Ussama Makdisi - "The Culture of Sectarianism"

Summary:

Makdisi seeks to challenge the understanding of sectarianism prevalent among historians and politicians alike: that sectarian violence consists of the flaring-up of primordial tensions between autonomous, separate, and rival sects. Sects are viewed as monadic groups of people bound and hence defined by their religious identity over and against other forms of social identity. Sectarian violence, then, is the expression of deep-seated and intractable rivalries and hatreds between groups whose unchanging religious identities create the conditions for situations of permanent, irresolvable conflicts. This understanding of sectarianism gives rise to a politics that attempts to contain sectarian hatreds and prevent them from becoming actual violence, generally by partitions and segregation, creating a sectarian geography that assumes the existence of these sectarian monads.

Makdisi engages in a history of conflicts over Mt. Lebanon during the early to mid 19^th Century to contest this understanding of sectarianism. Makdisi demonstrates that sectarianism does not simply exist, nor is it something that is “invented” by colonialist thinkers (as Gyanendray Pandey in The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India believes, see Makdisi, 7) but is something that is produced through a concatenation of circumstances involving colonialism, Ottoman attempts at reform resulting from confrontations with modernity, the collaboration of local elites, and most importantly, the process of silencing the subaltern revolution that threatened the old social order. Makdisi describes the conditions leading up to the violence of 1860 at Mt. Lebanon between the Maronite and Druze communities that had hitherto lived peacefully in that region. For Makdisi, the Maronite-Druze War of 1860 was not one moment among others where deep-seated hatreds boiled over, but an event that was produced by contradictions within the Ottoman reform movement, the Tanzimat, and the attempts of groups to navigate them, thus reintroducing contingency into this narrative of sectarianism. In so doing, Makdisi demonstrates how a knowledge of these groups as sects was produced by local, Ottoman, and European elites as a way of controlling the crisis.

Chapter 1: “Religion as the Site of the Colonial Encounter”

Scholars treat the Maronite-Druze War of 1860 as an archetype of sectarian violence. Sectarianism, for historians and Lebanese nationalists, is the opponent of modernity: the remnant of tribalism and religious identity that impedes the development of the modern, secular nation-state. This war demonstrates that “Lebanon is, in the final analysis, a metaphor for a failed nationalism in the non-Western world.” (3) This contemporary understanding of sectarianism is inherited from elite Ottoman and European discourses on the meaning of reform in the Ottoman Empire in the 19^th Century: reform transitioned the Ottomans from an unchanging, ahistorical, traditional existence to a modern, progressive, linear history, embodying Orientalist understandings of the “changeless East” standing opposed to European enlightenment (Lord Dufferin, quoted in Makdisi, 5). The questions the war raises are “why has the Middle East failed to modernize, to develop, and most important, to secularize? The foregone conclusion has been that the violence represents the triumph of tradition, manifested as sectarianism, over the modern ideals of coexistence and tolerance; and all efforts have gone toward explaining the conditions under which this so-called tradition could reemerge with such devastating consequences.” (5) This understanding of the sectarian history of Lebanon, and the Middle East in general, Makdisi seeks to historicize.

Sectarianism is instead “an expression of a new form of local politics and knowledge that arose in a climate of transition and reform in the mid-nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire and that laid the foundations for a (later) discourse of nationalist secularism.” (6) The context of reform and transition between old and new political and social regimes created what Makdisi calls a culture of sectarianism, which can be defined in several ways:

1) A practice created in the context of Ottoman reforms.

2) A discourse “scripted as the Other to various competing Ottoman, European, and Lebanese narratives of modernization.” (6)

3) The sum of (1) and (2), the “deployment of religious heritage as a primary marker of modern political identity.” (7)

4) Another way of stating (3), a form of knowledge regarding the identity of local communities, their relationship with the modern nation-state, and their place within a history of rationalization and modernization.

As a culture (the total of practice, discourse, and knowledge in this case) produced by Ottoman, European, local elite, and local commoner actors, sectarianism cannot simply be thought of as colonialist knowledge of local communities, or the form resistance to colonialism takes, or as a primordial conflict that takes a particular shape in the context of 19^th Century Ottoman reforms. Rather, sectarianism arises as a dynamic process of production whose means are (a) the material and social interests of each party, (b) the power relationships between them, and (c) the competing discourses of reform and concomitant understandings of the roles each party plays in the new reformed state.

Makdisi begins by describing the two competing imperial discourses of reform:

The European colonialist discourse – firmly grounded in notions of European cultural superiority, this discourse stresses the philanthropic duty of Europeans to spread their civilization. In the context of the Ottoman Empire, Europeans felt that colonial administration provided an effective administrative means to carry out European-style reform as a “positive” form of despotism, opposed to “Asiatic” despotism, which was “understood as fanatical and all-encompassing, not an extension but the essence of Asian civilization.” (9) Reform had a definite religious edge to it, such that Islam stood in for all of the evils of Asiatic civilization, seen as a monolithic religious society, under which local Christians were supposedly subjugated and repressed. European Christianity was the counter-monolith, the representative of European civilization that would liberate the people of the Middle East from their Islamic oppressors.

The Ottoman discourse – was directed towards consolidating the power of the Ottoman state, and reforming it to create a rationalized, efficient, modern state. Ottoman rulers wished to “improved security, end corruption, rationalize taxation, and regularize army service,” and did so through a series of decrees and laws collectively known as the Tanzimat. The Tanzimat reorganized the Ottoman imperial administration and reorganized the Empire to accomplish the “juridical equality of all subjects” under the Sultan’s absolute will (10). At the same time, however, as the Tanzimat sought to create a secular state modeled on modern ideals of social equality, it also sought to revitalize Islamic tradition, in essence “advocating a secular Ottoman subjecthood within a modernized yet extremely hierarchical Islamic state.” (11)

These two discourses collided at Mt. Lebanon, a region populated by large groups of Christians and Muslims. The contradictions between the calls for juridical equality within a hierarchical social order, complicated by the European narrative of the Christians living in that region as oppressed, formed the context in which the violence and formation of a sectarian culture took place.

Chapter 2: “The Gentle Crusade”

Makdisi next turns to the European, and particularly European Christian, discourse on Mt. Lebanon and its inhabitants. Due to Mt. Lebanon’s place in Biblical narratives, it was a key destination point for missionaries, travelers, and pilgrims, who evoked a scene of eternal, divine beauty, dilapidated by Muslims who oppressed the Christians (themselves inferior in narratives to European Christians) living in the region. Mt. Lebanon was therefore an ideal site in the Christian imagination to begin the process of cultural revitalization and reform of the area’s inhabitants to conform to the social ideals of modern Christianity.

Makdisi refers to the religious and ideological interest in Mt. Lebanon as a “gentle crusade,” gentle in that it took place without military means but through political alliances forged with (and welcomed by) local elites and accomplished through literary works, and a crusade as the travel and pilgrimage narratives and the discourses surrounding political activities all evoked a stagnant, decaying Islamic Ottoman Empire which stood opposed to a progressive, Christian civilization that “reclaimed the history of this region from the morass of decline and the stagnation of time.” (16) Mt. Lebanon, having fallen from its state of Biblical prestige to decadence and oppression under Islamic despots, was to be redeemed through Christian modernization. Makdisi references Johannes Fabian’s Time and the Other to argue that the peaceful crusaders removed the inhabitants of Mt. Lebanon, along with the entire Ottoman Empire, from coevalness, denying their place in the present and relegating them to a timeless past.

Within this context of decline of Mt. Lebanon existed the Maronite and Druze communities. These groups were, in colonial narratives, isolated havens of Christian and modern democratic spirit, amidst a sea of corrupting influences from Islam and the Ottoman despotism. These communities were essentially the rhetorical foil to the Europeans’ understanding of the Ottoman Empire as oppressive, backwards, and unchanging. These areas had the potential to be reformed into the model of European civilization, but required the assistance of the colonial administration.

The contradiction between religious and secular reform experienced in the Ottoman Tanzimat, however, also were expressed here. Authors like Volney, having come from the Europe of the Enlightenment, were “aligned against political despotism and was opposed to the tyranny of entrenched Catholicism,” and so wished for secular reform, but was even more opposed to Islam, and so idealized “those religious communities which he perceived to be the farthest from Islam.” (21) Again, the interests of sacred and secular reform were left in tension in the European narratives of Mt. Lebanon.

In their narratives, Europeans also “invented the tribes of Lebanon.” (23) While, as described next chapter, the inhabitants of Mt. Lebanon did not primarily identify themselves according to religious community, the Europeans divided them into tribes including Maronites, Druzes, Greek Orthodox, Greek Catholics, and Shi’a and Sunni Muslims. These supposed tribes in fact had very similar customs, so that Europeans experienced severe discomfort among the inhabitants. Christians acted like Muslims and were often times almost indistinguishable, which fed the European Christians’ experience of them as threatened and corrupted Christians in need of revitalization and reform.

Chapter 3: “Knowledge and Ignorance”

Having discussed imperial and colonialist discourses of Mt. Lebanon, Makdisi now describes the historical social order of the inhabitants of that region. Violence was not new to the region in 1860, but had almost always been a result of elites keeping commoners in their place. Instead of a sectarian understanding of the communities around Mt. Lebanon, social identity was divided between elites or notables and commoners or ahalis, almost without regard to religious identity. Power was exercised by the notables through “control over religious and secular knowledge,” which they considered to be “essential to a hierarchical ordering of society.” (29)

Although the different religious communities absolutely existed prior to the colonial period, religious identity was not by any means the essential factor in understanding group identities. Mt. Lebanon was divided according to what Makdisi calls a genealogical geography, where territory was not divided by sect, but by the elite family which owned a particular district. The group of elite families which oversaw their separate districts formed a common class of notables, bound together by material wealth, power, and social custom. Elaborate rituals of dress and interaction between notables, and even more elaborate rituals regulating interactions between commoners and notables, cemented the two-tiered hierarchy that defined the local social order.

