Raymond Tallis: Aping Mankind

Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity

In a devastating critique Raymond Tallis exposes the exaggerated claims made for the ability of neuroscience and evolutionary theory to explain human consciousness, behaviour, culture and society.

While readily acknowledging the astounding progress neuroscience has made in helping us understand how the brain works, Tallis directs his guns at neuroscience’s dark companion – “Neuromania” as he describes it – the belief that brain activity is not merely a necessary but a sufficient condition for human consciousness and that consequently our everyday behaviour can be entirely understood in neural terms.

With the formidable acuity and precision of both clinician and philosopher, Tallis dismantles the idea that “we are our brains”, which has given rise to a plethora of neuro-prefixed pseudo-disciplines laying claim to explain everything from art and literature to criminality and religious belief, and shows it to be confused and fallacious, and an abuse of the prestige of science, one that sidesteps a whole range of mind–body problems.

The belief that human beings can be understood essentially in biological terms is a serious obstacle, argues Tallis, to clear thinking about what human beings are and what they might become. To explain everyday behaviour in Darwinian terms and to identify human consciousness with the activity of the evolved brain denies human uniqueness, and by minimising the differences between us and our nearest animal kin, misrepresents what we are, offering a grotesquely simplified and degrading account of humanity. We are, shows Tallis, infinitely more interesting and complex than we appear in the mirror of biologism.

Combative, fearless and always thought-provoking, Aping Mankind is an important book, one that scientists, cultural commentators and policy-makers cannot ignore.

Julian Baggini: The Ego Trick - What Does it Mean to Be You?

http://grantabooks.com/page/3012/The-Ego-Trick/1540

Are you still the person who lived fifteen, ten or five years ago? Fifteen, ten or five minutes ago? Can you plan for your retirement if the you of thirty years hence is in some sense a different person? What and who is the real you? Does it remain constant over time and place, or is it something much more fragmented and fluid? Is it known to you, or are you as much a mystery to yourself as others are to you? With his usual wit, infectious curiosity and bracing scepticism, Julian Baggini sets out to answer these fundamental and unsettling questions. His fascinating quest draws on not only the history of philosophy, but also anthropology, sociology, psychology and neurology; he talks to theologians, priests, allegedly reincarnated Lamas, and delves into real-life cases of lost memory, personality disorders and personal transformation; and, candidly and engagingly, he describes his own experiences. After reading The Ego Trick, you will never see yourself in the same way again.

"Vivermos e Pensarmos como Porcos"

«Filósofo e matemático de renome internacional, Gilles Châtelet ficou conhecido pela sua verve panfletária, e seguramente o seu documento mais incendiário é "Vivermos e Pensarmos como Porcos", finalmente publicado entre nós ("Vivermos e Pensarmos como Porcos, Sobre o incitamento à inveja e ao tédio nas democracias-mercados", por Gilles Châtelet, Temas e Debates, 2003).

Temos aqui uma visão crítica dos 30 anos que medeiam entre o fim da abundância, que acompanhou a idade de ouro do Estado-Providência e a consolidação da globalização e do consumidor-indivíduo.

A terceira vaga pós-industrial em que vivemos é dominada pelo tecno-populismo, a tirania da estatística, a "tartufice humanitária", numa atmosfera da "Contra-Reforma" neoliberal em que "mercado igual a democracia igual a maioria de homens médios". A nossa democracia já não está ao serviço da solidariedade, da autonomia da pessoa, mas do bom governo dos mercados. Governar bem é estar atento aos desejos do homem médio, mantendo em equilíbrio com o consumidor-cidadão-egoísta, o ciber-comunicador e o pobretana que se alimenta dos restos das indústrias do entretenimento com que as Sobreclasses anestesiam as Subclasses.

No essencial, o livro de Châtelet desmonta os mecanismos do discurso dominante, assente num colectivo de individualidades em que a "engenharia do consenso" faz o equilíbrio mágico da democracia dos mercados.

Se bem que ironizando em torno dos conceitos das classes médias, este libelo acusatório da pós-modernidade carnívora não esconde as suas raízes no pensamento de outro influente contestatário, Herbert Marcuse, pensador emblemático da agitação universitária do período revolucionário dos anos 60. É na linha deste pensador que Châtelet fala na "tripla aliança" (política, económica e cibernética) que é susceptível de auto-organizar as massas humanas, dando-lhes um simulacro de projecto: através do digital, cria-se a utopia de que todos os confrontos são ultrapassáveis; através da cidadania democrática aprende-se a tolerar um sistema de competitividade feroz em que o despojado já não se revolta contra o super-rico; através do consumo, estabelece-se o controlo social, gerando-se a ilusão do respeito pelas diferenças.

