Chapter 7: Renouncing Violence

Without a strategy to dam the flood of metaphysical desire in internal mediation, the waters of modernity will continue to thwart safe passage. For then, our only options would be Holderlinian retreat or intoxicated mimetic frenzy. To chart a middle way between the Scylla of escapism and Charybdis of delirium, we must chart a course of internal mediation that does not inevitably crash on the reefs of metaphysical desire and mimetic rivalry. We must find strategies to be engaged with society yet remain a degree of sobriety.

Recall, the necessary conditions to be mediated by someone – the precondition to metaphysical desire and mimetic rivalries – are threefold. The rival needs to be proximate. We need to consider the rival as metaphysically autonomous. And we need to feel a sense of shame.

The Holderlinian proposal tackles the problem through proximity: be close to Christ and be distant from all other humans. But what about changing the two other conditions? Why do we feel shame and seek metaphysical autonomy in the first place?

Girard’s investigation into the origin of shame proceeds as follows. Because of our natural tendency towards pride, a tendency particularly inflamed in the past few centuries without the restraint of religion, we readily attribute metaphysical autonomy to humans. Reality, self-sufficiency, and autonomy, can be and have been achieved by people we think; it is an ideal we, as humans, can reasonably aim at. But in the “solitude of [our] consciousness”[1], Girard describes, we discover through first-hand experience that we ourselves are clearly not metaphysically autonomous. We are only mortals after all. (Here, we can add – alongside the immanent and social reasons for the impossibility of metaphysical autonomy – a theological reason. For Christians, metaphysical autonomy is reserved for God not man.) Shame, then, Girard argues is the violent “contrast between this marvelous promise [of metaphysical autonomy] and the brutal disappointment inflicted by [human] experience.”[2] What sustains shame and renders it even less bearable is the fact that we believe this fate to be uniquely our own – the deceitful character of metaphysical desire. Because we don’t have access to others’ intimate experience but only to their outward appearance, we falsely believe that they, at least the ones who are wealthy recipients of esteem, are metaphysically autonomous. Of course, this only serves to further exacerbate our sense of shame and fuel our quest for metaphysical autonomy.

Notably, in this explanation, shame, despite being depicted as the “original sin”[3], isn’t primary. It is pride, the personal yearning for metaphysical autonomy, which generates expectations in conflict with reality that creates shame. Girard elaborates: “what impoverishes the ego is the very desire to be that ego — the desire for the kind of narcissism that is never ours but can be seen radiating from the other to whom we enslave ourselves."[4] The good news, then, is that shame isn’t part of our human constitution but merely a byproduct of pride. Furthermore, pride can be diminished through the process of conversion.

Despite its Christian connotations, conversion is not an experience reserved for the religious but simply the process of becoming disillusioned with the promise of metaphysical autonomy. There are certainly Christian conversions, like that of Augustine, which are Girardian conversions. But Girard uses the term more broadly to describe “a liberation from desire.”[5] Seeing through the vanity of metaphysical autonomy, one naturally renounces the futile violence within mimetic rivalries, develops an identification and love for the other as false differences diminish, and is even imbued with a newfound “creative energy.” [6] Post-conversion, or so Girard makes it seem, we can continue to engage deeply with society without being trapped in the pernicious games of metaphysical desire. But if it is possible to remove or, at least, greatly tame our pride and shame, why is the Holderlinian option offered at all?

Conversion, while indeed plausible is, for three reasons, unreproducible. First, the conditions for conversion are extremely specific. While necessary, it is not sufficient for the desirous subject to just intellectually comprehend the impossibility of metaphysical autonomy. Girard explains: this will only encourage a deceitful “sense of having achieved such victory.” Even “the slightest degree of progress” would additionally require the delusion of metaphysical autonomy to be “vanquished on the most intimate level of experience.” Furthermore, this experience “must succeed in collapsing ... our ‘ego’, our ‘personality’, our ‘temperament’, and so on.”[7] That is to say, conversion relies on a rare experience that fundamentally changes what we conceive the self is or could be.

Second, the conditions for conversion cannot be pursued directly. What is necessary to produce such a strong, life-changing experience is a “fall.” We must utterly fail at securing our cherished metaphysical autonomy in, as Girard puts it, “the trials that desire obliges us to suffer.”[8] Since the fall is defined by, above all, failure, it cannot be pursued directly. It is not as if one can work towards a fall in hopes that it will lead to conversion for then it would cease to have the necessary destabilizing shock. Instead, the fall must result from a genuine and intense metaphysical desire that is inevitably thwarted.

Third, even when all the conditions for conversion are met, it is still, to some degree, up to chance. Girard’s discussion on the possibility of reconciliation between rivals – a corollary if not subsidiary experience to conversion – proves illuminating. “This process is possible, but it is not under our control. We are immersed in mimetism. Some are lucky enough to have had good models and to have been educated in the possibility of taking distance. Others have had the bad luck to have had poor models. We do not have the power to decide; the models make the decisions for us.”[9] In other words, even when all the conditions of conversion and reconciliation are in place, we are still left with a choice: to deepen our pride or renounce it, to enact violence on the rival or to seek reconciliation. Unfortunately, this choice is not completely up to us and will be determined, at least in large part, by the models we have been exposed to.

It should now be clear why conversion and the escape from mimetism is a path only for lucky “geniuses and saints.”[10] Its irreproducibility prevents it from being a reliable antidote. Therefore, what seemed to be an easy Christian solution to the Girardian problem is no longer available. The hopeful line of thinking went as such: our original sin, shame, is due to our misplacement of pride. Thus, we need only to redirect our gaze towards the rightful recipient of pride – God, who alone is metaphysically autonomous – to resolve our shame. The problem, however, is that one can be Christian without experiencing Girardian conversion. (And it is not like being Christian makes conversion any more reproducible.) In other words, one can attribute metaphysical autonomy to and love God all they want, but until they become disillusioned about metaphysical autonomy in the human realm – the outcome of Girardian conversion – they will continue to experience shame and be seduced by metaphysical desire as soon as they come in contact with society. The first commandment to direct one’s sights towards God is incomplete without the tenth commandment to divert one’s gaze away from others. Due to the irreproducibility of conversion, Girard cannot offer any more advice, even to the God-loving Christian, than he already has in his praise of Holderlin: stay away from others, imitate Christ.

Our quest to rescue internal mediation within modernity, has led us to explore all three conditions for metaphysical desire – shame, pride, and proximity – to no avail. Within Girard, it seems that to the extent one accepts his psychological, anthropological, and theological descriptions, one must also abide by his eschatological prescriptions. However, our journey is not for naught, for we have outlined what the solution must look like. Since pride and shame can be tamed, if not completely abolished through conversion, we only have to find a way to make conversion systematic to uncover a way to engage with the world without spiraling into delirium. To make conversion – the removal of pride and shame – reproducible, we first have to reproduce a deeper explanation of pride and shame than what Girard has to offer. To the Buddhism of David Loy, we must now turn.

7.1 How do you Reproduce a Triangle?

The existential sense of shame that has taken central place in our discussion is, so Loy argues, “the most important concept in Buddhism: dukkha.”[11] Dukkha, more often translated as “suffering”, is interpreted by Loy as lack. What makes this lack a meaningful equivalent for Girardian shame is, and I will elaborate further, its similar and intimate dependency on a “delusive sense of self.”[12] By “meaningful equivalent” I do not imply identity – Dukkha is too multivalent to find an exact Western equivalent – but simply that the two states broadly share the same manifestations, causes and, therefore, the same solutions. In his existential and psychoanalytic reading of Zen, Loy claims that the Buddha had only one thing to teach: the cause of “Dukkha and the end of Dukkha … the Buddhist path is nothing other than a way to resolve our sense of lack.”[13]

The cause of this lack is explained in the Second of the Four Noble Truths as three kleshas, or mental distortions: misknowledge, craving, and aversion.[14] While these three distortions reinforce each other, misknowledge is the root cause of which the latter two are, in a sense, reactions.

