Arthur Schopenhauer
The second philosopher I would like to introduce is Schopenhauer (1788-1859). Again, for convenience, I am reprinting an article I originally wrote three years ago.
The Vedas, the Upanishads, the Bhagavad-Gita, Socrates, Plato, Kant and Schopenhauer (written 9-20 February, 2003)
Over the last two to three years, as preparation for the creation of Conscious Living Seminars, I have been re-reading material I had first read in the sixties and seventies; mostly works in Philosophy and Psychology, some History, some Sociology – even some literature (the English and French Romantics, with a few German-speaking poets and philosophers thrown in). I’ve found it a fascinating experience, re-reading things I had first read 30-35 (in some cases almost 40) years ago. Several times in the last 18 years I actually gave up reading altogether. The first time was in December, 1984 after my remarkable experiences with Self-Transformation Seminars (ST). The last time was two years ago when I read something which upset me so much that I became physically sick (I spent several weeks in bed with the flu, in the middle of Summer). I have again reached the point where I can hear myself say:
“Enough reading”. Yet there is enormous value in reading, especially the thoughts and doings of people who lived at a different time, in different circumstances. My most recent reading – prompted by a desire to understand more fully the context in which modern (western) Psychology was born – has been the German-speaking world of the nineteenth century, with several detours into the eighteenth. What an eye-opener! Yes, I read much of this stuff in the mid-sixties; but that was a long time ago. I re-read much of it in the seventies, to be sure, but even that was light-years away from the present.
What is the point I am making? It is this. We are not alone. There is nothing new under the sun. Our “issues” – as we tend to call them today – our troubles, our concerns are not new. They were all known to those who came before us. The “new” concepts, the “new” approaches or “therapies” that are proposed to help us deal with or resolve our “problems” are neither “new” nor revolutionary. More important still, we can learn from those who came before us; we do not need to keep on repeating their mistakes in order to learn the same lessons.
Let’s start with one of my earliest loves – Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860). As I mentioned earlier, my awakening began in early 1964, when I suddenly became aware of death. This led to despair and depression and, in this new state of consciousness, I discovered the English Romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) and, through Shelley, something called “Philosophy”. I fell in love with philosophy, enrolled in a subject with that name the following year (1965) and began my intellectual journey. At the beginning of the 1965 academic year I enrolled in an eight-week extracurricular course of (lunchtime) lectures in “existentialism”. Amongst the earliest precursors of “modern, post-war existentialism” were, we were told, three nineteenth-century philosophers: Arthur Schopenhauer, Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) and Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900). I quickly fell in love with the first two while finding Nietzsche fascinating but incomprehensible. I immediately bought and read a paperback called The Essential Schopenhauer, which comprised a selection of essays from a book originally published in 1851 and also read some excerpts from an earlier work by Schopenhauer, completed between 1814 and 1818. In addition, I read several commentaries on Schopenhauer. Until recently, I recalled very little of what I had read by or about Schopenhauer, remembering only that I was attracted by his pessimism. Yet now, 38 years later, I have rediscovered what a wealth of insights this amazing genius had bequeathed the world. To my horror, amongst these are Schopenhauer’s reworking of what he had read in the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads and the Vedas. I say “to my horror” because I have no conscious memory of reading any of this material, even though some of it was actually underlined by me at the time! As late as last year, when I was writing my “story” for the website, I believed that my first exposure to (the ancient Indian philosophy which developed into what came to be called) “Hinduism” did not occur until March, 1988. An important lesson!
In re-reading Schopenhauer after a passage of 38 years I am simply awestruck by the profundity of what he had to say. How is this for a sample? “… whoever is satisfied with life as it is, whoever affirms it in every way, can confidently regard it as endless, and can banish the fear of death as an illusion” (1818). After giving several examples of what would ordinarily be described as “selfless”, “courageous” actions in which people have saved the lives of others, even when they themselves were “already destined to death, beyond any hope of rescue”, Schopenhauer writes: “In all these cases we see an individual in the face of his own immediate and certain destruction no longer thinking of saving himself, so that he may direct the whole of his efforts to saving someone else. How could there be a clearer expression of the consciousness that what is being destroyed is only a phenomenon [that is, mere appearance], and that the destruction itself is only a phenomenon; that, on the other hand, the real being of the person who meets his death is untouched by that event, and lives on in the other person, in whom, even now, as his action betrays, he so clearly perceives it to exist? For if this were not so, and it was his real being which was about to be annihilated, how could that being spend its last efforts in showing such an ardent sympathy in the welfare and continued existence of another?” (1851). Schopenhauer asks how a person “may become conscious of his own existence” [that is, of the Real Self, rather than the everyday self, or ego]. He replies: “[B]y going down into the depths of his own nature, a person may become conscious that he is all in all; that, in fact, he is the only real being; and that, in addition, this real being perceives itself again in others, who present themselves from the outside, as though they formed a mirror of himself … [This going down into the depths of his own nature] makes a person immediately conscious that he is the thing-in-itself [that is, what we could call “essence” or the person’s “essential nature”]. This is a doctrine in which … I have the Vedas to support me”. Finally, “our self can exist in other beings whose consciousness is separated and different from our own” (The Essential Schopenhauer, Unwin Books, 1962: 134-135).
