Maverick Philosopher – Page 301 – Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

A Curious Mode of Refutation

To begin with, the idea that “existence exists” excludes the idea that existence doesn’t exist. It denies the subjectivist, pragmatist, postmodernist view that reality is an illusion, a mental construct, a social convention. Obviously, people who insist that reality is not real are not going to buy in to a philosophy that says it is real.

So that’s one huge problem with Rand’s philosophy.

Now I am no fan of Ayn Rand: my Rand category is chock-full of trenchant criticisms of her and her acolytes. But the above is so stupid as to be beyond belief.

Forgive me for stating the obvious. One cannot refute a view by pointing out that there are those who do not accept it.

UPDATE (7:40)

This just in from Patrick Toner:

Off to class in two minutes, but I thought I should send a quick note to say that I think Biddle's piece is satirical. Or something like that. It wasn't meant as a refutation. I hope you're well!

Professor Toner may well be right. You decide.

FISA-Gate and Watergate

Unsure what FISA-Gate is all about? Victor Davis Hanson explains it clearly and how it differs from Watergate. His piece concludes:

Barack Obama was a progressive constitutional lawyer who expressed distrust of the secretive "Deep State." Yet his administration weaponized the IRS and surveilled Associated Press communications and a Fox News journalist for reporting unfavorable news based on supposed leaks.

Obama did not fit the past stereotypes of right-wing authoritarians subverting the Department of Justice and its agencies. Perhaps that is why there was little pushback against his administration's efforts to assist the campaign of his likely replacement, fellow Democrat Hillary Clinton.

Progressives are not supposed to destroy requested emails, "acid wash" hard drives, spread unverified and paid-for opposition research among government agencies, or use the DOJ and FBI to obtain warrants to snoop on the communications of American citizens.

FISA-gate may become a more worrisome scandal than either Watergate or Iran-Contra. Why? Because our defense against government wrongdoing — the press — is defending such actions, not uncovering them. Liberal and progressive voices are excusing, not airing, the excesses of the DOJ and FBI.

Apparently, weaponizing government agencies to stop a detested Donald Trump by any means necessary is not really considered a crime.

Hold onto your (pussy)hats boys and girls, things are going to get nasty.

Joseph Sobran

Here is an article worth reading if you know nothing about him. I wrote 'if,' not 'if and only if.'

My daily labors in the blogosphere since 2004, impressive as they are to some, have garnered nary a word of encouragement, or the opposite, from any relative. In compensation, I have a big fat file folder of tributes from strangers.

I suspect this is not unusual. The people we know we take for granted. Is it not written that "no prophet is welcome in his hometown"? (Luke 4: 24: nemo propheta acceptus est in patria sua. Cf. John 1:46.)

One could call it the injustice of propinquity. We often underestimate those nearby, whether by blood or space, while overestimating those afar.

Copy Editor Makes Me Out to be a Disease

Dear Dr. Varicella:

Attached you will find two PDFs: a copyedited version of your manuscript and a version indicating changes to the original file. This is your final opportunity to make any clarifications or stylistic changes to the manuscript.

An honest mistake, no doubt, so I won't reveal the names of the editor or the journal. But it is a little ironic that a copy editor would make such a mistake. But it's tough being an editor. It's a lousy job. So I want to thank all of the editors out there without whom those of us who publish would not see our words in print.

The only thing that really gets my goat is political correctness in a copy editor. I vent my spleen in The Paltry Mentality of the Copy Editor and Copy Editors and Political Correctness.

Let me end with a bit of praise for the tribe of bloggers.

Most people 'massacre' my name and it "pisses me off" in the phraseology of Jeff Dunham's Walter; but bloggers almost universally get it right. No surprise, I suppose: bloggers are an elite group of highly literate natural-born scribblers.

The Riddle of the Self

Jacques comments:

I like your reply to the reader who asked about the existence of the self. All good points! I wonder what you think about the following different response to people like Harris (or Hume)… It seems to me that they just don't adequately support their claim that no self can be known or discovered or experienced. A few thoughts:

(1) It just might be true that the self isn't found "when looked for in a more rigorous way", if meditation (or whatever) is a rigorous way of looking for it. But does that support the conclusion that we don't experience the self in some other way–for example, without "rigorously" looking for it? Phenomenologically, it seems to me that I'm aware of myself most of the time. I can feel "self-conscious", for example, if I'm uncomfortable or worried how other people perceive me. At other times, when I'm lost in the moment, I'm less aware of myself. Why doesn't this kind of phenomenological fact (or seeming fact) count as evidence that there is such a thing?

