Jonardon Ganeri's book is about the use of the rhetorical strategy of postponement, concealment or deception in classical Indian sources. It also is about how Indian philosophers have tried to rationalize its use by claiming, for example, that a teaching is what Ganeri calls a ‘Trojan text’ designed to burn away attachments (Aryadeva); or a deconstruction aimed at the attempt to understand things conceptually (Dharmapala). Ganeri himself seems to do both: he talks about why concealment is employed in theorizing about the self, and he also seems to use the postponement tactic when presenting his own theory.
Ganeri's discussion turns on a distinction that he seems to ignore or neglect, the distinction between a religious and a metaphysical teaching. Consider, for example, how misleading Prajapati is in the Chandogya Upanishad when he agrees with Indra and Virocana that they see the imperishable self when they look at their reflections. When Indra comes back dissatisfied, he is told that the self is the dreamer, and when he comes back again, that the self is the dreamless sleeper. Finally, when Indra comes back still again, dissatisfied because none of these selves is imperishable, Prajapati tells him that the self within is unchangeable and imperishable, and that it is God. Although the text itself is not teaching these faulty conceptions of the self before it teaches the true one, it is significant that the teaching within the teaching does employ this rhetorical strategy of deception and postponement.
To understand the significance of the use of this strategy, we need to remind ourselves that the Upanishads, as priestly commentaries on Indian religious practices, address people who are engaged in sacrifices (and other observances) to their many gods. Since a revolutionary reconception of their religion is being taught, something must be done to overcome the resistance of the audience, and the tactic of a teaching within a teaching that features false teachings before the true one is given may be effective.
However, if we are to be convinced of the teaching, independent of a religious orientation, then secrecy or deception may be needed to hide this fact from us. That Ganeri does think of the teaching this way is evident from his asking such questions as, ‘if a great lesson of the Mahabharata is the need to fight illusion with illusion' (85), are we supposed to think that that work really is about how to treat everything in the world as illusory (except for God)? If we assume, as Ganeri (or many a philosopher in the Indian tradition) does, that the classic sources are teaching metaphysical ideas, then concealment seems to be needed to hide the fact that unimaginable changes in our everyday talk and thought are being proposed.
Or, consider that the Buddha's advocacy of skilful means seems to be a defense of the use of deceptive tactics. In the Lotus Sutra the Buddha provides an illustration of skilful means with the story of a father who lures his children from a burning house by deceiving them into thinking that wonderful toys await them outside. And in one of his sermons the Buddha compares his teachings to a raft a man builds and then discards when he uses it to cross to the other side of the river. But, if the teachings are disposable, that must mean that there must be something deceptive or even false about them, and so by trying to convince us to accept them he must be trying to deceive us.
However, that the Buddha is defending the use of deceptive rhetoric depends on the questionable assumption that what the Buddha is teaching are (metaphysical) truths (that have to be assimilated in order to achieve enlightenment). It is questionable because the Buddha is teaching how to achieve non-attachment or become compassionate, and his advocacy of the use of skilful means reflects his awareness of the fact that different students will benefit from different practices and different kinds of help with those practices. Rather than being true or false, deceitful or forthright, advice with practice is helpful or unhelpful. And when the student overcomes his problems with the help of the teachings, then he may no longer need them, and certainly should not become attached to them as having some permanent or ultimate value.
Ganeri saves for last his own theory of the self; why does he wait so long? I am not suggesting that there is anything deceptive about how he proceeds. On the contrary, his theory is sufficiently puzzling that it needs to be preceded, as it is, by a discussion of other theories and how they are problematic.
What is the self that Ganeri's theory is about? I ask this question because when I actually refer to the self I do not seem to be talking about anything that interests him. I may try to take better care of myself, which it would make no sense to refer to as taking care of my self, as if that is something distinct from me. And I may be self-centered because of being so preoccupied with my interests or needs at the expense of those of others, or attached to self, perhaps because of my resistance to change. I also can become alienated from myself or even be said to lack a self, because I am such a victim of conditioning that it is no longer possible to say that there is anything I really value. However, in none of these cases does there seem to be a need for a theory (of the self). Moreover, Ganeri does not allude to any of these references to ‘self’, and none seem to be of interest to him.
I submit that the self that interests Ganeri is the person that has thoughts, perceptions, feelings, that isn't taking care of herself, that lacks a self or is attached to self. So, the question Ganeri seems to be asking when he asks whether there is a self is whether I really exist, a question I cannot take seriously without losing my mind. I may not exist for another person, in the sense that I do not matter to her. But, I cannot take seriously the idea that I am a fictional character or a figment of your imagination unless I have gone mad.
Of course, I am being disingenuous because I know that Ganeri is thinking of the Cartesian self, i.e. what is left when we think away the body. I have a body, or so this thinking goes. But I am not my body. So who or what am I? Rather than consider any proposal as to what the I (self?) really is, I would want to question the idea that we can understand the idea that we have no body. However, for our present purposes, it suffices for me to remark on how problematic it is to operate on the methodological assumption that the Indian sources are talking about this Cartesian self.
