Topics Identity

Question I am a different person to the person I was 10 years ago. This change has been brought about by various dramas and experiences that have unfolded over short and long time-scales. I didn't realise that the events were changing me until after they had affected me, so I could say that all the experiences I am having now are making a new me that I don't know and will not recognise until I have changed so much that I can clearly see a difference. So is there such a person or an individual as 'me' or am I a different 'me' at any time of my existence? Does the concept of self exist? (I really hope this makes sense!)

Accepted:
December 14, 2007

Comments

This is one of the more contentious and continuing questions that I've encountered in philosophy...and the way you put it makes perfect sense. So you are likely to get a great variety of answers.

I like J. David Velleman's account of triadic, reflexive selfhood: he argues that the "self" has different meanings depending on the question it is used to answer: questions about metaphysical persistence (how is the entity I call my "self" the same thing now as it was in the past and will be in the future, which I take to be the focal point of your question); about psychological self-regard (when I think about my "self," what is it I'm thinking about?); and about the generation of autonomous action (how does a particular action have its source in my "self" as opposed to some outside force or influence?). You can find this account in Contours of Agency:Essays on Themes from Harry Frankfurt, ed. Sarah Buss (Cambridge, MA:MIT Press, 2002), pp. 91-123, and criticism that it is overly inclusive, granting selfhood tothings like robots, in Diana Tietjen Meyers' “Who’s there? Selfhood, self-regard, and social relations,” Hypatia 20 (2005), pp. 200-215.

My own answer is that all three of Velleman's meanings can be brought together by thinking of the self as an autobiographical narrator whose story extends backward and forward in time, who creates a self-image as protagonist of the story and who authors the protagonist's actions. It might be said that the "self" is just what a given self, or autobiographical narrator, perceives itself to be from its own first-person perspective. Certainly a self is capable of transformation without ceasing to be the same self...but how much? I'd say the changes wrought by your various dramas and experiences are part of the autobiographical narrative of a single self. But there are many philosophers who would disagree, and have very good reasons for doing so.