In posting past scholarship, I’ve promised a few pieces that deal with Buddhism, which I’ve ended up discussing at various stages in my own cultivation. Of these, this excerpt is the most technical, and assumes the most background. I recognize that outside of the very (excessively) dense conversation I was having in my doctoral dissertation, some of this may make little sense. I crave your indulgence, though, as it seems possible that something useful for one person or another may be buried in this or that fold of this reticulated and decussated edifice.
Herewith a portion of my doctoral dissertation, starting at page 111 (the beginning of Chapter Four):
CHAPTER FOUR
Being, Nothing, and the Text of Scripture
Absolute selfhood opens up as nonobjectifiable nothingness in the conversion that takes place within personality. Through that conversion every bodily, mental, and spiritual activity that belongs to person displays itself as a play of shadows moving across the stage of nothingness. [. . .] It is the field commonly seen as “outermost” by the personal self and referred to as the external world actually present in the here and now, ever changing. [. . .] The “outer world” emerges here as a self-realization of nonobjectifiable nothingness, or, rather, makes itself present such as it is, in oneness with nothingness.
The field of true human existence opens up beyond the outer and the inner, at a point where the “shadowy man” is in oneness with absolute selfhood. We have here an absolute self-identity. Thinking, feeling, and action are, on every occasion, entirely illusory appearances with nothing behind them, the shadowy heart and mind of the shadowy man.Nishitani 73
It should, perhaps, be surprising that Zen practitioner and philosopher Keiji Nishitani, a chief representative of what has come to be called the Kyoto School of Japanese philosophy, so neatly retraces the quintessentially modern and Western representation of the human subject as found in Coleridge’s corpus and the related interventions of Nietzsche and Artaud, along with the comments of Heidegger, de Man, and Derrida. Nishitani’s discussion of the “play of shadows” by which humans perceive as phenomenal the “bodily, mental, and spiritual activity” which originates in the human subject corresponds closely to Coleridge’s discussion of origination. Going beyond Nietzsche’s statement about art, Nishitani describes all “Thinking, feeling, and action” as “illusory” insofar as they are themselves phenomena with regard to the “shadowy man.” This “shadowy man” is another name for the self as absolute subject, prior to what Coleridge calls the “act of self-duplication” which founds the conscious being of the human subject. Nishitani describes a conscious retracing of this origination as the “conversion” which introduces “absolute selfhood” once again into the consciousness. Like Artaud, and with reference to Plato as well as Nietzsche, Nishitani’s practice is self-consciously theatrical, taking as the goal of Buddhist practice and philosophy the freedom of the human subject from prior representations. This convergence of thought seems to be of just the sort predicted in Coleridge’s discussion of the universal philosophical and religious affirmation (even underlying apparent denial) of original sin in Aids to Reflection. Nishitani’s remark therefore serves as a further example of the telescoping of global and social concerns at work in Coleridge’s thought. Perhaps more importantly, it also serves as a step in examining to what extent Coleridge’s representation of the human subject and his discussion of original sin may actually reach beyond a parochially Christian or Western discourse.
The correspondence of Nishitani’s text with Coleridge’s corpus is less surprising than it might be, as Nishitani’s Religion and Nothingness throughout represents his Zen practice in terms intelligible to the Western tradition, with special attention to developments in Continental philosophy. There is in fact a steadily growing (though very uneven) interaction of Western philosophy with Buddhism throughout the past two centuries. Nietzsche’s Antichrist at one point addresses the relationship of Buddhism to Christianity under the very late Nietzsche’s critical reading of both religions. Significantly, Nietzsche compares the two in terms of the relationship between representation of the subject and the theology of sin: “Buddhism is the only really positive religion to be found in history, even in its epistemology (which is strict phenomenalism)—it no longer speaks of the ‘struggle with sin’ but fully recognising the true nature of reality it speaks of the ‘struggle with pain’” (17). Nietzsche (whose access to Buddhist works would have been extremely limited, likely to poor translations of derivative Sanskrit texts, and whose understanding of Eastern thought principally comes through Schopenhauer) does not have a particularly close understanding of Buddhism, but he does identify the difference in emphasis between Western philosophy and Buddhism reasonably well.
