Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes on God
Schopenhauer's metaphysics is officially atheist. The single underlying Will of which the world is the appearance is no providential God, but a blind, purposeless cosmic striving — closer to the Hindu Brahman in some respects, but lacking the moral and salvific character of any traditional Western or Eastern theism. Schopenhauer's polemics against the Hegelian state-philosophy of his Berlin contemporaries, and against what he called the optimism of Christian and rationalist theology, frame the systematic argument of The World as Will and Representation: any benevolent intelligent designer would have made a world less filled with the suffering, frustration, and predation Schopenhauer documents at length, and the proper philosophical response is the resigned compassion he found exemplified in Buddhism, Hindu Vedanta, and the Christian mystical tradition.
Quotes
-
“It is the courage to make a clean breast of it in the face of every question that distinguishes the philosopher . He must be like Sophocles ' Oedipus , who, seeking enlightenment concerning his terrible fate, pursues his indefatigable inquiry even though he divines that appalling horror awaits him in the answer. But most of us carry with us the Jocasta in our hearts, who begs Oedipus, for God's sake, not to inquire further.”
Letter to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (November 1815) [ citation needed ] -
“Suzanne L. Marchand - German Orientalism in the Age of Empire. Religion, Race, and Scholarship-Cambridge University Press (2009)”
Think of the fanaticism, the endless persecutions, the religious wars, that sanguinary frenzy of which the ancients had no conception! Think of the crusades, a butchery lasting two hundred years and inexcusable, its war cry “It is the will of God,” its object to gain possession of the grave of one who preached love and sufferance; think of the cruel expul- sion and extermination of the Moors and J -
“Suzanne L. Marchand - German Orientalism in the Age of Empire. Religion, Race, and Scholarship-Cambridge University Press (2009)”
In an essay on ‘“The Christian System,” he argued that the visions of the Old and New Testament are so unalike that the latter “‘must be in some way traceable to an Indian source: its ethical system, its ascetic view of morality, its pessimism and its Avatar, are all thoroughly Indian. -
“When the Church says that, in the dogmas of religion , reason is totally incompetent and blind, and its use to be reprehended, this really attests the fact that these dogmas are allegorical in their nature, and are not to be judged by the standard which reason, taking all things sensu proprio , can alone apply. Now the absurdities of a dogma are just the mark and sign of what is allegorical and my”
The Christian System" in ' Religion: A Dialogue, and Other Essays (1910) as translated by Thomas Bailey Saunders, p. 105