Stephen Priest Page 1 05/12/2007 NIETZSCHE AND ZEN An Essay in Philosophical Theology Stephen Priest Stephen Priest is a member of the Faculty of Philosophy in the University of Oxford. He is Senior Research Fellow of Blackfriars Hall, Oxford and a member of Wolfson College, Oxford and Hughes Hall, Cambridge. Stephen Priest is the author of The British Empiricists Penguin and Routledge), Theories of the Mind (Penguin and Houghton Mifflin), Merleau-Ponty (Routledge) and The Subject in Question (Routledge). He is editor of Hegel’s Critique of Kant (Oxford University Press), Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writings (Routledge) and co-editor (with Antony Flew) of A Dictionary of Philosophy (Macmillan). He has lectured widely in the United States and Europe and his writing has been translated into Spanish, Russian, Japanese, Korean and Macedonian. A dunce once searched for a fire with a lighted lantern. Joshu Washes the Bowl, The Gateless Gate No. 7 Zen Flesh, Zen Bones Compiled by Paul Reps. Translated by Paul Reps and Nyogen Senzaki p. 176 Nietzsche and Zen 2 PREFACE This book is a philosophical examination of the work of the nineteenth century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and the Chinese and Japanese philosophy of life, Zen. Although both philosophies appear radically anti-metaphysical, I argue that they tacitly presuppose the metaphysics and theology they disparage or putatively eschew. Nietzsche and the Zen Buddhists make some strikingly similar claims about life, death, suffering, illusion and reality, life after death, and the possible transformation of what it is to be human. A central conclusion that I argue for is that Nietzsche's Übermensch is an enlightened being. The life of that 'superman' who is more quintessimally human than the average human being is similar in philosophically important respects to that of the the Zen monk who has undergone the transformation in being called Satori or 'Enlightenment'. These affinities show that Nietzsche's philosophy is, or essentially contains, Zen. However, my aim is not comparative History of Ideas but the philosophical appraisal of Nietzsche's philosophy and Zen. I first sat, or ‘learned’ the meditative practice of letting-be that is zazen, over thirty years ago. My interest in Nietzsche was caused by lectures delivered by Michael Tanner and Bernard Williams in the University of Cambridge. I am grateful to Keith Ansell-Pearson, Daniel Came, Richard Fitch, Benedikt Goecke, Michael Inwood, Grahame Locke and Alexander Norman for useful discussion. I thank Professor Hitoshi Nagai and his research student Shogo Shimizu, both of Chui University, Japan, for visiting me in Oxford and for such a worthwhile exhange of ideas. Stephen Priest Oxford Michaelmas 2007 3 CONTENTS Preface INTRODUCTION 5 Who is Nietzsche? 5 What is Zen? 7 (1) BEYOND DEATH AND SUFFERING 10 Facing Death 10 The End of Suffering 23 Is There Any Point in it All? 33 (2) THE ILLUSION OF THE WORLD 35 Perspectivism 37 Eating the Menu 40 What is What is? 44 (3) THE DOCTRINE OF 'NO-SELF' 45 Sense and Spirit 49 Pain and the Self 50 Do I Exist? 62 (4) REBIRTH AND THE ETERNAL RETURN 64 The Eternal Sandglass 64 Buddahood and Time 72 What Changes? 77 (5) THE ÜBERMENSCH IN SATORI 78 Freedom 84 Language and its Limits 87 Is God Dead? 105 Bibliography 107 4 Abbreviations Nietzsche BGE: Beyond Good and Evil. trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House, 1966 The Birth of Tragedy. trans. Walter Kaufmann, in The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner. New York: Random House, 1967 CW: Friedrich Nietzsche The Case of Wagner. trans. Walter Kaufmann, in The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner. New York: Random House, 1967 D: Friedrich Nietzsche Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality. trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982 GM: Friedrich Nietzsche The Genealogy of Morals Cambridge: Cambridge University Press HATH: Friedrich Nietzsche Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits. trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986 GS: Friedrich Nietzsche The Gay Science, with a Prelude of Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs. tr. WalterKaufmann. New York: Random House, 1974 W: The Will to Power. trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House, 1967 Z: Friedrich Nietzsche Thus Spoke Zarathustra. trans. Walter Kaufmann, in The Portable Nietzsche. New York: Viking Press, 1968 Zen WD Kapleau, Philip, and Paterson Simons, eds. The Wheel of Death: A Collection of Writings from Zen Buddhist and Other Sources on Death, Rebirth, Dying. (Harper and Row, New York, 1971) WZ Alan Watts The Way of Zen (Vintage Books, New York, 1957) ZB D. T. Suzuki Essays in Zen 3 vols. (Rider and Co., 1949-53) ZNM D. T. Suzuki The Zen Doctrine of No-Mind ed. Christmas Humphreys. (Rider and Co., London, 1969) 5 INTRODUCTION Here I offer a summary of Nietzsche’s philosophical development and say something about what Zen is. There is something inherently paradoxical about trying to do either. Nietzsche’s philosophy and Zen are elusive, aphoristic and practical in ways that render any précis of them incomplete and misleading. Paradoxically, their essence is to have no essence. The only way to understand Nietzsche is to read him and think. The only way to understand Zen is to do it or, more accurately, be it. Who is Nietzsche? Nietzsche describes his own life phases as like masks. I suggest they are like the phases in the development of a Zen monk. Nietzsche is concerned with the efficacy of ideas, rather than establishing their realistic truth. Nietzsche is concerned to change people's lives rather than to refute or prove their beliefs and theories. He seeks to discredit and explain metaphysical and theological philosophy, he does not seek to refute it by deductive argument. A brilliant prose stylist, Nietzsche authored sharp philosophical interventions. He lived from 1844-1900 but went mad in January 1889 at the age of 44. It is possible to discern five main philosophical influences which motivate his thought. Firstly, Nietzsche was immersed in the literature and culture of ancient Greece as a student at the Universities of Bonn and then Leipzig from 1864, and then as professor of classical philology at the University of Basel at the age of twenty-four. Secondly, Nietzsche discerns the crisis of Western civilisation in the 'Death of God', that is, in atheism, and in 'the advent of nihilism' which implies that there is no theological foundation for ethics. His own philosophy may be understood as an attempt to overcome this crisis; to ‘go beyond’ nihilism and 'affirm life'. Nietzsche’s profound anti-Christianity is arguably also a reaction against the faith of his family. His father and maternal grandfather were both Lutheran ministers. His paternal grandfather was a Christian author. Thirdly, Nietzsche studied the major work of the German neo-Kantian idealist Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860); The World as Will and Representation, while a student at Leipzig. Nietzsche understood Schopenhauer as a pessimistic atheist whose thought encapsulates the problem of the Death of God. In Schopenhauer’s thought, the individual strives and suffers. Nietzsche aimed for a positive, or optimistic, solution to this suffering and the possibility of a point to this striving. Fourthly, through the personal and artistic influence of the German operatic composer and music theorist Richard Wagner (1813-1883) Nietzsche thought suffering could be transfigured though aesthetic creation. Finally, Nietzsche was steeped in contemporary scientific materialist philosophy, notably the then influential work of F.A. Lange: The History of Materialism (1865). 6 This seemed to open the possibility of sweeping away the old superstitions of theology and metaphysics forever. It is possible to discern four phases of Nietzsche's life, three sane and one mad: an anti Socratic phase, a positivistic pro-Socratic phase, a relativist and pragmatist Phase, and the final mad phase. The anti-Socratic Phase lasts from 1869 to 1876. While holding the Chair of Philology at the University of Basel (1864-1879) Nietzsche visited Richard Wagner at Lake Lucerne. In The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872) Nietzsche searched for a new non-Christian ethics in the Ancient Greeks and subsequently in Wagner. Nietzsche contrasts Greek culture before and after Socrates with German culture before and after Wagner. He argues that life is essentially tragic and inexplicable but transmuted by art. The affirmation of life through creative genius transmutes life into an aesthetic phenomenon. Creative genius is the goal and justification of culture. The Dionysian and the Appollonian were fused in the tragedies of Aeschylus before the advent of Socrates effected their bifurcation. If their fusion could not be reinstated, it is a model to be emulated. During this phase, Nietzsche was heavily influenced by Schopenhauer. In Untimely Meditations (1873- 6), Nietzsche is critical of the German theologican David Strauss (1808-1874), author of the controversial Leben Jesu (Life of Jesus) (1835) and advocates Schopenhauer’s philosophy, and Wagner’s opera and operatic theory. In 1870 Nietzsche served as a volunteer medical orderly in the Franco-Prussian War. The positivistic pro-Socratic phase lasts from 1876 to 1883. Nietzsche resigned from the chair at Basel in 1879 through ill-health and spent 1879-1889 in Switzerland, Italy, Germany, devoting his time to writing. The book Human, All-too- Human (1898-9) is profoundly anti-metaphysical and materialist and includes naturalistic explanations of morality. For example: that a distinction is drawn between good and evil is a necessary condition for a society. Conscience is the internalised voice of secular, not divine, authority: the father, the mother, the teacher. Daybreak (1881) is a tirade against ‘morality’. There is no God, no responsibility and no morality.