The first part of this three-part essay began with the near-universal assumption that we are independent subjects, ultimately identified with a center of conscious experience outside of social life. Both progressives and neoliberals share this assumption, which grounds campaigns for equal rights but destroys any basis for collective action; once society is conceived of as a congeries of private interests no fundamental change is even thinkable. Non-Western cultural traditions, though, especially those which are encoded in religions, offer a standpoint outside of these assumptions.

***

Our contemporary personal and political paralysis is bound up with Christian assumptions about human nature and human agency; we live in a culture shaped by two thousand years of Christianity, and our ideas and the very shapes of our lives bear more hallmarks of their religious foundations than we might care to admit. The thinkers of the eighteenth century, though, were more aware of those roots than we are, and at least some of them looked to Asian religious and philosophical traditions for alternatives. For a few decades after William Jones publicized the linguistic commonality between Greek and Sanskrit, in 1786, India could be seen as a sister to Greece, an untapped source of both artistic and philosophical inspiration, and as misguided as Schopenhauer’s employment of Vedanta and Buddhism was, he at least saw these as alternative ways of framing and answering foundational questions.

In these days it is usually Buddhism that comes first to mind in this regard, but this may be due to its similarities to our own forms of thought as much as to its differences. Classical Buddhism was a monastic religion, and its monasteries were less real communities than sites where the social could be sloughed off in the interest of individual realization. The Buddha told his monks, “Work out your own salvation with diligence,” and they often did this through analyses of experience that resonate with today’s own academic philosophy. When divorced from their practice, though, these discourses could turn on themselves; an insistence that nothing had any enduring substance ironically left the equally insubstantial but suffering self as the least unreal of entities. This may be one reason that the tradition lends itself so easily to the merely therapeutic, and can be marketed to the middle classes and employee benefits departments as “mindfulness.”

Later developments, such as the Bodhisattva’s vow to liberate all sentient beings, brought Buddhism no closer to social questions; Buddhist soteriology remained individualistic. Tantra, which emerged in the sixth century C.E., was and is different. It started in both Buddhism and what we now call Hinduism with antinomian and transgressive rituals, but it developed into an anti-ascetic lay movement which offered “both enlightenment and worldly success” through a unification of unity and diversity:

The way for Tantric practitioners to reach dual goals comes by connecting themselves to a power that flows through the world, including their own bodies, a power usually visualized as female. Tantrins identify the power, locate it, activate it, and use it for their own desires. … The guide is above all the teacher (the guru) who is simultaneously the deity and ultimately the student as well. Indeed, the collapsing and overlapping identities of the teacher is one illustration of the transformational processes so central to Tantrism that involve the movement both toward a unity, an essence, a center, and a monism while simultaneously breaking into dualities and multiples that replicate (often in numbered ranks) toward the periphery.[i]

Its later association with royal power never removed it from the temple practice and private rituals of householders, and, though it was ultimately overshadowed by devotional traditions and institutional temple culture, tantra has survived in the South Asian periphery, in Kashmir, Tibet, Assam, and the Dravidian South.[ii]

Take, for example, Sri Vidya, or “Auspicious Wisdom.” This is a bourgeoisified and respectable form of tantra, widely practiced in Tamil Nadu and other states of South India. There are numerous Sri Vidya devotees in North America, too, and a major temple in the tradition is half an hour south of Rochester, New York.[iii] Enthroned in splendor in that temple’s sanctuary is a black granite statue of Rajarajeshwari, the monarch of monarchs, one of whose primary names is Tripurasundari, the “beauty of the three cities.” Her full complement of 1008 names is chanted in her presence every day.

The Devi (as everyone calls her) has three forms, though, and the statue shows only one of them. It is the least important. Sri Vidya practice revolves instead around a secret mantra and a diagram, the Sri Yantra, a complex of triangles within triangles with a dot at the center and walls and gates at the outside.[iv]

It is the Sri Yantra that gives the clearest picture of what this practice is about. It is a map of the moments through which undifferentiated, non-manifest reality is realized in and as the manifest world. It is a kind of flow chart of the movement described in the passage quoted above, showing how all things arise and subside through the dialectical movement of a single process and its uncountable diremptions and syntheses. It shows not just that everything is the Goddess but how it is that she and the endless variety of the world are one.

This process generates and unites the subjective and objective. The initial scission at the center of the Sri Yantra is the split between the god Siva, seen as a contemplative, and the goddess Sakti, seen as activity. There is no separation between spirit and matter or between self and world, then; all apparent oppositions arise through the ungraspably complex interplay of the absolute with itself.