A denúncia da impostura, feita pelo autor, não introduz qualquer alternativa à mornidão do sistema controlado em que vivemos. O "homem médio" vive aprisionado na democracia-mercado, mas o filósofo diz que a este homem médio será possível opor o "homem-qualquer" capaz de reabilitar a excelência do político e de nos salvar num processo histórico que ultrapassa toda a rotina e todo o possível antecipado. A democracia do futuro só será válida se der uma oportunidade aos heroísmos do "qualquer um". "Vivermos e Pensarmos como Porcos" é uma obra indispensável aos analistas da sociedade contemporânea, aos estudiosos do consumo, a todos os investigadores que estudam a articulação entre os diferentes pensamentos científicos e mesmo aos políticos confrontados com os sucessivos impasses a que nos conduziu a exaltação do ultraliberalismo. Este manifesto é uma provocação que pode contribuir para um outro mundo possível que transforme a globalização predatória numa globalização de solidariedades.»

Beja Santos "colunista semanal" no Jornal Regional O RIBATEJO (www.oribatejo.pt) 21 Outubro 2004

La terapia como el cultivo de la impotencia

Publicado el 28.09.09 , por Marina Garcés

Uno de los principales problemas que debemos afrontar cuando nos planteamos la relación entre terapia y política es el de su ambivalencia. Por un lado, la terapia se vislumbra como un nuevo dispositivo de control capaz de atravesar todas las dimensiones de la vida social hasta llegar hasta lo más recóndito de nuestras almas. Por otro, toda politización de la existencia que parta de un cuestionamiento radical de la propia vida tiene algo de terapéutico. Es difícil salir de este doble filo de lo terapéutico. Por eso los trabajos reunidos en este volumen colectivo de Espai en Blanc lo que se proponen es explorar esta ambivalencia.

El libro de Frank Furedi, titulado Therapy Culture. Cultivating vulnerability in an uncertain age, tiene la virtud y el inconveniente de saber cortar esta ambivalencia y llevar hasta el final el análisis de uno de sus dos extremos. El autor, un conocido sociólogo británico traducido a múltiples idiomas pero ausente del panorama hispánico, opta por denunciar declaradamente la cultura terapéutica como la institución de un nuevo régimen de control social. Frente a quienes ensalzan las promesas de autonomía y autorrealización del individuo anunciadas por el giro terapéutico, Furedi muestra que la cultura terapéutica pone a funcionar un dispositivo de coerción y de control que no necesita del castigo porque se basa en el cultivo de la propia impotencia y vulnerabilidad en un mundo percibido como crecientemente amenazante. Ésta es la paradoja y la trampa de la cultura terapéutica en la que nos hallamos instalados: con el lenguaje de la autorrealización y de la plenitud del yo, la cultura terapéutica promueve el sentido íntimo de la autolimitación y de la dependencia. Nos invita a mirar hacia uno mismo para que podamos descubrir nuestros déficits e incapacidades y reconocernos en ellos.

“La cultura terapéutica cultiva la impotencia”. En esta frase se resumiría la tesis que Frank Furedi nos invita a analizar pormenorizadamente, en un trabajo que no tiene como objeto el análisis de las terapias en sí sino de lo terapéutico como ethos o modo de pensar, como sistema de sentido que actualmente organiza, junto a otros, la estructura de la realidad. Furedi trabaja a partir de una extensa bibliografía y de innumerables estudios empíricos que demuestran hasta qué punto el giro terapéutico es autoconsciente, por lo menos en el mundo anglosajón. No es una observación anecdótica. Lo terapéutico ha puesto una enorme ingeniería social a trabajar. Desde múltiples campos de las ciencias sociales, la teoría política, la neurología o la psicología se ha puesto en marcha un giro hacia el yo que lo entrega a una nueva percepción de sí mismo.

