Beyond Good and Evil? A Buddhist critique of Nietzsche

In what ways was Nietzsche right, from a Buddhist perspective, and where did he go wrong? Nietzsche understood how the distinction we make between this world and a higher spiritual realm serves our need for security, and he saw the bad faith in religious values motivated by this need. He did not perceive how his alternative, more aristocratic values, also reflects the same anxiety. Nietzsche realised how the search for truth is motivated by a sublimated desire for symbolic security; philosophy's attempt to create the world reflects the tyrannical will‐to‐power, becoming the most ‘spiritualised’ version of the need to impose our will. Insofar as truth is our intellectual effort to grasp being symbolically, however, Nietzsche overlooks a different reversal of perspective which could convert the ‘bad infinite’ of heroic will into the good infinite of disseminating play. What he considered the crown of his system—eternal recurrence—is actually its denouement. Having seen through the delusion of Being, Nietzsche still sought a Being within Becoming. Nietzsche is able to affirm the value of this moment only by making it recur eternally. Rather than the way to vanquish nihilism, will‐to‐power turns out to be pure nihilism, for nihilism is not the debacle of all meaning but our dread of that debacle and what we do to avoid it.     

The Dark Side of Desire: Nietzsche,Transhumanism, and Personal Immortality

Nietzsche has become embroiled in two interesting twenty‐first century debates about advancing technology and its impact on human life, especially its meaning/value. The first focuses on Nietzsche himself and is concerned with the extent to which his views align with those of transhumanism. The second involves the not so blatantly Nietzsche‐centric question of whether or not immortality, or radical life‐extension, is desirable. Given that the desire for immortality, or at least some more feasible (but not so permanent) approximation of it, is strongly associated with transhumanism, it seems that these two debates have some fairly significant overlap. Establishing what Nietzsche ultimately believes about such a core transhumanist issue will go a long way toward determining how sympathetic he would be to the transhumanist cause in general. I argue that while his views do not commit him to an all‐encompassing disdain for immortality, his intolerance for immortality‐seekers means that he might only be open to some of the more fringe understandings of transhumanism.     

What is “Good” Technique? How to Teach it? Personal Reflections on Psychoanalytic Training

There is an intense interest in the interactional process across the varying psychoanalytic schools of thought. The analytic relationship itself, in all of its complexity, is the vehicle for our work. These advances raise the question of what we mean by technique these days, a question that has implications for analytic training and supervision. In this paper, the author reflects back on his analytic training experience, specifically at how two of his supervisors regarded technique, how it was taught, and the various ways in which it was communicated. In looking back at these supervisory experiences, the author examines how these teaching analysts embodied some of what they had to teach. The author shows what was mutative across these training experiences in terms of what was needed in order to grow—what facilitated his own development as an analyst and contributed towards the cultivation of his own style.     

Carnapian explications,experimental philosophy,and fruitful concepts

It seems natural to think that Carnapian explication and experimental philosophy can go hand in hand. But what exactly explicators can gain from the data provided by experimental philosophers remains controversial. According to an influential proposal by Shepherd and Justus, explicators should use experimental data in the process of ‘explication preparation’. Against this proposal, Mark Pinder has recently suggested that experimental data can directly assist an explicator’s search for fruitful replacements of the explicandum. In developing his argument, he also proposes a novel aspect of what makes a concept fruitful, namely, that it is taken up by the relevant community. In this paper, I defend explication preparation against Pinder’s objections and argue that his uptake proposal conflates theoretical and practical success conditions of explications. Furthermore, I argue that Pinder’s suggested experimental procedure needs substantial revision. I end by distinguishing two kinds of explication projects, and showing how experimental philosophy can contribute to each of them.     

Discovering Multiple Identities among Italian Non-Heterosexual Men in a Cruising Context

For many men in modern Western societies it is not uncommon to have anonymous same-sex acts in cruising places with a varying frequency depending on their biographical history. Specific identities of men cruising for same-sex acts (cruisers) in a park located in a North Italy city were investigated. In this study 57 men were interviewed by three different methods (individually, couple interviews, and one focus group of friends). A pragmatic approach was followed throughout the analysis of the data, drawing from a number of analytic strategies, including constant-comparative, typographic, and narrative methods. Queer theory and queer historiography were also blended into the examinations of the men??s lives. Cruisers?? identities consisted of three elements: self-perception, or what an individual felt or perceived about himself and his contexts; experiences, or what and/or how he behaved or acted; and interpretations drawn from the cruiser??s experiences, or the meanings he ascribed to himself and his life concerning his experiences, in juxtaposition to what he perceived as the normative values of the contexts of which he was a part. Six identity types among cruisers were delineated, providing evidence of different ways non-heterosexual men identify in cruising places. Understanding the nuances of cruisers?? identities will prevent other researchers from extrapolating from only the visible elements or actions of this population.     

