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The Western, Buddhist, and Upanishadic Answers to the Problem of the Self

Man looking in the mirro

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Your body and mind have changed enormously in the course of your life, and will continue to change. Yet, convention has you, from the baby to the retiree, as the same person.

But let’s not be so conventional. Let’s take the time to ask: what is a ‘person’, and what would it take for a person no longer to be that same person? Are you the same, identical person at all times? Are you the same person that you were a minute, a day, a year, ten years ago? If so, what is the abiding factor?

The English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) famously defined a person as ‘a thinking, intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places.’ According to this definition, you are a person because you can think about yourself in the past, future, and conditional, and in a variety of different places: ‘Last month I could have won the lottery, if only I had bought a ticket.’ 

This may tell us what it takes to be a person, but it does not tell us what constitutes the person—or what it is that makes you this self-conscious mental being. Is it your body, your brain, your ‘soul’?

Three Thought Experiments

Imagine, God forbid, that you have a serious accident that leaves you lying brain-dead on a hospital bed. Your body is being kept functioning, but you are no longer self-conscious nor can you ever be again. Are you, in that permanent brain-dead state, still a person? If not, then your physical body cannot be that which makes you a person. And if it is not your physical body, the obvious candidate is your brain or mind.

Some philosophers have argued that you remain the same person because your body or brain remains the same body or brain, in the sense that it is spatiotemporally continuous (continuous in space and time). Others have argued that you remain the same person because you are psychologically continuous, that is, because your later mental states derive or descend from your earlier mental states.

To help decide this problem, the American philosopher Sydney Shoemaker (1931-2022) asked us to imagine that science has advanced to such an extent that brain transplants are now possible. On the same morning, two men, Mr. Brown and Mr. Robinson, each have their brain removed and operated upon. However, a poorly trained assistant inadvertently puts Brown’s brain into Robinson’s head, and Robinson’s brain into Brown’s head. One of these men dies, but the other—say the one with Brown’s brain and Robinson’s body (let’s call him ‘Brownson’)—eventually regains consciousness. When asked his name he replies, ‘Brown.’ Subsequently, he is able to recognise Brown’s wife and family and to relate Brown’s childhood memories, but he cannot recognise Robinson’s wife and family nor relate Robinson’s childhood memories.

Who then is this man Brownson with Brown’s brain and Robinson’s body? If he is Brown, as most people would argue, this would confirm our earlier intuition that a person cannot be reduced to a body. This leaves us with two possibilities: Either Brownson is Brown because he has Brown’s brain, or he is Brown because he is psychologically continuous with Brown.

To decide between these two possibilities, let us push our thought experiment further still. As people can survive with extensive damage to one cerebral hemisphere, let us imagine that Brownson’s brain (or indeed anyone’s brain, say Smith’s) is divided into two hemispheres and that each hemisphere is transplanted into a brainless body. After the operation, two people awake who are both psychologically continuous with Smith, and who have the same character and memories as Smith.

Although both people are psychologically continuous with Smith, they cannot both be Smith—or, by the transitivity of identity, they would also be each other! Moreover, from the moment they awake, their lives and experiences will begin to diverge.

Our attempt to decide between brain and psychological continuity as the seat of personal identity has landed us in an even deeper difficulty: whereas both brain and psychological continuity seem capable of division, personal identity is not.

Parfit and the Pearl of Self

In considering this kind of ‘fission’ thought experiment, the Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit (1942-2017) argued that personal identity may not be what matters.

Because neither of the two people who acquired one of Smith’s brain hemispheres is Smith, Smith cannot be said to have survived the fission of his brain. Yet, everything that matters about Smith—his memories, character, intentions, relations—has survived in both of the transplantees. And it would be absurd to destroy one of the transplantees simply so that we could preserve numerical identity and claim that Smith had survived.

For Parfit, there is no further fact about personal identity, no ‘pearl of self’ that passes intact from one moment, or body, to the next. What matters is not identity but continuity.

This sounds radical. But to me, who has written on Indian philosophy, it rings a bell—or even two.

The Buddhist Take

More than two thousand years before Locke, Shoemaker, and Parfit, the Buddha had argued that what we take to be the self is composed of five elements (skandhas), namely, body, sensation, perception, will, and consciousness. The five skandhas are in a constant state of flux but together create the illusion of integrity and continuity, that is, the illusion of the self.

This explains why, when I try to become aware of myself, I can only ever become aware of such and such perception, such and such sensation, or such and such thought, but never of any actual, core self.

The death of the bodily self leads to the disaggregation of the skandhas and to their re-aggregation into another not-self, which is neither identical to nor entirely different from the previous one, but forms part of a causal continuum with it. An analogy that is often offered to describe this process of rebirth is that of a flame, fuelled by desire, passing from one candle to the next.

The cycle of rebirth can only be broken by transcending our subjective and distorted image of the world, which is built around the ‘I am’ conceit. This, then, is nibbana, or, in Sanskrit rather than Pali, nirvana.

Nirvana, as I see it, rests on the understanding that consciousness is a sequence of conscious moments rather than the continuous, unbroken consciousness of the ‘I am’ conceit. This understanding, so long as it can be maintained, amounts to freedom from the self.

The Upanishadic Take

While Parfit and the Buddha have much in common, the Upanishadic tradition adopts a different approach.

When I look for my self, I find my body, sensation, perception, and so on. The Buddhist concludes that, since none of these is permanent, there can be no permanent self. But the Upanishadic sage might ask: who, or what, is aware of all these things?

The answer of the Upanishads is the Atman, or true Self: not the skandhas, which wax and wane, but the consciousness that is aware of them. Just like the eye cannot see itself, though it sees all else, so this ‘witness consciousness’ cannot observe itself. But through every change, it is the one constant.

