Identity

I have heard that some philosophers claim that "self is an illusion". What does this mean? And how could anyone subscribe to this strange, counter-intuitive belief?

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The idea of the self that is called into question when it is claimed that the self is an illusion is the idea of a substantial, persisting, intellectual substance, such as the self of which Descartes, in the second of the Meditations on First Philosophy, claimed to have knowledge, and which the later Rationalist, G. W. Leibniz, took as one of the foundations of his philosophy.

One of the most famous Western challenges to such an idea is raised by David Hume, in A Treatise of Human Nature. In Book 1, Part 4, Chapter 6 of the Treatise, "Of Personal Identity," Hume characterizes the belief in a persisting self: "There are some philosophers, 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." To this view, Hume responds: "For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception....If any one upon serious and unprejudic'd reflection, thinks he has a different notion of himself, I must confess I can reason no longer with him. All I can allow him is, that he may be in the right as well as I, and that we are essentially different in this particular. He may, perhaps, perceive something simple and continu'd, which he calls himself; tho' I am certain there is no such principle in me."

Now Hume's challenge to the idea of the self is based on his view that every idea--like the idea of the self--must be based on some impression (this view is sometimes called Hume's 'copy principle', because Hume thinks that every idea is a copy of an impression): on the basis of introspection, Hume claims not be able to find such an impression--"when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other...". (Hume's view is not altogether idiosyncratic, or wholly dependent on his 'copy principle': in the Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant also challenges the idea that human beings can have empirical awareness of such a persisting self.)

Nevertheless, to stay with Hume, Hume doesn't deny that there is any sense to be made of the idea of the self: in "Of Personal Identity," he remarks that "we must distinguish betwixt personal identity, as it regards our thought or imagination, and as it regards our passions or the concern we take in ourselves." And in Book 2, Part 1, Chapter 5 of the Treatise, he says that pride produces the idea of the self.

Thus, although Hume denies the existence of the self as a metaphysical subject, he maintains that some idea of the self is requisite to account for the concern we take in ourselves. This suggests that some sense can be made of the self after all, but that the self cannot be taken to some entity that is the subject of all thoughts. One might even go so far as to suggest that Hume is laying the groundwork here for a notion of the self as something that is constructed, rather than discovered. It is the latter view that Hume and other Western philosophers who have challenged the coherence of the notion of the self, mean to be questioning.

(I have emphasized Western challenges to the idea of the self; such challenges are also an important part of Buddhist philosophy, about which I am not competent to comment; I will, however, note, that it has recently been plausibly argued by Alison Gopnik that Hume himself may well have known about Buddhism, and so may well have been aware about Buddhist challenges to the idea of the self when he formulated his own distinctive attack on that idea.)

Debate about the cogency of Hume's view continues. The contemporary philosopher Galen Strawson has argued, in Selves, that there must be a self and that this self may be known, pace Hume, on the basis of first-person experience. If Strawson's arguments are cogent, then there may well be a way to defend at least a version of common-sense, albeit without returning to the perspective of Rationalists such as Descartes and Leibniz.

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