- Email: [email protected]
On nietzsche and orientalism: A response to Faber
Ncu Idas tn Pqckol Vol. Printed in Great Brian
7. No
3. pp.
285-290.
0732-118x/89 $3.00 + 0.00 Pergamon Press plc
1989
ON NIETZSCHE AND ORIENTALISM: A RESPONSE TO FABER* ANDREW P. TUCK Department of Religion, Barnard College, 3009 Broadway, New York, NY 10027-6598, U.S.A. The notion that there is such a thing as “Eastern thought,” which has a single, consistent identity, and that Western thinkers can have much “in common with comparatist trope that, for most scholars, should have it,” is a long-standing exhausted itself two decades ago in the search for a non-Western, alternative culture. In his paper “Back to a crossroad: Nietzsche, Freud, and the East,” M. D. Faber offers an oddly isogetical reading of some of Nietzsche’s more familiar remarks about Buddhism and, in so doing, presents a distinctly anachronistic style of Orientalist interpretation. Faber does readers the service of carefully citing, with an eye toward chronology, a number of disparate passages from a variety of Nietzsche’s writings. This section is intended to demonstrate that, after a lengthy phase of disdain for Buddhist “pessimism,” Nietzsche developed an eventual appreciation for the healthful and lifeaffirming aspects of what Faber refers to as “the East’s wisdom” (p. 41), an appreciation that, Faber finally argues, Sigmund Freud would have been wise to adopt as well (cf. p. 390. It is undeniable that there is a shift in the tone of Nietzsche’s remarks about Buddhism in later texts such as Ecce Homo, On the Genealogy of Morals, and most prominently, The Anti-Christ. But the reasons that Faber asserts for this shift are unintelligible when viewed in the context of either Nietzschian or Buddhological sources. In fact, Faber’s essay does readers the disservice of arguing for a theoretical simplicity and a referential determinacy that is unsuitable to either tradition. In the end, he offers us a domesticated Nietzsche and a “hygienic” Buddhism that have little of the complexity or interest of their textual loci. Faber’s suggestion that Nietzsche’s mature work exhibits a “reversal of his initial antipathy to Buddhism” (p. 25) is based upon a common misreading of Nietzsche’s rhetorical strategy and a misapprehension about the state of European knowledge of Buddhist thought in the 19th century. Nietzsche, like any other Western writer in this period, had little idea of a Buddhism which directed attention toward “attaining integration and harmony in one’s life” (Faber, p. 41). The kind of Buddhism to which Faber refers is a contemporary combination of popular, self-help therapies and Oriental imports’adapted to a with wholesome food, personal health-oriented, Western audience. ‘Combined fresh air, exercise, and a refusal to engage in exhausting, interpersonal *Commentary on No. 1, pp. 25-45.
M. D. Faber (1988) Back to a crossroad:
285
Nietzsche,
Freud,
and the East, Vol. 6,
A. P. Tuck
286 struggles, attitudes
such a reorientation of being can result in the most treasured of all and states: celebration of existence, natural good spirits, bodily and
spiritual health” (Faber, p. 40). This is a Buddhism known to neither Nietzsche nor, for that matter, to most Asian Buddhists. The prevailing 19th-century view of Buddhism was that it was a philosophy of negativism, and the scholars responsible for introducing Buddhist materials to Europe in that Century-Eugene Burnouf, J. B. Saint-Hilaire, and Max Miiller are the most prominent+ffered a consistent indictment of its life-denying characteristics. The negativistic view, the only one that Nietzsche had access to (he read no Buddhist texts himself), was as different from Faber’s appreciative, contemporary, “personal health” version of Buddhism as is possible. Burnouf, for example, in his pioneering, Introduction ci 1’Histoire du Buddhisme Indien (1844), offered
Europe
exerted asserted
influence to the present day. He translated nirvana that the goal of Buddhist philosophy was
the first interpretations
of significant
Buddhist
terms
that have
as “extinction,”
and
a disappearance of individuality by way of absorption-absorption into the Supreme Being or into the void (Stinyata) . in any event, nirvana means a fundamental change in the condition of the individual, that would, to all appearances, be utter annihilation (Welbon, 1968, p. 62). Saint-Hilare, the journalist and translator who was to be proclaimed by Mtiller as “the first true historian of Buddhism,” read Burnoufs publications of 1844 and 1852 about the nature of nirvana and went even further toward developing the negative “annihilationist” reading of Buddhism. Saint-Hilaire termed Buddhism “a monstrous enterprise in which every potential service to mankind is sterilized by a pervasive nihilism” (Welbon, 1968, p. 68), and made