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Substance and Selfhood

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

E. J. Lowe
E. J. Lowe
Affiliation:
University of Durham
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Extract

How could the self be a substance? There are various ways in which it could be, some familiar from the history of philosophy. I shall be rejecting these more familiar substantivalist approaches, but also the non-substantival theories traditionally opposed to them. I believe that the self is indeed a substance—in fact, that it is a simple or noncomposite substance—and, perhaps more remarkably still, that selves are, in a sense, self-creating substances. Of course, if one thinks of the notion of substance as an outmoded relic of prescientific metaphysics—as the notion of some kind of basic and perhaps ineffable stuff—then the suggestion that the self (or indeed anything) is a substance may appear derisory. Even what we ordinarily call ‘stuffs’—gold and water and butter and the like—are, it seems, more properly conceived of as aggregates of molecules or atoms, while the latter are not appropriately to be thought of as being ‘made’ of any kind of ‘stuff’ at all. But this only goes to show that we need to think in terms of a more sophisticated notion of substance—one which may ultimately be traced back to Aristotle's conception of a ‘primary substance’ in the Categories, and whose heir in modern times is W. E. Johnson's notion of the ‘continuant’. It is the notion, that is, of a concrete individual capable of persisting identically through qualitative change, a subject of alterable predicates that is not itself predicable of any further subject.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 66 , Issue 255 , January 1991 , pp. 81 - 99
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1991

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References

1 See his Logic, Part III, Ch. VII (Cambridge University Press, 1924)Google Scholar. For more general discussion, see my ‘Substance’, An Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, Parkinson, G. H. R. (ed.) (London: Routledge, 1988).Google Scholar

2 Dickens, Charles, Hard Times (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969), 224.Google Scholar

3 It may be suspected that even these qualified claims are threatened by the existence of such clinical disorders as schizophrenia and multiple personality. Though I shall touch on these disorders later, I do not have space to discuss their implications for our conception of the self in any detail. However, I am willing to allow—since this is all I really need for my purposes—that it is strictly only psychologically normal selves that fully meet my condition for selfhood, and that other cases only approximate to it to varying degrees. I should add, though, that it may be possible to have de re knowledge of two experiences, e 1 and e 2, that each is mine, without necessarily having de dicto knowledge that e 1 and e 2 are both mine—and this might permit even the psychologically disordered selves to meet my condition fully.

4 I present other arguments against identifying the self with its body in my Kinds of Being: A Study of Individuation, Identity and the Logic of Sonai Terms, Ch. 6 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989)Google Scholar, and in my ‘Real Selves: Persons as a Substantial Kind’, forthcoming.

5 See Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature, Book I, Part IV, Sect. VI, Selby-Bigge, L. A. and Nidditch, P. H. (eds) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978)Google Scholar and Parfit, Derek, Reasons and Persons, Part III (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984).Google Scholar

6 See my Kinds of Being, 131–133Google Scholar and, more especially, my ‘Real Selves’, Sect. IV.

7 See, e.g. Anscombe, G. E. M., ‘The First Person’, in Guttenplan, S. (ed.) Mind and Language (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975).Google Scholar

8 For further discussion of these issues, see my ‘Substance, Identity and Time’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Suppl. Vol. LXII (1988), 61–78.Google Scholar

9 In another terminology, we may say that movements of certain parts of its own body can necessarily be executed as ‘basic’ actions by the self. The locus classicus for the notion of a ‘basic’ action is Danto, Arthur C.'s ‘Basic Actions’, American Philosophical Quarterly 2 (1965), 141–148.Google Scholar

10 See further my ‘Real Selves’, Sect. IV.

11 See, e.g. Goodman, Nelson, The Structure of Appearance, 3rd edn (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1977), 33 ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 See, e.g. Dennett, Daniel C., Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1979), 122–124.Google Scholar

13 See, e.g. Scruton, Roger, ‘Corporate Persons’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supp. Vol. LXIII (1989), 239–266.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 See again my ‘Real Selves’, Sect. IV.

15 For more general discussion of persistence and criteria of identity, see my ‘Substance, Identity and Time’ and also my ‘What is a Criterion of Identity?’, Philosophical Quarterly 39 (1989), 1–21.Google Scholar

16 See further my ‘Lewis on Perdurance versus Endurance’, Analysis 47 (1987), 152–154Google Scholar, and my ‘The Problems of Intrinsic Change: Rejoinder to Lewis’, Analysis 48 (1988), 72–77.Google Scholar

17 See further my ‘Substance, Identity and Time’.

18 A sizeable literature related to this issue has grown out of Evans, Gareth' paper ‘Can There be Vague Objects?, Analysis 38 (1978), 208CrossRefGoogle Scholar, but this is no place for me to attempt to engage with it.

19 Cf. Geach, P. T., Truth, Love and Immortality: An Introduction to McTaggart's Philosophy (London: Hutchinson, 1979), 134.Google Scholar

20 See, especially, Burge, Tyler, ‘Individualism and the Mental’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy IV (1979), 73–121.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21 This appears to be an inescapable implication of Davidson, Donald's well-known thesis of the ‘holism of the mental’, for which see his Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 217Google Scholar. I do not, for reasons which I have already made plain, accept Davidson's own view of the relation between mental and physical events, which is a ‘token-token’ identity theory. See further my Kinds of Being, 113–114, 132–133.Google Scholar

22 See further Edelman, Gerald M., Neural Darwinism: The Theory of Neuronal Group Selection (Oxford University Press, 1989), 33–37.Google Scholar

23 See, e.g. Crutchfield, James P. et al. , ‘Chaos’, Scientific American 255 (12 1986), 38–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Goldberger, Ary L. et al. , ‘Chaos and Fractals in Human Physiology’, Scientific American 262 (02 1990), 34–41.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

24 It has also been pointed out that if quantum states of the brain have to be taken into account (as they will if mental states are at all dependent on them), then exact duplication at the relevant level of organization will be ruled out by quantum mechanical principles: see Penrose, Roger, The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics (Oxford University Press, 1989), 270.Google Scholar

25 See White, Randall, ‘Visual Thinking in the Ice Age’, Scientific American 261 (07 1989), 74–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and the further bibliographic references listed therein.

26 This would be consistent with much of the recent work of psychologists, anthropologists and ethologists presented in Byrne, Richard and Whiten, Andrew (eds), Machiavellian Intelligence: Social Expertise and the Evolution of Intellect in Monkeys, Apes, and Humans (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).Google Scholar

27 My opposition extends even to the most sophisticated modern proponents of the biological approach, such as Millikan, Ruth G.: see her Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984)Google Scholar. However, a detailed critique must await another occasion.

28 I should remark, incidentally, that I by no means wish to deny mentality to chimpanzees and other higher primates, though I very much doubt whether any such animal may be said to possess or embody a ‘self, as I have defined that term. Thus, inasmuch as mental states necessarily attach to psychological subjects which are not to be identified with biological bodies (see further my ‘Real Selves’), I am committed to the view that persons or selves are not the only species of psychological substance, and that—in an older terminology— there are ‘animal souls’ which find a place ‘below’ ourselves in a hierarchy of psychological substances. I hope to discuss this issue more fully elsewhere.

29 See, e.g. Linden, Eugene, Apes, Men and Language (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976).Google Scholar

30 I am grateful to audiences at the University of York and the London School of Economics for helpful reactions to earlier versions of this paper, when it was delivered with the title ‘A Substantival Theory of the Self’.