Schechtman thinks that the contemporary literature of personal identity has gone off in the wrong direction and in this slim volume she attempts to reorient the debate. I fear that her efforts will have little success. Although there is much of interest in this book, the central thesis seems to me to be both under-developed and rather implausible.

According to Schechtman, recent work on personal identity has conflated the following two questions. The first question is that of reidentification: what does it take for a person to survive through time? The reidentification question is the central concern of the personal identity literature. Schechtman is more interested in a second question, which she calls the characterization question. Unfortunately, I failed to settle on an interpretation of the characterization question that I was fully content with. At one point, Schechtman says that the characterization question concerns ‘which beliefs, values, desires and other psychological features make someone the person she is’ (p. 2). As I read it, the characterization question asks what it means for a person to really have a particular characteristic. What distinguishes those qualities that can be truly ascribed to me, from those that are mine in only some superficial sense? There is a difference between what I do in a fit of rage, or while under hypnosis, and what I do while ‘I am myself’. I take it that the characterization question is, at least in part, concerned with the articulation of this difference.

Personal identity is often thought to have four important features, namely, it underlies survival, moral-responsibility, self-interested concern, and compensation. Personal identity theorists have supposed that there are constitutive links between these four features and personal identity, e.g., it is only appropriate to blame a person for an act if that very person committed the act; in general, it is appropriate to compensate someone for something that was earlier done only if they themselves who did it. Schechtman argues that none of these four features have an important bearing on the reidentification question. Rather, she holds that they bear on the characterization question, and are illumined by her particular narrative self-constitution answer to that question. The narrative self-constitution thesis holds that persons, selves, are constituted by a process of self-narration, a process of ‘organizing one’s experience according to an implicit narrative’ (114). To the extent that a person is no longer able to continue the same implicit narrative account of their life – as there is with those who suffer from late state Alzheimers or a battered spouse who has ‘lost her identity’ – there is some temptation to say that the person no longer survives. If a person’s action is not at the center of her self-narration, if it fails to ‘flow naturally from features absolutely central to her character’ (81), then it may be less appropriate to hold her morally responsible for it.

I had difficulty with this book in a number of places. First, as I’ve already intimated, I was often unclear on what the characterization question is. There certainly seems to be something to the idea that persons have a real or deep identity, but it is not always clear what such claims really mean. At some points it seems to be the distinction between acts that flow from one’s character, and uncharacteristic acts. But it is far from clear that Schechtman would agree with this claim for, using the example of Nora in Isben’s play A Doll’s House, Schechtman seems to grant that one can live one’s whole life denying one’s identity. But if all of one’s acts can be done out of character, then it’s no longer clear what exactly is meant by one’s character, or what the distinction between those things that one really does, and those things that are one’s acts only in a more superficial sense, comes to. The idea that that we can distinguish between different degrees of psychological ownership is an appealing one, but I was left wanting more than Schechtman’s vague discussion provides. I expected more of a book that begins by charging modern personal identity with conflating the question of reidentification with that of characterization (p. 1).

A second worry concerns Schechtman’s central thesis, that the four features mentioned above are relevant only to the characterization question. This claim just seems false. At the very least, these four features are relevant to the reidentification question insofar as personal identity in the traditional sense of the term is a necessary condition for the proper applicability of these four features. Obviously, the fact that I did something may not mean that I should be held accountable for doing it – perhaps I was hypnotized when I did it – but unless I did it, then I probably should not be blamed for it.

Perhaps a sympathetic version of Schechtman’s story is as follows. Answering the reidentification question is necessary but not sufficient for investigating the four features. In order to know whether someone has survived, or whether she is an appropriate object of moral evaluation, one has to know who she, that is, one has to answer the reidentification question. But knowing who she is is only half the story; one also needs to know certain facts about their real identity. It is at this point that questions about this real identity reemerge. Schechtman holds that a person’s real identity is created by a process of self-narration. But, like all narration, she accepts that self-narration can go awry. Like any other story, the story with which one spins one’s own life can contain falsehood. In order for it to be possible for one’s identity-constituting narrative to go wrong, one’s real identity needs to be independently constrained. It is at this point that the traditional Lockean will want to step into the picture. Perhaps self-constituting narratives have a role to play in demarcating a peripheral self from a core self, but the Lockean will want to claim that this work is done within the context of a Lockean person, constituted as it is by relations of memory, intention, and so on.

The idea that the self is constructed by a narrative process is not novel. Neuroscientists (Damasio, Gazzaniga, Pribram), psychologists (Neisser), and philosophers from both sides of the Atlantic (Dennett, Ricoeur) have all claimed that the self has a narrative aspect or character. Yet most of these writers would also agree that much work needs to be done in specifying the narrative process involves, and how it interacts with non-narrative features of the self. Schechtman’s study is a first step in exploring this fertile ground, ground that is fairly underworked by analytic philosophers. I hope others will take up these themes again soon.

Timothy Bayne was until recently a graduate student in the PhD program in Philosophy at the University of Arizona. He is now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at The University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand (his native country).

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Categories: Philosophical