A few thoughts on Buddhism

What are we to make of the famous Buddhist notion of no-self?

The Buddha teaching the Four Noble Truths, from a Sanskrit manuscript, Wikimedia.

A number of years ago I went through a mid-life crisis. Nothing that is not experienced by plenty of people. An unexpected divorce. My father dying of cancer. To those two events add getting a new job, which meant selling my house, buying a new one in the new location, moving across a good chunk of the country, and acquainting myself to new colleagues and a new environment. All in the span of a few months.

Frankly, I got a bit shaken and disoriented. I need a compass by which to navigate those vicissitudes, a framework that would help me steady myself, reorient goals and priorities, that kind of thing. Since I had just finished my PhD in philosophy I figured surely the love of wisdom would help me figure out the answer!

Of course, nothing I’d read in my graduate level textbooks—on subjects ranging from Descartes to Kant, from the analysis of concepts to the varieties of formal logics—was actually of any use during the crisis, as intellectually stimulating as all that stuff had been.

So I decided to turn to practical philosophy—not an oxymoron! My first stop, after the advice of a number of friends and acquaintances, was Buddhism. By far the most successful and apparently useful philosophy of life of the past two and a half millennia might provide me with handy advice, or so I hoped.

It turns out, however, that there were two stumbling blocks to my embracing of Buddhism: its culturally remote language and its metaphysics. The first one was indubitably my limitation. Buddhist texts and concepts did not resonate with me in part, I’m sure, because I grew up in Italy and not in India or China. The second one, though, may reflect either (or both) my failure to grasp difficult concepts, or perhaps the fact that such concepts are indeed problematic, perhaps even incoherent.

After a while I let go of my attempts to study Buddhism and turned to the more easily resonant Greco-Roman philosophy. The rest is, as they say, (personal) history.

Recently, though, I have had a new opportunity to look afresh into Buddhism thanks to one of my ongoing reading projects: going through every volume of Peter Adamson’s A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps book series, based on his podcast by the same title. Peter is a charming and brilliant historian of philosophy, and has in fact argued that philosophy in a very important sense is the history of philosophy.