The Schopenhauerian Mind (Routledge Philosophical Minds) [1 ed.] 9780367501532, 9780367501570, 9781003048992, 0367501538

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THE SCHOPENHAUERIAN MIND

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) is now recognised as a figure of canonical importance in the history of philosophy. Schopenhauer founded his system on a highly original interpretation of Kant’s philosophy, developing an entirely novel and controversial worldview guided centrally by his striking conception of the human will and of art and beauty. His influence extends to figures as diverse as Fredrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Iris Murdoch within philosophy, and Richard Wagner, Thomas Hardy, Sigmund Freud, Thomas Mann, Samuel Beckett and Jorge Luis Borges outside it. The Schopenhauerian Mind is an outstanding, wide-ranging collection that explores the rich nature of Schopenhauer’s ideas, texts, influences, and legacy. Comprising 38 original chapters by an international team of contributors, the volume is organized into five clear parts: • • • • •

Knowledge and Reality Aesthetics and the Arts Ethics, Politics, and Salvation Before Schopenhauer After Schopenhauer

The Schopenhauerian Mind covers all the key areas and concepts of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, including fields omitted in previous studies. It is essential reading for students of nineteenth-century philosophy, Continental philosophy and philosophy of art and aesthetics, and also of interest to those in related disciplines such as literature and religion. David Bather Woods is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick, UK. He has published work on a range of topics in Schopenhauer’s philosophy, including political philosophy, sexual ethics, boredom, punishment, and pessimism. Timothy Stoll is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick, UK. He works on a variety of figures in post-Kantian philosophy, including Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Schiller.

Routledge Philosophical Minds

In philosophy past and present there are some philosophers who tower over the intellectual landscape and have shaped it in indelible ways. So significant is their impact that it is difficult to capture it in one place. The Routledge Philosophical Minds series presents a comprehensive survey of all aspects of a major philosopher’s work, from analysis and criticism of their major texts and arguments to the way their ideas are taken up in contemporary philosophy and beyond. Edited by leading figures in their fields and with an outstanding international roster of contributors the series offers a magisterial and unrivalled picture of a great philosophical mind. THE LOCKEAN MIND Edited by Jessica Gordon-Roth and Shelley Weinberg THE ANSCOMBEAN MIND Edited by Adrian Haddock and Rachael Wiseman THE BERGSONIAN MIND Edited by Mark Sinclair and Yaron Wolf THE JAMESIAN MIND Edited by Sarin Marchetti THE MURDOCHIAN MIND Edited by Silvia Caprioglio Panizza and Mark Hopwood THE PROUSTIAN MIND Edited by Anna Elsner and Thomas Stern THE KANTIAN MIND Sorin Baiasu and Mark Timmons For more information on this series, please visit: https://www​.routledge​.com​/Routledge​ -Philosophical​-Minds​/book​-series​/RPM

THE SCHOPENHAUERIAN MIND

Edited by David Bather Woods and Timothy Stoll

Cover image: Arthur Schopenhauer, 1859. By Johann Schäfer First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter David Bather Woods and Timothy Stoll; individual chapters, the contributors The right of David Bather Woods and Timothy Stoll to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bather Woods, David, editor. | Stoll, Timothy, editor. Title: The Schopenhauerian mind/edited by David Bather Woods and Timothy Stoll. Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2023. | Series: Routledge philosophical minds | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023023373 (print) | LCCN 2023023374 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367501532 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367501570 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003048992 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Schopenhauer, Arthur, 1788-1860 | Philosophy, German—19th century. Classification: LCC B3148 .S366 2023 (print) | LCC B3148 (ebook) | DDC 193—dc23/eng/20230828 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023023373 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023023374 ISBN: 978-0-367-50153-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-50157-0 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-04899-2 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003048992 Typeset in Sabon by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

CONTENTS

Abbreviations ix Notes on Contributors xi Introduction 1 PART 1

Knowledge and Reality

3

1 Realism and Its Discontents Douglas McDermid



5

2 Schopenhauer’s Representationalist Theory of Rationality: Logic, Eristic, Language, and Mathematics Jens Lemanski

22

3 Schopenhauer’s Metaphysical Two-aspect Account of the World and the Will to Life Manja Kisner

40

4 Schopenhauer’s Theory of Science Timothy Stoll

53

5 Representing Nothing: Schopenhauer “Decoding” Acoustical Science Steven P. Lydon

68

6 Schopenhauer’s Synoptic Metaphilosophy Alexander S. Sattar

79

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Contents

7 Time, Death and Boredom in Schopenhauer: Existential Themes in His Theory of (Self-)Consciousness João Constâncio

95

8 “Zwar ein Wissen, jedoch keine Wissenschaft”: Schopenhauer’s Ambivalent Philosophy of History Anthony K. Jensen

110

PART 2

Aesthetics and the Arts

125

9 Schopenhauer’s Aesthetic Ideology Michel-Antoine Xhignesse

127

10 Artistic Creativity and the Ideal of Beauty: The Representation of Human Beauty in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy of Art Bart Vandenabeele

141

11 Schopenhauer and the Beauty of the Past Peter Poellner

154

12 The Significance of Nichtigkeit in Schopenhauer’s Account of the Sublime Patrick Hassan

170

13 Schopenhauer on Music Andrew Huddleston

185

14 The Moral Weight of Art in Schopenhauer Sandra Shapshay

198

PART 3

Ethics, Politics, and Salvation

211

15 Schopenhauer’s Five-dimensional Normative Ethics Colin Marshall and Kayla R. Mehl

213

16 Schopenhauer and Modern Moral Philosophy Stephen Puryear

228

17 Acquired Character Sean T. Murphy

241

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Contents

18 A Schopenhauerian Solution to Schopenhauerian Politics David Bather Woods

256

19 Schopenhauer’s Critique of the State Jakob Norberg

270

20 Schopenhauer’s Pessimism Byron Simmons

282

21 Schopenhauer’s Philosophy of Religion Jonathan Head

297

22 Ways to Salvation: On Schopenhauer’s Theory of Self-negation and Salvation Mathijs Peters

311

PART 4

Before Schopenhauer

325

23 Philosophy Contra History?: Schopenhauer on the History of Philosophy Sabine Roehr

327

24 Schopenhauer, Europe, and Eurocentrism Christopher Janaway

342

25 Schopenhauer on the Pessimism, Fatalism, and Superstitions of Herodotus and the Greek Tragedians Mor Segev

357

26 Schopenhauer on Stoicism as a Way of Life and on the Wisdom of Life Keith Ansell-Pearson

376

27 Schopenhauer on Spinoza: Animals, Jews, and Evil Yitzhak Y. Melamed

390

28 Compassion, Egoism, and Selflessness: Schopenhauer’s Problematic Debt to Rousseau 401 David James 29 Kant’s Monstrous Claim: Schopenhauer on the Intuitive Understanding and the Cognition of Causes Alejandro Naranjo Sandoval