The case of Buddhism also occasions a considerable refinement in Coleridge’s analysis of the universality of original sin as a religious doctrine or philosophical exigency. “In that most strange phænomenon, the religious atheism of the Buddhists,” he says in Aids to Reflection,
with whom God is only universal matter considered abstractedly from all particular forms—the Fact [of original sin] is placed among the delusions natural to man, which, together with other superstitions grounded on a supposed essential difference between right and wrong, the sage is to decompose and precipitate from the menstruum of his more refined apprehensions! Thus in denying the Fact, they virtually acknowledge it. (188-9)
Coleridge’s understanding of Buddhism is very imprecise. What he grasps, along with Nietzsche, is that Buddhism completes what Coleridge’s “rhetorical self-containment” prevents in his representation of the human subject. This added perspective, in fact, helps to clarify the stakes in what Christensen calls “the infelicitous reliance of the absolute on the fall for its very manifestation,” and how Coleridge’s abridgement of the difference between creatureliness and fallenness complicates his strivings toward orthodoxy.
“Dependent Origination” and the Subject
The Zen-derived philosophy described by Nishitani, or the somewhat different Amida Buddhism (also called Jodo Shinshu) of Takeuchi Yoshinori, does begin with the insight that the desire through which the human self originates is moribund—the same insight encoded ambivalently in “Kubla Khan,” more clearly and personally in “The Pains of Sleep,” and confessed openly in Coleridge’s effort to articulate a Biblical theology of original sin. Takeuchi criticizes “neo-Kantianism—along with the liberal theology based on it” for being “fettered to the immanentism of human reason and hence [. . .] only impeding our view of that abyss of death and sin and nihility that opens up under our very feet as the fate of being human” (72-3). In Takeuchi’s writing, the “turn” toward what Derrida calls the “invisible interior” or Nishitani the “shadowy man” is represented as the subject’s becoming conscious of “dependent origination.” Takeuchi suggests that this conversion is often described in the “fundamental experience of artists and poets,” who in their self-conscious acts of representation may “experience an immediate embodiment of the dynamism of world and body, other, and life prior to the distinction of subject and object” (74). Takeuchi describes “dependent origination” as follows:
the subject that, seen from the world, is part of the world, constructs its own being-in-the-world co-dependently and correlatively with the world, and yet does so as its own activity. [. . .] We may liken it to dreaming: when we dream, we live in correlatedness with the world of the dream and, through the phenomenal identity of dreamer and dream, keep the dream alive; but as soon as we become aware of this correlatedness, we have already awoken. (80-1)
Takeuchi extends this similitude of “dreaming,” as though to accommodate reading with Coleridge, when discussing the consequences of a developed consciousness of “dependent origination”: “at the moment one awakens, the various sufferings that troubled the world of sleep are awakened to in the realization, ‘it was only a dream; I was sleeping’” (91). Takeuchi writes as though to suggest a Buddhist solution to the problem depicted in “The Pains of Sleep,” proposing that the conditions for the construction of world and self “are only grasped in their primary sense when their essential determination is sought in terms of their extinction, when they are seen as past essences, as things that were.”
Coleridge’s expectation (which he shares with the Western tradition in metaphysics) is that the erasure he calls “scientific scepticism” has for its goal “certainty”—just as Derrida suggests when describing the metaphysical work as that “break with the domain of empirical history [. . .] whose aim is reconciliation with the hidden essence of the empirical.” Takeuchi, on the other hand, sets forth a Buddhist practice whose retracing of the constitution of the self has in view, not a recovery of antecedent unity, but its more complete erasure; it seeks to obliterate the trace, also, by counting the subject, self, spirit, sin, all among the phenomena of causation. The subject having awakened to the understanding that something—the subject, the self, Coleridge’s “I AM” both personally and globally, as self or as deity—has originated through moribund desire, the practice of disassociation from such desire should cause, not a return to that self, but a ceasing from those very perturbations of spirit which Coleridge envisioned in the prose introduction to “Kubla Khan” as “images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast” (43). Where Coleridge exclaims “but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!” over his apparent incapacity to remember the historical, religious, and poetic vision which the dream-vision represents, and is tormented by the memory of dreams and his apparent incapacity to regain his self-composure in “The Pains of Sleep,” Takeuchi’s Buddhism attempts to describe everything except the present phenomenon not only as originating (conceived) within the human subject but as therefore essentially illusory, to be awakened from and not to.
The Convergence: Coleridge, Artaud, Mishima
From Coleridge’s representation of the human subject, in view of the unhappy coincidence of original sin (the origin of the fallen human) with origination through repetition of the “I AM” (the unity of human and divine creativity), two paths forward seem to become one: the Western path of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida as exemplified by Artaud converges with the Eastern path as marked by Buddhism, whose singular distance from the Western metaphysical tradition has yet to be rendered fully intelligible. Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, a product of the Shinto-Buddhist culture of Imperial Japan whose postwar writings were among the most read in the West, serves as a convenient reference point. Like Coleridge, Nietzsche, and Artaud, Mishima’s works place the self-representing work of the human subject in the foreground. In Sun & Steel, Mishima seems to echo Artaud’s anxiety over his body’s being stolen by the priority of text:
Interestingly enough, my stubborn refusal to perceive my body was itself due to a beautiful misconception in my idea of what the body was. I did not know that a man’s body never shows itself as “existence.” But as I saw things, it ought to have made itself apparent, clearly and unequivocally, as existence. It naturally followed that when it did show itself unmistakably as a terrifying paradox of existence—as a form of existence that rejected existence—I was as panic-stricken as though I had come across some monster, and loathed it accordingly. It never occurred to me that other men—all men without exception—were the same.
