139. Nietzsche and Eastern philosophy

With Buddhism, Nietzsche shares an engagement with the flux, shift, proliferation and transformation of phenomena in the world, without any absolute, immutable substance, including the self, which has no unified, fixed identity. This entails uncertainty, contingency, vulnerability and suffering.

With Taoism, Nietzsche shares recourse to nature, away from the artefacts of ethics, and of social and cultural rules and rituals (wu-wei, in Taoism). Nietzsche was certainly not a Confucian.

However, Buddhism seeks an escape, yielding rest and serenity, equanimity, in Nirwana. Taoism also seeks the achievement of invulnerability, serenity, in an awareness of the puniness of human life and concerns, a form of indifference, in the perspective of the vastness, all-encompassingness, unendingness, incomprehensibility and ineffability of nature.

In Western philosophy, the Stoics sought such invulnerability and serenity (ataraxia).

For Nietzsche that is escapism, decadence, a denial of life and nature. Nietzsche accepts the flux, uncertainty, strife and pain, as part of life, and as a source of strength, something to be engaged in rather than to be transcended or dodged. 

In the nihilistic rejection of immutable absolutes, as humanly impossible to achieve, or even as undesirable, Nietzsche distinguished between passive nihilism, in submission and a striving for invulnerability, and active nihilism, which engages nihilism, welcomes it as a challenge and opportunity.

With Nietzsche nature culminates in the will to power, a noble combat, an agonistic striving for transformation, not a flight from flux but engagement in it, the making of it. The sorrow and pain of life are to be embraced, to be accepted, in a love of fate, even they were to recur and recur forever.

In his early work, Nietzsche made a distinction between Apollo, as a principle of form, balance, harmony, and serenity, in art, and Dionysus, as a force of nature, creative destruction, rupture of form, and ecstasy, as I discussed in item 81 in this blog. In his later philosophy, of the will to power, Nietzsche was definitely on the Dionysian side.

The dynamism of Dionysus is reminiscent of Tao as a force of nature. For Nietzsche, the Dionysian and the Apollonian alternate, in a cycle, an eternal return of ascent and descent. The eternal return is to be accepted, even rejoiced in, taking the good and the bad.

In two preceding items in this blog I discussed Yin and Yang, where Yin is the movement towards stability, harmony, quiet, integration, nurturing, while Yang is the agonistic, strong, wilful, disintegrating force. Together, in their succession, interaction, and their merging, they drive life and nature. Is there a parallel here with the cycle of the Dionysian and the Apollonian in Nietzsche?   

In this blog I have embraced flux, in what I have called ‘imperfection on the move’, an ongoing striving for perfection without the hope or even desire of ever achieving a final end of rest and perfection. I indicated that while ultimately in Eastern philosophy Yin is the more fundamental principle. I noted that in my ‘cycle of discovery’, in line with my interest in innovation and entrepreneurship, I lean towards Yang. In that, I am a Nietzschean.