Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction

running an experiment several times with exactly the same result. As I say, we cannot be certain—not even Hume, one of the best philosophical writers in this respect, is clear all the time. But we can be fairly certain that that was not all he was trying to say. For at the end of the paragraph from which the quotation above is taken, we find this: ‘The decay, corruption, and dissolution of nature, is an event rendered probable by so many analogies, that any phenomenon, which seems to have a tendency towards that catastrophe, comes within the reach of human testimony, if that testimony be very extensive and uniform.’
Or in other words, the alleged eight-day darkness would indeed be very unusual, but there is nothing especially unusual about nature behaving out of the normal pattern from time to time. So we have no reason to regard such a thing as impossible, and therefore there is no real comparison with the case of a miracle at all. We could spend a long time amongst the details of Hume’s essay Of Miracles. Many have. But our tour must move on.

Chapter 4 What am I? An unknown Buddhist on the self: King Milinda’s chariot
It is generally true of Indian philosophy that we do not know much about the people who wrote it. If we know their names, the region in which they lived, and their dates within fifty years, that counts as scholarly success. But in the case of the Milindapañha, the Questions of King Milinda, no such ‘success’ has been achieved—we really know next to nothing. Here a Buddhist monk, Nagasena, debates with a regional king and answers his questions. Nagasena is probably a real figure, grown legendary; King Milinda is generally thought to be Menander, one of the Greek rulers in north-west India left over from the conquests of Alexander the Great. Even that is speculative—so let us just go straight to the text.
Only a few lines into it a shock awaits us. Plato’s Crito, we saw, is built of elements nearly all of which most readers will have found quite familiar. Hume’s argument in Of Miracles aimed to start from everyday commonsense observations about testimony plus an unsurprising definition of a miracle, and then arrive at a remarkable conclusion by showing that it is an inevitable consequence. But sometimes authors will adopt different tactics, pitching us straight in at the deep end with an assertion which seems frankly preposterous. We should learn to ride out the shock and read on, seeking to discover what the preposterous assertion really amounts to (it may be what it seems, or it may just be an unusual way of saying something rather less startling), and why they made it. Notice that ‘why they made it’ means two things, both important: their reasons for thinking it true—and their motives for being interested in it, what they are aiming at. All of these points are highly relevant to the passage we are about to look at.
First, the shock. The party gathers; the king asks Nagasena’s name, Nagasena tells him: ‘Sire, I am known as Nagasena’—but then adds that this word ‘Nagasena’ is only ‘a mere name, because there is no person as such that is found’. What can he possibly mean? One would have thought that Nagasena was a person, and he has just told Milinda his name; but immediately it turns out that the name is not the name of a person. So Nagasena isn’t a person after all, and this even though he has just told the king how he is known and how his fellow monks address him. What is going on here?
The king, who is evidently experienced in this kind of discussion (and also has considerable prior knowledge of Buddhism), doesn’t despair but sets out to get to the bottom of it. Realizing that Nagasena wasn’t just speaking of himself, but intended the point he was making (whatever it may have been) to apply equally to everyone, he starts drawing what he takes to be absurd consequences from the monk’s view. If it is true, then nobody ever does anything, right or wrong, nobody ever achieves anything, suffers anything. There is no such thing as a murder, for there is no person who dies. And then a little joke about Nagasena’s status: there was no one who taught him, and no one who ordained him. The tactic is common in debates of all kinds: here are a number of things which we all unhesitatingly take to be true; is Nagasena really saying that they are all false? Or is he going to tell us that his view, if properly understood, doesn’t have that consequence? Nagasena never takes that challenge up directly. By the end of the chapter he has given a hint, from which we can reconstruct what he might have said had he done so. But for the moment the king continues, falling into question-and-answer style reminiscent of many of Plato’s dialogues.
Milinda’s questioning in this passage is structured by the Buddhist doctrine of the ‘five aggregates’, according to which what we call a human being is a complex of five elements. Milinda calls them material form, feeling (by which they seem to have understood pleasure, pain, and indifference), perception, mental formations (i.e. our dispositions, our character), and consciousness. Exactly what these are we need not bother about, so long as we have some rough idea: the point is that the person is not to be identified with any of them.
That is probably what most of us would say, on a little reflection. Are we our feelings? No, we are what has the feelings, not the feelings themselves. Are we our perceptions? No, for the same reason. Are we our dispositions, our character? Well again, no—because dispositions, characters are tendencies to behave in certain ways; and we aren’t the tendencies but rather what has those tendencies. Likewise, we aren’t the consciousness; we are whatever it is that is conscious. The fifth