SCHECHTMAN. Personal Identity and the Past

Personal Identity and the PastMarya Schechtman

Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, Volume 12, Number 1, March2005, pp. 9-22 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/ppp.2005.0032

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SCHECHTMAN / PERSONAL IDENTITY AND THE PAST 9

2005 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

Marya Schechtman

Personal Identityand the Past

ABSTRACT: In the second edition of the Essay Concern-ing Human Understanding, John Locke argues thatpersonal identity over time consists in sameness ofconsciousness rather than the persistence of any sub-stance, material or immaterial. Something about thisview is very compelling, but as it stands it is too vagueand problematic to provide a viable account of per-sonal identity. Contemporary psychological continu-ity theorists have tried to amend Lockes view tocapture his insights and avoid his difficulties. Thispaper argues that the standard approach fails becauseit takes Locke to be a memory theorist, and does notfocus enough on his claim that we need continuity ofconsciousness for personal persistence. An alternativereading of Locke is offered, emphasizing the role ofself-understanding in producing continuity of con-sciousness. This alternative overcomes the difficultieswith the standard approach, and shows how it ispossible to attribute unconscious psychological ele-ments to a person, even when personal persistence isdefined in terms of consciousness.

KEYWORDS: personal identity, consciousness, memory,unconscious, self understanding.

IN THE SECOND EDITION OF THE Essay Concern-ing Human Understanding, John Locke takesup the question of what makes someone thesame person throughout her entire life. His re-sponse to this question has served as the startingpoint for many of the views of personal identityrepresented in the philosophical literature today.Lockes important contribution is to argue thatthe continuation of a person is independent of

the continuation of any substanceeither physi-cal (the body) or nonphysical (the soul). I am thesame person as someone who existed in the past,says Locke, if and only if I can extend my currentconsciousness back to that persons actions. Thisassertion is usually interpreted as a memorytheory of personal identitythe view that what-ever actions and experiences a person can re-member are, for that reason, her actions andexperiences.

In some respects, Lockes view is extremelycompelling, but at the same time a simple memorytheory is totally implausible. Although Lockesarguments that continuation of substance cannotserve as a viable account of personal identity arepowerful, a view that implies that a person can haveno experiences that he does not (or cannot easily)remember consciously seems far too strong. Lockemight or might not be willing to bite the bullet andaccept that no forgotten experiences can be ours,but most philosophers are not. The contempo-rary theorists who base their views on Lockesinsight (psychological continuity theorists) havethus altered his original account, trying to keepthe basic insight while avoiding the counterintu-itive implications. This has met with mixed suc-cess. Psychological continuity theories do fix someof the obvious difficulties with Lockes originalview, but they do so at a cost. These amendedviews lose much of the appeal of Lockes originalpicture and undermine much of the original ar-gument for a psychological account of identity.

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In what follows, I argue that this cost is in-curred because psychological continuity theoriestake a wrong turn in developing Lockes view.They concentrate too much on the notion ofmemory, and not enough on the notion of con-sciousness. As a result, they end up with viewsthat neither fully capture Lockes original insightnor fully avoid the implausibilities of his view. Ipropose an alternative development of Lockesinsight that emphasizes the importance of self-understanding. This view captures most of whatLocke says about why consciousness is so centralto personhood and personal identity without be-ing committed to the implausible view that onlyexperiences of which we are conscious can beours. I begin with a brief review of Lockes view,the objections to it, and the development of psy-chological continuity theories to answer thoseobjections. Next, I describe some of the deficien-cies of psychological continuity theories, and out-line my proposed alternative.

Lockes ArgumentLockes central contribution to work on per-

sonal identity is his insistence that identity mustbe defined in terms of sameness of consciousnessrather than sameness of substance. It is not thecontinuation of either an immaterial soul or abody that constitutes the continuation of theperson, he says, but rather the continued flow ofconsciousness. There are two basic elements ofhis argument for this claim. To make the claimintuitively plausible, he uses a number of hypo-thetical cases in which continuation of conscious-ness is separated from continuation of substance,showing that our judgment in such cases wouldbe that the person goes with the consciousness.He also provides a more theoretical discussionabout what it is to be a person, arguing that oncewe understand this clearly we see that identitymust be defined in terms of consciousness ratherthan substance. It is helpful to review brieflyeach aspect of his discussion.

Locke gets us to see the force of his viewthrough the use of a series of imagined cases. Heasks us to imagine, for instance, the mental lifeof a prince entering and informing the body of

a cobbler, and argues that everyone would seethat the resulting person is the same person asthe prince rather than the cobbler (Locke 1979,340). He suggests that we imagine someone whohas the same soul as Nestor or Thersites at thesiege of Troy, but without consciousness of anyof their actions, and tells us that it is obvious thatthis person is no more the same person as Nestoror Thersites than he would be if his body hap-pened to share some of the same matter that hadonce composed theirs (Locke 1979, 339). Heasks us also to imagine a man who has twodistinct consciousnesses sharing his bodyoneby day and one by nightwith no communica-tion between them, and says that it is clear thatthere are two distinct persons sharing one bodyin such a case (Locke 1979, 344345).

This view of personal continuation is not, ofcourse, uncontroversial. It is, however, widelyaccepted, and whether or not this is the finalword on what it is to be a person, it undoubtedlycaptures one important strand of our thoughtabout ourselves. The same basic intuition is ex-pressed, for instance, by William James in ThePrinciples of Psychology when he says,

The Soul, however, when closely scrutinized, guar-antees no immortality of a sort we care for. Theenjoyment of the atom-like simplicity of their sub-stance in scular sculorum would not to most peopleseem a consummation devoutly to be wished. Thesubstance must give rise to a stream of consciousnesscontinuous with the present stream, in order to arouseour hope, but of this the mere persistence of thesubstance per se offers no guarantee. (James 1950,348)

This idea can also be seen when we recognizethat there is a real sense in which we would viewtotal, irreversible amnesia as a form of death.Faced with the prospect of such amnesia wemight well distribute remembrances, write lettersto loved ones, and in other ways act as if we wereanticipating death.

