Speculative Non-Buddhism

tool theory | radical critique

Against Empathy

Posted by Glenn Wallis on June 8, 2013

masksThe possibility of empathy is a western-buddhist dogma. Empathy, together with its near relative, compassion, may even be considered a necessary axiom of contemporary x-buddhist belief, whether in a secular, crypto, or traditional inflection. For, without the possibility of empathy and compassion, x-buddhism loses its ethical footing, its prime rationale for practice, and its very impetus toward the pro-social utopian. In this post, I’d like to present a paper that challenges the possibility of an activity that resembles our folk notions of “empathy.” The article, by the German thinker Jan Slaby, is aptly title “Against Empathy” (links below).

Before I do, I want to set the stage a bit by giving an indication of how these terms function in contemporary x-buddhist discourse. We can glean the axiomatic/dogmatic nature of the x-buddhist belief in empathy-compassion from the Tricycle article entitled “Empathy or Compassion? Reflections on the Compassion Meditation Conference.” This article is a report on a now familiar scene, where, “scholars and researchers in psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience congregated alongside His Holiness the Dalai Lama for,” in this case, Emory University’s 2010 conference on “compassion meditation.” The question at hand was not “what do we mean by ‘empathy’ and ‘compassion’?” The conference presupposed folk meanings for the terms; namely, that they refer to feeling or, as the report puts it, “resonating” with, another’s pain.

The issue at hand was thus how empathy and compassion might differ from and complement one another. Go-to x-buddhist compassion expert, Matthieu Ricard, “western monk, scientist, and author,” explained the importance of resolving this matter by:

considering how the experience of empathy without compassion would induce incredibly unpleasant, even crippling, states.  The following day, Matthieu explained the testing of this hypothesis in the lab, where seasoned meditators were instructed to resonate with others’ suffering without generating compassion or performing cognitive reappraisal until the practice became utterly unbearable—and it did.  When the meditators in the lab then generated compassion, their experience transformed completely.  These meditators had trained extensively in generating compassion in the face of suffering almost immediately, but teasing apart empathy and compassion in the lab proved to be extremely illuminating.

Neuroscientist Richard Davidson then “presented findings suggesting that empathy and compassion correlate to differing neural states:”

He found that the circuits engaged by compassion training partially overlap with those activated during empathy, but differ in that they also involve the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, which he suggested might play a role in expressing and enacting aspiration.  Such would accord with the Buddhist definition of compassion—the aspiration that others be free from suffering.

So, one conclusion of the conference was that:

Empathy that resonates with another’s painful condition causes the empathizer to experience that same suffering, which can easily overwhelm. Training in compassion can transform the same empathy that in itself is debilitating into a helpful force.

Of course, we learn nothing about what empathy and compassion are from any of this. We are merely offered a circular argument: when certain subjects “resonated” with others’ “suffering,” thereby experiencing the “same” suffering, certain things occurred in the area of their brains that “might” have something to do with something called “aspiration” to “resonate” with and eliminate another’s pain. The burning question of just what these people were actually doing as they “resonated” is left unasked. Obviously, the very metaphor of “resonance” prejudices our understanding. It already assumes a direct correspondence and interaction between two poles. But nothing in the research indicates that anything like that—interaction, much less resonance—was happening at all. So, what was happening? Were the subjects imagining some scenario? Were they triggering their own emotions via their imaginations? Were they accessing vague elements of memory? You will never get an answer, much less the question, from an x-buddhist, caught, as s/he is in the circular dharmic machine.

I mention this conference because it shows the dogma of empathy/compassion as it is put into play by some of the most influential figures in the world of contemporary x-buddhism as well as in that of science-meets-meditation. It also has, we can surmise, a trickle-down effect. We can see the same kind of dogmatic/axiomatic rhetoric equally at work at the most popular level of the discourse. The most recent links on the Secular Buddhist Facebook page, for instance, are:

“How to Train the Compassionate Brain.” A new study finds that training in compassion makes us more altruistic.

“Meditation Makes Us Act with Compassion.” A new study suggests mindfulness meditation can help us overcome the “bystander effect.”

(Which led me to:)

“Can meditation make you more empathic?” A program that focuses on compassion was found to boost a person’s ability to read the facial expressions of others as well as activate regions in the brain that help us be more empathic.

How can we slow the rate at which the “empathy” buddheme is spreading?

_______________________

In his article, “Against Empathy: Critical Theory and the Social Brain,” Jan Slaby, a professor of philosophy at the Free University in Berlin, poses just that question. How, he asks, might we:

crack the unholy alliance between shallow, popularized human science and the trendsetting discourses and practices in the corporate universe and affirmative mainstream culture? What can scientists and scholars do in order to not blindly and unwittingly drive further and publicly promote the trends here outlined? (27)

Slaby’s question is doubly apt for us. In dealing with contemporary x-buddhism, we are simultaneously dealing with both the “corporate universe” and “affirmative mainstream culture.” The former, because of the collusion between x-buddhism and consumerism; the latter, because of the lockstep adherence in x-buddhist communities to what Barbara Ehrenreich calls the “smile or die” imperative. Slaby calls this imperative “a pervasive regime of positive, conformist, domesticated affectivity” (26). He sees it operating in western culture as a whole. Of course, “a whole” presupposes discreet units. X-buddhism is such a unit: it absorbs the values of its culture, cursorily refashions them in its own image, and finally reintroduces the now mildly exoticized originals back into the culture. It should be useful to quote Slaby at length on the basic issue of the “smile or die imperative” operating in x-buddhism and the wider culture. It is, he says:

ubiquitous, placing an effective ban on the open expression of negative emotion. Instead of letting affectivity be a field of resonance for a wide range of human experiences, including those that reflect potentially problematic, pathological aspects of today’s conditions of living, a strict policy is imposed towards a thin range of mind-numbing positive emotions and ways of “positive thinking.” It is a mixture of optimism, cheerfulness, sympathetic politeness and composed self-possession which restricts and controls the range of affects on display in everyday life. Thereby, the potential for critique and resistance is drowned effectively already on the level of sentiment, interpersonal style and emotional conduct. A specific perniciousness lies in this tendency, as emotional dispositions, once sufficiently engrained, tend to become so profound that they freeze into a kind of second nature. This means not only that they are rarely called into question, but that even our capacity to question them is severely limited, because our emotional outlook will inevitable also come to shape the very standards we employ in our normative self-assessments. Our emotions shape what seems natural to us. Because of this, it will be increasingly hard for individuals to even see and appreciate the potential value of alternatives to the dominant affective regime. (26)

So, again, how can x-buddhists be encouraged to step away from this particular set of ideological blinders–at least long enough to consider whether they are such? Slaby suggests that “the first step has to be the creation of an awareness of the material and discursive constellation that” he hints at in “Against Empathy.”

