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Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live without a Self by [Jay L. Garfield]

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Jay L. Garfield

Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live without a Self Kindle Edition

by Jay L. Garfield (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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Why you don’t have a self—and why that’s a good thing

In Losing Ourselves, Jay Garfield, a leading expert on Buddhist philosophy, offers a brief and radically clear account of an idea that at first might seem frightening but that promises to liberate us and improve our lives, our relationships, and the world. Drawing on Indian and East Asian Buddhism, Daoism, Western philosophy, and cognitive neuroscience, Garfield shows why it is perfectly natural to think you have a self—and why it actually makes no sense at all and is even dangerous. Most importantly, he explains why shedding the illusion that you have a self can make you a better person.

Examining a wide range of arguments for and against the existence of the self, Losing Ourselves makes the case that there are not only good philosophical and scientific reasons to deny the reality of the self, but that we can lead healthier social and moral lives if we understand that we are selfless persons. The book describes why the Buddhist idea of no-self is so powerful and why it has immense practical benefits, helping us to abandon egoism, act more morally and ethically, be more spontaneous, perform more expertly, and navigate ordinary life more skillfully. Getting over the self-illusion also means escaping the isolation of self-identity and becoming a person who participates with others in the shared enterprise of life.

The result is a transformative book about why we have nothing to lose—and everything to gain—by losing our selves.

Print length

218 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Princeton University Press
Publication date

24 May 2022
File size

3966 KB
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About the Author

Jay L. Garfield is the Doris Silbert Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy, Logic, and Buddhist Studies at Smith College and a visiting professor of Buddhist philosophy at Harvard Divinity School. His many books include Engaging Buddhism.

--This text refers to the hardcover edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B09M7XCWQX
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Princeton University Press (24 May 2022)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 3966 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 218 pages
Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 069122028X

Best Sellers Rank: 121,480 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- 113 in Humanism Philosophy
- 115 in Consciousness & Thought (Kindle Store)
- 138 in Social Philosophy

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61 ratings

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Adrian Bailey

A good addition

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 26 June 2022

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Interesting philosophical arguments for no-self. Clear writing while serious enough for a layperson. A useful resource probably best combined with past and future studies. It would be interesting to see a follow-up work digging more deeply into practical ethical implications.

michael mortimer

brilliant

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 5 June 2022

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cogent, precise and profoundly useful. thank you for writing this book.

One person found this helpful

Gregorio Tomassi

Thought provoking!

Reviewed in Mexico on 19 June 2022

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This is a thought provoking book with a convincing discussion about the idea that while the person in us exists, the idea of self and free will are illusions.
I would have appreciated a clearer structure and simpler arguments in the section devoted to prove false the ideas proposed about the reality of self. I still find it difficult to link the community values as a necessary consequence of us humans trashing the self illusion.

AltCountry007

Audible; Making Sense podcast

Reviewed in the United States on 5 June 2022

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I would appreciate an Audible edition of this book, especially if Dr. Garfield is the reader. I strongly recommend the brilliant conversation between Dr. Garfield and Sam Harris on the Making Sense podcast (# 282).

22 people found this helpful

Dan Baer

Perhaps the most effective self-help book: there is no self!

Reviewed in the United States on 21 June 2022

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I so enjoyed this book. Chapters one through five "slay" the illusion of the self, and chapters six through ten explain how relinquishing the illusion of selfhood and replacing it with the reality of being a person "embodied, embedded, and enactive" in/with/as the world moves us toward a happier, healthier, shared life. I'd like to include a couple quotations to help prospective readers get a taste of Garfield's thought and writing:

"To understand one's selflessness is to understand not that one is nonexistent, but that one is a real person in constant interaction with everything else in one's environment, a causally interdependent sequence of psychophysical processes. And it is to understand that the identity we do have – our personal identity – is not achieved alone, but instead is achieved only in immersed interaction with the rest of the world we inhabit. The myriad things – the entities of the empirical world – therefore do not constitute an independent reality with which we interact, but instead constitute a reality as sub-processes of the causal unfolding of the universe" (pp 112-3).

"To believe that we have selves is to succumb to a natural illusion, just as we succumb naturally to optical illusions. We are neither substantial subjects who take the world as object, nor free actors who intervene in an otherwise law-governed natural world. Instead, we are persons: hyper-social organisms embedded in the world, in open causal interaction with our environments and with each other; complex causal continua who play complex social roles" (p 170).

It's hard not to get the sense that Yuval Harari, Robert Sapolsky, Riccardo Manzotti, Jay Garfield, and no doubt numerous other intellectuals of diverse backgrounds seem to be converging on what might be a Copernican moment for humanity's understanding of what it is.

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