Our reading selection (Essay Book II Chapter 27) was added to the second edition of John Locke’s major work in metaphysics and epistemology, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689/1694).
The chapter is titled “Of Identity and Diversity,” by which Locke means what we’ve been calling numerical identity and numerical difference (non-identity). He’s primarily focusing on what the numerical identity of persons consists in, but in the early sections he’s also discussing the numerical identity of other things, like animal bodies.
Locke showed a lot of creative imagination in the views he came up with, and also saw the possibility of many insightful distinctions that his predecessors and peers had overlooked. These make him really valuable for later philosophers to study.
At the same time, Locke is sometimes “messier” than one might ask or expect a great philosopher to be. He says some things that seem to be incompatible with other things he says. It may be that some of these tangles can be explained away, but if so it takes work and there’s controversy about how to do it. And it may be that some of the tangles just can’t be explained away. Locke may just not have realized that his thinking was pulling him in two directions, and that he couldn’t have things both ways.
Some of this messiness shows up in the selection we’re reading. I’ll suppress it in the first part of these notes, to keep the basic picture more clear and simple. At the end, I’ll point out a few of the tensions/tangles in Locke’s own writing.
These tensions/tangles are “small problems” for Locke, in that if he were aware of them, he could have made some choices, and then made small adjustments to what he wrote that would have made his whole story more consistent. There are also “larger problems” or more fundamental objections to Locke, that we’ll discuss in later classes.
Locke believed God existed and was a soul/immaterial substance. (Locke usually says “spirit” where we say “soul.”) He thought angels might also exist, and if they did, they would be souls.
Locke was officially agnostic about whether you and I have souls. Elsewhere (in Chapter 23) he says that we are “apt to think” that the operations of our mind exist in and are supported by an immaterial substance. He argues that we’d only understand in a limited way how that could work and what such substances are — but he thinks that’s true for material substances too.
Locke doesn’t think that our thought/experience can be reduced or explained in material terms, but he says (later in the Essay but see also §§17 and 27 in our selection) that for all we know, God could have as easily added the power to think/experience to certain configurations of matter as he could add them to an immaterial soul.
When Locke says “thinking substance,” this reflects his agnosticism about whether it’s matter or souls that think.
The rest of Locke’s discussion is already complicated enough, so I’m going to pretend that Locke did definitely agree that we had immaterial souls. This makes some of the discussion easier than it would be, if we were instead explicitly allowing for his agnosticism. Locke sometimes also himself talks as though it were agreed that we have souls.
Locke is sympathetic to the kind of view that says a statue and the clay it’s made of are two things that exist in the same place at the same time. (There’s some tension here with his §1, but we’ll postpone that until the end of these notes.)
This shows up in his discussion in §§3–5, where Locke distinguishes:
Think of things of type (a) as statue-like and things of type (b) as clay-like.
Locke sometimes uses expressions like material substance and bodies to refer to both types of things; other times he uses these expressions more narrowly, just to refer to the type (b) things.
But for our purposes, we can mostly set the type (b) things aside, and focus on the type (a) things, specifically animal bodies. There are also things of this type that belong to humans. We can call them human bodies, but Locke mostly uses the label “man” for these. When he says “man,” he means something like the animal organism that makes up a human’s body.
The human may also have a soul; but that’s not part of what Locke is talking about here.
So, on Locke’s picture, in our case there’s a soul and there’s a living human body. He doesn’t think that persons are identical to any of these. As I said in class, he thinks the person or self you are is instead something like a “session” in an Internet interaction, that might be hosted on several servers over time. Our bodies and souls are just the servers.
In §8 Locke discusses a “rational parrot,” which he says might be a person, but he argues we wouldn’t call it a “man” — it doesn’t have a human body.
Sometimes Locke talks as if names like “Socrates” attach to human bodies (§15 , §21 ), though elsewhere he talks as if they attach to persons (§14 , §23).
Just as living organisms can be made up of different masses of atoms at different times (because of the organizing role their life plays for them), Locke thinks persons can also be made up of different organic bodies and whatever their thinking substances are (because of the organizing role their consciousness plays for them). This parallel is most explicit in §10.
Locke defines a person as “a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection , and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing in different times and places” (§9).
Which past thoughts, experiences, and actions are yours goes back exactly as far as your consciousness/memory does (§§9-10, 14, 16-17, 24-26). A person is roughly a coherently memory-linked sequence of mental states (what we called Proposal #5 in our discussion of Perry’s Dialogue).
