No-Self

Classification

Position level

specific

Domains

Philosophy of Mind

Overview

The Buddhist argument goes aggregate by aggregate. A person is analyzed into five components — body, feeling, perception, mental habits, and consciousness — and each is shown to be impermanent, dependent on conditions, and outside anyone's control, so none of them, alone or together, is fit to be the fixed self it would need to be. What gets called "a person" is a causal stream of these five arising and passing in dependence on prior conditions, not a further owner standing behind the stream. Denying such a self does not deny that people act or suffer; it denies that a permanent, essential subject exists to be found doing the acting or the suffering.

This is a direct denial of Descartes's substantial self, which starts from the certainty of a single thinking subject and treats it as one, simple, and persisting. It reaches a similar verdict to Hume's bundle theory by a different road, and the two should not be run together: Hume's case is that introspection, searched carefully, never turns up an impression of a self among the perceptions it does find — an argument aimed at settling a question about the mind. The Buddhist case is built into a larger account of causes and conditions and aimed at a practical end, ending suffering by removing its root, which the tradition locates in craving built on the illusion of a self worth protecting.

Position on

• Existence of the Self

Held by traditions

• Buddhism

  Question scope: Existence of the Self

• Zen (Chan)

  Zen seeks direct, non-conceptual realization of no-self: 'to study the self is to forget the self' — in zazen the boundary between subject and object drops away, disclosing the emptiness of any fixed, separate self.

  Question scope: Existence of the Self

Incompatible positions

• Substantial Self

  Question scope: Existence of the Self

References

• Samyutta Nikaya 22.59 (Anattalakkhaṇa Sutta)
• René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, Meditations II and VI