In the most important ritual in Sri Vidya, the Sri Yantra puja, the devotee evokes the movement from unity to multiplicity and back again, aiming to dispel any inclination to favor one or the other. In doing this the devotee also comes to understand his or her own thoughts and activity as identical with the deity’s. Although educated devotees will often refer inquirers to the brilliant philosophical writings of Kashmiri Saivism, they will also warn that this is not a matter of assent to any set of propositions. It can take place only through a transformation of experience. Sri Vidya is a tantric practice, after all, and although the too-common identification of tantra with sex is substantially (though not entirely) inaccurate, it is safe to say that tantra is always a practice of embodiment.

Sri Vidya practice encourages the recognition that inner experience is only a perspective on an all-encompassing activity, dissolving subjects and objects alike into the movement from which they emerge and into which they subside. Its popularity in Dravidian India may be due in part to the strong tendency in Tamil and related languages to favor verbs over nouns; as David Shulman has said, “Tamil is a language engineered to express processuality … in the external domain of objects no less than in the internal world of thought, feeling, and awareness.”[v] It is also in harmony with some of the deepest assumptions of South Indian culture. In the words of anthropologist Margaret Trawick, “[For Tamils] the experience of life itself, the multiplicity of finite sensations given by the body, is the most general form assumed by the hidden, infinite sacred.”[vi] It stands as an implicit critique of how it is that we appear to be. The tantric body is not armored and the tantric self is not apart from the world; both are essentially open and both are simultaneously active and passive, co-participants in the ongoing self-manifestation of the divine.

This is radically subversive of everyday experience. Being and consciousness are traced to a single activity in which self and world, seamlessly one, emerge and change together. Individual and social perspectives merge, and agency is distributed instead of being individualized. What is most subversive of all is the denial that we stand apart from that activity, that we live at one remove from our own shared life: the first-person foundation of the modern world’s inner self, of liberal democracy and neoliberal capitalism.

***

Religious doctrines and practices do not exist in a separate compartment. Distinctive habits of social interpretation and self-understanding are common where the dominant forms of spiritual practice and discourse are process-oriented and relational, as they are in tantra, Taoism, Confucianism, mainstream Hinduism, and Buddhism. There is a preference for multicausal explanations over ones that favor a single factor, for example, and a tendency to read images in terms of overall patterns and the interplay among visual elements; those raised in European cultures tend instead to focus on the ostensible subject.[vii] However the causal relationships run, the world pictures implicit in spiritual practice often echo and are echoed by folk psychological ideas of human nature and agency and about the nature and depth of each person’s relations with other people, other beings, and other objects.

One might expect these differences to appear in ideas of political order, too, but neither the quasi-feudalism of Buddhist Tibet, the Indian preference for divinely ordained kingship, nor the paternalist organicism of the Confucian state offers an appealing alternative to liberal democracy. It was in Europe, in fact, that the political implications of a relational understanding of the human subject were developed, in the extraordinary “twenty-five years of philosophy”[viii] normally labeled “German Idealism,” and most of all in the work of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814).

Fichte’s fate, even in his lifetime, was to be the most misunderstood of philosophers—a problem for which he bears some, but not all, of the responsibility—but he was also the European philosopher who came closest to escaping the assumptions and constraints of the European tradition. His popular image, to the extent that he has one, is quite the opposite. A recent book called him the “I philosopher,” the man who “crowned” the I as the source of all reality.[ix] In the closest thing we have to an English-language biography of Fichte, Anthony La Vopa interpreted Fichte’s ideas as a reformulation of Lutheran themes, where “spontaneous inner freedom became, in its turn outward, a highly disciplined and indeed ascetic self-mastery.”[x]

These are both misleading. There is certainly a strong influence of Luther in Fichte’s thinking, as there is in just about all German philosophy of his period, but it is a mistake to think that he discovered, invented, or laid a crown on the self. He was not concerned with justifying or defending subjectivity. He asked how it came about. Rather than seeing him as the creator of the individual, it would be more accurate to see him as the first Western thinker to deconstruct it, starting from the first-person perspective on which it is founded.

Fichte always claimed to be a transcendental idealist, making explicit what Kant had only dimly understood. Whether or not he was right has been debated for centuries, but nobody doubts that he started out with a transcendental argument in the Kantian sense. We all understand ourselves to be independent subjective beings within an objective world. Fichte asked what operations were necessary for us to see ourselves that way, and he answered that it emerges through a complex act of “positing” an I, a not-I which stands opposed to the I, and the mutual limitation of these two.

