7 - Critical Interests and Critical Endings: Dementia, Personhood and End of Life in Matthew Thomas’s We Are Not Ourselves

Summary

In his essay on “Ageing and Human Nature,” philosopher Michael Bavidge contends that we can distinguish “between the end of our existence as animals, as human beings, and as persons” (41). There is no guarantee, however, that “these terminations will neatly coincide and harmonize with each other.” He does not fully substantiate this contention, but I will examine here what seems to me to be at stake in such an idea, and explore its significance in relation to the end of life as it is experienced for people with dementia and those who care (in all senses) for them. I will establish how these endings align with certain philosophical positions on identity, and, with this framework in place, consider how far research on ageing and dementia, as well as its cultural imagining in fiction, might or might not support the idea of such different endings. In what Stephen Post has called the “hypercognitive society,” what survives of personhood in dementia after memory and propositional speech are lost? When and how are we, in the words of King Lear, and in the title of Matthew Thomas’s 2014 novel, not ourselves? And, if we come to this condition, how does this and should this bear on the question of our ending?

Bavidge alludes here to a central account of personal identity in recent philosophy. A dominant strain in liberal moral philosophy has been to find in human existence what distinguishes it from animality, to see human persons and animals as distinct. It has commonly followed John Locke’s 1867 construction of personhood as requiring language, memory and ‘reason’: a person a “thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places” (Locke 287). Another line of thought, however, admits our animal existence as central to our identity – the ‘animalism’ argument. Whether or not we attain rationality for a part of our lives, our essential identity is as a (human) animal (see, for example, Olsen; Snowdon). Whatever we can or cannot do, this is what we are. Animalism does not deny the Lockean account of personhood: reason is attained, if it is, when we develop language and reflective cognitive capacities.