Self-Identity and Personal Autonomy

An Analytical Anthropology

Stefaan E. Cuypers

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138634251
• eBook ISBN: 9781351812634
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This title was first published in 2001: We are all persons or selves. But what exactly does it mean that we possess an identity and autonomy as persons or selves? This book explores the related problems of self-identity and personal autonomy within the framework of contemporary analytical anthropology, a blend of analytical philosophy of mind and action with moral psychology. Cuypers critically examines the empiricist bundle theory and metaphysical ego theory of self-identity as well as the hierarchical Frankfurt / Dworkin model of personal autonomy. Arguing that all these standard views are found wanting, Cuypers then offers an alternative 'personalist' theory of personal identity, plus an innovative 'moderately heteronomous' theory of autonomy without ever going beyond the analytical frame of reference. In critical discussion with analytical philosophers such as Derek Parfit, John Perry and Harry Frankfurt, this book develops an original perspective on the nature of persons or selves that is orthogonal to the received views in analytical anthropology. Stefaan E. Cuypers is Professor at the Institute of Philosophy, Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium

PART I
SELF-IDENTITY

Chapter One
The Problem of Personal Identity

Introduction

Since Heraclitus remarked that no one can step twice into the same river, philosophers have wrestled with the identity of things and, in particular, with personal identity. How can someone possibly remain one and the same person throughout the course of their life, given their physical and mental changes? This old philosophical question has led to a controversy in contemporary analytical philosophy that continues a discussion from the classical rationalism and empiricism of the 17th and 18th centuries (Martin and Barresi, 2000).

In this chapter, following a short history of the concept of the person and a more detailed description of the analytical problem of personal identity, I shall present and critically evaluate two prominent analytical theories of personal identity: the empiricist bundle theory and the metaphysical ego theory. The proponents of the former theory — notably Quinton, Shoemaker and Parfit — are rooted in the tradition of John Locke and David Hume, while the proponents of the latter theory — notably Chisholm, Swinburne and Madell — are rooted in the tradition of René Descartes, Joseph Butler and Thomas Reid. The basis of my critical evaluation of both the empiricist and the metaphysical solution to the roblem of personal identity lies in the common sense conceptions of the phenomenon of personal identity. In light of these common sense conceptions, I shall then attempt to demonstrate that the standard debate between empiricists and metaphysicians about personal identity in analytical philosophy culminates in an aporia.

I restrict myself here to the standard debate between the adherents of the two most prominent theories. This restriction means that various non-standard theories will not be discussed.¹ The underlying reason for this restriction is my belief that the non-standard theories either do not provide a clear alternative to the bundle theory or the ego theory, or else they can in some sense be reduced to one of these two.

The history of the concept of the person

In contemporary analytical philosophy, the concept of the person is most often analyzed in terms of the concept of the self. This identification of person with self is not a necessary one, but a contingent result of the conceptual development that reflects the history of the West. In his essay entitled Une Catégorie de l’Esprit Humain: la Notion de Personne, Celle de ‘Moi’, the renowned French anthropologist Marcel Mauss (1938) outlines the historical development of the concept of the person, resulting in its fusing with the concept of the self.² He distinguishes four stages of development.

Originally the notion of the person had the same content as the notion of mask in cultural anthropology. Though the etymology is dubious, the Latin word persona is said to be derived from per-sonare: through (per) the mask one hears (sonare) the voice of the masked one. Additionally, persona is presumed to derive from the Etruscan phersu and to be related to the Greek prosopon — both words meaning, among other things, ‘mask’. This mythical idea of person as mask was not only an element of ancient Greek and Latin culture, but is still present today in so-called primitive cultures. In these strongly ritualized forms of society, the identity of a member of the community is fully determined by the role that he or she plays in a collective drama. By inherited names and titles, one is identified with ones ancestors from a mythical past. The identity of a tribal member is purely a function of the social place he or she occupies within the continuity of the tribe. The external mask gives the person a fixed and recognizable profile — the person as mask is a character.

In ancient Rome — Mauss’s second stage — the idea of the person acquired a more limited social content and came to signify the equivalent of legal person. Nowadays we are familiar not only with natural, but also with artificial legal persons such as corporations and societies. This juridical concept implies that the person is a subject of rights and duties in the public sphere. Within the legal order, there are only persons (personae), property or things (res) and actions (actiones). Roman law granted citizenship to every free Roman man, thus distinguishing him as a responsible individual from barbarians and slaves (servus non habet personam). Contrary to these nonpersons, the Roman citizen had the right to a surname, a first name and a pseudonym (nickname), which guaranteed his recognition as a prominent dignitary. Outside the social and legal order, the respectable status of the individual disappeared; the Roman legal person was a public figure.

Influenced by Stoicism and Christianity, the idea of the person underwent another shift of meaning. In this third stage, the juridical concept of the person gradually expanded to include the ethical and theological concept of moral substance. It was mainly the Stoics who introduced the ideas of moral self-consciousness and ethical autonomy, while the Christians elaborated the religious idea that all people are one in Christ without distinction. The title of person was no longer dependent on a particular social or legal order, but acquired an additional individualistic and universalistic foundation. Individual conscience and the universal dignity of the person were ultimately founded by the medieval moral and religious worldview. The ontotheological disputes concerning the trinity of God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit — three persons in one substance — had repercussions not only on the conception of the divine nature but also on the conception of human nature. Persona —rationalis naturae individua substantia, according to Boethiuss classical medieval definition. It was this Christian articulation of the concept of the person that was to exercise such influence on the self-conception of Western man: the moral person is an internalized individuality.

Finally, philosophy’s emancipation from theology and the rise of modern science in the Renaissance announces the fourth stage. The idea of the person was detached not just from the social context but also from the moral and religious context. Moreover, corporeality was considered to be a negligible aspect of personhood. During the Enlightenment (17^th and 18^th centuries), the concept of the person was fully equated with the psychological concept of the self (or with a transcendental variant of the same concept). Particularly under the influence of Protestantism, personhood became exclusively aligned with consciousness of self and self-knowledge. In philosophy, subjectivity became the fundamental principle on which not only epistemology, but also ontology and ethics were based. Descartes’s cogito ergo sum stands as the motto for philosophy in modern times: the person as self is a private space.

To sum up, the historical development of the concept of the person can be regarded as a general process of interiorization resulting in the identification of the person with the self. Against the background of Mauss’s outline of the evolution of the concept of the person, I argue in this book for a return, in a certain sense, to a general process of exteriorization: the person is a bodily acting being within the social order — an actor on the public stage. There are sound reasons to believe that the category of the person belongs to what Strawson calls the immutable conceptual core of Western civilization: ‘For there is a massive central core of human thinking which has no history — or none recorded in histories of thought; there are categories and concepts which, in their most fundamental character, change not at all.’ (Strawson, 1959, p. 10) In contemporary analytical philosophy, however, the identification of person with self is not merely considered as a contingent result of a historical process of interiorization but also as a necessary outcome of the ahistorical philosophical analysis of the very problem of personal identity. To this problem I now turn.

The analytical problem of personal identity

The analytical question of personal identity should not be confused with the psychological question of personal character or with the ethical question regarding whether a person is good or evil by nature (Stevenson and Haberman, 1998). The standard debate addresses very specifically the problem of the numerical identity of a person through time (or over time). There is a relevant distinction here between two sorts of identity (Parfit, 1984, pp. 201–202; Shoemaker, 1984, pp. 72–73). My double — or my replica — and I are qualitatively identical or similar persons, but we are not numerically identical, we are not one and the same person, just as two ‘Coca-Cola cans are qualitatively but not numerically identical. We sometimes say of someone that he or she is no longer the same person as he or she used to be. This is not a contradiction since both senses of identity are being used. He or she, numerically the same person as before, is no longer qualitatively the same person as before. What is meant is that one and the same person now has (radically) different physical and/or mental qualities.

Qualitative change is not only reconcilable with numerical identity but also with Leibnizs temporally indexed ‘law of the identity of indiscernibles’, which numerical identity must satisfy. This temporally indexed law stipulates that if X and Y are numerically identical, then every characteristic of X at time t must be a characteristic of Y at the same moment t, and vice versa (Grayling, 1982, p. 74).³ Although Russell the child was small and religious and Russell the adult was large and atheistic, it is still a matter of one and the same person because the elder Russell had been small and religious in his childhood, while the young Russell would become large and religious in later life. Finally, the relation of numerical identity is in a logical sense a relation of equivalence, that is to say a reflexive (X = X), symmetric (if X = Y then Y = X) and transitive (if X = Y and Y = Z then X = Z) relation.