The Lockean insight is also seen in the im-pulse to view Multiple Personality Disorder as acircumstance in which more than one personshare a body. Of course, describing this disorderin this way is by no means uncontroversial, andlater I examine some of the reasons we might


want to say that there is only one person perbody, even in cases such as this. The point here,however, is to get clearer on the intuition behindthe Lockean view, not to argue that there is amonolithic problem of personal identity to whichit provides the unique solution. It is, I think, atleast uncontroversial to claim that in MultiplePersonality Disorder we are not presented un-problematically with a single person. The factthat these cases seem to present, at least some-times, genuinely independent streams of con-sciousness, which may have no awareness of oneanother, seems reason enough to say that there issome very important sense in which distinct per-sons co-occupy a body just as Locke took hisrevolving day and night consciousness to do.

This, then, is the basic intuition behind Lockesview, and it is in many respects a familiar andcompelling one. Locke further supports his ac-count of identity by giving a more general defini-tion of the concept of the person revealed inthese cases. He tells us that person stands for athinking, intelligent Being, that has reason andreflection, and can consider it self as it self, thesame thinking thing in different times and plac-es (Locke 1979, 335). To be a person is to haveself-consciousness, viewing oneself as a persist-ing subject. This means that a person becomesthe same person who has past experiences orundertook past actions when her consciousnessincludes them. As far as any Intelligent Beingcan repeat the Idea of any past action with thesame consciousness it had of it at first, and withthe same consciousness it has of any presentAction; says Locke, so far it is the same per-sonal self (Locke 1979, 336). His view in anutshell, then, is that Personal Identity con-sists, not in the Identity of Substance, but, as Ihave said, in the Identity of consciousness (Locke1979, 342).

Locke expands on this concept of person bytelling us that person is a Forensick Term ap-propriating Actions and their Merit; and so be-longs only to intelligent Agents capable of a Law,and Happiness and Misery (Locke 1979, 346).This characterization sets out two features thatLocke takes to be unique to personhood, andthat he uses to support his definition of personal

identity in terms of sameness of consciousness.First, persons are capable of a special sort of self-interested concern and second, they are moralagents, capable of taking actions for which theycan be held responsible. Both of these capacities,he argues, are linked to consciousness. To careabout the unfolding of our lives, we need to havea conscious conception of ourselves as having afuture to care about. Moreover, it is throughconsciousness that we experience pleasure andpain, and so the extent of our concern is theextent of our conscious experience. He puts itthis way: Self is that conscious thinking thing,(whatever Substance, made up of whether Spiri-tual, or Material, Simple or Compounded, itmatters not) which is sensible, or conscious ofPleasure and Pain, capable of Happiness or Mis-ery, and so is concernd for it self as far as thatconsciousness extends (Locke 1979, 341). Healso argues that moral responsibility requiresconsciousness. To be moral agents, we must beable to plan and to recognize that actions wetake now have consequences in the future. Herehe taps the intuitions unearthed by the kinds ofhypothetical cases described above. He says, forinstance, for suppose a Man punishd now, forwhat he had done in another Life, whereof hecould be made to have no consciousness at all,what difference is there between that Punish-ment, and being created miserable? (Locke 1979,347). Again the case of Multiple Personality Dis-order gives us a real-life example of what Lockehas in mind here. Such cases have raised trickyquestions in legal contexts about how to assignculpability when the consciousness of the per-sonality who allegedly committed a crime is un-available to other personalities in the same body.

Locke thus taps into a widely held concept ofthe person according to which a person is a self-conscious subject. On this picture, personal iden-tity or continuation through time depends on thecontinuation of consciousness. In particular, ifone is conscious of oneself as the same self whoexisted at some past time, this consciousnessactually makes one the same person as that pastself. The failure of such self-consciousness, onthe other hand, signals the end of the person.Attempting to capture this conception of the

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person, Locke thus tells us that we become thesame person as some past person by extendingour consciousness back to her experiences be-cause in doing so we become aware not only ofthose experiences themselves, but of the fact thatwe are the ones who had them. This awarenessgives us consciousness of ourselves as persistingbeings, and so constitutes the fact of our identitywith the past persona fact that would not holdwere we not conscious of her experiences.

Although there is undoubtedly something verycompelling about Lockes view of personal iden-tity, it is problematic as it stands. It is not entirelyobvious just what the details of the view are, butit is generally read as a memory theorytheview that whatever experiences a person remem-bers are, for that reason, her experiences. Locketells us that a person makes past experiences hersby extending her consciousness back in time tothem, but as Thomas Reid suggests, Mr. Lockeattributes to consciousness the conviction we haveof our past actions, as if a man may now beconscious of what he did twenty years ago. It isimpossible to understand the meaning of this,unless by consciousness be meant memory, theonly faculty by which we have an immediateknowledge of our past actions (Reid 1976, 115).Although I have argued elsewhere that this is anoversimplified reading of Locke (Schechtman1996, 105112), it seems obvious that memorymust be a large part of the picture.

