{∅, {∅}, {∅, {∅}}} : Rage Against the Meat Grinder

Thank you so much-this is something which I have been looking for.I will check my mail.Buddhism today is usually seen as a kind of pragmatic therapy that cures or reduces suffering, but from approximately 1820 to 1890--Europe was haunted by the nightmare of an alternative religion that denied existence and recommended annihilation. It had less to do with the rudimentary state of Buddhist studies during that period than with Europe's fears about its own incipient nihilism, which would later ripen into the horrors of the twentieth century. Thinking they were talking about the Buddha, Westerners were talking about themselves.

At the end of the eighteenth century, new translations of Indian texts were exciting European intellectuals, giving rise to hopes for another Renaissance greater than the one that had resulted from the late-medieval rediscovery of Greek texts. But it never happened. About 1820, when scholarly research first clarified the distinction from Brahmanism, "Buddhism" became constructed as a religion that, amazingly, worshiped nothingness, and European commentators reacted in horror.

In their descriptions of nirvana, earlier scholars such as Francis Buchanan and Henry Thomas Colebrooke had been careful to deny that it was equivalent to annihilation. Their influence, however, was overwhelmed by the philosophical impact of Hegel and later the unsurpassed authority of Eugene Burnouf at the Collge de France. Hegel established the strong link with Nichts that would endure throughout most of the century. Instead of benefiting from the best scholarship then available, he relied on earlier sources such as de Guignes and the Abbots Banier and Grosier, evidently because their views of Buddhism fit better into his equation of pure Being with pure Nothingness. In Hegel's system this equation signified the advent of interiority, a "lack of determination" that was not really atheistic or nihilistic in the modern sense--more like the negative theology of Rhineland mystics such as Meister Eckhart. Later, Burnouf's Introduction a l'histoire du Buddhisme indien (1844) was immensely influential because it provided the first rigorous study of the Buddha's teachings, thus taking Buddhist studies to a new level of sophistication, but one which firmly established the nihilistic specter: despite making cautious qualifications due to the West's still-limited knowledge, Burnouf did not hesitate to identify nirvana with total annihilation.

Burnouf's scholarly objectivity was soon supplemented by apologetic and missionary ardor. Catholic preachers such as Ozanam declared that, behind his serene mask, the Buddha was Satan himself in a new incarnation. The Buddha's cult of nothingness aroused in Felix Neve's soul the need to liberate Buddhist peoples from their errors, weakness, and immobility. Victor Cousins, who played a major role in establishing philosophical education in mid-century France, and who proclaimed that Sanskrit texts were worthy of Western philosophical attention, nevertheless followed Burnouf in reacting against the Buddhist system: it was not only an anti-religion but a counterworld, a threat to order. His follower Barthelemy Saint-Hilaire took a further step and denied that such a "deplorable and absurd" faith could be philosophically relevant, even asking whether such a strange phenomenon meant that human nature in India "is still the same nature we feel within ourselves," since Buddhism's "gloomy meaning" led only to "moral suicide" . Ernest Renan called Buddha "the atheistic Christ of India" and attacked his revolting "Gospel of Nihilism" .

Schopenhauer discovered in Buddhism many of his favorite themes--renunciation, compassion, negation of the will to live--but relatively late, so, Buddhism had no significant influence on his system. However, his annexation of Buddhist principles brought the Buddhist challenge back to Europe, from missionary conversion to counteracting home-grown nihilism. Ever the philosopher, however, Schopenhauer was careful to say that nirvana could only be nothingness "for us," since the standpoint of our own existence does not allow us to say anything more about it. Would that other commentators had been so sensible.

The nihilistic understanding of Buddhism had a significant impact on Arthur de Gobineau's Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races , which would become enormously influential for the Nazis and other twentieth-century racists. For Gobineau, humanity was rushing to perdition and nothingness due to degeneration caused by intermingling of the races. He viewed Buddhism as the effort of an inferior people to overthrow the racially superior Aryan Brahmins. The failure of this attempt--the fact that Buddhism was largely eliminated from India--was somewhat inconsistent with his own historical pessimism, which accepted the inevitability of decline; but it may have encouraged the Nazis to attempt their own program of extermination for the sake of racial purity.