vii

414

Contents

30 In Agon with Goethe: Parerga and Paralipomena 2 Adrian Del Caro

434

31 Schopenhauer and Hegel Stephen Houlgate

451

PART 5

After Schopenhauer

467

32 “Either Shudder or Laugh”: Kierkegaard on Schopenhauer Patrick Stokes

469

33 Wagner and Schopenhauer Mark Berry

482

34 Thomas Mann on Schopenhauer: A Philosopher of the Future? Paul Bishop

496

35 Wittgenstein’s Reception of Schopenhauer: A Systematization and Evaluation Michał Dobrzański

514

36 Melancholy and Pessimism: Adorno’s Critique of Schopenhauer Brian O’Connor

531

37 Iris Murdoch and Schopenhauer Miles Leeson

544

38 Schopenhauer in Latin America: Borges, Funes, and the Poetry of Thought Elizabeth Millán Brusslan

555

Index 565

viii

ABBREVIATIONS

Reference to Schopenhauer’s Works in The Schopenhauerian Mind In providing citations of Schopenhauer’s texts, the present volume uses the following abbreviations for the titles of individual works: FR= On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason [Über die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde] FW = Prize Essay on the Freedom of the Will [Über die Freiheit des menschlichen Willens] OBM = Prize Essay on the Basis of Morals [Über die Grundlage der Moral] PE = The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics [Die Beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik] PP = Parerga and Paralipomena [Parerga und Paralipomena] VC = On Vision and Colours [Über das Sehn und die Farben] WN = On the Will in Nature [Über den Willen in der Natur] WWR = The World as Will and Representation [Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung] Page references are jointly to the pagination of Schopenhauer, A. (1988). Sämtliche Werke. 6 Volumes. Edited by Hübscher, A. Mannheim: F.A. Brockhaus [abbreviated as SW] and the following volumes of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Schopenhauer: Schopenhauer, A. (2009). The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics. Translated and edited by Janaway, C. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. –––––––––––. (2010). The World as Will and Representation, Volume 1. Translated and edited by Norman, J., Welchman, A. and Janaway C. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. –––––––––––. (2012). On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason and Other Writings. Translated and edited by Cartwright, D., Erdmann, E. and Janaway, C. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. –––––––––––. (2014). Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays, Volume 1. Translated and edited by Roehr, S. and Janaway, C. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.



ix

Abbreviations

–––––––––––. (2015). Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays, Volume 2. Translated and edited by Del Caro, A. and Janaway, C. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. –––––––––––. (2018). The World as Will and Representation, Volume 2. Translated and edited by Norman, J., Welchman, A. and Janaway C. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Citations generally follow the scheme: (SW [volume:page]/[Title Abbreviation] [volume:page]). The method for citing Schopenhauer’s correspondence and notebooks has been left to the discretion of the authors and is explained in the individual chapters. Any deviations from the Cambridge translations are also indicated in the individual chapters.

References to Kant’s Works in The Schopenhauerian Mind The works of Immanuel Kant, with the exception of the Critique of Pure Reason, are cited using title abbreviations (for commonly cited works) and references to the volume and pagination of the Akademieausgabe (AA [volume:page]): Kant, I. (1900–). Kants Gesammelte Schriften, edited by the Royal Prussian, later German, then Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, 29 volumes (Berlin: Georg Reimer, later Walter de Gruyter). Citations to the Critique of Pure Reason use the standard pagination of the first and/or second [A/B] editions. The following abbreviations are used: Anthropology= Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View [Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht] G= Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals [Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten] KpV = Critique of Practical Reason [Kritik der praktischen Vernunft] KrV = Critique of Pure Reason [Kritik der reinen Vernunft] KU = Critique of the Power of Judgment [Kritik der Urtheilskraft] MFNS = Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science [Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft] Prolegomena = Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics that will be able to come forward as a Science [Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik die als Wissenschaft wird auftreten können]

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CONTRIBUTORS

Keith Ansell-Pearson is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick, UK. His book, Nietzsche’s New Wisdom: The Philosopher, the Sage, and the Poet, will be published in early 2024. David Bather Woods is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick, UK. He is the co-editor of The Schopenhauerian Mind and has previously published work on a range of topics in Schopenhauer’s philosophy, including political philosophy, sexual ethics, boredom, punishment, and pessimism. Mark Berry is Professor of Music and Intellectual History at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK. He is the author of Treacherous Bonds and Laughing Fire: Politics and Religion in Wagner’s ‘Ring’ (2006), After Wagner: Histories of Modernist Music Drama from ‘Parsifal’ to Nono (2014), and Arnold Schoenberg (2019); and co-editor of, as well as contributor to, The Cambridge Companion to Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen (2020). He has written widely on musical and intellectual history from the later seventeenth century onwards. His next major project will be a synoptic history of Mozart’s operas in eighteenthcentury intellectual and political context. Paul Bishop is William Jacks Chair of Modern Languages in the SMLC at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. His research focuses on the history of ideas, with particular emphasis on Goethe, Schiller, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Thomas Mann, C.G. Jung, and Ludwig Klages. Among his publications are companion volumes on Goethe’s Faust, and on Nietzsche’s life and works; a “critical life” of Jung; and an introductory “toolkit” on the thought of Klages. João Constâncio is Professor of Philosophy at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa (UNL). He earned his PhD there in 2005 with a dissertation on Plato. He is co-founder of the Lisbon Nietzsche Group and of HyperNietzsche, as well as a member of the scientific committee of the Nietzsche-Studien (De Gruyter). He is currently Director of the research institute for philosophy (IFILNOVA). He has published extensively on Nietzsche, with a special emphasis on the relationship between Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. His publications include “On Consciousness: Nietzsche’s Departure from Schopenhauer,” in Nietzsche-Studien 40 (2011), pp. 1–42, and “Nietzsche and Schopenhauer: On Nihilism and the Ascetic ‘Will to 

xi

Contributors

Nothingness’”, in: Shapshay, S. Ed., The Palgrave Handbook to Schopenhauer, London: Springer/Palgrave, 2017, pp. 425–446. Adrian Del Caro is Professor of German and Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the University of Tennessee, USA. He is the translator of Schopenhauer’s Parerga and Paralipomena (Volume 2) as well as several titles by Nietzsche. His books, articles and chapters on German and Austrian poets and philosophers have appeared in numerous international publications. He is General Editor of the Stanford University Press edition The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, in which his translation of The Joyful Science was published in 2023. Michał Dobrzański is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Warsaw, Poland, and head of the German Philosophy Lab. He graduated in 2016 jointly at the University of Warsaw and Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz with a thesis about language and philosophical methodology in Schopenhauer’s system, which was published in German as “Begriff und Methode bei Arthur Schopenhauer” (2017, Königshausen & Neumann). His research is focused on Schopenhauer, German philosophy, and social philosophy. In 2016, he was a visiting lecturer in Mainz. He has published in Polish, German, English, and Italian. Patrick Hassan is Lecturer in Philosophy at Cardiff University, UK. He specialises in ethics and 19th century philosophy. He is the editor of Schopenhauer’s Moral Philosophy (Routledge, 2021) and author of Nietzsche’s Struggle Against Pessimism (Cambridge University Press, 2023). Jonathan Head is Lecturer in Philosophy at Keele University, UK. He is the author of Schopenhauer and the Nature of Philosophy (Lexington, 2021) and co-editor of Schopenhauer’s Fourfold Root (Routledge, 2016). Stephen Houlgate is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick, UK. He is the author of Hegel, Nietzsche and the Criticism of Metaphysics (1986), Freedom, Truth and History: An Introduction to Hegel’s Philosophy (1991, 2nd ed. 2005), The Opening of Hegel’s Logic (2006), Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (2013), and Hegel on Being, 2 vols. (2022). He served as Vice-president and President of the Hegel Society of America and was editor of the Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain from 1998 to 2006. He is currently President of the Hegel Society of Great Britain. Andrew Huddleston is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Research in Post-Kantian Philosophy at the University of Warwick, UK. He previously taught at Birkbeck College, University of London and Exeter College, Oxford. He has published widely on Nietzsche and other figures in European philosophy, as well as on aesthetics. David James is Reader in Philosophy at the University of Warwick, UK. His publications include Property and its Forms in Classical German Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Practical Necessity, Freedom, and History: From Hobbes to Marx (Oxford University Press, 2021) and Rousseau and German Idealism: Freedom, Dependence and Necessity (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Christopher Janaway is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton, UK. His books include Self and World in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy (1989), Beyond Selflessness: xii

Contributors

Reading Nietzsche’s Genealogy (2007), and Essays on Schopenhauer and Nietzsche: Values and the Will of Life (2022). He has edited the collections The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer (1999), Willing and Nothingness: Schopenhauer as Nietzsche’s Educator (1998) and the co-edited volume Nietzsche, Naturalism and Normativity (2012). During 2007–2010, he was Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded research project ‘Nietzsche and Modern Moral Philosophy’ and is General Editor of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Schopenhauer. Anthony K. Jensen is Professor of Philosophy, Providence College, USA. He is the author of An Interpretation of Nietzsche’s On the Uses and Disadvantage of History for Life (2016), and Nietzsche’s Philosophy of History (2013); and co-edited with Carlotta Santini, The Re-Encountered Shadow: Nietzsche on Memory and History (2021), and with Helmut Heit, Nietzsche as a Scholar of Antiquity (2014). His current project is a comprehensive exposition of the concept of ‘Will’ in the 19th Century. Manja Kisner is Assistant Professor at Radboud University in the Netherlands. She completed her PhD at the University of Munich and was afterwards a postdoctoral researcher in Munich, Wuppertal, and Jena. Her research focuses on Classical German Philosophy and Schopenhauer. She is the author of the monograph Der Wille und das Ding an sich: Schopenhauers Willensmetaphysik in ihrem Bezug zu Kants kritischer Philosophie und dem nachkantischen Idealismus (2016) and has written articles and book chapters on Kant, German idealists, and Schopenhauer. Miles Leeson is Director of the Iris Murdoch Research Centre at the University of Chichester, UK. He has published widely on Murdoch’s work and his forthcoming collection Iris Murdoch and the Literary Imagination (2023) is published with Palgrave Macmillan. He co-edits the Series ‘Iris Murdoch Today’ with Palgrave, lead-edits the Iris Murdoch Review, and hosts the Iris Murdoch Podcast. Jens Lemanski is Researcher at the University of Münster and Privatdozent for Philosophy at the FernUniversität in Hagen, Germany. He holds a binational PhD in philosophy from the Johannes-Gutenberg Universität Mainz and the Università del Salento (Lecce). He is currently Principle Investigator of the DFG-project “Gestures and Diagrams in VisualSpatial Communication” and the Thyssen-project “Logic Diagrams in Kantianism”. He has published on the history and philosophy of science, and metaphysics, logic, multimodality and the foundations of mathematics. Steven P. Lydon is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of Medieval & Modern Language at Oxford University, UK. He was previously the recipient of a Japan Society for Promotion of Science Postdoctoral Fellowship at Tokyo University and a teaching fellow at Durham University. He is currently working on two book projects: 1) a monograph on Friedrich Schelling and Romanticism and 2) an edited volume entitled Romantic Realisms, which addresses the impact of speculative realism on literary studies. Colin Marshall is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Washington, USA. His work focuses on early modern philosophy, Kant, Schopenhauer, metaethics, and the ethics of persuasion. He has defended a neo-Schopenhauerian metaethical view (Compassionate Moral Realism; Oxford, 2018), and edited a volume on cross-cultural metaethics (Comparative Metaethics; Routledge, 2019). Together with Sandra Shapshay, xiii

