Episode post here. Thanks once again to Caroline Wall for this transcript!
Matt Teichman:
Hello, and welcome to Elucidations. I’m Matt Teichman.
Henry Curtis:
And I’m Henry Curtis.
Matt Teichman:
With us today is Graham Priest, Distinguished Professor
of Philosophy at the City University of New York Graduate Center and Professor
Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Melbourne. And he is here to discuss
Buddhist metaphysics. Graham Priest, welcome.
Graham Priest:
Thanks, Matt. Hi, Matt, Henry.
Matt Teichman:
So one thing we were interested in asking you about is
how you came to be interested in either Buddhism or Buddhist philosophy.
Graham Priest:
Well, it was like this. For a start, I wasn’t trained as
a philosopher. I was trained as a mathematician. So for reasons I still don’t
understand properly, I was given a job in a philosophy department. And I spent
many years educating myself in philosophy—by reading, teaching, and so on. And
after 20, 25 years, I started to think that I had a handle on philosophy, the
big picture. And then I met a man who’s now an old friend, Jay Garfield, who
knew a lot about Asian philosophy. And I knew nothing. And talking to Jay made
me realize that I was ignorant of half the world’s philosophy. My horizon
extended no further east than Russia or Turkey. And so I came to understand that
there was a lot of the world’s philosophy I needed to know more about. And so I
spent the time since then teaching myself, or learning about the Asian
traditions. Now, I haven’t lost interest in the Western traditions—far from
it—but I’ve just been trying to find out what’s happening on the other side of
the East/West divide, as it were. And there’s a fascinating amount of stuff that
would interest any philosopher.
Henry Curtis:
You’ve been widely known and associated with the position
of dialetheism, and it seems
like in the Buddhist metaphysics that you’ve written about, there’s a lot of
space where dialetheism can play a role in elucidating some of the metaphysical
positions. Could you maybe say a little bit about the relation between the two,
and whether or not chronologically the interest in dialetheism came first, and
advocating for that as a position, or the interest in studying Buddhist
philosophy?
Graham Priest:
Okay, well, the chronological thing first—what made me
interested in dialetheism many, many years ago were issues from logic,
particularly things like Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, and the paradox of
self-reference, and so on. So that’s what set me on the dialetheic path, as it
were. And then, over the next 20 years or so, I started to investigate the
possibility of dialetheism in other areas, for example, by reading Hegel, and
legal philosophy, and so on. So at that point, there was absolutely nothing to
do with the Asian traditions.
What interested me in the Asian traditions originally also had nothing to do with dialetheism. It was just that I found the philosophical ideas that you get in many of the Asian traditions—especially, I guess, Buddhism interests me more, of all these traditions—I found those fascinating. But as I thought about them more, and talked to people about them, and so on, it did seem to me that there was scope for applications of dialetheism in the Asian traditions. So some things I’ve done over the years since I got to know something about Asian philosophy has been exploring the applications of dialetheism to the Asian traditions, and particularly Buddhism, I guess.
Matt Teichman:
And would it be fair to say that dialetheism is roughly
the idea that some statements can be simultaneously true and false?
Graham Priest:
Yeah.
Matt Teichman:
Or how would you—?
Graham Priest:
Yeah. So they’re contradictory statements that are
true. So a contradictory statement is something of the form, it’s raining/it’s
not raining, we’re in New York/we’re not in New York, and so on. And the
dialetheic view is that some statements of that form, although not those
examples, can be true. And another way of saying much the same thing is that
some statements can be both true and false.
Matt Teichman:
I see. And what would be an example of a contradictory
statement that actually is, in your view, true?
Graham Priest:
Yep. Okay, so there are many possible examples. But I
guess one of the ones that’s drawn the most attention over the last 30 or so
years, and also one of the easiest to get your head around, is one of the
paradoxes of self-reference. This is called the liar paradox. It’s a paradox
that’s been known for two and a half thousand years in the West, and all the
great logicians over the last couple of thousand years have addressed the
question of what one should say about it. Most of them have thought that
something has gone wrong with the reasoning, which leads you to a contradictory
conclusion. But dialetheism says, no, there’s nothing wrong with the
reasoning. You should just accept it at face value.
