"God in the Dock"

Scott Bradley

I have put this title in quotes because I'm sure it has already been used elsewhere, though I can't remember where. The idea of questioning "God" is an important one to me because I was for a long time a Christian and I ultimately abandoned that faith when its "God" could no longer live up to the lofty moral standards he ostensibly proclaimed. "God" must ultimately kill "God".

As an aside, I'd like to address the understandable sense of embarrassment that I feel in saying I was a born-again Christian. I do occasionally have my previous beliefs thrown in my face when I mention some of the moral absurdities of that faith. My answer is simply that when stoned on LSD and you have an incredible transformative experience packaged as Jesus, all the absurdities that go along with it are of little consequence. In other words, I did not become a Christian because I believed its doctrines but because almost accidently (it was with a laugh and as a lark that I prayed the prayer) I had my socks blown off. I saw it happen to another while my friend and I were bumming around S. California shortly thereafter. An AWOL marine, also stoned on LSD, had the same experience before my eyes, and when my friend mentioned Noah (and his ark) the marine exclaimed, "I believe, I believe!"

The revealed God of Judaism, Christianity and Islam made the critical error of identifying with certain beliefs and ‘historical’ deeds which though then acceptable are now seen as monstrous. "Hell" is, in my opinion, the most horrendous idea ever conceived by the mind of man. (Though strictly speaking Judaism has no hell — just a smoldering dump, Jesus was Jewish and thus his ideas were Jewish and likely reflected the Jewish thought of his time.) Of 'historical' events I need only mention a few: choosing one tribe above every other, Passover (being the passing over of that tribe while God murdered the firstborn of all of Egypt), raining fire and brimstone on Sodom, ordering the total genocide of the indigenous peoples of Palestine. (These are all from the Judaic root, but Christianity and Islam have made their own horrendous use of and contributions to them.) If this "God" is God, then we are in deep shit indeed.

Nietzsche wrote that every great idea must ultimately lead to its own negation. Understanding this, we can both affirm the contributions of these traditions — and they are many — and also leave them behind. Judaism gifted the West with a high moral code; yet that morality, once internalized, cannot but renounce the very God supposed to be its author. If God is in the dock, it is because he has failed of his own morality.

This is about my personal journey and I feel no crusading need to disabuse others who still believe of their faith. These things happen when they happen and not because we make them happen, or even because we ever wished them to happen.

You can check out Scott's other miscellaneous writings here.

Global Responsibility

Scott Bradley

I recently listened to a conference call talk by James O'Dea, a leading advocate for peace, in which he said (perhaps as a quote): "Inner peace is a global responsibility." This is a statement with deep spiritual implications. If world peace is something we value and something for which we feel a certain personal responsibility, then it begins in the heart of the would be peacemaker. Only those who know inner peace can truly bring peace to the world.

This has its obvious cause and effect relationship; being peace, one brings peace. But there is something else here that touches on that Daoist belief that the harmony of a sage somehow influences a larger communal context without any direct agency. This belief is something to which I feel inclined to give assent, but also hesitate to proclaim, simply because it would seem to require belief. Nevertheless, it points to a spiritual interconnectedness that we not only experience in our guts, but to which science has begun to tilt. For my part, it is not necessary, in any event, to categorically affirm this possible reality since affirmation or denial does not change what actually happens, and such an intentional and purpose-driven inclination to self-cultivation would, from the Daoist perspective, be counter-productive in any case.

A sense of "global responsibility", whatever its focus may be, begins with a sense of personal responsibility with regard to one's own being-in-the-world. Being of skeptical disposition, however, for me the question immediately arises: From whence comes this sense of global responsibility, or even of responsibility to cultivate one's own peace? For if it is founded in some religious moral imperative wearing the garb of new age sensibilities, I think it foreign to the way of spontaneity, of letting life itself have its way.

"Responsibility", in the context of the traditions to which this blog addresses itself, immediately conjures up visions of the Confucianism which Zhuangzi recognized as an impediment to both personal and communal cultivation. The imposition of 'morality' from without can only stifle the growth of the moral sense within. The Zhuangzian vision of "responsibility" is of an expression of one's innate humanity and can only be authentic when experienced as such. That that sense of responsibility does arise seems clear, but we must remain careful not to externalize and codify it, and thereby render it inauthentic once again.

