Schopenhauer develops an understanding of maya over time which makes it at once an epistemological category of falsification and an existential fetter that causes human beings to comport themselves. As Berger has traced in the manuscript remains, Maya in the Upanishads is "most often identified to be the magical power of God employed to create the world and then to hide behind the matter out of which it was made" (p. Here Berger shows very convincingly that the formation of Schopenhauer's system was strongly influenced by his appropriation of one particular element of Hinduism-or better, of Brahmanic world views-namely the idea of maya. On the basis of the published manuscript remains Berger traces how the early system developed. In this respect Berger states:Īfter reading Schopenhauer for some years, I became convinced that some crucial aspects of his system, specifically how he made argumentative transitions from epistemology to metaphysics to ethics, transitions about which much dispute still rages in the secondary literature, could not be well assessed without taking into consideration how Scho-penhauer understood the Upanishadic and Vedantic notion of maya.
Douglas Berger's timely study, "The Veil of Maya": Schopenhauer's System and Early Indian Thought, shows that this case can be made by way of a careful analysis of the development of Schopenhauer's philosophy without recourse to unpublished manuscript remains. As recently as 1998 Urs App was able to conclude, from his study of Schopenhauer's unpublished annotations to the Asiatick Researches, that it has been a misconception-although one carefully nourished by Schopenhauer himself-to assume that Indian concepts only confirmed what Schopenhauer had conceptualized intuitively of his own accord. The fascinating exploration of Schopenhauer's exposure to relevant indological texts, commentaries, and scholars is still far from complete, as only a comparatively small selection of Schopenhauer's manuscript remains has been published, by Arthur Hübscher in 1966. And although there exists a significant tradition of relating Advaita Vedānta and Buddhism to Schopenhauer's philosophy-the approaches of Paul Deussen, Helmuth von Glasenapp, and Wilhelm Halbfass marking conceptual shifts in this tradition-truly comprehensive perspectives are emerging only now. By contrast, Schopenhauer's decisive role in the development of Freud's psychoanalytic theory has only begun to be appreciated in the past few years. Aside from the role he played for Nietzsche, this is perhaps the only area in which Schopenhauer's impact is well understood.
Schopenhauer became especially popular with artists, due to the fact that he proposed a metaphysical theory of art that offered artists possibilities for self-flattering. Despite definite exceptions, the strength of Schopenhauer's writing lies in his attempt to be descriptive about the human experience, in combination with a willingness to incorporate its possibilities, and therefore his writings provided, and still do provide, points of departure for a wide variety of investigations. From a contemporary perspective it is fair to say that Schopenhauer does not offer a systematic philosophy, internally consistent in all its parts, but rather a philosophical approach that is descriptive and sensitive to a wide range of issues. Schopenhauer read widely in several languages and incorporated many influences, including his reading of Anquetil Dupperon's Latin translation of selected Upanishads. Arthur Schopenhauer's (1788-1860) philosophy combines a number of inquiries into epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, and psychology.
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