Self, No Self?: Perspectives from Analytical, Phenomenological, and Indian Traditions

339 Pages·2011·1.72 MB·English

by  Mark Siderits (Editor)

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Contents

Notes on Contributors xi

Introduction
Mark Siderits, Evan Thompson, Dan Zahavi 1

1. The Who and the How of Experience 27
Joel W. Krueger

2. The Experiential Self: Objections and Clarifications 56
Dan Zahavi

3. Nirvana and Ownerless Consciousness 79
Miri Albahari

4. Self and Subjectivity: A Middle Way Approach 114
Georges Dreyfus

5. Self-No-Self? Memory and Reflexive Awareness 157
Evan Thompson

6. Subjectivity, Selfhood and the Use of the Word 'I' 176
Jonardon Ganeri

7. 'I Am of the Nature of Seeing': Phenomenological
Reflections on the Indian Notion of Witness-Consciousness 193
Wolfgang Fasching

8. Situating the Elusive Self of Advaita Vedānta 217
Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad

9. Enacting the Self: Buddhist and Enactivist Approaches
to the Emergence of the Self 239
Matthew MacKenzie

10. Radical Self-Awareness 274
Galen Strawson

11. Buddhas as Zombies: A Buddhist Reduction of Subjectivity 308
Mark Siderits

Index 333
Preface

This work represents an attempt to begin a dialogue among philosophers
who are interested in problems to do with the nature of consciousness and the
self, but are situated in differing locations in the philosophical landscape. The
project began with a mini-conference held at Columbia University in March
2008, featuring Georges Dreyfus, Evan Thompson, and Dan Zahavi, as well
as John Dunne, speaking on the topic of the existence of a self and the
question of consciousness' reflexivity. This event was organized by the
Columbia University Seminar on Comparative Philosophy, and we wish to
express our thanks to Chris Kelley, rapporteur for the Seminar, for all he did
to make the event possible. The office of Columbia University Seminars is
also to be thanked for its generous financial support of this and similar
activities.
The event at Columbia represented a dialogue between phenomenology
and Buddhist philosophy. A larger conference was organized by the Center for
Subjectivity Research in Copenhagen in April 2009, featuring an expanded
range of voices: phenomenology and Buddhist philosophy, but also Advaita
Vedânta and analytic philosophy. Many of the papers in this collection first
saw the light of day at this conference. Their present form owes much to the
spirited and stimulating discussion that it sparked and helped foster. This
event was made possible through the generous support of The Danish
National Research Foundation and the Danish Ministry of Science,
Technology and Innovation. We must also express our deep gratitude to Joel
Krueger and Pia Kirkemann for all their help in making the event run
smoothly and successfully.
Editing of this volume was made possible in part thanks to generous
research support from the Korea Research Foundation. Thanks are also due to
Peter Momtchiloff of Oxford University Press for his support, encouragement,
and to Jennifer Lunsford and Angela Anstey‐Holroyd for their able assistance
in shepherding us through the production process.
Notes on Contributors

