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David Hume’s Notion of Personal Identity: Implications for Identity Construction and Affective Communal Living in Africana Societies



Author(s)

Lawrence Bamikole

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DOI:10.17265/2159-5313/2014.04.003

The notion of personal identity is a topic that is widely discussed in all philosophical traditions-western, African, Asian, and Caribbean. The thread that runs through the different conceptions of personal identity is that the notion is linked with self-consciousness, whether in the metaphysical, epistemological, religious, or social contexts. In this paper, I shall focus attention on Hume’s conception of personal identity drawing from it, and certain implications for affective communal life in Africana societies. It is a common knowledge among philosophers that Hume denies the ontological and independent existence of the self. For Hume, the self is a bundle of perception. However, in another section of the Treatise of Human Nature, Hume examines the development of what could be considered as self, placing it in a broad social context in which mirroring fellow minds have a critical role. What is significant in Hume’s conception of personal identity is that the self is the locus of multifarious experiences and the social context in which it is placed enables us to relate the self to affective and relational construction of identity. It is then argued that this conception of identity can be used to stress the need for affection, love, compassion, sympathy, and empathy among persons, which in turn can promote societal transformation in Africana societies.

David Hume, personal identity, affective community, sympathy and empathy, Africana societies