NATURALIZATION OF THE SOUL ‘This is an excellent book, with an original and interesting approach to its topic.’ Stephen Gaukroger, University of Sydney. ‘I do not know of any other recent book which is comparable to this one in its focus, range and approach. Naturalization of the Soul makes an important new contribution to the literature on the history of theories of personal identity.’ E.J.Lowe, University of Durham. Naturalization of the Soul charts the development of the concepts of soul and self in Western thought, from Plato to the present. The authors place particular emphasis on the eighteenth century, which witnessed an enormous intellectual transformation in the way theorists perceived self and personal identity and paved the way for contemporary philosophical and psychological debates. The present work fills a very important gap in intellectual history by being the first book to trace the evolution of theories of self and personal identity throughout the eighteenth century. Martin and Barresi initially examine the history of Western thought on self and identity from Plato to Locke. The central chapters analyse the evolution of these concepts from Locke in the seventeenth century to Hazlitt, at the beginning of the nineteenth, exploring the two critical transitions which marked this period: the move from a religious conception of soul to a philosophical conception of self, and then to a scientific conception of mind. This rigorous and erudite study becomes even more compelling by proving that contemporary theories of self that have since the 1960s been debated by philosophers, as if for the first time, were widely discussed in the eighteenth century. These include issues such as the implications of fission examples for personal identity theory and the thesis that personal identity is not what matters primarily in survival. Martin and Barresi also break new ground by recognising the status of William Hazlitt as perhaps the most significant personal identity theorist of the English Enlightenment, after Locke and Hume, for his direct relevance to contemporary thinking. Naturalization of the Soul makes a major contribution to our understanding of one of the most radical transformations in the history of thought and is essential reading for all who are interested in issues which lie at the core of the Western philosophical tradition. Raymond Martin is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Maryland at College Park. John Barresi is Professor of Psychology at Dalhousie University. ROUTLEDGE STUDIES IN EIGHTEENTH CENTURY PHILOSOPHY 1 NATURALIZATION OF THE SOUL Self and personal identity in the eighteenth century Raymond Martin and John Barresi NATURALIZATION OF THE SOUL Self and personal identity in the eighteenth century Raymond Martin and John Barresi London and New York First published 2000 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002. © 2000 Raymond Martin and John Barresi All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0–415–21645–1 (Print Edition) ISBN 0-203-02670-5 (Master e-book ISBN) ISBN 0-203-16248-X (Glassbook Format) TO TIMOTHY JOSEPH MARTIN AND ANTONIO AND FLORENCE BARRESI CONTENTS Preface ix Introduction 1 1 Personal identity 12 2 Fission 30 3 The self as soul 49 4 Human nature 80 5 The self as mind 110 6 Future of the self 149 Notes 178 Bibliography 189 Index 199 vii PREFACE In the eighteenth century in Britain, there was a revolution in personal identity theory. In our own times, beginning in the early 1970s, there has been another. It is well known that in the earlier revolution, the self as immaterial soul was replaced with the self as mind. This replacement involved movement away from substance accounts of personal identity, according to which the self is a simple persisting thing, toward relational accounts of personal identity, according to which the self consists essentially of physical and/or psychological relations among different temporal stages of an organism or person. At the heart of the revolution in our own times has been the emergence of two questions where previously, it seemed, there had been only one. The traditional question is: What are the necessary and sufficient conditions for personal identity over time? That is, what must obtain in order for the same person to persist, and what, if it does obtain, guarantees that the same person persists? The new question is: What matters fundamentally in a person’s apparently self-interested concern to survive? That is, from the perspective of what, in normal circumstances, would count as a person’s self-interested concern to survive, is it fundamentally personal identity that matters—does the person fundamentally want to persist—or is what matters other ways of continuing that do not themselves suffice for identity? Readers unfamiliar with the contemporary debate may want to read the section entitled, ‘Contemporary philosophy of self and personal identity,’ in Chapter 6, before reading the rest of the present book. Probably, most philosophers who are engaged in the post-1970 debate over self and personal identity suppose that the emergence of their ‘new question’ —what matters fundamentally in a person’s apparently self-interested concern to survive—is a recent philosophical development. We too used to make this assumption. Then we discovered William Hazlitt’s little-known, first book, An Essay on the Principles of Human Action (1805), in which Hazlitt addressed many of the core questions that were being hotly debated, as if for the first time, in the 1970s. He even made important use of a kind of example—what has come to be known as a fission example—that had been primarily responsible for ushering in the recent revolution in personal identity theory. ix PREFACE Our discovery of Hazlitt’s early book quickly led to another discovery, which was even more surprising. It was that Hazlitt had neither invented fission examples nor been the first to see their relevance to personal identity theory. Throughout the eighteenth century in Britain, fission examples had been close to the center of a continuing and vigorous debate over self and personal identity. In this debate, many of the core issues had been discussed that since the 1970s have been discussed again, as if for the first time. Eventually we were forced to the realization that it is only a slight exaggeration to say that in the late twentieth century, personal identity theorists were to a large extent merely replaying the unresolved concerns of eighteenth century thinkers. Although key elements of the eighteenth century debate over personal identity and the debate in our own times are remarkably similar, the larger contexts in which the two debates occurred is radically different. The eighteenth century debate occurred in the context of a larger debate over the naturalization of the soul. In our own times, the debate occurred against the backdrop of an intellectual view in which the ‘soul’ had already been naturalized. Central to the larger context in which the eighteenth century debate took place were certain issues, such as whether matter can think, which were thought to be highly relevant to views of self and personal identity. Also central was intense concern over the fate of religion, and in particular Christianity, in an era of increasing secularism. To understand the evolution of the eighteenth century debate over self and personal identity, one must keep one eye on its connections to the emerging science of human nature and the other on its perceived relevance to religious concerns. We try to do this. Almost all of the theoretical action with which we shall be concerned took place in Britain. In the eighteenth century, at least prior to Kant, this is where the main action took place. However, in a fuller study, non-British thinkers, especially Diderot and Rousseau in France, and Leibniz, Wolff, and of course, Kant, in Germany, would have to be taken into account. Our reason for ignoring these non-British thinkers is that, for the most part, until at least the end of the eighteenth century, their views did not impinge much on developments in Britain. Where their views may have had some influence, such as in the case of Leibniz’s early views on metaphysics and Rousseau’s on education, we consider them briefly. Eventually, of course, Kant’s influence on English-speaking philosophy was enormous, but his influence did not begin to be felt seriously in Britain until the nineteenth century. And when his influence was finally felt, its effect was not primarily to continue the tradition of debate over self and personal identity that had flourished in Britain throughout the eighteenth century but, rather, to terminate that debate in favor of another, rather different way of framing questions about the self. With the exception of a few nineteenth century philosophers and psychologists, such as William Hazlitt, Thomas Brown, James Mill, John x PREFACE Stuart Mill and then eventually F.H.Bradley, it was not until the twentieth century, in what became the analytic tradition in philosophy, that the most conspicuous themes in the earlier eighteenth century British controversy were rediscovered and debated anew.