Schopenhauer’s Parerga and Paralipomena (Selections)
This week we move from the Ancient Levant (the area around the Eastern Mediterranean sea, including Northeast African, Asian, and Grecian coasts) to 19th Century Germany, with Buddhism as our conceptual bridge.
I don’t want to ignore all the history in between though. I want to provide this history for sure, but I also want to be sure that you know that I won’t expect you to remember all of this or get all of it exactly right if you write or talk about it—this is background information, not core to this course. I’ve marked this history as its own section below.
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I want to tell this history in a decolonized history of philosophy and science—that is, I want to tell the story in a way that strips away the ideological narratives that colonialism has placed on this history in order to provide cover and justification for Euro-American violence and exploitation.
Stoicism and the focus on ataraxia emerge in the Hellenistic period soon after Alexander the Great’s Macedonian Empire brought South Asian Buddhist and Hindu thought into conversation with Greek culture. With the fall of the Roman Empire, the Levantine philosophical and religious traditions which had previously found centers in Memphis, Thebes, Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, and Rome now moved to Constantinople in the Byzantine Empire, and then, from there, further inland and further from the Mediterranean than ever before.
The Qur’an (القرآن) was added to the trilogy that started with the Torah (תּוֹרָה) in the 7th Century by the Prophet Muhammad near Mecca on the Arabian Peninsula, and Islam spread into the Levant and South Asia. A distinctive Islamic theological debate tradition, kalam (عِلْم الكَلام), emerged. In the 9th Century CE, Al-Ma’mun (أبو العباس عبد الله بن هارون الرشيد), the seventh caliph of the Abbasid Caliphate, funded a project in Baghdad to translate great Greek philosophical and scientific works into Arabic putting this Greek “falsafa” (being the Arabic pronunciation of “φιλοσοφία” [philosophy]) into conversation with the kalam tradition, and beginning what became known as “The Islamic Golden Age.” During this period, from the 9th to the 12th Century, progress in science, medicine, and philosophy in the Levantine traditions was centered in the Islamic world, with major figures, schools, and events in the Byzantine Empire (contemporary Turkey and Greece, spreading further along the coast at points), the Samanid Empire (Persia; contemporary Iran), the Abbasid Caliphate (contemporary Iraq), the Almohad Caliphate (contemporary Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Spain, and Portugal), and the Seljuk Empire (at its largest, from contemporary Turkey east into Afghanistan and south to Oman).
At the end of the Islamic Golden Age, an offshoot of this tradition grew and expanded in Europe, where Christianity, one of the religious traditions originating in the Levant, had taken firm hold, but the philosophical and scientific traditions had not. Philosophers like Moses ben Maimon, a 12th Century Jewish philosopher in the Almoravid Empire (contemporary Morocco, Algeria, and Spain), brought Islamic and Greek philosophy and science into Europe. Europeans also gained access to some of these texts by violent means, most notably the Sack of Constantinople in 1204, at the end of the Fourth Crusade. Tommaso d’Aquino (St. Thomas Aquinas), a 13th Century Italian philosopher, brought these traditions into the European Christian context, emphasizing most of all the work of Aristotle, Averroes (as Ibn Rushd [ابن رشد] was called in Latin), and Maimonides (as Moses ben Maimon was called in Latin). From there, an ongoing flow of knowledge, information, and culture from the Islamic world brought Europe into conversation with centuries of work from North African, Hebrew, Greek, Roman, Persian, and Arabic philosophers and scientists, and modern science, European, and Anglo-American grew from this foundation.
This European offshoot of the philosophical and scientific traditions of the Levant, through contact with Islamic Empires, leads to what Euro-American culture describes as “The Renaissance,” or “rebirth” from the Latin nasci (to be born). This term implies that Europe is the original and “true” or “real” home of the philosophical, scientific, and religious traditions of the Levant, a view advanced in Eurocentric and white supremacist ideologies used to justify race-based slavery, colonialism, and other forms of Euro-American violence and exploitation. The success of this ideology can be seen in how the Greeks, Romans, and some Jews (most notably Jesus of Nazareth) are treated as being part of the history of Europe and are depicted as white, while the entirety of the North African and Asian contributions are erased.
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Okay—so our next materials are from 19th Century Germany. Elements of Hinduism and Buddhism had been brought to Europe by Christian missionaries. Given that these missionaries had gone to Asia with the intention of converting the godless heathens there, the information about these traditions they brought back was typically poor and incomplete, since it was encountered through a very clear bias against taking these traditions seriously as having insights and refinements on par with European Christianity. In the early 19th Century, however, the Upanishads were translated into Latin, and other Hindu and Buddhist texts also soon found translation into European languages for the first time.
