Wordle

Neat website/application.

 

Back-Handed Praise for Zizek’s Western Buddhism

Here’s a slightly edited post I left in a Buddhist Forum on Western Buddhism. It starts with a quote from another post in the thread.

Paraphrasing Slavoj Zizek:  “Western Buddhism” as it is used today represents a set of techniques and methods that are designed basically to make your crappy office job more meaningful and less stressful.  This is why he calls it the ideal supplement to or “hegemonic ideology par excellance of global capitalism” (that’s in On Belief).

I think Zizek’s onto something here.

If your motivation for practice is “stress relief,” I humbly suggest a reconsideration of your motivation for practice is in order.

This doesn’t address the broader speculative question, however, of what an authentic Buddhism that is integrated in an intelligent way with Euro-American culture might look like.  Really, it’ll have to take some generations of rigorous practice for that to come around.

I have wrestled with Zizek’s critique of Western Buddhism for a couple years now, and I think he is on to something too. I also think, for as versed as he is in the Euro-American philosophical tradition, he’s sloppy when it comes to how he defines and subsequently critiques Western Buddhism. The point about “stress relief” as a motivation for practice is why I reply though.

Jacques Lacan, one of Zizek’s most important influences, didn’t view psychoanalysis strictly, if at all, as a therapeutic exercise. It was a quest for truth, particularly the truth of our desire (a complicated term that shouldn’t be immediately substituted for/by related Buddhist terms). Therapeutic benefits, in terms of self-fulfillment or “being happy,” aren’t necessarily the criterion of a successful psychoanalysis, though they aren’t necessarily excluded either.

It’s from this perspective that I think we should consider Zizek’s definition and subsequent critique of Western Buddhism. That is to say, one the one hand there is Buddhism practiced in the West by Westerners; on the other hand, there is a critical sub-set of that, which is what I think Zizek accurately identifies in his notion of Western Buddhism, that takes particular notions of well-being, which for Zizek are hallmarks of a perverse superego injunction to Enjoy, as criterion of the efficacy of the Dharma. 

Though the Buddha taught to avoid the extreme of self-mortification, it would be a bit disingenuous to characterize the motivations of acknowledged Dharma-teachers and masters as happiness. The Buddha himself identified happiness with suffering, and even equanimity (cf. Dogen’s warning in the Shobogenzo about the monk who mistook equanimity as the proof of his attaining enlightenment) isn’t strictly speaking the point of practice. In other words, the point of practice is more important than partial effects like happiness and the reduction of stress, though they are clearly not unimportant in the Dharma either—”With nothing to attain, a Bodhisattva relies on Prajna Paramita, and thus the mind is without hindrance. Without hindrance, there is no fear.”

Anyway, getting back to Zizek, an important question he at least implicitly raises for me is with regards to the effects of capitalism on so-called Western culture and what that means for Buddhism as it adapts to the West. Specifically, what I have in mind actually touches on a memorable remark Marx made about the effects of Capitalism and modernization on feudal societies and tradition in general: “all that is solid melts into air…” Buddhism didn’t really become influential or widely practiced in Europe or America until the late 19th century, if not much later, well after those regions had industrialized and begun, for better or worse, the process of up-rooting traditional sensibilities and ways of life. 

In its life in Asia, Buddhism had fairly well established cultures to engage in the process of adaptation, which I don’t think for the most part it had in Europe or America. That’s not to say there aren’t cultural peculiarities in Europe or America, but that the historical developments of the region called “the industrial West” and the pre-industrial civilizations of East and South Asia have yielded different encounters with Buddhism. Zizek, half recognizing this, throws his energies into criticizing (what I see as) the negative effects of the Western encounter. Unfortunately, this seems to be the larger part of his view of Buddhism. Moreover, he sloppily conflates his Western Buddhism with Buddhism in general (cf. parts of The Puppet and the Dwarf and elsewhere, where he directly argues against “Asiatic Buddhism” being a different, much less innocent phenomena), which is ironically a symptom of the distortion I see him critiquing.

