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Nothingness and Desire an East-West Philosophical Antiphony

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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 eventu- ally 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 sys- tems, 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 1 12 | Nothingness and Desire 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 through- out 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 popu- lar 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 fundamen- tal 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 per- sons—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.
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