Mislim da govori bas o budizmu. Zizek je opsednut budizmom, vidi ga kao sustinski kompatibilnog sa savremenim kapitalizmom, nasuprot revolucionarnoj prirodi Hristovog ucenja, i to ponavlja u desetinama tekstova i nastupa. Ovde recimo govori o superiornosti hriscanstva u odnosu na budizam kao takav, na osnovu primera zastranjenja japanskih zen monaha:
The so-called oriental spirituality, Buddhism, with its, so we are told, more gentle balanced, holistic, ecological approach. You know, all the stories about how, when digging up earth for the foundation of a house, Tibetan Buddhists are careful to not kill any worms and such. In the whole of the last 150 years Japan’s rapid industrialization and militarization, with the ethics of discipline and sacrifice, was sustained by the large majority of Zen Buddhist thinkers. Who today knows that Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki himself, the high guru of Zen in the United States of the 1960’s, supported in his youth in Japan of the 1940’s the spirit of utter discipline and militaristic expansion. There is no contradiction here, no manipulative perversion of some authentic, compassionate insight. The attitude of total immersion into the selfless now, of the Instant, this so-called Buddhist enlightenment in which all reflexive distance is lost, in short in which absolute discipline coincides with total spontaneity, perfectly legitimizes our subordination to the militaristic social machine. It’s quite interesting to read Buddhist texts on war, where they claim openly that, for ordinary people, who don’t have time to meditate for years, the best shortcut for overcoming you false self and reaching nirvana, satori whatever we call it, is total subordination to the military discipline. And Suzuki himself wrote a wonderful text, where he even gives advice to the military how to use Buddhism to make killing easier. He says that if I persist in my everyday attitude of false belief in that I have a self, which is the free agent of its acts, and let’s say I have to kill one of you, this is difficult, I look into your eyes, I find it difficult, [I hesitate whether] I should stab the knife into you, I feel responsible. Then Suzuki says if you reach Buddhist enlightenment it’s much easier. You no longer believe in your autonomous self, your perceive yourself as just a void, an anonymous, impassive observer of life around you where phenomena simply are engaged in their cosmic dance, which is a totally neutral process. From this distance, as Suzuki puts it, you simply observe your knife in a cosmic dance of phenomena hitting the eye or the throat of your enemy. This is no joking matter, because I’m not blaming Buddhism for this. I’m just saying how even the most radical spirituality is no guarantee that we will not be doing horrible things in our daily life.
What this means is that the Buddhist all-encompassing compassion has to be opposed to the Christian intolerant violent love. I want to praise the Christian love. Though Christian will probably lynch me for what I will say now. The Buddhist stance is that of indifference, of quenching all passions which strive to establishing differences. While the Christian love is a violent passion introducing difference, a gap in the order of being, to privilege and elevate some object at the expense of others. Love is violence, not in the vulgar sense of the well-known Balkan proverb “if he doesn’t beat me, he doesn’t love me”, [but] violence is already the love choice as such which tears its object out of its context elevating it to the sublime absolute thing. In Montenegrin folklore the origin of Evil is a beautiful woman. She makes men lose their balance, she literally destabilizes the universe, coloring all things with a tone of partiality. Among Christian theologists it was Gilbert Keith Chesterton who fully assumed the consequences of this violent aspect of love: one has to get rid of the old Platonic topos of love as Eros which gradually elevates itself from the love for a particular individual through the love for the beauty of a human body in general and the love of the beautiful form as such to the love for the supreme Good beyond all forms: true love is precisely the opposite move of forsaking the promise of Eternity itself for an imperfect individual. What if the gesture of choosing temporal existence, of giving up eternal existence for the sake of love, from Jesus Christ to, for example Siegmund in Act II of Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre, who prefers to remain a common mortal if his beloved Sieglinde cannot follow him to Walhalla, the eternal dwelling of the dead heroes. What if this is the highest ethical act of them all? I think this is the message of Christianity which is still alive. Not forsake all terrestrial things for eternity, but love means I know you are a miserable, mortal being but I am ready to forsake eternity itself for you. Based on this insight Chesterton rejected the fashionable claim about the alleged spiritual identity of Buddhism and Christianity. To quote Chesterton from his Orthodoxy:
Love desires personality; therefore love desires division. It is the instinct of Christianity to be glad that God has broken the universe into little pieces. […] This is the intellectual abyss between Buddhism and Christianity; what for the Buddhist (or Theosophist) personality is the fall of man, for the Christian is the purpose of God, the whole point of his cosmic idea. The world-soul of the Theosophists [or Buddhist] asks man to love it only in order that man may throw himself into it. But the divine center of Christianity actually threw man out of it in order that he might love it. […] All modern philosophies are chains which connect and fetter; Christianity is a sword which separates and sets free. No other philosophy makes God actually rejoice in the separation of the universe into different living souls.”
Nastavak o inherentnoj superiornosti hriscanstva u odnosu na sve ostale pagane: http://daily-struggles.tumblr.com/post/50765863638/slavoj-%C5%BEi%C5%BEek-on-love-as-a-political-category
Home
by boomer crook Fri 18 Dec 2015 - 10:23