Say, it's only a paper moon
Sailing over a cardboard sea
Yes, it's only a canvas sky¹⁰

"In so far as he is alive ... a human being ... is doomed not merely to sin and death, but also to illusion, and this illusion is as real as life, as real as the world of the senses itself, indeed it is identical with these (Māyā of the Indians)."¹¹

Schopenhauer may be called a bit careless for the way he identified categories of different, only superficially compatible thought systems as in the following chart:

I would like to add to this homology of oppositions the following one:

The Principle of Uneigentlichkeit

The basic pattern of thought at work behind all these oppositions is the principle of inauthenticity, of surrogacy. From the times of Plato and the Upanishads unto epistemologies of this day, it has become the way we have learnt to perceive perception.

In colloquial Hindi speech Māyā is regarded as true – but not as the truth. Māyā stands for the truth of the phenomenal world. Very much so like a film: it does not make sense to say of a film that it is true or untrue. As a film, it should perhaps make sense in itself, within the limits of the world it itself establishes – not necessarily in relation to the world outside, the real world, that is at hand, takes place, on an ontologically different level. "Māyā, 'illusion' (Wahn, Schein), is that power of cognition and reason whereby we take this phenomenal and insubstantial world of our experience to be real and independent of our own being"¹².

The Deep Forbidden Lake

Sigmund Freud's "Unbehagen in der Kultur"¹³ has established the concept of a merely thin layer of regulated behaviour for the sake of the co-existence of human beings. This concept has evoked images of dark, ominous depths covered by a thin and sugar-coated or gilded crust, of a deep, forbidden lake¹⁴ beneath a treacherous thin sheet of ice. In any case, the truth is supposed to lie beneath the surface. Or, behind a veil. And the seeker after truth – in century-old Indian as well as in European traditions always thought of as a male – must penetrate the sealing surface to get into the depths¹⁵ and reach what is real and true and therefore usually good and beautiful, too.

The notion of māyā, appropriated from the Vedāntic philosophical tradition, is the cognitive apparatus through which the world not only appears to the knowing consciousness as representation, but also by virtue of which the "inner nature" of the world is falsified by representation. Only by piercing the veil of māyā through an unmediated knowledge of the will can we ascertain the world's, and the self's true essence¹⁶.

There is – apart from the obvious phallic/violent nature of this conception – a cultural tradition into which Schopenhauer inscribed his notion of what Māyā may have meant to the "weisen Urväter des Indischen Volkes"¹⁷, a tradition of gender characteristics that culminated in novellas by E.T.A. Hoffmann¹⁸ but ran through narrative texts of the entire 19th century and to this day continues to be undead in films by Lars von Trier, a cultural complex that welcomes the destruction of the female/the natural for the sake of art/culture (or simply their survival) by men.

In those works, the brutal act of destruction is always connoted with "love"¹⁹.

The phallic/masculine character of the piercing perpetrator – a word etymologically derived from pater (father) – is implied as a given. Only by penetrating Māyā can we get (to) the real thing, the thing-in-itself. "For this penetration alone [...] renders possible [...] perfect goodness²⁰. But Māyā has – as I have pointed out – always been associated with female, seducing features, by Schopenhauer no less than in the Hindu tradition. The act of penetrating Māyā, of piercing through her veil in order to reach Brahma truth, the thing-in-itself, unmasked and undivided will, thus turns into a sexual act, into an erotic endeavour, at least on a linguistic level.

Being an element of the Vedas, the Māyā concept could easily be used like a brick by Schopenhauer and built into the house of European (male) thinking. It has on occasions been reinterpreted but has since been an integral part of that building. However, the piercing character of analytical thinking is only one of the thought movements in Central Europe, the other one being represented e.g. by phenomenology, by Edmund Husserl, Martin Buber, Vilém Flusser etc. ...

In contemporary spoken Hindi maya is also used as affection. It is what you feel for a person. Maya can be felt only when there is an attachment but not necessarily a blood relation. Schopenhauer however, in order to fit this exotic brick from the building of the Upanishads into his a bit exertive attempt to build a system that reduces the world to nothing but one will and its many forms of representation, needed to correlate it to the most obvious manifestations of the will in very direct ways. He charged Māyā with desire, and "by 'desire' is meant maya which is just this willing, that love (for the object) whose objectification or appearance is the world"²¹.

"In this vein, māyā has become for Schopenhauer precisely that kind of knowledge which brings about desire and perpetuates the will-to-live"²². "This will's most vehement phenomenon is the sexual impulse, which is the eros of the ancients ... the principle of the world, that which creates; the Maya of the Indians means the same thing.²³"

There is an aspect of temptation to Māyā. In colloquial Hindi, "maya" also means "temptress", a person you should not trust but who keeps you attached. There is a clear erotic connotation to it that even underlies the other meanings of the term in subverted ways. Schopenhauer's implicit focussing on the erotic connotation of Māyā does by no means wrong the original meaning of the term. It is just a bit selective and reduces the wide field of original implications and derivations of the word "Māyā".

Unveiling the principium individuationis

"Schopenhauer equates loving acts, compassionate acts, and the piercing through the veil of māyā to see into the metaphysical identity of all individuals"²⁴. The principium individuationis, the veil, must be pierced. Because

it is māyā, the veil of deception, which covers the eyes of mortals, and causes them to see a world of which one cannot say either that it is or that it is not; for it is like a dream, like the sunshine on the sand which the traveler from a distance takes to be water, or like the piece of rope on the ground which he regards as a snake²⁵.

What's Film Got to Do With It?

So, "the veil of Maya has become transparent for the person who performs works of love, and the deception of the principium individuationis has left him.²⁶" This is the only way to get from the phenomenal forms of appearance to the essence of things, to their ιδέες , their Ideen²⁷ – a veritable mission impossible. In this light, film appears as a promise of something else underlying it that is real and proper and intrinsic but hidden beneath its surface. Like Māyā, the fake truth of film turns into reality for us. It acquires, by ways of a detour, the status of a reality of a different kind – though no less meaningful or true.

The audience watching a film is aware of the outside reality beyond the cinema's walls but allow themselves to be involved with and engaged in the reality of the drama unfolding on the screen.²⁸The split between the two realities, their duality, does not create a serious difficulty to the individual recipient – as long as its implicitness is not called into question or as long as it does not present itself as a problem to be expounded and theorized. In a sense, this is how Hindus perceive life and reality – if I can trust my Indian filmmaker friends on this. The triangle between a film, the outside reality and the audience mirrors exactly the relationship between Māyā, Brahma and the Self:  »