Crucially, misknowledge is not only an ignorance of reality but seeing reality for exactly what it is not. For Buddhists, phenomenal reality is marked by Śūnyatā, or emptiness. That is to say, phenomena do not exist independently from the causes and conditions that give birth to them; they are impermanent, not eternal. Phenomena do not exist independently from mereological relationships they are in; they are constructed, not indivisible. Lastly, phenomena do not exist independently from the subjects who perceive them; they are dependent, not autonomous. Misknowledge then, is to treat phenomena as if they had “intrinsic existence”: as if they were eternal, indivisible, and autonomous. Evidently, emptiness and intrinsic existence are opposites. Specifically, emptiness is an ontological claim negating the possibility of intrinsic existence. It is not an unqualified denial of reality altogether.

As is the case with shame and Dukkha/lack, there is a meaningful equivalence to draw between intrinsic existence and metaphysical autonomy as both describe a real, solid, self-sufficient, and autonomous mode of existence. By “meaningful equivalence” I don’t imply identity: while intrinsic existence describes all phenomena, metaphysical autonomy appears to be primarily a state reserved to describe human beings. “Meaningful equivalence” means that the individual’s pursuit for reality and autonomy in metaphysical autonomy is none other than the rejection of impermanence, constructedness, and dependency in the pursuit of intrinsic existence. I draw this specific identity not through a metaphysical deduction of these concepts but through the, and I will soon draw this out, psychological similarity in consequences, manifestations, and motivations both authors use to describe these pursuits. Immediately, this equivalence implies that emptiness presents a fourth and most fundamental phenomenological impossibility of the Girardian ideal in addition to the immanent, social, and theological impossibilities. Reality and autonomy are futile goals in a world where the nature of phenomena, including the phenomena of self, is constructed and dependent. Buddhism goes one layer deeper than Girard in critiquing the quest for metaphysical autonomy.

But it would be a mistake to think misknowledge as only a rational, reflective error with our consciously held views of ontology. A greater, deeper, and more problematic dimension of misknowledge is the perceptual way we treat phenomena, independent of our held opinions. The analogy of an optical illusion is helpful at differentiating between these two faces of misknowledge. Even though we rationally know the Müller-Lyer illusion to be constituted of lines of equal length, they still appear to us in different sizes.[15] In like manner, even though we may reflectively agree that all phenomena are empty – impermanent, dependent, and constructed – we still cannot shake the natural cognitive reflex of taking them to be intrinsically existing – lasting, indivisible, and independent. This deeper side of misknowledge is an empirical claim, gleaned from observation. One ought only observe the universality of the desire to establish the self after death through symbolic gestures to see our reluctance to accept impermanence. One ought only notice the instinctiveness with which we posit an unchanging "I" behind the superficial changes and an autonomous core through which the "self" acts to see our refusal of constructedness. And one ought only examine how natural the idea of a discrete subject observing external objects is to see our difficulty in grasping dependence. Regardless of our held metaphysical positions, we treat and expect all phenomena and, specifically, the phenomena of self to be not empty but intrinsically existing. In Girardian language, we consider the self to be a legitimate candidate for metaphysical autonomy.

But deep down, we develop a suspicion through lived experience that the self is in fact empty. We develop this rationally by recognizing our mortality. We develop this intuitively through the rapidity of which we adopt and dispose of identities in childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood. We develop this emotionally in times of despair when we are vulnerable and dependent. We develop this physically if we ever lose control of our environments, such as in a car crash. With a move in harmony with Girard, Loy explains that lack results from the difference between one’s expectation of the self as intrinsically existing and the growing suspicion, gleaned from intimate experience, that the self is empty.[16]

This lack, Loy explains, takes on the immediate form of a pervasive and foundational anxiety “at the very core of one’s being, which becomes almost unbearable because it gnaws on that core.”[17] As a result, we repress this deeply uncomfortable lack, only to have it return in distorted forms, projected on the world. In service of its own agenda, lack furnishes our lives with pursuits that, unbeknownst to the subject, have a hidden but foundational aim of establishing ourselves as intrinsically existent. This logic of repression and projection reveals that mediation and rivalry itself is a reflex from a more fundamental fear. This is a fear that Girard himself had hinted at: “rivalry is intolerable, but the absence of rivalry is even more intolerable. It brings the subject up against nothingness."[18] But Loy goes one layer deeper in explaining the origin of the yearning for metaphysical autonomy. It does not originate merely from an act of rebellion by a prideful self, but from an even more fundamental error with how we treat phenomena altogether.

The logic of these self-establishing pursuits is objectification, identifying with objects in hopes that doing so will give us a sense of reality. The logic goes: if I own objects, I can see that I ‘am.’ If I can identify with intrinsically existing objects, then I too must be intrinsically existing. When identifying with objects, one projects the remedy of their lack externally and pursue or guard it with fervor. We can also identify against objects. In this case, we project the cause of our lack externally and seek to punish and expel it.

Through the logic of objectification, misknowledge transforms into the two other poisons: craving and aversion. These urges are more than an expression of simple preference and distaste but are motivated to establish the self as intrinsically existing. To swoon after objects with zeal thinking "I am this; this grants me reality!" is craving. To chase objects away with hatred thinking "I am not this; this threatens my existence!" is aversion. Objectification, then, adds a second layer of deceit upon phenomena.[19] In addition to considering them as intrinsically existent, we now label all phenomena as “mine” or “not mine”. Furthermore, this label itself is considered to be not empty. That is to say, we consider the quality of “mine” to be an intrinsic property of objects and not just a mind-dependent label. After all, if through identifying with the object, I hope to become real, then this object has to be “really” mine.

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But identifying with objects will not fill this lack for the simple fact that they too are empty. How can identification with impermanent, constructed, and dependent objects grant me the lasting, indivisible, and autonomous sense of self I seek? Of course, we begin to suspect their emptiness only when we are in close proximity to them, when they are already in our possession where we can examine them through intimate experience. One may, for example, attribute intrinsic existence to Ivy League universities from afar in highschool. No doubt, this can be a deeply motivating force. Yet, after a few years of enrollment, it becomes blatantly obvious that they too are institutions that will one day cease, constructed by departments and people that come and go, and whose prestige varies depending upon one’s perspective. Identifying with an Ivy League no longer fills their lack for it is recognized as being empty. Instead of rejecting the quest for intrinsic existence – for it is not even conscious to them – their gaze merely gets redirected to the next object that has not lost its metaphysical allure.

Since disillusionment almost exclusively occurs after we have already achieved the goal – only then do we have enough intimate experiences to suspect their emptiness – we end up on one wild-goose chase after the other. Objectification furnishes our lives with games – fame, immortality, fitness, knowledge, beauty, etc. – that appear varied and may indeed confer different and numerous physical (experiential) rewards but nonetheless are motivated by the foundational metaphysical promise of intrinsic existence. Within these games that we construct – a fact that is hidden from us since we must believe these games reflect the objective way things “really” are – we demarcate internal standards of success and failure, attributing glorious metaphysical autonomy to the former and abject despair to the latter. We may, for example, believe fame to be the key to intrinsic existence and the lack of it as a state worse than death. This is not to say that there aren’t plentiful of experiential states worth striving for, but that this metaphysical injection means these games, in Loy’s own words, “cannot be won.”[20] If one fails to meet the internal standards, one is condemned – or, it would be more accurate to say, condemns oneself – with abject despair. But if one meets them, they are not greeted with abundant reality and autonomy but disappointment and disillusionment, followed by a new game to play. Loy elaborates: “when we do not understand what is actually motivating us—because what we think we need is only a symptom of something else—we end up compulsive.”[21]

Loy’s description of the pursuit for intrinsic existence is structurally aligned with Girard’s depiction of the quest for metaphysical autonomy. But even among the details, Loy shares Girardian intuitions: we naturally gravitate towards specific people who appear to be real[22]; “the sense of reality we crave is largely socially determined”[23]; imitation is intimately connected with reality: “If he was real, I can become real by imitating him.”[24] Girard, then, completes Loy by drawing out Loy’s phenomenological analysis and social intuitions of lack into a complete social theory. Because lack is an inherently social experience, its analysis would be incomplete without investigating the social mechanisms by which lack is generated, sustained, released, and responsible for the best and worst of culture. The lacking individual in Loy becomes the shameful social subject and citizen in Girard. This is not to say that Loy himself has not written prolifically about the social dimension of lack[25] – what makes him a fruitful Buddhist interlocutor for Girard is precisely his uncommon engagement with the social forms of Dukkha – but to say that Girard identifies a social logic that is independent from yet interfaces with the phenomenological origins of lack and shame. While both authors engage with the phenomenological and social causes of lack and shame, Girard focuses on the social catalysts; Loy, on the other hand, investigates the phenomenological origins.

