Nothingness and Desire an East-West Philosophical Antiphony

jordan lectures 2011

Nothingness and Desire An East-West Philosophical Antiphony

James W. Heisig

Updated 1 October 2013

(with apologies from the proofreader & author)

University of Hawai‘i Press honolulu Prologue

The pursuit of certitude and wealth lies at the foundations of the growth of human societies. Societies that care little to know for certain what is true and what is not, or those that have little concern for increasing their hold- ings—material, monetary, intellectual, geographical, or political—are easily swallowed up by those that do. The accumulation of certitude and of wealth has given us civilization and its discontents. Those at one end of the spec- trum who doubt fundamental truths or who forsake the prevailing criteria of wealth in the name of other values are kept in check by the mere fact of being outnumbered and outpowered. The further away individuals are from that extreme and the greater the routine and normalcy of the accumulation, the higher they are ranked in the chain of civility. The number of those who try to find a compromise somewhere in between is in constant flux. In one sense, access to literacy, education, democracy, and private property are crucial to increasing the population of the self-reflective who aim at transforming those pursuits away from the intolerance and greed that always seem to accompany them into something more worthy of a human existence. In another sense, the institutionalization of the means to that end menaces the role of self-reflection. As organizations established to control normalcy grow in influence and expropriate the law to insure their own continuation, the pursuit of certitude and wealth is driven further and further away from the reach of individual conscience. In the name of social stability, institutions intended to serve the greater good take on a life of their own and batten to the point that they can eventually come to work against their founding ideals and yet enjoy the protection of the law. Once that threshold has been crossed, the reflected life becomes more and more powerless to reverse the course of a society. Once the basic need for schools, courts, governmental agencies, hospitals, financial systems, and religious establishments has been taken for granted in any given society, whatever its cultural history, the role of critical thinking is easily redrawn to focus on improvement and reform of those institutions. Warfare between tribes or nations waged in the name of competing ideals remains

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analogy of broader application than I can demonstrate here. The elevation of desire to a primary category of understanding the human will serve us later when we come to question human being as the sole standard against which to measure the quality of experience and evaluate moral praxis. A good place to begin is the skepsis on desire we find running throughout Buddhist texts dating back to the at least the first century of the Com- mon Era. Among them is the Dhammapada, perhaps the single most popular work of the Buddhist canon. The aphorisms that make it up are presented as answers of the Buddha to specific questions, all of which have to do with the everyday practice of Buddhist ideals. The logic of its argumentation is that of a vademecum. It defines its terms not in abstract principles but in arresting imagery whose meaning can only be learned in practice. The reader is led in circles around a small number of insights such that at each repetition the circle widens and spirals upward. Literal contradictions are not so much overcome as they are walked through, as if they belonged to clarity of insight. In contrast to more analytical texts of the canon where the question of desire is taken up, the Dhammapada brings us right to the living heart of the matter. The counsels of the text are addressed to monastics and laity alike, to the educated and the naïve, to young and old. Again and again we are reminded how the passions of mind muddy our perceptions of the world, deluding us into clinging to what we attain and yet suffering perpetual discontent with it. Each time we seek to change our heart by changing our surroundings, we are said to be left like a fish flapping on the ground alongside the pond (34). Against this rule of passion, the Dhammapada advances an “awareness” of the fragility of our condition and the delight that comes from letting go of one’s cravings without taking leave of daily life. This purification of the mind (183) praises both the spontaneous enjoyment of self-composure and the strenuous cultivation of good habits—always with the aim of dispelling the dark clouds of meaninglessness that hang over the impermanence of life so that the bright light of the moon might illumine the night (382). It is not desire as such that is uniformly rejected, but attachment to the objects of desire and its accompanying forgetfulness of the transience of all things. If you hold poison in a hand with a cut on it, it is said, the intoxi- cation will follow you around, but “poison does not follow one without a wound” (124). So, too, unless you heal the mind of its discontents and illu- sions of permanence, the evil you do and the evil that is done to you will sicken your life all the way to death. The desires that we think belong to us and that we try to control to our own satisfaction in fact only have us all the 14 | Nothingness and Desire

As simple as all of this may sound, and as deeply as the sayings of the Dhammapada may touch us, the argument about desire is uncoordinated and the images fragmentary. The more we comb out the strands of the text, the more snarled the picture. The ambiguity, it turns out, has been more important for Buddhist philosophy than its exposure. The paradox of the desire to be free of desire is one that does not need its Buddhist expression to make sense. On the contrary, its Buddhist expression makes sense precisely because it is so easy to rehearse in one’s own experience and to uncover in philosophies of very different ancestry. If we may speak of attachment to the object of our desires as a desire for desires, then we can also think in terms of detachment as an expression of a desire to be free of desires and their objects. In either case, we need to distinguish two levels of desire, much the same way that we distinguish between thinking and thinking about thinking. Neither level can collapse into the other, but then, too, the commonality they share should not be dismissed as mere linguistic imprecision. At the very least, we need to take a closer look. First-level desire is the desire for something. Awareness of the desire independently of what is being desired is an elusive enterprise. As often as we talk of wanting and willing, of inclinations and passions, of hunger and thirst, we have a hard time explaining what those words mean without attaching them to something concrete. Without an object, the terms elude description, even though we know full well that they are different from their objects and have no trouble juggling them as abstractions. Put another way, first-level desire assumes a mindset that thinks in terms of a subject and its objects. We want things and we get what we want often enough to confirm the assumption of ourselves as subjects grasping at objects outside of ourselves. This does not mean that the connection between a desire and its object is always very clear, let alone that we pause as often as we might to try and make that connection clear. At the first level, the act of desiring is most clearly distinguished from its object not in satisfaction but in frustration. Desires themselves tend to be transparent as long as we remain attached to what the desire was for. It is in the separation, or the failure to sustain the attachment of the desire to its object, that the act of desiring reveals itself to us. Similarly, desires are more obvious when we reflect on our past actions or passing judgment on the actions of others than when we are actually engaged in desiring something or other. But it is different with desiring itself, which can never be an object for public examination. I may want the 18 | Nothingness and Desire

indirect reaffirmation of the fact of the restlessness of desire as a fundamental quality of human being. If we extend it to all of being, then desire as such, both as subjectively felt and as directed at objects, becomes an affirmation of the change and becoming of everything in existence. From within the world of desire, the only possible release is renunciation to pure desire as grounded not in a higher state of being but in a nothingness beyond being. Complete freedom from desire can only mean liberation from existence. As long as we are in the world, desire cannot overcome desire any more than fire can burn fire. The objections against the slave mentality are parried by addressing God as a person with the same subjective structure as we have. For Augustine, knowing, remembering, and willing—the very things that define us as persons—are the same functions that describe the inner workings of the triune God. In other words, the very best of our very nature is a finite expression of a divine power that we ignore only by denying who we are. This circularity is not particular to Christian piety and doctrine. It is the same pattern we find in the Dhammapada with regard to the dhamma or universal law taught by Buddha: the liberation from slavery to our cravings is achieved by accepting a common ground in reality with the best part of our human being. Indeed the idea of a “religious instinct” to which we renounce ourselves constitutes one of the most important—and perhaps also most universal—rationales for transcending private interests to be found in human cultures. To this extent, it provides a way into the discovery of desire freed of the objects of desire. In short, the desire for rest in God is a suitable way of talking about the raw but conscious urge that is not a subjective possession, while at the same time disqualifying God as just one more object among other objects in the world we can desire. Nevertheless, there is something unsettling about the literalism this inflicts on our attempts to describe the nature of desire. Still, we can see through the strategy of enlisting a personal God to fit desire out with a final teleology without having to reduce it without remainder to a demythified paraphrase. If Augustine’s confession of faith can be seen as an example of the kind of language desire requires if it is to be spoken at its most rudimen- tary level of raw, conscious urge, then assent to its literal meaning or to the interpretative framework in which it was uttered would not be a prerequi- site. By the same token, neither would that meaning have to be rejected out of hand. Insofar as the critical reflection that goes on at second-level desire entails thinking about how we think about desire, it cannot simply avoid self and no-self | 33 a standpoint, whose importance to intellectual history can hardly be over- stated, runs into an idea of no-self, it is only natural to classify that idea as a negation of certain aspects or interpretations of the self, not as a substitute capable of assuming the full weight of responsibility we expect of an idea of the self. In the philosophical traditions of India and China that influenced the development of Buddhist, Daoist, and Confucian thought throughout Eastern Asia, the idea of “self” is understood as a flight from the reality of nothingness into the illusory world of desire. Self is seen as an epiphenom- enon of no-self. This extends both to the subject-object mode of thought and to the notion of a substantial self. Like western philosophical reflections on the self, eastern traditions of thought about no-self are too old and rich, too widely varied, and beset by too many different kinds of unresolved contradictions to allow for any but the most monstrous generalizations. In any event, I am not concerned here with historical description or comparative analysis. I wish only to suggest the way in which a positive reading of no-self can function as a reliable source of self-reflection and moral action. I am convinced that there is no great philosophy of self or no-self that can claim access to blocks of experience lacking in the others. The way that experience is expressed may be culturally and textually unfamiliar and non- coincident with one’s habitual models of thought. But there is nothing in our ideas of self or no-self that does not have a clear analogy with ordinary experience, and therefore nothing that makes either idea de facto unapproachable. At bottom, when everything has been laid out, these philosophies say the same things, only in a different arrangement. Take a kaleidoscope apart and all you have are a few mirrors and a handful of colored stones. What you do not have are the “beautiful shapes” that the juggling of these simple ingredients makes possible. So, too, self and non-self cannot be understood in their autopsy, only in their lived expression. It is not a matter of having or not having access to a certain experience because of cultural or linguistic limitations, but of trying to see that experience in its lived expression with as little interference as possible from descriptions and interpretations that abstract from it. The addiction to filtering perceptions through a set of abstractions as rationally organized as possible is a constant companion to the search for wisdom and understanding. It is not overcome by counterargument as effi- ciently and swiftly as it is by the shock of unforeseen circumstances throw- ing themselves at us in defiance of all our expectations and reasoning. A chastising image of this addiction appears in a chain of events at the end of 34 | Nothingness and Desire the life of Don Quijote. Dostoyevsky once wrote of Cervantes’ masterpiece that it is the one book humanity must not forget to bring with it to the last judgment, for “in its pages Cervantes has delivered to us the very heart of human being.” En route to Barcelona, where he is to face the Knight of the White Moon in a joust to determine whether he returns home to his estate or continues his adventures as a knight errant, Quijote falls among a band of thieves led by the notorious Catalan bandit Roque Guinart. At first he lectures Guinart for wasting his life by living outside the law. But as he observes the justice and discipline with which the company is ruled, he grows perplexed. Whence such virtue, he wonders, whence such generosity seldom equaled in those parts of society living within the law? He sees himself as sharing a common dream with the bandit, with one important difference: Guinart does not seem to have gathered his dream from library shelves or traditional moral teachings, but from some inner prompting. Quijote’s dream, in contrast, was such that he felt obliged to “erect a wall between the desires of my heart and the dictates of my principles.” Guinart did not. After his defeat in Barcelona, Quijote returns to La Mancha in despair, his principles taken from him by force of arms. He resolves to change his name to Quijotiz and roam about the hills breathing the fresh air of freedom from the principles he had come to from his reading. His self-imposed exile from society and forfeiture of his previous identities are not intended to substitute a pastoral illusion for a chivalrous one, but to discover in a “not-I” the source of the wisdom of Guinart. Before he can begin, he falls deathly ill and prepares to depart life in a state of sadness over his failure. Suddenly he sits up in bed and announces to those in attendance that he has finally recognized the cause of the fraud that had so misled him, Don Alonso Quijano, down the wrong path: he had read the wrong books. With a judgment free and unclouded by the “bitter and prolonged reading of detestable books of chivalry,” he announces: “I now see their absurdities and deceits, and my only regret is that my disillusionment has come so late, leaving me no time to make amends by reading other books that might be a light to the soul.” And with that, he puts his affairs in order and dies. Cer- vantes’ final stroke of irony—aimed also at the many cheap imitations of his masterpiece in circulation after the publication of the first volume—could not be clearer: Don Alonso Quijano is an archetype of everything that is wrong with tethering one’s life and energies to ideals not discoverable in the “desire of the heart.” Even before we begin to ask what such ideals might be or how they can self and no-self | 37 honoring simple oblivion, repression of memory, drowsiness, or some other form of mental paralysis, the forgetting of self is a disciplined practice of self-awareness. No-self does not mark a retreat to an animal or vegetative state. The attentiveness it requires corresponds to a deliberate abandon to the very thing that models of self-fulfillment understand as the innermost heart’s desire of the human being. When one is completely absorbed in trying to juggle several tasks for others at the same time, tending to the children, answering the door, preparing a meal, cleaning up after the dog, and so forth without any thought to the personal needs left in neglect, the self-forgetfulness that makes this possible is a manifestation of no-self in daily life. In comparison, philosophical theories of no-self require a very different frame of reference, one that works with texts and logical reasoning. The mental discipline needed to think the idea of forgetting the self through is not only out of place in the selfless attentiveness to everyday tasks; it is an interference. Similarly, the discipline of meditation in which deliberate effort is concentrated on letting go of one’s attachment to the self and its desires is only possible if one forgets about conceptual problems and sets aside the hustle and bustle of selfless action for others. Finally, no-self can also indicate the state of being absorbed in communal ritual. Here all concerns of the self, and all other modes of self- forgetfulness, need to be set aside in order to enter into the rhythms, symbols, and gestures of the rite. None of these instances of no-self is necessarily easier than any other, though in practice different temperaments take better to some disciplines than to others, and cultivate the requisite habits better in some aspects than in others. There is no intrinsic reason why forgetting the self in an elevated state of meditation can be said to be superior to selfless action for others or ritual absorption or even to rational reflection on the philosophical meaning of the notion as such. On the contrary, all these elements are indispensable to a full account of the idea of no-self and its practice. In all cases, no-self is not inactivity or passive renunciation or weakness. It is a virtuosity that requires practice aimed at a habitual way of living. No-self is nothingness challenging the moral authority of the desiring self. So far, there may seem no good reason to dislodge no-self from its role as a subcategory of self. Each of the frames of reference in which the no-self is practiced may just as well as defined as a form of self-discipline in which some impulses are repressed in order to release others. It remains to be shown how no-self can radically reform the self-awareness of desire. 44 | Nothingness and Desire