There is, of course, much, much more that is worth quoting (the exception is his incredibly twisted view of women). One problem we encounter, however, is that of language. Several commentators have noted the difficulty of translating Schopenhauer’s German into meaningful English (the above quotation is an exception, rather than the rule). Schopenhauer’s major work was Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, completed by August, 1818 and published at the end of that year (though bearing the date 1819). The two major concepts are “Wille” (nearly always – inappropriately – translated as “will”) and “Vorstellung”, sometimes translated as “idea” and sometimes as “representation”. So we have an author’s major life’s work being presented to the English-speaking world under two different titles: “The world as will and idea”; and “The world as will and representation” – neither of which is very helpful to our efforts to understand Schopenhauer. Yet another key concept is “Idee”, which some have translated as “Idea” with a capital “I” to indicate that it is Plato’s (or Socrates’s) concept of “Idea” (or “Form”) that Schopenhauer implies. None of this helps us, particularly since the English translation of Plato’s concept as “Idea” or “Form” is misleading. The best translation would be “essence” or “[the] essential nature [of things]”. Finally we have the near-impossibility of translating the original Sanskrit of the Vedas, the Upanishads or the Bhagavad Gita into any modern language. That is why Schopenhauer, in 1818, after trying to convey his meaning of his two key concepts (“Wille” and “Vorstellung”) for over 200 pages, finally gave up and wrote: “But if we had to convey to the beholder, for reflection and in a word, the explanation and information about their inner nature, it would be best for us to use the Sanskrit formula which occurs so often in the sacred books of the Hindus, and is called Mahavakya, ie the great word: ‘Tat tvam asi’, which means ‘This living thing art thou’” [The world as will and representation (1818), trans E F S Payne, New York: Dover Publications, 1958/1969: 220]. More than 30 years later (in 1851), he wrote: “The readers of my Ethics know that with me the ultimate foundation of morality is the truth which in the Vedas and the Vedanta receives its expression in the established, mystical formula, Tat twam asi (This is thyself), which is spoken with reference to every living thing, be it man or beast, and is called the Mahavakya, the great word”. Every person who acts “in accordance with this principle”, Schopenhauer continues, “recognises himself as identical with another individual, who exists in complete separation from him”. This is “the beginning of mysticism” he writes, based on the “recognition of a person’s own true being in another individual” and leads to genuinely ethical or moral behaviour (The Essential Schopenhauer, p133). Alan Watts, writing in 1956, explained it this way: “Indian philosophy does not describe the content of this discovery (of who or what I am, when I am no longer identified with any role or conventional definition of the person), except in mythological terms, using the phrase ‘I am Brahman” (aham brahman) or ‘That art thou” (tat tvam asi) to suggest that Self-knowledge is a realization of one’s original identity with God” (The way of Zen, Penguin Books, 1957/1962: 56). Watts points out (p55) that in Buddhism this “experience or state of consciousness” is called “moksha” or “liberation”.
The above considerations are precisely those that led us to explain, in the section on Philosophy, why we did not discuss such matters – and why we do not intend to discuss them in our courses. Everything I have just written amounts to WORDS. These words may, or they may not, have conveyed any meaning. There is, simply, no substitute for experience – and that means, that must mean, experience of the PRESENT. The more we can stay in the present moment, the more we can learn to connect with – and to remain in contact with – our moment-by-moment experience, the greater the likelihood that, from time to time, we might experience something we cannot express in words, or, perhaps, we might say: “TAT TWAM ASI”.
