The Buddhist Ethic and the Spirit of Global Capitalism
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2012 · 1:09:56 · 9,089 words
religion-theologypsychoanalysisideologycapitalismconsciousness-mindhegel-dialecticsphilosophy-generalethicsgeopolitics-war
Žižek examines Buddhism's contemporary relevance through two lenses: its function as ideological lubricant for global capitalism (inner detachment enabling frantic market participation) and its resonance with cognitivist neuroscience (no-self aligning with the denial of free will). He surveys several responses to the cognitivist challenge, resignationism, Habermas's transcendental a priori, the Churchlands' eliminativism, and Metzinger's Buddhist-materialist solution, before turning critical: he identifies internal tensions in Buddhist ethics (the Bodhisattva typology, the gap between morality and enlightenment, the drug-induced nirvana problem) and documents Zen Buddhism's historical justification of wartime killing, notably D.T. Suzuki's 'compassionate war' doctrine and the figure of Pol Pot as a case of enlightened detachment enabling atrocity. He concludes by counterposing Buddhism to a Hegelian-Christian ethics of excessive attachment and poses a speculative Gnostic question: what if something can go wrong in nirvana itself?
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 21
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Žižek mentions his own panic attacks as explanation for missing the previous day's session, a personal autobiographical note.
The commodified Western appropriation of Buddhist meditation as a technique for managing stress while remaining fully engaged in capitalist dynamics, functioning as the spiritual supplement of global capitalism rather than a critique of it.
The subjective stance cultivated by Buddhist practice that allows full participation in the crazy rhythms of capitalism while remaining existentially unattached to outcomes, the ideal attitude for the modern top manager.
Žižek's proposed rewrite of Weber's Protestant Ethic thesis: today it is Taoist/Buddhist inner detachment, not Protestant asceticism, that provides the spiritual infrastructure for capitalist accumulation.
The Churchlands' term for the spontaneous everyday belief in free will and a unified self, which they treat as naive ideological superstition analogous to animist readings of lightning, destined to be eliminated by mature neuroscience.
as “no-self (an-atman)”
The Buddhist doctrine that the self has no substantial identity, which Metzinger treats as the existential realization of the neuroscientific finding that the unified ego is a construct, and which Žižek exposes as potentially enabling atrocity by dissolving personal responsibility.
as “thoughts without a thinker”
The Buddhist meditative endpoint, invoked via Epstein's book, where thought-events occur without an 'I' agent to claim authorship, the limit case Metzinger treats as the only genuine subjectivization of the cognitivist no-self result.
as “freedom as the power to stop”
Žižek's reading of Libet: since neural signals precede conscious decision, genuine freedom is not the positive act of willing but the negative capacity to interrupt what the brain has already initiated, a Hegelian negativity at the heart of neuroscience.
The Hegelian principle Žižek finds latent in Libet's experiment: freedom resides not in positive willing but in the capacity of the subject to negate, to stop, the determined neuronal process already underway.
as “the death drive”
Implicit in Žižek's critique of Buddhism's first axiom: he invokes Freudian-Lacanian theory to deny that humans fundamentally avoid suffering, pointing to passionate love as evidence of a drive that courts catastrophe.
as “dark side of nirvana”
Žižek's speculative Gnostic extrapolation: just as Star Wars posits a dark side of the Force, some Tibetan Buddhists suggest something can go wrong in nirvana itself, human evil may originate in a catastrophic reversal within the enlightened domain.
Žižek's Lacanian reworking of the 'subject supposed to know': for most lay Buddhists, enlightenment functions not as a personal goal but as a fixed point of reference occupied by imagined others whose achievement guarantees meaning.
as “codependent origination”
The Buddhist doctrine that all phenomena arise interdependently and karma is not divine punishment but the immanent traces left by acts within a dense causal texture, which Žižek notes even attracted Stalinist readings.
For Žižek, the very thing Buddhism identifies as the source of suffering is the necessary condition of possibility for nirvana: one must fall into excessive attachment and be denaturalized by it before the void that enables withdrawal can open.
The Buddhist wheel of suffering driven by unquenchable desire; Žižek emphasizes that the Buddhist goal is not to exchange bad karma for good karma but to step out of the cycle entirely.
The Buddhist figure of the enlightened being who delays personal liberation to assist all sentient beings; Žižek analyses the three subtypes (king, boatman, shepherd) as staging a core tension between self-first and other-first ethics.
Žižek's label for the opposed Buddhist position, attached to the sacrificial bodhisattva, which aims at a global cosmic change rather than mere attitudinal shift, a tendency he regards as the origin of catastrophe.
A structural tension Žižek locates within Buddhism itself: the preparatory moral rules (no killing, no lying) have no immanent logical connection to enlightenment, so that one who truly attains nirvana is free from those rules and could, in principle, torture without karmic consequence.
The doctrine Žižek attributes to D.T. Suzuki and Japanese Zen Buddhism: killing in war is not only compatible with Buddhist compassion but is its highest expression, since the true bodhisattva kills with enlightened non-attachment.
Žižek's name for the most oppressive ideological narrative: the naturalization of hierarchy and suffering by embedding them in a cosmic cycle where all positions are equivalent, he illustrates its function via The Lion King and extends the reductio to the Holocaust.
Heidegger's term for the event of appropriation that Žižek contrasts with Buddhist nirvana: unlike nirvana, Ereignis is radically finite and historical, it does not dissolve into timeless cosmic peace.
Stories he reaches for 3
D.T. Suzuki wrote texts supporting the Japanese war effort in China, claiming the Chinese could not understand that the sword killing them was a sword of love. Žižek presents this as the logical endpoint of applying Buddhist non-attachment to military violence.
“the chinese are like stupid children. they cannot get that the sword which is killing them now is really a sword of love.”
Libet wired subjects' neurons and found that brain signals indicating a voluntary movement precede the conscious decision by a fraction of a second. The naive reading concludes there is no free will; Libet himself argues freedom consists in the power to stop the initiated process.
“the basic form of freedom is not i do this... but to stop it. that in that split of a part of a second, when i do this, i can stop it. and that's the form of freedom.”
When Simba asks why lions eat zebras, his father sings 'The Circle of Life': lions eat zebras, die, feed grass, which zebras eat. Žižek applies this to Life Is Beautiful: imagine Benigni singing the circle of life to explain the Holocaust, Jews are killed, become manure, feed grass, etc. The reductio shows that the ideology of cosmic cycles naturalizes atrocity.
“imagine roberto benigni singing back, it's all one big circle of life, you know, jews are killing us, but we will die and we will turn into food”
Works invoked 8
Star Wars film
Žižek calls Star Wars 'real works of art' and uses the concept of the dark side of the Force as a popular analogy for the Gnostic notion that something can go wrong in the enlightened domain itself.
Life is Beautiful film
Žižek imagines a scene where Benigni's character sings 'The Circle of Life' to explain why the Nazis are killing Jews, a reductio to show the ideology of cosmic cycles naturalizes atrocity.
Left Behind book
Tim LaHaye's evangelical apocalyptic novels, Žižek calls them 'the lowest of the low', 'Dan Brown is Shakespeare compared to them', cited only to use 'left behind' as a phrase.
The Lion King film
Žižek uses 'The Circle of Life' from The Lion King as a paradigm of ideological naturalization of hierarchy, then extends the reductio to the Holocaust via an imagined Life Is Beautiful sequel.
Weber's classic is Žižek's structural template: he proposes that if Weber were writing today, he would write 'The Taoist or Buddhist Ethic and the Spirit of Global Capitalism'.
Modest but well-written book by Bret Davis that Žižek recommends for its analysis of a deep ambiguity in Heidegger between radical historicism and a quasi-Buddhist a priori structure of evil.
Holzwege book
Heidegger's collection containing 'Der Spruch des Anaximander', from which Žižek reads a passage on entities that linger too long in presence, used to explore the Heidegger/Buddhism comparison.
Book by Mark Epstein (Žižek says 'Jean Epstein') used to characterize the endpoint of Buddhist meditation where thoughts occur without an 'I' agent, the state Metzinger treats as genuine subjectivization of the no-self result.
People invoked 22
Bret Davis positive
Author of a modest but well-written book on Heidegger and Zen Buddhism that Žižek cites for identifying a deep ambiguity in Heidegger between radical historicism and locating the origin of evil in an a priori structure.
Žižek publicly apologizes for missing Fynsk's session the previous day, calling him 'one of my absolute persons' and a reason he is at EGS.
Owen Flanagan negative
A cognitivist philosopher Žižek cites for drawing attention to Western distortions of Buddhism and for the distinction between deserved and undeserved happiness, a distinction Žižek rejects as non-immanent.
Jacques Lacan positive
Framework implicit throughout; explicitly invoked for the 'subject supposed to know' reworked as 'subject supposed to meditate' in the analysis of lay Buddhist belief.
Cited for a statement that if alcohol helps one, why not, used as an opening for the drug-induced nirvana problem.
G. K. Chesterton positive
Žižek cites Chesterton's argument that Christianity is a religion of separation, not harmony, the only religion that valorizes excessive particular attachment against the pagan circle of cosmic unity.
Daniel Dennett positive
Žižek finds Dennett mixed, 'sometimes too stupid but sometimes bright', but credits his Derrida-like temporality argument against the naive Cartesian reading of Libet as a useful counter-move.
Patricia Churchland negative
Žižek finds the Churchlands' eliminativist position on folk psychology 'beautiful' but ultimately naïve, they underestimate the existential difficulty of genuinely accepting that one is a neuronal automaton.
Žižek's close friend with whom he does 'usual communist plotting'; he formally prohibited Badiou from attending due to health concerns and had lunch with him that day.
Cited as a case study: colleagues reportedly described his extraordinary inner peace and kindness even while ordering mass killings, and Khmer Rouge mythology cast him as having attained the highest Buddhist stage.
D. T. Suzuki negative
Žižek uses Suzuki's texts supporting Japanese wartime killing in China and his doctrine of 'compassionate war' as the clearest exhibit of how Buddhist non-attachment can justify atrocity, presented as consequent but horrifying.
Martin Heidegger positive
Žižek argues for a non-romantic, non-technological reading of Heidegger and uses Ereignis's radical historicity to distinguish Heidegger sharply from Buddhism, against attempts at synthesis.
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling positive
Cited with Böhme as a source for the Gnostic speculation that evil originates in a catastrophic reversal within the divine, mapped onto the dark side of nirvana.
Thomas Metzinger positive
A serious scientist and materialist Buddhist-adjacent thinker whom Žižek praises for honestly confronting the cognitivist no-self result and finding Buddhist meditation its only genuine existential correlate; Žižek wishes he would come lecture.
Paul Churchland negative
Co-cited with Patricia Churchland as advocates of folk-psychology eliminativism; Žižek finds their vision of a post-folk-psychology society naïve.
Jürgen Habermas negative
Žižek calls Habermas's transcendental a priori solution to the cognitivist challenge 'the worst' position, agreeing with Wolfgang (unnamed colleague) only on this point.
Jakob Böhme positive
Cited alongside Schelling for the Gnostic notion that human evil originates in a reversal within God himself, used to frame the speculative question of whether something can go wrong in nirvana.
Benjamin Libet positive
Žižek appreciates that Libet, the author of the decisive free-will experiment, did not draw the naive eliminist conclusion but instead relocated freedom in the power to stop, a quasi-theological move Žižek finds congenial.
Sigmund Freud positive
Cited as the source of the Lacanian framework Žižek uses to contest Buddhism's first axiom: from a Freudian standpoint, it is not true that we do not want to suffer.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Žižek consistently frames his own interventions as Hegelian, asking the genetic question 'how did we fall into samsara?' rather than the therapeutic 'how do we get out?', and finding Hegelian negativity in Libet.
Friedrich Nietzsche positive
Invoked briefly via the host's introduction; also referenced when Žižek says 'as nietzscheans we should agree' that someone who boasts of his sacrifice should not be trusted.
Max Weber positive
Žižek proposes a direct parallel to Weber's Protestant Ethic thesis: today the spiritual supplement of capitalism is Buddhism/Taoism, not Protestantism.
