Desire Without an Object

Some thoughts on Christianity, Zen, and music

I read this review a few months ago, by Rob Wyllie, of the philosopher Byung-Chul Han’s recent book (still published only in German), Sprechen über Gott: Ein dialog mit Simone Weil [Speaking about God: A Dialogue with Simone Weil], and found it connects some dots in my thinking that were previously not quite connected. My readers will know that I’m a big fan of Byung-Chul Han, and have cited him several times on this blog. One of the curious features of Han’s work is the simultaneous influence of Christianity and Zen Buddhism upon his thinking. In some respects, these distinct influences seem to be in tension with each other; but Wyllie’s review of Sprechen über Gott suggests that Han arrives at a certain reconciliation between Zen and Christianity through his reading of Simone Weil. I direct readers to the review itself for just how this reconciliation comes about, but I take this paragraph to be the clincher of the whole piece, summarizing the tension and its resolution:

Sometimes Han has emphasized renunciation of the self in the manner of Zen Buddhism; other times he has emphasized the erotic desire for an unpossessable Other. Now he reconciles these two fundamental dispositions with Weil’s “desire without an object,” the desire that things simply remain to be, which allows us to see things as they are rather than to imagine how we might possess them for ourselves…

In other words, where Christianity emphasizes love of God as eros for an unpossessable Other, Zen emphasizes self-renunciation, even the renunciation of desire and eros. Where Christianity urges the soul to desire the Other with burning desire, Zen advises the practitioner to renounce desire itself, since desire is the root of all suffering. Through Simone Weil, Han discovers that desire without an object is the key concept through the empty self-renunciation of Zen and the eros for an Other of Christianity are reconciled.

This coincides pretty well with the apophatic tradition in Christian mystical theology. In that tradition, so centered upon the human heart’s deepest desire for God, it would nonetheless be considered inappropriate to speak of God as an object of desire—as an object at all! God is so fundamentally unknown to us—and only more so the closer we approach him—that to desire him is accurately described as desiring nothing at all. Desiring no object. Almost as if it were to have no desire at all, but simply to let things be as they are, and to simply let oneself be.

To be clear, this “desireless” state is not exactly a state of total absence of the desires and passions any human lives with daily. It’s rather a state of distance and detachment from them: a refusal to identify with them. From this desireless stance, one lets even desire itself be: it comes, and it goes. The passions pass lightly through one who is empty in the Buddhist sense. Similarly, in the Hesychastic fathers, the practice of watchfulness is not exactly the suppression of any human desire and passion, but a stance of distance from them, such that they are allowed to arise and fade, to pass by—allowed to be, in all their transience and impermanence. The empty self, no-self, no longer clings to these desires and identifies with them. He merely observes them.

How does one practice and achieve this state of emptiness? The Zen sages and the Hesychastic fathers of course offer many techniques and practices. But it recently dawned on me, while reading Denys Turner’s magnificent book on Thomas Aquinas, Faith, Reason, and the Existence of God, that one particular avenue of this practice might be found in music, at least of a certain kind.

Turner’s book, which humbly claims to limit its scope to the question of “whether God’s existence may be proved,” nevertheless covers such topics as diverse as the existence of God, Eucharistic theology, Meister Eckhart, and music. The chapter on music seems delightfully out of place at first, but upon reading it one quickly learns why it is included in a book that is largely about the question of speaking about God (similar to the title of Byung-Chul Han’s book, above). In Turner’s presentation, the question of music is essentially a question of language; but contrary to some authors—including his own teacher the great Dominican theologian, Fr. Herbert McCabe—Turner claims that music is not something striving to emulate language, but exactly the reverse: music is what language itself strives to be.

Language communicates discretely, signifying objects as things that break up the fabric of reality into discrete categories, and in a manner that identifies the speaker with the intention towards its own objects, thereby separating the subject and the object. The speaker—the I—voices his own thoughts, desires, intentions towards the objects in the world. By the very act of speaking, the subject cannot help but claim a kind of possession over the objects of which speaks: he seeks to possess them by means of intention, thought, desire, etc.

Music, by contrast, is not per se voiced from any first-person point of view: the subject of the ego has vanished. Similarly, the objects of speech and the thoughts and desires expressed by speech are similarly absent. Thus, as Turner writes:

For when we are drawn into the ‘sadness’ of the second movement of Schubert’s ‘Death and the Maiden’ quartet we do indeed experience that sadness directly, but not as being sadness about anything, nor as anybody’s sadness—not yours, not mine, not even Schubert’s. Of course, you may, as you experience it, contingently be caused to recollect the tragedy of Schubert’s predicament as he wrote that movement, or you may, as it happens, be caused to recollect some sadness of your own. But such personal experiences of sadness are strictly irrelevant to the music’s own character as sad. For what you experience is sadness as such, the pure form of the emotion, but as subjectless and objectless. Hence, on the one hand, you do experience the sadness in its inner character as sadness—and not merely the skill of its expression—but on the other, you experience it not as yours nor yet as originating in any actual cause or as directed at any object in particular. This is not to say that the experience of music’s sadness or joy is not a personal experience, for of course it is. But it is the personal experience of an emotion in its pure character as that emotion, so that just as the musical expression of that emotion is without subject and without object, so is ‘my’ experience of it. Through my experience of the music I enter a ‘space’ in which I can experience the transcendence of the opposition between subjectivity and objectivity within the experience itself… (Faith, Reason, and the Existence of God, p.113)

