For the metaphor buried deep in our cultural subconscious, which I talk about this is my work from an ontological perspective, you might want to consider what I call the Negative Fourfold that is implicit in Greek Mythology as the opposite of the Positive Fourfold spoken about by Socrates and taken up by Heidegger which is Heaven/Earth//Mortal/Immortal which is associated with the masculine. The Negative Fourfold associated in myth with women in Greek Myth is Chaos, Night, Abyss, Covering. See Aristophanes The Birds for the classical locus of this idea, which also appears in a slightly different form in Hesiod’s Theogony along with the Greek requisite misogyny. For my treatment of it see The Fragmentation of Being and the Path Beyond the Void at http://works.bepress.com/kent_palmer.

Suggest you read Zizek’s interpretation of Lacan to get at this problem. He does not talk about it in terms of false consciousness or bad faith but since you are after what the appeal might be of these existential conditions the Lacanian analysis is pertinent.

I guess what this question is saying implicitly is that “mind” which is part of the “mind/body” dualism is ‘super-natural’ while the body part is ‘natural’; so the question becomes: can you have a dualism like the mind/body duality where one part is not ‘supernatural’. This is precisely what materialism is. Materialism would describe all phenomena as either nature, or epiphenomena of nature, with no transcendental ideals that go beyond nature. It turns out that this is hard to do. Our tradition is idealist, because Kant figured out how to get around Hume’s objections to causality though the idea of a priori projection of synthesis. That assumes transcendentals as a framework like ego, noumena, God.  Nietzsche tried to produce an atomist materialism that avoided all transcendentals that was purely immanent without being overtly materialist  Deleuze attempts to produce a wholly immanent philosophy based on expressionism. There are a lot of attempts to get around the impasse created by the mind/body duality in our worldview kicked off really in the modern era by Descartes. Spinoza solved the problem by identifying God with Nature and constructing a pantheism. But fundamentally all solutions actually reinforce the dualism in most cases. In other words you need to start from the duality to understand the clever way that someone comes up with to avoid its consequences.

Nonduality on the other hand takes a completely different approach which says that there is Not One! Not Two~ Not Many! In other words there is a possibility that is non-representable that is prior to the arising of the dichotomy. Non-duality despite its name means that we must explain the ur-strata out of which the duality arises, in order to understand the duality. This is Heidegger’s strategy in Being and Time positing Dasein as what was before the Subject/Object dichotomy. But of course this merely pushes the duality deeper into fundamental ontology as the difference between being/Being (ontological difference). True nonduality does not do this but rather explains what is the nature of existence prior to any arising of any distinction, dichotomy, or duality, and how it can arise, and why it is not fundamental, i.e. why non-duality remains fundamental despite the appearances of dualism. Turns out this is hard and it took basically the whole history of Buddhism to figure out how to do this with the epitome being achieved by Fa Tsang with the idea of interpenetration. Thus for him the nondual indicator emptiness was equivalent to the interpenetration of all things. So interpenetration comes first, and then emptiness arises only in response to a specific move of creating a dualism. We invoke emptiness to negate the dualism and return to the primal ground of interpenetration. Thus we realize what the Heart Sutra would have us understand that Form is Emptiness and Emptiness is Form. The inter-transformation of the two occurs in the ground of interpenetration. Form arises along with emptiness that negates it and returns it to the ground of form which is the non-form of interpenetration. But the important thing to realize is that the ground of interpenetration is not unstructured. All the forms you see as you look around you are this ground. Each form you see comes with its emptiness which cancels it out as it arises. So we get non-arising and non-cessation. In other words because the forms arise with the emptiness that cancel them out they do not actually arise but merely appear to arise. And because they are not differentiated from the emptiness that cancels themselves out the forms do not cease to be just because they never left the ground of interpenetration. This way of thinking about the primal ground was perfected by Buddhism, and really has no equivalent in the Western worldview. It is far far more sophisticated than Western philosophy and its ad hoc solutions to philosophical problems that come out of dualism AFTER dichotomies, distinctions, dualisms have arisen. Genuine Nondual philosophies deal directly with this question of non-arising and non-cessation and its corollary which is called dependent co-arising. What that means is that everything arises together from the interpenetrating ground, so that there is quasi-causation rather than direct causation. That quasi-causation is called Karma. I model this with what I call the Emergent Meta-system in Special Systems Theory. Dependent co-arising with quasi-causality is the way that the interpenetrating ground exhibits the dynamism of continuous meta-levels of change. Interpenetration is not static but extremely dynamic, which is modeled by the meta-levels of non-existence in non-indo-european languages. In Indo-European languages we have Being that stands in and ursups the place of negation becoming striated into meta-levels. What you are calling super-natural is merely higher meta-levels of Being which in nondual philosophies of non-indo-european cultures is modeled by meta-levels of non-existence, because existence is itself unstriated unlike Being. So for instane we have Becoming which is Heraclitian Flux (Process Being) that is the first meta-level up from Parmenidian Stasis of Pure Being. But this is not Existence as opposed to Being, but rather just a meta-level of Being. We have to go up to the fifth meta-level of Being before we encounter true existence, and this is why most existentialist philosophy in the West like for instance that of Heidegger or Sartre is not truly existentialist, but rather merely an adumbration of Being of some sort. The whole way of posing this question is caught up in the machinations of Being. In order to solve this problem we need to get outside of Being and understand the nondual interpretations of Existence and then comprehend Existence as interpenetrating as a dynamic ground prior to the arising of any distinction, dichotomy or duality, but which does not negate the world we see in front of us with its own distinctions which we call NTR or Nature. NTR is the word for the Egyptian Gods. From the beginning the Nature was already Supernatural and to this extent Spinoza was right in his pantheism by identifying god and nature. Because NTR is already supernatural in its origins that is why it is possible to have immanent solutions to mind/body dualities like that of Nietzsche or Deleuze.

