Abstract for the Kant in Asia
International Conference
at Hong Kong Baptist
University
20-23 May 2009
Ellen Zhang, “What
Is Personhood? Kant and Huayan Buddhism”
Personhood
is a polyvalent concept that is ethically directed and philosophically
embedded, yet notoriously difficult to define. In the Kantian theoretic
framework, person or personhood is intimately connected to his conception of
self that entails the notions of identity,
individuality, autonomy, and freewill, all of which seems irrelevant to Buddhism, since the Buddhist
doctrine of anatman
suggests a kind of “voidness of personhood” that would
disrupt the Kantian idea of self. In this presentation, I shall discuss two
different yet interrelated accounts of personhood in terms of self in Kant: a transcendent
conception of personhood and a transcendental conception of personhood, both of
which speak of a rationally unified consciousness. Then I shall employ Huayan Buddhism as an example to explicate the
Buddhist conception of personhood and discuss how the Huayan
doctrine of Dharmadhatu-pratityasumtpada
would embrace a transcendental conception of personhood in terms of one’s
individual’s relationship to a larger existence.