Subject and object both have vanished; the emotions signified by music are not voiced by any subject nor directed at any object. The music is just “there,” as are the passions it represents. What is remarkable about music is that it is capable of imitating the entire range of human passion with all of its depth and intensity, even from this ethereal stance of subjectless and objectless abstraction! It is nothing else but an incarnate representation of desire without an object. Music is no-self in an embodied form.

On the one hand, music’s subjectless-objectless character does make it an extremely suitable and versatile vehicle for the expression of human passion, with all of its complex subjectivity and objectivity. Music is an incredibly effective tool for the expression of discrete human struggles, all the “weal and woe” of human nature. It is easily molded by the imagination of the composer, the singer, the listener, into a means for the conveyance of individual stories and their emotional complexities. In a certain way, it does this even better than plain language; hence the very human impulse to sing our stories, to put our words into song, rather than merely to speak them. Music lends greater force and impact to our words, precisely because it conveys and represents the range of human passion more forcefully and tangibly, in a purer and rawer form.

On the other hand, this function of music—its service to language—seems almost secondary to music as such. In and of itself, music has a value beyond giving greater impact to language: it has a value beyond language, precisely in its “empty” character as subjectless and objectless. True, it is blank slate, ready to be used for any particular subjective expression—but there is also inherent value in its very blankness. As a school of moral-spiritual training, music teaches a person—both the musician and the audience—the simple art of listening, which is sensible form of simply letting be. It is a training ground for the cultivation of that subjectless-objectless state of emptiness which is really the precondition for contemplation as such. One who immerses himself properly in music, as music, whether musician or as listener, learns to let go of his own subjectivity as well as the objectivity towards which a subject naturally tends—he learns to be egoless, a no-self in the Buddhist sense. That is, if he immerses himself in music properly, as music, without making into a canvas onto which he may project his own egotistic passions, he learns the emptiness of the sage, the watchfulness of the mystic. This is because as such, music does not give expression to any particular human story or any particular instance of human emotion, directed at any particular object or experienced by any particular subject. As such, it is without subject and object; and to be no longer a subject tending towards an object is precisely the state of a mystic.

Now, I think it is possible, even necessary at times, to approach music in both ways simultaneously: as an instrument for the augmentation of language (really the ennoblement of language), on the one hand, and as a “space” of watchful but subjectless-objectless emptiness, on the other hand. There are too many cases of sung music which may be discussed, but what has impressed me lately—because my primary profession is that of a church musician—is how music is used in the service of the Church, as a means of praying. When I pray the psalms through singing them, the music of Gregorian psalmody is so simple that I cannot help but attend to the words, the particular meanings they express, the objects they signify; and I cannot help but make those words my own, as if I indeed am praying them. After all, I could not be praying them if I were not making them my own! And the music helps me do this: it serves the language, giving it an eloquence and soulfulness that it might otherwise lack. Music is a rhetorical device, in that it augments and deepens the very significance of speech itself.

And yet, at the same time, this is not the only thing happening when I chant the psalmody. The other thing that happens is something beyond the words I utter, beyond their specific meaning and significance: the music induces in me a state of pure listening, almost passivity—or better, a state of complete rest, where I am no longer asserting myself as subject, nor grasping for things as objects, not even grasping them by means of thought, but merely letting all things be. At my church, we sing the office of Vespers (evening prayer) every Sunday during the season of Advent, and the atmosphere is overwhelmingly one of rest: merely letting be. To be sure, we are singing words the whole time, making ample use of human language; and yet the musical quality of the language, as simple as it is, has the effect of inducing a condition of pure rest, a state of mind beyond subjectivity and objectivity. It is difficult to describe—you really have to be there to know it. It is also prayer, in another sense of the word: prayer beyond words, wordless prayer, meditation—to return to a concept from Simone Weil, pure attention. Notably, this wordless prayer is taking place at the same time as a prayer of words, thus giving a whole new layer of meaning to Augustine’s famous phrase: that he who sings prays twice.

To put it yet another way, through music, and especially through musical prayer, we accomplish two things at once: one, we sing a love song to our beloved, expressing our Eros for God, the transcendent Other; and two, we enter a space where we are no longer a subject desiring an object, where desire merely “passes through” without either subject or object, where subjectivity itself is laid to rest, along with its impulse to objectify.