The problem addressed by the standard debate — that of numerical personal identity through time — is a two-fold problem. In the first place there is the epistemological question: how do we know that this person today is one and the same as that person in the past or future? This question asks after the criteria for personal identity. These are the criteria that formulate the evidence we have for personal identity, thus telling us how we come to know personal identity (ratio cognoscendi). In the second place there is the ontological question: what makes this person today one and the same as that person at some other time? This is a question about the constitutive conditions for personal identity. These are the conditions that define the necessary and sufficient conditions for personal identity, thus telling US what personal identity is (ratio essendi). In what follows, I only discuss this second question.⁴

The epistemological criterion of bodily identity undoubtedly plays the main role, not only in the everyday process of identifying persons, but also in forensic and judicial identification procedures. We identify and re-identify one another in practice with the help of bodily, external features. Yet does this mean that the nature of personal identity consists of nothing other than bodily identity? The refusal of most analytical philosophers — and most of us — to define a persons essence in bodily terms is rooted in their — and our — awareness of the rational, moral and emotional importance of personal identity.⁵

Philosophical reflection about the phenomenon of personal identity is not limited to conceptual puzzles; it has significant consequences for all kinds of existential issues such as self-interest, responsibility and love. In these contexts, the question of personal identity plays a leading role: for example, the moral question whether this person is responsible for that crime presupposes that the question of identity — is this person one and the same as the person who committed the crime? — has been posed. The problem of the nature of personal identity is irrevocably bound up with the importance of personal identity.

Now bodily identity, at first sight, is not so significant and certainly not crucial in these existential contexts. Take love for instance. If the love of a person, X, would be directed to the body of a person, Y, then X does not love an individual or token-person but a person-type (token is to type as individual to species), since Y’s body is a repeatable instance of a specific bodily type: a ‘brunette’ can be replaced by any other 'brunette’. X’s love would then be mere sexual desire: ‘In the case of a purely sexual relationship no particular human body is required, only one of a more or less precisely demarcated kind. Where concern with the soul is wholly absent there is no interest in individual identity at all, only in identity of type.’ (Quinton, 1962, p. 66) As a result, the focus of love for a token-person cannot be the physical aspect; it must be the mental aspect. Similarly, in ascribing moral responsibility and in deciding on the basis of rational self-interest, the personal identity that is presupposed would seem to refer to a psychological rather than a bodily dimension.

In order to articulate these intuitions more precisely, analytical philosophers invoke the thought experiment of ‘mental transfer’ (or ‘change of body’) (for instance, Shoemaker, 1963, pp. 22–24). If the mental content of a person X is transferred to the body of Y, then X seems to retain his essential identity. The body of Y and the original body of X appear to have no influence on what is fundamental for X: an inner personality or a self. Locke (1694, p. 44) already remarked:

For should the soul of a prince, carrying with it the consciousness of the prince’s past life, enter and inform the body of a cobbler, as soon as deserted by his own soul, every one sees he would be the same person with the prince, accountable only for the prince’s actions: but who would say it was the same man [body]?

From this it is concluded that the essential mental aspect logically differs from the bodily aspect. The essential constituent of the person is the self, which is only accidentally linked with the body. Consequently, numerical self-identity through time makes the person one and the same at every moment of his life.

The analytical problem of personal identity, then, is the problem of numerical self-identity through time. What does this self-identity consist in? Both the metaphysical ego theory and the empiricist bundle theory formulate an answer to this question of the constitutive conditions for self-identity. Let me begin with the latter.

The empiricist bundle theory

The inner self cannot be known by way of the external senses; it must be perceived by the ‘inner sense’. When the empiricist looks introspectively into his inner space, what appears to his mind’s eye is nothing more than the complex of experiences, the mental bundle: ‘When I turn my reflexion on myself, I never can perceive this self without s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Analytical Anthropology
• Part I: Self-Identity
• Part II: Personal Autonomy
• Appendix: The Memory Theory of Personal Identity
• Bibliography
• Index of Names