Virtual identity crisis: The phenomenology of Lockean selfhood in the “Age of Disruption”

Abstract

From the end of the seventeenth century to now well into the 21st, John Locke’s theory of personal identity has been foundational in the field of philosophy and psychology. Here we suggest that there are two fundamental threads intertwined in Lockean identity, the flux of perception-thought-action (i.e. continuity of consciousness) and memory. Using Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Paul Ricoeur, and Bernard Steigler as guides we will see that these threads constitute a phenomenological self (l’ésprit), a lived experience of our identity that is not only perhaps the most essential component of our humanity, but also the most threatened in today’s ongoing, commercial convergence of the real and the virtual in the “Age of Disruption”.