Nothingness and Desire: A Philosophical Antiphony

Self and No-Self

Self and No-Self 31 6defining self through no-self. The usual way of understanding the notion of no-self has been to define it as a gloss on the notion of self. I would like to reverse the process and see no-self as the primary analog for talk about a self. To do this, we need to show how the notion of self is incapable of embracing the concept of no-self within itself. A good place to begin is by questioning Feuerbach’s project of unmasking all theology as a covert anthropology. Relying on mainstream theological descriptions of God, Feuerbach saw such talk as projections into the skies of human nature minus all its imperfections and limitations. Viewing the all-powerful, all-knowing divinity as an inverted projection of a weak, ignorant humanity, he sought to affirm the human. What Feuerbach failed to take into account, and what finally weakened his project, was the standpoint of negative theology. Since the early centuries of Christianity, there has been a tradition that considered the best way to describe the divine to be a series of negations. In its radical form, the categories by which we affirm or deny things about God are rejected, including the attribution of existence or nonexistence. In other words, both the literal projections as well their reduction to a covert anthropology can be seen as inevitable distortions wrought by the human mind on an ineffable mystery. If the conscious affirmation of divine qualities is based on a negation of human qualities, and if the exposure of this mental trick ends up reaffirming the human, then what does the direct, conscious negation of divine qualities have to say about the human? To preserve this question without gainsaying Feuerbach’s important but partial insight, we need to close the circle of affirmation and negation in on itself and then talk about the circle itself as a human invention. From that perspective, both affirmations and negations about the divine and the human will be seen to be incomplete, even radically incomplete in the sense that they cannot fully complement one another. Projection is what the human mind does, and there is no place, pace Feuerbach, from which all projections can be dissolved into objective statements of truth. The consequence of this insight is that to affirm a negation of both affirmations and negations is at the same time to affirm an unspeakable reality that makes them both inevitable. 32 | Nothingness and Desire As long as the conversation accepts the problem of a thinking self grasping at an understanding of an objective humanity facing an objective divinity , there is no reasonable escape from Feuerbach’s criticisms—the “fiery stream” that has to be crossed, as Karl Barth put it. To distort apophasis into a mere corrective of cataphasis, to see the negations as a no less objective corrective to overstatement of affirmations, is to misjudge the more radical role that the via negativa can play in philosophy. A basic but tacit assumption behind Feuerbach’s argument is that the ideas of self and God entail one another because the self is taken fundamentally to be a subject with desires unquenchable in the reality of being. Unless one reads the projection as a pessimistic wisdom about the human condition, its dissolution would seem to require either a repression of certain desires as a distraction from the real world or a belief in the possibility of their final satisfaction. Both solutions leave the assumption intact. If, on the contrary, we accept a notion of no-self as primary and remove ourselves from the obligation to explain the place of consciousness in the world of being and becoming through a straightforward affirming or denying of relationships between the subject of desire and its objects, Feuerbach’s insight yields a different harvest. To follow this line of thought, sympathy for a different set of assumptions and its resonance within our customary ways of thinking about the self and God is needed. The transition from a God of being to a God of nothingness will be left for later. We first have to see what sense it makes to see the negation of the human, or no-self, as a way to getting to the heart of what it means to be human. The no-self is not only negative in the sense that the self is affirmed merely through the apophasis...