Much is said about in both Eastern and Western philosophy regarding the rejection of selves

in Buddhism. Primarily, it seems radically counter-intuitive to deny something that we all feel so

viscerally, something that seems to ground our very being. If we deny the self, it almost seems as

though we are denying the lived life; for without a grounded centre of some description, what is it to

feel, to be conscious, to experience? I will illustrate that these are simultaneously both relevant and

yet paradoxically irrelevant questions for the Buddhist, with each side operating on different levels

of ‘reality’. Through the course of this paper, I will refer to Dan Zahavi’s 2011 paper ‘The

Experiential Self: Objections and Clarifications’ to highlight the phenomenological resistance to the

anātman (no-self) doctrine that permeates all schools of Buddhism. I will then argue that his

rebuttal is – at least in some ways – misguided and will draw on various sources in an attempt to

shed some light on Zahavi’s fundamental question: what exactly are Buddhists denying and how

does it make sense?

Buddhism and the self

First, it would suit our requirements to give a brief sketch of the general Buddhist position

on the self. It is crucial to remember that the Buddha was repudiating specifically Brahminical

notions of self when he lived and taught, and so this means that he was rallying against the notion of

ātman (inner self, essential unconditioned self ontologically distinct from the world). Julius Lipner

characterised the definition of ātman at the time of the Buddha as ‘the innermost reality of the

individual, the subtle essence’ (Lipner, 2010: 53), whereas Chris Bartley (2011: 20) points to the

Chāndogya Upaniṣad VIII.7.1 for a more substantial elaboration:

The Self which is free from sin, free from old age, free from death,
free from grief, free from hunger, free from thirst, whose desires
come true and whose thoughts come true—That it is which should
be searched out, That it is which one should desire to understand.
He who has known this Self from the scriptures and a teacher and
understood It obtains all the worlds and all desires.

1
 We can see that the self is here defined as something very specific indeed. It is the highest

reality, the unconditioned, uncontaminated root of personhood and its discovery provides the

ultimate meaning to human life. Nevertheless, the Buddha thought this line of thinking self-

interested (quite literally!) and destructive: when we place such value on this imagined self, we

become exasperated, frustrated and feel despair when we are unable to recognise or find it. More

to the point, thought the Buddha, we will fail to find it because it is neither readily apparent to us in

our day-to-day life nor when we search for it through introspection and reflection. Thus we are

doomed to a cycle of idealising a nonexistent self and then being caught in disappointment and

despair when we cannot locate it. I will later go on to show that Dan Zahavi argues that we can

locate the self – or at the very least we can reflectively locate things that might be called aspects of

self, and this is enough to suppose that a multi-faceted, complex self exists. The Buddhist would be

comfortable in conceding that we can find many things that might look symptomatic of self but

ultimately, do not point to or constitute it. To use a somewhat lazy analogy, the conspiracy theorist

can think that they have found ‘aspects’ or ‘symptoms’ of alien abductions – this does not mean that

the abduction happened or that the aliens exist! It is simply all a matter of projection and inference,

regardless of how sound or unsound the premises are, and so the Buddhist would simply argue that

finding an aspect of self is itself symptomatic of reifying a self that does not ultimately exist:

concepts of self look to be nothing more than empty de dicto descriptions.

Buddhism contends that self is a conceptual construct reified by momentary incidences of

subjectless consciousness.1 This arises within and because of the interactions of five impersonal

aggregates or skandhas. These skandhas are rūpa (form, matter, āyatanas); vedanā (sensation,

feeling); samjñā (perception, conception, cognition, discrimination); samskāra (mental formations,

volitions, impulses); vijñāna (perception of objects, discernment), and within the skandhas we have

1
‘Subjectless’ here means that there is no substantial ‘I’ behind or above consciousness – the definition of
‘subject’ will change slightly later in the paper when I discuss both the work of Miri Albahari and Galen
Strawson.

