Nietzsche on anatta

Your world stands on your immediate experience in the same way that a tree stands on its trunk.

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From Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, 54:

What, at bottom, is the whole of modern philosophy doing? Since Descartes – and indeed rather in spite of him than on the basis of his precedent – all philosophers have been making an assault on the ancient soul concept under the cloak of a critique of the subject-and-predicate concept – that is to say, an assault on the fundamental presupposition of Christian doctrine. Modern philosophy, as an epistemological skepticism, is, covertly or openly, anti-Christian: although, to speak to more refined ears, by no means anti-religious. For in the past one believed in “the soul” as one believed in grammar and the grammatical subject: one said “I” is the condition, “think” is the predicate and conditioned – thinking is an activity to which a subject must be thought of as cause. Then one tried with admirable artfulness and tenacity to fathom whether one could not get out of this net – whether the reverse was not perhaps true: “think” the condition, “I” conditioned; “I” thus being only a synthesis produced by thinking. Kant wanted fundamentally to prove that, starting from the subject, the subject could not be proved – nor could the object: the possibility of an apparent existence of the subject, that is to say of “the soul,” may not always have been remote from him, that idea which, as the philosophy of the Vedanta, has exerted immense influence on earth before.

(In a preceding passage Nietzsche distinguished between a Germanic “Northern” Christianity and a Mediterranean “Southern” Christianity. When reading Nietzsche, I try to keep his attitude toward surfaces in the front of my mind. Unlike things, opposite things are sealed into the same skin and taken for identical. Especially notice his designations for “Christ”. “The Redeemer” and “the Crucified” should never be taken for synonyms. The person designated by “the founder of Christianity” is ambiguous; the singular article is plainly ironic.)

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Extending this thought: the substance of thinking – the language, the metaphors, the methods, the sense of relevance – where does that originate? There is a sense in which all things are founded on the immediacy of phenomena, but the questions of what elements of the phenomenal life-world are taken up and structured, and how and for what purpose the structuring is attempted and accomplished leads off beyond both the immediacy of phenomena and the (apparent) immediacy of the ego. It is clear that our “individuality” is articulated from a culture who transcends us. This realization, if it persuades you, cannot leave your morality intact. It changes absolutely everything.

 

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