* Article: POSTMODERN SPIRITUALITY. A dialogue in five parts. ROLAND BENEDIKTER. Integral World, 2005

URL = https://www.integralworld.net/benedikter1a.html

I: POSTMODERN SPIRITUALITY? IS THERE SUCH A THING?
II: THE SITUATION: THE GLOBAL “RENAISSANCE OF RELIGION” (SINCE 1989-91) AGAINST THE PROTO-SPIRITUALITY OF LATE POSTMODERNISM (1979-2001)
III: THE RISE OF A “NEGATIVE SPIRITUALITY” IN THE LATE WORKS OF SOME MAIN POSTMODERNIST THINKERS
IV: THE POSTMODERN PARADOX: AT THE BORDERLINE TO SYNCHRONICITY – WITHOUT EVER CROSSING IT SUSTAINABLY

Part II: Perspectives of the proto-spirituality of late postmodernity [3]

PERSPECTIVE 1: THE PERSONAL AND CULTURAL “EROTIZATION OF THE WILL” (JEAN FRANCOIS LYOTARD)
PERSPECTIVE 2: THE PSYCHO-PHILOSOPHICAL “HEGELIANIZATION OF KANT” (JACQUES LACAN, SLAVOJ ZIZEK)
PERSPECTIVE 3: THE POSTMODERN INSPIRATION AND ITS POTENTIALLY HIGHEST ACHIEVEMENT: THE “FLUID” AWARENESS OF THE “HERE AND NOW” (WIM WENDERS, PETER HANDKE)
PERSPECTIVE 4: THE WALKING ON THE EDGE OF THE LONELY POSTMODERN INDIVIDUAL - AND THE NEW “COMING TOGETHER” (ANDREW COHEN, CLAUS OTTO SCHARMER)
V: THE PRODUCTIVE DIALECTICS BETWEEN THE USA AND EUROPE IN THE FRAMEWORK OF THE RISE OF A RATIONAL SPIRITUALITY FOR THE GLOBAL CIVIL SOCIETY
VI: PERSPECTIVE 5: THE “PAIN OF THINKING” AND THE EVOLUTIONARY VALUE OF SUFFERING BETWEEN EROS AND PATHOS (EMMANUEL LÉVINAS, MARTIN BUBER, ALDO CAROTENUTO)
VII: THE FUTURE: A SECOND GENERATION OF POSTMODERNISTS IS NEEDED NOW – A “SUBJECTIVE-OBJECTIVE” AND “NOMINALISTIC-REALISTIC” GENERATION (KEN WILBER, RICHARD TARNAS, JOHANNES HEINRICHS)
VIII: ONE CORE PROBLEM: GLOBAL TERROR, POSTMODERNITY'S SOULLESSNESS AND THE OPENING UP OF PANDORA'S BOX

Part III: The Postmodern Mind – And Its Future [4]

I: RESUMING THE CORE PROCESS: DECONSTRUCTION LEADS TO THE “PRODUCTIVE VOID”
II: THE RESULT: THE EMERGING OF THE TWO “I”'s
III: THE PRODUCTIVE PARADOX IN THE DEEP SILENCE OF THE POSTMODERN DAIMON
IV: THE POSITIVE ASPECTS OF POSTMODERNITY - A FORWARD MOVING POTENTIAL OF CRITICALLY ENLIGHTEND CONSCIOUSNESS
V: THE PROBLEM: POSTMODERN PROTO-SPIRITUALITY AND ITS INBUILT LIMITS. 4 CORE ASPECTS

Part IV: The positive Core Concept at the Center of late Postmodern Philosophy: Inspiration [5]

I: COMPARING THE PROTO-SPIRITUAL TENDENCY OF LATE POSTMODERNITY WITH THE EASTERN TRADITIONS
II: THE HIDDEN GOAL OF LATE POSTMODERN PHILOSOPHY: OBSERVING YOUR OWN THOUGHTS IN THE MOMENT THEY ARE HAPPENING
III: THE CORE PROCEEDING AND THE ULTIMATE GOAL OF LATE POSTMODERN PHILOSOPHY: INSPIRATION

Part V: Can Only A God Save Us? Postmodern Proto-Spirituality And The Current Global Turn To Religion [6]

I: THE RISE OF A PROTO-SPIRITUALITY IN LATE POSTMODERN PHILOSOPHY AND THE PRODUCTIVE CRISIS OF THE TRADITIONAL HUMANITIES
II: POSTINDUSTRIAL SOCIETY, THE POSTMODERN DOUBLING OF THE “I” BY DECONSTRUCTION AND THE INCREASE OF SYMPTOMS OF SCHIZOPHRENIA IN CONTEMPORARY CULTURE
III: PHAENOMENOLOGY, THE “ETHICAL AND THEOLOGICAL TURN” OF LATE DECONSTRUCTION AND THE FUTURE: HOW CAN WE RENEW THE METHODOLOGY OF DECONSTRUCTION IN A MORE BALANCED WAY?
IV: DEEP AMBIVALENCE AND SOCIO-EVOLUTIONARY PRODUCTIVITY
V: WHERE DOES POSTMODERNITY EVENTUALLY LEAD US? THE EMERGING OF THE NEW BASIC FACULTIES OF INSPIRATION, IMAGINATION AND INTUITION IN THE POSTMODERN SUBJECT AND IN CONTEMPORARY CULTURE – AND THEIR FORWARD POTENTIAL BETWEEN NOMINALISM AND REALISM
VI: THE CONCEPT OF INSPIRATION RELOADED
VIII: CAN ONLY A GOD SAVE US? POSTMODERN PROTO-SPIRITUALITY AND THE CURRENT TURN TO RELIGION

Contextual Quotes

1.

