By Ed Reither, Beezone
Preface
I had never been a serious student of Fredrick Nietzsche (1844 -1900 – German philosopher). I knew his name, his reputation, and a few scattered quotes, but I’d only approached Beyond Good and Evil for another purpose. Then I reached his chapters on “Philosophers” and “The Free Spirit,” and something stopped me. He was describing how cultures and societies build their great edifices — moral, political, even intellectual — on what I would call “make-believe” reality, and what he calls “the will to ignorance.”
It wasn’t a casual remark. For Nietzsche, this “will to ignorance” isn’t simply a failure to know; it’s the very condition that allows us to live. We simplify, distort, and falsify because it gives us room to move, to act, to enjoy life. Knowledge itself, he says, rises on a deeper foundation — the deliberate preservation of not-knowing. That idea opened a door for me.
What began as a passing encounter with Nietzsche’s book turned into a much wider reflection, not only on the Western philosophical tradition he was working within, but on how that tradition changes when seen alongside another current entirely — the Buddhist Madhyamaka. The piece that follows traces that movement, beginning with Nietzsche’s “will to ignorance” and ending in a place he never tried to reach: the unsettling, and ultimately freeing, territory of what I’ll call spiritual reality.
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I was reading Beyond Good and Evil, Part Two, “The Free Spirit.” Nietzsche is blunt: philosophers should create values, not protect the old ones. In 1886 he paid for the printing himself — 300 copies, half sold, half given away. He wrote for a future audience. His target was the moral scaffolding of his age, but he still stood on the Newtonian stage — space and time fixed, the self assumed as the anchor of thought.
From the start, I keep another frame in mind: Madhyamaka. Bringing it in shifts the story out of the Western orbit entirely. Nāgārjuna was a philosopher, yes, but a Buddhist first. His aim was not to perfect a moral code or metaphysical system, but to show the emptiness of all systems — including the “self” that claims them. For a mind trained in Western philosophy, this is where the disturbance begins. The secure center you think is doing the thinking is itself called into question.
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Nietzsche wrote for a future audience. He wanted philosophers to create values, not defend the old ones. In his time, few noticed. Only 300 copies of Beyond Good and Evil were printed, half sold, the rest given away. He worked inside the old Newtonian universe, but overturned the moral structures that had stood for centuries.
Einstein changed the stage itself. Space and time were no longer fixed backdrops. They bent with motion and mass, tied to the position of the observer. There was no absolute frame of reference.
Heisenberg took the next step. At the smallest scale, reality was not fixed in advance. Observation changed what could be known. The more precisely one thing was measured, the less precisely another could be.
Wittgenstein turned to language. He argued that what can be said is limited by the structure of language. In his early work, language mirrored reality; later, he saw it as a set of practices — “forms of life” — that shape what counts as truth.
Whitehead entered with a different approach. He didn’t discard the past but reworked it. Using the insights of modern science, he built a process philosophy: the universe as events, not substances; everything in a state of becoming; creativity as the basic fact of existence. His system challenged both traditional metaphysics and modern reductionism, while keeping elements of both.
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The Western sequence takes the dismantling step by step. Nietzsche attacks absolutes in the moral sphere. Einstein changes the physical stage — space and time bend with motion and mass; the “view from nowhere” is gone. Heisenberg moves the uncertainty into the smallest scale — measure one property precisely, and you lose grip on its pair; observation is entangled with what is observed.
Wittgenstein turns the focus to language. Early, he treated it as a logical mirror of reality; later, as a set of shared practices that define meaning. The limits of language become the limits of thought. What we take as private certainty is shaped by public grammar.
Whitehead works in this altered world without discarding the past. He uses modern science to replace the metaphysics of substances with a philosophy of process: reality as a web of events, relations, and continual becoming. Creativity is the most basic fact. This challenges both traditional metaphysics and modern reductionism, but it still builds a coherent structure you can inhabit.
Seen through a Madhyamaka lens, all of these shifts — Nietzsche’s moral revaluation, Einstein’s relativity, Heisenberg’s uncertainty, Wittgenstein’s language-games, Whitehead’s process — are powerful, but still within the realm of the relative. They loosen our grip on absolutes, yet leave intact the sense of a stable “knower” who holds these insights.
Spiritual reality, in the Madhyamaka sense, disturbs that last refuge. It says the self is empty — a dependent construction, not an independent ground. For the Western mind, this can feel threatening at first. It’s not just that the world outside is unstable; the one holding the worldview is also without fixed nature.
Once Madhyamaka enters the frame, the idea of philosophy itself shifts. In the Western arc, even when philosophers overturn old foundations, they still tend to replace them with new ones — a better theory, a more accurate picture, a reformed moral order. In the Madhyamaka view, those replacements are not wrong, but they remain conventional. They are tools, not truths. They have a use, but no independent, ultimate standing.
This reframing is what makes “spiritual reality” so disruptive in a Western context. It is not just a claim about what is “out there” in the world. It is a confrontation with the basic instinct to secure a position for oneself. Even in the most daring Western philosophy, the self often survives as the hidden point of reference — the stable “I” who holds the insight. Madhyamaka goes after that reflex directly.
The early encounter with this can feel like standing on a platform that suddenly gives way. If the self is empty, who is thinking? Who is acting? Who is responsible? This is where the threatening quality comes in. It is not an intellectual threat but an existential one. It unsettles the ordinary confidence that there is someone here, managing things.
But if you stay with it, the disturbance changes. The emptiness of the self does not mean nothing exists; it means the self exists only in dependence — on body, on mind, on other people, on language, on the conditions of the moment. That realization doesn’t cancel the relative truths of Nietzsche, Einstein, Heisenberg, Wittgenstein, or Whitehead. It changes how you hold them. They become part of a larger practice: a way of loosening the grip on certainty without falling into despair or nihilism.
In that light, Nietzsche’s call for philosophers to create values becomes a call to create provisionally — to know that all creations are relative, yet still to act. Einstein’s relativity becomes a case study in how even the most basic structures are dependent on the frame from which you see them. Heisenberg’s uncertainty becomes an illustration of how the act of knowing changes what is known. Wittgenstein’s later work becomes a caution that even our most precise concepts are tied to specific contexts. Whitehead’s process metaphysics becomes a vision of reality as a continuous creative advance, without fixed things, without final states.
Taken together, they form a kind of curriculum for learning to live without absolutes — and yet to live fully. Madhyamaka sits both inside and outside that curriculum. Inside, because it shares the work of dismantling what is taken as final. Outside, because it is not trying to perfect the dismantling into a new system; it is trying to break the habit of system-making itself.
That is why I see the arc not as a chain of thinkers, but as a set of stepping stones. Each one is valuable for where it leads, not for where it stands. And “spiritual reality,” in this sense, is not another stone — it is the water running between them, reminding you that you were never meant to stop on any of them for long.
We live in a time when certainty is traded like currency. The demand is for strong positions, quick explanations, confident answers. The public philosopher — the media “voice of reason” — meets that demand by reinforcing the sense that there is a stable place to stand if only we can find it. Even the sharper critiques in this space tend to promise a new footing, a better map.
“Spiritual reality” in the Madhyamaka sense moves in the opposite direction. It does not offer a final position. It reveals that the need for one is itself the barrier to seeing clearly. This is why it can feel so foreign and threatening in a Western context: it does not stop at changing what you believe about the world; it changes what you believe about the one doing the believing.
In the arc from Nietzsche to Whitehead, each step loosens something that seemed fixed. Morality, space-time, determinacy, language, substance — all shown to be conditional. Madhyamaka goes further: the self who sees all this is conditional, too. When that is understood not as a loss but as a fact, the urgency shifts. We stop trying to build an unshakable ground and start learning how to live — and act — without one.
That stance is rare now. It doesn’t translate easily into headlines or soundbites. But it is the one that can work across cultural lines, across traditions, across the sharpest disagreements. It doesn’t depend on defending a fixed view of the world or of ourselves. It depends on the ability to use every view as a tool, and to put it down when it has done its work. That, in the end, is the work of philosophy when it opens into spiritual reality — not the search for the last word, but the cultivation of a mind that no longer needs one.