Eilís Ward writes: In his essay on ideas of selfhood and egocide in philosophical thought (Dublin Review of Books, Autumn 2024), Joseph Rivera asks why my book Self takes a leap from critique of neoliberal selfhood to Buddhist accounts of the same. A large part of the answer comes from my years teaching politics in the University of Galway where students seemed unable to imagine a world beyond neoliberalism. It was the sea in which they swam. Buddhist thought, as rank outsider, seemed to me to offer a fruitful ground from which to critique neo-liberal selfhood especially, and, better still, to offer a liberatory alternative.
But his essay raises issues more interesting by far and is a welcome offering. I am not sure, however, that I would accept its foundational conflation of ‘ego’ with ‘self’. The complex history of these two concepts throughout the Western psychological tradition would question this reduction, though Rivera makes an interesting case for its validity. For Freud, for instance, the ego was one part of the tripartite structure of the human psyche. Jungian therapy thinks about the self and the ego on an axis and has posited ego-death as a technique for saving the self. Here, egocide is an alternative to suicide, ensuring survival of the self.
As for Buddhist psychology, it has little purchase on the concept of ego, except perhaps when speaking of the everyday understanding of the ego as related to narcissism, self-obsession etc. In this sense, Rivera and Buddhism are of one mind: a ‘toxic ego’ is indeed anathema to a moral life, or, in Buddhist terms, is likely to rupture the bonds between people and produce more suffering for everyone, including the egotist.
Rivera’s essay seems to suggests a strict binary in relation to the very idea of a self: it is either an illusion or it is real. Buddhist thought, and Zen thought, on which Self is based, is indeed tricky here, if not slippery, but, not surprisingly, Zen repudiates this dualism, as it does all dualistic thinking. What Zen troubles is the idea, foundational in the Western cannon, that each of us has, somewhere inside us, a bit that is eternal, fixed, permanent and unique to each one of us: our essence. This canonical belief echoes the so-far inconclusive search in the sciences for the smallest particle, the discrete thing, that is at the base of life. In relation to humans, we name this discrete idea differently; our soul, our spirit, our true self, or, when cashed out in the neoliberal marketplace our unique ‘brand’.
Zen offers different terms and concepts for thinking through this debate. Perhaps the most straightforward is that which conceives of ourselves as ‘empty’ of fixity, of eternality, of essence. This emptiness is, however, inseparable from what Tich Nhat Hanh has called ‘inter-being’, sometimes more clunkily called ‘dependent origination’ or ‘dependent co-arising’: the idea that each of us is, at the same time, full of everything and everyone else, in the immediacy of each moment’s dynamism and shaped by our history, culture, language, DNA, childhood socialisation and more besides. Emptiness is simultaneously fullness. There is nothing illusionary about this and Zen practitioners are invited to test these ideas for themselves. And in meditation practice we may see that all of these dimensions of selfhood are too, without permanence, empty of fixity, operating as a dynamic flux, and a particular flux that brings forth uniqueness in personhood.
Rivera quotes Allen Ginsberg’s ‘big goof’ – the idea of a fixed, static self – to support a part of his argument. Ginsberg was a practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism, and his ‘big goof’ sounds just like what a Tibetan or a Zen practitioner would be expected to say: it is the notion that we all have a fixed, static, categorisable, discrete and immutable self that is an illusion. Another way of conceiving this goof, is as the ‘myth of the isolated mind’, understood in both Buddhism and in psychoanalytic theory as a defence against anxiety caused by the transient nature of all life, by the very inevitability of our death.
What Zen asks of practitioners is to let go of our attachment to this goof, or, this myth. Hence, teachers often speak of ‘opening up to’, or ‘releasing into’ the reality of our inter-being, ever present behind and around it. No murder, no violence, no killing off of any kind is required. Rather, it may be conceived of as a continuous, bottomless softening.
It is of no great importance to these ideas, but for the record, I am not in fact a philosopher, nor indeed a sociologist, as is stated in the essay. I don’t know if these lacks should preclude Self from belonging to the category of philosophical texts, but, I confess, my ego was tickled by its inclusion therein, reminding me that even after many years of practice, it is alive and doing its job, in accordance with all beings.
19/10/2024
