The Gentleman Who Might Have Not Been There

A letter concerning identity, continuity, and the unreasonable persistence of acquaintances

The Lakes and Fells of Cumbria

A little after eleven o'clock

My sweet Little Charlotte,

I had intended to spend this evening in the agreeable company of a book, a pot of tea, and the sort of silence which, in my experience, is among the few luxuries that improve with age. Instead, I find myself writing to you about a gentleman whom I encountered in the town this afternoon, and whose entirely ordinary appearance has occasioned an entirely disproportionate disturbance in my understanding of existence.

I should start by explaining to you that I had not seen this gentleman for a considerable number of years. I recognised him immediately, although time has made its customary alterations to his person. There was rather more flesh about the waist, rather less hair upon the crown, and an expression of mild bewilderment which I have observed in several otherwise respectable men who appear to regard the passage of time as an administrative error for which somebody else ought to be held responsible.

We exchanged the usual civilities. He inquired after my health, asked whether I still lived by the lakes, and observed that I had scarcely changed at all.

This last remark was so manifestly untrue that I accepted it as a compliment.

We spoke for perhaps five minutes. He mentioned two mutual acquaintances, told me something of his present circumstances, and departed with the familiar promise that we ought not to allow so much time to pass before meeting again; a sentiment that struck my ears as distinctly Continental European.

I watched him walk away, continued with my shopping, and returned home. I took tea, settled myself in my accustomed chair, and began perusing the evening papers.

It was then that the trouble began.

I cannot say precisely why my thoughts returned to him. Perhaps it was the peculiar familiarity of his voice, or perhaps the curious sensation one experiences upon meeting a person whom one has not seen for years: the past, which one had considered safely deposited in its proper compartment, suddenly appears in the present without so much as an apology for the intrusion.

Whatever the cause, I found myself considering the years between our two encounters.

More particularly, I found myself wondering why, in the light of his actual presence, I had assumed that he had continued to exist throughout the intervening years.

My dear Little Charlotte, the question, I hasten to explain, is not biographical. I have no particular curiosity concerning his employment, his domestic arrangements, or the number of times he might have visited the dentist. I am concerned with something more elementary, and therefore considerably more troublesome.

I had seen this man once, many years ago. I saw him again this afternoon. Between these two observations lies a considerable expanse of time, most of which I could neither remember nor describe.

From these two encounters I had immediately inferred that he had continued to exist throughout the intervening period.

I have not witnessed this continuity. I had simply assumed it.

The assumption seems so natural that I have never previously thought to examine it. Had anyone suggested that the gentleman might have been absent from existence for a substantial portion of the interval, I should have suspected either a deficiency in his education or an excess in his consumption of port.

Yet I could not help noticing that my certainty exceeded my evidence.

I had seen him in the past. I have seen him in the present. Between these encounters, I have no direct acquaintance with his existence. I merely supposed that the man I had known had continued to be the man I had known, day after day, year after year, through all the unobserved circumstances of his life.

It seemed an eminently reasonable supposition.

Unfortunately, reasonableness is not the same thing as proof, a distinction which has caused a great deal of unnecessary suffering in theology, philosophy, marriage, and the reading of newspaper editorials.

I therefore put down my paper and considered the matter more carefully.

Suppose, I thought, that the gentleman had not existed throughout those years.

I do not mean that he had been travelling abroad, residing in an obscure monastery, or living under an assumed name in the south of France. Such possibilities would merely have required me to revise my understanding of his circumstances. I mean that he had literally ceased to exist, and had somehow returned to existence in time to interrupt my afternoon shopping.

I admit that this hypothesis presents certain practical difficulties. One would wish to know by what agency he had disappeared, where he had been in the meantime, and whether his restoration had been properly entered in the relevant registers. One would also wish to know whether his tailor had been informed, since the gentleman's jacket appeared to have suffered from a rather different conception of eternity.

Nevertheless, the logical question remained.

Would he have been the same man?

