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Locke on Personal Identity and the Trinity Controversy of the 1690s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

Gary Wedeking
Gary Wedeking
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia
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Extract

No aspect of Locke's Essay has received more attention than his theory of personal identity. Yet surprisingly little attention has been given to the intellectual context in which it was written. This is particularly noteworthy in that the chapter in which the theory is developed, “Of Identity and Diversity” (II,xxvii), has a history quite independent of the bulk of the Essay. Added only in the second edition (1694), the theory constitutes a rather late chapter in Locke's intellectual biography. In contrast to other major themes of the Essay, such as the origin of our ideas, substance, power, essence, etc., which received their early development in the various drafts of the Essay (the first being dated 1670), Locke's views on personal identity were apparently first formulated in a note in his 1683 journal.

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Articles
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Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 29 , Issue 2 , Spring 1990 , pp. 163 - 188
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Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1990

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References

Notes

1 Notes in the text are to the Nidditch, Peter edition of the Essay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979)Google Scholar. Most references are in standard form to the book, chapter and paragraph. But some, mostly in the analysis of II,xxvii, 13, are given to page(s) and lines in the Nidditch (N) edition.

2 Aaron, R. I. and Gibb, Jocelyn, An Early Draft of Locke's Essay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936).Google Scholar

3 Printed in Dewhurst, Kenneth, John Locke: Physician and Philosopher (Oxford: Wellcome Historical Medical Library, 1963), p. 222–223Google Scholar (dated January 5). I am indebted to Prof. H. A. S. Schaukula for this reference. An earlier note in Locke's Journals for February 20, 1682 (in Aaron and Gibb, An Early Draft, p. 121–123) concerns the issue of whether the soul is always thinking and is therefore an early attempt at the critique of Cartesianism in Bk. II, chap. i. But it does not raise the question of personal identity and therefore cannot really be said to be an anticipation of Bk. II, chap, xxvii.

4 Bailey, Cyril, trans., Lucretius on the Nature of Things (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950), p. 134 (De rerum natura, Bk. III, II. 850–865).Google Scholar

5 Harrison, John and Laslett, Peter, The Library of John Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 1823–1825Google Scholar. All references to Locke's library are by entry numbers in this edition.

6 Wedeking, Gary, “Locke's Metaphysics of Personal Identity,” History of Philosophy Quarterly, 4 (1987): 17–31.Google Scholar

7 Molyneux to Locke, March 2, 1693, in The Correspondence of John Locke, edited by de Beer, E. S. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), Vol. 4, p. 1609Google Scholar, and Locke to Locke 185 Molyneux, March 28, 1693, in ibid., p. 1620.

8 Of particular importance was the publication of Nye's, StephenBrief History of the Unitarians (London, 1687).Google Scholar

9 The single most important passage supporting the Trinity doctrine, the Comma Joanmum (1 John 7–8) had in fact been surrounded by controversy since the time of Erasmus. See Bainton, Roland H., “The Bible in the Reformation,” in The Cambridge History of the Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), p. 10Google Scholar. Its doubtful authenticity became known in the period we are concerned with due to the arguments of the Unitarians and, somewhat later, to the writings of the Catholic Richard Simon (Norman Sykes, “The Religion of Protestants,” in ibid., p. 194). Concerning Isaac Newton's work on this and other scriptural evidence for the Trinity, see this article, p. 174.

10 A Vindication of the Doctrines of the Holy & Ever Blessed Trinity & The Incarnation of the Son of God (London, 1690) (henceforth Vind.).Google Scholar

11 In The Distinction between Real and Nominal Trinitarians Examined (1696), p. 16, Sherlock explains that one substance is to be distinguished from one singular substance. The Godhead is a substance but not a singular substance. But whatever we make of Sherlock's reflections on substance it is clear that substance is irrelevant to the Trinity. For if substance were the criterion of personal identity, there would be, he argues, two persons in Christ, man and God (Sherlock, , A Defence of Dr. Sherlock's Notion of a Trinity in Unity… [London, 1694], p. 42 [henceforth Defence]).Google Scholar