"To sum up these phaenomena in the late Lyotard, Derrida and Foucault, the decisive point is that their search remains deeply, deeply ambivalent. You just have to consider all these thinkers, and also the female thinkers like Helene Cixous, my favorite female thinker, and other women, but also those postmodern men like Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, you just have to consider them as symptoms. They are, in the end, nothing else than creators, but symptoms for a “borderline” state of mind that is emerging in many who live in the Western-European hemisphere today. The postmodern thinkers, the philosophers are just symptoms of the much broader evolution of postmodern culture, of postmodern desire. They are not doing anything special, the are not inventing something new. But they are just expressing in their late works, what many of us feel and do — the struggle of transformation that many of us are going through, and what our whole culture invisibly is starting to go through. ... It is ambivalent, but it contains the potential and power of progress. The universal deconstruction of postmodermism has the potential to discover something out of the nothing. And this discovery may be an alternative to the going back into confessional, traditional belief of the world wide “renaissance of religion”. Postmodernity, in a certain sense, is the creation of a productive void, in which you have to discover your “other” I as the primordial act behind all the contents. You cannot make an object out of that act, because he himself is the only thing that is “objective” in your thinking and being. The discovery of that dimension seems more productive to me, even if it is much more painful and individually much more dangerous, than the regression into confessional, mythological, collective religion, where personal, direct experience is, at least in many cases, excluded or not seen as decisive."

2.

"The proto-spiritual tendency of late postmodernism we talked of in four basic steps as follows:

Reaching the “productive void” of thinking and being produced by consequent deconstruction - including the deconstruction or even “destruction” (Martin Heidegger) of your ego;

Reaching a kind of pre-conceptual self-awareness of consciousness, which in many cases comes almost necessarily out of that productive void and of the de(con)struction of your ego;

Thus “doubling” the basic feeling of the “I” and reaching a state of mind of a “doubled I” between ego (still strong) and witness (still week);

And reaching some times, as a consequence of the “productive void” of deconstruction and the “doubled I”, a “fluid” state of consciousness of “pure here and now” or “directed attention”, which cannot itself be objectivated, but seems to be pure “beeingness” of consciousness that precedes every act of ego and every content of thought."

- Roland Benedikter [7]

Abstract

"This Paper gives, in the form of a dialogue, an overview over the proto-spirituality emerging in the late works of some of the main postmodern thinkers. The focus is on investigating the tendencies of thinkers like Jacques Derrida, Jean Francois Lyotard, Michel Foucault and others, to “re-spiritualize” their basic thoughts in the last years of their lives. In their late works, these thinkers searched for the “absolute secret that cannot be brought into language, but must be protected from language” (Derrida), in many cases going back into traditional religions. Or they were searching for the dimension of the “Not-I” (Lyotard) and the “inaudible presence” through the experience of “an ecstasy of the black void” (Lyotard). The following dialogue tries to describe and understand these tendencies, including the desires and fears in their background, pointing at some of the core motivations in the late works of some main postmodern thinkers."

Summary

From the reading notes of Michel Bauwens, 2006:

RB sees two trends:

1) Since 1989-91, a revival of traditional religion, which is also an issue of 'cultural identification'.

2) a desire for personal spiritual experience

This happened parallel with the post-1968 emergence of postmodernism, which according to RB, is centered around the idea of equality. To discover this you have to 'deconstruct' your hidden hierarchies. Show that you are not an independent "I", but the product of your context. Once you destroy the illusion of essentialism, you realize you are changeable. RB says this process was massively practiced and led to a'productive void', except for those who regressively returned to 'tradition'.

That western 'nothingness', negative nothingness, is a spiritual state, so some started asking how it is related to the positive nothingness of the East.

The core European thinkers shared being influenced by five major historical impulses:

1) Jansenist counter-reformation, which sees every natural behavior as a sin

2) the break up of secular/spiritual unity by the French Revolution

3) the anti-substantialism of Kant

4) the catastrophe of absolutist ideologies such as Nazism and Stalinism

5) the anti-hierarchical impulse of 1968

However deeply anti-essentialist, RB says that after 1999-2001, they started looking for a new essentialism, compatible with their insights. What they found is that the only thing that can do the deconstruction is the 'active consciousness' itself. This new essence is not speculative, since it can be experienced.

The most serious account of such experience were Lyotard's last books about the discovery of the 'No'. Derrida saw himself as a descendent of 'hidden Jew/covert Christian of 14th cy. Spain, protecting the 'absolute secret' from any interpretation in language.

Foucault began to think about the thinking that is thinking itself. From a rationality of the first grade, that thinks and then thinks about these thoughts; to a meta-rationality of the second degree, which can observe the thoughts as they arise. However, RB insists that all these thinkers were borderline: they did not arrive at the other shore. Modern self-observation was diachronic, observing thought after it occurs, while post-modern observation is synchronic. I think and I observe what I'm thinking in the very moment of its occurrence. So why did they fail to cross the line to the 'other' side ? Partly because they used ill-suited psycho-analytic concepts. A second reason is their cultural background, i.e. monotheism, which pre-rationally forbids the naming of that other.

A breakthrough possibility is Lyotard's 'erotization of the will', whereby self-awareness is transformed from the intellect to the will. RB notes that the core postmodernists were Kantian, but following a Kant which had been 'Hegelianzed' partly through the phenomenology of Husserl. Mostly implicitly, but sometimes explicitely (Zizek). Such a 'Kantian Hegelianism', is the way forward, believes RB. Hegel said that that our thoughts are objective (the cosmic order is thinking us) and this has to b e transferred to an objective will.

