Becoming You
Are you the same person you were when you were a child?
By October 3, 2022
People have strong, divergent opinions about the continuity of their own selves.Illustration by Juan Bernabeu
Ihave few memories of being four—a fact I find disconcerting now that I’m the father of a four-year-old. My son and I have great times together; lately, we’ve been building Lego versions of familiar places (the coffee shop, the bathroom) and perfecting the “flipperoo,” a move in which I hold his hands while he somersaults backward from my shoulders to the ground. But how much of our joyous life will he remember? What I recall from when I was four are the red-painted nails of a mean babysitter; the brushed-silver stereo in my parents’ apartment; a particular orange-carpeted hallway; some houseplants in the sun; and a glimpse of my father’s face, perhaps smuggled into memory from a photograph. These disconnected images don’t knit together into a picture of a life. They also fail to illuminate any inner reality. I have no memories of my own feelings, thoughts, or personality; I’m told that I was a cheerful, talkative child given to long dinner-table speeches, but don’t remember being so. My son, who is happy and voluble, is so much fun to be around that I sometimes mourn, on his behalf, his future inability to remember himself.
If we could see our childish selves more clearly, we might have a better sense of the course and the character of our lives. Are we the same people at four that we will be at twenty-four, forty-four, or seventy-four? Or will we change substantially through time? Is the fix already in, or will our stories have surprising twists and turns? Some people feel that they’ve altered profoundly through the years, and to them the past seems like a foreign country, characterized by peculiar customs, values, and tastes. (Those boyfriends! That music! Those outfits!) But others have a strong sense of connection with their younger selves, and for them the past remains a home. My mother-in-law, who lives not far from her parents’ house in the same town where she grew up, insists that she is the same as she’s always been, and recalls with fresh indignation her sixth birthday, when she was promised a pony but didn’t get one. Her brother holds the opposite view: he looks back on several distinct epochs in his life, each with its own set of attitudes, circumstances, and friends. “I’ve walked through many doorways,” he’s told me. I feel this way, too, although most people who know me well say that I’ve been the same person forever.
Try to remember life as you lived it years ago, on a typical day in the fall. Back then, you cared deeply about certain things (a girlfriend? Depeche Mode?) but were oblivious of others (your political commitments? your children?). Certain key events—college? war? marriage? Alcoholics Anonymous?—hadn’t yet occurred. Does the self you remember feel like you, or like a stranger? Do you seem to be remembering yesterday, or reading a novel about a fictional character?
If you have the former feelings, you’re probably a continuer; if the latter, you’re probably a divider. You might prefer being one to the other, but find it hard to shift your perspective. In the poem “The Rainbow,” William Wordsworth wrote that “the Child is Father of the Man,” and this motto is often quoted as truth. But he couched the idea as an aspiration—“And I could wish my days to be / Bound each to each by natural piety”—as if to say that, though it would be nice if our childhoods and adulthoods were connected like the ends of a rainbow, the connection could be an illusion that depends on where we stand. One reason to go to a high-school reunion is to feel like one’s past self—old friendships resume, old in-jokes resurface, old crushes reignite. But the time travel ceases when you step out of the gym. It turns out that you’ve changed, after all.
On the other hand, some of us want to disconnect from our past selves; burdened by who we used to be or caged by who we are, we wish for multipart lives. In the voluminous autobiographical novel “My Struggle,” Karl Ove Knausgaard—a middle-aged man who hopes to be better today than he was as a young man—questions whether it even makes sense to use the same name over a lifetime. Looking at a photograph of himself as an infant, he wonders what that little person, with “arms and legs spread, and a face distorted into a scream,” really has to do with the forty-year-old father and writer he is now, or with “the gray, hunched geriatric who in forty years from now might be sitting dribbling and trembling in an old people’s home.” It might be better, he suggests, to adopt a series of names: “The fetus might be called Jens Ove, for example, and the infant Nils Ove . . . the ten- to twelve-year-old Geir Ove, the twelve- to seventeen-year-old Kurt Ove . . . the twenty-three- to thirty-two-year-old Tor Ove, the thirty-two- to forty-six-year-old Karl Ove—and so on.” In such a scheme, “the first name would represent the distinctiveness of the age range, the middle name would represent continuity, and the last, family affiliation.”
My son’s name is Peter. It unnerves me to think that he could someday become so different as to warrant a new name. But he learns and grows each day; how could he not be always becoming someone new? I have duelling aspirations for him: keep growing; keep being you. As for how he’ll see himself, who knows? The philosopher Galen Strawson believes that some people are simply more “episodic” than others; they’re fine living day to day, without regard to the broader plot arc. “I’m somewhere down towards the episodic end of this spectrum,” Strawson writes in an essay called “The Sense of the Self.” “I have no sense of my life as a narrative with form, and little interest in my own past.”
Perhaps Peter will grow up to be an episodic person who lives in the moment, unconcerned with whether his life forms a whole or a collection of parts. Even so, there will be no escaping the paradoxes of mutability, which have a way of weaving themselves into our lives. Thinking of some old shameful act of ours, we tell ourselves, “I’ve changed!” (But have we?) Bored with a friend who’s obsessed with what happened long ago, we say, “That was another life—you’re a different person now!” (But is she?) Living alongside our friends, spouses, parents, and children, we wonder if they’re the same people we’ve always known, or if they’ve lived through changes we, or they, struggle to see. Even as we work tirelessly to improve, we find that, wherever we go, there we are (in which case what’s the point?). And yet sometimes we recall our former selves with a sense of wonder, as if remembering a past life. Lives are long, and hard to see. What can we learn by asking if we’ve always been who we are?