They cannot not study the way because they do not abstract themselves from their surroundings or concentrate attention on particular aspects of it. They belong to it; we need to find our way back to it by thinking, feeling, speaking, and practicing. Rocks do not forget, but that is not because they do not remember, nor are they preoccupied with how they are remembered. The registry of the environment on the rock holds it in place and carries it through time. It remembers everything. Nothing is filtered out, nothing repressed. In other words, it is non-conscious. The same may be said of vegetation, where life gives it desires in the aboriginal sense of instinct, but where life does not permit the repression of desire. A sunflower cannot be taught not to turn toward the sun without genetic alteration. Animals, too may be trained not to act on certain instincts by introducing undesirable consequences to that action. They can be trained to act habitually in certain ways, but not to “control” their desires. They do not forget one instinct in order to obey another. They do not obey instinct any more than they can be said to obey life—they simply live it. In fact, the category of instinct is applied backward to lower forms of life only when the repression of desire in the human being is taken as a primary analog. Just as mirrors can mirror many more things than they can mirror them to, so, too, desire moves many more things than those with enough intentionality to talk about them and sort them out. Except for the human being, nothing in existence has anything like forgotten memories. Forgetting may be said to be a precondition for the estab- lishment of consciousness. Or to put it in other words, consciousness—even consciousness in its most elevated state—is not possible without unconscious mind, any more than pure light would allow us to see anything hidden in pure darkness. For this reason alone, the idea of pure consciousness as a cosmic principle, whether in its eastern or western philosophical forms, is impossible to sustain without eliminating from the discussion everything we know about human consciousness. Aristotle began his Metaphysics with the claim that “all humans by nature desire to know,” but the shadow claim, that all of us by nature desire not to know, is equally important for any knowing at all to go on. The organs of perception, as Bergson pointed out, are not purely ways of taking the world in but more so of keeping it out. Without their filters, the mind would suffocate from a surplus of information. In the words of George Eliot, “we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.” What makes an objective world possible is the repression of knowledge, both perceptual and cognitive. Even in the case of the language 46 | Nothingness and Desire

10 no-self with its desire. Just as self-reflection raises the question of a duality within the self that allows a part of it to stand before the whole as a spectator, so, too, does talk of a desire for no-self entangle itself in the apparent contradiction of desiring not to desire. In speaking of a “deliberate” detachment from desires, we left open the question of who does the detaching. This is not a question that is asked as often as it might be among Buddhist philosophers. But when it is faced squarely, the notion of a true, deeper self that is said to act on an illusory, everyday self is disassociated, one way or the other, from the skin-bound consciousness of the individual. The duality is overcome by appealing to a nondual reality that has been split into two in order to allow for belief in an enduring, autono- mous center of subjective consciousness. If consciousness can be seen as the tainless mirror we referred to above, it can be seen as merely phenomenal, with no substantial ground of its own. Rather than leading to simple skepti- cism about our desire and ability to know and perceive reality, the idea of no-self eventually comes to rest in the insight that the desire and the ability are not ours to begin with. Desire ceases to be a faculty of the atomic subject and instead is viewed as a way of bringing a part of reality to consciousness and language. To see the world and its abstraction at once is the way of seeing proper to the no-self, where everything in the world is remembered with its representations. These representations exist, of course, in a consciousness unified by a seeing subject, as does the question of who it is that desires to be free of desire. They belong to a frame of reference that thinks in the same terms of subjects and objects, causes and effects as the self it sets out to overcome. But the questions have shifted and with it the mode of thought. The self in the standpoint of no-self no longer asks Who is the subject of desire? but only What does desire express? This question sees desire and the notion of desire as phenomena of ego-consciousness, but phenomena that express, within the limits of its existence, a reality beyond those limits. Without such phenomena and an ego-centered consciousness to attend them, nothingness would be pure, negative speculation about the hollowness of all thought and language. The idea and experience of desire, and in particular a desire driven to a self-awareness of not having any proper object, is the way nothingness manifests itself in the world we live in without having to drive us to another, imagined world. Desire is our way of not forgetting that nothingness is what makes the world of being, and us with it, pulse with life and change without 48 | Nothingness and Desire

as a matter of experience rather than of assent to revealed doctrine may be said to approach an idea of a nothingness beyond being in which God and self are indistinguishable. The fullness of experiential insight alluded to here, even in its most radical mystical form, is a state of existence in which the self retains its identity, and in that sense may be said to retain a consciousness unified around an individual, central, subjective ego. This is due in part to the disassociation of no-self from individual consciousness, in part to the shifting of the foundation from nothingness to being. The dominant Christian view that human nature is essentially inclined to evil may not be necessary to an idea of salvation grounded in a transcendent, grace-bestowing creator, but an innate inclination in the self to self-awareness—which Nishida once identified as “the one true good and ultimate reality of the universe”—is necessary for a view of reality grounded in nothingness. Without it, there would be no way to speak of reality as the final agent of moral action.

11 no-self and self-transcendence. At first sight, the differences between a no-self grounded in nothingness and a self-transcending self grounded in being seems to be cosmetic in comparison to their similarities. As unreflected modes of thought governing action, this may be the case. But when we consider them as consciously entertained models for thought and action, the difference in orientation takes on greater importance. Self-transcendence through divine grace is concerned with the salvation of the being of the individual by preparing it for a truer life in an other worldly realm of existence. Belief in the true home of the self as beyond the temporary abode on earth encourages moral praxis aimed at realizing the values of that other world as much as possible within this finite, broken existence of human life. The goal is to extend awareness of those values to daily life so that the greatest possible number of individuals can repair themselves and return home. The final judgment does not have to do with how successfully the transient world of time has been repaired in the light of an everlasting reality, but with the state of the individual soul whose being is destined to survive death. Meantime, the survival and advance of human civilization requires working within a framework of the laws, languages, sciences, economics, and governments that is not based on those eternal values. The pursuit of self-transcendence within this framework is an impor- 58 | Nothingness and Desire dissolved. For Eckhart, and still more explicitly for his disciple Suso, it is not the images as such that are rejected but only their ambitions to literal truth as perceptual or rational representations. The aim is to get behind imagery to a “form of life” that boils up out of “the depths of silence” and excludes everything outside of itself. The final goal of the cycle of imaging and re- imaging is to strip away images to arrive at a pure signification uncontami- nated by a distinction between the signifier and the signified, a creatio ex nihilo and ad nihilum. As an example of an image overcoming its own imagery, let us return to Kazantzakis and his epic poem, The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, in which he traces the path to the epitaph carved on his gravestone. There we find Odys- seus, who has set off on the ascetic path, standing at the edge of an abyss and watching all of life struggling to propel itself into the future. He presses his ear to the earth and hears small seeds toil, flat on their backs, fighting the soil to break through to life and freedom. As he watches nature he recovers his respect for the senses and their unquenchable desire to know as much of the earth as they can. During this reverie he hears the words: In damp tree-hollows coupling scorpions, newly wed, Keep motionless, nor eat nor drink, dizzy with lust; The males watch death approaching in the females’ eyes, The females watch small scorpions playing in male eyes, And ah, deep down, both in their male and female orbs I watch my own face fill with death and deathlessness. The scorpions’ dance brings the poet to a place where life opens up into a battle between death and deathlessness, of which his own life is only one part. If we let the scene play itself out further, there is still more to be seen. Let us say that the male is the perishable “I” and the female my image of the imperishable God, both of them overflowing with desire. I look into the eyes of God and see my impending death reflected there. Thinking of infinitude makes me aware of my finitude, my ignorance, my evil, and, finally, my death. Eternity can only finally suffer the transiency of time by willing its transiency, by maintaining the constant flux of life and death. The mystic wisdom captured in the image of the female scorpion who bites off the head of her mate may seem a little distant from the image of a loving God who grants eternal life to those who have died. But the fact is, reflection on one’s own mortality is an inevitable consequence of reflection on what is immortal. And what does God see when he looks into my eyes? He sees the memory of my life surviving in a life that outlives me. New life requires 60 | Nothingness and Desire me,” but we also need to forgive life—and therefore also God—for suffering and death. God is not an answer to the tragedy of life, and the idea of death as a break with individual existence does not offer the usual consolations of religious myths of the afterlife. The ego can never forgive life for its transiency without imagining its own eternal life. Forgiveness belongs rather to the self-awareness of nothingness, where we understand self-awareness as both the highest state of consciousness and the way that nothingness reaches consciousness. It is not an achievement of the monarchical ego but more in the nature of what Augustine called a free gift of “grace.” In other words, our images of God finally come to rest not in a supreme being to which they are connected by an analogia entis, but in a nothingness that makes both being and our images of it part of experience. But if that final resting place, which puts God beyond our reach, is to have any meaning for the conscious mind, it will require us to return to our images of God. In the same way that hope and fear and desire are known through their expression, so, too, God is known through the experiences to which we align our talk of God.

