David Hume 1711 - 1776

A DISCUSSION OF THE REAL NATURE OF ‘SELF’ Part 1 derived primarily from COGNITION AND COMMITMENT IN HUME’S PHILOSOPHY by Don Garrett, Oxford, 1997, chapter 8 “Personal Identity”, pages163-186

wherewith it will be shown that, though there may or may not be a strong “propensity” to believe and accept superficially many of Heidegger’s ideas, they are none the less structures of the individual’s imagination (Heidegger’s) whose basis is inherited “understanding” derived from the specific culture of the specific people around him (South German Catholic) wherein it may seem he is talking about ideas common in the parlance of the English speaking world but in fact, at best, they do not really fit, and, at worse, have no place in English speaking culture. This especially applies to the structure of “conscience” upon which the structure of an “authentic self” can be conceived. The structure of “conscience” in Heidegger is based generally on Aristotle’s setting up expectations of how one should act considering the axioms one believes in and has no specific morality in mind other than logical responsibility as the origin point of actions attributed to one. “Authentic” in Heidegger simply means, in the final analysis, you simply know what you are doing in Aristotle’s sense, and still implies no moral value whatsoever. However, the phrase “authentic” taken out of context implies something morally desirable and not simply a pragmatic tool of better clarity. And since people still use it even after Heidegger completely dropped it (at least as a major concept as it is in Sein und Zeit), it should be demonstrated at best it is a trivial and thoroughly confusing distinction, and at worst it is either meaningless or vicious in intent.

Intro

163: In Treatise I. iv. 6, entitled “Of Personal Identity”, Hume presents his explanation of why we regard human minds as entities having an identity through time. His explanation depends on his previous account (Treatise I. iv. 2) of how we arrive at the idea of identity as a relation, something more than unity, therefore, and yet still less than number or plurality. The idea of identity is the idea of something persisting “invariable and uninterrupted” through a “supposed variation in time.” Since human minds are not invariable or uninterrupted, identity is not an entity with a “perfect” or “strict” identity. A perfect identity is in fact only a bundle of perceptions, “bundled” by their interrelations of resemblance and causation. The actual relation among these perceptions is thus only a “fictitious” or “imperfect” identity. It is only because a series of varying objects related by resemblance and causation itself resembles an invariable and uninterrupted object that we confuse the former with the later and ascribe an “identity” at all.

163/164: Hume accounts for our tendency to think of ourselves as having a continuous identity through time by utilizing essentially the same mental-mechanism of identity-ascription that gives rise to the belief in “continu’d and distinct existences” (THN 202-204, i. e., A TREATISE OF HUMAN NATURE, edited Selby-Bigge, revised Nidditch, Oxford, 1978), thereby confirming the existence of this mechanism while avoiding the need to introduce another one.

164: Hume answers the question of whether memory “produces” personal identity (as Locke held) or only “discovers’ it (as Locke’s critics claimed) with a diplomatic compromise , by noting that while memory discovers resemblances and causal relations (“always”) already existing among perceptions, in doing so it also serves to produce additional resemblances (THN 260-262).

Hume is able to dismiss all “nice and subtle questions” concerning particular instances of personal identity as “grammatical” rather than substantive (THN 262). This dismissal calls into question the determinacy of many of the eschatological questions concerning the justice of divine rewards and punishment that originally motivated philosophical interest in the question of personal identity.

Yet in the Appendix to the Treatise, Hume confesses dissatisfaction with his own previous account:

But upon a more strict review of the section concerning personal identity, I find myself involv’d in such a labyrinth, that, I must confess, I neither know how to correct my former opinions, nor how to render them consistent. (THN 633)

Why did Hume become so dissatisfied? . . . Although he devotes several pages in the Appendix to stating his misgivings, Hume does not succeed in clearly stating any specific problem with his earlier account.