I will situate these questions under the sign or the oracle of opening, thus of egological nonclosure, of renunciation of narcissistic self-importance, the first condition of listening and of speaking that the tradition of India taught me.
According to this tradition, no theory or practice is ever completed. Both are always evolving. The task is to try to connect the here and now of today, this present moment of our life, to the reality of yesterday and that of tomorrow. It is useless therefore to do too much in order to immortalize the whole immediately. It is impossible. On the other hand, it is a matter of doing enough to attempt to pass from the present reality to immortality or eternity.
Moreover, I do not know the exact historical date of this present moment, its material or spiritual birthdate; I do not know its age. This imprecision regarding the state of development of the universe, of the living world, and of the human species obliges me, in all strictness, to questioning, to incompleteness or to relativity. It is not, therefore, a question of uttering a truth valid once and for all but of trying to make a gesture, faithful to the reality of yesterday and to that of today, that indicates a path toward more continuity, less tearing apart, more interiority, concentration, harmony—in me, between me and the living universe, between me and the other(s), if that is or becomes possible, as I hope it is, given respect for the living universe and its temporality.
I return then to Schopenhauer in order to ask some questions starting from his texts, which I have not yet read exhaustively. According to him, I have therefore read nothing. And I understand this irritation of the author who takes care over his journey and to whom only a part is returned. But Schopenhauer believes that there is not great progress in our development. He also teaches that the human species will be condensed, without differentiation or evolution, in him as in each human being. Certain chapters of his writings reveal therefore the whole of his work and even the whole of the truth of the man that he is, even of the humanity that he claims to recapitulate in himself.
I will not linger over his Essay on Women, except to underline that this text is not at all the inverse of his work as Didier Raymond, who wrote the preface to the French edition, claims it to be. It finds a totally coherent place there. I am going to try to make that clear.
I am only astonished that, while so many women have intelligent things to say and so many men are still unknown, a publisher cared to print such a little book, and at such a price. That confirms what Schopenhauer reveals to us, among other truths: philosophy is a matter of death. A philosopher living and thinking life is a priori suspect in our philosophical culture. Thus begins the chapter “On Death and Its Relation to the Indestructibility of Our Inner Nature” (2:463) in The World as Will and Representation: “Death is the real inspiring genius or Musagetes of philosophy, and for this reason Socrates defined philosophy as thanatou mélétè (preparation for death; Plato, Phaedo, 81a). Indeed, without death there would hardly have been any philosophizing. It will therefore be quite in order for a special consideration of this subject to have its place here at the beginning of the last, most serious, and most important of our books.”1
I will begin from this chapter as well as those entitled “The Metaphysics of Sexual Love,”“On the Vanity and Suffering of Life,” “The Hereditary Nature of Qualities,” “On the Possibility of Knowing the Thing-in-Itself,” “On the Primacy of the Will in Self-Consciousness.”
I will not make precise references to them. I have constructed my analysis more particularly in relation to these chapters. Which does not exclude a reading of the texts On Vision and Colors and On the Will in Nature, a reading that has not contradicted until now the interpretation of Schopenhauer that I am going to sketch in order to interrogate it.
SCHOPENHAUER’S PHILOSOPHICAL INTENTION
Schopenhauer’s metaphysics can be defined, according to me, as biological materialism. The will of which he speaks does not correspond to a will of the becoming of the spirit nor even of the flesh, that is, to an individuation. It is a blind pathos of the reproduction of the species. For Schopenhauer what we designate generally as a duty to reproduce, to give birth, is linked to the most obscure and elementary passion of man. Of man, in effect. Because the will is, according to him, masculine, and intelligence is feminine. The reproduction of the species is therefore a concern of man. But this passion or this dynamis corresponds to the substance of metaphysics and of transcendence.
