Locke begins his chapter on identity and diversity by what
seems to be a refusal of philosophical and theological speculation – a refusal,
that is, to consider either Stoic cyclical time or theological eternity:
“When we see anything to be in any place in any instant of
time, we are sure (be it what it will) that it is that very thing, and not
another which at that same time exists in another place, how like and
undistinguishable soever it may be in all other respects: and in this consists identity,
when the ideas it is attributed to vary not at all from what they were that
moment wherein we consider their former existence, and to which we compare the
present. For we never finding, nor conceiving it possible, that two things of
the same kind should exist in the same place at the same time, we rightly
conclude, that, whatever exists anywhere at any time, excludes all of the same
kind, and is there itself alone.”
Notice the drum beat of the “same”, here, doing the
conceptual work – the “same kind”, the “same place”, the “same time” – as
though the identity “fix” is in. Locke, in other words, is placing this
discussing in a certain locale – very much sub species non-aeternitatis. The
neighborhood of sameness reaches out through all time and space, but it at the
same time normalizes that time and space for the purpose of identity. Locke did
not make this move because he was unaware of other ideas of time and space – in
fact, the chapter is full of references to those other ideas, especially those
associated with the idea of the pre-existing self of the Cambridge Platonists.
And at the same time, Locke is also aware of Newton. In fact, his tremendous
whack at all non-respectable metaphysics is made as a sort of “clearing the ground” for the work of the
true magi, of whom the most eminent was Newton. Now, Newton in his scholium had
written of various senses of time – which applied to various approximations of
reality:
“Absolute, true, and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature,
flows equably without relation to anything external, and by another name is
called duration: relative, apparent, and common time, is some sensible and
external (whether accurate or unequable) measure of duration by the means of
motion, which is commonly used instead of true time; such as an hour, a day, a
month, a year.”
What does Newton meant by “flows equably without relation to anything
external”? What after all would be this external thing? Space? Or the observer?
Newton explains further that “It may be, that there is no such thing as an
equable motion, whereby time may be accurately measured. All motions may be
accelerated and retarded, but the flowing of absolute time is not liable to any
change. The duration or perseverance of the existence of things remains the
same, whether the motions are swift or slow, or none at all.”
Newtonian absolute time became an important reference in the 19
th
century after thermodynamics tried to capture an irreversible temporal
direction in the universe - which Botzmann provided the equations for. J.
Loschmidt criticized the discrepancy between Boltzmann and Newton, the latter
of whom clearly allows for equations of motion that are reversible in time.
“This means that if a system of hard-sphere particles starts a backward motion
due to the particles reversing their direction of motion at some instant of
time, it passes through all its preceding states up to the initial one, and
this will increase the H-function [entropy] whose variation is originally
governed by reversible equations of motion. The essential point to be made here
is that the observer cannot prefer one of the situations under study, the
forward motion of the system in time, in favor of the second situation, its
“backward” motion.” (Alexeev, 3) Notice that this observer is an observer ex
machina – for in a sense the observer, being external, cannot penetrate to
absolute time, having no footing according to Newton’s scholium. And it is this
that may justify Locke, who plants the observer at the very beginning of his
chapter with the telling phrase, “we see”.
It is from the position of what we see that Locke wants to proceed. Thus, it
is in the observer’s world that we travel, and in which, for Locke, personal
identity insists. It will insist fiercely in the rumble between finite spirits
and bodies, for Locke quickly throws out the relevance of our idea of God, the
third substance in Locke’s system. God is equivalent to the self-evident, an absolute
point of view that combines a number of piously ornamental traits (is
everywhere, is eternal, etc.) that do not interfere with the real argument
about identity.
That argument comes down to what sense we are to make of personal identity
when we borrow the terms from our notions of bodies. Locke, beginning with the
observer’s notion of the identity of the moment with itself and the place with
itself, would seem to have to continue in this vein. In that sense, every
passed second and every dissipated ray of light would enforce a change in
identity on the living. This is an idea that Locke rejects:
“In like manner, if two or more
atoms be joined together into the same mass, every one of those atoms will be
the same, by the foregoing rule: and whilst they exist united together, the
mass, consisting of the same atoms, must be the same mass, or the same body,
let the parts be ever so differently jumbled. But if one of these atoms be
taken away, or one new one added, it is no longer the same mass or the same
body. In the state of living creatures, their identity depends not on a mass of
the same particles, but on something else. For in them the variation of great
parcels of matter alters not the identity: an oak growing from a plant to a
great tree, and then lopped, is still the same oak; and a colt grown up to a
horse, sometimes fat, sometimes lean, is all the while the same horse: though,
in both these cases, there may be a manifest change of the parts; so that truly
they are not either of them the same masses of matter, though they be truly one
of them the same oak, and the other the same horse. The reason whereof is,
that, in these two cases -- a mass of matter and a living body --
identity is not applied to the same thing.”
In the observer’s world, we notice
that it is a question of the observer himself.
The observer has one characteristic
that distinguishes it from ‘parcels of matter’ – it is alive. Plant or animal,
it has a living existence. Locke’s vitalist move is even expressed in terms
that will later be refined into a vitalist philosophy: unlike the watch, which
receives its impetus from without, the organism receives its impetus from
within. That impetus will later be the much sought after vital force of
romantic science and its aftermath.
Locke however does not stop with that impulse, which
merely gives him a living thing. He moves on to the enigmatic co-determinant of
personal identity: consciousness. And it is here that he engages with a set of
questions that, while being very much
of the time –metempsychosis, resurrection – are aids to Locke’s picture of
consciousness. It is an argument that, I think, has a great influence on the
function of character in Anglophone countries.