Author Topic: Schopenhauer, Opera Glasses and the Rabble  (Read 4672 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Nation of One

  • { }
  • { ∅, { ∅ } }
  • Posts: 4756
  • Life teaches me not to want it.
    • What Now?
Schopenhauer's Encounter with Indian Thought
« Reply #45 on: June 22, 2017, 01:58:11 pm »
I have been pecking away at Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy Monographs: Schopenhauer's Encounter with Indian Thought.

I want to tear myself away from the mathematics and programming for just this breif interlude so i can note here some of what I was reading late after mindnight.

“If I wished to take the results of my philosophy as the standard of truth, I should have to concede to Buddhism pre-eminence [over other religions]."  ~ Schopenhauer

In On the Will in Nature Schopenhauer includes a brief discussion of the obstacles standing in the way of European understanding of Oriental religions..   

- sidenote: I have often read that it is considered wrong to use the term Oriental (as it cuts the world in half - Occidental vs Oriental), but this was the term used in Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy Monographs, so I am retaining its usage in this excerpt.

Europeans, Schopenhauer says, had come so closely to identify the notion of religion with theism and to assume without evidence that all peoples on earth worshipped a single World-Creator as they themselves did, that the discovery that this was not the case in lands like China and India loomed disproportionately large for them.  A second obstacle he identifies is the optimistic view of the world that is the necessary complement of belief in a beneficent Creator-God. This too is absent in the East:

“They [Europeans] have been brought up in optimism, whereas existence is regarded there [in the East] as an evil.”  ~ Schopenhauer

And a third major obstacle standing in the way of European understanding is “the decided idealism ( entschiedenen Idealismus), essential to both Buddhism and Hinduism.” Idealism for Schopenhauer is the doctrine of “the merely apparent existence of this world that is presented to our senses.”  It is, he says, “a view known in Europe merely as the paradox of certain abnormal philosophers and as hardly worthy of serious consideration,” and yet in Asia it pervades society and finds expression even in the popular belief.  It is this idealism and the extent to which its expression in Indian thought corresponds to Schopenhauer’s own teaching of representation.

another sidenote:  While I was attending the state university in 2000-2002, I was renting a room from a grouchy German woman.  Another student also renting a room was from India.  Evidently he had been raised in a home where servants did all his laundry and cooking.  He told me this himself.  He delighted in walking to the foodstore for frozen waffles which he prepared in the toaster.   He treasured being able to do his own laundry.

Anyway, during one of our conversations, he told me that he did not care for India being refered to as Asia, or grouped with Asia.  He said that India is like a continent of its own, in its own right.

This got me to thinking how "Europe" seems to be a kind of strained effort of seeming to be separate from the land mass where it happens to be located.

And then there is the United States in North America ... I don't want to get side-tracked by my own chaotic thoughts. 

... While in Dresden, Schopenhauer withdrew from the library of that city the first nine volumes of Asiatick Researches, retaining them for six months. These volumes cover the years 1788–1807 and include important articles by Jones, Colebrooke, Francis Buchanan, and others.

Some forty-five pages of notes preserved in the Schopenhauer Archive and
written in English (with which Schopenhauer was familiar) are evidence of his interest. They are records of passages that drew his attention, and there is generally no comment, other than underlining of significant passages and a few brief marginal remarks. These provide indications of the direction and extent of Schopenhauer’s interest and belong to a critical period during the formative stage of his philosophy. In accordance with the character of the early volumes of Asiatick Researches, most of these notes concern Hinduism.

However, volume 6 (1799) contained a discussion of Buddhism in the form
of Buchanan’s long essay “On the Religion and Literature of the Burmas.”

Schopenhauer found this work of considerable interest, and his notes show that he drew the following conclusions:



1. Gotama and Buddha, and probably also the Chinese Fo and Shaka, are the same.

2. The doctrine of transmigration is held by the Buddhists of Burma.

3. Buddhists (“The Sect of Gotama”) consider the belief in a divine being who created the universe to be highly impious. This note is emphasized by Schopenhauer with double vertical lines and a marginal comment, “This is the teaching of the Buddha” ( d. ist die Lehre des Buddha).

4. The Burmese religion knows of no supreme Being who is creator and preserver of the universe (similar emphasis by Schopenhauer).

5. Their system of morals is as good as that of any religion.

6. The Buddha’s followers are atheists (emphasized).

7. Nirvāna is the most perfect of all states and consists in a kind of annihilation. Nothing can give us an adequate idea of it. It is salvation and freedom from the miseries attaching to old age, disease, and death.


I am being pulled from the keyboard by my mother requesting my assitance.

I just wanted to leave some notes here.  They are of extreme importance to me.

It was Schopenhauer's understanding that the Buddhists (“The Sect of Gotama”) considered the belief in a divine being who created the universe to be highly impious.  That is, wicked.   This is great stuff.  It would explain to me why the pious believers seem so mean-spirited.

The Burmese religion knows of no supreme Being who is creator and preserver of the universe.

The Buddha’s followers are atheists.


I have to go.

I think I am an atheist of the Buddhistic-Schopenhauerian variety.
« Last Edit: June 22, 2017, 09:22:55 pm by Raskolnikov »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~