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Emptying the Global Self

Suzuki

Throughout D. T. Suzuki's intellectual career, he argued that a very spe- cific experience was necessary for the perception of truth. 1 He called

this experience "satori," a Japanese word meaning, roughly, "awakening."2

This awakening, Suzuki told his readers in An Introduction to Zen Buddhism (1934), is the only path to Zen: ''.At all events," he wrote, "there is no Zen without satori."3 Unfortunately, the eager student looking to master the term will quickly be frustrated, because satori cannot be described in words, but only experienced in existence: "To understand Zen, it is essential to have an experience known as satori, for without this one can have no insight into the truth of Zen."4 When Suzuki lectured at Columbia in 1952, he told his audience that though it was difficult to "give ·expression to the experi- ence that is enlightenment ... it is necessary ... to make the experience possible."5 He hoped his writings and lectures could help his readers and listeners find their way to satori. As he attempted to convince them to embark on this difficult quest for Zen, he did give hints of what the word meant. One of the ways Suzuki expressed this, as cited by his disciples Alan Watts and John Cage, was that Zen was like everyday experience, but about two feet off the ground. 6 This was Suzuki's essential promise to his readers and followers: if you pursue Zen and if you achieve satori, you will live in this world with a kind of miraculous "super-consciousness."7

As I show in this final part of the book, that super-consciousness bears a remarkable resemblance to what I have called "instinctual reason."8

By "instinctual reason," again, I do not mean an essential human instinct for reason. Rather, I refer to the achievement of making reason a kind of instinct. To be "Zen," according to Suzuki, means that you are in the flow of the world, unburdened by the anxieties of reflection. Unlike Hamlet or

249

250 I Global Origins of the Modern Self

Descartes, you are not trapped in_ your priv~te subjectivity, unsure of what is true incapable of concrete action. You simply know and enact wh . ' u~ right. This idea evokes certain doubts. How, ~fter all, can someone just "in the flow" know what is right? Is not that kind of knowledge somethin achieved by rational reflection? But satori promises something greater: afte~ the experience, you will know what to do, and you will know how to do it as habit or instinct. This is your "original nature," what Suzuki will call "primal man." If the story of the Fall from Rousseau on is the story of fall- ing into knowledge and needing to reconnect it to instinct, for Suzuki we have fallen into instinct (habits, karma) and need to reconnect to this other kind of knowledge: "Ignorance is conquered only when the state of things prior to Ignorance is realized, which is satori, seeing into one's own nature as it is by itsel£"9 This is absolutely central to Suzuki's place in this story: whereas Rousseau and his followers, especially Hegel, sought the synthesis of global being in the development of the concept, Suzuki insisted that this way of being was only possible by renouncing concepts as such. "Intellect," he told his Columbia audience, "holds in itself the contradiction it is unable in itself to solve."10 Only by finding a path to the moment before intellect began could we overcome the burdens of being.

Suzuki illustrated this overcoming with a Christina Rosetti poem in which she asks God to help her bear the burden of herself. But it was this very feeling of self-alienation, this double consciousness, he argued, that caused the self to feel like a burden in the first place. 11 His solution to the problem was not the Emersonian and Du Boisian move of alternation or the Hegelian attempt at reconciliation through the concept, although he learned, as we shall see, from each. His proposed solution demanded another path: neither to flee into your private ego nor try to grasp the world nor try to share being pluralistically. Instead you must go through the arduous process of abandoning everything you have inherited to arrive at satori. This is when you experience the "isness" of the universe. You neither con- ceive nor perceive the world; you simply are it. There is neither separation of subject and object nor an achievement of identity between them. It is identity itself that is vanquished. Satori is beyond (or, perhaps better pu~, before) language and intellection. Thus Zen is not about "a kind of medi- tation or contemplation directed toward some fixed thought," but rarher about a "general mental upheaval which destroys the old accumulations_ of intellection and lays down the foundation for a new life."12 That new life, Suzuki claimed, could overcome the otherwise unbearable demands of being a global self: not because it solved the problems, but because it ceased to

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vieW the self as separate from the world. The world is no more a burden for us than the weight of the earth is for the earth itsel£ 13

I try to show across this chapter how the self is global for Suzuki

in multiple ways. On an intellectual level, it is because he understood the

problem of the burden of being through the philosophies he encountered in his global travels. Also at this level, it is because the way in which he articulated the answer-the achievement of instinctual reason-was explicitly

grounded in the history we have seen so far. Suzuki kept the aim; but he

changed the method: not the concept, but the overcoming of conceptual thought. At another level, which emerged more and more in his post-World

War II writings, it was because Suzuki understood the interdependence of subjects as a global problem. "You cannot have enlightenment all by your- self," he said in 1952, "for your existence is conditioned by the existence

of others."14 This does not necessarily make enlightenment impossible until some moment when the whole world becomes enlightened at once. But it does mean that enlightenment is partial-and may always remain partial. "You can never be free without helping others to freedom, so there is no absolute freedom. Everything is bound together, there is no real freedom."15

The closest we can get, then, is to achieve our moment of satori and, in that moment, to experience our connection to the world in a way that is beyond the limits of both intellect and affect: "This very moment of enlightenment experience takes in the whole world and is totality."16

But while the moment of connection may be liberating, there are unanswered questions within Suzuki's work about how the subject can reconnect to the fractured present. This is the moment when, as Melville predicted, identity comes flooding back. Suddenly the subject who has pierced into the true nature of reality and lost all sense of self must return to this phenomenal world as that very sel£ As some critics of Suzuki such as Ichikawa Hakugen suggested after World War II, emptying the mind of concepts and entering into the flow of things is a dangerous modality in fascist times. Instinctual reason may not help when revolutionary reason is called for.

More recently, Slavoj Zizek has suggested that Suzuki's nonthinking subject is the perfect complement to global capitalism's laissez-faire ideol- ogy. There are, as I suggest below, ways of defending Suzuki from these claims. It is especially hard to see how Zen, which Suzuki always stressed was an ascetic and antimaterialist practice, relates to the excesses of capital. Bur these critiques do hit at the heart of what remained unbearable within Suzuki's work itsel£ His aconceptual globality does not suffer from the Atlas

252 / Global Origins of the Modern Self

complex of German idealism-he does not seek to prescribe institutional laws for all the world. Rather, it suffers from the opposite problem: it gives few or only vague suggestions for how to relate the experience of satori to ethical life.17 As Ichikawa put it, "The problem is that of what, once the

· · d · h ld d "18 ego Is empne , It s ou o. My suggestion here is that Suzuki's Zen, like Hegel's dialectics or

Senghor's rhythm, needs to be partialized. Seen as one "mood" (as Emerson would put it) of an expanding pluralism, it offers rich possibilities for subject formation such as we will see in two essayists who worked in Suzuki's wake: John Cage and bell hooks. To see what Suzuki makes possible, I trace the development of satori in his thought, showing its relation to Buddhist his- tory (both philosophical and institutional), transcendentalism, and idealism. Suzuki was truly a global theorist in the sense that he engaged theories from around the world and also because his ideas of Zen are deeply related to how to be a global subject.

Suzuki's voice, however, has been lost in contemporary debates about global subjectivity. In part, this is because he is looked on as a naive phi- losopher who peddled a vague mysticism. His renown is explained away as a kind of Orientalism: it was only his Eastern guise that made him so popular; there was no true philosophical wizard behind the curtain. He is taken seriously only by New Age hippies, not by the world's leading philosophical and artistic minds. (Never mind that in his lifetime he went to some lengths to distance his work from what he himself viewed as the nonsense of his followers.) Further still, in spite of the fact that he was consistently if quietly critical of Japanese imperialism, it is common today to view his version of Zen as being designed to create a passive subject, pliable by authoritarian and corporatist influences. 19

How are we to explain this discrepancy? Is it merely that we are sav- vier than our 1950s forerunners? Were they all really just under the thrall of Orientalism? It seems to me rather the reverse: under our own thrall of having revealed the structure of Orientalism, we can no longer take seriously the productions of a thinker like Suzuki. Even if some of his popularity was created by an ''.Asian craze," and even if some of his ideas demand critique and scrutiny, it simply does not follow that all of his work and its influ- ence can be explained away or dismissed. Suzuki was indeed a profound thinker whose work demands a reevaluation. He was also a profoundly interesting writer, and his complex and suggestive style is indebted to the figures already encountered in this book-especially Emerson, on who:~ Essays Suzuki based his own major work, Essays in Zen Buddhism (1927).

Emptying the Global Self / 253

. Furthermore, his formal innovations chart new territory by linking the essay to the concept of satori, or enlightenment. Reciprocally, he updates the very meaning of enlightenment, transforming it into a way of life aimed at essaying the globe. 21

Satori after Globalism

One way to enter Suzuki's vast corpus of writings is through the seemingly simple question from his Essays in Zen Buddhism, First Series: "How can this [satori] be eff~cted?"22 In other words, he wanted to explore not just what satori was or how it related to the historicity of thought, but how it could come into being in our modern world. And he perhaps feared, as Cavell speaks of Thoreau fearing, that "his readers will take the project of self-emancipation to be merely literary."23 In other words, it will sound nice on paper, and they will dream of it, but they will not take the steps to make it real. Some of his appropriations of Orientalism-of an idea of the Orient as a place where enlightenment had been actualized for centu- ries-were aimed precisely at inducing an otherwise distracted audience to take his proposals to heart.

After all, Suzuki's answer to the question of effect reveals it to be an arduous task: one achieves satori by "meditating on those utterances or actions that are directly poured out from the inner region undimmed by the intellect or the imagination, and that are calculated successfully to exterminate all the turmoils arising from ignorance and confusion." 24 The answer one might presume, that one achieves satori simply by emptying one's mind, is nowhere apparent here. Suzuki wants us to understand that the event of satori occurs through a rigorous process of meditation on both thoughts and actions.

In the historical Zen tradition, various modes of writing have been used to help practitioners achieve satori. 25 Perhaps most famous is the koan. 26

As Victor Hori has argued, the koan is not simply a paradox that provokes a nonconceptual insight, but an actual activity of coming to understand something about the paradoxical nature of reality. He discusses the activity of thinking through the koan in a particularly helpful way when dealing with the classic: "Two hands clap and there is a sound. What is the sound of one hand?" Hori explains that this is not simply an unanswerable ques- tion that should liberate the mind, but that as one thinks about the koan to such an extent that one becomes one with it, one realizes that the answer

254 I Global Origins of the Modern Self

is in fact chis oneness: the sound of the one is the meditator's being one

with the world. 27 Suzuki relates his own experiences with the koan in his autobiographical

essays "Early Memories" ( 1961) and ''.An Autobiographical Account" (1969, published posthumously). In these autobiographical sketches, Suzuki describes the first time he went co a Zen temple as an experience of frustration and alienation. The head monk yelled at him for his stupidity, and no one was there to offer him any advice besides to just keep meditating. 28 A few years later he came across the Zen modernizer Imakita Kosen, who was a key figure in attempts to make Zen into a "practical pursuit" during the Meiji Restoration. As Janine Sawada has shown, Imakita was particularly important because he abandoned his contemporaries' interest in scholastic study in favor of an intensive practice for achieving enlightenment. 29 As pare of the general trend of modern religions, Imakita set out to remake Bud- dhism in the face of Western scientific critique and imperial power. 30 Like many other modernists, he did this through a renewed focus on meditative practice, something that has been, perhaps surprisingly, largely absent from the actual history of Buddhism. 31 The point, again, is not to deride chis turn as part of the Europeanization of Buddhism; it is rather to understand the turn to transformative practice within a larger, transnational history of attempts to essay the globe.