The question of our continuity has an empirical side that can be answered scientifically. In the nineteen-seventies, while working at the University of Otago, in New Zealand, a psychologist named Phil Silva helped launch a study of a thousand and thirty-seven children; the subjects, all of whom lived in or around the city of Dunedin, were studied at age three, and again at five, seven, nine, eleven, thirteen, fifteen, eighteen, twenty-one, twenty-six, thirty-two, thirty-eight, and forty-five, by researchers who often interviewed not just the subjects but also their family and friends. In 2020, four psychologists associated with the Dunedin study—Jay Belsky, Avshalom Caspi, Terrie E. Moffitt, and Richie Poulton—summarized what’s been learned so far in a book called “The Origins of You: How Childhood Shapes Later Life.” It folds in results from a few related studies conducted in the United States and the United Kingdom, and so describes how about four thousand people have changed through the decades.
John Stuart Mill once wrote that a young person is like “a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.” The image suggests a generalized spreading out and reaching up, which is bound to be affected by soil and climate, and might be aided by a little judicious pruning here and there. The authors of “The Origins of You” offer a more chaotic metaphor. Human beings, they suggest, are like storm systems. Each individual storm has its own particular set of traits and dynamics; meanwhile, its future depends on numerous elements of atmosphere and landscape. The fate of any given Harvey, Allison, Ike, or Katrina might be shaped, in part, by “air pressure in another locale,” and by “the time that the hurricane spends out at sea, picking up moisture, before making landfall.” Donald Trump, in 2014, told a biographer that he was the same person in his sixties that he’d been as a first grader. In his case, the researchers write, the idea isn’t so hard to believe. Storms, however, are shaped by the world and by other storms, and only an egomaniacal weather system believes in its absolute and unchanging individuality.
Efforts to understand human weather—to show, for example, that children who are abused bear the mark of that abuse as adults—are predictably inexact. One problem is that many studies of development are “retrospective” in nature: researchers start with how people are doing now, then look to the past to find out how they got that way. But many issues trouble such efforts. There’s the fallibility of memory: people often have difficulty recalling even basic facts about what they lived through decades earlier. (Many parents, for instance, can’t accurately remember whether a child was diagnosed as having A.D.H.D.; people even have trouble remembering whether their parents were mean or nice.) There’s also the problem of enrollment bias. A retrospective study of anxious adults might find that many of them grew up with divorced parents—but what about the many children of divorce who didn’t develop anxiety, and so were never enrolled in the study? It’s hard for a retrospective study to establish the true import of any single factor. The value of the Dunedin project, therefore, derives not just from its long duration but also from the fact that it is “prospective.” It began with a thousand random children, and only later identified changes as they emerged.
Working prospectively, the Dunedin researchers began by categorizing their three-year-olds. They met with the children for ninety minutes each, rating them on twenty-two aspects of personality—restlessness, impulsivity, willfulness, attentiveness, friendliness, communicativeness, and so on. They then used their results to identify five general types of children. Forty per cent of the kids were deemed “well-adjusted,” with the usual mixture of kid personality traits. Another quarter were found to be “confident”—more than usually comfortable with strangers and new situations. Fifteen per cent were “reserved,” or standoffish, at first. About one in ten turned out to be “inhibited”; the same proportion were identified as “undercontrolled.” The inhibited kids were notably shy and exceptionally slow to warm up; the undercontrolled ones were impulsive and ornery. These determinations of personality, arrived at after brief encounters and by strangers, would form the basis for a half century of further work.
By age eighteen, certain patterns were visible. Although the confident, reserved, and well-adjusted children continued to be that way, those categories were less distinct. In contrast, the kids who’d been categorized as inhibited or as undercontrolled had stayed truer to themselves. At age eighteen, the once inhibited kids remained a little apart, and were “significantly less forceful and decisive than all the other children.” The undercontrolled kids, meanwhile, “described themselves as danger seeking and impulsive,” and were “the least likely of all young adults to avoid harmful, exciting, and dangerous situations or to behave in reflective, cautious, careful, or planful ways.” Teen-agers in this last group tended to get angry more often, and to see themselves “as mistreated and victimized.”
The researchers saw an opportunity to streamline their categories. They lumped together the large group of teen-agers who didn’t seem to be on a set path. Then they focussed on two smaller groups that stood out. One group was “moving away from the world,” embracing a way of life that, though it could be perfectly rewarding, was also low-key and circumspect. And another, similarly sized group was “moving against the world.” In subsequent years, the researchers found that people in the latter group were more likely to get fired from their jobs and to have gambling problems. Their dispositions were durable.
That durability is due, in part, to the social power of temperament, which, the authors write, is “a machine that designs another machine, which goes on to influence development.” This second machine is a person’s social environment. Someone who moves against the world will push others away, and he’ll tend to interpret the actions of even well-meaning others as pushing back; this negative social feedback will deepen his oppositional stance. Meanwhile, he’ll engage in what psychologists call “niche picking”—the favoring of social situations that reinforce one’s disposition. A “well-adjusted” fifth grader might actually “look forward to the transition to middle school”; when she gets there, she might even join some clubs. Her friend who’s moving away from the world might prefer to read at lunch. And her brother, who’s moving against the world—the group skews slightly male—will feel most at home in dangerous situations.
Through such self-development, the authors write, we curate lives that make us ever more like ourselves. But there are ways to break out of the cycle. One way in which people change course is through their intimate relationships. The Dunedin study suggests that, if someone who tends to move against the world marries the right person, or finds the right mentor, he might begin to move in a more positive direction. His world will have become a more beneficent co-creation. Even if much of the story is written, a rewrite is always possible.