The Ottoman Empire generally followed a policy of “benign neglect” towards the inhabitants of Mt. Lebanon, content to let them live according to their historical customs (37). Because of the region’s proximity to Damascus, however, the Ottomans were especially harsh towards any political activity that could be considered a threat to imperial rule, and consequently engaged in periodic invasions of the region against notables who were too ambitious. The Ottoman governor Abdullah Pasha, for instance, “conferred legitimacy on Bashir [Shihab, the head of a notable family], and, in exchange, he expected discipline, prosperity, tranquility, and security of the imperial subjects, as well as the prompt deliverance of required taxes and all other obligations, the safeguarding of roads, and the eradication without forgiveness of all those who would sow corruption and transcend their huddud, or limits.” (38)

The secular and religious authorities collaborated in a different way to cement social hierarchy, by creating an elite community that possessed knowledge and a class of commoners who were ignorant. The knowledgeable elite community knew the limits of acceptable social and religious custom and political engagement of each tier of the hierarchy, and “had the power to explain, legitimate, alter, or otherwise mediate such boundaries.” (38-39) This composition of power relations within the society of Mt. Lebanon was affirmed by local chroniclers, who understood social rank not only as a “natural fact but an inviolate reflection of the will of God. They took a dim view of popular mobilizations, including the French Revolution, which Haydar Ahmad described as having thrown open the ‘doors of hell’ which allowed the ‘Lord of Darkness’ to emerge. They feared the breakdown of social order and submerged the history of the commoners in a narrative of the elites.” (41) Any intrusion of the commoners into politics was treated as a literary trope indicating an aberration of the norm, to lead to instability and unpredictability. Social order was always restored through the just violence of the benevolent Ottoman state.

The limits of commoners were not to be involved in politics, but to engage in economic production on the huge…”tracts of land” …owned by the elites (42). Commoners were meant to be loyal and religious subjects, obedient to the local elites and the Ottoman state. Any violation of the commoners’ limits was attributed to their ignorance having been manipulated by a cunning leader. The most serious crime an elite could commit was therefore corruption, the act of “‘stoking the passion’ of the commoners and ‘seducing’ them into rebellion […] deliberate upsetting of the natural order by otherwise sensible elites for their own political advantage.” (45)

In this way, commoners were, in the narratives and histories of elites, systemically denied agency in political affairs. This was primarily expressed through a nonlinear understanding of temporality. The social hierarchy and communities of knowledge and ignorance were seen as the eternal expression of God’s will, and any transgression of that order could always be pardoned and atoned for (through punishment) to return to this norm. The Ottomans and the inhabitants of Mt. Lebanon certainly understood the march of linear time, marked through the deaths and lives of Sultans and elite governors, but politics had a cyclical element to it, as “the social order was assumed to be eternal and unchanging in a world that recognizably changed.” (50)

Chapter 4: “The Faces of Reform”

Religious identity became increasingly prominent during the Egyptian invasion and occupation of Syria during the 1830s. While the population was uniformly drafted into Egyptian military service, several Druze notables remained loyal to the Ottoman sultan and revolted against the Egyptian occupational force. In response, the Egyptian authorities attempted to arm the Maronites and set them against the Druzes. While this was the first time Maronites and Druzes had ever come into conflict on a communal basis, Makdisi adds the caveat that this conflict was not in any way a religious conflict, simply a divide and conquer political strategy that pitted different communities against each other. What this strategy did do, however, was to highlight the identities of these two groups as separate and monadic communities and attach rhetorical and ideological significance to those communities. The Maronites, in the eyes of the Egyptians, were loyal and obedient subjects, while the Druzes were rebellious infidels. For Makdisi, this highlighting of communal identity over social position in a hierarchy was the first step in producing tribal and sectarian identities in Mt. Lebanon.

In 1840, the European powers decided to reinstate Ottoman authority through intervention, which they interpreted as a liberatory military action on behalf of the non-Muslim inhabitants of the region. With Mt. Lebanon returned to Ottoman control, the empire attempted to institute, in collaboration with British and French colonial advisors and administrators, the Tanzimat reforms there. However, the contradiction between the secular and religious aspects of the reforms, combined with the European interest in liberating the Christians of the region, coincided in the application of the Tanzimat’s laws, which were interpreted in such a way as to foster sectarian identities. One of the first actions of the combined Ottoman-European architects of Mt. Lebanon’s regional government was to proclaim the legal equality of all “religious communities” in the region, effectively making religious identity the primary marker of political identity (60). The new regional government was composed of a “religiously mixed council” that included elected representatives, generally notables, from each of the region’s religious communities (61). This new government was supported not only by the European and Ottoman authorities, but also by the regional notables, and most importantly, by the Maronite clergy, who demanded to be treated as a group with a separate religious identity from the Greek Orthodox and Catholic Christians. Religious identity thus became not only the most prominent marker of political identity, but now religious groups began to be actively involved in politics, something that had not previously occurred.

The Maronite church leaders insisted that they be considered a ta’ifa, which at this time essentially referred to a sect, meaning that the clergy would be able to represent all members of the Maronite community as a unit separate from other religious sects in the region. In addition, since the Maronites were the majority of the population of Mt. Lebanon, the head of the Maronite Church was also appointed to be governor of the entire region, regardless of religious identity. And so the contradiction between religious and secular reform inherent within the discourse surrounding the Tanzimat resurfaced in the actual government of Mt. Lebanon, since while all religious sects were declared legally equal, the Maronites were given greater authority through the instatement of a Maronite governor over the entire region.

Another problem in the new arrangement lay in its tension with the old genealogical geography of Mt. Lebanon. While previously loyalty to one’s local notable was the most important social boundary, now religious communities gained prominence, whose members were in close geographical proximity to each other. Since the notables on the council still possessed strong local control over taxation and everyday administrative activity, whether one’s regional notable was a member of one’s religious group became for the first time a social problem. In 1841 this tension turned violent when a Maronite notable refused to return a particular region to the Druze family that had previously owned it, causing a Druze revolt against what they perceived as an infringement of their rights, followed by a Maronite revolt in a different region against taxation by a Druze notable. For Makdisi, this new violence demonstrated that “a marked redefinition of the relationship between religion and politics had profound implications for a multireligious society. The old regime had been dependent on a notion of a quietist religion and passive subjecthood that had underpinned and yet was separate from a nonsectarian notable politics. Restoration politics, however, had singled out the religious identity of the local inhabitants as the point of departure for a modern reformed and ambivalent Ottoman sovereignty in Mount Lebanon.” (64)

Chapter 5: “Reinventing Mount Lebanon”

In response to the violence of 1841, elites were left trying to interpret the tensions in such a way as to restore order. As described earlier, violence in the region had previously been understood as a transgression against elite authority, and in the nonlinear temporality of the inhabitants of Mt. Lebanon could be reversed and pardoned to reestablish social custom and normalcy. The elites now, however, were unsure of just how to define normalcy and social custom, due to the changes towards sectarian political identities. This problem was exacerbated by the decision of the European and Ottoman authorities to, as their response to the violence, mandate the partitioning of Mt. Lebanon along sectarian lines, fully breaking with the old genealogical geography of the region.

This joint Ottoman-European decision to partition Mt. Lebanon was informed by the utilization of the discourse of knowledge and ignorance that had defined traditional power relations between elites and commoners in the region. This time, however, both Europeans and Ottomans set themselves up as the knowledgeable group, as opposed to the ignorant local population of the region. The Europeans understood the conflict between Druzes and Maronites as an “ancestral conflict” that underscored the necessity to prevent the Christians of the regions from being corrupted and destroyed by outside influences (69). The Ottomans, for their part, understood the violence as another example of why central authority was necessary to further the cause of modernization. The net effect of these discourses interpreting the violence was to construct a narrative of a primordial sectarian conflict that stood against modernity, whether defined in European or Ottoman terms.

Hearing this discourse coming from imperial authorities, local Maronite and Druze notables decided that the best way to ensure their continued material power was to present themselves as the “guardians of tradition and social order and their rivals as the instigators of perennial perfidy.” (75) Elites themselves took up the discourse of primordial sectarian conflict to their own advantage,

presenting themselves as the only genuine interlocutors of the so-called primordial sectarian communities that inhabited Mount Lebanon. The sought to transform their religious communities into political communities and to harness invented traditions to their respective causes. The construction of a political sectarian identity did not come naturally; it entailed petitions, meetings, and the incessant application of moral as well as physical pressure by the leaders in each community to overcome local rivalries, regional differences, and family loyalties. Maronite and Druze elites each strove to present a unified front to the Ottoman state and the European powers, effectively ignoring a long history of nonsectarian leadership. (77)

In order for this reorganization of the social and political geography of Mt. Lebanon to succeed, elite discourses had to become the rhetoric expressing everyday life as well as local history, becoming, as Makdisi argues, “hegemonic in a Gramscian sense.” (77) Thus, communal life in Mt. Lebanon was redefined entirely from the top-down:

Partition was not a local decision, and the natives were not consulted but were depicted as savage mountaineers incapable of solving their own problems. To this extent at least, what followed in Mount Lebanon over the next two decades should be interpreted in light of the arrogance of imperial powers who dismissed as an “inconvenience” centuries of native coexistence. It is also clear that with partition the very notion of coexistence became a vexing issue in a society increasingly defined along religious lines. The logic of partition demanded the unambiguous classification of the local inhabitants into one or another camp, either Christian or non-Christian. The European-designed partition plan assumed that there were in fact two distinct and separate primordial tribes of Druzes and Maronites to which all Druzes and all Maronites instinctively adhered. Leaving aside the fact that Greek Orthodox and Greek Catholic communities resnted being under Maronite tutelage, the partition legitimated sectarian politics by organizing the administration and geography of Mount Lebanon along religious lines. (80)

Thus, society in Mount Lebanon began to develop along sectarian lines. Local education and history was reoriented towards a supposed sectarian past that was increasingly read into the region’s history, and new political decisions were made under the assumption of intractable differences between Maronite and Druze communities. In this climate, new narratives of “pure” communal identities became more prominent, particularly in the work of the Maronite Bishop Murad, who claimed that Mt. Lebanon had always been a Christian refuge from Islam, framing communal and sectarian tensions as “a wider struggle of modern, progressive, and united Christianity against a barbarous Islam.” (83) A later reorganization of the Mt. Lebanon government into separate Druze and Maronite councils only furthered the invention of pure communal identities and traditions. The Druze and Maronite elites in these councils were treated themselves as knowledgeable groups, told by the Ottoman governor to forget past violence and to “restore an allegedly traditional status quo ante of political sectarian harmony under benevolent Ottoman rule.” (86)

One way in which elite sectarian consciousness infiltrated itself into the communities of commoners was through education, particularly through missionary schools. Christian missionaries, particularly Jesuit missionaries, carried out what they saw as reform by teaching children their ancient Christian identity, tying it not only to their sectarian identities but with their essential affinity with European civilization.

Chapter 6: “The Return of the Juhhal”

As Makdisi notes, Ottoman and European authorities were attempting to recreate hierarchically-organized society while “they undermined its material and metaphorical foundations.” (95) The true challenge to the social order came, however, from an insurrection of commoners, the community of Maronite juhhal, or ignorants. These commoners wished to represent themselves, rather than letting themselves be represented by elites, and “deliberately and autonomously sought to carve out their own place in the modern world and to enter the realm of traditionally elite politics.” (97) A group of Maronites in the Southern Kisrawan district of Mt. Lebanon had been led by elites of the Khazin family, but a muleteer, Tanyus Shahin, began to lead the other commoners of that district in a revolt which overthrew the Khazin notables and installed Shahin as the “general representative of all Kisrawan.” (99)

In justifying the rebellion, the Kisrawan commoners exploited the rhetoric of social equality that had surrounded the Tanzimat to argue against the rule of notables and social hierarchy in general. The contradictions latent within the construction of the Tanzimat now became actualized as both commoners and notables interpreted the set of laws in ways which justified their claims to rule the Kisrawan district. The notables argued that the “right to property – and with it the confirmation of social hierarchy – was far more important to them than the nebulous Tanzimat right to equality of treatment.” (102) The notables had hitherto owned the land and thus carried out administrative functions and held power over it. So far as they were concerned, the rebels had usurped the property that was rightly theirs.

In the back and forth between commoners and elites, both sides eventually turned to the Patriarch of the Maronite Church to decide the competing claims. The church, however, was caught between its own competing interests, both having pledged their support to the Ottoman modernization and affirmation of social equality, while also being one of the largest landowners in the district and hence having its own territorial claims at stake in the preservation of property rights. Since the church had always believed in social hierarchy, however, it ultimately sided with the Khazin elites and Ottoman state that

the term ahali [commoner] implied the ideal of a politically quiescent population; it intimated a passive community whose legitimate and lawful needs (about which there was no consensus) were represented by others. They deployed the trope of the passive and obedient ahali primarily to isolate and delegitimize the rebels, whom they accused of being at the forefront of a conspiracy whose goal was to overturn the order of things and to instigate the innate “ignorance” of the commoner class. At the most basic level, this accusation reflected elite unease in the face of a genuinely popular movement, an inability to comprehend that the meaning of ahali was itself bound to change following the Tanzimat, and a refusal to accept the idea that commoners had a stake in the making and interpretation of history or that they could participate in rational rule or government. (104)

Makdisi thus concludes that “a subaltern movement now claimed to speak for all and, in so doing, impinged on the coherence of an elite Marionite identity.” (105)

The commoners and elites, and increasingly the Ottoman and European imperial authorities, were engaged in a struggle “to define the contours of the Tanzimat in Mount Lebanon,” and thus the meaning of modernization and reform. (105) Shahin understood the Tanzimat to demand equality both within and between religious communities, thus linking “religion and reform in a manner that turned an imperial project of reform on its head. The Sultan and his reforming ministers assumed that the traditional social order – the separation of high and low, elite and nonelite – would remain unchanged by reform. Indeed Ottoman officials saw that the right to religious equality in a modernizing empire was possible and desirable only if all subjects maintained their hudud, or statin in life. It never occurred to the reformers that the upheavals of reform would provide for a subaltern understanding of the Tanzimat.” (105)

Shahin’s key transgression, in the mind of the elites and the Ottoman authorities, was to claim knowledge of what the people’s needs were and how they ought to be politically addressed and represented. Shahin claimed knowledge, however, on the basis simply of being a Christian Maronite, the member of a religious community, thus also indirectly affirming a sectarian identity. Indeed Shahin believed that along with liberating the Maronites from elite rule, they also had to liberate themselves from the Druzes living in the region, taking up the European colonialist narrative of Mt. Lebanon as a sanctuary of Christendom among a sea of Muslim corruption. This understanding of the rebellion intensified once violence spread past the borders of the Kisrawan region into other “mixed districts” of Maronites and Druzes.

In the face of this violence and threat to their authority, Maronite and Druze notables signed an agreement to join together to defeat this insurrection of ignorant commoners. They therefore allied military forces with the Ottomans and marched on Kisrawan. In response, Shahin called upon all Maronites of the nearby districts to be of “one hand and one mind” against the elites (114). Shahin thus “conflated the defense of reform with the salvation of ‘the’ Christian community. In shifted, in other words, the basis of loyalty away from a notable family toward an imagined political sectarian community.” (115)

Chapter 7: “The Devil’s Work”

Although the ensuing violence between Druzes and Maronites, which resulted in the destruction of over 200 villages and the massacre of Maronites, particularly in mixed communities, has generally been interpreted by historians as the product of “alleged Ottoman policies of ‘divide and rule,’ Great Power machinations, material factors such as the decline of textile production in Syria, and sectarian tensions left over from the days of the Egyptian occupation,” “rarely discussed – although it seems to be one of the fundamental facets of the war of 1860 – is its transgressive nature, which violated social as well as geographic and religious boundaries.” (119) Makdisi, in newly recounting the war, specifically seeks to “unsettle the pretension of homogeneity and solidity of communal identity that the term sectarianism implies.” (119)

The war’s aspect of social transgression was the result of Shahin and his rebels’ seeing “little difference between social liberation in Kisrawan and freedom from Druze ‘tyranny’ for the Christians of mixed regions.” (120) For Makdisi, this understanding of their rebellion’s goals was transgressive in three ways:

1) Shahin and the rebels identified themselves as defenders of the Christian faith, challenging the hitherto unquestioned status of the bishops and Maronite elite families.

2) They imagined their own geography of Mt. Lebanon, uniting Christian villagers, ignoring both the traditional genealogical geography and the Ottoman-European partition of the region.

3) The rebels did not consent to be represented politically by anyone else, but rather engaged in political and military action in their own capacity as political agents, upending the traditional understanding of commoners as politically quiescent.

However, Shahin and his rebels were materially a very weak fighting force, poorly equipped and organized. As such, they stood no chance of defeating both the Druze military and the growing elite and Ottoman counter-revolutionary reaction that was sure to bring the Ottoman regular army to Mt. Lebanon. Shahin hoped that other Christian villagers would join their cause and take up arms with his rebels, but this support which might have helped even the odds against Shahin’s enemies never in fact materialized. For their part, the Maronite elites and bishops were more concerned with preserving social hierarchy, and so saw Shahin more as a threat to Christians than as their defender. In fact, they saw the commoners he had banded together as a group of ignorants who Shahin had manipulated to divide Christians rather than unite them.

Makdisi, however, sees the War of 1860 as comprehensible only as a result of the contradictions inherent within the Ottoman attempt at reform. The tension within discourse proclaiming the equality of all religious groups under the law, highlighting both the political identity of all commoners and the differences between religious sects, allowed for the contest over interpretations of reform between commoners, elites, Ottomans, and Europeans, that produced the war: “the circumstances surrounding the violence of 1860 must be understood not as conspiratorial but as contingent, not as tribal but as modern, not as unexplainable but as a comprehensible attempt to purify a reformed landscape created by the combined efforts of locals, Europeans, and Ottomans.” (128)

The violence perpetrated by the Druzes in turn confirms for Makdisi the socially transgressive nature of the war. Against traditional justice that always allowed for forgiveness and return, Druze warriors mutilated the bodies of those they left alive, leaving permanent markings on Maronites signifying that there would be no return to any social order other than one reconstituted “along pure and segregated sectarian lines.” (128)

Unable to control or even comprehend the violence on the ground, the Ottoman governor Hursid relied on “a myth of primordial communalism to explain the violence.” (131) He wrote to the Grand Vizier that the War of 1860 was the result of an “age old enmity” between Druzes and Maronites, and that each group needed to return “to his place” or boundary in order to recreate order in the region (Hursid, quoted in Makdisi, 130-131). This interpretation of events, though, taken up by the Ottoman and imperial authorities as the true explanation of the war, belied the complexity of the violence. The war was not, generally speaking, waged between standing armies, but was carried out often times by mobs or by small groups of assassins who would engage in revenge killings. Prior to the war, such killings would have remained family matters, but in the context of the process of production preceding this paroxysm (10 points for Gryffindor!), “the prevailing atmosphere tended toward greater communal separation and segregation with each additional killing,” despite incidents where Druzes and Maronites protected each other or collaborated (132). Additionally, despite the various ways in which this war was socially transgressive, the Maronite rebels did not see themselves as breaking with “all traditional notions of community and subjecthood. The Christian villagers who rebelled against Druze control underscored their belief that their actions were legitimated by their status as obedient subjects who were merely recovering their rights guaranteed them by the Tanzimat.” (133)

In the context of increasing concerns over communal security, though, a united Maronite front failed to emerge, not only because of the lack of elite participation, but because Maronite communities, particularly ones in mixed districts, were too afraid of leaving themselves undefended to join an army. The Druzes were ultimately better able to organize, and so not only directly attacked Christian emirs and priests, members of the class of notables against whom violence on the part of commoners had been thought unthinkable, but engaged in a “total cleansing of conquered areas” of Maronies, which they did not consider “a shameful event to be covered up but a moment of exultation because in an era of rights based on property, on population, and on representation, the elimination of the Catholic other was the only guarantee of security.” (139)

Eventually, the local governor Hursid was able to eke out a peace treaty between Druzes and Maronites, and in so doing attempted to erase the subaltern aspects of the war, describing it instead as the result of the age-old sectarian hatreds that still dominate our discourse surrounding sectarian violence today. In his effort to reestablish a “semblance of social order,” Hursid’s peace treaty accomplished two goals:

The first was to reinstate an imperial Ottoman authority over the natives – to once more draw a clear line between the Sultan’s representatives and the Sultan’s subjects and to reinforce a Tanzimat-era notion of equal imperial distance from all subjects regardless of religious affiliation. The second was to underscore the illegitimacy of popular mobilizations and to reconsecreate a strict sectarian hierarchy. Together, these functions conspired to “abolish” the memory of the conflict and, with it, the reality of transgression of social order and the possibility of liberation. (142)

Hursid injected his understanding of the violence into the peace treaty, posturing himself as a knowledgeable elite who understood the reality of supposedly ancient sectarian conflicts between ignorants in religious groups and the leaders who manipulated them. The aim of the peace treaty, as Makdisi concludes, was to return commoners to their boundaries in social hierarchy and to forget the conflict entirely, conspiring to “write the ahali out of history,” reestablishing the image of the quiescent commoner who stays out of politics (144).

