Affectivity in its Relation to Personal Identity

Abstract

My aim is to propose affectivity as a criterion for personal identity. My proposal is to be taken in its weak version: affectivity as only one of the criteria for personal identity. I start by arguing for affectivity being a better candidate as a criterion for personal identity than thinking. Next, I focus on synchronic vs. diachronic and on ontic vs. epistemic distinctions (my proposal will concern diachronic ontic personal identity) and consider the realm of affectivity in its temporal dimension. In my argument, I rely on the genuineness of affectivity and I exploit chiefly long- or everlasting feelings (or emotions) and those which involve the feeling subject more rather than less. I conclude by stating that genuine long-lasting feelings (or emotions) are constitutive of diachronic ontic personal identity.

Introduction

Two Criteria for Personal Identity

In the debate on personal identity - provided that there is anything of the kind at all¹ - two general and conflicting perspectives are suggested: either bodily identity or memory identity is adopted as a criterion.² Yet the bodily criterion is rejected because the body changes both quantitatively and qualitatively throughout the life of an individual. And memory does no better: it changes and, more importantly, happens to be inadequate. It may deform past experiences and the extent of deformation - which, to be sure, is a new experience - is unverifiable by the person whose memory is deformed otherwise than by her relying on external data. In response to that, a distinction between a veridical memory and a non-veridical memory has been introduced. For instance, it has been claimed that:

[i]n order for a specific memory to coconstitute personal identity, then, that memory is required to be veridical. (Slors, 2001: 188)

However, it helps little, because a person has no criterion for distinguishing veridical and non-veridical memory and even if this be possible, it remains that:

[e]stablishing whether or not a memory is veridical means, however, establishing whether or not the person who remembers really witnessed the remembered event. And that just means establishing whether the witness and the rememberer are identical. Thus, personal identity seems to be presupposed by veridical memory so that, on pain of vicious circularity, the latter cannot be a criterion for the former. (Slors, 2001: 188)

As it seems, instead of obtaining a criterion for personal identity we fall into a circularity. Since neither body nor memory is satisfactory as a criterion for personal identity, another criterion should be proposed.

A Proposal for a New Criterion

In what follows I want to test another criterion for personal identity. I want to see to what extent the affective domain - affectivity for short³ - could be suggested for a criterion for personal identity. My idea originates from the fact that there is no such thing as a non-veridical feeling (or emotion). Hence feelings (or emotions) - insofar as they are ongoing - do not entail a risk of circularity. Whereas memory is a second-order experience (e.g., memory of or about a feeling, a thought, etc.), feeling is a first-order act (e.g., feeling what is felt). Feeling is a direct experience,⁴ while memory is superimposed on another experience of which it is a memory. An occurring feeling, regardless of its object, be it past, present, future or fictive, is always genuine. The issue is not about the world being represented in feelings or even how feelings represent the world - certainly many times they do so falsely - but about a genuinely lived experience,⁵ which means that they are veridical and, therefore, are a good candidate as a criterion for personal identity.

This is why I take into consideration only ongoing experiences, that is experiences synchronic with the personal identity under scrutiny. I exclude past feelings, i.e., feelings prior to personal identity, as irrelevant, although they are relevant to a prior personal identity, i.e., to personal identity during the portion of time in which they were being experienced.

Why Affectivity may be Considered a Better Criterion than Thinking of Personal Identity?

In what follows I review arguments which prompted me to think that affectivity rather than thinking may be a good criterion for personal identity. I find it useful to do so insofar as I am unable to refrain completely from mentioning thinking while discussing affectivity and also because I don’t discuss the opposite position, i.e., that thinking may be a better criterion for personal identity than affectivity. This means that I consider affectivity a better criterion for personal identity than thinking for some reasons only - not absolutely.

I must acknowledge that the issue is difficult - and this is independent of the personal identity problem - partly because we hardly have a clear-cut definition of thought (or belief for that matter) and feeling (or emotion). Accordingly, any discussion in which an explicit thought/affectivity distinction is needed is complicated. I think this is also because there are few, if any at all, examples of pure-thought-without-any-affective-component-at-all and also of pure-affective-act-without-any-component-of-thought-at-all. These two kinds of mental acts are not like chemical elements and most often they exist as blends of both.