Imakita insisted chat students at his temple focus on a single koan given to them by their master. For Suzuki, this was "the sound of one hand" koan. 32 However, Imakita's method was not successful for Suzuki: "I was not at all prepared to receive a koan at that time." 33 He pursued his Zen studies nevertheless and eventually received a different koan from his new teacher, Shaku Soen, after Imakita passed. Soen was, like Imakita, a central figure in the transformations of Zen in the twentieth century. He was deeply committed to the preservation and dissemination of Buddhism, and his most important act in this regard may have been sending Suzuki to the United States. 34

Soen's first move in helping Suzuki was to give him the "mu" koan. (Q: Does a dog have Buddha nature, or not? A: Mu [no]. 35) At first this switch made little difference. Suzuki struggled with the new koan for four years without much progress. "Life in the monastery," he writes, "was exceed- ingly miserable." 36 It seems even to have driven him to suicidal thoughts: "It often happens that just as one reaches the depths of despair and decides to cake one's life then and there that satori comes. I imagine chat with many people satori may have come when it was just too late. They were already

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on their way to death." 37 Suzuki's crisis in the end, however, seems milder:

he was about to leave for the United States to work with Paul Carus, a

German emigre in the States who became interested in Buddhism after Soen's speech (translated by Suzuki and the novelist Natsume Soseki3B) at che 1893 Parliament of World Religions in Chicago.39

Desperately seeking satori before his departure, Suzuki rededicated

himself to the task. One night he had his experience while "seeing the trees in the moonlight. They looked transparent and I was transparent too."40

Whatever one makes of this account (some critics deny the meaningfulness

of satori; others have said that if Suzuki really had satori he would have more bravely spoken out against the war41), it is clear that his experience is mediated by the transnational world he lives in. First, because his lay train- ing is a specifically modern form introduced by lmakita and Soen; second, because his interest in Zen is spurred by its promotion in the West at the Parliament and by Carus. Moreover, it is this latter context of his immi- nent departure for the States that finally drives Suzuki to his realization. These elements of the story can help us to understand the intertwining of the koan and the essay form in Suzuki's work to "effect satori": the essay extends the koan out into the modern, global world and makes it available for Suzuki's readers.

But what it is that Suzuki claims to have experienced here is not so obvious. It is not simply about overcoming dualism. The key word to under- stand is "transparent," and doing so will take some philosophical labor across Suzuki's vast readings in both Mahayana Buddhism and German idealism. Suzuki frequently used the word transparency when describing satori. The word (alongside "luminosity") is a possible translation for a kind of inher- ent purity of the mind available through certain meditative techniques.42 But Suzuki is not just talking about the mind-he is also talking about the world; here, the trees. There is something about the transparency of satori

that is about the relation between self and world. Suzuki was concerned to forestall the assumption that satori was about

a kind of blissful calm or general mental blankness: "To tell the truth, there is here not the remotest hint of tranquility or serenity, nor of the identity of Nature and man. If anything is suggested here, it is the idea of utmost transparency."43 There is no conceptual identity here, but rather the "identity" of both Nature and humans has been undone in order to produce transpar- ency. By transparency, Suzuki meant that we experience the world as it is, Without assumptions. And yet, at the same time, we experience the world

h alld " "d" " as t e kind of place in which there are things c e nature an man.

256 I Global Origins of the Modern Self

In other words, Suzuki is claiming t~at satori is not simply the breaking down of all categories, but the breakmg down of all categories in such way as to see the foundation of category making itself. This is what th: word "transparency" means: both that one has broken with categories and the world has become transparent as what it is and that, in this experie nee, one sees that the world as it is has categories.

When Suzuki says that he experienced transparency, then, what he means is that he has broken with his standard intellection that told him that trees were trees and he was a man observing them. In a moment of mental upheaval, he realized the foundation of why this was both the case and not the case. In other words, he saw that, indeed, as he experienced the world every day, there were trees, and he was a man, and that was real. But he also saw, viscerally, experientially, that these trees, and he himself, were made of infinite and infinitesimal interdependence. Every part of him and every part of the tree are themselves broken down into infinite parts. But when those infinite parts connect in the right way, they form everyday realities like trees and consciousness. The famous Zen saying for this is "Before Zen practice, there are mountains and rivers. When Zen begins, there are neither mountains nor rivers. After enlightenment, mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers again."44 Suzuki uses the word "transparency," I believe, to signal this double movement of the truth.

Here a question arises: if in satori everything is interpenetrating and transparent, does that mean that our average everyday world is false? Is a tree just a mental projection, for example? And wouldn't that contradict Suzuki's promise that the world after achieving satori is basically the same, only that one feels a few feet off the ground? Suzuki attempted to answer this question by innovating concepts from both German idealism and Mahayana Buddhism.

In one of several essays Suzuki wrote on satori (1949), he put che problem in very philosophical terms: "a genuine satori is at once tran- scendental and immanental." 45 This is explicitly Kantian language. Kant (whom Suzuki had studied 46) had made an important distinction between the transcendent, as in that which passed beyond the possibilities 0/ human

· d d' · s of experience, an transcendental, as in that which created the con mon possibility for human experience. 47 Suzuki's neologism, "immanental," sug- gests a similar distinction. Immanence is simply the daily world that w: live in and · b r dent an experience erore satori. It is the opposite of transcen · 1· fi 1 al" means unp ies a u 1, unconscious immersion in everyday life. "Immanent . that h h d rne into we ave s attered our ordinary perception of the world an co

Emptying the Global Self / 257

direct contact wich re~i~ .. Just as the_ transcendental shows the conceptual conditions for the poss1b1lity of experience, so immanental marks the non- conceptual possibility of our being in the world.

It is thus equally important here that Suzuki is not denying the tran- scendental: he is not claiming that the categories of the mind are meaning- less, and only the immanental experience is the truth. To the contrary, he is suggesting that in our very experience of the world is the potential for categories of thought. The very immanental shattering of the categories of perception is what eventually allows us to see chose categories in a new light. These categories, however, are not permanent, as Kant had thought, but open to constant transformation. This is so because they only have "conventional" and not "ultimate" truth. (There may come a time, after all, when mountains and rivers simply no longer exist, and this is equally true for the more abstract categories of thought.) This standard distinction in Buddhist philosophy needs some explication.

The doctrines of emptiness and the two truths are some of the most widely discussed and debated in Buddhist studies, and no simple overview can do justice to these concerns that cut to the heart of Buddhism and its quest to end suffering. What I offer here is simply an overview of these positions so that Suzuki's unique take on them can be understood. 48 The canonical account of these doctrines is in Nagarjuna's Fundamental Wts- dom of the Middle 'Way, chapter XXIY. Nagarjuna claims, "The Buddha's teaching of the Dharma / Is based on two truths: / A truth of worldly convention / And an ultimate truth." 49 These are the two truths, then: a conventional one and an ultimate one. It is tempting to assume that "ultimate" signifies in some way a higher truth, and conventional a lower one. But Nagarjuna is explicit: "Without a foundation in the conventional truth, / The significance of the ultimate cannot be taught."50 So what are these two truths, and how do they relate? Conventional truth is more or less what it sounds like: the agreed upon truth formed by a community of thinkers and actors about the world they live in. Ultimate truth is the truth of things from their own side, that is, not as we impute reality to

them but as they are in themselves.51

How are things in themselves? They arise by dependent origination and are empty in themselves.52 This means that there is no intrinsic essence to anything; everything comes into being through dependence on other things, all of which are dependent on other things. The very condition of ~ thing being conventionally true for a community of thinkers and actors 1s that that thing has no essence. For, Nagarjuna argues, if a thing had an essence,

258 / Global Origins of the Modern Self

then it could neither come into being nor go out of being: "If somethin comes from its own essence, / How could it ever be arisen?"53 The logic her:

is not dissimilar from that of deconstruction: a thing can only come into

being because of the passage of time, but it is the passage of time that also

means that that thing must cease.54 It is only because of this passage that

anything can come to be or go out of being. This is the ultimate truth. But

it is not too hard to see how this ultimate truth is entirely dependent on

conventional truth, for without the conventional world of existing entities that dependently co-arise, there would be nothing to be the ultimate truth of This is how I understand Nagarjuna's comment: "Whatever is dependently

co-arisen / That is explained to be emptiness. / That [statement], being a dependent designation, / Is itself the middle way." In other words, empti- ness itself is only a conventional name for this process, and the doctrine of

emptiness itself is bound to dissolution. 55

(I want to mark here that this thinking has been central in my formula- tion of radical pluralism. The two truths help us understand the relationship

between an object's actual, existent constitution and its ongoing reconstitution across global networks; how interdependence-local and global-produces real entities; and the fact that, like the doctrine of emptiness itself, it is a

way of viewing the world that may someday lose its purpose.) Suzuki was a close reader of this tradition of thought, and what he

means by transparency is bound up with the idea of understanding the two truths simultaneously. But there is a key difference here between Nagarjuna and Suzuki. According to Suzuki, "Emptiness is the result of an intuition and not the outcome of reasoning . . . When one tries to unravel it without the experience, the system becomes all the more a mass of confusion or an unintelligible jargon."56 For Nagarjuna, one arrived at emptiness through a process of ratiocination. 1he Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle mty is a philosophical treatise, not a guide to meditation. Of course, its aim is to

transform the subject, but it does so at the level of rational thought. 57 For Suzuki, one can only understand the transparency of the two truths once

one has had the experience of satori. This focus on experience is both what made Suzuki's work attractive

and what has left it subject to extensive critique over the past several decades.

David McMahan well summarizes the duality of his reception:

Suzuki claims that Zen supersedes [the] personal perspective • · · by directly accessing reality per se . . . However philosophically problematic it maybe be in light of post-Kantian, analytic,

phenomenological, and postmodern epistemological critiques,

Emptying the Global Self / 259

chis influential picture gives Buddhism and · 1 1 z . . . . , part1cu ar y en, a

special place m the western 1mag1nation.5s

Suzuki is said to be popular because he promises som th' th " ,, . . . e mg at we m

the West have banished: the idea of direct unmediat d al' . , , e access to re 1ty. This does expl~n some _of_ Suzuki s appeal, but there are problems with this kind of analysis. Why 1s It, after all, that these "epistemological critiques" are given pride of place, as if they had proven something that Suzuki was entirely unaware of? McMahan is not suggesting chat there is no tradition of questioning the access to reality in the history of Buddhist thought-that is simply not the case. 59 Rather, he is analyzing the cultural configuration in which Suzuki promises something that "we" now know better than, and, because he is outside "our" tradition, "we" are inclined to believe in his promise in spite of this fact. The hope once placed in "the primitive" is now transferred to Zen.

And, to a real extent, this does describe how Zen has been received. For Foucault, Watts, Cage, and others (my young self included), Suzuki promised a kind of feeling about the world that we no longer believed possible within the confines of our immediate culture. What I disagree with in McMahan's claims, then, is not the cultural analysis, but the lack of acknowledgment that Suzuki was in fact directly responding to these very sorts of critiques. It is true, as McMahan notes, that Kant did not believe in the possibility of this kind of experience, famously arguing that we could not experience the world in itself, but only apprehend it through our transcendental categories. Furthermore, he claimed that even if we could experience the world as is, it would mean nothing because we could not cognize it. He thus specifically denied the coherence of an "immanental and transcendental" experience of the world, writing:

Assume that nature were completely exposed to you; that noth- ing were hidden from your senses and to the conscio~sness of everything laid before your intuition: even then you_ St1ll could not, through any experience, cognize in concreto the obJect of yo~r ideas (for besides this complete intuition, a completed syn~esis and the consciousness of its absolute totality would be reqmred,

. . th h pirical cognition).60 but that 1s not possible roug any em

Kan . . . p of reality is not in any e's basic point is that such an mcumve gras th b'l' •1 · divorced from e a 1 Ity to

way meaningful because it necessan Y remains . bl' d 61 h famously put It, are m .

cognize it. Intuitions without concepts, as e

260 I Global Origins of the Modern Self

Suzuki, as we have seen, does not exactly disagree. He is not . saying

that this moment of absolute exposure solves the whole problem of ex . · B h · . h h' · peri-ence and cognitton. ut e zs saymg t at t ts experience is necessa .

order to make any claims about the world. Suzuki is not naive about i~: he is directly criticizing him. And what he is saying is that if Kant thin~ he can understand the nature of reality without the experience of satori h

' e is sadly mistaken. 62 The problem is that one comes to believe in somethin like transcendental categories and never learns the truth of emptiness. Kan~ is thus stuck with an idea about the immutability of the mind-something that, as Foucault points out, is in deep tension with his historical writings.63 Suzuki's response, avant Foucault's, is to say that what is required is not a series of rational claims about knowledge, but the actual experience of transforming the mind:

Theorists may say this [experience of satori] is impossible, for we put our subjectivity into every act of perception, and what we call an objective world is really a construction of our innate ideas. Epistemologically this may be so, but spiritually a state of perfect freedom is obtained only when all our egoistic thoughts are not read into life and the world is accepted . . . When therefore I say Buddhism is radical empiricism, 64 this is not to be understood epistemologically but spiritually. 65

This is a key moment in which Suzuki grapples with the idealist tradition. He takes Kant's point about the subjectivity of perception seriously, but he then claims it only applies to perception prior to satori. When he says that there is a spiritual possibility beyond this epistemology, we should not understand this as mystical or religious in an unprovable sense. Rather, Suzuki is using the word spiritual in much the same way that Foucault does. He is concerned, as Foucault is, that "a philosopher may think out a deep sys- tem of thought, without necessarily living that thought himsel£" 66 Through practices of the self, indeed, through the breakdown of the very entity called the self in the achievement of satori, we can arrive at an experience of the world in its transparency and thus actually begin to live out philosophy.

It should be no surprise, then, that as Foucault prepared his lectu~e~ on the Hermeneutics of the Subject, he was, according to his partner, Dant~ Defert, a "great reader" of Eugen Herrigel's Zen and the Art of Arc~ery, d Herrigel's book, in both French and English, had a preface by Suzuki an h many references to him throughout. A principle thread that runs throug

Emptying the Global Self/ 261

these chapters starts with this very fact: that as Foucault theorized the split

between spirituality and truth in modern Western thought, his own actual practice was oriented toward thinking with other cultures in order to create a more global set of practices of the self. The wonderful irony is that while Foucault looked to Japan as a way of thinking outside the West, Suzuki articulated his Zen as a new interpretation of the Japanese religion based on contact with the West: "Until now we have seen Zen solely through the medium of Chinese and Japanese texts . . . Allow me to conclude by stating that we must now begin to consider how to interpret Zen in the context of Western thinking and feeling."68 Rather than degrading Suzuki's thought because of its contact with the West, I think we are better to appreciate him within this broader context of "practices of the global sel£" Then some of Suzuki's more provocative claims in this regard can really be appreciated and debated.

One of the most attractive components of Suzuki's idea of satori is the kind of subject that it claims to produce after the "immanental and transcendental" experience. It is, as I suggested above, a version of Rous- seau's "savage made to inhabit cities."69 And although Suzuki borrowed the goal, he did not keep its geographic presumptions. So far as I know, he never wrote about "primitive cultures," but he certainly did keep the generic idea of a sublated "primitive." 70 Indeed, Suzuki spoke of his "Copernican Revolution'' (in another explicit response to Kant) as giving us access to the "primal man," that is, the transparent being that exists before the Fall.71

He also spoke of the fact that "we all seem to have an innate longing for primitive simplicity, close to the natural state of living."72 What he argued was that current attempts to arrive at that state did not understand that we can return to the "primal man," but only if we abandon our hope at dialectical integration. In other words, Suzuki's Copernican Revolution is that this progress happens not by grasping our mental categories, as Kant's followers had claimed, but-quite the opposite-by overcoming those very mental categories through the immanental experience of aconceptuality.

After satori, Suzuki promised his readers, one would be both in the moment and aware. One would act instinctually, but one's instincts would have the utmost perspicacity. Moreover, one would be freed from the alienat- ing burdens of rationality and returned to an immersive life, but with the same promise of gain from the experience of alienation that we have seen in idealism and Romanticism: "the restoration is more than a mere going hack, the original content is enriched by the division, struggle, and ~esettle- ment • . . Zen proposes to do this for us and assures us of the acquirement

262 I Global Origins of the Modern Self

of a new point of view in which life assumes a fresher, deeper, and more

satisfying aspect."73 For Hegel, one had a concept of the world after such a movement. For Suzuki, the struggle has been to lose concepts altogether.

He flips Hegel on his head yet again. Suzuki's claims about this aconceptual moment have been heavily

criticized in recent years. Even those like Victor Hori who defend Suzuki's basic insights think that the aconceptual interpretation is a mistake: "there is no Zen enlightenment beyond thought and language in a realm of pure consciousness" any more than humans would be "free as birds" without gravity.74 Gravity is the condition of our physical existence, and any physical freedom we might have cannot be thought outside it. Similarly, thought and language are the conditions of our mental existence, and any freedom we might have is through them. The use of gravity is not incidental here-it recalls Suzuki's claim that Zen enlightenment was like everyday experience "except about two feet off the ground." But Suzuki was not naive here. He affirmed, ''As . . . human beings we cannot help thinking and talking."75 And he insisted on the continuity of "particular experiences" with "pure experience," suggesting that pure experience-the moment before conceptu- alization-was the ground of all these other experiences, whether we actually arrived at that original experience or not. 76

But even with these qualifications factored in, the problem, Hori and others claim, is that Suzuki had been blinded by the primitivism of Rous- seau and his followers. n Hori argues that Suzuki's idea of an enlightenment experience outside language and consciousness is as fallacious as the idea of a pure, idyllic state of nature: "Just as the state of nature is said to exist prior to the development of society and state, so also the state of pure consciousness is said to exist prior to the development of thought and lan- guage."78 He continues, "To the extent that this is so, the breakthrough to pure consciousness labeled kensho [seeing reality] is the psychological version of a return to the innocence of the state of nature before dehumanizing society got started."79 Any notion of "pure consciousness" is thus a "political concept" naming a critique of society. so It has nothing to do with what can actually be attained in consciousness.

In this critique, I believe that Hori senses a real proximity of concepts that he does not properly contextualize. Indeed, the idea that pure con- sciousness names a return to some primordial, unblemished state is exactly the argument that I want to make about Suzuki. However, whereas Hori views this as a debilitating historical thought that should be abandoned, I am arguing here that it shows how perfectly Suzuki both engaged and cri-

Emptying the Global Self / 263

tiqued modern attempts to essay the globe. Since at least Rousseau, there has

been a c~ncern to dev~lo~ subjects who could integrate reflective rationality with instinctual capacity m order to handle their new, global situation. And whereas such ideas of inte_gration can certainly be found in earlier subject positions, such as what Aristotle called phronesis, or Ikkyii called foryu, it is only in the modern era that this achievement is thought to require global engagement with the problematic concept of "primitive life."

Suzuki is seeking a state very similar to what Rousseau, Schiller, and Hegel imagined: a way of being that would unite our conscious intellect with the sensual world. And like them, he believes that this is neither impossible nor immediately given, but rather an achievement. He stated this more or less explicitly: satori "is a kind of super-consciousness in which there is no opposition of subject and object, and yet there is a full awareness of things . . . In a sense 'the originally pure' is emptiness but an emptiness charged with vitality."81 When Suzuki speaks of pure conscious- ness, then, he is speaking at the same time of this "super-consciousness," and this super-consciousness is nothing other than a new method for reach- ing Rousseau's proposed solution for global subjectivity, that is, a mode of being in the world that unites both the immersion and the reflection; both the transcendence and the immanence, which are required to think and act effectively in an interconnected world. Again, whether or not Rousseau and his followers were right about this need, the key point for the history of modern thought is to recognize that their conception of how to be global subjects formed within this troubled anthropological and colonial context. And while we might criticize Suzuki's solution on similar grounds, we should not criticize it simply because it is a Westernization. Rather, we should see him as critically participating in this tradition of modern global thought.

It is thus no coincidence, then, that when Suzuki sets up this move- ment toward instinctual rationality, he does so with explicit reference to the process of Hegelian dialectics. First, he summarizes the dialectical method

as follows:

The rationalistic way of dissolving contradictory concepts is to create a third concept in which they can be harmoniously set up. To find out such a new concept is the work taken up by the philosopher. While it is a great question whether he can finally succeed in discovering an all-embracing . . . concept, [they] can- not stop short ... Endless and fruitless may be [their] efforts,

but [they] shall have to go on this way.82

264 / Global Origins of the Modern Self

Suzuki leaves open the question of whether ~r ~ot such a concept can b cound but he is not actually concerned with it, because this mod e r1 , 11 e of thought is mistaken from the start. Therefore, [t]he Zen way has tak

" 83 I . h . 11 b en an altogether different course. t appreciates t e mte ect, ut it does not chink chat this dialectical method is the path to what we are looking fi Rather, Zen "steps backwards."84 It breaks out of the stream of history, 0:f habits and ego formation, and enters into the moment of the immanental

and transcendental. Neither the concept of the ego nor the categories of

thought is the goal; the pure negation of the ego is. After this negation, we

return to our original state of freedom and instinct, but at a higher level.BS

Heidegger, too, spoke of this non-Hegelian movement in remarkably

similar words86: "For us, the character of the conversation with the his-

tory of thinking is no longer Aujhebung . . . but the step back [der Schritt zuruck]."87 But again, the difference is that Heidegger conceptualizes this movement within a particular history-"Western thinking"-and not within

the broader frameworks chat such an analysis would require. 88 I cite again from his last interview:

It is my conviction that any reversal of the modern technological world can only occur from out of the same location in which it originated. It cannot take place through the adoption of Zen Buddhism or other Eastern experiences of the world. In order co achieve a shift in thinking, one needs the European tradi- tion as well as a new appropriation of it. Thinking will only be transformed through thought that has the same origin and determination. 89

If I think Suzuki needs to be ranked with Heidegger as a thinker of moder- nity, it is because he understood the global condition to which Heidegger

was utterly oblivious. Indeed, as I have argued throughout this book, if we look seriously at the history of modern thought, we find not an unbroken

line 0: abstr~ct "European thought," but a continual, unequal, fraught, an~ oftennmes violent attempt to chink the globe carried out by writers the worl over. To state that what we need is a "new appropriation" of che European

· · · ld" tradmon as something that excludes "other ... experiences of the wor is precisely to misunderstand chat tradition itself. Heidegger, like many theoriSts today, was blinded by the idea of Europe and so misunderst00~ the actual context in which he operated. This was not che case for Suzuki. He developed his concepts not based on a false historical geography, but on

Emptying the Global Self / 265

the needs of the present global condition. And again, this does not simply mean that he "Westernized" Zen, for "Western thinking and feeling" is itself a plural category that in the modern era is indissociably bound up with the need to think globally. Thus what is interpreted by Hori and others as Suzuki's greatest weakness may in fact be his greatest strength as a theorist

of his present.

Suzuki and Emerson's Provocation

Suzuki's engagement with Emerson is equally if not more complex. Suzuki was widely appreciative of Emerson. 90 He even published an essay before coming to the States, which has not been translated, titled "Emaason no Zengakuron" or "Emerson's Zen Treatise." Suzuki quotes extensively from the Divinity School Address as well as "Circles" and "The Over-Soul" in the essay.91 He seems, at this early point, to believe that Emerson and Zen are aiming at the same thought. At some point, however, he began to discern a difference: Emerson stopped at a point beyond which Suzuki insisted we go. In Zen and Japanese Culture ( 19 3 8/ 19 5 9), he looks back on his younger self and writes, "I am now beginning to understand the meaning of the deep impressions made upon me while reading Emerson in my college days. I was not then studying the American philosopher but digging down into the recesses of my own thought ... I was, indeed, making acquaintance with myself then." 92 This is a warmly Emersonian response to Emerson. As Emerson himself had written: "Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul. What he announces, I must find true in me, or wholly reject." Or again: "whosoever propounds to you a philosophy of the mind, is only a more or less awkward transla- tor of things in your consciousness." 93 And if Suzuki will claim, as he does in the following paragraph, to have surpassed Emerson, then this, too, is Emersonian: "great men exist that there may be greater men." 94 So we should read the following passage with some sense of this indebtedness:

It was raining one day, and Kyosho (d. 937) the master said to a monk, "What is the sound outside the door?" The monk answered, "The pattering of rain drops, master." This was an honest answer, and the master knew it from the first. His ver- dict, however, was: "All beings are confused in mind, they are pursuing outside objects always, not knowing where to find

266 I Global Origins of the Modern Self

the real self" This is a hard hit. If the outside pattering is not to be called rain, what is it? 'What does it mean to pursue the outside objects, and to be confused in the notion of the ego? Sech6 comments:

An empty hall and the sound of pattering rain! Indeed, an unanswerable question even for an accomplished master!

The American Transcendentalist's attitude toward Nature has no doubt a great mystical note, but the Zen masters go far beyond it and are really incomprehensible. 95

Suzuki's claim, then, is that Emerson opened up for him the thought that Emerson did not himself pursue. But it is not very dear what exactly this greater thought is. Suzuki tells us at best that it is "incomprehensible." What that would seem to mean, based on his other work, is that it cannot be "comprehended," that is, put into rational or logical language. And yet it is unclear why this would function as a criticism of Emerson, who was himself often criticized for his openness to what was beyond the given order of thought and expression. There appears to be something else on Suzuki's mind here.

Stanley Cavell seems to have intuitively grasped the nature of the relation between Suzuki's thought and Emerson's. His brief remarks on the seventeenth-century Zen popularizer Bankei (whom Suzuki not only first brought to an American audience, but also recovered for Japanese Buddhist history 96) cut to the heart of matters. Cavell writes:

This fantasy of a noumenal self as one's true self seems to me rather to be a certain expression or interpretation of the fantasy of selflessness (Kant's holy will; Bankei's Unborn ... ); the idea would be that the end of all attainable selves is the absence of self, of partiality. Emerson variously denies this possibility (''Around every circle another can be drawn," from "Circles"), but it seems that all he is entitled (philosophically) to deny is that such a state can be attained (by a self, whose next attain- ment is always a self). Presumably, a religious perfectionism may find that things can happen otherwise. 97

Cavell's suggestion is that in Bankei, as in Suzuki there is the belief ind ' al" a moment beyond any partiality. Suzuki calls this the "immanent an

Emptying the Global Self / 267

"cransparency." And indeed, if we recall the moment of Emerson's "transparent eyeball" we can quickly see. t~e difference. For Suzuki, there is no eyeball, there is nothing left, there 1s Just transparency (even if it is a transparency pregnant with the mutable categories of reality). For Emerson, something always remains, even if just the eye/I-the circle of partiality and perception.

The question here, as Cavell puts it, is one of attainability: can one attain a position beyond the last circle, the fragment of perception? Emer- son had said no: "When we discern justice, when we discern truth, we do nothing of ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams. If we ask whence this comes, if we seek to pry into the soul that causes, all philosophy is at fault."98 The task of the self then, as Cavell interprets it, is not arriv- ing at something attainable, but always maintaining a relationship to one's "next self." This is what Emerson had called our "unattained but attainable sel£"99 It is the task of essayists, whether "Stoic, or oriental or modern," to describe such a self to us. 10° Cavell comments: "I do not read Emerson as saying . . . that there is one unattained/attainable self we repetitively never arrive at, but rather that 'having' 'a' self is a process of moving to, and from, nexts."101 I have called this the perpetual movement of alternation in the context of Emerson's radical pluralism. Emerson, as I argued, banishes the anxiety of presuming that there is a singular truth out there that we must come into contact with in order to grasp our self, or the world. As Cavell puts it, Emerson's task in writing then becomes "to present nextness, a city of words to participate in." 102

Suzuki is not presenting us with a city of words in his writing. Indeed, he is offering us an experience that promises to be both beyond language and the very ground of language itself--both immanental and transcendental. This is what Suzuki refers to when he speaks of what is "incomprehensible" in Zen. This moment unites both what is and what is not. Suzuki claims that we can go beyond what we think we can know, which is to say that we can know more than we can think. Whether this is a progress of thought through Emerson's provocation or a regression to some vague mysticism is precisely Suzuki's burden of proo£

The place where he takes on this burden most directly is an essay whose title is an implicit response to Emerson (and anticipatorily a response to Cavell), "Self the Unattainable" (1960/1970). There he writes:

Relatively or dualistically, it is true, the self is "the unattain- able" (anupalabdha), but this "unattainable" is not to be under- stood at the level of our ordinary dichotomous thinking. The

268 / Global Origins of the Modern Self

Unattainable, so termed, subsists in its absolute right which We must now take hold of in the way hitherto unsuspected in 0 intellectual pursuit of reality. The intellect is to be set aside f~r a while in spite of "a certain sense of intellectual discomfort'~ one may have, and we must plunge into the nothingness which is beyond the intellect, threateningly opening its maw in the form of an abysmal pit. The Unattainable is attained as such in its just-so-ness ... The Unattainable is attained as unattain- able-this is the experience not of the psychological or logical self, but of the Unattainable self.103

That Emerson is on Suzuki's mind is clear from how he translates anupal- abdhi, which is a Sanskrit term generally meaning "nonperception." It is part of the classical Indian system of epistemology and is a debated term, concerned with what it means to perceive an absence. 104 Suzuki, as he often does, sees within this scholastic debate a potential to address a more existential issue.105 The epistemological category of "nonperception" opens up for Suzuki a way to discuss the possibility of having real knowledge of something that cannot be cognitively verified.

This is further underscored by the fact that he capitalizes "Unat- tainable," just as Emerson had in the essay "Circles" where he speaks of "the Unattainable, the flying perfect, around which the hands of man can never meet." 106 It is because there is this Unattainable, this beyond human perception, that we must accept the fact of our perception and learn to alternate, rather than "pry into the soul that causes." But it is exactly this prying that Suzuki recommends: not only can we, but we must experience the transparency of the universe. Without this experience, our knowledge falters at the very instant before it could have understood the world. For Suzuki, the Unattainable is in fact available to the self, but not as the self classically conceived, which is to say, that self that Suzuki interchangeably calls ego or atman, and that Buddhism from its start has sought to show the nonexistence 0£ This is not exactly "selflessness," and so Cavell's interpretation is limited here. What it is, rather is that experience in one instant of boch having and not-having a self that' Suzuki called transparency. It is that chi~ · · h' h b · nal It 15 Instant m w 1c we are etween the ultimate and the convenno ·. d h . f h . f "' h' h the attaine ' t e expenence o w at 1s, o JUSt-so-ness " the point at w 1c

th · bl d th ' · nt is not e attama e, an e so-called Unattainable meet. Tius mome .11 • Wl

self-less, because, as Suzuki insists, the self is still there-mountains . . Emerson,

once agam be mountams, and rivers will be rivers, and Emerson

Emptying the Global Self / 269

What he claims we can exp~rience then is not this moment as a finality, but as the moment from whzch all other selves spring. Thus, if Emerson and Cavell are right to say _that to h~ve a self is to always be moving on to new selves, what Suzuki suggests 1s the possibility of a liberatory moment in which we could experience the condition of this movement. This would not refute Emerson, philosophically or religiously; it would simply suggest the human capacity to reach beyond, to seek to pry, to plunge into the vitality of nothingness.

For Cavell, nextness is Emerson's (post-Kantian) insight that the thing is barred to me and that I must receive it and acknowledge it rather than asking for the security of experiencing it. But the point of something called enlightenment-achieved suddenly as in a flash, or through gradual means of purification of the mind, or in a combination of the two-is that this is not given in experience, but achieved by an experience. Emersonian experience, then, is a perpetual movement, a perfectionism of nextness, of what we can do given that to be human is to live in two worlds, one from which we are always already barred or, as Emerson had put it in "Experi- ence," always "too late" to enter. 107 Suzukian experience, to the contrary, is a single movement in which the whole is felt, known to be, and then the rest of one's life is lived out as the deepening of this moment, its extension into other domains of life. One mistake we can make reading Suzuki is to think that this is a kind of perfection, attained and absolute and after which we will make no mistakes or have any problems. All that Suzuki promises us is that this experience frees us-not from the world, but to the world.

In claiming the possibility of such an experience, Suzuki places the phrase "a certain sense of intellectual discomfort" in quotation marks, which suggests that he is citing Bertrand Russell's introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (a text we know that he had read and under- lined.) 108 The full context of the phrase is this: "[Wittgenstein's] defense would be that what he calls the mystical can be shown, although it cannot be said. It may be that this defence is adequate, but, for my part, I confess that it 1 al d. i:. ,,109 I · th eaves me with a certain sense of intellectu 1scomrort. n saymg at we must pass through this discomfort, Suzuki seems to both be affirming Wittgenstein's (early) work and availing himself of the latter's attempt to prove the limits of what can be done in language and what muSt be left to "showing" or to experience: "There are, indeed, things that cannot be put . h . ·ca1 ,,110 into words. They make themselves manifest. They are w at is mysn · A fuller discussion of Suzuki and Wittgenstein would take us bey~nd. the scope of this chapter. Suffice it to say that, at this moment, Suzuki th mks

h h h fc nd in Wittgenstein a helpful attempt to articulate th 1. t at e as ou . . e I.tnits f h .1 h d the needs of manifest expenence. 0 p 1 osop y an .

I se to Emerson's double consc10usness, then, Suzuki . n respon posits ki d f nonconsciousness. For Emerson, to be a global self was t l a n o , al' . 0 earn

f th 1 all'ty embedded in the worlds du mes and to learn to o e p ur . move between them. For Suzuki, the task 1s to overcome all concept of number

all concepts really, and, at last, be. To be global is to be transparent With

the world, not to have a conce~t of it, not to have a ~anner of handling its multiplicity: Suzuki, as we will see below, thus left himself open to the

charge of quietism and empty abstraction because this experience of the

world's isness has no necessarily positive outcome. And while I believe that radical pluralism is a stronger solution to the challenge of essaying the

globe without winding up in an unbearable identity, I also believe that the

experience described by Suzuki is real and attainable and that it can be one of the moods of truth that helps to positively construct a pluralistic world.

