With a title like that, you know this is not going to be easy, right? But we have to make some attempt to understand the extremely difficult middle section of this first chapter on The Tragic (subsections 9-12).
One part of this section is relatively clear. It contrasts three views: 1) The Greek idea of human existence as blameworthy, as a sort of punishment; 2) The Christian conception that existence is not only blameworthy, but that we ourselves our responsible for its misery; 3) The Nietzschean notion that existence is completely innocent. I think I can outline the logic of these contrasts relatively quickly. Then I feel compelled to add a few comments on the Buddhist view of the problem of existence.
The second, more metaphysical, part of this section asks how we have to think of existence if we are to believe in its innocence. This is an extension of the question we ended with last time, the question that defines the tragic perspective on life. How do we make all of existence -- everything -- an object of affirmation, a joy to be experienced rather than a struggle to be judged and condemned? It's difficult to describe the philosophical view of what existence is that corresponds to this way of life. But this difficulty is at the root of Deleuze's entire philosophy. While he doesn't use these terms here, the problem of existence is the same as the problem of the univocity of Being, or the problem of pure immanence. So I'll do my best to again approach the question of what kind of existence we need to believe in to affirm it absolutely. [Update: all metaphysical questions to be resolved in the forthcoming Problem of Existence -- 2]
For the Greeks, existence was 'Titanic'. It was literally too much suffering to bear and could only be a punishment inflicted by the gods. The Orphics had a wonderful myth that illustrates. The Titans (children of Sky and Earth) killed and dismembered Dionysus. Then they ate him. As punishment, Zeus struck the Titans with a thunderbolt that turned them to dust. Since humans are (partly) made from this dust, they inherited something of the crime and punishment for the killing of Dionysus. Obviously, Orphism promises that if we atone for this crime, by, you know, becoming Orphics, we can be released from our suffering and reborn exactly as Dionysus was reborn after his dismemberment. After all, what good is a religion that doesn't solve all your problems, no?
I first learned of this myth back when I was reading Plato. With the help of Nightingale's background information about ancient Greek language and religion, it's easy to see the marks of Orphism in many dialogues, though particularly in Phaedo. In fact, it's easy to see that something like this theogeny animates the core of Plato's philosophy. As beings with a dualistic structure (as wikipedia says of Orphism: "The soul of man (the Dionysus part) is therefore divine, but the body (the Titan part) holds the soul in bondage") we are called to depreciate the sensual in favor of the supra-sensual, to look through the appearances of the world till we see the true reality of the divine Forms. The familiarity of this myth about existence is exactly why Nietzsche sees it as so pernicious. It makes us take it for granted that this bodily existence is merely a punishment to endure and escape from.
Existence seems to be given so much by being made a crime, an excess. It gains a double nature - an immense injustice and a justifying atonement. It is Titanised by crime, it is made divine by the expiation of crime. Is there at the end of all this if not a subtle way of depreciating existence, of subjecting it to judgment, moral judgment and above all God's judgment? (NP, 20)
Last time we briefly noted the similarity between the dismemberment of Dionysus and the crucifixion of Christ. Upon hearing the full tale though, it's impossible to miss the correspondence, which goes right down to the sarcophagy involved. Despite this, Nietzsche see a crucial distinction between the Greek and the Christian version of the dying-and-rising God. For the Greeks, it's the old gods, the Titans, that bear the responsibility for our suffering. The Christians revolutionize the same story by making the god die for our sins. With Christianity, it's our fault, our original sin, that makes a punishment of existence. This is some next level passive aggressive shit man. Not only do we feel bad because we're suffering the slings and arrows of an outrageous human existence, but we have to feel bad about feeling bad because it's our own damn fault! We're only being punished because we're guilty. This, after all, is the essence of justice. Only the guilty are made to suffer. We are suffering. Ergo, we must be guilty. This logic is inevitable when we move from the capricious polytheism of the Greek gods to the monotheistic belief in a single 'just' God. Divine justice is punishment for our sins.
