Whitehead by John B. Cobb, Jr
Chapter 2: The Human Soul
4. Personal Identity
of natural theology to inquire.
Whitehead himself was troubled by the apparent conflict of his doctrine and the universal intuition and practice of mankind. He shared the intuition, and again and again he returned to the topic, seeking to shed light upon it.(AI 210, 240; MT 129-130, 221-222; Imm 689-690.) The most obvious commonsense basis for asserting the identity of a person through time is the continuity of the body of whose dominant occasions that living person or soul is composed. When we are dealing with the same body, we almost always assume that we are dealing with the same person. This is surely part of the normal meaning of personal identity.(MT 222.)If it were the only meaning, the doctrine of life after death would be nonsensical. However, quite apart from this
consequence the understanding of personal identity in terms of the identity of the body has at least two limitations.
First, our bodies change. If two points of time are sufficiently remote, we are told that no enduring object earlier present in the body will be there at the later time. Of course, the gradualness of the change is such that we have no difficulty in identifying the body as the same from birth to death. Nevertheless, it is highly questionable that we would correlate closely the identity of the person and the actual identity of the body.
Second, Whitehead affirms that a single body may house dominant occasions ordered in competing societies. He believes that this is the case where split personality occurs.(PR 164.)If so, it is clear that the identity of the body would not guarantee the identity of the soul.
Whitehead sometimes answers that the identity of the person through time points to the inheritance of a common character through the successive occasions. (This note is the primary in Imm. See pp. 688- 691.) This is an application to the special case of the soul of the general principle by which social order is defined.(PR 50-51.) It should be noted that it contains two aspects: the insistence on a common character, and the transmission of this character from member to member of the
society. It will be worthwhile to consider the two elements separately to determine their individual relevance.
It is certainly clear that commonness of character in itself provides no basis for personal identity. Twin boys at six months of age are likely to be very much alike, whereas if we compare one of those boys of six months with the man of twenty he later becomes, we will be more impressed by the great differences. Yet we never suppose that the twins are the same person, whereas we do assume that there is a personal
identity of the child of six months and the man he grows to become.
However, granting that commonness of character alone helps us very little, we must ask whether it is indeed commonness in what is inherited that causes us to judge personal identity. There is some evidence in our ordinary speech in favor of this view. If a person has changed greatly, we may say that he is a new person, or if the change is unfavorable, that he is not his old self. Whitehead’s account would illuminate such
language.
Nevertheless, Whitehead is in error if he intends to explain the common intuition of personal identity in this way. If pressed, the persons who use phrases such as those just suggested will insist that the person in question is really the same person, only changed. An exception may be made in the case of split personality or total amnesia, but mere change of personality will not lead to the conclusion that personal identity is gone. Furthermore, if the change leads to heightened sensitivity and responsibility, the person himself may take more rather than less responsibility for obligations undertaken before the change. Men will take it as a mark of bad character rather than enlightenment if, after the most drastic alteration in personality, a man refuses responsibility for all earlier commitments.
It is a perplexing fact, and perhaps an indication of some desperation on Whitehead’s part, that he fell into the trap of describing personal
identity in terms that refer to a common character. He was himself quite aware that the decisive feature of life is novelty and not the repetition of past patterns. When considering the status of a living cell and the living occasions within it, he rejected the suggestion that they be considered as enduring objects on the grounds that "‘endurance’ is a device whereby an occasion is peculiarly bound by a single line of physical ancestry, while ‘life’ means novelty." (PR 159.) Since the cell is alive, we should not regard it as an enduring object just because the special feature of enduring objects is that they continue a common character through successive occasions. How then, when we come to the soul, which is even more alive than the cell, can we appeal to the inheritance of a common character to explain its identity through time?
If this were Whitehead’s only answer, or the only answer his categories would allow, the philosophy would be in serious trouble. Reflection upon our normal understanding of our self-identity makes it quite clear that it is not in virtue of similarity of character that we affirm our identity through time. The whole burden of Whitehead’s case must fall
on the fact of inheritance, for as he himself fully recognized in
discussing the cell, commonness of character is not the distinctive mark of life. But in that case, the distinction must be made in terms of a distinctive mode of inheriting, since otherwise, personal identity would relate every occasion to every other occasion in its past.
On several occasions, Whitehead stressed the fact that personal identity depends upon a special mode of inheriting rather than upon a common pattern inherited. He wrote, "We -- as enduring objects with personal order -- objectify the occasions of our own past with peculiar
completeness in our immediate present." (PR 244.) And again, "An enduring personality in the temporal world is a route of occasions in which the successors with some peculiar completeness sum up their predecessors." (PR 531.) In these quotations, the enduring objects and enduring persons are what we have called, in dependence on other passages in White-head’s writing, living persons and souls.
Unfortunately, Whitehead did not adequately develop what he meant by peculiar completeness, and the theory of personal identity that follows goes beyond his explicit statements. However, I believe it to be the only satisfactory approach to personal identity allowed by his system and to correspond closely with my own intuition as to what constitutes my own identity through time. Furthermore, I consider it the only way to take seriously the statements of Whitehead just cited.
My sense of personal identity with my past seems to me to depend upon memory. I think of myself as remembering my own past experiences but not as remembering the past experiences of other persons or of any other entities. I may remember something about those experiences, but only my own are directly remembered as such. If, indeed, I remembered any experience, I would affirm that it was my own, and if I were
persuaded that I could not have had that experience, I would be
extremely perplexed. Likewise, I find it very difficult to identify myself as the subject of experiences of which I have no memory whatsoever, such as experiences I am told I had while under ether. I incline to view those experiences as belonging to my body but not to me. Also, I have a very limited sense of identity with the infant who, I am told, I was. I view that infant, in my imagination, from without rather than
remembering his experiences from within.
