Lack and Transcendence

I learned so much from David Loy's first book that I knew I would eventually need to return to his work.  Fortunately, Lack and Transcendence is just as clearly written and insightful as Nonduality, though its essays are closer in style to dharma talk than dissertation.  As a result, this one may perhaps prove even more influential for me, since it is written with the passion of direct practical insight into our fundamental dilemma -- the ego can't solve our problems because it is our problem.  

Of course, there are many ways to express this idea that the sense of self is the source of our suffering.  Here, Loy tries to couch the problem in terms that make the Buddhist concept of no-self seem like a continuous extension of the ideas of psychotherapy and existentialism.  He traces a path that begins with Freudian psychoanalysis, moves past existentialists like Heidegger, Kierkegaard, and Sartre, then passes through "existential psychotherapists" like Becker, Brown, and Yalom, before finally ending with Dogen and other nondual Buddhists.  The whole trajectory is held together by the questions, "what do we really want?" and, "what are we afraid of?"  For Freud, sex was the biggest source of our desire and anxiety.  For the existentialists, the problem was the thrill and terror of our ungrounded freedom.  The existential therapists (a new term for me) that Loy discusses then hypothesized that the root of this philosophical craving to be, and fear of non-being, was the more practical fear of death.  Loy continues this story by asking again what we really fear and desire, and discovers the Buddhist response lurking under all the previous answers -- our ego desperately wants to be real, and constantly suffers (correctly) from the  sneaking suspicion that it is not.  

This subtle shift in emphasis puts a profound new spin on the source of our anxiety as well as all the projects aimed at repressing it.  It's not that we desire something 'objective', like sexual power or freedom or eternal life.  Conversely, Freudian castration or even our own death are not the ultimate objects we fear.  Loy interprets these objects as the symbolic return of the repressed consciousness that we have no real and substantial essence.  Our deepest fear is that there is something essentially missing from ourselves, that, as Loy puts it, "there is something wrong with me".  Death, then, is merely a symbol projected into the future of something we're afraid of now -- our contingency, that is, our emptiness.  No object can assuage this fundamental 'lack' that constitutes us because, no matter what it attains, the ego cannot lift itself by its own bootstraps and, as it were, prove to itself once and for all that it is a real, essential, or self-existing subject.  Thus the ego is a perpetual motion lack machine.  In other words, our existential dread is not built into the structure of the world, but into the structure of our selves.  Which is great news!  Because it means that we can end our suffering without getting some particular object and without giving up the world.  All we have to do is give up the habit of behaving as if our self were an essentially existing thing.  The problem vanishes when we realize that we have invented it ourselves.

Because of the peculiar way the book is written, the thesis I just described is not the climax of a long argument, but spills out rather haphazardly in the first chapter.  Loy explains in the preface that he didn't set out to write a book but to give a simple teisho.  One thing led to another, and what we have reads more like a collection of insightful aphorism collaged together after the fact.  This means that, from one point of view, the book can feel very repetitious.  We come back to the idea of the self as a sort of lack machine over and over again.  However, each chapter revisits the idea from a slightly different perspective.  Loy successively explores its implications for our concepts of death, time, suffering, and meaning.  These chapters are all excellent, and make use of an eclectic mix of Eastern and Western thought to show how Loy's idea of lack speaks to some of these classical philosophical topics.  The final two chapters are a bit of a departure from this mold and discuss the way whole cultures can function as collective machines for generating and maintaining a sense of lack, precisely by seeming to offer us easy solutions to the problem.  While also interesting, these chapters seemed considerably weaker to me, perhaps because they seem to have a rather naive social ontology, or perhaps because they appear to be written as extensions, later, and with less force of personal insight.