Garfield traces arguments against the existence of a self primarily through 7th century Indian Buddhist scholar Candrakīrti and 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume, and explores where many other philosophers hit or miss the mark along the way. The book is a surprisingly accessible read about a complex topic with perhaps the exception of a couple more in-depth chapters that develop arguments to further his conclusion: you don't have a self, and that's a good thing.
Garfield starts with the idea of self from ancient India: the ātman is at the core of being. A distinct self feels necessary to understand our continuity of consciousness over time (diachronic identity) and our sense of identity at a single time (synchronic identity). A self gives us a way to explain our memory and allows for a sense of just retribution when we're wronged. We feel a unity of self to the extent that it's hard to imagine it's not so.
However, Garfield argues that feeling of having some manner of core self is an illusory cognitive construction. Hume claimed the idea isn't merely false but gibberish, and Garfield calls it a "pernicious and incoherent delusion." We cannot infer from a sense of self that there is a reality of self. Garfield asserts that, "We are nothing more than bundles of psychophysical processes--changing from moment to moment--who imagine ourselves to be more than that." We are similar to the person we were yesterday and a decade ago because we're causally related yet distinct. We share enough properties and social roles with ourselves to feel as if we're the same over the years. That causal connectedness enables the memory of the past and anticipation of the future.
It's unnerving to think that our sense of self isn't real if that just leaves us as nothing more than a collection of perceptions. Garfield calls this complex bundle of subjective processes a person. It's not just a substitution of terminology, though. Personhood, in contrast to selfhood, is a legal and narrative term. From persona, we are a collection of roles we play that don't make sense outside of our social context. A person is like a character in a book without a set dialogue, doing improv as an ensemble player. Our identity includes how our role fits in with the people around us. Garfield uses an analogy of money to explain that our physical body and mind aren't enough to make up who we are since we only exist within a social context. A one hundred dollar bill is just worth a few cents for the ink and paper without the social context that permeates it with meaning.
I wrote a while back about the importance of having some sense of a core self in order to take responsibility for our own development of character. We need to be able to look through our past actions and decide to do things differently in order to improve our behaviour in future. However Garfield's notion of being a person fulfills this function as well. The problem comes that we still want to assume we're a concrete agent behind a persona. The term brings to mind the Jungian understanding of self as the very center with the persona just a small part of our ego out in front and our shadow elements in the dark recesses behind this self. This view makes sense to us or at least it's become familiar to us. We know we act differently with different people, but still feel like there's some real self in there somewhere that's informed by some subconscious feelings that we can't quite put a finger on. Garfield wants us to eliminate our attachment to a self and embrace ourselves as just persons.
For Garfield, the concern with this common self-illusion isn't just about living a lie, but that it brings about disastrous moral effects. He argues that our belief in a distinct self is from an egocentricity that has each of us at the center of our own moral universe. It provokes us to feel proud of ourselves as if we're the sole author of our own actions and to be vindictive when others offend us, both of which destroys true caring if we can't take as much joy in others' achievements as we do our own. The self stands against the world instead of being embedded in it. When there's an inner and outer world -- a subject surrounded by objects -- we end up reifying the self. A self allows us to act from self-interest and the interests of close friends and family.
As a self, we feel like our decisions are not caused, as if we exist beyond the parameters of cause and effect. Garfield explains that when we recognize we're part of the causal order, the fact that our thoughts and actions are caused seems obvious. This is something Zen Buddhist and founder of Dialectic Behaviour Therapy, Marsha Linehan also discusses: once we can radically accept the chain of events that caused this moment, it's easier to accept the situation we're in. We tend to believe that we can make predictions about the world because everything runs by cause and effect except our own mind (possibly unless we have a brain tumour or are inebriated.) Garfield says it's bizarre to want our behaviour to be uncaused and random as if it means freedom, when it actually leaves us no control over any aspect of our lives. If actions are accepted as caused, then we withdraw responsibility for the action, and there's less likelihood of blame and vengeance. We're more likely to respond with care. He puts the west's glorification of free will at the feet of Augustine's argument to explain how an all-powerful and all-benevolent God allows so much harm to come to people.