Okay, so what is the reasoning? Well, the liar sentence is a sentence of the form, this very sentence that I’m now uttering is false. Okay. You ask yourself, is that true? Is that false? Well, suppose it’s true. It says it’s false. So if it’s true, well, then, it must be false. So if it’s true, it’s false. Okay. What’s the other possibility? Well, the other possibility is it’s false. Hey, but it says it’s false. So if it’s false, then it’s true. So if it’s false, it’s true, so it seems to be false and true. And that’s the liar paradox.
Matt Teichman:
So the topic of this episode is Buddhist
metaphysics. What exactly would you say that metaphysics is?
Graham Priest:
Yeah, that’s a really hard question. I’m not sure I’ve
got a very good answer. Like so many things in philosophy, the best way to
explain something is not to give a definition, but to give examples. So
metaphysical questions are about time, and space, and substance, and causation,
identity and etc, etc. But if you want a rough and dirty definition, it’s
something to do with the structure of reality. That’s not very satisfactory,
because in some sense, physics is also about the structure of
reality. Metaphysics is about the structure of reality at some more fundamental
level. And of course, how you cash out that thought is highly contentious. But
if you want a quick and dirty definition, that’ll do.
Henry Curtis:
So in investigating Buddhist metaphysics, having earlier
studied the classical Western tradition of metaphysics, and then also being
immersed in the contemporary, mainstream, Anglophonic metaphysical tradition,
what were some of the first and largest differences that you noticed between the
two?
Graham Priest:
Yeah. Okay. Well, the first thing to note is that
there’s no single tradition in the West. And there’s no single tradition in the
East, either. And certainly, there isn’t anything that you could call Western
metaphysics. I mean, think of
Plato,
Aristotle,
Kant,
Hegel,
Nietzsche,
Wittgenstein,
Kripke—I mean, generally
speaking, these have not much in common. So there are many, many different
metaphysical systems that you find in Western philosophy. And the same is true
in the East. I mean, metaphysical systems that you get in Buddhism are not the
same as those you get in Taoism or
Confucianism or
Hinduism. Even within Buddhism, there’s no
single metaphysics. I mean, Buddhism is a philosophy that rolls over two, two
and a half thousand years in two subcontinents. And there are many different
systems of metaphysics which you find in Buddhism—early India, later India,
East Asia, China, Japan.
Okay. So there’s no uniform story to be told here. Some of the metaphysical systems which you find in Eastern philosophy are similar to those you find in Western philosophy, or some of them. So for example, you can hear similarities between, let’s say, a Kantian metaphysics and the metaphysics of Advaita Vedanta, which is a Hindu school. So often when you study metaphysics across the East/West divide, you will see certain views that occur on both sides. I mean, both sides have a realist tradition, and an idealist tradition, and so on. Often, these views are articulated in somewhat different ways, depending on the context, of course. But there are aspects of these things which are relatively similar.
One thing that I find interesting about some Buddhist metaphysics is that it does have a kind of metaphysics of which there’s no equivalent, I think, in the West. So Buddhism goes through a development for about 500 or 600 years after the life of Siddhartha Gautama, the historical Buddha. And then, around the turn of the common era, it develops into a new form of Mahayana. And one of the central ideas of Mahayana Buddhism, especially in one of its Indian forms, Madhyamaka, is that everything is empty. Now, what that means is this. It does not mean that everything is nonexistent. This is not nihilism. What it means is that everything is empty of—and then, there’s this whole Sanskrit word, which is hard to translate. The word is svabhava, and it means something like self-being, self-nature. So something that has svabhava is something which is what it is independently of anything else. It’s kind of a metaphysical atom, if you like.
And the Madhyamaka view is that there’s nothing like that. So everything is what it is only in virtue of its relation to other things. So Graham Priest is not what he is in virtue of having a soul, or a self. Graham Priest is what he is in virtue of his genetic structure, the way his parents treated him, the school he went to, his expression, experiences and so on. That’s what makes me Graham Priest. Okay. So I am what I am only in relationship to those other things. And the Madhyamaka view is everything is like that. Everything is what it is only in relation to other things. And as far as I know, you don’t find a view like that in Western philosophy. So there are certainly metaphysical views you find in some of the Eastern traditions you don’t find in the West. And it’s probably true for the other way around, as well. But that was one that I found particularly interesting in Buddhism.
Henry Curtis:
So are there places, certain junctures, in debates with
which philosophers operating in the West might be more familiar where, say,
Madhyamaka Buddhism, or various other schools of Buddhist thought, may be able
to make points or enter into conversations in ways that are novel, that may not
be as familiar with philosophers in the West, but can lend interesting insights
and progress debates?
