Personhood. Workshop papers of the conference &#39;Dimensions of personhood&#39;

Arto Laitinen

"This volume contains the workshop papers of the philosophical conference Dimensions of Personhood held in August 13-15, 2004 at University of Jyväskylä, Finland. The conference was organized by the Finnish Academy research project The Concept of Person. In the call for papers, the theme of the conference was formulated as follows. Recent developments in neuroscience and information technology, in medicine and biotechnology, and in society and culture more broadly have made various questions concerning our identity as human beings urgent. As our power over ourselves increases, the questions of who we are, how we are to conceive of ourselves and how we should use our powers over ourselves, become more and more pressing. The concept of person is in many ways a necessary starting point in answering such questions. However, the concept is often used in an indeterminate sense, and when efforts have been made to clarify the concept, different philosophers have ended up with rival usages and rival theories. For example, the theories differ on whether ‘person’ is identical with ‘human being’, ‘subject’ or ‘self ’. Yet it seems to us that the rival theories of personhood are trying to capture a common idea, namely that persons differ from (other) animals, machines, detached ‘minds’, brains and sub-personal mechanisms in the kind of relations to self, to others and to the world that they have, or are capable of having. The general idea of the conference is thus to approach personhood along three dimensions, where the being of persons differs from the being of non-persons: 1 self-relations, 2. interpersonal relations, and 3. world-relations. The guiding question of the conference is: how does the concept of person illuminate these relations (to self, to others, to the world), and how do these relations illuminate the concept of person? Our wish is to bring together recent work done in each of these dimensions and further our understanding concerning the ways in which personhood and these relations are intertwined."

PERSONHOOD WORKSHOP PAPERS OF THE CONFERENCE ‘DIMENSIONS OF PESONHOOD’ Edited by Heikki Ikäheimo, Jussi Kotkavirta, Arto Laitinen & Pessi Lyyra Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 1 30.7.2004 15:34:27 University of Jyväskylä Publications in Philosophy, 68 Printed at Kopijyvä ltd., Jyväskylä 2004 Copyright © Editors and Individual Authors 2004 ISBN 951-39-1887-4 ISSN 1455-9471 Distributor: Kampus Kirja Kauppakatu 9, FIN-40100 Jyväskylä, Finland tel. +358-14-2603157 fax. +358-14-611143 email: kirjamyynti@kampusdata.ﬁ Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 2 30.7.2004 15:34:41 TITLES Dina A. Babushkina, 9 F.H. Bradley on Self-Realization as Relation to the Self and to Others Per Bauhn, 14 The Concept of Normative Identity Kathy Behrendt, 21 Corrupting Concepts George Berguno, 29 Encountering the Dark Spaces of Selfhood Chris Buford, 36 Animalism and What Matters Iskra Fileva, 43 Can We Know Too Much, Do We Know Too Little, and Does It Make a Difference Either Way? Pieranna Garavaso, 54 On Behalf of the Neglected Body Miguel García-Valdecasas, 61 Wittgenstein on ‘Self-Observation’: An Approach via William James and Reductionism Igor Gasparov, 68 Is it Possible to Have a Self-Evident Relation to Oneself ? Ylva Gustafsson, 75 Being Blind to Other Persons Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 3 30.7.2004 15:34:41 Heikki Ikäheimo, 82 Recognitive Attitudes and Dimension of Personhood Antti Kauppinen, 90 Autonomy, Ownership, and History Sharon M. Kaye, 99 Personhood and Free Will: A Revival of the Introspective Argument Mikhail Khorkov, 106 Is it Natural for Human Being to be a Person? Jussi Kotkavirta, 113 Person and the Psychoanalytic Unconscious Camilla Kronqvist, 121 Personhood in the Light of Human Relationships Arto Laitinen, 127 Constitution and Persons Vili Lähteenmäki, 135 Consciousness Behind its Role as a Constituent of Identity of Persons: Descartes and Cudworth Pessi Lyyra, 143 Lynne Rudder Baker’s ‘First-Person Perspective’ and the Immunity to Error through Misidentiﬁcation Tuomas W. Manninen, 152 Is the concept ‘Person’ a Concept Easily Attained? Andreas Matthias, 161 Responsibility Ascription to Nonhumans. Climbing the Steps of the Personhood Ladder Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 4 30.7.2004 15:34:41 Olli-Pekka Moisio, 171 The End of Personality Lydia L. Moland, 178 Ideals, Ethics, and Personhood Arto Repo, 185 Self-Awareness and Body Antti Saaristo, 192 Personhood as a Social Status Hans Bernhard Schmid, 199 Personhood and the Structure of Commitment Christiane Seidel, 212 Conceiving of oneself as oneself Jussi Suikkanen, 220 The Inadequacy of the Communitarian Account of Practical Agency Philippe Vellozzo, 228 Persons and Experiences Ugo Zilioli, 235 Plato and Parfit on the Identity of Persons. Continuity Through Replacement in Symposium 207d-208b ABSTRACTS, 242-252 Sara Heinämaa Phenomenology of Persons or Ontological Analytic of Dasein? A Reply to Heidegger’s Critique of Classical Phenomenology? Sune Holm Materialism and Psychological Approaches to Personal Identity Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 5 30.7.2004 15:34:41 Daniel Hutto Folk Psychological Narratives and Personal Identity Ari Kivelä Conscious Life as Subject and Person. Notes on Dieter Henrich’s and Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s Theory of Subjectivity Roberta de Monticelli Subjectivity and Essential Individuality Heike Schmidt-Felzmann Identiﬁcation and Authentic Personality Mikko Yrjönsuuri Body, Animal and Moral Agent: Three Lockean Identiﬁcations in Posthuman Times Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 6 30.7.2004 15:34:41 Foreword T his volume contains the workshop papers of the philosophical conference Dimensions of Personhood held in August 13-15, 2004 at University of Jyväskylä, Finland. The conference was organized by the Finnish Academy research project The Concept of Person. In the call for papers, the theme of the conference was formulated as follows. Recent developments in neuroscience and information technology, in medicine and biotechnology, and in society and culture more broadly have made various questions concerning our identity as human beings urgent. As our power over ourselves increases, the questions of who we are, how we are to conceive of ourselves and how we should use our powers over ourselves, become more and more pressing. The concept of person is in many ways a necessary starting point in answering such questions. However, the concept is often used in an indeterminate sense, and when efforts have been made to clarify the concept, different philosophers have ended up with rival usages and rival theories. For example, the theories differ on whether ‘person’ is identical with ‘human being’, ‘subject’ or ‘self ’. Yet it seems to us that the rival theories of personhood are trying to capture a common idea, namely that persons differ from (other) animals, machines, detached ‘minds’, brains and sub-personal mechanisms in the kind of relations to self, to others and to the world that they have, or are capable of having. The general idea of the conference is thus to approach personhood along three dimensions, where the being of persons differs from the being of non-persons: 1 self-relations, 2. interpersonal relations, and 3. world-relations. The guiding question of the conference is: how does the concept of person illuminate 7 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 7 30.7.2004 15:34:41 these relations (to self, to others, to the world), and how do these relations illuminate the concept of person? Our wish is to bring together recent work done in each of these dimensions and further our understanding concerning the ways in which personhood and these relations are intertwined. In the three dimensions mentioned, it is possible to ask questions such as: - How is the given relation (to self, to others, to the world), or some speciﬁc modiﬁcation of it, constitutive of personhood? - How does the given relation in the case of persons differ from the possibly analogous relations that other animals, or perhaps sub-personal mechanisms, might have? - What are the possible sub-personal mechanisms or processes that have to take place in order for there to be a given relation in the ‘personal’ mode? - What exactly might the ‘personal-sub-personal’-distinction mean in the case of a given relation? - What kind of internal connections does this triangle of relations (to self, to others, to the world) have? We wish to express our gratitude to everyone who contributed to the call for papers and especially to those whose papers or abstracts are contained in this volume. Our thanks are due also to Olli-Pekka Moisio for the layout. Those of the participants, who were not able to contribute their papers for the volume, are included with their abstracts. Editors 8 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 8 30.7.2004 15:34:41 F.H. Beadley on Self-Realization as Relation to the Self and to Others Dina A. Babushkina University of Saint-Petersburg, Russia dibishe@yahoo.com T he aim of the paper is to consider the idea of self-realisation, developed by the leader of the Idealist movement in Great Britain, F.H. Bradley. Bradley himself determines this notion as the only deed that we do in each action and moreover as the only end of morality. In this paper the notion of self-realisation is viewed through the problem of personality and its relation to others (Bradley’s doctrine is rooted in Aristotle’s deﬁnition of a man as a social animal). It is maintained here that Bradley considers different problems of man’s personality while taking all of its aspects as sides of a complete self. In the idea of self-realization the distinguished unity of the personality, which is a problem to be unconsciously solved by the man himself, is presented and made a question of philosophy. Present investigation is based mainly on the early work by Bradley – “Ethical Studies”. “Self-realisation” is the notion very close to the idea of the care of the self, which we found in “Alcibiades” by Plato. Both these concepts suppose a kind of self-relation that leads to one’s becoming himself. On the one pole of this process we meet a man living unconsciously and not being himself, and on the other – a personality, who knows who he is and lives his own life. Socrates’ doctrine of one’s becoming himself presumes that this becoming is possible only in relation to the wise man, who helps one to cognise oneself. The doctrine of self-realisation emphasises not the aspect of knowledge but the aspect of completeness of realisation in the process of becoming. 9 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 9 30.7.2004 15:34:42 To reconstruct this notion we are above all to note the sphere where it is used. For Bradley, one exercises self-realization in moral realm. It means that one’s self is realized in the moral or virtuous conduct. Morality can be deﬁned as the sphere of mind which is lower then religion. Religion absorbs morality, overcoming its defects, or as Bradley (1962, 314) says, “morality issues in religion”. Bradley’s reasoning leads us to conclude that morality is constituted by a dualism of particular and universal. The particular in morality is understood as individual will which is opposed to the will of the whole or community. From this point of view relation of the particular and the universal (the part and the whole) or otherwise the possibility of realization of the universal in the will of the individual is the chief problem of morality. In our opinion this problem is solved by the theory of dualistic nature of will (see below). We can further say that the relation, viewed above through metaphysical eyes, presents itself in the ordinary life as the relation between a man and others, whose wills he recognizes as opposed to his own. The clariﬁcation of the terms “self ” and “universal” which the key notion is undoubtedly connected with leads us to conclude that self-realisation is the relation to oneself realised in the sphere of relation to others. This statement implies interrelation and interdetermination of private and social spheres. Though not deﬁned, “self ” is used in “Ethical Studies” as synonymous to 1) “I”/“me” in the meaning of ”myself ” (as the subject of the moral action, though beyond the sphere of personhood it is denoted as “moral agent”) and 2) “will”. It issues from what Bradley says that morality exercised by a “self ” is presented by the moral act in which a will is realised (on virtue, see Bradley 1962, 58 – 64). We can infer that the universal (which is the same as the will of the whole) is given to the self as the ideal or the aim of its life. The self realizes this ideal in its actions: it does everything in a reference to the aim (Bradley emphasizes the aspect of unity in human life throughout the book). Moreover Bradley agues that for common consciousness the ideal is an idea of the completeness of one’s life, i.e. as the idea of subordination of all particular aims to the main end, or as a whole (system) of ends (see Bradley 1962, 69-70, 74, 95). This presupposes that a man understands his aims and knows them as a systematized whole. 10 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 10 30.7.2004 15:34:42 The main difference between moral and religious spheres is the treatment of the universal or the ideal. In moral consciousness, what is ideal is believed to be non-real, to exist “only in our heads” (Bradley 1962, 316), and thus never already-attained (realized). For religious consciousness, the ideal or the universal is true reality contrary to physical reality. So overcoming the wrong understanding of the moral consciousness, religion makes the complete realization of the ideal possible. So Bradley (1962, 319) writes: “For morals the ideal self was an “ought”, an “is to be” that is not; the object of religion is that same ideal self, but here it is no longer only ought to be, but also is”. But how are the individual and the universal connected in the volition? And in what relation does the particular act stand to the life as a whole? In each separated act a will identiﬁes with the universal will which correlates to the ideal. So the individual will realizes the universal through itself. Thus the separated act is nothing more, but a moment in the process of aim attainment. Let us illustrate this statement by the analysis of the volition and the structure of will, which Bradley carries out in Essay II. We have already seen that according to the philosopher, the sphere of morality is built on the fundamental opposition of the universal and the individual, which is overcome in the notion of will. The analysis of the will shows that the only object of desire is the self. Hence what is willed is always the self, which differs from the self that wills. The self that wills is a particular one, while the self that is willed is the particular will that identiﬁes itself with the universal. Each act/volition is described as selfrelation (Bradley 1962, 78). If presented in a phenomenological order the volition can be ﬁgured as following: (1) the self (SR, i.e. Self Real) wills an object (O) that is “a thought, and my thought” for “nothing moves unless it be desired” (Bradley 1962, 67): so the self takes it as the motive and feels itself affirmed in it (O’=SI, i.e. Self Ideal); (2) the desired object is presented to the self as its state (the state of mind) (O=SI); (3) thus the self seeks for itself in the object that is not so far itself, but is the self opposed to the self (SR≠SI). Moreover the essence of the desire for the object is “the feeling of our affirmation in the idea of something not ourself, felt against the feeling of ourself as, without 11 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 11 30.7.2004 15:34:42 the object, void and neglected” (Bradley 1962, 68); (4) the desired self is the idea of the perfect self that the real self lacks, and in the act the real self tries to get/realise the perfect one (which is the same as the ideal), (5) so the self (SR) wills and gets itself (SI) by itself. (6) But to be able to name this process self-realization we should add that the ideal self (SI) is the self as a whole. This statement will become clear by the following. For Bradley, volition is the identity of two sides – the universal that is above all the desired objects, and the particular, i.e. the identiﬁcation of the will with this or that object – and thus is called by Bradley “the individual whole” or “the concrete universal” (Bradley 1962, 72; see also p. 98). The universal side of the will is a formal one and the particular stands for the content. (Thus Bradley criticises Kant’s ethical doctrine arguing that the will is the unity of the form and the content. See also Bradley 1962, 33). Both from the point of view of the content and the form the will is a whole (it is a whole of all desired objects being the ideal or universal self; and it is a whole as a possibility of volition of the object. Bradley 1962, 70-72). So the will wills itself as a whole (ideal). Thus Bradley solves the opposition of the particular and the universal by the dualistic nature of the will. But what is meant by “whole”? It is Hegelian true inﬁnite or self-related whole (Bradley 1962, 74-81). To realise itself as true inﬁnite means to become a member of true whole community (family, society, state) that is itself only for being more than and being only in its particulars, i.e. to be itself one must go beyond himself (see: Bradley 1962, Essay V). Otherwise the community as the true inﬁnite whole is a whole which is organised by two principles: “Homogeneity” and “Speciﬁcation” (Bradley 1962, 74). So Bradley puts it as following: “The whole, to which you belong, speciﬁes itself in the detail of its functions, and yet remains homogeneous. It lives… in its members. Just so, each one of the members is alive, but not apart from the whole which lives in it. The organism is homogeneous because it is speciﬁed” and vice versa (Bradley 1962, p. 79). Hence the will realised is identiﬁed with the universal good will. Thus in the self, relating to itself, the whole, relating to itself in the private self, can be found. Thus the self-realisation – becoming true it- 12 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 12 30.7.2004 15:34:42 self, self-perfecting with the orientation toward the ideal – is possible only in society. Let us in closing say a few words about the modi of the realised self (ideal). In “Ethical studies” Bradley distinguishes three modi: 1. a) a social ideal involving relation to others, which is named – my station and its duties (here the self is understood as function in the whole); b) the ideal that can be called the sphere of ideas (such as being noble, merciful etc. recognised by a man as the guiding ideas of his life) (see Bradley 1962, Essay V); 2) a non-social ideal. The very last can be interpreted as following one’s vocation and realising ones talent (see Bradley 1962, Essay VI). Bradley maintains that my station and its duties is the attainable ideal, while the sphere of ideas is never completely realized. Bradley seems to raise and elaborate the complex of problems connected with different aspects of personality. He views it though the aim which is believed to be very important for the man – the aim of self-realisation. The analysis of Bradley’s doctrine lets us to infer that self-realisation is attainable only in the community, i.e. in relation to others. For it is relation to others that constitutes the true inﬁnite whole, that in turn produces the ideal with which the will of the individual identiﬁes itself, the ideal which is, therefore, the same with the realised self. From his doctrine it is possible to conclude that the self has three hypostases: 1. oriented towards others in two ways a) in reference to be useful for the community, to feel one’s necessity in the whole – the formal side; and b) subjective side, which is presented by the spiritual need; 2. oriented towards itself, – the need to realize inclinations. So one if wants to be himself, be happy and satisﬁed with life, one should realize these three modi of his self. Literature Bradley F.H. 1962 Ethical studies. London. 13 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 13 30.7.2004 15:34:42 The Concept of Normative Identity Per Bauhn University of Lund, Sweden per.bauhn@soc.lu.se P ersonal identity can be conceptualized in different ways. It can be analysed as a logical relationship, stating that if x is identical with y, then everything that holds for x must also hold for y, and vice versa. Applied to persons this logical conception runs into the problem of explaining how there can be such a thing as personal identity over time, since people are bound to change—gaining more weight, their hair turning gray, and so on. (This problem is discussed by, for instance, Derek Parﬁt in his Reasons and Persons, Clarendon Press, 1984.) Another way to characterize personal identity is to list those empirical features that enable us to single out one particular person from other people. This is what I will call descriptive identity. It is the kind of identity that is given in missing persons descriptions, passport applications, and ID-cards, focusing on fairly clearly ascertainable characteristics such as a person’s height, weight, and colour of the hair and eyes, or on less obvious but physically just as distinguishing characteristics, such as ﬁngerprints. Unlike the logical conception of identity, descriptive identity does not assume sameness of characteristics over time, but is conﬁned to those characteristics that are sufﬁcient to single out a particular person at a particular time. However, a third way to conceptualize personal identity can be made in terms of a person’s being identiﬁable with certain values and norms. This is what I will call normative identity. Here we single out an individual by referring to her (professed or assumed) beliefs about the good and the right. We should in this context distinguish between the internal nor- 14 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 14 30.7.2004 15:34:43 mative identity of a person, which refers to her conception of herself as somebody that should be identiﬁed in terms of certain values and norms, and the external normative identity of a person, which refers to other people’s conception of her as somebody that should be identiﬁed in terms of certain values and norms. As an example of a person’s internal normative identity we could refer to the case of the French revolutionary politician Maximilian Robespierre, who in his last speech to the National Convention declared himself to be the persecuted defender of virtue: “I was born to ﬁght crime, not to rule over it” [Je suis fait pour combattre le crime, non pour le gouverner] (Œuvres de Maximilien Robespierre, vol. x, Presses Universitaires de France, 1967, p. 576). Or we could quote a Confederate sergeant, ﬁghting in the American Civil War, who in a letter to his family told them that “if my heart ever sincerely desiered [sic] any thing on earth … it certainly is, to be useful to my Country…. I will sacriﬁce my life upon the alter [sic] of my country” (McPherson, James M., For Cause and Comrades, Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 95). But we could also think of Albert Speer, explaining his infatuation with Hitler: “If you were committed to Hitler, you were politically committed…. I felt that he could save Germany, give us back faith in ourselves. If that was political, then I was political” (Sereny, Gitta, Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth, Picador, 1996, p. 89). Hence, a person’s internal normative identity may consist in her selfperception as being devoted to morality itself, to her country, or to a political leader. Implied in all these self-perceptions are values and norms that can be expected to guide the person’s actions. The important thing to remember here is that these values and norms are perceived by the person to be central to whom she is, rather than as something externally imposed. In adhering to these values and norms the person may experience herself as simply doing what her heart and mind tell her to do. Consequently, should she fail to act in accordance with these values and norms, she would perceive this as a personal failure rather than as a failed attempt to accomodate the standards of other people or of society. Moreover, we should note that a person’s internal normative identity refers to her conception of whom she should be, rather than of whom she wants to be. A person may want to indulge in a life of debauchery and feel ashamed of this desire of hers, because it conﬂicts with her conception of herself as a person devoted to duty. But as long as she believes 15 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 15 30.7.2004 15:34:43 that it is the life of duty that she should be committed to, this is also her internal normative identity, regardless of whatever other strong desires she may have. As for a person’s external normative identity, we may think of the role played by terms like “worker” and “kulak” (that is, a wealthy farmer owning his land privately) in the thinking, rhetoric, and practices of the Bolsheviks of the former Soviet Union. As has been noted by one of Lenin’s biographers, “[t]he formula ‘of working class origin’ aroused in him the highest level of trust in a man”, while, on the other hand, “[h]e always spoke the word ‘kulak’ with seething hatred” (Volkogonov, Dmitri, Lenin. A New Biography, The Free Press, 1994, pp. 332; 342). The ascription of social class identity-labels like “worker” and “kulak” also implied the ascription of certain values and norms. While a worker in Bolshevik thinking was viewed as the victim of past oppression and injustice as well as being imbued with the capacity to build the classless society of the future, a kulak was considered to be a selﬁsh parasite and exploiter of the people. Internal and external normative identities may of course coincide. A person who labels herself a communist may also have that normative identity ascribed to her by others. Still, the concept of internal normative identity and the concept of external normative identity are logically distinct, and there is no logically necessary relation between how we conceive of ourselves normatively, and how other people conceive of us normatively. Now, while normative identities provide standards of behaviour and rules of action for their possessors, they still seem to be lacking in conclusive justiﬁcatory power. For instance, we may understand how the normative identity of a Bolshevik justiﬁes to him the persecution of kulaks, but we may still want to question the validity of that justiﬁcation. Here we may face the Relativist Objection, that we are merely conceited in our efforts to formulate such an external evaluation of the Bolshevik normative identity. Where is that independent objective perspective, that Archimedean point, from which we may pronounce on the objective validity of this or that normative identity and the justiﬁcations it provides? Are we not here (no matter what we may think of it) just applying the values and norms of our own particular normative identity to another normative identity, appropriating for our culturally and historically local 16 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 16 30.7.2004 15:34:43 point of view epithets like “objective” and “universal”? In criticizing the justiﬁcations provided by a normative identity different from our own we are anachronistic as well as unfair, according to the Relativist Objection. We are anachronistic to the extent that we apply standards belonging to one historically and culturally speciﬁc normative identity to actions justiﬁed in accordance with values and norms derived from another historically and culturally speciﬁc normative identity. And we are unfair to the extent that we blame people for doing what their normative identity tells them is the right thing to do, since there is no way that these people could have acted otherwise. We will deal with the Relativist Objection in two steps. The ﬁrst move is rather simple and addresses the unfairness part of the objection. We should distinguish between cases in which people acting in accordance with their normative identity could have chosen to act differently, and cases in which they could not. It is often too simplistically assumed that since people’s normative identities are determined by the values and norms of the society in which they are born, grow up, and lead their lives, they are unable to question the moral norms belonging to these normative identities. However, as Michele Moody-Adams has argued, sometimes this “inability” is merely a case of “affected ignorance”, that is, of choosing not to know what one could and should know (Moody-Adams, Michele M., Fieldwork in Familiar Places, Harvard University Press, 1997, pp. 101–102). In every society where there is at least some questioning of prevailing norms (as there was, for instance, in ancient Athens with regard to the slavery system), a person who opts for these prevailing norms should be conceptualized as an agent who has made a choice. It was not epistemologically impossible for that person to conceive of alternative standards since such alternative standards were in fact proposed at least by some members of her society. Of course, it may have been socially problematic for her to side with the minority, but the fact that an alternative is difﬁcult does not preclude that it is indeed an alternative, nor that it is an act of choice not to embrace it. Let us now look at the anachronism part of the objection, that is, the part that says that it is inappropriate to criticize the values and norms of a normative identity from a point of view external to that normative identity. This is so, the objection says, because we lack an Archimedean 17 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 17 30.7.2004 15:34:43 viewpoint that is not itself a part of a particular normative identity and from which we would be able to assess objectively the merits of different normative identities. However, this part of the Relativist Objection ignores the extent to which all particular normative identities at least implicitly refer to universal goods of human action. Normative identities contain norms for action. Hence, no matter the differing contents of particular normative identities, they will all, at least implicitly, refer to capacities for agency. Their injunctions to perform or to refrain from performing certain actions necessitate for all normative identities (at least implicitly) a positive evaluation of the generally necessary conditions of successful action. While the agent must (logically) conceive of the realization of the ends inherent in her normative identity as something good (otherwise she would not involve herself in the pursuit of their realization), she must (logically) conceive of the generally necessary conditions of successful action as necessary goods (because without them she would not be able to realize any of her ends). And while different agents, trying to realize different normative identities, can be expected to differ as regards their particular ends, they will all require these necessary goods of action. For any agent, the generally necessary conditions of successful action can be summed up as freedom and well-being. These terms denote the capacity to exercise control over one’s behaviour in accordance with one’s unforced choice together with the basic physical and mental abilities needed to initiate any kind of action as well as the capacities to maintain and to increase one’s level of purpose-fulﬁlment (not being stolen from, having access to education, and so on). Given that freedom and well-being are necessary goods for all agents, regardless of their more particular normative identities, every agent must (logically) claim rights to freedom and well-being. This is what Alan Gewirth has described as the normative structure of action: In saying that freedom and well-being are necessary goods for him, the agent is not merely saying that if he is to act, he must have freedom and well-being; in addition, because of the goodness he attaches to all his purposive actions, he is opposed to whatever interferes with his having freedom and well-being and he advocates his having these features, so that his statement is prescriptive and not only descriptive…. Hence, the agent is saying that because freedom and well-being are neces- 18 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 18 30.7.2004 15:34:43 sary goods for him, other persons strictly ought at least to refrain from interfering with his having them. And this is equivalent to saying that he has a right to them, because the agent holds that other persons owe him this strict duty of at least noninterference. (Gewirth, Alan, Reason and Morality, The University of Chicago Press, 1978, pp. 79–80.) Moreover, the agent is logically committed (by the principle of universalizability) to accept that all agents have these rights to freedom and wellbeing (Gewirth, p. 112). Now, given the argument developed above, we should distinguish between two levels of normative identity. At the level of contingent normative identities we ﬁnd all those normative identities that people as a matter of fact happen to have or have had in the past or will have in the future. At the level of necessary normative identities we ﬁnd the normative identity of being an agent, involving the norm that all agents have rights to freedom and well-being. The distinction between contingent and necessary normative identities relates to different degrees of needfulness. You may be an agent without being a Buddhist or a Bolshevik, but you cannot be a Buddhist or a Bolshevik without being an agent. Accordingly, the normative identity of being an agent has a logical priority over all particular contingent normative identities. This means that we are able to morally evaluate these particular contingent normative identities from the point of view of whether or not they respect the rights of all agents to freedom and well-being. Hence, we are able to criticize, for instance, the values and norms of the Bolshevik or the Nazi normative identities, applying to them a standard of evaluation that is objective in the sense that it does not itself presuppose any particular contingent normative identity. From the point of view of the necessary normative identity of being an agent, we can point to a practical inconsistency in the ways in which Bolsheviks, Nazis, and others try to realize their normative identities. They claim for themselves (not necessarily verbally, but implicitly in their actions) rights to freedom and well-being (by resisting interference with their actions and by protecting and taking care of themselves while they plan and prepare their actions) while they at the same time deny these rights to their victims. Hence, they rely on the very agency-related rights that they deny to their victims. In their actions Bolsheviks and Nazis at 19 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 19 30.7.2004 15:34:43 least implicitly accept that they are agents with rights to freedom and well-being, while at the same time denying that their victims, to whom they at least implicitly must accord the status of being agents—the victims would not be persecuted if they were not conceived of as agents with (dangerous) purposes of their own to fulﬁl—have these rights. In order for us to legitimately interfere with Bolsheviks and Nazis and their likes, we need not have them share our normative identity. We need only point to the fact that there is a conﬂict between their contingent normative identity (as Bolsheviks and Nazis) and the necessary normative identity that they, their victims, and we all have in our capacity as agents. 20 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 20 30.7.2004 15:34:44 Corrupting Concepts Kathy Behrendt New College, Oxford, UK kathy.behrendt@new.oxford.ac.uk T he object of this paper is to explain and assess Derek Parﬁt’s recent shift of attention to the concept of a person. According to Parﬁt’s established Reductionist view, there is no single, simple substance – Cartesian Ego or otherwise – that constitutes our essence and endures throughout our lives. This ‘simple view’ is false, and like most of his contemporaries, Parﬁt opts instead for a ‘complex view’ (Noonan, ch. 1.13). Nothing more is involved in a person’s existence than brain, body, and related mental and physical events. Facts about these things and events can be described in a way that does not presuppose the identity of the person. And, if I know all these facts, I know all I need to about what will happen in those puzzling thought-experiments in which I get teletransported to Mars, or divide like an amoeba, or merge with my twin, and so forth. If I go on to ask whether the future subject(s) of such experiments would be me, then I am misguided. That question is empty; I already have all the empirical information there is to be had. And the question is unimportant; if I reﬂect on it, I will realise that what matters with respect to my future survival is not my identity per se, but psychological continuity and connectedness, which can hold whilst identity is lost or indeterminate. Parﬁt’s latest work on personal identity presents the following possibility. There could be beings who do not have the concept of a person or related concepts such as ‘subject of experience’, ‘thinker’, ‘agent’, ‘self ’ and ‘I’. Where we talk and think about ‘myself ’ or ‘I’, the impersonal beings would talk and think about ‘this sequence of thoughts and 21 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 21 30.7.2004 15:34:44 experiences of which this thought is a member’ and, where relevant, the brain and body to which this sequence of thoughts and experiences is (causally) connected (Parﬁt 1999, sects. I and III). Crucially, these impersonal beings would be ‘metaphysically or scientiﬁcally’ no worse off than us in terms of their knowledge and understanding of the world (ibid. 221). Parﬁt calls this thesis ‘INW’ (ibid. 221). Parﬁt claims that the impersonal beings have a strong sense of the ‘“from within” character of “consciousness”’(McDowell 1997, 243) of their experience and ‘could distinguish such direct awareness from their indirect knowledge of other experiences’ (Parﬁt 1999, 230). This provides certain of their thoughts and judgements with error-immunity, which in turn allows them to function roughly as our I-thoughts do for us: as direct, non-inferential judgements that form the basis of much crucial knowledge pertaining to ourselves in the world, and which inform and guide our action in that world (see Shoemaker 1968, and Evans 1982, ch. 7.1 ff.). This ability to distinguish between direct and indirect awareness of experiences, for the impersonal beings, manifests itself in their thoughts and claims to the effect that certain experiences are either part of, or not part of, this sequence, of which this current thought is a member. Yet Parﬁt insists we are not here dealing with a mere notational variant on our I-thoughts (Parﬁt 1999, sect. X). The impersonal beings ‘have the concept of a sequence of thoughts, experiences, and acts, and they might regard each sequence as occurring in some persisting body. But they do not regard this body, or any other entity as the subject of these experiences, the thinker of these thoughts or the agent of these acts’ (ibid. 221). Consequently their conceptual scheme ‘differs by subtraction from our ordinary scheme’ (ibid. 255). Ostensibly, INW is a response to McDowell (1997), who argued that we could not understand Parﬁt’s Reductionism unless we already had the concept of a person (Parﬁt 1999, 220). The possibility of impersonal beings is meant show that McDowell is wrong about this by showing that facts about brains, bodies, and experiences are intelligible independent of the concept of a person. But why does Parﬁt bother with McDowell’s argument? It is irrelevant to Parﬁt’s established view. Even if we or any beings like us necessarily possess the concept of a person, this would not undermine the core Reductionist view that persons are complex entities, the identity and 22 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 22 30.7.2004 15:34:44 existence of which consist in more basic facts, which can be described in a non-circular way – a way that does not presuppose identity. Personinvolving descriptions of the facts in which identity consists are compatible with non-identity presupposing descriptions (see Cassam 1992, 2526). And as for Parﬁt’s claims about what matters, we don’t have to stop talking or thinking about persons altogether in order to agree with Parﬁt that it does not matter whether I, the same person, survive in the future so long as some person psychologically connected with me does. The concept of a person can and often does remain in operation throughout Parﬁt’s attempts to rid us of concern for our identity. So of what interest is the possibility of beings who have no concept of a person? Parﬁt writes: ‘The concept of a person, or subject, may not do essential metaphysical work …. but … it has other kinds of importance in our conceptual scheme. It enables us to ask questions, and to have beliefs, for which there is no equivalent in my imagined scheme [of INW]’ (Parﬁt 1999, 263; cf. 255). These beliefs manifest themselves in thoughts or feelings to the effect that ‘our identity must be determinate’ – that our relation to our future self is ‘peculiarly deep and simple, in a way that guarantees that every future experience must either be, or not be, ours’ (ibid. 264; cf. 1995, 45). Consequently, in the face of puzzling thought experiments, we hold that there must be a deﬁnite yes or no answer to the question of whether we have survived, and we generally hope the answer to be ‘yes’. Parﬁt refers to such beliefs and hopes as ‘illusion[s]’, ‘false beliefs’ or ‘mistakes’ (Parﬁt 1999, 264-265). I will call them ‘identity-favouring tendencies’. Note that when Parﬁt says ‘we’ are susceptible to them, he does mean all of us. It is not just the believer in the simple view who will express concern for identity, despite the fact that such concerns could only be justiﬁed by the truth of the simple view (Parﬁt 1995, 27-28). Holders of the complex view are also guilty of identity-favouring tendencies. Even the card-carrying Reductionist is not exempt: in our thoughts about our own identity, we are prone to illusions. That is why socalled ‘problem cases’ seem to raise problems: why we ﬁnd it hard to believe that, when we know the other facts, it is an empty or a merely verbal question whether we shall still exist. Even after we accept a Reductionist view, we may continue, at some level, to think and feel as if that view were not true. Our own continued existence may still seem an independent fact, of a peculiarly deep 23 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 23 30.7.2004 15:34:44 and simple kind. And that belief may underlie our anticipatory concern about our own future….One cause [of this is] our conceptual scheme (Parﬁt 1995, 45, emphasis mine). This returns us to the original motivation for INW, namely McDowell’s worry that there is something self-defeating in the very fact that the Reductionist has the concept of a person at all. It has the power to work an insidious inﬂuence on all who possess it. In so far as we are all susceptible to identity-favouring tendencies, and the concept of a person is the cause of this, it follows that we all possess the same concept of a person. The concept is univocal across all varieties of personal identity theory, simple or complex (see Parﬁt 1999, 223 and 234). Call this the minimalist construal of the concept of a person. Elsewhere Parﬁt is clear that we can and do have the same concept of a person while disagreeing over what the nature of persons might be – indeed we can only engage in direct disagreement if we possess the same concept (Parﬁt, unpublished). And the minimalist concept of a person is in keeping with the fact that INW, if it is to be of interest at all, must be seen as not merely proffering something on a par with various rival views on personal identity; rather, it must be assessed as an antidote to the general identity-favouring impulse, present or latent in all person-involving views. Parﬁt’s claim is that ‘[the impersonal] scheme would be in some ways better than ours’ (Parﬁt 1999, 264-265). Without the concept of a person the impersonal beings are not in a position to speculate about and distinguish between those cases in which facts about a body, brain, and psychological continuity and connectedness might form or contribute to the identity of a person, and cases in which they do not. Hence these beings will not favour identity over non-identity involving cases. They will not ask with respect to problem cases, ‘Shall I continue to exist? Will the resulting person be me?’ (ibid. 264); there is ‘no equivalent in my imagined scheme’ for such questions, Parﬁt writes (ibid. 263). The impersonal beings’ view of what matters with respect to the future can be conﬁned to psychological continuity and connectedness alone, and unadulterated by concerns for personal identity. It is because of this that Parﬁt suggests that we would beneﬁt if we ‘thought in this impersonal way’ (ibid. 266). We can look to the impersonal beings in order to expose and curtail our identity-favouring tendencies, and so INW may fulﬁl an important heuristic role. Its 24 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 24 30.7.2004 15:34:44 relevance to Reductionism is thus secured. We also now see the broader signiﬁcance of Parﬁt’s shift of attention to the concept of a person; it is the concept of a person that stands between us and our acceptance of the claim that personal identity does not matter. Parﬁt has isolated the source of resistance to this crucial claim, and using INW, can work to combat it. One objection to all this is while the impersonal being cannot ask, with respect to future situations, the question ‘will it still be me?’, he can ask the question, ‘will it still be the same sequence as this one?’. That the impersonal beings could ask such a question is clear, given certain other things that have already been established. The impersonal beings must have a basic notion of the identity of sequences in order to have a strong sense of the ‘from within’ character of their experience and to ‘distinguish such direct awareness from their indirect knowledge of other experiences’ (Parﬁt 1999, 230), which they do by means of thoughts and claims to the effect that certain experiences are either in or not in this sequence, of which this current thought is a member. With a notion of the identity of sequences in hand, the impersonal beings could imagine puzzle cases which raise questions and concerns about the future identity of sequences. If such questions and concerns about identity are indeed available to the impersonal beings, this casts doubt on the impersonal beings’ status as the ideal Reductionists, that status having been bestowed on them on the grounds that they were exempt from such concerns. Call this the ‘impersonal identity objection’. If correct, it strikes at the heuristic heart of INW. It may be responded that while the impersonal beings are, technically speaking, capable of raising such concerns about the identity of ‘this sequence’, nevertheless in the absence of the possession of the concept of a person, they will not in fact do so (see Parﬁt 1999, 265). Only questions about the identity of persons, and not the experiences and bodies which may make up their existence, can exercise a peculiar grip over individuals such that they will be disposed to be concerned with them. As discussed, it is the concept of a person that corrupts us – that leads to illusions and identity-favouring tendencies. The peculiar inﬂuence of subject-related concepts is highlighted in Parﬁt’s later work: Even the use of the word ‘I’ can lead us astray. Consider the fact that, in a few years, I shall be dead. This fact can seem depressing. But in re- 25 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 25 30.7.2004 15:34:44 ality it is only this. After a certain time, none of the thoughts and experiences that occur will be directly causally related to this brain, or be connected in certain ways to these present experiences. That is all this fact involves. And in that redescription, my death seems to disappear (Parﬁt 1995, 45; cf. 1999, 266). The impersonal beings only grasp the matter in the terms of such ‘redescriptions’. So dread of death and other future-directed self-concerns ‘disappear’ (or in their case, are never there to begin with). Along with their disappearance goes any motivation to articulate questions and concerns about identity of ‘this sequence’. This response to the impersonal identity objection reﬂects Parﬁt’s deep and long-standing conviction that full adherence to Reductionism would help divest us of such negative and debilitating emotions and attitudes as egoism and fear of death (Parﬁt 1971, sect. VI, and 1987, sect. 95). But this response leaves too much unanswered. We want to know why the discontinuation of this sequence is less likely to be of importance than the discontinuation of myself. The differences Parﬁt draws between ourselves and the impersonal beings, on which the signiﬁcance of INW rests, suggest that he has some insight into the nature of the concept of a person qua corrupting force. But unfortunately, his minimalist construal of the concept of a person precludes such insight. On the minimalist construal, the concept of a person is not identiﬁed with the pernicious simple view. It is compatible with any number of Reductionist views, including Parﬁt’s own. Yet only beings who don’t possess it behave like Reductionists ought to, and are exempt from identity-favouring tendencies. Why? If we cannot see what it is about a concept that is allegedly causing thought and behaviour x, we cannot see why lack of the concept would result in the absence or unlikelihood of thought and behaviour x. (Note the corollary to this is that any appeal to the necessity or positive inﬂuence of the concept of a person construed in the minimalist way is equally mysterious). As it stands, Parﬁt’s concept of a person casts no light on the source of our identity favouring tendencies and INW provides no clear means of divesting ourselves of those tendencies. But if this is so, why would Parﬁt be so misled as to think it was otherwise? The answer in part lies at the end of the paper in which he introduces INW. There he writes that we are ‘persisting things’ whereas sequences are ‘processes, which have temporal parts’, and 26 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 26 30.7.2004 15:34:44 in asking whether some persisting thing will continue to exist, we are asking whether some thing that exists at one time is one and the same as some thing that will exist at a later time. In asking about the identity of some process over time …. we are asking whether two different things – such as two different events – are parts of a single, larger thing. And the relation of parts to wholes is simpler, and clearer, than the relations between persisting things at different times (Parﬁt 1999, 265; cf. 234 ff.). For this reason impersonal beings are ‘less likely to be misled’ over questions about whether the same sequence continues than are we to be misled over the question of whether the same person continues (ibid. 265). There are reasons to think that this explanation is plausible, though I haven’t room to discuss them here. It is more important to note that in any case, Parﬁt is not in a position to avail himself of this explanation, for the following reasons. Upon this explanation, the key to the impersonal conceptual scheme is a perdurance view of mental and physical events that make up ‘this sequence’, while the person-involving conceptual scheme is necessarily tied to having an endurance view of persons. But then it seems that anyone with a perdurance view – in general, or of persons in particular – ought to be said not to be operating with the concept of a person (and on some interpretations this will include Parﬁt himself; cf. Noonan 1989, 125). We lose the minimalist construal of the concept of a person and lose the opportunity to have direct disagreement amongst certain factions of personal identity theory. Furthermore Parﬁt must have been wrong about the universality of our identity-favouring tendencies – the four-dimensionalist ought not ever to display such tendencies, since he, like the impersonal beings, is not committed to any enduring entity. Indeed the whole mechanism of INW is redundant – perdurance theorists ought to behave as ideal Reductionist role models. None of these are things Parﬁt wants to say. He may respond that there is a difference between the impersonal being and the perdurance theorist – the latter has the additional concept of a person and therefore his view is a view on what persons are (and brings with it identity-favouring baggage), in keeping with Parﬁt’s minimalist concept of a person. But given the preceding arguments, the basis for this response is unclear. The only substance Parﬁt seems prepared to give to the claim that the 27 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 27 30.7.2004 15:34:45 impersonal beings lack the concept of a person and so lack identity-favouring tendencies is that we have an additional commitment to an enduring entity. But we don’t all have such a commitment. We are left at an impasse: either there is no signiﬁcant difference between so-called personal and impersonal conceptual schemes, or if there is, it is not due to the possession or lack thereof of the concept of a person as Parﬁt understands it. If he retains the minimalist concept of a person, he must relinquish the claims that that concept corrupts our thinking, barring us from fully embracing Reductionism, and that the impersonal beings are exempt from identity-favouring tendencies and stand as Reductionist role models. If he narrows the concept of a person to one that necessarily involves commitment to an enduring entity, he ends up tacitly denying the perdurance theorist the concept of a person, and he goes against his own commitment to the possibility of direct disagreement amongst certain personal identity theorists. In all, Parﬁt’s shift in focus to the concept of a person has not been beneﬁcial to him. Literature Cassam, Q. 1992 “Parﬁt on Persons”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 93, 17-37. Evans, G. 1982 The Varieties of Reference, J. McDowell (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press. McDowell, J. 1997 “Reductionism and the First Person”, in J. Dancy (ed.) Reading Parﬁt, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, Ltd. Noonan, H. 1991 Personal Identity, London: Routledge. Parﬁt, D. 1971 “Personal Identity”, Philosophical Review, 80, 3-27. ---. 1987 Reasons and Persons, rev. ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press. ---. 1995 “The Unimportance of Identity”, in H. Harris (ed.) Identity, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 13-45. ---. 1999 “Experiences, Subjects, and Conceptual Schemes.” Philosophical Topics, 26, (1999): 217-270. ---. (unpublished) The Metaphysics of the Self. Shoemaker, S. 1968 “Self-Reference and Self-Awareness.” Journal of Philosophy, 65, (1968): 555-567. 28 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 28 30.7.2004 15:34:45 Encountering the Dark Spaces of Selfhood George Berguno Richmond University, London, UK bergung@richmond.ac.uk I n his classic phenomenological study of lived experiences, Minkowski (1970) distinguished between two kinds of lived space: ‘light’ and ‘dark’. In light space, everything is clear, precise and open to rational analysis. In this natural and unproblematic space I am granted the concrete possibility of situating myself in relation to things and to others. Moreover, communication is not only possible in light space, it is taken for granted. Light space can be shared. It is a socialized space, a public domain. But perhaps the most important characteristic of light space is that in the midst of my activities and experiences, I do not deliver myself entirely to its domain. I withhold certain intimate spaces of my being. I experience myself as in control and as the master of the terrain. In contrast, dark space is both mysterious and beyond all forms of representation. In dark space the possibility of communicating directly with others remains uncertain. Dark space is not to be conceived as the simple absence of light, but as an experience in which the subject-object dichotomy collapses. It is an experience in which one feels affected at the core of one’s being, enveloped and penetrated in a way that offers no hope of a rational afﬁrmation or intellectual comprehension. I can neither assert myself in relation to this darkness, nor can I hide an aspect of my being. In this lived obscurity, I experience a profound aloneness, as I realise that I will never know if others share this space with me. Dark space, therefore, has an intimate resonance that makes it more mine than the clarity of light space. According to Minkowski, the clarity that light space provides is not 29 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 29 30.7.2004 15:34:45 sufﬁcient for the establishment of a deep sense of self and moreover, dark space has a ‘fullness of life’ which is essential to our freedom and capacity for creative living. Yet, we must remember that the distinction between light and dark spaces is nonmathematical and non-geometric. We are not dealing with the everyday quantiﬁable understanding of space, but with lived distance. That is, these terms are not to be applied in a conceptual sense, but as existential categories of thought. Light and dark spaces are ways of being-in-the-world and according to Minkowski, they are the two fundamental modes by which life and the self unfold. Extending this idea in its existential dimensions, it can be said that each space presents me with a particular form of freedom. In light space, I have the freedom of willing and knowing. But in dark space I enter a more intimate potentiality for being, I come to dwell within the ground of my primordial freedom. It becomes imperative then to elucidate the nature of these spaces. In Minkowski’s own words, he hopes that ‘...one day we will be able to penetrate to the heart of this problem and draw from it all that it contains of value for our knowledge and understanding of life.’ (Minkowski 1970, 406) It is the aim of this paper to identify those existential situations that qualify as ‘dark spaces’ and further, to elucidate their relevance for an understanding of selfhood. Thus, Jaspers (1932) suggested that there are certain boundary situations that never change, that are beyond intellectual analysis, and yet, remain the foundations of our freedom: historicity, death, suffering, struggle and guilt. These existential situations represent a limit to our power and knowledge, and therefore qualify as dark spaces in Minkowski’s meaning of the phrase. Yet paradoxically, they also represent opportunities for existential self-becoming. In Jaspers’ view, the self is created in ‘tension’ with these boundary situations and any release of the tension represents a failure to realize one’s most original freedom. My own reading of Jaspers’ (1932) philosophy is as follows. The opportunity for self-becoming that a boundary situation offers can be lost in one of three ways: by denying or ignoring the boundary situation, by resigning oneself to the tragic aspect of the situation, or by projecting a rational meaning onto the encounter with these dark spaces of the self. Historicity, for example, refers to the fact that wherever I turn, I ﬁnd my possibilities constrained by events that are not my doing and are felt as an imposition. I was born into a particular historical situation and ﬁnd 30 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 30 30.7.2004 15:34:45 myself the inheritor of deﬁnite social and cultural currents. In so far as I understand that the events of the past have inﬂuenced my present existence, it can be said that I have a sense of history, but I have not yet arrived at the boundary situation of historicity. If I deny that the past or present events are related to me; if I adopt the role of a passive victim of history’s indifference; or if I construe historical currents as the workings of fate – in all these cases I have forfeited my freedom. In historicity, the factual knowledge that I have of the past and current world events speak to me directly as a unique human being and inspire me to action. And so, these unique conﬁgurations of events, which are at ﬁrst experienced as constraining and restricting, grant depth to my freedom precisely because I am acting, not in a world of general possibilities, but in a singular situation that calls to me directly. What has just been stated about historicity, applies equally to all boundary situations. Although reason cannot survey these realms, I can respond to them from the depths of my being. It is by assuming these situations as mine and deﬁantly continuing my efforts at self-becoming, that I make of these impositions the expression of my primordial freedom and my creative commitment to the future. Similarly, Marcel (1935) has argued that there are certain questions which, once raised, are experienced as a mystery, but which paradoxically illuminate our deepest sense of self. Marcel argues that a question that can be answered by recourse to a method or a technique is a ‘problem’, but problems do not touch us deeply and do not inspire us to creative self-becoming. A problem is an obstacle that is experienced as external to the self and the elements that compose the problem are similarly experienced as situated at a distance from the problem-solver. Thus, a problem is something that I have and which will, given the appropriate procedure, be resolved at some time in the future. But a question to which no rational answer can be given and moreover, which once raised seems to entangle me and surround me, is a mystery. Suffering and evil, embodiment and love, ﬁdelity and hope – these are all examples of Marcellian mysteries. Marcel suggests that the most striking example of a mystery is the question of Being. I cannot situate myself at a comfortable distance from this ontological mystery, for it is something that I am. Marcel points out that although we often attempt to confront a mystery by treating it as if it were a problem, it is by participating in the mystery that we experience our deepest, most intimate opportunity for self-becoming and transcendence of time. 31 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 31 30.7.2004 15:34:45 In response to Marcel’s existential analysis of mystery, I wish to raise the following question. If my deepest freedom is to be found in situating myself within a mystery, by posing and participating in an unfathomable question, what more profound mystery could there be than to raise the question of freedom? The paradox that confronts us here is all the more powerful when we realize that if freedom is to be the source of philosophy, it must also be its precondition. The consequences of such a view are far reaching. First, a philosophy that ﬁnds its creative impulse in freedom must of necessity be a philosophy grounded in personal life and experience. Second, the dynamic movement of such a philosophy must be existential and ethical, rather than ontological. Third, and perhaps most importantly, the truth that I seek in philosophy is one that both emerges from freedom and promotes freedom. It is with these points in mind that we now turn to an elucidation of human situations that have rarely been discussed in western philosophy as sources of our primordial freedom: sexuality, impermanence, technology and terrorism. Merleau-Ponty (1962) once claimed that if we could only understand how a thing or a person comes to acquire signiﬁcance for us through desire or love, we would then come to understand how the world in general acquires meaning for us. The emergence of sexual desire in particular presents itself as a mystery, enclosing me in an area of experience that cannot be surveyed rationally and is intensely personal. A person acquires sexual signiﬁcance for me. If I say of someone that they are attractive, I do not mean that they are attractive for all others in the same way. The fact that I cannot desire whomsoever I choose, is a clear indication that sexual longings represent yet another boundary situation to my efforts at self-becoming. Moreover, I cannot purge myself of my sexual longings, for they represent one of the givens of my existence. As an embodied human being, I make contact with the world and with others, but it is in my sexual life that I experience the most radical presence of the other. What I discover in sexual longings then, is the inescapable web of intersubjective life and the impossibility of creating myself by withdrawing from human contact. Sexuality is an openness onto the world and an expression of my existence. As a form of primordial intentionality, the meanings that I grasp in my sexual life are never clear and communicable. Instead, I am reminded of the ambiguous atmosphere pervading all my experiences. 32 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 32 30.7.2004 15:34:45 Along with sexual longings, another ineradicable existential given of my inner life is the longing for permanence. Although we can accept that the world is governed by change and that no phenomenon can endure indeﬁnitely, we invest our hopes and desires in the idea of a permanent self or permanent state of affairs. Existential thought in the western world has tended to focus on death as the ultimate mystery and boundary situation, but it is possible to argue that death is simply an aspect of a more radical, more pervasive limit situation – impermanence. On this analysis, impermanence would represent yet another opportunity for self-becoming, as well as an appeal to our primordial freedom. This idea has been developed by eastern philosophers and ﬁnds its most radical expression in Buddhist thought (Abe, 1992). According to Buddhism, not only does impermanence represent the ground of our freedom, but the insight into its all-pervasiveness becomes the foundation of enlightenment and compassion. Buddhism teaches that although there is no permanent self, there is selfhood within change. The search for permanence then, is a denial of our primordial freedom and it is only by transforming our encounter with impermanence into embodied unconditional action that we realize our deepest potential for authentic selfhood. One of Jaspers’ (1932) insights into the dynamics of boundary situations was to differentiate between limit situations that are entirely imposed upon us (death, suffering) from those that are brought about by our own actions (struggle, guilt). Impermanence and sexual longings would be examples of the ﬁrst kind of situation. In contrast, technology and terrorism present themselves as examples of the second kind. The emergence of technical knowledge in the history of humankind, granted us the potential to distance ourselves from and dominate the natural world. It also gave us the means by which to extend and transform our cognitive abilities (Vygotsky, 1980). In this view, technology presents itself as an instrument of freedom. But the mystery that surrounds technical knowledge and innovations is that technology has acquired a direction of force which is now beyond our control, to the point where humans sometimes become the means for the realization of technical advancements. The existential paradox that confronts us here is that technology both liberates and enslaves us. Moreover, technological innovations created for the purpose of enhancing our quality of life can also be used to destructive ends, thus creating an aura of uncertainty and anxiety in our everyday lives. 