What it argues
Buddhism as ideological supplement to global capitalismcognitivist neuroscience and the denial of free willinternal tensions in Buddhist ethics (Bodhisattva typology, morality vs. enlightenment)Zen Buddhism's justification of war and killingexcessive attachment as the condition of possibility for enlightenmentHegelian-Christian ethics vs. Buddhist dispassionthe speculative-Gnostic question of evil originating in nirvana itself
Dialectical moves 10
“The very thing Buddhism offers as cure to capitalist stress is what makes you a better capitalist: inner detachment is not resistance to capitalism but its spiritual fuel.”
Western Buddhism is not the antidote to capitalist alienation but its ideological complement, the reversal of apparent opposition into identity.
“It's not that we want to avoid suffering—the very structure of passionate love shows that we are ready to embrace catastrophic suffering and do it again.”
Buddhism's foundational axiom (no being wants to suffer) is inverted by the Freudian death drive; desire is not flight from pain but its pursuit.
“The true form of freedom is not 'I do this' but 'I stop this'—freedom as negativity, not as positive willing.”
Žižek inverts the standard notion of free will: Libet shows positive initiative is determined, but the negative power of stopping is the genuine locus of freedom.
“It is the very force of compassion which yields the sword—a true warrior kills out of love.”
Suzuki's Zen logic inverts the opposition compassion/violence: enlightened non-attachment transmutes killing into its opposite, the highest compassion.
“When I try to kill some of you, it is really not me but the sword itself that does the killing—the killer has no desire to harm anybody, but the enemy appears and makes himself a victim.”
Zen dissolution of the agent-self converts murder into an impersonal cosmic event, inverting moral responsibility into its annihilation.
“What Buddhism sees as evil—excessive attachment—is for Western Christian ethics the good itself.”
The foundational values of Buddhism and Christianity are precisely inverted: Buddhism's poison is Christianity's virtue, precluding any synthesis.
“You cannot get into nirvana directly from full immersion in natural life—you must first fall into excessive attachment, and this fall creates the void where withdrawal becomes possible.”
Attachment, the source of Buddhist suffering, is dialectically the necessary precondition for the liberation it seems to prevent, a Hegelian negation of negation.
“Far from being the highest ethical act, the shepherd bodhisattva's self-sacrifice is the most dangerous: whoever boasts of how much he sacrificed for you, don't trust the guy.”
The seemingly most selfless Buddhist figure inverts into the most suspect, performative self-sacrifice conceals bad faith.
“The true proof that you are in nirvana would be precisely that you can do horrible things without leaving traces in your karma—it is easy not to kill if you just meditate peacefully.”
The ultimate test of enlightenment inverts: not refraining from violence but committing atrocity with perfect equanimity would be the true demonstration of non-attachment.
“Heidegger's Ereignis is not nirvana—it is a historical event, finite, not a timeless peace; the paths to the same do not converge here.”
Žižek rejects the synthesis of Heidegger and Buddhism by insisting on Ereignis's radical historicity as irreducible to Buddhist atemporal liberation.
Claims 19
asserts
Western Buddhism functions as the ideal ideological supplement to global capitalism, providing the inner detachment that allows subjects to participate in frantic market dynamics without existential breakdown.Western Buddhism / ideology
asserts
If Max Weber were writing today, his book would be titled 'The Taoist or Buddhist Ethic and the Spirit of Global Capitalism'.Buddhism / capitalism / ideology
asserts
Buddhism is not merely an exotic fashion but has genuine actuality today because it fits both the dynamics of global capitalism and the results of cognitive neuroscience.contemporary relevance of Buddhism
rejects
The Freudian-Lacanian view contradicts Buddhism's first axiom: human beings do not simply want to avoid suffering—passionate love demonstrates a readiness to embrace catastrophic suffering and repeat it.Buddhist axiom that no living being wants to suffer
rejects
The dominant response to cognitivism—resigning ourselves to living in the gap between scientific determinism and everyday freedom—is inadequate because it never achieves genuine existential acceptance.resignationist response to cognitive neuroscience
rejects
Habermas's transcendental solution—treating communicative freedom as an a priori condition of scientific practice itself—is the worst response to the cognitivist challenge.Habermas's transcendental argument against eliminativism
asserts
Metzinger's Buddhist-materialist position is the most honest: Buddhist meditation, at its limit, is the only genuine existential subjectivization of the neuroscientific no-self result.Metzinger / Buddhism / cognitive neuroscience
reframes
Libet's experiment does not disprove free will but relocates it: genuine freedom is the negative power to stop the neural process already underway, not the positive act of initiating it.Libet's free-will experiment / freedom
asserts
There is no immanent logical connection between Buddhist preparatory morality and enlightenment: a truly enlightened being could in principle commit atrocities without karmic consequence.gap between Buddhist ethics and enlightenment
rejects
The distinction between drug-induced and meditation-induced nirvana is non-immanent: once you are in the state, the path of arrival is irrelevant.Owen Flanagan's ethical distinction between deserved and undeserved happiness
asserts
Zen Buddhism historically justified wartime killing through the logic of compassionate war and the dissolution of the agent-self—Suzuki's writings are a paradigm case.Zen Buddhism and war / D.T. Suzuki
asserts
Buddhist enlightenment as total non-attachment is not merely compatible with atrocity but can actively enable it, as the case of Pol Pot demonstrates.Buddhism / ethics / atrocity
asserts
There is an absolute abyss between Buddhist ethics and Western Christian ethics: what Buddhism names as evil (excessive attachment) is precisely what Christianity valorizes as the good.Buddhism vs. Christianity / ethics
asserts
Christianity is not a religion of harmony but of separation: its core gesture is excessive, particular attachment that ruptures the pagan circle of cosmic unity.Christianity / ethics / universalism
asserts
One cannot pass directly from full immersion in natural life to nirvana: the detour through excessive attachment is necessary to denaturalize the subject and open the void in which withdrawal becomes possible.the dialectic of attachment and enlightenment
rejects
Heidegger's Ereignis is not equivalent to Buddhist nirvana because it is radically finite and historical, not a timeless cosmic peace.attempts to synthesize Heidegger and Buddhism
reframes
The Hegelian question to pose against Buddhism is not 'how do we get out of samsara?' but 'how did we fall into it?'—a question Buddhism either sidesteps pragmatically or dissolves with sophistry.the origin of samsara / Buddhist metaphysics
asserts
There may be a dark side to nirvana itself: human evil could originate in a catastrophic reversal or madness within the enlightened domain, paralleling Böhme/Schelling's notion that evil originates in God.speculative origin of evil / Buddhism / Gnosticism
asserts
The 'circle of life' is the most oppressive ideological narrative because it naturalizes hierarchy and suffering by embedding them in a cosmic equivalence of positions.circle of life / ideology / naturalization
Quotes 15
“if max weber to rewrite his legendary book on protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism today, the title of the book would have been the taoist or buddhist ethic and the spirit of global capitalism”Slavoj Žižek · Western Buddhism as ideology of capitalism
“i simply think that there is in our passionate engagement certain logic where you are ready fully to buy final fiasco, incredible suffering, but you are ready to do it again.”Slavoj Žižek · death drive / excessive attachment over Buddhist avoidance of suffering
“the basic form of freedom is not i do this. there we are overdetermined by neurons. but to stop it. that in that split of a part of a second, when i do this, i can stop it. and that's the form of freedom.”Slavoj Žižek · freedom as negativity / Libet reread
“subject presupposed to meditate. people need it as a fixed point of reference.”Slavoj Žižek · subject supposed to meditate / Lacanian structure of belief
“even though the buddha forbade the taking of life, he also taught that... killing and war are necessary... it is the very force of compassion which yields the sword.”Slavoj Žižek · compassionate war / Zen justification of killing
“when i try to kill some of you, it is really not he, me, but the sword itself that does the killing. he, the killer, has no desire to do harm to anybody, but the enemy appears and makes himself a victim.”Slavoj Žižek · Suzuki's Zen dissolution of moral agency
“pol pot had such an absolutely breathtaking incredible inner peace and kindness. even when he ordered, we know what.”Slavoj Žižek · enlightened atrocity / dark side of nirvana
“what buddhists see as evil is for us the good itself.”Slavoj Žižek · absolute incommensurability of Buddhism and Christian ethics
“christianity is not a religion of harmony. it's a religion which says... the christian gesture is to say, no, i do something crazy. i choose this, i stick to this, even if it turns everything around.”Slavoj Žižek · Christianity as religion of excessive particular attachment
“you cannot get into nirvana directly from full immersion into natural life. you must fall—in the sense of excessive attachment—and this fall creates the void where you have to withdraw.”Slavoj Žižek · excessive attachment as dialectical precondition of nirvana
“as a hegelian, i like the opposite question, not how to get out, but how did we fall in?”Slavoj Žižek · Hegelian inversion of the Buddhist problem of samsara
“what if something can go terribly wrong in this nirvana domain itself?”Slavoj Žižek · speculative Gnostic dark side of enlightenment
“i think that's the most oppressive ideology you can imagine—the circle of life.”Slavoj Žižek · critique of the ideology of natural cosmic cycles
“once you are in, you are in. who cares how you got there?”Slavoj Žižek · anti-moralist immanence of nirvana / drug-induced vs meditated enlightenment
“human evil is not because we fell from god. human evil originates in madness, reversal, something going wrong in god himself.”Slavoj Žižek · Böhme/Schelling Gnostic origin of evil / dark side of nirvana
Transcript 6 turns
Host
friedrich nietzsche
friedrich nietzsche
Host
pointed out the most dangerous person in the world is a philosopher. because it comes in and everything which was agreed on... is no longer clear, he confuses everyone. and tonight we have a founding professor of ejs. he was here in the first year and he's coming back every time he can. and he is on his book, that the most dangerous man in the world.
pointed out the most dangerous person in the world is a philosopher. because it comes in and everything which was agreed on... is no longer clear, he confuses everyone. and tonight we have a founding professor of ejs. he was here in the first year and he's coming back every time he can. and he is on his book, that the most dangerous man in the world.
Slavoj Žižek
philos.
philos.
Host
now you have the most dangerous man in the world. please welcome sl.
now you have the most dangerous man in the world. please welcome sl.
