Nietzsche, Buddha, Zarathustra: Eine West-Ost Konfiguration
Gereon Kopf
Philosophy East and West, Volume 60, Number 4, October 2010,
pp. 560-564 (Article)
Published by University of Hawai'i Press
For additional information about this article
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/pew/summary/v060/60.4.kopf.html
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believable was part of the “special practice” of this style and only enhanced the literary effect.
In the end Welter finds that the Record is the work of Song dynasty literati who
manipulated tales of Linji to create a hero. The upshot of their efforts is that much of
what has been subsequently accepted as fact about Linji, the Record, and, more
broadly, Tang dynasty Chan can be shown to be products of these later editors/
creators. Does all this mean that the traditional view is historically incorrect? Well,
as Welter points out, not necessarily. But, it is equally clear from the conclusion that
the Linji of the Record is at least as much a Song literati creation as a Tang historical
fact.
Welter’s very detailed and carefully researched work charts new directions for
the study of this text and sheds new light on the history of Chan. Additionally, though
it exceeds the scope of his conclusions, the inquiry also implicitly suggests areas for
further study. For example, thoughtful readers who are familiar with modern Japanese
and Western versions of this Chan school will be struck by the fact that the complex
process of manipulating the Linji story to construct orthodoxy, while simultaneously
maintaining that such constructions represent “the pure Chan” of Linji himself, certainly did not end with early Song literati. Though the specificity and detail of Welter’s work will appeal most to scholars, anyone with an interest in the history of Chan
should find Welter’s conclusions thought-provoking and perhaps even surprising.
Nietzsche, Buddha, Zarathustra: Eine West-Ost Konfiguration. By Michael Skowron.
Daegu: Kyungpook National University Press, 2006. Pp. 293.
Reviewed by Gereon Kopf Luther College
In Nietzsche, Buddha, Zarathustra: Eine West-Ost Konfiguration, Michael Skowron
sets out to develop a comparative philosophy of “self-overcoming,” “transformation,”
and “process” (p. 7). Skowron’s main interest is to retrace Friedrich Nietzsche’s
­“genealogical thinking back to where the Eastern and the Western way began their
separate direction in order to unearth the only place where they can be unified in its
original form.” The goal of this project is “to uncover the religious and postreligious
dimensions of his [Nietzsche’s] thinking” (p. 5). This work thus promises to contribute to the contemporary understanding of Nietzsche; to compare the philosophies of
Nietzsche, Buddha, and Zarathustra; and to facilitate a comparative philosophy of
self-overcoming for a postreligious age.
This is a collection of at times promising but, in the end, uneven essays on
­Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and other themes in Nietzsche and Buddhism that are
loosely connected to the idea of “self-overcoming.” Thematically, these essays can
be d­ivided into four categories.
The first group of essays explores themes central to Nietzsche’s philosophy. In
chapter 2, Skowron praises the visionary nature of Nietzsche’s writings and suggests
that a metaphysics “beyond good and evil” does not imply a morality “beyond
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© 2010 by University of Hawai‘i Press
good and bad” but envisions the “philosopher of the future,” who takes “the body as
guideline” (am Leitfaden des Leibes) of thinking (p. 45). Nietzsche’s Übermensch,
Skowron explains in chapter 3, overcomes the self by embracing the ambiguity of the
self’s “overcoming itself by itself” (p. 52) and of the “eternal return” (ewige Wiederkehr), which simultaneously entails the “return to the past” as implied by the
word Wiederkehr and a “future arrival” as indicated by the term Wiederkunft. Chapter 6 explains that Nietzsche’s conception of language as having always only a provisional character, which means that every statement has to be written in “quotation
marks” (Gänsefüßchen), is rooted in the fragile nature of the subject, which reveals
itself as an illusion and conceals that “doing is everything” (das Thun [sic] is alles)
(p. 117).
Then there is the second group of essays, which compare tropes in Nietzsche’s
work to similar motifs in the works of Martin Heidegger (chapter 1) as well as Franz
Kafka and Rainer Maria Rilke (chapter 5). In chapter 1, Skowron probes the conceptions of the “death of god” in the work of Nietzsche and Heidegger and concludes
that both, albeit in different ways, understand the “death of god” to signify the end of
traditional metaphysics; furthermore, both interpretations equally beg the question
of who or what the “new god” will be. Chapter 5 explores different conceptions of
“transformation” (Verwandlung). In a similar fashion, chapter 4 correlates the four
phases in Plato’s allegory of the cave — the phases of the prisoner, the liberation from
the shackles of ignorance, the contemplation of the pure forms outside the cave, and
the return to the cave to liberate the prisoners left behind — to the threefold process
of transformation that the Übermensch undergoes from the “obedient camel via the
freedom-loving lion to the playfully creating child” (p. 102).
