The Philosophic Buddha

I’ll admit it: I am not a fan of Buddhism. I know this doesn’t sound good—like confessing to contempt for puppies or to harbouring doubts about human kindness. But it’s best to be plain-spoken. Reader, consider yourself warned.

What bothers me is a particular nexus of ideas: the “no-self” view in Buddhist metaphysics and its implications for ethical life. I’ve expressed my reservations more than once, in passing, first in Midlife, then in Life is Hard. But I was too dismissive. You can’t refute a tradition that goes back 2500 years in a couple of quick sentences. You need at least 71.

What makes my critique obnoxious is that, despite having read a fair few books about Buddhism, I am not an expert in the field. Instead, I rely on scholars like Donald S. Lopez, whose lectures on The Scientific Buddha are a source of seditious joy. Lopez studiously mocks contemporary claims to reconcile Buddhist philosophy with cutting-edge science, tracing their tendency back to Victorians like William Erskine and Eugene Burnouf. “If Buddhism was compatible with the science of the nineteenth century,” Lopez innocently asks, “how can it also be compatible with the [conflicting] science of the twenty-first?”

The Buddha of the sutras is decidedly supernatural, aware of everything past, present, and future, including the inner lives of others, able to live forever but deciding not to. Karma is the basic law of nature, governing a realm of immaterial conscious events. This is not the science of the nineteenth or the twenty-first century.

If Buddhism is not science, can it be reconciled with cutting-edge philosophy? Like Lopez, I am sceptical. The reconciliation faces a dilemma.

We could give an inflationary reading of the no-self view: a radical metaphysics on which first-person thought—“I think, therefore I am”—refers to nothing at all. The concept I purports to designate a substance given to introspection, the radical theorist holds: not a being of flesh and bone, but the bed in which the stream of consciousness flows. Yet argument, or meditation, shows that there is no such thing. In that sense, I do not exist.

If we interpret it on these lines, we can see why the no-self view has ethical upshots. Our obsessive self-concern cannot survive the revelation that there is no self—no I—to be concerned with. Mortality and loss are less traumatic. (At least that’s the idea; as I wrote in Life is Hard, it’s never been clear to me why the discovery of no-self is not itself traumatic, like being told that everyone you know, including you, is already dead.)

But the inflationary approach has problems. It isn’t obvious, on reflection, how it could subvert our attachment to other people. My inordinate self-interest may turn on the idea that “I” refers to something other than a living organism. My inordinate attachment to my wife and child does not.

Nor do I believe the metaphysical arguments work. They are related to arguments presented by Mark Johnston in Surviving Death, which trace back to Buddhism through Derek Parfit and David Hume. As I’ve argued elsewhere (in section II of this review), those arguments do not convince; and I have yet to see better ones. The concept I picks out a concrete human being.

Of course, I might be wrong: there could be stronger reasons for the no-self view. But that doesn’t affect the basic point. On the inflationary reading, the no-self view is a matter of wildly contentious metaphysics; and while it may have ethical implications, they are both alarming and uncertain.

Anecdotally, this is the point at which one’s interlocutor complains that one has set up a straw man. The no-self view is not the bald assertion that you don’t exist; it’s more subtle than that. To which I say: fair enough! But then we land on the other coast of the great dilemma.

On a deflationary reading, the metaphysics of no-self denies that we are indivisible or immaterial substances. Perhaps it adds, with Jay Garfield, that composite objects are no more than useful fictions, so that we are useful fictions, too. Or, with Robert Wright, it proclaims that “there is no one self, no conscious CEO, that runs the show.”

The problem is that it is mysterious why ardent self-concern or paralyzing fear of death, let alone attachment to others, have anything to do with being non-composite, or with the “CEO self.” So it is a mystery how these versions of the no-self view could bear on ethical life. In truth, they don’t—at least not in any way that lives up to the rhetoric of liberation.

How do contemporary Buddhists argue otherwise? I’ve criticized Garfield’s thinking in a book review. Wright’s reasoning strikes me as equally flawed. He argues, first, that the no-self view helps us transcend the selfish values thrust on us by natural selection. But this argument makes no sense: if self-interest is a product of natural selection, so is concern for others.

Second, Wright contends that self-concern is incoherent:

Consider the absurdity of the current situation: this planet is full of people operating on the premise that their interests trump the interests of pretty much everyone else on the planet—yet it can’t be the case that everybody is more important than everybody else.

Where to start with this? Maybe with the fact that nothing in it rests on the no-self view in any form. There’s been a bait-and-switch. Then with the fact that it’s philosophically confused. Wright’s argument has the authority of G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica behind it:

Egoism holds, therefore, that each man's happiness is the sole good—that a number of different things are each of them the only good thing there is—an absolute contradiction! No more complete and thorough refutation of any theory could be desired.

But whatever Moore’s stature, the fallacy here is now proverbial: refuting it is an exercise for undergraduates, a philosophical warm-up, like practicing scales. According to the egoist, I should pursue my own good and everyone else should do the same. But this means that they should each pursue their good, not—absurdly—mine! The claim is about relative, not absolute, importance. And it is perfectly coherent.

If the first horn of the dilemma is a radical metaphysics, unsupported by proof, whose ethical upshots are disturbing if obscure, the second horn is metaphysical banality void of ethical interest, combined with unrelated ethical arguments that don’t work.

The last resort is to insist, as a matter of brute psychology—a fact observed by Buddhists and confirmed by modern science—that a certain form of meditation distances us from our emotions, freeing us from anger, grief, and fear.

To which the right response is: maybe so, but that does not tell us when or why we should want to be free of these emotions, if they do not turn on metaphysical misconceptions of the self. If someone made a drug that would eliminate difficult feelings, we should refuse to take it. I do not believe that Buddhist meditation is, or is meant to be, that drug.