The Dunedin study tells us a lot about how differences between children matter over time. But how much can this kind of work reveal about the deeper, more personal question of our own continuity or changeability? That depends on what we mean when we ask who we are. We are, after all, more than our dispositions. All of us fit into any number of categories, but those categories don’t fully encompass our identities.
There’s an important sense, first of all, in which who you are is determined not by what you’re like but by what you do. Imagine two brothers who grow up sharing a bedroom, and who have similar personalities—intelligent, tough, commanding, and ambitious. One becomes a state senator and university president, while the other becomes a Mob boss. Do their parallel temperaments make them similar people? Those who’ve followed the stories of William Bulger and James (Whitey) Bulger—the Boston brothers who ran the Massachusetts Senate and the underworld, respectively—sometimes suggest that they were more alike than different. (“They’re both very tough in their respective fields,” a biographer observed.) But we’d be right to be skeptical of such an outlook, because it requires setting aside the wildly different substances of the brothers’ lives. At the Pearly Gates, no one will get them confused.
“He’s more interesting poolside.”
Cartoon by Liza Donnelly
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The Bulger brothers are extraordinary; few of us break so bad or good. But we all do surprising things that matter. In 1964, the director Michael Apted helped make “Seven Up!,” the first of a series of documentaries that would visit the same group of a dozen or so Britons every seven years, starting at age seven; Apted envisioned the project—which was updated most recently in 2019, with “63 Up”—as a socioeconomic inquiry “about these kids who have it all, and these other kids who have nothing.” But, as the series has progressed, the chaos of individuality has encroached on the clarity of categorization. One participant has become a lay minister and gone into politics; another has begun helping orphans in Bulgaria; others have done amateur theatre, studied nuclear fusion, and started rock bands. One turned into a documentarian himself and quit the project. Real life, irrepressible in its particulars, has overpowered the schematic intentions of the filmmakers.
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Even seemingly unimportant or trivial elements can contribute to who we are. Late this summer, I attended a family function with my father and my uncle. As we sat at an outside table, making small talk, our conversation turned to “Star Trek,” the sci-fi TV show that premièred in 1966. My father and uncle have both watched various incarnations of it since childhood, and my dad, in particular, is a genuine fan. While the party went on around us, we all recited from memory the original version’s opening monologue—“Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. . . .”—and applauded ourselves on our rendition. “Star Trek” is a through line in my dad’s life. We tend to downplay these sorts of quirks and enthusiasms, but they’re important to who we are. When Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” wanders through a Dublin cemetery, he is unimpressed by the generic inscriptions on the gravestones, and thinks they should be more specific. “So and So, wheelwright,” Bloom imagines, or, on a stone engraved with a saucepan, “I cooked good Irish stew.” Asked to describe ourselves, we might tend to talk in general terms, finding the details of our lives somehow embarrassing. But a friend delivering a eulogy would do well to note that we played guitar, collected antique telephones, and loved Agatha Christie and the Mets. Each assemblage of details is like a fingerprint. Some of us have had the same prints throughout our lives; others have had a few sets.
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Focussing on the actualities of our lives might belie our intuitions about our own continuity or changeability. Galen Strawson, the philosopher who says that he has little sense of his life “as a narrative,” is best known for the arguments he’s made against the ideas of free will and moral responsibility; he maintains that we don’t have free will and aren’t ultimately responsible for what we do. But his father, Peter Strawson, was also a philosopher, and was famous for, among other things, defending those concepts. Galen Strawson can assure us that, from a first-person perspective, his life feels “episodic.” Yet, from the third-person perspective of an imagined biographer, he’s part of a long plot arc that stretches across lifetimes. We may feel discontinuous on the inside but be continuous on the outside, and vice versa. That sort of divergence may simply be unavoidable. Every life can probably be viewed from two angles.
I know two Tims, and they have opposing intuitions about their own continuities. The first Tim, my father-in-law, is sure that he’s had the same jovially jousting personality from two to seventy-two. He’s also had the same interests—reading, the Second World War, Ireland, the Wild West, the Yankees—for most of his life. He is one of the most self-consistent people I know. The second Tim, my high-school friend, sees his life as radically discontinuous, and rightly so. When I first met him, he was so skinny that he was turned away from a blood drive for being underweight; bullied and pushed around by bigger kids, he took solace in the idea that his parents were late growers. This notion struck his friends as far-fetched. But after high school Tim suddenly transformed into a towering man with an action-hero physique. He studied physics and philosophy in college, and then worked in a neuroscience lab before becoming an officer in the Marines and going to Iraq; he entered finance, but has since left to study computer science.
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“I’ve changed more than most people I know,” Tim told me. He shared a vivid memory of a conversation he had with his mother, while they sat in the car outside an auto mechanic’s: “I was thirteen, and we were talking about how people change. And my mom, who’s a psychiatrist, told me that people tend to stop changing so much when they get into their thirties. They start to accept who they are, and to live with themselves as they are. And, maybe because I was an unhappy and angry person at the time, I found that idea offensive. And I vowed right then that I would never stop changing. And I haven’t stopped.”
Do the two Tims have the whole picture? I’ve known my father-in-law for only twenty of his seventy-two years, but even in that time he’s changed quite a bit, becoming more patient and compassionate; by all accounts, the life he lived before I met him had a few chapters of its own, too. And there’s a fundamental sense in which my high-school friend hasn’t changed. For as long as I’ve known him, he’s been committed to the idea of becoming different. For him, true transformation would require settling down; endless change is a kind of consistency.