It might seem like an unnecessary splitting of hairs to make this distinction between an imposed and an arising sense of responsibility since we end up with responsibility in either case, but we need to remember Nietzsche's critique of morality and the death of God in this regard: it is we who brought nihilism into the world by virtue of our having grounded truth and morality in another, supposedly 'truer' world than the one to which we actually belong. Not only does an imposed sense of responsibility result in actions counter to the values espoused ("fighting for peace"), but it sets us up for a fall into complete disenchantment with any action at all.

All this having been said, when we discover in ourselves the life-expressive impetus toward inner and global peace, we affirm from the heart that "inner peace is a global responsibility".

You can check out Scott's other miscellaneous writings here.

Beyond Good and Evil Revisited

Scott Bradley

Transcendence of all moral discrimination is at the heart of both Zhuangzi's and Nietzsche's vision of human liberation. In fact, Nietzsche entitled one of his books precisely this. Yet, as we have seen, he did not in fact truly transcend this discrimination, but instead went to war against conventional morality in an effort to establish a new morality, that of the full exercise of the will to power, self-assertion. Zhuangzi, on the other hand, overturned the moral conventions of his time, exemplified in Confucianism and Mohism, as a means to transcending all conventional morality. Having done so, he was able to "follow along with" each and every morality no matter that they are themselves contradictory. Any one of them will do for someone with no fixed and absolute commitment to illusory "Truth".

Zhuangzi's purpose in transcending morality was simple; Dao, spontaneous arising (ziran) reality, is completely amoral. Should one wish to be utterly identified with this ever-transforming reality, where no discrimination between things exists, then the transcendence of morality is essential. The "Grand Transparency" is free of all such opaqueness.

Many immediately become upset at this proposition; comments on this blog have exclaimed that pedophiles would rejoice to hear it. These are the voices of those still bound by good and evil. Yet perhaps the first thing that needs to be understood about this proposition is that it is not understood as having been inscribed in stone by the hand of God for universal application. It is not a prescription for the world, but for you. And if you cannot trust yourself to live free of the constraints of law, then it most definitely is not for you.

Yet this transcendence is transformative. Today, even as I write, people are being murdered throughout the world because their rights and wrongs differ from those of others. Christians and Muslims, Sunnis and Shia, Muslims and Buddhists, Catholics and Protestants all fight and attempt to destroy one another because they each know good and evil. It is more than a platitude that religion has been the cause of more death and destruction than any other human fixation. The transcendence of good and evil, on the contrary, is a means to peace and harmony.

But this is only secondary. It is not primarily about the world; it is about you. It is a means to bringing peace and harmony to your own heart. And this is the only way the world in its turn might experience the same.

How does it liberate individual hearts? Try it on for yourself. Stop judging and condemning yourself. Forget sagacity, and enlightenment and all the other burdens of this idea of having-to-achieve-to-be-acceptable that weigh down your existence. Understand that there are no conditions to meet, but that Dao is expressed in you just as you are. Affirm yourself.

Not so burdened? Then you are either a sage or someone who has failed in the work of self-examination; and if in this latter you see yourself blessed, it can only be hoped that the collateral damage inflicted on others is minimal.

You can check out Scott's writings on Zhuangzi here.

Play

Scott Bradley

Wang Fuzhi sums up Zhuangzi’s perspective on reality saying, "It's only the play of this wandering, nothing more." It is worth exploring how this wandering is also play.

For the child, play is largely a matter of pretending, and this, I would submit, is something of which the sage is also a master. Pretending that knows it is pretending is play. But why pretend? Nietzsche tells us that "untruth is a condition of life"; we require our daily dose of fiction to function in the world. The sage plays the game, knowing that it is a game. This is a form of transcendence.

Play is fun. And if life is not fun . . . well, that's no fun. I often speak of laughing as a form of transcendence. When we laugh at misfortune, grasping the seemingly infinite irony that is life as a whole, we transcend. And most importantly, when we laugh at ourselves, our own stupidity, our own bondage, our own 'failings', we transcend.

Seriousness has its place; but when seriousness judges and condemns, and makes of 'enlightenment' or 'awakening' some kind of driving necessity, it has become religion; it has robbed life of the possibility of playful wandering.

Playful wandering is now, just as you are, not a sage, not 'awakened', just human.

Nietzsche's Dionysian philosophy, a vision of Pan playfully cavorting through life surrounded by nubile and willing nymphs, despite the apparent tragic character of life, is another expression of this same perspective.

Yet, when I imagine Nietzsche in his elysian fields, I see him attempting to frolic while shackled to a ball and chain. He rightfully condemned 'civilization', with its creation of a "true world" as opposed to this actual world, as a great negating of life, but he formulated a response which was also steeped in negation. In declaring himself an antichrist, an immoralist, a re-creator and the like, he bound himself to the world of discrimination, and thus to negation. He went to war.

There is a great deal 'wrong' with the world and with us. Playful wandering dances on and through it all. It knows that it doesn't matter. It does not depend on salvation. It does not depend on change. It has no need of conquest. It knows only that life wants to laugh and dance and be what it is, and thus it lets it be so.

You can check out Scott's writings on Zhuangzi here.

The Grand Transparency

Scott Bradley

There is a story in the sixth chapter of the Zhuangzi in which Yen Hui, Confucius' favorite disciple, comes to his master three times to report on his 'progress'. The first and second times he declares himself to have forgotten key Confucian moral imperatives, most importantly, goodness and righteousness. 'Confucius' is pleased with Yen's progress, but tells him he has yet to truly "get it".

On his third appearance, however, Yen declares himself to "have sat-forgetting", and this startles his master who asks what this might mean. Yen responds that (I paraphrase) he has forgotten his own body, the existence of the world, and all his so-called knowledge, and this has rendered him "identical with the Grand Transparency (of nature)." (Watson)

Confucius immediately realizes that, not only has Yen "got it", but he has gone beyond his own attainment. "Once you're identical (with nature)", he exclaims, "you must be free of prejudice! Once you're transforming (with nature), you must be free from fixation!" Confucius then declares himself ready to be Yen's disciple.

This is, I believe, one of the clearest suggestions of what "free and unfettered wandering" might involve. "The Grand Transparency of nature" may be the 'truth' of nature, that it is free of every trace of discrimination, whether moral or hierarchical, and every similitude of permanence, but it is rooted in the experience of the human mind. It is not an objective 'fact' about nature, but an experience of the nature of human possibility. Were it a 'fact', there would be no transparency.

The experience of the Transparency of nature is contingent on two things, the forgetting of all opinions and the release of one's grasp on fixity. Opinions, the meat of our minds, dearly beloved and cherished, render us opaque and at odds with things as they are. "Do not seek Truth, only cease to cherish opinions," says the Xin-Xin Ming. All is in flux, ever-transforming, there is nothing fixed, not the world, not the universe, not "Being", and most importantly, not our identity. This unfixedness-of-self-identity is much more than a realization that we shall 'pass away'; it is the realization that there was never anyone to 'pass'. This is the pivot upon which the realization of transparency turns. And this is why Zhuangzi sums it all up saying, “It’s just being empty, nothing more.”

This is a possibility for the human experience, nothing more. It has nothing to do with salvation; it is not an ‘answer’ to the great questions of life. And it is entirely optional.

This is where Zhuangzi and Nietzsche part company. Both understand the need for the devaluation of all values, but whereas Zhuangzi does so to attain transparency, Nietzsche goes on to create new values in their stead. Nietzsche revels in self (“Why I Am Destiny”); Zhuangzi revels in no-fixed-self at all. Who’s to opine that one is ‘better’ than the other.

You can check out Scott's writings on Zhuangzi here.

Nietzsche VII: The Final Recurrence - Yes!

Scott Bradley

Perhaps the concept that has proven the most controversial among students of Nietzsche is his "eternal recurrence of the same", the idea that not only does history repeat itself, but that it repeats itself endlessly and in precisely the same way; you will eternally live again your life exactly as you are living it now.

It would be ridiculous, to my thinking, to believe that Nietzsche actually believed this to be the case. In fact, where he introduces the idea he begins with the hypothetical, "What if . . . ?" What if a demon visited you in your "loneliest loneliness" and told you this, how would you react? "Would it change you as you are or perhaps crush you? The question in each and every thing, 'Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?' would lie upon your action as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?"

