Review of Mark Siderits, Personal Identity and Buddhist Philosophy: Empty Persons
Review of Mark Siderits, Personal Identity and Buddhist Philosophy: Empty Persons
Ruth Gamble
There are some books that are interesting and insightful because of the information they contain, there are other books that are fascinating because of the skill displayed in their composition and—rarely—there are books that have both of these qualities. Mark Siderits’ new work, which throws light on the problematic of personal identity by approaching it from the perspective of Buddhist philosophy, is just such a book. By undertaking the fraught project of ‘fusion philosophy’—an attempt to combine the sometimes very different discourses of Western and Buddhist philosophies—he has approached both traditions in new ways, without belittling either. That said, there is no doubt, because of its style and tone, that this work is mainly focused on the use of Buddhist ideas in Western philosophy, rather than the other way round. Any reader with a background in Western philosophy need not be dissuaded by the term ‘Buddhist’ in the title. This book seems to have been written, in the main, with an audience of philosophers in mind. Siderits has managed to present the often complicated and self-referential ideas of Buddhist philosophy in a way that should be easily palatable to those with no previous exposure to them. As would be expected with such a new and difficult process, his work also raises questions and dilemmas, but his mastery of and comfort with both traditions makes this examination ‘truly’ (at least in the conventional sense) fruitful.
Siderits takes as his starting point Derek Parfit’s 1984 work Reasons and Persons1 and the discussions that arose from it. According to Siderits, these discussions have reached something of an impasse and may benefit from the
1Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). R. Gamble (*)
introduction of Buddhist philosophy’s accounts of persons and about selves. Siderits acknowledges in his introduction that such an undertaking could have its pitfalls. On the one hand, he notes, there is a tendency amongst some scholars to assume that Buddhism, with its ‘soteriological aims,’ is ‘prima facie incompatible with the analytic enterprise.’ Yet others, he asserts, will dismiss the adaptation of Buddhist philosophy to the analytical enterprise because they are under the incorrect assumption that ‘Asian cultures advocate the attainment of spiritual ends by abandoning reason.’ Both these qualms, he suggests, are the result of a ‘reason/faith dichotomy’ that is not applicable to Buddhism and ‘stands in the way of a potentially
fruitful conversation between historically distinct traditions.’
The body of the book is divided into two parts. The first half (Chapters 1 through 5) adapts the position of the Abhidharma schools, particularly the Theravāda, Vaibhās:ika and Sautrāntika, which he calls ‘Buddhist reductionists.’ In the second half (Chapters 6 through 9), he changes tack, presenting his interpretation of the Madhyamaka school of Indian Buddhist philosophy, under the pseudonym of ‘anti-realism.’
The first section of the book devotes most of its energies to the refutation of queries that have arisen from Parfit’s reductionism. In chapter one, ‘Situating Reductionism,’ Siderits positions his debate a little differently than Parfit’s by introducing the idea of ‘eliminativists’ to Parfit’s dichotomy of ‘reductionists’ and ‘non-reductionists.’ ‘Eliminativist,’ it seems, is ‘something of a term of abuse the non-reductionists are wont to hurl at reductionists.’ Siderits’ adoption of this term to describe one possible form of ‘reductionism’ not only brackets his presentation from the criticisms directed towards ‘eliminativists,’ but in positioning his idea between the ‘eliminativist’ and the ‘non-reductionists’ he also aligns his argument with the ‘middle way’ of the Buddhist Abhidharma.
In chapters two and three, he presents the idea of ‘self’ and the related idea of ‘persons’ by looking at the function they perform in the philosophies of those who propound them. He then systematically dismantles these propositions by ‘fusing’ the ideas of Abhidharma with the language and arguments of analytical philosophy. In chapter two he examines non-reductionist arguments, concluding with an interesting discussion of what Buddhist philosophy presents as the soteriological aims of the refutation of the self. As Siderits puts it, ‘Belief in a self has consequences for the believer that make this belief quite unlike belief in any other sort of fictitious entity.’ He writes persuasively about the ‘happiness-seeking enterprise’ in which all beings are engaged under the assumption that there is an enduring ‘self’ and because of this ‘the despair that arises in response to seeing the consequences of one’s mortality.’ Chapter three develops these themes, arguing against the eliminativist
Review of Mark Siderits, personal identity and Buddhist philosophy: Empty persons
claim that the ‘person-convention’ should be replaced by ‘some other way of aggregating psychophysical elements.’
