In my post last month, The absolute, the apparent, dogma, the Self, I ended with a long quote from the Anattalakkhaṇa Sutta, in which the Buddha claims — rather convincingly — that there is no self. Or, as I said, this is the usual paraphrase.

In fact, the Buddha being one of the supreme thinkers of his or any age, his claim was far subtler than an outright rejection of any kind of self. Instead, the Buddha acknowledges that there is, in fact, a self, but only in a conventional sense, and not in reality. The conventional self is the subject that experiences the World; the ‘I’ that has a name and a history. It is, in my opinion, close to what what Dan Dennet calls a centre of narrative gravity. It is, in Dennet’s view, construed like a character in a novel: through a consistent, iterative process of creation and interpretation. Unlike these characters, however, our selves are construed in real time, in reaction to happenings in the world; and the construal is therefore not as ‘artificial’ or ‘planned’ as a novel’s character.[1]

When the Buddha challenges his followers to find their selves – in Sanksrit, their ātman – he is referring to the self-as-metaphysical entity: a permanent, inviolable observer that is, in some sense, the truest thing that one can possess or observe. This (upper-case S) Self was treated for much of the Western philosophical tradition as the basis for constructing reality. In the most famous example, Descartes proclaims Cogito ergo sum: the Self exists, demonstrated by its thought, and this eventually ends up being the basis of all knowledge. But this Self has a longer philosophical tradition, including notably Berkeley, Hume, Kant, and, in an interesting way, Fichte (but more on him in a bit).[2]

What the Buddha didn’t diagnose from this is why we should have a sense of an inviolable, permanent Self in the first place. To put it more directly, and perhaps provocatively: Why should we believe that we have a soul? The Buddha identifies that it is a delusion – one of the most important delusions. But why does this delusion arise? Perhaps it is considered self-evident. Perhaps the existence of the demon Māra, who is the personification of suffering and delusion, was enough. Or perhaps knowledge of this kind isn’t useful, and ultimately is distracting from the path of liberation.

☛

Let me posit not only a reason for the arising of a permanent Self, but also of a conventional self. Both appear to me to arise on the basis of identifying correspondences that they exhibit, but differ slightly in which correspondence they are most salient to.

First, one’s self is attached to a body. While it is possible to imagine one’s self without one’s body, it doesn’t seem possible to imagine one’s self in the World without a body. The extent of the body is the demarcation one what is me (i.e., my self) and what is not. The borders of this may be porous: you may consider an object (your phone, for instance) an extension of you. But even this porous border is always a border: there is always a self and all the rest. Fichte, perhaps the strangest (and probably the funniest) of the idealists,[3] reached exactly this conclusion: that the self can only be construed relative to other selves. There cannot be a self in the Cartesian sense, since to exist by thinking presupposes that one can differentiate one’s thoughts from the thoughts of others, or of thoughts projected from the World. The self is, in words that Fichte probably wouldn’t have approved of, identified by subtracting all that is not-self, and naming the remainder.

But Fichte’s self still relies on the second correspondence: a correspondence through time. A self by definition appears to be grounded in a history, which stretches back as far as one has memories. This self is identified with the accumulation of a series of memories. It is, in a sense, additive: the result of the addition of a certain number of memories, assumed to be experienced by the same self. The irony of this correspondence is that we don’t remember most of what happens to us: this self is also selective in a certain sense, as it is identified with certain – and only certain – memories. I point to events in my past and draw a direct line of continuity from them to the present moment. And since – as I mentioned in the aforementioned post – one’s mental model is intimately tied to the parallax of the entity that experienced this continuity, it is natural to suppose that this continuity is the Self.[4] And before Kant, in the West, we didn’t even possess a way of disputing that our observations were relative and not absolute – imperfect due to our irreducible parallax.

☛

In the tradition of the most obtuse philosophers, I will name these two correspondences with two very similar words. The first – correspondence with a body – is the continuous self. It is the upper-S, inviolable Self, since it is persistent, and – insofar as one can’t live without one’s body – ‘eternal’ with respect to one’s experience of a life. It is continuous because of the identification with a body that is always there. The second – correspondence with a series of memory – is the contiguous self. It corresponds with the lower-s self, since the particular selection – or, in some cases, invention – of memories, and the presentation of these memories as constituting the self, seems to be an act more of choice that can be altered at a whim. It is contiguous because it is a series of sensations and images that are discrete, but form a coherent series.

The continuous Self and the contiguous self are always present, and both furnish the World, and both arise from the World. They are, in my view, as two eyes, both of which capture images or models of reality, but which, due to their slightly different parallax, capture different aspects of this model. Any model of the World that is not interpreted through both will necessarily be deficient.

☛

And now a potential problem.[5] The inviolable Self has been relegated, it seems, back to the status of the self-evident, obvious truth: the one kind of Self. We’re back to Descartes. The privileged place of the individual and of individualism in our society – think of the language of individual rights and freedoms; of bodily autonomy; of altruistic, individual contributions to society; or of Thatcher’s claim of there being ‘no society’ – attests to this: the individual provides the calibration and attenuation of our understanding of society, and more broadly perhaps of reality itself.

And yet, despite this, the Self continues to operate alongside the conscious authoring of the self. I’m thinking here of the idea of a ‘personal brand’, which is really an amplified, commodified refinement of any social media presence—which seems by its own nature to necessitate the adoption of a persona. These personae may be close to one’s ‘true self’ – that is, how one tends to behave outside social media – but they’re still personae: curated, authored characters that reveal only a part of one’s breadth of experience.

This is only the paragon case. Another example is a basic paradox in a culture that accepts (a) fluidity of the self alongside (b) the privileged position of lived experience-as-expertise (as I commented on in the previous post, when discussing identity). In this example, the self is permitted to be radically constructed and identified with, for instance, a list of labels – one’s profession, one’s sexuality, one’s taste in music – and to be so perfectly true that it can by itself permit one to speak with authority just by virtue of itself. The former of this is the self, and the latter is the Self.

One way I might capture this trend is that the continuous Self is seen as the subject, the agent, the doer. Meanwhile, the contiguous self is treated objectively – as something to be sculpted, crafted, moulded. The Self is inviolable, and the self is curated. The major issue with this is that an objective self cannot furnish the World, and nor can it arise from it. It is a human creation and not a natural flourishing. It is artifice. And yet, its purpose is to furnish the world, and to arise from it. It is meant, like the continuous Self, to be an equal in this task. It is instead treated as a tool in meeting and edifying the desires of the continuous Self. We have become obsessive artists, revising our work without end, never satisfied with the result. We possess a thousand portraits of Dorian Gray, contiguous in an Instagram story.

☛

When Narcissus approaches the pool, he sees himself and is instantly transfixed by his own appearance. He falls in love with it, and is transfixed until his death. He may well know that it is he that he stares at in the pool, until the end of his days. Perhaps he is in love with himself.

Or is it that he falls in love with the image itself, the reflection as an object in the world. Is he in love with the portrait?

  1. The previous post has a slight difference in terminology: ‘identity’ is recast as the ‘self’. Most of what I said in the previous post still holds, but there are some subtle differences. Identity in the sense that I used it before was a bit confused between self and Self: my thinking has evolved since the last post. But, as we will see, this confusion becomes relevant to my argument. ↩︎

  2. It is worth pointing out how astonishing it is that the Buddha was so perceptive in recognising the difference between these two selves, just over two millennia before the distinction was made in Western philosophy. What is more extraordinary is that he used this to produce a practice that is utterly therapeutic and liberating. ↩︎

  3. This is a verbatim quote, from the Annals of Philosophical Tone:

    Anyone who does not agree with what I am going to say must either show that my reasons for defining philosophy in this way are insufficient, or, if he cannot do that, he must show that some of my specific deductions are incorrect. Or, if he can do neither of these things, he should just say nothing at all. But what do these persons do instead? When I tell them that I have here deduced a priori the necesity of assuming that there are other rational beings like ourselves, they reply: “Of course you have deduced a priori the necessity of assuming that there are other rational beings like ourselves. Just think of it! Ha ha ha!” I tell them that I have here given an a priori deduction of air and light. They answer me: “Air and light a priori, just think of it! Ha ha ha! Ha ha ha! Ha ha ha! Come on, laugh along with us! Ha ha ha! Ha ha ha! Ha ha ha! Air and light a priori: tarte à la crème, ha ha ha! Air and light a priori! Tarte à la crème, ha ha ha! Air and light a priori! Tarte à la crème! Ha ha ha!” et cetera ad infinitum.

    Stunned, I look around me. Where did I lose my way? I thought that I had entered the republic of scholars. Have I fallen into a madhouse instead?

    So good. ↩︎

  4. I was thinking of stressing this point more: I use ‘is’ absolutely. The Self is, in this view, completely and utterly inseparable from the continuity. The Self is not a name for the continuity; it exactly is the continuity. If I were more obtuse, I would have introduced a ‘matheme’ à la Badiou to stress this even further: ‘Self ≡ continuity,’ or somesuch horseshit. ↩︎

  5. Even I am not convinced as I write this that this is correct. But let’s play with these ideas. I never claimed that any information on this website came with a warranty, except perhaps my email address. ↩︎