The Kierkegaardian Requirement.

In chapter one I formulated what I called the Kierkegaardian requirement. This is the requirement for any philosophical description of persons to be able to account for both the aesthetic and ethical character of persons. As regards her aesthetic character, a person can be seen as a succession of moments, a being who is tied to the present with no existence beyond the now. As regards her ethical character, a person can view themselves and be viewed as a single subject with a continuous existence that stretches backwards and forwards in time. It is not obvious that these two ways of viewing the self are incompatible, but there is certainly a tension between them. Can the psychological reductionist account I have developed resolve this tension? I believe that it can. To show how, I will try to say a little about how my account can explain both the aesthetic and ethical views of the self, and about how the two can happily co­ exist.

(i) Aesthetic Persons.

The fundamental characteristic of the aesthetic person is that they are inescapably bound to the moment. The psychological reality of this is not something that requires any demonstration. The fact that we are only conscious in the here and now, the “specious present", is well known and is the cause of puzzles of its own. The fact that we are nothing more than individual human beings, as finite and bound to the present as any other animal, is also confirmed

by the current thesis, but is, again, not a novel or illuminating explanation of our aesthetic character. What we need to consider here is rather the ways in which my conception of persons reinforces the sense in which we are bound to the moment.

Consider first ways in which we can understand something as not bound to the moment. The easiest way of doing this is to consider how a being or object which perdures or endures exists at different points of time. If X at Ti = Y at J2 then X exists not only in the here and now but at various points of time. There are two ways in which this is more complicated in the case of persons. Firstly, on my account, there is no thing the endurance or perdurance of which is required for personal survival. A person's existence requires a brain and a body, but a person’s survival does not depend on the continued existence of either of these particular things. At any particular time, a person is a whole human being, but the person’s survival does not necessarily require the continued existence of that human being. As a person’s survival is not a matter of the survival of a body, this makes a person an aesthetic being, as there is no

thing the continued existence of which constitutes personal survival. Personal survival requires certain psychological relations between persons-at-a-time, not identity between persons-at-a-time.

A person-at-a-time is, however, a being. As I argued in section 1, the force of Locke’s point is that though a person is a living being, survival of the person is not survival of that being. There is a sense then in which a person is not what they will necessarily become. That I am this particular human being now does not entail that I will survive as this particular human being later. The continued existence of the human being is just not a part of what my survival consists in. As Kant argued, the unity of our mental lives over time entails no identity of substance. We can trace the identity over time of any living thing and by doing so trace out a four-dimensional being not entirely bound to the moment. We could do the same with persons. But because survival does not consist in

identity, the four-dimensional being we are tracing does not necessarily support the unified mental life which constitutes our survival. The fact of personal identity over time is thus not of importance to our first-person considerations of survival. Therefore, facts of identity cannot be invoked to relieve our sense of being bound to the moment, as facts of identity are not relevant to the idea of our survival.

So unlike other objects or beings, our survival does not entail identity at all. I have argued that the relation which unifies the life of a person over time, the I* relation, is not a relation of identity. This is one of the features of Parfitianism which my account has retained. This means if X at Ti is I* related to Y at T2, although Y would be seen as a survivor of X we cannot deduce that Y is X. There is always the logical possibility that fission has occurred, for example. There is nothing in the I* relation itself which rules out such possibilities. In this way, though a person can think of themselves and be thought of as the same person over time, this does not entail that there is actual personal identity over time, as identity is a one-one relation and is not entailed by the I* relation. Judgments of personal identity therefore have to be third-personal and empirical, based on the continued existence of the human being. So the fact that I have survived entails nothing about the continued existence of any being. This again shows how one cannot even consider the continued existence of the physical human being as evidence for our transcending of the moment, as it is simply not part of what personal survival entails.

What we can see here is that the aesthetic view of the self is tied up with the negative aspects of my conception: that survival is not survival of any substance and that survival does not entail identity. Both these factors together suggest that, even though beings exist beyond the here and now because they endure or perdure, this fact is not relevant to human survival. Therefore, it is not a fact that can remove our sense of being bound to the moment. Rather, because personal survival does not require identity of a being, the sense in which our

existence is dependent on the being-at-a-time, the human being in the here and now, is accentuated. For Kierkegaard, this was the cause of the despair which is characteristic of the aesthetic. But when we consider how my conception fits in with the ethical view, we shall see that this despair is not inevitable.

(ii) Ethical Persons.

If the aesthetic character of persons is reinforced by the negative aspects of my conception, then the ethical characteristics emerge from the positive points. An ethical person is not bound to the moment, but has a continuous existence over time. It would appear that if my account makes persons aesthetic then they cannot also be ethical. At the end of chapter one, I made it clear that making the ethical and the aesthetic compatible with each other was only one possibility. We could also explain the appearance of one in terms of the other. This is what I shall now do.

The appearance of the enduring self has already been explained in Kant's paralogism. Despite the fact that T entails no substantial identity, the formal identity this entails leads us to think of of ourselves as substantially identical over time. We could then say that the ethical view we have of ourselves as single entities existing over time is an illusion. What I have made clear is that this illusion of substantial identity is not anything we should feel cheated by. I have argued that our survival just doesn’t entail identity, and if this is the case, we should accept Kant’s point with ease. As A. J. Ayer once put it, “it is perverse to see tragedy in what could not conceivably be otherwise.” What I believe is the correct view of what our survival consists in preserves all that was important when we thought of ourselves as substantially identical over time. The point of the relevance requirement was to make sure that our real interest in our survival, the first person question of identity, is addressed. Having addressed this, in the process we have found that in fact, the first-person question of identity can be answered without the concept of identity. Hence the important