Metaphors of Personal Identity in Derek Parfit and Teresa of Ávila
Personal identity over time is an idea derided by analytic philosophy. Hume began the process of debunking the person, or self, as “nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions.”[1] The demolition job concluded in 1984, with the publication of Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons. Parfit (1942–2017) found liberation in dispensing with personal identity—shattering the “glass tunnel” that kept him apart from life. Parfit uses the metaphor of glass walls to express personal identity as a constraint. Four hundred years earlier, by contrast, St. Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582) used glass walls to express personal identity as a luminous, faceted beauty—an interior crystal castle where God lives within us. The difference between the philosophers and their vitreous metaphors is that Parfit’s person is a self, and Teresa’s is a soul.
Parfit: Under a Dark Glass
In Reasons and Persons, Parfit conducts thought experiments like teleportation and brain switching to show that personal identity over time could only be true if there were a “further fact” beyond our psychological states, which “owns” or “holds” those states. But there is no further fact beyond the psychological states, nothing beyond the Humean bundles of perceptions, memories, and the like. Therefore, there is no personal identity, no self, over time. As a consolation, Parfit shows us that personal identity doesn’t matter anyway, because all we really care about is surviving in some way or other. To render Parfit’s meticulous examples crudely but briefly: if the cross-galaxy teleporter was buggy one day, and only deposited a very close replica of my body, brain, and brain states—not my original, self-same molecules and brain states—I could learn to live with it. I might even enjoy it, as Parfit enjoyed life once he stopped worrying about personal identity:[2]
When I believed my existence was such a further fact, I seemed imprisoned in myself. My life seemed like a glass tunnel through which I was moving faster and faster, and at the end of which was darkness. When I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. I now live in the open air. There is still a difference between my life and the lives of other people. But the difference is less.
Parfit did not dismiss the human concern for personal identity. In an interview, he recognized that people want a “guaranteed identity,” a way to exist as ourselves over time. He also noted that this desired identity “would be true if what each of us really was, was a soul.”[3] But Parfit dismissed the existence of souls, which he called a type of “further fact” beyond our immediate and verifiable sense experience. Without a soul, we do not have clearcut individual identities over time.
Obviously, Parfit thought “soul” had huge explanatory power: It could explain personal identity over time. But access to this power required a leap of faith, something Parfit felt unprepared to do. In contrast, Teresa of Ávila leapt without hesitation. She didn’t rejoice over the shards of a broken self, but built a lasting identity—a soul—from the most brilliant glass.
St. Teresa: Luminous Walls
Teresa began her masterwork, Interior Castle, by sharing her vision of the soul as a castle made of “very clear crystal” or “a single diamond,” in which there are “many rooms, just as in heaven there are many mansions.”[4] Teresa identifies seven rooms or abodes (moradas), each with its own ethical and spiritual significance, with God fully present and experienced in the seventh. The crystal castle is the soul—the place where God abides. But soul also enters and travels though the rooms of the castle. Teresa expressed this duality throughout Interior Castle. She also put it in one of her poems, “Alma buscarte” (“Soul, Seek Yourself”). In this poem, God calls the soul “my chamber, my dwelling, and my house” (soul as castle), but also gives counsel to the soul if it “gets lost inside my tinted caverns” (soul entering and traveling through the castle).[5]
This is an apparent, rather Parmenidean contradiction—how can a soul both be a thing and enter that thing? Teresa directly addresses the contradiction as the very nature of what we might call the search within—a feature of human self-consciousness also integral to prayer and meditation:[6]
Now let us return to our beautiful and delightful castle and see how we can enter it. I seem rather to be talking nonsense, for, if this castle is the soul there can clearly be no question of our entering it. For we ourselves are the castle: and it would be absurd to tell someone to enter a room when he was in it already. But you must understand that there are many ways of “being” in a place…You will have read certain books on prayer which advise the soul to enter within itself: and that is exactly what this means.
