The nonduality of Life and death: A Buddhist view of repression
By David Loy
Philosophy east and west
Volume 40, No.2 (April 1990)
P.151-174
(C) by University of Hawaii Press
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SUMMARY
Is there any meaning in my life that the
inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?
(Tolstoy)
Why was I born, if it wasn't forever? (Ionesco)
YAKSHA: What is the greatest wonder in the
world?
YUDISHTHIRA: Every day men see others called to
their death, yet those who remain live as if they
were immortal. (The Mahaabhaarata)
One can no more look steadily at death than at
the sun. (La Rochefoucauld)
All of life is but keeping away the thoughts of
death. (Samuel Johnson)
The king is surrounded by persons whose only
thought is to divert the king, and to prevent his
thinking of self. For he is unhappy, king though he
be, if he thinks of himself.
This is all that men have been able to discover
to make themselves happy. And those who philosophize
on the matter, and who think men unreasonable for
spending a whole day in chasing a hare which they
would not have bought, scarce know our nature. The
hare in itself would not screen us from the sight of
death and calamities; but the chase which turns away
our attention from these, does screen us. (Pascal)
All our knowledge merely helps us to die a more
painful death than the animals who know nothing.
(Maeterlinck)
Death is easier to bear without thinking of it,
than is the thought of death without peril. (Pascal)
He who most resembles the dead is the most
reluctant to die. (La Fontaine)
"I had to die to keep from dying." (Common
schizophrenic remark)
By avoiding death, men pursue it. (Democritus)
Man has forgotten how to die because he does not
know how to live. (Rousseau)
It is true: we love life not because we are used
to living but because we are used to loving.
(Nietzsche)
History is what man does with death. (Hegel)
Madness is something rare in individuals--but in
groups, parties, people, ages it is the rule.
(Nietzsche)
Men are so necessarily mad that not to be mad
would amount to another form of madness. (Pascal)
The `struggle for success becomes such a
powerful force because it is the equivalent of
self-preservation and self-esteem. (Kardiner)
For life in the present there is no death. Death
is not an event in life. It is not a fact in the
world. (Wittgenstein)
The artist carries death in him like a good
priest his breviary.(Boll)
To live in the face of death is to die unto
death. (Kierkegaard)
Art has two constants, two unending concerns: it
always meditates on death and thus always creates
life. (Pasternak)
Only the man who no longer fears death has
ceased to be a slave. (Montaigne)
As long as you do not know how to die and come
to life again, you are but a poor guest on this dark
earth. (Goethe)
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Q: Do not one's actions affect the person in
after-births?
A: Are you born now? Why do you think of other
births? The fact is that there is neither birth nor
death. Let him who is born think of death and
palliatives therefor. (Ramana Maharshi)
Just understand that birth-and-death is itself
nirvana. There is nothing such as birth and death to
be avoided; there is nothing such as nirvana to be
sought. Only when you realize this are you free from
birth and death. (Dogen)
Much has happened to psychoanalysis in its century
of life, and Freud today would have difficulty
recognizing many of his progeny. Among those
descendants that are of interest to comparative
philosophers, transpersonal psychology has attracted
considerable attention(1); but this article will
focus on existential psychoanalysis, which
originated quite early out of a cross-fertilization
between Freudianism and phenomenology, including
Heidegger's Being and Time.(2) The leading figure
was the Swiss psychoanalyst Ludwig Binswanger, who
is also distinguished by the fact that he was able
to disagree with Freud without that leading to a
break between them. For reasons that will become
clear at the end, I think this original movement
made a mistake by allying itself with the early
Heidegger, and what I have to say is more influenced
by the second and third generations of existential
psychology in the United States: among the analysts
are Rollo May and now Irvin Yalom, and among the
scholars, Norman O. Brown and most of all Ernest
Becker, whose last two books, The Denial of Death
and Escape from Evil, cannot be recommended too
highly.(3)
These figures are more pragmatic; for them the
"existential" in existential psychology means not so
much existentialism as being rooted in the
fundamental issues of life and death, freedom and
responsibility, groundlessness and meaninglessness.
Despite this--or is it because of this?--their
findings display a remarkable agreement with what I
think is the best of the existentialist tradition.
Becker refers often to Kierkegaard and Pascal, and
he could have found as much in Nietzsche and Sartre
to support his conclusions. This confluence may be
of great importance, because it is one of the
fertile places in our time where philosophy and
science meet. Psychoanalysis is many things: a
religion (with founder, dogma, and schisms), a
philosophy (Freud and many since could not resist
metaphysical extrapolations), but also a science,
which means it doesn't just change, it learns.
Despite a problematic philosophical foundation, it
has discovered many things about how the mind
functions, which we cannot ignore except at our
peril. The problem, as usual, is separating the milk
from the water.
Ernest Becker was not a psychologist but a
cultural anthropologist, so his theory of death
denial summarizes more than the conclusions of one
psychoanalytic school; he attempts what might be
called a unified field theory for the social
sciences, and I think he comes close to succeeding.
Here I want to bring a third party into this
dialogue: Buddhism. If we add what Buddhism
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has to say about the human situation--in particular,
the "emptiness" of the ego-self--fireworks go off
and another cross-fertilization can occur. While
Becker demonstrates what du.hkha really means today,
Buddhism is able to show how Becker doesn't quite
grasp the main point and therefore misses an
alternative to his pessimistic conclusions. I
confess to high hopes for this expanded
conversation: for if important movements in the
existentialist tradition (philosophy) , the
psychoanalytic tradition (science), and the Buddhist
tradition (religion) were to end up agreeing on the
essentials of the human condition, who knows to what
this might lead?
I shall begin by summarizing some of Becker's
rich exposition while making a few general
criticisms, then gradually bring in the Buddhist
perspective. The conclusion will apply what we learn
from this to turn Heidegger's Being and Time upside
down.
Freud always emphasized that repression is the
key psychoanalytic discovery which underlies the
whole edifice. The concept is basically simple:
something (it can be almost anything--usually a
thought or a feeling) makes me uncomfortable, and
since I do not want to cope with it consciously, I
choose to ignore or "forget" it. This clears the way
for me to concentrate on something else, but at a
price: part of my psychic energy must be expended in
resisting what has been repressed, to keep it out of
consciousness, and (the real rub) the repressed
phenomenon tends to return to consciousness anyway,
but as a symptom which is therefore symbolic
(because that symptom re-presents it in distorted
form). Freud traced the hysterias and phobias of his
middle-class Viennese patients back to repressed
sexuality, and he concluded that sexual repression
is man's primal repression-although, like many of
us, his attention gradually shifted from sex to
death.
Today psychoanalytic attention has followed him
there. Becker builds on a perceptive remark by
William James: "mankind's common instinct for
reality...has always held the world to be
essentially a theater for heroism." Our natural
narcissism and need for self-esteem mean that each
of us needs to feel that we are of special value,
"first in the universe." Heroism is how we justify
that need to count more than anyone or anything
else. This is the common denominator behind the
cultural relativity that anthropology discovers,
which is nothing other than the relativity of hero
systems. But why do we need to be heroes? It is
"first and foremost a reflex of the terror of death"
because heroism is what can qualify us for a special
destiny. And we need that hope for a special fate,
because the alternative is literally too much to
contemplate.(4) The irony of man's unique symbolic
life is that it only serves to reveal our fate in no
uncertain terms. "Consciousness of death is the
primary repression, not sexuality." (5) This fear of
death is needed to keep our organism armed toward
self-preservation; but it must also be repressed for
us to func-
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tion with any modicum of psychological comfort. The
result is us: hyperanxious animals who constantly
invent reasons for anxiety even when there are none.
This was also the conclusion of Otto Rank, Melanie
Klein, Norman O. Brown, and more recently Irvin
Yalom, who argues that "a considerable portion of
one's life energy is consumed in the denial of
death."(6) Most animals have fears programmed into
them as instincts, but the animal who has no such
instincts (or whose consciousness allows him to
transcend his instincts) fashions his fears out of
the ways he perceives the world--which unlocks a
door that Becker himself does not open, for it
suggests that if we can come to experience the world
differently we might be able to fashion our fears
differently, too. Or is it the other way around: do
our fears cause us to perceive the world in the way
we do, and might someone come to experience the
world differently who was brave enough to face the
thing we fear most?
The reason man's essence was never found, says
Becker, "was that there was no essence, that the
essence of man is really his paradoxical nature, the
fact that he is half animal and half symbolic."(7)
But how easily this moves from the common
existentialist view that man has no essence to the
claim that his essence is dualistic: a spirit with
an anus and all the other accoutrements of
mortality. This duality lies at the heart of
Becker's argument. The mind looks down at the body,
realizes what flesh implies, and panics. As a
consequence, "everything that man does in his
symbolic world is an attempt to deny and overcome
his grotesque fate. He literally drives himself into
a blind obliviousness with social games,
psychological tricks, personal preoccupations so far
removed from the reality of his situation that they
are forms of madness." A good example is our
character traits--secret psychoses, said Ferenczi, a
mechanization of a particular way of reacting, not
very different from a repetition compulsion. These
sedimented habits are a necessary protection, for
without them there can only be "full and open
psychosis": to see the world as it really is is
"devastating and terrifying"; "it makes routine,
automatic, secure, self-confident activity
impossible....It places a trembling animal at the
mercy of the entire cosmos and the problem of the
meaning of it." Thus the bite in Pascal's aphorism:
"Men are so necessarily mad that not to be mad would
amount to another form of madness." For Becker this
is literally true: normality is our collective,
protective madness, in which we repress the truth of
the human condition, and the ones who have
difficulty playing this game are the ones we call
mentally ill. Schizophrenics are suffering from the
truth. Psychoanalysis reveals the high price of
denying this truth about man's condition, "what we
might call the costs of pretending not to be
mad."(8)
This gives a more existential slant to such key
Freudian concepts as guilt and the Oedipal complex.
The early experience of the child is really his
attempt to deny the anxiety of his emergence, his
fear of losing his support, of standing alone,
helpless and afraid.
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This despair he avoids by building defenses. and
these defenses allow him to feel a basic sense of
self-worth, of meaningfulness, of power They allow
him to feel that he Controls his life and his death,
that he really does live and act as a willful and
free individual, that he has a unique and
self-fashioned identity, that he is somebody....(9)
Yet this, which Becker calls the "great
scientific simplification of psychoanalysis," may be
grounded in other views of human nature than
Becker's god-that-shits dualism. Elsewhere Becker
refers to Maslow's "Jonah syndrome" in presenting a
somewhat different explanation for repression:
because we are not strong enough to endure the full
intensity of life. "It all boils down to a simple
lack of strength to bear the superlative, to open
oneself up to the totality of experience."(10) In
this sense, too, life is really too much for the
child, and so we end up with the two great fears
that other animals do not have: the fear of life,
from inability to endure the intensity of full
openness, and the fear of death, from inability to
accept one's inevitable fate--which, as we shall
see, are not two distinct fears but two different
aspects of the same fear.
But is mind-body dualism the cause of our panic,
or its effect? Do we panic because we are
consciousnesses with bodies, or is our panic what
impels us to dualize ego-consciousness from body?
The most detailed historical study of death in
Western culture is Philippe Aries' The Hour of our
Death, a monumental--indeed, interminable--survey of
the last millennium. Although Aries' approach is not
psychoanalytic, his conclusions are therefore all
the more relevant, since his evidence comes to us
from a different perspective. At the moment the most
interesting to us are the first two stages of
death-awareness that he distinguishes. In striking
contrast to what came later, death in the Middle
Ages was "tame." Although recognized as evil, it was
also accepted as inseparable from life. Contrary to
the universal implications of Becker's thesis, there
do not seem to have been the extremes of terror and
denial that we now associate with death; rather, it
was a repose, a peaceful sleep from which one may or
may not reawaken, in the eventual resurrection of
the body.
But this changed. "The strong individual of the
later Middle Ages could not be satisfied with the
peaceful but passive conception of requies....He
split into two parts: a body that experienced
pleasure or pain and an immortal soul that was
released by death."(11) Evidently it was this
dualism that attained a philosophical
rationalization in the Meditations of Descartes,
whose legacy we still are and with which we still
struggle.
Is it a coincidence that this new conception of
death spread just before the acceleration--the
explosion--of Western civilization that began as the
Ressance? If history is what man does with death, as
Hegel said, then a more death-conscious society will
create more history. Fromm pointed out that the
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Renaissance brought an increased feeling of strength
and freedom, but also isolation, doubt, skepticism,
and anxiety. Burckhardt noticed the most outstanding
symptom, now so widespread that we take it for
granted: a morbid craving for fame. The desire to be
famous is a good example of how something repressed
(here, death terror) remanifests in consciousness in
distorted form (the passion for symbolic
immortality), which therefore becomes a symptom of
our problem (if what I really want is personal
immortality, no fame will ever be enough--but this
is usually experienced as "I am not yet famous
enough").(12) This craving and the other character
traits that Fromm mentions are associated with
greater self-consciousness: increased consciousness
is increased awareness of the end, and the need to
resolve the increased anxiety that that awareness
brings with it, whether by becoming an immaterial
soul or by attaining symbolic immortality through
one's reputation.
This implies that the Platonic, Cartesian, and
now "commonsense" mindbody dualism that Becker, too,
presupposes (in a more sophisticated version:
Plate's immaterial psyche and Descartes' cogito
become with him the symbolizing functions that
modern social science analyzes) is not the unvarying
essence of human nature but another example of
nurture being taken for nature: a historically
determined conception of man now so deeply ingrained
that its metaphysical nature is forgotten--which, we
remember, is the definition of repression, something
that can afflict whole civilizations as well as
individuals. But if this understanding is
conditioned, can it be un-conditioned?
From the Buddhist perspective, this is not the
only questionable dualism that Becker assumes. Like
most of us all of the time (and perhaps all of us
most of the time) he takes for granted the
apparently objective nature of the world, which
Western philosophy (and cognitive psychology) since
Kant has realized to be mentally constituted. Not
only does each of us construct the supposedly
objective world, but (just as important
psychologically) we constitute the world in a manner
that conceals the fact that we have constituted
it--which can also be seen as a form of repression.
Perhaps the most potent defense of all [against
death anxiety] is simply reality as it is
experienced--that is, the appearance of
things....[A]ppearances enter the service of denial:
we constitute the world in such a way that it
appears independent of our constitution. To
constitute the world as an empirical world means to
constitute it as something independent of ourselves
(13)
Yalom relates this to repressed fear of
groundlessness, which makes us try to secure
ourselves by stabilizing the world we are in. This
fits the Buddhist view of the problem if we
understand this fear of groundlessness as the
ego-self's fear of its own "emptiness." But it is
not just the sense-of-self that is empty. The denial
of subject-object dualism which is so fundamental to
Mahaayaana (and Advaita Vedaanta) implies that our
usual sense of separation (between myself and the
world I am in) is delusive; the supposed
subjectivity of ego-consciousness gains a spurious
reality only in opposition to the sup-
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posed objectivity of the empirical world (and vice
versa) .(14) Then to repress the fact that I
constitute my "objective" world is also to repress
the fact that I constitute myself. But before we get
any further ahead of ourselves, let us return to
Becker's exposition.