The challenge of its relation to politics is what we now must address.

The Limits of Satori

"What about what happens when someone turns from divine study to

the evils of human life?"

-Plato, 1he Republic

Whether one agrees that we can simultaneously experience the ultimate and the conventional or not, this account of satori leaves a thorny question about conventional truth: if a community of thinkers and actors accepts

something as true (say, that some human beings are inherently slaves), muSt

this conventional truth be accepted as conventionally true even if ultimately

false? Claims like this can in fact be easily refuted because no one coul~ inherently be a slave. That would not be a conventional truth at all because Jt

would force the conventional truth to contradict the ultimate truth, whereas

we have seen them to be inextricably related. But the following situation

is harder to dismantle on these grounds: for contingent historical reasons

(war, for example), certain people have become slaves and are accepted _as such in a society. Nothing in the ultimate truth would seem to conrra_d1ct

th is conventional reality. "Interdependence" is often invoked, with the 1~ea being that because we are all connected, we need to do what is best or

Emptying the Global Self / 271

each other. 111 In theory, an enlightened humanity would act for collective interest. But while this sounds nice, it does not necessarily hold, because the fact of interdependence does not necessarily lead to beneficence. Indeed, interconnectedness may equally lead one to aggression, as in Hegel's dialectic. Connection therefore must be interpreted, and this brings us back into the conventional world with its norms and disputes. Indeed, although there is a robust field of Buddhist social ethics, there is no normatively agreed-on relation between the epistemology of the two truths and those ethics. 112

One of the most probing questions in recent studies of Suzuki has been about the relationship between his work and Japanese fascism during World War II. On all sides, there is agreement that Suzuki never became swept up in war fever, and, by comparison with many Japanese intellectuals at the time, he remained largely resistant to nationalistic tendencies. 113 Nev- ertheless, Suzuki's work has been criticized for a lack of serious engagement with these problems. Although he did not encourage the war effort, he did little, publicly, to oppose it. 114 After the war, he did begin to make public criticisms of imperialism and fascism and even criticized his own culpability for not having taken a stronger public stance. 115 Suzuki also made strong political claims throughout his life, and these appear increasingly in his postwar writings in both Japanese and English. This can be seen especially in his Columbia lectures and dialogue with Thomas Merton. And in his Japanese-language writings, Suzuki tended to be more critical of the Japanese state and people, whereas externally he was often chauvinistic. 116 Critics like Zizek might be surprised to discover remarks in these works such as "Lately I have had a desire to study socialism, for I am sympathetic to its views on social justice and equality of opportunity. Present-day society (including Japan, of course) must be reformed from the ground up." 117

But there is a deeper logic to the critiques than mere ignorance of such statements by Suzuki. The question that has driven much of these concerns is: How could Zen Buddhists, with their claims to enlightenment and their Mahayana precepts of compassion and nonviolence, have aligned themselves with the war effort? The thinker most closely associated with pursuing this question is Hakugen Ichikawa, a priest, professor, and activist who has written extensively on issues relating to Zen and social justice. There is unfortunately very little of Ichikawa's work available in English, but his critique was popularized by Brian Daizen Victoria in his work Zen at 'War, which, as we will see shortly, has (mis) informed Zizek's critique of Zen. 118

As a young man, Ichikawa was influenced by Suzuki's work and admired his modernizing tendencies. 119 He distanced himself from Suzuki

272 I Global Origins of the Modern Self

after the war because he did not feel that Suzuki's criticism f Z . • s O en er

a sufficient explanation for the failure of Zen Buddhists d . 01rered , . h . uring th

Suzuki s own response, m s ort, was to msert a wedge betw e 'War. een sato.

politics. Satori could ease anxiety, open one's mind, change , ri and ones sen

the world, but it could not tell one how to act in such terribl . se of d ffi 1 f h e tunes lh· would require a i cu t return rom t e sun to the cave an d" · 1s

' · 11 f 1 · · d" all b ' a JUStrnent of ones mte ect rom c ear vision to ra ic y pro lematic cond' . Suzuki wrote after the war: ltlons. As

With satori alone, it is impossible [for Zen priests] to shoulder their responsibilities as leaders of society. Not only is it impossible, but it is conceited of them to imagine they could do so ... In satori there is a world of satori. However, by itself satori is unable to judge the right and wrong of war. With regard to disputes in the ordinary world, it is necessary to employ intellectual discrimination. 120

Suzuki admits the unbearability: satori cannot "shoulder" the responsibili- ties of this world. But it still can help free one of egotism, make one more spontaneous, and reduce one's anxiety. The basic concepts of no-mind, original nature, and spontaneity are all still correct; they simply need to be more firmly wedded to a rigorous adherence to basic Buddhist precepts of compassion and antiviolence.

The difference between Suzuki and Ichikawa was about this question of the meaning of satori. For Ichikawa, it is precisely such concepts as no-mind and aconceptuality that have to be discarded. Zen is not about a carefree satori; it is about a satori that gives one a discriminating ~d powerful intellectual vision. 121 This is perhaps most clearly articulat~~ _m Ichikawa's idea of the "origin," which he turns from Suzuki's primmvtSC revision into a mathematical point. Thus in his essay ''A Preliminary Con- ception of Zen Social Ethics" he links Suzuki's basic notions to Rousseahu,

. e Goethe, and Schiller, similarly to how I have above. 122 Such nouons,

they were says, were meaningfully uprooted by Hegel and Marx because lei's

ld 123 suzu not adequate to the difficult social problems of a global wor · f lobal brilliance, which I have touted above, indeed solves a problem O ~ocial thought, but for Ichikawa it fails to solve the problem of contempora~ idve

. . f the prun existence. Rather than finding a new path to the primacy ~ , ,, Ichikawa

· d al' d · · h • d " · · al naivete, via a econceptu ize ongm, a pat to a revive origm betWeen suggests that an origin must be found at the point of two axes

Emptying the Global Self / 273

"seeing into the non-duality of Nature and ... researching into the laws · f h Id " 124 E 1· h · h" and constructions o t e wor . n 1g tenment m 1s conception, then,

should not be directed first toward a nondual insight and then toward a hopeful worldly praxis, but rather should be concerned with finding this crossing point: "To die a 'Great Death' [such as in the satori experience] signifies, in my view, not merely to eradicate our dichotomy of reasoning, but also to awaken our humble and open minds of inquiry, aiming at the establishment of a peaceful and blissful world for all mankind." 125

The main difference between Suzuki and Ichikawa, then, is that Suzuki, like Plato, insists on a possible errancy within the process of satori during the subject's return to the world, while Ichikawa wants to remove or at least reduce this possible errancy by finding a juncture between enlightenment and the world. The fact of the matter is that neither of these positions is perfect, for the simple fact that life, which unfolds in time, offers no perfect position. I think that Suzuki understood this very well when he wrote a now infamous remark in Zen and Japanese Culture that Zen "may be found wedded to anarchism or fascism, communism or democracy, atheism or idealism, or any political or economic dogmatism." 126 His point was not that Zen had no ethics, but that one could not have a satori process separated from the ethics of one's time (that the ultimate truth could not be separated from the conventional; it could only deny its inherency). At the same time, from Sato's archival research, we know from Suzuki's letters and early essays that he was indeed a very political thinker who praised socialism and excoriated nationalism. 127 In his later writings, Suzuki was simply trying to understand how it was that the beauty of satori could go awry, and what he saw was that it could not be separated from social conditions. Rather than denying the power of satori, he chose to hold onto its potential, insisting that we combine our pure experience with our intellectual discrimination to guide us during the unbearability of war. War, in effect, made Suzuki a plural- ist in spite of himsel£ Suddenly intellectual discrimination was no longer subordinated to satori, but rather on par with it.

As a useful comparison, consider how Slavoj Zizek took up lchikawa's critique of Suzuki in his For lhey Know Not What lhey Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor. 128 For Zizek, like Ichikawa and indeed like Suzuki, we should be concerned with the ways in which Zen is being used as form of thought ~o ~ollify subjects in the face of capitalist excess. Zizek thus writes against th1s pop-cultural phenomenon preaching inner distance and indifference

towards the frantic pace of free-market competition." 129 But he then adds that this is not merely a pop-cultural concern for those without satori; rather,

274 / Global Origins of the Modern Self

it cuts co the very heart of Zen itself. He argues that what satori . h th " h h .fy. . gives us is only the choug t at even t e most orn mg crimes eventual! do

matter "130 He calls this the "horrible thought!" that "Zen is ambi'g y ,, not . ~~ d 1 " · · al h · h. all al · an is simp y a spmtu tee nzque, an et 1c y neutr instrument which

· 1· · al "131 H h can be put co ,different soc10po me uses. e t en a~~roves of the accuracy of Suzuki s remark chat Zen can be part of any polmcal system Bue wh

· ereas Suzuki says this so that he can argue for making this neutral event into a positive politics, Zizek comes to the frighteningly absurd conclusion that "this means ... that all-encompassing Buddhist Compassion has to be opposed to intolerant, violent Christian Love." 132 To he sure, he means that this Love can be used for revolutionary aims, but it is somewhat inconceiv- able that he would claim that this intolerance that has been so horrifyingly used through the past two millennia is somehow unscathed.

Rather than opposing one ideology with another, then, it would be better to think of politics as precisely the kind of negotiation Suzuki envi- sions. Whether we should spend our time reducing ourselves so that we can become better political subjects, as Thoreau, Gandhi, and Suzuki suggest, or whether we should directly seek a kind of worldly wisdom that aims less at absolute enlightenment and more at its point of intersection with social good, as Ichikawa, Marx, and Zizek suggest, is more of a personal choice than a metaphysical absolute. Indeed, Zizek is right: the "horrible thought" is that the universe simply is, and we do not ultimately know what is right and true, hut can only feel our way toward justice within our conventional worlds. But, ironically, it is Suzuki who is willing to confront this horrib~e thought and go into the "abysmal pit," whereas Zizek flees away from it and runs to Christian Love.

The relation of thought and politics, the move to praxis, and th~ possible intersection of political and spiritual liberation: these are etern themes. The task is not to answer them once and for all, but to see what

. rr perfec- connecnons between them we can enable. Suzuki does not oner us tion, then, hut he does offer a way of thinking that might help open us to

'alisrn we create better conditions for our global times. Freed from materi . ' ble are free to inhabit the world in a way that might make the more equi~~le: d . ·b • f v h • n) poss1 1stn unon o wealth (which Zizek himself claims to c ampio

Are we not constantly engaged in warlike preparations everyf where in order to raise or maintain our precious scandard 0 l' • i\ d d f living, ivmg. • • • Instead of raising the so-called scan ar 0

Emptying the Global Self / 275

will it not be far, far better to elevate the equality of living? This is a truism, but in no time of history has such a truism been more in need of being loudly declared than in these days of greed, jealousy, and iniquity. We followers of Zen ought to stand strongly for the asceticism it teaches. 133

Or again, "To be poor, that is, not to be dependent on things worldly- wealth, power, and reputation"-that is what Suzuki thinks of as the poten- tial politics of Zen. 134 And finally: "The individual gains meaning when we share in existence; one individual has no meaning. When we speak of one, this one brings others along-not just humans, but all the universe, or cosmos."135 To open oneself to the world, to lose one's ego in the world, and then to return to the world not with demands but with gifts of clarity and insight-this is Suzuki's practice of the global sel£

My argument here is not quite Suzuki's, however. While I have no doubt that the mystical experience of unity is real and meaningful, I do not believe that satori is necessary for everyone any more than I believe calculative analysis is necessary for everyone. These are all moods available to the radically pluralist self. As soon as one becomes necessary, it becomes unbearable. Moreover, satori itself is unbearable in the sense that it cannot tell us what to do without the other tools of the intellect, as Suzuki himself was forced to admit. It is wonderful to experience the world as transparency, and that transparency can teach us to let go of pernicious aspects of human life, but it cannot prevent us from letting go of those other elements that make our global existence livable. To overcome the unbearable identity is not to lose oneself in the world; it is to combine that experience with other ways of being in the world and learning how to alternate between them without imposing singularity on others in the process. It is, in short, still the lesson of Emerson and Du Bois.

