BECOMING AND UN-BECOMING: THE
THEORY AND PRACTICE OF ANATTA

Clare Carlisle

Theory

Who am I?

The doctrine of anatta, selflessness, is at the heart of the Buddha’s teaching,

and it ties together metaphysical, ethical, meditative, and devotional facets of
Buddhism. Like many spiritual and philosophical traditions, Buddhism rests on the
idea that wisdom is liberating, but unlike most other traditions teaches that the
wisdom that must be sought is not about oneself, but about one’s selflessness.
Western philosophers, habituated to Christian, Platonic, and Cartesian ways of
thinking, and to a substantialist, unrepentantly self-centred grammar, may find
anatta difficult to understand, to accept, to imagine.

Actually, anatta is so simple that it can hardly be called a doctrine: it is a

denial, a denial that ‘I’ really exist. The Buddhist philosopher’s challenge is not to
argue or to prove that there is no such thing as a distinct, enduring self—in any
case, the truth of anatta only becomes meaningful (i.e. liberating) in practice,
when it is experienced—but to account for the phenomenon of selfhood. What is
this ‘I’ who, it seems, experiences and remembers things; worries, loves, hopes,
suffers, grows old; seeks wisdom; practices Buddhism, and so on? The
phenomenon of self-identity is not only, or even primarily, an outcome of
introspection: if we deny the reality of the self, we need to explain how it is that we
are able to know and understand another person; to recognise an old
acquaintance, even from a distance, after many years of absence. How does a
Buddhist philosopher account for the continuity, consistency, and stability of a
human being through time, without recourse to concepts such as substance and
essence?

For some time now I have been developing an account of selfhood that is

based on the concept of habit. For reasons that will soon become clear, this focus
on habit is very useful, and rather well suited, to the European Buddhist
philosopher I find myself to be. Many thinkers in our western tradition have
emphasised the role of habit in human life: for example, Aristotle and Aquinas
regard habit as a second nature, which develops through actions and shapes

Contemporary Buddhism, Vol. 7, No. 1, May 2006

ISSN 1463-9947 print/1476-7953 online/06/010075-89

q

2006 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/14639940600878034

a person’s moral character; Hume argues that ‘habit or custom’ is ‘the great guide
of human life’ (1975, 44),

1

the source of our beliefs and judgements about

causation, the external world, and personal identity. William James and Marcel
Proust both go further in seeing habit as a fundamental principle of the human
person as a whole. More recently, a few philosophers have gone so far as to
identify the self with habit: Gilles Deleuze suggests that ‘we are habits, nothing but
habits’ (1991, x); Merleau-Ponty describes the embodied self—‘the lived body’ or
‘my own body’—as ‘my basic habit’ (1962, 91). John Dewey writes that ‘all habits
. . . constitute the self’ (1922, 25), and Krishnamurti claims that ‘I am my habit, my
habit is me. . . my whole life is a structure of habits’ (1986, 125 – 7). In an earlier
essay on habit, I tried to argue for and develop this idea that habit can account for
selfhood (see Carlisle 2006). I no longer wish to make this claim, not least because
it rests on an assumption that we know what the self is, what its boundaries are,
and are therefore able to reflect on the extent to which habit can account for it.
But how would we know when we have fully accounted for a self that remains
undetermined?

Nevertheless, in taking seriously the suggestion that ‘we are habits, nothing

but habits’, I made some progress in thinking through the conceptual structure of
habit, its mode of operation, its transcendental conditions, its connections to
personal identity, and its ethical relevance; and I think that this does tell us more
about the self—in a way that accommodates the theory and the practice of
anatta. Now, by identifying the self with habit I am merely suggesting that we
work with a certain definition of the self, delimited by habit. In other words, we
draw from the concept of habit a provisional determination of the self. Whatever
cannot be explained in terms of habit—freedom, creativity, spontaneity, and
awareness, for example—will be put outside the domain of selfhood. This leaves
us with the possibility that the human being is not exhausted by the self, that
there are other ways of living available to each of us. This possibility is a
prerequisite of the Buddhist path.

