Maverick Philosopher

I. THE ANATTA DOCTRINE

The anatta (Sanskrit: anatman) doctrine lies at the very heart of Buddhist thought and practice. The Pali and Sanskrit words translate literally as “no self”; but the doctrine applies not only to persons but to non-persons as well.[1] In its extreme form, associated with the Theravadins, the “no self” claim is that nothing possesses selfhood or self-nature or “own-being,” not even nibbana “itself.” It is this extreme or unrestricted form of the doctrine that will be under examination here. Is it true that nothing at all has self-nature? Is this even possibly true? These invite the logically prior question: what would it be for an item to have or lack self-nature?

If a substance be defined as anything metaphysically capable of independent existence, then perhaps we can interpret the anatta doctrine as a denial of the existence of substances.[2] The claim would then be that in ultimate reality there are no substances: what we ordinarily take to be such are wrongly so taken. Accordingly, a pervasive ignorance (avijja) infects our ordinary view of the world. It is not an ignorance about this or that matter of fact, but one about the world’s ontological structure. We interpret what is impermanent (anicca) as if it were permanent and substantial, or at least as possessing a core of permanence. Thus if we admit change, as in some sense we must, we yet seek to “contain it” by interpreting it as a mere change in properties or states which leaves the “underlying” substance of a person or thing unchanged. So interpreted, change is mere alteration, a self-same thing’s having incompatible properties at different times. But if there are no substances, and thus no

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unchanging substrates of alteration, then change “cuts deeper,” affecting not only the properties and states of changing things, but also their very existence and identity.

In our own case, there is a tendency to contain the change that obviously affects our bodies, mental states, and fortunes in the world by ascribing to ourselves something like a soul-substance or ego-substance that remains the same through time and change. The postulation of such a substance is often held to be justified on account of its ability to explain a range of data: (i) it accounts for the unity of consciousness at a time, thus explaining how, for instance, seeing a bird and hearing it sing can come together in one act of consciousness; (ii) it accounts for personal identity over time, explaining how one can “reap what one sows,” (that is, experience in the present the consequences of past actions and omissions), and thus how one can now be legitimately held responsible for past acts and omissions; (iii) it accounts for the free origination of one’s actions and is thus their free (hence, morally responsible) agent; (iv) it is that in one which knows when something is known, believes when something is believed, etc.; (v) it is that which makes one unique and distinct from everything else and “irreplaceable” and thus of moral dignity. In sum, the soul-substance is postulated to play the roles of unifier, continuant, doer, knower, and dignifier. If the anatta doctrine is right, however, this postulation of an ego- or soul-substance has no ultimate justification, but arises merely from an ignorant craving for permanence that nothing can satisfy, nothing in the sense-world to be sure, but also nothing in any realms that might lie beyond it.

This putative ignorance about the ontological structure of the world is not a merely theoretical matter, but a deeply practical one: on the Buddhist doctrine, suffering (dukkha) arises from the unavoidable frustration of our desire for permanence, a desire rooted in our ignorant taking of what is impermanent and “selfless” as the opposite. And for Buddhism, suffering is the primary fact, as the First Noble Truth attests. It is not only the primary fact but an all-pervasive one: Sabbe dhamma dukkha, all things are unsatisfactory. Thus even what is ordinarily taken to be satisfactory (sukha), a state of mental or physical pleasure for example, is ultimately unsatisfactory when correctly viewed. For one with right view, the opposite of dukkha is not sukha, but nibbana: the opposite of suffering is not a positive state, pleasure or satisfaction, but a privative state, absence or cessation of suffering.

To eradicate suffering, therefore, we must come to see the world for what it is: void of self-nature. If nothing in the world has self-nature, then the world is impermanent and unsatisfactory “all the way down,” so that there is literally nothing to cling to and nothing in which to find lasting satisfaction. The worldling (puthujjana), who of course to some extent recognizes both impermanence and suffering, believes nonetheless that on balance he will escape from them and enjoy a life that, viewed as a whole, could be adjudged satisfactory. Or at least he believes that he has a good chance at achieving such a life, and that therefore the effort to achieve it is well worth making. Buddha’s doctrine, however, is that there is no escape for any sentient being from unsatisfactoriness no matter how fortunate or well-endowed: impermanence and suffering are ubiquitous. Not even death constitutes escape: there is re-birth to be reckoned with, and bad living might land one in a predicament worse than the present one. One who gains intuitive insight into the truth of anattata (selflessness) will thus

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be enabled to see deeply into the all-pervasive nature of impermanence and suffering, and so seeing, learn to renounce all craving, clinging, and attachment, thereby eventually becoming free of all suffering. As I see it, the anatta doctrine explains the manifest empirical features of impermanence and suffering, but does so in such a way as to imply that they are more pervasive than they seem to the worldling, and are indeed all-pervasive. Thus the worldling will admit that there is impermanence and suffering, but only by contrast with things he regards as permanent and satisfactory; what he cannot grasp until he grasps the truth of anattata (selflessness) is that absolutely everything, even relatively permanent and satisfactory things, are in the end impermanent and unsatisfactory. A correct understanding of impermanence and suffering therefore requires insight into the anatta doctrine.

So although Buddhism is first and foremost a soteriology — as the “poisoned arrow” parable makes unmistakably clear — the Buddhist way of salvation rests on a theoretical claim about the world, the anatta doctrine. If this doctrine is false or unsupported or perhaps even incoherent, then in equal measure so is its soteriology. But this requires a bit more discussion. We need to see that the soteriology is not merely practical or pragmatic, but rests on the Buddhist ontology.

For the Buddhist, the problem at the root of our uneasy and unsatisfactory predicament in this life is not mis-directed desire, but desire itself. Whereas the First Noble Truth establishes, or at least asserts, the fact of all-pervasive suffering, the Second points to desire or craving (tanha) as its origin. We suffer, not because we desire the wrong things, but because we desire at all, and in desiring become attached to objects all of which are ultimately unsatisfactory or dukkha-inducing. If we could stop desiring, then, we would stop suffering. Thus a solution to the problem of suffering is not to be had by a re-direction of desire, from say transient objects to more lasting ones, but by its complete eradication. This is affirmed in the Third Noble Truth which affirms the possibility of the complete cessation and utter renunciation of desire. How this is to be brought about is set forth in the Fourth Noble Truth which outlines the Eight-Fold Path consisting of right views, right intentions, right speech, right conduct, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. Paramount among right views is of course the teaching on anatta.

Buddha thus proposes a radical cure for our existential malaise: the extirpation of desire. Compare the Christian Platonist, St. Augustine. We know from his Confessiones that he lusted after bodies, male and female, after property and position, after name and fame.[3] But tasting these things, he could not be satisfied by them. For they are all corruptible and their enjoyment leaves us as empty and vain as they are. Platonist that he was, he took their corruptibility as an index of unreality and unsatisfactoriness. Arguably, he was as sensitive to impermanence as Buddha was. It would not be too much of a stretch to say that Augustine too took the sense world and its ancient lures to be devoid of self-nature. (Anything continuously dependent on God for its very existence cannot possess much by way of self-nature.) But the main difference between them is that Augustine had nothing like an anatta doctrine with respect to God

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and the soul. If anything is atta, God and the soul are.[4] (The marks of atta will occupy us in a moment.) Indeed, these were precisely the two ultimate realities he wanted to know to the exclusion of all else: Deum et animam scire cupio, “I want to know God and the soul.” Hence for Augustine the solution to the problem of suffering was not via an eradication of desire but by the soul’s re-direction of its love from the sense-world to God, from this half-lit world of shadows to the Unchangeable Light.[5] The solution is through a conversio, a turning-around: “For I had my back to the Light and my face to the things illuminated.”[6] For Buddha, ultimately nothing can satisfy desire; hence the cessation of suffering requires the eradication of desire. But for Augustine, desire can be satisfied, but only by union with God. “Our hearts will not rest until they rest in Thee.” Hence the problem for Augustine is not desire as such but ignorantly and sinfully chosen objects of desire.

I think it is clear that these two different views about how salvation is to be achieved (whether by the eradication, or by the re-direction, of desire) reflect different underlying metaphysical commitments, and stand and fall with these commitments. Thus if Buddha radically interpreted is right, and nothing has self-nature, then, given that only the substantial, permanent, and eternal can satisfy us, salvation is possible only by the uprooting of desire. But if Augustine is right, and God and the soul possess self-nature, then salvation demands “merely” the soul’s re-direction of desire away from the false glitter of this world toward God.

To know which of these competing paths really works, we need to know which of the competing metaphysical commitments is really true. The Buddhist “therapy” is not a mere practice, but a practice resting on the anatta doctrine: we must eradicate desire, as per the Second Noble Truth, precisely because only what has self-nature could satisfy desire, and nothing has self-nature. If the unrestricted anatta doctrine is false and something (Augustine’s God for example) has self-nature, then we ought to seek our salvation by a re-direction of desire to this Something. The Buddhist way would then lead not to genuine salvation but to mere annihilation of desire. Buddhist practitioners might think that their practices “work for them,” but if the unrestricted anatta doctrine is false, they would be living in illusion. We therefore see that, although metaphysical discussions such as the one to follow are not conducive to salvation in one sense – they may distract from meditation and moral ascesis and contribute to the ego-bloat found everywhere in the world but especially in academe — they are essential to understand what one must do to achieve salvation, and therefore essential to salvation in another sense.

II. AN ARGUMENT FOR THE DOCTRINE

To better determine what the anatta doctrine amounts to, we need to look at some of the Buddhist arguments for it. (The full sense of a philosophical thesis emerges

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only on consideration of its grounds and its consequences.) On this occasion we look at only one early but highly characteristic text. Here are the words of Buddha according to the Anattalakkhana Sutta, his second discourse, the Sermon on the Mark of Not-Self:

The body [rupa], monks, is not self. If the body were the self, this body would not lend itself to dis-ease. It would be possible (to say) with regard to the body, “Let my body be thus. Let my body be not thus.” But precisely because the body is not self, the body lends itself to dis-ease. And it is not possible (to say) with regard to the body, “Let my body be thus. Let my body not be thus.”[7]

Buddha then goes on to argue similarly with respect to the rest of the five “aggregates” or categories of personality-constituents (khandhas, Sanskrit: skandhas), namely, feeling (vedana), perception (sanna), consciousness (vinnana), and mental formations (sankharas). All are claimed to be not-self. Thus we are told that feeling afflicts us and is not amenable to our control, whence it is inferred that feeling is not one’s self, not one’s own inner substance. The tacit premise of this enthymeme is that one’s self would be something over which one would have complete control, something wholly active and spontaneous. And it is clear that something wholly active will not suffer: to suffer is precisely to be afflicted by something external over which one has no control.

After arguing that each of the personality-constituents is outside of our control and brings suffering, Buddha argues that each of the constituents is impermanent and for this reason as well is lacking in self-nature. The over-all argument of the Anattalakkhana Sutta may therefore be reconstructed in a generalized form as follows:

1. If anything were the self, then it would have two properties: it would not be liable to disease, decay, destruction or change generally, and it would be self-determining, i.e., it would have complete control over itself.

2. But nothing in our experience has either of these two properties, neither the body, nor feeling, nor perception, nor consciousness, etc.

Therefore

3. Nothing in our experience can be identified as the self.

I have structured the argument so that it is not only valid in point of logical form, but also has plausible premises. (A charitable reconstruction can aim at nothing less.) Thus the addition of “in our experience” in premise (2) makes this premise more plausible than without the addition. But this gain in plausibility exacts a price: the conclusion (3) cannot then amount to the unrestricted anatta doctrine according to which nothing at all is a self or has self-nature. It is one thing to say that nothing in our experience can be identified (veridically) as a self, and quite another to say that there is no self.

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For it may well be that the existence of a (transcendental) self that is not experienced is a necessary condition of establishing that whatever is experienced is not a self. After all, if I come to see that my body, feelings, perceptions, and so on cannot be identified as my very self, then it is presumably I myself who come to this insight. If I come to reject body-identification, feeling-identification, etc. as false self-identifications, then presumably there must be at least the possibility of a true self-identification, even if only of the tautological form, “I am I.” If every self-identification were false, then “I am I” would be false. But that is either a contradiction, or implies that there is nothing that body, feelings, etc. are distinct from, which is again incoherent. For if “I am not this body” is true, then in some sense I must exist as that from which my body is distinct. Furthermore, if anyone needs and desires liberation, it is presumably in every case I myself who needs and desires it, and I myself who, if all goes well, achieves it, and indeed achieves it on the basis of my own insight into my non-identity with any of five khandhas or with the psychophysical complex composed of them. The self who needs, desires, and possibly attains liberation is obviously distinct from each of the khandhas and from the psychophysical complex. My body, obviously enough, cannot come to realize its non-identity with itself, for the simple reason that it is not distinct from itself. The same holds for each of the khandhas, and for the lot of them taken together. And to suppose that no one desires, needs, or attains liberation would appear to make hash of the whole Buddhist system of soteriology. Buddhism is an existentialist system in roughly Kierkegaard’s sense: it is the salvation of the “existing individual” that is the unum necessarium and sole desideratum. It is therefore arguable that the existence of a transcendental self is a cognitive and soteriological presupposition: it is presupposed if there is to be insight that no object of experience is veridically identifiable as one’s very self, and it is presupposed if there is to be something that is saved from the samsaric predicament. But to properly exfoliate and evaluate all of this would require a separate article.