What Suzuki offers us is something else. A phrase of Cavell's names it succinctly: "suppose the issue is not to win an argument . . . but to manifest for the other another way."136 Rather than arguing for or against a particular experience, what Suzuki did at his best was to manifest the possibility of a kind of experience that had been banished from many forms of modern thought. Suzuki recovered mysticism as a practice of the global sel£ His Zen would not have been possible without the history of attempts to essay the globe that preceded him. In turn, he made possible a new path for the modern global subject.

l?6 I Global Origins of the Modern Self

Extensions of Suzuki: Cage and hooks

The number of thinkers whom Suzuki influenced is, as I noted . preface, bewildering-not just because it is so impressive, but also 6

1n the 1. I · · al 1· h h' eca11se there exists very itt e crmc Iterature t at assesses 1s global im

f h d. . f h' k I h pact. In these brief extensions o t e 1scussion o is wor , ave chosen r . . to rocus

on two of his followers: John Cage, who studied directly with h' im, and

bell hooks, who was led into much broader studies of Buddhism through the range of his influence. I discuss Cage here for a few reasons: he was excellent interpreter of Suzuki's thought; his own work is often misund: stood because Suzuki has been misunderstood; he not only directly returns to the themes of practices of the global self and global aesthetics, but he also extends the scope of these practices to questions of sexuality. I discuss hooks because she shows the surprising places where an engagement with Suzuki may lead; because she adds to this account a complexity of vision around class, gender, and race that might otherwise go missing; and because she brings recent popularizations of Buddhism around mindfulness and presence into the discussion of what practices of the global self might look like today. Overall, both thinkers extend Suzuki by connecting his thoughts to the revolutionary essay tradition, suggesting why practices of the global self today will be unbearably partial unless they connect up co transforma- tions in the social world.

The Global Politics of Cage's Zen

Cage is not often read as espousing such a social vision. Perhaps not surf

prisingly, his critics have raised critiques of his work that parallel rho~; :f Suzuki's. Edward Said (in his role as a music critic), for example, saif his

Cage that "a kind of joyous freedom, jouissance, underlies eve~ ~ne °Ca e efforts in either prose, music, or silence."137 For Said, this posmons Je

th 'd f h • d " d refuse on e si e o t ose who withdraw "into self and solitu e an ist difficult political work that requires us to "speak truth to power · · · r;;ia, through irony and skepticism, mixed in with the languages_ of cheof Jived government, and dissent, trying to articulate the silent cesmnony d chat suffering and stifled experience."138 Similarly, Theodor Adorno ar~:ers by Cage had reacted to the troubles of the present like other cornP prefer me I" · h' go Thq re Y renouncmg any control of their music by t eir e : C e's b011

d 'ft d n ag to n an to refrain from intervening, in the hope that, as 1

Emptying the Global Self / 277

mot, it will be not Webern speaking, but the music itsel£ Their aim is to transform psychological ego weakness into aesthetic strength."139 And perhaps most vociferous is Fredric Jameson in Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic

of Late Capitalism:

Think, for example, of the experience of John Cage's music, in which a cluster of material sounds . . . is followed by a silence so intolerable that you cannot imagine another sonorous chord coming into existence, and cannot imagine remembering the previous one well enough to make any connection with it if it does. 140

Cage, in short, retreats (Said), embraces weakness (Adorno), and undoes our temporal capacities to comprehend the present Oameson). All of these critiques do speak some aspect of Cage's work. But there is more to Cage's opaque and difficult music and writing than these critiques would have us believe, and to understand what his work offers we will need to situate it within the context of Suzuki's global enlightenment.

In a series of remarks on Marcel Duchamp collected in the book A Year from Monday, Cage made this commentary:

There are two versions of ox-herding pictures. One concludes with the image of nothingness, the other with the image of a fat man, smiling, returning to the village bearing gifts. Nowadays we have only the second version. They call it neo-Dada. When I talked with M. D. [Marcel Duchamp] two years ago he said he had been fifty years ahead of his time. 141

There is a lot happening in these few sentences, and unpacking them can help us understand quite a bit about Cage's practice of essaying the globe.

To begin with, we need to know what the "two versions of the ox- herding pictures" are. An alternative translation, "The Ten Cow-Herding Pictures," is the final essay of Suzuki's first series of Essays in Zen Buddhism 0927). It is about a series of pictures by the twelfth-century Rinzai Zen monk Kalcuan. The pictures depict the spiritual progress of a young man. It is often argued that the ox represents our untutored mind before we have embarked on the Buddhist path. We must find the ox, tame it, and then transcend it, because it is only a nominal (or pictorial) designation for what is in fact beyond words. Suzuki notes that Kakuan's paintings are an

278 I Global Origins of the Modern Self

innovation on an earlier versio~. In the earlier version, the paintings en with an empty circle represennng the transcendence of the kar . d

. . mic cycle The second version, as Cage notes, ends with an image of a man . ·

. . returnin to the world and bearing gifts. The lesson of the second version is h g

. . t ar the point of spiritual pracnce 1s not transcendence but the Bodhisattva of returning co express one's understanding and help others on their :;h

We now know the context of the first few lines of Cage's · . . quote:

the two versions of the tale mennoned by Suzuki. Bue why does Cage 0 on co say, "Nowadays we have only the second version," chat is, what ~s it about his moment chat means that there is no longer the possibility of ending with an empty circle? To understand this, we have to go to Cage's foreword to the book. He describes there a question he has been pondering: whether or not his work has changed from a kind of inner meditation to a concern with changing the world. Building on Suzuki's teaching about the interdependence of subjects (implicitly) and Marshall McLuhan's idea that changes in technology have created a situation in which our minds extend into the world (explicitly), Cage collapsed the distinction:

To me chat means chat the disciplines, gradual and sudden (principally Oriental), formerly practiced by individuals to pacify their minds, bringing them into accord with ultimate reality, must now be practiced socially-chat is, not just inside our heads, but outside of them, in the world, where our central nervous system effectively now is. 142

This quote by Cage has been central co my formulation of "practices of the global self" and "essaying the globe." It extends Suzuki's focus on how work on the self can help one engage social concerns by showing that engaging social concerns is part of our work on the self. I do not agree

. h C ' . 1· h" d b 1· thac wit ages nme me or is technological determinism, but I o e ieve h · d "b" h · · . char e is escn mg ere precisely what happens with the modern essayi5c. . her self-transformative writing activity is directed toward a new relacionshi~ to the world as a whole. In the afterword, Cage gives chis goal a narne- "Wc Id 1· h "14 • of the or -en 1g tenmenc. 3 By saying chat only the second verswn

h d. . . h" ce chat ox- er mg pictures 1s operative these days he is repeating is sran al h · · ' · d lob · t e once solitary practices of mind are now of necessirv: social an g I

' -,, h' rea· To further understand Cage's practice, we need to ask about 15 a

. h" "th D . . fc here co tIOns 1P wt uchamp m the above citation. Cage obliquely re ers chat conversation he once had with Duchamp in which Cage cold DucharTlP

Emptying the Global Self / 279

he had discovered chance operations fifty years before Cage did. 144 It is to this remark that Duchamp responds that he was ahead of his time. For example, in 1hree Standard Stoppages, Duchamp threw a piece of cape measuring one meter three times. He then made sculptures of the resulting falls that, because they do not fall straight, demonstrate their varying "lengths." This stressed not just the relativity of measurement, but its randomness as well. In another piece called Erratum Musical, Duchamp had a trio of musicians play random notes drawn from a bag. Such operations would become central co Cage's own mode of using chance in the making of his music and writings. Originally derived from his reading of the I Ching, Cage would use different methods throughout his career to determine how his work would be structured.

Cage theorized this practice in various places. One of the most important versions is in his preface to "Lecture on the Weather," a piece composed of quotes from the works of Henry David Thoreau. Cage notes chat some might think this a contradiction because Thoreau warns us in Walden against "blind obedience to a blundering oracle." But, Cage says, this misunderstands what chance operations are:

[They] are not mysterious sources of "the right answers." They are a means of locating a single one among a multiplicity of answers, and, at the same time, of freeing the ego from its taste and memory, its concern for profit and power, of silencing the ego so that the rest of the world has a chance to enter into the ego's own experience whether that be outside or inside. 145

Cage here takes what was often implicit in Suzuki and puts it into a concrete plan for global selves. This is perhaps the most straightforward example of what such a practice would look like from the vantage of modern Zen.

On the same page, Cage opposes chance operations to empires, which are planned and willed constructions. Chance operations are about opening to the world and its multiplicity of practices while still knowing that one has to act and cannot do everything. They are meant to free us of our determi- nation but not of our necessity to act: we must return after chi~ mom~nt of freedom in order to bring gifts to the village. 146 If Duchamp_s Pr:1cn~e was Dada, then what Cage is doing here is connecting such pracnces m ~Is own work-neo-Dada-to the legacy of the ox-herding tales. ~e pracnce ~f neo-Dada, then, is nothing other than the practice 0 ~ open~ng th e self into a field of global possibilities so that the meaning of Its enlightenment

can only be to become a bearer of gifts.

280 I Global Origins of the Modern Self

This is an important context for understanding all of Cage's w d . h' k . . h ork. It is often thought that ran omness m 1s wor 1s Just t at-a kind f

pointless chaos concerned only with the freedom of the subject. We ::~~• above in Edward Said's suggestion that Cage seeks to avoid confronting t is

" ul th ·1 · f 1· d IX power and so fails to artic ate e s1 ent tesnmony o 1ve suuering and stifled experience." But another way to understand Cage's work is as a scram.blin of those very discourses of power so that those silent testimonies can b! brought to light. Cage's most famous piece, 4'33 ': can productively be seen in this way. In 4'33 ': a pianist comes out on stage and, for the duration of the piece, plays no music. 147 It is easy to understand why this would make it seem that Cage was interested in some kind of vague freedom. But the question is, what can happen when the concert scene is framed by this action? For, as Cage repeatedly stated, he was not interested in expressing something, but rather making an open "field of possibilities."148 The challenge for the global self is to choose within this field. But Cage, like Emerson, always insisted that there was no single answer. The point was to devdop

practices that could allow different answers to come forth. If one practice works, you partialize around it for a time until, like a stream of air on the body, it goes from refreshing to rancid, and you must open up again.