14 god and life. It is entirely too simple to dismiss God as a mere creation of the imagination that can be reduced, without remainder, to other, more tangible things of life. Reflection on nothingness and desire pure and simple has a purgative effect on the literalizing of talk about God, but it does not do away with what it is that has been literalized. The symbols we use to speak of a divine being point to more than a mere self-deception, even if we are aware that we cannot literalize them. In returning to talk about God from the standpoint of no-self at the intersection of nothingness and desire, however, we cannot simply reinstate our customary modes of thought as if nothing had changed. I propose to approach the question from the viewpoint of life. In the Judeo-Christian West, attempts to describe God in terms of life in its highest form of self-conscious life range from the naturalistic panentheism of Spinoza to the sweeping visions of Hegel’s supra-personal absolute, each of them with roots that go back to the pre-Socratics. In eastern thought, where the battle between theism and atheism has been less clearly defined—and rarely, if ever, occupying central stage—the attempt to integrate faith in a divine realm with the transcendent rhythms of life has been free of theological restraints and much more closely connected with god | 61

the rational appraisal of ritual, experience, and popular beliefs in spirits. In both, the Gods cling to culture and language with a tenacity that no amount of scientific progress has been able to dislodge. Western philosophers are often surprised to find twentieth-century Japanese philosophers struggling to find a place for Christian reflections on God in their thought, even though they have no intention of subscribing to the objective existence of anything like a transcendent being that Christian theology might recognize as God. Part of the confusion stems from the fact that the conscious effort to demythify the realm of the gods does not play the same central role in those philosophies as it does in the West. The level of tolerance for accepting the mixtures of literal and symbolic truth is much higher in the East, where the attempt to bring the realm of the gods down to earth and cleanse it of “superstition,” though not absent, was not foundational for philosophy and did not occupy a central place in modern religious reflection. This is not to say the same aims are not met in another way. Rather than attempt to drive out subjective fictions by counter- ing them with objective reality, the more common approach is to drive out fictions by seeking out inner self-negations that culminate in a reaffirmation that includes their negation. In any event, no philosophy or religion with a developed doctrinal system can calm “superstition” by condemning it as a simple failure of ortho- doxy. It belongs among the poor that reason always has with it. Mystical insight sees through words, but it is too often a luxury and elitist. Supersti- tion is the simple poverty of reason trying to get by with ordinary language. Somehow, the surplus of meaning contained in it has to be integrated into the reasonableness of religion. The desire for more than doctrine is prepared to say is as much a critique of naïve, unreflective religion as it is a critique of established doctrine. One way or another, logos always has to reckon on cohabitation with mythos. It is the refusal to do so that is pathological. Some years ago, a visitor passed through with the story of a ritual experience that captures the point dramatically. He had been part of a small group of pilgrims, ordinary women and men, who had gathered in mid-morning at the foot of a small mountain where a yamabushi monk was to guide them on a day’s journey. The monk passed each of them a small carving knife and told them to make their way alone and in silence up to the summit by noon. En route, they were to pick up the first branch or root that catches their eye and carve a figure of the busshō or potential for Buddhahood that dwells within them. When they reached the top, carvings in hand, they found that the monk had built a small bonfire, which he asked them to stand around in 64 | Nothingness and Desire

the place of religion in daily decisions has been severely diminished. We are children of the age of science. Or so we have prided ourselves. For more than half a century, scientists have been publishing data demonstrating that the planet is sick and, worse still, that our technologies are incapable of repairing the damage they have caused. The fact that for so long their data fell on deaf ears is not due to our mistrust of science but to a deeper belief that neither science not religion has been able to expose as the dangerous superstition it is, namely, the belief that all humans are endowed with an inalienable right to the standard of life and consumption to which the advanced nations have become accustomed. In the end, what little awak- ening there has been is due more to the natural disasters that have disrupted those habits and even imperiled them, not to the data themselves. The irony reaches deeper than the affront to science. Not even the conscience of the most advanced societies has seen fit to consult its philosophical and religious wisdom until the forces of nature obliged them to. None of the great religious traditions has been able to assert itself in defense of the natural world, from which they have drawn their primary fund of symbols, until the economic and political pressure to do so were in place. Those who feel the problem most keenly are powerless in the face of the dominant social institutions that feed them their primary modes of thought and insist on maintaining, or at least aiming for, the very levels of consumption that are causing the problem. Meantime, the planet is trembling with a high fever and little hope of a cure, as we continue to trust that somehow, someday soon, science and technology will justify the way of life we conceive of as “developed” without requiring any major sacrifices on the part of consum- ers. The possibility that the earth is afflicted with a disease that could destroy civilization as we know it is believed to be extreme and alarmist, and that provides reason enough for continuing as before and leaving the rest to experts who are paid to solve such problems. It is precisely here that the relationship between our images of God and the sacredness of life come into question.

15 displacing the personal god. An ailing planet offers us the first opportunity in human history to form a global community not based on the struggle for economic advantage. It is an opportunity that no religion and no civilized nation has been able to offer, and yet it goes ignored by the masses of humanity. As more and more persons are capacitated to 68 | Nothingness and Desire

tant than the sense in which I transcend the earth and God transcends me. This way of thinking begins to break down when we bring prehistoric time into the picture. We are, in fact, a rather recent phenomenon in the story of life on earth and it will not do to isolate consciousness from the rest of life as if it were a superior subject observing an inferior object. The scientist looking through an electron microscope at an atom is a perfect example a subject asserting its superiority by distancing itself from an object through the mediation of a tool it has fashioned for objectivity. If we shift from a spatial perspective to a temporal one, we see something quite different: an atom that has evolved to the point that it can look at itself. So, too, when I walk on the earth aware of time, I am not merely con- quering space as a mobile agent; I am in touch with an ancestry I can forget about but not move away from. Restoring prehistory to the religious imagination opens the eyes to a fundamental affinity with the earth, not as subjects controlling an objective world but as relatives. To exile God from time to an atemporal eternity rejects, or at least devalues, this relationship. From the standpoint of the time of the universe, personality can never be more than one small piece in the great mosaic of that which transcends us, each piece of which is like a mirror that reflects the whole that we call “the world.” There are many such images in the religious and philosophical wealth of humanity, a patrimony that Christian ideas of God have yet to claim sufficiently as their own. It is difficult to abandon our faith in humanity as the crown of creation, but there is no reason not to ask whether the only possible divine kenosis in time is by way of human personhood. On the contrary, the sickness of the planet obliges us to ask. To include the planet in the picture, we need to redraw the hierarchy of reality, not as God humanity earth but as God earth humanity. Insofar as metaphors fixated on God as a super-consciousness devalue the natural world, we need to give greater importance to a non-personal idea of God. To see the transcendent as non-personal requires that we value the presence of raw impersonal desire in ourselves first. Without it, the only encounter possible is by way of the projections that Feuerbach criticized as anthropology with the lining turned inside out. When Jesus directed his listeners to look at the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, he did so in order to expose the futility of organizing one’s life around preoccupations with one’s individual self. Of the birds, he remarked “They do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?” (Matt. 6:26). No doubt there is a sense in which we are more valuable. Without that assumption, there would god | 73

becomes inappropriate. It cannot be a singular one in the sense of a totality composed of parts or in the sense of a part superior to all other parts. And since it cannot, for the same reason, represent a class of entities, it cannot be a plurality either. It is the fullness of memory in which nothing is forgotten and everything is immediately present. The fullness of the absolutely related is its emptiness of self, singularity, and elective affinity. It is the incarnation of Nietzsche’s ideal of “becoming nothing without being nothing” and of “harmony without melody.” Not only is the absolutely relative connected directly to all things, it is the condition of the possibility of anything relating to anything else, that is, for beings to come and go, to continue and to change in an interconnected manner. Put the other way around, if there were nothing in the world of being and desire directly connected to everything else, then there would be no reason for interconnectedness not to crumble from time to time under the pressure of the coming and going of things. Absolutely relative is like the notion of “being that is becoming” except that it is a relational category rather than a mere ontological one. This way of thinking of the world differs from mainstream western philosophies of being at a fundamental level and helps us understand why so much of premodern eastern philosophy has been able to get along without the notion of being and, in most cases, without even a word corresponding to it. It helps us understand better what it means to say that reality, and with it everything we refer to as the world of being, can be grounded in nothingness. For these reasons, the nothingness that holds being and becoming in place is not anything we can refer to grammatically as a substantive or an adjective defining a substantive. This is why it is more often referred to -ver bally, as if it were the pure dynamic of relatedness. But this, too, is not quite right since it leaves out a crucial aspect of its absoluteness, namely the fact of its being directly related to everything. This connecting quality of nothingness is something that everything in the world of being imitates by the fact of its existing, but imitates in a limited sense. The dynamism not only holds things together; it is a desire for ever-greater interconnectedness. In other words, the more something is directly connected to the things of the world, the closer it is to the absolutely relative. The progression from innate matter to vegetation to animals to human consciousness is a function of this connectedness. Its status, if we have to identify it grammatically, would be more in the nature of an adverb, a quality of relativity, in virtue of which the range and the immediacy of the connection is enhanced. We will consider this more in detail in the fol- 80 | Nothingness and Desire

time within a given cultural frame of reference. Loosening the straps brings us no closer to the common ground that rational moral praxis requires. Insofar as moral reflection is a rational enterprise, it cannot of course lay claim to a certitude that is denied to reason itself. But insofar as the locus of moral praxis is communal and normative, it cannot be reasonable without at least some claim to universality across time and space. There are two questions here, then. The first, and most foundational, asks after the rational grounds for rationality; the second, after the reasonableness of moral ideals. We may agree that rationality cannot account for itself rationally, but this does not mean that all rational thinking has its two feet planted in mid- air, or that every attempt to be reasonable is too rooted in human interests and particular conventions to have anything universal to say. Wittgenstein concluded that the only escape from the conundrum was to consider reasoning—and the particular language games in which it is carried out— something inherent in the “human form of life” that is neither rational nor irrational. He likened it to the desire to protect ourselves from the dangers surrounding eating and drinking. Nietzsche called it an “authoritative need.” We reason because we have to, because the form of life that makes us human leaves us no choice. Our life does not oblige us to reason one way or another, to have some thoughts rather than others, but it does oblige us to think rea- sonably. It is, we might say, a universal desire with no proper object. Moral ideals and principles cannot appeal to the same ground. They do not have, nor do they require, a universal foundation in order to serve as a reasonable orientation to a good life. They are like cornerstones for the con- struction of practical habits of thought and action, They are moved by the drive to reasonableness in the human form of life, but the reasons for how they move and where they move to are always relative to the time and circumstances in which that reasonableness is practiced. Both in the abstract and in the concrete, moral reason is radically localized. It takes place in the world of being and becoming, but its final ground is in nothingness. In this sense, the middle ground of nothingness and desire represents a kind of deliberate ascesis toward attempts to find a universal, objective basis for describing reality as it is or acting in accord with how it ought to be. It does not beg the question; it abstains from it. At the outset, we defined nothingness and desire as guiding fictions. This implies that, like all our core ideas, they can also be misguiding. To know the difference we need to review our inherited traditions of thought and values through the lenses they provide. We also need to consider the morality | 81 kind of action they inspire in us. It is only in the respiration, the breathing in of these abstract ideas and their breathing out in concrete action that we can speak of a reasonable justification for standing in the place they open up for moral reflection. We begin then, standing foursquare in the inescapable condition of conscious beings, recognizing the incoherence between the world as we know it and the world as we would like it to be; or to frame it in the terms we have been using, we become aware of reality as a nothingness that manifests itself in beings as the desire to become what it is not. It is is from there that I would like to consider the sense in which moral reflection on the consequences of our ideas and actions can shed light on just how reasonable they are. This approach is not as unusual as my phrasing of it might suggest. On the contrary, Nietzsche gave us a way to read philosophy that it took a full century to reach the common sense that it is today: Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memory; also that the moral (or immoral) intention in every philosophy constituted the real germ of life from which the whole plant had grown. The moral intention of a philosophy, conscious or unconscious, is not merely the exercise of a particular vision of a perfect world or a strategy for diminishing its imperfections. It must also see to the preservation of the aboriginal completeness of the world by restoring to our image of it what has been forgotten, repressed, or simply neglected. Ultimately, I am persuaded, this latter is the more important. Insofar as completeness resides in connectedness, disconnectedness—even when it is perfect—is an agent of evil. Where apocalyptic hopes flourish, the memory of completeness is obscured by dreams of perfection. Regimes of purification, if left to their own ideals, always end up in a forgetfulness that require them one day to be overthrown. There may be no way to avoid the unending historical cycle of reform and counterreform, but it is possible to keep it in mind when it comes to confessing one’s hopes for the future. As the twelfth-century Jew- ish philosopher Maimonides remarked, when the Messiah comes, “nothing in the world will cease to exist, nor will any novelty be introduced into the scheme of the universe. The world will go on as usual.” In those terms, to stand in the middle ground of nothingness and desire is a kind of messianic posture without which practical moral posturing is prey to self-delusion. There is another and equally compelling reason for seeking this middle 82 | Nothingness and Desire

ground as a starting point for morality. When moral reflection distinguishes good from evil, as it eventually must if it is to have any visible effect, one runs the risk of infection either from the evil one has decided to work against or from the good one has decided to work for. The Dhammapada counsels not against avoiding evil but against avoiding contamination by evil. The good can be equally harming when it is seen as only good and only the absence of a particular evil. Grabbed the wrong way, even a beautiful clump of grass can cut the hand (311). It is not that good and evil are only relative and that one should seek a higher ground where the distinction no longer matters. It is rather that good and evil are radically relative, which means that the higher ground is one where a sense of the shifting borderlands of good and evil can be retained.

