non-spinozan karma
It is said that a boy picked up a handful of sand and offered it to the passing Buddha as alms. The common offering was food. But this was a most meritorious deed — the boy was reborn in his next life as the great king-to-be Ashoka. The Dhamma flourished in Ashoka’s kingdom. What a destiny the world held in store for the little boy!
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The layperson and philosopher alike position destiny at the end of a chain: destiny is the fatedness of outcomes. Why, then, does Deleuze think so highly of the “prince” of philosophers, Spinoza? More specifically, how does Deleuzean destiny trace a direct line back to Spinoza, whose concept of such seems so at adds with Deleuze’s? Spinozan destiny is an absolute predetermination, more absolute than most conceptions before it. The innovation was, of course, that God is absolutely perfect in His predetermination; it took nothing away from His perfection to act out His destiny. Does Deleuze not invert the colors of the picture? Even the concept “free will” seems to be an understatement for the freeness of the Deleuzean cosmos. As Nietzsche puts it, we are but a thousand little souls, each with its own character. Each soul is small, not much more than a passive synthesis of an immediate contraction, containing within it only the basic elements necessary for Life: sensibility, memory, Time, and generality. A thousand wills in each passing moment, so free that even the very next moment cannot be determined by the previous. Yet, he is enraptured by four moments in the history of philosophy that espouse the strongest of positions on destiny: the Stoic fate, the Spinozan perfection, the Nietzschean return, and the Leibnizian series.
What is the active synthesis of these conceptions that allows for a powerful new rendering of destiny — one which is the exact same repudiation enacted by the Buddhists against their predecessors (“Hinduism” and “Jainism”)? I will ignore Leibniz and the Stoics, for now, and focus on the other two.
In Spinoza we find a conception of pure freedom. Compare it to the Enlightened conception, namely, that of causality: a mechanistic universe traces series of causality infinitely back in time, leading us to the present Point and a past Web, the latter with interlocking lines, sure, but lines which are nonetheless distinguished from one another. The limit of this infinite series draws finer and finer threads (this subparticle has this even smaller agent, which fills the space between this and that subparticle, etc.), but it never operates at the limit, instead resigning itself to an ever-finer process of magnification, precision, and experimentation. (A note here that the quantum mechanical view is not so different; it is, after all, still quantized in the end.) Spinozan predetermination, on the other hand, is markedly non-Newtonian. It is not that this force or this element produces that effect or that outcome; we are only allowed to think of the total unity in relation to its causal flow through time. When we do this, no longer can we say this causes that — indeed, no longer can we say anything causal, only that there is causality. In other words, Spinoza allows causality to reach its final limit and become not the causality Of, but Causality in itself and for itself. Every moment is prewritten, but as to the individual words, we cannot say. It is nothing but a spiritual burden taken off our shoulders; causality is, and that’s it. Moral license to justify an action on causal bases is not allowed. If Spinoza allows destiny of outcome, it is only insofar as it is the destiny of all outcomes, and not any particular. Modes of God, thus, are post-facto items, not constitutive elements. The unity comes first, and finally, we are freed from having to mix in the complications of causality into our daily actions (what a neurosis that creates!). The unity speaks, over and over, and over. God is powerful, definitely, but is He not also a little annoying? Sometimes I would like a pause…
The unity eternally returns. It wears its modes as masks (shall we add playfulness to the list of God’s qualities?) and in between scenes there is no time for costume changes. Nietzsche’s question of the eternal return does not forego an understanding of this fact. When he poses his scenario, he must have done so in full acknowledgement that this was already the present state of things. It is the entire world which continually and incessantly keeps reasserting itself, at every moment, with every action. We don’t have the luxury of separation; any distinguishing statement of causality (“this is because of that”) is only a partial truth. There is a repetition we are doomed to, and the doom is not the repetition itself, but the sheer unstoppability of its returning force. Beings who ascend to the Deva realms, living out their eons in unimaginable bliss, still must fall back to the ground one day. Under this stage light we cannot hide from, we live our moments doing one thing over and over: creating concepts. Or, in other words, philosophizing. The concept or the fixed crystal or the calcified field-moment must necessarily lie underneath every intention. Bergson identified this: all concepts carry with them an inherent telos. All concepts convert time to space, they carve out a pocket of space and temporary stasis, or a world where time stops just a little bit. But there is always slippage, and the larger the construction, the greater the slippage. The largest constructions require the most upkeep, are affected by the most things, and have the most degrees of freedom. The primacy of the concept in its relation to spatiality is the reason why the Dharma clearly and unequivocally states that the root poison is not greed, not hate, but ignorance. It took me a long time to wrap my head around this. Is it not affectation that yields the construction? It felt backwards to think that something as unfeeling as the Concept could be underneath the most immediate realities of our lives: pain and pleasure. And still does not feel entirely right. But there is one thing I must keep reminding myself: the most basic sensibilities are still primal generalizations. Primal territories.
This is all to say that the eternal return is nothing but the force of samsara. It is the force that subdues the greatest gods and the lowest demons, the perpetual recurrency of a Life.
All it takes is a small shift to get from Spinoza to Deleuze, but it is a small shift with radical consequences. The shift is this: what if we treat destiny not as the destiny of outcome, but the destiny of choice? (On the battlefield, Krishna tells Arjuna that he is never entitled to the fruits of his actions, but only to the actions themselves.) At first, assigning destiny to the beginning of the chain, not the end, feels too flimsy. What is it to say that we are always allowed choice? Can we not then exit causal outcomes at any time? This is only an epi-difficulty, borne from a misreading. If you read into it, you find that it is a much darker truth. The destiny of choice at every instance brings you to the absolute limits of your energy. You are never allowed to step back from the matter of choosing. This is not to say that karma does not have outcome, or that the outcomes do not affect you in any way. It is, instead, a position of radical inevitability. It is your destiny that the fact of choice, of even the smallest passive syntheses, will torment your every moment. You will always be doomed to repeat the world, but it will always be a repetition of your own choosing.
We must undertake this shift because we have already conceded that the smallest phenomena are still intentions. The total sum of the outcome of past karma only exists virtually in a presently created past, i.e. the past-for-itself. Karma always fruits, but at this moment, at this very moment, there is nothing but the intentions created and the actions produced from those intentions. We must navigate this space with care, delicacy, and completeness. The space lends itself easily to misconception, and partial understanding is a dangerous thing, especially here. One must not mistake, for example, the conception of karma as destiny-of-choice for a conception of personal responsibility for misgivings; it is not a moral concept, it does not offset the structural and political forces of greed, capital, industry, and colony that pervade our lives and make certain decisions impossible…
(to be continued at a later date.)
