Abstract
Derek Parfit’s early work on the metaphysics of persons has had a vast influence on Western philosophical debates about the nature of personal identity and moral theory. Within the study of Buddhism, it also has sparked a continuous comparative discourse, which seeks to explicate Buddhist philosophical principles in light of Parfit’s conceptual framework. Examining important Parfitian-inspired studies of Buddhist philosophy, this article points out various ways in which a Parfitian lens shaped, often implicitly, contemporary understandings of the anātman (no-self) doctrine and its relation to Buddhist ethics. I discuss in particular three dominant elements appropriated by Parfitian-inspired scholarship: Parfit’s theoretical categories; philosophical problems raised by his reductionist theory of persons; and Parfit’s argumentative style. I argue that the three elements used in this scholarship constitute different facets of one methodological approach to cross-cultural philosophy, which relies on Western terminology and conceptual schemes to establish a conversation with non-Western philosophy. I suggest that while this methodology is fruitful in many ways, philosophy as a cosmopolitan space may benefit significantly from approaching Buddhist philosophy using its own categories and terminology.
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Notes
While Parfit’s analysis of personal identity had a direct influence on Parfitian readings, the broad sense and significance of his claims are to be understood in their historical and thematic contexts, on which this paper will not elaborate. Historically, Parfit’s inquiry into personal identity is embedded in a philosophical tradition that goes back to thinkers such as John Locke and David Hume, and engages with contemporary philosophers such as Bernard Williams, Christine Korsgaard, and Susan Wolf. Thematically, the concepts of reductionism and eliminativism draw their significance from a wider set of debates in Western philosophy, particularly in metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of science.
Collins’s view changed over time. A number of years after first comparing Parfit and Buddhism, he embraced it more vehemently, noting that Parfit’s reductionist position is very close to the Buddhist one, both in theory and in the practice of most ordinary Buddhist believers (Collins 1985, pp. 482–483). A decade later, however, he retreated from this strong claim and subscribed to a more restrained version, according to which the Buddhist anātman (anattā) doctrine, despite certain similarities, is not fully reductionist; while the reductionist view can offer a complete description of reality without asserting the existence of persons, in Buddhism the conventional level of truth (the level at which the existence of persons is admitted) is required for a complete description of reality, both for social discourse and for the overall coherence of Buddhist thought (Collins 1997, pp. 477–480).
Parfit’s knowledge of early Buddhism was based chiefly on the Milindapañha, Vasubandhu’s Abhidharmakośabhāṣya, and Buddhaghosa’s Visuddhimagga, as translated in Stcherbatsky 1919. He quotes passages from these works in appendix J of Reasons and Persons (Parfit 1984, pp. 501–502), as well as in Parfit 1987 (p. 93), 1995 (pp. 16–17), and 1999 (p. 260). I use the umbrella term 'early Buddhism' throughout the paper, as it reflects the tendency (albeit not a uniform one) of the literature surveyed to consider different non-Mahāyāna traditions collectively as holding the same version of the anātman theory. There is, however, room for subtler distinctions here. For example, Jake Davis (2017) shows that the understanding of personhood expressed in the Pāli Nikāyas is at variance with Parfit’s version of metaphysical reductionism, in that the former is interested in the lived experience of selfhood, not in a given ontological entity.
In addition, Parfit introduces a third variation, 'identifying reductionism,' but he says very little about this view and it is of less interest to our current discussion. I therefore set it aside.
Later still, Parfit rejected this stance as distinct from reductionism. See Parfit 1999, p. 260.
For the evolution of this inquiry see, in chronological order, Bastow 1986, Stone 1988, Giles 1993, Duerlinger 1993, Basu 1997, Siderits 1997, Perrett 2002, Siderits 2003, Stone 2005, Ganeri 2007, Ch. 6, and Siderits 2015 (some of which will be discussed below). Generally, non-reductionism has a secondary importance in these works. Nearly all of the above studies which discuss non-reductionism regard it as a rival view to mainstream early Buddhism, attributable to non-Buddhist schools of thought as well as to the Buddhist Pudgalavāda school. However, see Siderits 1996 for a self-contained treatment of the Pudgalavāda as non-reductionism, and Carpenter 2015 for a reconstruction and philosophical defense of the motivation underlying the Pudgalavāda theory of persons, with reference to Parfitian non-reductionism.
The question of the crucial differences between the Parfitian categories and Buddhist anātman doctrine remains beyond the scope of this study, but here are several remarks on the issue: Matthew Kapstein (1986, p. 297 and 2001, p. 50, n. 21) points out that the teaching of rebirth, accepted by all major Buddhist schools, is in disagreement with Parfit’s version of reductionism, which sees transmigration as a supporting claim of non-reductionism. According to Goodman (2005, p. 381), neither reductionism nor eliminativism is able to fully explain the Buddhist view, since they do not acknowledge the distinction between conventional and ultimate truths – an important theoretical principle in Buddhist accounts of the person and the self. Mark Siderits (2003, p. 76) mentions that one significant difference between the Buddhist teachings and the Parfitian versions of reductionism is that the former reduces wholes in general, while the latter applies this view to persons only. Finally, Robert Ellis (2000) offers a more radical analysis of the discrepancy, claiming that any apparent similarity between reductionism and the Buddhist view is purely superficial. The crucial difference between the two, according to him, is that Parfit’s categories deal with self-identity – a matter of ontological fact – whereas the Buddha’s position is essentially about self-identification, which is a psychological and epistemological issue, comprising desire and belief.
