In order to get back to a playful, artistic, creative existence, the human had to give up the idea of value outside of their playful momentary existence.
Buddhism and Postmodernism: Nietzsche [Part 1 of 4] Douglas Powers
To a large degree, postmodernism goes back to Nietzsche. A lot of the postmodernist themes that we’ve talked about were developed by Nietzsche much earlier. Modernism picked up some of them but not all of them.
No Universal Moral Principles The first key point is postindustrialist culture. We’re talking about Europe in the late 1800s, and Nietzsche is responding to the rise of the industrial revolution. He sees that the culture around him breeds a particular type of character. This goes back to the theme that we are created by the culture we live in. This, of course, will be profoundly important, because the idea of the important role of culture leads to the question of the individual and whether there is anything like an individual. Also, it means that there is a historical evolution in a Hegelian sense – there was a bit of Hegel in Nietzsche. Any truth that lies outside the historical context of culture was to be questioned.
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Basically, truth was a creation of culture, and any reference to essence or anything outside of culture was highly suspicious. And as we’ll talk about, Nietzsche was the one who said that referring to anything like truth was ultimately ideological and came down to power relations between people. So in postindustrialist society, it seemed that what we called essence or human nature was basically just a bunch of ideas that culture had created in which the relationships between people were set up in a particular way. He would look right now with great amusement as lassiez faire capitalism because macroeconomics is essentially a bourgeois ideology, with all its trappings.
Edited transcript from Lecture 3 of the Spring 2008 course: “Buddhism and Postmodernism,” a collaboration between Dharma Realm Buddhist University and the Graduate Theological Union, with Dr. Snjezana Akpinar and Douglas Powers as instructors. 1
Questioning Science
Playful, Dionysian Existence
The second thing is that he saw that what had happened with the rise of science and industrialization was, in fact, not life-affirming. He believed that ever since Greek thought, we’ve been on a downhill slide. He thought the Greeks had some pretty good understanding that had been misrepresented for 2000 years, and that rather than being life-affirming, science and technology were basically death-affirming. The idea of science and technology and objectification completely belied human existence in the existential life of a human. As we move toward technology and “objective” science, we’re moving away from where humans actually lived and existed.
In order to get back to a playful, artistic, creative existence, the human had to give up this idea of value outside of their playful momentary existence. He observed that modern people saw life as a chore – of being productive, of being moral, and all these other chores that humans were involved in – which got in the way of human existence. And the more of these that we picked up, the more difficult life became. In some places he says that the goal is to be like a child, completely caught up in the moment, in the concentration of a child in a game, and not burdened by ideas about self that are given by culture. He thought that guilt had weighed down humanity, not just moral guilt, but guilt about productivity. He says it’s all a lie, because it’s not actually about empathy or the names we give it, it’s all about power relations. We start getting our identity within these value constructs, we gain our identity through a culture system and simultaneously lose our existential identity. I think existentialism does come out of Nietzsche.
Transvaluation of Values and Nihilism There had to be a transvaluation of all values in order for this change to occur. Nietzsche questioned modernity’s fascination with scientific truth, and he questioned universal moral principles such as equality and reason. Both of these he saw as working against life – science because it objectified humans and alienated them from nature, from each other and from themselves, and universal moral principles as another form of alienation from how humans really lived. He saw a problem with the idea of the subject, or self, as a substance existing outside of history. He saw that Descartes had made a fundamental error in “I think, therefore I am,” in thinking that the “I” is outside of history somehow, that there is some kind of essential nature to the subject. Essentially, I think Nietzsche thought he was being completely descriptive. When he said modern society was nihilistic, he wasn’t prescribing nihilism, he was being descriptive of an alienated state that modern man found himself in. As they continued to exist within it, it would be a totally uncomfortable and unsatisfying state of existence. Society was alienating people, and they were becoming nihilistic. He even said that in the 20th century there would be extended warfare between different ideologies in the battle to attempt to bring some kind of new value construct. Nietzsche was very clear that you can never live outside a value construct, and he never said that humans could live outside of such a construct. In fact, he said that was the only horizon in which meaning could happen.
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Critique on Kant and A Priori Categories Nietzsche critiques Kant, Kant solving the problem that was laid out by Locke, Berkeley and Hume, that is the basis of Western a priori categories. He says that Kant didn’t discover these a priori categories; he created them. These a priori categories of time and space and so on that Kant said grounded reason, Nietzsche said he created them. The idea that we would get somewhere based purely on reason, creating a kind of religion out of reason, he saw as purely a cultural creation. We can’t take it as a truth; we have to look at the pragmatic value of reason in our existence. We can’t take it as a discovered law that lies outside of human history, or as some kind of basis for objectivity.
