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Jun. 27th, 2003 03:37 pmlast night ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
universaldonor and i had an argument: he claims that he has nothing to do with his self of seven years ago, and therefore he is not responsbile for anything that self might have done. i argue that a diachronically consistent personality is necessary in order to live in an ethical way, and thus statements like "i am not the same person that i was ___ years ago" can and should only be used as a metaphor for a change/growth in the person, and cannot have any power outside of the realm of a person's phenomenological self-perception. because if we follow UD's way, that way lies moral/epistemological relativism, and the reification of the "synchronic" (defined, seemingly, arbitrarily, since he could not tell me when the cutoff line is, when his old "self" stopped being him and because this archaic, deferred "other") as a modus operandi, which, to me, is really problematic. as i wrote in an email to someone a very long time ago, a fragmented identity is not a very useful concept outside of postmodern texts.
questions, comments, resposnses?
universaldonor and i had an argument: he claims that he has nothing to do with his self of seven years ago, and therefore he is not responsbile for anything that self might have done. i argue that a diachronically consistent personality is necessary in order to live in an ethical way, and thus statements like "i am not the same person that i was ___ years ago" can and should only be used as a metaphor for a change/growth in the person, and cannot have any power outside of the realm of a person's phenomenological self-perception. because if we follow UD's way, that way lies moral/epistemological relativism, and the reification of the "synchronic" (defined, seemingly, arbitrarily, since he could not tell me when the cutoff line is, when his old "self" stopped being him and because this archaic, deferred "other") as a modus operandi, which, to me, is really problematic. as i wrote in an email to someone a very long time ago, a fragmented identity is not a very useful concept outside of postmodern texts.questions, comments, resposnses?