Slavoj Žižek
thanks very much for the great number of you here. just a couple of points before i... begin three points basically. first i must publicly, i promise this to myself, apologize to my good friend christopher fynsk that i was not here yesterday. i mean, he's one of my absolute persons, the reason i am here. and i just was i have my problems with panic attacks. i was not in a good. yesterday so i really apologize on the other hand so that you will not think something is wrong. i hope he's not here because i formally prohibited alain badiou to come here. no, no, seriously, because, you know, he has some health problems. he came yesterday tired and i saw him, we had lunch this afternoon, we did our usual communist plotting against different persons and so on. he wasn't here. a third thing, it may surprise you, but i decided, because we debated it a lot in my class, that i will talk about buddhism. and it's very open. please don't take this as a rhetorical point. i am not sure how deep i am into it. and even if i will be very critical this is more kind of a series of remarks to provoke you because i know that some of you are probably much more substantially in it than me myself. so why deal with buddhism? is it just the fashion so that we in the west feel more organic, holistic or whatever? no, i claim there are... two features weak account for the let's call it naively actuality of buddhism in our today's global capitalist whatever we call it predicament as we all know two features. charakterisiert. our work. civilization today to put it very naively a global capitalism with its unheard of dynamics and second science the role of science and i claim. in both domains, buddhism. and i'm not going now into is it the authentic one or not, blah blah blah, but some reference of buddhism. if it's not crucial at least it plays a very interesting role first i would like to begin with what may be dismissed, but i don't think it's as simple as that, as some kind of a comical western copy of authentic buddhism, so-called western buddhism. by this i mean groups in west who practice buddhism and so on and so on. now, if you followed. this trend a little bit. you may have noticed something how western buddhism presents itself as the remedy against the stressful tension of capitalist dynamics allowing us to uncouple from this crazy frantic rhythm and retain inner p and. enlightenment. but i claim, and you know what gave me to think this, when i read, i don't know in what journal, an interesting analysis of, let's call it, if not religious, spiritual trends among top managers, businessmen today. to cut a long story short, 80% some kind of, what they claim, tibetan buddhist, whatever you call it, practicing so-called meditation. and i can understand it. because insofar as if you are really engaged in modern capitalism at its craziest, you know, like... ich really. one of the top managers claimed that when he studied buddhist ontology, the way he understood it, the idea being, as you probably know, the fragility of existence, all are fleeting phenomena, everything can fall apart at every point, he said, but this is our market today one room, everything falls apart. so he got it correctly, this manager. sorry, i forgot his name. he said, if you really want to be fully engaged in this market, you get crazy. so what you need is a kind of a... inner distance which tells you okay, it's a crazy market to teach you how to participate in it without being fully existentially engaged in it. that's why businessmen like this bullshit. you know, even if i speculate all the day, it's just a cosmic play for me. i'm aware of the nothingness of it. it means nothing. it functions perfectly. which is why, to conclude this first point, i think that if max weber to rewrite his legendary book on protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism today, the title of the book would have been, i'm sure. the taoist or buddhist ethic and the spirit of global capitalism, something like that. now, mcia, no, no, no, wait a minute. let me make one point. there may, i cannot resist it, it's in my nature to make so-called bad taste jokes, but i take buddhism extremely seriously. it's absolutely authentic. i don't like the term because it's itself western anti-orientalist, but let's call it subjective existential experience. so the other reason, for me at least much more interesting is what some people call the so-called cognitivist breakthrough. the new states of our understanding of our brain, our thinking, provided by whatever you call them, brain sciences, cognitivism and so on. now... i... don't want to deal with the problem. like, are they true or not? what i'm just saying is that more and more they are somehow generally re. even those who should resist it most, psychoanalysts, you know, often play the game of, how do you call this, if you can't beat them, join them, you know. like they claim, oh, but you see what cognitive sciences are at arriving at, this is just a paraphrase of what already freud knew and so on, you know, this kind of a... uh... join the enemy. okay, but there is nonetheless one interesting point for me. and here i agree with, we have many problems with me and wolfgang, but at one point i agree with him, and i will make this point, that if we want to retain martin heidegger as a reference, it's crucial not to read heidegger along the lines of some kind of anti-technological romanticism, you know, heidegger walking in his stupid forest up there and. and cursing all the technology blah blah. no heidegger quite rational here. i read in one biography of heidegger that like, okay, it's nice that authentic tod nauberg had, but at the end he he wanted air conditioning, full electricity and so on know. okay, so what i'm saying is that the question that we should ask in this spirit. ish it's a very naif one. if we really accept. we don't have to, but if we. the result of brain sciences, which is, but this already is to be debated, but i don't want to enter it, that our subjective freedom or the unity of our ego as a free ego, as a free and responsible agent is an illusion. that in reality we are just a well-functioning neuronal mechanism, whatever you put it. okay. the problem is how to subjectivize this. that is to say how... should or does this affect your innermost but not in some deep metal even everyday sense of. an agent in gainley social life and so on and so on. so here i think that buddhism to be vulgar, is doing quite well without any irony because there are three main attitudes. the way i can see it, i mean only, i'm talking only about those who accept cognitivist breakthrough. and buddhism is the fourth one, i think. the first predominant attitude is simply... ooh. resign ourselves to the gap between the scientific view of ourselves as neuronal automata, whatever you want, and our... everyday self-experience as free responsible autonomous agents. the idea is that because of, you can be very materialist here, because of how we were produced through evolutionism, through evolutionary choice and so on and so on. we cannot but experience ourselves as free responsible agents and so on so that. we are simply condemned to live in the gap. scientifically we know but in everyday life, you know, it's the same, some of them like to use this metaphor as. we know very well how big moon is, but you cannot help perceiving moon as that small circle up there. that is the same. we cannot step out. the second attitude, the worst, if you ask me. is the, i hope again we agree here, we have many other reasons to kill each other, so here we can agree. this is my declaration of love, if you didn't get it, you know. is the habermasian position. wis. he also. fully assert the duality. but not the non-naturalist aspect is for habermas not simply an illusion that we should tolerate, but a kind of a transcendental a priori which is necessary and even points to an imminent limitation of scientific knowledge. his habermas's reasoning is here very very transcendental philosophical one. it is that. science is a certain social practice. intersubjective practice where, you know, we formulate universal statements, we confirm them through experiments in a debate, blah blah and in this practice, the transcendental a priori of this practice is that we are free, responsible beings, reasoning in a certain way and so on. so even if the result, for example, of our scientific investigation is we are neuronal puppets, whatever, we should not forget that this result is the result of an exercise of our. transcendental freedom of scientific thinking, which is a priori. you know, we cannot say, no, that is false. if you neglect that, the result also disappears. then we have and even more naive but in a way sympathetic to me attitude that of some radical. brain scientists like the big couple from la jolla i think california patricia and paul churchland. they claim. i don't think it works what they are saying but it's a beautiful position they claim that no they claim that our. the term among some brain scientists for this everyday attitude is, as you probably know, folk psychology. this spontaneous idea, my god, i do whatever i want, we are free and so on. okay, they claim that this folk psychology doesn't have such a deep status as some darwinists think. that it's not a kind of a biological evolutionary a priori, but simply a reflection of our old naive ideology. they say self like in old times when i think this is even by patricia churchland an example when so-called primitive people saw a lightning, they thought god is sending us a message or there is a higher force behind. and they claim when we act i think, oh, i have a free self in me, which is the true source of it, it's exactly the same type of superstition. and in the same way that even if you are scared shit of a storm, as i am, i admit, especially if you are up on the plane, when it happens, no nonetheless... at least mostly i succeed. not starting to pray and... claiming you know like you naturalize it. we no longer think like so-called primitives. day. the churchland couple, they think the same thing is possible. even with our freedom of the will and self. and in a pretty naive way they describe how such a society would have looked, that it wouldn't be simply a society without punishment, as some people think, namely the idea being, if i am an automaton and there is no freedom of the will, what right do you have to punish me? i'm not responsible. no, they say punishment can nonetheless be a regulative mechanism which works and so on. er. just a more kind, less oppressive society and so on. the reason i don't agree with this solution is its implicit naivety and the one who is my good guy here, the german brain scientist maybe you should invite him he didn't want to come thomas metzinger. it would be really nice to get him. maybe you can, if he has some son, blackmail him like, you know mafia, everything is permitted to get good people here to satisfy you know like maybe your son will get have an accident, who knows, you know if you don't come here. no she sees very well how this type of simple acceptance, okay, so what? we change her view, still lives even if in words. it. recogn yeah mean you say what's the problem you know okay i'm an automaton what the hell? but de facto in your activity you still treat yourself as the good old free self. you don't really existentially accept it. and here again we come to buddhism. because metzinger, who is? a serious scientist, not some kind of a shitty new ager like those who claim, you know, the tauao of quantum physics. we are not talking about that. he is in. but at the same time, for very precise reasons, although he's also totally materialist. he. buddhist in the sense that he claims that although it may appear that we are, as the first position which i described claims, that we are condemned to this duality. that is to say, scientifically we know we are neural automata, but in your immediate self-experience, you experience yourself as free agent and so on and so on, that there is nonetheless. possible as a limit case and this for him, as you can guess would have been precisely when you arrive at enlightenment in buddhism, when you accept so-called an-atman, that your self does not have any substantial identity, that it's a beautiful thesis, i like it in a way, that and again, he's not in that sense, a mystist. he claims that he's totally a scientist. he just claims that if you go to the end in buddhist meditation, where you arrive at a stage of, this is one popular book on buddhism, jean epstein, i think, which is not so bad, the title is thoughts without a thinker. that literally you arrive at a stage where you have thoughts, but you no longer can say there is an i agent who is thinking these thoughts. and that he claims, although for large majority of us, he puts it very nicely, we can... he agrees with the first position. we can. uh. scientifically objectively accept as an object of study our brain okay we are automata but... he puts this beautifully. he says, we simply... cannot really believe in it in our everyday life even if you claim okay show what, i'm that kind of automaton. in your innermost identity, you cannot really believe this, except if you come to the end of buddhist meditation. i love this position, although, and metzinger is aware of this, although, do you know that, and that's the beauty of all these debates, cognitive scientists, buddhism, because, you know, many of them are idiots, but some of them are really bright guys. and denoit, for example, my god, i forgot his name, there is a scientist jewish because this affects his notion of free will, he's so well known. in san francisco, his name will come to me, who is the very author of the crucial experiment his name will come to me i'm sorry, benjamin libet you know, the author of the crucial experiment demonstrating allegedly that there is no free will. you know, it's that famous experiment where don't ask me how, i'm giving you a reader's digest simplified version that he wires your neurons and then she asks you to do some extremely elementary. gesture. for example, grab this pen. and he tells you just to say. now or whatever to somehow signal the moment you decide it. okay, you know the story. i don't know how much part of a second before you decide, your brain already knows it. signals are already on the way. but now comes the beauty. that's why i like this guy. a big shock to this common gang of more stupid flat scientists is that they automatically took this as a proof of there is no free will. because when you think, you decide, you just, what's the term, take. cognizance assumes what your brain has already decided. but this is not you see these are intelligent guys, this is not libet's position. and he says, that's why, not out of any anti-semitism or praising the jews, that's why i emphasize that he is a jew, because he makes here a very nice theological, but he's a materialist, just as a spiritual point, reference to ten commandments prohibitions, and he claims, although it's also a very problematic topic, that we are looking for freedom of the will at the wrong. point that the basic he is very hegelian here negativity that the basic form of freedom is not i do this. there we are overetermined by neurons, blah blah. but to stop it. that in that split of a part of a second, when i do this, i can stop it. and that's the form of freedom. it's a beautiful. then if you want a more complex counter-argumentation. daniel dennett, who again is like mixed, sometimes too stupid but sometimes bright, has also a wonderful attack on this primitive reading of libet. his point is very deridian almost. a minimum of he almost calls it differentrence temporality of brain. he says that there is no freedom only if you presuppose what he wrongly i think d called a so-called central cartesian self where ultimately things happen at the same point. you know, if you presuppose this, then you can say, i decided this, but it already happened. but you must presuppose a homogeneous central agent. wit. basic temporality if you renounce this then this primitive conclusion doesn't work. i'm telling you this why? just to let you know that i'm not, as it were, totally bluffing. you know that i know that things are more complex. but okay. now... this is just the introduction, you