- Secret 1979. Palingenesis, alchemy and metempsychosis in renaissance medicine
- Sharp 2004. Metempsychosis and social reform
- Ketcham 2018. Schopenhauer and Buddhism
Secret, Francois 1979. Palingenesis, alchemy and metempsychosis in renaissance medicine. Ambix 26(2): 81-92. DOI: 10.1179/amb.1979.26.2.81 [tandfonline.com]
Two studies published during the years 1971 and 1973 in Isis, the review founded by the great science historian, G. Sarton, rightly drew the attention of historians of ideas to palingenesis and alchemy which preoccupied many minds - in particular, those of medical men - from the Renaissance up to the famous work of Charles Bonnet (1720-1793), Palingénése philosophique ou idées sur l' état passé et futur des êtres vivants, published in 1770. (Secret 1979: 81)
One of those studies is in English. Charles Bonnet "was among the first to use the term "evolution" in a biological context".
- Debus, Allen G. 1973. A further note on palingenesis: The account of Ebenezer Sibly in the Illustration of Astrology (1792). Isis 64(2): 226-230. DOI: 10.1086/351083 [tandfonline.com]
Jacques Marx, of the Fonds de la Recherche scientifique of Brussels, and then A. G. Debus, the authority on Renaissance alchemy, have rightly stressed the links between palingenesis and the wholyl religious idea of apocatastasis, or the restoring of a thing or being to its previous state (as with metempsychosis); yet it still seemed to me worthwhile for an investigator who has spent many years in studying such strange subjects as magic, astrology and alchemy (brought to light in its humanist setting by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola at the end of the fifteenth century) to set the fashion of palingenesis more correctly in the stream of Renaissance ideas. (Secret 1979: 81)
Defien:apocatastasis - "restitution, restoration especially : the doctrine of the final restoration of all sinful beings to God and to the state of blessedness". Giovanni Pico della Mirandola "wrote the Oration on the Dignity of Man, which has been called the "Manifesto of the Renaissance"".
It is this "regeneration" which inspired Guillaume Saluste du Bartas (1544-1590) in la Sepmaine de la Création du Monde, also commented on by Simon Goulart, as well as rousing the enthusiasm of another Béarnais, the poet Jean de Sponde who came to Switzerland to study alchemy:O holy preservative, would thou be Mumia,Jean de Sponde returned to Basle to stay with the physician Theodor Zwinger whom Goulart cited as the authoritative critic of the alchemical passages of Du Chesne's poem. (Secret 1979: 82)
The Great Work, the Elixir promised by Alchemy,
Excellent restorative, is it not thou who, at the same time
Made Aison younger than his son.
The kinds of ideas that I'm here for. "She [Medea] slit Aeson's throat, then put his corpse in a pot and Aeson came to life as a young man."
That was the time of the revival of the ideas of Paracelsus (died in 1541), as the eminent historian of magic and experimental science, L. Thorndike, has rightly pointed out. In an annotated edition of the works of Homer, Jean de Sponde, when considering Medea (who restored Aison's youth) did not refrain from praising Paracelsus and the elixir of long life. "It is with pleasure", he wrote of Paracelsus, "that I dare to compare him to Machaon (the son of Aesculapius), or rather to Paon (another name for Apollo, the healer of the Gods, whom we shall come across presently)." (Secret 1979: 82)
I'm vaguely aware that Paracelsus made extensive use of triadic thinking. That Apollo was "the healer of the Gods" is also news to me.
Henry IV's ambassador, Jacques Bongars (1554-1612), who corresponded with Tycho Brahe (known to possess next door to his observatory for "upper" astronomy an alchemical laboratory, alchemy being known then as "lower" astronomy) left a treatise on alchemy. (Secret 1979: 82)
What a thicket of vaguely familiar figures.
Moreover, long ago the way had been pointed out by Gabriel Naudé (1600-1653), the eminent librarian of Mazarin, in his Instruction à la France sur la vérité de l' histoire des frères de la Roze Croix, those Rosicrucians of whom it is known that Descartes, keenly interested in the problem of prolonging human life, sought traces. Naudé, indeed, denounced "the mischief-making spirits who, seeing no mention in the Bible of the deaths of [|] Elijah, Enoch and John the Baptist sought to oppose their immortality and ecstasy as some spectre of youth discovered on the Isle of Boinca, and the protracted life of one Arthur of Brittany, Paracelsus and Sebastian of Portugal, who being, perhaps, concealed, like Pythagoras in their caverns, meditated upon some transmigration or other...". (Secret 1979: 83-84)
Descartes, too? Naturally, Pythagoras shows up only a few pages in.
