The Meaning of Personal Identity

The most mysterious and obscure entity in the universe is that which is closest and most immediate to us: it is the self. The most significant question for each of us in this time of deep uncertainty is what is it that is at the brink? Is it a self, a soul? David Hume, the philosopher, denied its existence and considered persons as “nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity and are in a perpetual flux and movement…” ¹ There is the other extreme concerning the nature of the self about which there is considerable diversity of opinion and confusion. Thus, in Herman Hesse's famous novel Steppenwolf: “There is not a single human being, not even the primitive … not even the idiot, who is so conveniently simple that his being can be explained as the sum of two or three principal elements; and to explain so complex a man as Harry by the artless division into wolf and man is a hopelessly childish attempt. Harry consists of a hundred or a thousand selves, not of two. His life oscillates, as everyone's does, not merely between two poles, such as the body and the spirit, the saint and the sinner, but between thousands and thousands.”² On the other hand, there are those who postulate a self or ego which is the object and recipient of experience, as well as its subject, as was historically expressed in the famous, “I came, I saw, I conquered.”

All the above is partially true. A person may be so alienated from himself that he exists momentarily as a collection of sensations and perceptions. He many assume many roles and selves, as situations demand, because there is no sense of identity as a constant frame of reference. He may, Hesse to the contrary notwithstanding, be split into two or more antithetical and conflicting selves. He may have a spurious idealized identity that represents the shaky organization of many contradictory tendencies. He may identify with a devalued self-image or a felt, contemptible n