know. you got the idea why i think buddhism is not just a kind of a amusing exotic reference. but it means something spiritually today in our own constellation. because it again, it appears to be. the ideal form of functioning in today's crazy frantic capitalism at the same time it appears to be the proper mode of subjectivization of the results of modern science. so... how do things stand with it now? i go to even a more problematic stance. and i will try to turn directly. into buddhism it will be of course here i have 45 minutes or what very short but please believe me, i do bluff a little bit, but i know more than it's here. no okay. so as you all know, let me begin with the beginning. buddhism, we all know, is concerned with solving the problem of suffering. so, its first axiom, as it were, automatic presupposition ich. not only we, but no living being wants to suffer. okay, i will not go now immediately into it, but for me as a freudian lachenian, i would say here already problems begin. i think that if there is something which is, from a freudian standpoint, not true, it's that we don't want to suffer. and not only i'm not going here in sham. obscure masochism or whatever i just would like to invoke to you, i will be very pathetic here even in the sense of melodrama imagine yourself passionately in love. isn't it that? if you are... true to yourself and you can be no cognitive discordance here. you know very well or you suspect that at the end it will probably end bad that whatever will happen at the end, it will be for you. terrible suffering whatever but nonetheless,. i've spoken with people to whom this happened passionately in love and then dropped. and now i'm quite open and i was one of those people with whom i've spoken kevin. but you know, when it ends in catastrophe, just suffering. and then a friend asked me the usual question, now you probably regret it. my answer was automatic. no, i would have done it again. you know. so i simply think that there is in our passionate engagement certain logic where you are ready. fully to buy final fiasco, incredible suffering, but you are ready to do it again. you know but okay, i will come to this later. now let's go through buddhist doksha. the source of suffering lies in the unquenchable desire of people for things which, even if they get them, will never satisfy them. and it is this dissatisfaction which causes suffering. so the goal of buddhist practice is, as we all know, liberation from suffering. we can call it reaching nirvana, enlightenment, awakening, whatever you want. and everything a buddhist does is ultimately for the attainment of this enlightenment. buddhism buddhist practice first, as we all know, focuses on a morality that will lead to enlightenment. you know how it began for buddha. he first establishes the fact life is this wheel of desire, it's suffering. then he defines the causes of suffering. and then the way to fight them. and here at least. the moment buddhism became an institution, it of course introduced a certain gradualism in the sense that first it begins with a simple morality. everyday morality which is supposed to et lituer. pave, prepare the way or put us on the path to enlightenment. but as they emphasize buddhists, it's not enough just to regulate your conduct, how you act. this should culminate in enlightenment. and the point of all this is enlightenment. this is already interesting, you know why? because i read recently in a a book, i think it's a book of the guy, very interesting guy, i think, what's the title, buddha's consciousness or what? owen flanagan, one of the cognivist scientists who is also doing buddhism, draws attention, and here begins our western distortion, to an interesting fact. debt for as in the west, if you say i'm a buddhist, it usually means i practice some stupid transcendental meditation or whatever. it's automatically meditation. while he dros! attention to the fact that for the majority, for the nations, thailand, i don't know which others where, really buddhism is a way of life for the majority. the large majority of people don't meditate. for them, being a buddhist means two things. first, to respect this ethical moral rather than ethical. moral rules, you know, don't be violent, don't cause suffering, blah blah and where does then meditation enter? it's very interesting. it's just as a kind of a... imagined presupposed point of reference. you need, even if they don't exist to be cynical. you need to know that there are some people who made it to the end. you know, so that it gives you hope. it's more this kind of a subject, to paraphrase lacon, subject presupposed to meditate. people need it as a fixed point of reference. okay, so let's go on. yep. uh. how do we then fight our enslavement to desires? here we have the first point of buddhism, which is, i think, very nice materialist. there are no higher powers. you should forget about those later religious misreadings of karma and so on and so on. the idea is simply that karma or fate triggered by your desires actions is a kind of issue immanent to the way we act because as buddhists like to point out, you know they have this wonderful, no wonder even some stalinist marxists like this this idea of codependent origination no which stalin called the electrical unity of all phenomena, to be slightly cynical so the idea, i precisely try to give you an idea of karma which not some kind of a divine up there. it's simply that our act. being part of a rich texture texture of the world, leave traces, have consequences. some consequences are good, wholesome, others are not, and so on. and in this way uh. tout. deal with your karma means to regulate, try to diminish negative tracy consequences of your acts. and again, as you all know, i will quickly just enumerate them just to give an idea of basically how, in a good sense, that's not a criticism, how common sense. this first step of basic morality is you have this buddhist classification where they claim actions can occur at three levels, body, speech and mind. and at each level, already buddha, but it was elaborated later, proposes a whole categorization of bad acts as it were. first at the level of body there are. acts which are to be avoided, killing, stealing, sexual misconduct. by misconduct, it's not meant so much perversion or what but this excessive passion, excessive attachment. then at the level of speech for actions, lying, slander, harsh speech, malicious gossip and at the level of mind greet. anger. delusion. so the idea is that this is vaguely the first step, to, as it were, calm yourself down in what buddha calls the middle way, not the tony blair third way, but the more authentic middle way, you know, like neither excess of, i don't know, gluttony, sex or whatever, but also not some kind of a s mist radical renunciation and so on. on and so on. the goal of all this is to acquire dispassion, as some translate for the objects of clinging to which we cling. that is to say, the point is... your subjective attitude of how much you cling you attach yourself to objects because again you all know this i'm just repeating it. what in buddhism is called samsara is precisely this wheel of life of suffering and the point this is crucial. i think without this you don't get it. uh. it's not that from bad samsara we should get good samsara or karma. the point is not if you do, this would be the western reading, if you do bad things, you will have bad karma. so let's do good things, so you have good karma, so when you die, you will profit. no, no, here buddhism is not this type of bullshitting. it's serious. which means that the point is not to get good karma. the point is to step out. of it. but again, i'm well aware how refined this is. stepping out doesn't mean melancholia von trier, the end of the world. in one version of buddhism, even nothing has to change materially. only your. let's call it, although it sounds too californian, your attitude. and now i see slowly emerging problems which are look. imported by me. i register these problems in the very ambiguities conflicts, the way i found them in the buddhist teaching itself. okay, the guy, sorry for vulgarity, who reaches this stage of acquiring a distance, maybe the term stepping out is wrong because we have nowhere to go out. there is no transcendence in buddhism. that's beautiful about it. as we all know, it's called... bodyhischatva. the one who is concerned with uh. with freeing all sentient beings, not just himself or herself, even not just humans from samsara and its cycle of death, rebirth and suffering. but what makes it so interesting here is that, and this brings me to the first conflict. the taiishi,, conflict tension. you know that... traditionally... at least according to my information. er. we get three. levels or notions of bodhisattva. they are called very nicely king like bodhisattva, boatman bodhisattva and shepherd bodhisattva. king bodhisattva aspires to become buddha as soon as possible and then help all others like i do it myself. i try to reach nirvana. and the wager is that by doing this, either me as an example or by acting in a more gentle way, i will help others. boman is already more a communist. the idea is yes, but not me alone, together with others. now the highest according to some classification. but for me, i agree here with critiques with the other tendencies in buddhism the lowest, the most dangerous, where things go really wrong is shepherd-like bodhisattva. the idea is the following one, that the greatest ethical act is that you reach enlightenment. but out of compassion for all those who are as they call it in the greatest work of american literature, i'm making joke. did you read the cycle of novels from how are they called, tim lahaye and that left behind? the lowest of the low. okay. what i want to say, i mean it's really like dan brown it's shakespeare compared to them. but what i want to say is that... so again, that should be the great ethical act. you are there, eternal blish blah blah, but out of compassion, you go back. into valley of suffering and so on and so on like you know you... you give priority to others. you say, no, i don't have right to enjoy it myself. i go back, help others. this delaying, stepping back. some, i was told, maybe i'm wrong, many of you must know it better,, teravada buddhists. made a counter okay okay in traditional buddhism there is a kind of a graduation here no the lowest, the king bodhisattva, i do it, fuck you, you follow me or not, you know then the shepherd-like stupid communist and then the highest one, i was up there, but o i came infinite goodness, i came down to help you all. but some theravada guys and i'm immediately on their side. they make a nice argument. if the core of authentic buddhism. it has nothing to do with this ridiculous european spirituality. o i move up there into a higher domain. no, i stay here. i'm fully here. i eat the same apples like you, whatever. it's just my attitude totally changes. i'm still socially active. it even doesn't mean to attain nirvana that you meditate, that you are in some kind of pseudo pseudo- orgasmasmic spiritual trust. if this is true and authentic buddhists always emphasize this, you know that this vision of buddhist saint as someone hidden in a cave and just trembling blah blah blah that's false. so if this is true why then the necessity to step back? you can act like buddha and so on. you can attain nirvana and at the same time be active here. the idea is, and i think again this is the origin of catastrophe, you know the moment somebody who wants to redeem you, here we as nietzscheans should agree. boasts of how good he was that he sacrificed himself don't trust the guy, you know. okay, show it. what do i mean by this now i come to another please i'm here openly exposing myself i'm not kidding this is not rhetoric to your criticism if you know more i noticed. another problem here on the one hand some radical buddhists, radical means i like them, sorry. describe in a wonderful way how ot buddhism deals with suffering. you first isolate. the cause of suffering and blame the others. for example, oh i was deprived of that pleasure, fuck the world. and so on. why me? this is the eternal why me question, you know, like. children are starving in somalia. okay, i will give them5 dollars a month to make me feel good, but why me or why my child? the idea is that, of course, the first thing to do is to precisely... stop blaming the circumstances, blame your desire and then extinguish, although i don't like this term extinguish, because it's too violent in a wrong way, but here is a quote. whoop! has always been what was extinguished when you step out of samsara, circular suffering? is only the false view of the self what had always been illusory was understood as such nothing can was changed but the perspective of the observer. so uh i noticed and again correct me if i am wrong. i notice here the following tension, which from my reading or on books on history of buddhism is all present there. and it mirrors precisely this first tension in the notion of bodhisattva. should i simply... go there and in this way it's the best thing for others or should i play this sacrificial game no no, i love you so much, i step back and so on. the problem is that on the one hand we have this. a radical description of nirvana, which is everything is different but nothing changes. you know, like... it's the same world out there and so on, just i am aware of it. illusory nature and i assume this illusory nature existentially. why? and this i call the minimalist attitude. but then you n the chef especially. attached to that notion of bodhisattva as the one who sacrifices himself, the opposite, i call it maximalist attitude. i don't want to reach nirvana. before prior to all other sentient beings reaching it. so there. it's not just my subjective attitude you are aiming effectively at some kind of a global et... uh. global global. cosmic. change. the next ambiguity i see. and again, i already debated this in my class some of you reproached me so i did as much of homework as i was able to do and i still stick to my opinion that there are serious debates among. within buddhism. i think this is the third level of the same tension. uh. namely, it... as you remember how i describe it, first you do morality, not too much sex, proper eating, don't curse, don't be violent, as preparing the way for enlightenment. but the obvious point here is is there any link between the two? like this is a great problem in buddhism. i read many texts on this, where they claim if we are really honest, we have to admit that once you are in enlightenment, nothing immanently. prevents you, for example, from torturing people. you can just say, my act leaves no traces because i'm already at the nirvana level, no karma and so on and so on. now, i know what you will say now. but nonetheless, where is your compassion for others blah blah blah. i'm just making a typical western logical extrapolation totally out of touch exist existential reality of buddhism. no, i will give you immediately. proofs sorry just before i go to this, the fourth debate i encountered is the one where even dalai lama has some wonderful statement like if drinking by drinking he means real alcohol. helps you, why not? you know? like the problem is that many, if not all, of the states described as nirvana. can be if not totally, it gets pretty close to it. you know like they say money is not all. my answer is usually but it comes pretty close to it no okay what if you can induce the experience which immanently, inherently fits nirvana in a biochemical way with some drugs or whatever? how to distinguish? should we then distinguish the bad nirvana, i take a pill, you, i'm there, and the good nirvana, i was torturing myself, meditating for years, whatever. some guys, but here i don't agree with them, try to introduce here an ethical distinction. quote from owen flanagan, cases where happiness is gained by magic pills. or is due to false belief, do not count. because the allegedly happy person must be involved in cultivating her own virtue. happy states born of delusion are undeserved. but i think this is totally non-immanent. once you are in, you are in. who cares how you got there? okay, back to that problem of... suffering compassion and so on let me give