this prediction: 1 believe that the study of Buddhism . . . will show how a religion which has at the day more adherents than any other on the surface of the globe, has contributed so little to the happiness of mankind; and we shall find in the strange and deplorable doctrines which it professes, the explanation of its powerlessness for good (Saint-Hilaire, 1962, pp. 29-30). Saint-Hilaire influentially decried the Buddhist tradition as “horrible and naive” (Welbon, 1968, p. 73), and added that the only justification for studying Buddhism at all was that it helped one to “appreciate the abiding values of our own heritage” (ibid., p. 88). These vituperative attacks, joined with Burnoufs and Miiller’s more cautious, philologically oriented misgivings about the philosophical inadequacies of Buddhist “nihilism,” formed a consensus that was not to be challenged for many years (until the famous disputes between Louis de La Vallee Poussin and Fyodor Stcherbatsky in the first decades of the 20th century). Burnouf, Saint-Hilaire, and Mtiller saw nothing in Buddhism but a philosophy of the annihilation of the individual, a denial of the reality of what Kantians were calling the “transcendental ego,” what Hegelians were calling Geist. This was the Buddhism that Nietzsche knew of. As Wilhelm Halbfass (1988) asserts in his recently published India and Europe,
On Nietzsche and Orientalism
287
As to the factual basis of Nietzsche’s assessment of Buddhism, we have to keep in mind that he had no knowledge of Nagarjuna’s enigmatic equation of samsara and nirvana, or related forms of Mahayana and Tantrism, or of more recent East Asian, specifically Japanese reinterpretations of Buddhism, which tend to present nirvana as freedom for this world (p. 125).
The modern, conventional understanding of Buddhism as “an eminently practical way to reduce the body’s stress and to protect the individual from the harmful habits and wasteful living that destroy so many human lives” (Faber, p. 41), was completely unknown to Friedrich Nietzsche. There is a more obvious, factual confusion exhibited by Faber’s suggestion that Nietzsche learned what he knew about Buddhist thought from his friend, the eminent Sanskritist, Paul Deussen. Faber writes that Deussen was a “pioneering student and translator of Buddhistic texts including the Sutrm of the Vedanta and the Upanishads . . . and that he continually worked on Nietzsche in an effort to make him see what he, Deussen, regarded as the positive, lifeenhancing aspects of Eastern thought” (Faber, p. 28). I would like to believe that Faber is making a sophisticated point about the hermeneutic interrelatedness of Hindu and Buddhist philosophical traditions, but he never alludes to the fact that the Veddnta Szitras and the Upani+a& are not Buddhist texts at all, but central texts of the Brahmanic tradition that most schools of Buddhism directly opposed-and Deussen was not, in fact, a scholar of Buddhist materials. Deussen’s most influential book, The Philosophy of the Upani+ads, mentions Buddhism in passing only four times and describes it simply as a doctrine of “pessimism” (pp. 51, 140, 255, 341). Nietzsche’s understanding of Buddhism, whether it was obtained from Deussen or from any other source, is that Buddhism was nothing other than the most extreme kind of pessimism, an ancient and consistent repudiation of the individual and the world. As Nietzsche characterized his own understanding of Buddhism in 1886, “Buddhistic tendency, yearning for Nothing” (The Will to Power, p. 7). It follows then, that Nietzsche’s seemingly positive remarks about Buddhism in his last writings need not be understood, in the way that Faber suggests, as a radical shift toward appreciation for newly recognized Buddhist ideals of individual health and happiness. For Nietzsche, Buddhism is no more than a “consistent type of pessimism” as compared to the “inconsistent type” of Christianity (Nietrrches We&e in Drei B&den, 1958, p. 649f), a nihilism that is even more extreme and more openly decadent than the “herd religion” of the West. As he asserts in the midst of his relative praise for Buddhism, “Buddhism is a religion for the end and fatigue of a civilization” (The Anti-Christ, Q 22). While Buddhism and Christianity are both rooted “in a monstrous disease of the will” (The Anti-Christ, $ 20), Buddhism is preferable precisely because it is so much more obviously nihilistic. As Halbfass (1988) emphasizes in his discussion of this point: For Nietzsche, Buddhism is and remains the highest manifestation of what he opposes, i.e., the repudiation of the world . , . According to Nietzsche, his own doctrine of “eternal recurrence” affirms what the Buddha denies. The special affinity which he finds between Buddhism and his own thought, is the closeness and affinity of extremes (pp. 127-128).
