Part One
Is personal identity a constant or a variable?
When I use the word “I,” does it always refer to the selfsame subject? While, as with many complex issues, the answer is both Yes and No, it is more interesting, and more fun, to explore “I” as a variable. And I have it on good authority, from philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, that “it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true.”
Identity is radically genetic, meaning that it is generated serially, moment by moment, with both vertical and horizontal components. To use a philosophical term, the pronoun “I” is indexical, with a meaning, and a referent, that is at least partly new each time the “same” person uses it, even when the person repeats “I” nonstop every second until his jaw either breaks or gets tired.
The Greek philosopher Heraclitus is famous for saying you can’t step into the same stream twice. We can do Heraclitus one better by saying the “same” you can’t step twice into the “same” stream.
Whitehead says it most succinctly, in four words: “No thinker thinks twice.” We—and note carefully that I did not say I— we are new every moment.
Bye, bye, Newton, and welcome to a quantum universe!
Looking at Jesus in this light is instructive for he clearly exemplifies the theme of identity as a variable—but with a distinction that makes a fundamental difference. Consider the following four gospel sayings:
“Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone.”
“Not I, but the Father that dwells in me, He does the works.”
“As the Father gave me commandment, even so I do.”
“I and my Father are one.”
As writer Beatrice Bruteau has pointed out, the referents of the pronoun “I” (or “me” in the first instance) in these four sayings is not the same. In fact, they differ considerably.
She suggests “the image of a spectrum, at one end of which the self says ‘I am very different from God.’ In the middle the self says, ‘I do nothing but God is in me, doing.’ A little later it says, ‘I also do things, but only by obeying God.’ Only at the other extreme of the spectrum does the self say ‘God and I are not different.’”
Think of these as four levels of increasing depth.
To say that “I” is a variable does not mean, in this case, the kind of incremental change that each of us experiences as we become older, day by day, week by week, year by year. That is one kind of change, true enough. But the argument here proposed is more subtle.
Bruteau explains by asking the reader to imagine a slide rule, the handy gadget once used in math to make calculations, but rendered obsolete by computers. Since the slide rule may be unfamiliar to many, here’s an alternative. Imagine an ordinary 12-inch ruler. Attached to the ruler, so that it can slide up and down, is a small magnifying lens with a black line down the center. Starting at the bottom, you can move the lens up along the ruler and stop so that the black line on the lens aligns with any of the marks on the ruler, such as the 4-inch mark, the 8-inch mark, or the 12-inch mark at the top.
Just as the marks on the ruler do not change as the lens slides up or down, so do levels of reality not change in terms of shifts of identity. What changes, as Bruteau observes, “is the level at which the self locates its ultimate identity.”
Of the four levels under consideration, the point is not that one level absolutely trumps the other three. All four levels are correct, and to function at any one level, is correct at that level. “The mistake that we want to avoid,” Bruteau says, “is to assume that ‘I’ refers to just one referent . . . that the sense of identity is fixed, that ‘I’ always means the same.”
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Note: I am indebted to Beatrice Bruteau, writer and philosopher, and her article, “Prayer and Identity,” which appeared in the journal Contemplative Review, in a special issue that was devoted to the work of Dr. Bruteau.
A powerful practical application of today’s Blague will be posted tomorrow in Part Two.
HyC