Say who everyone is as you go along - Faculty of Philosophy ...

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the Zen Buddhists present the possibility of living without metaphysical hopes and
fears. To hold out the hope of eradicating metaphysical hopes and fears would simply
reinstate the fear that metaphysical hopes and fears could not be eradicated.
Therefore, they claim to expose metaphysics as illusory, or at best irrelevant to the
way life is most fully lived. In the Übermensch and the enlightened being the
temptation to metaphysics has been psychologically tamed.
According to Nietzsche, how we think of death profoundly affects the way we
live our lives. He thinks that if we think of death in the way we have been
conditioned by the Judeo-Christian tradition, our lives become pessimistic and
sluggish, gloomly and half-hearted. He says we can rethink death so that it becomes a
psychologically positive force in life:
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DEATH. - The certain prospect of death could introduce into every life a precious,
sweet-smelling drop of levity - and yet you marvellous apothecary souls have made
of it an ill-tasting drop of poison through which all life is made repulsive! (HATH
para. 322 p. 390.)
The psychologically indubitable fact that my life will end could lend to it a frivolity;
a kind of reckless spontaneity which prohibits taking life too seriously. Like a game,
life will be over so should be fully engaged in while it lasts. Rather than doing this,
we allow our lives to be haunted by death:
'How everyone's shadow, his gloomy travelling companion stands behind him' (GS
para 278 p. 215)
Nietzsche compares death, as misconstrued by us, to a drug or a poison. As a drug
makes us half asleep or plunges us into illusion so death makes us half committed to
our lives and burdened with metaphysical images. As a poison produces illness and
ineffectiveness so death, as we foresee it, inhibits the living of life. Our concept of
death makes life 'hideous'. It is as though our lives have been poisoned: If we are
poisoned we are going to die. If we know we are poisoned we know we are going to
die. Life is hideous precisely in the existentialist sense: If we are going to die it
would have been better not to have been born. Facing death is so terrible that it
would have been far preferable to have had no life at all than to have to live a life
facing death as its end. After all, it really is going to happen to you.
In Nietzsche and Zen, there is no life without death. To ask for life without
death is to ask for something as impossible as death without life. To ask for birth
without death is to ask for something as impossible as death without birth.
Yasutani says:
'We die because we are alive. Living means birth and death. Creation and destruction
signify Life.