HUMAN SUFFERING AND THE QUEST FOR
COSMOPOLITAN SOLIDARITY: A BUDDHIST
PERSPECTIVE
EILÍS WARD
Abstract: This article argues that Buddhist social thought offers valuable insight
into debates about cosmopolitan solidarity by raising cosmopolitanism’s need to
explore more deeply the relationship between the nature of self and the politics of
solidarity. It suggests that a radical ‘socio-existential’ account of the individual,
which rejects a conception of the self as autonomous and separate from others,
mitigates categories of exclusion and offers a robust account of the possibility of
solidarity with strangers. Buddhist thought theorises a movement from suffering
to solidarity that does not recognise borders or boundaries as containing inherent
ethical value.
Keywords: Buddhism, cosmopolitanism, critical theory, self and non-self,
solidarity, suffering
Introduction
This essay brings the conceptual resources of Buddhist social thought to
bear on Andrew Linklater’s proposition that human vulnerability to mental
and physical suffering constitutes the most solid basis on which to build
cosmopolitan solidarity between strangers. The generative connection drawn
here between suffering and solidarity invites us to take seriously the possibility
that ‘basic considerations of humanity’ (Linklater 2007: 135) might have
political significance for cosmopolitan ethics. It makes assumptions about
human relationships that require continued investigation.
Linklater’s contention that common humanity can be the basis of solidarity
is treated with deep scepticism in the social sciences today notwithstanding
attempts to rescue the broader ideal (Wilde 2004: 162). It seems that the ‘sticky
Journal of International Political Theory, 9(2) 2013, 136–154
DOI: 10.3366/jipt.2013.0051
© Journal of International Political Theory 2013
www.euppublishing.com/jipt
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web of universalism’ (Santoro 2011) implicated in arguments for humanity
produces, at the end of the day, both assimilation and exclusion. His proposition,
moreover, runs counter to the debates on causality particularly those weighing
in behind structure, most explicitly in the relationship between globalisation,
contemporary and historical, and cosmopolitanism (see Haller and Roudometof
2010; Delanty 2009; Beck 2006; Beck and Sznaider 2006; Roudometof 2005).
Linklater’s approach also renders a further preoccupation in the literature, the
quest for a typology of the virtues, dispositions and skills of the cosmopolite,
somewhat secondary (see Turner 2002; Turner 2001; Ossewaarde 2007; Fine
2007; Skrbis and Woodward 2007; Hannerz 1997).
Linklater’s case makes an altogether simpler claim based on the political
potential of human vulnerability to suffering, thereby nudging debate towards the
‘motivational heart’ (Dobson 2006: 165) of cosmopolitanism. The particularities
of this claim, which provoked this essay initially, served as a conceptual groundclearing exercise towards Linklater’s later magnum opus on cosmopolitan harm
conventions (Linklater 2011). Indeed the political potential for a Buddhist
inflection on solidarity was anticipated by him (Linklater 2006) and, later, folded
into that opus although it is not in either iteration granted sustained attention.
That this earlier deliberation was analytically significant is underscored by
Linklater’s reassertion in his conclusion that ‘common vulnerabilities to mental
and physical suffering’ uniquely escape the criticisms of both parochialism
and domination (2011: 258). This essay therefore returns to and isolates
one dimension of the debates about solidarity raised by Linklater to draw
out the inflection he anticipated. I have coined the phrase ‘the suffering
solidarity complex’ (the SSC) to encircle the preoccupation: how to consider
the solidaristic potential of suffering in the context of cosmopolitan ethics.
This essay suggests that Buddhist thought, a rank outsider to the Western
canon, offers a different and comprehensive set of conceptual tools to explore
Linklater’s claim while sharing the same emancipatory intent. Ultimately, it both
supports the case and points up a vulnerability in his account of humanity given
especially cosmopolitanism’s desire to enhance ‘human interconnectedness’
(Linklater 2009) and to resist assimilative tendencies in the tradition.
Buddhist social thought begins with an acceptance that suffering is universal
and ubiquitous and, thereafter, conceives social collectivities that emphasise
deep bonds of responsibility and mutuality at all levels of the human – and
nonhuman – world. However, the solidity of its suffering solidarity complex rests
on a radical account of the self, more radical than that currently advocated in
cosmopolitanism thought. It refuses a world comprised of autonomous moral
agents and abjures the idea of human nature with consequent implications for
ethics and for the politics of solidarity. It is this account that makes Buddhist
social thought distinct and, I suggest, has something to offer current discourses
on cosmopolitan ethics.
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The first section of this article sets out a précis of Linklater’s argument.
