Pranam
Schopenhauer’s Initial Encounter with Indian Thought by Urs App
Schopenhauer’s thought with Indian philosophy may involve ideas or
movements that Schopenhauer was not at all acquainted with, for exam-ple
Yogācāra, or philosophies which he only knew through questionable or
pos-sibly misleading sources, for example old Latin translations of the
Upanishads or of Vedanta texts However, such comparisons often involve
claims about possible influence of Indian thought on Schopenhauer
Schopenhauerian philosophy, which from the outset bore the seal of Indian
spirit on its front, was not directly influenced by it. [...] Only later
on, when [Schopen-hauer] acquainted himself with the fruits of Indian
speculation, did he establish a direct connection between Indian thought
and his own.
An exotic but typical example is found in a recent Japanese
book about Schopenhauer and Indian philosophy. He had no correct notion
of the Upanishad’s saying Tat tvam asi. His interpretation of the
Bhagavadgītā and Sankhya-karika is wrong. He has not grasped the
meaning of Brahman.
Schopenhauer (1778-1860) was one of the few modern philosophers who
made a serious study of Upanishads and Buddhist philosophy, not merely to
satisfy an intellectual quest but also to derive from them some of the
basic elements of his own philosophy as also the grounds for the aim and
method of the practice in life. In Schopenhauer, we find an early exemplar
in the modern era of the view that the East and West can meet. It is mainly
for this reason that we in India look upon Schopenhauer with deep
appreciation and we are impelled to make a special effort to trace those
elements in the Western philosophy which culminated in Schopenhauer who was
the first one to proclaim in its purity the doctrine that Will is
paramount, the doctrine which came to be advocated by many subsequent
modern philosophers such as Nietzsche, Bergson, James and Dewey.
That doctrine has effected a striking change in the temper of
philosophy in our own times. Realisation that that doctrine was in some
measure the result of the influence on him of the Upanishads and Buddhism
inspires us to undertake a fresh look Philosophical Notes on into the
Indian philosophy and to enrich our own critical assessment of the
comparative study of Indian and Western philosophy. Plato and Kant played a
dominant role in preparing Schopenhauer up to the point where he could
enter into the message of Upanishads and Buddhism with that awakening which
is required for entering into the domain of an alien culture.
As we all know, Schopenhauer’s system, which is expounded in his
work the World as Will and Representation (Die Welt als Wille und
Vorstellung), can be seen as adaptation of the system of Kant. Kant
maintained that a state of the categorical imperative and experi-ence of
moral will or the goodwill can take us beyond the realm of phenomena which
alone our categories of pure reason enable us to cognise. According to
Kant, goodwill must belong to the real world, the world of
things-in-themselves. It is this aspect of Kant’s philosophy which led
Schopenhauer to assign overwhelming importance to will. According to Kant,
both time and space belong only to phenomena, things-in-them-selves cannot
be in space and time. It may, therefore, be reasoned that the Will that
operates in categorical imperatives can be designated as something not
bound by the limits of space and time, and therefore it is universal. It
Schopenhauer and Indian Philosophy can also be identified with the will of
the universe.
In this light, separateness may be shown to be an illusion, resulting
from one’s own subjective apparatus of spatio-temporal perception.
Secondly, what is real is one vast will. We are thus led to the genesis of
Schopenhauer’s conception of the whole world as Will. A central question
relating to Schopenhauer’s philosophy is regarding the nature of Will.
According to Schopenhauer, all processes in nature are fundamentally a kind
of striving. He also speaks of unconscious processes of end-seeking. His
statement of the world as a Will is not merely empirical but also
metaphysical. Will provides Schopenhauer with a kind of nature of the
world-initself, including the underlying reality of the individual human
being. This view is comparable to the Buddhistic view of the world as a
constant becoming and of the life of the human beings driven by desire.
Schopenhauer’s philosophy is anti-dualist, and he paints a vivid picture of
the whole of animate nature as for ever striving, struggling, and competing
for life and further life by producing offsprings. He maintains that the
conscious or rationally caused willing in human beings is merely the
highest sophistication of will to life that permeates all nature. Although
human beings are organisms whose Philosophical Notes on brains and other
physiological processes enable them to function as subjects of knowledge,
applying classification of space, time, and causality, and making rational
judgements, yet the innermost core is the Will. He points out that the
mental processes are almost always at a deeper level subservient to blind
will to life. Incidentally, it may be mentioned that his idea that the
intellect is often forced to follow the secret purposes of uncontrollable
underlying will was a precursor of Freud’s view of the unconscious.
According to Schopenhauer, there cannot be a plurality of things in
themselves, since plurality implies individuation, and individuation arises
from space and time, and space and time do not apply to the thing in
itself. He contends that thing in itself or the will objectifies itself as
multiplicity of things itself. This view is comparable to the Upanishadic
view that reality is one without the second that it is spaceless and
timeless and that it is only in space and time that oneness of the ultimate
reality manifests itself or appears in terms of multiplicity. According to
Schopenhauer, will is associated with misery.
