[Opmerking: dit artikel is geschreven voor een verzamelbundel met verschillende artikelen
van Nederlandse boeddhisme-onderzoekers, werktitel “Buddhist Studies”, onder redactie van
Paul van der Velde en Aloys Wijngaard, te verschijnen in 2007/2008. Mijn verzoek aan jullie
is om het kritisch te lezen met deze context, en dit lezerspubliek, in het achterhoofd. Een
tweede idee is om dit uit te bouwen tot een filosofisch meer uitgewerkt artikel voor het
tijdschrift “Philosophy East and West”. Als jullie suggesties hebben voor deze filosofische
uitwerking, graag.]
André van der Braak
15 februari 2007
Nietzsche and Nagarjuna: skepticism East and West
Towards a comparative study
The comparative philosopher these days has a much harder time capturing the attention of his
audience than the average Western philosopher. First he has to fight a commonly shared
skepticism concerning the usefulness of doing comparative philosophy (or intercultural
philosophy, or world philosophy, even the terminological confusion poses a problem). Then
he has to outline and defend his methodological approach. And, after having outlined the
topic of his paper and the issue that he wants to analyze, he has to introduce the non-Western
philosopher that he uses in his argument, to his audience. Only then can he start with his
actual argument.
Therefore this paper on Nietzsche and the second-century Buddhist philosopher
Nagarjuna, written for an audience of non-specialists, will be more of a prolegomenon than I
hoped for. It has four sections. In section (1) I will defend the usefulness of approaching
Nietzsche’s thought from a non-Western, and specifically Mahayana Buddhist, point of view.
In section (2) I will introduce the cross-cultural hermeneutical approach that I will be taking.
In section (3) I will outline the aspect of Nietzsche’s thought that I want to elucidate in this
paper: the relationship between Nietzsche’s no-saying philosophy and his yes-saying
philosophy. I will argue that a crucial aspect in this relationship is the notion that he develops
in Jenseits von Gut und Bose 209: that of a strong skepticism. This notion is very closely
related to his self-imposed task of a revaluation of all values. In section (4) I will introduce
Nagarjuna. In section (5) it will be argued how Nagarjuna’s philosophical approach can shed
1
fresh light on what Nietzsche actually means by his practice of strong skepticism. It will be
apparent that such skepticism is not only an epistemological stance or practice, but also an
ethical and even a soteriological practice, aimed at liberation.
1.
Do we need another, ‘Buddhist’, Nietzsche?
As the number of Nietzsche-interpretations has mushroomed over the past decades, so have
the various ‘Nietzsche’s’. After Nietzsche the ‘Lebensphilosoph’, Nietzsche the Naziphilosopher, the existentialist Nietzsche, the structuralist Nietzsche, the postmodern
Nietzsche, why do we need more Nietzsche’s? And why, of all things, a Buddhist Nietzsche?
Although Nietzsche wrote in his Nachlass “Ich könnte der Buddha Europas werden”, he
continues with “was freilich ein Gegenstück zum indischen wäre” (KSA 10.109). Throughout
his work it seems clear that he rejected Buddhism as a life-denying, nihilistic response to the
problem of suffering.
But more is to be said on this issue. Firstly, Nietzsche’s relationship to Buddhism is
more complicated. He paid, as one of the few western philosophers, quite serious attention to
Buddhism. The term Buddhismus occurs 173 times in his work sometimes in a performative
sense, and sometimes to elucidate his own positions.1 In his early work, Nietzsche considers
Buddhism to be a Schopenhauerian nihilism, an illness, a denial of the will. Between 1880
and 1887 he uses the term “Buddhismus” to diagnose the development of nihilism in
European culture. He regularly writes about the inevitable development of a new European
Buddhism: a longing for nothingness as a result of decadence. Nietzsche calls this a “passive
nihilism”. In The Antichrist Nietzsche speaks very positively about Buddhism, but mostly for
performative reasons, as a weapon in his war on Christianity. He idealizes Buddhism as a
positivistic religion “a hundred times more realistic than Christianity.” (AC 20). Although he
still calls Buddhism a form of nihilism, he praises it as an aristocratic and non-moralistic
religion.
