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

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Nietzsche also thinks our concept of death thoroughly informs our attitude to
life and makes a difference to who we are:
'The whole way in which a man thinks of death in the prime of his life and strength is
very expressive and significant for what we call his character' (HATH 46)
Were I to be correctly identified with my body or my soul then there would be
genuine grounds for my fear of my own destruction. God could perhaps destroy my
soul, and my body will in any case be dissolved in natural, biological death. If I am
my soul, and my soul is destroyed, then I am destroyed. If I am my body, and my
body is destroyed, then I am destroyed.
In Zen the self is 'reduced' to what we would normally think of as the psychophysical
stream of events constituting a person's life (or, in Nietzsche and Buddhism,
lives). There are different kinds of reduction. If the self is reduced to a set of events
then it is nothing 'over and above' them, that is, the self is identical with those events
and so nothing more than or nothing other than those events. That the self is
reducible to a set of psycho-physical events might mean that 'self' and 'set of psychophysical
events' have the same reference even though they differ in sense. In what
sense is the self 'reduced' to a set of psycho-physical life processes in Zen? Roshi
Yasutani gives this example of the absence of the fear of death:
'Even though heaven and earth were turned upside down, you would have no fear.
And if an atomic or hydrogen bomb were exploded, you would not quake in terror'
(WD 8)
and provides this explanation of the possibility of overcoming that fear:
'So long as you became one with the bomb what would there be to fear?
"Impossible!" you say. But whether you wanted to or not you would perforce become
one with it, would you not?' (WD 8)
What is it to become 'one with the bomb'? By 'the bomb' is meant the explosion of
the bomb. It at least follows from this identification that it is false that there are two
things: myself and the explosion of the bomb. Rather, the explosion of the bomb is
part of the same psycho-physical life process in which the sensation of self also
intermittently appears. At the moment of the explosion of the bomb there is only theexperience-of-the-exploding-of-the-bomb.
(Following the German and French
existentialists) I hyphenate this expression to signify that the items it refers to are not
separable in reality (only in thought, or conceptually, or in language). The event is
one, precisely not the tripartite structure I, experience and explosion. In particular;
there is no sensation of 'self' or 'me' as the victim of that explosion. This concept of
death in an atomic explosion is very different from the idea of a human being caught
in its blast. Clearly Yasutani does not deny that, on one level, that is exactly what