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Nietzsche, Buddha, Zarathustra: Eine West-Ost Konfiguration. By Michael Skowron. Daegu: Kyungpook National University Press, 2006. Pp. 293.
In Nietzsche, Buddha, Zarathustra: Eine West-Ost Konfiguration, Michael Skowron sets out to develop a comparative philosophy of "self-overcoming," "transformation," and "process" (p. 7). Skowron's main interest is to retrace Friedrich Nietzsche's "genealogical thinking back to where the Eastern and the Western way began their separate direction in order to unearth the only place where they can be unified in its original form." The goal of this project is "to uncover the religious and postreligious dimensions of his [Nietzsche's] thinking" (p. 5). This work thus promises to contribute to the contemporary understanding of Nietzsche; to compare the philosophies of Nietzsche, Buddha, and Zarathustra; and to facilitate a comparative philosophy of self-overcoming for a postreligious age.
This is a collection of at times promising but, in the end, uneven essays on Nietzsche's Zarathustra and other themes in Nietzsche and Buddhism that are loosely connected to the idea of "self-overcoming." Thematically, these essays can be divided into four categories.
The first group of essays explores themes central to Nietzsche's philosophy. In chapter 2, Skowron praises the visionary nature of Nietzsche's writings and suggests that a metaphysics "beyond good and evil" does not imply a morality "beyond good and bad" but envisions the "philosopher of the future," who takes "the body as guideline" (am Leitfaden des Leibes) of thinking (p. 45). Nietzsche's Übermensch, Skowron explains in chapter 3, overcomes the self by embracing the ambiguity of the self's "overcoming itself by itself" (p. 52) and of the "eternal return" (ewige Wiederkehr), which simultaneously entails the "return to the past" as implied by the word Wiederkehr and a "future arrival" as indicated by the term Wiederkunft. Chapter 6 explains that Nietzsche's conception of language as having always only a provisional character, which means that every statement has to be written in "quotation marks" (Gänsefüßchen), is rooted in the fragile nature of the subject, which reveals itself as an illusion and conceals that "doing is everything" (das Thun [sic] is alles) (p. 117).
Then there is the second group of essays, which compare tropes in Nietzsche's work to similar motifs in the works of Martin Heidegger (chapter 1) as...