D. T. Suzuki revisited

I had forgotten that I had something to say about D. T. Suzuki in a previous post: 

Gods, UFOs, Zen, epistemology, autonomy

Last year I retraced my steps back to 1977, when I read Zen Buddhism & Psychoanalysis, by D. T. Suzuki, Erich Fromm, and Richard De Martino (New York: Harper, 1960). I concluded somewhere along the line that Fromm was naive about Suzuki and other religious/spiritual figures, but this time I was appalled by Suzuki, so I wrote this:

Revisiting D. T. Suzuki: Selective reading, memory, & embarrassment

Tarrying with Theology: Slavoj Žižek & The Monstrosity of Christ

The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?
Slavoj Žižek & John Milbank, edited by Creston Davis.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009.
http://www.sok.bz/web/media/video/ChristZizek.pdf

Contents:

Introduction: Holy Saturday or Resurrection Sunday? Staging an Unlikely Debate / Creston Davis

The Fear of Four Words: A Modest Plea for the Hegelian Reading of Christianity / Slavoj Žižek

The Double Glory, or Paradox versus Dialectics: On Not Quite Agreeing with Slavoj Žižek / John Milbank

Dialectical Clarity versus the Misty Conceit of Paradox / Slavoj Žižek

Creston Davis is a jackass: he is the philosophical correlate of the Democratic Party, of Clinton-Obama bipartisanism: overcome the cleavage between liberals and conservatives by capitulating to conservatives. In philosophy, is there anything more disgusting than postmodern theology?

Apparently, one of Žižek's other conceits, besides being a poseur tough-guy born-again Leninist, is to pose as an atheist Christian theologian. This is almost as sickening as the rest of the book, but there are some interesting moments. I'll confine myself to Žižek's first essay "The Fear of Four Words."

Žižek begins with a quote from Chesterton. The aims is to posit Christianity against magical thinking, nature worship, and other religions. Žižek has an animus against New Age mysticism, which is at least interesting:

The next standard argument against Hegel’s philosophy of religion targets its teleological structure: it openly asserts the primacy of Christianity, Christianity as the “true” religion, the final point of the entire development of religions. It is easy to demonstrate how the notion of “world religions,” although it was invented in the era of Romanticism in the course of the opening toward other (non- European) religions, in order to serve as the neutral conceptual container allowing us to “democratically” confer equal spiritual dignity on all “great” religions (Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism . . .), effectively privileges Christianity—already a quick look makes it clear how Hinduism, and especially Buddhism, simply do not fit the notion of “religion” implied in the idea of “world religions.” However, what conclusion are we to draw from this? For a Hegelian, there is nothing scandalous in this fact: every particular religion in effect contains its own notion of what religion “in general” is, so that there is no neutral universal notion of religion—every such notion is already twisted in the direction of (colorized by, hegemonized by) a particular religion. This, however, in no way entails a nominalist / historicist devaluation of universality; rather, it forces us to pass from “abstract” to “concrete” universality, i.e., to articulate how the passage from one to another particular religion is not merely something that concerns the particular, but is simultaneously the “inner development” of the universal notion itself, its “self- determination.”

Postcolonial critics like to dismiss Christianity as the “whiteness” of religions: the presupposed zero level of normality, of the “true” religion, with regard to which all other religions are distortions or variations. However, when today’s New Age ideologists insist on the distinction between religion and spirituality (they perceive themselves as spiritual, not part of any organized religion), they (often not so) silently impose a “pure” procedure of Zen- like spiritual meditation as the “whiteness” of religion. The idea is that all religions presuppose, rely on, exploit, manipulate, etc., the same core of mystical experience, and that it is only “pure” forms of meditation like Zen Buddhism that exemplify this core directly, bypassing institutional and dogmatic mediations. Spiritual meditation, in its abstraction from institutionalized religion, appears today as the zero- level undistorted core of religion: the complex institutional and dogmatic edifice which sustains every particular religion is dismissed as a contingent secondary coating of this core. The reason for this shift of accent from religious institution to the intimacy of spiritual experience is that such a meditation is the ideological form that best fits today’s global capitalism.

