4 Personal Identity

Lichtenberg on Self-Consciousness

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In Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), Descartes claimed that the existence of the self follows from the fact that one is aware of oneself as a thinking being, which he expresses in his cogito judgment “I think”. In his subsequent discussion, Descartes also goes on to demonstrate that this thinking “I” is an immaterial substance, a soul, that persists across time and is immortal. Lichtenberg’s remark may to some degree be understood as a challenge to the epistemic grounds for Descartes’ cogito judgment, “I think”, and further to the idea that this “I” is a persisting substance.2 In the K 76 remark, Lichtenberg notes that, upon introspection, he finds no self or “I” above and beyond the representations of inner sense. On this basis, he suggests we are warranted only in saying that sensing, representing, and thinking merely occur: “to say cogito is already too much” (K 76). To capture this understanding of thinking, he proposes replacing the cogito judgment, “I think”, with the impersonal formulation “it thinks”. He suggests we understand the impersonal formulation “es denkt” as we would “es blitzt”. In English, “it thinks” should be understood along the lines of “it lightnings”, “it’s lightning”, or “it’s raining”. In these impersonal formulations, “it” is pleonastic and merely required by the grammar of the phrase, but it does not refer

wir wenigstens hingen von uns ab; wo ist die Grenze? Wir kennen nur allein die Existenz unserer Empfindungen, Vorstellungen und Gedanken. Es denkt, sollte man sagen, so wie man sagt: es blitzt. Zu sagen cogito, ist schon zu viel, so bald man es durch Ich denke übersetzt. Das Ich anzunehmen, zu postulieren, ist praktisches Bedürfnis.” (K 76). Guenter Zoeller proposes that the second part of the first sentence be translated as “others believe that we are at least dependent upon ourselves.” He argues that the subjunctive “hingen” indicates a dependent clause following “glauben” and therefore justifies his translation (Zoeller 1992, 418). It appears, however, that the subjunctive “hingen” does not determine decisively what the subject of the sentence is and so does not decisively favor his translation. I therefore translate the second part of the first sentence as “others [representations], at least we believe, are dependent upon us”. This translation fits the grammar of the sentence and also accords better with Lichtenberg’s statements on the dependence and independence of representations elsewhere in the Waste Books, for example J 1537. All citations from Lichtenberg’s Waste Books are given in keeping with the standard practice: the letter in parentheses indicates the notebook, and the number indicates the place of the remark within the notebook according to the Wolfgang Promies edition of Lichtenberg’s Schriften und Briefe. All translations from the Waste Books are from Tester 2012. 2 One may, however, wonder whether the K 76 remark is well directed against Descartes. As an anonymous referee has pointed out, Descartes does not initially assume that the “I” in cogito judgments is a substance, though he does take himself to have demonstrated this in the 6th Meditation. See Cottingham 1984, 18–19, 54, 59. For a discussion of the soul as substance in Descartes, see Markie 1992, 149–151; Sievert 1975, 51–70. Regardless of whether Lichtenberg’s criticism is well aimed at Descartes, his point appears to be the rejection of a substance account of the self on the basis of introspection.

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to any substantial or persisting entity that serves as a bearer of ascriptions. Likewise, the “I” in “I think” is also thought to be pleonastic, a practical necessity, but it does not refer to a substantial self as the bearer of self-ascriptions. Lichtenberg’s cogito remark has been a point of reflection for philosophers from Nietzsche to Wittgenstein and Parfit, but without exception, the remark has been regarded as an isolated insight and considered apart from Lichtenberg’s other writings.3 This is likely due in part to the philological difficulty of making sense of Lichtenberg’s philosophical views, which primarily appear scattered throughout a series of notebooks, his Sudelbücher (Waste Books), that he kept from the time of his matriculation in 1764 as a student of physics at Georg-AugustUniversität Göttingen until his death in 1799.4 This paper aims to correct the oversights of these other philosophers and expand our understanding of Lichtenberg’s thoughts on self-consciousness and personal identity by situating his remark on the self within the broader context of early-modern philosophical views of the self and Lichtenberg’s own remarks in the Waste Books. To this end, my discussion proceeds in three stages. In the first section (1), I show that Lichtenberg criticizes the rationalist metaphysics of the soul for the failure to distinguish between what can merely be conceived and what can be an object of empirical knowledge or cognition. In the second section (2), I discuss Lichtenberg’s views on consciousness and inner sense, arguing that he holds that on the basis of empirical observation in inner sense, we cannot know ourselves to be a persisting substantial self and are therefore not justified in believing we are. I then show that Lichtenberg held that the self consists in interrelated conscious states, a view that bears some similarities with Hume’s bundle theory of the self. In the third section (3), I argue that this view of the self leads him to a Lockean view of personal identity according to which the identity of a person consists in the continuity of interrelated conscious states, regardless of the basis upon which this consciousness supervenes. Although Lichtenberg’s position on the self is hardly unique among early-modern theories of self-consciousness and personal identity, particularly among British philosophers, his consideration of the relationship between materialism and personal identity does set his view apart from many of his German contemporaries and from positions that emerge later among German idealists and presents an interesting but undervalued contribution to the discussion of the self in the history of German philosophy.

3 For recent discussions of Lichtenberg, see Williams [1978] 2005, 79–85; Burge 1998; Parfit 1986, 210–212, 223–228. 4 For a discussion of the idea of a ‘waste book’, see Waste Book E 46. The notebooks are arranged chronologically and designated by Lichtenberg with a letter of the alphabet beginning with A and ending with L.



