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or because we did not value ourselves but because personal identity is not what
matters in survival.
Unfortunately, Lucretius did not argue for his view that it is identity that
matters in survival. Yet, because he was so widely read both during the middle
ages and into the modern period, he introduced into the discussion of self and
survival the question of what matters in survival. As we shall see, this question
resurfaced again in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries
and then again in our own times, when it moved to center stage.
Neoplatonism
During the first three centuries c.e., most of Roman philosophy had a this-
worldly orientation. Yet there was also a dramatic increase in
philosophy with
an otherworldly or religious orientation, primarily among marginal groups,
such as the Jews and Christians, but also among the Greeks. The most original
and influential of these Greek thinkers was Plotinus (204-270 c.e.), who viewed
the world hierarchically, with the One at the top of the hierarchy, humans in the
middle, and physical objects at the bottom. In this scheme, reality, unity, and
intrinsic worth emanate from above and vary directly in proportion to each
other. Thus, the One is not only the most real, unified, and intrinsically valuable
thing but the source of whatever reality, unity, and intrinsic value other things
have that are lower in the hierarchy. Plotinus’s development of these ideas
marked a new beginning for Platonism.
In Plato’s philosophy of self and personal identity, in which he put forward his
view of the soul, he did not ask what accounts for the unity of the self at any given
time . Had he raised this question, he might have answered that the soul’s imma-
teriality and, hence, its indivisibility, accounts for its unity. However, in his psy-
chology
of self, in the Republic
and elsewhere, he suggested a different sort of
answer. In the context of a discussion in which his concern was on what is con-
ducive to harmony in the soul, he claimed that when the rational part of a per-
son’s soul is in charge, the person lives morally and his soul is harmonious.
Six centuries later, Plotinus raised more fine-grained questions about the
unity of consciousness.
He argued that unity would be impossible if the soul
were matter because matter is inherently divisible in a way that would destroy
the mind’s unity. While conceding that the soul too is divisible, he argued that it
is divisible in a way that does not interfere with its unity. “The nature, at once
divisible and indivisible, which we affirm to be soul has not the unity of an
extended thing: it does not consist of separate sections; its divisibility lies in its