BV: It is an interesting question whether the experience of self-consciousness you describe is evidence against the claim made by Sartre, Butchvarov, et al. that that there is no self or subject who is conscious. It is not obvious to me that it is. Suppose I feel self-conscious in a social situation. I am perhaps reading a paper before a large group of people I do not know. Maybe it's part of a job interview! My one chance at securing a tenure-track position! A latter-day Humean might offer the following description. There is in the speaker awareness of: the audience, the expressions on their faces, the body and sensations in the body such as dryness in the mouth and sweat forming on the forehead, a bit of queasiness in the stomach, the less-than-confident sound of one's voice, feelings of anxiety, nervousness, self-doubt, and so on. There needn't be a self that is aware of all this physical and mental data. There is just (subject-less) awareness of it.

It is important to bear in mind that when a philosopher asks about the existence of the self, he is not asking about his possessions or his body or any part thereof, or his memories or any introspectible contents. He is not asking about what ordinary people identify as themselves. People identify themselves with the damndest things, their cars, their Zip codes, their bodies. For all of that is 'on the side of the object.' What he is asking is whether there is a subject distinct from all of that, distinct from the body and from the empirical psyche.

A much stronger objection to the Humean invokes the thesis of Brentano that every primary intentional awareness is accompanied by a simultaneous secondary awareness of that very awareness. This is essentially wat Sartre later described as the pre-reflective cogito. Kant famously maintained that the 'I think' must be able to accompany all of my representations. Brentano and Sartre maintain that the 'I think' does accompany all of my representings, or better, awarenesses — it is just that the 'I think' needn't be an act of explicit reflection.

Suppose I see a black cat. The act of visual awareness is typically, even if not always, accompanied by a simultaneous secondary awareness of the primary awareness. I am aware of the cat, but I am also aware of being aware of the cat. How does the Humean account for the awareness of being aware? He can say of the primary straightforward awareness that it is a subjectless awareness of a phenomenal object. But he can't say the same of the secondary awareness. For it is not a phenomenal object over against the awareness of it. It is not something presented but a state of affairs that involves me as subject.

'I am aware of a cat' can perhaps be rewritten subjectlessly as 'There is awareness of a cat.' But 'I am aware of being aware of a cat' cannot be subjectlessly rewritten as 'There is awareness of awareness of a cat.' For the second sentence could be true without the first being true. Suppose there is in Tom visual awareness of a cat, but no awareness of awareness, and in God awareness of Tom's awareness, but no visual awareness of a cat. The point here is that the primary and secondary awarenesses need to form a synchronic unity in one and the same subject.

(2) Why shouldn't we allow that the self might be the kind of thing that "rigorous" examination will tend to obscure. There are lots of things I can perceive, somehow or at some times, but which I can't perceive or can't easily perceive when I "rigorously" consciously attend to them. If I consciously focus my attention on the question of what "truth" means I can easily get confused. I might begin to doubt whether I'm really aware of truth, or the concept of truth. It doesn't follow that I'm not somehow aware of truth at other times, e.g., when wondering whether what X said about Trump is really true.

BV: This is a line of thought worth developing. You mention truth. Time is another example. What is time? Don't ask me, and I know. Ask me, and I don't know. (Augustine). We all have a pre-analytic or pre-theoretical understanding of what time is, but when we attempt an analysis or a theory we get tangled up.

One famous theory of time, McTaggart's, issues in the conclusion that time is unreal. This is the analog of those theories of the self that deny that there is a self. Another famous theory of time, the B-theory of D. H. Mellor and others, denies temporal passage, reducing (real) time to the static ordering of events by the B-relations (earlier than, later than, simultaneous with). This is the analog of theories of the self like that of Hume's that do not outright deny the self, but reduce it to a bundle of impressions or of other items.

You might also develop your thought by exploring the the focus-fringe relation. Focal awareness seems to presuppose fringe awareness. What is on the fringe of my awareness can become my focus, but only if what was before at the focus moves to the fringe. Perhaps the self is like a permanent fringe that cannot be brought into focus, but must be there for anything to be brought into focus. If so, that would explain why one cannot isolate the self as an object among objects. The notion of 'horizon' in Husserl and Heidegger is relevant here.

