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(Just a quick note, don't have time for more now.) "The great lodestar of the German Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant, said that there are things one cannot experi
by ableal 12y ago
(Just a quick note, don't have time for more now.)
"The great lodestar of the German Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant, said that there are things one cannot experience (noumena), and that we cannot talk about such things. He also explained why this is so: our concepts apply only to things we can experience. Clearly, he is in the same fix as Nagarjuna. So are two of the greatest 20th-century Western philosophers. Ludwig Wittgenstein claimed that many things can be shown but not said, and wrote a whole book (the Tractatus), explaining what and why."
The jump from Kant to Wittgenstein elides the step that was Schopenhauer, who did look East and said some cogent things.
- KrisAndrew 12y agoWittgenstein would say that the Buddha and Schopenhauer were playing a quite similar language-game.
- ableal 12y agoHe might say that, but I think "language-game" is not quite the right take. Anyways, to shore up my impression I looked up "Schopenhauer eastern philosophy" and hit a few things. The "Schopenhauer and Buddhism" piece by Peter Abelson ( at http://ccbs.ntu.edu.tw/FULLTEXT/JR-PHIL/peter2.htm http://ccbs.ntu.edu.tw/FULLTEXT/JR-PHIL/peter2.htm ) seems good: "When the tenets of Buddhism became known in Europe during the third and fourth decade of the nineteenth century, Arthur Schopenhauer was delighted with the affinity they showed to his own philosophy. Having completed his main work Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung as early as 1818, he considered it an entirely new (and thus pure) expression of the wisdom once taught by the Buddha." I would have been gladder if the original article, by a professional philosopher, which I am not, had said something about this.