Freud traced guilt back to the early ambivalent
feelings of the child, particularly hate and death
wishes toward parents, which lead to fears of object
loss. The Denial of Death sees the origin of guilt
in the child's reaction to his bodily processes and
their urges: "guilt as inhibition, as determinism,
as smallness and boundedness" is implied by the
constraints that the basic animal condition imposes
upon the symbol-using god, who needs to control his
condition and would like to escape it. Escape from
Evil expands on this:
Guilt, as the existentialists put it, is the guilt
of being itself. It reflects the self-conscious
animal's bafflement at having emerged from nature,
at sticking out too much without knowing what for,
at not being able to securely place himself in an
eternal meaning system.(15)
This "pure" guilt has nothing to do with
infringements or punishment for secret wishes; the
major sin is the sin of being born, as Samuel
Beckett has said. It is the worm in the heart of the
human condition, apparently an inescapable
consequence of self-consciousness itself--and not
only the human condition but the social fabric, for
Becker like Brown sees social organization as "a
structure of shared guilt." The burden is so heavy
that man cannot endure it by himself; it must be
shared in order to be expiated collectively, as we
see more clearly (because more objectively) in the
rituals of archaic man, whose life "was openly
immersed in debt."(16)
This illuminates the existential view of the
Oedipal complex, which Norman O. Brown more
accurately calls the "Oedipal project." Brown agrees
with Freud that this project is the attempt to
become father of oneself, but not by sleeping with
mother. To become one's own father is to become what
Naagaarjuna described (and refuted) as
self-existing--in Spinoza's formula, causa sui,
self-caused; in Sartre's, etre-en-soi-pour-soi,
"being both in-itself and for-itself," which, in his
ontology, is a contradiction. Becker summarizes this
by saying that the Oedipal project is the flight
from obliteration and contingency. The child wants
to conquer death by becoming the creator and
sustainer of his own life. In Buddhist terms, the
Oedipal project is the attempt of the developing
ego-self to attain closure on itself, foreclosing
its dependence on others by becoming autonomous. To
be one's own father is to be one's own origin.
Rather than just a way to conquer death, this makes
even more sense as the quest to deny one's
groundlessness by becoming one's own ground: the
ground (socially sanctioned but nonetheless
illusory) of being an independent person. What is
called the Oedipal complex is due to the discovery
by the child that he is not part of mother, after
all. The problem is not so much that Dad has first
claim on Mom, as what that contributes to the
child's dawning realization of separation:
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"but if I'm not part of Mom, what am I part
of?"--which becomes, more generally: what am I? Who
am I? This generates the need to discover one's own
ground, or rather the need to create it--a futile
project, never to be fulfilled except by delusively
identifying with something ("I may not be Mom, but I
am this!"), which must include, as its other side,
the fear of losing it.
If this is what happens, the Oedipal project
originates in our intuition that self-consciousness
is not something obviously "self-existing" but a
fiction, a mental construct. Rather than being
self-sufficient, consciousness is more like the
surface of the sea: dependent on depths which it
cannot grasp because it is a manifestation of them.
The problem arises when consciousness wants to
ground itself, to make itself real. But to real-ize
itself is to objectify itself. The ego-self is this
attempt of awareness to objectify itself by grasping
itself--which it can no more do than a hand can
grasp itself. Vedaanta shows the futility of this by
pointing out that whatever the "I" becomes aware of
cannot be the "I", that the "I'' will always be
different from anything cognized as "me."
The consequence of this is that the
sense-of-self always has, as its inescapable shadow,
a sense-of-lack, which (alas!) it always tries to
escape. It is here that the psychoanalytic concept
of repression comes in, for the idea of "the return
of the repressed" in a distorted form shows us how
to link this fundamental yet hopeless project with
the symbolic ways we try to make ourselves real in
the world. This deep sense of lack is experienced as
the feeling that "there is something wrong with me."
To the extent that we have a sense of autonomous
self, we have this sense of lack, which manifests in
many different forms. We have already noticed one:
the craving to be famous, which is a good example of
the way we usually try to make ourselves
real--through the eyes of others. In its "purer"
forms lack appears as ontological guilt or, even
more basic, an ontological anxiety at the very core
of one's being, which is almost unbearable because
it gnaws on that core. For that reason all anxiety
wants to become objectified into fear of something
(as Spinoza might say, fear is anxiety associated
with an object), because then we know what to do: we
have ways to defend ourselves against the feared
thing.
The tragedy of these objectifications, however,
is that no amount of money can be enough if it is
not really money that we want. When we do not
understand what is actually motivating us--because
what we think we want is only a symptom of something
else--we end up compulsive, "driven." Such a
Buddhist analysis implies that no true "mental
health" will be found short of an enlightenment
which puts an end to that sense-of-lack which is the
shadow of the sense-of-self, by putting an end to
the sense-of-self. Is psychoanalysis coming close to
realizing the same thing?
Transference in the narrow sense is our
unconscious tendency to take emotions and behavior
felt towards one person (for example, a parent) and
project them onto another (for example, one's
analyst). But if transference in the large
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sense is "distortion of encounter" (Rollo May), then
we all do it most of the time, and this is just what
Freud concluded: it is a "universal phenomenon of
the human mind" that "dominates the whole of each
person's relation to his human environment."
Transference reveals that I never grow up, remaining
"a child who distorts the world to relieve his
helplessness and fears, who sees things as he wishes
them to be for his own safety." The need to find
security by subjecting ourselves to others remains,
transferred from parents to teachers, superiors, and
rulers. This is not making "an emotional mistake,"
but a matter of experiencing the other as one's
whole world--just as the family is for the child. In
this way we tame the terror of life, by focusing the
power and horror of the universe in one place.
"Mirabile! The transference object, being endowed
with the transcendent powers of the universe, now
has in himself the power to control, order, and
combat them." This natural fetishization for man's
highest yearnings and strivings explains our urge to
deify the other: "the more they have, the more rubs
off on us. We participate in their immortality, and
so we create immortals." Rank said that we need to
erect a god-ideal outside ourselves in order to live
at all, and the transference object fits the
bill.(17)
The problem is that this process is unconscious
and hence uncritical, a regression to wishful
thinking which is not fully in one's control. We
children of the twentieth century do not need to
think very hard to come up with good examples--but
examples have never been lacking. Man has always
been hypnotized by those who represent life to him,
and eager to submit himself to charismatic
personalities who legitimize their power with a
little symbolic mystification. "Each society
elevates and rewards leaders who are talented at
giving the masses heroic victory, expiation for
guilt, relief of personal conflicts." Alas, these
leaders are usually the grandest, most mindless
patriots, "who embrace the ongoing system of death
denial with the heartiest hug, the hottest tears,
the least critical distance."(18)
Yet Freud and Ferenczi also saw a more positive
side, for transference indicates a natural attempt
to heal oneself through creating the larger reality
one needs to discover oneself, the "self-taught
attempts on the patient's part to cure himself."
Thus Rank concluded that "projection is a necessary
unburdening of the individual; man cannot live
closed in upon himself and for himself." So for
Becker the question ultimately becomes: "What is
creative projection? What is life-enhancing
illusion?"(19) As Jung put it: what myth do you live
by?
If transference is broadened to include ego
models, we can do it with someone we have never met.
Let's be honest with ourselves: don't philosophers
like Wittgenstein tend to be models for us, as movie
stars are for many others? The person not fascinated
by one model is fascinated by another, because this
is how we choose the cosmology for our own heroics,
even if those heroics must be vicarious; at least we
can identify our universe with the one that our hero
lived, thought, and acted within. And that brings us
closer to the heart of the matter, for transference
applies not just to people: we admire not only
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outstanding sportsmen, but their teams; we identify
not only with national leaders, but countries; not
only with Nietzsche, Freud, and the Buddha, but with
existentialism, psychoanalysis, and Buddhism.