288
A. P. Tuck
In this way, Nietzsche’s eventual preference for Buddhism over Christianity is a preference for a doctrine that, if it were adopted in Europe, would contribute to the eventual destruction of Christian morality and Platonic philosophical presuppositions. This is what allowed Nietzsche’s grudging respect for what he perceived as a means to the desired end of European civilization. Nietzsche never saw Buddhism itself as a positive “transvaluation of values.” Its role was as the most extreme of “metaphysical pessimisms,” a religion for “late human beings” who have become “too kindly, gentle, over-intellectual, who feel pain too easily” (The Anti-Christ, $ 22). So, when the young Nietzsche first denounced the “Buddhistic negation of the will” in The Birth of Tragedy, and when, almost 20 years later, he argued in section 20 of The Anti-Christ that Buddhism is “a hundred times more real than Christianity,” he was not asserting a stance on Buddhist thought that derived from any kind of positive, appreciative familiarity with Buddhist texts, Buddhist practice, or even the works of European Buddhologists who interpreted Buddhist thought as anything other than pure negativism. In his customary manner, he was arguing from a dialectical stance that, at best, was meant to overturn the presuppositions of his readers and, at the very least, to draw these presuppositions into question. To this end, the Buddha served the same rhetorical purpose that Zarathustra, Socrates, and Christ also served throughout Nietzsche’s works. All of these figures were pragmatic weapons in the writer’s consistent attack on deeply-held beliefs, theories, and moralities, and culturally inherited assumptions. Just as Nietzsche chose the name, Zarathustra, to represent the strongest possible critique of the historical Zarathustra’s ethically dualistic system, the Buddha’s image was invoked in order to serve a specifically rhetorical-anti-Christian and anti-Buddhist-purpose. He wrote that while he himself “could be the Buddha of Europe,” he was “admittedly an antipode to the Indian Buddha” (Nachgelassene Fragmente, Siimtliche Werke, 1980, p. 109). Nietzsche was not a historian of Asian religions and was not attempting to discover a new source of truth in the “wisdom of the East.” The reader, as always, is being directly challenged by Nietzsche’s rhetoric-not offered a set of therapeutic suggestions for attaining personal happiness within conventional society. His use of Buddhism is part of a consistent, radical skepticism toward exactly those conventionalized values that are today represented by terms such as “health” and “happiness.” It is one thing to assert that there are ways of understanding Nietzschian concepts of “eternal recurrence,” “will to power, ” and “the overman” that have much in common with certain popularized varieties of modern Buddhism. While such an effort might involve one in questionable arguments for philosophical universality and determinate meaning, this comparative temptation is at least understandable. Some contemporary interpretations of certain Mahayana Buddhist teachings can, indeed, be made to sound Nietzschian. But it is quite another thing to argue that Nietzsche actually held a Zen-influenced view of the entire Buddhist tradition in the 19th century that had little or nothing in common with the contemporary European understanding of Asian materials,
On Nietzsche and Orientalism
289
and that this 1980s-style Buddhism was somehow gleaned from conversations with the Vedantist, Paul Deussen. There have been a number of attempts to demonstrate parallels between Nietzsche and Buddhism, some quite recent (cf. Mistry, 1981). As is often the case in cross-cultural comparisons, however, these attempted parallels tell us far more about the views of the interpreter than about the philosophies being interpreted. Faber’s desire for a Nietzschian Buddhism (or a Buddhist Nietzsche) is symptomatic of at least two contemporary trends. There has been, since the now-dated association of Nietzschian thought with Nazism, a consistent attempt to reconsider Nietzsche positively, to reject the simple-mindedly existential, anti-moralistic appeals to individual “will,” and to characterize him as a precursor to contemporary strategies of textual deconstruction, and antimetaphysical, anti-epistemological hermeneutics (cf. Allison, 1977). Faber is, to his credit, apparently aware of and influenced by these more contemporary, sympathetic readings of Nietzsche’s thought. Similarly, there have been innumerable efforts to present westernized and sanitized formulations of certain Buddhist (usually Mahayana) teachings as contemporary therapy (such efforts are usually marketed outside of the scholarly community familiar with Asian textual materials and religious traditions). Faber’s essay appears to be located precisely at the intersection of these two trends and, as such, is an interesting example of a significant, contemporary hermeneutic phenomenon. But the suggestion that Nietzsche found his own views expressed in what he called “Buddhism” is a confusion of contemporary interpretation with a claim about authorial intention. It should be obvious that there is always a danger of oversimplifying the extraordinarily varied and complex assortment of religious sects and philosophical schools that all claim allegiance to the teachings of the Buddha. Well before Buddhism even left India for its East Asian transformations, doctrinal differences between Mahasanghikas and Sthaviras, Sarvastivadins and Theravadins, Sautrantikas and Madhyamikas, etc., engendered literally hundreds of philosophically distinct, sectarian divisions within the tradition. At the very least, attention to the major split between Theravada and Mahayana approaches to practice and belief is a scholarly commonplace. While it is true that Nietzsche, and the European Asianists of his time, were, as yet, completely unaware of these divisions, there is no reason for anyone to continue to write as if Buddhism has ever been a single, unified doctrine or to refer, even more egregiously, to such a thing as “the wisdom of the East” (Faber, p. 44). To collapse the immensely diverse varieties of Asian thought into one simple, homogenized super-philosophy that can be made available to Westerners in homilies about health, personal integration, and hygiene is to devalue ancient traditions to the level of fortune cookie aphorisms. There is always a tendency among cross-cultural, comparatist scholars to discover simple “essences” beneath the surface of philosophical diversity and to reveal what a European or Asian thinker “was really saying.” Once a doctrine, practice or theory is given a name (such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Nietzschian perspectivism, or psychologism) that name is assumed to be a label
290
A. P. Tuck
for a “thing” that can be described-reduced to a conceptual kernel. But this is little more than what Nietzsche so often described as a beguiling illusion caused by a fascination with natural language: “The sculptor of language was not so modest as to believe that he was only giving things designations, he conceived rather that with words he was expressing supreme knowledge of things” (Human, All Too Human, p. 11). Nietzsche manipulated that illusion in his readers according Nietzsche’s
to how it suited his polemical purposes. After reading any of writings, we might be more conscious of this illusion in ourselves.