(3) They don't really justify the assumption that the kind of entity that they claim not to discover in their "rigorous" examination should be identified with the self. Or the characterization is too vague to decide whether we do or don't discover this thing. The vague idea of "an experiencer distinct from the flow of experience", for example. In some sense, I'm pretty sure that I do know this kind of entity from first-hand experience: right now I seem to be aware of the sensations and thoughts I'm having, and also something (i.e., me, my-self) that is the (distinct) subject of these experiences. Presumably they'd say this isn't my experience, or else that they don't mean to deny that I can have that experience but rather some other kind of experience. But then either their position seems false or it's just not clear what they're talking about.

BV: You are putting your finger on an important issue. You can't search for a thing unless you have an idea of what you are searching for. You won't be able to find my lost cygnet unless you know what a cygnet is. One will miss the self — assuming there is one — if one searches for it under a description it cannot satisfy. Case in point:

Here are the words of Buddha according to the Anattalakkhana Sutta, his second discourse, the Sermon on the Mark of Not-Self:

     The body [rupa], monks, is not self. If the body were the self,
     this body would not lend itself to dis-ease. It would be possible
     (to say) with regard to the body, 'Let my body be thus. Let my body
     be not thus.' But precisely because the body is not self, the body
     lends itself to dis-ease. And it is not possible (to say) with
     regard to the body, 'Let my body be thus. Let my body not be thus.'

Buddha then goes on to argue similarly with respect to the rest of the five aggregates or categories of personality-constituents (khandhas, Sanskrit: skandhas), namely, feeling (vedana), perception (sanna), consciousness (vinnana), and mental formations (sankharas). All are claimed to be not-self. Thus we are told that feeling afflicts us and is not amenable to our control, whence it is inferred that feeling is not one's self, not one's own inner substance. The tacit premise of this enthymematic argument is that one's self would have to be something over which one would have complete control. The tacit premise is that the self is something wholly active and spontaneous and self-regulating. It is clear that something wholly active will not suffer: to suffer is precisely to be afflicted by something external over which one has no control. To suffer is to be passive. An agent in excelsis is an impassible agent. (In the West, impassibility became one of the divine attributes.)

So if you set the bar really high, it will turn out that nothing we encounter in experience is a self or has self-nature. If so, we should discard, not the self, but the conception no actual self can instantiate.

David Hume too searches for the self under a description it cannot satisfy. You know the famous passage from the Treatise wherein he speaks of entering most intimately into himself only to stumble upon nothing but perceptions. Hume reports, "I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception." (Treatise of Human Nature, Selby-Bigge, 1978, p. 252.)

Well, if he is looking for a self that is bare of all perceptions (taking 'perception' broadly to subsume all mental states or conscious experiences), then it is no surprise that he finds nothing. It could be like this: the self is a substance (an endurant, not a perdurant) that remains numerically self-same over time but is always in some state or other. It would then be distinct from each of its states, and from all of them taken collectively, but also necessarily such that it cannot exist without being in some state or other.

And if that is so, then, when I am in a self-presenting state such as that of being euphoric, I am directly aware of my self as being in that state. We may grant Hume that we cannot be aware of the self as an item apart from its states, but that is consistent with being aware of the self in and through its states.

(4) I'd admit that the deep and detailed nature of this (seemingly) distinct entity is mysterious. But then it seems that they're wrongly assuming that having experience or knowledge of X requires having experience or knowledge of X sufficient for some kind of exhaustive and perfect understanding of X. I know about other people, and I experience them, without knowing everything about them (or what the ultimate nature of a person is, etc). Harris seems to be saying merely that the precise character of his self is elusive, hard to individuate or define, at least while he's meditating. I don't understand why that phenomenological fact is supposed to warrant the conclusion that he's found nothing of the kind. Maybe I haven't meditated properly but, in my experience, I take myself to be always dimly aware of just that kind of thing. But it's in the corner of the mind's eye, so to speak.

I agree that the self is mysterious and indeed beyond the reach of naturalistic understanding.

The Tet Offensive Fifty Years Later

It was around the time of Tet that I received a letter from Uncle Sam ordering me to downtown Los Angeles for my pre-induction physical. I went, and flunked. Due to a birth defect I hear only out of my right ear. I was classified 1-Y, and that was later changed to 4-F.

In any case, I had been awarded a California State Scholarship to attend college that fall. So I was doubly safe from the draft.

