> Perhaps you should explain what "no-self" means?
There is no permanent, fixed, unchanging, essential self.
> there is some interesting alternative views in both
Sankara's debates on samsara, as well as Heidegger's
thoughts on thrown-ness, etc).
Tell me more about Sankara. I tried Heidegger twice and was lost. I just ain't smart enough.
> The point about people taking responsibility -- at
worst its the go-to moral trope of the moderately
(or better) literate right-wing(er).
But it is also a crucial piece of Nagarjuna's concepts of wisdom and compassion.
Carrol:
> The direction of this is pretty much the same as that
of Marx's sixth thesis on Feuerbach, human essence as
"the ensemble of the social relations."
I think it interesting that so many thinkers come to some concept of no-self at different points in time.
> A class analysis which incorporates psychology can only
lead to identity politics in their most useless form; it
transforms class from a social relation to a mechanical and
static conditon which shapes individual psychologies.
But the social relations that give rise to class are brought about by people with psychologies in the first place (and those psychologies can then be altered by the class that the social relations created).
Brian