THE PERSON

Thoughts arrive without being asked. Sleep cuts the scene.

A body changes while something still answers to you. John Locke was born in 1632 in Somerset.

He trained as a physician. He wrote in Restoration England and, for a time, in the Dutch Republic.

The people around him already had soul, conscience, and ideas. They did not yet have a working English word called consciousness in the way his Essay would use it.

The title page of An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding is dated 1690. The book was already circulating at the end of 1689.

The walk uses the title-page year as the public date of the first edition, and records the 1689 circulation here rather than collapsing the two. The printed title uses Humane.

Later editions print Human.

In the first edition, consciousness is the perception of what passes in a man's own mind. It belongs with reflection, ideas, and knowledge.

It is not yet Book II, Chapter XXVII. The identity argument belongs to 1694.

The second edition of 1694 adds “Of Identity and Diversity”. William Molyneux, Locke's correspondent in Dublin, encouraged the addition.

A person is a thinking intelligent being that can consider itself as itself in different times and places, which it does by consciousness. Person, Locke says, is a forensic term.

It belongs to intelligent agents capable of law, happiness, and misery. It appropriates actions and their merit.

If you are not conscious of an action as yours, in what sense should you be answerable for it?

Locke pries the terms apart. The same man may not be the same person.

The same soul may not secure the same person.

Personal identity reaches as far as consciousness can be extended, including through memory, but the theory is an account of appropriation and accountability, not a storage test.

Shelley Weinberg, a contemporary scholar of Locke, reads Lockean consciousness as a non-evaluative self-referential awareness internal to perception: awareness that points to itself without yet judging right or wrong.

Ruth Boeker stresses personhood as moral and forensic. Thomas Reid, an eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher, objected with a story of a brave officer.

The officer remembers being flogged as a boy. Later, as a general, he remembers taking a standard as the officer, but not the flogging.

If sameness were only a chain of memories, the general would be the boy. If consciousness of the flogging is required, he would not.

That treats consciousness as transitive memory. That is one of the simplifications this room is here to block.

It does not prove that consciousness is only memory. It does not prove that 1690 and 1694 are the same intervention.

It does not settle whether Locke's forensic person requires his theology. The question of answerability outlives that theology.

If you are not conscious of an action as yours, in what sense should you be answerable for it? That is the 1694 return.

It is not the 1690 question. Both remain open.