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Deconstruction, Zen Buddhism, and the Ethical Jin Y. Park American University (Summery of Paper) (Philosophical Encounter, July 14, 2006, Hong Kong) This paper is based on the claim that deconstruction offers its own ethical paradigm and that the nature of deconstructive ethics is different from the traditional ethics based on metaphysics. With this assumption, this paper demonstrates the ethical mode in deconstruction and Zen Buddhism in threefold: the first section explores the ethical in Derridean deconstruction focusing on Derrida’s short essay “On Cosmopolitanism” (1997/2001); the second section investigates contemporary Western discourse on Zen ethics; in the third section, I conclude by proposing deconstructive Zen ethics as an alternative to normative ethics. 1. Deconstructive Ethics or Deconstructing Ethics Derridean deconstruction marks a gap in a discourse. By marking a fissure and thus finding internal chasms and self-contradictions in a discourse, deconstruction dismantles a being’s self identity, which has constituted the foundation of metaphysical thinking. In reading a text, Derrida demonstrates moments of indecidability imbedded in a discourse. The structure of this indecidability is called a double-bind, which Derrida sees as involved in each moment of our decision making. In his late writings, Derrida has addressed the impact of deconstructive marking of indecidability and double-binding on our consideration of ethics. One such example appears in his essay “On Cosmopolitanism”(“Cosmopolites de tous les pays, encore un effort!” 1997), in which Derrida discusses the concept of hospitality as articulated in Kant’s essay “To Perpetual Peace”(Zum ewigen Frieden, 1795). In this essay Derrida addresses the issue of the possibility of universal hospitality, which can be summarized as follows. In “To Perpetual Peace,” Kant outlines five preliminary articles to maintain permanent peace among states, which is followed by his proposal of three definitive articles for eternal peace. In the Third Definitive Article, Kant brings our attention to the concept of universal hospitality. Here Kant treats hospitality not as an issue of philanthropy but “of right” as he states: “Hospitality means the right of an alien not to be treated as an enemy upon his arrival in another’s country.”1 Kant’s idea of the right to universal hospitality is based on the fact that no region of the earth originally belongs to anyone and thus everybody has a right to be on any part of the earth. In other words, the earth is owned by no one and is thus open to everybody. Kant thus states: “the right to visit, to associate, belongs to all men by virtue of their common ownership of the earth’s surface; …because originally no one had a greater right to any region of the earth than anyone else.”2 From the perspective of the twenty-first century in which the modernist concept of separate nation-states became a standard of regional divisions, no statement might sound more naïve than this claim of the universal right for individuals to be on any part of earth. However, no period in recent history makes us more aware of the truth and reality of this statement, that we all live on earth and if humanity wishes to survive, we need to live together. By saying so, in our understanding of territorial ownership, we are already in the realm of a double bind in the sense that Derrida will argue in his reading of Kant. Just to get the sense of what Derrida means by the double bind, let us consider the following questions: to whom should we open “our” territory and how should we open it? What limitations should we impose on the foreigners who will be on “our” territory? Is “unconditional” opening of “our” territory an option at all? If our acceptance of foreigners has conditions, what are the grounds of this conditionality? Since when does this land belong to “us,” and exclusively to “us”? What about a nation-state’s responsibility to protect its 1 citizens? But can a nation survive, either in Kant’s time or in the twenty first century, without cooperation with other nations economically, politically, environmentally, or humanistically? The indecidability and double bind that we find in our attempt to answer these questions are the double bind that binds the concept of universal hospitality as well. Kant himself must have been aware of this problem. Hence, after he declares the universal ownership of the earth, Kant sets conditions for universal hospitality. That is, Kant limits the right of universal hospitality to the right for foreigners to visit and not to reside in the foreign soil. And the residential right will be speculated by the sovereign power of the region. Hence, we need conditions to execute unconditional hospitality. This statement falls into aporia. If universal hospitality has conditions, can it still be universal? This is exactly what Derrida finds as the double bind in Kantian concept of hospitality. Derrida thus states: “in defining hospitality in all its rigor as a law… Kant assigns to it conditions which make it dependent on state sovereignty, especially when it is a question of the right of residence.”3 In Kant’s hospitality, the distinction between the “universality,” and thus unconditionality of hospitality, and the conditions of such hospitality can be compared to the distinction between the