The Identity That Persists: III. The History of a Participant

If a participant can persist while its participation changes, something else becomes possible.

It can have a history.

This sounds obvious. But a history is more than a sequence of events.

Consider:

I misunderstood the question.

I reconsidered the argument.

I changed my interpretation.

I now understand it differently.

There is a sequence here, but we do not construe it simply as four unrelated events.

We construe them as changes belonging to one participant.

That is what gives the sequence its historical character.

The instantial participant provides the continuity through which successive figures can be related:

one participant → successive processes → changing participation.

The history is therefore not something added to the participant from outside.

It emerges through the participant's persistence across the unfolding instance.

This also explains why history is inseparable from change.

If the participant never changed, there would be little to distinguish one stage from another.

If the participant did not persist, the changes could not be gathered into a history belonging to one participant.

History therefore depends upon both:

variation

and:

continuity.

This is the same complementarity we have already encountered in the Nucleus.

Process unfolds.

The participant persists.

But across logogenesis, persistence allows the unfolding to accumulate.

The participant is no longer merely in successive figures.

It is now possible to construe the successive figures as its history.

This becomes particularly significant when the participant can refer to that history:

I said this earlier.

I changed my mind.

I misunderstood that before.

The participant is now represented as having a past that matters to its present participation.

Its history has become part of how the participant is construed now.

And this gives us a further step towards identity.

An instantial participant does not have to remain unchanged in order to remain identifiable.

It can become a participant with a past.

Indeed, its past may be precisely what makes its present identity intelligible.

The question is therefore beginning to shift.

We started by asking how a participant persists across different processes.

We can now ask:

What happens when that persistence accumulates into a history?

Because once a participant has a history, it is no longer simply something that persists.

It is something that can be construed as having become.

And that may be where persistence begins to look remarkably like identity.