This thesis is a 'big-picture' look at the course of Western philosophy and its eventual arrival at ideas that look remarkably similar to the revelations of Guatama Buddha 2500 years ago. I look at the roots of how the West has understood itself and understood "being" through the centuries and at the revolutions in thought that took place in the 20th century. I look more closely at 20th century thinkers to demonstrate how their thinking begins to align with the ancient insights of Eastern philosophy, particularly the notions of a prevailing emptiness as "ground" of Being and of the fallacy of the individual subject. I also look at how some 20th century artists have engaged with these new ideas. I see generally two responses to the postmodern (post-subject) position: that of a play of surfaces, such as in the work of Andy Warhol and the philosophy of Jean Baudrillard; and that of an embracing of absence, presented in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger and the works of such artists as John Cage, George Brecht, Pauline Oliveros, Bill Wegman, David Hammons and others.

This Master thesis analyzes the conception of self-knowledge in work of Jiddu Krishnamurti. Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895-1986) was a spiritual teacher and writer, born in India and lived in USA. The goal of the thesis is to show Krishnamurti's conception of self-knowledge from its own. In thesis there are quotations from Krishnamurti's works and also from works of others related authors from ranks of philosophy, science or literature. The first part of thesis shows Krishnamurti's life and his work in general. The second part analyzes a topic of self-knowledge in work of Krishnamurti. First of all, the thesis tries to introduce the way in which Krishnamurti understands a self-knowledge and its potential. In the second place, it tries to incorporate Krishnamurti's work into context of whole human searchng with intention to find a dialog between science and spirituality and between East and West.

(Deutsch) Diese Arbeit versucht sich unter Einbeziehung interkultureller Quellen im Dialog mit Julio Cortázars Erzählung "der Verfolger" [el perseguidor] an einer Verfolgung der Jagd. Sie hofft, mit dem Begriff der Jagd und seiner Ausdifferenzierung in verschiedene Modi fundamentale Bewegungsrichtungen der menschlichen Existenz zu beschreiben. Die menschliche Existenz kommt dabei als spannungsreiches Zwischen ("inter") von sinngetragener medialisierter Bezogenheit und außer-sinnhafter realer Faktizität in den Blick. Im Verlaufe der Arbeit werden anhand ausgewählter Szenen der Erzählung nicht nur die Spannung des Zwischen selbst, sondern auch seine Pole zum Gegenstand des philosophischen Fragens gemacht. Schlüsselworte: Jagd, Cortázar, Zwischen (inter), Sinn, außer-Sinn, Reales, Leib, absolutes Nichts

The aim of this thesis is to interpret Jan Zahradnicek's spacious poem The Sign of Power. The interpretation crystallizes around the motifs of dehumanisation (connected with Nietzsche's motif of nihilism and of the last man) of a man, the loss of a word, discontinuity, the loss of time, the human face, nothingness (specific Nothingness) and the possibility of salvation, connected with an awakening of the sight. There are two semantic lines essential for enlightening these motifs: Dante's Divine Comedy and Picard's works of the late 40s. Zahradnicek wrote The Sign of Power during 1950-1951, at the time of his intense work on the translation of Dante's Divine Comedy. The purpose of the first part of this thesis is to illustrate how strongly the Divine Comedy influenced the key motifs of The Sign of Power. The purpose of the second part of the thesis is to uncover a new semantic context for the interpretation of Zahradnicek's poem; the works of Swiss essayist, philosopher and poet Max Picard, which were of great importance for Zahradnicek's poem. I see the exposition of Picard's specific grasp of the key modern phenomena, which penetrated to Zahradnicek's poem, as the further objective of the work. The thesis is guided by the fundamental question of The Sign of Power - "what happened with a man" -,...

