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The Turn Towards Buddhism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Michael McGhee
Michael McGhee
Affiliation:
Department of PhilosophyUniversity of LiverpoolLiverpool L69 3BX
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Extract

The paper draws on the Heideggerian distinction between Bildung and Besinnung to locate a discussion of theological strategies in the face of Nietzsche's pronouncement that God is dead, and sketches what should be an epistemologically vigilant (and thus properly sceptical) Buddhist response to that pronouncement. The theological options that are mentioned or discussed include naive and critical theological realism, anti-realism and a nontheistic ‘spiritual realism’. Buddhism is discussed in terms of its naturalistic sources and their development in the expression of states of mind rather than in terms of belief.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 31 , Issue 1 , March 1995 , pp. 69 - 87
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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References

1 From the Gay Science (Aphorism 343).

2 ‘The Word of Nietzsche’ in The Question Concerning Technology and other essays (trans. William Lovitt), Harper and Row, 1977, p. 61.Google Scholar

3 In Twilight of the Idols, p. 40, trans. Hollingdale, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1968.Google Scholar

4 Though not essentially reflective. The reflective/immediate distinction has varying starting-points. It is a feature of our condition that ‘regenerate’ impulses are not usually our first.

5 I am indebted here to Rajan's, R. J. Sundara use of this term in his Critique of Cultural Reason, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1987.Google Scholar

6 Especially since Nietzsche was concerned about the emergence of a ‘European Buddhism’ as a form of passive nihilism.

7 Included in the above collection translated by William Lovitt. He translates Bildung as ‘intellectual cultivation’, but it seems to me that the adjective excessively narrows the scope of the concept. I shall use the German term. He translates Besinnung as ‘reflection’ which, again, does not seem to me to quite capture the scope of Heidegger's word. The word ‘mindfulness’ may carry some of it. I shall use the German term.

8 Ibid. p. 180.

9 p. 180.

10 p. 181.

11 I owe this phrase and others to the work of Janet Martin Soskice, to which I shall be alluding.

12 Dilman, Ilham, Philosophy and the Philosophic Life: A Study in Plato's Phaedo, MacMillan, 1992, p. 78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 Taking Leave of God, London, SCM Press, 1980, p. 91.Google Scholar

14 Metaphor and Religious Language, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1985, ch. VIII, p. 143.Google Scholar

15 The idealist philosopher McTaggart is of some interest here, since his non-theistic view was that reality is ultimately constituted by a community of souls who stand in loving relations to one another. We could think of this as a version of spiritual realism. A spiritual realist might seek to offer a reduction of theological statements in those terms.

16 Soskice, p. 145.

17 Frank Hoffman, J., ‘Towards a Philosophy of Buddhist Religion’ in Asian Philosophy, 1991, p. 25.Google Scholar

18 Hoffman's dismissal of his position as ‘popular psychology of the self-realisation variety’ seems a bit mean. An anti-realist reading can be relatively profound or superficial in its sense of tragic human realities.

19 See his paper in Stuart Brown (ed.), Reason and Religion, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 1977.Google Scholar

20 Ibid. p. 210.

21 Dewi Phillip's first book, The Concept of Prayer brings this out.

22 I am here reflecting on the argument offered by Fr Herbert McCabe in the first chapter of God Matters, London, Geoffrey Chapman, 1987.Google Scholar

23 I have discussed the causal implications of meditative activity in ‘Chastity and the (Male) Philosophers’ in the Journal of Applied Philosophy, vol. 10, 1993.Google Scholar