Metaphysics, Ontology, & Ethics

In the time between my last dispatch and this one, summer has moved along. There have been more long days, tons of sun, lots of heat; my garden has produced massive zucchinis (pictured above), and I’ve continued to indulge in my summertime ritual of moving and thinking more slowly than I do at other times of the year. I’ve also been immersing myself in the work of Stephen Batchelor, reading his writings, watching YouTube videos of him giving talks1, and listening to podcasts in which various people have interviewed him.

At this moment, I’m sitting in a cafe drinking an iced Americano. I don’t have anyone with me, so I’ve chosen to sit at the counter. My laptop is open in front of me, and the screen shows the Safari web browser with several tabs open. One of those tabs is the Substack editor where I’m typing these words. The tab immediately to the right displays the prior dispatch I sent out and (re)read before starting to type these words. 2

As I read what I sent two weeks back, something that really stood out to me was this:

Batchelor formulates a secular form of Buddhism stripped of metaphysics and ontology.

Another way to state what I was driving at there would be to say,

Batchelor reformulates Buddhism as an ethical practice rather than a metaphysical or ontological system.

This continues to feel very important to me as I delve further into Batchelor’s formulation of an ethics informed by secular Buddhism. However, I also realized that in the prior dispatch, I did not elaborate on this point enough.

• What does it mean to use Buddhist ideas and principles as an ethic?

• How might an ethic informed by secular Buddhism compare to one informed by psychoanalysis?

• Why should we consider stripping Buddhism or psychoanalysis of metaphysics and ontology?

These (and other questions along these lines) are the questions I did not spend enough time grappling with in my prior dispatch, and they are the questions I’d like to spend time thinking and writing about today.

Let’s start by thinking through three things and how they relate to psychoanalysis and secular Buddhism.

Two Lacanian aphorisms that I associate with the concept of metaphysics come from the Écrits, where Lacan writes “There is no metalanguage that can be spoken, or, more aphoristically, that there is no Other of the Other.”3 What each of these suggests to me is that there is no universal authority that can provide subjects with a way of life guaranteed to work. There is no final Truth (with a capital T) that a person can use as a north star to ensure they arrive at the place they are meant to reach. All of this feeds into another Lacanian idea: “There is no truth that, in passing through awareness, does not lie. But one runs after it all the same.”4

I see this as relating to metaphysics because (I think) metaphysical systems typically claim to describe reality from a standpoint outside the conditions they describe. The Lacanian position, as I understand it, is that it is not possible to take up a position outside of the conditions of our own experience.5

I’ve spoken about this with other non-Lacanian people, sometimes with philosophy graduate students who are particularly interested in metaphysics. They will sometimes say something along the lines of, “Even if we only have a subjective experience, you have to admit that there is an objective reality (a metaphysical Truth) outside of that subjective experience!”

Whether there is an objective reality isn’t something I claim to know. My point is simply that whatever reality may be, I never encounter it objectively. I only ever encounter it through my own (subjective) experience.

I think Batchelor argues that many people understand Buddhism as a metaphysical system capable of revealing the ultimate nature of reality that they can access through intense meditation, contemplation of Zen koans, or other spiritual practices. Still, he does not want to see Buddhism that way. Instead, Batchelor sees Buddhism as an ethics.

This is fascinating to me because I think some people can see psychoanalysis (psychoanalytic theory/ortodoxy) as a kind of metalanguage, an Other of the Other, as something that can offer access to a metaphysical Truth. However, this is not how I see psychoanalysis! I see psychoanalysis the way Batchelor sees Buddhism, as a set of ethical practices —practices available to ordinary people— that can change people’s relationships to what Buddhists call suffering (dukkha) and what I’d call their mode of jouissance, symptomatic repetition, and fantasy structures.

To be clear: Whether there is ultimately a metaphysical Truth is an interesting philosophical question! I don’t think that thinking about this or attempting to answer this question is a waste of time, and I don’t think Lacan or Batchelor would see it as a waste of time either. (Lacan would probably be interested in what kind of jouissance a subject derives from trying to answer this question.) What strikes me is that both Lacan and Batchelor are saying someting remarkably similar about their respective practices —in both instances, what matters is not fidelity to a metaphysical belief or truth claim, but cultivating a different way of responding to the reality one actually experiences.

I see ontology as a subset of metaphysics, which is concerned with asking the question of what exists.

Does the self exist? Does God exist? Does the unconscious exist? Does the Dharma exist? Does the Phallus exist? Does time exist? Does the signifier exist? Do dreams exist? Is emptiness something that exists? Does the Other exist? Does human nature exist? Does karma exist? Does marriage exist? Does the Name-of-the-Father exist? So on and so forth.

I realize the list above is long, probably unnecessarily long, because you got the point after two or three examples. While editing this, I almost made it shorter, but decided to keep it long because I thought it was actually a good way to demonstrate the endless, repetitive metonymic questioning that ontology opens the door to. It is that kind of questioning that can go on forever.6

While I don’t believe there is anything evil or fundamentally wrong with asking questions about what does and does not exist, what it means for something to exist, how X exists if it does exist, or with pondering one question like this, then the next, on and on, forever and ever. What I’m interested in doing is revealing something about what happens in this questioning and changing the way people relate to that process. To do this, I’m going to rely on something I read in Batchelor’s book After Buddhism: Rethinking the Dharma for the Secular Age, where Batchelor talks about the Buddhist parable of the poisoned arrow.