you a little bit to shock you and then. yeah, yeah, we will stop then. to shock you... some of my old stuff uh... a little bit of je of buddhism and war. because... you know, like... buddhism did deal with this problem. especially interesting is here the relationship between japanese zen budduddhism and war and it's interesting to note what tricks did zen buddhism employ to justify? taking part in war. first there are two main strategies in zen buddhism. the first one to justify participating in warwar, that is to say, killing people, whatever, to be clear. the first one is the standard teleological narrative which is even well known in our western societies. a quote. uh. uh... even though, i think this quote is from, i forgoto suzuki, the great popularizer, even though the buddha forbade the taking of life, he also taught that until all sentient beings are united together through the exercise of infinite compassion, there will never be peace. therefore, as a means of bringing into harmony those things which are incompatible, killing and war are necessary. you know, the usual trick, you know, like, my god, i'm sorry to tell you, hitler could have argued, likeinsky could have said, i'm totally against suffering, i want peace. but fuck, there will be no peace as long as jews manipulate in our midst. so the only way to really fight for peace is... to give jews, to be cynical, one-way first-class ticket to auschwitz. i mean okay. so again. did you listen precisely what this passage says? it is the very force of compassion which yields the sword. a true warrior kills out of love. and suzuki was consequent here. you know, when he wrote many texts supporting japanese war effort in china, he said, the chinese are like stupid children. they cannot get that the sword which is killing them now is really a sword of love. he even proposed som fuck you if you think you will squeeze out by compassion. suzuki and some other japanese buddhists introduced the wonderful term of compassionate war. like, you know. you do it precisely out of compassion to prevent further. now comes the true horror. okay, this is the western bullshit also, we have it. but suzuki and others then add to this teleological, let's call it, justification in the sense of war is a necessary evil to bring about the greater good. no? and of course, in a certain way i agree with it. i mean, i'm not problem. der is a much more radical line reasoning weaklich i really signed this one. et. terrifying and okay look into my book i think it is the puppet in this world where i don't want to repeat myself where i developed this in detail, namely suzuki also. dealt with this problem. how to make the japanese military machinery more efficient. he knew well that we have a certain elementary decency like let's say you're my love partner i meet you wolfgang on a battlefield and. even if i hate you, i would find it somehow difficult to stab my knife or sword into you. here suzuki enters and says, i have this difficulty because i am still caught in the false illusion of myself. you know, like, because i still think i'm the agent of my act. i feel falsely responsible and so on but quote from suzuki. a uh a beautiful one. if the logic is that if i reach nirvana, then i no longer experience myself as an active agent. responsible for the act but you know it's this very beautiful i admit it buddhist view of world as a free flow of phenomena where i whatever remains of me i am no longer an agent but just a pure gaze and impassive observer which meditates on this crazy dance. this makes things easier because here, quote from suzuki. when i try to kill some of you. it is really not he, me, but the sword itself that does the killing. he, the killer, has no desire to do harm to anybody, but the enemy appears and makes himself a victim. it is as though this work performs automatically its function of justice, which is the function of mercy. now, are you? and please, just don't tell me these are the freaky japanese and so on. all around you find this idea that, all around buddhism, death. reaching nirvana, getting rid of your false self. makes you a much better warrior. this is why you have this long mythology of, you know, zen buddhists as perfect samurai, because you can do it with with proper... proper distance and so on and so on so if you allow me now from here just to. i mean, i should squeeze it now, two concluding points. the one is dead. here, i see. i cannot. my god, i feel like a bad buddhist. let's squash that. take a living, take a sentient being. good, good! he killed a sentient being. good thing, you know. but you know that this will worsen your karma, you know. in the next life, maybe, instead of being an even greater philosopher, you will be reborn as dead butterfly. who knows, you know. sorry, i'm not making fun. but i hope no let me. no i'm not because, you know why not? because do not please misunderstand me and that's why i'm open to say this prejudice here i'm not in any way saying that buddhist enlightenment is some kind of a joke to make killers or military. better functioning. it's absolutely an authentic existential experience. all i'm saying is that we have to accept the gap. and again suzuki is here honest. he says, buddhism is the technique of stepping out of the karma blah blah and he says you can be his examples, a stalinist, a fascist, a liberal democrat, whatever, it doesn't matter. so i think... to be a truly radical buddhist. you have to accept the minimal gap between all those ethical, you know why? because let me give you now a really brutal idea. uh. if the point of acting kindly, the buddhist moral injunctions and so on, compassionate, if the true point of this morality is... to teach you to bring you to this dispassionate attitude of seeing the illusory nature of reality and so on and so on. and when i was in korea a month ago, i debated there with a buddhist and i laughed him because he said, yes, what's the problem? when i told him, wouldn't then be logical to conclude? depp. the true proof that you are in nirvana. would have been precisely that you can do horrible things without your acts leaving traces in your karma. like it's easy to claim, i don't cause any suffering, blah blah, if you just, you know, eat properly, don't swear, don't steal, not too much sex and so on, no kill. but wouldn't the true strength have been to do acts which usually involved a kind of a crazy fanatic attachment, torture, killing. but to be able to do it in the same way with the distance. and here i got very depressed. when i read a biography of... haha, he was the one, pol pot. mer rouge and... it's incredible how many of his colleagues claim people who met him that pol pot had such an absolutely breathtaking incredible in direct human relations inner peace and kindness. even when he ordered, we know what. that there was a kind of a myth all around. khmer rouge leadership that he is in that. highest stage and so on. so what am i saying here two things. to conclude, first. i claim that, and i'm not even taking sides here, both positions are crazy. but i claim that here we should grasp the gap that separates buddhism as one radical condition from, let's call it the western christian ethics. british i think there is an absolute abyss here and all those shitty attempts to claim no we are all talking about the same god or bliss, this are paths are wrong. namely, as chesterton and others emphasized. in western christian ethics. the truth is, as it were, out there. the whole point is excessive attachment. what buddhists see as evil is for us the good itself. gut, mich! let's take our love. you fall in love means al but you will probably... talk about this to you later, which means, you know, you get excessively attached. you throw yourself to the end into it. in other words, chesterton put it so nicely uh. uh. all other religions. want to unite the world. how to unite with god. we are all one, all blah blah. christianity separates. it's the religion of separation. christianity is not a religion of harmony. it's a religion which says, yes, there is some kind of a homogeneous, harmonious circle of life. but... this is bullshit. this is... the pagan background. the christian gesture is to say, no, i do something crazy. i choose this, i stick to this, even if it... turns everything around. okay now if you allow me just two three minutes really to conclude here also because some people try this will be the really concluding part some people try to bring together heidegger and buddhism claiming again to paths towards the same and so on. no, i claim not. you know why not. because... for. heidegger, what he calls er erignis is a radical form of historicity concealment unconcealment and so on and so on. and precisely this radically historical dimension for for heidegger, ereignis is not nirvana. re is also finite. re is a historical event. this dimension i don't find. but now, if you allow me just to conclude, and it's madness because this is the speculative center of what i try to prove. where i would have been. at the same time. where i would have entertained a certain distance towards heidegger and towards buddhism is in the following one. and this is not just ethical, it's much more radical distinction you know, as a guy called, if you want to get more on this, there is an interesting book, very, it's a modest book, but very well written full i think the guy is brett davis. i forgot the title, but basically it's about heidegger and zen buddhism and he points to one. to a deep ambiguity in heidegger. how? heidegger. sometimes he's radically historicist, you know, in the sense of like modern nihilism, blah blah, but somehow here and there, heidegger locates, let's call it, naively. the origin of evil, of how things go wrong. into the a priori structure of disclosure of being itself. for example, i will read you this short passage from heidegger's spruch des anaximander. the saying of anaximander from holzwege, where he claims something which sounds strangely buddhist. a quote, an entity may even exist bestehen upon it. while like strange translation it means like the way it goes on i think solely to remain more present present in the sense of perduring that which lingers. perss in its presencing. in this way it extricates itself from its transitory while while is here a substantive. it strikes the willful pose of resistance, no longer concerning itself with whatever else is present. it stiffens as if this were the only way to linger. it aims solely for continuance and subsistence. so here heidegger says something like the origin of disturbance is when a thing, an entity, and this, persists too much. does it want to be just part of circle of life, whatever, you know what is the circle of life? i hate it. it's you know i think it's the most oppressive ideology you can imagine. it's my old joke, maybe you know it. did you see, i hope you didn't, the lion king? and you know when where you find there the song, the circle of life? precisely when the son asks his father the obvious question, is this right that we lions eat zebras? and father, it's easy when you are on the top, sings the song, which is, it's all a circle of life. we eat zebras, but we will die, we will turn into dust, our flesh will feed grass. and grass will be eaten by zebras. so it's all one big circle of life no? so all i'm tempted to say is imagine in beautiful life, the movie by benigni, the son asking him, father, but why are germans killing us jews? and i can well imagine roberto benigni singing back, it's all one big circle of life, you know, jews are killing us, but we will die and we will turn into food, our manure for grass. grass will be eaten by cows and one of us will kill a cow, we will eat the cow, and so it's a big circle of life, you know? like, you know, what's the point here? the point is, yeah, but what if there are different circles of life? you know, like maybe, let's hope there is a circle of life where you exactly don't have to do holocaust. no let's hope. no so seriously, now comes my final thesis. i will just try to hint it. if you want more, read my big fat book. my thesis is that eh. enlightenment is an authentic position, but... comes afterwards that let's say at an animal level immediately we are simply fully emerged in life. and... there is no fault. we are there like animals. but how do you create the space for nirvana, void or whatever? by acquiring a distance from being fully emerged into ordinary life. and this distance is through excessive attachment. that is to say... to be primitive, how do, it's very naive, i develop it much more technically in the book, how do animals become humans? when you say, no, no, sorry, mr. lyon king, it's not a cycle of life, circle of life, there is this woman political idea. i get fixated on that. if the whole world drops, i want that. you know, this fixation denaturalizes you, throws you out of the circle and in this way, that's my claim, creates the space for for. withdrawal for nirvana. you cannot get into nirvana. directly from full immersion into natural life. you must fall fall in the sense of excessive attachment and this fall creates the void where... where you have to withdraw. now, really to conclude, look, i don't have a paper, no this brings me, and here i'm not kidding, i'm sincerely asking you if you know more. i spoke with some guys here. this brings me to the crucial enigma that i find in buddhism. and again, very respectfully, this is not a critical remark. you know? buddha says, the fact is people suffer, how to get them out? as a hegelian, i like the opposite question, not how to get out, but how did we fall in? and here, and this is the question i'm asking people. is simply samsara a fact or was there some kind of, you know, illusion of maya? but like how did we get caught into this illusion? and i can make a report to you. i got three answers. the first is the totally pragmatist one. buddha is a practical guy, he is not... it's a concrete answer, i'm not mocking it. buddha was a practical guy. his problem was how to get out of suffering. he didn't care about these metaphysical questions. the second answer is a version of the first one but it's more tricky one, a little bit of a sophism. it says to understand this, how the follow card, you have already to be there in nirvana. but once you are there, you don't care about this. you know, like a kind of a trick. the third one. and some tibetans. that i met. in beijing, half illegally, told me i really liked that. here i can identify with buddhism. they told me that they gave me a kind of a... the name is meant ironically but basically very seriously. you know in star wars, now we are talking about the real works of art, you know how they all the time mention this dark side of power, you know. and this is, i think, very. so you don't have simply, we are caught into earthly. confusion. but then there is a higher domain of peace. what if something can go terribly wrong in this nirvana domain itself? what ich... you know, what is we are here in deep shit not because or to put it in more gnostic terms of jacob böhme, schelling and so on human evil is not because we fell from god. human evil originates in madness, reversal, something going wrong in god himself. i know in buddhism you don't have in this sense god, but what they told me, these guys, is that, and they gave me a wonderful experimental, experiential reason. they told me, my god, just listen to, and i do, it's really pure horror. do you know that buddhist music or that those horrible they told me this is the voice of evil. and no wonder, you know who knows this? fbi. you remember some 10 years ago, wo texas, those fundamentalists who were encircled by fbi, you know what music fbi played to them to get them out, to terrorize this buddhist horns and so on and so on. so this is, i think, some kind of a secret of tibetan buddhism, which, and again, it's not rhetoricics what i'm telling now. if you know... anything about me i would... it's nice that you want to take a walk before i finish. come back in half an hour, come back in. no, seriously, you see this enigma, speculative heell of how... it's not just we hear our world of illusions and then nirvana. what if something can go wrong? up there. i'm very sorry if i was too long, but on the other hand i'm not sorry. fuck you, what can i do?
