This essay is being published in six installments.
PREVIOUS INSTALLMENTS:
#1 Introduction
#2 Modernity and Postmodernity: Two Types of Nihilism
#4 On Nishitani’s Anti-Nihilism
The BIBLIOGRAPHY will be included in the sixth installment.
V. What is The New Subjective Body?
The reversal or Gestalt shift that I just described juxtaposes, or rather, re-aligns, Being and Nothingness. It shows the Nothingness-in-Being.[i] But what is the effect of seeing the world with new eyes? And what consequences does it have for a new subjectivity that is outside the reach of existentialist and relativist nihilism?
We have to return to the idea of Absolute Nothingness (Nishitani also calls it “Emptiness”) in order to examine in more detail what a new subjectivity entails. Nishitani’s point is that Western metaphysics clung too stubbornly to the notion of Being. Certainly, during the last century, poststructuralist criticism has raised a similar point. By focusing on the “metaphysics of presence,”, the content of philosophy was almost exclusively framed in terms of being, objects, concepts, theoretical reason, and theoretical representations. And when Nothingness was discussed, it was as discussed only as a purely logical notion, negation as the reversal of truth-values, or the opposite of Being.
This position becomes untenable when we realize that nihility rears its head whenever we think of the world as finite. Our lifespan is finite. The sun will explode some day in the future. The human race will become extinct. Even the sturdiest oak tree will die someday; and the most touching painting will turn pale, crumble, crack, and ultimately fall apart. All the things that give our world a sense of continuity will at some point disappear. This realization often gives rise to existentialist nihilism, or to relativist nihilism and unconstrained consumerism. After all, if the world is meaningless, purposeless, and valueless, then why not endlessly distract oneself from this unwelcome realization? As Nishitani puts it:
Within time, “everything becomes nothing under our fingertips at every moment.” That everything passes away in this manner reveals the nullity of the strivings of the will to life. The will to life appears as desire in the individual things that are its phenomena, and this desire harbors profound dissatisfaction. As long as the will to life is operative, dissatisfaction arises ceaselessly from within. (Nishitani, 1983: p. 4)
As long as nothingness is seen only as the logical negation of Being, as a pure negativity that circumscribes our existence and our experiential horizon, then it is humanly impossible not to succumb to cynicism and/or despair, and in turn, both of these are the underlying causes that drive postmodern hyperproductive advanced capitalism.
But if we radicalize the idea of Nothingness, we see that it suffuses everything. In Japanese, the character mu (meaning “fleetingness”) refers to various types of nothingness. It is used to reflect on the aesthetic quality of decaying Sakura flowers, the withering of the leaves once the fall sets in; it conveys our very own finitude; but equally it conveys the fact that Nothingness (or Emptiness) and Being are conjoined at the ground of anything whatsoever. Nothingness is not a negation: it is really there, and together with is, we recognize the reality of its existence as such, although it cannot be framed in objectifying, discursive or representational terms.
If we drive this point further, and consider entities in their suchness, we must conclude that Nothingness or Emptiness is a constitutive, inseparable ingredient of suchness. Moreover, and even more radically, Nishitani charges Western philosophy with stopping its analysis too early. If we consider mental representations as theoretical cognitions of objects, as Hume and Kant both did, then we place them either in the field of sensibility or in the field of understanding/theoretical reason. For Hume, this led to the sceptical conclusion that we are stuck with perceiving properties and inferring chains of cause and effects between them, without ever being able to justify our inferences rationally, but instead only by recourse to sensory experience and “habit” (Hume, 2008: pp. 55–56, 66). For Hume, we are ineluctably stuck in the field of sense perception and empirical investigation. For Kant, the Humean predicament led to a crucial refinement in how we construe sensibility and understanding/theoretical reason, but also to the deeply unsatisfactory ontological split between appearances or phenomena and things-in-themselves or noumena. So, we can either probe reality by means of sensibility or by means of understanding/theoretical reason, but the thing-in-itself or noumenon is forever out of reach.