The Buddha tells the story of a man who has been struck by a poisoned arrow and lies bleeding to death on the ground. Before allowing his friends to bring a doctor to remove the arrow, the man insists on knowing the name of the person who shot it, the place where he lives, the complexion of his skin, and so forth, down to such absurd details as the kind of feathers on the arrow shaft: “whether those of a vulture or a crow or a hawk or a peacock or a stork.

My reading of what Batchelor is doing here is that he is trying to show how, when someone is suffering, they can become overly interested in theoretical questions about suffering and its causes. Again, there is nothing inherently wrong with these questions, but pondering them can become a problem if it prevents a person from actually doing things (i.e., engaging in practices) that could help them by changing their relationship to their symptomatic ways of living their lives.

During my time as a practicing Lacanian psychoanalyst, I’ve had several people come to me for psychoanalysis who have spent a lot of time reading and thinking about Lacan’s teaching. I’ve witnessed some of these people spend a lot of time talking about what they are doing symptomatically in very theoretical terms, by which I mean they use their experience to demonstrate and understand the theory they have been reading. They ponder what they are going through by pairing it with a psychoanalytic concept, and then the next time I see them, they have moved on to another concept. They ask questions like, “Is this my mode of jouissance?” or “Is this the sinthome, the symptomatic remainder that I need to learn how to enjoy?” There is nothing wrong with those questions, but I believe they are usually a defense against encountering the real of the symptom.

When this happens, I will think that a kind of ontological thinking, in and of itself, has become symptomatic. I consider the possibility that there is a kind of jouissance (ironic satisfaction) in this kind of endless theorizing. In general, one thing I will do is ask a question along the lines of, “I can see you know the theory; that’s abundantly clear to me. But what I’d like to hear more about is what is happening to you when you…” This is my attempt to try to privilege subjective experience over demonstrations of theoretical mastery. Sometimes, I might be more direct and say something like, “I’m not going to discuss theory with you. Please say more about why you bothered to come here today.” Or perhaps, “I think you might be using theory as a defense so that you don’t need to talk about your symptom.”7 Regardless of the style of the intervention I use, I am generally trying to get past metaphysical and ontological modes and move more toward what I would consider the radical and ethical aspect of psychoanalysis.

In After Buddhism and the other writings of Batchelor that I’ve been reading, he consistently proposes that one way to think about suffering is to see it as a kind of reaction to our conditions. I’d go so far as to say that he often describes this reactivity as a repetitive reaction, which has obvious parallels to symptomatic repetition compulsions.

Another point in Batchlor’s work is that we can’t completely free ourselves from reactivity. This strikes me as similar to the Lacanian idea that we will always be symptomatic. However, I think it is interesting to consider the idea that an experience of practices—doing something consistently—might change how a person relates to the suffering they experience, relative to their symptomatic representations.

In After Buddhism, shortly after the section I quoted above, Batchelor says this explicitly when he writes,

The purpose of the Buddha’s teaching is not to resolve doubts about the nature of “reality” by providing answers to such conundrums but to offer a practice that will remove the “arrow” of reactivity, thereby restoring practitioners’ health and enabling them to flourish here on earth.

It seems to me that what Batchelor says about Buddhism could also be said of psychoanalysis.

Perhaps the most succinct way to formulate what Batchelor is doing here is to pose it as a few questions:

• What if we use Buddhism as a set of principles that shape how people live their day-to-day lives, rather than as a system that explains what reality ultimately is?

• What happens if we don’t approach Buddhism in a scholastic/adademic way that is available only to those who can dedicate an enormous amount of time and energy to studying it, and see it as a set of ideas that normal people can make use of in their normal lives?

Incidentally, these are the kinds of questions I often ponder about psychoanalysis as a body of knowledge and as an embodied practice.

As I wrap up this dispatch, I find myself thinking of something that Freud wrote at the very end of Studies in Hysteria.

When I have promised my patients help or improvement by means of a cathartic treatment I have often been faced by this objection: ‘Why, you tell me yourself that my illness is probably connected with my circumstances and the events of my life. You cannot alter these in any way. How do you propose to help me, then?’ And I have been able to make this reply: ‘No doubt fate would find it easier than I do to relieve you of your illness. But you will be able to convince yourself that much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness. With a mental life that has been restored to health you will be better armed against that unhappiness.’8

When I read Freud’s words right now, I sense a huge similarity between what he is expressing and what I’m discovering in the writing of Batchelor: There is no cure for being human, for being what Lacanians call a divided subject or speaking body. Batchelor frequently remarks that Buddhism grew out of an encounter with the fact that all human beings are subject to birth, sickness, and death, and experience the diminishment of their bodies and minds as they age.

While I could be wrong about this, I believe that even though we can’t escape pain and suffering, we can engage in practices that can change the way we relate to our conditions and the suffering inherent within those conditions.