Whereas the Buddhist concludes that there is no enduring self, the Upanishadic sage concludes that we have been looking for it in the wrong place. The self is not something that we experience, but that by which we experience. It is not an actor on the stage, but the prince watching from behind the curtain.

Two birds sitting in a tree
The jiva and Atman, sitting in a tree

East and West

We began by asking what, from baby to retiree, makes you the same person. The body could not provide the answer, while brain and psychological continuity proved capable of division. Parfit’s solution was to question the question: beyond continuity, there is no further fact of personal identity.

The Buddhist arrives, by a very different route, at essentially the same conclusion. What we call the self is a succession of changing states and processes, held together by causal continuity and the ‘I am’ conceit. Liberation lies not in finding the self, but in freeing ourselves from it. To ‘know yourself’ is, paradoxically, to know that there is no self to know.

The Upanishadic sage, though acutely aware of the problem, succeeds in salvaging the abiding self. No abiding self can be found among the changeable contents of consciousness, because the true Self is not one of those contents, and not changeable.

All three traditions have noticed that the self cannot be found among the contents of experience. From this, the Western tradition and Buddhism conclude that there is no self. The Hindu tradition preserves the self by distinguishing between the personal self, or jiva, and the universal Self, or Atman. Where the jiva is attached, ever-changing, and mortal, the Atman is detached, steadfast, and immortal, and of a kind with God, or Brahman. The precise relationship between Atman and Brahman is a major theme, and dividing line, in Hindu philosophy.

In the Shvetashvatara Upanishad, the jiva and Atman are compared to two inseparable birds sitting in a tree (the body). One bird, the jiva, gorges on the sweet and bitter fruits of the tree, while the other bird, tasting of neither, calmly looks on.

We can never catch the second bird, because it is the one that is looking. And so it remains forever elusive. But if the Upanishadic vision is correct, to know that bird is to know both ourselves and God, and, as in Buddhism, to transcend the distinction between self and other.

In the West, we tend to look upon the personal self as a problem to be solved; in India, as the key to salvation.

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With an Account of How Freedom Might Sometimes Be Possible for Some

Yogi in meditation
Do you have enough free will to read this essay?

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

The problem of free will has been described as ‘the most difficult and pressing problem in all of philosophy’—so I suggest you take your time over this essay.

In philosophy, so-called libertarians defend the kind of free will that the vast majority of people take for granted, that is, the kind of free will that makes us responsible for our choices, and thus for our lives, in a deep and meaningful sense.

However, libertarians are a minority among philosophers, who, for the most part, believe that this kind of free will is not possible or even intelligible, and that, like myth or magic (which is, in a sense, unfettered free will), it has no place in our modern, rational-scientific picture of the universe.

How could something that is so deeply ingrained in our psyche and that pervades every aspect of our lives be nothing more than a product of our minds? As the writer Isaac Singer (d. 1991) once quipped, ‘We must believe in free will—we have no other choice.’ Be this as it may, can a belief in free will, that is, in libertarian free will, be justified on rational grounds?

From the outset, it is important to distinguish the libertarian in matters of free will from the libertarian in matters of politics, who believes, broadly, that the role of government ought to be circumscribed to protecting individual liberties, at least insofar as those liberties do not conflict with the liberties of others. Although the free will libertarian need not share in the political libertarian’s ideal of society (many do not), there is a clear sense in which the political libertarian relies upon the existence of libertarian free will, which he or she, at least implicitly, takes for a given. Thus, if a belief in libertarian free will cannot be justified on rational grounds, neither can a belief in libertarian politics, or for that matter criminal justice, divine retribution, and much else besides.

Determinism

Given its importance to ordinary life, you’d expect libertarian free will to be popular among philosophers—but it isn’t, and this is why.

Given the physical state of the universe at any given point in time, and given the laws of physics which are universal and constant, it is impossible for the history of the universe to be any other than it is. In other words, all past and future events are written into the very fabric of the universe, which is merely ‘playing itself out’, albeit on a grand, cosmic scale.

Some 200 years ago, the polymath the marquis de Laplace transmogrified this concept of ‘causal determinism’ into a super-intelligent demon who could accurately predict the future, first, by knowing every physical fact about the universe, and, second, by applying Newton’s Laws to those facts.

Of course, Newtonian physics has since been superseded by quantum mechanics, which allows for indeterminism in the behaviour of elementary particles. Even so, quantum mechanics has not put paid to the initial concerns about causal determinism because (a) even if quantum mechanics is not itself to be superseded by a more comprehensive deterministic theory, indeterminism in the behaviour of elementary particles need not translate into indeterminism in human behaviour, and, (b) even if it did, the behaviour that resulted would be random and chaotic rather than free and responsible. 

Compatibilism

A widespread response to the problem posed by determinism is ‘compatibilism’, according to which freedom amounts to (1) being able to do something, and (2) not being prevented from doing that thing. Thus, I am free to run away if (1) I am able to run away, and (2) I am not prevented from doing so, for instance, by being held at gunpoint or locked up in a dungeon. According to the compatibilist philosopher Thomas Hobbes (d. 1679), a person is free when ‘he finds no stop in doing what he has the will, desire, or inclination to do’. If this is freedom, then a person is free even if what he has the will to do happens to have been determined.

Many eminent philosophers, from Aristotle to Schopenhauer, might be said to support compatibilism. 