Nonetheless, I think a critical engagement with Zizek’s negative and positive interest in Buddhism offers some interesting ways of wrestling with the complexities of practicing Buddhism in the Western context. He gets some things wrong and others right, but its his assessment of the problems and complexities of late capitalist culture that are the most useful for the more difficult Buddhist engagement.

 

Some More Thoughts On IRV

Recently in The Nation, Katarina Vanden Heuvel has spoken about electoral reform. Much of it has to do with what I view as absolutely critical, but relatively peripheral issues—public financing, ballot technologies, media coverage and the like. At one point, she does take up the concrete question of the electoral process itself (how a vote is conceived to measure political will). It’s a long article, most of which I’m not discussing at this point, so I’ll just quote at length.

For the first time in nearly a century more than a quarter of American voters are not registered as either Republicans or Democrats. During the 2004 presidential campaign, one poll suggested 57 percent of voters thought candidates besides Bush and Kerry should be included in the debates. In the latest biannual survey from Harvard’s Institute of Politics of 18- to 24-year-olds, 37 percent of young voters agreed that there was a need for a third party.

If majority rule is to be more than a hollow slogan and third parties more than “spoilers,” we need to experiment with more accurate ways to represent the diversity of backgrounds, perspectives and opinions of the American people. Proportional representation–in which 10 percent of the vote wins 10 percent of the seats–is one way. But the United States is an outlier when it comes to PR. We’re one of the few “advanced” democracies that don’t use it in national elections. But PR isn’t as alien as it might seem: Cambridge, Massachusetts, has used a proportional voting scheme to elect its City Council for seven decades. Illinois used a similar system to elect its lower house from 1870 to 1980, and it enjoys broad bipartisan support. As opposed to our winner-take-all system, in which a mere plurality of voters can carry an election, full representation allows for the expression of a broader range of interests.

The Democrats’ use of proportional representation in their nominating process gives a sense of what it means: every vote counts, no matter how lopsided the result might be in any district or state.

Although not as radical a departure as proportional representation, instant runoff voting (IRV)–in which low-scoring candidates are eliminated and their supporters’ second-choice votes are added to those that remain, until one candidate wins a majority–is another way to challenge the duopoly while protecting majority rule for all.

Backed by groups like FairVote and the New America Foundation, IRV also has the support of McCain and Obama, along with Democratic National Committee chair Howard Dean and third-party candidates like Libertarian Bob Barr, the Green Party’s Cynthia McKinney and Ralph Nader.

And instant runoff voting has begun to catch on with the public. IRV has won thirteen of the last fourteen times it appeared on a ballot, winning landslides in cities like Oakland (69 percent), Minneapo-lis (65 percent), Sarasota (78 percent) and Santa Fe(65 percent). San Francisco just held its fourth IRV election, and exit polls have found it popular there with every measurable demographic. This fall, Pierce County, Washington, with a population of nearly 800,000, will use it for the first time for a hotly contested county executive election. And new cities voting to adopt it will include Glendale, California; St. Paul, Minnesota; and Memphis, Tennessee. A bill instituting IRV for Congressional elections in Vermont was vetoed by that state’s Republican governor but will be back next year.

Finally, fusion voting has the weight of long experience behind it. Before the twentieth century, it was a frequent tool of emerging parties, until major parties started banning it. Fusion allows two or more parties to nominate the same candidate on separate ballot lines. That simple change permits people to vote their values without “wasting” their vote or supporting “spoilers.” The positive experience of New York’s Working Families Party in the past decade shows you can build a viable minority party this way. And fusion has also helped progressives focus on the challenge of building majorities in a winner-take-all system. These options would dramatically open our electoral system to more choices, ensuring the representation of diverse views instead of seeing them co-opted or suppressed by the “least worst” options presented by the duopoly.