This is a test by which to measure "how well disposed you are to yourself and life" in this very moment. If you are affirming this very moment and all of life as it presently is, then you have discovered and become "the sacred Yes" of the liberated human being. If instead, it causes you to despair, are you able to see and embrace this other possibility, this life of affirmation?

As is generally the case, what is missing is the "how". But perhaps there really is no "how", or at least no means to state it; this is a psychological exercise, the effectiveness of which depends entirely upon the immeasurable workings of you. Can this exercise help to “change you”? But what’s this about change? Affirmation begins here at the root, where you presently are, and where change is no longer an issue, and thus change spontaneously happens.

What Nietzsche has presented here is yet another spin on the task of self-examination, not at all unlike Byron Katie’s questions intended to lead us to a life of “loving what is”.

I was surprised to discover this Yes!, so much a part of my philosophy, in Nietzsche, though I have read him in the distant past. We can be sure that he did not read Zhuangzi, but did he read Zhouzi?

You can check out Scott's other miscellaneous writings here.

Nietzsche VI: Uber-Man

Scott Bradley

Before continuing with this discussion of Nietzsche's philosophy, I need to re-iterate that my responses are just that and use his thought merely as a sounding board; they are not intended to suggest a definitive understanding of Nietzsche. My understanding of his philosophy is, in fact, very superficial, and almost entirely derivative of the opinion of others.

Like the "will to power", Nietzsche's presentation of his sage, the ubermensch, or "overman" (not "superman"), has led to the belief that he laid a foundation for fascism. It would take the ignorance of a fascist, however, to believe so.

The will to power is life itself. It is not power over others, but the power over oneself which enables a life creative and transcendent.

"Overman" is an individual human being who is in the ceaseless process of overcoming the propensity for a flight from reality which our respective cultures have laid upon us. It is overcoming all the presuppositions which attempt to ground us in a false sense of permanence and being. These are the cause of nihilism, for they have set us up for this fall. Overman is Nietzsche's answer to despair.

This is the negative aspect of overman. On the positive side, overman is freeing himself so as to enjoy life to the fullest. Living his Dionysian philosophy of life affirmation, he dances and plays free of the constraints of fear and world-negation.

Nietzsche's sage is not 'realized', but ever-realizing. The process of overcoming, like becoming itself, is unending. It is ever-dynamic, like life itself.

There is much in this philosophical effort that might help us to understand more clearly how philosophical Daoism, which began with a similar project, might be useful in our own responses to our being-in-the-world. I have tried to express these here, though like that in the previous paragraph, I have largely left them as raw possibilities for those who wish to explore them.

I do have a few criticisms of Nietzsche's approach that I'll mention now. These have to do mostly with his relationship with the past and the future. I have already made mention in a previous post of his belief that humanity has "degenerated" from a more ideal state. This creates a belief in a static sense of being and robs reality of its emergent quality. Secondly, though negative critique is necessary, we cannot transcend the dualism implicit in mutually arising opposites through negation; at some point we need to transcend them. In his negation of Christianity, for example, Nietzsche saw himself as an antichrist; this is not transcendence. Thirdly, Nietzsche sees his overman as a future “salvation” and “new hope” for the earth. This introduces purpose and meaning where it has no need to be. In these cases, “he still had something he depended on.”

You can check out Scott's other miscellaneous writings here.

Nietzsche V: Frog Perspectives

Scott Bradley

Curiously, Nietzsche, like the "School of Zhuangzi" philosopher and author of the seventeenth chapter of the Zhuangzi, uses the analogy of the limits of the frog's perspective as representative of the human condition in general. (Nietzsche tells us he has borrowed it from an expression used by painters.)

The Zhuangzian well-frog begins by believing that his little world is the whole world. A sea turtle who happens by disabuses him of his folly, and the frog is amazed. The author stops there, but I have suggested that this now enlightened frog still remains in his claustrophobic well; to send down a basket and bring him into the wider world would make no difference; though different in scale, every world has its limits, every perspective is frog-like. The Zhuangzian vision of liberation is to transcend one's limits by releasing oneself from the fixed ideas which have established them in the first place. In this instance, it is the frog's belief that he can know reality that has created this boundary, and his liberation is to be had first in discovering the boundary, the false belief, and secondly in abandoning the idea that he can know reality at all.

