Abstract
Jay L. Garfield explores similarities and differences between Indian Madhyamaka Buddhist accounts of the person and the self and those of Hume. Both Candrakīrti, a 6th Century Buddhist thinker, and Hume distinguish the person from the self; both argue that the very idea of a simple, enduring self is incoherent, although both agree that persons are real. These similarities reflect Candrakīrti’s and Hume’s shared commitment to the importance of custom or convention in the construction of identity and the essentially social nature of personal identity.
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Notes
- 1.
All translations from Introduction to the Middle Way are my own.
- 2.
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- 4.
Leave aside the coherence of this desire; the nice thing about desire is that it doesn’t have to take a coherent object. Cantor wanted to settle the continuum hypothesis; Hilbert wanted to prove the completeness of arithmetic. Nobody denies that these were genuine desires, despite their provable inconsistency. And note that Hume affirms both that we have no idea of the self and that it is the object of the passions.
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For a more detailed discussion of Pyrrhonian skepticism in Madhyamaka, see Garfield (1990), and for the relation between Greek skepticism and Madhyamaka, Kuzminksi (2008), and Beckwith (2017). For more extensive recent discussion of Hume’s Pyrrhonism, see Garfield (2019a) and Fosl (2019). Fosl also explores in great detail the interplay between Academic and Pyrrhonian skepticism in Hume’s thought.
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This is one more reason to take seriously the idea that the primary meaning of truth is that in which we can trust, and that the more recent tendency to foreground the truth of sentences as the primary context in which the term is used (as opposed to locutions like true friend, or true coin of the realm) obscure the idea that the idea of truth need have nothing to do with correspondence. See Garfield (2019b).
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The Sanskrit term satya is translated as true/truth or as reality/real depending on context. Its semantic range covers that of both English terms. See Garfield (2019b) for more on this term.
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- 10.
Note that this is not only a realism, but a kind of panfictionalism, but only a panfictionalism in which the fact that fact and fiction are cognate is taken seriously, as it is by Hume. So, to say that something is a fiction in the relevant sense is not to say that it is unreal, but that it is manufactured.
- 11.
Although the Tibetan translation of the text uses the term bdag, often used to translate ātman, it is clear that here Candrakīrti is referring to the conventional person, and not the self that has been the object of the negative dialectic. In Tibetan and Sanskrit, as in English, authors (including Hume) are often inconsistent about the way they use these terms.
- 12.
See Garfield (2019a, chs. 3, 4, and 11) for more extensive discussion of this issue.
- 13.
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Garfield, J.L. (2022). Candrakīrti and Hume on the Self and the Person. In: O'Brien, D. (eds) Hume on the Self and Personal Identity. Philosophers in Depth. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04275-1_10
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