The Buddhist Ethic and The Spirit of Global Capitalism
DIRECT TRANSCRIPT, FURTHER EDITS PENDING
Tags: religion (buddhism), capitalism, ethics
Thanks very much for the great number of you here. Just a couple of points before I’ll begin, three points basically.
First, I must publicly – I promise this to myself, to apologize to my good friend Christopher that I was not here yesterday, I mean, he is one of my absolute persons, the reason I’m here, and I was just… I have problems with… I was not in a good, yesterday… sorry, I really apologize.
On the other, so you will not think something is wrong, I hope he is not here because I formally prohibited Alain Badiou to come here. [AUDIENCE LAUGHS]. No, no, seriously, because, you know, he has some health problems and he came yesterday tired and I saw him, we have lunch this afternoon, and with it the usual communist plotting against different persons and so on… he wasn’t here.
Third thing, maybe it surprises you, but I decided that, because we debated it a lot in my class, that I will about Buddhism, and it is very open, so please don’t take this as a rhetorical point. I’m not sure how deep I’m into it, and even if, I will be very critical, this is more kind of a series of remarks to provoke you, because I know that some of you are probably much more substantially in it than me myself.
So, why deal with Buddhism? Is it just the fashion so that we in the West feel more organic, holistic, or whatever?
No, I claim that there are two features which account for the, let’s call it naïvely, actuality of Buddhism in our today’s global capitalist, whatever we call it, predicament.
As we all know, two features characterize our civilization today to put it very naïvely: a global capitalism with its unheard dynamics; and second, science, the role of science. And I claim, in both domains, Buddhism – and I’m not going now into if it’s an authentic one or not, blah blah blah, but some references of Buddhism, if not crucial, at least play a very interesting role.
First, I would like to begin with what may be dismissed, but I don’t think it is as simple as that, as some kind of a comical Western copy of authentic Buddhism, so called Western Buddhism. By this, I mean groups in the West who practice Buddhism and so on and so on. Now, if you follow these trends a little bit, you may have noticed something: how Western Buddhism presents itself as the remedy against the stressful tensions of capitalist dynamics, allowing us to uncouple from this crazy, frantic rhythm, and retain inner peace and enlightenment, but I claim – and do you know what gave me to think this? When I read, I don’t know in what journal, an interesting analysis of, let’s call it, if not religious, spiritual trends among top managers, businessmen of today, and to cut a long story short, 80% are what they claim to be Tibetan Buddhists or whatever you call it, practicing so called meditation, and I can understand it because insofar as… if you are really engaged in modern capitalism at its craziest, you know, like it is really, as one of the top managers claimed, that when he studied Buddhist ontology the way he understood it, the idea of being, as you probably know, the fragility of existence, all are fleeting phenomena, everything can fall apart at every point, he said, but that this is our market today, you know? One rumor, everything falls apart. So he got it correctly, this manager, sorry, I forgot his name. He said if you really want to be fully engaged in this market, you go crazy, so what you need is a kind of inner distance which tells you ‘OK, it’s the crazy market’ to teach you how to participate in it without being fully existentially engaged in it. That’s why businessmen like this bullshit, you know? Even if I speculate all day, it is just a cosmic play for me, I’m aware of the nothingness of it, it means nothing. It functions perfectly, which is why, to conclude this first point, I think that if Max Weber were to rewrite his legendary book on the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, today the title of the book would have been, I’m sure, the Taoist or Buddhist ethic and the spirit of global capitalism, or something like that.
Now more seriously, no no no, wait a minute, let me make one point. I cannot resist it, it’s in my nature to make so called bad taste jokes, but I take Buddhism extremely seriously, it’s absolutely an authentic, I don’t like the term because it is itself Western orientalist, let’s call it a subjective existential experience. So, the other reason, for me, at least much more interesting, is what some people call the so-called cognitivist breakthrough, the new stage of our understanding of our brain, our thinking, provided by whatever you call them, brain sciences, cognitivism, and so on.
Now, I don’t want to deal with the problem of are they true or not. What I’m just saying is that more and more they are somehow generally received, even by those who should resist it most; psychoanalysts, you know, often play the game of – how do you call this? – if you can’t beat them, join them, you know? They like to claim ‘oh, but you see how cognitivist scientists are arriving up, this is just a paraphrase of what already Freud knew’ and so on, you know, this kind of join-the-enemy.
OK, but there is nonetheless one interesting point for me, and here I agree with – we have many problems with me and Wolfgang, but at one point I agree with him and I will this point that if we want to retain Martin Heidegger as a reference, it’s crucial not to read Heidegger along the lines of some kind of anti-technological romanticism, you know, Heidegger walking in his stupid forest up there and cursing all the technology, blah blah. No, Heidegger was quite rational here. I read in one biography of Heidegger that like, OK, it is nice that authentic Todtnauberg, but at the end he wanted air conditioning, full electricity, and so on, you know?
