Personal Identity and Buddhist Philosophy: Empty Persons

This self-styled essay in "fusion philosophy" should gain a wider hearing for the sophisticated reconstructions of Indian Buddhist arguments that Mark Siderits has developed in articles published over the last twenty years. This is as it should be. The book will, however, inevitably have a limited readership; although lucidly written, its idiom is very much that of analytic philosophy, and it will be tough going for readers without philosophical training. Moreover, this idiom tends to get the better of the Buddhist materials that inform the arguments, and it may not be clear to those unacquainted with Buddhist philosophy where (or even whether) Siderits's arguments closely track particular Buddhist discussions. It is to be hoped, though, that these difficulties will not prevent the appreciation of this as an illuminating development of Buddhist arguments—as a challenging but finally rewarding book.

The book consists in two parts. Chapters 1–5 sympathetically develop the case for the broadly Ābhidharmika trajectory of Buddhist thought that includes the epistemology of Dignāga and Dharmakīrti—which Siderits calls "Buddhist Reductionism" and characterizes as constitutively "realist." Chapters 6–9 develop the Buddhist "anti-realist" position, which Siderits seldom explicitly calls Madhyamaka. Proceeding thus, Siderits sets up an interpretation of Madhyamaka as constitutively opposed to the Ābhidharmika approach—in the strong sense that while it is framed as a critique of the latter, Madhyamaka nevertheless presupposes it as propaedeutic.

The idea of the first half is that the characteristically Buddhist approach to reductionism provides conceptual resources to address objections leveled at contemporary reductionist projects like Derek Parfit's. Chief among these resources is the Buddhist idea of "two truths." On the Ābhidharmika view, these consist in two sets of enumerable entities: the "conventionally" existent is the set of all reducible entities, while the "ultimately" existent comprises the ontological primitives to which those are reducible. This is analogous to various projects in cognitive science: In this contemporary idiom, there is, "conventionally," an intentional level of description (comprising what Siderits calls "person-regarding practices" [37]); and, "ultimately," a scientific level of description—one comprising (depending on the particular account) neurological states, computational representations, etc. (It is interesting that these Buddhists, emphatically not physicalists, should thus have developed a position importantly analogous to cognitive science.) The Buddhist version of this approach, Siderits rightly stresses, is meant to be reductionist without being eliminativist; "persons" are not said by Buddhists to be altogether nonexistent, but to exist in something other than the way typically taken—a way, Siderits says, that makes them suitable objects (but presumably not subjects!) of "ironic engagement."

Until Siderits develops (in Chapter 5) the ethical implications of this approach, it is not always clear precisely what the Buddhist contribution is, and the defense of reductionism is mainly in terms of contemporary arguments (some of which, to be sure, are shown to have Indian analogues). The objections to reductionist accounts chiefly involve what Siderits characterizes as "circularity" objections—basically, transcendental arguments to the effect that anyone offering an exhaustively "impersonal," nonintentional description of (what we think of as) persons can be shown necessarily to presuppose precisely the personal, intentional level of description that is purportedly explained. Much to his credit, Siderits appreciates the force of such arguments, which he canvasses thoroughly. Against them, he develops a line of argument involving a basically pragmatist criterion (one proposed in the impersonal terms of evolution): "Becoming a Reductionist means coming to see [a] strictly Consequentialist justification of egoistic concern. Overall utility is best served by the practice of each causal series coming to adopt an attitude of identification with and appropriation of the states in that series" (59).

Siderits is sensitive to the ethical concerns that Buddhists mean to advance by similar arguments, and students of Indian Buddhism will recognize the echoes of Śāntideva: "Because pain is bad, we all have a reason to try to prevent its occurrence. . . [And] my concern over my own future well-being no longer seems different in kind from my concern over the well-being of others . . ." (60, cf. 102–103). But there may remain a question whether this entirely impersonal description of pain (and of committing to its amelioration) can finally be made intelligible. The very idea of maximization of utility (and of knowing what will bring that about) arguably presupposes an intentional level of description as does the activity, on the part of putatively impersonal causal series, of "coming to adopt an attitude of identification" (59). Despite his care in addressing them, Siderits's position here remains vulnerable to circularity objections.

But this Ābhidharmika account is, in any case, superseded by the "anti-realist" Madhyamaka school that constitutively attacks the central presupposition of Abhidharma: the view that "conventional" truth is to be contrasted with an "ultimate" level of description at which the real explanatory work is done. Siderits masterfully reconstructs this critique, developing recognizably Mādhyamika arguments in a more systematic progression than is to be found in the antecedent Indian texts. It can, however, reasonably be asked whether his succinct expression of these arguments—which those familiar with Nāgārjuna will know to have been developed in an idiom that does not readily admit of translation—leaves out something that is not adventitious to Indian Buddhist arguments: viz., a discursive style deeply inflected by Sanskritic assumptions about language and the appropriate terms for the analysis thereof.

