Buddhism and Existential Angst

In Happiness, I argued against the popular belief that our ultimate goal should be happiness. Our tragedy, I said, is that we’re equipped with high degrees of consciousness, reason, and freedom, which enable us to appreciate what I called Our Existential Situation (OES). This situation is roughly equivalent to our worst nightmare, implying that life for most of us is effectively hell on earth. Our situation as intelligent animals, thrown into the world, as the existentialist philosopher Heidegger said, is defined by ironies, by the world’s being different from how we’d prefer it to be. For example, theistic and New Age fantasies are all wildly off the mark, logically and empirically speaking. Those differences between our naïve, anthropocentric picture of the world and the modern scientific picture of it, are results not of any demonic design, but of the inhumanity of the natural forces that put us here in the midst of cosmic evolution.

In short, this is the worst possible world, from a humane standpoint. A Satanic dominion over the universe would be preferable to dominion by mindless natural forces, because Satan would at least be a person, albeit an evil one, and were personhood at the root of reality, we could at least take comfort that the universe and thus life and our position have meaning. Our purpose would be to serve as Satan’s playthings. Were this the case, we might even succumb to Stockholm Syndrome and come to approve of that demonic plan. As it stands in the Lovecraftian, scientific picture, though, there’s no such meaning and no such cold comfort. We’re alienated from reality and thus from ourselves, because we view the world through the filter of our ideals, which project onto the world what isn’t there, such as the ultimate propriety of our pursuit of those ideals. Our values are either means by which natural forces drive us to perpetuate some stage in a natural process or are free-standing creations of our imagination. Either way, our confidence in their propriety is usually wrongheaded.

Our most popular goal is to be happy, to be successful and contented with the pleasures we earn. This goal is certainly attainable to some extent or other, but we’re aesthetically, if not also ethically, obligated not to seek happiness as our ultimate good. Instead, we ought to be anxious and saddened as a result of our knowledge of OES. The existentialist’s remedy, of hopeless rebellion in the alien face of inhumane nature, is nobler and more aesthetically compelling than the Aristotelian reduction of our ethical purpose to our narrow biological function. Our biofunction is to stop investigating what’s really going on and to merely survive and sexually perpetuate our genetic code. If we do that, as most people in fact do, raising a family and committing ourselves to various delusions that serve that biological end, we become more or less happy, whether we’re rich or poor or whether we’re born beautiful or physically disabled. We then live at peace with ourselves and with the world, despite the fact that that peace is as obscene as the peace of slaves in the Matrix or in the philosopher Robert Nozick’s Happiness Machine (a thought experiment about a virtual reality simulator that caters to our fantasies, enabling a person to live successfully in a dream world that may differ drastically from the real one). 

The Buddhist Critique

So I averred in that article on happiness. There is, however, an interesting Buddhist critique of this grim existentialism, which runs as follows. My talk of OES, of a gulf between the conscious, free, intelligent person and the rest of nature assumes that that person is an independent, self-contained essence, detached from the world. Instead, according to the Buddhist principles of Interdependent Arising (IA) and of emptiness, there are no such essences anywhere in the universe: everything is in flux, ever-changing and interdependent. Instead of things, there are phases of processes. A person’s mind consists entirely of such flowing transitions, from one mental state to the next, with no unified self tying them together. There is no immaterial spirit or essence that is the bearer of particular thoughts and feelings. Therefore, there can be no gap between a person and the rest of the world; on the contrary, a person is interconnected with the world, since both are bound up in natural processes that unite them. For example, we breathe oxygen from the outer environment and exhale carbon dioxide which plants in turn absorb.

According to Buddhism, when nature is understood in terms of cycles and processes that are empty of essences or of thinghood, we can appreciate the source of our anxieties: our delusion of an independent self causes us to crave an unsuitable permanence or stability, an impossible control over those processes for our benefit. We build walls to protect us from the natural flux, including literal walls and conceptual frameworks that amount to fantasies. That defense against free-flowing natural reality and the self-righteous, egoistic justifications of that defense are wrongheaded, for the Buddhist. There is no such thing as an ego, or as a single, autonomous self that can possibly bear the brunt of cosmic indifference or win for itself pleasure rather than suffering. There are only interdependent stages of cycles that unite all that there is in nature.