Adorno did as good a job or better on this subject. Later, Žižek approvingly quotes Chesteron again:

Love desires personality; therefore love desires division. It is the instinct of Christianity to be glad that God has broken the universe into little pieces. . . . This is the intellectual abyss between Buddhism and Christianity; that for the Buddhist or Theosophist personality is the fall of man, for the Christian it is the purpose of God, the whole point of his cosmic idea. The world-soul of the Theosophists asks man to love it only in order that man may throw himself into it. But the divine centre of Christianity actually threw man out of it in order that he might love it. . . . All modern philosophies are chains which connect and fetter; Christianity is a sword which separates and sets free. No other philosophy makes God actually rejoice in the separation of the universe into living souls.

Žižek has his problems with Western mysticism, too, e.g. Eckhart, who, among others, neutralized the "monstrosity of Christ". A couple more interesting paragraphs:

The trap to avoid apropos of Eckhart is to introduce the difference between the ineffable core of the mystical experience and what D. T. Suzuki called “all sorts of mythological paraphernalia” in the Christian tradition: “As I conceive it, Zen is the ultimate fact of all philosophy and religion. . . . What makes all these religions and philosophies vital and inspiring is due to the presence in them all of what I may designate as the Zen element.” In a different way, Schürmann makes exactly the same move, when he distinguishes between the core of Eckhart’s message and the way he formulated it in the inappropriate terms borrowed from the philosophical and theological traditions at his disposal (Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Aquinas . . .); even more, Schürmann designates the philosopher who, centuries later, was finally able to provide the adequate formulation of what Eckhart was striving at, Heidegger: “Eckhart came too early in his daring design. He is not a modern philosopher. But his understanding of being as releasement prepares the way for modern philosophy.” However, does this not obliterate the true breakthrough of Eckhart, his attempt to think Christology (the birth of God within the order of finitude, Incarnation) from the mystical perspective? There is a solution to this impasse: what if what Schürmann claims is true, with the proviso that the “modern philosopher” is not Heidegger, but Hegel? Eckhart’s goal is withdrawal from the created reality of particular entities into the “desert” of the divine nature, of Godhead, the negation of all substantial reality, withdrawal into the primordial Void--One beyond Word. Hegel’s task is exactly the opposite one: not from God to Godhead, but from Godhead to God, i.e., how, out of this abyss of Godhead, God qua Person emerges, how a Word is born in it. Negation must turn around onto itself and bring us back to determinate (finite, temporal) reality.

Later on, Žižek does reveal what a reactionary Chesterton is without naming him as such; Chesteron has merely failed to see that the anarchist lawlessless of the philosopher is not just the most criminal act, but an indictment of the criminality of an entire system. I imagine that Orwell would have a field day--perhaps he did, for all I know, with Chesterton's contention that orthodoxy is the greatest rebellion.

Here is a curious comment on the diversity of atheisms:

Peter Sloterdijk was right to notice how every atheism bears the mark of the religion out of which it grew through its negation: there is a specifically Jewish Enlightenment atheism practiced by great Jewish figures from Spinoza to Freud; there is the Protestant atheism of authentic responsibility and assuming one’s fate through anxious awareness that there is no external guarantee of success (from Frederick the Great to Heidegger in Sein und Zeit); there is a Catholic atheism à la Maurras, there is a Muslim atheism (Muslims have a wonderful word for atheists: it means “those who believe in nothing”), and so on. Insofar as religions remain religions, there is no ecumenical peace between them—such a peace can develop only through their atheist doubles. Christianity, however, is an exception here: it enacts the reflexive reversal of atheist doubt into God himself. In his “Father, why have you forsaken me?”, Christ himself commits what is for a Christian the ultimate sin: he wavers in his Faith. While, in all other religions, there are people who do not believe in God, only in Christianity does God not believe in himself.