Contrary to what we have generally been taught, meta-physics, according to Schopenhauer, is not situated in an ascending economy of forms, of norms, of ideas more and more transcendent to the sensible and to matter. No. Metaphysics resides in the dynamism of reproductive chromosomes that tear man away from his individual being. I am—Schopenhauer asserts—projected outside of myself by my will to reproduce the species. Love between lovers represents nothing but an irresistible reproductive attraction. Their sorrows and groanings—Schopenhauer speaks little of their joys …—are only those of the species and nothing can oppose them. As individuals, the lovers do not exist, and both men and women are treated here in the same way. Neither the one nor the other exist and they are differentiated only by the hierarchy of natural functions. There too, contrary to what could be expected, the will prevails over intelligence. Would I dare to say that the old brain prevails over the new? That is neither totally correct nor totally exact. But the allusion will make it clear, if need be, that once again Schopenhauer confounds our habitual ways of thinking. We have been taught that women were passionate and men intelligent, capable of sublimating their passions. For Schopenhauer it is nothing like this. But if you think, as women, that you will find here some kind of valorization, you are wrong: intelligence is only a passive emanation of the will. The least flick of the will makes it change opinion. No intelligence—not even that of men, unless they are beings of great genius—can resist the will.
Thus Schopenhauer’s metaphysics does without representable formal ideals, without overtly confessed divine transcendence; the transcendence of the other is not claimed there either. The transcendence of metaphysics resides in the genius of the species that merges with the masculine will to reproduce.
Before laughing too quickly, it would be fitting to make sure that what Schopenhauer expresses is not hidden in the majority of philosophies called Western, more exactly in philosophical discourse starting from a certain epoch of domination of culture by patriarchy. In other words, does not Schopenhauer go to the end of things by bringing to light that which most veil with a maya, an art of illusion, that is more or less clever and blinding? Does not Schopenhauer attest altogether bluntly what others do without saying or knowing it: philosophy corresponds to an absolute patriarchalism and it is a matter of death?
Does not what is described as pessimism in Schopenhauer’s work correspond, at least in part, to the revelation of an elementary truth that has founded metaphysics for ages, at least in our cultures? Man essentially wants to reproduce, nothing can stop him from doing this, not even the intelligence of women, and this will, when it does not produce natural children, gives birth to imaginary children. Philosophy and religion are two of them. This necessity of reproduction would correspond to the genius of the species of which men are the guardians.
Thus man is the slave of a genius, of the genius that obliges him to transcend himself in and by reproduction. Schopenhauer often confines his discussion to natural reproduction. It seems to me that the reproduction that is called spiritual grows from the same will as long as it is not interpreted in the light of such revelations. Schopenhauer says it. Nietzsche asserts it very explicitly: his works are his children.
So all of metaphysics is neatly overturned by Schopenhauer or, more exactly, pursued all the way to its root and beyond. Its dynamis is the work of the will inscribed in the masculine seed. Truth would not be as transcendent as it is attested, discreetly but in an authoritarian way, or its transcendence is the work of maya that blinds the philosophers themselves. Unveiled, truth is spermatic. Logos spermatikos, if one prefers to invoke it or evoke it in another language and in a field not directly philosophical in order to maintain a little of its mystery.
Schopenhauer’s questioning, at first glance naive, is fundamental. And every truth would have significance setting out again from this biological revelation. How to interpret this position of the philosophical unveiled by Schopenhauer? How to interpret the work of Schopenhauer himself? How to give his work a meaning or a future other than those that he proposes? All of which could be restated another way: how to reconstruct what he deconstructs?
THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE GENUS
Two places can serve as fulcrums or as sites for putting Schopenhauer’s philosophy into perspective. They are not foreign to one another:
1.The question, to some extent natural, of the difference of the sexes that Schopenhauer treats in a biologically inexact manner. Let us say, for example, that he confuses genus and species.
2.The Hindu tradition to which Schopenhauer appeals in order to hold his discourse and which, unlike his own truths and will, never distances itself from the body or from nature as micro- and macrocosm, which it is a matter of cultivating with the aim of winning the happiness of immortality or of eternity while discharging one’s human task.
According to me these two sites—the tradition of India and the question of the cultural status of sexual difference—are linked, inasmuch as “Hinduism, such as it appears since the end of the Middle Ages, represents the synthesis, but with a marked predominance of aboriginal factors,”2 of Indo-European and pre-Aryan aboriginal Asiatic cultures. The cultures of Hinduism would have resisted the influence of patriarchy and its economy: pastoral, nomadic, celestial, atmospheric, through a defense of places, in particular the earth and its plants and foods, through the respect for traditions of the mother and of woman, more faithful to life in its concrete aspects, to religion in its perceptible and mystical dimension. The contribution of patriarchalized Indo-Europeans consisting among other things in ritualism and philosophical and religious speculations.
