Schopenhauer and the Wisdom of India
Schopenhauer’s philosophy owes as much to Kant as to the Indian doctrines, yet the synthesis he attempts unfolds to the detriment of both sources.
Schopenhauer, in fact, carries forward Kant’s critical idealism, defending it from the accusations of incompleteness and inconclusiveness advanced first by Fichte and then by Hegel, his aim, he believes, is to bring it to its genuine completion.
For Kant, human knowledge extends only to appearances—to reality as it presents itself within the limits of experience—while the ultimate nature of things, the thing-in-itself, remains hidden from us. Yet reason, in its pure form, endures as the sole guide, allowing us to discern the categorical imperative: the pursuit of good and the rejection of evil.
For Fichte and Hegel, absolute idealism rests on the premise that, if the thing-in-itself is unknowable by definition, it can be dismissed altogether. Consequently, since things exist for the self only insofar as they are conceived within it, the Self emerges as the ultimate horizon of knowledge and reality.
Within this framework stands Schopenhauer, who believes he has discerned the true essence of phenomena and discovered what the thing-in-itself ultimately is—what for Kant was unattainable and for absolute idealism meaningless. Schopenhauer holds that the ultimate nature of phenomena is the Wille, the Will: the will to exist, to survive, to reproduce. Will is the driving force of nature, evolving without any divine design, simply according to its inherent will to exist. From this irrationalist vision arises his pessimism.
This Will is, indeed, one of the two terms that form the title of Schopenhauer’s chief work, The World as Will and Representation. The first book was composed in his youth, the second in his maturity. The notion of “representation” expresses, in keeping with Kantian thought, that reality can be known only at the surface level, within the bounds of the phenomenal world.
At this juncture, Schopenhauer turns to the first Indian texts available in Western translation, especially those of the Vedānta and early Buddhist literature.
The Vedānta consists chiefly of the Upaniṣad, commentaries upon the Veda, and comprises a broad domain of Indian doctrine together with the more distinctly esoteric and Tantric paths.
The influence of the Vedānta declined sharply within the subcontinent after the rise of Buddhism, which later spread to China, Tibet, and across the East. In India itself, however, Buddhism was eventually replaced by a revival of the Vedānta, carried forward by several schools, the greatest and most profound being the doctrine of Advaita, or non-duality, articulated by Ādi Śaṅkara around the eighth century.
Schopenhauer read several of the Upaniṣad and regarded them as consistent with Kant’s idealistic framework, since the Hindu Brahman represents the true and ultimate reality, of which human beings have no direct knowledge, being confined within the limits of representation. At this very superficial level, an affinity between the Vedānta and idealistic philosophy can be discerned, yet it is based on a purely metaphysical and philosophical interpretation of the Indian doctrines, whereas these, in their essence, convey something altogether different from what Schopenhauer believed he found in them — a misunderstanding that has always characterized the Western reading of Indian wisdom.
The Upaniṣad are not philosophies, nor explanations of the world. At the level of genuine understanding, as shown for centuries by the yogin and sannyāsin of India and still today, they point to the path through which the mind is transmuted and true knowledge attained — a knowledge that is the very opposite of conceptual, for it means becoming what one truly is. “For human beings the mind is the cause of bondage or of liberation: when it is bound to objects it leads to bondage; when it is free from objects it is called liberation” (Maitrī Upaniṣad, VI.34.11). For the Upaniṣad, the Brahman is not a metaphysical entity but the reality that human beings, when engaged upon the spiritual path, can truly attain. The Vedānta, which to most appears abstract, in fact sets forth a science—the supreme science, it should be said—which, as a science, must be experienced and realized. As Bodhānanda still reminds us today in his presentation of the Advaita Bodha Dīpikā (“Lamp of Non-dual Knowledge”) by Srī Karapatra Swāmī, merely reading and thinking one has understood the notions described is empty and fruitless.
When Schopenhauer takes up the Vedāntic maxim tat tvam asi—“thou art that,” meaning that there is no difference between the self and the Brahman—he does so in a wholly distorted and arbitrary way. The same is true of his use of the phrase “the veil of Māyā.” In the Vedānta this expression, which refers to the human mind’s incapacity to know ultimate reality, does not bear the meaning Schopenhauer gives it. For the German philosopher, the veil of Māyā is a conceptual description of a philosophical position, the unknowability of the thing-in-itself; for the Hindus, by contrast, Māyā, illusion, is the apparent—though not unreal—reality that can in fact be transcended. It should be kept in mind that already in the most ancient Upaniṣad, prāṇa plays a role no less central than that of the Brahman. The principal path toward recognizing oneself as ātman—that is, as a portion of the Brahman—is prāṇa, the dimension of subtle energies of which kuṇḍalinī is the purest form. The Upaniṣad (as repeated), if one reads plainly what the ṛṣi wrote without omission or reduction, are not metaphysical philosophies at all but practical doctrines of transmutation. As for Buddhism, it must first be noted that it is articulated into three vehicles: the path of the Sūtra, which presents the doctrines in a simple and discursive manner; the Vajrayāna, the esoteric path of the tantras; and the supreme vehicle, the Dzogchen. Schopenhauer—like all Westerners, inevitably—read certain sūtra as though they were philosophical texts. Yet the sūtra, which convey the teachings given by the Buddha Śākyamuni, the historical Buddha, do not constitute a philosophical system at all, nor even a religion properly speaking; rather, they are a body of doctrines that show the way to liberation from suffering for those without particular spiritual capacities, and this way proceeds through mastery of the mind.
From Buddhism, Schopenhauer drew what he took to be a confirmation of his own philosophical and metaphysical conception of representation, misinterpreting both impermanence and śūnyatā—emptiness. He also adopted the idea of compassion as a means to overcome the world’s suffering. Yet bodhicitta, which certainly includes compassion, is not intended as a way to free oneself from pain; for that purpose, the Buddha taught, one must overcome ignorance. Compassion, rather, is the natural consequence of having disentangled oneself from false conceptions.
These clarifications concerning the genuine meaning of the Indian doctrines are not intended as a criticism of Schopenhauer. The mode of thought of the West—from Aristotle to the present day, centered on materialism and on the presumption of the rational faculty to give an account of everything—could scarcely have done otherwise than to reduce to its own prejudices systems of practice and thought that move on entirely different wavelengths. Schopenhauer, like all others, remains bound by representation, which he explicitly assumes to be the fatal structure of understanding; thus he stands outside the pre-theoretical dimensions of Sacred Science. At the same time, he deserves credit for having brought Western attention to themes that lay beyond the horizon of European culture. Schopenhauer is often neglected because of a logical short circuit inherent in his system—specifically, his defining of the will as noumenon while at the same time treating it as phenomenon. Yet to his honor and credit, beyond his fierce critique of Hegelian idealism, stands above all his clear assertion that not everything must be comprehensible to reason.