 
Heuvel doesn’t tout its advantages as well as she could, nor really the problems it helps to mitigate. The dominance of two-parties is, on the face of it, a problem, but when you consider how it arises from our electoral process itself, you realize it is actually a response to the deeper insufficiencies of that process. As a response, it is not necessarily a bad thing. It’s comparable to the nasty symptoms you get when you have a cold or the flu: they suck, but their absence despite the presence of infection would probably mean worse things.

IRV doesn’t simply remedy the two-party system (a symptom) any more than a decongestant remedies a cold (a deeper problem). IRV remedies the way our political choice appear to us from without—notably in the media, but also in the sense that makes “Candidate A stole votes from Candidate B” meaningful, as if the votes belonged to them. In this sense, our vote is not our own, but almost literally the property of the candidates. When our political choices appear to us to come from sources other than us, the electorate, then our political will is effectively not our own. Worse yet is the triangulation that takes place between us, the politicians, and the supposed place where we meet to tell them what to do. We end up compromising with the politicians and media, rather than amongst ourselves, which is both the source and the end of political polarization from Nixon onward.

What’s at stake in calling for IRV is not simply the “freedom of choice,” if that at all, but the ability to take political responsibility. In this sense, it is not only demands that we change how we look at politicians (”now with more choices!”), but how we look at our own political responsibilities. It’s easy to, taking a cue from the above mentioned the implicit politicians vs. the people relationship demanded by our current voting system, view our political impasse as a failure of the gub’mint and not a conflict born of the electorate’s own inability to articulate its political will. Opening the conversation of electoral reform to include this thought will be a key transformation in the process that changes anything.

Like any Twelve Step program: admitting you have a problem is the first step to recovery.

 

Thoughts on Instant Runoff Voting

Ever since discovering Instant Runoff Voting, I have been amazed how our electoral process can so structure our view of politics, and how little it seems to be treated by political economists. Here is an element of the political process that is thoroughly material, and gives a definite structure to our perception of political choice and the possibilities of political action, but relatively little activism for reforming it (at least in the United States). I am only beginning to seriously survey the literature on this and other electoral forms, but I already see striking differences, in terms of property, between the standard American plurality vote (first-past-the-post, where it’s one vote to one candidate) and Instant Runoff Voting or otherwise Condorcet methods.

In the plurality vote, the votes belong to the candidates. This is why “candidate C” can “steal votes from candidate B.” There is also a bit of bottom-line Capitalist logic to how a winner is determined: not by a popular majority, but by getting more votes than any other candidate, which can easily happen with less than a popular majority when more than two candidates are running. Usually overlooked, too, is how pluralist elections depend upon a forced choice between one of two candidates. It is easy to point out the disconnect between the unspoken rule of pluralist elections and the overt rule of getting to vote for whomever you want, but they are nonetheless connected by the electoral process itself.

Two-Party politics is common fodder among critics of American politics, but Two-Party politics doesn’t represent an ideological limit, but a material limit to political choice in a pluralist elections. Psychoanalytically speaking, Two-Party politics is a symptom of an electoral system with material contradictions (The People cast their vote, but as belonging to the candidates/party). The problem for American politics isn’t so much that Two-Party politics gets us no where, but that as a symptom it has or is beginning to fail to make bearable our electoral system’s failure to enact The Will of The People. This is most apparent in the merging of the Democratic and Republican parties into Left and Right wings of corporate interests, that continue to erode the American economy, infrastructure, and capacity to take care of its own.

Instant Runoff Voting implies a very different relationship between the elected and the electorate, one that I think begins to return political determination to the electorate. Since votes in IRV do not belong to a single-candidate, each ballot effectively belonging to as many candidates for whom the voter wishes to express preference, votes are more easily (though not necessarily) determined by the voters themselves. One way IRV gives more determination to the electorate is by eliminating spoilers and making multiple-party politics an actual and not just a formal possibility.

This is a pretty interesting video on Instant Runoff Voting, the most popular one on IRV on You Tube, but they would have done better to explain how it gets rid of the spoiler-category and not just its effect on an otherwise two-candidate election. In the context of the video, IRV not only helps out “candidate B,” but “candidate C” too. In the initial example B loses to A because of C’s spoiler effect. In the IRV example, the authors assume that the same amount of people would give their first preference to candidate C. In the real-world of pluralist elections, if C is appealing enough to steal some of B’s votes when those voters “know C can’t win” because of the way pluralist elections work, it’s likely that there are more possible voters for C than this video suggests.