REFERENCES Allison, D. (1977). The new Nietzsche. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Deussen, P. (1966). The philosophy of the Upanishad.s. New York: Dover Press. Halbfass, W. (1988). In& and Europe: An essay in understanding. Albany: SUNY Press. Mistry, F. (198 1). Nietrtche and Buddhism: Prolegomenon to a comparative study. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Nietzsche, F. (1958). Karl Schlechta (ed.), Nietzsches Werke in Drei B&&n. Munich: Carl Hanser. Nietzsche, F. (1967a). The birth of tragedy. New York: Vintage Books. (Original work published in 1872.) Nietzsche, F. (1967b). The will to power. New York: Vintage Books. (Original work published in 1904.) Nietzsche, F. (1968). The anti-Ch&. London: Penguin. (Original work published in 1895.) Nietzsche, F. (1969). On the genealogy of morals. New York: Vintage Books. (Original work published in 1887.) Nietzsche, F. (1969). Ecce homo. New York: Vintage Books. (Original work published in 1888.) Nietzsche, F. (1980). G. Colli & M. Montinari (eds.), Siimtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Banden. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Nietzsche, F. (1984). Human, all too human. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska. (Original work published in 1878.) Saint-Hilaire, J. B. (1862). Le Bouddha et sa religion. Paris: Didier. Welbon, G. (1968). The Buddhist niru@uz and its western interpreters. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
7. No
3. pp.
285-290.
0732-118x/89 $3.00 + 0.00 Pergamon Press plc
1989
ON NIETZSCHE AND ORIENTALISM: A RESPONSE TO FABER* ANDREW P. TUCK Department of Religion, Barnard College, 3009 Broadway, New York, NY 10027-6598, U.S.A. The notion that there is such a thing as “Eastern thought,” which has a single, consistent identity, and that Western thinkers can have much “in common with comparatist trope that, for most scholars, should have it,” is a long-standing exhausted itself two decades ago in the search for a non-Western, alternative culture. In his paper “Back to a crossroad: Nietzsche, Freud, and the East,” M. D. Faber offers an oddly isogetical reading of some of Nietzsche’s more familiar remarks about Buddhism and, in so doing, presents a distinctly anachronistic style of Orientalist interpretation. Faber does readers the service of carefully citing, with an eye toward chronology, a number of disparate passages from a variety of Nietzsche’s writings. This section is intended to demonstrate that, after a lengthy phase of disdain for Buddhist “pessimism,” Nietzsche developed an eventual appreciation for the healthful and lifeaffirming aspects of what Faber refers to as “the East’s wisdom” (p. 41), an appreciation that, Faber finally argues, Sigmund Freud would have been wise to adopt as well (cf. p. 390. It is undeniable that there is a shift in the tone of Nietzsche’s remarks about Buddhism in later texts such as Ecce Homo, On the Genealogy of Morals, and most prominently, The Anti-Christ. But the reasons that Faber asserts for this shift are unintelligible when viewed in the context of either Nietzschian or Buddhological sources. In fact, Faber’s essay does readers the disservice of arguing for a theoretical simplicity and a referential determinacy that is unsuitable to either tradition. In the end, he offers us a domesticated Nietzsche and a “hygienic” Buddhism that have little of the complexity or interest of their textual loci. Faber’s suggestion that Nietzsche’s mature work exhibits a “reversal of his initial antipathy to Buddhism” (p. 25) is based upon a common misreading of Nietzsche’s rhetorical strategy and a misapprehension about the state of European knowledge of Buddhist thought in the 19th century. Nietzsche, like any other Western writer in this period, had little idea of a Buddhism which directed attention toward “attaining integration and harmony in one’s life” (Faber, p. 41). The kind of Buddhism to which Faber refers is a contemporary combination of popular, self-help therapies and Oriental imports’adapted to a with wholesome food, personal health-oriented, Western audience. ‘Combined fresh air, exercise, and a refusal to engage in exhausting, interpersonal *Commentary on No. 1, pp. 25-45.
