Questions



Questions

Question 1:

Hume account of personal identity

Hume begins his discussion on personal identity with a philosophical idea that he sees as clearly false. This is the idea that “we are every moment intimately conscious of what we call our self ... and are certain ... of its perfect identity and simplicity” in the way that we cannot doubt its existence without doubting everything else. This assumption does not seem as clear to Hume as it has to some other philosophers. To have an idea of a self there needs to be an impression that corresponds to that idea and Hume asks in what way can we assert this identity since there is not any impression that is constant and invariable enough to give rise to such an idea of a self (A Treatise on Human Nature, p. 251). Instead all of our impressions, pain, pleasure, grief, joy and so on, are momentary and succeed each other rather than exist at the same time. Therefore, they cannot constitute the ground for a self (Rousseau 2004).

Our perceptions are also “different, and distinguishable, and separable from each other, and may be separately consider'd, and may exist separately, and have no need of anything to support their existence”. They do not need to be connected to a self to exist and since we cannot observe such a self but only these perceptions, and cannot think of ourselves as existing without these perceptions, Hume concludes that we are “nothing but a bundle of or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement” (Treatise, p. 252). From this Hume takes it to follow that “[t]he identity, which we ascribe to the mind of man is only a fictitious one” (Treatise, p. 259). That we still go on and ascribe identity to persons, even if there is not any unchanging self that would justify this description is, according to Hume, to be explained as a trick of the mind. We perceive of something as a continuos object even if it is in fact a succession of related objects, so that, when the change in an object, for example, is gradual or inconsiderable, we do not notice that we are concerned with a diversity of objects but regard it as the same object. In persons this relation between the objects can be seen in the resemblance and causation between our different perceptions. These relations do not however, Hume goes on to say, exist in themselves but are in turn also imposed on the objects by our imagination. We have an idea of the impressions as related to each other, but the impressions in themselves exist separately and distinctly from each other and are not dependent on each other. In that sense we cannot even say that there are bundles of perceptions, the only thing we can say that there is, is perceptions. There are several problems connected with this idea that perceptions are all there ...