Our Self Does Not Precede Relation

Barry Magid, July 25th 2026

Generally I don’t particularly enjoy going back and reading my old dharma talks. But this week’s reading was an exception — more because of the quotes from Zadie Smith than anything I wrote in commentary about them. I think the sections I quoted from an interview she had with Ezra Klein are particularly useful to us, because they describe in plain, ordinary language what we often refer to as emptiness, or interdependence, or no-self. When we use those Buddhist terms, which often get capitalized and reified and turned into rather forbidding abstractions that we don’t quite know what to do with, she describes them in a very matter-of-fact way. I think it really is a wonderful bridge between the Buddhist language and what we endeavor to do all the time, which is bring that kind of language back into our ordinary daily lives.

I’ll begin by reading a couple of quotes from her. It begins with Klein asking her how she thinks about herself, how she defines herself. She says:

“I would call myself a radical humanist. A socialist. But also an existentialist. And those three things combined are sometimes hard to think from. The existentialist part means, I think, people are thrown into life. I don’t believe in people having essences. And that leads to a certain kind of fiction, a certain kind of thought. But also a political angle. Because if you think people are thrown into life, then the circumstances they are thrown into are of absolute significance. And in 2016, the circumstances we were all about to be thrown into were my focus. Whereas in a quieter, or a more peaceful time, the idea of what you’re thrown into being the beauty of the world, nature itself, your relations with other people — this kind of private domestic world — that had to be put to one side.”

So she calls herself an existentialist, and she’s echoing the Sartrean motto: existence precedes essence. The idea that we don’t start from any predefined human nature that provides a ready template for who and what we are, what it means to be human. And this has two different aspects to it.

Sartre tended to emphasize the aspect of freedom. If we have no essential nature, then who we are is going to be a matter of what we decide to do. Choice and freedom were paramount to him. In a way, this was in reaction to deterministic theories — whether of science, that tried to say if it’s a completely physical, deterministic universe, there can’t be any such thing as free will; or he was very hostile to the idea of psychoanalysis suggesting that unconscious forces shape and control our lives, outside of our awareness, outside of our control, and that we only think we’re making decisions, but at some level there’s an underlying psychic determinism that shapes who we are. And there was a dilemma for him in the early days with Marxism or Hegelianism that imagines a kind of underlying economic determinism to things. He was very opposed to determinism. This created complications later on, because all through the ‘40s and ‘50s he also had a radical political side, which he had identified with the Communist Party, and he had a hard time reconciling his commitment to freedom with his communism.

But in any case, Zadie Smith doesn’t emphasize the freedom aspect of no essence. She emphasizes the thrownness. Thrownness is a word I usually associate more with Heidegger, but it conveys a sense that who we are is going to be inseparable from the circumstances in which we find ourselves. And that, I think, is an important component — these two things — of what we think of as no-self in Buddhist terms.

First, this business of no essence. No essential nature. That’s one of the definitions we read about of what no-self means. But the thrownness is also another aspect of no-self. It’s another way of talking about oneness, though in this sense it’s a oneness that speaks of the inseparability of who we are and our world, the world we find ourselves in, in time and place. Too often, oneness gets capitalized and identified with something like an oceanic feeling, as if oneness were a mystical state, a particular state of consciousness. But what she’s describing is a description of the way things already are for everybody all the time. Which is, again, another way of thinking about no-self. Not as a special achievement, but as a pre-existing state of things that we need to come to recognize.

Thrownness means we’re inseparable from our circumstances. Another way of saying that is we are one with our world. We don’t have a kind of pre-existing, separate, enclosed nature — an ego or a self that is then thrown into the world. I’m not originally me, and then I find myself here in the 21st century, in America, and so forth. The me, the self, is constituted by being in this place and at this time and in these relations. This is very much what we mean by no-self.

She goes on, when she talks about identity, to elaborate this further:

“When I think of my identity, I think of myself as a Black British woman. I think of myself as a writer, a mother. A friend. An occasional drug taker. Dancer. Clubber. Many things. These things are all me. They are probably best described by your name. So what I’m trying to do when I’m writing is try to defend that fundamental sense that we are, in the end, this person. I am a Zadie, you are an Ezra. And I really think there’s a way in which you can acknowledge that truth about yourself and still do your political work, and still participate in struggle, but still know that human beings are essentially uncontainable by these terms entirely.”

When she describes herself, when she asks what her identity is, essentially she creates lists — of relations and activities. The ways in which she’s situated. She’s a writer. She’s a mother. She’s a clubber. She’s a drug taker. She’s a political activist. All these things are not something you arrive at by some act of deep introspection, looking inside and trying to find out who’s the real me. Rather, you look around, and you see all the things you do. All the people that you interact with, and the ways you interact with them.

At any given moment, one or the other could be in the foreground. When she’s out at a club with friends, the dancer and the occasional drug taker are in the foreground. She’s dancing, she’s playing. When she’s with her family, mother can be in the foreground. When she’s at her desk, she’s a writer, and that’s in the foreground.

But the other important aspect of all this is that each one of these things doesn’t exist in a separate compartment. They are not dissociated self-states, each of which exists independently of the other. Each one bleeds into the other and informs the other.

In the context of our original talk, we were looking at different translations of the Heart Sutra. And I believe Kaz was suggesting the word “boundless” as a way to talk about emptiness. Again, boundless is one of those words that to me is just too abstract, too mystical sounding. What I liked about Zadie Smith’s description is that really what she’s describing is boundarylessness. The absence of boundaries between each of these different selves. Each one informs the other. The way she’s a mother informs the way she’s a writer. And the way she’s a writer is informed by the time and place that she finds herself living. That was part of thrownness.

She says, at a different time, I could be Jane Austen, just writing about domestic relations and preoccupied with who’s going to get married or engaged, and who’s going to get this inheritance, and so forth. You need a certain kind of sense of stability in your political world in order to make that kind of thing seem like an important focus. Contemporary literary critics tend to try to flesh out the background of the world that made those kinds of preoccupations possible. Where did all that wealth and security come from? Well, it turns out a lot of it may have come from the slave trade and the wealth of the British colonies. So you can create a much thicker description of the background of domestic novels. But at a certain level, if you’re thrown into a certain situation, something is automatically foregrounded for you. If you’re born into a world of political turmoil, who’s going to propose marriage may not exactly be in the forefront of your mind.

So what we hear in what she’s writing about is this kind of enunciation of all the implications of what we mean by no-self and by interdependence. We don’t have to think of these in purely philosophical or Buddhist terms. No-self is this fact of being constituted in time, place, and relationship. We don’t start with a separate inner identity. Our identity is formed and defined in context, in relationship. Intersubjectivity, relationality, are the ground of subjectivity. Subjectivity doesn’t precede intersubjectivity. Essence doesn’t precede existence. Essence doesn’t precede relationship.

And these relationships that define us are constantly growing and changing. They don’t constitute any fixed list that adds up to our identity. When she talks about being a woman, a mother, a writer, a clubber — she might go on and list ten things. But she might list twenty. With a little imagination, maybe she could list fifty or a hundred. We could constantly expand. What are all the relationships? Some very occasional or seemingly minor. They gradually add up to who we are. The inexhaustibleness of that list is also what we mean by no-self and interdependency. If we are our relations, our relations are multiple, if not infinite, extending in every direction, to everybody and everything. We can just see that if we look at a description of how we go through our life, and what we do, and who we talk to, and what we depend on. It’s all a thick layer of interdependency and interrelation.

Sometimes we can sum up this whole package of no-self and interdependence and call it Buddha nature. But when we use a word like that, we should be clear that we want to be able to unpack it into this kind of ever-changing list of relations and connections. We’re not talking about some esoteric inner state, some level of consciousness or potentiality. Buddha is simply the one who realizes the nature of things. Recognizes emptiness, the non-essential nature of things. Recognizes interdependence. This is what we mean by our Buddha nature. It’s right in front of us all the time, if we know what we’re looking for.