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Category: personal identity

Thoughts on Time, Grief, and the Self

Thoughts on Time, Grief, and the Self

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I would like to begin by considering two radically different pictures. First, consider the original notion of an atom: a kind of indestructible, unchanging, simple. That is, because it had no smaller parts, i.e., it was simple, and it was further then taken to be indestructible and unchangeable, since to be destroyed or changed, it would require smaller parts that could be taken away or replaced. Now imagine such an atom moving through the world, interacting with various things, but…

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Life and Death, Sunshine and Rain: Accept one, Accept the Other

Life and Death, Sunshine and Rain: Accept one, Accept the Other

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This morning I came across the lovely Buddha Doodles illustration with the Khalil Gibran quote: “If I accept the sunshine and warmth, then I must also accept the thunder and lightning.” It’s a wonderful line to think about. For what exactly does it mean? In what sense must accepting the one mean accepting the other? I am aware of at least one other explicit version of the idea, namely, in the Daoist text the Zhuangzi, though I imagine it is…

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Suffering and Platonic Lives, Platonic Selves

Suffering and Platonic Lives, Platonic Selves

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How would you feel if you were never to read another book in your life? What about if you were never to ski, or if not skiing, then some other sport? How would you feel if you could not live in the city? What about the country? What about the suburbs? These are only a few questions that pertain to the kinds of lives we might live. Some of us would be unmoved by life without books and others could…

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Walt Whitman and Crossing the Boundaries of Consciousness

Walt Whitman and Crossing the Boundaries of Consciousness

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My dear reader, forgive me for what is most likely a projection. I am loath to admit it but often when poetry begins some prose piece that I am to read, I do little more than skim it. I have never even read through all of the poems that begin Nietzsche’s The Gay Science. Please do not gasp too loudly—I know I’m a terrible human being. So, please do not be like me. Please read these selections (and ideally the…

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Dirty Ontology: The Muddy Waters of “the” Self

Dirty Ontology: The Muddy Waters of “the” Self

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“When the water is deep, the boat rides high. When there is much mud, the Buddha is large.” —Dōgen, “The Indestructible Nature in Deep Muddy Water” in the Eihei Kōroku   “Know thyself” is the fairly famous injunction inscribed overhead at Apollo’s temple at Delphi. The meaning of this may be less obvious than it seems, but regardless of how it was intended, we can read it in different ways depending on what we understand by “knowing” and what we…

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Epicurus, Dōgen, and Not Fearing Death

Epicurus, Dōgen, and Not Fearing Death

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Accustom thyself to believe that death is nothing to us, for good and evil imply sentience, and death is the privation of sentience,… Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and when death is come, we are not. It is nothing, then, either to the living or to the dead, for with the living it is not and the dead exist no longer. (Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus,…

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You are Right and I have my Peace—On the Pursuit of Truth and a Meaningful Life

You are Right and I have my Peace—On the Pursuit of Truth and a Meaningful Life

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What am I after in pursuing philosophy? A ready answer is: the Truth. The truth about whatever philosophical topic I might be interested in. But this answer is problematic for a number of important reasons. One is that philosophy is extremely difficult and I’d have to be a fool or full of hubris to think that I will figure out any significant truths, truths that greater minds than my own failed to see. Another is revealed in the following passage…

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The Relational Identity of Persons and the Importance of Personal Projects

The Relational Identity of Persons and the Importance of Personal Projects

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What follows are some first steps in thinking through an aspect of the possible relational identity of persons. I imagine there is a great deal of confusion herein. But so it goes with many beginnings. The question “What is it to be an…..?” is often, if not always, difficult to answer. Pick any object around the house, a chair, for example, and ask what is it that makes it a chair, and you can discover the difficulty. But when we…

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Something about the self

Something about the self

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With some questions we just can’t help our- selves. Buddhists answer one way. Hindus answer another. Both say we’ve got the wrong idea of what the self is or isn’t. I’m not sure what to think…except… that they, that we, are likely all a bit off in our estimation. Is it a bit like when in the Boy Scouts, on a camping trip, the older scouts would make the younger scouts excited about snipe hunting? And so off we’d go…

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The Relational Nature of Personal Identity Part II

The Relational Nature of Personal Identity Part II

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In the original essay on the relational nature of personal identity, from October 10th, 2010, I wrote the following: What are some of the typical components of personal identity? 1) Body 2) Consciousness associate with/centered in one body (including will and self-consciousness). 3) Memories of consciousness (as the direct causal product of 2) But it seems to me that we should also include things such as: 4) Sets of beliefs 5) Attitudes/dispositions 6) Emotional make up 7) Ways of thinking…

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