Nietzschean Buddhism Redux
March 27th, 2009
I’ve been trying to examine my understanding/misunderstanding of the place of eros/desire” in Buddhism and Western philosophy. Re-read Plato’s “Symposium.” (Will had “Phaedrus.” Also the “Dhamappada.”)
Yes, it’s true. I got my understanding of Buddhism mainly through Western interpreters. Jacques Maritain’s “Introduction to Philosophy,” if I remember correctly, makes a distinction between Hinduism and Buddhism that’s quite striking. He says that while 11Hinduism saw INDIVIDUAL EXISTENCE as evil, Buddhism saw EXISTENCE ITSELF all Hindus meant the return to Brahman. (The world is maya/illusion.) The Buddhist Nirvana, on the other hand, is the “cessation of life,” which meant the “cessation of desire.”
In “The Birth of Tragedy,” Nietzsche tells this story about a man who confronts the laughing Silenus about the secret of life. Silenus tells the inquirer, “Do you really want to know? … Here it is: It were better for you not to have been born. And the next best thing? To die early.”
Nietzsche acknowledges the pessimist Schopenhauer as a major influence to his o thinking. Always the onfused mind, I may have mixed all these stuff in my head.
But it’s still quite true that “eros/desire” in both Christianity and Buddhism has been, so to say, problematized. The tradition of Christianity has a wealth of discourses on the dangers posed by desire and has probably more than a number within its tradition whose solution to the problem is to extinguish it, cut it off. The Buddhist notion of detachment/equanimity appears to be quite similar to Stoicism, a kind of indifference to life’s vicissitudes. And the way I see it, this detachment/indifference can only be attained through the weakening of eros/desire.