natural surface of the earth and the institutions established on that natural surface. An example is the sovereignty of a nation. One may be on any part of the earth because all of us share the ownership of the earth’s “surface” but to be a resident means to be a part of an institution. A society, or a nation-state as an institution, is not merely a “surface” of the earth, but it is institutionalized --or civilized, if you prefer,-- space. However, where does the natural state of earth end and the institutionalized space of a nation begin? Kant does not ask this question. Some might argue that Derrida’s claim is naïve or even perverted, because no nation in reality can accept all and any foreigners without imposing some limitations in order to protect its own citizens. However, in the ultimate sense it is not merely an issue of whether a nation should accept foreigners or emigrants without imposing conditions. The very fact that that is not possible in reality, and thus the application of hospitality is always limited, and that the universal hospitality is always to be done ununiversally, is the double-binding nature of hospitality. That the “universal” is subject to conditions, thereby becoming partial in being universal, is the status of the universal. In this context, Derrida compares our exercise of hospitality to that of ethics, as he declares: “ethics is hospitality”4 (emphasis original). The limits and perversion of our practice of hospitality is, from Derrida’s perspective, the very limits of ethics that we practice. Why is ethics hospitality? Because ethics, like hospitality, begins with one’s relationship with others; ethics, like hospitality, begins with one’s desire to have a favorable, good and right relationship with others; and like hospitality, ethics, in one’s attempt to be fair, be right, and be good, always gets caught in the double-bind of the impossibility of making decisions without appropriation. From Derrida’s perspective, the function of ethics does not lie in merely offering precise rules for our decision-making. Instead, ethics, from a deconstructive perspective, reminds us of the question of appropriation and domestication involved in our thinking, decision-making, and action-taking. Deconstructive ethics is thus an interruption. Why is normative ethics problematic to Derrida and deconstructive mode of thinking? Normative ethics grounds itself in the belief of human beings’ capacity as rational beings capable of distinguishing between right and wrong or good and bad, as well as the metaphysical foundation of those concepts. Normative ethics is a corollary of identity-principle of metaphysical tradition. Deconstructive mode of thinking understands a being as a differential notion; identity is inevitably non-identity, because in the concept of identity is already others. When we expand this idea of identity of non-identity further, we encounter what Derrida calls the inexhaustibility of context. The non-saturability, inexhaustibility, and thus inconceivability, of the full scope of our reality is the secret that every moment of life and every being contains within itself. 2 Deconstructive operations do not deny the fact that decisions should be made in our daily lives and especially in the public and political realms. Conversely, the fact that decisions are there to be made each and every moment of our personal and public life does not mean that the appropriation of the inexhaustible contexts of our existence and the excluded part in decision-making should also be forgotten. Deconstructive ethics provides us with the possibility of thinking the ethical without resorting to the metaphysical grounding which traditionally functioned as foundation for ethical value judgments. It also demonstrates that ethics is not just about making distinctions, and that ethics is also possible by realizing the impossibility of making the final decision. The idea of indecidability and double-bind which Derrida sees at the core of a being and a being’s relationship with the world reject finality of any decision-making and thought-process. Derrida’s idea of the differential notion of a being and the insaturable contexts in which a being exists connect deconstruction with Zen Buddhist world view. By the same token, deconstructive ethical paradigm can be shared with Zen Buddhism as well. 2. The Ethical in Contemporary Discourse on Zen Buddhism Since Zen Buddhism’s entry into the Western world, the ethical nature of Zen Buddhism has become one of the most discussed topics. This topic, however, has largely been disregarded in the discourses of Zen Buddhism in East Asia. Recent Buddhist scholarship in the West provides us with two opposing reports regarding the status of Zen Buddhism in the context of ethical discourse. On the one hand is the claim that Buddhism in general, and Zen Buddhism in particular, needs to offer a clearer blueprint on social issues and demonstrate its viability as an ethical discourse in order for the tradition to survive in the West. In contrast to this demand for a Zen Buddhist ethical layout, recent scholarship on Zen Buddhism has revealed how “un”-ethical Zen Buddhism has been. In that context, Robert Sharf, for example, demonstrated how Zen Buddhism was closely related to and even a result of Japanese nationalism during the first half of the twentieth century.5 Brian Victoria has also brought our attention to Zen Buddhism’s involvement with Japanese militarism during the World War II, raising doubts about Zen Buddhism’s capacity as an ethical discourse. Despite of such grim aspects of recent history in Zen Buddhism, they cannot completely negate the capacity of Zen Buddhism to offer an ethical discourse. In fact, scholars attempting to create Zen Buddhist ethics have produced results worth considering for the future of Zen Buddhism’s viability as a social theory. In that context two opposite views on Zen ethics is noticeable. T. P. Kasulis finds the foundation of Zen Buddhist ethics in the pure state of pre-thinking. Unlike rulebound nature of western ethics based on metaphysical foundation, Kasulis argues, Zen ethics is a mode which “eliminates selfishness by modeling oneself after oneself and, therefore, forgetting oneself.” Interpreting the well-known passage from “Genjōkōan” in Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, Kasulis locates the ethical ground of Zen Buddhism in the realization of the presencing of things as they are. Kasulis sees Dōgen’s view of enlightenment as the realization of “the authentification of our own experience,” which goes in line with “the idea of hongaku (“primordial enlightenment”).”6 According to Dōgen and the hongaku thought, this “prereflective state” is given; the dualism of the subject and object is a result of our reflection. Hence Kasulis states: “our isolation from each other arises upon reflection.”7 The state of pre-reflection, “the preego mode of without-thinking,”8 is the source in which both wisdom and compassion radiate, Kasulis claims. In sum, Kasulis claims the pre-reflective state of original enlightenment, which Zen Buddhism considers to exist in every being, as the ground of Zen ethics. There are, however, fundamental issues that the Kasulisean approach needs to resolve in order to be seriously considered as Zen ethics. The first is the relationship between awakening and ethics. In other words: How does the attainment of enlightenment, or awakening to the original enlightenment, enable an individual to behave virtuously? Kasulis claims that compassion and intuitive wisdom are one. However even the Buddha himself went through the period of hesitation before he made a decision to teach his 3 enlightenment to other human beings, which seems to me a clear evidence that awakening or original enlightenment does not have to be immediately transferred into virtuous actions. Secondly, if Zen ethics is possible only in the state of pre-reflective experience, which is available only to those who attained awakening, what is the status of ethical behaviors for the sentient beings who live in the world of reflection, and who are yet to attain the state of pure pre-reflective awakening? Without clear answers to these questions, the Kasulean version of Zen ethics does not seem functional as an ethical discourse. James Whitehill seems to be aware of the problem involved in taking the pre-reflective state as a ground for ethics. Critical of what he calls the “transcendence trap” of the romanticized Buddhist ethics, which considers the moral life as “a nonrational expressiveness, something natural, spontaneous, non-linguistic, and uncalculating,”9 Whitehill emphasizes the importance of will in Buddhist ethics, the model of which he found in the disciplined life style of early Buddhism.10 From Whitehill’s perspective, Kasulisean interpretation of Zen Buddhism, instead of offering any ethical paradigm, will end up demonstrating the incompatibility between Zen Buddhism and ethics. That is so, because, to Whitehill, such a paradoxical statement as “nirvana is samsara” creates an obstacle in the path to Zen ethics, because of its incapacity to make distinction between the two, which he considers as a critical blow in ethics. Kasulis’s and Whitehill’s proposals of Zen ethics stand in stark contrast with each other. By characterizing Zen ethics as the non-rational, pre-reflective state of original enlightenment, Kasulis’s vision of Zen ethics faces the challenge of how to actualize the pre-reflective state of non-discrimination in a world that requires discriminatory judgment. On the other hand, by over-emphasizing moralistic aspects of Zen Buddhism, Whitehill’s proposal of Zen ethics faces the problem of reducing Zen tradition into one part of early Buddhism with emphasis on vinaya, disregarding the entire history of Zen Buddhism in its attempt to problematize the reifying tendency of human mind. Put side by side, the limits of Kasulisean ethics lies in the equation of wisdom and compassion without explaining the actual path linking the two, whereas the problems of Whitehillean ethics arises from applying substantialist views of ethics to Zen Buddhism, which is basically non-substantialist. The structure of Zen Buddhism does not call for the rule-bound ethics as the early Buddhism might do. Constant revolts against conventional forms of communication, which mark the history of Zen Buddhism, symbolize Zen rejection of any fixed configurations in our handling of the world. That this revolt itself has a structure that might have led to the creation of specific forms of power and authority, as claimed by Dale Wright, for example, in his view of Zen monastic language game, does not completely negate Zen efforts to deconstruct the reified mode of thinking. Seen from this perspective, a third view on Zen ethics is necessary if we want to consider Zen Buddhist ethics at all. My proposal as a third form is deconstructive Zen ethics, which I will outline based on our discussion of deconstructive ethics in the previous section. 