Galen Strawson notes that there’s a wide range of ways in which people can relate to time in their lives. “Some people live in narrative mode,” he writes, and others have “no tendency to see their life as constituting a story or development.” But it’s not just a matter of being a continuer or a divider. Some people live episodically as a form of “spiritual discipline,” while others are “simply aimless.” Presentism can “be a response to economic destitution—a devastating lack of opportunities—or vast wealth.” He continues:
There are lotus-eaters, drifters, lilies of the field, mystics and people who work hard in the present moment. . . . Some people are creative although they lack ambition or long-term aims, and go from one small thing to the next, or produce large works without planning to, by accident or accretion. Some people are very consistent in character, whether or not they know it, a form of steadiness that may underwrite experience of the self’s continuity. Others are consistent in their inconsistency, and feel themselves to be continually puzzling and piecemeal.
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The stories we tell ourselves about whether we’ve changed are bound to be simpler than the elusive reality. But that’s not to say that they’re inert. My friend Tim’s story, in which he vows to change forever, shows how such stories can be laden with value. Whether you perceive stasis or segmentation is almost an ideological question. To be changeable is to be unpredictable and free; it’s to be not just the protagonist of your life story but the author of its plot. In some cases, it means embracing a drama of vulnerability, decision, and transformation; it may also involve a refusal to accept the finitude that’s the flip side of individuality.
The alternative perspective—that you’ve always been who you are—bears values, too. James Fenton captures some of them in his poem “The Ideal”:
A self is a self.
It is not a screen.
A person should respect
What he has been.
This is my past
Which I shall not discard.
This is the ideal.
This is hard.
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In this view, life is full and variable, and we all go through adventures that may change who we are. But what matters most is that we lived it. The same me, however altered, absorbed it all and did it all. This outlook also involves a declaration of independence—independence not from one’s past self and circumstances but from the power of circumstances and the choices we make to give meaning to our lives. Dividers tell the story of how they’ve renovated their houses, becoming architects along the way. Continuers tell the story of an august property that will remain itself regardless of what gets built. As different as these two views sound, they have a lot in common. Among other things, they aid us in our self-development. By committing himself to a life of change, my friend Tim might have sped it along. By concentrating on his persistence of character, my father-in-law may have nurtured and refined his best self.
The passage of time almost demands that we tell some sort of story: there are certain ways in which we can’t help changing through life, and we must respond to them. Young bodies differ from old ones; possibilities multiply in our early decades, and later fade. When you were seventeen, you practiced the piano for an hour each day, and fell in love for the first time; now you pay down your credit cards and watch Amazon Prime. To say that you are the same person today that you were decades ago is absurd. A story that neatly divides your past into chapters may also be artificial. And yet there’s value in imposing order on chaos. It’s not just a matter of self-soothing: the future looms, and we must decide how to act based on the past. You can’t continue a story without first writing one.
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Sticking with any single account of your mutability may be limiting. The stories we’ve told may become too narrow for our needs. In the book “Life Is Hard,” the philosopher Kieran Setiya argues that certain bracing challenges—loneliness, failure, ill health, grief, and so on—are essentially unavoidable; we tend to be educated, meanwhile, in a broadly redemptive tradition that “urges us to focus on the best in life.” One of the benefits of asserting that we’ve always been who we are is that it helps us gloss over the disruptive developments that have upended our lives. But it’s good, the book shows, to acknowledge hard experiences and ask how they’ve helped us grow tougher, kinder, and wiser. More generally, if you’ve long answered the question of continuity one way, you might try answering it another. For a change, see yourself as either more continuous or less continuous than you’d assumed. Find out what this new perspective reveals.
There’s a recursive quality to acts of self-narration. I tell myself a story about myself in order to synchronize myself with the tale I’m telling; then, inevitably, I revise the story as I change. The long work of revising might itself be a source of continuity in our lives. One of the participants in the “Up” series tells Apted, “It’s taken me virtually sixty years to understand who I am.” Martin Heidegger, the often impenetrable German philosopher, argued that what distinguishes human beings is our ability to “take a stand” on what and who we are; in fact, we have no choice but to ask unceasing questions about what it means to exist, and about what it all adds up to. The asking, and trying out of answers, is as fundamental to our personhood as growing is to a tree.
Recently, my son has started to understand that he’s changing. He’s noticed that he no longer fits into a favorite shirt, and he shows me how he sleeps somewhat diagonally in his toddler bed. He’s been caught walking around the house with real scissors. “I’m a big kid now, and I can use these,” he says. Passing a favorite spot on the beach, he tells me, “Remember when we used to play with trucks here? I loved those times.” By this point, he’s actually had a few different names: we called him “little guy” after he was born, and I now call him “Mr. Man.” His understanding of his own growth is a step in his growing, and he is, increasingly, a doubled being—a tree and a vine. As the tree grows, the vine twines, finding new holds on the shape that supports it. It’s a process that will continue throughout his life. We change, and change our view of that change, for as long as we live. ♦
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L Review of Books
Vol. 18 No. 8 · 18 April 1996
The Sense of the Self
Galen Strawson
Human beings in different cultures are much more alike, psychologically speaking, than most anthropologists and sociologists suppose. There’s a great deal of substance to the idea of a common humanity – of profound emotional and cognitive similarities that transcend differences in cultural experience. It’s also true that human beings are very varied, psychologically, but the deepest psychological differences are those that can be found within a given culture. The cultural relativism of Emile Durkheim and others, elegantly renewed by Clifford Geertz and orthodox in large parts of the academic community is based on a serious underestimation of the genetic determinants of human nature, and a false view of mental development.