thanks very much for the great number of you here. just a couple of points before i... begin three points basically. first i must publicly, i promise this to myself, apologize to my good friend christopher fynsk that i was not here yesterday. i mean, he's one of my absolute persons, the reason i am here. and i just was i have my problems with panic attacks. i was not in a good. yesterday so i really apologize on the other hand so that you will not think something is wrong. i hope he's not here because i formally prohibited alain badiou to come here. no, no, seriously, because, you know, he has some health problems. he came yesterday tired and i saw him, we had lunch this afternoon, we did our usual communist plotting against different persons and so on. he wasn't here. a third thing, it may surprise you, but i decided, because we debated it a lot in my class, that i will talk about buddhism. and it's very open. please don't take this as a rhetorical point. i am not sure how deep i am into it. and even if i will be very critical this is more kind of a series of remarks to provoke you because i know that some of you are probably much more substantially in it than me myself. so why deal with buddhism? is it just the fashion so that we in the west feel more organic, holistic or whatever? no, i claim there are... two features weak account for the let's call it naively actuality of buddhism in our today's global capitalist whatever we call it predicament as we all know two features. charakterisiert. our work. civilization today to put it very naively a global capitalism with its unheard of dynamics and second science the role of science and i claim. in both domains, buddhism. and i'm not going now into is it the authentic one or not, blah blah blah, but some reference of buddhism. if it's not crucial at least it plays a very interesting role first i would like to begin with what may be dismissed, but i don't think it's as simple as that, as some kind of a comical western copy of authentic buddhism, so-called western buddhism. by this i mean groups in west who practice buddhism and so on and so on. now, if you followed. this trend a little bit. you may have noticed something how western buddhism presents itself as the remedy against the stressful tension of capitalist dynamics allowing us to uncouple from this crazy frantic rhythm and retain inner p and. enlightenment. but i claim, and you know what gave me to think this, when i read, i don't know in what journal, an interesting analysis of, let's call it, if not religious, spiritual trends among top managers, businessmen today. to cut a long story short, 80% some kind of, what they claim, tibetan buddhist, whatever you call it, practicing so-called meditation. and i can understand it. because insofar as if you are really engaged in modern capitalism at its craziest, you know, like... ich really. one of the top managers claimed that when he studied buddhist ontology, the way he understood it, the idea being, as you probably know, the fragility of existence, all are fleeting phenomena, everything can fall apart at every point, he said, but this is our market today one room, everything falls apart. so he got it correctly, this manager. sorry, i forgot his name. he said, if you really want to be fully engaged in this market, you get crazy. so what you need is a kind of a... inner distance which tells you okay, it's a crazy market to teach you how to participate in it without being fully existentially engaged in it. that's why businessmen like this bullshit. you know, even if i speculate all the day, it's just a cosmic play for me. i'm aware of the nothingness of it. it means nothing. it functions perfectly. which is why, to conclude this first point, i think that if max weber to rewrite his legendary book on protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism today, the title of the book would have been, i'm sure. the taoist or buddhist ethic and the spirit of global capitalism, something like that. now, mcia, no, no, no, wait a minute. let me make one point. there may, i cannot resist it, it's in my nature to make so-called bad taste jokes, but i take buddhism extremely seriously. it's absolutely authentic. i don't like the term because it's itself western anti-orientalist, but let's call it subjective existential experience. so the other reason, for me at least much more interesting is what some people call the so-called cognitivist breakthrough. the new states of our understanding of our brain, our thinking, provided by whatever you call them, brain sciences, cognitivism and so on. now... i... don't want to deal with the problem. like, are they true or not? what i'm just saying is that more and more they are somehow generally re. even those who should resist it most, psychoanalysts, you know, often play the game of, how do you call this, if you can't beat them, join them, you know. like they claim, oh, but you see what cognitive sciences are at arriving at, this is just a paraphrase of what already freud knew and so on, you know, this kind of a... uh... join the enemy. okay, but there is nonetheless one interesting point for me. and here i agree with, we have many problems with me and wolfgang, but at one point i agree with him, and i will make this point, that if we want to retain martin heidegger as a reference, it's crucial not to read heidegger along the lines of some kind of anti-technological romanticism, you know, heidegger walking in his stupid forest up there and. and cursing all the technology blah blah. no heidegger quite rational here. i read in one biography of heidegger that like, okay, it's nice that authentic tod nauberg had, but at the end he he wanted air conditioning, full electricity and so on know. okay, so what i'm saying is that the question that we should ask in this spirit. ish it's a very naif one. if we really accept. we don't have to, but if we. the result of brain sciences, which is, but this already is to be debated, but i don't want to enter it, that our subjective freedom or the unity of our ego as a free ego, as a free and responsible agent is an illusion. that in reality we are just a well-functioning neuronal mechanism, whatever you put it. okay. the problem is how to subjectivize this. that is to say how... should or does this affect your innermost but not in some deep metal even everyday sense of. an agent in gainley social life and so on and so on. so here i think that buddhism to be vulgar, is doing quite well without any irony because there are three main attitudes. the way i can see it, i mean only, i'm talking only about those who accept cognitivist breakthrough. and buddhism is the fourth one, i think. the first predominant attitude is simply... ooh. resign ourselves to the gap between the scientific view of ourselves as neuronal automata, whatever you want, and our... everyday self-experience as free responsible autonomous agents. the idea is that because of, you can be very materialist here, because of how we were produced through evolutionism, through evolutionary choice and so on and so on. we cannot but experience ourselves as free responsible agents and so on so that. we are simply condemned to live in the gap. scientifically we know but in everyday life, you know, it's the same, some of them like to use this metaphor as. we know very well how big moon is, but you cannot help perceiving moon as that small circle up there. that is the same. we cannot step out. the second attitude, the worst, if you ask me. is the, i hope again we agree here, we have many other reasons to kill each other, so here we can agree. this is my declaration of love, if you didn't get it, you know. is the habermasian position. wis. he also. fully assert the duality. but not the non-naturalist aspect is for habermas not simply an illusion that we should tolerate, but a kind of a transcendental a priori which is necessary and even points to an imminent limitation of scientific knowledge. his habermas's reasoning is here very very transcendental philosophical one. it is that. science is a certain social practice. intersubjective practice where, you know, we formulate universal statements, we confirm them through experiments in a debate, blah blah and in this practice, the transcendental a priori of this practice is that we are free, responsible beings, reasoning in a certain way and so on. so even if the result, for example, of our scientific investigation is we are neuronal puppets, whatever, we should not forget that this result is the result of an exercise of our. transcendental freedom of scientific thinking, which is a priori. you know, we cannot say, no, that is false. if you neglect that, the result also disappears. then we have and even more naive but in a way sympathetic to me attitude that of some radical. brain scientists like the big couple from la jolla i think california patricia and paul churchland. they claim. i don't think it works what they are saying but it's a beautiful position they claim that no they claim that our. the term among some brain scientists for this everyday attitude is, as you probably know, folk psychology. this spontaneous idea, my god, i do whatever i want, we are free and so on. okay, they claim that this folk psychology doesn't have such a deep status as some darwinists think. that it's not a kind of a biological evolutionary a priori, but simply a reflection of our old naive ideology. they say self like in old times when i think this is even by patricia churchland an example when so-called primitive people saw a lightning, they thought god is sending us a message or there is a higher force behind. and they claim when we act i think, oh, i have a free self in me, which is the true source of it, it's exactly the same type of superstition. and in the same way that even if you are scared shit of a storm, as i am, i admit, especially if you are up on the plane, when it happens, no nonetheless... at least mostly i succeed. not starting to pray and... claiming you know like you naturalize it. we no longer think like so-called primitives. day. the churchland couple, they think the same thing is possible. even with our freedom of the will and self. and in a pretty naive way they describe how such a society would have looked, that it wouldn't be simply a society without punishment, as some people think, namely the idea being, if i am an automaton and there is no freedom of the will, what right do you have to punish me? i'm not responsible. no, they say punishment can nonetheless be a regulative mechanism which works and so on. er. just a more kind, less oppressive society and so on. the reason i don't agree with this solution is its implicit naivety and the one who is my good guy here, the german brain scientist maybe you should invite him he didn't want to come thomas metzinger. it would be really nice to get him. maybe you can, if he has some son, blackmail him like, you know mafia, everything is permitted to get good people here to satisfy you know like maybe your son will get have an accident, who knows, you know if you don't come here. no she sees very well how this type of simple acceptance, okay, so what? we change her view, still lives even if in words. it. recogn yeah mean you say what's the problem you know okay i'm an automaton what the hell? but de facto in your activity you still treat yourself as the good old free self. you don't really existentially accept it. and here again we come to buddhism. because metzinger, who is? a serious scientist, not some kind of a shitty new ager like those who claim, you know, the tauao of quantum physics. we are not talking about that. he is in. but at the same time, for very precise reasons, although he's also totally materialist. he. buddhist in the sense that he claims that although it may appear that we are, as the first position which i described claims, that we are condemned to this duality. that is to say, scientifically we know we are neural automata, but in your immediate self-experience, you experience yourself as free agent and so on and so on, that there is nonetheless. possible as a limit case and this for him, as you can guess would have been precisely when you arrive at enlightenment in buddhism, when you accept so-called an-atman, that your self does not have any substantial identity, that it's a beautiful thesis, i like it in a way, that and again, he's not in that sense, a mystist. he claims that he's totally a scientist. he just claims that if you go to the end in buddhist meditation, where you arrive at a stage of, this is one popular book on buddhism, jean epstein, i think, which is not so bad, the title is thoughts without a thinker. that literally you arrive at a stage where you have thoughts, but you no longer can say there is an i agent who is thinking these thoughts. and that he claims, although for large majority of us, he puts it very nicely, we can... he agrees with the first position. we can. uh. scientifically objectively accept as an object of study our brain okay we are automata but... he puts this beautifully. he says, we simply... cannot really believe in it in our everyday life even if you claim okay show what, i'm that kind of automaton. in your innermost identity, you cannot really believe this, except if you come to the end of buddhist meditation. i love this position, although, and metzinger is aware of this, although, do you know that, and that's the beauty of all these debates, cognitive scientists, buddhism, because, you know, many of them are idiots, but some of them are really bright guys. and denoit, for example, my god, i forgot his name, there is a scientist jewish because this affects his notion of free will, he's so well known. in san francisco, his name will come to me, who is the very author of the crucial experiment his name will come to me i'm sorry, benjamin libet you know, the author of the crucial experiment demonstrating allegedly that there is no free will. you know, it's that famous experiment where don't ask me how, i'm giving you a reader's digest simplified version that he wires your neurons and then she asks you to do some extremely elementary. gesture. for example, grab this pen. and he tells you just to say. now or whatever to somehow signal the moment you decide it. okay, you know the story. i don't know how much part of a second before you decide, your brain already knows it. signals are already on the way. but now comes the beauty. that's why i like this guy. a big shock to this common gang of more stupid flat scientists is that they automatically took this as a proof of there is no free will. because when you think, you decide, you just, what's the term, take. cognizance assumes what your brain has already decided. but this is not you see these are intelligent guys, this is not libet's position. and he says, that's why, not out of any anti-semitism or praising the jews, that's why i emphasize that he is a jew, because he makes here a very nice theological, but he's a materialist, just as a spiritual point, reference to ten commandments prohibitions, and he claims, although it's also a very problematic topic, that we are looking for freedom of the will at the wrong. point that the basic he is very hegelian here negativity that the basic form of freedom is not i do this. there we are overetermined by neurons, blah blah. but to stop it. that in that split of a part of a second, when i do this, i can stop it. and that's the form of freedom. it's a beautiful. then if you want a more complex counter-argumentation. daniel dennett, who again is like mixed, sometimes too stupid but sometimes bright, has also a wonderful attack on this primitive reading of libet. his point is very deridian almost. a minimum of he almost calls it differentrence temporality of brain. he says that there is no freedom only if you presuppose what he wrongly i think d called a so-called central cartesian self where ultimately things happen at the same point. you know, if you presuppose this, then you can say, i decided this, but it already happened. but you must presuppose a homogeneous central agent. wit. basic temporality if you renounce this then this primitive conclusion doesn't work. i'm telling you this why? just to let you know that i'm not, as it were, totally bluffing. you know that i know that things are more complex. but okay. now... this is just the introduction, you know. you got the