OK, so what I’m saying is that the question we should ask in this spirit is a very naïve one, if we really accept it. We don’t have to, but if the results of brain sciences which are… but this is already to be debated, but I don’t want to enter it… that our subjective freedom or the unity of our ego as a free and responsible agent is an illusion; that, in reality, we are just a well-functioning neuronal mechanism. Whatever you put it. OK, the problem is how to subjectivize this? That is to say, how should or does this affect your innermost, but not some deep metaphysical, even everyday sense of an agent engaging in social life and so on and so on. So here I think that Buddhism, to be vulgar, is doing quite well without any irony because there are three main attitudes the way I can see it. I’m talking only about those who accept the cognitivist breakthrough, and Buddhism is the fourth one, I think.
The first predominant attitude is simple; to resign ourselves to the gap between the scientific view of ourselves as neuronal automata, whatever you want, and our everyday self experience as free responsible autonomous agents. The idea is that because of, you can be very materialist here, because of how we were produced through evolutionary choice and so on, we cannot help but experience ourselves as free responsible agents and so on, so that we are simply condemned to live in the gap. Scientifically we know, but in everyday life, you know, it’s like the same – some of them like to use this metaphor, as we know very well how big the moon is but you cannot help perceiving the moon as the small circle up there, that is the same, we cannot step out.
The second attitude, the worst if you ask me, is the – I hope again we agree here – we have many other reasons to kill each other so here we can agree, this is my declaration of love if you didn’t get it, you know – is the Habermasian position which is, he also fully asserts the duality but not as a necessary – but the non-naturalist aspect is, for Habermas, not simply an illusion we should tolerate, but a kind of transcendental a priori which is necessary and even points to an immanent limitation of scientific knowledge. Habermas’ reasoning is here a very transcendental philosophical one, it’s that science is a certain social practice, intersubjective practice where we formulate universal statements, we confront them through experiments, in a debate, blah blah, and in this practice, the transcendental a priori of this practice, is that we are free responsible beings reasoning in a certain way and so on. So, even if the result, for example, of our scientific investigation is we are neuronal puppets, whatever, we should not forget that this result is the result of an exercise of our transcendental freedom of scientific thinking which is a priori. We cannot say no, that is false, if you neglect that the result also disappears.
Then we have an even more naïve, but in a way sympathetic to me, attitude, that of some radical brain scientists like the big couple of La Jolla, I think, California, Patricia and Paul Churchland. They claim, I don’t think it works with what I’m saying, but it’s a beautiful position… they claim that our term among some brain scientists for this everyday attitude is, as you probably know, folk psychology; this spontaneous idea, my god, I do whatever I want, we are free and so on, OK. They claim that this folk psychology doesn’t have such a deep status as some Darwinists think, that it’s not a kind of biological, evolutionary a priori, but simply a reflection of our old naïve ideologies. They say self, like in old times when (this is even by Patricia Churchland, as an example) when so called primitive people saw lightning, they thought God was sending us a message or there is a higher force behind and they claim when we act, I think ‘oh, I have a free self in me’ which is the true source of it, it’s exactly the same type of superstition, and in the same way that even if you are as scared of a storm as I am, I admit it, especially if you are in the plane when it happens, nonetheless at least, mostly I succeed not starting to pray and claiming… like, you naturalize it. We no longer think like so called primitives. They, the Churchland couple, they think the same thing is possible with even our freedom of the will and self and in a pretty naïve way they described how such a society would look; that it wouldn’t be simply a society without punishment as some people think, mainly the idea being, if I’m an automaton and there is no freedom of the will, what right do you have to punish me? I’m not responsible. No, for them, punishment can nonetheless be a regulative mechanism which works and so on, just a more kind, less oppressive society and so on. The reason I don’t agree with this solution is its implicit naivety, and the one who is my good guy here, the German brain scientist Thomas Metzinger. He knows very well how this type of simple acceptance, ‘OK, so what, we’ll change our view’, still leaves, even if it works, it recognizes the ‘yeah, I admitted it, what’s the problem, OK, I’m an automaton, what the hell’. But de facto, in your activity, you still treat yourself as the good old free self. You don’t really existentially accept it and, here again, we come to Buddhism because Metzinger, who is a serious scientist, not some kind of a shitty New-Ager like those who claim the Tao of quantum physics… but at the same time, for very precise reasons, although he is totally materialist, he is Buddhist in the sense that he claims that, although it may appear that we are, as the first position which I described claims, that we are condemned to this duality, that is to say, scientifically we know we are neuronal automata, but in your immediate self-experience you experience yourself as a free agent and so on and so on, that there is nonetheless possible as a limit case (and this, for him, as you can guess, would have been precisely when you arrive at enlightenment in Buddhism) when you accept so called Anatman, that your self does not have any substantial identity that… and this is a beautiful thesis, I like it in a way… that, and again, he is not in that sense a mystic, he claims that he is totally a scientist, he just claims that if you go to the end of Buddhist meditation where you arrive at a stage of, this is one popular book on Buddhism by John Epstein, I think, which is not so bad, the title is Thoughts Without A Thinker, that literally you arrived at a stage where you have thoughts but you can no longer there is an agent who is thinking these thoughts, and that, he claims, although for a large majority of us, he puts it very nicely, we can’t, he agrees with the first position, we can’t scientifically objectively accept as an object of study our brain. OK, we are automata, but he puts this beautifully, he says we simply cannot really believe in it in our everyday life, even if you claim ‘OK, so what, I’m some kind of automaton’, in our innermost identity you cannot really believe this except if you come to the end of Buddhist meditation.