It’s partly for this reason, and partly because I have a Kantian confidence in the ability of philosophy to reach conclusions of extreme generality on this sort of question, that I expect my remarks about the self to apply, if true, to human beings generally. When it comes to the sense of the self, the difference between those who can’t sleep and those who can may be more important than any cultural differences.
By the ‘sense of the self’ I mean the sense that people have of themselves as being, specifically, a mental presence, a mental someone, a conscious subject that has a certain character or personality, and is distinct from all its particular experiences, thoughts, hopes, wishes, feelings and so on. I’ve no doubt that this sense comes to every normal human being, in some form, in childhood. It is perhaps most often vivid when we are alone and thinking, but it can be equally vivid in a room full of shouting people. It connects with a feeling that most people have had at some time, that their body is just a vehicle or vessel for the mental thing they really are. (Neither physical activity nor pain need diminish our sense of the independence of the self from the body; they’re just as likely to increase it.) I’m not claiming that the sense of the self automatically incorporates belief in an immaterial soul, or in life after bodily death. It doesn’t. Philosophical materialists have it as strongly as anyone else, although they believe, as I do, that we are wholly physical beings, and that consciousness evolved by purely physical processes.
Our natural, unreflective conception of the self seems to have six main elements. First, the self is thought of as a thing, in some sense. Second, it is thought of as specifically mental, in some sense. Third, it is thought of as single. Fourth, it is thought of as something that has a certain character or personality. Fifth, it is thought of as something that is ontologically distinct from all other things. Sixth, it is thought of as something that is a subject of experience, a conscious feeler, thinker, chooser. In considering each element in turn, I use the expression ‘the self’ freely, as a loose name for all the undeniably real phenomena that lead us to think and talk in terms of the self. This doesn’t rule out the possibility that the best thing to say, in the end, is that there is no such thing.
The first claim, that the self is thought of as a thing, is, in a way, the least clear. The general idea is this: it isn’t thought of as a state or property of something else, or as an event, or as a mere process or series of events. To this extent, there is nothing else for it to seem to be, other than a thing – not a thing in the way that a stone or a chair is, a sort of ethereal concrete object, but a thing of some kind. It is thought of, in particular, as something that has the causal character of a thing; something that can undergo and do things. Bishop Berkeley’s characterisation of the self as a ‘thinking active principle’ seems as good as any. In this old use, a principle manages to sound like a thing without sounding like a table or a chair.
The second claim, that the self is something mental, is also unclear, but the central idea is this: when the self is thought of as a thing, its claim to thinghood is taken to be sufficiently grounded in its mental nature alone; it may also have a non-mental nature, as materialists suppose, but its being a thing is not thought to depend on its counting as a thing considered in its non-mental nature. The self is the mental self. It’s true that people naturally think of themselves as possessing both mental and non-mental properties, but this doesn’t affect the standard conception of the mental self.
Although experience of the mental self needn’t involve any belief in an immaterial soul, it does incorporate elements that make that belief come rather naturally. The mental self can easily seem to exist self-sufficiently in a sphere of being quite other than that described by physics. Things are not as they seem, according to materialists; but they certainly seem as they seem, and this helps to explain how natural it is to think of the self as a specifically mental thing.
The third claim is that the self is thought of as single. But in what way? Not as a single assemblage or collectivity, as a pile of marbles is single, but rather, as a marble is single when compared with a pile of marbles. Furthermore, it is standardly thought to be single both when it is considered synchronically, i.e. as existing at a given time, and when it is considered diachronically, i.e. as a thing that persists through time. I will take ‘synchronic’ to apply to any consideration of the self during what is experienced as a unitary or ‘hiatus-free’ period of consciousness. ‘Diachronic’ will then apply to any period that includes a break or hiatus. Truly unbroken periods of experience are, I suggest, almost invariably brief: a few seconds at most, a fraction of a second at the least.
I’ve said that we normally have a sense of the singleness of the self. Some, however, may claim to experience it as fragmentary or multiple, and most of us have had experience that gives us – we feel – some understanding of what they mean. In fact there are reasons for thinking that the experience of multiplicity can only really affect the sense of the self diachronically considered, not synchronically. But this may be doubted: we may be subject to rapidly changing and overlapping moods, and conflicts of desire. Our thought processes can become extraordinarily rapid and tumultuous, disparate contents tumbling over one another. This may be claimed to involve experience of the self as synchronically multiple.
To experience conflicting desires is not to experience the self as multiple, however. On the contrary, it’s one of the most vivid forms of experiencing oneself as single: as a single thing that feels conflict precisely because it is single. What about the mind racing chaotically? When this happens many people experience themselves as helpless spectators of the pandemonium, which is more likely to increase than to diminish their sense of being single. Furthermore, any supposed experience of the self as synchronically multiple will have to be an episode of explicitly self-conscious thought; but there is a crucial sense in which such experience is incompatible with genuine self-conscious thought. ‘The subjective “I” can never be ... divided, and it is this “I” that we presuppose in all thinking,’ as Kant remarks. Don’t believe anyone who tells you otherwise, especially if they come from Paris.
The fourth claim is simply that the self is thought of as having character or personality, in exactly the same way as an embodied human being. This is hardly surprising, for we take it that our personality is a matter of how we are, mentally speaking; so if we think that our existence involves a mental self, we’re bound to think that that self has a personality.