Žižek demonstrates here how little he knows of Jewish atheists, and how he obtuse he is to real, historical Christianity, not the sanitized version of theologians. It is the same intellectual fraud that real theologians and mystics perpetrate via their religions: that their constructs constitute the inner meaning of the vulgar exoteric religions that form the actual substance of history.

Žižek digresses from there to Frankenstein, the Book of Job, pop culture, and Freud. Then back to Kant and Hegel. Another curious assertion follows:

This double kenosis is what the standard Marxist critique of religion as the self-alienation of humanity misses: “modern philosophy would not have its own subject if God’s sacrifice had not occurred.” For subjectivity to emerge— not as a mere epiphenomenon of the global substantial ontological order, but as essential to Substance itself—the split, negativity, particularization, self-alienation, must be posited as something that takes place in the very heart of the divine Substance, i.e., the move from Substance to Subject must occur within God himself.

A little farther down, another indictment of "standard" Marxism:

This is why standard Marxist philosophy oscillates between the ontology of “dialectical materialism” which reduces human subjectivity to a particular ontological sphere (no wonder Georgi Plekhanov, the creator of the term “dialectical materialism,” also designated Marxism as “dynamized Spinozism”) and the philosophy of praxis which, from the young Georg Lukács onward, takes as its starting point and horizon collective subjectivity which posits / mediates every objectivity, and is thus unable to think its genesis from the substantial order, the ontological explosion, “Big Bang,” which gives rise to it.

More rehabilitation of Hegel. Then literature, movies, detective stories. . . and Wagner.

Žižek poses the question of what is different about the Jewish communal spirit and the Christian one? I must have missed his answer, for we are back to Hegel. Then on what makes Christ different from other wise men.

The next section begins with Pope Ratzinger's verbal assaults on Islam, secularism, and Darwinism. Then comes a curious defense of Islam, coupled with Judaism. Christianity as the monstrous exception that unifies the two abstractions. More Chesterton. Žižek sees an affinity between Catholicism and dialectical materialism (vs. the ontological incompleteness of the universe, viz. quantum mechanics, Badiou). More on Badiou and materialism . . . and of course Lacan. Passing remarks about the new atheists. Then ruminations about the relationship between monotheism and atheism, e.g.:

. . . what if the affinity between monotheism and atheism demonstrates not that atheism depends on monotheism, but that monotheism itself prefigures atheism within the field of religion—its God is from the very (Jewish) beginning a dead one, in clear contrast with the pagan gods who irradiate cosmic vitality. Insofar as the truly materialist axiom is the assertion of primordial multiplicity, the One which precedes this multiplicity can only be zero itself. No wonder, then, that only in Christianity—as the only truly logical monotheism—does God himself turn momentarily into an atheist.

More on materialism, Deleuze, Badiou, Lenin, Bukharin, Chalmers, Lacan . . . . Then:

What, then, is the proper atheist stance? Not a continuous desperate struggle against theism, of course—but not a simple indifference to belief either. That is to say: what if, in a kind of negation of negation, true atheism were to return to belief (faith?), asserting it without reference to God—only atheists can truly believe; the only true belief is belief without any support in the authority of some presupposed figure of the “big Other.”

Žižek is a clever boy. Interesting little observations here and there, but he adds up to nothing. And this intervention in theology is outstandingly worthless and devoid of integrity.

Zen Judaism

The Daodejing /Tao Te Ching was once one of my favorite books. Its minimalism is one aspect of its appeal; you don't really have to believe in anything to relate to it. Daoism is also an institutionalized religion, and as such is quite different from this text taken in abstraction. The other great classic of Daoism taken in abstraction is the Chuang Tzu (or Zhuangzi in the new transliteration). I was a big fan of this too long ago and far away. Ultimately, the world views inscribed therein have their limitations, but are pretty sophisticated for ancient feudal society.

