TRYING TO BECOME REAL: A Buddhist Critique of Some Secular Heresies
by David R. Loy
International Philosphical Quarterly
Volume 32,Number 4
December 1992
pp.403-425
403
If one looks with a cold eye at the mess man has made of his
history, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that he has been
afflicted by some built-in mental disorder which drives him
towards self-destruction. (Koestler)
"Madness is something rare in individuals," said Nietzsche, "but in
groups, parties, peoples, ages it is the rule." A century so full of
war, revolution, genocide and now ecological suicide testifies to the
truth of this but has yet to understand it. Is it because our self-
destructive disorder is built-in, as Koestler speculates, or do we
build it into ourselves, by collectively repressing and projecting
mental processes that we haven't been able to cope with more
consciously? If history is a nightmare from which we're trying to
awaken, perhaps that nightmare began as a daydream more attractive
than reality -- until the dream took a life of its own and an ugly
turn, as we became objectified by our own objectifications. Then the
key to this puzzle is why we prefer daydreaming to waking up, and that
brings us to duhkha, the Buddhist concept of "dis-ease".
In trying to understand the Buddhist claim that "life is duhkha"
we can benefit from the psychoanalytic concept of repression and "the
return of the repressed" in symbolic form. Freud always emphasized
that repression is the foundation-stone of psychoanalysis which
underlies the whole edifice. If something (a mental wish, according to
Freud) makes me uncomfortable and I do not want to cope with it
consciously, I can 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 to resist the repressed idea and
keep it out of consciousness, yet (the real rub) what has been
repressed tends to return to consciousness anyway, as a symptom which
is therefore symbolic. What is not consciously admitted into awareness
irrupts in obsessive ways that affect consciousness with precisely
those qualities it strives to exclude. Freud traced the neuroses of
his Viennese patients back to repressed sexuality and concluded that
sexual repression is our primal repression -- although, like many of
us, his attention gradually shifted from sex to death as he aged.
Recently many existential psychologists have followed him there,
to conclude that consciousness of death is our primary repression.
This is much closer to what Buddhism implies, and many of its
implications will be adopted in what follows, but there is still a
significant difference. The Buddhist claim that the self is
insubstantial suggests that even death-denial re-presents something
else more immediately terrifying: the quite valid suspicion that "I"
don't really exist. Buddhism analyzes the sense-of-self into sets of
impersonal mental and physical
404
phenomena, whose interaction creates the illusion of self-
consciousness--i.e., that consciousness is the attribute of a self.
This transforms Freud's Oedipal complex into what Norman Brown calls
an Oedipal project: the never-ending attempt to become father of
oneself -- that is, one's own origin. The child wants to conquer death
by becoming the creator and sustainer of his own life. The Oedipal
project is the attempt of the developing sense-of- self to become
autonomous, like Descartes' supposedly self-sufficient consciousness.
It is the quest to deny one's groundlessness by becoming one's own
ground: the ground (so-cially conditioned and maintained but
nonetheless illusory) of being an independent person.
If this is what happens, the Oedipal project derives from our
intuition that self-consciousness is not something obviously
"self-existing" but a mental construct. Rather than being
self-sufficient, consciousness is more like the surface of the sea:
dependent on unknown depths that it cannot grasp because it is a
manifestation of them. The problem arises when this conditioned
consciousness wants to ground itself--i.e., to make itself real. If
the sense-of-self is a construct, it can real-ize itself only by
objectifying itself in some fashion in the world. The ego-self is this
continuing attempt to objectify oneself which would amount to grasping
oneself, something consciousness can no more do than a hand can grasp
itself.
The consequence of this perpetual failure is that the
sense-of-self always has, as its inescapable shadow, a sense-of-lack,
which it always tries to escape. In deconstructive terms, the
ineluctable trace of nothingness in our being, of death in our life,
is a feeling of lack. The psychoanalytic concept of "the return of the
repressed" in the distorted form of a symptom shows us how to link
this basic yet hopeless project with the symbolic ways we try to make
ourselves real in the world. We experience this deep sense of lack as
the feeling that "there is something wrong with me," but that feeling
can manifest, and we can respond to it, in many different ways. In its
"purer" forms lack appears as guilt or anxiety that becomes almost
unbearable because it gnaws on one's very core. For that reason
anxiety is eager to objectify into fear of something, because then we
know what to do: we have ways to defend ourselves against feared
things.
The problem with objectifications, however, is that no object can
ever satisfy if it's not really an object we want. When we don't
understand what is actually motivating us--because what we think we
want is only a symptom of something else (according to Buddhism, our
desire to become real)--we end up compulsive. Then the neurotic's
anguish and despair are not the result of his symptoms but their
source; those symptoms are necessary to shield him from the tragedies
that the rest of us are better at repressing: death, meaninglessness,
groundlessness. Likewise, the guilt that bedevils our lives is less
the cause of our unhappiness than 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."(1) (Brown) From the Buddhist perspective, if
the autonomy of self-consciousness is a delusion which can never quite
shake off its
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1.Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of
History (New York: Vintage, 1961), p.270. "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" (Ernest Becker, The Denial of
Death [New York: T
485
shadow-feeling that "something is wrong with me," it will need to
rationalize that sense of inadequacy somehow. Without a religious
means of absolution, modern man usually experiences his lack as "I
don't yet have enough; I must get more." This paper explores some of
the forms that flight-into-the-future takes.
All this seems to suggest conservative political and economic
conclusions: reformers are projecting their own lack when they see the
shortcomings that require radical solutions. Yet the element of truth
in that yields to something of greater consequence: our individual
lacks collectively objectified in social structures that return the
favor and objectify us. Holderlin said that what makes the state a
hell on earth is that man tries to make it his heaven. In lack terms,
that becomes: by trying to resolve our sense-of-lack collectively, we
have compounded the problem; and such compounded lack-objectifications
assume more of a life of their own. We need to see how our personal
senses of lack plug into the collective unconscious of our social
behavior and institutions.
This paper offers a new perspective on secular modernity by
arguing that four historically- conditioned forms of delusion (and
craving) are attempts to resolve such lack: the desire for fame, the
love of romantic love, the money complex, and humanity's collective
"Oedipal project" of technological development. These four tendencies
are not bound to any particular time and place, of course, but it can
hardly be a coincidence that they began to gain special importance at
the time Christianity began to decline. Burckhardt, Huizinga and Aries
each noticed a striking increase in death-preoccupation at the end of
the medieval era. (2) In psychoanalytic terms, such an increase in
death-anxiety requires stronger psychic devices to cope with it. In
lack terms, the stronger sense-of-self that began to develop then must
have been shadowed by a stronger sense-of-lack, leading to greater
need to real-ize this self and more radical attempts to do so.
The pursuit of fame and money are attempts to real-ize oneself
through symbols; romantic love tries to fill in one's lack with the
beloved; technological progress has become our collective attempt to
ground ourselves by transforming the environment into our ground,
until the whole earth testifies to our reality. As long as there was a
truly catholic church providing an agreed, socially-maintained means
to cope with lack, such projects were not spiritually necessary. Here
we can benefit from Nagarjuna's denial of any difference between
samsara and nirvana. If we do not presuppose the usual difference
between secular and sacred, we can see the same religious drive
operating in each case: the conscious or unconscious urge to resolve
our sense of lack. To the extent that these four are motivated by such
a spiritual need, they may be considered "secular heresies." Since
they cannot fulfill that need, they tend to spin out of control and
become demonic. The secular/sacred dualism seems important insofar as
we are wary of materialistic and psychologistic reductionism, but
there is another way to understand their nonduality. Rather than
viewing sacred as a function of secular, this
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2.Chapter 11 of Johan Huizinga's The Waning of the Middle Ages (trans.
F. Hopman [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987]) begins: "No other epoch has
laid so much stress as the expiring Middle Ages on the thought of
death. An everlasting call of memento mori resounds through life " (p.
135). But he never explicitly relates this to the beginning of chapter
2: " At the close of the Middle Ages, a sombre melancholy weighs on
people's souls. Whether we read a chronicle, a poem, a sombre
melancholy weighs on people's souls. Whether we read a chronicle, a
poem, a sermon, a legal document even, the sam impression of immense
sadness is produced by them all"(p.30).