The Kant and Race Debate: A Frederick Douglass Intervention

Samuel Fleischacker is interested in two questions that are—what he refers to as—a rephrasing of three implications Charles Mills takes away from his encounter with Kant: (1) Is Kant's moral philosophy racist at its core? and (2) Whether it is or not, how should we respond to the fact that Kant displays open racism in some of his writings when we study, teach, or try to make use of his purportedly egalitarian teachings? Frederick Douglass was an abolitionist who wrestled with similar questions regarding the liberatory and inclusive nature of emancipatory documents like the Constitution. In this essay, I want to consider Douglass's changing views on this issue and reasons behind them to think about how he might offer insights into this current debate concerning Kant and race. In doing so, I will consider to what extent Fleischacker adheres to Douglass's guidelines on this matter as he makes his case. I then offer suggestions on how to move forward.     

When the External Conflict Quietly Invades the Intimacy of the Therapeutic Dyad: Reflections on Conducting Therapy Within the Context of Political Upheaval

This article highlights the issue of how the practice of psychoanalytic therapy is affected by its being conducted within the context of war and terror. The author confides not having given this question any systematic thought prior to writing the article, in spite of having lived and worked for decades in that context. He shows how his personal history and the course of his career as a therapist were intertwined with the history of the political conflict, and politically involved though he was, he seems to have vertically split-off its potential effect on his therapeutic work. Four vignettes are presented to explore the clinical and ethical dilemmas he faced under these circumstances, and an attempt is made to seek some answers.     

Nietzsche’s Questioning

Abstract

When Nietzsche is called a radical philosopher, it is (among other reasons) because he claims to call into question what other thinkers take for granted. In the article I concentrate on the way in which Nietzsche asks his questions, and how his questions (and the vocabulary which he uses to express his questions) develop through his writings. The article points out how Nietzsche gradually discovers his guiding question and how this search reaches its climax around 1886. This guiding question turns out to be a practical or existential one: ‘To what extent can truth endure incorporation?’ (FW/GC 110 KSA 3.471).     

Of Innocence and Experience: Commentary on Paper by Stuart A. Pizer

In providing the background to a pivotal session, Stuart Pizer reveals his clinical work as an unsupervised neophyte, prior to his own analysis and analytic training. These early therapeutic efforts were flawed, leaving Pizer at times “grimacing with mortification 26 years after the fact.” But they were also extraordinarily helpful to the patient. Schaffer discusses the challenge of supervising similarly talented beginners: how does one teach psychoanalysis without desiccating a treatment? How does one teach a relational approach, with no “basic model” and few rules, to a beginning analyst infused with an unformulated, yet often passionate, sense of what is “curative”? Pizer recognizes that were he to meet the same patient today, he would not conduct the same treatment. Now trained and analyzed, not to mention more cautious and “worldweary,” Pizer would not do what he did then. But what if he were the supervisor then? Schaffer concludes her discussion by asking Pizer how he, now a seasoned analyst, would supervise his early therapist self.     

Jean Améry: Resentment as Ethic and Ontology

Against the view that trauma cripples the survivor??s ability to account for his or her own experience, Jean Améry, a survivor of Auschwitz, argued that trauma speaks a language of its own. In this language, what may be taken as a clinical symptom, the inability to let go of a traumatic past, is actually an ethical stance on behalf of history??s victims. Améry wrote about aging in similar terms. Aging and death are an assault on the values of life, an assault that Améry rejected with equal vigor, and in much the same terms, as he rejected the history that does not stop with the Holocaust. In the second case, Améry is mistaken. Aging and death, allowed to proceed at a natural pace, serve life, the succession of generations. This argument is pursued by comparing Améry??s position with that of a large group of Holocaust survivors. It may appear as if Améry??s argument about the Holocaust has little to do with his argument about aging. In fact, they are related, to the detriment of both arguments.     

