Schopenhauer’s invective is legendary among philosophers, and is unmatched in the historical canon. But these complaints are themselves worthy of careful consideration: they are rooted in Schopenhauer’s philosophy of language, which itself reflects the structure of his metaphysics. This short chapter argues that Schopenhauer’s vitriol rewards philosophical attention; not because it expresses his critical take on Fichte, Hegel, Herbart, Schelling, and Schleiermacher, but because it neatly illustrates his philosophy of language. Schopenhauer’s epithets are not merely spiteful slurs; instead, they reflect (...) deep-seated theoretical and methodological commitments to transparency of exposition. (shrink)

In response to the claim that our sense of will is illusory, some philosophers have called for a better understanding of the phenomenology of agency. Although I am broadly sympathetic with the tenor of this response, I question whether the positive-theoretic blueprint it promotes truly heralds a tenable undertaking. Marshaling a Schopenhauerian insight, I examine the possibility that agency might not be amenable to phenomenological description. Framing this thesis in terms of Charles S. Peirce’s semiotic framework, I suggest a way (...) to integrate the idea of streaming experiences with that of bodily strivings, which, owing to their primitive structure, can never be represented. (shrink)

In Beyond Good and Evil, section 15, Nietzsche offers a criticism of the Kantian contention that the external world is but the work of our organs. As such, he claims, our organs, as part of this world, would by implication also be the work of our organs. Unless then we are to assume that the concept of a causa sui is not an absurd one, the external world is, reduction ad absurdum, not the work of our organs. This paper offers (...) a defence of Schopenhauer from Nietzsche’s charge of circularity, based on the contention that the apparent circularity arises only upon the Nietzschean assumption that the transcendental idealist is, in fact, mistaken in his conception of a transcendental subject. It is only by assuming that Schopenhauer was mistaken, for example, in supposing the law of causality to be of a subjective and transcendental nature, that Nietzsche can even speak about the subject or the world as ‘caused’. A true grasp of Schopenhauer’s position can only lead to the conclusion that no causal chain, let alone a circular one, is at play here. Nietzsche’s error is diagnosed as arising from a deepening of historical sense, which assumes, from the outset, that the conceptual categories of the perceiving subject do not offer us an aeterna veritas. Finally, Nietzsche’s misconception, and his subsequent inability to diagnose it, arises from Schopenhauer’s own inability to escape what Wittgenstein terms the “temporality of our grammar.” Schopenhauer simply does not have the words at hand to ever remove the notion of temporality from the idea that the subject and the world ‘create’ each other. Taking cognisance of Schopenhauer’s ‘double aspect’ theory of the subject, removes from the relationship the notion of causality upon which Nietzsche’s critique is based. (shrink)

Beyond vague references to his ‘Eastern’ or ‘Oriental’ influences, there exists almost no work on the impact made by Buddhist traditions on the work of Georges Bataille. This study takes a first step towards understanding this impact. It embarks upon a reading of 'La Pratique de la joie devant la mort' as a record of Bataille’s meditation practice infused with Tibetan and Japanese Zen Buddhist concepts and practices as he understood them, through the prism of European interactions therewith. The study (...) traces the evolution of what are here termed the ‘imagined Buddhisms’ emerging from such interactions, from early Euro-Buddhist encounters during the Christian missions, through the 19th-century birth of ‘Buddhist Studies’ and the related influence of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, to an interwar avant-garde preoccupied with the rejection of the European values held to have caused WWI. Foremost of the avant-garde factions considered here is the secret society Acéphale, founded by Bataille with the stated aims of creating a new religion and waging war on ‘tout ce qui est reconnu aujourd’hui’. In the course of this investigation, a pattern of Buddhist traditions weaponised in support of European projects is established; one in which they are imagined and re-imagined alternately as equivalent and antagonist to the work of Bataille, his peers and their antecedents. 'La Pratique de la joie devant la mort' emerges in the light of Bataille’s ‘imagined Buddhism’ as a practical version of an inverted Nietzschean sovereignty, incorporating elements of the concepts and practices of Tibetan and Japanese Zen Buddhism as he understood them. In the former case, these include his method of dramatisation and the idea of Tibetan meditation as what he terms a means of ‘put[ting one] to sleep’. Such an ‘put[ting] to sleep’ is argued to be akin to the what Bataille elsewhere calls the ‘narcotic’ of the profane world and to which he offers his own practice as a solution. In the case of Japanese Zen, the process Bataille would come to call the 'opération souveraine' is shown to be present in 'La Pratique de la joie devant la mort' and to bear resemblance to the process of achieving the form of Zen enlightenment called satori. A momentary flash of insight, satori is also shown to be comparable to the breakthrough of sacred from profane. (shrink)