GONTER WOHLFART

THE DEATH OF THE EGO: AN ANALYSIS OF

THE “I” IN NIETZSCHE’S UNPUBLISHED
FRAGMENTS

In the first part of Nietzsche’s chief work, Thus Spake

i!arathustru, which is also Nietzsche’s best received work in the Far
East, Nietzsche writes of the three transformations of spirit to the
camel (“thou shalt”), to the lion (“I will”) and finally to the child (“it
plays”).’ Having examined Nietzsche’s reception in the East, one
discovers that the lion’s roar: “I will” was especially emphasised in
the “wild wisdom” of this re-evaluation of all Palues. Nietzsche’s
doctrines of “the will to power” and the “superman” (“iibermensch”),
which received especial attention, were understood as expressions of
an extreme egoism and voluntarism. Nietzsche’s reception was thus a
recipe for personal problem solving, i.e. the overcoming of the
“burdensome” slave ethic of the camel, or, properly, of the
Conhcianist ‘’thou shalt”. Through the reception of Nietzsche as a
prominent representative of modem Europe, characterised by a will to
power, freedom of the will and strong individualism, he could be
declared the protagonist of a modem ChidJapan, in whom one
hoped to find the intellectual weapons necessary to re-evaluate the
antiquated values of the East2 Beyond the lion’s roar of the willing
ego the third and highest transformation of spirit to the child was
hardly heard at all. I hold this self-forgetfullyplaying child, however,
to be Nietzsche’s claim to “grandfatherhood of postmodernism”.
In the following pages I attempt to paint a new picture of
Nietzsche as ego-analyst, in which the modem - all too modern
Nietzsche shall show postmodern f e a t ~ r e s . ~This retouching of
Nietzsche’s portrait has been my constant goal in recent years,
especially in my travels to the distant Orient.
It may be that one decisive reason for the one-sided
interpretation of Nietzsche as an egomaniacal, megalomaniacal proto-
nazj (the will to power as will to political empowerment) in the Far

Journal of Chinese Philosophy 26:3 (September 1999) 323-341

Copyright Q 1999 by Dialogue Publishing Company/InternationalEast-
West University Press, Honolulu, Hawaii, U.S.A.
324 G m R WOHLFART

East as well as -- with a poor omen -- in the Far West4 was the limited
aquaintance with Nietzsche’s work, which had only been translated in
part, and the general ignorance of his late, unpublished work.
’ h s work, which is indispensable for a clear understanding of
Nietzsche, was only known partially in the form of a wild
compilation, i.e. in the form of the so-called “magnum opus”: “The
Will to Power”. I have therefore attempted in the selection for the
editio minor of the Nietzschean “opus postumum” which I have
preparedS to call attention to Nietzsche’s analyses of the “Ich wili”
and the “Ich denke”, which have been heretofore generally neglected
and thus to present Nietzsche as a critic of modernism and a pioneer
of the postmodern “decentering of the subject”. Not only for reasons
of time efficiency, but also for reasons of propaganda I shall therefore
rely for the most part upon this booklet.
In order to avoid terminological misunderstanings let it be noted
in advance that Nietzsche’s critique of subject-centrism, i.e. hs
Analysis of the “I”, is not a critique of egoism in the moral sense, but
of egotism in the extramoral sense. Just as the opposite of egoism, or
selfishness, is selflessness, so is the opposite of egotism, or “I-
centrism” “I-lessness”, or “egolessness”. This death of the ego is not
to be understood as an undetermined negation of the “I”, but rather in
the Hegelian sense as determined: the I is “aufgehoben”, i.e. at once
negated and preserved. This aufgehobene and cosmic I shall be
called “it”, though this “it” (id) is not to be understood in the
Freudian sense.

1. NIETZSCHE’S ANALYSIS OF THE CARTESIAN

“EGO COGITO” AND OF THE KANTIAN “ICH DENKE” AS
DECONSTRUCTION OF MODERNISM

In the Discours de la Methode Descartes describes the well

known statement, “jepense, done j e suis,”6 as the “remiere principe
de la phil~sophie”.~It became the philosophical fundament of
modernity in its broader sense.* The heuristic fiction of the “ego sum,
ego existoYyis the Archimedean point from which Descartes displaced
mediaeval philosophy. The Cartesian “ego sum res cogitans“’o
became the cornerstone of the modem era which Nietzsche seeks to
undermine. He exposes the “res cogitans” as a “poor thing” which is
not “lord in its own house”, to place Freudian words into Nietzsche’s
mouth.
 THE DEATH OF THE EGO 325

Despite all of Kant’s critique of Cartesius,” the Kantian

tiranscendental philosophy remains a subject-oriented philosophy and
critical reason a subject-centered reason. The first statement of
Kantian anthropology is “that man in his faculty of conception can
have the I exalts him infinitely above all other earthly living
c.reatures.” In 0 16 of the Critique of Pure Reason, which deals with
the original-synthetic unity of apperception, it is written: “the I think
must be able to accompany all of my conceptions. . . . ” I z This
consistent identity of apperception contains, according to Kant, a
siynthesis of conceptions, and only because I can grasp the manifold
conceptions “in consciousness do I call these all together as my
conceptions; for otherwise I would have as many multi-coloured and
various selves as I have conceptions of which I am conscious. . . .
And so the synthetic unity of apperception is the highest point, upon
which one must fasten all use of the understanding, the whole of logic
and, thereafter, transcendental philosophy; indeed, this faculty is the
understanding itself.”I3 Nietzsche exposes the “ich denke,” the North
Star of transcendental philosophy, toward which it orients itself in
thought, as mere northern lights. He unveils the “being which thlnks
in us,”14 “this I, or he, or it (the thing), which thinks,”ls as an unthing,
is no-thing.

Let us turn now to Nietzsche’s analysis of the “I”. “God is

dead.” The age of medieval Chnstianity is, according to its highest
determination, a thing past, to shift the words from Hegel’s “Death of
Ad’.If the light of Christianity should still bum after all these years,
Then this is like the light of a star light years away which in fact has
long since burned out. In the modem era the ego has stepped into
(God’s place. It has become the modem article of faith. But is this
modern belief in the self only a “subject- and I-superstition,” as
‘Nietzsche says in the preface to Beyond Good and Evil? Following
the death of God does the death of the ego yet stand before us in the
,postmodern era? Nietzsche makes the following relevant statements:

If there are words at all, people believe that something must

correspond to them, e.g. soul, God,will, destiny, and so forth.16

We place a word there, where our ignorance begins, where we

can see no further, e.g. the word ‘I’ [. . .]; they may be the
horizon of our knowledge, but they are no ‘truths.’17Is the ‘I’ in
truth not merely a ‘perspectival illusion’, a vanishing point of
326 G m R WOHLFART

thought perspectives. i.e. an “apparent unity, in which

everything meets, as at the horizon”?I8

Our nasty habit of taking a mnemonic sign, an abbreviated

formula for a being, at last for a cause, e.g. to say of lightning
that: ,>it glows<, or even the word, I. To posit a sort of
perspective in sight again as cause of the seeing itseg that was
the art in the invention of the-’subject’.of the

Was not the superstitious belief in the *‘I” (like a modem Zeus,
who hurls bolts of thought) not merely the subreption of a ‘.self’ (or
“ego”) as a processor, but in truth the processes play themselves out
of their own accord? Was not the conclusion of the “ego sum res
cogitans” from out of the “ego cogiro” the hypostasization of a
hypothesis, the embodiment of a condition of thought into a thing of
thought? A hypokeimenon, a subjectum, a person has sneaked in
under a personal pronoun! “‘1’-- this is an auxiliary hypothesis to the
end of the thinkability of the world --just as material and
The assumption of atoms is, according to Nietzsche, only a
consequence of the concepts of subject and substance: “Somewhere
there must be a thing from which the activity comes. The atom is the
final descendent of the soul-~oncept.’~~ In truth, there can no more
be a-toms than there can be individuals.22 There is no steadfast
(Archimedean) I-point, but rather I-punctuation, ego-quanta, so to
speak. The sit venia verb0 Nietzschean splitting of the ego
demonstrates this: the ego as “subiectum” is just as empty as the atom
is a supposed “substratum”. The search for a supposed “core of the I”
ends with the same result as the search for the “core” of the onion; it
ends in weeping!
Allow me to use another analogy: the “I” is like a wave moving
toward a beach from the sea: what one thinks one sees is one and the
same mass of water. In truth there are ever new and different masses
of water which replace each other through rotation, and so give the
impression of a single mound of moving water. That is to say, there
are no more egos as subjects than there are atoms as substances, as
“basic building The one basic “I” is only thought along
with the multiplicity of its
Thought is comparable to an ensemble of thought processes.
We trace the more or less “concerted action” of our thought back to a
concert master, a conductor. In truth, however, the situation is that
 THE DEATH OF THE EGO 327

the conductor does not even know the piece being played. He lets the
orchestra conduct him! To use a nice example of Freud: “his Majesty
the I” is in fact only a little “mind-imp”, a “little man of the brain”
who plays the role of the “dumb August” in the circus. He attempts
with his gestures to convince the spectators that he controls all the
changes in the ring. But only the youngest believe lum.
The indignant philosopher responds: “But it is I who thlnk. I
can think whatever I will.” One might answer: ‘Yes, you may be
able to think what you will, but can you also will what you will?” Is
the supposed autonomy of the ego really heteronomy, is the “I” as
puppet master in our marionette cabinet in truth a mere marionette
IiimseiP

“Thought is, therefore there must be a thinker”; that is what the

argumentation of Descartes comes down to. But that is to posit
our belief in the concept of substance as an a priori certainty:
that if there is thought, there must be something, “which thinks”,
is simply a formulation of our grammatical habit which posits a
doer for each deed.”2s

Let us take greater care than Cartesius, who was caught in the
snare of words. Cogito is admittedly only one word, but it has
many meanings: [. . .] In that well known cogito lurks (1) it
thinks (2) and I believe that it is I who think (3) but
presupposing that this second point remains suspended as a
matter of belief, the first ‘it thinks’still contains an assumption:
namely that ‘thinlung’ is an act to which a subject, at least an
‘it’ must be posited, and the ergo sum means nothing more! But
that is all belief in grammar, ‘things’ and their ‘actions’ are
posited and we are quite far from immediate

In 0 17 of Beyond Good and Evil, which was written at

about the same time (1 885), it is stated:

[A]s regards the superstition of the logicians: I wish not to tire

myself by underlining a short little fact repeatedly to which this
superstitious folk so hates to admit, namely, that a thought
comes when ‘it’ will, and not when ‘I’ will, so that it is a
forgery of the state of things to say: the subject, ‘I’, is the
condition of the predicate,‘ think’. It thinks: but that this ‘it’
should indeed be the great old ‘I’ is, mildly spoken, only an
328 G w R WOHLFART

assumption, an assertion, but far from an ‘immediate certainty’.

