Reality As It Is

It’s been nearly a year since I published my first piece on the Speculative Non-Buddhism blog. In criticizing the intellectual poverty of Western Buddhism, it is important to remain vigilant of our own ideological blind spots, and so I thought it would be interesting to return to my earlier critiques, to see how my own subjectivity has changed since that time, and to hopefully help others move beyond primitive stages of criticism. I recently decided to re-read my article “Reality As It’s Not” and, though I stand behind the spirit of the critique of Western Buddhism I presented there, I noticed that even in my very critique of x-buddhist ideology, I fell prey to many of the conceptual errors that lead someone to be attracted to something like Buddhism in the first place. I decided that it might be useful, both to myself and to others, to spend some time critiquing my own critique—particularly taking aim at the existentialist approach I was so fond of employing.

In the above-mentioned article, I used the work of the Norwegian existentialist Peter Zapffe to criticize what I saw as Western Buddhism’s tendency to, contrary to its claims that its goal is to see reality “as it is,” in fact avoid reality through the use of various tools from its “repertoire of cognitive defense mechanisms.” I want to begin by simply analyzing the very language of that phrase, in particular the use of the word “cognitive,” in order to show that, while the general claim that Western Buddhism spends all of its efforts avoiding reality remains true, the mechanisms by which they do so are not the result of some vague existential need of humans to repress, but rather arise from specific, historical contradictions within subjects of capitalism.

As I described in my piece, Zapffe’s claim is that the four defense mechanisms humans employ in their efforts to repress—isolation, anchoring, distraction, and sublimation—have come about in order that we may “come to grips with existential anxiety.” Terms like “existential anxiety,” “existential suffering,” and “existential repression” are used frequently throughout my piece, and echo what I see as a popular error in the field of philosophy, an error which I was myself unaware of: the subtle transformation, in thought, of material circumstances into abstract idealisms.

In The German Ideology, Marx criticizes the Young Hegelians for mistaking their “ideas about ideas” for the material conditions of history. This confusion, according to which the history of humanity is reduced to the history of abstraction, is what leads to Max Stirner, for instance, to conceive of history in terms of his ideas about the religious and philosophical illusions of a given historical era, rather than in terms of the concrete material activity of the particular historical peoples under consideration, their material activity in relation to the productive forces of their society. For instance, Stirner conceived of the history of the Middle Ages in terms of the history of Catholicism, and as such had to explain the hierarchy of the Middle Ages by taking “the illusions of the Middle Ages on trust, in particular those illusions which the Emperor and the Pope brought to bear in their struggle against each other” (190). In reality, as Marx points out, the ideological struggle against feudalism “can only be explained by demonstrating . . . [the] practical material relations of feudalism.”

Indeed, a quite similar confusion is at play in much of existentialist theory, which Stirner himself greatly influenced, and which the author of “Reality As It’s Not,” in following Zapffe, gets caught. The confusion is one of existentializing the historical, such that that material reality, ideology, is thought in generalized abstraction and removed from its actual, which is to say historical, causes.

Take the way I describe, for instance, Zapffe’s theory of the development of this “existential repression:” These mechanisms “have been developed by humans in response to us having reached a particular milestone in our cognitive evolution” (emphasis added). The reason that “we”—”Man,” “Humans”—have developed these as of yet historically unspecified mechanisms is that our “cognitive evolution” has endowed us the “capacity to see ourselves for what we are.” And, given our “biological urge to survive [and] reproduce,” it’d be simply too terrifying for us to contemplate our “condition.”

It’s no small irony that this critique of x-buddhist ideology was itself ideological, and in fact ideological in much the same way in which x-buddhist ideology is; that is to say, these two ideologies result from similar historical conditions, and serve similar ideological ends. Let us preliminarily clarify some errors present in this “existential” treatment.

To begin with, the phrase “cognitive evolution,” which implies a conception of the historical development of humanity in terms of increased cognitive “capacities,” such as that of seeing ourselves “for what we are,” (and the “existential anxiety” which ensues from this “seeing”) is an obfuscation of the actual historical conditions under which particular human beings repress, the ways in which they repress, and the things it is that they are repressing. To wit: not a single human being in the history of the Earth has ever repressed anything whatsoever that can be called “existential anxiety.” This is because, in order to exist, humans must first “always already” be interpolated into a particular ideology which allows for her existence. There is no such thing as human existence without human ideology. What is repressed is thus always ideological, in that the content of the repression exists only as and in an ideology. First error clarified.