Existence under the Titans may be a sort of punishment, but for the Greeks it's not a punishment we deserve. It is simply the lot we bear as humans. This fits perfectly with the confusing overdetermination of events we find in the Iliad and the Odyssey. Things happen because of mortal actions, or because of the passions of a god, or because of fate, or due to any unspecified combination of these three. The question of whether existence as a whole is just or not simply doesn't seem to come up. Who could say? Certainly not even the strongest and most heroic mortals, who are as much the plaything of forces beyond themselves as anyone. Any concept of justice lies in the simple and direct notion of revenge. An eye for an eye is the full definition of someone's just deserts. He tried to bang my wife (in the parlance of our times) and so I stuck a spear in him. Even Zeus operates this way, throwing thunderbolts whenever someone pisses him off.
By contrast, though the Christians explicitly disavow the classic motto, they actually accomplish an insidious cosmic expansion of the concept of revenge. All of human existence becomes, in effect, God's revenge against us for our sins. If we are expected to give up on our simple, as it were local, human revenge and meekly accept our punishment, it's only because everyone is guilty all the time. We don't give up the spirit of revenge but spiritualize it. After all, why punish someone when God is already doing it for you? And if it seems like he's doing okay now, just wait smugly till he burns in hell. He can't help but get what he deserves because justice -- revenge -- has become the divine plan.
For the moment we can leave aside the question of who might want to interpret all of existence as a punishment we ourselves are responsible for. We've already alluded to Nietzsche's answer: the slave who wants to take revenge on the master. Here, we're focused on the incredibly far reaching effects this interpretation of existence as universal revenge has had. For Nietzsche, these cannot be overstated. Christianity supercharges the Greek myth of the dying-and-rising god by coupling it to the myth of the Fall. This is a potent and infectious combination that has come to dominate our view of existence. All morality and all philosophy since then ultimately boil down to the simple idea that life as it appears to us is not as it should be. The fact that it's not as it should be is our fault, and our only salvation lies in admitting this and trying to escape. Whether this escape takes the form of seeing Plato's Ideas, or coming to Jesus is secondary. Life seen as somehow defective, as suffering and as punishment; life that needs to be optimized, corrected, transcended, escaped -- all this is the spirit of revenge. Life as God's revenge upon us. And our revenge upon Life.
"Everywhere where responsibilities have been sought it is the instinct of revenge that has sought them. This instinct of revenge has gained such a hold on humanity through the centuries that all of metaphysics, psychology, history and above all morality bear its imprint. As soon as man began thinking he introduced the bacillus of revenge into things" (VP III 458). Nietzsche does not see ressentiment (it's your fault) and bad conscience (it's my fault) and their common fruit (responsibility) as simple psychological events but rather as the fundamental categories of semitic and Christian thought, of our way of thinking and interpreting existence in general. (NP, 21)
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Those who want to make an attempt to salvage some of Nietzsche's blatant misogyny will find support from Deleuze on pages 20-21. The basic idea is that the difference between the Greek and Christian views of existence can be summed up by contrasting male and female ideas of revenge. One avenges a sacrilege, while the other punishes a sin.
