Raymond Martin

Hazlitt on the Future of the Self

There are moments in the life of a solitary thinker which are to him what the evening of some great victory is to the conqueror and hero.. .milder triumphs long remembered with truer and deeper delight. And though the shouts of multitudes do not hail his success ... [yet] as time passes ... [such moments] still awaken the consciousness of a spirit patient, indefatigable in the search of truth and a hope of surviving in the thoughts and minds of other men.

Self-concern from Priestley to Hazlitt

Toward the beginning of the nineteenth century, William Hazlitt, in An Essay on the Principles of Human Action , proposed a theory of personal identity and self-concern that is remarkably similar to Derek Parfit’s recent revisionist account. 1 Hazlitt even asked in regard to possible resurrection fission scenarios, how he could decide which of the multiple copies of himself or of his continued consciousness that were created by God were really himself or a proper object of his egoistic self-concern. Hazlitt concluded that belief in personal identity must be an acquired imaginary conception and that since in reality each of us is no more related to his or her future self than to the future self of any other person none of us is ‘ naturally ’ self-interested. 2

What really matters

What really matters fundamentally in survival? That question—the one on which I focus—is not about what should matter or about metaphysics. Rather, it is a factual question the answer to which can be determined, if at all, only empirically. I argue that the answer to it is that in the case of many people it is not one’s own persistence, but continuing in ways that may involve one’s own cessation that really matters fundamentally in survival. Call this the surprising result. What are we to make of it? According to several philosophers, not much. I argue that these philosophers are wrong. What best explains the surprising result is that in the case of many people one’s special concern for oneself in the future is not fundamental, but derived. I explain what this means. Finally I explain why the task of explaining empirically what matters fundamentally in survival is in some ways more like a meditative quest than a traditional inquiry in western philosophy or social science and, as such, is best answered not by psychologists, but by philosophers.