Nothingness and Desire: A Philosophical Antiphony

Nothingness and Desire

Nothingness and Desire 9 1the guiding fictions. The orbit of questions taken up in these lectures is defined by two focal ideas, nothingness and desire. The discussion is never centered on one without taking into account its eccentricity from the other. The movement of the argument is therefore deliberately elliptical, with no covert aim of collapsing the two into a common central point. The distance between them will depend solely on how they are applied to specific questions, not to any higher standpoint at which they can be shown to coincide. But neither are they meant to stand as opposing principles of reality that would land us in a kind of metaphysical dualism. I would characterize them rather as guiding fictions. As guides, nothingness and desire serve a twofold purpose. To begin with, they give us nets to cast out upon a vast fund of philosophical texts in order to draw into our boat a small selection of material relevant to the conversation. This is their heuristic function and as such does not suppose or exclude any particular response to what is found; a response that generates questions for its own justification is an act of invention, not of discovery. This is not to say that there are not certain interests driving the whole adventure from the start. If ideas are to guide, they must also play the hermeneutic function of fixing attention on the construction of a framework for posing questions and arriving at a response to them. In these talks my way of sorting out the philosophical catch has been to focus on the familiar questions of self, God, moral principles, and property, and to rephrase them within that framework. Answering questions by reframing them may not satisfy all the aims of a conversation across philosophical traditions, but it does teach us something about what kind of response to expect. There is a story told of Nāgārjuna, the second- to third-century Indian philosopher widely held to be the most important Buddhist thinker after Siddhartha Gautama himself, that one day he was visited with an apparition of the Buddha. “You have written wisely of me, Nāgārjuna, and in appreciation I will allow you to pose me any two questions, to which I shall respond directly and fully.” The philosopher fell into a deep trance and on emerging addressed the visitor. “I thank you, Lord Buddha, for this privilege. My first question is this: What is the best possible 10 | Nothingness and Desire question I could ask? And second: What is the best possible response you could give?” Without batting an eye, the Buddha replied: “The best possible question you could ask is the question you have just asked. And the best possible response I could give is the response I have just given.” The best questions are questions about questions, and the best answers are those that provoke these kinds of questions. Put the other way around, a response that poses as a mere datum of knowledge that renders the question obsolete is less of an answer than one that deliberately exposes itself to a deeper and more precise form of posing the question. In other words, any account of that toward which we are being guided must always be seen as fictional. In their function as fictions, desire and nothingness do not pledge allegiance to their own literal, objective truth, but neither are they merely signs that can be cast aside once they have been properly interpreted. They have been chosen precisely because of their symbolic quality. That is to say, they are inexhaustibly intelligible ideas that engage us, provisionally, with reality at its deepest ground. To expect a stable, Archimedean point from which to measure the things of life without the use of symbols does metaphysical violence both to the world and to our consciousness of it. We must disavow from the outset any illusion of writing a chapter in a unified, continuous biography of reality simply by applying preestablished ideas to it. Further, the truth of this pair of ideas cannot be linked to the world as it is without being bound hand and foot to their consequences in practice. Reality itself, we may assume until proven or experienced otherwise, is radically plural, and all our conceptions of reality are radically filtered by our own provisional and forever corrigible engagements with it. The logical circularity of being guided by...