Therefore, Loy also completes Girard in two equally important ways. Firstly, because shame is an inherently phenomenological experience, its diagnosis would be incomplete without investigating into its phenomenological origins. Loy goes as deep as Girard goes broad. Beyond the Girardian explanation of pride and shame as merely original dispositions, Loy, and Buddhism as a whole, locates their cause in the misinformed way human subjects treat phenomena.

The Girardian triangle, where the pursuit of objects is secondary to the rival, is the social origin of the Buddhist triangle, where craving and aversion are mere projections from misknowledge. Conversely, the Buddhist triangle is the phenomenological origin of the Girardian triangle. The outcome of misknowledge is to enter into mediation with a model we consider to be metaphysically autonomous. And the logic of objectification, manifested in craving and aversion, take upon its social forms in the positive and negative stages of mediation respectively. Without Girard, we cannot understand how society manufacturers and allocates reality and why we crave or are averse to specific objects. Without Buddhism, we fail to grasp why we desire reality in the first place.

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Having offered a deeper explanation for lack, Loy is also at a better vantage point to prescribe a solution. Thus, Loy completes Girard, secondly, by providing a reproducible path to conversion.

7.2 There is a Cessation to Rivalry

The Buddhist path of liberation is as radical as it is simple: transform your phenomenological experience such that you directly perceive phenomena to be impermanent, constructed, and dependent. If it is the dissonance between your cognitive reflexes and the reality of phenomena that creates lack, then you can only change the former through the realization of emptiness.

The Buddhists anticipate Girard’s concern that "no purely intellectual process and no experience of a purely philosophical nature”[26] can help overcome the allure of metaphysical autonomy. While philosophical argumentation which establishes the rational necessity of emptiness is important, it is impotent without the corresponding meditative practices to hammer it into our cognitive substratum. Different Buddhist schools prescribe different techniques in realizing emptiness[27], the dazzling variety and complex instructions of which lie beyond the scope of this project. What they all share however is the quality of being reproducible. That is to say most of them prescribe, more or less, algorithmic instructions – the simplest of which include directing one’s attention on a specific object – that through the sheer force of repetition slowly but surely alter our phenomenological experience. Girard’s examples of conversion all included overwhelming, irreproducible events that triggered near instantaneous Gestalt shifts. These Buddhist prescriptions, while not easy and certainly not instantaneous, are reproducible and, because of this, reliable solutions to the problem at hand. Furthermore, these meditations usually tackle our coarser, more obvious reflexes of an intrinsically existent self, such as narcissism, before moving on to dissolving its more subtle manifestations. Progress is gradual instead of instantaneous; the degree to which and arenas in which one treats phenomena as intrinsically existent will decrease. Thus, even though the entire path of realizing emptiness is long, one need not wait until full completion before seeing corresponding reductions in lack.

While the idea of renouncing an autonomous self may be unthinkable to the modern west, it shouldn’t be for the Girardian. Girard constantly advocates a rejection of the Romantic ideal of an autonomous self in favor of the "interdividual" that is profoundly influenced by and interconnected with other humans. Recall that, for Girard, the necessary experience for conversion requires a “collapsing, or at the very least shaking to their foundations [of] our “ego”, our “personality”, our “temperament”, and so on.”[28] This is precisely what the aforementioned meditative practices aim to achieve in a reproducible and controlled way. Even Girard himself compares the requisite “fall” necessary for conversion to how "Oriental religions"[29] liberate their practitioners from cycles of suffering. To those who still remain skeptical that Buddhist meditations on emptiness can reproduce Girardian conversion – a relation that has not escaped Girard’s commentators[30] – I can only appeal to the likeness between Girard’s own descriptions of conversion and Loy’s description of the Buddhist path.

