『Fire Philosophy: Nietzsche, Zen, and How to Live』のカバーアート

Fire Philosophy: Nietzsche, Zen, and How to Live

Fire Philosophy: Nietzsche, Zen, and How to Live

著者： Dale Wright & Krzysztof Piekarski
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One thing is needful. --To "give style" to one’s character–– a great and rare art! ~Nietzsche Professors Dale Wright, Malek Moazzam-Doulat, and Krzysztof Piekarski explore Nietzsche, Zen, and the Philosophy of Living.

firephilosophy.substack.comKrzysztof Piekarski 個人的成功 哲学 社会科学 自己啓発
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  • Conversation about Michael Pollan's New Book: A World Appears

    Conversation about Michael Pollan's New Book: A World Appears
    2026/05/07
    Fire PhilosophyOn Michael Pollan’s A World Appears: A Journey into ConsciousnessA conversation between Krzysztof Piekarski and Dale WrightKrzysztof: Greetings, Fire Philosophers. I’m here with Dale Wright, and we’ve both just finished reading A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness by Michael Pollan. Pollan enters the world of Zen in this book, so it felt like an appropriate text for us to take up.Dale: When you first suggested it, I said something like, “Yeah, good idea.” But my real inner thought was, “Really?” Consciousness is what’s called a really hard problem, because you can never get out of it to look at it. You can’t bring it before you as an object. We’re at war, our institutions are in chaos, our culture is deeply divided, and we each have our own problems. Do we really want to go there?Dale: And yet I did, and it was just the tonic I needed. It lifted me out of the concrete issues I struggle with every day and up into a place where you’re thinking broadly. That breadth gets brought back to bear on the practical, difficult issues. So it was good for me, even though my first response was resistance.Krzysztof: Look at you persevering. Let’s start with definitions. There’s another book I’ve had on my shelf called Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness, and a good rhetorician starts by defining terms. What landed for me, maybe reductively, is that there are layers of increasing complexity. We go from the inanimate, like a rock, to intelligence, something like a computer, to sentience, where we look at plants and say, “Okay, they obviously feel things,” to the animal layer, where we apply the word consciousness, and then ever-increasing amounts.Dale: Layer or level is a good word. The structure of the brain has those various layers, from the brain stem up to the cerebral cortex.Krzysztof: Having read the book, what is your working definition of consciousness, and is it different than when you began?Dale: I doubt it. This is something I’ve been pondering and meditating on for most of my life. But I really appreciated the book. To the title you mentioned, Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness: for me, that’s nineteen ways of using this one word, nineteen meanings we apply when we use it. The word itself is creating more confusion than clarity. We get stuck on it, as if consciousness is one important thing in the world we have to define. Really, our awareness of it has to do with our vocabulary for it.Dale: Pollan helped clarify what I’ve always thought of as layers of deepening consciousness. From sentience at the bottom: a tree is sentient in that when the sun comes out, trees that close down at night respond and turn toward it. Plants have this kind of awareness. Awareness is a more helpful word than consciousness. Then, working up to self-awareness, you get more sophisticated forms.Krzysztof: Plants are how Pollan enters this world. There’s an interesting part where some plant biologists are saying, look, if it has a kind of memory, and we can anesthetize it, then you have memory and the feeling of pain or no pain. Maybe the difference is really time. Maybe plants are beyond sentient, and we’re just imposing our timeframes onto them. Pollan mentions that thought experiment about aliens looking down at humans at thousandth speed, who would see us as plants just standing around.Dale: It’s helped some botanists actually push in that direction. They’re finding things we just don’t see. No doubt projecting consciousness onto plants. But there’s an awareness there that’s really interesting, that we’re only beginning to explore.Krzysztof: We’re going into the deep end. You know all the recent studies about rainforests as ecological systems: families, awareness of which tree is kin, which is enemy. This gets dicey faster than it gets resolved. I’m a vegetarian mostly for ethical reasons, because I don’t want to cause unnecessary suffering on conscious beings. But if plants are more conscious than I assumed, what am I going to eat? Cotton candy all day?Dale: Rocks. Just rocks. A nice bowl of sand.Dale: There’s a tradition among some physicists and some religious seers called panpsychism. There are scientific versions where you study elementary particles and see a certain kind of spirit in matter, because matter is energy, matter is movement. Physicists have done experiments where it seems like particles will opt for one thing or another: wave, not wave. Panpsychism is the view that there is no ultimate split between matter and mind, that all the way down into the tiniest elementary particles there is what’s called proto-consciousness. The whole split between life and non-life begins to fade. Hindus, going back thousands of years, worked on a version of this, where pantheism saw everything as having a divine element, from the highest seers down into matter. Some kinds of physics and neuroscience are now leading back toward that ...
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  • Conversation with Stephen Batchelor II: Towards a Socratic Buddha