Although Scévole de Sainte Marthe suspected Postel of dyeing his hair, Francis Bacon (1560-1626) who discussed it in his History of Life and Death, following the famous case of Cornaro of Venice, accorded him a hundred and twenty years. (Secret 1979: 84)
Bacon, too?
- Bacon, Francis 1658. Sylva sylvarum: or, A naturall history. In ten centuries; whereunto is newly added the History naturall and experimentall of life and death, or, Of the prolongation of life. Published after the Authors Death, by William Rawley. Seventh edition. London: William Lee. [Internet Archive]
But, just as Postel the mathematician and cartographer, in his Polo aptata nova charta universi, the first map of the world in polar projection, sought to site at the pole the land of the Hyperboreans (who knew neither illness nor death), the Earthly Paradise, so Postel the physician invented a new word to denote the Christ of his Restoration of all things. In a commentary on his translation of one of the monumental works of the Kabbalah, the Zohar, he wrote: "Christ who, in fact, was born in a like manner to men, was, following the ecstasy of Enoch, amid the multitude of men in his pantopaeon spirit." [↩] We have already heard from Jean de Sponde this name Paeon, a basic title for Apollo, healer, helper, physician; and here the prefix Pan denotes the whole of mankind finally saved in the Restoration of all things. (Secret 1979: 84)
How come I did not know any of this about Apollo and the Hyperboreans?
Then, starting in particular from a treatise of Bacon, Postel produced a series of lessons on the followers of Macrobius; or Artephius who, thanks to his studies in alchemy, succeeded in living for a thousand and twenty years; on John of the Ages who lived for three hundred years; on an Arabian King who, having received as a gift an elixir of long life, was mistrustful enough to try it out first on one of his slaves, a German who, once freed, went to have his case registered at Rome. (Secret 1979: 85)
Ich would like to file a complaint...
Whatever one makes of these calculations, 1552 was the great year of what Postel called his Immutation, based upon Corinthians I, XV, 51: "Behold, I show you a mystery: we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump [...] For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality". (Secret 1979: 86)
Define:immutation - "obsolete. : change, alteration, mutation". 1. Korintose 15: "[51]Vaadake, ma ütlen teile saladuse: meie kõik ei lähegi magama, aga meid kõiki muudetakse, [52] äkitselt, ühe silmapilguga, viimse pasuna hüüdes, sest pasun hüüab ja surnud äratatakse üles kadumatutena, ning meid muudetakse. [53] Sest see kaduv peab riietuma kadumatusega ja see surelik riietuma surematusega."
At the same time Postel translated the principal masterpieces of the Kabbalah, obtained for him by his friend Daniel Bomberg, celebrated publisher of Hebrew literature, in particular, the Bahir, which set out the doctrine of "Gilgul", or revolution of souls, and he used to tell his close friends in confidence that the two great truths of the Kabbalah were [|] the "Mens Messiae" and metempsychosis. (Secret 1979: 86-87)
Gilgul neshamot "is a concept of reincarnation in Kabbalistic esoteric mysticism. In Hebrew, the word gilgul means "cycle" or "wheel" and neshamot is the plural for "souls." Souls are seen to cycle through lives or incarnations, being attached to different human bodies over time."
And in a tract remaining in manuscript form and dealing with the doctrine of numbers and Plato's world-soul, in which he discussed the myth of Er with the help of the Kabbalah, Postel developed especially his notion of "Gilgul". One chapter was entitled: "How, without metemnoesis, metempneumatosis and metempsychosis, no Christian establishment or good Republican can be set up in this life". By following his teachers of Kabbalah, Postel perceived Neshamah as Mens in Latin, Nous in Greek and suggested calling it Mente in French. Next the Ruach, in Greek pneuma and in Latin spiritus; last, Nephesh which, again, he perceived as animus or anime in French, and in anima, or soul. However often Postel was muddled in his explanations, it is fairly clear that the divine part, the "Mens Messiae", is the necessary intermediary, the mediator between motionless God and the moving world. (Secret 1979: 87)
Unsurprisingly, this Guillaume Postel thinks triadically. Compare "the mediator between motionless God and the moving world" with the Pythagorean doctrine of numbers.
