Personhood & Renewed Existence

Absolute individuality and immutable personhood are incompatible with the Buddhist worldview. Acceptance of the core concept of pratitya-samutpada would seem to force the Buddhist to repudiate the notion of a permanent identity. Anything that might constitute the Self can be ruled out on account of its transience and contingency. The thesis of interdependence subverts both subjective and objective knowledge of the Self by positing the dependent arising of sensory phenomena in the former case, and suggesting an ontology of co-emergence in the latter.

What, then, of the ordinary sense of self or personhood?

It is argued that, by virtue of the right sort of causal connections, a person, Jones, at the age of ten is not the same (in the strict sense) as Jones at the age of 50, nor is he different. The relation of neither-sameness-nor-difference (or both-the-same-and-different) is also said to obtain between Smith at the time of his death and his causally related, afterlife successor, Bialistok. A third person, Allweather, has never had the same sort of relation with Jones or Bialistok that the various ephemeral versions of Jones have with each other or that Jones is alleged to have with his identity-successor, Bialistok. Jones and Allweather are different persons. Moreover, all the temporally successive versions of Smith are different from all the successive versions of Allweather, all the causally dependent predecessors of Smith (i. e., his “past lives”) are different from the causally dependent predecessors of Allweather, and the same relation of difference will be true for future versions of Smith and Allweather.[1]

Leaving aside for the moment the matter of how to account for causal relations across lifespans, let us ask what is it about Jones and Allweather that makes them different persons The most obvious difference between them is the two particular bodies associated with the names Bevan Jones and Thaddeus Allweather. Identical twins, no matter how much alike, are regarded as separate persons. A living clone of Bevan Jones would doubtless be considered another person for both quotidian and legal purposes. And although bodily form by itself cannot comprise personhood—a brain-dead body on mechanical life support has ceased, I think, to be a person except perhaps in a restricted legal sense—there is strong reason to suppose bodily form to be a sine qua non of conventional identity. Try joining a health club without one.

I hasten to add that we are speaking here of socially acknowledged bodies, bodies with names, “personalities.” Animate, particular, recognized bodies are all we need for a perfectly serviceable concept of personhood, the long tradition of dualism notwithstanding. In any case, so long as there is a body or bodies present there is no problem in grasping both “complete difference” between persons and the relation of neither-same-nor-different between different stages or versions of the same person. The trouble starts when the conversation turns to causal continuity (of any sort) in the absence of bodies.

If we begin with the idea, or vision, of interdependent origination, we will come to see that the many stages, phases, moments of a life (the activity of being a person) are causally continuous, share a common context and bear a family resemblance to their spatial and temporal neighbors rather than a strict identity. We will notice also that we do not have the same kind of direct access to the experiences of others, or to “our own” putative past lives. In no ordinary sense can Mr. P of this life be said to be the same as Ms. Q of the next, whatever “next” may mean. If I have a speculative turn of mind it may occur to me that there will come a time when the future person(s) who are causally dependent upon my actions will bear so little resemblance to me that it would strain the concept of personhood to the breaking point were either of us to claim a shared identity even in the very loose, Buddhistic sense.

In making sense of how the person functions in the absence of a Self, the conceptual schema of the five skandhas is most helpful. I will have more to say about it in future posts.

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[1] Tibetan tradition admits the possibility that concurrent versions of Jones and Allweather could have a common karmic ancestor as, for instance, is claimed for certain great treasure-finders of the Nyingma tradition. Among the Dharma-heirs of Guru Rinpoche, for instance, some are believed to have inherited the person, as well as the mind-treasures, of their illustrious, neither-same-nor-different predecessor. To allow such an option, however, further darkens the already murky theoretical waters. I would contend that our concept of personhood simply can’t accommodate a splitting of self into more than one future causally continuous me, him or her.