Lastly, tlus ‘it thlnks’ is already too much; already this ‘it’
contains an interprefafionof the process and does not belong to
the process itself.” One concludes here, according to the
grammatical convention, “thinlung is an action. To each action
belongs one who acts. Therefore. . .*’
Indeed “I think” means in truth “it thinks (in me),” and this “it”
is no thing, no being, but rather thought itself. “‘A thinks’, means
‘thought thinks’.”* I only think that 1 think. “Something” goes
through my head; thoughts go through my head; “something” occurs
to me, “somethng” strikes me, thoughts come and go of their own
accord, without the “I” escort. To think does not mean “to have
thoughts”,29they rather have me. I am these thoughts. I have no
concepts which I only accompany, I am rather these concepts myself.
To think is not to make thoughts oneself, but rather to let thoughts
pass through one’s head. Does this mean that there is no thinking “I”?
Perhaps one could answer this with the slyness of reason: ‘Yes, there
is an I; there is the I, i.e. the I is in thought.” And if someone should
remain stubborn and reply: “But it is I who think!” One could easily
answer him: ‘Yes, it is you, but you are i t . You are thought, and
nothing more!”
To speak figuratively, the “I” is not so much like a spider whch
sits in its web spinning threads of thought. The “I” does not have
thoughts, but rather is these thoughts, i.e. it is no central “multi-
coloured” I, which divides itself into multiple “federal” or associated
1’s. It is more like the many knots in a fisherman’s net, which bind
the thought mesh together, making it hold.30 These knots would be
quasi-thought synapses, “synaptic” units of consciousness, so to
speak. To express it differently: the “I” is not the “texter”, but rather
the “texture” of the “text”.
“No subject-‘atoms’. The sphere of a subject constantly
expanding or contracting, the middlepoint of the system constantly
shifting. . . .’31The ego rolls, to play with Nietzsche’s word, from the
centre into the X, involuntarily, by itself. . . . Whatever pictures one
may use, they all support new misunderstandings. In any case, after
the Copernican critique of geocentrism and the Darwinian critique of
anthropocentrism, Nietzsche prepared the third “narcissistic disorder”,
the Freudian critique of an ego which misunderstands itself as free.
 THE DEATH OF THE EGO 329

There are still harmless self-watchers who believe that there are
‘immediate certainties’, for example ‘I think’, or, as was
Schopenhauer’s superstition, ‘I will’. . . . One ought, however,
finally to free oneself from the temptation of words. The
masses may believe that recognition is a coming to an end, but
the plulosopher must say to hlmself as soon as I dissect the
process which is expressed in the statement, ‘I think,’I disclose
a series of audacious assertions whose establishment is difficult,
perhaps impossible, for example, that it is 1 who think that it
must be a something at all which thinks. that hnlung is an
activity and effect of a being, which is to be thought as a cause,
that there is’ an ‘I’, finally, that it is certain what is to be called
thought, that I know, what thought is. 32

One can imagine a causal theorist who, sitting in a Platonic cave

and never having seen a cat before, looks through a wall of boards.
‘There he repeatedly sees first a cat’s head through one gap, and then
the cat’s tail through another. Would such a theorist not be tempted
to call the head the cause of the tail?33 Is not the “I” related to the
"think" as the head is to the tail? And is there not the one cat, the one
rhnking thought? “Distrust of self observation. That a thought is the
cause of a thought is not ascertainable. Upon the table of our
tconsciousness appears a series of thoughts, as though one thought
‘were the cause of the next. In fact we do not see the struggle which
takes place under the table.”34
“We newcomers are all opponents of Descartes and take a r m s
against his lightness in doubt. ‘One must doubt better than
Des~artes!”’~~ Out of Descartes’ doubt has emerged the
Nietzschean despair of the “ego cogifo - ego existo.” For
Nietzsche the “I” has become a “fiction”, a “fable”.36

No one [is] so innocent today as still to posit the subject ‘I’ as

the condition of ‘thmk,’ on the contrary, the skeptical trend in
contemporary phllosophy has made the reverse, namely that
thought should be assumed cause and condition of ‘subject’, of
‘object’, of ‘substance’, and of ‘material’, more credible to us,
which is perhaps merely the same error the other way around.37

What separates me most fundamentally from the

metaphysicians is: I do not confess that it is the ‘I’ which thinks;
rather I take the I itself as a construction of thought, with the
330 G m R WOHLFART

same position as ‘material’, ‘thing’, ‘substance’, ‘individuum’,

‘end’, ‘number’; a mere regulative fiction, then, with whose
help a sort of continuity and thus ‘recogmtion’ can be laid into,
written into a world of becoming. The belief in grammar, in the
lingual subject, object and verbs has enslaved metaphysicians
up until now: I teach renunciation of this belief. Thought first
posits the I; but until now one believed, like the masses, that in
this ‘I think’lay something of the ‘immediately certain’ and that
this ‘I’ were the given cause of thought, after whose analogy we
‘understood’ all other causal relationships. However customary
and necessary t h ~ sfiction may now be, this proves nothing
against its fabrication: sometlung can be a necessary c6ndition
of life and still be false.38

