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

40
'I do not mean as a deception, an "appearance", an "idea" (in the Berkeleyan and
Schopenhaueran sense), but as possessing the same degree of reality as our emotions
themselves' (BGE para 36 p. 66)
Idealism is the attempt to reduce the external world to the internal world, to reduce
the physical to the mental, the objective to the subjective. Idealists typically wish to
translate claims about material reality into claims about non-material appearance.
Nietzsche is not attempting any such reduction. Indeed, he is trying to do precisely
the opposite. It is the fact that the external world cannot be logically reduced to our
imaginary projections that makes the latter erroneous or imaginary. The external
world is not the imaginary world.
Nietzsche thinks the content of our fictional world has as much reality as our
emotions. Both are psychological. Both are felt or undergone. Both matter to us. We
spend a great deal of mental time in both. Both are non-physical. Neither is part of
the external world. Neither is either true of the external world: not our thought-world
because it is erroneous, not our emotions because they are not the sorts of things that
could be true or false.
Eating the Menu
Crucially, the Buddhist doctrine is no more idealist than Nietzsche. There is no
doubt about this. Alan Watts warns from the outset that any idealist reading wil be
mistaken:
'Maya [...] in trying to grasp its meaning one must try to put aside the various
"idealist" philosophies of the West with which it is often confused - even by modern
Indian Vedantists' (WZ 40)
Maya, like the fictitious thought-world of Nietzsche, is an illusion that we
mistake for the external world. In both philosophies, that there does exist an external
world makes the illusion the illusion.
Having said this, there are many passages in Buddhist scripture which seem to lend
support to an idealist construal . The fact is that maya does have a radically
metaphysical and idealist meaning in the pre Buddhist philosophies of Vedanta and
Hinduism from which Buddhism tries to distance itself. In Buddhism, maya is
understood in a psychological rather than a metaphysical manner. I shall present
some seemingly idealist construals in Buddhism and suggest non-idealist or weak
idealist reading of them.
In the third series of his Essays in Zen D.T. Suzuki reports a conversation
between Subutu and the Buddha. The Buddha asks Subhutu:
'Do you think Maya to be different from Rupam ['form'] and Rupam from Maya?'
(ZB3 264)