FREEDOM, CARING AND BUDDHIST.pdf

FREEDOM, CARING AND BUDDHIST

PHILOSOPHY

Mark Siderits

Lecture 1: ways of being selﬂess

My visiting professorship in the Philosophy Department at Liverpool came

about thanks to the generosity of the Leverhulme Trust, which awarded a grant in

connection with the development of the new MRes program in classical Indian

philosophy. This program represents something of a departure in philosophical

studies in the United Kingdom. The Indian tradition is more commonly studied by

philologists in language and culture programs, and by scholars in religious studies

programs. What I would like to do in these lectures is explore some of the reasons

why it might be important to include the study of the Indian tradition in

a philosophy program—for it is not completely obvious that this is important.

Perhaps we all recognize nowadays that Europe has not had a monopoly on the

systematic use of reason to address the perennial problems of philosophy. Still this

does not necessarily mean that philosophy has been done better elsewhere.

And given the complexity of any philosophical tradition, there is something to be

said for studying just one—perhaps one’s own—tradition in depth, instead

of dabbling in several. One response to this is that the study of a distinct tradition

serves the important pedagogical function of putting one’s own in proper

perspective. But there is an additional beneﬁt that also deserves our attention.

It has been my experience that when two distinct traditions treat the same

problems using similar methods, it can sometimes happen that one will explore

solutions that are neglected in the other. This makes the study of a tradition other

than one’s own a source of potential insights that can be of help when a tradition

has reached an impasse. I shall try to illustrate that here in these lectures.

From among the many schools of classical Indian philosophy, it is the

Buddhist tradition that I have chosen to discuss. And the problem I want to explore

is how to ground values that we care about. We agree that people ought to have

concern for the welfare of others. And we believe that people should have more

rather than less freedom in their lives. The question is what reason there is to believe

these things. But before I begin to address this question, I should immediately

clear up a possible misunderstanding. Buddhism is widely thought of as a religion.

Contemporary Buddhism, Vol. 6, No. 2, November 2005

ISSN 1463-9947 print/1476-7953 online/05/020087-116

q 2005 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/14639940500435521

88 MARK SIDERITS

And religions are often seen as holding dogmatic positions, positions based on faith

or on feeling, particularly on normative questions. So there might be the

misapprehension that since I propose to talk about Buddhism and values, I shall be

proselytizing on behalf of some exotic creed. I want to assure you at the outset that

nothing could be further from the truth. First, what I propose to talk about is

Buddhist philosophy. Buddhist philosophers were like all other philosophers in their

dedication to the use of rational methods. For them, the fact that the Buddha made

some claim is not, by itself, a reason to accept that claim. For them, the question is

precisely whether there are good reasons, reasons that anyone can appreciate, for

accepting the central tenets of Buddhism. Second, all I wish to persuade you of is

that this tradition contains insights that might be useful for us in our distinctly non-

Buddhist lives. Buddhists believe that the exercise of philosophical rationality has

soteriological consequences. But this does not preclude the possibility that the

products of its exercise may be useful elsewhere as well.

Part I

Buddhist philosophers claim that we should care about suffering regardless

of where it occurs. They also agree that freedom is of considerable value. The value

of caring and of freedom derive, they would claim, from facts about the nature of

persons. In this lecture I would like to discuss the view about persons that is the

basis for their normative views. Then, in the second and third lectures,

respectively, I shall discuss some Buddhist views about caring and freedom.

For Buddhists the fundamental fact about persons is that they lack selves. It is

because I lack a self that, they claim, I should care equally about the welfare of all.

The fact that persons lack selves can also help explain why persons are best

thought of as autonomous. Before we can investigate these claims, we need to

understand what a self might be, and what reason there is to deny that selves exist.

What Indian philosophers like the Buddha have meant by the claim that there is a

self is that there is some one part of the person that is the essential part, the part

without which that person cannot continue to exist. So if there were something

within the psycho-physical complex—some part of my body or my mind—that was

my self, then I would continue to exist only as long as that part continued to exist.

If it were to go out of existence—even if it were immediately replaced by another

part just like it—then I would cease to exist. And so any person who existed after

that could not be me, they would have to be someone else.

