Philosophical questioning of personal identity concerns ourselves by virtue of being persons instead of living things, material objects, or rational beings. Precisely, philosophers attempted to solve the question, ‘what does being the individual that you are, from one day to the next, necessarily entail?’ Literary, the question is one of life and death since the correct response ascribed to it is a determinant of the types of changes that an individual could undergo without stopping to exist. As is the case with many philosophical questions, several thinkers have attempted to describe who we are. John Locke, David Hume, and other philosophers expressed their perceptions of self, which can be taken to mean personal identity for the purpose of this paper. Locke and Hume differed in their arguments; while the former thought that personal identity adequately describes the continuity and invariability of individuals through life, the latter expressed a disillusioned perspective of identity by suggesting that personal identity does not simply exist. This paper justifies Hume’s argument that the idea of personal identity is faulted because we keep changing, especially because our minds and bodies are different.
John Locke advanced one of the most widely understood philosophical arguments of personal identity, which emphasized the idea of survival. To survive, according to the philosopher, means to remain unchanged through different circumstances. Notably, the scholar was keen to avoid contradictions that would come through perceiving oneself first as a child then as an adult through insisting that once it is possible to prove that not another person, similar to self in all aspects but not the self, is being represented as an adult form of self, then they shall have survived, which solves the question of personal identity (Perry, p. 544). It is commonsense, therefore, to conclude that the philosopher implied that self-identity is lost at death since an individual stops surviving when they die and even though we could have their look-alike, such persons shall not meet the criteria for self. In other words, in the ideology of David Locke, personal identity is a construction of sameness in physical appearance throughout an individual’s life.
As everyone would anticipate, Locke’s treatise was criticized primarily by renowned philosophers, such as William James, Heraclitus, and David Hume as well as a host of Buddhism practitioners who argued centrally that the claim of self was a mere illusion. Locke’s word directly provided a critic to Hume’s earlier writing, which perfectly makes it useful for analysis in this work. While Hume had relied on the idea of survival to construct his notion of personal identity, Locke dismissed the idea that people remain the same (Hume, p. 97). The primary weakness of earlier arguments that Locke appeared to have realized was the fact that they relied on physical appearance to perpetuate the argument of identity. In the first place, as Locke found, even physical appearance keeps changing; at one time one is young then at another, they are grown, which comes with significant changes. The latter philosopher factored in the idea of the mind, and he argued that our minds keep shifting their focus, which significantly alters the person that we are. Therefore, there was not a thing as personal identity in Locke’s world.
My worldview coincides with Locke’s; to believe that personal identity exists because we are always the same could be partly true, but it is majorly faulted. First, Hume was right in his conceptualization that there can never be an identity of a dead person, and Locke appears to have agreed with the same. However, I dismiss the idea that personal identity is a construction from the survival of an individual because I think the argument ignores a great deal of the facts that what we are is also a formulation of what and how we think (Parfit, p. 7). We may always have the same mindset most of the time, but everyone must agree that at times we deviate from such perspectives. Our minds are always shifting from one thing to the next, which means that we keep creating and demolishing thoughts. The modern world is a complex playground in which we must always think creatively if we should survive in Hume’s sense of the word as well as its literary implication. A large extent of creative thinking means that at times we have to bend our approaches to doing things to suit the way others think or suggest we do. In such cases, we compromise our philosophies, which from a philosophical standpoint, means that we are not the same persons. Therefore, when mental aspects are factored into personal identity, it becomes an illusion, especially when we want to interpret in the sense of the survival of self.
Conclusively, based on the idea of survival, Hume may have been right in suggesting that personal identity stops at death, but he may have erroneously stated that it comes with the survival of self. I agree with Locke’s ideology that personal identity is an illusion considering that people keep changing both physically and mentally.
Works Cited
- Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. Jovian Press, 2017.
- Parfit, Derek. “Personal identity.” The Philosophical Review 80.1 (2015): 3-27.
- Perry, John. Identity, Personal Identity, and the Self. Hackett, 2002.