My existential rant, then, according to Buddhism, is based on a self-righteous delusion--as if there could be anything wrong with nature’s inhumane treatment of sentient beings, given that there are no such beings, because there are no beings at all. Assuming this Buddhist anti-essentialism, the enlightened attitude is bemused detachment as opposed to unrealistic craving. We should carefully observe changes in the processes we encounter, instead of crying like babies when we’re disappointed that we don’t get what we want. If there’s no such thing as a self, there’s no realistic basis for thinking there’s a gap between nature’s inhumanity and our anthropocentric values. Natural forces aren’t alien to us; instead, we’re shot through with those forces, and since there’s no self to protect from careless nature, we ought to observe the flux from an objective, aesthetic distance, watching each thought pop into our minds like so many frames in a reel of animated images.

Instead of suffering from resentment, like the boy who holds his breath when his mother refuses to buy him his coveted toy, we can relish all changes, including painful ones, as ever more data to scrutinize with a connoisseur’s eye for artistic detail. The enlightened Buddha’s nirvana is like an art critic’s peace from being able to freely judge an artwork from a distance, with no reality-based pressure to cling to one judgment or another. Unlike, say, the artist who worries about not receiving the praise she craves, who complains when her art doesn’t suit the critic’s taste and thus when she loses the job offer she desperately wants to be able to afford a larger apartment, and so on and so forth, the art critic--we can assume with some simplification—enjoys the freedom that comes from aesthetic detachment. And it’s this detachment that the bitter, angst-ridden existentialist seems to lack. There’s no need for any suffering at all, including so-called dutiful or heroic suffering in defiance of what’s actually a non-existent abyss between what there really is and what we ultimately want. In short, from a Buddhist perspective, my account of OES is based on egoistic conceptions, and thus my prescription that’s supposed to replace the politically correct one of happiness, is itself deluded.

Buddhism and Existentialism

The obvious response to Buddhism is to insist that there are beings, including selves, after all, and that therefore existential angst can be justified. Indeed, there may be a mere semantic dispute here. What non-Buddhists call the self, the Buddhist may call a phase of a process. Moreover, while nothing in nature may be absolutely independent, some things or processes may be more or less independent; hence, the usefulness of concepts that posit similarities between things (or processes) that hold despite their differences. What are commonly called selves have more in common with each other—their cognitive faculties, their genotypes and phenotypes, and so on—than they do, say, with asteroids or with peanut butter. To explain those distinguishing features, we categorize their bearers as instances of a type, and we theorize about them, generalizing for the sake of understanding. For example, we say that humans are persons and are thus different from other animal species in certain respects. Were we to end our inquiry with the Buddhist principle that everything is interdependent and united, we wouldn’t understand any of the patterns in nature; that is, we wouldn’t yet be generalizing about the differences and similarities we observe. In short, scientists and ordinary people alike generalize, making use of concepts to explain patterns, and in the case of our patterns, this requires talk of the self. Finally, even if the Buddhist is correct that everything is interrelated at some level of explanation, relative independencies can emerge at higher levels. At the quantum level, particles may be mostly entangled with each other in superpositions, but regularities emerge as subatomic interactions develop complex forms, like the chemical elements, the stars and planets, and all the myriad species on Earth, including people.

But I don’t want to rest with those head-on answers. Instead, I want to grant the Buddhist’s anti-essentialist assumptions for the sake of argument, and question whether those assumptions really divide the Buddhist much from the angst-ridden existentialist. I begin by asking why the Buddhist is interested in ending human suffering. After all, as is apparent from the Four Noble Truths, the whole point of Buddhism is to end our suffering, or dukkha, meaning all varieties of disappointment. But on the assumption that everything is interdependent and part of a cosmic process, why the Buddhist’s compassion for the deluded stages of that process--naively called persons--which suffer from futile cravings? Shouldn’t the Buddhist fatalistically infer that that suffering is a necessary part of the cosmic process, which the Buddhist should objectively observe along with all of the other parts?