The fifth claim is that the self is thought of as ontologically distinct. From what? The question has various answers. To begin with, the self is thought of as ontologically distinct from any conscious mental goings-on – thoughts, experiences and so on. It has thoughts and experiences but is not the same as them, or constituted out of them. A stronger version of this view holds that the self is distinct not only from any conscious mental goings-on, but also from any non-conscious mental features like beliefs, preferences, stored memories, character traits. Hume famously challenged the first of these views, proposing that the self, if it exists, just is a series of mental goings-on. Ordinary thought rejects this ‘bundle’ theory, however, as Hume later did himself, and endorses the second, stronger version.
A third and still stronger version rejects materialism, claiming that the self is ontologically distinct from anything physical. But this dualist, or idealist, idea is not an integral part of the sense of the self.
The sixth claim, that the self is a subject of experience, I take to be obvious. What is a subject of experience? The ordinary notion seems pretty clear: independently of any metaphysical commitments, each of us has a very good idea of what a subject of experience is just in being one and being self-conscious. The self is clearly not the only thing that is thought of as a subject of experience: it’s just as natural (or more natural) for us to say that a human being considered as a whole is a subject of experience – as are millions of non-human animals. Nevertheless, we have a tendency to think that in the human case it is above all the mental self that is the subject of experience.
What about the view that the self is capable of action, in thinking and choosing, for example? Perhaps I should add a seventh, separate, claim, that it is thought of as an agent, as ‘the source of effort and attention, and the place from which ... emanate the fiats of the will’, in William James’s words. This seems very plausible.
Suppose the seven elements capture the conceptual core of the ordinary human sense of the self. The question then arises whether they are all essential to anything counting as a genuine sense of the self. I will challenge the claims about personality and diachronic singleness.
The principal point to be made against the personality claim is simple. We already have a natural way of conceiving of the self according to which it does not have a personality, but is, strictly speaking, a mere ‘locus’ of awareness. Most people have at some time, and however temporarily, experienced themselves not just as neutral and unengaged, but as stripped of particularity of character: as a mere point of view. This may be the result of exhaustion or solitude, or it may just be how some people feel when they wake up. It may be the temporary result of abstract thought or a hot bath. It is also a common feature of severe depression, in which we experience ‘depersonalisation’ – an accurate term. Depersonalisation is pathological, but it is experientially real, and one can imagine getting stuck in this condition. (Some people do.) Equally, one can imagine a race of alien beings for whom it is the normal condition, but who still have a clear sense of the mental self as the locus of consciousness.
A very strong form of what may be lost in depersonalisation is recorded by Gerard Manley Hopkins, who talks of considering
my self-being, my consciousness and feeling of myself, that taste of myself, of I and me above and in all things, which is more distinctive than the taste of ale or alum, more distinctive than the smell of walnutleaf or camphor, and is incommunicable by any means to another man ... Nothing else in nature comes near this unspeakable stress of pitch, distinctiveness, and selving, this self-being of my own.
This is bewildering. I find it quite hard to believe that Hopkins is telling the truth, and have yet to meet someone whose experience resembles his. For most people, their personality is something unnoticed, and in effect undetectable, in the present moment. It’s what they look through, or where they look from; not something they look at.
It is harder to dislodge the idea that a genuine sense of the self must incorporate a conception of it as something that has relatively long-term diachronic singleness or continuity. Yet that sense may be vivid and complete, at any given time, even if it has to do only with the present brief, hiatus-free stretch of consciousness. It may be said that although this is a formal possibility, it is remote from reality and from our interests: that life without any significant sense of the long-term continuity of the self is conceivable for aliens, but hardly for ourselves. Strictly speaking, all I need for my argument is the formal possibility; but it seems to me that life without any such sense of long-term continuity lies well within human experience. We can be fully aware that we have long-term bodily continuity without having any such sense of the self. The idea may have very little – or no – emotional importance for us. It may contribute little or nothing to the overall character of our experience. Human beings differ deeply in a number of ways that may affect their experience of continuity.
In considering these differences, I sometimes write ‘in the first person’, like William James, ‘leaving my description to be accepted by those to whose introspection it may commend itself as true, and confessing my inability to meet the demands of others, if others there be’. Clearly James doesn’t really believe that there are others unlike himself, any more than Hume does when he pretends to allow that some people may perceive a simple and continuous mental self when they introspect, although he is ‘certain there is no such principle in me’. My position is different. When it comes to the differences I am about to discuss, I believe that there are others quite unlike myself.
First, there are differences of memory. Some people have an excellent ‘personal’ memory (as philosophers call memory of one’s own past), and an unusual capacity for vivid recollection. Their personal memory may not be just reliable and retentive: it may also be highly active and regularly intrude into their present thoughts. Others have a very poor personal memory, which may also be quiescent, and almost never intrude. These differences of memory are matched by equal differences in the force with which people imagine, anticipate or form intentions about the future.
These differences interact with others. Some people live in narrative mode, and wrongly assume that everyone else does the same: they experience their lives in terms of something that has shape and story, a narrative trajectory. Some of them keep diaries with posterity in mind, and imagine future biographies. Some are self-narrators in a stronger sense: they regularly rehearse and revise their interpretations of their lives. Some are great planners, and knit up their lives with long-term projects. Others have no early ambition, no later sense of vocation, no interest in climbing a career ladder, no tendency to see their life as constituting a story or development. Some merely go from one thing to another, living life in a picaresque or episodic fashion. Some people make few plans and are little concerned with the future. Some live intensely in the present, some are simply aimless. This can be a basic fact of character or the outcome of spiritual discipline; it can be a response to economic destitution – a devastating lack of opportunities – or vast wealth. There are lotus-eaters, drifters, lilies of the field, mystics and people who work hard in the present moment. There are many possibilities. Some people are creative although they lack ambition or long-term aims, and go from one small thing to the next, or produce large works without planning to, by accident or accretion. Some people are very consistent in character, whether or not they know it, a form of steadiness that may underwrite experience of the self’s continuity. Others are consistent in their inconsistency, and feel themselves to be continually puzzling and piecemeal. Some go through life as if stunned.
