In the last two posts, with the help of the imaginative and erudite folks at Existential Comics, we've discussed how Hume and the Buddha agreed that there is no self in the traditional sense, no enduring person behind the experience day to day, no soul subject to judgement as good or evil. We also discussed the extent to which their inferences from that premise diverged (utterly). Today I'll ask a Jamesian question about what underlies those last two posts. What is it to say of any X that it exists? What is it to deny existence of any X? What is it to say that the millionth digit of the number pi exists? Does that imply that we know what it is? No. For all I know (I haven't looked into the matter) no one has yet bothered to calculate what the millionth digit of pi is. If they HAVE, then we could use some further digit for the example. Does our affirmation of its existence mean anything Platonic -- that it exists beyond the cave of our earthly affairs, in a super...
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A neat installment of "existential comics" recently did a compare/contrast on David Hume and the Buddha. Here's a link to the comic. This is the first of a series of three posts inspired thereby. What do Hume and the Buddha have in common? The denial of the self. Hume wrote, "For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, ... and never can observe anything but the perception." The implication here is that the self is just a loose bundle of the perceptions that get assigned to it, there is no permanent center to the bundle. Buddhism is built upon much the same contention. This is formally referred to as the doctrine of anatta. Intriguingly, the anatta did not get in the way of the Buddhist inheritance of the Hindu doctrine of reincarnation. You might think that strange and ask, what IS it that gets reincarnated, if it is not the self or soul? The Buddha answers: it is the fa...