I love this position although, and Metzinger is aware of this, although – and this is the beauty of all these debates (cognitive scientists, Buddhism); because, you know, many of them are idiots but some of them are really bright guys, and they know it, for example… my god, I forgot his name.. there is a scientist, Jewish, because this affects his notion of free will. He is so well known in San Francisco, his name will come to me, who is the very author of the cucial experiment… his name will come to me, I’m sorry… Benjamin Libet, you know, the author of the crucial experiment demonstrating, allegedly, that there is no free will, you know. It’s that famous experiment where… don’t ask me how, I’m giving you a Reader’s Digest simplified version… that he wires your neurons and then he asks you to do some extremely elementary gesture, for example, grab this pen, and he tells you just to drop it or whatever, and to somehow signal the moment you decided, OK, you know the story, I don’t know how much part of the second before you decide your brain already knows it, signals are already on the way. But now comes the beauty, this is why I like this guy, a big shock to this common gang of morons, stupid, flat scientists is that they automatically took this as a proof that there is no free will because when you think you decide you just, what’s the term, take cognizance, assume what your brain has already decided, but this is not… these are intelligent guys. This is not Libet’s position and he has, that’s why not of any anti-Semitism or praising the Jews, that is why I emphasize that he is a Jew, because he makes here a very nice theological – but he is a materialist, it’s just as a spiritual point – reference to the ten commandments, prohibitions, and he claims, although it’s also a very problematic topic, that we are looking for freedom of the will at the wrong point; that the basic – he is very Hegelian here, negativity – that the basic form of freedom is not ‘I do this.’ There we are overdetermined by neurons, blah blah, but to stop it, in that split of a part of a second when I do this (Zizek drops his pen), I can stop it, and that this is the form of freedom. It’s beautiful.
Then, if you want a more complex counter-argumentation, Daniel Dennett, who again, he is like a mix, sometimes too stupid but sometimes bright, has also a wonderful attack on this primitive reading of Libet. His point is very Derridean almost, a minimum of, he almost calls it difference, temporality of the brain; he says that there is no freedom only if you presuppose what he wrongly, I think Daniel Dennett calls the so-called central Cartesian self where ultimately things happen at the same point, you know? If you presuppose this, then you can say I decided this but it already happened, but you must first presuppose a homogeneous central agent with basic temporality. If you renounce this, then the primitive conclusion doesn’t work.
Why am I telling you this? Just to let you know that I’m not, as it were, totally bluffing, you know? That I know that things are more complex. But, OK. Now, this is just the introduction, you know.
You’ve got an idea why I think Buddhism is not just a kind of amusing, exotic reference, but it means something spiritually today in our own constellation because it, again, it appears to be the ideal form of functioning in today’s crazy, frantic capitalism. At the same time, it appears to be the proper mode of subjectivization of the results of modern science; though, how do things stand with it?
Now I’ll go to an even more problematic stance and then I will try to turn directly into Buddhism. It will be, of course – here I have 45 minutes or what? – very short, but please believe me, I do bluff a little bit but I know more than what’s in here, you know. OK.
So, as you all know, let me begin with the beginning: Buddhism, we all know, is concerned with solving the problem of suffering. So it’s first axiom, as it were, automatic presupposition, is not only we but all known living beings suffer. OK. I will not go now immediately into it but for me, as a Freudian-Lacanian, I will say here already problems began. I don’t… I think that if there is something which is, from a Freudian standpoint, not true, it is that we don’t want to suffer. And not only, I’m not going here in some obscure masochism or whatever, I just would like to invoke to you, I will be very pathetic here even in the sense of melodrama; imagine yourself passionately in love. Isn’t it that if you are true to yourself, and you can be (no cognitive discordance here) very well or you suspect that, at the end, it will probably end bad, that whatever will happen at the end it will be for you terrible suffering, whatever, but nonetheless, and I’ve spoken with people to whom this happened, passionately in love and then dropped – and now I’m quite open, and I was one of those people whom I’ve spoken (???), but, you know, when it ends in catastrophe, just suffering, and then a friend asks me the usual question, ‘now you probably regret it’, my answer was automatically no. I would have done it again, you know. So, I simply think that there is in our passionate engagement a certain logic where you are ready, fully, to buy final fiasco, incredible suffering, but you are ready to do it again, you know? But OK, I will come to this later.