Nishitani, however, takes another route that carries his analysis of experience one step further. We can imagine sensibility as the outer circumference of two concentric circles and understanding/theoretical reason as the inner one. We can refine and order sense impressions by the use of understanding/theoretical reason, but are ultimately unable to think objects apart from their Being. But if we penetrate deeper into the heart of the concentric circle, we encounter objects in “the field of Emptiness.”
It is essential to note here that when we encounter objects in the field of Nothingness or Emptiness, we have left sensibility and understanding/theoretical reason well behind, and objects do not look like objects any longer, nor do they appear in some sort of discursive space that we can analyse by using concepts or familiar scientific terminology. Here, we are squarely in the domain of pure experience, where concepts and words used theoretically or scientifically fall infinitely short of that pure experience itself. The only way we can speak meaningfully about them is obliquely or poetically, and even then, only in a stammering and fragmentary way. In this connection when I use the term “experience,” I am not speaking about the type of sensible experience, or Erfahrung, that Kantians ascribe to the output of the joint operations of the faculties of sensibility and understanding: namely, judgments of experience. Instead, what I am referring to here is a unique Ur-experience that pre-empts, encapsulates, and enables “experience” or Erfahrung in the Kantian technical sense of that term. To reach our new subjectivity, it is this Ur-experience that we must tap into and calibrate.
What we encounter here is the world in its very suchness. The flash of insight that Dostoevsky describes comes from this place, or alternatively, from the topos that Eckhart called “God.” It is probably best described as a colour tone or hue that suffuses the world, illuminating and breaking up the familiar in a way that is thoroughly non-objectifiable. The inner essence breaks as it were through the outer shell of appearance, or, for that matter, through the veil of ignorance that sense and reason have thrown over it. Our sensibility-shaped concepts shatter for a moment, and in the same way that the setting sun colours the forest in tones of auburn, vermillion and red, so too Nothingness or Emptiness manifests itself as the ground of Being.
However, this self-manifestation spells not the end of Being, nor does it invite a a sense of disquiet at encountering finitude in full force. Instead, in a radical reversal or Gestalt-shift, Being in its fullest sense, as shot through with and equivalent to Nothingness or Emptiness manifests itself. And, as we saw in the previous section, when Being appears in its finitude, it appears in its suchness. Nishitani’s analysis clearly shows that the “objectifying gaze” equates Being with objects. But once we make this mistake, nihilism rushes in. Only insofar as we recognize the presence and importance of Nothingness or Emptiness, can we confront nihilism for what it is: the refusal to accept our finitude, and with it the refusal to take full responsibility for the time and the life that is given to us. And here, Nishitani and Kierkegaard bang the same drum: it is only by detachment and resignation in the sense of creative piety, or moral or religious piety, that we can regain the world without nihilism.
From a moral point of view, it is important to emphasize that Nothingness or Emptiness does not appear as some sort of unified philosophical “One” or “Absolute,” in which all differences and complexities of the real world are submerged. To fixate upon this image of the Absolute, under the aegis of Reason with a capital “R,” was Hegel’s prime mistake, and one that he inherited from a long line of Western thought focused on objectification or theoretical representation.[ii] And if we were to make the same mistake from a religious angle, we would end up with a watered-down Buddhism, and revert to talk about “seeing the harmony of the universe.” In fact, every tension in the universe would disappear, idealizing our lifeworld beyond what seems either desirable or realistic.
Most emphatically, I do not intend to convey the thought that Nishitani’s account of Nothingness or Emptiness is somehow equivalent to the idea of a “total harmonious cosmic dance” in which everything is good or justified. Indeed, this image has been used to weaponize Zen Buddhism: it would be all-too-convenient if I could not commit a moral mistake due to the fact that my life is all and only part of a larger cosmic plan (Victoria, 2006). However, as both Kenkō and Nishitani explicitly point out, there is a clear and present danger that Zen Buddhism will retreat into a moral quietism in favour of inner peace. The idea that “enlightenment” is “just sitting” is far too comfortable. The entire world can burn to ashes, but the “enlightened” person simply sits in blissful ignorance. Indeed, Nishitani was well aware of this problem, and described the social ethics of Buddhism as “weak”:
Where does Buddhism fall short? As I have mentioned many times elsewhere, when it comes to the study of Buddhism, or Buddha and dharma, the history of the sangha —namely, the theory of Buddhist community—does not come to the fore as inseparable from Buddha and dharma. In considering the Buddha and dharma, we must also advance our argument to include the sangha. (Nishitani, 2006: p. 50)
By [the Tokugawa era], the issue of ethics had become very difficult to handle, and Buddhism was forced to try to find something to counteract this loss, but these efforts were in vain. There has remained a void to be filled since that time. In place of Buddhism, various kinds of ethical thinking have been imported from the Occident, but they do not yet seem to have settled down in Japan. (Nishitani, 2006: p. 51)
Due to its focus on individual cultivation, Buddhism falls short when it comes to formulating communal guidelines. Consequently, Buddhist ethics tend to lean towards the individual over the collective. Granted, over the course of its development, Buddhism incorporated a number of precepts from other Asian philosophies and religions (notably Confucianism and Shintoism), but the initial orientation towards personal peace and redemption still remains.
This is not to say the individual perspectives are not important: indeed, as we will see, they are of the utmost importance to my argument. Rather, it brings us to the twin issues of conscience and courage. If my outlook on life makes me satisfied with quietism, then it creates a rift between my personal development and the social development of the community I am embedded in, no matter how distantly. But, more importantly, it downplays the importance of lived pure experience:
The world of “now” is a field where something novel arises constantly, and where beings come to emerge one after another as genuinely living things. My sense of Buddhism is that, while it has made various attempts to understand the world of time as something to be negatively transcended, there have been few attempts that assume a forward-looking and mainly positive pose that regards the world as a field in which something new constantly occurs. (Nishitani, 2006: p. 50)
The novel things that arise are, above all, developments that impact the social and communal domains. Collective human life is not merely a collection of individuals. It is also the social and cultural substrate, and therefore also the moral community that springs up around social and cultural norms and patterns. If the focus of subjective development or enlightenment is on “just sitting,” then the social world retreats into the background. And this focus does not merely play down lived pure experience, but also simultaneously plays down morality.
If my conscience leans towards “just sitting,” then the effect is that the concerns of the world will pass by left and right. I might be engaged in some sort of “radical subjectivity,” working on myself as if working on an artwork. But, one way or the other, this project results in an alienation from life. By sharp contrast, consider for a moment the conscience of a figure like Martin Luther, whose (apocryphal) statement “here I stand, I can do no other” reveals a diametrically opposite model of radical subjectivity. There is a clear link here to Kierkegaard’s distinction between the ethicist and the “knight of faith”:
The knight can only remain rich, because he has won the world. How? By resigning. The ethicist resigns internally because he has to be consistent: he resigns to his desires, his lust, he submits to a law. The knight resigns outwardly, because he has found something internal that he cannot lose. This difference is crucial. The ethicist must remain outwardly rich in order to be inwardly rich: he needs the consistency that keeps outer and inner in harmony. The knight can be rich today, poor tomorrow, his interior is unaffected. This is why Job is central for Kierkegaard. Job loses everything until he finds what cannot be lost. Or rather: he does not perish from his loss, because he has found something that he cannot lose. (Gerber 2021)
The Buddhist mode of radical subjectivity is quietist, and thereby treats morality as if it has not relevant impact. But Lutheran radical subjectivity recognizes morality and the very social embeddedness out of which it arises. Or, put differently: one mode of radical subjectivity regards conscience as a compass for personal enlightenment only; the other one regards conscience as a personal compass for social action.
