The Death of the Self and Becoming a Person
Personal Identity
One of the first questions a person new to philosophy is likely to consider is sure to be the question of personal identity.
They may ask: “Am I the same me I was five or ten years ago? I have changed so much. I have a new haircut, new political beliefs, new wants and dreams. My older self was closer to other people in similarity than she was to me.”
This talk is all over the place. We often imagine that we are no longer the person we once were: our old self is dead, we’re ‘a new person,’ or ‘not that person anymore,’ we were overcome with a wave of emotions such that, the things we said, the insults we spewed, were not ‘ours.’
However, a paradox arises: if we are no longer our old self, if that self is but another person, then, logically, we would expect to relate to it as we do any other person—objectively and with detachment. Yet, what actually happens is quite the opposite. Our old self, the so-called “dead” one, holds a special significance for us that no other person does.
This manifests in various ways. We feel nostalgic; we wake up in the middle of the night, once again possessing our old self’s desires and losses. We find ourselves thrown into the past, through a smell or a taste, like Marcel’s Madeline.
A Problem
This leaves the new philosopher in a tough spot. They now must adopt a philosophical position, decide where they fall on the problem of ‘Theseus’s ship,’ and then apply it to their lives. Whatever they do, the result is sure to be counterintuitive. Perhaps they will maintain that we are not our past selves. Or, they will maintain, maybe, that change is an illusion, that we are essentially the same across time.
Detour: Maturity
I want to pause and abruptly change the subject for a moment. The language of ‘older selves’ is not the only way we might be inclined to speak of our past. As we grow older, we often understand our past in terms of maturity (or a lack thereof) or development.
Consider: “We all did things we regretted in high-school, but we were just kids. We weren’t adults, we weren’t full blown persons yet.”
To appeal to maturity in such a context is not to deny that we did regrettable things in high school. Neither is it to posit that we were a different person back then. Instead, it is an entirely different kind of acknowledgment. When we say such a thing, we leave untouched the idea that the person who did the regrettable thing in high school was indeed us, and instead assert that he was not yet a full-blown person. He had not fully developed yet.
This may seem, at first glance, crazy. Of course he was a person! What else could he have been, an animal? But here, “person” takes on a more nuanced meaning—not just a biological or moral category, but an “exalted” way of being human.
An example is in order. As I grow close to graduating college for instance, I find myself more and more inclinded to describe my experience as that of becoming a full-blown person (I don’t mean to say graduating college is required for this, only that it has been what brought me here. I would imagine and hope that a diverse set of life experiences can lead one to develop into a person). My interests and projects have solidified, I’ve come to terms with certain aspects of my personality, made great gains in self-knowledge.
The Solution
What I want to suggest, then, is that, perhaps, when we talk of ‘old selves being dead,’ or of having been a different person, we are not talking about personal identity at all. Rather, we are using person in its more exalted sense, as a way of talking about our development.
To say that ‘our old self has died,’ then, is to say quite a similar sort of thing to ‘But that was 30 years ago!’ or ‘I haven’t held that belief since high-school.’ We are not claiming that the person of 30 years ago is literally a different person, or that our high school self was someone else, but, rather, that in the time since high-school or 30 years ago, we have matured or progressed in some sort of way such that, to the person we are now, the high-school-self’s decision looks a lot like that of a child’s.
What remains unclear, however, is what this development culminates in. After all, the process of ‘becoming a person’ is quite Sisyphean: I am now quite sure that I have finally become a person, and almost just as sure that, in three or four years’ time, I will look back upon myself as I am today as immature, full of hubris, and far from a person. Given this, I am not sure that development qua person has an end or a goal. Perhaps what matters is not that we are developing with respect to something, inching closer and closer to some objective ideal, some ‘standard’ of person-ness, but rather, that we understand ourselves as developing and maturing.
Such an interesting article 👌