Brian Charles Dauth wrote:
>
> Dear List:
>
> Michael writes
>
> > Brian, you talk like "no-self" means you have no self, no perception,
> interpretation, and enactment of your individuality, your separateness and
> partial independence from other people and things. If that's your claim,
> you are wrong.
>
> That is not my claim. No-self means that human beings have no intrinsic
> nature, no soul if you will. Human beings are in a constant fluid state of
> change.
It has been a long time since I've encountered such a naive individualism as Michael expresses, but it is interesting to note that arguments for such an extreme and untenable a perspective tend to consist merely in a loud repetition that it is right and everyone else is wrong. Even an establishment scholar such as Wayne Booth can remark in passing that he can't accept immortality because he rejects the premise of the atomic individual which it posits.
The premise is omnipresent, but usually implicit rather than explicit. John Arthos, commenting on PL, claims "One of the great advantages of Milton's manner is that it largely frees the Christian view from the limited contexts of contemporary society and draws us instead to think of Adam and Eve as ourselves at any moment in history and at any place entering upon an unknown life." That is, Arthos simply assumes that we are monads, existing prior to an independently of history, which we enter only by an abstract act of will.
And of course the weird concept of "the individual" outside history _is_ an excellent image of the person in a world of commodities, in which relations between persons appear as relations between things.
When my younger daughter was about 10, she begin to grill me on whether I would have voted for Lincoln had I been alive in 1860. It took awhile, but even a ten year old was finally able to grasp that had I been alive in 1860 I wouldn't have been me, so there was no way to answer the question. There is simply no atomic self existing prior to and independently of the relationships and ongoing history in which we always already find ourselves enmeshed.
In the _Odyssey_ Odysseus, at his furthest removed from his _oikos_, trapped in the cave of Polyphemus, gives his name as "nobbdy" (Fitzgerald's translation of the nonsense term used in Greek). It was more than a ruse, for, separated from the whole web of relationships which constituted him as lord of his oikos, he was indeed "nobody," not real. And this seems to be also manifest in the non-being of the shades of the dead in Homer's afterworld.
Has Michael ever answered the question of how this mystical "self" of his can be the same at the age of 10 and the age of 35.....?
Whatever one thinks of Reismann, he and his co-writers certainly coined an illuminating phrase in the title of their work, "the lonely crowd." The kind of separated individual Michael (or Arthos) posits can only be an isolated cipher in a crowd -- variously classified as consumer, taxpayer, citizen, draft age, white, black, etc. The uniqueness of the concrete social person as opposed to the abstract individual is precisely in his/her _history_, in the ensenble of relations which separately from which he/she simply has no existence, not in some homonunculus at the controls but separate from the history.
I know nothing of Buddhism, and at 74 I don't think studying it would be a useful allocation of time I have left, but it does seem to me that "Human beings are in a constant fluid state of change" is a perfectly good materialist proposition, and quite incompatible with individualist metaphysics.
Carrol