The Ego Trick [Paperback]

Baggini clearly and engagingly convinced me my strong sense of self or "I" is simply a bundle of components in my brain and body interacting with the environment that change continuously throughout life. It is a joy to read his subtle arguments that feel common sense, and that you always knew them to be true. He interviews philosophers, neuroscientists, psychologists, Buddhists, Belle de Jour and a transgendered woman that add colour and richness to his arguments. Despite not being a self help book, his view of self as a bundle brings real consolation when he discusses death.

For Baggini philosophy is not "transformative englightment, but simply better understanding". However, sometimes this goes too far and his crushing logic picks on some easy targets. For example, he teases Buddhists about re-incarnation (that he admits is a later addition and not from the Buddha) and over-commercialisation (electric prayer wheel anyone?). Yet when his logical firepower aims at the core insights of Buddhism he misses the target. He dismisses the key Buddhist insight that attachment or grasping leads to suffering by saying we must attach to something. So his attachment to his girlfriend would be "pathological" by Buddhist standards. This is a crude interpretation that does not reflect the transformations of the self that can arise from meditation such as increased compassion and ability to read emotions. For a richer exploration of Buddhist insights and the overlap with neuroscience I really enjoyed Daniel Goleman's Destructive Emotions.

I would have liked Baggini to explore Buddhism more practically (perhaps try meditation himself?) and in more depth as there is so much overlap between what he concludes and Buddhist thought. He acknowledges the overlap in some but not all of his conclusions. For a fuller exploration I would recommend The Monk and the Philosopher: A Father and Son Discuss the Meaning of Life where Jean-Francois Revel (a Western philosopher) discusses Buddhism with his Buddhist son Matthieu Ricard (a former Western scientist and now translator for the Dalai Lama).

Baggini also believes we should not expect to find great differences in the self between different cultures such as the West and say indigenous Eskimo populations. He dismisses Rom Harré a philosopher who puts this forward because he is not an anthropologist. For an enjoyable exploration of why the self could actually be very different among indigenous tribes (e.g. original American Indian and Australian Aborigine's) I'd recommend Steve Taylor's book The Fall: The Insanity of the Ego in Human History and the Dawning of a New Era. This does cover anthropology and puts forward a theory that the ego (our sense of self) is much weaker in tribes untouched by the West. Our much stronger Western ego he identifies as the main cause of Western neurosis.

However, I hope my review doesn't put anyone off this book. Baggini has made me think critically, fired me up to write this review and crucially reconsider some Buddhists insights I'd started to take for granted. For this I think Baggini (and the Buddha!) would be pleased.

This book is a 'must read' for anyone who has ever wondered who they really are!

Julian Baggini adds rigour and readability to what could easily be a dry and confusing subject. Having said that the first half of the book is devoted to what the self 'obviously' isn't and is perhaps overlong, but then things start to hot up.

The author makes a convincing case for his theory that '"I" is a verb dressed as a noun.' It is not a 'thing' but what brains and bodies `do'.

So is self 'just an illusion'? No:

The self is really a 'bundle' of thoughts not a hard fixed 'pearl', but it is still 'real', just not what we generally assume it to be.

The self as 'no-thing' can't be destroyed by death but this doesn't mean it survives it! In as far as the self is real it will end in death! This is even less comforting than the often used non-dualist idea of 'how can something that was never born die?' But this isn't about comfort of course, neither is Stephen Batchelor's (Buddhist) idea that there is nothing (no-self) beyond the veil of appearances - all is impermanent and contingent. There is no 'transcendent' self.

Christine Korsgaard's theory of 'self-creation' is examined next: the sense in which the self is created from what is chosen and enacted. We are responsible because we are 'agents' and we 'are what we do'. This sounds very like existentialism to me. We are nothing beyond what we do and are condemned to freedom since we must do something.

This 'living without a soul' is explored further: according to Susan Blackmore bundle theory lends itself to determinism rather than free-will. This is quite convincingly explained. However having already given support to the idea of freedom and responsibility, Baggini suggests that rather than 'freedom' we use the compromised term of 'autonomy' whereby we can regulate our own behaviour based more on 'internal machinations' than on external events. But what are these internal machinations based on? and who is the regulator? This part of the book becomes rather vague and contradictory.

So has Baggini cast new light on the subject of self? Probably not, but he has clarified the terminology and linked the philosophical, scientific, religious and psychological ideas into a very thought-provoking whole. This considerable task alone merits the five stars.

Personally I don't think this investigation is radical enough in that it is undertaken within the context of the phenomenal world. It is to some extent about playing within boundaries rather than with boundaries (to borrow a James Carse expression). For example what if consciousness is the 'ground of all being' as proposed by non-dualist philosophers? (e.g as expressed by Jeff Foster (An Extraordinary Absence) or Tony Parsons (The Open Secret)). This would give a whole other starting point and resulting investigation.
However the case for the 'self' model that Baggini proposes sounds plausible, although his eloquence and clarity does not leave one thinking that we now have all the answers, but rather what new and greater implications these ideas may have. This is a good thing of course!

