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Abstract
This paper departs from the hegemonic notion of truth—the cognitive notion of truth—and arrives at four other notions of truth in Marx, Gandhi, Heidegger, and Foucault. It puts the four to a possible dialogue. It argues that one can get a glimpse of the cusp of Marxism and spirituality in the dialogue among the four. The work at the cusp, in turn, renders Marxism asketic and the spiritual phronetic. Thinking at the cusp also inaugurates the possibility of an anti-Oedipal future for Marxism and a this-worldly present for spirituality.
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Acknowledgments
This paper is a “gift” to Serap Kayatekin, whose constant urging inspired us to embark on this not-so-usual journey of bringing to dialog Marxism and spirituality. Special thanks to her and Stephen Healy for reviewing and commenting on the essay. Parts of what is covered here were discussed in classrooms, seminars, and summer schools on Marxism. The political theology study group at Jawaharlal Nehru University—especially Satya Brata Das, Soumyabrata Choudhury, Franson Manjali, Babu Thaliath, Soumick De, and Achia Anzi—has contributed to this paper in mostly noncited ways. The usual disclaimer applies.
Notes
1 The essay asks two questions. One, is it desirable to be totally and unconditionally free of “some faith”? Is such freedom from faith at the root of the problems of the modern proclivity and the current political imagination? Is “spiritual deficit” one of the fundamental problems of Marxism? Two, is it indeed free? Building on Lacan’s Seminar XX, Braungardt (Citation1999) shows how “a central event in the development of Western philosophy and theology was the merger between Christian theology and Greek philosophy [Lacan shows how the Jewish response to human fragility, however, was theological, and not philosophical] … The philosopher who created a synthesis on the basis of a theism, which lasted for almost nine centuries, is Thomas Aquinas. What would we call this? Christianization of (Greek) philosophy? Or the turning Hellenic of Christianity? Does Marx's dual critique—critique of both philosophy and theology—stem from an appreciation of this “merger” by Thomas Aquinas? Does this Marxian double critique—doubled-up critique, one critique folded into the other—then get split into (1) the Foucauldian critique of Christianization and (2) the Derridean critique of the metaphysics of presence?
2 The specter of a thinker, Freud, who purportedly had nothing to do with the political but had lots to do with the noncoercive, the nonjudgmental, and with patient reorganization of desire, haunts this exchange between Marxism and spirituality: “Psychoanalysis offers a method of intervening non-violently between our overbearing conscience and our raging affects, thus forcing our moral and our ‘animal’ natures to enter into respectful reconciliation” (Erikson Citation1969, 439).
3 Derrida (Citation1991, 99) shows how “we have a trio of languages: Greek (pneuma), Latin (spiritus), German (Geist)” and how “Heidegger does not disqualify the immense semantics of breathing, of inspiration or respiration, imprinted in Greek or Latin. He simply says they are less originary.” Marx, however, is responding to the German, to Geist. Building on Derrida's reading of Geist in Heidegger, this essay explores which understanding of Geist Marx is responding to: would Marxism's relationship with spirituality change, get displaced, if the understanding of Geist changes, gets displaced? The last part of the section titled “The Other Spiritual” is a reflection on three other conceptualizations of Geist (in Heidegger), conceptualizations that would render Marxism and spirituality apposite.
4 See the preface to The German Ideology (Marx Citation1932).
5 Including the ghosts/specters of interlocutors “flapping in the wings” of the nineteenth-century “alchemical theatre” in which “one of the most obsessing ghosts among the philosophers of this alchemy would … be Hegel who … situated the passage from the ‘philosophy of nature’ to the ‘philosophy of spirit’” (Derrida Citation1991, 99).
6 One note of caution: the above is put to crisis by Foucault when he brings to a troubled apposition the secular and the theological in his description of European enlightened modernity as a “secular theology” or a kind of “theological secularism.”