And with the second mode of radical subjectivity, the issue of courage emerges once again. Quietism does not belong to this type of radical subjectivity: a certain assertive, expressive attitude is part-and-parcel of it. Breaking through all the constraints of mechanical, constrictive thought-shapers, ideologies, social imperatives, and mental manipulation, radical subjectivity unleashes a potential in the individual that cannot be reduced to activism, exercise, or skill alone. Instead, what appears is the moment that in the Bible is asserted by Jesus: I am the Truth. What Jesus means here is not simply that he “knows it all”, or that his opinion is the final verdict on worldly matters. Instead, Jesus means that something out of him erupts, a point where subjectivity is concentrated to such a degree that it disturbs the very flow of the world. By “Truth”, Jesus does not mean doxa, either reasoned or received truth, nor does he refer to factual knowledge. Instead, truth with a capital “T”, means that the full Truth of the situation in which an individual operates is—through that person—made manifestly real and visible in the world.
And, like Job, such a person retains a powerful, resilient individuality as opposed to the forces of change and aversity that confront them. It is against this very background that heroism arises: flying in the face of all odds stands this individual who simply refuses to bend or break. In fact, heroism of this sort is not rare—every single mother who raises her children in circumstances of poverty, and every father who earns money in a dead-end job to feed his family participates in the heroic dimension of everyday life—but it is something so striking that the depths of human existence itself open up.
We find this insight in a different form in Kant, who (no doubt due to his Pietist upbringing) echoes the basic Lutheran thought. Simply to submit oneself to an external law turns one into a conformist moralist: someone who requires rules and guidelines from others, and lectures other people on how to follow them. Kant has little positive to say about this attitude, which he describes as a “self-incurred immaturity.” Instead, according to Kant our rational agency is such that we have to step up to become our own thinkers and legislators. But the very norms that we use to prescribe laws for ourselves cannot originate from the outside. They must emerge from within us, in an existential Gestalt-shift in feeling, thinking and acting. What we require if we are to enact and realize “the moral law within us” is creative piety, fuelled and nurtured by detachment in the qualified sense (Hanna and Paans 2022).
So, what we quite literally require is a “new subjective body,” before we can carve out a new subjective space. This body, or corpus, must be understood in both the individual sense (one’s own living animal body) and the communal sense (the body politic).
Individually and communally, we must tap again into the source of our existential agency, so that we can start to feel, think and act differently. And this process starts with detachment. Collectively, we must realize our finitude and allow it to shape our morality.
We find this thought worked out in the political philosophy of Alain Badiou, whose neo-communist project curiously (and I would say sometimes oversimplifies) overlaps with the thought of early Christianity. I say “curiously,” because Badiou’s communism bears a close resemblance to the materialist, Marxist-Leninist variety that wreaked havoc during the 20th century. But if we affectively remove the destructive, Bolshevist tendencies from communist thinking, then the prospect of an anti-hierarchical community external to State power and other forms of ideological control bears quite some similarity to the early Christian political agenda.[iii]
Badiou recognizes the current limits of the constant demand to immerse oneself in the postmodern world of activism, moralism, and constant gratification:
We know today that in this way, we have nothing else but an ethics of compassion, a vision where the hero of our consciousness is the suffering human body, the pure victim, and we know also that this moralism is perfectly adequate to capitalist domination under the mask of democracy. (Badiou, 2013: p. 2)
The cycle of hyperproductive advanced capitalism is all-too-willing in accommodating ceaseless “engagement” with this cause here, that cause there, until the very core of ones being seems to turn on either improving the world non-stop, or starting to lecture others, and turning these projects into constituents of one’s self-identity: “I have become Activism, the Saviour of Worlds!,” to paraphrase Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Manhattan Project for constructing and deploying the atomic bomb. And Oppenheimer was more right than he realized. He equated a new identity (“Death”) with the destruction of worlds. But exactly this is what it means to be “born again”: to assume a new stance in the world is to destroy the old world that belonged to the old identity. And it is against the background of these words that we should Christ’s ominous warning that he came to “bring the sword” and that the “Kingdom of God is near.” These words should be taken not in the metaphyaical-theological sense of a celestial realm after death, but instead with the recognition of a possibility, and the conscious effort to carve out a kingdom of one’s own.