But enough about me.

50 Years Later: What Tet Didn't Destroy, Deferments Did

I would add:

There is something to be said in favor of an all-voluntary military, but on the debit side there is this: only those with 'skin in the game' — either their own or that of their loved ones — properly appreciate the costs of foreign military interventions. I say that as a conservative, not a libertarian.

There is also this to consider: In the bad old days of the draft people of different stations – to use a good old word that will not be allowed to fall into desuetude, leastways not on my watch — were forced to associate with one another — with some good effects. It is 'broadening' to mingle and have to get along with different sorts of people. And when the veteran of foreign wars returns and takes up a profession in, say, academe, he brings with him precious hard-won experience of all sorts of people in different lands in trying circumstances. He is then more likely to exhibit the sense of a Winston Churchill as opposed to the nonsense of a Ward Churchill.

Strange Anti-Epicurean Bedfellows: Josef Pieper, Thomist and David Benatar, Anti-Natalist

Many find the Epicurean reasoning about death sophistical. Among those who do, we encounter some strange bedfellows. To compress the famous reasoning into a trio of sentences:

When we are, death is not. When death is, we are not. Therefore, death is nothing to us, and nothing to fear.

The distinguished German Thomist, Josef Pieper, in his Death and Immortality (Herder and Herder, 1969, orig. publ. in 1968 under the title Tod und Unsterblichkeit) speaks of

. . . a deception which men have long employed, particularly in classical antiquity, in the attempt to overcome the fear of death. I refer to the sophism of not encountering death, which Epicurus seems to have been the first to formulate; "Death is nothing to us; for as long as we are, death is not here; and when death is here, we no longer are. Therefore it is nothing to the living or the dead." [In footnote 13, p. 134, Pieper reports, "Ernst Bloch, too, has recently repeated the old sophism. Das Prinzip der Hoffnung, Frankfurt a. M., 1969, p. 1391] The same argument, or variations of it, has been repeated many times since, from Lucretius and Cicero to Montaigne and Ernst Bloch; but the idea has not thereby become more credible. (p. 29)

Why does Pieper consider the Epicurean philosopheme to be a sophism?

What Epicurus attempts to do is to quarantine death, restricting it to the future period when when we will be dead and presumably nonexistent. Or perhaps we can say that Epicurus is engaged in an illicit compartmentalization: there is being alive and there is being dead and the two compartments are insulated from each other. Thus when we are alive we are wholly alive and death is nothing to us. And when we are dead, death is also nothing to us because we no longer exist.

I read Pieper as maintaining that this is a false separation: death is not wholly other than life; it is a part of life. We are not wholly alive when we are alive. Rather, we are dying at every moment. Compare Benatar for whom death is part of life in that "death [being dead] is an evil and thus part of the human predicament." (The Human Predicament, p. 110) Part of what makes the human predicament bad is that death awaits us all as a matter of nomological necessity. Now Pieper would never say that the human condition is bad or evil, believing as he does that the world is the creation of an all-good God; but the two thinkers seem agreed on the following precise point: death cannot be assigned to the future in such a way that it is nothing to us here and now.

For Pieper, the image of death as Grim Reaper, although apt in one way, is misleading in another, suggesting as it does that death is wholly external to us, attacking us from without and cutting us down. Of course it is true that our lives are threatened from without by diseases, natural disasters, wild animals, and other humans. To this extent death is like a scythe wielded from without that cuts us down. But it is not as if we would continue to live indefinitely if not attacked from without. Death does not kill a man the way his murderer kills him. What images such as that of the Grim Reaper hide, according to Pieper, is the fact

. . . that we ourselves, in living our life away, are on the way to death; that death ripens like a fruit within us; that we begin to die as soon as we are born; that this mortal life moves towards its end from within, and that death is the foregone conclusion of our life here. (28)

If so, then death cannot be pushed off into the future where it will be nothing to us. It is something to us now in that we are now, all of us, dying. While alive we are yet mortal: subject to death. But not in the sense that it is possible that we die, or probable, but in the sense that it is necessary. To be mortal is to be potentially dead, and living is the gradual actualization of this potentiality. Death would be nothing to us while we are alive if we were non-mortal until death overtakes us. But this is not the case: we are mortal while we are alive. We don't go from being wholly alive to wholly dead; we go from being potentially dead to actually dead.

The Epicurean therapeutics is supposed to allay our fear of being dead, and to some extent it does, on the assumption that we are wholly mortal. But it does nothing to allay our anxiety over being mortal. Being mortal, and knowing that I am, I know what is coming, my personal obliteration.

The Real FISA Scandal

Andrew Klavan:

It now seems very likely the FBI and Department of Justice deceived a FISA court with an uncorroborated piece of Democrat-funded oppo research in order to obtain a warrant to spy on American citizen Carter Page. If, as seems reasonable to conjecture, the broader target turns out to have been the Donald Trump presidential campaign for which Page had recently worked, the needle on the scandal meter will begin to edge up into the red zone.

Let’s put it this way: if this sort of thing had gone on under President Trump or even George W. Bush, the Times would have announced the news in front-page headlines so large it would have taken two strong men just to carry the letters to the press room. An enormous collection of Times reportage on the subject—with a black cover and some title like “The Path to Tyranny”—would have been on the bookstore shelves within the month.

Klavan on Experience

The Left eats its own: pink pussyhats are now ‘racist’

But of course! First, not all 'women' sport pussies. Second, not all female genitalia are pink.

The second point presupposes that race and skin color are the same, which is demonstrably not the case; that, however, is a serious point upon which I shall expatiate in a rather more serious offering. Here I am engaged in the Alinskyite task of mocking the willful stupidity of leftists.

There is also the irony of protesting an alleged presidential pussy-grabber by parading around like an idiot in a hat that ramps up the vulgarity a couple of orders of magnitude. I'm thinking of you, Madonna. This is the Women's Movement brought to fruition?

Welcome to the Decline of the West brought to you by the Left.

One good thing about leftists, though, is that they eat their own. They seem bent on their own destruction as they drift ever farther leftward. Contemporary Dems are an example. It wasn't so long ago that they took a reasonable line on illegal immigration. (Whether Clinton, Obama, and their ilk actually believed what they preached is a further question.) Now the Dems support open borders. We of the Coalition of the Sane, trusting in the basic sanity of most Americans, hope they become as unelectable as Libertarians, the perennial losertarians of American politics.

Story here.

Related: Camille Paglia on Pussy Hats

Woody Allen, Meet Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange: Meaning and Desire

To repeat some of what I wrote earlier,

According to Woody Allen, we all know that human existence is meaningless and that it ends, utterly and meaninglessly, with death. We all know this, he thinks, but we hide the horrible reality from ourselves with all sorts of evasions and distractions. Worldly people, for example, imagine that they will live forever and lose themselves in the pursuit of pleasure, money, name and fame. Religious people console themselves with fairy tales about God and the soul and post-mortem bliss. Leftists, in the grip of utopian fantasies, having smoked the opium of the intellectuals, sacrifice their lives on the altar of activism. And not only their lives: Communists in the 20th century broke 100 millon 'eggs' in pursuit of an elusive 'omelet.' Ordinary folk live for their children and grandchildren as if procreation has redemptive power.

Pushing the line of thought further, I note that Allen is deeply bothered, indeed obsessed in his neurotic Manhattanite Jewish intellectual sort of way, by the apparent meaninglessness of human existence. Why does the apparent lack of an ultimate meaning bother him? It bothers him because a deep desire for ultimate sense, for point and purpose, is going unsatisfied. He wants redemptive Meaning, but Meaning is absent. (Note that what is phenomenologically absent may or may not be nonexistent.)

But a deep and natural desire for a meaning that is absent may be evidence of a sort for the possibility of the desire's satisfaction. Why do sensitive souls feel the lack of point and purpose? The felt lack and unsatisfied desire is at least a fact and wants an explanation. What explains the felt lack, the phenomenological absence of a redemptive Meaning that could make all this misery and ignorance and evil bearable? What explains the fact that Allen is bothered by the apparent meaninglessness of human existence?

You could say that nothing explains it; it is just a brute fact that some of us crave meaning. Less drastically, and more plausibly, one could say that the craving for meaning has an explanation in terms of efficient causes, but not one that requires the reality of its intentional object. Let me explain.

Craving is an intentional state: it is an object-directed state of mind. One cannot just crave, desire, want, long for, etc. One craves, desires, wants, longs for something. This something is the intentional object. Every intentional state takes an object; but it doesn't follow that every such state takes an object that exists. If a woman wants a man, it does not follow that there exists a man such that she wants him. She wants Mr. Right, but no one among us satisfies the requisite criteria. So while she wants a man, there is no man she wants. Therefore, the deep desire for Meaning does not guarantee the existence of Meaning. We cannot validily argue, via the intentionality of desiderative consciousness, to the extramental reality of the the object desired.

