THEORY AND PRACTICE OF ANATTA.pdf

BECOMING AND UN-BECOMING: THE

THEORY AND PRACTICE OF ANATTA

Clare Carlisle

Theory

Who am I?

The doctrine of anatta, selﬂessness, is at the heart of the Buddha’s teaching,

and it ties together metaphysical, ethical, meditative, and devotional facets of

Buddhism. Like many spiritual and philosophical traditions, Buddhism rests on the

idea that wisdom is liberating, but unlike most other traditions teaches that the

wisdom that must be sought is not about oneself, but about one’s selﬂessness.

Western philosophers, habituated to Christian, Platonic, and Cartesian ways of

thinking, and to a substantialist, unrepentantly self-centred grammar, may ﬁnd

anatta difﬁcult to understand, to accept, to imagine.

Actually, anatta is so simple that it can hardly be called a doctrine: it is a

denial, a denial that ‘I’ really exist. The Buddhist philosopher’s challenge is not to

argue or to prove that there is no such thing as a distinct, enduring self—in any

case, the truth of anatta only becomes meaningful (i.e. liberating) in practice,

when it is experienced—but to account for the phenomenon of selfhood. What is

this ‘I’ who, it seems, experiences and remembers things; worries, loves, hopes,

suffers, grows old; seeks wisdom; practices Buddhism, and so on? The

phenomenon of self-identity is not only, or even primarily, an outcome of

introspection: if we deny the reality of the self, we need to explain how it is that we

are able to know and understand another person; to recognise an old

acquaintance, even from a distance, after many years of absence. How does a

Buddhist philosopher account for the continuity, consistency, and stability of a

human being through time, without recourse to concepts such as substance and

essence?

For some time now I have been developing an account of selfhood that is

based on the concept of habit. For reasons that will soon become clear, this focus

on habit is very useful, and rather well suited, to the European Buddhist

philosopher I ﬁnd myself to be. Many thinkers in our western tradition have

emphasised the role of habit in human life: for example, Aristotle and Aquinas

regard habit as a second nature, which develops through actions and shapes

Contemporary Buddhism, Vol. 7, No. 1, May 2006

ISSN 1463-9947 print/1476-7953 online/06/010075-89

q 2006 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/14639940600878034

76 C. CARLISLE

a person’s moral character; Hume argues that ‘habit or custom’ is ‘the great guide

of human life’ (1975, 44), 1 the source of our beliefs and judgements about

causation, the external world, and personal identity. William James and Marcel

Proust both go further in seeing habit as a fundamental principle of the human

person as a whole. More recently, a few philosophers have gone so far as to

identify the self with habit: Gilles Deleuze suggests that ‘we are habits, nothing but

habits’ (1991, x); Merleau-Ponty describes the embodied self—‘the lived body’ or

‘my own body’—as ‘my basic habit’ (1962, 91). John Dewey writes that ‘all habits

... constitute the self’ (1922, 25), and Krishnamurti claims that ‘I am my habit, my

habit is me ... my whole life is a structure of habits’ (1986, 125–7). In an earlier

essay on habit, I tried to argue for and develop this idea that habit can account for

selfhood (see Carlisle 2006). I no longer wish to make this claim, not least because

it rests on an assumption that we know what the self is, what its boundaries are,

and are therefore able to reﬂect on the extent to which habit can account for it.

But how would we know when we have fully accounted for a self that remains

undetermined?

Nevertheless, in taking seriously the suggestion that ‘we are habits, nothing

but habits’, I made some progress in thinking through the conceptual structure of

habit, its mode of operation, its transcendental conditions, its connections to

personal identity, and its ethical relevance; and I think that this does tell us more

about the self—in a way that accommodates the theory and the practice of

anatta. Now, by identifying the self with habit I am merely suggesting that we

work with a certain deﬁnition of the self, delimited by habit. In other words, we

draw from the concept of habit a provisional determination of the self. Whatever

cannot be explained in terms of habit—freedom, creativity, spontaneity, and

awareness, for example—will be put outside the domain of selfhood. This leaves

us with the possibility that the human being is not exhausted by the self, that

there are other ways of living available to each of us. This possibility is a

prerequisite of the Buddhist path.

Selfhood and habit

Habit is a familiar concept, and (as for many things) its familiarity is both a

blessing and a curse. Perhaps because we all recognise the notion of habit, and

have ﬁrst-hand acquaintance with at least some of its effects, most philosophers

who make use of the concept do so rather uncritically. But when we do begin to

reﬂect on habit, we ﬁnd that neither its meaning nor its mechanism is self-evident.

