Individuality and Subjectivity

Is there any concept of the difference between individuality and subjectivity in Indian philosophy?
That is, does the critique of the concept of a subject also embed a critique of any possible individuality? Are individuality and subjectivity well distinguished in Western philosophy in general? And in Western common sense?

I just stumbled in this statement by Birgit Kellner (in her contribution to Hans-Dieter Klein's Der Begriff der Seele in der Philosophiegeschichte, 2005):

[…] hier wird kein Unterschied gemacht zwischen personenbezogenen Termen wie Eigennamen , "Person" oder "Seele", und dem Personalpronomen "ich" –eine Differenzierung von Subjektivität und Individualität ist zumindest in diesem Bereich buddhistischer Philosophie nicht auszumachen (B. Kellner, Der Begriff der Seele in der buddhistischen Philosophie, p. 192).

Kellner discusses here Vasubandhu's critique of the ātman in his Abhidharmakośa (chapter pudgalapratiṣedha) but her point is perhaps more general. In fact, whenever the aham ("I") is considered as different from the ātman, this is rather out of different concerns, primarily because it is a theorised concept (a vikalpa), and not something which could be directly and intuitively grasped.

Subject, no subject and their consequences on one's happiness

Let me try an experiment in applied philosophy: is one's sense of being a subject enduring through time going to enhance one's future happiness or not? I'll sketch the two options in a rather extreme way:

1: Enduring Subject. I have an excellent memory and my memories play a major role in shaping my actual life. I am also a self-narrator: I regularly rehearse and revise my interpretation of my life. I am a great planner and knit up my life with long-term projects. In fact, I enjoy remembering, rethinking and understanding past events and I enjoy even more thinking about the future and trying to do my best in order to achieve what I would like to (the first part of this description has been adapted from Galen Strawson, 'The Self', pp.14-15). I can also add that I have somehow been trained to be one, insofar as my father writes/used to write a diary and likes/used to like to talk about his past life and to 'understand' it. My mother does/did it much less, but appreciates/appreciated it.

Nonetheless, I never thought of that as a particular ability, since it seems spontaneous to me to plan and remember. I also tend to think that this made possible many important decisions in my life —the ones I am now happy about. For instance, if I had not been a planner, if I had just jumped from one thing to the other (again, Strawson), I would not have decided to interrupt my South Asian studies in order to study Western Philosophy. I did it because my long term project was to study Indian philosophy and, hence, I knew I needed a better philosophical training.

People who do not remember, are likely –again, in my opinion– not to learn from their mistakes and, hence, to repeat them again and again. They might marry beautiful women because they are at first sight fascinated by beauty, only to then understand that they in fact would have preferred a caring one. Similarly, people who do not plan may not be able to finish their studies or to engage in whatever activity is not at every moment rewarding –and this category includes, in my opinion, most really significant jobs.

2. Momentary Subject. Other people, and G.Strawson claims to be one, "have a very poor personal memory. And it may not be simply poor. It may also be highly quiescent, and almost never intrude spontaneously into their current thought. […] They have no early ambition, no later sense of vocation […]. Some merely go from one thing to another". More in detail, Strawson avows that "Using 'Me*' to express this fundamental way in which I think of myself, […] I can accurately express my experience by saying that I do not think of Me* as being something in the future. It is also accurate fo shift the 'not', and say, more strongly, that what I think of as being in the future is not Me*". Assuming that such an extreme case is possible, this would lead to some unwanted consequences, such as the ones I listed above (but also teeth cavity: since one does not identify with the subject who will later experience pain, why should one care about cleaning one's teeth?). On the other hand, it might have its pros: since one does not think of oneself as existing in the future, one is not afraid of examinations, loss of one's job, loosing a beloved person, etc. Further, one does not regret past events, nor does one have to bother about planning one's future, especially if this involves painful decisions. More radically, a Buddhist might argue that one is many steps ahead in the path away from 'I' and 'mine'.

I know, the analysis is too crude, especially insofar as (in 1) it presupposes the existence of a self when it describes the possible shortcomings of position 2. To say the least, one might argue that it is senseless to try to learn from one's mistakes, since there is no special link between, e.g., 'my' mistakes when I was 13 and 'my' mistakes now. Instead, it might be better to investigate on 'common mistakes' of people in a certain age-group or social class, etc.

What do readers think? I'm curious to know about insights from the latter kind of experience.

Memory and an enduring self

The phenomenon of Memory seems to me perhaps the biggest obstacle to the theory that there is no enduring self. If there is no such one, how could one be aware of one's memories?