Unnecessary Essence All of that misses our primary faculty as human beings. According to Nietzsche, our primary faculty is to create the world. We create the world in which we exist, in all of its aspects. We create our world and the values with which we live in the world. You can call that nihilistic – though at this point it seems like common sense. If you need an essence, if
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you need a truth, if you need a God, then of course, the absence of that is nihilism. But if the idea of this extra added element of truth is unnecessary, then the lack of that is common sense. The question of nihilism is really a relative question of where you start. At the time he said it, of course it was dramatic. When he said God is dead, he meant that truth no longer exists in the same way. And in saying it, he did of course open up Pandora’s Box. But at this point, secular culture would pretty much say that was common sense. Of course, Nietzsche would also critique common sense as another way in which authority sneaks back in. Nietzsche does a series of genealogical critiques. He says the human desire to be rational was a creation of the history of man and was really grounded in something deeper, the will to power. That man has a deeper drive. The will to understand is the will to dominate.
GENEALOGY of CULTURE Will and No Will Nietzsche got the concept of will to power to some extent from Schopenhouer’s “will”. The latter metaphorically saw each one of us as a will bubble. What is the boundary of our will bubble? Of every other person in the world and their will bubble? Nature is also there, and in the evolution over time, it has gone from nature to society. One of the major things about the late 1800s was the transformation from primarily being in nature to primarily being in society as the fundamental construct, the operating boundary of this. So, how big a will you need is how much power but there’s no way out of it because there’s two kinds of power – there’s your power over other people which is pushing your will bubble out, but there’s also everyone else’s will bubble pressing against yours. In this room, most people are more concerned with their defensive power than their offensive power, protecting themselves from everyone else’s will bubble. People may want to simply be left alone, but there is no such thing as being left alone, because no matter what, everyone else’s will bubble is pressing against yours and there has to be something that you’re involved in – someone has to be giving you food, or something, that in some ways keeps you in a relationship with other people.
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Now Schopenhouer had this really interesting idea which is very relevant to Buddhist understanding, which was that the only way to be free was to have no will. I don’t think Nietzsche actually understood Schoepenhouer on this, completely. Schopenhour’s idea was that even the person with the biggest will bubble on earth, a god incarnate, is still being pressed upon by every other bubble, and where they actually experience life is at the edge of these bubbles. You can have the biggest will bubble in the world, and you still experience life at that edge. It’s not a question of whether people are driven by a will to power or not; it’s that in order to exist at all, you must have some kind of will, even the smallest will bubble, in order to eat, and so on.
Cultural Repression of Will/Drive This isn’t exactly what Freud was saying. I’m not sure – I think Freud stole a lot of stuff from Nietzsche, but anyway. So what we’re really driven by is that we are all faced with this situation, and we need to be realistic, and honest. I think all that Nietzsche was saying at this point was that we need to be honest about the situation we find ourselves in, and current society is not honest. It comes up with all of these stories and justifications and rationalizations about this relative balance of the will to power of people in society. Society comes up with all of these “niceties” to get around what it really is. Q: Current society or ..? A: He says the Greeks were much closer. For example, their understanding of the erotic is much closer to an honest appraisal than we are right now. The Greeks had a very realistic idea of the role of the erotic in our society, and though it’s not the exact same thing as the will to power, there’s a close proximity. He would say that the Greeks were much closer, and from that time it’s been one long downhill, made worse by Christianity.
Nietzsche on Buddhism In the work on Anti-Christ, Nietzsche actually says a lot about Buddhism. In fact, Nietzsche thought that Buddhism would be the next great religion of Europe. He thought it was much more honest about the human condition in its understanding of suffering, among other things, but he felt it was too
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passive. His big critique, which we’ll get into later, was that although Buddhism understood the human nature very well and the human condition very well, and was honest in its recognition of suffering and vulnerability, Buddhists were too passive in dealing with their condition. He didn’t feel they understood enough about this creative advent; they weren’t active enough. Now how much he actually knew about Buddhism is very debatable. He didn’t read that much – they’ve gone into his library and looked into which books he had actually read, and which books he hadn’t, and a lot of the books that people had assumed he read had never been opened. Schopenhouer actually understood Buddhism much better. I’m not sure if Nietzsche ever got the Buddha’s idea of the freedom from will. It’s a pretty amazing idea -- that if you’re always shoving up against someone’s boundaries, then the only way to avoid the power dynamic is to give up will entirely. Nietzsche saw that as incredibly passive, and I’m not sure if he ever saw the power of that idea.