I will highlight a few salient features of that “constellation” here.

It is important, Slably says, first of all to recognize that the rhetoric of the advent of the empathetic human is being celebrated across various disciples. He cites social and economic theorist Jeremy Rifkin, president of The Foundation On Economic Trends, as a particularly noteworthy example. In the 1970s Rifkin wrote books with titles like How to Commit Revolution American Style: Bicentennial Declaration and Common Sense II: The Case Against Corporate Tyranny. In 2010, we get, The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness In a World In Crisis, wherein he claims:

A radical new view of human nature is emerging in the biological and cognitive sciences…Recent discoveries in brain science and child development are forcing us to rethink the long-held belief that human beings are, by nature, aggressive, materialistic, utilitarian, and self interested. The dawning realization that we are a fundamentally empathic species has profound and far-reaching consequences for society. (1)

That Rifkin is proclaiming the virtues of empathy is particularly telling. It reveals the extent to which the rhetoric of empathy has become an accepted part of our thinking about global issues. More ominously, it signals a retreat into the same kinds of feel-good utopian platitudes that our contemporary x-buddhim so excels in: We may be poisoning the air, land, and water; we may be pitiful stooges to manipulative corporate masters; we may be headed for economic meltdown, but, relax!: empathy is a “fundamental” human trait, capable of trumping aggression and materialism! As Slaby puts it:

Jeremy Rifkin has offered many a diagnosis and many a cure for the problems of our times. Globalization, structural changes in wage labor, the biotech revolution, Europe as a new global power, the new capitalist regime of ‘access’, hydrogen as the solution to global warming…Recently, Rifkin has added empathy to the list of world-saving memes…Rifkin’s recent joining the empathy party is telling of a global trend: Empathy is en vogue – the hottest stone not yet fully turned in the universe of humanism. The core storyline is one that is heard all too often these days: Human nature is in the process of taking on a fundamentally new shape – thanks mostly to the brain sciences, developmental psychology, primatology and other bio-psychological sciences, a new core human nature rife with emotion, attachment, communication – but most of all: empathy – is currently being revealed. And surely, this is GREAT NEWS, because empathy, together with all those other pro-social traits now suddenly in the scientific spotlight, is such an immensely beneficial thing. How fortunate indeed that humanity, just in the midst of another gigantic global crisis, and while on the verge of destroying for good the ecosystem of this earth, stumbled on a so far undiscovered profound positive characteristic of itself. (3)

Given the saving role to be played by empathy in the coming age (think, for instance: the bodhisattva vow), it is unfortunate that we must interrupt the celebration and ask of the term: to what does it refer? Slaby’s next move is therefore to survey the literature for an answer. As with the x-buddhist usage of, for example, “mindfulness,” he concludes that the literature evinces a range of conceptual and theoretical models so broad as to render the term practically meaningless. “Empathy” ranges, namely, from low-level, automatic responses, such as emotional contagion and sympathetic concern, to the complex, high-level mentally deliberate process of perspective-taking. Note that the x-buddhist view of the empathy-compassion nexus intimated in the Tricycle report contains both automatic, low-level (“resonance”) and mental, high-level (“cognitive reappraisal”) dimensions.

Similar to scientists who employ “mindfulness” models in their research, to stay with our x-buddhist parallel, Slaby argues that in order to make progress in empathy research, we must first limit the current “terminological ambiguity and conflation” (7). He finds the definition of fellow philosopher Amy Coplan valuable toward that end.

[E]mpathy is a complex imaginative process in which an observer simulates another person’s situated psychological states while maintaining clear self-other differentiation. To say that empathy is “complex” is to say that it is simultaneously a cognitive and affective process. To say that empathy is “imaginative’ is to say that it involves the representation of a target’s states that are activated by, but not directly accessible through, the observer’s perception. And to say that empathy is a “simulation” is to say that the observer replicates or reconstructs the target’s experiences. (8)

As Slaby notes, this definition contains three basic components which, together, constitute a “fully fledged empathy” (8). Coplan’s account includes (i) both mentally deliberative and automatic traits, (ii) an other-person-oriented perspective, and, as that perspective requires, (iii) a perceived differentiation between oneself and another. Comparison to the Tricycle report shows agreement here. So does our common, folk understanding.

However, Slaby then proceeds to show how “all these components pose severe difficulties” (8). The most basic difficulties are not hard to predict. Just think about it. You may believe that you are feeling or “resonating” another’s pain, but on what grounds do you form this conclusion? What assumptions about shared experience, congruity of emotional response, common spontaneous reaction, and so much more, must be true for your claim of “empathy” to be coherent, much less demonstrable? Coplan summarizes the difficulties that she sees as follows:

[P]ersonal distress, false consensus effects, and general misunderstandings of the other are all associated with self-oriented perspective-taking. When we imagine ourselves in another person’s situation, it frequently results in inaccurate predictions and failed simulations of the other’s thoughts, feelings, and desires. It also makes us more likely to become emotionally over-aroused and, consequently, focused solely on our own experiences. (9)

If such a feeling/resonance-oriented version of empathy proves delusional, what about a perspective-shifting one? The folk version of perspective-shifting is captured in the trope of walking a mile in another’s shoes. Slaby cites Peter Goldie’s definition here:

Consciously and intentionally shifting your perspective in order to imagine being the other person, thereby sharing in his or her thoughts, feelings, decisions and other aspects of their psychology. (9)

Slaby elaborates on this definition. Perspective-shifting involves:

Accessing another’s mind from the inside—and thus only producing the same mental states in oneself as one assumes the other person to have, but shifting imaginatively into the other’s predicament while maintaining a clear-cut self/other differentiation. Only then, or so the expectation goes, might one succeed to feel what the other feels not from one’s own perspective but from the other’s. Only then will one “get at” what one wants to get at in one’s earnest attempts at understanding another person.” (9)

The only problem with this “quite demanding mental maneuver” is that it is impossible to achieve. What makes it so, according to Slaby, is that it requires nothing short of cancellation of human agency. Or, to cast it in a slightly different light, a view of empathy that presumes access to another’s experience can only be founded on an skewed theory of mind. Based on what we know of self-conscious agency, “the empathizer will ever only project and impose her own mental life, most notably her own agency, onto the other” (5). But, pace x-buddhists, Rifkin, and the New World Empathicos:

The fact that empathetic perspective shifting doesn’t work is not tragic. Rather, its failure is instructive, because in analyzing it we learn something about what it means to be a full-blooded agent, about what it means to possess a practical point of view. Understanding this failure provides us with a more adequate understanding of the mind and of personhood, and thus is in the end also informative for a better way to conceive of beneficial and praiseworthy ways of interpersonal interaction that actually do work. (10)

With a similarly absurd irony, x-buddhist views of empathy require usurpation of agency and objectification of the other person through an imagined, yet egoistically-informed, experiential correspondence. In fact, the prevailing x-buddhist view of empathy requires, yet again, an atomistic/atmanistic view of mind. Empathy is understood as an encounter between discrete minds. Yet, as Slaby argues, we may abandon that particular x-buddhist absurdity by insisting on a richer and more robust notion of agency, one that involves an overturning of the currently fashionable, and facile, theory of the “social brain.”

X-buddhist allies such as Daniel Golemen present an optimistic picture of personhood, one that involves “hard-wired” pro-social–emotionally attuned, communicative, and cooperative–qualities. Slaby offers another possibility, which he calls, following anthropologist Allan Young, “Human Nature 1.0.” Unlike Goleman’s and Rifkin’s domesticated, conformist, and thus disempowering, Human Nature 2.0, this involves a view of agency that allows the person to, among other things, “sidestep the logic of market and commodity capitalism and the rigorous framing of life choices that it engenders.”

(To be continued)

________________

Thanks to Nathan Muchinsky for drawing my attention to Slaby’s paper.

Tricycle summary of the Emory conference: Empathy or Compassion? Reflections on the Compassion Meditation Conference.”

Jan Slaby’s personal site

Slaby, J. (in preparation). “Against Empathy: Critical Theory and the Social Brain. Draft Manuscript,” comments welcome [pdf].

Critical Neuroscience website

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On Reading Hegel as a Corrective for Meditative Malpractice

Posted by Tom Pepper on May 29, 2013

tumblr_m4iypr5qUt1qcu0j0o1_400This summer, I am making a commitment not to meditate.  At least, not to meditate in any way that Western Buddhists would identify as Buddhist meditation.  My meditation practice, I have decided, will be to do a slow and careful rereading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, attempting to think dialectically about every argument Hegel makes.

In part, this is motivated by having recently read Zizek’s Less Than Nothing, which offers a fascinating and compelling  interpretation of Hegel’s thought.  In part, it is motivated by the enormous increase of attention to Hegel in the English-speaking world, and the numerous stimulating recent books on Hegel, such as Jameson’s The Hegel Variations and Pinkard’s Hegel’s Naturalism: Mind, Nature, and the Final Ends of Life.  In addition, I came across a pdf of Pinkards new translation of the Phenomenology, and realized, thumbing through my yellowed copy, that it has been close to twenty years since I’ve read it all the way through.

Although the summer is just beginning, and I am proceeding slowly through the book, I am already convinced that a bit of time spent with Hegel could be a useful corrective for the current state of Western Buddhism.

We are all familiar with the constant admonishment to “spend more time on the cushion” as a cure for whatever it might be that ails us.  Buddhism in the U.S. has turned its focus to guaranteeing the pleasures of the body (witness the current issue of Buddhadharma), if we will only consent to abandon the life of the mind.  Any thought is called “clinging to views,” and argument or critique violates the suffocating misunderstanding of the concept of “right speech”; we are told to feel, never think, to perceive with bare attention, to dwell in the ineffable and learn complete acceptance of whatever is.  All of this will relieve our “stress,” break our “addictions,” and give us states of bliss of varying duration and intensity.

Years ago, when I was returning to an active interest in Buddhism after a couple of decades of being a bookstore Buddhist, I read a little collection of texts on meditation translated by Thomas Cleary.  In his introduction to this little collection of Chan and Zen meditation manuals, Cleary describes the “fifth and highest type of meditation…called pure clear meditation arriving at being-as-is”: “This is considered the most penetrating insight and the nearest that an individual consciousness can come to true objective identity”(ix).  Rereading Hegel’s Phenomenology recalled this definition of the goal of meditation–a goal I had at one point assumed to be the goal of most people who practiced Buddhism–because Hegel intended this book to do much the same thing as what Cleary describes the five types of meditation as attempting to do.  The Phenomenology is meant to take the reader from an initial stage of a delusion that he can have a pure, thought-free sense-certainty of what exists, to the awareness of “Absolute Knowing,” which is not omniscience in the ordinary sense of the word (knowing every bit of information on Wikipedia, for instance), but an awareness of the limits of objectivity, an awareness that our knowledge is always socially constructed, intentional, and so however “correct” it may be it is “objective” in only a limited sense.

As I said, at one point I assumed that achieving this “Absolute Knowing” was the goal of those who practiced Buddhism; I have since come to doubt this assumption.  As Cleary also points out, for most of the history of Buddhism it was assumed, even in Chan and Zen, that years of study were necessary before any intensive meditation could be usefully practiced.  Meditation was thought to be a thought-intensive, effortful practice, with a goal achievable in one’s lifetime.  Cleary observes that although the “psychopathology of meditative malpractice is well known and thoroughly described in Buddhist Literature…certain cults regularly plunge people into intensive meditation without sufficient background knowledge” (xiv).  This seems to be the common practice in Western Buddhism today, where study and thought are derogated as “intellectualizing.”  I would suggest that, in Cleary’s words, “this is not done out of sheer ignorance but as a calculated recruitment tool, because people become extremely vulnerable to fixation and conditioning under these circumstances”(xiv). To put this in my own terms, the goal of intensive mediation without any intellectual preparation is the reification of an existing ideology, convincing people to become “conditioned” to and “fixated” on the ideological social formations they happen to inhabit, convinced that this ideological construal of the world is a pure awareness of the ineffable truth of reality.