Here we take a different tack. Rather than arguing that (2) could be true only if there is a (transcendental) self as cognitive/soteriological presupposition, we focus solely on the evaluation of premise (1), the truth of which is required not only for the soundness of the argument to (3), but also for the soundness of the further argument to the unrestricted anatta thesis, to wit: (4) Nothing is a self. Let us call the argument to (3) the restricted argument, and the argument to (4) the unrestricted argument. The problem of how to move validly from (3) to (4) will not concern us on the present occasion.

III. AN EXAMINATION OF PREMISE (1)

Premise (1) of the above argument says that anything that could count as a self would have to be both permanent and self-determining. But “permanent” here cannot mean relatively permanent: one’s body and many of one’s bodily features are relatively permanent as are one’s attitudes and dispositions. Indeed, if one’s body were not relatively permanent one could not become attached to it and desire its indefinite continuance. The same goes for “self-determining.” Since it is obvious that we do have some control over our bodily and mental states, “self-determining” cannot mean

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relatively self-determining.[8] Properly understood, then, (1) says that for anything to count as a self it must be both absolutely permanent and absolutely self-determining. But given the soteriological context of Buddhist thought, we may immediately add that a self both absolutely permanent and absolutely self-determining will also be absolutely devoid of suffering: the state of such a self would be a wholly satisfactory and maximally desire-worthy[9] state. It would obviously be the ideal state for a self to be in.

What premise (1) does, therefore, is to set an exceedingly high standard for selfhood: to be a self, or to have self-nature, or to be veridically identifiable as one’s very self, a thing must be absolutely permanent, self-determining, and desire-worthy. But the further course of the unrestricted argument makes it clear that nothing at all comes up to this standard: nothing is a self. Now if nothing is absolutely permanent, self-determining, and desire-worthy, then the idea or concept of self-nature invoked in the initial premise is fictitious in that it fails to apply to anything. This suggests the following questions. How could a fictitious idea be held up as an ideal or standard by which to denigrate ontologically the things we encounter? How could a fictitious idea be used to show that the things we naturally desire are fundamentally not worthy of desire?

Let us see if these queries can be transformed into an argument. I will try to establish the thesis that premise (1) is inconsistent with the anatta doctrine taken in its full scope, that is, as applying to everything, nibbana included, and that (1) can be true only if there is something absolutely permanent, self-determining and desire-worthy. In the majority of cases, of course, statements of the form, “If something is F, then it has such-and-such properties” are logically consistent with statements of the form, “Nothing is F.” For example, “If x is the luminiferous ether, then x is the medium through which electromagnetic signals are transmitted” is logically consistent with “There is no luminiferous ether.” It would be absurd to argue that the existence of the ether is a necessary condition of the meaningfulness of the concept of ether. There are plenty of uninstantiated concepts whose meaningfulness is in no way prejudiced by their being uninstantiated. But there are other concepts which cannot be coherently supposed to be uninstantiated. The supposition that the concept of truth[10] has no instances, for example, quickly succumbs to a reductio ad absurdum. For if the concept of truth is uninstantiated, then it is true that it is uninstantiated, which implies that the concept of truth is instantiated. If, on the other hand, the concept of truth is instantiated, then of course it is instantiated. Therefore, necessarily, the concept of truth is instantiated. Hence it is impossible that the concept of truth be uninstantiated. To show that the concept of the self cannot be an uninstantiated concept is not as easy a task; but that is what I

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propose to do. The basic idea of this section is that the concept of the self as it figures in the argumentation of the Anattalakkhana Sutta cannot be an uninstantiated concept due to its specific normative content. To be precise, the concept of the self cannot be an uninstantiated concept if it is a standard relative to which ordinary objects of desire[11] are to be adjudged ontologically and desideratively substandard. Thus the project of establishing that nothing possesses self-nature can be successful only if there is something possessing self-nature. But that is just to say that the project must fail, and that it is incoherent to maintain without qualification or restriction that nothing has self-nature. For all I will be saying on this occasion, however, a suitably restricted anatta doctrine may well be true. Thus nothing I will be saying casts doubt on the restricted argument, i.e., the argument to (3) above.

It is crucial that the reader understand what I mean by “ontological denigration” as it figures in the question, How could a fictitious idea be held up as an ideal or standard by which to denigrate ontologically the things we encounter? To denigrate something is to assert or imply that it fails to meet a certain standard or achieve a certain norm. To denigrate something ontologically is to assert or imply that in its very being or mode of existence the thing in question fails to meet a certain standard or achieve a certain norm. The relevant norm here is maximal satisfactoriness or desirability. Thus to denigrate ontologically the things of this world is to assert or imply that they lack the plenary being or existence they would have to have to be desire-worthy as ends in themselves. A lack of this sort, if it obtains, is obviously all-pervasive and irremediable: all-pervasive, because rooted in the very existence of each worldly being as such; irremediable, because the mode of existence of a thing is essential to it.

That Buddhism is involved in the ontological denigration of ordinary objects of desire is beyond question. The constant emphasis on impermanence has no other point than to establish that things are unsatisfactory and lacking in self-nature, and that we must therefore stop clinging to them and detach ourselves from them. The existence and ubiquity of impermanence are not value-neutral facts about the world that we are invited to contemplate theoretically; impermanence is made much of because of its link with suffering or unsatisfactoriness which has its ground in selflessness. And this for the sole soteriological purpose of inspiring us to work out our salvation with diligence by fleeing from our enslavement to our passions, as one would flee from a burning building. If Buddhism is true, we are in a truly dire predicament made all the worse by the prospect of countless future lives in circumstances even worse than the one we are in now. Buddhism, to put it in a slogan, is “a path not a proposition”; but it is a path of salvation resting on the proposition that the pursuit of ordinary objects of desire, as ontologically substandard, is harmful to our spiritual health.

I should make it clear that I am not opposed to the ontological denigration of ordinary objects of desire; indeed I am all for it. Every genuine religion is involved in such denigration.[12] Thus the New Testament text that “the world is passing away

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and also its lusts” (1 John 2, 17) is not a mere theoretical observation, but a warning: the objects of lust and of the “boastful pride of life” are worthless and next-to-nothing; therefore, turn away from them at once if you value your spiritual well-being. My point, however, is that (i) a thing cannot be ontologically substandard unless there is a standard or norm relative to which it is substandard, and (ii) this standard must objectively exist. Thus in Plato’s metaphysics, phenomenal particulars are ontologically substandard — but only by comparison to standard-setting Forms or Eide. Nietzsche was therefore quite right to point out that any denial of Platonism’s “true world” is tantamount to a denial of its “apparent world.”[13] For “true” and “apparent” are normatively charged terms. Deny the standard relative to which something is adjudged imperfect, and you deny the imperfection of the thing hitherto so adjudged. Plato and Nietzsche agree in this, that the apparent and true worlds stand and fall together, such that it would be simply incoherent to say that the objects of the sense world are merely apparent while also maintaining that there is no true world of standards relative to which they are merely apparent.

To appreciate this, one must see that “ontologically substandard” and such cognates as “ontologically standard-setting” are not purely ontological designations, but ontological-cum-normative designations. Since the days of Hume at least, philosophers have become accustomed to drawing a sharp distinction amounting to an “entailment-barrier” between facts and norms, between what is the case and what ought to be the case. The tendency is to view facts as objective but norms as subjective, as deriving from and relative to subjective acts of evaluation. But in many ancient modes of thought, Buddhism included, there is no such entailment-barrier. What is objectively the case can also be objectively normative. Thus consider this characteristic formulation from the Pali canon: “Dhamma anicca: yad aniccam tam dukkham: yam dukkham tad anatta.”[14] “Things are impermanent: what is impermanent is suffering: what is suffering is not-self.” This means that what is objectively impermanent is by its very nature as objectively impermanent objectively unsatisfactory. The impermanent as such, in its very being, is unsatisfactory. It does not mean that impermanent things sometimes give rise to suffering or even that they always, as a matter of contingent fact, give rise to suffering. For on Buddhism, suffering is inescapable so long as we cling to the impermanent. The plain sense of the formulation, therefore, is that impermanence metaphysically entails suffering, and that suffering metaphysically entails lack of self-nature, and that none of this depends on subjective value-preferences. Because it does not so depend, failure to see the connections here amounts to ignorance and delusion. (Someone who does not share my subjective preferences cannot sensibly be taxed with delusion.) Thus the very nature of impermanence is such as to necessitate suffering, and the very nature of suffering is such as to necessitate lack of self-nature.

On the face of it, however, impermanence is a “factual” or non-normative property, the property of changing or being subject to change, while unsatisfactoriness

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is a normative property. How then can impermanence entail unsatisfactoriness? How can the non-normative entail the normative? This is a question we need to answer. But first we need to appreciate the difficulty.

It is a plain empirical fact that things change, a fact one can literally see and literally feel; but it is not an empirical fact, although I will assume that is a fact, that all changing things are unsatisfactory. That painful states are unsatisfactory is empirically obvious, but the Buddhist claim is that absolutely everything is unsatisfactory, including what we normally think of as states of pleasure: Sabbe dhamma dukkha.[15] Feeling one’s pleasure grow, climax, and then subside, in the sex act for example, one is directly acquainted with impermanence; but one is not directly acquainted with unsatisfactoriness. Hugh Hefner is well aware that his pleasures are transient, but I rather doubt that he would admit that they are unsatisfactory. To the suggestion that they are, he would probably and quite plausibly retort: “Why should what is impermanent be unsatisfactory?” If he were a philosopher, he might defend the view that the impermanent can be satisfactory as follows. There is nothing in the concept of impermanence, or in the meaning of the term “impermanence,” to require that an impermanent thing be unsatisfactory. Even if “Everything impermanent is unsatisfactory” is true, it is surely not analytically true. Thus impermanence does not analytically entail unsatisfactoriness. But neither is the putative unsatisfactoriness of a transient pleasure an object of direct empirical acquaintance. While experiencing a pleasure, one is precisely not experiencing anything unsatisfactory. If one attends to the pleasure alone, no mark of unsatisfactoriness is empirically discernible as long as the pleasure lasts. Thus the truth-ground of “Everything impermanent is unsatisfactory” does not lie in experience. Physical and mental pleasures are impermanent but satisfactory as long as they last. Of course, it is unsatisfactory that they should come to an end; but they can be adjudged unsatisfactory in this regard only relative to the ideal of permanence as a mark of satisfactoriness. But then one has brought in a standard that is precisely not empirically given or empirically justifiable, and the question arises as to what justifies this standard. I shall return to this point in a moment.

The failure of analytic entailment, together with the unobservability of unsatisfactoriness in the cases of sensory states that are pleasurable or else neutral as between pleasure and pain, show that there is a distinction between the ostensibly non-normative property of impermanence and the obviously normative property of unsatisfactoriness. Given this distinction, a worldling might naturally hold that it is merely arbitrary and subjective to evaluate transient pleasures and transient things generally as unsatisfactory. “Everything impermanent is unsatisfactory” would on this view be a subjective stipulation and thus not objectively true at all. Buddhism might be thought to rest on a purely subjective life-denying value-judgment, one that we are under no obligation to accept, and one that a Nietzschean might take to be little more than an expression of physiological decadence or excessive susceptibility to pain.[16] Or thus our hedonist philosopher might argue.

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But, the Buddhist might counter-argue, from the fact that impermanence does not analytically entail unsatisfactoriness, it does not follow that the former does not metaphysically entail the latter.[17] “Everything impermanent is unsatisfactory,” though not analytically true could still be necessarily true. Indeed, I think this is the clear sense of the Buddhist doctrine. Once one appreciates this metaphysical entailment, one is in a position to appreciate that impermanence is not a merely ontological property, but a combined ontological-normative one. Clearly, the same holds for “no self”: it too is an ontological-cum-normative property. To say that something lacks self-nature is not merely to describe it, but to evaluate it. It is to say that it lacks being or reality; that it is not “really real” (ontos on) in Plato’s sense.

But this still leaves us with the question as to the truth-maker of “Everything impermanent is unsatisfactory.” What makes this true? It is not an analytic proposition, and so if true, it is not true in virtue of the meanings of its constituent terms. Nor is its truth-ground to be found in experience. I may learn from experience that all pleasures, noble or base, mental or physical, pass away; but that this passing-away of pleasures is unsatisfactory – this is not something I learn from experience. No doubt both the passing-away of pleasures as well as the pleasurableness of pleasures are empirically detectable features. But the unsatisfactoriness of passing pleasures is not an empirically detectable feature. Note that the passing-away of pains is not unsatisfactory, but the opposite. Hence it is not passing-way as such that is unsatisfactory. Nobody complains when a migraine headache passes away. And of course the unsatisfactoriness of passing pleasures does not derive from their felt quality, i.e., their pleasurableness. For their pleasurableness is quite obviously satisfactory. The unsatisfactoriness stems from the fact that something we want to last, does not last. Thus the unsatisfactoriness derives from the discrepancy between what we want or desire, a permanent state of pleasure, and what we get, pleasures that subside. This discrepancy between the ideal and what is found in experience is obviously not something that can be empirically discerned since it involves a comparison, one of the terms of which is precisely not to be found in experience, namely, the ideal of absolute permanence as the criterion of satisfactoriness. We do not learn from experience that the passing-away of pleasures is unsatisfactory; we impose on our pleasurable experiences the stamp of unsatisfactoriness by comparing them with a standard of absolute permanence that neither has nor can have any empirical pedigree.