La autopercepción del yo ya no pasa, como en la modernidad, por el ensalzamiento del racionalismo, sino del emocionalismo. El lenguaje emocional establece un nuevo campo de juego en el que desaparece todo horizonte social. En este campo de juego nos encontramos al individuo como único protagonista de los acontecimientos y de los conflictos. Este individuo, sin embargo, ya no es el individuo omnipotente de la modernidad, sino un yo que, según el análisis de Furedi, se ve “disminuido” y siempre “en riesgo”. Son las caras subjetiva y objetiva de un mismo proceso que es el cultivo terapéutico de la impotencia. En el declinar de los sentidos compartidos (lo comunitario, la tradición, la religión, la moral y la política), la incertidumbre pasa a ser gestionada por una cultura del emocionalismo que pone al individuo como sujeto de múltiples carencias y objeto de innumerables amenazas. Con ello, se abre la puerta a una nueva colonización del mundo de la vida que transforma de raíz el escenario político moderno: paradójicamente, la cultura terapéutica no sólo desvaloriza el ámbito de lo público, sino que tiene como objetivo desorganizar la esfera privada y las relaciones informales. En la cultura terapéutica no hay refugio ni intimidad posibles. No hay opacidades para el poder. La vida cotidiana se ha profesionalizado en todos sus momentos y dimensiones, hasta el punto de que ya nadie se atreve a vivir por sí mismo. Escuelas de padres, consultores matrimoniales, entrenadores personales, etc: tomar decisiones sin el referente de un experto da miedo. Este miedo es la principal arma de la cultura terapéutica: el miedo que nos tenemos a nosotros mismo cuando no seguimos las pautas que nos ofrece el terapeuta. El miedo que tenemos a fallar y a no saber, por un lado; el miedo que tenemos a no saber responder a las contingencias, por otro. El rol de enfermos se ha normalizado, porque un ser emocional siempre es deficitario.

La naturaleza deficitaria del yo emocional se percibe con claridad en el mito cultural que la cultura terapéutica ha puesto en el centro de la vida, tanto individual como colectiva: la autoestima. Es el eje vertebrador de una relación con la vida que identifica al yo con unos estados de ánimo provocados por la imagen especular que tiene de sí mismo y al nosotros con el sentimiento provocado por la lógica de la identidad y el reconocimiento. Furedi muestra, en un análisis muy interesante, como el auge de las políticas de la identidad y del reconocimiento son la extrapolación social de la cultura terapéutica. La colectividad que se organiza en función de la demanda de reconocimiento es el equivalente del yo que da significado a su vida a partir de la emisión de un diagnóstico por parte de un experto. Con ello, Furedi abre un interesante campo para una nueva evaluación de las esperanzas emancipatorias que la última teoría crítica y una parte importante de los movimientos sociales habían puesto en esta realidad política tan característica del capitalismo tardío.

Furedi, con su análisis, no deja margen de duda: la relación terapéutica es la que efectúa la dialéctica de la separación / reintegración en una sociedad de individuos que han aprendido la propia impotencia. La terapia, con su giro hacia el yo, normaliza el extrañamiento y a la vez nos socializa en tanto que seres vulnerables y amenazados. Eso es lo que nos enseña la historia contada hoy por sus víctimas sobrevivientes, la realidad social de las minorías amenazadas y la experiencia cotidiana de nuestras existencias precarizadas y dependientes. No hay germen de lucha en lo terapéutico. Como afirma Furedi, la terapia no es hoy una herramienta de transformación sino de supervivencia. Nos hace reconocer nuestros problemas e identificarnos con ellos en vez de superarlos.

Decíamos que la claridad del análisis de Furedi es su virtud y su inconveniente. La disección que propone de la cultura terapéutica es contundente e iluminadora. Desmonta falsos mitos y tibiezas sentimentales. La terapia como dispositivo de control queda expuesta a la luz de cualquier sombra de duda. Sin embargo, nos queda la pregunta: ¿dónde, entonces, vislumbrar los procesos de resistencia a este mismo dispositivo de control terapéutico? ¿Hay un afuera de la terapia? ¿Cómo arrancar al yo de su propia vulnerabilidad? La cultura terapéutica propone autolimitación. No le interesan los héroes sino las víctimas. No nos invita a transformar el mundo sino a sobrevivir. ¿De dónde arrancar las fuerzas para emprender una lucha efectiva contra esa forma de control social que nos ha engullido en nosotros mismos y en nuestra impotencia? Furedi no da pistas en este sentido y la contundencia del análisis conduce a desearlas vivamente. Hay autores, bien conocidos, que frente a esta deriva terapéutica del capitalismo proponen un paso atrás hacia los espacios políticos modernos: el espacio público y el ejercicio de la ciudadanía. Pero cualquier crítica que no se contente con horizontes reguladores tiene que partir de la materialidad de sus condiciones de vida actuales. Éstas han sido bien descritas en el libro de Furedi. Por tanto, no hay en nuestro futuro próximo otro protagonista que este yo disminuido, que no tiene sino su propia vulnerabilidad y su anhelo de autonomía. Quizá su existencia no es tan coherente como la describe Furedi. Quizá la cultura terapéutica entraña contradicciones que escapan a su sibilino control. Quizá este yo no tenga toda la capacidad de autocontrol y autolimitación que se le exigen. ¿Y entonces? ¿Qué ocurre entonces? Está en nuestras manos explorarlo.