Thanks to this presence of feminine traditions, India has retained traces of pre-patriarchal cultures. It has also developed certain cultural dimensions that we have nearly forgotten. In India men and women are gods together, and together they create the world, including its cosmic dimension. The divine couples, whether it is Vishnu or Shiva, along with their lovers, are microcosms in constant economic relations with the macrocosm; the same goes for Tantrism. These couples are generally represented without children. They are lovers, and lovers of the universe.
We are far here from Schopenhauer’s genius of the species. We are close to a possible philosophy, wisdom, or religion of sexual difference of which India is perhaps one of the places of emergence or of subsistence.
But of which India does Schopenhauer speak? Which India is evoked in Western philosophy, when it is evoked? The greater part of the Hindu tradition remains unknown to it except in the case of some practitioners of the Vedas, of yoga, of mantras, of the texts or the art of India. But these people most often know the Western philosophical tradition poorly and do not secure the possible passages between the two traditions, or at least they fail or are reluctant to do it. The only chance for a correct interpretation of Hindu thought is found nevertheless with these men, or women, because this Indian culture does not separate theory and practice, notably in love. And we risk interpreting it very badly if we do not approach it with an appropriate practice. It seems that this misunderstanding exists, for example in the work of Schopenhauer. He has retained certain elements of the Indian tradition, but has he not perverted these in taking them out of their framework, this word being understood with a rigor to which we are little accustomed? I would like to give some examples of this concerning 1. temporality in the strict sense, 2. the practice of philosophy, 3.the interpretation of suffering and the joy of living, 4. the intention concerning the will to live, 5. the question of individuation, 6. the question of the status of knowledge.
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER’S EGOLOGICAL CONFUSIONS
1.Time, temporality, in India could not belong to the genius of the human species alone. This egological, egocentric, passion is unknown to the diverse traditions of India. Man is never at the center there, but he also is not “less than,” “not as good as” some animal for example, as he would be according to Schopenhauer’s statements. Man is, and, inasmuch as he is, he must devote himself to being at the service of macro- or microcosmic temporality. The Vedas, the Upanishads, and yoga have for their principal function to assure the articulation between the instant and immortality or eternity. Sometimes it is above all a matter of constituting or creating a macrocosmic unity through rites relative to the days, to the seasons, to the years, rites practiced among others by the Brahmins; sometimes the accent is put on the realization of a unity or individual immortality, even an eternity, through the control of breathing, thanks in particular to yoga but also to the Upanishads.3 Nothing is more foreign to the traditions of India than the metaphysical pathos of reproduction. This could only be a Western translation of the respect for life supposing it evoked happiness. But that does not amount to the same thing. Thus the Vedic gods, the Brahmins, and the yogis care about the maintenance of the life of the universe and that of their body as cosmic nature. They care about them at each moment. Their task is to articulate a continuity between the present and immortality or eternity. The question that I would pose on this subject is, Why is the present time perceived as discontinuous? Or, starting from what or when is it thus perceived? By whom? I am going to return to this. I wanted to emphasize that, unlike the traditions of India, the time of life, according to Schopenhauer, is no more than an abstract survival of the species whose cause is situated before my birth or after my death. The present, unless it be an a priori framework, is for Schopenhauer no more than an unfortunate and passively suffered temporality between these two moments that escape my will but determine it. No present or presence for Schopenhauer. The gods of India, the Brahmins, the yogis are, on the contrary, in the present, or they start from it and look for the means to repair, to reestablish, a torn up cosmic time through the constitution of immortality or of eternity for the universe and for oneself.