Both thinking and affectivity are activities of a subject and a particular thought or feeling (or emotion) is her product. As such they belong to the subject or are authored by her, so to speak. However, as soon as we try to disconnect thought or feeling from the subject, a difference becomes apparent. Thoughts may be separated from their author and reproduced, quoted, paraphrased, or even appropriated, without losing anything of their content. Also, I may know someone’s thought either directly or indirectly, since it may be provided to me either by a person whose thought it is or by another person. A prosaic proof of this being so is copyright. It is needed in order to secure an otherwise decomposable link between a thought and its author. I suppose this is so because a thought’s content does not include a mark pointing to its owner. To find her we need another inquiry. The case of feeling is anything but similar. The content of a feeling (or emotion) points to its owner: when I know someone’s feeling I know perforce who is its owner. Next, not only can I not know someone’s feeling (or emotion) from a different person than the one whose feeling it is, but it also cannot be quoted, paraphrased or appropriated. If so, it means that feeling (or emotion) is inseparable from its author, i.e., from a subject whose feeling (or emotion) it is. A thought t thought by one person and a thought t thought by another person is the same thought. But there is no such thing as a feeling f felt by one person and the same feeling f felt by another person.⁶

Now, this is not only how things seem to be, but also how they are expected to be. If a feeling is particular and cannot be universalized, it does not matter, because what makes feeling meaningful is its subject being so-and-so towards the object of this feeling. They are not - and could or should not be - subjectless.⁷ By contrast a thought’s content is expected to be separable and universalized, and as such may become interpersonal and, in the end, impersonal. We need it to be impersonal because we discuss and analyze the content of thought independently of whose thought it is (or what else would the blind review process be for? ). The more a thought is objective and subjectless, the more it satisfies our expectation of being able to grasp the object it is about. Conversely, a feeling is not about an object but about a person’s relation to an object (others’ and her own feelings included). As such, feelings (or emotions) are personal, not universal. A blind review process for assessing a feeling (or an emotion) or depersonalizing or anonymizing it would be absurd.⁸ Moreover, if I see that my feelings are not what I would like them to be, e.g., my anger is too violent, my love is too weak, the feelings of another person, unlike her thoughts, cannot be a model for my feelings or they might be only a type-model, not a content-model (whereas when I am wrong and you are right, it suffices for me to adopt your opinion, belief or thought). Next, if one day it turns out that the Odyssey is Homer’s (or the opposite for those who believe it is Homer’s), this will change nothing to the content of the Odyssey, but if Paul’s love for Laura were transferred to Peter and replaced Peter’s love for Laura - assuming such a thing is possible - it would make all the difference to Peter and, supposedly, to Paul and Laura too. The more personal feelings (or emotions) are, the more we trust them because they tell us more about their author. Hence, since feelings (or emotions) are both subjective and inseparable from the subject, there is for them neither the requirement nor the risk of being separated from a subject they belong to. They don’t stand on their own, i.e., they can’t be severed from their subject or if they are, they cease to exist.⁹

If then I am tempted to consider affectivity a better criterion for personal identity than thinking, this is because thoughts may be the subject’s and feelings must be the subject’s. If thoughts are separable from their subject, transferable to another subject and, consequently, anonymizable, they seem to me to be a weaker¹⁰ criterion for personal identity than feelings which are neither separable nor transferable, nor anonymizable. The latter is a better candidate for a criterion for personal identity, provided that there is a kind of subjectlessness of thought and subject-involvement of affectivity.¹¹

How Much the Proposal is New?

Before I develop my argument, I need to see to what extent my proposal sets forth a new thesis.¹² Affectivity has been occasionally used as a criterion in the analysis of personal identity, but either implicitly or indirectly. What I mean is that either the category of feeling (or emotion) is used when personal identity is discussed, but without an explicit claim about the relation between personal identity and feeling (or emotion) or the category of experience (or mood) is introduced but is not explicit whether, and if so to what extent, this category comprises feeling (or emotion).¹³ In either case it is hard to say how much affectivity qua affectivity is intended and if it matters for personal identity at all. Therefore, since I haven’t met my proposal in the form I am going to develop it in this paper, let my overview be interpretatively more charitable insofar as I am going to make reference to a selection of authors whenever their works contain a similitude to my thesis.

It is conventional to start with Locke when discussing personal identity, especially because he is considered to be the first to introduce psychological continuity as a criterion for personal identity.¹⁴ Locke makes feelings a necessary constituent of psychological continuity even if he is not explicit about them being a criterion for personal identity. Instead, he considers them in a Cartesian-like way to be the content of consciousness.¹⁵

Most relevant to the point I am making is, it seems to me, Rosenthal’s (1983: 180) claim that emotions, thoughts and desires are “highly characteristic of a person’s individuality,” but thoughts and desires in order to be so “must be, to a very high degree, emotionally charged”. He insists that emotions not only make a person distinct but also unites her and also that (1983: 181) “emotions and dispositions to have emotions reflect a long-term continuity that is central to the unity of the self”.

