Flesh in the Age of Reason (13 page)

But what
was
man? What did Locke’s empiricist critique of the Cartesian
cogito
– reason enthroned, like Louis XIV, as an absolute monarch – leave of the very concept of personal integrity and moral agency, all so proudly vaunted in the Cartesian ‘I’? If the mind started
out blank, was a person irremediably a void – mere putty, or a puppet? Could there be any stable, constant, individual self at all? If there could, what was its nature and how did it grow? Not least, was there, as the Churches taught, a heaven-bound soul? Critics spied in Locke’s thinking a dangerous and cynical relativism: might he be a Trojan horse for Hobbism?

Initial readers of the
Essay
noted Locke’s relative silence – evasiveness? – on such issues. In response to his friend William Molyneux’s urging that he should more fully address the question of the individual, he added to the second edition (1694) a new chapter entitled ‘Of Identity and Diversity’. This amplified themes already introduced at the beginning of Book II, where Descartes’s view that the mind never stopped thinking (advanced as confirmation of
res cogitans
, the lofty ‘I’) had been criticized. It was fallacious, countered Locke, to believe that the mind was always thinking. For when it did not think, it was aware of so doing, and there were obviously times when we had no inkling whatsoever of thinking taking place. Perceptions, he insisted, were self-reflexive: ‘When we see, hear, smell, taste, feel, meditate, or will any thing, we know that we do so.’ Hence it was ‘impossible for anyone to perceive, without perceiving, that he does perceive’.

Experience was the
sine qua non
of knowledge, and self-consciousness accompanied every experience. So this feeling of perceiving-yourselfperceiving was such that ‘in every Act of Sensation, Reasoning, or Thinking, we are conscious to our selves of our own Being’. The self-awareness which defined and sustained the ego was ‘the condition of being awake’.

This conviction led Locke to radical conclusions as to the unity of wakefulness, perceiving and selfhood. In an aphorism which contemporaries found particularly teasing – it was also the nearest Locke came to a philosophical joke – he proposed that Socrates asleep might not be the same person as Socrates when philosophizing:

if the same
Socrates
waking and sleeping do not partake of the same
consciousness
,
Socrates
waking and sleeping is not the same Person. And to punish
Socrates
waking, for what sleeping
Socrates
thought, and waking
Socrates
was never conscious of, would be no more of Right, than to punish one Twin for what his Brother-Twin did, whereof he knew nothing.

(Typically, for Locke, questions of identity ran into matters of public and legal accountability.)

Conversely, he suggested in a no less provocative thought-experiment about oneness or identity, that if two apparently different people shared the same consciousness, they should be considered the same person:

suppose the Soul of
Castor
separated, during his Sleep, from his Body, to think apart. Let us suppose too, that it chuses for its Scene of Thinking, the Body of another Man,
v.g. Pollux
, who is sleeping without a Soul: For if
Castor
’s Soul can think whilst
Castor
is asleep, what
Castor
is never conscious of, ’tis no matter what Place it chuses to think in. We have here then the Bodies of two Men with only one Soul between them, which we will suppose to sleep and wake by turns; and the Soul still thinking in the waking Man, whereof the sleeping Man is never conscious, has never the least Perception. I ask then, Whether
Castor
and
Pollux
, thus, with only one Soul between them, which thinks and perceives in one, what the other is never conscious of, nor is concerned for, are not two as distinct Persons, as
Castor
and
Hercules
; or as
Socrates
and
Plato
were?

The implications were mind-boggling.

Though Locke could not so easily be accused as Hobbes of atheistical mischief-making, this speculation certainly pulled the rug away from under all orthodoxy. Questions of fractured and multiple personality, with all their anarchic implications, were thus being raised, as early as the close of the seventeenth century, as the inevitable consequences of Locke’s dethroning of the Cartesian
cogito
. Who then did wear the crown? Who was master of the house? Who was a pretender?

