One of the great partial truths of Buddhism is that the self, as experienced, is unstable. When a man begins to observe himself closely, not merely as a thinker of concepts, but as one who watches the movements of consciousness, he discovers that what he ordinarily identifies with his “I” is in fact a stream. As he learns to see the patterns of thoughts and emotions as they arise and pass, their fluid nature becomes more and more apparent. As we get older, we realize that even the image one has of oneself is subject to constant revision. The self as experienced is not like an immovable granite object, but a bottomless web that seems to slip through our fingers.
The Buddhist tradition saw this with remarkable clarity. In the Anattalakkhaṇa Sutta, the Buddha subjects the human person to a ruthless phenomenological analysis. He argues that form, feeling, and perception is not self. The premise is that mental formations are impermanent. These cycles of existence are subject to affliction, instability, and change. Thus he concludes, “What is impermanent is suffering; what is suffering is nonself.”¹ And again, these changing realities are understood in the context, “This is not mine, this I am not, this is not my self.”² There is truth in the idea that when the self is investigated only on the grounds of experience, its timeless nature does not necessarily become readily apparent.
The more carefully one examines experience as experience, the more one sees that the empirical self is not a simple thing. It is composite, relational, and transient. The “I” that is angry in the morning is not the same “I” that is peaceful at noon. The “I” that is confident in public may collapse in private. The one who says “this is who I am” usually refers not to essence, but to a temporary arrangement of memories, wounds, habits, fears, and roles. Buddhism is right to strike at this illusion. It is right to deny permanence to the self insofar as the self is taken as an object within experience.³
Here Husserl becomes unexpectedly helpful. Husserl does not give us a theology of the soul, but he does give us a disciplined account of appearance. He reminds us that phenomenology concerns what is given in consciousness and how it is given. “Any consciousness is a consciousness of something.”⁴ Consciousness is always intentional; it is always consciousness-of. That simple insight is revolutionary because it prevents us from treating the experienced self as a static object. The self, at the phenomenological level, is encountered in acts, orientations, horizons, intentions, memories, retentions, and anticipations. It appears within a living stream.
And Husserl is explicit that the contents of experience belong to a kind of flux. In Ideas II, he writes: “Each and every cogito, along with all its constituents, arises or vanishes in the flux of lived experiences.”⁵ That is profoundly important. The experienced self is bound up with lived experience, and lived experience is marked by arising and vanishing. The phenomenological ego, insofar as it is encountered in the field of consciousness, is not some crude, unchanging substance available to immediate inspection. Experience does not present us with a little homunculus sitting behind the eyes. Experience presents a field, a movement, a style, a unity-in-flux.
And yet Husserl also hints that the matter is not exhausted by the passing stream. In the same discussion he says, “the pure subject does not arise or vanish.”⁶ Husserl does not thereby prove the immortal soul in the Thomistic sense, but he does show that phenomenology itself presses toward a distinction between the mutable contents of experience and the abiding pole of subjectivity.
To arrive at the stable identity of the individual, we ought to rely on Aquinas. For him, the soul is not one more object in experience. It is not something that appears the way a feeling appears or an image appears. The soul is the substantial form of the body, and in man the rational soul possesses an intellectual operation that transcends matter. Because the intellect can know being in a universal way and is not limited to a material organ as such, Aquinas argues that the human soul is subsistent. “The principle of intellectual operation which we call the soul of man, is a principle both incorporeal and subsistent.”⁷ And because it is subsistent in this way, it is not destroyed as material composites are destroyed. Thus Aquinas concludes that “the human soul is incorruptible.”⁸
Thus we can make the distinction that the self as experienced is impermanent while the self as metaphysically grounded is not. What Buddhism sees, and sees rightly, is that everything available to introspection is unstable. What phenomenology sees, and sees rightly, is that consciousness unfolds as a structured stream of givenness. But neither introspection nor phenomenology, by themselves, can settle the full metaphysical question of what the human person is. They can describe appearance, but they fall short in that appearance alone cannot account for essence.
This is one of the great confusions of the modern age: men assume that if something cannot be located within experience as an object, it therefore does not exist. But the soul is not absent because it is unreal. It is absent because it is deeper than the level of objectification. The eye does not see itself by direct sight. The ground of identity is not ordinarily one more datum among data.
The Christian tradition can therefore affirm the Buddhist critique at one level while rejecting its final metaphysical conclusion. We can affirm that the self that is grasped in sensations, moods, thoughts, and psychological narratives is unstable. Thus the world of phenomena, considered merely as phenomena, offers no permanent resting place and the ego collapses under sufficient scrutiny. However, man is not merely a bundle of appearances nor is he merely the theater of passing impressions. He is a creature with an immortal soul.
Beneath the flux of consciousness, beyond the weather of experience, there remains the spiritual soul: not an object among objects, but the abiding root of the person, created by God, ordered to truth, and destined for eternity.⁹
Endnotes
1. Anattalakkhaṇa Sutta (SN 22.59), trans. Nyanaponika Thera (Access to Insight, 2010), https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn22/sn22.059.nypo.html: “What is impermanent is suffering; what is suffering is nonself.”
2. Aniccasutta (SN 22.45), in The Connected Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Saṃyutta Nikāya, trans. Bhikkhu Bodhi (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2000), 884; also available at SuttaCentral, https://suttacentral.net/sn22.45: “This is not mine, this I am not, this is not my self.”
3. Saḷāyatanasaṃyutta (SN 35), in Bhikkhu Bodhi, trans., The Connected Discourses of the Buddha, 1119–1236; cf. SuttaCentral, https://suttacentral.net/sn35, summarizing the six sense fields as “impermanent, suffering, and not-self.”
4. Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. F. Kersten (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983), §36, p. 73: “Every mental process is a ‘consciousness of’ something.”
5. Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989), §23, p. 96.
6. Ibid.
7. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 75, a. 2, resp., in Summa Theologiae, vol. 11, trans. Timothy Suttor (London: Blackfriars/Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1970): “The principle of intellectual operation which we call the soul of man, is a principle both incorporeal and subsistent.”
8. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 75, a. 6, resp.; cf. Summa Theologiae, vol. 11, trans. Suttor.
9. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima, trans. Kenelm Foster and Silvester Humphries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951), bk. III, lect. 10, n. 745.