Spiritual Philosophers: From Schopenhauer to Irigaray

Richard White

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350129139
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

How does thinking illuminate the spiritual view of life? How does a close examination of key spiritual thinkers help us to live in the modern world? And in what way does philosophy enhance spirituality? In this book, Richard White answers these questions by analysing a range of important philosophers, from Schopenhauer in the first half of the 19th century to Irigaray in the present day. Each chapter examines the work of a single writer and one closely associated theme, such as Nietzsche on generosity, Benjamin on wisdom, and Derrida on mourning. The author looks at philosophy and spirituality in the tradition of continental philosophy, and he views spirituality as something that can be separated from religion. With the rise of reductive scientific materialism becoming ever more prevalent in modern society, White seeks to recover the idea of a spiritual tradition which is not otherworldly but philosophical in nature. The thinkers discussed in this book articulate some of the deepest possibilities of human existence. Spiritual Philosophers offers an approach to philosophy as a spiritual practice, which the author sees as an integral part of our life. As a pioneering work in an emerging field – the philosophy of spirituality -- this book contributes to several key debates surrounding spirituality, theology and the role of philosophy in the contemporary world.

1

Schopenhauer on Compassion

On the face of it, Schopenhauer would seem to be one of the least spiritual of all philosophers. He argues for the complete pointlessness of human life, and in passages like the following he appears to taunt the reader with the total absurdity of all of our goals and ambitions: “No satisfaction, however, is lasting; on the contrary, it is always merely the starting point of a fresh striving. We see striving everywhere impeded in many ways, everywhere struggling and fighting, and hence always as suffering. Thus that there is no ultimate aim of striving means that there is no measure or end of suffering.”¹ Schopenhauer claims that human existence moves continually between the two poles of dissatisfaction and boredom, and he denies that our lives could ever be meaningful or worth living. Likewise, he describes ultimate reality in terms of the one primordial will, which strives relentlessly for nothing in particular. The will wills through us, but it is not moving toward any final goal. All of this seems to confirm our impossible situation, which we can grasp if we have the strength to look beyond all the illusory goals of our individual existence. Indeed, for Schopenhauer, individual existence itself—the principium individuationis—is just another illusion.

And yet, in spite of all of Schopenhauer’s pessimism and nihilism, there is a strong counter-current in Schopenhauer’s philosophy; and for different reasons, I think it is appropriate to begin the recent history of spiritual philosophy with Schopenhauer’s thought. As I have already mentioned, Schopenhauer was among the first to take non-Western philosophy seriously, and he celebrates the Vedanta philosophy of India and Buddhism as wisdom traditions that are just as important—if not more important—than those of Christianity and Judaism. Schopenhauer’s grasp of the wisdom traditions of Asia is certainly filtered through his own pessimistic lens, and he does not always have an accurate grasp of key doctrines. But he is a spiritual pioneer, and he opens up the possibility of different ways of apprehending ultimate reality and meaning. In particular, Schopenhauer saw how once we admit the illusory character of individual existence, and the reality of the one primordial will that underlies the whole of nature, we must also come to experience our identity with others and the fact that we are all basically the same. In this way, compassion will emerge as the fundamental relationship between human beings and all other creatures.

According to Schopenhauer, compassion—and not reason—is the only real basis of morality. For apart from compassion there is nothing that can inspire us to care for others if it is not in our own interest to do so. In the West, since at least the time of the Stoics, compassion has been regarded with some suspicion as a kind of weakness that takes us away from our own project of self-determination, although it must be said that here the attitude of the philosophers only reflects the prejudices of everyday life. In Buddhism and other Asian traditions, compassion is regarded as one of the highest virtues—if not the highest—and a form of strength rather than weakness because it involves openness toward the other person and the willingness to be available to them. Perhaps our first impulse is one of flight and the desire not to get involved, but compassion overcomes selfishness and gives priority to the other. Schopenhauer is perhaps the first Western philosopher to grasp the absolute value of compassion in this respect, because he sees it as the necessary consequence of self-overcoming and the illusory nature of the individual self, and his discussion of compassion was only deepened by his study of Asian philosophical traditions, including Buddhism.

Now compassion is certainly an ethical principle, but in this chapter I want to claim that it is also a spiritual principle—in fact, it can be viewed as the beginning of spiritual life. Without compassion we are self-absorbed and self-contained, and we are unable to connect with others or with the higher or greater reality of which we are a part. It is a fairly widespread view among different religious and philosophical traditions that spiritual life begins with the death of the ego, and our need to hold on to a separate self-centered existence. In Christianity and Islam, we are taught to subordinate our own will to the will of God; in Stoicism we are taught to think of our reason as a fragment of the divine Logos, and we should accept whatever happens as the will of the cosmos itself; in Daoism we are taught to reject self-assertion and to follow the way of the Dao. With Buddhism, the achievement of true compassion can also be viewed along these lines as a kind of ego death, for it involves self-overcoming for the sake of others; and since we experience their wellbeing as a part of our own, we can say compassion is a spiritual impulse that speaks to our connection to a higher or greater reality that transcends our own selfish lives.

In the following discussion of Schopenhauer, I focus on his account of the illusory nature of individual existence, and I show how he makes use of the ancient Vedanta perspective. In this respect, one special point of interest would be his philosophy of music. Next, I look at Schopenhauer’s view of compassion in relation to Buddhism and the priority of compassion in spiritual life. Schopenhauer is by no means a consistent scholar of ancient Indian philosophy, but he was a pioneer and his work has been profoundly influential. He is without doubt a pessimist, and it is hard to reconcile his life-denying comments with the spiritual standpoint that is typically life affirming. But Schopenhauer saw that the newly available Eastern wisdom was an essential corrective to modern individualism and the blind faith in progress that characterized much of nineteenth-century thought. His scathing and polemical style is meant to transform the individual reader by shaking her deepest convictions; and in this respect, his philosophy was profoundly transformative of the Western spiritual tradition.

Indian philosophy and the illusion of the self

Schopenhauer was one of the first Western thinkers to recognize the value of Asian philosophy. He was profoundly impressed by the Oupnek’hat, a translation of the Upanishads that he received a few years before the publication of The World as Will and Representation (1818), and he described this text as “the most profitable and sublime reading that is possible in the world; it has been the consolation of my life, and will be that of my death.”² For the rest of his life, Schopenhauer made an extensive study of Indian philosophy (including Buddhism) which appeared to anticipate his own philosophical views. Like other scholars at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Schopenhauer believed that the recovery of ancient Indian wisdom would bring about a new Renaissance in Europe.³ He also held that the essential truth of Christianity could be understood in relation to its more original expression in Indian thought: For “the innermost kernel and spirit of Christianity is identical with that of Brahmanism and Buddhism … they all teach a heavy guilt of the human race through its existence itself, only Christianity does not proceed in this respect directly and openly, like those more ancient religions.”⁴ Now we can certainly admire Schopenhauer’s attempt to understand Indian philosophy and to integrate it into the horizon of Western thought. While others, like Hegel, were more dismissive, or simply oblivious, Schopenhauer sought to use Indian philosophy to rethink the Western tradition.⁵ Even so, his appropriation of Indian philosophical works, such as the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, or the Prajna Paramita, can also be viewed as a misappropriation of Indian thought insofar as he uses these texts to confirm his own philosophical views. For at this point, Indian philosophy is drawn into Schopenhauer’s orbit of pessimism, the celebration of nothingness, and denial of the will to live, and the dangerous temptation is to read Indian philosophy retroactively in the light of these modern nihilistic themes.

Among the most essential features of Schopenhauer’s philosophy is his claim that the world of empirical reality is nothing more than a dream, or a merely phenomenal occurrence that derives from the will, the underlying reality that is the thing-in-itself. According to Schopenhauer, everything in space and time is a secondary manifestation whose existence depends on the will that sustains it: “As the will is the thing-in-itself, the inner content, the essence of the world, but life, the visible world, the phenomenon, is only the mirror of the will, this world will accompany the will as inseparably as a body is accompanied by its shadow; and if will exists, then life, the world, will exist.”⁶ From this it follows that individual existence is truly insignificant. As individuals, we move from one desire to another, trying vainly to escape the pain of dissatisfaction or boredom. But since whatever we desire is just the expression of the will that wills through us, we can never know satisfaction since the will is unquenchable and blind. Schopenhauer also argues that nature—the objectification of the will—cares only for the species and not for the individual. Indeed, in some passages he goes out of his way to stress that nature is not just indifferent, but actually cruel in her dealings with human beings. As “Nature” personified is made to declare in The World as Will and Representation,

the individual is nothing and less than nothing. I destroy millions of individuals every day for sport and pastime; I abandon their fate to chance, to the most capricious and wanton of my children, who harasses them at his pleasure. Every day I produce millions of new individuals without any diminution of my productive power; just as little as the power of a mirror is exhausted by the number of the sun’s images that it casts one after another on the wall. The individual is nothing.⁷

Schopenhauer argues that once we realize the illusory character of human existence and the unsatisfactory character of all of our individual goals, we can gain release from this wheel of suffering by refusing to affirm the will to live, with ascetic practices, including poverty, chastity, and mortification of the will through the torment of the body: “By the expression asceticism,” he notes, “I understand in the narrower sense this deliberate breaking of the will by refusing the agreeable and looking for the disagreeable, the voluntarily chosen way of life of penance and self-chastisement, for the constant mortification of the will.”⁸

Initially, Schopenhauer claims that all of our actions are determined by the law of cause and effect, and in this respect he is adamant that everything in the phenomenal world happens according to strict necessity. By the end of The World as Will and Representation, however, he says that the will can be annulled through self-mortification, and hence, through an act of will, we may be released from the sufferings of life. Schopenhauer can only describe this paradoxical doctrine in mystical terms as the effect of “grace.” From the perspective of his own philosophy, however, it seems contradictory to claim both that: (1) everything in the phenomenal realm is “absolutely necessary” including human actions since we are “the determined phenomenon” of the will and (2) freedom from the will can be achieved through ascetic self-denial: for ascetic self-denial is also an expression of will and it is unclear how the will could ever undermine itself by willing. This may be one case where calling something a “mystery” implies an unwillingness to think more critically about it. But Schopenhauer frequently refers to the work of Christian and Indian mystics to support his basic position.

On the face of it, Schopenhauer’s account of the individual’s relationship to the underlying will bears a close resemblance to Indian philosophical perspectives in the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita which suggest a similar dichotomy between the empirical individual and the absolute reality that underlies us. Of course, each of the Upanishads has a different focus, and there are points of tension or philosophical disagreements within the whole collection. But overall, the Upanishads seem to offer a unified philosophical account of the nature of reality (which is by no means the same thing as a systematic philosophy). Earlier Vedic texts, such as the Rg Veda, are based on the theme of ritual sacrifice to the gods, who are viewed as separate beings. Sometimes there is a single god, like Brahma, who replaces the lesser deities as a universal being and the creator of the world, but he is still considered separate from us. The Upanishads go beyond this perspective insofar as it affirms the reality of Brahman as both the ruler of the universe and the inner principle that lies behind all of our sensible, intellectual, and spiritual life. In fact, the Upanishads propose a form of “spiritual idealism,” according to which, this world cannot be understood in merely physical terms, but neither is it just a mental projection or subjective idealism. The point is that ultimate reality is spiritual in character, and if we are prepared to sacrifice our individual desires and perspectives, we may recover this absolute unconditioned level of consciousness and experience unending bliss. According to this doctrine, the inmost self (or Atman) is identical to the highest reality, and everything else that we consider real is just a derivation from it.

In a passage from the Katha Upanishad, there is a description of the individual ego and its relation to the deeper self or Atman:

There are two selves, the separate ego

And the indivisible Atman. When

One rises above I and me and mine,

The Atman is revealed as one’s real Self.

When all desires that search in the heart

Are renounced, the mortal becomes immortal.

When all the knots that strangle the heart

Are loosened, the mortal becomes immortal.

This sums up the teaching of the scriptures.⁹

Before we achieve enlightenment, we believe that the separate world of individual beings is the only real world, and so we passionately pursue our individual desires, although we never gain any lasting happiness. Likewise, when we identify with our own individual ego, we treat others as totally separate and different from us and so our alienation persists. But according to the Upanishads, through meditation and the will to spiritual progress we can experience the deeper reality of the self as pure consciousness, or Atman, which is the undifferentiated ground of our personal being.

Another of the most basic claims of the Upanishads is that Atman itself is Brahman, or ultimate reality, for in the end there is nothing to distinguish the undifferentiated self from the unconditional principle of reality itself. In the Chandogya Upanishad, this insight is expressed in the famous slogan, tat tvam asi (“you are that!”), which Uddalaka repeats to his son as the basic truth of Vedanta wisdom. But once again, it is a truth that must be experienced since it goes beyond intellectual understanding, and it is not given through the testimony of the senses:

As the rivers flowing east and west

Merge in the sea and become one with it,

Forgetting they were ever separate rivers,

So do all creatures lose their separateness

When they merge at last into pure Being.

There is nothing that does not come from him.

Of everything he is the inmost Self.

He is the truth; he is the Self supreme.

You are that, Shvetaketu, you are that.¹⁰

What is the nature of this underlying reality? The Upanishads do not provide a precise account of these things, and especially since ultimate reality is literally beyond words, it tends to remain silent about such issues. But one recurrent image suggests a point of comparison: For just as a lump of salt ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Schopenhauer on Compassion
• 2 Nietzsche on Generosity
• 3 Kandinsky on Art
• 4 Benjamin on Wisdom
• 5 Jung on Religion and the Sacred
• 6 Hillman on Spirit and Soul
• 7 Foucault on the Care of the Self
• 8 Derrida on Mourning
• 9 Irigaray on Love
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint