Roland Benedikter on Postmodern Spirituality

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

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

Directory

• Part I: The rise of a proto-spirituality in the late works of some leading postmodern thinkers [https://www.integralworld.net/benedikter1a.html

]

Contextual Quote

"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."

- Roland Benedikter [1]

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."

Excerpt

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”?"