As a result, we see Western Buddhists attempting to use meditation to become unthinking, contented drones, always smiling and always kind.  My suggestion would be, if you find yourself untroubled by the problems of the world around you, with a complacent smile on your face, never using a harsh word or engaging in any argument, then it is time to get off the cushion, and do some studying.  And one could do worse than to spend some time thinking through Hegel’s Phenomenology. Because the world needs changing.  The only reason to retreat into mindless acceptance is if you believe that there is some reward awaiting in the afterlife; if you don’t buy into this particular delusion, then it might be worth thinking about how to begin enjoying working for change, thinking, making effort, instead of attempting to escape into some fantasy of infantile comfort.

Although at this point I’ve just begun the section on self-consciousness, I’ve found that this careful reading has already been far more beneficial than years of thought-free “following the breath” could possibly be.  Let me just offer some reflections on the “preface” alone, as an invitation to consider this practice.

One essential question the “preface” raises is the particular kind of mental effort we need to make, depending on the specific social formation in which we are constructed.  Hegel conceives of consciousness as an inherently aesthetic practice, a dialectic of abstract reason and concrete perception.  At certain times, we may need a focused attention on the concrete of perception, in order to give some content to our speculation, and to see that the quotidian is interesting and significant, not mere “dross” to escape from.  On the other hand, in Hegel’s age, at the height of empiricism, he sees a dearth of symbolic thought:

Now it seems that there is the need for the opposite, that our sense of things is so deeply rooted in the earthly that an equal power is required to elevate it above all that. Spirit has shown itself to be so impoverished that it seems to yearn for its refreshment merely in the meager feeling of divinity, very much like the wanderer in the desert who longs for a simple drink of water. That it now takes so little to satisfy spirit’s needs is the full measure of the magnitude of its loss. (¶ 8)

We can perhaps consider what phase we are in.  Are we lost in abstractions, or so mired in the sensory that we can’t find any abstractions to usefully make sense of our experience? Is the collective mind so weak that it is satisfied with “meager feelings of divinity” in place of active interaction with the world?  One thing seems clear to me: the practices of Western Buddhism seek to avoid the work of the dialectic, and to simply assert a final correspondence of the abstract and the concrete in the illusory “ineffable” mystical truth of pure experience.  Working through the Phenomenology can perhaps restore the original purpose of sati, and show us that there is no “sense-certainty,” no “pure perception,” because every perception is already socially “mediated,” to use Hegel’s term for it.  If we jump too quickly to intense meditation, shunning all thought, we are liable to merely delude ourselves that we have achieved some ineffable pure experience, and to reify our socially produced construal of the world, cutting off any hope of actual awakening.

The Western Buddhist practice of meditation is aptly described in Hegel’s description of religion in his own time: “The absolute is not supposed to be conceptually grasped but rather to be felt and intuited. It is not the concept but the feeling and intuition of the absolute which are supposed to govern what is said of it” (¶ 6).  The problem with this is that it is an illusion, and requires us to abandon all that actually makes us uniquely human:

For the nature of humanity is to drive men to agreement with one another, and humanity’s existence lies only in the commonality of consciousness that has been brought about. The anti-human, the merely animalistic, consists in staying put in the sphere of feeling and in being able to communicate only by means of such feelings. (¶ 69)

We live as animals when we accept the mystical ineffability of “truth.”  Worse, we turn a blind eye to the social system which produces our intuitions and feelings, ignoring the enormous human suffering that is necessary, in our present capitalist system, to produce our calm, happy, comfortable womb of meditation retreats and mindful tea parties in pleasant flower gardens.

Getting off the cushion, and reading Hegel, can perhaps do more to actually awaken us today than years spent in seclusion and retreat.   Most importantly, to my way of thinking, is the capacity of Hegel’s concept of Geist to restore us to a proper understanding of what non-self really means.  For Hegel, the mind is always a collective thing, produced in collective symbolic practices, and so is completely dependently arisen, with no eternal essence at all.  We can only awaken by  becoming fully interpellated into a collective subject, a collective mind or Giest:

at a time when the universality of spirit has grown so much stronger, and, as is fitting, when what is purely singular has correspondingly become even more a matter of indifference, and so too when the universality of spirit now both sticks to its entire breadth and claims all the cultural wealth it has built up, then the share in the total work of spirit which falls to the activity of any individual can only be very small. As the nature of science implies, the individual must thus all the more forget himself; and, that is to say, although he must become what he can and must do what he can, there is nonetheless even less which must be demanded of him, just as he in turn must both anticipate less for himself and may demand less for himself. (¶ 72)

If we become, through study, a part of this collective mind, we might actually achieve awakening, and there might be some beneficial function for meditation.  If we sit and attend to some perceptual experience not to foster delusion and reification, but to see that there is no such thing as a “bare awareness” free of mediation by social symbolic systems, then meditation may start us on the path that Hegel outlines for us in Phenomenology of Spirit.  We can progress toward self-consciousness and reason and finally achieve Absolute Knowing, and meditation can perhaps help us get there, but only if we know where we are trying to go.  A period of intensive study is certainly the only way to begin.  Nobody claims awakening or “enlightenment” today, and this is probably not mere modesty; certainly the aim of most forms of Buddhist meditation existing today is to prevent any such awakening, because while it is perfectly possible, it is surely dangerous to the stability of our present social formations.

Works Cited

Cleary, Thomas.  Minding Mind: A Course in Basic Meditation.  Boston: Shambhala, 2009.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich.  Phenomenology of Spirit.  Trans. Terry Pinkard. 
http://terrypinkard.weebly.com/phenomenology-of-spirit-page.html

Note: Comments remain disabled for the present time.  If you have any questions or want to discuss the topic of this post, feel free to contact me at wtompepper@cox.net

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Witch’s Flight

Posted by Glenn Wallis on May 24, 2013

tree10That which founds is the ordeal.

To think is always to follow the witch’s flight.

