Personal Identity, Divine Love, and Extrinsic Individuation
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What is it that makes a person who she is despite has? Traditional accounts of personhood rely on intrinsic criteria: A person is his body or his mind, or perhaps his soul. Yet, these accounts are problematic because it seems I could have a different body or a different set of psychological experiences and still be me. Moreover, appeal to an immaterial soul to individuate persons is unhelpful because each soul seems to have the same set of properties! This problem of personal identity is linked, of course, to a host of deep questions, e.g., Is a fetus a person? Does one in the throes of dementia still have personal identity?
After reviewing the standard objections to understanding personal identity intrinsically, I suggest an extrinsic account of individuation, e.g., Bob is Bob, not because of Bob's body or mental experience, but because of God's intentionality. Just as God's love individuates the Persons of the Trinity, so does His love individuate extra-Trinitarian persons. Bob is Bob because God eternally regards Bob to be Bob and eternally loves and sustains Bob in being.
If the problem of personal identity finally demands such an extrinsic account of individuation, then personhood itself is a matter of God's grace. Accordingly, there is nothing anybody can do to effect (or affect) personhood. Divine love brings persons ex nihilo into being. Accordingly, the question of whether or not it is justifiable to choose to terminate the life of the fetus is profoundly altered, for viability is grounded in divine intent, not in biological and/or psychological development and achievement.
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Although I never thought it explicitly, I was assuming what philosophers now call global supervenience, that two Kirk brains, one in the transporter tube on the Enterprise and another down below on the surface planet, if they are molecule-by-molecule replicas, would necessarily have the same mental states. Simply put, the mental life of Kirk depends asymmetrically upon his neurophysiological constitution. Only in this way, would physical reconstitution bring with it the requisite mental reconstitution needed for identity. For more on global supervenience see, Gregory Currie, “Individualism and Global Supervenience,” British Journal of the Philosophy of Science 35 (1984): 345-58, Jaegwon Kim, Supervenience and Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), and Dennis Bielfeldt, “The Perils and Promise of Supervenience for Theology, in The Human Person in Science and Theology, eds. Niels Gregerson, Willem Drees and Ulf Görman (Edinburgh: T & T Clarke, 2000), 117-52.
The question pertains to the relationship between information and life. In Plato’s Timaeus, the demiurge takes information from the world of forms and crafts a world in conformity with it. Clearly, agency is needed to actualize information of the forms into a world of becoming. See The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Including the Letters, eds. Huntington Cairns & Edith Hamilton (New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1963), 1151-1211. Assuming the Demiurge is a living being, Plato might thus be comfortable with this definition of information: Some pattern or organization of matter and energy that has been given meaning by a living being. See Marcia Bates, “Information and Knowledge: An Evolutionary Framework for Information Science,” Information Research 10, no. 4 (July 2005). URL = https://informationr.net/ir/10-4/paper239.html. Accessed May 12, 2024. For a solid introduction to the Timaeus, see Donald Zeyl and Barbara Sattler, "Plato’s Timaeus,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2023 Edition), eds. Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman. Last modified Fall 2023. URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2023/entries/plato-timaeus/.
I did not realize either that I was tacitly assuming a behaviorist criterion of personhood. Yosemite’s body acting like Bugs Bunny simply was Bugs Bunny for me. I suspect that if challenged, I would have said then that Bug’s soul caused Yosemite’s body to act, so Bugs person was not reducible to bodily behavior.
Heraclitus is a Greek philosopher of Ephesus who taught around 500 BC. He was famous for teaching inter alia that all things are constantly changing. See Daniel W. Graham, "Heraclitus,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, (Winter 2023 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman, eds. Last Modified December 8, 2023. URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2023/entries/heraclitus/. Accessed May 10, 2024.
See Aristotle’s Categories in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York, Random House, 1941), 7-39.
It is generally agreed that Aristotle held a view of general or species essences. What is more controversial is that he advocated individual essences. For a defense of Aristotle’s embrace of individual essences drawn from his Metaphysics, see Charlotte Witt, Substance and Essence in Aristotle: An Interpretation of Metaphysics VIII – IX (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989).
