DiaBLOGue

Psychologist William James referred to personal identity as psychology’s “most puzzling puzzle.”The oracle of Delphi’s most famous charge—Know Yourself—affirms that human puzzlement over the nature of identity goes back to the early days of civilization, since the oracle would hardly find this counsel significant enough to utter if everyone already knew themselves as a matter of course. Descartes thought he had solved the problem by locating identity itself in the irreducible fact of consciousness, or the cogito of I think, therefore I am, but in our own day, philosopher-theologian Paul Ricoeur points out that the I implicit in Descartes’s first-person verb presumes itself, rather than proves itself, so that Descartes’s assurance only demands that we ask, “. . . what is this ‘I’”?A person’s very first step toward a definitive declaration of identity—in terms such as I am . . .—has no ground on which to land. Insofar as what constitutes any identity, or human identity, per se, still baffles us, we find ourselves unmoored even before we consider a question such as what constitutes a specific kind of identity.