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NAGARJUNA, SARTRE AND LACAN
THE CONTINGENCY OF THE SELF
MIRA FONG
房曼琪
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"Never in the thought of the West has the Self been so pervaded by negation. One
would have to go to the East, to the Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna with his doctrine
of Anatman (no-self), the insubstantiality of the Self, to meet as awesome a list of
negations as Sartre draws up. The Self, indeed, is in Sartre's treatment, as in
Buddhism, a bubble that has nothing at its center." Irrational Man by William Barrett
A Negative Ontology of the Self
Nagarjuna 龍樹論師, the foremost scholar of the Mahayana School and was revered as
the second Buddha, who articulated the doctrine of emptiness, aimed in the
deconstruction of Essentialism. His argument, regarding the contingency of the self and
the existence of the phenomenal world, was further elaborated, after two thousand years,
in the existential analysis of Jacques Lacan and Jean Paul Sartre. The principal motif of
this paper is to correlate their analysis of the self with references to their own
propositions including the ideas of emptiness 性空 (Nagarjuna), nothingness 虛無
(Sartre) and the lack 依性空 (Lacan) as these are the foundations in which they
construct the insubstantial and indeterminate character of the self.
Each of the three thinkers conducts a critical theory on the self by eliciting a particular
hermeneutics, either from a Buddhist or psychoanalytic perspective. They seem to have
reached the same understanding that the self has no underlying substance. Rather, the
self is a terrain of composites 六識六境 and its consciousness and identity co-arise 緣起
with the world. Such assertion is tied to Nagarjuna's key theory of dependent
origination 依他起性 , which is investigated in great details in the context of
psychoanalysis by Sartre and Lacan.
While Nagarjuna advanced his arguments by utilizing a progression of dialectic logic to
demonstrate the fictitious nature of the self 破相顯性, Sartre's phenomenology and
Lacan's structural psychoanalysis formulated a negative ontology to uncover the precondition of the self. Here, negative ontology means the self is treated on a phenomenal
plane. Sartre observes that man's existence is marked by nothingness 空無, "a being
who is not what he is and is what he is not". Lacan, a postmodern theorist, views the
self, lacking a unified identity. It is rather fragmented and conditioned by cultural
discourses. Additionally, both Sartre and Lacan depict the antagonistic and dependent
nature of the human psyche with reference to Hegel's "life and death struggle of the self
and the other" which can be compared as a Western version of dependent origination.
Nevertheless, one must keep in mind that, as a philosophical construction, there
remains fundamental differences between their work; each was a response to its own
historical circumstance. In the case of Nagarjuna, his epistemic deconstruction of the
self by taking an opposing stand against the metaphysics of the Hindu system which
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postulates a universal Selfhood, the Atman or Brahman. He also rejects the doctrine of
the early Buddhist schools of his time as they regarded the self as having its own
existence (svabhava, a substantial real). For Sartre, the emphasis on freedom and action
was to counter the pervasive nihilism during WWII. With a Nietzschean defiance, he
contends that there is no creator and one must invent its own authentic self within the
condition of nothingness. Lacan, an anti-orthodox rebel who supported the French
Communist Party to fight against the capitalistic practice, tackled the gap between the
Freudian ego and the sovereignty of the establishment.
My attempt to draw a connection between their negative ontology of the self and the
psychology of dependent origination could perhaps risking a misinterpretation.
Nonetheless, in a deeper level, their investigation of the fundamental conditions of
human existence, its suffering and transcendence, is universal. In the Buddhist
scripture, Sati, as pure awareness, could be achieved when one understands the nature
and cause of suffering (the five aggregates of attachment and the five mental obstacles).
Lacan and Sartre's analysis, though without any reference to Buddhism, offers insights
relevant to the Buddhist notion regarding the three marks of existence, that is,
impermanence, discontent and no self. They all stress the social dimension of desire or
craving as the cause of suffering.
The added Chinese phrases taken from Buddhist texts (for those who also read Chinese)
are intended to expand the contextual meanings as well as cultivating a transitioning
from Lacan's multi-layered analysis to the way of Zen.
Nagarjuna (c.150-250): The Radical Indeterminacy of the Self
"If there is no essence, who could become the other? If there is essence, what could
become the other?" Nagarjuna
In refuting Descartes' claim that the mental substance is indubitable, David Hume, a
Scottish empiricist, argues that the cogito, the thinking substance, is composed of
memories, impressions and concepts. They are mental concepts determined by the
principle of contiguity, the relational conjunction of ideas. Hume's radical skepticism
accords with the central tenet in Nagarjuna's teaching that our knowledge of the self and
reality is fallible. Although both argue from a causal point of view, but causality, for
Hume, is constituted by constant conjunctions, itself is not a principle or self-evident
truth.
Nagarjuna's major work, Madhyamika 中觀論, is a systematic and rigorous analysis of
the status of the self through the concept of sunyata (emptiness 性空). His aim was to
counter the realistic view of the self and its perceived phenomenal world 森羅萬相. He
asserts that the idea of a coherent, independent self is an illusion 假相 since its genesis is
pervaded by sunyata. All things come into existence by their relations with others and
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are mutually dependent, linked by a causal nexus 因果相續, meaning a process of
differentiation.