IRV makes it harder to argue against a candidate for reasons of “electability,” which makes it easier to for their platforms to be heard. It also makes it easier to raise legitimate criticisms against otherwise front-running candidates, who are often defended as “our only choice” (a fair argument to make, too, in a pluralist system!) by those otherwise willing to hear such criticisms. These are, of course, changes that are maximized by reforms in campaign finance and either the decline of television debates as a proving ground for candidates or the introduction of public national television channels for campaign information.

 

Nietzsche and Buddhism: An Annotated Bibliography (forthcoming)

One of my last courses as an undergraduate was a survey-course on Nietzsche. For one of the core assignments, I ended up writing up a quick-and-dirty sort of bibliography on and a summary of his use of Buddhism. For this I found the most incredible text, Nietzsche-Wörterbuch or “Nietzsche Dictionary.” It’s published by de Gruyter, publishers of Freny Mistry’s original “Nietzsche and Buddhism: Prolegmenon to a Comparative Study.” The Nietzsche Dictionary is actually a work-in-progress, which de Gruyter explains so I don’t have to.

The Nietzsche Dictionary elucidates in detail some 300 terms from Nietzsche’s vocabulary. The first volume presents 67 of them. The account of each term includes the number of occurrences, main uses, synonyms, the various meanings, components of meanings and semantically relevant contexts (with examples), and the historical linguistic and philosophical localisation of Nietzsche’s use of the word, as well as a discussion of Nietzsche research and the reception of Nietzsche.

The complete dictionary will comprise 4 volumes. The project will be completed by 2010. An electronic version is planned upon completion of the printed edition.

Lucky for me, Buddhismus is early enough in the alphabet to be included in the first volume. Unlucky for me, the text is in German. It’s not so bad though, having taken a couple years of German. I can read through the citations (I count 66), and translate with little trouble the cited words.

What I have already done is format the 14-page section into a nifty reference to all the places Nietzsche uses the words that invoke the Buddha, Buddhists, Buddhism and/or Buddhistic (culture). I also made a small list of what Robert Morrison describes in his Nietzsche and Buddhism: A Study in Nihilism and Ironic Affinities as the only texts Nietzsche owned or probably read on Buddhism. Graham Parkes points out in a critical review of Morrison’s book that he over looked work done by Johann Figl into Nietzsche’s earliest encounters with Buddhism and Asian thought in general, which suggests Nietzsche encountered Buddhism even earlier than Morrison describes, in his days at the University of Bonn (just slightly earlier than his discovery of Schopenhauer). To be fair to Morrison, that is about the only substantial point Parkes makes. I encourage people to read Morrison’s response to Parkes, in which he addresses not just Parkes but the problems with Mistry’s book that he sought to remedy in his book while making his own original arguments. Lastly I am collecting a list of secondary sources on Nietzsche and Buddhism.

What I want to do is not only translate the Nietzsche Dictionary selection into English, but perhaps expand upon it with the secondary literature. Here is what I have so far.

Nietzsche

The Birth of Tragedy: Buddhism (7); Buddhistic negation of the will (7); Buddhistic culture (18); Indian Buddhism (21).

Dawn: Buddha (96); Buddhist (469)

The Gay Science: Buddha (108, 147, 353); Buddhism (99, 347); buddhistisches (99);

Beyond Good and Evil: Buddha (56); Buddhism (61, 202)

Genealogy of Morals (Essays/Section): Buddhist/ism (1/6), (2/21), (3/17); Buddha (3/7, 27); European Buddhism (Preface 5).

The Case of Wagner: “Buddhistic” in letter to Peter Gast included in Kaufmann’s 1967 translation.

