Theme
The self
26 philosophers, 5 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
6th century BCE
Pythagoras
The soul is immortal and survives the death of the body, passing into new bodies, human or animal. Pythagoras was famous in his own time as an expert on what becomes of the soul after death.
5th century BCE
The Buddha
There is no self. A self would have to be permanent, and nothing among the five kinds of physical and mental element that make up a person lasts. 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 can act without the body and understands the forms best when released from it. In some dialogues it existed, disembodied, before birth, and learning is its recollection of what it knew then.
About 500 years later
1st century CE
Epictetus
The real self is the volition (prohairesis), the capacity to choose and to judge our impressions. The body, possessions and reputation are merely facts about us, not the self, so the self cannot be harmed from outside.
About 300 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
5th century CE
Gauḍapāda
The individual soul seems finite only through ignorance; in reality it is identical with the supreme self, pure consciousness beyond waking, dream and deep sleep. Knowing this non-difference brings liberation.
7th century CE
Huineng
Beneath our delusions, our own original nature is Buddha-nature, pure and awakened from the start. It is not a lasting substance but a readiness for awakening that is always at hand; to see it is to find that sentient beings are already Buddhas.
8th century CE
Śāntideva
There is no substantial self, and no body that is truly mine, to be found under analysis. Śāntideva drew the practical conclusion: without an owner to privilege, the sufferings of others have as strong a claim on us as our own.
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.
Argued against Vasubandhu; drew on Gauḍapāda
9th century CE
Kūkai
The self is lived existence, body and mind as one whole, and enlightenment is realised in it, “in this very body”. The self is not independent: enlightenment comes through a correspondence between the Buddha’s compassion and the practitioner’s own effort and devotion.
11th century
Avicenna
What we essentially are, and what survives death, is the rational soul: an immaterial substance, akin to the intellects of the heavens. 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.
Argued against Śaṅkara
13th century
Meister Eckhart
The self that clings to things, even to its own holiness, must be let go. Beneath it lies the ground or “spark” of the soul, empty of images, where the Word of God is born.
About 300 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.
Blaise Pascal
The self is wretched and great at once: fragile, contingent and lost in an infinite universe, yet able to know its own wretchedness. Our dignity lies not in space but in thought.
Drew on and argued against Epictetus
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 and argued against 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.
Edmund Husserl
Consciousness has a pure ego, but the real person is more: a unity of character, habits and convictions formed through experience and never finished. The self is also embodied, perceiving from a point of view, and shaped by others.
Drew on and argued against René Descartes
Henri Bergson
The self lives in duration, where conscious states are not separate units side by side but permeate one another in a growing whole. Freedom belongs to this lived time, which mechanical causality, a way of thinking borrowed from space, cannot capture.
Argued against Immanuel Kant
20th century
Nishida Kitarō
The self is not a mind facing an outside world but a “focal point” in which the world becomes aware of itself. It becomes itself in recognising others, and becomes most acutely aware of itself as an individual in facing its own death.
Drew on Plato and Edmund Husserl
Watsuji Tetsurō
A human being (ningen) is both an individual and a social being, and neither side can be reduced to the other. We exist in the “betweenness” of our relationships, and the isolated ego of desert-island thought experiments is an abstraction.
Drew on Nishida Kitarō
Jean-Paul Sartre
There is no fixed self or ego given in experience; the ego is constructed, an object of reflection. Consciousness is free, and we make ourselves through our choices, though we often flee that freedom in bad faith.
Drew on and argued against Edmund Husserl; drew on Henri Bergson
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
The self is not a pure consciousness that constructs its world but an embodied, perceiving being already engaged with it. Reflection can never fully step outside this engagement, because the one who reflects belongs to the world reflected on.
Drew on and argued against Henri Bergson, Edmund Husserl and Jean-Paul Sartre
Iris Murdoch
The self is not a bare choosing will but a “fabric of moral being” built up by what we notice and how we see. Our fantasies and self-absorption are the chief obstacles to seeing others as they really are.
Drew on Plato and Jean-Paul Sartre; drew on and argued against Immanuel Kant
Jacques Derrida
The self is not a unified foundation. Self-consciousness is divided by a difference within it, a relation to oneself as to an other, so the firm foundation Descartes sought turns out to be a divisible limit.
Drew on and argued against Edmund Husserl
Sources
- Eric T. Olson, Personal Identity, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Christian Coseru, Mind in Indian Buddhist Philosophy, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy