Beyond the Nirvana Principle
Submitted under the supervision of Professor Ben Sifuentes-Jauregui and Professor Edwin Bryant to the Comparative Literature Program at Rutgers University
May 8th, 2023
Only after the inner being of nature[…]has ascended[…]through the long and broad series of animals, does it finally attain to reflection for the first time with the appearance of reason (Vernunft), that is, in man. It then marvels at its own works, and asks itself what it itself is. And its wonder is the more serious, as here for the first time it stands consciously face to face with death[…]Therefore with this reflection and astonishment arises the need for metaphysics that is peculiar to man alone.
(Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, II 160)[1]
Death
My motivation for writing this essay was as an attempt to understand (what appeared to be) a contradiction which I felt sat at the heart of the so-called modern academic “critical theory.” On the one hand, there was a large growth of leftist, atheistic politics, and on the other there appeared to be a certain comfort, and trafficking in, what is commonly referred to as “mystical” thought. This appeared to me to be, in some sense, a contradiction.
I noticed myriad references to Buddhism in Lacan, and I had a vague sense that many in the psychoanalytic field believed there to be some connection between their theories and the oldest philosophies of India. It was only after reading Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle that such a connection was made most apparent. In that essay, Freud theorized that the most basic desire of all living things was in fact the extinction of life, and he chose as the name for this phenomenon the “Nirvana Principle[2].”
Having studied Sanskrit and to some extent Indian philosophy, it behooved me to investigate just how far the genealogical connection lay, and to what extent these older systems of thought influenced contemporary practices of critical theory, and if the mystical qualities that had found their way into contemporary critical theory compromised it; or, if they in fact enriched and expanded the scope of their critique.
To that extent, I have produced the following four chapters on the subject of the connections between Freudian psychoanalysis, its predecessors in German thought (namely Schopenhauer), Indian philosophy, and the aforementioned Lacanian psychoanalysis. The first immediately below, Liberation, discusses the relationship between Freud’s notion of the “Nirvana Principle,” and the named antecedent and influence for this idea in psychoanalysis, Schopenhauer. The second chapter, Nirvana, discusses the relationship between the definitions of the word “nirvana” in the way Freud uses it, in the way Schopenhauer uses it, and in the way it is used in the Indian philosophical traditions. In the third chapter, Moksha, I discuss the direct influence of the Bhagavad Gita on Schopenhauer, and I also make a comparative study with the Sankhya school as a way to introduce the philosophy of the Gita and compare it with the interpretations of nirvana/liberation in the Gita, Schopenhauer, and Freud. Finally, in chapter four, Jouissance, I discuss the Lacanian notion of jouissance as it relates to the nirvana principle of Freud, and how and why Lacan names himself as a member of the mystical tradition. The chapter Rebirth is the conclusion.
Liberation
Psychoanalysis remains one of the most influential theories in the world. I seek here to investigate the metaphysical, more “mythical” grounds of psychoanalysis, as it is my conviction that psychoanalysis, as an attempt to explain and uncover the scientific, empirical, “rational” explanation of the irrationality in life, has as its basis an idea which is completely divorced from what would normally be called scientificity, Nirvåña. And I seek to explain here where exactly that idea comes from.
Most people, even those who are moderately familiar with Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, are not aware that psychoanalysis has a speculative, metaphysical basis. It is this metaphysical or “metapsychological” basis, to use Freud’s term for his meta-theories developed to explain his empirical research, that I will write about here; focusing specifically on the “death drive” as it is first introduced in Beyond the Pleasure Principle in 1920. There, when introducing the speculative discussion of what he would later accept as the Nirvana Principle, he makes no direct reference to any antecedents of his work:
It is of no concern to us in this connection to enquire how far, with this hypothesis of the pleasure principle, we have approached or adopted any particular, historically established, philosophical system[…]Priority and originality are not among the aims which psycho-analysis sets itself[…]On the other hand, we should willingly acknowledge our indebtedness to any philosophical or psychological theory that could tell us the meaning of these feelings of pleasure and pain which affect us so powerfully. Unfortunately no theory of any value is forthcoming. (XVIII 7)[3]
There is a certain irony that in this introduction to the essay which formally outlines the theory of the drives, he doesn’t actually cite a single source as the basis of his idea, only very much later in the essay does he admit he “ha[s] unwittingly steered our course into the harbour of Schopenhauer’s philosophy. For him death is the ‘true result and to that extent the purpose of life,’ while the sexual instinct is the embodiment of the will to live.” (50) And about twelve years later in his New Introductory Lectures about the very same topic he introduced Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud directly attributes Schopenhauer as a philosophical antecedent when speaking on the notions of “instincts;” or drives[4]:
...the instincts that we believe in divide themselves into two groups—the erotic instincts, which seek to combine one and more living substances into ever greater unities, and the death instincts, which oppose this effort and lead what is living back into an inorganic state[…]You may perhaps shrug your shoulders and say: ‘That isn’t natural science, it’s Schopenhauer’s philosophy!’ But, Ladies and Gentlemen, why should not a bold thinker have guessed something that is afterwards confirmed by sober and painstaking detailed research. (XXII 107)
More strikingly, in his 1917 essay “One of the Difficulties of Psychoanalysis,” published 3 years before “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” Freud directly claims Schopenhauer as his philosophical antecedent:
Probably but very few people have realized the momentous significance for science and life of the recognition of unconscious mental processes. It was not psychoanalysis, however, let us hasten to add, which took this first step. There are renowned names among the philosophers who may be cited as its predecessors, above all the great thinker Schopenhauer, whose unconscious ‘Will’ is equivalent to the instincts in the mind as seen by psycho-analysis. It was this same thinker, moreover, who in words of unforgettable impressiveness admonished mankind of the importance of their sexual craving, still so depreciated. Psychoanalysis has only this to its credit, that it has not affirmed these two propositions that are so wounding to narcissism on an abstract basis — the importance of sexuality in the mind and the unconsciousness of mental activity — but has demonstrated them in matters that touch every individual personally and force him to take up some attitude towards these problems. It is just for this reason, however, that it brings on itself the aversion and antagonism which still keep at a respectful distance from the name of the great philosopher. (Collected Papers, IV 355-6)
Two important things to note here. First, what are these two drives or “unconscious instincts?” And second, who is Schopenhauer, and what is his relationship to Freud and psychoanalysis?
The two drives, that of life, and that of death, were first clearly elucidated in Freud’s aforementioned essay, Beyond the Pleasure Principle. It is in this essay that Freud most fully describes what he believes to be the basis of all human behavior–in fact, life in general–and how this develops into the various psychological phenomena he observes at a higher level. Unlike what the general public believes about psychoanalysis, Freud’s speculative metaphysical theory was developed to explain empirical psychological phenomena because he observed that everything wasn’t about sex. His patients in therapy would frequently describe fantasies and desires which had nothing to do with sexual fulfillment. They would have nightmares, they relive past horrors, they frequently felt compelled to hurt themselves. Hence, therapy was needed. The basic question was, why would an organism, whose only “goal,” so-to-speak, would be to reproduce and find pleasure–why would such an orgasm like a human being do things all the time that resulted in its own physical detriment. In fact, why would his patients in general be unconsciously compelled to repeat, over and over again, things that caused them harm?
This is where Freud posits his most controversial, and most speculative hypothesis: it is not life, love, and happiness that humans truly desire, but a desire to return: to go back home, to go back to bed, to go back to what comforts, what satisfies, what lowers tensions and anxiety; to return to ones original home, to a childlike state, to being a child, to child with their mother, to their mother’s arms and their mother’s breast, to return to the womb, to return to a state before life, to return to a state before all tensions, before all anxiety, before all being and existence. In summary: a desire for Death, which he calls Thanatos[5]. This literary litany I think describes Freud’s movement from his original analysis of hysterical patients, to the analysis of dreams, to his analysis of human sexuality, then on-to war-trauma, and eventually deriving a general theory for why all these psychological phenomena occur. He later uses this theory in his writings on cultural analysis such as Civilization and its Discontents, and Moses and Monotheism in the 30s in the late part of his career before his death[6]. By then, this basic theoretical formula was to all intents and purposes fact to Freud.
For Freud, this movement was not only in one direction; there was also the movement to life, to the creation of new things, Eros. But the creation of new things in the psyche creates more tensions which pile up and create denser and more rigid psychological structures; the desire to return, is also a desire to free up space to move forward, to “clear up the hard drive” or declutter a room[7]. But every attempt to “go back” is always an attempt along the lines of what was already built before by the life drive or Eros, and creates a constant cycle of progression and return; always coming home, but never quite the same. Freud calls what is at the heart of this formula the “death drive,” or “instinct.” And he accepts the term Nirvana Principle for it.
The death drive is a drive structured by a constant desire to return to a state “before” whatever current state one is experiencing, with the eventual result being the return to a state prior to experience itself, since all experience for Freud is some sort of outside stimulation which, naturally, in some way perturbs the organism. It would be impossible for the logic of psychoanalysis to hold otherwise: the incest taboo is essentially a repression of an “original” desire (for the mother/father), and the eroticism of transiting taboos is also a desire to “return” to a state prior to that taboo. If it wasn’t for the death drive, no empirical phenomenon would make any sense, according to Freud’s empirical method.
This is even more strikingly true when turning towards the relationship between the life and death instincts and the mapping of the psyche for Freud. In his essay, The Ego and the Id, Freud describes the various parts of the psyche–the Ego, Id, and Superego[8]–as products of the “fusion” of these instincts or drives: libido, Eros, becoming “desexualized” by Thanatos or the death drive, and “sublimating” sexual energy in order to maintain its rational unity in the ego, its state of constancy that would be disturbed in the case of erotic contact. As Freud writes: “If thought-processes in the wider sense are to be included among these displacements [ie sublimations], then the activity of thinking is also supplied from the sublimation of erotic motive forces.” (XIX 45)
Freud claims, then, that even the rational mode of understanding the world, thought-processes and logic, is secondary to these drives that in humans fuse into the Ego and thus create the world for the Ego, these drives which are more original than rationality and logic and which are present in all forms of life.
Returning to Schopenhauer, the named philosophical antecedent to Freud’s theory of the drives. He was an early-mid 19th century German philosopher working out of Jena. Although his philosophy is entirely new for his era, there is a distinct desire in Schopenhauer to recognize the wisdom of his own antecedents in comparison to the “degenerated” state of philosophy of his day[9], as he states in the introduction to the World as Will and Representation,
The philosophy of Kant, then, is the only philosophy with which a thorough acquaintance is directly presupposed in what we have to say here. But if, besides this, the reader has lingered in the school of the divine Plato, he will be so much the better prepared to hear me, and susceptible to what I say. And if, indeed, in addition to this he is a partaker of the benefit conferred by the Vedas, the access to which, opened to us through the Upanishads, is in my eyes the greatest advantage which this still young century enjoys over previous ones, because I believe that the influence of the Sanscrit literature will penetrate not less deeply than did the revival of Greek literature in the fifteenth century: if, I say, the reader has also already received and assimilated the sacred, primitive Indian wisdom, then is he best of all prepared to hear what I have to say to him. (I XII-XIII)[10]
We can note in this such a desire to return–that is, to a perceived state of higher culture–but also an acknowledgement by Schopenhauer that the one who has the highest understanding of his thought is the one who has studied Indian Philosophy. So it's best, therefore, to start from this connection to Indian philosophy, and discuss the central node by which Freud, Schopenhauer, and the Indian connect. I will argue that this is “Nirvana.”