Children and the lower animals as well as men are capable of voluntary action, but not of choice. —Aristotle

Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills. —Schopenhauer

But surely, you might say, freedom involves not only the ability to do something, but also the ability to do otherwise. The compatibilist’s response to this objection is to define ‘the ability to do otherwise’ in the same way that they defined freedom. ‘The ability to do otherwise’ amounts to (1) being able to do otherwise, and (2) not being prevented from doing otherwise. Had I wanted to do otherwise than run away, nothing would have prevented me from doing so. However, I did not want to do otherwise than run away (because what I wanted to do was determined), and, in this sense, I acted freely.

Still, even if the compatibilist account is able to capture surface freedoms involving the ability to do or not do something, it does not seem to capture the deep freedom of choice that most people associate with free will. When you and I talk about free will, we do not mean merely ‘unconstrained choice’, but also control over that choice. But the compatibilist would insist that this sort of strong, libertarian free will is simply incoherent: the same past cannot lead to more than one possible future, basta, un point c’est tout, end of the story.

Imagine that Emma, in her final year at college, is deliberating between careers: teaching on the one hand and investment banking on the other. After due consideration, she ‘chooses’ to go into investment banking. Given the same past—the same upbringing, the same beliefs and desires, the same thought processes—how could she possibly have ‘chosen’ otherwise? Emma could only have chosen otherwise if her past, that is, the past, had been different—but, of course, the past could not have been different for the simple reason that there is only ever one past. Even if she could have chosen otherwise, such a choice would seem inexplicable, and therefore arbitrary, in light of her upbringing, her beliefs and desires, and so on.

In essence, says the compatibilist, people have a confused notion not just of freedom, but also of determinism, which they associate with constraint or compulsion. Clearing up this confusion does not usually bring them round to compatibilism, because what they actually believe is that determinism is in itself incompatible with free will. In other words, they are incompatibilists. 

Indeterminism

It gets even thornier for the incompatibilists, in that their idea of free will is incompatible not only with determinism but also with indeterminism!

If undetermined events like quantum leaps occur by chance, and if free actions are undetermined events, it seems that free actions also occur by chance. But this is a contradiction in terms, since free and responsible actions cannot, by definition, occur by chance. If my actions are the result of undetermined events in my brain, they are random and chaotic, and undermine rather than enable my freedom.

Imagine that I am deliberating between fast food and a healthier but more time-consuming home-cooked meal, and that, at the outcome of this deliberation, I opt for the home-cooked meal. If my choices are undetermined, I might at this point, despite the process of deliberation that I have just undergone, suddenly and inexplicably ‘change my mind’ and plump for fast food. You might argue, along with the idealist philosopher GW Leibniz (d. 1716), that prior reasons merely ‘incline without necessitating’. But it is precisely because prior reasons inclined me towards the garden risotto that I chose it over the cheeseburger. Had I instead gone for the cheeseburger, this ‘choice’ would not truly have been my own.

Or, imagine that I have an exact counterpart, Neel*, who lives in another possible world which is in all respects identical to this one. One day, I succumb to the temptation to steal a bicycle, whereas Neel* resists this temptation—even though both of us have had exactly the same past up to that point. In the words of the philosopher Alfred Mele (b. 1951), ‘If there is nothing about the agents’ powers, capacities, states of mind, moral character and the like that explains this difference in outcome … the difference is just a matter of luck.’ 

Mind, Soul, and the Causa Sui

If they are to hold that free will is compatible with indeterminism, libertarians need to provide an account of how we might be able to act and act otherwise without it seeming completely arbitrary. After Descartes, who distinguished the immaterial mind from the material body, a common libertarian move has been to posit an additional factor such as the mind or soul that is not bound by the laws of physics. Although the mind or soul exists outside the material realm, it is able to intervene in the material realm to influence events—possibly by exploiting the indeterminism in the brain.

Some libertarians believe that such a Cartesian dualism of mind and body is the only possible solution to the problem of free will. But, putting aside traditional concerns about mind-body dualism, it is not at all clear that mind-body dualism is an effective response to the threat of indeterminism. If Emma’s decision to go into banking is no longer determined by the prior activity of her brain, then it is determined by the prior activity of her disembodied mind or soul. In other words, all that mind-body dualism achieves is to shift the problem to one remove, that is, from the brain to a (hypothetical) mind or soul.

All that remains to dualist libertarians is to appeal to mystery and claim that disembodied minds or souls exist in a realm that is beyond reason or science. This was, more or less, the line adopted by Immanuel Kant (d. 1804), who argued that free will is presupposed by our practical and moral lives. Although reason and science can tell us about how things appear in the world (‘phenomena’), they cannot tell us about how they are in themselves (‘noumena’). Our noumenal selves, which govern our practical and moral lives, lie beyond the material realm of reason and science, and cannot be apprehended in those terms.

Another ‘additional factor’ strategy, the agent-causal strategy, consists in arguing that Emma’s choices are determined, not by prior events (determinism), nor by chance (indeterminism), but by Emma herself. This kind of ‘immanent’ causation brought about by the agent herself differs from the ‘transeunt’ causation brought about by events in that it involves a ‘prime mover unmoved’—in other words, an entity, at least in this respect, akin to God. But, of course, immanent causation is no less mysterious than Cartesian mind-body dualism or Kantian noumenal selves, and, like them, merely shifts the problem to one remove, in this case, to a prime mover unmoved, uncaused cause, or causa sui (Latin, ‘cause of itself’).

For Nietzsche (d. 1900):

The causa sui is the best self-contradiction that has been conceived so far; it is a sort of rape and perversion of logic. But the extravagant pride of man has managed to entangle itself… with just this nonsense. The desire for ‘freedom of the will’ in the superlative metaphysical sense, which still holds sway, unfortunately, in the minds of the half-educated—the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one’s actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance, and society—involves nothing less than to be precisely this causa sui and, with more than Baron Munchausen’s audacity, to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the swamps of nothingness.