This is probably Baggini's best book to date and he stands virtually alone in being able to make incredibly complex and subtle philosophical ideas both accessible and entertaining.

Those of us not entirely unsympathetic to the philosophical enterprise should be reassured by this memorable image, in itself almost all the recommendation this fascinating book needs. Julian Baggini is a practitioner who has evidently managed to retain, despite constant professional exposure to the writings of countless Great Minds, both a sense of humour and a healthy regard for human foibles and the fallibility of philosophers. That this book is both readable and comprehensible by ordinary mortals is no slight on Baggini's philosophical credentials. His intellect is sharper than most, and his verdicts on the self are delivered with a surprising degree of certitude. "The solidity of self is an illusion; the self itself is not. The Ego Trick is not to persuade us that we exist when we do not, but to make us believe we are more substantial and enduring than we really are."

Baggini's surefooted conclusions are of course a million miles away from dogmatic assertion. As far as I can tell, they rely on the best available evidence and emerge from sound arguments. This is all the more impressive given that, as well as the usual background research, he has talked to all kinds of people with all kinds of views, ranging from the common sense to the frankly eccentric. He quotes from many of these interviews, and comments according to the principle of charity (a phrase I first came across in a talk given by Baggini). That said, if the best sense falls short, he pulls no punches ("Swinburne's commitment to the truth seems to be genuine, whatever his ability to arrive at it").

"On the question of whether we are physical beings or not, the case should be closed." This is one of those surefooted conclusions I agree with, but many may be surprised to hear that the idea of "the immaterial soul is dead" and cannot even be rescued by playing the mystery card. Of course we don't yet fully understand how consciousness arises out of neural activity, but it seems pretty certain that it does: "damage the brain, and you impair consciousness". Physical stuff is all there is, "but to describe our true nature, you need more than just a physical vocabulary". The way Baggini sums up "non-reductive physicalism" is that "we are no more than, but more than just, matter".

This is one of the three facts about ourselves that are central to understanding the Ego Trick. Anyone repelled by materialism, worried that if we are made of the same stuff as rocks and dirt, then perhaps we can be treated the same as rocks and dirt, is forgetting the self, which "is a function of what a certain collection of stuff does". Baggini quotes the neurologist Todd E. Feinberg: "your life is not a pack of cells; your life is what your particular pack of cells collectively do". Last time I looked, rocks and dirt weren't doing much of anything off their own bat (although give them enough evolutionary time - but that's another story).

Another key fact is that "the unity of the self is psychological", a result of "the remarkable way in which a complicated bundle of mental events, made possible by the brain, creates a singular self, without there being a singular thing underlying it". Mental events emerge from physical ones, just as a university emerges from all the relevant buildings and individuals. Thoughts and feelings are what matter does, "but they are not themselves lumps of matter". In this sense, "I" is a verb dressed as a noun, and the Ego Trick is like a mechanic's and not a magician's trick: it's a psychological shortcut to the self.

The third idea underpinning the Ego Trick will probably surprise a few more people than the falsity of dualism: identity "is not what matters" and is even "the wrong concept to apply to persons". Here, things get a little technical but not too hard to follow. Basically, you cannot have "a strict philosophy of the identity of anything which is not a strict sortal concept". Baggini thinks that most philosophers of personal identity have been caught in its spell and, as a result, "their arguments have gone badly wrong".

Having gone diving for pearls in part one of the book, and found none, "no core of self that holds steady through life", Baggini turns to bundle theory. Not the most poetic or high-falutin of names to label a defining feature of humanness, perhaps (word associations conjure up a bundle of rags, being bundled over, even bungle), but prosaic is better than portentous. It's a radical idea, and one that happens to go back to the Buddha: "bundle theories explain why it is we believe ourselves to be individual persons who exist over time, but deny that any such beings really exist". (Anyone concerned that Baggini might be turning Buddhist need not worry. He points out in passing a slight difficulty, that "Buddhism needs to deny the personal nature of reincarnation in order to make it coherent, but assert its personal nature in order to make it ethical".)

Philosophers have always argued between themselves, and most of us are happy to leave them to it, either uninterested or unqualified to adjudicate. In this case, since you've woken up today and so long as you vaguely remember who you are, then you're getting up close and personal with the Ego Trick. That should make this corner of philosophy a shade more interesting. As for qualifications, Julian Baggini has them and comes across as using them even-handedly to solve the riddle of the self. The only way it could be more entertaining is if you could catch him nailing custard to the wall.