Following Plantinga, one might claim that E is an individual essence of individual x if and only if ) E is essential to x and (ii) necessarily for all y, y exemplifies E if and only if y = x. For a solid treatment of the issues concerning individual essences see Penelope Mackie, How Things Might Have Been: Individuals, Kinds and Essential Properties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). URL = https://academic.oup.com/book/36189. Accessed May 11, 2024.
There are many logical issues that arise regarding contrary to fact conditionals. Let us again contemplate an antecedent in which Germany won the war W and German is the official language of commerce S. So W → S. But we know that a material conditional is true if the antecedent is false or the consequent true. Thus, ‘W → S’ is true if Germany did not win the war or German is the official language of commerce. But in thinking through a counterfactual, we seem to want to say the truth of ‘W → S’ is dependent upon W obtaining, and that it is W’s truth that is important in the truth of ‘W → S’. For a very solid introductory treatment of this issue, see Paul Egré and Hans Rott, "The Logic of Conditionals", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta, eds. Last modified July 3, 2021. URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2021/entries/logic-conditionals/.
Despite the way I am presenting this, I want to remind the reader that, in my opinion, the material conditional cannot adequately express counterfactual and subjunctive conditionals. Assume that p→q. This is equivalent to ~p v q, so all that ‘p→q’ means is either p does not obtain or q does. Since the antecedent p of the subjunctive and counterfactual does not express what is the case, the entire conditional is true whatever might be the truth of the consequent q. But this is not what a counterfactual statement means. Treating all of this in the main body of this article would be tangential to the issue of personal identity.
Sydney Shoemaker, “Identity and Identities,” Daedalus 135, no. 4 (Fall 2006): 40-48. See 44ff.
See, for instance, David Shoemaker, Personal Identity and Ethics: An Brief Introduction (Peterborough, Ontario, CA; Buffalo, NY: Broadview Press, 2009) or Eric T. Olson, The Human Animal: Personal Identity without Psychology (New York, NY; Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1997).
The literature on the problem of personal identity is enormous. Defendants of the physical view are legion, as well as its attackers. For a very easy introduction to this problem from a theologian, see Joshua Farris, “What’s so simple about Personal Identity,” Philosophy Now—Issue 107. (https://philosophynow.org/issues/107/Whats_So_Simple_About_Personal_Identity). Accessed April 29, 2024. Farris distinguishes the body view, the brain view, memory continuity and character continuity views, the “simple view” advocating a soul, and the “not-so-simple view” which identifies personhood with a particular first-person perspective.” For the latter, see Lynne Rudder Baker, Naturalism, and the First-Person Perspective (Oxford, UK; New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2013). Farris quotes Baker: “A Person is a being with a first-person perspective essentially, who persists as long as her first-person perspective is exemplified.” See Baker, Naturalism, and the First-Person Perspective, 149.
So much here depends upon the phenomenological evidence. It certainly seems like I can think of myself having a different body. But one could argue, “yes, you’re thinking of having a different body, but the one you think of having a different body is not strictly identical to the one who was thinking originally. David Lewis, in fact, argued that when thinking of oneself having a different body, one is thinking of a counterpart of oneself having that body. See Mackie, Penelope and Mark Jago, "Transworld Identity", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2022 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2022/entries/identity-transworld/. Accessed May 12, 2024. A forensic account understands personhood in terms of moral conduct and of what is praiseworthy or blameworthy. ‘Person’ thus relates directly to responsibility and accountability. Locke writes: “[person] is a forensic term, appropriating actions and their merit; and so belongs only to intelligent agents, capable of law, happiness and misery. This personality extends itself beyond present existence to what is past, only by consciousness – whereby it becomes concerned and accountable.” See An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, Chapter 27.