Cage's hope was that his work-his music, performances, lectures, and essays-would lead people to listen to things other than what had already been determined for them. Thus, when he reflected on 4'33" some years later, he noted that it had for him a political legacy and memory in a speech that he had given in high school: "It was called 'Other People Think,' and it was about our relation to the Latin American countries. What

I proposed was silence on the part of the United States, in order that we could hear what other people think, and that they don't think the way we do, particularly about us."149 And it is not a coincidence that when Cage

writes about this same moment in Em1ity i%rdr it is in the middle of rhe ".r ' "1h

discussion about Thoreau, which concludes with the following quote: e

best communion men have is in silence."150 C I h. h he most age, as noted just now, was opposed to an idea, w IC . ,5

ft · d 'th B th · fan art15C 0 en associate WI ee oven, that music was the expression° • 151 H th 'dea of art emotion. e was particularly opposed, it would seem, to e 1 co

th . f . fi . He wanted as e representation o an m nite and unfulfilled longmg. . e h . k f . h aud1enc t m O music not as the expression of an emotional state t at an

b . h al d . chose verr mem er mig t so experience, but rather as a process of un omg

emotional energies. His essay writing operated in the same way:

Emptying the Global Self / 281

When Art comes from within, which is what it was for so long doing, it be-came a thing which seemed to elevate the man who made it a-hove those who ob-served it or heard it ... But since everything's changing, art's now going in and it is of the utmost importance not to make a thing but rather to make nothing. And how is this done? Done by making something which then goes in and reminds us of nothing. 152

In other words, art is to become something that creates a space of enlight- enment for the subject. This enlightenment is not anxious; it is the calm opening to the sounds of the world that a listener of 4'33" would experi- ence. There is nothing onstage for the listener to try to re-create in hersel£ Rather, the stage is there only as an opening for the transformation of all involved. Visually on the page, these openings are transcribed right into Cage's writings.

In spite of his reputation, Cage was neither naive nor whimsical. He did not think that this openness was de facto good, only that it offered the possibility for various transformations toward justice and equality. He was fond, for example, of quoting Buckminster Fuller's remark that so long as one person in the world is hungry, we are all hungry, but the problem was that we did not all feel this hunger. (We are not, in Suzuki's terms, "transparent" to it.) In creating interactive spaces of interpenetrating selves in a general field, Cage hoped that aesthetic experience could open us to this interdependency. But it could only do so, he believed, if it abandoned the dictatorial position of proscribed experience. This was for him the very definition of the inhuman-the creation of a "Frankenstein monster," of parts stitched together by an imposing conductor figure. This practice "when concerned with humane communication only move[s] over from Frankenstein monster to dictator." 153 Within the field of communication, then, the idea was for everyone to be open to everyone and build together some other ~ossibility for living. Merely abandoning the conductor "is not a sign of identification with no matter what eventuality but simply of carelessness with regard to the outcome." 154 Like Suzuki, Cage was unfailingly precise. And he understood that any process of nonduality was not the end in itself, b~t part of an ongoing movement. Unlike Suzuki, and this is crucial, he ~id not view this as a process of a single enlightenment that then expressed itself for social good, but rather of enlightenment itself as a social process. This is one of his key innovations in this story.

282 / Global Origins of the Modern Self

It is in general important to note that while Cage learned an • Incredibl

amount from Suzuki, he did not follow his teacher to the letter S e · uzuki'

aesthetics were, in fact, of the precise Romantic variety that Cage wa d s "Z B ddh nte to get past. In a 1950 lecture on en u ism and the Arts," for exam I

Suzuki stated, "Here is the origin of poetry and of all other arts w{ e, there is a perfect identification of subject and object . . . something. m en

oves in the depths of what we might call the cosmic spirit, and it is from this movement that the utterance flows out." 155 What interested Cage in Suzuki was the philosophy of this relation of subject and world. But Cage's signal contribution was to level the difference between philosophy, experi- ence, and art: it was not, for him, that we experienced something and then communicated it in art, but, rather, that art itself was this possible communion of subject and object. As he put it with regard to Suzuki's teaching about subjectivity, an individual ego "either closes itself off from its experience ... or suppresses itself as ego and becomes open to all pos- sibilities ... What Suzuki said about this seemed, and still seems, to me directly applicable to music." 156 For Cage, Suzuki's thoughts were applicable to music, but not about music itself. His essays, like his art, were less about provoking a particular experience and more simply about opening the subject to new forms of global relation.

Cage scholarship has constantly failed to understand how he contin- ued the task of essaying the globe through his work with Suzuki. This is missed even by Cage's defenders, including Branden Joseph, who has been, in other respects, perhaps his most sophisticated reader. Joseph's work h~s been instrumental in showing both the rigor and complexity of C~g~s thought as well as in redressing the critical silence on his role in the ar~isnc avant-garde from the 1960s on. 157 Unfortunately, however, Joseph believes that the reading of Cage's fundamental concepts as signs of "irrationali~.~: mystical oneness" were, when "combined with Zen," "almost unavoidablCe.

d . ake age Whereas Joseph excuses this confusion about Zen an mes to m d h . · d b b · · h. · · 1°th Foucault an more sop 1st1cate y nngmg 1m mto conversation w k d

h C , wor an Deleuze, I think this fundamentally misunderstands bot ages . his modernity in general. The problem with Joseph's treatment of Cage is ork

• · rant framew assumption that these French thinkers provide the most 1mpor ding, It for understanding the modern condition to which Cage was respo~ laiJtlS then becomes easy to write out his Zen as unimportant to his a~cub ck has

l ·d · this 00 within that context. But if the groundwork I have at lil ki' Jue to · l'k Suzu 5• any purchase, then Cage's importance as a thinker 1s, 1 e

his global engagement.

Emptying the Global Self / 283

We can also return in this context to Jameson's critique of Cage.

Jameson's concern is that the situation of contemporary capitalism has

led to the breakdown of our active capacities to connect experience across

time and space.159 This is largely the case because of globalization-because

the "experience" of politics is no longer subjectively available in daily life,

but is rather spread out across global networks of capital. Postmodernism,

rather than seeking to subvert or at least actively engage this situation, has

come to celebrate it. This, in essence, is Jameson's reading of Cage, which is not significantly different from Adorno's: it makes an aesthetic value out

of a political failure. But consider Jameson's own response to this situation:

For neither Marx nor Lenin was socialism a matter of returning to small (and thereby less repressive and comprehensive) systems of social organization; rather, the dimensions attained by capital

in their own times were grasped as the promise, the framework, and the precondition for the achievement of some new and more comprehensive socialism. How much the more is this now the case with the even more global and totalizing space of the new world system, which demands the invention and elaboration of

an internationalism of a radically new type?160

This is precisely what Cage is doing: attempting to use new technological means to increase the capacities of the subject to understand and listen to the world around her. Given what we have seen about the actual plurality of Marx's own vision (in chapter 4), and given the notorious difficulties of Jameson's proposed solutions to this problem, one wonders if he too might have produced more integrated approaches had he learned to listen better to others-whether to Cage's music or the voices of "Third World literature.''161

Cage himself was often appropriative and not always as actively engaged with global alternatives as he might have been. Nevertheless, as Jameson's own notion of "cognitive mapping" provided us with techniques of spatial- izing the present, so Cage's music opened up new kinds of global listening.

One site in which we can see these new modes at work is Cage's own queer politics. In an essay on the relationship between Cage's silence and the closeted homosexuality of Cold War America, Jonathan Katz offers an exemplary model of reading Zen as part of Cage's practice of the global self. Katz suggests that we often read Cage's practice of silence as part of his own being silenced as a gay man. But he offers readings that allow us

to see Zen as both personally and socially liberating. For example:

284 I Global Origins of the Modern Self

In essence, Zen repositioned the closet not as an a ccornplice

repression nor a source of anxiety but as a partner in h . to it was in not talking about-and hence reifying-on , ealing;

es troubl that healing began. Hence, perhaps what made Zen so . es

. . . . attractive to Cage was us unhmgmg of the connection between bl

. . pro erns and passions. Zen provided a way to negotiate traumas b acknowledging the pain and then moving beyond or throu h . y

h bl g ~ This is not to say t at pro ems are to be ignored nor pas • s1ons smothered, but rather that they are not to become obsessively rehearsed. 162

Zen thus offers a rigorous practice beyond a standard psychoanalytic model of repression. It allows us to see silence-not talking about it-as a globally available mode of handling the burdens of psychic life imposed by social structures.

And, Katz further argues, it offers a model of social change: "My point is that if silence was, paradoxically, in part an expression of Cage's identity as a closeted homosexual during the Cold War, it was also much more than that. Silence was not only a symptom of oppression, it was also, I wane to argue, a chosen mode of resistance." 163 Also noting the speech about Latin America that I referenced above, Katz shows how silence opens up a kind of dialogic politics of humility and openness. It is, in effect, through his practices of the global self (his engagement with Zen's globalism) that Cage opened up new ways of understanding his own local practice. Through silence, his unbearable closeted identity became what bell hooks might have

called an "identity in resistance." 164 y r. rna Katz rightly hedges his claim by noting that this mode of P~ It~: And

be limited to the culturally specific moment of Cold War ~enca. izing, indeed, the history of queer politics is largely a history of public or~pand· As Yannik Thiem has noted, we are in a historical moment when forcable . b . . h i: b" I . all-too-com mg ourgeois ng ts ror queer su Jects may resu t m an . is not co p~sition o: ~ilence. 166 But here ~~in I am a pl_uralist. Thee ~~:;:;r silent or pick a posmon and say that polmcs today reqmres us to b hich modal· public and organized. The point is to learn when to rely on wh only one • umet~ f ity. As James Scott has argued, for instance, when we ass leX forms 0 k . d f 1· · · " " d r:r • • e the comP wh0 m o po incs is correct an errecnve, we ignor ffi scout, " d . ,, d h kabl 167 And Je rey ,on· every ay resistance an t eir remar e power. 0 ther h h . . than anY rciCS• as per aps argued more for broad-based organizmg d 0 f po 1

1 al mo es temporary theorist, notes not only that there are P ur

Emptying the Global Self / 285

but also chat humility and listening are fundamental to organizing. 16s These

ideas of humility and listening are also fundamental to another essayist who wrote in Suzuki's wake: bell hooks. But hooks is not just a reader of Suzuki; her work presents a significant challenge to modern Buddhism as a practice of che global self from the vantage of race, class, and gender.

bell hooks's Global Presence

Globalization is not the only thing that disappears from Foucault's account

of what has happened to practices of the self in the modern age. He also neglects the fundamental contributions of two things at the heart of bell hooks's writing career: feminism and pedagogy. The link between these two modes of practice goes all the way back to Mary Wollstonecraft. For Wollstonecraft, the problem was not that practices of the self had been lost, but that they had been denied to women. 169 This was especially the case with education.