Selfhood and habit

Habit is a familiar concept, and (as for many things) its familiarity is both a

blessing and a curse. Perhaps because we all recognise the notion of habit, and
have first-hand acquaintance with at least some of its effects, most philosophers
who make use of the concept do so rather uncritically. But when we do begin to
reflect on habit, we find that neither its meaning nor its mechanism is self-evident.
In addition to its various philosophical uses, the concept of habit has several
different, although related, senses within everyday language. We know that habit
signifies ‘a settled disposition or tendency to act in a certain way, especially one
acquired by frequent repetition of the same act until it becomes almost or quite
involuntary’ (OED). Habit also denotes an individual’s outward demeanour,
posture, bodily constitution; a mode of dress; a place of dwelling. In botany, a
plant’s habit is the shape and direction of its growth; in mineralogy, a crystal’s

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habit is its pattern of formation. These different uses of the word contribute to my
own philosophical concept of habit, which identifies three key elements: action,
repetition, and shape or form.

By action I mean mental, vocal, or physical action. Curiously, habit is at once

a source and a result of action. The phenomenon of habit testifies to the power of
action not merely to produce an effect, but to generate and to shape further
actions. Actions, when repeated, lead to the formation of a habit; a habit
represents a sort of accumulation of actions. This accumulation of repeated
actions—or of some kind of trace of these actions—gives rise to subsequent
actions, so that we can, and frequently do, ‘act out of habit’. The continuity of
habits relies on repetition: repetition sustains the habit, and the habit sustains the
repetition—habit is inseparable from repetition. Habit gives us a principle of
continuity through time that is itself temporal, since repetition is unthinkable
without time. The concept of repetition finds its philosophical significance in the
reflection—crystallised by Kierkegaard, and developed by Deleuze and Derrida—
that, because existence continually becomes, things ‘stay the same’ only if they are
repeatedly renewed, only by virtue of movement and difference. Habit is
essentially dynamic, but also essentially conservative; it has, or rather is, a self-
perpetuating force, its own momentum.

Deleuze states that, at least for an empiricist, ‘the [human] subject is

defined according to the movement through which it develops’ (1991, 85). In
the Preface to his essay on Hume, Empiricism and Subjectivity, Deleuze
highlights Hume’s concept of habit (one of his ‘most essential and creative
contributions’ to philosophy), and suggests that ‘there is no more striking
answer to the problem of the self’ than the discovery that we are ‘nothing but
habits—the habit of saying “I”’. Deleuze is suggesting that the continuity and
stability of this ‘I’ should be explained by habit, rather than by a metaphysical
concept of substance or essence, or by a doctrine of divine creation; he is
identifying habit as ‘the movement through which [the self] develops’, and thus
offering an empiricist definition of the self. In fact, Deleuze describes his own
philosophy as ‘transcendental empiricism’, and the influence of Kant and
Husserl is evident in his interpretation of Hume: ‘Habit is the constitutive root of
the subject, and the subject, at root, is the synthesis of time—the synthesis of
the present and the past in the light of the future’ (Deleuze 1991, 92 – 3). In
other words, subjectivity is constituted by a synthesis that ‘posits the past as a
rule for the future’ (Deleuze 1991, 92 – 4). I find Deleuze’s account of the self
attractive because it is naturalistic (habit is a principle of nature; we can
understand plants, animals, and people in terms of their habits); because it is at
least in part empirical (habits can be observed, and the mechanism of habit can
be scientifically modelled); and because it accommodates both physical and
psychological aspects of selfhood, and treats the living, embodied ‘I’ more
holistically than most rival accounts.

Another point in favour of this interpretation of the self is that it includes,

and emphasises, the sociality and worldliness of selfhood. We ‘catch’ habits

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from people who we spend a lot of time with, adopting and making our own
their manners of speech, their gestures, their ways of dressing, even their
patterns of thought and behaviour. Habit accomplishes a kind of compromise
and adaptation between beings and their environment. We might regard habit
as a fundamental mode of what Heidegger calls ‘being-in-the-world’: in this
case, the close connection between habit and habitat resonates with
Heidegger’s predilection for the vocabulary of dwelling and abiding. The
self’s capacity to be affected and shaped by actions renders it irreducibly
worldly, so that the distinction between one’s habits and one’s habitat is less
clear than we might suppose. This is particularly true of linguistic habits: in
order to communicate we must repeat words, phrases, gestures, and
intonations already in circulation, already meaningful, and this mobile resource
of signs is the habitat or ‘house of being’, which domesticates—renders familiar
and orderly—the flux of sense experience. At the same time, habit individuates
in so far as each being is a unique configuration of habits, a singular site of
repetition.

Deleuze’s claim that habit offers an account of the self leaves us with the

task of accounting for habit. (In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze (1994) goes
some way toward doing this, although here he gives less emphasis to habit.) How
are habits formed? How must a being be constituted in order to be capable of
habit? To begin with, habit presupposes a capacity to accumulate or contract
repeated actions; and a capacity to be formed by this repetition. We can
distinguish four transcendental conditions of habit, two corresponding to each of
these capacities: retention and synthesis, affectivity and plasticity. First, then, the
phenomenon of habit implies the retention and the synthesis of repeated
elements. Repetition is productive—the second time adding to the first—only if
actions can be stored, accumulated, held together; only if the past can be
contracted within the present. For Hume (as for Kant) the imagination fulfils this
function; Deleuze describes the subject’s contractile power as ‘contemplative’, a
kind of ‘passive synthesis’ that makes possible the active synthesis of memory.
Habit requires the retention of traces of past actions, but it does not require
memory; indeed, the more deeply habitual an action, the less likely we are to
remember performing it.

Second, the formative effects of habit imply the affectivity and plasticity of

the subject. As Spinoza emphasises, the nature of any individual depends on its
capacity to be affected: the complexity and sophistication of human beings is an
outcome of our sensitivity to affection in so many different ways. We are shaped
by what we suffer, and these sufferings affect us precisely in so far as we are able
to receive and retain impressions, and to be modified by them. We speak of being
‘scarred’ by traumatic experiences, but it is more important to recognise that we
are scarred or formed, in however slight a way, by our own actions (mental, vocal,
or physical). Again, we see that subjectivity is dynamic: we are continuously
forming—whether re-forming or re-affirming—our selves. It is often supposed
that people become less impressionable as they grow older, when habits harden

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into a fixed character that is increasingly difficult to alter. William James remarks
rather wistfully that if only the young were to realise ‘how soon they will become
mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while
they are in the plastic state’ (1977, 20).

In addition to the transcendental conditions of retention, synthesis,

affectivity, and plasticity, there is a quality of inattention that seems to be
essential to habit. I regard this less as a capacity than as a function of habit.
One of the reasons why habit is so useful to us is that it saves time and
energy, promotes efficiency, and leaves our attention free to focus on other
things. Without habit we would have to concentrate very hard on every little
daily task—and we would certainly never get around to doing philosophy or
practising Buddhism. The development and success of the human species
depends on habit. William James emphasises the role of habit in this respect,
pointing out that habit ‘simplifies our movements, makes them accurate, and
diminishes fatigue [by reducing] the conscious attention with which our
actions are performed’. In fact, James claims that ‘habit depends on sensations
not attended to’ (1977, 12 – 14).

Repetition tends to have a numbing effect: the more we become used

to something, the less we notice and question it. For this reason we take for
granted—and assume as our own—those things that are most constant and
familiar: our bodies, our parents, our native language, the level of material
comfort with which we grow up. Of course, these are sorely missed when
they are no longer with us: habit’s inattentiveness at once creates and
obscures profound attachment, and this leads to suffering when things
change. It is this aspect of habit that most interests Proust, who describes
habit as:

an annihilating force which suppresses the originality and even the awareness of

one’s perceptions. . . a dread deity, so riveted to one’s being, its insignificant face

so incrusted in one’s heart, that if it detaches itself, if it turns away from one, this

deity that one had barely distinguished inflicts on one sufferings more terrible

than any other and is then as cruel as death itself. (1996, vol. 5, 478)

The narrator of A la recherche du temps perdu endures acute discomfort on his first
night at the Grand Hotel in Balbec, finding his perceptions ‘on the permanent
footing of a vigilant defensive’ in a strange, indifferent room ‘full of things which
did not know [him]’. Unable to sleep, he is ‘tormented’ by the ticking clock, the
violet curtains, the glass-fronted bookcases. Last year, I had a similarly unpleasant
experience when I arrived in a small town in Minnesota, where I was to spend a
month working. All at once I had a new home, a new neighbourhood, a new
workplace, and new colleagues, and I felt quite alarmed: most of my habits had
abruptly become redundant, and it took continual effort to interact with and make
sense of my world. Only when new habits formed (which fortunately happens very
quickly) could I feel settled and ‘at home’ again—and after a few weeks I was

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attached to the place and to my friends there, and my departure was as painful as
my arrival.

Habit and Buddhism

Probably some of the affinities between Buddhist teachings and this

account of selfhood are already becoming apparent. However, I would like to
clarify these by pointing out several points of convergence.

