The ‘Scent’ of a Self: Buddhism and the First-Person Perspective
Buddhism famously denies the existence of the self. This is usually understood to mean that Buddhism denies the existence of a substantial self existing over and above the flow of conscious experience. But what of the purely experiential self accepted by the phenomenological tradition?
Does Buddhism deny the reflexive or first-personal character of conscious experience? In this paper, I argue that even the notion of an experiential self is ultimately incompatible with Buddhist teaching—in fact, deeply incompatible. According to Buddhism, I am an objectively existing
person (though not irreducibly real). However, when I conceive of myself as myself, I conceive of myself as having a subjective mode of existence. What Buddhism denies, then, is not that I exist, but that I exist in the subjective or first-person manner in which I conceive of myself as existing.
The problem I take up in this paper is to understand how Buddhism can simultaneously affirm the reflexivity of conscious experience and yet deny that the experiential self is a self.
Document Type: Research Article
Publication date: 01 August 2012
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