Anticipating this: global civil society is already primarily concerned with doing (transforming the world for the better), rather than thinking. RB refers to Steiner as an anticipation of this attitude.

What we need is a individual moral intuition, which can perceive an 'essential objectivity of the true', and subjects his ego and personal desire to that objective logic. We are moving to a 'subjective-objective' cognitive stance, which can be practiced by any human, independently of his religion, and so it corresponds to their transcultural demand for a globalized world. On the other hand, the revival of traditional religion often requires a 'non-thinking' stance.

The productivity void of deconstruction, thus provokes free inspiration, pure processionality. Alone, most postmoderns - who see the world as a construction - cannot reach 'the real world', the 'spiritual life'. They remain borderline.

The only resistance to this, is the other selves, which cannot be reduced to one's own world construction, it is the discovery of 'the objective', in the subjective realm!

RB claims that Europe is opposed to any form of consciousness collectivity as a result of its historical legacy (Nazism's manipulation of groups, etc ...). . He claims that the postmodern thinkers are extremely narcissic and individualistic. Just after this, he says: the postmoderns have discoloed 'the pain of thinking': what happens when you radically deconstruct your ego.

RB claims that Europeans are without illusions, and that while Americans still have more illusions, they also have a more positive will. They just 'do it'.

But the cultural complementarity between both can produce something more valuable.

First generation postmodernism only leads to despair, if a breakthrough to the objective is not achieved. According to RB, postmodern man knows he is nothing,

In the end, there must be something that can realize the illusionary self, the 'observer'. But it should not be forgotten that the impulse of students aware of their restrictive conditionings, is by itself a emancipatory impulse. RB cites Judith Butler's attempts at 'un-gendering', an attempt to create 'pure humanity', which can encounter themselves in an open pre-gendered way. But since you actually need a concrete clothed being,, what is arrived at is a double being, both identified and aware of the relativity of that process.

RB claims that as we grow older, we are increasingly dissatisfied with our ego, and want to be the 'other'.

But the postmodern genius is to teach us that this structural paradox of double being has to be accepted.

Part IV compares the concept of the 'productive void' with the Eastern concept of 'Nothingness'.

The positive breakthrough would have four steps:

- reaching the productive void through deconstruction

- reaching a coupling between the "I" (Ego) and the "doubled I" (witness)

- pure awareness

But if the East 'knows' what it does, the West does not: there is a similarly in methods, but not in the type of awareness using them. The void and nothingness are therefore simultaneously similar and different.

RB tries to explain why Wilber is still not accepted in mainstream academia. The explanation is cultural: Wilber has a pacific culture while the US academia, and a forteriori the European, have a Anglo-European 'Atlantic' culture. So Wilber should 'atlanticize' his theories and language.

Back to the postmodern: how did its philosophical analysis of the ego improve on modernity? In modernity there was a double split:

- 1) between the subjective and the objective

- 2) between the subjective and its capacity to understand the world.

Postmodernity argued that since subjectivity is similarly created, there is no such split. Postmodernity therefore represents a 'permanent self-conscious sensitivity' about its own mind.

RB describes postmodernists as 'not caring, not participating', because every thing is a construction anyway (despite the known engagements of many of its protagonists ??? - mb)

RB sees a double impulse (i.e. motivation) behind postmodern deconstruction:

- 1) a digestion of the post-1968 desillusion, i.e. 'why did it all go wrong' ?

- 2) an opposition to totalitarian ideologies

Furthermore, they went at first back to Husserl's pre-conceptual phenomenology. Later PoMo then made a 'ethical and theological turn', under the influence of precursors such as De Man and Heidegger, leading to Derrida admiring Levinas. 2001 (9/11 ?) was a breaking point, as it became untenable to argue that 'there is only discourse'.

Excerpts

THE GLOBAL “RENAISSANCE OF RELIGION” (SINCE 1989-91) AGAINST THE PROTO-SPIRITUALITY OF LATE POSTMODERNISM (1979-2001)

"RB: I think, overviewing the situation today, we have to recognize: On the one hand we have the so-called “renaissance of religion”, the return of religion on a worldwide scale. You can see it in controversies in America under George W. Bush, you can see it here in Italy where I live in the Silvio Berlusconi era, you saw it when the pope John Paul II. died and his heir, Benedict XVI., was elected, and you see it in Hinduism where people become more aggressive, more militant, more organized. You see it, of course, in Islam. This is a movement, a general movement, of some of the world's most influent religions, that has been going on since 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, and since 1991, when communism collapsed. Old ideologies are disappearing, and what replaces them is culture, something invisible, that forms a new center of identity and a new center of gravity for social organisation. And at the core of culture there is always religion. That is true for every culture in the world, be it pre-modern, modern or post-modern (even if in the last case it is more hidden, and often unconscious). So we have seen the return of religion since 1989, when the big polarity between East and West fell. And at the same time, at the other hand we have this kind of growing desire in the post-modern cultures for something that is not religion, but a more direct, more personal broadening of horizons, of consciousness. For some essence you can grasp with your own hands and can hold on. For something, that should be more a personal experience than a religious belief. A psychological or individual growth. For a concrete, meta-rational transformation – but, if possible, firmly grounded on empirical rationality.

At the same time, when these two tendencies began to move, we experienced a big change in the cultural paradigm of the European-Western world. It was the so-called “postmodern” movement in philosophy, in the social sciences and in academical thinking in general, that rose since the late 1970s, about ten years before the Berlin Wall fell, of whom the big change was made. The “postmodern” thinkers in Europe were people that came out of the revolutionary impulse of 1968: Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Helene Cixous, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari. They were inspired by a big, overwhelming emphasis of emancipation. If you put it in the guiding principles of the French revolution, the first, grounding emancipative and democratic impulse that stays at the beginning of modern life, you can say that their big intuition was not primarily “freedom”, not primarily “brotherhood” (even if those two principles were very important to them), but “equality”. They all tried to fully establish the principle of equality that was expressed in the French Revolution in the post-war and post-colonial European-Western world. And they tried to do that importing this principle from the political sphere into the educational sphere and into the academic thinking in general - where not equality, but freedom would be the right principle, according to the French revolution. As you remember, the French revolution, and we should never forget that, said: brotherhood should be the guiding principle in the economic sphere of modern society; equality the guiding principle in the political and juridical sphere; and freedom the guiding principle in the educational, cultural and religious sphere. The “postmodern” thinkers coming out of 1968 were concentrated on the principle of equality, because they saw that the society they lived in was unjust. People were not equal and there were strong hierarchies, open hierarchies and hidden hierarchies – just think at the situation in Berkeley and San Francisco at the end of the 1960is, but also, even if in a completely different manner, in Continental Europe. And they thought that changing these hierarchies would change everything. So they took the principle of equality as their “universal key”. And to start the change, they thought, since most of them were students or scholars, you have to start with the single person, with her or his thoughts and feelings: you have to start in the educational and cultural sphere. So they just wanted that everybody was conscious of what equality between people means, and that everybody could feel it and act accordingly.

But how to pursue that goal? To pursue it, they used the method of “deconstruction”. More or less all of them, even if they gave this method different names. They wanted to “deconstruct” the main pillars of hierarchic organisational patterns in the European-Western societies. And the mechanism for doing that was, to put it in a simple image, to import what psychoanalysis does in therapy into the educational system. They tried to import the method of “self-deconstruction” in philosophical discourse, in academic life, in higher education, and to do it there in a slightly different way than psychoanalysis. But basically, it was the same. You just learned from them, and you learn it until today, how to deconstruct yourself. That means: How to see what you are not, what your illusions of yourself are, and how you eventually are made by your parents, your experiences here and there, you education, your friends, the culture you live in, the social class you come from. With one word: You learn to see, and feel, how you are not primarily an independent “I” as you thought, but much more, decisively more a construct of your context. Gaining this insight means, according to the leading postmodern thinkers, “deconstructing” your illusions of yourself (and the world) that you had before this discovery. In the end, as the main result of the postmodern deconstruction method, which lies at the heart of our cultural paradigm since the end of the 1970is until today, you realize that your context: your education, your culture, your class, your unconscious bindings, all this is your self, even if you normally feel that you are something else than all those things. And the result may be, that you become more connected, more tolerant, more self-aware for hidden hierarchies working in your ego generating hierarchies in yourself and in your everyday world, and thus that you pay more attention to equality and justice in your thinking and in your everyday life with other people, who share your moment in time and your destiny of a “constructed” being.

If this is the core goal and method of Postmodernism, than we can assume: The main postmodern thinkers like Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard or Foucault tried to “deconstruct” virtually everything possible, that means: everything that appears as “something” in the normal mind, such as: your unreflected everyday self, your ego, your “normal” I, the history and societal patterns we are living in, our truth concepts, our “speech acts”, our gender roles and so on. Deconstruct them until they fully reveal themselves as pure social and cultural constructions without any “essence”, without any objective truth. When they reveal their “essencelessness”, we are free to change them at our will. So deconstructing everything means, to leave just nothing “essential” behind. And the logic behind that is: If there is nothing essential, if everything is just a construct, than everything can be changed if people want to change it. And that will equally be an emancipative impulse for society, collective and individual truth systems as for the concepts of “I”. It will, basically, be good for everything. It will move us forward – not in spite, but because we have nothing “essential” or objective left.

So my view point is that in the time we are speaking of - from 1979, the year of Jean-Francois Lyotard's book which gave the movement the name, “The postmodern condition”, until today -, almost everybody has practiced what those people, the likes of Jacques Derrida or Michel Foucault or Jean Francois Lyotard, expressed in a very simple philosophical maxime: “Deconstruct yourself: See what you are not. You have to destroy your illusions. To reach progress in society, we have to forget about all essentials, and to see: Everything, including your self, is just a construct by socio-economic and cultural processes. Then we all will live better, and that means: more self-conscious and, eventually, more equal. Even if we will have to pay the price of having nothing 'objective' left on which we could build enduring truths and values, and even if man himself, following this path, must lose his 'essence' than.”

We can sum up that the main postmodern thinkers tried to destroy all illusions by transforming everything into a construct. We can sum up that the main postmodern thinkers, in their common guiding intuition, tried to destroy all illusions by transforming everything into a construct – with the goal to realize fully the principle of equality as the guiding principle of a more open, pluralistic and progressive society. But they did not build anything positive as alternative to the illusions. They did not create a theory, an observation that could explain what your real I or your spirit is. They just tried to destroy your false I. And nothing more. Leaving nothing behind. Nothing in the strict sense of the word. Deconstruction of the false “I”: exactly this was it, what almost everybody did in our European-Western hemisphere in the last decades, consciously or unconsciously. You can say that after 1989-91, and even more intensely after 9-11, you have the return of a very strong religious sense that tends to strengthen the traditional confessional forms of spirituality. This return is, at least in part and in our civilisation, a (regressive) answer to the “nothing” produced by (progressive) postmodernity. It is the desire for a “return of the objective” or the “return of essence” – but in a regressive form, which in many cases has to exchange rationality, equality and critical self-deconstruction with belief, “confidence” and the return of old hierarchies. It is in many cases militant and increasingly linked to a clash of cultures. On the other hand, you have those “postmodern” people today that have practiced “universal deconstruction” for decades. At the treshold of the new millennium, and especially after 9-11, they stood in the world completely free of illusions, if you can say so, but also, at the same time, completely without any objective ground to build on to answer the new needs for orientation, for sense and meaning. What they had achieved, was a “productive void” (Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze). They led you into a realm of “negative” nothingness, like John Cage, into a realm of “deconstructed” I. But they couldn't tell you who you really are, or what the world is. They couldn't give you a vision what to do after 9-11, how to answer 9-11 and how to re-order the world thereafter in a better way. Why? Because: If you do what postmodernism tells you in order to become a better citizen, and take it seriously, if you really practice it, then you go into a state of nothingness that, in the end, as an ontological experience, may seem to many of us already as something semi-spiritual. Please observe: It is not nothingness like in the eastern ways, like in buddhism, for example, but genuine European-Western nothingness. Western nothingness, where, for the first time, you really know that you don't know anything, where you just see everything as a construct and therefore, to a certain extend, as an illusion – even yourself. But, secretely in their hearts, some practicing “Postmodernists”, especially those, who took all this seriously and underwent the process of deconstruction with their whole body, soul and spirit, began to wonder: Could there be some relation between this “negative” western nothingness of postmodernity and the “positive” eastern nothingness, like in Buddhism, for example? Could there be some relation – maybe not looking towards the past, but looking into the future? Even if they are methodologically very different and have completely different cultural backgrounds and histories, both experiences of “nothingness” seem to lead, at least at the beginning and to a certain extend, to similar experiences in making the first steps beyond the normal consciousness.

This is the reason why, if certain contemporary Indian thinkers, for example, look at our postmodern philosophy and culture today from the point of view of their traditions, they usually would say: “What this postmodern culture tries unconsciously to realize with deconstruction is to break through the veil of the Maya. It tries to destroy the illusion of the world and of the normal I. That is the avant-garde of this culture, but this avant-garde is deeply ambivalent. It tries to destroy all illusions; but it does it unconsciously. It does not know what it does. And therefore it knows not how to proceed after coming near the breakthrough.”

If Indian thinkers say that, they seem, from my point of view, to catch something very important, something deeply, deeply at work in the culture of the European-Western world. Positively speaking, it means: We are in the process of coming near a breakthrough that could take us beyond our normal ego, our illusionary self. But it means also: We are just at the point where we have recognized that nothing is, what is seems - but, at the same time, we have nothing essential left in our hands to build on a step further.

Question: All that seems to be a dead end street, where liberatory “nothingness” is unable to go anywhere. That seems, to a certain extend, to be a very difficult and hopeless situation, doesn't it?

RB: In fact, that's what it is. Definitely. But it means also: Today, where “nothing is anything” (Paul Feyerabend) in the postmodern mind, something else can and must be discovered. A third way between the “renaissance of religion” and the “universal void” of postmodern deconstruction. A third way, where those two ways that remain both in many ways unfulfilling or uncompleted, can converge on a higher level. A level which is spiritual, like the “renaissance of religion”, and at the same time rationally self-observing, like postmodernism. What could such a third way be? For the time being, we can say this: It must be (re-)discovered the objective realm not beyond, but in the deconstructed subjective mind. It seems to me that, for a couple of years now, we are exactly in the process that this “third way” wants to emerge genuinely out of the nothingness of the total self-deconstructed subjective mind, which postmodernism has given us. And my conviction is that this could be, in the long run, a more important “spiritual” movement than the return of traditional religions."

(https://www.integralworld.net/benedikter1a.html)

The Anti-Religious, Anti-Spiritual Impulse of Core European Thinking Since the Enlightenment

Roland Benedikter:

"main “Core European” thinkers in France and Germany, besides that they had some dispute between themselves, commonly rejected any religion and, more than that, any spirituality in general. Why? Because of an at least fivefold anti-“essential” historical impulses in Europe:

the counter-reformation in the style of archbishop Cornelius Jansen (1585-1638) with an extremely oppressive (radical Augustinian) interpretation of Christianity, which declared virtually every natural behaviour of man as a sin, and was effective for the perception of (catholic) spirituality by large parts of the population in "Core Europe" until the end of 19th century;

the liberatory impulse of the French Revolution 1789, which was directed against the pre-modern unity of secular and clerical power;

the anti-substantial (but not anti-religious) philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804);

the experience with absolutistic ideologies in the first half of the 20th century (1916-1945), especially with the pseudo-spiritual ideologies of national socialism and communism in “Core Europe” (Habermas and Derrida);

the anti-hierarchical (and deeply anti-authoritarian) impulse of 1968.

Of these four impulses, the experience of the 20th century in Europe: national socialism and communism, remains the most important until today – a core experience for the generation, who grew up with those ideologies and, until today, is still in control of the cultural paradigma. I mean people like Jürgen Habermas or Hans-Otto Apel. Their basic intuition, as of their French colleagues Lyotard, Derrida, Baudrillard and Kristeva, is anti-essentialistic and anti-substantialistic: because they experienced, what catastrophes can be provoked by “absolute” or pseudo-transcendental ideas. And in fact, there is some truth in this: Those anti-humanistic ideologies were all built on the belief in some strange kind of “absolute” ideas or in a kind of absolutistic pseudo-“spirituality”, on all too “essential” ideas that have turned out to produce inhuman results. That is the main reason why European Postmodernists were, as you say, for a long period of their personal and intellectual lives aggressively anti-essentialistic. From 1979 until 1989-91, and then, even if in a different manner, from 1991 until 1999 and 2000 - the years of the rise of the neo-idealistic and neo-essential global civil society in Seattle and Genova. But after that, and especially after September 11, 2001, their paradigmatic anti-essentialism began to change in some crucial parts. They were, increasingly, searching for some kind of rationally “enlightend” essentialism to add to their nominalistic paradigm. More accurately: for a essentialism that could merge with postmodernism, without changing its basic pilars. And more: For a spiritual realism that could come out of it."

(https://www.integralworld.net/benedikter1a.html)

The Essential Productive Void Behind Any Deconstruction

Roland Benedikter:

"So there was, certainly more unconsciously than consciously, in the 30 year long development process of universal deconstruction activity done by the postmodern mind, step by step the almost inevitable rise of something you can call the primordial basis (or, to put it again in Ayn Rands words, “the fountainhead”) of something that may neither be part of the deconstructable world, nor of the normal ego. It was the latent, emerging discovery of something behind the normal “I” - of something that must stay, as active stream of consciousness, at its origins. Of something, that is, in its empirical phaenomenology, the “continuous presence of an origin out of itself” (Jean Gebser), even if it is fully rationally and logically operating. And that means: of something “essential”, or even, if you want to call it that way, “spiritual”. Late Postmodernists turn, in different ways, their attention to this sphere of “essence”. Why? Because they must realize by their own rational proceedings of universal deconstruction, that there obviously is a creative force that is not an ego, nothing that could be called “something”, but that at the same time is a fact, which you can, if you are an empirical observer, neither oversee nor neglect. It is the “productive void” that lies behind every mental construct. It is the “productive void” that does the deconstruction, but is not itself part of the universal illusion that can be deconstructed. If you try to deconstruct it, you lose everything.

Thus, late Postmodernists inevitably discovered some new “essence”. And it is an essence that is strictly empirical and rationally mind-based, not speculative.

But at the same time, there was also a very strong speculative search by some of the late postmodernist thinkers for a kind of negative, ecstatic religion. You can see, for example, that Jean Francois Lyotard, when he died in 1998, had written a programmatic, “spiritual” testament: “The soundproof room. The Anti-Aesthetics of Malraux” (Stanford University Press 2001). Already, his books before this one were extremely spiritual (“extreme” is the right word here, as we will have to discover only in the coming years of academic research, we still do not realize it fully so far). But especially in his “testament”, he was in search for some new essence - mainly from a negative point of view, and using a strictly negative methodology of research.

In his last years of life, Lyotard tried to find, as he says in “The soundproof room”, “the realm beyond the I”, the “Not-I”. He tried to find it through a method, that he called a “negative ecstasy” of the mind, an “ecstasy of the black void”. He hoped, that a spiritual experience could come out of that experience. It is no accident that “The soundproof room” is about the negative aesthetics of the romantic French poet André Malraux. Lyotard says that he hopes that the negative ecstasy of sickness, of mental illness or loss of normal consciousness could possibly bring us into a new, altered and possibly higher state of consciousness. In his testament, at the end of his life, in the final stadium of cancer, looking back, he speaks of his universal abhorrence towards contemporary culture, which appears to him as a kind of sacrilege. Remember, that he himself, as the “father” of postmodernism, helped decisively to create this very culture! And, outlining the necessary, desirable step in the future, he tell us: You should try to leave your normal consciousness and come near to “the other”. You should enter into an ecstasy of fear, into an ecstasy of negative feelings, into something like a sickness of the normal “I”, into a state of consciousness where you are completely overwhelmed by “Not-I”-experiences: an ecstasy of pain, for example. And if you do that, if you enter into such a state of mind where your normal I disappears, then you will see that there is another I, another dimension of being. And this dimension will be decisive for giving birth to a new self. A self that is, in a certain sense, more than your normal, “postmodern” self. A self, that is not “I”, but, as he calls it, the experience of the “Not-I”. This dimension will be something else. It will open up a space and time for you, where a different, a possibly higher aesthetic reigns. It will open your eyes for the unthinkable, even if only negatively. And then, everything will be transformed. But into what? And you, what will you be then?

Question: Is it —

RB: Jean-Francois Lyotard explicitly tells us in his testament: “You should try some mechanisms.” He calls the common basis of those mechanisms the “pain of thinking”. That's his central term: the pain of thinking. Enter the pain of thinking, enter it fully and with your whole heart, and the ecstasy of the negative, as he calls it: the “ecstasy of the black void”, will help you do destroy your normal “I”. This will enable you to reach your “other” self: an “I” which he calls the “Not-I”. That is what he says in some of his last words.

This effort was extremely serious. And we can say that if the whole postmodern core process unconsciously tries to destroy the “veil of the Maya” and break through the illusions constructed by your own consciousness, then, out of that, at a certain point it comes almost as a necessity that you try to go one step beyond. A step beyond the point of destroying the normal “I”, and to discover the realm of the “productive void”, of the “Not-I”. But, in the end, you see that most of the main postmodern thinkers can't do all that positively. They are simply not able to go beyond the borderline of the subject, who reveals himself as a construct, in a positive manner. They can just evoke the borderline negatively. Not less, not more. As it is shown in the late work of Jean Francois Lyotard.

At the same time, you have Jacques Derrida, in his last works, but especially in his biographical investigation done by himself in the best film about him, “Derrida is elsewhere” (1999). This film was made by a arab woman, Safaa Fathy. Here, Derrida speaks of himself as a double personality: as of his false, and as of his “other”, his truer self. The true Derrida is not the one who speaks, he is “elsewhere”. Derrida tells us that he, in reality, is a “Maran”. He says: There is no ego, I have never seen one. But I myself am an “I” beyond time and space, a self that is not fully here, where the normal “I” is. My true self is a self that is, at the same time when I am speaking here, elsewhere. And he calls that self the “Maran”. At one point he even says: “I feel not only as a Maran, but sometimes as a Meta-Maran”. But what is a Maran? If this has been his main identification in his last years, as he says, if this was, as he put it, his “obsession over all the last years” – what is then a “Maran”?"

POSTMODERN PROTO-SPIRITUALITY AND ITS INBUILT LIMITS

Roland Benedikter:

"I would mention at least three main aspects.

Question: Ok.

RB: The first aspect is that postmodernists were not ready to give spirituality a positive shape. That is due to their own intellectual logic. According to their predominantly nominalistic concept of rationality, the realm of “essences” or philosophical realism cannot and should not be entered positively. All the main postmodernist thinkers 1979-2001 were, to a certain extend, part of analytical philosophy. They wanted to see how things interact; they were interested in how reality is produced, how the collective machine of “reality production” functions. They were much less interested in the question, what truth may be, and how mankind and world “really” are in their “deeper” dimensions. But, in most cases unvoluntarily, unveiling the mechanisms of consciousness that create reality, and “deconstructing” the mind of the creator of this reality, they came necessarily near a borderline to something else, to something that they increasingly discovered in their late works. It is something that Jean Francois Lyotard called the “inaudible presence of the void” or the “Not-I”. Jacques Derrida called it the “absolute secret, which is bigger than my self, which must be protected from language, and to which I have no access.” What did he want to say with these words? He wanted to say: There is a dimension which is bigger than my rational consciousness, and to this dimension, I have no access with my normal ego. But he didn't say that there is no access at all. He just limited himself to say that with the rational, intellectual, linguistic mind he was not able to gain access. Period. That means clear thinking and auto-critical consciousness, to me. But at the other hand, he felt increasingly as a “Maran”, as we know – as a Spanish Jew who practices his religion in the secret of his privacy. He was deeply involved in what “spirit” may be, and what were the “productive mechanisms” of spirit as such. He critizised Heideggers political and existencial misuse of “spirit” at the one hand, and he critizised Freuds pathological and behaviouristic misuse of “spirit” at the other hand. He tried to understand what “spirit” may be from the outer perspective at first hand, but increasingly also from the inner perspective. (Cf. Geoffrey Bennington: Spirit's Spirit Spirits Spirit. In: David Wood, ed.: Of Derrida, Heidegger and Spirit. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993, pp. 82-92. Cf. Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida: Jacques Derrida. Religion and Postmodernism Series, University Of Chicago Press 1999.)

Question: But why do they came to such “borderline” interests of research only in their late works?

RB: Again, there are different reasons for that. Most of the main postmodern thinkers, before entering their late period of personal development, were strongly under the influence of the experiences of the 20th century: of Nazi and Communist totalitarianism, later also of Maoist and Red Khmer dictatorships. They thought: Our experience in 20th century that did almost destroy mankind shows us especially one thing: Any time you try to describe positively the “essence” or “vital sphere” (Kuehlewind) of the idea, every time you try to describe the realm of philosophical realism positively, then you're always in danger to fall into absolutistic dreams, into ideologies of a “total truth”. Into ideologies of truth which are conceived always in absolutistic means: in means of a total wisdom, which is not beyond my ego, but is inherent in it, is graspable by it. And the so conceived ideologies suggest you the illusion that your ego could have the right to use total power and total control over other people, which probably do not have the same access to this absolute truth. That may lead you ego to think, that it could be the master over life or death – not only for its own, but also for others. And with full right, a right that derives from its priviledged access to truth. In other words: A right that seems to belong to the ego by the will of the idea itself – may it be the idea of progress of mankind, of spiritual truth or of God. Call it as you like it. In any case, the concept that there could be a possibility of direct conjunction between the ego and the sphere of the truth produces harm for the other. Therefore, you have not only to avoid the thinking in terms of truth, but you also have to battle those who try it.

Question: Yes. That was a very strong European feeling in the decades from 1979 to 2001. Maybe a little bit less in the USA, where religion is on the rise not only since 1989-91, but since the death of the Kennedy's (1963/1968) and the successive gaining of a “cultural overhand” by the “republican turn” since then.

RB: Exactly. It is much more European than American. But the American Academic Sphere, with only a few exceptions, integrated it in its “politically correctness” and made as well an universal paradigm of rationality and critical consciousness out of it. (Cf., for example: Tom Cohen (ed.), Jacques Derrida and the Humanities: A Critical Reader. Cambridge University Press 2002).

Question: Yes.

RB: So this is one main, basic reason why postmodernists did never sustainably cross the border line of the “productive void” produced by deconstruction. It is one main reason why they never tried to transform their predominantly negative, in many cases more literary than philosophical evocation of spirituality, which I tried to describe in our first dialogue, into a more positive, more systemic and more active building-up of spirituality. This is especially due to the fact, that some of them were themselves, at least for certain periods of their lives, active or even militant in radically “truth”-oriented, ideological groups. In groups, which were strongly “absolutistic” truth-oriented. For example Jean Francois Lyotard in the times of his membership in the militant group “Socialisme ou barbarie” (1948-1963), a radical leftist circle of intellectuals which fought publicly for a kind of postmodern communism during the North African colonial wars done by Post-World-War-II-France with rare brutality. The same as for Lyotard is true, for example, also for Luis Althusser, and for many others. When those thinkers, like Lyotard, turned away from that groups, and saw that those “absolutistic” ideas of justice, truth and brotherhood did not improve life, but did the contrary, they were deeply shocked by their own behaviour. They were brandmarked forever with the failure of what they first thought, with the necessary failure of every ideology. And so they became radically anti-ideological, and they thought that this would mean also: to be radically anti-“essential” and anti-“realistic”. In the end, assuming this position which became then their main position from 1979 to 2001, they were just trying to learn from their mistakes.

