Continuity of Self and the Creation of an Identity Narrative

Kant followed the notion of a single unified self prevalent among his contemporaries and examined its continuity over time, hypothesising the persistence of 'numerically identical self' through a series of successive states, writing that:

Anything that is conscious of the numerical identity of itself at different times, i.e. of being the very same individual thing at different times, is to that extent a person... I relate each of my successive states to the numerically identical self in all time. . . in my own consciousness, therefore, identity of person is unfailingly met with.

He continues, discussing an alternative viewpoint:

But if I view myself from the standpoint of someone else (as an object of his outer intuition)... this observer... won’t infer from this that I am something objectively permanent. It could be that one thinking subject is replaced by another, that by a third, and so on, while the same-sounding I is used all through, because each outgoing thinking subject hands over its state to its immediate successor. (1781, p.363)

William Godwin, a contemporary of Kant, viewed an individual’s qualities as acquired from without and changing over time and compared ideas being to the mind as atoms are to the body:

The whole mass is in a perpetual flux; nothing is stable and permanent; after the lapse of a given period not a single particle probably remains the same. Who knows not that in the course of a human life the character of the individual frequently undergoes two or three revolutions of its fundamental stamina? (1798).

David Hume follows a similar line of reasoning which leads him to seemingly reject the notion of a unified Self. Moving away also from the idea of deliberate self-authoring of identity Hume ascribes passions or emotions, which are responses to the world, as a factor in the makeup of personal identity.

If the idea of self came from an impression, it would have to be an impression that remained invariably the same throughout our lives, because the self is supposed to exist in that way. But no impression is constant and invariable. Pain and pleasure, grief and joy, passions and sensations follow one other and never all exist at the same time. So it can’t be from any of these impressions or from any other that the idea of self is derived... When I am without perceptions for a while, as in sound sleep, for that period I am not aware of myself and can truly be said not to exist.... each of us is nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions that follow each other enormously quickly and are in a perpetual flux and movement... we only feel a connection or a determination of the

finds personal identity, when reflecting on the train of past perceptions, that compose a mind, the ideas of them are felt to be connected together... our notions of personal identity must proceed entirely from the smooth and uninterrupted movement of thought along a sequence of connected ideas... we only feel a connection in our mind when our thought is compelled to pass from one object to another. It follows, then, that personal identity is merely felt by our thought; this happens when our thought reflects on the sequence of past perceptions that compose a mind. (1739, pp. 132-140)

However in his Appendix he tries to reconcile these ideas to incorporate the notion of unified self:

When I look in on myself, I can never perceive this self without some one or more perceptions; nor can I ever perceive anything but the perceptions. It is a complex of these perceptions, therefore, that constitutes the self.

In support of the notion of a unified and persisting Self, Thomas Reid proposed a thought experiment to refute the view that continuity of consciousness, as demonstrated by the memory of past actions, correlates to continuity of the self, in which an Officer was conscious of a particular experience as a boy, and a General conscious of his experience as that same Officer but no longer recalled the experience as a boy. Reid enquired as to whether the general was the same person as the boy and argued:

My thoughts, and actions, and feelings, change every moment -they have no continued, but a successive existence; but that Self of I to which they belong is

permanent, and has the same relation to all the succeeding thoughts, actions, and feelings, which I call mine. (1785, p.203)

Tittle further comments upon a thought experiment by Bernard Williams (1957) which examines a scenario in which a person, Charles, loses the memory of his actions, but recalls accurately those of a different person, Guy Fawkes. Williams concludes that, regardless of this, it could not be said that Charles has become Guy Fawkes. Tittle argues that Williams therefore supports the claim that 'bodily identity is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition of personal identity' (2005, pp.76-77).

Henri Bergson presented a new perspective on the relationship of memory and the continuity of the self:

Whenever we are trying to recover a recollection, to call up some period of our history, we become conscious of an act sui generis by which we detach ourselves from the present in order to replace ourselves, first, in the past in general, then, in a certain region of the past - a work of adjustment like the focusing of a camera. But our recollection still remains virtual… (1991, pp. 33-34).

