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John Locke

John Locke (1632-1704) is difficult to read for two reasons: first, the reading you have is an excerpt from a larger work, and like all excerpts, it suffers from being taken out of context. You will doubtless run across terms and phrases that cry out for definition, and that have been defined by the author, but not in the excerpt itself. I'll do my best to clarify what is lacking in this excerpt.

Second, Locke's writing style seems arcane to us; sentences seem to run on forever, and the number of embedded clauses make following Locke's train of thought tricky at best. Still, there are some terribly important ideas here  that repay careful reading.

Terms you'll need to know:

Soul/spirit = that which contains or houses your consciousness

Consciousness= awareness of self as self

Person= being who possesses consciousness

Personal identity= person whose consciousness remains the same (and memory is used to establish sameness).

Man= Biological organism (the body)

According to Locke, a person is "...a thinking, intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and different places." (p. 349) Buried inside this definition is the claim that a distinctive feature of a person is that a person can "consider itself as itself" (which is Locke's definition of consciousness). What does it mean for a being to be able to "consider itself as itself"?

Briefly, Locke's definition of "consciousness" is more like what we would call SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS, i.e. the ability to conceive of yourself as a self, i.e. as an abstract entity called "I". Persons are able to conceive of themselves in this way, and hence can reflect upon the image they create, acting in response to it.

Consider the following example. Your dog Spot, while a loving and faithful companion, has no conception of himself. He cannot look in the mirror and think "I've REALLY got to go easy on that Puppy Chow." Why? I'm sure there are lots of physio-neurological reasons that would explain this, but the bottom line is that Spot cannot represent (literally re-present) himself to himself. He lacks the necessary mental facilities to have a conception of himself.

What is a "conception of oneself?" Nothing more than the ability to say (and understand) the term "I". I don't know precisely when this occurs in children, but consider a newborn baby. Newborns cannot distinguish between themselves and their environment...when one baby hears another baby cry, she cries too, because she has no conception of herself as a separate entity. She'll eventually develop this, but at birth it's not there.

Back to our buddy Spot -- unlike a newborn, Spot won't ever develop the ability to reflect on himself. Put differently, Spot won't ever be able to say (or think, or bark) "I", because he cannot create an abstract representation of himself.

Locke then goes on to distinguish the term "person" (defined above) from the phrase "personal identity." What is personal identity (as defined in the last sentence of the first paragraph), and how is it different from simply being a person? (Hint: Being a person is one thing; being the same person is another).

The next section (entitled Consciousness makes personal identity) is very tricky. Locke believes in something called a "spiritual substance," and in this portion of the reading he is trying to reconcile his views about identity with this notion of spiritual substance.

If your "identity" is to remain the same over time, there must be some substance that this identity resides within...a "stuff" within which all the qualities of your identity cohere. For Locke, that "stuff" is spiritual substance.

This paragraph thus asks the following question: for you to remain the same person, must the spiritual substance that houses your identity remain the same? Locke responds that this question isn't relevant to his current project, which is to explain what personal identity is. We want to know what it means for someone to be said to be the same person, and not whether the "stuff" that houses their identity is the same over time.

Much of the next two pages concerns the various possibilities for how one's identity (i.e. consciousness and memory) might be related to the substance within which that identity is housed. Here Locke is trying to reconcile his views about identity with the theological and philosophical views of the day about souls (the rough equivalent of Locke's "spiritual substance").

Locke believes that changes in the substance that houses consciousness don't affect one's identity so long as consciousness remains unchanged.

Suppose we were able to place Oscar Page's consciousness (i.e. Oscar's thought processes plus all his memories) into your body. According to Locke, this new combination would be Oscar, because personal identity is nothing more than consciousness plus memories.

QUESTION: According to Locke, if you woke up one morning and suddenly had clear, first-person memories of crossing the Delaware, leading the Continental Army, being the first President of the United States, etc., according to Locke, would you be George Washington?