I confess that I found myself rather more reluctant to answer than I had anticipated.

If he had returned possessing the same face, the same voice, the same memories, the same character, the same peculiar manner of laughing before he had quite finished telling a joke, and the same unfortunate conviction that the modern world had become unnecessarily complicated, I should almost certainly have recognised him.

Indeed, I might have recognised him more readily than I recognise certain gentlemen whom I have seen continuously for forty years.

There are people one encounters every morning whose identities seem to alter with the weather, the company they keep, and the prevailing political fashion. There are others whom one may not see for half a lifetime, yet who return to one's acquaintance with the astonishing familiarity of an old church bell heard across the fields.

Continuity of acquaintance, I began to suspect, is not always the same thing as continuity of recognition.

But recognition itself is an imperfect witness. I have occasionally mistaken a stranger for an acquaintance, and on at least one memorable occasion mistaken an acquaintance for a gentleman who owed me money. The latter error was corrected with admirable speed, although not by the gentleman concerned.

If two men were indistinguishable in every respect, I wondered whether my recognition of the second could establish that he was numerically identical with the first.

The distinction between resemblance and identity is not one that troubles us in ordinary life. If I leave my umbrella at the club and return the following afternoon to find it where I left it, I do not demand a certificate establishing that it is the very same umbrella. I recognise the handle, the worn fabric, and the little nick in the ferrule. I am satisfied.

Yet umbrellas are comparatively uncomplicated objects. They do not ordinarily claim to remember their childhood, complain about the state of the Church of England, or insist that they once bowled a very respectable length on a damp wicket at Cheltenham.

A man is a rather more difficult proposition.

...

Excuse me, my Little Charlotte. I poured myself a little more tea. I was thinking, and found myself considering the matter of resurrection.

Christianity, of course, requires us to take seriously the possibility that death does not constitute the final extinction of personal existence. But the precise relationship between the person who dies and the person who is raised is not a question which can be settled merely by pointing to a likeness between them.

If a man dies and is raised again, we ordinarily say that he has returned to life. We do not say that a new gentleman has been manufactured to resemble him, even if the latter description might prove easier to accommodate within certain administrative departments.

The Christian hope rests upon the identity of the person who is raised, not merely upon the appearance of a replacement.

But suppose, for the sake of argument, that the gentleman I have met this afternoon had been recreated, with all his memories intact, after an interval of absolute non-existence. Would his memories of the earlier period make him the same man? Would the preservation of his character suffice? Or would something more be required: some unbroken relation between the person who had once existed and the person who now stood before me?

I confess that I cannot settle the matter.

I am, however, increasingly convinced that I have stumbled upon an excellent means of inconveniencing philosophers.

One can imagine the conversation.

'My dear fellow, have you existed continuously since our last meeting?'

'Naturally.'

'And upon what evidence do you base this assertion?'

'I remember my life.'

'But a sufficiently exact reconstruction might possess your memories without having experienced the events it recalls.'

At this point, I suspect, one would be asked to leave the premises.

I should not advise conducting such experiments at L'Enclume, where the tolerance for metaphysical speculation is not necessarily proportional to the quality of the luncheon.

Nevertheless, the question has a certain charm. We assume that a person whom we meet again has existed throughout the interval because this is what ordinarily happens. We possess a vast accumulation of experience supporting the assumption. We have bodies, records, relationships, witnesses, and a world whose regularities make continuity the overwhelmingly sensible explanation.

I have no intention of abandoning these advantages in favour of a theory which would require me to suspect that every acquaintance had been secretly assembled five minutes before meeting me.

I have already enough difficulty remembering names.

But the fact that an assumption is justified does not make it an observation. We do not witness another person's existence at every moment. We infer it from what we know, what we observe, and what we have good reason to believe.

The distinction is modest, but it is not meaningless.

Indeed, I began to wonder whether we might be making a similar mistake when we speak of ourselves.