406
paper suggests that modern worldly values (desire for fame, money,
etc.) acquire their compulsiveness from a misperceived spiritual
drive.
The conclusion briefly outlines the Buddhist solution to such
secular heresies.
1.The Fever of Renown
Because the public image comes to stand as the only valid
certification of being, the celebrity clings to his image as the
rich man clings to his money--that is, as if to life itself. (3).
"How can he be dead, who lives immortal in the hearts of men?"
mused Longfellow, bestowing on Michelangelo our highest possible
praise. "If his inmost heart could have been lain open," wrote
Hawthorne of a character in Fanshawe, "there would have been
discovered the dream of undying fame; which, dream as it is, is more
powerful than a thousand realities." More powerful, because of such a
dream is reality woven, and the nature of this dream ensures that
there is no lack of historical testimony to its power. Unfortunately,
seeing through one aspect of this delusion does not immunize us
against others. Horace warned that the race for public honors traps
men, for the urge to glory and praise ruins both wellborn and lowly:
"those who seek much, lack much." But this did not stop him from
crowing, at the end of his third ode: "I have wrought a monument more
enduring than bronze, and loftier than the royal accumulation of the
pyramids. Neither corrosive rain nor raging wind can destroy it, nor
the innumerable sequence of years nor the flight of time. I shall not
altogether die." Was Horace more vain than us, or just more frank
about his own motivations?
According to Alan Harrington, the urge for fame has one purpose:
"to achieve an imitation of divinity before witnesses." What do gods
have that we do not? Immortality, he says. The rest of us will have to
settle for a symbolic substitute, which requires witnesses. "Being
recognized before many witnesses strengthens our claim to membership
in the immortal company."(4) But Marcus Aurelius already saw the
problem with witnesses: Those that yearn for after-fame do not realize
that their successors are sure to be very much the same as the
contemporaries whom they find such a burden, and no less mortal. What
is it anyway to you if there be this or that far-off echo in their
voices, or if they have this or that opinion about you? What is the
advantage of having one's own name on the lips of future generations,
if their overriding concern will be the same as ours: to have their
name on the lips of their successors---how does that confer any
reality on us? Nagarjuna demonstrated the futility of such infinite
regresses with his argument against dependent being: if there is no
self-being there can be no dependent being either, since dependent
being requires the self-being of another. Yet we strive to become real
through the eyes of others who strive to become real through the eyes
of others who will strive.
Nonetheless, in Western secular societies belief in an afterlife
has been largely replaced by fame and the approval of posterity;
physical death may come, but
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3.Lewis H. Lapham, Money and Class in America( New York: Ballantine,
1988), p.230. "The fever of renown" is from Samuel Johnson's poem The
Vanity of Human Wishes.
4.Alan Harrington, The Immortalist (Millbrae, CA: Celestial Arts,
1977), p.112.
407
symbolic life will continue in the work. Reputation -- primarily
through public deeds -- was also paramount for the Greeks and Romans:
"a culture whose afterlife offered so little comfort to the soul was
obsessed with preserving the fame of the dead on the lips of the
living."(6) Yet, like Derrida's elusive trace, genuine heroism is
always receding if true greatness means achieving a being without a
sense-of-lack. A few generations ago, madhouses were said to be full
of Napoleons, but Napoleon was inspired by the example of Caesar,
while Caesar lamented that he hadn't accomplished as much as
Alexander, even as Alexander the Great modelled himself on Achilles...
When lack is "the origin of the origin, " such traces become
unavoidable. "If he was real, I can become real by imitating him" --
but not if his reality is a past that has never been present. Then
trying to recover the past in the future merely loses the present.
What little remains today of our discomfort with fame is a residue
of the Judeo-Christian critique of Roman standards of public glory,
for "in the wake of Jesus, public men of all sorts develop a kind of
guilty conscience about their desire for achievement in front of an
audience."(7) Christianity offered a different project to overcome
lack. The success of this project accounts for the Middle Ages as we
remember them; or, more precisely, that we remember so little about
them. If, as Hegel said, history is what man does with death -- a
record of how humankind runs away from death -- a society less
preoccupied with death will make less history. Then it is no
coincidence that at the end of the Middle Ages (when, according to
Burckhardt, Huizinga and Aries, man became more obsessed with death)
man became more obsessed with fame: "from the Renaissance until today
men have been filled with a burning ambition for fame, while this
striving that seems so natural today was unknown to medieval man."(8)
(Burckhardt) The crisis in Europe's collective religious project to
cope with lack opened the door to a proliferation of individual
projects, both secular and sacred (e.g., personal mysticism). The
Reformation worked to de-institutionalize religion by shifting from a
corporate orientation towards salvation (the Church as the body of
Christ) to a more private relationship with God. If God is first and
foremost the guarantor that our lack will be resolved, we can
understand how God may be sought symbolically on earth -- perhaps must
be, if we no longer seek him in heaven.
In his comprehensive study The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and its
History, Leo Braudy traces the modern history of fame from late
medieval glorification of the saint (e.g., St. Francis and Jeanne
d'Arc) through the painter and playwright of the Renaissance
(Michelangelo, Shakespeare) and the writer of the nineteenth century
(Byron, Dickens, Victor Hugo) to today's performer (Madonna, Michael
Jackson). It seems to be a gradual descent from sacred to secular:
saints are believed to gain their being from direct contact with God;
Dante and Milton strove to be worthy of fame; today we have
celebrities whose only claim to fame is that they are famous. Fame has
become self-justifying as an end in itself.
According to Braudy, the eighteenth century (also singled out by
Aries for its
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6.Oswyn Murray in the Times Literary Supplement, June 16, 1989, p.656;
see also Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and its History (New
York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986),pp.28, 59-60.
7.The Frenzy of Renown, pp. 56, 160.
8.Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (New
York: Macmillan, 1921), pp.139ff.
408
death-preoccupation) was a turning-point in the development of our
modern preoccupation with fame:
[I]t is difficult not to characterize the latter part of the
eighteenth century as a world in which the waning of belief in an
afterlife has bred a twin obsession with posterity and death....
In a culture where talk of the afterlife was becoming less and
less important to theology, let alone the ordinary believer, the
hope of fame on earth was part of the expectation that one might
be fulfilled, that is, recognized in one's lifetime. Hope of
heaven, hope of immediate fame, and hope of fame in posterity were
becoming difficult to distinguish.(9)
This became tied up with the belief in progress (and, later,
evolution): "The cult of progress, of growth, of achievement -- the
image of new dawns, new tomorrows, and a new sense of time so
prominent in both the American and French revolutions -- turned all
eyes to the future, where perfection and understanding would be
achieved on earth."(10) The decline in a sacred after-life was
accompanied by a rise in the importance of secular after-life, for
need to project a lack-free time somewhere in the future remained.
Diderot argued that in posterity fame will redeem one's work from the
envy of the present, much as the Christian afterlife redeems the
reputation of the virtuous from the persecutions of the wicked.
Gradually, however, this secularization of fame led to a decline
of belief even in a secular afterlife. Hazlitt noticed that the young
value posthumous fame because they don't yet believe in their own
deaths; the aged would rather have their celebrity on earth. Nowadays
it has become more difficult to believe in the future, so we prefer
our fame too on the installment plan. This profanation of salvation
has eroded the distinction between "good" and "bad" fame. "How many
times do I have to kill before I get a name in the paper or some
national attention?" wrote a murderer to the Wichita police. Only with
his sixth killing, he complained, had he begun to get the publicity he
deserved. When it is believed that recognition by others is what leads
to self-fulfillment, "fame promises acceptability, even if one commits
the most heinous crime, because thereby people will finally know who
you are, and you will be saved from the living death of being
unknown."(11)
The living death of being unknown. When the "real world" becomes
what's in the newspapers or on television, to be unknown is to be
literally nothing. If the sense-of-self is internalized through social
conditioning -- i.e., if others teach me that I am real -- then the
natural tendency will be to cope with my repressed sense of unreality
by continually reassuring myself with the attention of other people.