MIRI ALBAHARI is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University
of Western Australia, where she has held a permanent position since 2006.
She did her MA at the University of Otago (on the metaphysics of colour),
and her PhD in philosophy from the University of Calgary in 2005. Her book,
Analytical Buddhism: The Two-Tiered Illusion of Self, is on how the illusion
of self is put together. She hopes to write a follow-up book on how the
Buddhist Noble Eightfold Path, via virtue, meditation, and wisdom, could
dissolve the illusion of self in a way that does not incur the types of pathology
that are predicted by Western neuroscientists.
GEORGES DREYFUS was the first Westerner to receive the title of Geshe
after spending fifteen years studying in Tibetan Buddhist monasteries. He then
entered the University of Virginia where he received his PhD. in the History
of Religions program. He is currently Professor of Religion of the Department
of Religion at Williams College. His publications include Recognizing
Reality: Dharmakirti and his Tibetan Interpreters (SUNY Press 1997), The
Svatantrika-Prasangika Distinction (co-edited with Sara McClintock,
Wisdom 2003), and The Sound of Two Hands Clapping: The Education of a
Tibetan Buddhist Monk(University of California Press 2003), as well as many
articles on various aspects of Buddhist philosophy and Tibetan culture.
WOLFGANG FASCHING teaches philosophy at the University of Vienna
(Austria) and is presently working on a project about the nature of experiential
presence. He is the author of Phänomenologische Reduktion und Mushin:
Edmund Husserls Bewusstseinstheorie und der Zen-Buddhismus (Alber 2003).
JONARDON GANERI is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sussex.
His work is at the border between Indian and analytical philosophy. He has
published three books: The Concealed Art of the Soul: Theories of Self and
Practices of Truth in Indian Ethics and Epistemology (Clarendon
2007), Philosophy in Classical India: The Proper Work of Reason (Routledge
2001), and Semantic Powers: Meaning and the Means of Knowing in
Classical Indian Philosophy (Clarendon 1999). He is currently working on the
philosophy of mind in classical Indian thought, as well as on the philosophy of
early modern India.
JOEL W. KRUEGER is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Danish National
Research Foundation: Center for Subjectivity Research, University of
Copenhagen. His research interests include issues in phenomenology and
philosophy of mind, Asian and comparative philosophy, pragmatism, and
philosophy of music.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
MATTHEW MACKENZIE is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Colorado
State University. His primary research is in Buddhist philosophy, philosophy
of mind, phenomenology, and metaphysics. He has published in journals such
as Philosophy East and West, Asian Philosophy , and Phenomenology and the
Cognitive Sciences. He is currently co-authoring, with Bradley Park, a book
on enactivism and Asian philosophy.
CHAKRAVARTHI RAM-PRASAD is Professor in the Department of
Religious Studies at Lancaster University. His research interests include
Indian and comparative epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of
religion. Recent publications include Knowledge and Liberation in Classical
Indian Thought (2001 Palgrave), Advaita Epistemology and Metaphysics: An
Outline of Indian Non-Realism (RoutledgeCurzon 2002), and Indian
Philosophy and the Consequences of Knowledge (Ashgate, 2007).
MARK SIDERITS is currently in the philosophy department of Seoul
National University. He previously taught philosophy for many years at
Illinois State University. He is the author of Indian Philosophy of Language
(Kluwer 1991), Personal Identity and Buddhist Philosophy: Empty Persons
(Ashgate 2003), and Buddhism as Philosophy (Ashgate and Hackett 2007), as
well as numerous articles. His principal area of interest is analytic
metaphysics as it plays out in the intersection between contemporary analytic
philosophy and classical Indian and Buddhist philosophy.
GALEN STRAWSON taught philosophy at the University of Oxford for
twenty years before moving to Reading University in 2001. He has held
visiting positions at NYU (1997) and Rutgers University (2000). Between
2004 and 2007 he was Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the City
University of New York Graduate Center. He is the author of Freedom and
Belief (OUP 1986), The Secret Connexion: Realism, Causation and David
Hume (OUP 1989), Mental Reality (MIT Press 1994), Selves: An Essay in
Revisionary Metaphysics (OUP 2009), and the principal author of
Consciousness and its Place in Nature (Imprint Academic 2006). A selection
of his philosophical papers, Real Materialism and Other Essays, was
published in 2008 (OUP).
EVAN THOMPSON is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto.
He received his BA in Asian studies from Amherst College, and his PhD. in
philosophy from the University of Toronto. He is the author of Mind in Life:
Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (Harvard University Press
2007), and a co-editor (with P. Zelazo and M. Moscovitch) of The Cambridge
Handbook of Consciousness (Cambridge University Press 2007). He is also a
co-author, with F. J. Varela and E. Rosch, of The Embodied Mind: Cognitive
Science and Human Experience (MIT Press 1991), and the author of Color
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Vision: A Study in Cognitive Science and the Philosophy of Perception
(Routledge Press 1995). He is currently working on a new book, titled
Waking, Dreaming, Being: New Revelations about the Self from Neuroscience
and Meditation. Thompson held a Canada Research Chair at York University
(2002–2005), and has also taught at Boston University. He has held visiting
positions at the Centre de Récherche en Epistémologie Appliqué (CREA) at
the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, and at the University of Colorado at
Boulder. He is a member of the Mind and Life Institute's Program and
Research Committee.
DAN ZAHAVI is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Danish
National Research Foundation's Center for Subjectivity Research at the
University of Copenhagen. He obtained his PhD. from Katholieke Universiteit
Leuven in 1994 and his Dr.phil. (Habilitation) from University of Copenhagen
in 1999. He was elected member of the Institut International de Philosophie in
2001 and of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters in 2007. He
served as president of the Nordic Society for Phenomenology from 2001 to
2007, and is currently co-editor in chief of the journal Phenomenology and the
Cognitive Sciences. In his systematic work, Zahavi has mainly been
investigating the nature of selfhood, self-consciousness, and intersubjectivity.
His most important publications include Husserl und die transzendentale
Intersubjektivität (Kluwer 1996), Self-awareness and Alterity (Northwestern
University Press 1999),Husserl's Phenomenology (Stanford University Press
2003), Subjectivity and Selfhood (MIT Press 2005), and, together with Shaun
Gallagher, The Phenomenological Mind (Routledge 2008).
Introduction
MARK SIDERITS, EVAN THOMPSON, DAN ZAHAVI