Kant's idea of the 'elastic ball' effect, suggests that a self at time t1 could cause to be a self at time t2 and so on, until one reaches one's present self, which has been caused by a chain of preceding 'selves' and which, only because of that, shares many characteristics with them. I sense that some Buddhist arguments about the self might be similar to this one.

Both sorts of argument can explain the fact that the 'subject' at t1234 can remember something which happened at the 'subject' at t678. But what they fail to explain, I am afraid, is how is the phenomenon of memory possible. In memory one is not just aware of a past event. One is aware of is as past. Hence, one is at the same time aware of oneself in the present moment, no matter how dimly, of the oneself one used to be, and of their identity. Memory, in short, is not just a repetition of a past experience. It adds to the repetition of this past experience the sense that it is past and that it is one's own. Eduard Marbach observed (in his contribution to Exploring the Self, 2000) that this makes memory different from hallucination or dream.

Śaiva authors (I am thinking especially at Utpaladeva's vivṛti on his Īśvarapratyabhijñākārikā + vṛtti) elaborated a lot on memory as evidence for an enduring self. However, as far as I know, they did not derive from that the logical consequence that memory is a distinct instrument of knowledge, since it does not just repeat the previous event, but adds to this repetition the knowledge that it is of a past event.

Agenthood and Independence

Following a previous discussion (see here), let me return to the topic of agenthood and how it is conceived by Mīmāṃsakas. I just came across a statement of Prabhākara's commentator, Śālikanātha, who writes that "agenthood is sovereignty" (kartṛtvam īśvaratvam, Ṛjuvimalā ad Bṛhatī 6.1.1.). A few pages before, he and Prabhākara discussed about "sovereignty" over an act as the fact of being the Master of that act (svāmin), just like one can be the Master of a village. Prabhākara further claimed that this amounts to have the right (adhikāra) over that act. This all seems to point to the fact that an agent is someone who is able/free to act. I guess some reader may think that "agent" may well not have its grammatical meaning here, but my point is exactly that Mīmāṃsakas interpreted kārakas according to their kāraka-status (karaṇa is that through which, karman is the object desired, kartṛ is the agent).

Are unconnected thoughts possible?

Some philosophers conclude that there is no persistent self out of the fact that our thoughts (in a loose sense of the term) follow each other without any necessary connection to the former ones. And, even if there is some connection, this can be due just to the previous thought and not to the fact that both belong to the same subject (cf Kant's "elastic ball" argument while discussing the Third Paralogism, KrV, A 363-4). For instance, Galen Strawson writes:

Consider the diachronic case first: imagine that a series of seff-conscious thoughts or 'I-thoughts' occurs in the same brain, one at a time, while none of them ever involves any awareness of any thought earlier … than itself. […]

Some may want to say that there is nevertheless a single thinker, simply because a single brain is the locus of all thoughts. But why should the fact of non-mental diachronic singlesess decisively overrule the natural judgement that there is no plausible candidate for a diachronically single mental self in this case? ('The Self' in Models of the Self, edited by Gallagher and Shear, 1999)

I remember an acquaintance of mine who, after a training in Vipassana meditation, could described her mind as "pauselessly transmitting stupid spots as a popular radio". However, I wonder whether there can be a similar series of unconnected thoughts. Are thoughts so 'subject-independent' (I'm sorry if this could seem to beg the question)? Is 'my' thought of /pleasure while eating a vanilla ice cream/ the same as yours, given the same sensorial feeling? Let us for instance assume that I am an Italian man, who has been eating ice creams all his life long and you a Japanese chap who never had the pleasure of a home-made ice cream. Isn't my emotion (or "thought") deeply mine since it is connected with my memories of happy days eating ice creams? Isn't yours different in a significant way?

In Pramāṇavāda terms, one might object that the basic thought is the same, whereas just the following vikalpas differ. This might be true. But isn't it the case that the vikalpas are unavoidably part of the flux of consciousness? Can there ever be a series of vikalpa-less "thoughts", which, hence, bear no specific link to their subject?

SESMET and Buddhist "selves"

Is there any significant difference between the claim that there is no-self (anātman) and that the self is nothing more than the instantaneous, self-aware experience of a patch of blue, an emotion, etc.?

I am currently reading and enjoying several of Galen Strawson's articles on the self (Strawson 1997, 1999, 2000). In the most recent among the ones I read (his contribution to Zahavi's Exploring the Self, 2000), Strawson somehow adjusts his previous theses and states:

I claim that it is in the limiting case possible for a being to lack any significant sense of itself as an agent, and as something that has a personality, and as somehting that has long-term persistence, and still experience itself as a self or mental subject at a given time.