20 convivial harmony. In the last lecture we spoke of the divine as the absolutely relative. We return to that idea to begin consid- eration of how moral reflection and action function at the intersection of nothingness and desire. The image of God as an absolute nothingness, we suggested, points to creative dynamism that links all things in the world to each other by being the one thing to which everything is related. For that reason, God cannot refer to any particular item in the world of being that can be affected by its relationship. Not that God is beyond change; God is intimately related to all change. And since all change is a change of relationships, the differences in the quality of particular relationships are bound by an absolute limit: nothing can be unrelated to relatedness. The more stable, mobile, and conscious the individual, the greater its capacity to extend its relatedness. When this extension takes place, the divine is manifest. In one of his sermons, Eckhart likens the soul to the word quasi—as if—whose reality puts it alongside the Word (God), much as a bîwort works with a wort. In the world of being, speech makes audible a word that is otherwise silent: the nothingness of pure, creative, absolute nothingness. If we replace quasi with the sinographic equivalent meaning and at once, we come closer to the intimacy of the absolutely relative God with relatively relative beings. Just as there is no word without analogy to a meaning, so there is no absolute without its echo in the relative. God is not so much an unspeakable word but a word that modifies all words. It is absolute and at once relative. We may draw here on an image from the Liber viginti quattuor philoso- phorum, a pseudo-Hermetic text that comes down to us in a seventeenth- 88 | Nothingness and Desire

nothingness, it is more important that evil not be done than that the reasons for not doing evil are fully conscious. Viewing the good life in terms of the action-without-action of no-self does not diminish the distinction between customs, habits, and decisions. It only loosens its tie to universal principles and reinforces the idea of an innate love of harmony that nothing in the world of being and becoming can claim to be the cause of. This is particu- larly crucial in the case of the natural world. Our motivations for doing what we can to lessen the assault on the planet are secondary to our actually doing something about it. What is more, habit is a more reliable way of doing something than the appeal of decision based on argument. In other words, the requisite conversion is a second-order decision about decision-making that places personal conviction and missionary zeal in a subservient role to simply doing what needs to be done.

22 morality and religion. Habits are cultivated not only to alter the actual things we do or do not do, but also to alter the reasons we act or refrain from acting. The idea of “cultivating” habits immediately suggests the ascetic discipline of a moral agere contra. The aim of the struggle against our baser impulses is to tune our way of acting and thinking to an accepted standard of perfection. This standard can be seen as coded in laws, accepted mores, divinely revealed commands, classical texts, philosophical maxims, and the like, but it can just as well be associated with the imitation of ethical models, great personalities whom we believe to embody the good life. All of these employ the model of the self as something to be tamed into a good behavior that often runs counter to our native inclinations. An ethic of personal responsibility talks in terms of judging the kind of life one has “led,” as if it were a kind of ill-tempered animal at the end of a rope that has to be led to ideals that, by its nature, it resists. Set in the context of original sin, this model eventually runs into the dilemma that Augustine introduced us to: If we are inclined to evil because of some eradicable fault in human nature, then even the freedom to contravene that inclination is affected. Only an infusion of supernatural assistance can liberate us, if only provisionally, from the evil we would do. Divine grace corrects the distor- tion that, left to our own devices, we are powerless against. Free will is thus only truly free when it lets go of the control and becomes an instrument of a higher power. Once will has been disassociated from “free will” as the primary analog, it can be repositioned in a wider reality. Like everything else morality | 89

in morality, once will is diluted to simple human freedom of choice, it moves further and further away from the wider reaches of desire that we have been at pains to describe here. Action under the sway of a superhuman power may be a fundamental factor in the way religion relates to morality, but its supernatural character is not. Rationalizing the superhuman to legitimize habits, desires, and customs is a consistent feature of religious traditions but does not require a divine will. Eastern philosophies of cultivation typically see the superhuman as residing in the natural order that enfolds human consciousness. Evil and discord are a function of a self-centered addiction to control life oblivious of its relationship to that greater convivium in which human nature finds itself from birth to death. Accordingly, the moral aim of cultivation is the detachment of self from acting, or what is called “acting-without-acting.” This is not a mere dispensation from thinking or moral judgment that entrusts the future to the past in an indifferent gesture of laissez faire. It is rather an entrusting oneself, mind and body, to the demands of a situation. To be able to see those demands, which often enough conflict with our own wishes or expectations, is the final standard of the good life. In its pure state, such action is nearly as unapproachable in the concrete as is pure selflessness. When achieved, it overrides principles, maxims, customs, commandments, and laws, as well as religious doctrine. Or perhaps better put, it gives them their highest level of reasonableness, one that contrasts sharply with the judgments based on pitting abstract norms against concrete choices. In Eastern Buddhist lore, one finds frequent examples of the suspension of moral judgment opening one’s eyes to the moral demands of a situation. The story is told of a small mountain village and a monk who lived alone in a nearby cave. Every so often the monk would walk down among the people to beg some rice and then return to his solitude. In time of conflict or natural disaster, the villagers would seek out the holy man for advice; they were his people and he was their monk. One day, as the monk hobbled along on his cane through the streets, the elders approached him and asked if it was not time to prepare disciples who might carry on after he is gone. He agreed and asked to have three of their most upright and willing youths to join him. Each was to bring only a bowl for their food and a brush to copy the sutras. The three were chosen and began their live in the hermitage. One day two of the young men came to the monk, dragging the third by the ear. “Master, you must send this fellow back into the village. He has stolen and is not worthy to be your disciple.” “Stolen?”, queried the monk. “What is there to steal?” 90 | Nothingness and Desire

“He broke his bowl while cleaning it, and while we were asleep he exchanged it with one of ours.” The face of the old man darkened. “Is this true?” he asked, turning to the young culprit. Do you wish to go back to the village?” “It is true,” replied the youth, “but I do not want to leave. It is my heartfelt desire to be your disciple.” The monk dismissed them without a word. Some days later, the scene repeated itself. This time, the young man had secretly replaced his unwashed and matted brush with one of the others’ brushes. Once again, they accused him and asked for his dismissal; and once again, the young mean acknowl- edged his guilt but pleaded to be allowed to remain in training. “Leave me, all of you,” commanded the monk, and “return in an hour for my decision.” An hour later the three gathered and the monk addressed them. “You two may return to the village; I will keep this one,” he said, smiling at the young thief. The two accusers were perplexed. “Master, your years are many and your ears are far. He was the one who stole and we were the ones who were stolen from.” “No,” retorted the monk, “your years are too few and your ears too close. You see, you two already know the difference between right and wrong. He has still to learn it.” If the wisdom of the monk brings a smile of comprehension to the listener, it is probably because it has been misunderstood. The reasons for the misunderstanding are the key to the story. The monk does not want to retain the thief to teach him right from wrong any more than he means to praise the other two youths for their capacity to judge. On the contrary, he suspends that kind of judging because it blinds one from seeing what is most important: the heartfelt desire to be a disciple, despite one’s failings. The two who lack the ability to recognize it have never left the village and are therefore sent back. This opens the perspective up from its narrow focus on the assessment of the goodness or evil of a particular act. It dispenses with the abstract norm and then sees what there is to see. Still, the suspension of judging might seem shaky ground for making moral choices. It might seem to imply letting the world go on as it is, uncriti- cally and passively handing oneself over to the status quo. This is because the primary analog of judgment is the act of holding an action up to the light of a perfect ideal and accusing it. But there are other ways to judge than by principles that supersede circumstances. More precisely, such principles are 116 | Nothingness and Desire

this sense, attachment to the accumulation of money reinforces the belief in my attachment to my own life and existence as more valuable than the life and existence of others. What is given is cut off from a relationship to the one from whom I receive, and receiving from the one who gives. It works automatically and “naturally” and only comes into question when the rules of exchange have been violated. As long as the norms are followed, money is beyond question. Friction between the haves and the have-nots over amounts of money owned is complicit in this belief. I am not proposing mass defection from the use of money, or from any particular class of possessions for that matter. My aim here is much simpler: to promote habits of thought that better illuminate the wider entanglements involved in attaching ourselves to possessions and at the same time that help reattach us to those of life’s enjoyments from which we have grown used to being detached. Here I would single out only one habit which I consider central to this aim: getting used to knowing just how much is enough. The satisfaction of the desire that has no object, as we discussed ear- lier, lies in release from the desire for satisfaction without release from the desire itself. This is the awareness of nothingness amidst the things of life. The negation it implies has no moral value if it cannot be confirmed in an affirmation of what is valuable, convivial, and harmonious in the everyday. The critique of accumulation, attachment, and greed are incomplete without the discovery of a better way to enjoy the things of life and to enjoy them habitually and without the demand for constant calculation. This better way is what we may consider under the rubric of “sufficiency.” I find it useful to begin from the walls of Apollo’s temple at Delphi, where Socrates went to consult the oracle. On one wall were inscribed the words γνῶθι σαυτόν, “know thyself.” Socrates took those words out of their original setting, where they were an admonition for visitors to “remember their place” in the presence of the god, and understood them as a life task. Less well known is an inscription on another wall which read μἠ δὲν ἄγαν, “nothing in excess.” The first philosophical use of this well-known maxim had to wait until Aristotle and his principle of the “mean,” which served as a way to locate true virtue at the midpoint of opposing excesses. Aristotle’s use of the idea, which was not very consistent and tended to render human passions anemic, may be left aside. Instead, I would like to see “enough” as the high point between “too much” and “too little,” namely, the point at which the fullest and liveliest level of satisfaction is reached. Knowing rationally what constitutes excess does not guarantee the pursuit of that high point, any more than that pursuit guarantees that we will property | 119 enough is a useful, if badly neglected, skill. But the general depletion of the planet’s resources, the systematic promotion of poverty, and the growing addiction to surplus call for a new way of looking at the activities of exchanging goods and services. But so does the ever more outrageous satu- ration of ordinary enjoyments with more and more possessions. Likewise, artificially embraced dissatisfactions may have therapeutic value for those who can afford the luxury of an environment where dissatisfactions are not otherwise thrown up in abundance. For such individuals, the overdose may even be enlightening, but often enough the asceticism is no more than a spiritual aberration that feeds the ego as it punishes it. Enjoyment would not be enjoyable if it did not hold suffering, death, and tragedy at bay. As surely as these misfortunes await us, this is not cause to revel in them as a disenchantment with all welfare. The pessimistic wisdom they bring to the good things of life is not all there is to wisdom. At the same time, the idea that the satisfaction of our desires, as many and as intensely as possible, is the best measure of welfare is as wrong as the idea that the amount one can afford to pay for goods and services is the best measure of their value. In the end, the nothingness that lies beyond joy and misfortune, beyond life and death, and beyond our capacity to make it an object for desire cannot be known except through what happens to our desires. Their frustrations and fulfillments are the only glimpse we get of the deeper meaning of all this being and becoming we call human existence. 124 | Nothingness and Desire

