The “Beautiful Soul” and “Religious Consciousness”: Deleuze and Nishida

ABSTRACT

A well-known term in eighteenth-century literature and philosophy, the “beautiful soul” (die schöne Seele) has resurfaced in recent years. Deleuze refers to the beautiful soul’s “religiosity” and argues that aggressive “selection” is necessary as its antidote. However, in volatile contexts of social destabilization, such selection risks recoiling into reactionary violence. After first developing in more detail the beautiful soul’s background as a discursive figure, I argue that understanding Deleuze’s selection within a context of spiritual experience is necessary to mitigate this worry. Exploration of this experience is pursued through juxtaposition of Deleuze’s thought with Nishida Kitarō’s investigation of the ontological structure of religious consciousness. The comparative resonances I develop suggest an ontological objectivity to the problems and structuring of the logos of religious consciousness and show how a more explicitly spiritual rendering of “selection,” developed through the Deleuze/Nishida encounter, intervenes into the broader beautiful soul problematic.

KEYWORDS:

• Deleuze
• Nishida
• religious consciousness
• beautiful soul
• violence
• self

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Timothy Morton diagnoses “beautiful soul syndrome” as a self-defeating attitude of separation between corrupting humans and an idealized nature that environmentalism must save (Morton 2010). Slavoj Zizek refers to the “beautiful soul” in criticizing popular liberal morality for hypocritical righteousness: “They play the Beautiful Soul, which feels superior to the corrupted world while secretly participating in it: they need this corrupted world as the only terrain where they can exert their moral superiority” (2016, 8). Discussion of the beautiful soul is also found in Lacan and various psycho-therapeutic literatures (Bazzano 2018; Lacan 2006).

2 For a comprehensive historical study, see Norton 1995. Jean Hyppolite (likely one source for Deleuze's familiarity with the figure) stresses its roots in German Pietism (Hyppolite 1974; Seidel 2008).

3 The “beautiful soul” also appears in Hegel’s early theological work, Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate, but its usage is not critical there (Seidel 2008, 365).

4 Scholars generally see Fichte and Novalis as Hegel's most definitive targets. His reference to the beautiful soul as one whose “light dies away within it . . . like a shapeless vapor that dissolves into thin air” (400) is often read as reference to Novalis’s early death from tuberculosis (Beiser 2009, 223; Pinkard 2002, 148). Pinkard adds “Goethe, Friedrich Schlegel, Fichte, Fries, Novalis, perhaps Rousseau, and maybe even Hölderlin” (240, n19) as additional possible beautiful soul references.

5 Norton reminds us that “Hegel abhorred hypocrisy in all of its forms” (1995, 279). In the Phenomenology, Hegel states “hypocrisy must be unmasked” ([1807] 1977, 401).

6 Recognizing the demands of the Other externalizes false self-sufficiency and leads to completion at a higher level: a synthesis of “absolute Spirit” (Hegel 1977, 408; Beiser 2009, 224).

7 Deleuze critiques “good” and “common” sense as mutually reinforcing assumptions of the dogmatic image of thought in both the Logic of Sense (1990) and Difference and Repetition (1994). Common sense “contributes the form of the Same” and good sense “distributes” this form through categorical judgments deemed universal (Deleuze [1969] 1994, 131–134). Whereas common sense serves interests of “identifying and recognizing,” good sense projects such identities into the future in the interest of prediction and “foreseeing” (Deleuze [1969] 1990, 78).

8 Édouard Glissant articulates this affective dynamic with great insight. His notion of “creolization” stresses how the irreducible unpredictability of creative encounter challenges the way that “certainty” endeavors to keep control: “Creolization is unpredictable, it is never fixed, or stopped, or inscribed in essences or absolutes of identity” ([1997] 2020, 14).

9 Certainty operates both epistemically and ethically, part of Deleuze’s point in referring to the dogmatic image of thought as a “moral” choice (Deleuze [1969] 1994, 131–132).

10 The reference to “bloody contradiction” is surprising given Deleuze’s critique of contradiction as “less profound than difference” (Deleuze [1969] 1994, 51). However, we can distinguish between metaphysical conditions and historical narration of conflict through contradiction’s reductive lens.

11 Ramey (2012) shows the extent to which “spiritual ordeal” is constitutive of Deleuze’s conception of thinking in a manner largely consistent with my argument here.

12 This is the title rendered by David Dilworth. The other English translation by Yusa Michiko translates it as “The Logic of Topos and the Religious Worldview” (Nishida [1949] 1986).

13 Michiko translates this as “Religion is a spiritual fact” (事実) (Nishida [1949] 1986, 1).

14 Maraldo’s “How Nishida Individualized Religion” dwells on the complexity of this point. Because “religion takes a view of the world . . . there is a philosophical articulation, a logos, that is proper to this view-taking” distinct from autobiographical, psychological, anthropological, and sociological studies (2017, 129–132, 135).

