Perhaps no other classical philosophical tradition, East or West, offers a more complex and counter-intuitive account of mind and mental phenomena than Buddhism. While Buddhists share with other Indian philosophers the view that the domain of the mental encompasses a set of interrelated faculties and processes, they do not associate mental phenomena with the activity of a substantial, independent, and enduring self or agent. Rather, Buddhist theories of mind center on the doctrine of not-self..
self as an ‘unchanging witness’
The denial of a permanent self, as well as the refusal to treat persons as referring to anything real and permanent, forms an integral part of the Buddhist analysis of consciousness. The frequent use of indexicals such as ‘I’ (ahaṃ) and ‘mine’ (mama) does not indicate that the Buddha accepts the conventional reality of persons either.
The centrality of the not-self doctrine in Buddhist thought is explained on the basis of its pragmatic role in guiding the adept on the path to enlightenment. Furthermore, the not-self doctrine provides a justification for treating endurance, independence, and self-subsistence as neither desirable nor attainable, but rather as what they are: mistaken notions resulting from the habitual tendency to construct an identity from a stream of physical and subjective phenomena.
The Buddhist claims that our sense of self as an autonomous being is imputed, there is a paralellism in Hume who claims that a self is never apprehended in the series of perceptions that are characteristic of the mental domain
This routine misapprehension of the discrete phenomena of experience as a self leads to a dualistic perspective: things appear and are categorized as either objective (thus external, but empirically accessible) or as subjective (thus internal, and immediately accessible to consciousness). Puzzled by this dualistic outlook, we cope by constructing an imaginary self as the permanent locus of experience.
This imaginary self, usually conceived in substantial terms as an unchanging reality behind the changing phenomenal world, is in effect the root cause of the pervasive ignorance which afflicts the human condition. From a metaphysical point of view, however, the not-self doctrine extends beyond the domain of subjective experience, to characterize all phenomena. Indeed, it is not just persons that are said to be selfless but all the elements of existence as well.
In espousing the doctrine of not-self with its aggregated view of persons, the Buddha claims to be offering a solution to the problem of human suffering. Not only is the idea of a permanent self a conceptual fiction, but adopting such a view leads to grasping after notions such as ‘I,’ ‘me,’ and ‘mine’ with deleterious effects for our psychological well being: attachment to such a fictional ‘I’ is the root cause of a range of negative emotions, including selfishness, craving, hatred, conceit, and ill-will. These negative emotions, in turn, fuel the general feeling of unsatisfactoriness that pervades the unenlightened human condition, and ultimately are responsible for all the troubles that ordinarily afflict our world
self as an ‘unchanging witness’
The denial of a permanent self, as well as the refusal to treat persons as referring to anything real and permanent, forms an integral part of the Buddhist analysis of consciousness. The frequent use of indexicals such as ‘I’ (ahaṃ) and ‘mine’ (mama) does not indicate that the Buddha accepts the conventional reality of persons either.
The centrality of the not-self doctrine in Buddhist thought is explained on the basis of its pragmatic role in guiding the adept on the path to enlightenment. Furthermore, the not-self doctrine provides a justification for treating endurance, independence, and self-subsistence as neither desirable nor attainable, but rather as what they are: mistaken notions resulting from the habitual tendency to construct an identity from a stream of physical and subjective phenomena.
The Buddhist claims that our sense of self as an autonomous being is imputed, there is a paralellism in Hume who claims that a self is never apprehended in the series of perceptions that are characteristic of the mental domain
This routine misapprehension of the discrete phenomena of experience as a self leads to a dualistic perspective: things appear and are categorized as either objective (thus external, but empirically accessible) or as subjective (thus internal, and immediately accessible to consciousness). Puzzled by this dualistic outlook, we cope by constructing an imaginary self as the permanent locus of experience.
This imaginary self, usually conceived in substantial terms as an unchanging reality behind the changing phenomenal world, is in effect the root cause of the pervasive ignorance which afflicts the human condition. From a metaphysical point of view, however, the not-self doctrine extends beyond the domain of subjective experience, to characterize all phenomena. Indeed, it is not just persons that are said to be selfless but all the elements of existence as well.
In espousing the doctrine of not-self with its aggregated view of persons, the Buddha claims to be offering a solution to the problem of human suffering. Not only is the idea of a permanent self a conceptual fiction, but adopting such a view leads to grasping after notions such as ‘I,’ ‘me,’ and ‘mine’ with deleterious effects for our psychological well being: attachment to such a fictional ‘I’ is the root cause of a range of negative emotions, including selfishness, craving, hatred, conceit, and ill-will. These negative emotions, in turn, fuel the general feeling of unsatisfactoriness that pervades the unenlightened human condition, and ultimately are responsible for all the troubles that ordinarily afflict our world
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