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The following excerpt is from a book review by Mark D. Wood of “Healing deconstruction: Postmodern thought in Buddhism and Christianity” edited by David Loy. It seems Wood’s critiques could equally apply to the main preoccupations in the emerging integral worldview?
The following constitute the principal limitations of their work. First, by making the transformation of the self the primary, if not sole, prerequisite for the creation of a “new way of relating to the world,” these authors reduce this project to a matter of individual conversion or, in secular terms, psychotherapy. Second, each author theorizes suffering as being primarily, if not entirely, an effect of discursive, cognitive, and especially philosophical conditions of existence. In doing so, they theorize suffering in fundamentally idealist terms. Suffering is caused, for example, by dualistic thinking, the metaphysics of presence, and the idea of the autonomous self. Third, and closely related to the second limitation, as a result of their assumptions regarding the discursive, cognitive, and philosophical causes of suffering, none of the authors investigates the role that particular institutions and structures may play in terms of causing people to suffer today. In short, their position is idealist and ahistorical. For these authors, suffering and healing have been and forever remain essentially epistemological, rather than sociological, problems. Fourth, and finally, I would suggest that these limitations characterize a mode of academic intellectual practice that remains alienated from most, especially working class, “selves.” Ensconced like secular monks in close-knit circles of professional associations, intellectuals rarely connect their scholarship and pedagogy to the needs and concerns of “selves” who suffer not from “dualism,” the idea of the “autonomous self,” belief in “inherent existence,” or a conception of “healing as holism,” but rather from the absence of empowering conditions of labor and life. Unless academic intellectuals working to develop a more “holistic praxis ” engage with life beyond the academy, their work will at most result in absolution therapy for middle-class scholars, while those who make the luxuries of reading and writing philosophy possible will continue to suffer.
With the exception of Magliola, all of the authors identify dualistic thinking and the autonomous self as principal causes of suffering and barriers that must be overcome to heal a wounded world. Each of the authors elaborates strategies for deconstructing dualistic thinking and the autonomous self.
Transforming institutions and the “self” are, of course, intrinsically related to each other. You cannot transform one without transforming the other. If it is the case, as I believe that it is, that “the self” produces and is more profoundly a product of institutionalized social, political, and economic relations, then transforming the self requires transforming these relations. This does not mean abandoning the work of criticizing different conceptions of the self. Rather it means exposing the linkages between different conceptions of the self and the practical relations out of which the former develop so that we may acquire a better understanding of what must be done to build a society in which, for example, “humanitarian selves” would flourish naturally.
Unfortunately, none of the authors in this volume investigates the connections between ideas and institutions. In addition to the problem of formulating the work of healing as primarily a matter of self- transformation, each of these authors assumes that suffering is primarily, if not solely, caused by ideas.
There is, however, no necessary relationship between altering our mental perceptions and transforming the objective arrangement of “things” and “people” in the world (e.g., the unequal distribution of privileges, property, and power). In making this point, I assume a philosophical position that is not shared by the authors of Healing Deconstruction: namely, that there is a difference between the way we see, represent, imagine, talk, and write about reality and reality in itself. In short, I assume that being and consciousness, subjectivity and objectivity, discursive and extra-discursive conditions of existence are linked to and yet fundamentally non-identical with each other. The world is heterogeneous to our sensually derived/mentally constructed ideas about the world.
With the exception of Joy, the authors in this volume either explicitly reduce extra-subjective to subjective conditions of existence or simply assume the latter encompasses the former in what amounts to a totalizing anthropomorphism of a most embarrassing kind. Thus, while they are critical of anthropomorphism, they nevertheless collapse objective into subjective conditions of existence.
But is it really the case that words, ideas, and concepts are the cause of suffering? Are the Ogoni fighting to protect their land from Shell Oil destructive operations in Nigeria, African Americans contesting police brutality in New York City, and women struggling to improve their lives in El Salvador ultimately struggling against the wrong enemy? Is their tendency to think dualistically and believe in the autonomous self as the root source of the problems they confront? Were the bombs that rained on Yugoslavia, killing thousands of citizens, a consequence of thinking according to deadened categories, metaphysical binaries, and “mind-forg’d manacles?” Perhaps. But the links between these ways of thinking and social, and political, economic, and military forces that are so obviously implicated in human suffering must be demonstrated and not merely asserted or assumed. Not surprisingly, as I detail below, the authors in this work do not clarify these linkages as their projects remain within the comfortable limits of philosophy alone.
