back to the beginning: dasein

[iambiguous]

Who am I? The Philosophy of Personal Identity
Luke Dunn at The Collector
Personal Identity: A Variety of Questions, a Variety of Answers

Some of the usual answers to the question of personal identity – ‘I am a human being’ or ‘I am a person’ or even ‘I am a self’ – are sufficiently vague as to be worthy of further philosophical analysis.

Vague, perhaps, but who among us needs philosophy in order to confirm them given our day-to-day interactions with others?

Unless, of course, they involve interactions pertaining to value judgments. Then, in my view, philosophers are still no less stymied given the manner in which I construe human identity here: a man amidst mankind: back again to dasein

Some of the problems of personal identity involve trying to define terms like ‘human’ or ‘person’ or ‘self’. Others ask what the conditions are for the persistence of a human or a person or a self over time; in other words, what it takes for a person or a self to persist.

Of course, that’s hardly sufficient from my own frame of mind. Far more – or less – productive is the part where the definitions and deductions become intertwined in actual moral and political and spiritual conflagrations.

As for the “conditions” we find ourselves in, that will basically revolve around memory, and memory will revolve around the accumulation of our own uniquely personal experiences over the years.

This part:

If you were born and raised in a Chinese village in 500 BC, or in a 10th century Viking community or in a 19th century Yanomami village or in a 20th century city in the Soviet Union or in a 21st century American city, how might your value judgments be different?

Yes, that’s one of the reasons philosophy was invented…to delve into things like this in order to attain the “wisest” assessment. And what might that be? Or, more to the point, do any of these assessments…

List of religions and spiritual traditions

List of political ideologies

List of philosophies

…nail it?

Still, others ask what the ethical implications of these categories actually are, or whether what matters in an ethical sense has anything to do with what we are most fundamentally at all.

Well, the ethical implications for those like me “here and now” revolve around a “fractured and fragmented” self rooted existentially in dasein. Click, of course.

As for what we all are “fundamentally”, you tell me. Given a context of your own choosing.

In other words, some question whether personal identity matters. How we respond to one problem of personal identity is likely to (partly) determine how we respond to other problems of personal identity. It is therefore justified to think about personal identity in terms of general approaches to it as an issue, rather than specific responses to specific problems.

So, is that vague enough for you?