The model civilizations use to communicate with each other governmentally carries over almost without question into the enjoyment or acquisition of other arts, sciences, and skills: the closer one gets to the core, the more reliable the outcome. This practice not only endorses the divide between East and West; it sets up standards of excellence against which all other interchange is to be measured. The cultural and linguistic shocks and clashes that accompany the process work to reinforce the impression that overlaps only make sense against a backdrop of cultural and linguistic noncoincidence. As the lines between the centers become stable and institutionalized, the assumption falls out of sight and out of mind. The fiction not only becomes reality for those who subscribe to it; it takes on the character of a necessary, universal predisposition for all future participation in and research on “for- eign” cultures and languages. What makes this fiction misleading is not its failure to produce results. The problem is rather with its self-understanding as the primary form of cultural and linguistic interchange. The centralization of culture implies a purity-impurity model, which is fundamentally geopolitical, not real and concrete. The true primary form of cultural interchange, it seems to me, takes place far from the center, at the borderlands where cultures and languages coexist and interpenetrate in communities of people so fully that the very term interchange no longer suits the reality. The borderlands I am speaking of are not, of course, only geographical. The center refers to a predominant mode of thought whose self-preservation and self-diffusion are defined, on the one hand, in contrast to other centers or predominant modes of thought and, on the other, in contrast to those modes of thought it devalues as subservient, minor, countercultural, and therefore peripheral. The mere fact of a society conscious of itself as multicultural or multilingual does not ensure that it even recognizes the reality of peripheral modes of thought, let alone recognize their primacy for cultural interchange. On the contrary, systematic aggressions by the institutions at the center bent on spreading their own standards of civilization all but ensure that this cannot happen. As it is, more and more languages and cultures are being absorbed into the “mainstream” with the promise of the greater good and services that come with inscription. The fact that we have not yet found a way to share the benefits of the center without the obligation to adjust to its insularities is more to blame than anything else for the cultural and linguistic impoverish- ment of our times. It is nothing less than an epidemic addiction to as much universalization of one’s own way of thinking and way of life as possible, masqueraded as a protection of national traditions and values. 126 | Nothingness and Desire

a few faint strokes hastily brushed on a canvas whose lines of perspective are themselves still fluid and indistinct. At a time when the very conception of the history of philosophy is being reappraised, however, something further needs to be said about the scale of the change and its effect on our received perceptions of what counts as philosophy and what does not. To say “philosophy of being” is to speak of a class of systems defined by a great diversity with the slenderest of commonalities: the idea that the nature of reality is being. And just as it is superfluous to speak of “philosophy of reality”—as if there could be any other kind of philosophy—so too the qualification “of being” is usually omitted. In short, the class of philosophies of being has no exceptions, and therefore ceases to be a class. Ever since the Enlightenment, European philosophy has known of systems of thought from “the East” which claim that reality is ultimately not being but nothingness. The blossoming of mythological research and comparative religion in the last century drew further attention not only to the age of these systems and the sophistication of their logics, but also to the possibility that they may have influenced Greek philosophy in its forma- tive period. The history of mathematics further corroborated the growing respect for Eastern philosophy. Ironically, what delayed full recognition of these systems of thought by the philosophical community was not primar- ily their unfamiliarity but their apparent insoluble bonds to religious practice and doctrine. In the wake of the birth of the new human sciences of anthropology, sociology, and psychology, Europe and later the United States witnessed the birth or reemergence from obscurity of a litter of new “wis- doms” that claimed to pick up where traditional religion and philosophy had left off, reasserting the unity of all true knowledge, rejecting the separation between religious truth and scientific truth, reestablishing the practical use of wisdom as the ultimate healer, reopening the hidden treasures of the esoteric tradition and making its powers available to a new world in the making. The role of nineteenth-century movements like theosophy and anthroposophy in this process is well known. Not only did these new directions claim the authority of classical Western thought, they embraced the traditions of the near and far East as well, culling ideas freely from the Christian, Islamic, and Buddhist world for their stew. Intellectual historians have given little, if any, of this a place of honor in the story of philosophy or the story of science, though such movements have continued to arise and pass away up to the present. In any event, this was the climate in which a range of philosophies of the East made their own way to the West early in this century, independently of the east-west divide | 127 each other and independently of their importation by Western movements. It is only from the latter half of the twentieth century that these systems of thought have been considered as belonging properly to the history of philosophy. Faced with a philosophy that claims nothingness as the ultimate nature of reality, the philosophy of being will reject the claim by showing that any genuine insight it has is already accounted for in its own system and that its conclusions are a failure to understand the nature of being. When a philosophy of nothingness tackles a philosophy of being head-on, it returns the compliment by showing how the preoccupation with being is laudable but misguided, and that the best achievements of that preoccupation are better preserved by making being subservient to nothingness. To a lesser extent, a similar upheaval is taking place in the role of the notion of desire in philosophical thought. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, philosophies of volition and free will were shaken to their foundations by psychologies of the unconscious that fortified the biological notion of “instinct” by locating it as a permanent feature of all our attempts to be rational. On a parallel front, behaviorism worked to undermine many assumptions about the freedom of the will that had been foundational for ethical theory and eventually came to reduce consciousness to an epiphe- nomenon of general instinctual drives. Phenomenology and hermeneutics led the way in remapping philosophies of mind in the attempt to save the primacy of conscious reason from being undermined by repressed memories and instinctual drives. Later cognitive psychologies focused on the processing of information in another attempt to pick up the pieces, but have tended to leave the basic premises of behaviorism regarding free will in place and to sidestep the particular questions that had arisen in the discussions about unconscious mind. Throughout these debates, the focus of discussions on free will has been on the freedom to make choices about the things we desire, in whatever intensity and for whatever reason. The disjunction between freedom and necessity has remained relatively constant in Western philosophy since Augustine. Aristotle, as we know, treated freedom of choice without an idea of a will, but critics of the will’s freedom from Hobbes and Spinoza to Schopenhauer, have not questioned the idea of will, only the dominion of the subject over it. Even within these broad outlines, philosophies of the East fit clumsily into the picture. One may find rough cognates for the variety of positions on the freedom of the subject with its desires, instincts, and capacity to choose, but the underlying idea of a subjectivity of no-self challenges the definition the east-west divide | 129 small tributary too shallow to carry the larger vessels of philosophical and religious thought that western thinking considers primary. As guiding fictions, these ideas both point to something in our nature, differently expressed as it may be in East and West. To say that nothingness belongs to the East like a kind of alien philosophia perennis is to reject its full rehearsal in western experience. Nothingness and desire are culturally specific in their expression, but there is a sense in which they belong first of all to the air that consciousness must breathe in order to become self- conscious. The words and sentences with which we speak of these ideas are no more than particular melodies that the flute draws out of the rich secrecy of the air we must inhale whether we think about it or not. If we imagine the intersection of the ideas of desire and nothingness as a mere crossroads, we are left marching in place. No matter which road we head down, the incompatibilities return and oblige us to the very position we set out to avoid, namely “taking sides.” The image is misguided. Or again, let us say we think of the divide as a great chasm, as it is ordinarily perceived to be when we think of the familiarity with texts, cultural and historical backgrounds, practical ethics, and collective views of the world. I stand on the western side, look over to the other side, and cry out “Desire!” There is no echo as the idea is swallowed up in the abyss called nothingness. Then I stand on the eastern side, look at the abyss as it spreads itself out westwards, and cry out, “Nothingness!” Again, no echo, just a great silence as the idea of desire devours it whole. Once again, the image confirms the unbridgeable breadth of the divide. The reticence to express this conclusion, reached with various degrees of sophistication, belies the strength of its conviction. An example of a forth- right statement is to be found in the analytical philosopher Arthur Danto, who rejects the idea of including Asian thought in the category of “moral philosophy” on the grounds that it is too alien: The fantastic architectures of oriental thought… are open to our study and cer- tainly our admiration, but they are not for us to inhabit.… The factual beliefs they take for granted are, I believe, too alien to our representation of the world to be grafted onto it, and in consequence their moral systems are unavailable to us.… No one can save us but ourselves. From a similar standpoint, Heidegger excludes eastern thinking from the philosophical forum: The often heard expression “Western-European philosophy” is, in truth, a tau- tology.… The word philosophia appears, as it were, on the birth certificate of the east-west divide | 133

Nishitani about the exclaustration of Japanese thought from the philosophical tradition. Rather than rattle their chains at being denied access to the philosophical tradition as equals rather than as tourists, they simply set out to do philosophy. And they did it for a Japanese audience without rushing to have their works translated for western consumption. If their Japanese read- ership found them hard going at times and complained of what they were doing to the language, they read quite naturally in translation and—insofar as I am able to judge—on the whole read better in western languages than the translations of their western counterparts read translated into Japanese. These efforts, as it turns out, have been much stronger arguments against exclusivity than any complaints against the cultural hegemony of philosophy. The Kyoto school thinkers can be read, with profit, by philosophers in the West with little or no knowledge of Asian intellectual history. This says a great deal about the quality of their performance. As I have never hesitated to state, they stand shoulder to shoulder with the best western philosophers of their age. They are not only intelligible to the West; they have made a distinctive Japanese contribution to its philosophical tradition. Per- haps this is why the slide away from “specific philosophical” questions into the defense of a “cultural block universe” during the war years is eyed with such disappointment. It has hardly had the effect of discoloring the whole of their work; on the contrary, it is the adventure of their work as a whole that has discolored their more or less nationalistic escapades of thought, to the point that no nationalist or Japanist for the past fifty years has cited any of these philosophers in their support. Indeed, the success of the Kyoto school have prompted attention to more general demands that had lain beneath the surface for entirely too long. If these demands are not met, it is likely they will slip back into oblivion, at home and abroad, as quickly as they rose to attention. Fundamentally, I see two problematic areas, the first more visible in the West, the second in Asia. In neither area can one count on leadership from educational establishments. On the contrary, they will no doubt wait until a path of least resistance has opened up before stepping up to announce permanent reforms of the system. The initiative will have to come from within the community of scholars, and their young students, themselves. The first area has to do with redefining the notion of philosophy in the West so as to return to the philosophical forum great areas of the intellectual history and activity of the East, from its exile to departments of Asian studies or religion. Current definitions will only be displaced by a deliberate effort to name large areas of thought as “philosophy” without the qualifica- 146 | notes the possibility of self-consciously guiding fictions. Further, in treating desire and will as fictions, he classifies them strictly in terms of their objects (1814, 18, 156). The Buddhist notion of expediency or upāya is also at work here, both as heuristic and as a hermeneutic critique. It is a mistake to think of notions like Dharma, nirvana, and enlightenment—as well as creation, resurrection, and redemption—only as doctrines interpreting reality. They are first and last questions that direction attention to what to look for. As upāya, doctrine is a kind of training drill needed until one has the skill to practice spontaneously. This is what I mean by guiding fiction. ▶ The number of philosophers both classical and modern who have taken up the universal notion of desire—whether directly or by way of notions like will, drive, impulse, and instinct—far exceeds the number who have ignored it. Spi- noza’s notion of virtus as a “power” in things is an ontological principle. I prefer desire because it is too anthropomorphic to serve as an ontological principle and because it does not beg the question of being vis-à-vis nothingness. Desire and nothingness are both tied here to human experience that can be rehearsed and do not require such principles. In contrast, Nietzsche’s Wille zur Macht, a cleaner version of desire than Freud’s libido or even Heidegger’s Wille (see Davis 2007), avoids both the anthropocentric and the ontological bias in a way that might also serve as a foundation for the broader notion of desire needed to relate it to nothingness. A general history of the notion of desire in western philosophy has yet to be written, but Hannah Arendt has given us a useful survey of development of the notion of will (1974, vol. 2). ▶ There are too many epistemological questions involved in the subscription to a plural reality and a rejection of an objective reality out there for the taking to do more than give them a passing nod. I believe that any attempt to face them squarely, one by one and a priori, would sour, or at least severely detain, the whole project of bringing different worlds of thought into conversation. ▶ The citation from Nikos Kazantzakis’s posthumously published auto- biography (1961, 16) reflects a theme that runs throughout his writings (see Heisig 1971). It also calls to mind an essay of George Steiner’s (1989) in which he lamented that we have become so accustomed to living in a “secondary city” where people talk about their experiences that we have forgotten the aesthetic, revelatory immediacy of actual experience itself. ▶ The “one great matter,” as the Zen master Hakuin called it, is that we remain aware of the experiences that catch us up in daily life as they happen rather than recognize them only secondhand, in the telling. After Kant turned epistemology on its head by beginning with preconditioning of the subject, it has been difficult to return to belief in our capacity to speak of an objective world in a fully literal sense. At the same time, to begin with conditions for the possibility of knowing, as Kant has shown, is not to give second-order, methodological notes | 147 problems a final primacy of place over practice. The next turn of the wheel is a return to the pure happenstance of things before the conscious division into subjects and objects. In the early years of the twentieth century, explicit arguments along this line, typified in the early writings of Nishida Kitarō, Japan’s foremost twentieth-century philosopher, drew attention to a way of thinking that predates both western scientific realism and the Enlightenment. Indeed, before Nishida, Schopenhauer had drawn the connection between nothingness and the overcoming of the subject-object dichotomy (1844, 1: 410).