7 See the last section of this essay, “‘An Ethical Guide for Transforming Our Communities,’” for a discussion on noncoercive yet Marxian transformation.
8 Religion has conventionally been seen as personal salvation/moksha. Ambedkar, like Marx, saw religion or dhamma as social. From the 1930s, Ambedkar's lifework was to delineate two strategies for emancipation for the Dalits in India. The first was a strategy of critical legal constitutionalism. The other was a turning away from Hinduism in particular and religion in general, not to land in secularism but to arrive at a form of Buddhism that official Buddhism cannot host, and hence a new yana—Navayana as against Hinayana, Mahayana, and Vajrayana. It is as if Ambedkar was looking for a third way—an in-between that puts under erasure the two poles of liberal discourse and theological discourse; the two poles of the theologizing of liberal political views and the politicizing of Buddha's views; the two poles of an ab-Original Enlightenment and an ab-Original religion. This is religion as social, which runs counter to the Orientalism of Buddhist studies and to the commodified discourse of “pop” Buddhism.
9 Lacan also has a “diagnostic relation” with theology: “God can either be a face of the Other, and then he becomes a Father-God, author of the Law. Or he is the dark God of jouissance, the God of the mystics: this God is unconscious” (Braungardt Citation1999). But Lacan also moves toward a radical displacement of theology—Braungardt diagnoses it as “the endpoint of a two-century long project of secularization”—into a “theory of the subject,” recreating the tension between immanence and transcendence within the subject itself.
10 For Marx (Citation1970), religion is “the expression of real distress,” a “protest against real distress,” “the sigh of the oppressed creature,” the “heart of a heartless world,” the “spirit of spiritless conditions,” etc. See the introduction to Marx's Critique of Hegel's Philosophy Of Right.
11 Alternative views of Christianity have been proposed by scholars such as Bloch, Derrida, Agamben, Negri, and Žižek.
12 We see a connection at the level of spiritual exegesis between The Story of My Experiments with Truth and the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. Hadot (Citation2001, 11, and 10, 179–205) sees the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (a better translation of the Greek title would be “Exhortations to Himself”) as “spiritual exercises, practiced according to a certain method … The key to this method, and thus to the Meditations, is to be found in the three philosophical topoi distinguished by Epictetus … judgment, desire, and inclination or impulsion … each of these activities corresponds to a spiritual exercise, a discipline of representation and judgment, a discipline of desire, and a discipline of inclinations or impulses to action.”
13 The Bhagavad Gita According to Gandhi is based on talks given by the Mahatma at the Sabarmati Ashram, Ahmedabad, over a nine-month period between 24 February and 27 November 1926.
14 “As de-legitimization of all worldly sovereign powers, the scandal of religion keeps alive the other absolute demand of mankind for unconditional happiness or justice. It is thus an absolute hope contra all hopelessness of the world. But this hope against all worldly hopelessness is not in turn the ‘other’ world of hope against ‘this’ world of hopelessness, but otherwise than the world at all. Religion is ‘un-worldly’ in that sense and not ‘other-worldly’; happiness is not realized in this ‘worldly’ world, nor in that another world beyond, but which, in its arrival, calls into question each worldly world in the name of the world to come” (Das Citation2014, 18–9).
15 “De l’esprit is a thoroughly French title, much too French to give the sense of the geistig or geistliche of Geist … This motif of spirit or of the spiritual acquires an extraordinary authority in its German language” (Derrida Citation1991, 4–5). Did Marx then reduce the pluripotency of Geist in the German to the simple matrix “matter/idea”?
16 Or circumspection as distinct from religious dogma: phronesis is attentive to “totality constantly sighted beforehand in circumspection,” but it is with this totality, however, that “the world announces itself” (Heidegger Citation1985 [1962], 105).
17 Not just the seminar on phronesis but even “an essay like ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ … offers a number of important insights to a contemporary Marxist criticism wishing to engage with art as a ‘construction’ and an ‘event’ of truth rather than a simple ‘document’ of social reality … Heidegger's notion of the philosopher or artist as a figure who uses words and images as ‘tools’ for engaging with his or her environment, as a precondition for transforming the world, is surely of continuing relevance if Marxism is to continue functioning as a philosophy of ‘praxis’” (Pawling Citation2010, 603).
18 This calls for a move from “transition” to “transformation”: the imagination of the political has hitherto been colonized by the concept of transition; it is time to envision the political in terms of transformation—that of self (à la askesis) and of the social. Because of this obsession with transition, much of Marxism's passion and energy has gone into historical materialism. Gandhi and Tagore, on the other hand, are philosophers of transformation, which is why their vision of the political looks a little strange (and also estranged) when evaluated from standard frameworks of transition, either liberal or Marxian.
19 Epimeleia heautou or “care of oneself is a sort of thorn which must be stuck in men's flesh, driven into their existence … epimeleia heautou is an attitude towards the self, others, and the world … epimeleia heautou is also a certain form of attention, of looking. Being concerned about oneself implies that we look away from the outside … we must convert our looking from the outside, from others and the world etc., towards ‘oneself.’ The epimeleia also always designates a number of actions exercised on the self by the self, actions by which one takes responsibility for oneself and by which one changes, purifies, transforms, and transfigures oneself” (Foucault Citation2005, 8–11).
20 “Out in left field,” Ama Adhe—an eighty-six-year-old Tibetan woman—spent twenty-seven years of her life (1958–85) in a Chinese prison. She now lives in exile in India. Her crimes: she retained faith in a kind of Buddhism torn in turn between a pre-Buddhist paganism of nature Gods and a Tantric sublime; she maintained obeisance toward a spiritual healer, the 14th Dalai Lama; her life perspectives and personal standpoints were not in tune with “Chinese Marxism,” which in turn was a shorthand for “Han nationalism,” “modern statecraft,” “democratic centralism” (with little attention to the “democratic”), the “rule of Party priests” in the name of the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” etc., and what could be called “secular theologisms” or “theological secularisms” (see Tapontsang Citation1997). What would contemporary efforts at rethinking Marxism make of the story of this woman? How would it reflect or fold back on the given idioms of Marxism? Would it? Let us also not forget, in the process, the story of the other left field, Sri Lankan Theravada Buddhism, which corners, pulverizes, and violates the rights of countless Tamilians, both Hindu and Muslim.
21 See Gibson-Graham, Cameron, and Healy (Citation2013).
22 As Derrida suggests in his rereading of Geist—Geist not as speculation or idealism. And it is this re-turning that makes Marxism apposite to the spiritual.
23 Pyarelal (Citation1951, 160), a close associate of Gandhi, observed that the ruling principle of Gandhi's Ashram life was “to each according to his need, from each according to his capacity.” This is a communist principle. In this regard, “His Ashrams are thus themselves experiments in Communism based on non-violence and Indian village conditions.” Gandhi (Citation1951, 152) confronted the Indian Communists thus: “You claim to be Communists, but you do not seem to live the life of Communism. I may tell you that I am trying my best to live up to the ideal of Communism in the best sense of the term.” Finally, Gandhi argued against the Communists by insisting on the importance of self-social transformation: “Socialism is a beautiful word … In order to reach this state we may not look on things philosophically and say that we need not make a move until all are converted to socialism. Without changing our life we may go on giving addresses, forming parties and hawk-like seize the game when it comes our way. This is no socialism. The more we treat it as game to be seized, the farther it must recede from us. Socialism begins with the first convert. If there is one such, you can add zeros to the one and the first zero will account for ten and every addition will account for ten times the previous number. If, however, the beginner is a zero, in other words, no one makes the beginning, multiplicity of zeros will also produce zero value. Time and paper occupied in writing zeroes will be so much waste” (9–10).