I don’t think your scenario is correct. We can tell a lot about the history of the context from our own experience.  Suggest you look at Husserl’s Internal Time Consciousness edited by Heidegger to get a bigger picture of the issues you are talking about. Also consider Aron Gurwitsch’s book on The Field of Consciousness.

Right now the most popular Continental Philosopher is Zizek, who talks about everything from literature, film to modern politics (He even lectured to the 99% at Occupy WallStreet). I have been reading his works and I find them extremely interesting.  I recommend them, especially the works on Hegel and Lacan. There are a lot of his lectures available online and they are always entertaining and usually fairly interesting as well. I like his use of old Communist jokes as a basis for some of his paradoxical thinking. Essentially he is a sophist, his main goal is to take some absurd stand and make it believable, and that makes you think. So of course there are those who will apply his theories to literature even more pervasively than he does. He is more interested in film, but he also uses stories occasionally to illustrate points. I don’t know anyone who has read as much as he has. It is unbelievable the range of what he has read. So you learn a lot about what is out there of relevance that you would never of hear of otherwise if you read his books and listen to his lectures. He made Lacan make sense to me for the first time. But then again he reduces Lacan to Hegel and so that helps. But the combination of Lacan and Hegel is very enticing in as much as it gives a good basis for explaining things in literature that might otherwise remain completely inexplicable. However, to use this kind of approach you have to be a very sophisticated thinker, so he would not be for everyone. Besides he is a latter day communist, which is one reason that his appeal is diminished. But he his a very coy communist and his dedication to that is not very great as far as I can see, he is mostly interesting in unmaking metaphysical absurdities that pass for normal in everyday life. Communism is diminished to an appeal to support for the commons. If he is the next generation of Communist then I don’t think we have much to worry about. Badiou’s Maoism seems much more dangerous (because his thought is too my mind less humane). Zizek is reveling in human all too human like Nietzsche did. Zizek finds some interesting stories to illustrate some of his Lacanian points.

I would say that there is no relation between meditation and Nietzsche’s thought. Mainly this is because Nietzsche did not understand Buddhism. Which is interesting since Hegel understood it much better. But Nietzsche was reacting against Schopenhauer and thought that Buddhism was what Schopenhauer thought it was, which was life denying, so Nietzsche lumped it in with Christianity as being life denying. Actually there is no relation between Buddhism and Christianity, and even if we were to say that Hinayana Buddhism seems life denying, it is hard to maintain that for Mahayana Buddhism. But of course the nature of Buddhism itself is fairly subtle and Nietzsche who otherwise is a very subtle thinker just did not get it at all. Better to stick to Buddhist understandings of Buddhism and its meditation practices. Or if you prefer some other type of meditation practice, stick to those who actually know something about it and do not get mixed up by trying to find parallels between Western Philosophers and Meditation practices. Basically Western Philosophers don’t know anything about that, and it is a gigantic deficiency in Western Philosophy that this is not part of the story of human experience considered by Western Philosophy.