The Buddhist term for all this is attachment,
but because that is such a vague term, Buddhism can
here learn from psychoanalysis, which is more
methodically discovering how delusion functions.
What ties all these manifestations together as the
same "universal phenomenon of the human mind" is
more than our need to tame the terror of death: it
is the need to organize the chaos of life by finding
a unifying meaningsystem that gives us knowledge
about the world, and a life program, telling us both
what is and what we should do. The child tends to
absorb this from his parents as part of what it
means to be a person; we place ourselves in the
universe by accepting the meaningsystem of someone
we identify with. "All of us are driven to be
supported in a self-forgetful way, ignorant of what
energies we really draw on, of the kind of lie we
have fashioned in order to live securely and
serenely."(20)
But not securely or serenely enough. After a
century of theory and practice, psychoanalysis has
come to agree with the great insight of
existentialism: anxiety is not incidental but
fundamental to the self, not something we have but
something we are. From this, many (for example,
Tillich) have decided that it is not possible to put
an end to anxiety. But that conclusion does not
necessarily follow. What is implied is that such an
end would require ending the ego-self as usually
experienced. Brown is sympathetic to such a
possibility: "since anxiety is the ego's incapacity
to accept death, the sexual organizations were
perhaps constructed by the ego in its flight from
death, and could be abolished by an ego strong
enough to die."(21) But for Rank and Becker, anxiety
cannot all be overcome therapeutically, because it
is impossible to stand up to the terrible truth of
one's condition without anxiety; hence our choice is
between anxiety and repression. If we cannot face
the truth of our condition, which is mortality, we
must repress that truth, which is to forget it. The
difference between neurosis and normality--that
undramatic, unnoticed psychopathology of the average
(Maslow)--is how successful that repression is. The
neurotic has a better memory than most, so his
anxiety keeps breaking through into consciousness
and so must be dealt with more harshly in order to
preserve a little freedom of action. All of us react
to our anxiety by "partializing" our world, by
restricting our consciousness within narrow bounds,
to areas which we can more or less control and which
give us a sense of self-confidence. The neurotic has
more difficulty sustaining the illusion of
self-confidence and must confine himself even more
narrowly. The psychotic can do this hardly at all,
and in self-protection de-animates himself, often
referring to himself as a toy, a puppet, or a
machine; the literature on schizophrenia is full of
expressions like "I had to die to keep from
dying."(22)
The difference between the three becomes a
matter of degree. When you grow up unable to immerse
yourself freely in the cultural roles available to
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you, then your own life becomes a problem. Tillich
called neurosis the way of avoiding nonbeing by
avoiding being. Rank said the constant restriction
of the neurotic's life is because "he refuses the
loan (life) in order thus to avoid paying the debt
(death)." The anguish and despair that the neurotic
complains of are not the result of his symptoms but
their cause; those symptoms are what shield him from
the tragic contradictions at the heart of the human
situation: death, guilt, meaninglessness. "The irony
of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be
free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but
it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must
shrink from being fully alive."(23)
Then is the guilt that seems to bedevil man not
the cause of our unhappiness, but its effect? "The
ultimate problem is not guilt but the incapacity to
live. The illusion of guilt is necessary for an
animal that cannot enjoy life, in order to organize
a life of nonenjoyment" (Brown).(24) In Buddhist
terms, if the autonomy of self-consciousness is a
delusion which can never quite shake off its
shadow-sense that "something is wrong with me," it
will need to rationalize that sense of inadequacy
somehow. The restriction of the neurotic life-sphere
merely aggravates this universal sense of lack into
a paralysis of consciousness, a death-in-life. But
if fear of death rebounds as fear of life, they
become two sides of the same coin. Then genuine life
cannot be opposed to death but must embrace them
both: "Whoever rightly understands and celebrates
death, at the same time magnifies life." (Rilke)
The irony is that as long as we crave
immortality we are dead. As La Fontaine noted, he
who resembles the dead is the most reluctant to die.
Aries is struck by the fact that, at the time of the
late Middle Ages which we have already mentioned,
the idea of death was replaced by the idea of
mortality in general: "the sense of death henceforth
diluted and distributed over the whole of life, and
thus lost its intensity." Yes, but only because
life, too, lost its intensity, as he notices
elsewhere: "It is a curious and seemingly
paradoxical fact that life ceased to be so desirable
at the same time that death ceased to seem so
punctual or so powerful."(25) In the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, the "living corpse" became a
common theme: what better image could we ask for?
Again, Aries' study implies that Becker's
pessimistic con-clusions about human nature do not
reflect man's unchanging nature, only one
particular, historically conditioned nature: ours.
But cannot a conditioned nature be reconditioned--or
de-conditioned?
Rank and Becker replace Freud's sexual
reductionism with the fear of death and--every fear
has a correlative hope--the desire for immortality.
As different as these monologies are, they imply
equally tragic conclusions about the human
condition. The best that the early Freud could offer
was sublimation or rational control of the libido by
the ego, which he saw as making the best of a bad
thing; and his later view was more pessimistic,
postulating a
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life-against-death struggle between two instincts,
Eros and Thanatos, that death must always win.
Becker is hardly more optimistic: if our deepest,
most repressed fear is of death, we seem to be stuck
between transference projections in one form or
another, or psychotically acknowledging the terror
of our situation; for each of us is indeed going to
die. Again, death always wins--in this case even
before we die, in the psychic paralysis of
death-in-life.
The difference between Freud and Becker is that
Eros and Thanatos are instincts, while the fear of
death is not: it is a reaction of the animal who is
conscious enough to become aware of himself and his
inevitable fate; so it is something we have learned.
But exactly what is it we have learned? Is the
dilemma of life-confronting-death an objective fact
we just see, or is this, too, something constructed
and projected, more like an unconscious game that
each of us is playing with himself? According to
Buddhism, life-against-death is a delusive way of
thinking it is dualistic: the denial of being dead
is how the ego affirms itself as being alive; so it
is the act by which the ego constitutes itself. To
be self-conscious is to be conscious of oneself, to
grasp oneself, as being alive. (Despite all their
struggles to keep from dying, other animals do not
dread death, because they are not aware of
themselves as alive.) Then death terror is not
something the ego has, it is what the ego is. This
fits well with the Buddhist claim that the ego-self
is not a thing, not what I really am, but a mental
construction. Anxiety is generated by identifying
with this fiction for the simple reason that I do
not know and cannot know what this thing that I
supposedly am is. This is why the "shadow" of the
sense-of-self will inevitable be a sense-of-lack.
Now we see what the ego is composed of: death
terror. The irony here is that the death terror
which is the ego defends only itself. Everything
outside is what the ego is terrified of, but what is
inside? Fear is the inside, and that makes
everything else the outside. The tragicomedy is that
the self-protection this generates is
self-defeating, for the barriers we erect to defend
the ego also reinforce our suspicion that there is
indeed something lacking in our innermost sanctum
which needs protection. And if it turns out that
what is innermost is so weak because it
is...nothing, then no amount of protection will ever
be felt to be enough and we shall end up trying to
extend our control to the very bounds of the
universe. Something like this, I think, is what
motivates mankind's compulsive technological
project, and suggests what is wrong with it; but
there is no space to go into that here.
If, however, the ego is constituted by such a
dualistic way of thinking, it means that ego can die
without physical death and without consciousness
coming to an end. What makes this more than idle
speculation is that there is ample testimony to the
possibility of such ego death:
No one gets so much of God as the man who is
completely dead. (St. Gregory)
The Kingdom of God is for none but the thoroughly
dead. (Eckhart)
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Your glory lies where you cease to exist. (Ramana
Maharshi) We are in a world of generation and death,
and this world we must cast off. (William Blake)
A moving example of death and resurrection is of
course one of the sources of Western culture; but
examples are found in many religious traditions. The
problem is demythologizing these myths, extracting
the core of psychological and spiritual truth from
the accretions of dogma and superstition that all
too often obscure their meaning, in order for that
truth to spring to life again within our myth--the
technical, objectifying language of modern science
(in this instance, psychology). Blake's quotation
(from The Vision of the Last Judgment) points the
way because it implies that we are not seeing
clearly but projecting when we perceive the world in
terms of the dualistic categories of birth and
death.
