Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Sources
- 1 Introduction
- 2 A Brief Introduction to Kantian Ethics
- 3 The Genesis of Shame
- 4 Love as a Moral Emotion
- 5 The Voice of Conscience
- 6 A Rational Superego
- 7 Don't Worry, Feel Guilty
- 8 Self to Self
- 9 The Self as Narrator
- 10 From Self Psychology to Moral Philosophy
- 11 The Centered Self
- 12 Willing the Law
- 13 Motivation by Ideal
- 14 Identification and Identity
- Bibliography
- Index
8 - Self to Self
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Sources
- 1 Introduction
- 2 A Brief Introduction to Kantian Ethics
- 3 The Genesis of Shame
- 4 Love as a Moral Emotion
- 5 The Voice of Conscience
- 6 A Rational Superego
- 7 Don't Worry, Feel Guilty
- 8 Self to Self
- 9 The Self as Narrator
- 10 From Self Psychology to Moral Philosophy
- 11 The Centered Self
- 12 Willing the Law
- 13 Motivation by Ideal
- 14 Identification and Identity
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Images of myself being Napoleon can scarcely merely be images of the physical figure of Napoleon. … They will rather be images of, for instance, the desolation at Austerlitz as viewed by me vaguely aware of my short stature and my cockaded hat, my hand in my tunic.
At the end of “The Imagination and the Self,” Bernard Williams uncovers a common confusion about the range of thoughts in which the metaphysics of personal identity is implicated. When I imagine being someone else, I can be described as imagining that I am the other person – which sounds as if I am imagining a relation of identity between that person and me, David Velleman. As Williams points out, however, this particular way of imagining that I am another person is not really about me or my identity with anyone.
If my approach to imagining that I am Napoleon, for example, is to imagine being Napoleon, then I simply imagine a particular situation as experienced by Napoleon. I imagine the landscape at Austerlitz as seen through Napoleon's eyes, the sounds of battle as heard through his ears, the nap of a tunic as felt by his hand. Although Napoleon doesn't appear in the resulting mental image, he does appear in the content of my imagining, since I am imagining Austerlitz specifically as experienced by him.
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- Self to SelfSelected Essays, pp. 170 - 202Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005
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