12 This, it emerges in a later passage of the Defence (p. 87), is more than simply an analogy, since Sherlock thinks of the Son as being the “living image” of the Father. But the argumentative employment of the concept in the earlier sections (Defence, p. 20ff.) amounts to a hypothetical analogy. Suppose a man had a living image, Sherlock is saying, then it would follow that there were two persons with one individual nature. Here, of course, “individual” should be underlined. Although Sherlock's argument sometimes appears to trade on the point that natures (or essences), as universals, are often common to diverse individuals (e.g., Defence, p. 90, 94), this notion of a common nature is clearly insufficient for his purpose. Just as three individuals who share the common nature of personhood are three persons, three who share the common nature of God are three Gods.

13 Acts of the Great Athanasius, p. 25, printed with The Faith of One God… (a collection of Unitarian Tracts), 1690. We should note, however, that the Trinitarian Richard Burthogge directs a similar criticism of Sherlock in An Essay Upon Reason (London, 1694Google Scholar; New York and London: Garland, 1976), p. 274. Burthogge himself is content to regard the Trinity as a revealed mystery.

14 Richard Cartwright, however, suggests some ways the Trinity doctrine might be read, given the difficulty (impossibility in his view) of maintaining this strong relativity doctrine (“On the Logical Problem of the Trinity,” in Philosophical Essays [Cambridge, MA: M.I.T., 1987], p. 198).Google Scholar

15 Sergeant, John, Solid Philosophy Asserted... (London, 1697), p. 265–267 (refl. 14, sec. 12–13)Google Scholar. Butler, Joseph, Dissertation 1, “Of Personal Identity,” appendix to The Analogy of Religion (London: Macmillan, 1900), p. 280Google Scholar. The priority of Sergeant in raising this objection, well known to philosophers in Butler's version, was pointed out by Behan, David P., “Locke on Persons and Personal Identity,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 9 (1979): 53–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 South, Robert, Animadversions upon Dr. Sherlock's Book (1693), p. 100.Google Scholar

17 Ibid., p. 108–110. See also Tindal, , “A Letter to the Reverend the Clergy of both Universities Concerning the Trinity and the Athanasian Creed,” in A Third Collection of Unitarian Tracts (London, 1694).Google Scholar

18 South, Animadversions, p. 107. See also Howe, John, “A Letter to a Friend Concerning the Postscript to the Defense of Dr. Sherlock's Notion of the Trinity in Unity,” p. 29–30Google Scholar, printed with A Calm and Sober Inquiry Concerning the Possibility of a Trinity in the Godhead (London, 1694)Google Scholar.

South's criticism has, from our post-Humean perspective, the objectionable feature that it regards self-consciousness as a direct awareness of the subject of consciousness as such. Since Sherlock in his lengthy reply nowhere objects to this assumption, South's interpretation cannot be wide of the mark. It is interesting nevertheless that a variant on this line of criticism was developed by Richard Burthogge giving a quite different reading to Sherlock's notion of self-consciousness, one in fact more in line with the theories of Locke and Hume. Burthogge interprets Sherlock as holding that self-consciousness is an awareness of the acts and passions of the subject. But “a Being … must be conceived to be, before it can be conceived to act, that is to Think, to Reason, to Love, to Hate, … before it can be conceived to be conscious to these its actings” (An Essay Upon Reason, p. 273). Thus the unity of the acting subject must be constituted prior to the reflexive act of self-consciousness.

19 South, Animadversions, p. 110–113. See also Acts of the Great Athanasius, p. 27.

20 Tindal, “A Letter Concerning the Trinity,” p. 29, sec. 88, in A Third Collection of Unitarian Tracts. Locke himself, it is interesting to note, raises the question of the form in which communication between disembodied Spirits might take place, in both the Essay (II, xxiv, 36) and in the Stillingfleet letters. See The Works of John Locke (1823 edition; 1963 reprint, Germany: Scientia Verlag Aaler), Vol. 4, p. 28. Such communication would appear to be a form of direct access to the consciousness of another and hence quite distinct from our human means of communication ideas. What was perhaps at the bottom of Locke's difficulty was the problem of how x's access to the thought or feeling of another spirit y could be in this sense direct without the thought or feeling simply being a state of x itself. But Locke, in contrast to his disciple Tindal, had no doubt that the distinction could be maintained.