Girard:

This time it is not a false but a genuine conversion. The hero triumphs in defeat; he triumphs because he is at the end of his resources; for the first time he has to look his despair and his nothingness in the face. But this look which he has dreaded, which is the death of pride, is his salvation. The conclusions of all the novels are reminiscent of an oriental tale in which the hero is clinging by his finger-tips to the edge of a cliff; exhausted, the hero finally lets himself fall into the abyss. He expects to smash against the rocks below but instead he is supported by the air: the law of gravity is annulled.[31]

And Loy:

To become completely groundless is also to become completely grounded, not in some particular but in the whole web of interdependent relations. The supreme irony of my struggle to ground myself is that it cannot succeed because I am already grounded in the totality. Or, better: as the totality. Buddhism implies that I am groundless and ungroundable insofar as delusively feeling myself to be separate from the world; yet I have always been fully grounded insofar as I am not other than the world.[32]

Both descriptions share an understanding that it is the radical exposure to what was previously dreaded – defeat, despair, nothingness, abyss for Girard and groundlessness for Loy – that liberates the subject.

But what is left when “I am not other than the world?” How does one operate with an empty self? To be sure, the phenomenology of liberation is widely debated, but this much I can say without controversy. To realize the self as empty is not to cease to inhabit one’s social roles or fail to respond to one’s name, since emptiness is not a wholesale rejection of existence. Instead, it is to recognize the self, alongside all its labels and possessions, as impermeant, constructed, and dependent in our everyday lived experiences and not just in argumentation. To contemplate emptiness is to understand viscerally that the self is situated in an interconnected world without an autonomous existence.

Using the demarcation between being and experience we developed in the section on metaphysical desire: the Buddhist path of liberation corresponds to a decreasing concern for being and increasing focus on experience. In fact, Loy goes as far as to say that Nirvana, the final state of liberation, “is simply the nature of our experience when there is not the sense of a self-conscious yet ungrounded self that has the experience and therefore feels something to be lacking in it. The joy of that experience is deeper than the heart’s agony.”[33] Only with the solution in sight can we fully appreciate the philosophical reason for positing a desire “to experience,” in addition to a desire “to be,” when interpreting Girard. Since conversion entails an abandonment of all pursuits for being, if there only were metaphysical desires and instinctual needs, then the post-conversion subject would be nothing but a vegetable with no desire to help others and even less creative energy to do so.

Footnote

[1] Girard, Desire, 57.

[2] Girard, Desire, 56.

[3] Girard, Desire, 57.

[4] Girard, Things, 392.

[5] Girard, Literature, 40.

[6] Girard, Literature, 40.

[7] Girard, Things, 400.

[8] Girard, Things, 398.

[9] Girard, Battling, 100.

[10] Girard, Battling, 133.

[11] Loy, Lack, Chapter 3.

[12] Loy, Lack, Introduction.

[13] Loy, Lack, Chapter 3.

[14] There are various ways in which the Second Noble Truth is explained. Sometimes the three kleshas expand to five kleshas. Other times it is explained with the twelve links of dependent origination. I want to make clear the three kleshas are just one way of explaining the cause of lack that is particularly fruitful in a dialogue with Girard.

[15] For a more detailed version of this argument see Garfield, Engaging, 10.

[16] Loy, Lack, Introduction: “To the extent I come to feel autonomous, my consciousness is also infected with a gnawing sense of unreality.”

[17] Loy, Lack, Chapter 1.

[18] Girard, Things, 361.

[19] For a discussion on this second layer of delusion, see Garfield, Engaging, 11.

[20] Loy, Lack, Chapter 4.

[21] Loy, Lack, Chapter 1.

[22] Loy, Lack, Chapter 1: “It is our earliest and our most natural way of trying to fill up our sense-of-lack: by identifying with someone who, we think, is real.”

[23] Loy, Lack, Chapter 3.

[24] Loy, Lack, Chapter 3.

[25] For Loy’s Buddhist social theory see Loy, Awakening. and Loy, Money, Sex, War, Karma.

[26] Girard, Things, 399.

[27] This is due in no small part to the fact that each school’s conception of what emptiness is will be meaningfully different.

[28] Girard, Things, 400.

[29] Girard, Things, 400.

[30] For Lefebure’s discussion on the similarity between the outcomes of Buddhist practice and Girardian conversion see Lefebure, Overture, 136.

[31] Girard, Desire, 294.

[32] Loy, Lack, Chapter 3.

[33] Loy, Lack, Chapter 4.

Preface