Secondly, there are some gaps in most Nietzsche-interpretations that could perhaps be
fruitfully addressed by means of a comparison with Buddhism. Nietzsche is well-known for
his scathing critique of the epistemological, ontological and moral foundations of the Western
philosophical tradition, which has served as an inspiration for the postmodern
deconstructionist movement. He is hailed as a great religious critic, as epitomized in his
1
See my lemma on ‘Buddhismus’ in part I of the Nietzsche Dictionary (van Tongeren 2005)
2
famous dictum ‘God is dead’. But for Nietzsche himself, this critique was only meant as a
stepping stone to a new beginning, a radical new way of thinking, an Umwertung aller Werte.
Among Nietzsche researchers, a growing recognition is taking place of this
postmoralist and postreligious dimension of Nietzsche’s thought (Roberts 1998, Schacht
2000, Urpeth & Lippitt 2000) that can be fruitfully interpreted from Asian traditions (Parkes
1991), especially Buddhist ones.
Since the early 1980s the importance has been stressed for a comparative study of Nietzsche
and Buddhism (Mistry 1981). In 1998 Robert Morrison published Nietzsche and Buddhism,
which unfortunately was limited to Theravada Buddhism, the only form of Buddhism that was
known well in Europe in Nietzsche’s time, and which Nietzsche rejected as a form of nihilism
(Morrison 1998). Nietzsche’s understanding of Buddhism was not only hampered by the
limited familiarity with historical Buddhism in his time, but also by contemporary nineteenthcentury interpretations of Buddhism as a ‘cult of nothingness’ (Droit 2003).
Nietzsche researchers such as Graham Parkes argue convincingly that the later
Mahayana Buddhism (that only became well-known in the western world after 1900) is a
much better candidate for a fruitful comparison with Nietzsche’s philosophy. For Nietzsche,
as for Mahayana Buddhism, the formulation of his thought in language belongs to the matter
of his thinking to a greater extent than for other philosophers. He knows and makes use of the
seductions and traps of language. Not only does the meaning of certain words change with the
development of his thought; more than most philosophers, he consciously works with the
possibility of ascribing different meanings to the same words through differing
contextualisations and the use of various perspectives.
2.
Towards a cross-cultural hermeneutical approach
Although much has been published on Nietzsche and Christianity, not that much has been said
about Nietzsche and Buddhism. The two monographs that have appeared on Nietzsche and
Buddhism (Mistry 1981, Morrison 1998) both suffer from two shortcomings. Firstly, they
limit their treatment of Buddhism to the oldest school of Buddhism, Theravada. Secondly,
they stop at pointing out similarities between the two systems of thought (what Morrison calls
‘ironic affinities’) and possible ways in which Nietzsche’s philosophy was influenced by this
knowledge of Buddhism. As interesting and rewarding as these purposes may be, my own
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goal is different. I want to shed new light on crucial aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy by new
hermeneutical strategies. This would entail doing comparative philosophy in a new way. As
Garfield (2002) notes,
“The field of comparative philosophy has acquired a deservedly bad reputation of late (see
Tuck 1990 and Larson and Deutsch 1989). It has been noted that it too often functions as an
arm of Orientalism in the most pejorative sense of that term, as an appropriation of expertise
on non-Western traditions by Western scholars, with a consequent disempowerment of their
non-Western colleagues. Moreover, it has been noted, comparative philosophy often imports
hermeneutical and philosophical methods to the study of non-Western texts that succeed in
distorting or simply missing the significance of those texts or the meaningfulness of their
claims and arguments in the context of their home cultures. In addition it has been noted that
the interpretive lens privileged in most comparative philosophy is distinctively Western. […]
As a closely related matter, it has been charged that in comparing philosophical text and
views, the Western texts, views, and arguments are typically taken as the standards against
which non-Western texts are compared and evaluated. ” (Garfield 2002 p. 152) 2
A more promising approach would be to elucidate forms of Western thought through the lens
of non-Western ways of thinking. Such a cross-cultural hermeneutical perspective is
advocated by Garfield (2002). The French sinologist Francois Jullien stresses that, through the
detour of non-Western philosophies, we can regain access to lost or underemphasized
dimensions of our own Western tradition (Jullien 2004). Western philosophy has always only
questioned itself from within. But however radical this questioning may be, it always remains
within the limits of an implicit understanding from which certain positions may emerge. To
step back from the Western tradition and criticize it from without can allow us to assume a
more truly global position. Understanding is only possible when we are far enough from our
object to see it more completely. Therefore, cultural distance can make things visible to a
somewhat removed interpreter that remain hidden for an interpreter immersed in the same
philosophical tradition. Just as we can read Plato with greater understanding than Plato
himself ever could, so Nietzsche can be read with greater understanding through a nonWestern lens.