(i) There is some correspondence between our concept of habit and the Indian

concept of samskara (Pali: sankhara). The complexity of this concept is illustrated
by the variety of its English translations: mental formations, dispositions,
reactions; conditioned phenomena; subliminal impressions; karmic impulses;
inherited forces; constructing activities; habitual potencies; ‘habits or tendencies’
(Nagapriya 2004, 57).

2

According to Buddhist teaching, samskara is one of the

five skandas (aggregates or aspects) of human nature; and also the second link in
the chain of conditioned arising, where it is preceded by avidya (ignorance) and
followed by vinnana (discriminative consciousness). Of course, the other four
skandas of human nature cannot be reduced to samskara, but we may regard
samskara as the active, constructive element that makes material form,
sensation, perception, and consciousness into something like a self. Lilian Silburn
suggests that ‘it is around the verb samskr—the activity which shapes, arranges
together, consolidates, and brings to completion—that the reflections of the
Buddha are concentrated . . . it is here that one finds the key to [his teaching]’.
Like habit, samskara is at once active and passive, both a source and a form of
action: ‘both the activity which constructs temporal reality, and the temporal
reality thus constructed, are samskara’ (Silburn 1955, 200). (I think ‘temporal
reality’ here must refer to samsara, the conditioned world, as opposed to
ultimate reality.)

If we identify the self with habit, or a collection of habits, and acknowledge

that our concept of habit resonates with the Buddhist notions of samskara and
conditioning, then we are claiming that the same principle underlies the self as
underlies the shape of samsara as a whole. I am focusing here on the connections
between habit and selfhood, but, as we have seen, habit applies to non-human
kinds of being too. William James and Deleuze both suggest that habit is a basic
principle of nature itself, not just of human nature: according to James, ‘The laws
of nature are nothing but the immutable habits which the different elementary
sorts of matter follow in their actions and reactions upon each other’ (1977, 9 – 10).
For Deleuze, ‘This living present, and with it the whole of organic and psychic life,
rests upon habit’ (1994, 22). This means that the relatively continuous and orderly
shape of the world in general can, like the stability of self-identity, be attributed to
habit. Since I am neither a scientist, a speculative metaphysician, nor an
enlightened being, I cannot comfortably make this kind of claim. But the idea that
the self operates in the same way as everything else is, it seems to me, very much
in tune with Buddhist meditation practice, in which the individual eventually gains

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insight into the nature of reality by means of the development of insight within his
own being—his own body, his own mind. By directing his attention to
phenomena such as his breathing, his sensations, his thoughts, and his emotions,
the practitioner gains first-hand, experiential understanding of the truths of
dukkha, anicca, and anatta, and this wisdom enables him to see more clearly these
qualities within things outside himself.

(ii) My interpretation of the self in terms of habit suggests that the individual’s

actions shape his future, that his own actions have consequences for himself. As
Charles Reade puts it, ‘Sow an act and you reap a habit. Sow a habit and you reap a
character. Sow a character and you reap a destiny’ (1903, 377). This echoes the
Buddhist teaching about karma (action). In both cases, the connection between
actions and their consequences is not to be understood moralistically—it is not
that wholesome deeds are rewarded and unwholesome ones punished. Rather, a
purely naturalistic law ordains that as a seed is, so the fruit will be (and here again
we find the idea that the same principle underlies both physical and psychical
reality). From a Buddhist point of view, actions matter so much because, as I
suggested above, they affect and form the individual, not just for the duration of
the action but for the future: one kind of action leads to another. This means that
the focus of moral or spiritual life is the individual’s responsibility for his actions,
habits, and dispositions. Of course, the effects of one’s actions on others must be
considered, but this kind of consideration—or the lack of it—is integral to the
actions themselves.

(iii) Habit is a response to suffering, an attempt to ease suffering. This means that

it presupposes the first noble truth: that existence is characterised by dukkha. In
recognising affectivity and plasticity as conditions of habit, we have already
invoked suffering in the neutral sense of passivity. But furthermore, the fact that
habits function to make life easier, more comfortable, more lived in, suggests that
we experience a fundamental uneasiness and discomfort, and that we instinctively
flee from this suffering. Proust highlights ‘the analgesic effect of habit’ (1996, vol.
2, 287). Ironically, habit turns out to be a source of suffering: not only do we suffer
when we lose those things to which we have become accustomed, but our
suffering is multiplied by our habitual—usually unconscious—reactions of craving
or aversion to sensations on the body.