The Anti-Christ: Buddha (20); Buddhism (20,21,22,23,42); Buddhists (22)

Ecce Homo (Essays 1,2,3&4): Buddha (1-6); Buddhists (Zarathustra Section1).

Nachlass (Notebook/Section): Buddha (1/5), (5/71), (7/111), (14/91, 162), (24/1), (25/16); Buddhist (1/5), (10/157, 190), (11/244), (14/107, 162), (19/148); Buddhism (2/4, 127, 131), (4/15), (10/157), (11/240), (14/91, 195), (24/1), (25/97); Buddhistic (11/4); Buddhist Pessimism (2/186); European Buddhism (2/144), (4/2), (5/71), (35/9); Buddhist negation of reality (9/62); “buddhaische Traumphilosophie” (23/4, 12); Buddhism as Passive Nihilism (9/35); Buddhist-Christian belief (25/222).

Buddhist Scholarship That Nietzsche Read – from Morrison’s Nietzsche and Buddhism.

(1) Hermann Oldenberg’s (1882) Buddha 

(2) Max Müller’s (1881) Selected Essays On Language, Mythology and Religion (vol.ii) 

(3) Carl Köppen’s (1857) Die Religion des Buddha 

(4) Muthu’s Coomaraswamy’s (1874) Dialogues and Discourses of Gotama Buddha

Nietzsche-Buddhist Scholarship You Should Read

Mistry, Freny. Nietzsche and Buddhism: Prolegomenon to a Future Study. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1981.

Morrison, Robert G. Nietzsche and Buddhism: A Study in Nihilism and Ironic Affinities. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Parkes, Graham ed. Nietzsche and Asian Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

Stambaugh, Joan. The Other Nietzsche. Albany: SUNY Press, 1994.

Van Tangeren et. al. “Buddhismus.” Nietzsche-Wörterbuch. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2004. 419-433.

 

Fish on The Academic and The Political

I wonder what difference there is between Fish’s judgement about private/public commitments in his article on “Liberalism and Secularism” and those he’s making in these last three articles (First, Second, Most Recent). In that article from late last year, Fish attacks the public-private distinction, while recently he’s happy to enforce it, though the terms are a bit more obscure. A professor as a professional pedagogue conducts their teaching in an effectively public realm by Fish’s view, but does Fish’s relegating their political commitments to the private sphere not constitute just another, if unspoken political commitment?

Fish is not about to say that of their political commitments professors should say “I have none,” because it’s ludicrous. At the same time, he doesn’t advocate that professors say their political commitments structure every last bit of their classes and how they’re taught. His middle-position, which puts political commitments off to one side and professional-academic commitments to another, is strikingly similar to the same kind of middle position he lambasts here:

“A candidate cannot say, ‘I don’t have any [religious faith],’ and a candidate cannot say, ‘My faith dictates every decision I make and every action I take.’ Rather, a candidate must say something like, ‘My faith generally informs my moral values, but my judgments and actions as president will follow from the constitutional obligations of the office, not from my religion.’ In other words, I too believe in the public-private distinction and I will uphold it. I won’t insist that you adopt my values and I will respect yours” (”Liberalism and Secularism,” Sept. 7, 2007)

What it sounds like Fish advocates is an approach to teaching that is like a liberal-secular approach to government. Academic and political commitments in this and the last two articles are analogous to the secular and sacred commitments he juggles in that article from last year. In the end, Fish suggests with Mark Lilla that “We need to recognize that coping is the order of the day, not defending high principles.” In the context of the academic and the political though, Fish doesn’t suggest coping, but rather candidly reverts to high, if academic, principles. His distinction on an academic level pre-supposes what is properly academic and properly political, but it is a matter of politics that this distinction is enforced, which he doesn’t escape. The problem this leaves is the same one Fish finds with liberal-secular neutrality: he does not expect academics to be apolitical so much as of a kind politics that respects the academic as distinct from the political.

 

What’s the Big Difference?