Nevertheless, if is it a natural (as opposed to an artificially induced) desire we are talking about, then perhaps there is a way to infer the existence of the object desired from the fact of the desiring, that is, from the existence of the desiderative state, not from the content or realitas objectiva of the desiderative state. The inferential move from realitas objectiva to realitas formalis is invalid; but the move from the existence of the state to the reality of its object may be valid.

Suppose I want (to drink) water. The natural desire for water is rooted in a natural need. I don't just desire it, the way I might desire (to smoke) a cigar; I need it. Now it doesn't follow from the existence of my need that there is water hereabouts or water in sufficient quantity to keep me alive, but the need for water is very good evidence for the existence of water somewhere. (Suppose all the water in the universe ceases to exist, but I exist for a little longer. My need for water would still be good evidence for the existence of water at some time.) If there never had been any water, then no critter could desire or need it; indeed no critter could exist at all.

The need for water 'proves' the existence of water. Perhaps the desire/need for Meaning 'proves' the existence of Meaning. The felt lack of meaning — its phenomenological absence — is grounded in the natural (not artificial) need for Meaning, and this need would not exist if it were not for the extramental reality of a source of Meaning with which we were once in contact, or the traces of which are buried deep within us. And this all men call God.

Mr. Allen, meet Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange:

Since natural desire can never be in vain, and since all men naturally desire beatitude, there must exist an objective being that is infinitely perfect, a being that man can possess, love, and enjoy. (Beatitude, tr. Cummins, Ex Fontibus 2012, p. 79)

This argument, studied in the context of Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics, is more impressive than it may seem. If nothing else it ought to undermine the belief of Allen and his like that it is known by all of us today that human existence is ultimately meaningless.

Here is a video with relevant excerpts from G-L's Life Everlasting and the Immensity of the Soul.

King Midas, The Philosopher, and the Leftist

Whatever King Midas touched turned to gold. Whatever the philosopher touches turns into a puzzle. Whatever a Continental 'philosopher' touches turns into a social construct. Whatever a leftist touches turns into crap.

SJWs Destroy Everything. Can this really be happening?

Is There a Self? A Reader Requests Reassurance

A reader reports that he has recently gone through "a season of depression and extreme anxiety" and has come to doubt what he hitherto believed to be true, namely that there is a self. He now fears that Sam Harris may be right in the following passage I quote in Sam Harris on Rational Mysticism and Whether the Self is an Illusion:

It is an empirical fact that sustained meditation can result in a variety of insights that intelligent people regularly find intellectually credible and personally transformative. The problem, however, is that these insights are almost always sought and expressed in a religious context. One such insight is that the feeling we call “I”—the sense that there is a thinker giving rise to our thoughts, an experiencer distinct from the mere flow of experience—can disappear when looked for in a rigorous way. Our conventional sense of “self” is, in fact, nothing more than a cognitive illusion, and dispelling this illusion opens the mind to extraordinary experiences of happiness. This is not a proposition to be accepted on faith; it is an empirical observation, analogous to the discovery of one’s optic blind spots.

What the reader wants from me are reasons in support of his belief that there is a self in the teeth of Harris' claim that the self is a cognitive illusion. Whether or not I can strictly refute the 'No Self' view, I can show that it is not rationally compelling and that one can very reasonably deny it. Here we go.

An Operator-Shift Fallacy

1) The nonexistence of what one fails to find does not logically follow from one's failing to find it. So the failure to find in experience an object called 'self' does not entail the nonexistence of the self. An absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Harris looks to be guilty of an operator-shift fallacy. The following is a non sequitur:

a) It is not the case that I find X

ergo

b) I find that it is not the case that there is X.

2) So failure to find the self as an object of experience is at least logically consistent with the existence of a self.

A Transcendental Argument

3) What's more, the positing of a self seems rationally required even if the self cannot be experienced as a separate object alongside the usual objects of introspection/reflection. For someone or something is doing the searching and coming up 'empty-handed.'

This is a sort of transcendental argument for the self. We start with a plain fact, namely, that a search is going on, a search for the referent of 'I' given that I am not identical to my property, my body, or any introspectible contents. We then ask: what makes it possible for this search to proceed? We conclude that there must be something that is searching, and what might that be? Well, me! I am searching. The I, ego, self is not exhausted by its objectifiable features.

A Dogmatic Assumption

It is simply false to say what Harris says, namely, that one empirically observes that there is no self. That is not an observation but an inference from the failure to encounter the self as an object of experience. It is an inference that is valid only in the presence of an auxiliary premise:

Only that which can be experienced as an object exists.
The self cannot be experienced as an object.
Therefore
The self does not exist.

This argument is valid, but is it sound? The second premise is empirical: nothing we encounter in experience (inner or outer) counts as the subject of experience. True for the standard Humean and Buddhist reasons. But we cannot validly move from the second premise to the conclusion. We need the help of the auxiliary premise, which is not empirical. How then do we know that it is true? Must we take it on faith? Whose faith? Harris's? My point is that Harris is operating with a dogmatic, non-empirical assumption, the just-mentioned auxiliary premise.

The Diachronic Unity of Consciousness

4) There are also important considerations re: diachronic personal identity. Suppose I decide to investigate the question of the self. A moment later I begin the investigation by carefully examining the objects of inner and outer experience to see if any one of them is the self. After some searching I come to the conclusion that the self is not to be located among the objects of experience. I then entertain the thought that perhaps there is no self. But then it occurs to me that failure to find X is not proof of X's nonexistence. I then consider whether it is perhaps the very nature of the subject of experience to be unobjectifiable. And so I conclude that the self exists but is not objectifiable, or at least not isolable as a separate object of experience among others.

This reasoning may or may not be sound. The point, however, is that the reasoning, which plays out over a period of time, would not be possible at all if there were no one self — no one unity of consciousness and self-consciousness — that maintained its strict numerical identity over the period of time in question. For what we have in the reasoning process is not merely a succession of conscious states, but also a consciousness of their succession in one and the same conscious subject. Without the consciousness of succession, without the retention of the earlier states in the present state, no conclusion could be arrived at.

All reasoning presupposes the diachronic unity of consciousness. Or do you think that the task of thinking through a syllogism could be divided up? Suppose Manny says, All men are mortal! Moe then pipes up, Socrates is a man! Could Jack conclude that Socrates is mortal? No. He could say it but not conclude it. (This assumes that Jack does not hear what the other two Pep Boys say. Imagine each in a separate room.)

The hearing of a melody supplies a second example.

To hear the melody Do-Re-Mi, it does not suffice that there be a hearing of Do, followed by a hearing of Re, followed by a hearing of Mi. For those three acts of hearing could occur in that sequence in three distinct subjects, in which case they would not add up to the hearing of a melody. (Tom, Dick, and Harry can divide up the task of loading a truck, but not the ‘task’ of hearing a melody, or that of understanding a sentence, or that of inferring a conclusion from premises.) But now suppose the acts of hearing occur in the same subject, but that this subject is not a unitary and self-same individual but just the bundle of these three acts, call them A1, A2, and A3. When A1 ceases, A2 begins, and when A2 ceases, A3 begins: they do not overlap. In which act is the hearing of the melody? A3 is the only likely candidate, but surely it cannot be a hearing of the melody. For the awareness of a melody involves the awareness of the (musical not temporal) intervals between the notes, and to apprehend these intervals there must be a retention (to use Husserl’s term) in the present act A3 of the past acts A2 and A1. Without this phenomenological presence of the past acts in the present act, there would be no awareness in the present of the melody. But this implies that the self cannot be a mere bundle of perceptions externally related to each other, but must be a peculiarly intimate unity of perceptions in which the present perception A3 includes the immediately past ones A2 and A1 as temporally past but also as phenomenologically present in the mode of retention. The fact that we hear melodies thus shows that there must be a self-same and unitary self through the period of time between the onset of the melody and its completion. This unitary self is neither identical to the sum or collection of A1, A2, and A3, nor is it identical to something wholly distinct from them. Nor of course is it identical to any one of them or any two of them. This unitary self is given whenever one hears a melody.

The unitary self is phenomenologically given, but not as a separate object. Herein, perhaps, resides the error of Hume and some Buddhists: they think that if there is a self, it must exist as a separate object of experience.

The above blend of phenomenological and dialectical considerations suffices to ensure at least a standoff with Harris and other latter-day Buddhists/Humeans.