Now let’s go through Buddhist doxa. The source of suffering lies in the unquenchable desire of people for things which, even if they get them, will never satisfy them, and it’s this satisfaction which causes suffering. So, the goal of the Buddhist practice is, as we all know, liberation from suffering. We can call it reaching Nirvana, enlightenment, awakening, whatever you want, and everything a Buddhist does is ultimately for the attainment of this enlightenment. Buddhist practice first, as we all know, focuses on a morality that will lead to enlightenment. You know how it began for Buddha. He first establishes the fact that life is this wheel of desire, it’s suffering, then he defines the causes of suffering and then the way to fight them and here, at least in this moment, Buddhism became an institution. It, of course, introduced a certain gradualism in the sense that first it begins with a simple morality, everyday morality, which is supposed to, as it were, pave, prepare the way, or put us on the path to enlightenment. But, as they emphasize, Buddhists, it’s not enough just to regulate your conduct or how you act. This should culminate in enlightenment, and the point of all this is enlightenment.
This is already interesting because – you know why? – I ready recently in a book, I think, it’s a book of this guy, a very interesting guy, I think… what’s the title? Buddha’s consciousness or what? Owen Flanagan, one of the cognitivist scientists who is also doing Buddhism, draws attention (and here begins our Western distortion) to an interesting fact that for us, in the West, if you say I’m a Buddhist, it usually means I practice some stupid transcendental meditation or whatever, it’s automatically meditation, while he draws attention to the fact that for the majority of the nations, I don’t know, Thailand, I don’t know which others where real Buddhism is a way of life for the majority, the large majority of people don’t meditate. For them, being a Buddhist means two things: first, to respect this ethic, moral rather than ethical, moral rules. Don’t be violent, don’t cause suffering, blah blah, and where does then meditation enter?
It is very interesting. It is just as a kind of imagined presupposed point of reference; you need, even if they don’t exist to be cynical, you need to know that there are some people who made it to the end, you know, so that it gives you hope. It is more… it’s kind of this subject, to paraphrase Lacan, subject presupposed to meditate. People need it as a fixed point of reference. OK, so let’s go on.
How do we then fight our enslavement to desires? Here, we have the first point of Buddhism which is, I think, very nice, materialist. There are no higher powers, you should forget about those later religious misreadings of karma and so on and so on. The idea is simple, that karma or faith triggered by your desires, actions, is a kind of… is immanent today to the way we act, because as Buddhists like to point out, you know, they have this wonderful – no wonder even some Stalinist-Marxists like it – the idea of codependent origination, you know, what Stalin called the ‘dialectical unity of all phenomena’ to be slightly cynical. So, the idea, I precisely try to give you an idea of karma which is not some kind of a divine out-there… it’s simply that our acts, being part of a rich texture of the world, leave traces, have consequences; some consequences are good, wholesome, others are not and so on, and in the way, to deal with your karma means to regulate, try to diminish negative traces, consequences of your acts and, again, as you all know, I’ll just quickly enumerate them just to give you an idea of basically how, in a good sense – it’s not a criticism – how common sense this first step of basic morality is.
You have this Buddhist classification where they claim actions can occur at three levels: body, speech, and mind; and at each level, already Buddha (but it was elaborated later) proposes a whole categorization of bad acts, as it were.
First, at the level of body, there are acts which are to be avoided; killing, stealing, sexual misconduct (by misconduct, it’s not meant so much perversion or what, but this excessive passion, excessive attachment). Then, at the level of speech, four actions; lying, hard speech, slander, malicious gossip. And at the level of mind; greed, anger, delusion.
So, the idea is that this is widely the first step as it were to calm yourself down in what Buddha calls the Middle Way, not Tony Blair’s third way, but a more authentic middle way, you know, like neither excess of, I don’t know, gluttony, sex, or whatever; but also not some kind of sadomasochistic radical renunciation, and so on and so on.
The goal of all this is to acquire dispassion, as some translate it, for the objects of clinging to which we cling; that is to say, the point is your subjective attitude of how much you cling. You attach yourself to objects because, again, you all know this, I’m just repeating it, this (what in Buddhism is called) samsara is precisely the wheel of life, of suffering, and the point, this is crucial I think, without this you don’t get it, is not that from bad samsara we should get good samsara or karma – the point is not, if you do (this would be the Western reading) bad things you will have bad karma, so let’s do good things to get good karma so when you die you will profit, no, no, here Buddhism is not this type of bullshitting. It’s serious. The point is not to get good karma, the point is to step out of it.
But again, I’m well aware how refined this is. Stepping out doesn’t mean Melancholia, Von Trier, the end of the world; in one version of Buddhism, even nothing has to change materially, only your, let’s call it (although it sound too Californian) attitude.
Now I see slowly emerging problems with are not imported by me, I register these problems, the very ambiguities, conflicts, the way I found them in the Buddhist teaching itself, OK. The guy, sorry for the vulgarity, who reaches this state of acquiring distance, maybe the term stepping out is wrong because we have nowhere to go out, there is no transcendence in Buddhism (that is the beautiful thing about it) – as you know, it’s called Bodhisattva, the one who is concerned with freeing all sentient beings, not just himself or herself, even not just humans from samsara and it’s cycle of death, rebirth, and suffering.