Yet if my sense of reality is gained by others' percep-
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9.The Frenzy of Renown, p.378.
10.Ibid., p.429. "We will have to wait till the eighteenth century-for
even the Renaissance does not truly bring the idea of progress-before
men resolutely enter the path of social optimism;-only then the
perfectibility of man and society is raised to the rank of a central
dogma, and the next century will only lose the naivete of this belief,
but not the courage and optimism which it inspired" (The Waning of the
Middle Ages pp. 36,37).
11.Associated Press,12 February 1978,in The Frenzy of Renown,pp.3,
562. " How many who could distinguish themselves by nothing prais-
eworthy, strove to do so by infamous deeds! " ( Machiavelli,
Florentine History).
409
tions of me, then, no matter how appreciative that attention may be, I
will be constrained by those perceptions. "The difficulty arises when
to be free is defined by being known to be free, because then one
might be more known than free." This applies to anything that
constitutes one's claim to fame: you can't use fame without being used
by it. Part of this problem is the fan, who seeks to bask in the glory
-- the being -- radiated by his or her heroes. "The audience... is
less interested in what they [celebrities] think they 'really' are
than what role they play in the audience's continuing drama of the
meaning of human nature."(12) That drama may be dangerous, as John
Lennon, Ronald Reagan and many others have discovered.
"[T]he essential lure of the famous is that they are somehow more
real than we and that our insubstantial physical reality needs that
immortal substance for support....because it is the best, perhaps the
only, way to be." De Toqueville, visiting America in the 1830's,
noticed that democratic societies aggravate this tendency.
Aristocracies fix one's social position so everyone knows who and
where he is, but democracy engenders a need to stand out from the
crowd. Democratic man usually has no lofty ambition, de Toqueville
said; he just wants to be first at anything.(13) We academics can
readily appreciate the consequences of this: "And hence this
tremendous struggle to singularize ourselves, to survive in some way
in the memory of others and of posterity. It is this struggle, a
thousand times more terrible than the struggle for life, that gives
its tone, colour, and character to our society". (Unamuno) To make
matters worse, this struggle is not just with our contemporaries. The
heaven of fame is not very large, and the more there are who enter it
the less is the share of each. The great names of the past rob us of
our place in it; the space which they fill in the popular memory they
usurp from us who aspire to occupy it.... If additions continue to be
made to the wealth of literature, there will come a day of sifting,
and each one fears lest he be caught in the meshes of the sieve."(14)
The importance of fame as a secular salvation has become so
pervasive today that we no longer notice it, any more than a fish sees
the water it swims in. It has infiltrated all the corners of our
culture, including Christmas carols ("Then how the reindeer loved him/
As they shouted out with glee/ 'Rudolf the Red-nosed Reindeer/ You'll
go down in history!'") and spaghetti sauce bottles (See the label on
Newman's Own Spaghetti Sauce). The Guinness Book of World Records has
become one of our most important cultural icons.
From a Buddhist perspective, the struggle between fame and
anonymity is another self- defeating version of dualistic thinking. We
differentiate between good and evil, success and failure, etc., in
order to valorize one over the other. But we can't have one without
the other because they are interdependent: grasping one half also
maintains the other. So anyone who wants to live a "pure" life will be
preoccupied with (avoiding) impurity. Our hope for success is equal to
our fear of
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12.The Frenzy of Renown, pp. 589, 592, 590. Derrida on his own
Reputation: "to try to free myself from it is sometimes difficult. You
are caught in a nework of differences. Even if people are
welldisposed, even if they welcome you, it's sometimes good and bad at
the same time. It's gratifying, so to speak, and at the same time it's
threatening, because you become a prisoner of this reception"
(Salusinsky interview, p.23).
13.The Frenzy of Renown, pp.6, 461-62.
14.Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life, trans. J. E. Crawford
Flitch (London: Macmillan, 1921), pp.52.54.
410
failure. And whether we win or lose the struggle for fame, we must
internalize the dialectic between fame and "invisibility".
Just as the titles of winners are worthless unless they are
visible to others, there is a kind of antititle that attaches to
invisibility. To the degree that we are invisible we have a past
that has condemned us to oblivion. It is as though we have somehow
been overlooked, even forgotten, by our chosen audience. If it is
the winners who are presently visible, it is the losers who are
invisibly past.
As we enter into finite play -- not playfully, but seriously -- we
come before an audience conscious that we bear the antititles of
invisibility. We feel the need, therefore, to prove to them that
we are not what we think they think we are...
As with all finite play, an acute contradiction quickly develops
at the heart of this attempt. As finite players we will not enter
the game with sufficient desire to win unless we are ourselves
convinced by the very audience we intend to convince. That is,
unless we believe we actually are the losers the audience sees us
to be, we will not have the necessary desire to win. The more
negatively we assess ourselves, the more we strive to reverse the
negative judgment of others. The outcome brings the contradiction
to perfection: by proving to the audience they were wrong, we
prove to ourselves the audience was right.
Themore we are recognized to be winners, the more we know
ourselves to be losers.... No one is ever wealthy enough, honored
enough, applauded enough.(15)
The more we are applauded, the more we feel our lack: if what I
have sought for so long does not make me real, what can? "Many seek
fame because they believe it confers a reality that they lack.
Unfortunately, when they become famous themselves, they usually
discover that their sense of unreality has only increased." Why? "The
reception of the great work by the world can never satisfy the
expectations its creator had for its own fame and his own."(16) If
fame symbolizes my need to become real, such a disappointment is
inevitable: no amount of fame can satisfy me when it's really
something else I seek. Here there are two ways to go. One is
concluding that I am not yet famous enough. Then each achievement has
to top the last one, for if you're not going up you're headed down;
this tends to become demonic. The other danger with becoming famous is
that one might accomplish one's project for overcoming lack without
overcoming lack, with the effect of increasing one's anxiety about
being unreal. From a Buddhist standpoint, however, this second problem
is also a great opportunity, since it opens up the possibility of
confronting one's sense of lack more directly. Then the issue is how
one deals with that heightened sense of pure lack.
II.All You Need Is Love
Few people would fall in love had they never heard of love. (La
Rochefoucauld)
As a word, "love" means too much and therefore too little; this
section addresses only that specific and historically-conditioned form
of attraction between the sexes called romantic love (defined by
Madame de Stael as "self-love a deux"). It has been argued that this
type of love verges on the ridiculous, like a
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15.James P.Carse, Finite and Infinite Games (New York:Free Press,
1986), pp. 72-73; his italics.
16.The Frenzy of Renown, p.589.
411
man dying of starvation because he could not find any brussels
sprouts. Then why does it so seldom seem ridiculous to us? Is it
because romance has become one of the most widely accepted ways to
overcome lack?
Our eagerness for both novels and films with their identical type
of plot; the idealized eroticism that pervades our culture and
upbringing and provides the pictures that fill the background of
our lives; our desire for "escape," which a mechanical boredom
exacerbates -- everything within and about us glorifies passion.
Hence the prospect of a passionate experience has come to seem the
promise that we are about to live more fully and more intensely.
We look upon passion as a transfiguring force, something beyond
pain and delight, an ardent beatitude.(17)
This beatitude may transfigure pain but it is still dependent on it,
for we know there is nothing more fatal to passion than the completion
that brings lovers down to earth. Unless the course of true love is
hindered there is no romance: it thrives on difficulties,
misunderstandings and forced separations, which postpone the
complacency inherent in familiarity, when housekeeping emotions take
over. Such a dismal encore to ecstasy is unendurable, hence suffering
-- the literal meaning of passion -- comes to the rescue. So enmity
between the families of Romeo and Juliet is necessary to challenge
their attraction. Without it there would be no story to tell and (we
have reason to suspect) no such grand passion to begin with.
As Diotima taught Socrates, love thrives on lack -- or is it the
reverse: does our lack thrive on love? We are not unaware that passion
means suffering, but we imagine that such passion is nonetheless
exciting and vital in a way ordinary life is not. Therefore we revel
in the pain, for all pain is endurable if we can see a reason for it
and an end to it. Our formless sense of lack seeks to objectify itself
into an object lacked, which grants the possibility of a project to
gain the lacked thing.
The Greeks and Romans were not unfamiliar with romantic love, yet
for them it was the exception rather than the rule and they looked
upon it as an illness. Plutarch called love "a frenzy": "Some have
believed it was a madness.... Those who are in love must be forgiven
as though ill." Then how we have come to cherish this frenzy so
highly? If salvation through romantic love is an historically-
conditioned myth, what were its origins and why did it arise at the
time it did?
Many of the answers are found in Denis de Rougemont's classic
study Love in the Western World. It traces the myth back to the legend
of Tristan and Iseult, a tale whose origins are unknown but which
became widespread in the twelfth century, about that time of the late
Middle Ages singled out by Burckhardt and Aries as the turning-point
in man's increasing awareness of death -- in Buddhist terms,
increasing awareness of lack. De Rougemont's analysis of the legend
demonstrates that Tristan and Iseult do not love one another. They say
they don't, and everything goes to prove it. What they love is love
and being in love....Their need of one another is in order to be
aflame, and they do not need one another as they are. What they need
is not one another's presence, but one
----------------
17 Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World, trans. Montgomery
Belgion, rev. ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1956), pp.15-16. All
italics de Rougemont's.
412
another's absence."(18) If absence gives us a project to overcome
lack, presence must disappoint because it accomplishes one's goal
without ending one's lack. Therefore each loves the other "from the
standpoint of self and not from the other's standpoint. Their
unhappiness thus originates in a false reciprocity, which disguises a
twin narcissism." Narcissism, because the other is experienced not as
he/she is, but as the opportunity to fill up one's own lack. Of course
that is not the way Tristan and Iseult experience it. Like all great
lovers, they imagine that they have been transported "into a kind of
transcendental state outside ordinary human experience, into an
ineffable absolute irreconcilable with the world, but that they feel
to be more real than the world." De Rougemont concludes that, unaware
and in spite of themselves, the desire of Tristan and Iseult is for
nothing but death. The approach of death acts as a goad to sensuality,
aggravating their desire. Love in the Western World begins by quoting
Bedier's version of the legend: "My lords, if you would hear a high
tale of love and death..." Of course we could listen to nothing more
delightful, for that is the fateful equation; "a myth is needed to
express the dark and unmentionable fact that passion is linked with
death, and involves the destruction of any one yielding himself up to
it with all his strength."(19) Dismissing this as "anti-life," de
Rougemont misses the point, if death is what most intimately
symbolizes our fear of letting-go of ourselves as well as our desire
to let-go of ourselves -- which is the only way to overcome one's
lack, according to Buddhism.
From a lack perspective, the most important aspect of De
Rougemont's analysis is that he sees the "spiritual" character of
romantic love: [T]he passionate love which the myth celebrates
actually became in the twelfth century -- the moment when first it
began to be cultivated -- a religion in the full sense of the word,
and in particular a Christian heresy historically determined."(20)
Again, it is unlikely to be a coincidence that the myth of salvation
through romance arose just at the time of decline in the prevalent
Christian myth, which cleared the ground for more individualistic
alternatives to develop. De Rougemont traces the rise of the romantic
heresy back to the troubadours, who were probably under the influence
of the Cathar heresy, itself likely to have been influenced by
Manichaeism from eastern Europe. He thereby marginalizes the infecting
virus into an external "other" invading pure Christianity, which
probably reveals more about de Rougemont's anti-pagan bias than about
the origin of the Cathars.
The famous twelfth century judgement by a "court of love" in the
house of the Countess of Champagne declared that love and marriage
were incompatible, for the first is by choice and the second by duty.
But their judgement was also opposed to the "satisfaction" of love:
"Of donnoi [courtly love] he knows truly nothing who wants fully to
possess his lady. Whatever turns into a reality is no longer love." So
the troubadours adored inaccessible ladies without hope of requital.
--------------
18.Ibid., p.43.
19.Ibid., pp.55,40-41,16,21-22.
20.Ibid., p.145(de Rougemont italicizes the entire passage)."When in
the twelfth century unstisfied desire was placed by the troubadours of
Provence in the center of the poetic conception of love, an important
turn in the history of civilization was effected. Antiquity, too, had
sung the sufferings of love, but it had never conceived them save as
the expectation of happiness or as its pitiful frustration....Courtly
poetry...makes desire itself the essential motif, and so creates a
conception of love with a negative ground note" (The Waning of the
Middle Ages, p.104).
413
The history of passionate love since then is the devolution of this
courtly myth -- still with strong spiritual overtones -- into more
"profane" life, the account of the more and more desperate attempts of
Eros to take the place of mystical transcendence by means of emotional
intensity. But magniloquent or plaintive, the tropes of its passionate
discourse and the hues of its rhetoric can never attain to more than
the glow of a resurgent twilight and the promise of a phantom
bliss."(21) From spiritual transcendence through emotional intensity
to... our present preoccupation with sexual fulfillment. Why has sex
become so important in the contemporary U.S.? If we do not dualize
secular from sacred, we can see the same urge functioning in each:
today we unconsciously seek a spiritual satisfaction from sex.
Spiritual, because we want sex to fulfill us and heal us -- that is,
to resolve our lack, yet that is to expect something it cannot
provide. "It is once more the aspiration towards the life sublime,"
says Huizinga, "but this time viewed from the animal side. It is an
ideal all the same, even though it be that of unchastity."(22) And if
we do not dualize animal from spiritual, perhaps the main difference
between troubadours and one-night stands is that the myth of sexual
salvation is easier to see through. It's as easy as giving up smoking,
which some people can do twenty times a day. Then the logical and
demonic culmination of this myth is Don Juan, who turns out to be
motivated by the same dream as the troubadours. Not lust but the
inadequacy of sex as a religion -- its more obvious inability to
satisfy lack for very long -- is what drives him from one woman to
another.
De Rougemont contrasts passion-love with life. The first "is an
impoverishment of one's being, an askesis without sequel, an inability
to enjoy the present without imagining it as absent, a never-ending
flight from possession." Instead, he says, happiness depends on
acceptance and is lost as soon as we try to gain it, since it pertains
not to having but to being. "Every wish to experience happiness, to
have it at one's beck and call -- instead of being in a state of
happiness, as though by grace -- must instantly produce an intolerable
sense of want."(23) Again, one can appreciate the wisdom in this
without being satisfied with de Rougemont's solution, which is a
return to more traditional Christian values, including a decision to
keep troth. Religious faith and fidelity do not necessarily resolve
the problem of lack, for it may simply be that one myth has been
replaced with another. Romantic passion is anti-life, insists de
Rougemont, but he doesn't see what impels the widespread fascination
with anti-life: the lack-dissatisfaction built
----------
21.Love in the Western World, pp. 35-36, 179. James Hillman
generalizes this point into a critique of our preoccupation with
"inter-personal relationships": "By our use of them to keep ourselves
alive, other persons begin to assume the place of fetishes and totems,
becoming keepers of our lives. Through this worship of the personal,
personal relationships have become the place where the divine is to be
found, so the new theology asserts. The very condition that modern
rational consciousness would dissuade us from-personifying-returns in
our relationships, creating an animistic world of personified idols.
Of course these archetypally loaded relationships break down, of
course they require constant proprietary attention, of course we must
turn to priests of this cult (therapists and counselors) for
instruction concerning the right ritual for relation to persons....We
seek salvation in personal encounters, personal relation, personal
soultions. Human persons are the contemporary shrines and statues
where personifying is lodged" (Re-Visioning Psychology [New York:
Harper, 1975],p.47).
22.The Waning of the Middle Ages, p.108.
23.Love in the Western World, pp.300,294.
414
into life as we ordinarily experience it, a frustration that must be
addressed one way or another.
