O “eu” empirista: Parte I

24Ago07

Michael Ayers, professor emérito em Oxford, é um dos principais comentadores contemporâneos de Locke. O que segue é uma entrevista com ele feita por Bryan Magee. A referência é:

• Bryan Magee, The Great Philosophers: An Introduction to Western Philosophy, Dialogue 6: Michael Ayers on John Locke, pp.134-6.

Magee: The body-mind distinction raises another important question. If Locke thinks that all material bodies, including therefore our own, are in their inner nature mysterious to us, and that minds are equally mysterious, what is his view of personal identity?

Ayers: The discussion of personal identity is one of the most original and interesting parts of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690).

He agreed with Descartes that I know that I am a thinking thing, but he held that I don’t know my nature, because I don’t know what nature a thing has to have in order to be able to think. Followers of Descartes held it a very powerful argument for their view that it explained personal identity. For them the identity of a person even in life could not be determined by the body, since matter is in continual flux. So it must be determined by the identity of the soul. The same soul can exist after death – indeed they argued that it followed from the soul’s being immaterial and unextended that it is also by nature indestructible. So at the resurrection personal identity would go along with the same soul. Now Locke started from a different consideration, which is that inimortality has to be personal immortality. The whole point of immortality is, to put it bluntly, reward and punishment. But unless the thing that is being punished in the after-life is conscious of the deeds that it has done in life on earth, then Locke thought that punishment has lost its whole point.

Magee: It would be the equivaient of a different person’s being punished.

Ayers: Right. Suppose that we grant that there is such a thing as an immortal, immaterial soul; suppose we grant that that is what receives punishment. If that soul has no recollection of what happened on earth, immortality loses its point. So what really matters, in Locke’s view, is not the supposed immaterial soul, but consciousness, the unity of consciousness, whatever is its natural basis.

Magee: And the continuity of consciousness.

Ayers: The continuity of consciousness, that is, the individual’s consciousness of its past. And of course in this life what matters is the thought that it’s going to be oneself who is going to get punished in the world to come.

Magee: For Locke, then, memory is the key to personal identity: it is more than anything else the fact that I carry within me a living awareness of my own history that makes me the person I am.

Ayers: Yes. Locke doesn’t deny or doubt that the memory will have some sort of substantial basis. His point is we don’t know what that is. Really the point of his whole argument is to allow for the possibility of immortality without going against his anti-dogmatism, without accepting the immaterial soul of the Cartesians as something of which we have knowledge. But what makes his theory so interesting and important, even today, is that it introduced into modern European thought the idea of the self as constituted by a connected, if interrupted, stream of consciousness. That scandalised the orthodox at the time, but has remained ever since a powerful ingredient of the way we think about ourselves.

Filed under: Descartes, Locke, consciência, identidade pessoal, memória   |  1 Comment