http://www.espaienblanc.net/La-terapia-como-cultivo-de-la.html

Evil in Modern Thought:

An Alternative History of Philosophy

Susan Neiman

Evil threatens human reason, for it challenges our hope that the world makes sense. For eighteenth-century Europeans, the Lisbon earthquake was manifest evil. Today we view evil as a matter of human cruelty, and Auschwitz as its extreme incarnation. Examining our understanding of evil from the Inquisition to contemporary terrorism, Susan Neiman explores who we have become in the three centuries that separate us from the early Enlightenment. In the process, she rewrites the history of modern thought and points philosophy back to the questions that originally animated it.

Whether expressed in theological or secular terms, evil poses a problem about the world's intelligibility. It confronts philosophy with fundamental questions: Can there be meaning in a world where innocents suffer? Can belief in divine power or human progress survive a cataloging of evil? Is evil profound or banal? Neiman argues that these questions impelled modern philosophy. Traditional philosophers from Leibniz to Hegel sought to defend the Creator of a world containing evil. Inevitably, their efforts--combined with those of more literary figures like Pope, Voltaire, and the Marquis de Sade--eroded belief in God's benevolence, power, and relevance, until Nietzsche claimed He had been murdered. They also yielded the distinction between natural and moral evil that we now take for granted. Neiman turns to consider philosophy's response to the Holocaust as a final moral evil, concluding that two basic stances run through modern thought. One, from Rousseau to Arendt, insists that morality demands we make evil intelligible. The other, from Voltaire to Adorno, insists that morality demands that we don't.

Beautifully written and thoroughly engaging, this book tells the history of modern philosophy as an attempt to come to terms with evil. It reintroduces philosophy to anyone interested in questions of life and death, good and evil, suffering and sense.

The Making of a Philosopher

My Journey Through Twentieth-Century Philosophy

By Colin McGinn

Book Description

Part memoir, part study, The Making of a Philosopher is the self–portrait of a deeply intelligent mind as it develops over a life on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Making of a Philosopher follows Colin McGinn from his early years in England reading Descartes and Anselm, to his years in the states, first in Los Angeles, then New York. McGinn presents a contemporary academic take on the great philosophical figures of the twentieth century, including Bertrand Russell, Jean–Paul Sartre, and Noam Chomsky, alongside stories of the teachers who informed his ideas and often became friends and mentors, especially the colorful A.J. Ayer at Oxford.

McGinn's prose is always elegant and probing; students of contemporary philosophy and the general reader alike will absorb every page.

The Philosopher Reviews

Humanity

A Moral History of the Twentieth Century

Selected as an outstanding book by University Press Books for Public and Secondary School Libraries

The twentieth century was the most brutal in human history, featuring a litany of shameful events that includes the Holocaust, Hiroshima, the Stalinist era, Cambodia, Yugoslavia, and Rwanda. This important book looks at the politics of our times and the roots of human nature to discover why so many atrocities were perpetuated and how we can create a social environment to prevent their recurrence.

Jonathan Glover finds similarities in the psychology of those who perpetuate, collaborate in, and are complicit with atrocities, uncovering some disturbing common elements—tribal hatred, blind adherence to ideology, diminished personal responsibility—as well as characteristics unique to each situation. Acknowledging that human nature has a dark and destructive side, he proposes that we encourage the development of a political and personal moral imagination that will compel us to refrain from and protest all acts of cruelty.

Jonathan Glover is director of the Centre of Medical Law and Ethics at King’s College, London. He is also the author of Causing Death and Saving Lives and What Sort of People Should There Be?

Meditations for the Humanist:

Ethics for a Secular Age

by A. C. Grayling

Synopsis

"Magnanimity is in short supply," writes A. C. Grayling is this wonderfully incisive book, "but it is the main ingredient in everything that makes the world a better place" And indeed Meditations for the Humanist: Ethics for a Secular Age is itself a generous, insightful, wide-ranging, magnanimous inquiry into the philosophical and ethical questions that bear most strongly on the human condition. Containing nearly fifty linked commentaries on topics ranging from love, lying, perseverance, revenge, racism, religion, history, loyalty, health, and leisure, Meditations for the Humanist does not offer definitive statements but rather prompts to reflection. These brief essays serve as springboards to the kind of thoughtful examination without which, as Socrates famously claimed, life is not worth living. As Graying notes in his introduction, "It is not necessary to arrive at polished theories on all these subjects, but it is necessary to give them at least a modicum of thought if one's life is to have some degree of shape and direction." The book is divided into three sections-Virtues and Attributes, Foes and Fallacies, and Amenities and Goods-and within these sections essays are grouped into related clusters. But each piece can be read alone and each is characterized by brevity, wit, and a liveliness of mind that recalls the best of Montaigne and Samuel Johnson. Grayling's own perspective on these subjects is broadened and deepened by liberal quotations from Sophocles and Shakespeare to Byron, Twain, Proust, Simone de Beauvoir, Martin Luther King, Jr., and many others.For those wishing to explore ethical issues outside the framework of organized religious belief,Meditations for the Humanist offers an inviting map to the country of philosophical reflection.

Publishers Weekly
Grayling teaches philosophy at the University of London, writes a weekly column for the Guardian, and frequently contributes to the New York Times Book Review, among other publications. Here he has written a primer designed to stimulate thinking on various aspects of "the problems and possibilities of being human," as he observes on the book jacket. Ranging in length from two to ten pages, the 60-plus essays are divided almost evenly into three categories: "Virtues and Attributes," "Foes and Fallacies," and "Amenities and Goods." They are balanced, intelligently written, at times caustic, and always (as intended) thought-provoking. Consider, for example, what Grayling has to say regarding love: "Despite appearances, the kinds of love that are most significant to us are not those that fill novels and cinema screens. They are instead those we have for family, friends, and comrades; for these are the loves that endure through the greater part of our lives, and give us our sense of self-worth, our stability, and the framework for our other relationships." This is a superb little book, partly because it reminds us of what we intuitively know but perhaps overlook and partly because it stimulates us to rethink beliefs we have perhaps held too long. Highly recommended. Terry Skeats, Bishop's Univ. Lib., Lennoxville, Quebec Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Biography
A. C. Grayling teaches philosophy at the University of London. He writes a weekly column "The Last Word" for The Guardian and is a frequent contributor to The New York Times Book Review, Financial Times, and Lingua Franca. The author of a biography of William Hazlitt and several introductions to philosophy, Mr. Grayling lives in London.

British Humanist Association

From Western Marxism

to Western Buddhism
Cabinet Magazine
By Slavoj Zizek

The ultimate postmodern irony of today is the strange exchange between Europe and Asia: at the very moment when "European" technology and capitalism are triumphing worldwide at the level of the "economic infrastructure, the Judeo-Christian legacy is threatened at the level of "ideological superstructure" in the European space itself by New Age "Asiatic" thought, which, in its different guises ranging from "Western Buddhism" to different "Taos," is establishing itself as the hegemonic ideology of global capitalism.1 Therein resides the highest speculative identity of opposites in today's global civilization: although "Western Buddhism" presents itself as the remedy against the stressful tension of capitalist dynamics, allowing us to uncouple and retain inner peace and Gelassenheit, it actually functions as its perfect ideological supplement. One should mention here the well-known concept of "future shock" that describes how people are no longer psychologically able to cope with the dazzling rhythm of technological development and the social changes that accompany it. Things simply move too fast, and before one can accustom oneself to an invention, it has already been supplanted by a new one, so that one more and more lacks the most elementary "cognitive mapping." The recourse to Taoism or Buddhism offers a way out of this predicament that definitely works better than the desperate escape into old traditions. Instead of trying to cope with the accelerating rhythm of techno-logical progress and social changes, one should rather renounce the very endeavor to retain control over what goes on, rejecting it as the expression of the modern logic of domination. One should, instead, "let oneself go," drift along, while retaining an inner distance and indifference toward the mad dance of accelerated process, a distance based on the insight that all this social and technological upheaval is ultimately just a non-substantial proliferation of semblances that do not really concern the innermost kernel of our being. One is almost tempted to resuscitate the old infamous Marxist cliché of religion as the "opium of the people," as the imaginary supplement to terrestrial misery. The "Western Buddhist" meditative stance is arguably the most efficient way for us to fully participate in capitalist dynamics while retaining the appearance of mental sanity. If Max Weber were alive today, he would definitely write a second, supplementary, volume to his Protestant Ethic, entitled The Taoist Ethic and the Spirit of Global Capitalism.2