A Possible Way Out

The real challenge for libertarians is to furnish an account of free will that does not rely on mysterious forms of agency, but sits comfortably with our modern, rational-scientific picture of the universe.

The idea that freedom might lie in the control of attention is an ancient one. In the Indian tradition, Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras locate liberation in mastery of the mind through concentration and meditation. Much later, in his Philosophy of Physiology (1779), the twenty-year-old medical student Friedrich Schiller argued that freedom lies in attention. More than a century later, William James developed a similar account in terms of an ‘effort of attention’.

So one more modern possibility is this. Neurotransmission, that is, electrical signalling in the brain, may be subject to quantum indeterminacies of a kind that could provide the leeway or ‘point of engagement’ for the exercise of free will. As demonstrated by Edward Lorenz (d. 2008), small changes in the initial conditions of a chaotic system can, through a snowball effect, result in much larger, if unpredictable, changes in that system’s behaviour. Potentially, the flap of a butterfly wing in Kyoto could result in a thunderstorm in Paris. Similarly, an effort of thought or concentration could sway or shepherd random and chaotic patterns of neurological activity so as to culminate in an undetermined action that is free in the strong, libertarian sense.

Most of the time, a person’s actions and corresponding brain activity would be determined by past events and the cumulative effects of those past events on the person’s patterns of thought. Most of the time, in fact, almost all of the time, the person’s actions would be determined by a commixture of neuroses, obsessions, learnt behaviours, socialisation, enculturation, and so on. But on certain occasions, such as when the person was genuinely torn between two competing choices, the degree of indeterminacy in their brain would rise to such a degree as to permit an undetermined action.

Such a window of freedom would be rare, but even a single free action (or non-action) could impact on all subsequent actions and completely alter the course of a life, and the lives affected by that life, and the lives affected by those lives… If Emma had freely decided to go into teaching instead of banking, she would have had a different set of colleagues and friends. She would have married someone whom she would not otherwise have met. Together, they would have had ‘other’ children, almost certainly in another house, and so on.

Are Some People Freer Than Others?

A corollary of this ‘effort of thought’ theory of free will is that some people are freer than others. First, people who are more imaginative, more independent, or more rebellious are freer than people who fall into conventional patterns of thought. Most people would not know possibility if it slapped them in the face; but a few actively seek to disturb fixed patterns of thought, thereby increasing the indeterminacy in their brain and so their latitude for freedom. Second, people who can ‘see into the future’, that is, people who have a high degree of insight into the potential ramifications of their choices, are freer than people who are unable or unwilling to project. Third, people who cultivate attention and concentration ought also to be freer. Indeed, this, and not bendiness, was the historical purpose of yoga. 

Of course, there is overlap between those who are mired in convention and those who are unable to see into the future (and who therefore lack intuition), since both conditions are mutually reinforcing, and both arise from the same ultimate source, namely, fear or cowardice. Conversely, there is a high degree of overlap between free thinkers and visionaries. Courage underpins both freedom of thought and freedom of action. In life as in chess, the best players are those who can see several steps ahead, and who can respond to ever changing circumstances with the boldest and most original moves.

Maybe you are not convinced by the ‘effort of thought’ theory, but if we are to rescue free will, which is essential if we are to take seriously the possibility of changing ourselves and our lives, it is probably the best we have to go on.

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His Life, Character, and Philosophy

Descartes by the cocklestove
Modern philosophy began in the warmth of a cockle stove, with three visions.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

René Descartes (1596–1650) is often called the father of modern philosophy. The title owes less to any single doctrine than to the ambition of his project. As the old Aristotelian worldview collapsed under the weight of the Scientific Revolution, Descartes set out to rebuild human knowledge from the ground up, in a way that could accommodate God, the soul, and human freedom.

A World Crying Out For a Philosopher

The demise of the Aristotelian system, brought about by the Copernican and Scientific Revolutions, left a void that needed filling—ideally by some all-encompassing metaphysical system on the scale of the old, Aristotelian one. If the Earth no longer stood at the centre of the cosmos, was man not the glory of creation, as affirmed in the Bible (1 Corinthians 11:7)? In this new mechanistic, atomistic world of matter in motion, where might God and the immaterial soul fit in? Where freedom and justice? And where, even, heaven and hell?

As recently as 1588, Galileo, qua mathematician, had been invited to address the Florentine Academy on the location, size, and arrangement of hell as described in Dante’s Inferno—underscoring the scale of the mind shift required. Even that paragon of the Scientific Revolution, Newton, albeit in secret, dedicated the larger part of his life to alchemy and the search for the fabled philosopher’s stone.

The three seventeenth-century philosophers who rose to the challenge of formulating a comprehensive metaphysics are René Descartes (1596–1650), Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), who sometimes inserted, with little to no justification, the nobiliary particle von in front of his cognomen.

Three Visions in a Stove-Heated Room

Descartes categorically rejected the substantial forms and primary matter of the mediaeval, Aristotelian schoolmen. In a letter to his friend Marin Mersenne dated 28 January 1641, he writes that his Meditations on First Philosophy ‘contain all the foundations of my physics. But please do not tell people, for that might make it harder for the supporters of Aristotle to approve them. I hope that readers will gradually get used to my principles, and recognise their truth, before they notice that they destroy the principles of Aristotle.’

Two decades earlier, Descartes had been serving in the army of Duke Maximilian of Bavaria. On 10–11 November 1619, while stationed near Ulm or else Neuberg an der Donau, he found refuge in a room with an ‘oven’ (probably a cockle stove) to escape from the cold and reflect on his thoughts. That night, he had three dreams which determined the course of his life. To repay these visions, he vowed to make a pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady of Loretto in the Italian region of Marche—and, in 1623, fulfilled his vow.