Nietzsche tells us that the origin of metaphysics, the presumption to explain reality, is a "misunderstanding of the dream". It is, in effect, to take on the perspective of the pre-enlightened well-frog. But what's more telling in this description is the suggestion that the dream persists. All our 'answers' are interpretations of the dream within the dream. Liberation is had, not in waking up from the dreaming, but waking up to the dreaming. Our 'wandering' is playfully living in the dream, facilitated by a release from our fixed, and therefore necessarily false, interpretations of the dream.

“We are fundamentally inclined to claim,” writes Nietzsche, “that the falsest judgments . . . are the most indispensable to us; that without the fictions of logic, without measuring reality against the purely invented world . . . man could not live — that renouncing false judgments would mean renouncing life and a denial of life.” (Beyond Good and Evil; quoted by Shang, Liberation as Affirmation)

In other words, we fear that the deconstruction of our false values will lead to nihilism. But this is only the case if we cannot release ourselves into the dream; and what makes this so difficult is that it also entails releasing ourselves from our grasp on ourselves as fixed and abiding beings. The great failing of existentialism as expressed in the likes of Camus was that it continued to cling to the presuppositions which were the cause of their own demise. “Cling to hope,” says Chen Jen, “and despair will cling to you.” Believe in the need for a raison d’etre, a reason to be, and nihilism is unavoidable once the sea turtle has opened our eyes.

Again, who killed God? We did; when we made him in our own image and placed him like humpty-dumpty on a finite wall.

You can check out Scott's writings on Zhuangzi here.

Nietzsche IV: Perspectivism

Scott Bradley

The similarities between Nietzsche's thought and that of Zhuangzi are striking; since it is unlikely that the former was ever exposed to any substantial part of the Zhuangzi, it would seem that this path has roots in a common human experience.

Zhuangzi introduces us to a kind of perspectivism in which we become aware that our points of view are dependent upon the points from which we view. The rights and wrongs of the Confucians and Mohists therefore cancel each other out. Perspectivism does not therefore cancel out either, however, but simply acknowledges that our truths are relative. Understanding this, the Zhuangzian clings to no one, fixed articulation of truth as a means to wandering unfixedly in no-truth, while simultaneously affirming the rights and wrongs of others. It understands all truths as partial.

Nietzsche's "perspectivism" goes a step further in its critique of truth. Human beings are "artistically creating subjects"; all 'truth' is a subjectively created interpretation of reality inextricably intertwined with our unique "interpretive forces" — we make our own truth. "There is no truth that corresponds objectively to things we confront," writes Ge Ling Sheng. "There are only perspectives mediated by our wills, affects, sensations, beliefs, and physical bodies..."

This perspective is important to both philosophers because, in pulling the rug out from under our presumption of fixed and metaphysically grounded truth, it facilitates a new and more authentic (honest) interface with our world experience. For Zhuangzi, it enables release into and playful wandering in the Unknown. For Nietzsche, it suggests a "Dionysian philosophy" that affirms life as a becoming which includes both an arising and a passing away, and in that context, a life embraced as it is, not as we would have it be. His "play" is the play of the worldly Pan; Zhuangzi's play is of the spirit.

You can check out Scott's writings on Zhuangzi here.

Nietzsche III: A Sense of History

Scott Bradley

In his critique of metaphysics as essentially a denial of reality as it actually is, Nietzsche points out the vital importance of a sense of history in our philosophizing. This goes way beyond mere human history, of course; to begin there would be to ascribe to the human a value that history itself does not give it.

One thing of which we become aware if we allow ourselves to be informed by history is that it is largely accidental. Our mores are accidental, not written on stone tablets by the hand of God. Chances are that if you are a Muslim or a Hindu it is because you were born into a family and a culture that was Muslim or Hindu. Religious belief is, on the whole, accidental.

But perhaps more importantly, an historical sense relativizes humanity itself by understanding that it too is accidental and unnecessary. A major point in my "Tao in the Age of Dinosaurs" post of long ago was to make this observation. Dao, if understood in the limited sense of 'happening', was ever much as present in the Jurassic as in the present age. Indeed, it is the lack of the human and every consideration of morality in that age which brings into bold relief the folly of our present self-absorbed anthropocentrism.

