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103 Chapter 4 AN INTERPLAY BETWEEN ZHUANGZI AND NIETZSCHE Nietzsche knew little about Chinese thought, though he had some acquaintance with Indian Buddhism and Hindu culture,1 certainly enough to prompt his disparagement of them. Nietzsche conceived Buddhism as the highest mode of nihilism and pessimism (WP, 55, 154; A, 20). He also very briefly mentioned the Chinese tradition as an Oriental example of the overall decadence of the human race (A, 32; WP, 129), without any awareness of the fact that there was also a “fortunate accident” and “exception” in Chinese history as in Greek history. Perhaps, Nietzsche would have perfectly agreed with this if he had, by “accident,” read Zhuangzi, or such Chinese Buddhist schools as, for example,Tiantai, Huayan, or Chan Buddhism. In any case, whatever small acquaintance Nietzsche had with Chinese culture, Zhuangzi had no idea at all of the West (Europe). His thought was initiated entirely from his own life experience and the cultural environment of ancient China. With such a vast separation in time and cultural context, is it possible to bring Zhuangzi and Nietzsche together and come up with an interplay of their texts? There is not much difficulty even from the surface to see how different they are in light of their cultural backgrounds and their philosophical works. My concern here is: How much affinity or commensurability could be there between the two obviously different thinkers? Some have already recognized the affinity between these two philosophers . Joan Stambaugh, in her article “The Other Nietzsche,” suggests that Eastern mystical experience, such as Chan experience, may have been the hidden or the other Nietzsche we have largely neglected in the scholarly literature: the mystic poet and “the poetic mystic.” At the end of the article she surprisingly remarks: Apart from the reference to Dogen, this essay has not made an explicit comparison of Nietzsche with Eastern thought. It has attempted to select some strains of Nietzsche’s thought that are most consonant with an Eastern temper of experience and to let the reader reach his own conclusions about parallels and affinities.The fact that 104 LIBERATION AS AFFIRMATION Nietzsche’s own understanding of Eastern thought was pretty well mutilated by the influence of Schopenhauer does not facilitate seeing or understanding these affinities. In particular, Buddhism gets lumped together with Christianity and both pronounced “religions of exhaustion .” Temperamentally, Nietzsche was perhaps closest to Laozi and Zhuangzi with his rejection of the metaphysical background and his understanding of the world as play. (Nietzsche and Asian Thought, 30) Yet she provides little argument or articulation of this suggestive observation. She also misses certain fundamental affinities between Nietzsche and Zhuangzi. Other than J. Stambaugh and scholars who did some partial comparisons such as Graham Parkes, Zhou Guoping, and Roger Ames, Chen Gu-ying is the first Chinese scholar who did a brief comparative study of Zhuangzi and Nietzsche. But since he focused superficially on their literary and stylistic affinities, he avoided a discussion of major philosophical themes of metaphysics , language, knowledge, and morality in the works of Zhuangzi and Nietzsche. Thus, he failed to make visible the profound philosophical insights and affinities of the two philosophers. In this chapter I intend to undertake a sustained analysis of less obvious affinities and differences between Zhuangzi and Nietzsche. By interplay and cross-reading of their texts, looking at basic philosophical issues, such as language , knowledge, morality, nature, and human life, in each as well as their ultimate concerns, I hope this comparative study will illustrate what I see as their shared religiosity. GOBL ET WOR DS AND DIONYSIAN DITHYRAMB Zhuangzi and Nietzsche are explicit in claiming that human language has constructed and determined human ways of thinking and living.They would agree that language is not, as many people have believed, the “proper” representation of the “thing” it represents. Nor is it an adequation to nomos, to the thing-in-itself, or to Being. Words are only signs and metaphors used by human beings to describe and appropriate things and to communicate with each other. Both Zhuangzi and Nietzsche concluded that there is no way to reach reality through common language, invented as it is by human consciousness and human appropriation. Daoism has always been suspicious of the adequacy of language. Dao, as the nature of the world, cannot be daoed or spoken of; thus said Laozi, the founder of Daoism. According to Laozi, Dao is the origin...

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