33 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 33 30.7.2004 15:34:46 Similarly, in contemporary society, terrorism has emerged as a modern form of the boundary situation of struggle. But the power of contemporary terrorism is that it makes thematic everyday actions that were once taken for granted. Expressed in phenomenological language, the new natural attitude is to assume that no person and no place is entirely safe. Furthermore, we feel surrounded by invisible enemies that may strike at any moment. This upheaval in our everyday worldview represents a reversal of values (Berdyaev, 1937) and an invitation to despair. We are tempted to betray our primordial freedom either by resigning ourselves to living in fear, or by withdrawing from the existential challenge that world events confront us with (claiming that they do not concern us). A Marcellian analysis of terrorism would argue that although it is possible to confront terrorism as a ‘problem’, its manifestation as a horizon of our everyday life suggests that we are confronted here with an existential mystery and by implication, a call to risk ourselves in existential communication with others. Our existential analysis of our lived experiences has shown us that our life is permeated by two kinds of vital space, each with its own existential structure, and both are necessary for the creation of a deep sense of self. In light space, I have the freedom of choice and the capacity to situate myself in relation to the world and to others. This is the domain of reason, knowledge and power. But there is another realm of living, which is experienced as a limit or boundary to my freedom of choice. In this realm, in which my capacity for rational self-choice and knowledge are defeated, I encounter a new sense of freedom by means of my participation in the mystery of this lived obscurity. The freedom that I am granted in this dark space is the possibility of transcendence, faith and unconditional action. We must conclude then, that our potentiality for being unfolds along two divergent, albeit overlapping, paths and that in order to see into what is most real about ourselves, we must direct our will to truth to the ultimate limits of what is possible. Literature Abe, M. (1992). A Study of D gen: His Philosophy and Religion. Albany, NY: SUNY. 34 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 34 30.7.2004 15:34:46 Berdyaev, N. (1937). The Destiny of Man. Trans. by Natalie Duddington. New York: Scribner’s. Jaspers, K. (1932). Philosophie (3 Vol). Berlin: Springer. Jaspers, K. (1996). Reason and Existenz: Five Lectures. Milwaukee, Wisconsin: Marquette University Press. Marcel, G. (1935). Etre et Avoir. Paris: Aubier. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). The Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. By Colin Smith. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd. Minkowski, E. (1970). Lived Time: Phenomenological and Psychopathological Studies. Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press. Vygotsky, L. (1980). Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. New Haven: Harvard University Press. 35 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 35 30.7.2004 15:34:46 Animalism and What Matters Chris Buford University of California, Santa Barbara, USA chrisnbets@yahoo.com nimalism is the thesis that we are identical to animals, human animals. Hence, we have the persistence conditions of human animals. Intuitively, Animalism is incompatible with any position that posits psychological continuity as either a necessary or sufﬁcient condition for one’s (personal) identity over time. Since an animal can survive in the absence of any psychological continuity, an animalist cannot accept such continuity as a necessary condition upon identity over time. Also, in some (imagined) cases it appears that psychological continuity obtains between x and y although x and y are not the same animal. x and y might not be the same animal, or perhaps y is not an animal at all. Thus, an animalist ought not accept that psychological continuity is sufﬁcient for identity over time. Although rejection of psychological continuity as a sufﬁcient condition for identity over time is in line with contemporary philosophical thought regarding personal identity, Animalism must go one step further. Non-branching psychological continuity is also rejected as a sufﬁcient condition. That Animalism rejects the sufﬁciency of non-branching psychological continuity is important since a reductio style argument exploiting this fact can be directed towards the theory. Consider ﬁrst the following scenario. I have contracted a terrible disease that has spread throughout my body. Any organ affected by the disease will soon cease functioning. Luckily, there is one part of my body that has not been affected, my cerebrum. My twin has, unfortunately, contracted the same disease. However, my twin has it in his cerebrum only. The doctors offer to transplant A 36 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 36 30.7.2004 15:34:46 my cerebrum into my twin’s body. My twin and I discuss the operation and decide to proceed. Fortunately, the operation is a success. The person composed of my cerebrum and my twin’s body minus cerebrum walks out of the hospital a few days later. One question we might ask is “Who walks out of the hospital after the operation, me, my twin, or someone else?” According to a plausible version of Animalism, my twin walks out of the hospital since no human animal was transferred during the procedure. As one Animalist Eric T. Olson states of the cerebrum, “it is no more a living organism than a freshly severed arm is an organism”. (Olson, 114) Any version of Animalism that accepts this result must then address the following anti-animalism reductio argument I will label Transplant. TRANSPLANT (1) My twin walks out of the hospital. (2) For any individuals x and y, if x at t has (can have, ought to have) prudential concern for y at t’, then x is identical to y. (3) Prior to the transplant I would have prudential concern for the individual that walks out of the hospital. (C) Thus, I am identical to the individual that walks out of the hospital. Of course, (1) and (C) are inconsistent and thus the reductio is complete. Olson has offered one response to the argument. The response draws upon the work of Parﬁt and Shoemaker. Consider the following to be the Parﬁt-Shoemaker thesis, PST- Prudential concern does not always coincide with numerical identity. The best way to understand PST is to take it as the denial of the quantiﬁed bi-conditional composed of the following quantiﬁed conditionals. C1- For all individuals x and y, if x=y, then x at t has (can have, ought to have) prudential concern for y at t’ C2- For all individuals x and y, if x at t has (can have, ought to have) prudential concern for y at t’, then x=y 37 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 37 30.7.2004 15:34:46 If PST is true, ﬁrst order logic tells us that either Cl or C2, or both, are false. Olson argues that both are false, but all that is needed to refute the previous argument against animalist of personal identity is the falsiﬁcation of C2, which is the second premise of the argument above. If C2 is false, the argument is unsound. If we adjust slightly the scenario discussed earlier, a putative counterexample to C2 emerges. Unfortunately, I contract the insidious disease in this example as well. However, now I have two twins, call them ChrisA and ChrisB. Both of them have contracted the disease, and it has not spread beyond either of their cerebrums. We decide to split my cerebrum in half and perform two transplants. Both operations go smoothly and we have a “double success.” ChrisA body minus cerebrum, plus half of my cerebrum, and ChrisB body minus cerebrum, plus the other half of my cerebrum, both walk out of the hospital a few days later. Let us also add to the description of the case the unfortunate fact that both ChrisA and ChrisB will be tortured after the transplant procedures. Even though Pre-ﬁssion Chris is not identical to ChrisA or ChrisB, Preﬁssion Chris’ concern at t for ChrisA at t’ (the time of the onset of torture) and Pre-ﬁssion Chris’ concern for ChrisB at t’ both seems rational, and rightly characterized as ‘prudential’. If this is so, C2 is false. The case under consideration actually provides us with two distinct counterexamples to C2. Pre-ﬁssion Chris at t has prudential concern for an individual y (ChrisA) at t’ who is not identical to Pre-ﬁssion Chris. Preﬁssion Chris at t also has prudential concern for another individual z (Chris B) at t’ who is distinct from Pre-ﬁssion Chris (and from Chris A). Olson posits that x’s prudential concern at t for y at t’, instead of being grounded in identity, is justiﬁed if x at t and y at t’ are psychologically continuous. Since psychological continuity is not a sufﬁcient condition for personal identity over time according to the animalist, the fact that x at t has prudential concern for y at t’ is consistent with that fact that x ≠ y. While this appears to be an adequate response on behalf of the animalist, trouble lurks near the surface. The closer we look at Parﬁt’s actual defense of PST, the more apparent it becomes that the animalist may want to reconsider his acceptance of PST since Parﬁt’s argument’s in favor of PST relies upon the supposed truth of a psychological approach to the problem of personal identity. I will not discuss Shoemaker’s views although two points are worth mentioning. Shoemaker, like 38 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 38 30.7.2004 15:34:46 Parﬁt, adopts a psychological account of personal identity. More importantly, as far as I can tell, Shoemaker, unlike Parﬁt, does not offer an argument for PST. Although Parﬁt frames his discussion in term of ‘what matters’ and not prudential concern I think it is easy to see that if x at some time and y at some later time are related by what matters, then x has prudential concern for y. Parﬁt considers a case, which he labels My Division, which is structurally similar to the ﬁssion case described above. Parﬁt, as Olson rightly notes, comes to the conclusion that what matters obtains between the pre-ﬁssion individual and both of the post-ﬁssion products. How exactly though does Parﬁt come to this conclusion? Parﬁt’s motivation for accepting this conclusion is stated clearly and succinctly in the ﬁrst paragraph of section 90 of Reasons and Persons. We ought to regard division as being about as good as ordinary survival. As I have argued, the two ‘products’ of this operation would be two different people. Consider my relation to each of these people. Does this relation fail to contain some vital element that is contained in ordinary survival? It does not. I would survive if I stood in this very same relation to only one of the resulting people. (Parﬁt, 261) Given the last statement of this passage, Parﬁt seems to agree, contra Animalism, that I would walk out of the hospital. Furthermore, this point appears to be central to Parﬁt’s argument that what matters in survival is not identity but instead what Parﬁt call the R relation, psychological connectedness and/or continuity with the right kind of cause. The following principle is vital to Parﬁt’s argument, (P) If process p preserves what matters, then any process intrinsically just like p must preserve what matters as well. Of course, any theorist of personal identity can accept P since P doesn’t seem to entail any speciﬁc theory of personal identity. However, it is not just P that allows Parﬁt to draw the conclusion that he does. Parﬁt needs the further premise that both of the transplants preserve what matters. In order to prove this, Parﬁt relies upon the datum that if either of the transplants were performed in isolation, then this process would preserve identity. Parﬁt then infers that this process would preserve what 39 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 39 30.7.2004 15:34:47 matters. The following principle is thus relied upon as well, (M) If a process p preserves identity over time, then the process must preserve what matters as well. Three things should be noted regarding M and its relation to Parﬁt’s argument. First, M alone is not sufﬁcient to prove that each of the transplants preserves what matters. We also need the assumption that each of the processes, in the absence of the other, would preserve identity. Parﬁt, as stated above, accepts this assumption. Why? Parﬁt holds that non-branching R with the right kind of cause is a sufﬁcient condition for personal identity over time. If only one of the transplants is completed, then non-branching R with the right kind of cause (in this case the normal cause) is preserved. Furthermore, the animalist cannot accept this assumption nor does it appear that the animalist can accept (M). If this is correct, then the Animalist either cannot appeal to the Parﬁt-Shoemaker thesis when responding to Transplant or must at least supply us with a new argument, one that does not rely upon the sufﬁciency of non-branching R, for why we ought to accept PST. The animalist cannot accept the assumption that non-branching R is sufﬁcient for personal identity since this is incompatible with the position that we are essentially human animals. If according to Animalism, my twin walks out of the hospital, then it cannot be the case that I walk out of the hospital since I ≠ my twin. But if non-branching R (with the right kind of cause) is sufﬁcient for personal identity over time, and given that the individual who walks out of the hospital bears this relation to me prior to the operation, then it would follow that I am the individual who walks out of the hospital after the operation. Thus combining Animalism and the sufﬁciency of non-branching R yields the conclusion (contradiction) that I am the individual who walks out of the hospital and I am not the individual who walks out of the hospital. Let us now turn to analyzing why the animalist will have a hard time defending another crucial component of Parﬁt’s argument, M. If M is accepted, another plausible argument can be aimed at the animalist. Let us call the following argument Post-Transplant. 40 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 40 30.7.2004 15:34:47 POST-TRANSPLANT (1) If a process p preserves identity over time, then that process must preserve what matters (M). (2) If Animalism is true, animal identity, hence one’s own identity, is not affected by the transplant operation. (3) The process does not preserve what matters. (4) Therefore, the process does not preserve identity over time. (5) Therefore, Animalism is false. I am not claiming that this argument is a refutation of Animalism, only that is prima facie compelling. If the animalist cannot accept the ﬁrst premise (M), then (3) appears to be the best premise to challenge. However, (3) is not obviously false as noted by Jeff McMahan, The view that we are human organisms seems to imply that at some point most of us will exist, for a while, as corpses. But, because it seems irrational to be egoistically [prudentially] concerned about what will happen to one’s corpse, it is hard to believe that one will be that corpse. (McMahan, 53) McMahan here is stating a somewhat stronger variant of Post-Transplant in that it sticks the Animalist with accepting corpse/animal identity but I think similar grounds can be adduced in favor of (3). The post cerebrum individual presumably cannot think, feel pain or complete any of the tasks I so wanted ﬁnished prior to the operation. Why then should I have prudential concern for this individual? This controversy is obviously not a settled matter but it helps to ﬂesh out the dilemma faced by the Animalist. Rejecting M gives the animalist a quick and easy response to Post-Transplant but precludes the Animalist from accepting Parﬁt’s argument for PST. Transplant thus becomes a much more pressing issue for. On the other hand, accepting M has implications. M alone does not get the Animalist PST, what is needed is apparently the sufﬁciency of non-branching R, a position at odds with central animalist tenets. In addition, if M is accepted, Post-Transplant jumps to the forefront as a concern for the animalist. I would like to turn now to some foreseen objections to the preceding line of thought. One might wonder why the Animalist needs an argu- 41 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 41 30.7.2004 15:34:47 ment for PST in the ﬁrst place. Couldn’t the Animalist posit PST as a brute fact and leave it at that? My response here is that I suppose the animalist could do this. However, the response strikes me as a bit ad hoc. Perhaps this, in itself, is not a cause for concern. The main problem with this objection is that PST initially seems to strike us as an extremely counter-intuitive thesis. “That’s not right” is how most people seem to react to the idea that prudential concern (what matters) need not track identity. In fact, there are many philosophers who do not accept it.(Sosa, Campbell) It would thus be nice to have a positive reason (independent of the arguments against Animalism) for accepting the thesis in light of this skepticism. Another objection might be that I am overlooking an obvious argument for PST that does not rely upon a psychological approach. However, even if one can develop an argument, compatible with Animalism, in favor of PST, one wonders whether it will have to rely upon M. If such an argument employs M, then the animalist must once again face Post-Transplant. To conclude, I have argued that if the Animalist invokes PST to block Transplant, she has some explaining to do. Given PST’s counterintuitive status, an argument should be proffered. To date, the only argument we have, Parﬁt’s, is incompatible with Animalism. Thus, a different argument is needed; preferably, such an argument will avoid invoking M, and thus avoid the worries presented by Post Transplant. It appears that the best course for the animalist to plot is one that avoids M. Thus, allowing the animalist to steer between the Scylla and Charybdis of Transplant and Post-Transplant. Literature Campbell, J. 1995 Past, Space, and Self Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, Ch. 5. McMahan, J. 2002 The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life Oxford: Oxford University Press, 53. (My emphasis) Olson, E. 1997 The Human Animal: Personal Identity without Psychology New York: Oxford University Press. Parfit, D. 1984 Reasons and Persons New York: Oxford University Press. Shoemaker, S. 1970 “Persons and Their Pasts”, American Philosophical Quarterly, 7. Sosa, E. 1990 “Surviving Matters”, Nous, 24. 42 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 42 30.7.2004 15:34:47 Can We Know Too Much, Do We Know Too Little, and Does It Make a Difference Either Way? Iskra Fileva Boston University, USA indi_aira@yahoo.com Introduction M oral philosophy usually proceeds by an appeal to ordinary intuitions. Empirical studies of man are motivated by the conviction that what seems ‘intuitively correct’ may not, in fact, be true. This methodological difference does not generate a tension between the two types of inquiry so long as the two are kept separate. And so indeed they have traditionally been.1 The polite indifference with which moral philosophers have long treated the empirical study of man is now gradually giving way to an increasing awareness of the fact that, contrary to what has been traditionally supposed, at least some of the claims made by empirical sciences can bear signiﬁcantly upon the claims of moral theory. That gives rise to the following problem. What shall we do in case the claims of empirical science based on evidence run counter to moral conceptions true to our normative intuitions? Shall we stick with our intuitively plausible moral conceptions or seek to revise them? My aim in the present paper is to take this question. I shall do this in the context of two accounts with radically opposed conclusions as to its answer. The ﬁrst is the revisionist attempt of Gilbert Harman. Harman (in)famously argued that our ordinary intuitions about what human be- 43 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 43 30.7.2004 15:34:47 ings are, just like our physical intuitions, of what, say, ‘mass’ is, may turn out to be mistaken. Hence in moral theory we need to proceed much the way we do in physics – by gathering empirical evidence and incorporating that evidence into our accounts. On the other hand, Philip Kitcher in his recently published Science, Truth and Democracy, espouses conservatism on normative grounds. The main problem we need to address according to Kitcher is not what is the surest way for us to know the truth but what is the best way to promote the good. But if that is so, holds Kitcher, revisions of ordinary moral conceptions may have to be resisted as normatively unacceptable even when they bring us closer to the truth. What I wish to maintain here is that both Harman and Kitcher are mistaken: neither should we be quick to revise our ordinary moral conceptions, nor is there a need to constrain scientiﬁc inquiry on normative grounds. I shall maintain that what I claim are mistakes of both Harman and Kitcher, are due to a failure on the part of both to appreciate the autonomy of humans in the face of uncomfortable or unbelievable truths, that is, their capacity for self-creation. In addressing my task I proceed as follows. I ﬁrst give brief outline of Harman’s challenge. I then sketch Kitcher’s argument (2). I next turn to a critical discussion (3). 1. Harman’s denial of character We tend to explain the behavior of others, maintains Harman, in terms of their character traits. Thus, we ordinarily think that “the honest person tries to return the wallet because he or she is honest. The person who pockets the contents of the wallet and throws the rest of the wallet away does so because he or she is dishonest.” (Harman 1998-99, 320) After Ross and Nisbett Harman calls the tendency of ‘folk psychology’ to explain action by an appeal to character traits ‘the fundamental attribution error’. The fact that two people behave differently from each other may well be due to the different situations those people have been put in, rather than to differences in their characters. Thus, suppose Jane stopped to help a stranger in need and we want to know why she did so. Folk morality and at least one major branch of ethics would have it that she did so be- 44 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 44 30.7.2004 15:34:47 cause she is a person of good character, a ‘virtuous’ agent. Yet suppose social psychology tells us that a while later Jane agreed to participate in an experiment whereby she was led to mildly torturing the very man she brought to the hospital. We learn also that 24 out of 25 people, including people we would not think of as ‘virtuous’ can be made to help a stranger by ensuring that they ﬁnd a quarter in the cash dispenser of the payphone they have used right before they see a person in need of assistance. Finally, we learn that nearly everyone, even those we consider most compassionate can, as a matter of fact, be led to engage in gratuitous cruelty. Should we still hold that Jane is virtuous? That there are any virtuous people? And what if general about people’s having characters? Harman, on the basis of some such examples, denies plausibility to the notions of both ‘virtue’ and ‘character’. The standard opinion that people differ in character traits is, according to Harman, on a par with the opinion of the practicing psychoanalyst as to the value of psychoanalysis or that of the employer as to the worth of job interviews: ‘Such opinions are ﬁrmly held quite independently of their truth (they are known to be false) and can be explained in terms of conﬁrmation biases of various sorts. Likewise for ordinary intuitions about character traits: “There is no reason to believe at all in character traits as ordinarily conceived.” (Harman 1999-2000a, 224) 2. Kitcher on subversive truth It is terrible to destroy a person’s picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction. Doris Lessing Know thyself ? If I knew myself I would run away. Johann Wolfgang Goethe If we follow Kitcher, revisionist attempts such as Harman’s above rely on a hidden premise. The possibly dubious character of ordinary moral 45 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 45 30.7.2004 15:34:48 conceptions, even if demonstrated, does not on its own sufﬁce to yield the conclusion that a revision of those conceptions is necessary. It can do so only in conjunction with the assumption that the value of truth is of primary import, more important than the conceptions which are to be subjected to revision. But that may well be a false premise. Or so at least maintains Kitcher. He coins the expression ‘subversive truth’ to describe knowledge that undermines our central moral conceptions or, to put it in his own words, ‘challenges the presuppositions on which the preferences held throughout society are founded.’ (Kitcher 2001, 149) But subversive knowledge isn’t necessarily a desirable thing.2 To see the force of this claim, pick a value we are all deeply committed to, say the value of altruism. Then envision a scenario whereby scientiﬁc knowledge puts that value into question. For instance, suppose that as a matter of fact, altruistic behavior is based not on concern for others but on manipulation. Ask yourself whether you really want to obtain the knowledge in question, in this case, the uncomfortable truth about the basis of altruism3. Kitcher’s own response is ‘no’ and he expects that this would be our response as well. I shall shortly argue for a different answer. 3. Discussion 3.1. Truth and autonomy I shall take the two proposals sketched above in a reverse order and ﬁrst pose the question do we have normative reasons to protect our ordinary moral conceptions from empirically based subversion. It would help to ﬁrst consider a preliminary question, namely what reasons are there for thinking that a positive reply is in order. Just why might Kitcher, or anyone for that matter, think that it would be better for us to not know an uncomfortable truth about the basis of altruism? The most plausible answer would seem to be something like this: if we ﬁnd out that altruistic behavior has a morally unsound basis we shall, most likely, abandon altruism as a value. But certainly altruistic behavior is not something we wish to give up on: we do want to be treated in ways we normally refer to as ‘altruistic’. 46 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 46 30.7.2004 15:34:48 Yet this worry seems somewhat misguided. For if we are genuinely concerned that we might, as a result of scientiﬁc ﬁndings, be led to give up attempts to behave altruistically, then we think that altruism is of value regardless of the scientiﬁc truth about its basis. But if that is what we think, if we take it that altruism is of value regardless of the truth about its basis, then why should we stop attempting to behave altruistically as a result of learning something about its basis? The fear that we will is akin to the fear of Darwin’s contemporaries that if scientiﬁc discoveries run counter to the hypothesis of a sacred origin of man the conclusion will follow that humans need not be respected4. But how would that conclusion follow? Scientiﬁc evidence which contradicts the hypothesis of the sacred origin of man can show at best that the sacred origin of man is not a ground for respecting human dignity, but it won’t show that human dignity is not to be respected. Whether it is or it isn’t depends on whether or not upon reﬂection we take it that there are acceptable and unacceptable ways for humans to treat each other.5 And our worry that we might start treating each other in unacceptable ways already implies that there are: apparently, it does matter to us or else why would the results of scientiﬁc ﬁndings be a cause for concern? Surely, even if God is dead not everything is permitted. 3.2. Humans as a matter of fact The trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efﬁciency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the liar and deceiver wishes to hide. In this sense, truth, even if it does not prevail in public, possesses an ineradicable primacy over all falsehoods. Hannah Arendt But it is possible to object to the above line of reasoning in the following way. Scientiﬁc ﬁndings may undercut ordinary conceptions by showing the ideals implied by those conceptions to be utopian. I claimed above that we need not fear the eventual ‘subversiveness’ of science on the ground that even when science undermines what we have hitherto taken 47 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 47 30.7.2004 15:34:48 to be a basis of our ideals, we are always free to retain these ideals on normative reasons, that is, because we ﬁnd them desirable upon reﬂection. Yet what if science shows that the ideals implied by ordinary moral conceptions are impossible to achieve? Harman’s revisionist proposal is largely motivated by the conviction that there are no such reasons and that, to the contrary, we have good reasons to opt for a revision.6 ‘If we know that there is no such thing as a character trait’, writes Harman, ‘and we know that virtue would require having character traits, how can we aim at becoming a virtuous agent?’ (Harman 1999-2000a, 225) One possible reply to Harman here is that pursuing illusory ideals may make us happier than learning the truth about those ideals. If so, it is by no means clear that it is truth rather than happiness we should side with. Kitcher is sympathetic to this response but I am not. I quite agree with Harman that we should aspire to free ourselves from utopias, even from beautiful utopias7. What I wish to question here is the suggestion that empirical science can show as basic a concept as that of ‘character’ to be groundless and so that the idea of a ‘good character’ to be a utopia. Imagine a school teacher who tells her pupils to be good. One of the pupils (whose brother is a graduate student of philosophy) raises up his hand and says, ‘But this is an impossible demand Mam. Don’t you know? People have no characters. There aren’t any good people. So how can we try to be good?’ What should the teacher reply? Should she perhaps say, ‘Oh thanks so much for telling me. If that is certain, then yes, it makes no sense for you to try to be good. I am going to improve my pedagogy. I won’t make my pupils try to do impossible things from now on.’ But it could be suggested perhaps on Harman’s behalf, that the reason the teacher shouldn’t give such a reply is that the idea of a ‘good character’ is a useful device in educating children. Maybe children should be told to be good just as they are sometime told that their noses would become orange if they swallow an orange with the seeds or something of this sort– because they are too young to be properly motivated by the truth. But they should learn when they grow up that there aren’t any characters and so any good characters much the way they learn that noses 48 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 48 30.7.2004 15:34:48 never become orange. They should then keep trying to behave well, maybe, but not to be good for the latter is an attempt doomed to failure.8 But the question would then arise just what is the difference between trying to behave well or better than one has had in the past and trying to be good? There is no much point in arguing about word usage unless there the terminological disparity conceals a real practical difference. Doris, one of Harman’s preferred sources, has suggested a reply – a ‘situationist’, according to Doris, will make an attempt to put himself in situations likely to illicit from him desirable behavior and avoid such that are likely to have unwelcome consequences, rather than let himself face any situation in the hope of behaving well as a person of good character.9 What can be said in response? Sometimes, indeed, the proper thing to do may be for us to either seek or avoid certain situations. For instance I know that once I turn my computer on, I am likely to check my email. But I really have to get this paper done and I have no time for email. So maybe the right thing to do is for me to work on my old computer which has no internet connection and can only be used as a type-writer. But there will be plenty of cases when I cannot control myself that way. Consider the question what should I do to escape the faith of the subjects from the Milgram experiment? Shall I, perhaps, avoid situations of obeying authority? That doesn’t seem to be either a good advice or one I can follow. So I would need to ﬁnd out ways to be good and do good despite my situation. But it could be objected, perhaps, that there aren’t such ways – the boundaries of our control over situations, it might be claimed, are boundaries of our control over our own behavior, period. Yet certainly there are. I can increase my chances for success by learning more both about myself and about the situations I am being put it. I can aspire to make myself less manipulable. And empirical studies such as those quoted by Harman can and should help me in this endeavor. I want to stress this point. The subjects from the Milgram experiment are not likely to behave in the same way when put in the same situation and likewise for subjects who are familiar with the experiment The results of that and other similar experiments are unrepeatable10. And they are unrepeatable because there isn’t a fact of the matter as to what human beings are. Each time we learn that we weren’t as we wanted to be, we become better able to be as we want to be. 49 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 49 30.7.2004 15:34:48 Someone can retort in defense of situationism that psychologists can devise a more elaborate and subtle, say Pilgram experiment in which subjects from the Milgram experiment or students of social psychology and its empirically minded moral theoretical counterpart are led to behave no less (perhaps more) cruelly. This is certainly possible and is, in a sense, what we should expect. Our capacities to control our own behavior go farther than controlling the type of situations we have to face but not much farther than our knowledge and self-knowledge go. Barring persons with an extraordinary moral insight, most of us come to the right conclusions as regards problematic situations post factum. But we are not likely to be easily mislead more than once. The past problematic situation will be easier to handle next time. This is my main point. Empirical science is a challenge not to our normative ideals but to our belief in that we are close to achieving them. The good news is that this challenge is a useful guide in our getting closer. Notes 1 2 The tradition goes back to Plato at least. In a famous passage in the Phaedo Socrates claims that he, Socrates, cannot be said to be sitting in the prison because he has the bones and sinews that he has. For had Socrates not decided to wait for his death, his bones and sinews on their own would have soon led him to flee away. Later, Kant struggled with the question how to reconcile the idea that natural causality is all pervasive with the ideas of reason and freedom. He put the problem as one of two different stances we can take towards ourselves – that of observation and that of deliberation and, much like Plato before him, pronounced himself in favor of the latter for the purposes of doing moral philosophy. More recently Thomas Nagel, in an essay with the telling title “Ethics as a Autonomous Theoretical Subject” writes: “My main point is that ethics is a subject. It is pursued by methods that are continually being developed in response to the problems that arise within it. Obviously the creatures who engage in this activity are organisms about whom we can learn a great deal from biology (…) But it would be as foolish to seek such an evolutionary explanation of ethics as it would be to seek such an explanation of the development of physics.’ (Nagel 1980, 202) Kitcher writes in this regard: ‘The great advocates of the Enlightenment, from the eighteenth century to the present’, ‘believed that by eradicating traditional prejudices and superstitions, scientific inquiry would enable peo- 50 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 50 30.7.2004 15:34:48 3 4 5 6 ple to live lives of superior quality (…) the rhetoric about the importance of seeking the truth seems to develop its own form of theology, viewing the high priests of the sciences as dedicated to a sacred task.’ And then he goes on: ‘behind the often evangelical rhetoric about the value of knowledge stands a serious theology, an unexamined faith (…) It’s time to abandon that theology (…) We need agnosticism all the way down.’ (Kitcher 2001, 158). I wish to note here that Kitcher’s argument against ‘subversive knowledge’ is a line of a general argument for the primacy of moral and political goals over the value of truth with which I find myself in an almost complete agreement. That argument is motivated by the realization that it is part of the human predicament that values compete and that pairs of values whose one component is the value of truth are no exception. Promoting the value of truth can get in the way of our attempts to further various moral and political goals of great and lasting import to us and it can do so in a number of ways – some scientific projects might be too costly, too time consuming or may require unlimited use of human subjects. Kitcher’s thesis is, that when realizing the value of objective truth militates against the promotion of other values, it is not truth but collective well-being which should be accorded normative priority and I have nothing to object to this point. What I question is the claim that knowing the truth might, upon occasion, be undesirable, not simply less desirable than other desirable things. As James Brown remarks in a related discussion: ‘Ironically, we may find ourselves in the position of Mrs. Wilberforce who, upon hearing about Darwin’s theory that we are descended from apes remarked ‘Let us pray it is not true; but if it is, let us hope it does not become widely known’. (Brown 1994, 70) There is a second possibility however. We may take it, upon reflection, that altruism is only of value if it is based on genuine concern for others. On this scenario, finding out that altruistic behavior is not in fact underwritten by such a concern, shows that altruistic behavior should not be encouraged. But this second scenario seems to me even less worrisome. For if that’s the case, if manipulation-based altruistic behavior does not seem to us worthy of promotion, then why fear that we might come to abandon this type of behavior, to abandon, in other words, behavior which is not worthy of promotion? Making progress in moral theory (and so promoting the value of ‘truth’) is only one of these reasons. Harman lists others – greater tolerance, better understanding of moral luck. If we fully appreciate the role of situational fac- 51 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 51 30.7.2004 15:34:49 7 8 9 10 tors in the behavior of others we won’t be quick to attribute to ‘badness’ the acts we would think of as ‘bad’. In regard of the last two, I argue later in this paper that past behavior may be a fit object for ‘observation’ rather than ‘deliberation’. This opens the possibility for us to appeal to ‘situational factors’ in explaining such behavior. But the same is not true of future courses of action. Considerations of space make it impossible to explain in detail why I am not sympathetic but for present purposes let me say this much. At least some people would prefer to know the truth than not to know it. If so, those people would be denied the right to learn the truth so that others, who wouldn’t want to learn the truth are happy. But the harm of denying people the right to learn the truth if they wanted is a more serious problem than the risk of making people unhappy by telling them the truth. Harman, it must be noted, is concerned not that much with the question what should we do but rather with the question, why did people act the way they did. There is a sense in which it seems all right to take the stance of observation (as empirical science and empiricist moral theories such as ‘situationism’ would want us to) rather than that of deliberation towards our past behavior. We have to be open to the possibility that situational and other factors shaped our behavior without our knowledge and approval. What seems in appropriate is to attempt, on this basis, to predict our future behavior rather than deliberate. See also note 8 bellow. He writes in this regard: ‘Imagine a colleague with whom you have had a ling flirtation invites you for dinner (…) if you take the lessons of situationism to heart you avoid dinner like the plague, because you know that you may not be able to predict your behavior in a problematic situation’ (Doris 1998, 516) Hence the peculiar need of social psychology to deceive in order to carry out its experiments. Batson writes about the experiments of moral psychology that they ‘ proceed by deceiving participants about the true purpose of the experiment…’ (Batson 1992, 77). As Hume already observed: ‘tis evident this reflection and premeditation would so disturb the operation of my natural impulses, as must render it impossible to form any just conclusion from the phenomenon’ (Hume 1739-1740/1978, xix quoted by Batson 1992, 77) The empirical study of man and moral philosophy, it could be claimed in a somewhat Kantian view, do have, after all, different purposes. Empirical science wants to know how man is naturally inclined to behave and moral philosophy how he should behave. 52 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 52 30.7.2004 15:34:49 Literature Brown, J. 1994 Smoke and Mirrors: How Science Reflects Reality, London; New York: Routledge. Batson, C. 1992 “Experimental Tests for the Existence of Altruism”, Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association, 2, 69-78. Doris, J. 1998 “Persons, Situations, and Virtue Ethics”, Nous, 32, 504-530. Harman, G. 1998-99 “Moral Philosophy Meets Social Psychology: Virtue Ethics And The Fundamental Attribution Error”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 99, 315-331. Revised version in Harman, G. 2000 Explaining Value and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 165-178. Harman, G. 1999-2000a “The Nonexistence of Character Traits”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 100, 223-226. Kitcher, P. 2001 Science, Truth and Democracy, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. Nagel, T. 1980 “Ethics as an Autonomous Theoretical Subject”, in G. Stent (ed.), Morality as a Biological Phenomenon, Berkeley: University of California Press, 196-205. Ross, L. and Nisbett, R. 1991 The Person and the Situation: Perspectives of Social Psychology, New York: Mc-Graw Hill. Thomas G. and Batson, D. 1981 “Effect of Helping Under Normative Pressure On Self-Perceived Altruism”, Social Psychology Quarterly, 44, 127-131. 53 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 53 30.7.2004 15:34:49 On Behalf of the Neglected Body Pieranna Garavaso University of Minnesota, Morris, USA garavapf@mrs.umn.edu I n Margaret Atwood’s novel The Blind Assassin, the elderly protagonist thus recounts the aftermath of a fall on a icy sidewalk: Now I’m grounded. Also enraged at myself. Or not at myself - at this bad turn my body has done to me. After having imposed itself on us like the egomaniac it is, clamouring about its own needs, foisting upon us its own sordid and perilous desires, the body’s ﬁnal trick is simply to absent itself. Just when you need it, just when you could use an arm or a leg, suddenly the body has other things to do. It falters, it buckles under you; it melts away as if made of snow, leaving nothing much. Two lumps of coal, an old hat, a grin made of pebbles. The bones dry sticks, easily broken. It’s an affront, all of that. Weak knees, arthritic knuckles, varicose veins, inﬁrmities, indignities - they aren’t ours, we never wanted or claimed them. Inside our heads we carry ourselves perfected - ourselves at the best age, and in the best light as well... (Atwood, 311) These are familiar sentiments for philosophers. The Platonic view of the body as a burden and a prison for the soul is well known and widely shared. Also the tacit assumption that one’s self and one’s body are wholly separate is not uncommon in philosophical debate and writing. Descartes is credited for having rationalized this position as metaphysical dualism. Similarly, Atwood’s character denies that her body, at least at this juncture in her life, is constitutive of her self. The decadence of the body, its aging and aching do not belong to the self who witnesses 54 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 54 30.7.2004 15:34:49 them. “Inside our heads we carry ourselves perfected.” This capacity to conceive of oneself as a complete whole entirely separate from one’s body or from the state of one’s body may be at the origin of the appeal enjoyed by the view that some type of psychological continuity, even deprived of any bodily continuity, ensures the identity of a person through time. In this paper, I outline one reason to distrust the appeal to our allegedly intuitive response to commonly used thought experiments in support of psychological criteria of personal identity. This reason is in some way a revival of Bishop Butler’s worry about the circularity of Locke’s memory criterion. I submit that the arguments based on these thought experiments commit some form of the fallacy of begging the question. This is not my only objection against the “bizarre, entertaining, confusing, and inconclusive thought experiments” [Wilkes 1988, vii] commonly appealed to in the analytic debate on personal identity. Some other reasons are based on empirical concerns; on the basis of what we know so far about the physiology of our psychological life, it is unlikely that a mere part of our brain or even a totally different material structure can preserve the continuity of memories and character traits required by most psychological criteria of personal identity. In her study on the effect of violence on the remaking of the self, Susan Brison claims that “the study of trauma does not lead us to the conclusion that the self can be identiﬁed with the body, but it does show how the body and one’s perception of it are nonetheless essential components of the self.” [Brison 2002, 46] I submit that the permanence of selected memories and character traits such as memories of life-threatening trauma or of memories triggered by heightened perceptions may require the persistence of one and the same body. I cannot pursue this reason adequately in this paper, but I submit that there are plausible empirical reasons to think that we actually need the persistence of one and the same body in order to preserve the same person. The psychological criterion of personal identity has enjoyed a long tradition in analytic philosophy (Locke 1975, Quinton 1962, Wiggins 1980). As Eric Olson aptly summarizes: “What these approaches all have in common is the assumption that our persistence depends on some psychological relation: a relation having to do with mental contents or ca- 55 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 55 30.7.2004 15:34:49 pacities.” (Olson 1997, 16) Not all supporters of the psychological criterion deny the need of some material continuity, i.e., the necessity that some portion of one’s person’s body persists as well in order for the same person to survive over time. However, when supporters of a psychological criterion claim the need of the survival of a material component of the person, they do not claim the need that the same or even a whole body survive. According to some supporters of the psychological criterion, “a being who exists in the future or in the past is you only if she has your cerebrum, or enough of your cerebrum to support the thoughts of a conscious, rational, being. Or if your cerebrum need not be preserved, at least your mental capacities must continue to be realized in some structure or other that is physically or spatio-temporally continuous with your cerebrum.” (Olson 1997, 15) Accordingly, defenders of some psychological criterion of personal identity construct thought experiments supposed to prove, on the basis of our allegedly intuitive reaction to them, that what would really matters to us in determining whether or not we ourselves or a dear one survived would be some set of psychological features, such as memories and character traits. Notice that if scientiﬁc inquiry were to show that the persistence of such mental traits required the persistence of a part of a person’s brain or of some such material structure, this in and of itself would not constitute support for a bodily criterion. Since the necessity of a material component is somewhat accidental, in the sense that is merely due to the nature of our physiology, these thought experiments are commonly taken to prove that what really matters for personal identity are the mental characteristics of a person. Although I cannot survey many examples of the type of thought experiments used in support of psychological criteria, the following two by John Perry and Anthony Quinton will sufﬁce to make my point. Perry (Perry 1975, 3-4) asks you to imagine a case in which you, a Senator and a key member of the Committee on Health, Education, and Welfare, wake up one morning - very much like the protagonist of Kafka’s Metamorphosis - “inside” the body of your worst political enemy right on the morning of the day in which an important political vote will be taken. Needless to say the switch of bodies and brains has been planned by the American Cobbler Association to prevent you from voting on a bill that will allow the manufacturing of shoes that will last for ever. 56 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 56 30.7.2004 15:34:49 Quinton provides two examples to deny that the body is either necessary or sufﬁcient for the sameness of personal identity through time. In the ﬁrst case, during a walk along the beach, A, a friend of yours, treads on a mine and his body is disintegrated. However, that night, you are visited by a luminous but intangible form that speaks to you in your friend’s characteristic style and, in so doing, displays the possession of memories that only A could have had. The luminous form is seen by others and even photographed. If this phenomenon persisted, and “if continuity of character and memory were manifested with normal amplitude, we surely should be convinced [that A has indeed survived the destruction of his body].” [Quinton 1962, 401] For Quinton, A’s story is meant to show that the persistence and identity of the same or even of any similar type of body is not necessary for the persistence of the same self. A second example is intended to show that the persistence and identity of the same body is not even sufﬁcient for personal identity. You have two friends, B and C, of opposite physical appearances and personalities. You pursue different activities with each of them; birdwatching with the puritanical, thin, and sardonic Scotsman B and social night life with the hedonistic, plump, and cheerful Polish C. One day you meet with them and ﬁnd their personalities, tastes, and memories hosted in the “wrong” body. [Quinton 1962, 401] For Quinton, of the three available explanations, i.e., (i) B and C exchanged bodies, (ii) they exchanged minds, (iii) they exchanged neither, it is quite clear that we would reject (ii). This shows that we do not rely on the bodies to identify these two men. B is not identical with the body that has the outwardly characteristics that B’s body used to have but the personality traits and memories of C. The body of a person is not sufﬁcient to identify the same person over time in the absence of some continuity of character traits and memories,. It is interesting that both Perry and Quinton trust that these examples will be received by the same intuitive response on the part of their readers. It is the senator who wakes up in his bed inside his enemy’s body, and it will be intuitively clear that friend A actually and mysteriously survived, although in a very unusual form that does not require the persistence of his old body and even of any human body at all. It will also be intuitively apparent that B and C have indeed switched their bodies, but not their minds. The conclusion that we are supposed to derive from 57 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 57 30.7.2004 15:34:50 this intuitive response is that what matters to us in the identity of a person is the set of memories, tastes, desires, inclinations, plans that are connected to that person and her relationships to others These thought experiments express with great clarity a disparaging attitude toward the role of the body and a high esteem for the role of psychological traits in determining personhood. According to the supporters of psychological criteria, the intuitive reaction to these examples that many people have and that Perry and Quinton expect us to have proves that the self can conceivably survive the total loss of one’s body, that we would be happy to be in touch with our friend A in whatever form will allow him to maintain his memories and character traits, and that we would adjust to B’s and C’s new outward appearances in order to be able to keep on enjoying their company. However, these three examples show the circular nature of the arguments for psychological criteria based on such types of thought experiments. Let us look at Perry’s and Quinton’s examples separately. In Perry’s example, the question concerns the subject of the experiment. Would you not believe that you are the one with the enemy’s body, on whom a bad trick has been played, and who should get mad at the person who, from inside your own body, will actually vote against your values, wishes, and plans? The thought experiment is of course meant to display this intuition and to support the claim that the identity of one’s body is neither necessary nor sufﬁcient even for the very same self to believe to be the same person, or in other words, to believe to have survived. However, notice how this thought experiment is supposed to have shown this. In the narrative, “you” wake up in your enemy’s body, there is no doubt that you, endowed with all your unaltered thoughts, plans, and intentions wake up in a different body. The reader is asked to conceive of this happening and clearly enough we can all conceive of it. But this is not what is at stake in the conclusion derived from this intuitive response to the thought experiment. The fact that we can conceive of ourselves as a fully continuous entity within material forms different from our own body is obviously true as Atwood’s clever quote at the beginning of this paper so aptly shows. “Inside our heads we carry ourselves perfected.” We have indeed the capacity to conceive of ourselves as inhabiting different bodies from those we actually inhabit. We can 58 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 58 30.7.2004 15:34:50 even conceive of inhabiting no body at all as clearly Descartes proves in his Meditations. Thus the fact that our intuitions suggest that we identify with the person with the enemy’s body but with our political allegiances intact rather than with the person with our former body but with antithetical values does not prove anything more than what it assumes: we can indeed conceive of ourselves as selves with different bodies or with no bodies at all. This does not prove that the persistence of one and the same self does not need the body but only that our conception of ourselves can do without it. In Perry’s example, the argument is circular and supports a conclusion already assumed in the premises rather than the alleged conclusion. Let us now look at Quinton’s examples. Here, we are asked to think about the persistence of someone else’s self not ours. In arguments based on this type of thought experiments, a different form of the fallacy of begging the question is committed, namely, a controversial and yet crucial premise is omitted. The fact that we would intuitively believe that A somewhat survived and that B now actually looks like C and C looks like B used to look seem to indicate that we believe in the possibility of maintaining some form of connection with our friends regardless of their physical appearances. This fact falls short of proving that these new beings are persons and moreover the same persons they were before. There is no room in Quinton’s discussion for the question whether A may still be considered a ‘person.’ This follows only if we assume that we could not be friends with A, unless he were a person. This is not an uncontroversial assumption for our ability to befriend others extends to all sorts of non-persons, such as pets, corporations, and extraterrestrials. Our intuitions concerning possible beneﬁciaries of human friendship are at least as imaginative as our intuitions concerning the permanence of A, B, and C. The thought experiments commonly used in analytic philosophy to support psychological criteria of personal identity fail to ensue the intended conclusions of the arguments in which they are employed. Their main shortcoming is that their employment in such arguments commits some form of the fallacy of begging the question. 59 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 59 30.7.2004 15:34:50 Literature Attwood, M. 2000 The Blind Assassin, New York, Doubleday. Brison, S. 2002 Aftermath. Violence and the Remaking of a Self, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Locke, J. 1975 An essay concerning human understanding, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Parfit, D. 1984, Reasons and Persons, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Perry, J. 1975, Personal Identity, Berkeley: University of California Press. Quinton, A. 1962 “The Soul.” The Journal of Philosophy, 59, 393-409. Wiggins, D. 1980 Sameness and Substance, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Wilkes, K. 1988 Real People, New York: Oxford University Press. Williams, B. 1973 Problems of the Self, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 60 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 60 30.7.2004 15:34:50 Wittgenstein on ‘Self-Observation’: An Approach via William James and Reductionism Miguel García-Valdecasas University of Oxford, UK miguel.garcia@philosophy.ox.ac.uk M odern philosophers such as Descartes, Locke, Reid or Hume have envisaged the self as a key problem in Psychology and Philosophy of Mind, and many contemporary philosophers have devoted themselves to its clariﬁcation. The later Wittgenstein was himself interested in the self, dealing with it in the Tractatus and in the Notebooks. In the former, his analysis resulted in the ‘metaphysical subject’. On resuming philosophical activity in 1929, however, Wittgenstein eschewed speaking of a metaphysical subject in the form he had in the past. The newly envisaged ‘language games’ which conduct his new form of philosophical enquiry were set to deal with the mistakes which naturally come out of our ‘superﬁcial’ grammar. For this reason he turned his attention to the reference of the pronoun ‘I’, that is, what ‘I’ stands for in ordinary language and how in practice we are to make sense of it. Most scholars think Wittgenstein had no wish to lay down an account of the self, and there is good reason to doubt that even speaking of the ‘self ’ could have dodged his strong opposition. Kenny sees the self as a piece of philosopher’s nonsense originating in a misunderstanding of the reﬂexive pronoun (1988, 4). Hacker is sceptical of the very idea of searching for a self. The trouble ‘is not that one cannot ﬁnd it, but that nothing would count as ﬁnding it’ (1990, 222). After all, it is not clear 61 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 61 30.7.2004 15:34:50 whether Wittgenstein gave us a deﬁnite account of the self or simply warned us about its intricacy. In fact, many of his remarks are intended to conjure up mistakes brought about by uncritical assumptions on the nature of the self. However, despite his criticisms, he never denied the possibility of a self conceived in a different way (e.g., the ‘myself ’ of which Kenny spoke), even if he never hinted at it. There is no core treatment of the issue in his works, and his remarks are sometimes scattered in treatments of related problems such as the ﬁrst and third person asymmetry, the reference of the word ‘I’ and self-consciousness. My purpose in this paper is to review two particular approaches to the self from the third of the perspectives just mentioned: self-consciousness. I will focus on Wittgenstein’s reading of William James’s account of self-consciousness such as it appears in the Philosophical Investigations. Then I will turn to contemporary reductionisms on self-consciousness, and will seek to show that, in spite of dissimilarities, both set of accounts are closely related. The concept of ‘self-observation’ will reveal the manner in which they are related. Augustine’s picture of language is one of the central topics in the Philosophical Investigations, and Wittgenstein is as dismissive of it as he is of dualism, a theory also subscribed to by Augustine. The common objections to dualism that we know from the Philosophical Investigations and other works do not concern only this theory. They apply also to any other theory which allows for observation of oneself. In the Investigations, the question is triggered by a comment on William James’s account of the self. In James’s account, the ‘self ’ consists mainly of ‘peculiar motions in the head and between the head and the throat’ (PI §413). The phenomenon is of course the result of introspection. Wittgenstein imagines the way in which that particular phenomenon occurred: ‘I stared ﬁxedly in front of me — but not at any particular point or object. My eyes were wide open, the brows not contracted (as they most are when I am interested in a particular object). No such interest preceded this gazing’ (PI §412). Wittgenstein depicts here a psychological approach to oneself by observation. By an exercise of concentration, inner abilities of perception succeed in observing certain movements between the head and the throat. According to James, the outcome of this exercise is a vision of the subject’s self, clear and transparent as if it were reﬂected in a mirror. 62 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 62 30.7.2004 15:34:50 The described act of self-consciousness seems to have two aspects: that of the observer and that of what is observed. I shall focus on the peculiarity of the latter. This contains a kind of object which must necessarily match the ‘internal eye’ by which the subject perceives. For introspection to work, what is seen and the seeing subject must thoroughly coincide. If incidentally, the object fails to match the internal eye, there is ground to think that the introspection failed. Any distortion of what is seen by the subject would prevent achievement. If such occurred, James’s experiment would have failed to fulﬁl its purpose: the perception of oneself. That is what Wittgenstein seems to suggest here. For us, the outcome of James’s experiment is most bafﬂing. For when the subject is expected to get its inner self out of its hidden locus, all that arises is a bizarre movement between the head and the throat. Considering it, Geach wondered how a professional psychologist like James could have missed his own self (1972, 119), and precisely when he had spoken so conﬁdently about it. After all, the introspector is still right to crave the cause of the experiment’s failure. What was the problem? Was the ﬁnal outcome other than that expected? The introspector might say: ‘I have looked into my self, but I found my self in a way I didn’t expect’. But then: ‘What was it like? Was it like entering a lounge and seeing someone unexpected seated in an armchair? Did he tell you anything?’. If this were his answer, I would ask the introspector to describe the object of his inward look. Certainly, someone might object to my question that this is the way in which Wittgenstein imagines James’s experiment, rather than James’s experiment itself. There are no indications of the way in which James got there, and Wittgenstein’s account relies on a supposition. This is hardly deniable. However, we might go as to consider the result of the experiment itself. Ultimately, James’s account of self-knowledge produces a picture of an unidentiﬁable stranger hidden behind a physical movement. But if there is a picture that our inward look should not present, that is the picture of a stranger. If self-knowledge knows anything mine, once I have it I cannot turn out to be a stranger to myself. In James’s account, the appearance of such a self seems too odd and out of the ordinary to be real. Wittgenstein’s strategy does not criticise the introspector in that way. His remark on James’s experiment reverts to the original purpose of the inward look. Wittgenstein wonders: ‘Whom do I really inform, if I say “I 63 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 63 30.7.2004 15:34:50 have consciousness?” What is the purpose of saying this to myself, and how can another person understand me?’ (PI §416). The introspector’s purpose seems unclear. If I were to explain what I see when I look into myself, I could hardly pick out any particular mental act among others. This was precisely the point of Hume’s remark when he looked for the centre of his own thoughts. In contrast, Wittgenstein did not look for that centre. He rather questioned whether the introspection is the kind of activity that conveys information at all. Allegedly, the introspector might reply: ‘What I see is not someone else’s self; it’s me. I know what is going on’. This answer, however, does not dispel the original doubt about the introspector’s own identity. The transfer of his self-consciousness onto a different object splits the introspector’s look, diverting his attention into a different process. The introspector might claim that he is perfectly aware of what is going on in his mind, but it is in fact uncertain whether this is what he expects it to be. James’s account resembles here Russell’s theory of expectation, which Wittgenstein also criticised. The expectation of A being the case (A’) and A itself are different objects. In fact, the introspector should ensure that the expectation of self-knowledge, which differs from self-knowledge as A’ differs from A, does not create a new inward act. For if A’ is taken to be A, A can never be the case. Attention to A’ when looking for A makes the subject believe that A’ is what he is actually looking for. In other words, the ‘expectation of self-knowledge’ takes the place of ‘selfknowledge’ as object in the inward look. Wittgenstein expressed this idea when he examined the use of informative sentences such as: ‘I perceive I am conscious’. For him, ‘the sentence “I perceive I am conscious” does not say that I am conscious, but that my attention is disposed in suchand-such a way’ (PI §417). Along with the introspector, the subject who says that is turning his attention to his own awareness, instead of to himself. In fact, there is no real information in a process in which I report to myself, and clearly, James’s self-knowledge has an informative character. It appears as if the mind were an informant of acts of awareness which happen to be mine. In fact, some psychological expressions seem to enjoy this structure too. The natural grammar of terms such as ‘observation’, ‘report’, ‘inward look’, or even ‘mental phenomena’, associated with in- 64 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 64 30.7.2004 15:34:51 trospection, plays a signiﬁcant role in the psychologist’s manner of representation. Under such an assumption, the psychologist deems the observation of himself as a fair and rigorous exercise of science. Since this is based on observation and collection of data, the philosopher driven by the psychologist’s point of view will pursue that method to explore his own self. Allegedly, a whole world of discoveries lies ahead. Some philosophers think that a scientiﬁc solution to the problem of the self is fairly possible. It is thought that we lack only the tools to make it. On the side of philosophy, self-consciousness has to be understood as a phenomenon of the mind, readable as a physical fact. Some philosophers such as McGinn contend that they do not see anything ‘wrong, metaphysically, with recognising that consciousness is a kind of stuff ’ (1991, 60). Many others have also written in similar terms. Wittgenstein devoted some time to dealing with the realm of scientiﬁc method. His appraisal did not extend to the justiﬁcation of science in general. He rather limited himself to assessing its inﬂuence on philosophy. The bluntness of his words on the issue should not misguide us. He deemed the inﬂuence of scientiﬁc method in philosophy rather disturbing. ‘Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions in the way science does. This tendency is the real metaphysics, and leads the philosopher into complete darkness’ (1960, 18). By ‘scientiﬁc method’ he meant ‘the method of reducing the explanation of natural phenomena to the smallest possible number of primitive natural laws’ (1960, 18). Certainly, with arguments both from neuroscience and philosophy, a signiﬁcant number of current theories of mind would subscribe to such a deﬁnition. They positively aim to reduce mind and consciousness to natural and observable phenomena. Reductionism of the mind is a complex and multiple bundle of theories. For brevity’s sake, let us consider them as a whole, leaving differences aside. As reductionists are committed to an analysis of states of mind as natural phenomena, scientiﬁc method rules out introspection. The analysis of phenomena must be conducted independently of the subject’s point of view. Scientiﬁc method allows the researcher to observe, examine and catalogue brain discharges, considering them as the neural 65 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 65 30.7.2004 15:34:51 counterparts of thoughts. The acceptance of this method commits the philosopher to independent enquiry into himself. In this way, the threat of subjectivism is dispelled. If self-consciousness is a criterion of being a person, self-knowledge is still possible. Philosophers think that reductionism has put an end to private accounts of the self such as those of Descartes or James. Reductionism partly concurs with Wittgenstein in this. Thoughts are not conﬁned to the ﬁrst-person perspective. Wittgenstein’s desire in the Blue Book to clarify the grammar of ‘to know’, common both to the scientist and the philosopher, seeks to discard mistaken readings of solipsism. The book deals with sentences such as: ‘I know I am here’ which turn out to have an informative character. Given the commitment of the scientist to the idea of observation of neural counterparts of our thoughts, Wittgenstein proposes to him the creation of a language game in which sensations may be observed without being felt. This will eschew the involvement of the subject in the recognition of its mental states. Wittgenstein writes: ‘It isn’t wrong, according to the new convention, to say: “I have an unconscious toothache”’ (1960, 23). But if it is possible to say that, something has gone wrong, because an ‘unconscious sensation’ would not seem to be a sensation at all. Wittgenstein observes some similarities between ‘unconscious toothaches’ and the scientist’s mental phenomena. We might wonder if mental phenomena are ‘unconscious thoughts’, and therefore, if self-consciousness might also be an unconscious fact. The scientist might ﬁrst object to Wittgenstein that experiences of self-consciousness are ‘subjective’ in the sense given above. Secondly, any comparison of sensations with complex processes such as self-consciousness seems unjustiﬁed. The scientist might agree that an unfelt sensation still conserves the core of a sensation. However, an unfelt sensation is a particular kind of picture of a sensation. Just as the idea of King’s College on ﬁre is rather different from escaping from King’s College on ﬁre, an unfelt toothache is a weird sort of toothache. A sensation constitutes a particular knowledge on its own, and nothing would count as its ‘observation’. The observational account of sensations deprives them of their cognitive content and allows for talk of ‘unconscious toothaches’. Such sensations require a subject whom we must inform. Therefore, if the observational model of sensations is unjustiﬁed, reductionism of the mind is unjustiﬁed too. 66 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 66 30.7.2004 15:34:51 After all, the imagined scientist is not in a different position from that of the psychologist. Both share a common belief in the observational character of consciousness, and both have to face up to puzzling questions on the nature of such observations. They base their views in what seems solid ground: the dependence of mental states on experience. But Wittgenstein revealed in it a misunderstanding about the nature of our grammar. His warnings about the effects of using the scientiﬁc method in philosophy make understandable his refusal to provide any picture of the self. For to make sense of it, the supposition of a subject of observation and a reductionist account of the mind cannot help. All that these arguments have shown is Wittgenstein’s reliance on the sheer immediacy of self-consciousness. Literature Geach, P. T. 1972 Logic Matters, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Hacker, P. M. S. 1990 Wittgenstein: Meaning and Mind, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Kenny, A. J. P. 1988 The Self, Milwaukee: Marquette University Press. McGinn, C. 1991 The Problem of Consciousness, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Wittgenstein, L. 1958 Philosophical Investigations, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Wittgenstein, L. 1960 The Blue and the Brown Books, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 67 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 67 30.7.2004 15:34:51 Is it Possible to Have a Self-Evident Relation to Oneself ? Igor Gasparov Voronezh State, Medical Academy, RUSSIA gasparov@mail.ru A classical claim about the relation of a person to himself is that every person necessarily has a self-evident relation to himself. One cannot go wrong, if one says that one is oneself or that one exists. This position is defended in Descartes (1992), Locke (1975) and also by many other ancient and modern philosophers, (e.g. Chisholm, 1976; Ayer, 1956). Ayer, for example, says: ‘The sentence ‘I exist’ … differs, however, from most other statements in that if that is false it can not actually be made. Consequently, no one who uses these words intelligently and correctly can use them to make a statement which he knows to be false. If he succeeds in making the statement, it must be true.” (Ayer, 1956, 50) I will call this claim evidentialism about self-relation. There are two main sorts of evidentialism, namely an a priori evidentialism and an a posteriori evidentialism. The ﬁrst view says one can ﬁnd by inquiring into the mental acts of one’s own mind that it is an a priori necessary truth that one has a self-evident relation to oneself; and that it is impossible not to have self-evidence about this. I hold a philosopher like Descartes to be an a priori evidentialist because according to him the evidence about oneself arises from logical reﬂections. The second view maintains that it is an empirical or a posteriori necessary truth that one has a perception of oneself and that it impossible for a person not to be in this relation to himself. This view is defended by philosophers like Locke who think that every perception ipso facto must 68 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 68 30.7.2004 15:34:51 be a perception of oneself. This kind of evidentialism seems to presuppose two things which stand in a relation to each other, e.g. selves and mental states perceived by these selves, or, at least, something else that could play the role of what terms like ‘I’, ‘self ’, ‘a pain’, ‘a thought’ could refer to. In this case the relation of a person to himself is to be called (self)consciousness and it seems to be a necessary distinction between a person as a whole and his (mental or/and physical) states. Both sorts of evidentialism agree that any person necessarily has a self-evident relation to himself, but disagree about whether the nature of this necessity is a priori or a posteriori. A view opposed to evidentialism claims that there is nothing like a self-evident relation of a person to himself because there are no such things as selves. I call it non-evidentialism. I don’t know whether any philosopher can be counted as a non-evidentialist. Most philosophers (like most people) are evidentialists. That is, they have no doubts about their own existence. Perhaps someone like Peter Unger who once thought that he does not exist (Unger, 1997), or like Elizabeth Anscombe who denied that ‘I’ refers to anything at all (Anscombe, 1981) could be taken as non-evidentialists. But I am not too certain about this. I will argue that if evidentialism is true at all, it must be true a priori; that a posteriori evidentialism is false, i.e. there is no empirical evidence of the relation of a person to himself. The classical way to express a posteriori evidentialism may be found in Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1975). In his famous deﬁnition of ‘person’ he writes: “it being impossible for any one to perceive without perceiving that he (my italics) does perceive” (Locke, 1975, II, xviii, 9). Locke’s theory of mind leads him to claim that perception is the sufﬁcient condition of (self)consciousness and consequently of selfevident knowledge about oneself. Locke’s argument could be presented as follows: (1) Nobody can perceive without perceiving that he does perceive; (2) I do perceive; (3) I cannot lack perception of myself. Locke puts forward a theory of mind that interprets one’s mind as some sort of mental space where a manifold of ideas are perceived by some self. The relation between a mental subject, the self, and a set of mental objects – the ideas – is the relation of consciousness. So far as 69 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 69 30.7.2004 15:34:51 I have any empirical perception, I cannot be without consciousness of myself. So for Locke, the a posteriori fact of my having perceptions entails necessarly my self-evident knowledge about myself. For all the differences of his account of a person’s relation to himself from that of Locke, Chisholm writes in a similar vein: “… Hume said that we have no ‘idea of self, after the manner it is here explain’d. For from what impression cou’d this idea be derived?’ Might not the proper reply be this – that we can derive the idea of such a self from any impression whatever?” (1976, 52). I think, there are, at least, three objections to this claim. Firstly, if I am perceiving empirically I am always dealing only with a part of me and never with me as a whole. For instance, looking in a mirror I see only a reﬂection of a part of my body, but I am never seeing me entirely. This can lead to some confusion as in the story mentioned by Perry (1998) about Ernst Mach who did not immediately realize that he was the shabby pedagogue reﬂected in the mirror. Or like the story John Perry told of himself (1979, 33): “I once followed a trail of sugar on a supermarket ﬂoor, pushing my cart down the aisle on one side of a tall counter and back the aisle on the other, seeking the shopper with the torn sack to tell him he was making a mess. With each trip around the counter, the trail became thicker. Finally it dawned on me. I was the shopper I wanted to catch.” If I am examining my body only a part of it is directly available to my senses. And this is true in every case of empirical experience. The consequence of this obvious fact is that I cannot have me as an immediate object of perception. Can I perhaps have some other empirical access to myself ? But what could this access be, if not my senses or something derived from them? Secondly, if every perception ipso facto provides evidence of myself, I must be prepared to meet in my mind ‘too many thinkers’ at any time when I have perceptions. Must I call each such thinker myself ? If so, then there are a manifold of ‘myselves’. If not, then which among these selves in my mind should be count as my self ? (cf. Zimmerman, 2004, 502). Perhaps I could have some kind of second-order relation to my own perceptions? But this is not really a solution. According to a posteriori evidentialism, if I am conscious at all, I am conscious of myself, or self-conscious. Therefore if I ﬁnd in my mind some ideas that I am perceiving I can suppose in me a second-order consciousness as a rela- 70 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 70 30.7.2004 15:34:52 tion of perception between a self and my feelings. In this case I must distinguish between ideas of external things present in mind and ideas of inner things, or perceptions of perceptions, present in it. If I make this distinction, I must ask whether the self that is the subject of ﬁrst-order perceptions is the same as the subject of second-order perceptions? What could give us any certainty in this? Nothing empirical, I believe, can really do it. Suppose there is a person P such that it has a relation S to itself. If this relation is an a posteriori relation then P knows about it only if P has a perception PER of himself. Since perception is a relation between a subject of perception s and an object of perception o, it is empirically impossible for s to be necessarily identical with o. Hence, PER does not entail S. Moreover, it is necessarily true that s is not identical with o, because they are two distinct things. One may object: ‘The terms “subject of perception” and “object of perception” don’t denote any concrete entity, like a person, but are only abstractions. Thus, it does not matter that subject of perception and object of perception could not be identical each other.’ One answer to this objection is that if the subject and object of perception are abstract things, then I cannot have any perceptions of them at all, because neither am I an abstract thing nor do I perceive abstract things. It is certainly possible that the second term of the two-place predicate S is a relation of perception. It is allowed that both S and PER are empirically perceived – if, for instance, there is a relation S’ that has S as its object of perception. In this case, PER is a relation of perception of the ﬁrst order and S is a relation of the second order. Then what was ﬁrst taken for a relation of a person to himself turns out to be a relation of a person to his own perceptions. So from an empirical point of view the self-consciousness relation S implies only that having self-consciousness means having a higher-order perception of lower-order perceptions. But the problem arising from this is that a single perception in one’s mind must generate an inﬁnite number of thinkers or selves populating one’s mind at a given time. Each act of perception will create a further act of higher-order perception with its own subject of perception and so on. On the other hand, I can suppose that the perception ipso facto doesn’t require any subject at all. If am perceiving anything I am perceiv- 71 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 71 30.7.2004 15:34:52 ing something but I don’t need to perceive myself or have any knowledge about who it is that is perceiving this something, e.g. an apple (see Perry, 1998). If this is right I can have all my empirical knowledge about the world without having any knowledge about myself. My empirical knowledge of myself I seem to gain from other sources as from my simple perceptions, where my self couldn’t be found. If I think of me as of some other person that is me, how can I think that this person is necessarily rather then contingently me? If I do exist at all, it seems logically impossible that I fail to be myself, but it is quite possible that I am not Igor Gasparov so far as ‘Igor Gasparov’ is a name for some concrete thing existing here and now. It is conceivable that I could been born at another time in another place and that I could have a life-story that is truly mine, but not that of Igor Gasparov. But what would be that ‘me’ in that other life-story? Perhaps, it must be, at least, a human person; perhaps not. But it need not not be the empirically perceivable object that can be seen at the time and in the place when and where it is now actually seen. Thirdly, if I am speaking about my future I, presuppose my own existence at a future time. If my talk about the future is to have ordinary sense, it must be possible for myself to persist somehow through time to that eventual future. Otherwise, it is somebody else I think about now. If some philosophers hold either that self-identity does not matter in survival (Parﬁt, 1984) or that the selves are ‘like pearls on a string’ that can have ordinarily only a short-time identity (Strawson, 1997), they must conclude that in expressing a sentence like ‘I will be back in two hours’, I mean by ‘I’ a distinct something. But what is it supposed to be that will be back in two hours? The main point is this: the reference of ‘I’ does not depend on the importance or non-importance to me (or anyone else) of self-identity or on my interest in survival. Consider someone who isn’t interested in his own survival but survives. I think that this person will acknowledge that he is himself – if he happened to be himself at that future time. But whence arises his certainty about this? I believe there is no empirical evidence about it. Suppose I remember doing something at a past time. Does it follow necessarily from this that I actually did it? No. I can remember doing something I didn’t do – something done by some else. Even if I, as acting in space and time, could have been uninterruptedly observed, it must be somebody else that has observed me, but not 72 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 72 30.7.2004 15:34:52 myself, because from the inside I have immediate access only to a part of myself. It seems that evidence of self-relation does not follow necessarily from the facts of perception or from any other empirical fact about me. Hence in none of my (empirically available) experiences can I have a self-evident access to myself. This does not by itself refute a priori evidentialism. But in order to be true the a priori evidentialism has to make a strong identity assumption, namely, that there cannot be entities without identities and anything is necessarily identical with itself. If one is ready to accept this one can continue to believe that a person necessarily stands in a self-evident relation to himself. However, it follows not from the fact of self-awareness but from the assumption that anything must be identical with itself. I think E. Anscombe saw rightly the core of the problem with the self when she said there is no concept under which ‘I’ or ‘self ’ falls (Anscombe, 1981, 28 – 29). But her solution that ‘I’ has no reference at all seems to me quite odd, for when I speak about myself I certainly speak about something rather than nothing – even if I don’t know what thing I am. Perhaps only if one knows the answer to the question ‘what am I ?’ (cf. Olson, 2002) is one able to see clearly the nature of one’s relation to oneself. Literature Anscombe, G.E.M. 1981 The First Person, in Collected Philosophical Papers of G.E.M. Anscombe, Oxford: Blackwell, Vol. II, 21 – 36. Ayer, A. J. 1956 The problem of Knowledge, London: Macmillian. Chisholm, R. 1976 Person and Object: A Metaphysical Study, La Salle, IL: Open Court. Descartes, R. 1992 Meditationen über die Grundlagen der Philosophie, Hamburg: Meiner Verlag. Locke J. 1975 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Olson E. 2002 “An argument for animalism”, in J. Barresi and R. Martin ed., Personal Identity (Blackwell), 318 – 334. Parfit D. 1984 Reasons and Persons, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Perry, J. 1998 “Myself and I”, in Marcelo Stamm (Hg.) Philosophie in synthetischer Absicht (Festschrift für Dieter Henrich), Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 83-103. 73 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 73 30.7.2004 15:34:52 Perry, J. 1979 „The Problem of the Essential Indexical“, in J. Perry, The Problem of the Essential Indexical and Other Essays, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1993, 33 – 52. Strawson G. 1997 “The Self ” Journal of Consciousness Studies, 4, No. 5/6, 40528. Unger P. 1997 “I do not exist”, in Rea, M., ed., Material Constitution: A Reader, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 175 – 190. Zimmerman D. 2004 “Material People”, in: M. Loux and D. Zimmerman, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Metaphysics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 491 – 526. 74 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 74 30.7.2004 15:34:52 Being Blind to Other Persons Ylva Gustafsson Åbo Akademi, Finland ygustafs@abo.ﬁ 1. In philosophy it is often seen to be a difficult question how we know what other people think or feel. A common trait when philosophers are occupied with this question is that they discuss the person to be understood from a distantly observing perspective where one tries to predict or describe a person’s behaviour. One talks about our understanding of other persons as a matter of having knowledge about the other person rather than seeing the understanding as a form of engagement in the other person’s life.1 Contrary to this view of understanding others as a matter of predicting or explaining the other person’s feelings and thoughts, Jean-Paul Sartre talks in Being and Nothingness about experiencing the other in one’s life as being a way of becoming aware of the other as well as becoming aware of oneself. He has a famous example where he describes himself peeking through a keyhole looking at some persons in the other room. Suddenly Sartre realises that another person is watching him and Sartre immediately feels shame. With the example Sartre criticizes the tendency to think that a distanced observing of others would be the primary form of our understanding others. However, Sartre does have a quite negative view on human relations. According to him, when I experience that another person is looking at me, I also feel that I am being looked at as an object in the other person’s world. For Sartre, there is always a struggle between two individuals to objectify the other into one’s own lifeproject and avoid being objectified into the other’s world. 75 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 75 30.7.2004 15:34:52 In I and Thou Martin Buber discusses what it is to meet another person. He distinguishes between my being able to treat you as an “It” (as an “object”) and my being able to meet you as “Thou”. This is a moral difference that can be seen in how we treat others and in how we care about others and become aware of others. In order to really meet another person there has to be a kind of openness and willingness to listen to the other, something Buber calls a dialogue. The openness and the dialogue consist in such attitudes as being honest and direct towards the other, to be able to listen to the other but also to be able to give of oneself. In this sense Buber’s view on what it means to understand another person is opposite to Sartre’s view. 2. When one talks about a person being blind to another person one often describes this as the person treating the other as an object. Also from Buber’s distinction between You and It one can get the impression that being blind to others is a unitary phenomenon where one treats the other as an It (or as an object). But what does it mean to treat a person like an object, and can all blindness be understood in terms of treating a person like an object? In Being and Nothingness people can be said to treat each other as objects by using each other for their own egocentric purposes and by looking at others with contempt. However, there also seems to be other ways of treating a person like an object. Alvin I. Goldman has the following example: Ezra Stotland (1969) had subjects watch someone else whose hand was strapped in a machine that they were told generated painful heat. Some were told just to watch the man carefully, some were told to imagine the way he was feeling, and some were told to imagine themselves in his place. Using both physiological and verbal measures of empathy on the part of the subjects, the experimental results showed that deliberate acts of imagination produced a greater response than just watching. (Mental Simulation, 1995, p.199) According to Goldman, the experiment shows that imagination is important for our feeling empathy for other people. I do not want to deny that imagination is important in our understanding others but I do ﬁnd the experiment problematical. I think especially that the one who care- 76 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 76 30.7.2004 15:34:53 fully observes the suffering person expresses a sort of objectifying blindness in his cold attitude. If one asks a person to take part in an experiment and tells him to carefully observe another person who is feeling pain, he probably doesn’t really know why he should observe but since he thinks this is science he gladly agrees to help the scientists. So, because the test person knows he is participating in a scientiﬁc experiment he therefore tries to observe as neutrally and objectively as possible. By telling the person to observe carefully, one is placing the observer in a distance from the person who is in pain. That the person who carefully observes does not feel much empathy is, as I see it, connected with how he understands what he should do in the experimental situation. It is an expression of how he is blinded to the suffering person by the scientiﬁc mission. There seems to be several ways of treating a person like an object. When the people in Ezra Stotland’s experiment treat others as objects they do it without realising what they are doing, they do it because they think they are doing science. Contrary to Sartre’s persons who might enjoy looking at the other as an object, one might imagine that the observer in the experiment forces himself not to feel compassion, not to intervene with the experiment. A difference is also that the persons in the experiment are deceived by an idea of what science is. It is a blindness that comes from the outside so to say, connected to a kind of naive view on science. On the other hand, when looking at another person with contempt or when using another person for one’s own purpose, it is a kind of blindness that comes from who I am as a person and does not have anything to do with naivity. 3. One might think that a person who is sensitive in a psychological sense, who can “see through” others is good at understanding others. That is, one thinks that the more you know about a person and the more you can predict his behaviour the better you understand him. This seems to be the view of the so called simulation theorists, such as Alvin I. Goldman. It is, however, problematical to think that our understanding of others is a matter of having as much knowledge of the other as possible. A person can be very sensitive in seeing through people and in predicting their behaviour, and still be very insensitive towards the other person, that is, he can still lack an understanding of the other person. 77 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 77 30.7.2004 15:34:53 I do not mean that it is not important to know what the other person might feel or think in order to understand her, but from a moral point of view it is of importance why you want to understand another person, and it is of importance how you get to know things about the other for whether one might say that you are blind to the other or not. That is, it is often an expression of respect towards the other person that you ask her how she feels. By asking, I accept that you choose to tell me how you feel or you do not, I accept that you want to have contact with me or you do not. So in order for me to have a sound wish to know and understand you I have to ask you, talk to you, listen to you. Otherwise, if I observe you or try to get information about you behind your back, my wish to know your feelings or thoughts will ignore you as a person. I think this is a common reason for philosophers like Martin Buber, Gabriel Marcel, Knud Ejler Lögstrup and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s emphasis on talking and listening as being essential for human life. That talking and listening are important in our understanding others is something that is completely missing in the examples taken by the simulation theorists, including Goldman. According to Goldman, I understand how you feel by imagining how I might feel myself in your situation. In a way this is true, it can be an important aspect when trying to understand another person’s situation that I imagine what I would do or feel myself. However, Goldman still talks about this imagination as something I do without the intention to be in contact with you. I observe and imagine and I might even feel something but I don’t talk to you and I don’t help you. There is a difference here in knowing as seeing through a person and knowing as a way of sharing the person’s life. Sometimes we say “I know how you feel.”. This is, however, usually not a question of reporting that one knows everything about the other, but it is rather a way of being open to the other, a way of sharing one’s life with the other. I say “I know how you feel.” and then I tell you about my own life, not about your life. On the other hand, if I see through you I might see no reason to tell you about my own life, unless, perhaps, in order to manipulate you. When I see through you I judge you and I might feel no need to share my life with you, but when I say “I know how you feel” I want to share my life and my experiences with you. Seeing through a person is also often a way of feeling contempt towards a person. However, this contemptful seeing through differs from 78 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 78 30.7.2004 15:34:53 Goldman’s scientiﬁc wish to know everything about the other person’s feelings. The sense of seeing through in contempt is more expressive of a certain kind of attitude of certainty towards the other than complete knowledge of the other. The certainty can be seen in expressions like “What a creep!”. The contempt also consists in a kind of certainty where I am not interested in ﬁnding out more about “this creep”, and I might refuse to listen to any of his explanations. The seeing through in contempt is connected with an attitude where one takes everything the other person says as excuses. It is an attitude where I stop listening and stop asking because I know who he is. I have here tried to show that some sorts of knowledge about who another person is can be expressions of a blindness towards the other person, something I think Buber would agree with. I have also tried to show that this knowledge can have different character. However, blindness does not necessarily consist in negative attitudes like using the other person for one’s own purposes or feeling contempt for the other or observing the other from a distant scientiﬁc perspective. For instance, sometimes it can be an intrusion in another person’s life if one is very interested in her life. This can be the case in some sorts of distorted admiration. The admiration might appear to be an expression of a positive interest in the other and can appear to have the character of honesty or compassion but may actually be ways of forcing the other into a certain personal relation. The problem is not that one uses the other or does not listen to the other person or that one sees the other as contemptible. The blindness here is not a matter of treating the other as an object. Rather the person is blind to what kind of personal relation he has, or does not have, to the one he admires. It is a blindness for what a certain human closeness means and what meaning honesty, openness and interest in the other person gets depending on what relation one has to the person. 4. Sometimes a person’s blindness for another can be seen in her whole attitude against the other person’s life. In The Philosophy of Existence Gabriel Marcel talks about hope, presence and belief being connected. For instance, to hope and believe in one’s child has not to do with hoping that one’s child will become a famous pianist some day and if she does not succeed one gets disappointed. This is not the kind of hope Marcel talks 79 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 79 30.7.2004 15:34:53 about. Rather the hope Marcel talks about is connected to what it means to love someone. One hopes that one´s child will have a good life, one is proud of her and proud of what she does even if her achievements are not fantastic in an objective sense, but one is also proud if one´s child does succeed in things. Sometimes parents think their children can’t achieve anything, they have a kind of general distrust for the child’s capabilities, skilfulness and competence. This kind of general distrust seems to come from the personal relation. The blindness does not have to consist in not seeing facts. For instance, even if the parent knows that the child has become a famous painter the parent might still see this as being a matter of popularity rather than as a proof of true talent and competence. The blindness consists in not believing in one’s child, not hoping, having a general distrust. This kind of blindness can be deeply rooted in the parent’s relation to her child, it is a blindness that can be hard to make the person aware of. The parent might think that she is just not spoiling her child. In this text I have wanted to show that blindness against another person is not a uniform phenomenon. The expression “treating a person like an object” as well as Buber’s distinction between seeing a person as an “It” or meeting the person as a “You”, do not show much about the character of a specific blindness. A person’s blindness in using others, contempt as blindness and Goldman’s scientifically objectified blindness can all be called treating a person as an object, but they also differ from each other in many ways. Also, blindness can’t always be understood as a matter of treating a person like an object. The blindness of the intrusive admirer has to do with not seeing what relation he has to the other person, it is not a matter of having a scientifically distanced attitude or a contemptful attitude towards the other person and it is not a matter of using the other. The parent’s blindness for her child has neither to do with her treating her child as an object nor does she not see what personal relation she has to her child. Rather the parent’s blindness consists in a lack of hope and belief in her child, it is a blindness that consists in an incapability to love.2 80 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 80 30.7.2004 15:34:53 Notes 1 The simulation theorists tend to talk about understanding others from an observing perspective (see Mental Simulation, 1995). The work with the text has been funded by the Academy of Finland (nr. 54701) Literature Buber, M. 1983 I and Thou, Edinburgh: Clark. Goldman, A.I. 1995 “Empathy, Mind and Morals”, in M. Davies and T. Stone (eds.), Mental Simulation, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd. Marcel, G. 1948 The Philosophy of Existence, London: The Harvill Press Ltd. Sartre, J.P. 1956 Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, New York: Philosophical Library Inc. 81 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 81 30.7.2004 15:34:53 Recognitive Attitudes and Dimensions of Personhood Heikki Ikäheimo University of Jyväskylä, Finland heanik@yﬁ.jyu.ﬁ I n what follows, I will sketch a three-dimensional conception of personhood based on a particular interpretation of Hegel’s concept of recognition (Anerkennung). According to this interpretation, an attitude of recognition, or a ‘recognitive attitude’ – love, respect or holding in esteem – directed to some B is an attitude of taking that B as a person. Recognitive attitudes First, a preliminary note on the word ‘recognition’. Recognition in the relevant sense is not to be mixed with two other senses of the word. First of all, by ‘recognition’ I do not mean ‘identiﬁcation’. We can recognize, or in other words identify, anything numerically as the individual entity it is and qualitatively as an entity of some particular kind. Secondly, by ‘recognition’ I do not mean ‘acknowledgement’. We recognize, or in other words acknowledge claims, rights, responsibilities, reasons, sins etc. Whereas anything can be identiﬁed and whereas only something like ‘normative entities’ can be acknowledged, only persons can be recognized in the relevant sense.1 According to Axel Honneth’s interpretation, recognition or the recognitive attitude in the Hegelian sense is a genus comprising of three species – loving, respecting and holding in esteem (Honneth 1995).2 But if these are the species of recognition, how should we conceive of their 82 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 82 30.7.2004 15:34:53 genus? My own suggestion is, that it should be conceived of as ‘taking something/-one as a person’ (Ikäheimo 2002a). This proposal is motivated, ﬁrst of all, by Hegel-scholarly considerations: in my reading, in the famous fable of the ‘lord and the slave’ Hegel is talking about recognition at the level of this genus, and in the texts referred to by Honneth at the level of the species (see Honneth 1995, chapter 3). Secondly, the proposal is motivated by independent philosophical intuitions and conjectures: for instance according to Wilfrid Sellars to take something/-one as a person is to think of it as belonging to a “we” with oneself (Sellars 1963, 38); and according to Robert Brandom to take something/-one as “one of us” is to recognize it/her in the Hegelian sense (Brandom 1994, 67, 663). Assuming that these ideas make sense and that both are talking about the same things – at least to a sufﬁcient degree – we may draw the conclusion that recognizing something/-one in the relevant Hegelian sense is to take it/her as a person. In other words, having a recognitive attitude towards something/-one is including it/her into ‘us’, that is, into the community of persons. If we accept that love, respect and esteem are species or ways of taking something/-one as a person, what exactly are the relevant concepts of love, respect and esteem? Let me start from respect. Sometimes people talk about ‘respecting’ non-persons like the stormy sea or other dangerous and untamed forces of nature. But respect in the sense of taking something/-one as a person is something else. In this sense, we only respect what we take to be capable of thinking and acting on reasons, asking and providing reasons, judging the goodness or badness of reasons etc., i.e. rational or cognitively autonomous creatures. As rationality comes in degrees, we seem to respect others according to our estimation of the degree of their rationality. Some we respect in this sense more, some less, and completely a-rational entities like the stormy sea not at all. To ‘respect’ a human being simply for his or her physical powers – take a dangerously doped bodybuilder – is not to respect him in the sense of taking him as a person, but rather to ‘respect’ him in the other sense of taking him as a dangerous force of nature beyond rational argumentation. What is important to note as regards to Brandom and Honneth, is that whereas for Honneth respect is one out of three species of recogni- 83 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 83 30.7.2004 15:34:54 tion, for Brandom recognition seems to be identical with respect in this sense. For Honneth, as well as for Brandom, recognition in this sense of respect relates to rights (Honneth 1995, chapter 5; Brandom 1994). For Brandom, recognizing someone is directly taking her as entitled to something, namely to thoughts and actions based on good reasons, to being provided with reasons, as well as to taking part on determining which ones are good and bad reasons in each case. In this, generally speaking Kantian, line of thought there is an immanent contradiction in recognizing someone as a rational creature and not acknowledging these basic rights or entitlements of hers. There are perhaps several ways to conceive the relationship of these basic or ‘meta-rights’ and more concrete or particular rights, but one obvious way is to say that the basic or meta-rights of persons qua rational vis-à-vis each other are a condition of possibility of the discursive space in which the more concrete rights, as well as any other questions, are negotiated. And since rationality and taking or respecting persons as rational come in degrees, also acknowledging these basic rights or entitlements to take part in the discursive practices of rational beings seem to come in degrees. We respect children as less entitled to take part in decision procedures to the extent that we take them as actually less capable of doing so. A further fact is that if children are not treated – perhaps respected in another but closely related sense – as potentially more rational or autonomous than they are actually at each stage of their development, this will be a major obstacle for the development of their personhood in the dimension of rationality. Following Hegel’s predecessor Fichte, recognizing (anerkennen) persons as autonomous is closely related to challenging or summoning (auffordern) them to autonomy (see Williams 1992, chapter 3). What about love? Although Honneth himself – for generally speaking historicist reasons – has been somewhat hesitant to spell out a precise deﬁnition for the concept of love in his scheme, I take it that love in the relevant sense is best spelled out along the Aristotelian core meaning (see Vlastos 1981) of philia. According to Aristotle, love or philia in its core meaning is caring for someone, or what comes down to the same thing, for the happiness of someone, for the sake of that someone herself (Nicomachean Ethics, 1166A2; Rhetorics, 1380B35-1381A1) – not for the sake 84 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 84 30.7.2004 15:34:54 of someone or something else, but simply for the sake of the object of the attitude itself. As has often been pointed out, this ‘for the sake of ’ does not work as a rational justiﬁcation, as for the sake of something else could work. And since love is not for the sake of something else, love has no justiﬁcations. Even if love has no justiﬁcations, there is still something like an appropriateness condition to the attitude of love. As Aristotle himself noted, it would be inappropriate or absurd to love good wine in this sense (Nicomachean Ethics, 1155b29-30). An obvious reason for this is, that nothing is good or bad for the wine in the subjective sense – it is not a subject capable of being happy or unhappy. We can only be reasonably concerned of the happiness of something that is it-/herself capable of being happy, or in others words is concerned of it/-herself for its/her own sake: only self-loving creatures can be loved. It seems also, that the degree of a creature’s love for itself is the degree to which that creature can be loved. To the extent that someone’s love or concern for herself, and thus her capacity to be happy or unhappy, fades away, also the possibility to love her fades away. Think of severe cases of dementia. In the limiting case, where a human being – or what ever creature for that matter – has become totally indifferent to itself, there is in a way nothing left in her/it to love. As in the dimension of rationality, also in the dimension of self-love or self-concern, the modalities of actuality and potentiality introduce further complications, but I will not discuss these here. What about the recognitive attitude of esteem? By holding in esteem (Wertschätzung) Honneth means the attitude of taking someone as a (potentially or actually) positive contributor to values or ends that the esteemer values or cares about (Honneth 1995, chapter 5). Honneth is particularly interested in esteem in the context of the economic life of modern societies, but I am interested now only on this general deﬁnition of esteem. Understanding esteem as a recognitive attitude of taking someone as a person means that it has to be distinguished from merely instrumentalizing valuation. A master can genuinely value his slave as a valuable, perhaps even irreplaceably valuable, instrument to the ends of the master. But being a valuable instrument is not being a positive contributor worthy of esteem. I take it that gratitude is the litmus test of esteem. We are not grateful to good instruments to the ends that we care 85 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 85 30.7.2004 15:34:54 about, but we are grateful to contributors to the ends that we care about. (Perhaps holding something/-one in esteem in the relevant sense simply is to be grateful to it/her.) We are also not grateful to those who deliberately contribute to the ends that we care about, but merely for their own egoistic reasons. If B is a doctor who saves lives highly efﬁciently, but does this solely for the sake of fame and fortune without the slightest of genuine concern for her patients for their own sakes, her deeds can hardly give reason to genuine and sincere gratitude. Thus she isn’t genuinely held in esteem in the relevant sense. Most likely, as her patients are for her merely instruments for her personal success, her patients too think of her purely instrumentally – as an efﬁcient means for saving ones life. Also, B’s deeds that just happen to contribute to A’s ends or happiness, do not arouse gratitude in A. (On these and other features of gratitude, see Berger 1975.) In short, taking someone as a person in the dimension of esteem is to take her as contributing positively to the ends or happiness of the esteemer, or those third persons that the esteemer cares about, out of genuine concern for the ends or happiness of the beneﬁciary. (If Adam Smith’s invisible hand were the whole truth about the coordination of ends in the modern work order, then no one of us would ever receive genuine gratitude and esteem for ones work.) Since motivations are mixed, and deeds can be motivated more or less out of genuine concern for their beneﬁciaries, contributions to the ends or happiness of someone deserve gratitude and hence esteem to the extent that they are motivated by genuine concern for that someone for his or her own sake. Another way of putting this is, that only to the extent that a contributor loves her beneﬁciaries and acts out of love towards them, she fulﬁls the appropriateness condition of esteem. This is the extent that she can be appropriately taken as a person in this dimension of personhood. Recognitive attitudes and dimensions of personhood What kind of conception of personhood follows from the thought, that the recognitive attitudes of respect, love and esteem, as speciﬁed above, are the genera of taking something/-one as a person? Firstly, personhood has three dimensions. To be a person according to this line of 86 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 86 30.7.2004 15:34:54 thought is to be rational, to have concern or love for oneself, and concern or love for others, and thus be motivated to contribute to their happiness. These dimensions of personhood are at least to some extent independent from each other. Secondly, according to this line of thought personhood is not a matter of all or nothing, but rather comes in degrees on all three dimensions. In its normal course of development a human animal becomes a person gradually, and sometimes the person that it has become fades away gradually as the capacities of personhood fade away, so that in the end all that is left is again just a helpless human animal. It may be possible also, that the degrees of personhood diminish temporarily, and then increase again. Mental disturbances diminish our rationality, and severe depression may diminish our capacity to be concerned of ourselves and of others. It is also possible to be a person to different degrees in different dimensions of personhood. A rational egoist is rational but has little or no genuine concern or love for others. Her personhood is thus at least lesser than that of the average person in one of its dimensions. In the limiting case where someone has absolutely no love for any others, she deserves no gratitude or esteem from others and is not ‘one of us’ for anybody in the sense of sharing, and contributing to, the ends or happiness of any others for their own sakes. In this dimension, she is not at all a person – a conclusion that ﬁts well with the intuition that a complete lack of love for any others may be psychologically impossible for persons. To say the least, the space of motivating practical reasons for this type is severely impoverished and thus she lacks essential elements of the normal motivational structures of persons. Think of intelligent psychopaths. On the other hand, a mentally disabled person may be a person to a lesser degree than the average person in the dimension of rationality, and hence ‘one of us’ to a lesser degree in the dimension of being respected as one whose judgements can be taken as authoritative. Still she may be genuinely concerned for the happiness of her closed ones, do her best to contribute positively to their lives, and hence be ‘one of us’ to somebody, a person who deserves genuine gratitude and esteem.3 Thirdly, although attitudes of taking something/-one as a person are at the centre stage in this recognition theoretical approach to person- 87 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 87 30.7.2004 15:34:54 hood, it is not committed to a ‘stance stance’ (Dennett) according to which being a person is indistinguishable from being taken as a person, or in other words from being an object of recognitive attitudes. The appropriateness of recognitive attitudes is dependent on real features of the object. Yet, following Axel Honneth (see Honneth 1995, chapters 4, 5 and 6) and a number of modern developmental psychologists, being recognized does importantly affect the development these features or capacities of personhood. I leave the exact nature of this dialectical relationship between being a person and being taken as a person, i.e. being loved, respected and/or held in esteem, to the discussion.4 Notes 1 2 3 4 This is not to say, that identification, acknowledgement and recognition are not intimately interconnected. Cf. Robert Brandom’s way of using ‘acknowledgement’ as distinct from, but internally related to, ‘recognition’ (Index to Brandom 1994). In fact, Hegel uses the word Anerkennung also for what I call acknowledgement, but this terminological complication need not concern use here. All this is not to say, that these dimensions of personhood are not at all interrelated, but only that their interrelations are very complex. Working out these interrelationships would require a theory on how self-love and love for others are related to each other, as well as a theory on how these are related to practical rationality. A highly thought provoking recent work on these themes is Frankfurt 2004. Ikäheimo 2004 contains a short discussion on this question, as well as more detailed treatments of most of the issues discussed in this article. Literature Aristotle, 1984 The Complete Works of Aristotle, translated and edited by J. Barnes, Princeton. Berger, Fred R. 1975 “Gratitude”, Ethics, Volume 85, Issue 4, July. Brandom, Robert 1994 Making It Explicit – Reason, Representing and Discursive Commitment, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Frankfurt, Harry 2004 Reasons of Love, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Honneth, Axel 1995 The Struggle for Recognition; The Moral and Political Grammar of Social Conflicts, translated by Joel Anderson, Cambridge: Polity Press. (Originally: Kampf um Anerkennung; Zur moralischen Grammatik sozialer Konflikte, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992.) 88 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 88 30.7.2004 15:34:54 Ikäheimo, Heikki 2002a “On the Genus and Species of Recognition”, Inquiry, Vol. 45, No. 4, 447-462. Ikäheimo, Heikki 2002b “Taylor on Something Called ‘Recognition’”, in Arto Laitinen, Nicholas H. Smith (eds.), Perspectives on the Philosophy of Charles Taylor, Acta Philosophica Fennica; 71, Helsinki: Societas Philosophica Fennica. Ikäheimo, Heikki 2004 ”Tunnustussuhteet ja persoonuuden konstituutio”, in Jussi Kotkavirta & Petteri Niemi (eds.): Persoona. Jyväskylä: Sophi. (In Finnish.) Ikäheimo, Heikki & Laitinen, Arto 2004 “Analyzing Recognition: Identification, Acknowledgement and Recognitive Attitudes Towards Persons”, manuscript. Sellars, Wilfrid 1963 “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man”, in his Science, Perception and Reality. London: Routledge. Originally published in Robert Colodny (ed.): Frontiers of Science and Philosophy. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1962. Williams. Robert R. 1992 Recognition. Fichte and Hegel on the Other. Albany: SUNY. Vlastos, Gregory 1981 “The individual as an Object of Love in Plato”, in his Platonic Studies, Princeton: Princeton University Press. 89 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 89 30.7.2004 15:34:55 Autonomy, Ownership, and History Antti Kauppinen University of Helsinki, Finland amkauppi@helsinki..ﬁ 1. It is a remarkable fact about our practices of holding each other responsible that on occasion we release people from responsibility, in part or completely, even when they consider themselves to have acted freely and are in possession of full rational capacities. Cases of this sort range from the man who has suddenly sold everything and left his family to join the Church of Scientology to the Bada Bing dancer who has had silicone installed in prominent places of her body that were in no need of enhancement. Such people often insist on their freedom. They are willing to take responsibility for their actions – but in certain circumstances, we refuse to give it to them. They take themselves to be autonomous, but we, knowing how they came to have and endorse the desires that lead them to act this way, refuse to believe them. It seems natural to say that these people really have the desire to go to church or the operating table – it is fully their own rather than alien to them, in the sense in which a reluctant smoker’s desire is alien to. They may not, at present, have contrary desires or evaluative beliefs, nor do they desire to have them. They are, in a technical sense, satisﬁed with their aims; no doubt that is why they are ready to take responsibility for them. A mainstream view in the philosophy of action, associated with Harry Frankfurt and his legion of disciples, identiﬁes acting on such desires of one’s own and acting autonomously (or yet, freely), deﬁning both in terms of the structure of the agent’s motivation at the time of acting. I will argue, however, that ownership in this sense is not sufﬁcient for autonomous action. Autonomy can be undermined not only by the structure of an agent’s motivation, but also its history. There is, therefore, a distinction to be made between acting on a desire of one’s own and acting autonomously. 90 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 90 30.7.2004 15:34:55 2. It is by now a platitude that nobody seems to agree about what autonomy is. My hypothesis is that this disagreement reﬂects two facts. First, autonomy is a theoretical rather than folk concept, so there are not widely shared pre-theoretical intuitions to draw on. Second, the theoretical uses to which the concept is put vary greatly in different contexts from the free will debate to issues relating to political liberalism. Given these two factors, the risk of people talking past each other is unusually high. What I propose to do here is to ﬁx on two central roles that autonomy is supposed to fulﬁl, and use them to ground an analysis that is explicit about its place in the bigger picture. When we see what is at stake, we can focus on substantial rather than verbal questions. Nor will it matter much whether the proposed analysis matches with current usage. What are the theoretical roles of autonomy? I will focus on the two that seem to me most important. First, if an agent acts autonomously, she is ﬁt to be held fully morally responsible (cf. Pettit 2001, 18–20). She is the author of her own actions, unlike those compelled or controlled by external forces. Second, beings that are capable of such autonomous action have value that is different in kind from the value of other things. As Kant said, they have dignity rather than a price. These two consequences will be my guide in the following: autonomy is that property, whatever it is, in virtue of which we are ﬁt to be held fully morally responsible and in virtue of which we have a special sort of value, dignity. These theoretical roles give rise to two constraints for analyses of autonomy, the Responsibility Constraint and the Dignity Constraint, respectively. 3. If the belief-desire model of folk psychology is correct, it is trivially true that our actions result from our beliefs and desires – that is what makes them actions in the ﬁrst place. Nobody would suggest, however, that all our actions are autonomous merely because their antecedents are our mental states. Some ways in which mental states result in action, like deviant causal chains, preclude autonomy. What is more, some mental states are intuitively not our own in the sense required for self-governance. They are in some sense external to the self that acts on them. This suggests a way of understanding autonomy and freedom: perhaps an action is autonomous if it is caused in the right way by psychological states that are genuinely the agent’s own. If ownership can be deﬁned in a way that does not assume some sort of non-material self or mysteri- 91 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 91 30.7.2004 15:34:55 ous agent-causation, we are much closer to a naturalistic account of autonomy. This is the essential aim of Harry Frankfurt’s project. His idea is that it does not matter where our desires come from as long as we identify with them at the time of action: “to the extent that a person identiﬁes himself with the springs of his actions, he takes responsibility for those actions and acquires moral responsibility for them; moreover, the questions of how the actions and his identiﬁcations with their springs are caused are irrelevant to the questions of whether he performs the actions freely or is morally responsible for performing them” (Frankfurt 1988, 54). Identiﬁcation contrasts with alienation; on occasion, we ﬁnd ourselves with desires we reject, experience as external forces within ourselves. Frankfurt’s views on what constitutes identiﬁcation (and thus ownership) have evolved over the years, but his present view comes down to wholeheartedness and volitional necessity. Wholeheartedness is a structural condition in which one has no contrary second-order desires. Similarly, volitional necessity constrains an agent when his desire is such that “he is unwilling to oppose it and because, furthermore, his unwillingness is itself something which he is unwilling to alter” (Frankfurt 1988, 87). Desires of our own, then, are those we cannot in this sense help having. I will not here challenge Frankfurt’s theory of desire ownership (but see Kauppinen (MS), Bratman 2001, and Watson 2002). The argument of this paper is simply that even if we accept these or similar structural conditions for desire ownership, they are still not sufﬁcient for fulﬁlling the theoretical role of autonomy. Distinctions between Frankfurt and those who deﬁne ownership in terms of matching evaluative beliefs (the agent’s “values”) (Watson) or higher-order self-governing policies (Bratman) turn out not to matter much. In the next section, I will argue that a person can fulﬁl the conditions laid down by such time-slice compatibilists, and yet fail to be ﬁt to be held fully morally responsible for her actions. Nor is ownership of desires sufﬁcient to ground the dignity of an agent. Ahistorical conditions, therefore, fail to satisfy the Responsibility and Value Constraints. 4. The key problem with ahistorical accounts comes into view when we consider different kinds of past manipulation that intuitively reduce one’s responsibility and correspondingly autonomy. One possible way to ma- 92 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 92 30.7.2004 15:34:55 nipulate someone is to create new desires in them through deception, temptation, suggestion, or whatever. Victims of this kind of manipulation may feel disconnected from what they want, perhaps helpless in the face of it. There is a rupture between the agent’s deliberative perspective, his views about what is worth doing, and the intentional perspective of explaining his actions in terms of his beliefs and desires (Smith 1994): the agent ﬁnds himself doing what he does not value or perhaps even understand. The motivational force of certain desires is disproportionate to their subjective justiﬁcation. This sort of manipulation can be accounted for by the time-slice view. It is natural to say that the agent does not really want to do what he in fact does. He is alienated from the desire on which he acts, and thus loses his autonomy (with regard to this action). However, it is also possible to manipulate the agent’s deliberative perspective itself, that is, to create new values – evaluative beliefs or higherorder desires – in the agent. This creates a situation in which one’s relevant desires and beliefs fulﬁl the conditions of ownership, yet fail to be autonomous. Consider the following story, modiﬁed from Al Mele (MS, chap. 8): KILLER GRANNY. Beth is a sweet old lady. Given her values, she wouldn’t hurt a ﬂy, though she’s annoyed with her other, noisy neighbour George. However, she’s about to become the unwitting object of a scientiﬁc experiment. Neuroscientists have studied the brain of Chuck, a hardened murderer, who wholeheartedly embraces his desire to kill everyone who annoys him. One night, these scientists brainwash Beth so that in the morning she has Chuck’s values. She ﬁnds herself thinking differently about things and is a little shocked, but reﬂecting on morality in the light of these new values, she concludes that her former views were wrong, that she had been fooled into believing into “a system designed for weaklings by weaklings” (Mele MS). Once again, George makes noise, annoying Beth, but this time she doesn’t just sit back and sigh, but breaks out her axe and chops the unsuspecting neighbour to pieces. Is Beth acting autonomously? Is she morally responsible for killing George? Is the desire to kill George her own? Has Beth become a different kind of person? Frankfurt would have to answer all of these questions in the afﬁrmative. Mele denies the ﬁrst two, but does not take, as far as I can see, a position on the latter ones. My preferred strategy is to 93 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 93 30.7.2004 15:34:55 deﬂate the debate by granting the latter two to Frankfurt and following Mele on the ﬁrst two. Sure enough, Beth has, unfortunately and due to no fault of her own, become a different kind of person (someone might even say “a different person” altogether) – there has been a qualitative change in her personality. Given that she identiﬁes wholeheartedly with her desire to kill, I see no reason for a compatibilist to deny that it is genuinely her own. It reﬂects her present values, and she endorses it on reﬂection. A desire to hold back would be in a peculiar sense external, a remnant of her former self. We have negative attitudes not only toward Beth’s action but her as well – we want her to change, and we take ourselves to be justiﬁed to forcibly restrain her as long as she remains what she is. This is the difference that ownership makes to our reactive attitudes. Nonetheless, she is intuitively not ﬁt to be held fully morally responsible or blameworthy for her action or her values, so, given the responsibility constraint, she does not count as autonomous. 5. What is it about Beth that prevents her being autonomous and responsible, even though she acts according to her present values? It should be clear that it is not the mere fact that change was rapid in her case. Sudden conversions happen, and they are not always incompatible with autonomy: REBEL MARY. Mary, having gone to convent school since the age of five, attends her ﬁrst philosophy class at nineteen, and suddenly realizes that the basic value system she has been taught does not withstand critical scrutiny and consequently rejects its central tenets. At one stroke her attitudes toward the opposite sex, her fellow students, teachers and parents and ﬁnally herself undergo a fundamental revision. She begins to go to parties, read different books, travel, and so on. However rapid this process of change is, we would hardly consider Mary’s ﬁtness to be held morally responsible to be diminished as a result – in fact, we would probably hold her more responsible for her actions than before. Could it be that our judgment about Mary is driven by the fact that she changes for the better, while Beth changes for the worse? To see that this is not the case, let us construct a variant of the case in which Mary draws more radical conclusions from her philosophy class: 94 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 94 30.7.2004 15:34:55 BAD MARY. Weighing the arguments presented in philosophy class, Mary comes to believe not only that the values she has been taught are wrong, but also that any system of morality is groundless, designed by weaklings for weaklings. As a result, she decides there is no reason for her not to earn money stripping at a club or to save it by stealing novels from unsuspecting bookstores. In this case, she not only changes her values as rapidly as Beth does, but also adopts similar ones – from our perspective, changes for the worse and becomes Bad Mary. Still, it seems Bad Mary is responsible if anyone is, but Beth is not. 6. The relevant difference between Mary and Beth may now seem quite obvious: in both her cases, Mary came to see things differently as a result of assessing reasons pro and con, after a critical scrutiny of her former values. There was an actual process of reasoning that we can in principle trace and reconstruct, even if we may ﬁnd the reasoning in question ﬂawed in the second case. Though Bad Mary in fact inferred too hastily from the unreasonableness of her convent school values to the view that there is no right or wrong, we can see she had some grounds to draw that conclusion; that she failed to consider or give proper weight to other reasons does not mean she did not reason at all. In Fischer and Ravizza’s (1998) terms, her conversion resulted from a moderately reasons-responsive mechanism. Had she undergone such a shock that she would have ended up believing in something wholly unsupported by the evidence available to her, like scientology, we would rightly be wary of attributing full responsibility for her. For Beth, in contrast, the change was a result of external manipulation, a process that bypassed her reasons-responsive and deliberative capabilities (Mele MS). To be sure, she can ex post facto justify her new values to herself, since she will inevitably draw on those very values in assessing her change – that is a part of what it means to say that they are her values now. But in contrast to Mary, Beth’s values are artiﬁcially ﬁxed in place. They are “unsheddable” in Mele’s sense (Mele 1995, 166–172). While further experience, evidence and discussion may lead Bad Mary to revise her judgments and consequently change her values again, in Beth’s case the brainwashing has ﬁxed the parameters of change: she is unable to learn from her mistakes. Notice that it is essential that this unshedda- 95 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 95 30.7.2004 15:34:56 bility itself is something she’s not responsible for – perhaps Chuck the homicidal maniac whose values she’s been injected with is responsible for hardening himself through repeated acts of cruelty (Mele, MS); likewise for Republicans and other fundamentalists.1 One suspicion the emphasis on reasons-responsiveness may raise is that the picture is too intellectualized – after all, our values and personalities change all the time, and only exceptionally through explicit deliberation. Thus, Nomy Arpaly (2002) presents cases of people who dislike children changing overnight when their own child is born, atheists who get religion after years of solitude, and so on. Arguably, these people remain responsible for their actions, though they do not come to hold their new views through reasoning. But the examples miss their target, for none of them involves bypassing the agents’ deliberative capacities, though those capacities may not be engaged at the time. Emotional conversion may be an essential part of becoming responsive to reasons. As John McDowell puts it, “the transition to being [motivated by a new set of reasons] is a transition to deliberating correctly, not one effected by deliberating correctly; effecting the transition may need some non-rational alteration such as conversion.” (McDowell 1995, 107) Coming to have new values in this manner is not, therefore, comparable to manipulation or brainwashing. Though it is not itself a rational process in the sense of being a matter of deliberation, it is still sensitive to reasons that there are. 7. When we ask whether the desire on which someone acts is her own, we are asking, in effect, whether it reﬂects her character and values as they are right now. We judge the agent (though not necessarily the action) differently if the desire that leads to a bad action is something she is alienated from, something that does not issue from her settled convictions, better opinions, or stable patterns of emotional reaction. But ownership is no guarantee of autonomy, nor does it sufﬁce to ground dignity, for we can be manipulated into valuing things. This draws our attention to the temporal processes of value change. I will sum up with a somewhat more precise suggestion about these changes. The key question turns out to be the following: Under what conditions is the adoption of a new set of values V by an agent A at t, due to mechanism M, autonomy-preserving? In any such case, we should not expect A to endorse V at t-1; that is 96 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 96 30.7.2004 15:34:56 what makes it a case of value change. Manipulation cases show that endorsement or reﬂective acceptance of V by A at t+1 is not sufﬁcient, for the brainwashed will endorse their new values. Non-deliberative conversion cases show that endorsement of M by A at t-1 is not necessary, for prior to conversion people will not necessarily endorse the mechanisms that bring about the change. What remains is that the agent’s endorsement of M by A at t-1 is sufﬁcient and her endorsement of M at t+1 is necessary. The latter condition rules out many cases of manipulation, since even the manipulated might not accept the mechanisms by which they came to hold their views (though they may of course have false beliefs about their own case). But presumably one can be manipulated into accepting the very process of manipulation, as the sad experience of totalitarianism shows. That is why we need an external criterion for assessing M; it must be reasons-responsive, as speciﬁed from the perspective of the agent who is attributing autonomy or the lack of it to A. Perhaps we could say that A ought to endorse M. Returning to the Scientology convert and the willing silicone dancer, we can say that they act in ways that accord with their present values, but in many cases the way they came to hold these values diminishes their responsibility for them. Most likely they fall under the category of having false beliefs about the mechanisms through which they came to have these values. If they are aware of the manipulation and still knowingly continue to accept their values, we will have a hard time accepting them as equal partners in interaction with full responsibility and dignity. It amounts to yielding control to external forces, to causal mechanisms that do not allow even for a compatibilist freedom. The alternative is to acknowledge that history matters; we should not pretend that the past is behind us.2 Notes 1 Thus, when Maureen Dowd correctly notes that “Mr. Cheney isn’t programmed to process evidence that shows he was wrong; he simply keeps repeating the same nonsensical claims as if he has a microchip malfunction” (The New York Times, June 17, 2004), the essential thing for future jurors is that Cheney has himself contributed to his programming and malfunctioning. 