Can Reality Be Wrong?
The conclusion of my critique of Žižek's critique of religion, Buddhism, and quantum physics
Before I look into Slavoj Žižek’s bizarre views on Buddhism and quantum physics – which he contorts to support his “real materialist” viewpoint – I want to reiterate, again, why I find this critique (which concludes today) necessary.
One reader asked in the comments: Should we take Žižek seriously since he doesn’t seem to take himself seriously? If Žižek, as a Lacanian, finds an “irreducible gap between signifier and signified (spoken and written word)” where “everything is just another hysterical show played out within arbitrary games of language,” then why not “take it as such and just enjoy the Žižek-show like true perverds [sic] and idiots”?
My answer is that, yes, Žižek presents his ideas in a joking / jester-like manner, but we all know that the joke is actually a sophisticated instrument, a psychological tool. Žižek’s Vaudevillian shuffle is strategic, calculated. For the many atheist/materialist Leftists who follow Žižek, just the fact that he offers this convoluted (in fact, once unpacked, nonsensical) refutation of idealism / Buddhism / transcendence gives them something to hang onto. As a materialist, your ego and sense of identity get trapped in your identification with physicalism / materialism. It is painful to address this and to change it, so you seek, instead, confirmation of your ideological biases.
Many Leftists hold onto atheism and materialism as a badge of their existential courage and rebellion: It proves you aren't taken in by any false solace, any delusional possibility of New Age transcendence or reincarnation – of soul, spirit, divinity. You have accepted the hard truth about the hard world: That we live, as Bertrand Russell put it, in a “universe in ruins,” or what Žižek keeps calling, via Hegel, “the night of the world.”
This is why I feel it is worth the time to smash apart his views of Buddhism and physics. And I mean to do it with love, as I still appreciate Žižek’s ideas in various areas. I admit to finding this latest tangled tome an enjoyable read, even as I push back against it.
I strongly agree with Žižek – relevant to this theme – that Eastern-tinged New Age mysticism has become the underlying ideology of contemporary Capitalism or Neoliberalism. This (Burning Man / Vipassana / psychedelic / etc) worldview allows people to continue to participate in the “Capitalist game” because they can access a realm of inner peace and (apolitical) detachment (Google, Amazon, and Facebook train their workers in “mindfulness,” and so on). This is where I also struggle with the neo-spiritual focus on personal healing – while I agree that healing is crucial. Perhaps all of us have been traumatized by the psychological and social/economic structures of monotheism / Capitalism / imperialism which we have internalized. But healing is a never-ending process. In a fragile mortal body, you can never reach a fully healed state. The focus on personal healing can become a way to postpone political activism, perpetuating a system of domination, oppression, and exploitation.
But I disagree with Žižek’s oft-restated idea that Buddhism is more likely to lead to some kind of “soft Fascism” than atheism or Christianity. I see no evidence for this. Both religious and atheist / Communist regimes can commit horrific acts. It seems, instead, that all societies – whether religious, atheist, or agnostic – can go off the rails and commit psychotic atrocities (as we now see in still-secular, still-“Democratic” Israel). What prevents this are many factors that fall outside of the atheist/religious dichotomy. The most effective movements for peaceful transformation often have a religious underpinning – such as the Civil Rights movement led by Martin Luther King in the US, or Gandhi’s satyagraha movement in India.
I agree that Žižek is best appreciated as an existential comedian, somewhat in the spirit of modernist literary writers I love, such as the super-cantankerous Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard, the absurdist Polish playwright Witkacy, or the grumpy Rumanian aphorist E.M. Cioran. In Christian Atheism, for example, “the Elvis of philosophy” writes:
My reply to the big question “Why is there something and not nothing?” is: because something is a failed nothing… So in some sense there is only nothing and not something – but, as we learned from quantum mechanics, this nothing or void is not totally empty, it is full of wave oscillations, and for something to emerge out of nothing, the “nothing” should be somehow blocked, barred, not allowed to find peace in its flat zero-state. So where does this barrier come from? My speculative conjecture is that it is not a mysterious something, it is another form of the Nothing itself – the pure flat nothing, not the nothing full of virtual wave oscillations. (We find here a strange echo of the Kabalah notion that, prior to creating the world (our reality), in a kind of radical self-contraction god had to create nothing itself as the space for new reality.) Reality thus emerges as an “incontinence of the void” (the title of one of my books taken from Samuel Becket), it emerges because a barrier prevents the void to rest in itself. The word “incontinence” is here well-chosen: reality is an excrement of the divine void, and humans themselves, the (for us and till now, at least) top of creation, as Luther put it, fell out of god’s anus.
As far as I can see, there is little meaning to this, beyond a perverse Lacanian jouissance for those who wish to equate the whole of our human reality with poop. A grim, oddly religious vision! And, as the Buddha himself said, “As perceived, so appears.”
In his most recent polemic against Buddhism (“Why Boddhisatva is a Fake”), Žižek writes:
Buddha was agnostic, not interested in any higher spiritual reality: all that exists is the interconnected non-substantial flow of phenomena beneath which there is no deep substantial divine ground but just the Void. But it is interesting to note Buddhism, which originally dispensed with all institutional ritual and focused solely on the individual’s enlightenment and the end of suffering, irrespective of all dogmatic and institutional frames, ended up clinging to the most mechanical and firmly entrenched institutional hierarchic frame, and simultaneously in a world conceived as full of spiritual entities…
What, then, is already wrong with the starting point, the Hinayana version of Buddhism? Its flaw is precisely that to which the Mahayana version reacts, its symmetrical reversal: in striving for my own Enlightenment, I regress into egotism in my very attempt to erase the constraints of my Self.
When Žižek proposes that, for the Buddha, “all that exists is the interconnected non-substantial flow of phenomena,” this is painfully inaccurate, a kind of chopped-up word-salad. For Buddhism, the basis of reality is primordial awareness, luminosity, “the fundamental nature of Mind,” beyond dualism and division, inherently paradoxical. Žižek misses this when he writes: “In contrast to Western individualism, Buddhism advocates a holistic approach: my well-being depends on the well-being of all others around me, but also on the balanced exchange with nature.”
From what I understand, this is also mistaken. While Buddhism consists of a philosophy with a dialectical approach to reasoning rooted in a proven technique of esoteric development, it also developed an exoteric – public-facing, devotional, moralist – aspect to it, like many religions (as well as the societal structures that Žižek mentions). From the esoteric perspective, there is no “well-being” nor even “nature” to balance out. These are projections of mind, which ultimately rests, untroubled and unperturbed, by its projections – just as waves and ripples do not affect the water molecules which make up the ocean.
Similarly, Žižek makes a mistake when he writes:
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