21 Nidditch, Foreword to Locke's Essay, p. vii.

22 Yolton, J. W., John Locke and the Way of Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), p. 128–130.Google Scholar

23 Ibid., p. 130 n.

24 Ibid.

25 Kroll, Richard W. F., “The Question of Locke's Relation to Gassendi,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 45 (1984): 339–359.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

26 McLachlan, H. John, Socinianism in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951), p. 353–330Google Scholar. See also McLachlan, H. John, The Religious Opinions of Milton, Locke, and Newton (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1941).Google Scholar

27 See especially Works, Vol. 4, p. 197–230.

28 Ibid., p. 343. Quoted in McLachlan, Socinianism in Seventeenth-Century England, p. 329.

29 The Correspondence (1592), Vol. 4, p. 625–626; Works, Vol. 9, p. 305.1 am indebted to Mark Dickson for pointing out this passage.Google Scholar

30 London, 1930, reprinted from the Horsley, Samuel edition of Newton, Opera que extant omnia, Vol. 5 (1785)Google Scholar. King, Peter, The Life of John Locke (London, 1830)Google Scholar contains an account of this episode (Vol. 1, p. 423–434). An account which includes an analysis of the contents of Newton's book is contained in Trenchard More, Isaac Newton (New York: Dover Publications, 1934), p. 630–638Google Scholar. See also McLachlan, The Religious Opinions of Milton, Locke, and Newton, p. 131ff., and Westfall, Richard S., Never At Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 489–491.Google Scholar

31 The relevant letters are in King, Life of John Locke, p. 400–409, and in The Correspondence, Vol. 4, p. 1338, 1465 and 1499. Questions of Scripture, the topic of much of the Newton-Locke correspondence, was also a topic of personal discussion, where, as Newton revealingly put it, “these discourses may be done with more freedom” (p. 1405, noted in Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 491).

32 Harrison and Laslett, The Library of John Locke.

33 Aaron, Richard I., John Locke (London: Oxford University Press, 1955), p. 310.Google Scholar

34 “I received besides [other books from Mr. Popple] Dr. Sherlocks Vindication of the Doctrine of the Trinity, I hope the Noter upon the Athanasian Creed, will now pull in his homes, or push them further out, and shew the contradictions he so confidently talks of” (October 16–25, 1690, The Correspondence, Vol. 4, p. 1325).

35 “Mr. Furly ma aussi prêté l'Evangelium naked, et la Vindication de M. Sherlok. J'admire le zele de l'Academie d'Oxford et celui de ce bon Docteur, qui damnent nécessairement ou toute I'Antiquité, ou qui font heretiques tous Ies derniers siecles, sans en excepter leur Eglise” (October 22-November 1, 1690, ibid., Vol. 4, p. 1329). The reference to “l'Academie d'Oxford” no doubt relates to the condemnation of Bury's The Naked Gospel by the convocation of Oxford in August 1690, in spite of a defence of Bury's views by LeClerc himself. See Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. “Arthur Bury.”

36 So much is this the case that Burthogge, in a work presented to Locke, “one of the Greatest Masters of Reason” (Preface to An Essay Upon Reason) and very much in line with the Lockean theory of ideas, discusses the nature of persons and individuation of spirits in a final chapter which centres on Sherlock and the Trinity question, but does not so much as mention Locke.

37 Behan, “Locke on Persons and Personal Identity,” and Atherton, Margaret, “Locke's Theory of Personal Identity,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 8 (1983).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

38 The idea that the self is the direct object of self-awareness is also suggested in the chapter on reflection: “The Mind … turns its view inward upon it self, and observes its own Actions about those Ideas it has …” (II, vi, 1).