2
the twelve āyatanas: six sense organs and their six corresponding objects: eye-visible objects; ear-

sound; nose-odour; tongue-taste; body-touch; mind-mental objects. It is worth noting that

according to Buddhist phenomenology, these skandhas are not to be taken as an enduring identity

either singularly or collectively; thus they do not constitute a self. Significantly, the ‘unity of

consciousness’ is never considered because Buddhists do not usually consider consciousness to be a

single enduring entity or phenomenon – indeed, they tend not to consider anything as a truly

enduring entity or phenomenon. Rather the process works something like this; ‘There is continuity

within a stream in that one event may cause the origination of the other. The process must be

characterised as one of [very quick] successive replacements’ (Bartley, 2011: 21). Subsequently, the

term ‘person’ or ‘self’ is a conventional, constructed linguistic designation that refers to nothing

more than a series of causally connected events – that there is enough continuity within the stream

that our agency and moral responsibility makes some kind of sense is by the by: if we are to be

happy, then we should be concerned about the future, regardless of whether or not the future

occurs to a substantial ‘me’!

The answer to our previous question regarding how a Buddhist can recognise aspects of self

whilst simultaneously denying the substantial self is, I hope, now clear. The Buddhist simply

recognises that we have this designation – self – that is incorrectly inferred from myriad interrelating

causes that stem from the interactions between the skandhas. Chris Bartley points to an excerpt

from the Questions of King Milinda, where Buddhist monk Nāgasena asks the king to consider a

chariot made up wheels, axle and chassis. The chariot is not identical with either one of its parts nor

with their sum; it is a conceptual construct imposed onto a selection of parts arranged in a given

way. When we look reductively at the conventional person, argues Nāgasena, we do not find a

single thing that can be called ‘I’ either on reflection or immediately in experience – rather, we see

that a person is a construct of multiple parts from (innumerate) multiple sources, subject to

(innumerate) multiple influences (Bartley, 2011: 23). Consciousness is then completely impersonal

but simultaneously wholly intentional. Dan Lusthaus writes that

3
 The collision of organ and object is consciousness. Consciousness is
not a third party, a spark set off when two material ‘sticks’ are
rubbed together. Perception itself is intentional, and hence the
organ and the object are always already producing consciousness
because consciousness is ‘producing’, intending itself through and
towards them. (2002: 461)

Lusthaus is making a key distinction here between a ‘subject’ that has consciousness as a

result of some material interaction of the skandhas, and consciousness-as-such, which is the very

interaction between the mental state and mental objects rather than a result of such interaction.

Despite its being categorised as the doing rather than the done, consciousness is absolutely not

immune to causes and conditions and does not stand alone as some unconditioned state. As such,

even consciousness does not meet the requirements needed to be deemed a ‘self’.

Zahavi and the ‘experiential self’

Next, a survey of Zahavi’s problem with the denial of self in Buddhism (and, it must be

mentioned, elsewhere): the most obvious issue with denying self is that it suggests that selfhood

can be whittled down to a simplistic phenomenon and stringently defined. This, he argues, is simply

not obvious either through experience or via reflection (Zahavi, 2011: 66). Looking at the definition

of self given in the Chāndogya Upaniṣad, we might think that Zahavi has a point. This is a very

precise definition that maybe is not obvious to us in experience or reflection: if we were to ask a

person in the street whether they felt that their inner self was free from desire, thirst, hunger and so

on, we would probably be met with a puzzled look! But this is to miss the point insofar as Védic

notions of self are concerned, for the very point of the Védas is to search out this elusive, hitherto

unknown self – it is not supposed to be obvious to us, that would be too easy!

For Buddhism, the challenge is somewhat more nuanced. The Buddhist wants to say that

the self is viscerally felt yet ultimately illusory, and so the Buddhist notion of self turns that of the

Védas on its head: we incorrectly infer a self; it is the realisation that it is a constructed illusion that

eludes us and is not obvious! This is obviously a big claim. Bruce Hood takes the position that the

4
average person in the street would likely define their ‘self’ as the ‘individual inside their body’, or in

other words, the owner of experience that occupies the body (Hood, 2012: xi) – he also holds that

this notion is wholly illusory, and so whilst not an endorsement of Buddhist thought per se (Hood is a

scientist seeking intellectual enlightenment rather than a Buddhist seeking intellectual and

spiritual/soteriological enlightenment), there is a suggestion that there might be more to the

