Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-gb8f7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-01T09:07:52.023Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

How Many Selves Make Me?1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Stephen R. L. Clark
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Cartesian accounts of the mental make it axiomatic that consciousness is transparent: what I feel, I know I feel, however many errors I may make about its cause. ‘I’ names a simple, unextended, irreducible substance, created ex nihilo or eternally existent, and only associated with the complete, extended, dissoluble substance or pretend-substance that is ‘my’ body by divine fiat. Good moderns take it for granted that ‘we’ now realize how shifting, foggy and deconstructible are the boundaries of the self; ‘we’ know that our own motives, feelings and intentions constantly escape us; ‘I’ names only the current speaker, or the momentarily dominant self among many fluid identities.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 29 , March 1991 , pp. 213 - 233
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1991

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

2 Wilkes, Kathleen V., Real People (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).Google Scholar

3 See Churchland, Patricia S., ‘Replies to Critics’, Inquiry 29 (1986), 241–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Wilkes, op. cit. (n. 1); Brennan, Andrew ‘Fragmented Selves and the Problem of Ownership’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (1989–1990), 143–58.Google Scholar

5 Plotinus, , Ennead VI 7. 41, 22f.Google Scholar

6 Armstrong, A. H.Enneads (London: Heinemann, Loeb Classical Library, 1988), vol. 7, 78.Google Scholar

7 Palmer, G. E. H., Sherrard, P. and Ware, K. (eds), Philokalia (London: Faber & Faber, 1979), 186.Google Scholar

8 Thigpen, Corbett and Cleckley, Harvey M. ‘A case of Multiple Personality’, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 49 (1954), 135–51CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed (reprinted in Sarason, I. G. (ed.), Contemporary Research in Personality (Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1962), 367–83Google Scholar; see also The Three Faces of Eve (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1957), 50.Google Scholar

9 McDougall, W., ‘The Case of Sally Beauchamp’, Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 19 (1905–1907), 410–31.Google Scholar

10 Sidis, B. and Goodhart, S. P., Multiple Personality (New York: Appleton & Co., 1909), 65.Google Scholar

11 Cory, C. E., ‘Spanish Maria’, Journal of Abnormal Psychology 14 (1920)Google Scholar: Crabtree, A., Multiple Man (Eastbourne: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1985), 41f.Google Scholar

12 Cory, , Psychological Review 26 (1919).Google Scholar

13 Prince, M., The Dissociation of a Personality (New York: Longmans, Greene & Co., 1908), 78ff.Google Scholar

14 Crabtree, , op. cit. (n. 11), 39ff.Google Scholar

15 Hawthorn, J., Multiple Personality and the Disintegration of Literary Character (London: Edward Arnold, 1983).Google Scholar

16 Prince, , op. cit. (n. 13), 147ff.Google Scholar

17 Prince, , op. cit. (n. 16), 489.Google Scholar

18 Hawthorn, , op. cit. (n. 15), 18.Google Scholar

19 Ibid. 8.

20 Wilkes, , op. cit. (n. 1), 110.Google Scholar

21 Spanos, N. P., Weekes, J. R. and Bertrand, L. D., Journal of Abnormal Psychology 94 (1985), 362–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22 Thigpen, and Cleckley, , op. cit. (n. 8), 165.Google Scholar

23 Crabtree, , op. cit. (n. 11), 211f.Google Scholar

24 Wilkes, , op. cit. (n. 1), 111.Google Scholar

25 See Hawthorn, , op. cit. (n. 15), 11ff.Google Scholar It is also widely claimed that such ‘multiples’ were often or always victims of sexual and other abuse as children. It is not surprising that such victims should exaggerate the normal tendency to forget unpleasant or disgraceful episodes.

26 See Lewis, I. M., Ecstatic Religion (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

27 Spanos, et al. , op. cit. (n. 21).Google Scholar

28 Thigpen, and Cleckley, , op. cit. (n. 8), 195.Google Scholar

29 Aldridge-Morris, Ray, Multiple Personality: an Exercise in Deception (London: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1989)Google Scholar, cited by Snedegar, Jean, The Independent, 20 03 1990, p. 15.Google Scholar

30 Thigpen, and Cleckley, , op. cit. (n. 8), 271.Google Scholar It may be they have other, better, reasons for their conclusions: how could we tell?

31 Plath, Sylvia, The Bell Jar (London: Faber & Faber, 1966), 80Google Scholar; cited by Hawthorn, , op. cit. (n. 15), 117.Google Scholar

32 Dunne, J. S., The City of Gods (London: Sheldon Press, 1974), 125.Google Scholar

33 Prince, , op. cit. (n. 16), 560.Google Scholar

34 Ibid. 514.

35 Guin, Wyman, Beyond Bedlam (London: Sphere Books, 1973), 15Off.Google Scholar

36 As Eve White apparently thought: Thigpen and Cleckley, , op. cit. (n. 8), 206.Google Scholar

37 Keyes, Daniel, who wrote The Minds of Billy Milligan (New York: Random House, 1981)Google Scholar, is better known as the author of the science fiction story, Flowers for Algernon. They are both touching stories, but I prefer the latter.