... "in original sin, curiosity, mendacious deception, susceptibility to seduction, lust — in short a series of pre-eminently feminine affects was considered the origin of evil . . . Thus the Aryans understand sacrilege as something masculine; while the Semites understand sin as feminine" (NP, 20)
Given the relative difference in physical power, this perspective has some basis in stereotype. Women seeking revenge are generally advised to do it in a more 'sneaky' way that involves less open spear thrusting. Nietzsche's point is that the Christian interpretation of existence is ultimately a way for the weak slave to triumph over the strong master by making the master feel guilty about ruling (this was essentially the same conclusion we came to when examining Hegel's dialectic). So it does make some sense to characterize this strategy for revenge as "feminine". Of course, there's also a deeper biographical reason that Nietzsche often chooses 'woman' as the representative of this spiritualized form of revenge -- he hated his mother and sister! Deleuze only comments obliquely on this biography:
Mothers and sisters; this second feminine power has the function of accusing us, of making us responsible. "It is your fault," says the mother, "your fault if I don't have a better son, more respectful of his mother and more conscious of his crime." "It is your fault," says the sister, "your fault if I am not more beautiful, more rich and more loved." The imputation of wrongs and responsibilities, the bitter recrimination, the perpetual accusation, the ressentiment - this is the pious interpretation of existence. (NP, 21)
But Klossowski considers this question in depth in chapter 7 of Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, "The Consultation of the Paternal Shadow". While I didn't translate this chapter into plain English, the basic idea was that the women in Nietzsche's life acted as conservative forces that always blamed him for ruining his health with his devotion to philosophy. While outwardly pitying him, their motive was less compassion than a desire to make hime feel guilty for not living up to their bourgeois moral prejudices. Hence, it's not so surprising that 'woman' often becomes his symbol of guilt and fearful pious conformity. In fact, like Hegel's slave, woman's power stems directly from her weakness.
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It seems worthwhile to use Nietzsche's framework to evaluate the Buddhist response to the problem of existence. While every culture and religion is a response to this same question, Buddhism even self-consciously views itself in this light. The Buddha specifically wanted to know what to do about old age, sickness, and death. Should we see his response as a depreciation of existence, as a belief that it is a punishment to be suffered, maybe even one we deserve? Or does it offer us a more affirmative view of existence than the Greek or Christian conception, one perhaps closer to what Nietzsche has in mind with 'The Tragic'.
I think we can interpret the Buddhist response as similar to the Greek one. Certainly, this is how Nietzsche (influenced mainly by Schopenhauer) interpreted it -- as a type of nihilism. And we can find many well known Buddhist ideas that seem to fit with the idea that life is a problem to be overcome. In fact, we needn't look further than how the first noble truth is often translated: Life is Suffering. Since the Buddha's avowed goal of Nibbana is a 'going out' (as of a candle flame), a complete cessation of suffering "without remainder", it can certainly seem that he's teaching us to escape from life, to renounce it. Along these same lines, the traditional Theravadan school sees progress along the path towards awakening as progress towards not being reincarnated and hence re-enmeshed in the endless circulation of Samsara. This same school also often espouses teachings that denigrate the body and emphasize the purity needed for the spiritual life. So we can easily see Buddhism as a religion of transcendence that encourages us to opt out of a life of suffering. Salvation lies in getting off the merry-go-round.
I suggest that this interpretation links Buddhism to the Greek idea of existence rather than the Christian one simply because Buddhism lays much less emphasis on guilt than Christianity does. While all three religions see existence as blameworthy, the Greeks think it's the gods fault, and the Buddhists mostly see it as simply the nature of the universe. Only Christianity is convinced that it's our fault. One could, of course, read the notion of karma as a sort of law of spiritual justice that makes us responsible for our own suffering in a way similar to Christian guilt. But the fact that this is portrayed as a universal, impersonal, law of cause and effect and not the judgement of god suggests that the stress in Buddhism is not on guilt and sin. Karma is more like a simple feedback loop that moves us closer to or further away from Nibbana than it is a theory of why we're in the shit in the first place. In fact, this almost mechanistic view of existence is what leads Nietzsche to see Buddhism as the crowning achievement of nihilism. Unlike the Greeks and Christians, the Buddhists are atheists. Existence isn't bad because it's a punishment for something the gods did, nor is it God's punishment for our sins; it's just bad for no reason at all. For the Buddhist, salvation doesn't lie in God's forgiveness, but only in not existing, in 'going out'.
