The anattaa doctrine and personal identity

·期刊原文
The anattaa doctrine and personal identity

By Richard Taylor
Philosophy East and West
Vol.19
P359-366
(C) by The University Press of Hawaii

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P359

Descartes saw that he could not identify himself
with his body. He therefore vacillated between
identifying himself with his mind, and with an
awkward amalgam of his mind and his body. Gotama
Buddha more profoundly argued that one could not
identify himself with his mind either, nor, indeed,
with anything at all. This is his doctrine of
anattaa, that there is no self. He evidently
considered rejection of belief in the self as
essential to blessedness, as Lucretius similarly
abominated belief in life after death, for similar
reasons.

It is essential to note, however, that the self
whose existence the Buddha denied was an inner
enduring self, having an identity through time and
presumably being, therefore, capable of an existence
independent of the body and the world, even after
death. Thus:

If there really existed the Self, there would be
also something which belonged to the Self. As,
however, in truth and reality, neither the Self, nor
anything belonging to the Self, can be found, is it
not therefore really an utter fool's doctrine to
say: `This is the world, this am I; after death I
shall be permanent, persisting, and eternal'?(1)

And all speculations on the self--whether or not it
is the self that perceives the self, whether or not
the self is permanent, or subject to change--he
dismissed as "mere views, a thicket of views, a
puppet-show of views, a toil of views, a snare of
views" through which no man will ever be "freed from
rebirth, from decay, and from death, from sorrow,
pain, grief and despair"-in short, from
suffering.(2)

Without considering the ethical and religious
implications of this teaching, I wish in an indirect
way to defend the claim itself, that there is no
personal self. My approach will be indirect, in the
sense that I shall maintain that a particular person
or self is one and the same thing as his body.

This will, moreover, be quite in keeping with
the claim of the Buddha, for in one place he said:

It would be better for the unlearned worlding to
regard this body, built up of the four elements, as
his Self, rather than the mind. For it is evident
that this body may last for a year, for two years,
for three, four, five or ten years, or even for a
hundred years or more; but that which is called
thought, or mind, or consciousness, continuously,
during day and night, arises as one thing, and
passes away as another thing.(3)

Now one should not, of course, on the basis of such
passages as this, represent it as the teaching of
ancient Buddhism that the self and the body are one,
for it was clearly the doctrine of Gotama that there
simply is no self. The differ-
-------------------
Richard Taylor is Professor of Philosophy,
University of Rochester.
1 The Word of the Buddha, ed. Nyanatiloka (Colombo:
Word of the Buddha Publishing Committee, 1952), p.
34.
2 Ibid., p. 34.
3 Ibid.,p.40.

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ence between these two claims is, however, only one
of emphasis; for, given that there are such things
as living human bodies, i.e., living men, which the
Buddha hardly denied, then the two claims are
logically equivalent. For, given this
uncontroversial presupposition, it is one and the
same thing to say (a) there is no self, and (b) the
self and the body are one and the same or, perhaps
better, there is no personal self other than just
the body.

I shall, in pursuing this theme, address myself
to the question, What is a person? And I shall
maintain that any given person, such as oneself, is
identical with, or is one and the same thing as,
that palpable physical object he refers to as his
body; in short, that no philosophical reason can be
given for believing in any inner "self" or person
other than this. One argument often put forth for
denying this claim, namely, that a man retains his
identity through time, while his body does not, will
be briefly discussed at the end.

Now this claim, that there is no inner self, or,
as I prefer to express it, that the only thing a man
can claim as himself is his body, is a purely
negative one, and cannot therefore be proved by any
philosophical discourse. All I can do, therefore, is
to show that it is consistent with common sense, not
inconsistent with anything that is known to be true,
and that the typical philosophical arguments that
are often given against it are inconclusive and,
usually, question-begging.

What is a person? Now this question can, of course,
be answered in a silly and superficial way, by
saying that any given person is simply identical
with himself. This, however, only calls attention to
the identity of the ordinary concept of a person and
the philosophical concept of the self, for it is
just conceptually true that every person is a "self"
and vice versa. And it is just for this reason that
we are entitled to ask, What is a person? rather
than the seemingly more esoteric question, What is
the self?

