display all the ideas for this combination of texts
4 ideas
9758 | To make sense of personal identity, focus on agency rather than experience [Korsgaard] |
Full Idea: A focus on agency makes more sense of personal identity than a focus on experience. | |
From: Christine M. Korsgaard (Intro to 'Creating the Kingdom of Ends' [1996], §2) | |
A reaction: This strikes me as eminently sensible advice for the beginning of any discussion of personal identity. Her personal bęte noir is Parfit, who focuses on what we are conscious of. |
9757 | A person viewed as an agent makes no sense without its own future [Korsgaard] |
Full Idea: In forming a particular plan of life, you need to identify with your future in order to be what you are even now. When the person is viewed as an agent, no clear content can be given to the idea of a merely present self. | |
From: Christine M. Korsgaard (Intro to 'Creating the Kingdom of Ends' [1996], §2) | |
A reaction: I certainly like the notion that we should treat persons primarily as agents, since I take personhood to be more like a process than an existent entity. If a large brick is about to hit you, you actually have no future, though you think you have. |
22162 | There is an everyday self, and an authentic self, when it is grasped in its own way [Heidegger] |
Full Idea: The self of everyday Dasein is the they-self [das Man-selbst], which we distinguish from the authentic self - that is, from the Self which has been taken hold of in its own way. | |
From: Martin Heidegger (Being and Time [1927], I.4.27) | |
A reaction: To a novice this sounds like a requirement for increased self-consciousness during daily activity. 'Be a good animal, true to your animal self' said one of Lawrence's characters. |
20114 | Everyone is other, and no one is himself [Heidegger] |
Full Idea: Everyone is other, and no one is himself. | |
From: Martin Heidegger (Being and Time [1927], p.165), quoted by Rüdiger Safranski - Nietzsche: a philosophical biography 09 | |
A reaction: Safranski describes this as the idea of 'structural self-evasion'. He detects the same idea in Nietzsche's 'Daybreak'. |