- seCtIon sIx: seLF AnD otHeR
Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves,
meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, wid-
ows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves.(James Joyce, Ulysses, 1922)One way of escaping the problem might be to declare that I am my whole body,
and there is no need for a self as well. This would be fine, except that most people
don’t feel that way. The ‘whole body’ idea of self works for some purposes – ‘I’ went
shopping, ‘I’ tripped on the carpet, ‘I’ am an expert skier; ‘she’ went on holiday and
‘he’ popped in for a drink. But it works less well for others. Can you really say that
your whole body believes in eliminative materialism, is worried about your par-
ent’s health, or hopes it won’t rain tomorrow?Hold up your hand in front of you. Whose hand is this? Look down at your feet.
Whose feet are these? Perhaps you feel as though you and the hands and feet
are one, and there is no gap between a perceived and a perceiving self. Or per-
haps you feel as though the hand is over there and ‘you’ are in here, somewhere
behind ‘your’ eyes and looking out at it, this thing that belongs to you. In this
case, who are ‘you’? Who is calling this ‘my hand’,
‘my body’, and even ‘my brain’? In this and many
other ways, we come to feel as though we are not
the same as our body but are, to use an old tradi-
tional metaphor, something like the driver of a car-
riage or the pilot of a ship. I talk about the body as
something that ‘I’ possess. And so I separate ‘myself ’
from it.
That this apparently natural way of thinking about
ourselves is problematic has been recognised for
millennia. In the sixth century BC, the Buddha
challenged contemporary thinking with his doc-
trine of anatta. This is often, perhaps inaccurately,
translated as ‘no-self ’, when really he was rejecting
the common idea that we consist of a separate and
continuous entity. Instead, he claimed that the self
is just a name or label given to a collection of parts,
in the way that we give the name ‘carriage’ to a set
of parts – a suggestion that seems as hard to under-
stand and accept today as it was then. The Greek
philosophers struggled with similar issues, including
Plato, who wanted to know whether the psyche
(the soul or true essence of a person) is immortal.
In his famous dialogues, he argued both that the
psyche is immortal and that it has parts – appetitive,
emotional, and rational parts. This created a serious
problem, since he also believed that only a unitary
and indivisible thing could be immortal. His ideas
helped set the stage for millennia of mind–body dualism in which the supposedly
rational immaterial self has been consistently valued over the supposedly base
and animal-like bodily self.FIGURE 16.1 • The Buddha taught the doctrine
of anatta or ‘no-self’. Parfit
(1987, p. 21) calls him the first
bundle theorist.