One criticism I have of Nietzsche's critique as I have so far come to understand it, however, is his repeated assertion that humanity has "degenerated"; there was, at least in a comparative sense, a previous Golden Age. This is, of course, a significant theme throughout most religious philosophizing and is found, speaking only of traditions related to the special interests of this blog, in Confucianism, the 'Daoism' of Laozi, and in a more limited sense, in Zhuangzi. This is, I think, a failure on Nietzsche's part to fully apply his own sense of history to the human. "Lack of historical sense," he writes, "is the family failing of all philosophers; many . . . even take the recent manifestation of man . . . as the fixed form from which one has to start out." It is equally mistaken to take some past manifestation of man as the place from which to start out.

Reality, as human experience, whatever else it may or may not be, is emergent, an arising. Humanity, irrespective of what it was or presently is, has no golden past, nothing to which it needs to return. This is the lesson of an historical sense. Our only measure is against what we presently are in the context of what we might presently be. And that, in the context of an historical sense, is ultimately of no import at all.

You can check out Scott's other miscellaneous writings here.

Nietzsche II: The Will to Power

Scott Bradley

One thing that has always put me off of Nietzsche is his emphasis on "the will to power". One immediately thinks of fascism, a phenomenon for which he has sometimes been wrongfully accused as having laid a foundation. Being of Daoist persuasion in matters of the use of power, the concept seems even more alien. But then, I've never understood what the concept means. Nor, to be honest, do I now; but no matter, I'm going to forge on here and say what it means to me, based on one mere mention (thus far) of the concept in Ge's Affirmation as Liberation.

The first thing we need to say of the will to power, and the thing which immediately clears the field of a great deal of misunderstanding, is that it is about gaining power in one's own life; it has nothing to do with power over others.

I began this project of growing a philosophy of personal liberation about five years ago principally because I realized I was most definitely not in control of myself; I did not like who I was; I did not like how I behaved. I was full of anger and miserable. I cannot claim that I have experienced complete liberation since then, but I have, I think, made significant progress. Here again is an opportunity to say that despite perhaps sometimes coming across (in word) as someone of spiritual achievement, I remain very much a work in progress. Don't let me fool you!

The will to power, like the will to live, fits under the rubric of life itself. It is what life is and does. It is the desire to be in control of one's own life, specifically in the self-world interface, that is, in one's response to the world. If one sees the greatest freedom in giving up the manipulative power of self in favor of allowing life to flow freely and be what it is, as I do, still this is an exercise of the will to power. We have the power to surrender. We have the power to release our white-knuckled grip on life and all the artificial, life-negating beliefs that that entails. True power is the power to let it go.

For Nietzsche, the exercise of the will to power, was first and foremost an act of “supreme self-examination” by which he sought to eradicate in himself every false, inherited value so as to be able to recreate new and honest values for himself. Honest values are those which accord with life as it is actually experienced. This is the existentialists’ ‘authenticity’; Sartre’s “good faith”; Confucius’ ‘sincerity’; Zhuangzi’s ‘genuineness’.

As a whole, humanity remains in incredible bondage. We are victims of millennia of harmful interpretations of the world. We are victims of our own emotional demons. But mostly we are victims of having evolved as we have, which is to say we are really not victims at all; we simply are as we are. The recognition of the will to power as an expression of life allows a renewed effort to take control of who we are and to find liberation in precisely that. Take control.

You can check out Scott's other miscellaneous writings here.

Nietzsche I: Who Killed God?

Scott Bradley

I have finished Ge Ling Sheng's initial treatment of Zhuangzi's philosophy (Liberation as Affirmation: The religiosity of Zhuangzi and Nietzsche); he next turns to Nietzsche. Before going there, I'll presume to critique what I've read so far. Fortunately, my initial criticisms of opaqueness of meaning and gross grammatical mistakes seem to have been largely applicable to only his opening pages. As to content, I was a bit disappointed in his presentation of Zhuangzi's philosophy, not because I disagreed with him, but because I was hopeful of new insights. Still, there are some helpful explanations which render it a profitable read thus far.

If I figure I've a decent (intellectual) grasp of Zhuangzi, I cannot say the same for Nietzsche. (Just spelling his name proves to be a challenge.) Thus, I already have a sense of having gained helpful insight into his thought which is very much applicable to the entire project of growing a philosophy of personal liberation.

