Why Is The First Person Point of View Important?

I have claimed that the first personal point of view is the important one when we consider personal survival. Over the next few sections, I shall subject this view to scrutiny by considering potential counter evidence. I start by looking at William James' work on the self. James' work on personal identity in the

Principles of Psychology is usually divided by critics into his interesting discussion on Hume and Kant, and his more extraordinary ideas such as those about the importance of clothes for personal identity and the role of the glottis in assenting and negating. But it is within the more unusual sections that I think we find some of the most interesting ideas. We know James holds to an idiosyncratic view the moment he describes not one, but four different selves: the material, social and spiritual selves plus the pure ego. Although all these

“selves” are interesting, I am only concerned with one; the social self.6

For James, the social self is itself a multifarious thing. Many, if not most, people behave, appear talk and even feel differently depending on whom they are talking to and where they are. It would seem wrong to attribute all of these differences to putting on an act and to say that only one of these represents the ‘real self. What would be more accurate would be to say that we display different facets of ourselves on different occasions. Think of the stereotypical mafia man, who is all love and kindness to his family and a cold killer at work. It seems an over-simplification to say that this man’s true self is only manifest in one half of this double life.

In his discussion of the social self in particular, James gets us thinking about the importance of factors other than a unified mental life, even though he, rightly it seems, does not believe the social self determines personal identity. We may concede that our social and material selves are important factors in what makes us who we are, but we would not immediately consider discontinuity of these selves to threaten our identity over time.

I would now like to bring this together with my argument that Parfifs claim about what matters in survival is best interpreted as meaning what is required for survival from the first person point of view. The question suggested by considerations such as those of James is, why should it be the first person point of view which settles the question of survival? Considerations of James can help us to push this question harder, imagine that all the social interactions you currently engage in come to an end, and that these are very important to you. Your family no longer treat you like a family member, you no longer enjoy the position you have at work, if you are famous, you are no longer sought after or recognised. This is the death of what James calls the social self. Loss of the social self is in effect society treating you as if you have died and that someone else now occupies your body. Given that we are social animals, and despite the

continuity of consciousness, I would say that for many people, such a fate would be seen, maybe not immediately, as death, in as strong a sense as global amnesia may be for many other people. Thus being treated as a different person could make the person feel that they were a different person from their first personal point of view too. This raises two questions. Firstly, in such a case,

is it not the case that it is the third personal, and not the first personal view of survival which is important? Secondly, is not the first personal judgment informed by third personal judgments, so that to analyse personal survival purely in the first personal terms as I have done is mistaken?

In this case, the I* relation is still very important. To be able to think that one is not a survivor in such a case actually requires the I* relation. In order to feel the break with the past one actually has to have a fundamental awareness of the continuity with the past, or the break would not be apparent. The I* relation therefore provides the fundamental unity against which a judgment of disunity can take place. In our actual society, such a person would not be considered as having died. Legally, socially and morally, we would consider that the person has survived the trauma altered rather than has altered so as not to have survived. But it is possible to imagine a society which places more importance on social position. In this case it is possible that both the subject and the society in general could view the person as having died.7 Once again, it is important that the r relation must be underpinning all these changes, because it is only because there is a unified mental life linking the person before and after the loss of the social self that one can conceive of a change in social position being equivalent to a change of person. My first point is therefore that the crucial factor in survival is the I* relation, even in those societies which decide to view other changes as resulting in a change of person. Such societies can only form these conventions if the more basic personal unity provided by the I* relation is already in place, at least for the vast majority of its members.

7 1 understand this Is the case In certain Melanesian societies where one’s Identity Is taken to change when o n e’s role in society changes.

But this is not yet enough. It could be objected that in such a society, the I* relation would simply be one necessary condition of personal survival, but not a sufficient one. The reason for this is quite simple. In such a society the criteria for personal survival are third personal, not first personal. Anyone who grew up in such a society would therefore apply the third personal criteria to themselves and would not take the continuity of their own mental life as evidence for personal survival. What this means is that the claim that it is survival from the first person point of view which is important could be a culturally relative one. And yet, it is supposed to be a claim about persons in all possible worlds. The I* relation would thus seem to fall short of its goal.

However, I believe this failure in the I* relation is only an apparent one. We need to answer the question, “In a society where the social self determines personal survival, are there persons, no persons, or are persons something different?” Consider the first possibility, that there are persons in that society, beings who fulfil Locke’s criteria of personhood, just as there are persons in our society. That there are such persons in such a society seems to me to be indubitable. The day before someone takes on a new role, for example, there is nothing to stop that person looking forward to that new role and making plans for it. Similarly, when in that new role, memories of and connections to life before are not lost. In this sense, there is still the unity of personal life that we have in our society. Consider also people who join cults and gain a new identity. Just because that community treats its members, and its members treat themselves, as new persons, doesn’t mean that there is not, before and after the conversion, what we would call one person.

So, despite the differences, there seems no reason to conclude that there are not persons, in our sense of the word, in that society. The third possibility is that there are persons, but that this means something different. In some sense, this must be true. But just so long as there are persons in our sense of the word - i.e. beings who meet something like Locke’s conditions of personhood -

whether or not there are also persons in some other sense is irrelevant. What I have said about personal survival applies in all cases to what we call persons. It can hardly be a counter argument to this to claim that in some cultures this concept of a person doesn’t operate. A person is a person whether they recognise that description of themselves or not.

There is a dilemma facing any claim that a concept is culturally relative. To establish that a concept is culturally relative, it is not enough to show that the concept is applied differently or has a different meaning, as this really boils down to the claim that it is just not the same concept. The claim must be a stronger one, that the concept has no application in that society. If it could be shown that what I have called a person is not a concept with any application in some other societies, then it would be a genuinely culturally relative term. But I can’t see how such a claim could be made. I shall further argue for this view in the next section.

Adapting Parfit, I have claimed that it is the first personal point of view which is the important one. I still believe this is true. Without the I* relation, there cannot be persons such as the persons we are. As I have argued, without the I* relation, alternative conceptions of personal identity that preserve a recognisable sense of “person” are not possible. We need the underlying unity of the I* relation. It is in this sense that the first-personal view of survival is the important one. Without it, we could not even think of plausible alternatives. Expressed in another way, this means that we must have persons, in the sense of the word I described in section 1, before we can have other, culturally relative, variants on the concept of personhood.8

So it is not true that the possible importance the social self could have in other societies supports third-personal rather than first-personal views of personal survival. What of my second worry, that it suggests third-personal

8 W e even have variants on the term person In our own society, such as the legal concept of a