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So we can follow Nietzsche in interpreting Buddhism as another negation of life. However, this would not be my preferred interpretation of the Buddha's original message, and it does a particularly poor job of characterizing many of the later, non-dual, strains of Buddhism (eg. Zen). I find it both more plausible, and what's more important, more interesting, to see the Buddhist interpretation of existence as something that in actual practice is much closer to Nietzsche's own -- existence is something we can affirm as totally innocent. Since we have yet to really characterize what this means for Nietzsche [stay tuned for part 2], perhaps an exploration of 'affirmative Buddhism' can help us prepare the ground.
Consider again the first noble truth in light of the idea that we might be looking at a philosophy that radical affirms all of experience. Instead of translating it as saying that (all of) life is suffering, let's translate it as less of a judgement than an observation -- there is suffering. As the Buddha says, suffering needs to be fully understood. This doesn't mean that all of existence is suffering, but simply affirms the undeniable fact that, yeah, sometimes we suffer. The point is not to universalize suffering but to acknowledge it when it happens and not look away or try to escape it.
While it might defy Theravadan orthodoxy, this reading of the first noble truth is hardly novel or controversial. To support it, we actually don't have to look any farther than the third noble truth -- there is a cessation of suffering. Obviously, this is the whole point of the religion; you can learn to stop suffering. If we think that "life is suffering", then this would only be possible at death. But the Buddha says over and over again that the end of suffering can be achieved in this life, not just in some afterlife. Also, should we perhaps note that the Buddha himself is alive when he gives this talk? When he says that the cessation of suffering is to be realized, we should read this in a way similar to how we approached the first noble truth. It's less a true statement about the character of reality than it is a practical observation. We should understand suffering whenever it arises, and we should realize its cessation whenever we are able to. Despite the sometimes eschatological vision, I think the cessation of suffering referred to here is actually something we are supposed to realize many times. Perhaps some ultimate and final cessation, where suffering ends once and for all, is possible within this life (the Buddha clearly claims to have achieved this). But what I and many other people seem to experience is something more relative and repeated. There was some suffering but now it stopped. More suffering will happen, but if we progress along the Buddha's path, more of it stops more often. In other words the cycles that run from understanding suffering to realizing its cessation get faster and deeper. In short, the cessation of suffering is not an escape from it, but it's continuous transmutation into joy.
The tragic is not founded on a relation of life and the negative but on the essential relation of joy and multiplicity, of the positivity and multiplicity, of affirmation and multiplicity. "The hero is joyful, this is what has, up to now, escaped the authors of tragedies" (VP IV 50). Tragedy - frank, dynamic, gaiety. (NP, 18)
This understanding of the third noble truth is bolstered by a (fairly obvious) insight I recently had into the fourth. The Buddha says that there is a path to the cessation of suffering, and that this path needs to be developed or cultivated. For a long time I thought that this path -- the noble eightfold path -- was just a lifelong spiritual path defined by a set of religious rules. After all, the eight branches all talk about the "right" way to do this, that, or the other; so they're like the Ten Commandments, right? I now think that the reason that the Buddha says this path must be cultivated is because it's a road you travel down again and again. Each moment to moment journey down the path leads to some cessation of suffering. The point of cultivating the path is to use it anytime you recognize that you're suffering. You can go down the path as many times as you need and as often as you suffer, thereby developing it, making it a little wider and easier to get on and follow, each time you go. The path is like a river that connects any suffering to its cessation. I say that this reading is obvious (even though I arrived at it after 5 years of meditation) because it now seems to me implicit in both the context of the fourth noble truth, as well as in the contents of the eight branches of the path.
Consider the context first. The cessation of suffering is to be realized, but then the path to this cessation is to be cultivated? If the end of suffering, Nibbana, is a one time destination, shouldn't the fourth noble truth come third? Don't we cultivate a path only once we already know something about what destination it leads to? The structure of the noble truths as a whole makes a lot more sense if we see that the fourth intends for us to cycle through the instructions of the first three. Understand our suffering, abandon its origin (which we'll come to momentarily), and thereby realize its cessation. Lather, rinse, repeat. That cycle is the path.
