Losing Ourselves

 Knowing my interest in all things philosophical and Buddhist, my esteemed colleague and fellow former Target Ranger JW recently suggested that I might appreciate Sam Harris' interview of Jay Garfield.  In fact, I enjoyed the interview so much that I've now read the book that they discussed, and listened to a number of other Sam Harris podcasts (or at least the parts he makes available for free).  Garfield, a professor of philosophy and Buddhist studies at Harvard has written a lovely and accessible explanation of what the idea of non-self means, as well as what's at stake in the debate about whether we have a self.  About half the book is devoted to philosophical arguments against the existence of a self, and the other half to elaborating what Garfield thinks we gain in affirming that we are persons, not selves.  While this question of identity is the deepest philosophical water I know of, Garfield does an admirable job of presenting everything in terms that anyone can understand and appreciate.  In terms of writing, there's really only one slightly dense chapter when Garfield confronts various advocates for a "minimal self"; the rest of the book is a breeze to read.  So let's hope his little book brings the idea of non-self to a much bigger audience. 

Before we discuss the details, I want to mention some of the background that makes Garfield's approach uniquely valuable.  First, while we generally think of anatta as a Buddhist idea, aimed specifically at the Hindu concept of atman, Garfield is not himself a Buddhist.  Or at least, while I don't know how (or if) he self-identifies spiritually, he does not write from the perspective of a practicing Buddhist, and the podcast revealed that he is not even a meditator.  This is a book of philosophy that argues, like all good philosophy, that we should change the way we think about ourselves.  Because it's not a practical guide to seeing non-self, written from the perspective that, should you look long enough, this is what you will necessarily see or at least should see, it's much more useful in letting someone with a critical mindset approach this concept on their own.  The closest thing to this that I've found within Buddhism would be the simplicity of Tejaniya's teaching -- just try to be aware, and find out whatever you find there.  While just thinking that you are not a self may not change your experience as quickly or as deeply as seeing it 'firsthand', so to speak, this approach has the potential to reach a much broader audience (though maybe these days there are more meditators than students of philosophy).  Second, Garfield's definition of what counts as philosophy is refreshingly broad.  He's as happy to cite Chandrakirti as Hume.  Nagarjuna and Heidegger comfortably inhabit the same paragraph.  He clearly doesn't subscribe to our sad, modern, Western assumption that we should, in the name of 'science' and 'progress', ignore most of the philosophy done in most of the world throughout most of time.  Non-Western philosophy is about as enlightening a term as non-linear science and non-elephant zoology.  While for years I was certainly guilty of tacitly making this assumption, I have several shelves to prove that I've worked on rectifying the problem over the past 5 years.

Garfield centers the book on the distinction between a self and a person.  A self is the imaginary inner substance or individual soul that we often identify with.  It's the homunculus-like inner witness who watches the projection screen of the Cartesian Theater.  It's the thing that supposedly stands behind and possesses our mind and body and experience, while remaining separate from any of these.  We often pack all of our subjectivity, interiority, and identity into this fixed dimensionless point outside of time and space, separated from everything but itself.  By contrast, a person is a real entity constituted through interaction with the world.  Though Garfield doesn't put it quite like this, a person arises in the manner of a vortex -- it doesn't preexist its instantiation in some realm of Platonic forms, but is constructed and changeable.  While it doesn't possess the (putative) reality of a metaphysical substance, a person still has the ability to affect and be affected by the world because it is embodied in an organism, embedded in a world, and enacted in a society.  In fact, affection (otherwise known as power) is the only definition of reality that makes sense.

From the outset of the book Garfield draws the distinction between persons and selves, explains how no matter what terms we use this is not a merely linguistic distinction, and demonstrates how we often take ourselves to be selves instead of people.  Then he  spends most of the first half of the book critiquing the many philosophical arguments explaining why we must have a self.  It's a terrific survey of a perennial philosophical issue.  I found his arguments against the self to be cogent and convincing, but then again he's preaching to the choir in my case; it has been a long time since I (intellectually) believed that anything had an essence.  His takeaway image is that belief in the self is a cognitive illusion just like to the Müller-Lyer illusion -- even when we know it is illusory, we can't help seeing it this way.  

While this analogy provides a memorable shorthand, I don't think the word "illusion" is appropriate here, given its implication of a contrast between appearance and reality.  It may sound like splitting hairs, but I'd prefer to think of the self as an effect, like a 'special effect' in the movies, or an 'optical effect' like a rainbow.  These effects are as real and objective as anything can be, it's just that following the rainbow does not take you to a pot of gold.  As Nietzsche explained, the word "illusion" should simply be banned from metaphysical discussion.  Nothing is an illusion.  Or everything is.  But the middle position is an incoherent conflation of what we were hoping to get from the truth with 'the truth itself'.  Everything, including the claim I am making right now, has to be evaluated based on whether it is useful, or perhaps more accurately said, based on which one, which type of life, it is useful for.  Naturally, this is also how we should judge the question of whether we 'really' have a self or not.  While I think that it's fine to argue against the existence of the self on rational, logical, and empirical grounds, the idea that we're ever going to 'prove' something one way or the other here strikes me as faintly comic.  

So while I thoroughly enjoyed the first half of the book, I think it's actually the second half -- where Garfield begins to discuss what kind of world we create when we think we have a self, and what new kind we might create if we discarded this notion -- that provides the stronger 'argument' against the existence of a self.  Because when you start to think about it, you realize that it actually sucks to be a self.  The life of a self is completely cut off from everything else. It exists only as a pure subjective interior, endlessly beset by Cartesian doubt about whether its experiences reflect real objects, and endlessly questioning whether there is even any subject other than itself in this lonely universe.  Life with a self is life post the zombie-apocalypse.  It is another example what Nietzsche called the belief in an ascetic ideal --  a mode of living that preserves a 'pure' life only at the cost of diminishing it as far as possible.  To be a self is to shrink life to the transcendental vanishing point, which then suddenly acquires the delusion of grandeur we call 'free will' -- a will completely separated from its power of acting.  By contrast, life is a whole lot better as a person.  A person isn't isolated from the world and others but only constituted in its connection to them.  Like Simondon's individual, the person always has a milieu, a context.  Garfield points out how we often feel our best when we are immersed in this context during a flow state.  And he has an interesting chapter inspired by Vasudevi Reddy's account of the way persons are co-created through the reciprocity of second-person perspective dialog (as opposed to the solipsistic first-person perspective of the self).  His point is to show us that giving up on the idea of the self is not an impoverishment of our existence but a jailbreak -- we lose nothing but our chains.  

But perhaps his most persuasive reason for changing our perspective on how we are constructed -- admitting that we are constructed -- is that it has major positive ethical implications.  A self is, of course, out for its self.  It is exclusively, 'naturally', and pretty much by definition, egotistical.  A person, however, actually can't be completely egotistical, since it cannot exist alone.  People co-construct one another in a way that Garfield compares to actors in a larger drama.  While this does not guarantee the harmony the beautiful soul dreams of -- we are perfectly capable of constructing our self as the enemy of someone -- it does also open the door to the possibility of a kindness and compassion that are not based on 'enlightened' self interest.  Thus Garfield connects the idea of non-self to the virtues of the brahmaviharas.  If we accept that we are all together constructing the world as we construct ourselves, then we are apt to start wanting the same thing for all the 'other' non-selves that we want for our 'own' non-self.  This is not because we think they are just like us in being little copies of the universal transcendental Subject, but because we have ceased to be sure exactly where we stop and they begin.  Instead of desperately holding on to our little life, we find that if we give it away, we get a much larger life in return.  Nihilism overcomes itself.