Buddhists deny there is a self because they claim that no part of the person

exists for as long as the person does. The existence of a person consists of

a continuous series of impermanent events: ﬁrst an experience, then a thought,

then a desire, then an action, and so on. There is no denying the existence

of these things. There are experiences, thoughts, desires, actions, and so on.

What Buddhists deny when they say there is no self is that there is something that

has the experiences and desires; that there is a thinker of the thoughts, an agent

of the actions. Descartes famously said ‘I think, therefore I am’. And he took this

FREEDOM, CARING AND BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY 89

‘I’ to be the thinker of the thoughts, what has the experiences. Buddhists say there

is no such thing. What Descartes should have said is ‘Thinking is occurring’.

And from this, they hold, we cannot conclude that there is a thing that is doing the

thinking. The episode occurs—there is the thinking. But there is no reason to

supply an extra something, the thinker. For by a thinker Descartes meant

something that endures, something that has ﬁrst one experience and then

another. And, Buddhists claim, all the evidence points to there being nothing that

endures like this. A self would have to be permanent, but all the parts of a person

are impermanent.

Now here you may feel inclined to side with Descartes—as well as with the

many other Indian philosophers who held there is a self. You may think that there

must be an enduring experiencer. Buddhists are well aware that many of us

believe this. But why? Because we are aware of something that ﬁrst has a feeling,

then thinks a thought, then has a desire, then formulates a plan? Are we ever

actually aware of any such thing? Or are we rather aware of just the feeling, the

thought, the desire, and so on? The Buddhist says that when we look carefully at

the evidence we will realize we are never actually aware of anything other than the

ﬂeeting episodes. It may feel to us as if there is something constantly there behind

the thoughts and feelings. But when we try to pin it down, in our experience

it turns very slippery and elusive, as if it were forever just outside our grasp.

Perhaps this sense we have of an enduring thinker is like the feeling we have when

we watch a ﬁlm and see a character move from one place to another. It seems to

us that what is being shown on the screen is an enduring ﬁgure who moves.

What we actually see is a succession of distinct images, each at a different location

on the screen. It is we who supply the enduring ﬁgure who moves from one

location to another. For the reality of the motion picture is that, each second,

24 distinct still photographs are projected in rapid succession.

Perhaps, then, we are not actually aware of a self. But, comes the objection,

must we not still suppose there is such a thing? For otherwise how are we to explain

the continuity in our lives? For instance, right now I can remember an experience

I had last month when I visited Venice for the ﬁrst time. I can remember seeing the

water shuttle to the airport pull away from the berth while I was running down

the quay trying to hail it. If there is no enduring self, if there is only a succession of

impermanent events, who is it that remembers this past experience? We all agree,

after all, that I do not remember your past experiences, and you do not remember

mine. But if the experience is one event and the remembering is another event,

and there is no common thinker that ﬁrst did the experiencing and then does the

remembering, will this not mean I am now remembering someone else’s

experience? And do we not agree that this is impossible?

Here the Buddhist will remind us that we are now performing an inference.

We are no longer claiming we can see the self when we look within. Instead, we

are saying a self must exist because otherwise we could not explain the

phenomenon of memory. And it is worthwhile to examine just how this inference

goes. For it is possible there is another way to explain the phenomenon, one that

90 MARK SIDERITS

does not involve supposing there is something we cannot actually perceive. It is

usually a good policy to avoid positing things we cannot perceive unless we are

sure there is no other way to explain what we observe. Our ancestors thought that

plants have souls, even though they could not perceive them, because they

thought otherwise we could not explain why a plant’s leaves change their

orientation to stay aligned with the sun. Since we now know how to construct

such an explanation, we no longer believe in imperceptible plant souls.

The inference of a self starts with the phenomenon of remembering a past

experience, so it is useful to try to describe this phenomenon carefully. When I now

recall my Venetian experience, there occurs a sort of inner image of the shuttle

boat pulling out onto the canal, accompanied by a sense of annoyance at my own

stupidity, and these are felt as replays of earlier events. Why do I take this as

evidence for the existence of a persisting self? There are two possibilities. The ﬁrst

is that we think there has to be something that held the memory trace from

the time of the experience last month until its activation now. So if we think of the

experience as a snapshot, and the remembering as image retrieval, we are

imagining that in order for this image to be the retrieval of that snapshot, there

must be some enduring thing in me that stored the data from that snapshot

between then and now. But this is false. We know that with a digital camera we

can transfer the ﬁles that hold our photographs from one storage device

to another. This is why it is possible to view our photographs on our computers.

