Schopenhauer vs. Schopenhauer

The questions Shapshay asks in her book and her theory of an internal contradiction or tension in Schopenhauer regarding compassion vs. renunciation are very incisive and relevant to our thesis, which is as follows.

1. Schopenhauer had an imperfect grasp of ancient Indian philosophical and spiritual traditions.

2. Schopenhauer's theory of renunciation was largely colored by Christian mysticism (from the middle ages to the 17th-century) and in particular by Eckhart and Luther.

3. This lead to a miscomprehension  and misreprentation of ancient Indian traditions due to a falsely postulating their essential unity with Christian mysticism in so far as being brought together under the heading of the common phenomenon of renunciation and negation of the will.

4. Christian mysticism and many important ancient Indian traditions (in particular original Pali Buddhism, Samkhya and the Yoga of Patanjali) are mutually antagonistic and irreconcilable. For the practice promoted by such traditions (called in Pali bhâvanâ) can be seen as the consequence to one the two fundamental sides of the positive ethics of compassion : compassion for others and compassion for self. For instance, the corner-stone of original Buddhism is the rejection of causing suffering to others and practices involving self-torment or causing suffering to self. We have the duty both to cultivate the alleviation of the suffering of others and the suffering of our own self (to do: investigate Kantian aspect).  This is radically opposite to Christian mysticism. For suffering (of the agent) is an instrumental, circumstantial, empirical cause for practicing compassion and self-development but never an essential or sufficient cause; there is no ethical or social value in suffering per se be it voluntary or involuntary.  This completely rules out the legitimacy of the concepts of vindictive (as opposed to preventive and corrective) justice as well as vicarious atonement and of course all misguided forms of asceticism based on mental or physical self-harm.

5. Such Indian traditions completely evade the important objections raised by Shapshay and are fully compatible with the ethics of compassion and hope.  It is the theory of art in WWR3 (rather than the theory of renunciation in the fourth book) that offers a far more accurate philosophical interpretation of the effects and ultimate aim of self-development.