The physician Postel did not then fail to provide for a medical opinion from a cautious source, by the great Fernel, on the noxiousness of menses. In Postel's opinion this poison is the foam of spittle with which the serpent Samael, who denotes the poison of God, sullied Eve and her posterity. And as, according to the utterance of St. Paul, it is there where abounded the transgression that grace must abound in, it is Jeho hanna, which means the grace of the Lord, that restitution brought about. Mère Jeanne, the new Eve, was indeed taken from the side pierced by the lance, just as was the first Eve from the first Adam. And it was not in vain that contemporaries accused Postel of having preached of a Christ "boy-girl". (Secret 1979: 87)
Brilliant! Jesus was intersex. (On top of being translucent, or whatever.)
Sharp, Lynn 2004. Metempsychosis and social reform: The individual and the collective in romantic socialism. French Historical Studies 27(2): 349-379.. [Project Muse]
It spring of 1842, Mme Dumesnil, the beloved friend of Jules Michellet, lay dying. In an agony of spiritual suffering, Michelet cast about for resolution to the meaninglessness of death. He read the work of Pierre Leroux, De l'humanité, which assured him that collective humanity lived on, but gave him no promises for the individual soul. Michelet, convinced of the immortality of the soul, refuted Leroux's ideas with a vision of metempsychosis of the individual soul progressing toward perfection. Pining for his lost love, he refused to accept Leroux's idea that the individual personality would disappear, subsumed and reborn into Humanity in general. He later "admitted that he got his ideas on the immortality of the soul from Jean Reynaud." (Sharp 2004: 349)
Pertinent topics indeed. Reminds me of my previous contacts with this topic, particularly the idea of individual personality being subsumed in humanity in general.
A note on the terms: Palingenesis referred at the time to the (re)generation of an animal; a different animal emerged, but one that existed already in genesis in the germ cells of its predecessor. In palingenesis, evolution occurred, but it was not random or left to nature; instead, all stages of existence were preordained. Metempsychosis generally refers to the theory of the transmigration of souls and includes in most definitions the progress from animal (or "lower") forms into human (presumed to be "higher") ones. Although the theories I discuss here do not assume movement from animal to human, I generally use the term metempsychosis, since my authors did so. In today's usage, the term would be reincarnation, which, as generally accepted, refers to a series of rebirths in human form. Occasionally I use the term reincarnation; in this essay it is interchangeable with metempsychosis. (Sharp 2004: 349, fn 1)
That cleared it up. Palingenesis = animal → animal; metempsychosis = animal → human; and reincarnation = human → human.
Gérard de Nerval, Charles Nodier, Alphonse de Lamartine, Eugène Sue, George Sand, Honoré de Balzac, Jules Michelet, and Victor Hugo (among others) wrote on the subject of metempsychosis and what it offered to the world; most of them borrowed at least some of their ideas from three important theorists of plural lives and societies: the neo-Catholic romantic writer Pierre-Simon Ballanche (1776-1847) and the republican socialist Pierre Leroux (1797-1871) and Jean Reynaud (1806-1863). (Sharp 2004: 350)
""Palingenesis" was a term by which Ballanche referred to the successive regenerations of the society" - goes to explain why this term appears in geopolitical writings. "Leroux' thought is a unique medley of doctrines borrowed from Saint-Simonian, German Idealist, Pythagorean and Buddhistic sources" - sounds about right. "Reynaud [...] was a French socialist philosopher" - his entry is two sentences long.
Despite the prevalence of belief in metempsychosis among romantic writers and philosophers, historians have done little investigation of it. An exception is Mitzman's psychobiography Michelet, Historian, where he treats reincarnation as important to Michelet's understanding of the past. D. G. Charlton briefly describes Leroux's beliefs in his Secular Religions in France, 1815-1870 (Oxford, 1963), 83-87. [...] Only Michel Nathan, also a literary scholar, has explored the concept in any depth, in his Le ciel des fouriéristes (Lyon, 1981). Nathan's thesis, "L'âme et les étoiles" (Université de Paris 8, 1980) gives more detail on the subject. (Sharp 2004: 350, fn 3)
Google Translate gives the title as "The Sky of the Fourierists: Star dwellers and soul reincarnations". The summary begins with a run-down of Fourier's most colourful statements: "When we have straightened the axis of the earth by cultivating the poles, the seas will taste like lemonade, the ferocious beasts will give way to anti-lions, anti-crocodiles and anti-whales." Fourier is pretty much the only author who makes me wish I could read French.