Graham Priest:
Well, take the discussion between idealism and
realism. Debates between idealists and realists are replete in all philosophical
traditions. And of course, people cash out those thoughts in different
ways. Realism is, crudely, the thought that there is stuff out there which is
mind-independent, okay? And idealism is the thought that stuff is
mind-dependent. Even realists are idealists about some things. If you’re a
realist about atoms, then you may well think that works of art—what is it to
be a work of art? That’s conceptually dependent. So the realist claim is that at
least there’s some stuff out there which is mind-independent. Whereas the
idealist claim is, generally speaking, that everything—or at least everything
that we normally think of as mind-independent—is mind-dependent. The obvious
example is Kant here in the West. Okay, so that’s the realist/idealist debate.
Now, you certainly get these things going on in the East, as well. But something that’s interesting about Madhyamaka, I think, is that you can’t really pin it down on either side of that debate, because everything depends on other things. So it’s true that most stuff is going to depend on the mind in some sense. And that might make it sound idealist. But of course, it’s equally true that the mind is dependent on reality. So you can’t privilege either the world or the mind, in either sense. I mean, crudely, idealists will say the mind is more fundamental than the world. Realists will say the world is more fundamental than the mind. Madhyamaka says no, each is dependent on the other. There’s this dialectic between them.
Is there a similar position in Western philosophy? Well, it’s hard to think of one, but perhaps the closest you get to this is Heidegger, who runs together a kind of phenomenological line about the real world. So in some sense, you cannot divorce the world from reality. But then, people are thrown into the world. And so, you cannot divorce their thinking from the objective reality out there. I’m never sure that I’ve understood Heidegger on this question, but if there’s a Western philosopher who has a similar view—that mind depends on the outside world and vice versa—I guess it’s Heidegger.
Matt Teichman:
I’m intrigued by this idea that you are dependent on
your relation to every single other thing. So does it follow from that that if I
were to leave the apartment now, and thus I would change my relation to you—I’d
be farther from you, distance-wise—would I then change you fundamentally? Would
you be transformed into something different because I left the apartment?
Graham Priest:
Yeah. Okay. So first of all, let me say that the
Madhyamaka view is that everything is what it is in virtue of its relation to
some other things.
Matt Teichman:
Ah, okay.
Graham Priest:
Okay. Now, when Buddhism goes into China, a number of
distinctively Chinese forms of Buddhism emerge. And one of the schools is called
Huayan. It means literally a flower garland. Don’t worry about it—it’s just
the name of a sutra which these guys take to be important. So the name doesn’t
mean anything in particular. However, what the Huayan do is take this principle
of emptiness and universalize it, so that everything is what it is not just in
relationship to some other things, but all other things. Okay? So there’s one
class of Buddhism that says that everything is what it is in relation to other
things. Okay.
Now, the question is, what counts as a relation? And people distinguish between different kinds of relations. So for the Western world, there’s such a thing as a Cambridge relation. So suppose I remain the same size, but you shrink until you’re three feet tall. Okay?
Matt Teichman:
Yeah. A witch cast a spell or something.
Graham Priest:
Yeah, okay. Then one of my properties is
changed—namely, I’ve become taller than you. But this isn’t really a change in
me. So the relationship of being taller than you isn’t necessarily a relation
that I’m having myself. Western philosophers call this kind of thing Cambridge
changes. Okay. And some people
think, well, you shouldn’t talk about—there’s not real relations or real
properties. There are honest-to-god hardcore relations out there in reality, if
you like. So David Lewis, for
example, a Western philosopher, calls these sparse relations.
So the answer to your question, finally, is that if you leave the room, no, that doesn’t necessarily imply that I change in any interesting sense, because your leaving the room would be one of these kinds of Cambridge relations, not one of these hardcore relations. Of course, it’s an interesting question, what the honest-to-god relations are. I’m not sure they have a really sensible answer to that question. But to address your question properly, you’d need to address that question.
Matt Teichman:
Another related question I have about both of these
views—that is to say, the view that I am what I am in virtue of my relations
to certain other things, and the view that I am what I am in virtue of my
relations to all other things. So is it part of the idea there that I couldn’t
be the only thing in the universe, because I’d have to be related to other
things in order to have the features that I have?
Graham Priest:
Well, for you personally, you have parts. So you must be
dependent on your parts. I guess you could say, well, suppose there was
something that was partless.