What, then, did Schopenhauer mean by the terms “Wille” and “Vorstellung”. It is clear from the above that, for Schopenhauer, the “Wille” was what today we might call our “Real Self” or our “Higher Self”, “Spirit”, “Soul” or “Essence” (or, even, our “Being”). This is the “Ding-an-sich” (the “thing-in-itself”) of Immanuel Kant. In the Upanishads, this is called the Atman and, as the words “tat twam asi” clearly indicate, that is who we really are; our essence is without form, timeless, eternal, indestructible; it is never born; it never dies; it defies conceptualisation. Now, interestingly, hardly anyone in the nineteenth century noticed this aspect of the meaning of “Wille”. The reason for this is that the German-speaking world of the nineteenth century (but, increasingly, the English-speaking world, too) was fascinated with the other, more pessimistic meaning of “Wille” – as was I myself in the 1960s. For Schopenhauer, this other aspect of the “Wille” can be expressed by words (all of which he used) such as “will-to-live”, “life force”, a “blind, irresistible urge”, an “unconscious, blind impulse”, a “dark driving force”, “desire”, “passion”, “motive” and “instinct”; the most powerful of these was the sexual impulse (1818: 329-330). This impulse or force is something of which the individual is unconscious; it is the real motor or driving force behind action, irrespective of the conscious reasons which we like to present (to ourselves and to others) when giving an account of our behaviour. When the “Schopenhauer revival” which began in the 1850s accelerated in the 1860s, Eduard von Hartmann, clearly recognising Schopenhauer’s intention, renamed his “Wille” (in 1869) with a far better word: “Das Unbewusst” (“the Unconscious”) and this was picked up, first by Nietzsche and then by Freud, amongst others. So Schopenhauer’s term covers what we would today call the unconscious aspect of our minds; this includes both our “shadow” (the Freudian unconscious) and our “Higher Self”.
As for “Vorstellung”, Schopenhauer made his meaning fairly clear in his first (1818) book. The world that surrounds us, including people, things and events, is a “mirror in which we see our own reflection”. “The outer mirrors the inner”, Schopenhauer said in 1851. “The phenomenal world [is] the mirror … - of the ‘Wille’” (1818: 275). “As … life, the visible world, the phenomenon, is only the mirror of the ‘Wille’, this world will accompany the ‘Wille’ as inseparably as a body is accompanied by its shadow” (1818: 275).
Andrew Reiner
The Vedas, the Upanishads, the Bhagavad-Gita, Socrates, Plato, Kant and Schopenhauer (written 9-20 February, 2003)
Over the last two to three years, as preparation for the creation of Conscious Living Seminars, I have been re-reading material I had first read in the sixties and seventies; mostly works in Philosophy and Psychology, some History, some Sociology – even some literature (the English and French Romantics, with a few German-speaking poets and philosophers thrown in). I’ve found it a fascinating experience, re-reading things I had first read 30-35 (in some cases almost 40) years ago. Several times in the last 18 years I actually gave up reading altogether. The first time was in December, 1984 after my remarkable experiences with Self-Transformation Seminars (ST). The last time was two years ago when I read something which upset me so much that I became physically sick (I spent several weeks in bed with the flu, in the middle of Summer). I have again reached the point where I can hear myself say:
“Enough reading”. Yet there is enormous value in reading, especially the thoughts and doings of people who lived at a different time, in different circumstances. My most recent reading – prompted by a desire to understand more fully the context in which modern (western) Psychology was born – has been the German-speaking world of the nineteenth century, with several detours into the eighteenth. What an eye-opener! Yes, I read much of this stuff in the mid-sixties; but that was a long time ago. I re-read much of it in the seventies, to be sure, but even that was light-years away from the present.
What is the point I am making? It is this. We are not alone. There is nothing new under the sun. Our “issues” – as we tend to call them today – our troubles, our concerns are not new. They were all known to those who came before us. The “new” concepts, the “new” approaches or “therapies” that are proposed to help us deal with or resolve our “problems” are neither “new” nor revolutionary. More important still, we can learn from those who came before us; we do not need to keep on repeating their mistakes in order to learn the same lessons.
