Theseus, the great king of Athens, sailed to Crete to slay the Minotaur. After his victory, he escaped on a ship going to Delos. This ship came to be famously known as the ship of Theseus. But over time, the ship components started to rot and rust. The sailors, fearing the ship would sink, started replacing the old wooden components with metal components one by one. After few years, the entire ship was replaced with new components. This raised a question:
Is it still the same ship that Theseus sailed on?
After all, the ship components were entirely removed. And if it is not the same ship, then when had it stopped being the original ship of Theseus?
Now suppose the discarded components of the original ship was kept safely and reassembled to form a new ship. Now we have two ships. This again raises another question:
Which one is the real Ship of Theseus?
What exactly is the identity of an object or an animal or a person? What makes something or someone the same over time? Many of my cells must have died and been replaced when I started writing this. Am I the same person who started writing this blog post?
Identity can be argued to be either materialistic or continuous. Materialistic identity means that an object remains the same as long as it has the same materials. In this case, the second ship would become the original one. But Theseus never sailed on this new ship so how can it be the original one? So does that mean, the objects identity lies in the continuity of the object? That if the change is gradual or continuous, the object is the same. In this case, the ship with gradual replacements is the real one.
This tension between the two views makes the Ship of Theseus so interesting. On one hand, the first ship looks original if we consider the continuious nature of the ship. On the other hand, the second ship sounds more authentic as the materials that make it up are the same as the original ship.
Now if we apply the same thought experience to ourselves, we are forced to question the meaning of identity. Is it our body which keeps changing just like the first ship? Or is it our memory that makes us who we are? Same goes for other people in our lives.
I can make this parallel to the Ship of Theseus. Friendships or relationships rarely collapses all at once. There is a lot of quiet and substitutions. Maybe some habits change, some beliefs are questioned and sometimes the once familiar laughter is replaced by silence. Just like rot and rust work on the ship, life works the same way with people. From the outside, people look intact and recognizable enough to be called the same. Yet something has changed. What emerges is not a complete stranger but a version so subtly changed that love struggles to locate its memory. Each experience replaces a piece of what once held two people together, until the original material exists only in recollection. At some point, the question ceases to be what went wrong and becomes what remains. It is in this quiet realization that the breaking point lies: not destruction, but change beyond recognition. Is it the same person who left us?
I cannot help but think of a butterfly while asking this question. The question of whether something remains the same after all its parts are replaced is similar to the question of whether a butterfly is the same butterfly after it has metamorphosed. Initially, there is no butterfly. All we have is a caterpillar. Its cell keeps on changing day by day until a new form is emerged. This new form has wings where there were none. It has flight which the caterpillar never knew. And yet, we insist it is the same being. The butterfly remembers nothing about the crawling in the same way that the ship doesn’t remember the old parts. The identity is not in the resemblance but in the continuity of the being. The ship would not have survived without the replacement and the butterfly would not have existed without the metamorphosis. Perhaps it is not really about the “realness” of an object or a being but in its persistance. Not in what remains unchanged, but in what continues to be. Some transformations are so complete that the idea of the “original” becomes meaningless. Maybe what matters is the idea of becoming what we are moving towards.
There is a great underrated movie about identity and questioning one’s beliefs and about rediscovery. I think it is a must watch for anyone who is interested in this topic.
“Purze mila kar hi to admi banta hoga”
“Kuch aur bhi hota hoga, warna purze badalne se admi badal jaata”
Ship of Theseus (2012)
View on IMDb