Revaluation of Values and Overman So anyway, current society has lost the meaning of life and is nihilistic. The only way out of this is to, first of all, give up the values we already have. Nietzsche saw that we have to become crazy, we have to give up the value constructs that we’re already in, go to the edge of sanity, and then come back with some new insight into how to live. As we were, we were so trapped in these needs that we had created for ourselves around essence, objectivity and productivity, we were so caught up in these identities, that until we got rid of this entire structure that we found our identity in, we couldn’t start fresh and find a new identity. This is the overman – the person who can go to the edge of madness and then come back. By definition, if you deconstruct your identity according to the values of the society that you are in, then you are mad. He thought that to be an overman was very, very difficult. He thought that he was on the path himself, but I don’t think he thought he ever achieved it. He could describe and understand the process, but his works were descriptive, and I’m not sure if he ever got to a place where he could say that he, himself, was an overman.
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His method was genealogical – in other words, going back into how things in the present had been formed, looking at the actual structure of how we see things as formed by the past, from which these things came into being. Genealogy is very tricky because it’s not asking absolute questions at any point, it’s just taking the existential aspects of culture as we experience it, and then looking at what created that culture. So on the first level, what was the history of the present? “All values and concepts or ideas of metaphysical truth are created in the human culture, and there’s no reference outside. Over time different moral truths preserve and promote different types of life or culture, which in turn create different kinds of people … good and evil.” So the irony is that in order to move further, we had to recognize the untruth of life, to get beyond good and evil as a construct in which we are trapped in our nihilistic identities. Science would never get us there, but would, in fact, lead us to nihilism, because science was moving towards an objective abstraction of humanity. Eventually, man wouldn’t even exist in science – science would create a world in which humanity would not exist, because in objectifying everything in nature and man, science would lead mankind to the ultimate nihilism. Nietzsche feared that people would be misled by science, which he saw as a dead end and the ultimate nihilism.
History as an Ongoing Contest of Wills to Power Knowledge is perspectivism. Of course most people know Nietzsche as a perspectivist. And here, all he was doing was, again, being descriptive. He says, what we take as knowledge in a particular culture is what is accepted as the truth according to different cultural perspectives. Truth looks different from different perspectives, which leads to huge conflicts. And truth and value change over time, so there isn’t anything absolute or universal about them. What is human history? It is a conflict or a contest over time between these different cultural values or the collective wills to power of different cultures. That’s what history was, it was a dialectic – not in the Hegelian sense – but simply an ongoing contest between different cultures or different wills to power. And if you look deep enough into the culture or the
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individual, what was really driving them was the will to power, the will for domination, the will to control and the will not to be controlled, which is a key point. If you look at nature, what overpowers and masters is what survives, through protecting itself, finding a place or niche to exist within.
Language and Consciousness – Language Is Always a Metaphor Then Nietzsche talked about language and consciousness, and the individual as simply a manifestation of the evolutionary process of language and consciousness. The individual doesn’t exist, in the way that we think it does. Even the question of what freedom is is a cultural creation, a perspective. The reason that human beings are in this position is that we are very weak. We are born very weak, and we have to develop language and culture because we have to communicate. As babies we are completely dependent on our environment for survival, so we have to learn to communicate as quickly as possible. So we learn this language in order to communicate with each other, and then we make a tragic mistake. We take this language that we are using to communicate with each other, and we believe that that relates to a world outside those relationships. Nietzsche says the world is actually totally chaotic and random; there is no order outside of our experience. There is only fate and chance, and any order that humanity thinks it understands is just made-up, because what is actually happening to people is purely random and chaotic. There is a real pragmatic, purposeful reason for why language developed, but the problem is that we then try to project language onto this completely chaotic world. Then we just have to justify and make things up, and we come up with heavens and causalities. We come up with all kinds of justifications for what will happen to each person in this room, when the reality is that random chance will just knock you off. That’s pretty hard to take for human narcissism, and Nietzsche acknowledges that. But by making the mistake that language actually corresponds to the world, we then create the world in our own image and by doing so, we project our idea of what is going on to everything around us. In fact, it’s not like that at all.