But that everything impermanent is unsatisfactory is also not an arbitrary stipulation or expression of subjective preference that we are free to accept or reject. Embedded in its Buddhist context, the proposition in question purports to be objectively true, so much so that anyone failing to grasp its truth is taxed with ignorance and delusion.

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What then is the truth-ground of “Everything impermanent is unsatisfactory”? There is only one answer. What makes this proposition true is that there is an Ideal of absolute permanence and satisfactoriness against which the impermanent can be compared and with which the impermanent is in conflict. And what makes ‘Everything impermanent lacks self-nature’ true is that there is an Ideal of absolute self-nature to which the impermanent can be compared and with which the impermanent is in conflict. These are presumably the same Ideal. If there were no such Ideal, there would be nothing in comparison to which worldly objects could be ontologically-desideratively substandard, and any judgment that they are thus substandard would be false.

IV. AN OBJECTION AND A REPLY

But does it follow that this Ideal objectively exists? For one might grant that there is in some sense such an Ideal, that it is necessarily in play in the various arguments for the unrestricted anatta doctrine, but that it is nonetheless illusory. One might argue that the Ideal is a mere projection of our human desire for permanence and security, a desire that is bound to go unsatisfied given that all is impermanent. As such, the Ideal would have no objective status but still could be used to argue the unreality and unsatisfactoriness of the objects of desire. According to Peter Harvey, “The not-Self teaching can in fact be seen as a brilliant device – a skillful means – which uses a deep-seated human aspiration, ultimately illusory, to overcome the negative products of such an illusion.”[18] Thus the aspiration to permanence, though ultimately illusory, is employed as a standard against which to measure the objects of desire and attachment so that we may come to see that they are insubstantial and ultimately unsatisfactory and therefore to be shunned.

I submit that Harvey’s suggestion is simply and irremediably incoherent. An illusory standard is not a standard relative to which anything could be objectively lacking in either desire-worthiness or self-nature. At best, an illusory standard would justify a merely subjective devaluation of the objects of desire, a devaluation that would be of no objective interest. A little parable may help convey what I am driving at. Suppose someone, call him Harry, goes spouse-hunting armed with an exceedingly exacting standard: a potential mate must be perfect, i.e. must possess all of the perfections appropriate to human beings, and must possess the highest degree of such perfections as admit of degrees. Since nobody meets the standard, Harry’s quest will end in frustration. Now is the problem that no one is objectively worthy of Harry’s attention, or is the problem with the standard? Clearly the latter: since the standard is utterly illusory, there being nothing that could satisfy it, someone’s failure to measure up is no argument against her suitability for marriage. What Harry must do is to throw out his unrealistic standard. It would be absurd for him to renounce his desire/need for a spouse on the ground that no one is suitable. For if his only reason for thinking a candidate unsuitable is her failure to satisfy a purely imaginary notion of perfection, then this is obviously no reason at all. Harry’s fertile imagination is surely no basis for an objective evaluation or devaluation of anything.

[IPQ 465]

Similarly, if the Self-ideal is illusory, as the unrestricted anatta doctrine requires, then a thing’s failure to measure up to it is no argument against it. There is of course a difference between the Self-ideal and Harry’s spousal ideal. The Self-ideal is presumably as common to all human beings as is their insatiable desire for permanent satisfaction, whereas Harry’s ideal is an aberration confined to him and perhaps a few others. But this is not a difference that makes a difference to my argument. An illusion’s being shared by all does not make it any less of an illusion. And so again, if the Self-ideal is illusory, then a thing’s failure to measure up to it cannot be taken to show that the thing in question should be renounced.

This is even clearer when we consider that if nothing is absolutely permanent, then this is necessarily the case. For if there were an absolutely permanent entity, it would be a metaphysical absolute whose possibility would entail its actuality.[19] Readers familiar with the modal versions of the ontological argument know that an existing metaphysical absolute is necessary, while a nonexisting one is impossible. An absolute is not the sort of thing that could have the modal status of contingency. So if the Self-ideal is objectively nonexistent, then it does not just happen not to exist: it is metaphysically impossible. Now it is particularly difficult to see how a thing’s failure to measure up to an impossibly existent ideal could count against its desire-worthiness and reality. If there cannot be a permanent entity, then the idea that anything ought to measure up to such a necessarily nonexistent standard on pain of ontological denigration in the event of failure to measure up is untenable. Why exactly? Well, just as ought implies can with respect to human actions, ought to be satisfied implies can be satisfied with respect to demands in general. Call this the generalized “ought implies can” principle. If the demand that things ought to be permanent to be desire-worthy cannot be satisfied by anything, then it is not a legitimate demand with binding deontic force. Everyone can see what is wrong with the following sentence: “You ought to have saved that child from the burning building even though you would have had to travel at the speed of sound to get there in time.” If a person cannot perform a physical action, then it cannot be demanded of him on pain of ethical denigration in case of failure to perform it. One’s ethical status cannot be lowered by one’s failure to do what one cannot do. Similarly, a thing’s ontological status cannot be lowered by its failure to meet an ontological standard that nothing meets and that indeed nothing can meet. So if nothing is permanent (and thus nothing is even possibly permanent), then a thing’s failure to be permanent cannot be taken to argue its lack of full reality or substantiality or self-nature. Nor can it be taken to argue its lack of desire-worthiness.

My point could be summed up as follows. If human desire makes an impossible demand, a demand for permanence that nothing can satisfy, such a demand cannot be

[IPQ 466]

legitimate: it cannot be employed as a standard for the ontological-desiderative denigration of ordinary objects of desire. If this were our predicament, the appropriate response to universal impermanence would not be the eradication of desire, but its scaling-back. One would only have to stop desiring what one cannot have. One cannot have an unlimited life-span, a maximally perfect spouse, or a house proof against every threat; but one can reasonably aim at a long healthy life of 80 years, marriage to a morally decent person, and possession of a reasonably durable house, and so on. Given that nothing is absolutely permanent, why could not one be satisfied with what is relatively permanent? If a thing fails to meet a standard that nothing does or can meet, why should this constitute a good reason for thinking that the thing in question is unreal or worthless? To reject as worthless all impermanent objects on the supposition that there are only impermanent objects would amount to total nihilism.[20] And I submit that to interpret the magnificent Buddha-Dhamma as a species of total nihilism[21] would be uncharitable in the extreme. But that it what we are committed to if we take the anatta doctrine to have unrestricted scope.

V. CODA

What I have shown is that the truth of premise (1) — the key assumption of the argumentation in the Anattalakkhana Sutta — is inconsistent with the unrestricted anatta doctrine. Thus it is inconsistent to hold both that (i) if anything is a self, then it is permanent and self-determining, and (ii) nothing is a self. For this is equivalent to holding both that (iii) there is an ideal, the Self-ideal, that nothing does or can satisfy, and (iv) things must satisfy this ideal if they are to be desire-worthy. A standard that nothing can satisfy and that everything must satisfy is obviously a self-contradictory standard. For a standard that everything must satisfy is a standard

that something can satisfy by the generalized “ought implies can” principle above; but this contradicts the unrestricted anatta doctrine according to which the Self-ideal is a standard that nothing can satisfy.

The unrestricted argument, the argument to the conclusion that nothing has self-nature, is therefore unsound. For its major premise is inconsistent with its conclusion. But this leaves open the possibility of a restricted argument to the conclusion that no object of our ordinary experience has self-nature and thus that no such object is ultimately desire-worthy. Such a restricted argument, however, requires the unconditioned existence of a supremely desire-worthy Object.[22]

[1]. Although “self” and “person” are sometimes used interchangeably, this is a usage we ought to avoid. Otherwise, “selfless person” in the sense of “person without a self” would be a contradiction in terms and our very terminology would beg the question against the anatta doctrine.

[2]. Cf. T. R. V. Murti, The Central Philosophy of Buddhism (London: Unwin Paperbacks, 1980), p. 17.

[3]. The case for Augustine’s having indulged in homosexual practices is made by Giovanni Papini, Saint Augustine, trans. Agnetti (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1930), pp. 45-47.

[4]. To the extent that the soul is created by God, and thus (given a non-deistic conception of divine creation) continuously dependent upon God for its very existence, the soul is not quite atta. But it is close, and obviously more atta than the body.

[5]. Cf. Confessions, Book 7, Ch. 10.

[6]. Confessions, Book IV, Ch. 16.

[7]. Samyutta Nikaya XXII, 59.

[8]. This remains the case even if determinism is true, and our limited control over our bodily and mental states is not libertarianly free. Note also that to say that we have some limited control over our bodily and mental states does not beg the question against the anatta doctrine: “we” refers to us as persons– persons which could conceivably turn out to be selfless. See note 1 above.

[9]. I often write “desire-worthy” rather than “desirable” because the latter expression is ambiguous as between “able to be desired” and “worthy of being desired.”

[10]. To be precise: true proposition.

[11]. I say “ordinary objects of desire,” since presumably freedom from all desire, bringing with it liberation from the samsaric go-round and entry into nibbana, is an object of desire for someone seeking liberation. But it is clearly extraordinary.

[12]. I realize that this claim requires detailed defense; but it cannot be provided here.

[13]. Friedrich Nietzsche, Goetzendaemmerung: “Die wahre Welt haben wir abgeschafft: welche Welt blieb uebrig? die Scheinbare vielleicht?...Aber nein! mit der wahren Welt haben wir auch die scheinbare abgeschafft!” Werke in Zwei Baenden, (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1967), vol II, p. 341.

[14]. Salayatana Samyutta 4.

[15].Yam kinci vedayitam tam dukkhasmin ti. Whatever is felt counts as unpleasure (suffering). Vedana Samyutta ii, 1.

[16]. Although Nietzsche has some good things to say about Buddhism as compared with Christianity, he classes both as “nihilistic religions,” “religions of decadence.” See The Antichrist, section 20. Section 22 ties Buddhism to an excessive susceptibility to pain.

[17]. Illustration: Being water does not analytically entail being composed of H2O molecules; but given that water is (identically) H2O, and given Saul Kripke’s doctrine of the necessity of identity, x’s being a sample of water metaphysically entails x’s being composed of H2O molecules.

[18]. Peter Harvey, The Selfless Mind: Personality, Consciousness and Nirvana in Early Buddhism (Surrey: Curzon Press, 1995), p. 45.

[19]. It might be argued that nibbana is absolutely permanent without being a metaphysical absolute. For (1) if nibbana were impermanent it would be as worthless as any impermanent state or thing; but (2) nibbana cannot be an absolute since, lacking self-nature, it is not a substance. It would take a separate article to show wherein the error of this reasoning consists. The present article assumes that the three characteristics of impermanence, suffering, and selflessness stand and fall together. Thus nothing can be permanent without being non-suffering and a self.

[20]. One response to this might be that (i) human desire does make an impossible demand, but (ii) we are powerless to scale it back: it is not possible for us to be satisfied with finite objects of desire. But if so, we would also be powerless to eradicate desire. Surely, if we have the power to eradicate desire, as Buddhism assumes, then we have the power to limit desire to impermanent objects. My point is that this precisely what we ought to do if we are convinced that only impermanent objects exist. So the defense consisting of (i) and (ii) won’t work.

[21]. Total nihilism may be defined as the view that all finite objects of desire are ultimately worthless, and that beyond the finite there is nothing at all.

[22]. I thank John Maraldo, Horace Jeffery Hodges, and an anonymous IPQ referee for comments on an earlier draft.

If all is empty, then this thesis is empty or devoid of self-nature. This implies that the thesis possesses no one determinate sense or meaning. Given that sense or meaning undergirds truth-value, in the sense that nothing devoid of sense or meaning could have a truth-value, (1) is without truth-value.

Is the problem with (1) simply one of performative inconsistency? Anyone who affirms (1) is involved in a performative inconsistency: the very act of affirming it presupposes that it has a definite affirmable content. The act of affirming (1) thus contradicts the content of (1). So (1) succumbs to retortion. Retortion seems to show that it cannot be the case that all is empty. Some things are non-empty, and one might expect that a Buddhist would hold that among these non-empty things are such fundamental truths of Buddhism as the truth of impermanence, the truth of suffering, and the truth of selflessness.

But might the unrestricted anatta thesis be true all the same? Might it be an unaffirmable truth? Are there any unaffirmable truths? One might respond: "Precisely because (1) is true, precisely because all is devoid of self-nature, you cannot affirm it; your inability to affirm it does not show it not to be true."

