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Schopenhauer, Existential Negativity, and Buddhist Nothingness |
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| Author |
Nelson, Eric S.
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| Source |
Journal of Chinese Philosophy
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| Volume | v.49 n.1 |
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| Date | 2022.03 |
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| Pages | 83 - 96 |
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| Publisher | International Society for Chinese Philosophy |
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| Publisher Url |
https://iscp-online1.org/
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| Location | Honolulu, HI, US [檀香山, 夏威夷州, 美國] |
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| Content type | 期刊論文=Journal Article |
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| Language | 英文=English |
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| Note | Author Affiliations: Division of Humanities, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, SAR, China |
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| Keyword | Schopenhauer; pessimism; negativity; Nirvana; nothingness |
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| Abstract | Hegel remarked in his discussion of the nothing in the Science of Logic that: “It is well known that in oriental systems, and essentially in Buddhism, nothing, or the void, is the absolute principle.” Schopenhauer commented in a discussion of the joy of death in The World as Will and Representation: “The existence which we know he willingly gives up: what he gets instead of it is in our eyes nothing, because our existence is, with reference to that, nothing. The Buddhist faith calls it Nirvana, i.e., extinction.” It is striking how nineteenth-century German philosophical discourses (from Hegel and Schopenhauer to Mainländer, von Hartmann, and Nietzsche) concerning negativity, nihility, and nothingness explicitly refer to Buddhism, which was initially conceived by Christian missionaries as a “cult of nothingness” and became entangled with European debates concerning pessimism (the Pessimismusstreit) and nihilism. In this article, I reconsider how the interpretation of negativity and nothingness in Schopenhauer and nineteenth-century German thought informed the reception of Buddhism as a philosophical and religious discourse, and trace the ways in which Buddhist emptiness was reinterpreted in the context of the Western problematic of being and nothingness. |
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| Table of contents | Introduction 83
Schopenhauer’s Suffering and the Advent of European Buddhism 85
Nietzsche and Schopenhauer: To Will or Not to Will? 87
Reevaluating Negativity, Nothingness, and Nihilism 89
Nothingness, Non-duality, and the Symbolic 93
Conclusion: The Flute, the Other, and the Idea 94
Acknowledgments 96 |
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| ISSN | 03018121 (P); 15406253 (E) |
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| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1163/15406253-12340050 |
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| Hits | 149 |
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| Created date | 2022.08.09 |
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| Modified date | 2022.08.09 |
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