I’m somewhere down towards the episodic end of this spectrum. I have no sense of my life as a narrative with form, and very little interest in my own past. My personal memory is very poor, and rarely impinges on my present consciousness. I make plans for the future, and to that extent think of myself perfectly adequately as something with long-term continuity. But I experience this way of thinking of myself as remote and theoretical, given the most central or fundamental way in which I think of myself, which is as a mental self or someone. Using ME to express the way in which I think of myself, I can accurately express my experience by saying that I do not think of ME as being something in the future.
It is January as I write this. The thought that I have to give a Wolfson College Lecture in March causes me some anxiety, and this has familiar physiological manifestations. I feel the anxiety naturally and directly as pertaining to me even though I have no sense that it will be ME that will be giving the lecture. Indeed it seems plain false to say that it will be ME. And this is how it feels, not something I happen to believe for theoretical reasons. So why do I feel anxiety? Doubtless because my susceptibility to it is innate and ‘hard-wired’, connected with the instinct for self-preservation: my concern for my future, which is within the normal human range, is biologically grounded and autonomous in such a way that it persists as something immediately felt even though it is not supported by any emotionally backed sense on the part of ME now that ME will be there in the future.
My experience of the self is just one kind among others; no doubt some people have it in a more extreme form. It matters here only insofar as it supports the claim that a sense of the self need not necessarily involve experience of it as something with long-term continuity. This experience may be common, but it is not universal, it fades over time in some, and is withered, in others, by reflection.
Some think that conscious experience flows, that this is simply given prior to any theoretical suppositions. According to James, ‘Consciousness ... does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as “train” or “chain” do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A “river” or a “stream” are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described ... Let us call it the stream of consciousness, or of subjective life.’
This seemed a good move in 1890, given the dominant psychological atomism that inspired the metaphors of trains and chains, collections, bundles and heaps. But perhaps we have now been misled in the opposite direction, into thinking consciousness more fluent than it is. This is important: for if consciousness does feel stream-like then this may be part – although only a part – of the explanation of why many people have a sense of continuity. In fact I think the metaphor of the stream is inapt, even though streams contain pools and falls – not to mention weeds and stones. Thought has very little natural continuity or experiential flow – if mine is anything to go by. It keeps slipping from mere consciousness into self-consciousness and out again. It is always shooting off, shorting out, spurting and stalling. James likened it to ‘a bird’s life ... an alternation of flights and perchings’ (the idea is beautifully developed), but even this image retains strong continuity insofar as a bird traces a spatio-temporally continuous path, and it fails to take adequate account of the fact that trains of thought are constantly interrupted by detours, fissures, byblows and white noise.
This is especially so when we are just sitting thinking. Things are different if our attention is engaged by some ordered and continuous process in the external world, like a fast and exciting game, or music. In this case thought or experience may be felt to take on the ordered continuity of the phenomenon which occupies it. But it may still cut out and restart, or flash with extraneous matter from time to time, and it is arguable that the case of solitary speculative thought merely reveals in a relatively dramatic way something that is true to a greater or lesser extent of all thought. Joyce’s use of full stops in Ulysses makes his depiction of consciousness more accurate in the case of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus (who have many) than in the case of Molly Bloom (who has none). There may be some difference between the sexes – Virginia Woolf claimed that Dorothy Richardson had ‘invented the psychological sentence of the feminine gender’ – but it is not normally so marked. Molly Bloom’s great flood of words resembles speech more than thought.
Radical disjunction does not occur only at the level of content. Switches of subject-matter can be absolute, and still be seamless in that they involve no sensible temporal gap or interruption of consciousness. It seems to me that the experience of seamlessness is relatively rare. When I’m alone and thinking and consider my thinking I find that the fundamental experience is one of repeated returns into consciousness from a state of complete, if momentary, non-consciousness. The (invariably brief) periods of true continuity are usually radically disjunct even when it is the same thought (or nearly the same thought) that I return to after an episode of absence. It is as if consciousness is continually restarting. It keeps banging out of nothingness; it is a series of comings-to.
Some hiatuses involve complete switches of focus and subject-matter. Others occur between thoughts that are connected in subject-matter, or when we are attending to something in such a way that we hardly notice the hiatus because the content of experience is more or less the same afterwards as before. In this case, the hiatus may be a mere caesura, an entirely accidental feature of the mechanism of consciousness. But it is likely that it is also functional in some way, part of a basic process of regirding attention: a new ‘binding’ of the mental manifold, a new synthesis in the Kantian sense. The hiatus is often fast: it’s not hard to overlook the absolute fugues and interstitial vacancies of consciousness – just as we overlook the blinks of our eyes. But they are easily noticeable when attended to, available to memory in our current state of consciousness.
Perhaps this is a rash generalisation from my own case, or an unwitting confession of schizophrenia. I think, though, that introspection will reveal the same to everyone, if in different degrees. It’s true that belief in the reality of flow may itself contribute to an experience of it, but the appearance of flow is undercut by even a modest amount of reflection.
Perhaps the experience of disjunction is an artefact of introspection, however: perhaps the facts get distorted by the attempt to observe them. Perhaps unexamined consciousness has true flow. The reply to this objection is, first, that even if the appearance of disjunction were partly – or even largely – an artefact, this would be a striking fact about how consciousness appears to itself, important when considering the underpinnings of a sense of continuity. A second reason the objection seems wrong is that awareness of disjunction can surface spontaneously: we can become aware that this is what has been happening, rather than seeing it happen only when we look. In a sense, the issue is undecidable, for in order to decide it we would need to be able to observe something while it was unobserved.