What Descartes had seen or grasped on that eve of St Martin’s Day 1619 is the unity of the sciences under mathematics: if a concrete problem could be abstracted into mathematical form, it would become clearer and more amenable to solving. Thus, in the course of his life, he contributed several mathematical innovations. In his La Géométrie (1637), he introduced the modern exponential notation which is taught in every contemporary school. He established the convention of using the letters x, y, z to represent unknown variables in equations, and a, b, c to represent known variables. If that were not impressive enough, he bridged algebra and geometry by transforming numerical relationships into geometrical shapes, plotting these lines and curves on a coordinate plane, and showing how they could be represented in the form of algebraic equations—a field now known as analytic, coordinate, or Cartesian geometry.

Descartes sought to carry the certainty of mathematics into philosophy itself. The culmination of that lifelong project was the Meditations on First Philosophy, which laid the foundations of his new metaphysical system while quietly dismantling that of Aristotle.

The Method of Doubt (Dubitatio methodica)

The closed-in stove-heated room later came to symbolise Descartes’ famous method of doubt, by which he systematically dismantled the edifice of his beliefs to rebuild on a more secure foundation of indubitable truths, to be arrived at through a predetermined set of logical rules.

In this climate of radical doubt, he could doubt the existence of the outside world, even the existence of his own body—but not that he was the one doing the doubting. This insight is encapsulated in his famous dictum, Cogito, ergo sum (‘I think, therefore I am’). The very act of doubting presupposed a thinking self to do the doubting.

Although Descartes knew that he was thinking, and so that he was, he could not be sure that his thinking bore any relation to the outside world. So he introduced an a priori proof (a proof derived from thought alone) for the existence of God, and argued that such a benevolent being would not deceive his favoured creation, man—so long as man had employed his (Descartes’s) method of doubt and taken every precaution to have ‘clear and distinct’ ideas and not to be deceived.

Dualism and the Piece of Wax Analogy

The Cogito also transformed Descartes’ understanding of reality. The indubitability of the thinking self led him to conclude that mind and body must be fundamentally different kinds of substance. The defining attribute of the mind (or soul, or res cogitans) is thought, while that of the body (or res extensa) is extension. It is by the knowable mind, rather than the deceptive senses, that the physical can be apprehended.

Descartes illustrated this point with one of the most famous passages in the Meditations: the wax analogy. When a piece of wax is heated, all its sensory properties change. Only the mind grasps its underlying essence, which consists in extension (as well as flexibility and movability in space), and recognises it as the same piece of wax. The physical, being extended, is divisible; but mind is indivisible, and therefore not physical. Since it is not physical, mind is beyond the laws of physics, and free and immortal.

[T]here is a great difference between the mind and the body, inasmuch as the body is by its very nature always divisible, while the mind is utterly indivisible. For when I consider the mind, or myself in so far as I am merely a thinking thing, I am unable to distinguish any parts within myself; I understand myself to be something quite single and complete… By contrast, there is no corporeal or extended thing that I can think of which in my thought I cannot easily divide into parts; and this very fact makes me understand that it is divisible. This one argument would be enough to show me that the mind is completely different from the body. 

The Soul of Animals

Descartes’s mind-body dualism is commonly taken as the starting point of modern philosophy. His method is indeed revolutionary, but the substance of his philosophy is in fact an attempt to shelter God, man, and his immortal soul from the new mechanism. Thanks to Descartes, those who embraced the Copernican revolution could remain good Christians, or claim as much.

But in solving one problem, Descartes created several others, most notably the place of animals and the mind-body problem.

Under the Aristotelian system, all living things had a vegetative (or nutritive) soul; animals, in addition, had a sensitive soul; and humans, on top of that, had a rational soul.

For fear of granting them immortality and a place in heaven, Descartes denied souls to the animals. Animals, he claimed, are mere automata, whose functions ‘follow from the mere arrangement of the machine’s organs every bit as naturally as the movements of a clock or other automaton follow from the arrangement of its counterweights and wheels’.

For Descartes, it is not merely that animals do not reason, but also, contra common sense, that they do not feel, perceive, or sense. Clearly, he did not have a cat. According to lore, he once threw a cat out of a window in an attempt to demonstrate that the poor thing lacked consciousness.

The Mind-Body Problem

If mind and body truly are incommensurate, how is it possible for them to interact? How might my mind move me to write these words without violating, or else submitting to, the laws of physics? Conversely, how might my eyes and ears relay sense experience to my mind?

Descartes responded to this so-called mind-body problem in two ways. At times, he said, literally, ‘Only God knows.’ At other times, he suggested that mind and body interact at the pineal gland, on the grounds that this structure is mobile and central in the brain. But this only puts the problem at one remove, for the question then becomes, how is it possible for the mind to interact with the pineal gland?

The Philosopher’s Daughter

Although France’s most famous philosopher, Descartes spent the greater part of his adult life in the relative safety of the Dutch Republic. There, he met a servant called Helena who became the mother of his illegitimate daughter Francine (b. 1635), whom he passed off as his niece. When Francine died, aged five, of scarlet fever, he called it the greatest sorrow of his life, even stating that it was not unmanly to cry. Later, a legend arose that he—the philosopher who had compared living bodies to machines—constructed an automaton in her likeness.

The Tree of Life

The name René derives from the Latin Renatus, ‘born again’—fitting for the man who sought to rebuild philosophy from first principles. But although remembered as a philosopher, Descartes looked upon himself first and foremost as a natural philosopher (scientist) and physicist.

