Theme
The self
10 philosophers, 3 traditions
Is there a lasting self beneath our changing thoughts and bodies, or only a stream of events? Traditions have answered with a soul, a self identical with all reality, or none at all.
In India, the Buddha’s teaching of not-self (anātman) challenged the Upaniṣadic idea of an enduring, substantial self (ātman), analysing a person into five kinds of physical and mental element. On this view “person”, like “chariot”, is only a convenient name for parts working together. Vedānta answered in several ways: Śaṅkara identified the true self with brahman, the one reality, while Rāmānuja and Madhva insisted that individual selves are real and distinct.
In Greek, Islamic and European philosophy the self was often taken to be a soul, an immaterial substance, as Plato and Descartes held; Avicenna saw the rational soul as our core, which survives death. Hume, looking inwards, found only “bundles of perceptions”, an analysis often compared with the Buddhist one.
Kant held that an “I think” must be able to accompany all of one’s thoughts and perceptions, and Kierkegaard treated the self as a task to be achieved. Recent debate asks what we are, and what it takes for a person to persist through time; some answer that there is nothing we are at all.
Through time
5th century BCE
The Buddha
There is no self. If there were one it would be permanent, but none of the five kinds of physical and mental element that make up a person is. A person is a convenient name for a causal series of impersonal events, and suffering ends when every sense of an “I” is rooted out.
4th century BCE
Plato
The soul is a different kind of thing from the body. It does not depend on the body to function and grasps the forms most easily when free of it. In some dialogues it existed, disembodied, before birth, and learning is its recollection of what it knew then.
About 800 years later
4th century CE
Vasubandhu
Defended the Buddhist denial of a self against those who posited a lasting self or “person”. Neither perception nor inference reveals one. The person is a conceptual construct laid over a causally connected stream of elements, as “milk” is laid over a taste, a smell and a touch.
Drew on The Buddha
About 400 years later
8th century CE
Śaṅkara
The true self (ātman) is pure consciousness, the witness to which every mental state is revealed, and is numerically identical with brahman, the one reality. Taking the mind and body for the self is ignorance; the knowledge “I am brahman” removes it and brings liberation.
Drew on Vasubandhu
11th century
Avicenna
Our essential core, which identifies us and survives death, is the rational soul, an immaterial substance of the same kind as the celestial intellects. The body hampers its thinking in this life, so we must care for the body to prepare the soul for unimpeded thought in the next.
12th century
Rāmānuja
Against Advaita, the individual self is real, not an illusion, since only an individual, never Brahman, can be ignorant. Each self is by nature a knower and belongs to Brahman as part of its body, as a body belongs to its soul, yet keeps its own identity within that whole.
Drew on Śaṅkara
About 500 years later
17th century
René Descartes
The one thing that survives radical doubt is that I, who doubt, exist. I am a thinking thing, a substance whose whole essence is to think: to understand, will, imagine and sense. Unlike matter, it is unextended, and so really distinct from the body it is joined to.
18th century
David Hume
Looking inwards, we find no impression of an enduring self beneath our perceptions, so we have no idea of one. The self, as far as thought can grasp it, is a bundle or succession of associated perceptions, though in an appendix to the Treatise Hume voiced doubts about this account.
Immanuel Kant
“The I think must be able to accompany all my representations”: self-consciousness comes from the mind actively combining its representations into one. But against earlier rationalists, Kant denied that reason can give us a priori knowledge of the soul.
Drew on David Hume
19th century
Søren Kierkegaard
A self is less a given thing than a task: we must become what we are to become, holding together finite and infinite, necessity and possibility. The self relates to itself only by relating to another, and only a self grounded in God escapes despair, the failure to become a self.
Sources
- Eric T. Olson, Personal Identity, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Christian Coseru, Mind in Indian Buddhist Philosophy, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy