If we take a modern Buddhist approach where the ultimate reality is emptiness, what then does that look like in practice? Especially as we think about the key question:how can you be yourself if there is no self?

In thinking through my Buddhism, I had once turned to a reductionist “Sellarsian solution” because it allows in some sense for selves as conventional (rather than ultimate) truth. I’ve now moved instead to a Buddhist view that is based on emptiness rather than reductionism – and, crucially, the emptiness view allows selves in that conventional sense too. For that reason, I think an emptiness-based approach may still be able to leave room for an expressive individualism, where we seek to be ourselves more fully.

The key is that the empty ultimate is in some respects normatively inert: it’s beyond good and bad, because at some level it’s beyond anything at all, purely ineffable. That ultimate normative inertness is important because it allows room for our preexisting reasons for action. If good and bad were themselves something ultimate, then their ultimacy would dictate what our values should be (as it does for the Abrahamic monotheisms, which are often foes of expressive individualism).

But if good and bad are at the conventional level, then we have more room to think of them in terms of our existing considered ends, not only the removal of suffering. They can include our second-order ends, maybe even self-expression. The key is that that conventional normativity needs to be informed by the ultimate emptiness of both self and world. If it is not informed by that emptiness, then it is trapped in an illusion that leads to further suffering – like the illusion that what’s going to save us is a move to a post-capitalist utopia.

Let me spell out that last point a bit more. In all Buddhist traditions, the positing of ultimate truth matters greatly: ultimate truth informs the conventional, we see the conventional differently when we understand ultimate truth. In this case, we see that the universe itself is ultimately empty, void: made almost entirely of empty space, yes, but more fundamentally, empty of purpose, of ultimate teleology. Sentient beings and their products, I would argue, do have purposes – but emerging from their own consciousness and values. Not from the universe.

The core of the emptiness idea in Madhyamaka Buddhist thought is dependent origination, pratītya samutpāda: all things are empty in that they originate dependently on other things, and whatever is subject to origination is subject to cessation. Nothing is permanent: we individuals, the universe, and any future utopia must all come to an end, and we must understand our individual and collective lives in the light of that impermanence. That impermanence in turn lends our life on this planet a certain kind of unreality, a dreamlike quality: one that diminishes our attachment to this impermanent life when we take it seriously. Again in Śāntideva’s words: “When all things are empty in this way, what can be received, what taken away? Who can be honoured or humiliated by whom?”

Because human life will ultimately end, we need to move from the perspective of history to something more like what George Grant would call the perspective of eternity – even if, contra Grant, it turns out that the perspective of eternity is a non-perspective. Such a view ends up in some respects existentialist as well as Buddhist – in a way quite close, I think, to the existentialist Buddhism expressed by Nishitani Keiji in his brilliant Religion and Nothingness. Emptiness or zero-ness, on this view, looks a lot like the universe’s ultimate nihility.

The ultimate death, individual and collective, sets the horizon for everything, including science itself. Science only makes sense when done by a subject, someone to interpret it. And someday there will be no more subjects. On some level that future subjectless world, like the past subjectless world, is rocks floating in space – but on another level it is pure empty void with no rocks or anything else, because there will be no one to perceive it. We need to live our lives in a way that accounts for that ultimate emptiness – but that doesn’t mean we can’t express ourselves.

(Cross-posted on the Indian Philosophy Blog. Since the IPB started I’ve generally attached these notifications to the bottom of each cross-post, but that adds additional effort to the already significant weekly effort it takes to put up my posts on both blogs plus the Substack, so I’m going to stop doing it after today.)