My proposal is also close in some sense, as I see it, to Whiting’s insofar as she makes the ongoing and lasting concern crucial to personal identity (see Whiting, 1986: 552). She emphasizes the analogy between friendship - which I take to be a long-lasting, if not everlasting, feeling (see 3.1. below) - and psychological continuity (see Whiting, 1986: 557 & 571), and, last not least, claims that “particular affections and personal projects are components of the psychological continuity which - assuming a psychological criterion - constitutes personal identity” (Whiting, 1986: 579). But again, there is no separate and explicit claim about feelings (or emotions) as a criterion for personal identity.

In a more recent collection of papers on personal identity (Gasser & Stefan, 2012), Nida-Rümelin, 2012: 168) speaks about a person’s being as consisting in “living that person’s life […] experienc[ing] the world from that person’s perspective […] hav[ing] that person’s body, and […] enjoy[ing] that person’s pleasures”. She considers a person to be the very subject of experience, that is, the subject that exists rather than does not exist, especially because, for that particular subject, it is fundamentally different whether she exists or not and she insists that “[t]he difference lies in nothing but who is experiencing that life” (2012: 173). However, no direct reference to affectivity, feelings or emotions is made. Still in the same volume Lowe (2012: 150) takes any psychological account of personal identity to be circular: if personal identity is based on experiences and experiences are properties of a person, then the criterion is circular because “we cannot both individuate persons in terms of their experiences […] and individuate personal experiences in terms of the persons having them”.¹⁶

Let it then be concluded that - provided that the category of experience may charitably comprehend affectivity/feeling - all the authors quoted above consider, but only vaguely, affectivity/feelings as contributing to personal identity. Since they do so implicitly and with no special focus on affectivity/feelings, nothing specific about the relation between personal identity and affectivity can be inferred from their statements. This provides, I think, an additional reason for testing my proposal.

A Proviso (A Strong vs. a Weak Thesis)

The proposal that affectivity is a criterion for personal identity may obtain two forms. A strong one is that affectivity is the only criterion for personal identity and the weak one that affectivity is only one of the criteria for personal identity. Since the strong thesis would necessitate ruling out other possible criteria (such as thoughts, for example), I prefer to argue here for the weak version, leaving a discussion of the strong one for the future (which will not make sense if the weak one turns out, either here or elsewhere, to be false).

It should be noted that the thesis is not about personal identity caused by affectivity but about personal identity constituted, either exclusively (in a strong version) or among others (in a weak version), by affectivity, that is about personal identity being affectivity (a strong thesis) or affectivity being an inherent and irreducible part of personal identity (a weak thesis). Alternatively, it can be said that personal identity and affectivity go hand in hand. To paraphrase James Mill:

The phenomenon of Self and that of Affectivity [instead of Mill’s Memory] are merely two sides of the same fact, or two different modes of viewing the same fact. (Mill, 1869: 174)¹⁷

Preliminary Distinctions

Now, before embarking upon my argument I need to make two kinds of conceptual clarification, first, because personal identity is understood in several ways, and next, because affectivity constitutes a large and intricate realm.

Four Facets of Personal Identity

First, personal identity. We encounter the terms synchronic and diachronic and also epistemic and ontic personal identity. The former two refer to two aspects of personal identity, whereas the latter two concern two perspectives of how it can be considered.

Synchronic identity is about what makes the person she is the person she is at this very moment. Diachronic identity pertains to what makes a person at time t₂ remain the same person she was at time t₁.

The core meaning of personal identity is ontic. It is about what it is to be identical to oneself. However, there is another sense built upon the ontic one, which is about knowing that a person is the person she is. The distinction stems from the fact that typically we are not perfect cognizers. In an ideal world, an ideal observer would have no trouble with a correct identification. But in the real world, there may be, for instance, two discrete persons not yet recognized as such¹⁸ because the difference between them consists in some subtle feature which is hardly perceptible and consequently they are not recognized as different from one another. Since they are two, they are distinguished or recognized as two only when they are together but without knowing which one is which. Only they know the difference between themselves: one knows who she is (1^st person) insofar as she is, even if only minimally, “an object of acquaintance to herself” (Grice, 1941: 335) and who the other (not she, hence the 2^nd person). They are ontically distinct but epistemically we do not grasp the difference between them because of their too great resemblance and/or of our insufficient cognitive capacity. Speaking ontically, a person’s being herself does not depend on whether she is recognized as herself or not. Suppose a highly complex feature f constitutes the core of Peter’s personal identity and he is aware of it. He remains still keen on it even if he realizes that another person, say, Paul, possesses the same highly complex feature f. In this case, f makes Peter and Paul the persons they are, yet they are hardly identifiable by virtue of this essential feature of theirs.¹⁹