Nirvana
The way Freud and Schopenhauer use the term Nirvana differs. But since Freud read Schopenhauer, we can say definitively that while he was probably not aware of its complex etymological history, he certainly was familiar with an author who was:
According to Colebrooke (Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. I, p. 566), it comes from va, ‘to blow’ like the wind, with the prefixed negative nir; hence it signifies a lull or calm, but as adjective ‘extinguished.’ Obry, Du Nirvana indien, p. 3, says: Nirvanam en sanscrit signifie il la lettre extinction, telle que celle d'un feu. (“Nirvanam in Sanskrit literally means extinction, e.g., as of a fire." Tr.) According to the Asiatic Journal, Vol. XXIV, p. 735, it is really Neravana, from nera, "without," and vana, "life," and the meaning would be annihilatio. In Spence Hardy's Eastern Monachism, p. 295, Nirvana is derived from vana, "sinful desires," with the negative nir. I. J. Schmidt, in his translation of the History of the Eastern Mongolians, p. 307, says that the Sanskrit Nirvana is translated into Mongolian by a phrase meaning ‘departed from misery,’ ‘escaped from misery.’ According to the same scholar's lectures at the St. Petersburg Academy, Nirvana is the opposite of Samsara, which is the world of constant rebirths, of craving and desire, of the illusion of the senses, of changing and transient forms, of being born, growing old, becoming sick, and dying. In Burmese the word Nirvana, on the analogy of other Sanskrit words, is transformed into Nieban, and is translated by ‘complete vanishing.’ See Sangermano's Description of the Burmese Empire, transl. by Tandy, Rome 1833, § 27. In the first edition of 1819, I also wrote Nieban, because at that time we knew Buddhism only from inadequate accounts of the Burmese. (Schopenhauer, II 508, Footnote 34)
The necessity of including such a long quote is to illustrate the impossibility of pinning down the “correct” meaning of nirvåña. Most Sanskritists, when asked to give a precise etymology of Nirvana, would produce a similarly confused assemblage of claims, none of which are particularly important. Later there will be an account of how exactly nirvåña is understood in Indian philosophy[11].
Each school of philosophy in the Indian tradition has its own doctrinal way of understanding, promoting, and giving an account for the attainment of Liberation–the word “Nirvana” is the typical rendering of this path in “Buddhism” as it’s understood in the west, and is the way in which Schopenhauer understands the term. So too does Schopenhauer have his own understanding and doctrinal method, in a different way. But it's also important to note that by dint of his numerous references to Indian philosophy and its relation to his system that he is as equally embedded in this conversation about the correct way to attain liberation from suffering as any other school. And Freud, by taking part in that debate, by directly crediting Schopenhauer as one antecedent of his system of drives, also has his own answer–though it will become clear that Freud’s “answer” is considerably more cognizant of its mythological status than perhaps Schopenhauer is.
The key difference in its use, therefore, is between Schopenhauer sincerely trying to argue that Nirvana is his “resignation,” the ideal result of one who embraces his philosophy–one “[who] alone wishes to die actually and not merely apparently, and consequently needs and desires no continuance of his person[…]The Buddhist faith calls that existence Nirvana, that is to say, extinction.” (footnote 34)–and Freud, who tries to understand why such a desire for death exists; a desire that, unlike Schopenhauer, Freud believes is universal.
Here I will demonstrate such a simple answer as “textual intersection” doesn’t actually give a satisfactory answer. Yes, the word itself, “Nirvana,” as Freud understands it, is a kind of fusion of multiple discourses that are written about by a single author, Schopenhauer. But the philosophical, metaphysical content of his claim pertaining to the death drive, is not.
Although, while Freud believes that his system outlines a certain universal psychological structure, one aspect of which he accepts as the “Nirvana Principle” or death drive, and the other as Eros or life drive, it's clear here that as the basis for his empirical system, the drives as they formulate into the perceptual apparati, itself is taken as a-priori; taking his ideas from the conceptual logic of Kant, it is something that gives us the world–the categories by which the world is constructed for the Ego–but from which we can only form secondary a-posteriori logic about it.
...all causality, hence all matter, and consequently the whole of reality, is only for the understanding, through the understanding, in the understanding. The first, simplest, ever present manifestation of understanding is perception of the actual world[...]Yet one could never arrive at perception, if some effect were not immediately known, and thus served as the starting point. (Schopenhauer, I 11)
This is to say that for Schopenhauer our secondary logic of the world after pure perception can never actually tell us about the fundamental nature of experience because those logic and concepts are derived from that very experience. But although at the bottom all logic is derived secondarily from pure perception, and this perception is in fact the perception of the ineffable motive cause behind all things, “...what in the Kantian philosophy is called the thing-in-itself[...is] nothing but the will,” (I 170) Schopenhauer does not go so far as to throw out logic entirely, “only the real archetypes of those shadowy outlines, the eternal Ideas, the original forms of all things, can be described as truly existing (ὄντως ὄν), since they always are but never come and never pass away.”(I 171) The “Ideas” are the highest “objectifications”–i.e. representation–of the motive cause, the thing-in-itself, the Will. And it is only through this “Idea” that one can come to the pure perception of the Will itself:
[we] devote the whole power of our mind to perception[...]let our whole consciousness be filed by the calm contemplation of the natural object actually present[…]We lose ourselves entirely in this object[...]the knowing individual raises himself in the manner described to the pure subject of knowing, and at the same time raises the contemplated object to the Idea[...]When the Idea appears, subject and object can no longer be distinguished in it[...]For if we look entirely away from that true world as representation [ie the Idea], there is nothing left but the world as will[...whoever does so] becomes in this way immediately aware that, as such, he is the[...]supporter of the world[...He] will be moved by the consciousness of what the Oupnek’hat [Upanishad] of the Veda expresses: ‘I am all this creation collectively, and besides me there exists no other being.’[12]
Schopenhauer here is describing his very particular fusion of Platonic Philosophy and Indian thought, in the end prescribing meditation and quoting the Upanishads. Many readers, especially in Freud’s era, would not be faulted for drawing a direct connection between Schopenhauer’s thought and the “ancient wisdom” of Sanskrit texts–something Schopenhauer himself makes no effort to avoid.
It is not actually the direct Sanskrit source he is quoting; Schopenhauer’s favorite book[13] was his edition of Anquetil-Duperron’s Oupnek’hat, a translation of the Upanishads from an originally Persian source into Latin–the original from Sanskrit to Persian ordered by Prince Dara (of Shah Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal for whom the famous Taj Mahal is named). As Urs App argues in his essay, Required Reading: Schopenhauer’s Favorite Book, Prince Dara himself already was interested in fusing his Sufistic, Neoplatonic teachings with the traditional Indian wisdom; and furthermore Anquetil, in his commentaries alongside his own translation, goes so far as to mix Platonic teachings, also, with more contemporary Kantian thought overtop the original Persian text. It seems Schopenhauer’s philosophy was his own, but the way for its construction was already paved by the way in which Europeans received the “Orient” in the 18th and 19th centuries; even in India itself in the high Mughal period–with what philosophical and cultural fusions were occurring that changed the character of the text, as we see here with this melange of Platonism, Sufism, Kant, etc.etc. all further modified by a genealogy of translation from Sanskrit into Persian, from Persian into French then into Latin.
From all this there still isn’t an answer to the question, what exactly does Schopenhauer think Nirvana is? From this contextual background, hopefully this helpful quote will suffice:
When a person is no longer subject to the following evils, namely burden, old age, sickness, death, then he is said to have attained Nirvana. No thing or place can give us a fair idea of Nirvana; we can only say that Nirvana consists in being freed from the above evils and having attained salvation. In the same way a person who suffers from serious illness and recovers with the help of medicine is said to have attained health; but if anyone wants to know how or what reason this recovery of health came about, he can only be answered that the recovery of health means nothing other than recovery from the disease. Only in this way can one speak of Nirvana, and so Gautama [Buddha] taught. (App, Schopenhauers Nirwana, 203)[14]
More precisely, Nirvana for Schopenhauer is the “abolishment of the Will'' which Schopenhauer claims are evaded by “myths and meaningless words, such as reabsorption in Brahman, or the Nirvana of the Buddhists.” (I 411). It is the final stage of his ethical system that comes when one has completely and entirely renounced all Willing, removed from all anxiety and tension one “vanishes” from the world. The desire for this final renunciation clearly accords with Freud’s formulation of the death drive as that which seeks to remove those burdens that are the qualities of living organisms. But this is not actually what Freud is quoting when he relates this idea to his death drive; he seems to be drawing from something like what Schopenhauer says about pain and pleasure: “it is called pain when it is contrary to the will, and gratification or pleasure when in accordance with the will[...pain and pleasure are] immediate affections of the will in its phenomenon.” (I 101) Schopenhauer also directly understands the tensions between life and death as being represented by “gravity” and “rigidity” in architecture:
...the conflict between gravity and rigidity is the sole aesthetic material of architecture; its problem is to make this conflict appear with perfect distinctness in many different ways. It solves this problem by depriving these indestructible forces of the shortest path to their satisfaction and keeping them in suspense through a circuitous path; the conflict is thus prolonged… (I 214, my emphasis)
This passage bears a remarkable resemblance to Freud’s understanding of the tension between the Life and Death drives in Beyond the Pleasure Principle:
…until decisive external influences altered in such a way as to compel the still surviving substance to ever greater deviations from the original path of life, and to ever more complicated and circuitous routes to the attainment of the goal of death. These circuitous ways to death, faithfully retained by the conservative instincts, would be neither more nor less than the phenomena of life as we now know it.
Schopenhauer only came to this conclusion that pain and pleasure directly corresponded to the will, seemingly, after already participating in the early reception of “oriental” philosophy as it was being interwoven with various philosophical traditions. Some, like Kant and Plato, already a part of the general “canon” of western thought; others, like the newly “uncovered” Indian material, being encountered in these sometimes poor and confused translations
This admixture of various influences informs what Freud thinks of Schopenhauer when he calls his death drive the “Nirvana Principle.” But unlike his early philosophy which gives us this conception of the Will as corresponding to the pure experiences of pain and pleasure, Schopenhauer’s actual definition of Nirvana and idea and use of it comes from later ideas and ammendations that seem to draw more directly from the Indian sources. Thus we see in Freud not a singular idea which has been transmitted many thousands of years straight into psychoanalytic theory, but a strange amalgam of ideas that have been given the name “Nirvana.”
Freud is borrowing his method from Schopenhauer, who knows for a fact that experiential being precedes logical thought, and goes on to say that such an experiential being has qualities that are painful, that go against the striving of the Will, and those that are pleasurable, those that go along with it. And Freud is basically saying the same thing, that the way of understanding the world around us and communicating about it, the construction of the ego for the individual, is originally a product of these very drives[15], the drives which are, in truth, simply aspects of the Will for Schopenhauer.
That this is something which, when investigated by Schopenhauer, who, being a philosopher, was not limited by empirical science, ends in his adoption of an essentially mystical system, even while criticizing it for being “overly mythical” as opposed to his more “pure” exegesis. But Freud, on the other hand, while detesting the morality and methods of the Enlightenment, still adhered to certain rational empiricist norms, and must at first mystify and mask such an origin for his investigation but, in the end, he admits in both the end of “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in his “New Introductory Lectures,” and in “One of the Difficulties of Psychoanalysis,” that his theory has just the same foundation of influence in a deeply mystical tradition, that he is drawing from a source, Schopenhauer, that has no discomfort in flouting all rigidly scientific norms, and no discomfort in drawing from strictly theological and mystical sources. And from this tradition we have a single word brought over as a nexus for all these investigations, Nirvana.
Moksha
Of the two Indian philosophical traditions that will be investigated on behalf of their likeness to the Schopenhauerian and Freudian systems, the first, the Sankhya[16] system, has a more definite family resemblance to Schopenhauer’s; the latter, the Bhagavad Gita, is from where we assume, as Urs App argues, he receives his notion of the Will from. Schopenhauer directly references both texts in the World as Will and Representation, and claims that they are representative of his philosophical system. He quotes from the Sankhya school, via Colebrooke, an early British Indologist,
This idea [of resignation] is expressed by a fine simile in the ancient Sanskrit philosophical work Sankhya Karika: ‘Yet the soul remains for a time clothed with the body, just as the potter’s wheel continues to spin after the pot has been finish, in consequence of the impulse previously given to it. Only when the inspired soul separates itself from the body and nature ceases for it, does its complete salvation take place.’ Colebrooke, ‘On the Philosophy of the Hindus’: Miscellaneous essays, Vol I, pg. 259. Also in the Sankhya Carica by Horace Wilson, § 67, p. 184. (Footnote 59, I 382)[17]
The referenced essay, On the Philosophy of the Hindus, is an extraordinarily thorough treatment of the Sankhya philosophy, which references the Gaudapa commentary of the Sankhya Karikas, that I employ below, as an authoritative exegesis thereon. Therein, Colebrooke distinguishes between three separate schools of Sankhya, that of Patanjali (the famous author of the Yoga Sutras), that of Capila (who is the author of the Sankhya Karikas, referenced by Schopenhauer above), and a third, puranic school, which he feels is unimportant,
The tenets of the two schools of the Sanc’hya[18] are on many, not to say on most, points, that are treated in both, the same; differing however upon one, which is the most important of all, the proof of existence of supreme God.
The one school (Pantanjali’s) recognising God is therefore denominated theistical (seswara sanc’hya[19]). The other, (Capila’s) is athiestical, (niriswara-sanc’hya[20]) as the sects of Jina and Buddha in effect are: acknowledging no creator of the universe, nor supreme ruling providence. The gods of Capila are beings superior to man; but, like him, subject to change and transmigration.
A third school, denominated Pauranica sanc’hya[21], consider nature as an illusion: conforming upon most other points to the doctrine of Patanjali, and upon many, to that of Capila. (25-6)
We have to imagine that, when Schopenhauer describes the more “physical” process of attaining liberation, as he does above when discussing what is essentially meditation in §34 of the World as Will and Representation (quoted above), he is almost certainly making reference to Patanjali’s thought,
One of the four chapters of Patanjali’s Yoga-sastra (the third), relates almost exclusively to this subject [of liberation], from which it takes its title. It is full of directions for bodily and mental exercises, consisting of intensely profound meditation on special topics, accompanied by suppression of breath, and restraint of the sense[...]But neither power, however transcendent, nor dispassion, nor virtue, however meritorious, suffices for the attainment of beatitude. It serves but to prepare the soul for that absorbed contemplation, by which the great purpose of deliverance is to be accomplished. (Colebrooke 36)
But when he describes the particulars and complexities of his metaphysical systems, he is most certainly drawing more closely from Capila:
In less momentous matters [Capila and Patanjali] differ, not upon points of doctrine, but in the degree, in which the exterior exercises, or abstruse reasoning and study, are weighed upon, as requisite preparations of absorbed contemplation[...]Capila is more engaged with investigation of principles and reasoning upon them. One is more mystic and fanatical. The other makes a nearer approach to philosophical disquisition… (Colebrooke 38)
In the main, though, when describing many of the intellectual, philosophical aspects of his system, Schopenhauer seems to heavily rely on the philosophy of Sankhya. He actually draws an equivalency between the 3 gunas[22], or qualities, of the Sankhya school, and his own theories of psychology:
We can in theory assume three extremes of human life, and consider them as elements of actual human life. Firstly, powerful and vehement, the great passions (Raja-Guna); it appears in great historical characters, and is described in the epic and the drama. It can also show itself, however, in the small world, for the size of the objects is here measured only according to the degree in which they excite the will, not to their external relations. Then secondly, pure knowing, the comprehension of the Ideas, conditioned by freeing knowledge from the service of the will: the life of the genius (Sattva-Guna). Thirdly and lastly, the greatest lethargy of the will and also of the knowledge attached to it, namely empty longing, life-benumbing boredom (Tama-Guna). The life of the individual, far from remaining fixed in one of these extremes, touches them only rarely, and is often only a weak and wavering approximation to one side or the other, a needy desiring of trifling objects, always recurring and thus running away from boredom. (I 321)
This, aside from the final sentence, somewhat corresponds to the description of the Gunas in the Sankhya Karikas. As Colebrooke writes,
The Sanc’hya, as other Indian systems of philosophy, is much engaged with the consideration of what is termed the three qualities (guna): if indeed quality be here the proper import of the term; for the scholiast of Capila understands it as meaning, not quality or accident, but substance, a modification of nature, fettering the soul; conformably with another acceptation of guna, singing a cord. (35)
He then gives a description of the Gunas, which in many ways matches the description both of Schopenhaur’s and the Sankhya Karika of Capila, referenced directly below:
The Attributes are of the nature of pleasure, pain and delusion; they are adapted to illuminate, to activate and to restrain. They mutually suppress, support, produce, consort and exist. Sattva is considered to be light and bright, Rajas exciting and mobile, and Tamas is only heavy and enveloping. Like a lamp, their function is to gain an end. (verse 12-13)
The Gaudapa commentary adds:
Again,—and they mutually suppress, support, produce, consort and exist. That is, they are mutually suppressive, mutually supporting, mutually productive, mutually consorting and mutually existing. Mutually suppressive; they mutually, i.e., one another, suppress, i.e., manifest themselves with the characteristics of pleasure, pain, etc. That means,—when Sattva is predominant, then it is so by suppressing the Rajas and Tamas with its characteristics; and it exhibits itself as pleasure and illumination. When Rajas is (predominent), then it is so (by suppressing) the Sattva and Tamas with its characteristics of pain and activity. When Tamas is (predominant), then it is so (by suppressing) the Sattva and Rajas with its characteristics of delusion and fixture. (commentary to those verses)
We can surmise, however, that it was from Colebrooke’s text that Schopenhauer gained his familiarity with the gunas. Although Schopenhauer refers to these qualities as “extremes,” they do in fact “mutually suppress, support, produce, consort and exist,” there is not one quality or another that someone is predisposed to at any given time, but the qualities are in a constant interaction that generates reality.
Samkhya philosophy is believed to be the most ancient of all the Indian schools of thought and the ground of all the logic proceeding therefrom, “Of all the philosophical systems, Samkhya is considered to be the most ancient. Nobody can gainsay the fact that this occupies a prominent place in all the Shastras, since it is either supported or controverted by all the philosophical systems. Therefore, the importance of the Shastra is recognized by all the systems.” (Sharma I 1).
I will give an account here and below of the Sankhya school based on my readings of both the Sankhya Karikas with the Gaudapa commentary, as well as Colebrooke’s essay on the matter, both referenced above.[23] In Sankhya philosophy, there are 3 things to consider, Purusha, the “knower,” Prakriti, the “manifest,” and Pradhana, the “unmanifest.” Between nature, which is the first evolvent from all “gunas” or qualities, upon which they evolve and are evolvent with each other and from which the rest of the tattva-s (or “thatnesses”) are evolvents and evolutes from each other, and Purusha, the observer, which cannot manifest and is neither an evolvent or an evolute, because it observes, are the twenty four evolvents and evolutes of pradhana, the unmanifest, beginning with the three gunas–Rajas, Tamas, and Sattva–these interact to create many variations such as the subtle, internal organs, the intellect, ego, and the mind (verse 38-40). From the ego, intellect, and mind come the set of subtle elements, those of sensation, and the subtle body, which is the means by which the intellect perceives the world. From the subtle elements comes the set of gross elements, what we would refer to as physical reality–fire, earth, wind, water, and ether. The “purpose” or goal of the manifestation of the universe is salvation: “Thus, this effort in the activity of the Nature, beginning from Mahat down to the gross elements, is for the liberation of each Spirit; (and although) it is for another’s benefit (yet) it seems as if it were for itself.” (verse 56) And, “As a dancer desists from dancing after showing herself to the audience, so the Nature desists after showing itself to the Spirit.” (verse 59) Liberation is thus achieved through proper knowledge of the unfolding of the universe: “By practising the principles thus, there arises the knowledge, viz., ‘I am not, naught is mine, there is no Ego’, which is complete, absolute and pure, because there remains no doubt.” (64) And that once the spirit, through correct knowledge, has attained liberation from the ego, it becomes “seated composed like a spectator” (verse 65) and “After obtaining separation from body and after the cessation of the Nature (the Spirit) acquires the salvation which is both certain and final.” (verse 68)
The goal appears similar to the goal of Freud’s “Nirvana Principle”: to enter a state without ego. But the important distinction would be that in Sankhya there is no “time” for the internal organs, ego, mind, and intellect: “The internal organs function in all the three times. Intellect, ego and mind apprehend their objects in all three times. The intellect cognises the jar in the present past and future times. The ego is self-conscious of the present, past and future. Similarly, the mind ponders over the present:, past and future. Thus, the internal organs function in all three times.” (Gaudapa commentary to verse 33) Although it is true that for Freud “that unconscious mental processes are in themselves ‘timeless’. That is to say to begin with: they are not arranged chronologically, time alters nothing in them, nor can the idea of time be applied to them.”[24] But perceptual consciousness is more “primary” in the psyche than the unconscious, since it is the “crust” through which the rest of the psychological (and biological systems) form:
…the grey matter of the cortex remains a derivative of the primitive superficial layer of the organism and may have inherited some of its essential properties. It would be easy to suppose, then, that as a result of the ceaseless impact of external stimuli on the surface of the vesicle, its substance to a certain depth may have become permanently modified, so that excitatory processes run a different course in it from what they run in the deeper layers. A crust would thus be formed which would at last have been so thoroughly ‘baked through’ by stimulation that it would present the most favourable possible conditions for the reception of stimuli and become incapable of any further modification. In terms of the system Cs., this would mean that its elements could undergo no further permanent modification from the passage of excitation, because they had already been modified in the respect in question to the greatest possible extent: now, however, they would have become capable of giving rise to consciousness. (26)
For Freud, time (and space) as we understand it may not be a Kantian “‘necessary form of thought’,” (28) but time is measured like the rings around a tree–the more “instinctual paths” that have developed, the more complex the repetition compulsions, the more “time” has passed.
This contrasts remarkably with Schopenhauer’s idea of time (and space), which he takes as necessary, Kantian aspects of perceptions “...matter has as its essential nature in the union of time and space” (I 10) and “The legislative force of causality relates solely and entirely to the determinations as to what kind of state or condition must appear at this time and this place. On this derivation of the basic determinations of matter from the forms of our knowledge, of which we are a priori conscious, rests our knowledge a priori of the sure and certain properties of matter.” (Schopenhauer, I 11)
The notion that time (and space) are necessary forms of consciousness accords much more closely to the Sankhya school, “(To this we reply)—There are (only) three categories, viz., the Manifest, the Unmanifest and the Knower. Time also is included under (one of) them. Time is Manifest. (And as) the Nature is the producer of all, (so) it must be the cause of Time also. Spontaneity is also included there. Therefore, neither Spontaneity nor Time is the cause; the Nature alone is the cause and there is no other cause of the Nature.” (Gaudapa commentary to verse 51) If the manifest is the cause of time, then time must be something that is an evolute of nature and therefore caused by the ego (an evolute of nature) in its perceptions of the world, but time is not of the perceptions in the ego but an aspect of perception for the ego[25].
In fact, Schopenhauer’s view of Nirvana accords much more closely with the traditional Sankhya school of thought, that it is “extinction,” deriving this clearly from the quote he noted above. But this extinction is in a constant process of manifestation and unfolding, unlike Schopenhauer’s claim, the Sankhya Karikas of Capila never actually claim that the Gunas stop moving at some point in time, or that even the end of the experience of reality comes at death even with liberation, the only true liberation is abandoning the Ego. But as I say above, by Freud assigning the ego a biological reality, literally a “cerebral cortex,” it is necessarily part of lived experience and cannot be abandoned in life.
Schopenhauer makes clear connections between his notion of “salvation” and traditional Christian practices, “...this system of ethics fully agrees with the Christian dogmas proper, and, according to its essentials, was contained and present even in these very dogmas. It is also just as much in agreement with the doctrines and ethical precepts of the sacred book of India…” (408) These dog him and seem to imply, in his philosophy, that individual salvation is possible only with the abandonment of the Ego. But this seems like a contradiction, since having abandoned the ego, there is no individual to be saved. Death becomes unimportant for the individual and there would be no “extinction” at any point because time is an aspect of the ego itself and not of consciousness or “perception” which would exist, in the Gunas of the Sankhya philosophy that Schopenhauer references, separate from nature (prakriti) and its unmanifested qualities (pradhana).
We can see here how by adopting, when convenient, both the theistical and atheistical aspects of Indian philosophy, he comes to a contradiction. Schopenhauer’s system both advocates for a recognition of the will through intellectual practice (as advocated by the Sankhya Karikas), and at the same time he advocates meditation and practice as a means of, recognizing it, extinguishing it. But if the Will is the same as Krishna, as App argues below, then in the traditional theistic practice it would not be an effort to “kill” the unifying force behind everything, but to be devoted to it. The end of Schopenhauer’s system is nothing.
Freud, on the other hand, is more faithfully atheistic in his interpretations of liberation.[26] In the same way that one could argue the Sankhya Karikas say that time is an aspect not inherent to matter before its contact with Purusha, but something that only comes about in the unmanifested aspects of nature (from which the ego evolves), Freud above says that time does not actually exist for the unconscious, only for the forms of perception, but just as in the Sankhya school “internally” there is no respect for time. In this same way, Freud takes the desire to “return” not as an actual possibility–far from it. While the desire may be to return, and the mechanisms of desire fully in line with Schopenhauer’s conception of the Will, for Freud this is only on account of his quasi-mystical starting conditions (see quote from pg. 26 above)[27], and after that moment, if we can even say “moment,” since the notion of time has not yet been imposed, then the constant tension between life and death begins, with no final “Nirvana,” as Schopenhauer claims his system may bring, but only a “Nirvana Principle,” a ceaseless instinctual drive towards an imagined state that doesn’t actually exist. There is no higher thing to attain, but simply a whole universe in constant movement.
We have claimed also from the outset that Schopenhauer’s “Will” does not actually directly come from the Samkhya school, and this would make sense as Samkhya is clearly a dualistic system which functions based on the interaction of Prakriti and Purusha and the generation of Pradhana (or the “unmanifest”). To receive our properly “non-dualistic” notion of the Will, which we have clear textual evidence to support is from where Schopenhauer received his own idea, we must turn towards the Bhagadvad Gita[28]. As Urs App argues in “Schopenhauer’s Initial Encounter with Indian Thought,” it was the very first document of Indian philosophy, before he even got his hands on the Oupen’khat, that Schopenhauer ever encountered.
Given that my dating of Schopenhauer’s Bhagavadgītā excerpts is not quite bomb-proof, that relevant notes in the Manuscript Remains have an element of ambiguity, and that at present it does not seem possible to disentangle possible influences of the Bhagavadgītā, Klaproth, Majer, Polier, and the Oupnek’hat, conclusions can of course not be categorical. We can, however, state that Schopenhauer’s initial encounter with Indian thought did not, as almost universally held in previous research, happen with the Oupnek’hat but rather with Majer’s translation of the Bhagavadgītā. We can further assert that Majer’s text addressed a number of themes which already were – or soon became – crucially important for the genesis of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of will. (75-6)
Majer was someone who Schopenhauer had contact with as a young scholar and who published, in the Asiatiches Magazin, a translation of the Bhagavad Gita which he made from the 1786 English translation (from the Sanskrit original) by Charles Wilkins. In December 1813, 3 months before Schopenhauer took out a copy of the Ouphnekat from the library, we have record of Schopenhauer taking out a copy of the Asiatiches Magazin, and in his notes he takes down two passages from it. In the course of this section, I will reproduce that copy (from the essay cited above where App critically examines it), the English version it was translated from, and the original Sanskrit text, for comparison. As App notes above, it is not clear from where or how much knowledge of Indian philosophy Schopenhauer had previous to his borrowing of the Ouphnekat, but we know certainly that the Bhagavadgita was the first book of Indian philosophy he got his hands on.
As App tries to argue, we can see the distinction between a more “upanishadic” interpretation of Indian Philosophy and Schopenhauer’s thought by examining the difference between his system and a “pure” Sankhya system: Sankhya posits a duality of inert matter and Purusha (or consciousness), with Pradhana, the unmanifest, coming in between as a consequence of the interaction of the two substances, whereas Schopenhauer’s “duality” is between the “Will” and the “Representation” of the Will. The manifestation of qualities might still be present, but it is a manifestation that occurs with substances that are interacting with each other. For Schopenhauer, the Will and its Representation coincide with one another:
To the subject of knowing, who appears as an individual only through his identity with the body, this body is given in two entirely different ways. It is given in intelligent perception as representation, as an object among objects, liable to the laws of these objects. But it is also given in quite a different way, namely as what is known immediately to everyone, and is denoted by the word will. (109)
Representations are, as the quote at the top of this thesis elucidates, higher “stages'' of that will. But the will is all, is complete, is the entire universe. And this notion of the “Will” corresponding to the body itself, and the “Representation” to the knower of the body, correspond exactly to a passage which Schopenhauer noted down from chapter 13 verses 2-3 of the Bhagavadgita[29]:
[Kreeshna oder Gott spricht:][30] Lerne daß das Wort Kshetra den Körper bedeutet, und Kshetra-gna denjenigen, welcher ihn erkennt. Wisse daß Ich dies Kshetra-gna in allen sterblichen Formen bin. Die Kenntniß von Kshetra und Kshetra-gna nenne ich Gnan oder die Weisheit. (69) | Learn that by the word Kshetra is implied this body, and that he who is acquainted with it is called Kshetra-gna. Know that I am that Kshetra-gna in every mortal frame. The knowledge of the Kshetra and the Kshetra-gna is by me esteemed Gnan or wisdom. (101[31]) | इदं शरीरं कौन्तेय क्षेत्रमित्यभिधीयते । एतद्यो वेत्ति तं प्राहुः क्षेत्रज्ञ इति तद्विदः ॥ १३-२॥ क्षेत्रज्ञं चापि[32] मां विद्धि सर्वक्षेत्रेषु भारत । क्षेत्रक्षेत्रज्ञयोर्ज्ञानं यत्तज्ज्ञानं मतं मम ॥ १३-३॥ |
Clearly, in both texts, the knower of the body, and the body itself, should be considered the same thing (the “Will” or “Krishna”, respectively). And we must assume that the answer to how this fusion of the Prakriti and the Purusha is possible with recourse to the second passage which Schopenhauer copied down. In other words, we will see the answer to how is it possible, in both the Bhagavadgita and in Schopenhauer’s philosophy, that one can be both the Will and Representation?
Derjenige welcher alle seine Handlungen durch Prakreetee, die Natur, vollzogen sieht, nimmt zugleich wahr, daß Atma oder die Seele dabey nicht thätig ist. Sieht er wie alle die verschiedenen Gattungen von Naturwesen in einem einzigen Wesen begriffen sind [, von dem sie nach außen hin ver- breitet und in ihre zahllosen Varietäten aus- gestreut sind;[33]] dann erkennt er Brahma, das höchste Wesen. Dieser erhabene Geist, dies unveränderliche Wesen handelt nicht, selbst wenn es in dem Körper ist, weil seine Natur weder Anfang noch Eigenschaften hat. So wie Akas oder der Aether, durch die Freiheit seiner Theile, allenthalben hin- dringt, ohne bewegt zu werden: so bleibt der allenthalben gegenwärtige Geist im Körper, ohne bewegt zu werden. So wie eine einzige Sonne die ganze Welt erleuchtet so erhellt diese Weltseele alle Körper. Diejenigen welche es mit den Augen der Weisheit wahrnehmen, daß Körper und Geist auf diese Art unterschieden sind, und daß es für den Menschen eine endliche Trennung von der animalischen Natur giebt, diese gehen in das höchste Wesen über. (74-75) | He who beholdeth all his actions performed by Prakreetee, nature, at the same time perceiveith that the Atma or soul is inactive in them. When he beholdeth all the different species of nature comprehended in one alone, and so from it spread forth into their vast variety, he then concieveth Brahm, the Supreme Being. This supreme Spirit and incorruptible Being, even when it is in the body, neither acteth, nor is it affected, because its nature is without beginning and without quality. As the all-moving Akas, or ether, from the minuteness of its parts, passeth every where unaffected, even so the omnipresent spirit remaineth in the body unaffected. As a single illuminateth the whole world, even so doth the spirit enlighten every body. They who, with the eye of wisdom, perceive the body and the spirit to be thus distinct, and that there is a final release from the animal nature, go to the Supreme. (105-6) | प्रकृत्यैव च कर्माणि क्रियमाणानि सर्वशः । यः पश्यति तथात्मानमकर्तारं स पश्यति ॥ १३-३०॥ यदा भूतपृथग्भावमेकस्थमनुपश्यति । तत एव च विस्तारं ब्रह्म सम्पद्यते तदा ॥ १३-३१॥ अनादित्वान्निर्गुणत्वात्परमात्मायमव्ययः । शरीरस्थोऽपि कौन्तेय न करोति न लिप्यते ॥ १३-३२॥ यथा सर्वगतं सौक्ष्म्यादाकाशं नोपलिप्यते । सर्वत्रावस्थितो देहे तथात्मा नोपलिप्यते ॥ १३-३३॥ यथा प्रकाशयत्येकः कृत्स्नं लोकमिमं रविः । क्षेत्रं क्षेत्री तथा कृत्स्नं प्रकाशयति भारत ॥ १३-३४॥ क्षेत्रक्षेत्रज्ञयोरेवमन्तरं ज्ञानचक्षुषा । भूतप्रकृतिमोक्षं च ये विदुर्यान्ति ते परम् ॥ १३-३५॥ |
In other words, it is only through the experience of the body, by which one can recognize the distinction between the physical body, or Prakriti, as perceived and the “spirit” or Purusha as the perceiver, they have attained “Moksha.”[34] However, it is clear that Schopenhauer’s philosophy differs dramatically from the Moksha of the Gita, which is intellectual in nature, in that it asks to extinguish this unified principle, and seeks to end all willing, through practice. As argued above, there is a distinct contradiction here between the devotional aspects of the theistic Patanjalian Sankhya, and the atheistic Sankhya of Capila, that remain unresolved in Schopenhauer’s writings, and seem to find their solution in Freud. In the following section, I will be discussing a later psychoanalytic thinkers contribution to the argument about the nirvana principle, someone who acknowledges the combined nature of the “body” and the “knower of the body,” but who has a radically different answer, from Freud, Schopenhauer, and the aforementioned Indian texts.
I will be discussing a concept called Jouissance of Jacques Lacan. Lacan’s formulation of experience differs from Freud and Schopenhauer in the respect that, like in the Gita, there is no final separation of the “knower of the body” and the “body” itself, but a constant, dialectical relation between the two where one influences the other. In Lacan’s parlance, he refers to this as a state of being of “signifierness,” that is, a being that exists only in the structural relations of language, and as a constant negotiation between the structures of language, desire, and lived experience.
Jouissance[35]
Before now, the question has been raised as to what the genealogical origins of Nirvana, in psychoanalytic discourse, are. But from here when examining the further developments of the “beyond” logic (of beyond the pleasure principle, beyond empirical thought, beyond what can be consciously apprehended), it must be asked what the status of “Nirvana” is for Freud: does Freud genuinely believe Nirvana is real, or is it a kind of myth? A myth designed to account for a certain “specimen story,” a story about how we come to understand ourselves in the world, and therefore how we understand the origin of our own discursive logic.
At this point, I am going to introduce ideas from a later psychoanalytic thinker, Jacques Lacan, who re-interprets the “nirvana principle” of Freud to refer not to an actual biological reality of a universal drive towards death, but a symbolic, mythical reality. Shoshana Felman, who studies the connections between psychoanalysis and literature, writes in the last chapter of her book Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight, “Beyond Oedipus,” about how the mythical character of psychoanalysis, which I have been exploring in the earlier chapters, is not a bug but a feature. This and other quotes in this section from Lacan’s seminar I and II come from Shoshana Felman’s book Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight.[36] I am using Felman’s chapter to discuss the basis of Lacan’s interpretation of Freud, what is normally described as the “early Lacan,” because I think this chapter gives great insight into his structural formalization of Freudian psychoanalysis. But I do not agree, in full, with her analysis of the death drive, and to that extent in the latter half of this section I have employed Nestor Braunstein’s interpretation of the “late Lacan,” the Lacan who spends much more time discussing and theorizing the Real.
Felman introduces her chapter discussing the difficulty of the mythical character of Psychoanalysis, but in the end Felman claims that not even Freud himself could avoid it, even admitting as such, citing,
The theory of instincts is so to say our mythology. Instinct are mythical entities, magnificent in their indefiniteness. In our work, we cannot for a moment disregard them, yet we are never sure we are seeing them clearly. (SE 22.95, Felman 151)
She follows with, “Myth in Freud is not an accident of theory: it is not external to the theory, but the very vehicle of theory, a vehicle of mediation between practice and theorization.” (151) Felman understands the confusing and mythical origins of something like the Nirvana principle not as something which leads to further mystification, but which is
‘that very truthful fictitious structure’ (E 449). Insofar as it is mediated by a myth, the Freudian theory is not a literal translation or reflection of reality, but its symptom, its metaphorical account. The myth is not pure fantasy, however, but has narrative symbolic logic that accounts for a real mode of functioning, a real structure of relations. (151)
In other words, as is underscored in Freud by Felman’s commentary, the myths which Freud employs are not actually “myths” in the common sense of the word, they don’t mystify but reveal certain aspects of logic (or as Lacan would put it, structural) relations in the psyche and in the social realm. But although Nirvana appears to be the “core” of psychoanalytic logic, if we exam psychoanalysis from the perspective of a series of myths, each representing a different stage of development of the psychoanalytic movement, we see that the idea of nirvana is not the first “myth” of Freuds, not even the last. It is only the one which represents a definitive logical turning point, from theories of psychological and social life to a definitive theory of the mind about biological life, natural processes. But as Freud says above, even this is a kind of a myth, and the first myth, as identified by Lacan, is the Oedipus complex:
[The Oedipal situation] is really the key–a very reduced key. I would think–as I have already indicated to you–that there is probably a whole set of keys…When we study mythology…we see that the Oedipus complex is but a tiny detail in an immense myth. (S I.101, quoted by Felman 122)
The “Nirvana principle” is not the first origin story of psychoanalysis, the more classical (in both senses) reference, starting from the interpretation of dreams, is the Oedipal drama, referenced at the very beginning of this thesis. At this early stage of Freud’s theorizing, he describes the Oedipal triangle as “mommy, daddy, me,” the subject who desires the mother and who wants to kill the father.