The second presents a Buddhist perspective on the SSC and for this, a
brief explanatory note on translation is provided. Buddhist thought was first
articulated 2,500 years ago in pre-modern Asia and making sense of its
‘otherness’ (King 2009) is a real challenge today. The translation convention of
establishing analogies between oriental and occidental concepts risks whittling
away important nuances. The most important translation tool may therefore be
a commitment to dialogic understanding (Keown 2005: 24). In this spirit, it is
recognised that the term ‘solidarity’ is not found in early Buddhism and shows up
infrequently in contemporary Buddhist writings. However, Buddhism grounds
its ethics and its politics in karuna, a Pali term that is customarily translated
as compassion, or suffering with. Compassion can be understood as a form of,
or having a quality of similitude with, solidarity. I suggest that no Buddhist
activist or practitioner today would refuse the term ‘solidarity’ to describe
their general orientation although they would likely seek to add much more.
Karuna consequently is one key Buddhist concept that this essay is concerned
with.
As will become apparent, the intelligibility of all concepts within the
Buddhist world rests in their relationality to other concepts. The source and
nature of karuna cannot be fully grasped outside the context of the Buddhist
understanding of suffering, for instance, and vice versa. The challenges of
translation and comprehension are rendered more acute therefore because of
the interdependency of the ideas, particularly for those approaching Buddhist
thought through an Indo European language structure which posits the world
as an edifice of persons, places and things where each exists with a defining
essence and attendant definable qualities (Olendzski 2010: 251). This essay
attempts therefore to present a thick account of relevant Buddhist thought to
expose concept relationality relevant to the SSC. Finally, in the third section I
suggest that Buddhist thought offers an exemplary form of cosmopolitan ethics
from outside the Western canon which both validates the need for psychological
insight in any theoretical accounts of solidarity and goes beyond that canon’s
traditional account of the self.
1. Cosmopolitanism, Solidarity and Suffering
While the question of the bonds of human solidarity is deeply embedded
in political theory, Linklater reconsiders it in the context of contemporary
global interconnectedness contiguous to his search for a sociology of global
morals with an emancipatory intent (2007). His interest is in the ‘sources and
channels of human sympathy’ that might provide a new agenda for critical
international relations (IR) theory wherein attitudes to harm, suffering, cruelty,
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Human Suffering and the Quest for Cosmopolitan Solidarity
compassion and vulnerability can be harnessed to bring global connectedness
under collective moral and political control (2007: 135). Thus a central question
for him is how far universal emotions can develop to close the gap between
cosmopolitan ideals and its political practice.
So what is Linklater’s case? In brief, he argues that solidarity for strangers
is possible because all human beings share a biological legacy of common
vulnerability to suffering, both mental and physical, rendering each of us in
need of solidaristic relationships no less significant in a global context. Ethical
cosmopolitanism therefore can productively ground itself in humanity, or in the
common human condition. While carefully avoiding the term ‘human nature’,
his claim is both humanist and universalist in keeping with his wider opus
that has its face set against both communitarian and postmodern accounts
of solidarity (Dobson 2006: 166). The work ultimately allows Linklater to
challenge what he perceives as the decorporealisation of critical IR theory
manifested in the movement away from early Frankfurt School deliberations
towards Habermasian-inspired discourse ethics. It is an attempt to reconnect the
early Frankfurt School’s politicisation of suffering into a renewed critical theory
in the context of globalisation. The story of suffering that Linklater presents
therefore goes far beyond its ‘sensuous knowledge’ (Wilkinson 2005: 2) to its
potential as a solid ground to build an emancipatory politics.
Linklater’s argument is structured around three stages. Firstly is an exposition
of the ‘Weilian condition’ (following Simone Weil): the universal capacity to
extend sympathy to others not conditional on a shared language, repertoire of
emotional responses or on any notion of equality between subjects. Vulnerability
to suffering, even for those outside our communities of affiliation, invokes
an obligation to respond. For Weil, such humanist dispositions always existed
across space and time and for Linklater they contain ‘the possibility of radically
enlarging the moral and political boundaries of community’ (2007: 135) and
create the possibilities of an embodied cosmopolitanism. As ethical potentialities
are immanent within a universal vocabulary of human emotions or of sentience,
neither complex culturally-transcendent debates nor translations across cultures
are required (Linklater 2007: 140). And potentiality is emphasised by Linklater
since rather more than mere recognition of a biological legacy is required to
produce the kind of binding social practices with which he is concerned. The
history of political theory offers many accounts of the role of basic sentience
in morality exemplified by him with reference to Aristotle and Adam Smith
(Linklater 2007: 138–9).
Linklater then turns, secondly, to the early Frankfurt School’s prioritisation
of the psychological dimensions of moral conduct in political life and to
affinities therein with a politicisation of suffering. Again his intent is to trace
a narrative that can strengthen the claim for shared humanity in relation to
cosmopolitan ethics. With one eye towards Habermas’s account of collective
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learning, here Linklater focuses on early Frankfurt School preoccupations
with the psychological and emotional dimensions of social conduct and moral
interaction as a form of ‘historical psychology’ (2007: 147) alongside historical
materialism. Following Horkheimer’s idea of the community of all inflicted with
‘fear of death and suffering’ (2007: 143), bodily vulnerability is foundational
to solidarity. At the very least, these narratives allow us to conclude that there is
rather more to be said in praise of appeals to humanity, and against moral closure
by particular communities, in determining ethical conduct.