Chapter 8: “A Very Old Thing”

The Ottoman authorities, in turn, sent the regular army to Mt. Lebanon to punish the perpetrators of the war in the name of modernization, viewing sectarian violence as “primordial behavior that emanated from what Napoleon III described to his troops (about to embark for Syria) as ‘the fanaticism of a previous century.’” (146) In so doing, the Ottoman army set up the modern Ottoman state as having a monopoly on legitimate violence, demonstrating that “what had occurred in 1860 did not belong in any way, shape, or form, to the modern world.” (148) This violence was a message addressed just as much to the Europeans as to the locals, demonstrating the Ottoman commitment to modernization and the quelling of supposedly ancient violence. The Ottoman authorities, then, collaborated with Hursud and the elites to produce a knowledge of sectarianism and sectarian violence that still informs how we think of such matters.

First, punishment had to be meted out according to the standards of modern justice. Thus, the supposed perpetrators of the violence were punished “regardless of their religious persuasion,” but merely to demonstrate the Sultan’s authority over all his subjects in line with the secular aspects of the Tanzimat reforms (149). In addition, the regular Ottoman army carried out punishments, symbolizing the organization and rationality of the modern Ottoman state as opposed to the passionate, ignorant mob that was at the bottom of sectarian violence. For Makdisi, however, this violence, carefully scripted to demonstrate the values of modernity to the eyes of all, was in its application a “crude terror intended to silence the population, born not out of a sense of frustration or alienation but out of a deliberate, imperial policy that set out to ‘discipline’ the masses of Syria. The terror masked an essentially reactionary goal: to banish the subaltern from politics once and for all and to reconstitute the broken lines of hierarchy by recovering the meaning of Europe and the Tanzimat from popular understanding.” (151)

The knowledge produced about sectarianism, then, has to be understood in the context of the attempt to absolve the Ottoman state and European authorities from any responsibility in the violence, limiting the conflict “to an allegedly tribal sectarian landscape removed both physically and temporally from metropolitan centers.” (151) The Europeans and Ottomans thus constructed a new, tribal geography of the region, thus explaining the supposedly ancient conflicts between religious and ethnic groups as intractable feuds. Local elites became the scapegoats of the war, either accused of not doing enough to stop the violence, or of conspiring to manipulate the commoners to engage in it. The authorities ultimately convinced Shahin to confess to having corrupted villagers to fight, thus forgetting the populist aspect of his rebellion: “two visions were represented that day, one of reinvigorated elites keen to put the memories of the Kisrawan rebellion and 1860 behind them and eager to regain their ‘rightful’ share in local politics, and the other of a spent populace that was unsure of its place in postwar society and unable to remove itself from the shadow of 1859 and 1869, where it had enjoyed its finest, yet saddest, hour.” (159)

A new Christian government was founded in Mt. Lebanon in collaboration with European authorities, determined to “bring civility and modernity to an allegedly unmodern province. […] All was ordered. All was deliberated beforehand, methodical, absolute, and without any doubt or contradiction. All was, needless to say, in stark contrast to the perceived anarchy on the ground that led to the creation of the Mutasarrifiyya [the new government].” (160) In so doing, the new government helped to create what Makdisi calls a culture of sectarianism in the region, creating an absolute split between religious identity, associated with antimodern, ignorant, and anarchic society, and modern secularist governance, associated with, modernity, knowledge, and rationality. The new government re-partitioned Mt. Lebanon based entirely on sectarian lines, but still with elite representation for each group, reaffirming the social hierarchy against which Shahin had fought.

Makdisi concludes that

In the aftermath of 1860, a culture of sectarianism developed in the sense that all sectors of society, public and private, recognized that the war and the massacres marked the beginning of a new age – an age defined by the raw intrusion of sectarian consciousness into modern life. At a public level, the discourse of sectarianism permeated all facets of administration, law, education, and finally, with the establishment of the Lebanese republic, the state. Mount Lebanon continued to be haunted by the possibility of renewed religious violence, and consequently there emerged a political culture determined to “forget” the trauma of 1860. This culture depended, and still depends, on a myth of communal homogeneity – that there is such a thing as a Maronite or a Druze nation that can or should be represented – and on a myth of traditional religious tolerance and harmony, all the while minimizing or ignoring he fact that such harmony undergirded an utterly rigid and often fiolenct notable hierarchy. […] The culture of sectarianism dominates, as well, the private world of citizens. It encompasses, beyond the eye of state surveillance, a range of aspirations, fears, and beliefs that as often contradict as reinforce the public culture of sectarianism. It forces all citizens to make a basic choice, either to resist or to support sectarianism – either to believe in a past that allows for the possibility of coexistence or to believe in a past that forever denies it. (163-164)

While dominating both public and private consciousness of religion and social life, however, sectarianism is ultimately an effect of the anxieties and contradictions inherent in the project of modernization, which it does not fully resolve, only explain away as something ancient and intractable. In turn, though, sectarianism is not simply an elite knowledge, but something that commoners also participate in, and is thus something that is produced through the competing interests of different parties. “There has never been a pure sectarianism, only narratives about its purity.” (165)

Epilogue:

In the context of the 20^th Century, concerns regarding sectarianism focus more on sectarian violence as an obstacle to national development. Again, sectarianism appears as “an illegitimate and divisive force, more a deviancy than an authentic expression of a specific historical experience. Sectarianism, moreover, has been depicted as a monolithic force, unchanging in the fact of history, while the nation-state has been viewed as the culmination of history.” (166) Makdisi insists, though, that if sectarianism is, as he has demonstrated, something that was produced in a historical context, “therefore it can be changed.” (166) Ottoman and European colonial histories written after the War of 1860 furthered the understanding of sectarian violence as a primordial and intractable conflict, exonerating themselves from guilt, while local histories emphasized the role of conspirators in the conflict to lessen “the need to face the contradictions that lay at the heart of changing communal identities.” (171) Local historians attempted to reconstruct the narrative of a unified community in Mt. Lebanon while having to come to terms with its new sectarian organization, and so chose to blame shadowy conspirators or each other.

Makdisi hopes that in describing sectarianism as something produced and contingent, however, he will show a way forward in confronting these seemingly impossible conflicts: “The beginning of sectarianism did not imply a reversion. It marked a rupture, a birth of a new culture that singled out religious affiliation as the defining public and political characteristic of a modern subject and citizen. To overcome it, if it is at all possible, requires yet another rupture, a break as radical for the body politic as the advent of sectarianism was for the old regime. It requires another vision of modernity.” (174) In so doing, Makdisi directs our attention towards other conflicts around the world that are labeled sectarian, in order that we may question whether they are in fact produced and contingent conflicts, saying “what happened in Mount Lebanon could occur, and in fact has occurred, elsewhere in the modern world.” (174)

I would, however, direct your attention to the huge…tracts of land…owned by elites. This man explains:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVWH01E2weA

Sigmund Freud - "Totem and Taboo"

Chapter 1: “The Horror of Incest”

Freud begins Totem and Taboo by postulating an equation between the psychological development of primitives (the earliest human societies, living in the simplest forms of social organization), savages (contemporary human societies who lack any sense of modern culture and live under similarly simple forms of social organization), and neurotic patients, particularly children (again, not doing scare quotes, too many instances of this and Freud uses them in a technical sense, but this starts off on a nice note, eh?). This tripartite equation Freud uses to resolve a paradox: although one might expect that primitive and savage societies would have fittingly primitive and savage sexual ethics (ie. none), one finds upon examination that these societies “set before themselves with the most scrupulous care and the most painful severity of avoiding incestuous relations. Indeed, their whole social organization seems to serve that purpose or to have been brought into relation with its attainment.” (4)

Primitive and savage societies have equivalent forms of social and religious organization, namely totemism. The social border of each tribe is identification with a particular totem animal, after which the tribe names itself, and each individual within the tribe is related in a form of social identification stronger than blood ties. The totem animal is defined as the father and guardian spirit of the tribe, and each member is under obligation not to kill or eat it, except on ceremonial occasions. For Freud, however, the most interesting practice of totemism is exogamy, the forbidding of sexual relations between individuals sharing a totem. Nothing in the concept of totem stands as justification for this practice, and appears to have “nothing to do with totemism, but became attached to it (without there being any underlying connection) at some time when marriage restrictions became necessary.” (7)

Four further facts regarding totemism pique Freud’s curiosity:

1. Violation of exogamy, or incest, is punished by the whole community, as opposed to other violations of totemic codes, suggesting that the punish expiates some danger that threatens the entire community.
2. Marriages that may result in children as much as passing affairs unlikely to result in children are equally punished, indicating that there is no practical basis for exogamy.
3. Although totems are hereditary and so apply to all members within a tribe,
4. Exogamic rules seem designed particularly to prevent unions between a man and his mother and/or sisters. All women of the tribe are treated as if they were blood relatives.

From the preceding Freud concludes that “these savages have an unusually great horror of incest, or are sensitive on the subject to an unusual degree, and that they combine this with a peculiarity which remains obscure to us – of replacing real blood-relationship by totem kinship.” (9) However, at certain approved ceremonies, incest is permitted. This situation is complicated by the further institution of marriage phratries, subgroups within and between tribes which are themselves exogamous. So for instance, if Daniel the Savage (new nickname, please) marries into a phratry, the offspring of that marriage cannot marry another member of that phratry, even if those phratry members are members of other tribes under different totems.

Furthermore, strict practices were undertaken to prevent even seeing an individual with whom one might have incest, called avoidances. Freud goes through a litany of these avoidances, often going to extremes (for instance, in several cases if a man notices his sister walking down a road, one of the two has to hide out of sight until the other passes), but noting that prohibitions limiting the activities of men with women in their tribe/phratry are far more severe than those for women. In particular relations between sons and their mothers-in-law are stringently avoided. Freud speculates that this may be explained by reference to separate impulses in the son-in-law and the mother-in-law which in combination with each other foster feelings of sexual desire between the two that must be repressed: the mother-in-law, recognizing that her sexual life with her husband is ebbing, identifies with her daughter in order to vicariously experience sexual desire through her, thus feeling an impulse to fall in love with the son-in-law. For the son-in-law’s part, his original repressed desire for his mother, the first object of his sexual desire, is displaced onto his wife, but the impulse towards mother-love always threatens to reestablish itself, such that he is prone to sexual desires towards his mother-in-law.

Freud extrapolates that repressed incestuous desires between family members are most likely the explanation for all avoidances, according with knowledge garnered from his studies on infantile sexuality. The original choices of love objects for infants are their family members, particularly the boy for his mother and then his sister if he has one, but these are always repressed. In most cases the boy successfully substitutes other women outside the family for these original choices, but neurotic patients suffer from inhibition and regression, or that “he has either failed to get free from the psycho-sexual conditions that prevailed in his childhood or he has returned to them.” (22) In civilized societies, this condition is relatively rare, but Freud speculates that in primitive or savage societies sexual desires have not been as successfully sublimated as in modern Europe, such that the equation between primitives, savages, and neurotics seems to him justified by the available evidence.