To the questions of "who I am" and "what I am", Nagarjuna's answer is that the self, as a
cognitive agent, is a mere collection of mental and physical aggregates 積聚, such as
sensory impressions and mental concepts, "A self under its own power is non-existent
because the aggregates are not the person. " Hume also made similar remark, "Man is
a bundle of collection of different perceptions with succeed one another with
inconceivable rapidity and are in perpetual flux of movement". What they both are
saying is that the self and the knowledge of the world (names and forms), is without
inherent substance (svabhava 實性) and is temporal in nature. What one takes to be real
and objective regarding the existence of the self and the world is merely a hypothesis as
they it is invented by thought. Nagarjuna proclaims,"No things whatsoever exist, at any
time or place, having risen by themselves, from another, from both or without a
cause."
The concept of sunyata is intended as an internal negation to dismantle any false
apprehension of a singular and substantial self. It plays a key role in Nagarjuna's system,
the Madhyamaka School, which rejects the postulation of a universal Self or the Atman,
since it can neither be logically inferred, nor verified by a posteriori judgment. In The
Treaties of Twofold Truth 二諦論, Nagarjuna conducts a dialectic method of reasoning
by differentiating the two levels of truth 真俗二諦, "One is that of a personal and
conventional truth of the self, and a higher truth which surpasses it. " 中觀論: 諸佛依二
諦, 為眾生說法, 一以世俗諦, 二第一義諦. 說諸法由因緣 , 緣起而有者, 俗諦. 說一切畢竟空,
真諦也. The first level truth 世諦, the thesis, is established by social agreement or public
opinion for pragmatic reason. The second level truth 真諦, as an antithesis with a skeptic
position, regards all truth claims are provisional. 吉藏 三論玄義: 說有為俗諦, 空為真諦.
有空為俗, 非有非空為真之二諦... 言亡慮絕為真之二諦.
Nagarjuna purports sunyata to the theory of no-self (anatman 性空) and of dependent
origination 依他起性. The epistemic application of sunyata 析空 is to explain the
misconception of reality but not to be taken as an absolute truth. Such clarification is
well explained by Hsueh-Li Chen in Nagarjuna, Kant and Wittgenstein, "Nagarjuna's
rejection of the concept of noumena does not imply that he accepted the legitimate use
of human categories or concepts in the realm of phenomena " 內止其心, 不空外界.
Basically, Nagarjuna is saying that ideas are merely products of the mind 假名 and are
determined by a dialogical system. To borrow Lacan's words, "Every truth has a
structure of a fiction."
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Nagarjuna proclaims that our ideas of things are established in virtue of its opposite 二
見分, such as the notion of being or non-being 空有問題. He explicates, "That which is
the element of light is seen to exist on account of darkness, and the element of good is
seen to exist on account of bad, that which is the element of space is seen to exist on
account of form." The Treaties of the Middle Way 中論, Nagarjuna's major theoretical
framework, addresses the idea of the self and the world is based on a dichotomous
thinking ( by way of paired opposites). The way to transcend the either/or mentality, he
proposes, is to cultivate a non-abiding awareness 言慮無寄, that is, the practice of the
middle way. It is a rigorous method of progressive negation to any truth claim as he
argues, "There is no arising, no dissolving 不生不滅, no atman and no anatman 無我亦
無無我." Basically, the Middle Way aims to develop one's higher cognition (pragna), to
see the limitation of conceptual thinking thereby transcends opposite statements of
existence. It alludes to a non-fixated approach in order to transcend both negation and
affirmation 言詞相寂, 文字性空, that is, between nihilism and essentialism.
Some scholars compare Nagarjuna's logic of deconstruction to that of Postmodern
theory which rejects the idea of universality and replaces with an unstable world view of
change and flux. Both claim that language plays a role in determine one's experience.
Rather, they argue from a relativistic position that ideas are inferred by contrasting to
other ideas 隨應諸法, 假實不定. To put it in a structural context, the meaning of a sign is
understood in its relation to other signs within a system of signifiers. Interestingly,
Wittgenstein's theory of the language game also implies the same notion that our ideas
of things are provincial as they are limited within the framework of language game as
well as a set of speech rules. In regard to the realm outside the language, Wittgenstein
seems to pointing to the way of Zen which transcends language 言語道斷, 心行處減, as
he ends his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus with these words, "Whereof one cannot
speak, thereof one must be silent".
Implicitly, Nagarjuna's dialectic meant to be a transitioning from critical thinking to a
state of Bodhi mind 淵微鏡徹, the silent mirroring of suchness. His method was later
assimilated into the Zen practice by way of non-verbal transmission 以教照心, 以心解教,
as such state is purely empirical 非想,非非想處. Seeing things as they are 諸相寂然
without articulation.
Overall, the basic premise of "The Middle Way", taken to a logical extreme, is to point
out that what considered as matter of fact is constituted through relations of ideas 因緣
所生. Things in themselves neither have substances (svahbava) nor empty. Nagarjuna
himself considers his own teaching to be tentative, a characteristic of Buddhist teaching.