The argument strays furthest from its Mādhyamika antecedents in developing a particularly important part of Siderits's reconstruction: his elaboration of the account of truth to be preferred on a view which holds (as Siderits rightly says Madhyamaka does) that "the ultimate truth is that there is no ultimate truth" (133, et passim). Siderits emphasizes (150–153) that this is not to say (as is often said) that Madhyamaka is an instance of skepticism. But the confusion is understandable in the case of Madhyamaka, and the objections that encourage it were familiar to Nāgārjuna and his commentators. Met with the claim that "the ultimate truth is that there is no ultimate truth," it is easy to ask: What is the status of this claim? It would seem open to the Mādhyamika only to allow that it is itself conventionally true—but is that not just to say that one may as well choose not to adopt this particular "convention?"

At this point, I think, there are two ways one might understand Mādhyamika claims as nevertheless proposed as really "true." One could emphasize that what Mādhyamikas refute, under the heading of "ultimate truth," is simply the idea of a privileged level of description, of a set of enumerable ontological primitives—but that the abstract fact of there being no such set is itself really (even metaphysically) true. In that case, the salient point is that the truth of the Mādhyamika claim does not consist in its reference to (its correspondence with) a specifiable domain of objects.

This would just be, on Siderits's reading, to refuse a realist conception of truth. Siderits opts to emphasize how the very idea of "truth" is changed when there is no longer an "ultimate" level of truth by which our ordinary intuitions are explained. But the resultant conception ends up mitigating the "anti-realism," such that it becomes rather less clear how different Siderits's approach is from the first. The idea is that Madhyamaka finally espouses a "semantic nondualism"—what remains once the idea of ultimate existents has been shown incoherent is "no ultimate truth, no conventional truth, just truths, that is, statements that tell it like it is" (185). But this amounts to "a kind of principled endorsement of common-sense realism with respect to truth" (185)—albeit, the kind of "realism" that goes with a basically deflationist account of truth, on which "truth" is not a metaphysical property (like "correspondence") that is predicable of beliefs; rather, to say of someone else's justified belief that it is true is not to add anything (like the substantive property "truth") to the belief but "just to pay it the compliment of concurring in its assertion" (185).

There is a great deal of technical discourse (following the likes of Tarski and Davidson) to be gotten through in reaching this point. This makes sense, given the traditional pedagogical analogue that Siderits might have invoked here as a Buddhist warrant for his manner of exposition. Thus, Siderits concludes that the "common-sense realism" of "semantic nondualism" differs from that of the unenlightened "by virtue of its being adopted in full cognizance of the progression through the intervening stages . . . each of which is recognized as superior to its predecessor in the sequence" (185). The same insight is reflected in traditional Tibetan doxographical accounts, which represent the schools of Indian Buddhist philosophy in an ascending hierarchy of progressively more refined views, the understanding of each of which requires having rightly understood its predecessors.

This is the sense, then, in which Madhyamaka, framed as an uncompromising critique of Ābhidharmika Buddhism, nevertheless depends on the latter: if the naïve realism of non-Buddhas consists in thinking there is something more real (paradigmatically, selves) underlying our experience of the world, the realization of the "deflated" realism of Madhyamaka is transformative only insofar as one has first pursued to its limits the kind of reductionist exercise that shows how unstable is our naïve self-grasping. But if Mādhyamikas are right, it is just as important then to abandon the reductionist's privileged level of description as it is first to have entertained it. This is why Mādhyamikas can urge (as they continually do) that it is the Ābhidharmika elaboration of Buddhist commitments that is "nihilistic" and not Mādhyamika claims regarding emptiness: the reduction of the person to a set of ultimately existent ontological primitives is tantamount to its replacement by what "really" exists (which then does effectively the same conceptual work as the self it replaces). But "[i]f there is just truth, then it seems we might say that persons do after all exist . . . That rivers and mountains are empty becomes the simple fact that there are rivers and mountains. That persons are empty becomes the simple fact that we are persons" (192–193, 202).

The eloquence with which Siderits thus expresses the ethical consequences of this interpretation shows this to be not only a philosophically sophisticated reconstruction of Madhyamaka, but one that is sensitive to the fundamentally soteriological concerns that drive that project. While it is perhaps regrettable that this reconstruction sometimes seems to owe more to analytic philosophers than to Indian Buddhists, it would be even more regrettable if that fact were to prevent this book's reception by students of Buddhist philosophy; for to the extent that it can be understood as developing Buddhist arguments, this is one of the most sensitive and illuminating accounts of the logic of Madhyamaka that I have seen.