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I have  been asked to explain how Nietzsche’s philosophy would be different if he had understood Buddhism better.

For this we need to go back to Hegel. Nietzsche is someone how is applying Hegelianism to the utmost, exploring its cutting edge implications. Hegel understood Buddhism because he understood emptiness and incorporated it directly into his Logic. So he says that the fundamental dichotomy is between being and nothing. But he defines nothing as Buddhist emptiness, which in fact is an interpretation of existence which is nondual. Therefore, Hegel’s philosophy, almost uniquely within the Western tradition can be interfaced with Buddhist insights into the nondual nature of existence under the rubric of Buddhist emptiness, whose opposite is Taoist Void. So there are two nondual interpretations of existence which is Buddhist Emptiness on the one hand and Taoist void on the other hand. Hegel during his time had at his disposal the first glimmers of knowledge about Buddhism which he interpreted correctly, i.e. he realized that it was not a form of nihilism, and that it was an interpretation of existence, so his first duality is Being verses Existence interpreted as Emptiness. This has a lot of implications but one of them is that it gives us perhaps the only good translation point between Buddhist philosophy and Western Philosophy. The next step is that Hegel provides an aufhebung (sublation) by which this duality he posits which is in fact fundamental to the Western worldview, because only the Western worldview has Being in its language base, and all other languages either have an existential or copula as the core concept of the language. Thus for instance Zeus/Apollo triumph over Typhoon/Python, and this triumph is seen as the triumph of Being over Existence. Existence is almost always represented as a reptilian metaphor most notably the dragon. Note the difference in the nature of the Dragon in Chinese culture for instance. So instead of establishing a monism of Being by completely suppressing Non-Being or Existence, as say Parmenides did with the three ways, Hegel instead says that the synthesis of Being and Nothing as Empty Existence is Heraclitian Flux, i.e. Becoming (what Heidegger will later call ready-to-hand in Being and Time). This showed a lot of insight on the part of Hegel. As Zeno showed any movement what so ever generates contradictions or paradoxes. So Heraclitian Flux of Becoming must be something paradoxical, but this can be avoided if instead we use the concept of emptiness as that which delivers the ability to embed a dynamic into Being by an appeal to empty existence. In other words there are discontinuities that becoming jumps over underlying the continuity that is posited by Being, in order to give continuity in time, rather than just a pure plenum  of continuity in the present moment. This in fact gives us an ability to understand what becoming actually is without being contradictory. It is not contradictory because there is just no connection between the moments of Being in the flux of becoming.

The next move that Hegel makes is to posit a new thesis beyond becoming understood in this way, which is Dasein or determinate being, which is the philosophical name for existence in German Philosophy. Heidegger uses this term to describe the a priori projection mechanism thought up by Hegel which is the focus of Being and Time.

Now that we understand the underlying framework established by Hegel that Nietzsche is taking for granted, we can skip to Schopenhauer who had the insight that Kant’s being in itself, or noumena within the human being, rather than in objects is the Wille. So we have noumena within ourselves and we k now it as our Will, or Desire, or in Freud the Trieb. Schopenhauer thought he was translating Hinayana Buddhism into Western parlance and created a very pessimistic philosophy. But unfortunately Schopenhauer did not really understand Buddhism very well, because there is nothing negative about Buddhism because Buddhism is essentially nondual, cannot be negative or positive in its essence. Nietzsche rejected Schopenhauer’s pessimism and reversed it searching for a basis of optimism instead. Nietzsche also reversed Hegel’s idea that all self-consciousness comes from slaves, and that nobles or masters cannot be self-conscious by definition. Note that Hegel said this because slaves are ready-to-hand for the masters, but the slave sees what the masters are doing as present at hand. On the other hand the masters are trapped in the present at hand and cannot reach the ready to hand because that is the domain of the slave, thus we get the master slave dialectic in which the slaves actually become the master of the master in an aufhebung. The slaves we are talking about are the greek philosophers in Rome who were Roman slaves. The master slave dialectic appears perfectly worked out in Waiting for Godot in the relation between Pozzo and Lucky. Nietzsche wanted a philosophy what was Positive in its essential nature and gave self-consciousness to the masters as well as the slaves. Because masters actually established their mastery though works and thus they did have access to the ready-to-hand in warfare by which they established their mastery.