38 Taylor, Charles, Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 34.Google Scholar

39 See ‘On Wishing there were Unicorns’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (1989–1990), 247–65.Google Scholar

40 McDougall, W., Outline of Abnormal Psychology (London: Methuen, 1926), 541f.Google Scholar

41 Ibid. 546ff.

42 Sidis, and Goodhart, , op. cit. (n. 10), 4.Google Scholar

43 McDougall, , op. cit. (n. 40), 546f.Google Scholar

44 Prince, , op. cit. (n. 13), 186–240.Google Scholar

45 Ibid. 399.

46 Crabtree, , op. cit. (n. 11), 52Google Scholar, after Keyes, op. cit. (n. 37).

47 It is a clumsy methodological error to suppose that—if there are real multiples at all—they must all end up requiring therapy. It is therefore quite wrong to claim that we know that all or most multiples (if they exist) must have been abused as children.

48 Sidis, and Goodhart, , op. cit. (n. 10), 193.Google Scholar

49 Ibid. 199.

50 Ibid. 364.

51 During discussion at the Conference I inflicted this elementary exercise on my audience, and concluded (from their unanimous failure to achieve a tensecond thought) that we could hardly be said to control our thoughts at all. İlham Dilman responded that he had at least thought of the thing I had asked them to, and so must have controlled his thinking at least for a moment. True enough: but now (if you control your thoughts) don't think of a white mare.

52 Philo, , On Cherubim, 114f.Google Scholar: Collected Works, trans. Colson, F. H., Whitaker, G. H. et al. (London: Heinemann, Loeb Classical Library, 1929), vol. II, 77.Google Scholar

53 Philo, , De Mutatione, 293fGoogle Scholar: ibid., vol. V, 265f.

54 Sangarakshita, , Survey of Buddhism, 6th ed. (London: Tharpa Publications, 1987), 196f.Google Scholar

55 Midgley, Mary, Wickedness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 123.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

56 I have discussed some of the difficulties in attempts to explain the existence or nature of consciousness by referring only to such things as can supposedly exist without consciousness in From Athens to Jerusalem (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), ch. 7.Google Scholar

57 Hawthorn, , op. cit. (n. 15), 34.Google Scholar

58 Potts, T. C., Conscience in Mediaeval Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

59 Allison, R., Mind in Many Pieces (New York: Rawson, Wade, 1980).Google Scholar

60 Sally: Prince, , op. cit. (n. 13), 166.Google Scholar

61 As ibid. 150.

62 BI: ibid. 209.

63 As in Stapledon, Olaf, Last Men in London (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972; first published 1932).Google Scholar

64 Anquttara-Nikaya 1, 10Google Scholar: cited by Sangarakshita, , op. cit. (n. 54), 104.Google Scholar Edward Conze emphasizes that Humean comparisons are deeply misleading: whereas Hume ‘understood our personality after the image of inanimate objects, which also have no “self”, or true inwardness of any kind… the Buddhist doctrine of anatta invites us to search for the super-personal’ (Thirty Years of Buddhist Studies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 239f).Google Scholar

65 Prince, , op. cit. (n. 13), 316.Google Scholar

66 Ibid. 152; see also 221.

67 Ibid. 234.

68 Ibid. 238.

69 See Merlan, Philip, Monopsychism Mysticism Metaconsciousness (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1963).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

70 See Robinson, H. M., ‘Aristotelian Dualism’, in Annas, J. (ed.), Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, vol. I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983).Google Scholar

71 Plotinus, , Enneads IIIGoogle Scholar 4.3; see my ‘Reason as Daimon’ in Gill, C. (ed), The Person and the Human Mind (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 187–206.Google Scholar

72 Evans, C. O., The Subject of Consciousness (London: Allen & Unwin, 1970), 144.Google Scholar

73 Prince, , op. cit. (n. 13), 525.Google Scholar

74 Blake, W., ‘Jerusalem’, 49.72fGoogle Scholar, in Keynes, G. (ed.), Collected Works (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 680.Google Scholar

75 See Suzuki, D. T. (ed.), Manual of Zen Buddhism (New York: Grove Press, 1960).Google Scholar

76 There is a related doctrine in Augustine, on which see Nash, R. H.The Light of Knowledge (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1969), 94ff.Google Scholar

77 See my ‘Is Humanity a Natural Kind?’, in Ingold, Tim (ed.), What is an Animal? (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988), 17–34.Google Scholar