Nietzsche, too, accepted the view of Buddhism as aspiring to nothingness, although for him it was the similarity with Christianity, not the difference, that was the problem. In the end the choice is between Buddhism, Schopenhauer, weakness, and peaceful inactivity, or strength, conflict,pain, and tragedy. Buddhism's spread in Europe was unfortunate, Nietzsche believed, since "Nostalgia for nothingness is the negation of tragic wisdom, its opposite".



The issue at stake was always Europe's own identity. With "Buddhism" Europe constructed a mirror in which it dared not recognize itself. (Darwin, the death of God, and Europe's own hopes for/fears of a religion of Reason without transcendence.)

When the question of the Buddha's atheism arose, it was the atheism of the Europeans that was really in question. No one really believed, and almost no one ever said, that the beliefs of the Buddhists on the other side of the world were going to come and wreak havoc among the souls of the West. It was not a conversion, a corrosion, a 'contamination' of any kind that was threatening, coming from outside. It was in Europe itself that the enemy, and the danger, were to be found.

This was not only a threat to the foundations of one's personal belief-system, but a challenge that threatened to undermine social order. "The nothingness of order corresponded to the nothingness of being. Once again, this nothingness was not the equivalent of a pure and simple absence. It was supposed to undo and disorganize. It was dangerous because it shattered, it leveled, it instigated anarchy.

I started reading The Will in Nature last night.  I don't know why it took me so long to track this book down.  I really appreciate en.bookfi.org.

I remember trying to track down a copy of this book 20 years ago, and then I just gave up, I guess.

Schopenhauer really resented professional academic philosophers, going so far as saying that University philosophy (as a trade) is the enemy of true philosophers.  He was very aware of why he had been ignored for so long by his contemporaries.

In a famous passage toward the end of the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant says that two things fill the mind with ever increasing wonder: the starry heavens above and the moral law within. Through Copernicus, Galileo, Newton and others, incredible progress had been made about understanding the "starry heavens above." But skeptical philosophers like David Hume maintained that the scientific success could not be extended to other areas such as theology or morality.

Hume said that what we see in the natural world might have all kinds of causes. Inferring a Creator, let alone a particular kind of Creator, goes beyond the evidence. In fact, the very concept of causality is merely a habit of the mind that we form by constantly seeing two things happening together. If we did not repeatedly observe that a billiard ball moved when hit by another billiard ball, we would not bring the two events in relation to each other. And we certainly would not be able to infer from the movement of the one ball that another ball had struck it, unless we have constantly observed the two together.

Likewise, we cannot infer anything about supposed metaphysical causes by looking at the physical world, because causal relations only form in our minds through repeated experience. But no one in his right mind claims, for instance, that he constantly observes God creating the world. God as a cause is inferred from the effect, but that is precisely what, according to Hume, we cannot do.

These and other thoughts by Hume awoke Kant, as he himself said, out of his "dogmatic slumber." Essentially, Hume raised in him the following questions:

Given what Hume said about causality, how can I affirm the validity of Newton’s physics, which is built on the concept of causality? What makes it possible for natural science and mathematics to give us apparently reliable knowledge of the world?
Why is it so difficult to make similar progress in metaphysical questions about God, the soul, free will, and morality? Is knowledge about these things possible at all? And if so, in what way and to what degree? Clearly, Reason itself compels us to ask these questions, but then Reason seems to be unable to answer them. Why is that?
In Kant’s long and laborious answer, laid out in his Critique of Pure Reason, he essentially harmonizes Hume with Newton. Science and mathematics are so successful, he says, because they only describe reality as it appears to us, not as it is in itself. Science only studies the world that we can touch, feel, see, hear, and smell—the experiences of our senses. Even with the aid of technology such as a telescope or, nowadays, a particle accelerator, we take in all scientific data through our senses. But the way that we experience our senses—the way our mind puts together what we touch, feel, see, hear, and smell—depends on certain forms in which our mind is structured. We cannot help thinking in terms of space and time, cause and effect, quantity and quality, modality and relation. These ways of thinking are what Kant calls a priori, that is, they come before experience. In fact, all coherent experience is dependent on them.