Fried and Freud on the Acropolis; on duality in the base of psychoanalytic thinking

Freud was conflicted in relation to his religious background. On the one hand, he was very clear on his adherence to a scientific Weltanschauung. On the other, he was fascinated by the Moses figure and one may see a Judaist structure in his way of thinking. The aim of this paper is to reflect on this conflict and the question of faith in psychoanalysis. After looking at object and method in religion and psychoanalysis, the authors go into the concept of ‘psychic reality’ and its change in the history of psychoanalysis. Through an analysis of Freud’s A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis and the function of literature, it is claimed that faith may be seen as a condition for the sense of experiential reality.     

Instances of Decision Theory in Plato's Alcibiades Major and Minor and in Xenophon's Memorabilia

This essay discusses Socrates' use of hypothetical choices as an early version of what was to become in the twentieth century the discipline of decision theory as expressed by one of its prominent proponents, F. P. Ramsey. Socrates' use of hypothetical choices and thought experiments in the dialogues is a way of reassuring himself of an interlocutor's philosophical potential. For example, to assess just how far Alcibiades is willing to go to attain his goal of being a great Athenian leader, we employ Ramsey's concept of Mathematical Expectation. Mathematical Expectation operates on the assumption that it is not enough to measure probability; we must also measure our belief to apportion our belief to the probability. In other words, it illustrates how strongly or to what degree a person holds a particular belief. If a person's belief in X lacks enough doubts to cancel the belief out, the probability of his acting on this belief is higher than if his belief in X was plagued by a greater number of doubts.     

Erich Fromm als Psychotherapeut

Erich Fromm (1900?C1980) was a co-founder of the Frankfurt Psychoanalytic Institute and the William Alanson White Institute in New York and finally he founded a training institute of his own in Mexico. However, he never intended to create a therapeutic school of his own. Furthermore, he published hardly anything about the so-called psychoanalytic techniques. All the more informative is the report of Ruth Lesser about her supervisions with Fromm. She describes how Fromm reacted to the presented cases, what kind of a role repression, resistance, transference and countertransference play in the therapeutic relationship and how strongly interested he was in the socially shaped unconscious intentions of the patient. The straightforwardness of the intervention style of Fromm is impressively described both in his empathy and in his confrontation with the unconscious reality. In the last part of the article Fromm??s understanding of the psychoanalytic situation is reflected and the characteristics of his psychoanalytic treatment method are outlined.     

An un‐Rortyan defence of Rorty's pragmatism

An identification is made of the core metaphilosophical, philosophical, and intellectual history theses in Richard Rorty's pragmatism. Their rationale is displayed and it is argued that his metaphilosophical theses are very much dependent on certain of his non‐metaphilosophical philosophical theses, most centrally his anti‐representationalism. Questions emerge about the status and justification of these theses. Rorty, in his programmatic pronouncements, resists providing a vindication of them. Seeking to avoid what has been called performative contradictions, he regards it as sufficient to provide the best narrative going of what is to be said here. It is argued that a more straightforward defence can be provided that does not depart from his holism or his historicism with its setting aside of claims of necessity.     

‘Too black or not black enough’: Social identity complexity in the political rhetoric of Barack Obama

The election of the first African‐American President of the United States, Barack Obama, has been widely recognised as an extraordinary milestone in the history of the United States and indeed the world. With the use of a discursive psychological approach combined with central theoretical principles derived from social identity and self‐categorisation theories, this paper analyses a corpus of speeches Obama delivered during his candidacy for president to examine how he attended to and managed his social identity in his political discourse. Building on a social identity model of leadership, we examine specifically how Obama mobilises political support and social identification by building an identity for himself as a prototypical representative of the American people, notwithstanding the protracted public debate within both the White and Black American communities that had questioned and contested Obama's identity. Moreover, we demonstrate how Obama managed the dilemmas around his identity by actively crafting an in‐group identity that was oriented to an increasingly socially diverse America—a diversity that he himself exemplified and embodied as a leader. As an ‘entrepreneur’ of identity, Obama's rhetorical project was to position himself as an exceptional leader, whose very difference was represented as ‘living proof’ of the widely shared collective values that constitute the ‘American Dream’. Drawing on social identity complexity theory, we suggest that by providing more inclusive and complex categories of civic and national identity, Obama's presidency has the potential to radically transform what it means to be a prototypical in‐group member in America. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Brain transplants and possible worlds: A response to Beck