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Im ersten Teil unternimmt der Autor den Versuch, Martin Heideggers Philosophie als eine Ontologie der Kontingenz zu lesen. Eine solche Ontologie macht keine abschließenden Aussagen mehr über das, was ist, sondern darüber, wie das, was ist, durch Kontingenz geprägt ist. Hierfür identifiziert sie die unterschiedlichen Ereignisweisen von Welt, Erde, Gott und Sprache als diejenigen Strukturen und Konfigurationen, aus denen sich das Kontingente ereignet. Durch den Rekurs auf das Ereignis wird der Begriff des Nichts zu einem ihrer Schlüsselwörter. Er spiegelt sich in Heideggers Versuch wieder, Natur als Physis zu verstehen. Eine als Physis aufgefasste Natur offenbart ihre Ambivalenz gegenüber den technischen Deutungsversuchen der Neuzeit. Auf diese Weise konfrontiert sie den Menschen mit dessen eigener Kontingenz. Heidegger entwickelt hieraus eine spezifische Form des Umweltethos: Es geht nicht mehr darum, in der Natur unveränderliche Werte zu erblicken, vielmehr liegt das Normative in einer Haltung gegenüber der Kontingenz. Der zweite Teil wirft einen Blick auf das Denken in Japan. Dazu erfolgt ein detaillierter Vergleich des heideggerschen Nichts-Begriffs mit dem japanischen. Er zeigt, dass der japanische Nichts-Begriff es weder erlaubt, zu einer Ontologie der Kontingenz zu gelangen noch zu einem Umweltethos nach Heidegger. / The first part of this work approaches Heideggers philosophy as an Ontology of Contingency. An Ontology of Contingency doesn''t try to find final answeres to that what is. It rather tries to understand in what way that what is is in the light of contingency. To understand how contingency influences being, it identifies different Ways of Enowning (Ereignisweisen) such as world, earth, god and language as structural configurations that enable emergence. When trying to understand the Ontology of Contingency and its Ways of Enowning nothingness becomes one of its keywords. Nothingness is best understood whithin Heideggers notion of nature as physis. The ambivalence of physis preserves nature of technical interpretations of the modern age and thus konfronts man with his own contingency. From this Heidegger develops a specific notion of Environmental Ethos as opposed to environmental ethics. Heideggers Ethos does not rely on values but sees normative actions as a kind of mindset towards contingency. The second part of this work follows the idea that western philosophy and Japanese thinking can be connected by a common notion of nothingness and thus also yield a common notion of environmental ethics. However, the comparision of Heideggers notion of nothingness with Japanese concepts shows that the latter will not allow for a Ontology of Contingency nor an Environmental Ethos.

This paper examines the role played by death in the philosophy of Nishitani Keiji, through the nondual logic of contradictory identity developed by his teacher and founder of the Kyotoschool of philosophy, Nishida Kitarō. I explore Nishitani’s understanding of how Nothingness, nihility, through our awareness of death penetrates and nullifies existence itself, how the irreality of all being comes to the fore to make being itself unreal. The nullifying nothingness of nihility, however, is still nothingness represented as a something; it is a reified nothing, defined as the antithesis to being and thus still seen as a corollary of being itself. A truly absolute nothingness, what Nishitani calls Śūnyatā, emptiness, must be a nothingness so devoid of being as to not even be nothing; it must be absolutely nothing at all, and thus nothing else than being itself. The final chapter of my paper seeks to apply this nondual understanding of being and nothingness to the question of death itself; to understand the ontological meaning of death - the passage from being to non-being - when being and non-being have been one from the very beginning. The paper also seeks to blur the lines between what has traditionally been considered philosophy and religion, using the thinking of the Kyoto school to point to the deeper ties between the two in the borderland that is buddhist philosophy.

