In late-2012 the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek gave a lecture in which he proposed to offer his critique of Buddhism from a Western Marxist perspective. Being Žižek, he talked about everything else as well, but he did articulate something that remains perspicuous. In the face of recent neuroscience investigating the neuronal bases of personal agency and the freedom of the will which, Žižek tentatively claims, increasingly demonstrates that “we are just neuronal machines, our freedom is an illusion, that there is no self, no autonomous agent” he put forward four separate interpretive options which we—presumably choicelessly!—must decide between.
The first, which he calls the predominant position among the majority of neuroscientists, is to simply “admit the gap” between our neuro-scientific knowledge, which asserts that “the way our brains are wired evolutionarily, we are condemned to experience ourselves falsely as free, responsible, autonomous agents” and the subjectively felt sense that we really are responsible, free agents. This results in a lived dualism, not uncommon, between what we theoretically know to be the case (for example in particle or quantum physics), and what we experience to be the case.
The second position he offers is like the first, except that it tries to give it some dignity by framing it within (in Žižek’s terms) a “Habermasian” humanistic all-inclusiveness whereby insofar as we rationally “know that we are neuronal automata, and that there is no freedom” then our very knowledge of that apparent fact only confirms our free rationality as the scientific endeavour by which we can know what we “really” are, and therefore in some fundamental sense, also transcend it. Žižek is a little doubtful about this, despite his own Hegelian proclivities, but then he is doubtful about what he sees as the entire Habermasian enlightenment project of trying to rescue (Euro-American) humanism from the assaults of science and religion.
The third option Žižek claims is the most attractive, but doesn’t hold up, and is represented in the cognitivist theory of Paul and Patricia Churchland, which maintains that “we can change our self-perception to fit with scientific results.” For these philosophers, we are not necessarily “wired to the naïve belief” to see ourselves as free agents as option 1 claims. Rather, we can unlearn this biologically conditioned falsehood (presumably over an aeon of socio-cultural inculcation), which might even in the meantime engender a better and more tolerant society. Žižek is skeptical about option 3 because it is impossible to fully eradicate the ground of free agency from the very terms of such a project, which Žižek would call a “pragmatic contradiction.”
The fourth and final option, Žižek claims, is “the only really consequent position.” Developed by the German neuroscientist Thomas Metzinger, this view stresses that we cannot subjectively believe the neuroscientific denial of free agency. As in options 1 and 3, we may know it rationally, in an abstract sense, but we cannot accept or assume it existentially. But for Metzinger, and for Žižek, there is an exception to this, discoverable in “some radical forms of Buddhist meditation” where the embodied sense of self and personal agency is seen to be only a provisionally true surface-level of a much more comparatively selfless, and complex, process of patterns of conditioning. Once the Buddhist meditator grasps this in fact (not just theory) the self is seen as a comparatively unreal illusion. In brief, Metzinger claims that (in Žižek’s words) “Buddhism is the only form of spirituality that is compatible with what science is telling us today.”
Žižek takes this seriously, and urges us to as well. He says in “this constellation of the total naturalization of man” that genetics, neuroscience and their technological applications are forcing upon the 21st century consciousness, we have no choice, as thinking beings, than to consider some kind of response within the spectrum he offers. If the neuroscience is accurate, is Žižek, Metzinger, and before them, Buddhism, right also? Can we expect the brave new world of the 21st century to include “meditative self-deconstruction” among its primary civilisational disciplines? The idea is intriguing; I leave it to your own—choiceless—imagination.
(originally published in the Prague Morning Post, Feb. 2, 2014)
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