97 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 97 30.7.2004 15:34:56 2 Thanks to Al Mele, Lilian O’Brien, Jussi Suikkanen, and Teemu Toppinen. Literature Arpaly, N. 2002 Unprincipled Virtue, New York: Oxford University Press. Bratman, M. 2001 “Two Problems about Human Agency”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 101 (3), 309–326. Fischer, J.M. and Ravizza, M 1998 Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Frankfurt, H. 1971 “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person”, Journal of Philosophy 67, 5–20. Frankfurt, H. 1988 The Importance of What We Care About, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kauppinen, A. “Which Desires Are Mine?” (MS) McDowell, J. 1995 “Might There Be External Reasons?” in Mind, Value, and Reality, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 95–111. Mele, A. 1995 Autonomous Agents, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mele, A. Free Will and Luck. (MS) Pettit, P. 2001, A Theory of Freedom, Cambridge: Polity. Smith, M. 1994 The Moral Problem, Oxford: Blackwell. Watson, G. 2002 “Volitional Necessities”, in S. Buss and L. Overton (eds.), Contours of Agency, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 129–159. 98 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 98 30.7.2004 15:34:56 Personhood and Free Will: A Revival of the Introspective Argument Sharon M. Kaye John Carroll University, Cleveland, Ohio, USA skaye@jcu.edu I n asserting that “the unexamined life is not worth living,” Socrates suggests that personhood is a function of self-knowledge. Human beings enjoy special status over animals and machines because we are aware of ourselves as selves. This awareness gives us a capacity for selfknowledge that even the most intelligent dogs and the most advanced computers lack. The point of Socrates’ life work was to show that philosophy makes life worth living because the self-knowledge it provides makes us persons rather than mere things. If this Socratic conception of personhood is correct, then there is a deeply disturbing movement afoot in contemporary philosophy. It is increasingly common for philosophers to argue that free will is a natural illusion (Dennett 1996). By this they mean that belief in free will is a product of evolution. Human beings believe they have free will, not because this belief is true, but because it is an effective survival strategy. In fact, the belief is completely false: everything we do is entirely determined by antecedent conditions in our biological make-up and in our environment of which we are largely unaware. Call this view “evolutionary determinism.” Proponents of evolutionary determinism grant that the sensation of free will is central to human consciousness. In our every waking moment we regard ourselves as agents with choices about what to think and what to do. For any given plan of action, we believe we could do otherwise. Without this conviction we could not function 99 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 99 30.7.2004 15:34:56 in a fully human way. Even the determinists themselves, who allegedly know they do not have free will, cannot stop believing they do (Nagel 1986, 117). According to them, the belief is just as inescapable as it is mistaken. Evolutionary determinism is disturbing because it undermines the possibility of self-knowledge and therefore personhood. How can we claim to be aware of ourselves as selves when we are so fundamentally deceived about what we are? People on the street claim to know of the existence of free will by examining their own experiences from the inside, what philosophers call “introspection.” Despite its commonsense appeal and despite its role in shaping the tradition of metaphysical libertarianism, the introspective argument for free will has all but disappeared from the current debate and is widely regarded as a dead horse (Smilansky 2000, 51). In this paper, I endeavor to restore conﬁdence in self-knowledge, and hence in personhood, by reviving the introspective argument. In so doing, I turn to one of its earliest and most committed defenders, William of Ockham. The determinist’s case relies on Ockham’s razor to justify the elimination of free will. I ﬁrst argue that this move constitutes an abuse of the razor stemming from a rationalist bias. I then argue that determinists have misrepresented the introspective argument as an argument from feeling. The argument is compelling when presented instead as an argument from ability. By advancing an ability version of the introspective argument, Ockham demonstrates why careful use of the razor supports free will. Ockham’s razor, the epistemic principle according to which the simpler theory is more likely to be true, is the lynchpin for the evolutionary determinist’s apparently devastating argument against free will. The long string of biological and environmental causes presupposed in the theory of natural selection is sufﬁcient to explain everything human beings do; therefore, there is no need to posit free will. It may not occur to one to question this powerful line of reasoning were it not for the fact that the namesake of Ockham’s razor was himself a thoroughgoing libertarian, even despite the popularity of various versions of determinism in his day (Kaye 2002). Understanding Ockham’s libertarianism requires a closer look at his razor. 100 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 100 30.7.2004 15:34:56 The principle of simplicity was just as controversial in the Middle Ages as it is now (Quine 1966, Sober, 1990, Maurer, 1978). The crux of the dispute, in my view, depends on one’s epistemological orientation. Rationalists often ﬁnd the principle objectionable because they hold that true knowledge is certain. Certainty is an ambitious standard that is liable to require a complex theoretical support (Watkins 1999, 27). Empiricists, in contrast, typically embrace some version of the razor. Satisﬁed with probability in lieu of certainty, they begin with a large quantity of raw data about reality—as complex as you like. They use the razor, not to simplify the data, but to ﬁnd the simplest possible explanation of the data (Barnes 2000, 362). Everything observed must be explained through hypotheses and there should be no more hypotheses than absolutely necessary for a complete explanation. The rationale is that each individual hypothesis is a liability: no matter how benign it may seem, it carries the possibility of falsehood. The less possibility for falsehood in a theory, the more likely it is to be true. Ockham was an uncompromising empiricist (Kaye and Martin, 2001). This is nowhere more evident than in his argument for libertarianism. He writes: The thesis in question cannot be proven by any argument, since every argument meant to prove it will assume something that is just as unknown as or more unknown than the conclusion. Nonetheless, the thesis can be known evidently through experience, since a human being experiences that, no matter how much reason dictates a given thing, the will is still able to will that thing, or not to will it, or to will against it (Ockham 1980, 88). Ockham regards the existence of free will in the same way most of today’s empiricists regard the existence of the external world: it is the unproven and unprovable given upon which his entire philosophy is constructed. It is instructive that Ockham fails to see any conﬂict between libertarianism and simplicity. In his view, the prospect of razoring free will never even arises because it is something we directly experience within ourselves. The razor does not permit us to simplify the raw data of reality; rather, it requires us to adopt the simplest explanation of everything 101 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 101 30.7.2004 15:34:57 we observe. In Ockham’s estimation, libertarianism meets this requirement perfectly. His argument is a medieval empiricist version of what is today known as the introspective argument for libertarianism . In the twentieth century, determinists represented the introspective argument as an argument from feeling (Wood 1941, Ayer 1954, Blanshard 1958). According to them, when human beings claim to have free will what they mean is that they feel as though they are able to do other than they do. To construe free will as a feeling, however, is to commit the straw man fallacy against libertarianism. Feelings are subjective psychological states. There is no reason to suppose they tell us anything about the structure of reality. My “feeling watched” does not warrant me to posit a stalker. My “feeling persecuted” does not prove that someone is persecuting me. My “feeling lucky” does not make me any more likely to win. These feelings are subjective psychological states. My feeling pain, in contrast, does make me likely to have some sort of injury. This is because, properly speaking, we do not feel pain, we experience pain. The fact that pain can be observed only introspectively does not make it a subjective psychological state. Likewise for free will. Signiﬁcantly, Ockham never appeals to feeling in his defense of libertarianism; he builds his introspective argument upon a feature of reality that is objective despite the fact that it lies within the human person. At this point, one might worry that the feature in question will turn out to be a spiritual entity. After all, dualists cast the will as an immaterial component of the immaterial soul, something unobservable by deﬁnition. There is no call, however, to saddle Ockham with such an unempirical position (Boler, 1996, 18). The objective foundation of libertarianism is ability. An ancient Talmudic saying asserts that one could never know that one has an ability to do otherwise because no one has ever done it. It is quite right to suppose that it is impossible both not to do something and to do it. Nevertheless, experiencing an ability to do otherwise does not require actually doing otherwise any more than experiencing an ability to do anything requires actually doing it (Lehrer 1966). I submit the following example in support of this thesis. I am a runner. I run ten kilometers almost every day. I ran 10K yesterday and the day before that. I am keenly aware that I have the ability to run 10K 102 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 102 30.7.2004 15:34:57 today. I am aware of this ability even despite the fact that, on this particular occasion, I do not feel like doing it. Let us call my running ability my “zill.” Do I need to exercise my zill today in order to know that my zill still exists? Of course not. Therefore, human beings can be directly aware of their abilities. This example hypostatizes the entity of the zill in order to show that the will is a parallel hypostasis. There is nothing especially mysterious about it. We get by in ordinary speech without ever referring to the zill while ﬁrmly believing in the existence of running ability. We could get by equally well without reference to the will while afﬁrming the ability to do otherwise. It might be objected that there is no direct awareness involved in my running example at all. Instead, I have made an inductive inference as follows: 1. 2. 3. 4. I ran 10K yesterday. I ran 10K the day before yesterday. Nothing relevant has changed. Therefore, I have the ability to 10K today. The alleged awareness of my zill is actually just part of my general assumption that the future will be like the past. One might conclude that, since the zill is inductively known, it does not prove that one is aware of one’s abilities (Mill 1962, 59). A compelling response to this objection emerges, however, in the familiar phenomenon of amnesia. Amnesia is loss of memory due to brain injury, shock, fatigue, repression, or illness. Studies show that many amnesiacs who cannot remember who they are or what they have done in the past, still know what they are able to do (Weiskrantz, 1997, chapter 5). If I suffered a blow to the head this morning rendering me unable to remember that I am a runner and that I have run 10K many times, I may still know that I am able to run 10K today. This indicates that I am directly aware of my zill without the help of any inductive inference. It might be objected further that human beings are notoriously inaccurate in estimating their own abilities. But regular error in this awareness is no more worrisome than regular error about what we perceive in 103 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 103 30.7.2004 15:34:57 the external world. Error is not a special problem for introspection. In fact, we should not expect introspection to be any more or less reliable than ordinary vision. Socrates would argue that part of the purpose of philosophy is to exercise one’s introspection so that, with practice over time, one might come to know oneself. Conﬁdence in philosophy and in our ability to attain personhood through it requires the assumption that human beings can introspectively observe their own abilities. I have argued that we should take seriously the possibility that free will is not a natural illusion. We should take it seriously because our ability to claim a measure of self-knowledge necessary for personhood depends on it. If we are deceived about free will then we are deceived about our very nature as human beings. Evolutionary determinists may try to respond to this concern by insisting that we are not deceived if we know that we are deceived. But this is a logical contradiction. In order to know that one is deceived one must actually be deceived. The most promising line of defense for the determinist is to assert that, since free will is an uncaused cause, being aware of it would be like being aware of the pink elephant that is not in the room. But the will can be construed as a non-being only within an event ontology. Within a substance ontology, it constitutes the very core of the organic power that one is as a human being. Granted, empiricists have historically preferred event ontologies over substance ontologies. But philosophers are not entitled to dismiss an observation just because it does not make sense within a pet theory. In fact, the reverse is true: one could use the ability to do otherwise to refute event ontology once and for all (Prior 1968). But that is a task for another occasion. If what I have argued here is correct, then the evolutionary determinist’s case against free will abuses of the principle of simplicity because it attempts to simplify the world rather than simplifying our explanation of the world. The razor is an empiricist principle that must take account of all objective features of reality—including that which is observed introspectively. Human beings introspectively observe free will, not as a feeling, but as an ability. Empiricists are therefore required to adopt the simplest theory that accommodates this observation, namely, libertarianism. 104 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 104 30.7.2004 15:34:57 Literature Ayer, A.J. 1954 “Freedom and Necessity”, in Philosophical Essays, London: Macmillan, 271-284. Barnes, E.C. 2000 “Ockham’s Razor and the Anti-Superfluity Principle”, Erkenntnis 53, 353-374. Blanshard, B. 1958 “The Case for Determinism”, in S. Hook (ed.), Determinism and Freedom in the Age of Modern Science, New York: New York University Press. Boler, J. 1966 “Will as Power: Some Remarks on Its Explanatory Function”, in L. Honnefelder et al. (eds.), John Duns Scotus: Metaphysics and Ethics Leiden: E.J. Brill, 5-21. Dennett, D. 1996 Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting (Cambridge: MIT Press. Kaye, S. 2002 “Saying No to God: The Emergence of Metaphysical Freedom”, Dalhousie Review 82, 153-170. Kaye, S. and Martin, R.M. 2001 On Ockham, Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Lehrer, K. 1966 “An Empirical Disproof of Determinism?”, in K. Lehrer (ed.), Freedom and Determinism, Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press. Maurer, A. 1978 “Method in Ockham’s Nominalism”, Monist 61, 427-431. Mill, J.S. 1962 “An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy”, in S. Morgenbesser and J. Walsh (eds.) Free Will, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. Nagel, T. 1986 The View from Nowhere, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ockham, W. 1980 Opera Philosophica et Theologica: Opera Theologica IX, Joseph C. Wey C. S. B. (ed.), St. Bonaventure N.Y.: Franciscan Institute. Prior, A. 1968 Time and Tense, Oxford: Clarendon. Quine, W.V. 1966 “On Simple Theories in a Complex World”, in The Ways of Paradox, New York: Random House, 1966, 255-258. Smilansky, S. 2000 The Argument from Introspection, Free Will and Illusion, Oxford: Clarendon. Sober, E. 1990 “Let’s Razor Ockham’s Razor”, in D. Knowles (ed.), Explanation and its Limits, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 73-93. Watkins, J. 1999 Human Freedom after Darwin: A Critical Rationalist View, Chicago: Open court. Weiskrantz, L. 1997 Consciousness Lost and Found, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wood, L. 1941 “The Free Will Controversy”, Philosophy 16, 386-397. 105 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 105 30.7.2004 15:34:57 Is it Natural for a Human Being to be a Person? Mikhail Khorkov Moscow, Russia mkhorkov@mail.ru A t ﬁrst sight it seems nonsense to speak about revival of Aristotle’s ideas in contemporary discussion of man, especially in the intellectual challenge of human embryo research and in the sophisticated methods of molecular genetics. What may the “surpassed Aristotelian science” have in common with modern trends in bio-technology? Are there only doubtful parallels? Meanwhile, the programmatic reference to Aristotle in the book Die Zukunft der menschlichen Natur by Jürgen Habermas seems to be a symptom of contemporary crisis in the philosophical understanding of human person: „Unsere Lebenswelt ist in gewissem Sinne ‘aristotelisch’ verfasst.“ (Habermas 2001, 80). In his book Habermas rejects pure naturalistic interpretation of the nature of man by supporters of liberal eugenics, like Aristotle rejected the physical understanding of man in pre-Socratic philosophy, while he forms his position on the theory of the unity of human soul and body, which is based on distinction between “human nature” and “essence of man”. In Aristotle as well as in Habermas it leads to the notion of societydependent phenomena which arise from dynamic/communicative processes in human nature. Deﬁning human nature as zōon politikon (Nic. Eth. 1097 b 8-10; Pol. 1253 a 7) Aristotle distinguished between “human nature” and “essence of man”. The ﬁrst one is complicated and mobile, the human psyche in actual life full of desire, passion, feeling, sense, as- 106 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 106 30.7.2004 15:34:57 piration, weakness, imperfectness, etc. (Nic. Eth. 1152 b 34 et al.). The second one is “man himself ” (Nic. Eth. 1178 a 1-8) which differs from life according to its mortal physical nature and empirical reality (Nic. Eth. 1177 b 31 – 1178 a 1) and means life according the best, the highest, the perfect, the supreme and the ruling identity of man (kyrion, kyriotaton: Nic. Eth. 1168 b 30, 1178 a 3; kratiston: Nic. Eth. 1177 b 34) that corresponds to the Mind (Nic. Eth. 1177 a 18-22; Met. 1205 b 21-27). Within the framework of such approach the person can be deﬁned as a normative concept, which makes imperfect human nature perfect, reminding in this function an assimilating substantial formation. It is fairly certain that this notion of human person has not only an analytical but also an ethical signiﬁcance. Apart from the evident value it has for social ethics – the moment, which is emphasized in contemporary discussions on bioethics – Aristotle by insisting on the unity of complicated human nature under the kyrion takes a guess at the possibility of analytical “scientiﬁc” psychology having a sense for the understanding of man as a body-soul identity, not as a mere object of nature, but also as a subject of ethics. Thus, he solves the problem of latent immorality of scientiﬁc naturalism and makes a signiﬁcant step towards understanding that the empirical sciences may obtain the values of the ethics of humanism. It means that the concept of person is only a theoretical model of knowledge of nature, including human nature, but not of the man as phenomenon. For every human being to be a person means to know oneself and to be known as a unique qualitative and quantitative identity. In the post-metaphysical era we ﬁnd this classical concept of the person in crisis. That all human beings are persons, is not considered more as something doubtless and obvious, concerning to practical sphere of common sense. Within the framework of analyzed model of thinking the key to solution of this problem is searched in exact deﬁnition of the qualities forming a human person. But such method makes every question about natural or artiﬁcial origin of these qualities even more insoluble. For the proper ordering of the questions according to modes of relationship between “human person” and “human nature” the phenomenological method of investigation could be especially helpful. The term 107 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 107 30.7.2004 15:34:58 “human nature”, taken on its wider meaning, refers to the most basic life-principles of homo sapiens as one of the biological species. Every living being – not only human ones – lives according to its nature as an inner-self-being. But at the animal level it exists in its most primitive manifestation, which makes an animal capable of simple intelligent behavior (Köhler 1925). According to evolutionist-naturalistic view, man is qualitatively and quantitatively superior in his intelligence (Portmann 1956, 62-63). Is then the difference between human person and human nature only a difference of degree of animal specialization? If it is so, then “person” becomes a technical term for the pragmatic view of man which never transcends the level of practical intelligence and the competence of biology. From this point of view, person uniﬁes logically inconsistent diversities of human existence: vital functions of human body, psychic experiences and spiritual mentality, which requires an actual opposition to the situational complex of environment. To deﬁne a person means to establish a relation between “inner being” and “outer space”. This relation is necessarily for the level that is distinctively human. Person is a unity in controversial diversity, while the living beings – as described by Helmuth Plessner in Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch (Plessner 2003, 303355) – tend to be homogeneous unities demarcating themselves by drawing a clear dividing line between their centered organization of life and all other forms of being. Person involves a progression from the natural to the ideal by means of the process which was called by Max Scheler the act of “ideation” (Ideierung: Scheler 1954, 124) and by which man is freed from his environment. Living body as psycho-somatic entity is in immediate and permanent contact with the environment. The term “person” gathers individualized data of human life in a common identity as homogenous, stable and unchanging. The borders of the “person” cannot therefore accommodate the rights of impersonal human forms to live according their own nature for they undermine unity with sense of their own. Yet, situated at the margin of the personality, varying human nature constantly disturbs the myth of the “person”. How does experience of one’s own person and persons of the others differ from the experience of living human being? Is it phenomenologically correct to say that it is our own personality that is ﬁrst given in our 108 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 108 30.7.2004 15:34:58 experience of the living body? Once we put the question in this way, it soon becomes clear that the answer cannot be a simple afﬁrmative. Max Scheler’s analysis of two presuppositions which arise from two alternative solutions by perceiving others: a) one’s own “I” is the primary datum of experience, b) the body of the other is the ﬁrst datum in our experience of others (Scheler 1948, 263), is very remotely connected with the cases such as embryo, clinical dead, amnesia and mental disease states for which the ground identiﬁcation of one’s own “I” and “my experience” lacks. These entities are quite alive, but they cannot have and personally express their own experience of themselves and of the others. There is no question here of an analogical reference. An image of one’s own body is not something we experience as personalized individuals. It is something we experience prima facie as living beings, since it doesn’t already involve a determination of who we are and what our world is. The distinction between experience of from environment demarcated living human being and of in the communication between “I” and “You” forming one’s own personality is not so much in respect to the emerging experience of homo sapiens that fully determines for us whether a particular experience belongs to my body or to an alien body, but in reference to intentional acts at two levels perceived. The ﬁrst level is one of corporeal acts of bodily separation. The second level is one of acts which at ﬁrst help us to identify ourselves as individuals. Person remains outside this division, but it closely connected to these two levels of experience. On the ground of experience of one’s own corporeal existence (as opposed to objectiﬁed bodily experience) man and his acts cannot be objectiﬁed as mental data. In this sense, other persons are not personiﬁed in their personhood. However, while my person stands in the sphere of intersubjectivity outside of the functions of my corporeal “I”, it is precisely this “my” person that is dynamically connected to my own body. By means of the intermediation of my person I can identify my body as a representation of my individuality connected to my “I” in my relation to the others. Mental process of identiﬁcation of a human being as human being seeks for likeness and determines similarity between somatic existence of an observant “I” and opposite body. Intentionally this kind of likeness means none other than the fact that every human being tends to be transparent for the others in the process of communication. 109 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 109 30.7.2004 15:34:58 What is immediately given in the experience of human living being is a stream of experiences differentiated between unifying corporeal experience of my living body and experiences of the others. They are undifferentiated between my person and other persons. For example, children originally perceive all things to be “my” things; only subsequently do they distinguish “my” things from “other” things. But as living beings they can quite effective assimilate “other” things since they have these things in their experience as corporeally absent. First of all and mainly it occurs at the stage of embryo. In many cases the appeal to personiﬁed human existence seems to be unnecessary. The peripatetic-scholastic concept of vivum perfectum (Köhler 2000, 257-258, 296-297; Dietrich von Freiberg 1977, 140) demonstrates how the argument of impossibility of improvement of the living human being lays the foundations of personal immunity and does not require any appeal to the concept of the person. The experience of human body as such is individual too and closely associated with mediation of personal-bounded structures, but it is not immediate related to the experience which forms the experience of living human being as independent from the experience of personhood. Imagining other human beings requires a perceptible form for every one of these human beings, which are individuals, since the objects of perception are individual. So perception and thinking of the others require an idea of individuality. But an ability to perceive a human being as a perceptible object is not sufﬁcient to produce the idea of person, since this object brought, for example, into direct contact with the eye and visual image cannot be seen as a person, nor can a visible object be seen in the absence of the perceptive body. Hence, seeing personhood in a human being requires, in addition to a visible he/she-form and an ability of perceptive “I” to see, a transparent medium of reciprocal relations between “I” and “You”. This transparency requires further explanation. Since such realities as human body (from biological point of view) and human soul (from psychological point of view) are not transparent in themselves, they require a transparent form of their individual existence. In the simplest sense it is representation of sensibles, but it differs from them in that sensibles require the presence of an external object, while person does not. And 110 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 110 30.7.2004 15:34:58 while sensing of a living being can only be of something immediate present which as external object can be represented only by means of a medium, imagining the person can only be of something immediate past which we have medium-like in our memory, and so like an immediate cause it forms the patterns of the present imagination of the person. Obviously, the body-perception is the condition under which the perception of our self takes place, but neither my body nor the other’s perceived body actually controls the total content of the experience of my personhood. For example, deﬁning man as a person, we do not use for this substantial deﬁnition the fact that it is of deﬁnite growth. But someone who thinks of a human being thinks of an object of deﬁnite growth, yet, in thinking it, he will pay no attention to the fact that it is of deﬁnite growth. If I accept my experience in its totality, two points should be kept in mind. As a living body I have an experience of my corporeality that must not be reduced to the purely sensibly perceived elements and an awareness of my body as living among others without having an awareness of the center of consciousness. Secondly, there is a sphere of the communicative “I”, of the “I” and the “You” in their unity, the sphere of intersubjectivity. The idea of person resides in the image of other human being that is the mental object of “he/she”-representation imaging like “I”-entity in every “You”-perception. For the more man thinks of his person on the model of something like metaphysics, the less he will be able to accept his knowledge of himself as genuinely being knowledge of his person. His person is not the required kind of that knowledge. Every attempt to explain knowledge of the person as knowledge that has itself as object of knowledge fades because every human individual, given the way he thinks of knowledge of himself, can no longer even make sense of his personality. In other words, even if someone thinks metaphysically of an indeﬁnite and not ﬁxed human personality, he will concurrently imagine a human being of deﬁnite quality. It means that it is impossible to think of a human person without thinking of this person as a human being. Thinking of a person intentionally requires the presence of a perceptible human image not only as medium in the process of perception, but also as object of thought of human personality. 111 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 111 30.7.2004 15:34:58 Literature Aristotle 1957 Opera, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dietrich von Freiberg 1977 „De intellectu et intelligibili“, B.Mojsisch (ed.), in Dietrich von Freiberg Opera omnia, t. 1: Schriften zur Intellekttheorie, Hamburg: Meiner, 125-210. Habermas, J. 2001 Die Zukunft der menschlichen Natur, Auf dem Weg zu einer liberalen Eugenik? Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Köhler, W. 1925 The Mentality of Apes, transl. from the 2nd rev. ed. by E. Winter, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner. Köhler, Th. W. 2000 Grundlagen des philosophisch-anthropologischen Diskurses im dreizehnten Jahrhundert, Leiden: Brill. Plessner, H. 2003 Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch, Einleitung in die philosophische Anthropologie, in H. Plessner, Gesammelte Schriften IV, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Portmann, A. 1956 Zoologie und das neue Bild vom Menschen (rde 20), Hamburg: Rowohlt. Scheler, M. 1948 Wesen und Formen der Sympathie, 5th ed., Frankfurt am Main: Schulte-Bulmke. Scheler, M. 1954 Philosophische Weltanschauung (Dalp-Taschenbücher 301), Bern: Francke. 112 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 112 30.7.2004 15:34:58 Person and the Psychoanalytic Unconscious Jussi Kotkavirta University of Jyväskylä, Finland jkotkavi@yﬁ.jyu.ﬁ 1. One should not understand psychoanalysis as a theory competing with philosophical theories of personhood or of mind. Yet psychoanalysis presents strong claims about mind as well as about personhood, and consequently not every philosophical theory of mind is equally compatible with psychoanalysis. The same is true of various theories of personhood. I this paper I will address the question, what kind of theory of person would be most compatible with psychoanalytical theory and practice. This question links closely with philosophical questions concerning mind. To the extent that one takes psychoanalysis seriously, this approach provides arguments in favour of certain kind of theories of persons and their minds, and challenges others. One obvious problem with this approach is that there is only a weak consensus about the nature of psychoanalytic theory. Within psychoanalysis, there are schools with incompatible views about both person and mind. In particular, there is disagreement about the status of Freud’s so called metapsychological views, which come closest to philosophical theories of person and mind (see e.g. Clark, Wright 1988). I will conﬁne myself here to a brief explication of the kind of view I ﬁnd most persuasive. I will then discuss some of its consequences for philosophical theories of personhood. The core of psychoanalysis is its clinical practice, and the purpose of analytical theory is to enable, promote and support the practice. This is 113 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 113 30.7.2004 15:34:58 true also of the psychoanalytical metapsychology which, according to Freud, “describes psychic processes according to their dynamic, topic and economic relations” (Freud 1915, 281). Metapsychological concepts like drive and psychic determinism are fundamental for psychoanalytic theory of psychic processes. One characteristic of them is that they explain psychic processes as rooted in physiological processes. Metapsychology operates also with neuroscientiﬁc explanations concerning objects which as such cannot be experienced a psychic qualities. The status of metapsychology is controversial because its status and relationship with the clinical practice is unclear. Some interpreters reject metapsychology altogether as incompatible with practice. The opposite view presents metapsychology as the scientiﬁc fundament of all psychoanalytic practice (on different views see e.g. Clark, Wright 1988). Freud himself thought that metapsychology, clinical theory and clinical practice belong together and explain the same psychic processes (see e.g. Reenkola 1996). Metapsychology is an essential part of analytical theory and serves the clinical practice, even though its concepts are not directly present in, or applicable to, the practice. Both metapsychology and the theorising of the clinical practice work with the same object, i.e. the personal mind and its integration, even if from different perspectives. Psychoanalysis as clinical praxis works with the qualities experienced by the parties in a therapeutic alliance, whereas metapsychology studies the same processes in dynamic, topic, economic perspective and in quantitative terms. There is rapidly increasing evidence, both in theory and in practice, for the view that the two perspectives do in fact not exclude but rather enhance each other (see esp. Solms, Turnbull 2002). This understanding of psychoanalysis, which emphasises its unity, has important philosophical consequences. Especially important for my argument is the existence of a conceptual connection between analytical theory, metapsychology included, and the ordinary understanding of concepts and words as used in the clinical practice. Obviously psychoanalytical theory is dependent on this connection with the practice in the sense that philosophical theories of mind are not. Hence psychoanalytical notions like repression, inhibition, resistance, desire, wish, or even drive and psychic determinism, all of which are related to the unconscious, are in a rudimentary and incomplete form also present in ordinary understanding. 114 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 114 30.7.2004 15:34:59 Psychoanalysis does not replace the ordinary meanings with its own theoretical constructions. Rather it re-interprets, extends and systematises ordinary understanding. Even if the theoretical explanations and interpretations suggested by psychoanalysis may not be actually present in ordinary understanding, they are intelligible and supposed to improve ordinary understanding. In particular, psychoanalysis explains more systematically phenomena not directly controlled by consciousness and intimately connected with one’s bodily constitution, desiring and sexuality (cf. Wollheim 1971, Gardner 1993). The purpose of all psychoanalytic knowledge is to improve ordinary understanding of and contribute to the personal integration of psychic processes. If this kind of understanding of psychoanalysis is accepted, it becomes apparent that, even if it is not a philosophical theory, psychoanalysis contradicts certain kinds of theories of person and matches better with others. First, psychoanalysis most compatible with such theories of person and personal mind that are realistic in the sense that they respect ordinary understanding, instead presenting its contents as a mythical folk psychology, or as an epiphenomenon to be overcome by scientiﬁc and philosophical theories. Secondly, psychoanalysis is most compatible with theories that emphasise the signiﬁcance of the bodily constitution, the fact that persons with their mind are essentially embodied. Thirdly, psychoanalysis insists that persons are conscious of themselves but also subjects of psychic states and processes of which they are not fully or at all conscious. 2. The principal notion of psychoanalysis is the unconscious. Within philosophy there are especially two kinds of views concerning the unconscious in general which, from the psychoanalytical point of view, are especially problematical. Both of them have a very prominent position in contemporary philosophy, and not only there. The ﬁrst view tends to identify the mental with consciousness. This may be done for varying reasons. For a Cartesian the cogito is self-transparent, for a Lockean personhood is deﬁned in terms of self-reﬂection and memory, for a Humean the mental consists of actually present impressions and ideas. If one equates mental phenomena with conscious ones, there is no room for unconscious mental phenomena. When this view is combined with a theory, which conceives of persons in mental 115 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 115 30.7.2004 15:34:59 terms, neglecting their natural constitution as embodied beings of certain kind, the idea of persons as subjects of unconscious psychic processes becomes impossible. The other view theorises about unconscious processes and states, but without attributing them to persons. They are sub-personal states and processes that do not yet allow individuating persons and their minds. These processes may be studied in terms of neurosciences or cognitive sciences, and generalised in terms of naturalistic philosophy of mind. There is a great variety of positions within this general approach, with the common denominator that they reject the personal unity of psychic processes and explain them in systemic terms. The unconscious is a sort of sub-systemic area or level with a causal inﬂuence on the conscious contents of a mind. Thus, if the unconscious is taken seriously at all, it is usually done within a naturalistic paradigm, in terms cognitive and neurological research. The unconscious processes and states are situated below the level of the mental proper, which constitutes the core and unity of a person. Even though the two approaches seem to exclude each other, they have in fact much in common as far as psychoanalytic unconscious is concerned. They both deny that persons, as beings for whom a certain mental unity is constitutive, could be subjects of unconscious processes. Yet psychoanalytic practice ― as well as theory ― builds on such processes. The analysis clearly takes place between two persons with a biography and with relations to various objects, including themselves. It does not occur between systems or some of kind sub-systems. This notwithstanding, much of the work is accomplished unconsciously, becoming conscious only at occasions and to some degree. Thus, it is the personal unconsciousnesses of the analyst and the analysand that are doing the psychic work. The unconscious is personal in the sense that two philosophical approaches rule out. In psychoanalytic theory, both consciousness and self-consciousness have a somewhat different status than they use to have in philosophical theories. As one of the functions of the Ego, consciousness is “a sense organ for the perception of psychic qualities” (Freud 1900, 620). Self-consciousness is regard rather as an achievement of the Ego, or as a manifestation of personal unity, than as its essence or most important criteria (cf. Gardner 1993, 81). Also for psychoanalysis, what is distinc- 116 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 116 30.7.2004 15:34:59 tive of personal constitution, compared with non-persons, is the capacity to achieve self-consciousness and thus a certain reﬂective unity. Without this capacity, persons could not do the psychic work which analysis is about. Yet one should keep in mind that the unity is always a relative one, taking very different grades and forms. What is more, besides its conscious integration, there are processes and states that are fully or partially unconscious and yet essential for the personal unity. These latter processes are rooted in our bodily constitution, and they concern most of all our drives, wishes and desires. Psychoanalysis conceives of persons natural substances of particular kind, which as persons are capable of constituting a psychic unity not possible for animals or artiﬁcial systems. A person is present for himself in his psychic reality, but only to a degree, and only partially in terms of conscious thoughts and emotions. Psychoanalysis focuses especially on the unconscious processes in between personal body and mind, conceiving “mind always as essentially embodied”. This view is in principle consistent with our ordinary understanding, which makes reference to various unconscious processes necessary for understanding inconsistencies one’s behaviour. Even if psychoanalysis extends the common sense views, sometimes quite radically, it does not replace these views with a theory a personal mind. 3. There are commentators according to whom also psychoanalysis shares a notion of the unconscious that altogether breaks the unity of a personal mind. Thus Sartre’s critique of psychoanalysis is based on his interpretation that for Freud the unconscious is an independent system and for this reason a self-contradictory notion altogether. “By rejecting the conscious unity of the psyche, Freud is obliged to imply everywhere a magic unity”, he claims (Being and Nothingness, Ch. 2, ﬁrst section). In a similar vein Davidson, in explaining the possibility of akrasia, appeals to psychoanalytic theory and ascribes to Freud the view that there are mental causes that are not reasons and that “the breakdown of reasonsrelations deﬁnes the boundary of subdivisions” (see Davidson 1982 and Gardner 1993, 59-64). In this reading, Freud too is committed to the view that the unconscious processes causing irrational motivations and behaviour are not part of one’s personal psychic reality. Dieter Sturma in his discussion of self-deception shares this view. Even though he expresses his disagreement with Sartre concerning the 117 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 117 30.7.2004 15:34:59 self-transparency of one’s mind, and presents interestingly Schelling’s and Hegel’s views on the unconscious motivations, he agrees with Sartre’s critique, according to which psychoanalysis “destroys constructively the unity of consciousness”. This means, according to Sturma, that “the subject of self-deception is not in a self-relation (Selbstbeziehung), but in a connection (Verhältnis) to himself that in principle does not differ from the one other persons may have with him” (Sturma 1997, 228). I take this as the claim that psychoanalysis is committed to a strongly person-divisive view. If true, it would mean that psychoanalysis is incompatible with the common sense view that one’s personal mind is after all a personal unity, even if it encloses unconscious processes and is at times far from fully rational. As I have already argued, I think this is a serious misunderstanding. It seems to me that the interpreters are led to this because they conceive either of the personal one-sidedly in mental terms, or even in terms of self-consciousness, like Sartre, or because they dissolve the personal naturalistically. There is conclusive evidence that Freud himself did not think of his topographies of mind as strongly person-divisive (see esp. Wollheim 1971, Ch. 6 and Gardner 1993, Ch. 3 and 7). It is characteristic of psychoanalysis that it explains thoughts and emotions with conﬂicts between the unconscious and conscious processes. Freud’s later model presupposes even constitutional conﬂicts between the id, the ego, and the super-ego (the ego being only partly conscious according to this model). Yet this model denies that the unconscious processes could be independent actors or second minds of some sort. Freud makes it very clear that the dynamically unconscious processes are functionally interdependent with conscious ones, from which repression separates them. Both kinds of processes are related to a single organism, as its primary and secondary functions. Psychic conﬂicts and various forms of psychic disintegration, on which psychoanalytic explanation of practical irrationalities focuses, in fact presuppose a personal unity. Both the analytical explanation of conﬂicts and disintegration, as well as the intent of analytical practice to contribute to the integration of dissociated psychic processes, work on the premise of there being a unity, which is personal and yet largely unconscious. For psychoanalysis, the unity of personal mind is not based on “the 118 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 118 30.7.2004 15:34:59 principle of rational connectedness”, according to which a rational connection between two psychic items would presuppose the presence of rationality all over the mental system (Gardner 1993, 186). Assuming such a principle would rule out psychoanalytic explanation. However, obviously, such a principle would be incompatible with our ordinary psychology. Like ordinary psychology, psychoanalysis conceives personal mind as a relative unity, but not as based on the principle of such connectedness or as fully conscious. Even if personal behaviour is for the most part interpreted in terms of reasons for action, reasons are by no means the only psychic phenomena relevant for explanation. Neither does the acknowledgment of unconscious motivations undermine the idea of personal responsibility for one’s activities. 4. I have argued that psychoanalysis conceives personal mind as a kind of unity that differs from many philosophical approaches. Essential for this conception is to think of mind as essentially embodied and to be sensitive to unconscious mental processes rooted into our bodily constitution. Psychoanalysis presents drives in their origin as physiological forces that demand mental representation and psychic work in order to be satisﬁed. It conceives personal mind as consisting of the primary process with drives seeking satisfaction, and of the secondary process relating wishes and desires to perceptions of internal and external realities. One of the main achievements of psychoanalytical theory is, I think, that it makes possible the study of the unconscious formation of desires and wishes. Hence, this releases us from the kind of view, still so often present in philosophical theories, for which desires are some sort of blind urges, stemming from us without any connection to rational processes. This latter view is problematic because it directly leads to instrumental conceptions of practical rationality. Thus, persons are presented as selves capable only of deliberating alternative ways of satisfying desires, of organising desires on various levels or degrees, and of distancing from them with rational means. Psychoanalysis means advancement in this crucial issue because it perceives desires and beliefs as always mutually connected. In psychoanalysis, desires are images originating from early experiences of satisfaction. There is no secondary process without the primary one, no thought without a desire, but also, no satisfaction of desires without accompanying 119 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 119 30.7.2004 15:34:59 thoughts and beliefs. Often the connections between desires and beliefs are not manifestly rational, and as a rule, they are partly or fully presents as unconscious motivations. Beside thoughts, they appear as affects and emotions, or various combinations of them. Yet, even if they are largely unconscious, they are personal motivations, for which one is also personally responsible. The crucial point is that psychoanalysis does not conceive of the relation between primary desiring and the secondary deliberation instrumentally. One arrives at such a picture only if one presents the unconscious as some sort of second mind independent of and causally inﬂuential on oneself, the latter being understood as self-conscious subject of one’s mental states. I have tried to show why such a strongly person-divisive view, usually formulated by the critics, is not a psychoanalytical view. After all, psychoanalytic focus on various mental process and states is concerned with their increasing integration of into a personal unity of one’s embodied mind. This unity of a personal one, even if it will for the most part remain outside the reach of one’s conscious perceptions of those processes and states. Literature Clark, P., Wright, Ch. (ed.) (1988), Mind, Psychoanalysis and Sciences. Oxford: Blackwell. Davidson, Donald (1982), Paradoxes of irrationality. In: Wollheim,R., Hopkins, J. (ed.), Philosophical Essays on Freud. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Freud, Siegmund (1990), Die Traumdeutung. Gesammelte Werke, Bd.II/III. Frankfurt: Fischer. Freud, Siegmung (1915), Das Unbewusste. Gesammelte Werke, Bd. X. Frankfurt: Fischer Gardner, Sebastian (1993), Irrationality and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reenkola, Turo (1996), Freudin metapsykologia ja psykoanalyyttinen tiedonmuodostus. In Roos, E., Manninen, V., Välimäki, J. (toim.), Kohti piilotajuntaa. Helsinki: Yliopistopaino. Solms, Mark, Turnbull, Oliver (2002), Brain and the Inner World. New York, London: Karnac. Sturma, Dieter (1997), Philosophie der Person. Paderborn: Schöningh. Wollheim, Richard (1971), Freud. London: Collins & Co. 120 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 120 30.7.2004 15:34:59 Personhood in the Light of Human Relationships Camilla Kronqvist Åbo Akademi, Finland chronqvi@abo.ﬁ I n response to John Donne’s “No man is an island”, the character Will in the ﬁlm version of Nick Hornby’s book About a Boy, states, “In my opinion all men are islands. […] I’d like to think I am Ibiza.” Will is a 36year-old who in many ways tries to live up to the ideal of being an island. He is desperate not to depend on anyone. Living off the royalties of his father’s only hit, he has no job or meaningful relations to the people in his life, using the women he meets as means for his own pleasure. As the ﬁlm progresses, however, he comes to realize, perhaps not that he is no island, since that would imply that we understand what that would mean, but deﬁnitely what it means to be a human being. Against his will, he becomes friends with the 12 year old Marcus, and thereby involved in the life of Marcus and his depressed mother. He also falls in love with a woman, Rachel, as for the ﬁrst time. Suddenly he ﬁnds himself wanting to be something for her, a wish that corresponds quite poorly with his “realization” that he is “nothing”1. As a consequence he pretends to be Marcus’s father to impress her. I wanted to begin this discussion of what it means to be a person with this example, because I think that notions such as being “nothing” or “wanting to be something for someone” are important for understanding the concept of a person. They point to the role our bonds and commitments to others play in our understanding of what a person is or of what kinds of persons we are, how we are shaped as persons in our life 121 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 121 30.7.2004 15:35:00 and relationships with each other. This can e.g. be seen in that Will’s realization of being nothing is a reﬂection of the fact that, apart from Marcus, he has nobody or nothing in his life that matters to him and nobody who cares for him. He does not latch on to anything in his life. Nobody gives his person a shape, wishing him to be something other than he is, caring for him remaining the same or encouraging him to change. Now, to the viewers it is clear that up to the point where Will meets Marcus he is missing something in his “island-life”. He is not a person (or a human being) in the deepest sense of the word. If we turn to the answers that philosophers have traditionally given to the question of what a person is, however, they seem to be quite content with viewing persons as islands. Descartes locked himself in a room to become clear about, by means of introspection, who, or rather what he was as a self or person without contact to the outer world or other people (Descartes, 1931). Hume, although he argued that “[t]he identity, which we ascribe to the mind of man is only a ﬁctitious one” (Hume 1978, 259), also thought that the best model for answering the question of what it is to be a person would be in the form of a snapshot of the individual at a given moment, without past or future or relations to anybody else. The two philosophers gave different answers to what a person is, Descartes regarding himself as “a substance the whole nature of which is to think” (Descartes 1931, 101) while Hume argued he was “nothing but a bundle of or collection of different perceptions” (Hume 1978, 252), but they still tried to answer the same question. They wanted to say something about what it is in the person that justiﬁes us in thinking that someone is the same person over a period of time, or what it is in the person that makes it possible for him to have relationships with other persons. In what follows, I want to turn this discussion around. I want to begin by asking what we may be or mean to each other in our relationships, to see what light this can throw on the concept of a person. This seems to be quite a natural step since it is within our relationships with others that the question of what it is to be a person primarily arises, or even makes sense in the ﬁrst place. Instead of focusing on the question of what we are as persons, I want to turn to the question of who we are as persons. I do this because if we look at the place the concept of a person has in our life, the important question is not what one is, but rather who, or what kind of person one is. These questions also seem to have a prima- 122 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 122 30.7.2004 15:35:00 rily moral character. I earlier spoke of Will ﬁnding out “what it means to be a human being” or “not being a person in its deepest sense”. It should be clear that expressions such as these belong to a moral or existential vocabulary. They are connected with seeing certain ideals, claims and obligations in our relationships with each other. Therefore it is within these we need to begin if we want to become clear about the sense speaking in these ways may have. In giving priority to the relationships we have with each other for understanding who we are, I am following a line of thought that David Cockburn develops in two articles. In the ﬁrst (Cockburn 1988), Cockburn criticizes the notion that we could make sense of the idea of a person as he is in himself, i.e. without reference to the circumstances that surround him, his past and future and relationships with other people. In the second, he argues that “there is a confusion in the idea that a persisting commitment to another is dependent on the thought of a persisting, unchanging core of that person” (Cockburn 1989, 88). What we are committed to in love and friendship are not some characteristics that make up the person. Rather ascribing personal characteristics to others is an aspect of the bond we have to them. When attempting to answer the question of what a person is, the focus has often been on the ways in which we can be said to describe something or someone correctly. Here the idea that we could give a neutral description that is not inﬂuenced by who is doing the describing seems to be lurking in the background. One thinks of what is described as something that is outer to the one describing. This idea seems to be problematic in many ways, especially when we turn to understanding who someone is as a person. One objection against it is that it is not true that all our descriptions of objects are independent of us, and of our relations to them. As Cockburn points out many of our descriptions of things are not pure descriptions of what the things are in themselves. Describing objects as e.g. “solid” is saying something about how they interact with other objects, or with ourselves. My hand does not e.g. run through them (Cockburn 1988, 14). Many of the words we use to describe persons, such as kind, caring, envious or suspicious, also refer to how they act in relation to others. In that sense, it is not clear what it means to talk about a description of things or persons as they are in themselves. 123 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 123 30.7.2004 15:35:00 Another objection is that it is constitutive of the concept of a person that we may enter into different kinds of relationships with other persons, be they loving, hating or indifferent. It is characteristic of some of these relationships that another person may come to matter to us in ways which cannot be reduced to a description of her. Buber e.g. introduced a distinction between entering a “Thou”-relationship with someone and regarding her as an “It” (Buber 1983). His point in making this contrast was to show that we cannot capture the essence of a human being in a description of her. This is reminiscent of Sartre’s point that human beings are always able to transcend any description one gives of them. To Sartre, whenever we are giving a description of who someone is, we are reducing her to an object, and whenever we think of ourselves as being something, being an it, we show signs of “bad faith”, we are giving up our free will (Sartre 1956). Whether we fully agree with Sartre or not, it seems right to say that we sometimes use descriptions to brand someone or diminish her. At times, we may also think that someone who wants, or tries to be something particular is betraying others and himself. We may say that he pretends to be something other than he is. These examples of talking about being or trying to be something brings out that talking about who someone is, is often not a matter of simply describing what someone is like. It is a way of expressing attitudes towards them. Rather than denoting personal traits that somehow are set in a person, the words “You are always so lazy” can be used to reproach someone, and “You know I am forgetful” can be used as a way of excusing oneself for missing an appointment, or avoiding responsibility. Saying that someone is a certain way may be a way of bestowing praise or blame, of offering support (“I know you can do it”), etc. An important aspect of these cases is that how we see someone tells us something both about the other and about ourselves, and our relationship with each other. It is not only expressive of the person who is being judged, but also expressive of the one who is judging. Someone who is always eager to throw herself into new projects may e.g. be quicker to judge others as lazy than someone who lets things take their time. The question about who someone is, thus, cannot be understood independently of the relationships we have with her, what she means to us and we to her. There is an openness in how we can come to see and under- 124 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 124 30.7.2004 15:35:00 stand another person, which depends on what we bring to the relationship with the other. But, one might object, do we not also describe persons sometimes? Do not people have different personal traits? Is every attempt to be something a way of reducing oneself ? How are we e.g. to take Will’s wish to be “something” for Rachel? Is it just another sign of “bad faith”? Now, I am not denying that people are different. On the contrary, the different perspectives that people bring in play an important part in our understanding of someone, and perhaps in understanding someone in different ways. What I have rejected is rather a certain picture of what it means to be a certain way or have personal traits. I have argued that it is illusory to think that we could say who someone is independently of our relationships with her. Personal traits are therefore not something that we in a simple sense have. Nor do I want to deny that there may be better or worse descriptions of someone. Giving a fair description of someone, however, is not the same as giving a neutral description of her, and I have argued that it is unclear what giving a neutral description of someone in the absolute sense that philosophers traditionally have seemed to call for would amount to. We may well ask who someone really is, who I really am, or if someone is being herself, but these questions are more related to what it may mean to be true to oneself and to others, than to ﬁnding some inner core of the person with which the person can be said to coincide. Wondering about who someone really is may e.g. express an uneasiness about a person, not being quite sure what she really thinks or whether she is true to us. Becoming clear about who someone is, thus, involves becoming clear about what it is meaningful, what it makes sense to say about someone without deceiving others or oneself. In a similar vein, İlham Dilman criticizes Sartre for thinking that “the only way in which we can be who we are, that is ourselves, is by refusing to take on any ‘positive being’” (Dilman 1991, 251). Dilman points out that we can also be said to be ourselves in that we identify with our actions, form convictions, and work out what we really think and feel in a matter. (“Is this what I really want or am I only playing a part?”) One could put his point in the following way: Saying that I am a certain way may be a way of evading responsibility, but it may also be a way of accepting responsibility. Will’s wish to be something can be described as 125 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 125 30.7.2004 15:35:00 an expression of “bad faith” in that he pretends to be Marcus’s father, i.e. something other than he is. Still, this does not mean that the only way of being true to himself is in realizing he is “nothing”. On the contrary, this may be as expressive of “bad faith” (if we stray from Sartre’s understanding of it) as claiming to be something he is not is, if it e.g. is an expression of self sentimentality, “feeling sorry for himself ”. Letting Rachel believe he was the father of Marcus, was indeed a lie, but his feelings for and commitment to the boy were true, and denying that relationship would be denying both Marcus and himself. Thus, Will’s desire to be “someone” may be an expression of wanting to take responsibility for the ﬁrst time in his life, being true to himself and others in admitting the lie and trying to ﬁgure out what matters to him. It may be a way of formulating an ideal of the kind of person that he strives to be.2 Notes 1 2 I put “realization” and “nothing” in quotation marks, because it could be argued that in the light of love no human being is ever “nothing”. However, I will not go further into that question here. Work on this paper was financed by the Academy of Finland within the project Emotions and Understanding at Åbo Akademi Unversity (54701). Literature Buber, M. 1983 I and Thou, Edinburgh: Clark. Cockburn, D. 1988 ”The Idea of a Person as He is in Himself ”, Philosophical Investigations, 11:1, 13-27. Cockburn, D. 1989 “Commitment to Persons”, in D. Z. Phillips and P. Winch (eds.), Wittgenstein: Attention to Particulars, London: Macmillan, 74-91. Descartes, R. 1931 “Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason”, in Philosophical Works on Descartes, vol. I, Cambridge : Cambridge University Press. Dilman, 1991 “Sartre and Our Identity as Individuals, in D. Cockburn (ed.), Human Beings, Cambridge: CUP, 245-264. Hume, D. 1978 A Treatise of Human Nature, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sartre, J-P. 1956 Being and Nothingness, New York: Philosophical Library. 126 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 126 30.7.2004 15:35:00 Constitution and Persons Arto Laitinen University of Jyväskylä, Finland armala@yﬁ.jyu.