    Conversation with Stephen Batchelor II: Towards a Socratic Buddha
    2025/11/25
    We offer Fire Philosophy as a space for living questions—for Nietzsche’s provocations, Zen’s paradoxes and silences, and the uneasy beauty of learning how to live with courage and imagination.We offer this free of charge. But if you find value in our brief essays, video interviews and dialogues that challenge and unsettle our lives while nourishing and invigorating them, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your support keeps stoking our collective 🔥.~ Krzysztof and Dale Fire Philosophy welcomes back Stephen Batchelor to further explore his new book Buddha, Socrates and Us and the surprising possibility that the Buddha and Socrates were true contemporaries. We discuss what it means to paint a “Buddhist portrait” of Socrates, and how his relentless questioning echoes the critical, dialectical side of Buddhism that often gets overshadowed by its non-conceptual, “stop thinking” reputation. We also dive into complex territory: Buddhism’s uneasy history with violence and pacifism, Socrates’s role as a soldier, and what an honest, secular Buddhist ethics might look like in a world of wars, nation-states, and messy human motivations. Along the way, Stephen reflects on how East and West now coexist inside many of us, the dangers of turning the Dharma into spiritual ego, and why the Buddha’s parable of the snake is still such a sharp warning. It’s a conversation about thought and silence, war and compassion, tradition and reinvention—anchored in the concrete ongoing question of how to live now.You can listen to our first conversation here:You can find Stephen’s work, his art, and his other interviews and teachings at www.stephenbatchelor.org.Books by our own Dale Wright:🔥 The Six Perfections: Buddhism and the Cultivation of Character Philosophical 🔥 Meditations on Zen Buddhism🔥 Living Skillfully: Buddhist Philosophy of Life🔥 What Is Buddhist Enlightenment?Buddhism: What Everyone Needs to KnowA series of five books on Zen Buddhism co-edited with Steven Heine and published by Oxford University Press—🔥The Koan🔥The Zen Canon🔥Zen Classics 🔥Zen Ritual🔥Zen Masters🔥 Theological Reflection and the Pursuit of Ideals, co-edited with David JasperBelow are some excerpts from our conversation above. We hope you enjoy it and respond with your own insights, questions and resonances. Because of the hypothesis that Buddha and Socrates lived at the same time, I was then able to more realistically imagine someone who had been born in India had maybe spent the first 10 or 15 years of the Buddhist teaching career with the Buddha, and for whatever reasons, then found themselves heading westward, crossing over the Persian Empire, and finally landing in Athens.  So it enables me, as it were, to then have to been able to see ancient Greece, Socrates, the playwrights and so on through the eyes of a Buddhist of that period. But what does Socrates or these Greeks say about human suffering?  Because Plato doesn’t mention suffering at all. The Greek philosophers don’t really seem to think it’s an appropriate topic for philosophy. It’s as simple as that. And in the School of Buddhism in which I which I was studying, the Gelugpa, they actively instruct you in dialectics and debate. And in fact this training, which goes on for some years, is very much embedded in the importance of critical thinking. And the critical thinking that I was trained in was largely, first of all becoming much more conscious of the trickiness of language itself. I think we have to see for ourselves the contradictions within our own thinking patterns, within our own concepts and ideas in order to to be able to put them down. Otherwise, we’ll just think that we might have seen through these ideas where in fact they’re still operating quite actively within us and just perpetuating the same pictures of the world.  So what I like about Socrates is that his way of getting people to come to terms with their preconceived ideas is to subject them to a very intense kind of testing or inquiry to make people become conscious of the contradictions and conflicts within their own. If you think that meditation is just about stopping thinking, then you’re really no different from a cow sitting in a field.The thing that differentiates Gotama and Socrates the most is their relationship to violence. And yet the Buddha is basically saying, don’t kill anyone and don’t if you’re a monk, especially, have any sexual engagement with another person at all. So you have a very, very strong rejection of sex and violence. And in the Greek world, you don’t have anything remotely similar. Both are seen as part of life. They’re never really held up for criticism. So that is a big difference, obviously. Buddhism is traditionally pacifist for the lay person or for the monk. To kill a human being is completely not allowed. But if you look at the actual history of Buddhism, you’ll see that ...
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    59 分
  • A Dialogue about Cultivating Courage

    A Dialogue about Cultivating Courage
    2025/10/21

    We offer Fire Philosophy as a space for living questions—for Nietzsche’s provocations, Zen’s paradoxes and silences, and the uneasy beauty of learning how to live with courage and imagination.

    We offer this free of charge. But if you find value in our brief essays, video interviews and dialogues that challenge and unsettle our lives while nourishing and invigorating them, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your support keeps stoking our collective fire.

    ~ Krzysztof and Dale

    The above conversation draws on Dale’s five part series about courage. Below are the installments to give you heart in the midst of life’s challenges. We en-courage-you to read and reflect on them before listening to our conversation above; and if you know someone who could use some encouragement, please share this series with them.



    This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit firephilosophy.substack.com/subscribe
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    42 分
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