2. I can try to make this understood speculatively. In order to comprehend it or, rather, to realize it effectively, it is fitting to do, to act. That does not mean recourse to some more or less occult or accessible cult or initiation. Certainly, it is necessary to learn the practice from one who knows it. The same goes for philosophy or grammar in our civilization. What I wanted to signal is that the present, temporality, the relation between the instant and immortality or eternity is constituted by acts, and not only by words, logical and grammatical conventions, already coded meaning, a prioris, etc. These acts, realized by certain Brahmins or yogis, for example, are not ritualized in the way we have a tendency to understand it. That is, they are not simply repetitive. They obtain the sought after efficacy—namely, the passage between present, past, and future—only if they are well done, well articulated, and well articulating. They vary therefore from one day to another, because the present time changes from one day to the next. What we could interpret as ritualism or boring asceticism signifies, for these practitioners, the accomplishment of acts, of gestures, appropriate for linking the body to the universe, the instant to duration, etc. They aim at a plenitude, at obtaining the status of immortals by surmounting the discontinuity of time; they are a contribution to the happiness of the self and of the world through the exercise of daily practices. Why daily? Because the day is the unit of measure. The season is another unit, the year yet another one.
We are unaccustomed to hearing this discourse concerning India because our tradition, since the golden age of the Greeks in particular, has begun to break the continuity between micro- and macrocosm. Philosophy, religion (apart from the liturgy celebrating the times of the year?), language, progress have become constructions of a socio-logical subject cut off from its cosmo-logical, bio-logical rootedness. In other words, science, knowledge are here generally relative to a social status of the individual and not to the articulation between micro- and macrocosm, body and universe, physical and spiritual temporality, present and eternity, etc. What we call metaphysics corresponds, in its negative side, to an ill-considered sacrifice of the body and of the universe to a coded and codeable knowledge outside a present act, to a truth that is valid in all times and all places.
This sacrifice is accompanied by the decline of the divine character of sexual difference, by the destruction of feminine religious traditions and of cultural, worshipful relations between mothers and daughters and between women. This is to the benefit of masculine genealogies alone.
The positive aspect that is invoked is the establishment of a democracy. I think that it would be necessary to reflect very rigorously on the destructive means employed for the establishment of this democracy, on the fact that it signifies the substitution of a public power practiced between men alone for a social order in which all human beings participate in the management of the civil and religious order.
A democracy in which only men exercise power and elect the officials of the city is, from the beginning, undemocratic. We have not finished observing its destructive fallout and impasses, including in the dissociation between the spoken, speakable discourses and the actions undertaken. Including in the gaps between coded truth and the demands of our time as well.
3. In India, at least according to tradition, the word remains gesture, in particular a phonatory one, and acts or movements cannot be separated from it. We have forgotten this because of patriarchal censorships and repressions carried out upon the relation of truth to the corporeal, to the sexual, to the macrocosm. Even the Buddha and Buddhism are sometimes used to further this forgetting and misunderstanding of the tradition of India, including in its association with a nihilistic pessimism. It is true that the Buddha goes away from what is not going well in the present with a view to liberation, to detachment. But that does not imply a negative judgment on the present nor on life, quite the contrary. Renunciation, for the Buddha, represents the way of access to continuity and to harmony. To practice renunciation does not signify, for him, sacrificing oneself for a hypothetical immortality or eternity but bringing them about here and now. Such work cannot be carried out in a purely speculative manner, which is another Western error in the interpretation of the Buddha’s teaching. He never separated himself from the economy of the living universe, notably the vegetal. If he renounces—at least according to our perspective—it is because the objects of desire, the objective correlates of my subjective desires, oppose harmony with the universal breath. They tear me to pieces. The quest of the Buddha seems to me to correspond to the search for a continuous communion with the respiration of the macrocosm. In order to attain such fluidity, the Buddha renounces the punctuality, the discontinuity, of objects and, moreover, of discourses. He tries to become pure subject but on a model forgotten by us: pure subject means here breathing in tune with the breathing of the entire living universe. If there is suffering in living, it is that this universal and continuous communication or communion is difficult to carry out. It is not a question, for all that, of wishing for death, because if death happens before this education of the breath, of the subject as breath, it means going back where all would start over again, and worse …
But the Buddha cannot be understood without the Vedic gods, the Brahmins, the Upanishads, yoga, etc. We make of him an export product abstracted from his practice, from his truth, if we thoughtlessly take him out of the places and the times of his coming. We also misinterpret him if we reduce him to discourse—including by using him to critique Western discursivity—while forgetting his gestures. The Buddha makes himself gestures. He even gives up speaking, undoubtedly because speaking harmonizes with breathing with difficulty—except in song and poetry?—and brings discontinuity to it. Moreover, speaking generally supposes an object of speech. Now the Buddha renounces every object, the object always being partial, nonabsolute, a cause of conflicts, sorrows.