Contributors

he is currently co-editing The New Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer (forthcoming, Cambridge). Douglas McDermid is Professor of Philosophy at Trent University, Canada, where he has taught since 2002. He is the author of two books: The Varieties of Pragmatism (Bloomsbury, 2006) and The Rise and Fall of Scottish Common Sense Realism (Oxford University Press, 2018). Kayla Mehl is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Johns Hopkins University, USA, who completed her PhD at the University of Washington in 2023. Her research interests are in bioethics, social and political philosophy, feminist philosophy, and values in science. Her research generally explores questions related to oppression and justice, particularly in the context of medical practice, medical research, and public health policy. Yitzhak Y. Melamed is the Charlotte Bloomberg Professor of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, USA. He works on Early Modern Philosophy, German Idealism, Medieval Philosophy, and some issues in Contemporary Metaphysics (time, mereology, and trope theory), and is the author of Spinoza’s Metaphysics: Substance and Thought (Oxford 2013), and Spinoza’s Labyrinths (Oxford, forthcoming). Currently, he is working on the completion of a book on Spinoza and German Idealism. Elizabeth Millán Brusslan is Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University, USA. She works on Aesthetics, German Idealism/Romanticism and Latin American Philosophy. She is the author of Friedrich Schlegel and the Emergence of Romantic Philosophy (SUNY, 2007) and several edited volumes on early German Romanticism and Latin American philosophy. She recently edited with Jimena Solé, Fichte in the Americas, a volume in the Fichte Studien Series (Leiden: Brill, 2023). In 2004–2005, she was awarded an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship for a project on Humboldt’s view of nature, and she has published several articles on that topic and is finishing a book-length study, Alexander von Humboldt: Romantic Critic of Nature. Sean T. Murphy is Assistant Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Languages and Philosophy at Southern Utah University, USA. He works on various figures and themes in 18th and 19th century European philosophy, focusing on the different conceptions of agency, self, and character that proliferate during this period. He has recently published papers on Schopenhauer’s account of motivation and the role of self-knowledge and reflection in his view of agency. He also works on historical and contemporary issues in aesthetics and the philosophy of art. Jakob Norberg is Professor of German at Duke University, USA. He has published two books, Sociability and Its Enemies (2014) and The Brothers Grimm and the Making of German Nationalism (2022). He is also the author of the article “Schopenhauer’s Critique of Nationalism” (2022). Brian O’Connor is Professor of Philosophy at University College Dublin, Ireland. He is the author of Adorno’s Negative Dialectic (2004), Adorno (2013), and Idleness: A Philosophical Essay (2018), as well as editor of volumes on German idealist philosophy and critical theory. Mathijs Peters is Assistant Professor at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society, Netherlands. He is the author of Schopenhauer and Adorno on Bodily Suffering (2014). He is interested in a wide range of fields, from political philosophy to film studies, and from aesthetics to Cultural Analysis. He has published on topics as diverse as the moral foundation xiv

Contributors

of Hartmut Rosa’s theory of acceleration, Theodor W. Adorno’s references to bodily suffering, the lyrics of the Welsh rock band Manic Street Preachers, and the Schopenhauerian aspects of the television series True Detective. Peter Poellner is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick, UK. He has published on topics in the philosophy of value, the philosophy of mind, and the history of philosophy, especially on Nietzsche, classical phenomenology (Husserl, Scheler, Sartre), and Musil. His most recent book-length publication is Value in Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2022). Stephen Puryear is Professor of Philosophy, and affiliate of the Classical Studies program, at North Carolina State University, USA. His areas of research are the history of modern philosophy (especially Leibniz, Kant, and Schopenhauer), metaphysics, and ethics. He has published numerous articles and book chapters in these fields. Sabine Roehr was Associate Professor of Philosophy at New Jersey City University, USA, until her retirement in 2022. She publishes on Reinhold, Schiller, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, and has translated works by Reinhold and Schopenhauer. Alejandro Naranjo Sandoval is an assistant professor in the Philosophy Department at University of California, Davis. His main research concerns the history of the philosophy of mind and psychology in 17th and 18th century European thought. His current project investigates the relation between Kant’s philosophy of mind and those of Leibniz and the Leibnizians Christian Wolff and Alexander Baumgarten with the aim of clarifying the debate about the nature of the cognitive faculties and their relation. Along the way, we obtain an account of the notions of representation, cognition, consciousness, perception, as well as of Kant’s elusive notion of an intuition, within their historical context in 18thcentury German philosophy. In addition to his historical work, Professor Sandoval has research interests in the philosophy of race and social ontology. Alexander Sattar is Fritz Thyssen Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy, Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany. He is a former Fulbright and Alexander von Humboldt fellow and his recent publications include “Positive Aesthetic Pleasure in Early Schopenhauer: Two Kantian Accounts” (Idealistic Studies), “Kantian vs. Platonic: The Ambiguity of Schopenhauer’s Notion of Ideas Explained via Its Origins” (Journal of Transcendental Philosophy), and “Schopenhauer’s ‘hermeneutischer’ Metaphysik- und Kritizismus-Begriff vor dem Hintergrund seiner Kant-Rezeption” (Journal of the History of Philosophy). Mor Segev is the American Foundation for Greek Language and Culture (AFGLC) Professor of Greek Culture, director of the Interdisciplinary Center for Hellenic Studies, and associate professor of philosophy at the University of South Florida, USA. He has published widely on topics in the history of philosophy, including Schopenhauer’s reception of Aristotle. His most recent book, The Value of the World and of Oneself: Philosophical Optimism and Pessimism from Aristotle to Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2022), discusses Aristotle, Maimonides, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Camus. ​​Sandra Shapshay is Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York (with appointments at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center). With Jonathan Gilmore, she is the co-editor of the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. She obtained her PhD xv