Matt Teichman:
Yeah, like an electron—or, I guess they have parts, too.
Graham Priest:
So could there be a universe with just a single thing in
it? This is going to take us into hardcore metaphysics. All right. Even if there
were nothing else, there would still be nothingness. So anything there is, is
going to relate to nothingness. Now, this will sound a very bizarre view to most
Western philosophers, because talking about nothingness sounds very strange and
contradictory. But something like this is not an uncommon view in certain kinds
of Buddhism where nothingness is something like Buddha
nature. It’s the ground of
conceptualized reality, if you like. It’s nothingness because there’s nothing
you can say about it. It’s just there—thusness.
Matt Teichman:
The canvas of the universe, as it were.
Graham Priest:
If you like, yeah. So it’s not even clear that the
thought that there can be just one thing in the cosmos makes sense if you take
that perspective.
Henry Curtis:
So one of the first points that often comes up when
people are discussing Buddhism and getting into the central tenets of Buddhism
are the Four Noble Truths
elaborated by the Buddha himself. So do you think you could explain what those
are, and then how they lead into the Eightfold Noble
Path?
Graham Priest:
Okay. Well, Buddhist views change radically in different
forms of Buddhism. However, the Four Noble Truths were enunciated by the
historical Buddha. I mean, legend had it that he spelled them out in his first
teaching after reaching enlightenment, whatever that is. And those are pretty
much core to all forms of Buddhism. Those don’t change. And there are four of
these things, and they are in the form of a medical diagnosis. There’s an
illness, there’s a cause, there’s a prognosis, and there’s a cure.
So the First Noble Truth is that life is not a happy one, that life is beset by—and then, there’s one of these untranslatable Sanskrit words, dukkha, which is usually translated to suffering, but its connotations are much, much broader than that. It means suffering, for sure. But it also means frustration, unsatisfactoriness, unhappiness—all the things you really don’t like in life. Okay? So the First Noble Truth is: life’s like that. Get your head around it. There is no one who doesn’t age, if they’re lucky enough, get ill, lose loved ones, limbs, whatever. This is a feature of life. And that can make Buddhism sound like a really pessimistic philosophy. It’s not. Hang on. It’s a realist philosophy. Life is like that, right?
So the Second Noble Truth is—okay, what’s the cause? Well, when you’re unhappy, when you experience dukkha, this can be caused by many things, like bridges collapsing, stock markets collapsing, wars, illness. Most of these things are beyond your control. There’s one thing, and only one thing, that you generally speaking have control over, which is your attitude. This is the thing you bring to bear on what life throws at you, as well. And it’s a specific attitude. And the Sanskrit name for that is trishna. The standard translation is craving, which is not great. It’s more like an attitude of attachment and aversion. And so when shit happens, you want it to stop. When good things happen, you want them to go on. Okay? And the thought is that when you experience this dukkha, the cause, at least in part, is the attitude you bring to bear on the things that happen. So the Third Noble Truth is just a corollary. Get rid of the cause, you get rid of the effect. Change your mind, and you won’t experience the dukkha—well, in theory, anyway. And the Fourth Noble Truth is: hey, you can do that.
So as I said, this is not a pessimistic philosophy. The Fourth Noble Truth is a set of techniques or practices which you can employ to help you change your headspace. And that’s called the Eightfold Noble Path, because there are eight steps. I don’t think the Buddha ever intended them to be exhaustive and exclusive. But they’re things like: understand the world in which you live. Don’t be an asshole to other people. Be aware of what your mind and your body are doing. So that’s the idiot’s guide to the Eightfold Noble Path.
Matt Teichman:
One of the first things this reminds me of in the
Western tradition is
Stoicism—where the idea that
the universe is basically a predictable mechanism just chugging along, where you
can predict all future states of it in principle, based on the current state of
it—is connected to this ethical outlook where, hey, I’m not sure I have free
will, and if bad things happen to me, the one thing I can control is not whether
or not they happen to me, but what my attitude’s going to be. So these are some
echoes that I heard in what you just said. Do you think the analogy to Stoicism
is helpful, or do you think it’s maybe a little bit misleading?