But, again, is this not a fatalistic decsent into quietism—fashioning a personal realm that is far away from the real world? We have to return to some of Badiou’s precise terminology to argue the opposite:
The question is not whether we need to struggle or oppose, but concerns more precisely the relation between negation and affirmation. So when I say that there is something nondialectical, whether with regard to St. Paul or to the field of concrete political analysis, formally it’s the same idea. We have to try to understand exactly the conditions under which we may still have anything like the possibility of concrete negation. (Badiou, 2013: p. 3)
But what is “the concrete negation”? Leaving aside the Hegelian terminology, concrete negation amounts to what Badiou has called “subtraction.” This concept is somewhat complex, but I will attempt to summarize it in the following way: subtraction is not negation in the Hegelian sense of the term, or the opposite movement of something that occurs. A Hegelian might for instance say that the development of a democracy is the negation of a totalitarian state. In other words: that kind of negation is the emergence of an opposite. But Badiou means something different by “negation”:
All creations, all novelties, are in some sense the affirmative part of a negation. “Negation,” because if something happens as new, it cannot be reduced to the objectivity of the situation where it happens. So, it is certainly something like a negative exception to the regular laws of this objectivity. But “affirmation,” the affirmative part of the negation, because if a creation is reducible to a negation of the common laws of objectivity, it completely depends on them with respect to its identity. So the very essence of a novelty implies negation but must affirm its identity regardless of the negativity of negation. That is why I say that a creation or a novelty must be defined paradoxically as the affirmative part of a negation. (Badiou, 2012: p. 269)
Concisely put, when something truly new, such as a new form of subjectivity, emerges out of a surrounding “politics of fragmentation” (Paans, 2020), this truly new element does not belong to the political culture from which it emerged, nor is it dependent on the laws of this political culture to emerge at all. Again, we find this thought already in the early Christian tradition. The injunction to become “strangers on the Earth” is a call to set oneself apart, or to appear to the larger world as that new, irreducible element. The figure of the hermit or stylite is the embodiment of a physical distance that is set up between oneself and the world.
However, that distance need not be physical and spatial. As mystics from both the Latin and Greek Christian traditions recognized, the true distance is the one that is in the heart. And it is not far-fetched to say that the “heart” in this case is a stand-in term for subjectivity as such. But with the emergence of a new subjectivity, it is not just a rift that is enacted, a chasm that opens up and positions one’s subjectivity. Simultaneously, a new way of living, a new social perspective, opens up. Yet again, it is instructive to look at the history of early Christianity here. As soon as Jesus has disappeared from the scene, his followers congregated and set up new communities. Indeed, a significant portion of the Book of Acts deals with the hostile reception they received. Why the hostility? The answer is simple: the early Christians represented the feasibility of a lifestyle that was not thought possible from within the confines of the existing Roman, Greek, and Jewish political cultures. The institutions that shaped these political cultures were not able to deal with what must have looked like a seismic shift of being-in-the-world. The point is not that early Christians represented yet another new religion, since the Roman empire at the time was comprised of many different sects and religions. Instead, early Christianity questioned the very foundation on which the social-institutional substrate of the Roman State was based. In setting up one’s subjectivity up as a deliberate “not-being-part-of,” one subtracts oneself from the world.
