Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live without a Self

Why isn’t the moral of this story simply that we were wrong initially about the nature of the self—that it is not an essential core, subject, agent, etc., but instead this high-level conceptual construction?

But we cannot forget that our identity is constituted as well by the countless other dramatis personae in the play that is our lives, who together bring into existence the context in which our own roles make any sense. This fact should call upon us to rethink our supposed independence. And this can be a wonderful realization: we gain a deeper appre

To the extent that we are single characters over our lifetime, we are, like Hamlet, played by a succession of actors: an infant; a toddler; a schoolchild; finally, with any luck, an elder.

Neuroscience does not reveal a central ego in the brain that marks who we are, as opposed to what we experience or do. There is no single place in the brain where it all “comes together,” or where consciousness is seated.

At the most basic level, the illusion of a self is the illusion that we stand outside of and against the world. We take ourselves pre-reflectively to be singularities: not participants in the world, but spectators of the world, and agents of actions directed on that world.

On the one hand, the attribution of independence leads to anger when others offend or wrong us. On the other hand, the sense that we are the sole authors of our own actions leads to egoistic pride in our own accomplishments.

Nonetheless, just as dollars exist on a different plane from dimes, persons exist on a different plane from minds and bodies.

Your dollar, however, is neither identical to nor different from any of these ways that it might be instantiated.

Candrakīrti argues that we are not selves, but persons (the Sanskrit term is pudgala). And the person, he argues, is neither identical to nor different from the psychophysical processes; but unlike the self, which is supposed to be an independently existent entity, there is no reason to believe that a person needs to exist in one of these ways. It