Graham Priest:
No, that’s right. In most of the Hellenistic
philosophers, but particularly in Stoicism, there’s the thought that you should
have the appropriate mental attitude to things that happen in life, and if you
have the appropriate mental attitude, well, you won’t be worried by the slings
and arrows of not-so-outrageous fortune. Okay? You certainly get that in
Stoicism. But in a sense, you get that in
Skepticism and
Epicureanism, as well. So to that
extent, there’s a similarity with Buddhism. If you’ve got a good philosophical
idea, lots of people are going to come up with it. So that’s not news. So that
part of Buddhism and Hellenistic philosophy is similar.
Where they’re not similar is in the metaphysics, because the Buddhist metaphysics is quite unlike Stoic metaphysics. In Stoic metaphysics, there’s a rational principle which runs the cosmos. Okay? You get nothing at all similar in Buddhism. So the underlying metaphysics are quite different, although the ethical implications could be similar. Is this a coincidence, that the same ideas had happened in the East and West? Well, nobody knows the answer to this. There’s no doubt that information was going across the Silk Route. So the Silk Route stretches right from East Asia, China, across all the ‘stans—Afghanistan, Turkistan—to Istanbul and Greece. And we know that people were carrying silk and spices and things across the trade route. And of course, they must have been carrying ideas, as well. So who knows what ideas passed in which direction across the trade route in the last 500 years BCE, or the last thousand years BCE? Did Buddhist ideas go west? Did some Greek ideas go east? Maybe. We just don’t know. And we’ll never know, probably, because these things are all conjectural.
Matt Teichman:
I’m intrigued by this idea of arriving at a similar
ethical conclusion on the basis of a completely different metaphysical
picture. So what is the metaphysical picture that gets us to the Four Noble
Truths and the Eightfold Path?
Graham Priest:
Well, as I said, the metaphysics of Buddhism is
different in different schools of Buddhism. But again, there are certain
fundamental aspects of Buddhist metaphysics which don’t change too much. One is
impermanence, anitya, and the other
is no self, anatman. And the first
of the Fourth Noble Truths—that’s the Eightfold Noble Path—is: understand
the world in which you’re living, because if you don’t, you’re going to suffer,
because you don’t understand the world in which you live. So we live in a world
of impermanence. Everything in the causal flux comes into existence when causes
and conditions are right, hangs around for a while, and then goes out of
existence when causes and conditions are right. Now, if you don’t get your head
around that, then of course, when good stuff’s happening and it ceases, you’re
going to be upset. But if you realize that it was inevitable anyway, well, maybe
you won’t be quite so upset.
Actually, I don’t think most people, when they think about it, think that anything’s going to last forever. This is an inconvenient truth that we push to the back of our minds. We like to think that our kids are going to grow old and happy. We like to think that our finest achievements in changing the world, in writing philosophy, in running podcasts, are going to be out there for all of time. But they’re all going to go in the heat death of the universe, if not substantially before that.
Matt Teichman:
Yeah, maybe it only seems like stuff is stably here
because we’re looking at it in our current timescale. But if we pressed the
fast-forward button, everything would just decay.
Graham Priest:
Yeah. And you might be lucky if it lasts for your
current timescale, given the way the world is going. But yeah, impermanence is
one of the core thoughts of Buddhism. And the other one is anatman, no
self. In many ways, this is much more radical, philosophically.
Henry Curtis:
So following up on that discussion, and also following up
on having already compared one famous school of Western philosophy, Stoicism,
and Buddhist philosophy generally in the Four Noble Truths and the idea of
detachment, it seems like we can draw another interesting parallel between the
impermanence of the self, or the nonexistence of the self, in Buddhism, and a
point that was made by David Hume in
A Treatise Concerning Human
Nature. Do you think
you could point out the nature of the Buddhist doctrine about the non-existence
of the self and how it is similar to what Hume argues?
Graham Priest:
Sure. So in discussing anatman, the first thing you’ve
got to do is get your head around what it actually means. Okay? So it’s often
glossed as “no self,” and you might think that means that you and I don’t
exist. It does not mean that. The word “self” in English is ambiguous. “She saw
herself in the mirror” is talking about the person. When Buddhists say there is
no self, they don’t mean there’s no person. The reality of persons is an
interesting issue. Buddhists have various lines on that, but that’s not what’s
at issue in anatman. The self, in the sense in which all Buddhists deny it, is
a part of a person, and a part that is constant and identifies the person as
that very person. So in Western metaphysics, the closest analog would be a
soul. The Buddhists weren’t attacking Christianity, of course. They were
attacking Hinduism, who believed that there’s an atman, a self in that
sense. So the Buddhist view is there’s no such thing.