A simple memory theory, however, is not plau-sible on its own. It is at the same time too weakand too strong. This theory is too weak becauseit seems that it takes more than simply remem-bering an experience to make me the person whodid it. As many objectors have pointed out, mem-ory is good evidence that a past experience isours, but on its own it does not seem quiteenough to make it ours. To use a variation on ascience fiction case that appears often in theliterature, the fact that a neurosurgeon may de-velop a technique whereby she could implant inmy brain the recollection of an experience hadby her grandmother does not now make me theperson who had that experience (i.e., her grand-mother). The memory theory is too strong be-cause even when we are thinking of ourselves as

conscious subjects rather than substances, it seemsobvious that we can and do forget experiencesthat are nonetheless ours. If the mind of theprince were, for example, to enter the body ofthe cobbler but along the way lose the memoryof what the prince ate for breakfast or repressthe memory of a rather unfortunate interactionwith the vice chancellor, we would not want todeny that these were, nonetheless, experiences ofthe prince and so of the person inhabiting thecobblers body. To provide a plausible account ofidentity, then, the simple memory theory needssome development.1 This is the task undertakenby psychological continuity theorists.

Psychological ContinuityTheories

Psychological continuity theorists take on thegoal of providing an account of personal identityover time that captures what seems so right inLockes observations but is more plausible in thedetails. There have been several strategies fordealing with the implausible aspects of the sim-ple memory theory; I review some of the mostfundamental. First, consider the objection thatmerely remembering some past experience doesnot seem enough to make me the person whohad it. One response to this difficulty is to re-quire that there be more than one memory con-nection between a present and past person if weare to judge that they are the same person. In theexample where a neurosurgeon implants onememory from her grandmothers life in some-ones brain, a large part of the reason we areunwilling to make a judgment of identity is thatthere is only a single, out-of-context connectionbetween the post-operative person and the pre-surgery grandmother. Psychological continuitytheorists thus generally require that there beenough connections between people at twotimes if we are to say they are the same person.There is, of course, a great deal of difficulty inindividuating connections, let alone in finding anonarbitrary number of connections to deter-mine identity. The general idea, however, is thatthere must be some threshold level of memoryconnection between a present person and a past


one that is required to make them the sameperson.

Even if a person remembers a great manyexperiences of a past person, however, it mayseem that the relation of memory is too weak tosupport identityat least if memory is taken tomean no more than having an experience ofrecollection. For this reason, it has been verycommon for psychological continuity theoriststo require that for a past experience to be attrib-uted to a person, he must not only recall theexperience, but the recollection must be properlycaused by the original experience. The idea ofproper cause is generally spelled out in terms ofthe continued functioning of a single brain inwhich a memory trace is laid down at the time ofthe original experience.

To address the sense that memory theories aretoo strong, a different but related set of changesis made to the simple memory theory. A first stepin overcoming this difficulty is recognizing thatthere is a fundamental difference between thetypes of cases Locke amasses to make the casethat memory is crucial to personal identity andthe kinds of cases marshaled to show that thememory theory seems so implausible. The casesLocke describes all involve a person experiencingwholesale memory loss, and so having her con-scious connection to the past severed entirely.The cases where it seemed obvious that a lapse ofmemory does not result in a change of personwere cases in which only a few memories werelost, but others stayed in place, providing a con-nection to the past time, if not to those particularpast events. Once again, then, the issue is howmany memory connections to a past time arepresent. In this context, however, the significanceof the number of connections suggests that thereare really two distinct questions at issue here:one is the question of whether a person in thepresent is the same person as some person in thepast (or whether a particular person survivesinto the future). The second is the question ofwhether some particular past action or experi-ence is attributable to a person in the present.What our discussion seems to show is that theintuition that memory is crucial to issues of iden-tity applies most clearly to the first question.

Lockes general claim seems plausible when wetake him to be saying that, for a person to con-tinue into the future, there must be someone inthe future who remembers some (enough) of herexperiences, and therefore takes herself to bethat person. It seems less plausible when we takeit to say that, for a person to be the person whohad some particular experience or undertooksome particular action, she must remember hav-ing that experience or taking that action.

One natural way of responding to this im-plausible feature of a simple memory theory isthus to separate the questions of what makes aperson at one time the same person as a person atanother time from the question of what makes aparticular action or experience the action or ex-perience of a given person.2 It is then possible tooffer a view according to which a person at thepresent time is the same as some person in thepast if the present person has enough memoriesof the past to allow for a conception of herself asa continuing subject, without being committedto the idea that it is memory that makes a partic-ular action or experience attributable to a per-son. It will then be necessary, of course, to offersome account of attribution as well.

Psychological continuity theorists follow thisstrategy either implicitly or explicitly, separatingthese questions, and taking the question of iden-tifying persons at two different times with oneanother as prior. To answer this question theytake as their basic starting point a reading ofLocke, which says that a person at time t2 is thesame person as a person at an earlier time t1 justin case the person at t2 remembers some of theexperiences of the person at time t1. They thenamend this view to try and overcome any residu-al implausibility. First they allow that a personneed not remember even one experience fromevery part of his life. There may be some phasesof the pastperhaps those very remote in timethat one does not directly remember at all, butthat nonetheless seem to be part of ones life.Psychological continuity theorists account forthis fact by requiring not direct memory, butoverlapping chains of direct memory to make aperson at one time the same as a person at anoth-er. If I currently have some memories of my 30th

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birthday, and if the person whose experiences Iremember on that day had some memories of my20th birthday, and the person whose experiencesare remembered on that day had memories of my10th birthday, and that person had memories ofmy 6th birthday, then I now am the same personas that person celebrating my 6th birthday, evenif I have no direct memories of that day whatso-ever. These theorists also suggest that memory isnot the only psychological connection that cancontribute to identity, but that the persistence ofbeliefs, values, desires, or the connections be-tween intentions and the later actions that carrythem out can also serve as identity-constitutingconnections between persons at different times.