3. Deconstruction, Zen Buddhism and Non-substantialist Ethics Purity of the transcendental is violence. And the violence is both symbolic and actual. It is as much militant as philosophical. The violence of the purity, the pure transcendental in its ethical form, and the violence of the Other without the play of différance is war, a concrete form of which we witness in various types of war-- a war between nations, between different genders, between different ethnic groups, between individuals. When the Other is reified, absolutized, and frozen within the subject, the subject’s identity is also reified. When Zen Buddhist discourse problematizes the discriminating mind and challenges the traditional ethical category, this does not necessarily indicate a symptom that Zen cannot have an ethical project of its own. Nor does this mean that Zen Buddhism needs to redirect itself to early vinaya codes in order to create Zen ethics. Instead, like deconstructive ethics, Zen ethics proposes a new paradigm in thinking the ethical without absolutizing the categorical division of the good or the right as in metaphysical ethics. 4 What happens when Zen does not make distinctions? What happens when Zen rejects the metaphysical nature incorporated in the fixed concepts of good, right and evil, and confirms that they are conditioned like any other things in the samsaric world? Like the deconstructive ethical mode, marking the fabricated nature of ethical categories becomes an ethical statement for Zen Buddhism. This reminder itself brings the Zen mode of thinking into the ethical realm. Let us take an example of śūnyatā and see how the concept of emptiness can function as an ethical category. Śūnyatā as an ethical reality does not simply mean that everything is empty, that one should not thus make a distinction between good and bad, or right and wrong. Nor does the idea of śūnyatā, which, in the ultimate sense, negates the existence of the good and the bad, promote the attitude of anything-goes anarchism. Instead, śūnyatā reminds us of the human being’s tendency of absolutizing and reifying the ethical categories. Reification of the fabricated concepts comes together with power and authority. The exercise of such a power becomes most visible when the reification functions within an institution. Ethics more often than not locates itself on the border between abstract conceptualization and concrete institutionalization. Institutionalization by nature goes against the non-substantialist stance of both deconstructive and Zen Buddhist ethics. As Derrida testifies, no thought system is intact from the reification resulting from its use of the institution called language. The ever-renewed deconstructive modes in the use of language that marks the history of Zen Buddhism demonstrate Zen Buddhism’s efforts to challenge the reifying mind of human beings. When institutionalization suppresses the capacity to destabilize its own system, nonsubstantialist mode of thinking turns itself into the totalitarian vision such as Zen militarism or Zen authoritarianism. Like deconstructive ethics, Zen Buddhist ethics is possible by marking the border of the traditional ethical categories, including the subject and the object. The impossibility of delineating this division in the ultimate level and at the same time necessity to have categories and meaning and value system in the provisional level, functions as an ethical beginning point in the non-substantialist thought system. By bringing our attention to the aporetic understanding of the meaning of normative ethical categories, both deconstructive and Zen Buddhist ethics urges us a radical reconceptualization in our ethical mode of thinking, which I call the non-substantialist ethical paradigm, which I hope could offer some insight into our ethical dilemma in postmodern, multi-cultural and globalized world. Notes: Immanuel Kant, “To Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch,” trans. Ted Humphrey, in Perpetual Peace and Other Essays (Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing Company, 1983), 107-143, p. 118. 2 Kant, “To Perpetual Peace,” p.118. 3 Jacques Derrida, Cosmopolites de tous les pays, encore un effort! (Paris: Éditions Galelée, 1997), p. 56; English translation by Mark Dooley and Michael Hughs, “On Cosmopolitanism,” in On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dooley and Hichael Hughes (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 22. 4 Derrida, Cosmopolites de tous les pays, encore un effort! p. 42; “On Cosmopolitanism,” p. 17. 5 Robert H. Sharf, “The Zen of Japanese Nationalism,” Donald S. Lopez, Jr., ed., Curators of the Buddha: The Study of Buddhism under Colonialism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995):107-160, p. 107. 6 Kasulis, Zen Person Zen Action (Honolulu, Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 1981), p. 88. 7 Kasulis, Zen Person Zen Action, p. 91. 8 Kasulis, Zen Person Zen Action, p. 98. 9 James Whitehill, “Buddhism and the Virtues,” in Damien Keown, ed. Contemporary Buddhist Ethics (Richmond, Surrey, Curzon Press, 2000): 17-36, p. 21. 10 Whitehill, “Buddhism and the Virtues,” p. 23. 1 5