Insofar as it finds support in the moment-to-moment nature of consciousness, then, the sense of continuity does not derive from a phenomenon of steady flow, but from other sources – such as the constancies and coherences of content that often link up experiences through time, and, by courtesy of short-term memory, across the radical jumps and breaks of flow. I work in a room for an hour; I look up at the rain on the window and turn back to the page; I hold the same pen throughout. Examined in detail, the processes of my thought may be scatty. And yet I am experientially in touch with a great pool of constancies and steady processes of change in my environment, which includes my body. These constancies and steadinesses in the contents of consciousness may seem like fundamental characteristics of its operation, although they are not. And this in turn may support the sense of the self as something truly continuous throughout the waking day, and smooth the path to the idea of it as an entity that may be continuous also during sleep, and so from week to week to month to year.
Although I have no sense of seamless flow in the process of consciousness, it doesn’t immediately follow that I have no sense of the continuing mental self. When we first try to think about our sense of the self – and to think about it, rather than simply have it, is already difficult – our first reaction may well be that it does present the self as a single thing continuing throughout the waking day: something that has all the interrupted thoughts and experiences but is not itself interrupted. This reaction is backed up by our awareness of our continuity as embodied human beings with robustly persisting sets of basic beliefs, preferences, mental abilities and so on. In my case, however, the reaction is weak, and soon undermined. As I think further about my mental life, I’m met by the sense that there is no ‘I’ that goes on through the waking day (and beyond). I feel I have continuity only as an embodied human being. If I consider myself as a mental subject of experience, my sense is that I am continually new.
I don’t mean new or different in respect of personality and outlook. I have an adequate grasp of the similarities that characterise me from day to day. And yet, when I consider the fundamental experience of myself as a mental self, my feeling is that I am continually new. In his autobiography, John Updike writes: ‘I have the persistent sensation, in my life ... that I am just beginning.’ This seems exactly right. The experience of the ‘I’ as in some sense new each time is (I suggest) fundamental and universally available, although it is occluded for many by familiar and contrary habits of thought, and may emerge clearly only on reflection. I feel I’m a nomad in time, although the metaphor is intussusceptive, because it is the ‘I’ itself that has the transience of abandoned camping-grounds.
Research by Pöppel shows that the conscious now’ is about three seconds long: this is the most we can hold together at any one time, experientially speaking. ‘In this sense,’ writes Miroslav Holub, ‘our ego lasts three seconds.’ His claim is tangential to mine. I don’t think that the brevity of the ‘conscious now’ necessarily contributes to the sense of hiatus or newness, for our experience could resemble a narrow beam of light sweeping smoothly along. The length of the ‘conscious now’ may set an upper limit on hiatus-free periods of thought, but it doesn’t follow that there will always be conscious experience of hiatus within any four-second period (there may be none for days). Nor, crucially, am I claiming that the self will never appear to last longer than the conscious now, when reflected on. My use of the word ‘long-term’ is vague but not idle: the self can certainly be felt to persist throughout a period of time that includes a break or hiatus, and its temporal extent may appear very different in different contexts of thought (fear of death raises interesting questions).
Some may doubt my claims about how I experience consciousness; those who do not may think I’m part of a small minority. Experience like mine may be thought to be the unnatural result of doing philosophy, or drugs. But even if the experience of disjunction was specifically the result of philosophical reflection, it wouldn’t follow that it resulted from philosophy distorting the data. Philosophy may simply make us examine the already existing nature of our experience more closely. Even if the experience were unnatural or uncommon in daily life, it would not follow that it gives a less accurate picture of how things are; for many natural experiences represent things inaccurately. More important, the experience may be natural in the sense that any ordinary human being who considers the matter will find that he or she comes to have it.
Human beings, then, can have a vivid sense of the self without having any sense of it as something that has either personality or long-term continuity. Does this improve the prospects for the claim that a sense of the self could be an accurate representation of something that actually exists – even if materialism is true? I think it does, although the full argument would require a careful statement of what it is to be a true materialist, further inquiry into the notion of a thing, and a challenge to the problematic distinction between things and processes. Perhaps the best account of the existence of the self is one that may be given by certain Buddhists. It allows that the self exists, at any given moment, while retaining all the essential Buddhist criticisms of the idea of the self. It gives no reassurance to those who believe in the soul, but it doesn’t leave us with nothing. It stops short of the view defended by many analytic philosophers, according to which the self is a myth insofar as it is thought to be different from the human being considered as a whole. It leaves us with what we have, at any given time – a self that is materially respectable, distinctively mental, and as real as a stone.
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Galen Strawson
Galen Strawson’s Things That Bother Me will be published this month.
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Letters
Vol. 18 No. 9 · 9 May 1996
Abridgment of my piece on ‘The Sense of the Self’ (LRB, 18 April) produced an error. The sentence ‘The ordinary notion of what a subject of experience is seems pretty clear: it is being one and being self-conscious’ is multiply false. For one thing, self-consciousness is not a necessary condition of being a subject of experience: anything that can feel pain is a subject of experience. The most generous reading of the sentence leaves it partly false and partly tautologous. It should read: ‘What is a subject of experience? The ordinary notion seems pretty clear: independently of any metaphysical commitments, each of us has a very good idea of what a subject of experience is just in being one and being self-conscious.’
Galen Strawson
Jesus College, Oxford