The final form of the psychological continuitytheorys answer to the question of what makes aperson at time t2 the same person as a person attime t1 is that it is an overlapping chain of psy-chological connections including memory andother connections between the person at t2 andthe person at t1. The answer to the second ques-tionthe question of what makes a particularaction or experience that of a particular per-sonis often implicit in psychological continuitytheories and rests on the answer to the first. Theidea is simple and natural: the criterion outlinedtells us whether a person at t2 is the same as aperson at t1. If they are the same, then whateverexperiences are attributable to the earlier personat t1 are also attributable to the person at t2. If,that is, the cobbler body before us is determinedto be the same person who was previously in theprince body, then he is the person who ate break-fast in the princes body or had that bad interac-tion with the vice chancellor, whether he remem-bers it or not.

This strategy, of course, requires that we havesome way of attributing experiences to personsat a time. This sort of attribution is usually takenfor granted, but the underlying idea is prettyclear. It is assumed that there is a primitive no-tion of unity of consciousness at a time. At anyparticular moment, there is some set of experi-ences experienced as co-conscious, and all ofthese belong to a single person. If a later personremembers some but not all of the experiencesthat were co-conscious earlier, she thereby con-

nects himself to the entire earlier person, andmakes all of the experiences that were co-con-scious at that time hers. This position is in thebackground in most psychological continuity the-ories, but is made explicit in an early version ofthis view put forth by H. P. Grice. Grice defineswhat he calls a total temporary state or t.t.s.To give an idea of what he means by this, he saysthat a t.t.s. is composed of all the experiencesany one person is having at any given time. Thus,if I am now thinking of Hitler and feeling a pain,and having no other experiences, there will beoccurring now a total temporary state contain-ing as elements a thought of Hitler and a feelingof pain (Grice 1976, 86). He then defines per-sonal identity over time in terms of overlappingchains of memory connections between t.t.s.s.The same strategy can also be found in versionsof the psychological continuity theory offered bySydney Shoemaker (1984), John Perry (1976),David Lewis (1983), and Derek Parfit (1984).3

Psychological continuity theories thus startwith the basic Lockean insight that persons areessentially self-conscious entities, and that theiridentity over time should be defined in terms ofthe extension of consciousness. They read this asthe claim that personal identity should be de-fined in terms of memory connection, and alterthis view to avoid some of the more obviousobjections. They end by offering a view accord-ing to which a person at one time is the sameperson as a person at an earlier time if the presentperson is connected to the earlier one by overlap-ping chains of sufficient numbers of psychologi-cal connections. When people at two differenttimes have been determined to be the same per-son, any experiences or actions that are attribut-able to the one person are also attributable to theother.

Problems With PsychologicalContinuity Theories

Psychological continuity theories present arather tidy solution to the difficulties described,but in the end they are not that much moresatisfying than a straight memory theory. Thesetheories, too, seem both too weak and too strong,


if in a different way from the memory theoryitself. They seem too weak because it is notobvious that the relation in terms of which theydefine identity really does any better than Lockesoriginal view at quieting the sense that memoryalone is not enough to constitute identity, andmay even do worse. In the finished psychologicalcontinuity theory, what we have are a collectionof independent persons-at-times that are cob-bled together through memory and other con-nections with the requirement that there be somecritical mass of memory connections and some(usually physical) causal connection betweenpresent memory experiences and past experienc-es of which they are memories. Although therequirements added to the simple memory theo-ry do in some sense make a stronger connectionbetween the different temporal parts of a per-sons life and between a person and the experi-ences that are attributed to her, it is not clear thatit is stronger in the right waythat is, that isstronger in a way that will answer the originalworries.

First, consider the requirement that there besome critical number of memory connections inplace before we make a judgment of personalidentity. This amounts to a difference in degreerather than kind from the simple memory theory.What we have here is just a collection of memo-ries, and it is not clear that that is enough whereone memory was not. It is not obvious how theaddition of connections besides memory couldhelp here either, because these give us even lessconscious access to the past. This, of course, iswhy the requirement of causal connection is add-ed, but it is not evident that that does the workpsychological continuity theorists want it to, ei-ther. What this amounts to, really, is a require-ment of sameness of substance. In addition tohaving the experience of remembering some setof experiences in the past, it requires that therebe a causal pathway, through a continuing body,from the experiences to the recollections. Thereis no indication that this changes the phenome-nological character of the experience at all, onlythat it guarantees that a single body (or at leastbrain) is present for both the experience and therecollection.

This requirement does make us feel betterabout the worry that memory alone is not enoughto constitute identity, but how does it do so?Essentially by appealing to the intuitions sup-porting a sameness of substance viewthe veryintuitions that Lockes arguments were meant toovercome. For this reason, Lockes original argu-ments can be brought into play against this meansof developing his insight. Why should it matterto us that the memory experiences in question bein one substance rather than another if it doesnot change the character of consciousness? If thememory experiences alone are not sufficientlystrong to constitute identity, why should theirbeing placed in a substance continuous with theone that had the experiences be a consumma-tion devoutly to be desired? Or, put anotherway, why on this view should the fact that thislump of stuff here will have memories of theseexperiences in the future be more comfortingthan the fact that those who come after me willremember me when I am gone? I do not denythat it may feel more comforting. There is nodoubt that one strand of our thought on person-al identity places that identity in the continua-tion of substance, and there is much to be saidfor sameness of substance views. Locke, howev-er, has identified another strand of thought ac-cording to which what matters is the character ofour experience. To solve difficulties with thatview by adding a requirement of sameness ofsubstance is not to develop the basic insight, butto reject it. If the simple memory theory providestoo weak a relation to constitute identity, thenthe psychological continuity theory does as well.

