So, basically, who are you? Well, you might say that you are the ideas that you have, or the feelings that you feel, or the sensations you receive from the world. You are a certain lump of matter with a certain appearance, sound, and set of behaviors.
And yet all these things are changeable. Your ideas, your sensations, your appearance, the very stuff of which you are made are constantly being turned over. What is there to unify them? What is it that really makes all these fleeting things you?
Well, Plato would say there is an underlying form or soul or self, in an abstract sense beneath the layers of physicality, of sense-experience, of ideas and memories, that is a constant. And in Hinduism a conception of this sort of pure self, called the atman, was held to be the ultimate reality of a person, and indeed, itself just a part of the ultimate reality which was Brahman.
Opposed to this idea is the Buddhist anatman, which says there is no unifying, underlying reality to the self. You are in fact this succession of appearances, sense experiences, ideas, memories, etc.. You are a part of the inevitable and constant changing of the entire world, both causing change and being caused by change. You are an aspect of the interdependent arising of all things, and your sense that there can be had any meaningful permanence, or the grasping after permanence is wrong and harmful. What is more, grasping after even this sense of unifying identity, of an underlying permanent thing which is you when all of the things that we otherwise say are you have fled, is wrong and harmful.
"No self" does not imply, "none of us exists." We each exist. We each have thoughts and sensations. We each have experiences and desires. Those thoughts and sensations, experiences and desires, are individual within each of us.
ReplyDeleteIt is not the individuality of subjective experience that a doctrine of "no self" denies, only the conclusion that this individuality is indicative of some internal entity distinguishable from external reality. In the Buddhist doctrine, we are not separate from the rest of the universe, we are an integral part of it. It is only our interpretation of our subjective experience as somehow cut off from the rest of the universe that errs.
In general, we each define our 'self' relative to our thoughts, our beliefs, our personalities. But those thoughts and beliefs could not form without our sensations and observations and impressions of so-called 'exterior; reality. Our personalities are influenced by these same factors, and predominantly determined by our genetic code, which only comes to us from 'outside' our 'self.'
We are all just bits of the universe, in a way a return to Paremenides and becoming, which we will talk about on Friday.
I'm not entirely sure that Plato would have said that the soul was something which experienced the senses. Although you said that the soul is something which remains constant, which I do believe he is claiming, I'm wondering if something which remains constant can still keep that sort of nature while at the same time experiencing the world as something that is changing. Is it our soul, our essence, which is shaped by worldly experience, or is it something else? I would love to know your thoughts. And if I have missed the mark here or mis-interpreted your post, please just let me know =)
ReplyDeleteThe soul is something Plato did not treat with enough skepticism. The Greek notion of the soul had been inherited from his culture and we carry that baggage today, but that isn't necessarily contingent on you and I having a philosophical discussion.
ReplyDelete"The Homeric poems, with which most ancient writers can safely be assumed to be intimately familiar, use the word ‘soul’ in two distinguishable, probably related, ways. The soul is, on the one hand, something that a human being risks in battle and loses in death. On the other hand, it is what at the time of death departs from the person's limbs and travels to the underworld, where it has a more or less pitiful afterlife as a shade or image of the deceased person. It has been suggested (for instance, by Snell 1975, 19) that what is referred to as soul in either case is in fact thought of as one and the same thing, something that a person can risk and lose and that, after death, endures as a shade in the underworld."
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ancient-soul/#1
And though I love our subject (Western philosophy) I rather not chalk up the soul as definite. For me, Plato's change of view from the Phaedo to The Republic on the soul is what started all of this doubt. Before I was more content thinking of the tri-part soul analyzing the cheescake. However, now, I am less sure. In any event, I think it is a good thing to question it all and that is what Plato's Socrates would have encouraged.