APPALACHIAN STATE UNIVERSITY
DEPARTMENT OF THEATRE & DANCE presents
The Philosophy of Iris
by Dr. Christopher Bartel
Assistant Professor of Philosophy
Warning: Spoilers!
Still Life with Iris presents an interesting scenario: who would you be if you lost all of your memories? This scenario has an old and venerable history—it represents a particular concern for personal identity. Philosophers have long questioned what it is that makes us who we are. What exactly is “personal identity”? What is it that distinguishes one person from another? And what is the source of a person’s uniqueness? As old and respected as this philosophical question is, equally as old and respected are the many attempts to grapple with this question within the arts. Still Life with Iris presents one such attempt, and it is one that philosophers would well recognize.
The problem of personal identity goes (roughly) like this. Imagine that I have a bicycle and each week I replace one part of my bike: the tires, the wheels, the handlebars, the chain and so on. This goes on for a long time until eventually I even replace the frame. At the end of this process, my bike is made up of completely new parts. Do I have the same bike that I began with? If you think that it is not the same bike, then you would need to identify at which point did my bike become a “new bike”. Was it when I changed the frame? Or was it when I changed the first valve cover? If you think that it is the same bike, then you would need to identify what it is about “my bike” that persists over time and cannot be destroyed by such drastic changes. This is the basic idea of the persistence problem: something persists over time if it is not altered, but clearly my bike was completely altered. So, if my bike still persists despite the many changes that it has suffered, then “my bike” cannot be identical to any of its parts.
The problem becomes even more tricky when we talk about the persistence of a person. People change all the time: physically, spatially, psychologically. We have changes of mood, changes of belief, even changes of personality. Physically, we might suffer dramatic changes—I might lose my legs, but presumably I would still be the same person. Even without suffering such sudden changes, people physically change constantly. I am physically very different today from the person that I was when I was six. Today, I am taller, heavier and have much less hair on my head! In fact, given that the cells of the body are constantly dying and being regenerated, I literally have nothing physically in common with my six-year-old self. Not only that, but I am psychologically very different as well. My personality has changed, my beliefs have changed, my tastes have changed and I would like to believe that I am smarter today than I was then! So am I the same person that I was when I was six? If you think that I am, then what has persisted all this time that links me to that six-year-old?
The answer given by the British philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) is that personal identity is secured through the persistence of memory. The person I am today is the same person as that six-year-old because I retain memories of events that were experienced by that six-year-old. Sure, I forget things. But, so what? There is still a continuity of experience leading from that six-year-old “Christopher Bartel” to the present-day “Christopher Bartel”. There are things that happened to that six-year-old that only I remember, and I have remembered ever since. But, what happens if I were to lose all of my memories indelibly?
In Still Life with Iris, we are presented with a version of Locke’s theory of the persistence of memory and the possibility of radical forgetting. We are told by the Memory Mender that PastCoats must be cared for attentively. The tiniest rip or loose button could lead to the loss of an important memory. “Every stitch, every pocket, every button and sleeve—it’s your whole life in there!” The loss of a person’s PastCoat is the loss of their past—which is to say the loss of their memory. Without a PastCoat, there is no memory left to persist, in which case the person’s identity is lost. It is as if they had their memory completely erased.
While Still Life with Iris presents a roughly Lockean view of personal identity, there are interesting differences with the Lockean theory as well. One consequence of the Lockean theory is that, were a person’s memory to be indelibly lost, so too would their identity. A “person” cannot survive the loss of their memory. Imagine that I had my brain erased so completely that I could not even remember how to walk, speak English or tie my shoes. Perhaps years later I could develop these skills again, but I would never recover my lost memories. According to the Lockean theory, the person who resides in my body those many years later would be a different person from me, because we share no memories in common.
However, this is not the case in Still Life with Iris. When Iris loses her coat, she retains one button. This button drives her to go searching for who she was and to rediscover her parents. The most important aspect of the play is the feeling it creates that Iris retains her identity even after the loss of her PastCoat. The Lockean theory is easy to understand but difficult to accept. Iris seems like the same person throughout. She seems to be driven by the same desires, by the same personality traits. It is too difficult to let go of Iris, to believe that she is “gone”. (Though, admittedly the retention of the one button would actually confirm the Lockean theory—Iris retains one memory only, and that is enough to secure her identity—but let’s ignore this for now.) She does not seem like a new person, though that consequence is what the Lockean theory would demand. Still Life with Iris challenges the audience to consider Iris’ identity and to consider our commitment to that theory. Do we really think that identity is determined by memory? Can we easily let go of the body?
A final point worth noticing is that in Still Life with Iris, memories are physical objects—coats, sleeves, buttons, pockets. While the play still presents a broadly Lockean theory of personal identity, we seem to be presented with a consumerist version of the persistence of memory. It is not just that personal identity is determined by our memories, but more specifically that our memories are determined by the stuff that we own. Iris’ memory of the familiar table setting in her home is a button! Iris retains this memory throughout the story only because she is allowed to hang on to the button. Thus, her memories are tied specifically to objects—commodities that Iris possesses.
This makes me uncomfortable. Consumerism is the idea that we find personal happiness and fulfillment through consumption—a happy life, a life of fulfillment, is one that is filled with a greater abundance or a greater quality of consumable stuff. But, Still Life with Iris presents us with a certain view on personal identity. So, what is really being said in the play? Is the implicit message meant to be that consumption not only leads to happiness and fulfillment, but also that a person’s unique identity can be reduced to the objects of their consumption? Ick! That cannot be right. Can my identity really be reduced to the stuff that I own? Am I really a unique person because my iPod is blue? Maybe I am showing my anti-consumerist leanings too strongly, but I resent the idea that my consumption of stuff—mass produced stuff squeezed out of an anonymous factory by some poor, undervalued worker—makes me who I am. As Ian MacKaye once sang, “You are not what you own.” Objects may invoke memories, but objects literally are not memories and cannot define who we are, no matter what kind of objects they might be.
My wife and I were married on a snowy January day three years ago while I was just finishing my doctorate in London. For our honeymoon, we stayed in a little cottage by the beach in Cornwall, England. On windy days, we would get bundled up and go clambering over the rocks to huddle together with a warm thermos full of hot tea to watch the icy gray sea roll in on big crusty waves, breaking on the rocks and spraying its frosty foam at us. These are memories. This is the stuff that identity is made of—not my laptop, nor my iPod, nor even a button on a coat. And on further reflection, I suspect that this is really what memories are for Iris, too. In Iris’ strange world, memories are external things linked to objects, but they are memories of the people and places that Iris loves. Presumably the objects themselves have little intrinsic value, rather the value of her button is linked to the value of that memory. Perhaps an interesting consequence of the peculiar way in which memories are “stored” in Iris’ world is that a person could choose to rid themselves of painful memories easily—it would be as easy as popping a button off of your coat. In Iris’ world, it is possible to escape your memories. But that is not what Iris chooses. Iris is brought to the island of the Goods, where there exists one perfect example of each kind of item. But this isn’t what Iris wants—she finds no happiness in being surrounded by the best of all things. Rather, Iris wants her button back, and the coat that it belongs to, and all of the memories of the people and places that have been taken from her—the memories that she has literally discarded. Iris does not struggle simply to find out who she is. She struggles to rediscover the people and places—and memories—that make her who she is.