The third and central group of essays strives to develop Nietzsche’s Zarathustra
as a model of transformation and postreligious religiosity. To be specific, Skowron
investigates the models Nietzsche used to fashion his Zarathustra (chapter 7), un­
covers flaws in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s reading of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (chapter
8), explores the teachings of Zarathustra (chapter 9), and envisions what he calls the
“Zarathustra-configuration” (Zarathustra-Konfiguration) (chapter 10). Skowron concludes that despite all potential similarities between, on the one side, Nietzsche’s
Zarathustra and, on the other, the historical Zoroaster, Siddharta Gotama (the historical Buddha), and Heraclitus, there seems to be enough evidence to suggest that
Nietzsche’s Zarathustra personifies Nietzsche’s vision if not Friedrich Nietzsche himself. The teaching of Zarathustra a.k.a. Nietzsche does not comprise a moral nihilism
and an undifferentiated affirmation of anything, as Gadamer suggests, but rather a
sophisticated non-dualism of the exoteric and the esoteric (p. 194), of return and
progress (p. 200), and of humanity and its transcendence in the form of the Übermensch (p. 200). It is this embodiment of self-overcoming in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra
where, Skowron concludes, “East” and “West” converge in somewhat of a “middle
way.”
In the fourth group, the final three chapters deal more directly with Buddhist
themes. Chapter 11 presents Skowron’s at times brilliant comparison between Buddha’s four noble truths (cattāri ārya-satya) — suffering, the cause of suffering, libera-
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tion from suffering, and the path to liberation — and Nietzsche’s “four great errors”
(vier Irrtümer), namely the errors of “the confusion of cause and effect” (i.e., happiness and virtue), “false causality” (the ego), “imaginary causes” (belief in transcendence), and “free will.”1 Here, Skowron describes how both models propose similar
programs designed to alleviate suffering and to deconstruct the illusion of an individual and independent self. He further argues that the first two errors help to illustrate the first two of the four noble truths: suffering is caused by the “confusion of
cause and effect” while the belief in the self constitutes the cause of suffering. At the
same time, the second two of the four noble truths and of the four errors, respectively, reveal the major difference between both models: according to Skowron, Buddhism proposes that final relief from suffering is possible if not inevitable, while
Nietzsche “believes that the complete elimination of suffering is neither possible nor
desirable” (p. 240). The remaining chapters introduce the “Zen” (“Sŏn” would be
more appropriate) of Seung Sahn (chapter 12) and the fascinating film Why Bodhidharma Went to the East by Yong-Kyun Bae (chapter 13).
Skowron’s project could have been an exciting one. He is correct in suggesting
that the postreligious dimension of Nietzsche’s thinking is of unequalled importance
today. First, in the last forty years, the world has witnessed a religious turn in many
societies at a time when the modernist conception of religion and even of the homo
religiosus has been thoroughly deconstructed. More than ever does there seem to be
a need for a postreligious religiosity. Second, it seems obvious that such a p­ostmodern
and postreligious conception of religiosity has to be developed by a philosophy that
employs a comparative methodology. We are past the age when we can afford to
speculate about religion in general while limiting ourselves to the insights and terminology of one localized tradition. Finally, Nietzsche and the Buddha seem to share
not only a compatible vision of “self-overcoming,” which is so necessary today, but
they also have been evoked, albeit to differing degrees, by contemporary thinkers as
diverse as Jacques Derrida and Derek Parfit as sources for a new paradigm for thinking about self, religion, and ethics. Thus, I was excited to be invited to review Skowron’s monograph.
However, great expectations carry in themselves the potential for great disappointment. In many ways, Nietzsche, Buddha, Zarathustra does not live up to the
promise of setting up Nietzsche in dialogue with Zarathustra and the Buddha. The
“Zarathustra” Skowron is concerned with is, for the most part, Nietzsche’s and not
the historical one. The short discussions of the historical Zoroaster (pp. 91, 99, 153–
160, 190–191, 223) serve Skowron only as the backdrop for an investigation of Nietz­
sche’s fictional character. Similarly Skowron’s interest in the historical Buddha
(pp. 77, 150–153, 223–226) is limited to his search for figures that could have served
Nietzsche as models for his own Zarathustra. In this search, the historical Zoroaster
and the historical Buddha are put into company with, for example, Heraclitus. It is
thus not immediately clear why Zoroaster and the Buddha made it into the title of the
book while Heraclitus did not. In the end, a discussion of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra
may, in the best-case scenario, reveal his appropriation of the “East,” but it neither
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does nor can facilitate a dialogue between traditions. Thus, it is difficult to talk of “reuniting” the “Eastern” and “Western” ways (p. 5).