Self-consciousness is not the mere acquaintance with one’s own inner states, as Dieter Henrich argued,[xi] and neither is it the discovery of a specific mental capacity that simply happens to be at work within us. It is an ongoing constitution of inwardness and an ongoing claim to agency. The self posits itself, Fichte said, but what posits itself is a way of parsing experience and activity into self and world—I and Not-I, or subject and object—and thereby forging the stance of first-personality. The self which grows from and around that perspective is not an entity at all. It rests on nothing other than an act of assertion and separation.[xii] Take agency and experience away and there is no I. Stop dividing these into the opposed actions of self and world and there is no I, either, which is almost certainly how our dogs, cats, and infant children live; they are acquainted with their emotions and sensations but lack a “self” to which these can be ascribed. It would follow that this complex set of relationships can be understood only within the context of whatever must precede and transcend the divisions we present to ourselves within self-consciousness.

In the English-speaking world, unfortunately, there is a tendency for Fichte scholars to place a one-sided focus on the I. The dean of North American Fichte scholarship, the late Dan Breazeale, claimed that the only realities for Fichte’s early thinking were “[a]n embodied subject, a social self, and a moral agent.”[xiii] From the first of his mature writings, though, Fichte was clearly aware that the I does not exist in a Newtonian void, and the generative movement out of which the “empirical I” posits itself was always essential to his vision. At first he left this unnamed, but in later texts he labeled this movement “Reason” and identified it as the self-manifestation of an unknowable Absolute or divinity.

Theory cannot deal with that global activity. Self-conscious cognition, like language, arises after experience has been split into subject and object, and it cannot reach behind itself to what preceded that division any more than we can leap over our own shadows. Worse yet, it reifies everything to which it turns its attention and, like Midas, condemns itself to live among the objectified corpses of its own making. “We look everywhere for the unconditioned,” wrote Novalis, “and find only things.”[xiv] We do the same thing to ourselves, converting a fluid and unstable claim to agency into the figure of a persisting independent agent confronting a static and uncaring world.

Theory, though, took second place for Fichte. We always find ourselves as acting, he said, and there can be no experience without activity. This makes practice primary, and practice has at least one signal advantage: though we cannot think about the all-creating activity of Reason without embalming it in words, the agency we claim as our own is in fact a fragment of that activity, and this connects us with what exists and acts outside (and inside) the circle we draw for ourselves in self-experience. We are finite in our thoughts, but through our actions we partake of an infinite productivity.

To evoke this generative activity Fichte borrowed the then-widespread language of drives. These weave together an essentially Leibnizian cosmos in which everything depends on everything else, a relational universe quite unlike the Newtonian one of bodies in empty space. The drives pass seamlessly through body to body, and they are circular, or reciprocal, so that nothing they produce is purely passive or purely active. The natural drives thus encompass both the urge to shape and the urge to be shaped, the drive to assimilate and the drive to be assimilated.[xv] All of life is the interplay of those drives, and in our own experience it is elaborated into a natural or lower drive, manifesting itself as the empirical needs of the body, and a pure or higher one, manifest in the moral law.

Fichte developed his once-influential theory of ethics from these two drives.[xvi] To act not as an individual but as a “pure presentation of Reason” fulfills both the immediate promptings of the natural drive and the ends of the entirety of things as conveyed through the pure drive. This is a reformulation of Kant’s categorical imperative: Fichte’s ethical act is not a submission to a universalizable law but an egoless realization of our share in a universal activity. In it our inclinations and the generative movement from which they arise stand in harmony, and we experience this as a moment of inner peace.[xvii]

As Fichte writes, moreover, the natural drive and the pure drive are one and the same. Their apparent separation is only another consequence of the self-forged separation of self and world. “All phenomena of the I rest solely upon the reciprocal interaction of these two drives, which is, properly speaking, only the reciprocal interaction of one and the same drive with itself.”[xviii] Here is where he joins hands with the Sri Vidya devotee, for they both share the bedrock assumptions that the multiplicity that we experience is the realization of a unitary process and that the embodied realization of the unity of unity and multiplicity is blessedness. But it is also where he goes farther, because he spent much of his career working out the social and political implications of this world picture.

Self and world are inseparable. The multiplicity of organisms and their reciprocal interactions, and the incomprehensible (to Fichte) individualization and reciprocal interactions among humans, are all aspects of a global process on which every moment of individual experience offers a unique perspective. That activity cannot be reduced to theory or codified; humanity could never realize its unity through the state, which knows only discrete individuals and for Fichte was always a makeshift. What the rational state could do, however, was to maintain an order within which each person had the time and resources to develop her own perspective and—more importantly—to bring hers and that of all others into harmony.

