Reading Alan Watts' autobiography In My Own Way, one is struck both by Watts' learned spiritual syncretism and his unabashed heterodoxy. In many way, Watts' religious thought epitomizes a more New-Age approach to mysticism, and his attempt to subvert chronological storytelling in his own personal narrative seeks to uproot our ingrained perceptions as to how life takes place--that is, not as a linear progression of a single "I" through a series of cohesive experiences, but rather as a constantly shifting subject confronted with ever-changing phenomena and experience.
With Watts also comes the authorial question of the ideological "I" and its relationship to the other aspects of the fractured ego. Watts was firstly a spiritual teacher, cultural critic of the sixties, and a well-known ambassador of "Eastern" religion to a Western audience. Despite his vast knowledge, it is salient in this autobiography that Watts seeks not only to impart that knowledge, but also to challenge ossified western assumptions and ways of interacting in and with our world.
He begins his own narrative with the jarring statement, "As I am also a you, this is going to be the kind of book that I would like you to write for me." This asserts both the plurality and interdependence of the self. It suggests that one person could write another's life story and vice versa. At the same time, by structuring his narrative in this way, Watts enacts a particular hermeneutic for the rest of his autobiography by asserting to the reader that his narrative could be construed as the reader's own. Do you buy this as a narrative posture? Can an autobiography be written without regard to chronology? How would that then be structured?
If we consider the idea of Orientalism in the sense offered by Edward Said as a negative caricature of "Eastern" culture by an outsider, would Watts' avowed idealism regarding Eastern religion mark him as an orientalist or simply as an admirer-cum-cultural ambassador of religious tradition to which he himself had been a neophyte?
Alan Watts on Zen (animated)
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Defining Our Terms: What Is Spiritual Autobiography?
What is Spiritual Autobiography? How might we define the genre and is it actually a genre as such?
We might surmise that spiritual autobiography consists of writing about the self--or multiple selves--in confrontation with some notion of transcendence or growth. But how can such a notion be explained and do these two terms complement or exist in conflict with one another? One useful approach in investigating the genre might be to split our two terms here. After all, what makes us so sure that the two should go together?
Let's begin by discussing the term, "autobiography," which is ostensibly the least problematic of the two. "Autobiography," comes from the Greek--αὐτός-autos self + βίος-bios life + γράφειν-graphein "to write." Autobiography is a genre in which the author is also the primary subject of his own work, and that work is purportedly true. Autobiographies can take a reader chronologically through an author's entire life, or be bound to a short time frame within a broader life. Thus, an autobiography can be written by a 40-year-old man and only concern his teenage years, or it might be written by the same man who interpolates those years into the larger narrative of his life story.
Let's take our 40-year-old man and examine his narrative more closely here. One salient problem that immediately arises is the veracity of his accounts. Even if the author has every intention of relating the truth to his reader, how is his a reliable testimony from a time frame which passed so many years before its relation? Can it really be claimed that he is the same "I" as the one from so many years ago?
In his book On Autobiography (1989), Philippe Lejeune offers a distinction which both further complicates and helps us to understand these narrative problems found in many genres but exaggerated here. LeJeune poses a distinction between the "enunciated I" and the "I-of-enunciation." The "enunciated I" could be likened in a fictional text to the protagonist, while the "I-of-enunciation" would correspond to the narrator. The assumption of autobiographical narratives is that these two are one and the same; however, there is difference (or Derridean différance) between them. Other scholars of autobiography enumerate other "I"s, including an ideological "I" and a real "I" in this splintering of self. To quote Rimbaud in his well-known discussion of himself as a visionary in a letter to Georges Izambard, Je est un autre ("I is another").
Another problem in considering autobiography is the problem of coaxing. Just what made the author of a given work decide to relate his or her story? This question is deeply connected with the intention and audience of the work, as well the amanuensis or ghost writer--if the work has one. The factors that lead to an author's desire or urge to relate his or her life story often ideologically and factually frame that life story. Nevertheless, we are not just studying autobiography but "spiritual" autobiography and works which present themselves as relating mystical experience.