Buddhist line of reasoning than Zahavi admits in his paper. Regardless of this, Zahavi’s main point is

that there are many notions and definitions of self, some relatively simple, some complex, and so to

simply dismiss them all in virtue of the doctrine of anātman would be too hasty. Subsequently,

Zahavi gives one major reason as to why he thinks that some notion of selfhood should be taken

seriously. In phenomenological terms, the primary consideration for Zahavi is the givenness and

‘for-me-ness’ of experience; that there seems to be a first-personal subject of experience. It is worth

noting – and I don’t think that Zahavi does – that most Buddhists would accept this ‘for-me-ness’ of

experience, at least to a limited degree.2 The notion is implicit in the Buddhist position that all

mental events are intrinsically reflexive (i.e. that each is its own subject) – it is not immediately

obvious to me, then, why this ‘for-me-ness’ must point to a ‘self’, and it is even less obvious to me

that this is what a person would mean when they referred to a ‘self’.

In any case, for Zahavi, this ‘for-me-ness’ is not a quality of conscious content (in the way

that an object might be soft, hard or red, for example), nor does it refer to the relationship between

different contents of consciousness (such as the relationship between two objects when they are

consecutively called to mind); it is in fact the ‘distinct givenness or how of experience’ (2011: 59).

The phenomenological impetus for taking a notion of selfhood seriously is, for Zahavi, simply

2
The problem here is with ‘me’ – the Buddhist does not think that there is ultimately any substantial ‘I’ (or
ultimately any substantial anything). Nevertheless, the Buddhist would have no problem in conceding that –
at least conventionally – there is some practical value to designating ‘me’, even in the discussion of conscious
experience. As long as it was borne in mind that ultimately speaking of ‘I’, ‘me’ etc. is a hindrance to liberation
and that eventually these notions would need to be jettisoned in order to achieve liberation, the Buddhist can
talk in terms of ‘for-me-ness’. For more on emptiness and conventional/ultimate perspectives, see Donnelly,
2014.

5
because of the first-personal presence of experience (although a Buddhist could simply respond that

all phenomenological content shows is the reflexivity of mental phenomena, not the existence of a

persisting subject!). We can call this first-personal perspective the ‘experiential self’, and for Zahavi

‘It refers to the fact that the experiences I am living through are given differently (but not necessarily

better) to me than to anybody else’ (2011: 59).

Zahavi stops short of fully equating first-personal consciousness with self-as-such, and is

keen to point out that he advocates a middle path between two common positions. The first

position is that which defines the self as ‘some kind of unchanging soul substance that is distinct

from, and ontologically independent of, the mental experiences and worldly objects it is the subject

of’, where the second position is the view that ‘there is nothing to consciousness apart from a

manifold of interrelated changing experiences’ (2011: 59). It is generally true that Buddhist thought

railed against an eternal, unchanging substance/essence that stands as ontologically distinct from

the world (and body) that we inhabit. Zahavi wants to toe a middle path between both of these

positions: he thinks that the experiential self is neither a separately existent entity nor a thing

reducible to one specific experience (or a subset of experiences) (2011: 59).

Interestingly, when Zahavi specifies the (lack of) features of his provisional self-as-subject-of-

experience, he sails very close to what might ostensibly be termed a ‘Buddhist notion of self’, or

perhaps more accurately, a ‘Buddhist notion of not self’ (what self is not rather than self as non-

existent). He writes:

When talking of first-personal givenness, one shouldn’t think of self-

reference by means of the first-person pronoun; in fact, one
shouldn’t think of a linguistically conditioned self-reference at all.
Nor should one have an explicit or thematic kind of self-knowledge
in mind, one where one is aware of oneself as a distinct individual,
different from other individuals. No, first-personal givenness is
meant to pinpoint the fact that (intransitively) conscious mental
states are given in a distinct manner, with a distinct subjective
presence, to the subject whose mental states they are, in a way that
in principle is unavailable to others. (2011: 60)

6
 The subject of experience is obviously important here, but crucially, there is a deliberate

avoidance of some of the key commonsensical notions of self. Zahavi tells us that we should not

think of the experiential self in terms of ‘I’, and this presumably extends to other I-notions such as