—Gilles Deleuze (respectively: What is Grounding? and What is Philosophy?)

I find the prevailing x-buddhist “image of thought” disturbingly conservative. Wherever it manifests, that image mimics society’s established values of conformity and order. The x-buddhist image of thought refracts a practitioner who is “well-adjusted,” regardless of the repressive (e.g., Thailand) or hedonist (e.g., the U.S.) climate of his or her state and society. Examining the American x-buddhist product, I find this judgment unavoidable: x-buddhist thought serves the prevailing political-cultural status quo, and, to that end, functions to bolster the mind of its subject against challenges to the comforts of convention.

An animating contention of this speculative non-buddhism project is that x-buddhism suffers from a pathological inability to unleash the force of its own thought. Whether oblique (going against the stream, home-leaving, not taking the bait of the world, abandoning the raft) or direct (no-self, causal contingency, emptiness, dissolution), x-buddhist ideas suggest lines of thought that are primed to subvert, or otherwise profoundly disrupt, contemporary modes of life. And yet, American x-buddhism, whether in religious or secular guise, panders to contemporary culture like a kowtowing sycophant.

Why is that? We can attempt to answer that question in several ways. Many currents of influence are involved. Historically, for instance, a pattern of symbiotic relationship between x-buddhist communities and the political status quo has been the norm. Economically, Buddhism has always depended on the patronage of the business class. Institutionally, forms of thought and types of individuals incline toward stability and conservation, and thus tend to reproduce themselves. Psychologically, people avoid the conditions of fundamental change, and seek those of ease and belonging. (Think Auden: We would rather be ruined than changed, etc.)

But I’ll leave that sort of sociological analysis to others. Here, I would like to consider the question based on what I referred to above as the prevailing American x-buddhist “image of thought.”

The Image of Thought

Briefly, “image of thought” is Deleuze’s term for the structure provided by a discipline or community to determine the contours that thinking is permitted to take therein. In the preface to the English edition of Difference and Repetition, Deleuze says:

By this I mean not only that we think according to a given method, but also that there is a more or less implicit, tacit or presupposed image of thought which determines our goals when we try to think. (xiv)

An image of thought has the basic form of “Everybody knows…” (DR, 129). In an x-buddhist community, for example, everybody knows that “suffering” is the primary human problematic, and everybody knows that craving is its cause. Everybody knows, furthermore, that there is an end to suffering, and everybody knows that The Dharma prescribes the way to that end. Such explicit propositions determine the basic lines of what, within an x-buddhist community, may legitimately be thought about and discussed.

Deleuze, however, says that images of thought contain elements that, unlike these x-buddhist postulates, are not explicitly stated. Such elements remain socially and doctrinally functional, yet personally unconscious. For example, the very assumption that “the four noble truths” are coherent, even practicable, is simply given in the x-buddhist image of thought. The assumption is thus operative within the community, but in a way that functions “all the more effectively in silence” (DR, 167). No committed “sangha member” questions the assumptions underlying the basic premises of x-buddhist thought. No x-buddhist has ever applied sustained thought to the prospect that, for example, eliminating craving is impossible or even undesirable, and, given our biology, an outright ludicrous notion—indeed, yet another desperate human attempt to overcome the irrevocably human. In other words, as Joshua Ramey says in The Hermetic Deleuze, “Under the auspices of the image of thought, what remains unasked are the truly critical questions…[U]nder this aegis, thought can never truly break with opinion (doxa)” (114).

Deleuze holds that the re-invigoration of thinking in western philosophy can “be reached only by putting into question the traditional image of thought” (DR, xiv). That image of thought, received, paradigmatically, from Plato and Descartes, naively takes for granted that the person doing the thinking (and by extension, legitimate thought itself) is possessed of such qualities as “good sense,” “common sense” (DR, 168), a “talent for the true and an affinity for the true” (DR, 166). What is thus required for thinking to be something other than the mere mimicry of received opinion (doxa, doctrine) is “to overturn Platonism” (DR, 71). Duly turned over—thinking untethered from the constraints and pre-determined goals of tradition-opinion—critical and creative force is restored to thought.

The conditions of a true critique and a true creation are one and the same: the destruction of the image of thought which presupposes itself and the genesis of the act of thinking in thought itself. (DR, 139)

In my experience, the x-buddhist image of thought is one that suffers a debilitation far, far graver than that diagnosed by Deleuze for western philosophy. X-buddhism does not even assume the good will and natural talent of its thinker. Unlike Plato, the x-buddhist teacher thus does not naively take for granted that thinking will result in clarity and truth. S/he assumes, rather, that it will result in confusion, in trouble of some sort. He or she assumes that the thinking practitioner possesses, in fact, a profound mental deficiency: the very capacity for individuated thinking. The generative myth of x-buddhism, after all, involves a cognitive cataclysm: Siddhartha Gautama awakened to—saw, understood, realized—the proper categories of salvific human wisdom. The task of the x-buddhist subject is to realize the same. This myth explains in part the fact that x-buddhism offers, at best, pseudo-thought, and, at worst, anti-thought. (Here are the first few examples that came up when I searched “Buddhism and non-thinking.” They cover the spectrum from Asian traditional to western quasi-traditional. I present them as being representative of the x-buddhist image of thought):

Stop talking and thinking and there is nothing you will not be able to know. (Hsin Hsin Ming)

No thinking, no mind. No mind, no problem.  (Seung Sahn)

Names and forms are made by your thinking. If you are not thinking and have no attachment to name and form, then all substance is one. Your don’t know mind cuts off all thinking. This is your substance. The substance of this Zen stick and your own substance are the same. You are this stick; this stick is you.  (Seung Sahn)

Zen has nothing to teach us in the way of intellectual analysis. [Sutras are] mere waste paper whose utility consist in wiping off the dirt of the intellect and nothing more. (D.T. Suzuki)

Mindfulness is not thinking. This is one of the reasons it is so powerful. (Trevor Leggett)

It’s like this. If you start really paying attention to your own thought process, you’ll notice that the thoughts themselves don’t go on continuously. . . . Most of us habitually fill these spaces with more thoughts as fast as we can. . . . Try to look at the natural spaces between your thoughts. Learn what it feels like to stop generating more and more stuff for your brain to chew on. Now see if you can do that for longer and longer periods. A couple of seconds is fine. Voilà! (Brad Warner)

Meditation is like a game of Simon Says with the most devious, misleading, and clever Simon ever — your mind. In absolute silence, with no distractions, and you focusing on only one thing, your mind can send you careening off of stillness in less than a single breath. (“The Secular Buddhist,” Ted Meissner)

As such commonplace statements demonstrate, a particularly noxious aspect of the x-buddhist image of thought is a paralyzing paranoia regarding thought’s labor. This is an aspect that makes it unlikely that x-buddhism, as it is currently conceived and organized, can ever break free of its orbit of faith.