Many disagree … I won't say more about it now, except to note that there are recognized pathologies that can involve the weakening or loss of all three of these aspects of ordinary human self-experience –aboulia, apraxia, depersonalization, passivity phenomena in schizophrenia, autism, and loss of time sense…. [p.46]

I want now to consider the ontological question:… Do there in fact exist (1) subjects of experience that are (4) single (3) mental (2) things during any gap-free period of experience, whether or not they can persist across gaps in experience?

I think there are. … I will call them SESMETs (Subjects of Experience that are Single MEntal Things). I think that gap-free periods of experience are always short in the human case… So I think that many SESMETs exist in the case of a human being. In all essentials, in fact, I agree with William James… He holds that "the same brain may subserve many conscious selves" that are entirely distinct —numerically distinct— substances. […] On this view the apparent continuity of our conscious experience […] derives from the fact that SESMETs "appropriate" […] the experiential content of their predecessors´ experiences. They do so in a way that is entirely unsurprising in sofar as they arise […] from brain conditions that have considerable similarity from moment to moment even as they change.

I understand that the reference to the brain and to the SESMET as a "thing" could not be endorsed by modern and classical Buddhists. But what about the rest of the claim? Is this more similar than my preceding, Humean proposal, to the Pramāṇavādin conception of the self? (I refer to the Pramāṇavādins since they developed a consistent philosophy of Buddhism).

As far as I am concerned, I share the doubt Strawson attributes to a hypothetical reader (p.48): even if they were true, these SESMETs seem to be useless as they are too far away from our experience of ourselves.

Subject, agent, language and reality

In his Tantrarahasya, Rāmānujācārya discusses various interpretations of Kumārila's theory of linguistic signification as regards prescriptive sentences (e.g. "The one who desires heaven should sacrifice"). Why do these sentences impel one to act? –asks Kumārila. It is noteworthy that the Mīmāṃsā account does not presuppose a speaker as a necessary condition and focuses instead on the listener's point of view. In the passage below, Rāmānujācārya investigates about one of the possible ways of constructing Kumārila's theory, namely, that the prescriptive force (the force expressed by prescriptive sentences and inducing one to act, in Sanskrit śabdabhāvanā, see here) is a cognition. But if it so, asks an objector, how can a linguistic unit (śabda), which is usually the object of a cognition, be at the same time its instrument? Rāmānujācārya's answer is that one should not conflate the way one expresses things (language) and the way things are (reality). One can express the same action in different ways, but this does not affect the nature of the action. Hence, that the word appears as object and as instrument of the cognition in different sentences is no hindrance. Similarly, the axe can be an instrument (if one says "I fell the tree with an axe") or an object ("I lower the axe").

This point leads him to an interesting excursus on kārakas (linguistic functions, cf. Chomsky) from the Mīmāṃsā point of view. Rāmānujācārya either slightly modifies or re-interprets Pāṇini's definitions (see, especially, his understanding of svatantrakartā which in Pāṇini identifies the "subject" as independent of any semantic burden, whereas in Rāmānujācārya stresses its independence as for the initiation of the action).

Unfortunately, Mīmāṃsakas do not share Pāṇini's concern in distinguishing kārakas from vibhaktis (i.e., logical functions from the case-endings expressing them).

[UP:] «But if a cognition (jñāna) were the denotative (abhidhā) function (vyāpāra), then how could the word (śabda) –which is the syntactical object (karman) in regard to a cognition (e.g., “Devadatta knows a word”)– be [at the same time] the instrument (karaṇa) with respect to this [denotative] function (vyāpāra)? Indeed, the usage (prayoga) “Devadatta understands a meaning by means of a word (śabda)” is [commonly] seen [so, the word is commonly known to be the cognition's instrument, and how can it be both instrument and object?]».

[PP/Bhāṭṭa:] «It [must] be said [in reply]: The distinct settlement (vyavasthā) of the factors of action (kāraka) like object, instrument, agent [is not made] with respect to the general (mātra) form (rūpa) of the activity (vyāpāra), rather it is made with respect to the delimitation (avacchid-) of the activity (vyāpāra) by means of this or that result,

