Recently I have been exposed to Buddhism and its teachings, not for the first time, but for the first time, it made me truly consider how things would be different were these ideas to have dominated our thought, rather than those of the West. Would we be facing the same onslaught of problems we are now confronted with—the climate crisis, the loneliness epidemic and so on. My answer is no, or not to the same extent.
Fundamentally, this can be boiled down to the varying conceptions of self as manifestations of the core principles found in these very different schools of thought. Charles Taylor in his text Sources of the Self describes the modern notion of the self as a very particular notion. In philosophy, it is essential to observe our assumptions, our own and that of our society, especially those that have become so natural to us to even be invisible. In this case, we can easily fail to recognise that the conception and understanding of the self we have in the West as one that, like any other, is historically and culturally specific. For Taylor, we must recognise that we, all of us, are descendants of a particular contingent history, one that could have been different.
Taylor Steelman credits the development of this self to the so-called “Father of Modern Philosophy”: Descartes. From him originated the modern notion of mind-body dualism where the mind and body are to be viewed as two distinct substances: spirit and matter. He transported this from the realms of the church and philosophical discussion into the scientific worldview. With this understanding, came the two further pillars of the ‘Cartesian self’: one being free will which rendered us responsible, morally, for ourselves and our actions, and the claim that it is humans alone who possess souls and, consequently, free will. Descartes famously made the claim that “all motions of animals originate from the corporeal and mechanical principle”, thus, in his view, all nonhumans were merely complex, biochemical machines without consciousness. Humans are special and distinct in virtue of their ability to observe the mechanical universe through the possession of a soul.
It is this conception of the self, the Cartesian model, that has existed in the background as the West developed, becoming embedded not only in our self-conceptualisation, but in our behaviour towards others and the world we inhabit. Steelman argues that colonialism, slavery and capitalism are all legacies of the Cartesian self. It is the ability to cast others outside the sphere of moral reasoning and empathy that has allowed us to objectify not only the world, but fellow beings and people. Many examples can be found throughout history of indigenous people being viewed as ‘subhuman’ and consequently being stripped of an identity that affords consciousness, thus moral status. As a result, colonisers felt able to justify these people as being objects, as means to an end, rather than an end in themselves.
However, the danger of this modern conception goes deeper and becomes more dangerous, according to Daniel Quinn, as “the way we relate to the rest of the biological community is mediated by who believe ourselves to be in relation to them.” We objectify nature, treat it merely as a raw material for us to exploit, extract something from. We treat nature instrumentally, rather than as something which surrounds us and that which we are fundamentally engaged with. It is in this sense we feel able to exploit it in the way we do. As a result, we now found ourselves in a world where, as a result of human activity, up to 150 species go extinct every day and 420 million hectares of forest have been lost in the last three decades alone. It is the positioning of humanity at the top of the natural order, that has justified centuries of exploitation and destruction.
It was on looking at Buddhist thought that I realised, potentially, how this has come to be. Our detachment from the world we inhabit has characterised and defined our practices and the way in which we live. I could not help but wonder how would it be different if we adopted an attitude towards our existence and place in the world that was more akin to that of Buddhist thought.
Buddha observed suffering as the first of his Four Noble Truths, this, he claimed, was caused, fundamentally, by craving. He offers a course of treatment to end this cycle: ‘The Eightfold Path.’ Partially, Buddha argues, our craving (cause of suffering) is a result of us being under the illusion that we inhabit a ‘self’—the no-self doctrine (anatta) denies that there is such thing as a self that is in some way distinct and unchanging. Buddha supports this claim from an empirical angle: we come to understand reality on the basis of experience and this experience shows that everything in the universe is ontologically interconnected and in a state of change. Rather than there being distinct entities that make up the world, the world is, in fact, a complex of mutually interdependence processes of change. The teaching of anatta is a special case of the wider teaching of Pratītyasamutpāda—the basic principle that all things arise in dependence of other things.
There is some dispute in literature regarding Buddhism and its links with environmental thought. This is largely due to, in Early Buddhist thought, to our oneness with nature being no cause for celebration, as this world is one of suffering where we are all craving something and the assumption that, simply because we see ourselves as a part of nature by no means entails that we will treat it well. Nonetheless, I wish to entertain the idea that, rather than the advance of this Cartesian conception of self that has come to dominate and embed itself in the Western world, were we to have had, or to still adopt, a view of ourselves not as distinct from the world, but as intrinsically intertwined and reliant on our relation with other things for our existence, this would, undeniably, see very real consequences on our behaviour towards others and the world.
Now, I am not saying we must adopt the Buddhist tradition to do so or reject the idea of self altogether. Rather, I urge you to not simply accept and, instead, interrogate the understanding of self we have come to know. One can look to the modern science of ecology where, I would argue, we can find similar notions to that of Buddhist teaching. In particular, one can look to and advance alternative conceptions of the self such as the “ecological self” –formally advanced by Norwegian thinker Arne Næss in the 1980s. It is this, Steelman argues, that is the antidote to the Cartesian self—its very antithesis. As Stephen Harding noted, this notion of the ecological self suggests “the wider self is not some insubstantial, ethereal intellectualisation, but rather deeply rooted in the materiality of our planet.”
The ecological self still acknowledges that humans are unique, yet, unlike the Cartesian self, this does not necessarily entail that we are at the top of the natural hierarchy, rather, we are unique because of the relationship we have with each other and everything else.
It is quite easy to see how viewing the world and our place in it in this way has radical potential. The more we come to see the world not only as precious or necessary for our own survival, but part of us, entirely equal, that, as Naess argues “conservation becomes as automatic as self-preservation.” We should not accept the ideas that have permeated how we think about the world and our fellow beings at face-value, this Western idea of the self. By distorting our image of ourselves, it has come to distort our relationship with others as well. There is a beauty in accepting, as Buddhism professes, that we are not entirely free agents, only beholden to ourselves—our wills, desires. Rather, we are subject to our relations with the rest of the world and its process as a whole.
Oxygen from plants fill our lungs, the water we drink will return to the soil. There is an intuitive and natural appeal to consider ourselves as simply part of this large, complex whole. This does not, in my opinion, diminish our place in the world. Rather, it makes it all the more incredible. While everything is changing, there is a stability to this process, we must simply accept that we do not, and will not, have control over it. To recognise and adopt this stance has radical potential and I think all of us can carry it into our lives and our relations with the world and those within it.