Is this response any good? I don't think that it is. For what (1) implies is that everything is empty or devoid of self-nature: every act of assertion, indeed every speech act, every content asserted, and every linguistic and other means used to encode or express propositional contents. The problem, therefore, is not just that the speech act of stating or asserting (1) is self-defeating, but that the propositional content asserted is inconsistent with this content's being true.

(1) is not merely performatively self-defeating; it is self-defeating in itself. (1) is in this respect different from

2. No statement is negative.

(2) is either true or false. If false, then unaffirmable because false; if true, then unaffirmable because the very act of affirming it would falsify it. Nevertheless, there are possible worlds in which the proposition expressed by (2) is true, namely, those worlds in which there are no statements. (1), however, expresses a proposition that is false in all possible worlds.

Both see the contemplative life, whether philosophical or scientific or mystical, as a form of evasion, evasion of the tasks of building socialist society (Marx), or of becoming an individual (Kierkegaard). And how divergent these life-tasks! Transcendence through a super-socialization in which the individual is dissolved in the collective versus transcendence through individuation. The contemplative, however, seeks a different form of transcendence of present self: transcendence into the impersonal, asocial, truth.

One sort of contemplative is the mystical quietist. Buddha may perhaps serve as an example. If Marx said that the point was to change the world, Buddha said that the point was to deny the world by extinguishing desire. Suffering is pervasive, and its root is desire; so a radical solutuion entails an eradication of suffering's root. But both agree that theoretical understanding is not the point, but a distraction from the task of transformation of society or self. In a famous Buddhist image, if I have been shot with a poisoned arrow, it does not particularly matter whether I can plot the arrow’s trajectory, provide a chemical analysis of the poison, or ascertain the archer’s social class. The unum necessarium is to extract the arrow. On fire with desire, we suffer; so extinguish the fire, in particular the 'fire below,' and enter into Cessation.

Social activism and Kierkegaardian fideism are dead-ends. The activist illusion is to suppose that unimproved man can improve the world in some global (as opposed to piecemeal) way that could satisfy our need for Transcendence. Those who haven’t seen through this illusion by now will probably never see through it. But mere fideism, mere subjective passion, mere intensification of inwardness is no solution either. What good is mere believing without knowing? What one wants and needs is direct contact with the Absolute. This mystical quietism can supply in some measure – but with its own excesses and limitations that can only be made good by a healthy application of discursive reason tempered by moral conscience.

A balanced life integrates philosophy and religion, mysticism and morality; reason and faith, intuition and conscience. A system of existential checks and balances, if you will.

CAN THE CHARIOT TAKE US TO THE LAND OF NO SELF?

Abstract

This paper examines a famous argument for the Buddhist doctrine of anatta (“no self”) according to which nothing possesses self-nature or substantial reality. The argument unfolds during a debate between the monk Nagasena and King Milinda (Menandros). Nagasena’s challenge to the King is that he demonstrate the substantial reality of the chariot in which he arrived at their meeting when said chariot is (i) not identical to any one of its proper parts, (ii) not identical to the mereological sum of its proper parts, and (iii) not identical to anything wholly distinct from its parts. After presenting the argument and defending it against a plausible objection, I argue that it cannot be taken to show that persons lack self- nature.

Non-Persons and Self-Nature

According to Buddhist ontology, every (samsaric) being is impermanent, unsatisfactory, and devoid of self-nature. Anicca, dukkha, anatta: these are the famous three marks (tilakkhana) upon which the whole of Buddhism rests. I would like to consider a well-known Buddhist argument from the Milindapanha for the third of these marks, that of anatta, an argument one could call ‘The Chariot.’ Since time is short, I will avoid the historical niceties and plunge right into the argument:

P1. No concrete partite thing is identical to any one of its proper parts.
P2. No concrete partite thing is identical to the mere(ological) sum of its proper parts.
P3. No concrete partite thing is identical to something wholly distinct from its parts.
Therefore
C. Terms denoting concrete things, useful as they are for counting and classifying, do not refer to anything real, anything possessing self-nature or ‘own-being.’

The premises of this argument are exceedingly plausible. Thus it is surely obvious that King Milinda’s chariot is not identical to its right wheel, or to any other proper part. It is also obvious that the chariot is not identical to the mere sum of its parts: the sum of the chariot’s parts can exist even if the chariot does not exist, as when the chariot is disassembled. It is the same sum whether the chariot is assembled or disassembled. As for the third premise, it also seems quite clear that there is not, in addition to the parts, some further physical or metaphysical entity that is the ‘real chariot’ or substance or substratum of the chariot. That is no more the case than that there is a little man – a homunculus – inside my head looking through my eyes, and hearing through my ears, etc.

The premises, then, seem to be true; but does the conclusion follow? One obvious response is that the argument is a non sequitur since it ignores a fourth possibility: that terms like ‘Nagasena’ and ‘this chariot’ refer to wholes of parts in a definite arrangement, where this arrangement is a feature of reality and is not introduced by our use of such terms as ‘Nagasena’ and ‘chariot.’ Thus a chariot is neither a sum of disconnected chariot-parts, nor something wholly distinct from the parts, but a sum of parts connected in the right way. Thus one might argue that ‘this chariot’ does indeed refer to something in reality, namely, a whole of connected chariot- parts, where both the parts and the connectedness are features of reality. Surely we cannot effect the assembly of chariot-parts simply by applying the term ‘chariot’ to them. It is the other way around: ‘chariot’ applies to them because of their antecedent connectedness. If this is right, then things like chariots would have a sort of relative self-nature which would entail relative permanence and relative satisfactoriness.

This response to the argument, however, is workable only if there is indeed some distinction in reality between the mere sum of chariot-parts and the connected parts. It is open to the Buddhist, however, to argue that there cannot be any such distinction, and thus to argue against even relative self-nature. To simplify the discussion, suppose we have a whole W consisting of two parts, a and b. Then from (P1) we know that ~(W = a) and ~(W = b). From (P2), we know that ~(W = (a + b)). From (P3), we know that there is no c wholly distinct from both a and b such that W = c. The objector, however, wants us to consider a fourth possibility, namely, that W = aRb, where R is an entity in the world that connects a and b, and in connecting them, makes the difference in reality between the whole and the mere sum of its parts.

One problem with this suggestion is that in many cases no entity R is given. Thus if W is a bolt on which has been screwed a nut, all that analysis reveals is the bolt and the nut: there is nothing in reality that connects the bolt and the nut. Of course, in the past someone or something had to screw the bolt onto the nut; but now all we have is a bolt and a nut with nothing that connects them. We may agree that the bolt and nut are connected – in that the nut is threaded onto the bolt – but this connectedness is not a further constituent of reality that can be found by analysis. Not finding any connectedness in reality, philosophers of an empiricist and analytic bent will deny that there is any connectedness in reality. If we introduce the term ‘nolt’ to refer to the bolt-cum-nut, then our Buddhist analyst will say that ‘nolt,’ like ‘chariot,’ refers to nothing in reality. It does not refer to the sum of the parts, because all will agree that a whole cannot be identified with the mere sum of its parts. Thus our natural thought that there is a connectedness in reality that justifies our belief that ‘nolt’ refers to something, and that what it refers to has relative self-nature, turns out, on the Buddhist analysis, to be an illusion.

Indeed, a defender of the Buddhist view could take a further step by pointing out that any further constituent introduced to do a connecting job will be unavailing for essentially Bradleyan reasons. Suppose two boards are connected with a nail. The resulting whole has three parts: two boards and a nail. An ordinary person will say that one of the parts, the nail, connects the other two. The Buddhist philosopher, however, could point out that there is no difference in reality between the unconnected sum of two boards and a nail, and the same three things connected. For even given that someone in the past drove the nail through the two boards, what we have now before us is simply two boards and a nail. At the present moment there is nothing in reality -- nothing that analysis can uncover — that accounts for the connectedness. There is nothing we can point to, nothing empirically discernible, that is the connectedness or the ground of the connectedness. If we call the two boards nailed together ‘noard,’ then our Buddhist will say that ‘noard’ does not refer to anything. For the noard is not identical to one of its proper parts, nor is it identical to the mere sum of its proper parts, nor is it identical to something wholly distinct from its parts.

It is furthermore clear that introducing a fourth entity to connect the nail to the boards will only generate a Bradley-style vicious infinite regress. For we can then reiterate the inquiry by asking what grounds the difference between the mere sum of these four items and the concrete whole having them as parts. The ground of connectedness continues to elude the analytic understanding.

Thus one can see that the Chariot is an argument that cannot be easily dismissed. We want to say, with King Milinda and with common sense, that a whole of parts is more than a mere sum of parts, and that this something more — the unity of the parts — is something real as opposed to something introduced by our conceptual or linguistic activities, or by our craving for permanence. But since we cannot find this ‘something more’ by analysis, the pressure is on to write it off as illusory.

Persons and Self-Nature

But even if the Chariot succeeds in showing that nonpersons lack self-nature, does it also show that persons lack self-nature? It may be that to argue by analogy as Nagasena does, applying to persons what is true of nonpersons, is a mistaken procedure. Indeed, I will now argue that the analogy is mistaken, and that a person is a whole of parts in an importantly different sense than that in which a chariot is a whole of parts.

Suppose my mental state passes from pleasurable to painful. Not only is the painful state painful, the transition from the pleasurable state to the painful one is itself painful. The fact that the transition is painful shows that it is directly perceived. Thus what we have here is not merely a succession of consciousnesses, but also a consciousness of their succession. For there is a consciousness of the transition from the pleasant state to the painful state, a consciousness that embraces both of the states. But a consciousness of their succession is a consciousness of their succession in one subject. It is a consciousness of the identity of the self through the transition from the pleasurable state to the painful one. Passing from a pleasurable state to a painful one, I am aware not only of a pleasant state followed by a painful one, but also that the one who was in a pleasurable state is strictly the same as the one who is now in a painful state.

What this example shows is that there is direct awareness of the self as that in which the two distinct states are united. I am not only aware of the two states; I am aware of myself as the unity of the two states, as a substratum of a mental alteration. The self, therefore, is directly given; but it is of course not given as a separate object wholly distinct from its states. Thus the failure of Buddhists and Humeans to find a self as separate object distinct from its states has no tendency to show that there is no self. The Buddhist-Humean mistake is to think that if a self is not either one of its states or the sum of its states, then it must be something entirely separate from its states. But this is to ignore a fourth possibility, namely, that a self is the unity of its states.

If the “no self” view were correct, there would be no such thing as mental alteration: all mental change would be existential change. One state would come into and pass out of existence, to be followed by another state that would come into and pass out of existence. But this contradicts the phenomenological evidence: we are aware of ourselves as persisting unities, as substrata of alterational change.

The fundamental problem with the Buddhist approach, as it seems to me, is an exclusive and unjustifiable reliance on analysis as the way to truth. The commonsensical suggestion that a chariot is a whole of connected parts, and not a mere sum of parts, was rejected on the ground that this connectedness cannot be found by analysis, as indeed it cannot. But this is to presuppose that only what can be found by analysis is real. We have, however, no good reason to accept this presupposition, and a very good reason to reject it. We ought to reject it because the project of analysis itself presupposes the existence of wholes which are more than mere sums. It is only a unitary whole which needs analysis, and yet no such whole can be exhaustively understood by analysis. Thus the very project of analysis presupposes that there are unitary wholes which cannot be exhaustively understood by analysis. Every analysis presupposes a prior synthesis.

However things may stand with chariots and other nonpersons, what I want to suggest is that each of us, as a person, is just such a whole. Each one of us is a synthetic unity of consciousness and self-consciousness. Analysis may lay bare the contents of our mental lives, but it will never disclose their unifying principle: not because there is no such principle, but because it is not the sort of thing that can turn up under analysis.

1. Let's begin by noting that both Buddhism and Stoicism are fundamentally practical, not theoretical. Roughly, both systems are primarily concerned with the soteriological/therapeutic question of how one ought to live to attain happiness. Theory is of interest only insofar as it subserves this practical end. At the high point of Greek philosophy, in Plato and Aristotle, it was the other way around, but that is a topic for another occasion. (I agree with Brentano that the schools of Stoicism and Skepticism represent decline from the Platonic-Aristotelian high point. Cf. his Die Vier Phasen der Philosophie.)

2. Both systems tie the problem of attaining happiness (or avoiding suffering) to the problem of finding the true or essential self, that which is genuinely one's own. For example, at Enchiridion XIX, Epictetus writes that "the essence of good consists in things in our own power. . . ."

3. Epictetus distinguishes what is in our control, in our power, up to us, from what is not. In our power: opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, etc. Not in our power: body, property, reputation, etc. Now it is obvious that one has some control over one's body, property and reputation. What one lacks is complete control over these externals. So by 'control' Epictetus must intend complete control.

But then, as Phil Flemming in effect complains, how can it be true that desire, aversion, opinion and other mental states are in my (complete) control? Is sexual desire under my complete control? Was sexual desire in Mohandas Ghandi under his complete control? No, but it was an ideal that he got closer to than most of us will.

