Freddy Purcell –
For Notion’s first colloquium, the department hosted Malcolm Keating of Smith College in the USA, who is currently working in the UK as a Visiting Professor at the University of Glasgow. Malcolm’s work primarily centres around Indian philosophy, particularly extracting philosophical points from classical texts and communicating them to those unfamiliar with Indian philosophy. It was a small section of this work that we were treated to last Wednesday afternoon.
The talk focussed on a linguistic puzzle discussed by Mimamsa Realists and Buddhists roughly between 400 and 650 CE. The puzzle identifies different uses of first-personal pronouns (I, me, my etc.) that seem to suggest multiple parts exist in one self. Firstly, in a sentence like “I now see what I saw earlier”, it appears that the speaker claims the self which saw some mysterious object is the same self that now sees it again. Secondly, sentences like “I am tall” and “I think” use the same pronoun to refer to both the body and mind. Common language therefore suggests that there is one entity called “I” that persists over time while having both mental and physical properties. The question being, how can one object have a numerical identity over time and at one moment?
The puzzle:
- Uses of first-personal pronouns have one referent, the self.
- Common language contains uses of first-personal pronouns to indicate a self enduring over time that also has mental and physical properties.
- Therefore, one object (the self) has mental and physical properties. Classical Indian philosophers discussed whether this is a contradiction.
To explain this puzzle in context, Malcolm described the views that would have been commonly held in late Classical India. As can be expected, people took themselves to have first-personal thought, something that Malcolm classifies as I-cognitions. Cognition being a close but imperfect translation of the Sanskrit that would have included delusions and non-conceptual events under the definition, as well as contentful events like learning or seeing. These I-cognitions justify the use of the first-personal pronoun while also demonstrating that individuals represent themselves as agents of action and subjects of experience that endure over time. It is the perception that the self endures over time that Buddhists classically claim is an illusion.
For those unfamiliar with Buddhist thought, the key doctrine of no-self maintains that there is no single referent of “I” that persists through time, linking this idea to the Buddhist doctrine of impermanence. Instead, Buddhists propose a trope theory that there are only momentarily occurring properties that stand in causal relationship to each other. The property (me) that writes one word of this article is only causally linked to a property that writes another word (me a few moments later) but is not the same thing. Interestingly, this analysis parallels to Strawson’s (1997) analysis of the self where he suggests that causal links between mental events are sufficient in claiming that we have continuity. Where Buddhists differ is in their view of mereological nihilism, the idea that there are no composite entities, only one fundamental thing. The self is therefore not real as it is a series of entities, but is a conceptual fiction constructed by people. The Buddhist answer to the linguistic puzzle above is therefore very simple, people use inconsistent language about the self because they are mistaken in thinking it exists.
At this point, Malcolm introduced the protagonist of his current work, Kumarila Bhatta of the Mimamsa Realists, a school named after the Sanskrit for “reflection” or “desire to know”. As practitioners of Vedic rituals that were designed to target the eternal self after bodily death, this school was invested in defending the idea of an enduring self. Kumarila described the self as an immaterial cogniser (in terms of the I-cognitions mentioned above) that persists over time. In the face of the Buddhist attack, Kumarila must therefore defend the idea that there are real things made up of multiple parts, accepting the part of the puzzle above that states the self has multiple properties.
The Buddhist challenge for Kumarila is that if there is an enduring immaterial self, this object must be the same as the referent in a sentence like “I am tall”. However, tallness cannot be a property of an immaterial object. In answer, Kumarila argues similarly to his Buddhist interlocutors that common language is mistaken in relating a property like tallness to the self. Instead, he claims that sentences like “I am tall” can be paraphrased as “my body is tall”, identifying one entity through “my” (the self) and another distinct from the self through “body”. We therefore end up in classic philosophical territory where the body is denied as a constitutive part of the self, in favour of what does cognition. In answer to the original puzzle, Kumarila therefore argues that it is a linguistic confusion to attach bodily properties to the self, only maintaining that the self is numerical owing to its existence over time. He argues that the self must persist over time because it is impossible for an individual to act without the presence of a self, particularly because the person that forms an intention to carry out an action must be the same as the person that then undertakes the action.
Malcolm described several Buddhists replies to Kumarila, but he adequately answers them to firmly establish a coherent view of the enduring self. During question time, lecturers and Malcolm exposed some weaknesses in Kumarila’s argument, including his vague answer to how an immaterial self can have a causal impact on the body (the mind-body problem strikes again). Despite some conceptual holes, this was a very interesting dive into an area of philosophy I knew essentially nothing about. It is always amazing to learn about different instances of people over a millennium ago elegantly expressing and solving still-relevant philosophical problems. So, thank you Malcolm for the talk!
Bibliography
Strawson, G. (1997) ‘The Self’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, Vol.4, No.5-6, pp.405-428.