Losing Ourselves

Learning to Live without a Self

Jay L. Garfield

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780691220291
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Philosophies orientales

Why you don't have a self—and why that's a good thing In Losing Ourselves, Jay Garfield, a leading expert on Buddhist philosophy, offers a brief and radically clear account of an idea that at first might seem frightening but that promises to liberate us and improve our lives, our relationships, and the world. Drawing on Indian and East Asian Buddhism, Daoism, Western philosophy, and cognitive neuroscience, Garfield shows why it is perfectly natural to think you have a self—and why it actually makes no sense at all and is even dangerous. Most importantly, he explains why shedding the illusion that you have a self can make you a better person.Examining a wide range of arguments for and against the existence of the self, Losing Ourselves makes the case that there are not only good philosophical and scientific reasons to deny the reality of the self, but that we can lead healthier social and moral lives if we understand that we are selfless persons. The book describes why the Buddhist idea of no-self is so powerful and why it has immense practical benefits, helping us to abandon egoism, act more morally and ethically, be more spontaneous, perform more expertly, and navigate ordinary life more skillfully. Getting over the self-illusion also means escaping the isolation of self-identity and becoming a person who participates with others in the shared enterprise of life.The result is a transformative book about why we have nothing to lose—and everything to gain—by losing our selves.

1

Who Do You Think You Are?

WHAT A SELF IS AND WHY YOU THINK YOU HAVE ONE

What We Mean by Self

In a memorable passage from chapter 6 of Introduction to the Middle Way (Madhyamakāvatāra), Candrakīrti (c. 600–650 CE) introduces us to the target of any critique of the idea of the self. He argues that it is important to keep that target clearly in view, and that it is important not to confuse it with other ideas in the conceptual neighborhood. Candrakīrti tells the story of a man who is afraid that a poisonous snake has taken up residence in one of the walls of his house. In order to alleviate his fear, the man searches the house for an elephant, and satisfies himself that there is none there. He then rests at ease. [6.141]¹

What is the moral of this odd Indian tale? Candrakīrti’s idea is that even once we recognize that a conception or a commitment is causing us problems, it is often easier and more tempting to confuse it with another idea, to refute that other idea, and to leave the problematic conception in place. This is particularly true when we suffer from an irresistible compulsion to adhere to the initial problematic commitment, despite the difficulties it raises. The serpent in this analogy is the self. Candrakīrti thinks that even a little philosophical reflection will convince us that there is something amiss in our thinking that we are selves.

Candrakīrti also thinks that the self illusion undermines any attempt to understand who and what we are, and that this failure to understand the nature of our own existence and identity can be devastating to our moral lives. I agree. For this reason, although the majority of this book is concerned with investigating the illusion of the self and defending the idea that we are selfless persons, in the end it is really a book about ethics. I ask the reader to bear this in mind, and I promise that even though I may lead you through some thorny philosophical patches, the payoff will come when we return to ethical reflection in chapters 6–9.

Candrakīrti argues that, despite our ability to understand the incoherence of the idea of the self, we have an innate tendency to think of ourselves as selves. For this reason, he takes it that it is easier to respond to the philosophical unease arising from the self idea by rejecting some other position—such as that the self is the body, or the mind, or even the mind-body complex—than to reject the self entirely. When we do this, we may reassure ourselves that none of these elephants are around, but we leave the serpent in place in our conceptual scheme. So, he argues, the first thing we must do is identify what this self is supposed to be. We thereby ensure that our analyses are directed at the correct target.²

I agree. Candrakīrti was writing in an Indian context. So, the view of the self that he took as the object of negation in his argument (an argument we will explore in chapter 2) is the view that to be a sentient being is to be an ātman. This term is usually and appropriately translated into English as self or soul. The idea that the ātman lies at the core of our being is ubiquitous in orthodox Indian philosophy, and it was a principal target of Buddhist critique. In the Vedas, and in particular, the Upaniṣads—the texts that ground many of the orthodox Indian philosophical schools—it is characterized as unitary, as the witness of all that we perceive, as the agent of our actions, and as the enjoyer of our aesthetic experience. It is regarded as that which is always the subject, never the object; and as that which persists through life despite changes in body and mind, and which even persists beyond death and in transmigration.³

The Indian classic Bhagavad Gītā (Song of the Lord) characterizes the relation between the self and the embodied person as akin to that between you and your wardrobe. Each day you might put on a new set of clothes, but you are still you, the bearer of those clothes; you are not in any sense identical to them, and you are the same individual who put on different clothes yesterday and who may put on new ones tomorrow. Just so, according to the Gītā, you, the ātman, put on a new mind and body in each life, but are never identical to any mind or body; instead, you are the bearer of that mind and body, which are just as much objects to your subjectivity as any external phenomenon. [2.22]⁴ Your mind and body are instruments by means of which you know and act on the world, and they are therefore distinct from that self that makes use of those instruments.

Later Indian philosophers such as Uddyotakara (c. sixth century CE) and Śaṅkara (c. eighth century CE) present more systematic accounts of and arguments for the reality of the ātman. They argue that it is necessary in order to explain sensory integration, as in seeing the various colors in a butterfly’s wings as constituting its variegation, or in assigning sounds, colors, smells, and other such properties to the same object. Without a self, they argue, these would simply be independent sensory experiences, with no common subject, and so could not be assigned to any common object.

