Succeeding a successor: Grover Cleveland

Grover Cleveland

Let me take another puzzle from Roy Sorensen’s book that I quoted in my blog last week. It’s about American presidents:

“Grover Cleveland was inaugurated as the 22nd and 24th US president, succeeding Benjamin Harrison, who was the 23rd president. Who was the other [US] president who succeeded his successor? ... You do not need any historical hints” (p. 20).

Unlike last week, I’ll give the answer immediately, so if you want to figure it out yourself, stop reading NOW.

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According to Sorensen the answer is Harrison, for “Benjamin Harrison succeeded his successor, because his successor was Grover Cleveland. Harrison was elected after Cleveland’s first term. Although Harrison was elected only one term, he succeeded his successor” (pp. 256-7).

At first sight, the answer seems correct. Let me do some simple logic:

(1) Cleveland = Harrison’s successor {namely during his second term as the 24th US president}.

(2) Harrison succeeded Cleveland {namely when Harrison became the 23th US president,
he succeeded Cleveland who had finished his first term as the 22th US president}.

Now fill in (1) in (2) and we get:

(3) Harrison succeeded Harrison’s successor.

In plain English we would formulate (3) as “Harrison succeeded his successor”, and that’s what Sorensen contends.

So far so good. Nevertheless, I wouldn’t be surprised if you think that there is something wrong with (3), even though the formal reasoning is correct. Anyway, I think that Harrison did not succeed his successor, although he succeeded Cleveland, who later became his successor. Just this “later became” is the point where Sorensen goes wrong, to my view, for what he ignores is the aspect of time. The question is: Is Cleveland as the 24th US president identical with Cleveland as the 22th US president? My answer is “No”, at least not in the respect we are discussing here: Being the successor of Harrison.

A much discussed issue in analytical philosophy is the question what makes a person P₂ at time t₂ the same person as person P₁ at time t₁. For example, what makes a ten years old schoolboy living in a provincial capital in the north of the Netherlands the same person as the philosopher who writes a blog about a philosophical puzzle more than fifty years later somewhere in the centre of the Netherlands? Now I pass over a long and extensive discussion, but we can say that in the first place it’s the physical continuity between the schoolboy and the philosopher that does, but – as most philosophers stress – it’s especially the psychological continuity in time between the schoolboy and the philosopher that makes them the same person. When talking about psychological continuity we have to think of qualities like character traits, memory, experiences, etc. Does the philosopher still remember to which school he went? Is he still like the boy who wanted to be the best of the class? Does the boy’s experience that he fell from a bridge explains the philosopher’s fear for water? To the extent that we can answer such questions with “yes”, we can say that the philosopher is still the same person as the schoolboy; to the extent that we have to say “no” the philosopher has changed and got another personality. Who doesn’t know the sayings “Oh, John has changed so much through the years”. Or “Pete is still like the one I met fifty years ago for the first time”?

Now I think that it’s clear that the ten years old schoolboy is not the philosopher he is fifty years later. Maybe someone would have predicted that the boy would become a philosopher, but then he was not the philosopher we see fifty years later writing blogs. Let’s now assume that you are also a blogger and you write in your blog “Fifty years ago I was a friend of philosopher By the Way, but when we left the primary school, we lost sight of each other and we have been out of touch since then.” Is this statement true? No. Maybe you were a friend of the boy who would become a philosopher but not of the philosopher. The characteristic “philosopher” applies only to the man many years later and not to the schoolboy, even if that man and the schoolboy can be considered otherwise the same person. In this respect the schoolboy has changed. And so it is also with Grover Cleveland as the 22nd president of the USA. At the moment that Benjamin Harrison became the 23 US president (in 1889), Cleveland was not the successor of Harrison, but the successor of Chester A. Arthur, the 21st US president. It was only four years later (in 1893) that Cleveland became Harrison’s successor. It is an anachronism and therefore wrong to ascribe in 1889 to Cleveland a characteristic he would get only four years later, and at least in this respect Cleveland as the 22nd US president is not identical with Cleveland as the 24th US president. So there has been only one US president that succeeded his successor: Grover Cleveland. When he did, Cleveland became a little bit another person (namely by becoming the successor of his successor), even though he was physically and psychologically continuous with the Grover Cleveland who had ended his term as president of the USA four years before and who lacked the characteristic just mentioned.