Four Meanings of Personal Identity

If the above two twofold distinctions are accurate, we arrive at four senses of personal identity: (i) synchronic epistemic, (ii) diachronic epistemic, (iii) synchronic ontic, and (iv) diachronic ontic. If this is correct, it would complicate the whole issue tremendously because being recognized as different could be not a necessary mark of personal identity, and any attempt at identifying a person by drawing on her being different would fail. For instance, it can be that two persons are different even if they are not recognized as such. But also being recognized as different could be not a sufficient mark of personal identity either since the same person could be recognized as different at time t₁ and t₂. In short, what constitutes an identity and what makes it recognizable, unless to an ideal recognizer, may not coincide and if they do not do so, being recognizable depends on a recognizer’s epistemic specificity. If, for example, two recognizers each had a dissimilar epistemic specificity, an identity would need to have traits by which it would be recognized as such by both of them, if three - by three, etc.

If this is so, it means that epistemic identity, either synchronic or diachronic, is scarcely traceable on a universal level and that the same is valid when we consider feelings (or emotions) as a possible criterion for epistemic identity. An identity is recognized not universally but by a recognizer. To recognize an identity on account of feelings (or emotions), they have to be conspicuous. But not all kinds of feelings are equally conspicuous. Besides the observer’s epistemic competence. There is an even more puzzling problem. If affectivity, essential to personal identity, is inner or very deep indeed, it manifests itself to an outer observer either to the lowest degree or not at all. My preferred example for that would be Kierkegaard’s Abraham’s anxiety related to his experience during more than three days of journey, for:

Abraham remains silent - but he cannot speak. Therein lies the distress and anguish. […] Abraham cannot speak, because he cannot say that which would explain everything (that is, so it is understandable) […] the distress and anxiety in the paradox were due in particular to the silence: Abraham cannot speak. (Kierkegaard, 1983: 113–118)

If this is correct, it means that the most manifest feelings (or emotions), say fear and anger, are typically and most easily detectable and therefore are not what best reveals personal identity because they are typically, we are told, short-lived. At the most, they are evidence of synchronic ontic personal identity or a short-lasting diachronic personal identity, if they are correctly identified.

Because of these issues, in the remainder of the paper, I shall limit myself to diachronic ontic personal identity. It is not contingent on the observer’s parameters and points to the very core of personal identity, regardless of the external conditions allowing or producing its manifestation or detection. Since it lies outside the empirical domain, it requires a purely conceptual investigation, which, no doubt here, should be as clear as possible. Yet, since synchronic ontic personal identity is weaker than diachronic ontic personal identity, given that any feeling (or emotion) constituting the latter also constitutes the former and not the other way round, I shall focus on the latter only.

Now, since the issue at stake is a diachronic ontic personal identity, the question of the feeling’s duration comes to the fore. It seems necessary that diachronic ontic personal identity constituted by a feeling (or affectivity) endures no longer and no shorter than the feeling (or affectivity) which constitutes it.

The Realm of Affectivity in View of its Duration

It is well known that the realm of affectivity is intricate. Apart from various taxonomies of feelings (or emotions), which are, in my view, attempts to deal with the complexity of affectivity, there are philosophers who not only were explicit about the intricacy of the affective realm but also treated it as stratified (or layered). Such were the theories of Max Scheler and Edith Stein, and, also of Nicolai Hartmann. While Stein²⁰ and Hartmann²¹ proposed a threefold model, Max Scheler offered a model of affectivity stratified in “four well-delineated levels of feeling” (Scheler, 1973: 332). In his view, “feelings are not only of different qualities but also of different levels of depth” (Scheler, 1973: 331).²² It’s a pity that a multilevelled approach to affectivity got little traction and is rarely, if at all, applied in current research. The correlation between depth and duration is not linear and short-lasting but deep feeling is possible, while the reverse maybe much less so. This issue cannot be discussed here. But since what matters here is the duration of feelings, a word about affectivity’s intricacy in precisely this respect is in order. Before, let me, however, comment briefly on the objection that feelings (or emotions) are inconstant and variable.