At first glance, it looks as though the Buddhist presupposes that some interdependent processes—naively called persons—have special value due to their capacity for disappointment and their autonomy which allows them to change their course for the better, to become enlightened and end their miseries. In fact, Buddhists also take on board, along with Hindus, the theodicy of samsara and moksha, which is to say the ideas that the cosmos of which we’re a part is a bad place to inhabit, obligating us to liberate ourselves from the cycle of rebirth. Enlightenment, or nirvana, is freedom from nature by way of emptying ourselves of the flotsam and jetsam that wash up on the shores of our minds, borne by the waves of natural forces. When we detach from our desires, we no longer feel disappointed when we fail to get what we want, because we no longer want anything; our suffering ends and we enjoy something like the art critic’s bliss of academic freedom.

That theodicy has much in common with what I call Our Existential Situation. In both cases, there’s a condemnation of the cosmos. Buddhism’s focus on ending dukkha might even presuppose that condemnation: suffering ought to be ended, because suffering inherits the badness of the rest of nature, being a stage of interdependent natural cycles, spun by inhumane forces. But these normative judgments of the prison of samsara and of the obligation to liberate ourselves don’t sit well with the Buddhist’s metaphysical principle of IA. If everything is interlocked as stages of a cosmic process of evolution, there’s no metaphysical basis for speaking of liberation from that process. Most people may be deluded, entranced by fantasies that bind them to degrading, punishing natural forces, while a minority manage to free their minds and enjoy the peace of carelessness and the pleasure of objective, aesthetic study of natural reality. However, both groups would surely be different stages in the same cosmic process. Enlightened Buddhists don’t transcend nature in the sense of reaching a supernatural vantage point overlooking the whole universe, but merely discover an alternative natural way of life.

If we stress the principle of IA, we’re left with an amoral perspective on what is empirically just a series of interrelated processes. Once again, then, I ask why the Buddhist is preoccupied with ending disappointment and short-circuiting its causes, namely delusion and craving. An authentically Buddhist answer would seem to appeal to aesthetics rather than to morality, which is why I compared the Buddha to an art critic. Above all, Buddhists are empiricists: they observe that everything is mixed together in a great flux of transitions. Enlightenment gives them the freedom simply of extreme objectivity, of detachment from biases and personal inclinations. A Buddha perceives natural reality as a process rather than as a host of independent things. And in that objective frame of mind, the enlightened Buddhist creates a taste, an aesthetic style of appreciating natural art, as it were, a new bias that befits a Buddha’s radical shift in perspective, rather than a passively-received bias that flows in and out of the deluded mind. In Nietzschean terms, the Buddha is, to this extent, an Übermensch, a hero who overcomes harsh natural obstacles and creates original values. On my existentialist view, this enlightened creativity is a rebellion that gives our lives meaning and holds off the insanity with which esoteric knowledge of OES threatens us.

The Buddhist may interpret the need for compassion differently, but he or she seems forced to admit that compassion is gratuitous, given the metaphysics of IA. The enlightened Buddhist merely chooses to become a Bodhisattva, a liberator of others from their delusions and thus from their sufferings. That is, an enlightened person faces a choice: to enter nirvana and renounce not only her desires but those of everyone else, to live alone somewhere on a mountain top, or to teach others how to achieve the same inner peace. That choice, I’m suggesting, is caused by an enlightened taste for one path or the other. Nothing forces the enlightened person to care about other people’s suffering—least of all individualistic morality that holds one process (the self) to be metaphysically (as opposed to aesthetically) more valuable than another (say, dirt or an asteroid), contradicting the monistic assumption of IA. Some enlightened people prefer the natural process of life on this planet that includes less craving and disappointment, owing to the Bodhisattva’s work. Likewise, some art critics prefer one style of art to another.