None of the above is a critique of love in its spiritual,
emotional or physical aspects; rather, it is an attempt to explain the
widespread inability to find happiness in such relationships. Of
course, the Western tradition has other, more ancient myths about
love. One profound example is the myth of Psyche and Cupid; another is
found in the Phaedrus and the Symposium. In these dialogues Plato
mentions a frenzied type of love that spreads from the body to infect
the spirit with malignant humours, and contrasts that with a different
kind of delirium conceived in one's soul by the inspiration of heaven
(therefore to be called enthusiasm,"possessed by a god"). In the
Symposium Diotima teaches Socrates that erotic passion at its best is
transformed into a love delighting in beauty of every kind. The lover
who has ascended high enough will therefore experience the perfect
form of beauty, which is the reality and substance that is in
everything we perceive as beautiful.(24)
This Platonic account of pure love and everlasting beauty does not
survive Nietzsche's scathing attack on all such "Real worlds," but it
touches on something that does: the ability of love to transform our
way of experiencing everything. We smile on the man for whom the whole
world has suddenly become inexpressibly beautiful, simply because his
beloved reciprocates. But who, he or we, experiences the world more
truly? Love shakes us out of the utilitarian, everything-for-the-
sake-of-something-else way of seeing things and therefore it opens up
the possibility of a deeper transformation. Ernest Becker wonders if
"the reason that love is one of the principle sources of anguish in
the higher primates is because it stands at the threshold of a
this-worldly liberation."(25)
The best example I know of such liberation is Etty Hillesum's love
for Julius Speier, as recorded in her extraordinary diaries. Soon
after she met him in early 1941, Speier became the focus of her life
and they became lovers, although he was even more important as a
"guru" figure for her. By the time that "dear spoilt man" died a year
and a half later, however, her love had grown far beyond him to
encompass everyone, and during the Dutch holocaust she devoted herself
wholeheartedly to helping all those who were suffering. Survivors from
Auschwitz confirmed that she was "luminous" to the last, doing
everything she could to comfort others. Such love has nothing to do
with narcissism. This implies that, instead of using the other to try
to fill one's lack, one may participate in a deeper love that consumes
self-love and self-preoccupation, and therefore their lack-shadow as
well. Perhaps, like all bodhisattvas, Etty realized that when there is
no self there is no other.
III.The Midas Touch
If there is to be a psychoanalysis of money it must start from the
hypothesis that the money complex has the essential structure of
religion -- or, if you will, the negation of religion, the
demonic. The psychoanalytic theory of money must start by
establishing
--------------
24.Symposium 211a-b.
25.Ernest Becker, The Revolution in Psychiatry (New York: The Free
Press, 1964), p.246.
26.Etty Hillesum, Etty: A Diary, 1941-43, trans. Arnold J. Pomerans (
London: Triad Grafton, 1986). Also under the title An Interrupted
Life.
415
the proposition that money is, in Shakespeare's words, the "visible
god"; in Luther's words, "the God of this world."(27).
One of Schopenhauer's aphorisms says that money is human happiness
in abstracto; consequently he who is no longer capable of happiness in
concreto sets his whole heart on money. The difficulty is not with
money as a convenient medium of exchange, but with the "money complex"
that arises when money becomes desirable in itself. That desire is
readily understandable when it improves the quality of life, but what
about those many situations, individual and collective, when its
pursuit reduces the quality of our lives? How does this happen? Given
our sense of lack, how could this not happen?
Money is the "purest" symbol "because there is nothing in reality
that corresponds to it."(28) As Midas discovered, in itself gold is
worthless: you can't eat or drink it, plant it or sleep under it. Yet
it has more value than anything else because it is value; it can
transform into everything because it is how we define value. The
psychological problem occurs when life becomes motivated by the desire
for such "pure" value. We all sense what is wrong with this but it's
helpful to make it explicit: to the extent that life becomes focussed
around the desire for money, an ironic reversal takes place between
means and ends: everything else is devalued in order to maximize a
"worthless" goal, because our desires have become fetishized into that
symbol. "The crux of the matter is the general fact that money is
everywhere conceived as purpose, and countless things that are really
ends in themselves are thereby degraded to mere means."(29) When
everything has its price and everyone his price, the numerical
re-presentation of the symbol-system becomes more important, more
real, than the things re-presented. We end up enjoying not a
worthwhile job well done, or meeting a friend, or hearing a bird-song,
but accumulating pieces of paper. To find the method in this madness
we must relate it to the sense-of-self's sense-of-lack, whose
festering keeps us from being able to fully enjoy that bird-song (just
this!), etc. Since we no longer believe in any "original sin" that
could be expiated, what can it be that is wrong with us and how can we
hope to get over it? Today the most popular explanation -- our
contemporary original sin -- is that we don't have enough money.
The origin of money is puzzling: how did the transition from
barter ever occur? How were human cravings fetishized into pieces of
metal? The answer is elegant because it also reveals the persisting
character of money: money was and still is literally sacred. "It has
long been known that the first markets were sacred markets, the first
banks were temples, the first to issue money were priests or
------------
27. Life Against Death, pp. 240-41. Marx: "Money is the visible deity,
the transformation of all human and natural qualities into their
opposite, the universal confusion and inversion of things." Cf. Ronald
Reagan: "What I want to see above all is that this remains a conuntry
where someone can always get rich " (quoted in Money and Class in
America, p.8).
28.Life Against Death, p.271.
29.Georg Stimmel, The Philosophy of Money (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1978), p.431. The passage continues: "But since money itself is
n omnipresent means, the various elements of our existence are thus
placed in an all-embracing teleological nexus in which no element is
either the first or the last."
416
priest-kings."(30) The first coins were minted and distributed by
temples because they were medallions inscribed with the god's image
and embodying his protective power. Containing such mana, they were
naturally in demand, not because you could buy things with them but
vice-versa: since they were popular you could exchange them for other
things.
The consequence of this was that (as Becker puts it) "now the
cosmic powers could be the property of everyman, without even the need
to visit temples: you could now traffic in immortality in the
marketplace." This eventually led to the emergence of a new kind of
person "who based the value of his life -- and so of his immortality
-- on a new cosmology centered on coins." A new meaning-system arose,
which our present economic system makes more and more the
meaning-system. "Money becomes the distilled value of all existence...
a single immortality symbol, a ready way of relating the increase of
oneself to all the important objects and events of one's world."(31)
In Buddhist terms: beyond its usefulness as a medium of exchange,
money has become modern man's most popular way of accumulating Being,
of coping with our gnawing intuition that we don't really exist.
Suspecting that the sense-of-self is a groundless construction, we
used to go to temples and churches to ground ourselves in God; now we
work to secure ourselves financially.
The problem is that the true meaning of this meaning-system is
unconscious, which means, as usual, that we end up paying a heavy
price for it. The value we place on money rebounds back against us:
the more we value it, the more we find it used (and use it ourselves)
to evaluate us. In The Hour of our Death, Aries turns our usual
critique upside-down. Today we complain about materialism but modern
man is not really materialistic, for "things have become means of
production, or objects to be consumed or devoured." [T]he ordinary man
in his daily life no more believes in matter than he believes in God.
The man of the Middle Ages believed in matter and in God, in life and
in death, in the enjoyment of things and their renunciation.(32) Our
problem now is that we no longer believe in things but in symbols,
hence our life has passed over into these symbols and their
manipulation -- only to find ourselves manipulated by the symbols we
take so seriously. We are preoccupied not so much with what money can
buy, but its power and status; not with a Mercedes-Benz in itself, but
what owning a Mercedes car says about us. Modern man wouldn't be able
to endure real economic equality, says Becker, "because he has no
faith in self-transcendent, other-worldly immortality symbols; visible
physical worth is the only thing he has to give him eternal life." Or
real Being. Our spiritual hunger to become real, or at least to occupy
a special place in the cosmos, has been reduced to having a bigger car
than our neighbors. We cannot get rid of the sacred, because we can't
get
---------------
30.Life Against Death,p.246. "The magical properties, with which the
Egyptian priestcraft anciently imbrued the yelow metal, it has never
altogether lost" (John Maynard Keynes, Tratise on Money [New York:
Harcourt, Brace, 1930], vol.2, p.290).
31.Ernest Becker, Escape from Evil (New York: The Free Press, 1975),
pp. 76, 79(ref. Geza Roheim), 80-81.
32.Philippe Aries, The Hour of Our Death (Penguin, 1981), pp. 136-37.