The purpose is to relinquish the constraint of an absolute or realistic position. Different
level of discourse is required due to circumstantial factors 方便教化.
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The Prajnaparamita Sutra 心經, the best known Buddhist text, contains Nagarjuna's
core theory, the investigation of the conditions of arising, dwelling and finally the
ceasing. Its content can be summed up in his words:
What dependently arises
Has no cessation, no production, no annihilation, no permanence
No coming, no going, no difference, no sameness,
Is free of elaborations of inherent existence and of duality
And is at peace.
One can observe a parallel and complimentary view of sunyata between Nagarjuna and
that of Sartre and Lacan; they also relate the concept of the no-self to a lack 依性空
which is precisely the field of sunyata, described by Sartre, "Nothing comes into the
world through man because man not only bears the nothing within him, but consists of
nothing". Although there is a conceptual difference between the two; emptiness for
Nagarjuna is an ontological statement whereas for Sartre, it associates with the unreality
of self-identity.
Contemporary Western philosophy puts emphasis on the social dimension of the self
such as the study of Dasein in Heidegger's Being and Time. Dasein, as human being, is
situated in temporality and constructed by its facticity, meaning its physical appearance,
intellectual competence and social integration. It has no prior essence. In this respect,
both Sartre's and Heidegger's existential phenomenology corresponds to Nagarjuna's
theory that the consciousness of the self is not innate but co-arises with the phenomenal
world 因緣所生.
Jean Paul Sartre (1905-1980): The Poverty of the Self.
The enquiry into the meaning and purpose of human existence in the climate of
pervasive nothingness 泯絕無寄 became the prime concern since Kierkegaard. He asked,
"I stick my finger into existence, it smells nothing. Where am I? What is this thing
called the world?... Who am I? How did I come into this world? Why was I not
consulted?" Since then, a new movement has emerged from Continental philosophy.
Contrary to the classical question, "What can one know" in the pursuit of
epistemological certainty, philosophers turned to the human subject to explore its inner
pathos. This is the realm of phenomenology, a descriptive method developed by
Edmund Husserl in the early 1900s. Instead of studying objects as independent entities,
phenomenology investigates objects that appear in consciousness as it is always an
intentional act. In other words, phenomenology studies the realm of conscious activities
of one's experience including one's perception of things and the internal thoughts and
feelings. They are treated equally as phenomena of a lived world (lebenswelt). One such
endeavor is the publication of Sartre's Being and Nothingness in 1943. It was his way of
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moving phenomenology toward the direction of human existence instead of studying the
phenomenal world. Although both Sartre and Nagarjuna illustrate the unstable
character of the self, Nagarjuna's argument relies on linguistic and logical operation;
whereas Sartre's is phenomenological and his negation of the self (as being) is through
the proposition of nothingness.
While Heidegger was interested in disclosing the region of being, Sartre located one's
being in social relationship. He came to realize that there is a negative mode within
human consciousness and manifests itself as an intrinsic split 緣慮. Based on his
observation, Sartre formulated a dualistic ontology, the dichotomy of being-in-itself and
being- for-itself, a theory was originally introduced by Hegel. In Phenomenology of the
Spirit, Hegel gives a dramatic account of the master and slave confrontation; each self
must "struggle till death" in order to subjugate the other self. He writes, "The absolute
object is the I individual, but when faced by another self-consciousness, difficulties
arise (the other is a veritable mirror of my own consciousness). Each I must position
itself against the other". Such antagonism was eagerly developed in both Sartre and
Lacan's psychoanalytic theory.
Sartre deconstructs the solidity of the self by internalizing the conflict of master and
slave which he regards as the cause of self alienation. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre
gives a detail explanation regarding the antagonism between being-in-itself and beingfor-itself. The category of being-in-itself refers to one's own facticity like object among
objects. It also applies to objects in the physical realm which described by Sartre as lack
of being (or becoming). On the other hand, being-for-itself is the conscious self or the
subjectivity of one's being. Both are the ontological constituents of nothingness. The
consciousness of being-for-itself experiences the world as a projection of its own
possibilities or freedom through a "for-me" interpretation. And yet, such subjectivity can
be objectified when one encounters the forces outside oneself. What this means is that
when being-for-itself collides with the other, it risks the threat of being turned into a
non-being, an object. Again, Sartre explains such a dynamic by referring to a
master/slave psycho-drama, "The other, in a certain sense, is the radical negation of
my subjectivity, he is the one for whom I am not a subject but an object". One's own
sense of self can easily slip away by the interrogative look of others as "sitting in
judgment". In this respect, the self is being reduced of its own possibilities by allowing
"what-is-not determines what-is." The inherent split of human psyche also manifests
itself in social and political conflicts between classes and nations. Similarly, Freud
interprets such internal trauma as the cause of man's outward aggression in his
Civilization and Its Discontents, "Man have gained control over the forces of nature to
such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty in exterminating one
another to the last man."
