ABSTRACT
Joseph Butler commonly gets the credit for a different, if formally somewhat similar criticism, 'that consciousness of personal identity presupposes, and therefore cannot constitute, personal identity; any more than knowledge, in any other case, can constitute truth, which it presupposes'.95 Yet Leibniz had earlier advanced much the same point, if less elegantly:
an identity which is apparent to the person concerned – one who senses himself to be the same – presupposes a real identity obtaining through each immediate temporal transition accompanied by reflection, or by the sense of I; because an intimate and immediate perception cannot be mistaken in the natural course of things.96
Both Butler and Leibniz were claiming that the unity of consciousness is the consciousness of an independently unitary thing, and that our internal sense of continuity is the awareness of the continuity of a simple substance, or of something whose 'real' identity manifestly depends on the continuity of a simple substance. Yet that claim, of course, is precisely what Locke was calling into question. Once again there is confrontation rather than refutation. Both of Locke's critics deny that a mere organic continuity would constitute the 'real' identity of a substantial thing. For Butler, someone who holds that consciousness constitutes identity cannot 'mean, that the person is really the same, but only that he is so in a fictitious sense'. Yet our own continuity, he insists, appears to us as a real identity. The extent of disagreement is therefore far too wide for Butler's famous and intuitively attractive dictum to carry much weight on its own (although we might hope to find some room for it in any final account). Certainly, after Hume and Kant, both deeply influenced by Locke, it can hardly be considered beyond all question that a unitary self is prior, whether epistemologically or ontologically, to the unity of consciousness.