In chapter four he changes direction, presenting the Abhidharma notion of ultimate and conventional truth by way of the Western philosophical notion of ‘supervenience’ and ‘mereological reductionism.’ Chapter five, the last Abhidharma/reductionist section of the book, establishes how ethics can be incorporated into a reductionist approach through ‘ironic engagement,’ which he describes as ‘a middle path in ethics.’
The second, and perhaps more successful, section of the book begins in chapter six by ‘establishing emptiness.’ After defending reductionism for the previous five chapters, he now begins to refute it. While this may seem a strange strategy at first, it actually works quite well, for it would have been difficult to understand emptiness/ ‘anti-realism’ without first understanding the worldview (Buddhist reductionism) from which it developed. While the introductory paragraphs to this second section suggest the author is about to take a radical change of direction, it does seem rather that Siderits uses the ‘truths’ he established in the first section of the book as the starting point for the second.
In chapters six and seven he begins by presenting the idea of ‘emptiness,’ or as he puts it ‘global anti-realism,’ and then looks at the metaphysical and epistemological consequences of this statement. Siderits’ ‘anti-realism’ is in point of fact his astute, close reading of the Indian Madhyamaka tradition, translated into the language and paradigms of analytical philosophy. As such he distinguishes this theory from both the kind of realism (reductionist, non-reductionist and eliminativist) that he discussed in the first section of his book as well as metaphysical nihilism. The distinction between the latter two is summed up so neatly that it is worth quoting here:
According to metaphysical nihilism, the ultimate nature of reality is such that nothing whatever exists.…According to global anti-realism, on the other hand, the very notion of an ultimate truth, of there being an ultimate nature of reality, is incoherent.
To my mind, the most interesting chapter of this section, and perhaps the whole book, is the lengthy analysis in chapter eight of anti-realist ‘truth.’ This argument works in two ways. To begin with, Siderits posits, because ‘no statement can be ultimately true’ then ‘bivalence failure is global.’ He then goes on to discuss how to establish ‘truth’ in this model. To accomplish this he introduces the notion of ‘semantic non-dualism.’ This term refers to the idea that, by way of the anti-realism, we can still come to understand that ‘it is non-dualistically true that we are a person.’11 This semantic non-dualism cleverly gets around the problem of truth by being reliable even though it is not ultimately verifiable. ‘Not being a theory, it is not
a strongly self-effacing theory. The worst that can be said about it is that it might turn out to be bad advice.’
While there is much to be gleaned from Siderits ‘fusion’ approach to this topic, it also highlights a few problems. To slightly adapt his argument on ‘mereological reductionism,’ for example, just how many Buddhist ideas can be abandoned before the entity we are dealing with is no longer ‘Buddhist philosophy’? In order, it seems, to be taken seriously within a Western philosophical discourse, he has had to abandon, for example, two of the most basic foundations of Buddhist philosophy and belief: karma (cause and effect) and rebirth. In what I would contend is a somewhat problematic reading of karma, he dismisses it in a footnote as ‘performing (the) ideological function of justifying a rigidly stratified social order’ and being the ‘price that
institutionalized Buddhist reductionism had to pay to survive in a highly stratified social order.’ Rebirth is also rejected as it is ‘widely seen as implausible.’ Removing these two ideas from Buddhist thought would entail a massive refiguring of the ‘Buddhist’ project, something that Siderits does not discuss here. It is also doubtful whether the end result of such a project could accurately be described as ‘Buddhism.’ How, for example, can Buddhist ethics be established without reference to karma? And, in the Mahāyāna tradition, how can the work of a bodhisattva be explained without reference to rebirth? Which is to say, if a bodhisattva is one who seeks to relieve suffering, and death marks the end of suffering, should not bodhisattvas commit mass murder? If this book is given its due, it will hopefully result in a discussion of these points and many others besides. It is certainly a thought-provoking work on many levels and will hopefully make a substantial contribution to both the field of Buddhist studies and philosophy.