In the third move, Linklater treats Habermas’s turn to discourse ethics as a
failure to capitalise on early Frankfurt School ideas that invested political values
in human vulnerability, pain and suffering, producing instead a decorporealised
ethical discourse in critical IR theory. Habermas’s contention that an ethics
that begins with the vulnerabilities of the human body commits a naturalistic
fallacy (2007: 146) is problematical for Linklater given that the ‘natural heritage’
must be part of any sociological account of human development. He points
to Elias’s configurational sociology as a reconceptualisation of the connection
between social-structural forces and psychological dynamics, producing, in
turn, a humanistic account of social evolution that lends support to the early
Frankfurt School enquiry (2007: 148–9). It is here between the socio-structural
and the psychological that Linklater wishes to rearticulate a politicised account
of human vulnerability to suffering to produce a sociology of global morals with
emancipatory intent.
In the end, Linklater’s account falters somewhat in its movement to both
make the case for a return of corporeality to a sociology of global morals
and to account for cosmopolitan solidarity based on vulnerability of that
corporeality, although they are related concerns. I suggest that the demands of
these two themes leaves his essay short of a depth-investigation of the manner
in which human vulnerability to suffering can mediate solidarity rather than
foster a retrenchment or a tightening of the circle of concern. Dobson contends
that a principled recognition of ourselves in everyone else who occupies the
think skein of humanity on the surface of the globe (2006: 169) might not
be sufficient to motivate cosmopolitanism. This critique draws our attention
to the need to consider both source and motivation and their relationship.
For Linklater, the starting point is the Weilian condition, the deontological
responsibility that flows from embodied vulnerability but a full exploration of
motivation is left aside. If vulnerability to suffering is the source, then we
need to explore more deeply the nature of our humanity to understand what
motivates (or not) a solidaristic response. We need a deeper account of the
human condition and one that investigates the relationship between ‘nature’
or the natural inheritance, subjectivity and social structures. For Buddhist
thought both source and motivation are interdependent. It is to this that I now
turn.
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Human Suffering and the Quest for Cosmopolitan Solidarity
2. Suffering and Solidarity: Buddhist Thought
As will become evident, Buddhist thought speaks of karuna, a form of
solidarity, based on shared ontological conditions faced by humans but abjures
something called ‘human nature’. It offers a thoroughly radical account of human
relationality in which mutual responsibilities inhere between self and other
precisely because of the fact of suffering. In this section I explore that account
by drawing on, inter alia, emerging scholarly work on Buddhist social theory.
Before making our way, two points are raised by way of contextualising the
narrative that follows, the second of which leads to some further points that
need addressing at this stage of the discussion. These discussions further serve
to illustrate the conceptual relationality of the Buddhist world.
The first relates to the political and social dimensions of Buddhist thought
in general. Since Weber’s oft-cited reference to Buddhism as a quietist tradition
acutely in opposition to politics (see Baumann 2000: 372–6), the perception of its
preoccupation with inner transformation to the exclusion of the social or political
has remained dominant. Popularly held images of religiosity, monasticism and
retreat, frame a picture where contemplative practices, and little else, seem
to exemplify the sum of Buddhism’s contribution. However, a reading of
Buddhism’s historical spread throughout Asia reveals a contrary view (Cho
2000). Today, Buddhist commitment to social and political activism is manifest
in Asia and elsewhere (Queen 2000; King 2005; Eppsteiner 1988; Sivaraksa
2005). However, more to the point, Buddhist philosophy proclaims non-duality
of internal (personal) and external transformation, a feature that distinguishes it
from other congruent forms of social activism and which prompts a conclusion
that there is no Buddhist thought without social theory (Loy 2003; Arnold
2005). The significance of this point is returned to below and constitutes a key
dimension of this essay.
The second point relates to the question of authenticity in Buddhist thought,
or to the issue of to what we are referring when we speak of Buddhism.
The validity of the question of authenticity is endorsed by both the absence
of revealed truths in Buddhist thought and its differential indigenisation over
time as it intermingled with local cultural practices and pre-existing religious
beliefs in Asia. For the spiritual seeker equally for the social scientist today,
a bewildering array of Buddhisms exists.1 Notwithstanding different doctrinal
and prescriptive accents and aesthetics, a perennial, transcultural Buddhism can
be identified, viz the recorded (and much-edited) direct teachings of the person
known as Shakyamuni Buddha (Jones 2003: 118). That the social and cultural
context of Asia would shape the emergence of Buddhism is not remarkable.
