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Is Yājñavalkya’s unseen seer an answer to the problem of personal identity?

Meera Kulkarni Fellow
· 4 replies
Personal identityBuddhistIndianNyayaVedantaAdi ShankaraGautama (Akṣapāda)Yājñavalkya#atman#neti-neti#persistence#witness-self
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Its coordinates: 1.3.2 Personal Identity

I study Sanskrit and Indian philosophy in Pune, and something about how Indian theories of self get slotted into Western debates bothers me.

In the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad, Yājñavalkya says you cannot see the seer of seeing or think the thinker of thinking, and he describes the self by negation, neti neti, not this, not this. Introductory surveys of personal identity sometimes put this in a table beside Locke and Parfit, as if the Upaniṣad were proposing a criterion for what makes the sixty-year-old the same person as the six-year-old.

I don't think it is. The persistence question asks what relation must hold between a past person and a present one for them to be the same. Yājñavalkya seems to be asking something else: what is the subject that is never an object of experience. And on the Advaita reading, that subject is not even mine as opposed to yours.

But I may be drawing the line too sharply. Nyāya, after all, argued for a persisting self partly from memory and recognition, which looks very much like a persistence argument.

So: can someone explain how the Upaniṣadic self relates to the persistence question? Is it a rival criterion, a different question, or a denial that the question is well formed?

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4 answers

Accepted answer

  1. Govinda Prasad Upadhyaya

    ✓ Accepted answer Fellow

    Meera, you are right to draw the line, and the tradition itself drew it. Let me put it in three steps.

    First, what Yājñavalkya is after is the self as subject, ātman as the seer. The argument is that whatever you can point to as "me", a body, a thought, a memory, is something seen, and so not the seer. That is a claim about what the self is, not about how one stage of a life is linked to another.

    Second, it does not supply a criterion of sameness between persons over time, because the seer is not the kind of thing that has a career. On Śaṅkara's reading it is the same in every being. If you ask "is the general the same as the boy?", the Advaitin will say the witness of both is the same, but so is the witness of the boy's schoolmates.

    Third, the persistence question then gets answered at a lower level, by the subtle body, karma and memory traces, which Vedānta treats as belonging to the empirical person. So the honest answer is: a different question, plus a borrowed answer to the old one.

    Helpful · 2
    1. Meera Kulkarni

      Fellow

      Govinda, "a different question plus a borrowed answer" is a good formula. It means the survey tables are not wrong to include it, only wrong to put it in the same column.

      Helpful · 3

Other answers

  1. Oskar Nyberg

    Fellow

    The Nyāya case is the interesting contrast. If I recall correctly, the Nyāya Sūtra lists desire, aversion, effort, pleasure, pain and cognition as the marks of a self, and the later commentators press the argument from recognition: the one who now recognises must be the one who saw before, or the recognition makes no sense. That is a persistence argument in exactly the Lockean sense, and it was aimed at the Buddhists.

    1. Nirmala Jayasekara

      Fellow

      And the Buddhist reply to the recognition argument is worth hearing: recognition only requires a causal series in which the earlier cognition leaves a trace that conditions the later one. You need continuity, not a single enduring knower. That is the same structure as the psychological-continuity view in recent Western work, arrived at in a debate with Nyāya rather than with Locke.

      Helpful · 1