Indeed, the psychological continuity theorymay be even worse off in this regard because ofthe method by which it attributes particular ac-tions and experiences to persons. On the simplememory theory, one needed to be directly con-scious of an action or experience for it to be hers.Although, as we have discussed, this seems liketoo strong a requirement in the end, at least wehad some explanation for why this relation wassupposed to be important. Those experiences ofwhich we are directly conscious are experiencesthat must necessarily affect our well-being. Theirnature matters to us because we experience them.

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They are also, at least according to Locke, tied toresponsibility in this way, because we can knowthem to be our actions or experiences, we have aresponsibility to and for them that we could nototherwise have. The Lockean insight thus seemsto rest on the special relation we have to experi-ences while we are conscious of them. Accordingto the psychological continuity theory, however,there are many experiencesand even whole lifephasesthat are counted as mine even though Ino longer have any consciousness of them at all.They are no more connected to my present con-sciousness than they would be by a sameness ofsubstance view. The original appeal of Lockestheory is thus lost on this view.

None of this is to deny that memoryat leastconceived as a simple recollection (even appro-priately caused)is too weak a relation to seemintuitively plausible as the relation which consti-tutes personal identity. It is just to say that psy-chological continuity theories do not remedy thedeficits of the simple memory theory in a waywhich counts as a development of Lockes in-sight. One response to the recognition of theweakness of the memory theory, of course, issimply to reject the Lockean insight in favor of asameness of substance view, and many have donejust that. If, however, we think that there is stillsomething valuable in the original argumentsagainst sameness of substance views, the way tospeak to the weakness of the memory theorywould be to develop an account of psychologicalcontinuity defined in terms of conscious connec-tions richer and deeper than memory, or to deep-en our account of memory itself. Simply addingmore of the same or continuity of substance willnot do the trick.

A seemingly contradictory set of intuitionsalso suggests that the psychological continuitytheory is too strong, particularly in its account ofattribution. Even though this theory allows thatexperiences and life phases of which we are nolonger conscious can be ours, attribution stilldepends on an initial act of consciousness. It isbecause we are connected through overlappingchains to some past time at which we were con-scious of an action or experience that the lifephase and its experiences become ours. This is

problematic because it leaves no room in theview for the impact and attribution of uncon-scious (or nonconscious)4 experiences to a per-son. If the person was not conscious of an expe-rience at the time to which she is currentlyconnected by overlapping chains, then the expe-rience cannot be hers. It seems clear, however,that experiences of which we are not consciouscan be part of our psychological lives. To namejust two species, dispositional states and repressedstates seem as if they can contribute to identityevery bit as much as consciously entertainedstates, but they are ruled out as attributable tothe person on this view.

It might be protested that psychological conti-nuity theories are in fact perfectly plausible onthis matter. All they require is that an experiencehave been conscious at some time. Then, if thetime at which the experience was conscious islinked via other conscious connections to thepresent, the unconscious state is made part of thepresent person through its attribution at the pasttime. This will probably capture many of thestates we wish to attribute to a person despite thefact that she is not conscious of them, but it willnot entirely solve the psychological continuitytheorists problem. First of all, this view does notgive us a way to distinguish between psychicelements that are at one time a part of conscious-ness and then lost forever and those which re-main as unconscious states. Because the statesconnection to the present is only a courtesy viathe connection of the past person to the presentperson through other states, there is no differ-ence on this view between an experience thatwas part of consciousness and then faded entire-ly and, for example, a repressed state that is stillactively at work in a persons psychological life,although no longer part of consciousness. Thereis an important difference between an experiencethat is mine because I experienced it in the pastbut have now forgotten it entirely, and one thatis mine because I have repressed it and am stillsuffering the symptoms of that repression, andthere is no clear way to capture this difference inthe psychological continuity theory.

Moreover, it seems likely that some experi-ences or features of our psychological lives may


be ours even if we are never explicitly consciousof them. We can be affected by a great deal thatdoes not make its way into the realm of con-sciously entertained experience. Although thisclaim is itself plausible enough, it may seem thatto make it I have to revert to the perspectivebehind sameness of substance views as I earlieraccused psychological continuity theorists of do-ing. Things are a bit more complicated in thisinstance, however. The idea that unconsciousstates can be part of who we are arises in thecontext where we are thinking of ourselves aspsychological subjects, and not just as substanc-es, and this is, among other reasons, becausemany states of which we are not conscious areimplicated in the relations of concern and re-sponsibility that Locke identifies. There is a vastdifference between the case where an experiencewas had by a particular substance (soul or body)that is currently cut off from itas in Lockeshypothetical casesand a case where we saythat a person has an (again, in a general, non-technical sense) unconscious memory, or belief,or desire. In the latter case, there is an assump-tion that the state is not simply wiped out of thepsychological economy, but is still playing a role.It will impact a persons well-being and the na-ture of her consciousness even if she is not direct-ly aware of the state itself and cannot become so.It can, moreover, inspire the feelings of guilt orshame or pride associated with moral agencyeven if the source of these feelings remains ob-scure. The relation we have to our unconsciousstates is thus generally far more intimate and farmore relevant to our present consciousness thanstates that we would consider not ours on theLockean viewstates that befell this substancebut have no impact on current experience at all.It thus seems both necessary and possible to finda way to make unconscious states attributable toa person within a broad Lockean perspective.The psychological continuity theory, however,does not seem to have a means of doing so.