In the preface to his Principles of Philosophy (1644), he compared philosophy to a tree, with metaphysics as its roots, physics as its trunk, and the other sciences as its branches—and it is, of course, the branches that bear the fruit. 

The ‘other sciences’ could be reduced to three principal ones, medicine, mechanics, and morals—which is why, in 1649, he published a book on the emotions, The Passions of the Soul.  He sent a copy to his penfriend Queen Christina of Sweden, who was so impressed that she invited him to join her court.

In October 1649, he left Holland for Sweden. But the northern winter did not agree with him, and the frenetic Christina insisted on taking her lessons at five in the morning. He did not live to see the spring.

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If you enjoyed this article, you might also enjoy The German Greeks, which traces the development of modern philosophy from Descartes to Nietzsche, via Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer.

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His Life, Character, and Philosophy

Hume leading Rousseau to the safety of England
Hume leading Rousseau to safety in England

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

David Hume was one of the greatest philosophers of the Enlightenment—and one of its most controversial. At a time when philosophers placed their faith in reason, he questioned everything from causation and the self to religion and morality. His radical scepticism led many to regard him as an atheist and cost him several university appointments. Yet the man whom many feared for his ideas was, by all accounts, open, sociable, and cheerful. Today, he is recognised as one of the most influential thinkers in the history of philosophy.

David Hume was born in 1711 in Edinburgh. His father Joseph was the laird of Ninewells, his mother Katherine the daughter of the Lord President of the Court of Session (Scotland’s supreme civil court). His father’s family was a cadet branch of the Earls of Home (pronounced ‘Hume’). In 1713, Joseph died at the age of thirty-three, leaving Katherine in sole care of three tots.

Hume went up to the University of Edinburgh at the age of ten or twelve, young even for the time, but found little of value in formal lectures. Later, he told a friend that ‘there is nothing to be learnt from a professor, which is not to be met in books.’ He shunned the legal studies that his family intended for him, preferring instead to devour classical and philosophical texts. ‘While [my family] fancied I was poring upon Voet and Vinnius, Cicero and Virgil were the authors which I was secretly devouring.’

This inner conflict drove him, at the age of eighteen, to a nervous breakdown. A local physician diagnosed ‘a disease of the learned’ and had the good sense to prescribe horse riding for outdoors and, for indoors, wine drinking, which worked a charm. Once Hume had found and embraced who he was, his malady never returned. In later life, he became an advocate of ‘ordinary life’ as a cure for ‘philosophical melancholy’.

I dine, I play backgammon, I converse … and whenafter three or four hours’ amusement, I would return to speculations, they appear so cold, and strain’d, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any further.

A Treatise of Human Nature

In 1734, at twenty-three, Hume moved to Bristol to work as a clerk for a sugar importer. Ill-suited to the job, he soon left for Paris, then Rheims, then the small town of La Flèche, with its Jesuit college made famous for having schooled Descartes. Hume had been attracted to La Flèche by the college’s library of some 40,000 books, as well as the lower cost of living compared to Paris or Rheims. He remained in La Flèche for three years (1734-1737), during which he wrote A Treatise of Human Nature.

When it was published in 1739, the reception was not as Hume had hoped. In the short autobiography written near (almost at) the end of his life, he tells us that the Treatise ‘fell dead-born from the press, without reaching such distinction, as even to excite a murmur among the zealots.’ He disavowed the Treatise and asked that his more polished Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) be regarded as his final word—a request that posterity has ignored.

Essays Moral and Political

After his disappointment with the Treatise, Hume turned to essay writing, which was then in vogue. In 1742, he published the first volume of his Essays Moral and Political, which were favourably received and ‘soon made me entirely forget my former disappointment’.

Hume developed a talent for prose and a reputation as a skeptic and all-round heretic. In 1745, he applied for the vacant chair of moral philosophy at Edinburgh, but was rejected on the strength of his reputation. He took up the post of tutor and companion to the troubled and impossible Marquess of Annandale, but resigned after a year.

He then joined a planned expedition to Quebec, serving as secretary to Lieutenant-General James St Clair. However, the expedition was cancelled and the forces diverted to a raid on Lorient in Brittany. The failure of this operation did not prevent Hume from sporting the uniform of an officer on subsequent diplomatic missions with St Clair to the courts of Vienna and Turin (then the capital of Savoy).

History of Great Britain

In 1748, Hume’s re-write of the first volume of the Treatise of Human Nature was published as Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding (retitled in 1758 to An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding). After being turned down as an improper person for the Chair of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow, he became, in 1752, the Keeper of the Advocates’ Library in Edinburgh—affording him the time and resources to write his monumental, and monumentally successful, History of Great Britain, published in six volumes over eight years (1754-62). Hume became, in his own words, ‘not only independent, but opulent.’ Such was the success of the History that, in his lifetime and for a long time after, he was better known as a historian than a philosopher.

Rescuing Rousseau

In 1763, Hume became Secretary to the British Embassy in Paris. He basked in the adulation that le tout Paris afforded to a successful writer. He acquired the nickname le bon David and, according to Horace Walpole, became ‘fashion itself’. Though the relationship was never consummated, he became intimate with the countess and grande dame Madame de Boufflers.

At that time, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was in big trouble following the publication of The Social Contract and Emile. Boufflers put Hume to rescuing Rousseau by sending him to the safety of England. In January 1766, at the end of his tenure at the embassy, Hume left for London with Rousseau. The two men had much in common, not least their infamy, and held each other in the highest regard. But Rousseau was prone to paranoia and began to suspect Hume of being at the centre of a plot to ridicule him. To protect his good reputation against Rousseau’s mighty pen, Hume reluctantly pre-empted Rousseau by publishing an account of the whole affair.