Plus que jamais, les débats que suscite le personnage de Louis-Ferdinand Céline s’apprêtent à prendre le pas sur la réception de son œuvre littéraire, pourtant exceptionnellement riche. Soumis à une lecture souvent approximative, imprégnée d’aprioris, ses écrits sont couramment victime d’une mise en perspective déformée, car abordés à rebours. Deux idées aussi tenaces que contradictoires se maintiennent alors : celle d’une œuvre principalement politique et celle d’un écrivain avant tout styliste. Donnant la priorité à une approche en accord avec le développement chronologique de l’œuvre, ce travail de thèse propose de remettre en valeur les intentions primaires de celle-ci. À partir d’une contextualisation dans l’histoire des idées de Voyage au bout de la nuit, Mea culpa et Bagatelles pour un massacre, elle soutient que les écrits de Céline s’appuient sur une interrogation philosophique qui s’élabore autour d’un même malaise vis-à-vis de l’héritage des Lumières, mais dont les conséquences, autant pour le fond que pour la forme, diffèrent selon les textes. Alors que Voyage au bout de la nuit présente une interrogation ontologique axée autour du motif du néant, Bagatelles pour un massacre poursuit une approche où la remise en question des Lumières donne naissance à des revendications esthétiques et sociologiques autant qu’à des diatribes idéologiques. Aux confins de l’un et de l’autre texte, Mea culpa pose les bases de ce passage de l’abstrait au concret, si lourd de conséquences pour l’appréhension de l’œuvre. Ainsi, ce travail de thèse contribue non seulement à une meilleure compréhension des textes abordés, mais montre l’univers intellectuel sous-jacent qui les relie. / More than ever, debates engaging the character of Louis–Ferdinand Céline prevail over assessments of his collected work. The latter tends to receive superficial treatment, falling victim to a distorted perspective, infused with pre-judgment and approached through the prism of the author rather than the work itself. Two ideas, as persistent as they are contradictory prevail: of work that is inherently political and of a writer who is above all a stylist. Emphasising an approach in sync with the chronological development of Celine’s work, this thesis proposes to resurrect the author’s primary intentions. Starting with a contextualisation of Voyage au bout de la nuit, Mea culpa and Bagatelles pour un massacre, it is submitted that the writings of Celine rely on philosophical questioning developed around the same unease as has been witnessed on the legacy of the Enlightenment, but whose consequences, as much for the substance as the form, differ as according to the text. Whilst Voyage au bout de la nuit presents an ontological question centred on the theme for nothingness, Bagatelles pour un massacre pursues an approach where the questioning of the Enlightenment gives rise to aesthetic and sociological claims as well as ideological denunciations. At the extremities of the various texts, Mea culpa forms the basis of this movement from the abstract to the concrete albeit fraught with consequences for the understanding of the work. Thus, this thesis not only contributes to a better understanding of the texts examined, but shows the underlying intellectual universe that connects them.

Egaré dans l’histoire, dans un devenir horizontal qui le condamne à s’autodétruire pour s’affirmer, l’homme de Cioran s’ouvre par moments à un devenir vertical, soit en s’élevant à travers l’extase qui le transfigure, soit en tombant à travers l’ennui qui le défigure. En envisageant la pensée de Cioran comme une « course thérapeutique en sens cosmique » ou comme une errance infinie issue d’une « théologie sentimentale où l’absolu se construit avec les éléments du désir », cette thèse, consacrée à la fois à l’œuvre française et à l’œuvre roumaine, s’attache à l’évolution de l’auteur de l’une à l’autre tout en dénonçant le mythe de la césure entre les deux. En posant le nihilisme à la fois comme un poison et comme un remède, comme l’horizon d’une fin ou d’un nouveau commencement, l’étude se propose d’analyser les processus et les expériences à travers lesquels le nihilisme est vaincu par lui-même. Le diagnostic du « héros de la rétractation » est interprété à partir de ses tentations et de ses inconséquences ; son exploration des impasses, son évasion dans le virtuel, ses hésitations entre une carrière métaphysique et un rôle historique, sa lutte avec le temps et ses expériences extatiques, sont analysées à partir d’une double tentation d’un même passage : « du néant vers le monde » et « du monde vers le néant ». / Going astray in History, in a horizontal becoming which condemns him to self-destruct to assert himself, Cioran’s man opens at times to a vertical becoming either in rising through the ecstasy that transfigures, either by falling through boredom which disfigures. Considering Cioran’s thought as a « therapeutic run in a cosmic sense » or as an endless wandering stemming from « a sentimental theology, in which the Absolute is built with the elements of desire », this study, devoted both to the French and Romanian works, focuses on the evolution of the author from one to the other by denouncing the myth of the caesura between the two works. Assuming both nihilism as a poison and as a remedy, as the horizon of an end or of a new beginning, the study aims to analyse the processes and experiences through which nihilism is defeated by itself. The diagnosis of the « hero of the withdrawal » is interpreted from his temptations and his inconsistencies ; his exploration of the impasses, his escape into the virtual, his hesitation between a metaphysical career and a historic role, his struggle with time and ecstatic experiences, are analyzed from a double temptation of a same passage : « from nothingness to the world » and « from the world towards nothingness ».