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2 Rationalist Metaphysics of the Soul In his critique of the rationalist metaphysics of the soul in the Waste Books, Lichtenberg most likely had in mind German rationalist philosophers such as Wolff, Baumgarten, and Knutzen.5 Christian Wolff for example adopted a broadly Leibnizian view, according to which the soul was thought to be a representational force that is immaterial, simple, and imperishable. Baumgarten and Knutzen also held similar views, which were quite popular in German universities in the eighteenth century. Despite the popularity of these views, however, there was also some backlash against them, most notably by Kant. Kant launched a devastating attack against these views in 1781 in the “Paralogisms of Pure Reason” section of the Critique of Pure Reason, but Joseph Priestley’s Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit (1777), which was widely read in Germany at the time, also contained a similar discussion of the soul.6 So in the period in which Lichtenberg was writing his remarks on the metaphysics of the soul, he was likely influenced to some degree by both Kant’s critique of rationalism on the basis of transcendental idealism and by the critiques raised by empiricist philosophers. In his own remarks from the Waste Books, Lichtenberg primarily critiques rationalist philosophers on two grounds: the lack of an empirical foundation for their claims about the soul and their assumption that logical arguments entail anything about empirical or metaphysical possibility. As we will see, Lichtenberg’s particular critique of the rationalist metaphysics of the soul motivates his turn toward a view of the self that is in keeping with what can be known empirically on the basis of inner sense. In his discussions of the rationalist views of the soul, Lichtenberg is, above all, skeptical of any a priori metaphysical reasoning that would attempt to derive properties of the soul, such as substantiality, persistence, and immortality, without considering whether these claims are confirmed or confirmable by empirical observation. In a notebook entry from the period 1776–1779, for example, he remarks that speculation on the soul and its nature are groundless and so lead to sophistical, hairsplitting, and ultimately dubious arguments:

5 Christian Wolff’s discussion of the soul can be found in Vernünfftige Gedancken von Gott, der Welt und der Seele des Menschen, auch allen Dingen überhaupt (Rational Thoughts on God, the World and the Soul of Human Beings, Also All Things in General), published in 1720, also known as the Deutsche Metaphysik. Baumgarten’s Metaphysica from 1739 also contains a discussion of the substantiality, simplicity, and immortality of the soul, as does Martin Knutzen’s Philosophische Abhandlung von der immateriellen Natur der Seele (Philosophical Treatise on the Immaterial Nature of the Soul) from 1744. 6 See Priestley 1777.


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Man becomes sophistical and overly subtle where grounded knowledge is no longer possible; consequently, everyone must become so when it concerns the immortality of the soul and life after death. Here we are all without ground. (F 489)

He does not discuss in detail here why such knowledge is ungrounded, or why grounded knowledge of the immortality of the soul is not possible. But it appears that what is lacking for Lichtenberg in the rationalist conception is any sense in which the ascription of properties, such as immortality, to a soul, and indeed even the existence of the soul, could be justified empirically. An immortal soul, and particularly an immaterial, immortal soul, simply cannot be an object of human empirical knowledge. Lichtenberg is not explicit about this, but there are a number of reasons for thinking the soul cannot be an object of empirical knowledge. One is because our empirical knowledge cannot extend so far as to be able to confirm if such a soul actually is immortal as there might at any point be some future death that awaits it. Another is that an immaterial soul by definition cannot be perceived using any of our ordinary methods, as it is immaterial, so it is unclear how we are to gain any empirical knowledge of it. For such reasons, Lichtenberg thought that mere speculation about the soul was ungrounded and, because of the purported nature of the soul, necessarily ungrounded as the soul is not a possible object of empirical knowledge for humans. Throughout his writings, Lichtenberg hopes that in moving toward an empiricist view of the mind and the self, some of the failures of rationalist psychology may be left behind. Lichtenberg’s tendency toward empiricism is also evident in other critiques of the rationalist metaphysics of the soul, where he distinguishes between what can be cognized, or known empirically, and what is merely conceivable. In an entry from the period 1784–1788, he describes metaphysical speculation as a mere “association of ideas” “to which nothing objective need correspond” (H 149), and he again faults rationalist metaphysicians for their failure to distinguish adequately between what can be an object of empirical knowledge and what is merely a matter of speculation guided by the single constraint that it not violate the principle of contradiction. Objecting in particular to the philosophy of the German metaphysician Christian Wolff and his followers, he writes, for example: One cannot consider often enough that the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, and the like are merely conceivable not cognizable. They are associations of ideas, a play of thoughts, to which nothing objective need correspond. It was a great error of Wolffian philosophy to extend the principle of contradiction to what is cognizable, for it concerns merely what is conceivable. (H 149)

In such remarks, Lichtenberg expresses reservations about whether the arguments of the rationalists can demonstrate anything about how the soul actually is



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and whether there is something “objective” that “need correspond” to their concepts (H 149). Similar to his contemporary Kant, Lichtenberg objects to the idea that any logical argument can demonstrate the actual existence of something and that mere logical conceivability entails anything about real empirical or metaphysical possibility. There is simply no reason to think that an entity conceived without contradiction will have any corresponding real entity in the world. Along similar lines, in notebook E from the period 1775–1776, Lichtenberg goes so far as to say that the term “soul” is merely a placeholder in logical arguments, a variable for which it is unclear that there is any value: “We use the word soul as the algebraists might use x, y, z or one might use the word attraction” (E 472).7 Interestingly, however, Lichtenberg appears to have overlooked the fact that Christian Wolff actually intended to establish the principles of rational psychology and the rationalist metaphysics of the soul on the basis of empirical psychology. In his Psychologia empirica, published in 1732, Wolff develops a definition of the soul according to what can be observed in conscious experience, concluding that the soul is something that is “conscious of itself and other things outside us”.8 This definition and other principles were supposed to be the foundation from which rational psychology could infer properties a priori about the soul that were not available to conscious experience.9 In the Psychologia rationalis (1734) and the Deutsche Metaphysik, Wolff demonstrates that the soul is a force of representation and that it must be simple and immaterial to be conscious of itself and other things, which also entails that it is imperishable.10 One can only speculate that if Lichtenberg had been more familiar with the empirical roots of the Wolffian philosophy of the soul, he may have been sympathetic to the idea that properties of the soul that we are not directly conscious of may be derived a priori from those of which we are conscious.11 Although Lichtenberg objects in general to the rationalist metaphysics of the soul, he also expresses more specific doubts about particular arguments. In notebook A (1765–1770), from the earliest period of his days at the university, for example, he attacks the analogical structure of a particular rationalist argument for the immortality of the soul. Lichtenberg writes:

7 See also the Waste Books, J 1306. 8 Wolff 1968, § 20. 9 Wolff 1968, § 1, and 1972, §§ 1–9. 10 See the Deutsche Metaphysik, Wolff 1983, §§ 729–738. 11 For a discussion of the relationship between Wolff’s empirical and rational psychology, see Dyck 2009; Blackwell 1961.


