Abstract
Surprising parallels can be found between the philosophical psychologies of William James, Bertrand Russell and Early Buddhist thought. James, a philosopher and psychologist who was influential in the early twentieth century, puts forth a view of selfhood that resembles the Buddhist doctrine of no-self (anattā). I suggest that James holds a reductionist view of the self that is very similar to the Early Buddhist conception of selfhood. The idea of relinquishing the notion of selfhood is then discussed in relation to philosophy of religion as well as ethics. I show how a no-self perspective, whether that of James or that of Buddhists, tends to support a form of impartial consequentialism in ethics. In fact, the endorsement of impartial consequentialism is evident in James’s own discussions of moral philosophy. Parallels can also be drawn with some of James’s ideas in The Varieties of Religious Experience, where various Asian notions of self-transcendence are treated sympathetically. The chapter ends with a consideration of various points of contact between James, Russell, and Buddhism. Russell, a friend and interlocutor of James, was impressed by aspects of Buddhism from an early age, and I discuss and examine the parallels between his early ideas and those of Buddhist philosophy. James’s exposure to Buddhist ideas may likewise have played an important role in his development. Though Russell and James did not agree on much else, they were both drawn to one or another version of the no-self claim and also both drawn to consequentialism. In the history of twentieth-century metaphysics and ethics – and especially the areas where they overlap – we thus find a hitherto unexplored triangular relationship between these two major figures of Western philosophy and a system of Buddhist ideas that was just beginning to make an impact in their milieu.
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Notes
- 1.
For the full argument, with translation and discussion, see Jay Garfield’s essay (Chap. 6) in this volume; see also the essay by Stephen Harris (in the next chapter).
- 2.
While some draw a distinction between ethics and morality (in various contested ways), I shall use these terms interchangeably in this paper. (The chapters in this volume by Mills and Sikka mention some ways of distinguishing them, and I do not wish to contest their usefulness; let us say my focus here is on other-regarding ethics.)
- 3.
According to Blackmore (2011), central to James’s theory of personal identity is the idea that there is a phenomenology of psychical unity ; but as James acknowledges, this does not settle the question of whether unity or continuity exists. James even seems to deny the existence claim when he says that “the thought itself is the thinker,” suggesting, perhaps, that among our cognitive states and sense data there is no separate ‘owner’ of those states.
- 4.
James also disagreed with Hume in another regard, despite the fact that their theories of personal identity are quite similar. While Hume dismissed the concept of the ‘self’ as a mere fiction, James acknowledged that such a view runs against “the entire common sense of mankind” (Blackmore 2011, p. 122). In outlining a sort of compromise view, James invokes this metaphor: in order to have a herd, there must be a herdsman that owns and holds the cattle together. There is no permanent herdsman, however, but rather a series of passing owners who inherit the cattle. Thus, “each Thought is born an owner and dies owned, transmitting whatever it realized as its self to the next owner. In this way is the apparent unity created” (Blackmore 2011, p. 123).
- 5.
According to Blackmore (2011), the spiritual self is the name given to “mental dispositions and abilities, and intellectual, moral and religious aspirations, together with moral principles, conscience and guilt” (p. 121). The spiritual self also includes subjective experience.
- 6.
As Ashwani Peetush points out in Chap. 12 in this volume, there are also Hindu systems of thought (e.g. Advaita Vedanta ) that offer a split-level treatment of individuality and selfhood , ultimately debunking any ontology of the latter. Given that James was also aware of Hindu thought, more needs to be said to motivate special attention to the Buddhist parallels.
- 7.
See n. 10 below, on the role of reductionism in his approach; see also the chapter by Stephen Harris in this volume (Chap. 11).
- 8.
In its most basic form, consequentialism is a normative theory that holds that ‘the good’ should be maximized. A consequentialist is someone “who holds that what makes an action wrong is its failure to maximize the good, that is, its failure to bring about the best consequences” (Shoemaker 2009, p. 242). Unlike utilitarianism , which is a strict form of consequentialism that focuses on the maximization of pleasure or happiness , consequentialism more generally is open regarding whether the maximized good should consist of pleasure, pain-avoidance, virtue , wisdom , equity, or whatever. It leaves open what exactly ‘the good’ is and therefore what should be maximized. As David Shoemaker remarks, “consequentialism is a kind of placeholder theory, neutral with respect to a variety of possible valuable things one might maximize” (2009, p. 242).