"We, at the present day, can hardly understand the keenness with which
a fur coat, a goods fire on the hearth, a soft bed, a glass of wine,
were formerly enjoyed" (The Waning of the Middle Ages, p.9).
417
rid of our ultimate concerns, except by repressing them, whereupon we
become "the more uncontrollably driven by them."(33)
We tend to view the profit motive as natural and rational (the
benevolent "invisible hand" of Adam Smith), but Brown's and Becker's
summaries of the anthropological literature remind us that it is not
traditional to traditional societies, and in fact has usually been
viewed with fear. For us, the desire for profit defines economic
activity, but in archaic society there is no clear division between
that sphere and others. Man's economy, as a rule, is submerged in his
social relationships. He does not act so as to safeguard his
individual interest in the possession of material goods; he acts so as
to safeguard his social standing, his social claims, his social
assets. He values material goods only in so far as they serve this
end.... The economic system will be run on non- economic motives.(34)
(Polanyi) Primitive man had no need for a financial solution to lack,
for he had other ways to cope with it. Tawney brings this home to us
by discovering the same truth in the history of the West:
There is no place in medieval theory for economic activity which
is not related to a moral end, and to found a science of society
upon the assumption that the appetite for economic gain is a
constant and measurable force, to be accepted like other natural
forces, as an inevitable and self-evident datum, would have
appeared to the medieval thinker as hardly less irrational and
less immoral than to make the premise of social philosophy the
unrestrained operation of such necessary human attributes as
pugnacity and the sexual instinct.(35)
Again, the crucial transformation evidently began at the end of the
Middle Ages. But once profit became the engine of the economic
process, the tendency was for gradual reorganization of the entire
social system and not just of the economic element, since, as Polanyi
implies, there is no natural distinction between them. "Capital had
ceased to be a servant and had become a master. Assuming a separate
and independent vitality it claimed the right of a predominant partner
to dictate economic organization in accordance with its own exacting
requirements."(36) The economic changes occurring now -- for example,
the transformation of the publishing industry, and the expansion in
banks' sphere of activity -- remind that this process of
reorganization is still going on, even as the individual money complex
continues to supplant other personal meaning-systems.
"Happiness is the deferred fulfillment of a prehistoric wish,"
said Freud. "That
-------------------
33.Escape from Evil, p.85(ref. Rank). This lends psychological support
to Weber's theory about the influence of the Protestant ethic on the
rise of capitalism. You and I shall die, our children will die, but
there is something else to inves in, that can take on a life of its
own. "Death is overcome on condition that the real actuality of life
pass into these immortal and dead things. Money is the man; the
immortality of an estate or a corporation resides in the dead things
which alone endure. " Instead of erecting time-defying monuments like
he pyramids, now we find solace in the numbers sent to us by banks.
"By continually taking and piling and accumulating interest and
leaving to one'heirs, man contrives the illusion that he is in
complete control of his destiny. After all, accumulated things are a
visible testimonial to power, to the fact that one is not limited or
dependent. Man imagines that the causa sui project is firmly in his
hands, that he is the heroic doer and maker who takes what he creates,
what is rightfully his. " (Life Against Death, p.279; Escape from
Evil, p.89)
34.In Life Against Death, p.262.
35.R.H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (New York:
Harcourt, Brace, 1926), p.31.
36.Ibid., p.86.
418
is why wealth brings so little happiness: money is not an infantile
wish." Then what kind of wish is money? "Money is condensed wealth;
condensed wealth is condensed guilt."(37) The most brilliant chapter
of Brown's Life Against Death, "Filthy Lucre," develops this link
between money and guilt. "Whatever the ultimate explanation of guilt
may be, we put forward the hypothesis that the whole money complex is
rooted in the psychology of guilt." The psychological advantage of
archaic man is that he "knew" what his problem was and therefore how
to overcome it. Belief in sin allowed the possibility of expiation,
which occurred in seasonal rituals and sacrifices. "The gods exist to
receive gifts, that is to say sacrifices; the gods exist in order to
structure the human need for self-sacrifice." (38)For Christianity
that sacrifice is incarnated in Christ, who "takes our sins upon him."
Religion provides the opportunity to expiate our sense of lack by
means of symbols -- e.g., the crucifix, eucharist, the mass -- whose
validity is socially-agreed and socially- maintained. In such a
context, we do feel purified and closer to God after taking Holy
Communion.
But what of the modern "neurotic type" who "feels a sinner without
the religious belief in sin, for which he therefore needs a new
rational explanation"?(39) How do you expiate your sense of lack when
there is no religious explanation for it? The main secular alternative
today is to experience our lack as "not yet enough." This converts
cyclic time (maintained by seasonal rituals of atonement) into linear
time (in which atonement of lack is reached-for but perpetually
postponed, because never achieved). The sense of lack remains a
constant, but our collective reaction to it has become the need for
growth: the "good life" of consumerism (but lack means the consumer
never has enough) and the gospel of sustained economic growth (because
corporations and the GNP are never big enough). The heart (or rather
blood) of both is the money complex. "A dollar is... a codified
psychosis normal in one sub-species of this animal, an
institutionalized dream that everyone is having at once."(40) Brown is
almost as damning:
If the money complex is constructed out of an unconscious sense of
guilt, it is a neurosis.... The dialectic of neurosis contains its
own "attempts at explanation and cure," energized by the ceaseless
upward pressure of the repressed unconscious and producing the
return of the repressed to consciousness, although in an
increasingly distorted form, as long as the basic repression
(denial) is maintained and the neurosis endures. The modern
economy is characterized by an aggravation of the neurosis, which
is at the same time a fuller delineation of the nature of the
neurosis, a fuller return of the repressed. In the archaic
consciousness the sense of indebtedness exists together with the
illusion that the debt is payable; the gods exist to make the debt
payable. Hence the archaic economy is embedded in religion,
limited by the religious framework, and mitigated by the
consolations of religion -- above all, removal of indebtedness and
guilt. The modern consciousness represents an increased sense of
guilt, more specifically a breakthrough from the unconscious of
the truth that the burden of guilt is unpayable.(41)
-----------
37.Sigmund Freud, The Origins of Psycho-analysis, eds. M. Bonaparte,
et al. (New York: Basic Books, 1964), p.224; Life Against Death,
p.266.
38.Life Against Death, p. 265.
39.Otto Rank, Beyond Psychology (New York: Dover, 1958),p.194.
40.Weston LaBarre, The Human Animal (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1954),
p.173.
41.Life Against Death, pp.270-71.
419
The result of this is "an economy driven by a pure sense of guilt,
unmitigated by any sense of redemption, " which is "the more
uncontrollably driven by the sense of guilt because the problem of
guilt is repressed by denial into the unconscious." Nietzsche said
that it's not only the reason of millennia but their insanity too that
breaks out in us. Isn't our collective form of that insanity today the
cult of economic growth, which has become our religious myth? "We no
longer give our surplus to God; the process of producing an
ever-expanding surplus is in itself our God.... Schumpeter agrees:
'Capitalist rationality does not do away with sub- or super-rational
impulses. It merely makes them get out of hand by removing the
restraint of sacred or semi-sacred tradition.'"(43)
If so, we can see what the problem is: money and economic growth
constitute a defective myth because they provide no expiation of guilt
-- in Buddhist terms, no resolution of lack. Our new holy of holies,
the true temple of modern man, is the stock market, and our rite of
worship is communing with the Dow Jones average. In return we receive
the kiss of profits and the promise of more to come, but there can be
no atonement in this. Of course, insofar as we have lost belief in sin
we no longer see anything to atone for, which means we end up
unconsciously atoning in the only way we know, working hard to acquire
all those things that society tells us are important and will make us
happy; and then we cannot understand why they don't make us happy, why
they don't resolve our sense of lack. The reason can only be that we
don't yet have enough... "But the fact is that the human animal is
distinctively characterized, as a species and from the start, by the
drive to produce a surplus... There is something in the human psyche
which commits man to nonenjoyment, to work." Where are we all going so
eagerly? "Having no real aim, acquisitiveness, as Aristotle correctly
said, has no limit." Not to anywhere but from something, which is why
there can be no end to it as long as that something is our own
lack-shadow. "Economies, archaic and civilized, are ultimately driven
by that flight from death which turns life into death-in-life."(44) Or
by that flight from emptiness that makes life empty. If money
symbolizes becoming real, the fact that we never quite become real
means that we end up holding pure deferral in our hands. Those chips
we have accumulated can never be cashed in, for the moment we were to
do so, the illusion that money can resolve lack would be dispelled and
we would be left more empty and lack-ridden than before, because
deprived of our fantasy for escaping lack. We unconsciously suspect
and fear this; the only answer is to flee faster into the future.
I think this points to the fundamental defect of any economic
system that requires continual growth if it's not to collapse: it is
based not on needs but on fear, for it feeds on and feeds our sense of
lack. In sum, our preoccupation with manipulating the "purest" symbol,
which we suppose to be the means of solving the problem of life, turns
out to be a symptom of the problem itself.
-------------
42.Ibid., p.272.
43.Ibid., p.261.
44.Ibid., pp.256,258,285.
420
IV.Progress Is Our Most Important Product
While we think of ourselves as a people of change and progress,
masters of our environment and our fate, we are no more entitled
to this designation than the most superstitious savage, for our
relation to change is entirely passive.... We talk of technology
as the servant of man, but it is a servant that now dominates the
household, too powerful to fire, upon whom everyone is helplessly
dependent.(45)
Like the urge for fame, the profit motive and the secular
salvation of of romantic love, we tend to think of scientific progress
and technological development as natural, which means: something that
doesn't need to be explained. It is difficult to grasp the
significance of any of these myths because they are too alive, too
much our myths. Then can technological transformation too be another
case of mistaking nurture as nature? Is it natural to "progress" from
the Wright brothers to a moon-landing during one generation? This
question can no longer be evaded; the ecological crisis impels us to
find out the answer.
At the end of his historical study of death, Aries comments on the
belief that technology has no limits. "Technology erodes the domain of
death until one has the illusion that death has been abolished." This
suggests that technology might somehow be another symbolized version
of our attempt to avoid death."(46) Heidegger seems to agree: "The
self-assertion of technological objectification is the constant
negation of death." However, Heidegger's reflections led him to
conclude that technological objectification is the main way Being
discloses itself to contemporary man. The essence of modernity is the
technological tendency to reorganize everything into "standing-
reserve." Rather than explain this in terms of something else, such as
repression of death or nonbeing, Heidegger came to believe that we
must simply accept this as the self-disclosure of Being today. In
contrast,Buddhism, which does not refer to any transcendental Being,
relates such problems back to desire based on ignorance. From a lack
perspective, technology can be seen as our effort to create the
ultimate security, by transforming the entire world into our own
ground. We try to make ourselves real by reorganizing the whole
environment so that it attests to our reality. "The purpose of the
god-imitator is to subdue his environment absolutely.... The would-be
god on earth never stops trying to incorporate the environment into
himself."(47) This is why many people today can dispense with the
consolations of religion: now we have other ways to control our fate,
or to try to. If the world isn't "developed" enough yet to quell our
lack, it will have to be developed more.
Part of our problem is how we understand the relation between
science and technology. We celebrate the scientific quest for truth,
and subordinate technology into the application of that truth.
Heidegger and others have suggested that we should reverse that
relationship. Technology is not applied science. It is the expression
of a deep longing, an original longing that is present in modern
science from its beginning. This is the desire of the self to seek its
own
--------------
45.Philip Slater, The Pursuit of Loneliness: American Culture at the
Breaking Point (Boston:Beascom Press, 1970), p.44.
46.The Hour of our Death, p.595; Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language,
Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter(New York: Harper and Row,
1971),p.125.
47.The Immortalist, p.119.
421
truth through the mastery of the object.... The power of technique is
not to connect thought effectively to nature; it alters nature to its
own purpose. Its aim is to master its being; to own it.(48)
Another way to put it is that technology is our attempt to own the
universe, an attempt that is always frustrating because, for reasons
we don't quite understand, we never possess it fully enough to feel
secure in our ownership. Is that because the only genuine salvation is
in being owned by it -- i.e., by participating in something greater
than us? "We now use the word Nature very much as our fathers used the
word God," John Burroughs noticed at the turn of the century, "and, I
suppose, back of it all we mean the power that is everywhere present
and active, and in whose lap the visible universe is held and
nourished." Nature can take on the role of God because both fulfill
our need to be embedded in mystery; Technology cannot because it is
motivated by the opposite response, attempting to banish the mystery
by extending our control, as if that can grant us the security we
crave. Bill McKibben sums up his sombre elegy on The End of Nature:
"We can no longer imagine that we are part of something larger than
ourselves -- that is what all this boils down to. We used to be."
(49) Our success in "improving" nature means we can no longer rest
peacefully in its bosom. We cannot manipulate the natural world in a
collective attempt to self-ground ourselves and also hope to find in
it a ground greater than ourselves.
In religious terms (and this whole essay is an argument that in
the end we cannot avoid religious terms), the world-view implicit in
technology has an inadequate eschatology. It is a meaning-system
without any ultimate meaning, because lacking any vision of cloture
between humankind and the cosmos. This is a defect that is quite
literally unendurable: a sense of purpose in the universe must be and
always is found somewhere. Then the issue is not how hard-headed we
are in our supposedly non-metaphysical materialistic realism, but how
repressed or conscious we shall be in our commitments. The
technological response to ultimate questions -- those questions which,
because they are ultimate, can never be avoided -- is to believe in...
the future. What is the meaning of life? Where are we all going so
fast? Since we no longer have answers to those questions, but can't
live without answers, our answer is to defer the issue. Until the last
few years, our eschatology has been progress: things are getting
better, or, when they obviously aren't, things will get better. The
ecological crisis, which we are now well into, signifies the end of
this collective dream, although it remains to be seen whether our
collective psyche will recognize this fact in time. The supreme irony
is that our collective project to secure ourselves, technology, is
what threatens to destroy us.
V.Conclusion
When our motivations are unconscious, we tend to pay an unexpected
price: what we project rebounds back onto us. The recent Japanese
philosopher (and Zen master) Hisamatsu put it well: "That which has
become an object to me is something that has captured me." What does
that imply about technology, if
------------
48.Donald Phillip Verene, "Technological Desire," in Research in
Philosophy and Technology, (London:JAI Press, 1984), vol. 7, p.107.
49.Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990, p.77. The Burroughs quote is on
pp.66-67.
422
technology is our attempt to objectify nature? For Buddhism, the
problem with technological objectification is only an extreme version
of the problem with all objectification: since we are nondual with the
world, not separate from it, to objectify the world is to be
objectified by it and in it. As the earth becomes a collection of
"resources" for us to "manage," the material and social structures
created to do this do the same to us, and we find ourselves
increasingly subjected to them. Nature, to be commanded, must be
obeyed, said Bacon. But if we must obey in order to command, then our
commanding is really obeying.
It is more than curious that the same karmic-like problem with
objectification also infects the other three projects to resolve lack.
One can't use fame without being used by it. In Being and Nothingness
Sartre argues that in order to win and keep the love of the other, I
must present myself as a fascinating object. Pursuing the purest and
most important symbol of all, money, we become preoccupied with what
it symbolizes about us. And insofar as the sense- of-self uses these
projects to fill up its sense-of-lack, each tends to become demonic,
because none can grant the reality we seek. No one is ever rich or
famous enough to fill up the sense of emptiness at his or her core;
the myth of romance ends in Don Juan's joyless quest for sexual
fulfillment; and today we are destroying the whole earth in order to
save it, as we once did for Vietnamese villages.
Rather than being natural, as we tend to think, the contemporary
importance of these four projects has been historically-conditioned.
Of course there have been people in most times and places who were
greedy, fell in love with love, sought glory, and tried to harness the
resources of their environment. But the decline in collective faith at
the end of the Middle Ages cleared the ground for these to take root
and grow into "heresies" that assumed a more central role in our
psychic struggle against death-anxiety and dread of groundlessness. We
could say that today the weeds have taken over the garden; but what is
the alternative? What would we rather cultivate in their place?
Another remarkable similarity among these four is that the modern
history of each is a gradual "devolution" from (what might be called)
sacred to secular. In the late Middle Ages saints were the most
respected. St. Francis didn't seek fame; it was a by-product of what
was believed to be his more immediate relationship with God. Dante and
Milton strove to be worthy of fame but today fame is sought for its
own sake and we celebrate celebrities. The troubadours adored noble
ladies without hope of satisfaction or even the desire for it; later
this became an emphasis on emotional intensity; today's version is
sexual fulfillment. In exchanging the fruit of his labor for
medallions with the god's image, archaic man used the god to protect
himself, but only by participating in the god's reality; later such
cosmic powers could be bargained for in the marketplace and now the
stock market. When we look for the same pattern in science/technology,
an otherwise peculiar fact makes sense: the spiritual origins of
Western science, which we think of as defining secularity. Pythagoras
was a mystic, the founder of a religious school whose sacred doctrine
was numbers and their harmonies. The Harmony of the Spheres may seem
absurd to us, but not to Kepler. Some of this religiosity persists in
the attitude of such great scientists as Einstein, who demonstrate and
celebrate a non-utilitarian quest for understanding that still has
spiritual overtones, but that motivation has long been superceded by
423
our desire for power and control over natural processes.(50) This
answers the question of how a secular civilization could ever evolve
out of a non-secular society. It didn't: what we think of as
secularity is still sacred, for our secular obsessions are symptomatic
of our spiritual need. By trying to become real through them, we
continue to seek Being in a distorted, heavily-symbolized fashion.
These conclusions give us a new perspective on the Mahayana denial
of any bifurcation between sacred and secular: "There is no
specifiable difference whatever between nirvana and the everyday
world; there is no specifiable difference whatever between the
everyday world and nirvana."(51) Without that dualism, then, how can
Buddhism describe these four devolutions? The pattern translates into
a movement from nondual participation in something greater than the
sense-of-self (and therefore greater than the sense-of-lack), to a
more dualistic relation in which the reified sense-of-self uses
objects in its vain Oedipal project to fill up its sense-of-lack. The
tendency is towards greater objectification, which is also
subjectification, since the sense-of-self is the first thing to be
objectified. For Buddhism, however, "greater than sense-of-self" does
not refer to something transcendentally Other to this world, but to
the interdependence of all phenomena. There is no appeal to another
reality, just the need to come out from my private and delusive
hiding-place -- my sense-of-self -- in order to realize this one,
including the full implications of "my" interdependence with
everything "else."
Such interdependence is the crucial point of Mahayana Buddhism.
Nagarjuna uses the dependence of things upon their causal
relationships to refute their self-existence; Chinese Buddhists made
the same point more "positively" by elaborating on a metaphor for
cosmic interpenetration found in the Avatamsaka Sutra: Indra's Net,
which stretches out infinitely in all directions, with a glittering
jewel in each "eye" of the Net; in the polished surface of each such
jewel "there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite
in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one
jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that there is an
infinite reflecting process occurring." Indra's Net thus "symbolizes a
cosmos in which there is an infinitely repeated interrelationship
among all the members of the cosmos".(52) As Nagarjuna might put it,
each of its "eyes" is at the same time an effect of the whole and the
cause of the whole.
The Vietnamese Zen teacher (and poet) Thich Nhat Hanh brings this
home to us by show- ing how in this very page you are reading right
now is nothing less than the entire universe:
---------------
50.Philippe Wolff, in The Awakening of Europe (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1968), describes the origins of European science in Moorish Spain: "It
must also be admitted that the products of Arabic science were not
always viewed in Europe in their loftiest and most fertile aspect. It
was not only the pure, disinterested thirst for knowledge which drove
so many savants to Spain and to work so hard when they got there, nor
was this alone what made their writings so valuable. Much more
important was a naive desire to acquire power over the hidden forces
of nature by wresting her secrets from her" (p.283).
51.Nagarjuna, Mulamadhyamikakarika 24:19, in Mervyn Sprung, trans.,
Lucid Exposition of the Middle Way (Boulder, CO: Prajna Press, 1979),
p.259.
52Francis H. Cook's description in Hua-yen Buddhism: The Jewel Net of
Indra (University Park, PA: Penn State Univ. Press, 1977), p.2.
424
If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud
floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no
rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow, and without trees we cannot
make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the
cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either....
If we look into this sheet of paper even more deeply, we can see
the sunshine in it. If the sunshine is not there, the tree cannot
grow. In fact, nothing can grow. Even we cannot grow without sunshine.
And so, we know that the sunshine is also in this sheet of paper. The
paper and the sunshine inter-are. And if we continue to look, we can
see the logger who cut the tree and brought it to the mill to be
transformed into paper. And we see the wheat. We know that the logger
cannot exist without his daily bread, and therefore the wheat that
became his bread is also in this sheet of paper. And the logger's
father and mother are in it too....
You cannot point out one thing that is not here -- time, space,
the earth, the rain, the minerals in the soil, the sunshine, the
cloud, the river, the heat. Everything co-exists with this sheet of
paper.... As thin as this sheet of paper is, it contains everything in
the universe in it.(53)
How does one real-ize this "inter-being"? If a sense-of-lack is
the inescapable "shadow" of our sense-of-self, then the only way lack
can be ended is by ending the sense-of-self -- that is, by
transforming the sense of myself as a Cartesian-like, self-sufficient
self- consciousness separate from the objective world, into a more
relational awareness that is nondual with the world.
In order to understand the Buddhist solution, it is helpful to
recast our situation in terms of the dualism that bedevils us. The
first part of this paper suggested that the problem of lack originates
in our repressed intuition that "I" am not real, for the self-of-self
is a mental construction. In other words, the "other side" of my sense
of being (tails to its heads, if you like) is an anguished sense of
being threatened by nonbeing or nothingness. The Buddhist way to
resolve such bipolarities is yielding to the side that has been
denied. If it is nothingness I am afraid of, the solution is to become
nothing. A famous passage in the Shobogenzo of the Japanese Zen master
Dogen sums up 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."(54) Meditation is learning how to become nothing by
learning to "forget" the sense-of-self, which happens by becoming
absorbed into one's meditation-exercise (mantra, etc.). Since the
sense-of-self is a process of consciousness attempting to reflect back
upon itself in order to grasp/ground itself, such meditation practice
is an exercise in de-reflection. Consciousness unlearns trying to
grasp itself, real-ize itself, objectify itself. Enlightenment or
liberation occurs when the usually-automatized reflexivity of
consciousness ceases, which is experienced as a letting-go and falling
into the void and being wiped out of existence. "Men are afraid to
forget their minds, fearing to fall through the Void with nothing to
stay their fall. They
------------
53.Thich Nhat Hanh, The Heart of Understanding (Berkeley, CA:Parallax
Press, 1988), pp.3-5.
54.Moon in a Dewdrop: Writings of Zen Master Dogen, ed. Kazuaki
Tanahashi ( San Francisco: North Point Press, 1985), p.70 (Genjo-koan
fascicle).
425
do not know that the Void is not really void, but the realm of the
real Dharma." (Huang-po) Then, when I no longer strive to make myself
real through things, I am "actualized" by them, says Dogen. What we
fear as nothingness is not really nothingness, for that is the
perspective of an ungrounded sense-of-self haunted by fear of losing
its grip on itself. Letting-go of myself and merging into that
nothingness leads to something else, the common origin of what I
experience as nothingness and what I experience as myself. When
consciousness stops trying to catch its own tail, I become nothing,
only to discover that "I" am everything: not a formless Oatmeal in
which each spoonful is the same as every other, but a network of
differences whose textuality (literally, "that which is woven, web")
encompasses the whole universe.(56)
--------------
55.Huang Po in The Zen Teaching of Huang Po, trans. Hohn Blofeld
(London: Buddhist Society, 1958),p.41.
56.For more on the Buddhist solution to the problem of lack, see "The
Nonduality of Life and Death," in Philosophy East and West 40(1990),
151-74, and Nonduality: A Study in Comparative Philosophy(New Haven:
Yale Univ. Press, 1988), chapter 6.