The Buddhist Accent in Gillian Rose’s Speculative Philosophy and The Broken Middle

As far as I am aware, the only direct reference to Buddhism in Gillian Rose’s writing is found in her autobiographical reflection,?Love’s Work.??The reference is most unpromising given my use of Rose’s insights for a project on Buddhist Christian belonging. She brushes off Buddhism as representative of new age and superficial spirituality. (Rose, 1995: 104) So it may sound facetious to speak of “the Buddhist accent” in her work.?

Yet, core Buddhist insights resonate with much of her own speculative spin on the space of the broken middle.[1]?Before I say more about the Buddhist vibe in her speculative engagement with philosophy and politics, it will be useful here to say why I find Rose such a fruitful resource for reflecting on the experience of a dual religious belonging and the growing phenomenon of individuals identifying with two or more religions simultaneously. The experience is more than some broad new age approach to finding spiritual resonances across the smorgasbord of faith traditions.?

What distinguishes the kind of dual religious belonging from populist experiences of drawing on elements from various religions and blending them into a personally tailored bespoke spiritualities? The dual or multiple belonging that I am advocating here would reflect the following criteria:??

1.???The individual must have formally taken steps to be a part of both traditions. (Baptism, in Christianity and receiving Jukai or taking refuge in the three jewels, in Buddhism).??

2.???The individual must actively participate in the life of both communities however such active participation is deemed appropriate. (Attending church on a regular basis and meeting with the Sangha for meditation and ritual practice.)?

3. Membership in both traditions must be such that the integrity of each faith is maintained and not construed as some tertium quid or hybrid.??One’s Christian beliefs remain intact as do one’s Buddhist convictions without admixture. (See also Drew, 2014 and Drew’s essay, “Chasing Two Rabbits” in D’Costa G. and Thompson, R edit., 2016: 11ff)

Living with the tensions between two widely different conceptual worlds is one of the challenges for dual belongers.??Quite apart from offering conceptual equipment for negotiating these tensions, Gillian Rose can be claimed as a dual belonger in her own right.??Her famous or infamous (depending on one’s perspective) deathbed baptism, raised concerns about the status of her Judaism. In a podcast interview with Giles Fraser, her sister Jacqueline Rose noted her initial disquiet at the news. Concerned that Gillian was dispensing with her Jewish identity, she visited her in hospital. She said that she left the conversation with Gillian with a real sense that she had not jettisoned her Judaism by receiving baptism. The act was one in which the integrities of both faiths remained intact for her.??(c.f. The third criterion above.)?

Rose’s speculative Hegelianism would certainly have offered as much material for processing dual belonging in her own case, as it does, in my estimate, for negotiating the territory that is the broken middle between Buddhist and Christian traditions.??Speculative philosophy sublates contradictions of identity and otherness, holding both within the tension of a middle that remains unresolved but dynamically engaged. The norms embodied in confessions and statements of belief, on such an acount, always constitute changing and contestable categories.?The antinomies pertinent to the encounter of Buddhism with Christianity that will especially require negotiation in terms of their engagement – and by way of internal processing for the “dual belonger” include the conflicting categories of self /no self; theism/a-theism; creation / beginningless universe; etc.??These find expression in doctrinal and conceptual formulations in both traditions.?

Within the framework of Rose’s understanding of law in terms of a widely construed jurisprudence embracing formal laws and social norms, there is always a certain plasticity allowing for more generous interpretations and, perhaps in this context, an awareness of the shifting nature of legal boundaries – i.e. stated doctrines and norms of practice, and their co-dependently arisen nature. These norms, doctrines, defining rules compose inevitably porous, changing boundaries, potentially allowing an overlapping middle space between two very different sets of belief over time.??We are reminded, here, of the phrase from the Heart Sutra, "All dharmas are empty". Maximus the Confessor's comment to the effect that "the contents of dogma transcend dogma" might be a Christian gloss on the Zen phrase, noting that statements about ultimate reality are "a finger pointing at the moon, not the moon itself."?

Rose’s take on this speculative middle can be read out of her second book,?Hegel Contra Sociology.??Dialogue around these antimonies will reflect the speculative reasoning described by Rose:?

To read a proposition ‘speculatively’ means that the identity which is affirmed between subject and predicate is seen equally to affirm a lack of identity between subject and predicate. This reading implies an identity different from the merely formal one of the ordinary proposition. This different kind of identity cannot be pre-judged, that is, it cannot be justified in a transcendental sense, and it cannot be stated in a proposition of the kind to be eschewed. This different kind of identity must be understood as a result to be achieved….. The subject of the proposition is no longer fixed and abstract with external contingent accidents, but, initially, an empty name, uncertain and problematic, gradually acquiring meaning as a result of a series of contradictory experiences. (Rose 2009: 52)

The tension between Buddhist and Christian propositions, that on the face of it point to irreconcilable and contradictory concepts, are held in hope of a different kind of identity “understood as a result to be achieved”, though not realised in the moment.??Several interviewees in Rose Drew’s study of dual belonging expressed living with such tensions as a part of their experience. (Drew 2011)?