4. So it may be that the central Epictetan distinction is between that which cannot be in our complete control and that which can be in our complete control. It is self-evident that body, property, progeny and the like cannot be in my complete control. But it is not self-evident that desire, aversion and the like cannot be in my complete control — at least while these states exist.

5. So I think Epictetus' distinction can be defended from Flemming's complaint. He was suggesting that the distinction is bogus, and I agree that is is bogus if it is the distinction between what is as a matter of fact in my complete control and what as a matter of fact is not. For as I am in my present state, nothing is in my complete control, nothing external but also nothing internal.

Take memories. Do I have complete control over my memories? Despite my work at the purgation of memory, I am still assailed from time to time by memories that rise up and gain control of my mind thus injuring my equanimity. So I can't say that memory is something I have in my complete control. But with memories and other 'internals' there is at least the possibility of gaining complete control over them. There is no such possibility as regards externals. It is impossible that I ever have complete control over my reputation, for example, involving as it does the fickle cooperation of other mortals.

6. Epictetus is thus proposing an ideal of autonomy, self-regulation, an ideal state in which one is in total control of all that transpires within the inner citadel. The fact that we are far from this ideal in our present state does nothing to refute it.

7. Now let's contrast the two control arguments.

Buddha: Nothing internal or external is under my complete control. Only that which is under my complete control is my self. Ergo, there is no self.

Epictetus: 'Internals' are potentially under my complete control. Only that which is under my complete control is my self. Ergo, the self, though not a present reality, is potentially attainable.

8. Now I reject both of these arguments for reason to be supplied in a later post.

The body [rupa], monks, is not self. If the body were the self, this body would not lend itself to dis-ease. It would be possible (to say) with regard to the body, “Let my body be thus. Let my body be not thus.” But precisely because the body is not self, the body lends itself to dis-ease. And it is not possible (to say) with regard to the body, “Let my body be thus. Let my body not be thus.”

Buddha then goes on to argue similarly with respect to the rest of the five aggregates or categories of personality-constituents (khandhas, Sanskrit: skandhas), namely, feeling (vedana), perception (sanna), consciousness (vinnana), and mental formations (sankharas). All are claimed to be not-self. Thus we are told that feeling afflicts us and is not amenable to our control, whence it is inferred that feeling is not one’s self, not one’s own inner substance. The tacit premise of this enthymematic argument is that one’s self would have to be something over which one would have complete control, something wholly active and spontaneous. And it is clear that something wholly active will not suffer: to suffer is precisely to be afflicted by something external over which one has no control.

After arguing that each of the personality-constituents is outside of our control and brings suffering, Buddha argues that each of the constituents is impermanent and for this reason as well is lacking in self-nature. The over-all argument of the Anattalakkhana Sutta may therefore be reconstructed in a generalized form as follows:

1. If anything were the self, then it would have two properties: it would not be liable to disease, decay, destruction or change generally, and it would be self-determining, i.e., it would have complete control over itself.
2. But nothing in our experience has either of these two properties, not the body, or feeling, or perception, or consciousness, etc.
Therefore
3. Nothing in our experience can be identified as the self.

I have structured the argument so that it is not only valid in point of logical form, but also has plausible premises. (A charitable reconstruction can aim at nothing less.) Thus the addition of “in our experience” in premise (2) makes this premise more plausible than without the addition. But this gain in plausibility exacts a price: the conclusion (3) cannot then amount to the unrestricted anatta doctrine according to which nothing at all is a self or has self-nature. It is one thing to say that nothing in our experience can be identified (veridically) as a self, and quite another to say that there is no self.

For it may well be that the existence of a (transcendental) self that is not experienced is a necessary condition of establishing that whatever is experienced is not a self. After all, if I come to see that my body, feelings, perceptions, and so on cannot be identified as my very self, then it is presumably I myself who come to this insight. If I come to reject body-identification, feeling- identification, etc. as false self-identifications, then presumably there must be at least the possibility of a true self-identification, even if only of the tautological form, “I am I.” If every self-identification were false, then “I am I” would be false. But that is either a contradiction, or implies that there is nothing that body, feelings, etc. are distinct from, which is again incoherent. For if “I am not this body” is true, then in some sense I must exist as that from which my body is distinct.

Furthermore, if anyone needs and desires liberation, it is presumably in every case I myself who needs and desires it, and I myself who, if all goes well, achieves it, and indeed achieves it on the basis of my own insight into my non-identity with any of the five khandhas or with the psychophysical complex composed of them. The self who needs, desires, and possibly attains liberation is obviously distinct from each of the khandhas and from the psychophysical complex. My body, obviously enough, cannot come to realize its non-identity with itself, for the simple reason that it is not distinct from itself. The same holds for each of the khandhas, and for the lot of them taken together.

And to suppose that no one desires, needs, or attains liberation would appear to make hash of the whole Buddhist system of soteriology. Buddhism is an existentialist system in roughly Kierkegaard’s sense: it is the salvation of the “existing individual” that is the unum necessarium and sole desideratum. It is therefore arguable that the existence of a transcendental self is a cognitive and soteriological presupposition: it is presupposed if there is to be insight that no object of experience is veridically identifiable as one’s very self, and it is presupposed if there is to be something that is saved from the samsaric predicament.

The gist of the control argument is this. There is no evidence of a self since nothing with which we are acquainted is immutable, and nothing with which we are acquainted is something over which we have complete control.

But this raises an obvious question: Isn't the standard for selfhood being set unattainably high?

This original ignorance is most conspicuous and most damaging in the case of oneself. Filled with the “boastful pride of life,” we take ourselves to be permanent and self-determining, when in fact we are the opposite. We view ourselves as substantial entities when everything about us is insubstantial. It hardly need be stressed that Buddha is not interested in establishing our fundamental insubstantiality or lack of self-nature as a merely theoretical thesis. For his perspective throughout is soteriological: we are in a dire state from which we need salvation. In a famous parable, he likens our condition to that of a man who has been shot with a poisoned arrow. For anyone in such a predicament, the one thing necessary is to extract the arrow: learned inquiries into the arrow’s trajectory, the chemical composition of the poison, the motives and social status of the archer and the like are nothing but a distraction from the one thing that needs to be done. The anatta doctrine is therefore not a merely theoretical claim, although of course it is a theoretical claim; it is a claim put forward as an essential ingredient in a soteriological project. To be saved we must realize the truth of anatta. Buddha’s teaching has therefore as little to do with Humean scruples about substantial selves as playing backgammon has with working out one’s salvation with diligence.

But what exactly is the link between the denial of self-nature and salvation from our unsatisfactory predicament? All of the great religions enjoin self-denial as a (partial) means to salvation, but only Buddhism takes the radical step of grounding the moral injunction to self- denial in a metaphysical denial that there are selves. How does the latter denial conduce to salvation? If I attain insight into my lack of self-nature, how is this supposed to alleviate my suffering (dukkha)? Well, in the Buddhist scheme of things we suffer because of our desire or craving (tanha) for the unattainable. What we want is permanent satisfaction, and we ignorantly think that ordinary objects of desire will provide it. Thus we pursue the likes of property and position, name and fame, pleasure and security. But all of these things are impermanent (anicca), and so our craving for permanent satisfaction is destined to remain unfulfilled. When we do not get what we want, we suffer from not getting it. When we do get what we want, we suffer from its inability to satisfy us, and from the attachment it breeds. Either way, we suffer. We stumble on in life foolishly hoping someday to find the satisfaction that we have never found, and indeed can never find. All is suffering because all is impermanent, and all is impermanent because all is lacking in self-nature. If we could attain insight into anattata, into the selflessness of all things, then we would have a grounded metaphysical understanding of impermanence, as opposed to a merely empirical acquaintance with it. We would clearly see its inescapability and its ubiquity. Armed with this understanding, we would be in a position to dispel the illusion of permanence, renounce our craving for it, and by renouncing it, sever at its root the weed of suffering. For suffering arises from our ignorant craving for permanent satisfaction. The cure for this ignorance is insight into anattata. Thus would the raging fires of lust, hate and delusion be quenched; we would attain 'cessation' and entry into nibbana.

That in a nutshell is the Buddha-Dhamma. It starts with the fact of all-pervasive suffering (First Noble Truth); ascribes its origin to craving (Second Noble Truth); proclaims the possibility of the utter extirpation and total renunciation of craving (Third Noble Truth); and concludes with a program (the Eight-fold Path) for the achievement of the extirpation of craving (Fourth Noble Truth). The Eight-fold Path consists of right views, right intentions, right speech, right conduct, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. Paramount among right views is of course the teaching on anatta. Thus the anatta doctrine lies at the base of the entire soteriological structure. But why should we accept it?

That is for another post.

In his Combattimento Spirituale (1589), Lorenzo Scupoli writes:

You my mind, are not mine: you were given me by God. Neither are the powers active within me – will, with its energy – mine. Nor does my feeling, my ability to enjoy life and all my surroundings belong to me. My body with all its functions and requirements, which determine our physical well-being, is not mine either....And I myself belong not to me, but to God. (172)

Apart from the references to God, this meditation of Scupoli, of which the above is merely an excerpt, bears a striking resemblance to the one contained in the Anattalakkhana Sutta. Buddha there examines each of the khandas, body, feeling, perception, etc., and concludes with respect to each of them that "This is not mine. This is not my self. This is not what I am." In Scupoli we encounter virtually the same litany: body, feeling, mind . . . of all of which it is true that "This is not mine, etc." Of course, nothing depends on the exact taxonomy of personality-constituents. The point is that however one classifies the constituents of personality, no one of them, nor any combination of them, is veridically identifiable as one’s very self. I say 'veridically,' since we do as a matter of fact (falsely) identify ourselves with all manner of item both within us (feelings, memories, etc.) and without us (property, progeny, etc.) But these false self-identifications are part of what our ignorance/sinfullness consists in.

Thus Scupoli (who I take to be a representative Christian, and who is of interest here only as such) and Buddha agree with respect to the (negative) thesis that nothing in one’s experience is veridically identifiable as one’s very self. Thus nothing that we ordinarily take to be ourselves (our bodies, our thoughts, feelings, memories, etc.) can in truth be one’s self. But there is also similarity in their reasoning. One way Buddha reasons is as follows. If x (body, feeling, perception, etc.) were my very self, or were something that belonged to me, then I would have complete control over x. But it is evident that no x is such that I have complete control over x. Therefore, no x is either my self or anything that belongs to me. This could be called the 'complete control' argument. Scupoli has something similar:

Let us remember that we can boast only of something which is a direct result of our own will and is done by us independently of anything else. But look how our actions proceed. How do they begin? Certain circumstances come together and lead to one action or another; or a thought comes to our mind to do something, and we do it. But the concurrence of circumstances does not come from us; nor, obviously, is the thought to do something our own; somebody suggests it. Thus, in such cases, the origin or birth of the thought to do something cannot or should not be an object of self-praise. Yet how many actions are of this kind? If we examine them conscientiously, we shall find that they almost all start in this way. So we have nothing to boast of. (174)

This passage suggests the following argument: One cannot justifiably take pride in anything (an action, a physical or mental attribute, etc.) unless one originates it 'independently of anything else.' But nothing is such that one originates it in sublime independence of all else. Therefore, one cannot justifiably take pride in anything.

But does this amount to an argument against the self? It does, given the Buddhist assumption, crucial to the reasoning in the Anattalakkhana Sutta, that a self is an entity that has complete control over itself. Such a self could justifiably take pride in its actions and attributes. For it would be their fons et origo. So if one cannot justifiably take pride in any of one’s actions or attributes, then one is not a self. Pride is one of the seven deadly sins precisely because the proud person arrogates to himself a status he lacks, namely, the status of being a self in the sense in which this term is employed in the Anattalakkhana Sutta.

In sum, both Buddha and Scupoli are claiming that no one of us is a self for the reason than no one of us is in complete control of any of his actions or attributes. No one of the things which one normally takes to be oneself or to belong to oneself (e.g., one’s body, habits, brave decisions, brilliant insights, etc.) is such that one has originated it autonomously and independently.

The main difference between Buddha and Scupoli, of course, is that the latter maintains that God gives us what we do not have under our control. Thus for Scupoli, what we do not have from ourselves, we have from another, and so have. But for Buddha, what we do not have from ourselves, we do not have at all.

I suggested that the essence of idolatry lies in the illicit absolutizing of the relative. A finite good becomes an idol when it is treated as if it were an infinite good, i.e., one capable of satisfying our infinite desire. That our desire is infinite is shown by the fact that it is never satisfied by any finite object or series of finite objects. Not even an infinite series of finite objects could satisfy it since what we really want is not an endless series of finite satisfactions -- say a different black-eyed virgin every night as in popular Islam's depiction of paradise — but a satisfaction in which one could finally rest. "Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee." (Augustine) What we really want, though we don't know it, is the absolute good which is goodness itself, namely God. This idea is common to Plato, Augustine, Malebranche, and Simone Weil.