The Banner of Faith’s Sufficiency

One of the most deeply hidden assumptions in any image of thought is that people are necessarily capable of thinking. Deleuze calls this assumption into question:

“Everybody” knows very well that in fact men think rarely, and more often under the impulse of a shock than in the excitement of a taste for thinking. (DR, 132)

Deleuze has a quite specific mode of thinking in mind here. (I’ll come back to that in a moment.) What he says, however, applies to the contemporary American x-buddhist scene generally.

Once again, I will invoke my own experience and offer the observation that x-buddhist communities are incapable of providing the conditions that satisfy the demands of both thinking and the thinking practitioner. And again I will offer that this failure is evidence of x-buddhism’s current status as what Laruelle calls “a faith, with the sufficiency of faith” (Dictionary of Non-Philosophy, 57). I have repeatedly witnessed a cycle whereby intelligent people are attracted to x-buddhism, only to become dissatisfied and abandon it. Why are they attracted in the first place? Like pseudoscience,* x-buddhism replicates the forms of genuine thought. It contains elements that look like philosophy (epistemology, ontology, ethics, etc.), depth psychology, cognitive science, literature, and other intellectual practices. On closer examination, however, the x-buddhist versions never rise to the level of genuine intellectual practice. Like the Buddha’s discussions with his interlocutors in the Pali suttas, the encounter is never really meant to be robust. It is unvarying: in every x-buddhist community, book, dharma talk, and interview, the banner of faith’s sufficiency is ultimately raised, and thought comes to an end.

One explanation for the paucity of thought among x-buddhists is that this cycle is perpetuated via self-selection. As Nietzsche puts it: “Not suitable as a party member: Whoever thinks much is not suitable as a party member: he soon thinks himself right out of the party.” What does this logic say about those who not only persist as suitable x-buddhist party members, but who become conspicuous figures within the party—teachers, leaders, apologetic authors, internet gurus, and so on? Whatever else it may suggest about such figures, it says that under their aegis thinking beyond the constraints of pre-established x-buddhist opinion is not going to happen. Thinking is simply too dangerous.

Another explanation, of course, is that not everyone can think.

“That which founds is the ordeal”

I want to suggest two lines of thought here that can lead us out of the current x-buddhist no-thought morass. I will sketch these lines briefly for now, and will develop them more fully in another post.

Despite x-buddhism’s anxiety toward thinking, despite its substitution of vacuous platitudes for sustained thought, despite its moralism and pathological do-goodism, despite all of this: a “subversive and profound notion of thought lies in wait” in the x-buddhist corpus (THD, 115).

We can recover this notion of thought by revisiting the locus of the founding x-buddhist myth, the seat of awakening. This myth is one of overwhelming elemental power: Trees, water, sky, fire, earth, bodies beautiful and decaying, lust, passion, storms, death, cosmos, occult powers, animals, sprites, spirits, gods. Sitting against the trunk of a massive ficus, the Buddha, as Deleuze says of writers, uses all the resources of his athleticism (THD, 23) to “dip into a chaos, into a movement that goes to the infinite” (What is Philosophy?, 172). Having rejected the lighted paths of his day, the myth’s protagonist has no recourse but to abandon himself to dark experimentation. At several junctures he nearly dies. At the culmination, under the tree, he risks death again. He is taking this risk in order to see once and for all, and completely for himself, reality, things as they are. Let’s take that for now as a reference to something like Laruelle’s real or Deleuze’s plane of immanence, as, that is, a form of immanent thought. For Deleuze “immanent thought is involved with an exploration of extremes, and with abyssal adventures of great risk and tremendous ordeal” (THD, 23). By engaging in such extreme experimentation, the protagonist has entered into a “Dionysian space of undoing” within which he enacts “not a system of demonstration, but an ordeal in which the mind is given new eyes” (THD, 23, 22).

If x-buddhists can re-imagine their mythical progenitor’s awakening as a cognitive event, an event in which the mind as social-symbolic-personal nexus and not some other faculty is given new eyes, they may be able to transform their attitude to the very nature of thought itself. But that transformation will come at great cost. Unlike the current x-buddhist project, this is not a practice that serves ease and control. It points, rather, toward “unexpected relations, uncanny mediations, and unforeseen creations” (THD, 214). It is, in other words, to follow the witch’s flight.

“To think is always to follow the witch’s flight”

I can see no way to break the obstinate hypnotic spell of x-buddhism’s sufficiency of faith with anything less than what Deleuze calls the “trespass and violence” of thought (DR, 139). And by “thought” here, I remind you that we have long put away the obsequiously civil, pseudo, and quasi forms of thinking that count as such in the universal x-buddhist sangha. The form of thought that the mythic protagonist engages in, and thus endorses, is abnormal. It is rooted as deeply in nightmare as it is in reason.

In the spirit of reverie and uncharted thought, I will leave you with this very real possibility:

Precisely because the [human truth sought by x-buddhism is pre-buddhist] and does not immediately take effect with [x-buddhist] concepts, it implies a sort of groping experimentation and its layout resorts to measures that are not very respectable, rational, or reasonable. These measures belong to the order of dreams, of pathological processes, esoteric experiences, drunkenness, and excess…To think is always to follow the witch’s flight. (WP?, p. 41)

____________

References

Gilles Deleuze. Difference and Repetition (1968). Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Colombia University Press, 1994. (DR)

__. What is Philosophy (1991). Trans. Hugh Tomlinson Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. (WP?)

Joshua Ramey. The Hermetic Deleuze. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2012. (THD)

* See Maarten Boudry on pseudoscience.

Image: “A Hallucination of Salty Trees.”