There is also much that needs to be said about the ideology, politics, and duplicity of intellectual elites of both East and West who have reprocessed and imported the philosophies of India, China, and Japan into the modern West. One could discuss for example, the fascist and Nazi sympathies of Indian gurus, or the participation of Zen Buddhists in Japanese fascism. But more generally, there is the conservatism, smugness, and quietism of the comfortable and well-off that tries to convince us that the world is okey-dokey as is; we just need to change our attitude. People who have suffered, on the other hand, don't tend to see things this way.

* * *

The Tao does not speak.
The Tao does not blame.
The Tao does not take sides.
The Tao has no expectations.
The Tao demands nothing of others.
The Tao is not Jewish.

-- David M. Bader, Zen Judaism: For You, A Little Enlightenment

Gods, UFOs, Zen, epistemology, autonomy

"Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another."

-- Immanuel Kant, An Answer to the Question: "What is Enlightenment?"

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"Seeing and Believing" by Jerry A. Coyne
The New Republic, Wednesday, February 04,2009

The Edge commentaries are all over the place.

As for the original article, it effectively establishes the incompatibility between faith and science, and more generally between religion and science. From a cursory reading, I'd say it gets a little weird in sections III & IV. For example, the proposals as to what would constitute a test of religious beliefs are not convincing to me and require a deeper logical analysis. Curiously, I last thought about this about 30 years ago, when I read a most unusual book by UFOlogist Jacques Vallee.

Some of Coyne's concluding statements are most interesting:

So the most important conflict--the one ignored by Giberson and Miller--is not between religion and science. It is between religion and secular reason. Secular reason includes science, but also embraces moral and political philosophy, mathematics, logic, history, journalism, and social science--every area that requires us to have good reasons for what we believe. Now I am not claiming that all faith is incompatible with science and secular reason--only those faiths whose claims about the nature of the universe flatly contradict scientific observations. Pantheism and some forms of Buddhism seem to pass the test. But the vast majority of the faithful--those 90 percent of Americans who believe in a personal God, most Muslims, Jews, and Hindus, and adherents to hundreds of other faiths--fall into the "incompatible" category.

Unfortunately, some theologians with a deistic bent seem to think that they speak for all the faithful. These were the critics who denounced Dawkins and his colleagues for not grappling with every subtle theological argument for the existence of God, for not steeping themselves in the complex history of theology. Dawkins in particular was attacked for writing The God Delusion as a "middlebrow"book. But that misses the point. He did indeed produce a middlebrow book, but precisely because he was discussing religion as it is lived and practiced by real people. The reason that many liberal theologians see religion and evolution as harmonious is that they espouse a theology not only alien but unrecognizable as religion to most Americans.

I have my doubts about Buddhism, which I doubt could pass the compatibility test. Coyne proceeds, in an abbreviated fashion, down the same path as Victor Stenger, who has written one of the best recent books I've seen on the incompatibility of science and theism. That is, they proceed by examining all the incompatibilities and then see what is left. For Stenger, some vague, toothless deism survives his tests; for Coyne, pantheism. I'll add that there are some lesser known variations on this theme, such as panentheism (I think you will find this and other variations in Wikipedia). But discounting these variations, we basically have pantheism and deism to deal with. Pantheism I would imagine to be more popular, but this could be my experiences of the counterculture in the '70s talking.

The question would then be, do what extent are these positions intelligible? If God is not immanent in the universe--which I think is the implication of deism (somebody correct me)--then what practical sense could be made out of the concept? As for pantheism, there are a couple ways of approaching the subject. What sense does it make to say that the universe is divine or transcendental? What specific qualities are posited other than a psychological or ideational disposition on our part? Does this mean that the universe as a whole possesses intelligence, or at least sentience, or functions as some sort of organism? If so, what is the evidence, and how does this notion concretely make sense? Perhaps the universe possesses a vital impulse or life-property without being divine per se, such as in the vitalism of Henri Bergson, George Bernard Shaw, or Hans Driesch? In my view, little would survive intensive conceptual investigation and our current knowledge of the universe except for some psychological / ideational disposition on our part regarding sacredness.