This quote is from the section ‘Metahermeneutic preliminaries’ of chapter 8 of Garfield (2002), entitled: Western
Idealism through Indian Eyes: a Cittamatra Reading of Berkeley, Kant, and Schopenhauer. In this chapter he retells the
development of western Idealism from the perspective of the Indian Buddhist mind-only school. Methodologically
my own work is indebted to his approach.
2
4
Such a confrontation could be a major breakthrough in the fusion of Western and nonWestern horizons. A much-needed common horizon can be a background for genuine
collaboration and conversation in a joint philosophical venture. The possibilities for such a
venture are enormous. The enlargement of the world scholarly community and the range of
texts and resources on which it can draw promise a greater philosophical depth and rate of
progress.
3.
Nietzsche’s skepticism
Nietzsche is well known for his skepticism. An excellent overview is given by Poellner
(1995). Not only does Nietzsche declare that it is impossible for us to know reality as it is in
itself (epistemological skepticism), he even goes as far to doubt the very notion of a ‘reality in
itself’ (ontological skepticism). Our metaphysical ideas don’t represent a fundamental truth,
but only the dynamics of the constructive process by which we generate a conceptual world
within which we can live. There are no extra-linguistic realities, no “being” to which our
“true” ideas ultimately correspond.
For Nietzsche, however, his skepticism is not only a philosophical position. His
philosophical skepticism is accompanied by what we could call a psychological skepticism:
our cherished notions that have sustained our western culture, such as “truth” and “being”, are
being diagnosed as expressions of a negative valuation of existence. With the skeptical
deconstruction of such notions, the world begins to look valueless and meaningless. Nihilism
looms large.
But Nietzsche’s philosophy doesn’t simply consist of an attack on metaphysical and
epistemological traditions. His genealogical writing creates a new kind of hermeneutic that
goes beyond taking epistemological issue with traditional ideas. Rather, those ideas are seen
as having a disguised meaning that is symptomatic of a certain valuation of life. Nietzsche
doesn’t accept nihilism as an inevitable outcome. He searches in his work to find a
breakthrough to a new mode of affirmation.
Nietzsche the skeptic who concludes that “there is no truth” must therefore be
distinguished from Nietzsche the visionary, whose third period is animated by a vision of a
state beyond nihilism, a vision that can transfigure our relationship to life itself into an
affirmative one. Nietzsche’s new experimental philosophy seeks a new spiritual vision not
grounded in metaphysical illusions.
5
For Nietzsche, therefore, skepticism doesn’t have the last word. In his work we can
find a skeptical critique of skepticism where Nietzsche diagnoses the philosophical position of
skepticism as motivated by a weakness in willing, a nihilistic inability to affirm existence. In
Beyond Good and Evil aphorism 208 Nietzsche calls skepticism “the most spiritual expression
of a certain many-sided physiological temperament, which in ordinary language is called
nervous debility and sickliness”. In aphorism 209 he opposes such a weak skepticism with
“another and stronger kind of skepticism”, “the skepticism of daring manliness”. “This
skepticism despises and nevertheless grasps; it undermines and takes possession; it does not
believe, but it does not thereby lose itself; it gives the spirit a dangerous liberty, but it keeps
strict guard over the heart.”
Such a strong skepticism is not just part of a philosophy that is a theoretical enterprise.
It should give rise to a radically altered vision of philosophy as a revaluation of all values.
Philosophy thus gains an existential dimension and turns into a soteriological enterprise,
aimed at a liberation of the individual, enabling him to live in the world without being
hypnotized by conceptual essences such as “truth” and “being”.
Truthfulness requires that we find a way to live with the continual realization that our
perspectives give us nothing but “lies” and “illusions”. In this way the word truth takes on an
ethical meaning. A person’s strength and courage are revealed by the degree to which he can
endure the truth that all meanings and all values have disintegrated, along with the notion of
“being” and its religious correlate, “God”. In aphorism 210, Nietzsche says that the
philosophers of the future must be such skeptics. They are not only great critics, but are also
able to create values. In this way they can execute Nietzsche’s post-skeptical project of a
revaluation of all values.