Truth is who. Nietzsche begins with a negative critique of the concept of truth as espoused in the West. Truth is not an objective reality above and beyond the world, but is preceded by and is an expression of the "will to life". He does not ask "What is truth?", but "Why do we seek it?" The answer is that we seek to affirm our individual lives. And we do this because this is what life does. Life is affirmation. Truth is who because it is the affirming answer which arises from every individual's personal existential reality. It is perspectival.

The sum of Western philosophizing and religionizing, Nietzsche tells us, has been an effort to establish an otherworldly, life- and reality-negating, absolute, immoveable and permanent "Truth". We have set ourselves up for a fall into nihilism. Nietzsche, when he says "God is dead", simply echoes the spirit of his age; he is not himself a nihilist, but someone trying to recreate value out of the rubble. Who killed God? Christianity and Western philosophy killed God by having introduced absolutes into a world of impermanence and flux. Truth, in the Western sense, is a negation of life as it really is.

Nietzsche’s personal project of self-liberation was a “revaluation of all values”, “an act of supreme self-examination”. He sought to discover the false, imposed values in himself so as to freely create his own. Our values are typically ‘imposed’ because they are inherited; we have been born into them. Freedom is to be had in finding those values which truly affirm our actual experience of being in the world.

How this parallels Zhuangzi’s project is quite obvious. He, too, endeavored to free himself from everything artificially “fixed”, whether it be truth or the concept of self, in a world of unfixedness. If he was more successful, and I think he was, it was perhaps because he was not already a casualty of the psychological trauma of the complete collapse of his culture, the Warring States Period not withstanding.

You can check out Scott's writings on Zhuangzi here.

The First Transmetaphysician

Scott Bradley

I have finally broken down and bought some new books; in recent years I have only bought books found in used book stores, a somewhat haphazard way to proceed in one’s education. My first purchase is Liberation as Affirmation: The religiosity of Zhuangzi and Nietzsche by Ge Ling Shang. With a title like that (despite the unfortunate "religiosity"), how could I have held out for so long?!

Ge's basic thesis is that both these philosophers, despite the substantial differences between them, saw the affirmation of life as a path to spiritual liberation. In the case of Zhuangzi, he begins his argument by contrasting Zhuangzi's eschewal of all metaphysics with Laozi's incipient metaphysics. I won't go into the details of his argument. Suffice it to say that Laozi, though he tells us that "the Dao that can be daoed [spoken] is not the Constant Dao", in effect makes Dao the Origin of things, and thus itself a something, despite calling it nothing (wu). For this reason he has been called "the first Chinese metaphysician".

Zhuangzi, on the other hand, completely deconstructs this metaphysics and transcends the Being/Non-being (you/wu) dualism, declaring them mere mental constructs and reaffirming Laozi's apparently original insight that Dao is indeed utterly un-dao-able. He introduces wuwu, (“no-nothingness”). Thus, Ge dubs Zhuangzi "the first transmetaphysician".

Does any of this matter? In a very real sense it does not matter at all; transcendence in general is not dependent on any particular interpretation of reality — we need not get it 'right' to get it. But in the case of Zhuangzi's philosophy of spiritual liberation it matters very much indeed.

Consider, if you will, this analogy: Zhuangzi wishes to launch his heart into the total freedom of undifferentiated vastness. ("The vast wilds of open nowhere.") His launch pad is not-knowing. His fuel is non-attachment to anything fixed (a kind of antigravity drive). And now, just as the rocket of his heart prepares to launch, that last structural umbilical cord, the ultimate question of what reality is (or is not), falls away; he stands alone and metaphysically naked. And thus his lift-off and escape velocity is achieved; and he "wanders in the palace of not even anything", or more to the point, "not even nothing".

But there is another, more philosophical reason why this transcendence of Being/Non-being duality matters. "If wu [Non-being] was conceived as the real Being of beings, the whole world of becoming would be denied as a real world," writes Ge. In other words, if we wish to affirm life, it is not helpful to declare it unreal, illusory, maya. It may all be a dream, but then awakening to the dream is awakening within the dream, and that, Zhuangzi would tell us, is an occasion for still more, happier dreaming. Dream on. Affirm life, together with all things.

If all this seems too complicated, just remember: It’s not wu or you, but wuwu (or, if you prefer, haha).

You can check out Scott's writings on Zhuangzi here.