Manifestly, Freud sincerely believed that this is a most basic psychological drive that not only affects him, but practically every living human in the entire world;
Only one idea of general value has occurred to me. I have found love of the mother and jealousy of the father in my own case too, and now believe it to be a general phenomenon of early childhood…If that is the case, the gripping power of the Oedipus Rex…becomes intelligible…The Greek myth seizes on a compulsion which everyone recognizes because he has felt traces of it in himself. Every member of the audience was once a budding Oedipus in phantasy, and this dream-fulfillment played out in reality causes everyone to recoil in horror, with the full measure of repression which separates his infantile from his present state.” (Freud, letter to Willhelm Fliess, 221-224, quoted by Felman, 100)
Felman, however, as opposed to the majority of analysts post-Freud (even Lacan), does not think that Freud is simply imposing a personal fetishism onto the whole of human life, but rather she argues that
what Freud is instituting is a new way of writing one’s autobiography, by transforming personal narration into a pathbreaking theoretical discovery. In the constitution of the theory, however, the discovery that emerges out of the narration is itself referred back to a story that confirms it: the literary drama of the destiny of Oedipus, which, unbecoming thus a reference or key narrative–the specimen story of psychoanalysis–situates the validating moment at which the psychoanalytic storytelling turns and returns upon itself, in the unprecedented Freudian narrative-discursive space in which narration becomes theory. (101)
Felman’s commentary is very useful in understanding how Lacan reads Freud so that we can understand why Lacan feels at odds with later psychoanalytic theorists, like Melanie Klein referenced below, she brings out in Lacan’s sometimes confusing, seemingly impenetrable writings a greater system for interpreting him, and by that measure a way of better understanding Lacan’s own system of analytic interpretation.
Instead of the standard “scientific method” of collecting data and making evaluations based on experiment, Freud recognizes in himself a certain structure of understanding the world, and is able to relate it to a well-known narrative (Oedipus Rex) in a way that is readily comprehensible–implying that the faculty by which he was able to make that evaluation must also be universal. The very telling of the story becomes the theorization.
Freud himself may not have been fully cognizant of this, although he appears to be in the first quote in this section. But for later theorists, like Melanie Klein, it would be the absolute core of psychological life, the origin of (sexual) difference, the origin of basic psychological and social activity and the kernel of all future relations. In Lacan’s first published seminar, which I quote from Felman extensively below, he discusses how Klein was able to manifest a therapeutic success by instinctively imposing an Oedipus complex on a patient, a little boy named Dick[37],
“I [Melanie Klein] took a big train and out it beside a smaller one and called them ‘Daddy train’ and ‘Dick-train.’ Thereupon he picked up the train I called ‘Dick’ and made it roll to the window and said ‘Station.’ I explained: ‘The Station is mummy; dick is going into mummy.’”
[Felman comments:]What Lacan seeks to understand in Klein’s narrative is, specifically her clinical usage of Oedupus in the originating moment of the therapeutic intervention. This clinical usage, however, strikes him as highly problematic and ambiguous[...]And yet this crude originating moment turns out to have been clinically insightful, since it brought about a spectacular therapeutic process.
[Later on Felman quotes Lacan:] “She stickers symbolism into him, little Dick, with the utmost brutality, that Melanie Klein![...]she throws him into brutal verbalization of the Oedipus myth, almost as revolting to us as to any reader whatever.” (106-7)
As Lacan and Felman observe, it doesn’t really matter if Klein actually understands why the Oedipal myth functions. To be precise, she does understand how it works, just under her own mythical categories. Through a series of speech-acts, she is able to impose a certain structure onto Dick, and by imposing that structure, she gives Dick an entire symbolic world, successfully introducing him into the social realm.
Returning to Freud’s myths, by no means is there a straight path between the Oedipus complex and the Nirvana principle. Although the basic notion of a “principle of constancy,” an organism's desire to always maintain a constant state of lowered tension, can be seen from the beginning in his unfinished Project for a Scientific Psychology, the more fleshed out, totalizing version comes later. First he generates, in his book Totem and Taboo, an origin story for the origin story: the primal father, collectively killed and eaten by his sexually deprived sons, who then establish monogamy and tribal exogamy to prevent one man from hoarding all the women again, who, in their guilt, then worship the dead father later as a totemic figure. It is the explanation for heterosexual monogamy, and for the Oedipal complex.
If the totem animal is the father, then the two principal ordinances of totemism, the two taboo prohibitions which constitute its core - not to kill the totem and not to have sexual relations with a woman of the same totem - coincide in their content with the two crimes of Oedipus, who killed his father and married his mother, as well as with the two primal wishes of children, the insufficient repression or the re-awakening of which forms the nucleus of perhaps every psychoneurosis. (SE XIII, 132)
In his later work, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud asserts that this original totemic structure, across all human societies, is the origin of all human social relations.
But even this story didn’t answer the most basic questions of aggressivity for Freud, so now, having been influenced to some degree by Schopenhauer, he created an origin story for an origin story for an origin story: the constant movement of the life and death drives, and the ceaseless desire to return to some sort of original state, the state of nirvana or annihilation. First Freud described the Oedipal complex, the means by which symbolic relations are established. Then he describes the Primal father, the means by which those social relations (which are, through the Oedipal complex, introjected into the individual psyches) are established, and then finally he described the Nirvana principle, the principle which regulates the ordering of even the most basic of biological relations.
Of these three specimen stories, the Nirvana principle seeks to explain the origin of all biological life, the Primal father seeks to explain the origin of all social life, but it is only the Oedipus complex which seeks to explain the origin of all psychological life. It is for that reason that it is ceaselessly returned to as a psychological framework, reworked, critiqued, and it is from this jumping off point, in his first published Seminar, that Lacan asks the question of why the Oedipus complex, for being something that is purely mythological, still functions therapeutically: how can something that seemingly has no life outside of its symbolic and symbolizing function, actually help to treat patients, why was Freud’s method so influential in the first place? As Lacan says in his first Seminar, quoted by Felman, “I would like to give you a more precise idea of the manner in which I plan to conduct this seminar. You have seen, in my last lectures, the beginnings of a reading of what one might call the psychoanalytic myth.” And, “This reading goes in the direction, not so much of criticizing this myth, as of measuring the scope of the reality with which it comes to grips, and to which it gives its mythical reply.” (S I.24, quoted by Felman 151)
Felman makes us attentive to this problem that what Lacan sees in the Oedipus complex is not its literal significance, but the beginning of the symbolic life of the child: the Oedipal complex is the first time that a child, who begins as purely narcissistic entity occupied purely with what Lacan calls the “imaginary dimension,” recognizes themselves as existing in a symbolic chain.
This is what the Oedipus complex mythically, schematically, accounts for: the constitution of the Symbolic, through the coincidence of the child’s introduction into language and of the constitution of his (linguistic) unconscious. (Felman, 104)
Felman here claims, alongside Lacan, that the Oedipus complex reflects the psychological structures of socialization. The Oedipus complex is not a universal, nor even unitary model, but it does offer a “triangularity” in its structure which Lacan sees as key to the unfolding of the unconscious, symbolic life:
When we go toward the discovery of the unconscious, what we encounter are situations which are structures, organized, complex. Of these situations, Freud has given us the first model, the standard, in the Oedipus complex…[What we have to realize is] the extent to which the Oedipus complex poses problems, and how many ambiguities it encompasses. The whole development of analysis, in fact, was brought about by the successive emphasis placed upon each of the tensions implied in this triangular system. This alone forces us to see in it an altogether different thing than this massive bloc summed up by the classical formula–sexual desire for the mother, rivalry with the father. (S I.79, quoted by Felman 104)
The narcissistic children are concerned only with themselves, and the words for their mother are no different from a cry for food, comfort–the baby does not see others as anything other than an extension of its body, there is a mirroring, a dualism: me=[38]mommy[39]. Lacan calls this the imaginary, it is without logic to express it, therefore it does not rise to the level of symbolic discourse. Felman comments on the above, saying:
This is why projection is ‘imaginary,’ dual (‘here’ equals ‘there,’ ‘inside’ equals ‘outside’), whereas introjection is ‘symbolic,’ triangular (the relation between ‘inside,’ ‘outside,’ and ‘myself’). Since naming an element relates it to a system–language–and not simply to me, who becomes yet another element in the same system, the Symbolic is the differential situating of the subject in a third position; it is at once the place from which it is articulated, and that which makes the subject (as, precisely, this symbolic, third place) into a linguistic signifier in a system, which thereby permits him to relate symbolically to other signifiers, that is, at once to relate to other humans and to articulate his own desire, his own unconscious, unawares. (Felman, 105)
Felman here is constructing a large system, extrapolating from many parts of Lacan’s first seminar, but it's clear from this simple reference that it is grounded in his writing.
It is around this distinction [between the dualistic imaginary and triadic symbolic] that you can separate, and see the difference, between the function of the ego, which is of the order of the dual register, and the function of the superego. (S I.97, quoted by Felman 111)
The symbolic structure introduced by an Oedipal formation is triadic. At a certain stage of maturation (what Freud would call the end of the oral stage, or the point at which the baby becomes weaned from its mother) the child is told, for the first time no, the “no” of the “father” (though not always the actual father), and that “no” creates what is for Freud the “reality principle,” the child must come to terms with the fact that their basic, narcissistic, imaginary desire cannot be attained, and they must repress that desire and push it down into the unconscious–this is called symbolic castration. This is where Lacan differs with Freud: though for both the unconscious drives are the result of repression, for Freud these, in the end, are determined by the more basic life and death drives–Freud is biologizing psychological action at its most basic level. For Lacan, the unconscious is simply the place where all the repressed signifiers, the battery of signifiers, come to stand in place of the “name-of-the-father,” or the “Law,” the order which then becomes internalized by the child in the formation of their unconscious drives–hence symbolic castration. As Felman comments,
Repression is, in other words, the rejection not of instincts but of symbols, or of signifiers: their rejection through their replacement, the displacement or the transference of their original libidinal meaning onto other signifiers (Felman, 123)
From the point of repression, after the initial injury (both physical and symbolic) of castration, as a need to make a compromise with the reality of not being able to ever be “whole” again, always missing some “part,” the unconscious then begins to form, and a series of signifiers come to stand in place of the “master signifier,” the original signifier which stands as the beginning of the structural relations. This is the beginning of the child’s entrance into social relations, since now the child himself is able to articulate those relations, and even more, the child is radically “ex-appropriated,” “The unconscious is a discourse that is other, or ex-centric, to the discourse of the self.” (123) The subject-speaking “I” now comes to stand for himself and now the child understands himself as existing in an economy of signifiers. As Felman quotes,
The development takes place only insofar as the subject is integrated into a symbolic system, which he practices and in which he asserts himself through the exercise of an authentic speech. It is not necessary, you will notice, for this speech to be his own. (S 1.101, quoted by Felman 124)
Lacan here is commenting on the case of Dick from Melanie Klein, and how she is able to impose a certain symbolic structure on the disaffective young boy. By doing so, as Lacan argues, she is able to manufacture the point at which the unconscious becomes “Other,” meaning that the unconscious becomes that which, as its repressed, something unrecognizable to the conscious operations of the symbolic chain–what Freud would call conscious thought. The introjection, that is, of the original no, the Law which denies the original narcissistic pleasure, then leads to a projection of the unconsciously repressed imaginary content onto another, what he terms literally L’Autre or the Other.