M. D. Faber (1988) Back to a crossroad:
285
Nietzsche,
Freud,
and the East, Vol. 6,
A. P. Tuck
286 struggles, attitudes
such a reorientation of being can result in the most treasured of all and states: celebration of existence, natural good spirits, bodily and
spiritual health” (Faber, p. 40). This is a Buddhism known to neither Nietzsche nor, for that matter, to most Asian Buddhists. The prevailing 19th-century view of Buddhism was that it was a philosophy of negativism, and the scholars responsible for introducing Buddhist materials to Europe in that Century-Eugene Burnouf, J. B. Saint-Hilaire, and Max Miiller are the most prominent+ffered a consistent indictment of its life-denying characteristics. The negativistic view, the only one that Nietzsche had access to (he read no Buddhist texts himself), was as different from Faber’s appreciative, contemporary, “personal health” version of Buddhism as is possible. Burnouf, for example, in his pioneering, Introduction ci 1’Histoire du Buddhisme Indien (1844), offered
Europe
exerted asserted
influence to the present day. He translated nirvana that the goal of Buddhist philosophy was
the first interpretations
of significant
Buddhist
terms
that have
as “extinction,”
and
a disappearance of individuality by way of absorption-absorption into the Supreme Being or into the void (Stinyata) . in any event, nirvana means a fundamental change in the condition of the individual, that would, to all appearances, be utter annihilation (Welbon, 1968, p. 62). Saint-Hilare, the journalist and translator who was to be proclaimed by Mtiller as “the first true historian of Buddhism,” read Burnoufs publications of 1844 and 1852 about the nature of nirvana and went even further toward developing the negative “annihilationist” reading of Buddhism. Saint-Hilaire termed Buddhism “a monstrous enterprise in which every potential service to mankind is sterilized by a pervasive nihilism” (Welbon, 1968, p. 68), and made this prediction: 1 believe that the study of Buddhism . . . will show how a religion which has at the day more adherents than any other on the surface of the globe, has contributed so little to the happiness of mankind; and we shall find in the strange and deplorable doctrines which it professes, the explanation of its powerlessness for good (Saint-Hilaire, 1962, pp. 29-30). Saint-Hilaire influentially decried the Buddhist tradition as “horrible and naive” (Welbon, 1968, p. 73), and added that the only justification for studying Buddhism at all was that it helped one to “appreciate the abiding values of our own heritage” (ibid., p. 88). These vituperative attacks, joined with Burnoufs and Miiller’s more cautious, philologically oriented misgivings about the philosophical inadequacies of Buddhist “nihilism,” formed a consensus that was not to be challenged for many years (until the famous disputes between Louis de La Vallee Poussin and Fyodor Stcherbatsky in the first decades of the 20th century). Burnouf, Saint-Hilaire, and Mtiller saw nothing in Buddhism but a philosophy of the annihilation of the individual, a denial of the reality of what Kantians were calling the “transcendental ego,” what Hegelians were calling Geist. This was the Buddhism that Nietzsche knew of. As Wilhelm Halbfass (1988) asserts in his recently published India and Europe,
On Nietzsche and Orientalism
287
As to the factual basis of Nietzsche’s assessment of Buddhism, we have to keep in mind that he had no knowledge of Nagarjuna’s enigmatic equation of samsara and nirvana, or related forms of Mahayana and Tantrism, or of more recent East Asian, specifically Japanese reinterpretations of Buddhism, which tend to present nirvana as freedom for this world (p. 125).