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The proof advanced by philosophers that there is a future life, which consists in their saying that were it not the case then God could not reward our final moments, belongs to the proofs by analogy. We reward only after the fact, thus God must also. We do this out of lack of anticipation, but where we are not thus hindered we also reward in advance, as we pay in advance our university tuition. Might God not also have paid in advance? (A 42)

The rationalist argument attempts to prove the immortality of the soul and its persistence after the death of the body by arguing: (1) God punishes and rewards analogously to how humans reward and punish; (2) We can justly reward and punish only after some action has been undertaken; (3) God can justly reward and punish us for actions undertaken during the final moments of our life only if our soul is immortal.12 Lichtenberg challenges the second premise by suggesting that God might also have justly meted out rewards and punishments in advance, just as we pay our university tuition in advance. This challenge to the second premise undermines the conclusion of the argument from reward, as to be rewarded in this life, one need not be immortal. One need be nothing more than the empirical self common sense would have us be. Though Lichtenberg does not explicitly endorse the latter conclusion, it is clear from his remark that the rationalist argument from reward fails for various reasons. Such remarks also indicate that Lichtenberg maintained an interest in rationalist views on the soul, but that he was dubious about the justification for their positions and whether they should be taken to reveal any deep metaphysical truths.13 We can now look more closely at his remarks on self-consciousness and the self to see how his empiricist tendencies lead him to hold that we are not justified in taking the self to be anything other than a series of interrelated conscious states.

3 Self-Consciousness and the Self I return now to Lichtenberg’s K 76 remark and related remarks on self-consciousness and the self. Lichtenberg’s remark on the cogito is very similar to an observation made by David Hume in his discussion of personal identity in the Treatise of Human Nature from 1739. Hume writes:

12 Though Lichtenberg does not challenge the first premise directly in this remark, other remarks suggest that he would reject it because of its anthropomorphic characterization of God. See the Waste Books, J 271, J 944, K 18, K 64, K 83. Problematically however Lichtenberg’s own counterargument in A 42 relies on an analogy between God and humans. 13 Lichtenberg also discusses the practical motivations for belief in the immortality of the soul. See the Waste Books, J 761, K 288.



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For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception. (Hume 2000, 1.4.6)

Much like Lichtenberg, Hume is skeptical of rationalist claims about a substantial and persisting soul, and he makes the empirical point that when he attempts to introspect a self, he encounters only particular conscious perceptions. Although Lichtenberg does not explicitly discuss Hume, it is not surprising to find that he was influenced in his discussion of the self by Hume’s observation and by empiricist positions on the self in general. Lichtenberg’s philosophical colleagues, such as Christoph Meiners, at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen where Lichtenberg was a professor of physics at the time he wrote the K 76 remark, often maintained empiricist views, and Meiners even espoused a Humean bundle view of the self, so Hume’s view would certainly have been present to Lichtenberg’s mind.14 Lichtenberg’s epistemic conclusion about the inability to locate a substantial self is however also informed by his own views on consciousness and inner sense. In a remark from Waste Book H written sometime between 1784 and 1788, Lichtenberg distinguishes between what might be called two modes of consciousness. He suggests that it is a particularly human characteristic that we can be both the subject and object of conscious experience, writing: “An animal is for itself always a subject, while man is for himself also an object” (H 142). And again around the same time period he indicates a similar distinction, writing: “I and myself. I feel myself – these are two [different] things” (H 146). We can gloss his distinction between consciousness of oneself as subject and consciousness of oneself as object, or in Lichtenberg’s terms, the “I” and “myself”, in the following way: In the former mode, one is conscious of perceptions, representations, and the flow of inner experience. This consciousness need not take the form of explicit cogito judgments or self-ascriptions of the form “I think x” or “I am perceiving y”, but one is nevertheless aware of oneself as the subject of these experiences, as the one to whom the experiences are occurring. All internal sensations and representations are accompanied by this kind of consciousness. In the latter mode, consciousness is understood as reflective. One can, so to speak, direct one’s attention at one’s thoughts and perceptions, reflect on them, and form be-

14 See Wunderlich 2005, 95f. Wunderlich argues that Meiners held a bundle theory of the self, although he notes that Meiners later traded this position for a substance view of the self. See also Meiners 1776, II.40.


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liefs about them.15 On Lichtenberg’s view, human beings posses a capacity for being both the subject of experience, an “I”, and an object of reflective attention or introspection, a “me” or “myself”. In developing this view of consciousness and reflection, Lichtenberg may have been influenced by Locke, whom he discusses throughout the Waste Books and whose theory of consciousness was well known and widely discussed in Göttingen.16 Although the intricacies of Locke’s theory of consciousness are open to debate, we may follow Udo Thiel’s interpretation of Locke’s distinction in situating Lichtenberg’s remarks.17 In an Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), Locke suggests that consciousness is inseparable from perceiving and thinking: [C]onsciousness […] is inseparable from thinking, and as it seems to me essential to it: It being impossible for any one to perceive, without perceiving, that he does perceive. When we see, hear, smell, taste, feel, meditate, or will any thing, we know that we do so. Thus it is always as to our present Sensations and Perceptions. (Locke 1975, II.xxvii.9)

Locke contrasts this consciousness that accompanies all thought and representation with what he calls “reflection” or “internal sense”, whereby the mind relates to itself, observing its own operations and producing “ideas” about these operations.18 Lichtenberg discusses Locke’s theory of inner sense and “ideas of reflection” with approval as early as notebook F (1776–1779). And in notebook entry K 64 from 1793–1796, around the period of the K 76 remark, he explicitly relates his theory of consciousness of oneself as subject and object to the theory of inner sense: “[W]e are conscious of the state of our soul at every moment. […] When I say something occurs within me, I am experiencing it with inner sense. […] Here we ourselves are object and observer, object and subject” (K 64).19 Though