Chapters 2 and 3: “Taboo and Emotional Ambivalence,” “Animism, Magic, and the Omnipotence of Thoughts”

Very little of note occurs in these chapters, most of which are spent re-presenting ethnographic data on a multitude of primitive and savage societies already collected in the works of James Frazer and Edward Tylor. In light of this, I will just summarize a few important arguments that Freud makes at various points in these chapters.

Taboo – Freud defines taboo as a condition of being both consecrated and dangerously dirty, and the actions which cause this condition. A taboo is something set apart from common activity and is thus prohibited to most individuals in a society without their knowing or even questioning why, and is thus taken as a matter of course. Special individuals such as kings, priests, and criminals, are taken to be subjected to taboos, and thus are attributed a dangerous and contagious power of pollution. Primitive and savage societies thus create a system of elaborate ceremonial actions to expiate the danger posed by taboos.

Freud outlines a parallel between primitive and savage taboos and the actions of obsessive neurotics, who possess a fear, particularly of touching, certain objects, for fear that they may pollute or defile them. They are equally unable to explain the origin of these fears, and are therefore taken for granted, though they also construct elaborate rituals to allay the fear of touching these prohibited objects. Freud argues that in the case of obsessional neurosis patients at one point possessed a desire for these objects, which had later to be repressed, creating an ambivalent relationship between the neurotic and the object, who experiences the conscious revulsion against touching it while simultaneously a subconscious desire for it. The ritual activities of obsessive neurotics are just as much, then, ways to avoid touching forbidden objects as they are ways of acting out this forbidden touching in a safe way, of coming as close as possible to touching these objects without actually doing so.

Taking his parallel back to primitive and savage taboos, Freud speculates that the earliest taboos must have been “prohibitions of primeval [sic] antiquity which were at some time externally imposed by the previous generation. These prohibitions must have concerned activities towards which there was a strong inclination.” (40) Since the earliest taboos prohibited the killing of the totem animal and incest, Freud concludes that these must have been the two strongest desires of primitive humanity. The communal punishment of transgressors of the two taboos, was for Freud a protection against the tempting quality transgression might have: if one person could follow their unconscious desires and not be punished, why not everybody? The community had to collectively punish breakers of taboos in order to collectively disavow their unconscious desires.

Freud thus neatly summarizes his conclusions:

Taboo is a primeval [sic] prohibition forcibly imposed (by some authority) from outside, and directed against the most powerful longings to which human beings are subject. The desire to violate it persists in their unconscious; those who obey they taboo have an ambivalent attitude to what the taboo prohibits. The magical power that is attributed to taboo is based on the capacity for arousing temptation; and it acts like a contagion because examples are contagious and because the prohibited desire in the unconscious shifts from one thing to another. The fact that the violation of a taboo can be atoned for by a renunciation shows that renunciation lies at the basis of obedience to taboo. (44-45)

Also, without knowledge of the origins of taboos, when they are internalized across generations the force of guilt against violation is felt in the consciousness as conscience, indicating for Freud a probable origin of moral sensibilities.

Overdetermination of psychic events – Primitive and savage communities have an animistic view of the universe, or one dominated by all objects in the universe possess a soul or spiritual being which animates them, and that the universe as a whole is animated by a spiritual being. Animism, however, is merely a way primitive and savage individuals interpret events in the world around them, as opposed to religious and scientific interpretations of the world. Animism, religion, and science, for Freud constitute 3 stages in human intellectual development, based on their interpretations of how nature functions.

Animism, however, bears a striking resemblance to the ways obsessional neurotics and children understand their ability to influence the universe, all of which suffer in Freud’s view from belief in the omnipotence of thoughts, or in other words that human thoughts have efficacious power in the world. Human thoughts and desires can lead to physical results, according to these three groups, thus creating magical belief, that one’s thoughts and intentions can have impacts in the world if combined with proper rituals. In animism such omnipotence humans attribute to themselves, causing Freud to postulate an early form of the theory of narcissism (this book having been written before Freud’s famous paper on narcissism) that underlies this viewpoint, where one overvalues oneself as a love object and attributes to oneself the powers that one later attributes to others. In religious thinking, omnipotence of thinking is attributed to a god or gods who are stand-ins for one’s parents, representing the psychological stage where one’s sexual attraction is directed towards one’s family. And finally in scientific thinking, it is renounced entirely, corresponding to the psychological point where “an individual has reached maturity, has renounced the pleasure principle, adjusted himself to reality and turned to the external world for the object of his desires.” (112-113)

Each of these forms of thinking, however, is organized according to a stage of human psycho-sexual development. The results of an individual’s thinking thus has two determinations: that of their “philosophy of nature” (Freud’s term, 95) and of the psychological process underlying it. Human thinking is thus overdetermined: “at least two reasons can be discovered for each of its products: a reason based on the premises of the system (a reason, then, which may be delusional) and a concealed reason, which must judge to be the truly operative and the real one.” (119)

Chapter 4: “The Return of Totemism in Childhood”

Freud now returns to question the origins of totemism and exogamy, taking as his guide the overdetermination of psychic events to argue that any coherent explanation of their origins (as well as that of religion) must have both a historical and a psychological component. Before embarking on this explanation, Freud notes a few oddities about the history of totemism and exogamy that also guide his explanation: (1) it would appear that totemism is older than the practice of exogamy, (2) the first exogamic sexual restrictions were placed upon a younger generation by the older, and (3) there is no instinctual aversion to incest, but only one that is conditioned by social and familial factors. In fact, as Freud notes, our earliest childhood love objects are consistently incestuous, indicating that events during life and not innate psychology must be the explanation for the horror of incest.

Freud begins the historical component of his explanation by citing Darwin’s theory of the primal horde, the most primitive form of human social organization. Primitive humanity “lived in small communities, each with as many wives as he could support and obtain, whom he would have jealously guarded against all other men. Or he may have lived with several wives by himself, like the Gorilla; for all the natives ‘agree that but one adult male is seen in a band; when the young male grows up, a contest takes place for mastery, and the strongest, by killing and driving out the others, establishes himself as the head of the community.” (Dr. Savage, quoted in Darwin, quoted in Freud, 156). As one adult male leads the horde and therefore owns all of the wives, exogamy is a de facto practice for all the other, weaker males. It would seem from this, however, that exogamy then precedes totemism, and so Freud is left with a paradox of which comes first: exogamy or totemism?

The limitations of contemporary historical theories of the origins of totemism and exogamy prompt Freud to add “one single ray of light” from psychoanalysis (157). Primitives, savages, and children seem to behave almost identically towards animals, having no qualms about treating them as friends and equals. At some points, however, children can develop animal phobias against animals for which they had hitherto felt peculiarly great affection. Freud speculates that these phobias are grounded in the child’s (particularly the boy’s) fear of his father, which he displaces onto the animal. Freud locates the origin of these phobias in the Oedipus complex:

The hatred of his father that arises in a boy from rivalry for his mother is no able to achieve uninhibited sway over his mind; it has to content against his old-established affection and admiration for the very same person. The child finds relief from the conflict arising out of this double-sided, this ambivalent emotional attitude towards his father by displacing his hostile and fearful feelings on to a substitute for his father. The displacement cannot, however, bring the conflict to an end, it cannot effect a clear-cut severance between the affectionate and the hostile feelings. On the contrary, the conflict is resumes in relation to the object on to which the displacement has been made: the ambivalence is extended to it. (160)

Freud notes with interest as well that if the totem animal is taken as a substitute for the father, the two taboos of totemism are identical to the crimes of Oedipus: not killing and eating the totem corresponds to the desire to murder one’s father and exogamy proscribes sleeping with his wife, the child’s mother.

Having suggested that the totem animal may be a substitute for the group’s primal father-figure, he then establishes the link between totemism and the sacrificial meal, what he takes to be the earliest religious rite. The flesh and blood of the sacrificial animal was shared in common by each of a tribe’s members who were under religious duty and social obligation to share in the meal. The sacrificial animal could also only be killed on these prescribed festival days, and killing was forbidden on all other days. Killing the sacrificial animal was considered a crime incurring guilt, and so had to be shared by the entire community, thus indicating that the animal was considered a member of the tribe. Since sacrifice was a feature of totemic religions, Freud concludes that the sacrificial animal was in the case of totemic societies in fact none other than the totem animal, the subject of taboos.

The totem animal as sacrificial animal is to be mourned and treated with respect by the tribe. After the sacrificial meal, however, ceremonies took place which expressed joy at the totem animal’s death, allowing for unlimited excess and taboo-breaking. For Freud this demonstrates an emotional ambivalence the members of the tribe felt towards the totem animal, perfectly explainable if the totem animal is taken as a substitute for the father, towards whom the sons feel both love and also competitive hatred.

From here Freud links his psychological observations with the historical theory of the primal horde. The primal horde pre-existed totemism, as a social system, made up only of a father who owned several wives and who drove away his sons in jealously guarding his women. And then, this happened:

One day the brothers who had been driven out came together, killed and devoured their father and so made an end to the patriarchal horde. United, they had the courage to do and succeeded in doing what would have been impossible for them individually. […] Cannibal savages as they were, it goes without saying that they devoured their victim as well as killing him. The violent primal father had doubtless been the feared and envied model of each one of the company of brothers: and in the act of devouring him they accomplished their identification with him, and each one of them acquired a portion of his strength. The totem meal, which is perhaps mankind’s earliest festival, would thus be a repetition and a commemoration of this memorable and criminal deed, which was the beginning of so many things – of social organization, of moral restrictions and of religion. (176)

The brothers in question had the same feelings of ambivalence all boys have for their fathers in Freud’s Oedipal schema: love and identification with him and his power, but hatred and jealousy for his possessing his mother’s love instead of the child. The act of killing their father resolved their feelings of hatred with him, but in their place guilt arose, shared by each member of the horde, They resolved this ambivalence by renouncing their claim to the women within the horde, creating a de jure out of a de facto practice of exogamy, and by substituting the father with a totem animal on which they placed their ambivalent feelings, creating totemism. Totemism was in essence a covenant with their father, exchanging the father’s protection through the totem animal with their promise not to repeat their act on the totem animal.

Totemism came about as the resolution of ambivalent feelings towards a group’s father-figure. An early rebellion prompts guilt which creates what Freud terms deferred obedience to the patriarchal rule of the father. For Freud, “all later religions are seen to be attempts at solving the same problem. The vary according to the stage of civilization at which they arise and according to the methods which they adopt; but all have the same end in view and are reactions to the same great event with which civilization began and which, since it occurred, has not allowed mankind a moment’s rest.” (180) All religion, according to Freud, are ways of re-experiencing the primal event of the killing of the primal father without actually killing him, as ways to mediate between the contradictory feelings of love and hatred for the father.

The resolution of this ambivalence also gave rise to the first moral codes. The brothers’ act of renouncing their wives not only served the psychological purpose of allaying their guilt for their father’s murder but also the practical purpose of stating that no brother would put himself in the position of the father again. The first moral prohibition was against fratricide, which in Freud’s speculations very quickly became generalized to cover all members of society, who concludes that “society was now based on complicity in the common crime; religion was based on the sense of guilt and remorse attaching to his; while morality was based partly on the exigencies of this society and partly on the penance demanded by the sense of guild.” (181)

Religion developed as the ambivalent feelings of the sons towards their father became further developed. In a sacrificial meal, the father was dually represented as totem animal and god. The gods of early religions were thus fittingly theriomorphic, only to be elevated later on into an anthropomorphic figure as a “more serious effort at atonement than had been the ancient covenant with the totem.” (185) At this point, however, societies also disavowed their guilt by claiming as elements of doctrine that the father-god demanded the sacrificial meal himself. A more efficient method of resolving ambivalence and denying guilt, however, was found with the Christian religion, replacing a primary father god with a son god, Jesus Christ. Here the son not only atones for himself and all other members of the society through his sacrifice, but also makes himself into a god, in the same gesture atoning for the father’s murder and taking his place, finally accomplishing what the original brothers could not. Freud sees a similar condition underlying the drama of Greek tragedy. A Greek tragic hero bears tragic guilt which he inherited from past generations, originating in some rebellion against a divine authority. Although the chorus attempts to sympathize and alleviate the hero’s guilt, it is in fact the hero that allays the guilt and complicity in the original crime of the chorus, and so he takes on all of the tragic guilt for himself as a key element of a tragedy’s plot.

Freud speculates that the guilt from the primal father’s murder was inherited as a disposition towards emotional ambivalence towards parents that could be activated given correct conditions. Thus neurosis also has an overdetermined origin: both in the historical fact of the primal murder, and also in psychological fact. For Freud, all that is required to trigger the emotional ambivalence inherited from ages past is the impulse or wish, which can be felt at any time, to kill the father, and the extent to which individuals feel this can determine the extent to which they feel moral restrictions, and ultimately suffer from neurosis. Freud thus concludes this book by suggesting that the origin of all culture and society resides in the Oedipus complex and the ways it is resolved. Culture sorta like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BA35ys91QJU

Keiji Nishitani - "Religion and Nothingness"

Introduction:

Keiji Nishitani attempts in this book to reformulate the question “What is religion?” away from attempts to amass historical evidence from a variety of traditions in order to create a universal definition of religion based on certain shared characteristics, from using an objective viewpoint to encounter religion as some type of object whose characteristics can be catalogued and compared. Instead, Nishitani seeks the home-ground of religion, its existence as it is lived by people. The question of religion is to be approached by a person questioning what religion is specifically to them, how they live what they call religion, treating that practice as religion’s sole existence, “where religion emerges from man himself, as a subject, as a self living in the present.” (xlviii) So Nishitani is uninterested in what religion “has been,” but in what it “ought to be,” how it can be understood and practiced in such a way as to carry personal conviction.

In so reformulating the question of religion, Nishitani attempts to engage not only with the Zen Buddhist tradition in which he has been raised and practiced, but also with Western philosophies of religion (comparisons of Eastern vs. Western thinking/society are all over this book – I’m too lazy to put scare quotes over all of them…). Nishitani regards the contemporary situation of Western culture (this book was written in 1982) as one whose primary disease is nihilism, the loss of lived belief in personal deities and an ordered cosmos, replaced by what he sees as empty worship of human capacities. In order to overcome this situation, Western thought must come to recognize the Buddhist standpoint of sunyata, and the perspective it opens on human affairs and the natural world.

Nishitani insists that his account is meant to be non-doctrinal, equally applicable to all religions, but he ultimately criticizes Christianity and Judaism for embodying a pre-nihilistic viewpoint, that of a personal deity and of individual chosenness and election by God, a fundamentally self-centered viewpoint, which he argues can only be overcome, along with the nihilism to which it has succumbed, by adoption of certain Buddhist concepts and perspectives, heavily inflected with concepts taken from Heidegger, Hegel, and Kierkegaard.

Chapter 1: “What is Religion?”

The question “What is religion?” or, more importantly, the question “Why do we need religion?” is ambiguous: asking the question is a demonstration that religion has not yet become a necessity for the questioner, but religion should be necessary even for one who does not yet see its value. This ambiguity arises from the fact that religion cannot be defended in terms of its utility: “a religion concerned primarily with its own utility bears witness to its degeneration.” (2) Utility is a form of evaluation that is fundamentally self-centered; when I ask what purpose religion serves I really ask what purpose it serves for me.

The question of religion opens up, for Nishitani, at the point where we no longer understand utility as a viable form of evaluation, in what are called limit experiences such as death, illness, poverty, etc., undermines “the roothold of our existence and bring[s] the meaning of life into question – become[s] pressing personal problems for us.” (3) The value of all our previous projects undertaken for our own sakes is dissolved in these limit experiences, and we recognize that “not one of all the things that had made up the stuff of life until then is of any use.” (3) Nishitani argues that, following Kierkegaard and Heidegger, “that abyss is always just underfoot,” and that the nihility, “that which renders meaningless the meaning of life,” always underlies the projects we create for ourselves (3-4). Religion arises at these moments of crisis where nihility has overcome our self-centered existence and called the meaning of our lives into question, such that we are force to asked for what purpose we exist. Religion, then, for Nishitani, is the practice, the lived experience, of an individual’s answering this question for herself, the overcoming of self-centered living through the replacement of self-love by life lived for a purpose which becomes the new object of live, which he will later compare to love of one’s neighbor.

Nishitani, noting that there are many different perspective by which one can view religion, chooses to focus on religion as the “real self-awareness of reality,” which refers both to our awareness of reality and reality’s realizing (actualizing itself and coming to its self-awareness) itself within our awareness and actions (5). Reality realizes itself in us by appropriating us to reality, thus altering not only our thoughts, but also our actions and practices to take up their “essential determination,” thus bringing us to live in the fullest sense of the term according to our real being (6).

Reality for Nishitani is unrelated to bare physical existence, as the nihility representing the meaninglessness of physical things and the death representing the negation of life are equally real phenomena. When Nishitani speaks of reality, he refers to “a great harmony among all things in the universe that brings them into being and sustains them in mutual dependence and cooperation, a mystical order that rules over all things so that God can be seen in the most trivial of things.” (8-9) In other words, reality constitutes that perspective whereby we can see within each individual thing, in its course of changes and ultimately its inevitable death, its essential relationship and harmony with all other things in the universe. Reality realizes itself in us when we not only see the universe according to this perspective, but actively take it up in our practices of living, behaving and becoming a harmonious being in relationship with all other things, described in more detail in later chapters.

Two types of self-centeredness, however, prevent us from living within what Nishitani calls the field of reality: the first, already described above, is the self-centeredness of our intentions and interests, understanding all of our activities in terms of their utility for us. The second is a conceptual self-centeredness, or the “subjective autonomy of the ego” that arises from Cartesian philosophy (10). Modern philosophy regards the ego as a separate individual, cut off from the world which it represents to itself and thus comprehends as a set of objects. This egocentric perspective prevents us from comprehending the pre-Cartesian view of the universe, as an organic whole whose parts are in sympathy with each other, connected by the souls of each thing.

The modern egocentric perspective sees only its own intentions and representations, its forms of knowledge and emotions, reflected back to it when looking into the universe. The egocentric subject is closed within its own self-understanding, such that “ego means self in a state of self-attachment.” (14) Nishitani opposes what he refers to as the elemental self to this form of encountering the world, where one recognizes and therefore lives within one’s roots or grounds within universal harmony. The passing-over from the self-attached to the elemental selves begins in the limit experiences outlined above, which create in the individual “the Great Doubt,” a Zen phrase Nishitani uses to express the “fundamental uncertainty about the very existence of oneself and others.” (16) The Great Doubt involves recognizing that nihility not only is present as a threat amongst our everyday existence, but is fundamentally at its root, that nihility, meaningless and formlessness, lies “concealed at the ground of all that exists, at the ground of the world itself,” a recognition that does not negate the reality of the world, but “nullifies” it, bringing us face-to-face with the impermanence and evanescence of our own existences, along with that of all things (16).

Nishitani compares the experience of the Great Doubt to the Christian recognition of sin and evil. An individual’s recognition of his or her own sinful state is connected with recognizing the sinfulness of all humanity, that in the very ground of humanity’s existence as humanity, it is in essence sinful. True recognition of sin is deeper than secular definitions of evil as the latter only isolate instances of evil actions, whereas the former recognizes the transtemporality and essentiality of sin to humanity as such, in other words that humanity is in itself corrupt. In Christianity, faith must exist within this experience of sin, beginning in the recognition that sin, the shunning of divine love, is only possible inasmuch as humanity is essentially a receptacle for divine love, such that the “point of contact” between humans and God is found within “the very awareness of the fact of complete corruption itself.” (25)

Nishitani labels this realization the “Great Reality,” which follows from the Great Doubt in Zen Buddhism. In both religions, faith comes upon the recognition that humanity, in its state of nihility/sinfulness, is in reality essentially connected by its point of contact with some form of divine love. It follows that humanity is transtemporally and essentially connected not only in its sinfulness, but also in its relationship with the divine, the “‘Power of the Original Vow’ (that is, the saving will) of the Tagatha (Buddha) in the direction of all sentient beings,” or God’s agape. (26) Our recognition of our relationship with all other sentient beings and thus also with the divine is the only way to fully overcome our egocentric selfhood, fully break apart our solitude, and actualize our true elemental selfhood through faith.

Modern atheism in fact provides the key to start each individual’s personal journey towards faith. Nishitani chooses Sartre as his representative for modern atheistic humanism, basing his understanding of the ego on “subjective nothingness,” where no transcendent meaning grounds human existence, such that humans are capable of choosing “an image of what he believes man ought to be” and living that image out (31). In place of the imago Dei as the transcendent ground of human ethics, Sartre has humans create an “image of man” by which they model themselves. In this way, Nishitani argues, humans become fully closed within their ego’s projections of who they ought to be, blinded to the nihility that underlies their projections.

