Even while proclaiming that God is dead, Nietzsche often praises Islam and explicitly endorses the Laws of Manu. His praise of Islam and the Laws of Manu is usually tied to a critique of Christianity. Nietzsche’s own social ethic, based in Will to Power, advocates the exploitation of the weak. Tariq Ramadan often speaks appreciatively of Nietzsche, but his vision of social justice seems very similar to the Christian social ethic that Nietzsche constantly attacks. This essay examines the role that (...) Islam plays for Nietzsche and the role that Nietzsche plays for Ramadan. Despite their differences, both thinkers criticize the provincial tendencies in Western thought. (shrink)

Статтю присвячено дослідженню звернення Ф. Ніцше до буддизму. Філософський аналіз його творів здійснюється з точки зору буддійської «філософії порожнечі». Згадки про буддизм присутні у більшості праць мислителя, однак вони мають неоднозначний й суперечливий характер, що було зумовлено відсутністю в буддології другої половини ХІХ ст. адекватного уявлення про засадниче для буддійської думки поняття – «порожнечу» (шуньята). На прикладі окремих паралелей показано близькість ідей Ніцше і буддизму (замежовість добра і зла, абсолютний пріоритет істинного пізнання, переоцінка всіх цінностей і шунья-вада Наґарджуни та ін.). (...) Висловлюється також припущення про можливість ознайомлення Ніцше з текстом «Дгаммапади». Здійснений аналіз дає підстави стверджувати, що Ніцше інтуїтивно передчував майбутні відкриття академічної буддології, причому його розуміння буддизму виявлялося більш адекватним глибинній філософській думці буддизму (філософії порожнечі), ніж панівний за тієї доби «культ Ніщо». (shrink)

Give style to your character, a great and rare art.Nietzsche Gay Science What are we to make of Nietzsche? There has been an explosion of scholarship over the past twenty years, much of it revealing and insightful, a good deal of it controversial if not polemical. The controversy and polemics are for the most part straight from Nietzsche, of course, and the scholarly disputes over what he ‘really’ meant are rather innocuous and often academic compared with what Nietzsche meant with (...) his conscientiously inflammatory rhetoric and hyperbole. We have been treated to extended debates about Nietzsche's politics, his attacks on Christianity and morality, his famed notion of the übermensch and his less lampooned doctrine of the ‘eternal recurrence’. We have recently heard Nietzsche reinterpreted as an analytic philosopher, as a deconstructionist, as a feminist, even as a closet Christian and a liberal. Stephen Aschheim suggests in his recent book that Nietzsche provides us with something like a Rorschach test, inviting readers with amazingly different commitments and ideologies to ‘make their own Nietzsche’. But there is another approach to Nietzsche, something quite different from interpreting him in terms of his various ‘theses’ and positions, unpacking his ‘system’ or repeating unhelpfully that he displayed no such coherence and consistency, something more than finding out ‘who’ Nietzsche is as opposed to what we have made out of him. The simplest way of getting at this alternative approach might be to ask, what Nietzsche would make of us? I grant that this is a bit cryptic, and it invites a variety of unflattering answers. But I think it is very much in the spirit of what he are all about. It is an intimately personal approach to Nietzsche, an approach that will, no doubt, be somewhat different for each and every one of us. But that, too, of course, is just what Nietzsche would have demanded. (shrink)

Abstract In what ways was Nietzsche right, from a Buddhist perspective, and where did he go wrong? Nietzsche understood how the distinction we make between this world and a higher spiritual realm serves our need for security, and he saw the bad faith in religious values motivated by this need. He did not perceive how his alternative, more aristocratic values, also reflects the same anxiety. Nietzsche realised how the search for truth is motivated by a sublimated desire for symbolic security; (...) philosophy's attempt to create the world reflects the tyrannical will?to?power, becoming the most ?spiritualised? version of the need to impose our will. Insofar as truth is our intellectual effort to grasp being symbolically, however, Nietzsche overlooks a different reversal of perspective which could convert the ?bad infinite? of heroic will into the good infinite of disseminating play. What he considered the crown of his system?eternal recurrence?is actually its denouement. Having seen through the delusion of Being, Nietzsche still sought a Being within Becoming. Nietzsche is able to affirm the value of this moment only by making it recur eternally. Rather than the way to vanquish nihilism, will?to?power turns out to be pure nihilism, for nihilism is not the debacle of all meaning but our dread of that debacle and what we do to avoid it. (shrink)

The article examines two claims made by Antoine Panaïoti: (1) That both Nietzsche and Buddhists denounce the self as a misleading fiction. (2) That Buddhist compassion is close to a “compassion of strength” that Nietzsche approves. This article agrees with (1) and disagrees with (2). The descriptive metaphysical commitments of Nietzsche and Buddhism are subordinate to their divergent normative projects. Both reject a single, enduring, and independent self; but where Mahāyāna Buddhism advocates care or compassion toward all sentient beings, Nietzsche (...) questions the value of compassion, holding that suffering is not bad in itself. Some recent commentators suggest that a text by the Buddhist philosopher Śāntideva offers an argument from “no‐self” to universal compassion. Nietzsche disputes this connection; and Śāntideva's Madhyamaka position, in which nothing has an intrinsic nature, cannot easily counter Nietzsche's claim that suffering is not intrinsically bad. Nietzsche's privileging of states of “becoming,” “discovering,” or “creating” oneself sets him deeply at odds with Buddhism. For Buddhists the fundamentally problematic attitude is a pre‐theoretical sense of self, “egoism,” or “self‐grasping” which is at the root of human craving. Agreeing with the philosophical claim that there is no self is not sufficient to dispel this pre‐theoretical orientation. (shrink)

Two models of human perfection proposed by Nietzsche and the Buddha are investigated. Both the overman and the arahant need practice and individual effort as key to their realization, and they share roughly the same conception of the self as a construction. However, there are also a number of salient differences. Though realizing it to be constructed, the overman does proclaim himself through his assertion of the will to power. The realization of the true nature of the self does not (...) lead the overman to seek the way to be released from saṃsara as does the arahant. On the contrary, he rejoices in the eternally recurring situation. The arahant, however, has totally relinquished any attachment to the self, constructed or otherwise. The arahant does not care about the Eternal Recurrence, as he only focuses on the present moment. Finally, they are both beyond good and evil, but in a substantively different way. (shrink)