Garfield and the Buddhist No-Self View

Is the self just an illusion holding us back?

This video lecture is part of the Identity and Selfhood course on Substack. You can find the reading list here. Links to readings and access to the full lectures as video and audio are provided to subscribers, with low-income and student learner discounts available on my homepage.

We’re rapidly approaching the end of the Identity and Selfhood lecture course, with this week featuring the penultimate video and readings. By this point, you’re familiar with a wide variety of views that question our commonsense assumptions about the self. But few are as straightforward in radically rejecting the commonsense assumption of a self altogether than the Buddhist teaching of , or no-self. One thing that sets Buddhism apart from other religions and philosophies is precisely this teaching, which is understood as one of the three marks of existence (the others being impermanence and suffering or discomfort).

Contemporary philosopher Jay Garfield has recently written a book, Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live without a Self, which argues in favor of Buddhist no-self theory and knocks down common arguments for the self, some of which we’ve studied in the course so far. For Garfield, speaking of selves is not only inaccurate, but also a source of suffering. The profound confusion that characterizes our existence is first and foremost a confusion about the kinds of beings we are, and thinking we are selves drives attachment and egocentricity. This is why overcoming the illusion of the self is so important on the Buddhist path to liberation.

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