Alan Watts

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Alan Watts painted on mural.jpg

Alan Watts (born January 6, 1915 in Chislehurst , Kent , England as Alan Wilson Watts ; † November 16, 1973 at Mount Tamalpais , California , USA ) was an English religious philosopher who is known for popularizing Eastern philosophy in the western world to the middle of the 20th century. He worked mainly in the United States , where he first worked as a priest of the Episcopal Church , later as a lecturer and freelance writer .

With his interpretation of Buddhism , Daoism and Hinduism , he hit the nerve of the times , especially in the countercultural youth movement of the 1960s ( hippies, etc.) and helped shape their worldview and lifestyle. The Buddhist philosophy of Zen had a central influence on his thinking ; his 1957 book The Way of Zen is considered the first bestselling book on Buddhism. His over 25 books, numerous articles and speeches deal with topics such as personal identity , the true nature of reality and human consciousness . Audio recordings of his speeches are still very popular today, including in the form of excerpts on YouTube or as text samples for electronic music.

Life

Childhood and youth

Born in England, he grew up in a middle-class family . His father was a tire dealer, his mother a housewife and the daughter of a Christian missionary. In his teenage years Watts turned to Buddhism and joined the Buddhist Society in London, whose secretary he became in 1931 when he was only 16 years old. After finishing school, he worked first in a printing company and later in a bank; For a time he was a follower of the " guru " Dimitrije Mitrinović , who in turn was influenced by PD Ouspensky , Georges I. Gurdjieff and the psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud , Carl Gustav Jung and Alfred Adler .

Watts' fascination with the Zen philosophy developed during the 1930s. In 1936 he published his first book, The Spirit of Zen , which was still heavily influenced by Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki , whom he met at a religious congress in London that same year. He later criticized this himself as "popularization of Suzuki's earlier works, and besides being very unsolarly it is in many respects out of date and misleading" ).

"Christian" years

In 1939 he emigrated to the United States to study theology at the University of Vermont and later at Seabury Western Theological Seminary . During this time he tried above all to unite Asian philosophy and Christianity. He obtained his master's degree with Behold the Spirit , a thesis on the “necessity of mystical religion”. From 1945 he served as a priest of the US Episcopal Church for five years. In 1950 he resigned because an extramarital affair ended his marriage and because his Buddhist beliefs could no longer be reconciled with the narrow doctrine of the church.

Breakthrough as a writer and lecturer

In 1951 Watts moved to California, where he taught at the American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco , where he also directed its administration for a few years and learned Chinese writing and calligraphy . At the radio station KPFA in Berkeley , Watts built up a large regular audience for almost ten years from 1953 onwards over a weekly radio program for which he received no payment. In 1957 he left the faculty in San Francisco due to the emerging career outside of the academic environment. After that Watts was never tied to a university any longer, but held various positions (mostly as professor and lecturer) at different universities and colleges, including a "fellowship" at Harvard University from 1962 to 1964.

In 1957, the then 42-year-old Watts published The Way of Zen , which became the very first bestseller on Buddhism and made it internationally known. The Way of Zen is a philosophical treatise on Zen Buddhism, which also contains historical elements and references to the then new early work of Norbert Wiener on cybernetics . In 1958 he toured Europe with his father and met CG Jung and Karlfried Graf Dürckheim , among others . Also in 1958 he took LSD several times and published his first work on spiritual experiences through psychedelics , which were based, among other things, on experiences with mescaline . Watts' work in the 1960s shows an influence of these substance experiences on his views. He later said of the use of psychedelic drugs: “If you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope, he goes away and works on what he has seen. "(" When you have understood the message, end the call. Psychedelic drugs are simply instruments like microscopes, telescopes and Telephones. A biologist does not sit permanently in front of the microscope with his eye glued on, he goes away and works for what he has seen. ")

death

Watts smoked most of his life. He has taught a lot in recent years and has also struggled with alcohol problems. After a strenuous international lecture tour, Alan Watts died in 1973 at the age of only 58 in his mountain hut on Mount Tamalpais .

Watts was married a total of three times and had seven children.

Watts' philosophy

shape

Alan Watts was a popular philosophical writer of the twentieth century and usually adapted himself in language and expressed fundamental worldview to the respective audience. For a long time he preferred to write in the language of modern science and psychology (for example in Psychotherapy East and West ), and forged connections between spirituality and the empirical, material world of the "hard" sciences of the 20th century (such as physics) . He later compared spiritual experiences with ecological awareness.

content

Watts saw the world in the pantheist sense as fundamentally one. The ego , which was separated from the rest of the world and "came into the world" through birth , he considered an illusion. Instead, he emphasized that every person “grew out of the world” and was therefore a consequence of the whole and connected with everything. The living and experiencing ego is thus no less than the entire universe, which experiences itself through it . Watts took a liking to the Hindu concept of purple , which viewed creation as the deity's hiding from itself. Outside of this context, too, he often spoke of life as a “game” in the sense of Zen Buddhism, meaning that convulsive wanting makes one unhappy and should be replaced by getting involved in the flow of things, which results in a playful one Dealing with life can develop. He was also strongly influenced by the dualistic principles of Eastern philosophy such as the yin and yang of Daoism.