- 9.
One reader has remarked that this seems to veer towards Spinoza (who claimed that what is good is whatever one desires ), albeit on a matter about which Spinoza seems to diverge from most Buddhists, for whom the most justifiable demand is not for ‘anything under the sun’, but rather, for spiritual liberation . See the chapter on Spinoza (Chap. 5 in this volume) for discussion of this point; the authors there question whether Spinoza could really have meant for his claim to be applied to the sense(s) of ‘good’ that seem to open up common ground between Western and Buddhist ethicists (and in attenuating the claim, they suggest a reconciliation with Buddhist ethics). Similar concerns may apply to James, although the neutrality of James’s assessment of ‘demands’ may, at least, helpfully reinforce the impersonal nature of his consequentialism .
- 10.
Siderits’s phrase , omitted here, which is a gloss on becoming enlightened, is “coming to know the truth of reductionism ”, but in citing this way of formulating my own understanding, and that of ‘most Buddhists’, it is perhaps worth exercising some caution about the label ‘reductionist ’.
- 11.
Leaving aside some complications as to how Mahayanists describe bodhisattvas and buddhas as enlightened without being liberated in an absentee sense, we could gloss how such an enlightened being proceeds, using more classical terminology: such a being would enjoy nirvana-with-remainder , not the sort of ‘nirvana-without-remainder’ that would efface all agency (not to mention all being) from the path that the person had occupied.
- 12.
This latter possibility is suggested by a more recent proposal offered by Goodman (2016) , though it is not the only way of reading the above claim; it could be that act-consequentialist success is just an unpremeditated outcome of bodhisattvas’ actions. The question of why this might matter is addressed in Goodman (2016).
- 13.
See Hanson and Jones (2009).
- 14.
See the essay by Douglas Berger (Chap. 8) in this volume, on Schopenhauer .
- 15.
The merging of the ‘narrower’ private self into the greater self can be seen as a realization of what might already be a fait accompli: the unity of many selves in one stream of consciousness , akin to what some pantheists describe as the unity of everything in the universe, such that persons and other things are not ultimately differentiated at all. This may call to mind Advaita Vedanta , but when we consider James’s phrase – “the isolating barriers of mistrust and anxiety are removed” (p. 91n.) – there is a strong resonance with Buddhist themes here as well.
- 16.
As Russell mentions in his Autobiography (1967), vol. 1, p. 46.
- 17.
There are references to James (and correspondence between the two) in ibid., vol. 1, pp. 80, 167, 197 and 211.
- 18.
Cf. Jonathan Gold’s survey of Vasubandhu’s Yogācāra philosophy, Paving the Great Way (2015).
- 19.
For a survey of similar interpretations of Spinoza , see the essay by G. Davis and M. Renaud (Chap. 5) in this volume.
- 20.
As Douglas Berger argues in his chapter in this volume (Chap. 8), on Schopenhauer and Nietzsche .
- 21.
Although there were some doctrines proposed by James that Russell was in partial agreement with, such as James’s radical empiricism , it was not so with James’s pragmatism . Acknowledging that James’s theories on will and religious belief were not isolated from his pragmatism, Russell ([1945] 1972) notes that James “is prepared to advocate any doctrine which tends to make people virtuous and happy; if it does so, it is ‘true’ in the sense in which he uses the word” (p. 727). According to James’s pragmatism, an idea is true so long as it is profitable in our lives. According to Russell , endorsing pragmatism means accepting that theories are instruments and not self-contained answers to pure enigmas. Russell admits that he finds fault with James’s pragmatism because it assumes that a belief can be ‘true’ just because the effects of it (e.g. of a religious belief), are worthwhile or repeatedly fruitful in practice. It is evident that while James considers a theory to be true if it is useful, Russell is concerned with actual truth and not the effects of particular beliefs, which lends further support to the idea that Russell , unlike James, gives epistemic priority to the notion of ‘seeing things as they really are’.
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Ramlakhan, N. (2018). Echoes of Anattā and Buddhist Ethics in William James and Bertrand Russell. In: Davis, G. (eds) Ethics without Self, Dharma without Atman. Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, vol 24. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67407-0_10
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