ﬁ 1. Lynne Rudder Baker’s “Constitution View” is a successful articulation of a novel, coherent view of personhood. It defends the unique characteristics of persons, and yet tells us how persons ﬁt the rest of the nature quite unproblematically. The crux is that persons, characterized by “ﬁrst person perspectives”, are not identical to human animals, but are constituted by human animals. The relation between a person and a human body (or, interchangeably, human organism) is the same relation, constitution, which can be found from all around the material world: between an organism and the combination of chemicals that makes it up, or between a statue and a piece of bronze. The ubiquity of the relation seems to favour the constitution view. In this paper I wish however to challenge the ubiquity of constitution as analyzed by Baker. She analyses “constitution” as a one-to-one relation between two non-identical things of different “primary kinds”, between two things with same size, shape, weight, and location, but with different modal, historical or causal properties. The paradigm example is the relation between a statue and the piece of bronze that constitutes it: melt the bronze and the statue is gone, but the piece of bronze is still with us. I hope to show that unlike statues, many things are not constituted by any further thing of the same size, shape and location. There is what I call “bottom level of thinghood” for things of different kinds. Many things are not constituted by a lower-level thing, although they consist of stuff, particles etc. Secondly, I wish to show that even though a ﬁrst-person per- 127 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 127 30.7.2004 15:35:01 spective is crucial for persons, there is no need to think that a person is a different thing from a human organism (although I realize that here there is a bedrock clash of intuitions). Pace Baker, it is possible to “take persons seriously” without postulating personhood as a primary kind concept. If personhood is not a primary kind concept at all, then the relation between a human being and a person is not that of two things of different primary kinds, and thus not constitution. Taking these two points together, my answer to the question of what constitutes persons is: nothing. Persons are organisms with ﬁrst-person perspectives, and organisms are already at the bottom level of thinghood. The bodies of persons of course consist of arrangements of various kinds of stuff, but there is no thing (of the same weight etc) that constitutes their bodies. Before turning to the details, let me note that this paper is written very much in the spirit of Baker’s declaration of her basic aim to understand “the common world that we all encounter, ..., populated by an enormous variety of kinds of things - from cows to cabbages, from cathedrals to catheters” (2002, 31). If my reading is correct, Baker’s analysis seems to have the unfortunate implication that our common world contains not only things “from cows to cabbages”, but for each cow and each cabbage there seems to be an enormous multitude of things of the same size and weight, namely the “things” that constitute the cows and cabbages in question. 2. Unlike some other philosophers, Baker does not use “constitution” to refer to the mereological relation between something and its parts, nor to the relation between a thing and its constituent “stuff ” (2000, 34). Instead, the relation she is interested in is a relation between two things. The relation is different from identity and separate existence, and can be understood with the help of the notions of a “primary kind” and “favourable circumstances”. A thing (or a substance, or a continuant) is something that can undergo many kinds of changes and yet remain the same thing it is. It can gain properties and cease to have them without ceasing to exist. But each thing has some properties it cannot lose without ceasing to exist, and these properties are determined by what it is, by its primary kind. Each continuant is fundamentally a member of exactly one primary kind. (2000, 39-40) 128 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 128 30.7.2004 15:35:01 An individual has the de re persistence conditions of its primary kind and hence has its primary-kind property essentially. It cannot cease to have its primary-kind property without ceasing to exist.(2000, 40) Baker introduces the notion of ‘G-favourable circumstances’ as follows: For any property of being a G, where G is a primary kind, call the milieu required for something to be a G ‘G-favorable circumstances’. G-favorable circumstances entail instantiation of every property, except for primary-kind properties, that must be exempliﬁed for something to be a G. ... The presence of something of a suitable primary kind in G-favourable circumstances is sufﬁcient for G to be instantiated then and there. (2000, 42) Baker’s informal idea of constitution is the following: Where being an F and being a G are distinct primary-kind properties, it is possible that an F exists without there being any spatially coincident G. However, if an F is in G-favorable circumstances, then there is a new entity, a G, that is spatially coincident with the F but not identical to it.”(2000, 42) A piece of bronze (F), when not in a suitable relation to an artworld (the G-favourable circumstances), does not constitute a statue (G). But when the piece of bronze is in a suitable relation to an artworld, it does constitute a statue. So far, so good. Now let us turn to organisms. 3. Let me quote Baker again: [A]n organism is a different kind of thing from the various chemicals that make it up”(2002, 33).”When a certain combination of chemicals is in a certain environment, then a new thing - an organism - comes into existence. A world without organisms ... would have different things in it from our world - even if it had the same combinations of chemicals ... as our world. (2002, 32). Now I would have thought that given the laws of nature, the combination of chemicals cannot help making up an organism, so that there is no need for “organism-favorable circumstances”. (Just like there seems 129 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 129 30.7.2004 15:35:01 to be no need for a combination of hydrogen and oxygen to be in special “water-favourable circumstances” to make up water.) So it may be, that in the case of natural entities, the analysis of a constituting thing (F) plus Gfavourable circumstances breaks down. Be that as it may, one can certainly agree with Baker that an organism is a different kind of thing from the various chemical that make it up. But the relation between an organism and the various chemicals that make it up is not a relation between two things of the same size, shape, weight and location. Rather, at any point of time there is a relation between, say, a cow and all of the constituent particles that make it up. This is a one-many relationship, and none of the particles has the same size, shape, weight and location as the cow. The same goes for a water molecule: there does not seem to be any one thing of same size that constitutes the molecule, it consists of three atoms. So it seems that at some point we reach a bottom level of thinghood (of that size and shape) and below that level there is no thing of the same size. There are of course the constituents (the atoms), which are things of some other kind themselves, but they are not of the same size etc. The one-many relation in question is not constitution in Baker’s sense. But perhaps we can allow that at any point of time there is a relation between the cow and the aggregate of particles that makes the cow up at that point? (Baker’s analysis is of constitution at a time, see 2000, 43). This is a one-to-one relation, and so ﬁts the bill. But is each of these cowlike aggregates really a continuant, a thing? Technically speaking, why not? Each of them is admittedly short-lived - each of them goes out of existence as soon as any new particle enters or exits - but during the whatever microseconds it persists, the aggregate is capable of undergoing qualitative change, for example getting warmer or having its centre of gravity move etc. But then again, technically speaking, nothing prevents continuants like “my left ear and the moon” from existing. In the commonsense ontology, it is only the cow that exists, and none of the myriads of nonidentical things of the same size, shape, and weight as the cow, located where the cow is. In the common sense view, it is certainly not so that each time a cow eats a bit of grass, or breathes, a cowlike creature passes away. 130 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 130 30.7.2004 15:35:01 Another possibility is that the one-to-one relation in question is between the organism and a temporally extended arrangement of chemicals. Here the suggestion is that there is one thing, one continuous cowlike arrangement of chemicals, which constitutes the cow throughout its life. Just like the cow survives eating or breathing, there is this one cowlike constellation of chemicals which survives changes in its parts. But certainly, if there is any such persisting constellation, that is just the organism itself, the cow. The postulation of any Doppelgänger seems quite arbitrary and unmotivated. At this point one may stop and ask whether there is really any reason to look for a one-to-one relation between a cow and anything? It seems to me quite strained to populate the ontological levels below the level of cows and cabbages with cow-like or cabbage-like continuants. In contrast, a piece of bronze, which constitutes a statue, is an independently thinkable and identiﬁable thing, but whatever the temporally extended thing is that is supposed to constitute a cow is thinkable and identiﬁable only given the cow. The postulated cowlike entity is parasitic in that sense. I conclude that one should not always analyse the constitution of a thing as a relation between two things, but when one reaches the bottom level of thinghood, one should turn to analyse the relation between a thing and its constituent stuffs, chemicals, particles or whatever. See e.g. Hacker (2004, 50), who points out that “a concrete individual thing of a given kind is a spatio-temporal continuant, and is made of, constituted of, matter of some kind, that is, a quantity of substance (stuff) or substances (stuffs) of one sort or another.” 4. The ontology of persons is quite different. There certainly is need for person-favourable circumstances, and the human organism is certainly a continuant, but is a person a thing of a different primary kind from the organism? Or is it rather that the very human organism in question is a person when it acquires a ﬁrst-person perspective, (or the capacity for a ﬁrst-person perspective, or whatever it is we accept is the person-making characteristic)? It is quite well documented that on this issue intuitions tend to clash. Some, the Animalists, think that ‘person’ is not a primary kind term at all. 131 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 131 30.7.2004 15:35:01 One and the same being can ﬁrst be a subject of experiences, and then, due to an accident perhaps, cease to be a subject of experience, without ceasing to exist. And when it ﬁrst gains the relevant capacity, no new entity (of the same weight, location, shape and size) comes to existence, it is just that the original entity gains a capacity. There is qualitative change, not substantive change. Personhood, then, is perhaps a cross-classiﬁcation concept: it includes humans, Martians, etc who have the relevant capacities for the ﬁrst person perspective, but whose identity conditions are those of humans, Martians etc. Assume this is right. Is there a problem? Baker suggests that this fails to take persons seriously, as it “construe[s] persons in such a way that the property of being a person is a contingent property that essentially nonpersonal beings have; we (the individuals who are persons) could exist without being persons at all” (2000, 219). But why would that be a failure to take personhood seriously, instead of being a quite perceptive acknowledgement of the human condition? After all, many of the most cherished and signiﬁcant things in life are contingent, and they are perhaps all the more cherished and signiﬁcant because they are contingent: they cannot be taken for granted. Someone who is a mother, or a husband, or a student, or an opera-singer, may think this as most signiﬁcant in one’s life at the moment, and take it very seriously. Here we must distinguish between three senses of essentiality: First, in one sense students are not essentially students. They are the very same individuals as they were before they became students, and they do not cease to exist when they cease to be student. (The same goes for mothers, husbands and opera-singers). This is just to say that student is not a primary kind concept. Second, in some other sense we can say that it is essential for someone to be a student. Here we refer to the practical or ethical signiﬁcance of being a student, and to the practical identity of the person. Many things that are relevant to practical identity, or to life, are not primary kinds. Third, we can ask what the essence of being a student is, and the correct answer lists the features that are necessary for one to be a student (like being enrolled in an institution of education etc.). Were one to lose these features, one would cease to be a student, but one might well continue to exist. All particular features and roles X, which are not 132 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 132 30.7.2004 15:35:02 primary kind concepts, may have “essences” in this sense, even though the individual Xs are not essentially Xs. The same goes for personhood. Intuitions clash on whether or not personhood, like human organism, is a primary kind concept, or whether, like student, it is not. But even if personhood is not a primary kind, we can agree that it is essential (in the third sense) for persons to have a ﬁrst-person perspective. An organism would not be a person, if it would not have a ﬁrst-person perspective. One would not belong to the circle of us, the individuals who are persons, without these capacities. From this nothing follows to the question whether or not personhood is a primary kind. Further, we can grant that someone’s status as a person has a most fundamental practical or ethical status, it grounds the most fundamental rights, and these rights are essential (in the second sense). And ﬁnally, even if personhood is not a primary kind term, this is not to fail to take the ontology of persons seriously. It is indeed the ontological (albeit contingent) fact that the agent really has the features that grounds the normative status. To take something seriously in the ontological sense is broader from merely taking it as a primary kind term: after all ontology is not restricted to primary kinds. Thus, one can take personhood quite seriously both practically and ontologically and yet agree that “we (the individuals who are persons) could exist without being persons at all”, but of course, then one would not be one of us in that sense. To sum up the view I have outlined in this paper: While a statue is indeed a thing constituted by another thing, an organism is a thing which is not constituted by another thing, and a person is a thing of some kind or another (e.g. a human, a Martian) which additionally possesses a ﬁrstperson perspective. While the suggested analysis of constitution between two individuals (F and G) in G-favourable circumstances, works for artefacts, it does not work for organisms. There is no F, and possibly no analogue for the G-favourable circumstance either. There is just G which consists of whatever stuffs or chemicals it consists of. But in the case of persons, the F acquiring the ﬁrst-person-perspective does not constitute a G, it is just the F with a ﬁrst-person perspective. From this view it follows that nothing constitutes a person, in Baker’s sense of constitution: a person is an organism with a ﬁrst-person perspective, and organisms are at the bottom level of thinghood and have no constitutive things ‘underneath’ them. 133 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 133 30.7.2004 15:35:02 Literature Baker, L. R. (2000) Persons and Bodies: A Constitution View (Cambridge UP) Baker, L. R. (2002) “On Making Things Up: Constitution and Its Critics”. Philosophical Topics. 30:1, 31-51. Hacker, P. (2004) “Substance”, Proceedings of The Aristotelian Society Supp, 4163. 134 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 134 30.7.2004 15:35:02 Consciousness Behind its Role as a Constituent of Identity of Persons: Descartes and Cudworth Vili Lähteenmäki University of Jyväskylä, Finland lahvili@cc.jyu.ﬁ S ince Locke it has been a commonplace to regard consciousness as a central constituent of personhood. Before the Lockean shift theories that addressed personal identity were often based on a conception of self as an immaterial soul. According to these ‘substance accounts’ self is a simple thing which persists because it is an incorporeal substance and thus incorruptible. Locke’s approach to question what personal identity consists of is something very different: personhood is based on certain psychological relations within an organism. According to Locke consciousness “always accompanies thinking, and it is that which makes every one to be what he calls self, and thereby distinguishes himself from all other thinking things, in this alone consists personal identity, i.e. the sameness of a rational being: and as far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action or thought, so far reaches the identity of that person” (Essay II, 27, 9). As is suggested by this passage Locke is not actually concerned with the notion of consciousness but that of person. Thus, he may have considered consciousness as an unproblematic notion, which neither needs nor admits of any explanation.1 There is, however, the plausible question of what is the structure of sub-personal, non-conscious mechanisms presupposed by such a consciousness ‘which makes every one to be what 135 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 135 30.7.2004 15:35:02 he calls self ’. Furthermore, there is the question of what the notion of consciousness was good for, both thematically and temporally, besides its role as a constituent of identity of person, since the notion of consciousness in early modern period is by no means conﬁned only to theories which consider it as a uniﬁer of a person over time. My approach here is to take a look at a version of early modern notion of consciousness by considering its constitutive structure, that is, the sub-personal mechanism prerequisite for person-level relations. Thus, I will not directly address the concept of person, but take it for granted that an account of such level is relevant to a theory of personhood. I will consider Descartes’ conception of consciousness and compare it with Ralph Cudworth’s thinking for the part that involves use of the notion. Obviously, this cannot be an account of early modern conception of consciousness in general. We have here, however, an early modern conception of the structure of consciousness that is shared on some important aspects by two quite different thinkers. Descartes on Consciousness and Inﬁnite Regress Descartes gives a deﬁnition: “by the term ‘thought’, I understand everything which we are aware of as happening within us, in so far as we have awareness of it.” (CSM I, 195) Furthermore, ‘thought’ applies to a wide range of phenomena including understanding, willing, imagining as well as sensing (CSM I, 195). Thus for Descartes thought and consciousness are interdependent. In the fourth set of replies, he puts the same in plain terms saying that “we cannot have any thought of which we are not aware at the very moment when it is in us” (CSM II, 171). But does the matter that I cannot entertain a thought without being conscious of it mean that my consciousness requires a further consciousness because it is itself a mode of thinking? For example, because my visual sensation of an object (by Descartes’ deﬁnition) is an act of thinking I am ipso facto conscious of my sensation. However, if consciousness is also an act of thinking, then there must be a further consciousness of that consciousness, and ad inﬁnitum. Let us ﬁrst consider a passage from Descartes’ conversation with Burman. 136 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 136 30.7.2004 15:35:02 It is correct that to be aware is both to think and to reﬂect on one’s thought. But it is false that this reﬂection cannot occur while the previous thought is still there. This is because [...] the soul is capable of thinking of more than one thing at the same time, and of continuing with the particular thought, which it has. It has the power to reﬂect on its thoughts as often as it likes, and to be aware of its thought in this way. (Cottingham 1976) Burman’s question was whether it follows from Descartes’ deﬁnition of thinking that one cannot be aware that one is thinking but only that one was thinking. Descartes’ answer is simply that one can have the original thought (say, a visual sensation of x) and be simultaneously aware that one is having the thought, (that is, without losing the sensation of x). Now if all consciousness requires reﬂection which takes a separate thought as its object (even though simultaneously) Descartes is committed to inﬁnite regress. I agree with Daisie Radner (1988) and Robert McRae (1972) who claim that reﬂection in this passage should be distinguished from consciousness that always accompanies thinking. This is because, as Descartes says, mind has the ‘power to reﬂect...as often as it likes.’ Thus, he is here treating reﬂection as a higher-level mental operation, a separate act invoked by the subject whereas a conscious mental state, which is not reﬂected (in the higher-level sense) is a dyadic phenomenon, which involves both the awareness and the content as its constitutive parts (see Alanen 2003, 110; Baker & Morris 1996, 43 and Radner 1988, 446). In a letter to Arnauld Descartes explicates that reﬂection is different from direct thought (e.g. a sensation) “in spite of its being so linked to sensation that the two occur together and appear to be indistinguishable from each other” (CSM III, 357). Udo Thiel (1994) has argued against interpretations that claim that there is no distinction between consciousness or reﬂection and the act, which is the ‘object’ of consciousness (e.g. Aquila 1988). Thiel is right in saying that Descartes is not denying the distinction between the two but rather emphasizing “that they are [acts] of the same general kind.” (Thiel 1994, 91) What Thiel does not consider, however, is the problem of inﬁnite regress even though Descartes’ deﬁnition of thought as always conscious and the status of consciousness as a distinct act seem clearly to commit Descartes to it. 137 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 137 30.7.2004 15:35:02 In order to avoid the situation Descartes would have to deny that every act of thinking requires a second act directed to it. However, what is important also, he should not commit himself to a view that no act can be an object of another. (He certainly does not claim that, as is shown by the last sentence of the Burman quote). A solution to that seeming problem is that there is reﬂection on two different levels. On one hand, ‘reﬂection’ stands for a relation inherent in every thought, that is, as an element of one token. On the other, it stands for a higher-level operation where a further act (a separate token) takes another act as its object, which is something that can be invoked by the subject due to her power to do so, and is thus a person-level affair. That every thought includes reﬂexivity as its ingredient is supported by Descartes’ letter to Mersenne. He writes that “...we cannot will anything without knowing that we will it, nor could we know this except by means of an idea; but I do not claim that the idea is different from the act itself” (CSM III, 172, my italics). To embrace an assumption that ‘act’ and ‘idea’ are just one thing, that is, identical in all respects, would be strange: an idea with the content ‘I know I’m willing’ is hardly the same thing as the act of willing. As mentioned above, Descartes indeed considers them as the same kind of things. However, whatever the sameness in kind, he obviously does not mean that they have the same objects, since the act is the object of the idea. Thus, as Radner (1988, 446) interprets, there is “the act of thinking of x, which has x as its primary object and itself as its secondary object”. This imports a much more plausible distinction between two types of things, act and idea, embedded in one token. This is the view also Arnauld, according to Steven Nadler, takes to be the correct Cartesian position: “Self-reﬂection is an essential part of any mental act” (Nadler 1989, 119). Also Victor Caston (in a footnote) attributes this position to Descartes by saying that even though Descartes admits that infants are capable of only direct and not reﬂexive thoughts “this need only qualify his views on the extent of consciousness and not its structure or nature,” and thus leaves “open the possibility of a token-identity view” (Caston 2002, 793-794). The type of reﬂexivity that is inherent in every act of thinking contributes to that particular thought by making it conscious, but not being 138 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 138 30.7.2004 15:35:02 itself a mode of thought. Another type of reﬂexivity is employed when there are two separate mental acts where one is the object of the other. This is essentially a person-level affair since it involves the mind’s power to reﬂect as it likes. With only the latter model of reﬂexivity in mind, we would be faced with the problem of inﬁnite regress, given Descartes’ deﬁnition of thought as necessarily conscious. In sum, reﬂexivity included in every (conscious) thought is reﬂexivity from the point of view of that particular state. As regards the consciousness dealt with in the Burman quote, reﬂexivity is considered from the point of view of a person. Admittedly, the ‘token-view’ has been found difﬁcult to accept. Already John Sergeant, Locke’s contemporary critic, challenged Locke on the issue: “But if I be Conscious, or know that I know when I know the Object without me, I must by the same Act know what’s within me and what’s without me both at once; and so my Act of Direct Knowledge would be Reﬂex; or rather, that one Act would be both Direct and Reﬂex, which makes it Chimerical.” (Sergeant 1697, 123-124; quoted from Thiel 1994, 93) The view Sergeant opposes here is essentially the view I am inclined to attribute to Descartes. I also wish that what has been said above helps to make this view even less obscure than what Sergeant takes it to be. Next, I turn to Cudworth in order to show that he also holds a ‘token-identity view’ as well as recognizes person-level reﬂection. Cudworth on consciousness as duplication and person-level reﬂection Cudworth makes the same basic distinction between conscious thought as including reﬂexivity and consciousness as acquired by reﬂecting. The structure of the former he calls duplication. It is “Duplication, that is included in the Nature of synaisthesis, Con-sense and Consciousness, which makes a Being to be Present with it self, Attentive to its own Actions, or Animadversive of them, to perceive it self to Do or Suffer, and to have a Fruition or Enjoyment of it self.” (TIS, 159) Cudworth does not elaborate on the issue of duplication, but by stating that duplication is ‘included in the nature’ of consciousness he gives a reason to think that consciousness is not induced by directing a separate 139 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 139 30.7.2004 15:35:03 mental act towards another but that duplication is an inherent element of one mental act. At bottom, duplication is responsible for qualitativeness and ownness of one’s mental states in an immediate manner. In addition to duplication, there are other reﬂexive relations, which are based on the model of second mental act taking a previous one as its object. Both of these levels of reﬂexivity are present in the following statement: “We are certain by inward sense that we can reﬂect upon ourselves and consider ourselves, which is a reduplication of life in a higher degree. For all cogitative beings as such, are self-conscious.”(TFW, 201; my italics) The passage is important because here Cudworth is explicit that there are reﬂexive relations on different levels. On the higher-level, “that which determineth itself and changeth itself may be said to act upon itself, and consequently to be both agent and patient.”(TFW, 200) The consequence holds also for duplication but with the qualiﬁcation, that such reﬂexivity is inherent to the duplicated state. This is what Cudworth means by ‘all cogitative beings as such’ being ‘self-conscious’. Consider the following passage: “We have all Experience, of our doing many Animal Actions Non-attendingly, which we reﬂect upon afterwards; as also that we often continue a long Series of Bodily Motions, by a mere Virtual Intention of our Minds, and as it were by Half a Cogitation.”(TIS, 160) Here we clearly have a case of person-level reﬂection, since when reﬂection is performed afterwards it is bound to be a separate act that takes a previous mental state as its object. This passage has also another interesting feature. Non-attended action is accompanied by awareness that does not qualify as consciousness that could determine actions, that is, it is not equivalent with deciding or deliberating but (merely) experiencing.2 This is an important distinction for Cudworth as regards to his thinking as a whole. What is relevant for my purposes here is that Cudworth relates the analysis of the structure of consciousness (i.e. duplication included in the nature of consciousness) with what the degree of self-intimation of such consciousness is (i.e. what the state is about). Cudworth’s interest in content is about whether it concerns oneself or objects external to oneself. As higher-level conscious states are structurally based on a model of person-level reﬂection, which renders deliberation and voluntary action possible it is noteworthy that for Cudworth that level is associated with 140 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 140 30.7.2004 15:35:03 the contents of these higher-level states. He thus makes use of both of the perspectives of structure and content. Cudworth’s overall aim is to show that there are actions, not mere motions, in the world that can be explained neither by appealing only to mechanism, because matter as such is passive, nor to self-consciousness, because there clearly are occasions when we are conscious but not selfconscious. Thus, we must acknowledge also a sense of ‘consciousness’ which stresses the phenomenal character. The so called ‘token-identity view’ of consciousness as distinguished from reﬂectively acquired consciousness held by both Descartes and Cudworth gives one answer to the question given in the conference poster of what “sub-personal mechanisms or processes have to take place in order for there to be a given relation in the ‘personal’ mode.” Notes 1 2 It is suggested in Charles Mein’s An Essay on Consciousness (1728) that this has indeed been the general attitude towards consciousness at that time. Mein claims that prior to his exposition there is no account that directly addresses consciousness. He sees this as a reason for thinking that common attitude might have been that consciousness is a simple notion and that therefore there really is nothing to study in the phenomenon (141-142). However, there is systematicity in Locke’s conception of consciousness as Mark Kulstad (1984) demonstrates. Cudworth’s other examples regarding the same distinction include animal consciousness and dreams. Literature Alanen, L. 2003 ”The Intentionality of Cartesian Emotions”, in B. Williston and A. Gombay (eds.), Passion and Virtue in Descartes, New York: Humanity Books, 107-127. Aquila, R. 1988 ”The Cartesian and a Certain ”Poetic” Notion of Consciousness”, Journal of the History of Ideas, 49, 543-562. Baker, G. and Morris, K. 1996 Descartes’ Dualism, London: Routledge Caston, V. 2002 “Aristotle on Consciousness”, Mind, 111, 751-815. Cottingham, J. 1976 (trans.) Descartes’ conversation with Burman, Oxford: Clarendon Press 141 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 141 30.7.2004 15:35:03 Cottingham, J., Stoothoff, R. and Murdoch, D. (trans.) 1985-1986 The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 2 vols., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Cudworth, R. 1678 The True Intellectual System of The Universe, in 2 vols., London. Reprinted by Garland Publishing, Inc., New York & London, 1978 Cudworth, R. (1838) 1996 A Treatise of Freewill in S. Hutton (ed.) “Ralph Cudworth: A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality, with A Treatise of Freewill”, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 153-209. Kulstad, M. 1984 ”Locke on Consciousness and Reflection“, Studia Leibnitiana, 2, 143-167. Locke, J. 1690 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding McRae, R. 1972 “Descartes’ Definition of Thought” in R. J. Butler (ed.) Cartesian Studies, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 55-70. Mein, C. 1728 “An Essay on Consciousness” in R. Brandt 1983 (ed.), PseudoMayne: Über das Bewußtsein, Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2-105. Nadler, S. 1989 Arnauld and the Cartesian Philosophy of Ideas, Manchester: Manchester University Press Radner, D. 1988 “Thought and Consciousness in Descartes”, Journal of The History of Philosophy, 26, 439-452. Sergeant, J. 1697 Solid Philosophy Asserted, London Thiel, U. 1994 “Hume’s Notions of Consciousness and Reflection in Context”, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 2, 75-115. 142 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 142 30.7.2004 15:35:03 Lynne Rudder Baker’s ‘First-Person Perspective’ and the Immunity to Error through Misidentiﬁcation Pessi Lyyra University of Jyväskylä, Finland plyyra@cc.jyu.ﬁ 1 Lynne Rudder Baker’s ‘First-Person Perspective’ C onsiderably many of the recent prominent theories of personhood deﬁne personhood by the cognitive self-reﬂexive capacities of the subject1. One such effort is Lynne Rudder Baker’s theory in her Persons and Bodies: A Constitution View (2000), where she deﬁnes personhood as brought about by reﬂexive capacities that are included in what she calls a ‘ﬁrst-person perspective’. In her theory of personhood, a person is not identical to her body. Instead, Baker maintains, a body constitutes a person as long as it can sustain a ﬁrst-person perspective. The persistence conditions of the person are tied to the ﬁrst-person perspective so that they are different from the persistence conditions of the body. The person is not, thus, identical to her body but rather constituted by it. In this manner, Baker’s theory remains materialistic without adherence to identity. By “ﬁrst-person perspective” Baker means the capacity to think of oneself as oneself, in the sense that one has ﬁrst-person concepts and knows how to use them of oneself. She distinguishes two kinds of ﬁrstperson phenomena, weak and strong. By weak ﬁrst-person phenomena she means those that are present in such creatures that have, in Bak- 143 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 143 30.7.2004 15:35:03 er’s terminology, an ‘egocentric perspective’ from which they are capable of minimal rational behavior and problem-solving. The behavior of such creatures, for example dogs and infants, is characterised by indexical thoughts and can be explained in terms of simple belief-desire psychology. But, Baker says: “Such explanations do not thereby attribute to the dog or to the infant any concept of itself as itself. Rather, they assume only that each organism has a certain perspective on its surroundings with itself as the “origin” (ibid., 61). “Grammatically”, she proceeds “we can distinguish between making ﬁrst-person reference and attributing a ﬁrst-person reference” (ibid., 64). The sentence “I am tall” is an example of simple self-reference and indicates capability to distinguish oneself from others. The sentence “I wish that I were tall”, in turn, indicates that the person that utters the sentence can attribute to herself the ﬁrst-person reference. Thus, she can conceptualise the self-world and self-others dualisms, think of herself as herself, and thus attribute the ﬁrst-person reference to herself.(ibid.) On Baker’s account, it is when a creature becomes able to conceptualise herself as herself that she acquires a ﬁrst-person perspective instead of merely an egocentric one. Through the ﬁrst-person perspective, the creature exhibits strong ﬁrst-person phenomena. Furthermore, Baker maintains that all other kinds of self-consciousness depend on this conceptual capacity, including the ability to regard one’s mental states as one’s own. The obvious implication is that lower creatures that lack this conceptual capacity are not self-conscious. They have, in Baker’s terminology, only an egocentric perspective. Dogs and infants that have only an egocentric perspective cannot think of themselves as themselves. Baker marks the kind of use of ‘I’, that contains the conceptualisation and attribution of the ﬁrst-person reference, ‘I*’. 2 Essential features of the ﬁrst-person perspective The ability to conceive of oneself as oneself from the ﬁrst-person perspective includes the property that in a linguistic description it cannot be substituted by any other description than one including the ﬁrst-personality. In fact, this property is shared by all ﬁrst-person thoughts and it was ﬁrst formally introduced by Hector-Neri Castañeda (1997). He revealed 144 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 144 30.7.2004 15:35:03 that we cannot move from the ﬁrst-person thought that Tarja Halonen would naturally express by “I am the 13th president of Finland” to the third-person expression of indirect discourse “Tarja Halonen thinks that she is the 13th president of Finland” without changing the truth conditions. This is so because it is not necessary that Tarja Halonen even thinks that she is Tarja Halonen. Due to amnesia, she might not remember that her name is Tarja Halonen and that she was elected by the citizens of Finland to be the ﬁrst woman president of the nation. Despite amnesia, however, when using the ﬁrst-person pronoun, she could not make the same mistake of misidentifying herself as when using a thirdperson description. So, Castañeda proposes, we should mark the thirdperson pronoun ‘she’ with the reﬂexive pronoun ‘herself ’ or an asterisk ‘*’ (‘she*’) to indicate when this feature of the ﬁrst-person pronoun is preserved in the third-person pronoun in indirect discourse. In that way we can in some sense retain the ﬁrst-personality in the third-person description and by the same token the same truth conditions. One distinctive feature of the ﬁrst-person perspective is that it enjoys the immunity to error through misidentiﬁcation or the ‘immunity principle’. This is the property of the ﬁrst-person pronoun that in its genuine use it is not possible for the user to misidentify who the user is. If we divide with Gareth Evans third-person judgments to two components, to an identiﬁcation component and a predication component, in the case of the ﬁrst-person pronoun the identiﬁcation component is unnecessary and so is the question of identiﬁcation (Evans 1982). If we now compare ﬁrst-person judgments and third-person judgments made by me, it does not make sense in the ﬁrst-person case to ask whether it is really me who thinks. But in the third-person case there is a genuine possibility of misidentifying the subject by himself. As special cases of Ithoughts, Baker’s I*-thoughts also enjoy the immunity (Baker 2000, Ch. 3). The ‘*’ of the indirect reﬂexive and the immunity principle are taken to be closely related. It is, in fact, difﬁcult to see what the difference is between them. Instead, they seem to be reﬂection of the same underlying structure. The father of the immunity principle, Sydney Shoemaker, suggests something in this vein already in his “Self-Reference and SelfAwareness” (Shoemaker 1994, 91). It is sensible to assume that what the asterisk marks in indirect discourse is precisely the immunity that is inherent in the indirect reﬂexive. 145 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 145 30.7.2004 15:35:03 Now, the ‘*’ and the immunity must also hold of the ﬁrst-person perspective in Baker. And as previously remarked, she refers with the asterisk to the attributing of the ﬁrst-person reference in indirect discourse and claims that she follows Castañeda in this use. But are these two uses of ‘*’ equal with each other? Bill Garrett has pointed out that they, in fact, are not. Garrett reminds that “Castañeda introduced the ‘*’ terminology with respect to the pronoun ‘he’ (not ‘I’). And for a good reason” (Garrett 2001). Let me quote once more how Baker describes her use of *-terminology: S can think of herself as herself* iff S can think of herself in a way expressible in the grammatical ﬁrst-person as the bearer of ﬁrst-person thoughts. ‘I am tall’ expresses a simple ﬁrst-person thought. S can express her thought of herself as the bearer of the thought ‘I am tall’ by saying, ‘I am having the thought that I* am tall’. This latter sentence indicates that S can think of herself as herself*. In Baker’s terms, plain ‘I’ and ‘I*’ differ in that ‘I*’ needs a thought preﬁxed to it in the form “I am having the thought that…” The asterisk is gained in virtue of the preﬁxed thought. The fact that Baker formulates her account like this in terms of iterated I thoughts commits her to a sort of (dispositional) higher-order thought theory. Garrett regards this as an unnecessary move when it comes to the ﬁrst-person pronoun. In Castañeda’s formulation the ‘*’ marks the spot of ‘herself ’ – and this is not necessary in the case of ‘I’. The asterisk was introduced to mark the property that the ﬁrst-person perspective already has – we cannot attribute the ﬁrst-person reference in indirect discourse without it. In Castañeda’s terminology, the asterisk is automatically inherent in the use of ‘I’ whereas in Baker’s terms it comes about through iteration or an intentional ascent. In Baker, in contrast, it seems that we must attribute the property, referred by the asterisk, by making the conceptualisation in order to bring the property about. But this has the consequence that it threatens to trivialise the headstone of Baker’s theory of personhood, the ﬁrst-person perspective. If it is the I*-thoughts that differentiate persons from non-persons that only have I-thoughts, and if there is no difference between ‘I’ and ‘I*’, it is hard to see what the difference is anymore. Garrett formulates the same worry in the terms of ‘he*’: 146 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 146 30.7.2004 15:35:04 Could Baker re-phrase her point in terms of ‘he*’? What would her concession to animals and toddlers be then: the dog believes that he* is about to be attacked? But then how would the dog contrast with us? She could say: no, all we can say is that the dog believes that he is about to be attacked. But how do we now characterise the low-grade ﬁrst-person perspective allegedly had by the dog? (That is, what now makes it worth calling a ﬁrst-person phenomenon?)(Garrett 2001) Baker replies: I couldn’t illustrate the point that I want to make in terms of ‘he*’. Castañeda’s ‘he*’ is used to attribute a ﬁrst-person reference. But a ﬁrst-person reference, on my view, does not always manifest a ﬁrst-person perspective. In ‘the dog believes that he* is about to be attacked,’ we are attributing to the dog a belief that (if he could speak) he would express as ‘I am about to be attacked.’ But this (pretend) speech would not indicate a ﬁrst-person perspective. (Baker 2001) Baker seems to beg the question but still her reply is illuminating. She seems to concede that in the case of ‘he*’ there is an attribution of ﬁrstperson reference to the dog but not attributing it the conceptualisation of the ﬁrst-person reference as with ‘I*’. She thus concedes that her use of the asterisk is not on a par with Castañeda’s. This means, in turn, that there is a real difference between the two uses – and consequently between dogs and persons, and this is the self-attribution of the ﬁrst-person reference. I have a suggestion how the confusion of the two uses of the asterisk could be avoided. But before getting to it in the end of the paper, let me introduce an implication that follows if self-consciousness is taken to be the mere ability to think ﬁrst-person thoughts, also in the iterated form, as Baker does. This is the ‘capacity circularity’ introduced by José Luis Bermúdez (1998). 3 The ‘capacity circularity’ by José Luis Bermúdez If self-consciousness is taken to be the ability to think ﬁrst-person thoughts it is very difﬁcult to see how this can come about without entering a vicious circle. Self-consciousness is entertaining I-thoughts. Ithoughts require mastery of the ﬁrst-person pronoun. But how is mas- 147 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 147 30.7.2004 15:35:04 tery of the ﬁrst-person pronoun possible without self-consciousness? In Bermúdez opinion, this renders all explanations of self-consciousness circular. The circularity is not only explanatory but it seems also to appear when we try to ﬁgure out how the capacity to self-conscious thoughts is acquired. Bermúdez nominates the circularity at this developmental level ‘capacity circularity’. (Bermúdez 1998 ch. 1) The capacity circularity concerns also the ﬁrst-person perspective in Baker’s theory: “[T]o master the ﬁrst person pronoun I must already be in what Professor Baker calls the ﬁrst person perspective. So how can I ever get into the ﬁrst person perspective, given that that perspective is deﬁned in terms of attributing ﬁrst person reference to oneself[?]” (Bermúdez 2001). The threat of circularity is evident. Bermúdez proposes as a solution to the capacity circularity that we must ﬁnd the most primitive level of thought where ﬁrst-person thoughts are present. If we ﬁnd at the prelinguistic level the very same capacities then the circularity will be broken and we would have some sort of explanation for the linguistic mastery of ﬁrst-person pronoun. The task is to ﬁnd corresponding ﬁrst-person thoughts at the pre-linguistic level. These are “thoughts that, although ﬁrst-personal in the sense that their content is to be speciﬁed directly by means of the ﬁrst-person pronoun or indirectly by means of the indirect reﬂexive ‘he*’, can nevertheless be correctly ascribed to creatures who have not mastered the ﬁrst-person concept”(Bermúdez 1998, 45). The pre-linguistic ﬁrst-person thoughts must also be immune to error through misidentiﬁcation. Now what might the pre-linguistic ﬁrst-person thoughts be? Here, Bermúdez brings to the picture the Gibsonian ecological theory of perception according to which perception is such interaction with the environment that it yields always simultaneously information about the environment and the self. Another source of ﬁrst-person information is somatic proprioception. Bermúdez also takes some developmental theories of early interaction in infants to show that infants are aware of themselves as perceivers, agents and bearers of reactive attitudes. All of these are forms of “self-specifying information” that are present in pre-linguistic creatures and to which it seems sensible to refer with the ﬁrst-person pronoun or indirect reﬂexive ‘he*’. The immunity to error through misidentiﬁcation is usually taken to be present in somatic proprioception 148 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 148 30.7.2004 15:35:04 but it applies, I think, as well to all of these forms of self-specifying information. 4 The immunity and self-reﬂexivity All this evidence supports the view that we should refer to the egocentric perspective of prelinguistic creatures already with the indirect reﬂexive ‘he*’. This conﬂicts with Baker’s use of the asterisk. What I take to be the main issue for Baker is, in fact, the difference between intentional thematised and non-intentional unthematised self-awareness. In Baker’s theory, genuine self-consciousness is acquired through thematising selfattribution of the ﬁrst-person reference. It seems however that the distinctive features of this thematised self-awareness proposed by Baker are already present in the unthematised forms of self-awareness. And they have to be, because otherwise our conception of self-awareness would be viciously circular. The only decisive difference between thematised and unthematised self-awareness seems to be the thematising itself, in Baker’s terminology, the ability to think of oneself as oneself. And it is of course a major difference2 that might well differentiate persons from non-persons. So what I am arguing against is deﬁning the most primitive forms of self-consciousness relationally by thematising or iteration. Dropping the formulation that the conceptual and thematised form of self-consciousness is the most fundamental does not threaten the overall picture of the Constitution View, it only strips off some of the load that Baker imposes on the ﬁrst-person perspective. It should be added that Baker has also introduced an intermediate form of ﬁrst-person phenomena. It has been famously shown by the famous Gallup experiments that chimpanzees can recognise themselves in the mirror. Baker takes this to be a problem for her distinction between weak and strong ﬁrst-person phenomena because chimpanzees surely are unable to think of themselves as bearers of ﬁrst-person thoughts but they nevertheless can conceive of themselves as themselves. (Baker 1998, 2000) This seems to be somewhere between weak and strong ﬁrstperson phenomena. The problem disappears if we concede that nonpersons are capable of thematised self-awareness such as self-recognition in the mirror. But Baker could nevertheless preserve the difference 149 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 149 30.7.2004 15:35:04 between persons and non-persons if she distinguished more accurately between different forms of intentional thematised self-awareness. One distinction that she does not make clearly enough in relation to the ﬁrstperson perspective is one between creatures capable of explicit psychological self-knowledge and those not capable of it. Explicit psychological selfknowledge could be deﬁned as knowledge of oneself as mental subject and includes the ability to attribute self-reference to oneself. Self-recognition in the mirror would not by this deﬁnition sufﬁce for psychological selfknowledge and thus for being a person. So I suggest that the ‘ﬁrst-person perspective’ of Lynne Rudder Baker should be redeﬁned in terms of explicit psychological self-knowledge or the ability to it, not by ability to conceive of oneself as oneself as these two seem to be two different things. Notes 1 2 Those include, e.g., Harry Frankfurt (1971), Kathleen Wilkes (1988), David Rosenthal (2002) and Lynne Rudder Baker (2000) Although Garrett (2001) himself does not hold this as a significant difference. Literature Baker, Lynne Rudder 1998 “The First-Person Perspective: A Test for Naturalism”, American Philosophical Quarterly, 35, 327-348. Baker, Lynne Rudder 2000 Persons and Bodies: A Constitution View, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baker, Lynne Rudder 2001 “Reply to Garrett”, Symposium on Persons and Bodies. A Field Guide to Philosophy of Mind (Spring 2001) http://www.uniroma3.it/kant/field/bakersymp_replytogarrett.htm. Bermúdez, José Luis 1998 The Paradox of Self-Consciousness. The MIT Press. Bermúdez, José Luis 2001 “Abstract of “The First-Person Perspective: A Test for Naturalism””, http://www.philosophy.stir.ac.uk/cnw/webpapers/baker1.htm. Castañeda, Hector-Neri 1997 The Phenomeno-Logic of the I: Essays on Self-Consciousness, James G. Hart and Tomas Kapitan (eds), Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Frankfurt, Harry 1971 “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of Person”, Journal of Philosophy, 68, 5-20. 150 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 150 30.7.2004 15:35:04 Garrett, Brian 2001 “The Story of I: Some Comments on L. R. Baker P&B”, Symposium on Persons and Bodies. A Field Guide to Philosophy of Mind (Spring 2001), http://www.uniroma3.it/kant/field/bakersymp_garrett.htm. Shoemaker, Sydney 1994 “Self-reference and Self-Awareness”, in Quassim Cassam (ed), Self-Knowledge, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 80-93. Rosenthal, David 2002 “Persons, Minds, and Consciousness”, in Randall E. Auxier and Lewis E. Hahn (eds) The Philosophy of Marjorie Grene, in The Library of Living Philosophers, La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, pp. 199-220. Wilkes, Kathleen 1988 Real People: Personal Identity withought Thought Experiments, Oxford: Clarendon Press. 151 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 151 30.7.2004 15:35:05 Is the Concept ‘Person’ a Concept Easily Attained? Tuomas W. Manninen University of Iowa, USA tuomas-manninen@uiowa.edu T o start off with a truism, most everyone thinks that there is some feature that makes us the same person now as we were in infancy, a feature that will make us the same individual tomorrow, the day after, and so on. But what could this be? An answer to this, I submit, can be found by considering what we mean by ‘person’? Put crudely, the problem of spelling out the criteria of identity of Φ is a problem of spelling out the nature of Φ. (Shoemaker 1963, 4-5; Wittgenstein 1958, passim; Quine 1981, 12) Although identifying and reidentifying persons doesn’t give us a moment’s pause in everyday life, approaching the concept philosophically leads us into a quagmire. When we try to spell out what constitutes personhood, we face two difﬁculties. On one hand, any single criterion for personhood seems to succumb to counterexamples, and no single criterion seems to capture the different relations a person has to herself, to others, and to the world. On the other hand, making the concept more open-ended by employing multiple criteria not only reeks of conceptual eclecticism but militates against our intuitions. If personhood is a singularity to which all means of identiﬁcation point, how could there be multiple criteria? In this essay, I hope to ﬂesh out the criteria of personal identity by focusing on the criteria of personhood. Most of the approaches to personhood are guided by the intuition that there is a single criterion that all the entities falling under the concept ‘person’ satisfy. Despite considerable efforts, such a criterion remains 152 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 152 30.7.2004 15:35:05 elusive. If we look at how the concept ‘person’ is generally used, we are tempted to regard it as coextensive with the concept ‘human being’: any human being is a person, and vice versa. But no sooner than we consider this, difﬁculties arise. History is rife with examples where humans of certain groups have been denied beneﬁts and rights that we regard as inalienable from persons in contemporary society. Thus, the concept ‘person’ hasn’t always been coextensive with that of ‘human being’. And as long as we regard persons as entitled to certain privileges and as bound by certain obligations, we ﬁnd that the concept applies to some non-humans as well. In legal context, we have the notion of juridical person in contrast to natural person. Based on these considerations, we could try to delineate criteria for personhood in the optimal case – for instance, make the term ‘person’ apply to entities who are self-conscious, rational, autonomous, and who have a sense of future. But, as Peter Singer has argued, some non-humans satisfy these criteria while not all humans do. (Singer 1993, 110-117) The various uses of ‘person’ make the task of ﬁnding necessary and sufﬁcient conditions for personhood virtually intractable. But the task can be made more manageable. The key for combining the various uses of ‘person’ can be found in the Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblances. Wittgenstein urges us to consider the different proceedings we call ‘games’ by looking and seeing what (if anything) they have in common instead of maintaining that they must have something in common. As a result of this, we see “a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail”. (Wittgenstein 1958, §66-67) Wittgenstein’s discussion of games can be easily applied to persons, mutatis mutandis. As we compare two different uses of ‘person’, we ﬁnd similarities between them; when we compare one of these uses with yet another, some of the similarities vanish, others remain, and new ones appear. There doesn’t seem to be one common feature to all uses of ‘person’, but we ﬁnd that the similarities still overlap. Construing the concept ‘game’ (or, ‘person’) as a family-resemblance notion thus follows from our ordinary practices. It could be objected that this doesn’t preclude the possibility that we could construct an analytic deﬁnition of ‘games’ such that it provides us with the necessary and sufﬁcient conditions for determining that something is a game. Nevertheless, this is mistaken. Although Wittgenstein leaves 153 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 153 30.7.2004 15:35:05 open the possibility of drawing more strict boundaries for ‘games’, this has little bearing on family-resemblances. Wittgenstein claims that by delineating the concept more strictly, we stipulate a speciﬁc use of the concept. For instance, we may stipulate a precise deﬁnition for legal use, but this just gives us another use of the concept ‘person’ in addition to all the other uses. In ordinary contexts, there are numerous different ways in which we identify persons. For instance, we are asked to present an identiﬁcation card when we visit the doctor’s ofﬁce. In a social setting, the identiﬁcation expected is either the name or some relation (or both) of the person introduced. When answering a telephone, we identify ourselves in yet another manner. (Wolgast 1999, 298) But these practices of identifying persons in different contexts seem to capture only some aspects of personhood, without giving us a handle on the concept ‘person’. Some of the criteria employed focus explicitly on the person’s self-relations, while others pertain to her relations to others or to the world. How are these different relations to be understood, and how can they be made to coincide? It appears as if looking at the ordinary uses of ‘person’ gives us very little of use by way of criteria, so there is a temptation to revisit the attempts of making the criteria more robust. But these difﬁculties are only superﬁcial rather than fatal. This suggests not that we should abandon this strategy, but that we should look deeper. Turning to Wittgenstein’s views, he discusses the topic of personal identity very scarcely, but from what little there is, we see that he doesn’t attempt to spell out a deﬁnitive criterion for personhood. The following anecdote illustrates this point: Think of a picture of a landscape, an imaginary landscape with a house in it. – Someone asks “Whose house is that?” – The answer, by the way, might be “It belongs to the farmer who is sitting on the bench in front of it”. But then he cannot for example enter his house. (Wittgenstein 1958, §398) Thus, whatever criterion is offered for establishing the ownership of the house, constructing a counterexample is an elementary task. But if we look closer at the question at hand, the answer “It belongs to the farmer who is sitting on the bench in front of it” is perfectly appropriate, given that the farmer is sitting on the bench in front of the house. The answer purports not to give a deﬁnitive criterion for the ownership 154 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 154 30.7.2004 15:35:05 of the house, but only to point out a salient, if contingent, feature about the owner. Were there no one sitting on the bench, this answer would unlikely be given. In such case, we should think of another way of answering the question. We see that Wittgenstein doesn’t offer the various criteria as a deﬁnite answer to the question, even if each of these is still a part of our ordinary use of the term. On Wittgenstein’s view, the crucial mistake in the inquiry for the criterion of personhood is in thinking that there is one possible answer that determines the matter. Before moving on to the question of bringing together these different aspects (or, dimensions) of personhood, we need to tackle another difﬁculty. Above, I have talked about the criterion for personhood used in both identifying and reidentifying persons. But are these two uses of ‘person’ the same? On one hand, we have the practices of identifying persons, and the criteria we use in these practices. On the other hand, we have the practices of reidentifying a single person at different instances, and a variety of criteria that goes with these. The former seems to call for an account on how different entities are similar so that they all fall under the concept ‘person’, whereas the latter requires an account of how we tell one person apart from another. Clearly, we are dealing with two different issues here, and the question becomes, can these be treated together? To defend my assumption that questions about criteria for personal identity are questions about criteria for personhood, our answer must accommodate both the similarities and the differences. As I hope to show, the concept ‘person’ we can extract from Wittgenstein’s writings allows us to do just that. If we approach the concept ‘person’ as used in identifying persons in the way Wittgenstein suggests, we end up with different uses that vary from one context to another. Although we cannot ﬁnd a single commonality between these different uses, there are still similarities that are captured by regarding these as comprising a family of uses; the familyresemblance concept ‘person’ is made up of these different practices of identifying persons. As these are not entirely congruent, we cannot settle for criteria which would give us the necessary and sufﬁcient conditions for personhood. Despite this vagueness surrounding the concept, we can – and do – stipulate the criteria for a speciﬁc case.* How can we apply these considerations in the case of ‘the same person’? Although Wittgenstein rejects the assertions of self-identity as 155 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 155 30.7.2004 15:35:05 useless, this should not be taken literally. These assertions show us what features one thing – one person – has, even if they don’t give us identity. (Wittgenstein 1958, §215-216) The obvious point here is that we focus on a particular feature of the person and reidentify her at a later time by recognizing that feature again. But when we initially identify a person, which feature(s) are we going to pick out? Given the vast number of contexts in which we identify persons, there is not going to be a single answer. In some cases it is pertinent to focus on the physical appearance of the person, in others on the person’s characteristic behavior, and so on. As with our practice of identifying persons, our concept ‘the same person’ appears blurred when we attempt to combine these different features. Here it could be objected that the vagueness prevents us from grasping whatever it is that constitutes that person’s identity; thus, looking at our ordinary practices is a non-starter when it comes to determinations of personal identity. But as with the concept ‘person’, this objection misses the point. Thus far, we see how different uses of ‘the same person’ can be captured by construing personhood as a family-resemblance concept. Our practices of reidentifying persons focus on some (incidental) feature(s) of the person, and we compare those at different instances. These, however, do not exhaust the features the person has. But neither does this prevent us from drawing other comparisons. The different comparisons employ different criteria, and these form, as it were, the different threads of a rope. These threads, when considered together, are not entirely overlapping; there is no one common thread that runs through the rope, although there still is overlap to considerable extent. The threads can be seen as having temporal extension, and our practice of reidentifying persons consists of observing the same feature (same thread) at different times. Once we consider the threads weaved together to a rope, we see that ‘person’ consists of all these different features. No single thread alone gives us the whole rope and, analogously, no single feature gives us the totality that is the person. Paraphrasing Wittgenstein’s remark on the concept ‘number’ illustrates this: Why do we call something a [“person”]? Well, perhaps because it has a – direct – relationship with several things that have hitherto been called [person]; and this can be said to give it an indirect relationship to other things we call the same name. And we extend our concept of [person] as in spin- 156 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 156 30.7.2004 15:35:05 ning a thread we twist ﬁbre on ﬁbre. And the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one ﬁbre runs through its whole length, but in overlapping of many ﬁbres. (Wittgenstein 1958, §67) Construing personhood as a family-resemblance concept allows us to understand how a person can undergo changes, and yet remain the same person. Our rope analogy holds: even if there is no one thread running through the entire rope, the overlapping strands together form the rope. Suppose we make two cross-sections on the rope to see the all individual threads, label them, and start tracing the threads through this section. As we do this, we end up with a different set of threads from the one with which we start. Yet we do not conclude that the rope is different because there is no one thread that remains the same. The continuity of the rope is preserved by virtue of all the other threads. While working through the section, we focus on one thread at a time; when one thread ends, the other threads overlapping with that one remain. Analogously with persons: we compare two different instances of the same person by comparing the features these two person-stages have. We don’t ﬁnd one feature that remains identical throughout the temporal gap, but as one feature changes, the ones overlapping with it preserve continuity. Thus, we conclude that the two stages are of the same person, despite the fact that the features have changed. This analogy helps us to account for radical changes in the features of a person while maintaining that the person remains the same. This provides an effective counter to the ordinary problem cases for personal identity. If a person suffers a total amnesia, there is still continuity in her bodily features, which sufﬁces for preserving identity. Likewise, if a person undergoes a signiﬁcant physical change (like major plastic surgery), identity is preserved by psychological continuity. Other problem cases can be dealt with in a similar fashion. Given this, one could argue that Wittgenstein’s strategy offers a panacea to all these philosophical ailments. However, this would be a dire mistake. To dismiss all situations that pose problems to the concept ‘person’ contradicts the strategy that lead us here, namely, looking at the different uses of ‘person’ and seeing what they have in common. An answer to the title question of this essay must be given both in the positive and in the negative. On the positive side, we face no problems in using the concept ‘person’ in various situations. On the negative side, we still can’t seem to settle on a concept that encompasses these different uses. But the strategy we 157 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 157 30.7.2004 15:35:05 have followed is contextualist in spirit; therefore, we should not expect to receive a single solution to all the problems. What we have instead is a strategy that provides us with methods for dealing with the ordinary cases, diverse as they may be. But one shouldn’t go on thinking that all the puzzles have been removed. There still remain problem cases, which may show that our concept is inadequate, and these must be dealt with individually. The plurality of the practices we have considered suggests that instead of there being a core criterion of personhood, there are various criteria, each of them restricted in their use. The different practices are held together by treating personhood as a family-resemblance concept; we can now bring together the disparate practices of identifying persons. At ﬁrst blush, this seems to violate our intuitions that personhood is one thing. But yet, this is how it is treated in our practices. It appears that bringing these criteria together is a special concern that enters in the context of philosophy. And it is for this purpose that construing the concept ‘person’ as a family-resemblance concept is best suited. My conclusions seem to leave large questions unanswered. For one, this interpretation seems to largely rely on the notion of practices, and the worry is that this is used as an unexplained explainer. Although this is a legitimate concern, frankly, this is not the place for me to answer them. Moreover, here it does well to note that ‘person’ is not a natural concept, but a social construct. (Wiggins 1980, 179-182) My goal was not to offer a ﬁnal answer to all questions about personhood but to provide an account of Wittgenstein’s treatment of the concept ‘person’. The usefulness of this investigation can be seen that the concept ‘person’ as discussed above could easily be adapted to new situations as they arise. This adaptability shows not that the concept is ad hoc but that the approach accommodates the new situations rather than vice versa. (Wittgenstein 1958, §131) Even if this approach doesn’t solve all the problem cases, it still performs well in a host of cases, unlike the approaches that attempt to delineate a singular criterion for personhood. As mentioned above, the problems set in once we approach the question(s) of personhood from a philosophical perspective. I wish to conclude by considering Wittgenstein’s suggestion that maybe the problem is not in the answers we ﬁnd, but in the questions we raise: To the philosophical question: “Is the visual image of this tree compos- 158 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 158 30.7.2004 15:35:06 ite, and what are its component parts?” the correct answer is: “That depends on what you understand by ‘composite’.” (And that is of course not an answer but a rejection of the question.) (Wittgenstein 1958, §47) Thus, maybe we should consider altering the questions we ask – for instance, by rejecting the assumption that there has to be an essence to personhood. This has been the key strategy in my essay, and thus far, the new answers seem to yield fruit. Notes * Turning briefly to a different philosopher, we can find a similar strategy in Quine’s views: “When we ask, “Does ‘rabbit’ really refer to rabbits?” someone can counter with the question: “Refer to rabbits in which sense of ‘rabbits’?” thus launching into a regress; and we need the background language to regress into. The background language gives the query sense, if only relative sense; sense relative in turn to it, this background language. Querying reference in any more absolute way would be like asking absolute position, or absolute velocity, rather than position or velocity relative to a given frame of reference.” (Quine 1968, 200-201) For Quine, there is no absolute answer to the question “Does ‘rabbit’ really refer to rabbits?” From this we can extrapolate to the case of personhood: there is no absolute answer of what constitutes personhood; any answer we give is dependent on the background language, or the frame of reference. (See also Quine 1981, 1-23) To pursue this tangent further, I don’t claim that Wittgenstein and Quine wholly agree when it comes to the concept ‘person’. The two can be seen as advocating parallel approaches, but Quine’s view is best characterized as theoretical holism, which emphasizes understanding as applying a familiar theory. Here the “whole” in question is a theory that can be formulated in terms of rules. In contrast, Wittgenstein is advocating practical holism, which entails that understanding involves explicit beliefs and hypotheses, which can only be meaningful against a background of shared practices. (Dreyfus 1980, 5-7) Literature: Dreyfus, H. 1980 “Holism and Hermeneutics”, The Review of Metaphysics, 34, 3-23. Quine, W. 1968 “Ontological Relativity”, Journal of Philosophy, 65, 185-212. 