39 Prior, A. N. and Fine, Kit, Times and Selves (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977), p. 30–31Google Scholar. The same result is obtained by Derek Parfit with his concept of “q-memory” in “Personal Identity,” Philosophical Review, 80 (1971): 14f.

40 In the same way, Atherton's attempt to interpret Locke's theory of “the same consciousness” as making reference to a common “seat” (“Locke's Theory of Personal Identity,” p. 288, etc.) or “center” (p. 289, etc.) of consciousness, would render it unsuitable as a criterion of personal identity. What, after all, is a seat of consciousness if not a subject? And if we must know that two conscious states are states of the same seat of consciousness in order to decide whether they constitute “the same consciousness”, then Locke is no better off than was Sherlock. But what is notable in Locke's theory is that he scrupulously avoids any talk of subjects, seats, or centres of consciousness.

41 Flew, Anthony, “Locke and the Problem of Personal Identity,” in Locke and Berkeley, edited by Martin, C. B. and Armstrong, D. M. (New York: Doubleday, 1968), p. 164; reprinted from Philosophy, 26 (1951).Google Scholar

42 Alston, Wm. and Bennett, J., “Locke on People and Substances,” Philosophical Review, 93 (1988): 42.Google Scholar

43 The fact that Locke is arguing from contingently satisfied error is noted by Jolley, Nicholas, Locke and Leibniz (London: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 132.Google Scholar

44 See Flew, “Locke and the Problem of Personal Identity.”

45 See Alston and Bennett, “Locke on People and Substances,” p. 42.

46 Ayers, Michael, “Individuals without Sortals,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 4 (1974): 125, n. 19CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Alston and Bennett, “Locke on People and Substances,” p. 28, arguing from the final sentence in this passage, conclude that Locke is not committed to SR, as, of course, their truncated evidence suggests. See also Griffen, Nicholas, Relative Identity (London: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 17–19Google Scholar, for additional evidence of Locke's commitment to SR, or, more accurately, of his waffling between the two forms of relativism.

Alston and Bennett, incidentally, offer two further considerations against Locke's commitment to SR. One (p. 27) is that nothing of the form “x is the same F as y but is not the same G as y” (well known in the twentieth-century literature on relative identity) is as such to be found in Locke! A second consideration is an instance of how SR violates LL: “If an animal is a body, and the same body cannot lose or gain any parts, it should follow that an animal cannot lose or gain any parts …” (Alston and Bennett, “Locke on People and Substances,” p. 28). This latter consideration has failed to deter recent supporters of SR, and Alston and Bennett offer no evidence for the view that it would have deterred Locke. It does, however, raise the question of how Locke, if committed to SR, might have restricted LL. We return to this question below.

47 Wedeking, “Locke's Metaphysics,” p. 22.

48 The exception is in Locke's discussion of the identity and diversity of ideas, where it is not clear whether the issue concerns numerical or qualitative identity (IV, i, 4,).

Locke is of course aware of the term's usage in connection with the traditional laws of thought, associating it with the maxim that “It is impossible for the same thing to be, and not to be” (I, iv, 3). But his discussion of the maxim, or rather of the notion of “identity” supposed to occur in it (I, iv, 4–5), strongly confirms the present view of this tendency in Locke's thought. For in spite of the fact that the maxim is evidently restricted to objects at a single time (for a thing may be at t and not be at t′, Locke's discussion concerns not identity at a time, as one might expect, but the problem of trans-temporal identity.

49 We take the identity conditions for a system of structured parts to involve identity of the components plus sameness of structure. (It is possible that Locke would also have included a continuity condition: does dismantling and reassembling the car, neither adding nor subtracting parts, result in the same or a different organized collection of parts?) The bridge between this notion of an organized collection and the identity of the thing (animal, etc.) is made by Locke's assumption that the organizing principle, in fact a property of the complex, remains the same through a gradual change in the constituents of the complex. The dubious metaphysical credentials of this assumption are discussed in Wedeking, “Locke's Metaphysics.”