15 Lichtenberg agrees here with other seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophers in holding that animals are capable of consciousness but not reflective consciousness. See, for example, “Of Perception” in the New Essays on Human Understanding, Leibniz [1704] 1996, II.ix.134. 16 It might also be argued that Lichtenberg’s discussion of consciousness of oneself as subject and object is influenced by Reinhold’s philosophy and the reflection theory of self-consciousness, but Lichtenberg’s thoughts on personal identity suggest he was most likely influenced by Locke. Lichtenberg explicitly discusses Reinhold’s philosophy in the Waste Books, J 110, J 234, J 1006, J 1081. On the reflection theory of self-consciousness, see Henrich 1982, 15–52. 17 See Thiel 2006, 288. On Locke’s discussion of “Ideas of Reflection” and inner sense, also see Locke 1975, II.i.4, 7, 8, 24; II.vi.1. On Lichtenberg and British empiricism, see Rapic 1999. 18 Locke 1975, II.I.4. 19 See also the Waste Books, H 142, H 146. In K 64, Lichtenberg follows Kant in suggesting that the form of inner sense is time, whereas the form of outer sense is space, although he does not insist on this with the systematic rigor that Kant does.



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Lichtenberg is not always consistent in his use of Lockean terminology in his discussions of inner sense, the basic distinction provides a way of understanding his epistemic point in the K 76 remark. The point Lichtenberg repeatedly makes throughout the Waste Books is that one cannot locate a substantial self reflectively through inner sense and that one merely experiences conscious sensations, representations, and thoughts.20 One is conscious of oneself as the subject of thoughts, but one cannot be conscious of oneself as a substantial, persisting object through reflection. He sums this up in a discussion of Sömmerring’s 1796 book Über das Organ der Seele. Nebst einem Schreiben von Immanuel Kant (On the Organ of the Soul), writing of the self that the “thing we can approach is not the thing we wish to approach” (L 10). But what if anything follows from Lichtenberg’s inability to locate a substantial and persisting self in inner sense? The fact that Lichtenberg bases his conclusions about the self on the observations of inner sense may appear surprising given that he was doubtless familiar with his contemporary Kant’s critique of empirical psychology in the Critique of Pure Reason, the Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, and the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science.21 In the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, Kant points out that introspection or empirical consciousness is an unreliable guide to questions of the self. Many of the reasons that Kant gives for this are reasons that Lichtenberg also gives. Kant observes, for example, that there are no real distinctions in the manifold of inner sense other than those made by the introspective observer, that items of inner sense cannot be separated and re-identified at a later time, that it is a wholly solipsistic enterprise as no one else could scan our inner states, and is also therefore not properly verifiable, and finally that “even observation by itself already changes and displaces the state of the observed object”.22 Lichtenberg is in agreement with many of these remarks, noting for example that “the properties we observe in our souls are connected in such a way that it is not easy to delineate a boundary between them” (A 118). So it would be surprising if Lichtenberg were to draw any strong metaphysical conclusions about the nature of the self, its substantiality, and persistence on the basis of a faculty about which he and others are so dubious regarding its ability to deliver genuine knowledge.

20 Related remarks can be found for example in the Waste Books, C 303, D 211, H 176, J 1537, L 10. 21 Lichtenberg’s familiarity with Kant is well documented in Neumann 1900; Dostal-Winkler 1924; Kauther 1992; Zoeller 1992. 22 Kant, AA IV: 471 (trans. Kant 2004, 7). All references to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason are given in standard form according to page number in the A and B editions. References to Kant’s other writings are given according to the Akademie-Ausgabe (AA) with the volume number and page number.


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Similarly, it is unclear whether Lichtenberg’s inability to locate a substantial and persisting self in inner sense is sufficient for rejecting a substantial and persisting self. Kant gives us some idea of how Lichtenberg’s conclusion could be undermined when he notes in the Critique of Pure Reason that the representation of a persisting thing need not be a persisting representation, nor need a persisting representation be of a persisting thing: “the representation of something persisting in existence is not the same as a persisting representation”.23 If this is true, then the fact that Lichtenberg encounters only a flux of impressions in inner sense is not sufficient to rule out the possibility that the flux of impressions is of a persisting, substantial self. Correspondingly, the discovery of a persisting representation of a self in inner sense would not be sufficient to guarantee that this representation is of a persisting thing. So, although Lichtenberg might deny that we are justified in making cogito judgments, based on the fact that he finds no representation of a persisting self in inner sense, the certainty of this claim is undermined by these various possibilities. Against these objections, we should however note that the point Lichtenberg makes in K 76 and similar remarks is that there is no epistemic warrant for regarding the self as a persisting substance, not that a persisting substantial self is metaphysically impossible, nor that it is certain that there is no substantial or persisting self. As we have seen from his discussion of rationalist metaphysics, Lichtenberg is dubious about making judgments regarding the ultimate metaphysical status of the self. We should therefore take Lichtenberg’s denial of a substantial self as being somewhat agnostic about the ultimate metaphysical status of the self. He leaves open that it is metaphysically possible that the modifications of conscious experience are ascribable to a substantial self, and that it is indeed possible that there is no more than one such substance.24 Although Lichtenberg is clear about the epistemic limitations on encountering a substantial self in inner sense, he is however less clear about what his positive view of the self is. His predecessor Hume argued in the Treatise of Human Nature (1739) that the self is “nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement”, and he concludes that “there is properly no simplicity in it at on time, nor identity in different”.25 On this basis, he goes on to

23 See Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason B xli. See also Quassim Cassam’s discussion of this critique in Cassam 1997, 22f. For a discussion of Cassam’s critique of Lichtenberg, see Rosefeldt 2000, 207–213. 24 Lichtenberg sometimes espouses a Spinozistic theory of nature. See the Waste Books, J 144, and “Amintors Morgenandacht” (Amintor’s Morning Prayer) in Lichtenberg 1967–1992, Vol. 3, 76–80. 25 See Hume 2000, 1.4.6.