All right. Now, who have held similar views in the West? Well, anyone who denies the existence of a soul is going to have such a view—for example, Marx. But it gets a bit more interesting than that, because if you look at Western philosophers, many of them have identified the soul with consciousness, or maybe better, what holds consciousness together. So Descartes says, I think, therefore I am. By the “I,” he means consciousness. And then, Kant comes along and says, well, okay. But yeah, the consciousness is fragmented. It’s all over the place. There must be something that holds it together. There must be something which accounts for, in Kantian jargon, the transcendental unity of apperception. It’s just a long Teutonic word meaning “what holds all this junk in the mind together.” The Buddhists certainly held that there’s a lot of junk going on in the mind, but there’s nothing that holds it together, because that would be a kind of self.
Okay. So, is there a Western philosopher who’s held something similar? Yes, indeed—Hume. So Hume said, when I close my eyes and think about my mind, I can see all this blooming, buzzing confusion of thoughts, emotions, sensations, etc, etc. I can never catch anything which holds them all together. I never catch an experience of myself as such. There’s just this blooming, buzzing confusion. Now, that sounds very much like the Buddhist view of the mind, that there’s just lots of stuff going on, but there’s nothing central that holds it all together. So sometimes, people think of Hume’s view as very similar to the Buddhist view.
And again, what Hume knew about Buddhism we don’t know. But he was certainly studying at some time in La Flèche, in France. And we know that the library at La Flèche, a Jesuit monastery, had stuff coming back from the East. Now, did Hume read them? What did he read? Absolutely no one knows. But it’s just possible there’s more than a coincidence here. It’s possible it’s a complete coincidence. After all, if the view’s interesting, it can well occur to different people at different times completely independently.
Matt Teichman:
So I remember when I first heard of this idea that maybe
there is no self, I was confused by it, and kind of the same way I was confused
when I first read Jorge Luis
Borges’ essay, A New
Refutation of
Time. When
he said there’s no such thing as time, I just thought: what do you mean? Stuff
happens in time, obviously. I can’t even conceive of what it would be for stuff
not to happen in time. I don’t even know what you’re saying. And I felt a
similar way when I first heard about this doctrine of no self. I felt like,
well, it’s just self-evident. I’m me. Here I am. I was the same way I was five
seconds ago. What would you say to somebody to whom this idea just sounds really
counterintuitive? Is there a way to make it square with our immediate
intuitions?
Graham Priest:
Sure. Well, first of all, put aside the thought that
when you’re referring to yourself, you’re referring to your body. As I said,
when the Buddhists analyze the self, they’re not saying you’re not here, you
meaning your physical appearance. All right? I mean, if you’re thinking that,
you’re just going off on the wrong track. The self, if it’s this Kantian thing
which holds your thoughts together, precisely is the unity of your
consciousness. And it is natural to think that I have this unity of my
consciousness which I’m the first person aware of. It’s exactly that thought
that essentially Hume is trying to debunk. But you cannot deny that we have what
you might call an illusion of self. When you wake up in the morning, this voice
comes on and says, “Hello! I’m back again.” If the Buddhists and Hume are right,
this is an illusion.
Now, we know that the brain is very good at illusions. We know that the brain fills in gaps. So for example, in psychology, there is a phenomenon called the phi phenomenon. You use it in making movies. So when you see, say, a bunch of lights, and they flash one after the other in rapid succession, say, moving from left to right. When you look at them, you will see something that moves. There’s nothing that moves, okay? What the brain is doing is filling in the gaps. And we know that the brain does this for external things all the time. So the question is: we have this view that we have a self. Could this be an illusion of the same kind, with the brain filling in gaps not with some kind of external sensations, but with some kind of internal sensations? And the view has to be that the sense of itself is illusory—it really is just the brain filling in gaps.
Now, that’s a substantial philosophical view. If the sense of self is really illusory, then one wants to know, well, what explains this, and undoubtedly, it would be something to do with functioning of the brain. If you look actually at modern cognitive science, something like that seems to be a very common view. So for example, it’s Dan Dennett’s view of the self. There’s no sort of central, meaner—I think those are his words—which holds everything together. There’s just this Humean blooming, buzzing confusion. But one thing the brain does is impose structure on them by constructing a central meaner, and giving the person the illusion that they have this self. So you might think of that as partly an explanation of how you can have the illusion of self. That’s not an argument the self is an illusion. For that, we have to go elsewhere. But it’s interesting that modern cognitive science is starting to come around to something like the Buddhist tradition.