‘me’ or ‘mine’ since they too are linguistically-conditioned self-referents. This is a position that is –

as we have already said – mirrored in just about every major discussion around the self in Buddhist

philosophical discourse.3 The key deviation from Buddhist thought here is that Zahavi merely asserts

that we should not think of the experiential self in this manner and thus implies that it is easy not to,

whereas the orthodox Buddhist position would be that we should not think of the experiential

subject (not ‘self’, importantly) in this way, although it is very, very difficult not to. Safe to say, then,

that for Zahavi, the first-person givenness of experience should be taken very seriously indeed. This

very individuation of experience is enough to justify at least the experiential self, but this too

remains far too ‘thin’ an account. Zahavi claims that ‘the self is so multifaceted a phenomenon that

various complementary accounts must be integrated if we are to do justice to its complexity’ (2011:

70-71). This is a strange statement to make – I am not completely sure why multiple accounts ‘must’

be integrated, it could just as easily be claimed that all such accounts are inadequate and as such, a

new approach needs to be forged. The Buddhist opponent would simply argue that all accounts are

necessarily fundamentally flawed (because there is no persisting self!) and so should be abandoned.

Presumably, Zahavi likes aspects of lots of theories of self but can’t agree enough with one theory or

system to commit to it. Nevertheless, he advocates a multidimensional account of self that might be

capable of reconciling the shortcomings that the experiential self obviously has, for how adequate

would an account of self be if it ‘we don’t also consider the self that forms plans, makes promises

and accepts responsibilities, the self that is defined and shaped by is values, ideals, goals,

consequences and decisions’ (2001: 71)? These are big questions, and I do not have the space to

answer them all here, but we can see that Zahavi is not arguing that first-personal givenness or the

experiential self constitutes the whole self; rather that it constitutes a basic part of it – there is on

3
Some examples are: Albahari, 2006: 51-54; 2011: 84; Siderits and Katsura, 2013: 197.

7
this account much more to be said of the self. But what of those who wish to deny parts of – or

even the totality of – self?

‘Ownership’ of the self

Miri Albahari talks of the ‘Ownership Model of Identification’ in a very similar way to

Zahavi’s rejection of first-personal pronoun identification of the experiential self – I will examine her

exegesis of her position before we turn to more pressing matters: could the self really be a

conceptual construct? Taking her cues from the Pāli Canon, Albahari discerns that Buddhism does

indeed have room for an ‘experiential self’, or as she puts it, a ‘subject’ (now defined as ‘witnessing

as it presents from a psycho-physical perspective’) (Albahari, 2006: 51). She calls this ‘perspectival

ownership’ (2006: 53-54), and this is encompasses the first-personal thoughts, perceptions,

intentions, sensations and suchlike. These are all ‘perspectivally owned’ by the subject. Her

justification for this step is as follows: if a person is to become enlightened (that is, to remove all I-

notions and sense of me, mine) then they do so when they are living in the world (it would be a

shock if they managed it when they were dead!). Further, they must continue to live in the

conditioned world after their enlightenment, and so it is unrealistic (to say the least!) to suppose

that they lose this perspectival ownership: they would simply be unable to experience! A subject

might also have ‘possessive ownership’ of mundane things such as clothes, cars and so on, and the

subject has a little of both sense of ownership in relation to its body; perspectival ownership is

present because bodily experience, movement and action can all be known from the inside, as it

were, and a degree of possessive ownership is present insofar as the body is a publically-observable

extended object whose parts can be lost, gained (transplants, for example), modified (tattoo,

piercing, implants), given away and otherwise changed (2006: 54).