Continuity vs. Fleetingness

Affectivity is often considered as fleeting or even as an example of fleetingness par excellence.²³ If so, suggesting that affectivity be a criterion for personal identity is absurd. It was Hume who is reported to have used this feature for famously ruling out not only affectivity as a possible constituent of personal identity but any idea of identity altogether. He said,

there is no impression constant and invariable (Hume, 1978: 251),

and, more patently:

It cannot, therefore, be from any of these impressions [i.e., pain and pleasure, grief and joy, passions and sensations], or from any other, that the idea of self is deriv’d; and consequently there is no such idea. (Hume, 1978: 252).

For Hume, if we speak about such a thing as identity, this is only because we replace resemblance with identity (see Hume, 1978: 254). He concluded that personal identity “is only a fictitious one” (Hume, 1978: 259).

This invites a remark.²⁴ If Hume’s claim that “there is no impression constant and invariable” implies that all impressions are variable, this is a claim about their changing character and not a denial of their duration. If indeed there were no constant and invariable impressions at all, however short they could be, that is if they did not last even the slightest fraction of a second and were subject to Heraclitean flux,²⁵ they would be punctual.²⁶ But then the impressions Hume named, i.e., pain, pleasure, grief, joy, and passions, would be punctual too. This is strange insofar as we take one grief to be one and not a series of what would form it and, more importantly, some of our griefs are perceived as longer than others. Given that Hume not only says that “tis impossible for our perceptions to succeed each other with the same rapidity” (Hume, 1978: 35) and that “perceptions succeed each other with greater or less rapidity,” but also speaks about “the same duration [as] appear[ing] longer or shorter to his imagination” (Hume, 1978: 35), it is better to interpret his claim as one about a certain duration of impressions (see also Hume (1978: 252) and Hume (1978: 633).²⁷ Second, if there is an impression of “resemblance, contiguity and causation” (Hume, 1978: 255), there must be a constant and invariable observer who not only notices them and then replaces them with identity but who also becomes aware of this state of affairs, i.e., that “there is no impression constant and invariable”.²⁸

A Side Note on Dispositionality

Here a side note is helpful. It is often argued that affectivity has no other duration than a brief one and it exists only as a kind of disposition with episodes in which it is, so to speak, active (or activated).²⁹ For instance love, we are told, is such a disposition. It is not a permanent feeling but a state in which acts of love become manifest when it is felt (or which is felt when acts of love manifest).

It is true that feelings (or a particular feeling or emotion) are not maintained in the centre of awareness all the time. This would be impossible. There are more regular interruptions of awareness in sleep and frequent and irregular when one is busy with various tasks. In this sense, feeling is certainly not felt or sensed permanently. But it does not mean that such feeling is interrupted in which case it would be more appropriate to speak not about a feeling of, say love, but about several episodes of different love - per day, week, month, or year.³⁰ If that were the case, it would be curious to know how every successive episode of actively experiencing love is linked with a previous one. But think about knowledge or beliefs. They cannot be maintained in the centre of awareness incessantly either. A schoolgirl after literature class moves to a math class and then goes home. But the next day, after such interruption, she resumes and continues her classes, both of literature and of math, without much trouble and her knowledge increases. Only if the interruption is too long - and what is too long varies from case to case - does a problem of maintaining continuity appear indeed. The same is the case for affectivity.³¹ Hence, what is discontinued, or patchy, or gappy, so to speak, is not the affective state itself or knowledge itself but their being in the centre of awareness, which is not directed at them all the time continuously.

Short(er)- vs. Long(er)-Lasting Feelings

Once we have acknowledged the fact that feelings may last however shortly, we are in a position to accept also shorter and longer sensations, pains, pleasures, grief, and joy, and so on. And this is where the crux lies. For, if the difference between extremely short on the one hand and a bit longer impressions, feelings, and emotions on the other is a difference of quantity, all impressions are similar in essence. If, however, it is a matter of quality, we are faced with various types of affectivity duration. One is of sensations, impressions, feelings, and emotions which are short or very short and which it is hard to prolong, and the other kind which are longer and which it is hard or impossible to shorten. For instance, a feeling of joy upon the arrival in a favorite place - which is not to be confused with the joy of being there - is hardly prolongable above a certain time, while a sadness resulting from bad news - which is not to be confused with a sadness resulting from learning it - is hard to shorten below a certain time. Since the difference in the duration is not accidental, these are two qualitatively different kinds of affectivity duration.