Leroux, almost forgotten until rescued by the Viards, père et fils, from the "conspiracy of silence" that surrounded him, is now well known, but mostly as one of the first and foremost socialist thinkers. See Jackques Viard, "Les origines du socialisme républicain," Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine 33 (1986): 133-147; and Bruno Viard, ed., A la source perdue du socialisme français (Paris, 1997). The importance of the Viards in Leroux studies and their emphasis on political questions has meant that Leroux's religious and philosophical writings have rceeived much less attention. Jack Bakunin, however, explores these works in "Pierre Leroux: A Democratic religion for a New World," Church History 44 (1975): 57-72. See also his "Pierre Leroux on Democratic Socialism and the Enlightenment," Journal of the History of Ideas 37 (1976): 455-474. Reynaud, the most influential of the three in popularizing a view of progress through plural lives, and despite being well known and popular in his time, remains largely forgotten except through his connection with Leroux. Their Encyclopédie nouvelle was recently republished (Geneva, 1991[1834-1847]). He is still cited by spiritists as a theorist of reincarnation, but he has received little attention from academics. The exception is a semibiographical exploration of his unpublished letters. See Griffiths, Jean Reynaud; and David Albert Griffiths, "Jean Reynaud: An Unfamiliar Page from the History of Socialist Thought," Science and Society 46 (1982): 361-368. (Sharp 2004: 350, fn 4)
All the more odd that Reynaud's Wikipedia page is so short and uninformative.
Historians have moved away from the old narrative of secularization and now recognize the importance of religion as a fertile source for reform and especially for socialist ideas. However, many of these [|] studies have pointed to the importance of Christ as the first communist, or of ideas of early egalitarian Christian societies as models for socialism. (Sharp 2004: 351-352)
Not according to The Gospel of Supply Side Jesus.
As defenders of the working class, many of these republicans came to detest the economic side of liberalism, even while many of them wanted to extend individual rights, such as the vote, to the working class. Economic individualism, they argued, set the interests of the individual against those of the society as a whole and thus created division rather than harmony. [|] The challenge to intellectuals wanting to create social equality was to find a way toward progress that did not favor the needs of the individual (usually assumed to be bourgeois) over social reform (assumed to aid the working classes). (Sharp 2004: 353-354)
Economic individuality amounts to social wealth inequality.
Two major socialists offered systems to address these problems. Charles Fourier argued for a complete revision of social life into a system of phalansteries. His social organization would completely change both individual and society, he argued, freeing the individual to experience his or her passions. Fourier, like Reynaud, also argued for metempsychosis on a series of planets. In fact, this vision drew to him many of his first and most enduring followers, including Victor Considérant. Yet the radical ideas of Fourier were little known and until 1847 Considérant, leader of the Ecole sociétaire, which promoted Fourierism, remained loyal to the July Monarchy. (Sharp 2004: 354)
Lord almighty, $73.95 and 600 pages:
- Beecher, Jonathan 2001. Victor Considerant and the Rise and Fall of French Romantic Socialism. Berkeley, University of California Press. [University of California Press]
The romantics and their contemporaries lived closely with death. The destruction and bloodshed of the French Revolution and the wars of Napoleon were fresh in the minds of all the French. Violent revolt and its violent suppression were commonplace after 1827, culminating in the revolution of 1830 in Paris. Witnessing the death agonies of cholera victims and feeling a (mistaken) certainty that he would soon follow spurred Nodier to write his own thoughts on metempsychosis in Palingénésie humaine. Romantics not only lived with death, however, they became fascinated with it. Michelet, like other romantics, succumbed to the urge to magnify, to explore in great depth personal tragedies; thus his obsession with mme Dumesnil's death and his hope for her return founded on theories of metempsychosis. Death not only inspired fear of the unknown, it offered an attractive and consoling mystery. What better way than through death and rebirth to become part of the great cycle of nature that romantics so valued? Small wonder, then, that they should see a beautiful future in death. Hardly unrelated is the fact that the French romantics were living in a reincarnated world - a world whose old form and institutions had been destroyed (or killed) by the Revolution and then regenerated, if in mutated form, by the Restoration. Romantic socialists hoped they, too, could re-create the world in a new and better form, one that had progressed and learned from its faults of inequality and privilege. Thus reincarnation echoed their ideas of creating anew what had recently died. (Sharp 2004: 356)
There is a historical parallel with the Bolshevik revolution. The 1920s were not only a socio-economic-politically explosive time in Russia, but also so in art, literature, philosophy, etc. Nothing makes you wish to create something beautiful fast than sudden unglamorous death lurking just around the corner.