The modern, conventional understanding of Buddhism as “an eminently practical way to reduce the body’s stress and to protect the individual from the harmful habits and wasteful living that destroy so many human lives” (Faber, p. 41), was completely unknown to Friedrich Nietzsche. There is a more obvious, factual confusion exhibited by Faber’s suggestion that Nietzsche learned what he knew about Buddhist thought from his friend, the eminent Sanskritist, Paul Deussen. Faber writes that Deussen was a “pioneering student and translator of Buddhistic texts including the Sutrm of the Vedanta and the Upanishads . . . and that he continually worked on Nietzsche in an effort to make him see what he, Deussen, regarded as the positive, lifeenhancing aspects of Eastern thought” (Faber, p. 28). I would like to believe that Faber is making a sophisticated point about the hermeneutic interrelatedness of Hindu and Buddhist philosophical traditions, but he never alludes to the fact that the Veddnta Szitras and the Upani+a& are not Buddhist texts at all, but central texts of the Brahmanic tradition that most schools of Buddhism directly opposed-and Deussen was not, in fact, a scholar of Buddhist materials. Deussen’s most influential book, The Philosophy of the Upani+ads, mentions Buddhism in passing only four times and describes it simply as a doctrine of “pessimism” (pp. 51, 140, 255, 341). Nietzsche’s understanding of Buddhism, whether it was obtained from Deussen or from any other source, is that Buddhism was nothing other than the most extreme kind of pessimism, an ancient and consistent repudiation of the individual and the world. As Nietzsche characterized his own understanding of Buddhism in 1886, “Buddhistic tendency, yearning for Nothing” (The Will to Power, p. 7). It follows then, that Nietzsche’s seemingly positive remarks about Buddhism in his last writings need not be understood, in the way that Faber suggests, as a radical shift toward appreciation for newly recognized Buddhist ideals of individual health and happiness. For Nietzsche, Buddhism is no more than a “consistent type of pessimism” as compared to the “inconsistent type” of Christianity (Nietrrches We&e in Drei B&den, 1958, p. 649f), a nihilism that is even more extreme and more openly decadent than the “herd religion” of the West. As he asserts in the midst of his relative praise for Buddhism, “Buddhism is a religion for the end and fatigue of a civilization” (The Anti-Christ, Q 22). While Buddhism and Christianity are both rooted “in a monstrous disease of the will” (The Anti-Christ, $ 20), Buddhism is preferable precisely because it is so much more obviously nihilistic. As Halbfass (1988) emphasizes in his discussion of this point: For Nietzsche, Buddhism is and remains the highest manifestation of what he opposes, i.e., the repudiation of the world . , . According to Nietzsche, his own doctrine of “eternal recurrence” affirms what the Buddha denies. The special affinity which he finds between Buddhism and his own thought, is the closeness and affinity of extremes (pp. 127-128).
288
A. P. Tuck
In this way, Nietzsche’s eventual preference for Buddhism over Christianity is a preference for a doctrine that, if it were adopted in Europe, would contribute to the eventual destruction of Christian morality and Platonic philosophical presuppositions. This is what allowed Nietzsche’s grudging respect for what he perceived as a means to the desired end of European civilization. Nietzsche never saw Buddhism itself as a positive “transvaluation of values.” Its role was as the most extreme of “metaphysical pessimisms,” a religion for “late human beings” who have become “too kindly, gentle, over-intellectual, who feel pain too easily” (The Anti-Christ, $ 22). So, when the young Nietzsche first denounced the “Buddhistic negation of the will” in The Birth of Tragedy, and when, almost 20 years later, he argued in section 20 of The Anti-Christ that Buddhism is “a hundred times more real than Christianity,” he was not asserting a stance on Buddhist thought that derived from any kind of positive, appreciative familiarity with Buddhist texts, Buddhist practice, or even the works of European Buddhologists who interpreted Buddhist thought as anything other than pure negativism. In his customary manner, he was arguing from a dialectical stance that, at best, was meant to overturn the presuppositions of his readers and, at the very least, to draw these presuppositions into question. To this end, the Buddha served the same rhetorical purpose that Zarathustra, Socrates, and Christ also served throughout Nietzsche’s works. All of these figures were pragmatic weapons in the writer’s consistent attack on deeply-held beliefs, theories, and moralities, and culturally inherited assumptions. Just as Nietzsche chose the name, Zarathustra, to represent the strongest possible critique of the historical Zarathustra’s ethically dualistic system, the Buddha’s image was invoked in order to serve a specifically rhetorical-anti-Christian and anti-Buddhist-purpose. He wrote that while he himself “could be the Buddha of Europe,” he was “admittedly an antipode to the Indian Buddha” (Nachgelassene Fragmente, Siimtliche Werke, 1980, p. 109). Nietzsche was not a historian of Asian religions and was not attempting to