even though the own nature (svarūpa) of the activity is the same. To elaborate, when precisely (eva) that cognition which [has been previously expressed as] having the word (śabda) as syntactical object (karman), is delimited (avacchid-) by a result characterised as the apprehension (pratipatti) of the meaning, and includes (vyāp-) the word (śabda) (in sentences such as “she knows that meaning through that word”), then the word (śabda) is an instrument because it is included in the activity (vyāpāra) initiated (pravṛt-) for another purpose (i.e., it is an instrument because it is necessarily part –vyāp– of the action though not being the most desired element of it, the object). The meaning is, on the other hand, the syntactical object (karman) because it is the substratum of the action’s result. And then that cognition receives the title (vyapadeśa) of “designation” (abhidhā) because it (the title “designation”) has been comprehensively learnt (vyutpatti) in this regard (that is, in regard to what has as its syntactical object the apprehension of a meaning). When, on the other hand, one wishes to express (vivakṣā) the autonomy (svātantrya) [of the word] with regard to the function (vyāpāra) [of denoting], then the word (śabda) is the agent which designates (abhidhā) the meaning (and in fact the agent is defined in the Aṣṭādhyāyī as svatantra, “autonomous”). But when just this word (śabda) is made by the cognition into [its] content (viṣaya), then the word, partaking (bhaj-) of the result (because the word is the substratum of the result, through the connection of word and meaning), i.e., the displaying of the meaning, is the syntactical object (karman), like in “she knows [p.46] the word (śabda)”. Then, indeed, the cognition does not partake of (bhaj-) the title (vyapadeśa) “designation” (abhidhā). Rather, it must be simply called “cognition”, because the word (śabda) “designation” has not been learnt (vyutpatti) with regard to that (knowledge of the word, not of the meaning). Like an axe: like an axe is the syntactical object (karman) in regard to raising (udyamana) and sinking. When raising and sinking are delimited (avacchid-) by the result of splitting into two, and the axe is included (vyāp-) by them, then the axe is an instrument (karaṇa) because of being included in an activity (vyāpāra) initiated (pravṛt-) for another purpose (artha) (that is, chopping the tree). The wood-logs, instead, are the syntactical object (karman), since they are the substratum (āśraya) of the action’s (kriyā) result. And raising and sinking, then, receive the title of “cutting”, since [the word “cutting”] has been learnt (vyutpatti) in their regard. However, when in regard to this same function (vyāpāra) one wishes to express [the axe's] autonomy then [the axe] appears as the agent, as in “the axe cuts the wood-logs”. When on the other hand precisely those raising and sinking are designated (abhidhā) by “he raises” and “he sinks”, expressing (vācin) [an action] delimited by a result which is the conjunction (saṃyoga) [of the axe] with the upper or lower space-region, then the axe is the syntactical object (karman), partaking of (bhaj-) the result, i.e., [its] union with this or that (region), like in “he raises [and] sinks the axe”. Therefore, it must be considered (dṛś) that the activities (vyāpāra) expressed (vac-) by this or that verbal root (dhātu) (“to raise”, “to sink”, and “to cut”) –though sharing a single (prātisvika) own nature (svarūpa), (i.e., chopping a tree)– are the cause of a distinct settlement (vyavasthā) of these factors of action (kāraka) because of a different delimitation (avacchid-) by means of this or that action's result, and that they (activities) are expressed (vac-) by this or that word (śabda) [again, according to the different delimitation through this or that result, and not because of the activity expressed by the verbal roots themselves, which remains the same]. If, for a distinct settlement (vyavasthā) of the factors of action (kāraka), merely (mātra) the own nature (svarūpa) of the activity (vyāpāra) would be required (apekṣ-), the action (kriyā) designated as “he walks” could become transitive (sakarmika) like the one designated as “he goes (which can have a prāpya karman, and hence be transitive.)”,

or the action “he goes” may become intransitive (akarmaka), and there would not be any distinction (vyavasthā) in use (prayoga) (that is, “he walks” and “he goes” describe the same activity, so if it were just up to the activity itself, they would be precisely the same and there would not be any difference in their employment). [The above explained procedure] can be applied (yuj-) accordingly (yathāsambhavam) also when the denotative (abhidhā) function (vyāpāra) is characterised (lakṣana) as a mnestic trace (saṃskāra). Among the [action factors], agent (kartṛ), object (karman) and instrument (karaṇa) are factors of action (kāraka) reciprocally distinguished (pravibhakta). The agent is autonomous (svatantra) in regard to the action (kriyā), the syntactical object is endowed with the result of the action, the instrument is [necessarily] included in an action (kriyā) which has been initiated (pravṛt-) for another purpose (artha). The intrinsic characters (svabhāva) of dative, ablative and locative, on the contrary, are intermixed with [those of] the [two] factors of action (kāraka) agent, and [syntactical object]. For instance, the locative is the the substratum of either the agent or the object, like “Devadatta sits on the mat (kaṭa), he cooks rice in the saucepan”. The dative is what is held in view through the object, e.g. “he gives a cow to [his] teacher”. [Finally,] the ablative is the general limit (avadhi) [of the action] of the agent (kartṛ) factor (kāraka), e.g., “a leave falls from the tree”. [The distinct settlement of the action factors] must be considered in this way, according to what is suitable in each case (yathāsambhavam)».