Now the question is: how long a feeling (or emotion) may last?³² Frankly, I am unable to answer it. But let me give an example. At the beginning of his literary project Marcel Proust had titled his work Intermittencies of the Heart. This is what his work is often meant to be: to provide us with images and analyses of irregularities of impressions, passions, emotions or whatever one likes to call affective phenomena. Proust’s ambition and aim were to establish or reconstruct general psychological laws and, especially, laws pertaining to affectivity and indeed he set forward several laws of affectivity.³³ Yet in the same work Proust insisted on another kind of affective phenomenon, which is durable and, thereby, crucial to the formation of a personality - in this case, of his own personality as a writer. Proust’s desire to become a writer and his feelings (or emotions) related to his vocation lasted for several years. And this is where Proust’s ontic diachronic personal identity lies.³⁴

Everlasting Feelings

The best candidate for a criterion for diachronic ontic personal identity would be everlasting³⁵ feelings (or emotions). Certainly many more will disapprove of the possibility of everlasting feelings than a possibility of long-lasting feelings.³⁶ However, at this juncture I do not claim that there are such feelings. If they exist, they may be extremely rare or extremely difficult to prove. Despite that I do not see a reason for ruling them out a priori.

Since my analysis is conceptual let me put it this way: if there are everlasting feelings (or emotions), they are constituents of diachronic ontic personal identity par excellence. Not all feelings (or emotions) are constitutive of diachronic ontic personal identity to the same extent since this varies according to their duration. To which the following might be added: if diachronic ontic personal identity is constituted by affectivity, the time span of the latter equates to those feelings (or emotions) which last the longest. If a person experiences one longer affective episode when young and another, clearly separated from the first, when old, she would have two clearly defined segments of diachronic ontic personal identity. A relation between the two segments of personal identity would be analogous to a relation between the two episodes.

Now, assuming that there is hardly such a thing as a pure affective act without any component of thought at all (see 1.3. above), and this applies even more to long-standing feelings (or emotions), it should be noted that the examples I have in mind - Proust’s ambition, mature human love and friendship to mention just these three - are more than just feelings (or emotions). They are complex phenomena as they involve cognition, intention and memory. These categories, however, cannot be discussed here, nor can their mutual relationship (see Malo, 2010, especially ch. 5: Il perfezionamento dell’identità: la personalità).

Main Argument for the Proposal

That affectivity, especially long- and everlasting affectivity, constitutes - as one of its components (on a weak thesis version) - diachronic ontic personal identity is what remains to be shown. Here’s why I think it could be so.

Feelings (or emotions) are criticized in various ways for being subjective.³⁷ Now this feature of theirs turns out to be beneficial. For, since they cannot be detached from a person whose feelings they are,³⁸ they are not transferable, anonymizable or replicable. And if a subject of feelings (or emotions) cannot be removed from their description, it means that they are a mark of a person whose feelings (or emotions) they are.³⁹

If so, the more subjective they are, the stronger the mark of a person they constitute. Here I take degrees of subjectivity to be a way of speaking about what is typically - but metaphorically - referred to as depth of feelings (or emotions).⁴⁰ Although it is difficult to avoid this metaphor, one manner of doing so would be to reword it as a degree of the subject’s involvement. For instance, existential feelings involve a person to a larger extent - that is they are deeper as said in common parlance - than psychic feelings. If so, the former would be a stronger mark of diachronic ontic personal identity than the latter (e.g., in Scheler (1973)).

However, this is where a word on what is a minimal involvement, if it exists at all, that is on ungenuine feelings (or emotions) is in order. The issue of genuineness of affectivity comes out because I don’t want to deny that there are such things as insincere or faked feelings (or emotions), not to speak about an ordinary misnaming. When an actress simulates a character’s feeling, her feeling is not genuine but faked. When a man expresses condolence to his colleague, while, in fact, he is glad that he experiences the pain of loss, his sympathy is insincere. In both cases, it would be more appropriate to speak about insincere or faked expression of a feeling (or an emotion) that does not exist. More complex is the case of an introjected feeling (or emotion). Hegel’s master/slave dialectic, emotional contagion, transgenerational trauma, Stockholm syndrome, etc. are difficult to interpret precisely because they involve one’s identification with another (parent, aggressor, other). Here I must leave it aside suggesting only that it may be that they evidence how much affectivity is important to personal identity. Certainly, they must be introjected and adopted genuinely, even if not deliberately, if they are to be constitutive of personal identity. Thus a long-lasting pretence or mask - especially if genuinely adopted - becomes with time a constituent of personal identity.

The above cases are not genuine feelings or feelings at all or in the proper sense and as such are beyond the scope of my argument. Consequently, I refer only to genuinely lived (or experienced) feelings (or emotions) - or genuine feelings (or emotions) for short - that is feelings of which the existence is incontestable. My argument is based on genuine feelings (or emotions) and is two-part.

Genuineness of Affectivity

If feelings (or emotions) are genuinely experienced,⁴¹ they are the experiences of a person who experiences them. The longer they are experienced, the longer they constitute her and, in a similar vein, the more they involve her, the more solidly they constitute her. Hence if we take, as an example, a perfect (teleia) or true (hōs alethōs) friendship, as understood by Aristotle (in Nicomachean Ethics VIII & IX), the link between experience and diachronic ontic personal identity is strong and essential. A genuine friendship is stable (monimos eulogōs) and with respect to time, it is perfect (kata ton chronon teleia). I claim that a genuine friendship makes a person the person she is, and because she is the person she is, she experiences friendship in the way it is experienced by a person such as the one she is.

Now, I don’t want to deny that true friendship is rare⁴² or that it is a rather singular experience since it is reciprocal (antiphilēsis), it comprises both a feeling of loving and a feeling of being loved and consists in sharing joy and pleasure (sunchairein, sunēdesthai) as well as sorrow and grief (sunalgein, sunachthesthai).⁴³ Moreover, friendship is more than just a feeling (or an emotion or sentiment): sometimes it is identified as an attitude or relationship, insofar as it includes cognition, intention, choice, memory, and so on. But this, interestingly, makes opting for a weak thesis even better grounded: in fact, if affectivity is a criterion for diachronic ontic personal identity, it is so in its more or most durable variant, in which case it is necessarily in close - maybe insoluble indeed - association with other mental acts. If then the adage that never has there been a friend who stops being a friend is correct, and we accept friendship as everlasting,⁴⁴ we have got an example of a strong criterion for diachronic ontic personal identity which is affective to a significant extent.

If therefore affectivity is constitutive of a person’s being such as she is - and it seems to be insofar as affectivity is undetachable from the person whose affectivity it is - this means that if there is a feeling, there is a person whose feeling it is, and her feeling is such as is the feeling of that person. Thus, whenever there is an affectivity, there is a mark of the ontic personal identity of the person whose affectivity that affectivity is and each time ontic personal identity is constituted by affectivity (and not by any other mental act), there exists the affectivity of that person. If this is correct, affectivity is a mark of diachronic ontic personal identity and the longer the affectivity continues, the longer the diachronic ontic personal identity lasts.

A Reduction

If personal identity is what a person is, it means that it must be what she cannot get rid of. I therefore suggest testing ontic personal identity by way of divesting a person of what is not essential to her and thus arriving at her core, i.e., at what constitutes her ontic personal identity with no harm or if harmed, harmed to only an insignificant degree. Proceeding by this kind of reduction is again a conceptual rather than an empirical task. If we step too far and divest her of her essential element, this will amount to destroying her ontic personal identity altogether. In fact, this is but another side, the reverse one, of the genuineness of affectivity. Anything which is genuine comes from or refers to the core of a person: the more away from the core the less genuine it is.

Accordingly, to take again the example of friendship, if it makes a person who she is the person she is and now we take friendship away from her, she is no longer the person she was before the friendship has been taken away from her. This is all the more so if friendship or another feeling (or emotion), say despair, is (i) longer- rather than shorter-lasting and/or (ii) an experience involving the subject to a greater extent rather than involving the subject to a lesser extent.

Now, what is it that a person cannot get rid of without jeopardizing her diachronic ontic personal identity, that is her being who she is? Certainly, her thinking may be such a thing. A way of thinking and the content of one’s thoughts may build one’s ontic identity. However, not every thought that is thought by a person is constitutive of her ontic personal identity. Those that are borrowed, reproduced, quoted or paraphrased do not do it, or if they do, they do it unoriginally and then build an unoriginal personal identity.⁴⁵ Hence, only unique, authentic and subject-involving thoughts (say Archimedes’ eureka) are constitutive of diachronic ontic personal identity and - as suggested for feelings (or emotions) - the longer they last and the more the subject gets involved in them, the longer and more solid the diachronic ontic personal identity they construct. The case of feelings is similar but stronger and, consequently, easier to be accepted as a criterion for ontic personal identity than is the case of thoughts. Any feeling (or emotion) is genuinely lived, hence we do not need to check whether it does indeed belong to the subject and whether it is authentic and subject-involving, as is in the case of thought. Imagine the following: Peter gets rid of a thought and he is given an identical thought of another person. How much will his ontic identity be affected? I think I should answer that I do not know.⁴⁶ First, it may be a lot or not at all. Second, it can be hard to determine it. Now imagine Peter’s getting rid of a feeling and being given an identical feeling of another. Here I think we can say that, first, it is difficult to conceive what an identical feeling would mean. I am inclined to say there is no such thing as an identical feeling of another. Since feeling (or emotion) cannot be subjectless and is by its essence subjective and inseparable from the subject, we may say, I think, that if Peter gets rid of his feeling (or emotion), his identity is affected, and the more a removed feeling involves the subject, the more his ontic personal identity is affected by its removal.