Henry Curtis:
And so I take it that part of what Hume takes his
philosophy to be able to do is actually give an explanation as to why we do fall
into this illusion. Is there anything you would say within any of the various
schools of Buddhist philosophy that try to explain, cognitively speaking, why it
is that human beings seem to mostly believe that there is some permanent self
that constitutes—
Graham Priest:
Yeah. I’m not entirely sure there’s anything in Buddhist
philosophy which explains why we have this illusion. Buddhist philosophy is very
much about, hey, we find the world in a certain way. That’s what it’s like to be
human, right? And one of these things is misunderstanding the world we live in,
and ourselves. So I don’t think you’re going to find anything in either Hume or
Buddhism which explains why we have this illusion, if it indeed is an
illusion. I think if you want an explanation of this thing, you’re going to have
to turn to evolutionary psychology, because it’s not implausible that creatures
which have this illusion of self are more successful in reproducing their genes
than creatures that don’t have it. So if there is an explanation of this thing,
I suspect it’s going to come from modern evolutionary cognitive psychology,
rather than the Buddhist or Humean metaphysics.
Henry Curtis:
So earlier in this episode, we discussed how Madhyamaka
Buddhism can in a sense walk the line between realism and idealism in a way that
might be somewhat difficult to find an analog for among philosophers operating
in the West. That debate—the one between realism and idealism—is a
long-standing historical debate. Are there any contemporary issues that are
dominant in the literature in mainstream analytic metaphysics where you think
Buddhism can have something very interesting to say that isn’t necessarily being
said by many authors within that tradition?
Graham Priest:
Well, one thing you might think about are current
debates on fundamentality, grounding—it goes by many names—let’s call it
ontological dependence. So the thought is when you look at the structure of
reality—metaphysics—you can see that some things are dependent for their
nature or their existence on other things. So for example, the shadow depends on
being a shadow of a tree on the tree. The tree doesn’t depend for being a tree
on the shadow. So this is some notion of ontological dependence. In truth, the
notion of ontological dependence has always played a role in the history of
Western philosophy. If you’re a Christian, for example, you think that the
creatures depend on the creator, so everything depends on God. And Plato thinks
things in the flux of the world depend on forms, and so on. So you find there
are claims of ontological dependence all the way through Western philosophy.
But what’s happened in the last, I guess, 20 years in Western philosophy is that a number of philosophers have started to scrutinize the notion of ontological dependence as such, and think about how you analyze it, what it means, what its properties are. So this is a hot topic, something of a cottage industry for New York, it must be said. But in trying to analyze the notion or notions of ontological dependence and think about its property, a very common assumption that contemporary analytic philosophers make is that ontological dependence must bottom out somewhere. So if you’ve got some stuff that depends on more fundamental stuff, if that stuff depends itself on more fundamental stuff and so on, all the way down, it’s got to ground out in something that is ultimate in the sense that it doesn’t depend on anything else. And to the extent that people have thought this way in the West, this kind of foundationalism has been the most common view. Everything grounds out in God, or the forms, or these things—well, okay. So the Buddhist term is: they have svabhava. They are what they are in themselves. They don’t depend on anything else for their nature. So this view is foundationalism. And as I said, most contemporary analytic debates assume that foundationalism is true. I suspect they just take this over from the historical Western context.
Now, it must be said that foundationalism is virtually never argued for. There are some possible arguments that don’t look very good when you scrutinize them, but for most people who have worked on that area of philosophy in the analytic tradition in the last 20 years, they’ve assumed this. Now, it’s not at all obvious. Fast-backwards to Buddhist philosophy. So Buddhist philosophy evolves for five or six hundred years after the historical Buddha. And the Buddhist metaphysicians are foundationalists. They believe that if you take a thing which has parts, like you or me, then those parts are going to depend on their parts, and blah, blah, blah, and all the way down until you hit bedrock. And they have a name for these things, called dhammas. And these *dhamma*s have svabhava. They are what they are in and of themselves. Okay. So these guys are foundationalists in the contemporary sense.
