無への転生 : ショーペンハウアーの死後生論

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書誌事項

タイトル別名
  • Rebirth into Nothingness : Arthur Schopenhauer's Arguments on Life after Death
  • ム エ ノ テンセイ : ショーペンハウアー ノ シゴセイロン
公開日
2013-03-31
資源種別
departmental bulletin paper
公開者
リトン

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説明

Much time has passed since life after death ceased being regarded as a serious theme of philosophy. This is due to both a decline in the Christian worldview, and due also to the epistemological limitations of metaphysical knowledge established by Kant. Arthur Schopenhauer belongs, despite his grounding in Kantian thought, to those last philosophers who discussed the afterlife. In this article, the author situates Schopenhauer’s views of life, death, and the afterlife in the context of his overall philosophical framework, and discusses their implication for contemporary thanatology. As is well known, for Schopenhauer this world is both the objectification of the ultimate entity called “Will” (Wille) and the imaginary constitution of human “Representations” (Vorstellungen). For Schopenhauer, human life is the result of the blind force of the Will, a fate that must be overcome. Furthermore, for Schopenhauer death has the positive function of emancipating the ego-being from the laws of “principium individuationis” and “Satz vom Grunde,” which strictly determine the phenomenal world. Schopenhauer denied the idea of personal survival after death and argued that the human consciousness returns to the Will as Oneness. At the same time, influenced by Buddhist thought, he discusses the possibility of “rebirth” (not the reincarnation of the same ego-personality). Seeking empirical evidence for his metaphysical views, Schopenhauer was also absorbed in the study of contemporary literature about “animal magnetism,” but he was critical of naive spiritualistic interpretations of the phenomena. The motive of the self-overcoming of the will is identifiable throughout the philosophy of Schopenhauer. This self-overcoming is realized both before and after death when the distinction between life and death will be transcended. It is not only the individual pursuit of the ascetics but also the process of emancipation of the cosmological Will itself from its blind urge. Seen from this world, the world that emerges after the overcoming of the Will seems to be “nothing.” After Schopenhauer, however, the “signature” of nothingness and being is reversed in the other world. Death and self-overcoming of the Will is, as it were, a new birth into Nothingness.

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