discover a new source of truth in the “wisdom of the East.” The reader, as always, is being directly challenged by Nietzsche’s rhetoric-not offered a set of therapeutic suggestions for attaining personal happiness within conventional society. His use of Buddhism is part of a consistent, radical skepticism toward exactly those conventionalized values that are today represented by terms such as “health” and “happiness.” It is one thing to assert that there are ways of understanding Nietzschian concepts of “eternal recurrence,” “will to power, ” and “the overman” that have much in common with certain popularized varieties of modern Buddhism. While such an effort might involve one in questionable arguments for philosophical universality and determinate meaning, this comparative temptation is at least understandable. Some contemporary interpretations of certain Mahayana Buddhist teachings can, indeed, be made to sound Nietzschian. But it is quite another thing to argue that Nietzsche actually held a Zen-influenced view of the entire Buddhist tradition in the 19th century that had little or nothing in common with the contemporary European understanding of Asian materials,
On Nietzsche and Orientalism
289
and that this 1980s-style Buddhism was somehow gleaned from conversations with the Vedantist, Paul Deussen. There have been a number of attempts to demonstrate parallels between Nietzsche and Buddhism, some quite recent (cf. Mistry, 1981). As is often the case in cross-cultural comparisons, however, these attempted parallels tell us far more about the views of the interpreter than about the philosophies being interpreted. Faber’s desire for a Nietzschian Buddhism (or a Buddhist Nietzsche) is symptomatic of at least two contemporary trends. There has been, since the now-dated association of Nietzschian thought with Nazism, a consistent attempt to reconsider Nietzsche positively, to reject the simple-mindedly existential, anti-moralistic appeals to individual “will,” and to characterize him as a precursor to contemporary strategies of textual deconstruction, and antimetaphysical, anti-epistemological hermeneutics (cf. Allison, 1977). Faber is, to his credit, apparently aware of and influenced by these more contemporary, sympathetic readings of Nietzsche’s thought. Similarly, there have been innumerable efforts to present westernized and sanitized formulations of certain Buddhist (usually Mahayana) teachings as contemporary therapy (such efforts are usually marketed outside of the scholarly community familiar with Asian textual materials and religious traditions). Faber’s essay appears to be located precisely at the intersection of these two trends and, as such, is an interesting example of a significant, contemporary hermeneutic phenomenon. But the suggestion that Nietzsche found his own views expressed in what he called “Buddhism” is a confusion of contemporary interpretation with a claim about authorial intention. It should be obvious that there is always a danger of oversimplifying the extraordinarily varied and complex assortment of religious sects and philosophical schools that all claim allegiance to the teachings of the Buddha. Well before Buddhism even left India for its East Asian transformations, doctrinal differences between Mahasanghikas and Sthaviras, Sarvastivadins and Theravadins, Sautrantikas and Madhyamikas, etc., engendered literally hundreds of philosophically distinct, sectarian divisions within the tradition. At the very least, attention to the major split between Theravada and Mahayana approaches to practice and belief is a scholarly commonplace. While it is true that Nietzsche, and the European Asianists of his time, were, as yet, completely unaware of these divisions, there is no reason for anyone to continue to write as if Buddhism has ever been a single, unified doctrine or to refer, even more egregiously, to such a thing as “the wisdom of the East” (Faber, p. 44). To collapse the immensely diverse varieties of Asian thought into one simple, homogenized super-philosophy that can be made available to Westerners in homilies about health, personal integration, and hygiene is to devalue ancient traditions to the level of fortune cookie aphorisms. There is always a tendency among cross-cultural, comparatist scholars to discover simple “essences” beneath the surface of philosophical diversity and to reveal what a European or Asian thinker “was really saying.” Once a doctrine, practice or theory is given a name (such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Nietzschian perspectivism, or psychologism) that name is assumed to be a label
290
A. P. Tuck
for a “thing” that can be described-reduced to a conceptual kernel. But this is little more than what Nietzsche so often described as a beguiling illusion caused by a fascination with natural language: “The sculptor of language was not so modest as to believe that he was only giving things designations, he conceived rather that with words he was expressing supreme knowledge of things” (Human, All Too Human, p. 11). Nietzsche manipulated that illusion in his readers according Nietzsche’s
to how it suited his polemical purposes. After reading any of writings, we might be more conscious of this illusion in ourselves.
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