Sartre and our Identity as Individuals

Abstract

It should be clear from what I said in the last chapter that the question about identity I wish to consider now is not the one so many philosophers have discussed since Locke and Hume. Descartes had been troubled about the identity of the piece of wax that melts, in the process losing all its properties and acquiring new ones: what is this thing, this ‘it’ that changes so radically? What the ‘it’ refers to, Descartes concluded, must be that in which the identity of the melting piece of wax is grounded. He called it ‘material substance’. Thus, on Descartes’ view, the piece of wax is a particular instantiation of a form of matter. When we say ‘it melts’, it is this instance of the form in question that changes; it is this instance that is transformed. It is in the co-ordinates of time and space of matter that we shall find the continuity through change which constitutes the identity of the melting piece of wax.