Modern atheism does not, however, liberate humanity from nihility, but rather brings it closer to it. Limit experiences will still call into question an individual’s existence, but this time with no grounding meaning to their lives outside of that which they have created and has just been called into question. In response, religion must reassert itself by coming to terms with two issues that have traditionally hampered it. First is a paradox regarding the ontological status of humanity vis a vis God. God has in traditional Christianity been understood as creator ex nihilo, meaning that God is ultimately more real than creation, being its archetype and architect. At the same time, however, creation is seen as imbued and sustained by divine love, and so the exact ontological status of creation is unsettled. Second, religion must come to terms with the problem of evil, of theodicy. Religion must finally be able to answer the problem of how a good and omnipotent God can allow evil and, for Nishitani, nihility, in the world.

Chapter 2: “The Personal and the Impersonal in Religion”

The two great intellectual crises of our time, Nishitani argues, are the resolution of the debate between religion and science, and the overcoming of philosophical nihilism, seen most prevalently in the form of modern atheism described above. The twin forces of science and philosophical nihilism began to challenge religion as the classical view of a teleologically ordered universe collapsed. The 1755 Lisbon Earthquake (destroyed lots of the city, churches destroyed, brothels not, etc., the idea that natural disasters were divine punishment was shattered) demonstrated that God and humanity do not have a personal relationship with each other, such that God responds to and ultimately supports human interests. In its wake a materialistic and mechanistic view of the universe, “a world cold and dead, governed by laws of mechanical necessity, completely indifferent to the fact of men.” (48) Without the idea of soul or spirit, the world now began to be seen as a collection of matter that followed impersonal rules.

This materialistic and mechanistic view of the physical universe was accompanied by a social vision of human progress. Under this vision, humans were viewed as the subjugators of nature, making the world conform to its own will and conceptions of justice and rationality. These three ideas, materialism, mechanism, and progress, are for Nishitani the three poles of modern atheism. The problem of nihility, however, was not resolved in the modern atheistic view of the world, but in fact was made into a presupposition of it. Humans became the masters of their own destiny with no structure of transcendent meaning (ie. metaphysics or religion) to ground their self-understanding, thus making them free to self-define.

The nihility underlying the modern atheistic subject, however, is not overcome by this kind of freedom, as limit experiences will always call into question whatever self-definition the subject gives itself. The only appropriate response to nihilism, for Nishitani, is to affirm the indifference of nature, but “not a cold and insensitive indifference, but an indifference of love. It is a non-differentiating love that transcends the distinctions men make between good and evil, justice and injustice.” (58) This type of love for Nishitani is the common denominator between Christian agape and Buddhist non-ego, both ways of indifferently appreciating all things, regardless of individual differences.

Nishitani explains the link between non-ego and agape in his reading of Meister Eckhart. For Eckhart, the essence of God is “absolute nothingness,” equated with the “Godhead” as opposed to the personal God, and a transcendence of any mode of divine being (61). When humans are made in the image of God, then, this includes the Godhead as well, such that each human has an element of absolute nothingness in his or herself. Union with God, then, requires that individual subjectivity be transcended in order to attain the divine element of absolute nothingness in the depths of the individual soul, such that “the element of self is broken through again and again” in mystic ascent (62). The individual in mystic ascent dies to his or her individual subjectivity, but begins to live a divine life having found and taken up his or her absolute nothingness, entering a condition Nishitani calls “death-sive-life,” the unity of death and life in mystic union (63). Having reached this union, Eckhart warns against rapture and self-intoxication in divine perfection, but advocates living everyday life with a higher sense of the value of all activities, each inspired with divine perfection. In fact, for Eckhart there is no divine soul beyond this everyday activity, such that Nishitani concludes that the mystic soul “bears witness to God as present in the Dasein of the soul itself.” (64) God does not stand in some transcendent ground beyond human experience, but in fact only exists as the Existenz, existence without essence, only through activity, of humans, the point of intersection between human and divine nature in the godhead which reveals itself as perfect practices of living.

In order to achieve this state, however, the subject must overcome the self-centered view of personhood implied in modern atheism. Modern atheistic subjects create and define themselves against a backdrop of nihility. Mystic ascent begins by affirming this nihility, recognizing that nothing underlies human subjectivity. There is no thing that models human existence, and the recognition of this opens the possibility of awareness of absolute nothingness: “true nothingness means that there is no thing that is nothingness, and this is absolute nothingness.” (70) Absolute nothingness can only be experienced as this lack of grounding of human subjectivity, experienced in succumbing to the experience of nihility in limit situations. Grounding subjectivity, in other words, is absolute nothingness, which opens up therefore as an individual’s true self:
The ‘nothing at all’ behind the person comes out into the open on the side of the self, the original self. If person [ie. modern atheistic subjectivity] be regarded as the sheer mode of self-being itself, ‘behind’ which there is nothing, this is so because the matter is being looked at from the side of the person. […] When the ‘nothing at all’ opens up on the near side of the personal self, however, and is seen as the sheer self itself, then nothingness really becomes actualized in the self as the true self. (70-71).

Instead of living as a “person,” an independent subject, we find ourselves, when recognizing that absolute nothingness is our ground, to be a “persona,” a role we play and nothing more. We are actors playing out roles that absolute nothingness delimits: our true nature is absolute nothingness, and so we merely embody the nature of absolute nothingness. Nishitani compares this situation to a wave and water. The wave is water and behaves as water does, but it an individual unit of it. There is no water that is not a wave, just as there is no ideal “humanity” that exists without individual humans, such that humans are the form and its instantiation at the same time. So it is not that humans are formless, but have no-form, have nothingness as their form, such that we are not “personal” beings, but are impersonal in our existence: “Seen from that aspect, every man, such as he is in the real Form of his suchness, is not man. He is impersonal. In other words, he is ‘man’ as an appearance with nothing at all behind it to make it an appearance,” and is “impersonal-sive-personal,” or beyond the duality of personality and impersonality. (74)

Chapter 3: “Nihility and Sunyata”

The similarity between religion and science/modern atheism is that each religion, and modern science as well, is grounded on a particular ontology or worldview. Each worldview acts as a basis for the truths expounded by the religion or science, and science, no less than religion, “seems to regard its own scientific standpoint as a position of unquestionable truth from which it can assert itself in all directions.” (78) Nishitani has already argued that modern science possesses a worldview of mechanism and materialism, or that the matter comprising the universe follows predictable laws. Each event in the universe, then, is an instance of those laws of nature.

Human freedom, then, follows a peculiar course for the scientific subject. Humans begin already appropriated to particular laws of their nature, those of human instincts. However, the ideal of progress requires transcendence of mere instinct to gain knowledge. At the same time, though, “knowledge advances and develops through the technological labors of man; and the advance of knowledge in turn advances technology.” (81) As humans free themselves from their bondage to instinct, they ultimately submit to the mechanistic rules of nature through technology. The condition of modern life is one of increasing impersonalization and mechanization of everyday human activity, so that just as humans liberate themselves from instincts often described as “animal,” they re-enslave themselves to their technology, causing the “mechanization of man, toward the loss of the human.” (85)

At the same time as human everyday life has become increasingly mechanized and routinized, however, humans themselves have become increasingly hedonistic. Humans see themselves as unbound by any laws whatsoever, free only to follow their personal desires, engaged in what Nishitani calls “crypto-nihilism,” the denial of any transcendent grounding of human subjectivity but without the Sartrean “image of man” or the Nietzschean drive toward self-transcendence that provided some guide to and impetus for subjective aspirations.

The standpoint that allows for movement beyond the mechanistic and hedonistic lives of modern subjects living by scientific atheism is the standpoint of sunyata, which in Buddhism refers to emptiness. Sunyata is the standpoint where each individual person becomes manifest as they are “as concrete human beings, as individuals with both body and personality. And at the same time, it is the point at which everything around us becomes manifest in its own suchness.” (90) The standpoint of sunyata is accessed through nihility. As one experiences the Great Doubt described above, all things in the world begin to appear meaningless and inessential, and beings become eclipsed by the absolute nothingness that not only serves as our ground, but the ground of the entire world. Sunyata, then, is the way of interpreting experience from the standpoint of absolute nothingness, how the world appears when being has been transcended.

Here the wave metaphor comes in handy again. Whereas classical Christianity would see God as inaccessibly transcendent to humanity, sunyata recognizes that each thing is like a wave in the ocean, where no ocean exists outside of the waves, but the waves themselves have no essential independent existence. “Rather, at the point that water and waves are self-identical (as water-waves), this flowing wetness emerges into reality for what it is, water there being water and waves there being waves.” (103) All things are absolute nothingness, but absolute nothingness has no existence (is nothing) apart from the things in the world which are groundless and inessential.

Attaining the standpoint of sunyata requires giving up conceptions of subject and object. Understanding the world as an object, or as a collection of objects, presumes an observing subject separated from those objects, particularly one who can represent the world to his or herself. In sunyata, contrastingly, each thing appears in its elemental existence as an appearance of absolute nothingness, “the point at which the self is truly on its own home-ground. Here plants and trees have penetrated to the bottom to be themselves; here tiles and stones are through and through tiles and stones; and here, too, in self-identity with everything, the self is radically itself.” (110) Sunyata understands each thing in its own selfhood as an appearance of absolute nothingness, thus revealing it not only its original nature but also its essential harmony with other things.

Chapter 4: “The Standpoint of Sunyata”

In classical Western philosophy, however, objectivity has traditionally taken the form of understanding individual things in terms of concepts like “substance” or “essence.” An individual existence is said to be an outgrowth of some form of true essence that explains the individual thing in its particular way of being. In classical philosophy, things are not seen on their home-ground, here defined as their existence as revealed by their particular activities, but rather as mediated through some more general concept that obscures the existenz of those things. In order to reach the standpoint of sunyata, individuals must transcend logical reason which categorizes objects and understands them in terms of universal concepts such as substance, etc.

The standpoint of sunyata regards things not as species within higher levels of logical genera, culminating with universalities such as “substance” or “matter,” but as they appear “with nihility at [their] ground, as lacking roots from the very beginning.” (122) In other words, rather than deriving the activity of things from a ground in universal concepts and laws, the standpoint of sunyata attends to the be-ing of things, their activity or in Nishitani’s terms, their virtus: “that individual capacity that each things possesses as a display of its own possibility of existence. The pine tree is returned to the virtus of the pine, the bamboo to the virtus of the bamboo, man to the virtus of his humanity.” (123-124) So rather than thinking of being as some kind of material base that differentiates itself to produce the myriad of existent things, things are grounded on nihility, and so only exist insofar as they are made visible in their virtus.