Modern feminism has further specified that feminist pedagogy implies not just an education in ideas, but a revolution in ideas. As Adrienne Rich argues:

Perhaps this is the core of the revolutionary process, whether it calls itself Marxist or Third World or feminist or all three . . . [Ir is] a rebellion against the idolatry of pure ideas, the belief that ideas have a life of their own and float along above the heads of ordinary people-women, the poor, the uninitiated. 170

For Rich, revolution is not just about access; it is about a general trans- formation. Feminism is not, as it was for Wollstonecraft, an extension of men's rights to women. It is a calling into question the very abstraction of rights that has so often bristled against lived experience. It is a demand that thought not be extracted from life and then roughly reapplied (as in certain forms of the dialectic), but that thought become continuous with

our becoming materially equal. Similar ideas can be found in the kinds of radical pedagogy with which

I began this book: the type hinted at by Montaigne, developed by Rousseau (for men to learn the social contract), and systematized and democratized by Paolo Freire and others, including bell hooks. Freire, who could have been a chapter of this book by himself, insisted on education as the site

286 / Global Origins of the Modern Self

that mediated the coming-to-consciousness of theoretical reflection and the

praxis of revolutionary transformation. This was because he did not aim to teach people about their situation. Rather, he acted as a guide to the

situation, posing questions and spurring critical reflection through everyday

understanding. m hooks, whose respect for Freire was enormous, remained

concerned that he had imported too many ideas from the patriarchal order

into his vision of the result of this pedagogic process. Freire, she writes,

"constructs a phallocentric paradigm of liberation-wherein freedom and the experience of patriarchal manhood are always linked as though they are one and the same."172 hooks offers instead visions of freedom grounded in

a loving community of equals, not a single liberated subject. 173

hooks is known for her critiques from the angle of race and gender that are focused on the transformation of individuals and communities. As the editors of a critical volume on her work make clear, hooks's work is structured on a series of "practices" that enable "spiritual and existential enrichment" within the context of what hooks refers to as "white supremacist capitalist patriarchy."174 These practices include, but are not limited to, talking back, constructing "creative spaces," narrating and naming one's own life, theoretical claims that allow us to take distance on the pain of experience so as to reshape it, and a writing style that essays an engagement beyond academic confines.175 Like Du Bois, Senghor, and Farron, she thickens the account of this book through her reminder that practices of the global self will necessarily change depending on where one finds oneself in the global order. Beyond them, she enlarges this perspective through her reflections on her position as black woman in the United States of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. More specifically here, she brings this position and this set of methods into her engagement with American Buddhism.

hooks's interest in Buddhism began through Suzuki's influence, espe- cially as embodied in the poet and essayist Gary Snyder, whom she met at a poetry event in college. hooks does not seem to have followed too deeply into Suzuki's Zen, however, as she mainly references the Vietnamese monk and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh and the notorious wild man of Tibetan-American Buddhism, Chogyam Trungpa, as her Buddhist teachers. ~evertheless, the very _fact of her interest in Buddhism begins with Suzuki's mflue~ce. He_r work _is yet another testament to the double globality of Suzuki s practices, which took in the world in their formation and also had an extensive worldly influence .

. ~ile ~ooks's. later works have tended to present Buddhism more or less m lme with mainstream mindfulness approaches, her early 1990s essays

Emptying the Global Self / 287

and interviews in Tricycle magazine represent an important critical voice on both the limits and potentials of Buddhist practice.176 In "Waking Up to Racism," for example, hooks takes on the fallacy that becoming enlightened, or "waking up," means that one becomes free of racism. Enlightenment, she suggests, would be more a matter of waking up to the fact of racism, that is, to the fact that if one lives with the conventional truths of a white supremacist culture, shades of racism will inflect one's attitude, regardless of one's race. What this necessitates, then, is the ongoing double movement of critiquing both institutional and personal racism. This, too, is a practice of the global self. It is about acknowledging that who we are, as we are, is racist, and that overcoming racism requires both a work on ourselves and a work on our cultures and institutions. To think that a moment of satori can end one's inner racism is as foolish as thinking that it could have ended Japan's imperial war.

This waking up also has specific effects on one's practices. hooks's essay represents a brief but sincere engagement with the question of the ego. For both Suzuki and Cage, a practice of the global self required the dismantling of the ego so as to open up the individual and the world to their shared transparency. hooks notes the problematic relation to race this inspires in some of her liberal, white Buddhist friends: "They are so attached to the image of themselves as nonracists that they refuse to see their own racism or the ways in which Buddhist communities may reflect racial hierarchies. This is made more problematic where the emphasis in predominately white communities is on letting go of the sel£"1n The problem with simply letting go of the ego as a mantra is that it does not recognize the fact of difference in subjectivity. How could it be the same for Emerson, who feels secure in his potential for self-reliance, as it is for Du Bois, who feels his self already split by the racism of his culture? Overcoming the ego is simply not the same for someone who has been told they do not have a meaningful ego

to begin with. What hooks suggests, instead, is that one think through the precise

locations in which a Buddhist practice might take place for a black woman from rural Kentucky, such as herself. And that begins to look like the difficult tarrying with two truths: to assert at once that there is a world beyond egos and racism and that nevertheless, that is not the case with our conventional world. And what hooks finds in this process is not so different from what Du Bois had polysemically called "the gift [German for poison] of second- sight." hooks writes: "It is often racism that allows white comrades to feel comfortable with their 'control' and 'ownership' of Buddhist thought and

288 / Global Origins of the Modern Self

practice in the United States. They have much to learn, then, fro b h ·1· . . d rn those people of color who em race um1 1ty m practice an relinquish th ,

d " Th' · r: h ·1· h ks e egos need to be recognize . 1s capacity ror um1 1ty, oo avers i " . f h ·1· ,, h h . h , s Part of an entrenched practice o um1 1ty t at as roots m t e African Am .

d Afi Ch . . . i7s 'T' • h 1 h erican experience an ro- nstian1ty. .10 tie t ese comp ex t reads to h . get er,

then, hooks accepts the values of reducing the ego, of humility, of mindful- ness, and of compassion, but she denies the claim that the path to these is-or ought to be-the same for every subject. Black people in the United States have been told that they are not subjects with egos, but pliable bodi es. If Buddhism is to be a meaningful practice within that historical context, it must be attentive to the resistant subjectivities formed in this process.

This analysis for hooks is also intersectional with the question of gender:

Ten years ago if you talked about humility, people would say, I feel as a woman I've been humble enough, I don't want to try to erase the ego-I'm trying to get an ego. But now, the achievements that women have made in all areas of life have brought home the reality that we are as corruptible as anybody else. That shared possibility of corruptibility makes us confront the realm of ego in a new way. We've gone past the period when the rhetoric of victimization within feminist thinking was so complete that the idea that women had agency, which could be asserted in destructive ways, could not be acknowledged. 179

Part of what makes hooks such an engaging essayist is that her critiq~es range in all directions. On the one hand, she critiques Buddhism for 1~5

unwillingness to meet subjects where they are. In this interview, she 15

especially suspicious of American Buddhism's willingness to countenan~e h h cr1-sexual misconduct between teachers and students. On the ot er, s e f

tiques feminism's unwillingness to see the value of Buddhism's critique 0

the ego. Her work is radically pluralist at such moments, as it refuse~ r: hypostasize a culture and looks both for what is positive and negative 10

constituted concept. al . so But hooks is not always so pluralist in her writing style. There is In

1 h . . · n· love, at east one concept t at seems wholly good in her 1magmat1o · d anY her interview with Tricycle, hooks goes so far as to declare that beyon a particular critical affiliation she views as herself as being "steadfastl~i°n ro path about love." She explains: "To commit to love is fundament lyrure

d. a cu commit to a life beyond dualism. That's why love is so sacre in

Emptying the Global Self / 289

of domination because it simply begins to erode your dualisms: dualisms of black and white, male and female, right and wrong." 180 As we have seen, however, going beyond dualism has no necessary relation to justice. This is apparent even in hooks's own claims about the problems of assuming that enlightenment means being beyond racism. Love is thus called on to do an incredible amount of work in hooks's thinking. Not only must it push us beyond dualism, but it must also lead us to "commitment and involvement with the world." 181 Love, which is of course itself an endlessly changing and mutating concept (capable of bringing out the most tortured parts of our nature, capable of creating dualisms between couples and others, and capable of extending beyond any possible scope of engagement, as in Augustinian Christianity), is forced by hooks to simply be the catchword for the thing that heals the world. But love, of course, is but one word with many mean- ings, some of whose logics aid us to bear the burden of global living, and others that rend our frames of global competence.

There is also the lingering issue here, in both Cage and hooks, about what we might call their "unreconstituted Buddhism." Like many in the West, they have confused Buddhist scripture with Buddhist practice and effectively ignored the complex lived realities of Buddhism. 182 This has often meant relying on specific Buddhist notions such as nonduality and assuming that they represent the universal claims of Buddhist philosophers. This is far from the case. Indeed, much of Buddhism relies precisely on a distinc- tion between conditioned existence and the nonconditioned achievement of nirvana. The idea that "samsara is nirvana" and other recurring cliches do certainly exist in Buddhist history, but they are heavily debated. 183 The argument I have made in this part of the book is that we need not insist on some more authentic Buddhism elsewhere so much as begin to under- stand modern Buddhism as part of an ongoing, dynamic series of attempts to essay the globe.

By reconstituting some of this history of Buddhism, we can see what is innovative and engaging in Suzuki, Cage, and hooks at the same time that we appreciate the historical limits of their vision. This second step is crucial lest we fall prey to continued exoticizations and Oriental imaginings of some pure Buddhist culture, which will produce unbearable identities for Buddhists and others. Such a vision of Buddhism has allowed many in the West to ignore the ongoing Buddhist massacres of Muslims in Myanmar, while also imprisoning Tibetan Buddhists in a peaceful identity that many argue has hindered their ability to effectively respond to Chinese imperial~sm there.194 This does not mean, however, that a reconstituted global Buddhism

290 / Global Origins of the Modern Self

lacks effective messages for today's world. So long as we b . ear 1n . this is an evolving tradition that should be critiqued as an hrnind that

f . 1 d h y ot er, ~ also extract some o 1ts essons to exten t e domain of p . e can ractices f

global self, such as Suzuki, Cage, and hooks offer. 0 the

One final practice that hooks's work has increasingly fi ocused on.

presence. At first glance, presence may seem like the opposite of 18 c · , · d' a global practice. How can rocusmg on ones Imme late surroundings conn

to the rest of the world? But this is precisely what we have s ect _one een since

Montaigne: that the rest of the world is deeply part of one's immedi' ate sur- roundings-whether that is in books, clothing, spices, commodities 'd

, 1 eas, or people themselves. The general response to this condition has been to develop practices that allow one to extend thought into new spaces-whether by skepticism, teleology, revolution, pluralism, or emptiness. hooks, now following more Thich Nhat Hanh than Suzuki, suggests mindful presence as a means of finding the global through immediacy, but without abandon- ing conceptual thought.

In a recent collection of essays largely centered around her decision to return home to rural Kentucky, hooks writes, "Walking, I will establish my presence, as one who is claiming the earth, creating a sense of belonging, a culture of place."185 hooks's point is not to ignore the global as she returns, but rather to use the local as a site through which she can come to terms with how she has been produced as a subject. It is essaying the local that allows her to understand her place in the world: "I had to return to those v ky h'll l . . h h ,,,s6 In some 1'.entuc 1 s to rec aim my sense of belongmg on t e eart • . . ways, hooks's claim here is a kind of weak ecology of the land. But it ~s also about reconstituting the ways in which the globe produced her loc f.

. . h "h power o In returnmg, she found that her identity is bound up Wit t e .

. . • " 1his snu· geographical location, of ancestral imprints, of racialized 1dentitY· ry

. call c " h fi all c. es on recove anon s ror a psyc ological practice that sped c Y iocus .. 5 chat fi · · · · · "187 "T' h b ble idennne rom racist v1ct1m1zat1on. .10 overcome t e un eara ned to l bal d . . h h •fi ctices attU go mo ernmes ave produced requires sue spec1 c pra . Rakhine,

the present realities that one finds in Appalachia as much as in London, or Kinshasa.