What lay at the heart of the matter, Locke avowed, was
continuity of consciousness
: it was therein – not in some property of the body – that sameness or unity lay. ‘Had I the same consciousness, that I saw
the Ark and
Noah
’s Flood, as that I saw an overflowing of the
Thames
last Winter, or as I write now,’ he proposed in another outlandish but pointed thought-experiment,

I could no more doubt that I, that write this now, that saw the
Thames
overflow’d last Winter, and that view’d the Flood at the general Deluge, was the same
self
, place that
self
in what Substance you please, than that I that write this am the same
my self
now whilst I write (whether I consist of all the same Substance, material or immaterial, or no) that I was Yesterday. For as to this point of being the same
self
, it matters not whether this present
self
be made up of the same or other Substances…

Identity – the ‘I’ – was thus continuity of experienced consciousness or memory.

In his new chapter on identity and diversity, Locke drove further these meditations on being awake and asleep, on consciousness and non-consciousness, identity and fragmentation. His conclusion was that self-identity was the attribute of a being who ‘has reason and reflection, and can consider it self as it self’;.

Locke’s account of what constituted a self was a remarkable break with that ‘identity of substance’ – the identity of the body based on physical continuity – which scholasticism had taken as the criterion of what made an individual. The implications were momentous. Since, for instance, the body was no longer the yardstick for the integrity of the self, the same body might be inhabited or haunted by multiple selves – as in the case of Socrates sleeping and awake. It sounds like a secular analogue of diabolical possession, close to certain modes of madness, and potentially no less disorienting.

Locke’s equation of personhood with consciousness – in effect, he rewrote Descartes to read ‘I am conscious, therefore I am, whoever it is I be’ – comes across in his declaration that ‘
self
is not determined by Identity or Diversity of Substance, which it cannot be sure of, but only by Identity of consciousness’. And this is where his post-Hobbesian way of speaking of the ‘person’ came in: ‘
Person
, as I take it, is the name for this
self
. Where-ever a Man finds, what he calls
himself
, there I think another may say is the same
Person
.’ Stretching
back into the past and forward beyond the present, personhood was not fundamentally fixed in the ensemble of the flesh, in the face, torso and limbs, but was borne in the understanding or self-awareness, regarded as the ‘totality of the Impressions, Thoughts, and Feelings, which make up a person’s conscious Being’.

In thus making the self hinge on such potentially impermanent, ephemeral phenomena as ‘impressions, thoughts, and feelings’, Locke seemed to his critics to come perilously close to undermining it completely: did he not imply that the self was all in the mind? Locke, however, felt no cause for unease: far from opening the floodgates to scepticism, madness or unbelief, his was a nobler vision, rescuing and liberating the essential ego, the first person (or conscious selfhood), from the contingent and drossy encumbrance of mere corporeality. His doctrine was also, critically in Locke’s eyes, a ringing refutation of Hobbesian materialism: man was not defined by the material body that Hobbes deemed was all there was. And Locke certainly showed no hesitation in affirming the actuality of the self as he portrayed it. ‘For if I know
I feel Pain
,’ he insisted, ‘it is evident, I have as certain a Perception of my own Existence, as of the Existence of the Pain I feel.… Experience then convinces us, that
we have an intuitive Knowledge of our own Existence
.’ Far from believing that he was dissolving reality away, Locke considered that he was offering a more valid and acceptable sense of the self: I am my consciousness, the sum total of my life experiences, or my memory; I am not circumscribed by my mortal coil.

Locke had his philosophical defenders. In the urbane style which Joseph Addison and Richard Steele made their trademark, his ingenious opinions were given an approving airing in the
Spectator
(see
Chapter 7
) – part of its publicizing of Locke’s thinking at large. Critics, however, censured ‘conscious selfhood’ as a piece of philosophical impudence or as a covert
apologia
for moral relativism, religious heresy or intellectual irresponsibility at large. Tory satirists, in particular, as will be shown in
Chapter 9
, attacked it as a specious philosophical excuse for trendy self-indulgent permissive poppycock. With its hint that man is, or can reinvent himself as, whatever he likes, Locke’s
philosophy of the self was characterized by hardliners as all too typical of those wicked, Whiggish times and their pernicious descent into self-admiring narcissism.