Carefully considering the contents of the path, "just this noble eightfold path", leads us to a similar conclusion. While the eight copies of the word "right" -- view, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, concentration -- at first give the impression that the path is a moral one, I think it's better to see each of the eight branches as advice you can practice in order to make your way towards the cessation of suffering. That is, they're only right because they work. In fact, right view is simply seeing the actions embedded in the four noble truths as practical advice for reducing suffering. This might also imply a metaphysical view like Nagarjuna's equation of dependent origination with emptiness, but that view is not 'right' because it accurately represents reality, but because it liberates us from thinking that existence must be any particular way at all. Similar things could be said about intention, speech, action, and livelihood. There's not a single correct way to do these things. But if you go around intending to harm people, and actually do frequently harm them with your speech or action or livelihood, its probably going to be pretty hard to see the suffering you're causing yourself and the craving that conditions it, and even harder to realize its cessation. As Upton Sinclair put it, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it". So again, the advice isn't primarily moral but practical. If we're willing to honestly examine our intentions and way of living and try to move these in a positive directions, we're just plain going to feel better. And finally, the last three branches of the path, and especially the crucial mindfulness one, are quite obviously practical in nature. They all involve monitoring and modulating our internal landscape in a way that lets us see more of what's going on, and see it without judgement. Mindfulness especially is a way of affirming all our experience without thereby possessing or identifying with it. As my meditation teacher says, "This is happening now".
The entirety of the path then is simply a list of parts of our experience we can examine, and ways we can examine them that lead us in the direction of less suffering. Their advice can be summed up as "just look". As the Buddha explains in his later elaboration of dependent origination, the root of our suffering lies in our ignorance, that is, in the way we ignore our own experience. The contents of the path are just a cheatsheet we can use to get back on the road to the cessation of suffering whenever we find that we have, in our own experience, gone in the 'wrong' direction (ie. towards suffering). We pick any of the noble eight folds and start examining experience. This examination itself leads in the 'right' direction, and we can immediately feel it. The path is not a moral doctrine but a practical manual, a compendium of eight important (though perhaps not exhaustive?) tools we can employ again and again, anytime we need them. We don't walk a single narrow path over the course of a lifetime, but wear a deep and wide groove into our experience so that all of our experience leads to the ocean of Nibbana.
At this point, you are undoubtedly wondering why your friend and humble narrator skipped over the third noble truth. I did this because the third noble truth is the one that really clinches the comparison of Buddhism with Nietzsche (and Deleuze). The short version is: "craving causes suffering". The more official wording is that suffering is conditioned on craving (it depends on it as a necessary condition rather than a cause), so that craving is the "origin" of suffering. Hence craving needs to be abandoned if we are to realize the cessation of suffering. This truth again fits with the understanding that the cessation of suffering is not a single transcendent endpoint we escape into once and for all, but an everyday experience we have again and again. Hence the path that leads to this cessation is something we travel down many times. Craving, after all, comes in an amazing variety of flavors. Biological, erotic, material, social, psychological. We crave a trip to the urinal. We crave a blowjob in the airplane bathroom. We crave a hamburger, a drink, or a Maserati. We crave to have people think we're smart. We crave the feeling of being loved. If we're intent on examining our experience, we see these cravings come and go all the time. We feel their urgency, the agitation they produce, their demands for action. And if we can see these individual cravings, and see how they cause us to suffer, we can start to release some of them some of the time. Sometimes, this doesn't amount to much and we only reduce our suffering a tiny amount for a short time. Sometimes the cessation is profound and prolonged. While the path to letting go of each individual craving may differ, there's a secret commonality to craving lying in plain sight. This secret is what really ties the room together.