What is subject to some discussion is the extent to which the entire cosmological
order of pre-modern Asian societies (notwithstanding the point above about
differences) necessarily belongs to all Buddhisms today. The philosophical
grounding of Buddhist thought, its theodicy and soteriology were utterly shaped
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by the understanding in pre-modern Asia that life was a continuous, cyclical
process. Everything in this process was subject to change and disintegration.
Everything – objects, persons, ideas, feelings, institutions – was understood as
interdependent and transient. From this order, two important teachings remain
constant and irreducible in Buddhist thought and important for our purposes.
These are 1) the principle of dependent origination and 2) the idea of karma.
A brief exposition of both follows.
Interdependency, or the principle of dependent origination, is referred to as
the law of mutual causality and is considered a true and accurate reflection of
how things are in the world. In accordance with this law, all phenomena arise
from complex sets of causes and conditions, each set unique within its specific
situation (Kaza: 166). Everything exists as interacting processes in a world of
what Loy calls relationships of interpenetrating non-duality (2003: 29). Thus
beings and objects are empty of permanent, stable, separate identities. Self,
too, is no more than a precipitate of our habitual ways of thinking, feeling
and acting which, over time, become meshed into a sense of identity formed
around a perceived stability. Our ownership of the idea of a stable self, with
a personalised history, memory and consciousness is not just a habit of the
mind, but is socially co-constituted and embedded as a principle in most legal
systems. In contrast, Buddhism proposes a thoroughly relational ontology: the
self is empty of permanent, stable essences and is a process in ever changing
relationships of non-duality.
The claim for non-self is thus not an observation of metaphysical importance
but one that exposes a deeply held psychological reflex (Olendzki 2006). We
are invited to test the power of this reflex ourselves. If we pay close, sustained
attention we will see that while our physical bodies remain stable, our thoughts,
desires, emotions and the stories that we continuously tell ourselves come and
go, rise and fall and are inconstant. We will find that an essential self cannot be
located because it simply does not exist.
Impermanence, as the ontological condition set out above, is co-constituted
in turn by the concept of karma. In traditional Buddhism karma was understood
as a moral code whereby punishments and rewards for actions that violated (or
supported) dependent origination were meted out, and its functioning relied on
the idea of reincarnation. Today, karma can be reinterpreted with more secular,
psycho-sociological meaning. Rather, we construct ourselves by what we choose
to do and in choosing certain actions, we shape our own characters and, in
turn, our futures (Keown 2005: 6). When we behave malevolently, greedily or
with compassion, we experience the world as just so in that moment. Here
then, karma speaks to a relationship between intentionality and consequences
to say that our world is not disparate in origin from our own intentions and that
the world becomes a different place as we, through our actions, experience it
differently (Loy 2003; Herchock 1996; Olson 2000; Magid 2002).2 This reading
of Buddhist thought posits human agency as irreducible and grounds ethical
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Human Suffering and the Quest for Cosmopolitan Solidarity
considerations solidly in the here and now, unbidden by any considerations of
an afterlife. With this philosophical and cosmological context in mind, we can
now examine a Buddhist account of the SSC.
2.1 The Place of Suffering
Newcomers to Buddhism are often guided into its ideas with reference to a
simple statement, attributed to the Buddha and recorded in the original Pali
language, in which he summarised his thought as follows: ‘(S)uffering, and the
way out of suffering, I teach’ (cited in Jones, 2003: 3). The word ‘suffering’
is usually rendered as translation from the Pali word dukkha but, as Buddhist
scholars attest, dukkha is considerably nuanced in its meaning. We can say that
dukkha certainly refers to the universally experienced suffering of the human
body; physical and mental pain, loss and bereavement, hunger and hardship.
But dukkha also refers to both our response to those afflictions and to a more
fundamental dis-ease of the human condition: our inability to be satisfied with
life and our desire for more and better (King 2009:15).
This reading of dukka connotes a deep existential suffering. However, it
also has significant epistemological implications which go beyond the issue
of suffering and which is critical to the enquiry here. As a governing
idea in Buddhist thought, dukkha directly challenges modernity’s governing
epistemological principle of the non-differentiated (or excluded) middle, tertium
non datur, and constitutes a critique of modernity itself. From a Buddhist
perspective, it is the substantive ontology involved in the very principle of
the non-differentiated middle that enshrines and solidifies dukkha because it
naturalises separateness or duality.
In other words, it is precisely because we believe ourselves to exist in a literal
sense as fully autonomous, sovereign individuals that we suffer. The very idea of
‘is’ and ‘not is’ become the basic determinants of our suffering or, in the words
of the Buddha, they become the ‘twin barbs’ on which all of humanity is impaled
(cited in Hershock 2006: 14). How does this come about? We learn to believe
that the gap separating each thing from each other thing is absolute including the
gap that separates us as individuals from all other individuals (Batchelor 1997).