But it is, of course, possible to suggest answers
that are not merely analytic. One might say, for
instance, that a given person, such as oneself, is
(a) a particular body; for instance, that I am, or
that I am identical with, or that I am one and the
same thing as, that palpable physical object which I
refer to as "my body." Or one might say that a given
person, such as oneself, is (b) a particular mind;
for instance, that I am identical with that thinking
thing I refer to as "my mind." Or again, it might be
claimed that a given person, such as oneself, is (c)
an amalgam of these two; for instance, that I am
identical with that composite of things I refer to
as "my body" and "my mind." Or finally, it can be
argued that a person is none of these things, but
rather that a given person, such as oneself, is (d)
something "primitive"; for example, that I am
identical with something which is neither a body nor
a mind, but something (namely, a given person,
myself) which has both physical and mental
properties.

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This last answer is, I believe, esoteric. There
is, in any case, no need to examine independently
any of the last three answers if the first answer
will do.

Persons and bodies. Apart from certain religious
presuppositions, which I shall leave aside, there
appear to be two kinds of consideration, and only
two, which have led philosophers to doubt that
persons are simply identical with those physical
objects we see about us all the time and which we
refer to as living human beings, or simply as men.
The first is linguistic, and the second
metaphysical.

Linguistic considerations. The grammatical forms we
use to refer to our bodies and their parts appear to
suggest a distinction between ourselves and our
bodies. Thus, everyone can say truly "I am a person,
and I have a body," though there seem to be no
contexts in which one could say "I am a body, and I
have a person." Again, it is usual for one to refer
to his bodily parts, and even to the totality of
these, by means of a first person possessive
pronoun. For example, I can speak of my hands and
feet, my heart, my brain, and even my body, which
seems to suggest a relationship between myself and
my body which is perhaps something like ownership or
possession but not, apparently, identity.

Reply. Such purely linguistic considerations as
these are highly superficial and prove nothing. In
fact, if one compares them with the manner in which
we commonly speak of other ordinary physical
objects, they appear perfectly consistent with the
supposition that there is no self in any absolute
sense, but only bodily constituents related to each
other and functioning in such a way as to constitute
a human being. The Buddha has, with familiar
analogies, made this point:

Just as that what we designate by the name of
'chariot,' has no existence apart from axle, wheels,
shaft, carriage, and so forth; or, as the word
'house' is merely a convenient designation for
various materials put together after a certain
fashion so as to enclose a portion of space, and
there is no separate house-entity in existence:--in
exactly the same way, that which we call a 'being,'
or an 'individual,' or a 'person,' or by the name
`I', is nothing but a changing combination of
physical and psychical phenomena, and has no real
existence in itself.(4)

And I would express what I take to be the same point
as follows.

Every man can truly say, "I have a body." But in
the same way one can say of any physical object
whatever that it has a body. Thus, I can say of my
car that it has a body, or of a table that it has
four legs and a top-and this might be all it has.
This hardly suggests that the car or table is one
thing and its body another. Similarly, I can say
that I have (say) a heart, legs, arms, brain, and so
on, but no special relationship is here connoted by
"have."
----------------
4 Ibid., p.11.

P362

Such a statement only means, or certainly may only
mean, that I consist of a heart, legs, brain, and so
on, along with other physical parts, all related to
each other and functioning in a manner necessary to
constitute a living human being or, which is the
same thing, a person.

Metaphysical considerations. If one ventures any
true description of something, A, and likewise any
true description of something, B, then one is
entitled to affirm that these are alternative
descriptions of the same thing--or in other words,
that A and B are one and the same thing--if and only
if the description rendered of A, whatever it might
be, can now be applied to B without ceasing to be
true; and, of course, vice versa. Thus, if one were
to describe a given man A as the father of numerous
children, and a given man B as the junior senator
from New York, then one would be entitled to affirm
that A and B are one and the same man only if one
could likewise say that A is the junior senator from
New York and B the father of numerous children. And
in case every descriptive statement true of A turns
out to be true of B as well, and vice versa, then it
follows that A and B are the same man; or in other
words, that these are all just alternative ways of
describing one particular man.

