Who am I, really?
The self, consciousness, what remains when everything changes
Who am I, really? Philosophers give 4 main answers: my consciousness, my memory, a soul, a self to build and no fixed self. AskPhilosophy presents 27 arguments, from Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha) to Desmond Tutu, reconstructed step by step, logic-checked and verified word for word against their original texts.
The 4 possible answers
Each column is one way of answering the question: what it holds and the philosophers who defend it. Click a column to see only its arguments.
I am what I remember and am conscious of, not my body.
Kant, Leibniz, Locke, William James…
I am a soul, a substance that stays the same through every change.
Platon, René Descartes, Thomas Reid, Joseph Butler…
We are not born ourselves, we become ourselves: through education, practice, choices.
Beauvoir, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Wollstonecraft…
There is no stable 'self': only a flow of perceptions and states.
Hume, Nāgārjuna, Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha), Sigmund Freud…
The arguments
Click an argument to see it step by step, with the objections and replies.
My consciousness, my memory
I am what I remember and am conscious of, not my body.
5 argumentsThe "I think" must be able to accompany all my representations
My representations are mine only if one consciousness unites them, but that unity does not let me know what I am.
King of China with no memories: it would no longer be me
Becoming king of China while forgetting all you were would amount to vanishing: without memory, surviving has nothing to wish for.
I am what I remember
I answer only for acts I am conscious of as mine: with the same soul in another body, it is consciousness that makes the person.
I am a thought that takes over the earlier ones: the thoughts themselves are the thinker
Each thought recognises as its own the earlier ones that are close and continuous, and inherits them: no hidden self is needed.
Brownson: if your brain is transplanted into another body, you are the one who wakes up
Brownson has Robinson's body but Brown's memories, and we say he is Brown: a person follows their mental life, not their body.
A soul
I am a soul, a substance that stays the same through every change.
6 argumentsI am not my body: I am the one who uses it
The user of a tool is not the tool: a man uses his body, so he is not his body but his soul.
I am a thinking thing, and I stay the same
I can doubt my body but not that I think; like the wax, what remains through all my changes is the thing that thinks.
The brave officer: memory does not make identity
If the general is the officer and the officer is the boy, the general is the boy even without remembering: identity does not rest on memory.
Butler's circle: consciousness presupposes identity
Remembering an act already presupposes being the person who did it: so consciousness cannot be what constitutes identity.
The self changes bodies like clothes
The body keeps changing, from childhood to death, but the self that inhabits it is neither born nor dies: it is what I really am.
I can know everything about my brain without knowing whether I survive: so I am more than my brain
If a brain is cut in two and each half is transplanted, we know all about the matter but not which of the two survivors will be me.
A self to build
We are not born ourselves, we become ourselves: through education, practice, choices.
7 argumentsOne is not born, but rather becomes, woman
As children, girls and boys have the same abilities; femininity comes from upbringing, which a different upbringing largely changes.
Master and slave: one becomes oneself only by being recognised
Alone, I cannot confirm that I am free; the obedience of someone dominated tells me nothing: recognition must be mutual.
Despair and the self
Trying to escape despair by one's own strength makes it worse; the self finds rest only by resting on what established it.
Not weak by nature, but brought up to be
Girls are raised to please rather than to reason, and men raised the same way show the same faults.
I am the character in the story I tell
To say who acted, we must tell a life story, and a story can hold together a person who changes.
Creating oneself as a work of art
If the self is not given to us, the only practical consequence is to make it, through practices of the self, as an artist makes a work.
A person is a person through other persons (ubuntu)
No one comes into the world fully formed: we become a person through our relations with others, within the community.
No fixed self
There is no stable 'self': only a flow of perceptions and states.
9 argumentsI find only perceptions in myself, never a self
When I look into myself I never find a constant self, only one perception after another (heat, cold, joy, pain).
Nothing exists by itself: everything is empty of own-nature
A thing with its own nature would depend on nothing, yet every phenomenon arises in dependence on something else.
The self is neither identical to the aggregates nor different from them
A self identical to the aggregates would vanish with them, and none is ever found apart from them.
None of the five aggregates is a "self"
What keeps changing and does not obey us cannot be our "self": and the body, feelings and consciousness are like that.
The ego is not master in its own house
Part of our mental life escapes both our awareness and our will, and what consciousness reports of it is incomplete.
The chariot: "Nagasena" is only a name
The self is not a part, their sum, or something else: like the chariot, it is just a name for an assembly.
The teletransporter: identity is not what matters
If the copy and the original lived at once they would be two people, yet the copy has all my memories: identity is not what matters.
The self as a center of narrative gravity
As a center of gravity organizes an object without being an extra thing, the self organizes our stories without being a thing in the brain.
We are all patchwork: I do not paint being, I paint passing
Our acts contradict one another from one moment to the next, and when I watch myself I find nothing fixed to grasp, only a passing.
Other philosophers' positions arrive as profiles are completed. No position is presented as the winner.