I am accustomed to thinking of myself as the same Timothy Monday who was born in Carrickfergus, who received his education, who acquired his habits, who developed his opinions, and who eventually came to dwell among the lakes and fells of Cumbria. I regard these events as belonging to one continuous life.

Yet my own consciousness does not present me with an uninterrupted record of every moment of that life. I sleep. I forget. I undergo changes in character which I only discover retrospectively. I possess memories of events which I cannot now reconstruct in their entirety, and I know that there are periods of my existence which have left scarcely any impression upon my mind.

Nevertheless, I do not ordinarily suspect that Timothy Monday has been repeatedly abolished and replaced by a succession of remarkably similar gentlemen.

Perhaps this is fortunate. The paperwork alone would be intolerable.

I am tempted, therefore, to distinguish between the continuity of existence and the continuity of consciousness. The former may persist when the latter is interrupted; the latter may preserve a sense of identity even when memory fails. Neither proposition, by itself, settles every philosophical difficulty, but both warn us against treating the two as interchangeable.

A man may sleep without ceasing to exist. He may forget an afternoon without having failed to live through it. He may return from a long absence and find that the years have changed his appearance without destroying his identity.

And he may, after many years, meet an old acquaintance who has changed so little in manner that one is tempted to believe the interval has been an illusion.

It is at this point that I recall an object which has long fascinated me: the ancient Ethiopian Gospel books preserved at the monastery of Abba Garima.

I am sure, my Little Charlotte, that you must be acquainted with them.

These extraordinary manuscripts, known as the Garima Gospels, were written on parchment made from goatskin, and contain magnificent illustrations. Radiocarbon analysis has placed the parchment of one of the manuscripts within a range extending from the fourth to the sixth century. They belong among the very earliest surviving illustrated Christian manuscripts in the world.

What interests me here is not merely their age, but their identity.

Imagine a manuscript copied, repaired, rebound, carried from one place to another, and preserved across fifteen centuries. Its parchment survives, though its original appearance may have altered. Some leaves may have been displaced; others may have been repaired or reunited with leaves from another volume. The book we see today may not possess precisely the physical arrangement it possessed when first completed.

Is it still the same book?

I should answer yes, provided that we understand what we mean. Its identity does not depend upon every leaf remaining in its original position, nor upon the binding remaining untouched, nor even upon the uninterrupted visibility of the object to any particular observer. It has a history, and the surviving manuscript belongs to that history.

But suppose that every leaf had been destroyed, and a perfect facsimile made from photographs and records. Would the facsimile be the same manuscript?

Certainly not. It might reproduce the text, the illustrations, the arrangement of the pages, and even the stains upon the parchment. It might be indistinguishable from the original to an observer who had never examined it closely. Yet it would not possess the same material history. The animal skin, the marks left by the original scribe, and the physical object which had survived through the centuries would be absent.

We should possess a perfect likeness, but not the original thing.

The comparison is imperfect, for a book is not a human being, and I would not wish to suggest that personal identity can be settled by the methods of manuscript conservation. Yet the example makes one point admirably clear:

Similarity is not necessarily identity, and continuity need not mean that every observable feature remains unchanged.

The Garima Gospels have survived through centuries of human history, but we do not suppose that their identity depends upon somebody having inspected them at every moment. Their continued existence is established through evidence of a different kind: the surviving physical material, their textual and artistic characteristics, their history of preservation, and the scholarly work by which their antiquity is investigated.

We infer continuity from evidence. We do not have to witness it continuously.

And if an ancient manuscript may retain its identity despite changes in appearance, arrangement, and condition, we should perhaps be cautious about assuming that every interruption in our acquaintance with a person represents an interruption in that person's existence—or, conversely, that every resemblance between two appearances proves the uninterrupted existence of one individual.

I do not mean that the manuscript provides evidence for the possibility that human beings disappear and reappear. It does not. The analogy concerns our reasoning about identity, not the biological facts of human life.