Precisely that claim is central to the Buddhist
tradition. "Why was I born if it wasn't forever?"
bemoaned Ionesco; the answer is in the anaatman "no
self" doctrine, according to which we cannot die
because we were never born. Anaatma is the "middle
way" between the extremes of eternalism (the self
survives death) and annihilationism (the self is
destroyed at death). Buddhism resolves the problem
of life-and-death by deconstructing it. The
evaporation of this dualistic way of thinking
reveals what is prior to it. There are many names
for this "prior," but it is surely significant that
one of the most common is "the unborn."
In the Pali Canon, what are perhaps the two most
famous descriptions of nirvaa.na both refer to "the
unborn," where "neither this world nor the other,
nor coming, going, or standing, neither death nor
birth, nor sense objects are to be found."
There is, O monks, an unborn, an unbecome, an
unmade, an unconditioned; if, O monks, there were
not here this unborn, unbecome, unmade,
unconditioned, there would not here be an escape
from the born, the become, the made, the
conditioned. But because there is an
unborn,...therefore there is an escape from the
born....(26)
Similar claims are common in Mahaayaana scriptures
and commentaries. The most important term in
Mahaayaana is 'suunyataa, "emptiness, " and the
adjectives most used to explain 'suunyataa are
"unborn, " "uncreated, " and "unproduced." The
best-known Mahaayaana scripture, the laconic Heart
Sutra, explains that all things are 'suunya because
they are "not created, not annihilated, not impure,
and not pure, not increasing and not decreasing."
This is echoed by Naagaarjuna in the preface to his
Muulamadhyamikakaarikaas, which uses eight negations
to describe the true nature of things: they do not
die and are not born they do not cease to be and are
not eternal, they are not the same and are not
different, they do not come and do not go.
Moving from India to China, we read in the "Song
of Enlightenment" of Yung-chia, a disciple of the
sixth Ch'an patriarch: "Since I abruptly realized
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the unborn, I have had no reason for joy or sorrow
at any honor or disgrace." That "all things are
perfectly resolved in the Unborn" was the great
realization and later the central teaching of the
seventeenth-century Japanese Zen master Bankei:
"When you dwell in the Unborn itself, you're
dwelling at the very wellhead of Buddhas and
patriarchs." The Unborn is the Buddha-mind, and this
Buddha-mind is beyond living and dying.(27)
These passages (many more could be added) are
important because, although it may not be clear what
"the unborn" refers to, in each case it is an
immediate experience that is being described (or at
least claimed) , rather than a philosophical
conjecture about the nature of reality. For a case
which combines personal experience with
philosophical acumen, we shall turn to Japan's
foremost Zen master and philosopher, Dogen.
For Buddhism, the dualism between life and death
is only one instance of a more general problem,
dualistic thinking. Why is dualistic thinking a
problem? We differentiate between good and evil,
success and failure, life and death, and so forth
because we want to keep the one and reject the
other. But we cannot have one without the other
because they are interdependent: affirming one half
also maintains the other. Living a "pure" life thus
requires a preoccupation with impurity, and our hope
for success will be proportional to our fear of
failure. We discriminate between life and death in
order to affirm one and deny the other, and, as we
have seen, our tragedy lies in the paradox that
these two opposites are so interdependent: there is
no life without death and--what we are more likely
to overlook--there is no death without life. This
means our problem is not death but life-and-death.
At issue are the boundaries of the self as a
symbolized entity, and for that issue the end and
the beginning are of a piece. There is a clear sense
of the relationship between awareness of death and a
delineated self. The second is impossible without
the first. Even prior to the disturbing syllogism,
"If death exists, then I will die," there is an
earlier one: "Since 'I' was born and will die, 'I'
must exist." (Lifton)(28)
There is an implication here which Lifton does not
consider: If we can realize that there is no
delineated ego-self which is alive now, the problem
of life-and-death is solved. And such is the
Buddhist goal: to experience that which cannot die
because it was never born. If our minds have created
this dualism, they should be able to un-create or
deconstruct it. This is not a devious intellectual
trick which claims to solve the problem logically,
while leaving our anguish as deep as before. The
examples above make it clear that we are referring
to an experience, not some conceptual understanding.
It can be no coincidence that the praj~naapaaramitaa
scriptures of Mahaayaana also repeatedly emphasize
that there are no sentient beings.
The Buddha: "Subhuuti, what do you think? You should
not say that the Tathaagata has this thought: `I
should liberate living beings.' Subhuuti, you should
not think so. Why? Because there are really no
living beings whom the
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Tathaagata can liberate. If there were, the
Tathaagata would hold (the concept of) an ego, a
personality, a being and a life. Subhuuti, (when)
the Tathaagata speaks of an ego, there is in reality
no ego, although common men think so. Subhuuti, the
Tathaagata says common men are not, but are
(expediently) called, common men.(29)
This gives us the context we need to understand
the cryptic remarks of Dogen. His most important
comments on birth and death are found in three
fascicles of the Shobogenzo. First, from Shoji,
"Birth and Death":
Just understand that birth-and-death is itself
nirvana. There is nothing such as birth and death to
be avoided; there is nothing such as nirvana to be
sought. Only when you realize this are you free from
birth and death....
It is a mistake to suppose that birth turns into
death. Birth is a phase that is an entire period of
itself, with its own past and future. For this
reason, in buddha-dharma birth is understood as
no-birth. Death is a phase that is an entire period
of itself, with its own past and future. For this
reason, death is understood as no-death....
In birth there is nothing but birth and in death
there is nothing but death. Accordingly, when birth
comes, face and actualize birth, and when death
comes, face and actualize death. Do not avoid them
or desire them.
From Shinjin-gakudo, "Body-and-Mind Study of the
Way":
Not abandoning birth, you see death. Not
abandoning death, you see birth. Birth does not
hinder death. Death does not hinder birth.
Death is not the opposite of birth; birth is not
the opposite of death.
The following passage from Genjo-koan, "Actualizing
the Fundamental Point," connects birth-and-death
with time:
Firewood becomes ash, and it does not become
firewood again. Yet, do not suppose that the ash is
future and the firewood past. You should understand
that firewood abides in the phenomenal expression of
firewood, which fully includes past and future and
is independent of past and future. Ash abides in the
phenomenal expression of ash, which fully includes
future and past. Just as firewood does not become
firewood again after it is ash, you do not return to
birth after death.
This being so, it is an established way in
buddha-dharma to deny that birth turns into death.
Accordingly, birth is understood as no-birth. It is
an unshakeable teaching in Buddha's discourse that
death does not turn into birth. Accordingly, death
is understood as no-death.
Birth is an expression complete this moment.
Death is an expression complete this moment. They
are like winter and spring. You do not call winter
the beginning of spring, nor summer the end of
spring.(30)
What is Dogen saying in these passages? (1)
Enlightenment is not other than birth-and-death.
Dogen does not offer the consolation of a heaven or
anywhere else "transcendental"--nor even the usual
Buddhist hope of rebirth (although he does not deny
that possibility). We cannot escape birth and death,
but there is liberation in or rather as
birth-and-death if we realize something about them.
(2) Birth and death are not opposites. Birth is
nothing but birth, death is
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nothing but death: face and actualize them, says
Dogen. "Do not avoid them or desire them." Do not
grasp at one and try to push the other away. His
solution is not a denial of life and death but a
complete affirmation of them very different from our
usual way of resigning ourselves to them. Does this
deny what was said earlier about the interdependence
of life and death? To criticize the fact that life
and death are opposites for us is another way of
pointing out the problem with dualistic thinking.
The interpenetration of those opposites means I live
my life paralyzed by the dread of death, and I
experience my death clinging to the scraps of life
that are being torn from my grasp. When life and
death are not experienced as opposites they will not
"hinder" each other in this way.
(3) Then birth is no-birth, death is no-death.
When there is nothing but death---no repulsion from
it nor seeking after it--then death is experienced
as no-death. Dogen correlates this with an
alternative way of experiencing time, a present
"which fully includes future and past." Our flight
from death takes the form of trying to make
ourselves real in time, as something that will
persist through time; I must accept my death in
order to experience the true nature of the now which
is outside time. In that now birth is no-birth
because no ego-self is ever born: if no "I" is ever
born then there is only the act of birth, but if
there is only the act of birth then there is really
no birth. Instead, the act of birth in itself and
(in exactly the same way) the act of death in itself
become lacking-nothing manifestations of...of what?
We have already referred to "the unborn"; another
common term is "Buddhanature"---but now we are in
danger of falling back into postulating something
like a soul. So perhaps it is better not to call
them a manifestation of anything, since the point is
that each act is realized to be complete and whole
in itself when not experienced in relation to
something else.
But something does come to an end: the attempt
at self-reflexivity that constitutes the ego. If the
ego-self is an act whereby consciousness tries to
grab hold of itself and objectify
itself--delusively, since consciousness can never do
so, and so it only ends up
self-paralyzed--unmediated experience "of" the
Unborn is the final shipwreck of that project. The
problem is resolved at its source. The "ridgepole"
of ego-self which has been trying to make itself
real by identifying with one thing or another in the
objective world collapses. In terms of
life-versus-death, the ego-self forecloses on its
greatest anxiety by letting go and dying right now.
"Die before you die, so that when you come to die
you will not have to die," as the Sufi saying puts
it. Of course, if the ego is really a
construct--composed of automatized, mutually
reinforcing ways of thinking, feeling, and
acting--it can't really die, yet it can evaporate in
the sense that these cease to recur. But insofar as
these constitute our basic psychological defenses
against the world, this letting go is not going to
be easy. It means giving up my most cherished ways
of thinking about myself
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(notice the reflexivity), which are what I think I
am, to stand naked and exposed. No wonder it is
called the Great Death.
Earlier J suggested that a sense-of-lack is the
inescapable shadow of the sense-of-self, and that
the "purest" form of that lack is unprojected
anxiety, which, because it has no object to defend
itself against, gnaws on the sense-of-self. We find
support for this in the conclusion to The Concept of
Anxiety, where Kierkegaard defines the paradox that,
if there is to be an end to anxiety, it can be found
only in anxiety. Understood and experienced in the
right way, anxiety is a school that roots out
everything finite and petty in us, and then leads us
wherever we want to go. The way to resolve the
problem of anxiety is to become completely anxious:
to let groundless anxiety devour all those "finite
ends" with which I have attempted to secure myself;
until, having no more attachments to chew on, it
gnaws me to nothing.
The curriculum of this school is possibility,
"the weightiest of all categories." No matter what
tragedies actually befall us, they are always far
lighter than what could happen. When a person
"graduates from the school of possibility,...he
knows better than a child knows his ABCs that he can
demand absolutely nothing of life and that the
terrible, perdition, and annihilation live next door
to every man...."(31) It is an exercise in
awareness: dredging up all the big and small
securities we have hedged around us and then
"forgotten," until we found ourselves in a safe but
constricted little world. Consciousness of what
could happen at any moment deconstructs this
comfortable cocoon by reminding us, at every moment,
of our mortality; in psychoanalytic terms, this
demolishes one's unconscious power linkages or
supports.(32) "He who sank in possibility...sank
absolutely, but then in turn he emerged from the
depth of the abyss lighter than all the troublesome
and terrible things in life." Such a person no
longer fears fate, "because the anxiety within him
has already fashioned fate and has taken away from
him absolutely all that any fate could take away."
Usually a large part of our mental activity is
structured by the need to have reassuring boltholes,
where we flee when our self-esteem is threatened. If
I lose a chess game to an opponent with a much lower
rating, I automatically compensate: for I am really
the better player, as my rating shows. Each of us
finds his own ways of rationalizing the more serious
shortcomings of his life. Fixed by repetition, the
web of these and other automatizations constitutes
my character, and therefore my unfreedom: all the
ways in which I habitually run away from open
encounter with the world. For Buddhism as well as
Kierkegaard, I must let go of these thought props,
which is to suffer. Without these defenses to
self-esteem, I die a thousand little ego deaths-or
walk on the edge of a thousand swords, to use the
Zen metaphor. My example is trivial compared to the
postgraduate school of possibilities that
Kierkegaard describes, but the process of ego
deconstruction is the same. In Kierkegaard's
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terms, our thought props, of whatever sort, are the
finitudes which must be rooted out to reveal the
infinitude that is our true ground.
In a classic passage from the Genjo-koan
fascicle just quoted, Dogen describes the result of
this process:
To study the buddha way is to study the self. To
study the self is to forget the self. To forget the
self is to be actualized by myriad things. When
actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as
well as the bodies and minds of others drop away. No
trace of realization remains, and this no-trace
continues endlessly.(33)
Meditation is learning to "forget" the self by
allowing oneself to be absorbed into the meditation
object (mantra, and so forth). If the ego-self is
the result of consciousness attempting to reflect
back upon itself in order to grasp itself,
meditation is an exercise in de-reflection.
Enlightenment or liberation occurs the moment that
the usually automatized reflexivity of consciousness
ceases, which is experienced as a letting go and
falling back into the void.(34) Suddenly
consciousness stops trying to catch itself, stops
trying to make itself real. I become nothing, and
discover that I am everything--or, more precisely,
that I can be anything. When I no longer strive to
make myself real through things, I find myself
actualized by them.
Needless to say, this cannot save the body from
aging and rotting; then does this realization really
solve our problem? It does, because, contrary to
what Becker says, what we really seek is not
immortality. The Buddhist analysis of the "empty"
ego-self implies that death is actually not our
deepest fear and the desire to become immortal is
not our deepest hope, for they, too, are symptoms
that represent something else. What do they
symbolize? --the desire of the sense-of-self to
become a real self, to transform its anguished lack
of being into genuine being. Even the terror of
death, with all its anguish, represses something,
for that terror is preferable to facing my lack of
being now, for death fear at least allows us to
project the problem into the future. In that way we
avoid facing what we are (or are not) right now.
One way to approach this is to reflect on
whether immortality--the actuality of an existence
that never ended--could really satisfy us. As much
as we may fear death, is ceaseless life really the
solution? Many have suspected that, like "the
immortal" in Borges' story of the same title, our
existence would sooner or later--and probably
sooner--become a burden, unless we also discovered a
meaning system to place it in, a cosmology wherein
we had both home and role. As the interminable
succession of centuries kept undermining all my
futile reality projects, what anguish would
accumulate! Mere immortality would become unbearable
as soon as I no longer craved it. As with other
symbolic (because repressed) games, victory cannot
satisfy me if it is really something else I want.