Question: Right. Great.

RB: A second reason for the incapacity to include realistic and nominalistic proceedings may be that most of the main postmodern thinkers of the first generation were simply not able to handle “essential”, “realistic” or “spiritual” experiences (which they obviously had, at least negatively, as we can clearly see from their late writings). Why? Because nobody taught them how to handle them. The paradigmatic European-Western approach of philosophy towards borderline consciousness phaenomena after World War II, especially in academic culture, was completely against every scientific approach to such phaenomena - for different reasons. The most important reason is the one mentioned above: the catastrophic experience with the pseudo-spiritualities of the 20th century. How to handle, and how to develop your spiritual experiences and desires, when they are banned from the social communications sphere, and if have to be dealt with exclusively in the sphere of the private? To talk about “essence” or philosophical realism could ruin your academic carreer. And so, when things became serious, most of those philosophers choosed the safe way, and they retired from the public question to a private question. But this revealed itself as a very ambivalent choice, because, as we saw symptomatically on September 11, 2001, if the enlightend rationality of the most evolved societies of the world leaves alone the renaissance of religion in most other parts of the world, religion could increasingly become irrational or even anti-rational. We have seen, that it is one of the most important responsibilities of postmodern rationality to occupy itself not exclusively, but also of religion, essence, realism, spirituality. We have seen that it is one of the most important responsibilities that the most evolved rationality we have today, and that actually is Postmodernity, must try to integrate nominalism and realism in an appropriate, new way to build an integrative paradigm for the coming world society that is being born right now. If Postmodernity does not, the comeout could be a new battle between irrational, not self-aware, uni-dimensional religion and rational, self aware, uni-dimensional secularism, which both miss their complementarity. And exactly that could lead to new catastrophic results on a world wide scale.

Question: Yes. In the last years and months, we already saw the first global signs of this battle. Let's think, for example, on the battle between parts of the Muslim religious world against the free press of Europe in the so called “Dispute about the cartoons on the prophet Mohammad” in a conservative Danish newspaper in January 2006; let's think at the difficulties with democratization and stability in Iraq, which are in large parts due to religious questions and to the cultural problems closely related to them; and let's think on the increasing problems of the Western-European world with Iran, which appear to be not only political, but, maybe even more than that, religious and cultural problems at a more “basic” level. At the level of incompatibility between uni-dimensional secularism at the one hand an uni-dimensional, irrational “spirituality” at the other hand.

RB: Exactly. Actually, there currently are some attempts to make secular and spiritual paradigms join on a rational, self-critical basis. (Cf. Jeremiah Hackett and Jerald Wallulis: Philosophy of Religion for a New Century: Essays in Honor of Eugene Thomas Long. Studies in Philosophy and Religion. Springer 2004; Patrick Maxwell and Deane-Peter Baker: Explorations in Contemporary Continental Philosophy of Religion. Value Inquiry Book Series 143. Rodopi 2003; Hent de Vries: Philosophy and the Turn to Religion. The Johns Hopkins University Press 1999). But these attempts are, in most cases, still week, isolated and not satisfying. And they will remain such, as long as a second generation of postmodern thinkers – and with that I mean: we! – do not enter the issue with a systematic effort to create a new philosophical and cultural paradigm which could merge realism and nominalism in a contemporary form: on the basis of the achievements of Postmodernity, but at the same time going beyond them.

Question: I agree. That is absolutely necessary. And we have absolutely not to blame someone for the non-achievements so far on this wide and difficult field. That will not lead us forward. We have to resume what the first generation of postmodernity achieved, and to take the best of it to move forward. But then, we have to do it. We have to move the philosophical and cultural paradigm one step forward, building on those achievements. But we should have, at the same time, no illusions: This is a big, a very big challenge. And many will be needed to face such a challenge. It is not a question of a few “strange people”.

RB: Yes, undoubtedly. We will have to create networks, with all people of good will on a rational basis.

Question: Yes. The important work is still to do.

RB: And even if it is done, the challenge may result too big anyway. But that's to see.

Question: Yes.

RB: But let's turn, for a moment, to our main question: Why the postmodern thinkers of the first generation encountered such difficulties in dealing with “essentialist” issues."

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"Here, I ask: can Roland Benedikter's (2005) conception of postmodern dialectic and spiritual turn, help us understand postmodern spirituality and can it assist in a construction of a postmodern epistemology of spirituality? " [8]

Roland Benedikter on Postmodern Spirituality

Contents

Contents

Contextual Quotes

Abstract

Summary

Excerpts

THE GLOBAL “RENAISSANCE OF RELIGION” (SINCE 1989-91) AGAINST THE PROTO-SPIRITUALITY OF LATE POSTMODERNISM (1979-2001)

The Anti-Religious, Anti-Spiritual Impulse of Core European Thinking Since the Enlightenment

The Essential Productive Void Behind Any Deconstruction

POSTMODERN PROTO-SPIRITUALITY AND ITS INBUILT LIMITS

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