Slavoj Zizek - The Buddhist Ethic and The Spirit of Global Capitalism
This is also a critique of "cognitive breakthrough" from an ideology view, a continental perspective ... Zizek comes from a psychoanalytic view and gets to the heart of it ... along the way he mentions Heidegger, Habermas and Metzinger.
there is also a youtube of the lecture
basically he breaks out the ways we have of dealing with the general acceptance of our being "neuronal puppets" - the Buddhist part is the main focus, but I excerpt here the parts before that which seem relevant to the discussion
extract
"Now more seriously, no no no, wait a minute, let me make one point, I cannot resist it, it’s in my nature to make so called bad taste jokes but I take buddhism extremely seriously, it’s absolutely an authentic, I don't like the term because it is itself western orientalist, let's called it subjective existential experience. So the other reason, for me at least much more interesting is what some people call the so called
cognitivist breakthrough, the new stage of our understanding of our brain, our thinking, provided by whatever you called them, brain sciences, cognitivism and so on.
Now I don't want to deal with the problem like are they true or not? What I’m just saying is that more and more they are somehow generally received, even those who should resisted it most, psychoanalysts, you know? Often play the game of how you call this? If you can't beat them join them, you know? They like to claim “oh but you see how cognitivist scientists are arriving up, this is just a paraphrase of what already Freud knew and so on” you know?
This kind of a join the enemy. OK, but there is none the less one interesting point for me and here I agree with, ehm, we have many problems with me and Wolfgang, but at one point I agree with him and I will make this point that if we want to retain Martin Heidegger as a reference it’s crucial not to read Heidegger along the lines of some kind of anti-technological or romanticism, you know? Heidegger walking in his stupid forest up there and cursing all the technology bla bla. No, Heidegger was quite rational here, I read in one biography of Heidegger that like, OK it is nice that authentic
Todtnauberg, but at the end he wanted air conditioning, full electricity and so on, you know? Ok, so what I'm saying is that the question we should ask in this spirit is is a very naive one, if we really accept, we don't have to but if the results of brain sciences which is ... but this already to be debated, but i don't want to enter it...
that our subjective freedom or the unity of our ego as a free and responsible agent is an illusion that in reality we are just a well functioning neuronal mechanism? Whatever you put it.
Ok, the problem is how to subjectivize this? that is to say how should or does this affect your inner most, but not some deep metaphysical, even everyday sense of an agent engaging in social life and so on and so on? So here I think that buddhism to be vulgar is doing quite well without any irony because there are three main attitudes the way I can see it, I mean only I'm talking only about those who accept cognitivist breakthrough, and buddhism is the fourth one I think.
- The first predominant attitude is simple to resign ourselves to the gap between the scientific view of ourselves as neuronal automata, whatever you want, and our everyday self experience as free responsible autonomous agents. The idea is that because off, you can be very materialist here, because of how we were produced through evolutionary choice and so on so on, it we can not but experience ourselves as free responsible agents and so on, so that we are simply condemned to live in the gap. Scientifically we know but in everyday life, you know? It’s like the same, some of them like to use this metaphor, as we know very well how big moon is but you cannot help perceiving moon as the small circle up there, that is the same, we cannot step out.
Habermas
- The second attitude, the worst if you ask me, is the, I hope again we agree here we have many other reasons to kill each other so here we can agree, this is my declaration of love if you didn't get it, you know? is the habermasian position which is, he also fully asserts the duality but not as a necessary... but the non-naturalist aspects, is for Habermas not simply as an illusion we should tolerate, but a kind of a transcendental a priori which is necessary and even points to an immanent limitation of scientific knowledge. No, this Habermas's reasoning is here a very transcendental philosophical one, it’s that science is a certain social practice, intersubjective practice where, you know? we formulate universal statements, we confront them through experiments in a debate bla bla, and in this practice the transcendental a priori of this practice, is that we are free responsible being reasoning in a certain way and so on. So even if the result for example of our scientific investigation is we are neuronal puppets, whatever, we should not forget that this result is the result of an exercise of our transcendental freedom of scientific thinking which is a priori you know? we cannot say no! that is false, if you neglect that the result also disappears.
Metzinger
- Then we have an even more naive but in a way sympathetic to me attitude, that of some radical brain scientists like the big couple from La Joya I think California, Patricia and Paul Churchland, they claim, I don't think it works what i'm saying, but it’s a beautiful position... They claim that no! they claim that our term among some brain scientists for this everyday attitude is as you probably know folk psychology, no? this spontaneous idea, my god, I do whatever I want, we are free and so on, OK. They claim that this folk psychology doesn't have such a deep status as some darwinists think, that it’s not a kind of a biological, evolutionary a priori but simply a reflection of our old naive ideologies. They say self like in old times when, I think this is even by Patricia Churchland, an example, when so called primitive people saw a lighting they thought God is sending us a message or there is a higher force behind and they claim when we act, I think 'oh! I have a free self in me' which is the true source of it it’s exactly the same type of superstition and in the same way that even if you are scared shit of a storm as I am I admit it, specially if you are in the plane when it happens, you know? nonetheless at least mostly I succeed not starting to pray and claiming you know? like you naturalize it, we no longer think like so called primitives … They, the Churchland couple, they think the same thing is possible with even with our freedom of the will and self and in a pretty naive way they described how such a society would had looked, that it wouldn’t be simply a society without punishment as some people think, mainly the idea being, if I’m an automaton and there is no freedom of the will what right do you have to punish me? I'm not responsible, no, for them punishment can nonetheless be a regulative mechanism which works and so on, just a more kind, less oppressive society and so on. The reason I don't agree with this solution is its implicitly naivety and the one who is my good guy here, the german brain scientist, maybe you should invite him, he didn’t want to come or what? Thomas Metzinger, it would be really nice to get him, maybe you can (refering to Wolfgang) if he has some son blackmail him like you know? mafia, everything is permitted to get good people here to Saas-Fee, you know? maybe your son will have an accident, who knows? if you don't come, no, he is very well how this type of simple acceptance ‘OK so what? we change our view’ still leaves, even if in works, it recognizes it ‘yeah I admitted it , what's the problem? OK I'm an automaton what the hell?’ but the de facto in your activity you still treat yourself as the good old free self, you don't really existentially accept it and here again we come to buddhism because Metzinger, who is a serious scientist not some kind of a shitty new ager like those who claim, you know? the tao of quantum physics, we are not talking about that, he is in but at the same time for very precise reasons, although he is also totally materialist, he is buddhist in the sense that he claims that although it may appear that we are, as the first position which I described claims, that we are condemned to this duality, that is to say scientifically we know we are neuronal automata but in your immediately self experience you experience yourself as free agent and so on and so on, that there is nonetheless possible as a limit case and this for him as you can guess would have been precisely when you arrive at enlightenment in buddhism, when you accept so called Anatman that your self does not have any substantial identity that... and this is beautiful thesis, I like it in a way... that, and again he is not in that sense a mysticist, he claims that he is totally a scientist, he just claims that if you go to the end in buddhist meditation where you arrive a stage of, this is one popular book on buddhism by John Epstein I think which is not so bad, the title is “Thoughts Without A Thinker”, that literally you arrived at a stage where you have thoughts but you no longer can say there is an I agent who is thinking this thoughts and that he claims, although for large majority of us, he puts it very nicely, we can't, he agrees with the first position, we can't scientifically objectively accept as an object of study our brain, OK, we are automata, but he puts this beautifully, his says we simply cannot really believe in it in our everyday life, even if you claim ‘OK, so what? I’m so kind off automaton’ in our innermost identity you cannot really believe this except if you come to the end of buddhist meditation.