desire and its objects. As a kind of Vademecum for Buddhist 2 believers, the Dhammapada is a collection of aphorisms that lay out the basic ideas of the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama. It is often considered a condensation of the early Buddhist canon, in which about half of its sayings are to be found. Though still used in ritual chanting and committed to memory by Theravada monks, its influence has been equally strong in the Mayahana tradition. Legend dates it back to the fifth century bce, but scholars generally place it two centuries later. The earliest text we have is from the first century ce. For more information, see the illuminating introduction to a recent commentary on the work by Leo Lefebure and Peter Feldmeier (2011). I have drawn on this work more often than I give it credit for here, though my translations have occasionally been adjusted in the light of the Chinese translation of the Pali original dating from 224 ce. ▶ I have drawn here on a critique of the misconception of the wholesale rejection of desire in Buddhism and comparison with western philosophy scholars in Japan by Jan Van Bragt, who argues that “Buddhism tends to situate the paradox of desire between its theory of emptiness, for which desire is absolutely taboo, and its practice, for which desire is absolutely necessary” (1994, 86). ▶ When the pioneering phenomenologists Brentano and Husserl insisted that all consciousness is consciousness of something, and in that sense is inten- tional, they were interested in the subject-object relationship, not in the pure experience of intending as such, thus reaffirming the primacy of the subject- object distinction. Louis Roy has thrown fresh light on the problem by comparing Christian mystical writers with Zen and the Kyoto school philosophers for whom “consciousness-in” is a more accurate category than “consciousness-of” (2003). ▶ A similar argument for the paradox of desire to the one made here could be made through a study of neo-Confucianism in Tokugawa Japan. Thinkers like Hayashi Razen and Fujiwara Seika set up an irreducible enmity between the darkness of human desire, on the one hand, and the illuminating practice of virtue in accord with the principle of heaven, on the other. The counterpositions advocated by Yamaga Sokō and Ogyū Sorai saw human desire and passion as 148 | notes continuous with the movement of reality as a whole, indeed its highest expression. A sample of their views and those in other neo-Confucian schools can be found in Heisig, Kasulis, and Maraldo 2011, 289–453. ▶ The imagination of death as a cure for desire as found in Buddhist texts helps clarify the distinction between cutting off desire and cutting desire off from its objects. For example, a 1692 text by the Zen thinker Dokuan Genkō explains a passage from the Perfection of Wisdom Sutra, which speaks of “cultivating the nine perceptions and getting rid of desire.” The nine all have to do with the discoloring, stench, and corruption of the body after death, but a close reading of the text shows that it is not desire that is to be cut off, but the desire for certain things, in this case the beauty, expression, and comportment of the body (see the translation in Mohr 2009, 183, 208–9). The cultivation of the detachment may thus be seen as replacing those desires with a higher desire. This is a perfect example of what we are calling second-level desire. ▶ The “four immeasurables” 四無量心( , maitrī, karunā, muditā, upekṣā) were originally the Brahmanic virtues were taken over by the Buddha not as a way to purify mind but as the way of a pure mind. This is clear in the Visuddhimagga, a fifth-century text on the discipline of purification considered by the Theravada tradition as the most important of all noncanonical texts. The goal of practice is clearly stated at the end of the first chapter as disentanglement from the self in order to engage in virtue and “incline toward its fulfillment” (§58). ▶ The first to distinguish between first and higher-order desires seems to have been Harry Frankfurt (1971), but the idea was later taken up by Amartya Sen, Bernard Williams, and others. ▶ The bond of desire to unconscious mind advocated by Freud has served both to articulate suspicions with a much longer history in philosophies and religions East and West, and to reconfirm the therapeutic power of second-level desires. His hydraulics of desire is constructed on the analogy of the blood being pumped through the veins. In the place of the heart, Freud named the central pump simply “it.” Pressure can build up to the point of aneurism, there can be ruptures in the piping and a rerouting of the flow, but almost everything takes place autonomically at the instinctual whims of the id. Jung’s break with Freud centered on his positive evaluation of the id and its depersonalization, which in turn drew him to eastern modes of thought. Despite a brief period of popularity in the 1980s, Jung’s approach did not have any noticeable impact on the philosophies or religions of the East he drew on for inspiration.

desire without a proper object. For Augustine, the will is 3 too untrustworthy and corrupt even to acknowledge its own condition without supernatural assistance (Confessions 1.1; see also Evans 1982, 117, notes | 149

148–9). Bonaventure bases his spiritual classic Itinerarium mentis in Deum on the same Augustinian acknowledgment that the longing for God is God’s doing, not our own; that we cannot “rise above ourselves” or “turn back to ourselves through desire” without a “higher power” to lift us up to do so (1259, 1.1, 4.1, 7.4). It was precisely this circularity that Nietzsche identified as the self-loathing “slave morality” of Christian culture, which denies freedom in our innermost nature only to turn around and blame it for moral evil. In contrast, Leibniz’s “will not to will” shifted the focus from the corrupt nature of the human individual to the universe as a whole, thus radically relativizing individual will power in a form more compatible with the basic orientation of eastern philosophies. Nishida, in an essay written a year before his death, acknowledges the similarity explicitly, noting that the true freedom of the individual is one that reflects the freedom of the world to determine itself (1944). ▶ Nietzsche’s concept of “religious instinct” was taken over by C. G. Jung in order to bolster the notion of a true Self seeking to unite within the person the opposites of the divine and the human as a way to integrate oneself into the cosmic scheme of things. The attempt to see the collision of opposites at the root of the birth of thought has been made in the last century by Lévi-Strauss, Jung, and Nishida, but is a much older pattern of thought. With Derrida and other critics, we have come to see this binary opposition as an imposition too weak to handle the confusion of the world. Tanabe Hajime’s introduction of “specific difference” may also be seen as a critique of this approach. Opposites of thought, moreover, are not always a sign of an oppositional reality; as an abstraction, the interplay and union of opposites is of limited use. Absent the bias to think in terms of one-to-one pairings, opposition is a cluster of numerous variables, all of which are affected by other variables. Even the most apparently binary opposition of I and you, as the work of Gilbert Simondon on individuation has shown, relies on “pre-individual fields” which make the individual a process that is never free of a surplus of the pre-individual (2007). ▶ In Japanese philosophy, the modern challenge to the subject-object dichotomy is associated with Nishida Kitarō. His initial focus was on explaining the unity of consciousness in a nonsubjective sense. Intimations of a raw “urge” that preceded consciousness, coupled with an encounter with Bergson’s thought, blossomed into a notion of absolute cosmic will, which he abandoned almost as quickly as he had formulated it in favor of an analysis of a “self-awareness” beyond subject and object. See Heisig 2013. ▶ The identification of the object of an objectless desire as a mode of expression rather than description draws on a distinction Wittgenstein made in order to break through the dichotomy of the subjective as “inner” world and the objective as “outer” as the source of the illusion of private states of mind describable in a private language (1953, §293). His repudiation of the “will act” notes | 151 of nothingness in the four aspects treated here. For example, concerning the role of nothingness as making beings be what they are, he states directly, “Insofar as nothingness is nothingness, it is incapable of functioning on its own. Being can function only because it is not nothingness” (thz 1946, 7: 261). Although the notion of nothingness does not as such entail a monistic view of reality, Nishida led it in that direction. Even after abandoning his initial goal of finding a principle for the unification of consciousness, Nishida remained attached to the idea of explaining the unity of reality. In his late years he argued vigorously that matter, life, and the conscious self can all be seen as “aspects” of a single historical world in which all contradictories are swept up into a single identity of that which knows and that which is known. Among all of Nishida’s critics, Tanabe was strongest in his rejection of the attempt to steer the many toward the one, preferring an idea of absolute nothingness disengaged from metaphysical monism of all sorts. ▶ Hisamatsu Shin’ichi referred to nothingness as “the living experience of self-realization” (cited in Heisig, Kasulis, and Maraldo 2011, 221) and insisted vigorously that it is not a negation of being or any quality of being, but a positive notion which he identifies with “no-mind,” or as he calls it “alone-mind.” There are problems with his understanding of early Greek philosophy and Christian thought, but the thrust of his comparisons is clear: nothingness is a dynamic source of life. These ideas were repeated, with only minor adjustments, by Masao Abe in what he called “dynamic śūnyatā” (see Heisig, Kasulis, and Maraldo 2011, 750–7). ▶ From Parmenides on, the idea that nothingness is unthinkable under- scored the primacy of being. But, as Hannah Arendt has remarked, there has been a lingering doubt about whether that implies that the abyss of nothingness is not real. Kant, for example, finds it inconceivable but does not draw the conclusion that it is not (Arendt 1974, 1: 146). ▶ It is a mistake to assume that all “ontological arguments” for the existence of a supreme being, beginning with Anselm’s, are circular in the sense that they require an assumption of the conclusions. Their circularity is rather a function of a basic and necessary metaphysical premise regarding being, namely that it is better to exist without the conceivability of not existing than to exist with the conceivability of not existing. In this regard, I find Hartshorne’s critique of classical refutations of Anselm’s ontological argument persuasive (1965, esp. 85–106) but limited by the fact that he did not take into account the possibility of a metaphysics premised not on being but on a nothingness beyond being. Indeed, he considered ideas about nothing an “antimetaphysical dogma” rather than as a workable premise (24–5). ▶ In speaking of nothingness as a quality of mind, it should be noted that the English word mind is not restricted to the faculty of intellect or the exercise 152 | notes of reason, but reverts to an older and more comprehensive meaning that includes memory, attentiveness, feelings, and intentions. This accords more closely with Sanskrit and Chinese usage.

the nothingness of desire and the desire for nothing- 5 ness. The notion of causation in Buddhist thought, where the idea of nothingness is much more at home than it is in Western philosophies, is complicated not only by the varieties of Buddhist thought, but by a wide range of pre-Buddhist ideas that have implicit, though rarely systematically articulated, assumptions about how things change from one state to another (see Kalupa- hana 1975). ▶ Jung’s appeal to “synchronicity” as an acausal principle that accounts for coincidences of meaning between simultaneously occurring events or perceptions of events does not so much satisfy the problem as postpone it. ▶ I have followed up this connection between nothingness and nowhere in Nishida in Heisig 2012b. ▶ We may note here that Heidegger challenged the priority given to causality in connection with the phenomenon of aesthetic enjoyment, claiming that it requires a kind of leap in which the result is already concealed in the beginning (1936, 73–5). The notion of archē or Ursprung he suggests in place of the classical notion of aitia or “causes,” however, explicitly breaks with the subject-object dichotomy, but does not for that reason liberate itself from causality of a different sort, namely telos or finality. ▶ Schopenhauer’s attraction to Eastern, notably Buddhist, ideas did not quite extend as far as the notion of nothingness. He saw that if there is anything beyond being, it is a being in which all the contradictions of the world of being as we know it are reversed. The only way to transcend being is for the will to deny itself and enter that “ocean-like calmness of the spirit” that we can admire in the countenance of the saints and mystics as “a complete and certain gospel.” And yet Schopenhauer could not bring himself to accept a nothingness beyond the will and its representations that make up our world. The most he can do is throw up his hands and admit that there is no remedy to the objection that renunciation of the will and all its objects obliges a positive meaning to nothingness. He can find no ground for the positivity. Absolute nothingness, he said, is conceivable only as a nihilum privativum, an absence of being. The honesty and forthrightness of his language represents the best single statement I have met of Western philosophy’s resistance to nothingness (1844, 1: 408–12). ▶ On Schopenhauer’s rupture of the causal link between the body and moral decision, see 1844 1: 99–103; and for comments on the authenticity of unconscious activity, see 1851, 377–8. ▶ Unlike Schopenhauer, who was stymied at the paradox of will willing itself out of existence, Eckhart’s Abgeschiedenheit, as expressed in his famous poverty notes | 153 sermon, advocates a selflessness in which one lets go of the desire to be conscious of letting go of oneself. Thus surrender of the will to God requires surrendering the will to do so, and with it, all images and ideas of God (Sermon 87). This is the central theme of Marguerite Porete’s The Mirror of Simple Souls (1306, cf. §§8–19, 12), which Eckhart was familiar with.