But what makes it so difficult, so interesting here, is that – and this brings me to the first conflict that I see, OK, conflict, tension – you know that traditionally, at least according to my information, we get three levels or notions of Bodhisattva. They’re called, very nicely, king-like Bodhisattva, boatman Bodhisattva, and shepherd Bodhisattva.
King Bodhisattva aspires to become Buddha as soon as possible and then help all others, like, I do it myself, I try to reach nirvana, and the wager is by doing this, either me as an example or by acting in a more gentle way, I will help others. Boatman is already more communist, you know, the idea is, yes, but not me alone, together with others. Now the highest, according to some classifications, but for me, I agree here with critics of the other tendencies of Buddhism, the lowest, the most dangerous, where things go really wrong is shepherd-like Bodhisattva. The idea is the following one: that the greatest ethical act is that you reach enlightenment, but out of compassion for all those who are, as they call it in the greatest works of American literature – I’m making a joke; did you read the cycle of novels from, how are they called, by Tim LaHaye? Left Behind? The lowest of the low, OK, what I want to say, I mean it’s really like Dan Brown is Shakespeare compared to them – but what I want to say is that, so again that should be the great ethical act. You are there, eternal bliss, blah blah, but out of compassion, you go back into the wheel of suffering and so on and so on, like, you know, you give priority to others. You say no, I don’t have the right to enjoy it myself, I’ll go back to help others – this delaying, stepping it back.
But some, I was told, maybe I’m wrong, many of you must know it better, there are other Buddhists who made a counter; OK, in traditional Buddhism, there is a kind of graduation here, you know. The lowest, the king Bodhisattva, ‘I’ll do it, fuck you, you are following or not’, you know. Then the shepherd-like communists, you know, and then the highest one, I was up there, but I came in infinite goodness, I came down to help you all. But some Theravada guys, and they are immediately on their side, they make a nice argument, even if the core of authentic Buddhism has nothing to do with this ridiculous European spirituality (‘I move up there into a higher domain’), no, I stayed here, I’m fully here, I eat the same apples like you, whatever, it’s just that my attitude totally change. I’m still socially active, it even doesn’t mean to attain nirvana that you meditated, that you are in some kind of a pseudo-orgasmic spiritual trance. If this is true and authentic, Buddhists always emphasize this, that this vision of Buddhists saying of someone hiding in a cave and just trembling, blah blah blah, that it’s false. So, if this is true, why then the necessity to step back? You can act like Buddha and so on, you can attain nirvana, and at the same time be active here.
The idea is, and I think again, this is the origin of catastrophe, this idea, you know, the moment that somebody who wants to redeem you – here, we, us Nietzscheans should agree both how good he was that he sacrificed himself, but don’t trust the guy, you know.
OK. So, what do I mean by this?
Now I’ll come to another, please, I’m here openly exposing myself, I’m not kidding, this is not rhetorical, do your criticism if you know. I noticed another problem here, on the one hand some radical Buddhists – radical means I like them, I’m sorry – described in a wonderful way how authentic Buddhism deals with suffering. You first isolate the cause of suffering and blame the others, for example, ‘oh, I was deprived of that pleasure, fuck the world, and so on, why me?’ This is the eternal ‘why me?’ question, you know. Like, children are starving in Somalia, OK, I’ll give them five dollars a month to make me feel good, but why me? Or my child?
The idea is that, of course, the first thing to do is to precisely stop blaming the circumstances. Blame your desire and then extinguish, although I don’t like this term extinguish because it’s too violent in the wrong way, but here is a quote: “what has always been, what was extinguished when you stepped out of samsara, the cycle of suffering, it’s only the false view of the self, what had always been illusionary was understood as such, nothing was changed but the perspective of the observant, so I notice here – and again, correct me if I’m wrong – the following tension which, from my reading of my books on the history of Buddhism, is all present there and it mirrors precisely this first tension in the notion of Bodhisattva; should I simply go there? And this way? Is it the best thing for others? Or should I play this sacrificial game, I love you so much I stepped back and so on?
The problem is that on the one hand we have this radical description of nirvana which is everything is different, but nothing changes, you know. Like, it’s the same world out there and so on, just, I’m aware of its illusory nature, and I assume this illusory nature existentially. Why? And this I call the minimalist attitude, but then you nonetheless have, especially attached to this notion of Bodhisattva as the one who sacrifices himself, the opposite of what I call the maximalist attitude (‘I don’t want to reach nirvana prior to all other sentient beings reaching it’). So there it’s not just my subjective attitude, you are aiming effectively at some kind of a global, as it were, global cosmic change.
The next ambiguity I see is, and again, I already debated this in my class and some of you reproached me, so I did as much homework as I was able to do and I still stick to my opinion, that there are serious debates within Buddhism… I think this is the third level of the same tension, namely, as you remember how I described it; first, you do morality, you know, not too much sex, proper eating, don’t curse, don’t be violent, as preparing the way for enlightenment. But the obvious point here is, is there any link between the two?