The problem of dogmatic metaphysics is that it pretends we can free ourselves from these necessary preconditions of our experience and get direct, unfiltered knowledge of ultimate reality. Not so, says Kant. Even space and time are not a reality that we perceive without a human filter. On the contrary, it is impossible for us to think of anything without picturing it in time and space. Space and time are, so to speak, mental cookie cutters. They are forms of the human mind that the dough of our experience has to conform to in order to experience anything at all. In Kant’s terminology, they are "forms of intuition" or "forms of sensibility."

Does that mean, then, that space and time are completely subjective and do not exist at all except in our minds? Do we live in some kind of illusory world, like in the Matrix? No, that would be to misunderstand Kant. Space and time are real for Kant. Objects do not merely seem to exist in time and space; they are in time and space. But since space and time are necessary concepts for any experience whatsoever, the concepts only apply to things as they appear to us. In what way and to what degree space and time apply to reality apart from our experience of reality, is unknowable to us. All we can say is they are necessary concepts for experiencing reality. Therefore, while all objects of our experience are in time, not all of reality must necessarily be in time as we understand it. While all objects of our experiences are in space, not all of reality must necessarily be in space as we understand it. On an ultimate level, reality might be quite different from the space-time framework from which we cannot free ourselves.

That is why, Kant thinks, mathematics and geometry have truths that can be definitely proven. They are about the necessary forms of all our experience, which is why they are internally coherent. Geometry takes place in space, and mathematics is done in time. Thus, they must conform to our a priori intuitions of space and time.

This makes arithmetic and geometry "synthetic a priori truths." "Synthetic" means that they are truths not merely about the meaning of words, which would be "analytic" truths, but about the real world. At the same time, however, these truths are a priori in that they are not based on our experience of the real world.

Kant’s conception of time and space as they relate to arithmetic and geometry is a good example of why he called his philosophy a new "Copernican Revolution." Just like Copernicus had reverted our understanding of the universe by proposing that it is us who move, even though it looks as if the sun moved, so Kant tried to show that it is really the structure of our minds that "moves" in a certain way and lets reality appear to us according to these "movements." Empiricists such as John Locke had thought that objective reality impressed itself on the blank slate of our minds. Kant proposed that it was the other way round: Our minds impressed themselves on objective reality. All our experiences of the outer world must necessarily conform to the a priori forms of our intuition and fundamental categories of our understanding. If Locke and Hume had been right, all our ideas about the world would arise as a result of our experience. They would come "after" experience, a posteriori. In contrast, Kant thought that a priori knowledge—knowledge prior to experience—was possible, namely the knowledge of the categories of our understanding to which our experiences conform.

Kant divided these categories as follows:

Quantity: unity, plurality, and totality.
Quality: reality, negation, and limitation.
Modality: possibility, existence, and necessity.
Relation: inherence, causality, community, and correlation.
While there was nothing particularly new about this list as such, as Aristotle and the Scholastics had already made similar categorizations, the revolutionary move on Kant’s part was to say that they are a priori: that they precede experience and are necessary conditions for it. In the longest and probably most difficult part of the Critique of Pure Reason, called the "Transcendental Deduction of the Categories," Kant tries to prove that these categories are in fact a priori.

Having, in Kant’s mind, provided this proof, he is now ready to answer his initial questions more explicitly. (1) What makes it possible for natural science and mathematics to give us apparently reliable knowledge of the world? (2) And why is it so difficult to make similar progress in metaphysical questions about God, the soul, free will, and morality? The answer is that science, arithmetic, and geometry stay within the framework of what is possible for us to experience—a framework that is set by the forms of intuition and the categories of the understanding. This is why science is so effective, but it also means that science is limited. It shows us only the “phenomenal” world, not the “noumenal” world. That is, it only shows as the world as it appears to us, not as it is in itself. The world as it is in itself is the realm of metaphysics, and this is why we cannot give scientific answers to metaphysical questions.

The last third of the Critique of Pure Reason attempts to show, as Robert Kane has put it, “how we get into trouble when we try to press the human mind beyond possible experience into the realms of metaphysics.” Take the existence of God, for instance. Trying to prove his existence has failed, Kant says, because such proofs take the categories of the understanding that only apply to the physical world of appearances and impose them on matters that exceed the bounds of our possible experience. We cannot infer what caused the universe to come into existence based on our way of thinking, because our way of thinking is only fitted for inferences about the physical world of appearances.

