LOSE YOURSELF, GET A LIFE
Book Review Contest Runner Up!
by Aurelian
A review of Jay L. Garfield, Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live Without a Self, Princeton University Press, 2022.
Jay Garfield is a distinguished western-trained philosopher, who for some decades now has also studied and written about Buddhist philosophy. This short but powerful book draws on both traditions, to argue forcefully, and I think largely successfully, that we have no “self” as that term is commonly understood, and that we should all be a great deal happier if we recognized that.
Garfield writes as a philosopher, and as an expert on thinkers in many languages, yet this is a book intended not for his colleagues, but for the intelligent general reader. That’s how I came to it, and how I treat the book for the purposes of this brief review. Losing Ourselves is important not simply because it sketches out a way in which we can all be happier as individuals, but also because of its potential for helping us to escape from, or at least better endure, the toxic political and social environment in which most of us are forced to live today. It helps that it’s written with admirable clarity, even if some of its ideas will probably be new and challenging to most readers.
One of the book’s major virtues is not just the presentation of an argument, but more importantly its brief survey of how the whole question of whether we have a “self” or not has been debated for thousands of years in different cultures. As a result, even if (like me) you’re not sure that you can accompany Garfield to the very end of the argument, there’s a great deal of useful … enlightenment? … to be gained along the way. Here, I’m going to cover the main outlines of Garfield’s argument, with some reactions and potential reservations, and then ask what use it can be in helping us climb out of the psychological skeptic tank that seems to typify western life today.
So, the argument. Garfield opts to present it in academic fashion, first as a thesis, then as objections to that thesis over thousands of years of controversy, and finally a series of reflections on the ethical implications of his thesis. In this short review, I’m going to slightly rearrange the order of the argument, to save space and improve clarity, and I’ll also pass over the more technical arguments with some contemporary philosophers.
As Garfield says, the idea that we are “selves," and that each “self” is “embodied” in a body, does not originate with any philosopher. The concept is what most of us instinctively think, and how the world empirically appears to us. The average person, it should be added, is still trapped in a nineteenth-century framework of materialist scientism: there’s an “in here” and an “out there.” We think we see a material world made of hard stuff called matter, consisting of tiny hard things called atoms, with elementary particles orbiting a nucleus much as planets orbit the sun. Our bodies are made of the same hard stuff, and a piece of matter between our ears has somehow evolved to provide us with Intelligence (which we can’t quite define) and Consciousness (which we can’t quite define either). How Consciousness could ever have emerged from a lump of meat is known, unsurprisingly, as the Hard Question of Consciousness.
Virtually the whole of that is untrue, and has been known to be untrue for decades and even generations. Matter is not solid, and the world is not what it appears. Solid objects are in fact force fields, colours just represent the only wave-length of light that the force field cannot absorb, and so on. If you haven’t come across such ideas before, there are dozens of books that explain them much better than I can. Or stop the first passing quantum physicist, and they’ll explain how frustrated they are that these insights simply haven’t penetrated in our culture.
But perhaps we shouldn’t really be surprised at these scientific discoveries. After all, if we think about it, how can we actually be sure that an outside world even exists? We have only our senses to go by: even assuming that matter, color, noise, etc. existed, they would be filtered through our sense organs. We can have no direct experience of anything. A string of influential philosophers, of whom Immanuel Kant is the best known, challenged the idea that we can have any knowledge of “the outside world” at all. Rather, the world is a “cognitive construction.” We literally therefore (and not in a New Age sense) “construct our own reality.”
And modern neuroscience essentially confirms this. As Garfield notes, not only do animals, with different senses from us, live in a perceptually utterly different world, but we ourselves are continually creating the world we live in. Information pours in to our senses much faster than we can process it: it is the mind that constructs the picture. It remembers what was there before, fills in blind spots, makes assumptions about colors, interprets vibrations as sound, and so on. Critically, also, as Garfield stresses, memory is not like an MP3 recording: it is itself constructed. It’s a “reconstruction of the past” and a “cognitive fabrication.” So the trauma or neglect we suffered, the loneliness and rejection we felt, the disappointments, anger, and depression we feel about the way we remember others treating us, are none of them literal recordings from the past. They are more like constructions, “inspired by” past events. These memories, and how we feel about them, change over time, both with age and as ideas and understandings around us change.
This leads to the first stage in liberating ourselves. We are not our memories. By extension, we are not prisoners of our thoughts about the past or our hopes for the future, either. If we do have a real self, what Kant called a “transcendental ego,” it is outside space and time. It does not have feelings or suffer disappointment: it is just aware of them. For Christian and Buddhist writers, it is our soul. In many traditions, from some schools of Classical Buddhism and Vedanta to Christian mystics like Meister Eckhart, “we” are nothing more than awareness. We are simply an aspect of a wider whole: the Ineffable, God, the Universe, according to your taste. Yet Garfield’s argument takes us one step further.
Now surely, something must be there? Surely Kant was right that there must at least be a self? We think we have memories and we anticipate the future, we assume we must have a self that unites all our experiences. Descartes thought that because he was thinking, he must exist as a “self.” You can’t have thoughts without a thinker. Not so fast, says Garfield. The most we can say is that we are “agents of thought.” There is nothing to suggest that we are “selves," still less continuous ones.
After all, where is this “self”? How could we find it? Garfield recounts two famous attempts to demonstrate the non-existence of the “self," by analogy. One comes from ancient India, where the sage Nagasena was questioned on the subject by King Milindra, who asked, how do you know I don’t have a self? Well, said Nagasena, consider one of your royal chariots. What “is” it? If I take away one ornament, is it the same chariot? If it’s the sum of its parts, then there’s no difference if it’s in pieces on the floor or if it’s ready to move. If a wheel breaks off and is replaced, is it the same chariot? In reality, “The King’s Chariot” is merely a “designation with no determinate referent.” If you prefer, its existence is only a convention, determined by how we use the word “chariot.” And so for humans also: our existence is merely nominal. David Hume made a similar argument more than a millennium later. We say “that church has been there a hundred years.” Yet none of the original parishioners or clergy remain, and the church itself has been rebuilt. Nonetheless, everyone understands what we mean. The church exists conventionally, just as we do.
Let’s apply the same logic to ourselves, says Garfield. What persists is not a “self,” but a “persona” (as he usefully reminds us, persona in Greek means “mask”). What persists is something co-created with the world and everyone in it, and with the society and circumstances that surround us. And if that sounds a little way-out, well, think of the times you’ve been so absorbed in an activity, so “in the flow” that you weren’t consciously aware of anything but what you were doing. Where’s the “self” then?
This has a number of implications. The most important is to undermine the concept of absolute Free Will: a concept, it should be remembered, first developed by Saint Augustine to explain why God allowed Adam and Eve to bring sin into the world, when He clearly could have organized things otherwise. If we accept that we are social co-creations, then it is clearly absurd to suppose that we are ever, entirely, responsible for anything. The person who hurt you or even attacked you may themselves have acted out of a complex causal chain, in which their conscious desire was only one factor. This surely doesn’t imply that we are programmed automata, and I think that Garfield could usefully have distinguished between acknowledging responsibility for something that has happened, and being absolved of having deliberately caused it. (In general I found the section on the ethical implications of “no-self”harder going than the purely logical demonstration of the doctrine itself. But then ethical issues are tricky like that, I suppose.)
If you’re not familiar with these ideas, the book will be an eye-opening introduction to them. If you are, then it’s an excellent and extremely well-constructed distillation. But there’s more, I think. Since the Enlightenment and the birth of Liberal ideas, we have lived increasingly, and now almost exclusively, in the World of Me. The morally autonomous utility-maximizing individual, unknown five hundred years ago, is the only role model we now have. It’s all about Me, or if it isn’t, it should be. It’s how I feel and what I need and want, how this or that episode made Me feel, how that person upset Me, how I was upset by that reference in that book, how My ego must be protected from others, even while it is allowed free rein in condemning them. There’s an arguable case that most social and political theory today, as well as much of the media’s output and many of the social conventions of contemporary life, amount cumulatively to by far the largest attempt to deliberately create mass mental illness in history. But if there’s no “me,” what then?
Ultimately, this is a book that will open doors for you. Whether or not you follow the author to the end of his “no self” argument, and its resulting ethical consequences, the even-handed treatment of other views and the extensive notes and bibliography will be valuable to anyone with the slightest interest in these issues, or just anyone who’s feeling depressed by the state of our society. Get hold of the book, and see for your, um, self.