Anne Rice, Rene Descartes, The Essence of Personhood, a Novelist’s Characters, and Multiple Personality

If you went to a wax museum, where they have statues that look like famous people, you wouldn’t confuse those statues with the real people, because the essence of people is not their physical appearance, but their thoughts, feelings, and memories.

Or think of stories and movies based on the fantasy of two people who exchange bodies. We consider the person to be where their personality is, not where their usual body is.

As Rene Descartes famously said, “I think, therefore I am.” Not, I have a body, therefore I am.

My point has to do with the last post in which the novelist Anne Rice explained how she used pseudonyms only as long as she had more than one personality who wanted to publish.

She stopped using her two pseudonyms, she explained, because her thinking, memory, etc., was no longer split into three personalities. Now her Anne Rice self knew things that had previously been known only by her two other selves.

Thus, multiple personality, even though there is only one body, is not just some abstract metaphor. It deals with the practical essence of personhood. The different personalities differ from each other, and from the person’s regular self, in the essence of what makes a person a person: their autonomous and unique thoughts, feelings, and memories.

That is why I have previously said that when novelists experience the autonomy (in thought, feeling, memory) of their characters—that their characters have minds of their own—it is the essence of multiple personality.