I am very grateful to Simon Beck for his thoughtful response to my paper “Transplanting Brains?” (2016). Needless to say, he raises more issues than I can hope to answer in a brief response. While Beck seemingly feels that the deck has been stacked against him, I think that the majority of his criticisms result from misconceptions and misunderstandings that I intend to straighten out in what follows. Before proceeding, I would like to draw attention to a worry that is lurking in the shadows. Perhaps Beck and I talk at cross purposes. While Beck is concerned with a metaphysical theory of personal identity that supposedly holds across all possible worlds—and as such places heavy importance on counterfactuals and intuitions—I am concerned only with the natural world with the aim of generating empirically substantiated hypotheses about how things really are when it comes to persons persisting through time. Now, here is a disclaimer: If the natural world does not exhaust reality, then my discussion is only partial. It goes without saying that most contemporary philosophers given a choice between going with science and going with intuitions, go with science.     

The mobile frontiers of Piaget’s psychology. From academic tourism to interdisciplinary collaboration / Las fronteras móviles de la psicología de Piaget. Del turismo académico a la colaboración interdisciplinaria

Jean Piaget’s (1896–1980) interdisciplinarity was related to his psychology in several ways. First, he was a simple tourist of other fields: an interested outsider. But as he became increasingly involved in the professionalization of the discipline, he moved through different contexts that constrained the possibilities for successful action in new and different ways. To make these clear, we adopt a little-known aspect of his later epistemological framework: the open hierarchy of levels. This then affords new perspectives of his life, his work, his theory and his location in the history of both Swiss psychology and French psychology. It also outlines his reasoning regarding the necessity of a disciplined approach to interdisciplinary collaboration, institutionalized in the founding of his International Centre for Genetic Epistemology. We therefore come not only to a fuller understanding of how Piaget thought scientific knowledge develops, but also of how the boundaries of scientific disciplines are pushed back.     

“Stony ground but not entirely”

Even though Alain Badiou depicts himself and his philosophy as “militant atheist” there is, as he himself has pointed out, nevertheless several theological notions present in his work. This presence of theological language is not restricted to his book on the Apostle Paul, but can be found throughout his work. This paper focuses on Badiou’s substantial use of the term “grace” as a metaphor for the exceptional occurrence that he defines in philosophical terms as an “event”. The aim of the paper is to identify the context in which Badiou comes to use, and the sources from which he draws the metaphor of “grace”, and thus to contribute to a more precise understanding of what he means by this metaphor. The paper will identify the key instances in which Badiou employs the term “grace” in an effort to clarify how he understands it and what ends he intends it to serve. And in contrast to the existing research concerning the issue of grace, in which there has been a tendency to centre the attention almost entirely on Badiou’s book on Paul, it will consider a number of different instances in which he uses this term.     

Auseinandersetzung,Colonialism and Heidegger’s Oblivion of Other Beginnings

ABSTRACT

This article attempts to enact a creative confrontation (Auseinandersetzung) between Heidegger and Sikh spirituality. Heidegger’s idea of confrontation did not stay the same throughout his career. It goes through multiple transformations. The earliest iteration of this idea in the 1930s can be linked to his ethno-centrism. In the Black Notebooks, Heidegger performs a confrontation with himself, which marks his attempts to go beyond his prior position. Later in the 1960s and 1970s, Heidegger gets a glimpse of what a different confrontation might look like. However, he fails to enact it. This failure can be located in his inability to build a profound connection between his quest and non-European traditions. The article concludes with a fleeting glance at what such a connection between Heidegger’s quest and Sikh spirituality might look like.     

Excitations of Vengeance: The We-Ness of History

The author responds to Frie’s paper by examining our denial of our own perpetrator legacies, both personally and culturally. In reckoning with this legacy, we, too, can be bewildered, as Frie is, by his central question: How can grandfather be loving and also a Nazi? Can we go on loving a beloved grandfather who wore the Nazi uniform? How do we metabolize this predicament? The author pursues these questions by excavating her own complementary history. Her father was an American Jewish soldier during World War II; he witnessed the liberation of Dachau. Through narratives of vengeance, the author’s father neutralizes his impotence and reconstitutes himself. How do his stories infuse a daughter’s idealization? What happens when these threads meet Frie’s history and concern? How do we construct a new I–Thou out of this dialogue across history and atrocity?