This is a great problem in Buddhism. I read many texts on this where they claim if we are really honest, we have to admit that once you are in enlightenment, nothing immanently prevents you, for example, from torturing people. You can just say my acts leave no traces because I’m already at the nirvana level, no karma, and so on and so on. Now I know what you will say now, ‘but nonetheless, where is here compassion for others, blah blah blah? I’m just making a typical Western logical extrapolation, totally out of touch with the existential reality of Buddhism. No. I will give you, immediately, proofs. Sorry.
Before I’ll go into this, the fourth debate I encountered is the one where even the Dalai Lama has some wonderful statements like if drinking (by drinking he means real alcohol) helps you, why not? Like the problem is that many, if not all of the states, described as nirvana can be, if not totally, it gets pretty close to it, you know… like they say money is not all, my answer is usually but it comes pretty close to it, no? OK. That… what if you can induce the experience which imminently, inherently, fits nirvana in a biochemical way with some drugs or whatever? How to distinguish? Should we then distinguish the bad nirvana? ‘I’ll take a pill, fuck you, I’m there’. And the good nirvana, ‘I was torturing myself meditating for years, whatever.’ As some guys, but here I don’t agree with them, try to introduce here an ethical distinction… quote from Owen Flanagan: “cases where happiness is gained by magic pills or is due to false belief do not count because the allegedly happy person must be involved in cultivating her own virtue. Happy states born of delusion are undeserved.” But I think this is totally non-immanent, once you are in, you are in, who cares how you got there?
OK, back to that problem of suffering, compassion, and so on, let me give you a little bit to shock you and then… yeah, yeah, I will stop then, to shock you, some of my old stuff, a little bit of Buddhism and war, because, you know, like Buddhism did deal with this problem. Especially interesting is here the relationship between Japanese Zen Buddhism and war. And it’s interesting to know what tricks this Zen Buddhism employed to justify taking part in war.
First, there are two main strategies in Zen Buddhism. The first one to justify participating in war, that is to say killing people, whatever, to be clear; the first one is the standard teleological narrative which is even well known in our Western societies, a quote, I think this quote is from Teitaro Suzuki, the great popular writer: “even though the Buddha forbade the taking of life, he also though until all sentient beings are reunited together through the exercise of infinite compassion, there will never be peace. Therefore, as a means to bring this harmony, those things which are incompatible (killing and war) are necessary.” The usual trick, you know… like, my God, I’m sorry to tell you, but Hitler would have argued you like this. He would have said, “I’m totally against suffering, I want peace, but fuck it, there will be no peace as long as Jews are manipulating our needs, so the only way to really fight for peace is to give to the Jews, to be cynical, a one-way first-class ticket to Auschwitz.’
I mean, OK. So again, did you listen precisely to what this passage says, it’s the very force of compassion which gilds the sword; a true warrior kills out of love; and Suzuki was consequently here, you know, when we wrote many texts supporting the Japanese war effort in China, he said “the Chinese are like stupid children, they cannot get that the sword which is killing them now is really the sword of love.” He even proposed so much, fuck you, if you even think you will squeeze out by compassion. Suzuki and some other Japanese Buddhists introduced the wonderful term of compassionate war, like, you know, you do it precisely out of compassion to prevent further attacks… now comes the truth horror, OK, this is the Western bullshit, also, we had it. But Suzuki and others then add to this teleological, let’s call it, justification, in the sense that war is a necessary evil to bring about the greater good. And of course in a certain way I agree with it, I mean, I’m not going to bring… there is a much more radical line of reasoning which is, I really find this one terrifying, and OK, look into my book, I think it’s The Puppet and The Sword, but I don’t want to repeat myself so I developed this in detail. Namely, Suzuki also dealt with this problem, how to make the Japanese military machinery more efficient. He knew well that we have a certain elementary decency, like, let’s say you are my love partner, I meet you, Wolfgang, in a battlefield, and even if I hate you, I would find it difficult to stab my knife or sword into you. Here, Suzuki enters and says I have this difficulty because I’m still caught in the false illusion of my self, you know, because I still think I’m the agent of my acts, I feel falsely responsible, and so on, but, quote from Suzuki, this is a beautiful one: “if, the logic is that, if I reach nirvana then I no longer experience myself as an acting agent responsible for the act, but, you know, this is very beautiful, I admit it, this Buddhist view of the world as a free flow of phenomena where I, whatever remains of me, I’m no longer an agent, but I’m just a pure gaze, an impassive observer which meditates on this crazy dance.” This makes things easier because here, quote from Suzuki: “when I try to kill some of you, it is really not me, but the sword itself that does the killing. He (the killer) has no desire to do harm to anybody but the enemy appears and makes himself a victim. It is, although the sword performs automatically, its function of justice which is the function of mercy.”
Now are you – and please don’t just tell me that these are the freaky Japanese and so on… all around you, you find this idea that, all around Buddhism, that reaching nirvana, getting rid of your false self, makes you a much better warrior. This is why you have this long mythology of, you know, Zen Buddhists as perfect samurai because you can do it with proper distance and so on and so on.
