[Buddha-l] Are we sick of dogma yet? (2nd of 2)

[Richard Hayes]

Joanna Kirkpatrick observes:

> This discussion has gotten pretty esoteric......how about more detail, 
> folks?

Dan has already provided a pretty good account of pudgalavada, to which
Lance has added some welcome nuance. I will confine myself to a brief
account of Siderits's treatment.

Siderits adapts some terminology used in analytic philosophy, and
especially philosophy of mind. He suggests that three possible attitudes
can be found with respect to the reality of a self or person. 

1. Elimininativism would be the view that the self is a complete and
useless fiction that so much gets in the way that we had best eliminate
all mention of it altogether. (In another context, an eliminativist
might say about the concept of the soul that it is utterly vacuous and
so misleading that we had best purge our vocabulary of it.) Siderits
claims that in Indian Buddhism there are no eliminativists with regard
to selves and persons. No one says that the concept of self is
meaningless.

2. Reductionism would be the view that it makes sense to speak of a
self, but only insofar as "self" is a convenient shorthand for a complex
of phenomena that it would be cumbersome to mention in full detail. The
concept of self could, in principle be eliminated, but at a cost. (In
another context we might say that "buddha-l" is a convenient shorthand
for the 500 or so people who subscribe to this discussion group, and for
the messages that appear on this discussion group. So when we say
"Buddha-l is a waste of time," this is a shorthand way of saying "All
the messages written by Dan Lusthaus and Richard Hayes and Lance Cousins
and [name every subscriber by name] is a waste of time.") Siderits sees
much of early Buddhism (Theravada, Vaibhasika, Sautraantika etc) as
reductionist in this sense.

3. Realism would be the view that the self is fully real in that there
are predicates that apply to it but that cannot be applied to anything
else. The self is one of the ultimately real constituents of the world,
and it would therefore be an intellectual mistake to eliminate it or to
see it as merely a convenient fiction. (In another context, some
philosophers hold that consciousness is a sui generis reality that
cannot correctly be seen as just a metaphorical or careless way of
speaking about events in the brain.) Siderits claims that no Buddhists
were realists about the self, but that one can find self-realists in
most non-Buddhist schools of Indian philosophy. These are the
full-fledged aatmavaadins.

Siderits suggests that just as reductionism is a middle path between
eliminativism and realism, one can find another middle position between
reductionism and realism. This middle position he calls non-reductive
mereological supervenience (NMS). This view of the self is non-reductive
in that it regards self as a subject that bears predicates that cannot
be borne by any of the aggregates. It is mereological in that the self
is seen as a whole that has parts, namely, the 5 aggregates (or, more
accurately, all the dharmas that can be classified into aggregates on th
basis of shared features). But the self has a supervenient relationship
with the dharmas. (The basic idea of supervenient relationship between A
and B is that it holds just in case every change in A is an effect of
some change in B. So the concept of self is supervenient upon dharmas
because no change in the concept of self occurs without some change in
the underlying dharmas.) The self on this account is an idea (prajnapti)
but not an idea to which there does not correspond a single uneliminable
and irreducible reality. Because it is a supervenient reality, it is not
regarded as simple, unconditioned and eternal; it differs, therefore,
from the aatman of Brahmanical thought. Siderits argues that at least
one version of pudgalavaada can best be described as a example of
non-reductionist mereological supervenience theory.

I think that we are now living in a time when it is seen by many people
as just wrong-headed to say that self or ego is nothing but a poetic way
of talking about more complex realities. Self is just too important a
construct in depth psychology and in moral theory to wave it aside. It
is not simply because of some beginningless delusional habit that we
think and talk of selves. So our tendency is to be non-reductive about
self. But we also tend not to see the self as eternal, unconditioned and
unchanging. Indeed, most of it see self as what analytical philosophers
call supervenient. By seeing the self as a supervenient reality we can
speak seriously, and without embarrassment or shame, about such things
as self-cultivation, self-improvement, self-awareness and
self-understanding, and we can do so without buying into what most of us
would see as a metaphysical absurdity, namely, an eternal soul or
something of the like.

Although the terminology of non-reductive mereologial supervenience is
perhaps unnecessarily arcane, the theory for which it stands seems both
reasonable and attractive to me. Whether or not anyone in India ever
held such a view---I'm happy to leave it to historians of ideas to sort
that whole matter out---, I think a number of Buddhists in our times
hold such a view. If only we could find a less awkward and pompous and
unattractive name for it. (It's a good job analytic philosophers never
have children; one shudders to think what ugly names they would give
them.)

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico
http://www.unm.edu/~rhayes