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argue that the self and its identity is a fiction generated by the observation of “the smooth and uninterrupted progress of the thought along a train of connected ideas” and a natural propensity to connect ideas in imagination: “the identity, which we ascribe to the mind of man, is only a fictitious one”.26 So Hume’s position is that we cannot know the identity of the mind or self on the basis of introspection: “the essence of the mind [is] equally unknown to us with that of external bodies”.27 And the identity that we do ascribe to the self is fictional as it is not warranted by empirical observation.28 But despite Lichtenberg’s remark that the “I” is merely a practical necessity in K 76, he does not appear in any obvious way to endorse Hume’s positive idea that the persisting self is a fiction generated by the imagination and its natural propensity to link representations. Given Lichtenberg’s agnosticism about metaphysical issues, it may be too much to claim that the substantial, persisting self is a fiction as this would seem to imply that a persisting self does not exist. As we have seen, Lichtenberg does not think such a claim could be grounded on empirical observation in inner sense. But although it is unclear whether Lichtenberg holds that the self is a fiction, he does however think that the representations and sensations encountered in inner sense are related to one another. Regarding this latter point, it is important to recognize that in the K 76 remark Lichtenberg is not making the very strong claim that there are merely isolated and unrelated instances of conscious representations, sensations, and thoughts, and no relations that bind them together. If the representations and sensations of inner sense were not related or connected in some way, then there would not only be no observable substantial self, but there would also be no coherence among the representations in inner sense. Borrowing a phrase from Kant, this would lead to “as multicolored, diverse a self as I have representations of which I am conscious”.29 Such a diverse self would not fit with Lichtenberg’s emphasis throughout the Waste Books on self-observation and the enlightened discovery of one’s own coherent and rational system of thought.30 It is, however, somewhat unclear how Lichtenberg thinks representations come to be related to one another such that there could be some coherence among them, but a few

26 Hume 2000, 1.4.6. 27 Hume 2000, 1. Intro. 28 Thanks to an anonymous referee for this discussion of Hume. The secondary literature on Hume’s view of the self is vast. See for example Thiel 2006; Ainslie 1999; McIntyre 1989; Stroud 1977; Wilson 1994. 29 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B 134. 30 Remarks on self-observation and systematic thought pervade the Waste Books; see for example KA 264, B 264, D 506, F 1171, G 208.


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options are available to him. He was very familiar with associationist psychology and so would have been in a position to appeal to the mechanism of association to explain how conscious states become connected with one another. Similar to Hume, however, Lichtenberg also suggests that memory has a role in relating the representations of inner sense to one another. Hume writes for example: “As memory alone acquaints us with the continuance and extent of this succession of perceptions, ’tis to be consider’d, upon that account chiefly, as the source of personal identity.”31 As we will see in the discussion of Lichtenberg’s views on personal identity, he appeals to the notion of memory in K 162 to explain the connection of conscious states that constitute the diachronic identity of a person.32

4 Personal Identity Having explored some of Lichtenberg’s remarks on the rationalist doctrine of the soul and argued that his views on consciousness and inner sense provide epistemic motivations for his rejection of the substantial self and acceptance of a view of the self as a series of interrelated conscious states, I will now consider his positive view of personal identity. Lichtenberg holds that the identity of a person across time consists in the continuity of consciousness brought about through memory, regardless of the basis upon which consciousness supervenes.

4.1 Memory, Consciousness, and Personal Identity Lichtenberg’s remarks on the metaphysics of personal identity are as varied as his remarks on the self and self-consciousness. Throughout the Waste Books, he often calls his speculations on the identity of the self his doctrine of Seelenwanderung (transmigration of souls, metempsychosis).33 But in an observation from

31 Hume 2000, 1.4.6. 32 Guenter Zoeller and I are in agreement in holding that Lichtenberg’s remarks on the cogito in K 76 are epistemically motivated. But Zoeller believes Lichtenberg intends to demote the self from the status of “author” of its thoughts to a mere “observer”, whereas I contend that Lichtenberg’s point is the rejection of a substance view of the self in favor of a view of the self as a series of interrelated conscious states. See Zoeller 1992. 33 For Lichtenberg’s discussion of his theory of Seelenwanderung or metempsychosis, see for example the Waste Books, D 254, E 474, J 511, J 705, J 2043, K 45, L 865.



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notebook K (1793–1796), written around the time of the K 76 remark on the cogito, Lichtenberg states what might be regarded as his considered view on personal identity. Here, he suggests that memory of one’s past experiences is necessary and sufficient for personal identity. He does this in a somewhat opaque way by offering a gloss on what he takes death to consist of: To die and become animate again with the memory of one’s previous existence, we call being unconscious […]. (K 54)

Lichtenberg suggests here that there is a sense in which someone suffers a kind of death when they become unconscious. They simply cease to be. But if the person awakes again from this period of unconsciousness with some recollection of their past life, then this period would be regarded as merely one of unconsciousness and not death. The person that entered the unconscious state would be continuous with the person who emerged from it because they would have some memory of their former state. Though Lichtenberg does not explicitly say so, we might also infer that if a person awakes from such a period with no recollection of the past, then the same person has not continued to exist across the period of unconsciousness. Instead, the person that entered the unconscious state has died, and the person emerging from the unconscious state is a new person. This position is also confirmed by another remark from notebook K where Lichtenberg further endorses the view that memory is constitutive of the identity of a person. He writes: As long as our memory lasts, a multitude of individuals work together united as one: the twenty-year old, the thirty-year old and so on. But as soon as it fails, we come to stand more and more alone, and the whole generation of I’s withdraws and sneers at the feeble old man. (K 162)