The existence of an unchanging self also is supposed to explain my persisting as the same person over time or over different lifetimes, but I am not sure how its existence can explain it. I would hope that I am not the same person I was in my twenties, when I was very self-absorbed and quite obnoxious. Even so, I did the changing, and it hardly follows that there must be something that did not change, let alone something imperishable and desireless. And, the phenomenon of serial reincarnations is so puzzling, from a non-religious standpoint, that I do not see how we can tell when any explanation of it is satisfactory. Since Ganeri is interested in the self as the perceiver, or as the subject of experience, the problems with the idea of the self as what remains the same over a single or many lifetimes may not be significant. Even so, he should have been clearer about which conception of the self is the subject of his theory.
That theory, which he sees anticipated in the writings of certain Madhyamika Buddhists, such as Aryadeva and Candrakirti, is that the self is a certain stream of aggregates of (momentary) psychological and physical components, that include a performative appropriation of one or more of these elements. As Ganeri explains, ‘the appropriation in question is to be thought of as an activity of laying claim to, not the making of an assertion of ownership’ (202). The theory is offered as an improvement over (other) no-self theories that cannot account for how my pain is somehow differentiated from yours. According to Ganeri, my pain is mine because by saying that I am in pain I am thereby appropriating it as an atom of the stream of aggregates that is me.
However, Ganeri's theory retains what is problematic about the aggregate theory, namely, that if the objects of meditation are momentary or if the things around us can be analyzed into momentary elements, then we, or the familiar objects of the world, really are constituted by such elements. Buddhists are especially interested in the suffering caused, for example, by my resentment at being passed over for a promotion. However, that resentment does not seem to be the kind of thing that can be considered a momentary occurrence or event. Its object is (my evaluation of) something that already happened, and its being correctly identified as resentment depends not only on how I behave now, when I may not do or feel anything resentful, but also how I will behave. So, it seems wrong to think of ‘resentment-here-now’ as an element of the aggregate, when the very existence of my resentment depends on facts about me, my history, my behavior. Ganeri does allude to a problem of individuating the atoms of the aggregate stream; however, the problem I have in mind has to do with the very idea of there being such atoms.
Even if this problem can be overlooked, the ‘appropriation-performative’ of Ganeri's theory of the self is confusing. How is saying, ‘I am in pain’ a performative? Not only does saying it not make it so, but saying it does not appropriate anything. I may lay claim to a thought, in the sense of being the first to come up with it. But, for Ganeri, I still lay claim to it even if I did not originate it: I lay claim to it as mine. However, ownership or discovery does not even seem to be relevant when it comes to, for example, an after-image or migraine; how is the ownership of it supposed to be in dispute; how are we supposed to think of it in terms of ownership at all?
Ganeri concludes his paper on a ‘lighter note’ by discussing a Buddhist legend. Two demons are fighting over a corpse that one of them carried to an abandoned house. A man, who was staying the night at the house, confirms that the first demon carried the dead man there, whereupon the second demon becomes enraged and tears off the man's arm, only to have the first demon replace it with an arm of the corpse. The tearing and replacing continues until all of the man's body parts have been replaced in this way, and the demons devour all the replaced parts. After they leave, the man meets a group of monks and asks them whether or not he exists. ‘Who are you?’ they ask. He replies that he does not know even whether he is a ‘person’ or a ‘non-person’. Whereupon he is told that he recognizes the non-existence of the I, and so will easily attain the ‘state of liberation’.
Ganeri says that the man learns ‘how to let go of his attachments.’ And he concludes, ‘As a moral exercise, reading the story leads us to a philosophical insight about ourselves, and that encourages us too to “sever” our attachments and achieve peace of mind’ (215). The insight is that since we are nothing more than aggregates, when two of the aggregates have such different elements, it is unclear which, if any, stream of aggregates is to be (conventionally) designated as the self.
However, Ganeri's reading seems problematic. If we can imagine that a person would survive this wholesale replacement of his parts, then from the third person perspective we would have to describe him as the person who had the parts of the dead man substituted for his own parts. And from the first person perspective the man, if he has not gone mad, would have to think something comparable, namely, that he survived having all his parts replaced. Nothing in the story suggests that the man does not know who he is because he has amnesia. Moreover, his question about whether he is a ‘person’ seems very confused, except as an expression of derangement, if only because it is unclear what he could be otherwise. Ganeri understands him to be asking the question that a metaphysician who believes in the aggregate-theory would ask, and so the value of the story in teaching the truth of this metaphysics seems questionable.
A different reading of the story suggests itself that is based on an appreciation of its use of skilful means. The story has a kind of ghoulish humor that is due to the fact that although the man suffers such traumatic losses, he is concerned only with whether he is a person, and, if so, who he is. However, it is not directed at the few of us who have received multiple organ transplants, but at all of us who have lived through various changes in our circumstances or lives. I read it as a parable about our need to accept change even when our very identity seems to be threatened by it.
I have saved for last some favorable remarks. Ganeri's book is an excellent example of what comparative philosophy can be at its best. By focusing on rhetorical strategies of concealment and what Indian thinkers have had to say about them he makes these writing available to the philosophical reader, and he makes them come alive. And by referring to writings by western philosophers he helps explain and illuminate what he has to say both about the rhetorical strategies of concealment, and about the self.
Was I wrong to conceal my admiration for the book? If I could avoid seeming to be sly or even deceptive by doing so, I would like to say that only after I have demonstrated how Ganeri has given me so much to think about is my expression of admiration believable.