So, if you allow me now from here just to, I mean, I should squeeze it in now, two concluding points.
The one is that here, I see, I cannot… (a butterfly appears in the room) my God, I feel like a bad Buddhist, let’s squash that. Take a sentient being—good! He killed a sentient being! But you know this will worsen your karma, you know. In the next life, maybe instead of being an even greater philosopher, you will be reborn as that butterfly, who knows. Sorry, I’m not making fun, but I hope – let me, you know why not? Because, do not, please, misunderstand me… and that’s my, I’m open to say this tragedy here, I’m not in any way saying that Buddhist enlightenment is some kind of a joke to make killers or the military better functioning. It’s an absolutely authentic existential experience. All I’m saying is that we have to accept the gap, and again, Suzuki is here honest, he says Buddhism is a technique of stepping out of the karma and blah blah and he says you can be (his examples) a Stalinist, a Fascist, a Liberal, Democrat, whatever, it doesn’t matter. So, I think to be a truly radical Buddhist, you have to accept the minimal gap between all those ethical… you know why? Because, let me give you now a really brutal idea, if the point of acting kindly, the Buddhist moral injunctions and so on, compassionate… if the true point of this morality is to teach you to bring this dispassionate attitude of seeing the illusionary nature of reality and so on and so on… and when I, when I was in Korea a month ago, I debated there with a Buddhist, and I laughed at him, because he said, yes, what’s the problem, when I told him ‘wouldn’t it then be logical to conclude that the true proof that you are in nirvana would have been precisely that you can do horrible things without your acts leaving traces in your karma?’ Like, it’s easy to claim I don’t cause any suffering, blah blah, if you just, you know, eat properly, don’t swear, don’t steal, don’t have too much sex and so on, and no guilt… but wouldn’t the true strength have been to do acts which usually involve a kind of crazy, fanatical attachment (torture, killing), but to be able to do it in a Zen way with a distance?
Here I got very depressed when I read a biography of, he was the one (???), Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, and it is incredible how many of his colleagues claim, people who met him, that Pol Pot had such an absolutely breathtaking, incredible (???) in direct human relations. His inner peace and kindness, even when he ordered, you know what, that there was a kind of myth all around the Khmer Rouge leadership that he is in the highest state and so on.
So what I’m saying here are two things to conclude.
First: I claim that, and I’m not even taking sides here, both positions are crazy, but I claim that here we should grasp the gap that separates Buddhism as one radical condition from, let’s call it, the Western Christian ethic which is, I think, there is an absolute abyss here, and all those shitty attempts to claim ‘no, we are all talking about the same God, or (???)’, mainly as Chesterton and others emphasized… in Western Christian ethics, the truth is, as it were, out there. The whole point is excessive attachment. What Buddhists see as evil is, for us, the good itself. Good means – let’s take our love. You fall in love; it means (Alain Badious will probably talk about this later too) you know, you get this excessive attachment, you throw yourself to the end into it. In other words, as Chesterton put it so nicely, all other religions want to unite the world (how to unite with God, we are all one, blah blah)… Christianity separates. It’s the religion of separation. Christianity is noa religion of harmony, it’s a religion which says, yes, there is some kind of homogenous, harmonious circle of life. But this is bullshit, this is the pagan background. The Christian gesture is to say no, I do something crazy, I choose this, I stick to this even if it turns everything around.
OK, I will, if you’ll allow me just to take these next three minutes really to conclude… here, also, because some people try… this will be the really concluding part, some people try to bring together Heidegger and Buddhism claiming again two paths towards the same and so on… no, I claim not. You know why not? Because for Heidegger, what he calls Ereignis, this radical form of historicity, concealment, unconcealment, and so on and so on, and precisely this radically historical dimension is missing in Buddhism. For Heidegger, Ereignis is not nirvana. Ereignis is a historical event, this dimension I don’t find.
But now, if you’ll allow me just to conclude, and it is madness because this is the speculative center of what I’m trying to prove, where I would have been at the same time, where I would have to entertain a certain distance towards Heidegger and towards Buddhism, is in the following one – and this is not just ethical, it’s a much more radical distinction, you know?
As a guy called, if you want to get more on this, there is an interesting book, very, it’s a modest book but very well written, I think the guy is Bret Davis, I forgot the title (Zen after Zarathustra), but it’s basically about Heidegger and Zen Buddhism, and he points to one, to a deep ambiguity in Heidegger, how Heidegger sometimes, he is radically historicist, you know, in the sense of like modern nihilism, blah blah, but somehow here and there Heidegger locates, let’s call it naïvely, the origin of evil, of how things go wrong, into the a priori structure of this closure of being itself. For example, I will read you this short passage from Heidegger’s Der Spruch des Anaximander, where he claims something which sounds strangely Buddhist. Quote: “an entity may even insist, bestehen, upon its while…” uh, strange translation, it means the way that goes on, I think… “solely to remain more present in the sense of perduring, that which lingers persists in its presence, in this way, it extricates itself from its transitory while (while here is substantive), it strikes the willful pose of resistance no longer concerning itself with whatever else is present. It stiffens as it is the only way to linger and aims solely for continuance and subsistence.”