Among the most enthusiastic about these Asian traditions was the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who saw Buddhism as a sort of perfected version of Christianity. Christian virtues, he thought, were about the destruction of the will and destruction of desire, and Buddhism speaks to this even more directly. Both, though, he thinks share the same message: to live is to suffer; to be virtuous is to free yourself from desire, which drives you into suffering; and we must above all show kindness and forgiveness to all beings around us, since they are also caught up in the same cycle of will, desire, and suffering.
Not surprisingly, his philosophical school of thought was known as pessimism.
Schopenhauer thought that just as we ourselves appear in two aspects—to the senses and to science we appear as a thing, but in our inner experience we experience ourselves as thought and will—so too is everything in reality both matter and will. Will is the “inner truth” and reality of the world. The will, then, is not destroyed by death. The body becomes soil, and then plants, and then animals, and then soil again, as the will is expressed as the nutrients in the soil, then as the growth of the plants, and then as the movement and hungers of the animals. Individuality dies, but the will, as the animating principle of the world, is indestructible.
Schopenhauer presented this in a dialogue, where he imagined the anguished reply, “I want to exist! That is what I care about, and not an existence which has to be reasoned out first in order to show that it is mine.” This, Schopenhauer thinks, is ridiculous. The “I” of the will, the “subject” that undergoes experiences and wills to live, is the least distinctive and individual thing about us! The drive to preserve the self traps us in an unending cycle of desire, and life becomes nothing but the constant cycle from the pain of desire to the boredom of satisfaction. Not even death frees us from this cycle of suffering (dukkha). We should seek instead, not that the “I” should survive death, but that the “I” should be destroyed within life in a Buddhistic “negation of the will.” Even death does not quiet the will, which is why Schopenhauer says that suicide is a mistake because “for a real release from this world of misery, it substitutes one that is merely apparent.” Only ceasing the cycle of desire by destroying the self, realizing the Buddhist no-self in freedom from desire and attachment, can free us from the will and from suffering.
Supplementary/Alternate access
This week, I can also make a full audiobook available! Reading while listening to an audiobook can be extremely helpful for people with dyslexia and other print disabilities, and I’ve had students tell me that while reading along with an audio version they were able to complete a reading straight through, where they weren’t able to make it through more than one page at a sitting going through without audio. I’ve also heard from abled students that they used audio versions to review materials during commutes or at the gym.
This audio recording is also one of mine, and was, I think, my first audiobook recording! It’s pretty good; a better performance than the one for Epictetus.
Arthur Schopenhauer, “The Sufferings of the World” Reading+Response
Read this selection and listen to the commentary when indicated by the black arrow on the side, then submit your Response.
Your Response should have three parts:
a. Words: Write down three words you learned (or learned more about) from the reading.
b. Ideas: Write down three ideas or concepts you learned about (or learned more about) from the reading
c. Prompt: Write a short response (100–200 words, minimum 100 words required) to the prompt in the reading.
Schopenhauer Activity
Starting after you finish the first reading, Monday or Tuesday, each day do the daily practices below. On Saturday, Sunday, or Monday, after about a week of daily practice, write a reflection according to the instructions below.
Pay attention to how much of your time you spend thinking about your desires. When you notice and satisfy a desire (whether it’s “I think I want some chips” or “I want to see my friends” or even “I want to feel better about myself”), compare the positives of your satisfaction with the negatives of your focus on your desires. At least once a day this week, when deciding whether to do something you’d like to do, specifically decide to abstain and to renounce your desire. Note that this does not mean to put it off or trade it against another desire! For example, if you want to zone out and watch bad TV but you say “No! I won’t give in to this desire!” because you want to be a better person than that, then that’s not renunciation of desire, it’s just that your desire to rest lost out against your desire to praise yourself. Instead, renounce the desire. Don’t trade one desire for another, but strive to destroy desire within you.
At the end of the week, in at least 400 words, write a reflection with reference to the readings from Schopenhauer on how this daily practice of renunciation has affected you. Begin by summarizing Schopenhauer’s views on desires, or a relevant part of his views, making specific reference to the text. (If you use a quote, no more than one sentence. If you don’t use a quote, just paraphrase and put a page number in parenthesis after the paraphrase.) Then describe your experience how it fit (or did not fit) with Schopenhauer’s views, and what takeaways you have from the experience.
Arthur Schopenhauer, “The Vanity of Existence” Reading+Response
Read this selection and listen to the commentary when indicated by the black arrow on the side, then submit your Response.
Your Response should have three parts:
a. Words: Write down three words you learned (or learned more about) from the reading.
b. Ideas: Write down three ideas or concepts you learned about (or learned more about) from the reading
c. Prompt: Write a short response (100–200 words, minimum 100 words required) to the prompt in the reading.