Identity

2007

oil on canvas in wooden box with tear-off text

18″ x 12″ x 2″

Identity.... “I” call myself “I” now in adulthood just like I called myself “I” in childhood.  Is it the same “I”? 

The nature of change.  Common sense tells us that some things change while others stay the same.  Out language seems to belie this.  When we say that “it” changes, we seem to be saying that there are some features that are shifting and moving and being transformed, but that there is still an “it” – “it” has got to exist in a continuing and permanent state in spite of some of its characteristics that have not stayed or we couldn’t say “it” changed.  We’d say “it” disappeared.

But is philosophy responsible for giving some account of our common-sense view?  What if the common sense view is just wrong?  Those romantics, Zeno and Parmenides, along with the father figure Plato, wanted to tell us something like, “you know, honey, the world is more stable than it looks, and there really is something that remains unchanged.  In fact, it is the thing that remains unchanged that is the only thing that is real.”  (But Zeno had some great paradoxes.)

Heraclitus just said forgitabbout it, nothing stays the same.  It’s all in a flux.  Stick your foot in the river, take it out, put it in again, and you know what?  It’s a different river the second time.  That water is not the same as the first water, and just because you use the same word for both “river” – doesn’t mean it is the same.  Don’t be shtoopid.

If there are two red spots that look the same are they one spot repeated twice or are they two different spots? Time is the medium that confuses us.  When we experience something through time and we see it in an uninterrupted fashion, we call it the same object.  If the man behind the curtain flashes one red dot, then very, very quickly drops that and picks up another one and flashes that one, and continues until he has flashed all ten that he had in his hand, we would say that a red dot – one red dot – was flashed over and over again.  Time leads us, says David Hume, to this “fiction” of identity.  We think it’s the same river.

I think it is still “I”.  The “I” when I was a baby is still there in the “I” that is an adult.  But where is that I?  It’s not found in my physical self, for that is different in most ways, though one could say my basic body type, gender, and race stay the same.  The “I” is certainly not in any idea, for all my ideas have come and gone in intervening years.  Perhaps it’s in some stable personality type?  Maybe the “I” of my childhood still thinks in the same patterns and with the same motives as the “I” of my childhood.  If we call it a sameness of identity, the “sameness” is one of rough similarity – we just blur that over into identity.  Maybe that’s why philosophy owes no obligation to common sense.  Common sense is just sloppy.

The wonderful philosopher of mathematics, Gottlob Frege, asked “Is sameness a relation?” and if it is a relation is it “A relation between objects or between the names or signs of objects?”  Wisely, he concluded that it was a relation between the signs.  We utter sentences.  We use words.   Meaning is ambiguous and a distinction must be made between the reference of something and its sense – its connotation. There is the sentence which is uttered or written, and accompanying that is the mental idea.  One is physical and the other mental.  But thirdly, there is the proposition that the sentence expresses, which proposition is the content of the mental act and is an abstract object.   As he states, “The thought, in itself immaterial, clothes itself in the material garment of a sentence and thereby becomes comprehensible to us.  We say a sentence expresses a thought.”

So where is the identity?  Between the signs.  So the sign for me when I was a child – the word “I” – refers to the same thing as the sign I use for me an adult, e.g. also the word “I”.  Are those two “I’s” referring to the same thing?  Where’s Heraclitus when you need him...in Brooklyn?