According to Lichtenberg’s remark, memory brings the multitude of distinct “I’s”, represented here as the twenty-year-old, the thirty-year-old and so on, into a unity, creating a link between past and present “I’s” or stages of a person. As in K 54, memory is thought to be both necessary and sufficient for drawing experiences together into the experiences of a single person. If there is memory between them, then each “I” is connected with every other “I”. In the absence of memories, each “I” stands alone as an independent, isolated stretch of experience or consciousness. Here, Lichtenberg connects the failure of memory with old age, suggesting that as we grow older and our memories begin to fade, we cease to be the person we once were. The fact that these remarks on memory and personal identity were written between 1793 and 1796, and in such close proximity with the K 76 remark, supports the conclusion that on Lichtenberg’s considered view, a


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person consists in a series of interrelated conscious states and that memory of one’s previous states is necessary and sufficient for personal identity. Given the similarity between Lichtenberg and Locke’s views on consciousness, it is not entirely surprising to find such a view of personal identity among Lichtenberg’s remarks. He was doubtless familiar with Locke’s discussion of personal identity in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) and likely also familiar with the criticisms surrounding this view. A closer look at Locke’s theory of personal identity and the criticism surrounding this theory will help fill out Lichtenberg’s view. Locke thought that a person is “a thinking intelligent Being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing in different times and places; which it does only by that consciousness which is inseparable from thinking”.34 Given this view of persons, he quite naturally takes the identity of a person across time to consist in what he calls the “sameness” of their “rational Being” or the sameness of consciousness across time. Regarding personal identity and sameness of consciousness, he writes for example: For since consciousness always accompanies thinking, and ’tis that, that makes every one to be, what he calls self; and thereby distinguishes himself from all other thinking things, in this alone consists personal Identity, i.e. the sameness of a rational Being: And as far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past Action or Thought, so far reaches the Identity of that Person; it is the same self now it was then; and ’tis by the same self with this present one that now reflects on it, that the Action was done. (Locke 1975, II.xxvii.9)

On a fairly common reception of Locke’s views on personal identity influenced by Thomas Reid, Locke indicates that this sameness of consciousness arises through memorial connections with the past and in the ability of a person to extend their consciousness back to some past action or thought.35 In the absence of this sameness of consciousness, a person ceases to be the same person. As such, sameness of consciousness generated through memory is both necessary and sufficient for the identity of a person. Although much progress has been made in the interpretation of Locke’s views on personal identity, Lichtenberg was most likely familiar with and influenced by Reid’s interpretation of Locke in Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785).

34 Locke 1975, II.xxvii.9. 35 There is a great deal of debate regarding Locke’s view on personal identity. In my interpretation, I follow Reid as this was most likely the view with which Lichtenberg was familiar. Galen Strawson convincingly argues against Reid’s reception of Locke’s view in Strawson 2011, 53–57. For an extensive discussion and bibliography on Locke and personal identity, see Thiel 2011; Winkler 1991.



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One problem raised by Reid against Locke’s view of personal identity, which might also be raised against Lichtenberg’s view, involves an absurdity produced when the logical law of transitivity is applied to cases involving memory lapses. In an often-cited passage, Reid writes: Suppose a brave officer to have been flogged when a boy at school for robbing an orchard, to have taken a standard from the enemy in his first campaign, and to have been made a general in advanced life; suppose, also, which must be admitted to be possible, that, when he took the standard, he was conscious of his having been flogged at school, and that, when made a general, he was conscious of his taking the standard, but had absolutely lost the consciousness of his flogging. (Reid 2011, 333)36

According to the view of personal identity attributed above to Locke and Lichtenberg, the general and the boy are not identical because the general has no direct memory of having been flogged. But the general does remember having taken the standard, and the brave officer who took the standard does remember having been flogged as a boy. Yet according to the logical law of the transitivity of identity, the general must be identical with the boy. This leads to the paradoxical implication that the general both is identical to the boy and is not identical to the boy. Reid concludes on this basis that any account that takes memory to be both necessary and sufficient for personal identity cannot be true as it leads to a contradiction. Lichtenberg would also have been familiar with the positive account of personal identity proposed by Reid and other Scottish common sense philosophers in part as a response to Hume’s skepticism about personal identity and Locke’s psychological view of personal identity.37 The common sense philosophers held certain truths to be self evident on the basis of common sense. Among these was the idea that the identity of a person across time is a common sense notion that cannot be reduced to sameness of consciousness across time. Reid for example writes: “every man of a sound mind finds himself under the necessity of believing his own identity, and continued existence. The conviction of this is immediate and irresistible.”38 And more pointedly, Beattie writes that “the thinking principle, which we believe to be within us, continues the same through life, is equally self-evident, and equally agreeable to the universal consent of man-

36 See Thomas Reid’s discussion of Locke in Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785), “Of Mr. Locke’s Account of Our Personal Identity” (III.vi). 37 For a discussion of Lichtenberg’s familiarity with Beattie and Reid and the influence of Scottish common sense philosophy in Göttingen during Lichtenberg’s tenure, see Kuehn 1987. On the common-sense view of personal identity, see Thiel 2006, 305. 38 See Reid 2011, 41 (I.iv).


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kind”.39 Throughout the Waste Books, Lichtenberg often speaks highly of the philosophy of Reid and Beattie because they eschew the “false subtlety” of philosophical reasoning and promote a philosophy that appeals to the “common man” and is able to avoid the counterintuitive positions of the skeptic.40 But despite his approval of Scottish common sense philosophy, Lichtenberg does not appear to have reevaluated his view of personal identity in favor of the common sense view. Can Lichtenberg’s view of personal identity be defended against Reid’s objection? Rather than accepting Reid’s objection to memory-based accounts of personal identity we might defend Lichtenberg by weakening the claim that personal identity requires sameness of consciousness brought about through memory. It might be argued that personal identity need not require direct memories extending from a person at one time to a person at some previous time but only that there be some sufficiently overlapping chain or continuity of memories.41 This would allow that the boy and the general are the same person because they are psychologically continuous, though there is no direct memory linking them. Employing Lichtenberg’s example from K 162, the twenty-year-old and the feeble old man are the same person because they have some overlapping memories, though the old man may not directly remember his youth. Certainly more could be said here about whether this proposal is a satisfying response, but it does give some indication of how Lichtenberg might respond to Reid’s objection and avoid a retreat into the common sense view of personal identity. Beyond these issues, there is, however, also more to the story of Lichtenberg’s views on self-consciousness and personal identity. In the Waste Books, Lichtenberg sometimes adopts a materialist view of the mind, which would seem to run counter to the interpretation of his views on personal identity proposed above. We may now consider this issue in more detail.