Craving is always craving for it to be different. It's always the negation of whatever is going on in our experience. We crave when something isn't as it should be. Thus, craving always introduces a duality into our experience. It posits another, better, world, that is not here and now, and thereby rejects or ignores this world that we're actually experiencing. The third noble truth tells us that our suffering depends on this type of craving, and, conversely, that if we let go of this craving for it to be different our suffering will cease. This makes affirmation of existence the key to the entire path. The Buddha is really counseling us to accept suffering, not to resist it and not to fall into ressentiment or bad conscience about it, not to blame existence or our self for the suffering. Craving and suffering just happen. Nothing is responsible for them, least of all us. Despite the fact that it's beyond our control, we nevertheless have a certain freedom to transform suffering.
Strangely, when we really look at and affirm our suffering, it stops. At least, it stops being suffering. Perhaps it would seem less paradoxical if we changed our terminology here to match a popular Buddhist saying -- pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional. Bad things will still happen to us after the cessation of suffering. We'll still get old and sick and die and so will everyone we love. But somehow being willing to fully affirm these 'tragedies' robs them of their sting. In a sense, the third noble truth is teaching us that our suffering doesn't mean anything. It has nothing to do with justice or judgement or revenge. It's a problem we add to experience only when we are unable to affirm it. And it's a problem that disappears as such whenever see it happening, despite the fact that this seeing doesn't actually 'solve' the problem.
Affirmation is the core of Nietzsche's tragic perspective. Life affirmed, life led without craving for it to be different, is joyous even when it's 'tragic'. The bad things that happen suddenly are no longer an accusation of life but an inevitable part of it. They stay bad from our limited perspective, but are no longer evil, because we affirm that from some larger perspective there's nothing inherently wrong with them. Shit just happens. The Buddhist and Nietzschean perspectives coincide as soon as we see that the suffering the Buddha claims our craving is responsible for is only an effect of what Nietzsche is calling the "pious interpretation of existence". We have some freedom to ease (Buddhist) suffering because it is the product of our own bad conscience and ressentiment, the product of thinking it should be different and assigning blame for why its not. Conversely, Nietzsche's (tragic) suffering is more like what the Buddha was calling pain. We convert pain (bad stuff, tragic-suffering) into suffering (evil stuff, non-tragic suffering) whenever we think that this pain should not be happening. Then we look around for something to blame it on -- the gods, our self, the universe -- and we begin to scheme our revenge for the perceived injustice of it. If, instead, we affirm that pain, we begin to see that nothing and no one is responsible for it.
This lack of responsibility is my final point of comparison between Nietzsche and Buddhism. One of the most crucial insights in Buddhism is not-self (anattā), or its Mahayana generalization, emptiness (śūnyatā). We've already seen how Klossowksi interpreted the Eternal Return as a similar dissolution of individual identity. And we'll see more of this idea in the next post when we explore Deleuze's take on the metaphysical view that corresponds to Nietzsche's tragic conception of existence. Phrased in the ethical or existential terms we've been using here though, the view that nothing has inherent and essential existence translates into an idea of positive irresponsibility.
Nietzsche takes on the tasks of providing a new ideal, a new interpretation and another way of thinking (GM II23). "To give irresponsibility its positive sense", "I wished to conquer the feeling of a full irresponsibility, to make myself independent of praise and blame, of present and past" (VP III 383, 465). Irresponsibility - Nietzsche's most noble and beautiful secret. (NP, 21)
We are not responsible for our suffering. And neither is god or the universe at large. Suffering is chance. It is contingent (as Stephen Batchelor translates Nagarjuna's word of dependent origination). This doesn't mean that it is without a law of its own. But it does call into question the identity of both the victim and the executioner, the identity of some entity to blame for the suffering. If no one is there craving for it to be different, who is left to suffer? By affirming all of experience, even this affirmation, we effectively dissolve ourselves into it. The true affirmation of experience is multiple, expansive, and redoubled.
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