Suffering, the Self, and Self-conceptions: Comments on Tadeusz Zawidzki, Bryce Huebner, and Eyal Aviv

These papers touch on a wide range of core issues in Buddhist ethics and metaphysics: the moral and personal imperative to alleviate suffering; the negative consequences of dysfunctional emotionality; the therapeutic effects of Buddhist practice; and metaphysics of causality, no-Self, and rebirth. But when we think about these papers together, there are some significant overlapping concerns with the ways we conceptualize the self and consequences of those self-conceptualizations on well-being and moral life.

Tadeusz Zawidzki's paper aims to show how the Buddhist claim that abandoning discursive conceptualizations alleviates suffering can be explained by a neo-Darwinian account of discursive conceptualization. The basic problem, he tells us, is that if conceptualizations are selected in evolution because they generate accurate representations of "the world and our place in it," then how could abandoning such conceptualizations be adaptive? The answer is that our discursive conceptualizations, particularly our discursive self-conceptualizations, are not selected in evolution for their accuracy but rather for their efficacy in coordinating social cooperation. Since social cooperation is, biologically speaking, our most important task, such discursive self-conceptualizations cause significant stress. Therefore, he argues, it is not at all surprising that human beings experience techniques that limit or even abandon discursive self-conceptualization as stress-relieving and promoting our mental well-being.

Focusing on the efficacy rather than the accuracy of conceptualizations, especially self-conceptualizations, is very much in the spirit of Buddhist accounts of conventional reality as being convenient. But I also think that Buddhists would not want to give up too quickly on the accuracy of self-conceptualizations, even if that accuracy is only conventionally relevant. One of the epistemically interesting aspects of Buddhist accounts of conventional reality is that even though it is ultimately deceptive, it is still a reality; after all, it is possible for something to be conventionally false or unreal (the earth is flat, unicorns, etc.). So, our conceptualizations can be conventionally accurate (as opposed to conventionally inaccurate) even though, ultimately, conceptualizations are deceptive. The same is true for self-conceptualizations: while it is not accurate to conceive of myself as a professor or an acrobat or anything else, since there is ultimately no "I" that could be those things, it is still the case that it is conventionally accurate to think of myself as a professor and conventionally inaccurate to think of myself as an acrobat. The fact of conventional reality is not in itself a problem for us, for our well-being or for liberation; our troubles begin when we mistake these conventional designations for ultimately existing things.

This suggests that Buddhists may have recourse to another answer to the puzzle that Zawidzki posed. Because Buddhist thinkers do not think that conceptualizations, even self-conceptualization, are equally inaccurate, such thinkers could say that certain discursive self-conceptualizations are conventionally accurate, which is why it is good to have them. The Buddhist path itself offers all sorts of helpful conventional truths and conventional self-conceptualizations. But when we mistake conventional designations, even helpful ones, for ultimate descriptions of reality, that causes suffering. This is especially true of conventional self-conceptions, the central one being that there is some ultimately existing self that one could have conceptions about. This basic mistake—mistaking the conventional existence of the self for the ultimate existence of the self—sets us up to suffer for many reasons: it habituates us to unrealistic expectations of stability and permanence in our lives, it maintains delusions of personal independence from other sentient beings, and it provides a basis for suffering—producing dysfunctional emotionality, such as craving and aversion.

Mindfulness and other nondiscursive, nonconceptual meditation practices are helpful not only because they give us a break from all that stressful self-conceptualization, as Zawidzki highlights, but also because, for Buddhist thinkers, these practices themselves help to deconstruct the very source of that stress: self-clinging. Buddhist thinkers argue that by engaging in nondiscursive practices regularly and over time, we can undercut harmful attachments and confusions, particularly to and about the self. Nondiscursive meditation and...