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Q: The will bubble is a metaphor that was created, and if you operate in that, then you can’t get beyond this zero sum game … Would he deconstruct his own idea?
Noumena and Phenomena A: Yes, Nietzsche would say that even our idea of what we see as will and our bubbles are already false. This is Schopenhouer’s understanding of will, and this is exactly where Nietzsche would have a problem with it. Wyatt actually raised a really good question about Schopenhouer, because remember he said this was the way to know a “thing in itself.” Schopenhouer believed we could know noumena; we weren’t just stuck in phenomena. And the way we would know noumena, or the world in itself, was through understanding; this will to power was the will to understanding. So you’re right that Schopenhouer gave this kind of metaphysical meaning to the will to power that Nietzsche would not agree with at all. He would not agree with Schopenhouer’s metaphor. He believes that the will itself is an illusion. Unlike Schopenhouer, Nietzsche would never deal with noumena, meaning the “thing in itself,” rather than the phenomenal representation of it. To even create the dichotomy between noumena and phenomena is already an entire metaphysical system [that he would see as untruth].
New Values So the question then is, how does each perspective enhance our lives? It’s not whether or not it’s true, because that’s absurd; perspectives are just cultural creations. The question is, how does each perspective bring us into direct contact with our senses – via direct contact with our sensual experience, via the joyful play of the moment – recognizing that we are actively creating our world in every split, second in our creative endeavor and our imagination. The closer we get to the artistic, joyful, immediate experience, the closer we get to the way that humans actually are.
Hedonism Q: What about hedonism? A: Make sure we understand that hedonism had an ethic. Hedonism is hard to do. Good luck on having pleasure every moment. It’s difficult, and it has a
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kind of ethic. You could say that Buddhism is a kind of hedonism. It is a strategy of constant pleasure. Q: Avoiding suffering? A: Avoiding suffering is having pleasure. Remember, the original hedonists were eaters … But if you start thinking about it, to live a totally pleasurable life would require you to not do a very great number of things. Because if you were trying to maximize your pleasure at every moment – after living now a few, a couple of decades – I’ve realized over time that morality is actually only for your own self-interest. You don’t realize that as much at 30 as you do at 60. At 60 you realize that all the things you didn’t do that led you to where you are now, it’s a good thing you didn’t do them. So what other purpose than selfinterest? So that’s in line with hedonism. Q: Does Nietzsche accommodate false hedonism? A: For Nietzsche, what’s false pleasure? Either you’re feeling pleasure, or you aren’t. Any time you set up a false ideology under which you’re operating, that does not allow you to be alive in the moment, you’re putting yourself under authority for no reason. Even morality has to be purposeful – you’re putting yourself in less suffering or more pleasure, and that’s why you’re moral.
Morality and Causation – Nietzsche and Buddhism Morality does not come from outside, it does not come from god, it does not come from nature, it does not come from anywhere. It comes from human culture, and what is it for? Less suffering and more pleasure, or it wouldn’t be there. Actually, Buddhism is pretty clear about this. Morality in Buddhism does not come from god or outer space or essence; it comes from a pragmatic recognition of causation. Actually Nietzsche says that Buddhists are absolutely right on that; they are absolutely honest about morality. There is no god or essence; it’s about self-interest and pleasure and ending suffering, which is really honest and forthright. Q: So the difference is that in Buddhism we ground it in karma, cause and effect, and he says the world is just random. How do we connect this to morality? A: This is a hugely complex question that we’re not quite ready to answer. There are points in Daybreak where Nietzsche understands something like causation. It’s very subtle. Inside a technical reading of Nietzsche, it’s a very difficult and complex
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point. First, what understanding do Buddhists have of karma? What people mean by karma is already highly uncertain, because we could ask five people, and they would probably all say something different. And then what does Nietzsche say about morality and causation? I think the two ideas could be closer or farther apart depending on the [definition of karma being used]. Obviously, any reference to an external force or power does not even … if we’re talking about karma as in raw causation, it’s not certain that Nietzsche would disagree; he would just question whether humanity would ever have the wisdom to understand it in total. And wherever it didn’t understand it, then what we call chance would come into play. In other words, I don’t think he could even conceive of the wisdom required to understand the totality of causation. But then I don’t think anyone at this table could either. Q: Did he speak of it? A: Yeah he said something about that in that article….Actually there is a quote in there that is very close to the concept of wisdom. So that was the genealogy of culture. I’m breaking this down into three genealogies. In the genealogy of culture, how do we determine if a culture has a perspectivism that is useful? If it’s life-affirming, and life-enhancing. And how do you determine that?