In addition to its various philosophical uses, the concept of habit has several

different, although related, senses within everyday language. We know that habit

signiﬁes ‘a settled disposition or tendency to act in a certain way, especially one

acquired by frequent repetition of the same act until it becomes almost or quite

involuntary’ (OED). Habit also denotes an individual’s outward demeanour,

posture, bodily constitution; a mode of dress; a place of dwelling. In botany, a

plant’s habit is the shape and direction of its growth; in mineralogy, a crystal’s

THEORY AND PRACTICE OF ANATTA 77

habit is its pattern of formation. These different uses of the word contribute to my

own philosophical concept of habit, which identiﬁes three key elements: action,

repetition, and shape or form.

By action I mean mental, vocal, or physical action. Curiously, habit is at once

a source and a result of action. The phenomenon of habit testiﬁes to the power of

action not merely to produce an effect, but to generate and to shape further

actions. Actions, when repeated, lead to the formation of a habit; a habit

represents a sort of accumulation of actions. This accumulation of repeated

actions—or of some kind of trace of these actions—gives rise to subsequent

actions, so that we can, and frequently do, ‘act out of habit’. The continuity of

habits relies on repetition: repetition sustains the habit, and the habit sustains the

repetition—habit is inseparable from repetition. Habit gives us a principle of

continuity through time that is itself temporal, since repetition is unthinkable

without time. The concept of repetition ﬁnds its philosophical signiﬁcance in the

reﬂection—crystallised by Kierkegaard, and developed by Deleuze and Derrida—

that, because existence continually becomes, things ‘stay the same’ only if they are

repeatedly renewed, only by virtue of movement and difference. Habit is

essentially dynamic, but also essentially conservative; it has, or rather is, a self-

perpetuating force, its own momentum.

Deleuze states that, at least for an empiricist, ‘the [human] subject is

deﬁned according to the movement through which it develops’ (1991, 85). In

the Preface to his essay on Hume, Empiricism and Subjectivity, Deleuze

highlights Hume’s concept of habit (one of his ‘most essential and creative

contributions’ to philosophy), and suggests that ‘there is no more striking

answer to the problem of the self’ than the discovery that we are ‘nothing but

habits—the habit of saying “I”’. Deleuze is suggesting that the continuity and

stability of this ‘I’ should be explained by habit, rather than by a metaphysical

concept of substance or essence, or by a doctrine of divine creation; he is

identifying habit as ‘the movement through which [the self] develops’, and thus

offering an empiricist deﬁnition of the self. In fact, Deleuze describes his own

philosophy as ‘transcendental empiricism’, and the inﬂuence of Kant and

Husserl is evident in his interpretation of Hume: ‘Habit is the constitutive root of

the subject, and the subject, at root, is the synthesis of time—the synthesis of

the present and the past in the light of the future’ (Deleuze 1991, 92–3). In

other words, subjectivity is constituted by a synthesis that ‘posits the past as a

rule for the future’ (Deleuze 1991, 92–4). I ﬁnd Deleuze’s account of the self

attractive because it is naturalistic (habit is a principle of nature; we can

understand plants, animals, and people in terms of their habits); because it is at

least in part empirical (habits can be observed, and the mechanism of habit can

be scientiﬁcally modelled); and because it accommodates both physical and

psychological aspects of selfhood, and treats the living, embodied ‘I’ more

holistically than most rival accounts.

Another point in favour of this interpretation of the self is that it includes,

and emphasises, the sociality and worldliness of selfhood. We ‘catch’ habits

78 C. CARLISLE

from people who we spend a lot of time with, adopting and making our own

their manners of speech, their gestures, their ways of dressing, even their

patterns of thought and behaviour. Habit accomplishes a kind of compromise

and adaptation between beings and their environment. We might regard habit

as a fundamental mode of what Heidegger calls ‘being-in-the-world’: in this

case, the close connection between habit and habitat resonates with

Heidegger’s predilection for the vocabulary of dwelling and abiding. The

self’s capacity to be affected and shaped by actions renders it irreducibly

worldly, so that the distinction between one’s habits and one’s habitat is less

clear than we might suppose. This is particularly true of linguistic habits: in

order to communicate we must repeat words, phrases, gestures, and

intonations already in circulation, already meaningful, and this mobile resource

of signs is the habitat or ‘house of being’, which domesticates—renders familiar

and orderly—the ﬂux of sense experience. At the same time, habit individuates

in so far as each being is a unique conﬁguration of habits, a singular site of

repetition.