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Based on his observation that "to be is to be for another", Sartre added a third category,
"being-for-others", which is an "otherized self", since part of one's being is always for
others 緣起性空 in an attempt to escape nothingness, the absence of being. In other
words, being-for-others has to do with the seeking of one's identity through others;
thereby one is being objectified into "for-itself-for-others". Sartre's in-depth
psychoanalysis of human relations and the troubled self is vividly illustrated in his play
No exit, a literary interpretation of his magnum opus, Being and Nothingnes. Both were
written in the same year.
No Exit, in a theatrical format, plays out the psychology of "being-for-others" and
"struggle till death" (except that all three characters in the play were dead already). In it,
the three characters, Garcin, Inez and Estelle, are supposed to be dead and confined in a
room(the realm of damnation). Each, as a chimerical self, is preoccupied with self
identity by seeking validation through the oppressive others. One hears Inez's lament on
the non-substantiality of herself, "How weak I am, a mere breath in the air, a gaze
observing you, a formless thought that thinks you." After being emotionally tormented
by the two women and unable to escape, Garcin concludes, "Hell is other people".
Because the others are able to take away one's own subjectivity and making it an object
of his world.
Sartre professes, "Nothingness enters the world through human existence". What he
meant is that human consciousness constitutes its own nothingness and yet, it is also a
pre-requisite of freedom. Nothingness is experienced through a subjective
consciousness. In Sartre's view, consciousness itself is basically empty since it exists
only as "conscious of" some phenomenal entities. As a subjective mode, nothingness is
the awareness of "what is not". What lies at the core of one's existence is a non-being (a
void); it has no prior essence. As a negation, nothingness is dialectically generated when
the "for-itself" moves toward its antithesis. In this respect, the self is divided by two
opposing poles, being and nothingness. It is through man that nothingness comes into
the world of beings as it co-arises with the consciousness of "for-itself". In short,
nothingness simply means man's existence is a lack of being 本無. The notion of lack is
further explored by another Parisian thinker, Jacques Lacan, in his analysis of the ego,
desire and the Other.
Sartre's investigation on the dependent nature of human desire is also an important
subject for both Buddhism and Lacan. Sartre observes that desire is originated from a
lack, "One looks at things with desire". Further, desire is always tied to one's memories,
anxiety, fear, interests, needs and projects. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre stresses
his point, "The existence of desire as a human fact is sufficient to prove that human
reality is a lack". Desire and anxiety are caused by one's internal nothingness which is
like a hole waiting to be filled, a view elaborated in his "Existentialism and Human
Emotions, "I have only to crawl into it (the hole) in order to make myself exist in the
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world which awaits me". In nothingness, man is propelled to seek its own density, like
"The uniform and spherical plentitude of Parmenidean being."
In many ways, Sartre's philosophy corresponds to the skeptic ideas of David Hume, an
intellectual of mid-Eighteenth century who frequented the salons in Paris. Both thinkers
reject the belief of a supernatural spirit, transcendent reality and a teleological universe
such as Hegel's Geist, an invisible spirit behind the rational development of human
history. Rather, they argue that there is no timeless principle that sustains human
reality and the self. Contrary to Plato or Aquinas' theory of the immortality of the soul,
Sartre compares the self to a blank canvas, a tabula rasa 空無所有 in which one must
create one's own portrait. Furthermore, Sartre associates egotism with the project of
becoming God (to cover up the lack of being). He remarks, "To be man means to reach
toward being God. Or if you prefer, man fundamentally is the desire to be God...Every
human reality is a passion in that it projects losing itself so as to found being and by
the same stroke to constitute the In-itself which escapes contingency by being its own
foundation which religions call God." Sartre makes it very clear that man's fundamental
project, the construction of a transcendent Being in order to fill the void, is "A useless
passion striving in a universe without purpose".
Jacques Lacan (1901-1981): The I is the Other
Jacques Lacan, a French Psychoanalyst and a contemporary of Sartre of the 1950s, is
perhaps one of the most intriguing continental thinkers. Apart from his reworking of
Freud's theory of the ego and the unconscious, Lacan formulates a pluralistic and
negative ontology by incorporating ideas from a diverse group of thinkers, primarily,
Hegel, Heidegger, Saussure and Levi-Strauss. Lacan was also active in the Parisian
artistic and literary circle, particularly, the surrealist group. From Hegel, Lacan adopted
his dialectic reasoning to invert the Platonic Real to the unreality of the self 性空. The
diversity of Lacan's theories, regarding the genesis of the self and its culturalization, is
influenced by the social anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss (the analysis of the basic
kinship system of different societies and culture instead of specific ideology/world view)
as well as Ferdinand De Saussure's structural linguistics (language as a system of signs
and signification. Signs are understood in relation to each other and to the system),
through which Lacan developed his own notion of the self within the framework of the
three orders.
Contrary to the practice in general psychology which aims to integrate the ego, Lacan, by
way of structural analysis, de-centers the Freudian ego. The self, in his view, is
predicated by language and has no intrinsic properties. Rather, it is something of a lack
依性空; its meaning is derived from a chain of signification. Beyond language, the world
is inaccessible to the cogito. Lacan transfers the Freudian ego to a structural theorizing,
a similar task conducted by Nagarjuna. Both argue that the idea of the self is derived
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through a process of differentiation 分別性. According to Lacan, the self, as a signifier
suspended in the linguistic plane, has no access to the thing-in-itself. His argument goes
like this, "The signifier is a sign that does not refers to any object...it refers to another
sign which is as such structured to signify the absence of another sign " 無盡緣起.