On the different interpretations of the Śāntideva Passage and for an overview of works that investigate it philosophically, see Garfield et al. 2015.
Goodman’s explicit rejection of the value of unified identity in ethics makes it clear that he favors this side of the equation. His rejection is directed at claims made by Western thinkers such as Christine Korsgaard (1989) and Charles Taylor (1989), who argued – against Parfit – that a unified identity is essential for ethics on practical grounds. Thus Goodman writes, in response to Taylor, 'That we must not only realize the ultimate nonexistence of any substantial self but also overcome the whole phenomenon of having an identity is an important message of the Mahāyāna scriptures' (2009, p. 11), and, commenting on Korsgaard’s argument, says that 'Rejecting and abandoning the psychological processes that, for Korsgaard, help to constitute a persisting self may not just be a demand of Buddhism; it may, under certain circumstances, be a demand of consequentialism itself. The kinds of identification that Korsgaard regards as necessary and inevitable will sometimes prevent people from responding in ways that would benefit sentient beings.' (2009, p. 213)
See Jenkins 2015 for a more detailed overview and philosophical discussion of the three objects of compassion in Madhyamaka thought.
In a critique that references Parfit’s two kinds of moral units – derived from the Extreme Claim and the Moderate Claim (on which, see Parfit 1984, pp. 306–311) – Vishhnu Sridharan claims that Goodman’s reading of Śāntideva’s ethics oscillates between the two levels of compassion in Śāntideva. For the critique and Goodman’s response, see Sridharan 2016a, Goodman 2016, and Sridharan 2016b.
Conventional persons do figure in Goodman’s defense of consequentialism, for example, in his Buddhist reply to the objection of excessive demands. It is important to note, however, that this use is not directly linked to the theoretical lines of the anātman doctrine (although, naturally, persons being conventional entities, the idea is in the background). Goodman's 2015 defense of consequentialism and his corresponding reading of Śāntideva’s arguments rests more substantially on conventional distinctions between persons, though this reading still seems to favor the other two points I enumerated above (the deconstruction of identity and the ethically grounding role of this deconstruction). However, the conceptual framework underlying this reading is considerably different. On the Buddhist side, the focus is on Madhyamaka philosophy and emptiness, rather than non-Mahāyāna thought and the anātman doctrine; and on the Western side, it is not Parfit but other contemporary thinkers who inform the interpretive model and challenge the consequentialist theory (Richard Boyd on the one hand, and Margaret Urban Walker, Robert Nozick, and John Rawls on the other).
For an extensive defense of the position that the reconstructed person is a vital component in Śāntideva’s soteriology and ethics, see Todd 2013, especially pp. 40–41, 143–163. See Fan (forthcoming) for a comparative study that considers the reconstruction of persons in Buddhist philosophy in light of Parfit’s criterion of personal identity.
Vasubandhu’s Abhidharmakośabhāṣya: '[Vaiśeṣikas:] – If the "idea of I" has [only] color-form and the other aggregates for its cognitive object [ālambana] [and not a self], why is it that this idea does not arise in regard to the color-form of others? [Vasubandhu:] – Because there is no connection [saṃbandha] between the stream of aggregates [of others] and this idea. When the body (rūpa) or thought (citta-caitta) are in connection with the "idea of I" —a cause-and-effect [kāryakāraṇa] connection—this idea arises towards this body and this thought; but not in regard to the aggregates of others. The habit of considering "my stream" as "I" exists in "my stream" since beginningless saṃsāra.' (Translated in La Vallée Poussin and Sangpo 2012, pp. 2572–2573; interpolated Sanskrit terms in original)
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Acknowledgements
This article was written with the generous support of a research grant by the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) and a postdoctoral fellowship by the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation. I am deeply indebted to Jay Garfield and Alexander von Rospatt for comments that significantly improved the paper. My thanks also go to Purushottama Bilimoria for kindly facilitating the publication of the article and providing access to unpublished material, as well as to members of UC Berkeley’s Humanities and Social Sciences Association for their encouraging feedback. The third section of the article stems from a paper presented at the 17th Congress of the International Association of Buddhist Studies, Vienna, August 2014. I wish to thank Gordon Davis, Pierre-Julian Harter, Mark Siderits, Roy Tzohar, David Weinstein, and Michael Zimmermann for their helpful comments, suggestions, and corrections. Any errors remaining are, of course, my own responsibility.
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Hanner, O. Buddhism as Reductionism: Personal Identity and Ethics in Parfitian Readings of Buddhist Philosophy; from Steven Collins to the Present. SOPHIA 57, 211–231 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-018-0668-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-018-0668-3