Coyne mentions the spineless position of the National Academy of Science on the compatibility of religion and science. The AAAS is just as bad if not worse. Coyne lets the cat out of the bag suggesting that scientists want to avoid losing funding and institutional support. Yet I think their cowardice goes too far. These organizations need not declare an official position against religion or theism, but it is entirely intellectually illegitimate and anti-scientific for them to declare officially a non-incompatibility between religion and science. If organized science can claim a compartmentalized mission in the totality of social life, then it should defend a compartmentalized role and refuse to take any position outside of defending the integrity of scientific research, publication, and education. Paradoxically, these organizations overreach their own sphere of competence by declaring the conceptual compatibility of religion and science rather than simply asking for a modus vivendi in social life.

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Jacques Vallée is a strange man. I think I may have seen him in person once discussing information science & technology. But I first heard of him as a UFOlogist as a child. Here's the basic poop:

Jacques Vallée - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Well, about 30 years ago I read one or both of these books, most likely the latter:

Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers. Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1969.

Another edition came out a quarter century later. An excerpt can be found on amazon.com:

Passport to Magonia: On UFOs, Folklore, and Parallel Worlds. Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1993.

The Invisible College: What a Group of Scientists Has Discovered About UFO Influences on the Human Race. New York: Dutton, 1975.

Vallee had a novel hypothesis, linking UFO sightings to accounts of alien, supernatural, or divine visitations throughout human history in diverse cultures. I never took seriously any theory he had about all of this, but at the time I found his approach epistemologically fascinating, with a possible ethical implication I will attempt to clarify below.

I was reminded of this while reading the Coyne article, which cited the criteria offered by Bertrand Russell and/or others for accepting the existence of God, Christ, etc., criteria which I never found compelling. Yeah. I'd be freaked out if a burning bush started talking to me, or if the clouds opened up and Mother Mary cried out to her Jewish Son of God, "How come you never call?", but in the final analysis, what does this change? The human impulse to bow down and submit is precisely the ethical problem. But more on that later. The epistemological issue is interesting, because a phenomenon has not only to be experienced, but interpreted. One cannot simply assume that some vision or visitation is congruent with one's religious mythology or supposition about origins in outer space; rather, sensory experience is one link in a chain of investigative evidence to yield a plausible and fully generalized explanation. Vallee's book interested me at the time because his bizarro hypothesis revealed, perhaps unwittingly, what is epistemologically at stake.

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Now back to the ethical dimension. Around the same time I was reading another book; it may have been D.T. Suzuki's contribution to Erich Fromm's Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis. Suzuki was the original and foremost propagator of Zen in the western world. I didn't know his actual history back then, or how dishonest and irresponsible New Age panderers are in erasing history, in this case, how Suzuki was really positioned among the Japanese intelligentsia and Zen's link with Japanese nationalism, militarism, and fascism. Nevertheless, I'm guessing I was reading Suzuki at the time. Whoever it was, I was impressed by this characterization: Zen makes you confront who you are; it's not ultimately about what you believe and what you've committed yourself to, but who is the one who is believing, thinking, acting? In other words, there's an irreducible personal responsibility involved, which is foregrounded while religious justifications are relegated to secondary status.

Now I think Suzuki was lying, because Zen Buddhist practice is as institutionalized, ritualized, and historico-culturally specific as all get-out. As I say, New-Agers are historically ignorant or liars or both. Nevertheless, this concept impressed me at the time, and I'm pretty sure I made a connection with Vallee's book(s).

We love to submit to overwhelming power, to bow, scrape, and genuflect, in hopes we will get something out of our self-abasement. From totemism to American Idol, some things never change. "I was only following orders"--the mantra of Adolph Eichmann and Jerry Falwell. It's even worse when the issuer of those orders is entirely fictitious. But guess what, since the Nuremburg Trials that excuse doesn't fly anymore. The proper response is: fuck you, buddy, you're responsible, and you're going to hang for this.