Reviews Description Table of Contents Author Information Additional Information   Reviews Book Review: THE VEIL OF MĀYĀ”: SCHOPENHAUER’S SYSTEM AND EARLY INDIAN THOUGHT - Andrew J. Nicholson, State University of New York at Stony Brook. Published in Religious Studies Review, Volume 34, Issue 2. June, 2008 Abstract from Wiley InterScience, Publisher. Homepage Book Review from the journal "Philosophy East and West." “Douglas Berger's The Veil of Māyā is a valuable study that addresses complex and interesting questions about influence, and what it means for an idea to exert an influence. According to Berger, Schopenhauer appropriates the Indian idea of māyā (a term that we might translate as "illusion", "trick" or "deceit"), and then uses this idea as the basis for what Berger terms his "falsification theory"--a theory that Berger holds to represent a crucial component in his philosophy. This is a refreshing agenda, not least because (as Berger notes) previous scholars have often been at pains to deny the importance of Indic materials to Schopenhauer's project. In The Veil of Māyā, Berger has produced a study that is careful, philosophically stimulating and admirably clear." -Dr. Richard Nance, Ann Arbor, MI “Berger does a fine job of arguing that the original and important thesis that the concept of Maya which Schopenhauer obtained from these early readings was not simply an “add-on” to his system, an external concept paralleling but providing only incidental support for Schopenhauer’s independent philosophical insights – as is commonly supposed by the major commentators. Rather, Berger argues, it is a key organizing principle in the development of Schopenhauer’s original metaphysical synthesis in the first edition of The World as Will and Representation in 1818. One of the most fascinating parts of Berger’s research was his careful reconstruction in Chapters One of the development of Indian scholarship in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the variety and limited number of sources available to Schopenhauer, the weakness of these translations, and the manner in which Schopenhauer played a formative (or, more accurately, de-formative) role in the growth of this discipline through his philosophy. This was a first-rate piece of intellectual history, I thought, full of insight into the manner in which Indian studies intersected with the cultural climate of European Romanticism to distort and conceal more of the Indian mind than it revealed. The gradual freeing of the discipline from Schopenhauer’s influence is also retold in a judicious and balanced manner that avoids an overly simplistic, progressivist vision of intellectual history. I find very persuasive Berger’s thesis that places the influence of Indian philosophy at the beginning, not the end, of Schopenhauer’s career. I also found Berger’s claim that Schopenhauer’s thought underwent a dramatic shift from approximately 1824 onwards away from Eastern concerns and towards a preoccupation with the natural sciences to be a major advance in my own understanding of Schopenhauer’s philosophy. One of the central arguments made by Berger, as I read him, is that the Indian notion of Maya, which originally served as an organizing principle for Schopenhauer’s idealist metaphysics in the 1819 edition of WWR, lapses into incoherence (or, perhaps, even greater incoherence) when he later reorganizes his system “around the brain’s determination of knowledge” in a “revised and naturalized epistemology.” The general strength of Berger’s main thesis is the emphasis it places upon the great importance of Indian thought in the formation of Schopenhauer’s thought, and in his research supporting this claim. I believe he has established this influence, and its very early appearance in Schopenhauer’s thought, beyond any reasonable doubt. This is no small accomplishment, given the tendency of so many commentators to minimize or even dismiss entirely such an influence. As such, I believe that Berger has done a great service to Schopenhauer studies through his research, and I think his book needs be read closely and taken seriously by any scholar planning in the future to offer yet another overview of Schopenhauer’s thought for popular or specialist." - Dr. Lance Byron Richey, Department of Philosophy and Theology, Cardinal Stritch University, Milwaukee “Berger offers us a study of the influence of the Indian philosophical concept of maya or ‘falsification’ on the shaping of Schopenhauer’s mature system. Berger brilliantly demolishes and entire tradition of historical and philosophical readings of Schopenhauer, opening the way for his own approach—a hermeneutical re-reading of the impact of Indian thought on Schopenhauer’s ideas and, through him, on Western interpretations of Indian thought, most spectacularly Nietzsche’s critique of the alleged ‘nihilism’ of Buddhism, as well as, in a reversal of ‘influence,’ on twentieth-century neo-Hindu readings of their tradition. Berger asks us to rethink our understanding of the intellectual relations of the West and India. A brilliant study.” —Dr. Thomas J. Dean, Professor Emeritus, Department of Religion, Temple University, Philadelphia “This substantial study of the influence of classical, pre-systematic Indian philosophical thought on the system of Arthur Schopenhauer is an impressive piece of scholarship.”  —Dr. J. N. Mohanty, Professor of Philosophy, Temple University,Philadelphia Go to Top   Description Schopenhauer, perhaps more than any other Western philosopher, has been associated with Asian, and specifically Indian philosophy. The problem in the last hundred and fifty years of commentarial literature has been assessing what his relationship to Indian thought was. Both European and Indian scholars have vacillated over the years from great confidence that Schopenhauer’s system was inspired by and even representative of classical Indian thought to a concurrence that Schopenhauer’s knowledge of pre-systematic Hinduism and Buddhism was superficial and his invoking of their ideas was meant to reflect ideas and cultural presuppositions that were his own. Schopenhauer’s System and Early Indian Thought explores the interpretive problems, complexities and legacies of Schopenhauer’s encounter with ancient India. It sets out to determine exactly to what degree the formation of Schopenhauer’s system was influenced by his knowledge of Indian philosophy, exposes his Eurocentric prejudices and reactions to India as well as details how his understanding of the concept of “māyā” profoundly affected his theories of knowledge, metaphysics and ethics. This study will challenge us to rethink both the dangers and the possibilities of cross-cultural philosophical reflection. Go to Top Table of Contents 1. THE QUESTION OF INFLUENCE 1.1 Criteria and Conditions of Influence 1.1.1 Interpretive Accuracy 1.1.2 Hermeneutic Preclusion 1.1.3 The Problem of Consistency 1.2 A Reappraisal of the Criteria 1.3 A Brief Sketch of Minimal Criteria of Influence 2: MĀYĀ IN SCHOPENHAUER’S PHILOSOPHICAL DEVELOPMENT 2.1 The Significance of the Nachlass 2.1.1 The Formation of the System 2.1.2 Indian Thought in the Notes: A Reappraisal 2.2 Development of the System’s Major Themes 2.2.1 Platonic Ideas 2.2.2 Epistemological Issues 2.2.3 Metaphysics of Will 2.3 The Notion of Māyā in the Early Nachlass   3: REPRESENTATIONALISM AND FALSIFICATION 3.1 Māyā in Schopenhauer’s Representation Theory 3.1.1 The Upanisads as Groundwork for the System 3.1.2 Māyā and the Questions of Metaphysics 3.2 Falsification and the Nature of Representation 3.2.1 Objects, Subjects and the Limits of Knowledge 3.2.2 Representation and the Standpoint of Knowledge 3.2.3 Realism and the Fabrication of Knowledge 4: MĀYĀ, PLURALITY AND THE METAPHYSICS OF WILL 4.1 Māyā, Will and Falsification 4.1.1 Satisfaction, Significance and Groundedness 4.1.2 The Knowledge of Will and Representation 4.1.3 Will, Falsification and Plurality 4.1.4 Attributing Reality: The Possibility of Metaphysics 4.2 Naturalizing Falsification: The Later Schopenhauer 4.2.1 The Unstable Ontology of Brain Idealism 4.2.2 The Appearing Will and the Veil of Time 4.2.3 The Psychologization of Māyā 5: FALSIFICATION AND THE ETHICS OF IDENTIFICATION 5.1 Māyā, Identification and a Metaphysical Ethics 5.1.1 Character, Motives and Moral Agency 5.1.2 Egoism and the Basis of Moral Conduct 5.1.3 Falsification and Compassionate Identification 5.2 Falsification, Renunciation and “Nothingness” 5.2.1 Māyā and “Eternal Justice” 5.2.2 “Nothingness" and the Standpoint of Enlightenment”   6: TWO LEGACIES OF SCHOPENHAUER'S APPROPRIATION 6.1 Schopenhauer's Stigmas 6.1.1 Monological Perennialism 6.1.2 “Myths,” “System” and Interpretive Privilege 6.1.3 A Pessimist’s Comparative Hermeneutic 6.2 Schopenhauer’s Appropriation and Cross-Cultural Philosophy Go to Top Author Information Professor Douglas Berger teaches courses in Indian, Chinese and Japanese philosophy and culture at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He specializes in classical and contemporary Hindu and Indian Buddhist philosophy, with special emphasis on Nyaya (Brahminical Logic), Advaita Vedanta and Madhyamika Buddhism.  He did his doctoral work at Temple University in Philadelphia as well as Eberhard-Karls University in Tubingen, Germany and has taught in Tokyo, Japan.  He has presented his scholarship in Indian and cross-cultural philosophy extensively in the U.S., Germany, India and China.  Berger is currently working on projects covering the cross-cultural philosophical engagement of the Mughal prince Dara Shikoh, the Nyaya theory of "formless" consciousness and how it serves as a basis of that school's philosophical realism as well as a comparative study of large-scale theories of personhood and social ethics in classical Indian and Chinese thought. In the midst of his work on Asian philosophical systems, Berger takes a special interest in the problems that encounter the interpreter of philosophical systems from across the boundaries of widely divergent cultural context.  The attempt to understand, be influenced by and incorporate ideas from culturally disparate philosophical traditions into one's own vocabulary of concepts is extraordinarily hermeneutically complex.  In the first book-length study of the influence of pre-systematic Hindu and Buddhist thought on the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), Berger sets out, using the German Idealist as a case study, to bring into sharp focus both the problems and potentialities of cross-cultural philosophical reflection.  As Schopenhauer was the first major Western thinker to make a full-blown attempt to appropriate ideas from Indian thought into his own system, he provides for every student of comparative philosophy a most important and instructive example of the dilemmas and rewards of this now blossoming endeavor.    Go to Top   Additional Information Douglas Berger at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale Douglas Berger at Oakton Community College Go to Top