159 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 159 30.7.2004 15:35:06 Quine, W. 1981 Things and Theories, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Shoemaker, S. 1963 Self-Identity and Self-Knowledge, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Singer, P. 1993 Practical Ethics, 2nd ed., New York: Cambridge University Press. Wiggins, D. 1980 Sameness and Substance, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Wittgenstein, L. 1958 Philosophical Investigations, 2nd ed., Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. Wolgast, E. 1999 “Personal Identity”, Philosophical Investigations 22, 297-311. 160 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 160 30.7.2004 15:35:06 Responsibility Ascription to Nonhumans. Climbing the Steps of the Personhood Ladder Andreas Matthias University of Kassel, Germany matthias@hrz.uni-kassel.de Introduction I n philosophy, as long as we talk about humans, we can safely use concepts of responsibility, culpability, rehabilitation, punishment, intentionality and personhood, which are based on anthropocentric views of what constitutes a (legal, moral, or social) person. It is only when we undertake to ascribe responsibility to nonhumans (e.g. machines) that we are confronted with the necessity of getting rid of implicit assumptions that are only valid for humans, and must ﬁnd an analytically clear and systematically sound distinction between properties of (a) legal subjects and (b) morally responsible agents. A systematic review of what constitutes a social person is beyond the scope of this paper. The paper shows that common conditions and phenomena of both the legal and moral spheres of interaction can each be ascribed to a speciﬁc type of agent for which they make sense. In consequence of this, each type of agent is integrated into the moral and legal framework of society in its own, special way. It is proposed to distinguish the following four types of agents. For the ﬁrst two types, the legal and moral phenomena that are associated with them are examined: 161 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 161 30.7.2004 15:35:06 1. The “legal person”. It is the carrier of legal responsibility, which can lead to a claim for compensation for damages caused by the agent and other rehabilitative legal measures. It is an intentional system (Dennett) and is receptive and responsive to reasons (Fischer/Ravizza). It can be the target of compulsory or punitive measures, but only in the utilitarian and rehabilitative sense, because, as it is a purely legal agent, it entirely lacks a moral dimension. 2. The “moral person“. It has all the properties of a “legal person“ and additionally it is a suitable target for moral deliberations and reactive attitudes (Strawson). A moral person can be worthy of praise and contempt, it can induce admiration or anger. It can be a target not only for rehabilitative and utilitarian, but also for retributive punishment, because it has the capability to be morally culpable. 3. The “social person“. Personhood in its full, social sense is a phenomenon, which cannot be reduced to a list of properties in a straightforward way. Instead, it seems that “social personhood“ is determined by intra-cultural conventions and can vary widely between cultures. Often the property of “social personhood“ is associated with the possession of speech and human emotions, in other cases it may depend on an intact link between the individual and a deity, on having been subject to speciﬁc rites, etc. Due to the complexity of this topic, it must stay outside the scope of this paper [1]. 4.The “human being“. This is, after we have separated from it the various functional components mentioned above, mainly a biological category, which will not be discussed further here. Concerning the methodology of this paper, it is important to note that we view personhood only from the perspective of responsibility ascription to nonhumans. Though the theories of Frankfurt, Fischer/ Ravizza and others are referred to, we are not concerned here with the problems of determinism and freedom, but instead use these theories as starting points for an analytical approach to personhood. In contrast to a purely abstract approach, existing (mostly German) law is used as a reference. Existing law is a useful tool in this discussion, because it reﬂects widespread social understanding and consensus on personhood, responsibility and liability issues in a clear, (mostly) consistent, and easily accessible way. 162 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 162 30.7.2004 15:35:06 Legal responsibility Conditions of legal responsibility To be legally responsible, one does not have to be human. Many legal systems have a concept of corporate agents, which can act and be responsible for their actions independently of the human beings that take part in the corporate structure; in international relations, countries have rights and obligations that are different from those of the individuals that represent them, and so on. Still, everything that is to be considered a proper subject for legal responsibility must possess certain properties. There are, of course, different ways to specify and categorise these properties, but if we want to stay inside the framework of the current philosophical discussion on moral agency and responsibility, we ﬁnd the following ﬁve criteria that a system must meet in order to be capable of legal responsibility: • • • • • Intentionality (Dennett) Being receptive and responsive to reasons (Fischer/Ravizza) Having second-order volitions (Frankfurt) Being (legally) sane (Susan Wolf ) Being able to distinguish between intended and merely foreseen consequences of actions (Dworkin) Though some of these properties have been proposed to be sufﬁcient for (moral) responsibility [2], we maintain that this is due to the implicit understanding that we are talking about humans or at least systems that are partially similar or functionally analogous to humans (dogs, for example, or chess computers: Dennett 1978a and 1978b). But as we are (at least in principle) able to construct software systems that exhibit only some of these properties without the others, we ﬁnd that all of them seem to be necessary to arrive at a concept of legal responsibility as it is commonly understood in a legal context, and none of them is, in itself, sufﬁcient. Intentionality, the condition that an agent must be capable of intentional action, is clearly required for the agent to be held legally responsible. 163 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 163 30.7.2004 15:35:06 Its actions must not be controlled by chance or environmental inﬂuences alone, but must be properly ascribable to the intentions of the acting subject. In law, this condition is exempliﬁed in many ways. In (German) criminal law, for example [3], there is the central concept of “Vorsatz” (intent), which is understood as “to know and want that the result of an action will take place” (Naucke 1980, 309) [4]. In civil law, intentionality is the foundation of freedom of contract (Koebler 1983, 316), where a contract is deﬁned as a “bilateral legal transaction, which takes place through two corresponding declarations of intention”. Intentionality in Dennett’s sense is not a property of the system itself, but of its description. If a system is complex enough not to be predictable through the design stance any more, we can possibly describe it as an intentional system; and we are justiﬁed in doing so if we gain further predictability through this approach. As we will see, intentionality is in itself not sufﬁcient for legal responsibility; but if a system is to be considered legally responsible, both law and common sense require it to “wish”, to “strive”, to “avoid”, to “fear”: that is, to be an intentionally describable system. Another necessary condition for legal responsibility is reasons responsiveness in the Fischer/Ravizza sense. Legal agents must be receptive to reasons for or against a possible action, and they must respond to sufﬁcient reasons against an intended action with a change in their plans and their subsequent behaviour. Rational understanding of causal relationships between actions and results, as well as the capability of the agent to act according to his understanding, are basic requirements for legal responsibility in law. If somebody is drunk or under the inﬂuence of hallucinogenic drugs, or if he is driven in his actions by uncontrollable emotions to such an extent that he is not able to understand the reasons for his actions and possibly change his behaviour as a response to new and better reasons, then this person will be ascribed only reduced or no legal responsibility by most modern legal systems. For example, in German law the declaration of intent of a legally incapacitated person is invalid (§105 I BGB). [...] Legally incapacitated (“geschäftsunfähig”) are children under the age of 7, as well as persons who have been declared legally incapable because of mental disorders. Freedom of will is moreover lacking if a person is unable to make decisions 164 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 164 30.7.2004 15:35:06 according to rational deliberation (RGZ 130, 71; BGH NJW 1970, 1680), e.g. because he is in a pathological way controlled by the will of others. [...] Legal incapacity can be limited to a particular ﬁeld of action, for example to questions concerning marriage in cases of pathological jealousy (RGZ 162, 228; BGHZ 18, 184) (Diederichsen 1984, 150). All these cases and many more that are considered by law can be accurately described in terms of lacking reasons-receptiveness or -responsiveness. Despite Fischer/Ravizza’s claim that it also seems plausible that weak reasons-responsiveness is sufﬁcient for moral responsibility (Fischer and Ravizza 1998, 45), we maintain that it is only a necessary condition for legal (not moral) responsibility, mainly because: 1. widespread legal understanding of the conditions of responsibility disagrees (it requires, for example, intentionality and sanity of values in addition to pure reasons-responsiveness); and 2.the issue of moral responsibility requires a separate treatment altogether. Surely a chess computer is both an intentional system (Dennett), and it is also reasons-responsive: if at any given moment we rearrange the positions of the pieces on the board, the computer will make different decisions about its next move. Here we have a continuous chain of “reasons” (positional variants) that lead to appropriate “decisions” (calculations of optimal moves) and ﬁnally to actions (output of the computer’s move). Still we would not consider a chess computer to be morally responsible, because morality has to do with an additional quality that is not present in the context of the purely technical, legal responsibility: the element of moral culpability, or to put it still differently, the appropriateness of Strawsonian reactive attitudes. Second-order volitions are another necessary ingredient of legal responsibility. As cited above, a person can be legally incapacitated “because he is in a pathological way controlled by the will of others” (Diederichsen 1984, 150). It is not only freedom to act, which German law requires for a person to be legally responsible, but also freedom of the will, and this is what Frankfurt calls second-order desires. Only a person who has the freedom to act according to her desires and the freedom to choose those desires freely, has all the freedom “that it is possible to desire or to conceive.” (Frankfurt 1971, 16) 165 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 165 30.7.2004 15:35:07 Susan Wolf ’s requirement of sanity means in this context that a person’s second-order volitions must be “sane”, that is, they must be compatible with the kind of second-order volitions that the other agents in a social system have. Effectively this leads to a third-order instance which controls individual desires, and this is not rooted in the agent itself, but instead in its environment. Law commonly recognizes this requirement: a person may be perfectly intentional, reasons-responsive, free in her second-order volitions, and still insane, in that her basic values system, which underlies all deliberations, is incompatible with the basic values of the surrounding society. Such a person would not be considered fully responsible for her actions in most legal systems. The desire to be sane is thus not a desire for another form of control; it is rather a desire that one’s self be connected to the world in a certain way -- we could even say it is a desire that one’s self be controlled by the world in certain ways and not in others (Wolf 1987, 55). Finally, legal systems often distinguish intended from just foreseen consequences of actions (Dworkin 1987), and they also require the agent to be able to make this distinction. It is assumed that legal agents follow a “plan of action”, which distinguishes primary goals clearly from merely accepted side effects. German law, for example, distinguishes clearly between negligent and wilful homicide, and presupposes that the legal agent is also able to do so. Legal liability and non-retributive punishment Though legal persons (as introduced above) have no moral dimension, they can still be legally liable as well as targets for certain types of punishment. Often the borderline between legal and moral person will coincide with the distinction of the legal realms of civil and penal law: civil law, being mostly a regulating framework for contractual interactions between the participants of a legal system, seldom refers to moral vocabulary. Civil liability comes about as a result of actions that conform to or violate speciﬁc rules, but this does not imply that the liable parties are considered “good” or “bad” in any moral sense of the word. 166 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 166 30.7.2004 15:35:07 Legal persons can be meaningfully “punished”, but only on utilitarian or rehabilitative grounds (Moore 1987). Such punishments include, for example, contractual penalties, which are purely rehabilitative and preventive measures, but have no retributive aspect. Moral responsibility Reactive attitudes We will not try to give yet another account of moral responsibility at this point. For the purpose of this paper it is sufﬁcient to note that holding a person morally responsible for her actions implies a different view of that person than that which is used when talking about purely legal responsibility. What is different has to do with the element of culpability, of moral blame, that is also present in large parts of penal law (as opposed to civil law). Moral responsibility presupposes that the subject is legally responsible, but it adds an element that can be best described as a Strawsonian participant reactive attitude: “resentment, gratitude, forgiveness, anger” or love (Strawson 1974). Suspension of these attitudes (“he is only a kid”, “he is schizophrenic”), and adoption of the objective attitude, denies a person her status as a morally responsible agent [5]. Culpability and moral costs In law, we ﬁnd the concept of retribution closely associated with the idea of a moral agent. Vossenkuhl (1983, 120) introduces the interesting concept of “moral costs”, which are created by a morally relevant (negative) action and can only be balanced with forgiveness. The point of Vossenkuhls argument is that moral costs are costs of a special kind, and they cannot be balanced by the exchange of material values alone. The relatives of a murder victim will not be content with a money transfer as an exchange for the life of the murdered person, regardless of the amount offered. In the same way, the long-term repression of a social minority cannot be balanced by just lifting the repressive measures: in both cases the moral cost has to be paid for with moral currency, that is, by retribution (in the case of the murderer) and recognition of the mi- 167 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 167 30.7.2004 15:35:07 nority’s equality and the moral wrongness of the previous regime by the majority. In the context of the personhood discussion, the additional element of moral culpability, be it expressed in Strawsonian terms as suitability of reactive attitudes, or through something like Vossenkuhl’s “moral costs”, adds something substantial to the concept of a person: it enables us to distinguish between the (more basic) legal person and a moral person, which can be a carrier of moral responsibility, a distinction which is also reﬂected in the separation of civil and penal law. And though it seems possible that advanced machines might, under certain circumstances, qualify as subjects for partial legal responsibility, that additional element of culpability, which a moral person requires, must for the present be considered to be beyond the reach of technological emulation. Conclusion The concept of personhood is very complex and generally it is made even more confusing by the implicit anthropomorphism that is contained in the notions of legally or morally responsible agents. Some of the difﬁculties can be avoided if we always attempt to draw a clear distinction between • • • • legal persons, which can be legally responsible and can be described entirely without moral or psychological vocabulary, moral persons, which are suitable targets for Strawsonian reactive attitudes, social persons, and finally human beings. Many theories of (moral) responsibility which are considered to imply rival concepts of personhood can be shown to be complementary in the proposed conceptual framework. Notes 1 2 The present report is an excerpt of work in progress done by the author at the University of Kassel, Germany. see, for example, Fischer/Ravizza 1998, 44. 168 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 168 30.7.2004 15:35:07 3 4 5 All examples are taken from German law, but it is safe to assume that similar concepts exist in most modern legal systems. All translations of German citations are by me. Susan Wolf ’s concept of sanity has a legal as well as a moral component: as we assumed legal sanity to be defined by second-order volitions which are compatible with the second-order volitions of the social environment of the agent, so we can describe moral sanity as being expressed in the agent’s second-order moral values system being compatible with the respective values systems of its social environment. In fact, Wolf herself seems to focus on this second, moral aspect of the sanity concept. Literature Dennett, D.C. 1978a “Intentional Systems”, in Brainstorms. Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology, MIT Press, 3-22. Dennett, D.C. 1978b “Conditions of Personhood”, in Brainstorms. Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology, MIT Press, 267-285. Dennett, D.C. 1987 The Intentional Stance, Cambridge Mass., London: MIT Press. Diederichsen, U. 1984 Der Allgemeine Teil des Bürgerlichen Gesetzbuches für Studienanfänger, 5th extended ed., Heidelberg: C.F.Müller jur. Verlag. Dworkin, G. 1987 “Intention, Foreseeability, and Responsibility”, in F. Schoeman (ed.), Responsibility, Character, and the Emotions. New Essays in Moral Psychology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 338-354. Fischer, J.M. and Ravizza, M. 1993 Perspectives on Moral Responsibility, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Fischer, J.M. and Ravizza, M. 1998 Responsibility and Control. A Theory of Moral Responsibility, Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and Law, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Frankfurt, H. 1971 “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person”, Journal of Philosophy, LXVIII, 5-21. Frankfurt, H. 1993 “Identification and Wholeheartedness”, in J.M. Fischer and M. Ravizza (eds.), Perspectives on Moral Responsibility, Cornell University Press, 170-187. Koebler, G. 1983 Juristisches Wörterbuch für Studium und Ausbildung, Studienreihe Jura, 3rd ed., München: Franz Vahlen. Moore, M.S. 1987 “The Moral Worth of Retribution”, in F. Schoeman (ed.), Responsibility, Character, and the Emotions. New Essays in Moral Psychology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 179-219. Naucke, W. 1980 Strafrecht. Eine Einführung, 3rd revised ed., Frankfurt: Alfred Metzner. 169 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 169 30.7.2004 15:35:07 Strawson, P.F. 1974 Freedom and resentment, and other essays, London: Methuen. Vossenkuhl, W. 1983 “Moralische und nicht-moralische Bedingungen verantwortlichen Handelns”, in: H.M. Baumgartner and A. Eser (eds.), Schuld und Verantwortung. Philisophische und juristische Beiträge zur Zurechenbarkeit menschlichen Handelns, Tuebingen: J.C.B. Mohr. Wolf, S. 1987 “Sanity and the Metaphysics of Responsibility”, in F. Schoeman (ed.), Responsibility, Character, and the Emotions. New Essays in Moral Psychology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 46-62. 170 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 170 30.7.2004 15:35:07 The End of Personality Olli-Pekka Moisio University of Jyväskylä, Finland olmoisio@yﬁ.jyu.ﬁ T he early Frankfurt School made a famous diagnosis of capitalistic society through 1930’s to 1970’s. It came to the conclusion that through various developments in the base structure of the societies the western civilization was plagued by the instrumentalization that penetrates it in all levels. They argued that this instrumentalization led to the shrinking of the modes of thought and experience. In this presentation I will try to make sense of this process by focusing on the core of autonomy, i.e. to the development of the strong ego. If previously the authority of the family, teachers and religious ﬁgures were essential in the development of the individual, it is obvious to us today that they have now been supplanted by the authority of the omnipotent standards of mass society. I would like to ask what this development means to the idea of person. Can we still hope to cherish the idea of limitless value of each person in the age where every relationship tends to be distorted as commodity relations? In Dialektik der Aufklärung, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno give a detailed analysis of the overall crisis that was developed as an effect of modernisation. In this now famous work, Horkheimer and Adorno profoundly criticise the western civilisation, coming to the conclusion that modernisation had lost the potential for a genuine development and rationality that was inherent in it. They hold that the process of enlightenment lies behind – or inﬂuences at the basis of – modernisation, to which thus it is primary. In this view, modernisation takes the shape of a radical realisation of “archaeological” examples. The crisis that has de- 171 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 171 30.7.2004 15:35:07 veloped via modernisation almost found its total manifestation in the irrationality and inhumanity of the Second World War. Characteristic of this overall social crisis is the unawareness of the people living in the middle of it of the fact that they live in a constant state of crisis. This ignorance is the reason for the inability of people to do anything in order to solve the crisis. Modernisation is the triumph of instrumentalization, or so Horkheimer believed. In his writings of the 1940’s, this fundamental instrumentalization seemed almost total and ﬁnal. The advancement of instrumental reason in the society did not mean the increase of genuine rationality. On the contrary, this development led to the birth of authoritarian barbarity, instrumentalization, and in its extreme, to the end of reason. The objective of a totally administered society, which was an inherent part of the project of modernisation, was reached, only to be totalised in the end, eventually producing barbarity. Horkheimer maintained that instrumental rationality sealed the iron cage of modernisation. Administrative control was spreading to all areas of life, extending to the smallest details of individual life and solidifying slowly into a mechanical apparatus. If an individual wanted to survive, it was necessary for him to adapt himself to the machinery and to become a part of it. Freedom disappeared without a trace. When control was internalised as a part of personality, and when it thus became more immediate, it was very difﬁcult to recognise it as control at all. Horkheimer diagnoses this kind of rationalisation as reiﬁcation, as instrumentalisation of social life. Along with the instrumentalization of reason and social life, people lost their absolute value as human beings, as persons. They became mere tools, and at worst mere material to be handled. The only criterion of rationality was, and I might argue that still is, that goals are reached as efﬁciently as possible without any extra “waste-energy” which would be consumed when, for example, reﬂecting on moral problems of certain actions. The price paid for efﬁciency, when measured in human suffering, loses completely its meaning in the calculation of expenses. Auschwitz is one example of the extremity of instrumentalization of reason. But I might argue further, those developments, which have past few decades taken place in the work-life underlines these tendencies. 172 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 172 30.7.2004 15:35:08 Horkheimer places central role on education that takes place in the family if we want to develop individuals that are critical and active persons. It is possible for these subjects to resist instrumentalisation of reason and the inclination to authoritarianism that is inherent in it (Horkheimer 1981, 126-133). In this educational relationship that is formative in the development of critical and active persons the intimate relationships are of central kind. Maternal love does not consist simply in feeling or even in attitude; it must also express itself properly. The wellbeing of the little child and the trust he has in people and objects around him depend very largely on the peaceful but dynamic friendliness, warmth, and smile of the mother or her substitute. Coldness and indifference, abrupt gestures, restlessness and displeasure in the one who attends the child can introduce a permanent distortion into his relationship to objects, men, and the world, and produce a cold character that is lacking in spontaneous impulses. […] Only today, however, are people beginning to grasp the factors involved in the connection of which we are speaking. […] mother who is pressed by other cares and occupations has a different effect than the one she wants. (Horkheimer 1974a, 8.) The possibility for intimate relationships of the kind that Horkheimer is describing has been narrowed by the dialectical process of enlightenment. The decline of the family has lead to the situation in which the family is no longer “a kind of second womb, in whose warmth the individual gathered the strength necessary to stand alone outside it.” (Horkheimer 1995, 276.) The family does not socialise the child anymore – instead he is being directly manipulated by the mass-culture whose aim is the “disappearance of the innerlife” (Horkheimer 1995, 277). The society has turned into a mass-society whose primary goal is economical and technological, instead of cultural and spiritual, development. This will eventually lead to the mutilation of the forms of sensing and thinking. Horkheimer talks about this as “the crisis of experience”. ”Experience is replaced by clichés, and the imagination active in experience by eager acceptance” (Horkheimer & Adorno 1997, 232). The mass-human, who has lost all his individuality and genuine personality, has been born by the changes in the social environment. The mass-human reacts according to predestined patterns to different stimuli. She lacks the ability to make 173 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 173 30.7.2004 15:35:08 spontaneous judgements of her own and to have actual or real experiences. The result at the end is that “man has lost his power to concieve a world different from that in which he lives.” (Horkheimer 1995, 278.) In his essay “Authorität und Familie in der Gegenwart”, Horkheimer tries to clarify the birth of the most barbarian embodiment of instrumental reason: the structuring of the fascist, or authoritarian, character. According to Horkheimer, almost a total lack of interactive situations among family members forms “the connection between servility and coldness which is characteristic for the potential fascist” (Horkheimer 1997, 388). Obedience for the paternal authority of the family has become abstract as the foundation of the family has been gnawed away by the process of enlightenment. Submissiveness arises from the suppressed rebellion against the father, which is revealed in ”the incompetence to feel empathy – empathy which is more than anything else a sign of mothers love for her child” (Horkheimer 1997, 389.) Horkheimer interprets the coldness which is characteristic for fascist and authoritarian character as an emotional result of abandonment by the mother, of being left without motherly love, which is revealed at the end as general social hostility against everything feminine. The I is the end-result of a long biologico-psychological development in mankind, repeated in shortened form by each individual. If this repetition of the process takes place in an abrupt way and in an overly cold and impersonal atmosphere, then a sense of separateness from others and an unapproachableness remain characteristic of the individual until the end. Love too, in its true form (the kind that embraces everyone, even the enemy), shows traces of the phase prior to the formation of the ego […] The closer a civilization approaches the point at which the interaction in men of childlike and adult traits is disturbed in the one or the other direction, the more freedom is threatened, for freedom is expanded by the possibilities opened up by identiﬁcation and love. (Horkheimer 1974b, 152.) Horkheimer uses the concept of identiﬁcation as Sigmund Freud had used it. Even though it is not always quite clear what Freud meant by identiﬁcation, he used it mainly while developing the Oedipus complex. Identiﬁcation is a key to the formation of personality in the Freudian frame work. Famously Freud mentions the rivalry which the boy feels with his father over his mother’s love and his fear of punishment. Here 174 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 174 30.7.2004 15:35:08 we ﬁnd the ground for, and the dynamic nature of, the identiﬁcation. Identiﬁcation is a means to prevent the threat that his own primitive impulses to retaliate when the boy is subjected to hostility from his father’s part. In identiﬁcation the boy is able to take part in father’s strength. Through identiﬁcation the boy thus takes on aspects of the father’s character. He takes over some of his father’s demands and expectations and some of his ways of thinking and moral beliefs. What is crucial here is the balance of the boy’s feelings towards his father. If the balance moves to the side of hostility, the identiﬁcation is mostly defensive and the super-ego that develops along the Oedipus complex is manly characterized by reaction-formation. In Freud’s mind feelings in Oedipus circle are always ambivalent and this is why hostility has a major role in the formation of the super-ego. We may ask is identiﬁcation enough for the moral development as Freud is suggesting. Does identiﬁcation create genuine autonomy which is fundamental to the idea of person? We might also argue that acquiring moral values involves more than the taking over someone else’s moral attitudes. While writing about group-psychology Freud (1988) notes, that identiﬁcation generally operates along two different axes, horizontal and vertical. To begin with, there is a certain degree of mutual identiﬁcation between the members of the group. This form of identiﬁcation resembles that between siblings. On the other hand, there is a qualitatively different identiﬁcation, one between the individual group members and their leader, teacher, God, or abstract ideal, the father ﬁgure. Identiﬁcation between group members, however, is strictly subordinate to their identiﬁcation with the leader, which in a more sublimated form may be replaced by an abstract ideology. Freud (1988, 56-61) also speaks about the so-called herd instinct of the group which is derived from the mutually aggressive desire of its members to replace one another in the desire of its leader. In the ontogenetic viewpoint it happens that siblings are jealous of each other for the love they receive from their parents, they want to kill each other but their father won’t let them. Their response to this is to repress their aggression and defend themselves against its subsequent irruption by developing the opposite affect, love. Moreover, this love is not allowed to be erotic either so it becomes inhibited in its aim. This love then regress- 175 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 175 30.7.2004 15:35:08 es to the level of a narcissistic identiﬁcation, something facilitated by the similarity between siblings-comrades, and their shared attachment to the father-leader. Moreover, this defensive reaction provides a secondary gain, in that identiﬁcation with the other permits the vicarious enjoyment of the love and approval received by them from the leader or parent. In Freud’s words, “social feeling is based upon the reversal of what was ﬁrst a hostile feeling into a positively-toned tie in the nature of an identiﬁcation […] under the inﬂuence of a common affectionate tie with a person outside the group” (1988, 60). The development of this narcissistic identiﬁcation, then, accounts for such phenomena as group hysteria, and mass hallucination; referred to as “group contagion”. However, it does so only by appeal to the relation of each group member to the leader, group contagion is subordinate to the vertical axis of identiﬁcation, that between father and child. National Socialist mass movement was based on this kind of collective narcissism. Collective narcissism derived its strength from the distorted form of the relationship that human beings have to their natural libidinal energies. The ideology of National Socialism used to its purposes these mimetic impulses which were banned and tabooed in the society which understood individuality as a monad (Horkheimer & Adorno 1997, 210). How this was done was simply by placing an oppressed nature’s rebellion against domination directly to the service of domination. The device in which this “mimesis of mimesis” practically materialised was a ritualistic mass meeting (Horkheimer & Adorno 1997, 215). In these meetings people found a way to merge to the crowd – a way to incorporate their weak ego to a larger collective. Freud (1988) saw that this oceanic feeling was characteristic for the religious sentiments, but we can rightfully argue that it is also a way to paste mass movements into a tight unity. Freud thought that through suggestion and identiﬁcations libidinal energy transforms into a glue which holds the mass together. But Freud was wrong in arguing that this bond would gradually vanish when the power of religious collectives would diminish. In fact just the opposite happened. (Adorno 1991, 117-123.) The reason that people are enchanted by the ritualistic mass meetings and mass movements is in fact connected with the retraction of the subject – his overwhelming feeling of emptiness and groundlessness. This retraction is connected with the crisis of experience where the continu- 176 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 176 30.7.2004 15:35:08 um of experience is broken. Leo Lowenthal (1987, 182-183) once argued that in terroristic situations “life becomes a chain of expected, avoided, or materialized schocks, and thus the atomized experiences heighten the atomization of the individual”. This breakdown of the continuum of experience leads to the breakdown of personality. Mechanical identiﬁcation and reactions produce inhibitions that move “mere material conforming to situations created by a power utterly independent of themselves” (Lowenthal 1987, 183). Both the individual who terrorises and the individual who is terrorised lose their personality in a traditional sense. Literature Adorno, T. W. 1991 “Freudian theory and the pattern of fascist propaganda.” In The Culture Industry. New York: Routledge. Freud, S. 1988 Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Horkheimer, M. 1974a “The concept of Man.” In Critique of Instrumental Reason, New York: Continuum. Horkheimer, M. 1974b ”Threats to Freedom.” In Critique of Instrumental Reason, New York: Continuum. Horkheimer, M. 1981 ”Gedanken zur Politischen Erziehung.” Teoksessa Max Horkheimer Gesellschaft im Übergang. Aufsätze, Reden und Vorträge 19421970. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Horkheimer, M. 1995 ”Art and Mass Culture.” In Critical Theory. Selected Essays. New York: Continuum. Horkheimer, M. 1997 ”Authorität und Familie in der Gegenwart.” In Max Horkheimer Gesammelte Schriften Band 5, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Horkheimer, M & Adorno, T. W. 1997 ”Dialektik der Aufklärung.” In Max Horkheimer Gesammelte Schriften Band 5, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Lowenthal, L 1987 “Atomization of Man.” In False Prophets. Studies on Authoritarianism. Comminication in Society, volume 3. New Brunswick: Transaction Books. 177 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 177 30.7.2004 15:35:08 Ideals, Ethics, and Personhood Lydia L. Moland Babson College, USA lmoland@babson.edu B eing a person, some philosophers have suggested, requires that we act on ideals. Without ideals, I lack the coherence and directedness necessary to being a person. Once I have ideals, they provide reasons that direct my actions, making me an integrated self. Acting according to ideals, in other words, makes a person out of an otherwise unordered collection of actions. Some ideals are relatively trivial: when an agent fails at these, she may feel unsettled but retains her identity. Some ideals, however, are so central to personhood that, should an agent act against them, she risks disintegrating as a person. “Disintegrating” should be understood literally as dis-integrity: in such situations, the agent’s wholeness as a person is destroyed. The self-constructing value of our ideals, in other words, naturally enough has a self-destructive ﬂip-side. Imagine someone who has betrayed her family, her religion, her convictions. People can be crippled by such failures and cease, in an important way, to be who they were when they still acted according to their identity-deﬁning ideals. Acting against one’s ideals can mean the end of one’s coherence and so, under this deﬁnition, of one’s personhood. But what must these ideals be like? Could they be just any ideals? Or must they reﬂect what the agent thinks is good, or how she thinks she should live? Must the agent believe that the ideals that make personhood possible are, in other words, ethical? In asking this question, I do not mean only to ask whether an identity-deﬁning ideal must be universally recognized as ethical. Instead, I mean to ask whether the agent must experience it as ethical: whether, in order to be identity-deﬁning, it must 178 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 178 30.7.2004 15:35:08 reﬂect what the agent believes is right. Would personhood be possible if the agent’s ideals had no ethical relevance to her? Could someone’s identity be comprised of ideals she found unethical? The philosopher Harry Frankfurt has claimed that the ideals against which we cannot act without disintegrating as persons need in fact not be ethical (Frankfurt 1999, 115). I want to suggest that only when we experience a failure to live up to our ideals as ethical –when, in effect, we feel guilt for what we have done—is the transgression serious enough to challenge our status as persons. Identity-deﬁning ideals are not, in other words, separable from our experience of the ethical. This caveat also has consequences for our description of the role of ethics in personhood. Frankfurt, to repeat, claims that our identity-deﬁning ideals can be fundamentally distinguished from ethics. Ethics has to do with others, with our assessment of right and wrong, with moral obligation (Frankfurt 1988, 80). Identity-deﬁning ideals, however, need concern none of these things. They need only reﬂect the loves that shape the agent’s will. Frankfurt’s interest in claiming this is to protect these loves from deontological analysis: to rule out, for instance, the idea that a mother’s love for her child is best explained by duty. I agree with Frankfurt that loves and ideals should not be reduced to duty. Clearly, we hold to some of our loves regardless of whether they are ethical by impartial standards or not, and this seems an important fact about us. Further, it is indeed transgressing these deep loves and the ideals they create that can threaten to disrupt our selfhood. However, it is not clear that distinguishing between identity-deﬁning ideals and ethics makes sense of our experience. For one thing, Frankfurt, though acknowledging that ethical ideals can be among an agent’s life-forming ideals, denies those ideals any special status in our coherence as persons. Yet the most obvious examples of ideals we cannot transgress without destroying ourselves are ethical by any deﬁnition. These ethical ideals—of justice, honesty, respecting others’ humanity, and so forth—forbid us to kill, to betray family, friends, or causes. Having transgressed such an ideal can indeed threaten our coherence as selves. In Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, the minister Dimmesdale ﬁghts (and loses) a battle for self-preservation as he ﬁnds he cannot live with the deceit and betrayal made necessary by his illicit affair and illegitimate child. Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth literally undoes herself, choosing to 179 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 179 30.7.2004 15:35:09 commit suicide rather than live with her complicity in Duncan’s murder. In Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov risks losing his sanity as he realizes that he cannot in fact transcend ethics and justify his murder of the old pawnbroker. In each case, the agent recognizes that he or she has violated an ideal that in fact is central to his or her sense of self. Unable to live with this failure, the agent either dies or, in Raskolnikov’s case, confesses. These seem to me to be paradigm cases of the loss of self Frankfurt refers to when he claims that transgressing our central ideals can destroy us. However, because these cases describe a violation of explicitly ethical norms, they fail to exemplify the distinction between identity-deﬁning ideals and ethical ideals Frankfurt describes. It seems already a strike against Frankfurt that the most obvious cases in which acting against an ideal causes a loss of personhood explicitly involve ethics. But in order to test his claim fairly, we must attempt to articulate an ideal that is not overtly ethical but whose violation nevertheless causes a threat to identity. We must set aside all ethical, identity-threatening cases such as those above and look for a non-ethical yet identity-threatening case. Consider the following scenario: imagine that I am dispositionally a very modest spender. Imagine additionally that I approve of my frugality and believe that my life is better because of it. This belief does not, however, extend to claiming that others should also be frugal. I am content for others to be as extravagant as they please: I, however, choose to be prudent. Let us also assume—in order to avoid the charge of selﬁshness—that my frugality does not extend to those who need assistance. My frugality, it seems, is not an ethical ideal. It does not involve others, and I make no claims regarding its being right, wrong, or a matter of moral obligation. It is nevertheless in my case an identity-deﬁning ideal: it orders my actions and makes my life coherent. Acting against it would threaten the integrity of my personhood. Suddenly, however, I ﬁnd myself tempted to buy a very expensive car. I am shocked by this temptation, as it is so uncharacteristic of me. After anguished weeks of attempting to overcome this urge, I purchase the car. Although I continue to appreciate the car’s attractiveness, I am unsettled by its presence in my garage. I feel that this foreign action betokens a status-consciousness that I am loathe to attribute to myself. A queasy feeling twists my stomach when I see it—a feeling uncannily like the guilt I 180 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 180 30.7.2004 15:35:09 feel when I have done something wrong. Certainly such a radical change in behavior can erode one’s sense of self. So here, we might think, is an example of my transgressing an ideal that is not ethical but nevertheless experienced as a threat to my personhood. Identity-deﬁning ideals and ethics seem indeed separable. Consider a revision to the end of the story. After weeks of anguished indecision, I ﬁnally sit down with the salesman to ﬁll out the paperwork. But I ﬁnd that I cannot commit myself. I decide that I could not live with myself if I made this concession to consumer culture. I stand up before afﬁxing my signature and, lamely apologizing, leave the fuming salesman. I gradually feel good about having done so. Week by week the temptation recedes, and ﬁnally I congratulate myself on my good judgment. Again: this seems to be a case in which both conditions outlined above are met: my identity is threatened by the temptation to buy the car and saved, in this second case, by my resistance to that temptation. There seems initially to be no ethical evaluation involved. But for our analysis to be complete, we must also consider how the agent experiences each case. In the ﬁrst ending, I continue to evaluate myself with disapproval; I feel, in effect, guilt. In the second, I come to approve of my action: I come to think it was right. It seems, in other words, that in both cases I experience the ideal of frugality as ethical—despite the fact that it does not involve others, objective analysis of right and wrong, or moral obligation. And since we are talking about a threat to my personhood that is caused by my self-evaluation, it is my evaluation that matters. We have yet to isolate an identity-deﬁning but non-ethical ideal. Consider a third version. I walk out on the fuming salesman but continue to want that car desperately. I begin to analyze my reluctance to buy it and ultimately am not satisﬁed with my reasons. My inability to allow myself pleasure frustrates me: whereas I once thought of myself as frugal and economical, now adjectives such as scrimping and tight-ﬁsted come to mind. I come to disapprove of my decision not to buy the car and return to the lot, ﬁnding the salesman still happy to make the sale. From then on, I live contentedly with my car. I feel I have done the right thing. Again, I experience this reevaluation of the ideal of frugality as ethical, as reﬂecting how I should live and act. Since I no longer view buying the car with moral disapproval, the purchase is not a threat to my 181 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 181 30.7.2004 15:35:09 personhood. Were I still to view frugality as a guiding principle of my life, transgressing this ideal by buying the car could indeed cause me to doubt my coherence as a person. In the initial two cases, there is a threat to my personhood but the case is ethical: in the ﬁrst case, I experience guilt and in the second, I resist the temptation and conclude I have done the right thing. In the third case, there is a threat to personhood, but it ceases to exist when I cease to believe that frugality represents the right way to act. This case, too, involves ethical evaluation. Why is it so difﬁcult to isolate cases that are essential to our persistence as persons but are not experienced as ethical? The answer, it seems to me, is that the division is unnatural. Our identity-deﬁning ideals indicate how we think we should live and what kind of life we believe is of value. Identity-deﬁning ideals, in other words, are experienced as ethical. Transgressing an ideal that has no ethical relevance for the agent rarely, if ever, perpetuates an identity crises. The threat of crisis increases when the agent experiences a failure as ethical. Further evidence for the claim that identity-deﬁning loves are experienced as ethical is provided by our own explanations of what happens when our ideals change. What we can and cannot bring ourselves to do is, of course, notoriously variable. Things we could never imagine ourselves doing at one stage in our lives we do at another stage with only a wistful backwards glance at our former selves. Consider for instance the 1960s dictum “Trust no one over thirty.” The statement does not allow or even invite the twenty-something speaker to deny that he himself will, barring some misfortune, one day be thirty. It rather implicitly acknowledges that life experience sometimes transforms radical principles into more conservative ones. The statement’s irony extends to the fact that, upon reaching thirty, our radical may continue to acknowledge its truth. He may acknowledge that he is now, at age thirty, willing to do things that earlier would have been unthinkable. He has changed and so in fact should not be trusted by those with youthful aspirations. His investment in the stock market and his two-car suburban garage are testament to his betrayal. But surely our thirty-something would attribute his willingness to join the capitalist conspiracy to the fact that he now sees the world differently, has different ideals and so should act differently. He would admit that were the ideals he embraced as a twenty-something actually true, he would think he should be acting now as he aspired to act then. 182 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 182 30.7.2004 15:35:09 The point however is that he no longer believes in those ideals. He is likely—if pressed—to say that more extensive experience of human nature, of economic reality, or of the strength of his own materialistic desires has prompted him to abandon idealistic beliefs for other more capitalist values. Otherwise, he will feel guilty, if only very vaguely, thus signaling that the situation has ethical relevance for him. We are not generally able to do what we truly believe is wrong without feeling any guilt. More often, we change what we think to be wrong, either after legitimate re-evaluation or after concocting excuses for ourselves. When we cannot make that change, however, when we recognize that we are acting against our ideals, that realization can threaten our sense of self. Only when we cannot convince ourselves that what we did was right can our personhood be destroyed. But what of the fact that some of these identity-deﬁning ideals, although they are experienced by the agent as ethical, do not meet criteria Frankfurt used, such as involving others, objectively deﬁned right and wrong, or moral obligation? I stipulated in the earlier example that I did not think of frugality as something others need aspire to; perhaps the thirty-something neo-conservative does not claim that others should follow his example either. If it is true that we experience transgression of ideals as ethical whether or not we use Frankfurt’s criteria to assess their worth, what consequences does this fact have for our deﬁnition of ethics? In order to analyze our ethical experience accurately, we must preserve the possibility that the experience of ethics extends beyond these criteria. It extends to our very particular evaluation of our own actions, and it is sometimes these very personal evaluations of self that are most devastating. This is a fact worth considering when we decide what role identity-deﬁning ideals play in the preservation of personhood. If we rule out those ideals that are experienced as ethical despite not ﬁtting conventional criteria, we risk misconstruing the relation between ethics and personhood. The experience of the ethical, whether or not it involves others, objectively deﬁned right and wrong, or moral obligation, is crucial to the existence of personhood. Ideals, and especially identity-deﬁning ideals, are in an important sense fundamentally ethical. The retention of personhood seems, then, to be in part an ethical project. Gaining clarity about this fact allows us to focus on the kinds of ideals necessary for living a coherent life and so necessary to personhood. 183 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 183 30.7.2004 15:35:09 Literature Frankfurt, H. 1988 “The Importance of What We Care About”, The Importance of What We Care About, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 80-94. Frankfurt, H. 1999 “On The Necessity of Ideals”, Necessity, Volition, and Love, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 108-116. 184 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 184 30.7.2004 15:35:09 Self-Awareness and Body Arto Repo University of Turku, Finland arrepo@utu.ﬁ I n order to illuminate the kinds of questions I am concerned with in my paper, it is useful to make a distinction between four kinds of questions about the self or the self-conscious subject. First of all, there are metaphysical questions. Are there such entities as selves? If there are, what is their metaphysical status? Are they material things, mental substances, or what? Second, there are epistemological questions about the kind of access selves have to their own thoughts and experiences. This access seems to be somehow privileged, or direct. How should we characterise and explain this privileged access and what is its epistemological signiﬁcance? Third kind of questions about the self could be characterised as phenomenological. What kind of awareness does a self-conscious subject have of itself ? Fourthly, there are what I would like to call transcendental questions about the self. These are close to the phenomenological questions, but the modal perspective, so to speak, is different. Where phenomenological examination tries to capture the actual character of self-conscious experience, transcendental questions are about the necessary connections between different aspects of self-consciousness. Transcendental arguments typically try to establish necessary connections between different capacities a self-conscious subject has. One starts with some capacity which may plausibly be ascribed to a self-conscious subject, and then one tries to show that in order to have this capacity the self must have some other, more contentious, capacity. With regard to the question of self-awareness and body, one could 185 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 185 30.7.2004 15:35:09 say that in both phenomenological and transcendental questions it is the relation between the awareness of the self of herself as subject and the awareness she has of her own body that is considered, but in transcendental investigation one wants to know if some features of the bodily awareness are necessary to how the self is given to itself, so that, as John McDowell expresses it, “one’s being a bodily agent cannot take on the look of an afterthought, a mere frame for something that could sensibly be supposed to be more fundamental to self-consciousness.” (McDowell 1998, 143) In this paper, I will to look at what Quassim Cassam has called “materialism about self-consciousness”. I will also brieﬂy examine one transcendental argument for this kind of materialism, the identity argument. In this paper, my aim is only to introduce the problematics in question, though I will express some doubts about the identity argument at the end of paper. Materialism about self-consciousness can be formulated, after Cassam, as the following thesis (Cassam 1997, 2): (MS) A self-conscious subject is necessarily aware of itself qua subject as a material thing among other material things. Notice that this is not a metaphysical thesis. Even if we accept (MS), materialist ontology of the self does not follow: a self may well have to be aware of itself as a material thing even if it is not in fact a material thing at all. Vice versa, materialist ontology about the self, does not entail (MS): it may well be that a self which in fact is a material thing, is aware of itself as subject in a way which excludes materiality as an attribute of itself. Notice also the peculiar iterated structure in (MS). What is said is not simply that selves are aware of themselves as material things, but that they are aware of themselves qua subjects as material things. This double modiﬁcation is necessary in order to distinguish possible cases where a self is aware of something, which just happens to be itself from cases of genuine self-consciousness where a self is aware of itself as itself. Let us suppose, for example, that materialism about the self is correct and that I am identical with my body. I could still clearly be aware of my body, for example when standing in front of a mirror, in such a way that my body would not appear to me as myself (I could take it be some stranger). To 186 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 186 30.7.2004 15:35:10 be aware of something as oneself is not simply to be aware of something that in fact is oneself. It is to be aware of what is in fact oneself in some peculiar ﬁrst-person way. We could say materialism about self-consciousness is a thesis about the attributes a self must ascribe to itself in introspective self-awareness. (Cassam 1997, 4-5) Opponents of this kind of materialist view of self-consciousness claim that there is some aspect in our awareness of ourselves as subjects, that is incompatible with the idea that the self we are aware of in this ﬁrst-person perspective could be presented as a material thing. I think it is possible to distinguish several forms this rejection of materialism about self-consciousness can take. Let me brieﬂy describe four. According to the Cartesian dualist view, a self-conscious subject is aware of itself as an immaterial substance. When we turn our attention towards ourselves we become aware that as bearers of different mental properties which are incompatible with the essential attributes of material things we must be non-material substances. This is now to be understood as a claim about self-consciousness, not a metaphysical claim about the self. Descartes himself, of course, thought that the clear and distinct idea we are able to have of ourselves reveals to us the real nature of the self as well. The Humean view: when the self-reﬂective subject turns its attention upon itself, trying to pick out itself as an object of self-reﬂective thought, it fails completely; all it can pick out are its inner states, particular impressions and ideas in Hume’s terminology. The paradoxical thesis of the Humean view is that the self is not given to itself as subject at all. What could be called the Schopenhauerian view involves a bit stronger claim still, adding to the Humean view which is just the negative claim that no self is found through introspection the thesis that the whole idea of a subject of thinking and experience as an object of awareness is contradictory (for Schopenhauer’s views, see Janaway 1999) . The Kantian view: even if we can in some sense be certain of the existence of the subject of thinking and experience, this subject is not given to us in such a way that we could say anything about its nature. The positing of the self is inevitable, but this thought of the self does not have any intuitive content, being merely formal, and thus we remain in deep ignorance concerning ourselves as subjects. I think that as a phenomenological thesis, materialism about self-con- 187 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 187 30.7.2004 15:35:10 sciousness is quite plausible. Almost all of our experience of the world is such that to make sense of it, we have to take ourselves to be material things among other material things. One such feature of our experience of the world is its perspectival character. This means roughly that our experience of things is always as if from some spatio-temporal position. Thus our experience is such that it locates us as subjects of these experiences within the material world we experience. And although this locatedness does not quite entail that the self with the perspectival experience is a material object, it does give some initial plausibility to what Michael Ayers has expressed by saying that “our experience of ourselves as being a material object among others essentially permeates our sensory experience of things in general” (Ayers 1993, 285). Consider also the following description I could give of my recent and present life: I came by train from Turku to Jyväskylä. I walked from the train station to the university. Now I am standing in a lecture hall reading my paper. I feel a bit uneasy, soon I will certainly be in total despair. To make sense of a story like this, I have to take myself to be a material thing among other material things. Of course, I have to take myself to be a self-conscious thing also, a thing able to feel despair and uneasiness. But the thing able to feel and think seems to be the same thing able to jump into a train and walk. Surely, this thing is a material thing among other material things. In other words, there is no dualism in our conception of ourselves as persons. These phenomenological features of our experience were noticed even by such metaphysical dualists as Descartes and Leibniz. But it is important that even if we buy this kind of anti-dualist phenomenology, we are not thereby forced to buy the materialist view of self-consciousness, (MS). What the opponents of the materialist view claim is that even if it is correct to say that the self-conscious subjects we are acquainted with are intimately intertwined with their bodily being, their awareness of themselves as subjects is still such that there remains a distinction between this kind of awareness and any awareness in which these subjects are aware of their own bodies as bodies. One argument for the conclusion that the self must be aware of itself qua subject as a material thing which goes beyond phenomenological 188 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 188 30.7.2004 15:35:10 considerations is the identity argument. Peter Strawson, who ﬁrst formulated this argument, claimed that it has roots in Kant’s thought about self-consciousness. The starting point of this argument is the capacity which every self-conscious subject can plausibly be taken to have, the capacity to ascribe to itself a plurality of distinct experiences. I am having a certain experiences E now, and I remember that a moment ago I had some other experiences E*. I was aware that I had E*, and I am now aware that I have E, but I am also aware that one and the same self is the subject of both E and E*. One feature of this ability to self-ascribe different experiences, which has been generally accepted although the precise characterization and signiﬁcance of this feature has been much debated, is that such self-ascriptions are not based upon criteria of identity for subjects in the same way as predications in the case of ordinary concrete objects are so based. When I say that this same table, which is now brown, was red yesterday, I assume that there is an appropriate kind of spatiotemporal continuity between today’s table-stage and yesterday’s table-stage. It may be that I have not kept track of the table between yesterday and today, but I assume that it would have been possible to keep such track. But when I think of the headache I had yesterday, the claim that it was I who had the headache, is not similarly based upon any kind of possibility of keeping track of something. We know how to keep track of a human being, because human being is a concrete material thing like the table, but keeping track of a human being does not seem to underlie our consciousness of self-identity. The basic idea of the identity argument is that despite this, it is a necessary condition of consciousness of self-identity that the self in question is aware of itself as a material thing. To establish this connection, one needs two things. First, some principle stating the conditions for having a thought or making a judgement about a particular thing. One formulation of this kind of principle comes from Gareth Evans, what he calls “Russell’s Principle”: “a subject cannot make a judgement about something unless he knows which object his judgement is about” (Evans 1982, 89). With regard to consciousness of self-identity, the principle entails, very roughly, the requirement that the subject should be able to give some content to the idea that it is the same self to which she self-ascribes distinct experiences. The step to the requirement of bodily awareness is 189 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 189 30.7.2004 15:35:10 then justiﬁed if one is, and this is the second thing needed, entitled to say that only if the self-conscious subject is aware of itself as a concrete material thing among others in the world, is she capable of giving the necessary content to the idea of self-identity. If this argument can be made to work, the conclusion is, in Strawsons words, that “a necessary condition of states of consciousness being ascribed at all is that they should be ascribed to the very same things as certain corporeal characteristics, a certain physical situation &c.” (Strawson 1987, 102) This is more or less what (MS) involves. But can the identity argument be made to work? As is often the case with transcendental arguments, the identity argument is suggestive rather than convincing. Much depends upon what we take the apparent elusiveness of the self to involve. Consider the thought-experiment, described by Elisabeth Anscombe, of a person in a state of extreme sensory deprivation: “sight is cut off, and I am locally anaesthetized everywhere, perhaps ﬂoated in a tank of tepid water” (Anscombe 1975, 58). If one is in this situation one cannot be aware of oneself as a material thing among material things anymore, but still one has not lost oneself, or one’s ability to have Ithoughts. McDowell puts it like this: The continuing referent of “I” is especially easy to keep track of: there is nothing to its persisting as one and the same thing, over and above the experienced continuity within the stream. (McDowell, 1998, 133-134) What is the signiﬁcance of Anscombe’s thought-experiment? A defender of materialism about self-consciousness is forced to say that a self-conscious subject which the sensory deprivation case tries to capture is not genuinely conceivable if we take it so far that the subject with sensory deprivation loses all its memories of more normal human existence. But surely it seems to be conceivable. We seem to end up with the same kind situation as in recent philosophy of mind where the conceivability and possibility of zombies has been hotly debated. A defender of (MS), or a defender of the identity argument, would have to do much the same as the physicalist in the philosophy of mind: the physicalist has to show that something which prima facie looks conceivable involves in the end some conceptual confusion which makes the apparently conceivable state of affairs – e.g. a physical duplicate of me which is not conscious at all – im- 190 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 190 30.7.2004 15:35:10 possible. A materialist about self-consciousness, who is not in the business of making metaphysical claims, must show that the sensory deprivation case does not involve a self-conscious subject which is not aware of itself as subject as a material thing among other material things. My own feeling is that this task is not easy to accomplish. Literature Anscombe, E. 1975 “The First Person”, in S. Guttenplan (ed.), Mind and Language, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ayers, M. 1993 (1991) Locke: Epistemology & Ontology, London: Routledge. Cassam, Q. 1997 Self and World, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Evans, G. 1982 The Varieties of Reference, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Janaway, C. 1999 (1989) Self and World in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy, Oxford: Clarendon Press. McDowell, J. 1998 “Referring to oneself ”, in L. E. Hahn (ed.), The Philosophy of P. F. Strawson, Chicago and Lasalle, Illinois: Open Court 129-145. Strawson, P. 1997 (1959) Individuals, London: Methuen. 