The unconscious is the discourse that is other, or ex-centric,to the discourse of a self[...]Since it is a discourse that no consciousness can own, the only way a consciousness can hear it is as coming from the Other[...]’The Other’ thus stands in the psychoanalytic dialogue both for the position of the analyst, through whom the subject hears his own unconscious discourse, and for the position of the subject’s own unconscious, as other to his self (Felman 123-4)
Felman quotes Lacan’s Ecrits here, “In language, our message comes to us from the Other, in a reverse form (9).” Furthermore, she adds from Lacan, “The unconscious is that discourse of the Other by which the subject receives, in an inverted form, his own forgotten message. (439)” As Felman interprets Lacan, the other in clinical practice is the analyst for the analysand, but it could be your boss at work, your sexual partner–it is, importantly, anybody anywhere at any time that a subject recognizes as another subject, who then, ironically, has the unconsciously repressed imaginary content projected onto them. They participate in something necessarily “ex-centric” and a discourse which is “radically intersubjective” (123). However, it is the “Other” (the “big” other), which structures the relation with the other, which is a psychical formation existing on account of repression, “the only way a consciousness can hear it is coming from the Other.” This is why Lacan says that “the unconscious is the discourse of the Other.” Someone sees in others what they cannot symbolically account for, they hear the unconscious in the Other.
But from that point on, everybody’s life experiences, symbolic orderings, etc. are unique–this accounts for the differences in language, culture, and family structure–but the core psychological foundations remain the same.
This specimen story is, however, just that–a story. But what Felman and Lacan are more interested in is not the story qua story, but the deployment of the story. How is it that the story is being used, and what kind of theorization is being effected by it. Here we are accounting for the origin of logic with a story about the origin of logic, even when that symbolic ordering accounts for our ability to understand ourselves, our history, and ultimately come to terms with our own desires, it still operates secondarily to some sort of original experience beyond language. There is not much difference between our Oedipal narrative and the tower of Babel[40], if treated purely in this respect.
However, the difference between Oedipus Rex and the biblical narratives was that they were meant to be performed for an audience, a successful production of a greek tragedy meant that it could somehow point to something universal, and elicit a cathartic reaction from the audience[41]. As quoted above, “The Greek myth seizes on a compulsion which everyone recognizes because he has felt traces of it in himself.” The point was to find what specific words would lead to some kind of psychological release. In the same way, the reason for the Oedipal narrative is not to have some perfect story which tells us, cleanly and from the start, what our “true” history is, what really happened, and how exactly we came to be the way we are today. The point is to provide a framework for analytic practice. The point then, for Lacan, is to see in the myths what there is that can be useful to us–Lacan, just like Freud, differs from Schopenhauer precisely in that they see psychology not as something simply to ponder, but a practical method for healing others. Where Schopenhauer sees the end goal of not only his philosophy but all philosophy, all intellectual practice, to be the recognition of the Will, and then all ethics should be an attempt towards extinguishing it, Freud and Lacan see the purpose of their intellectual practice as helping people continue to live, they see the use of psychological investigation always as something that works for their patients: that is why in the quote from Freud’s New Introductory Lectures–“‘That isn’t natural science, it’s Schopenhauer's philosophy!’ But, Ladies and Gentlemen, why should not a bold thinker have guessed something that is afterwards confirmed by sober and painstaking detailed research.” (my emphasis)–he distinguishes himself from Schopenhauer in the fact that he had to perform “painstaking detailed research.” It doesn’t matter if it’s a myth, as long as it works, and only as long as it works did he continue to employ it.
As Lacan says, the point of analysis is not to find some magic key of truth behind what the analysand is saying, it is not even to understand some deeper metaphysical import, it is to “recognize what function the subject assumes in the order of symbolic relations which cover the whole field of human relations, and of which the initial cell is the Oedipus complex, where the assumption of sex is decided.” (S I.80, quoted by Felman 120) There is one final aspect to the Lacanian system of psychology, however, which resists this therapeutic definition; what Lacan calls the Real.
The Real is not simply “reality,” like I’ve mentioned above, reality is, in psychoanalysis, simply coming to terms with the inability to attain what one desires. When Lacan refers to the Real, what he is referring to is exactly what cannot be reconciled in “reality,” because it is something that exceeds the symbolic structure of socially organized reality. It is not a repressed imaginary, it is only experienced when the structural order of repression is shot through. We cannot actually discuss it; instead when we talk about the Real, we really describe what Lacan calls the petit object a, something (a signifier) which comes to stand in place of what exceeds symbolization. The object a is the “object cause of desire,” it is the desire for that original pleasure which is covered over by the master signifier and which is the object of discourse itself–but because the symbolic system only concerns the movement of signifiers (and their constant repression) it never actually approaches that original pleasure: it is this original pleasure, which may or may not be illusory, which Lacan refers to as Jouissance. Nestor Braunstein says in his article, “Desire and Jouissance in the Teachings of Lacan,” that there are actually “3 modalities of jouissance”:
The function of speech permits us to separate the three modalities of jouissance: (a) Jouissance in the word, of the speaking being as such, phallic jouissance, subservient to castration, the Law, and the Name-of-the-Father; (b) Jouissance before the word, experienced in relation to the mother's jouissance, to the proximity of the Thing, a jouissance written on the body, but unnamable, mythical, a retroactive creation, impossible for the subject already immersed in speech to objectify and consequently, forever sundered from it, a jouissance of being; and (c) Jouissance beyond the word, beyond the regulation of the Law and of the phallus, jouissance of the Other, feminine jouissance, which for the very same reason - lying somewhere beyond speech - is equally impossible to objectify, impossible for the parlêtre to articulate. (Thesis 14)
The phallic jouissance, (a) which is the jouissance experienced by the constant displacement of signifiers, the mythical jouissance of nirvana (b) which is the retroactive construction after the introjection of the name of the father (in a), and the jouissance of the Other (c), the “feminine” jouissance, the one that corresponds to the Real.
The division made by Braunstein is not between the location of jouissance, but to whom it is being addressed. But fundamentally the (non-)experience of jouissance is still being divided into two, that between the Jouissance of the “body” which is the experience of a jouissance in excess of language, the indescribable “petit objet a,” the Other’s jouissance, and the Jouissance of every-day experience, the jouissance of language, of symbolic structures, that is most apparent to us in our constantly shifting desires.
It is the former that relates to the “mystical”, the “real”, to the articulation of what it means to be feminine, the experience of the body which is in excess of what it is. The latter which is the state of the castrated: the economic, phallic, symbolic. This is the split of primary sexuation, this is the “duality” of experience that at the bottom is the mythical explanation for duality itself. As Lacan says in seminar XX, “The fact remains that if she is excluded by the nature of things, it is precisely in the following respect: being not-whole, she has a supplementary jouissance compared to what the phallic function designates by way of jouissance.” (73)
The difference between Nirvana and Jouissance is in the fact that the nirvana principle designates the jouissance which is below discourse, which discourse always seeks but never captures, thereby structuring it. Whereas the woman represents the excessive jouissance, the jouissance of the not-whole, beyond. The family resemblance between Jouissance and Nirvana is complicated by this dual nature.
On the other hand, women’s jouissance is defined by being “not-whole”, “it means that when any speaking being whatsoever situates itself under the banner ‘women,’ it is on the basis of the following - that it grounds itself as being not-whole in situating itself in the phallic function. (S XX.72)” “The fact remains that if she is excluded by the nature of things, it is precisely in the following respect: being not-whole, she has a supplementary jouissance compared to what the phallic function designates by way of jouissance.” (73) The difference between Nirvana and Jouissance is in the fact that the nirvana principle designates the jouissance which is below discourse, which discourse always seeks but never captures, thereby structuring it. Whereas the woman represents the excessive jouissance, the jouissance of the not-whole, beyond. It is to that extent that Lacan labels himself as a “mystic”: “These mystical jaculations are neither idle chatter nor empty verbiage; they provide, all in all, some of the best reading one can find - at the bottom of the page, drop a footnote, ‘Add to that list Jacques Lacan’s Ecrits,’ because it’s of the same order.” (S XX 76).
It is, after all, the mystical tradition which asks the question of not what constitutes Jouissance, which is, in simple terms, “pleasure,” but what is that beyond Jouissance, mystics are those who “get the idea or sense there must be a jouissance that is beyond.” (ibid.) This jouissance is then that “of a woman insofar as it is extra,” (76) the woman who is “not-whole.”
When the child experiences symbolic castration, initially, they are cut off from the basic imaginary, narcissism, and forced to possess themselves as a signifier in a social context–as Lacan says in Seminar 20: “Being…is the being of signifierness.” (71) But before this state, there was some primary experience of the “monad,” the One.
All these things are described precisely in language[42]– because of that, there is some difficulty in locating jouissance precisely because it is situated in one sense in the repressed imaginary, therefore it only appears in the Other–therefore desire is always desire for the Other’s jouissance, and at the same time it is beyond or rather exceeds the symbolic system, it exceeds the monad itself which is the imagined state prior to the lack in symbolic castration. There is something “nirvana-esque” in Jouissance in the fact that it refers to some sort of original pleasure. But in the sense that it refers to a phenomenon that at the same time exceeds pleasure and even structurally orders it, there is something beyond the nirvana principle inside of it.
Lacan answers this question by asking what is the difference between phallic jouissance, the jouissance of the attempt to return to the state before castration, and the jouissance of the body, the jouissance experienced as a symbolic excess, as demonstrated above. The phallic jouissance is a man’s, “man is but a signifier because where he comes into play as a signifier, he comes in only quoad castrationem, in other words, insofar as he has a relation to phallic jouissance.” (S XX.35)
Here, I would like to go back and talk about how this problem of mysticism relates to the previous chapters. The problem originally encountered in the Bhagavad Gita by Schopenhauer, and which then came to influence Freud, was the split between the subject of experience and the subject as experienced: the body and the knower of the body, the Will and Representation. This split, between the “Will” and the “Representation”, would become for Lacan the split of castration, the castration being, in a deeply Freudian sense, from the original pleasure of the mother, the “non-being” of the state before the formation of the ego and the subsequent understanding of the body as a subject of representation.
We can see now that the jouissance which is “beyond” is the Other’s jouissance, which Lacan calls the feminine form of jouissance and is the jouissance as of being the other for another, the jouissance of the body. We can surmise that knowledge, as unification of the body and the knower of the body in Krishna, is exactly what Lacan would call this mystical jouissance, and what Schopenhauer would likewise consider to be wisdom.
What the question becomes, however, is that if this erotics of the mystical, indescribable jouissance has any relation to the Real. Whether, if Lacan is saying, in a way, that what Schopenhauer and the Gita might point as being the object of true knowledge, the erotics of nirvana as theorized and narrativizes by Freud, if that is actually a contact with the Real that produces such an erotic effect. Or, if in fact it is the case that for Lacan all erotics, all pleasure, is too deeply intertwined with structure, with the symbolic function, and that nothing that what we would call sublime or ecstatic exceeds it.
On the one hand it seems as though Lacan, in the end, must conclude that such representations already influence the understanding of the state before the creation of representation itself, and the word which Lacan uses to describe the desire for such an impossible state, the state of imagined pure pleasure before language which can only be, ironically, described in language, is Jouissance. On the other, those erotics still point to that mystical contact with a post-discursive reality.
The problem that Lacan must deal with is how it is possible to describe the experience of representation from within representation, and if there is even such a sense of being avant representation: that is, a state of experience which does not have a structural location. And yet, it is a state of experience assigned to the “feminine,” Lacan articulates in this notion of the feminine jouissance, a jouissance experienced as a result of “being” the other for another, a radically different kind of jouissance than that of “nirvana,” which is a jouissance simply of the phallic function, related to its constant failure of achieving its imaginary repressed desires. Lacan places feminine jouissance beyond discourse, in Woman, and yet at the same time says Woman does not exist, she is not “one,” that even our notion of the mystical is already captured by a certain structural relation. As he says in Seminar XX,
How is one to return, if not on the basis of a peculiar (spécial) discourse, to a prediscursive reality? That is the dream - the dream behind every conception (idée) of knowledge. But it is also what must be considered mythical. There's no such thing as a prediscursive reality. Every reality is founded and defined by a discourse. (32)
It is clear that for Lacan, Jouissance does not actually “exist” in the sense of it being a real physiological phenomenon–that is, it doesn’t exist as does the biological “Nirvana” for Freud. It is not the tie to a deeper, biological reality upon which psychological life has its foundation, “Nirvana,” just like Jouissance, is purely discursive. It is always addressed to the other for the Other, it is the Real which cannot be approached in reality, and therefore is always missed, and is never achieved. It stands outside and below discourse, thereby structuring it, but also somehow beyond discourse, but in both senses it is not really there, it only exists to explain the operations of discourse, it exists as that “center” of being, that thing below pleasure, but also somehow beyond it. By transforming Nirvana into Jouissance, Lacan is going against Freud and saying that Nirvana is nothing but a myth. But it's a myth deployed deliberately, a myth that exists to help navigate the field of speech, a myth that, in Lacan’s theorization, denies that there is something beyond pleasure–or if there is, what is beyond pleasure is only in theory, it only exists as a structural framework.
And yet, when Lacan says that “every reality is founded and defined by a discourse,” he doesn’t seem to be referring to the Real. He leaves in his notion of reality something that exceeds it.
Rebirth
In the beginning of this project I discussed the unscientific nature of the Nirvana principle, and attempted to find the genealogical origins of what appeared to be a mystical, philosophical idea divorced from scientific practice. In my search for the origins of this notion, I came to find that it was Schopenhauer’s philosophy that influenced Freud’s thought. I performed a critical reflection of Freud and Schopenhauer’s interrelation, and then found the origin of Schopenhauer’s idea of what constituted Nirvana from his interpretation of the Indian sources. In doing so, it became clear that Schopenhauer was mixing multiple discourses, and within Schopenhauer's texts were multiple layers of his own path of philosophical discovery and analysis. But it was also clear that Schopenhauer and Freud were employing this word “Nirvana,” to discuss the same empirical problem noted in both the Sankhya philosophy and the Bhagavad Gita, that is the separation between the actual experience of the body and knowledge of that body.
I then investigated how Lacan attempts to understand this through one of his own interpreter’s Shoshana Felman, who gives an excellent account of Lacan’s approach to the “Freudian myths,” from the Oedipal Complex to the Nirvana Principle. Using Felman’s analysis, I found in Lacan a discourse not of finding truth instead of mythology, but how mythology is operative in our understanding of what constitutes truth and how the theorization of mythology allows us to “performatively” think through the basis of empirical investigation. This led to my final analysis of Lacan’s notion of Jouissance as it relates both the idea of Nirvana, in both Freud and Schopenhauer, and how Jouissance also redefines and exceeds the discourse of Nirvana in the psychoanalytic and mystical traditions, employing Nestor Braunstein’s three-fold taxonomy of the modalities of Jouissance.
In the end, I’m not sure this was a completely successful project. I began with the question about why, exactly, did Freud use something so unscientific to construct his psychological system, and what were the origins of this idea. To the extent that I was able to trace, from both a textual and ontological perspective, the origin of that idea, I would say I succeeded, for the most part, in creating a link which I do not believe has been made quite so directly in research before.
But having created this link, it became clear, through reading Felman and Lacan, that such a mythical, “unscientific” idea of Nirvana had no bearing on the effectiveness of treatment, the usefulness of psychoanalysis, and that Freud to a certain extent was even aware of the mythical character of his treatment–which is probably why he was so hesitant, in the first place, to name any antecedents: he didn’t think it mattered to give an author to a myth.
However, while the early Lacan which Felman writes about is interested in the formalization of Psychoanalytic theory and the transformation from a series of mythical narratives to a set of mythical signs, which he felt more thoroughly formalized the field and also opened the room for the constant, critical re-evaluation of his own interpretations, creating a constant practice of theorization through interpretation and likewise a pedagogical method, the later Lacan, of Seminar XX, has become more concerned, still, with how something like Jouissance, which describes merely a set of structural relations, also at the same time points to something which exceeds those relations, and if the position of “Woman” as the one who experiences the Other’s jouissance, is a form of jouissance that corresponds to an experience of the Real. And it is insofar as he asks these questions that he re-adopts the sign of mystical practice.
This final set of questions which Lacan asks at the end of Seminar XX puts into play every “conclusion” made in the previous chapters of this essay, because in the end Lacan does not seem to provide us with a clean answer: Lacan, perhaps, claims that there is such a thing as a mystical truth.
But at the very least, it’s clear that Lacan’s notion of what constitutes a mystical truth is not the same as the “extinguishing of the Will” of Schopenhauer, it differs from Freud’s Nirvana in that is somehow exceeds what we’d call the experience of biology and the experience of the body (being unable, in this way, to be organized bodily since it lacks symbolic structure), and, ultimately, it differs from the Indian philosophy referenced in that it interrogates the mythical position of deities like Krishna, or concepts like the Atman, by placing this ultimate mystical truth in the form of a Woman–specifically, the body of a woman, grounding the absolute identity with the Real in the regular, everyday social reality of sexual difference, and everyday reality of women’s sexual pleasure and erotic life. What is in much of the Indian philosophy examined here is that which is to be avoided through intellectual practice–rebirth, the return to the womb–for Lacan becomes the center of critical thought.
Though we have to say it was Freud who first turned the world’s head towards the idea that perhaps all mystical thought was just a deep repression of the most basic desire to return: but as we have seen throughout this project, as Lacan answers in the final analysis, such a simple proposition does not have an equally simple conclusion.
This research was “painstaking,” to say the least. The vast majority of scholars, when it comes to finding the influences of Indian philosophy on Freud and/or Schopenhauer, first draw a middle point through Nietzsche, and then, in the absence of clear textual genealogies after Schopenhauer, simply attempt a comparative analysis of Schopenhauer and/or Freud’s thought with Buddhism.
I would have simply relied on those comparative studies, and made a comparative study myself, if it had not become clear, throughout the course of my research, that Freud very clearly names Schopenhauer, and only Schopenhauer, as the main philosophical antecedent to psychoanalysis, and Schopenhauer very clearly is influenced in the main by what today would be called Hindu philosophy, and only references Buddhism secondarily[43]. Not to mention the recent, invaluable work of Urs App, who performed the textual analysis of Schopenhauer’s notebook, and looking directly at his copy of the Oupnekhat, to suss out the complex field of textual intersections and trace a far more definite set of influences than we had access to before.
But it was Lacan’s analysis that was invaluable, and on account of him and Felman, I would say that from a critical perspective I neither have a negative nor positive view of mystical traditions, but I believe, from a literary, philosophical perspective they hold great value and I can see now why Freud and Lacan would be comfortable at the very least acknowledging (or, in the latter case, placing himself in) the mystical tradition.
But I think Lacan’s greater comfort with mysticism comes from the key difference between him and Freud: that Lacan really, very truly, wants the most basic drives to have a discursive function, he does not want to admit that people have aggressive, sexual impulses by nature, but that sex and the “sexual relationship” are discursive and symbolic. Freud, in this way, is far more “realistic” and conservative. At the bottom of our psyches, for Freud, is the most deepest desire for self-destruction which gets expressed oftentimes in violence against others. This destructive violence both shapes and is limited by the structures of human society, always ready at any moment, in Freud’s eyes, to implode.
By placing these desires in the frame of discourse, Lacan, on the other hand, sees a more progressive vision for the future. The violent structures of society do not exist by nature, the basic, symbolic structures of the psyche that make them up can be influenced, reworked, and changed to improve individuals and society as a whole, through the psychoanalytic method.
I’d like to believe Lacan, but in my heart I know Freud is right; I remain a pessimist. Freud may not have been directly influenced by Nietzsche, but that philosophical pessimism that still insists, in the face of such terror, to embrace life and create and impose your own values on the world, runs deep in the Freudian theory. But Freud’s acknowledgement of what are essentially universal logical structures that shape society and discourse, also means that he would never advocate the complete explosion of society like Nietzsche, and at the same time he cannot acknowledge the progressive possibilities of altering discourse like Lacan. Still, I suppose he remains the most influential of the three because he is the most “realistic.”
One more book which I read in preparation for this essay was Gilles Deleuze’s Coldness and Cruelty, which gives, I think, a far better theoretical account of the so-called life and death drives than either Freud or Lacan. Unfortunately, the discussion of that text, as well as a more thorough undertaking of the Real in Lacanian analysis, could not be completed due to constraints of the most necessary forms of perception, time and space. I would not be exaggerating if I said that it might take me five more years to write five more pages on the Real. The Real in Lacan has been the subject of intense scholarships in the last few decades, and I hope any of my further research in this field would be able to adequately add to it.
While I began this essay with the intention of elucidating why the critical theory tradition seemed to be so mired in mystical thinking, I have ended with the understanding that what we understand as “mysticism” is nothing more than a different way of discussing the structural orders of reality. Since Plato, there has always been the question of how we, with structurally ordered cognition, living in an orderly reality, are always at a permanent distance from what stands behind our cognition. And yet we are able to discuss and communicate about that world, we are able to build things in it, collectively, and affect each other in a social process. I think Psychoanalysis elucidates this well, but only because thinkers like Schopenhauer, who was so influenced by Indian philosophy, paved the road for a comprehensive understanding of the social process in which cognition develops.
My essay has not solved this problem, but only found the historical pathway into its contemporary development. Clearly, Freud’s method has radically changed the modern world, and Lacan only sought to thoroughly understand how his mythology could produce such an effect, and how the psychoanalytic method reveals in more fine detail the negotiations between what Schopenhauer called the Will and its Representation, what in the Bhagavad Gita is called the Body and the Knower of the Body. As I say above, I have only reached this point of understanding. Where Lacan went with this, after he developed his cognitive topology–his way of analyzing psychological processes as sets of relations, the most fundamental, to him, way of mythologizing[44]–is not something I was able to explore. But the direction of research has led, in the final analysis, towards what is traditionally termed “analytic” philosophy, and the philosophy of language and logic. Although it would not have been possible to complete this project within contemporary academic philosophy, as it was only Lacan who understood the structural, topological method of modeling psychology as it interrelated with social processes–and not as something exceptional to them. The comprehensibility, and ultimately the necessity of his use of such forms can only be made clear through such a critical genealogy which I’ve performed here, in order to demonstrate how, in the end, structural logic is the middle term between rationality and unfettered experience–the sign, the phallus (or as they say in Indian philosophy, the Lingam) was identified as the ultimate creative power in the world that generates what we experience as reality. But only once that is understood from a historical basis can such a middle term be properly critiqued.
Works Cited
App, Urs. "Schopenhauer’s initial encounter with Indian thought." Schopenhauer and Indian Philosophy: A Dialogue between India and Germany. New Delhi: Northern Book Centre (2008): 7-57.
App, Urs. Schopenhauer's Compass: An Introduction to Schopenhauer's Philosophy and Its Origins. Switzerland, UniversityMedia, 2014.
App, Urs. Die Wahrheit ist nackt am Schönsten: Arthur Schopenhauers philosophische Provokation. Germany, Societäts-Verlag, 2010.
Aristotle. “Poetics.” tr. Bywater, Ingram. , and Jonathan. Barnes. The Complete Works of Aristotle: the Revised Oxford Translation. Vol, II. Princeton University Press, 1984.
Braunstein, Né. "Desire and Jouissance in the Teachings of Lacan." The Cambridge Companion to Lacan, Cambridge. Edited by Jean-Michel Rabaté. Cambridge University Press, 2003. ProQuest, https://login.proxy.libraries.rutgers.edu/login?qurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.proquest.com%2Fbooks%2Fdesire-jouissance-teachings-lacan%2Fdocview%2F2138000986%2Fse-2%3Faccountid%3D13626, doi:https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521807441.007.
Colebrooke, Henry Thomas. “On the Philosophy of the Hindus. Part I.” Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, vol. 1, no. 1, 1824, pp. 19–43. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25581692. Accessed 5 Apr. 2023.
Deleuze, Gilles. “Coldness and Creulty.” Masochism, translated by Jean McNeil. Zone books, 2006, pp 9-138.
Felman, Shoshana. Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight: Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture. Harvard University Press, 1987.
Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Edited by James Strachey et al., Hogarth Press, 1900.
Freud, Sigmund. Collected Papers. Vol IV. Hogarth Press, 1954
Freud, Sigmund, and Michael. Molnar. The Diary of Sigmund Freud, 1929-1939 : a Record of the Final Decade. Scribner’s, 1992.
Lacan, Jacques. Encore, the Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX. tr. Fink, Bruce. W.W. Norton & Company, 1999.
