Schopenhauer, Europe, and Eurocentrism

Janaway, Christopher (2023) Schopenhauer, Europe, and Eurocentrism. In, Bather Woods, David and Stoll, Timothy (eds.) The Schopenhauerian Mind. London and New York. Routledge, pp. 342-356.

Abstract

This essay examines Schopenhauer’s attitudes towards European and non-European cultures, peoples, and elements of intellectual history. Schopenhauer expresses intellectual and ethical sympathies with Asians and Africans, and presents Europeans as misguided outliers, or as moral delinquents. In this respect Schopenhauer’s stance seems antithetical to Eurocentrism. However, we find a complex of attitudes, some of which must be categorized as Eurocentric. Schopenhauer denies any historical world-progress in which later-developed cultures are necessarily more advanced; holds that whiteness is an aberration from the human norm and that there is no white race; condemns Europe’s arrogance and cruelty in its treatment of African and Asian peoples; valorizes Indian culture as intellectually and morally superior to that of Europe; claims Indian origins for Greek and Christian thought; and believes Europe will benefit from retrieving an ancient wisdom to be found in India. On the other hand, he believes in physiological racial differences that would show Africans in particular to be ‘naturally’ deficient in intellect, and in certain ways ‘closer to animals’; he pictures Indian intellectual culture in a highly romanticized manner; his prime motivation is to critique and reform European culture itself; and he repeatedly uses the claim of an Indian genealogy to distance Christianity from Judaism, in a manner that is arguably anti-Semitic, marking out the Jews as fundamentally alien to Europe.

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Author: Christopher Janaway

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