Buddhism does not specifically tackle any of these modes of ownership. Indeed, we have

said that at least some degrees of both seem necessary for the enlightened person to carry on living

within and engaging with the world! The problem begins, then, says Albahari, when this subject

8
assumes that if there is a self (me, I) then there must be things that belong to self (mine). There is an

obvious sense here in which Albahari concurs with Zahavi insofar as both recognise the problematic

assignation of I-notions to ‘self’, but it is problematic for both writers in, I think, markedly different

ways. Zahavi seems to want us to jettison I-notions in discussions of the experiential self for a

couple of closely related reasons; first, because it narrows the conception of self to a very specific

thing that is ‘me’ or ‘mine’ when, in fact, we might eventually be able to point to a multiplicity of

attributes/things that combine to form aspects of a composite thing, self. This is very interesting for

the Buddhist philosopher who can draw a parallel between Zahavi’s position and that of Buddhist

orthodoxy straight away: both think that there are multiplicities of factors that combine in the

construction of self and both think that we cannot whittle down selfhood to one single, enduring

thing. The crux of the disagreement rests with Zahavi’s insistence that an intuitive ‘for-me-ness’

means that there is a self – or at least that we should take this as very strong experiential evidence

that a self is likely – whereas the Buddhist wants to say (as Albahari will say shortly) that this ‘for-

me-ness’ is a construction; an inference based on identification with aspects of, or the totality of, the

skandhas.

Second, Zahavi thinks that assignation of I-notions or my-ness to self implicitly neglects the

social construction of self – as he says in his footnotes (Zahavi, 2011: 74), ‘[w]e shouldn’t forget that

our life-stories are multi-authored. Who we are is not something we exclusively determine

ourselves’. Again, this could be interpreted as a reason for denying self. There is a sense in which

Zahavi looks to be talking along the same lines as Dan Dennett when he writes ‘[o]ur tales are spun,

but for the most part, we don’t spin them; they spin us’. This would mean that there is no core self

that we are, there is merely an emergent narrative centre produced by our brains (Hood, 2012: xi).

Hood also argues that neuroscience tends to support a bundle-theory of self rather than an ego-

theory (2012: x), and in principle, I think that both Zahavi and the Buddhists must agree that this is at

least something worth considering despite their separate agendas. This is to say that there are

bundles of thoughts, perceptions and sensations that are experienced prior to any I-notions or ideas

9
of ‘my-ness’: a notion of self somehow arises via these interactions. This sounds familiar in our

current discussion and although Hood does not fall fully in line with Buddhist theory (he claims that

experience of bundles is contingent on brains, for example, whereas some Buddhist schools would

dispute this), it does offer an interesting contribution to the debate.

Overall, Zahavi does not think that the ‘I’ is illusory or non-existent, merely that there is

much more to it than reducing it down to one principle or one aspect of what may well turn out to

be a composite self (2011: 70-71). Albahari, on the other hand, is most certainly coming from the

typically Buddhist position that says the ‘I’ is illusory and propagates suffering – we have already

seen arguments that claim self is incorrectly inferred or constructed by means of incorrect cognition

around the subject as ‘me’ or ‘I’, which then leads to speculation and assignations regarding what is

‘mine’. Consequently, despite the focus still being phenomenological (insofar as the Buddhist is

concerned with experiences and mental propensities), there is no radical ‘for-me-ness’ to consider:

there is no ‘me’ to begin with! Perhaps we can instead posit a ‘for-subject-ness’, for once the

subject makes the leap to ‘me’, it begins to incorrectly infer that various psycho-physical are

assimilated into it. The Buddhist challenge to ‘self’ then manifests as a challenge to this reified sense

of bonded ownership of psycho-physical attributes, or in other words, the wrongful assumption or

inference by the subject that there are attributes other than its witness-consciousness that are

somehow assimilated to it. The construction of a self stems from these incorrect premises when

what Albahari calls the perspectival owner (2006: 53) incorrectly infers that it ‘owns’ the phenomena

stemming from the five skandhas (as mentioned earlier). According to Buddhist phenomenology,

consciousness is but one of five factors that progress in a (generally, but not exclusively) linear

manner – from rūpa to vijñāna – to constitute what we recognise as a person. We can now examine

precisely how a subject attaches itself to and assumes assimilation with these skandhas. How is it

that the experiencing subject makes such a drastic mistaken step?