Europe rediscovered the ideas of India and the East in an "oriental Renaissance" during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A Vogue for Eastern ideas followed the translation and publication of texts such as the Bhagavad Gita and Ramayana, which privilege metempsychosis. (Sharp 2004: 357)
The Bhagavad Gita seems pretty manageable - less than 800 pages of Sanskrit, its transliteration, dictionary definitions, and what amounts to a quatrain of sensible English text per page. Valmiki's Rāmāyana, on the other hand, does not appear to fit a single volume unless abridged.
- Vyasa 2009. The Bhagavad Gītā. Translated by Winthrop Sargeant. Edited and with a Preface by Christopher Key Chapple. Foreword by Huston Smith. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press. [lg]
The romantics, in their fascination with nature, thrilled to the idea of each rock, each tree, having a soul, that all nature was alive with spirit. (Sharp 2004: 357)
If every single-celled organism is invested with a soul, how many reincarnations per minute does that amount to?
The vogue for metempsychosis drew on Western as well as on Eastern sources. Ballanche and others looked back to Plato and Pythagoras as responsible for "initiating" the West into the knowledge of Eastern [|] thought. The Englishman William Jones had linked Indic metempsychosis, Pythagorean metempsychosis, and Platonic myth in his translation of the Gita Govinda (1792). (Sharp 2004: 357-358)
At that time many thought that Plato, too, had been to India. There are a couple of hundred volumes, it appears, of The works of Sir William Jones but Wikipedia helpfully pointed out that this translation is on p. 463 in the 1st one.
In addition, mesmerists popularized misconceptions of the mystic Emanuel Swedenborg during the 1820s. Mesmerized somnambulists and Swedenborg's visions of spirits and angels not only helped focus interest on the afterlife but also offered hope that individual and social interests could be easily reconciled. Although Swedenborg had presented a very different version of the afterlife, in which the soul moved on to other planes rather than be reincarnated, his view that the soul continued on, inhabiting the interstices of the universe and perhaps existing on other planets fit well with ideas of metempsychosis. (Sharp 2004: 358)
This is exceedingly fascinating. One day I wish to get into the mesmerists as well. The only thing I know about Swedenborg is that he taught about some kind of "Pre-Established Harmony" between body and soul, and that Peirce engaged with his philosophy.
German idealistic philosophers also influenced the romantics. McCalla points to Gottfried Leibniz's ideas on the "divinely preestablished harmony among all substances of the universe," which are reflected first in Bonnet and later in Ballanche (A Romantic Historiosophy, 153, 157). Leroux claims that Leibniz's ideas on perfectibility are simply a middle ground on the way from Pythagoras to Saint-Simon (De l'humanité, 300). The implication is that they are being surpassed by Leroux himself. (Sharp 2004: 358, fn 26)
A chronologically uneven middle ground, that.
The emerging evolutionary concept of time challenged the Christian concept of time, which focused on a definable beginning and end. In Terre et ciel Reynaud criticized the unchanging belief of the church: "The scale of time is [...] absolutely unchanged by geology and, as that changes, so must be medieval beliefs" of the church. (Sharp 2004: 359)
The beginning was calculated from a genealogy and the end has been arriving for two thousand years. Sadly, many are still living with medieval beliefs about the world.
Ballanche's highly original theories of regeneration and social reform nonetheless show the imprint of two major non-Catholic influences. The first is Charles Bonnet, the second illuminism. Ballance explained that what Bonnet did for the individual, he would do for "l'homme collectif." (Sharp 2004: 361)
define:illuminism - "belief in or claim to a personal enlightenment not accessible to humankind in general".