191 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 191 30.7.2004 15:35:10 Personhood as a Social Status Antti Saaristo London School of Economics and Political Science, UK a.j.saaristo@lse.ac.uk 1. The contemporary world-view is largely based on two metaphysical convictions. First, the developments of modern science commit us to ontological monism in the sense of physicalism. Physicalism is the view that even if the world can be described at different levels of description such that the descriptions form a hierarchy of micro and macro levels, things at different macro levels are the way they are in virtue of how things are at the most fundamental – whatever that may turn out to be – level of microphysics. All events, objects, properties or whatever categories one prefers are ultimately physical in the sense that they are constituted and determined by micro-level physical processes. Consequently, all possible causal powers of macro-level entities are inherited from the causal processes at the fundamental level of microphysics (Kim 1998). There are no sui generis causal powers at any macro level. There is exactly one world, the physical world, and that world is governed by the laws of fundamental physics, regardless of how we happen to describe the processes of that world. The second indispensable cornerstone of the received world-view is what Kim (1993) calls mental realism. We are not just puppets in causal strings; our intentions and decisions, beliefs and desires, make a difference to what we do. In short, we are agents. When our bodies move it is not always the case that something happens to us. Rather, sometimes our movements amount to behaviours that we do. Sometimes we perform actions, i.e., meaningful behaviours (Weber 1947). They are meaningful to the extent that we intend something by them. Moreover, their meaning is due to the contents of our mental states of believing, desiring, intending etc. This, 192 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 192 30.7.2004 15:35:10 then, is the core of mental realism: We are agents, or indeed persons, precisely to the extent that the contents of our mental states make a difference qua mental to what we do. The last clariﬁcation, “qua mental”, is of utmost importance here. If our mental states make a difference, say, qua physical brain states, then mental contents are at most epiphenomenal (if, that is, we can still make sense of their existence in the ﬁrst place). But this would not sufﬁce for agency and personhood, as for agency and personhood mental contents must make a difference, and this is something epiphenomenal aspects by deﬁnition cannot do. A considerable amount of contemporary philosophy of mind is fuelled by the dogma that mental realism must be regarded as a causal notion. However, such a causal interpretation of mental realism is obviously problematic, for it seems to render mental realism as inescapably incompatible with the ﬁrst cornerstone of scientiﬁc world-view, namely physicalism. If the causal powers of macro-level entities are inherited from and thereby parasitic (or at any rate dependent) on the causal powers of the fundamental-level physical particles as physicalism requires, then mental contents cannot possess sui generis causal powers, which in turn is a requirement of mental realism. As Kim (1993) concludes, if we stick to physicalism and the causal interpretation of mental realism, we have exactly three possibilities. First, we can opt for Cartesian dualism and say that mental contents can have sui generis causal powers, for mental contents are not part of the physical realm. Second, we can accept reductivism and say that mental states have causal powers, but they are reducible to the causal powers of microphysical entities the mental states consist in. Third, we can accept eliminativism and say that in fact there are no mental states and contents. I take it that it is obvious that none of Kim’s three possibilities in fact turn physicalism and (causal) mental realism mutually compatible. Cartesian dualism is an explicit denial of physicalism, while eliminativism does the same to mental realism. In fact, also reductivism denies mental realism, since it rejects the possibility of the mental making a difference qua mental. This situation is known as the problem of mental causation (see, e.g., Heil and Mele 1993), and it has prompted a vast amount of ingenious philosophising. To dream up a way of combining physicalism with 193 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 193 30.7.2004 15:35:11 causal mental realism without sliding to any of Kim’s three intolerable options is a major fantasy among contemporary philosophers of mind. 2. There are generally speaking two ways in which philosophers have sought to combine physicalism with causal mental realism. First, one can try to reduce causation to counterfactuals. The idea is that if we can formulate robust, counterfactual-supporting connections at the mental level such that co-extensional connections cannot be formulated in physical terms (this is usually thought to be achieved with the Multiple Realisability Argument), then we have an ontologically neutral theory of sui generis mental causation. The theory is compatible with ontological materialism, for each and every mental token is still assumed to be identical with some physical token. The theory leaves room for mental causation, for mental types are not assumed to be co-extensional with physical types (they, as it were, carve up the world differently). To the extent that we can formulate robust counterfactuals in terms of mental types, the argument goes, we have sui generis mental causation, since the same counterfactuals are not expressible in terms of physical types, and there is nothing more to causation than counterfactuals (versions of this view are defended by, e.g., Fodor 1974 and Tuomela 1998). In this sense it is argued that “[t]he causal powers of at least some mental events are not completely determined by their material properties” (Tuomela 1998, 6), even if all mental events are ultimately material events. This attempt to combine physicalism and causal mental realism fails for two reasons. First, it accepts sui generis causal powers at any level as long as they support counterfactuals. Physicalism, however, explicitly requires that higher-level causal powers are inherited from and thus dependent on the fundamental-level causal powers. This could be seen as the difference between scientiﬁc physicalism and mere ontological materialism. Moreover, the combination of across-level token-identity and sui generis causal powers at different levels would lead to unacceptable causal overdetermination (Papineau 2002, Kim 1993 & 1998). Thus, sui generis mental causation seems to be incompatible not only with physicalism but also with mere ontological materialism. So the attempts to defend sui generis mental causation fail to offer an acceptable alternative to Kim’s pessimism. This gives the motivation to the second popular way of trying to answer to Kim’s challenge. This at- 194 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 194 30.7.2004 15:35:11 tempt admits that we can formulate robust higher-level counterfactuals precisely because the fundamental-level causal processes allow such formulations. Causation is not reduced to these counterfactuals, but causal explanation is. The idea is that even if the macro-level connections (supporting counterfactuals) hold in virtue of more fundamental micro-level causal connections, the Multiple Realisability Argument prevents us from translating macro-level explanations without a remainder into micro-level explanations. This would give us sui generis causal explanations in terms of mental states, although not sui generis mental causation. This is the line of thought of, e.g., Dennett’s (1991) pragmatic instrumentalism and Jackson and Pettit’s (in Jackson et al. 2004) programme explanations. However, this cannot sufﬁce for mental realism. Since micro-level causation is allowed to determine macro-level connections, there is no sui generis mental causation and thus mental contents are not causally efﬁcacious qua mental. All concrete instances of higher-level connections are nothing but fundamental-level physical processes. Hence mental realism is violated. This kind of explanatory pluralism may be sufﬁcient for a methodologist worrying about the justiﬁcation of special sciences, but it surely is insufﬁcient for a metaphysicist worrying about the ontological status of agency and personhood, i.e., mental realism. The talk about mental states, actions and persons would be nothing but a pragmatically useful way of talking about microphysical processes. 3. I conclude that physicalism and mental realism remain mutually incompatible – an excruciating conclusion – as long as we insist on a causal interpretation of mental realism. Thus, we must admit that agency, personhood etc. are not causal notions at all. Most contemporary philosophers, however, ﬁnd such anti-causalism unacceptable. They think that physicalism in fact implies that mental realism – mental states making a difference – must be interpreted causally, for to think otherwise would be to postulate some unnatural non-causal forces in virtue of which mental contents make their difference. However, such causal dogmatism is based on a false premise. “To make a difference” does not necessarily mean “to bring about”. Rather than producing behaviour, our mental states make a difference by rendering our actions intelligible, rationalising them and determining whether our actions were appropriate in a given situation (von Wright 1971). To be 195 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 195 30.7.2004 15:35:11 an agent, a person, is to have the normative status of being responsible for one’s actions. And as Strawson (1962) suggests, causation is irrelevant here. Mental realism is a normative affair; to be a person is to be able to give reasons for one’s actions (cf. Brandom 1994, Dennett 2003, Sellars 1956). My claim is that far from challenging ontological naturalism and physicalism, the normative interpretation of mental realism is in fact precisely what is needed for combining physicalism and mental realism. To make my case I want to evoke Kripke’s (1982) problem of rule-following and the social solution to it. Kripke’s starting point is the arguably uncontroversial observation that for a mental state to have a determinate meaning the following two problems must be shown to be resolvable: • • The Infinity Problem: Any finite sequence of examples of correct applications of, say, the judgement “that is a dog” instantiate infinitely many rules as to how to continue to apply the judgement. Our theory of meaning must explain why we choose exactly one of those infinitely many ways. The Normativity Problem: It is not enough to continue a sequence of examples in any random way. Rather, it must be a case of rule-following; there must be a difference between continuing the sequence correctly and incorrectly. Kripke’s sceptical conclusion is that neither problem is resolvable. Hence there can be no meanings in the world – and, consequently, no mental realism and no persons. However, I think Bloor (1997) is right to think that by considering seriously only individualistic and Platonist solutions Kripke leaves room for a social non-sceptical solution. It seems that Kripke is wrong to think that a dispositional solution (e.g., Blackburn 1984) cannot solve the Inﬁnity Problem. Even if it is logically speaking true that a ﬁnite sequence instantiates inﬁnitely many rules, perhaps often enough there is nonetheless one way in which we are disposed (due to innate mechanisms and socialisation) to continue the sequence. However, dispositionalism renders the Normativity Problem irresolvable. If we simply react causally to input, there is no normativity. Causal dispositions are governed by the laws of nature; to talk about correct and incorrect there is a fundamental philosophical category mistake (this is another way of expressing the apparent incompatibility of physicalism and mental realism). 196 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 196 30.7.2004 15:35:11 4. The social theory of meaning (e.g., Barnes 1983, Bloor 1997, Brandom 1994, Esfeld 2001, Haugeland 1990, Kusch 1997 and Pettit 1993) holds that we must assume that in addition to ﬁrst-order dispositions to continue a sequence in a certain way individuals have essentially social secondorder dispositions to co-operate in the sense of adapting one’s behaviour and dispositions to the behaviour and dispositions of others. By their mutual adaptations individuals who possess such social dispositions constitute agreement in practice. From the point of view of individuals participating in the practice their behaviour is rule-governed, because their individual applications are all the time subject to the assessment of others. Since the assessment and agreement is based on non-normative dispositions, normativity resides in the practice itself – norms are implicit in co-operative practices. When the individuals have a language, they can of course seek to make the norms explicit by formulating a rule describing the practical, implicit normativity of their social behaviour. Implicitly normative rule-governed behaviour nonetheless remains conceptually prior to explicit rules. The social account explains how there can be objective meanings and contentful mental states in our thoroughly physicalist world by showing how it is possible to follow rules in contrast to exhibiting mere regularities of behaviour. The trick is to see that normativity and rules reside always in social practices and thus exist only relative to – and are only visible within – the practices. From the perspective of an external observer there is nothing but regularities prompted by causal dispositions (and hence no normativity), doing thus justice to physicalism, but from the perspective of an essentially social individual there is a distinction between correct and incorrect, making thereby room for meanings and contents or, in short, for (normative) mental realism. Thus, to accommodate our two indispensable principles, physicalism and mental realism, we must pay close attention to the normative nature of the mental. Moreover, this normativity requires a social setting. Only within social practices it is possible to have the status of being correct or incorrect, i.e., the status of having a content. Mental states qua mental are essentially normative statuses. Normative statuses, in turn, presuppose rule-governed behaviour, which requires implicitly normative social practises. Hence, I conclude, it is possible to be a full-blown person, in contrast to a mere causal automaton, only within the context of social practices. In this sense the social is prior to the psychological. In sum, personhood is a social status. 197 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 197 30.7.2004 15:35:11 Literature Barnes, B. 1983 “Social Life as Bootstrapped Induction”, Sociology, 17(4), 524-545. Blackburn, S. 1984 “The Individual Strikes Back”, Synthese, 58, 281-301. Bloor, D. 1997 Wittgenstein, Rules and Institutions, London: Routledge. Brandom, Robert B. 1994 Making it Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitments, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Esfeld, M. 2001 Holism in Philosophy of Mind and Philosophy of Physics, Dordrecht: Kluwer. Dennett, D.C. 1991 “Real Patterns”, The Journal of Philosophy, 88(1), 27-51. Dennett, D.C. 2002 Freedom Evolves, London: Allen Lane. Fodor, J. 1974 “Special Sciences (or: The Disunity of Science as a Working Hypothesis)”, Synthese, 28, 97-115. Haugeland, J. 1990 “The Intentionality All-Stars”, Philosophical Perspectives, 4, 383427. Heil, J. and Mele, A. (eds.) 1993 Mental Causation, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Jackson, F. Pettit, P. and Smith, M. 2004 Mind, Morality, and Explanation: Selected Collaborations, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kim, J. 1993 Supervenience and Mind: Selected Philosophical Essays, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kim, J. 1998 Mind in a Physical World: An Essay on the Mind-Body Problem and Mental Causation, Cambridge MA: The MIT Press. Kripke, S.A. 1982 Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Kusch, M. 1997 Psychological Knowledge: A Social History and Philosophy, London: Routledge. Papineau, D. 2002 Thinking about Consciousness, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Pettit, P. 1993 The Common Mind: An Essay on Psychology, Society, and Politics, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sellars, W. 1956 “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” in H. Feigl and M. Scriven (eds.), Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science 1, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Tuomela, R. 1998 “A Defense of Mental Causation”, Philosophical Studies, 90, 134. Weber, M 1947 The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, New York: The Free Press. Von Wright, G.H. 1971 Explanation and Understanding, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 198 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 198 30.7.2004 15:35:11 Personhood and the Structure of Commitment Hans Bernhard Schmid University of St. Gallen, Switzerland hans_bernhard.schmid@unisg.ch O ver the last quarter of a century, Amartya Sen has developed a powerful critique of the economic standard model of human behavior. The general thrust of his critique is to pit the possibility of committed action against the rational choice approach. Sen‘s analysis of the structure of commitment seems to revolve around two main claims. One of these ideas is widely accepted, while the other, as far as I can see, has not met with much approval so far. This is not surprising, because Sen‘s second claim sounds so utterly extreme, that it lacks any prima vista credibility. In this paper, I shall ﬁrst shortly expound Sen‘s controversial claim (I.), than go into the difﬁculty that is connected with that claim (II.). Thirdly, I shall try to defend Sen’s claim by bringing in a non–reductivist theory of shared agency (III.). Some conjectures concerning the consequences of these considerations for our understanding of personhood shall conclude this paper (IV.). I. The ﬁrst, less controversial point of Amartya Sen’s analysis of the structure of commitment concerns what he calls the “wedge between choice and welfare” driven by committed action, which Sen postulates in his famous ’77 paper on “Rational Fools”. Committed action requires us to go beyond narrow standard models of preference. Echoing Harry Frank- 199 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 199 30.7.2004 15:35:12 furt’s analysis of personhood, Sen claims that “Preferences as rankings have to be replaced by a richer structure involving meta-rankings and related concepts” (Sen 1977, 344). In his later paper on “Goals, Commitment, and Identity”, Sen further analyzes this by saying that committed action violates both the assumption, that a person‘s welfare depends only on her or his own consumption (goal-selfregardingness), and the assumption, that a person‘s only goal is to maximize his or her welfare, including satisfaction of sympathy (self-welfare goal). Both assumptions are implicit in the standard economic model of rational action (Sen 1985, 213). Whereas these two points can be seen as a reﬁnement of the earlier statement made in “Rational Fools”, however, Sen now goes one step further by saying that there is yet another standard assumption that is violated by committed action. It is what Sen calls self-goal choice. According to the more radical of Sen‘s two statements of the self-goal choice assumption (Sen 2002, 34), it basically says the following: “a person‘s choices must be based entirely on the pursuit of her own goals”. (In a slightly softer version, self-goal choice is taken to mean that “each act of choice is guided immediately by the pursuit of one‘s own goals”; Sen 1985, 214; 1987, 80 [my emphasis].) Since in Sen‘s view, committed action violates this assumption, the wedge driven by commitment is not between the agent‘s choice and her or his welfare, as it was in “Rational Fools”. Rather, it is between the agent‘s choice and her or his goals. The claim is that committed agents do not pursue their (own) goals. As Sen well knows, this claim sounds rather extreme. Indeed, it seems that in spite of its appeal to some everyday phrases, it is not even understandable. In everyday parlance, we might say of strongly altruistic or heteronomous people, that they do not pursue their own goals, but the goals of other people instead. In the proper sense, however, self-goal choice is not violated even in the most extreme such cases. The issue at stake here is not the possibility of altruism. For the whole clue of strongly altruistic (or perhaps heteronomous) behavior seems to be that the agent makes the other‘s goals her or his own. As Sen, who is well aware of this problem, puts it: “it might appear that if I were to pursue anything other than what I see as my own ‘goals‘, then I am suffering from an illusion; these other things are my goals, contrary to what I might believe” (Sen 2002, 212). Perhaps there are other, more elaborated concepts of goals and their roles in agency. More than that, it might appear that this reading draws 200 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 200 30.7.2004 15:35:12 intentions and goals too close together. Especially, it seems that to identify goals with conditions of satisfaction of intention unjustiﬁedly excludes such cases in which somebody may be said to have a goal without actually intending to do something about it. I might have the goal to close the door, and yet no the intention to close the door, because my more important goal is to eat the ice cream.1 Against this objection, one might argue that the intention to do something about it is what distinguishes an actual goal from a mere wish. However, we need not settle this issue here, because in the present context, the role of goal interests us only insofar as goals pertain to intentionality and action (or, in the parlance of the economic model of behavior: to choice). Thus we need not claim that there are no goals without intention, or no intentions without goals, for that matter (even though I conjecture that the use of the term “goal” in these cases is widely equivocal). All that is claimed is that where goals pertain to action, their role is that of the conditions of satisfaction of these intentions. I assume that something similar must be included in any account of the role of goals in agency. And this claim seems especially ﬁt to shed light on the trouble with Sen‘s critique of self-goal choice. The abovementioned example may serve to illustrate the point. In order to attain my goal to close the door, I simply have to close the door. This, however, I have to do myself, because the mere fact that the door is shut is not enough to satisfy my intention. If you pre-empt me and close the door for me, or if the draft does the job before I could get around to doing it, this might fully satisfy some other intentional state of mine such as my long-standing desire that the door be closed. However, it does not satisfy my intention to close the door (which might have been prompted by that desire). This well-established fact directly pertains to what is at stake in Sen‘s claim that self-goal choice is violated in committed action. In a manner of speaking, one can transcend one‘s own aims in all sorts of ways, for example by intending to do something on behalf of others, or for the beneﬁt of others. Also, one can intend to inﬂuence other people so as to prompt them to act according to one‘s own wishes. However, one cannot directly intend the other‘s actions, because one can intend only what one takes oneself to be able to do (cf. Baier 1970). I can intend to make it the case that you close the door, but I cannot intend your closing the door (Stoutland 1997). In continental philosophy, this basic feature is 201 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 201 30.7.2004 15:35:12 sometimes called the “mineness” or “ownness” of intentionality.2 Just as one cannot die the death of others, even though in some cases, one can die for them, one cannot pursue the other‘s goals without making these goals one‘s own. This is an essential fact about our intentionality. Thus it seems that what Sen believes to be violated by committed action is nothing less than a basic trait of what makes an agent an agent – at least if we take intentionality as constitutive of agency, and if we take goals to be the conditions of satisfaction of intentions.3 Or, to put it negatively: no agency without self-goal choice. In this sense, the claim that the structure of committed action (or any action, for that matter) violates self-goal choice seems to be a contradictio in adiecto. II. Should we therefore simply forget about Sen‘s second claim, taking it as a condonable excess of his righteous fury at the annoyingly persistent small-minded idea of agency in economic theory? Should we just return to the ﬁrst feature of Sen‘s analysis of the structure of committed action, the wedge between choice and welfare, which is less controversial, and still an important contribution to the theory of rationality in action? Or is there any way to make sense of the idea of a violation of self-goal choice by a committed agent? I suggest that we start by taking a closer look. In “Rational Fools”, Sen already emphasized the role of group membership for committed action. In “Goals, Commitment, and Identity”, as well as in other papers, Sen further elaborates this idea. On a ﬁrst line of thought, Sen introduces “as if ” goals to explain the violation of self-goal choice by committed action.4 However, Sen is well aware that “as if ” goals offer no more than a formal equivalent, which does not capture the real structure of the phenomenon.5 Just the fact that violation of self-goal choice can sometimes be accomodated in “as if ” objective functions (Sen 2002, 41), in itself, does not shed light on the structure of committed action. The question is: what do people actually do when their behavior violates selfgoal choice? In adressing this question, Sen introduces the concept of identity. As Sen puts it, “the pursuit of private goals may well be compromised by the 202 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 202 30.7.2004 15:35:12 consideration of the goals of others in the group with whom the person has some sense of identity” (Sen 2002, 215). It is, as he says, this “sense of identity” which “partly disconnects a person‘s choice of actions from the pursuit of self-goal” (ibid., 216). One might wonder what this “sense of identity” which drives a wedge between choice and self-goal is. In some passages, Sen seems to suggest a reading according to which the agent identiﬁes himself so thoroughly with another person that the goals he pursues are no longer his own goals. The assumption that one can pursue other people’s goals without making them one’s own, however, ﬂies in the face of our understanding of agency as analyzed above; taken in this sense, identiﬁcation amounts to some paradoxical self-elimination. If the object of identiﬁcation is taken to be some other person, any attempt to go beyond self-goal choice by means of identiﬁcation amounts to nothing but the futile attempt to stop being oneself by taking on somebody else‘s identity (cf. Charlie Kaufman‘s “Being John Malkovich” for a vivid illustration). In this self-eliminative sense, identiﬁcation with others is simply self-defeating. The harder one tries to get rid of one’s own identity by identifying with somebody else, the more it becomes apparent that it is all about oneself trying to be another, and not another. In this sense, identiﬁcation is self-defeating, because the very act of identiﬁcation presupposes the very difference in identity that the agent in question tries to eliminate. On this line, there is no way to go beyond self-goal choice, because no matter how far one goes in making somebody else’s goals ones own, it is still one’s own goals which one pursues. However, this self-eliminative sense is not the only reading of the role of identiﬁcation that Sen suggests. The predominant line is quite a different one: here, identiﬁcation is not with others, taken as single agents. It is not a matter of any I-Thou-relation, but between agents and groups – a matter of the I-We-relation, as it were. In this sense, identiﬁcation is not self-eliminating (which would be self-defeating). Rather, it is self-contextualizing. This kind of identiﬁcation is not about trying to be the other, but simply about not just being oneself, but one of us. This second concept of identiﬁcation is the one put forth in Sen‘s talk on “Reason before Identity”, where Sen develops an understanding of belonging that avoids the pitfalls of the communitarian critique of liberalism (Sen 1999). On this second line, the claim that committed action violates self-goal choice takes on a different meaning. If identiﬁcation with a group lies 203 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 203 30.7.2004 15:35:12 at the heart of the structure of commitment, an agent does not have to perform the paradoxical task of choosing someone else‘s goal without making it his own in order to qualify as truly committed. In a sense, committed action is neither about one‘s own goals, nor about anybody else‘s goals. The point seems to be that in committed action, the goals in question are not individual goals, but shared goals. If the scandal of the self-goal choice assumption is that it implies too narrow a conception of goals, this is not because it excludes some form of altruism, but because it unjustiﬁedly limits goals to individual goals, thereby banning shared goals from the picture. What is needed in order to correct the shortcomings of the self-goal choice assumption is not an account of other-goal choice, but an account of the pursuit of shared goals, or of collective agency. 6 As Sen puts it: “‘We‘ demand things; ‘our‘ actions reﬂect ‘our‘ concerns; ‘we‘ protest at injustice done to ‘us‘” (Sen 2002, 215). This “self-contextualizing” notion of identiﬁcation, however, has some problems of its own. How does the claim that collective agency violates self-goal choice square with the earlier thesis that self-goal choice is a deﬁning feature of any kind of agency? If the earlier considerations on the status of goals in intentional behavior are correct, it seems that departing from self-goal choice amounts to endorsing one of the following two equally repellent alternatives. Either it requires denying that the individuals taking part in collective actions are proper agents, or it requires making a category mistake of the most basic Rylean type. The ﬁrst of these alternatives seems implausible because whatever one takes collective action to be, it is clear that individuals involved in shared activity are agents, not just, say, organs in some collective body. There is no reason to doubt that it is legitimate to demand that an account of collective agency be consistent with the notion that individuals do act when they act together. If one accepts this assumption, however, it appears that the only reason left to believe that collective agency violates self-goal choice is a category mistake. For the only alternative then seems to be to understand collective action as something different from the actions of the participating individuals. This, however, is in direct conﬂict with the predominant view, according to which it is not only the case that individuals act when they act together, but that the actions of the participating individuals, is what collective agency is. There is no collective agent, no macro-subject 204 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 204 30.7.2004 15:35:12 that acts in addition to the participating individuals, when individuals act jointly. To adapt the Rylean example for a category mistake to the given case, it seems that whoever contests this makes a mistake similar to the spectator watching some soccer game for ninety minutes, before saying “I have had enough of those twenty-two people running about on the ﬁeld in some coordinated way. I just wonder when ﬁnally, the teams will start playing!” Because individuals, running about on the ﬁeld in some coordinated way is what team play is. Therefore, it appears that collective agency cannot violate self-goal choice: all that is chosen in collective action is individual goals, namely the goal to contribute to the attainment of some shared aim. As it was put in an earlier contribution to the theory of shared goals: if a team has goal x, than each individual member has goal x (cf. Levesque/Cohen 1991) – or, more precisely, some contributive goal y –, which conforms to self-goal choice. III. The result of the previous section is the following: it seems that any attempt to depart from self-goal choice faces a dilemma. It amounts to ending up either in some massively collectivist conception, which ﬂies in the face of even our most basic understanding of intentional autonomy (cf. Pettit 1996, 117ff.), or in a conception that is based on a simple category mistake. Since both alternatives appear unacceptable, it seems that we should not depart from self-goal choice. I think, however, that the argument concerning the second alternative is not sound. In the following, I shall argue that even though the participants act when they act jointly, there is no category mistake in assuming that joint action violates self-goal choice. The thesis I would like to put forth is not that agents violate self-goal choice when they act together (this claim would directly lead into some of the nonsense we have encountered before). Rather, my claim is that the self-goals which individuals choose when they act together cannot be adequately represented within an account which takes all goals to be self-goals, because these self-goals presuppose shared goals. The argument is the one put forth by those advocating a non-reduc- 205 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 205 30.7.2004 15:35:13 tivist reading of collective agency. Participative intentions and goals are, to use a term coined by Wilfrid Sellars, “we-derivative” (Sellars 1980, 99). If we play a duet together, my aim is not just to play my part while you play yours (such cases may occur, but they do not constitute genuine cases of shared agency). Instead, it is as a part of our shared activity that you and I do what we do individually when we play together (cf. Searle 1990). In order to account for our contributive self-goal choices, an observer needs to understand that what she or he observes is something the agents are doing together (for more arguments for the non-reductivist view cf. Schmid 2003). Some current accounts of shared agency and collective intentionality are accused of circularity, because their analysis of what individuals do when they act together presupposes what should be explained. From a non-reductivist perspective such as the one I just have taken, this is not surprising, but simply reﬂects the ontological structure of participative intentions or participative goals. In the sense of the “we-derivativeness” of participatory intentions and goals, togetherness is irreducible; or, in to use Sen‘s term of the “privateness” of goals: shared goals are not simply a combination of private goals. There is a difference between goals that individuals just somehow happen to have in common, on the one hand, and goals, which individuals have individually only because they have this goal in common, on the other.7 An account of agency that is unable to see beyond the limits of self-goal choice cannot account for the latter kind of goals, i.e. the case of genuinely shared agency. Paradoxically, the self-goal choice assumption renders action theory blind for one special, but important kind of self-goal choice, namely contributive self-goal choice. There is yet another argument for a non-reductivist account of collective agency that I would like to mention, even though this brings me into some tension with Raimo Tuomela‘s account of collective agency. As Annette Baier (1997, 26; 1997b, 37) has pointed out, there are some rare cases in which individuals fail to form an appropriate we-derivative individual intention, even though in a sense, they still can be said to share an intention (for a differing view cf. Tuomela 1991, 271ff.; 1995, 135ff.). Take the case of some spontaneous and transitory collective action, such as the one of a couple of passers-by joining their forces in order to push 206 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 206 30.7.2004 15:35:13 a car. As a participant in that activity, I might suddenly feel estranged from my role and lack the aim to provide my contribution, even though I might still think of our goal to push the car as our goal, and not merely as their, the other people‘s, goal. In such cases, it seems to make perfect sense to speak of collective goals or collective intentions in a sense that does not refer to corresponding individual contributive goals or intentions. An account that is based on self-goal choice seems to be blind for such cases. Admittedly, these are rare and perhaps even pathological cases. But in the light of such deviant cases, normality reveals some of its basic traits. If I think of some goal as our goal, I can be expected to have a corresponding individual contributive goal, or some other kind of pro-attitude. In the absence of overriding reasons, I should choose to do my part. The relation between shared goals and individual contributive goals (i.e. between shared goals and self-goal choice) is a normative one. This, however, points against a constitutive relation between individual contributions and shared goals of the kind at work in reductivist accounts of collective agency. Because normativity entails contingency. That I should choose my contributive goal in our collective project presupposes the possibility that I decide not to contribute to the attainment of what is our goal. The possibility (perhaps more than the fact) of dissidence, as well as of other kinds of failures to do one‘s part, is an essential part of shared agency. It is what makes the relation between shared goals and individual choices normative. And again, an account that is limited to self-goal choice seems to be blind to the fact that some self-goal choices normatively depend on shared goals. In a word, the self-goal choice assumption is incompatible with a non-reductivist account of collective agency.8 It seems that if we want to take Sen’s invitation to look beyond the limits of self-goal choice seriously, we need a more robust conception of collective agency (cf. Anderson 2001). IV. An outlook on possible consequences of these views on the concept of personhood shall conclude this paper. In the last couple of years, the question of whether or not the status of a person can be assigned not 207 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 207 30.7.2004 15:35:13 just to single human beings (or perhaps to single higher animals), but to groups, too, has become the focus of some consideration. In this context, Carol Rovane has developed some thoughts that seem to be closely connected to the argument developed in the previous section of this paper. In a passage of her groundbreaking analysis of personal identity, she suggests that it is basically the existence of existence of shared ends and common goals, which brings about the possibility of collective persons (Rovane 1998, 138). In a somewhat related vein, Philip Pettit has claimed that groups with purposes constitute not just intentional, but personal subjects (Pettit 2003, 167).9 On the basis of the thoughts developed above, I am sympathetic with the general thrust of these analyses, as far as it is directed towards a more robust (and possibly less individualistic) social ontology. It seems to me, however, that the role of personhood in collective agency is not (or at least not primarily) that of a supra–individual macro–person, some entity that simply parallels the role of the individual person in the case of individual agency. Rather, I should propose to venture in another direction, and to submit the role of participation in shared agency for the personhood of individuals to closer scrutiny instead of simply taking the concept of a person to a higher level. If the above considerations concerning the structure of shared agency are correct, and if shared agency should turn out to be essential to our individual personhood, a considerable change in our view on personhood would ensue. As far as it involves participation in shared agency, personhood is not just a matter of our intentional relation to the world, to ourselves, or to others. It involves community in a sense which is not reducible to mutual intentional relations between individuals. It is not a matter of what we think, feel, or intend with respect to each other, but a matter of what we think, feel or intend together. I do not claim that this is what Amartya Sen had in mind when he claimed that we should depart from the standard model of action in order to allow for the possibility of committed action. It seems to me, however, that these consequences are part of what makes Sen’s invitation to look beyond the limits of self-goal choice so important. 208 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 208 30.7.2004 15:35:13 Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 The example is by courtesy of Peter Vallentine, to whom I am grateful for pointing out the problem. “Mineness” translates such terms as Martin Heidegger’s “Jemeinigkeit” (Heidegger [1927] 1996). The last clause is of special importance. Clearly, there is no problem involved in pursuing other people’s goals where goals are simply desired states of affairs, rather than conditions of satisfaction of intentions. Concerning the decision for an intentionality-related concept of goals cf. the above remarks. “Consider a pair of individuals whose real goals are those as in the Prisoners’ Dilemma, but whose actual behavior violates goal-priority (and self-goal choice). The ‘revealed preference’ relation of their respective choice functions may place the cooperative outcome on top, that is, they may behave ‘as if ’ they would favor that particular outcome most of all” (Sen 2002, 217). In “Maximization and the Act of Choice”, Sen states with regard to the phenomenon of Japanese employees working themselves literally to death: “The as if preference works well enough formally, but the sociology of the phenomenon calls for something more than the establishment of formal equivalences” (Sen 2002, 191). For an analysis of the link between Sen’s concept of identification and the demand for a robust concept of collective agency see Anderson (2001). In her reflections on collective agency, Carol Rovane clearly distinguishes projection into other individuals’ points of view from orientation on common ends: “these activities do not require that persons project themselves all the way into another person’s own rational point of view so as to take up that person’s perspective. These activities require rather that persons project themselves into a rational space that is generated by the ends that they hold in common […]. When persons project themselves into this common rational space, they can reason and act together from the perspective of their common ends” (Rovane 1998, 138). Jay Rosenberg calls the former type of ends “common” and the latter “communal”. “A communal end (…) will be one which is collective without being conjunctive. It will be an end, which is mine and hers and his by virtue of the fact that it is ours, and that each of us represents himself/herself as one of us. It will, in other words, be a genuinely plural end, attributable to all of us collectively and therefore univocally to each of us severally and to all of us conjunctively” (Rosenberg 1980, 160). 209 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 209 30.7.2004 15:35:13 8 9 I assume that the self-goal choice assumption is equivalent to what Margaret Gilbert (1989, 418-425) criticizes under the label “singularism“. Pettit does not believe that shared agency violates self-goal choice. For his critique of Sen’s claim cf. Pettit (forthcoming). Literature Anderson, E. 2001 “Unstrapping the Straitjacket of ‘Preference’: A Comment on Amartya Sen’s Contributions to Philosophy and Economics”, Economics and Philosophy, 17, 21-38. Baier, A. 1970 “Act and Intent”, Journal of Philosophy, 67, 648-658. Baier, A. 1997 The Commons of the Mind, Chicago: Open Court. Baier, A. 1997b “Doing Things With Others: The Mental Commons”, in L. Alanen et al. (eds), Commonality and Particularity in Ethics. London, 15-44. Benn, S. I./Gaus, G. F. 1986 “Practical Rationality and Commitment”, American Philosophical Quarterly, 23/3, 255-266. Gilbert, M. 1989 On Social Facts, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Heidegger, M. (1927) 1996 Being and Time, Albany: State University of New York Press. Levesque, H. J./Cohen, Ph. R. 1991 “Teamwork”, Noûs, 25, 487-512. Pettit, Ph. 1996 The Common Mind. An Essay on Psychology, Society, and Politics. Oxford, Oxford University Press. Pettit, Ph. 2003 “Groups with Minds of their Own”, in F. Schmitt (ed.), Socializing Metaphysics. The Nature of Social Reality, Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 167-194. Pettit, Ph. (forthcoming). “Construing Sen on Commitment”, Economics and Philosophy (special issue on Amartya Sen). Rosenberg, J. 1980 One World and Our Knowledge of It, Dordrecht: D. Reidl. Rovane, C. 1998 The Bounds of Agency. An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Schmid, H. B. 2003 “Can Brains in Vats Think as a Team?”, Philosophical Explorations 6, 201-218. Searle, J. R. 1983 Intentionality. An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Searle, J. R. 1990 “Collective Intentions and Actions”, in P. Cohen/M. Morgan/ M. Pollack (eds.), Intentions in Communication, Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 401-415. Searle, J. R. 2001 Rationality in Action, Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press. Sellars, W. 1980 “On Reasoning About Values”, American Philosophical Quarterly, 17, 81-101. 210 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 210 30.7.2004 15:35:13 Sen, A. K. 1977 “Rational Fools: A Critique of the Behavioral Foundations of Economic Theory”, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 6 (4), 317-344. Sen, A. K. 1985 “Goals, Commitment, and Identity”, Quoted from Rationality and Freedom, Sen, A. K. (2002), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 206-225. Sen, A. K. 1987 On Ethics and Economics, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Sen, A. K. 1995 “Is the idea of purely internal consistency of choice bizarre?”, in J.E.J. Altham/R. Harrison (eds.), World, Mind, and Ethics. Essays on the Ethical Philosophy of Bernard Williams, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 19-31. Sen, A. K. 1999 Reason before Identity. The Romanes Lecture for 1998, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sen, A. K. 2002 Rationality and Freedom, Cambridge Mass.: Cambridge University Press. Stoutland, F. 1997 “Why are Philosophers of Action so Anti-Social?”, in Alanen, L. et al. (eds.), Commonality and Particularity in Ethics. London, 45-74. Tuomela, R. 1991 “We Will Do It: An Analysis of Group-Intentions”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 51, 249-277. Tuomela, R. 1995 The Importance of Us. A Study of Basic Social Notions, Stanford: Stanford University Press. 211 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 211 30.7.2004 15:35:14 Conceiving of Oneself as Oneself Christiane E. Seidel Erasmus University, Rotterdam, The Netherlands seidel@fwb.eur.nl W hen I reﬂect on a decision that I made some time ago, I may realize that my goals have changed, but I never doubt to be the one who now reﬂects and then made that decision. When I think about buying a farmhouse in the future, I may realize that other things might become important to me, but I never doubt to be the one who now thinks about her future. In short, we are aware of changeability of our self, but we nevertheless conceive of ourselves as the self that has been and continues to be. Isn’t it surprising that we are not in utmost confusion about ourselves? Well, people sometimes are in confusion about themselves, namely when they struggle to reconcile different notions of themselves. Nevertheless, such a person does not doubt to be the one to whom those different notions of herself apply. The question is: Why does our awareness of the changeability of our self not threaten our conception of ourselves as the self that has been and continues to be? Outline of the proposed solution I believe that only an account of the self that argues for a pre-reﬂective sense of selfhood (SoS) – which, as I will argue later, actually is a sense of continued selfhood (SoCS) – can provide an intelligible explanation for the fact that our awareness of our changeability does not threaten our conception of ourselves as ourselves. Based on our pre-reﬂective 212 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 212 30.7.2004 15:35:14 SoS, our self appears to us as the certainty of being-self, and by this as something constant that we can relate to in reﬂective acts of self-awareness. In other words, creatures with a SoS have a sense of identity1, or rather – for our SoS actually is a SoCS – a sense of identity over time. Conceiving of oneself as oneself is an act of reﬂective self-awareness that is grounded in our pre-reﬂective SoCS. After all, one can only reﬂect on something that is already ‘given’ to oneself. It should be emphasized that conceiving of oneself as oneself means nothing more than conceiving of oneself as being-self. And because a notion of the self as being-self is the notion of a ‘content-free’ self, identity in this sense is a ‘neutral identity’2. Hence, conceiving of oneself as the self that has been and continues to be does not require conceptualization and symbolization of one’s self; and it does therefore not require content. That is why our awareness of our changeability, which requires content – a self-image, however vague that may be – does not threaten our certainty of being the self that has been and continues to be. As already mentioned, our pre-reﬂective SoS actually is a SoCS, it covers a period of time. We do not ﬁrst conceive of ourselves as a momentary self and then come to realize that we have been and continue to be. As Shaun Gallagher and Anthony Marcel convincingly argued, experiencing ourselves as agents belongs to our pre-reﬂective self-awareness.3 And a creature that pre-reﬂectively experiences itself as an agent is not ‘given’ to itself as a momentary self but as a continuing self. If our prereﬂective SoCS is tied to our perceiving ourselves as agents, then the period of time that is covered by our pre-reﬂective SoCS seems to be connected to the extent of complexity of our actions. However, we regularly perform acts of reﬂective self-awareness which imply permanence of oneself in a way that is not solely based on our prereﬂective SoCS. When we, e.g., think of long-term goals, we have to conceptualise ourselves as existing in other circumstances in the future. And in those reﬂective acts, we may be confronted with our changeability. We may, e.g., realize that the things that are important to us now might change over time. That is why we may experience a tension in our overall self-conception: the tension between constancy and changeability. In what follows, I will clarify the relevant distinctions that characterize my account of the self. I will ﬁrst be concerned with the notion of a SoCS and then turn to our self-conception. 213 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 213 30.7.2004 15:35:14 Sense of continued selfhood As Dan Zahavi and Josef Parnas pointed out, self-awareness is not limited to situations where I reﬂectively recognize that I am perceiving a certain object or refer to myself using the ﬁrst-person pronoun, it is possible to speak of self-awareness in a more fundamental sense, namely whenever I am conscious of an external object and of my experience of that object.4 It is important to notice that the distinction between being conscious of an external object and being conscious of one’s experience of that object is a conceptual distinction that does not imply an epistemological or phenomenological distinction. Being conscious of an external object is always a subject’s consciousness of experiencing that object. However, consciousness of one’s experience of an external object or of one’s feeling does not ‘give’ oneself to oneself as an object that one could relate to in an act of reﬂective self-awareness. What is lacking in fundamental self-awareness to count as pre-reﬂective self-consciousness is a pre-reﬂective SoS. A pre-reﬂective SoS requires that the subject prereﬂectively experiences itself as one and the same perceiving, thinking, and feeling subject in various acts of fundamental self-awareness that may appear at the same moment. A creature without a SoS might experience itself as the subject that perceives a certain external object and as the subject that has a certain thought without experiencing the two subjects as one and the same5. Only a creature with a pre-reﬂective SoS exists for itself as a self – more precisely, it exists for itself as a self, in the present moment.6 Such a creature has a sense of identity, in the present moment7. It’s self appears to that creature as the certainty of being-self, and by this as something constant that it can relate to in reﬂective acts, in that moment – presupposed that the creature has the required reﬂective capabilities. Now think of acts of reﬂective self-awareness that are characteristic of persons. Many, if not most of them imply permanence of the self, e.g., being willing to accept or wanting to avoid the consequences of one’s actions. The question is: Do we ﬁrst, based on our SoS, conceive of ourselves as a momentary self and then come to realize that we have been and continue to be? No. We pre-reﬂectively experience ourselves as 214 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 214 30.7.2004 15:35:14 a continuing self, because we pre-reﬂectively experience ourselves as one and the same perceiving, thinking, feeling, and acting8 subject – and actions obviously have durations; after all, what one is just prepared to do or is just doing can consist of more or less complex behavioural structures and is often related to what one has just been doing. Therefore, a creature that pre-reﬂectively experiences itself as an agent is not ‘given’ to itself as a momentary self but as a continuing self. Consider the reﬂective act of being willing to accept or wanting to avoid the consequences of one’s actions. When I recognize that an action, which I am just thinking of to perform, has certain consequences for myself, I may hesitate to perform that action and deliberate whether to refrain from or modify the action. But whatever I decide, the very fact that I think of certain consequences of the action as consequences for myself, means that I relate, in the act of reﬂecting on my action, to myself as a self that continues to be. It means that I have a sense of identity over time. Self-conception A being that has a SoCS does not necessarily conceive of itself as itself. It may lack that property. The property of conceiving of oneself as oneself is what Lynne Rudder Baker calls a highly developed form of a ﬁrstperson perspective and which, according to her view, is the fundamental property of persons. In the reﬂective act of conceiving of ourselves as ourselves, we cannot misidentify ourselves, for we do not identify ourselves as ourselves.9 After all, based on our SoCS, we are pre-reﬂectively ‘given’ to ourselves as a self – as something that we can relate to in the act of conceiving of ourselves as ourselves. Although the act of conceiving of oneself as oneself is an act of reﬂective self-awareness, that act does not require that we take a detached stance toward ourselves and explicitly conceptualise ourselves qua self. As far as ‘merely’ the property to conceive of oneself as oneself is concerned, that self-conception, as I mentioned earlier, means nothing more than conceiving of oneself as being-self. The self is content-free, so to speak. On top of the property to conceive of oneself as oneself, we are able 215 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 215 30.7.2004 15:35:14 to think ourselves qua self in other circumstances in the future (or in the past). We, e.g., think ourselves in particular circumstances in the past when we provide an explanation or justiﬁcation for our former actions; and we think ourselves in particular circumstances in the future when we evaluate our career opportunities. Such acts of reﬂective self-awareness require explicit conceptualisation of our existence as a self over time. And conceptualisation of oneself as existing through time is deﬁnitely a detached, reﬂective act of self-awareness. Conceptualisation means symbolisation and hence requires content. That content is what we conceive of as, e.g., our character traits, our goals, our lasting practical beliefs, or the traditions that we care about. This brings me to our reﬂective awareness of our changeability. When we engage in reﬂection on ourselves, we may recognize the vagueness of our self-image. After all, when we ask ourselves who we really are, our self seems to slide away. And we will, moreover, often recognize that we qua self are unstable. We may, e.g., realize that our current goals and the actions that we performed recently do not ﬁt in with the things that were important to us and which we cared about in the past. In short, when engaging in reﬂection on ourselves, we may become aware of the changeability of our self. But awareness of the changeability of oneself does not require metareﬂection; it also becomes evident when we reﬂect on particular actions. When asked to justify a past action, we may, e.g., refer to the fact that we had other plans and goals, in those days, and that other things were important to us then. Or when deliberating about whether to buy a farmhouse and to live at the countryside, we might come to think that our enthusiasm for a ‘natural’ way of life might disappear over time. Nevertheless, the awareness of the changeability of ourselves does normally not harm our self-conception as the self that has been and continues to be. Let me recapitulate the two reasons. Conclusion and upshot Firstly, our self-conception of being the self that has been and continues to be, on the one hand, and our self-image and the awareness of our changeability, on the other, require different reﬂective capabilities, 216 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 216 30.7.2004 15:35:14 whereby the reﬂective capability that is required for the former is more fundamental. After all, our self-conception of being the self that has been and continues to be ‘merely’ requires the capability to conceive of oneself as oneself. Secondly, our self-conception of being the self that has been and continues to be is not only more fundamental than our self-image but also free of any speciﬁc content. It is therefore not threatened by the fact that our self-image is vague and unstable and that we are aware (at least, implicitly) of our changeability. This is not to deny that we may experience a tension between the constancy that is implied by our self-conception of being the self that has been and continues to be and the incoherence or inconsistency of our self-image. A person might feel confused about herself if she, e.g., did not conceive of the change of her goals and of the things she cares about as an intelligible change of her self, in other words if she did not succeed in reconciling different notions of herself. That person might even end up in a psychic crisis. I believe, although I cannot argue for that claim in the context of this paper, that we strive – whether consciously or not – to relieve the tension between our constancy and our changeability by desiring unity of our self. This desire expresses itself in certain ways of conceiving of our actions and of ourselves, e.g., in our interpreting ourselves as the protagonist of a more or less coherent self-narrative. The desire also expresses itself in certain self-reﬂexive emotions, e.g., in being dissatisﬁed with oneself because of regularly acting in conﬂict with one’s own goals. In my view, this inclination to desire unity of our self is based on our prereﬂective sense of identity over time. Notes 1 I was inspired by Manfred Frank to use the term ‘sense of identity’. He cites (Frank 2002, 171) Christoph Meiners, who uses the German term Gefühl der Identität and characterizes it (according to Frank, and free translated by myself ) as the ability to keep various psychic modifications ‘consciously’ present in the same moment and to relate them to a numerical unique entity, the person, who does not lose itself in the change of impressions. 217 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 217 30.7.2004 15:35:15 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 The term ‘neutral identity’ is borrowed from Charles Taylor (Taylor 1989, 49). Shaun Gallagher and Anthony J. Marcel write (Gallagher et al. 1999, 292): “[E]cological self-awareness gives us more than just a snap-shot profile of our posture, location and action. Implicit in this kind of self-awareness is a sense of what I have just been doing, and, of equal importance, what I can do, and what I am just prepared to do, a sense of capability which goes beyond the momentary.” (Italics in original) See (Zahavi 1999, 255). Manfred Frank raises a similar point when arguing that selfhood requires a certain intimacy with oneself (Vertrautheit). Without that intimacy with oneself one could not identify one’s being conscious of experiencing a certain external object and one’s being conscious of one’s feelings or thoughts as two manifestations of one peculiar phenomenon. We, possibly, would be other subjects as perceiving beings than as thinking beings. (Frank 2002, 144) (This passage is not a translation but my interpretation of Frank’s point and applied to my line of thought.) Developmental psychology may be able to answer the question how we pre-reflectively come to know ourselves in the relevant way; see, e.g., George Butterworth’s developmental-ecological approach (Butterworth 1999). Admittedly, a moment still is a period of time. But I will not enter into the discussion here what period of time may count as a moment in the relevant sense. See footnote 3. For a denial of the possibility of misidentification, see, e.g., (Baker 2000, 136-137) or (Zahavi 1999, 262). Literature Baker, L.R. 2000 Persons and Bodies: A Constitution View, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Butterworth, G. 1999 “A Developmental-Ecological Perspective on Strawson’s ‘The Self’”, in S. Gallagher and J. Shear (eds.), Models of the Self, Thorverton: Imprint Academic, 203-211. Frank, M. 2002 Selbstgefühl. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. Gallagher, S. and Marcel, A.J. 1999 “The Self in Contextualized Action”, in S. Gallagher and J. Shear (eds.), Models of the Self, Thorverton: Imprint Academic, 273-300. 218 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 218 30.7.2004 15:35:15 Taylor, C. 1989 Sources of the Self, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zahavi, D. and Parnas, J. 1999, “Phenomenal Consciousness and Self-awareness”, in S. Gallagher and J. Shear (eds.), Models of the Self, Thorverton: Imprint Academic, 253-279. 219 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 219 30.7.2004 15:35:15 The Inadequacy of the Communitarian Account of Practical Agency Jussi Suikkanen University of Helsinki, Finland jussi.suikkanen@helsinki.ﬁ 1 I will now return to an infamous debate between the liberalists and the communitarians1. In its core lies a disagreement about personhood. Liberalists seemed to base the requirements of justice on an abstract conception of a person, who is a pure deliberator behind all the contingent, non-essential and detachable features (Rawls 1971). Communitarians argued that if this is what it is essentially to be a person, then persons are not capable of acting in an ordinary way (Sandel 1982, 154–174). Additional features need to be added to the conception of the personhood for the capacity to act, which all persons admittedly have. Liberalists claimed that they weren’t in fact committed to the implausibly ‘thin’ view of the person and that their actual version of the person was plausible, capable of acting and carried the weight of their theory of justice (see Carse 1994). In this paper, my interest lies in the communitarian view of personhood, and whether it provides a satisfactory account of agency, a property that makes persons distinct from everything else. I begin by introducing the liberalist accounts – the Kantian ‘noumenal’ self and its updated version by Rawls. From the problems of Rawls’s conception we can see what the communitarians wished to add to it to form their practical 220 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 220 30.7.2004 15:35:15 agent, a functioning person. I will argue that these additions can’t give persons their agency. 