The conclusion Nishitani reaches is that being is only a coherent concept when united with emptiness. To explain this paradoxical conclusion, Nishitani gives the example of fire. Fire burns, but it burns something other than itself (ie. oxygen, wood, etc.). In fact, fire’s activity is in burning things other than itself, and not burning itself up in the process. So if we called the virtus of fire combustion, then the being of fire as combustion is dependent on its negation, its not combusting itself, so that fire is grounded on nothingness, non-combustion. The same goes with attributes as with substance. When we say that fire is hot, we do not say that the heat of fire itself is hot, because that statement would presuppose some deeper conception of heat that allows us to say that heat is hot, and so on ad infinitum. Heat is only an intelligible concept because of the existence of non-heat, the negation of heat as a concept, that heat is not itself hot. In both cases, being is grounded upon nothingness, such that being is only intelligible from the perspective of nothingness or sunyata.

For Nishitani, that being is grounded upon nothingness justifies its being labeled an illusion, an appearance that can only exist by virtue of its dependence on nothingness. Thus, the standpoint of sunyata allows us to see things in their truly elemental existence, in the sense described above. Since, furthermore, this standpoint allows things to reveal themselves in their activity, their virtus, rather than as a species within a category, taking up sunyata allows us to affirm the existence of all things as they are in their elemental natures. Things are as they reveal themselves when viewed from the standpoint of sunyata, and so are nothing but their own activity, and are thus radically affirmed, giving Nishitani cause to apply the Nietzschean title “Great Affirmation” to sunyata (131).

The standpoint of sunyata also breaks through the limitations of Enlightenment and German Idealist conceptions of human subjectivity, both sharing the notion of an isolated individual human subject standing apart from the world, representing it to itself as a set of objects. For Nishitani, this conception of subjectivity naturally bleeds into modern atheism, with an independent subject who is able to represent and order the world and himself according to his own faculties of reason and imagination. The Enlightenment/German Idealist subject, then, fails to confront its nihility as with the modern atheist subject. The standpoint of sunyata, however, allows subjects to see themselves as grounded in the same absolute nothingness as all other beings, finally overcoming their isolation and allowing them to affirm themselves and their own virtus in elemental existence. To this state of affairs of interconnectedness of all things by virtue of being grounded in absolute nothingness Nishitani applies the term circumincession, originally a Christian term used to describe the mutual indwelling of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit of the Trinity. Nishitani also likens it to Leibniz’s monads, each “reflecting one another like living mirrors of the universe.” (150)

Realizing the circumincession of ourselves with the rest of the world allows us to finally overcome the self-centeredness and self-attachment of our everyday lives. All of our activity is grounded on nothingness, such that the absolute nothingness we share with the rest of the world is closer to our true selves than our egos. Sight is only sight because it is also non-sight, the eye does not see itself or it would be eternally lost in itself viewing itself viewing itself, etc., and the same goes for consciousness. By recognizing one’s own grounding in nothingness, we can cease to cling to our ego-based self-recognition that inevitably succumbs to nihility, and rather take up the absolute nothingness that connects us with the rest of the world, thus answering the question of how to overcome the essential nihility at the heart of the human experience posed at the end of chapter 1. Religion also answers the problem of the ontological status of humanity by arguing that humanity is indeed essentially nothingness, but a nothingness that connects it will all things, including the godhead as per Eckhart.

Chapter 5: “Sunyata and Time”

The question of theodicy, however, still remains open, and Nishitani spends the rest of the book dealing with it by reconceptualizing time and history from the perspective of sunyata. Nishitani begins by stating the basic principle of samsara, describing the way sentient beings exist, condemned to a constant cycle of births and deaths of their selves and their projects, or in other words, “the awareness of an unfathomable nihility and “nullification.” (169) Samsara is the state of our being as always threatened by nihility underlying our activity. Nishitani connects samsara with karma, where humans are bound to experience the consequences of their past actions that condition their present possibilities, such that “everyone without exception reaps only the fruits of his own acts.” (169)
Nishitani argues that the recognition of samsaric suffering in the face of constant nihility and our imprisonment to the causal conditions of karma that continually renew our commitment to actions underlain by nihility constitutes Buddhism’s mythos, its fundamental awareness of humanity’s subjective experience. From the mythic perspective of Buddhism, our struggle against suffering and to overcome nihility is fundamentally a search for liberation from samsara and eventually for Nirvana, a state of absolute freedom unbound by karmic conditioning. Buddhism’s mythos provides the interpretive ground to understand human suffering as fundamentally a struggle to overcome the despair brought on by nihility.

Even if, however, we succeed in finding our original selves on the elemental ground of our existence described in the previous chapters, that attainment does not constitute the end of our struggle against despair. Nirvana cannot be considered some paradisiacal state outside of human experience, or only existing after death, but must be lived within ordinary life, as liberation from samsaric suffering while still enduring the “anxious, petty troubles of daily life,” or in Nishitani’s terms, “samsara-sive-Nirvana.” (182) Keeping in mind that samsaric suffering is truly suffering at the nihility grounding all existence, affirming nihility allows us to see the wheel of birth and death in each thing or event in the world as a microcosm of the absolute nothingness that pervades the entire universe, of the godhead that is imbued into all things.

Zen Buddhism refers to the ability to recognize absolute nothingness in any event or object as meditation, zazen, or in other words, religious practice. Through meditation, which in Zen takes the form of “just sitting,” one releases one’s interests and desires that keep one chained to karmic conditions, allowing oneself to experience the godhead hidden within each moment. Nishitani compares the experience of religious practice to opening oneself to the “atom of eternity” Kierkegaard sees in temporality, where every moment may open up transcendence from the despair of everyday life (189). In each moment one can find absolute nothingness, allowing one to view the universal harmony of elemental existence within its microcosm contained in the present moment. Viewing eternity and the fullness of universal harmony within the present moment is, for Nishitani, the standpoint opened and represented by all “religions that have their base in myth,” in recognition and interpretation of our subjective existence. (206)

Chapter 6: Sunyata and History

The standpoint of religion allows us to see eternal and universal harmony among the meaninglessness and suffering of samsara by coming to terms with and ultimately affirming nihility. The problem of theodicy is thus resolved inasmuch as it is only through a recognition of the suffering that is inherent to the samsaric condition of all sentient beings that the ability to see eternity and universal harmony in each moment is opened. Nishitani also seeks, however, to demonstrate that sunyata provides a standpoint to justify ethical behavior and action against suffering and in favor of love, so that religion does not achieve liberation by merely ignoring concrete suffering by seeking eternity within people’s pain.

The Buddhist conception of time is as an infinite system of simultaneous kalpas, closed and complete temporal systems that coexist. These kalpas exist overlain upon “an infinite openness at the bottom of time, like a great expanse of vast, skylike emptiness that cannot be confined to any systematic enclosure.” (219) Thus time is truly irreversible and unique in the Buddhist scheme, as each “now” in one kalpa only exists in the context of an infinite set of other “nows” in other kalpas. Each moment is thus truly impermanent, as no moment could ever be conceivably repeated, unlike a circular system of time, or even Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence. This system of infinite time, always opening onto newness, is both profoundly liberating and profoundly burdensome. For, at the same time as each moment is necessarily and truly new and unrepeatable, the constant becoming of time continually pushes us into having to confront ever-renewed realities, such that the “obligation to unceasing newness makes our existence an infinite burden to us.” (220) The infinite nature of time signifies that we are always caught within karma, that our actions will necessarily feed back upon us in the future and keep us chained to causality.

The Buddhist conception of time also escapes the illusion that time has a beginning and an end, a key grounding of both classical religious and modern atheist histories. The idea of divine election seeks the ground of time in a transcendent being that can create time and give it a sense and purpose. Modern atheist historicism grew in revolt against this notion, affirming instead that there is no ground transcendent to time, that all things exist only within time, not recognizing that “the time that provides it with its field, a time unrestrictedly open to both past and future, can only come about by virtue of an infinite openness lying at the ground of the present.” (227) Progress narratives merely posit a point where history will culminate and fulfill itself, rather than grasping the infinite openness the Buddhist conception of time understands as grounding any temporal system.

While both classical religious and modern atheist understandings of time are future-oriented, however (with the exception of scientific time seeking the causes of things, thus being past-oriented), Nietzsche’s Eternal Return provides a way to come to the Buddhist understanding of time as present-oriented. As time for Nietzsche bends and meets at the extremes of past and future it returns at the beginning of the cycle to now, the present, where in the Great Affirmation one sees the significance of all past and future things in the present moment. The Great Affirmation brings us back to the present moment, where nihility inevitably comes to overthrow whatever sense of meaning we build, thus opening the ground for absolute emptiness to appear in the present moment.

The Buddhist affirmation of nihility allows for the burden of existence to be interpreted in another way than as the field for the pursuit of self-centered endeavors based on our self-definition. Modern atheistic time also contains a form of infinite time, inasmuch as “each of the various facets of human existence becomes autotelic, each as it were becomes autonomous. Each begins to contain a kind of infinity, an infinite finitude.” (235) Each moment can become the fulfillment of human desires inasmuch as one acts exactly according to one’s self-definition at every moment. At this point, however, human activity ceases to serve anything other than its own desires and interests, bringing us back to the beginning of the book where nihility calls into the question the meaning of our projects.

The burden of existence from the perspective of sunyata appears instead as a mission or a debt towards all others with whom we are essentially connected in elemental existence. As discussed last chapter, entering the infinity of the present moment allows to see our connection with all other things in the universe, effecting a liberation from karmic conditioning. The moment of time and the present moment, then, appears from this perspective as instead one unit of time, the present moment, “spreading out endlessly before and after with the present at its point of origin.” (267) This conception of time as one moment spreading out infinitely into the past and future correlates with the understanding of the elemental existence of the universe as one harmony, a single whole. Understanding the universe as essentially connected makes self-love ignoring others impossible, as loving ourselves necessarily entails loving all other sentient beings, such that loving thy neighbor “as thyself” “comes about where each and every ‘other’ has its being as other, namely, at its own home-ground; or again, where all things are gathered into one circumcessional interpenetration as a ‘world’ and ‘All are One.’” (279) Self-centeredness gives way in religion to understanding the entire world as its own center, such that love must be directed towards all others. Thus, only from the perspective of religion can we grasp our ethical purpose in loving all others, seen most clearly for Nishitani in Boddhisattvahood in Buddhism and love of one’s neighbor in Christianity.

So hopefully religion would help you avoid situations like this prime example of samsara:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjio-F47IfM