Nietzsche and Zen: Self Overcoming Without a Self

by André van der Braak

In Nietzsche and Zen: Self-Overcoming Without a Self, Andre van der Braak engages Nietzsche in a dialogue with four representatives of the Buddhist Zen tradition: Nagarjuna (c. 150-250), Linji (d. 860), Dogen (1200-1253), and Nishitani (1900-1990). In doing so, he reveals Nietzsche's thought as a philosophy of continuous self-overcoming, in which even the notion of "self" has been overcome. Van der Braak begins by analyzing Nietzsche's relationship to Buddhism and status as a transcultural thinker, recalling research on Nietzsche and Zen to date and setting out the basic argument of the study. He continues by examining the practices of self-overcoming in Nietzsche and Zen, comparing Nietzsche's radical skepticism with that of Nagarjuna and comparing Nietzsche's approach to truth to Linji's. Nietzsche's methods of self-overcoming are compared to Dogen's zazen, or sitting meditation practice, and Dogen's notion of forgetting the self. These comparisons and others build van der Braak's case for a criticism of Nietzsche informed by the ideas of Zen Buddhism and a criticism of Zen Buddhism seen through the Western lens of Nietzsche - coalescing into one world philosophy. This treatment, focusing on one of the most fruitful areas of research within contemporary comparative and intercultural philosophy, will be useful to Nietzsche scholars, continental philosophers, and comparative philosophers.

Genres: Philosophy, Buddhism, Spirituality, Personal Development, Zen

310 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2011

Reviews

[Lucas · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am always very wary of philosophical works that attempts comparing ideas that are far in time and space, they either trample over its crucial differences, reducing one to the other, or are an uninteresting exercise of boring remarks over their differences. Braak avoid these pitfalls by writing a book that enable us to see Zen and Nietzsche through new lens by superimpose one over the other at different distances. The preface alone is a great lesson in comparative philosophy that delineates and clarify the goals of this work.

[Glen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an engaging and well-annotated attempt to put Nietzsche and the Zen Buddhist tradition into some sort of dialogue with each other. The author stops short of declaring Nietzsche a Zen master unawares, just as he avoids declaring Zen Buddhism an Asian version of Nietzsche's project. He does think that a careful comparison of Nietzsche's work, including a sizeable selection from his notebooks, with certain representatives of Zen Buddhism, most notably Dōgen and Keiji Nishitani, is a mutually illuminating project, and with that it is hard to argue. The author struggles a bit to explain such paradoxical notions as self overcoming without a self (the book's subtitle) and a soteriology that seeks to undermine all soteriologies, but I don't know of any commentator on Zen or on Nietzsche that hasn't struggled with each, so putting them together is hardly a recipe for clarity. Van der Braak's most important rhetorical move is to view Nietzsche as a philosopher who operates outside the typical and dominant Anglo-European tradition of being preoccupied with questions of truth and comprehensive views of reality, being more preoccupied as he is with finding a way out of the existential problem posed by nihilism. This notion of the philosopher as way-finder is more familiar to devotees of Indian, Chinese, and Japanese philosophers than to western readers, though it has its exemplars (Pascal, Kierkegaard, Montagne, to name but three) within that tradition as well. Nietzsche's intent hearkens back to pre-Socratic Athens, wherein a wise person was expected not simply or even primarily to have a theory of truth and reality to offer, but more so to embody whatever truth they had uncovered, to be the truth, so to speak, rather than simply to articulate it or contemplate it. In this respect, Nietzsche is more like a Zen master than, say, someone like Kant.

All of the above makes for some pretty interesting reading, but in the end I was unconvinced by Van der Braak's contention that the Heideggerian reading of Nietzsche as preoccupied with will-to-power as an explanatory principle is misguided. I also found myself unconvinced that Nietzsche is primarily interested in impacting individual thinkers, though there is no question that Nietzsche believed or at least hoped that his future readers would have impactful influences, in that I read Nietzsche as someone who was concerned above all with culture. The overcoming of decadent culture in the name of affirming life on its own terms seems to me the sine qua non of Nietzsche's activity as a philosopher almost from start to finish. Helping a few individuals find their own way, unless and until it had a redemptive impact upon culture, was not something on which I think Nietzsche set much of a premium. I was left uncertain why one might give one's philosophical assent to Nietzsche's amor fati or his notion of eternal recurrence over that of, say, Spinoza's Sub specie aeternitatis, and even more uncertain on how well Nietzsche's frequent glorification of power over historical conditions sits with the Zen emphasis on nothing different, nothing special. Those misgivings registered, I recommend this interesting and provocative study to anyone interested in Nietzsche and/or Zen, whether or not there is hope for any fusion thereof.

[Cristiano Maggiore · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simply one of the most interesting books I have ever read.