This volume examines the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer's (1788–1860) worldview in comparison with ancient Indian discourses, especially those of Advaita philosophy and Buddhist traditions (particularly the Madhyamika and Yogachara schools). Schopenhauer's engagement with India has been the subject of a long lineage of scholarship, including two recent collections.Footnote 13 Stephen Cross, however, introduces a number of new perspectives with argumentative originality.
After an introductory first chapter that highlights the importance of comparative philosophical study in rescuing extra-European discourses from cultural condescension, Cross describes the so-called “Oriental Renaissance” in early nineteenth-century Europe and traces the intellectual milieu from which Schopenhauer inherited his Indophilia (chapter 2) as well as his concrete knowledge of “Hindu” and Buddhist epistemologies (chapters 3 and 4). He then examines Schopenhauer's concept of representation (Vorstellung) and argues that this is comparable to Advaita and Madhyamika teachings; in all these cases, the reality of the phenomenal world is radically questioned. The empirical world is found to be shaped by the subject's mind and devoid of an ultimate objective reality. For Schopenhauer, as well as for the “Indians,” there are thus two levels of reality: the empirical reality and the absolute reality (chapters 5–8). Cross then analyses Schopenhauer's concept of will (Wille), suggesting that it is similar to the Indian idea of shakti (mythologically represented in India through the Goddess). As Indian soteriologies are dependent on transcending the effects of karma or goal-oriented action, so does Schopenhauer offer a kind of soteriological epistemology based on the denial of the will (chapters 9–14).
Cross suggests that in Schopenhauer's early writings (the Manuscript Remains), this soteriological concern was more explicit, since he wrote of a better consciousness (bessere Bewusstsein) that was compassionate towards others and shone out above the ordinary empirical consciousness dominated by the will. In his later published writings, however, this concept disappeared from overt visibility, since it was the “denial of the will” that was given greater attention. However, Cross argues that striving for better consciousness constituted the fundamental subtext that remained throughout Schopenhauer's writings. Cross concludes that from his nineteenth-century European philosophical context Schopenhauer did not (or could not) resort to overt religious mysticism, but nevertheless his epistemology is impossible to understand unless one acknowledges the latent mystical assumptions (chapters 15–17).
Cross's unit of analysis is the individual thinker (Schopenhauer) rather than the structural sociohistorical background of the entanglement of India and Germany. This focus on singularity can complement historical approaches to Indo-German intellectual encounters, which often give greater causal importance to “impersonal” factors like colonialism, late nation-state formation, and delayed capitalism. I would suggest that Schopenhauer offers a point of contrast to Hegel. Hegel has been seen as an intellectual champion of colonialism,Footnote 14 while his philosophical understanding of the world has been conceived (however ironically) as being attractive to anti-colonial Indian nationalists in framing their understanding of politics and theology.Footnote 15 Whereas Hegel immanentized the Geist into a teleological force that legitimated state formation and a racialized notion of world-historical progress, Schopenhauer partly resisted such provincially complacent narratives. Schopenhauer's celebration of India (in sharp contrast to Hegel's racist critique of the country) demonstrates the manner in which individuated thinking can sometimes subvert the structural limits of global power asymmetries.
Individual-oriented analyses cannot however neglect the social structures that shape philosophy. To consider a problematic facet of Schopenhauer, I would underline that his inferiorization of worldly reality had its correlate in associating women with the “lower” nature of the sensual world. Given Schopenhauer's positive references to ancient Indian discourses about the subjection of women to male authority, as in his essay On Women, which in turn was read (in 1899, in the United States) by the Advaita-influenced Indian ascetic reformer Vivekananda and his disciples,Footnote 16 one gets tantalizing thoughts about transnational connections linking India and Germany along lines of world-renunciation, transcendentalist orientation, and ascetic masculinity. By noting these connections, I do not intend to reduce the complexity of Vivekananda's reflections, scattered throughout his oeuvre, which critiqued different aspects of Schopenhauer while appreciating his admiration for Advaita. Vivekananda was especially ambivalent towards what he felt to be Schopenhauer's excessive focus on the will to the detriment of a more transcendentalist reality. What I would stress however is that Cross's “purely” philosophical approach of comparing Wille and shakti/maya does not dwell on how philosophical standpoints are partly shaped by more mundane appraisals of this-worldly reality. While Cross has taken a comparative philosophical approach, future scholars may interrogate the plurality of precolonial Indian philosophical standpoints on the relation between salvation and social power (debates on who has the adhikara/right to achieve liberation) and investigate to what extent Schopenhauer was selectively reading India, valorizing some strands to the neglect of others.
A more nuanced position is visible in Cross's discussion on the role of Sufi-Islamic monotheism in structuring Schopenhauer's worldview. The Oupnek'hat that so influenced Schopenhauer was based on a Latin translation (by Anquetil-Duperron, published in 1801–2) of a seventeenth-century Persian edition (produced under the patronage of the Mughal prince Dara Shikoh) of the Upanishadic texts. Cross's comparison of shakti with Sufi-Islamic discourse on ishq in Dara Shikoh's edition reveals fascinating aspects of Schopenhauer's understanding of will, eroticism, and desire.Footnote 17
Overall, Cross explains Schopenhauer in relation to Advaita, Madhyamika, and Yogachara philosophies in a way that admirably balances philosophical erudition with an engaging style of writing. One hopes that this book will inspire future scholarship, enable individuated-philosophical approaches to inform socially embedded intellectual history writing, and enhance awareness of the multiple and idiosyncratic discursive positions that together have built up horizons of thinking in rich, plural, and disturbing ways that escape any linear teleological narration.
