O “eu” empirista: Parte II

27Ago07

• Robert Langbaum, The Mysteries of Identity: A Theme in Modern Literature (NY: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 25-27.

Identity is “the sameness of a person or thing at all times or in all circumstances.” As a term in philosophy identity used to apply mainly to the unity of objects, especially through an expanse of time: “a single object, plac’d before us, and survey’d for any time without our discovering in it any interruption or variation, is able to give us a notion of identity.” The word did not take on its current psychological denotation, it did not begin to be applied to the self, until the unity of the self became problematic. As long as men believed in a soul created and sustained (continuously known and seen) by God, there could be no question about the unity of the self. It is significant that identity is first used to mean personal identity by the empiricist philosophers Locke and Hume, who use the word identity to cast doubt on the unity of the self. The term in this sense is not used by Descartes, who might be considered the founder of modern philosophy and the last philosopher to take the unity of the self as axiomatic. But Descartes’ “I think, hence I am” so amputates the self by reducing it to consciousness that, despite his intention to substantiate the self, Descartes has probably done more than Locke and Hume to kill it off, as Beckett’s use of Descartes suggests. Most of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers I shall discuss recur to one or another of these Enlightenment philosophers or their successors (Bradley on his empiricist side serves Eliot the way Locke and Hartley serve Wordsworth), as defining the self in a way they both accept and resist.

Hume, in his section “Of Personal Identity,” [in Treatise of Human Nature] raises most of the issues about identity that I shall discuss in this book. “There are some philosophers,” Hume begins,

who imagine we are every moment intimately conscious of what we call our Self; that we feel its existence and its continuance in existence; and are certain, beyond the evidence of a demonstration, both of its perfect identity and simplicity.

But the self, Hume argues, is not experienced. What we experience are successive, changing impressions all of which are supposed to refer to the self:

Pain and pleasure, grief and joy, passions and sensations succeed each other, and never all exist at the same time. It cannot, therefore, be from any of these impressions, or from any other, that the idea of self is deriv’d; and consequently there is no such idea.

The issue here, which we will see repeated over and over, is whether we experience successive selves rather than any one self.

“I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception.” The self then is equivalent to the contents of its perceptions and ceases to exist when it ceases to perceive, as in sleep or death. Hume has no concept of unconsciousness, and therefore does not allow for a sense of self in sleep or dreams.

We “are nothing,” he says, “but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.”

We arrive at the sense of self through error, through the process of association; we pass insensibly from the idea of succession to the idea of identity, because the imagination feels the same in conceiving these opposite ideas (here Hume anticipates nineteenth-century dialectical thinking). In order to justify this absurdity, “we feign the continu’d existence of the perception of our senses, to remove the interruption,” or we imagine “something unknown and mysterious, connecting the parts” (here Hume anticipates romantic organicism), and thus “run into the notion of a soul, and self … to diguise the variation.” The self, in other words, is a necessary fiction. Hume anticipates and rejects the dialectical logic and the organicism by which later generations will try to solve the problem of the self as he defines it.

Hume concludes that identity is not in the different perceptions themselves, uniting them, “but is merely a quality, which we attribute to them, because of the union of their ideas in the imagination, when we reflect upon them.” The self is a retrospective construction of the imagination, and for this reason “memory not only discovers the identity, but also contributes to its production.” Only through memory can we create the self by seeing continuity between past and present perceptions; only through memory can we conceive “that chain of causes and effects, which constitute our self or person.” Hume does not deny the self as an operative presence; like Locke he insists that it is a fabrication achieved through association, imagination, memory – especially memory. … Memory above all [is] the creator, the artist-fabricator, of self.

Filed under: Beckett, Bradley, Descartes, Eliot, Hartley, Hume, Locke, Wordsworth, bundle theory, identidade pessoal, memória, reducionismo   |  Leave a Comment