This passage suggests Teresa’s concept of personal identity over time. Identity is a function of one’s soul being a durable, beautiful, and complex edifice, which also possesses the unusual quality of being able to search itself and, in so doing, meet God. The soul is the structure that owns or holds consciousness (a further fact, per Parfit). Self-consciousness provides a two-fold proof of persistence over time: first, the continuity of inner experience in the temporal sequence of entering and traveling through the soul; second, the experience of an everlasting, indwelling God. As Teresa wrote in her poem, “Hermosura de Dios” (“God’s Beauty”), God has the astounding ability to bind the eternal to the mortal: “What a knot you tie from two unequal things…you join the mortal—what need not be, with that must be—Eternal.”[7] Discovering God within shows all seekers that we connect to the immortal, and so we endure.
Teresa, like Parfit, imagines darkness as well as clear glass. But unlike Parfit’s tunnel of glass leading to darkness, Teresa’s darkness is the muck full of venomous creatures outside the crystal castle. This is the state of sin. Before the soul enters itself, it lives outside itself in sin; to enter the crystal castle is to start renouncing sin and embarking on the search within. There is comfort in Teresa’s metaphors, because they suggest our identity is not obliterated by sin. We always have the soul as structure, the castle within us, with God in residence. In sin, the soul has not yet entered its own lovely dwelling—but the option is always there, beckoning with its brightness.
Sorrowful Self, Delighted Soul
Of course, history, circumstance, and religious practice enabled Teresa to think about the soul in ways that Parfit found impossible. In unpacking personal identity, the most Parfit could seriously contemplate was the self, defined by such things as bodily continuity, memory, or psychological connectedness. All of these failed to pan out when mined for the “further fact” of personal identity, as would be expected, per Hume, from mere collections of sense data, impressions, and ideas. But Parfit knew what Teresa knew: the optimal further fact of personal identity is not the self, but the soul. The difference is that Parfit rejected the soul, while Teresa embraced it.
It is fascinating to consider that Parfit and Teresa, separated by four centuries, both chose glass as metaphor to express personal identity. The sense that a transparent barrier individuates me from others is a common modern feeling, and perhaps it was in Teresa’s day also. The key point is that Parfit and Teresa lent opposing meanings to the metaphor: Parfit’s glass tunnel defines personal identity as the miserable prison of self, best demolished; Teresa’s crystal castle defines personal identity as our glorious, protective home—the soul. That again is the difference between self and soul. One is sorrow, the other, delight.
Author Bio
Dana Delibovi is a poet, essayist, and translator who started out as a philosopher. Her new book of translations and essays, Sweet Hunter: The Complete Poems of St. Teresa of Ávila, will be published on St. Teresa’s feast day, October 15, 2024, by Monkfish Books. Delibovi’s work has appeared in After the Art, Noon, Presence, Salamander, U.S. Catholic, and many other journals. She is a 2020 Best American Essays notable essayist and a consulting editor at the e-zine, Cable Street. Delibovi holds a BA in philosophy from Barnard College and an MA in philosophy from New York University, where she studied with Peter Unger.
[1] David Hume 1740: A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. P.H. Nidditch (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press), 252.
[2] Derek Parfit 1984: Reasons and Persons (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press), 281.
[3] 1996: “Derek Parfit on Personal Identity.” Available at https://youtu.be/d7asDhjj7Xk?si=vntx-TXL9VHtwDWb. Accessed 11 March 2024.
[4] St. Teresa of Ávila 1577: Interior Castle, ed. and trans. E. Allison Peers (New York, NY: Image Books, 1961), 28.
[5] St. Teresa of Ávila, 1576: “Alma, buscarte has en mí” / “Soul Seek Yourself in Me,” trans. Dana Delibovi, U.S. Catholic 87, no. 9 (2022): 15.
[6] Teresa 1577: Interior, 31.
[7] St. Teresa of Ávila 1577: “Hermosura de Dios” / “God’s Beauty”, trans. Dana Delibovi, U.S. Catholic 87, no. 3 (2022): 21.