He expanded upon the role of memory in moderating perception to present actual and virtual aspects of our existence to us:

Our actual existence, then, whilst it is unrolled in time, duplicates itself all along with a virtual existence, a mirror-image. Every moment of our life presents two aspects, it is actual and virtual, perception on the one side and memory on the other. Each moment is split up as and when it is posited. Or rather, it consists in this very splitting, for the

is now no more and the immediate future which is not yet, would be a mere abstraction were it not the moving mirror which continually reflects perception as a memory (1920, p.165)

Of these concepts Gilles Deleuze wrote:

We have great difficulty in understanding a survival of the past in itself because we believe that the past is no longer, that it has ceased to be. We have thus confused Being with being-present. Nevertheless, the present is not; rather, it is pure becoming, always outside itself. It is not, but it acts. Its proper element is not being, but the active or the useful. The past on the other hand has ceased to act or to be useful. But it has not ceased to be. Useless and inactive, impassive, it IS, in the full sense of the word; it is identical with being in itself (1991, p.55).

Kilpatrick (1941) writes that the sense of continuity of the self is a key stage in the development of a child's perception of Selfhood whilst Anthony Giddens attaches a particular importance of a continuing narrative in shaping identity; "A person's identity is not to be found in behaviour, nor … in the reactions of others, but in the capacity to keep a particular narrative going ... It must continually integrate events which occur in the external world, and sort them into the ongoing 'story' about the self." (1991, p.54). It is of exactly this kind of integration which Jurgens Habermas discusses when he writes of the "ability of the adult to construct new identities in conflict situations and to bring these into harmony with older superseded identities so as to organize himself and his interactions … into a unique life history." (1974, pp.90–91). Alasdair MacIntyre added the notion that in constructing identity by means of a life narrative an individual must necessarily take responsibility for all past and future acts, going so far as to say

that "all attempts to elucidate the notion of personal identity independently of and in isolation from the notions of narrative, intelligibility and accountability are bound to fail." (1981, p.218)

Writing on virtual worlds Winder writes that we should “think of a personality as being the sum of its parts; behavioural, temperamental, emotional and mental. One’s personality can change from day to day… whereas an identity is the distinct personality that remains as a persisting entity” (2008, p.xi). Boellstorff writes of our expectations of a narrative to the existence of our avatars: "One way cultures construct selfhood is by placing the self on a temporal trajectory or life course” (2010, p.122) and quotes Charlotte Linde in referring to a ‘coherent, acceptable and constantly revised life story’ (1993, p.3). For an avatar to be used to exhibit a consistent identity a narrative must be imposed upon it, either within the virtual world, e.g. that of a pre-defined role, or a narrative 'back-story' devised by the operator, or the actual world narrative of the operator themselves. In traditional game worlds the avatars normally assume the narrative of a pre-defined role. Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown (2009) write of games such as World of Warcraft: "The situation is determinative insofar as one’s identity is defined and constrained by the 'rules of the game' or the structure of the world." Social non-ludic virtual worlds such as Second Life offer a much less constraining structure within which individuals can impose their avatar identity narrative.

Rune Klevjer discusses how such performances of identity within virtual worlds are impacted on by the imposition of narrative:

The primary function of character has to do with narrative; when we play with characters, we play with a story... Through the avatar, instrumental agency is replaced

subject who belongs to and is exposed to the environment that it inhabits. (2007, pp.116- 130)

This description of a ‘fictional body-subject who belongs to and is exposed to the environment that it inhabits’ may be compared to Johan Huizinga’s theory of the Magic circle which posits play as an act separate from everyday activity: “All play moves and has its being within a play-ground marked off beforehand either materially or ideally, deliberately or as a matter of course. (Huizinga 1955, p.12). However those in opposition to the application of Huizinga’s theory to virtual worlds argue that this does not take into account the fact that experiences within virtual worlds “are very much part and parcel of our mundane, everyday reality.” (Calleja, 2015, p.213)

Papargyris and Poulymenakou (2009) refer to the collective formation of significantly critical narratives through which the process of negotiation of meaning, collective and individual identity is constructed. Appiah (2007, p.22) discusses how collective group identities provide narratives that individuals can use in shaping their personal identity; "Collective identities, in short, provide what we might call scripts: narratives that people can use in shaping their projects and in telling their life stories.”