Contributors

from Columbia University and taught at Indiana University Bloomington before coming to CUNY in 2019. Her research focuses on contemporary intersections of aesthetics and ethics – especially with respect to public commemorative artworks such as monuments and memorials as well as the aesthetic appreciation of nature – and is informed by 19th century philosophy (with focus on Schopenhauer and Kant). Recent publications include: “What is the Monumental?” in Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (2021), “A Two-Tiered Theory of the Sublime” in British Journal of Aesthetics (2021), “Kantian Approaches to Ethical Judgment of Art” in the Oxford Handbook of Art and Ethics, ed. James Harold (forthcoming). Shapshay has also published widely in 19th-century German philosophy, for example, a recent monograph Reconstructing Schopenhauer’s Ethics: Hope, Compassion, and Animal Welfare (Oxford University Press, 2019). Byron Simmons is Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Texas A&M University, USA. He is interested in metaphysics, ethics, and the history of 19th- and 20th-century philosophy. Patrick Stokes is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia. His works focus on issues of personal identity, death, and moral psychology. He is the author of Kierkegaard’s Mirrors (Palgrave, 2010), The Naked Self (Oxford, 2015) and Digital Souls (Bloomsbury: 2021) and is a regular media commentator on philosophical matters. Timothy Stoll is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick, UK. He is the co-editor of The Schopenhauerian Mind. He works on a variety of figures in postKantian philosophy, including Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Schiller. Bart Vandenabeele is Professor of Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art at Ghent University, Belgium. He has written extensively on aesthetics and on Schopenhauer, Kant, and postKantian philosophy. He is the author and editor of several books, including The Sublime in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and A Companion to Schopenhauer (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, ed.). He is a member of the international advisory board of the Schopenhauer-Gesellschaft, past Vice-chair of the Philosophy of Communication Section of ECREA, and past Vice-president of the Dutch Association of Aesthetics. Michel-Antoine Xhignesse is Instructor of Philosophy at Capilano University in North Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. He is the author of Aesthetics: 50 Puzzles, Paradoxes, and Thought Experiments (Routledge 2023).

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INTRODUCTION

Why this book now? The simplest answer is that the field of Schopenhauer studies can easily accommodate it. While recent years have seen the appearance of many fine companions and handbooks on Schopenhauer, including The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer (ed. Christopher Janaway, 1999), A Companion to Schopenhauer (ed. Bart Vandenabeele, 2012), The Palgrave Schopenhauer Handbook (ed. Sandra Shapshay, 2018), and The Oxford Handbook of Schopenhauer (ed. Robert Wicks, 2020), there is still endless room for novelty in Schopenhauer studies. Moreover, and if the above list and recent news of The New Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer (eds. Sandra Shapshay and Colin Marshall, forthcoming) are any indication, the Anglophone world’s interest in Schopenhauer's philosophy stands now at something of a historic high. As the latest in this line of distinguished compendia, The Schopenhauerian Mind offers readers both new perspectives on core areas of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, as well as treatments of more neglected, but no less fascinating and important, aspects of his thought, context, and legacy. The book presents new research in Schopenhauer’s theoretical philosophy, including new interpretations of his metaphysics of the will and representation, his theories of rationality, science, acoustics, self-consciousness, and his meta-philosophy. While Schopenhauer’s philosophy of art and aesthetics is rightfully well-trodden ground, we include groundbreaking work on its application to human beauty, temporal beauty, moral beauty, musical beauty, and specific modes of aesthetic experience such as the sublime. Perhaps the largest area of recent growth in Schopenhauer studies has been in his practical philosophy and philosophy of value, with Schopenhauer’s ethical theory, metaethics, moral psychology, political philosophy, philosophy of history, philosophy of religion, and philosophy of pessimism, receiving renewed and increasing attention. All of these topics find new treatments here. As if that were not enough, the volume also presents new essays on Schopenhauer’s place in the history of philosophy, and indeed on his own thoughts on the history of philosophy, including both European and non-European traditions, as well as on his reception of such figures and schools as Herodotus and the Greek tragedians, the Stoics, Spinoza, Rousseau, Goethe, and Hegel. And finally, the volume concludes with chapters on Schopenhauer’s legacy among other thinkers, writers, and artists, including Kierkegaard, Wagner, Mann, Wittgenstein, Adorno, Murdoch, and Borges. Most of these figures before and after Schopenhauer have DOI: 10.4324/9781003048992-1

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Introduction

never been covered in other companion volumes. These nearly forty newly commissioned essays, in sum, present yet more sides to the multifarious Schopenhauer. We owe a large debt of gratitude to all of the fine scholars who are responsible for the growth and health of contemporary Schopenhauer studies, especially, of course, those who have generously contributed a chapter to this volume. Throughout the process, we have been consistently delighted and heartened by the superb quality of their work. The achievements of these scholars are especially extraordinary given that this project was started in earnest just before the coronavirus pandemic, meaning that all of this high-quality work was produced under conditions of immense pressure, fear, confusion, often sadness, and of course illness. In the words of Max Horkheimer, first published in 1961 but just as relevant today: ‘There are few ideas that the world today needs more than Schopenhauer’s—ideas which in the face of utter hopelessness, because they confront it, know more than any others of hope.’ In their triumph over adversity, these fine scholars join Schopenhauer in this paradoxical form of hope. David Bather Woods and Timothy Stoll

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PART 1

Knowledge and Reality

1 REALISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS Douglas McDermid

It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. – Oscar Wilde

1.1 Why was Schopenhauer implacably opposed to “that natural and childlike realism in which we are all born, and which qualifies one for every possible thing except philosophy” (SW 2:17/WWR 1:xxiv)?1 If the explanation I advance in this chapter is essentially sound, his critique of metaphysical realism deftly weaves together ideas and arguments from Plato, the Upanishads, Descartes, Malebranche, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Reid, Kant, and Fichte. Before I say anything about Schopenhauer, however, a few preliminary remarks about realism are in order.