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Samuel Beckett Stares at a Wall

Posted by Glenn Wallis on May 18, 2013

wall[Meditation] is a faith, with the sufficiency of faith, intended by necessity to remain empty but which necessarily evades this void by its repopulation with objects and foreign goals provided by experience, culture, history, language, etc. Through its style of communication and “knowing” it is a rumor—the [Asian] rumor—which is transmitted by hearsay, imitation, specularity and repetition.1

That passage came to mind while reading texts and watching video on the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society website.2 Laruelle is talking about philosophy, but the statement works equally well for meditation (and its varieties: contemplation, mindfulness, centering prayer, even yoga, tai chi, and so on). Much of what I read and heard about contemplation on the Center’s website struck me as reasonable enough. A typical example:

Contemplative Practices cultivate a critical, first-person focus, sometimes with direct experience as the object, while at other times concentrating on complex ideas or situations. Incorporated into daily life, they act as a reminder to connect to what we find most meaningful.

That’s reasonable—as an opening. An awful lot of questions would have to be asked about the statement, though. What, for instance, is this “first-person focus” of direct experience? What, for that matter, is “direct experience”? Anyone who has been reading this blog knows how attuned some of us are to the machinations of unacknowledged ideology. For instance, concerning this overlap between first-person accounts and experience, a reader recently wrote to me:

[T]here is a built in petitio principii that makes the viewpoint unfalsifiable. The ideology includes a meta-message regarding the autonomy of (meditative) experience as a veridical source of knowledge. This seems to be what [B. Alan] Wallace is up to with his emphasis on “first-person” experience, arguing from an assumption that such experience is autonomous and not already formed by ideology.

I agree with that assessment. It succinctly identifies the big question for meditation: is it a vessel for ideology or a science of ideology?3 Does the practice, in fact, produce new knowledge, about, say, subjective experience or the intransitive world, or does it merely reinforce the views provided by doctrine? I’m still holding out for the former (barely). So, I’d want to ask the people at the Center why, if they believe that meditation-contemplation holds such natural human promise (as the director says, in effect, on a video), do they incessantly populate it “with objects and foreign goals provided by experience, culture, history, language, etc.”? Why not let the practice do its work, unencumbered by over-determining doctrine? I am not going to offer a critique of the Center’s site here. I am more interested in the wide-spread x-buddhist phenomenon of what Laruelle calls here “re-population.”

“Re-population” is, of course, a somewhat polemical term. Read the rest of this entry »

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On the Grammar of Meditation: Parataxis

Posted by Glenn Wallis on May 16, 2013

parataxis2Here, mute world.
There, dharmic tale.
Near here, inching ever closer,
the persecuted human.

Terrence Malick’s film The Tree of Life is, by nearly every account that I have heard or read, painful to watch. It is frustrating, boring, uninteresting. Nothing happens.  No story is told. Imagine—a movie without a story!

These are curious reactions to a film that enables us to be present at the creation of the universe, watch dinosaurs fighting in pristine forests and frolicking on the shore, be voyeurs of a darkly suffering family in 1950s suburban Texas, and witness the stellar conflagration that ends it all.

Yet, it is true: no story is told. In this lack, the film shows us a way to exorcise the enchanters haunting x-buddhist meditation.

Exorcise it of what, exactly? First of all, of the controlling narratives which invariably cleave to it. I mean the heroic narratives about its origin, value, use, benefit, purpose. Once we evacuate the narrative from the practice, we can exorcise it of the subordinate grammar that supports the narrative. What is left is a form of severe parataxis. Severe, but just. It is an existential grammar without coordinating or subordinating connectives. It’s this next to that. No hierarchy. No and, for, with, because. No therefore, since, and then, as, if. No essential sense or meaning—the fires that fuel the narrative juggernaut.

Malick’s paratactic cinematic grammar is a model for our meditation grammar. Read the rest of this entry »

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The Epistemic Meditator

Posted by Glenn Wallis on May 14, 2013

blackarrowCan meditation produce knowledge? Or is it a vessel for dogma?

The latter is without question the case. How else should we understand the perfect confluence of some x-community’s practice with its doctrine? It never fails. It appears to be as inevitable as it is complete. Whether Trappist, Quaker, Zen, TM, Shamanic, Wiccan, Vipassana, MBSR or any other form, what happens in meditation never fails to validate the claims of doctrine. Let me converse for five minutes with any meditator, and I can tell you to what system of thought he or she subscribes. Meditation, it seems, is a potent tool for inculcating ideology. And the meditator, as good subject of that ideology, cannot hide the fact. S/he cannot but expressively ventriloquize the terms and beliefs that populate the practice.

If it is demonstrably the case that meditation can be employed as a tool for indoctrination, is it necessarily so? Can the term “meditation” be used to designate a human practice that produces knowledge? If so, what conditions might be required?

On the back cover of her new book, In-Cite: Epistemologies of Creative Writing, Camelia Elias, writes:

The epistemic creative writer is not merely an expressive writer, a writer who writes for creative writing programs at diverse university colleges. Rather, the epistemic creative writer is the writer who understands that in order to say something useful you must step out of the space that engages your ego. Awareness of what really matters comes from the contemplation of the futility of words. Before the word there is silence. After the word there is silence. But during the word there is knowledge that can be made crystal clear. [Links at bottom.]

Similarly, the “epistemic meditator” is not a ventriloquized subject, one who practices obediently within a particular tradition and dutifully absorbs the views of that tradition. Rather, the epistemic meditator is one who understands that in order to think or learn something important he must step out of the very space within which the community’s subjugating practice does its work. That space is demarcated by the words of the community’s doctrine. Words are the furniture and infrastructure of the x-buddhist fortress. By accident or by design, those words are compelling and coercive. “What really matters,” for example, is already given in x-buddhist postulates. It is, in fact, provided at the very inception of “Buddhism.” X-buddhism’s origination myth has the Buddha-figure attaining to saving knowledge. And so the first tracks of borrowed thought are lain. “Awareness of  what really matters” is not awareness at all: it is rather acquiescence to tradition’s formulation. The x-buddhist who “sees” that “all is suffering” (or whatever) is merely seeing what he, by his affective acquiescence, has decided to see.  What he has “seen” is the ostensible value of a particular formulation. If contemplation reveals “the futility of words,” the first words to fail are those that say what contemplation is.

