Do you know the story of the “Ship of Theseus?”
Theseus was one of the greatest Greek mythological heroes. Often called “the father of Athens,” his role in Greek mythology is compared with that of Romulus, founder of Rome. Ancient Greeks had a saying: “Nothing without Theseus.”
According to myth, Theseus was abandoned as a child by his father, King Aegues, who left him a sword and a pair of shoes in a hole under a boulder. He told Aethra, the boy’s mother, that when the child was strong enough to move the rock he could seek Aegues out and claim the King as his father.
Isn’t Greek mythology great?
Anyway, Theseus grew up, moved the rock and went in search of Aegues. The boy had always admired Hercules, “the most magnificent of all the heroes of Greece,” according to Edith Hamilton’s essential book, Mythology. Knowing that travelers in the Greek countryside were constantly harassed by bandits, Theseus chose to make the journey to the still provincial Athens by land in the most dangerous, heroically Herculean manner he could. He did, killing all the bandits along the way. When he arrived in Athens, his father (who recognized him by the sword he carried) proclaimed Theseus his son and heir.
Theseus, now on a serious heroic roll, went on to challenge the greatest threat of all, the half-man/half-bull Minotaur, in the Labyrinth, from which no man had previously escaped. Spoiler alert: he won, and sailed away with his new bride Ariadne. Depending on which story you believe, he either immediately deserted Ariadne on the island of Naxos or was blown out to sea leaving her on the shore. He’d also rescued thirteen young Athenians who had been the Minotaur’s prisoners!
He returned to Athens, where his father had thrown himself off a rock cliff believing Theseus to be dead (!!), making him King. He went on to unite Attica (the ancient name for Greece) but, actually not wanting to be King, established democratic rule in the city. Hamilton tells us that this made Athens “the happiest and most prosperous, the only true home of liberty, the one place in the world where the people governed themselves.”
Whew!
Plutarch also tells the story, adding an element about the ship that has resounded through thousands of years:
The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question as to things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.
Plutarch’s Lives (Volumes I and II) by Arthur Hugh Clough, emphasis added.
Think about that. Plutarch wrote his biographies in roughly 100 CE, meaning that by then the question he raised in the quote was already a matter of philosophical debate about “things that grow.” Was the restored ship of Theseus “the same” as the one on which Theseus himself had sailed? Or not? In the 17th century, Thomas Hobbes went further and asked if someone had collected all the parts that needed to be replaced and reassembled them, would that be “the ship of Theseus?” Would there then be two “ships of Theseus”?
This fable intrigues me because it poses a question about the entity that we all call “me.” You know, my “self.”
Now, we all know that my today “me” is different from my yesterday’s “me,” or last year’s “me,” or “me” when I was 15. Right? On a basic physics level, we are pretty sure our body replaces all of its cells over some period of time, although the replacement rates differ for different types of cells. On a psychological level, we are certain that some of the things my “me” thought, felt, believed, valued, and did when it was 15 are vastly different than they are now. So, what remains the same? What part of my “me,” my “self,” persists?
This is not just idle speculation. There are plenty of serious thinkers who contend that the whole idea of a persistent “self” is an illusion. They range from the Buddhist idea of anatta, which holds that there is no permanent entity underlying transient human experience, to philosopher David Hume’s contention that we are nothing but a bundle of individual perceptions, to neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio who see our perception of a unified self as the brain’s construction to unify millions of individual neural processes.
These thinkers are opposed by those who see the “self” as the core of human existence. Rene Descartes famously said, “I think, therefore I am,” meaning that there must be a persistent “I” that exists across time and space. Others, like Immanuel Kant, John Locke, William James, and Ayn Rand agreed that I know there’s a persistent, essential “me” by virtue of having a point of view from which I make choices about how to live in the world. Christian thinkers go further and argue that this “me,” or “soul,” persists after death.
For me, the point is that the existence of a persistent “me” is a fundamental aspect of our lived experiences. Whether or not there “really” is an essential defining entity that persists across our lives is a question that we only pose after first rejecting the “of course there’s a ‘me’” idea that we carry around with us on a daily basis. Whether we’re “right” or not, we all live “as if…” there is something consistent about ourselves and the people we interact with. To assume otherwise is to believe that we would have to somehow “re-certify” our beliefs about ourselves and others, including our loved ones, every day (every minute?). That leads to a conclusion that is almost too chaotic to imagine. Our world is built on the belief in the persistence of (relatively!) consistent selves.
So, on this question, count me on team “Yes, there is a ‘me’ in Theseus”!
How about “you”?
Tom Guarriello is a psychologist, consultant, and founding faculty member of the Masters in Branding program at New York’s School of Visual Arts. He’s spent over a decade teaching psychology-based courses like The Meaning of Branded Objects, as well as leading Honors and Thesis projects. He’s spearheaded two podcasts, BrandBox and RoboPsych, the accompanying podcast for his eponymous website on the psychology of human-robot interaction. This essay was originally posted on Guarriello’s Substack, My Favorite Things.
Header image: courtesy of the author (made in Midjourney).