1.2 According to metaphysical realism, a razor-sharp distinction must be drawn between the reality and the appearance of a physical object: between the tree as it is apart from us, on the one hand, and the tree as it appears to us in perception, on the other. To avoid confusion, it must immediately be added that the metaphysical realist does not regard this distinction as mere epistemological shorthand, or as a convenient way of contrasting one's fragmented and imperfect consciousness of a thing (how it may initially seem or appear to me) with an ideally complete and coherent understanding of its nature (how the thing really and truly is).2 No; our realist insists that objects are ontologically prior to appearances, that trees and rocks exist in their own right, and that their fundamental attributes exist independently of anyone’s perceptions of them. The gist of her creed, we might say, is that the world is not our representation, that things in space and time are not constituted by “such stuff as dreams are made of,” and that there is an epistemic gap between appearance and reality which can never be closed completely, at least in theory. This view is so familiar and trite that we may forget to ask why anyone would subscribe to it. How can such forgetfulness be remedied? A brisk review of four pleas for realism will DOI: 10.4324/9781003048992-3

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remind us of the phenomena which that doctrine is meant to clarify, as well as the principles which its purveyors tend to take for granted. (1) Seeing is believing: Our first argument, unsophisticated to the point of naivete, seeks to derive our knowledge of mind-independent things directly from the testimony of our senses. Since we cannot doubt the existence of what we perceive, our artless realist reasons, we know that physical objects exist if we know that we perceive them. Yet who but a pathetic Bedlamite or brazen paradox-monger doubts that we perceive trees and rocks, houses and rivers? Assuming that our beliefs in the existence of what we perceive are non-inferentially justified, we can credit ourselves with knowledge of mind-independent particulars which is epistemically foundational or basic. (2) Appearance and reality: Consider the fact that some experiences – sensory illusions, hallucinations, dreams, and phantom limb pain – fail to match or correspond with the way the world is. The question we need to ask, but rarely do, is how such failure is possible. What must the world be like, in other words, if experience can misrepresent it? The realist’s answer is straightforward: the world must exist independently of our minds. And this answer surely sounds plausible. After all, if we think it is possible for an object to appear F to us when it is not-F (as when a distant tower seems round when it is really square), haven’t we assumed that at least some of an object's properties are what they are apart from our perceptions? Similarly, if we allow that it is possible for a perceiver to have an experience of an X – a pink elephant, say – when no X is present, haven’t we taken it for granted that there is a distinction between experiences (which are subject-dependent) and physical objects (which are not)? In short, it looks very much as if the idea of an objective world is built into the way we think about truth and falsity, knowledge and error, being and seeming. And if realism is indeed an inescapable presupposition of our thought, it admits of no proof and requires none. (3) Natural convictions and common sense: Ask friends who are innocent of philosophy whether they believe the moon and stars would cease to exist if there were no astronomers. Better yet, ask them whether they agree with Berkeley’s dictum that to be is to be perceived. Most of your interlocutors will probably find your questions bizarre; some will suspect you are joking; a few might even question your sobriety, if not your sanity. What do these spontaneous effusions of perplexity and scorn betoken? Answer: that your friends are natural realists in whom there is no guile, Johnsonian stone-kickers who instinctively believe that full many a flower is born to blush unseen. But if belief in the mind-independent existence of physical objects is a spontaneous and necessary product of our constitution, how can we quarrel with it? Doubt is reasonable only when based on something which is more evident to us than the doctrine to be doubted; yet nothing is more evident to us than those universal convictions which are the direct and irresistible expression of human nature. (4) Ockham’s razor and explanations: What is the best explanation of the fact that you seem to see trees and rocks? Let us concede at least this much to the intrepid skeptic: it is possible that you are deep in a vivid dream of Arcadia, or that your prosaic vision is a drug-induced hallucination, or that your “perceptions” are counterfeits struck by a cunning demon. Nevertheless, these skeptical scenarios immediately strike us as contrived, counterintuitive, and convoluted; and it is a maxim widely acknowledged among empiricists that we should choose the simplest explanation of the facts available to us, all other things being equal. Now, the simplest explanation in this case is the one proffered by our realist: that 6

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your perceptions of trees are normally caused by real trees, that your perceptions of rocks are normally caused by real rocks, and so forth. In other words, the hypothesis of a mindindependent world is an explanation than which none better can be conceived. So much for my introductory remarks about the meaning of metaphysical realism. In the remainder of this chapter (Sections 1.3–1.7), I shall do my best to show that Schopenhauer's many-sided attack on this doctrine involves five theses, each of which is supported with a passel of intriguing arguments.

1.3 Thesis 1: The view that physical objects are mind-independent is most emphatically not self-evident, axiomatic, indubitable, or a first principle of common sense. Modern European philosophers tend to present what they call “metaphysical realism” as if it were little more than a pedantic re-statement of what sane human beings have always and everywhere believed about the nature of things. Schopenhauer strenuously objects to this way of proceeding, and he isn’t afraid to tell us why: Realism, which commends itself to the crude understanding by appearing to be founded on fact, starts precisely from an arbitrary assumption, and is in consequence an empty castle in the air, since it skips or denies the first fact of all, namely, that all that we know lies in consciousness. (SW 3:5–6/WWR 2:8) As Schopenhauer sees it, realism stands in need of philosophical justification; it cannot be treated as a luminously intuitive truth or assumed as a first principle. Let us see why he thinks so. (1) Skepticism about realist “intuitions”: Although the idea that Nature exists absolutely or in its own right may appear unimpeachably self-evident to metaphysicians in Europe, it has not seemed self-evident to innumerable Hindu and Buddhist philosophers in India. What are we to make of this arresting discrepancy? According to Schopenhauer, the realists among us should at least acknowledge the possibility that their apparently spontaneous attachment to this doctrine may be the product of contingent historical developments. For example, could it be that Western philosophers tend to find realism self-evident not because it is self-evident, but because their culture’s cosmological assumptions were shaped by a religious tradition in which God created Nature before He created human beings capable of knowing it? Schopenhauer occasionally suggests that this debunking explanation – viz., that our instinctive doubts about idealism are simply secularized echoes of the Book of Genesis – may very well be correct:3, 4

In India, idealism is the doctrine of popular religion, not merely of Brahmanism, but also of Buddhism; only in Europe is it paradoxical in consequences of the essentially and inevitably realistic fundamental view of Judaism. (SW 1:32/FR 36; cf. SW 6:39–40, 412/PP 2:38, 349) 7