When related in a personal sense, the spiritual often blurs into the mystical, so we might employ "mysticism" as an analogous term here. "Mysticism" is a word that is etymologically related to "mystery" and comes from the Greek μυστικός, mystikos, meaning "an initiate." Mysticism sees the purpose of religion as the direct experience of God, Self, Absolute Reality--or however we might define such an ineffable experience--and not simply the adherence to dogma or the expectation of some sort of a reward. In his essay "Mysticism" (1901) from the Varieties of Religious Experience, the great psychologist of religion, William James, defines four aspects which pertained to mystical experience(s):
1) Ineffability
2) Noetic Quality
3) Passivity
4) Transience
Items 2-4 are fairly transparent and will be helpful for us; item 1, however, presents a particular problem in this genre. Ironically, we will be reading books and watching films expressed with and through language that seeks to convey an experience that defies language. Do you think this can be done? Assuming we accept the ontological possibility of mystical experience, can a mystical experience be conveyed--at least by analogy-- and should we believe those who try?
We might surmise that spiritual autobiography consists of writing about the self--or multiple selves--in confrontation with some notion of transcendence or growth. But how can such a notion be explained and do these two terms complement or exist in conflict with one another? One useful approach in investigating the genre might be to split our two terms here. After all, what makes us so sure that the two should go together?
Let's begin by discussing the term, "autobiography," which is ostensibly the least problematic of the two. "Autobiography," comes from the Greek--αὐτός-autos self + βίος-bios life + γράφειν-graphein "to write." Autobiography is a genre in which the author is also the primary subject of his own work, and that work is purportedly true. Autobiographies can take a reader chronologically through an author's entire life, or be bound to a short time frame within a broader life. Thus, an autobiography can be written by a 40-year-old man and only concern his teenage years, or it might be written by the same man who interpolates those years into the larger narrative of his life story.
Let's take our 40-year-old man and examine his narrative more closely here. One salient problem that immediately arises is the veracity of his accounts. Even if the author has every intention of relating the truth to his reader, how is his a reliable testimony from a time frame which passed so many years before its relation? Can it really be claimed that he is the same "I" as the one from so many years ago?
In his book On Autobiography (1989), Philippe Lejeune offers a distinction which both further complicates and helps us to understand these narrative problems found in many genres but exaggerated here. LeJeune poses a distinction between the "enunciated I" and the "I-of-enunciation." The "enunciated I" could be likened in a fictional text to the protagonist, while the "I-of-enunciation" would correspond to the narrator. The assumption of autobiographical narratives is that these two are one and the same; however, there is difference (or Derridean différance) between them. Other scholars of autobiography enumerate other "I"s, including an ideological "I" and a real "I" in this splintering of self. To quote Rimbaud in his well-known discussion of himself as a visionary in a letter to Georges Izambard, Je est un autre ("I is another").
Another problem in considering autobiography is the problem of coaxing. Just what made the author of a given work decide to relate his or her story? This question is deeply connected with the intention and audience of the work, as well the amanuensis or ghost writer--if the work has one. The factors that lead to an author's desire or urge to relate his or her life story often ideologically and factually frame that life story. Nevertheless, we are not just studying autobiography but "spiritual" autobiography and works which present themselves as relating mystical experience.
When related in a personal sense, the spiritual often blurs into the mystical, so we might employ "mysticism" as an analogous term here. "Mysticism" is a word that is etymologically related to "mystery" and comes from the Greek μυστικός, mystikos, meaning "an initiate." Mysticism sees the purpose of religion as the direct experience of God, Self, Absolute Reality--or however we might define such an ineffable experience--and not simply the adherence to dogma or the expectation of some sort of a reward. In his essay "Mysticism" (1901) from the Varieties of Religious Experience, the great psychologist of religion, William James, defines four aspects which pertained to mystical experience(s):
1) Ineffability
2) Noetic Quality
3) Passivity
4) Transience
Items 2-4 are fairly transparent and will be helpful for us; item 1, however, presents a particular problem in this genre. Ironically, we will be reading books and watching films expressed with and through language that seeks to convey an experience that defies language. Do you think this can be done? Assuming we accept the ontological possibility of mystical experience, can a mystical experience be conveyed--at least by analogy-- and should we believe those who try?
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