What happens with the rise of Mayahana, and especially its Madhyamaka variety, is that this wages a fairly ruthless attack on the earlier Abhidharma foundationalist philosophy. So earlier on, we talked about the view that everything is empty. Everything depends for what it is on other things. And that is true all the way down. So everything depends on other things, and all the way, in an infinite regress. So the Madhyamaka view is strongly anti-foundationalist. There’s no ground to reality in the sense that everything depends for being what it is on other things. And again, I don’t really know of similar views in the West. You get structuralist views, both in French philosophy and mathematical structuralism, which says that lots of things depend for what they are on the structure in which they’re embedded. This is a standard thought in French structuralism. It’s a standard thought on mathematical structuralism in philosophy of mathematics. But it’s very rare to hear the philosophers who talk about structure itself. And to the extent that there’s this view, most people take the structure itself to be fundamental. Now, the Madhyamaka view is that it’s structure all the way down. So even the structure depends for being what it is on other things. So there are certainly structuralist views in the West. But the thought that it could be structure all the way down is, I think, a view that you really only find in Madhyamaka.
Matt Teichman:
Is there an example of a phenomenon where intuitively,
it feels like you keep going one level down, and it’s structure, structure, more
structure, and you’re never going to reach an end?
Graham Priest:
Try the following. The table around which we’re sitting
depends for being what it is on its parts—the legs, the top, et cetera, et
cetera. Take a leg. This depends for being what it is on the stuff it’s made
of. I think it’s wood. Say it’s got cells of wood. Those cells are dependent for
being what they are on molecules of certain kinds, and molecules are dependent
for being what they are on atoms. Atoms depend for being what they are on, I
don’t know, subatomic particles, which might depend on quarks. Now, at each
stage, what’s happening is you’re getting more and more fundamental things. And
as a matter of fact, the sizes are getting smaller, and smaller, and
smaller. Now, could this go on indefinitely? Well, if it goes further than
quarks or whatever, we don’t know about it. But there’s in principle no reason
why it shouldn’t go on forever, as far as physics goes, as far as I understand
contemporary physics. So it could well be that in some sense, these regressive
parts go on forever. If that’s right, then you have this infinite regress. There
are all sorts of issues here concerning quantum mechanics and size, but we don’t
know how long quantum mechanics is going to last. You asked for some kind of
analog in the West. That’s one where you might look.
Henry Curtis:
Would you say—there was that really beautiful analogy,
the net of Indra. Would you say
that that’s an exemplification of this? That, I think, has more to do with
interpenetration. But could it also be endless grounding?
Graham Priest:
Yeah. Look, interpenetration is one way that dependence
is conceptualized, especially in the Huayan tradition. So the net of Indra is a
visual metaphor. You’ve got this god Indra, who’s put out a net throughout
reality. And at each of the joints of the net, you’ve got a brightly polished
jewel. Each jewel is an analog for something in reality, like you and me, or
whatever. And each jewel, being brightly polished, reflects each other
jewel. But of course, if Jewel A is reflecting Jewel B, Jewel B is reflecting
Jewel A. So Jewel A is going to reflect Jewel B reflecting Jewel A, and so
on. So it’s a bit like—maybe you did this when you were a kid. You get two
mirrors, you put them face to face, and you sneak a look at one of them, and you
can see mirrors, mirrors, all the way down. Well, that’s what one of these
jewels is like. So the metaphor of the net of Indra is a visual metaphor for how
the regressive dependence can go all the way, because each jewel encodes every
other jewel encoding every other jewel, and so on, to infinity.
Since you mentioned Borges just now, there’s a really nice Borges story called “The Aleph.” I don’t know if you recall it, but it’s about the narrator, who goes to a friend. And the friend says, hey, in the cellar, I’ve got this singularity in spacetime called the aleph, and if you put your head there, you can see the whole of the cosmos spread out before you. So the narrator says, oh, yeah, pull the other one—right? No, come and see. So the guy comes down into the cellar, and it’s black, of course. So he puts his head where the aleph is, and he waits for his eyes to acclimatize, and god, he sees the whole universe spread out before him. So he looks—this is happening in Buenos Aires, right? So he looks at the world spread out before him, and can he see Argentina, and he can see Buenos Aires, he can see his friend’s house. He can see himself in the friend’s house. And he can see the aleph. And inside the aleph he can see is Buenos Aires, and his friend’s house, and the aleph—okay. So you get this picture. Borges is playing with the same idea that reality could be such that it’s non-well-founded in just this way. So this is from fiction. It’s not from physics. But it’s a very striking illustration of how this kind of regress can happen.
Matt Teichman:
Well, like everything else, podcasts are impermanent, it turns out. So thank you very much for joining us.
Graham Priest:
You’re welcome.
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