Ultimately, all desire is desire for the Absolute. A desire that understood itself would understand this. But our de-luded desire thinks it can find satisfaction in the finite. Therein lies the root of idolatry. The Buddha understood this very well: he saw that desire is infinite in that it desires its own ultimate quenching or extinguishing, its own nibbana, but that finite quenchings are unsatisfactory in that they only exacerbate desire by giving birth to new desires endlessly. No desire is finally sated; each is reborn in a later desire. Thus the enjoyment of fleshpot A does not put an end to lust; the next night or the next morning you are hot for fleshpot B, and so on, back to A or on to C, D, . . . and around and around on the wheel of Samsara. The more you dive into the flesh looking for the ultimate satisfaction, the more frustrated you become. You are looking for Love in all the wrong places.

So Buddha understood the nature of desire as infinite. But since he had convinced himself that there is no Absolute, no Atman, nothing possessing self-nature, he made a drastic move: he preached salvation through the extirpation of desire itself. Desire itself is at the root of suffering, dukkha, not desire for the wrong objects; so the way to salvation is not via redirection of desire upon the right Object, but via an uprooting of desire itself.

In Buddhist terms, we could say that idolatry is the treating of something that is anatta, devoid of self-nature, as if it were atta, possessive of self-nature. Idolatry arises when some finite foreground object, a man or a woman say, is falsely ascribed the power to provide ultimate satisfaction. This sort of delusion is betrayed in practically every love song ever written. Here are some typical lyrics (trivia question: name the song, the singer, the date):

You are my world, you're every move I make
You are my world, you're every breath I take.

There are thousands more lyrics like them, and anyone who has been in love knows that they capture the peculiar madness of the lover, the delectable madness of taking the finite for infinite.

Or will you deny that this is madness, a very deep philosophical and perhaps also religious mistake? I say it is madness whether or not an absolute good exists. Whether or not it exists, reason suggests that we should love the finite as finite, that our love should be ordered to, and commensurate with, its object. Finite love for finite objects, and for all objects if there is no infinite Object.

Now what does this have to do with causation? Malebranche's idea, as I understand it, thanks in part to Brandon Watson's fine post, is that our belief in the efficacy of secondary causes is rooted in idolatry: we idolatrously ascribe to secondary causes productive power when sober Humean analysis -- to put it anachronistically -- reveals nothing but regular succession and neither production nor necessitation. The flame does not produce ignition in the dry paper; what is given is a spatiotemporally contiguous event-sequence that instantiates a regularity. Secondary causes are mere occasional causes, occasions of the exercise of the causality of the only true productive cause, God.

To put God to work in the theory of causation seems wildly extravagant; but it seems less crazy when one faces up to the difficulties involved in productive natural causation. And if sense can be made of occasionalism as a general theory of causation -- as opposed to an ad hoc solution to the interaction problem faced by the substance dualist -- then, as Brandon points out, there emerges a moral dimension to the theory of causation. And that's a surprising result.

Some self-referential difficulties attaching to impermanence were addressed in a previous post. Now let's see whether similar difficulties are to be found in the doctrine of anatta/anatman when this is taken unrestrictedly. Roughly, the doctrine so construed has it that nothing possesses self-nature, own-being, substantiality. So let us consider

1. All is empty.

One will be tempted to say that (1) is self-refuting. For if all is empty, then (1) is empty, in which case we are not in the presence of any one, self-identical, determinate thesis with a determinate truth-value. But that is presumably not what is intended by someone who asserts (1). Such a person intends (1) as a determinate thesis that is true. Not only that, the person intends the thesis to be always true and necessarily true. The idea behind (1) is not that it is true now but was perhaps false in the past and will again be false in the future. The affirmer of (1) is not countenancing the possibility that if we just wait long enough some nonempty things will emerge. Nor does the proponent of (1) intend it as contingently true. She is not saying, "It is true in the actual world, but there are a myriad of possible worlds in which it is false." Or, "(1) just happens to be true, but it might have been false." The idea is rather that (1) captures a temporally and modally invariant structure of beings qua beings.

But if so, then (1), if true, is false. So the proponent of (1) must retreat to an empty emptiness doctrine, so to speak, to a relativized version of (1) according to which all is empty including (1) itself.

Now is that a problem for the proponent of (1)? I argued elsewhere that relativized alethic relativism is severely problematic. But what about the present case? Is emptied emptiness -- to give it a name -- coherently maintainable?

I should think there is a serious problem. The earlier difficulty was that, if (1) is true, then it is false. Now the difficulty is that, if (1) is true, then (1) is meaningless. For if it is granted that (1) is empty, then (1) lacks self-nature, a determinate identity, a definite sense or meaning in consequence of which it cannot be either true or false. The problem now is not that (1) proves itself to be false, but that it proves itself to be truth-valueless, which is tanatamount to its being meaningless and no proposition at all.

Michael Krausz, however, thinks there is no problem. He writes,

. . . if the doctrine of emptiness is itself 'empty' then it does no harm to the situation it paradoxically addresses. Rather, the doctrine becomes non-assertable; utterance of it becomes only 'empty' sound. It may be that everything is empty but one cannot assert that. (Bilimoria and Mohanty, p. 102)

Krausz's idea (which he credits to Matilal) is that (1) proves its own non-assertibility. (1), though not assertible as true, might be true nonetheless. It is merely the assertibility of (1) that is problematic, not its truth. It can therefore be coherently maintained that (1) is true just so long as one is careful not to assert (1).

Compare

2. No statement is negative.

(2) applies to itself and so appears to refute itself: if (2) is true, then it is false. But consider a possible world W in which God destroys all negative statements and makes it impossible for anyone to make a negative statement. In W, (2) is true, but non-assertible. (2) does not prove itself to be false; it proves itself to be non-assertible. So why not say the same thing about (1)?

But this defense of (1) will not work. For what (1) implies is that everything is empty or devoid of self-nature: every act of assertion, indeed every speech-act, every content asserted, and every linguistic and other means used to encode or express propositional contents. The problem, therefore, is not just that the speech-act of stating or asserting (1) is self-defeating, but that the propositional content asserted is inconsistent with this content's being true.

And the same goes for any truth-maker you care to introduce. If you distinguish the proposition that all is empty from the fact that makes this truth-bearer true, then the emptiness extends to this truth-maker as well.

So the the analogy between (1) and (2) fails, and (1) collapses either into falsehood or into truth-valuelessness/meaninglessness.

(1) simply must be rejected. This is not to say that a restricted anatta/sunya thesis is not defensible. But (1) in its restricted form, as applying to everything, is indefensible.

Now consider a more philosophically interesting example,

2. All is impermanent.

(2) applies to itself: if all is impermanent, then (2), or rather the propositional content thereof, is impermanent. That could mean one of two things. Either the truth-value of the proposition expressed by (2) is subject to change, or the proposition itself is subject to change, perhaps by becoming a different proposition with a different sense, or by passing out of existence altogether.

Note also that if (2) is true, then every part of (2)'s propositional content is impermanent. Thus the property (concept) of impermanence is impermanent, and so is the copulative tie and the universal quantifier. If the property of impermanence is impermanent, then so is the property of permanence along with the distinction between permanence and impermanence.

In short, (2), if true, undermines the very contrast that gives it a determinate sense. If true, (2) undermines the permanence/impermanence contrast. For if all is impermanent, then so is this contrast and this distinction. This leaves us wondering what sense (2) might have and whether in the end it is not nonsense.

What I am suggesting is not just that (2) refutes itself in the sense that it proves itself false, but refutes itself in the much stronger sense of proving itself meaningless or else proving itself on the brink of collapsing into meaninglessness.

No doubt (2) is meaningful 'at first blush.' But all it takes is a few preliminary pokes and its starts collapsing in upon itself.

Michael Krausz ("Relativism and Beyond: A Tribute to Bimal Matilal" in Bilimoria and Mohanty, pp. 93-104) arrives at a similar result by a different route. He writes:

Paradoxically, because all things are contexted, the idea of permanence cannot be permanent. But it does not follow that in the end all things are impermanent either, for impermanence too is contexted and it too finally drops out of any fixed constellation of concepts. (101)

Krausz invokes the premise,

3. All things are contexted.

Krausz writes as if (3) is unproblematic. But surely it too 'deconstructs' itself. Just apply the same reasoning to (3) that we applied to (2). Clearly, (3) is self-referential. So (3) cannot express an invariant structure of being. It cannot be taken to mean, context-independently, that every being qua being is contexted.

Note also that if (3) is true, then every part of (3)'s propositional content is contexted: the universal quantifier, the concept thing, the copulative tie, and the concept of being contexted are all contexted. What's more, the very contrast of the context-free and the context-bound is contexted.

In short, (3), if true, undermines the very contrast that confers upon it a determinate sense, namely, the contrast between the context-free and the context-bound. For if all is contexted, then so is this contrast and this distinction.

(3) collapses in upon itself and perishes for want of a determinate sense. And the same goes for all its parts. Copulative Being collapses into indeterminacy along with every other sense of Being: the existential, the identitative, the veritative, the locative, the class-theoretic. Being ends up with no structure at all. If Being and Thinking are one, as Father Parmendides had it, then the collapse of Being brings Thinking down with it.

Clearly, we are sinking into some seriously deep shit here, and it is of the worst kind: the formless kind, crap that won't own up to its own crapiness, the kind that deconstructionists, whether Continental or Asian, like to serve up. It is stuff so unstable that one cannot even say that it stinks. Do we really want to wallow in this mess?

Wouldn't it be better to admit that there is an Absolute?

Suppose I have a parcel of land P. I divide P into two subparcels of equal size, A and B. Thus P is a whole having exactly two proper parts, A and B. I put the two subparcels on the market for 100 K each. Mr. MoneyBags comes along and offers to buy my land. I agree, and he hands me 200 K from his bag.

"Not so fast, friend," say I. "You owe me twice that: 100 for A, 100 for B, and 200 for P, making a grand total of 400 K."

This sounds absurd because, since P is composed of A and B and nothing else, P is not a third entity 'in addition to' or 'over and above' or 'above and beyond' the sum A + B. Similarly, Milinda's chariot is not something 'in addition to' its parts. Furthermore, a smoking pipe is not something in addition to bowl and stem: when I clean my pipe, there aren't three things to clean: bowl, stem, and pipe. One more example. Suppose I buy a sixpack of beer. I have bought either one item or six items. If the express checkout line is for six items or fewer and I refuse to use that lane on the ground that I am purchasing seven items, then I am a very strange bird indeed.

So should we conclude that P = A + B? Should we embrace reductionism, the view that a whole is identical to its parts? If a whole is not something in addition to its parts, is it then identical to its parts?

But this seems equally mistaken. P is one; A and B are two. How can one thing be identical to two things? The puzzle can be put syntactically. In the open sentence, 'x is identical to y,' 'x' and 'y' must both be singular terms. How can one be singular and the other plural?

P is not something in addition to A + B. P is also not identical to A + B. We seem to be affirming both limbs of a contradiction. We seem to be affirming that P is not something in addition to A + B, but also that P is something in addition to A + B.

Unless one believes that some contradictions are true, then this contradiction needs to be removed. How?

I will stop here and pose the following questions to Alan Cook and to whomever else is interested. First, do you agree that a whole is not something in addition to its parts? Do you agree that a whole is not identical to its parts? Do you agree that these views are logical contradictories of each other? Do you agree that contradictions are never true of reality and must be removed? How do you remove the contradiction?

1. Introduction

A reductionist about nonpersons, whether artifacts or naturally occurrent things, need not be a reductionist about persons. But the two forms of reductionism are often jointly asserted. Employing the terminology of Mark Siderits, a Buddhist reductionist is a Buddhist who is a reductionist about both persons and nonpersons. (Personal Identity and Buddhist Philosophy, p. 7, note 9. Reviews here and here.) The aim of this paper is to lend support to my contention that Buddhist reductionism (BR) is false. My concern will be much more with the reductionism of BR than with the Buddhism of BR. Since BR is a conjunctive claim, refutation of one of its conjuncts suffices to refute it. Here I do not discuss persons, except in passing, but attempt to refute reductionism about nonpersons. Since Siderits’ book is a rigorous, state-of-the-art discussion of the issues, I will advance my case via a discussion of some of his theses and arguments.

2. Reductionism, Non-Reductionism, and Eliminativism

At issue is ontological reductionism. This being noted, I will henceforth omit the qualifier ‘ontological.’ Consider a partite entity, any entity that is composed of parts, a bicycle for example, or one of its proper parts such as the chain. The reductionist holds that the existence of a partite entity E is nothing more than the existence of the more basic entities of which E is composed. The reductionist thus reduces wholes to their parts. ‘Parts’ is elliptical for ‘proper parts’ unless otherwise noted. Reductionism implies that in ultimate reality there are no such partite entities as bicycles or pools of water or bolts of lightning. A pool of water is just a collection of H₂O molecules; but since each molecule is itself a partite entity, each molecule reduces to its constituent atoms, and so on, until we arrive (if we do arrive) at impartite entities that alone would make up ultimate reality. This is the essence of ontological analysis: we start with complex wholes, resolve them into their parts, and ultimately into their simple (not further analyzable) parts. Such analysis is guided by a conception of ultimate reality according to which the ultimately real is the ultimately simple. Siderits makes what I take to be an equivalent point when he writes, “...only that which bears its own essential nature (that is, has an intrinsic nature)is ultimately real.” (96) Later we will have to ask how this ‘self-nature’ criterion of reality (X is real if and only if X has self-nature) comports with another relevant criterion, namely, the ‘causal’ criterion: X is real if and only if X is causally active/passive.