idea why i think buddhism is not just a kind of a amusing exotic reference. but it means something spiritually today in our own constellation. because it again, it appears to be. the ideal form of functioning in today's crazy frantic capitalism at the same time it appears to be the proper mode of subjectivization of the results of modern science. so... how do things stand with it now? i go to even a more problematic stance. and i will try to turn directly. into buddhism it will be of course here i have 45 minutes or what very short but please believe me, i do bluff a little bit, but i know more than it's here. no okay. so as you all know, let me begin with the beginning. buddhism, we all know, is concerned with solving the problem of suffering. so, its first axiom, as it were, automatic presupposition ich. not only we, but no living being wants to suffer. okay, i will not go now immediately into it, but for me as a freudian lachenian, i would say here already problems begin. i think that if there is something which is, from a freudian standpoint, not true, it's that we don't want to suffer. and not only i'm not going here in sham. obscure masochism or whatever i just would like to invoke to you, i will be very pathetic here even in the sense of melodrama imagine yourself passionately in love. isn't it that? if you are... true to yourself and you can be no cognitive discordance here. you know very well or you suspect that at the end it will probably end bad that whatever will happen at the end, it will be for you. terrible suffering whatever but nonetheless,. i've spoken with people to whom this happened passionately in love and then dropped. and now i'm quite open and i was one of those people with whom i've spoken kevin. but you know, when it ends in catastrophe, just suffering. and then a friend asked me the usual question, now you probably regret it. my answer was automatic. no, i would have done it again. you know. so i simply think that there is in our passionate engagement certain logic where you are ready. fully to buy final fiasco, incredible suffering, but you are ready to do it again. you know but okay, i will come to this later. now let's go through buddhist doksha. the source of suffering lies in the unquenchable desire of people for things which, even if they get them, will never satisfy them. and it is this dissatisfaction which causes suffering. so the goal of buddhist practice is, as we all know, liberation from suffering. we can call it reaching nirvana, enlightenment, awakening, whatever you want. and everything a buddhist does is ultimately for the attainment of this enlightenment. buddhism buddhist practice first, as we all know, focuses on a morality that will lead to enlightenment. you know how it began for buddha. he first establishes the fact life is this wheel of desire, it's suffering. then he defines the causes of suffering. and then the way to fight them. and here at least. the moment buddhism became an institution, it of course introduced a certain gradualism in the sense that first it begins with a simple morality. everyday morality which is supposed to et lituer. pave, prepare the way or put us on the path to enlightenment. but as they emphasize buddhists, it's not enough just to regulate your conduct, how you act. this should culminate in enlightenment. and the point of all this is enlightenment. this is already interesting, you know why? because i read recently in a a book, i think it's a book of the guy, very interesting guy, i think, what's the title, buddha's consciousness or what? owen flanagan, one of the cognivist scientists who is also doing buddhism, draws attention, and here begins our western distortion, to an interesting fact. debt for as in the west, if you say i'm a buddhist, it usually means i practice some stupid transcendental meditation or whatever. it's automatically meditation. while he dros! attention to the fact that for the majority, for the nations, thailand, i don't know which others where, really buddhism is a way of life for the majority. the large majority of people don't meditate. for them, being a buddhist means two things. first, to respect this ethical moral rather than ethical. moral rules, you know, don't be violent, don't cause suffering, blah blah and where does then meditation enter? it's very interesting. it's just as a kind of a... imagined presupposed point of reference. you need, even if they don't exist to be cynical. you need to know that there are some people who made it to the end. you know, so that it gives you hope. it's more this kind of a subject, to paraphrase lacon, subject presupposed to meditate. people need it as a fixed point of reference. okay, so let's go on. yep. uh. how do we then fight our enslavement to desires? here we have the first point of buddhism, which is, i think, very nice materialist. there are no higher powers. you should forget about those later religious misreadings of karma and so on and so on. the idea is simply that karma or fate triggered by your desires actions is a kind of issue immanent to the way we act because as buddhists like to point out, you know they have this wonderful, no wonder even some stalinist marxists like this this idea of codependent origination no which stalin called the electrical unity of all phenomena, to be slightly cynical so the idea, i precisely try to give you an idea of karma which not some kind of a divine up there. it's simply that our act. being part of a rich texture texture of the world, leave traces, have consequences. some consequences are good, wholesome, others are not, and so on. and in this way uh. tout. deal with your karma means to regulate, try to diminish negative tracy consequences of your acts. and again, as you all know, i will quickly just enumerate them just to give an idea of basically how, in a good sense, that's not a criticism, how common sense. this first step of basic morality is you have this buddhist classification where they claim actions can occur at three levels, body, speech and mind. and at each level, already buddha, but it was elaborated later, proposes a whole categorization of bad acts as it were. first at the level of body there are. acts which are to be avoided, killing, stealing, sexual misconduct. by misconduct, it's not meant so much perversion or what but this excessive passion, excessive attachment. then at the level of speech for actions, lying, slander, harsh speech, malicious gossip and at the level of mind greet. anger. delusion. so the idea is that this is vaguely the first step, to, as it were, calm yourself down in what buddha calls the middle way, not the tony blair third way, but the more authentic middle way, you know, like neither excess of, i don't know, gluttony, sex or whatever, but also not some kind of a s mist radical renunciation and so on. on and so on. the goal of all this is to acquire dispassion, as some translate for the objects of clinging to which we cling. that is to say, the point is... your subjective attitude of how much you cling you attach yourself to objects because again you all know this i'm just repeating it. what in buddhism is called samsara is precisely this wheel of life of suffering and the point this is crucial. i think without this you don't get it. uh. it's not that from bad samsara we should get good samsara or karma. the point is not if you do, this would be the western reading, if you do bad things, you will have bad karma. so let's do good things, so you have good karma, so when you die, you will profit. no, no, here buddhism is not this type of bullshitting. it's serious. which means that the point is not to get good karma. the point is to step out. of it. but again, i'm well aware how refined this is. stepping out doesn't mean melancholia von trier, the end of the world. in one version of buddhism, even nothing has to change materially. only your. let's call it, although it sounds too californian, your attitude. and now i see slowly emerging problems which are look. imported by me. i register these problems in the very ambiguities conflicts, the way i found them in the buddhist teaching itself. okay, the guy, sorry for vulgarity, who reaches this stage of acquiring a distance, maybe the term stepping out is wrong because we have nowhere to go out. there is no transcendence in buddhism. that's beautiful about it. as we all know, it's called... bodyhischatva. the one who is concerned with uh. with freeing all sentient beings, not just himself or herself, even not just humans from samsara and its cycle of death, rebirth and suffering. but what makes it so interesting here is that, and this brings me to the first conflict. the taiishi,, conflict tension. you know that... traditionally... at least according to my information. er. we get three. levels or notions of bodhisattva. they are called very nicely king like bodhisattva, boatman bodhisattva and shepherd bodhisattva. king bodhisattva aspires to become buddha as soon as possible and then help all others like i do it myself. i try to reach nirvana. and the wager is that by doing this, either me as an example or by acting in a more gentle way, i will help others. boman is already more a communist. the idea is yes, but not me alone, together with others. now the highest according to some classification. but for me, i agree here with critiques with the other tendencies in buddhism the lowest, the most dangerous, where things go really wrong is shepherd-like bodhisattva. the idea is the following one, that the greatest ethical act is that you reach enlightenment. but out of compassion for all those who are as they call it in the greatest work of american literature, i'm making joke. did you read the cycle of novels from how are they called, tim lahaye and that left behind? the lowest of the low. okay. what i want to say, i mean it's really like dan brown it's shakespeare compared to them. but what i want to say is that... so again, that should be the great ethical act. you are there, eternal blish blah blah, but out of compassion, you go back. into valley of suffering and so on and so on like you know you... you give priority to others. you say, no, i don't have right to enjoy it myself. i go back, help others. this delaying, stepping back. some, i was told, maybe i'm wrong, many of you must know it better,, teravada buddhists. made a counter okay okay in traditional buddhism there is a kind of a graduation here no the lowest, the king bodhisattva, i do it, fuck you, you follow me or not, you know then the shepherd-like stupid communist and then the highest one, i was up there, but o i came infinite goodness, i came down to help you all. but some theravada guys and i'm immediately on their side. they make a nice argument. if the core of authentic buddhism. it has nothing to do with this ridiculous european spirituality. o i move up there into a higher domain. no, i stay here. i'm fully here. i eat the same apples like you, whatever. it's just my attitude totally changes. i'm still socially active. it even doesn't mean to attain nirvana that you meditate, that you are in some kind of pseudo pseudo- orgasmasmic spiritual trust. if this is true and authentic buddhists always emphasize this, you know that this vision of buddhist saint as someone hidden in a cave and just trembling blah blah blah that's false. so if this is true why then the necessity to step back? you can act like buddha and so on. you can attain nirvana and at the same time be active here. the idea is, and i think again this is the origin of catastrophe, you know the moment somebody who wants to redeem you, here we as nietzscheans should agree. boasts of how good he was that he sacrificed himself don't trust the guy, you know. okay, show it. what do i mean by this now i come to another please i'm here openly exposing myself i'm not kidding this is not rhetoric to your criticism if you know more i noticed. another problem here on the one hand some radical buddhists, radical means i like them, sorry. describe in a wonderful way how ot buddhism deals with suffering. you first isolate. the cause of suffering and blame the others. for example, oh i was deprived of that pleasure, fuck the world. and so on. why me? this is the eternal why me question, you know, like. children are starving in somalia. okay, i will give them5 dollars a month to make me feel good, but why me or why my child? the idea is that, of course, the first thing to do is to precisely... stop blaming the circumstances, blame your desire and then extinguish, although i don't like this term extinguish, because it's too violent in a wrong way, but here is a quote. whoop! has always been what was extinguished when you step out of samsara, circular suffering? is only the false view of the self what had always been illusory was understood as such nothing can was changed but the perspective of the observer. so uh i noticed and again correct me if i am wrong. i notice here the following tension, which from my reading or on books on history of buddhism is all present there. and it mirrors precisely this first tension in the notion of bodhisattva. should i simply... go there and in this way it's the best thing for others or should i play this sacrificial game no no, i love you so much, i step back and so on. the problem is that on the one hand we have this. a radical description of nirvana, which is everything is different but nothing changes. you know, like... it's the same world out there and so on, just i am aware of it. illusory nature and i assume this illusory nature existentially. why? and this i call the minimalist attitude. but then you n the chef especially. attached to that notion of bodhisattva as the one who sacrifices himself, the opposite, i call it maximalist attitude. i don't want to reach nirvana. before prior to all other sentient beings reaching it. so there. it's not just my subjective attitude you are aiming effectively at some kind of a global et... uh. global global. cosmic. change. the next ambiguity i see. and again, i already debated this in my class some of you reproached me so i did as much of homework as i was able to do and i still stick to my opinion that there are serious debates among. within buddhism. i think this is the third level of the same tension. uh. namely, it... as you remember how i describe it, first you do morality, not too much sex, proper eating, don't curse, don't be violent, as preparing the way for enlightenment. but the obvious point here is is there any link between the two? like this is a great problem in buddhism. i read many texts on this, where they claim if we are really honest, we have to admit that once you are in enlightenment, nothing immanently. prevents you, for example, from torturing people. you can just say, my act leaves no traces because i'm already at the nirvana level, no karma and so on and so on. now, i know what you will say now. but nonetheless, where is your compassion for others blah blah blah. i'm just making a typical western logical extrapolation totally out of touch exist existential reality of buddhism. no, i will give you immediately. proofs sorry just before i go to this, the fourth debate i encountered is the one where even dalai lama has some wonderful statement like if drinking by drinking he means real alcohol. helps you, why not? you know? like the problem is that many, if not all, of the states described as nirvana. can be if not totally, it gets pretty close to it. you know like they say money is not all. my answer is usually but it comes pretty close to it no okay what if you can induce the experience which immanently, inherently fits nirvana in a biochemical way with some drugs or whatever? how to distinguish? should we then distinguish the bad nirvana, i take a pill, you, i'm there, and the good nirvana, i was torturing myself, meditating for years, whatever. some guys, but here i don't agree with them, try to introduce here an ethical distinction. quote from owen flanagan, cases where happiness is gained by magic pills. or is due to false belief, do not count. because the allegedly happy person must be involved in cultivating her own virtue. happy states born of delusion are undeserved. but i think this is totally non-immanent. once you are in, you are in. who cares how you got there? okay, back to that problem of... suffering compassion and so on let me give you a little bit to shock you and