Between East and West

From Singularity to Community

Luce Irigaray, Stephen Pluhácek

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9780231507929
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Eastern Philosophy

With this book we see a philosopher well steeped in the Western tradition thinking through ancient Eastern disciplines, meditating on what it means to learn to breathe, and urging us all at the dawn of a new century to rediscover indigenous Asian cultures. Yogic tradition, according to Irigaray, can provide an invaluable means for restoring the vital link between the present and eternity—and for re-envisioning the patriarchal traditions of the West.

Western, logocentric rationality tends to abstract the teachings of yoga from its everyday practice—most importantly, from the cultivation of breath. Lacking actual, personal experience with yoga or other Eastern spiritual practices, the Western philosophers who have tried to address Hindu and Buddhist teachings—particularly Schopenhauer—have frequently gone astray. Not so, Luce Irigaray. Incorporating her personal experience with yoga into her provocative philosophical thinking on sexual difference, Irigaray proposes a new way of understanding individuation and community in the contemporary world. She looks toward the indigenous, pre-Aryan cultures of India—which, she argues, have maintained an essentially creative ethic of sexual difference predicated on a respect for life, nature, and the feminine.

Irigaray's focus on breath in this book is a natural outgrowth of the attention that she has given in previous books to the elements—air, water, and fire. By returning to fundamental human experiences—breathing and the fact of sexual difference—she finds a way out of the endless sociologizing abstractions of much contemporary thought to rethink questions of race, ethnicity, and globalization.

The Time of Life

I will situate these questions under the sign or the oracle of opening, thus of egological nonclosure, of renunciation of narcissistic self-importance, the first condition of listening and of speaking that the tradition of India taught me.

According to this tradition, no theory or practice is ever completed. Both are always evolving. The task is to try to connect the here and now of today, this present moment of our life, to the reality of yesterday and that of tomorrow. It is useless therefore to do too much in order to immortalize the whole immediately. It is impossible. On the other hand, it is a matter of doing enough to attempt to pass from the present reality to immortality or eternity.

Moreover, I do not know the exact historical date of this present moment, its material or spiritual birthdate; I do not know its age. This imprecision regarding the state of development of the universe, of the living world, and of the human species obliges me, in all strictness, to questioning, to incompleteness or to relativity. It is not, therefore, a question of uttering a truth valid once and for all but of trying to make a gesture, faithful to the reality of yesterday and to that of today, that indicates a path toward more continuity, less tearing apart, more interiority, concentration, harmony—in me, between me and the living universe, between me and the other(s), if that is or becomes possible, as I hope it is, given respect for the living universe and its temporality.

I return then to Schopenhauer in order to ask some questions starting from his texts, which I have not yet read exhaustively. According to him, I have therefore read nothing. And I understand this irritation of the author who takes care over his journey and to whom only a part is returned. But Schopenhauer believes that there is not great progress in our development. He also teaches that the human species will be condensed, without differentiation or evolution, in him as in each human being. Certain chapters of his writings reveal therefore the whole of his work and even the whole of the truth of the man that he is, even of the humanity that he claims to recapitulate in himself.

I will not linger over his Essay on Women, except to underline that this text is not at all the inverse of his work as Didier Raymond, who wrote the preface to the French edition, claims it to be. It finds a totally coherent place there. I am going to try to make that clear.

I am only astonished that, while so many women have intelligent things to say and so many men are still unknown, a publisher cared to print such a little book, and at such a price. That confirms what Schopenhauer reveals to us, among other truths: philosophy is a matter of death. A philosopher living and thinking life is a priori suspect in our philosophical culture. Thus begins the chapter “On Death and Its Relation to the Indestructibility of Our Inner Nature” (2:463) in The World as Will and Representation: “Death is the real inspiring genius or Musagetes of philosophy, and for this reason Socrates defined philosophy as thanatou mélétè (preparation for death; Plato, Phaedo, 81a). Indeed, without death there would hardly have been any philosophizing. It will therefore be quite in order for a special consideration of this subject to have its place here at the beginning of the last, most serious, and most important of our books.”¹

I will begin from this chapter as well as those entitled “The Metaphysics of Sexual Love,”“On the Vanity and Suffering of Life,” “The Hereditary Nature of Qualities,” “On the Possibility of Knowing the Thing-in-Itself,” “On the Primacy of the Will in Self-Consciousness.”

I will not make precise references to them. I have constructed my analysis more particularly in relation to these chapters. Which does not exclude a reading of the texts On Vision and Colors and On the Will in Nature, a reading that has not contradicted until now the interpretation of Schopenhauer that I am going to sketch in order to interrogate it.

SCHOPENHAUER’S PHILOSOPHICAL INTENTION

Schopenhauer’s metaphysics can be defined, according to me, as biological materialism. The will of which he speaks does not correspond to a will of the becoming of the spirit nor even of the flesh, that is, to an individuation. It is a blind pathos of the reproduction of the species. For Schopenhauer what we designate generally as a duty to reproduce, to give birth, is linked to the most obscure and elementary passion of man. Of man, in effect. Because the will is, according to him, masculine, and intelligence is feminine. The reproduction of the species is therefore a concern of man. But this passion or this dynamis corresponds to the substance of metaphysics and of transcendence.