Given this aesthetic interpretation of Buddhist compassion, there’s another commonality between Buddhism and my existentialism: the choice to confront the horrors of nature by a renunciation of what’s naturally expected of us. My problem with happiness is that emotional contentment is aesthetically and ethically unsuited to creatures with dark esoteric knowledge. These creatures should be anxious and melancholic, not at ease with themselves or their position. The cause of happiness, I said, is ignorance of Our Existential Situation, or some delusion that stands in for knowledge. Likewise, the Buddhist renounces the so-called pleasures that derive from egoistic delusions, as so many forms of what is ultimately disappointment.

The difference, then, is that the Buddhist opposes dukkha, whereas I oppose the popular notion of happiness. But this difference may not be as significant as it seems. In the first place, my condemnation of happiness as an indignity isn’t the same as a rejection of pleasure following from the achievement of any goal whatsoever. The problem isn’t pleasure or success of any kind, but just that which depends on ignorance of OES. There may well be a kind of pleasure or contentment in renouncing a conventional way of life, a sort of rebel’s or Gnostic’s glee of being an insider rather than a hapless member of the herd. This wouldn’t be happiness, but gallows humour, a way of coping with the melancholy that accompanies a commitment to existential philosophy. Just as the Buddhist’s notion of dukkha is broad enough to interpret vulgar pleasures as forms of suffering, I interpret vulgar happiness as an obscenity and an abomination, owing to its dependence on pitiful fantasies.

Moreover, enlightened Buddhists certainly aren’t happy in a materialistic sense; they’re contented with the peace that follows from their mystical vision of cosmic connectedness. But while they don’t suffer, neither do they feel joy or any other satisfaction caused by the achievement of what’s personally desired. In fact, their personality disappears with the attachment to their desires. They become empty, which is to say alienated from the world in so far as that world is egoistically conceived. In this respect, a Buddha isn’t a Nietzschean Übermensch, since while a Buddha may accept the natural flux as it is, without weak-minded illusions, a Buddha still withdraws from the world, disengaging from her desires. In any case, a Bodhisattva seems even less happy than a Buddha. After all, compassion for other people’s plight is a form of suffering. Empathy is the feeling of someone else’s pain as yours. If empathy informs a Bodhisattva’s taste for compassion, this sort of enlightened Buddhist is similar to the existentialist who responds to the duty to renounce opportunities for personal contentment, out of awe at the magnitude of our tragedy. Both suffer for their knowledge, the Bodhisattva who understands the absurd needlessness of suffering caused by egoism, and the existentialist who appreciates the grotesqueness of pleasures that require ignorance or intellectual cowardice. Both affirm that the vulgar form of happiness is the flowering of delusion and is thus aesthetically if not also ethically degrading.

Nirvana and Angst

In short, Buddhism has much in common with my Lovecraftian existentialism. But what of the main point of the Buddhist’s critique, that existential angst is egoistic and therefore foolish? Is angst compatible with an acceptance of Buddhist anti-essentialism? Certainly, if everything were really one and all concepts that differentiate were misrepresentations, angst would rest on confusion, since angst presupposes a gap between the self and the world from which the self is alienated. But Buddhist monism isn’t so extreme. The principle of IA implies not that everything is one, but that everything is interconnected as transitions in a flux. One transition must still differ from another for their interdependence to be possible.

So the more relevant question is whether one part of a process can be alienated from another. And the answer is obviously that there can be such alienation. After all, on the Buddhist’s own assumptions, the cosmic flux includes a phase consisting of deluded people whose consequent disappointments amount to ways of being alienated from reality. To preserve our fragile egos and our pride and vainglorious ambition, we pretend that each individual is absolutely independent, and even that each is imbued with an immaterial spirit and thus deserving of his or her successes (and failures). If no one is so independent, the egoistic lifestyle becomes absurd. The Buddhist seems led to say, then, that egoism is the unenlightened person’s means of avoiding a confrontation with the reality of everything’s interconnectedness in the cosmic process. This confrontation produces either angst or, if the person is properly prepared, enlightenment and nirvana.