then. yeah, yeah, we will stop then. to shock you... some of my old stuff uh... a little bit of je of buddhism and war. because... you know, like... buddhism did deal with this problem. especially interesting is here the relationship between japanese zen budduddhism and war and it's interesting to note what tricks did zen buddhism employ to justify? taking part in war. first there are two main strategies in zen buddhism. the first one to justify participating in warwar, that is to say, killing people, whatever, to be clear. the first one is the standard teleological narrative which is even well known in our western societies. a quote. uh. uh... even though, i think this quote is from, i forgoto suzuki, the great popularizer, even though the buddha forbade the taking of life, he also taught that until all sentient beings are united together through the exercise of infinite compassion, there will never be peace. therefore, as a means of bringing into harmony those things which are incompatible, killing and war are necessary. you know, the usual trick, you know, like, my god, i'm sorry to tell you, hitler could have argued, likeinsky could have said, i'm totally against suffering, i want peace. but fuck, there will be no peace as long as jews manipulate in our midst. so the only way to really fight for peace is... to give jews, to be cynical, one-way first-class ticket to auschwitz. i mean okay. so again. did you listen precisely what this passage says? it is the very force of compassion which yields the sword. a true warrior kills out of love. and suzuki was consequent here. you know, when he wrote many texts supporting japanese war effort in china, he said, the chinese are like stupid children. they cannot get that the sword which is killing them now is really a sword of love. he even proposed som fuck you if you think you will squeeze out by compassion. suzuki and some other japanese buddhists introduced the wonderful term of compassionate war. like, you know. you do it precisely out of compassion to prevent further. now comes the true horror. okay, this is the western bullshit also, we have it. but suzuki and others then add to this teleological, let's call it, justification in the sense of war is a necessary evil to bring about the greater good. no? and of course, in a certain way i agree with it. i mean, i'm not problem. der is a much more radical line reasoning weaklich i really signed this one. et. terrifying and okay look into my book i think it is the puppet in this world where i don't want to repeat myself where i developed this in detail, namely suzuki also. dealt with this problem. how to make the japanese military machinery more efficient. he knew well that we have a certain elementary decency like let's say you're my love partner i meet you wolfgang on a battlefield and. even if i hate you, i would find it somehow difficult to stab my knife or sword into you. here suzuki enters and says, i have this difficulty because i am still caught in the false illusion of myself. you know, like, because i still think i'm the agent of my act. i feel falsely responsible and so on but quote from suzuki. a uh a beautiful one. if the logic is that if i reach nirvana, then i no longer experience myself as an active agent. responsible for the act but you know it's this very beautiful i admit it buddhist view of world as a free flow of phenomena where i whatever remains of me i am no longer an agent but just a pure gaze and impassive observer which meditates on this crazy dance. this makes things easier because here, quote from suzuki. when i try to kill some of you. it is really not he, me, but the sword itself that does the killing. he, the killer, has no desire to do harm to anybody, but the enemy appears and makes himself a victim. it is as though this work performs automatically its function of justice, which is the function of mercy. now, are you? and please, just don't tell me these are the freaky japanese and so on. all around you find this idea that, all around buddhism, death. reaching nirvana, getting rid of your false self. makes you a much better warrior. this is why you have this long mythology of, you know, zen buddhists as perfect samurai, because you can do it with with proper... proper distance and so on and so on so if you allow me now from here just to. i mean, i should squeeze it now, two concluding points. the one is dead. here, i see. i cannot. my god, i feel like a bad buddhist. let's squash that. take a living, take a sentient being. good, good! he killed a sentient being. good thing, you know. but you know that this will worsen your karma, you know. in the next life, maybe, instead of being an even greater philosopher, you will be reborn as dead butterfly. who knows, you know. sorry, i'm not making fun. but i hope no let me. no i'm not because, you know why not? because do not please misunderstand me and that's why i'm open to say this prejudice here i'm not in any way saying that buddhist enlightenment is some kind of a joke to make killers or military. better functioning. it's absolutely an authentic existential experience. all i'm saying is that we have to accept the gap. and again suzuki is here honest. he says, buddhism is the technique of stepping out of the karma blah blah and he says you can be his examples, a stalinist, a fascist, a liberal democrat, whatever, it doesn't matter. so i think... to be a truly radical buddhist. you have to accept the minimal gap between all those ethical, you know why? because let me give you now a really brutal idea. uh. if the point of acting kindly, the buddhist moral injunctions and so on, compassionate, if the true point of this morality is... to teach you to bring you to this dispassionate attitude of seeing the illusory nature of reality and so on and so on. and when i was in korea a month ago, i debated there with a buddhist and i laughed him because he said, yes, what's the problem? when i told him, wouldn't then be logical to conclude? depp. the true proof that you are in nirvana. would have been precisely that you can do horrible things without your acts leaving traces in your karma. like it's easy to claim, i don't cause any suffering, blah blah, if you just, you know, eat properly, don't swear, don't steal, not too much sex and so on, no kill. but wouldn't the true strength have been to do acts which usually involved a kind of a crazy fanatic attachment, torture, killing. but to be able to do it in the same way with the distance. and here i got very depressed. when i read a biography of... haha, he was the one, pol pot. mer rouge and... it's incredible how many of his colleagues claim people who met him that pol pot had such an absolutely breathtaking incredible in direct human relations inner peace and kindness. even when he ordered, we know what. that there was a kind of a myth all around. khmer rouge leadership that he is in that. highest stage and so on. so what am i saying here two things. to conclude, first. i claim that, and i'm not even taking sides here, both positions are crazy. but i claim that here we should grasp the gap that separates buddhism as one radical condition from, let's call it the western christian ethics. british i think there is an absolute abyss here and all those shitty attempts to claim no we are all talking about the same god or bliss, this are paths are wrong. namely, as chesterton and others emphasized. in western christian ethics. the truth is, as it were, out there. the whole point is excessive attachment. what buddhists see as evil is for us the good itself. gut, mich! let's take our love. you fall in love means al but you will probably... talk about this to you later, which means, you know, you get excessively attached. you throw yourself to the end into it. in other words, chesterton put it so nicely uh. uh. all other religions. want to unite the world. how to unite with god. we are all one, all blah blah. christianity separates. it's the religion of separation. christianity is not a religion of harmony. it's a religion which says, yes, there is some kind of a homogeneous, harmonious circle of life. but... this is bullshit. this is... the pagan background. the christian gesture is to say, no, i do something crazy. i choose this, i stick to this, even if it... turns everything around. okay now if you allow me just two three minutes really to conclude here also because some people try this will be the really concluding part some people try to bring together heidegger and buddhism claiming again to paths towards the same and so on. no, i claim not. you know why not. because... for. heidegger, what he calls er erignis is a radical form of historicity concealment unconcealment and so on and so on. and precisely this radically historical dimension for for heidegger, ereignis is not nirvana. re is also finite. re is a historical event. this dimension i don't find. but now, if you allow me just to conclude, and it's madness because this is the speculative center of what i try to prove. where i would have been. at the same time. where i would have entertained a certain distance towards heidegger and towards buddhism is in the following one. and this is not just ethical, it's much more radical distinction you know, as a guy called, if you want to get more on this, there is an interesting book, very, it's a modest book, but very well written full i think the guy is brett davis. i forgot the title, but basically it's about heidegger and zen buddhism and he points to one. to a deep ambiguity in heidegger. how? heidegger. sometimes he's radically historicist, you know, in the sense of like modern nihilism, blah blah, but somehow here and there, heidegger locates, let's call it, naively. the origin of evil, of how things go wrong. into the a priori structure of disclosure of being itself. for example, i will read you this short passage from heidegger's spruch des anaximander. the saying of anaximander from holzwege, where he claims something which sounds strangely buddhist. a quote, an entity may even exist bestehen upon it. while like strange translation it means like the way it goes on i think solely to remain more present present in the sense of perduring that which lingers. perss in its presencing. in this way it extricates itself from its transitory while while is here a substantive. it strikes the willful pose of resistance, no longer concerning itself with whatever else is present. it stiffens as if this were the only way to linger. it aims solely for continuance and subsistence. so here heidegger says something like the origin of disturbance is when a thing, an entity, and this, persists too much. does it want to be just part of circle of life, whatever, you know what is the circle of life? i hate it. it's you know i think it's the most oppressive ideology you can imagine. it's my old joke, maybe you know it. did you see, i hope you didn't, the lion king? and you know when where you find there the song, the circle of life? precisely when the son asks his father the obvious question, is this right that we lions eat zebras? and father, it's easy when you are on the top, sings the song, which is, it's all a circle of life. we eat zebras, but we will die, we will turn into dust, our flesh will feed grass. and grass will be eaten by zebras. so it's all one big circle of life no? so all i'm tempted to say is imagine in beautiful life, the movie by benigni, the son asking him, father, but why are germans killing us jews? and i can well imagine roberto benigni singing back, it's all one big circle of life, you know, jews are killing us, but we will die and we will turn into food, our manure for grass. grass will be eaten by cows and one of us will kill a cow, we will eat the cow, and so it's a big circle of life, you know? like, you know, what's the point here? the point is, yeah, but what if there are different circles of life? you know, like maybe, let's hope there is a circle of life where you exactly don't have to do holocaust. no let's hope. no so seriously, now comes my final thesis. i will just try to hint it. if you want more, read my big fat book. my thesis is that eh. enlightenment is an authentic position, but... comes afterwards that let's say at an animal level immediately we are simply fully emerged in life. and... there is no fault. we are there like animals. but how do you create the space for nirvana, void or whatever? by acquiring a distance from being fully emerged into ordinary life. and this distance is through excessive attachment. that is to say... to be primitive, how do, it's very naive, i develop it much more technically in the book, how do animals become humans? when you say, no, no, sorry, mr. lyon king, it's not a cycle of life, circle of life, there is this woman political idea. i get fixated on that. if the whole world drops, i want that. you know, this fixation denaturalizes you, throws you out of the circle and in this way, that's my claim, creates the space for for. withdrawal for nirvana. you cannot get into nirvana. directly from full immersion into natural life. you must fall fall in the sense of excessive attachment and this fall creates the void where... where you have to withdraw. now, really to conclude, look, i don't have a paper, no this brings me, and here i'm not kidding, i'm sincerely asking you if you know more. i spoke with some guys here. this brings me to the crucial enigma that i find in buddhism. and again, very respectfully, this is not a critical remark. you know? buddha says, the fact is people suffer, how to get them out? as a hegelian, i like the opposite question, not how to get out, but how did we fall in? and here, and this is the question i'm asking people. is simply samsara a fact or was there some kind of, you know, illusion of maya? but like how did we get caught into this illusion? and i can make a report to you. i got three answers. the first is the totally pragmatist one. buddha is a practical guy, he is not... it's a concrete answer, i'm not mocking it. buddha was a practical guy. his problem was how to get out of suffering. he didn't care about these metaphysical questions. the second answer is a version of the first one but it's more tricky one, a little bit of a sophism. it says to understand this, how the follow card, you have already to be there in nirvana. but once you are there, you don't care about this. you know, like a kind of a trick. the third one. and some tibetans. that i met. in beijing, half illegally, told me i really liked that. here i can identify with buddhism. they told me that they gave me a kind of a... the name is meant ironically but basically very seriously. you know in star wars, now we are talking about the real works of art, you know how they all the time mention this dark side of power, you know. and this is, i think, very. so you don't have simply, we are caught into earthly. confusion. but then there is a higher domain of peace. what if something can go terribly wrong in this nirvana domain itself? what ich... you know, what is we are here in deep shit not because or to put it in more gnostic terms of jacob böhme, schelling and so on human evil is not because we fell from god. human evil originates in madness, reversal, something going wrong in god himself. i know in buddhism you don't have in this sense god, but what they told me, these guys, is that, and they gave me a wonderful experimental, experiential reason. they told me, my god, just listen to, and i do, it's really pure horror. do you know that buddhist music or that those horrible they told me this is the voice of evil. and no wonder, you know who knows this? fbi. you remember some 10 years ago, wo texas, those fundamentalists who were encircled by fbi, you know what music fbi played to them to get them out, to terrorize this buddhist horns and so on and so on. so this is, i think, some kind of a secret of tibetan buddhism, which, and again, it's not rhetoricics what i'm telling now. if you know... anything about me i would... it's nice that you want to take a walk before i finish. come back in half an hour, come back in. no, seriously, you see this enigma, speculative heell of how... it's not just we hear our world of illusions and then nirvana. what if something can go wrong? up there. i'm very sorry if i was too long, but on the other hand i'm not sorry. fuck you, what can i do?
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