2 In the world, we see stones, dogs, lakes, cars etc. and also human beings. To most humans we attribute the property of being a person. Kant held that persons are categorically different from the rest of the things (Kant 1998[1785], 4:428). This is revealed by the difference in value; the value of persons is always objective and absolute, whereas the value of things is conditional to their value for persons. What made persons to have this value, to be this different from everything else, was for Kant the free nature of their wills. Also animals have wills. They willingly act on their desires to do things. However, their wills are not free in a way in which the wills of persons are. The will of an animal is straightforwardly determined by the desires, which are always products of two elements; the internal structure of the animal and the external circumstances having a causal effect on that structure. Kant argued that the wills of persons, free wills, are not necessarily the sum of these two elements (Kant 1998[1787], 4:446–463). Persons and their wills have the capability of distancing themselves from the desires caused by nature, and this capacity in part constitutes the identity of persons as different from mere things, including animals. Kant thought that this particular capacity was still not sufﬁcient for being a person – a second capacity to make an independent difference on the world was also required. This second capacity required that persons were able to act as un-caused causes for events in the world. Surprisingly it was the formal moral law, the categorical imperative, which Kant thought enabled persons to act as the ﬁrst, free cause. If one’s ends were such that everyone could promote them for themselves, then realization of this marked the fact that one was free, no longer on the mercy of arbitrary, external circumstances or one’s contingent desires. 3 Kant’s account of personhood is attractive, but difﬁcult to accept for its 221 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 221 30.7.2004 15:35:15 extravagant metaphysics of another ‘noumenal’ world beyond the world we inhabit. It also remained mysterious how the decisions of the free will, existing in the ‘noumenal’ realm, to endorse acting on some desires could have effects on the real persons that existed in the ‘phenomenal world’ governed by the causal laws of nature (Kant 1998[1785], 4:459462). And, if there were such effects wouldn’t they be arbitrary for the actual situations real humans face (Rawls 1971, 254–255)? For these reasons, Rawls wanted to revise Kant’s account by dismissing the assumption that there were ‘noumenal’ persons in a distinct world (Rawls 1971, 264). It is sufﬁcient that we, the actual persons, can think of ourselves still as same persons without the desires natural to us at particular instants, when deciding whether we want to act on them (Care 1987, 137– 139, Rawls 1971, 587). Metaphysically this sounds innocent enough. Rawls thought that our intuitions about justice provide evidence that we do think of ourselves in this way. The main thrust of A Theory of Justice was to argue that our judgments of justice conform to principles of justice that would have been chosen by us in the original position (Rawls 1971, 11–22). This position is characterised by the veil of ignorance. Behind it we are unaware of all the contingent features of ourselves that we possess; social positions, natural endowments, personal relationships, conceptions of good etc. The fact that our intuitions about justice that we are willing to act on match the principles selected from the original position, then for Rawls suggest that we can identify ourselves with the featureless persons behind the veil of ignorance – they are us (see Sandel 1982, 40–46). And so, there seems to be an actual person in us all prior to and independent of our ends and attachments revealing to us what would be the right things to do (Rawls 1971, 560). One problem with this conception is that it is unable to account for how such a person acts on the basis of deliberation in actual circumstances, where she possesses all her contingent features and ends (Sandel 1982, 154–174). How would a person deliberate and act in Rawls’s model? First, Rawls insists, this person would need to always make sure that her actions conformed to the principles of justice (Rawls 1971, 449). The purpose of those principles is to guarantee wider social circumstances in which one can express one’s nature as a person, who is an autonomous deliberator behind her ends. To act against such principles would be, in a way, self-defeating – reducing the possibilities to act out of free delib- 222 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 222 30.7.2004 15:35:15 eration. However, these principles are too loose to determine what one does; they guarantee room for individual decisions, not provide standards for each choice. This leaves us the question how to decide what to do within the limits of justice. The communitarians argue that the Rawlsian person behind all her ‘detachable’ features has impoverished means to resolve this question; mere principles of instrumental rationality (Sandel 1984, 158, Taylor 1979, 157). All the person can do is to fall back on what Rawls calls ‘pure preferential choice’ (Ralws 1971, 552). In this choice, you make an inventory of the intensity of your momentary desires and wants, and come up with a plan of life that most efﬁciently, extensively and probably fulﬁls those ends. The rational act at a moment is then chosen by how it conforms to that plan. In this way, agent’s acts are based on her own conception of good – her momentary desires corrected by principles of justice and instrumental rationality (Rawls 1971, 92–93, 416–417). However, this quasi-voluntarist view of practical agency doesn’t account for the difference between persons and other beings. If one’s conception of good and the rational end-product of deliberation have such a strict connection to the intensity of momentary desires that are products of one’s internal structure and the circumstances, then there is no categorical difference between persons who have the capacity to step back from desires but always ﬁnd out that the rational option is to act on them and animals that act on desires straight-away. On the basis of this one could claim that there are no persons, who are more strongly agents than other beings – personhood must thus be something else, or one could revise the conception of personhood to account for the fact that persons are ﬁrst and foremost agents. This latter is just what the communitarians did. 4 According to Sandel, Rawls drew the line between essential and detachable features of the person in the wrong place (Sandel 1982, chap. 4). The identity of a person is not merely constituted by an abstract ability to choose, but also by such substantial features as inhabiting particular social roles, taking part in personal relationships, being committed to certain projects etc. With introspection a person can come to know her 223 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 223 30.7.2004 15:35:15 own essential features. The communitarian person then has the kind of self-understanding that is impossible for the Rawlsian person without any other essential features than her capacity to deliberate (ibid., 54–59). According to this view then, living without the core attachments one can get to know would not be living the same life and being the same person, but being someone else. If all of one’s attachments were essential to the identity then this would mean that loosing any of these would imply loosing one’s identity as a person. Surely this is implausible, but the communitarian needn’t claim that all attachments are essential, but only that the most important ones are. Altogether, this is a more plausible account about the essential features of persons than the Rawlsian alternative. However, I don’t think these additions to the essential features can help us understand what gives persons the ability for self-commanding agency that makes persons distinct from other beings – as the following will show. (i) The Causal Route. The ﬁrst thought could be that one could ﬁnd one’s non-detachable features by reﬂecting the ways in which one has found oneself acting repeatedly even when occasionally one had thought of doing something else. This could reveal the strong dispositions to act in certain ways that make up for one’s character without which one would be another person. Dispositions could then be understood as elements of one’s internal structure that cause one to act in certain ways. These dispositions could solve the deliberative problems in which one is unsure about what to do – they lead to taking ‘the typical way out’. The problem is that when such dispositions are constituents of one’s personhood, they would seem to rather reduce agency than enable it. The smoking habit may solve practical problems by making one smoke, but this makes one more like a conditioned lab-rat running through the maze to get food than a self-commanding person. (ii) Close Attachments as Reasons. Michael Sandel implies that essential commitments can enable agency in another way (Sandel 1982, 180). He thought that the practical question ‘what to do?’ could be answered by changing the question to ‘who am I?’. The non-detachable attachments give a direct answer for this question. If I was an Arsenal supporter and couldn’t see myself as the same person without this commitment, then this fact about my identity could solve my practical problem by providing me with a good reason to watch the match rather than do something 224 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 224 30.7.2004 15:35:16 else. This reason could then make my decision independent of my momentary desires, and therefore provide grounds for my agency. There are however problems with this suggestion. First, it goes against our moral experience. Sandel presses this objection against Rawls, and so we can do the same against Sandel (Sandel 1982, 100, 177). In deciding to watch the match tonight I do not entertain thoughts about my identity - ‘who I am’, but thoughts about Arsenal – their last season’s winning streak and players like Henry. Those are my reasons that I use to solve the practical problem, not the facts about what sort of person I wouldn’t be without a particular choice. But could I use facts about my constitutive features as reasons in deliberation? Remember the addicted smoker whose non-detachable feature smoking is. This feature, by just being a non-detachable feature, is not a good reason to smoke – not even smokers themselves claim that it would be. I assume that the reasons willing, addicted smokers use to justify their smoking are facts like ‘smoking relaxes’, ‘provides breaks’ etc. but not that giving up smoking would shatter one’s identity. So, here is an essential feature of a person that is not a good reason to act on. Therefore, essential features are not good reasons to act qua being essential features (Buchanan 1989, 874), and if they are not, they hardly can help the person to acquire agency. (iii) Constitutive reason-responsive mechanisms. The best communitarian solution for the problem of agency comes from Charles Taylor (Taylor 1989, 27, 105). For him, the non-detachable commitments are not reasons for actions but distinct evaluative perspectives, ‘reason-responsive mechanisms,’ for the agent. From such perspectives certain things typical for that framework appear as reasons and others do not. If I am an Arsenal supporter then from that perspective I see their victories as reasons to celebrate, but I am indifferent to motor-sports. If I was a Maﬁoso I’d see considerations related to family and honour as reason-providers, but not the law. Such reason-responsive mechanisms can plausible be constitutive of one’s personhood – if one suddenly stopped seeing certain relevant facts as reasons, we would say that one’s identity is changing. In extreme cases one could become ‘another person’. This account avoids the previous problems. The sort of things we usually see as reasons are considered to be reasons, and they are considerations we take to be, by and large, good reasons. For us, as agents, our 225 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 225 30.7.2004 15:35:16 constitutive commitments thus appear to provide an evaluative basis to deliberate about the worth of the options provided by our immediate desires. By using these evaluative frameworks we acquire the needed distance from our desires, and get the necessary self-command. Therefore we seem to have succeeded in constituting an account of agency that can explain this distinguishing feature of all persons. However, there still is a problem (MacIntyre 1994, 188–189). It follows from our modern, complex identities. Most of us have identities that are constituted by a rich set of different deliberative perspectives. Even though many of these perspectives are prioritized within our identities, still when facing a choice between two different acts, we often ﬁnd in ourselves conﬂicting perspectives from which both options seem more reasonable than the other but in different ways. How are we to decide which framework to adopt if each of them is in part constitutive of our identities and no deﬁnitive order of importance is found? If this choice boils down to an immediate preference for one evaluative framework, communitarians have failed to provide us with a better account of human agency than liberalists. Notes 1 For an overview of the debate see Kymlicka 1990, ch. 6 and Mulhall & Swift 1992. Literature Buchanan, A. 1989 “Assessing the Communitarian Critique of Liberalism”, Ethics, 99, 852–882. Care, N. 1987 On Sharing Fate, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Carse, A. 1994 “The Liberal Individual: A Metaphysical or Moral Embarrassment?”, Noûs, 28, 184–209. Kant, I. 1998[1785] Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, translated by Gregor, M., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kymlicka, W. 1990 Contemporary Political Philosophy, Oxford: Clarendon Press. MacIntyre, A. 1994 “Critical Remarks on The Sources of the Self by Charles Taylor”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 54, 187–190. 226 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 226 30.7.2004 15:35:16 Mulhall, S. and Swift, A. 1992 Liberals and Communitarians, Oxford: Blackwell. Rawls, J. 1971 A Theory of Justice, London: Oxford University Press. Sandel, M. 1982 Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, C. 1979 Hegel and the Modern Society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, C. 1989 Sources of the Self, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 227 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 227 30.7.2004 15:35:16 Persons and Experiences Philippe Vellozzo Institut Jean Nicod, Paris, France philippe_vellozzo@club-internet.fr I believe the concept of a conscious being is very poorly understood. It is my aim in this paper to contribute to a better understanding of it. I wish to argue that the concept of a conscious being is logically prior to (or simpler than) that of a person. I believe and will argue that it is a priori that if S is a person, then S is a conscious being. (I do not wish to consider “compound persons”, such as business ﬁrms, nations and associations.) I think we also have good reasons to believe that it is not a priori that if S is a conscious being, then S is (or was once) a person. (Note that this might still be true if, as a matter of fact, only persons were conscious beings.) On what seems to be the majority view, conscious being is simply the concept of a being which has conscious states. For a being to be conscious at time t, it is necessary and sufﬁcient that at least one of its states be conscious at t. Obviously, however, this is not very illuminating. It is plainly as difﬁcult to explain precisely what it is for a state to be conscious as it is, in my view, to explain what it is for a being. I assume moreover that the relevant concept here is that of a phenomenally conscious state. A mental state is a phenomenally conscious state iff it has a qualitative or “phenomenal” character or, in other words, iff there is “something it is like” to be in that state (Nagel, 1974). A phenomenally conscious state is what we more ordinarily call “an experience” (see Block, 1997 and Siewert, 1998 for phenomenal consciousness.) 228 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 228 30.7.2004 15:35:16 1 The Concept of a Conscious Being Rosenthal claims that, to be conscious, “a person or other creature must be awake and sentient.” (Rosenthal, 1997). If this were right, we would have a good, objectively testable necessary condition. Rosenthal seems to think so, since he writes: “No special puzzle exists about what it is for a creature not to be conscious; so in this case the contrast between being conscious and not being conscious is reasonably transparent.” (Rosenthal, 1997, emphasis mine). The claim is that if a being is neither awake nor sentient, then it is unconscious. Still, one may conceive of a creature which, while neither awake nor sentient, can safely be supposed conscious. This creature suffers from complete “sensory deprivation”. All its senses are “cut off ” and it is “locally anaesthetized everywhere, perhaps ﬂoated in a tank of tepid water” (Anscombe, 1975). It is then not sentient, at least in the ordinary sense. Imagine also that it is asleep (hence, not awake), dreaming vivid dreams. Is it conscious or not ? I would say yes, but I agree the question is not settled. If it is not, then the contrast between conscious and unconscious beings is not transparent either. In order to clarify the issue, we need a distinction between the (folk) concept of a conscious being and the relatively technical notion of a subject of experience. Begin with the latter. Subject of experience is a “substance-concept”. A substance-concept purports to refer to a self-standing, independent entity, by picking out its essence, its “individuating” property. It answers the ‘What is it?’ question (Wiggins, 1980). An individual subject of experience just is a Cartesian Ego, a “conscious thing”. Conscious being, by contrast, refers to a contingent property. Then, nothing is simply a conscious being and anything that is a conscious being could have been unconscious. Moreover, something that is a conscious being at t0 and that, for whatever reason, loses this property at t1, do not cease to exist. Conscious being is a “phase sortal”, a concept that picks out a property things may have only temporarily (Wiggins, 1980). We cannot leave matters here. There is another relevant notion with which the concept of a conscious being might be confused. The concept I have in mind is temporary consciousness, which I deﬁne thus: A subject S is temporary conscious at t iff it has conscious states (that is, experiences) at t. Since conscious states are occurrences, temporary consciousness refers necessarily to an occurrent property. This is not so with conscious being, 229 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 229 30.7.2004 15:35:16 which refers, in my view, to a dispositional property. Something can be a conscious being at time t and yet have no conscious state at t. Think of a (“normal”) human adult in a coma for a few hours. Would it be literally false to say she’s a conscious being during that brief period? Of course, not. Yet, she’s not conscious, in the sense of temporary consciousness. A conscious being may then be temporarily unconscious, even for a long time. (One the other hand, it is a priori, I think, and uncontroversial, that if something is temporary conscious, then it is a conscious being.) Note ﬁnally that the concept of a conscious being, thus distinguished from the other two, is very close to, but more precise than that of “creature consciousness” (Rosenthal, 1997). 2 Logical Priority I believe the concept of a conscious being is prior to the concept of a person. I hold then what I will call the Priority Thesis. Intuitively, a concept C is logically prior to another C*, iff C* can be analysed or explained in terms of C and C cannot be analysed in terms of C*. It is quite a complicated task however to provide an a priori explanation or analysis for any concept whatsoever. Moreover, many will be suspicious of the very idea of conceptual analysis. In my view, the claim that a concept C is logically prior to another concept C* is best understood as the claim that it is a priori that if C is true of something, then C* is, while it is not a priori that C is true of something only if C* is (or, equivalently: while it is not a priori that it is not the case that C can be true and C* be false of the same thing.) I shall say that a situation in which p holds is conceivable if it is not a priori that it is not the case that p. Conceivability, in this technical sense, is a negative notion, which corresponds roughly to Chalmers’ “negative conceivability” (Chalmers, 2002). It is important to note that, while it is true that the conceivability of a situation s is different in principle from our actual capacity to imagine that s obtains, this capacity, when exercised with sufﬁcient rational reﬂection, may nevertheless be taken as evidence for the conceivability of s. In order to assess which of two concepts C and C* C is prior to the other, one should then try to determine whether (1) a situation in which C is true of an individual a and C* is false of a is conceivable, and whether (2) a situation in which C* is true of a and C is false of a is conceivable. 230 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 230 30.7.2004 15:35:16 If only the ﬁrst condition is fulﬁlled, then C is logically prior to C*. If only the second, C* is prior to C. If both conditions are fulﬁlled, then C and C* are entirely unrelated. If neither is, then C and C* are not different concepts. According to P.F. Strawson, the concept of a person is “the concept of a type of entity such that both predicates ascribing states of consciousness and predicates ascribing corporeal characteristics, a physical situation &c. are equally applicable to a single individual of that single type.” (Strawson, 1959). He does not argue directly for the thesis that person is prior to conscious being, but I think he’s committed to it. Strawson’s view is that the concept of a person is primitive. Anyone who embraces such a view is committed to denying that any likely candidate concept, like that of a conscious subject, is logically prior to the concept of a person. 3 Is Person Primitive? I won’t enter into the details of Strawson’s argument here. He claims that the concept of a subject of experience, the concept of a type of entity such that only predicates ascribing states of consciousness are applicable to a single individual of that single type, is incoherent. In rough outlines, the argument is as follows. (1) Solipsism would necessarily be true of a subject of experience, since “one cannot identify others if one can identify them only as subjects of experience”. (2) A substance-concept is not applicable to an individual of a certain type unless it is applicable, at least in principle, to another individual of that same type. Therefore: Subject of experience cannot be a substance-concept. But, since conscious being is not a substance-concept, the argument has no force against the claim that conscious being is logically prior to person. Is it a priori that if something is a conscious being, then it is (or was once) a person? I don’t think so. Even if it were empirically false that there are conscious beings that are not persons, one might easily imagine such creatures. In fact, most of us believe non-human animals are such creatures. If we were wrong and animals were not temporarily conscious the way we are, as Shoemaker (1991) suggests, we wouldn’t be irrational in believing that they are. This is, I think, good evidence that a situation in which something is a conscious being and is not a person is conceivable and, in the absence of conﬂicting evidence, I shall conclude that it is. So 231 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 231 30.7.2004 15:35:17 it is not a priori that if something is a conscious being, then it is (or was once) a person. The concept of a person is not primitive. At this point, one might object that the sense in which most of us believe animals and infants are not persons, is not the sense in which Strawson claims that person is primitive. My reply is that the difference is irrelevant. True, the Strawsonian concept of a person is not the more ordinary, Lockean concept. On the “Lockean Account of Personhood” (Olson, 1997, pp. 102-105), S is a person iff S is a self-conscious, rational creature1. But Strawson says that a person is what the pronoun “I” refers to (Strawson, 1959). His (Kantian) concept of consciousness entails selfconsciousness and his “states of consciousness” are “personal” (i.e. rational) states. Then, as far as mental properties are concerned, the Strawsonian and Lockean concepts are the same. In addition, I don’t see how one could claim that animals and infants are “persons” and be faithful to “ordinary use”. 4 An Argument for the Priority Thesis It remains to be shown that it is a priori that if something is a person, then it a conscious being. This is a much more difﬁcult task than the previous one. But let me remind you that “compound persons” have been excluded. The question of interest is whether, compound persons excluded, a situation in which something is a person and is not a conscious being is conceivable. If it is not, and if what has been said so far is correct, then conscious being is logically prior to person. I admit we’re able to imagine a person who is not temporary conscious. But a conscious being is not necessarily temporary conscious. Are we able to imagine a person who cannot be temporary conscious, a person who would not be temporary conscious if favourable conditions were to obtain ? As far as I can tell, the answer is “no”. Yet, our imaginative powers are limited and a situation one cannot imagine may still be conceivable. I will then use a thought-experiment to make my case. Cora, a “normal” human adult, is a conscious being and a person. Imagine that Cora, captured by a team of mad scientists, has been put into a machine called a “Consciousness Extractor”. As a result, she’s been duplicated, but in such a way that her duplicate, “Dora” is unconscious. (Even if nomologically impossible, such a situation does not seem, to me at least, logi- 232 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 232 30.7.2004 15:35:17 cally impossible.) Cora is still alive. Then, consciousness apart, Cora and Dora are perfect functional and physical duplicates. To be sure, they are entirely different. Cora is a conscious being while Dora is not. Consequently, there is “something it is like” to be Cora, but nothing it is like to be Dora, and Cora is able to do lots of things Dora is unable. My question is: Is Dora a person? I doubt that we have much reason to say it is. Yet I cannot prove that it is not. I cannot but appeal to shared intuitions. In more explicit form, my argument is the following. (1) An unconscious duplicate of a person, like Dora, is possible (at least it is conceivable). (2) Such an unconscious duplicate is not a person. This is a conceptual claim with which I think most would agree. In my view, this count as strong evidence in its favour. Further, I don’t see any clear evidence against it. (3) Since Dora is not a person but is identical with a person, apart from the fact that it is not a conscious being, one is justiﬁed in believing that it is a priori that if something is a person, then it is a conscious being. Notes 1 Dennett (1978) gives a full list of necessary conditions, along the same lines. However he takes these conditions not to be sufficient. (Note also that consciousness figures on his list, as in the original Lockean theory.) Literature Anscombe, G.E.M. 1975 “The First Person”, in S. Guttenplan (ed.), Mind and Language: Wolfson College Lectures, 1974, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Block, N. 1997 “On a confusion about a function of consciousness”, In N. Block, O. Flanagan & G. Güzeldere (eds.), The Nature of Consciousness, Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press. Chalmers, D. 2002 “Does Conceivability Entails Possibility”, In T. Gendler & J. Hawthorne (eds.), Conceivability and Possibility, Oxford : Oxford University Press. Dennett, D. 1981 Brainstorms. Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology, Brighton : Harvester Press. Frankfurt, H. 1971 “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person. Journal of Philosophy, LXVIII (January 14, 1971). Loar, B. 1997 “Phenomenal States”, In N. Block, O. Flanagan & G. Güzeldere (eds.), The Nature of Consciousness, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 233 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 233 30.7.2004 15:35:17 McGinn, C. 1989 “Can we solve the mind-body problem?”, Mind, 98, 349366. Nagel, T. 1974 “What is it Like to Be a Bat?”, Philosophical Review, Vol. 83 : 4 ; 435-450. Olson, E. 1997 The Human Animal. Personal Identity Without Psychology, Oxford : Oxford University Press. Rosenthal, D. 1997 “A Theory of Consciousness”, In N. Block, O. Flanagan & G. Güzeldere (eds.), The Nature of Consciousness, Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press. Searle, J. 1992 The Rediscovery of the Mind, Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press. Shoemaker, S. 1991 “Qualia and Consciousness”, Mind, 100, 57-524. Siewert, C. 1998 The Significance of Consciousness, Princeton : Princeton University Press. Strawson, P.F. 1959 Individuals, London : Routledge. Wiggins, D. 1980 Sameness and Substance, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 234 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 234 30.7.2004 15:35:17 Plato and Parfit on the Identity of Persons. Continuity Through Replacement in Symposium 207d-208b Ugo Zilioli University of Exeter, UK u.zilioli@ex.ac.uk O ne of the possible ways to approach the idea of personhood and its problematic dimensions is to talk about the identity of persons. As widely known among those present at this conference, to talk of personal identity means to deal with many issues of philosophy of mind and ethics. What I intend to do in this paper is to conﬁne myself to one central aspect of personal identity only, namely that of the identity of persons over time, and to do that by having, as ﬁeld of inquiry, Greek philosophy. In particular, the passage that concerns me most in this respect is Plato’s Symposium 207d-208b. This is one of the ﬁrst places in the history of philosophy in which the problem of the identity of persons over time is posed and a solution, although cryptic, is given. What I intend to show is that the solution provided by Plato in the Symposium to the problem of the identity of persons over time has very close similarities with the radical answer proposed by Derek Parﬁt to the same problem in his Reasons and Persons (or, conversely, I wish to show that the solution Parﬁt proposes may help to make better sense of the passage of the Symposium under scrutiny). My claims are ﬁrst that Greek philosophy was well aware that there was a problem about the identity of individuals over time and, secondly and more importantly, that the radical solutions that contemporary philosophy has provided to the problem in a so detailed way may be already hinted at in Plato’s Symposium. 235 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 235 30.7.2004 15:35:17 From an historical point of view, the ideas of personhood and personal identity have become important issues in philosophy since the time of Locke, Butler, Reid and Hume. This led some to deny that those ideas were signiﬁcantly present in philosophy before Locke but in recent years some studies have demonstrated the presence and importance of the notion of person in Greek Thought (e.g. C. Gill, Personality in Greek Epic, Tragedy, Philosophy, Oxford: OUP, 1996.) In particular, in an illuminating article David Sedley has shown that there had been a tough debate in the third and second centuries B.C. between Academics and Stoics over an argument (initially formulated by the comic playwright Epicharmus in the ﬁfth century B.C. and later labelled the ‘Growing Argument’) which dealt with the identity and change of physical objects and, more importantly, of individuals (Sedley 1982, 255-265.) In its original form, i.e. that of Epicharmus, the argument runs in the following way: ‘One man is growing, another is diminishing, and all are constantly in the process of change. But what by its nature changes and never stays put must already be different from what it has changed from. You and I are different today from who we were yesterday, and by the same argument we will be different again and never the same in the future.’ (This is Sedley’s paraphrase of the original quotation of Epicharmus; Sedley 1982, 255.) The argument concerns a puzzle about the identity and persistence of persons over time. As we know, this puzzle is the crucial question for most of our current discussions about personal identity but, surprisingly, the problem was already individuated by Greek philosophy, which was later able to provide two solutions for it. The ﬁrst one is that offered by the Stoics and the most inﬂuential head of their school, Chrysippus, who, by distinguishing the material constitution of a body and a mind from what makes the same body and mind a person, arrived to a solution very close to that proposed by Locke in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Sedley 1982, 259.) The alteration, both physical and psychological, of a lump of matter over time need not imply that the identity of the person related in some way to this lump of matter is affected, at least in the extreme way that Epicharmus seems to have suggested. This is the argument that Chrysippus puts forward to answer Epicharmus’ puzzle and that closely resembles, as I have just said brieﬂy, that of Locke when he afﬁrms that “in the state of living creatures, their identity depends not on a mass of the same particles, but on something else” (Locke 1694, 27.3, in Perry 1975, 35.) But in Greek philosophy another 236 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 236 30.7.2004 15:35:17 solution was provided, or at least hinted at, to Epicharmus’ puzzle and this is the solution we are faced with in Plato’s Symposium. Almost at the end of the dialogue, whose central topic is eros, Diotima, Socrates’ master in the mysteries of love, begins talking about immortality and claims that the only way in which human beings can be immortal is through reproduction. This is so because it is only through reproduction that mortal nature “always leaves behind another, new generation, to replace the old” (Symp. 207d; Gill 1999, 45.)1 This is also the case, Diotima argues, when each living creature is described as alive and as the same over time. Since this is the key-point of her speech for us, I will quote it entirely. Diotima says: Someone is said to be the same person from childhood till old age. Although he is called the same person, he never has the same constituents, but is always being renewed in some respects and experiencing loss in others, for instance, his hair, skin, bone, blood and his whole body. This applies not only to the body but also to the mind: attributes, character-traits, beliefs, desires, pleasures, pains, fears (…). Our knowledge changes too, some items emerging while others are lost, so we are not the same person as regards our knowledge (Symp. 207e-208a.) This passage in fact reformulates Epicharmus’ puzzle about the (non)identity of persons over time. After the puzzle being expounded, Diotima reiterates the cryptic solution she has rapidly alluded to earlier by saying: This is the way that every mortal thing is maintained in existence, not by being completely the same, as divine things are, but because everything that grows old and goes away leaves behind another thing of the same type (Symp. 208b.) Plato’s Diotima offers an answer to the problem about the identity of persons over time and thus gives a solution to Epicharmus’ puzzle one century before the Stoics gave theirs, but it is hard for us to understand what she means. She says that human beings cannot be completely the same, since only divine things are that way. In a strict sense, only gods can be always the same over time, but in another sense, a loose and popular one perhaps, human beings are said to be the same because everything that changes in us, both from a physical and a psychological point 237 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 237 30.7.2004 15:35:18 of view, is being replaced by another new thing of the same type that takes the place of the perishing old one. As far as human beings are concerned, we cannot say that an individual is identical, the same, over time, according to Diotima; nonetheless there should be another relation, different from identity, which makes it intelligible for us to conceive of the individual as the same (although not completely the same) over time. What might this relation be? The more suitable candidate for identifying this relation, the second best after identity, is, I believe, continuity. For Diotima, an individual experiences physical and psychological changes in his lifetime but the nature of the process of replacement she talks about is such that the new replacing stuff, whatever it is, is different from the old replaced one but of the same type. This may allow us to think of the individual who experiences inevitable alterations to his physical and mental constitution as someone experiencing a kind of continuity, of a spatio-temporal sort, among all these alterations, since these latter can be as many as they can, but they will all be of the same type, of the same nature (I am ready to admit that this point here needs more clarity, but Plato has not been very generous in providing details on it). Is this kind of spatio-temporal continuity the one Plato’s Diotima has in mind in the Symposium? It could well be, but what happens if the modiﬁcations that an individual undergoes are so signiﬁcant that it is hard for himself and others to recognize him as the same person? Does the passage of the Symposium under scrutiny allow us to think of such drastic alterations? The case of personal identity over time in the Symposium is a minor case of a more important process that is that of human reproduction. When Diotima poses the problem of the identity of persons over time, what concerns her most is immortality through reproduction. It is through reproduction that human nature becomes immortal, since “it always leaves behind another, new generation, to replace the old” (Symp. 207d.) Let me illustrate what I think is Diotima’s point with a personal example (which may be particularly relevant since we are here talking about persons…). My wife and I are expecting a daughter, due in few weeks, whose name will be Ida. Ida will make us immortal, according to Diotima, since she will ‘replace’ my wife and I. Although being a different individual both from my wife and myself, Ida will have some physical and psychological traits of both my wife and myself. Diotima could argue that Ida, al- 238 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 238 30.7.2004 15:35:18 though leading her own peculiar life, would be, in some sense, continuous with my wife and myself in such a way that she can be said to replace both of us. The kind of continuity that Ida would display is not spatiotemporal, she and her life occupying different times and spaces from that of her parents. We can make better sense of this situation if we think of continuity, of a weaker sort, between parents and sons but before understanding the possible nature of this continuity, it is important to remember that Diotima’s argument about immortality through reproduction is then applied to the minor case about the identity of persons over time.2 This latter case is a less important example of a more essential event of human life (i.e. namely human reproduction); if a weaker continuity (between parents and their offspring) is what can characterize the major case of human reproduction, I believe there will be good reasons for taking this weaker continuity as being possibly characteristic of the minor case of personal identity too. This would mean that in Diotima’s treatment of personal identity in the Symposium, we could conceive of an individual undergoing so drastic alterations in his lifetime that it would be hard for himself and others to re-identify him as the same person. As the paradigmatic case of immortality through reproduction suggests with the duplication of lives, the individual undergoing drastic modiﬁcations in his physical and psychological structure may be thought of as being two different persons. Diotima could argue that “everything that grows old and goes away leaves behind another thing of the same type”, even in the case of drastic alterations, and that continuity between the various stages of the life of the individual would be guaranteed anyway. But it is hard to take the continuity we can speak of in case of drastic modiﬁcations of the individual as a spatio-temporal one (indeed it seems that we have two different persons at the beginning and end of the changing process) and again, as in the case of human reproduction, we had better think in terms of a weaker continuity. What sense can we make of this weaker continuity? What I propose is that one candidate for deﬁning this weaker continuity might be the kind of continuity or connectedness that Derek Parﬁt has in mind in his Reasons and Persons. Very summarily, what he says is that the kind of continuity or connectedness (exclusively psychological for him) he thinks of is one that allows for the branching of lives so that there is the possibil- 239 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 239 30.7.2004 15:35:18 ity, at least from a theoretical point of view, that in some (extreme) cases there will be two different people psychologically continuous or connected with the person I am now. This breaks off the uniqueness of the relation of identity, which is all-or-nothing, to leave room for the more modest relation R (psychological continuity or connectedness, with the right kind of cause), which is what matters for us (Parﬁt 1987, 261-266.) As Diotima claims in the Symposium, identity is a divine prerogative and human beings are thus left with a less potent relation to be established between the inevitable modiﬁcations through which they undergo (as unique and peculiar individuals) in their lives. Such a less powerful relation can be, as I have argued, spatio-temporal continuity. But since the logic of the section of the Symposium considered in this article requires us to consider cases concerning duplication of persons and lives, another candidate for the less powerful relation Diotima talks of could well be Parﬁt’s relation R, which allows for the branching of persons and lives even within the life of what we wrongly take to be the same individual over time. If this argument is sound, Greek philosophy will reveal itself to have been capable not only to understand that there was a problem about the identity of persons over time, but also to both provide a Lockean answer to the problem (i.e. the one the Stoics formulated) and to hint at a more radical solution (in a Parﬁtian fashion), namely the one alluded to by Diotima in Plato’s Symposium. With this latter radical solution, Greek philosophy made what I believe is the correct philosophical move for those who still nowadays are faced with the problem of the criteria of personal identity over time, namely to leave aside the idea of identity to take a safer refuge in the idea of a weak continuity over time. From this change of perspective, a more evanescent idea of personhood may follow, which may be more hard to deﬁne or more disturbing to accept but which may provide better answers to our queries about the notion of person than those that more traditional conceptions of personhood are able to provide. Notes 1 For Plato’s Symposium, I refer to Gill 1999. Every passage of the dialogue quoted in this article will be found at p .45 of Gill’s translation. 240 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 240 30.7.2004 15:35:18 2 See Symp. 207d: “This point (sc. that of immortality through reproduction) applies even in the period in which each living creature is described as alive and as the same.” (See above, p. 3.) Literature Gill, C. 1999 Plato. The Symposium, London: Penguin. Locke, J. 1694 Essay Concerning Human Understanding, reprinted in Perry, J. (ed.) 1975 Personal Identity, Berkeley: University of California Press, 3352. Parfit, D. 1987 Reasons and Persons, Oxford: OUP, 2nd edition. Sedley, D. 1982 “The Stoic Criterion of Identity”, Phronesis, 27, 1982, 255275. 241 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 241 30.7.2004 15:35:18 Abstracts Phenomenology of Persons or Ontological Analytic of Dasein? A Reply to Heiddegger’s Critique of Classical Phenomenology? Sara Heinämaa University of Helsinki, Finland sara.heinamaa@helsinki.ﬁ In Sein und Zeit (1929), Heidegger presents two critical claims against Husserl’s account of persons. First, Heidegger argues that Husserl’s notion of personhood is inadequate: Husserl deﬁnes the person as a mere performer of acts but leaves unexplained what it means to perform acts. Second, Heidegger claims that the classical phenomenological account of the person as a spiritual-bodily whole is naïve, because Husserl fails to explain the unity of the three different kinds of being: body, soul, and spirit. Heidegger argues: “When (…) we come to the question of man’s Being, this is not something we can simply compute by adding together those kinds of Being which body, soul, and spirit respectively possess – kinds of Being whose nature has not as yet been determined.” Heidegger claims that these shortcomings have their roots in phenomenology’s indebtedness to Ancient and Christian anthropology. He argues that philosophy must break away from this tradition and inquiry back to its forgotten basis. Thus, classical phenomenology could be substituted by the ontological analytics of Dasein. I argue in this paper that Heidegger’s presentation of Husserl’s account of personhood is misguided. This holds for the remarks presented in Sein und Zeit as well as for the earlier, more extended discussion in the lecture course 242 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 242 30.7.2004 15:35:18 Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs: Prolegomena zu einer Phänomenologie von Geschichte und Natur (1925). By focusing on Husserl’s discussion in Ideen II (written in 1912–1928), I demonstrate that already in the 1920s, Husserl argued that the phenomenological investigation shows that the self is not a mere performer of transient acts or an empty act pole but a temporal sediment of actions and affections. Husserl called “person” this internal temporal formation, and argued that as such the person is not an outcome of activity but founded on primary passivity. He systemized this view in the end of the 1920s in his Cartesianische Meditationen, but Ideen II already includes the main reasoning, and this work was sent to Heidegger in 1925. Further, I argue that Heidegger’s critical remarks on the soul-body union ignore Husserl’s argument that the living body of a person is not a union of two substances but must be described by the concepts of expression. Thus I conclude that Heidegger’s presentation of Husserl’s notion of personhood in Sein und Zeit is selective and one-sided. Materialism and Psychological Approaches to Personal Identity Sune Holm University of St. Andrews, UK shh2@st-andrews.ac.uk In this paper I start out by presenting some central motivations for taking psychological relations to be necessary for personal identity. The Psychological Approach claims that persons have psychological persistence conditions. For me to exist at some other time there must be someone with which I am appropriately psychologically related. Two central reasons for claiming that psychology is necessary for personal identity is (1) the Transplant Intuition brought out in Shoemaker’s famous Brown-Brownson scenario that we believe we go were our mind goes and (2) considerations about the patterns of our identity based practical concerns as shown in e.g. Unger’s Avoidance of Future Great Pain Tests. The Psychological Approach seems to combine badly with materialism about persons. If I am identical to a material body, e.g. a particular human organism, and go where my mind goes, then it seems that we must hold contradictory be- 243 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 243 30.7.2004 15:35:18 liefs about ourselves in some albeit abnormal circumstances. The problem is this: (1) At t1 you are identical to organism x which is at place P (2) At t1 there exists another organism y which is at another place P* Say there is a brains-state transfer and hence a transfer of psychology after t1 from x to y. Then at some later time t2 (4) You are identical to organism y (5) y were at P* at t1 (6) You were not at P* at t1 But if (4) is true, then the formal character of numerical identity allows that we can substitute (5) with (5*): you were at P* at t1. But (5*) contradicts (6). Hence, if we allow for body-change and assume that you are a human organism we allow for the possibility that at time t1 you were in place P* and not in place P*. A way in which a materialist impressed with the Psychological Approach might try to avoid the difﬁculty is to distinguish personal identity from the identity of human organisms or animal identity. This would allow for the claim that two distinct human organisms such as x and y in the example can be the same person and not the same organism. But it would also commit one to the claim that you, the human person, are a material being that is not identical to the human organism or animal sitting where you are sitting. If the human person is identical to the human animal it will presumably have the same persistence conditions as that animal but this has just been ruled out. What the adherent of the Psychological Approach will argue is rather you share your matter with a human animal which is distinct from you. In Persons and Bodies Baker provides a defence of a constitution view of persons. I shall discuss the prospect of this view in relation to the problem presented and conclude that it is not the way to go for a materialist. One of the criticisms which I take up is ‘The Thinking Animal’ argument against the constitution view about persons presented in Olson’s The Human Animal. However, I ﬁnd that there are problems facing Olson’s preferred Biological Approach. I shall focus on his acceptance of the view that ‘identity isn’t what matters.’ I shall argue that it is a problem for Olson’s approach that there can be personal identity without what matters. The psychological approaches associated with this slogan (e.g. Parﬁt and Shoemaker) denies that there can be personal identity without what matters, and only accept that there can be what 244 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 244 30.7.2004 15:35:18 matters without identity. Hence, Olson’s claim is more radical than his opponent’s and needs independent justiﬁcation. I conclude that neither of the materialist views discussed is satisfactory and that Parﬁtian reductionism or Lewisian fourdimensionalism seem more likely to be able to deal with the problem of combining a Psychological Approach and materialism. Folk Psychological Narratives and Personal Identity Daniel Hutto University of Hertfordshire, UK d.d.hutto@herts.ac.uk It is almost universally assumed that the main business of commonsense psychology is to provide generally reliable predictions and explanations of the actions of others. In line with this it not unusual to hear that development of an innate ‘mindreading’ module was the ancient solution to an adaptive problem that arose for our ancestors (Baron-Cohen 1995, p. 12). Since folk psychology is thought to underwrite even the most basic forms of social navigation and coordination a great energy has been invested into determining exactly by what means it is conducted; deciding whether its feats are achieved by the deployment of some kind of theory or by a process of simulative imagining. Drawing on current developmental evidence and evolutionary considerations, I expose some serious problems with standard accounts of genesis of these abilities, if understood under their typical ‘mentalistic’ construal. More than this, I reveal that the ‘standard view’ incorporates highly questionable assumptions about the scope and nature of commonsense psychology. Chief amongst these is that we start life and remain at ‘theoretical’ remove from others; that the attitude we adopt towards them is on a par with that deployed when understanding impersonal ‘foreign bodies’. Accordingly, it is supposed that our initial stance with respect to others is essentially estranged. Bogdan conveniently labels this ‘the spectatorial view of interpretation’ (Bogdan 1997, p. 104). This cluster of ideas has been seriously challenged by advocates of secondpersonal approaches that regard our primary intersubjective interactions as a form of ‘embodied practice’. They maintain that it is simply false to suppose that commonsense psychology explains what underpins our most basic forms 245 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 245 30.7.2004 15:35:19 of interaction with others. Rather it shows that the success in this arena depends on our being embedded in ‘normal’ contexts, in which we are naturally attuned to their responses and cues. I brieﬂy explicate and defend this work, maintaining that a strong case can be made for Gallagher’s developmental claim about the primacy of embodied practice as well as for his ‘strong pragmatic’ claim that intersubjective engagements subtend our normal adult interactions. However, I go on to argue that taking seriously the second-personal starting point ought to get us to reconsider prevailing views about the function and context of commonsense psychology. In abandoning the idea that contexts in which we make sense of others are normally spectatorial, we can recast and reorient our thinking about its scope, nature and function. In doing so, I expand upon Bruner’s idea that narratives establish our folk psychological norms about what to expect from each other in everyday circumstances. I also defend the idea that narratives play a vital role in enabling others to ‘negotiate’ deviations from these norms when explaining their actions, either by ﬁlling in missing details or helping us to appreciate the wider background against which an action took place. In this way, where possible, narratives domesticate the seemingly eccentric, exotic or somehow extraordinary. I then relate these proposals to the vexed issue of the role and extent that narratives might play in unifying our self-consciousness and its bearing on issues concerning personal identity. Against philosophers such as Taylor and MacIntyre, I suggest that the narratives, or better meta-narratives, that might plausibly help us to understand self-consciousness are not linear or uniﬁed. Nor is it plausible that the supposed unity of such narratives can be the basis for personal identity since it is only if we presuppose that the narrator remains the same over time that we can make sense of the kinds of shifts in interests, values and goals that make up an ordinary life. 246 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 246 30.7.2004 15:35:19 Conscious Life as Subject and Person. Notes on Dieter Henrich’s and Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s Theory of Subjectivity Ari Kivelä University of Oulu, Finland ari.kivela@oulu.ﬁ Concepts like conscious life, basic relation, subject and person play central roles in Dieter Henrich’s theory of subjectivity. Several ideas are embodied in his programmatic project. Henrich tries to solve the conceptual and logical problems involved in the classic reﬂection theoretical concept of self-consciousness. Thus subjectivity can remain in the focus of philosophy. In his theory of subjectivity, Henrich criticises the intersubjectivistic reduction of subjectivity. Self-relations of conscious life cannot be understood or explained by linguistic intersubjectivity alone. Although personhood constitutes itself in intersubjective relations, personhood and prereﬂective subjectivity both are undeniable dimensions or origins of an individual being. Henrich’s project is also open to metaphysics. Consciousness has a ground that cannot be reached by the reﬂexive consciousness itself. However, this ground actualises itself in basic human-world relation. Thus the conscious being in the world can be understood as an opening process of conscious life. In this process the ground of consciousness actualises itself as subjectivity and personhood, and the conscious individual ﬁnds itself in a conﬂict between the tendencies, that arise from the tension of the two dimensions and that constitutes the basic relation. Although Henrich has always emphasized the importance of Fichte’s theory of subjectivity, he rarely refers to early Romanticism. I try to argue, however, that Henrich´ s own theory of subjectivity resembles in many ways Fichte’s ideas, even more than Henrich is ready to admit. According to Fichte, conscious being is a complex totality constituted of different elements or dimensions that have their functional sense only in the complex structure of consciousness itself. In this complexity absolute reason materialises itself into individual form. The process of individualisation takes place in the mutual determination-relation between I and Not-I. Interpersonal relations build the context for this process. Thus, close reading of Fichte’s early philosophy gives us a deeper understanding for Henrich’s thesis that subjectivity and intersubjectivity must be seen in terms of equality. 247 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 247 30.7.2004 15:35:19 Subjectivity and Essential Individuality Roberta de Monticelli University of Geneva, Switzerland roberta.demonticelli@lettres.unige.ch What is individuality? The intuition I shall defend is that some objects are individuals in a stronger sense than others, which are usually classiﬁed as individuals too by the standard logical and ontological terminology. For example: a person is an individual in a stronger sense than a chair or a stone; a work of art, a poem or a novel, a picture or a sonata, have a stronger individuality than, say, washing machines or refrigerators. This stronger individuality will be called essential individuality. Persons are not, according to this theory, the only case of individuals in an essential sense; yet they are the paradigmatic case of such individuality. Now this connection to persons is what makes the study of essential individuality deeply interesting – and necessary. Even more so, since the strong sense of « individual » is practically the only one people bear in mind when using common language, and to some extent, common sense. Each person is perceived by others and by herself as an individual in a very strong sense, namely as a unique individual. Moreover, this supposed uniqueness is commonly thought of as linked with another character that we tend to attribute to persons (as opposed, say, to stones or chairs): a kind of depth, hidden to sensory perception, yet in some measure accessible to other means of personal knowledge. Uniqueness and depth are the main features of the notion of strong or essential individuality, which is the subject of this paper. It is a notion – admittedly a quite implicit one – we make use of in a massive way when dealing with people (marrying a person, for instance, or falling in love with her/him, or being in mourning for somebody), but also when thinking of people (writing a biography, studying a historical character) or addressing to them (writing a letter, entertaining a conversation). From a phenomenological point of view strong individuality is more than an implicit commonsensical notion about persons: it is a basic phenomenon, a way in which our being manifests itself quite apparently, or an ontologically well founded appearance. But if this is the case, and if the notion of strong individuality is – in ordinary speech - commonly although implicitly linked to that of personality, it is surprising that contemporary philosophers have not philosophically or conceptually 248 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 248 30.7.2004 15:35:19 analysed such a notion. Such a silence is even more surprising within contemporary philosophy of mind, where it is the rule – with the relevant exception of some biologists or biologically minded philosophers. As it is well known, subjectivity, this apparent layer of being that is lacking in chairs, is the very centre of the debate about the naturalisation of the mind. It actually is the point at issue: is subjectivity an effective layer of being, or is it nothing but an appearance founded on a completely different sort of things? Is subjectivity a part of the ontological furnishings of the world, or is it nothing but an epiphenomenon? Strangely enough, subjectivity seems to be the only notion taken into account by both “naturalizers” and their opponents, whereas strong individuality is no less essential to the ordinary notion of a person, as opposed to that of a “thing”. If I am right and individuality is indeed the foundation of subjectivity, it is not surprising that one should not succeed in rescuing subjectivity against physicalistic arguments while ignoring individuality. I shall propose a theory of strong or essential individuality, including ontological and epistemological criteria for applying this notion. I shall argue that the proposed theory provides us with solutions (better than most traditional ones) to three (classical) related problems: 1.Individuation and its principle; 2. personal identity; 3. body-mind. Identiﬁcation and Authentic Personality Heike Schmidt-Felzmann National University of Ireland, Galway h.s.felzmann@gmx.de Authenticity is an important characteristic of personal existence that is usually considered to be closely related to personal identity and uniqueness, a person’s autonomy and responsibility, and her interpersonal life. In my paper I will discuss one requirement of authenticity, namely the person’s identiﬁcation with her particular psychological dispositions. Drawing partly on certain psychiatric cases of personality change, I will argue that affective attitudes may have a more independent role in identiﬁcation than is often acknowledged. This in turn may have implications for the possible scope and force of critical reﬂection. The notion of identiﬁcation has played a crucial role in recent debates on freedom of the will and authenticity, notably in Frankfurt and Christman. Identiﬁcation with a psychological state requires that the person takes a speciﬁc 249 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 249 30.7.2004 15:35:19 stance towards this state. A number of different aspects have been discussed as relevant for authentic identiﬁcation, namely (i) critical reﬂection of these states and their implications for the person’s life broadly understood, (ii) their positive evaluative assessment, (iii) the person’s positive affective experience with regard to them, and (iv) her awareness and acceptance of the legitimacy of the process of their development. Based on this understanding of identiﬁcation, I will discuss two cases of signiﬁcant personality changes from psychiatric practice that are the result of abnormal brain processes (initial stages of Pick’s disease) or psychopharmacological intervention (the antidepressants SSRIs). However, in both cases, neither do the resulting personalities seem abnormal when considered by themselves, nor is there an indication of signiﬁcant impairments in cognitive and emotional functioning. I will discuss the way in which the persons who are affected by such personality changes cope with their new situation. Many patients seem to fully identify with these changes, even when they run counter to what were previously important personal values for them, and even when they are aware, as in the case of antidepressants, which causal processes brought about these changes. However, cognitive distancing occurs in some cases and has been reported especially in some cases of antidepressant use. Interestingly, the difference between both cases may not be only based on cognitive disagreement, but it may also involve a different phenomenology of the state of antidepressant use, as some descriptions by patients indicate. How should the case of identiﬁcation be interpreted? One option is to argue that it should be understood as pathological, as not fulﬁlling the requirements of identiﬁcation in the full sense. However, on an alternative interpretation, which would be in keeping with Frankfurt’s recent reﬂections on what it means to care for something, these cases may be understood as further indication of the importance of affective elements in “what we care about” and of the comparatively limited scope and force of rational argument with regard to evaluative attitudes. However, even if these patients may be said to fully identify with their changed personalities, whether they should also be considered authentic depends on the further question (that exceeds the scope of this paper) whether authenticity requires the fulﬁlment of additional criteria. 250 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 250 30.7.2004 15:35:19 Body, Animal and Moral agent: Three Lockean Identiﬁcations in Posthuman Times Mikko Yrjönsuuri University of Jyväskylä, Finland mikyrjo@yﬁ.jyu.ﬁ As is well known, John Locke distinguishes as personal identity a special kind of cross-temporal sameness that is based on some kind of psychological continuity. Instead of directly tackling with the difﬁcult concept of consciousness - as much of the discussion has done - I here start with the two other kinds of identity described by Locke in Essays II, 27. By this route, we can get a clearer picture of the deeper problems involved in identifying ourselves with that which Locke calls a person. For Locke, the identity of a material particle is clear and unproblematic. It is based on the fact that the particle remains the same under all circumstances. In Essays II, 27 he seems to adopt an atomistic theory of matter, where identity as a piece of matter, as a body, is based on the entire particle remaining the same. If their collection changes, the identity of the body changes. This kind of identity is, however, not of much use in practical life, as Locke recognizes. The identity of an animal or a machine is functional. Despite the collection of material particles changing through nutrition and growth, the identity of a plant or an animal remains unchanged, if the same life continues. The same holds for machines, where sameness is not threatened when parts (“organs” in Locke’s words) of the machine are changed as long as it remains functionally the same machine. As Locke makes clear, our identities as human beings are of this kind. Identity of a person is conceptually distinct from either of these two previous types. As Locke argues, a person must at all times consider some material (or immaterial) substance as himself. But just like the matter in an animal or in a machine may change, so can the substance which I, say, as a person in this sense take to be me. Indeed, Locke’s point seems to be that as a person I could in some sense identify with distinct functional identities - as different functional identities. Or, in other words, as different human beings. Moral responsibility is, as Locke sees it, relevant only at the level of personal identity. By the essentially rational identiﬁcation through consciousness, persons 251 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 251 30.7.2004 15:35:19 identify themselves moral agents. It is clear that Locke thinks that these moral agents are bodily things and even functionally identiﬁable human beings. Nevertheless, the moral identiﬁcation as a person takes place at a different level. How should we think of ourselves? As rational moral agents capable of viewing some actions as up to us and under our own responsibility? Or as physical human beings with continued physical lives? These two are distinct identities and a choice between the two is imaginable. Locke allows that his arguments do not sufﬁce to prove that the former identity is the morally preferable one. With his choice he stands, however, in a venerable tradition deriving from Ancient Stoicism. There individual intellectual and moral identity is taken to transcend importantly one’s own human, animal nature. The conclusion of my paper looks into how distinguishing the two alternative personal identities shed light on problems related to a certain cluster of recent technological developments: biotechnology, genetical engineering, cyborgian humanity, and artiﬁcial intelligence. It seems that these developements show very different faces if looked at from the perspective of a rational moral agent rather than a physical member of the animal species Homo sapiens. 252 Dimensions_of_personhood.indb 252 30.7.2004 15:35:20

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