THE ‘EMPTY VERTICAL SELF’ RECONSIDERED

Ten years ago, at the Conference on Persons in Nottingham, I criticised Raymond Tallis, Emeritus Professor of Geriatric Medicine at Manchester, for falling back, on the revived Humean, narrative, diachronic and ‘horizontal’ account of personal identity as a series of experiences held together by memory, despite his demolition of it, because he rejected as the only alternative the immediate, synchronic and ‘vertical’ experience of our own existence, on the grounds that it is ‘empty’ and provides no clues for who I am. Instead, I proposed, following St Augustine and Max Scheler, that each of us is a radically unique ens amans, such that I do not know what constitutes my uniqueness but that others can, even though I may have undergone radical changes of character, temperament, belief, attitudes and outlook. I still hold to that. But since then I have reconsidered my position regarding the ‘vertical’, especially as a result of rereading H.D. Lewis’, The Elusive Self, and reading his other publications on the same and connected themes. (He was Professor of Philosophy of Religion at King’s College, London, and that book had been the set text for one of the papers on that subject which I took for my external BD. at King’s.)

Curiously Tallis, whose books I otherwise heartily recommend to all those of a personalist orientation, made the same fundamental mistake regarding the ‘vertical’ self as that which condemns recourse to the ‘horizontal’ self as the answer to the question of personal identity: namely the gross error of conflating ‘evidence for’ and ‘clue to’ with ‘meaning of’, endemic in Empiricist philosophy and, it seems, in much Analytic philosophy, along with behaviourist psychology. A particular example is that of Wittgenstein’s ‘criteria’ for identifying something, and his and Ryle’s linguistic behaviourism and behaviourist account of language and meaning as ‘usage’. How a word is used, is not its meaning but a clue to what the speaker means by it, just as the symptoms of a disease are not the disease itself, but the initial perceptible clues to what the disease is or may be.

Hence our memories of what we have done or have been present at, can be clues to who we are, but do not constitute our identity. Consider a favourite theme of writers of romances, mysteries and thrillers: the amnesiac who has no idea of who he or she is and how he or she has come to be at the place where someone has met him or her. For example, two or three years ago a man was found wandering around a place in Dorset. He did not know his name, nor how or why he got there. There were no clues at all as to who he might be. Finally after twelve months a New Zealander met him and recognised certain turns of phrase peculiar to New Zealand. Quite quickly from that one clue others were found and from them his identity was established. But all along that man knew that he was he and not someone else. That experience is real, even though monist philosophers have denied that finite selves are unreal, wholly or in some degree, such as, respectively, the Advaita Vedanta school in India, and the British Absolute Idealists, notably F.R. Bradley and, above all, Bernard Bosanquet.

Thus the ‘vertical self’ of ‘I exist!’ and ‘I am I’, may lack any further and distinguishing details which could be clues to precisely who I am, but it is the bedrock on which self-identity is founded. As for what constitutes my identity, I stand my previous account, derived from Augustine and Scheler.