John Locke was known to be one of the most influential philosophers of the Enlightenment Era, and earned the title of the “Father of Liberalism”. Within his work, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, a foundational work during the Enlightenment, Locke’s epistemological narrative reflects the claim that we, as humans, are not in the position to know, or discover, more than we need to live. His dedication to concept empiricism is reflected in his theories of personal identity, government, politics, and even metaphysical concepts such as perception, as they maintain relation to the practical concerns of human beings. Locke’s account of personal identity within the Essay examines the limits of human understanding and the qualities of personhood through an empirical lens, as it pertains to moral responsibility and conditions of persistence.
To understand personal identity, we must begin with an understanding of the conditions of personhood and the qualities of identity. Locke begins by acknowledging four kinds of existences within the world: atoms, compounds of atoms, masses of matter, living organisms, and persons. The principle of individuation for a sequoia tree, for example, is that it has a consistent existence; From its beginning atomic composition as a sapling to its life as a giant redwood, the sequoia persists through each stage of life and development as the same organism in the same life cycle, regardless of variation in mass or atomic structure, characterizing its numerical identity, or the state of being the same entity across of time.
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The qualities that characterize persons, however, consist in the sameness of one’s consciousness across time, converse to the sequoia’s persistence of material life itself. Locke’s discussion of this diachronic identity begins with the examination of personhood (Barnes, 2021a). According to Locke, a person is. This awareness characterizes Locke’s principle of individuation for persons, as he believes that the condition required to establish a numerical identity between persons across time is one’s persisting consciousness through memory. Further, it is in this current awareness, this ability to identify ourselves as ourselves at this moment, that allows us to identify our past thoughts as our own. Memory, according to Locke, presupposes consciousness in that it connects person X at one given time to person Y at another given time; In his Essay, he states,
In other words, a person can be seen as a single center of consciousness, and so long as that single center of consciousness persists in thought and awareness, the person persists.
In his account of personal identity, Locke reasons that persons are, in addition to the empirical definitions of personhood and numerical identity, entities that can be held accountable for their actions. Moreover, he argues that it is in one’s continuity of consciousness and capacity for memory and thought that creates moral responsibility, as one is conscious of the consequences of their actions. With this reasoning of personal identity, Locke identifies one of the strongest fallacies to his account: the objection to interrupted consciousness. Within the Essay, he outlines the conditions of these gaps in personal identity as lapses in our memory that result from forgetfulness, sleeping, drunkenness, etc (Locke, Essay II.27.20). As aforementioned, one’s identity is contingent upon the “sameness” of consciousness and being across time. Given this assertion, any change in the self reflects a change in personal identity, and conversely, any change in personal identity therefore implies that the self has changed. Locke continues to suggest that one’s identity extends only so far as one's consciousness is present, inherently implying that one may not be held morally culpable for actions done in a dissociative, unconscious state.
Memory, according to Locke, is both a necessary and sufficient condition of self, and consequently, personal identity. I believe that, among other arguments of circularity and memory, the objection of interrupted consciousness seems most obvious and inherent to his account; Locke accepts this objection as an additional quality of his account, stating,
It is because of Locke’s defense of this objection and addendum to his account of personal identity that I believe it is successfully defeated, but a significant objection nonetheless. To put it simply, I believe in the continuity of consciousness through memory. If acting is part of one’s present consciousness, then one must be held responsible for the act. Conversely, if one has no recollection of the action and cannot be brought to the consciousness of performing it, it was not their action, and cannot be held, at least not morally, to it.
I believe John Locke’s view of knowledge has maintained a simple philosophy: no one has access to the hidden secrets of nature, but what we need to know for practical purposes we can know. In his Essays, he strongly argues that the only significant identity is responsibility. In so being, as philosophy professor and author Richard Francks states,
One’s ability to reason, reflect, and consider themselves as the same thinking beings in different times and places is, as Locke believed, all to say that they uphold some form of responsibility in their actions as conscious beings, and in this knowledge may we better understand our existence and persistence in the world.
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