Born in Gdansk (modern day Danzig, Poland), Schopenhauer is one of the German Idealists, like Kant, Hegel, Fichte and Schelling although his disdain for Hegel and Schelling caused him a lot of trouble with all the other Idealists and their followers, resulting in him struggling to find a place in German academia.
His famous work on The World as Will and Representation prefigures many modern ideas in psychology about how human beings live inside their models of reality, rather than living in reality itself. And while this very insight could have brought about a kind of liberation from those same models ( which the idealists call the intelligible world), for Schopenhauer that potential for liberation was missed. Instead, he came to some very different, pessimistic and nihilistic conclusions: about life, about the will-to-life (or as he often calls it just “will”). One of those, as he saw it was that the very meaning of life was suffering which had no end without self-destruction.
Like many other Germanic intellectuals of the times he was a huge fan of “Hindu-Aryan thought” and studied translations of the Upanishads, as well as many other classics translated from Sanskrit . His philosophy was informed by not only Kant and Plato, but also a rich stream of Vedanta, newly published in German at that time. He therefore came to know Buddhism from within this stream; and when he saw what he took to be the similarity between his conclusions and the philosophy of the Buddha (as he saw it) he rejoiced, and even called himself a “Buddhaist.”
Yet the Buddhism of Schopenhauer is not Buddhism. But his view on Buddhist philosophy has shaped and continues to shape the way the people of the West see the Buddha, Buddhist logic and Buddhic aims. In this episode I will have a go at explaining how Schopenhauer and those who still use his paradigm got what we now call “Buddhism” so wrong. And hopefully, maybe how we can get it right.
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