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This implies that our ultimate hunger is
spiritual or "ontological" (Ken Wilber): it can be
satisfied by nothing less than becoming real, which
in the nondualist terms of Mahaayaana (and Advaita
Vedaanta) means real-izing that my mind is actually
nondual with the whole universe, nothing other than
the universe, which is possible if the core of my
ego-consciousness is "hollow, " groundless. This
reduces our striving for immortality to a symptom,
the more common symbolic way that this unrecognized
spiritua thirst surfaces into our consciousness; and
death becomes a "complex symbol" (Charles Wahl)
representing the feared failure of this reality
project, but also a catchall for all the ugly,
negative, tragic aspects of existence that we cannot
cope with and so project as the Shadow of Life
generally.
Why do we need to keep projecting ourselves into
the future, unless something is felt to be lacking
now? The obvious answer is that we are afraid of
losing something then that we have now; but many
have found this unpersuasive, replying that if life
is not something we have but something we are,
there's nothing to fear because we shall not be
around to notice (what) we're missing. Epicurus
stoically claimed that "the most horrible of all
evils, death, is nothing to us, for when we exist,
death is not present; but when death is present,
then we are not." Otto Fenichel followed Freud in
doubting whether there is such a thing as a normal
fear of death: the idea of my own death is
subjectively inconceivable; therefore it must cover
other unconscious ideas. The Buddhist perspective is
that if nothing is lacking now, then immortality
loses its compulsion as the way to resolve lack, and
whether or not we survive physical death in some
form becomes, if not irrelevant, at least not the
main point.
Parmenides said that the real is timeless; we
may add that it is timeless because it doesn't lack
anything. As long as I yearn for immortality I am
still trying to run away from my shadow-sense that
something is wrong with me now. In this way we are
led to consider time. To make a Buddhist point in
psychoanalytic terms, our choice is between a
repressed metaphysics which disguises itself as the
objective, commonsense temporal system we normally
place ourselves within, or a more explicit approach
which brings the repressed back into consciousness
and allows us to see how we ourselves have
constructed the time schema that now constricts us.
As so many philosophers have noted, "time is
generated by the mind's restlessness, its stretching
out to the future, its projects, and its negation of
'the present state'."(35) Pascal noticed why we do
not rest satisfied with the present: "because the
present is generally painful to us." Brown calls
time "a schema for the expiation of guilt,"(36)
which in Buddhist terms becomes: time is created by
our futile attempts to fill in our sense of lack.
Purposiveness means that we are more concerned with
the remote future results of our actions than with
their own quality or their immediate effects on
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our own environment. The "purposive" man is always
trying to secure a spurious and delusive immortality
for his acts by pushing his interest in them forward
into time. (John Maynard Keynes)37
If even our "purposive" preoccupation with the
future is a reflex of death terror (and nonbeing
terror), no wonder we are so obsessively busy.
I conclude by briefly considering the
implications of this for Heidegger's Being and Time.
It can hardly be coincidental that Being and Time
presents essentially the same relations among death,
self, guilt, and time that we have outlined--but
completely inverted. Heidegger ofCers a mirror image
of the psychoanalytic view just discussed, and from
that he naturally draws the opposite conclusions.
Perhaps the key metaphor in Being and Time is
the need to "pull oneself together" out of the
dispersion and disconnectedness of everyday,
inauthentic existence, in which we are liable to be
distracted by whatever the moment offers. But this
image needs to be complemented by another one: the
person so driven by his life project that he is
never where he is because he is always busy going
somewhere else--usually clawing his way up the
ladder of success. Today, at least, such people are
just as familiar to us as the dispersed people
Heidegger finds inauthentic, and as a solution to
the problem of life this is just as one-sided.
This is where Heidegger, too, needs to be
supplemented, if not corrected, by a
psychoanalytic/Buddhist approach. We have seen that
repression can also appear as the compulsiveness of
the person who must become wealthy, or famous, or
even a "word-historical hero"-pardon me, thinker.
How "authentic" is this "resoluteness, " if it
involves an attempt to escape death through an
unconscious symbolic immortality project? We have
seen that even preoccupation with the future can be
a reflex of death terror, an unconscious and
therefore compulsive attempt to transcend death
symbolically. That is the trap that Heidegger
himself fails to guard against, and which he himself
may have fallen into. Becker and others have argued
convincingly that Freud never analyzed his own fear
of death, and for that reason psychoanalysis became
for him his own private "immortality project," which
is one reason why he reacted so strongly against any
perceived threat to his own patriarchy. Is there not
some philosophical bravado detectable in Heidegger's
call for resoluteness and in his eagerness to
contend "violently" against our tendency to let the
meaning of Being be "covered up" and obscured?" One
senses that he, at least, hoped to fill up his own
sense of lack by becoming a "world-historical
thinker" who finally reveals th~ true nature of
Being to a grateful posterity.
For Heidegger, anticipatory resoluteness
cultivates death as not-to-beforgotten possibility.
Such resolution, activated by the call of conscience
which reveals the "lack" of my groundlessness, pulls
me together out of my
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dispersion in chance possibilities and illumines my
being as care. All these issues finally come down to
the nature of time (the condition of care), which
reveals itself to be the Being that Heidegger seeks,
or as close to it as we can get: in Being and Time,
"to be" means to appear according to the temporal
"ecstasies" of past, present, and especially future.
In Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Heidegger
criticizes Kant for recoiling from much the same
realization, in the first edition of The Critique of
Pure Reason, that temporality is the source not only
of pure intuition but also of the categories of the
understanding. Yet we may make a similar critique of
Heidegger, for he himself never asks what generates
time. Well, one must stop somewhere, but the irony
is that Heidegger's own analysis provides the
answer: it merely needs to be read backward in order
to realize that time is "a schema for the expiation
of guilt" (Brown).
It comes down to whether Heidegger's two
possible ways of experiencing time, inauthentic and
authentic, truly exhaust the possibilities. With
inauthentic life, scattered by the distractions of
everyday affairs, we experience and understand time
as an interminable sequence of "nows" that
consecutively arise and pass away. These "nows" have
been "leveled off," each shorn of its intrinsic
relations with the others so that they simply follow
each other. One's attention is caught, now by this,
then by that, because in this dispersal there is
nothing to hold these "nows" together--which means
there is nothing to hold one's life together. But
this is inauthentic, for such a leveling-off is
caused by repression--in Heidegger's terms, it is "a
fleeing which covers up," "a fleeing in the face of
death."(39)
Authentic temporality, which "temporalizes
itself primarily in terms of the future, " is
revealed only in resoluteness. Resoluteness pulls
the present out of its dispersal on objects of
immediate concern and holds it firmly in the future
and the past; this gives us the authentic present,
which Heidegger terms Augenblick, "the Moment." In
this way Heidegger conceives of our supposedly
irreducible "now-moment" as something which can be
understood only in terms of something else even more
basic: the "stretching along" of futureoriented
temporality. "The 'now' is not pregnant with the
'not-yet-now', but the Present arises from the
future in the primordial ecstatical unity of the
temporalizing of temporality."(40)
But what if there is a "now" which is pregnant
with the "not-yet-now"? The nunc stans or "standing
now" of medieval philosophy has traditionally been
offered as such an alternative, but Heidegger
casually dismisses this possibility in a footnote:
eternity conceived as a nunc stans has been derived
from the ordinary (that is, inauthentic) way of
understanding time and as such does not need to be
discussed in detail.(41) This forecloses for him the
possibility of any third conception of time: our
choice is between the inauthentic, vulgar"
experience of the present as a uniform series of
leveled-off "nows," and an authentic temporality
which pulls us and those scattered "nows" together
by
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resolute projection into the future. With this
Heidegger believed that he himself had resolutely
wrested the authentic nature of time from the veils
of the common "vulgar" interpretation. But does his
authentic temporality amount to another version of
the vulgar veil? The problem with both of
Heidegger's alternatives is that both are
preoccupied with the future because in different
ways both are reactions to the possibility of death;
thus both are ways of running away from the present.