Self and No-Self

defining self through no-self. The germ of Feuerbach’s 6 idea is to be found in several Enlightenment thinkers. An abbreviated formulation appears in Nietzsche’s Antichrist and its further development is reflected in Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents. ▶ Descartes 1649, 52. ▶ The use of the term “primary analog” here and elsewhere is in basic agreement with David Tracy’s analysis of analogical language as a tool in a movement from symbol to critical reflection that preserves, and is completed in, the return to the primacy of the symbol by way of a dialectic of negation (1981, 405–13). ▶ In speaking of a commonality of “experience” I am glossing over two important ambiguities in the notion of experience itself. The first has to do with privileged experience as providing authoritative grounds for arguing philosophically, which I reject. The second has to do with the role of the self in experience. Nishida’s idea of “pure experience” knowing a thing by becoming it (成り切る) is foreshadowed in William James’s idea of an “endosmosis” of subject and object, both of them attesting to an idea of experience closer to no-self. This is the more inclusive, though theoretically incomplete, sense in which I am using the term here. ▶ Dostoyevsky 1877, 1186. ▶ Kierkegaard has suggested that Cervantes would be better to have let his novel end with Quijote becoming a shepherd rather than as a “rational man,” but this would have deprived the work of its resounding irony (jp 1854, 2: 206, §1562) ▶ Japanese and Chinese oblige us to clarify whether “subjective” and “objective” refer to particular subject or objects (主体, 客体) as such or to the standpoint from which they are seen (主観, 客観). The language of western philosophy does not always add the necessary qualifiers to keep the distinction as sharp. ▶ The “invention” of the self as a category read back into translations and interpretations prior to the invention is everywhere in evidence in western thought. It can be shown that the notion of an “I” or “ego” or “self” only became possible with Fichte’s introduction of das Ich, prior to which it would have sounded as strange to speak of the “I” as it would have to speak of the “she” or the “it” (Heisig 1997). 158 | notes into a concrete, active, driving force of history, but cut off from that greater, communal, passive passion, they produce “selfishness and corruption” (1840, 93). ▶ The idea of a place beyond subject and object as the practice of suspend- ing judgment in order to encounter reality and other human beings is a common theme in philosophies of the East. It is worth recalling here that the modern sinograms for “subject” and “object” (主体, 客体) are clearly based on the much older distinction between host and guest, as in the Zen sayings: 火炉頭無賓主 Around the hearth, no guests, no hosts. 賓主共失 Lose both host and guest. (Hori 2003, 230, 161)

no-self with its desire. Nishida, and after him Nishitani, 10 posed the question of the deeper self in terms of St. Paul’s claim, “I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I that live, but Christ lives in me” (Gal. 2:20). The Japanese scholar Yagi Seiichi draws on the notion of a “true self” distinct from the everyday ego as a way to get at the Buddhist concern with Paul’s statement. See Heisig, Kasulis, and Maraldo 2011, 1053–8. ▶ To say that nothing is forgotten is not to say that everything is perceived. See also the references to Bergson cited in the notes to chapter 9 above. ▶ The idea of “knowing a thing by becoming it” as an overcoming of the subject-object dichotomy originated with Nishida and influenced his successors in the Kyoto school. One of Nishida’s calligraphies captures it well: 物来たりて我を照らす Things come / and light up the self. This is not unlike William James’s distinction between knowing about and knowing by acquaintance (1904, 28). ▶ There is a very old and persistent strain in the Christian tradition, beginning with the Gospel of Thomas, that stresses experiential insight as superior to belief and understanding, running counter to the words that the evangelist John puts into the mouth of Jesus to upbraid Thomas: “Happy are those who have not seen and have yet believed” (John 20:29). Note, for example, the following statement in one of Bernard of Clairvaux, whose reference to the “surer knowledge of faith that experience does not find” (1153, 28.9) is overshadowed by his insistence on experience. Note the following: May those who have experienced recognize it; may those who have not burn with the desire not so much to know as to experience. (1.11) May they believe what they have not experienced, so that one day by virtue of faith they may obtain the fruit of experience.… The soul with experience knows more fully and is happier. (84.7) 160 | notes on desire in connection with Pure Land Buddhist faith in other power I have found most congenial and stimulating for their attempt to protect ordinary piety from the literalizing pressures of doctrine (see the excerpt in Heisig, Kasulis, and Maraldo 2011, 788–91).

God

god and death. Petronius’s saying (Frag. 27) was later taken 12 up by Lucretius, who saw philosophy as a cure to the fears that fill our lives. Hume took it up to ground his critique of the superstitious (1741, 40), which Schopenhauer went on to endorse and propose as a supple- ment’s to the Kantian account of proofs for the existence of God (1836, 256). ▶ Kant 1776, 989. He makes his remark concerning the deathbed in a foot- note and does not explain its relation to the surrounding text (Kant 1793, 72). What is clear is that the strong distinction he drew between what we can know and what our moral sentiments oblige us to thinking about or hoping about included the hope of a future life. ▶ Plato, The Republic, §330. ▶ On Kazantzakis’s death, see Helen Kazantzakis, 1968, 562). According to Colerus (1706, 426), a friend and Lutheran minister, similar stories about Spinoza are spurious. ▶ Philippe Ariès (1974, 85–103) has traced the interdiction of death as something “shameful and forbidden” to its expropriation by medical technology. I have tried to show that the “universal creed” of institutionalized health on which this is based has shaken free of the moral compass and marginalized the role of much richer philosophical and religious traditions (Heisig 2002).

from god to nothingness. Davis shows how Heidegger 13 has misread Eckhart’s notion of letting go or Gelassenheit as a “deferred willing” (2007, 127–45). ▶ The idea of pursuing fictions and images to affirmation through negation is typified in Henry Suso’s project of “driving out images with image,” which challenges Eckhart’s excesses in dispensing with all images. His aim is to preserve the indispensable function of images at the same time as it negates them by a logic internal to the images themselves (Hamburger 1998, 204, 232). This is consistent with our distinction between hope beyond expectations and the expectation that are required for hope to be recognized in the concrete. On Eckhart, see McGinn 2001, 72–3. ▶ Kazantzakis 1938, xvi.439–44. ▶ Eckhart n.d., 2: 87, 118. ▶ Kant 1793, 138. 162 | notes politically and economically advanced nations; it is rather at the point of the collapse of their received ways of thinking of themselves that the dialogue has produced its greatest fruits.

displacing the personal god. Nishitani (1961a, 47) 15 proposed an “impersonally personal” God, impartial, but still retaining its core personality. I think we need to go further than his courtesies to Christianity allowed him to go, despite hints of a more radical stance in an essay on Bultmann (1961b). ▶ Nishida Tenkō, the inspirational founder of the Ittō-en (Garden of One Light) movement in Japan, is said to have accepted the personification of evil in the devil because of its origins in the ego, but for that same reason to have treated the supreme reality, the One Light, as impersonal because of its overcoming of egoism (1969, 153). I have yet to locate anything similar in the history of eastern thought.

toward an impersonal god. ▶ Feuerbach 1841, 17. ▶ 16 Tillich, who is at pains to liberate God from subject-object substantiality, causality, and even ontological status as a being, strikes a careful position in noting that the idea of a personal God “does not mean that God is a person. It means that God is the ground of everything personal…” (1951, 176–7; cf. 222–3, 235, 243–5). ▶ The quotation from Bonaventure appears in §4 of the prologue to his Itenerarium mentis in Deum (1259). For Bonaventure, seeing God as the fulfillment of desire is a way of undefining God. ▶ Eckhart’s notion of the spark is already prefigured in Marguerite Porete (1306, §§58, 115). ▶ H. Richard Niebuhr consolidates the traditional Christian approach when he writes: “To be a self is to have a god; to have a god is to have history, that is, events connected in a meaningful pattern; to have one god is to have one history” (Niebuhr 1941, 59). The natural world has been excluded. ▶ GordonKaufman suggests that we view God as a “serendipitous creativity manifesting itself in evolutionary and historical trajectories of various sorts” has to be taken a step further to see this cosmic force as an image of God (2000, 10). ▶ Scarborough’s suggestion of a God who is born simultaneously with the cosmos out of primordial nihilum replaces one form of literalism for another (Scarborough 2000, 214) and mistakes the meaning of nothingness for non- being. 168 | notes

morality and religion. Augustine’s dilemma over the 22 freedom to search for God without God’s assistance (see notes to chapter 3 above) lay behind Aquinas’s distinction between a “natural desire” in human beings for ultimate truth and the absolute freedom of God, without which that desire could not be turned to God or fulfilled (Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard 4.4). Behind it lay a distinction Duns Scotus drew between the desire which draws us to God the way planets are drawn to the sun—that is, by natural inclination—and personal will. ▶ Hume’s critique of false religion distinguished between the superstitious (overflowing of doctrine) and the enthusiastic (charismatic action). The latter he found tolerable because at least it can be channeled into social change, whereas superstition tends to dull one’s sensitivities. True religion, accordingly, is grounded in morality, not in ontological truths (1741; 1776, §xii). His rather pedestrian understanding of myth and symbol is unsatisfactory precisely because he centered them on doctrine, rather than the other way around, and hence did not see that moral enthusiasm is no replacement for doctrine. ▶ The term religio is most often tied to Cicero, though his use of the term was decidedly ambiguous. He associated it both to relegere, that is, to recollect or reread, and to religare, or reinforce bonds. Neither etymology has been proven correct. ▶ The roots of the Japanese word nature point to something that works of itself, not to an environment for living things. The word seems first to have been given the western sense of the natural world in Inoue Tetsujirō’s 1881 Dictionary of Philosophical Terms (哲學字彙). ▶ The first step in nudging East Asian Buddhism toward greater engagement in justice ethics is not by persuading its tradition to subscribe to or even accom- modate itself to the universal nature of our western principles. It is rather, I am persuaded, to seek together insights into the harmony with the earth that has been so badly neglected in both traditions that together we need to learn from those more spiritually alert to the ongoing assault on the natural world. ▶ What is said here is in basic agreement with the argument of Ronald Dworkin that free will is not the ability to make decisions without interference, but the ability to observe ourselves making decisions (2011, e.g., 219–25).

the moral subject in love. Kant is right to distinguish 23 personal desires from personal duty. The categorical imperative shows the irrationality of placing private inclinations above one’s duties to the group. His association of desire with feelings, and emotions and duty with reason, assumes that the group is coextensive with the human community. He seems to pass too lightly over the extent to which duty to the group is itself a function of desire in a narrow sense that excludes the natural world. notes | 169

▶ In place of Kant’s categorical imperative of reason Karl Jaspers proposes an “unconditional imperative” that sees reflection on God and human desire as grounded in the same goal: not the acquisition of secure knowledge but the discovery of love in the world. Given the “irremediable injustice of all institutions,” we have to look beyond magistrated duty to an inner command of our authentic natures to lift ourselves above the chaos of history (1949, 54–5, 62, 108). ▶ The similarities of the axiom of love proposed here to the “pure rule- agapism” of Paul Ramsey (see, for example, 1967, 104–22), at least in language, will be obvious. That said, the “axiom of unforced love” that Thaddeus Williams advances as a balance to the excessive attention on freedom of choice in theories of free will (2011) is the more philosophically persuasive.