For will to life impels us on ever[1]increasing train of desires and
goals, but we reach no ultimate point or final satisfaction. The
Schopenhauer and Indian Philosophy conclusion is that desires always
remain unsatisfied, and to have desires unsatisfied is to suffer. In
developing this aspect of his philosophy, Schopenhauer comes closest to the
Buddhistic doctrine, according to which there is perennial suffering in the
world and that suffering is caused by desire. Upanishads, too, maintain
that all human suffering is caused by desire. Both Buddhism and Upanishads,
therefore, advocate renunciation of desire. And Schopenhauer, too,
maintains that suffering can be alleviated, and this alleviation can come
about when one may have the suspension of the will. In elaborating this
aspect of his theory, Schopenhauer develops his aesthetic theory. The
unifying thought in that theory is that one may have perceptual experience
while the will is suspended. He admits that such an occurrence is
comparatively rare because the intellect by nature is driven by will and is
not prone to contemplating reality with objectivity and freedom from
desires that the aesthetic experi-ence demands. In his account of the
aesthetic experience, he points out that in that experience we are no
longer considering the where, the when, the why, and the whither of things,
but simply and solely the What.
Moreover, in the aesthetic contemplation, the subject becomes
unaware of its separateness from that which it Philosophical Notes on
experiences. As he explains, “the person who is involved in this perception
is no longer an individual, for in such a perception the individual has
lost himself; he is pure will-less, painless, timeless subject of
knowledge.” Schopenhauer goes farther, and he points out that the object of
the aesthetic experience is not merely the individual spatio-temporal
thing, but one of the eternal Ideas fixed in nature. In advocating this
view, Schopenhauer has clearly at the back of his mind the Platonic theory
of ideas. As in Plato, so in Schopenhauer, individual empirical things
cannot be apprehended except when the subject applies to the
representations of particular objects the a priori Ideas of Forms. He adds,
however, that ordinary empirical knowledge is driven by the will and it
consists in brain processes whose concurrence subserves the ends of
organisms. Consequently, if the intellect breaks away from its service to
the will, it must leave behind the forms of space, time and causality.
Schopenhauer believes that, by freeing one’s intellect temporarily
from the will, one gains a higher form of knowledge, and becomes a pure
subject, objectively nurturing reality, and learning behind one’s
identification with any individual part of the empirical world.
Schopenhauer and Indian Philosophy One can notice here the reason as to
why Schopenhauer felt a great solace in the Upanis-hads and why he found in
Buddhism a great support. Both in the Upanishads and in the Buddhism, the
resolution of suffering is in the cessation of desire; in both, the
emphasis is on the cessation of the limitation of space and time and in the
cessation of the limited individuality. Both speak of the experience in
which there is an experience of silence, although in the Upanishads the
silence is of the eternal Self and in Buddhism there is the silence beyond
silence in which self is transcended.
Schopenhauer is often stigmatised as a pessimistic philosopher, in the
same way as many critics of Upanishads and Buddhism regard them as
pessimistic. But when we consider Schopenhauer’s understanding of the
psychology of the saint, of compassion and the value he attaches to
striving for liberation without escaping from the struggle by taking
recourse to suicide, one is obliged to conclude that his theory
exemplifies, not the futility of life, but the possibility of attainment of
a state of release from all subjectivity of egoism. Just as we can say that
Buddhism is not a petty ideal of escape but of heroic striving towards
Nirvana, a state free from suffering, and just as we see the Upanishadic 16
Philosophical Notes on teachings as an affirmation of the possibility of
the recovery of spaceless-timeless Reality in experience that transcends
all subjectivity and objectivity, even so we can say that Schopenhauer
advocates the possibility of release from sorrow in the experience of
compassion.
He rightly holds the view that individuation or egoism is not an
ultimate truth in the universe and that therefore compassion is more
profoundly justified than egoism. We may recall that according to
Schopenhauer, compassion is the impulse is to seek another’s well-being and
to prevent another’s suffering, and is grounded in a vision of the world
which sets less store than usual on divisions between individuals.
According to Schopenhauer, the good man sees everywhere “I once more”. A
true understanding of Schopenhauer’s philosophy reveals a profound
psychology of saintliness, of inner resignation, true composure, true
desirelessness. His message is a message of remedy, which lies in achieving
a vision of the world which attaches the lowest possible importance to
egoism, to one’s own individuality which strives in divisions. Schopenhauer
has been rated as one of the greatest prose writers among the German
philosophers. He exercised a great influence in his old age on eminent
personalities like Wagner, Schopenhauer and Indian Philosophy 17 Nietzsche,
Tolstoy, Hardy, Freud, Jung, Proust, Thomas Mann and Wittgenstein. During
the later years of his life, he attained the stature of one the greatest
intellectual figures in European culture. In his aesthetic philosophy, he
can be seen as a mystic, and considering his intellectual bond with the
Plato and Kant, and considering his spiritual bond with Upanishads and
Buddhism, he can be regarded as a multifaceted universalist
. KR IRS 6522
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