10
 The answer lies, says Albahari, in ‘identification’. This is uncontroversial to most Buddhist

philosophers, and according to renowned psychologist Bruce Hood, it is uncontroversial to most

neuroscientists and psychologists, too (Hood, 2012: xi). Mark Siderits (2011: 308) asks the questions

‘does subjectivity require a self or subject’ and ‘is consciousness intrinsically reflexive’? By

separating the subject from the perspectival ownership, Albahari seems to be answering the first

question in the affirmative, at least in the sense of a subject. For her position to remain coherent,

Albahari must – like most Buddhist traditions – answer in the affirmative to the latter question, too,

for she explains that ’identification involves a reflexive assumption on the part of the subject, that

various (psycho-physical) attributes are in some way assimilated into itself’ (Albahari, 2006: 56).

What – we might ask – does this actually mean?

In short, it means that the subject identifies as and/or with the skandhas. Albahari

introduces a caveat here as to the difference between ‘identifies with’ and ‘identifies as’. ‘Identifies

with’ is the state of affairs assumed to be true by the subject (such as its being assimilated with the

skandhas); this identification implies an independent reality to X (where X is that being identified

with). ‘Identifies as’ is what the subject implicitly does, and so refers to the act of the subject

assuming itself to be assimilated (with the skandhas, for example); this identification does not imply

an independent reality to X – where X is the thing the subject identifies as, X may or may not actually

exist (2006: 56-57). The significance of this distinction will become clearer as we go on and it has

specific importance when I relate Albahari’s position to Strawson’s in order to argue that the subject

can be aware of itself in a weak, pre-conceptual manner without recourse to a self. For now, I will

stick with Albahari’s contention that the subject’s identification with or as any given X does not

actually necessitate that this identification is actually valid or true in the same way that a

philosopher’s arguing for Y does not mean that Y is actually true (it merely means that the

philosopher argued for it!) (2006: 57).

11
 With this background in mind, we can begin to posit how a subject might make the mistaken

leap to self. Albahari argues that the knowing conscious subject identifies itself with a collection of

roles (observer, owner, actor to name but a few) and attributes (conscious, unified) that emanate

from the interactions of the skandhas. These roles and attributes are, through this erroneous

identification, bound to the subject so that some seem intrinsic to subjectivity itself, leading to

reification on behalf of the subject: whenever the subject has a feeling of ‘my-ness’ toward any

mental or physical object, ‘then the subject implicitly identifies with whatever group of mental and

bodily [skandhas] serve to stand it in a relation of possessive or perspectival ownership towards the

object in question’ (Albahari, 2006: 59).

(Un)constructed ‘self’, or pre-conceptual ‘subject’?

Dan Zahavi writes that he ‘would deny that unconstructedness and boundedness are

essential features of self, features that any viable notion of self must include’ (2011: 69). In

principle, this assertion seems acceptable enough, but given that Zahavi has spent so much time

defending a notion of first-personal experience that necessarily pits the experiencer versus the

experienced, I am not sure how seriously I can take the claim – Zahavi’s notion of self looks pretty

bounded to me, and contrary to his view, I do think that most people would identify their inner self

as ultimately separate from the world in some fundamental way: we hear all the time about how

people reveal their true selves, or how people are ‘not themselves’ or ‘not really like that’ after they

commit questionable acts. Similarly, we have seen how Bruce Hood spoke of people identifying

their selves as ‘occupying’ and thus somehow separate from their bodies. This all suggests a sense

of boundedness and identification that runs really quite deep and, in my view, gives credence to Miri

Albahari’s ideas around reification of self stemming from ownership of phenomena. He elaborates

that just because the boundary between self and other (the world, other people) shifts and moves

there is not sufficient reason to think that we should not recognise that there is a difference

between the self and the world (2001: 69). My concern here is to do with degrees of emphasis.

12
Whilst Zahavi acknowledges that the boundaries might shift, I am not sure that there is enough

emphasis on the world’s shaping us. To use something of a clichéd sound bite, the world is within us

as much as we are within the world. Like it or not, we are, in innumerate ways, contingent on,

shaped and influenced the world, and so whilst I acknowledge that there are obvious differences

between ‘me’ and my environment, I would be extremely wary of forcing this issue too far. In any

case, I am prepared (as are, presumably, Albahari and Strawson) to acknowledge a difference

between the subject (which is now suitably established, I hope, as different to the notions of self

that we are discussing) and the world: it is simply the case that I think this subject precedes a notion

of self!

