What Is the Self?

It Depends
BY JULIAN BAGGINI
 FEBRUARY 8, 2016 3:21 AM February 8, 2016 3:21 am 132

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I recently took my self to a gathering of a dozen selves to discuss the idea of self, East
and West. This created a strange dissonance between the theoretical premise of the
meeting and the empirical reality. The people seated around the table seemed very
obviously all to be the same kinds of beings, yet they kept telling one another how
differently they conceived the self. Stark differences between theoretical selves were
completely indiscernible in ordinary human interaction.
In the East, it is often argued there is no meaning of self that is independent of our
relations to others. The self is irreducibly social.
A cynic might conclude that this is yet more evidence – as though any more were needed
– that the abstract speculations of philosophers have nothing to do with the lived reality
of daily life. But there is a more charitable and also more credible explanation. We have
different conceptions of the self the world over not because selves differ, but because at
different times and places people have more or less concern with different aspects of
selfhood. They provide different answers to the question “What is the self?” because that
apparently singular question in fact contains any number of different ones.

This explanation also helps justify the value of cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary
inquiry. The point is not to reach some kind of warm, ecumenical mutual
understanding, rooted in profound respect for difference. Rather it is to see that our
questions are not the only ones worth asking and that by considering others, we might
not only open up new vistas but also see our familiar intellectual territory in a different
light.

Both these explanations for the coexistence of radical difference and fundamental
sameness seem extremely plausible when it comes to ideas of self. Take perhaps the
most commonly noted, broad-brush feature of the Eastern conception of self: its
relationality. Whereas in the West the self is understood primarily as an autonomous
ego whose existence is distinct from that of others, in the East, it is often argued there is
no meaning of self that is independent of our relations to others. The self is irreducibly
social.

Evidence for this is legion. There are more than a dozen different words for “I” in
Japanese, and which one people use depends on the precise social circumstances.
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All of this is no doubt true, but we misunderstand what it means if we see it as indicating
a wholly other idea of self to that which holds in the West. That would be to fall prey to a
kind of exoticization, the source both of xenophobia and romantic idealizing of the
foreign Other. Many identities are relational in the West, such as those of parent, child,
group member and so on. What we think of as different notions of self are largely a
matter of differences in what aspects of self are expressed where and when.

Why then is it that different aspects of self receive greater or lesser emphasis in different
cultures? The answer is, I think, primarily ethical. Conceptions of self are usually
assumed to be attempts to describe the objective reality of what a self is, and this is
indeed what thinkers around the globe have often thought they were doing. But
philosophies of self are usually at least as prescriptive as they are descriptive. For
example, thinkers like Confucius knew that people could choose to live in isolation as
rugged individualists. Living without relationality is perfectly possible; it just isn’t good.
There would still be some self living such a life but it would be an impoverished,
emaciated one. Differences between conceptions of self are therefore more ethical than
metaphysical.

Hence these Eastern accounts of self do not so much provide a rival set of answers to the
questions asked in the West as suggest that there may be other questions worth asking.
If we want to know what it is which underpins the continued identity of a self over time,
for example, it seems to me nothing from the East threatens the account offered in the
tradition of Hume and Locke, in which psychological continuity is the bearer of
selfhood. The question posed by a fruitful engagement with the East is whether this
continuing self is best sustained by its own resources alone or its engagement with
society and with others.

Western philosophers have never been completely blind to these questions. William
James explicitly talked of the social self. Generally speaking, however, they have played
down relationality and emphasized individuality. Many in the West now question this,
wondering whether we have become too atomized, too discrete. Eastern ways of
thinking about the self are a resource for thinking about how we might change this.

As the West rethinks the importance of relationality, it also needs to think which
relations matter most. At the moment this looks decidedly under-thought. We worry
about “bowling alone” and about diminishing social cohesion but are the relations that
can fix this the ones of family, friends, neighborhood, community, nation, social media,
interest groups or religion? Comparative philosophy shows us that there is more than
one possible answer, and perhaps others that no great tradition has yet given.

There are also other gains to be had from cross-cultural philosophical encounters. First,
there would certainly appear to be some value in at least understanding the often
implicit philosophies that inform populations, benefits for both observers and those
observed.
NOW IN PRINT
The Stone Reader: Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments

An anthology of essays from The Times’s philosophy series, published by Liveright.

For instance, although Confucianism has deeply affected the Chinese outlook, after
decades of official disavowal of his philosophy, many even in China do not realize just
how instinctively Confucian their thinking is. Cross-cultural philosophy can therefore be
not just a way of understanding the cultures of others but of our own. This is particularly
important as countries begin to be affected by foreign values. In Japan, for instance,
aspects of Western individuality are becoming more apparent with some studies
suggesting that tradition, service and abrogation of self are less valued by youth.
(Although it should be noted that laments for the passing of old values are as old as
those values themselves.)

We should be careful, however, that an atmosphere of ecumenical respect does not

prevent real interrogation. To learn from other traditions one has to see the bad as well
as the good. The downside of less emphasis on individuality, for instance, can be an
excessive deference and a consequent lack of energy against injustice. When self is
defined relationally, that can also make it more constrained by society and less flexible.
That perhaps in part explains the relatively high suicide rate in Japan. North Korea is an
even starker reminder of how the relegation of self can be a tool for terrible things.

There are of course some elements of foreign philosophies that others can borrow from.
Jin Li’s work on the differences in child-rearing practices of Asian and Western parents,
for example, suggests that all children everywhere can benefit from being brought up to
think more about effort and their relations to others than their own abilities and
personal development.

We might also consider the value of Confucian harmony in politics, as Daniel Bell urges
us to do in his recent book “The China Model.” Harmony is found when our social
relations are good, and to be good they require openness about disagreement and
conflicts of interest. Harmony is not an aspiration for bland uniformity. As Bell points
out, “One of the most famous lines in the Analects of Confucius – known to most
educated Chinese – is that exemplary persons should pursue harmony but not
consensus (or uniformity).”

However, such appropriation has its limits because of what Isaiah Berlin called
the plurality of values, meaning that more than one set is justifiable but they may also be
incompatible. Gains from greater community, for example, result in losses for real
values arising from individual autonomy. If we therefore set out to decide which set of
values is right and which is wrong we often ask the wrong question. Both have their
losses and gains, and you can’t have one with the other.

The different conceptions of self in different cultures matter so much because they are
so subtle. If they really were staring us in the face we would know how to deal with
them. When people speak a foreign language, for example, you either need to get an
interpreter or learn it. But when people hold slightly different assumptions, it’s easy to
miss what is critically different. And if we miss that, we not only cut ourselves off from
others, we also cut ourselves off from useful ways of thinking about how we live.

Julian Baggini is the founding editor of The Philosophers’ Magazine. He is the author,
co-author or editor of more than 20 books including “The Virtues of the Table,” “The
Ego Trick” most recently, “Freedom Regained.”

Now in print: “The Stone Reader: Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments,” An

anthology of essays from The Times’s philosophy series, edited by Peter Catapano and
Simon Critchley, published by Liveright Books.

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