Believing ourselves to be autonomous, we struggle to solidify this fictional self
through fixing boundaries. We attach our self-identity to beliefs, objects and to
other persons in order to support that self and its needs. We find comfort, stability
and existential validation in collective identities, shared histories, corporations
and economic institutions (Loy 2008). We create insider/outsider dualities in our
minds by attributing separateness and solidity to phenomena and by emphasising
their differences (Jones 2003: 12). This socio-psychological process assuages the
anxiety created by the fear that that ‘I’ may not be solid (Loy 1996). However, its
very deluded foundation perpetuates our own suffering and that of others around
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us through creating closures that rupture dependent origination. For Buddhism
then, suffering is of socio-existential origin (Jones 2003), it is intimately and
perennially bound up with our existential belief in the self as containing some
essential solidity.3 These points are returned to in the concluding discussion.
2.2 From Suffering to Solidarity
If suffering is principally caused by our attachment to a particular notion of self,
what then are the implications for solidarity?
Within Buddhistm, compassion for the suffering of others is a defining
characteristic of the original teachings and, as a virtue, is enshrined across the
different traditions as belonging to a family of values that inhere in the human
condition and to which we all have access. On appreciation of the reality of
the emptiness of self and of our own suffering, we draw on these inherent
qualities to respond accordingly with compassion. In this sense, compassion
for others is not separate from compassion for ourselves. For Cho (2000: 80)
selflessness provides the basis for a Buddhist theory of a rational social justice,
it is the doorway from ontology to phenomenology. Altruism becomes a rational
response to suffering in the world (Harris 2011). On this view compassion is
not directly analogous with the idea of an emotionality or with a subjective
feeling but becomes a relationship quality (Hershock 2006) that arises in a world
of radical ontological relationality. For Buddhist social theorists, compassion is
therefore located alongside suffering in a socio-existential account of the human
condition (Jones 2003: 212–3).
In terms of moving from soteriology to global ethics, a literature is beginning
to emerge that applies core Buddhist ideas to the complexities of the modern
world. Thai Buddhist activist Sulak Sivaraksa, for instance, posits capitalism
as a form of institutional violence that is founded on human suffering for not
just the poor but the middle classes too (Sivaraksa 2005). The relationship
between ontological insecurity and, for example, the pursuit of political power,
material wealth, overconsumption and consequent environmental degradation
is drawn out (Loy 2003; Moore 2002; Jones 2003). While our focus here is
more narrowly concerned with the SSC two themes treated by these authors are
of direct interest. These are that, firstly, non-self is political and secondly that
the empirical reality of the world reveals the nature of our interconnection and
lends support to the profound ethical implications of dependent origination as a
statement of how things actually are. Here, we can think of the vulnerability
of state’s economies to the global markets and of all societies to climate
change.
How then can we move from the reality or otherwise of suffering at a
global level to solidaristic responses? Here, both traditional and contemporary
Buddhist thought unfailingly emphasise the view that while compassion,
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as motivation, inheres in the human condition it does not always follow
in response to suffering.4 Compassion needs cultivation through awareness
practices characterised by continuous effort over long time. It is in this
sense that it constitutes a form of virtue ethics. It requires nothing less
than a rigorous experiential examination (Harvey 2009: 571) of our mind’s
capacity to continuously conjure up dualities, hatreds, prejudices, separations
and boundaries. In their account of mindfulness and environmental education,
Bai and Scutt (2009) reflect on the corresponding integrative function of
mindfulness. The practice, simple to explain, but no less challenging in the
doing, creates a sense of continuity in the world of objects so that ‘self’ and
the world phenomonologically arise together moment by moment. Synthesising
Foucauldian scholarship with Zen meditation practices to develop a critique of
consumerism, Doran (2011) reworks Foucault’s notion of askesis, or training, to
describe the transformative process required.
Without this continuous examination we may remain deludedly attached to the
fictional world of self, cling to physical and mental constituents such as cultural
values, political identities and shared histories and seek in their assemblage
the kind of permanence and stability we long for to validate our self. Here
the Buddhist SSC turns ultimately on a psycho-social process, bringing our
attention to the mind’s role in creating separations, and arguing for an attentive,
embodied practice to dissolve those separations. This final link in the conceptual
framework, the continuous enquiry into our minds and the world they create,
allows us move from philosophy – the ontological status of suffering in the
context of interpenetrating non-duality – to solidarity, expressed in Buddhist
social action.
2.3 Buddhist Social Action and the Politics of Solidarity
In the growing scholarly literature on engaged Buddhism, a sine qua non is
the reduction or diminution of collective suffering that begins and ends with
a rejection of the ethical significance of boundaries between self and other
enforced by interpersonal or communal borders. Movements for peace and
social justice have emerged within Asia based on these ideas (King 2009; Bond
2004). Solidaristic actions, exemplified by Burmese monks risking their lives
in support of pro-democracy demonstrations,5 Taiwanese medics providing free
care to the poor (King 2005) and Americans providing free hospice care for
AIDS sufferers (Ostaseki 2008) are understood as embodiments of compassion.
Albeit manifesting in the twentieth century, these movements are continuous
with traditional practices such as leaving water by the roadside and planting
trees for shade to assist passing strangers (King 2009: 23). Their start and end
point is that suffering, wherever experienced, evokes a ‘universal responsibility’
(Queen 2000: 5).
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The refusal of the self as ontologically separate and distinct is rehearsed
throughout this literature. Its viscerality is captured by a Thai activist, cited in
Harris (2001: 66):
[Y]ou want to change the social structure and all sorts of things. But in meditation you
can see that all the oppressive forces are also within you at the same time. You know
that when you are accusing this oppressive, exploitative authoritarian system, you also
have that tendency within yourself too. You see that you and the oppressive structures
are not separate.
International peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh (2004) discourages discussion of
conflict when working with oppositional actors, such as those divided by the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, privileging instead a reflexive, collective process that
seeks to dissolve otherness. Maha Ghosananda, a reconciliation leader in postKhmer Rouge Cambodia comments ‘we see ourselves in our opponent – for
what is our opponent but a being in ignorance and we ourselves are ignorant
of many things’ (Ghosananda 1999: 152). The Buddhist Peace Fellowship, a
catalyst for engaged Buddhism in the US, stakes its identity on a recognition
that the suffering of others is one’s own suffering and that the violence of others
is one’s own violence. This ethic has challenged the organization to defend
the principle of compassion in all circumstances even for those considered
oppressors (Simmer Brown 2000).
Such seamless ethical commitment, honorific to the Fellowship, sets the
bar very high and on a pragmatic level, presents a paradox for Buddhist
activists: how to operationalise solidarity or compassion towards perpetrators
most especially in the realpolitik of world politics. The problematics of such
a position are vast and outside the remit of this essay’s theoretical concern,
however, Buddhist thinkers are grappling with the need for a social theory that
is ethically coherent in the face of such questions. In the aftermath of NATO’s
intervention in Kosovo, for instance, Jones (2000) proposes an engagement in
just war reasoning to allow Buddhism to offer sophisticated perspectives on
contemporary suffering and, inter alia, questions fellow Buddhist’s principled
attachment to non-violence.
In summary the Buddhist suffering solidarity complex begins and ends with
the corporeal reality of the suffering body and is founded on the transformation
of self in a process that, in turn, is linked dramatically to the transformation
of any context. Buddhism offers a theory of self in which human agency is
irreducible. In turn, the normative contribution of Buddhist thought to the public
sphere is less prescription than a form of social virtuosity (Hershock 2006: 10).
3. Discussion and Conclusion
The purpose of this essay is to explore what Buddhist thought can tell
us about suffering and solidarity following Linklater’s founding arguments
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for cosmopolitan solidarity. So what does this enquiry allow us conclude?
Undoubtedly, Buddhist thought lends support to Linklater’s proposition. If
the point of solidarity between strangers rests most immediately on common
vulnerabilities to mental and physical suffering, in order to create an overlapping
agreement about inhumane behaviour (Linklater 2011: 1–28) then Buddhist
ethics suggests a prototype. More, it expands Linklater’s Eurocentric theoretical
scope with an account that originated in the Orient but is now empirically found
everywhere.
There is much congeniality between Linklater’s case and Buddhist thought
and it is perhaps no coincidence that a critical theorist and psychoanalyst
such as Erich Fromm was interested in Zen Buddhism. A Buddhist social
theory supports Linklater’s argument that normative cosmopolitanism needs
further analysis of the interplay between material structures and the libidinal
and emotional dimensions of individual and collective selves (2007: 147).
An insistence on corporeality and on the ethical significance of the body’s
injurability unites the early Frankfurt School and Buddhist thought. In turn
Adorno’s logic of suffering enshrined it with the power to disrupt the
instrumentalism and abstractionism of modernity (Schick 2009: 138–60) a
view which underwrote his and Horkheimer’s abjuration of the Cartesian split
between subject and object (Dallmayr 2004: 103).
However, I suggest that a Buddhist social theory does more than further
exemplify the kinds of affinities with which Linklater is concerned. Its account
of the SSC necessarily rests on a thoroughgoing ontological relationality that
posits the self, and all objects, as empty of fixity. It confronts the Cartesian
supposition about the essential interiority of the self as separate (Magid 2002:
82) and the attendant ontological separation of self from other. Although its
insights emerged in pre-modern Asia, its anti-essentialism conceives the subject
in his or her relationship to the material world in a manner that corresponds with
postmodern psychology. Here, all forms of behaviourism and essentialism are
rejected and the subject is shaped by connections and actions and by history,
each co-constituted by and within the wider environment. On this view, the
nature-nurture debate can be restated in propositions about mental states arising
in response to conditions both external and internal (Pickering 2010). While
not concerned with the political, unlike the Freudian influenced critical theory,
this approach’s consideration of the material and the emotional/libidinal as
co-constitutive of the subject opens the door to conceptualising a generative
connection between corporeal experience and ethics.