I would go further, though, and suggest that angst and nirvana are fundamentally the same. Nirvana is said to be transcendent peace and freedom from suffering, due to hyper-objectivity and attentiveness to everything’s interrelatedness, and to an antipathy to egoism. But the Bodhisattva’s compassion makes for a kind of cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, this mostly-enlightened Buddhist is free from ego-based suffering; on the other, this person feels compassion for the unenlightened herd, which can mean only that the Bodhisattva feels their egoistic pain. This is quite comparable to the two-sidedness of an existentialist’s life experience. On the one hand, the existentialist is naturally compelled to satisfy her animalistic appetites, to achieve certain goals for the sake of her survival; on the other, this person is barred from happiness by her appreciation of OES and is forced to endure angst. This cognitive dissonance is in each case the curse of dangerous esoteric knowledge, whether of IA or of OES. While the enlightened Buddhist finds that knowledge uplifting, she must admit that were everyone to affirm Buddhist principles, modern civilization would be undone. Buddhist mysticism is destructive to the ego, just as Lovecraftian existentialism destroys optimistic delusions. 

In addition, nirvana and angst are both forms of alienation. The Buddhist may feel mystically at one with the cosmos, but by refusing to take ownership of anything, including her thoughts and feelings, she casts herself adrift. She’s an outcast, surrounded by egoistic animals that chase after their mirages of power and pleasure. As I said, the Buddhist is alienated from the egoistically-conceived world. Most people think of the world in anthropocentric terms, and so the Buddhist is alienated from all of these people and from the social games that vain persons play. The existentialist is just as alienated, refusing to pragmatically submit to optimistic delusions, and horrified by the tragic ironies that dominate our absurd lives.

Furthermore, as I suggested, nirvana and angst force the mystic to make aesthetic rather than moral choices. The Buddhist and the existentialist are each like an art critic: they’re alienated observers, objectively scrutinizing all of nature as a sort of meaningless, postmodern artwork. From what the philosopher Thomas Nagel called the view from nowhere, or what Spinoza and other philosophers call the God’s eye view or the perspective from eternity, which is just merciless objectivity, we learn the grim truths that mock all of our dreams and illusions. Nirvana and angst are both uncompromising, mystical perspectives that compel the Buddhist or the Lovecraftian existentialist to renounce the fruits of false hope.

The difference between nirvana and angst lies only in the interpretation of what’s perceived from the viewpoint of alienating objectivity. The Buddhist is trained to think in terms of liberation from a world of suffering, whereas the existentialist regards certain suffering as ennobling. The Buddhist meditates to escape from the debris blown through her mind on cosmic winds, while the existentialist uses angst as the song inspired by her muse, by the Lovecraftian cosmic god, for example, which is just a symbol for the inhumane cosmos. Again, though, the Buddhist escapes suffering only by severing herself completely from human life. As long as she remains at best a Bodhisattva, she suffers from compassion and must regard her altruism as an absurd, purely aesthetic decision, a matter of taste. Likewise, when confronting the remorselessly-alien cosmos, without the comfort of crutches, the existentialist can judge only by the light of aesthetic and primitive ethical standards. Equally alienated from society, the Buddhist and the existentialist must live on with the sense that life is absurd. Just as the judgment of art becomes farcical when art represents nothing, the evaluation of life becomes arbitrary without the benefit of comforting myths. Compassion is as meaningless as psychopathic misanthropy, given IA, which might explain why Buddhist societies, such as in Japan or in Sri Lanka, sometimes endorse killing. And whatever the alienated existentialist does to rebel, she does with a grave sense of irony and of the ridiculousness of all human efforts. 

Thus, the Buddhist’s case against my version of existentialism isn’t so clear-cut. The two positions are closer to each other than might at first be apparent.