They also argue that the self is necessary in order to explain the possibility of memory: my remembering today what I did yesterday requires that the subject of the remembered experience and the subject of the memory are identical. Moreover, they argue that it is necessary in order to account for moral desert, since the one who is to be praised or blamed for any action must be identical to the agent of that action. Our minds and bodies, they concede, change from day to day, violating the condition of identity. So, neither mind nor body, they conclude, is a candidate for the self; the self must be something that stands behind both mind and body as the locus of our identity. We will return to these arguments in more detail in chapter 4.

It is against the existence of this ātman that Candrakīrti’s arguments are directed. And so, as we shall see when we turn to those arguments, the Buddhist position, and indeed any no-self position, must assume the burden of explaining both the apparent integration of consciousness at each moment and our perceived identity over time in the absence of a unitary subject and agent. In order to be successful, these no-self positions must show both that the idea of the self is incoherent and that everything that the self is meant to explain can be explained in its absence. That is, the proponent of the no-self view must show that everything that the self is meant to explain can actually be accomplished by a person, a socially embedded human being with no self.

The ātman reemerges in another guise in a Christian context as the psyche, another term usually translated as soul. In this context as well, the soul is held to be enduring, and to endure even after death (although in the Christian tradition, not through reincarnation, but instead through eternal reward in Heaven or damnation in Hell). The psyche, like the ātman, is held to be distinct from and to be the possessor of the mind and body; the subject of knowledge; the agent of action; the object of moral approbation or disapprobation; and the enjoyer or sufferer of reward and punishment. Once again, philosophers worked assiduously to develop arguments for the existence and nature of this thing deemed so necessary by religious figures, defending its immortality, its simplicity, and its function as the unitary focus of experience and action. St. Augustine (354–430) also argues that it is immediately available to us in introspection and that it has the distinctive property of freedom, of exemption from causation in its active role, a property he deems necessary for moral responsibility.

Those, like Hume and the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976),⁵ who argue in the Western tradition against the existence of the self, have this Christian version in mind as their target. For our purposes, the Indian ātman and the Christian psyche are close enough in content, and are defended on similar enough grounds, that we can often treat them as manifestations of the same broad idea. I would add that the difference between a religious view according to which we are reborn and one in which the afterlife is in Heaven or Hell is incidental, and indeed that the entire question of post-mortem existence is irrelevant to the debate about the existence of the self, despite the religious context in which that that debate is often prosecuted, and despite the fact that anxiety about post-mortem existence may motivate our belief in the self.

As we will see, this debate can be, and often is, pursued in an entirely secular register. You might think the fact that the idea that our existence involves the reality of a self emerges in diverse traditions is evidence for its correctness. I hope instead to show you that this ubiquity is in fact evidence for a kind of innate tendency to succumb to a particular cognitive illusion. I hope also to show you that philosophical arguments for the reality of the self are only ways to ramify that illusion into explicit doctrine. And throughout this study, I will use the word self only to refer to this kind of self, reserving the word person to denote the complex, constructed, socially embedded psychophysical complexes in which I will argue we really consist. This is important: sometimes people use the word self indifferently to refer to a self or to a person. If we are careful about the use of these terms, we can avoid confusion as well as the tendency to confuse merely verbal differences with real disagreements.⁶

The efflorescence in the West of systematic argument for the existence of the self and of reflection on its nature (as well as for critique of that idea, to which we return in chapter 2) was the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century period known as the Early Modern period of Western philosophy. Descartes (1596–1650) famously argues in his Meditations on First Philosophy that we can be certain of our existence as res cogitans, or as thinking things, identical not with our bodies, or our perceptual faculties, but with our faculty of abstract reason. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), defending a position very much like that of many of the orthodox Indian schools, argues in the Critique of Pure Reason that the self is a noumenon, a transcendental object existing outside of space and time, a pure subject or perceptual, conceptual, and aesthetic experience and agent of action, transcendentally free of the causal order.

The arguments and views of each of these philosophers have been addressed in detail by many scholars, and it is not my purpose here either to articulate or to criticize them (although we will return to them in chapter 4), but only to use them to get a fix on the object of negation, to identify the self the existence of which will be the target of the arguments to come. And the first thing to say is that, like the white whale, belief in the self is ubiquitous: it seems to crop up in some form in every major religious and philosophical tradition. We seem to be wired to experience ourselves as selves just as we are wired to see the two lines in the Müller-Lyer illusion as unequal in length, even when we know them to be equal.

That You Really Believe That You Have Such a Self

“But wait,” you might say, “long-dead religious philosophers might have thought that there was such a thing as a self, but I am a modern person. I think no such thing. I take myself to be nothing more than a psychophysical complex, what you, Garfield, want to call a person.” This is a common reaction, and if it were correct, I would indeed be attacking a straw man. So, I now want to convince you that you, just like the orthodox Indian philosophers, just like the Church Fathers, and just like Descartes and Kant, understand your own identity as that of a self. I will do that by means of an easy thought experiment.

One nice thing about imagination and desire is that we can imagine or desire anything, including that which is impossible. When I was very young, I wanted to count to the highest number, but of course there is none; the natural numbers just keep going on and on. The great mathematician David Hilbert (1862–1943) wanted to prove the completeness and consistency of arithmetic, something Kurt Gödel (1906–1978) showed to be impossible. We might wish to live in the universes depicted by the artist of the impossible M. C. Escher (1898–1972). And so on. I say this, because I am going to invite you to imagine, and even to desire, something that might be impossible, and I do not want your sense that it is impossible to lead you to balk in following me in this thought experiment.

The experiment proceeds in two parts. First, think of somebody whose body you would like to...