"Western Buddhism" thus fits perfectly the fetishist mode of ideology in our allegedly "post-ideological" era, as opposed to its traditional symptomal mode in which the ideological lie which structures our perception of reality is threatened by symptoms qua "returns of the repressed," cracks in the fabric of the ideological lie. The fetish is effectively a kind of symptom in reverse. That is to say, the symptom is the exception which disturbs the surface of the false appearance, the point at which the repressed Other Scene erupts, while the fetish is the embodiment of the Lie which enables us to sustain the unbearable truth. Let us take the case of the death of a beloved person. In the case of a symptom, I "repress" this death and try not to think about it, but the repressed trauma returns in the symptom. In the case of a fetish, on the contrary, I "rationally" fully accept this death, and yet I cling to the fetish, to some feature that embodies for me the disavowal of this death. In this sense, a fetish can play a very constructive role in allowing us to cope with the harsh reality. Fetishists are not dreamers lost in their private worlds. They are thorough "realists" capable of accepting the way things effectively are, given that they have their fetish to which they can cling in order to cancel the full impact of reality. In Nevil Shute's melodramatic World War II novel Requiem for a WREN, the heroine survives her lover's death without any visible traumas. She goes on with her life and is even able to talk rationally about her lover's death because she still has the dog that was the lover's favored pet. When, some time after, the dog is accidentally run over by a truck, she collapses and her entire world disintegrates.3

Sometimes, the line between fetish and symptom is almost indiscernible. An object can function as the symptom (of a repressed desire) and almost simultaneously as a fetish (embodying the belief which we officially renounce). A leftover of the dead person, a piece of his/her clothes, can function both as a fetish (insofar as the dead person magically continues to live in it) and as a symptom (functioning as the disturbing detail that brings to mind his/her death). Is this ambiguous tension not homologous to that between the phobic and the fetishist object? The structural role is in both cases the same: If this exceptional element is disturbed, the whole system collapses. Not only does the subject's false universe collapse if he is forced to confront the meaning of his symptom; the opposite also holds, insofar as the subject's "rational" acceptance of the way things are dissolves when his fetish is taken away from him.

So, when we are bombarded by claims that in our post-ideological cynical era nobody believes in the proclaimed ideals, when we encounter a person who claims he is cured of any beliefs and accepts social reality the way it really is, one should always counter such claims with the question "OK, but where is the fetish that enables you to (pretend to) accept reality 'the way it is'?" "Western Buddhism" is such a fetish. It enables you to fully participate in the frantic pace of the capitalist game while sustaining the perception that you are not really in it; that you are well aware of how worthless this spectacle is; and that what really matters to you is the peace of the inner Self to which you know you can always with-draw. In a further specification, one should note that the fetish can function in two opposite ways: either its role remains unconscious—as in the case of Shute's heroine who was unaware of the fetish-role of the dog—or you think that the fetish is that which really matters, as in the case of a Western Buddhist unaware that the "truth" of his existence is in fact the social involvement which he tends to dismiss as a mere game.

Nowhere is this fetishist logic more evident than apropos of Tibet, one of the central references of the post-Christian "spiritual" imaginary. Today, Tibet more and more plays the role of such a fantasmatic Thing, of a jewel which, when one approaches it too much, turns into the excremental object. It is a commonplace to claim that the fascination exerted by Tibet on the Western imagination, especially on the broad public in the US, provides an exemplary case of the "colonization of the imaginary." It reduces the actual Tibet to a screen for the projection of Western ideological fantasies. Indeed, the very inconsistency of this image of Tibet, with its direct coincidences of opposites, seems to bear witness to its fantasmatic status. Tibetans are portrayed as people leading the simple life of spiritual satisfaction, fully accepting their fate, liberated from the excessive cravings of the Westerner who is always searching for more, and as a bunch of filthy, cheating, cruel, sexually promiscuous primitives. Lhasa itself becomes a version of Franz Kafka's Castle: sublime and majestic when first seen from afar, but then changing into the "paradise of filth," a gigantic pile of shit, as soon as one actually enters the city. Potala, the central palace towering over Lhasa, is a kind of heavenly residence on earth, magically floating in the air and a labyrinth of stale seedy rooms and corridors full of monks engaged in obscure magic rituals, including sexual perversions. The social order is presented as the model of organic harmony and as the tyranny of the cruel corrupted theocracy keeping ordinary people ignorant. The Tibetan Buddhism itself is simultaneously hailed as the most spiritual of all religions, the last shelter of ancient Wisdom, and as the utmost primitive superstition, relying on praying wheels and similar cheap magic tricks. This oscillation between jewel and shit is not the oscillation between the idealized ethereal fantasy and raw reality: in such an oscillation, both extremes are fantasmatic, i.e. the fantasmatic space is the very space of this immediate passage from one extreme to the other.