Still, I found the example useful. It reminds me that the identity of a thing is not always exhausted by the features we happen to observe, and that the history connecting its earlier and present forms may matter as much as their resemblance.

I began to wonder whether the gentleman in the town might be thought of in a similar fashion—not as an object to be catalogued, but as a person whose present appearance belongs to a history I have only partially witnessed.

I had met him before. I met him again this afternoon. I have good reason to believe that the intervening years were genuinely his years, even though I was not present to observe them. The fact that I cannot give an account of those years does not make them disappear.

This, perhaps, is where my speculation ought to end; yet I fear, my little sweet darling, the mind is seldom content to stop where good sense advises it to do so.

There remains, however, a question which I find difficult to dismiss. When we meet someone again, what exactly do we mean when we say that we have met the same person?

We mean more than that we have encountered a body resembling one we remember. We mean that the present individual belongs to the same history as the individual we knew before. We assume that the intervening events have occurred, that the person has passed through them, and that the life we now encounter is the continuation of the life we remember.

Ordinarily, this is entirely correct.

But the phrase 'the same person' contains a claim about identity which cannot be reduced to the simple observation that two appearances resemble one another. It reaches beyond what is immediately before us and connects the present with the absent past.

We are, in this respect, creatures of continuity. We connect yesterday with today, childhood with old age, and remembered faces with the faces that appear before us in the street. Without these connections, our lives would become a collection of disconnected impressions, each incapable of acquiring much significance beyond the moment in which it occurred.

Perhaps this is why we are so reluctant to entertain the possibility that the interval between two encounters might contain something other than the continuous existence we expect. The possibility threatens not merely our assumptions about other people, but the narrative by which we understand our own lives.

I do not claim that this narrative is false. On the contrary, I have every reason to believe that the gentleman I encountered in the town had continued to live throughout the years since our previous meeting. I should be astonished to learn otherwise, and would probably insist upon hearing the explanation twice.

But I have learned, during my years of philological study, that a word may conceal an assumption, and during my years of observing human nature that an assumption may conceal an entire philosophy.

We say that a man has returned, and suppose that he must have been there all along.

We say that a friend has changed, and assume that there has been one continuous subject undergoing the change.

We say that we have not seen someone for twenty years, and speak as though the twenty years belonged to a single, uninterrupted story whose central character has been quietly waiting for our return.

Perhaps he has.

But the interesting thing is that we know this not because we have observed every page of his story, but because we possess good reasons for believing that the story continued when we were not reading it.

I find this a more satisfactory conclusion than the alternative. It preserves common sense without requiring us to mistake common sense for omniscience.

It is now approaching midnight, and I must confess that the gentleman has occupied considerably more of my evening than he occupied of my afternoon. I have been at home for only a few hours, and yet I have managed to travel, in thought, from a bookseller's doorway in the town to the philosophical problem of personal identity, with a brief excursion to an Ethiopian monastery thrown in for good measure.

I hope he would be gratified to learn how much intellectual labour his five minutes of conversation have occasioned. I rather suspect he would be alarmed.

Tomorrow, I shall almost certainly return to the town. I may meet him again, although I hope he will not insist upon discussing metaphysics. If he does, I shall ask him whether he has been in continuous existence since our conversation, and whether he can furnish satisfactory evidence of the fact.

He will doubtless regard the question as absurd.

I shall agree with him.

Then I shall go home and write it all down.

For there is one consolation in philosophy: even when it cannot establish whether a man has existed continuously since his last appearance, it can usually establish that he has given another man a very uncomfortable evening.

And that, in my experience, is already more than one should reasonably demand of an acquaintance.

I shall now put the pen to rest, with the hope that sleep will prove to be an interruption in consciousness rather than an interruption in existence. I have no particular desire to discover tomorrow morning that I must introduce myself anew to the gentleman in the mirror.

Should that unfortunate event occur, I shall at least have the advantage of knowing precisely where to begin my inquiry.

I remain, my Little Charlotte, your obedient servant,

Timothy Monday

Cumbria