Personal Identity

Since the day, about six weeks ago, when I struggled up the stairs of the subway stop at 86^th and Broadway, I’ve been thinking a lot about identity.  That’s because as I half pulled myself up the stairs by means of the railing, I remembered running up the same stairs almost fifty years ago.  That’s when we lived on 86^th Street between Columbus and Amsterdam.  I was 31 and newly married. 

Could I be the same person now as I was then?  Running up the stairs now would be as likely as my flying up them.  But my physical decline is only one of the differences between that young man and this aged one.  I have changed in so many fundamental ways that I question the extent to which I’m the same person now as I was then.  Is it an illusion to think that that 31- year- old and I are the same?

When I posed this question to my good friend Elaine Yaffe, she referred me to an essay written by her son Gideon Yaffe, a professor of the philosophy of law at USC, “Locke on ideas of identity and diversity.”  This was a big help in furthering my cogitations, although Professor Yaffe should not be blamed for the marked lack of rigor in my own conclusions.    

While I’m a lot different from that newlywed, not yet a father, who thought, for example, that I would stop worrying about my as yet unborn children when they turned eighteen, I’m even more different from the two-year old child who appears in a studio photograph I recently found.  He’s seated on a bench, one leg folded under the knee of the other, holding a ball and smiling.  My parents told me that this picture is of me, which I would otherwise have doubted since the child has light colored hair and I cannot remember a time when my hair was other than dark brown or gone.

In what sense are that child and I the same person?  We share no memories.  The child did not yet speak – I waited until I was three before I spoke, leading my parents to wonder if I was mentally disabled – so, on the assumption that we need language in order to retain memories,  we cannot be linked through a sequence of memories that might connect us through a long chain beginning with him and running through intermediate manifestations of himself until the chain ended with me right now.  

“An Oak, growing from a Plant to a great Tree, and then lopp'd,” Prof. Yaffe quotes Locke as stating, “is still the same Oak.”  So in that sense that child and I are the same organism.  But are we the same person?   

If each person represents a unique collection of memories, abilities, attitudes, habits of mind, and so forth, then that child and I are not the same person, nor is that 31-year-old man who ran up the subway stairs the same person as the writer of this post.  But this leads to an uncomfortable conclusion, namely that as persons we keep changing, as we acquire new skills, memories, attitudes or change or lose them, so we’re never exactly the same person from one day to the next.   My late uncle, a doctor, told of the army recruit who, in response to the question, during his initial medical examination,  “when did you stop masturbating?” replied “you’re supposed to stop?”   This is probably apocryphal, but the point is that we never finish growing up.  We continue to grow and to change.

Sixty-three years ago, I barely passed a college course on the introduction to philosophy, a fact that my readers will say contradicts my thesis, inasmuch as I’m as philosophically inept at 80 as I was at 17.    But I ‘m not claiming that everything changes only that some things change and that these changes transform one person into another. Although the net change from one manifestation to the next may be slight, the change from the earliest to the latest version may be great.  In the meantime, when our friends and relations see us, they see the same person as they saw yesterday or last week.   This is too useful an illusion, both for them and for me, to tell them that they’re wrong.  The organism is the same, but the person is not.




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