He saw himself as a thinker and public relations worker against the suffering of humans caused by alienation in the modern world, in which he was very similar to various other thinkers of his time, including his friend Aldous Huxley . He also propagated the increased integration of aesthetics into all areas of typical American life, i.e. better architecture, finer and more conscious food, more art and the like, and lived these principles with like-minded people in the commune of Druid Heights near Mill Valley on the eastern slope of the Mount Tamalpais in California . His writings reflect, among other things, the cultural and psychological limitations that he experienced in Great Britain. Despite the educational opportunities that the schools had opened up for him in his childhood, he felt the general cultural influence, especially in the religious area, as restrictive and repressive. In his opinion, Western Christian culture had developed over the centuries in a way that was skeptical of human nature as such, that suppressed the essence of man and alienated him from a holistic, nature-related worldview instead of teaching him to recognize one's true nature and to live in the here and now. Above all, he criticized the greatest (conservative) values ​​of his time such as the pursuit of wealth and monogamy .

Sample quote

“The inability to recognize the spiritual experience as such is more than an intellectual limitation. Lack of awareness of the fundamental unity of the organism and the environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination. Because in a civilization endowed with immense technological power, the alienation between humans and nature leads to the application of technology in a hostile attitude - to the 'conquest' of nature instead of intelligent cooperation with it. "

Mentions in popular culture

Movie

In the 2013 film Her , the consciousness- gaining operating systems generate an artificial , hyper-intelligent virtual personality from the books by Alan Watts, which is also named after him.

music

A large number of electronic music songs contain excerpts from his lectures, such as the pieces "Dreams" by nuages , "Overthinker" by INZO or the intro of the debut album Full Circle by the British trip-hop band Hælos . (This is based on a text read by Watt from his Spectrum of Love .) Of all the subgenres of electronic music, such samples are probably the most widespread in psytrance music. But there are also occasional audio recordings by Watts in music of other genres, for example in the song “Memento Mori” by the Metalcore band Architects .

Works (selection)

  • The Spirit of Zen , 1936
  • The Legacy of Asia and Western Man , 1937
  • The Meaning of Happiness , 1940
  • The Theologica Mystica of St. Dionysius , 1944
  • Behold the Spirit , 1948
  • Easter - Its Story and Meaning , 1950
  • The Supreme Identity , 1950
  • Wisdom of unsecured life (orig .: The Wisdom of Insecurity , 1951), OWBarth 1955
  • Myth and ritual of Christianity (orig .: Myth and Ritual in Christianity , 1953), OWBarth 1956
  • The Way of Zen , Pantheon Books, New York City, USA 1957.
    • German by Manfred Andrae: Zen Buddhism. Tradition and a living present . rowohlt's German encyclopedia, Reinbek near Hamburg 1961.
  • In harmony with nature (orig .: Nature, Man, and Woman , 1958), 1977, ISBN 3-85914-114-7
  • "This Is It" and other essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience (orig .: "This Is It" and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience , 1960), 1981, ISBN 3-85914-135-X
  • Psychotherapy and Eastern Liberation Paths (orig .: Psychotherapy East and West , 1961), Goldmann 1986, ISBN 3-442-11410-1
  • Cosmology of Joy - Adventures in the Worlds of Consciousness (orig .: The Joyous Cosmology - Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness , 1962), At-Verlag, ISBN 3-85502-681-5
  • The Two Hands of God - The Myths of Polarity , 1963
  • Beyond Theology - The Art of Godmanship , 1964
  • The illusion of the self. (orig .: The Book - On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are. 1966), Goldmann 2005, ISBN 3-442-21717-2
  • Nonsense , 1967
  • Does it matter? - Essays on Man's Relation to Materiality. 1970
  • Erotic Spirituality - The Vision of Konarak. 1971
  • The art of contemplation. (orig .: The Art of Contemplation. 1972), Kamphausen 1987, ISBN 3-591-08033-0
  • In My Own Way - An Autobiography 1915-1965. 1972
  • Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown - A Mountain Journal. 1973
  • The course of the water - the wisdom of Taoism. (orig: Tao: The Watercourse Way. 1975), Insel, Frankfurt 2003, ISBN 3-458-34639-2 .
  • The Early Writings of Alan Watts. 1987
  • The Modern Mystic: A New Collection of Early Writings. 1990
  • The Tao of Philosophy. (orig .: The Tao of Philosophy. 1995), Theseus Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-89620-208-1
  • Live now! The way of liberation (orig .: The Way of Liberation . New edition of the German first edition Leben ist now. The Mindfulness Book ), Herder, Freiburg im Breisgau 2009, ISBN 978-3-451-06137-0

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ https://www.ozy.com/good-sht/the-dead-philosopher-injecting-spirituality-into-mass-culture-on-youtube/96746/
  2. ↑ The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness (the quote appears in the 1965/1970 edition on page 26 and is not part of the original 1962 edition).
  3. ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RMHHwJ9Eqk
  4. ↑ Lowly .: INZO - Over Thinker. July 23, 2018, accessed April 8, 2019 .
  5. ↑ INTRO / SPECTRUM. March 18, 2016, accessed August 27, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Watts, Alan
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Watts, Alan Wilson
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English philosopher of Eastern philosophy
DATE OF BIRTH January 6, 1915
PLACE OF BIRTH Chislehurst , Kent
DATE OF DEATH November 16, 1973
Place of death Mount Tamalpais