(iv) Habit is closely associated with attachment. This association is implicit in the

etymology of habit: the word comes from the Latin habere, which means to have
or to hold. (We might even define habit as ‘the way in which one holds oneself’.)
This core notion of holding already has connotations of possession and belonging.
Not only do we hold on to what we have become accustomed to regard as our
own, but our habits can exert a powerful hold over us, even against our will. The
attachment engendered by habit is reflected, in its most extreme form, by the
colloquial use of the term to denote opiate addiction.

Attachments are a form of spiritual bondage: in the Buddhist tradition, this

provides the context for the path of liberation. Similarly, the conservative
momentum of habit can exert a powerful binding force: some habits are

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extremely difficult to break. Several western thinkers have recognised this, and
consequently view habit very negatively. Kierkegaard, for example, would argue
that a person who acts out of habit fails to exercise his/her freedom, since he/she
allows his present, and therefore his/her future, to be determined by the past. St
Augustine offers a striking description of the force of habit in his Confessions,
where he records his struggle to live a pure Christian life. Even after Augustine
has experienced a revelation, and has a ‘new will’ to serve God, he remains in
bondage to his old habits:

I was held fast, not in fetters clamped upon me by another, but by my own will,

which had the strength of iron chains. . . For my will was perverse and desire had

grown from it, and when I gave in to desire habit was born, and when I did not

resist the habit it became a necessity. These were the links which together form

what I have called my chain, and it held me fast in the duress of servitude. . . For

the rule of sin is the force of habit, by which the mind is swept along and held

fast even against its will, yet deservedly, because it fell into the habit of its own

accord. (1961, Book VIII, section 5)

Even though Augustine understands habit in terms of the theological notion of

sin, this passage suggests a naturalistic interpretation of human bondage.
Closely linked to this is one’s sense of self: for Augustine, liberation requires
self-surrender. If we identify the self with habit, and recognise that habit effects
a bondage with ‘the strength of iron chains’, then this implies that the self is, in
its very essence, an obstacle to liberation.

(v) Habit involves a lack of attention, a lack of awareness. The way in which habit

‘creates oblivion’ is an important theme in Proust’s novel: his narrator experiences
habit as ‘an annihilating force which suppresses the originality and even the
awareness of one’s perceptions’, and suggests that ‘the heavy curtain of habit
conceals from us almost the whole universe’ (1996, vol. 5, 478, 621, 642). This
metaphor reminds us that the word ‘habit’ may refer to clothing, to a particular
form of dress; that is, to something that covers one up. Perhaps every habitual
action is a movement of veiling, a perpetuation and consolidation of oblivion or
ignorance. This, of course, prompts the question of what is covered up—who
wears the habit? As I have suggested, if we regard habit as constitutive of self-
identity, then there is no need to posit a distinct self within or underneath our
layers of habit, and indeed it does not make sense to do so. What habits conceal,
then, is precisely this emptiness, this lack of a fixed, permanent, substantial core: ‘if
habit is a second nature, it prevents us from knowing our first’ (Proust 1996, vol. 4,
178). Recognising that habit is associated with both a lack of awareness and a lack
of freedom, we soon arrive at the key Buddhist idea that the path to liberation
involves the cultivation of awareness. According to Krishnamurti, ‘habits are built
in, conditioned. . . To break down that conditioning you have to be aware of what
you’re doing. That’s all’ (1978, 123). Awareness unconceals habits, and through this
unconcealment can weaken and eventually unravel them.

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(vi) The claim that the self is a product of habit means that human nature is not

fixed. However strong the force of habit, it does not amount to determinism: even
the most entrenched habits can be changed. This leads us to the third noble truth:
that freedom from suffering is possible. Habits are constructed, and therefore they
can be deconstructed. In fact, the four basic conditions of habit I outlined earlier—
retention, synthesis, affectivity, and plasticity—are also the conditions of learning,
of development, of progress. The concept of practice (in the sense of training and
cultivation) has much in common with the concept of habit: it shares its three key
elements of action, repetition, and formation. The different between the two is
that practice involves effort, attention, and at least some degree of choice and
purposive intent. Often, practice—whether one is developing a capacity to speak
a foreign language, to play a musical instrument, or to meditate—requires a lot of
effort, and I guess that this is precisely because it encounters resistance from the
conservative force of habit. It is habit that makes practice necessary, for habits can
seldom be broken all at once, with a single act: they carry a momentum that must
be countered by an opposing momentum. Only because practice shares with
habit its mode of operation can it exert any power upon it. Buddhist practice turns
the mechanism of habit against itself, utilising the three-fold process of action,
repetition, and formation, but transforming this, with awareness, from a force of
bondage to a force for liberation. It is interesting to note that spiritual practices,
while being oriented toward liberation, are almost always codified in rules, rituals,
and customs. This raises a question: if practice, like habit, accomplishes a kind of
conditioning, how can a Buddhist practitioner do more (or rather, less) than
replace one self with a new, carefully constructed, ‘Buddhist’ self?

Practice

Just over a year ago I went on a ten-day silent meditation retreat in the

Welsh countryside. The retreat was led by a teacher called David Smith, who
has been a Buddhist practitioner since the early 1970s—for the first ten years
with a Zen teacher in London, then for a shorter, intensive period in a
Theravadan monastery in Sri Lanka, and then independently back in England.
During the retreat, each morning after breakfast David would address the
group for about an hour. In these talks he did not give much instruction on
meditation technique, but he spoke about important elements of the Buddhist
path such as commitment, faith, discipline, and patience, and he offered a very
lucid exposition of the Middle Way. He frequently emphasised the need to
integrate meditation into everyday life, rather than let it be confined to a daily
session of formal practice. However, on the penultimate morning he announced
his intention to focus on a very specific issue: ‘I’d like to discuss a fact of
training, of practice, that I think we’ll all identify with: the habit, the
conditioning, of ambition—and wanting, and desiring. I know it’s something we
all struggle with’. After several days of talking to us individually about our
meditation practice, David had repeatedly encountered our tendencies to

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approach the Buddhist path with a deeply ingrained mentality, characterised by
a desire to become something, to achieve something, or perhaps to get rid of
certain aspects of ourselves. He explained how this kind of desire begins to stir
at a very early age, ‘and from then on it’s something we are taught to nurture,
and to be very good at; something that we train ourselves to become better
and better at as we get older’.

This sense of self-motivation, David suggested, is ‘virtually impossible to

avoid’, and encompasses everything we do. ‘And then we find the dharma, we
come to Buddhism, we come to practice, and of course we’ve still got this same
mind because it’s so incredibly entrenched. We come to the practice because we
want to change, because we want to be enlightened, because we want to become
some way other than how we are’. However, in time we find that Buddhist practice
works very differently from other kinds of pursuit; we find that our spiritual
ambition leads to disillusionment—with ourselves, with our particular practice or
tradition, or with Buddhism itself. ‘We are continually reaching out to become
something, and this perpetual ingrained mode of always wanting to become is
going to trip us up, give us trouble—and it’s always, always going to fail. And yet
we cannot shake it off. . .’

David’s description of our predicament seemed bleakly accurate: whatever

we do, we are trapped by the habit of desire, enclosed by our sense of self—and,
quite naturally, this applies to our Buddhist activities too. But, of course,
although Buddhist teachings offer an account of this sort of bondage, they also
offer a way out. David explained the fourth noble truth by drawing a distinction
between two fundamentally different mentalities: our normal, everyday ‘worldly
mind’, which we all possess ‘and which we’re all possessed by’; and the ‘dharma
mind’ that instantiates the Middle Way in its freedom from desire and ambition.
Practising the Buddhist path, continued David, means developing the ‘dharma
mind’ and letting go of the ‘worldly mind’. ‘It may take years of practice’, he said,
‘but the time will come when you have to realise that this is not a path of
becoming, but a path of un-becoming. What we must learn to do—and it goes
against our whole conditioning—is to let go, to let go and not want something
in return’. While the ‘worldly mind’ is characterised by the habit of becoming, the
‘dharma mind’ is developed through a process of un-becoming. This requires ‘a
lot of cultivating, a lot of awareness, a lot of coming back over and over again’.
David emphasised that awareness has to be practised repeatedly, to counter the
momentum of our habits and conditioning, ‘so that in the end—and it’s
something that’s very possible—actually we can do this training without any
ambition’. From the state of un-becoming, of not wanting, ‘the paradox begins
to come alive, that in fact this is when the fruit does begin to fall—because [the
practice] is not self-motivated; it doesn’t have the self behind it; the self is truly
not polluting the insightful process’.

