"All they lacked was a past"

...British philosopher, Galen Strawson, who claimed to have no sense of himself as a continuously evolving being—a creature whose self consisted of a coherent story about accumulating memories and distinctive traits. Strawson was, for that reason, uninterested in his past. He acknowledged that his life had shaped him, but he believed that whether or not he consciously remembered it didn't matter to who he was now, any more than it mattered whether a musician playing a piece could call to mind a memory of each time he'd practiced: what mattered was how well he played. What was important, Strawson felt, was his life in the present. He liked to quote the third Earl of Shaftesbury, a British philosopher of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, who had felt the same way:

The metaphysicians … affirm that if memory be taken away, the self is lost. [But] what matter for memory? What have I to do with that part? If, whilst I am, I am but as I should be, what do I care more?

Nick wasn't sure he agreed with Strawson, and he certainly didn't feel, as Strawson did, that his memory of his own life was unimportant, but he found the argument somewhat comforting. He still longed to relive important moments in his life, but it was easier to think about this experience as just one of many he hadn't had, like paragliding, or visiting Peru, than as a void at the core of his self. Many people believed that their selves were made up largely of memories, and that the loss of those memories would be a self-ending catastrophe. But he knew now that there were also thousands of people like him, who had work and marriages and ideas and thwarted desires and good days and bad days and the rest of it. All they lacked was a past. ■

Just nov3 '25