Religion played a key role for Ballanche because Christianity already expressed the equality among individuals, equal before God, which he called solidarity, that would gradually become the social norm through social palingenesis. "It is precisely the task of the new social order to extend the principal of solidarity into the civil realm." Solidarity here meant the fraternal brotherhood of the human race taught by Christ. Rather than attempt to change the world politically, Ballanche imagined it evolving socially and morally on its own. (Sharp 2004: 363)
Solidarity means interdependence and mutual support, not equality. Even less so being "taught" by an allegorical deity whose historicity is extremely dubious.
In an argument against both extremes, individualism and ideas of organization of labor, Leroux insisted he was socialist only if socialism meant "the Doctrine that sacrifices none of the terms of the formula Liberty, Fraternity, Equality, Unity, but reconciles them all." His belief, Leroux insisted, had always been in "la Démocratie religieuse." Socialism, if it would be called that, must be socialism that continued the values of the French Revolution, but with the emphasis on individualism replaced by a religious impulse. (Sharp 2004: 364)
Why is Unity regularly left out of the slogans?
The greatest shortcoming of the church was to teach acceptance of inequality on earth rather than the hope of equality through solidarity. Also, the idea of eternal punishment denied any hope of progress. What just God would punish people forever, with no hope of improvement? Leroux and Reynaud did not reject God, but rejected a wrathful and punishing God who did not recognize the conditions of humanity on earth. They imagined a God in their own image, a just God who wanted to eliminate the suffering of people on earth, just as they did. Conscious of the unequal chances that each individual had to do good in life, they questioned a church that would condemn a man forever to suffering after already suffering in this life. (Sharp 2004: 365)
Christian eschatology sure is cruel.
Those who looked to the past and those who looked to the golden age were equally ridiculous in his eyes. Rather, he agreed with Leibniz that humans are perfectible by definition; their nature is to be perfectible. But perfectibility happened only within society. "Man lives in society and only in society; society is perfectible and man perfects himself in a perfected society. This is the great modern discovery; this is the supreme truth of philosophy." The perfected society would also be a just society, and thus poverty and inequality would cease. This had to happen, because, for Leroux, God is a just God and a benevolent God, one who could not condemn humanity to endless suffering without purpose. (Sharp 2004: 367)
Contrast this with conservatives, who may believe, contrary to the witness of their own eyes, that society cannot change, or - like the Margaret Thatchers of the world - that society itself is an illusion.
Leroux saw human nature as tripartite, consisting of sensation-emotion-knowledge (sensation-sentiment-connaissance). To deny any part of that human trinity, either of oneself or of others, damaged the self and caused suffering. (Sharp 2004: 367)
This is so early that sensation and emotion have not yet been conflated into Firstness, and volition has not entered the picture.
For Leroux, the greatest right and fulfillment of individuals occurred through their communication with the whole of humanity. He argued that family, nation, and property each acted as means of communication among people. Society must be arranged to ensure that these acted as sources of freedom rather than as limitations. Without family, nation, or property, a person (man?) had no social existence. Leroux criticized those who wanted to do away with any of these institutions. (These criticisms would presumably be aimed at socialists [|] such as Robert Owen and Charles Fourier. Owen rejected both private property and marriage, as well as religion. Fourier rejected traditional marriage and morality, although he allowed for property. Even the Saint-Simonians challeged the family in their critique of inheritance.) (Sharp 2004: 367-368)
Fourier is still the coolest. Which would foster more "communication among people" - individual families living next to each other in their own homes, or men, women and children living together in a communal home? Or, men going to work, women staying at home with the children, or everyone working together in teams that constantly shift around?
Ketcham, Christopher 2018. Schopenhauer and Buddhism: Soulless Continuity. Journal of Animal Ethics 8(1): 12-25. DOI: 10.5406/janimalethics.8.1.0012 [JSTOR]
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) was a student of both Kant and Buddhism. From Kant he took much but differed on the understanding of the thing in itself and soul. Schopenhauer explained that there is no separate soul whether for humans or animals. Animals and humans differ in physical form and intellect. What is common to all is will, which he described as the thing in itself. All animals and humans have will. But he also believed that all animals and humans suffer. (Ketcham 2018: 12)
Hence the subheading: soulless continuity.
From Buddhism, Schopenhauer (1910b) learned that attachment clinging nad craving (will) even to being itself was the cause of dukkha (p. 628). Dukkha from the Pali is much more than suffering. Dukkha has been explained as suffering, ill, unsatisfactoriness, and lack. As T. W. Rhys Davids (1921-1925) explained, no one of these definitions is a good fit because dukkha involves not only the physical but the mental (p. 363). Michael C. Branningan (2010) said dukkha is "dislocation" that includes both physical pain and mental anguish (p. 52). Rhys Davids and others of the Pali Text Society translated dukkha into English as "ill." (Ketcham 2018: 12)
Ill will. Somewhat different from interpretations of volition I'm familiar with.