The first antidote against this topos of the raped jewel, of the isolated place of people who just wanted to be left alone but were repeatedly penetrated by foreigners, is to remind ourselves that Tibet was already in itself an antagonistic, split society, not an organic Whole whose harmony was disturbed only by external intruders. Tibetan unity and independence were themselves imposed from the outside. Tibet emerged as a unified country in the ninth century when it established a "patron-priest" relationship with the Mongols. The Mongols protected the Tibetans, who in turn pro-vided spiritual guidance to Mongolia. (The very name "Dalai Lama" is of Mongol origins and was conferred on Tibetan religious leader by the Mongols.) Events took the same turn in the 17th century when the Fifth Lama, the greatest of them all, established the Tibet we know today—again, through benevolent foreign patronage—and started the construction of Potala. What followed was the long tradition of factional struggles, in which, as a rule, the winners won by inviting foreigners (Mongols, Chinese) to intervene. This story culminates in the recent partial shift of the Chinese strategy. Rather than use sheer military coercion, the Chinese now rely on ethnic and economic colonization, rapid- ly transforming Lhasa into a Chinese version of the capitalist Wild West with karaoke bars intermingled with the Disney-like "Buddhist theme parks" for Western tourists. In short, what the media image of the brutal Chinese soldiers and policemen terrorizing the Buddhist monks conceals is the much more effective, American-style socioeconomic transformation. In a decade or two, the Tibetans will be reduced to the status of the Native Americans in the United States.

The second antidote is therefore the opposite one: to denounce the split nature of the Western image of Tibet as a "reflexive determination" of the split attitude of the West itself, combining violent penetration and respectful sacralization. Colonel Francis Younghusband, who in 1904 led the English regiment of 1,200 men that reached Lhasa and forced trade agreements on the Tibetans, and was a true precursor of the late Chinese invasion. He mercilessly ordered the machine gun slaughter of hundreds of Tibetan soldiers armed only with swords and lances and thus forced his way to Lhasa. However, this same person experienced in his last day in Lhasa a true epiphany: "Never again could I think of evil, or ever again be at enmity with any man. All nature and all humanity were bathed in a rosy glowing radiancy; and life for the future seemed nought but buoyancy and light."4 The same went for his commander-in-chief, the infamous Lord Curzon, who justified Younghusband's expedition thus: "The Tibetans are a weak and cowardly people, their very pusillanimity rendering them readily submissive to any powerful military authority who entering their country should forthwith give a sharp lesson and a wholesome dread of offending."5 Yet this same Curzon, who insisted how "nothing can or will be done with the Tibetans until they are frightened," declared in a speech at an Old Etonian banquet: "The East is a university in which the scholar never takes his degree. It is a temple where the suppliant adores but never catches sight of the object of his devotion. It is a journey the goal of which is always in sight but is never attained."6

What was and is absolutely foreign to Tibet is this Western logic of desire to penetrate the inaccessible object beyond a limit, through a great ordeal and against natural obstacles and vigilant patrols. In his travelogue To Lhasa in Disguise, published in 1924, William McGovern "raised the tantalizing question: What provokes a man to risk so much on such an arduous, dangerous, and unnecessary journey to a place that is so manifestly unappealing when he at last gets there?" To the Tibetans, at least, such a useless trek seemed nonsensical. McGovern wrote of his efforts to explain his motives to an incredulous Tibetan official in Lhasa: "It was impossible to get him to understand the pleasures of undertaking an adventure and dangerous journey. Had I talked about anthropological research he would have thought me mad."7

The lesson to our followers of Tibetan Wisdom is thus that if we want to be Tibetans, we should forget about Tibet and do it here. Therein resides the ultimate paradox: The more Europeans try to penetrate the "true" Tibet, the more the very form of their endeavor undermines their goal. We should appreciate the full scope of this paradox, especially with regard to "Eurocentrism." The Tibetans were extremely self-centered: "To them, Tibet was the center of the world, the heart of civilization."8 What characterizes European civilization, on the contrary, is precisely its ex-centered character—the notion that the ultimate pillarof Wisdom, the secret agalma, the spiritual treasure, the lost object-cause of desire, which we in the West long ago betrayed, could be recuperated out there in the forbidden exotic place. Colonization was never simply the imposition of Western values, the assimilation of the Oriental and other Others to European Sameness; it was always also the search for the lost spiritual innocence of our own civilization. This story begins at the very dawn of Western civilization, in Ancient Greece. For the Greeks, Egypt was such a mythic place of lost ancient wisdom.

