Decentered Self of Modernity

Bishop Joseph Butler of Durham worried about the consequences of Locke’s empiricism: “That personality is not a permanent, but a transcient thing: that it lives and dies, begins and ends continually: that no one can any more remain one and the same person two moments together, than two successive moments can be one and the same moment.” This leads Seigel to suggest that “It is not disengagement that makes [Locke’s] ideas about the self modern, but his recognition that the first task the self must face is to provide some degree of stability and durability in the face of its divisions and discontinuities.”