I'm open to the idea of a no-self and accepting a more interdependent understanding of our world; however, I don't think it's necessarily the case that we generally think our decisions are freely made without cause. Decisions are definitely caused: by ideas, by a line of reasoning, by information and experiences we take in, as well as by social influences. Sometimes we're better able to act on our decisions than others. We recognize that we get better at this with maturity and that we regress when sucked in by social media algorithms, and then we struggle to regain control over ourselves. Decisions are caused but still our own agency. It's not that everything's random, but that it's possible to make an uncaused decision. We don't have maximal autonomy in that we don't choose what we desire, but that's not to say we never make decisions from among choices presented to us. If someone plans to cause harm to others, we might care about them enough to try to change their mind without being punitive, but we will also want to make an effort to influence their decision. Maybe we're just one more cause creating that final effect, but without the actor's belief in the agency of their choice, they might lose the influence of being perceived as acting rightly.
I'm not convinced that removing all praise and blame will necessarily lead to more moral interactions. I agree that we've gone off the rails in terms of glorification of the self and an all-by-myself type of egocentricity. Many of us are often loath to acknowledge all the help we've gotten along our journey. And we could definitely benefit from softening all the guilt and shame so many carry from minor lapses in judgment or from harmless behaviours that meet with social disapproval. Neuroscience professor Hermes Solenzol explains:
"When our natural drives towards food or sex conflict with shame and guilt derived from body image (social disapproval from being fat) or sexual repression from religion, this increases dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens. It is this conflict, and not the pleasure of eating or masturbating, that leads to compulsive behaviors. The greater the conflict between natural drives and repression, the more we feel that we cannot control our behavior. This explains why ‘porn addiction’ is often found in people with a religious upbringing."
However, shame and independent agency have their place when it comes to actual harm caused to another person or entire groups of people.
Garfield explains that we aren't spectators in the world, but part of it, co-constructing the world and ourselves all the time. Thinking of ourselves as people calls on us to abandon egocentricity and rethink our interdependence, which provokes a deeper appreciation of and responsibility for all others. A selfless morality includes impartiality, friendliness, sympathetic joy, and caring. It wishes all others well and is fully able to take pleasure in their successes, acting to alleviate pain and suffering in general, not just our own. It's a disinterested caring to avoid being impaired by a "contagion of suffering." It lets go of pride and revenge. I love this idea of the world, yet there exists a handful of people in the world right now to whom I would struggle to wish well. I don't hope for revenge, but justice, and that involves a belief in their free will to make the heinous decisions they have made.
Outside of the worst actors, I do see the benefit of at least loosening our attachment to our sense of self. Some Buddhists argue that it's only possible to eliminate our illusion of self with long-term meditation, but Garfield is more optimistic that it's possible by focusing on the times that this illusion weakens or disappears, which happens regularly. He describes moments of flow, when we're so immersed in activity that we lose track of our very being. It's an indication of expertise when we're able to spontaneously interact with the world, and Garfield calls it "our most effective mode of being." Shedding the self illusion means becoming more attuned to the world we inhabit. When we're in a state of self-conscious awareness of our actions, it's typically when we're training or learning. Self-consciousness is a special feature of our cognition; it's not always at play because it has a limited utility.
Garfield's arguments are thorough, yet they still don't entirely hold water. Others have criticized his notion of dualism, his unity argument, his treatment of Buddhist ideas, and his conflation of groups with individuals. He provides some arguments to have us reduce how much we cling to a reified inner self, which can be beneficial to ourselves as well as the world as a whole. It could do us a world of good to get beyond that childish longing to be special and work towards a greater sense of interdependence and connectedness. We hate when we fall short in any comparison, but we hold fast to this artificial sorting when we're ahead of the game to the point that we cling to the entire hierarchical system. I completely agree it's the cause of our suffering, and we'd be so much further ahead if we could abandon that game altogether.
However, Garfield's expectations of the moral utopia we'd achieve as persons seems overblown. Without a sense of agency as a distinct entity, at least in the meantime before we reach some kind of spiritual enlightenment, the argument that all is cause and effect leaves a door wide open to renouncing any sense of personal responsibility. I don't think we're ready for that. More importantly, as an ethical treatise, I'm not convinced that people living in such an individualist culture will be provoked into selfless thinking by understanding the nature of self as egocentric. If all is cause and effect, and we believe we have no true agency, are we more likely to develop a morality of impartial friendliness or dive into potentially harmful hedonism?
I think it's possible to be less egocentric if we can just stop looking inward, desperate to prove we belong or that we deserve some care. Garfield wants to start with a sense of interdependence from a dissolved self in order to build connection, but it may suffice to start by looking outward to the world which then helps us to feel that necessary sense of belonging. We can see ourselves as subjects without necessarily seeing others as objects.