15 Indeed, when Nishida insists that “religious faith pertains to something objective,” he means ontologically, not culturally or anthropologically (Nishida [1949] 1987, 85).

16 As Masao Abe suggests, if Zen provided some of the experiential direction for Nishida’s thought, “for it to become a philosophical answer, he [Nishida] had to engage in philosophical thinking . . . to transform Zen experience into a philosophical answer” (Nishida [1921] 1990, xiii).

17 Nagatamo renders this pattern, which repeats throughout the sutra, in propositional form as “‘A is not A, therefore it is A’” (2000, 213).

18 I refer to “good” and “common” sense following Deleuze’s critique. See note 7 above.

19 No doubt cultural difference in Nishida’s thought is an issue of further complexity, but it is not essential to the argument I develop here. For additional discussions, see Nishitani [1982] 2016, 77 106; Maraldo 2017, 21–57, Heisig 2013, 123–140.

20 There is no evidence of Deleuze being familiar with Nishida, whose works begin to appear in French translation in the late 1990s. There are indications of an awareness of Buddhism and specifically Zen, however. Tony See cites three explicit references to Buddhism in Deleuze’s oeuvre [in Nietzsche and Philosophy, A Thousand Plateaus, and What is Philosophy? (See 2019, 106–108)]. See does not mention perhaps the most interesting reference, a footnote referring to Dogen’s Shōbōgenzō (published in French in 1980) as invoking a “horizon or “reserve” of events” (Deleuze, 220, n2). Wirth makes a compelling case for Dogen’s relevance in relation to Deleuze’s “plane of immanence” (2019, 77–79). Higaki (2020) traces parallels between Deleuze and Nishida through the shared Bergsonian influence.

21 On this point, Nishida’s final essay remains consistent with his first book, An Inquiry into the Good (善の研究, Zen no kenkyū): “The religious demand is a demand that concerns the self as a whole, the life of the self . . . true religion seeks the transformation of the self and the reformation of life” ([1921] 1990, 149). Nishida’s emphasis on “unity” as a goal of this transformation is tempered, though not eliminated completely, by the time of the final essay under examination here. The quality of this unity is a potential divergence in considering the Deleuze/Nishida encounter.

22 Nishida’s “problematic” resonates with Deleuze’s claim that: “Being is also non-being, but non-being is not the being of the negative, rather, it is the being of the problematic” (Deleuze [1969] 1994, 64, emphasis in original). Smith declares that Deleuze’s “fundamental metaphysical position is that Being is a problem; Being always presents itself under a problematic form” (2012, 136).

23 The jiriki/tariki terminology is most famously associated with Shinran and True Pure Land sect (Jōdo Shinshū). Ultimately, this relation must be understood through the reciprocal logic of the soku.

24 Nishida’s language of “self-negation” has Hegelian overtones that Deleuze would not endorse. More technical investigation is necessary, but as a preliminary note, the outcome of negation is not conceived as synthesis into a higher union. Rather, it realizes a “bottomlessly contradictory identity” that perpetually displaces stable ossification of subject self or object other (Nishida [1949] 1987, 85–86).

25 Nor is this transcendence a Neo-Platonic/Christian move out of a fallen world of becoming. Rather, Nishida states that in contrast to the “objectively transcendent,” religious consciousness is discovered through the “immanently transcendent” (Nishida [1949] 1987, 110).

26 Deleuze stresses the distinction between “history” and “becoming” in a manner that also shows their inherent relation: “Without history, becoming would remain indeterminate and unconditioned, but becoming is not historical” (Deleuze and Guattari [1991] 1994, 96).

27 Nishida notes explicitly: “The interpretation of eschatological here is different from that of Christianity” ([1949] 1987, 110). Such contrasting notions invite further investigation. For a magisterial study of eschatological structure in Western philosophical thought, see Taubes [1947] 2009.

28 See note 26 above.

29 Wirth characterizes upāya as “the capacity to translate something true into the terms and conventions of the prevailing mindset” (2019, xxii), and he offers insightful discussion of what this means in a specifically philosophical context (65–69).

30 In a 1902 diary entry, Nishida writes: “Scholarship is after all pursued for the sake of life. Life holds first place. Without life, scholarship is useless” (cited in Nishitani [1982] 2016, 31).

31 First proposed by Ferdinand Tönnie, the Gesellschaft/Gemeinschaft distinction is often translated as society and community.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Russell J. Duvernoy

Russell J. Duvernoy is Associate Professor of Philosophy at King’s University College in London, Ontario. He works at the intersection of process philosophies and world comparative philosophy. His essays have appeared in Environmental Philosophy, Contemporary Pragmatism, Southern Journal of Philosophy, and Philosophy Today among other journals. His monograph Affect and Attention after Deleuze and Whitehead: Ecological Attunement was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2020.