Similarly, Zahavi claims that if there is no ‘me’ then there is no ‘you’ or ‘we’ either, and this

leads to us declaring the entire world ‘illusory; a form, I suppose, of metaphysical nihilism (Zahavi,

2011: 70). This is absurd and there are reams of Buddhist literature countering this very argument. I

do not have the space to go into intricacies here, but suffice to say that most Buddhist schools work

with a notion of ‘two-truths’, one conventional and one ultimate. ‘Conventional’ is this world and all

within it, including our linguistic designations such as self. Unsurprisingly, opinions differ over what

‘ultimately’ exists depending on which school is asked, but a lot of schools adhere to notions of some

fundamental constituents of reality. A similar case could, I think, be made by the physicalist that

wants to reduce the world to its physical properties and use these properties to explain every

phenomenon. On this view, a ‘person’ as designation would also be conventional, because

ultimately, a person is simply an arrangement of matter, neurons, electrons, and so on. Put simply,

that the ‘I’ is a convenient designation that helps us get on in our day to day life is enough reason to

speak of it – but only conventionally and not as an ultimately real constituent of reality. I hasten to

add that this is not to deny the character of experience (for-me-ness/for-subject-ness or otherwise);

rather it is the position that experience is ‘just neurons firing’, but that neurophysiology cannot

account for all the characteristics contained within these experiences (Strawson, 2006: 7).

13
 Galen Strawson would hold that any definition of self is entirely unhelpful– he defends a

stance that would determine between a ‘weak’ sense of ‘subject’ (subject defined largely in

Albahari’s terms) and a ‘strong’ sense of subject. This difference between the two can be described

as pre-conceptual and post-conceptual, with the weak sense allowing for a pre-conceptual subject

and the strong sense designating a post-conceptual subject. What are the differences? Well, the

strong, post-conceptual sense of subject is when the ‘subject’s awareness of itself involves its

bringing itself under the concept subject,’ presumably involving what most Buddhists would see as a

reification of subject based upon the application of a linguistic concept to the subject (Strawson,

2011: 302). It would be in this instance of applying subject-concepts to itself (or, as Albahari might

put it, subject identifying with characteristics) that I would say a ‘self’ has been constructed. In

contrast, the weak, pre-conceptual sense of subject ‘requires only that what the subject is in fact

concerned with is itself in so far as it is a subject, and allows that it may not, in being so concerned,

be deploying anything recognizable as a concept of itself as subject’ (Strawson, 2011: 302). What

this would amount to is the perspectival subject’s ‘immediate thetic self awareness’, or the subject’s

immediate, unmediated, pre-conceptual subject-awareness. ‘Thetic’ here is tied to a sense of

attention that lacks ‘discursively structured operations of positing or positioning things as objects of

attention’ (Strawson, 2011: 295): in other words, attention ‘as is’ before any concepts are arranged,

imposed or understood by it; subject as recognising subject without identifying with any

characteristics.

Strawson defends the claim that a subject could have direct acquaintance with itself in a few

ways. Here, I wish to pick up on just one of them, being that it applies more widely to my thesis that

we must at least seriously consider the possibility of selflessness. First, he uses an analogy regarding

the blueness of the sky. It is usually the case, he says, that when we look at the sky that the

awareness of the sky’s blueness will comport some awareness of the fact that the sky’s blueness is

currently being taken as the object of attention. However, the claim Strawson (and I, and

presumably Miri Albahari) want to make is that we can actually move further than this and hold the

14
sensation of the sky’s blueness in full, direct attention; unmediated by the awareness that the

blueness is being taken as an object of awareness – as Strawson puts it, ‘in which one’s experience

ceases to have, as any part of its content, the structure of subject-attending-to-something’

(Strawson, 2006: 298).

The problem with such an approach is that its truth is somewhat personal. As such,

assessing its truth and verifiability is difficult. Strawson notes that ‘[t]his doesn’t mean that it [thetic

subject-awareness] isn’t empirical: it’s wholly empirical’. It is empirical precisely because it can be

observed thetically. It simply is not ‘publically checkable’ (Strawson, 2001:302). Commentators oft

claim that ‘[m]ystics of all religions report strikingly similar experiences: a sense of direct

communion with ultimate reality, a sense of complete unity with all things, and a loss of all

distinction between self and other’ (Harrison, 2008: 80-81), and this is very close to the crux of my

argument. We need not place emphasis on ‘religion’, I feel. We could just as readily replace it with

‘meditators’ – especially apt given the overarching theme of this paper. The fact that people report

losing the sense of self – even if only momentarily – is surely reason enough to investigate further?

