How to Strawson a Buddhist-Buddhaghosa ______

Journal of World Philosophies Book Review/173

MONIMA CHADHA Monash University, Australia ([email protected])

Jonardon Ganeri. Attention, Not Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017, pp. 392.

This review details Jonardon Ganeri’s laudable attempt to move Buddhist philosophy further into the center of contemporary philosophical debates about self, personhood, agency, action, perception, attention, and kinds of mental content. This book is a must read for any contemporary philosopher interested in these debates. My only concern is that Ganeri is reading too much of P.F. Strawson into Buddhghosa’s philosophy.

Key words: Jonardon Ganeri; attention; no-self; persons; consciousness; Theravāda Buddhism

Attention, Not Self is an important and timely book. It moves Buddhist philosophy further into the center of contemporary philosophical debates about self, personhood, agency, action, perception, attention, and kinds of mental content. The book is focused on commentaries attributed to a single philosopher, the fifth-century Theravāda monk Buddhaghosa. However, this book is much more than an exegesis of Buddhaghosa’s work. It is, in its own right, an original exploration of foundational issues in the philosophy of mind, consciousness, personhood, and self. Jonardon Ganeri’s book is rewarding and fascinating in many ways. I cannot do justice to its rich material, thematically organized into five sections, in the space of a review. One important accomplishment of this book is the rich detail it offers in every chapter and theme it covers, but this feature also makes it hard, and almost impossible, to offer a summary overview. So, rather than attempting an overview, I will list some notable contributions of this book before I mention some concerns about Ganeri’s methodology and philosophical license. The main claim of the book is that attention does the work traditionally attributed to the self. Attention replaces self (as the agent) in the explanation of perceptual experience, thought, action, and personal identity. Philosophically, the most significant contribution of the book is a philosophically adequate theory of persons in the absence of selves. There is no doubt that the issue is important for Buddhist philosophy, but its significance goes beyond that. The popularity of no-self views in contemporary philosophy, inspired by Parfit together with recent developments in cognitive sciences, makes this a pressing issue that demands attention from contemporary philosophers. Ganeri’s discussion in Section V on “Attention and Identity” offers a refreshingly original and groundbreaking account of persons that all no-self theorists must consider seriously and evaluate on the basis of its adequacy. Another important contribution of this book is to offer a new reading of the Buddhist idea that a human being is nothing over and above an aggregate of nāma-rūpa (often naïvely translated as mental and physical states or factors). Ganeri renders “nāma-rūpa” as “minded body” (18). This is a novel interpretation which provides a sophisticated, nuanced way of thinking about Buddhist theory of mind, consciousness, and persons and which does not run into objections faced by the naïve interpretation. Another major contribution of the book is to present a way to transform the rich theoretical vocabulary in Pāli commentarial tradition for ______Journal of World Philosophies 4 (Summer 2019): 173-176 Copyright © 2019 Monima Chadha. e-ISSN: 2474-1795 • http://scholarworks.iu.edu/iupjournals/index.php/jwp • doi: 10.2979/jourworlphil.4.1.10

Journal of World Philosophies Book Review/174 concepts of mind, consciousness, and conscious states into an empirically-informed philosophy of mind. This inter-theoretical translation of the central Pāli Buddhist notions of mind and consciousness into concepts familiar to those versed in contemporary discussions of consciousness in analytic philosophy and phenomenology is worth emphasizing because it lays important groundwork for a cross-cultural conception of philosophy of mind. It should help put to rest skeptical concerns about incommensurability and untranslatability of concepts across cultures. Ganeri masterfully works, in chapters 2 and 3, through the Pāli Buddhist jargon to propose carefully considered equivalents for concepts of mind, sensory contact, various kinds of attention, intention, phenomenal feel, cognitive and conative components of consciousness, etc. This provides the context for subsequent discussions in the book. I recommend these chapters as essential readings for anyone keen on exploring the original Pāli canon. Another important contribution is that the book engages with contemporary philosophical and political agendas. A fascinating example of the latter is Ganeri’s discussion of Aung San Suu Kyi as someone who sees herself guided or inspired by Buddhist values to inform a program of political action aiming at democracy and human rights (326). This is especially notable as many Buddhists, perhaps rightly, see Buddhism as being apolitical and ostensibly incompatible with western ideas like human rights and democracy. This is another reason why Ganeri spends considerable time and space developing a new theory of persons. Now onto some methodological concerns. Ganeri provides an account of the human mind inspired by the rich theoretical vocabulary in the Pāli tradition, which is transformed into a philosophy of mind with the assistance of tools, techniques, and empirical findings from the cognitive sciences (347). The resulting theory of mind is novel, and an admirable example of a genuine cross-cultural philosophy. This project requires and exercises considerable latitude in interpreting Buddhaghosa’s view. But one may wonder whether it does justice to Buddhaghosa’s philosophy, or to Buddhist philosophy more generally. Ganeri’s book, in his own words, transforms Buddhaghosa’s view so we look at it through the lens of contemporary cognitive sciences, but there is also a second transformation that Ganeri fails to acknowledge. Buddhaghosa’s view are presented as if they concur with Ganeri’s own philosophical commitments. As an example, consider the passage Ganeri quotes from Buddhaghosa:

Just as the butcher, while feeding the cow, bringing it to the shambles, keeping it tied up after bringing it there, slaughtering it, and seeing it slaughtered and dead, does not lose the identification of it as a ‘cow’ so long as he has not carved it up and divided it into parts; but when he has divided it up and is sitting there, he loses the identification of it as a ‘cow’ and the identification ‘meat’ occurs […] so too bhikkhu […] does not lose the identification ‘living being’ or ‘man’ or ‘person’ so long as he does not, by resolution of the compact into elements, review this body, however placed, however disposed, as consisting of elements. But when he does review it as consisting of elements, he loses the identification ‘living being’ and his mind establishes itself upon the elements (Path 348 [xi.30]).1