the experience of happiness. See Heisig 2010b. ▶ See- 24 ing nothingness as a moral “universal” located in subjective consciousness favors the tendency to exempt culture from ethical critique. This, I believe, is the major philosophical reason for the slide into cultural pan-Asian- ism by Japanese philosophers like Tanabe and Nishitani during the Pacific War. Although there is no hard evidence that their ideas actually influenced fascist movements or were ever cited by ideologues of the war effort, neither is there evidence in support of the position that moral reflection grounded in nothingness equipped them to present a solid philosophical critique of it (see Heisig and Maraldo 1994). Nothingness, especially when direct related through moral reflection to the no-self, ought to ground ethics in the particular rather than in the universal. ▶ Aquinas’s remark on the suffering of the damned can be found in Summa Theologiae iii.94.1. The fact that his idea of the fulfillment of desire coincides with a visio beatifica that does not explicitly include the senses should alert us to with this. The seven qualities Aquinas assigns the “glorified body” (Suppl. 85.1) show favoritism toward vision for its intellectual clarity and render sense experience as we know it anesthetized. The difference between a glorified body and the disembodied soul is erased, and even the contemplation of the divine nature is reduced to visual perception. ▶ The theological tendency to faire l’ange when it comes to happiness, something that is not without an echo in Buddhist texts, is countered frequently among the Christian mystics. One thinks, for example, of figures like Ruusbroec, John of the Cross, Hugh of Saint Victor, and Hadewijch for whom “touch” is the primary sense of mystical knowing. ▶ See also the passing remark of Ortega y Gasset regarding the primacy of touch over sight (1957, 72). ▶ Perhaps in order to avoid associating happiness with legends of being carried away by a spirit or daimon (first mentioned in the Eudemian Ethics i, l.25) notes | 171 the human cuts through the traditional ontological divide of Western philosophy between existence and essence, being and consciousness, which puts Heidegger on one side and Husserl on the other (see Banchetti-Robino 2008). Watsuji Tetsurō is right to argue that Heidegger never overcame the dualism due to a neglect of the social dimension of the body (see Yuasa 1977 for the fuller context of Watsuji’s remarks, 39–40). Although Eastern philosophy is not without similar divides of its own that neglect the body for different motives, Watsuji’s analysis lends support to the idea of the body as the primary property of the human being.

detachment. The classic statement of the primary of own- 27 ership of singularity is Max Stirner’s Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (clumsily translated at The Ego and its Own). In his enthusiasm for reappropriating individual freedom from the alienating forces of society, Stirner expropriates all the religion and social order as meine eigene, my own property. He accused Feuerbach of dispossessing the divine essence of its transcendence in order to divinize the essence of the human (1844, 32, 121). From such a viewpoint, there is no essence of humanity, either on earth or in heaven, and therefore is no difference, when all is said and done, between confessing “God is love” and “love is divine.” Marx was quick to condemn this preoccupation with “ownership of oneself” as a sign of the decaying life of city-dwellers (Marx and Engels 1846, e.g., 208–16). ▶ Nishitani (1949) stands out among twentieth-century philosophers for his careful critique of Stirner. ▶ In a 1985 interview Levinas speaks of “stupid, senseless goodness” as manifesting something more real than “the good.” He gives an example from a novel by the Russian writer Vassily Grossman in which a Russian woman, who hates the Germans and is disgusted at the sight of them clearing away the rotting, decomposing bodies of prisoners they had tortured, gives her last piece of bread to an officer in charge, though she cannot figure out why she did it (1985, 79–81, 89–90). The detachment from a vital possession is made all the more powerful because of the detachment from judgment. The scene undercuts the reciprocity of self and other, of give-and-take, in a way that also detaches property from the satisfaction of needs in order to be a sublime embodiment of freedom. I am grateful to Matthias Fritsch for the reference.

orthoaesthesis. The fuller argument for recovering the 28 senses and the accompanying critique of an attached detachment is drawn from an abbreviated commentary on the Gospel of Thomas Bibliography

The following bibliography includes only works directly referred to in the notes, where they are referenced according to their original date of publication. Where the date of the edition cited differs, that date is indicated in the bibliographic information.

Abbreviations jp Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, vol. 2. Trans. by H. V. and E. H. Hong. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1970. nkz 『西田幾多郎全集』 [Complete writings of Nishida Kitarō], 19 vols. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1978–1980. thz 『田辺元全集』 [Complete works of Tanabe Hajime], 15 vols. Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1963–1964. Other works Arendt, Hannah 1974 The Life of the Mind, 2. vols. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978. Ariès, Philippe 1974 Death in America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975. Badiou, Alain 1988 Being and Event. Trans. by Oliver Feltham. New York: Continuum, 2006. Banchetti-Robino, Marina Paola 2008 “Hiroshi Kojima’s Phenomenological Ontology.” Philosophy East and West 58/2: 163–89. Bankei Yōtaku 盤珪永琢 1690 The Unborn: The Life and Teachings of Zen Master Bankei, 1622–1693. Trans. by Norman Waddell. New York: North Point Press, 2000.

179 186 | bibliography

1985 Is It Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Lévinas. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. 1987 “Sociality and Money.” Business Ethics 16/3 (2007), 203–7. Llull, Ramon 1274 The Book of Contemplation on God. Excerpted in Amador Vega, Ramon Llull and the Secret of Life, trans. by J. W. Heisig, 137–58. New York: Crossroad, 2002. MacIntyre, Alasdair 1981 After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007. MacKinnon, Donald M. 1974 The Problem of Metaphysics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974. Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels 1846 The German deology.I Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964. McGinn, Bernard 2001 The Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart: The Man from Whom God Hid Nothing. New York: Herder and Herder. Moeller, Hans-Georg 2009 The Moral Fool. New York: Columbia University Press. Mohr, Michel 2009 “Cutting through Desire: Dokuan Genkō’s Odes on the Nine Percep- tions of Foulness.” The Eastern Buddhist 40: 175–215. Moran, Dermot 1989 The Philosophy of John Scotus Eriugena: A Study of Idealism in the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Naess, Arne 1973 “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement.” In quiry 16: 95–100. Niebuhr, H. Richard 1941 The Meaning of Revelation. New York: Macmillan. Nietzsche, Friedrich 1878 Human, All Too Human (I): A Book for Free Spirits. Trans. by Gary Handwerk, in The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, vol. 3. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997. 1886 Beyond Good and Evil. Trans. by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Ran- dom House Vintage Books, 1966. Index of Proper Names

be, Masao 阿部正雄, 151, 186 Collins, Steven, 155, 180 A Confucius, 21, 33, 94, 105, 150, 166, 170, Adler, Alfred, 145 180 Anselm, 151, 182 Cusanus (Nicholas of Cusa), 161, 165 Apollo, 116 Aquinas, Thomas, 96, 131, 168, 169 alissier, Michel, 156, 180 Arendt, Hannah, 146, 151, 179 D Danto, Arthur, 129, 173, 180 Ariès, Philippe, 160 Davis, Bret W., 146, 160, 181 Aristotle, 21, 24, 40, 44, 84, 97, 116, 118, 127, Deleuze, Gilles, 175 156–7, 164, 166, 170, 173, 182 Derrida, Jacques, 149, 174 Augustine, 17, 18, 47, 60, 67, 70, 88, 127, Descartes, René, 32, 62, 107, 150, 153–4, 181 148–9, 168, 181 Dewey, John, 167, 181 Averroes, 131 Dōgen Kigen 道元希玄, 43, 157, 180–1 Dokuan Genkō 独菴玄光, 148, 186 Badiou, Alain, 174, 179 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 34, 153, 181 Banchetti-Robino, Marina Paola, 171, 179 Dworkin, Ronald, 164, 166, 168, 181 Bankei Yōtaku 盤珪永琢, 157, 179 Barth, Karl, 32 Eckhart, Meister, 57–9, 69, 75, 82, 152–3, Bashō. See Matsuo Bashō 160–3, 165, 181, 186 Bentham, Jeremy, 145, 180 Eliot, George, 44, 157, 181 Bergson, Henri, 44, 149, 157–8, 163, 180 Ellul, Jacques, 159, 181 Bernard of Clairvaux, 158, 161, 180 Engels, Friedrich, 171, 186 Bodhidharma, 42 Evans, G. R., 148, 181 Bonaventure, 149, 156, 162, 165, 180 Eve, 47 Boutry-Stadelmann, Britta, 159 Bruno, Giordano, 165 Faust, 42 Buber, Martin, 170, 185 Feldmeier, Peter, 147, 185 Bultmann, Rudolf Karl, 161–2 Fesmire, Steven, 167, 181 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 31–2, 51, 67–8, 70, Caesar, 104 75–6, 153–4, 159, 159, 162–3, 171, 181 Cephalus, 55–6 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 153 Cervantes, Miguel de, 34, 153 Foucault, Michel, 173, 181 Chan, Joseph, 166, 180 Francis of Assisi, 93 Christ. See Jesus Frankfurt, Harry, 148, 181 Cicero, 168 Freud, Sigmund, 146, 148, 153 Colerus, John, 160, 180 Fritsch, Matthias, 171 Collins, Randall, 145, 180 Fujiwara Seika 藤原惺窩, 147

191 192 | index of proper names

Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 156, 181 Kant, Immanuel, 24, 26, 45, 55, 56, 59, 94, 96, 145–6, 151, 153–4, 160, 168, 169, 185 George, St., 155 Karatani Kōjin 柄谷行人, 159 Gier, Nicholas F., 173, 182 Kasulis, Thomas P., 148, 151, 156, 158, 160, Graham, A. C., 166, 182 164, 184, 190 Gregory of Nyssa, 161 Kaufman, Gordon, 162, 185 Grossman, Vassily, 155, 171, 182 Kazantzakis, Nikos, 11, 56, 58, 146, 160, Guattari, Pierre-Félix, 175, 182 164, 185 Guinart, Roque, 34 Kazantzakis, Helen, 160, 185 Kearney, Richard, 161, 185 adewijch, 169 H Kierkegaard, Søren Aabye, 99, 153, 164, Hakuin Ekaku 白隠慧鶴, 146 179 Hamburger, Jeffrey H., 160, 182 Kjelberg, Paul, 173, 181 Hardie, W. F. R., 173, 182 Kojima Hiroshi 児島洋, 170 Hartshorne, Charles, 151, 167, 182 Kōyama Iwao 高山岩男, 156 長谷正當 Hase Shōtō , 159 Krieger, David, 164, 185 Hayashi Razan 林羅山, 147 Hegel, G. W. G., 20, 42, 60, 71, 157, 170, 182 Lai, Pan-Chiu, 167, 185 Heidegger, Martin, 2–2, 129, 136, 146, 152, Laozi 老子, 117, 170 160, 171, 17–4, 180, 182 Lefebure, Leo, 147, 185 Heisig, James, 5, 145–6, 148–9, 151–3, Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 149–50 156–60, 164–5, 167, 169, 172–4, 180, Leopold, Aldo, 167, 185 182–4, 186 Levinas, Emmanuel, 170–2, 185–6 Hillman, James, 157, 184 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 149 Hisamatsu Shin’ichi 久松真一, 151 Lille, Alain de, 165 Hobbes, Thomas, 127 Llull, Ramon, 156, 186 Hori, Victor Sōgen, 158, 184 Lucretius, 160 Horkheimer, Max, 167, 184 Hugh of Saint Victor, 169 MacIntyre, Alisdair, 166, 186 Huike 慧可, 42, 157 MacKinnon, Donald, 145, 186 Huizinga, Jan, 173, 184 Maimonides, Moses, 81 Hume, David, 55, 91, 153–4, 160–1, 168, 184 Maraldo, John C., 148, 151, 156, 158, 160, Husserl, Edmund, 147, 167, 171 164, 169, 184 Martin, St., 155 Illich, Ivan, 112, 145, 159, 165, 172, 184 Marx, Karl, 103, 170–1, 186 Inoue Tetsujirō 井上哲次郎, 168 Matsuo Bashō 松尾芭蕉, 93 McGinn, Bernard, 160, 186 James, William, 42, 132, 141, 150, 153, Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 175 157–9, 163, 173, 180, 182, 184 Moeller, Hans-Georg, 186 Jaspers, Karl, 161, 169, 184 Mohr, Michel, 148, 186 Jesus, 68–9, 84–5, 103, 111, 154, 158, 166, 185 Montaigne, Michel de, 141 Joan of Arc, 62 Moran, Dermot, 161, 186 Jung, C. G., 35, 148, 149, 152, 157, 183 Naess, Arne, 175, 186 Kahneman, Daniel, 167, 184 Nicholas of Cusa. See Cusanus Kalupahana, David J., 152, 185 Niebuhr, H. Richard, 162, 186