What this discussion of the failing of the psy-chological continuity theory reveals is that whatoriginally looked like a clash of intuitions aboutwhether an experience a person does not remem-ber can be his experience is really about con-

sciousness rather than memory itself. Memorybecame important in the discussion as the medi-um through which consciousness is continuedover time. The real conflict of intuitions, whichmakes development of the Lockean insight sodifficult, is the conflict between our sense thatthe person (understood as psychological subject)should be identified with conscious mental activ-ity only and the sense that the psychologicalsubject is more extensive and includes non-con-scious mental activity as well. Both ideas havetheir appeal. Freud has pointed out many mo-tives for identifying ourselves with our conscious-nessin doing so we can avoid acknowledgingcharacteristics, fantasies, desires, and experienc-es that are, for one reason or another, unpalat-able. Locke, on the other hand, tries to presentreasons for identifying the person with consciouspsychological life. The reasons involve first thefact that it is the continuation of conscious expe-rience that seems both necessary and sufficientfor our own continuation, and second the waysin which our consciousness of experiences under-lies the special kind of self-interested concernand moral agency that distinguish persons fromother kinds of creatures.

Our discussion of how psychological continu-ity theories grow out of Lockes view, and howthey fall short of their goals, has given us thetools we need to develop Lockes insight in amore satisfying way. From Locke we have thereasons, outlined in the previous paragraph, foridentifying the person with the conscious self. Todevelop his insight, we thus need a view thatincorporates the role of self-conscious awarenessin the constitution of identity, and also recogniz-es the link between identity and issues of self-interested concern and moral responsibility. Frompsychological continuity theories, we get the strat-egy of separating these two elements, offeringdistinct but interrelated accounts of personal con-tinuation and the attribution of particular ac-tions and of experiencesthe first depending onconscious connections between the different partsof a persons life, and the second allowing for theattribution of experiences a person does not re-member. Their theory of attribution does not,however, seem to do the work it needs to. Ulti-

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mately, it loses the relation to concern and re-sponsibility that is so important in the Lockeanview, and it does not say enough about the differ-ence between experiences that are really dead tous and those which, though not part of con-sciousness, are an active part of our psychologi-cal lives. To give a more satisfying developmentof the Lockean insight, then, we need to give abetter account of how and when states of whicha person is not conscious can be attributed toher. I offer such an alternative in the next section.

An Alternative AccountThe task of developing the Lockean insight is

now twofold. First, it is necessary to give anaccount of the kind of connection to the pastthat a person must have to develop the type ofself-conception that constitutes personal identi-ty. Second, it is necessary to give an account ofthe attribution of particular actions and experi-ences that allows for the attribution of uncon-scious elements as well as conscious ones. It iseasiest to begin with the first task. Locke tells usthat we make ourselves selves, and so determineour identity, by forming a self-conscious concep-tion of ourselves as persisting subjects. The exactnature of this self-conception is never reallyspelled out, however. In the hands of psycholog-ical continuity theorists, it becomes the require-ment that we have a sufficient number of memo-ries of past experiences to connect us to a pasttime. Undoubtedly, this is a very important partof how we come to have our self-conceptions,but as a full account, it is rather thin. All that isrequired to have the appropriate sort of self-conceptionthe kind that determines personalidentity and continuation into the futureis tohave knowledge of what some collection of ex-periences is like from the inside. It is enough, onthis view, just to have access to a certain numberof memories. There is no further requirement onhow these memories are to cohere or to be asso-ciated with present states.

The alternative development of the Lockeanview I suggest adds to the recognition of theimportance of memory and brute self-conscious-ness a recognition of the importance of being

intelligible to ourselves. To have the kind of self-conception that constitutes personal identity onthe view I am urging (call it the self-understand-ing view), one must not just know about somecollection of past experiences and think of themas hers, she must see her life as unfolding accord-ing to an intelligible trajectory, where presentstates follow meaningfully from past ones, andthe future is anticipated to bear certain predict-able relations to the present. This does not meanthat a persons life course is entirely under hercontrol, only that she can see connections be-tween how things were, how they are, and howthey are likely to be. Having a self-conceptiondoes not just amount to knowing that one has apast and will have a future, but also involvesseeing these as inherently interconnected and richwith implications for one another.

This understanding changes the fundamentalnature of the self-awareness that constitutes usas persons. It is no longer a passive knowing thatwe have had experiences, but a more active at-tempt to make sense of those experiences andunderstand where they are leading us. Fully un-derstood, Lockes fundamental insight is that asself-conscious entities we are interested in thecharacter of our experience, and also in what weshould do and what kind of person we should be.What this means, however, is that we are con-stantly self-monitoring, keeping track of how weare feeling, what we are doing, and what we arelike. This self-monitoring is mostly implicit. Thereare many occasions where we introspect andconsciously consider the trajectory of our livesand how its episodes fit together, but usually weare caught up in the activity of living, and thiswork goes on in the background. On the self-understanding view, it is this self-monitoring thatgives us our sense of continuation and coherenceas a self, and so provides the kind of self-concep-tion and relation to a particular past that consti-tutes personal identity.

The basic picture of this self-monitoring isnicely developed by Raymond Martin in his bookSelf-Concern. There Martin develops the notionof a perceiver self. We experience the world,Martin says, as if one part of the self were splitoff from the flux of events as an observer, watch-


ing and recording the stream of our experience.Martin argues that the perceiver-self is an illu-sion, and of course in some sense it must be;there is no homuncular entity within people whois the observer of their experience. Nevertheless,as Martin indicates, the sense that there is such aself is a robust and pervasive element of experi-ence, and a central feature of human psychologi-cal organization. He also suggests that in think-ing about personal survival it is the continuationof this self in which people are interested; theythink they have survived if the perceiver-self con-tinues, and that they will die if it does not.