Meditators and mystics of all or no religious traditions report precisely the awareness that Albahari

and Strawson wish to investigate and account for: this is surely just as phenomenological as Zahavi’s

experiential self!

Conclusion

By way of conclusion, I hope to have argued that whilst Dan Zahavi does indeed present a

compelling case that there might be something that we can call a self, his is firstly not the sort of self

that the average person would identify themselves as having nor is it immune from the Buddhist

criticism that it is constructed and illusory. He manages to come close to Buddhist principle of

anātman in some senses (notably his disdain for I-notions in discussions about self) yet at the same

time maintains a thin notion of self based solely on the ‘for-me-ness’ of experience. I have argued

that contrary to Zahavi’s argument, Buddhism denies a type of self that is commonsensically

15
assumed by the average person – one of a separate, bounded, body-owning consciousness that

occupies the body rather than an emergent subject that is the body, and that it is at least possible

that this emergent subject is, in its natural state, lacking conceptual constructions around

personality, ‘me’,’ mine’ and ‘I’. I appeal to research by both Miri Albahari and Galen Strawson to

illustrate how it might be that this subject identifies with characteristics that are not actually part of

it in order to construct notions of what we commonly call ‘self’, and I discuss how both philosophers

try to account for an experiencing subject that lacks the fundamental ‘for-me’ that Zahavai is so keen

on defending. Through all of this, I hope to have illustrated that this discussion is not as simplistic as

Zahavi would perhaps like us to think, and that he should consider the possibility that it might be he

rather than the Buddhists who has dismissed an alternative position out of hand.

Albahari, M., 2006. Analytical Buddhism: A Two-Tiered Illusion of Self. Hampshire: Palgrave
Macmillan.

Bartley, C., 2011. An Introduction to Indian Philosophy. London: Continuum.

Chāndogya Upaniṣad. Swami Nikhilananda (Trans.), available online:

http://www.swamij.com/upanishad-chandogya.htm [Last Accessed: 04/06/2014]

Donnelly, G., (2014) ‘Rejecting the Ultimate Truth, A Defence of the “Semantic Interpretation of
Emptiness”’. Dialogue (00122246), Oct 2014, Vol. 57 Issue 1, p12-16.

Harrison, P., 2004. Elements of Pantheism. Coral Springs, Florida: Llumina Press.

Hood, B., 2012. The Self Illusion: Why There is no ‘You’ Inside Your Head. Croydon: Constable.

Lipner, J., 2010. Hindus: their religious beliefs and practices. Oxon: Routledge.

Lusthaus, D., 2002. Buddhist Phenomenology: A Philosophical Investigation of Yogācāra Buddhism

and the Ch’eng Wei-shih lun. Oxon: RoutledgeCurzon.

Siderits, M., 2011. Buddhas as Zombies: A Buddhist Reduction of Subjectivity. In: Siderits, Thopson
and Zahavi eds. Self, No-Self? Perspectives from Analytical, Phenomenological, & Indian Traditions.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp308-331.

16
Siderits, M. and Katsura, S., 2013. Nāgārjuna’s Middle Way: Mūlamadhyamakakārikā. Somerville:
Wisdom Publications.

Strawson, G., 2006. Consciousness and Its Place in Nature: Does Physicalism Entail Panpsychism?
Exeter: Imprint Academic.

Strawson, G., 2011. Radical Self-Awareness. In: Siderits, Thopson and Zahavi eds. Self, No-Self?
Perspectives from Analytical, Phenomenological, & Indian Traditions. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, pp274-307.

Zahavi, D., 2011. The Experiential Self: Objections and Clarifications. In: Siderits, Thopson and Zahavi
eds. Self, No-Self? Perspectives from Analytical, Phenomenological, & Indian Traditions. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, pp56-78.

17