The Metaphysics of Personal Identity

In the early morning hours of 31 August 2004, a Burger King employee in Richmond Hill, Georgia, found a naked, unconscious man behind the restaurant's dumpster. The man had several head injuries, his body was sunburnt and covered in ant bites, and he appeared to be in his late fifties or early sixties. He was nursed back to good physical health in the following weeks and months by hospitals and shelters, and a charity organization paid for eye surgery to remove cataracts that had left him blind.

But when the man had regained full consciousness, he could not remember who he was or what he had been doing in Georgia. He had no identity documents on him when he was found and he could remember only vague fragments of his previous life, with at least a twenty-year gap between what seemed like his memories of living in Indiana and Colorado and his reappearance in Richmond Hill. One of these vague fragments was the given name 'Benjaman' and so the man eventually adopted the name Benjaman Kyle, in part, because its initials corresponded to those of the case name assigned to him at the first hospital that had treated him: 'Burger King Unknown'. Although his injuries suggested an attack, local police never launched an official investigation into Kyle's case. The doctors and nurses who tended to him assumed that his inability to recall his identity and his history would be temporary. But Kyle's memory never returned. Three years later, he was diagnosed with severe retrograde amnesia.

1.1 THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMAN KYLE

Kyle's story attracted local and national media interest in the United States. In 2008, he appeared on the Dr. Phil show in an attempt to find people who could remember him and tell him who he was. But this plea to reconstruct his identity was as unsuccessful as the FBI's efforts to find his fingerprints in their databases and to list him as a 'missing person' – although it was not his physical presence but his history that was missing. Unlike in standard missing person cases, Kyle's whereabouts were known but his official identity was unknown, and there were no traces of Kyle's former life that could be tied to his current self. In 2009, 'genealogical detective', Colleen Fitzpatrick, assembled a research team to uncover Kyle's genetic history. They worked on his case for years. Fitzpatrick's team narrowed the pool of Kyle's potential genetic relatives to two family names, but then Kyle suddenly broke off all contact with her – not unlike other instances in which he alienated those who attempted to help him.

In 2011, John Wikstrom, then a film student at Florida State University, sought out Kyle to shoot a documentary about him. The short documentary, Finding Benjaman, became another plea for help. When Wikstrom found Kyle, he was sleeping in a park in Jacksonville, living off donations and whatever little money he could earn under the counter. In the seven years since the incident in Richmond Hill, Kyle had been unable to re-establish an official identity. Authorities assumed that he had been registered somewhere in the United States under his former name and social security number, but because Kyle remembered neither and could not produce any other valid identification, they refused to issue a new identity. Without a social security number or any other form of official identity, he could not be lawfully employed, he could not access public resources such as libraries or schools, and he could not sign contracts and was thus unable to rent an apartment or buy a mobile phone. Even homeless shelters had turned him away.

Wikstrom's documentary, which played at several high-profile film festivals, reignited interest in the case. Due to the engagement of a Florida State Representative, Kyle was able to obtain a replacement identity card; a local restaurant owner in Jacksonville offered him a steady job and housing; and eventually another genealogist and television personality, CeCe Moore, took over Kyle's case, igniting a bitter rivalry between her and her former colleague, Colleen Fitzpatrick. On 15 September 2015, almost exactly eleven years after he had been found unconscious behind that dumpster in Georgia, Benjaman Kyle announced on his Facebook profile that Moore's team found his genetic relatives and his former identity, thanking her and all the friends and charities who had supported him through the years. Kyle had his social security number restored and new identity documents issued in his birth name on 21 September 2015, as reported in the Orlando Sentinel a day later. For their article about the restoration of his official identity, the Orlando Sentinel chose the subtitle, 'Amnesia Stole His Identity for 11 Years'. But this seems plainly false: Benjaman Kyle had his identity returned to him in spite of his amnesia, and it was not the amnesia that had stolen it, but whoever or whatever caused the loss of his identity documents and made him fall through the cracks of American bureaucracy. He mused to journalist Matt Wolfe – who wrote a long feature story about Kyle's case in 2016 – that the main reason he had kept on searching for his history was not a desire to reconnect with his past but access to social security: his 'civil death' appeared much more threatening to him than his inability to remember. In a literal sense, Kyle's identity was lost when it then proved impossible to find any official records of his existence prior to the attack. Indeed, one of the unsolved mysteries of the case is that, despite the fact that Kyle's birth name is known now, there is a span of more than twenty years during which there are no traces of Kyle's existence, neither under his birth name, nor his adopted name.

Even the notion that it was hard genetic evidence that finally revealed his true identity is misleading: it was not the genetic evidence as such that did this, but the instrumental role it played in re-establishing connections to records of Kyle's former life. One of the most moving moments of Wikstrom's documentary is Kyle's reflection on the fact that for years, and despite all the media attention, no one had been missing him: 'When you think about it, it's pretty pathetic if there's no one that's actually looking for someone that disappeared.' It is this reflection that might also explain his initial reluctance to divulge information about his birth name or details about the genealogical research conducted by Fitzpatrick's and Moore's teams. He may have wondered what his old identity would be worth if there was no one to whom it mattered. Colleen Fitzpatrick once suggested that he shied away from having his mystery solved because it might uncover an unhappy past.

Kyle has since re-connected with two surviving brothers and moved back to the city of his birth, Lafayette, Indiana – but he appears to keep to himself. Over the years, he received plenty of attention as a medical curiosity, a bureaucratic anomaly and as a 'human interest' story. But why should his story be of...