4.2 Materialism and Personal Identity Throughout the Waste Books and in his lectures on physics, Lichtenberg is critical of both the psychophysical parallelism model and the physical influx model of mind-body dualism.42 According to Lichtenberg, these views leave unexplained, for example, why merely one soul or mind should be associated with one body,

39 Beattie 1777, I.2.iii. 40 See the Waste Books, E 411, E 418, E 454. 41 For a contemporary discussion of Locke and the psychological continuity criterion of personal identity, see Noonan 2003, 10. 42 Lichtenberg’s lectures on physics can be found in Lichtenberg 2007.



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why multiple souls might not inhabit one body, and why a single soul or mind might not be associated with multiple bodies.43 If the soul is immaterial, then it seems that there would be no limit to the number of souls that occupy one body as immaterial things occupy no space. He also notes that psychophysical parallelism fails to give any explanation of how a harmony between mind and body comes about, and so in the end needs to posit a God who ensures the parallelism, a move that is anathema to Lichtenberg’s interest as a physicist in providing empirical causal explanations. Physical influx fares no better in his eyes because it fails to account for how causal interaction between mind and body occurs or is even possible given the laws of physics known in the eighteenth century.44 It is unclear, namely, how something that is immaterial and occupies no particular space could interact with something that does. This general suspicion of dualism informs a great deal of Lichtenberg’s writing. In rejecting the dualist pictures of mind and body, Lichtenberg found a number of allies among his philosophical contemporaries, most notably David Hartley and Joseph Priestley, though he also often mentions the theories of the French materialists Helvétius and La Mettrie with approval.45 He was greatly influenced by the associationist psychology developed by Hartley in his Observations on Man, his Frame, his Duty, and his Expectations (1749), and furthered by Priestley, and mention of associationist psychology and its neurophysiological explanation of thought can be found throughout the Waste Books. In notebook F (1776–1779) for example, he expresses the conviction that “our psychology will eventually settle on a subtle materialism” (F 425) and suggests that “materialism is the asymptote of psychology” (F 489).46 The neurophysiological views of the mind and brain offered a materialist explanation of thought in terms of the vibration of matter and would potentially allow Lichtenberg to dispense with the dualist views he found so perplexing and objectionable.47 For the present discussion of personal identity, however, it is important that Lichtenberg was familiar with Priestley’s rejection of dualism in his Disquisitions relating to Matter and Spirit (1777) and so also likely familiar with the discussion of materialism and per-

43 See the Waste Books, D 656, E 30, F 189, F 324, F 349. 44 On dualism and mind-body identity, also see the Waste Books, J 404 and F 1084. 45 See the Waste Books, D 133, D 454, D 705. 46 See Hartley 1749, chapter 1. For discussions of materialism and associationist psychology, see the Waste Books, E 31, E 453, F 425, F 474, F 469, F 489, F 1045, F 1130, L 799. Lichtenberg would likely have been exposed to British materialism during a stay in England between 1774 and 1775. 47 A materialist explanation of thought can also be found in Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651) and De Corpore (1655), but there is little evidence in the Waste Books that Lichtenberg was directly familiar with Hobbes.


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sonal identity in §XIII “Observations on Personal Identity with Respect to the Future State of Man”. In his discussion of personal identity, Priestley offers a response to standard objections to materialist theories of personal identity that would suggest that the identity of a person consists in the identity of a physical body. One worry that was raised against materialist views is that if the identity of a person across time is specified in terms of the identity of a physical body, then it appears that any change in a part of a body would entail a change in person. To overcome such an objection to materialism about personal identity, Priestley points to a theory proposed by Isaac Watts in 1733, which holds that there are permanent “stamina” that were thought to be essential constituents of bodies that would persist despite qualitative changes and so would allow for the retention of identity in death and resurrection.48 He writes: I doubt not that, in the proper sense of the word, the same body that dies shall rise again, not with every thing that is adventitious and extraneous (as all that we receive by nutrition) but with the same stamina, or those particles that really belonged to the germ of the organical body. And there can be no proof that these particles are ever properly destroyed, or interchanged. (Priestley 1777, 161)

Whatever such stamina turned out to be, they were supposed to ensure that the identity of a material body could be preserved across time. But this is unlikely to be a satisfying theory of personal identity for an empirically inclined philosopher such as Lichtenberg unless such staminal particles can be empirically located and more can be said about how they persist. Otherwise, positing staminal particles sounds as dubious as positing a persisting, substantial soul at the basis of the identity of persons. Despite his discussion of Watts’ staminal particles, Priestley actually goes on to endorse a Lockean account of personal identity in his considered discussions.49 To overcome the implications associated with materialism about personal identity, Locke distinguished between the identity of a person and the identity of a man. He maintained that although the identity of a person consists in sameness of consciousness, the identity of a man consists in the identity of a physical body.50 This proposal allows Locke to avoid the objections to materialist views of personal identity by holding that the identity of a person may be main-

48 See Watts 1794, 176–178. Watts refers to “staminal particles”. 49 My own discussion here is indebted to Udo Thiel’s discussion of Priestley and Locke in Thiel 1998, 59–83. According to Thiel, many materialists tended to adopt some form of Locke’s view of personal identity. 50 See Locke 1975, II.xxvii.