[. . .] Never dreaming that the body existing in a form that rejected existence was universal in the male, I set about constructing my ideal hypothetical physical existence by investing it with all the opposite characteristics. And since my own, abnormal bodily existence was doubtless a product of the intellectual corrosion of words, the ideal body—the ideal existence—must, I told myself, be absolutely free from any interference by words. (Mishima 11)
The “ideal body” in this passage corresponds to both Artaud’s “body without organs” and the “absolute subject” in Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria. It represents the hoped-for unity prior to the discursive formation of the self, the “act of self-duplication” which in Coleridge’s work is both creation and fall. The effort to construe the human subject in this way, in Mishima as in Coleridge, leads to “a terrifying paradox of existence” which leaves him “panic-stricken” in the face of a universal failing: “other men—all men without exception—were the same.” Mishima’s response to this, as revealed in his own political and personal preoccupations, has the Buddhist pattern set out by Takeuchi. As Shu Kuge has helpfully summarized,
The “body” in Mishima’s thought is a metonymy for “experience” that is not yet translated into discursive language. Mishima once clamored: Why don’t people realize the importance of the depth of the surface? The surface is the depth; in other words, the surface is not a representation or reflection of what is hidden beneath. The surface is everything. (Kuge 66)
For Mishima, the “terrifying paradox” of “the body existing in a form that rejected existence” (the very crux of Nietzsche’s assault on Christianity, and his critique of Buddhism, in The Antichrist) is ultimately resolved, beyond the naïveté of simple oppositions, by an insistence on the surface—on the very skin itself—as the phenomenal being, here, now, than which nothing else can be meaningfully represented. This ultimately meant, for Mishima, that only the act of ritual suicide by cutting into the skin with a sharp blade, only at the peak of physical perfection, and only at the historical moment when he (vainly) hoped his public political act would lead to revolution, could be meaningful.
The example of Mishima thus presses the urgency of the problems which plague Coleridge’s representation of the human subject. In collocating “Kubla Khan” and “The Pains of Sleep,” and in classifying each as a “psychological curiosity,” Coleridge broaches the subject of madness and the more serious problem of damnation. The moral and spiritual, as well as the epistemological, dimensions of his theorizing of the human subject are at stake. The discourse of Western metaphysics from Coleridge’s time forward is increasingly studded with what Derrida calls a “tradition of mad poets” such as Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and Artaud; and what is perhaps more significant (for, as Derrida says, “Artaud is not the son of Nietzsche. And even less so of Hölderlin.”) is the exemplary significance which the interrogators of that discourse have assigned to these works. Nietzsche, Foucault, Heidegger, de Man, and Derrida, to name but a few, have extensive recourse to these “mad poets,” whose primary distinction is the radical pressure they bring to bear on the language of metaphysics in their efforts to represent the “terrifying paradox” that Coleridge has also found.
For Coleridge, however, seppuku is not an option; neither is the extremity of Artaud, for whom “God is [. . .] a sin against the divine” and “the essence of guilt is scato-theological” (Derrida “La parole” 185). Coleridge’s representation of the origination of the human subject through repetition of the “I AM” of God’s creation creates a challenge for him, and for his readers, precisely because it does clash with his representation of the origination of the human subject as sinful through moribund desire. That is, whether in the context of the post-Christian West or of Shinto-Buddhist Japan, it is possible to completely conflate the subject’s creaturely being with the subject’s moribundity. At one extreme of the modern Western tradition, one may join Artaud in rejecting the repetition intrinsic to the discursive formation of the self, especially as that repetition comes to be the basis for knowledge of God and to be associated with the moribundity of human desire. On the other hand, one may carefully disregard, as Mishima does, “what is hidden beneath,” and attempt to signify only by and concerning the surface, the flesh of human being. The two seem to meet, however, in the fulfillment of the horrible expectations described in “The Pains of Sleep.” Coleridge, who makes an intellectual effort to reconcile himself to a Biblically orthodox confession of Christianity, continues to represent within his works the consequences of conflating the Creator/creature difference with the creature/fallen difference, confusing the origination of the human being as creature with the origination of the fallen human self.