Thus, Buddhism’s account of the SSC is at once congruent with and
more radical than that currently offered within cosmopolitanism including the
reiteration of the ground of cosmopolitan solidarity in Linklater’s (2011) recent
work. Its radicalism is illustrated in relation to the two themes that have
dominated this essay; Buddhism’s account of a) the nature of suffering and b) the
nature of self. In the section below I treat each of these by way of conclusion.
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Eilís Ward
3.1 Suffering as the Site of Liberation
Western thought principally posits suffering as standing against or as opposed to
our humanity (Wilkinson 2005: 1) exemplified by Fineman’s (2008) account of
suffering and vulnerability as a rupture to the normally functioning, autonomous
person. In Linklater’s scenarios, following Weil’s, the suffering individuals are
at critical stages of existence: their very survival is under threat. In a similar vein,
the ground of Adorno’s moral imperatives in the face of suffering is the extreme
experience of the Holocaust.
For Buddhist thought, however, suffering is neither exceptional nor a rupture.
Rather, suffering is the ground of both our humanity and our liberation not
because of any ‘sacred’ qualities it might evoke but because it is the doorway to
the realisation of non-self and thus it refuses ethical closure based on privileging
any particular self or collectivity of selves. The difference here has important
normative significance because while Buddhism would not argue for equivalence
between the extreme suffering brought by genocide and by grief due to the
death of an elderly relative, it argues that suffering is everywhere and that
none of us ‘escapes’ it. If suffering is exceptional or particular then ethical
claims that arise from the need to ameliorate it also become exceptionable
and particularisable. Our capacity to comprehend suffering (others’ and our
own) undermines the construction of borders between ourselves and, equally,
strangers in distant lands and intimate or proximate others. It thus provides a
kind of simultaneity that renders distance immaterial. In this sense alone, if
cosmopolitanism was historically an outlook of those who ‘look and journey
beyond borders’ (Nederveen Pieterse 2006: 1248) reflected contemporarily and
theoretically in the idea that human beings can belong anywhere (Fine 2007: x),
then Buddhist thought constitutes exemplary cosmopolitanism.
However, the ethical implications of such an account of suffering cannot be
taken for granted. Suffering alone has little to say to solidarity when sundered
from the emptiness of self and dependent origination. It is to this point that I now
turn.
3.2 Suffering, Solidarity and the Nature of ‘Self’
As we have seen Buddhism argues that the primary cause of suffering is the
pursuit of and attachment to a self in whatever assemblages of identities because,
in accordance with the law of mutual causality, self is a process rather than an
entity with stable, distinct, separate essential components at its core. What is the
significance of this point for the attempt to construct a cosmopolitan ethic from
human vulnerability to suffering?
A brief return to Linklater’s (2007) foundational account might help set the
context for this final discussion. Here Linklater posits cosmopolitan solidarity
on the premise of a ‘basic consideration of humanity’. He eschews any reference
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Human Suffering and the Quest for Cosmopolitan Solidarity
to the words ‘human nature’ and argues initially from the Weilian condition that
humanist dispositions are universally available and thus rescuing the stranger
compels in a manner that transcends communal affiliations. There is a tension
here between arguing deontologically (as Weil does) and from a notion that
certain humanist dispositions, attached to our human condition, render the
solidaristic response automatic. The tension echoes Dobson’s (2006) critique of
Linklater’s insufficient explanation for motivation for such solidaristic responses
and, I suggest, speaks to the need for humanistic claims to furnish an account
of what it means to be human. As we saw however, Linklater does beg a
question about the social construction of selves at the interplay between material
structures, emotions and libido. Linklater returns to this question again with an
exploration of how sympathy can be emancipated from the various constraints
that prevent its advance to engender cosmopolitan harm conventions (2011:
222–31). Revisiting, inter alia, the preoccupations of the early Frankfurt School,
he argues again that the emotions are intimately involved with, and most
politically charged by, the idea of emotional connectedness (2011: 228).6 In his
willingness to take seriously the role of human emotions and the psychological
aspects of intersubjectivity in cosmopolitan ethics he echoes a concern of other
cosmopolitan theorists. Ossewarde posits an expansion of our ‘emotional maps’,
by detaching our selves from our former cultural patterns of group life – to
prevent violence or ethical closure as response to empirical cosmopolitanism
(2007: 384–5). Sanchez-Flores (2010) canvasses for a cosmopolitanism that
expands the self to overcome its (cosmopolitanism’s) negative identification with
the project of modernity, a process that preserves liberalism’s commitment to
the autonomous, unitary agent. Delanty’s reworking of critical theory argues
that cosmopolitanism emerges with the transformation of collectivities in the
light of ‘the encounter with the Other’ (2009: 253), occurring equally in
diasporic exchanges and creolisation as in current globalisation processes.
The reconfiguration of the self is externally mediated by sets of empirical
phenomena, that is, in some form of local-global relations.