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tained despite a change in the identity of the man. One’s body may be subject to change, but one remains the same person so long as one exhibits the requisite memorial connections. Though Locke’s proposal in this regard is open to criticism on many points and was indeed critiqued by his contemporaries, it provides some suggestion of how one might hold a materialist view of the mind while still maintaining that personal identity consists in continuity of consciousness. Lichtenberg also considers the relationship between materialism and personal identity, arguing that continuity of consciousness is constitutive of personal identity regardless of the material substrate upon which consciousness supervenes. In an observation from Waste Book A (1765–1770), written during his formative years as a university student, Lichtenberg discusses an article in Der Arzt (The Physician), in which the author presents an argument against the materialism proposed in La Mettrie’s L’Homme Machine (Machine Man) (1747). Lichtenberg considers the consequences of this argument for a theory of personal identity, writing: The argument against the materialists offered in Herr Unzer’s journal Der Arzt, and which derives from the mutability of our body, truly has some force. Certainly the parts of my body are no longer me when I am a few years older, so how could successive souls so to speak impart consciousness to one another? One might respond that the transformation is very gradual, just as traditions have been passed on even though every eighty years the Earth itself is different. (A 56)51

As becomes clear from the surrounding discussion, the problem raised in response to La Mettrie’s materialism is that a materialist account of personal identity could not work as parts of matter are constantly changing. If they are constantly changing, then identity could not be preserved. In the journal, an anonymous respondent to the objection argues that the materialist believes the representational activity of the brain lies in its mechanistic nature, just as the capacity of the heart to convey blood lies in its mechanistic nature. According to the respondent, the brain is analogous to a machine. The capacity of a machine is a function of its entire structure and not of the individual parts, and the machine retains this capacity despite a gradual replacement of its component parts. The respondent concludes that this is also the case with the representational activity of the brain. Despite a gradual replacement of the material components of the brain, the mind retains its capacity for representation. To adopt contemporary terminology, the respondent is suggesting that the representational capacities of a mind supervene on a material basis but are not identical to it.

51 Lichtenberg is referring to Johann August Unzer’s (1727–1799) weekly journal, Der Arzt. See Unzer 1778, 565–567.


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Lichtenberg makes a couple of points in his remark on this discussion. First, he appears to agree with the reviewer’s suggestion that the representational capacities of a mind persist despite a replacement of its material base. This, as I have suggested, is because both Lichtenberg and the reviewer have in mind a supervenience account of the relationship between the mind’s representational capacities and its material basis. Given this understanding, if personal identity consists in continuity of consciousness, then personal identity may be retained despite changes in the material basis of consciousness. Though he does not say so explicitly, this kind of response on Lichtenberg’s part indicates that he might have thought that consciousness could be transferred from one substance to another, a view that is also in keeping with his speculations on Seelenwanderung. For if consciousness is not identical with its material basis, then it is metaphysically possible that consciousness can be realized by different material bases. This is very similar to Locke’s solution to the problem of reconciling materialism with personal identity in suggesting that the identity of a person differs from the identity of the man. Nevertheless, it is interesting because it demonstrates that Lichtenberg was aware of the tension between his materialism and his thoughts on self-consciousness and personal identity and had some insights into how they could be reconciled. Although Lichtenberg might prefer some form of materialism, he can nevertheless maintain that the identity of the material basis of consciousness is not relevant to personal identity. Lichtenberg’s A 56 remark might also be interpreted as making the additional point that even if one accepted a materialist view of personal identity, the gradual replacement of parts of matter would not be sufficient to undermine the identity of a body. Similar to what was argued regarding the continuity of consciousness generated through memory, so long as there is some overlapping continuity of physical constituents, a body could be said to persist if the “transformation is very gradual”. Unfortunately, however, Lichtenberg does not discuss the possibility of a sudden and total replacement of parts, or the possibility of a reconstruction from the replaced parts along the lines of the thought experiments involving the identity of the ship of Theseus. This is also an interesting response on Lichtenberg’s part to arguments against materialist views of personal identity, which might allow him to retain a materialist view without recourse to the staminal particles discussed by Watts and Priestly. But it is unclear how satisfying Lichtenberg’s response here would be to those in the period who were concerned with the problem of resurrection, for it is unclear how the requisite continuity could be maintained upon the death of the body. Nevertheless, whatever the conclusions about the continuity and identity of physical bodies, it appears that on Lichtenberg’s considered view of personal identity expressed in notebooks A and K and elsewhere, he would hold that personal identity consists in the continuity of consciousness



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brought about by memory regardless of the material basis upon which consciousness supervenes. One might speculate that Lichtenberg’s thoughts here on selfconsciousness, personal identity, and materialism may have had an important impact on the discussion of the self among his contemporaries or in later German idealism had they been more widely known and understood. We may sum up the results of this discussion of Lichtenberg’s remarks on self-consciousness and personal identity and their relation to early-modern and eighteenth-century views of the self by returning to Lichtenberg’s remark on the cogito: We know only the existence of our sensations, representations and thoughts. It thinks, we should say, just as we say, it lightnings. To say cogito is already too much if we translate it as I think. (K 76)

As the preceding arguments have shown, Lichtenberg’s central insight about the self is not that a substantial self is metaphysically impossible and that there are only isolated and unrelated mental states, a view best captured by the statement “it thinks”. The idea is that we cannot locate a substantial self in inner sense and are therefore not warranted in regarding such a substantial self to be the bearer of ascriptions of mental states. As we have no reason to believe that the self is substantial, we should also not believe that its identity across time consists in the identity of such a substance. Lichtenberg proposes instead that we are warranted only in holding that the self consists in a series of interrelated conscious states and that the identity of a person consists in the continuity of conscious states brought about through memory regardless of the material basis upon which such consciousness supervenes. It is this idea of the self that according to Lichtenberg is best expressed in the statement “it thinks” rather than “I think”.52

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52 I am grateful to Rachel Zuckert, Peter Fenves, Tobias Rosefeldt, Alfred Nordmann, James Messina, Yannig Luthra, Rolf-Peter Horstmann and the participants in his colloquium at Humboldt Universität, and two anonymous referees for Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie for helpful discussion of various aspects and drafts of this paper.


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