Now philosophers have been apt in pointing out
the incongruity of certain descriptive locutions
which, it would seem, would not be incongruous if
men thought of themselves and their bodies as
identical things. A person can sometimes truly say
of himself, for example, that he loves his country,
is subject to quick changes of mood, admires Plato's
theory of forms, is politically liberal, and things
of that sort. It would seem utterly incongruous,
however, to assert such things of any body
whatsoever, and hence of one's own body; to assert,
for example, that his body is politically liberal.
There should not be such incongruity, however, if
persons and their bodies are identical. For if I am
one and the same thing as my body, then it must
follow that if I, for example, admire Plato, then
that physical object I refer to as "my body" must
admire Plato too, this body referred to in the
second statement and this self or "I" referred to in
the first being one and the same thing, namely, that
person I call "myself." But since this consequence
seems absurd, we seem obliged to reject the
antecedent from which it is derived; namely, that I
and my body are one and the same thing.

Can matter think? There have in the history of
thought been many ways of expressing essentially
this same metaphysical point, all of which are
capsulated in the dictum that "matter cannot think."
Thus, it has beep claimed that ideas can exist only
in a mind, not in a body. Or again, it is thought
obvious that matter cannot experience self-awareness;
but since persons are undoubtedly sometimes aware of
themselves, it follows again that persons are not
bodies. Or again, it is said that sensations and
feelings are not material states or

P363

processes. One could never say that sensations or
feelings are transpiring in a test tube, for
example, because the only kind of process that can
occur there is a physical process. Persons, however,
do have sensations and feelings, and are therefore
quite unlike the matter that can exist in a test
tube. Or again, there are certain uniquely mental
things--mental images, for instance--which can by no
means be described in terms of the concepts we apply
to bodies. One can neither say, for example, that
such images are soluble in alcohol, nor that they
are not. Persons, however, can possess such things
as mental images, so it would seem that persons must
themselves be nonphysical things; and so on.

It is fairly clear that all of these and similar
familiar remarks are but more or less crude ways of
saying that matter cannot think, construing thinking
sufficiently broadly to include feeling, sensing,
imagining, and so on. And this dictum, that matter
cannot think, is itself a crude, epigrammatic way of
expressing the previous metaphysical point, to the
effect that there are many descriptive predications
which are applicable to persons but not to their
bodies. What we have here are certain descriptions
which, it is claimed, "make sense" when applied to
persons, but "make no sense" when applied to any
body whatsoever, and hence make no sense when
applied to one's own body.

Reply. In order to overturn this line of thought we
have to get a fresh orientation on the thing, and
this I propose to do as follows.

When one sees a man--sees a man tilling a field,
for instance, or assembling an engine-what one sees
is a person. One can point to that man and say, for
instance, that he, that person, is tilling,
tinkering, or whatnot. It would be incongruous to
say that his visible body is tilling or tinkering,
unless this were understood as a funny way of saying
that the man himself, the person pointed to, is
tilling or tinkering; for this latter is the truth
of the matter. One might say of the man assembling
the engine, for instance, that he is reading the
instructions, inferring the proper position of this
part or that, getting things wrong sometimes,
perhaps, and right other times, adjusting this or
that, contemplating the result, checking against
diagrams, and so on. It would be quite strange to
say that his body was doing these things. It would
be incongruous, indeed, absurd, to set all these
activities down to his mind; to say that his mind is
reading instructions, adjusting this and that, and
so on. It would be downright primitive to attempt
distributing these various tasks between two
things--to say, for example, that his mind makes the
appropriate inferences, that his body then makes the
needed adjustments, that his mind then contemplates
the result, his body moving parts this way and that,
and so on--as though the work of assembling the
engine were somehow divided between them.

Clearly, we are talking about one and the same
being when we say all of

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these things. And the being we are describing is a
certain man, whom we see and point to. And that man,
thus described, is a person; for nothing except a
person could be so described.

The next thing to observe, then, is that this
man, whom we see and point to, and who is one and
the same thing as the person we are describing, is a
visible, palpable, physical object. What else,
indeed, could one see and point to? And from this it
surely does follow that the person we are
describing, the man who is assembling the engine, is
a visible, palpable object, a living human body or,
in short, a body.

Two common mistakes. Why, then, do such commonsense
observations as these fail to satisfy so many
philosophers? The explanation is mainly found, I
think, in two common mistakes. The first is to treat
certain psychological states and activities as
things rather than as states and activities, and the
second is to suppose that the human body, being a
body, can have only those capacities that are
discoverable in lifeless things. I shall consider
these in turn.