Anyone familiar with Buddhist philosophy, especially Buddhaghosa’s philosophy, will immediately recognize that the talk of identification in this passage draws attention to the Abhidharma distinction between two truths: ultimate truth and conventional truth. Ganeri does not even mention this distinction that is made use of in the Path; rather, he offers a fresh interpretation of this passage as a step towards endorsing his favored liberal naturalist stance. It is from this liberal naturalist stance that Pāli Buddhists, according to Ganeri, investigate the moral psychological properties of suffering and craving, which are to be understood within a manifestly normative framework of wrong belief and mistaken conception (298). It is far from obvious that these Buddhists or the Buddha himself were concerned with offering a naturalist ______Journal of World Philosophies 4 (Summer 2019): 173-176 Copyright © 2019 Monima Chadha. e-ISSN: 2474-1795 • http://scholarworks.iu.edu/iupjournals/index.php/jwp • doi: 10.2979/jourworlphil.4.1.10

Journal of World Philosophies Book Review/175 philosophy, let alone the defensible liberal naturalist form that has become more popular in recent times. Ganeri’s claim that the normative Buddhist description of the twelve-step process of the cycle of birth and rebirth makes Buddhist philosophy a liberal naturalism (298) is not justified. At most, Ganeri can claim that this rational reconstruction allows Buddhist philosophy to engage more readily with contemporary philosophical concerns, but saying that Buddhist philosophy, therefore, is liberal naturalist in its orientation is perhaps taking greater philosophical license than is warranted. Ganeri confidently calls his (and Buddhaghosa’s) view of the mind attentionalism, which is “the stance which lends attention centrality in explanatory projects in philosophy” (5). I do not doubt that attentionalism is a position worth developing in detail, as Ganeri does in the book, for it provides us an occasion to rethink the central concepts in philosophy of mind from this new perspective. My concern is that Buddhaghosa, and Abhidharma more generally, always speaks of all of the concomitants of consciousness-directedness, presence, felt evaluation identificatory type, intention, sustaining of cognitive boundaries, attentional placing, and attentional focusing—Buddhaghosa’s list, quoted on 37-8—as essential cognitive functions which are co- emergent, co-dependent, and conjoined (Kathāvattu 2337; Path 589 [xviii]) with every experience; I doubt that these Buddhist philosophers would think that attention alone has explanatory priority in philosophical projects. Indeed, if we look at Ganeri’s account of persons in chapter 14 “Identifying Persons,” it is affect (vedanā) rather than attention that is given a central role in his apophatic conception of persons. Contra to Ganeri’s stated aim in the book—that attention is “key to an account of persons and their identity” (1)—the chapter hardly mentions attention. In Ganeri’s words: “The concept of person in Pāli Buddhism is a negative one: it is indeed the concept of ‘those attributes which are the subject of our most humane concern with ourselves’ but only by being the concept of attributes concerning which there is no disgust. [All] there is to being the person one is, is the absence of disaffection” (303). This suggests that other concomitants of consciousness, especially affection or felt evaluation, also deserve an in-depth analysis and may indeed have explanatory priority in some domains. Similarly, I suspect intention might be central and have explanatory priority in the domain of moral and mental action. This is beautifully illustrated in Heim (2014).3 Rather than trying to decide whether it is attention or intention or felt evaluation that is both central and explanatory prior in diverse projects in philosophy of mind and action, epistemology of perception and justification, and the metaphysics of persons and their identity, it might be better to share the explanatory burden among the various concomitants of consciousness. This way of looking at the role of the concomitants of consciousness fits better with the Abhidharma and Buddhist philosophy insofar as it not just puts attention in the place of self, but rather denies the self, tout court. The denial of the self in Buddhism implies that there is no single thing that can do the work of the self. Ganeri’s project in the book suggests that attention can do the work of the self. In fact, he concedes this much in the introduction: “Attention precedes self in an explanation of what it is to be human, and if there’s anything defensible in the concept of self, for example as the expression of subjectivity that is at once experiential and normative, then it must itself be understood in terms of its relationship to attention” (4). This is then yet another attempt to reconstruct the self and understand it in terms of attention. I think, in the true spirit of Abhidharma philosophy, we should deny the self tout court, rather than offer a reconstruction of the self to avoid the counterintuitive consequences of the no-self view. Attention, Not Self is not the last word on the topic of no-self or attention in Buddhist philosophy of mind, but it is the state of the art today in cross-cultural and multi-disciplinary philosophy. For those deeply concerned with understanding the Buddhist conceptions of mind, those who want to genuinely engage with other philosophical traditions, and all those who take a stand on the place of mind and human beings in nature, this is essential reading. It not only

Journal of World Philosophies Book Review/176 deepens our understanding of Buddhist philosophy of mind, but also enlightens us on what it means to be a person even though we are not selves.

Monima Chadha is Head of Philosophy at Monash University, Australia. She works in cross- cultural philosophy and engages Abhidharma Buddhist Philosophy as a contender in contemporary debates in philosophy of mind and cognitive science.

1 trans. Ñāṇamoli Bhikkhu, The Path of Purification by Visuddhimagga by Bhadantācariya Buddhaghosa, 5th ed. (Kandy: Buddhist Publication Society, 1991). 2 Bimala Charan Law, Kathāvattu, The Debates Commentary (Oxford: Pali Text Society, 1940 [1915]). 3 Maria Heim, The Forerunner of All Things: Buddhaghosa on Mind, Intention, and Agency (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).