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Death, Contemplation and Schopenhauer. By R. Raj Singh. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2007. Pp. xiv + 126.
In his newly released Death, Contemplation and Schopenhauer, R. Raj Singh, Chair of the Philosophy Department at Brock University in Ontario, attempts to reawaken what he argues to be the true vocation of the "authentic" philosophical life. For Singh, "death is not only a theme but the theme of philosophy, and . . . the very impetus to philosophize issues from a reflection on death" (p. 10). The classics of ancient and modern philosophy, in both Western and Asian civilizations, attest to the vocation of philosophy as "death contemplation." Death is seen as the inspiration of the search for wisdom in Socrates, who characterizes philosophy as "rehearsal for death (thanatoi meletos)" (pp. 1-4); in Plotinus, who extols "the attempt to free one's soul from 'matters bodily"' (pp. 4-8); in Nachiketas, who seeks knowledge of the soul from the god of death in the Katha Upanisad (pp. 13-22); in the bhakti poet Kabir, who praises fearlessness of death in the knowledge of brahman (pp. 22-23); and in Heidegger, who finds in the existential encounter with death the key to human authenticity (pp. 8-10).
Rather than construct a thematic anthology that would include the breadth of these classical statements, Singh focuses his study on Arthur Schopenhauer, both because Schopenhauer's metaphysics, ethics, and soteriology are thoroughly suffused with the insights of genuinely philosophical "death-contemplation" and because Schopenhauer draws his insights from the religious and philosophical classics of the West and from the Vedantic and Buddhist treatises of India. In Schopenhauer, as Singh sees it, we find a thinker whose searching is profoundly rooted in the significance of death as the motivator of contemplation and who can truly be called a "world philosopher."
Singh begins with an examination of the development of Schopenhauer's philosophy in the three editions (1818, 1844, 1859) of his "chief work," The World as Will and Representation (WWR). Schopenhauer's metaphysics of will grounds all individuals in an eternal, undifferentiated force that nonetheless consigns those individuals to contest, conflict, and death, and this inspires the "denial of the will-to-live" in the sages and saints of the world's religious traditions (pp. 29-37). This metaphysics leads Schopenhauer to an overarching doctrine of...