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Enacting the self: Buddhist and Enactivist approaches to the emergence of the self

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Abstract

In this paper, I take up the problem of the self through bringing together the insights, while correcting some of the shortcomings, of Indo–Tibetan Buddhist and enactivist accounts of the self. I begin with an examination of the Buddhist theory of non-self (anātman) and the rigorously reductionist interpretation of this doctrine developed by the Abhidharma school of Buddhism. After discussing some of the fundamental problems for Buddhist reductionism, I turn to the enactive approach to philosophy of mind and cognitive science. I argue that human beings, as dynamic systems, are characterized by a high degree of self-organizing autonomy. Therefore, human beings are not reducible to the more basic mental and physical events that constitute them. I critically examine Francisco Varela’s enactivist account of the self as virtual and his use of Buddhist ideas in support of this view. I argue, in contrast, that while the self is emergent and constructed, it is not merely virtual. Finally I sketch a Buddhist-enactivist account of the self. I argue for a non-reductionist view of the self as an active, embodied, embedded, self-organizing process—what the Buddhists call ‘I’-making (ahaṃkāra). This emergent process of self-making is grounded in the fundamentally recursive processes that characterize lived experience: autopoiesis at the biological level, temporalization and self-reference at the level of conscious experience, and conceptual and narrative construction at the level of intersubjectivity. In Buddhist terms, I will develop an account of the self as dependently originated and empty, but nevertheless real.

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Notes

  1. ‘Reductionism’ is often used very liberally in the literature on personal identity, such that an account of personal identity is reductionist so long as it does not rely on either a Cartesian ego or a brute ‘further fact’. My view does not easily fit into these categories, but rather is an emergentist self-constitution view of the self.

  2. The term ‘saṃjñā’ (sam: ‘to put together’ + jña: ‘knowledge’) is cognate to ‘cognize’ and can have the sense of ‘synthesis’ as well as ‘association’. Lusthaus translates samjña as “associational knowledge” (Lusthaus 2002: 47).

  3. The classic version of the criterial argument occurs in Saṃyutta Nikāya 3.66-68. Cf. Holder (2006) for a translation.

  4. This argument occurs in the “Refutation of the Theory of the Self” 1.2. Cf. Duerlinger (2003) for a translation.

  5. The school in question is the Sarvāstivāda Vaibhāśika. When referring to Abhidharma and Buddhist reductionism, it is this school I have in mind.

  6. Continuity is a weaker relation than identity in that continuity comes in degrees, while identity is all or nothing. Non-substantialist theories of the person typically account for diachronic personal identity in terms of continuity.

  7. Though the reductionist still owes an account of how to get from causal connections to the kind of semantic and (broadly) narrative connections that seem to play an important role in any plausible account of psychological continuity.

  8. It might be argued that the concept of a causal sequence is innate, but this response is not available to the empiricist Ābhidharmikas.

  9. There is in fact a debate about whether dharmas have only momentary existence, as argued by the Sautrāntikas, or whether, as argued by the Sarvāstivādins, dharmas exist in the past, present, and future. In either case, though, dharmas are only causally efficacious in the fleeting present. Thus there remains a problem of continuity on either view.

  10. As Ganeri points out, Hume is perhaps more consistent here in denying the (ultimate) reality of causation.

  11. ‘First-personal givenness’ is often used interchangeably with ‘subjectivity’. Cf. Zahavi (2005) for a discussion of this.

  12. The following discussion of autonomous systems closely follows Thompson (2007) and Varela (1999, 2001).

  13. The analysis here is the type of ontological analysis that looks for the substantial reality of the object.

  14. Hence, the Mādhyamika holds that all phenomena are constitutively interdependent and also rejects the idea of the ‘ready-made world’ characteristic of metaphysical realism.

  15. See Garfield (1995), Siderits (2003), and Westerhoff (2009) for in-depth discussions of Madhyamaka arguments.

  16. The Mādhyamikas do say that the self is illusion-like in that it appears to have substantial existence, but is in fact empty. But, again, according to this view all phenomena are illusion-like in this sense.

  17. Mādhyamikas reject the ‘pearl’ view of the self (cf. Strawson 1999)—the view that the person consists of series of short-lived selves-and maintain, on phenomenological and pragmatic grounds, that the self is persistent. But, since the self is a process, it perdures rather than endures.

  18. On this point, the Mādhyamikas agree with the Nyāya critics of Buddhist reductionism.

  19. Thompson defines sentience as “the feeling of being alive” (2007: 161), while neuroscientists Damasio (1999) and Panksepp (1998) posit a primitive ‘feeling of self’.

  20. See Dreyfus (1996), Garfield (2006), MacKenzie (2007), MacKenzie (2008), and Williams (1997) for further discussion.

  21. Unlike, Tsongkhapa, I do accept the notion of svasaṃvedana. On my view, the minimal self (ahaṃkāra) emerges from the more basic inherent reflexivity of consciousness. Thus my view is closer to the Mādhyamika of Śāntarākṣita (in India) or the Kagyu and Nyingma traditions (in Tibet).

  22. This is not to say that linguistic construction plays no role in Tsongkhapa’s account, but only to point out that the minimal self is pre-linguistic.

  23. The Madhyamaka account of the minimal self, therefore, differs from Antonio Damasio’s notion of the core self in that the core self has no long-term temporal extension.

  24. One can reject an entitative view of the self and still allow that self-talk is referential. In this case, self-talk refers to self-appropriating activity (and thereby also to that which is appropriated). Further, the use of a term can be both performative and referential, as when one says “I now pronounce you husband and wife.” Here ‘pronounce’ is both performative and referential.

  25. Though of course, we do not want to make too sharp a distinction between the biological and the experiential here. These are two aspects of one process of living.

  26. See Zahavi (2005) for an illuminating discussion of these issues.

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MacKenzie, M. Enacting the self: Buddhist and Enactivist approaches to the emergence of the self. Phenom Cogn Sci 9, 75–99 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-009-9132-8

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