The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 53 [Free Press, 1969]; the painting is the School of Athens (Scuola di Atene) by Raphael, with Plato, pointing up, and Aristotle, gesturing down, in the middle.
BILL MURRAY: "What did you study?"
SCARLETT JOHANSSON: "Philosophy."
BILL MURRAY: "Yeah, there's a good buck in that racket."
SCARLETT JOHANSSON: "Well, so far it's pro bono."
Lost in Translation, 2003, Focus Featues
Contributed Essays |
We, on the contrary, now send to the Brahmans English clergymen and evangelical linen-weavers, in order out of sympathy to put them right, and to point out to them that they are created out of nothing, and that they ought to be grateful and pleased about it. But it is just the same as if we fired a bullet at a cliff. In India our religions will never at any time take root; the ancient wisdom of the human race will not be supplanted by the events in Galilee. On the contrary, Indian wisdom flows back to Europe, and will produce a fundamental change in our knowledge and thought.
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Volume I, §63, p. 356-357 [Dover Publications, 1966, E.F.J. Payne translation] [note]
While Schopenhauer was correct about the lack of impact of English Christian evangelism on India, he has failed to recall, or perhaps at the time did not know, that a large part of the population of India, 25% or so, had already converted to Islâm, which in turn drove Buddhism to extinction in the land of its birth. Islâm, as much as Judaism and Protestant Christianity, was lacking the key ingredient to real religion, as far as Schopenhauer was concerned: Monasticism. What was worse, Islâm offered explicit promises of very earthly pleasures for the Saved in Paradise. This earned nothing but contempt from Schopenhauer. Christian evangelism, of course, was soon, after the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857-1858, renounced as any part of official British policy in India.