Contrary to what we have generally been taught, meta-physics, according to Schopenhauer, is not situated in an ascending economy of forms, of norms, of ideas more and more transcendent to the sensible and to matter. No. Metaphysics resides in the dynamism of reproductive chromosomes that tear man away from his individual being. I am—Schopenhauer asserts—projected outside of myself by my will to reproduce the species. Love between lovers represents nothing but an irresistible reproductive attraction. Their sorrows and groanings—Schopenhauer speaks little of their joys …—are only those of the species and nothing can oppose them. As individuals, the lovers do not exist, and both men and women are treated here in the same way. Neither the one nor the other exist and they are differentiated only by the hierarchy of natural functions. There too, contrary to what could be expected, the will prevails over intelligence. Would I dare to say that the old brain prevails over the new? That is neither totally correct nor totally exact. But the allusion will make it clear, if need be, that once again Schopenhauer confounds our habitual ways of thinking. We have been taught that women were passionate and men intelligent, capable of sublimating their passions. For Schopenhauer it is nothing like this. But if you think, as women, that you will find here some kind of valorization, you are wrong: intelligence is only a passive emanation of the will. The least flick of the will makes it change opinion. No intelligence—not even that of men, unless they are beings of great genius—can resist the will.

Thus Schopenhauer’s metaphysics does without representable formal ideals, without overtly confessed divine transcendence; the transcendence of the other is not claimed there either. The transcendence of metaphysics resides in the genius of the species that merges with the masculine will to reproduce.

Before laughing too quickly, it would be fitting to make sure that what Schopenhauer expresses is not hidden in the majority of philosophies called Western, more exactly in philosophical discourse starting from a certain epoch of domination of culture by patriarchy. In other words, does not Schopenhauer go to the end of things by bringing to light that which most veil with a maya, an art of illusion, that is more or less clever and blinding? Does not Schopenhauer attest altogether bluntly what others do without saying or knowing it: philosophy corresponds to an absolute patriarchalism and it is a matter of death?

Does not what is described as pessimism in Schopenhauer’s work correspond, at least in part, to the revelation of an elementary truth that has founded metaphysics for ages, at least in our cultures? Man essentially wants to reproduce, nothing can stop him from doing this, not even the intelligence of women, and this will, when it does not produce natural children, gives birth to imaginary children. Philosophy and religion are two of them. This necessity of reproduction would correspond to the genius of the species of which men are the guardians.

Thus man is the slave of a genius, of the genius that obliges him to transcend himself in and by reproduction. Schopenhauer often confines his discussion to natural reproduction. It seems to me that the reproduction that is called spiritual grows from the same will as long as it is not interpreted in the light of such revelations. Schopenhauer says it. Nietzsche asserts it very explicitly: his works are his children.

So all of metaphysics is neatly overturned by Schopenhauer or, more exactly, pursued all the way to its root and beyond. Its dynamis is the work of the will inscribed in the masculine seed. Truth would not be as transcendent as it is attested, discreetly but in an authoritarian way, or its transcendence is the work of maya that blinds the philosophers themselves. Unveiled, truth is spermatic. Logos spermatikos, if one prefers to invoke it or evoke it in another language and in a field not directly philosophical in order to maintain a little of its mystery.

Schopenhauer’s questioning, at first glance naive, is fundamental. And every truth would have significance setting out again from this biological revelation. How to interpret this position of the philosophical unveiled by Schopenhauer? How to interpret the work of Schopenhauer himself? How to give his work a meaning or a future other than those that he proposes? All of which could be restated another way: how to reconstruct what he deconstructs?

THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE GENUS

Two places can serve as fulcrums or as sites for putting Schopenhauer’s philosophy into perspective. They are not foreign to one another:

1.The question, to some extent natural, of the difference of the sexes that Schopenhauer treats in a biologically inexact manner. Let us say, for example, that he confuses genus and species.

2.The Hindu tradition to which Schopenhauer appeals in order to hold his discourse and which, unlike his own truths and will, never distances itself from the body or from nature as micro- and macrocosm, which it is a matter of cultivating with the aim of winning the happiness of immortality or of eternity while discharging one’s human task.

According to me these two sites—the tradition of India and the question of the cultural status of sexual difference—are linked, inasmuch as “Hinduism, such as it appears since the end of the Middle Ages, represents the synthesis, but with a marked predominance of aboriginal factors,”² of Indo-European and pre-Aryan aboriginal Asiatic cultures. The cultures of Hinduism would have resisted the influence of patriarchy and its economy: pastoral, nomadic, celestial, atmospheric, through a defense of places, in particular the earth and its plants and foods, through the respect for traditions of the mother and of woman, more faithful to life in its concrete aspects, to religion in its perceptible and mystical dimension. The contribution of patriarchalized Indo-Europeans consisting among other things in ritualism and philosophical and religious speculations.