Gillian Rose makes reference to John Keats idea of a negative capability and its connection to faith in her unfinished?Paradiso:

For faith is first and last negative capability?…the capacity of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after facts and reasons.??It is also positive capability, not developed by Keats, the enlarging of inhibited reason in the domain of praxis, practical reason, Aristotle’s ‘phronesis’, the educating wisdom that knows when to pass unnoticed and when to act.”??(Rose 1999: 33)

It is also its twin expression of a “positive capability” referred to by Rose. It is this peculiar capability and expanded reason, perhaps, that dual belongers cultivate in their experience. It is also this capacity for both negative and positive capabilities that is nurtured in both Christianity and Buddhism’s apophatic traditions that see their respective truths as ultimately inexpressible in language and concepts: these are fingers pointing at the moon, but not the moon or inadequate means to for assailing that cloud of unknowing that can never be pierced by thought but “by love alone”.

Gillian Rose’s spin on Hegel’s philosophy with its affirmation of the speculative identity of subject and predicate resonates with the Mahayana Buddhist notion of emptiness, i.e. the affirmation that nothing, sentient or non-sentient, has an autonomous essential being in and of itself.??As with Hegel, autonomies are socially constructed and reality is “interconnected”. In the language of the late Thich Nhat Hanh, we inter-exist with one another.??In Rose’s own words, “reality is intrinsically relational and experience is generated between what interconnected actors posit..” (Rose, 1996: p. 13)

Rose’s “intrinsically relational” reality of engaged “interconnected actors” adds to this Buddhist accent an element of what has been called “red thread Zen”.??Susan Murphy expounds the significance of the Koan, “Why are perfectly accomplished saints and bodhisattvas still attached to the red thread?”?

In the original medieval Chinese context, the “red thread” – sometimes translated “vermillion” - would bring to mind the colour of courtesans’ under garments which women in role were obliged to wear. It evokes sexual passion, lust and love - and the vast baggage of gender and power relations, tangled up with strong urges, stigma, shame, vulnerability and inequality. (Murphy: vii-viii) It speaks of embodiment in a social and political context.??

The interconnected actors engaging with each other in the speculative ‘broken middle’ do so with a passion to know and understand the suffering of the other, one’s own implication in that suffering, and the mutual recognition of our embodied experiences amid messy and shattered reality. Saints, sinners, bodhisattvas, all of us are bound to one another by the red thread of the intersubjective journey of Spirit / Geist.?

Inseparably threaded are embodiment, life, pain, joy, bliss, despair, suffering, empathy, love, loss and, of course, the inarguable fact of death, the certifying detail of all sentient life. Already, such a rich mix of light and dark, delight and difficulty, affording little room for dreams of purity, but much amplitude for laughter and lament" (Murphy: viii)?

Murphy’s description of red thread zen is echoed in the fully embodied engagement with life to which Gillan Rose summons her readers: full-on embodied encounter, shorn of pious innocence or utopian pretensions, willing to engage and be engaged by the other, vulnerable, willing to know and be known in the journey toward greater recognition, fulfilment of our deepest connection as human beings and glimpses of those?intersubjective realisations of Geist as we journey together, failing forward in the direction of a higher calling.?

Rose’s own "red thread zen" of the broken middle, perhaps.?

I have argued here that Rose’s speculative philosophy has something of a "Buddhist accent" and offers a conceptual tool for thinking and negotiating the contradictories of Buddhist Christian belonging. When one considers the vast expanses between the conceptual worlds of theistic Christianity and a-theistic Buddhism, one might be forgiven for imagining that if Rosean insights can be employed in traversing such massive gaps, they might also equip us in the wider context of peace building in the world.?

[1]?See Gillian Rose’s essay, “Diremption of Spirit” in?Shadow of Spirit: Postmodernism and Religion?(1992)??Philippa Berry and Andrew Wernick, (edit). Gillian Rose first posits her notion of “the broken middle” in this essay.??It was reprinted as “Shadow of Spirit” in Rose’s,??Judaism and Modenity: Philosophical Essays?(2017). See also her book,?The Broken Middle?(1992)

Texts: By Gillian Rose

Mourning Becomes the Law (1996)

Hegel Contra Sociology (2009)?

Love’s Work (1995)

Paradiso (1999)

The Broken Middle (1992)?

Texts By Others:

Buddhist and Christian? (2011) by Rose Drew

“Chasing Two Rabbits” by Rose Drew, in Buddhist-Christian Dual Belonging: Affirmations, Objections and Explorations (2016) edit: Ross Thompson and Gavin D’Costa

Red Thread Zen (2016), by Susan Murphy