Let’s start with one of my earliest loves – Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860). As I mentioned earlier, my awakening began in early 1964, when I suddenly became aware of death. This led to despair and depression and, in this new state of consciousness, I discovered the English Romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) and, through Shelley, something called “Philosophy”. I fell in love with philosophy, enrolled in a subject with that name the following year (1965) and began my intellectual journey. At the beginning of the 1965 academic year I enrolled in an eight-week extracurricular course of (lunchtime) lectures in “existentialism”. Amongst the earliest precursors of “modern, post-war existentialism” were, we were told, three nineteenth-century philosophers: Arthur Schopenhauer, Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) and Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900). I quickly fell in love with the first two while finding Nietzsche fascinating but incomprehensible. I immediately bought and read a paperback called The Essential Schopenhauer, which comprised a selection of essays from a book originally published in 1851 and also read some excerpts from an earlier work by Schopenhauer, completed between 1814 and 1818. In addition, I read several commentaries on Schopenhauer. Until recently, I recalled very little of what I had read by or about Schopenhauer, remembering only that I was attracted by his pessimism. Yet now, 38 years later, I have rediscovered what a wealth of insights this amazing genius had bequeathed the world. To my horror, amongst these are Schopenhauer’s reworking of what he had read in the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads and the Vedas. I say “to my horror” because I have no conscious memory of reading any of this material, even though some of it was actually underlined by me at the time! As late as last year, when I was writing my “story” for the website, I believed that my first exposure to (the ancient Indian philosophy which developed into what came to be called) “Hinduism” did not occur until March, 1988. An important lesson!
In re-reading Schopenhauer after a passage of 38 years I am simply awestruck by the profundity of what he had to say. How is this for a sample? “… whoever is satisfied with life as it is, whoever affirms it in every way, can confidently regard it as endless, and can banish the fear of death as an illusion” (1818). After giving several examples of what would ordinarily be described as “selfless”, “courageous” actions in which people have saved the lives of others, even when they themselves were “already destined to death, beyond any hope of rescue”, Schopenhauer writes: “In all these cases we see an individual in the face of his own immediate and certain destruction no longer thinking of saving himself, so that he may direct the whole of his efforts to saving someone else. How could there be a clearer expression of the consciousness that what is being destroyed is only a phenomenon [that is, mere appearance], and that the destruction itself is only a phenomenon; that, on the other hand, the real being of the person who meets his death is untouched by that event, and lives on in the other person, in whom, even now, as his action betrays, he so clearly perceives it to exist? For if this were not so, and it was his real being which was about to be annihilated, how could that being spend its last efforts in showing such an ardent sympathy in the welfare and continued existence of another?” (1851). Schopenhauer asks how a person “may become conscious of his own existence” [that is, of the Real Self, rather than the everyday self, or ego]. He replies: “[B]y going down into the depths of his own nature, a person may become conscious that he is all in all; that, in fact, he is the only real being; and that, in addition, this real being perceives itself again in others, who present themselves from the outside, as though they formed a mirror of himself … [This going down into the depths of his own nature] makes a person immediately conscious that he is the thing-in-itself [that is, what we could call “essence” or the person’s “essential nature”]. This is a doctrine in which … I have the Vedas to support me”. Finally, “our self can exist in other beings whose consciousness is separated and different from our own” (The Essential Schopenhauer, Unwin Books, 1962: 134-135).
There is, of course, much, much more that is worth quoting (the exception is his incredibly twisted view of women). One problem we encounter, however, is that of language. Several commentators have noted the difficulty of translating Schopenhauer’s German into meaningful English (the above quotation is an exception, rather than the rule). Schopenhauer’s major work was Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, completed by August, 1818 and published at the end of that year (though bearing the date 1819). The two major concepts are “Wille” (nearly always – inappropriately – translated as “will”) and “Vorstellung”, sometimes translated as “idea” and sometimes as “representation”. So we have an author’s major life’s work being presented to the English-speaking world under two different titles: “The world as will and idea”; and “The world as will and representation” – neither of which is very helpful to our efforts to understand Schopenhauer. Yet another key concept is “Idee”, which some have translated as “Idea” with a capital “I” to indicate that it is Plato’s (or Socrates’s) concept of “Idea” (or “Form”) that Schopenhauer implies. None of this helps us, particularly