Given these two moves of reversal Nietzsche established the goals of his philosophy and to obtain those goals he attempted to understand the Value of value. In other words he attempted to take values to a meta-level, and he concluded that the ultimate value is life itself based on a Darwinian and Atomistic model. And thus from this point of departure he railed against everything that was life denying, like Schopenhauer, like Christianity, and since he accepted Schopenhauer’s interpretation of Hinayana Buddhism, like Buddhism. But, of course, he was wrong about Buddhism because emptiness is nondual and thus does not affirm or deny life, but merely takes it as an existence, a fact of life.

Now we are entering a very speculative arena. If Nietzsche had actually understood Buddhism at least as good as Hegel did or better, as we can understand it today, then Nietzsche would have had a measuring rod for  his own thought. Buddhism is the most sophisticated philosophical tradition on the planet ever. We can mention Nagarjuna, Mipham, Fa Tsang and of course the myriad Mahayana Sutras that explore the subtle nuances of attainable states of consciousness through meditation that they describe in detail. There is nothing like this in Western Philosophy which spends its time just trying mundane everyday experience with no knowledge of the heights possible in the refinement of human spirituality as it interrogates the nondual. Without that measure it is only possible to push the limits of philosophy so far. So for instance we see that Nietzsche thinks by reversing the positions of his predecessors. So he never departs from duality. His only ideas that are are monistic, like Will to Power is everything, or eternal return but even between those there is a duality. But if he had understood Mahayana Buddhism and nonduality he might have been able to go on to other higher types of thought rather than just reacting against what went before. One way to look at it is that his UberMench is really just those who understand Mahayana, but all Nietzsche could only do is say that there is something beyond the Last Man, but not really be able to say what the Ubermench might be. Of course, anyone who knows anything about meditation and its benefits can see that there is a path beyond common humanity, or deeper into ones own humanity as the case may be, is through meditation. So, of course, having philosophies that take into account altered states of consciousness are going to be more sophisticated and more advanced than theories that do not. So if Nietzsche had taken seriously Buddhism then his thoughts would have been very different, but then of course we would not have the Nietzsche we do have who is the master of irony, absurdity, and paradox who reverses all the fundamental assumptions of our tradition so we can see what lies beneath the surface. We are better off to have Nietzsche as he is, without the pollution of nondual ideas. Because after all most of use have no idea about these things anyway, and at least we can relate to Nietzsche as the ultimate heretic of our tradition, and thus in his own way a measure for us of our tradition, but this measure is week compared with the measure of the Buddhist tradition, which we not understand better than we did through earlier Western interpretations that saw it as merely nihilistic without comprehending its intrinsic nonduality. But today we can have both the proto-postmodern outlook of Nietzsche who sees no headland above the world, and the Buddhists who see through the fundamental illusion of our dualistic worldview. Or at least that is a possibility if we read widely enough to encompass both our own tradition and the traditions that are nondual from other countries  The real question is how we can come to understand nonduality within the Western Tradition, a lone example of which is Meister Eckhart.

You are not going to believe this but we still live in a Aristotelian world. In the West they lost Plato and all they had was Aristotle’s class notes up until the Renaissance. The Renaissance was the re-entry of Plato into the Western tradition after a long absence. And they forgot Greek so they were reading Aristotle in Latin translation. The point here is that because Aristotle was never lost, as Plato was, that he is more central to our Western Roman tradition than Plato and that Science for all its difference in detail from Aristotle’s opinions about natural phenomena, is still basically Aristotelian in its approach.

Latin had degenerated a lot during the middle ages. So in the Renaissance there was a resurgence in Latin, but also a relearning of Greek, and the reintroduction of the Greek originals of both Aristotle and Plato. So the West had lost touch with the Greek Foundations of the Roman empire that were preserved in Constantinople  but when that fell then the West basically re-invented itself as the inheritor of the Roman Empire despite the Barbarians having taken over, and the population crisis that occurred in Europe.

When Modern Empirical Science came along it was Aristotelian Science together with its infusion into Christianity that was being rebelled against. But everyone was still getting a classical education, so everyone was still steeped in Aristotle primarily and Plato secondarily, and then one might read the new works of science written in French, or Italian or German or English. What ever you fight against you become like.