Conclusion

My aim was to propose and test affectivity as a criterion for personal identity. I started by giving arguments for affectivity being a better criterion for personal identity than thinking. Then I clarified that my proposal is to be taken in its weak version: affectivity as being only one of the criteria for personal identity. Next, I dealt with the synchronic vs. diachronic as well as with the ontic vs. epistemic distinction: my proposal concerns the diachronic ontic personal identity. Finally, I considered the realm of affectivity in its temporal dimension. Only then did my argument turn to chiefly long- or everlasting feelings (or emotions) and, for the most part, those which involve the feeling subject more rather than less. Insofar as they are genuine and form the very core of a person, they cannot be eliminated without harming a person’s identity. A reduction of genuine feelings (or emotions) would imply a change of her identity.

Ideally, it would be useful to get a criterion for both synchronic and diachronic, and for both epistemic and ontic personal identity. Since I was unable to provide such, my aim was much more modest and even given the restriction introduced, what I obtained is that affectivity is a criterion for personal identity to some extent only, i.e., as much as affective experiences are lasting and for the time they last. This is not much because since one person’s affectivity may vary from another’s, the same is valid for their personal identities.

Although I did not prove that affectivity is a criterion for personal identity, I answered the question to what extent and how affectivity may secure the diachronic ontic personal identity. This may not seem much, but is better than nothing. The extent to which personal identity extends depends on affectivity’s duration, which means that it depends on the quality of the affective life of a person: the more stable the affective life of a person, the stronger, i.e., the more durable, her diachronic ontic personal identity is.

Now, I referred more than once to Proust’s novel. Let me do it for the last time, given I have somehow arrived at a conclusion much similar to what he expressed in the following: “[f]or a man cannot change, that is to say become another person, while he continues to obey the sentiments of the self which he has ceased to be” (tr. C. K. Scott Moncrieff modified).⁴⁷ I think that my contention is similar to Proust’s, though his is expressed in a negative way: unless one changes one’s long- or everlasting feelings (emotions), one remains the same person.⁴⁸ And this is to say that affectivity, as long as it lasts, is a criterion for diachronic ontic personal identity. To know how long affectivity may last and if there may be very long-lasting or outright everlasting affectivity - which, from the conceptual point of view, is the best candidate for a criterion for diachronic ontic personal identity - is an issue I tried to confront but which should be treated separately on another occasion with or without relation to personal identity.

I would like to end with three remarks.

• 1) Above I have hinted at the degree of a subject’s affective involvement as relevant to personal identity. A proviso is needed. Although I think it does matter to diachronic ontic personal identity and that the more involvement the more solid personal identity, a more involving feeling (or emotion) may happen to be less important for the temporal aspect of personal identity than another one, a less involving feeling (or emotion) but which lasts longer. Compare, for example, a long-lasting fondness with a relatively short-lasting love, provided that love is more involving than fondness.

• 2) An interesting fact is that ontic personal identity does not have necessarily - or have to a limited extent only - an effect on the epistemic one. I may not know someone’s feelings and do not recognize her because of ignoring her feelings but this fact has no impact on her ontic personal identity: since she does have her feelings, her ontic personal identity is constituted by them regardless of an observer’s recognizing her as identical with her. Most certainly, the deeper and less conspicuous her feelings (or emotions) are, the more difficult it is for them to be known to an observer.

• 3) Fiocco (2021) has argued - most interestingly to my mind - that there is not and cannot be such a thing as a criterion for personal identity.⁴⁹ I think the last remark above accords with his claim: we may not know about someone’s personal identity which, nevertheless, exists if it exists and it exists if she whose personal identity it is, exists. My point is that - conceptually - (1) if there is a person of whom there is a diachronic ontic personal identity, a diachronic ontic personal identity of her exists and (2) this fact may happen to be known only from a 1^st person perspective in which case her insight into herself is substantially different from her insight into other persons. (1) is an ontic and (2) an epistemic thesis.⁵⁰