Ralph Aaron M.

Panganiban MEE12 August 29, 2019

John Locke: Perspective on One’s Self

John Locke in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding restated the importance of
the experience of the senses over speculation and sets out the case that the human mind at birth is
a complete, but receptive, blank slate ( scraped tablet or tabula rasa ) upon which experience
imprints knowledge.

Locke argued that people acquire knowledge from the information about the objects in the world
that our senses bring. People begin with simple ideas and then combine them into more complex
ones.

Locke’s account of personal identity has been highly influential because of its emphasis on a

psychological criterion. The same consciousness is required for being the same person. It is not

so clear, however, exactly what Locke meant by ‘consciousness’ or by ‘having the same

consciousness’. Interpretations vary: consciousness is seen as identical to memory, as identical

to a first personal appropriation of mental states, and as identical to a first personal distinctive

experience of the qualitative features of one’s own thinking. There is wide agreement, however,

that Locke’s theory of personal identity is meant to complement his moral and theological

commitments to a system of divine punishment and reward in an afterlife. But these

commitments seem to require also a metaphysical criterion, and Locke is insistent that it cannot

be substance. The difficulty reconciling the psychological and metaphysical requirements of the

theory has led, at worst, to charges of incoherence and, at best, to a slew of interpretations, none

of which is widely accepted.

Early on, Locke makes a linguistic distinction between the terms ‘person’ and ‘man’. ‘Man’ he
defines as having both an “immaterial spirit” and “a living organized body”, in which “different
particles” are “successively united” as they participate within “the same continued life”. To be
the “same man” over time is simply a matter of establishing the continuity of certain material and
immaterial substances.

Locke claims, for example, that what makes me today the very same person as I was yesterday,
is, basically, the fact that I can now remember what I did or experienced yesterday. So memory,
for Locke, is what actually determines who I am.

person, he says, is “a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider
itself as itself, the same thinking thing in different times and places, which it does through only
by that consciousness which is inseparable from thinking, and as seems to me essential to it.”
It’s the part about “considering oneself as oneself” that strikes me as really important.

Locke believes that identity and soul are somewhat

independent ideas

 Like Descartes, Locke believes in three types of

substances: 1. God 2. Finite intelligences 3. Bodies

 Animals and plants are identified by participation in the

same continued life, bodies by their material composition.

 For humans, he creates this distinction

1. Man (our biological make up, similar to animals)

2. Person (a “Self”, or what our identity consists of)

“The identity of the same man consists…in nothing but a

participation of the same continued life, by constantly

fleeting particles of matter in succession vitally united to

the same organized body.” (AW 369)

 Locke aims to create a continuity of self that is independent of a

reliance on a substance (body or soul); Responding to several

concerns for example, Boyle’s cannibalism example

 He posits that what makes us who we are is the continuity of

memory (i.e. “consciousness”), rather than a soul or a body,

although he acknowledges the existence of both.

 He believes that one individual can have multiple selfs (such as

people with multiple personality disorder)- identity is

independent of soul

 He also believes that a self transferred into a new body remains

the same self, and thus keeps the same identity- Identity is

independent of body

John Locke holds that personal identity is a matter of psychological continuity. He considered
personal identity (or the self) to be founded on consciousness (viz. memory), and not on the
substance of either the soul or the body.

For centuries philosophers have struggled to define personal identity. In his 1690 work An Essay
Concering Human Understanding, John Locke proposes that one's personal identity extends only
so far as their own consciousness. The connection between consciousness and memory in
Locke’s theory has earned it the title of the "memory theory of personal identity."

ocke was particular interested in the 'self' in terms of what this would mean at the Resurrection
and the afterlife...
Locke uses the term 'person' to refer to a conscious thinking thing (the self), the term 'man' to
refer to a physical entity, and the term 'substance' is an unchanging thing (this can be material of
immaterial). The soul is an example of a substance, so is a soul.

As Susan James points out, Locke is concerned with personal identity in terms of forensics-
(moral and theological considerations), he is not concerned with the metaphysical aspect of the
'self' like Descartes, because he believes this is something we will never understand (Audio,
Understanding Historical Texts).

In this article Locke argues that humans are born with a blank slate and only though the
accumulation of experiences does the person. It is the continuation of consciousness which
makes the person today. Therefore what makes the person today the same as the person
yesterday is not that they had the same body, but rather the person today remembers he ws the
person yesterday. The person or self is a moral and forensic entity.

That with which the consciousness of this present thinking thing can join itself makes the same
person and is one self with it, and with nothing else, and so attributes to itself and owns all the
actions of that thing as its own, as far as that consciousness reaches, and no further; as everyone
who reflects will perceive. (Locke, p278).

Locke uses the thought experiment of the ‘severed finger’ to prove how consciousness is a
separate entity to the physical body, and that the self should be attributed to the former rather
than the latter. When the finger is part of the physical whole, it is connected to the consciousness
because the consciousness is aware of it. Thus if we were to prick our finger we would feel pain
because we are conscious of the finger, if the finger becomes separated completely and we feel
nothing of it, it no longer becomes part of our conscious self. Thus the conscious self and the
physical self are not the same thing.
Therefore bodily continuity should not be considered the continuation of self. Many physical
changes happen in a lifetime, maybe not as dramatic as losing your finger but, over time, just as
distinctive- the young boy is a very different phyically from the old man. The thing that
connects one self in the past with one self in the future is a connected consciousness, and this
connected consciousness comes through memory. Thus, in Locke's example, if the severed finger
retains the conscious thoughts and memory of the ‘whole body’ person then the finger becomes
the person even though the majority of physical body is elsewhere.

By talking about an identity of consciousness Locke is suggesting that it is consciousness itself

which defines someones identity and consciousness alone! This consciousness is linked to
memory, not bodily substances, or souls etc. You are conscious of only what you are conscious
of being. Thus if you have someone else’s soul inside you, yet you are not aware of him, then
you are not in fact the same person because you have none of his memories. and are not
conscious of being him. (Locke uses the Major of Quinborough and Socrates to emphasis this
point). If however Socrates soul was in the Major of Quinborough’s and the memories were
merged this would make the same person (self).