When David finished speaking, we were invited to offer comments or to ask

questions. A young man called John raised his hand:

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This has really struck a chord with what I’ve been thinking about over the past

couple of days. . . it stems from a feeling of inadequacy about my life: I feel like I

need to become something else before I can start the practice. There are certain

aspects of my self that seem pretty ugly, pretty inferior, pretty unsavoury, and

there’s a sense of being ashamed of certain qualities that I have, and I feel that in

order to practice the dharma I need to purify these . . . I’ve built such a lot around

them. . .

‘Well that’s what we all do’, replied David:

this is our self-identity. We may not be a good self, we may be an unwholesome

self, but nevertheless we are a self—and that’s our starting point. . . Take

whatever you consider to be your unwholesomeness as absolutely the centre of

your practice. . . This is the dharma, and the dharma’s different from anything

you’ve ever done before. Now you’re not trying to make yourself into something

else; now you’re just trying to let the whole thing go, as you are—just to stand

still, as it were, and from that point learn to un-become. . . This we have to learn,

because we are thoroughly, thoroughly conditioned beings; in fact, when we

truly look at ourselves we’ll see that there actually isn’t anything there other than

conditioning. . . A spiritual path is about un-becoming, it isn’t about creating

something—and this is what we have to learn to grow into.

A second questioner asked how we should motivate ourselves to practice without
a sense of wanting to become something; a third described how he was ‘even
making a possession out of letting go’.

When I heard David Smith talk about spiritual ambition, I had already spent

several months researching and thinking about habit and selfhood, and I had also
begun to reflect on the relationship—both theoretical and practical—between
habit and practice. The way David’s dharma discourse drew together the themes
of habit and conditioning; self-interest and desire; attachment, bondage,
awareness and letting-go; training, learning, cultivation, and repetition, echoed
the conclusions of my academic work, and helped me to see more clearly the
affinity between my philosophy of habit and Buddhist teachings. It is not
surprising that my interpretation of selfhood should be Buddhist, but it had not
been planned that way: my interest in repetition was inspired by Kierkegaard, and
my study of habit began with Merleau-Ponty, Aristotle, Aquinas, and Hume. In
David’s talk that morning, I found a reflection of my ideas that was absolutely
embedded in Buddhist practice: here we were, on retreat, trying to practice;
David’s teaching was rooted in his own practice, and the insights this had yielded;
he chose to talk about ‘the habit of ambition’ in response to what we had been
telling him about meditation practices; he was explaining why we needed to
practice, and how the practice works.

For several years I had been reluctant to bring my interest in Buddhism

into my academic work, because it seemed to me that a purely intellectual
approach falsified the very essence of Buddhist teachings—and because I felt

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that practising the dharma was difficult enough without trying to figure it out
philosophically. But of course, my own Buddhist practice, and the teachings I
have encountered through my attempts to practise, make me see the world in a
certain way. Sooner or later, it becomes natural to raise questions like the one I
have tried to address in the first part of this article: if there is no such thing as a
self, where does our sense of self come from? By focusing on habit, I stumbled
on a set of concepts that do not jar with the Buddhist emphasis on practice—in
fact, I found that these concepts facilitate philosophical reflection on Buddhist
practice itself.

Until now, my work on habit has been directed towards providing an

account of selfhood in general: I have suggested that, given the facts of anicca
and anatta, habit can explain the continuity, stability, and order of personal
identity through time. As we have seen, this idea can be developed by analysing
the transcendental conditions of habit, and by considering the connections
between habit, attachment, suffering, unawareness, and so on. But as well as
invoking the principle of habit to account for selfhood, we can also enquire about
the particular habits of which each one of us is composed. As I have suggested, a
person can be distinguished by the unique configuration of habits he carries at
any one time: some are his alone, but most are shared with other people of the
same family, community, or culture. Many of these habits will be deeply
entrenched and may endure throughout his life, whereas others will be
ephemeral, indicative of a phase he happens to be going through. (Nietzsche
extols the virtues of ‘brief habits’, which allow him to get to know many different
things and states; he attacks the ‘tyranny’ of enduring habits; but he asserts that
‘most intolerable, to be sure, would be for me a life entirely devoid of habits, a
life that would demand perpetual improvisation’ (1974, section 295).) In everyday
life, each person’s habits constitute a phenomenal sense of self-identity: they tell
me who ‘I’ am, and they enable others to recognise us, to grasp who we are. To
the extent that we share habits with others, we also share an implicit
understanding.

