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

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true ? Nietzsche has no answer to this question. Nietzsche's position is inconsistent
with the weaker kind of mind-body dualism on which there are mental events that are
not physical, but no soul. Soul is only the name of something in the body means that
mentality is only a physical property of the body. Thinking, for example, is only a
neurological process in the brain.
Although part of Nietzsche's strategy is to debunk spirituality as metaphysical
illusion, by reducing the spiritual and mental to the physical, his considered position
is not materialist. He thinks that a human being is their life (or lives) and aspects of
the life process may be thought of as mental, or physical, or neither. Nietzsche uses
materialism as a philosophical weapon against mind-body dualism, theism, and other
metaphysical theories but once it has been used he is happy to relinquish it. A similar
pragmatic emphasis on the physical world, and denigration of metaphysical
spirituality, can be found in Buddhism. In The Diamond Sutra, which recounts the
former lives of the Buddha, Siddhartha Gotama himself says
'when my body was cut to pieces by the king of Kalinga, I had neither the idea of an
ego, nor the idea of a person, nor the idea of a being, nor the idea of a soul' (ZNM
120/MZB 51)
Read one way, the Buddha is saying that in facing death he was facing the
destruction of his body not the destruction of something mental or immaterial. In his
previous incarnations the Buddha was not yet an enlightened being and so feared
death. Presented with dismemberment by the king of Kalinga, what he feared in
fearing his own destruction was the destruction of his body. The destruction of his
body is necessary and sufficient for his own destruction. This view is based on the
pragmatics of ordinary fear, not on metaphysical belief or a priori argument. Like
Nietzsche, the Buddha is presenting the identification of oneself with one's body as
the realistic view, the view one adopts in living practice rather than when doing
metaphysics or theology. Not only were the ideas of ego, person, being, and soul not
sufficient to dispel the immediate fear of death through dismemberment, these
philosophical concepts were not even present to his mind. Read another way, the
Buddha is saying that in his experience of dying he did not encounter ego, person,
being, or soul. These concepts do not denote anything in the transition from life to
death. In describing what it is to die, we should not have recourse to them because
dying is the destruction of the body. On both interpretations, death is a test of
metaphysics. In fearing death, our fear is for our body. In dying, it is the body that
dies. Practically, I am not my ego. Practically, I am my body. Nietzsche says:
'An instrument of the body is also thy little sagacity, my brother, which thou callest
"spirit"' (Z 36)
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