The No-Self Argument Only Defeats Descartes, Not the Self

The no-self position in philosophy of mind and contemplative traditions operates with an unexamined presupposition: it measures the self against a Cartesian standard of substance — an immaterial, unified, enduring thing in which experiences inhere — and, finding nothing that meets that standard, declares the self illusory. But this is a standard we abandoned for virtually every other domain of inquiry centuries ago. Matter is not a Cartesian substance; it is a dynamic system of fields and interactions. Life contains no élan vital. The atom is divisible. In each case, the referent survived the failure of the model. The rational move was revision, not elimination. The no-self argument is thus a motte-and-bailey: the provocative claim that there is no self retreats, under scrutiny, to the defensible but far less radical claim that there is no Cartesian soul.

This critique deepens when the historical contingency of the Cartesian self-model is made explicit. Nicholas Stang's work on the "divine double" demonstrates that in third-century Gnostic, Hermetic, and Neoplatonic traditions, the dominant self-model was inherently relational, dialogical, and developmental — a spark of the divine in movement toward reunion with its transcendent counterpart. The Cartesian monadic soul is not a universal feature of human self-understanding; it is a culturally and historically located construction.

This matters because the no-self argument requires the Cartesian content of the self-model to be universal in order to generate a universal conclusion. If different traditions have modeled the self in fundamentally non-Cartesian ways, then the failure of the Cartesian model establishes only that one particular cultural description was inaccurate — not that selfhood as such is illusory. The motte shrinks to a historically local observation, not the sweeping metaphysical negation that was advertised.