Obviously, there are many issues to be settledabout the nature and function of the perceiver-self before any forceful claims can be made aboutits role in personal identity. Martin says a greatdeal on this subject, and there will doubtless bemuch more discussion to come.5 For present pur-poses, however, it is not necessary to put toomuch metaphysical weight on the concept; it cansimply be used to represent a widespread andfamiliar picture of psychological continuationand personal survival. A somewhat more whim-sical version of this picture is found in MichaelFrayns novel Headlong, where the protagonistundertakes a common sort of internal dialogueto convince himself to do what he knows to bewrong:

Odd, though, all these dealings of mine with my-self. First Ive agreed to a principle with myself, nowIm making out a case to myself and debating my ownfeelings and intentions with myself. Who is this self,this phantom internal partner, with whom Im enter-ing into all of these arrangements? (I ask myself.)

Well, who am I talking to now? Who is the ghostlyaudience for the long tale I tell through every minuteof the day? This silent judge sitting, face shrouded, inperpetual closed session? (Frayn 1999, 126127)

The perceiver-self then should be thought ofas a stable observer who views and records thepassing flux of experience, and recognizes it aspart of a single life; it need not be an actuallypersisting agent, or even a truly continuous psy-chological process, but it is a process that givesrise to the background sense of a stable self of thesort whose existence seems crucial to personalidentity on the view we have been exploring. My

suggestion is that it is this sense of a stableperceiver-self, rather than a simple knowledgethat one has had experiences in the past, thatconstitutes the continuation of consciousness thatconstitutes personal identity over time.

One way to make this rather abstract concep-tion more concrete is to connect this self-moni-toring to certain capacities. One quite simpleimplication of having such a self-conception isthat a person can generally answer questionssuch as, Why do I feel this way? or Why am Idoing this? should they arise. If she cannotanswer them, she should be motivated to lookfor an answer. Answers to questions of this sortusually involve a number of factors. If one can-not easily make sense of the way one is feeling orchoosing to act, however, it is natural to look forexternal explanations, considering the environ-ment carefully to see if there is some hithertoundetected factor that is exerting an influence. Inthis way one might notice that it is the gatheringclouds outside that are making one gloomy oranxious, even if one had not noticed them be-fore; or that ones mother is constantly sendingoff subtle signals of disapproval and that this canexplain ones guilt.

Sometimes, however, scrutiny of our environ-ment and of our conscious internal states stillleaves us baffled about why we feel or act as wedo. This unintelligibility threatens our integrityas self-conscious subjectsin the subject, as inthe world more generally, there should be noevents that are simply uncaused. This does notmean that we must fully understand all of ourfeelings or motives, but only that we should notbe at a loss as to where to start in such self-understanding. This really would undermine thedifference between punishment and being creat-ed miserable. If we are at a loss, and no over-looked external factors can be found, it is naturalto look for occult internal causesnonconsciousmemories or impulses. Descartes offers an earlyexample of this strategy with respect to his per-ceptions in the course of his Meditations on FirstPhilosophy. He recognizes that he had previous-ly taken his perceptual images to come fromexternal objects because he was not aware ofbringing them about himself. In the context of

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the meditations, however, he is supposing thatthere are no external objects, and so wonders ifthe images might come instead from some un-known part of himself. Although he ultimatelydecides that they come from an external worldvia God, his reflections demonstrate nicely thekind of dynamic I have in mindfirst, the basicidea that it is our responsibility not only to knowthe contents of our consciousness but to under-stand their origins, and second the willingness toconsider that we could, unknowingly, be the causeof our conscious experience. In a context moredirectly related to the current discussion, Freudsdiscovery of the unconscious follows just thislogic, and it is, of course, this insight which is theinspiration of the self-understanding view withits emphasis on the importance of being intelligi-ble to ourselves.

In postulating inner sources for our experi-ences and actions we recognize that there areparts of ourselves that we are not conscious of,but that are yet part of our psychological lives inan importantly intimate way. These experiencesimpact the nature of our conscious experience,and hence should be part of the purview of ourself-interested concern. They also influence whatwe do, and lead to experiences of guilt, shame,or pride, and so are connected to our moralagency. To have an identity-constituting self-con-ception, then, a person must demand (at leastimplicitly) a kind of coherence and intelligibilityto the course of her life. The past should not onlybe remembered; it should help to explain thepresent, which in turn should help predict thefuture. To achieve this intelligibility, we oftenneed to allow for the impact of psychologicalfeatures and experiences of which we are notdirectly conscious. The suggestion is thus thatthe attribution of individual states should be onthis basis. Those memories or desires or motiva-tions whose existence as part of the psychologi-cal economy must be postulated to make sense ofa persons experience or the course of her life willbe considered her experiences. In this way, wecan make room for the attributions of experi-ences that are nonconscious without violatingthe fundamental Lockean insight. These experi-ences still affect us along the dimension of plea-

sure and pain, and are still connected to ourcapacities for moral agency. They are part ofwhat determines how our lives will unfold, andwhat our experience will be like.6

The proposed alternative to the psychologicalcontinuity theory is thus a view that developsLockes idea that to be a person is to understandoneself as a persisting being in terms of the de-mands we make that our lives be intelligible. Tobe a person on this view is implicitly to keeptrack of the unfolding of ones life. The particu-lar type of self-concern that Locke takes to bedefinitive of personhood, as well as the capacityfor moral agency, depends on our not just know-ing ourselves to persist, but actively seeking tounderstand how our lives come to be pleasant orunpleasant, learning lessons from the past andapplying them to the future. The stream of con-sciousness that we count as personal continua-tion involves understanding how the connectionsbetween past, present, and future work for usnot just seeing the present as connected to thepast, but as flowing from it. This sometimesdepends on the recognition of psychological statesthat play a role in determining our consciousexperience, although they are not themselves con-scious. It is important to understand that forsuch states to be attributed to a person, she neednot consciously reflect on her history and accepttheir existence. This is worthy work and may bewell worth undertaking for many reasons. For usto say of a person that a nonconscious experi-ence is hers, however, all that is required is that itin fact be necessary to make her psychologicallife intelligible, whether she recognizes this factor not.