All that is necessary in order for the image on my screen now to be a picture of my

Venetian adventure is that there be the right kind of causal connections between

the jpg ﬁle being run by my computer and the data that were stored on the

memory stick of my camera that day in Venice. Why could memory not be like

this? Why could it not be the case that memory traces get passed along from one

storage device (one brain state) to another from time to time? As long as the

copying process is accurate enough, remembering can still occur without

the need for something that endures from the time of the experience until

the time of the remembering.

The second possible reason why memory might seem to require a persisting

self is that we think of it as my remembering what I experienced. This suggests

that in order for there to be memory there must be this one thing, the experiencer,

that ﬁrst had the experience and then later recalls it. But this depends on the

assumption that an experience requires an experiencer. If we assume that for every

conscious state there must be something that has that state, then we can say the

following: there must have been an experiencer that had the Venetian experience,

there must be an experiencer that is now doing the remembering, and these must

be one and the same experiencer. But what justiﬁes the assumption that every

experience requires an experiencer? What we were looking for is evidence that in

addition to the experiences themselves there is a self that has those experiences.

We cannot just assume this if this is what we are trying to prove.

It begins to look as though there may not be a way to prove there is a self.

Still most people remain unpersuaded. Despite the lack of evidence, they remain

FREEDOM, CARING AND BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY 91

convinced that within each of us is an enduring essence that is the true me, the

thinker of my thoughts and the doer of my deeds. They are sure that a person is

not a series of experiences, the person is the subject that has those experiences.

To most people it seems absurd to suppose there can be experiences without

someone who has them. The Buddhist must do more than just poke holes in the

evidence for a self. They need to explain why it seems so obvious to most people

that there is such a thing if there really is not. They do this by suggesting that our

convictions derive from the way that we talk. And the way that we talk is not

always a reliable guide to what actually exists. We say ‘It is raining’ but the ‘it’ refers

to nothing, it is just a dummy subject supplied for grammatical purposes. There is

more than this to the semantics of ‘I’ in ‘I remember’ on the Buddhist account,

but the basic idea is the same: the sense of an enduring subject comes from

the way that we talk. Only because we have all learned to talk and think in a certain

way does it seem obvious that there could not be experiences without an

experiencer, thoughts without a thinker, acts without an agent, and so on.

Part II

Up to this point, everything that the Buddhists say about the self has also

been said by Western philosophers. David Hume pointed out that we never

ﬁnd a self when we ‘look within’. More recently, Derek Parﬁt has shown the

fallaciousness of the standard arguments for the existence of the self. 1 It is the next

step in the Buddhist account that is interesting and novel. We might ask why we

all talk in a way that suggests there is a self if there is no such thing. After all, if this

way of talking is ubiquitous, there might be some reason for it. Perhaps the reason

is that there is a self. The Buddhist response is that just as the word ‘forest’ is a

useful way to talk about a large number of trees, so the word ‘I’ is a useful way

to refer to a causal series of bodily and mental entities. Strictly speaking there is no

forest, there are just the trees. But because it is useful for us to talk this way, we

may end up believing in a forest as something that exists over and above the trees.

By the same token, while there are just the psycho-physical elements and their

causal connections, our useful way of talking leads us to suppose there is an

enduring thing, the person whose bodily and mental constituents they are.

The forest is not real, the Buddhist will claim, because there is no acceptable

account of its relation to its parts. Suppose we agree that the trees are real. If we

suppose that the forest is also real, and in just the same way in which they are,

then we may ask whether the forest is identical with or distinct from the trees.

The forest cannot be identical with the trees, since the forest has a property that

they lack: the forest is one, while the trees are many. But if the forest is distinct

from the trees, something that exists over and above them, then it must possess

autonomous causal powers: there must be some fact pertaining to the forest that

cannot be explained wholly in terms of facts about the trees. And the Buddhist will

deny that any such fact is to be found. The coolness of the forest, for instance, is to

be accounted for in terms of the shade cast by individual trees and by the cooling

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