Second error clarified: In tandem with the idealist naiveties of the “science” of evolutionary psychology, I fell prey to the illusion which has it that the activities born of the human “biological urge to survive [and] reproduce” are best understood as those activities which are most primal, most free of ideology. In reality, these things are the most ideological of all, for neither of these activities are possible for human beings without social relations, and thus without ideology. What is repressed is not consciousness of reproduction itself, but the mechanisms of social reproduction, of the reproduction of the relations of production which in the first instance determine our formal capacity for biological reproduction.

What is the significance of these errors?

Just as with Stirner and the Young Hegelians, who “consider conceptions, thoughts, ideas, in fact all the products of consciousness, to which they attribute independent existence, as the real chains of men” (Ger. Id., 30), a consideration which leads them to believe in the very illusions of those whom they criticize—so too the existentialist critique of Buddhism will necessarily “consider [the] conceptions, thoughts, ideas, in fact all the products of consciousness” of the x-buddhist to be their “real chains.” In my critique, for instance, I quoted Jack Kornfield, who describes the Buddhist refuge as that which is supposed to help us in “our journey as we move through joy and sorrow, gain and loss.”

My critique of this quote took “on trust” Kornfield’s own ideological description of what refuge provides for him, instead of recognizing that this description of his represents none other than his own illusions about what it is that he is repressing. The x-buddhist, in practicing refuge or meditation, does not repress abstractions called “sorrow and loss,” but rather they repress the consciousness of specific conditions of their material lives, material lives which exist under capitalism.

This point is difficult to grasp, so I will present another example. I included a quote from Kornfield in which he uses Victor Frankl to legitimize the concept of Buddhist refuge. Frankl “discovered”—and Kornfield re-discovered this invariable human phenomenon—”that most of those who survived the [Nazi] camps did so only if they had faith in a greater purpose for themselves and the world.” Kornfield goes on to say that, much like a holocaust survivor (recall that Kornfield is quite the victim himself, leading retreats that cost only the most modest of sums of upwards of $1500 per retreat), the subject of capitalism must find her “sense of purpose,” so that she can “orient and support” herself “amidst the fragmented pulls of busy, modern life.”

The implication is, of course, that material circumstances do not matter: whatever the form of suffering one experiences—be it due to Nazi persecution or capitalist exploitation—this suffering should be conceived simply as a general “existential” suffering, for which the cure is always the same: a bourgeois “sense of purpose.” There is no need to investigate the historical and social causes of this “busy, modern life.” We must simply take it on trust that the solution to this “existential” situation is the same of that of overcoming Nazi persecution.

The point here is to not, in fact, take the illusions of x-buddhism for granted. It is to recognize that their description of the kind of “suffering” which they imagine themselves to be practicing away is in fact just their own illusions about what they suffer from, insofar as they are entirely unconscious of the practical material relations which produce their consciousness.

Similarly, in my discussion of the strategy of “anchoring,” I took “on trust” what we as “Westerners” think about our own motivations for being attracted to Buddhism. I hypothesized that Buddhism is so attractive for the following reason:

Many Westerners . . . are increasingly recognizing the arbitrariness of their culture’s system of anchoring, which is clearly illustrated by the decline of religiosity in the West.

In seeking “existential relief” and failing to find it within the “anchorings” of Western culture—so my hypothesis went—people turn to the “mysterious East” to discover new forms of anchoring. If I had thought to not take “on trust” what we as Westerners think our motivations driving our attraction to Buddhism are, I would have looked to the actual material conditions that produce the actual motivations driving our attraction to Eastern spirituality. I would have instead concluded, for example, the correct explanation for this phenomenon, which is not that our religions are failing to provide us with a refuge from “existential anxiety,” but that our religions are becoming less and less adequate at reproducing capitalism.

This is why Buddhism is so attractive: not because humans have some kind of abstract need for comfort and security, but that humans have a real, material need for comfort and security, a need for which we have invented capitalism. Since our institutions are no longer as effective in reproducing capitalism, we turn to spirituality, which, as we have seen, is better than Christianity ever was at making capitalism appear desirable and natural. Instead of seeing our suffering as being the cause of real, material circumstances, we ascribe it instead to an abstract lack of meaning, to an existential suffering, and look for new illusions by which to cure us from our own abstractions, so that we may go on reproducing our social formation.