The No-Self Theory: Hume, Buddhism, and Personal Identity

PERSONAL IDENTITYThe problem of personal identity is often said to be one of accounting for what it is that gives persons their identity over time.However, once the problem has been construed in these terms, it is plain that too much has already been assumed.For what has been assumed is just that persons do have an identity.To the philosophers who approach the problem with this supposition already accepted, the possibility that there may be no such thing as personal identity is scarcely conceived.As a result, the more fundamental question-whether or not personal identity exists in the first place-remains unasked.Consequently, the no-self theory, that is, the rejection of the notion of personal identity altogether, is never fully considered.One of the reasons for the ignoring of the no-self theory seems to be the failure of many philosophers to distinguish between reductionism and the no-self view.The reasons for this error are perhaps understandable.For there is a sense in which the two theories are in agreement.Both theories, for example, reject the notion of a substantive self which somehow exists beyond the bounds of experience.The difference, however, is that while the reductionist accounts then go on to resurrect the self and, consequently, its identity, in terms of putative psychological relations or various theories of the body, the no-self theory lets the self lie where it has fallen.This is because the no-self theory is not a theory about the self at all.It is rather a rejection of all such theories as inherently untenable.And since reductionism is just one more theory about the self, it, too, must be untenable.In explaining the distinction between these two theories it is instructive to turn to the philosophy of mind, where we find a similar distinction being employed.Here a distinction is often drawn between reductive materialism and eliminative materialism.Both these theories are in agreement so far as they reject the existence of mental phenomena.But while the former attempts to do so by showing how the notion of the mental can be reduced to the physical -that is, that those things called minds are really just brains or states of the brain-the latter rejects the notion of the mental as fundamentally confused, and so hopes to eliminate the idea of the mental altogether.The eliminative materialist would argue that although the reductive materialist is right to reject the idea of the mental, he is wrong to think he can reconstruct the mental in terms of the physical.This is because, it is argued, discourse about things like intentionality and awareness is simply not reducible to discourse about things like neurological states.Importing this distinction into the discussion of personal identity, we could then say that the no-self theory is an eliminative rather than a reductive theory of personal identity.The no-self critique of the reductive theory of