Schopenhauer's understanding of Buddhism was not that it considered continuity through the Greek concept metempsychosis or transmigration of the soul, but a peculiar palingenesis, which can be explained by Hoffman's (1987) phrase, "continuity without identity of self-same substance" (p. 53). (Ketcham 2018: 13)
Tantalizingly vague.
While some have suggested that Schopenhauer was a follower of Meister Eckhart's mysticism, he differed with Eckhart in a fundamental way (King, 2005, p. 253). Eckhart (2007) claimed that "the soul has by nature two capacities. The one is intelligence. [...] The second capacity is Will. That is a nobler one, and its essential characteristic is to plunge into the Unknown which is God" (pp. 36-37). (Ketcham 2018: 14)
Both seem to lack Firstness. The soul has Will and Intelligence, but no Sensation/Emotion?
With the Buddha, the final elimination of dukkha produces nirvāna, an ethical state that has been described by Steven Collins (1996), using the early Pali Text Majjhima Nikāya, as "the enlightened person is deep, immeasurable, unfathomable like the great ocean" (p. 163). He also said about nirvāna:What you can't say about nirvāna you can't say, and you can't picture it by means of imagery either. [...] Inexpressible, timeless nirvāna is a moment in the Buddhist textualization of time, the explicit or implicit closer marker in its discourse of felicity. It is the motionless and ungraspable horizon, the limit-condition that makes of the Pali imaginaire a coherent whole. (Collins, 1996, p. 185)Like will, nirvāna is more mysterious than not. But nirvāna is not transcendental; it is a real and continuing experience, but as will be discussed later, nirvāna is an altered form of consciousness. (Ketcham 2018: 15)
Shows how little I know about Buddhism. I really thought it was something transcendental, and not just an altered form of consciousness.
From Schopenhauer as a generous monist in respect to will, we derive that there is a universal will but wha tis contingent is how will is utilized by the entity in its particular life world, it's umwelt. (Ketcham 2018: 18)
A wild Umwelt appears.
Something that is in humans must also be compatible with lesser life-forms and vice versa for this to be possible. If there is this something that continues, then it could be possible for a lower life-form to ascend to a higher life-form upon rebirth. Taken to the ultimate Mahayana conclusion, this could include becoming enlightened while as a bug. What Buddha nature does is put all creatures into the realm of the tehical. By giving all sentient creatures the opportunity to become enlightened (nirvāna), Mahayana Buddhism eliminates the impossibility of the possibility for becoming enlightened. (Ketcham 2018: 18)
Dude, what if you eliminate the possibility of impossibility?
This ending of dukkha from the quenching of craving and attachment even to being itself he called nirvāna. As a result, nirvāna ends the cycle of samsāra, or rebirth. Once one achieves nirvāna, one will not be reborn and will upon final passing enter the state called parinirvāna. What nirvāna ends is the continuity of existence in dukkha. In nirvana, one enters an existence in sukha, or happiness. What is the condition of the enlightened one (Tathágata) after a final death? The Buddha gave no definitive answer other to say that nirvāna was the end of dukkha. (Ketcham 2018: 19)
Nirvana is sukha blyat.
The Buddha, like Schopenhauer, did not believe there was a separate self or soul, but rather we are made up from the process of skandhas, or five aggregates, which are: rūpa (material qualities), vedanā (feeling), saññā (perception), sankhārā (dispositions), and viññāṇa (consciousness). We are constantly changing, like growing hair and skin, and thinking, so how could there be something separate and whole like a self? Rather we are a process made up from five separate processes (aggregates) collectively called the skandhas (or khandhas in Pali). These five aggregates never coalesce into a whole because they form the processes that are what we are at this moment. (Ketcham 2018: 19)
My beloved triad, if Firstness were tripartite.
With all the extinction events that the universe has put earthly life through, life has continued to thrive and evolve. Therefore, there must be something to the idea that continuity is important to the metaidea of life itself beyond the notion of self-reproduction with variations. (Ketcham 2018: 23)
The idea of the idea of life itself?
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