To be sure, Locke’s conviction that selfhood inhered in a consciousness which was, by his own admission, discontinuous (witness sleep) opened up all manner of tantalizing possibilities. Many such kites were flown by his gadfly friend and somewhat embarrassing supporter, Anthony Collins. The controversies which ensued between that gentleman lawyer-cum-freethinker and the rationalist Anglican divine Samuel Clarke brought those disturbing implications to the fore. In an exchange on the immortality of the soul, for which the matter in contention was personal identity, Clarke insisted (in rather Cartesian vein) that consciousness was a property
inherent
in the immaterial and indivisible soul. As such, it was a quality existing prior to and independently of
experience
. For the sceptical Collins by contrast, Lockean experience was all in all, no matter if it were discontinuous and fragmentary in nature. For Clarke the Christian rationalist, the omnipresence of the conscious mind confirmed the immortal soul, which was in its turn a proof of the Supreme Intellect. Deny this, and the whole edifice of objective truth would totter. Challenging these pieties, the impish Collins revelled in Locke’s suggestion that consciousness, while assuredly coterminous with the self, was nevertheless intermittent: remember Socrates asleep. Thinking, stressed the Deist, following Locke, did not go on all the time: slumber, trances, coma, absent-mindedness and derangement all proved that perception, like matter itself, was interrupted and divisible. Golden opportunities opened up for the sceptical lawyer. ‘Let us consider to what Ideas we apply the Term
Self
,’ he proposed, giving such unsettling speculations a challenging spin:

If a Man charges me with a Murder done by some body last Night, of which I am not conscious; I deny that I did the Action, and cannot possibly attribute it to my
Self
, because I am not conscious that I did it. Again, suppose me to be seized with a short Frenzy of an Hour, and during that time to kill a Man, and then to return to my
Self
without the least
Consciousness of what I have done; I can no more attribute that Action to my
Self
, than I could the former, which I supposed done by another. The mad Man and the sober Man are really two as distinct Persons as any two Other Men in the World.

Here were unfolded some of the shocking implications of Locke’s account of the self – implications that were never spelt out, of course, by that ultra-cautious philosopher. His freethinking friend’s plausible forensic speculations not only problematized personal responsibility in the ethical and legal spheres, but also implicitly challenged Christian doctrines of divine accountability and punishment in the world to come.

The Clarke–Collins controversy fanned out. Joseph Butler, a Dissenter who had converted to the Church of England and was to climb to a bishopric, appended a dissertation ‘Of Personal Identity’ to his popular
The Analogy of Religion
(1736), dedicated to Clarke. Butler endorsed the latter’s criticism of Collins. His views on the conscious self had baleful consequences, precisely because, according to the Locke–Collins line, ‘personality is not a permanent, but a transient thing… no one can any more remain one and the same Person two Moments together, than two successive Moments can be one and the same Moment’. Believe that, and all would collapse in chaos!

Particularly worrying, Locke’s notion that identity lay in ‘conscious selfhood’ seemed to threaten orthodoxy on the crucial matter of life after death. If your body was not your self, what did this mean for the Universal Resurrection? To this we shall return in
Chapter 6
.

And new Philosophy calls all in doubt!

JOHN DONNE

Despite the fears of the metaphysical poet and Dean of St Paul’s, John Donne, other influential thinkers, as we have seen – from his contemporary Francis Bacon through to Thomas Willis and John Locke – believed that it was not the ‘new philosophy’ which was truly disturbing and destructive: rather, science would come to the rescue of truth, setting it at last upon rock-solid foundations after all the centuries of scholastic castles in the air. Far from puncturing the soul, science would breathe new life into ailing theories of the self.