See Saul Kripke, “Semantical Considerations on Modal Logic,” Acta Philosophica Fennica 16 (1963): 83-93 and “Quantified Modal Logic and Essentialism,” Nous 51, no. 2 (2017): 221-234, and Jaacko Hintikka, “The Semantics of Modal Notions and the Indeterminacy of Ontology,” Syntheses 21, nos. 3/4 (1970): 408-424 and Models for Modalities (Dordrecht: Reidel Publishing Co., 1969).
While (7) can be read as de dicto modality (the modality attaches to propositions), it is clear that the modality of (8) is de re, that is, it attaches to things.
See “A Dilemma for the Soul Theory of Personal Identity,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 83 (2018): 41-55, 42. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-016-9594-x .
Ibid.
Notice that the haecceity must be “deeper” than thoughts that the soul might have. It has to be that which is stable and can accordingly take on or have differing thoughts. Saying that each individual soul has one without being able to identify the properties by which it is had seems to beg the question.
Ibid., 53. See Jaegwon Kim, “Lonely Souls: Causation and Substance Dualism,” in Soul, Body and Survival: Essays in the Metaphysics of Human Persons, ed. K. Cocoran (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001).
Wittgenstein, of course, would suggest that the entire pursuit of locating the criterion of personal identity likely expresses an underlying philosophical neurosis or pathology.
David Hume is associated with the “bundle theory of the self” as is Derek Parfit. Parfit famously argued that while one can speak of persons, they cannot be separately listed in an inventory of what exists. They are, in fact, nothing more than the brain and body and the complicated interrelationships between physical and mental events. The upshot of this is that although one can use person-talk, there are no metaphysical facts about them, and accordingly, that what is important is not the putative identity of the person, but a survival connecting physical and psychological events. See inter alia, Derek Parfit, “Personal Identity,” The Philosophical Review 80, no. 1 (1971): 3-27, and “Personal Identity and Rationality,” Syntheses 52 (1982): 227-41, and “The Unimportance of Identity,” in Identity, Henry Harris, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 13-45.
For those interested, the criterion of identity I propose is this: x = y if and only if, for any property P, God regards x as instantiating P if and only if God regards y as instantiating P. On this criterion, it is a question of the intrinsic instantiation of P, but rather the extrinsic judgment by God of x and y instantiating P. If God can extrinsically regard x’s intrinsic instantiation of ~P to be W (worthy of salvation), even when intrinsically it is not worthy (~W), then God should be able to regard x=y when there is some P that x instantiates that y does not. For a somewhat technical account of defining virtue extrinsically, see Dennis Bielfeldt, “Virtue is not in the Head: Contributions from the Late Medieval and Reformation Traditions for Understanding Virtue Extrinsically,” 58-76, in Habits in Mind: Integrating Theology, Philosophy, and the Cognitive Science of Virtue, Emotion, and Character Formation, eds. Gregory Peterson, James van Slyke, Michael Spezio, and Kevin Reimer (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill Publishing, 2017). I argue here that the general movement towards externalism in semantics invites an extrinsic account of virtue as well. Accordingly, for any person x, and any possible virtue M, necessarily x has M if and only if God regards x as having M. Luther routinely substitutes ‘believer’ for ‘person’ to soften the electionistic overtones. Accordingly, allowing B to be the domain of believers, N the necessity operator, and defining the intensional operator ‘Rx(My)’ as ‘x regards y as instancing M,’ we have (∀xϵB)(∀M)N(Mx ↔ Rg(Mx)).
Robert Koons, “Divine Persons as Relational Qua-Objects,” Religious Studies 54, no. 3 (September 2018): 337-357.
A universal, unlike a particular, can exist in many places at the same time. For instance, if human nature is a universal, then that exact nature is present in both Peter and Paul. This Plato-inspired view must be distinguished from that claiming that human nature is a trope. Trope theory, often associated with Aristotle, claims that Paul’s nature is as particular as is Peter’s nature, but that these particular natures can nonetheless be instantiations of a common universal. Consider the statement, ‘Socrates is white.” Aristotle construes Socrates’ whiteness as a particular whiteness present in Socrates, but allows for whiteness in general to be said of this particular whiteness. While to say that the divine nature is a universal, but has only one instantiation is perhaps metaphysically distinct from saying that the divine nature is a particular (a trope), the distinction seems to make little difference to the structure of the divine. God’s individuality and uniqueness is preserved either way.
