THE SPONTANEOUS SELF
VIABLE ALTERNATIVES TO FREE WILL
PAUL BREER
Copyright © 1989, 2012 by Paul Breer. Cover painting (Metamorphosis) by Varouj Hairabedian. Original printing, Institute for Naturalistic Philosophy, Cambridge, MA, 1989 Second printing, Xlibris Corporation, Bloomington, Indiana, 2012 Library of Congress Control Number: 2012914695 ISBN:
Hardcover
978-1-4771-5969-9
Softcover
978-1-4771-5968-2
Ebook
978-1-4771-5970-5
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner. Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to use copyrighted material from the following sources: Dylan Thomas: Poems of Dylan Thomas. Copyright c 1952 by Dylan Thomas, 1967 by the Trustees for the Copyrights of Dylan Thomas. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation. Transformations of Consciousness by Ken Wilber, Jack Engler and Daniel P. Brown. Selection c 1986 by The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology. Reprinted by arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc., 300 Massachusetts Ave., Boston, MA 02115. The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan W. Watts. Copyright c 1951 by Pantheon Books, Inc.; The Way of Zen by Alan W. Watts, copyright c 1957 by Pantheon Books, Inc. Both reprinted by permission of Pantheon Books, a Division of Random House, Inc. On the Genealogy of Morals by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale, and edited, with commentary, by Walter Kaufmann. Copyright c 1967 by Random House, Inc.; The Will To Power by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale and edited, with commentary, by Walter Kaufmann. Copyright c 1967 by Walter Kaufmann. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc. Beyond Freedom and Dignity by B.F. Skinner. Copyright c 1971 by B.F. Skinner. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
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Contents Preface Introduction
In Search of the Homunculus 1 An Overview of the Agency Problem 2 What Does It Mean To Say I? 3 How Do I Know That I Exist? An Experiment 4 Linguistic and Social Origins of Agency
A Question of Survival 5 The Self-governing Organism 6 Moral Responsibility and Social Control
Psychological Implications of Giving Up Free Will 7 Blaming Others, Blaming Ourselves 8 Beyond Pride and Virtue 9 Releasing The Wheel 10 Going Gentle Into That Good Night 11 The Will To Power 12 Emotion: Torrents of the Soul 13 Love and Sexuality 14 Just Who Do We Think We Are?
Dispelling the Free Will Illusion 15 A Strategy for Giving Up The Ghost 16 A Dignity We Never Had Bibliography
Preface Eight years ago I met Tom Clark at a meeting of the Alan Watts Fellowship in Boston. At the time, he was working on a monograph called “Buddhism, Behaviorism, and the Myth of the Autonomous Self.” I was in the process of sketching out a book on the illusion of self based on thinking I had done since leaving the Rochester Zen Center. We were delighted to discover that we shared a basic conviction that the “I” most Westerners take as their real self was no more than a conceptual fiction. At the same time we were intrigued by the differences in our approach to that fiction. While Tom was concerned with demonstrating how it had surfaced in traditions as disparate as Buddhism and behaviorism, I was more concerned with spelling out what it implied for our everyday lives. In the months that fo