«The term nibbāna/nirvāṇa is chosen carefully, and is often misunderstood by Western consumers of Buddhist literature. It is essentially a negative term, and figures in an elaborate fire-based metaphor (Gombrich 2009). […]

When Buddhists think about the human being analytically it is in terms of five skandhas, or piles of phenomena. […]

The term khanda (Pali for skandha) refers originally to a very specific kind of pile—a pile of firewood on a funeral pyre. Skandhas, therefore, are conceived as burning, and as being consumed. And this is an important soteriological metaphor. In the Fire Sutta (Additapairyaya-sutta), Siddhartha Gautama is represented as saying that our life is led as though we are on fire. We are burned by dukkha, consumed by forces out of our control, and we are being depleted all the time by those forces. Nibānna is also a term with a very specific core meaning—the extinction of a flame, as in blowing out a candle or a lamp. Nibānna, or nirvāṇa, then, is not a positive attainment or state of being. Nor is it a state of complete non-being, of annihilation. Instead it is the state of no longer being driven, consumed and tormented (however unconsciously) by dukkha.»

— Jay L. Garfield. Engaging Buddhism: Why It Matters to Philosophy

— Donald S. Lopez Jr. The Story of Buddhism

хотя с огнем в буддизме бывало и наоборот

Уже несколько лет собирюсь прочитать “The Enigma of Health” Гадамера, теперь точно пора.

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«The fundamental task of being a human being is self-understanding in the world, in which the self is thrown into the variety of languages that cannot be reduced to one language. To understand oneself in the world means understanding the self and the other. To understand the other, one needs to listen to the other with a strong conviction that the other might be right. To help a human being find itself at home in this complex world can be seen as a genuine goal of a phenomenological hermeneutics of medicine and, in fact, medicine itself. The task of medicine is to help uncover the phenomenon of being a human being in the adequacy of one’s own vocation without a premature pressure to solve all the difficult problems that the self experiences. If medicine wishes to be an art of healing, it must be a dialogical science, an art of healing that assists in finding one’s own way to live one’s life. […]

Suffering discloses something essential about our way of being-in-the-world and cannot be reduced to a medical problem in need of being controlled or overcome.»

— Andrzej Wiercinski. Gadamer
(in G. Stanghellini et al. (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Phenomenological Psychopathology)

психотерапевтическое руководство

«Foucault started out as a student of Heideggerian existential psychiatry. His first published work, a one hundred page introduction to Binswanger's Dreams and Existence (1954), begins by setting out and defending Heidegger's account of human existence, or Dasein, in Being and Time. In this account, there is no human nature. Rather, "human being" is a self-interpreting way of being whose practices have enable it to act as if it had a whole series of different natures in the course of history. To understand Heidegger's claim, it helps to remember that, in Homeric times, there were ways of singing of heroes and so men could become heroes. Later, in Christian times, there were practices for cannonizing saints so men could become saints. At the time of Homer, there could be no saints but only pathetic losers who let people walk all over them, and, conversely, in Medieval times there could be no heroes but only prideful individuals who disrupted society by denying their dependence on God. Or, to take an example from Foucault's History of Sexuality, in Antiquity in some groups men took care of themselves by taking care their actions were in keeping with the laws of health and society, while in another, confessional practices produced a new type of man who identified himself with his desires, and then, since his desires might be the disguised work of the devil, developed a hermeneutic of suspicion to ferret out their true meaning.»

— Hubert Dreyfus. Foucault's Critique of Psychiatric Medicine

«Consider the young, devout, and extremely pious monk [Martin] Luther. So dedicated was he to eradicating all trace of sin in his soul that he worked constantly to purify himself. Indeed, he became obsessed with the identification and confession of personal sin. No doubt at least some of the traditional stories about the young Luther are false. But they are telling nevertheless. They describe Luther as a pious, innocent young monk who was so obsessed with the purity of his soul that he once kept his confessor for six hours to hear the full recitation of his sins. A monk who—at least once after a long and satisfying confession—rushed back to the booth to confess the hint of pride that had crept into his mind at the thought of the lengthy confession he had just offered! They describe a frustrated Johann von Staupitz, Luther’s wise and patient confessor, who finally rebuked Luther for his incessant visits to the confessional, complaining, “You must get a hold of yourself, Martin. Every time you fart you want to make confession of your sins.” Apparently Staupitz did finally reach the end of his rope: “Quit coming to me with these puppy confessions, Luther,” he shouted. “Go kill your father or something—then we’ll have a sin to talk about!»

— Hubert Dreyfus. All Things Shining

попался 👀

«In his later work, however, when Foucault focuses on the social effects of the sciences of man rather than on their selfdefeating attempt to recuperate the unthought into the cogito, he comes to see psychoanalysis not as a liberating step beyond the human sciences, but as the culmination of a normalizing confessional technology developed by the early Christians. In the lectures and interviews reflecting the not yet published Confessions of the Flesh, Foucault argues that Christian confessional practices produced a being he calls 'the man of desires'. This Christian man identifed himself not with his public deeds but with his most private intentions, desires, fantasies, and dreams. Moreover, since what one desired might well be forbidden and thus the desire disguised, one had to be suspicious of one's desires and constantly work to dredge up one's true motivations. Foucault quotes a confession manual: "Examine .. . all your thoughts, every word you speak, and all your actions. Examine even unto your dreams, to know if, once awakened, you did not give them your consent. And finally, do not think that in so sensitive and perilous a matter as this, there is anything trivial or insignificant" (1978, p. 20). This is the motto of the hermeneutic subjects we have all become. […]

"We convince ourselves that we have never said enough on the subject, that, through inertia or submissiveness,we conceal from ourselves the blinding evidence, and that what is essential always eludes us, so that we must always start out once again in search of it" (1978, p. 33). Thus, in principle, Freudian theory advocates the interminable analysis of one's desires, fantasies, and dreams and so contributes to the practices that tend to make everyone into self-normalizing subjects. Each person is led to seek the truth about himself, and thus to assure that all his actions and even his thoughts in every area of life do not deviate from what science has shown to be normal, healthy, and productive. […]

What makes Freudian theory dangerous, according to Foucault, is that such self-inspection is not confined to a period of therapy when dealing with a specific problem. Rather it is supposed to be based on a science of the psyche that holds that relentless self-inspection must be practiced as a permanent way of life if one is to become and remain a mature and healthy human being.[…]

Acording to Foucault, this endless self-analysis, in which each private subject is urged to speak so as to make itself available to inspection and correction, has become not our cure, but our curse.»

— Hubert Dreyfus. Foucault's Critique of Psychiatric Medicine

“Если в книге ничего не понятно, то читать ее нельзя, если в книге все понятно, то читать ее не надо”