GENEALOGY of SELF Self as an Illusion That leads us to the genealogy of the self. “There is not a human subject, endowed with .. free will.” That’s another metaphysical illusion. There’s no truth that lies outside of history and culture, and there’s an equal metaphysical illusion in that there is some subject with individual will. “The illusion of a … and unitary self … that knows the world yet somehow is distinct from the act…” Let me specify exactly what he means. “The illusion of an essential unitary self,” which is the storyline about yourself, of who you think you are – and again, Buddhists would not disagree – “that acts in, has feelings about, and knows the world, yet somehow is distinct from that, is an illusion.” He’s not saying there isn’t individual sense experience, or feelings in the world, he’s not saying
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the senses don’t function. What he’s saying is that any metaphysical self that we attribute to our sense experience is an illusion. The subject is a fiction. These knowings of the world are not done by a subject, but rather, we have a sense of agency because of the activity. So there isn’t a subject first that is experiencing the world in some neutral, objective way, but rather, the self is coming into being at each moment in the immediate sense experience. That’s the key element. He’s very interested in the momentary sense experience.
Self as Multiplicity – The Shurangama Sutra and Activity Skandha The key thing here is: no metaphysical subject, no illusion of subject. The subject is a multiplicity – all of our different engagements in the world and all of our relationships to culture. This is going to be really interesting when we get to the collective share. The Shurangama Sutra talks about two different kinds of karma: the individual karma and the collective share karma. This is very close to what Buddhists mean by the collective share, in other words, how we carry the karma of the culture in which we exist, and how not even our perceptions, our intentionality of what we perceive is, our sense experience is caused, not only by our individual karma, but by our collective karma. So the subject is a multiplicity; there is a whole lot of different activities going on, which are all products of our personal breeding and the collective share. Nietzsche’s famous idea is that we are like a chariot driver, and we have 20 horses, and on any particular day, under particular conditions, any one of these horses could emerge. There isn’t anything like a self or a subject, there are just a whole bunch of habits of mind, which is actually the Activity Skandha. In this skandha, the 4th skandha, there is the idea of “prehensions.” The first is form, then there’s feeling, then thought, then activity – which people have a whole lot of trouble with. Q: People call it formations.
Habits of Mind, Intentions A: Yeah, but formations don’t mean anything. So what we’re talking about here is intentionality – based on habits, based upon experience. That’s why the first three happen before that, because there are habits of
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mind upon which activity is based. Most people don’t explain it very well. I don’t even know what they’re talking about with formations … what the hell does that mean? In better psychological terms, it’s the intentions or the proclivities; there are other English words that would work a lot better. And the reason that it comes in the 4th place is that it is based on the habits, based on happened in the other three. And then the activity leads to the next moment of experience, the 5th skandha, which is consciousness. Remember, don’t confuse the 5th skandha in Buddhism with consciousness in Hinduism. People make a very big mistake here. Half of all Buddhists are actually Hindus, because they confuse the 5th skandha with the Hindu idea of “atman”, like a universal consciousness. The Buddha did not say there was a universal consciousness. In Buddhism consciousness is just the habits of mind from the skandhas. There has to be this meeting, this something to be conscious of. And it’s always provisional. So there isn’t any universal consciousness. Q: Is it real at the moment, just constantly changing?
Awareness and Nothing Else A: It’s real if the word real means anything to you. Is it real in the sense that it’s actually happening? Sure. But as soon as it’s over and you add anything to it – an idea of self or world or whatever – it’s illusory, and it’s misleading because it misses the activity of the moment of experience. When we get to awareness, it’s the idea of being constantly in the awareness of the moment. And there’s nothing else going on. I think most Buddhists are waiting for something else to happen. That’s all there is. Sorry. Sorry! Again, another form of essentialism has crept into Buddhism and they are dissatisfied just being aware, because they’re waiting for something else to happen. Sorry, that was my little critique. Q: If you live in the now, and stop there, and not try to connect one now with the next now – Q: And everyone else’s now – A: No, there is no “everyone else’s now.” Everyone else is a total abstraction to you. They don’t exist. And that’s cool. But anyway, let’s leave that alone for the time being.
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