Schopenhauer and Indian Philosophy, summary: the meaning of the veil of Maya and how to reach nirvana for the German philosopher.
Our religions will never be able to take root in India: the original wisdom of the human race will not be supplanted by the accidents that happened in Galilee. On the contrary, Indian wisdom will flow back towards Europe, and will produce a fundamental change in our knowledge and thinking ” (The World as Will and Representation, Arthur Schopenhauer ).
Schopenhauer was the first Western philosopher to recover Eastern philosophies, for which he had great admiration. From these civilizations, so distant from the West and from India in particular, Schopenhauer derives two basic concepts: the veil of Maya and Nirvana .
THE VEIL OF MAYA
The veil of Maya is the veil of illusion: Eastern thought maintains that our vision of the world is obscured by a sort of veil that presents us with a deceptive representation of reality.
For Schopenhauer , the phenomenal world is nothing other than a veil that must be torn at all costs, since it prevents us from grasping reality as it actually is.
This phenomenal world has, in Kantian terms, its two a priori sensible forms (space and time) and its a priori form of the intellect (causality); whereas the true reality as noumenon is infinite will and pain.
The concept of life as a pendulum that swings between pain and boredom finds many references in Buddhism , where it is generalized by maintaining that everything is discomfort, everything is uneasiness, everything is “ dukkha ” (suffering): both in act, when we suffer, and in potential, when the joy or pleasure we enjoy will subsequently be converted into pain and affliction.
The answer to pain for Schopenhauer is the liberation from the very will to live (that passionate longing, that frustrated and unfulfilled desire) which occurs mainly through ethics and asceticism (to a lesser extent also through art).
For Schopenhauer, ethics is a feeling of compassion, of suffering the suffering of others as one’s own; as soon as one feels the suffering of others (it is not enough to know that it is there), one feels the noumenal unity of reality.
And so it was also for the ethics of the Vedas which affirmed charity and love towards one’s neighbour, a renunciation of selfishness and the symbiosis between the tormented and the tormentor.
However, if one conquers selfishness with piety, one does not free oneself completely from life and therefore from the will. This can only happen with asceticism .
Asceticism is typical of Eastern philosophies and consists of a series of practices aimed at mortifying the will (fasting, humility, poverty, sacrifice, renunciation of pleasures…), recognized as the cause of suffering.
IRVANA, SCHOPENHAUER
The ascetic thus denies the will, becomes free from attachment to worldly things, regenerates himself and all ends in the experience of nirvana :
“ What remains after the complete suppression of the will is certainly nothingness for all those who are still full of will. But for others, in whom the will has turned away from itself and denied itself, this very real universe of ours, with all its suns and milky ways, is itself nothingness .”
Nirvana , literally means “extinction”, “extinguishing” of the breath, of desire. It is the negation of the world itself , it is an ocean of peace and serenity, where the notion of the self dissolves.
It is complete annihilation, that total peace that only a few enlightened ones reach but it is also the end of life accessible to consciousness.