So the fact that Modern Science came out of Aristotelian Science through a struggle means that Modern Science is just a variation on Aristotelian science, not a genuine departure. Since we no longer get classical educations we are just unaware of the similarity. But it is impossible to really get away from hundreds of years of Scholasticism. It is there beneath the surface informing our outlook in myriad ways.

Culture appears as archaeological deposits, we never jettison anything we merely build over the rubble of what went before. Alexander established the Greek civilization worldwide in his campaigns, and then this was replaced by the Roman Empire, which then split in two, and in the Western half we inherited the Latin with Aristotle being the basis of thought about everything. Plato and Greek texts came back in during the Renaissance, and then after that slowly the modern period arose in which we tried to disengage from the worst offenses of dogmatic science, but we did not cease to consider Aristotle right about everything else.

Basically what ever is the question we start off with Aristotle’s opinion and then start comparing that to Plato and then to others. The reason for that is that Aristotle had thought things out extensively and it is very difficult to come up with something different from what he had to say that carries equal weight. Basically modern science merely learned to query nature itself and to give authority of what nature said over what Aristotle said, but for everything else we just continue to stick to Aristotle as the first source.

Or in some cases we substitute Plato when there is a clear reason to do so. Plato tends to be much harder to understand and more sophisticated and so it is much more difficult to appeal to Plato than Aristotle. So the answer is that the whole of Aristotle is still relevant, even if you are someone like me who prefers Plato. Modern Science is merely a set of variations on Aristotle. Aristotle thought that nature acted like people and had intentions, but this turned out to be false, and so those parts of Aristotle’s work relating to Physics has been superseded

But he still defined what Physics was and separated it from Metaphysics. He founded Theology, and Politics, and Literary Criticism. You name it and it probably had some source in Aristotle or in his successors. We are all just late successors of this main predecessor within our culture.

For instance, we now know that Being and Time by Heidegger is basically his going back to Aristotle and treating his work as if it was phenomenological. It is very hard to get away from Aristotle in our tradition. For instance he set up the Excluded middle and the Law of Non-Contradiction that made our culture dualistic. This is one of the most profound moves made by any thinker in our tradition, and one if the most far reaching in its consequence. We still hold to that principle despite all the evidence from Quantum Mechanics that dualism is not the way nature works.

Ok, given the answer of Toni Shuma which is excellent, I can see what this Question could mean. The point is that life itself is messy in all its manifestations. The idea that much of anything can be neat in life is an illusion. But much of what we do is driven by trying to make that illusion as true as possible.

I normally have a hugh stack of books that I want to read so that is not a problem normally. The problem is to decide which one out of the stack has the highest priority, and I guess the answer to that is whim.

What is so great about Homer is the depth of his poetry in the Iliad and Odyssey. We take Homer as just the name instead of Anonymous that History gave to whoever came up with the epics being one or many people. There are just a few writers like Homer in our tradition which include Plato, Dante, and Shakespeare and a few others whom it is almost impossible to understand how a human being could do what they did. Their work opens up almost infinite horizons of meaning. Without them our tradition would be much more impoverished than it is, they give the tradition almost infinite depth. And this is no mean accomplishment. Other writers have a finite depth, they are fathomable. But there are a handful of writers that are unfathomable, and they appear as founders in many ways of their traditions. Many of the greatest of these deeper fathomable ones appear in All Things Shining by Kelly and Dreyfus along with some of the unfathomable ones. Heidegger talks about their works in The Origin of the Work of Art, which when he says creates worlds. It is this quality of infinite depth of meaning that creates the world for us. Other fathomable works fill that world, but it is the unfathomable ones that produce the infinite horizon of the world itself. Harold Bloom says that Shakespeare teaches us what it is to be human. Homer did that for the Greeks in the Mythopoietic Era and Plato did it for them in the early Metaphysical Era. Dante did it in the Renaissance and Shakespeare did it for us just before the modern era in the later Renaissance. Homer gives us a peak inside the mythopoietic era and makes it coherent for us as a way of worlding the world prior to the onslaught of reason. This is tremendously valuable as it gives us some perspective on the effects of reason once it became the primary criteria for comprehending experience  Kelly and Dreyfus say we do not get back out of it until Herman Mellvile’s Moby Dick. Melville wrote against the Cristian Onto-Theological (defined by Heidegger) viewpoint prior to Nietzsche.