Therefore, although Nietzsche’s radical skepsis seems to culminate in epistemological
nihilism ("God is dead"), he ultimately thinks it possible to overcome this nihilism. He
differentiates between strong and weak skepticism. Strong skepticism refers to a new truth
practice based on perspectivism and will to power, aimed not at discovering static truths about
reality, but at becoming a truthful person. In this sense this new truth practice has a strong
ethical component. It is connected to a process of self-cultivation. In order to elucidate and
evaluate this new truth practice of strong skepticism, a comparison and confrontation with the
philosophy of Nagarjuna could be useful.
6
4.
Nagarjuna
It is unfortunate that Nietzsche was not familiar with the writings of the second-century
Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna, one of the most important figures in the early development
of the philosophical tradition of Mahayana Buddhism. He is the founder of the Madhyamika
school, a rich skeptical tradition, startlingly similar to the Western skeptical tradition, in
respect of its aims, methodology, and philosophical problematic (see Garfield 1990).
Although Nagarjuna certainly was a historical figure, not much is known about his life. He is
widely considered to be the most influential Buddhist philosopher after the Buddha himself.
Nagarjuna is clearly a soteriological writer. His aim is to liberate his readers from a
psychological clinging to their own thought constructions (and therefore what they take to be
a real multiplicity of substantial things in the world) which generates the suffering that
Buddhism describes, connected with greed, desire and all forms of attachment. Liberation
from suffering takes place through a form of self-cultivation, which enables one to view the
world without compulsively needing to take refuge in limiting perspectival stances.
It is instructive to consider the context in which Nagarjuna was operating. In the
centuries after the death of the Buddha (traditionally placed at 480 B.C., but according to
recent research perhaps as late as 400 B.C., which would make him a contemporary of
Socrates), Buddhist philosophical schools developed (perhaps as a consequence of contact
with post-Alexander the Great Greek colonists in North-West India). Although the Buddha
himself had emphasized the non-metaphysical character of his teaching (he repeatedly refused
to answer questions on metaphysical topics), gradually a Buddhist scholastic developed which
systematized the basic Buddhist teachings: dukkha (all phenomena are unsatisfactory), anitya
(impermanence) and anatman (non-self). In their philosophical Abhidharma-writings, various
schools constructed an ontology of becoming. They described reality as a flux of dharma’s,
insubstantial momentary “constituent factors” of human experience and of the entire mental
and material world. These dharma’s are the only type of entity that truly exists, they claimed.
Reality is irreducibly plural, and consists of ever-changing configurations and constellations
of dharma’s. The world of becoming, as we find it in the Abhidharma writings, seems not all
that different from the world as will to power, as some Nietzsche-interpretations claim to find
in Nietzsche’s writings.
But Nagarjuna rejects this ontology of becoming. In his main work, the
Mulamadhyamika-karikas (MMK, Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way) Nagarjuna
negates the separate existence of dharma’s. For him all phenomena are “empty”, i.e., without
independent self-existence. This is however not an ontological statement, but a soteriological
7
one. It is intended to liberate the reader from the conceptual framework of the Abhidharma.
Since the MMK consists almost entirely of a series of seemingly very cryptic refutations, it
lends itself to many interpretations. Just as there are many Nietzsche’s, there are many
Nagarjuna’s. His method involves the dialectical deconstruction of the central categories by
which language seduces us into accepting its “thought constructions” as realities. Nagarjuna
uses the Buddhist logical form of the tetralemma: A, not-A, both A and not-A, neither A nor
not-A. Through a method of reductio ad absurdum he proves that all four horns of the
tetralemma lead to incoherent conclusions. In this way, Nagarjuna not only negates every
possible positive assertion, he also negates the negation of that assertion.
Nagarjuna examines twenty-seven different thought categories (the 27 chapters of
MMK). In every case he examines the dichotomies by which we characterize our world
(origination and extinction, permanence and impermanence, identity and difference,
enlightenment and unenlightenment) and shows that we cannot logically accept either
category. One of the categories that Nagarjuna deconstructs for example, is that of
‘existence”. To say that things exist would be an eternalistic, substantial view. To say that
they don’t exist would be a nihilistic view. Ultimately things neither exist, not do not exist.
But also that view turns out to be logically incoherent. Nagarjuna concludes that the
fundamental categories are characterized by “emptiness” (sunyata).
