Source
Hume (1739), A Treatise of Human Nature 1.4.6, “Of personal identity”, with the Appendix to vol. III (1740), App. 10–21, LIT-451, read in the Hume Texts Online critical text in NOTE-386. Paragraph numbers are the Norton numbering.
What was actually shown
No idea of self (1.4.6.1–3). “It must be some one impression, that gives rise to every real idea” (1.4.6.2), and no impression is constant and invariable through life. “Consequently there is no such idea.” Introspection finds only perceptions: “I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception” (1.4.6.3). Someone who perceives “something simple and continu’d” may be right “as well as I”, but “we are essentially different in this particular”.
The bundle (1.4.6.4). Mankind are “nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity”. The theatre image is withdrawn: “They are the successive perceptions only, that constitute the mind”.
The mechanism (1.4.6.6–14). The idea of one invariable object and the idea of a succession of related objects are distinct, but the acts of the imagination that survey them are “almost the same to the feeling”, so we “feign” a soul, self or substance “to disguise the variation” (1.4.6.6). The cases: a mass changed a little, a ship repaired plank by plank, an oak with no particle the same, a church rebuilt in stone, a river that changes all its parts within a day (1.4.6.8–14).
Persons (1.4.6.15–21). “The identity, which we ascribe to the mind of man, is only a fictitious one” (1.4.6.15). Memory produces resemblance among perceptions; causation links them like “a republic or commonwealth” (1.4.6.18–19). Because we extend our identity past what we remember, memory “does not so much produce as discover personal identity” (1.4.6.20). Hard cases have “no just standard” and “are to be regarded rather as grammatical than as philosophical difficulties” (1.4.6.21).
The Appendix (App. 10–21). “I find myself involv’d in such a labyrinth, that, I must confess, I neither know how to correct my former opinions, nor how to render them consistent” (App. 10). “If perceptions are distinct existences, they form a whole only by being connected together. But no connexions among distinct existences are ever discoverable by human understanding” (App. 20). “There are two principles, which I cannot render consistent”: that distinct perceptions are distinct existences, and that the mind never perceives a real connexion among them (App. 21). He pleads “the privilege of a sceptic” and does not call the difficulty “absolutely insuperable”.
What could have come out otherwise. Introspection could have turned up a constant impression of self. Hume reports that it does not, and grants that another may report otherwise.
What this does not say
- That there is no self in any sense. The claim is that there is no idea of a simple, persisting self. The question is restricted to identity “as it regards our thought or imagination”; identity “as it regards our passions or the concern we take in ourselves” is left to Book 2 (1.4.6.5).
- That the mechanism is shown. The cases show how we talk about ships and churches. That the same passage of the imagination produces belief in a self is argued by analogy (1.4.6.15) and from separability (1.4.6.16).
- That the account of the connexion stands. The Appendix withdraws it without saying which part of 1.4.6 fails. Commentators disagree about what exactly the labyrinth is, and the text does not settle it.
- That memory makes the person. Hume argues the reverse against a memory criterion: memory discovers identity, and causation extends it past what is remembered.
- That the account is free of the subject it replaces. “We feign” and “our propension” presuppose someone doing the feigning. The section does not address this (NOTE-386, Open questions).
Connections
- Locke (THEORY-546). Hume takes Locke’s analogy between the identity of plants and animals and that of persons, holds it for both, and makes both fictitious. The Appendix’s “most philosophers … personal identity arises from consciousness” is Locke’s thesis.
- Dennett (THEORY-691) ends on Hume’s failure to find a self and answers it with an abstractum of interpretation. Hume’s “fictitious” identity and Dennett’s “theorist’s fiction” both make the unity a product of a process that tells it, not a thing found; for Hume the teller is the imagination, for Dennett the brain’s autobiography.
- Floridi (THEORY-650) quotes the Appendix as the statement of his problem of the chariot, what binds a self’s information into a unity.
- Self-models. Metzinger’s account (THEORY-064) and relational frame theory’s self as content (THEORY-044) cite Hume as an ancestor. Minsky’s Single-Self as a convenient fiction (LIT-432, NOTE-348) is the bundle with an architecture.
- A candidate connexion. NOTE-386 reads Damasio’s homeostatic feeling (LIT-387) as a candidate for the “real connexion” Hume could not find, one supplied by the body and not perceived among the perceptions. That reading is the filing reader’s, not Damasio’s.
- Hume’s commonwealth (1.4.6.19) is used for persistence through change, not for mentality, so it does not bear on whether a commonwealth could be a mind (THEORY-043).