Deleuze’s claim that habit offers an account of the self leaves us with the

task of accounting for habit. (In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze (1994) goes

some way toward doing this, although here he gives less emphasis to habit.) How

are habits formed? How must a being be constituted in order to be capable of

habit? To begin with, habit presupposes a capacity to accumulate or contract

repeated actions; and a capacity to be formed by this repetition. We can

distinguish four transcendental conditions of habit, two corresponding to each of

these capacities: retention and synthesis, affectivity and plasticity. First, then, the

phenomenon of habit implies the retention and the synthesis of repeated

elements. Repetition is productive—the second time adding to the ﬁrst—only if

actions can be stored, accumulated, held together; only if the past can be

contracted within the present. For Hume (as for Kant) the imagination fulﬁls this

function; Deleuze describes the subject’s contractile power as ‘contemplative’, a

kind of ‘passive synthesis’ that makes possible the active synthesis of memory.

Habit requires the retention of traces of past actions, but it does not require

memory; indeed, the more deeply habitual an action, the less likely we are to

remember performing it.

Second, the formative effects of habit imply the affectivity and plasticity of

the subject. As Spinoza emphasises, the nature of any individual depends on its

capacity to be affected: the complexity and sophistication of human beings is an

outcome of our sensitivity to affection in so many different ways. We are shaped

by what we suffer, and these sufferings affect us precisely in so far as we are able

to receive and retain impressions, and to be modiﬁed by them. We speak of being

‘scarred’ by traumatic experiences, but it is more important to recognise that we

are scarred or formed, in however slight a way, by our own actions (mental, vocal,

or physical). Again, we see that subjectivity is dynamic: we are continuously

forming—whether re-forming or re-afﬁrming—our selves. It is often supposed

that people become less impressionable as they grow older, when habits harden

THEORY AND PRACTICE OF ANATTA 79

into a ﬁxed character that is increasingly difﬁcult to alter. William James remarks

rather wistfully that if only the young were to realise ‘how soon they will become

mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while

they are in the plastic state’ (1977, 20).

In addition to the transcendental conditions of retention, synthesis,

affectivity, and plasticity, there is a quality of inattention that seems to be

essential to habit. I regard this less as a capacity than as a function of habit.

One of the reasons why habit is so useful to us is that it saves time and

energy, promotes efﬁciency, and leaves our attention free to focus on other

things. Without habit we would have to concentrate very hard on every little

daily task—and we would certainly never get around to doing philosophy or

practising Buddhism. The development and success of the human species

depends on habit. William James emphasises the role of habit in this respect,

pointing out that habit ‘simpliﬁes our movements, makes them accurate, and

diminishes fatigue [by reducing] the conscious attention with which our

actions are performed’. In fact, James claims that ‘habit depends on sensations

not attended to’ (1977, 12–14).

Repetition tends to have a numbing effect: the more we become used

to something, the less we notice and question it. For this reason we take for

granted—and assume as our own—those things that are most constant and

familiar: our bodies, our parents, our native language, the level of material

comfort with which we grow up. Of course, these are sorely missed when

they are no longer with us: habit’s inattentiveness at once creates and

obscures profound attachment, and this leads to suffering when things

change. It is this aspect of habit that most interests Proust, who describes

habit as:

an annihilating force which suppresses the originality and even the awareness of

one’s perceptions ... a dread deity, so riveted to one’s being, its insigniﬁcant face

so incrusted in one’s heart, that if it detaches itself, if it turns away from one, this

deity that one had barely distinguished inﬂicts on one sufferings more terrible

than any other and is then as cruel as death itself. (1996, vol. 5, 478)

The narrator of A la recherche du temps perdu endures acute discomfort on his ﬁrst

night at the Grand Hotel in Balbec, ﬁnding his perceptions ‘on the permanent

footing of a vigilant defensive’ in a strange, indifferent room ‘full of things which

did not know [him]’. Unable to sleep, he is ‘tormented’ by the ticking clock, the

violet curtains, the glass-fronted bookcases. Last year, I had a similarly unpleasant

experience when I arrived in a small town in Minnesota, where I was to spend a

month working. All at once I had a new home, a new neighbourhood, a new

workplace, and new colleagues, and I felt quite alarmed: most of my habits had

abruptly become redundant, and it took continual effort to interact with and make

sense of my world. Only when new habits formed (which fortunately happens very

quickly) could I feel settled and ‘at home’ again—and after a few weeks I was

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