And the same holds today in our own societies. The difference between the authentic fundamentalists and the perverted Moral Majority fundamentalists is that the first (like the Amish in the United States) get along very well with their American neighbors since they are simply centered on their own world and not bothered by what goes on out there among "them," while the Moral Majority fundamentalist is always haunted by the ambiguous attitude of horror/envy with regard to the unspeakable pleasures in which the sinners engage. The reference to Envy as one of the seven deadly sins can thus serve as a perfect instrument enabling us to distinguish authentic fundamentalism from its Moral Majority mockery: authentic fundamentalists do not envy their neighbors their different jouissance.9 Envy is grounded in what one is tempted to call the "transcen-dental illusion" of desire, strictly correlative to the Kantian transcendental illusion: a natural "propensity" in the human being to (mis)perceive the object which gives body to the primordial lack as the object which is lacking, which was lost (and, consequently, possessed prior to this loss); this illusion sustains the longing to regain the lost object, as if this object has a positive substantial identity independently of its being lost.

The conclusion to be drawn from this is a simple and radical one: Moral Majority fundamentalists and tolerant multiculturalists are two sides of the same coin: they both share a fascination with the Other. In the Moral Majority, this fascination displays the envious hatred of the Other's excessive jouissance, while the multiculturalist tolerance of the Other's Otherness is also more twisted than it may appear—it is sustained by a secret desire for the Other to remain "other," not to become too much like us. In contrast to both these positions, the only truly tolerant attitude towards the Other is that of the authentic radical fundamentalist.

1 — See Peter Sloterdijk, Eurotaoismus (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1989).
2 — In a strictly homologous way, the opposition between globalization and the survival of local traditions is false. Globalization directly resuscitates local traditions, it literally thrives on them, which is why the true opposite to globalization are not local traditions, but universality. See chapter 4 of Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject (London: Verso Books, 1999).
3 — In the classic literature, one should mention Emile Zola's Germinal, in which the attachment to a rabbit helps the Russian revolutionary Souvarine to survive. When the rabbit is slaughtered and eaten by mistake, he explodes in an outburst of violent rage.
4 — Quoted from Orville Schell, Virtual Tibet (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2000), p. 202.
5 — Ibid., p. 191.
6 — Ibid.
7 — Ibid., p. 230.
8 — William McGovern, quoted in Schell, ibid., p. 230.
9 — Is not the obvious thing for an analyst to root Envy in the infamous penis envy? Rather than succumbing to this temptation, one should emphasize that envy is ultimately the envy of the Other's jouissance. My affluent business-oriented colleagues always marvel at how much work I put into theory and, comparatively, how little I earn; although their marvel is usually expressed in the terms of aggressive scorn ("How stupid you are to deal with theory!"), what obviously lurks behind is envy: the idea that, since I am not doing it for money (or power), and since they do not understand the reason I am doing it, there must be some strange jouissance, some satisfaction in theory accessible only to me and out of reach to them.

Slavoj Zizek is a philosopher and a researcher at Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut in Vienna. He is the author of many books.

The Really Hard Problem

Meaning in a Material World
By Owen J. Flanagan

Table of Contents and Sample Chapters

If consciousness is the "hard problem" in mind science—explaining how the amazing private world of consciousness emerges from neuronal activity—then the "really hard problem," writes Owen Flanagan in this provocative book is explaining how meaning is possible in the material world. How can we make sense of the magic and mystery of life naturalistically, without an appeal to the supernatural? How do we say truthful and enchanting things about being human if we accept the fact that we are finite material beings living in a material world, or, in Flanagan's description, short-lived pieces of organized cells and tissue? Flanagan's answer is both naturalistic and enchanting. We all wish to live in a meaningful way, to live a life that really matters, to flourish, to achieve eudaimonia—to be a "happy spirit." Flanagan calls his "empirical-normative" inquiry into the nature, causes, and conditions of human flourishing eudaimonics. Eudaimonics, systematic philosophical investigation that is continuous with science, is the naturalist's response to those who say that science has robbed the world of the meaning that fantastical, wishful stories once provided.

Flanagan draws on philosophy, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and psychology, as well as on transformative mindfulness and self-cultivation practices that come from such nontheistic spiritual traditions as Buddhism, Confucianism, Aristotelianism, and Stoicism, in his quest. He gathers from these disciplines knowledge that will help us understand the nature, causes, and constituents of well-being and advance human flourishing. Eudaimonics can help us find out how to make a difference, how to contribute to the accumulation of good effects—how to live a meaningful life.

About the Author
Owen Flanagan is James B. Duke Professor of Philosophy at Duke University. He is the author of Consciousness Reconsidered (MIT Press), The Problem of the Soul: Two Visions of Mind and How to Reconcile Them, and other books.
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