There is a longstanding idea that memoryplays a crucial role in the constitution of person-al identity over time. This idea is tied to theLockean insight about the importance of conti-nuity of consciousness for personal identity. Thereis also a sense that a person can obviously haveexperiences she does not remember. This conflictof intuitions seems to be more than simply aconflict over whether persons are to be viewed aspsychological subjects or substances. It is alsointernal to the view of persons as subjects. Psy-chological continuity theorists attempt to recon-


cile this conflict by developing a view where asufficient number of memory connections be-tween one moment and the next defines the basiccontinuity of the person, and attribution of for-gotten experiences takes place through the rela-tion of personal identity over time. Although thisis a move in the right direction, it fails to capturethe Lockean insight in many respects, and alsofails to capture the way in which unconsciousstates can be part of who we are. An alternativeaccountthe self-understanding viewrecogniz-es the original conflict as between intuitions thatidentify the psychological subject with consciousstates and intuitions that see psychological lifeand the subject itself as involving much that isunconscious as well. We can accommodate thislatter understanding of the person and still retainLockes insight if we simply recognize the factthat unconscious states have a powerful effect onconsciousness and self-consciousness. The self-consciousness that Locke is after requires morethan memory, it requires a certain level of self-understanding, and this, in turn, leads us to theattribution of psychological elements, which helpexplain how our conscious experience comes tobe as it is. The memory theory on its own isobviously too simple to explain what is distinc-tive about being a person, but the idea that weare what we areand who we arebecause weunderstand ourselves in a certain way is not. Onat least one important conception, to be a personis, as Locke says, to recognize oneself as a per-son, and here identity is indeed determined byself-understanding. Given that we are ultimatelytrying to define beings as complex as ourselves,however, it should be no surprise that this self-understanding involves more than a simple act ofrecollection.

Notes1. I do not mean to imply that these are the only

difficulties with a memory theory of identity. There aremany other famous objections raised in the literature.These are, however, the objections that are importantin what follows.

2. In a slightly different context, I have called these,respectively, the reidentifcation question and thecharacterization question (Schechtman, 1996, 12).

3. These theorists all differ from one another in avariety of details of course. Parfit, in particular, differs

from the others in one of the details I have discussedhere. He does not require any particular causal connec-tion between recollections and the experiences theyrecollect to make them identity constituting. This is asignificant deviation from the standard view, but be-cause it only makes it harder for Parfit to speak to thedifficulties I raise in the next section, I ignore it in whatfollows.

4. I have no technical sense of unconscious inmind here. For now when I talk about unconsciousand nonconscious psychological states, I mean onlystates that are not consciously entertained, but arenonetheless part of the overall psychological economy.I will say a bit more about this in a few pages.

5. Martin believes that this assessment of the condi-tions of survival is ultimately a mistake because theperceiver-self never actually persists (and people dosometimes survive). An alternative way of reading thesefacts would be to say that, to capture what is accuratein this intuitive sense of survival, it is essential to thinkof the continuation of the perceiver-self as a phenome-nological rather than metaphysical fact. That is, if aperson can experience the perceiver-self as continuousand persistent she will have the kind of psychologicalcontinuation that, in at least some moods, is taken toconstitute personal survival. Resolving these issues is,of course, a matter for a different series of papers.

6. It is worth noting that it may be absence of thiskind of intelligibility as much as the unity of body thatstands behind our hesitations to say that there is morethan one person present in cases of Multiple Personali-ty Disorder. In most such cases, there are periods ofblackout and a variety of other puzzling events thatkeep any of the streams of consciousness from provid-ing a really intelligible life narrative. From the outside,moreover, it often seems clear that if the streams ofconsciousness could have access to each other, theintelligibility of each would be greatly increased. In thisrespect, this is more like a case of a person havingexperiences of which he is not conscious than a casewhere they are not his at all. This account can thuscapture both our inclination to say these cases involvemore than one person sharing a single body and ourinclination to say that this is not so.

AcknowledgmentI am grateful to Grant Gillett for helpful com-

ments throughout the process of writing thispaper.

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In which the existence of God and the distinctionof the human soul from the body are demonstrat-

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Frayn, M. 1999. Headlong. New York: Picador.Grice, H. P. 1976. Personal identity. In Personal iden-

tity, ed. J. Perry, 7395. Berkeley and Los Angeles:University of California Press.

James, W. 1950. The Principles of psychology, Vol. 1.New York: Dover.

Lewis, D. 1983. Philosophical papers, Vol. 1. Oxford,UK: Oxford University Press.

Locke, J. 1979. An essay concerning human under-standing, ed. P. Nidditch. Oxford, UK: ClarendonPress.

Martin, R. 1998. Self-Concern: An experiential ap-proach to what matters in survival. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press.

Parfit, D. 1984. Reasons and persons. Oxford, UK:Clarendon Press.

Perry, J. 1976. The importance of being identical. InThe identities of persons, ed. A. Rorty, 6790.Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of CaliforniaPress.

Reid, T. 1976. Of Mr. Lockes account of our personalidentity. In Personal identity, ed. J. Perry, 113118.Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of CaliforniaPress.

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