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ESSAY SAMPLE ON "PERSONAL IDENTITY : BODY, MEMORY AND SOUL" |
Personal Identity can be broken down into three areas: 1.) Body 2.) Memory and 3.)
Soul. In John Perry's "A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality" these composing
aspects of personal identity are discussed at length. In the reading and class
discussions the body was defined clearly as a part of one's person, even alluded to at
times as a "prison" in which one cannot escape until one dies. Memory and one's Soul
seemed to be lumped together many times, understandably so, for the two bare many things
in common such as they are intangible, cannot be completely defined as to what each
exactly is (people remember things that did not actually happen to them, are those still
memories?; do you have one soul throughout your life?), and both are thought to compose
one's character and beliefs. This essay will deal with the two aspects of one's personal
identity which are the most obvious in day to day life, that of the body and of
soul/memory.
As stated beforehand, memory and the soul bare many of the same qualities. The body
and soul, however, also share this trait. Perry illustrates in his essay that the body
and soul are similar because there is a "link" between one another, that is they both
make up a person and are responsible for the qualities associated with being an
individual (height, weight, character, belief, etc.). Perry also comes back to challenge
this using the analogy of a river. If one goes to a river, and then the next day goes
back to the same river, the person will not say that it is a different river, although
almost all of the properties of the river have changed (water molecules, pollution level,
temperature, etc.). This is the same with a person, for we say that a person at
adolescence is still the same person at adulthood, even though the the persons beliefs,
knowledge, and character may have changed over the years. Perry answers this problem by
saying that we can still regard the person as the same by the relative "similarity" of
the person to how they were in the past, and that "[the] sameness of body is a reliable
sign of sameness of all; of soul" . In another example, Perry differentiates between the
body and the soul by saying that "personal identity" (referring to the soul/mind) cannot
be based on bodily identity, for one can judge who one is without having to make any
judgments about the body. Perry continues to elaborate on this by saying even if he woke
up one day and found he had a different body or form (going as far as to refer to Kafka's
The Metamorphosis) he would still be the same person (possessing the same character,
beliefs, memories, etc.) Perry then identifies that at the heart of the soul and memory
of a person's identity is one's memory. This brings up the question of if there were two
people with the same memories, would they not have the same personal identity? Because of
the fact it is impossible to have two people of the same identity, Perry finds that the
body is more important then previously anticipated. Overall, every aspect of one's self
(body, soul, and memory) contributes to what makes them a person with a unique identity
and attributes all their own.
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