Qianyi Qin

This dissertation is an interdisciplinary investigation of the imagination and the self that engages with cognitive science, philosophy of mind, Buddhism, ethical theories, and a variety of perspectives from Asian and Western philosophy. I address the following questions in three interrelated chapters. First, what does it mean for the self to appear in imagination? In Chapter 1, against certain narrow understandings of the self in philosophy of language, I build a multidimensional model of the self in imaginative experiences to capture the rich phenomenology, drawing on empirical findings on memory and imagination. Second, can the self be removed from imagination? To what extent can imagination be self-less? This investigation is inspired by Buddhist metaphysics of "no-self." In Chapter 2, through a close reading of Buddhist texts on imaginative self-transformation, I argue that there is no straightforward translation from metaphysics to psychology when it comes to self-dissolution: some dimensions of self are necessarily present in imaginative experiences. Finally, should the self be morally evaluated for its imaginative activities? Can there be a genuine inconsistency between one's fantasy and real-life attitudes? I make an intervention in the ethics of imagination in Chapter 3. I argue that while there is nothing morally wrong with engaging in pure, private fantasies that involve counter-normative elements, the fantasizer can nevertheless have good reasons to feel psychological unease. One kind of unease can be understood as rooted in an inconsistency between the selves inside and outside fantasy, and is most accurately understood as a feeling of ambivalence, rather than shame.

Interpenetration, a central idea in Huayan Buddhist metaphysics, is commonly understood as the mutual dependence of all things. However, in Religion and Nothingness, Keiji Nishitani proposes that while everything is interdependent, each entity is also absolutely independent. Furthermore, Nishitani attributes a "non-objective" mode of being to entities in interpenetration. These tensions between dependence and independence, and objecthood and non-objecthood, reveal the uniqueness of Nishitani’s view and the limitations in the traditional understanding of interpenetration. This paper explores these tensions within Nishitani, contrasts Nishitani’s approach to interpenetration with both the common view and Fazang’s view, addresses Nishitani’s treatment of contradictory utterances, and reflects on the relation between metahpysics and ethics in Buddhist philosophy.