4. But to renounce objects, once more, does not mean renouncing life. The time of life, in most of the traditions of India (which correspond to the evolution of a single thought where what is at stake is precisely the question of time), corresponds to the time of cultivating my life in harmony with that of the universe. Philosophies and/or religions present themselves in India as practices the intention of which is to live the happiest life possible thanks to the renunciation of that which hinders living, particularly in harmony with the living universe, its past, its present, and its future. These practices aim, among other things or principally, at realizing the immortality or the eternity of the self and of the world here and now. The meaning of the philosophical and religious practices of the Indian tradition is misunderstood most of the time, notably as concerns the time of life and its economy seeking to attain the absolute happiness of immortality or eternity here below. Detachment has for its goal the end of misfortune, of illusion tied to the partial character of the truth. These philosophical and religious practices are not without intention, as is often presented to us, or as we risk imagining it; they are, on the contrary, evaluated according to their efficacy. But their intention should be understood in a different sense than the one we generally give to this word. Intention does not aim at an exterior object or project with the objective of an appropriation, of a consumption, or of a possession. Intention has as its objective the constitution of an accomplished interiority that remains tied to and in constant communion with the whole of the world. If you are having trouble grasping what is at issue, perhaps the contemplation of certain representations of the Buddha in meditation will be able to convey to you something of the nature of his intention.
5. These few elements of the Indian tradition seem rather different from the use that Schopenhauer makes of them. Yet I chose them in response to what he cites of this culture. I have not spoken of Vishnu, of Krishna, of Shiva and of their loves, for example. Now these philosophico-religious representations are not less important than the others, including in popular practices but also in those of certain Brahmins and yogis of India today. They are closer to feminine aboriginal cultures, thus more foreign still to the Western philosopher than the Buddha is. But already certain misunderstandings appear evident in what Schopenhauer recovers from the Hindu tradition:
—There can be no question, in this culture, of sacrificing the individual for the species. Every living being—human, animal, plant, or element of the universe—is considered here with very great respect. Moreover, the Hindus do not at all worship reproduction. The loving couple that they form generally reproduces two children out of consideration for the order of the living. They are two and they engender two children. This is their contribution to the time of the world: mortal and immortal. Finally, the Hindus worship individuation as body, as self, but not as ego. Now is not Schopenhauer’s genius of the species in fact egological?
—The species, according to the traditions of India, cannot be reduced to one genus, nor the genius of the human species to the masculine gender. The gods, including the god of gods, Vishnu, create the universe with their lovers. It is their loves that give birth to the micro- and macrocosm, it is their amorous misfortunes that destroy them. The two are evoked together, embracing, and in relation with the elements of the universe. These are represented as exterior but linked to a part of the body: thus Vishnu often has a foot in the water and Shiva often has fire in his hand.
To be sure, there are in India tensions between feminine aboriginal cultures and patriarchal Aryan cultures. It is significant that Western philosophy recovers only the most Aryan elements of the Indian tradition. Instead of transforming this error into conflicts between men, it would seem more useful to understand that it is always a question of a choice of men to the detriment of pre-patriarchal cultures still living in India. If we confine ourselves to theoretical and political quarrels between men, nothing allows us to get out of these conflicts, as murderous as they are. That mediating third is lacking, the real existence of which the pre-patriarchal cultures of India still manifest today.
6. Thus Brahma, invoked by certain Western intellectuals as the place of the neuter par excellence, can be identified only by his place in relation to the other divine couples, in particular in corporeal geography. Brahma is situated at the summit. He is the last born of the divine genealogy, perhaps a child of Shiva and Uma Parvati. But:
—Brahma is often represented as a child (as is the case with Krishna and Jesus). The gods of the head, which have been represented to us as the excellence of masculine intelligence and the place of its authority over the feminine body, are represented more and more as boys with the advance of patriarchalized History, but they are children or adolescents. The gods of the word would seem not yet to have acquired their completed forms, especially human and especially sexual. They are still children, ill-defined sexually (Krishna has a very feminine aspect and Jesus is sometimes defined as the most feminine of all men).
—Brahma is also represented as a hybrid of the human species and other kingdoms. So he is sometimes evoked as a flower, born of the lotus. Concerning this, it would be worthwhile to remind Schopenhauer of the mode of plant reproduction. It is involuntary, dependent upon other species or other kingdoms: butterflies, insects, or winds, for example.
—Brahma is accompanied by a bird, like most of the practitioners of the Indian tradition (between the Father and the Son, between Mary and Jesus as well, the Spirit is thus represented).
—Brahma fears the natural elements, particularly the wind. When the god of winds, Vac, menaces him or threatens, he takes refuge in a blade of grass; he takes root again. He no longer argues. He gives up his summits. He returns to the earth (the wind is another attribute of the spirit).
—Brahma asks questions. His genius is not to know everything but to be capable of one more question. Far from being certain, Brahma always remains in a questioning state. Under no circumstances does Brahma represent a neuter universal who can be extrapolated from his context, abstracted from the universe—an abstraction that is universalizable because it is neuter. Brahma exists only through the capacity to pose a question beyond what already exists, for thus he assures becoming, especially between air and ether. The genius of Brahma is the art of posing questions and not that of elaborating a closed system. In this, Brahma is faithful to the temporality of natural growth, from which the greatest part of Indian practices cannot stray. To be sure, Brahma is supposed to assure a joining between earth and sky, but that mediation remains incarnated. It is child, flower, blade of grass, element of the universe. It is also linked to the animal world by the bird. It is subjected to the macrocosmic kingdom, especially to the will for breathing. Moreover, this mediation is always becoming, always in the form of a question. Mediation for Brahma would not be exercised once and for all. Will and intelligence are in perpetual growth and interaction. Brahma wants to assure the passage from air to ether. He can only do it through the mediation of questions. If his will exceeds his intelligence, Vac gets angry. Brahma must again become a blade of grass, a plant, in order to save his life, life itself, intelligence.
THE GENIUS OF THE SPECIES AND THE HINDU TRADITION
The genius of the species, according to Schopenhauer, has a relation to the traditions of India in so much as it does not forget the physiological in favor of a discursive truth said to be valid for men, women, and everything. But he only goes back to one part of this biological or physiological, which distorts its truth.
The genius of the species is pre-Hindu—if that can be said—inasmuch as it is pessimistic as concerns human individuation. That is marked by two points above all:
—Human development, according to Schopenhauer, is not necessarily better than animal development. Respecting all the incarnations of life, the Indian does not, for all that, place all these incarnations on the same plane because we must become gods as men and women. For this development, there are stages, a temporality, corresponding notably to the progressive spiritualization of different parts of the body. This spiritualization can be realized alone or in couples with a more experienced practitioner. There is always a part of the development that remains solitary, tied to individuation.
—There is no spiritualization of the body in Schopenhauer. This lack goes hand in hand, it seems to me, with his impression that suffering is inevitable, with his contempt for the feminine gender, with his relationship to death, with his exasperated passions (manifest in his correspondence with Goethe, for example). To be sure, Schopenhauer must have been an unbeliever. But he looks to establish a transcendence and he does not find any other than that of the human species as species. He searches, as is done in India, for a transcendence that is in part immanent. To do this he is required to sacrifice individuation and all forms of spiritual development. It seems to me that Schopenhauer could have learned from the traditions of India that the divine is not situated in an inaccessible transcendence. It is what I become, what I create. I become and I create (the) god(s) between immanence and transcendence. The rupture between immanence and transcendence is due, it seems to me, to 1. the constitution of the divine as logos having all power over the natural universe, although it is produced by only one part of this universe, at a moment of its history, 2. the release of each man and each woman from concern for realizing each day the passage from the microcosm to the macrocosm, from the mortal to the immortal, from tearing apart to unity, 3. the substitution of the creation of a totality potentially completed by a God referred to as belonging to the masculine gender for the continuous generation of the world in its material and spiritual dimension.
The genius of the species would still be pre-Hindu insofar as it fails to recognize that the fulfillment of the human species, its nonregression to animality, can only come about through the deification of the two human genders: men and women (and not only as mother and son) and their carnal as well as spiritual love.
It seems that Schopenhauer doubts the immortality of the human species. Does not this uncertainty, which is transformed into metaphysical will, result from the will to reproduce (oneself) as masculine pathos, functioning outside of all love and recognition of a feminine gender capable of transcendence?
STRATIFICATIONS NECESSARY FOR THE TIME OF LIFE
This transcendence of the feminine as gender is related to the time of the vegetable kingdom, plants and flowers, to the animal kingdom by the bird, to the universal economy by earth, water, wind. If Aristotle leaves woman at best to the vegetal world, and at worst to chaos and the void, this is not an accident. But, even this relation of the most speculative to the most vegetal, of the most vegetal to the most speculative, of which Brahma still testifies and which attests—in Greek terms—that hyle, dynamis, and morphe cannot be separated, this relation has become foreign to us. The death in which the philosopher is interested is without doubt the symptom of this interruption of the growth and blossoming of matter of which the feminine, in particular, is victim because of the lack of subjectivation of her nature.
In Western philosophy the thought of the world as a living world no longer exists. Nor does the thought of sexual difference. Logos is supposed to express cosmos and to give an account for all being, including the gods. That has rendered the truth a priori timeless and fixed. The truth must be, once and for all, immortal or eternal: immortal for ideas and gods, eternal for God.
Diverse strata necessary for the constitution of time are therefore abolished. Thus:
1.The time of life is always partly cyclical, like the time of the seasons and of the vegetal or vegetative universe. Now philosophy splits up into philosophy of the fluent, of the timeless, or of the cyclical without perceiving that it is a matter of choices that are not very conscious with respect to the time of life.
In the same way, the cyclical character of feminine sexuality is little appreciated by the upholders of truth, like that of the cycles of the moon and even of the earth. And the models relative to masculine sexuality characterize its energy as reversible with return to homeostasis, that is to say as immutable.
2.The time of life is partly growth. The vegetal remains tied to the cyclical and to growth. This development of life has been fixed in definitive forms. It reappears in the form of comparisons, scales of values, etc.
3.The time of life is irreversible. Which is also in part denied by Western philosophies.
4. The time of life has become in the West an effect of social organizations and conventions, of socio-logical projections upon living reality:
a) a submission to patriarchal genealogical order, substituting itself for natural engendering, either cosmic or maternal;
b) a social and political organization between humans—which has meant, in fact, between men—founded upon sacrificial rites and not upon cosmological rhythms;
c) a substitution of the reproduction of the human species for the becoming of the living world as a whole;
d) an institution of History as human time that is cumulative but not necessarily progressive, which leads to disorder, entropy, chaos.
The time of life has become a socio-logical temporality founded on a second (or double) nature of man that has caused him to lose his relation to the living world. Women are supposed to carry out the task of guarding this relation while men attend to the work of a universal without a natural, if not arbitrary, substratum, constructed by one part of humanity. What assures this torn and artificial temporality are logical structures founded in particular upon the principles of identity and resemblance, upon the principle of noncontradiction, that is to say upon the definition of a second nature the poles of which are no longer day and night, the seasons, the ages of life, but, at best, the oscillating from the true to the false, from a clear to an obscure that are called spiritual, from a speculative day to its night.
Nothing of this pendulum of the universe that we are, particularly through our hearing, remains in these lacerations and oscillations. Buddha knew this—and maybe all the Boddhisattvas. He had to learn it by meditating under the tree, by spiritualizing his senses, by becoming familiar with the price of compassion.
Because what is at stake in the Indian traditions—but not only in these—aside from the passage from the present to immortality or to eternity, is the correlative question of the heaviness or lightness of bodies. This question calls for much wisdom and love in order to begin to be perceived. It demands thinking and putting into practice two poles of attraction:
—that which ties me to cosmological attractions, notably to earthly heaviness but also to solar or lunar attraction;
—that which ties me to others, in particular to the other of sexual difference.
We still know almost nothing of this appeal or attraction, an important element of wisdom and of divinity.
Familiarity with the tradition of India can put us on or put us back on the way, or, at least, challenge us.
