Against American Buddhism: Note on Time

Stories do matter, and one should not try to, or pretend that they, live only in a pure present. Our actions are shaped by our experiences, which we remember, and our desires and expectations, which enable us to imagine a future. Indeed, this, and not only the fact that for us beings with language attention to this or that may itself be given to us as a task, are part of what distinguish us from other species. Success and failure do not turn in conventional patterns of conflict, but on projects, and the fact that every project is pursued in a field of forces external to it. Of course it is true that there is no story (or theory) that is given and that suffices as a model or pattern for explaining things to us so that we can be reassured that we 'know' how things are in the world such that we can live rightly or well by following it. There is nothing present to us that we are involved in that hasn't started already and that will not be displaced by other events that are not only discrete particulars but linked meaningfully in a temporal series. This is true even at the moment of my death, a fact that any philosophy centered on consciousness or 'spirituality' must deny: the time of the world will continue, it just will do so without me; this is simply inverted in those spiritualisms which hold mind to be absolute and world to be contingent, something that must have started and can end. The manner in which moments in a temporal series (the purest form of which is perhaps given in counting, where each successive number names an identical discrete particular that has no properties other than its being an element in a series) are linked, and sometimes the identity itself of these particulars ('what' they are), is contingent, but if there were no past or future, things would be purely present but would have no meaning. It would be what may be the ethical ideal of a certain contemporary form of Buddhism: the affirmative, 'happy', character of the traumatic event or encounter experienced as such, finding beauty in terror, and wanting both of these as absolute.

The 'technological' character of such metaphysical fantasies of spiritual enlightenment is surely revealed by the fact that they aim to master experience but concern for world and other beyond the experience of a solitary consciousness is at best a secondary matter. Curiously, business in America has adopted a secular Buddhism of sorts along these lines, as an ethics of attention to the task at hand (albeit that as a task that is part of a project, this has a temporality closer to that of 'linear' narrative than the eternal present that is posited as ethical ideal), free of distractions, memories, or desires. Desire is always for something other than what is. The figure of the Buddhist self, which has much in common with a Stoic one of late antiquity, is that of the absolute worker qua laborer who performs a task under command and in exchange for a payment, but not the artisan who makes worlds. The world is sad, seems to be the message, so find joy by repairing your attitude.

Unhappiness is not, or not only, a sign of sin. It can be greatly useful. We need it in art and politics more than in labor, where often discontent is a liability. The managed society, in seeking only the happiness that is correlated with success, and reductively identified with enjoyment, does not know what it missing.