self
What defines the self for Kierkegaard are the choices that it makes and its
relationship to God divorced from the crowd.
For the Jewish thinker Martin Buber, the self is defined in a triadic rela-
tionship between self, God, and other. Similar to Kierkegaard, Buber
stresses achieving authentic being, which is possible when a person
becomes an I through the Thou, which is characterized by mutuality, direct-
ness, presentness, intensity, and ineffability. The I of the primary I–Thou
relationship, which stands in contrast to the potentially exploitive I–It rela-
tion, achieves its personhood by meeting with the Thou with the whole of
one’s being. The Thou can be another person, God, objects of nature, or
animals. For Buber, real living takes place through encountering others and
engaging in dialogue with them, although a real relationship to others is
possible only in terms of a real relationship to God. The self is unique and
personal for two basic reasons: its relation to others and its relation to God.
Thus, this triadic relationship is grounded in history and society, which
means that the self is personal, historical, and social by nature.
In contrast to Kierkegaard and Buber, the Buddha taught that there is
no permanent self because we are captive to the cycle of causation, thus
impermanence, and ignorant cravings that endlessly drive the cycle. The
assumption that a person can satisfy their self or ego is a false notion that
represents a fundamental misconception because there is no self or ego
to satisfy. The Buddha refers to this teaching as the anatta (non-self)
doctrine. What a person mistakenly assumes to be a self is actually a
group of five aggregates that consists of matter, sensations, perceptions,
impulses to action, and consciousness, which are in a constant state of
flux and impermanence. In the Milindapañha, the monk Nāgasena com-
pares the five aggregates to a chariot and its parts, which represent noth-
ing substantial. When a person dies the five aggregates completely
dissolve and leave no distinctive physical or mental identity that endures.
Therefore, complete detachment from the five aggregates is essential for
escaping the world of suffering and pain. Unenlightened people are
prone to cling to the five aggregates that give them an illusion of a self
and keep them caught in the cycle of death and rebirth.
Centuries after the death of the historical Buddha, Dōgen, a Zen Buddhist
master, writes about the authentic and inauthentic self. The latter arises from
the human tendency to superimpose the following onto experience: patterns
of thinking, categories, and concepts. This is done in order to manipulate
experience with the inauthentic conveying itself out to the experience and
imposing meaning on it. The authentic self is the exact opposite because it
results from things advancing to the self. The authentic self is concrete
because it represents the immediacy of experience, whereas the inauthentic
self is abstract because it arises from the self’s memory of past concrete