Thanks to this presence of feminine traditions, India has retained traces of pre-patriarchal cultures. It has also developed certain cultural dimensions that we have nearly forgotten. In India men and women are gods together, and together they create the world, including its cosmic dimension. The divine couples, whether it is Vishnu or Shiva, along with their lovers, are microcosms in constant economic relations with the macrocosm; the same goes for Tantrism. These couples are generally represented without children. They are lovers, and lovers of the universe.

We are far here from Schopenhauer’s genius of the species. We are close to a possible philosophy, wisdom, or religion of sexual difference of which India is perhaps one of the places of emergence or of subsistence.

But of which India does Schopenhauer speak? Which India is evoked in Western philosophy, when it is evoked? The greater part of the Hindu tradition remains unknown to it except in the case of some practitioners of the Vedas, of yoga, of mantras, of the texts or the art of India. But these people most often know the Western philosophical tradition poorly and do not secure the possible passages between the two traditions, or at least they fail or are reluctant to do it. The only chance for a correct interpretation of Hindu thought is found nevertheless with these men, or women, because this Indian culture does not separate theory and practice, notably in love. And we risk interpreting it very badly if we do not approach it with an appropriate practice. It seems that this misunderstanding exists, for example in the work of Schopenhauer. He has retained certain elements of the Indian tradition, but has he not perverted these in taking them out of their framework, this word being understood with a rigor to which we are little accustomed? I would like to give some examples of this concerning 1. temporality in the strict sense, 2. the practice of philosophy, 3.the interpretation of suffering and the joy of living, 4. the intention concerning the will to live, 5. the question of individuation, 6. the question of the status of knowledge.

ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER’S EGOLOGICAL CONFUSIONS

1.Time, temporality, in India could not belong to the genius of the human species alone. This egological, egocentric, passion is unknown to the diverse traditions of India. Man is never at the center there, but he also is not “less than,” “not as good as” some animal for example, as he would be according to Schopenhauer’s statements. Man is, and, inasmuch as he is, he must devote himself to being at the service of macro- or microcosmic temporality. The Vedas, the Upanishads, and yoga have for their principal function to assure the articulation between the instant and immortality or eternity. Sometimes it is above all a matter of constituting or creating a macrocosmic unity through rites relative to the days, to the seasons, to the years, rites practiced among others by the Brahmins; sometimes the accent is put on the realization of a unity or individual immortality, even an eternity, through the control of breathing, thanks in particular to yoga but also to the Upanishads.³ Nothing is more foreign to the traditions of India than the metaphysical pathos of reproduction. This could only be a Western translation of the respect for life supposing it evoked happiness. But that does not amount to the same thing. Thus the Vedic gods, the Brahmins, and the yogis care about the maintenance of the life of the universe and that of their body as cosmic nature. They care about them at each moment. Their task is to articulate a continuity between the present and immortality or eternity. The question that I would pose on this subject is, Why is the present time perceived as discontinuous? Or, starting from what or when is it thus perceived? By whom? I am going to return to this. I wanted to emphasize that, unlike the traditions of India, the time of life, according to Schopenhauer, is no more than an abstract survival of the species whose cause is situated before my birth or after my death. The present, unless it be an a priori framework, is for Schopenhauer no more than an unfortunate and passively suffered temporality between these two moments that escape my will but determine it. No present or presence for Schopenhauer. The gods of India, the Brahmins, the yogis are, on the contrary, in the present, or they start from it and look for the means to repair, to reestablish, a torn up cosmic time through the constitution of immortality or of eternity for the universe and for oneself.

2. I can try to make this understood speculatively. In order to comprehend it or, rather, to realize it effectively, it is fitting to do, to act. That does not mean recourse to some more or less occult or accessible cult or initiation. Certainly, it is necessary to learn the practice from one who knows it. The same goes for philosophy or grammar in our civilization. What I wanted to signal is that the present, temporality, the relation between the instant and immortality or eternity is constituted by acts, and not only by words, logical and grammatical conventions, already coded meaning, a prioris, etc. These acts, realized by certain Brahmins or yogis, for example, are not ritualized in the way we have a tendency to understand it. That is, they are not simply repetitive. They obtain the sought after efficacy—namely, the passage between present, past, and future—only if they are well done, well articulated, and well articulating. They vary therefore from one day to another, because the present time changes from one day to the next. What we could interpret as ritualism or boring asceticism signifies, for these practitioners, the accomplishment of acts, of gestures, appropriate for linking the body to the universe, the instant to duration, etc. They aim at a plenitude, at obtaining the status of immortals by surmounting the discontinuity of time; they are a contribution to the happiness of the self and of the world through the exercise of daily practices. Why daily? Because the day is the unit of measure. The season is another unit, the year yet another one.

We are unaccustomed to hearing this discourse concerning India because our tradition, since the golden age of the Greeks in particular, has begun to break the continuity between micro- and macrocosm. Philosophy, religion (apart from the liturgy celebrating the times of the year?), language, progress have become constructions of a socio-logical subject cut off from its cosmo-logical, bio-logical rootedness. In other words, science, knowledge are here generally relative to a social status of the individual and not to the articulation between micro- and macrocosm, body and universe, physical and spiritual temporality, present and eternity, etc. What we call metaphysics corresponds, in its negative side, to...