When I see a bright blue sky and hear the wind stirring the leaves, there is
awareness of the blue color and the rattling sound. Is there also the awareness
of my seeing the blue and hearing the sound? Does being conscious
necessarily involve being self-conscious in some sense? And if it does, would
this count as evidence for the existence of a self? These are the sorts of
questions that the papers in this volume are meant to explore. The
explorations embarked on here employ tools and techniques drawn from a
number of distinct philosophical traditions: phenomenology, analytic
philosophy of mind, and classical Indian and Buddhist philosophy. While
these traditions have all investigated the questions of the self and the reflexive
nature of awareness, they have for the most part done so independently of one
another. So it might be best to begin by attempting to develop a common
framework within which to locate the different approaches they employ.
To ask whether, when I am aware of blue I am also aware of my
awareness of blue, is to ask whether consciousness is necessarily reflexive or
self-intimating. To use the latter expression is to do two things: to suggest that
being conscious is a matter of being intimate or ‘in touch’, of bringing the
object into proximity with the self understood as what is ‘within’, and to invite
the question whether the reflexivity at issue involves anything that might
properly be called my self. To start with the second point: it might be said that
consciousness' being reflexive would be no different than a statement's being
self-referential. The statement ‘This sentence contains five words’ can be
described as reflexive just in the sense that in assessing its truth we need look
at nothing else besides the very statement itself. In this case the reflexivity of
the reference relation is nothing more than this binary relation's involving not
the normal two relata but just one. If the thesis that consciousness is reflexive
or self-intimating were understood this way, there would be no suggestion that
the thesis is at all connected to the claim that there is a self. To think it is
would be to conflate the quite distinct expressions ‘myself’ and ‘my self’.
MARK SIDERITS, EVAN THOMPSON, DAN ZAHAVI
Some will welcome such a diagnosis, since it would mean that we can
investigate the reflexivity thesis without having to enter into the murky
question of the self's existence and nature. Among them will be those who
deny the existence of a self on other grounds. But some will find this
dismissal all too quick. They will claim that what we find when we carefully
scrutinize the self-intimating nature of our states of awareness is quite
different from the simple self-linking exhibited by self-referential statements
and the like. If it is true that consciousness is aware of itself not just in bouts
of introspective reflection but always, then perhaps this serves as a clue to the
nature of subjectivity and hence of the subject. The idea is that a careful
investigation of the self-intimating nature of consciousness will bring into
clearer focus the phenomenal character of experience, thereby allowing us to
discern an otherwise elusive common element in all our conscious states. It is
widely held that what is distinctive about experiential states is their ‘what-it-
is-like-ness’ or phenomenal character: there is something it is like to be in the
state of seeing that blue color, and it is the presence of this phenomenal
character that marks the difference between a sentient being and a mere color-
detection mechanism. The present suggestion is that the reflexivity of
consciousness is at least partly constitutive of what-it-is-like-ness, and that
this in turn tells us something important about that for which it is so like, the
subject of phenomenal states.
Critics may still have their doubts. The suggestion just mooted involves
what can be described as a move from subjectivity to subject, and one might
question the legitimacy of such a move. One might agree that what is
distinctive about consciousness is precisely its subjective or phenomenal
character, its ‘what-it-is-like-ness’, yet wonder why this should require us to
supply something to serve as the subject to which the seemings are presented.
Even if it is granted that ‘what-it-is-like’ demands completion with a dative—
‘what-it-is-like-for’—it might still be said that the reflexive nature of
consciousness allows us to fill that slot without invoking anything that could
be called a self. For, such a critic would insist, the consciousness whose self-
intimation is at least partly constitutive of the experience of seeing blue, can
play that role for that experience, while another consciousness fills a similar
role for the experience of hearing the rattling of the leaves. These being
distinct episodes of consciousness, the move to a self as unifying subject of
distinct experiences is illegitimate.
INTRODUCTION
This little debate brings out something that might have seemed obvious all
along: that before we can investigate a possible linkage between the thesis that
consciousness is reflexive and the question of the existence of a self, we must
enter the murky waters and clarify just what a self might be. The parties to the
above debate hold what are sometimes called egological and non-egological
views of consciousness respectively. But what is this ‘ego’ or self about
whose possible involvement in and disclosure through consciousness and self-
consciousness they are debating? It is generally agreed that each of us has a
sense of self: the (perhaps somewhat elusive) feeling of being the particular
person one is. It might seem that the best way to answer the present question
would be by exploring this sense and trying to find its underlying structure.
And much of the Western philosophical discussion of the issue has followed
this path. But the Indian tradition suggests otherwise. Indian philosophical
investigations of the self begin with the suspicion that the sense of self that
everyone seems to have might be importantly mistaken—indeed that this
might be the cause of our being bound to the wheel of saṃsāra or
beginningless rebirth. So while our commonly acknowledged sense of self
might be worth investigating, we should not assume that doing so will lead
directly to an understanding of what the self is.
A word might be in order at this point concerning the soteriological
concerns that stand behind much of the Indian philosophical tradition. In this
tradition it is often claimed that one should study philosophy in order to
overcome the ignorance that results in bondage to a cycle of potentially never-
ending rebirths: philosophy will help us find whatever truth lies behind our
possibly mistaken views about our identity. Since very few philosophers today
subscribe to the view that we are trapped on a wheel of saṃsāra, this fact
about the Indian context might make it seem implausible that there could be
much fruitful dialogue between the Indian and Western traditions on the topic
of the self. But this response might be over-hasty. For it might be that at least
some of the concerns that motivate discussions of the self in the Western
tradition are, at bottom, similar in nature. To look for the self is to look for
what might be thought of as the essence of the person. And essences are often
thought to determine what something is good for. Knowledge of the self is
sometimes sought because of the promise that such knowledge might help
resolve concerns about the meaningfulness of the lives of persons. Now, such
concerns might be thought to stem from the realization of human finitude.
And those Indian philosophers who see persons as subject to a process of