When exploring the idea of the soul Cottingham says nothing of Buddhism, or any non-Western religion. He considers briefly a modern version of the denial of self- hood, which questions the idea that we should aim for narrative unity in our lives. Any such defence of the “episodic” or “happy-go-lucky” life, he tells us, “seems open to a swift and devastating rebuttal: lives of this episodic kind are possible only because others who are not leading happy-go-lucky lives are sustaining the stable relationships that make their easy-come-easy-go attitude possible”. He goes on to observe that advocates of the “episodic” life “tend to be drawn in the end to abandon the very idea of a self persisting over time… Yet the more we think about this, the more it starts to look like a fantasy of evasion.” [...]
The life of Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) was both. He writes in his autobiography that when he looked back he found not a single person but something more like a club whose members changed over time. The solitary, rationalistic and rather puritanical self of Russell’s late Victorian youth was not the self that flirted with mysticism as he fell unhappily out of love with his first wife. Nor was it the self that emerged from a spell in prison for pacifist resistance against the First World War, after which his interests shifted from mathematics and logic to politics, and he travelled to Lenin’s Russia and war-torn China. Still less was it the self that married three more times and had countless affairs. Reflecting on his life, Russell found no enduring selfhood. [...]
Even within the Western tradition, as Tom Holland showed in Dominion: the Making of the Western Mind, there are enormous moral gulfs. The Iliad knows nothing of forgiveness, nor does Aristotle’s Ethics of humility. Self-sacrifice figures nowhere in the Epicurean pursuit of tranquil pleasure, nor does concern for the downtrodden and forgotten in Stoicism. Our revulsion at the gladiatorial games of ancient Rome does not come from any inbuilt repugnance at the spectacle of human suffering and violent death. There is no sign that those who watched the games felt any such revulsion. Nor is there much evidence from that era that slavery was felt to be inherently wrong. The repugnance we feel for these practices is an inheritance from Jewish and Christian ideas of human dignity and equality.
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