since the English translation of Plato’s concept as “Idea” or “Form” is misleading. The best translation would be “essence” or “[the] essential nature [of things]”. Finally we have the near-impossibility of translating the original Sanskrit of the Vedas, the Upanishads or the Bhagavad Gita into any modern language. That is why Schopenhauer, in 1818, after trying to convey his meaning of his two key concepts (“Wille” and “Vorstellung”) for over 200 pages, finally gave up and wrote: “But if we had to convey to the beholder, for reflection and in a word, the explanation and information about their inner nature, it would be best for us to use the Sanskrit formula which occurs so often in the sacred books of the Hindus, and is called Mahavakya, ie the great word: ‘Tat tvam asi’, which means ‘This living thing art thou’” [The world as will and representation (1818), trans E F S Payne, New York: Dover Publications, 1958/1969: 220]. More than 30 years later (in 1851), he wrote: “The readers of my Ethics know that with me the ultimate foundation of morality is the truth which in the Vedas and the Vedanta receives its expression in the established, mystical formula, Tat twam asi (This is thyself), which is spoken with reference to every living thing, be it man or beast, and is called the Mahavakya, the great word”. Every person who acts “in accordance with this principle”, Schopenhauer continues, “recognises himself as identical with another individual, who exists in complete separation from him”. This is “the beginning of mysticism” he writes, based on the “recognition of a person’s own true being in another individual” and leads to genuinely ethical or moral behaviour (The Essential Schopenhauer, p133). Alan Watts, writing in 1956, explained it this way: “Indian philosophy does not describe the content of this discovery (of who or what I am, when I am no longer identified with any role or conventional definition of the person), except in mythological terms, using the phrase ‘I am Brahman” (aham brahman) or ‘That art thou” (tat tvam asi) to suggest that Self-knowledge is a realization of one’s original identity with God” (The way of Zen, Penguin Books, 1957/1962: 56). Watts points out (p55) that in Buddhism this “experience or state of consciousness” is called “moksha” or “liberation”.
The above considerations are precisely those that led us to explain, in the section on Philosophy, why we did not discuss such matters – and why we do not intend to discuss them in our courses. Everything I have just written amounts to WORDS. These words may, or they may not, have conveyed any meaning. There is, simply, no substitute for experience – and that means, that must mean, experience of the PRESENT. The more we can stay in the present moment, the more we can learn to connect with – and to remain in contact with – our moment-by-moment experience, the greater the likelihood that, from time to time, we might experience something we cannot express in words, or, perhaps, we might say: “TAT TWAM ASI”.
What, then, did Schopenhauer mean by the terms “Wille” and “Vorstellung”. It is clear from the above that, for Schopenhauer, the “Wille” was what today we might call our “Real Self” or our “Higher Self”, “Spirit”, “Soul” or “Essence” (or, even, our “Being”). This is the “Ding-an-sich” (the “thing-in-itself”) of Immanuel Kant. In the Upanishads, this is called the Atman and, as the words “tat twam asi” clearly indicate, that is who we really are; our essence is without form, timeless, eternal, indestructible; it is never born; it never dies; it defies conceptualisation. Now, interestingly, hardly anyone in the nineteenth century noticed this aspect of the meaning of “Wille”. The reason for this is that the German-speaking world of the nineteenth century (but, increasingly, the English-speaking world, too) was fascinated with the other, more pessimistic meaning of “Wille” – as was I myself in the 1960s. For Schopenhauer, this other aspect of the “Wille” can be expressed by words (all of which he used) such as “will-to-live”, “life force”, a “blind, irresistible urge”, an “unconscious, blind impulse”, a “dark driving force”, “desire”, “passion”, “motive” and “instinct”; the most powerful of these was the sexual impulse (1818: 329-330). This impulse or force is something of which the individual is unconscious; it is the real motor or driving force behind action, irrespective of the conscious reasons which we like to present (to ourselves and to others) when giving an account of our behaviour. When the “Schopenhauer revival” which began in the 1850s accelerated in the 1860s, Eduard von Hartmann, clearly recognising Schopenhauer’s intention, renamed his “Wille” (in 1869) with a far better word: “Das Unbewusst” (“the Unconscious”) and this was picked up, first by Nietzsche and then by Freud, amongst others. So Schopenhauer’s term covers what we would today call the unconscious aspect of our minds; this includes both our “shadow” (the Freudian unconscious) and our “Higher Self”.
As for “Vorstellung”, Schopenhauer made his meaning fairly clear in his first (1818) book. The world that surrounds us, including people, things and events, is a “mirror in which we see our own reflection”. “The outer mirrors the inner”, Schopenhauer said in 1851. “The phenomenal world [is] the mirror … - of the ‘Wille’” (1818: 275). “As … life, the visible world, the phenomenon, is only the mirror of the ‘Wille’, this world will accompany the ‘Wille’ as inseparably as a body is accompanied by its shadow” (1818: 275).
Andrew Reiner
posted by Andrew Reiner at 8:25 PM
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