The Identity That Persists: II. Persistence Without Sameness

We have distinguished the persistence of a participant from the persistence of its role.

But this leaves us with a deeper question.

If the participant can change its role, its state, and even its relation to other participants, in what sense can it remain the same participant?

The temptation is to answer by looking for something that does not change.

But that would turn persistence into invariance.

And these are not the same thing.

To persist is not to remain identical in every respect.

Consider:

I misunderstood the argument.

I reconsidered it.

I changed my interpretation.

I now understand it differently.

The participant remains I throughout the sequence.

Yet something has clearly changed.

Indeed, the discourse only makes sense as a history because the participant has changed while remaining identifiable as the participant whose understanding changed.

If nothing changed, there would be no becoming.

If nothing persisted, there would be no change of anything.

So persistence and change are not opposing conditions.

They are complementary.

This brings us back to the insight contained in the Nucleus. Process provides temporal unfolding; the Medium provides persistence through which that unfolding is actualised.

But now we can see the same principle at the level of the instantial participant:

the participant persists through changing participation.

Its persistence therefore cannot consist in possessing some fixed role or unchanging state.

It consists in the continuity that allows successive differences to be related to one another.

This is why an instantial participant can have a history.

A history is not simply a collection of things that happened.

It is a sequence of changes understood as belonging to something that persists through them.

And this gives us a first glimpse of what identity might be.

Perhaps identity is not the property that makes something remain unchanged.

Perhaps it is the construal of different states and participations as belonging to one continuing participant.

The distinction is subtle, but important.

We do not say:

I am the same because nothing about me has changed.

We say:

I am the same because these changes are changes of me.

That is a very different conception of sameness.

And it suggests that identity may have less to do with invariance than with continuity through variation.

The question, then, is no longer:

What stays exactly the same?

but:

What allows change to remain the change of the same participant?

That is the question we need to follow next.