Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live without a Self

by Jay L. Garfield

Śāntideva also argues that the idea that we are selves arises primarily in emotionally charged situations, as when we perceive that we have been harmed, or when pride is aroused.

That is, when I think of myself as a self, I can imagine that even if the entire world outside of me disappeared, I could remain as a center of subjectivity. I take my self to be the basis of my ability to experience the world, not as a part of that world.

At the most basic level, the illusion of a self is the illusion that we stand outside of and against the world.

To my mind, that natural attitude of taking ourselves to be selves is a symptom of a profound instinct for self-alienation, and is the deepest form of what Buddhist philosophers call primal confusion, the root of suffering.

All of this is to say that we are many, not one; we are collections of collections of processes, not unities; we are more like hives than bees in that respect. We are of the world, not over and against it. We are dynamic and constantly changing causally interdependent systems of processes, not independent, enduring objects or agents.

But what difference does it make, if our personhood is what guides our lives (ways of living in the world) anyway?

The self is taken to be preexistent, primordial, unitary, and transcendent of the world of objects, independent of body, mind, and social context. The person is constructed; the person is dependent on the psychophysical and social network in which it is realized; the person is complex, embodied and embedded. That is the difference between the actor and the role. We are roles, not actors.

Interdependence can thus be a source of misery as well as of joy; of despair as well as of gratitude.

Just so, a plethora of subconscious perceptual and cognitive processes can jointly generate the representation of unitary objects in a unified experiential field. There is no need for their interaction to be integrated or managed in any single neural or cognitive structure. Indeed, this is precisely how the brain appears to work. The fact that the field and the objects in it are experienced in introspection as unified does not entail that this unity is achieved by a unified subject of consciousness, any more than the fact a legislature passes a single bill entails that there is a single legislator, no more than the fact that a student earns a single degree entails that she was taught only by a single teacher. It entails only that there is a set of processes robust and integrated enough to create a single manifold of experience. An organism may be necessary for this task, but not a self. So, even the unity of experience would not entail the existence of a unified subject of experience; nor does a unified object presuppose a unified subject. This shows that the inferences in both the argument from the unity of the subject and in the argument from the unity of the object fail to establish the reality of the self.

The contemporary philosopher-psychologist Thomas Metzinger defends the position I am urging. He argues that our cognitive architecture reflexively creates what he calls a phenomenal self model, that is, a complex representation of a self. That model includes representations of our body, of our current sensory state, of our cognitive processes, and of our orientation to the world, as well as representations of our relation to the past and the future. It represents us as agents, as centers of experience, and as extended in time and in space. And this representation induces a first-person perspective on our experience through our identification with it. That model may have some value: it may help us to orient ourselves in space and time, for instance.

Tsongkhapa’s advice is that only long-term meditative exercise is capable of ridding us of the innate sense of self: it is too wired into our psyche to be extirpated just by doing philosophy. This is indeed one of the reasons that meditative practice is so important in Buddhist traditions: it is a vehicle through which philosophy can be transformative, by allowing that philosophy to seep so deeply into our consciousness that it comes to shape our experience.

When we are completely immersed in activity—whether the physical activity of carving an ox or the cognitive

activity of thinking about how best to carve that ox—our sense of self, and with it, the experience of the duality of subject and object in experience, vanish. There is only the experience of a flow of activity.

To understand one’s selflessness is to understand not that one is nonexistent, but that one is a real person in constant interaction with everything else in one’s environment, a causally interdependent sequence of psychophysical processes. And it is to understand that the identity we do have—our personal identity—is not achieved alone, but instead is achieved only in immersed interaction with the rest of the world we inhabit. The myriad things—the entities of the empirical world—therefore do not constitute an independent reality with which we interact, but instead constitute our reality as sub-processes of the causal unfolding of the universe.

They are summarized in Buddhist theory under the four divine states (brahmavihāras) as friendliness, care, sympathetic joy, and impartiality.

one does not come to understand our cultures by understanding how an individual Homo sapiens organism works, and then scaling up; one understands how a person works by understanding our cultures and our multiple roles therein. And there is no place for a self in the story that these analogies suggest. We are too bound up with others for that. This means that in order to understand who we are, and what our lives are, we must take the social level of analysis at least as seriously as we do the psychological and the biological.