Final Years

In 1767, Hume took up his last appointment as Under-Secretary of State for the Northern Department (the predecessor of the Foreign Office). The following year, he retired to Edinburgh and built himself a house in St Andrew’s Square, where he lived with his sister Katherine.

Within ten years, shortly after the American Declaration of Independence (July 1776), Hume died from a ‘disorder of the bowels’. He wrote a concise autobiography, My Own Life, so near to his death that at the end he switches to the past tense:

I am, or rather was (for that is the style I must now use in speaking of myself, which emboldens me the more to speak my sentiments); I was, I say, a man of mild disposition, of command of temper, of an open, social, and cheerful humour, capable of attachment, but little susceptible of enmity, and of great moderation in all my passions. Even my love of literary fame, my ruling passion, never soured my temper, notwithstanding my frequent disappointments … I cannot say there is no vanity in making this funeral oration of myself, but I hope it is not a misplaced one; and this is a matter of fact which is easily cleared and ascertained.

In his eulogy, Adam Smith, who had recently published The Wealth of Nations (1776), wrote that his friend Hume approached ‘as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit’.

The Newton of Human Affairs

Already at the age of eighteen, Hume complained about philosophy being engaged in ‘endless disputes’ of an entirely hypothetical nature. He disparagingly referred to rationalist systems such as those of Leibniz, Spinoza, and Descartes as ‘speculative metaphysics’. 

Newton, in contrast, set out only to describe and predict events, without seeking to explain them. One of his most famous phrases is, Hypotheses non fingo [I do not feign hypotheses].

I have not as yet been able to discover the reason for these properties of gravity from phenomena, and I do not feign hypotheses. For whatever is not deduced from the phenomena must be called a hypothesis; and mere hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, or based on occult qualities, or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. In this philosophy particular propositions are inferred from the phenomena, and afterwards rendered general by induction.

Hume saw himself as extending Newton’s experimental method to the study of human nature and the ‘moral sciences’—whence the subtitle of A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects.

Empiricism and Skepticism

At the core of Hume’s radical empiricism are two tenets. First, there are no innate ideas: all knowledge and concepts must arise or else derive from sensory impressions. Without prior observation, Adam (from Adam and Eve) could not have inferred that fire would burn him, or water drown him. All that is not founded in sense experience is essentially meaningless. 

Second, all we can directly perceive are our internal mental states. The self is no more than a bundle or collection of various perceptions and sensations, ‘which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity’. Taken together, these two tenets have dramatically skeptical implications, undermining traditional concepts such as God, the soul, a persistent self, external objects, and causation.

The Problem of Causation

When it comes to causation, we never perceive a ‘necessary connection’ between events, only ever a ‘constant conjunction’ of one event following another, over and over again. The supposed causal link is missing from sense experience. Cause and effect are merely a habit of mind. But that the sun keeps on rising every morning need not mean that it will always rise every morning. Cause and effect, which underpins all science, is justified not by reason and deduction but only by induction (habit), which is unsafe.

Reason the Slave of the Passions

At the height of the Age of Reason, Hume was the great debaser of reason. ‘Reason’ he said, ‘is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions…’ 

Still today, most people think of choice and action as a battleground between reason and the ‘passions’ (desires, emotions, and sensations). Hume argued that it is in fact a battleground between the passions and the passions. For example, if I pass over dessert, this is because my desire to feel and look good is stronger than my desire to eat something heavenly. It can sometimes feel as if the passions are fighting with reason, when, really, it is an urgent passion, such as my desire for dessert, fighting with a calmer, longer term one, such as my desire for moderation which masquerades as reason.

Reason on its own cannot impel action. Its role is simply to supply us with true beliefs about the best means of achieving the ends that our passions have already determined. The aim of a monarch or general in delivering a battle exhortation is not to be right or logically sound, but to fire up the passions and try to make it so that the resolve of his men is greater than their fear.

A passion may be justified or unjustified, but cannot be true or false like a belief. When a passion is founded on a false belief, the problem is with the false belief rather than the passion. Once we have ascertained that there are no gremlins under the bed, or persuaded ourselves that there are no such things as ghosts, our fear of these things simply evaporates.

Morality and the ‘Is-Ought’ Problem

Because morality is about choices and actions, it cannot arise from reason. Or in Hume’s famous turn of phrase, ‘You cannot derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’.’ Prescriptive statements (‘oughts’) arise not from facts and reason but from values and feelings, especially the capacity for sympathy, which leads to pleasure in response to prosocial actions and aversion in response to antisocial ones. Whenever a prescriptive statement appears to derive from a descriptive one, this is only because there is a prescriptive premise that is missing but presumed. For example: ‘Stealing harms other people. Therefore, we ought not steal.’ The presumed prescriptive premise here is, ‘We ought not harm other people’—which is not a fact but a value judgement.

You can see why Immanuel Kant was disturbed by all of this. If Hume was right, science rested on habit rather than certainty, and morality on feeling rather than reason. His response, the 856-page Critique of Pure Reason (1781), emerged after a ‘silent decade’ during which he retreated into himself and published a total of just 23 pages. He later wrote that it was Hume who had awakened him from his ‘dogmatic slumber’.

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If you want to know what happened next, read The German Greeks, which tells the story of how Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and others responded to the philosophical revolution that Hume helped to create.

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What Kantian Aesthetics Reveals About Human Nature

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 17 August 2026.

Kant’s third critique, The Critique of Judgment, was published in 1790, two years after the Critique of Practical Reason. Although it did not receive the immediate attention of the previous two critiques—some even dismissed it as the product of senility—its historical impact has been significant. Kant himself looked upon it as the completion of his critical project.