Ibid., 339. Koons believes divine simplicity is also committed to God being identical to His own existence, which is the one and only instance of pure or absolute existence. He does not, however, need this assumption to justify the conclusions he reaches in this article.
Ibid., 339-40: The realist version assumes that universals are real and distinct from particulars, the latter of which are bundles of universals plus something that individuates the bundle, e.g. signate matter, a haecceity, or a bare particular. The nominalist version claims that essences are particulars that are really distinct from one another, and that these essences are related by “less than numerical identity” (Scotus).
Ibid., 340. The term ‘conspecificity’ means ‘to belong to the same species.’ While two organisms might differ with respect to their physical characteristics and behaviors, they can still belong to the same species and be “conspecific.” Accordingly, when coming to know triangularity, one might claim an identity between the triangle known and our intential act of knowing it. Alternately, one might claim that the intential object and the thing intended are not identical, but only conspecific. Both are particulars though they share deep commonality. The question is always how to explain the commonality between conspecifics. But while it is quite plausible, I think, to explain their similarity by appeal to a universal they both instantiate, one can simply allow the similarities (and differences) between the two simply to remain a brute fact about each. Nominalist strategies do the latter.
Ibid.
Ibid., 341.
Koons is thinking about Thomas Aquinas’ metaphysics here, so he realizes that the form of the tree needs matter in order to be an existing substance. The intelligible species of the tree is accordingly conspecific with the tree itself.
For Thomas, the internal vehicle of intentionality is the intelligible species.
Koons points out that on the Aristotelian-Thomistic account all acts of understanding are veridical, because when A intends and object B, the intelligible species B cannot not be present to A.
Ibid., 342. One might say on this view that it is the nature of S to abstract the intelligible species of S in knowing S. Accordingly, self-knowledge proceeds by abstracting the species of self-knowing from the self-knower.
S knows S by knowing S as knowing S.
Ibid., 342-43. This might seem confusing, but Koons is pointing out that if S knows S by abstracting from S the knowing of S, there obtains an identity between the knower and thing known. Establishing this identity formally is beyond the scope of this paper.
Ibid., 343.
Ibid. Intuitively, it seems easier to establish that God knows God by knowing God as knowing God than to show, in general, that S knows S by knowing S as knowing S.
Ibid., 344.
Ibid, 344ff. See Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, Q14, A5, A6, A11. Koons develops a model of the Trinity based upon qua-objects.
Ibid., 353: “It is a distinction that is necessary and does not in any way depend upon how we (contingent creatures) think about God, or how God has chosen to reveal Himself or relate Himself to us.”
Ibid., 346: “Given the SDDS, divine love and divine knowledge are the very same relation. Moreover, God knows that these are all the same. So God qua lover is identical to God qua knower, and so on."
Ibid., 349. They are really distinct from each other, but not the divine nature.
Ibid., 345-46.
Ibid., 346.
Ibid.
Ibid., 345: “Extrinsic aspects of God, like God qua creator of the world or God qua friend of Abraham, do represent distinct qua-objects, but they all differ very radically from God simpliciter, in that all of them are merely contingent in their existence.”
It might seem heretical to claim that this extra-divine individuation is intrinsic to the divine nature. However, if we take seriously the claim that God is omniscient and omnipotent, then extra-divine freedom falls within the sway of the divine will. Such freedom is known and loved through the divine nature, is consistent with God’s divine simplicity, and is a constituent of the one divine action upon creation.
I realize that I have not given an account of divine love individuating extra-divine persons, but rather have provided a sketch of the trajectory such an account might take.This is all that can be done here, unfortunately.
Daniel Dennett, “Conditions of Personhood,” in The Identities of Persons, ed. A. O. Rorty (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1976), 177-78. See https://philpapers.org/archive/DENCOP.pdf.