Freedom in Human Life: Hints from Nietzsche and Zen

A few weeks ago, with the help of Steve Heine and Malek Moazzam-Doulat, we pondered the music and lyrics of Bob Dylan, asking ourselves in the process what kind of freedom is expressed in or evoked by his work. Following those reflections, I explore here a few related ruminations about freedom in Nietzsche and Zen because if you have to pick the one thing that both Nietzsche and Zen are about, it’s freedom.

In the now global Zen Buddhist tradition from East Asia we find that aspiring monks and nuns became Zen masters when, after much self-sculpting, they could insert themselves into a lineage/community of Zen masters, demonstrating their elevated awareness and personal presence by speaking freely and acting in their own unique ways. Similarly, Nietzsche repeatedly praised the “power of self-determination,” the “freedom of will” by means of which someone becomes “the free spirit par excellence.”

Yet neither Nietzsche nor Zen can be understood as champions of the modern concept of freedom whereby people individuate themselves by abandoning the determining forces of family, community, and tradition through the exertion of free will. Zen has been first and foremost a community practice solidly sustained by tradition, not something that you do on your own. Moreover, the concept of individual “free will” never even came up in East Asia as an idea worthy of debate. And even though that conception of freedom was ever-present in Nietzsche’s 19^th century Europe, on many occasions Nietzsche vehemently condemned “the error of free will” in spite of his valorization of “the free spirit,” insisting all along that these two ideas are fundamentally distinct. He rejected what he took to be the naïve assertion of freedom in romanticism and in modernity while constantly forcing the paradox of freedom upon his readers. So, how can we understand these dismissive doubts about free will in view of the throughgoing quest for freedom in both Nietzsche and Zen?

Let’s start with Zen. Inductees into Zen monastic practice, and contemporary lay practitioners when engaged in the rituals of Zen meditation, each surrender a wide variety of freedoms. What to do, when, and how are all arranged for them, decisions that are no longer theirs. Having given up these forms of free choice, only one potential domain of personal control remains--what goes on in their minds. In meditative silence, questions about oneself and about one’s freedom arise. Do I in fact exercise any control over what goes on in my head? Regardless of my right to make decisions in the outer world, what interior freedom can I honestly identify?

Having surrendered the freedom to get up from meditation when introspective insight threatens my cherished self-image--to go walk or eat or do something else--my only choice is to sit there and face it. What is the range and character of my inner freedom, I ask myself? Do I ever get out of my ingrained patterns of habitual mental states? In what sense have I ever really chosen these habits? Do I in fact exercise control over my resentments when they come up, over my personal fears, my feelings of inadequacy, my daydreams, my sexual fantasies, my memories, the songs that come into my mind and stay there for days, and so forth through the entire itinerary of my inner mental states?

One of the early discoveries of those who engage in Zen meditation is that the free exertion of self—all our picking and choosing—is ironically quite the opposite of freedom. Authentic freedom would entail developing the capacity not to be determined by unchosen habitual patterns that rule my life. It would entail my having the capacity to decide whether to spend my entire day rehearsing resentments over the affront I suffered yesterday. It would entail being able to examine my personal fears, to question them, to redefine them. It would entail being able to stand back from my sense of inadequacy, to just let it pass by and to redirect that energy elsewhere. Doing what we want, we discover, isn’t free at all if what we want is determined in advance by habitual patterns that we never really choose in the first place. The first level of Zen freedom starts here and is fundamentally distinct from the freedom to avoid external constraints.

This Zen response overlaps in some ways with Nietzsche. After an early life of high-level social engagement, Nietzsche spent an enormous amount of time alone—hiking in the mountains, pondering, writing, suffering horrendous physical pain and illness. This contemplative experience of solitude led him to discover what advanced Zen practitioners had found—that for the most part our free choices are not free at all, not free from inner compulsions that dictate our lives and confine us to a smaller and smaller range of experience.

Nietzsche asked himself “What are we at liberty to do?” And his answer adopted the garden as its central metaphor. A gardener, like a self-sculpting person, can cultivate this or that dimension of the garden, pull weeds that get in the way, freely develop it in any number of styles. He says that we are at liberty to do all of this with ourselves. But, he writes, “how many know we are at liberty to do it?” Very, very few. Somewhat surprised at what he had discovered, Nietzsche wrote that most people live their lives thinking of themselves as “complete, fully developed facts,” and that philosophers have accepted this “prejudice of the doctrine of the unchangeability of character.”

So, Nietzsche claims, “One thing is needful: To give style to one’s character—a great and rare art!” This rarely practiced art of self-sculpting entails developing “a great mass of second nature,” the removal of some elements of what has been natural to us, and to “resist giving nature free reign.” Freedom requires that nature be cultivated into “an artistic plan” of one’s own choosing. This freedom is in some sense “unnatural.” It requires a disciplined step back from all the natural free choices that we have made in an effort to liberate the chooser from what had been an invisible slavery.

That’s one level of freedom that Zen masters and Nietzsche have each developed in their own ways. Yet neither would have agreed that individuals can somehow separate themselves from the determinations of their genealogy, from human instinct, cultural traditions, and upbringing. They understood that all of us are always buoyed up by massive contexts of influence and support, and this is the starting point for a second level of freedom that both develop in brilliant ways.