Again and again Nietzsche reassures us: “the ‘subject’ is just a

fiction; there is no ego, of which one speaks when one condemns
egoism.”39 With Kant and yet beyond Kant, the “I” is referred to
outside of the area of the understanding-constitution and moved into
the regulation of reason. The “I” becomes an “heuristic fiction”, a
‘yocus imuginurius”, a “transcendental illusion’’. But Nietzsche does
not just ban the “I” from the “land of pure understanding” as the
“land of truth” in Kantian terms to the “stormy ocean of
appearance”,40 he goes beyond the Kantian critique of reason when he
diagnoses the death of the ego as God’s modem place holder: there
really is no ego; the “I” which haunts our heads is in reality a nothing,
an i l l ~ s i o n . ~ ’

The greatest portion of our being is unknown . . . [ w e have a

phantom of the I in our heads which determines us to a great
extent-42 The ‘I’ is that fallacy’’, without which a certain genus
of living creatures could not live.43

Main thought! . . . the individuum itself is a fallacy. Everything

which happens in us is in itself something else which we do not
know: we read the intention and the deception and the m o d t y
into nature. I distinguish, however, between the imagined
individual and the true ‘life systems’ of which each of us is one
--both are thrown together into one, whereas ‘the indwiduum’
is merely a sum of conscious feelings and judgments and
misconceptions, a belieJ a piece of the true life system or many
pieces thought together and spun together, a unity a unity that
 THE DEATH OF THE EGO 33 I

doesn’t hold together. We are buds on one tree -- what know

we of what can become of us in the interest of the one tree? But
we have a consciousness as though we would and should be all,
a phantasy of ‘I’ and all ‘not 1’. Stop feeling like such a
phantastic ego! Learn gradually to discard the supposed
individuum! Discover the fallacies of the ego. Recognise the
ego as misconception! The opposite is not to be understood as
altruism! Tlus would be love of other supposed individuals!
No! Beyond ‘me’ and <you!’ Feel cosmically!”44

Does this programmatical call not sound “Euro-taoist”?

2. CONSEQUENCES: WITH NIETZSCHE YET BEYOND

NIETZSCHE

Between the words of Nietzsche in 1887 (the grandfather of the

postmodem: “there is no and the dictum of Wittgenstein (the
father of the postmodern: “the thinking, imagining subject does not
exist”46)lies not much more than a generation. In looking at the two
forefathers of postmodernity, bound especially by their
characterization of the homo sapiens as homo ludens, certain
conjectures shall therefore be allowed in connection to Nietzsche’s
analysis of the “I”, through which I should like to attempt with
Nietzsche’s negation of Cartesian and Kantian egotism
(subjectcentrism) to show a way beyond Nietzsche, through
Wittgenstein’s thought, which leads in the direction of a positive re-
evaluation of eg01essness.~~
Let us turn once more to the three transformations of spirit
described in the first part of Zarathustra: 1) the transformation of
spirit to the camel, which is commanded: “thou shalt!,” 2) the
transformation of spirit to the lion, which says: “I will” and 3) finally
the transformation of spirit to the child, whose primary characteristic
is that “it plays.”48 Stmying from Nietzsche’s antique association^,^^
one could see in the “thou shalt” the articulation of the premodern, in
the “I will” the articulation of the modern and in the “it plays” the
articulation of the postmodern mind.
Considering the obvious parallels of Nietzsche’s critique of the
“I will”5O and the “I hnk” as a dual articulation of the second
transformation of the modem mind, one could parallel the “it plays”
as an expression of the third transformation of spirit to the
332 G I h l T R WOHLFART

postmodern with the rightly understood “it think~”.~1“It thmks”

would then mean “it, i.e. thought, plays itself out,” thought processes
play themselves out. “Everything which comes into consciousness is
the last member of a chain, a conclusion. That one thought should be
the immediate cause of another thought is only apparent. The
actually linked occurence plays <itself> out beneath our
consciousness . . .”52 It, thought, plays “thought games”. These
games play themselves out mostly without an I-game master.
The “I” does not play thought games or language games; the ‘T’
is these games. That means the “I” is not the one identical game
companion (or leader) as outside spectator; it all happens in these
games; it is nothng more than a family of similar thought or language .
games, to use the concept of “familial similarity” whch Nietzsche
mentions in the context of language p h i l o s ~ p h y . ~
Once
~ again: the
ego, i.e., the thinking, imagining subject, does not exist, means then
not “I think,” but: “it ttunks” i.e. “thought thinks,’’ “thought plays
itself out,” “thought plays (familially similar) thought and language
games.” It is this whole pluralistic, colouhlly mixed up family, not
the one monistic-egoistic head of the family, directing all others. The
ego monopoly as highest instance of thought is broken. The ego --
the ‘‘dark despot”-- is dead.

3. COMPARATIVE QUESTIONS

One could -- having gone this far with Nietzsche and

Wittgenstein -- go beyond Nietzsche and interpret the ‘‘it thinks” in
analogy to the third and highest transformation of mind in the
eminent sense as “it plays.”% How far is it, though, from such a self-
forgetfhl “it plays,” or “it thinks,” which has dicovered the
“misconception of the ego,” to the self-forgetfhlness and egolessness,
for example, in Taoism and Zen Buddhism? If we stopped feeling
like a “phantastic ego”, and went beyond the “I”, the “me” and the
“you”, beginning to “feel” co~rnically,~~ would we then become
Eurotaoists and western Zenists?
How near does Nietzsche come, in the consequence of his
thoughts regarding the death of the ego, to the concept of wu shen
(“without body/person/self ’) of Laozi, or of wu ji “without self’ and
wu sang wo (“I forget myself’) of Zhuangzi, or the related concept of
rnuga (“without ego”) in Zen Buddhlsm? How would Nietzsche have
seen himself in relation to these two Far Eastern schools of thought,
 THE DEATH OF THE EGO 333

which seem ever more attractive to the postmodern Westerner, and of

which -- to the best of my knowledge -- the pre-postmodern
Nietzsche had no knowledge? I suspect that Nietzsche, should he
have had a fleeting aquaintance with Taoism, or with Chan and Zen,
comparable to his factual aquaintance with Buddhism, would have
put both of these into the one pot of pessimism and defeatism
together with Buddhism, and thrown out the baby with the bathwater
in his distancing himself from Schopenhauer and his love of the
IJpanishads. Nietzsche admittedly said: “I must learn to think more
cvientally about phlosophy and knowledge. Eastern overview of
Europe.”s6 Would he not only have been really prepared for “asia
minor”, that is, for the Near East, which he certainly meant,s7but also
for the Far East?
Whatever the case may be, I think that Nietzsche, and after him
Wttgenstein, in my opinion even more than Heidegger, blazed
“thought-trails” to the East. Even if Nietzsche’s “project of self-
overcoming” indeed “seems to differ in important respects,”s8I also
thnk “there is some common ground in the notion of overcoming
e g o - ~ e l f . ”Nietzsche’s
~~ pre-postmodern destruction of the ego -- in
the form of the “cogito” just as in the form of the “ V O ~ O ” -- allows at
lleast for comparisons to the great death of the ego in the Far East,
even if that &vision or rending of the individuum comes from the
Near Eastern spirit of Dionysius.

4. CONCLUSION: THE END OF EGOLESSNESS IN

PHILOSOPHICAL TAOISM EXPLAINED WITH AN
EXAMPLE FROM LAOZI

The so-called great death of the ego is in Chan (or Zen)

Buddhism the “doorless door” to the kensho, to the “view of self-
being”. The famous words of Dogen from the Genjokoun chapter of
his Shobogenzo shall serve as a guide: ‘‘To study the way is to study
the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to
be enlighrtened by all As is well known, the philosophical
Taoism of Zhangzi and Laozi is one of the main sources of Ch’an, or
Zen.61 As regards the Zen mugu (“no-self”), or self-forgetfulness,
one should think first of the Zhuangzi, chapter 1, “The perfect man
has no self, ( w ~ j i ) ,and ~ Zhuangzi chapter 2, “I lost myself’ (wu
” ~ of
sung w0).63
334 G m R WOHLFART

Although the two cited passages deserve more detailed

treatment, this falls outside of the scope of this Nietzsche study. I
should rather like to restrict myself to the citation of a single passage
in Laozi. At the First International Laozi Symposium in Germany,
which took place in 1993 in Kloster MarienthaVWestenvald,
Wolfgang Bauer, to whom I wish to call attention in this conclusion,
lectured on the concept of the “I” in Laozi. The lecture was repeated
shortly thereafter under the title, “The I and the Non-I in Laozi’s
‘Da~dejing”’~~ at McGill University in Montreal for the Euro-Sinica-
Symposium organised by my colleague, Adrian Hsia. At this
instructive lecture, in which Bauer treated the most important of the
41 passages in which the personal pronouns, wu/wo, appear, my
attention was particularly drawn to the concept of shen (the body, the
person, the hull, oneself, I, me, a lifetime),65to which Bauer granted
special attention in hs In all, it appears 23 times in the Laozi,
6 times in chapter 13. I should therefore like to concentrate
especially on this latter chapter, given the restricted length of this
paper. I shall refer to Bauer’s work for interpretation and translation
of the relevant passages.
Bauer translates: “Favour and disgrace are typical of terror,
honour and great mischief are typical of the person (shen) . . . What is
the meaning of ‘honour and great mischief are typical of the person’
[shen G.W.]? The reason why I (wu) suffer great mischief is that I
have a person (shen). As soon as I had no person [wu shen G. W.],
what mischief could I suffer? Therefore, he who, with regard to
honour, identifies his person [shen G. W .] with All-under-heaven,
may well be entrusted with all the world; and he who, with regard to
love, identifies his person [shen G. W.] with all the world, may well
be entrusted with all the Translation and interpretation are,
as Bauer already states, quite different.68
Lin Yutang, Ernst Schwarz and Chang Chung-yuan interpret
shen similarly to the way Bauer does, although they translate shen not
as “Person”, or “person”, but as “Selbst”, or “self‘. The translation-
interpretation of the end of chapter 13 of Chang Chung-yuan goes as
follows: ‘Why do we say that the great trouble is having a self?
Because we have great trouble simply because we have a self. If we
are selfless, then where is the trouble? If we identify our self with the
world, then within our self there is the world. If we love the world as
we love our self, then within our self there is only the
He comments: “Taoism teaches the transformation of the
limited ego-form self to the unlimited non-ego-form self. When a
 THE DEATH OF THE EGO 335

)man lives according to the limited ego-form self he is easily ‘moved’

by such things as honour or dishonour, success or failure, life or death
When a man achieves the unlimited non-ego-form-self, he identifies
with the universe.”70
In the short space offered here I wish to note the following:
firstly, the commentary by Wang Bi. Where he comments on wu
shen, the translation by A. Rump or Wing-tsit Chan reads: “If I have
no body [wu shen G.W.I7’(because of) the return to Tzujun [i.e.
zirun G . W.] what trouble could I have?”72“No self’ (wu shen) and
“self-so” (zirun)are two sides of the same coin. The end of Lao Tzu
chapter 25 (duofu ziran) shows that the “return to zirun” is a “return
to dao”. To be without self (wu shen) (i.e. without the I identity of
the small ego) means to be identified “from self so” (zirun) with the
with the “duo”
Secondly, I would like to close by pointing to the commentary
by He-Shang-Kung, who appears to confirm this interpretation.
Where the w u shen is commented on, the translation by E. Erkes
reads: “If I am allowed to be without a body, then it is natural for me
to reach T ~ o . ” ’ ~
The self-forgetting self, the self without self (wu
shen) is the great “cosmic” self, the self as mirror of the dao, w h c h
has d e d the great death of the ego by itself.74

BERGISCHE UNIVERSITAT - G E S M H O C H S C H U L E
WUPPERTAL, GERMANY

ENDNOTES

I For my interpretation of the third transformation cf. the editor’s afterword in:
Friedrich Nietzsche, Die nachgelawenen Fragmente. Eine Auswahl, ed. G. Wohlfart
(Stuttgart: 1996).
Nietzsche’s reception in East Asia began quite early and took hold in Japan
already in 1893, as an unknown author published a comparative study on Nietzsche
and Tolstoy. Cf. G. Parkes, “The Early Reception of Nietzsche’s Philosophy in
Japan,” in Nietzsche and Asian Thought, ed by G. Parkes (Chicago, London: 1991),
pp. 177 ff., esp. 182. The earliest traces of a first Nietzsche study in China (cf. R.D.
Findeisen, ‘Wietzsche in China,” in Monumentn Serjcu, 42 ( 1 9 9 4 ~pp, 547 ff.) are
traceable back to the year 1902, when Liang Qlchao introduced Nietzsche to China in
the 18’ issue of the “New People’s” periodical (cf. also Longfa Yu, Nietzsche vor
und in der 4. Mai-Bewegung I919 in China, M.A. thesis, Bayreuth, 1995). Both
before and after the May 4”’ Movement the C h e s e dedicated a great deal of
attention to the study of Nietzsche. Many authors, among them Wang Guowei, Guo
336 GUNTER WOHLFART

Moruo and Ma0 Dun dealt with Nietzsche philosophically or politically and started a
first wave of Nietzsche fanaticism and vulgarkition in China. The second Nietzsche
wave in China was characterised by support of certain of his statements on war,
which were distributed in the thirties and forties. After the founding of the People’s
Republic in 1949, Nietzsche was at fmt taboo. A new interest in Nietzsche began to
emerge, however, in the eighties, whereby I personally first think of Chen Guying.
(Cf. D. A. Kelly, “The Highest Chinadom: Nietzsche and the Chinese Mind, 1907-
1989”, in Niefzsche and Asian Thought, 1.c. 15 1 ff.).
Cf. G. Wohlfart, Nietzsche: Presocratic - Postmodernist and G . Parkes, I.c.,
195 ff., who speaks of a “counter-tendency in Nietzsche’s thinking that has been
generally ignored even by Western commentators.”. . “This counter-strain involves
the themes of the ego as an utterly fictional construct, the radical multiplicity of the
‘I’, and the Dionysian dissolution of the bouiidaries of the ‘self.”’
The view of Nietzsche in the U.S., which was only changed through the work
of W. Kaufinann, demonstrates Uus clearly.
Cf. F. Nietzsche, Die nachgelassenen Fragmente, Eine Aunvahl, Reclam 1996
Cf. Pn’ncipia I,7 ‘Ego cogifo, ergo sum.’
’ Discours, IV, 1 & 3.
* The adjective, in use since the early 18* century, and taken from the French
“modeme” (first coined by the French mathematician, physician and philosopher
Nikolaus of Oresme in 1361) appears primarily to mean “new”, “contemporary”,
which is still the exclusive meaning of the Latin adjective which is its source.
“modemus”. Cf. Duden E m o l o g i e . There seems to be no universally accepted
meaning for the word as a concept of temporal relation. Cf. Historisches Wdrterbuch
der Philosophie, Bd. 6,Modem, die Moderne.
Medifationes, 2,3, & 8.
lo L.c. 2,9, & 14.
Cf. esp. “Von den Paralogismen der reinen Vernunft,” Kritik der reinen
Vemunft (subsequently KrV), A 3411 B 399 ff. and “Von der Unmdglichkeit eines
ontofogischenBeweises vom Dasein Gottes” KrV, A 592l B620 ff.
KrV, B 132.
KrV, B 134.
KrV,A401.
Is KrV, A 346/ B404.
16 F. Nietzsche, Die nuchgefusenen Fmpente, Eine Auswahl, Reclam 7 118, p.
54.
l7 Reclam 7118, p. 189.
Ibid., pp. 178 lT.
19 Ibid.
a, Reclam 71 18, p. 105.
21 Ibid.,p. 172.
 THE DEATH OF THE EGO 337

zz bid., p. 230.
:D Cf. F. Capra, The Tuo ofPhysics (London 1992), pp. 165 & 235 ff.
Reclam 71 18, p. 112.
5 Ibid., pp. 223 ff.
Ibid.,p. 161.
KSA 5, pp. 30 ff. cf. further Okochi Ryogi, Wie man wird, was man ist
( D m t a d t : 1995), 3‘* chapter: “Sprache und Denken: Nicht ‘ich denke’ sondan, ’es
denkt.,”’ pp. 3246.
Cf. Heidegger, “Die Sprache spricht”, “Die Sprache” in Untenvegs zur
Spruche (Pfullingen: 1960), pp. 1 1 ff.
Cf. G.W.F. Hegel, EyklopZidie ( 1830), 5 465.
Cf. R. Rorty, “Physicalismus ohne Reduktionismus,” in Eine Kultur ohne
Zentrum (Stuttgart: 1991), pp. 65 ff.
Reclam 71 18, p. 212.
KSA 5, pp. 29 ff.
Cf. A.Watts, Die Illusion des Ich (Milnchen: 1980),pp. 36 ff.
Reclam 71 18, p. 179. Cf. KSA 6 , p. 90.
Reclam 7118, p. 162.
35 Cf. KSA 6, p. 91.
31 Reclam 71 18, pp. 159 ff. A parallel text passage from 5 54 ofJenseits von Gut
und B6se demonstrates that Nietzsche has Kant in mind: “Once, namely, the ‘soul’
was believed in, just as one believed in grammar and the grammatical subject: one
[i.e., Descartes G.W.] said ‘I’ as condition, ‘think’is a predicate and conditioned -
thought is an activity, to which a subject must be thought as cause. Now one tries
with awe inspiring tenacity and cunning whether one can escape from this network, -
whether perhaps the reverse should not be hue: ‘think’as condition, ‘I’ conditioned;
‘I,’ then, first a synthesis which itself is made through thought. Kant . . .” KSA 5, p.
73.
38 Reclam 71 18, p. 149.
bid.,pp. 213;cf.pp.207&218.
Cf. Kant,KrV, A 236 f./ B 294 f.
D.C. Dennett says: “The self is the brain’s user-illusion of itself. The self is a
model which the brain uses to organise its activities.” “Die Suche nach dem Selbst.”
in Geo (February 1998), p. 74. The U.S. Neurophysiologisf B. Libet, asked certain
of his patients to raise their hands, watching the clock and a f t e w d s explaining
when they had decided to raise their hands, during which Libet took readings of their
brainwaves. He registered an interesting delay: “At the point in time at which the
subjects noticed their decision their neurons were long since active. At least a third of
a second before, the brainwaves showed that the nerve cells already gave the order
for movement. Apparently the brain had made a decision before it entered
consciousness. Is the human mind thus ketrieveably belated, the free will only an
338 G m R WOHLFART

illusion?” from Der Spiegel 29.12.1997, “Die Entmachtung der Uhren,” p. 10 I . The
interpretation of Bremer biologist and neurophysiologist G. Roth: “[Tlhe subjects of
the experiment had no free will, even if they felt otherwise. The brain decided the
point in time at the press of the button in a structure inaccessible to the person’s
thought - the limbic system. This only related its decision to the cerebral cortex and
consciousness.” Also other experiments support the illusion of the free will,
according to Roth, for example, during an operation, physicians can electrically
stimulate areas of the brain. The patient thereupon moves his arm under compulsion.
Should the patient be awake during the operation, so that he can answer questions, he
will say that he decided to move his arm. The illusion of the free will is a trick of the
brain for Roth, to the end that the activities of the brain are identified with the person.
From Information Philosophie (Dec. 1997), p. 119. I was surprised and confirmed in
my interpretation of Nietzsche as I received this information after completion of this
article.
Reclam 71 18, p. 56.
Cf. Ibid., p. 146.
Ibid., p. 85.
35 Reclam 71 18, p. 213.
45 Tractatus logico-philosophicus 5.631. The writing of the Tmctatus was
completed in 1918.
41 “...[I]
t is not unthinkable that first a decentering of the subject, whch
respectfully dismisses the fiction of autonomy, could lead to a valid constitution of
subjectivity beyond I and will.” P. Sloterduk, Der Denker auf der Biihne-Nietzsches
Materialismus,edition Surkamp 1353, Neue Folge Bd. 353 (Frankfurt 1986), pp. 168
ff.
48 Cf. KSA 4,p. 31: “Innocence is the child and forgetfulness, a new beginning,
a game, a wheel rolling by itself, a first movement, a holy affirmation,” Cf. also KSA
11, p. 105. M.E. the “I am”,which Nietzsche suggests is a characterization of the
third transformation, reminds one too much of the Cartesian “sum” and is thus
misleading.
Cf. KSA 11, p. 105.
Cf. also Reclam 71 18, editor’s ARerword, esp. chap. 1, “Wille eine falsche
Verdinglichung,” pp. 295 ff.
The “it thinks”was rightly understood in that the problematic “it” (cf. Ibid., p.
161) itself was not hypostasized like the ‘‘I” before, but was rather understood as a
synonym for .“thought”.
* Ibid., p. 173 “Thoughts are signs of a game and shuggle of the
af€ections. . .”@id., p. 174).
Cf. Nietzsche, KSA 5, p. 34 and WittgenStein, Philosophische
Untersuchungen,5 67.
 THE DEATH OF THE EGO 339

3 It may also be noteworthy that in the third transformation Gom “I W’to “it
thmks”, just as in the corresponding transformation from “I will”to “it plays”, the
sf:cond transformation is not merely to be forgotten, to be neglected. The thxd
transformation should rather be seen as the final consequence or completion of the
st:cond. The thud (postmodem) transformation could, in my opinion, therefore be
&scribed as an Aujhebung of the second (modem) transformation, in the threefold
H.egelian sense. The understanding, “it thinks”, would thus be understood as the final
consequence of the “I thmk,I am,”“the I is”. The solid “Archmedean” standpoint of
the “I think” has become a moment.
Cf. Reclam, 7 1 18, pp. 84 ff.
st; Reclam, 71 18, p. 130.
51 Cf. 1.c. Fragment 41 [7], pp. 169 ff.
sH Cf. R.T. Ames, ‘Nietzsche’s ‘Will to Power’ and Chinese ‘Virtuality’ (De): A
Comparative Study,” in Nietzsche and Asiun Thought, ed. by G. Pukes (Chicago:
1991). p. 148.
33 Ibid.
Cf. also by the author, “Kleine unwissenschaffliche Vorschrift m Zen-weg”
in Zen und Haiku (Stuttgart: 1997), pp. 1 1 ff.
fJ
Cf. by the author, “Nature and Eth~csin Zen,” in 0. Fenomeno Religioso
( h a i s Universitanos: 1995), No. 6, pp. 75 ff.
Cf. Fung YU-La, Chuang-Tm. A new selected trensluh’on with an Exposihon
ofthe Philosophy ofKuo Hsiang, (New York: 1964), pp. 34ff. Cf. also Livia Kohn,
“Selfhood and Spontaneity in Ancient Chinese Thought”, in Selves, People and
Persons, ed. by L. Rower (University of Notre Dame Press: 1992), esp. pp. 126 ff.
Regarding the seven inner chapters, one should further note the “fasting of
mind” (xin zhui) in chapter 4 and the “sitting and forgetting” (mowung) in chapter 6.
’%
Cf. Tao-Reception in East and West, ed by A. Hsia (Bern: 1994), pp. 73 fT
Matthew‘s Chinese - English Dictionary. The spectrum of meaning, which
reaches from ‘%body” to ‘T’, is interesting vis a vis Nietzsche’s reflections on “Leib”
and “Ich”.
Cf. Ibid., pp. 84 ff.
61 Ibid., p. 86.
Here an incomplete overview, shen is translated as “Kiirper” by V.V. Straul3,
Lao-Tse, Tuo Te King, (Manesse, Zilrich 1959), p. 70, as Leib in G. Debon, Lao-tse,
Tao-Te-Kin (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1979), p. 37; H. G. Mailer, Lootse, Tuo Te King,
Frankfurt: Fischer, l995), p. 174; as “corps” by. J. - J. - L. Duyvendak, Too Td King,
Le livre de lu voie et de In vertu, (Paris: 1987), p.3 I; as “body”by A Waley, The Way
and its Power (New York : 1958), p. 157; D.C. L a y Loo T m Tao Te Ching (London:
Penguin, 1963), p. 69; V.H. Mak,TOOte Ching, Lao Tim, (New York: 1990). p. 73;
shen is translated by Bauer as “Person,” or “person,” by R. Wilhelm, Laotse. Too Te
King (Dbseldorf: Diederichs, 1957), p. 53; R. G. Henricks, Lao-Tm, Te-Tuo Ching
340 G m R WOHLFART

(New York: 1989), pp. 65 and 212 [Henricks vacillates between “person” and
“body”]; Chen Ku-ying, Lao Tzu, Text, Notes and Comments (San Francisco: 1977),
p. 95; - shen is translated as “Selbst,” or “self’ by Lin Yutang, The Sayings ofLao
Tzu (Confucius Publishmg Co: 1981), pp. 180 ff.; Chang Chug-yuan, Too: A New
Way of Thinking (New York: Perennial Library, 1977), p. 35; J. Ulenbrook, Lao Tse,
Too Te King (Frankfurt/ Berlin Ullstein: 1980), pp. 68 ff.; E. S c h w a , Laudse
Daudedsching, (Milnchen: 1980), p. 63.
@
Chang Chug-yuan, ibid, p. 35.
Ibid, p. 36. Cf. also the references to Chuang Tzu in the further commentary.
I would agree with the translation, “If I have no body,” with the addition: “i.e.
if I am nobody.” Might one with regard to the use of “shen” in Lao Tzu chapter 7:
“sb stellt der Weise sein selbst m c k und ist den anderen voraus, wahrt nicht sein
selbst und es bleibt ihm bewahrt,” (translation Schwm, b i d , p. 57) and in Lao Tzu
chapter 66 perhaps also think of a “tactical,” or “strategic” form of self denial which
reminds one of Odysseus’ denial of the self (Odysseus=oudeis) to the Cyclopse?
Commentary on the Lao Tzu by Wang Pi [Wang Bi], translated by Ariane
Rump in collaboration with Wing-kit Chan, Monogmph ofthe Society for Asian
and Compamtive Philosophy, no. 6, p. 4 1.
E. Erkes, Ho-Shang-Kung’s Commentary on Lao-tse (Ascona: 1950), p. 148.
21 “Death is a fearful thing because of its irrevocableness, but at times, when
perhaps least expected, or even unwanted, the realization comes to us that what has
never existed, the individual soul, the ego, has not gone and cannot go out of
existence.” Zen and Zen Classics, Selections from R.H. Blyth compiled and with
drawings by F. Franck (Tokyo: Heian International, Inc. 1991), p. 104.

CHINESE GLOSSARY

ChanEen
Chan Wing-tsit
Chen Guying
Dao
Daodejing
daofaziran
Guo Mom0
Laozi
Liang Qichao
Lin Yutang
Mao Dun
shen
 THE DEATH OF THE EGO 34 1

Wang Bi
Wang Guowei
wu j i
wu sang wo
wu shen
x.in zhai
z;i ran
2:uo wang