Not only do each of the authors reduce objective to subjective conditions of determination and freedom, they also, and as indicated above, explain suffering as being primarily, if not solely, caused by the mistaken epistemological assumption that reality or some aspect of reality is not subject to difference. Oddly enough, in making this argument, the same authors who critique essentialist thinking posit a concept of suffering in which its source remains essentially the same throughout all time and in this way, the solution to suffering has nothing to do with the material differences between one period, place, or society and another. The defenders of difference, in other words, remain oddly indifferent to historical differences.
It is not private ownership of health care resources and their allocation according to the law of profitmaking that leaves so many in need of healing. Nor is it corporate-driven degradation of the environment that leaves nature in a state of toxic shock. Rather, it turns out that what caused suffering during the time of Gotama the Buddha in the fifth century b.c.e., Hui-neng in the sixth century c.e., Dogen in the twelfth century c.e., Eckhart in the thirteenth century c.e. is the same as what causes suffering during our own time. The cause was and remains “dualistic thinking,” belief in “inherent existence,” “an autonomous self,” “healing as holism,” etc. We just keep making the same ontological blunder over and over.
In place of analyzing social, political, economic, and military forces that are responsible for the “[r]acism, sexism, and classism [that] pervade our social structures in ways that damage the lives of billions of people,” these authors remain within the limits of the onto-theological tradition (p. 71). While each of the authors is concerned with translating erudite theory into healing practice, they do not analyze the social, political, and economic relations which are materially cogenerative of “the self.” I would suggest that a more fruitful analysis of suffering ought to examine not only the historically and socially specific ideas and concepts that cause human beings to suffer but also, and as importantly, the social, political, and economic institutions and relations that reinforce and are reinforced by these ideas and concepts. Such an analysis might, for example, expose the ways in which the existing division of labor, property, and power reinforce “dualistic thinking” and belief in the concept of the “autonomous self.” In this way, the philosophical critique of dualistic thinking and the autonomous self would become a political critique of the social relations that give rise to dualistic thinking and belief in the concept of the autonomous self. Such an analysis assumes that the problems posed by dualistic thinking and the autonomous self cannot be solved philosophically. Solving these problems also means building institutions that support, for example, integrated thinking and a relational concept of the self.
To accomplish this end, however, requires translating philosophical categories into sociological categories, for example, translating the problem posed philosophically as the problem of “the self” into a problem regarding social, political, and economic conditions that structure the relationships between different “selves”…What is needed, then, is not only a “new vision of things” and concept of self. What is also needed is a different mode of organizing our practical relationships with each other. To realize this goal requires not only interpreting the world differently, but participating in the work of transforming the social relations reflected in and reinforced by our theoretical concepts.
The failure to engage with extra-philosophical conditions of human existence perhaps explains why these authors are left with little more than gestures toward something called transformative practice.
Perhaps their failure to examine extraphilosophical causes of suffering partially explains why the theme of dualism (or separation) between the self and the world is so prominent among their concerns. Perhaps this concern tells us more about their particular circumstances than it does about the nature of “the human condition.” Indeed, and as indicated in my introduction, I would suggest that their work is symptomatic of a certain mode of intellectual practice which is not only alienated from most human beings (and no doubt their own) extraphilosophical needs, problems, and concerns but also pessimistic regarding the possibility of building anything like a genuinely democratic, just, and peaceful global society. But the struggle to build such a society is, as indicated above, underway everywhere around the world and in this regard, I would argue that intellectuals concerned with healing ought to link their work to individuals and organizations struggling to improve their material and spiritual conditions of life. In short, it “requires a move from theorizing to practice” (p. 10). Anything less reduces healing to a purely academic endeavor.