As we have seen, Buddhist thought allows us build an account of the SSC
that is not contingent on any account of human nature or any particular set
of material conditions in any relationships of causality, but begins and ends
with the experience of suffering. Where cosmopolitan thought gestures towards
a reconception of the ‘self’ which shifts its boundedness in sociality towards
an embrace of the ‘society of strangers’ (Ossewaarde, 2007), Buddhist thought
offers a way of conceiving a cosmopolitan self in which all inscriptions of
cultural, ethnic, national and other forms of identity, on the body and in the mind,
are empty, impermanent, to begin with. Its coherence rests on a psychologically
orientated account of how the dialectics of self-other continuously produces
entities (selves) that can either perpetuate or dissolve ethical closure as a
matter of agency in any given moment. Absent a thoroughgoing ontological
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Eilís Ward
relationality, attempts to construct cosmopolitan solidarity on the experience
of suffering (whether sacred or developmental) may founder on the rock of
the Western autonomous individual, deeply embedded in the dualist orientation
of the Western mind (Williams 2008). The human interconnectedness that
Linklater seeks may require a thorough unpacking of the psychological process
whereby humans get tightly constricted around ideas of ‘self’ that are built on
insider/outsider categories and become solidarity-resistant. If a Buddhist account
is correct, resistance is generated by our deluded belief in a self in the first place
and the abundant capacities of its egocentric imagination (Jones 2003: 33).
Our exploration problematizes the conceptualisation of suffering that assumes
the self as ontologically autonomous. In relation to the SSC, it emphasises
the need to interrogate more deeply the ontological basis of cosmopolitan
solidarity to both identify the nature of self that is implicated and explore its
vulnerability to the diremptive logic of modernity. For Buddhism, appreciation
of the emptiness of that ‘self’ is both the source of our liberation and of solidarity.
In its dissolution of the autonomous subject, Buddhist thought most profoundly
challenges the traditions of Western political and social thought.7 A Buddhist
account of the SSC disrupts assumptions about the self as a central organising
principle of Western culture; deeply ingrained as such in the psyche (Olendzki
2010). The greatest barrier to solidarity with strangers is the bounded view of
‘self’ as separate, distinct and distant. Here, Buddhist social thought offers a
fully theorised framework for understanding the ‘connected self’ that Linklater
seeks (2011: passim) and identifies one profound barrier to connectivity: the
very self of modernity. If insider-outsider dualisms prevent states from extending
the boundaries of moral and political community (Linklater 2011: 24), Buddhist
social theory offers a way of thinking through all insider-outsider dualisms.
This enquiry directs us towards a socio-existential account of human sentience
where the idea of human nature is abjured in favour of a subject that is
empty of permanence and is fashioned instead by ever changing relations
of psychological continuity and of connectedness (Flanagan 2006: 154). The
question that percolates through the narratives of Buddhist thought is not, why
and on what basis solidarity but: what are the states of exception to solidarity? In
this sense, a Buddhist social theory exemplifies normative cosmopolitanism and
offers, following Linklater, one ‘structure of consciousness’ (2011: 266) that is
inherently cosmopolitan.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for invaluable and encouraging
comments and suggestions. I would also like to thank Peter Doran and David
Loy for comments on an early draft of this paper.
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Human Suffering and the Quest for Cosmopolitan Solidarity
Notes
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Conventionally, it is said that three traditions emerged in Asia over time: Hinayana Buddhism
(southern Asia), Mahayana Buddhism (east Asia) and Vajrayana Buddhism (northern Asia).
A case is made for a fourth now emerging in response to modernity founded on a generalised
commitment to social engagement as a style of ethical practice. See Queen (2000).
See Waldron (2010) for a comprehensive exploration of these ideas worked around the
congruence of Buddhist thought and various scientific fields on a ‘circular causality’ theory
of mind and world.
A practitioner of Buddhism spends considerable time exploring and neutrally observing the
mind as it creates and recreates the fiction of self.
Our concern here is with normative theory but it can be noted that Buddhist cultures have not
universally produced compassionate societies, witness for example the Sri Lankan civil war
and the Cambodian genocide.
Monks took to the streets in thousands and withdrew their services to the military in support
of the anti-government protests in autumn 2007. See Burma VJ, Reporting from a Closed
Country, http://news.bbc.co.uk/l/hi/world/asia-pacific/7972703.stm.
Here it must be noted that Linklater’s latest work (2011) offers a synthesis of Frankfurt School
and Elias’ process orientated sociology – the former contributing the philosophical ground on
which to build arguments for solidarity in the bigger discussion of harm conventions. As stated,
this essay concerns itself only with the former.
See Cho’s (2000) account of selflessness as counterweight to traditional Western approaches
to social justice. See also Hershock’s (2006) analysis of convergence between Buddhism and
feminism and care ethics in their rejection of the autonomous subject as a foundational project
of modernity.
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