Inauthentic existence scattered into a series of
disconnected nows is "a fleeing in the face of
death"; authentic life pulled out of this dispersal
by the inevitable possibility of death is more aware
of its impending death, but still driven by it. This
means that neither experiences the present for what
it is in itself, but only through the shadow that
the inescapable future casts over it. What the
present might be without that shadow is not
considered in Being and Time. For that, we must
return to Buddhism.
APPENDIX
DEATH --> SELF --> CARE --> TIME
Becker:
Mentally ill: terror of death->damage to ego
structure-> paralysis, partial (neurosis) or full
(psychosis) ->disintegration of objective time
schema.
Normal: denial of death -> repression of fear by
"healthy" ego structure -> transference, symbolic
immortality projects->necessity of objective time
schema to expiate guilt.
Heidegger(42):
Inauthentic: flight from death->dispersal of
self->distraction by everyday affairs->"vulgar" time
as a series of leveled-off passing moments.
Authentic: awareness of death->pulling of self
together, acceptance of guilt->authentic care:
anticipatory resoluteness->care grounded in
authentic temporality; past and present united by
concern with future.
Buddhism:
Deluded: intuition of groundlessness, unconscious
fear of nonbeing-> sense of lack at core manifesting
as death fear, anxiety, and so forth->various
attachments, projects to make ego-self
real->subject-object dualism: sense-of-self striving
to real-ize itself in projected spatiotemporal
world.
Enlightened: the Great (Ego) Death: "letting go,"
evaporation of sense-of-self and collapse back into
Emptiness->grounding in groundlessness: "from the
very beginning, nothing was ever lacking" ->
freedom: no subjective need to real-ize self, thus
an ability to respond appropriately to situation ->
now (Dogen's being-time) outside time; nonduality of
self and world.
NOTES
1. Among the works that I am familiar with, Ken
Wilber's The Atman Project (Wheaten, Illinois:
Quest, 1980) and Up from Eden (Boulder, Colorado:
Shambhala, 1981) are the most interesting.
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2. For the origins of the "existential analytic"
movement, including a selection of influential
papers, see Rollo May et al., eds., Existence (New
York: Basic Books, 1958).
3. Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York:
Free Press, 1973) and Escape from Evil (New York:
Free Press, 1975) (the second was unfinished at his
death); Irvin D. Yalom, Existential Psychotherapy
(New York: Basic Books, 1980); Norman O. Brown, Life
Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History
(New York: Vintage, 1961).
4. "We admire most the courage to face death; we
give such valor our highest and most constant
adoration; it moves us deeply in our hearts because
we have doubts about how brave we ourselves would
be" (Denial of Death, pp. 11-12). Becker points out
that war is a ritual for the emergence of heroes
(Escape from Evil, p. 109), but today sports plays
that role: it has become the main way that we
produce and admire heroes.
5. Becker, Denial of Death, p. 96.
6. Yalom, Existential Psychotherapy, p. 41.
Yalom devotes half of his book to discussing it.
7. Becker, Denial of Death, p. 26.
8. Ibid., pp. 27, 29, 60, 66; Becker, Escape
from Evil, p. 163; Pascal's Pensees no. 414.
9. Becker, Denial of Death, p. 55.
10. Ibid., p. 49.
11. Philippe Aries, The Hour of Our Death
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), p. 606.
12. Another example of this phenomenon is money,
but unfortunately there is no space here to go into
Brown's and Becker's brilliant analyses. See Brown,
Life Against Death, chap. 15 ("Filthy Lucre"), and
Becker, Escape from Evil, chap. 6 ("Money: The New
Universal Immortality Ideology").
13. Yalom, Existential Psychotherapy, p. 222. A
similar realization--that the ego not only
represses, but represses the fact that it
represses--was a turning point in Freud's career,
deflecting his investigations from the nature of the
repressed to the nature of repressing.
14. For an analysis of subject-object dualism,
see David Loy, Nonduality: A Study in Comparative
Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).
15. Becker, Escape from Evil, p. 158.
16. Ibid., pp. 28, 32. This was the reason for
the gods and for their later visible counterparts,
kings. They existed in order for the debt to be
payable, to receive the sacrifices which
periodically expiated the guilt and kept the
universe working.
17. Sigmund Freud, An Autobiographical Study
(London: Hogarth, 1946), quoted in Becker, Denial of
Death, p. 147; Denial of Death, pp. 129, 146-152.
18. Becker, Escape from Evil, pp. 132, 166.
Examples in contemporary American politics are not
hard to think of.
19. Becker, Denial of Death, p. 158.
20. Ibid., p. 55.
21. Brown, Life Against Death, p. 113.
22. Quoted in Robert Jay Lifton, The Broken
Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life (New
York: Basic Books, 1983), p. 223. On p. 227, Lifton
quotes Harold Searles, who was struck by the fact
that the "very mundane, universal factor of human
mortality" seems to be a major source of anxiety in
"this overtly most exotic of psychopathological
processes": people "became...and long remained
schizophrenic...in order to avoid facing...the fact
that life is finite." As William Burroughs said, a
paranoid is a man who knows a little of what's going
on.
23. Becker, Denial of Death, pp. 181-182
(quoting Roy D. Waldman), p. 66 (my emphasis).
24. Brown, Life Against Death, p. 270.
25. Aries, The Hour of Our Death, p. 333.
26. Udaana 6; 7:1-3 (my italics in the first).
27. Norman Waddell, ed. and trans., The Unborn:
The Life and Teachings of Zen Master Bankei (San
Francisco: North Point Press, 1984), pp. 47, 52, 55.
28. Lifton, The Broken Connection, p. 69.
29. Vajracchedika-Praj~naa-Paaramitaa Sutra
("Diamond Sutra"), trans. Charles Luk (Hong Kong:
Buddhist Book distributor, n.d.), p. 20 (Luk's
parentheses).
30. Moon in a Dewdrop: Writings of Zen Master
Dogen, ed. Kazuaki Tanahashi (San Francisco: North
Point Press, 1985), pp. 74-75, 93-94, 70-71.
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31. Unless otherwise noted, all the references
in this section are from Soren Kierkegaard, The
Concept of Dread, trans. Waiter Lowrie (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1957), pp. 155-162.
32. Becker, Denial of Death, p. 89.
33. Moon in a Dewdrop, p. 70. Ramana Maharshi
made the same point: "There will come a time when
you must forget all that you have learnt."
34. "Men are afraid to forget their minds,
fearing to fall through the Void with nothing to
stay their fall. They do not know that the Void is
not really void, but the realm of the real Dharma."
(The Zen Teaching of Huang Po, trans. and ed. John
Blofeld (London: Buddhist Society, 1958), p. 41.
35. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (New
York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), vol. 1, p.
45.
36. Brown, Life Against Death, p. 277.
37. John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Persuasion
(New York: Harcourt Brace, 1932), p. 370.
38. Later, of course, after his Kehre "turning,"
Heidegger's attitude changed markedly.
39. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans.
John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York:
Harper and Row, 1962), pp. 474, 477.
40. Ibid., pp, 476, 479. Cf. J. L. Mehta, The
Philosophy of Martin Heidegger (Varanasi, India:
Banaras Hindu University Press, 1967), p. 281.
41. Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 499, note
xiii.
42. This schema seems to put Heidegger on the
same footing as the other two, but his conception is
opposite because for him the arrows symbolize a
different process. For Becker and Buddhism the
arrows refer to mental construction: for example,
the psychoanalytic need to repress death terror
leads to the creation of symbolic immortality
projects, and the Buddhist view of self as sense of
lack leads to various projects to make ourselves
real. But for Heidegger, resolute care is based on
authentic, future-oriented temporality. This means
that, with Becker and Buddhism, our mental condition
creates its corresponding temporality, but for
Heidegger the sense-of-self is grounded in
temporality.