Kant’s first two critiques had left us inhabiting two very different worlds: the deterministic world of nature and knowledge, and the free world of morality. The purpose of the Critique of Judgement was to serve as ‘a bridge between realms’ and help bring these two worlds together.

Hierarchy of the Arts

Kant has much to say about beauty in both art and nature, beginning with the fine arts. He established a hierarchy of the arts based on their capacity to engage the imagination and understanding, and their potential for moral and intellectual improvement and the stimulation of afterthought (Nachdenken). First came the speaking arts of poetry and rhetoric, then the ‘formative arts’ such as painting, sculpture, and architecture, and, finally, the ‘arts of the play of sensations’ such as music. Schopenhauer, by contrast, would place music at the top of the hierarchy.

Nature as a Model

For Kant, nature, which appears purposive (Zweckmäßig) to the human mind, is the model or standard for artistic beauty. An appreciation of natural beauty suggests a moral disposition, whereas even ‘a hardened old usurer’ could take an interest in art—pointing to the pre-eminence of natural beauty. The artist (genius) aims to create art that appears as if it were a product of nature.

The core of aesthetic judgement of both nature and art is the perception of ‘formal purposiveness’, or ‘purposiveness without a purpose’ (Zweckmässigkeit ohne Zweck), which allows for the ‘free play’ of the cognitive faculties and leads to aesthetic pleasure.

When Friedrich Schiller (d. 1805) wrote that a person ‘is only fully human when he is at play’, he was building on Kant. When contemplating beauty, or playing, we temporarily escape the tyranny of practical ends. We engage in something not because it leads to something else, but because it is worthwhile in itself.

The Four Moments of a Pure Aesthetic Judgement

For Kant, a pure aesthetic judgement has four complementary aspects, or ‘moments’, based on the logical functions of judgement: quality, quantity, relation, and modality. These are, respectively, disinterested satisfaction, universal subjectivity, purposiveness without a purpose, and necessary delight.

Disinterestedness: Our satisfaction in beauty must be purely disinterested, that is, without any consideration for instrumentality (for example, the utility of the vase, the worth of the painting), moral significance, or even existence. Our focus ought to be purely on the contemplative experience of the object itself. In other words, we ought to look upon the object, or its beauty, not as a means to an end but as an end in itself. If something merely satisfies or gratifies our appetites, it is agreeable rather than beautiful.

Thus, Canary wine is merely agreeable—unless, it has been argued, we adopt a disinterested attitude towards it, swishing it and spitting it out.

Universal subjectivity: When we call something beautiful, we expect other disinterested, right-thinking people to agree with our judgement, as if beauty were an inherent property of the object. The agreeable, on the other hand, is a ‘private feeling’, and we are not indignant if others do not share our penchant for blue cheese or anchovies. Whereas the judgement of the agreeable is born out of our personal characteristics, the judgement of beauty is disinterested and grounded in cognitive faculties that we have in common with every other human being.

Here again, in his aesthetics as in his morality, is this Kantian notion of the objectivity of intersubjectivity. Judgements of taste are neither purely subjective (based solely on individual pleasure), as Hume believed, nor purely objective (based on a perfect standard in the object itself), as Baumgarten believed. Instead, they are an expression of the free play of the cognitive faculties that all human beings have in common.

Purposiveness without a purpose: Beauty does not reside in an object’s instrumentality. Nor is it an inherent property of the object. Instead, the judgement of beauty arises from the object’s form displaying a ‘purposiveness without a purpose’. The object’s form appears to have been designed with some indeterminate purpose, exhibiting order and harmony. ‘Beauty is a form of purposiveness in an object, so far as this is perceived in it apart from the representation of an end.’

Kant argued, controversially, that the ingénue is at greater liberty to enjoy the beauty of a flower than is the botanist, who gets caught up in the various ends of the flower and its parts. Kant’s philosophy of beauty significantly influenced the development of a movement in art criticism known as formalism, which emphasises compositional elements such as form, colour, and spatial arrangement over content or context.

Necessary delight: The object is the source of necessary pleasure or satisfaction. Even though this pleasure is not an objective property of the object, it is grounded in an a priori principle of the mind, namely, the free play of the cognitive faculties, especially the imagination and understanding. As such, it ought to be universally shared and acknowledged.

The Experience of Beauty

The feeling of beauty, uniquely, bridges the divide between the deterministic world of nature and knowledge and the free world of judgement and morality. In experiencing beauty, we reveal our dual nature: we belong to the phenomenal world of cause and effect, but also to the noumenal world of reason and freedom. Computers, and non-rational beings, do not straddle these two worlds.

But there is another reason why a computer could never experience beauty. A computer might learn which patterns human beings call beautiful. It might recognise a beautiful face, predict our aesthetic preferences, and even generate a poem, picture, or piece of music that moves us. But recognising, predicting, or even producing beauty is not the same as experiencing it.

For Kant, beauty is not simply a property to be detected. It is a feeling that arises from the free play of our cognitive faculties, and from our disinterested contemplation of an object without regard to what it can do for us. A computer is always directed towards an end, and has no opportunity or desire to stop and admire the view.

For Kant, then, beauty gives us a glimpse of a world in which nature and freedom, reality and our highest aspirations, are somehow reconciled. Beauty, in other words, is a vision of heaven on earth—which is why we should value beauty and surround ourselves with beautiful things.

Beauty and beautiful things make the world feel like a better place, a place, finally, that feels like home.

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To explore Kant’s ideas in their historical context—and discover how they influenced Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche—see my book, The German Greeks.

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