Spielrein, Sabina. “Destruction as the Cause of Coming Into Being.” Journal of Analytical Psychology, vol. 39, no. 2, 1994, pp. 155–86, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1465-5922.1994.00155.x.
Schopenhauer, Arthur, and E. F. J. Payne. The World as Will and Representation. Dover Publications, 1969.
Sharma, Har Dutt. The Samkhya Karika. The Oriental Book Agency, 1933.
Unknown. (2020, August 25). Sāṃkhya Kārikā. Universal Theosophy. Retrieved February 22, 2023, from https://universaltheosophy.com/hds/samkhya-karika/
Wilkins, Charles. Bhagavat-Geeta, a Dialouges of Kreeshna and Arjoon in Eighteen Lectures with Notes. 1802
[1] Citations in this essay are in MLA format.
[2] Efforts have been made to differentiate between the usages of “Nirvana” as it has been understood in the western context, and the actual Indian context. Generally speaking, the above spelling is accepted as referring to the word निर्वाण, even without diacritical marks, but in some places I have included such marks where I felt it was necessary to refer more clearly to the word in its original context and not as has been understood in the west.
[3] Citations of the Standard Edition of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud will be given with volume number in roman, followed by the page of that volume.
[4] German Trieben. The word “Instinct” was chosen by Freud’s translator to replace “Trieben” to make him sound more like a scientist, but the word actually has its direct cognate with English “Drive” so we will use it here.
[5] There were many thinkers whose work preceded Freud’s in this regard, one of whom Freud directly credits (Barbara Low), but others (those more closely aligned with Jung) who are missing from his work, like Sabina Spielrein’s 1912 essay “Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being,” which actually anticipates not only the life and death drives, but many other developments in later psychoanalysis.
[6] Moses and Monotheism was actually published only a few months before Freud passed.
[7] After all, why shouldn’t human habitations reflect the psychology of their inhabitants; Plato’s ideal city was to reflect the individual ψυχή (“soul”, hence “psyche”) of those inhabiting it.
[8] Ich, Es, Über-ich in the original German. Again, Strachey was subbing more “scientific” terms for the plain German of Freud. Cf. footnote 3 on page 2 above.
[9] Note that Schopenhauer detested German Idealist philosophy, specifically because of their tenet that reason was the ordering principle of philosophical thought, whereas Schopenhauer quite firmly believes that reason is only a byproduct of perceptual consciousness which for him is inscrutable by traditional empirical methods for obvious reasons.
[10] Citations for Schopenhauer will be given in the same format as those from the Standard Edition (of Freud). Here, the page numbers are given in roman, as they are from the preface.
[11] Cf. Chapter 3 below, Moksha.
[12] Essentially an abridgment of §34 on pg. 178-81. The end quote is originally in Latin, for which I’ve subbed in the English translation provided by the editor. This meditative process is referred to as dhyāna in the indic schools.
[13] “It is well known that Schopenhauer’s favorite book was a Latin work called Oupnek’hat, id est, secretum tegendum. He called it ‘the most rewarding and uplifting reading in the world’ and informed his readers that the Oupnek’hat ‘has been the solace of my life and will be the solace of my death.’” (App 65)
[14] From App, Urs, Schopenhauers Nirwana in “Die Wahrheit ist nackt am Schönsten: Arthur Schopenhauers philosophische Provokation.” Pg. 203. Taken from Schopenhauer’s notes. Translated from the original German. Apparently Urs App has his own English translation somewhere but I couldn’t find it. Original text: “Wenn eine Person nicht länger den folgenden Üblen unterworfen ist, namentlich Burde, Alter, Krankheit, Tod, dann sagt man, er habe Nieban erreicht. Kein Ding und kein Ort kann uns eine angemessene Idee von Nieban vermitteln; wir können nur sagen, dass Nieban darin besteht, von den obengennanten Üblen befreit zu sein und Erlösung erlangt zu haben. Auf gleiche Weise sagt man von einem Menschen, den an einer schweren Krankheit leidet und mit Hilfe eines Medikamenentes genest, er habe Gesundheit erlangt; doch wenn jemand wissen will, wie oder aus welchem Grund dieser Gewinn der Gesundheit erfolgt sei, so kann ihm nur geantwortet werden, dass der Wiedergewinn der Gesundheit nichts anderes bedeutet als die Genesung von der Krankheit. Nur auf diese Weise kann man von Nieban sprechen, und so lehrte Godama.”
[15] Cf. Ego and the Id, part IV, Standard Edition XIX
[16] सांख्य (“sāṃkhya”), a nominal derivation from the word संख्या (“saṃkhyā,” number).
[17] From verses 67 and 68 of the Sankhya Karika. Sanskrit original:
सम्यग्ज्ञानाधिगमाद्धर्मादीनामकारणप्राप्तौ ।
तिष्ठति सम्स्कारवशाच्चक्रभ्रमवद्धृतशरीरः ॥६७॥
प्राप्ते शरीरभेदे चरितर्थत्वात् प्रधानविनिवृत्तौ ।
ऐकान्तिकमात्यन्तिकमुभयं कैवल्यमाप्नोति ॥६८॥
[18] I am not sure if Schopenhauer employed this more archaic English spelling in his writing or not (cf. “Sankhya” above), and the editors of the Dover edition of the World as Will and Representation simply corrected it to the more contemporary version.
[19] सेश्वर सांख्य (“seśvará sāṃkhya”), lit. “sankhya with god.”
[20] निरीश्वर सांख्य (“nirīśvará sāṃkhya”) lit. “sankhya without god.”
[21] पौराणिक सांख्य (“paurāṇika sāṃkhya”) lit. “mythical sankhya.”
[22] गुण (“guṇá”).
[23] In fact Colebrooke’s essay on the matter is so thorough that whether or not Schopenhauer read the Karikas (or Patanjali’s text) directly is not relevant, the clear influence of the philosophy through the comparison below demonstrates that.
[24] Standard Edition vol. XVIII pg. 28
[25] It could also be argued that Time is a result of the interaction of Purusha and Prakriti, but it appears that such an interpretation coincides neither with Schopenhauer nor Freud’s systems. Because the nature of time in the original Sankhya Karikas is not clearly elucidated, and given that a rational explanation for the passage of time is quite important in any philosophical system, there has been much debate on the function and origin of time between later thinkers, and unfortunately I did not have the time to explore these arguments in more depth while preparing this thesis.
[26] To be certain, the Sankhya school denies Isvara or “God,” it is considered itself an atheistic.
[27] It will be my claim later on that Lacan tries to “fix” Freud’s mysticism.
[28] भगवद्गीता (“bhagavadgītā”) lit. “the song of the lord.”
[29] In order from left to right: First is the section of the Bhagavadgita as written and noted down by Schopenhauer in 1814 from Majer’s Asiatisches Magazin, published in 1802. Second is the original English which Majer translated (without credit) from Charles Wilkin’s version, translated in 1784. The third is the Sanskrit text of the Gita, taken from the Sanskrit Documents website, which are the verses which Wilkins translated from. It is a contemporary edition; however, the Gita is a fairly complete and well-preserved text, and it appears there is very little difference between the edition Wilkins translated from, and the one presented here.
[30] This phrase is added by Schopenhauer, though in the Wilkins version it specifies that Krishna is speaking, and in the Sanskrit version the line is preceded above by “श्रीभगवानुवाच” or SribhagavAnuvAca (capitalized letters are long), referring of course to Krishna.
[31] Page number in Wilkin’s Gita (see Charles Wilkins’ Bhagawad Geeta in Works Cited below.)
[32] Wilkins seems to miss this particle “चापि” in his translation, which in this context can translate to “also.” The full pada, therefore, goes something like this: kṣétrajñaṃ (adj, masc acc. sg. “knower of the field”) ca (conjunction, postpositive “and”) ápi (particle “also”) māṃ (1st pers pro, acc. sg.) viddhi (2nd sg m/p imp. “know”) sarvakṣétreṣu (loc. Neut. pl. “ in all fields”) bhārata (voc masc sg. “Bharata”), or “and know, Bharata, that I am also the knower of the field (ie domain/body) in all fields.” This implies that he is both at once the body and the knower of the body, the fusion of nature (as experience) and consciousness of that nature. This was almost certainly picked up by Schopenhauer, especially considering the next passage that he noted down, below.
[33] Omitted by Schopenhauer, though present in the original Asiatiches Magazin which he copied it from.
[34] To note, in the Gita, Moksha and Nirvana are synonymous terms.
[35] When Jouissance is capitalized in this chapter, it refers to the concept as such as it exists in Lacan’s writings, when written in lower-case it refers to the “specific modalities” of Jouissance described in Nestor Braunstein’s article, quoted below.
[36] Works from Freud and Lacan referenced in the chapter are as SE I, II, etc., for those from the Standard Edition, and those of Lacan’s Seminars will be referred to by S I, II, etc., the Ecrits of Lacan as E (pg #).
[37] Richard, presumably. Although the reading Dick=Penis is common in American English today, and certainly Klein’s therapy in a way transforms Dick into a phallus, there may not be such a direct relation in the language which she was operating under.
[38] The “equality” of the subject and its mother is an impossible equation that only operates in the field of language, which is why we are “blocked” from this experience in actual life on account of symbolic castration.
[39] The mirroring here is separate from the famous “mirror stage” of Lacan, since the Mirror stage is actually the first time the child establishes in it’s own “gestalt” of its reflection in the mirror an ego-ideal, a failure of identification that the child is constantly striving for: thus the “mirror stage” of the mirror stage would be another kind of model for the beginnings of symbolic relations for a child. But Lacan also refers to the first mirror as the “mirror in the mother’s eye,” the baby sees itself in the mother, but quite literally sees itself as its mother, the absence of the (comfort) of the mother is felt as a bodily injury–hence, castration.
[40] A great essay on the mythical origins of language (heavily influenced by Lacan) is Derrida’s “Des Tours de Babel.”
[41] “The tragic fear and pit may be aroused by the spectacle; but they may also be aroused by the very structure and incidents of the play—which is the better way and shows the better poet. The plot in fact should be so framed that, even without seeing the things take place, he who simply hears the account of them shall be filled with horror and pity at the incidents; which is just the effect that a mere recital of the story in Oedipus would have on one.” (Aristotle, Poetics, 1453b6)
[42] That is, symbolic structures–Lacan doesn’t even refer to it as “language” but llanguage, since language is a scientific notion of how speech functions, whereas llanguage is the actual symbolic use. From Seminar 20:
It is generally said that language serves to communicate. To communicate about what, one must ask oneself, about which them (eux)? Communication implies reference. But one thing is clear - language is merely what scientific discourse elaborates to account for what I call llanguage.
Llanguage serves purposes that are altogether different from that of communication. That is what the experience of the unconscious has shown us, insofar as it is made of llanguage, which, as you know, I write with two Fs to designate what each of us deals with, our so-called mother tongue (lalangue dite maternelle), which isn't called that by accident.
If communication approaches what is effectively at work in the jouissance of llanguage, it is because communication implies a reply, in other words, dialogue. But does llanguage serve, first and foremost, to dialogue? As I have said before, nothing is less certain. (138)
[43] I must add here that Freud was undoubtedly influenced, probably indirectly, by thinkers like Nietzsche and by Buddisht thought through Jung and his associates–like Sabina Spielrein above–even though he makes a strong effort to disassociate himself from Jung’s theory and his “analytical” psychology. There is even an interview published somewhere, which I could not find in English translation, by a Japanese psychoanalyst who met with Sigmund Freud on the 7th of May, 1930, which is summarized in the relevant entry “Yabe from Japan” in The Diary of Sigmund Freud: “Eitingon came with Yabe late in the evening to visit Freud; they stayed over an hour and left after midnight. Freud was curious that one of his first japanese translations should be Beyond the Pleasure Principle and challenged Yabe about this. Yabe replied that ‘...the theory that life tends towards death is a Buddhist idea. Since Buddhism influences Japanese thinking to a great degree, an understanding of psychoanalysis might be easier through this book.’ Yabe’s account of their meeting continues: ‘This reasoning pleased Freud tremendously. Since he had been attacked for this theory, and had modified it somewhat, he was happy to feel that he had suddenly acquired many colleagues who would agree with him. He called out to his daughter in the next room: “Anna, Anna!”’”
[44] It is said that the term matheme, Lacan’s word for his topological formulations, comes from Claude Levi-Straus’ mytheme, his word for the structural analysis of tribal myths. Though I’m not sure if it's true or it just sounds nice.
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