Who Am I · ages 7–10
Who am I?
If you forgot everything about your life, would you still be you?
One answer: you are your memories. Erase them and you would be a different person in the same body. Many people who lose memories seem to disagree and still feel like themselves.
Another answer: you are your habits and your choices - the things you do, over and over. Aristotle liked this one. It means you are not a fixed thing you were born as; you are something you are building.
Children are told to ‘be yourself’ as if there were a parcel inside waiting to be unwrapped. Philosophy suggests something more interesting: you are partly a parcel, and partly the wrapping is being painted while you work.
Try it
Fill a page with these four lines and finish them fast without thinking too hard: I am someone who ___. I am good at ___. People come to me when ___. I want to be the kind of person who ___. Keep the page; do it again next year and compare.
What do you think?
Do you think there is a right answer to this question?
Talk about it
- Can you be more than one person at once?
- Is being different from your family 'not being yourself'?
- If you change a lot, were you ever the old you?
Yes, but… — the arguments people actually make
You're the same person you were at four.
Then say what is the same. Not the body, not the memories, not the opinions. Whatever you pick, someone can show you a case where it changes.
If you changed completely, you'd still be you — so memory can't be it.
That is Locke's problem exactly, and it is a good one: a person who loses their memories still feels like themselves, which is evidence against his answer.
Being told to 'be yourself' means there's a real you inside.
Maybe. Or it means: stop copying what you think other people want. Those are different claims and only one of them needs a hidden parcel.
What other philosophers think
- John LockeYou are your memories: the same person continues as far back as you can remember being you. Erase them and a different person is left in the same body.
- David HumeLooked for the self and found only a bundle of perceptions — a very fast sequence, with no single thing underneath it.
- AristotleYou are your habits. Character is built by doing the same things repeatedly, which makes you something you are making rather than something you were given.
- Simone de BeauvoirWrote that one is not born a woman but becomes one — identity is partly made by what the world teaches you to expect of yourself.
If you want to go further
- An Essay Concerning Human Understanding — John LockeThe memory theory of personal identity, in a book that is otherwise about knowledge.
- A Treatise of Human Nature — David HumeBook I, section 6: Hume looks for himself and cannot find anything to point at.
- The Second Sex — Simone de Beauvoir1949. Where 'becoming' rather than 'being' an identity is argued at length.
Most of these were written for adults, which is why it is worth reading them with someone older.