Lacan sees the self is bound up in the tension between its own fragmentation and the
imaginary ideal as to be unified and coherent. The self, for Lacan, has two components,
the social/cultural as well as the linguistic. On the social plane, the content of the self is
pre-determined by an existing value system. On the linguistic plane, the self as a
speaking entity, its status is identified as a signifier.
As a young doctor in the 1930s, Lacan was influenced by the pro-left surrealists, in
particular, the painter Salvador Dali's view of the free flowing of the unconscious. Lacan
agrees that the human subject is not a rational construct but rather deficient, lacking
identity and is driven by desire. His investigation of the self as the subject is a radical
departure from Descartes' view of the human subject as a rational being. Descartes'
cogito, the thinking substance and an anchor for epistemology, is capable of acquiring
universal knowledge through reason. On the contrary, Lacan's subject is neither rational
nor immaterial. He reverses Descartes cogito from "I think therefore I am" to "I think
where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think." For Lacan, the subject is an
unreality and has no interiority 空境. It inheres its content from outside as Bruce Fink
differentiates in The Lacanian Subject. He explains, "The Lacanian subject is neither
the individual, nor the thinking subject... " further: "Temporary speaking, the subject
appears only as a pulsation, an occasional impulse or interruption that immediately
dies away or is extinguished " 眾緣合即有. One find such characteristic of the subject
similar to the Buddhist view 一切諸法, 皆同幻化 as Fink further comments, "Eastern
philosophy has been telling us for millennia, a construct, a mental object."
Lacan's principal theory is a tripartite structure composed of three orders (as co-arising
相應俱起), the Imaginary (unaware of the unreality of its content), the Real (which is an
absence) and the Symbolic (language is the prime element). Among the three orders, the
Symbolic as a moral framework, is sometimes referred to the term "The name-of- thefather". It regulates the subject's conscious and unconscious activities. It is internalized
as soon as the subject enters the human community. The Symbolic precedes the other
two orders and is generally referred to as law and social convention. Lacan associates
the Symbolic plane with the Big Other (the cultural super-ego) which refers to language
and the Symbolic fabrics.
Within the tripartite structure, the self is adventitious. It is conditioned by the Symbolic
Order, a universal totality which Lacan describes in Ecrits (1966), "It covers all human
lived experience like a web...it is always there, more or less latent." Inevitably, such
totalizing power generates tension for both the Imaginary and the Real which is almost
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absent since the three orders are interwoven 因緣相生. Lacan proclaims, "The
unconscious is structured like a language". What he meant is that the unconscious of
the subject is taken over by the discourse of the Other.
Under the sovereignty of the Symbolic Order, the Imaginary self is a false self identity of
"Who I think I am". It survives through bad faith meaning one is indoctrinated by social
propagandas. Such self-delusion is dramatized in Eugene O'neill's classic play, The
Iceman Cometh. It is a story of a collection of characters harbor together in a place
called Harry Hope's Salon. Each lives in his own fantasy, the Imaginary realm. Their day
to day existence is by hanging on to a pipe dream which is really a hopeless hope. Until
one day, they are confronted by a messianic figure, Hickey, who represents the terrifying
truth. That is, one must confront one's own self-delusion which is made up with desires
and borrowed self-identity.
As for the Real, it is hidden and knotted together with the Other, described by Lacan as
the Borromean knot. Lacan distinguishes the Real as outside the language and cannot
be symbolized except with occasional breakthrough 隱顯, like tearing a hole. The only
possibility for the Real to unveil itself and claim its being is by subverting the Symbolic
Order all together (this suggests Lacan's political activism, the attempt to undermine
Capitalism). In other words, the Real must confront between being and its own vacuity
since its space is occupied by the Symbolic Other. This is exactly the message that
Hickey, in The Iceman Cometh, brought to those who live in the Imaginary realm.
Like Sartre, Lacan, in his early work, also examines one's psychological need for
confirmation through others by referring to Hegel's master and slave dynamics. The
servile relation of self and Other plays out as Hegel describes, "On approaching the
other, it has lost its own self, since it finds itself as another being." It implies that one's
identity is unconsciously concealed in the other. Lacan equates the self/other dichotomy
to the subject's encountering of the Big Other. He sees it as an intrusion to the Real that
occurs during the ego's early psychic development. Thus, he re-describes Hegel's
dialectic to "A struggle for the others", that is, "Le desir de Autre, man desires what the
other desires". The self wants to be desired by the other (as portrayed in Sartre's play,
No Exit, each desires the other for his or her own redemption).
Perhaps the most significant contribution of Lacan's work is his insight on the social
dimension of desire 遍計所執. Lacan tackles Freud's pleasure principle by introducing
two key concepts in his later work, namely "Objet a", the object cause of desire 痴障" and
"Jouissance", pleasure in pain 驅心役識". The concept of Jouissance was first introduced
in his seminar The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960. It refers to a paradoxical
reaction of the subject's intention as it constantly tries to transgress the prohibition 貪欲,
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to find pleasure in its lack of enjoyment. Hence, it is more of a suffering than pleasure 苦
樂二受.