If zazen is when you’re on the cushion, and Zen is when you’re not, then the only substantial difference is whether you’re on the cushion or not. If zazen is what we call it when we’re on the cushion, then it doesn’t matter what we call it when we’re off. The key to zazen is if done with Right Intention, the difference between standing and sitting, i.e. between being on the cushion and not, will become clear and empty. To that end, advocating zazen with Right Intention is at minimum and all it means to spread the Dharma.

The key to zazen is if pursued with Right Intention, the difference between standing/walking and sitting, i.e. between being on the cushion and not, will appear clear and empty. Thus Dogen says in the Genjokoan that when Dharma fills this whole body and mind we realize that something’s missing. Not only does this mean realizing our psycho-physical self is empty, but that emptiness is form, and that when we have psycho-physical form it’s only finite, which means temporal and ontologically determined. To that end, we realize that standing is standing and sitting is sitting all because of this, which we already know is nothing special.

 

Lessons in Emptiness: a recipe for cake

Joshu, a novice monk in a Zen monastery, was feeling hungry for some cake. He went to the abbott to ask for permission. Normally, the abbott wouldn’t allow such indulgence, but instead he said to Joshu that he could, if he followed the abbott’s recipe. Joshu agreed to this term, and went with the abbott to retrieve the recipe.

When the abbott gave Joshu the recipe, he quickly scanned it to get a feel for what kind of cake it would be. It had all the standard ingredients for a white cake of some sort, except one of the ingredients was listed as “cake.” Joshu respectfully pointed out the strange ingredient, and asked how this could be. The abbott cheerfully replied that it must have been a mistake, and crossed it out. “You can make it now,” he said.

Joshu thanked the abbott and proceeded to the kitchen, still confused as to how cake could appear on the recipe. When he went through the recipe, mentally checking off the ingredients as he used them, he finally got to the crossed-out “cake,” and it occurred to him again what the abbott said before he left: you can make it now; cake is possible only without “cake.”

 

 

Open to Others or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Skeptical Doubt

Descartes. Brains-in-a-vat. Skepticism. The problem of other minds. Philosophy 101.

The 15 year-old pragmatist in me was already fed up with these sorts of puzzles– “why do you ask?” I would wonder. I can’t help but notice how bothered some people are by the mere thought that reality as they know it might not really be what they think it is. The thought doesn’t bother me like it does them, and far be it from me to impose myself on anyone, but it’s hard not to have something to say about this stuff when people press you for an opinion. Interestingly enough, the last thing they really want you to do is agree with their suspicions. Hell, no. The only reason anyone asks you such stupid questions is because they want to be told they’re wrong. Why ask questions at all though?

Whoever asks questions with the desire or at least openness to being surprised has a sense of someone else really being there. The surprise would be an impossible explosion of the world, the revealing of a hole in what was thought to be wholly imagined, for someone not expecting someone else to really be there– the Lacanian psychotic. For such a person, a someone else isn’t even a meaningful possibility; the sheer thought of it ruins everything, and they don’t know why.

This is why skeptical doubt, the kind shamelessly suggested in movies like The Matrix and The Truman Show, is least of all a problem. This doubt is the eternal confirmation and seal we so fervently crave, though we forget it periodically when certainty creeps into our world. Without it, we could not know if we were wrong about anything; to be wrong about that which we are certain is not possible without going through doubt.

In this sense, our openness to Others is constitutive of our openness to the world at all. How do we know if we are open to Others, and therefore the world at all? Specifically to the extent that this always remains in question. To this end, Cartesian skepticism and the “problem” of other-minds are hardly problems at all; our doubt is our openness to Others, who may confirm or deny us.

 

Risky Business

The most recent post over at I cite about Zizek’s tremendous literary output and whether it is “too much” struck me in a different situation. Reading another of Cary Tenis’ advice columns, this time about a woman who apparently likes to engage in risky sexual behavior without telling her boyfriend, a lot of the responses I read appeal to her risky behavior being a problem and it being an indication that she’s living life to the fullest. In this context, at what point does risk transform from being authentically life-affirming to pathological? Moreover, which direction does the transformation move?