Losing Ourselves Quotes

“Self-satisfaction as I contemplate actions of which I am proud might well turn to gratitude towards others and a bit of humility when I recognize that the causes of those actions may lie well outside myself, and gratitude and humility might in the end be more salutary reactions than pride.”
― Jay L. Garfield, Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live without a Self

“That is, the proponent of the no-self view must show that everything that the self is meant to explain can actually be accomplished by a person, a socially embedded human being with no self. The ātman reemerges in another guise in a Christian context as the psyche, another term usually translated as soul.”
― Jay L. Garfield, Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live without a Self

“When we join the community of language users, we tacitly agree to follow the rules for usage of linguistic terms that are enforced by our community. When we learn to reason, we learn to conform to the rules of reasoning respected in our community. When we learn to claim knowledge, we learn to conform to the epistemic norms of our community.”
― Jay L. Garfield, Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live without a Self

“We are, on this view, causally and cognitively open continua of psychophysical processes. No one of these processes by itself captures who we are; none persist unchanged over time; none are independent of the others. Together, they constitute our conventional identity, an identity we can now see to be very robust indeed. To put this another way, we do not stand over and against the world as isolated subjects; we do not act on the world as transcendent agents. Instead, we are embedded in the world as part of an interdependent reality.”
― Jay L. Garfield, Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live without a Self

“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.”
― Jay L. Garfield, Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live without a Self

“our identity is constituted as well by the countless other dramatis personae in the play that is our lives, who together bring into existence the context in which our own roles make any sense. This fact should call upon us to rethink our supposed independence. And this can be a wonderful realization: we gain a deeper appreciation towards those who help us to become who we are, and a deeper sense of responsibility to others, when we appreciate our collective roles in constituting one another’s identity. The resulting humility, gratitude, and resolve both reflect a deeper understanding of our identities and make us better people.”
― Jay L. Garfield, Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live without a Self

“Awareness is most plausibly an umbrella property that reflects an extremely complex set of underlying properties and relations. If this is the case, awareness can be present—a person can be aware—without there being any single thing that is aware, just as a nation or a corporation can act without there being any singular entity that performs that action.”
― Jay L. Garfield, Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live without a Self

“THIS BOOK is a reflection on selflessness, that is, on what it is to be a person, but not to be a self.”
― Jay L. Garfield, Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live without a Self

“My body and my psychological states are constantly changing, like the oil and lamps that support the flames. But, like those flames and those lamps, they constitute a causal sequence with a common function. And we have a convention of calling distinct members of such sequences by the same name. So, in one obvious sense, I am not identical to the person called by my name yesterday. We are alike, causally related, but numerically distinct. In another sense, though, we are the same person. We share a name, many properties, a causal history, and a social role; and that, while not involving a self, is enough.”
― Jay L. Garfield, Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live without a Self

“What, we might ask, is the status of the person who is no self? In particular, one might wonder, what accounts for the continuity of consciousness from one moment to the next, and the persistence of our identity through all of the changes we undergo in our lives if there is no self? Wouldn’t we exist even if there were no conventions? Isn’t our existence the precondition of any conventions? That is, we might ask, what exactly is the mode of existence that persons like us in fact enjoy?”
― Jay L. Garfield, Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live without a Self