Personal Essay: "Is there an enduring self?-.
Is there an enduring self? Like what John Locke believed, the enduring self is defined by a person's memory. With memory there is an enduring self, and without it there is no self at all. I believe there is an enduring self. Even if a person encounters a dramatic change to his/her life, they are still the same self, the same person. I believe memory is not the only factor that defines the self. Many things form this enduring self, and these things work together to form an identity, to form who you are now. These things are your memories, your experiences, your personalities, your thoughts, beliefs, or even your daily habits are the things that form the self. .
John Locke said "what makes a person at one time the same as a person at another time is memory-, I agree to Locke's statement. But does the enduring self exists only through memory? I believe the enduring self forms not only through memory, but also through many things. The self is created by events we have encountered in the past, by our physical features, and by a lot more than just a person's memory. What if we lose our memory, then according to Locke's statement, we are not the same self anymore? Therefore, I think there are more to the self. If we lose our memories, we might become a different person, our personalities might change, but our physical features will remain the same. We would still have the same eye color, skin color, tone of voice, and the same fingerprint. People who lost their memories in a car accident, sometimes they still have the same feeling toward certain event or a person or maybe a simple object like a couch, where they used to sit on and relax for the day. Sometimes people who have no memory of their past might subconsciously do something that they used to do a lot, like a habit they used to have. In this case, memory is not the only factor in creating the enduring self.