So here Heidegger says something like the origin of disturbance is when a thing, an entity, persists too much, doesn’t want to just be part of the circle of life, whatever, you know what is the circle of life? I hate it. It’s, you know, I think the most oppressive ideology that you can imagine. This is my old joke, maybe you know it, did you see, I hope you didn’t, the Lion King, and you know when you find there the song “The Circle of Life”? Precisely when the son asks his father the obvious question; is this right that we lions eat zebras? And Father, it’s easy when you are on the top, sings the song which is ‘it’s all a circle of life, we eat zebras, but we will die, we will turn into dust, our flesh will feed grass and grass will be eaten by zebras, so it’s all one big circle of life’, no? So all I’m tempted to say is imagine in A Beautiful Life, the movie by Benigni, the son asking him, Father, but why are Germans killing Jews? And I can well imagine Roberto Benigni singing back, ‘it’s all one big circle of life, you know, Jews are killing us, but we will die and we will into food, manure for grass, grass will be eaten by cows, and one of us will kill a cow, and we will eat the cow, so it is a big circle of life, you know.’ You know what’s the point here? The point is, yeah, but what if there are different circles of life? Maybe let’s hope there is a circle of life where you exactly don’t have to do holocaust. Let’s hope, no…
But seriously, now comes my final thesis, I will just try to hint it, if you want more, read my big fat book. My thesis is that enlightenment is an authentic position, but comes afterwards to that, let’s say, that at the animal level, immediately we are simply fully emerged in life and there is no fall. We are there like animals, but how do you create the space for nirvana, void, or whatever; by acquiring a distance from being fully immersed into ordinary life. And this distance is true obsessive attachment, that is to say, to be primitive – it’s very naïve, I developed it much more technically in the book – how do animals become humans? When you say, no, sorry Mr. Lion King, it’s not a circle of life, there is this woman, political idea… I get fixated on that. If the whole world drops, I want that, you know. This fixation denaturalizes you, throws you out of the circle, and in this way, that’s my claim, creates the space for withdrawal for nirvana. You cannot get into nirvana directly from full immersion into natural life. You must fall, fall in the sense of excessive attachment, and this fall creates the void where you have to withdraw.
Now, really to conclude, look, I don’t even have a paper, this brings me (and here I’m not kidding, I’m sincerely asking you if you know more… I spoke with some guys here) to the crucial enigma that I find in Buddhism, and again, very respectfully, this is not a critical remark, you know. Buddha says the fact is people suffer; how to get them out? As a Hegelian, I like the opposite question, not how to get out but how did we fall in? And here, and this is the question I’m asking people, is simply samsara affected or was there some kind of, you know, illusion of maya? But how did we get caught into this illusion? And I can make a report to you, I’ve got three answers.
The first one is the totally pragmatist one: Buddha was a practical guy. He was not, this is a concrete answer, I’m not mocking it… his problem was how to get out of suffering. He didn’t care about these metaphysical questions.
The second answer is a version of the first one, but it is a more tricky one, a little bit of a sophism. It says to understand how this, how the follower, you have to be already there in nirvana but once you are there you don’t care about this, you know. It is kind of like a trick.
The third one, and some Tibetans that I met in Beijing half-illegally told me, I really like that, here I can identify with Buddhism, they told me that… they gave me a kind of… the name is meant ironically, but basically very seriously. You know in Star Wars? Now we are talking about real works of art, you know how all the time they mention this dark side of power, you know? And this is, I think, very Hegelian… so you don’t simply… we are caught into earthly confusion but then there is a higher domain of peace, but if something can go terribly wrong in this nirvana domain itself? What is, you know, we are here in deep shit not because, or to put it in the more agnostic terms of Schelling and so on… human evil is not because we fell from God, human evil originates in madness, reversal, something going wrong in God himself. I know in Buddhism you don’t have, in this sense, God, but what they told me, these guys, is that – and they gave me a wonderful experimental, experiential reason… they told me, my God, just listen to (and I do, it’s really pure horror) Buddhist music. They told me this is the voice of evil, and no wonder. Do you know who knows this? The FBI. Do you remember some 10 years ago, they got to Waco, Texas, those fundamentalists who were encircled by the FBI, do you know what music the FBI played to them to get them out, to terrorize? These Buddhist horns and so on and so on.
So this is, I think, some kind of a secret Tibetan Buddhism which, and again it is not rhetorics what I’m telling now, if you know anything about me I would…
(audience member exits the room) It is nice that you want to talk a walk before I’ll finish, come back in half an hour… no, seriously, you see this speculative, Hegelian enigma of how it is not just ‘we are here in a world of illusions and then nirvana.’ What if something can go wrong up there?
I’m very sorry if I was too long, but on the other hand, I’m not sorry, fuck you, what can you do? Thank you very much.