Reductionism is a ‘middle path’ between non-reductionism and eliminativism. The non-reductionist holds that things like bicycles are irreducibly real, and that their having parts has no tendency to show that they reduce to these parts. The eliminativist, on the other hand, holds that not only are partite things not ultimately real, they are not real in any sense. Eliminativism about every partite entity is of course absurd. What is not absurd is eliminativism relativized to a kind K of partite entities. For some values of ‘K,’ eliminativism is reasonable. Thus it is reasonable to be an eliminativist about flying horses, demons, caloric, phlogiston, and the ether that the Michaelson-Morley experiment failed to detect. The reductionist about Ks thus occupies a middle position between the non-reductionist, for whom Ks are irreducibly real, and the eliminativist, for whom Ks have no reality whatsoever. For the reductionist, the reality of Ks reduces to the reality of their parts.

Applying this to persons, we can say that, for the reductionist, the reality of persons consists in their being composed of impersonal or subpersonal psychophysical constituents such as the five skandhas. Thus there are persons, contrary to the eliminativist claim, but they are not irreducibly or ultimately real, contrary to the non-reductionist claim. In Buddhist terms, persons are empty or devoid of selfhood. There are persons, but they are selfless, anatta (Pali), anatman (Sanskrit).

3. The Conventionally Real and the Ultimately Real

Despite the apparently natural distinction between reductionism and eliminativism, one may wonder whether it can stand up to close scrutiny: Does not reductionism ultimately collapse into eliminativism? If X reduces to Y, or to some collection of sub-X items (a, b, c . . . ), how does that differ from saying that X does not exist? Suppose that a person is just a collection or bundle of impersonal constituents such as thoughts, feelings, and so on. For the reductionist, the existence of the person is nothing other than the existence of these impersonal constituents. But this seems to imply that the person as person, the person as the diachronic and/or synchronic unity of these constituents, does not exist. Why then doesn’t reductionism about persons amount to eliminativism about persons? If one person reduces to many nonpersons or subpersons, many psychophysical constituents, then it would seem that the one person does not exist, and the reduction is in effect an elimination. To put it another way, if persons qua persons are ultimately unreal – since they reduce to nonpersons – then what is the difference between a person such as you, dear reader, and Santa Claus or Pegasus? Clearly, human persons have a sort of reality that flying horses lack. To solve this problem, Siderits invokes the old Buddhist distinction between what is conventionally real and what is ultimately real. (7) Partite entities such as chariots and persons, though not ultimately real, are conventionally real. This yields three categories: (i) the ultimately real, (ii) the conventionally real which is ultimately unreal, and (iii) the ultimately unreal. Chariots and persons are on this account useful fictions. The difference between a useful fiction such as myself and a fiction such as Santa Claus is that in the case of the former there are certain impersonal entities that undergird the fiction, while in the latter case there are not. To put it another way, a chariot is an aggregate mentally constructed out of sub-chariot entities, while in the case of Santa Claus there are no sub-Santa Claus entities to be mentally aggregated.

If “all aggregation involves mental construction,” (Siderits 7) then we may have a way of distinguishing an assembled, and thus functional, chariot from the corresponding set or sum of disassembled chariot parts. There is clearly a difference here that any adequate theory must be able to account for. This is obvious from the fact that the parts can exist without the chariot existing, but not vice versa. Hence there is more to the chariot than its parts: there is the connectedness of the parts, which, Siderits seems to be suggesting, derives from mental construction. We shall return to this a bit farther down.

4. An Argument for Reductionism

So much for explaining the reductionist thesis, and its difference both from non-reductionism and from eliminativism. The next step is to examine the grounds for it. One way to argue for reductionism is by eliminating its competitors. The following is my paraphrase of Siderits’ argument. Consider:

1. A whole and its parts are equally real in one of two ways. Either (1a) the whole is identical to its parts, or (1b) the whole is distinct from its parts. 2. A whole and its parts are equally unreal. 3. A whole is real, while its parts are unreal. 4. A whole is unreal, while its parts are real.

We may exclude the nihilistic thesis (2) right away inasmuch as it implies, contrary to fact, that nothing exists. We may also eliminate (3) due to its monistic consequences. For if only wholes are real, and no parts of wholes, then any whole that is a part of a wider whole is also unreal, whence it follows that there is only one whole, the world-whole, and all distinctions go by the board. If this strikes the reader as too quick, it doesn’t matter for the purposes of this paper since I am not disagreeing with Siderits on this point. Siderits and I agree in rejecting (3). As for (1a), it too is eliminable on the ground that there are properties that wholes and their parts cannot share. Thus each whole is one, while its parts are many. (1b) is also easily eliminated. A whole is not something above and beyond its parts as it would have to be if it were wholly distinct from its parts. A chariot, for example, is not something entirely distinct from wheels, axle, etc. After all, it is composed of them, and indeed exhausted by them taken collectively. There is no empirical evidence of a chariot apart from empirical evidence of wheels, axle, etc. When one looks at a chariot, one does not see something distinct from wheels, axle, etc. If a chariot has n gross parts, it seems strange indeed to conclude that the chariot itself is an n + 1 th entity. (A gross part is a part uncovered at the first stage of analysis. Thus a wheel is a gross part despite the fact that it has parts, and its parts have parts, etc.)

Allow me to expand on this point using a simpler example. My smoking pipe has two gross parts, a bowl and a stem. It sounds distinctly odd to say that these add up to three entities: bowl, stem, pipe, all equally real. And if I charge $100 for the bowl, and $5 for the stem, you would consider it either a bad joke or a moral outrage were I to charge you $210 for the assembled pipe: $100 + $5 + $105. But why isn’t that the fair price if you are purchasing three entities all equally real?

Having excluded (1a), (1b), (2), and (3) using arguments that I accept, Siderits concludes that the reductionist thesis (4) is true. In ultimate reality, there are no wholes; there are only simples that may or may not come to form wholes. “Strictly speaking, there are no chariots...” (77) or anything else partite either. Nevertheless, partite entities can be said to be conventionally real as explained above. Since partite entities are accorded some reality – conventional reality – the absurdity of eliminativism about all partite entities is avoided.

5. Refutation of the Foregoing Argument by Elimination

There is, however, a third way one might construe (1). Instead of being forced to choose between saying that (1a) a whole is identical to its parts or (1b) distinct from them, one might say,quite commonsensically, that (1c) a whole is its parts properly arranged, its parts connected in the right way. A chariot is neither one of its parts, nor the mere sum of its (disconnected) parts, nor something entirely distinct from its parts: a chariot is its parts so connected as to given them the functionality of a chariot. To take a simpler example, suppose whole W has two proper parts, a and b. Then we ought to agree that W is not a; W is not b; W is not the set {a, b} or the mereological sum (a + b); and W is not something entirely distinct from a and b. What W is is Rab, where R is the relation that connects a and b . (For example, a smoking pipe is not its bowl,its stem, the set or sum consisting of the two, or something wholly distinct from bowl and stem; a pipe is a bowl with its stem properly inserted into it.) If so, (1), construed as (1c), cannot be eliminated, and the reductionist thesis (4) remains unproven.

Some may object to the syntax of sentences like ‘This pipe is its parts properly connected.’ For ‘This pipe’ is a singular term while ‘its parts’ is plural, thus violating the syntactical requirement that the blanks of the open sentence ‘___ is identical to —' be filled either by two singular terms or two plural terms. My response is that the above sentence does satisfy the requirement since ‘its parts properly connected’ is a singular term: it refers to exactly one entity, the same entity designated by ‘This pipe.’ In other words, I am not saying that a pipe is identical to its parts, but identical to its parts properly connected. Now let us think about this connectedness, which is not to be confused with the pipe itself.

The connectedness of a and b is not nothing; it is a reality that stands in the way of the reduction of W to its parts. Bear in mind that this reduction is supposed to show that, in ultimate reality, there is no W, but only a and b. The fact of the matter, however, is that this connectedness is just as real as a and b. To appreciate that the connectedness is real, consider that it confers causal powers and causal liabilities upon the whole that are not possessed by the parts. An assembled chariot has the power to convey its driver into battle – a power its parts taken as a mere collection do not have.

The point I have just made presupposes the second criterion of reality mentioned above in section 2, namely, the ‘causal’ criterion according to which X is ultimately real if and only if X is causally active/passive. Does this criterion conflict with the ‘self-nature’ criterion? On the latter, X is ultimately real if and only if X has self-nature. This amounts to saying that the ultimately real is the ultimately simple. This is because any contingent whole W is asymmetrically dependent on items (its parts) that could exist even if W does not exist – which is just to say that W lacks self-nature or own-being: its being is not intrinsic to it, but depends on factors that are what they are whether or not W exists. Now there need be no conflict between the two criteria of reality if everything that ultimately exists is simple. For there is nothing to prevent these simples from being causally active/passive. But if some wholes have causal powers not possessed by their parts, or causal powers not fully explainable by the causal powers of their parts, then the two criteria will diverge.

That would obviously cause trouble for the reductionist. The reductionist must therefore show that there are no wholes whose causal powers are not fully explainable in terms of the causal powers of their parts.

Siderits is aware of this problem and tackles it by saying that the relation R which establishes the connectedness of a and b “is decomposable into a set of properties...” of a and b “so that when all the facts about the parts are taken into account, the effect of the chariot is wholly accounted for.” (77) One way of construing this idea is as follows. Relational facts like Rab decompose into conjunctions of monadic facts, facts involving an individual’s exemplification of a nonrelational property. To give an example of my own, Al’s being heavier than Bill reduces to the conjunction of Al weighs 210 lbs. & Bill weighs 200 lbs. In the case of a wheel’s being attached to an axle, there is a monadic property P1 of the wheel and a monadic property P2 of the axle such that the wheel’s being attached to the axle is the conjunctive fact, P1w & P2a. Let us call this doctrine foundationism. On foundationism, relations reduce to their monadic foundations. Accordingly, a relation is not a third thing ‘between’ its relata. This implies that there are no relations in ultimate reality; what there are are individuals exemplifying monadic properties, some of which are the foundations of their relatedness. On this foundationist scheme, the fact of relatedness can be explained without recourse to relations. The relatedness (connectedness) of a and b does not require anything that ‘refers beyond’ a and b. Thus the whole W = Rab reduces without remainder to a and b, when the latter are taken together with their monadic properties.

Even if foundationism is defensible, it is not clear that adopting it solves the problem. The problem is that (1c) must be eliminated if we are to arrive at (4). (1c) states that a whole is its parts properly arranged, connected in the right way. The whole W has a and b as parts related by R. Thus W = Rab. On Siderits’ view, Rab reduces to P1a & P2b. But a and b have the properties P1 and P2 respectively if and only if a and b are connected; they do not have these properties when a and b are disconnected. How then can it be said that W reduces to a and b? A reduction cannot be circular: if a whole reduces to its parts such that the whole is ultimately unreal and the parts ultimately real, then the parts cannot have monadic properties that entail that the parts are connected into a whole. Otherwise, the whole has not been reduced but presupposed. To reduce a whole to parts that cannot have the properties they have except as parts of that very whole is not to effect a reduction at all.

Equivalently, a reduction of a whole to its parts, if it is to be a genuine reduction which does away with the irreducible reality of the whole qua whole, must reduce the whole to its disconnected (unrelated) parts.

To put it still another way, if the parts have monadic properties that entail that they form a whole, then those parts are distinct from the parts to which the whole could be noncircularly reduced. Reduction is asymmetrical: if a whole reduces to its parts, then its parts do not reduce to the whole. But if the parts are taken together with the monadic foundations of their relatedness, then the parts depend on the whole to be what they are. We have a situation of symmetry rather than asymmetry. But then the parts of a whole are as dependent on it, as it is on them, which implies that wholes and their parts are equally real.

Let us not forget that the wholes we are concerned with are contingent wholes. A contingent whole is one that may or may not exist given the existence of its parts: the existence of the parts does not entail the existence of the whole. An example of a noncontingent whole would be a set: the set {a, b} ‘automatically’ exists given the existence of a and b. Properly formulated, the reductionist thesis is that contingent wholes reduce to entities whose parthood (in a given whole, and in any whole) is extrinsic to them. Although it is essential to every contingent whole that it have some parts or other, if reductionism is true, then it is accidental to the parts of a whole that it be parts of any whole. From this one can see that reductionism faces a dilemma. If a whole W reduces to parts whose parthood is extrinsic to them, then the entities to which W reduces are what they are whether or not they are connected so as to form W. But this is to say that W reduces to its disconnected parts. This, however, is absurd, since a whole is a unity, or connectedness, of parts. On the other hand, if a whole W reduces to parts whose parthood is intrinsic to them, then the asymmetry of reduction is violated, and there is no reduction.

Our interim conclusion is that contingent wholes are irreducible to their parts. For although a whole is dependent on its parts (in that it cannot exist unless they exist), a whole is more than its parts inasmuch as it is their connectedness. Now this connectedness can neither be a further connecting part – on pain of a Bradley-type regress – nor can it be reduced to monadic properties of the parts, as we have just seen. Since contingent wholes are irreducible to their parts, the argument for reductionism presented in the preceding section is unsound. But this requires further support.

6. Refining my Refutation of the Argument by Elimination

The reductionist denies that wholes and their parts are equally ultimately real, maintaining instead that only the parts are ultimately real. But a whole is more than its parts, being their connectedness, and this connectedness is in some sense real. As in some sense real, it simply must be accounted for. The Buddhist reductionist, as Siderits represents him, holds that wholes are conventionally real, where this conventional reality derives from mental aggregation on our part. This way of accounting for connectedness will be discussed in the following section. What I want to do now, however, is to consider in more detail Siderits’ rejection of the idea that wholes have non-conventional, or ultimate, reality. A reason to embrace this idea is that wholes have causal powers not possessed by their parts, together with the natural assumption that causal efficacy is a mark of reality. If reductionism is to be viable, this idea must be rejected.

Against the notion, defended by Jaegwon Kim, that the mereologically supervenient possesses distinctive causal powers, Siderits says this: ...it is of course true that water dissolves salt (something that neither hydrogen nor oxygen can do), just as it is true that the chariot (but not the wheels, not the axle, etc.) transports the driver. But the dissolving of the salt is nothing over and above the ionization of sodium and chlorine, something accomplished by hydrogen and oxygen atoms when suitably related – just as the transporting of the driver just is the result of the lateral motion of the chariot body caused by forces transmitted from the axle, etc. (p. 93)

I fail to see how this refutes the idea that wholes have causal powers above and beyond those of their parts. Note that it is the hydrogen and oxygen atoms when suitably related that has the salt-dissolving power. It is not the hydrogen by itself, or the oxygen by itself, or the mere set of the two, but the two related so as to form a whole. But this is just to concede Kim’s point about the mereologically supervenient having distinctive causal powers. For when we consider the suitable relatedness of the hydrogen and oxygen atoms, we realize that we have a whole whose causal powers cannot be accounted for in terms of the causal powers of the parts when taken separately.

7. Can Mental Construction Account for Connectedness?

It is self-evident that a contingent whole such as a chariot is a connectedness of parts, and not a mere collection of (disconnected) parts. But we have just seen that the ground of this connectedness cannot be internal to a whole either as a further part or as a set of monadic properties of its parts. Call the ground of connectedness the connector. If the connector is a special part in addition to the primary parts, then the problem arises as to what connects the connector to what it connects. That way lies Bradley’s regress. If, on the other hand, we think of the connector R as reducing to monadic properties of the primary parts, then, as we saw in section 5, no genuine reduction is achieved. I conclude from this that the reductionist, to remain a reductionist and thus to avoid saying that a whole and its parts are equally real, must appeal to something external to a contingent whole to account for the connectedness of parts that makes it a whole. There is need for an external unifier. Only with an external unifier or connector can a reductionist remain a reductionist in the teeth of the arguments I have presented. It is clear that a reductionist cannot say that a whole unifies itself – in the sense that it is a unity distinct from its parts – for the simple reason that this amounts to abandoning reductionism.

Siderits appears to provide two competing accounts of the difference between a chariot and the corresponding collection of unassembled chariot parts. One of them -- the foundationist account -- we have just criticized. The other appeals to the notion that “all aggregation involves mental construction.” (7) Could mental aggregation be the ontological ground of connectedness? I submit that this notion of mental construction as the ground of connectedness is untenable. Ask a simple question: Whose mind is doing the aggregating? Does the chariot-driver assemble his chariot by ‘thinking together’ its parts, starting at ontological rock-bottom with impartite parts? Must he continuously ‘think them together’ to maintain the chariot’s functionality? That would be absurd. The unity of parts that bestows upon them chariot-functionality is logically and ontologically antecedent to any act of mental constructing or aggregating by any individual. This is painfully obvious in the case of very small parts such as molecular and atomic parts. The charioteer can drive his chariot only because it is already (logically speaking) a full-fledged unity of parts. Furthermore, the mind that does the aggregating is itself a partite entity, and therefore one that cannot be ultimately real if Buddhist reductionism is true. If so, the aggregating mind M is itself in need of an aggregator to account for the difference between M and its parts. The appeal to partite minds as aggregators pretty clearly leads nowhere. Is there another option?

If it cannot be individual minds that do the aggregating, is it language that does it, or language together with social practices? Siderits points out that we have the name ‘chariot,’ but no name for the corresponding collection of disassembled parts. (7) He says that this is because we have an institutionalized use – as a means of transportation – for the assembled parts, but no such use for the parts in their disassembled state. Siderits claims that it is our “institutionally arranged interests” (8) that bring it about that we view the chariot parts as a “single entity” when in ultimate reality there is no single entity. The suggestion is that what makes the chariot a single entity, a unity of parts having chariot functionality, is something social or institutional or linguistic.

I would say, however, that this puts the cart (or the chariot!) before the horse. It is because the chariot is a “single entity” that we can ride it and to name it ‘chariot.’ Granted, it has a name because of its human usefulness, but it is humanly useful because of the functionality that derives from the connectedness of its parts. The connectedness, therefore, cannot derive from our applying of ‘chariot’ to a bunch of otherwise disconnected chariot parts. The connectedness whereby it is a single substantial entity is logically and ontologically prior to any mental act of constructing or any linguistic act of naming. This is not to say that the chariot is ultimately real; it is to say that the reality of the chariot is not a merely linguistically or mentally created reality. The chariot may not be ultimately real, but its reality is greater than that of any mentally constructed object.

8. Summary

There is no denying that reductionism is attractive. It allows us to avoid monism (wholes alone are real), nihilism (neither wholes nor parts are real), and dualism (both wholes and parts are real). Unfortunately, reductionism flies in the face of the obvious fact that wholes are in some sense real. This is why Siderits supplements straight reductionism -- which threatens to collapse into eliminativism -- with a doctrine of conventional reality as brought about by mental aggregation on our part. But conventional reality is not reality enough. The salt-dissolving power of water is a reality more substantial than mere conventional reality. Water has this power independently of us, our institutions, our language, our interests, and any mental aggregating we may engage in.

Where does this leave us? Siderits’ tetralemma is exhaustive: we must choose among monism, nihilism, dualism, or reductionism, where reductionism, if it is not to collapse into eliminativism, must be fortified by recourse to an external unifier, connector, aggregator. But this aggregator cannot be me or you or any partite mind. After all, any partite mind will itself require a unifier to insure its unity. So if we wish to maintain reductionism, we must have recourse to an impartite mind, an ontologically simple mind. Or is that too much to swallow?

The target of my criticism in the Chariot paper is the unrestricted anatta doctrine, the claim that nothing at all has self-nature, own-being, substantiality, pick your interpretive term. Accordingly, it is not only phenomenal or samsaric entities that are selfless, but all entities including nibbana. It is this unrestricted thesis, and it alone, that I will be discussing.

Now it seems to me that philosophers are not in the business of denying obvious facts. As G. E. Moore might have said, the gross facts are not in dispute. Reasonable dispute first arises when we turn to the question of the best analysis or interpretation of the gross facts. Gross facts may also be called data, givens. (From the Latin dare, to give, whence donor, dative, donation, etc.)

Now I take it to be a datum that a partite entity such as a chariot — to stick with this hoary example — is not identical to a mere sum of its constituents. The sum exists whether or not the chariot exists. A chariot is not the sum of its parts but their togetherness or unity. There is both a diachronic and a synchronic togetherness.

To simplify, we discuss only the synchronic togetherness. The parts form a unity at time t, a unity that confers upon the parts chariot functionality. (You can't ride disassembled chariot parts into battle.)

What is the ontological ground of this unity? If you deny the unity then you fall into nihilism. Clearly, the chariot is not nothing; it is something and indeed something more than the mere sum of its parts. Again, that is just a datum, and hence not anything any reasonable person can deny.

P. F. Strawson famously distinguished between descriptive and revisionary metaphysics. I have no problem with the latter. But when revisionism collapses into eliminativism, then I object.

It should be clear that the ground of unity cannot be found by analysis. So we examine the view that the ground of unity is on the side of mind and language. The suggestion, roughly, is that we make (conceptually not physically) a collection of subchariot entities into a unity: we do the unifying.

Suppose I unify a manifold of data by subsuming them under a concept. The unity of the object then derives from the unifying activity of the subject. But this unifying presupposes that the subject is itself a unity. If it were a mere sum of data, it would have no unity to impart to the object. So the subject that does the unifying must itself be a unity.

Now either this unifying subject is a self-unifying unifier or it is not. On the second alternative, the infinite regress is up and running. For if the unifying subject U1 does not unify itself, then it is unified by another entity U2 distinct from it. At this point the game begins again. Either U2 is self-unifying or it is unified by another entity U3 distinct from U2. And so on.

My thesis is this. It cannot be the case that nothing at all has self-nature. Even if it can be shown that an artifact like a chariot lacks self-nature (equivalently: that it reduces without remainder to its constituents), there must be something that has self-nature since there must be something that serves to unify the artifact's constituents.

What say you, Alan? What remains unclear?

1. Does everything change? The first point to be made is that it is not obviously true that everything changes. There are plenty of putative counterexamples. Arguably, the truths of logic and mathematics are not subject to change. They are not subject to change either in their existence or in their truth-value. There is no danger that the theorem of Pythagoras will change from true to false tomorrow. If you say that the theorem in question is true only in Euclidean geometry, then I invite you to consider the true proposition expressed by 'The theorem of Pythagoras is true only in Euclidean geometry.' Is the truth of this proposition, if true, subject to change?

Here is an even better example. Consider the proposition P expressed by ‘Everything changes.’ P is either true or false. If P is true, then both P and its truth-value change, which is a curiously self-defeating result: surely, those who preach that all is impermanent intend to say something about the invariant structure of the world and/or our experience of the world. Their intention is not to say that all is impermanent now, but if you just wait long enough some permanent things will emerge later. Clearly, P is intended by its adherents as changelessly true, as laying bare one of the essential marks of all that exists. But then P’s truth entails its own falsity. On the other hand, if P is false, then it is false. Therefore, necessarily, P is false. It follows that the negation of P is necessarily true. Hence it is necessarily true that some things do not change. The structure of the (samsaric) world does not change.

2. Do the things that change always change? I take ‘always’ to mean ‘at every time.’ Clearly, not everything subject to change is changing at every time. The number of planets in our solar system, for example, though subject to change, is obviously not changing at every time. Last time I checked, the number was nine. I'd put money on the proposition that the number is still nine.

3. Do the things that change continuously change? To say that a change is continuous is to say that between any two states in the process of change, there are infinitely many – indeed, continuum-many – intermediate states. To say that a change is discrete, however, is to say that there are some distinct states in the process of change such that there are no intermediate states between them. Now although some changes are continuous, such as the change in position of a planet orbiting the sun, not all changes are continuous. If I lose a tooth, that is a discrete change, not a continuous one. Hence it cannot be true that each thing that changes continuously changes.

4. Do the things that change change in every respect? No; consider the erosion of a mountainside. Erosion of a mountainside is a change that is occurring at every time, and presumably continuously; but there are properties in respect of which the mountainside cannot change if there is to be the change called erosion, for instance, the property of being a mountainside. Without something that remains the same, there cannot be change. Alterational change requires a substrate of change which, because it is the substrate of change, precisely does not change. Hence if change is all-pervasive, in the sense that every aspect of a thing changes when a change occurs in the thing, then there is no change. Compare Soren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Princeton University Press, 1941), p. 277.

In sum, I have given reasons to believe that (i) some things are unchangeable; (ii) among the things that are changeable, some are merely subject to change and not always changing; (iii) among the things that are actually changing, only some are continuously changing; and (iv) there is no (alterational as opposed to existential) change without unchange.

Therefore, those who lay great stress on the impermanence of the world and our experience of it need to balance their assertion by proper attention to the modes of permanence. For example, if we are told that everything is subject to change, does not the very sense of this assertion require that there be something that does not change, namely the ontological structure of (samsaric) entities? And if a thing is changing, how could that be the case if no aspect of the thing is unchanging? Furthermore, how could one become attached to something that was always changing? Attachment presupposes relative stability in the object of attachment. Jack is attached to Jill because her curvacity and cheerfulness, say, are relatively unchanging features of her. If she were nothing but change 'all the way down,' then there would be nothing for Jack's desire to get a grip on. But without desire and attachment, no suffering, and no need for a technology of release from suffering.

It is a mistake to think that change is all-pervasive. So those who maintain that all is impermanent need to tell us exactly what they mean by this and how they arrived at it. Is it not onesided and unphilosophical to focus on impermanence while ignoring permanence?

If all being is pure becoming, then there is no being -- and no becoming either.