The first mistake. Instead of saying, for example,
that a given person, such as oneself, "has" an
image, sensation, or thought, one can simply say
that he imagines, senses, or thinks. For instance,
instead of saying that I "have" a mental image of my
birthplace, I can surely say, conveying exactly the
same claim, that I imagine my birthplace. The former
inept but common expression implies the existence of
a thing called an image. It is true that no such
thing can be a physical thing, but it should not
therefore be supposed that it must be a nonphysical
thing. One can say, rather, that there is no such
thing to begin with; that there is only a person
imagining something. This implies only the existence
of that person, that is, a certain man, or living
human being, and, perhaps (though not necessarily),
the thing imagined. There is no reason why that
person may not be the very man one points to when
one points to him. Indeed, it must be, for otherwise
we could not point and say truly that he, the person
so indicated, is imagining his birthplace.

This same observation can be applied, I think,
to every other philosophical locution that is
brought forth as implying a distinction between
persons and their bodies--such as "idea, "
"sensation," "thought," and so on. At least, I have
discovered none which cannot be so dealt with.

The second mistake. It seems quite obviously
gratuitous to assume that the living human beings we
see (which are bodies) can have no capacities not
exemplified in inanimate things, and to rest this
assumption on nothing more than the fact that things
of either kind are bodies. One might as well claim
that inanimate things, like bricks and stones, can
think, resting this on the fact that, like men, they
are bodies. If one gravely asserts that matter
cannot think, and then quite validly infers from
this that persons, who think, are not bodies,

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we can surely reply that since those living human
beings we see around us all the time do think--or at
least, that there is every reason to believe they
do, and no reason to doubt it--then the proper
inference should be that some physical objects,
namely, those very men we see, do think. And the
same, of course, applies to every other capacity
which is alleged to be a unique capacity of a
person: the capacity to reason, daydream, plan for
the future, and so on.

Personal identity through time. Are there, then, any
special problems arising from the identity of a
given person through time which cast doubt on the
foregoing suggestions? I cannot attempt discussion
of all such alleged problems, but one or two samples
will, I believe, typify them all. And it can be
seen, I think, that they simply beg the question.

Thus, it might be asked, what if two persons
changed bodies--perhaps gradually, bit by bit, over
a long period? Or what if they merely exchanged
brains? Or suppose you and I were physically
conditioned, perhaps unbeknown to us, in such a way
that I (note) "woke up" with all your memories and
you with all mine. Which would be you, and which me?
What if, for example, I were forced to decide which
of these bodies should suffer pain and death, the
other to be set free--which, out of self-interest,
would I designate for each fate?

Now it should be obvious that in all such
questions it is simply presupposed that a person is
something distinct from his body, such that the
question can, it is thought, be seriously asked,
Which person goes with which body?

To see the absurdity of these questions and
others like them, let us consider two nonhuman
things, such as two automobiles, yours and mine, and
fabricate similar "problems." Thus, what if the two
cars changed bodies, perhaps gradually, bit by bit,
over a long period? Which would be yours, and which
mine? Or what if we merely exchanged their engines?
Or suppose my car were made to look just like yours,
and yours like mine. Suppose further that each was
physically conditioned, perhaps unbeknown to us, in
such a way that there was every reason to believe
that what I supposed was my car had the history
which was uniquely that of your car, and vice versa.
Which would be which? What if I were forced to
decide which of the two cars should be wrecked, and
which overhauled? Which, out of self-interest, would
I designate for each fate?

Now to affirm an analogy here is, of course, to
presuppose that persons are, like cars, identical
with their bodies. But to deny the analogy is
equally to presuppose that they are not. So, just as
this alleged analogy does not show that persons are
bodies--which it was not intended to show--the
denial that the two cases are analogous does not
prove any distinction between persons and their
bodies. It merely presupposes that distinction.

I do affirm, however, that no absurdity whatever
can be derived from

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giving the same kinds of answers to both sets of
questions. If my car were made to look like yours, I
might think it was yours--but I would be wrong. If
it were conditioned to appear to have had the
history yours had, I might think it was yours--but I
would be wrong. If all the parts of these objects
were gradually exchanged, there would be a point at
which each would be about half yours, half mine. If
the engines were switched, the exact truth would be
that my car had your engine, or that your engine had
my car. And, I submit, exactly the same kinds of
answer can be given, with no absurdity whatever, to
the similar questions about persons and their
bodies. What any man would think or say under such
fanciful circumstances is not in every case easy to
see, but what the truth of the matter would be to
someone not misled and knowing the facts, knowing
just what has happened with respect to the two men
involved, is not so recondite.