And subtraction is not just retreating, as we saw, but letting detachment and stillness run their natural course. By activating one’s existential agency, all of a sudden one can step outside the confines of advanced capitalist commodification and hyperproductivity by means of an act of subtraction. But subtraction is not merely liberating oneself from the mechanical, constrictive thought-shapers and orthodox ideas that structure advanced capitalism. Instead, it is a productive force:
I name “subtraction” the affirmative part of negation. For example, the new musical axioms which structure the admissible succession of notes in a musical work, for Schoenberg, outside the tonal system, are in no way deducible from the destruction of this system. They are the affirmative laws of a new framework for musical activity. They show the possibility of a new coherence for musical discourse. The point that we must understand is that this new coherence is new not because it completes the process of disintegration of the system. The new coherence is new to the extent that, in the framework that Schoenberg’s axioms impose, musical discourse avoids the laws of tonality or, more precisely, becomes indifferent to these laws…. Clearly, this subtraction is within the horizon of negation, but it exists independently of the purely negative part of negation. It exists apart from destruction. (Badiou, 2012: pp. 269-270)
It is a deliberate not-partaking in the affairs of the world, a powerful existential gesture of sociocultural abstinence. Not-partaking exerts an individual and communal effect. Nietzsche noted in Morgenröte that nothing was as judgemental as the eyes of a nun when she saw a couple in love. In an analogous way, not-partaking in this sense sends a clear signal to everyone: this world is not for me. And my not-partaking amounts to an act of being-there (Dasein) that is intensely disturbing to the ordinary onlooker, just as Socrates’s insistent questioning must have been disturbing to ordinary onlookers in the Athenian marketplace. Luther’s forceful exclamation “I stand here” is the most direct expression of this concrete negation. Luther’s religious and moral non-conformism presents an unfathomable possibility: the ultimate nightmare of the powers-that-be and the high priests of the status quo. The negation is a reversal of the usual order of things: not just an inverted mirror image, but a nightmarish abyss, a possibility as yet unimagined, but suddenly really existing: not only an unimagined, but also a truly unimaginable form within the current cultural order and its associated political framework. As Badiou correctly notes, St. Paul is an excellent example:
Paul provides a new, very acute perspective on how this logic operates in the field of law, and specifically in the relation of the new subject to the old law. In a very explicit manner, Paul explains that when you have an event that is really the creation of a new possibility in the situation, one must first create a new body and affirm a new subjectivity before all negation and all negative consequences. The first thing is to create, to affirm the new subjectivity. What, then, is at the very beginning of the new subjectivity and of the new subjective body? It is the group of people who affirm that there is really a new possibility— they affirm the affirmation. (Badiou, 2013: pp. 405)
The affirmation is a form of expression – a moral or existential expression perhaps, as opposed to an artistic expression. But nevertheless, it is the manifestation of an underlying thought or political possibility that starts to take shape in the world. The new subjective body appears as an entity that possess the possibility to change the world, and even to upset the existing order of things. The act of expression turns the new subjective body into a force for change. Above all, the new subjective body is subjective.
It provides a new vantage point from which to approach the world and cannot be reduced to the existing modes of individual, political and communal life. It can be compared to them but can never be reduced to them. The new subjectivity that emerges sees the world anew, conceptualizes its possibilities in ways that were hitherto unimaginable or that existed only as mere fantasies. However, we must avoid the trap here to cast this theory of new subjectivity in the same mould as Badiou did. For him, the new subject is the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary subject, the newest incarnation of a Marxism that is customized for the 21st century.
Instead, we should see the new subjective viewpoint more as an awareness that one is a citizen of the cosmos, and as such ecologically and morally continuous with it. This viewpoint is not some sort of postmodern, sustainable-lifestyle hipsterism, but instead its very negation. Grafted on the old religious traditions of Christianity and Buddhism alike, it is sharply at odds with postmodernity and hypercapitalism, yet fully compatible with a radical subjectivity, anti-relativism about moral value, dignitarianism and the organicist worldview.
NOTES
[i] Nishitani uses the terms “Life-sive-Death,” or “Fullness-sive-Emptiness,” often reversing the order to show their reciprocity.
[ii] Interestingly, Hegel himself objected to positing an “unconditioned,” describing it as the “night in which all the cows are black”, or as a philosophically insufficiently differentiated set of objects and/or relations. However, notably in his Logic, this statement disappears into the background. A possibility is that Hegel went too far in his systematization and forgot his own important insight in favor of scientific—in the maximally broad sense of Wissenschaft—rigor.
[iii] Roger Scruton’s searching criticism of the Badiouian project seems well-deserved to me. It’s not that Badiou’s insight that an “Event,” i.e. the eruption of Truth into the world via an individual’s actions or historical event, is per se wrong. It’s the fact that Badiou’s attempts to shoehorn this insight into a narrow, authoritarian and above all strangely abstract Communism that never takes shape, and yet retains the menacing threat of violence and coercive collectivism. Notably Badiou’s half-hidden defense of Maoism directly contradicts the core tenets of (early) Christianity and any form of dignitarian ethics. See (Scruton, 2019: ch. 8).
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