Can consciousness be transferred from one thinking substance to another? For all Locke knows, yes (§§10, 12-13, 25).
Locke supports his proposal with three kinds of considerations:
Consciousness is how you (automatically) know/are aware of all your current thoughts/experiences, and how you know/are aware of, and can “own” or “appropriate” or “attribute” or “impute” to yourself, your past thoughts/experiences.
I follow many scholars in understanding Locke’s “consciousness of past states” to be memory; but there is some controversy about this.
Locke claims consciousness is inseparable from and essential to thinking, that is, whenever you have any thought/experience, you are conscious of it/know you have it.
I’m “concerned for” only those (thoughts, experiences, and) actions I remember (§§14, 16-17, 26)
Similarly, I count a body part as mine, and direct my self-concern to it, only when and because I’m conscious of feeling it (§§11, 17-18, 24-25)
Locke has the same attitude towards counting an immaterial substance as part of me (§§24-25)
§§15-19 and 26 connect the question of what counts as one person with the question of what one can take credit/be properly blamed for.
Compare the notion of a “legal person,” which needn’t be a human being, but could be for example: a temple, a deceased human’s estate, political states and agencies, corporations, and so on.
You can’t be accountable for earlier actions, if you can’t possibly remember them (§§22, 26). Objection: then why do we punish sober people for what they can’t remember doing when drunk? Locke’s reply: human justice is imperfect, and we can’t know what people are really unable to remember. But divine justice won’t punish you for things you can’t remember.
(§6) A soul may join different organic bodies in turn, even animal bodies (see also §27)
(§14) Socrates’s and Nestor’s souls host a new person (“beginning a new account”). Past actions you have no consciousness of have nothing to do with you; you can’t think of them as yours.
(§§14, 16) Remember Nestor’s actions or having seen Noah’s ark? Then you are the same person who originally saw it.
(§15) Prince’s soul and consciousness enters the body of a cobbler, whose former soul has left. Locke thinks we’ll say the cobbler’s body stays the same “man” (human body), but the person inhabiting it is now the Prince, accountable only for the Prince’s actions.
(§19) Socrates waking/sleeping, in a single organic human body, but with no conscious connections: different persons. Shouldn’t punish one for what the other thought or did.
(§23) Day man/night man: like waking/sleeping Socrates, but here even if they share a single soul
(§23) person who regularly switches between two bodies
Locke says: Identity of persons does not consist in identity of substance (§§10, 16, 19, 23, 25).
What then are persons? What ontological category do they belong to?
Some scholars think Locke understood persons to be a different kind of substance than organic human bodies or immaterial souls. Others thought Locke took persons to not be substances at all, but rather to be “dependent objects” or “modes,” like the “wrinkle in the carpet” we discussed in earlier classes. Others thought Locke was moving towards a view that says A and B can be “the same organic human body” but “different persons,” or vice versa: that is, you can’t talk about being-the-same-period, you have to talk about being-the-same-K.
Each of these options has difficulties, and doesn’t perfectly fit all of what Locke says.
Locke says: Identity of persons does consist in identity/sameness of consciousness (§§10, 13, 19, 23, 25)
But §2 says “there can be no question” of identity for “things whose existence is in succession,” such as motion/thought. Those particular events last only a moment. Can we talk about the identity over time of processes or sequences of such events? Isn’t consciousness such a sequence? Observe that Locke very often does talk about the “same consciousness” over time.
On the other hand, Locke admits that consciousness is “always interrupted” by sleep and forgetfulness (§§10 and 23). (In later classes, we’ll see Reid complain about this.)
In §13, Locke takes up the question of whether it’d be possible to have false memories (consciousness) of things that someone else did. His answer seems to be that fortunately God doesn’t let this happen, for reasons. But this isn’t really a satisfactory answer. This seems to be something we think is possible, even if God decides not to let it happen. But Locke’s theory looks like it has to say this cannot possibly happen. If you’re conscious of some past thought or action, it looks like his theory is saying you’d have to be identical to the person who thought or did those things. We’ll talk about this issue more in coming classes.
Later in §13, Locke seems to be suggesting it’d be problematic for a consciousness to be transferred from one soul to another, “draw[ing] reward or punishment with it”; but by his own lights, shouldn’t accountability attach to consciousness not to souls?
Despite these unclarities, this chapter of Locke’s was imaginative and revolutionary, and profoundly influenced later discussions of personal identity — both in the 1700s and in the 20th/21st century.