From a philosophical point of view, the focus will be less on particular

individuals than on human beings in general. According to the account of
selfhood developed here, investigation of ‘human nature’ or ‘the human
condition’ will involve identifying and exploring actual, specific habits that
everyone shares. (If almost everyone shares them, that is good enough.) But the
philosopher’s task is difficult, because the more ubiquitous these habits, the less
apparent they are, and the harder it may be to describe them in the language and
grammar to which we are accustomed. How can we articulate those habits that
condition articulation itself? How can we perceive those habits that condition the
very nature of our perception? How can the conditioned mind come to know its
own conditioning? I am not sure that the intellect alone can give a full answer to
this kind of question. According to the Buddhist tradition, insight into the human
condition arises more easily when certain possibilities within this condition are
cultivated—with the help of meditation techniques, experienced teachers,

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like-minded friends, a quiet environment, and so on. My own experience as a
Buddhist practitioner is even more limited than my knowledge of philosophy, but
already it has enabled me to know profound and ubiquitous habits which years of
philosophical study left unquestioned. At least, I know how forcefully these habits
hold me.

When David Smith suggested that ‘we are continually reaching out to

become something’, he was describing a habit of becoming that is absolutely
basic to the human condition. (‘Becoming’ has a specific sense here: of course,
becoming in general just happens, just emerges, but reaching out to become
something suggests desire and intention, however unconscious, and in the
present context this is what ‘becoming’ signifies.) By calling this a habit we
acknowledge that it is not fixed, that it can be changed: by ‘human condition’
we really mean human conditioning. The habit of becoming is, in fact, the habit
of restlessness, which is central to both the theory and the practice of
Buddhism. As anyone who has tried to meditate will know, we are beings who
cannot rest: we cannot rest in the present, but wander off into the past or the
future; we cannot rest with pleasant experiences, but crave more or fear their
cessation; we cannot rest with painful things, but want to flee from them. While
habit as such is conservative—and therefore the habit of restlessness endures—
restlessness makes us unable to stay still. This helps to explain why, although
we are creatures of habit, we continually push forwards in search of novelty
and improvement; in search of an elusive satisfaction. At the same time,
restlessness is manifested by resistance to life as it comes, as it is, from moment
to moment.

In this condition of restlessness, people first come to Buddhism. Of

course, they want to get away from suffering, and of course they want to find a
happier, more peaceful way of living. Once a person engages in Buddhist
practice, many of his habits will probably change: he might begin to meditate
every morning, to attend classes or puja rituals each week, to associate with
other Buddhists; he might stop shoplifting or eating meat or drinking alcohol.
Over time, his patterns of thought and emotional response may gradually shift
too. But right at the heart of his practice will be, as David put it, a desire to
become something: wiser, more serene, even less selfish. There is, it seems, an
irony inherent in the Buddhist path: we are practising because we are not yet
liberated, and because we are not yet liberated we are restless even in the name
of Buddhism—rather as people can be judgemental in the name of Christianity,
or arrogant in the name of Islam. But of course, condemning restlessness in the
name of Buddhism and seeking to overcome it compounds this irony. Both the
restlessness and the irony are, I suspect, unavoidable: they are absolutely to be
expected, and need not be condemned. According to Buddhist teachings, the
deep habit of restlessness, desire, becoming, can, like any other habit, be
broken through awareness—pure awareness, free from judgement and
reaction.

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The Buddhist doctrine of the Middle Way is not merely an intermediate

lifestyle choice between asceticism and hedonism; nor an intermediate
metaphysical position between eternalism and annihilationism (or existence
and non-existence). The Middle Way also signifies an alternative to reactions of
craving and aversion, to running towards things and running away from them.
The habit of restlessness means that our inner lives—and often our outward
lives, too—are characterised by a continual oscillation, an incessant movement
back and forth between these two extremes. The Middle Way, which the
Buddha awoke to, is a way of being that is free from the habit of restlessness,
the habit of becoming. It is a path of un-becoming, because accumulated
moments of stillness, awareness and equanimity weaken the habit, resist its
momentum. The wheel of samsara can begin to turn the other way, toward
liberation. Unravelling habit means unravelling the self: this is the practice of
anatta.

NOTES

1. See also Hume (1978, Book I, Part III, section xiv).
2. Here the author includes a diagram illustrating ‘the cycle of habit formation’. For

discussion of the translation of samskara, see Whicher (1998, 99 – 103, 274 – 5) and

Kapani (1992, 475 – 503).

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Clare Carlisle, Department of Philosophy, University of Liverpool, 7 Abercromby

Square, Liverpool, L69 3BX. E-mail: [e-mail]

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