Reply to Graham Parkes: Nietzsche as Zebra: With both Egoistic Antibuddha and Nonegoistic Bodhisattva Stripes

One must stop feeling oneself as a phantastical ego! Learn step by step to get rid of the supposed individual! To detect the errors of the ego! To see through egoism as an error!

—KSA 9:11[7]; trans. Parkes¹

—in other words the infinite worth of the individual person as bearer of the life process and, consequently, his or her highest right to egoism. [. . .] In fact, anything “unegoistic” is a phenomenon of décadence.

—eKGWB/NF-1888, 22[22]

Against mediators. [. . .] Seeing things as similar and making them the same is the mark of weak eyes.

—GS 228

It is not at all necessary, and not even desirable, to side with me: on the contrary [. . .] an ironic resistance would seem an incomparably more intelligent attitude toward me.

—Nietzsche, letter to Carl Fuchs, July 29, 1888²

In one’s friend one should have one’s best enemy. You should be closest to him in your heart when you strive against him.

—ZI: “On the Friend”

While I remain confident that Nietzsche’s ideas come closer to certain types of Zen thinking than Japanese philosophers are willing to admit, I still believe that Nishitani’s mature thought, with its emphasis on the field of emptiness, may indeed comprehend and in some respects go beyond what Nietzsche has wrought. In view of the difficulty of carrying out the comparison between Nietzsche and Nishitani on these core issues—and of my expectation that the comparison will yield some nourishing fruits philosophically—I should like to finish by calling for more workers to enter this potentially fertile field of research.

—Graham Parkes, 1993³

Dear Graham,

Thank you first of all for, more than twenty years ago, calling on younger scholars such as myself to pursue a comparison of Nietzsche and Nishitani (and East Asian thought more broadly); and thank you, secondly, for your thoughtful and provocative critique of my essay in which, ten years ago, I attempted to do just that.⁴

An “open letter” is a strange genre. In these letters we are at once addressing each other and a public forum, in this case, readers of Nietzsche. I would like to begin by informing the latter of how much you have meant to me, not only as a trailblazing scholar in the endeavor to bring Western (especially nineteenth- and twentieth-century Continental) philosophy into dialogue with traditional East Asian thought and modern Japanese philosophy (especially Daoism, Zen, and the Kyoto School), but also as a friend whose generosity I first experienced when, nearly two decades ago, you responded to an out-of-the-blue email (luckily there were no spam filters at the dawn of the email age!) by offering to introduce me to one of Nishitani’s last students, Professor Tsutomu Horio, who in turn generously opened university and monastery doors for me in Kyoto. Since the time we first met in person a year later at a “Zen Symposium” in Arashiyama, I have always appreciated the fact that you have always treated me, not merely as a younger scholar walking through doors that you helped open but also as a companion philosopher on the path of bringing these Eastern and Western traditions of philosophical thinking and living into dialogue and diapraxis. I would also like to inform readers that the disagreement that will be aired here takes place in a much wider field of philosophical agreement, agreement especially about what is most inspiring in Nietzsche, in Daoism and Zen, and in Kyoto School philosophers such as Nishitani. We share a list of favorite philosophers and philosophies, even if we sometimes read them a bit differently—especially, perhaps, with regard to the manner and extent to which we read them critically as well as sympathetically.

Does the fact that we are engaging here in open (frank, as well as public) criticism of one another’s writings mean that we value truth even more than friendship? Your letter does indeed exude an air of Amicus Bret, sed magis amica veritas de Nietzsche. Yet surely both...