Dualism is obviously a central concept in Buddhism. But it’s typically framed as a simple opposition: self and other, self and thing, self and world, with the alternative being non-separation or becoming one with the thing from which one has been separated. Even though we may get a lot of sophisticated interplay describing something like the Sandokai, basically the problem is separation and the solution is non-separation, with non-separation, or unity, being a kind of underlying truth from which separation is our ordinary delusional misconstrual of reality. What we saw when we read Buber’s I and Thou, was an alternative to that schema and the problem of dualism, where the alternative to I-It dualism wasn’t merger or non-separation with the thing, but a different kind of relationship, an I-Thou relationship. And as Buber said, the I of the I-Thou is different from the I-It. We become more fully who we are in relation, not in unity, not in non-separation, but in relation.
That idea is going to be developed in much more complexity and depth in Bonds of Love. The framing of dualism is also going to become more complex and she’s going to go into lots of ways in which separation manifests as different kinds of binaries, typically characterized by certain forms of domination by one side or another. If we don’t think that domination is the kind of thing we usually see as a problem in Buddhism or in our meditation practice, I would say that we should recognize the way we all come to practice with a certain kind of curative fantasy in which one part of our mind that we think of as good comes to dominate the bad, and the bad is often characterized by thought or emotion or desire or attachment, but that the overcoming of one part by another is something that is very fundamental to how many people’s practices are organized, consciously or unconsciously. One part goes to war against the other and calls it spirituality.
Now, I’m going to read the Introduction and make some comments as I go along. The book opens with an epigraph from Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents:
“Men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus. [Man is wolf to man.] Who, in the face of all his experience of life and of history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion?”
Freud is making here a basic case not just about the inevitability of war between individuals but the inevitability of internal struggle, the struggle between the rational and the irrational, the struggle between reason and aggression, between one part of us needing to dominate the other in order for civilization to be possible.
Now this is Jessica’s beginning of the Introduction: [Barry reads aloud the Introduction].
All right. I hope that will set the stage for our reading through this book, not obviously line by line, but in the coming chapters I will try to offer selective passages for our discussion and our reading. The theme here, I hope, has become apparent: that the dualism that is domination can’t be addressed just by either assuming it’s necessary and inevitable or by reversing the terms, where instead of pessimistically concluding that reason must dominate the instincts, we flip the paradigm and say, ecstatically, that the instincts will now dominate reason. That was much of what happened in the discussion when we were coming of age in the 60s. Instead, we want to find an alternative to that kind of either/or, and that’s going to take the shape of what she will call intersubjectivity and it will require mutual recognition rather than the domination of one side by another. So this is the beginning of our journey, and I hope if we’re lucky we’ll get Jessica in here to talk about it and answer questions herself, but no promises. She’s a tough customer that way, but I’ll do my best to stand in for her and lead a discussion starting today.
Thank you.