"Objet a" denotes a non-specific object of desire. Rather, it is the cause of desire, the
desire to be desired by the Other. In other words, desire is not related to its object but to
a lack. According to Lacan, "Object a" is a surplus of Jouissance, a psychological state in
which Jouissance becomes obsessive as the ego imagines and experiences its own
existence through the antagonistic relation of self and other. Lacan gives his take on
"Object a", "What makes an object desirable is not any intrinsic quality of the thing in
itself but simply the fact that it is desired by another." Objet a is a corollary with the
empty experience of Jouissance, because it is essentially empty. Given the fact that
desire is always followed by suffering 生苦為業, Lacan, a theorist, endeavors to get to the
deeper layer by differentiating between Jouissance and desire. It is well explained by
Jeanne Wolff Bernstein, "Lacan linked and contrasted jouissance with desire. Whereas
desire implies a lack-one can only desire what one does not have, jouissance implies an
excess of gratification, readily turning its pursuit of pleasure into an abyss of tension
and pain."
In his article Kant with Sade, Lacan continues to elaborate the dependent and causal
character of desire 情執, "Desire must be formulated as the Other's desire (desir de
L'Autre) since it is originally desire for what the Other desire." One's unconscious
desire is tied to the desire of the Other since the I and Other are co-arising. Hence Lacan
concludes, "The I is the Other, Je est un autre."
Like Sartre, Lacan also attributes desire to a lack (a lack of being). Conversely, the lack
leads to the surplus of desire in a vicious cycle. For this reason, Lacan disagrees with
Freud's suggestion of liberating the unconscious because it too operates within the
symbolic order. Lacan also considers the conventional psychoanalytic model is, in fact, a
reinforcement of the unreal self 假相 along with its pathos 本惑. He regards the attempt
to unify the individual psyche or the split ego as practicing "human engineering". It
actually intensifies the ego's narcissistic impulse by postulating an ideal self which can
further create a rift between the I and other. Such antagonism and idealization have
been playing out in endless human dramas 恆沙煩惱 (as brilliantly portrayed in all
Shakespeare 's plays). Instead of finding a cure, Lacan suggests a conscious effort to
dissolve the subject's illusion of the self 斷惑減苦. Essentially, Lacan is not saying
anything different from the Buddhist perspective that desire, haunted by its own
insatiability 妄執, is the basic condition of human existence.
Lacan's comprehensive theorizing operates on several different levels simultaneously by
incorporating linguistics, psychology, literature and art. Behind the Lacanian
hermeneutics, there is a connection to the core teaching of Nagarjuna; both are non-
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essentialist and regard the self as indeterminate and contingent. The idea of "dependent
origination 依他起性" corresponds to Lacan's portraying of the subject as an empty
signifier. It loses its certainty in a signifying process 遷流相續. More importantly, his
insights on desire 妄執 as the cause of suffering is fundamental to Buddhism 苦諦.
5. Project of Freedom
Although the three thinkers appear to have painted a nihilist view of human condition at
the brink of nothingness; such deconstruction itself meant to be a way of relieving
suffering by way of dismantling the self 破相. Nagarjuna compares the illusion of the self
to that of a magical performance, or reflections from a hall of mirrors. David Hume also
made a similar remark, "The mind is a kind of theater, where perceptions successively
make their appearance, mingled in an infinite variety of postures and situations."
The way Nagarjuna conducts his extreme logic in Madhyamika can be regarded as a
training method 分別所分別 to free the mind from clinging to names and forms 恆審思
量 as if they are real. For instance, the concept of sunyata, taken as either negative or
otherwise, is still a mental construct. It is nothing but a name, lacking its own reality.
The implication of sunyata depicts a revelatory possibility 蘊空 outside the bound of
language. Within the world of samsara, the realm of suffering and perpetual wandering
苦輪常運, lies the possibility of mukti, an enlightened mind 正覺. Nagarjuna refers such
becoming to Buddha's own journey of liberation. The investigation of nothingness 如虛
空之包藏萬有 opens to a path of transformation 真空妙有. As Heidegger amuses, "Das
nichts selbst nichtet, nothingness makes nought!"
Influenced by Kierkegaard, the freedom project for Sartre takes the form of an eruptive
force. He declares, "Man is what he makes of himself". The word "authenticity" has its
Greek root, meaning to make or create oneself. As an intellectual revolutionary, Sartre's
self creation is linked to the ethics of authenticity. Despite the fact that the human agent
is contingent and the self is only a convention, Sartre's counter polemic is that the self
can be experienced as "the presence to self". Against the backdrop of an indifferent
universe, the freedom project is to surge up from the void 空境 and to reinvent one's life
through active self-determination.
In contrast to Hegel's attempt to re-enact Plato's transcendental Eidos by inserting the
absolute consciousness within the human history as the guiding spirit, Sartre sees man's
overall condition is nothingness and thereby proclaims, "Man's essence is freedom". The
posit of nothingness is the basis of freedom; it allows man to define himself by action.
Sartre's Being and Nothingness paves way to affirmative action as explained by William
Barrett, "The only meaning he can give himself is through the free project that he
launches out of his own nothingness. Sartre turns from nothingness not to compassion,
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but to human freedom as realized in revolutionary activity." Far different from other
continental thinkers (the analytic, hermeneutic or phenomenological), Sartre's
existential stance was "the philosophie engagee". Similarly, Nagarjuna, a political
reformer of his time, also gives priority to personal action for a higher cause over a
contemplative path 成大悲則不住 涅槃.
In his less pessimistic writing Existentialism and Human Emotions (1946), Sartre
moves from a negative ontology to an ethical plane which emphasizes freedom and
action. Why? Because one's being is located in its existential dimension and is
historically and politically situated. Thus freedom is to be exercised "only in the ethical
plane". Sartre gives his reason, "When we say that a man is responsible for himself, we
do not only mean that he is responsible for his own individuality, but that he is
responsible for all men." Obviously, Sartre's freedom is predicated by an ethical precept
since the individual is part of the larger phenomenon of being. It's up to the individual
to define who he is and not escaping into a "Bad Faith" which is a form of self-deception.
One is to rise above the antagonistic existence 無礙 by cultivating an empathetic
understanding 真心全體. This is self-transformation.
The answer in which Lacan comes up with, in order to relief the trauma of the self, is as
radical as Nagarjuna's, that one must be resolute in confronting the sunyata of the self
性空 and the unreality of the Other 別相. Jeanne Wolff Bernstein explains such
confrontation, "One's subjectivity was constructed through and for an Other...and
forced to confront both the void of the Other and the void inside of himself..."
Some of Lacan's ideas may appear to be inconsistent when he integrated the three
orders into a meta-theory including the science of mathematics and logic. Nevertheless,
he continued to tackle the notion of the Real and its resistance to the established order.
It is interesting to note that Lorenzo Chiesa's comment in Subjectivity and Otherness
regarding Lacan's reassessment of the Real and its demarcation from the Other, "All we
are left with is the Real-of-the-Symbolic and a mythical extrasymbolic
"undead". ..Lacan also unintentionally falls back into a quasi-mythical understanding
of the pure Real by promoting the notion of a transcendental real "Thing" understood
as a positive absence." The statement reveals an ambivalent status of the Real as "The
undead". Though absent, it has the possibility for further explication through a nonverbal surfacing, from the surreal to the real (Lacan participated in the early French
Surrealist's movement and was a close friend of Andre Breton) and perhaps, mixed with
a bit of Zen.
Lacan's anticipation of the Real seems to coincide with Heidegger's meditation on being
since Lacan translated his work into French. According to Heidegger, Dasein is "being
thrown" into a world of Das Man, the They, which he refers to as social norms and
linguistic convention. Such interpretation coincides with Lacan's notion of the big Other.
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Das Man, says Heidegger, "Prescribes one's state-of-mind and determines what and
how one sees". One can further relate Dasein's throwness to the traumatic entrance of
the Real into the Symbolic plane. This explains why both Heidegger and Lacan insist
that the way to uncover one's authenticity (one's authentic mode of being) or the absent
Real is by questioning the whole establishment through which one is taught to think.
One may further implicate Lacan's elusive Real 隱顯, the pre-symbolic subject, with
Heidegger's portraying of the inexpressiveness of Being 離言直顯 which resembles a
non-conceptual state of suchness 体性現起. In fact, they both were interested in the
contemplative approach 觀照 of Eastern philosophy. Lacan characterizes the intrinsic
resistance of the Real as an eruption which he described "As a knock on the door that
interrupts a dream"先有大覺 而後覺此大夢. One can compare such eruption to a
sudden awakening. The self is seen as reflection of the moon over the water or an image
in the mirror 水月鏡像.
In the late 1960s, Lacan developed a theory of discourses as a method of questioning the
imposed identity of the ego 我相. These questions would be: "Why am I who you say
that I am?"or as Bernstein paraphrases, "What am I and for whom?" By questioning
the subject's servility to the illusive Others, the Real is able to make its presence.
On a deeper level, Lacan's extensive analysis of desire meant to free the ego from the
fabric of Symbolic illusions 捨緣離相. In his approach to psychotherapy, Lacan rejects
the attempt to unify the ego's psychic life 我執 in order to provide a temporary sense of
coherence. He explains that such a unified self was developed during the infant's mirror
stage, a process of identification with the mother/Other. This developmental stage is the
origin of the split ego as well as the seat of neurosis 迷悟之源. For Lacan, the only way to
unburden the ego 斷惑滅苦, the illusory image of one's self, is to undergo a series of
articulated discourses through which one learns that the self is only a social construct
and "a thin, weightless and empty self without substance " 照見五蘊皆空.
To simply put: "The end of desire is the end of subjectivity". Only then, the mind is
capable of reflecting a mirror like clarity 寂而恆照, 照而恆寂.