Fichte came up with several schemes that he thought would allow communities to build such an order, including a semi-authoritarian government tempered by the supervision of “ephors” (the 1795 Foundation of Natural Right), a system of autarchic nation states (in The Closed Commercial State of 1801), and a national system of residential schools that owed much to the educational reformer Pestalozzi and much to Fichte’s own imagination (in the Addresses to the German Nation of 1808). None has much appeal today.

Better to return to the beginning of his career, to the lectures he delivered to throngs of excited students at the University of Jena in 1794. On the Vocation of the Scholar sees reciprocity written into the lives of all people, united “by the loveliest bond of all—the bond of free, mutual give and take.”[xix] That give-and-take expresses the movement of a “social drive,” which like Fichte’s other drives contains two contrary elements united in mutual interaction: “the drive to communicate, [or] to cultivate in other persons that aspect of personality in which we ourselves are especially strong, … and also the drive to receive, that is, the drive to allow other to cultivate in us that aspect in which they are especially strong and we are especially weak. … [Thus,] the entire species cultivates the individual.”[xx] This process brings humanity ever closer to its final, if infinitely deferred, aim: “the complete equality of all of its members.”[xxi] The question remaining, of course, is how we could get there from here.

 

To be concluded

Notes:

[i]           Brown, Robert L. “Introduction,” in Harper and Brown, The Roots of Tantra. (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002), p. 3.

[ii]           There are tantric traditions in Japan and elsewhere, but these may be passed over in this brief text.

[iii]          Dempsey, Corinne. The Goddess Lives in Upstate New York: Breaking Convention and Making Home at a North American Hindu Temple. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). What follows is largely based on observations and conversations at this temple.

[iv]          It is often realized in three dimensions, and this conical shape is called a “Mount Meru,” the fabled mountain at the center of the world.

[v]           Shulman, David. Tamil: A Biography. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2016), p. 12.

[vi]          Trawick, Margaret. Notes on Love in a Tamil Family. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 39.

[vii]         As Robert Nisbett, one of the most prominent researchers in this field, says, “Westerners focus their attention on objects, often fail to see covariations in the stimulus field, typically (and often mistakenly) explain objects’ behavior with respect to their presumed dispositions. … East Asians focus their attention on the field, are sensitive to covariation, are likely to explain objects’ behavior with respect to situations or conditions in the stimulus field.” (https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/nisbett/research-2/)

[viii]         The term comes from Förster, Eckart, tr. Bowman. The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy: A Systematic Reconstruction. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).

[ix]          Wulf, Andrea. Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self. (United States: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2023), p. 94.

[x]           La Vopa, Anthony J. Fichte: The Self and the Calling of Philosophy, 1762-1799. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 13.

[xi]          Henrich, Dieter, “Fichte’s Original Insight,” in K. Gjesdal (ed.), Debates in Nineteenth Century European Philosophy. (New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 35-45.

[xii]         Fichte’s I is merely the structure around or within which habitus and memory combine to compose the narrative self with which we identify; in itself it has no content.

[xiii]         Breazeale, Dan. Thinking Through the Wissenschaftslehre: Themes from Fichte’s Early Philosophy. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 123.

[xiv]         It is better in German, where “unconditioned” can be read as “unthinged:” “Wir suchen überall das Unbedingte, und finden immer nur Dinge.” Novalis, “Blüthenstaub,” Schriften II, p. 412 #1, my translation.

[xv]         Fichte, J.G., tr. Breazeale & Zöller. The System of Ethics According to the Principles of the Wissenschaftslehre. (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 116; SW IV, 121.

[xvi]         “Fichte’s 1798 System of Ethics was seen, in the German-language philosophy of the first half of the nineteenth century, as the most important exemplar of systematic normative ethics on non-theological foundations.” Kosch, Michelle, “Fichtean Kantianism in Nineteenth-Century Ethics,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 53, no. 1 (2015), p. 111.

[xvii]        “Zufriedenheit;” The System of Ethics, supra, p. 139; SW IV, 146.

[xviii]       Ibid., p. 125; SW IV, 130.

[xix]         In Fichte, J.G., tr. Breazeale. Early Philosophical Writings. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 161, SW, VI, 311. All emphases are in the original.

[xx]         Ibid., pp. 163-164, SW VI, 315.

[xxi]         Ibid., p. 163, SW IV, 315.