In addition, the essays here reveal tensions that are not resolved and oddities that
were commonplace in Nietzsche’s time but deserve more critical reflection today. I
will not dwell here on the problems entailed in evoking the dichotomy between
“East” and “West” or in implying a “middle between East and West, that is, Persia
[sic] or India” (p. 5), which reveals an “original unity” in thought, even though a
discussion and deconstruction of these geographical and ideological tokens would
have significantly aided the philosophical project of Skowron. Rather I would like to
focus here on two phenomena, Skowron’s use of the name “Zarathustra” and his
understanding of Buddhism. After he identifies as the goal of his book a trialogue
between Nietzsche, Zoroaster, and the Buddha, the reader is bound to be confused
by the question of to whom the name “Zarathustra” in the book refers — the historical
Zoroaster or Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. It is only after the historical Zoroaster is mentioned for the first time on page 91 and introduced in his own right in two small passages on pages 153–160 and 190–191 that it becomes clear that “Zarathustra,” for
the most part, refers to Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. By the same token, the tropes of
“Zarathustra” and the “Übermensch” are not often clearly demarcated: is, for Skowron, Zarathustra the author or the personification of the Übermensch ideal? Similarly
Skowron’s depiction of Buddhism is at times bewildering. For example, naive comments that juxtapose “Indian” and “Buddhist” thinking (p. 136) as well as his tendency to depict Buddhism as undifferentiated and monolithic (e.g., p. 238) when he
describes Buddhism as “passive nihilism” (p. 138) and to assign later Mahāyāna
ideas such as the notion of “buddha-nature” to Siddharta Gotama himself (p. 236) are
at odds with the thoughtful observations that Buddhism is diverse (p. 140) and that
the self-understanding of Buddhist thinkers often differs from Orientalist depictions
of Buddhism (p. 153).
Of a different nature but similarly puzzling is his claim that the term “not two”
(advaita; Chin: bu’er 不二) can be traced back to the Advaita Vedanta of Śaṅkara
when already the Vimalakı̄rti Sūtra dedicates a whole chapter (chapter 9) to this term
more than five hundred years prior to the advent of Śaṅkara. Too often Skowron
seems to follow uncritically the understanding of Buddhism expounded by Nietzsche
but also by teachers such as Sahn and D. T. Suzuki. While an analysis of their respective visions of Buddhism is certainly relevant for Skowron’s project and not without
merit in general, it is necessary to ask if such an analysis should not be done c­ritically
in the light of the immense diversity of schools, identities, and self-understandings
within the Buddhist traditions and of contemporary buddhological scholarship. Some
of these tensions are probably caused by the fact that this volume constitutes a compilation of separately written essays; nonetheless, these tensions are neither resolved
nor explained.
These critical reflections, however, cannot conceal the strengths of the book. At
its best, Nietzsche, Buddha, Zarathustra displays the author’s deep knowledge of
Nietzsche and outlines themes toward a postreligious religiosity and ethics. Skow-
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ron’s observations that “Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is designed to portray the opposite of
the historical Zoroaster” (p. 91); that Zarathustra’s, that is Nietzsche’s, philosophy is
inherently nondual (p. 99, 208); that Nietzsche’s Zarathustra embodies the “awakened one,” that is, the Buddha (p. 77), as well as the Bodhisattva ideal (p. 149); and
that the “death of god” correlates, in some sense, to the Zen dictum “when you see
the Buddha, kill the Buddha” (p. 143); as well as his suggestion that Nietzsche’s conviction that the alleviation of suffering is at best temporal is rather close to certain
specific positions within Mahāyāna Buddhism (p. 240) that are profound and central
to the project of a postreligious religiosity. An elaboration of these ideas would be of
immense benefit for an understanding of the relationship between Buddhist thinkers
and Nietzsche in particular and a comparative vision of “self-overcoming” as a m­odel
of religiosity in general.
Note
1 – Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols, or How to Philosophize with a Hammer,
trans. Anthony M. Ludovici, vol. 15 of The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed.
Oscar Levy (New York: Russel and Russel, 1964), pp. 33, 35, 37, 41.
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