The final point to be made here is that, either from a Buddhist perspective or psycho
analysis, at heart of their work, depicts the core meaning of the Four Noble Truths 四聖
諦. The origin of desire 苦諦 as both Nargarjuna and Lacan explicated, has to do with
one's surplus drive rather than the actual seeking. The narcissistic ego, according to
them, is the seat of dukkha 心染故眾生染, 心淨 故眾生淨, the realm of suffering. As for
the path that leads to the cessation of suffering 滅諦, Sartre, Lacan and Nagarjuna, each
offers a way of being in the world of impermanence 無常.
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One may wonder if there is a way to free oneself from the constraint of the Symbolic
Other? To find the answer to this question, one needs to look no further than the
countless literature in Eastern philosophy as it seems suggested by Lacan. Among
various systems and practices concerning the way to a free mind 念念無滯 is the sage
knowledge of Lao-Tzu (5th century BC) and Chuang-Tzu (369 BC), both are influential
Taoist philosophers. They describe that a free man is unconcerned 空有雙泯 , who lives
outside of culture but finds solace in nature. According to their philosophy, all lives are
"Pu 樸", meaning "put together by nature". The literary meaning of Pu is "uncarved
wood"; it refers to the original state of things 本相 prior to the process of societal
indoctrination.
Within the cryptic course of nature, the human self hangs in the peripheral like a speck
of dust in an infinite universe. In a godless world, David Hume offers his consoling
statement, "Nature herself is suffice. One may also think of Sartre's being-in-itself and
Lacan's unsymbolizable Real, are part of the life's mystery, irrelevant to culture and the
psychic state of the mind. Beyond language, ideas and man's search for meaning, all
things are already in tune with a larger universe 曰月星辰, 山河大地 .
Although the experience of nothingness is often associated with alienation,
paradoxically, it also opens to a path of freedom. "One is free when does not get
involved in fixation, attachment or clinging, nor resolved on one's self 不起執心",
affirmed by Nagarjuna. A free mind is a state of non-abiding 非有非空. Through the
unfolding of prajna, the intelligible knowing 妙覺, one can dissipate the unhappy
consciousness into the evanescent 萬滯同盡 and transform the nihilistic nothingness 虛
無 to a free play of no-thing-ness.
Through the unfolding of sunyata, the restless mind is transformed into a quiet heart. 山
堂靜夜坐無言, 寂寂寥寥本自然 (川禪師頌).
February 2013
Foot notes:
1. Nagarjuna's work was translated into Chinese and had great influence on the Sanlun
School 三論宗 (Three Treaties School), an early Mahayana Buddhist sect during the
Sui 隋 and Tang 唐 Dynasty. Ji-Tsang 吉藏, an eminent priest scholar, was
summoned by Emperor Sui (the first emperor to unite both the Southern and
Northern Dynasties 南北朝), to propagate the teachings of Nagarjuna through which
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Buddhism was flourished in China. The Middle Way is a methodology in Nagarjuna's
system. It is a linguistic and dialectic strategy to abandon any absolute position 破相遣
執. The same method was employed in Sanlun School and later incorporated into
the Zen practice (三論宗- 僧詮: 頓跡 幽林, 禪味相得). Its approach is by uttering
paradoxical phrases in order for the teacher to help students to realize that the
unsayable 以心傳心, 不立文字 cannot be attained through rational discourses.
2. 本文主要意旨是依據東西方三個不同的哲學系統，包括沙 特的存在主義、 勒康的心理
分析與龍樹論師的中觀哲學，作互相參照。並延伸他們西方的觀念，來詮釋無我，尤
其是關於依他起性 dependent origination 的論証。也許，這種嚐試 對三論學者以及心
理分析學派來說，可能有越界的問題。事實上，己有學者介紹龍樹的中論與後現代 語
言分解 Linguistic deconstruction 的關聯。
勒康的体系，龐大複雜，深受黑格爾、海德格、人類學以及 超現實主義影響。其主要
思想，包括彿洛依德理論及語言結構分析 structural linguistics。他的後現代「破相」
方法與中觀論近似，甚至可以和禪宗作連結。
References:
1. Jeffrey Hopkins, 1996, Meditation on Emptiness.
2. Jean-Paul Sartre, 2001, Being and Nothingness.
3. Jean-Paul Sartre, 1987, Existentialism and Human Emotions.
4. Jacques Lacan, 2006, Ecrits. Translated by Bruce Fink
5. Lorenzo Chiesa, 2007, Subjectivity and Otherness.
6. Bruce Fink, 1995, The Lacanian Subject -Between Language and Jouissance.
7. Jeanne Wolff Bernstein, 2012, Jacques Lacan from Text Book of Psychoanalysis.
8. Stephen Ross, 2002, A Very Brief Introduction to Lacan.
9. David Hume, 1975, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning
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the Principles of Morals.
10. Sigmund Freud, 1989, Civilization and Its Discontents.
11. Nagarjuna- The Fundamentals of the Middle Way, 1998. Edited by George Cronk
12. Hsueh-Li Cheng, 1981, Nagarjuna, Kant and Wittgenstein.
13. 宗密: 禪源諸詮集都序
14. 黃懺華: 中國佛教史