Before the word there is silence. After the word there is silence. X-buddhism, like all systems of thought, is nowhere to be found in this empty silence. Yet, x-buddhism, the paladin of emptiness, is nothing if not a loquacious filler of the silence. Read the rest of this entry »

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Radical Potential

Posted by Glenn Wallis on May 10, 2013

MalevichSpeculative non-buddhism is an attempt to think x-buddhism via radical concepts. A radical concept is one that has the status of a transcendental minimum. In Laruellen language, a radical, transcendentally minimal concept is one that “clones” the real rather than the wholly transcendental, and is thus posited by the “human-in-human” rather than by some totalizing x-system. Intriguingly, yet confoundingly, x-buddhism itself is populated by radical concepts. In Cruel Theory | Sublime Practice, I argue that the prime calculus of classical-buddhism is constituted by radical concepts. I have in mind concepts such as vanishing, ancestral anamnesis,  symbolic identity, nihility,  surface, and others (anicca, sati, anattā, suññatā, sabba).

And yet I claim that the brutal failure of x-buddhism throughout its entire history has been its inability (or refusal?) to unleash the revolutionary potential of its thought. I further claim that what has filled the space of this failure/refusal is not a merely quasi-revolutionary force-of-x-buddhism; it is, rather, an impotent collusion. Contemporary x-buddhism’s impotence makes it easy prey to the very status quo its calculus is, arguably, designed to upset. Do we need any further evidence of this than the smooth grafting of x-buddhism onto the western marketplace? In fact, this is an old pattern. Everywhere Buddhism has been brought–Tibet, China, Japan, Thailand, Sri Lanka, etc.–it has been co-opted by the ruling power structures, and thereby seduced away from its revolutionary designs.  It is fair to ask whether today, in Europe and North America, x-buddhism is not just another product that enables its consumer merely to retreat and  refresh before the next day’s onslaught. That would certainly fit the ancient pattern. Chinese Chan, for example, was a mix of agrarianism, Daoism, and Indian Buddhism bound tightly with the heavy chains of Confucianism. In the West, we have a mix of feel-good pop psychology, Hallmark Card-like positive affirmation, and world-buddhism trapped in the bloated cage of consumer capitalism. Read the rest of this entry »

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Go fann on Calls

Posted by Glenn Wallis on May 7, 2013

Mark Rothko-orange and yellow,1956-2I am going to retreat for a while into my workshop. I will craft text there. I will craft tools there, too, tools that should prove useful to your sifting through the ruins of the dilapidated fortress we call x-buddhism. Who knows what treasures you may find? Remember, our ruin is ruin because of treasure.

I will continue to present my finely-wrought wares here.

The work I want to get back to requires concentration. In order to do it, I will be disabling discussion here. I will allow ping backs. They will show up to the left there, where the commentators do now.

Thank you for your participation. Thank you for all your comments.

As many of you know, thoughtfully writing and responding to comments can be extremely time-consuming. On many days over the last two years I have spent several hours responding to comments. I can tell from many of yours, too, that you must spend a great deal of time crafting your comments. I also happen to be conscientious about getting back to readers when they make an interesting critical point or ask a valuable question. So, I am not the kind of blogger who can post something and then turn away. Sometimes I lose sleep over it. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of you do, too.

I have learned a great deal from many of you. Thank you.

I will leave the comments open on the previous posts for a couple of days, or until I can reconfigure the blog a bit. That way, you can finish up whatever conversations you were having. Who knows, maybe we’ll have a forum for exchange again someday. Better yet, maybe one of you will create one somewhere else.

It’s been a fun experiment. Now, where did I leave that old slack tub…?

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Pause to Reflect

Posted by Glenn Wallis on May 6, 2013

EndlicherLet’s take a moment to reflect.

I am always receiving advice on how to conduct this project of non-buddhist criticism. Nearly all of it  misses the point.  Nearly all of it is nonetheless worth considering. I would like to take a pause, and share some of that advice with you. I will also say what I will do about it.

Advice #1: Remain substantive
Advice #2: No naming
Advice #3: Stop trolling
Advice #4: Address alternatives
Advice #5: Moderate comments
Advice #6: Stop Tom Pepper!
Advice #7: Be more self-critical
Advice #8: Stop already! The blog has run its course Read the rest of this entry »

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Žižek v. Buddhism: who’s the subject?

Posted by Glenn Wallis on May 3, 2013

LacanSubjectŽižek v. Buddhism: who’s the subject?

By Adrian J. Ivakhiv

This started out as a response to Slavoj Žižek’s recent talk at the University of Vermont on “Buddhism Naturalized,” but evolved into a consideration of subjectivity, which happened to be the topic of my next post in the pre-G (process-relational ecosophy-G) series. [Links at bottom.] So this can be considered part 1 of a 2-part series.

There are Western philosophers with a good understanding of Buddhism. Some of them are Buddhologists: longtime scholars of Buddhism, like Herbert Güenther, Jay Garfield, Kenneth Inada, Jin Park (the definition of “Western” gets a little blurry here), Brook Ziporyn, Stephen Batchelor, and others who are philosophers in their own right (if not necessarily academically sanctioned ones), and who have cut their teeth interpreting original Asian Buddhist texts.

Others have come to Buddhism through a side door: either by accident or through a logical extension of their own interests. Owen Flanagan is one of these, and his recent book The Bodhisattva’s Brain: Buddhism Naturalized provides a model for how an established analytic philosopher can develop a critical dialogue with a philosophical tradition that is foreign yet ancient, complex, and clearly worthy of comparative assessment.

Then there are those whose writing about Buddhism extends somewhat beyond what they know about it. In the past, this was excusable by the dearth of material for western commentators. Buddhist literature is voluminous — one might say it’s Himalayan in its voluminousness — and the fraction of what’s been translated into European languages is still comparatively small. But there is enough now to support full-time positions in Western universities for those who specialize in refined sub-areas of Buddhist studies. And with Buddhism alive and well now in the West and in the East, there is no end to what a Buddhist scholar can do.

Where does Slavoj Žižek fit into this continuum? Read the rest of this entry »

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