Now I recognize that much of what I have forgotten and which is
seemingly beyond recall could be recovered to memory under hypnosis
or even on an analyst’s couch. Hence, I extend my sense of identity beyond my actual ability to recall. I assume that in my unconscious even now there is a relation to past experiences, also influencing my present conscious experience, that binds them to me "with some peculiar completeness."
My understanding of my future self-identity with my present runs along the same lines. If I could suppose a future condition, in this life or
another, in which the occasions then occurring had no peculiar mode of inheritance from those I now am, I would not identify myself with them in imagination. To be told that there might be some underlying
substance that would be the same then as it is now would not affect my judgment. Neither would Whitehead’s doctrine of inheritance of a common character. Only memory can serve in my self-understanding to determine self-identity through time.
I have made this statement quite independently of Whiteheadian terminology to pose the question as to whether, after all, Whitehead’s philosophy allows an explanation of this peculiar phenomenon of the sense of personal identity. If the inheritance from previous occasions in the soul is different only in quantitative ways from other routes of inheritance, then I believe it does not, and the consequences must be accepted or the philosophy itself altered or abandoned. But, in fact, I believe that we can make sense of the "peculiar completeness" of this inheritance, and that not only in quantitative terms.
In an enduring object of the ordinary physical variety, each occasion can directly prehend only the immediate predecessor occasion. This is
because it objectifies its predecessor by the physical pole, and such prehensions are only of contiguous occasions. The influence of earlier members of the enduring object must be mediated through the more recent ones. In a living person, on the other hand, the mental poles of the past occasions are of primary importance for their
objectification.(PR 163; AI 271-272.) Prehensions of the mental poles of occasions do not depend upon contiguity. Hence, there may be
immediate objectification of many, perhaps of all, of the past occasions in the living person. In this way, a peculiar completeness of summing up would be accounted for and the question of common characteristics would be seen as entirely secondary. Also, my own experience of personal identity as described in non-Whiteheadian terms would be explained. I do experience immediate prehensions of former mental experiences, sometimes with considerable vividness. This experience
does assure me of my personal identity, not of course of numerical identity, with that earlier occasion of experience.
We need not make personal identity in this view dependent upon the unmediated prehension of all past occasions in the person in question.
So long as all those past occasions of experience are potentially
available for such recall, whether spontaneously or under hypnosis, the peculiarity of the sense of identity can be explained. Whether or not in the unconscious dimensions of our experience they are continuously effective is a factual question best left to the depth psychologists.(See sec. 5 in this ch.)
This understanding of personal identity explains our sense of
responsibility for our past acts. We remember, or can remember, those experiences from the "inside." Hence we identify ourselves with them.
If, in fact, I am entirely unable to remember some past act attributed to me and am persuaded that the relation of that acting occasion to me is not like those of occasions I can remember, I can feel no responsibility for that act whatever others may say. The sense of responsibility is a function of that kind of identity determined by the possibility of memory in this sense, in Whiteheadian terms, the possibility of the unmediated prehension of the mental pole of a past occasion.
This understanding of personal identity is also adequate for explaining the hope for life after death. That hope will be satisfied if there exist occasions that have to each other and to my present occasions this
relationship of memory. Their character may be quite different. The fact that personal identity in this life depends so little upon the relation to a common body and so much upon unmediated hybrid prehensions of past occasions of the soul’s life strengthens the plausibility of the claim that continuity may occur after bodily death. In no sense does it prove that this will occur.
I believe this to be an account of personal identity fundamentally loyal both to Whitehead and to normal human intuitions. I regret to note that in my own view it is still not entirely satisfactory.
The analysis I have given would serve to exhibit personal identity with full discreteness except for one point. Whitehead’s philosophy and some empirical evidence point to the possibility of having in relation to other souls experiences like those I have described as memory. In mental telepathy there seems to be an unmediated prehension of the mental
pole of another person’s experience. Experiences have been reported in which occasions of experience in the distant past have been
"remembered" in this way. If personal identity is defined as I have defined it, then all mental experiences subject to being prehended unmediatedly must be included in the living person. We can solve the problem definitionally by appealing to the fact that the living person is serially ordered, but the deeper question remains. It can be pointed up by a wild hypothesis.
If the dominant occasion in my body began to "remember" the past dominant occasions of another body and to fail to remember its own, my definition would require that it be regarded as a continuation of the other person. This would seem proper to common sense also, if we may appeal to common sense in this realm of fantasy. But what if successor occasions continued to occur in the other body in a quite normal
fashion? Would these two strands of occasions then be the same living person?
An analogous difficulty can be posed with respect to the suggested possibility of life after death. Suppose that after my death there is a set of serially ordered occasions that enjoy unmediated memory of all the occasions of my life. Is it not possible still to wonder whether those occasions will be "me"? If so, it is clear that the definition of personal identity I have offered does not really exhaust the common intuition of self-identity. That intuition remains mysteriously unformulable.
(Whitehead also speaks of "the mystery of personal identity," and says that "in respect to such intuitions . . . our powers of analysis, and of expression, flicker with our consciousness" [AI 210]). It may be an illusion, but I suggest that it is a persistent one which remains baffling in the light of any existing philosophy.
Meanwhile, so long as the eccentric possibilities I have mentioned are never actualized, the account I have proposed is quite satisfactory for practical purposes. It is that personal identity obtains whenever there is a serially ordered society of primarily mental occasions (a soul) in which each occasion actually or potentially prehends unmediatedly the mental poles of all its predecessors.