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Unless I am able to come up with some reason for thinking that this debunking explanation is not the whole story, how can I be sure that my so-called “intuition” is more than an inherited prejudice or a culturally conditioned response? Schopenhauer’s point here, to be clear, is not that metaphysical realism is not self-evident; it is that realism is not selfevidently self-evident. (2) The egocentric predicament: Since knowledge requires both a subject (the knower) and an object (what is known), any object we know must be related to our minds by virtue of the very fact that we know it.5 But if every object we can know is always related to a subject, how can we know what objects are like apart from subjects? Indeed, how can we know that objects even exist apart from subjects? One thing is apparent: the mere fact that I am conscious of X does not mean that it is self-evident or certain that X exists independently of consciousness. Here is how Schopenhauer puts it:

[N]othing is more certain than that no one ever came out of himself in order to identify himself immediately with things different from him; but everything of which he has certain, sure, and hence immediate knowledge, lies within his consciousness. Beyond this consciousness, therefore, there can be no immediate certainty; but the first principles of a science must have such a certainty. (SW 3:5/WWR 2:8) To be sure, objects may exist outside of us and correspond to our perceptions; but Schopenhauer insists that this correspondence cannot be taken for granted as if it were an irrefragable datum, because “[w]e cannot go beyond consciousness” (SW 3:568/WWR 2:512). Since we have not ruled out the possibility that our intellects impose forms on reality which are foreign to reality's nature, it is sheer dogmatism to assert that the objects we know must exist as we know them independently of our knowledge. (3) La vida es sueño: As we have seen, some realists hold that mind-independent things are immediately perceived. However, Schopenhauer thinks that this view was effectively refuted by Descartes in Meditation I:

Everything objective is for us always only mediate; the subjective alone is the immediate; and this must not be passed over, but must be made the absolute starting point. Now this has been done by Descartes, indeed, he was the first to recognize and do it, and for this reason with him a new main epoch of philosophy begins. (SW 5:82/PP 1:72; cf. SW 5:3–5/PP 1:7–8, SW 6:17/PP 2:19–20) Suppose our realist assures us that she is immediately aware of something external – the Parthenon, for example. At this point, Descartes and Schopenhauer will remind her that any experience I can imagine myself having while awake could be part of a subjectively indistinguishable dream: “[T]he world must be recognized, from one aspect at least, as akin to a dream, indeed as capable of being put in the same class with a dream” (SW 3:4/WWR 2:7). But what is immediately before your mind when you dream of the Parthenon? Nothing objective or external; only a fleeting sequence of images, a private parade of apparitions. 8

Realism and Its Discontents

Why, then, should I suppose that anything objective or external is directly present to consciousness if and when I see the real Parthenon? Since the two experiences are identical from the point of view of the subject who has them, there seems no reason to deny that their immediate objects are of the same ontological type. And there’s the rub: if you are acquainted with nothing but ideas, how can the existence of mind-independent things possibly be self-evident? (4) Secondary qualities and the objects of perception: Schopenhauer’s point here can be made in a slightly different way. Whenever I perceive a physical object, I am immediately aware of what Locke called its secondary qualities: color, taste, texture, and so on. However, Locke and his congeners (who are legion) urge that our ideas of these qualities resemble nothing in things themselves:

Locke had shown that the secondary qualities of things, such as sound, odor, color, hardness, softness, smoothness, and the like, founded on the affections of the senses, do not belong to the objective body, the thing-in-itself. To this, on the contrary, he attributed only the primary qualities, i.e., those that presuppose merely space and impenetrability, and so extension, shape, solidity, number, and mobility. (SW 2:494–95/WWR 1:444) That is to say, the colors we glimpse and the flavors we savor are not woven into the fabric of the universe; they exist only in relation to creatures with our constitution. Yet if what I am immediately aware of always has qualities that nothing purely objective or external can have, nothing is self-evident to me except the existence of subjectively conditioned phenomena – mere appearances, presentations, or impressions. This, then, is Schopenhauer’s first thesis about metaphysical realism: if objects exist independently of our perceptions, no beliefs about trees and rocks can be epistemically basic or foundational, because “the subjective alone is the immediate” (SW 5:82/PP 1:72). However, some beliefs about trees and rocks will qualify as foundational if objects are identified with presentations, since the latter are known immediately. Hence the factitious and intractable “problem of the external world” is a problem for metaphysical realists, but not for idealists.

1.4 Thesis 2: If metaphysical realism is true, we cannot know how things are in themselves; we can only know how they appear from our point of view, or in relation to our all-toohuman faculties. Having argued that metaphysical realism is not self-evidently true, Schopenhauer now argues that it is not true at all. Along the way, he calls our attention to a curious paradox: the epistemological consequences of metaphysical realism contradict common sense, yet common sense is an authority to which realists confidently appeal and gladly defer. (1) The synthesis of philosophy and common sense: Is the existence of a mind-independent world self-evident from the standpoint of modern philosophy? No; thinkers from Descartes to Fichte have made it perfectly plain that our starting point in philosophy 9

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must be the inner citadel of subjectivity. Nevertheless, the existence of physical objects is self-evident from the standpoint of common sense and science; for everyone in their right mind instinctively believes that trees and rocks can be perceived in propria persona, without any epistemic intermediaries or go-betweens. How, then, can we reconcile the sturdy dictates of common sense with the subtle discoveries of modern thought? There is only one way to effect this synthesis, Schopenhauer thinks, and that is to turn our backs on metaphysical realism once and for all.