Or take the soul. We cannot, Kant stresses, know the soul as such, only the self as it appears to us—our “phenomenal” self, not our “noumenal” self. We do not and cannot know what the soul is in itself, apart from the way our sense of self appears to us. Neither can we say anything of scientific certainty about the mortality or immortality of the soul. We may have faith and hope in eternal life based on what Kant calls “practical” Reason, but not scientific certainty.

Nor can we scientifically resolve the conflict between determinism and free will. Science is based on the view that everything works by determined laws, but our understanding of morality is based on the view that we have free will. Without the concept of free will, none of our moral practices would make any sense: no commands or punishments, no blame or excuses, no forgiveness or justice. But how can we reconcile the determined world of science with the free world of morality? Science itself cannot resolve this contradiction, says Kant. It cannot be resolved by “theoretical” Reason, only by “practical” Reason.

And it is this practical Reason that Kant tackles in his second Critique.

I intend to set up a thousand year Reich-Hitler.
Hitler's Olympic Village of 1936 - the so-called 'Nazi Games' intended to showcase German supremacy against the rest of the world.
Behind closed doors of that facility can be seen the rotting remains of the '1000 year Reich' which vanished in flames after just 12.

Mortification of the flesh:
All those men and women … who in their body serve the world through the desires of the flesh, the concerns of the world and the cares of this life: They are held captive by the devil, whose children they are, and whose works they do.

I know now why the USSR fell.

There was, and still is, a belief in India among many of her ascetics that purification and final deliverance can be achieved by rigorous self-mortification, and the ascetic Gotama decided to test the truth of it. And so there at Uruvelâ he began a determined struggle to subdue his body in the hope that his mind, set free from the shackles of the body, might be able to soar to the heights of liberation. Most zealous was he in these practices. He lived on leaves and roots, on a steadily reduced pittance of food; he wore rags from dust heaps; he slept among corpses or on beds of thorns. The utter paucity of nourishment left him a physical wreck. Says the Master: "Rigorous have I been in my ascetic discipline. Rigorous have I been beyond all others. Like wasted, withered reeds became all my limbs...." In such words as these, in later years, having attained to full enlightenment, did the Buddha give his disciples an awe-inspiring description of his early penances.

There is a certain joy in destroying one's body-the objectification of will.

Señor Hentrich,
I read this wonderful part. Really good. I read John Gray´s Straw Dogs where he mentioned Schopenhauer. I liked that part where he kept his pistols loaded all the time. Careful man, Arthur because he knew the misery of the human condition. When he was young, I don´t remember the city in Germany, he left in order to avoid Napoleon´stroops. After all he wisely regarded all that situation as none of his business.

Your question "Is there something wrong with me?" Of course there is. You dont want to be exploited, you don´t want to be abused,you don´t want to be pushed, told what to do, you don´t want to obey the authorities, you don´t want to go to church and get a "breath from the "saviour",  you didn´t want to serve in the US army. You don´t want to fit in the Land of the Brave. And last but not least you don´t want to do something "useful" and you don´t want to contribute to "good" society. You are a "menace" to the world. Take care of yourself. Raúl

Señor Hentrich,
In the Essay by Schopenhauer, ,that is, The Emptiness of Existence, in the third paragraph Schopenhauer writes " This is why Kant is so great.". I don´t repeat the three paragraphs. I know an answer to my question may take a whole book. Nevertheless could you tell me why Kant is so great. Stay safe. Raúl

This is why Hentrich is so great.That was beautiful.Without you, I would have never known Schopenhauer,let alone Kant.

The reason some people find mathematics so soothing is that while mathematics is synthetic on the one hand(this is what makes it interesting),its based on our forms of understanding & thus empty,on the other.There is no a posterior i(the will) content in it & thus no ghosts to scare me there.

It tells me that mathematics is that closet where I can hide from the rest of horrible world,playing with my toys alone.
And I'd love to share my toys with you:-)
Could you find fof if f(t)=t/(1+t^2)^1/2

And I'd love to play with your toys as well i.e. learn programming from you. I'd download the files which you sent in the other thread & try to decipher it.Mathematics is my hiding place.

Señor Nobody,
Thank you very much. It is very kind of you to reply. I am going to read and reread what you wrote.Stay safe. Raúl