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Fire Philosophy: Nietzsche, Zen, and How to Live

Fire Philosophy: Nietzsche, Zen, and How to Live

By: 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 Personal Development Personal Success Philosophy Social Sciences
Episodes
  • Conversation with Stephen Batchelor II: Towards a Socratic Buddha

    Conversation with Stephen Batchelor II: Towards a Socratic Buddha
    Nov 25 2025
    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 mins
  • A Dialogue about Cultivating Courage

    A Dialogue about Cultivating Courage
    Oct 21 2025

    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 mins
  • What's your blind spot? Playing table tennis without vision

    What's your blind spot? Playing table tennis without vision
    Aug 26 2025
    Can blind people play table tennis? “Yes we can” says Brendan Wright who gradually lost his vision until becoming completely blind over 20 years ago. Brendan is a huge sports fan and a multi-sport athlete who participates whenever he can. He is an accomplished four stroke swimmer, having won numerous medals at the Special Olympics, and plays “Beep Baseball” with his blind friends in the Los Angeles area. Still not fully satisfied with those limits, he wanted to try table tennis to explore whether it might be possible to play that sport without being able to see the ball. And it’s worked! Although the rules of the game differ, Brendan is now an accomplished ping pong player. Check out the video above to see how he can do that.Like others who live their lives with what we call a “dis-ability,” Brendan has learned to live a fruitful, active, and basically happy life without the benefit of vision. His abilities are astonishing. Compensating for the absence of sight, Brendan’s ability to feel and to understand the contours of his environment is astonishing. And his hearing capacity is so much greater than mine that you might as well call me “deaf.” He hears the world with astonishing precision and tells me what I’m missing.Based on research over the past half century, we now realize that many animals have ways of registering the world that are very different from human ways. And in many cases, more accurately attuned, more perceptive. In other words, all living beings have “blind spots” that go along with their specific ways of encountering the world. Beyond perceptual blind spots, we all stumble through the world with a wide variety of mental blind spots, cognitive leaps and gaps that shape how we perceive and understand the world in which we live.People who realize this—and cultivate the ability to notice—are able to recognize the strengths, weaknesses, and differences between a wide range of people. Picture those with a poetic sense for the world, with an artistic sense, with an acute connection to the natural world, with the capacity to understand animals in some intuitive way, with a musical ear, with a natural inclination to be quiet and listen or to be articulate, vocal, and humorous, with a chef’s ability to differentiate between tastes, with a natural ability to learn many languages, and on and on and on. People live incredibly interesting lives with different kinds of perception that support very different skills, and although we label some differences as disabilities, that label often blinds us to other people’s natural gifts. When the power goes off and the city is pitch dark, Brendan can navigate his environment as though nothing has changed. When I can’t hear subtle sounds in my environment, Brendan teaches me what I’m missing.The career that I stumbled into for very contingent reasons—a professor of Religious Studies and Asian Studies— forced me to acquire some level of sensitivity to human differences. I found myself exploring different cultures, different spiritual sensitivities, different philosophical takes on who people are or could be. Looking back, I can see how fortunate I was to spend my life learning to understand and to appreciate these differences. Other people—all of you—spend their lives with other occupations, other pursuits and as a result develop different sensitivities, different skills and ways of living. Human diversity is the engine of our collective creativity and a posture of open generosity to others is what sustains peaceful, productive living.For all the reasons above and more, I spend considerable time and some money to help support blind athletes—men and women who participate in the Special Olympics or who play “Beep Baseball.” For anyone interested, I invite you to join me in this endeavor by making a donation to support the Beep Baseball team featured below. Although, having spent my career as a teacher there are serious limits to my capacity as a donor, I am happy to offer to match all donations up to a limit of $2000. Here is a brief video on how blind men and women play baseball and a link for donations to help this team afford to rent a field for practices, purchase equipment, and travel to Beep Baseball tournaments around the USA:➡️ https://www.socalbeepbaseball.org/donate/Krzysztof here: Dale, who some of you may know is the author of The Six Perfections: Buddhism and the Cultivation of Character, wrote about the cultivation of generosity as the first important step on the path of seeing beyond the limits of one’s world . It’s a bit squeamish for Dale to talk about his own writing, especially in the context of encouraging donations to his son’s Beep Baseball team. So I’m going rogue here by adding this commentary and a pithy reminder from that book: We can only give to the extent that we are truly free, and are not possessed by our possessions, or our money, or ourselves. This is a public ...
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    4 mins
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