Nagarjuna himself claims to hold no philosophical views whatsoever. Everything he
writes serves as upaya, a Buddhist notion that can be translated as “skillful means”.
Philosophical perspectives only serve to bring the reader beyond thought constructions to
liberation. The concept of sunyata is not an ontological concept. It can’t be hypostasized.
Sunyata is a soteriological concept, a liberating concept with therapeutical value.
Nagarjuna distinguishes two types of truth: conventional truth, which is based on
intersubjective agreement between participants in a language game, and ultimate truth. But
“ultimate truth” does not refer to a self-existent dimension of reality beyond the everyday.
Rather, it is everyday reality viewed from a radically different perspective. The only
difference between an awakened and an ignorant person is this realization of “emptiness”.
5.
Nietzsche and Nagarjuna
Nietzsche and Nagarjuna both battled the dogmatic philosophies of their time. Nietzsche
fought the metaphysical views of Plato and German Idealism on one hand, and the ‘weak
skepticism’ of scientific positivism and empiricism on the other. Nagarjuna fought both
8
metaphysical Hinayana Buddhist schools, as well as more skeptical empiricist Buddhist
schools. Both show that “true reality” and “true knowledge” are fictions, that there are no
facts but only interpretations, and bring thought to an aporia.
Two concepts in Nagarjuna’s philosophy can be used to further illuminate certain obscurities
in Nietzsche’s notion of a strong skepticism. The nature of the suspension of belief or
“positionlessness” is explicitly characterized by the non-concept of sunyata. Such a concept is
lacking in Nietzsche’s philosophy, which makes it easier to misinterpret him. Also, Nagarjuna
clarifies the relationship between skeptical methodology and the role of convention by using
the notion of upaya. There are several passages in Nietzsche’s work that we can interpret as a
description of a strategy of upaya. In The Antichrist 54 for example, Nietzsche first stresses
the importance of skepticism: “Great spirits are skeptics. Zarathustra is a skeptic […] A mind
that aspires to great things, and that wills the means thereto, is necessarily skeptical. Freedom
from any sort of conviction belongs to strength, and to an independent point of view.” (AC
54). Then he goes on to describe making use of convictions as upaya: “Conviction as a
means: one may achieve a good deal by means of a conviction. A grand passion makes use of
and uses up convictions; it does not yield to them--it knows itself to be sovereign.” (AC 54)
For both Nietzsche and Nagarjuna, strong skepticism is not a goal in and of itself, but
only a means to an end. Nagarjuna is, just like the Buddha, a physician who diagnoses his
opponents as being poisoned with philosophical dogmatism. The pill is skeptical inquiry. But
when the poison is purged, the inquiry is no longer necessary. In the same way Nietzsche
makes use of convictions and perspectives, not as a goal in itself, but in a performative sense.
The point of skepticism is not just to fight dogmatical convictions. The goal is to
create as much doubt as possible in the values that have up until now been seen as true, in
order to make room for new values. Those new values can only be created by the philosopher
of the future, of which Zarathustra is a prime example. Strong skepticism is a truth practice
that serves as an example of philosophizing with the hammer.
Both for Nietzsche and Nagarjuna, the practice of strong skepticism can fruitfully be
interpreted as part of their approach to philosophy as a soteriological practice, culminating in
the transformation and liberation of the individual. For Nagarjuna, being a Buddhist thinker,
such a conclusion would not come as much of a surprise. To interpret Nietzsche as a
soteriological thinker will undoubtedly raise more eyebrows. Yet in my doctoral dissertation I
have attempted to argue exactly this position (Van der Braak, 2004).
9
What would be the perceived goal of such a soteriological practice? For Nagarjuna,
liberation would refer to the ability to live fully and directly in the world without the
mediation of representative thinking and conceptualization. Sunyata, like phenomenal
existence, is epistemologically and metaphysically groundless. As Martin puts it: “It is not
metaphysics, not empiricism, but the inexpressibility and non-duality of things seen in their
immediacy at the point of the groundless-ground prior to thought” (Martin 1991). For
Nietzsche, a revaluation of values should result in a yes-saying, affirmative relationship to
life. Such a transformation is outlined, according to Nietzsche himself, in Thus Spoke
Zarathustra. But this would be the topic of an entire different study altogether.
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