[T]rue philosophy must at all costs be idealistic; indeed it must be so merely to be honest. For nothing is more certain than that no one ever came out of himself in order to identify himself immediately with things different from him; but everything of which he has certain, sure, and hence immediate knowledge, lies within his consciousness. Beyond this consciousness, therefore, there can be no immediate certainty; but the first principles of a science must have such a certainty. It is quite appropriate to the empirical standpoint of all the other sciences to assume the objective world as positively and actually existing; it is not appropriate to the standpoint of philosophy, which has to go back to what is primary and original. Consciousness alone is immediately given, hence the basis of philosophy is limited to the facts of consciousness; in other words, philosophy is essentially idealistic. (SW 3:5/WWR 2:8) Note that this conciliatory gambit is basically Berkeleyan: if trees and rocks can be known immediately (the invincible conviction of the vulgar) and if nothing is known immediately except appearances (the measured verdict of the learned), trees and rocks can only exist as such for subjects.6 (2) The veil of perception: We have already noted that physical objects cannot be known immediately if they exist independently of perception. Now consider this: if mind-independent objects cannot be known immediately, they cannot be known at all. For if we are aware of nothing but our representations, we cannot compare our representations with objects existing independently of them; and if we cannot compare what is in our mind with what is outside it, we can never know whether the way the world appears to us corresponds to the way the world really is.

Subjective and objective do not form a continuum. That of which we are immediately conscious is bounded by the skin, or rather by the extreme ends of the nerves proceeding from the cerebral system. Beyond this lies a world of which we have no other knowledge than that gained through pictures in our mind. Now the question is whether and to what extent a world existing independently of us corresponds to these pictures … [T]he fact that, on the occasion of certain sensations occurring in my organs of sense, there arises in my head a perception of things extended in space, permanent in time, and causally operative, by no means justifies me in assuming that such things also exist in themselves, in other words, that they exist with such properties absolutely belonging to them, independently of my head and outside it. (SW 3:12–13/WWR 2:13–14; cf. SW 5:3/PP 1:7) 10

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One of two things, we see, must be true: either trees and rocks are not mind-independent entities or they are inaccessible and utterly unknowable. Defenders of common sense should reject realism, Schopenhauer concludes, because idealism is the only alternative to skepticism. (3) Veridical perception and causality: The preceding argument can be formulated in a more perspicuous manner. If metaphysical realism is true, I cannot be said to see a tree unless my visual experience of the tree has been caused by it. It follows, or seems to follow, that I cannot know that I am seeing a real tree unless I know that the tree caused my visual experience of it. However, any knowledge I have of the world outside my mind is mediated by my experiences; so I cannot know that the tree causes my experience unless I assume that my experience is veridical. Yet the veridicality of my experience, it will be recalled, was the very thing I set out to establish. Much to my chagrin, then, I find myself reasoning in a rather small circle: in order to know that my experience can be trusted, I must know something which I cannot know unless I already know that my experience can be trusted.

(4) The limits of perception: Schopenhauer himself, it should be stressed, does not doubt that our senses can furnish us with knowledge of the physical world. As far as he is concerned, the most important question about perception is not whether it can give us knowledge of objects; it is whether there are fundamental aspects of reality which perception cannot possibly grasp. Think of it this way: when you see a tree or touch a rock, do you acquire any insight into what these objects are in themselves? Does sense afford you any access to their inward being? By no means, Schopenhauer replies; what you perceive is always subjectively conditioned, and since what is subjectively conditioned has the status of mere appearance, nothing mind-independent can ever be known by means of perception.

For if our perception, and thus the whole empirical apprehension of the things that present themselves to us, is already determined essentially and principally by our cognitive faculty and by its forms and functions, then it must be that things exhibit themselves in a manner quite different from their own inner nature and that therefore they appear as through a mask. This mask enables us always merely to assume, never to know, what is hidden beneath it; and this something then gleams through as an inscrutable mystery. (SW 3:218/WWR 2:206) Our senses, then, can only cling to the phenomenal surface of the world; they can never get under its thick skin, let alone lay hold of the mystery hidden within the mundane. But if this is correct, and the way things are in themselves can never be known through perception, the world of everyday experience must be more or less what the Upanishads refer to as Maya: a specious vision, a snare for the credulous, a metaphysical mirage which neither is nor is not. Does this mean that the world of things in space and time is a monstrous fraud or a dazzling sham? No; we are seduced or bamboozled by the passing show, Schopenhauer thinks, only if we foolishly assume that the objects of perception exist absolutely or in their own 11

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right. Unfortunately, metaphysical realists cannot give up their faith in this foolish dogma, because it is the first article of their outworn creed. (5) Naturalism and physiological relativity: What if a tough-minded realist denies that perception is subjectively conditioned? According to Schopenhauer, we need only remind her of a fact that no self-respecting naturalist would ever dream of doubting – namely, that the way Homo sapiens experience their environment depends on the peculiarities of our brains, our sense organs, and our central nervous systems.

What is knowledge? It is above all else and essentially representation. What is representation? A very complicated physiological occurrence in an animal’s brain, whose result is the consciousness of a picture or image at that very spot. Obviously, the relation of such a picture to something entirely different from the animal in whose brain it exists can only be a very indirect one. This is perhaps the simplest and most intelligible way of disclosing the deep gulf between the ideal and the real. (SW 3:214/WWR 2:202–203; cf. SW 5:18/PP 1:19–20) The significance of physiological relativity in the present context is twofold. In the first place, it means that there may be many more things in heaven and earth than our paltry powers can grasp, either because our perceptual faculties are insufficiently acute to detect them (as in the case of ultraviolet light) or because these aspects can only be apprehended through some faculty we lack (such as a sixth sense). In the second place, it means that there may be far fewer things in heaven and earth than we suppose, because we have no way of knowing whether the entities which our constitution compels us to posit are fictions or projections, akin to secondary qualities. The upshot of this argumentum ad hominem is hard to miss: naturalists should not balk at the view that knowledge is subjectively conditioned, because naturalism itself seems to lead to a version of that very view.7

1.5 Thesis 3: We cannot conceive of a mind-independent physical world, nor can we think of objects apart from subjects. If physical objects are mind-independent, the existence of objects without subjects must be conceivable. According to Schopenhauer, however, trees and rocks cannot be distinguished in thought from “mere” perceptions or presentations. Hence metaphysical realism requires us to think what cannot be thought: “The aim of realism is just the object without the subject; but it is impossible even to conceive such an object clearly” (SW 3:14/WWR 2:15). (1) Phenomenalism and the limits of thought: When I think of a sensible particular, Schopenhauer asks, what exactly am I thinking of? Since “concepts borrow their material from knowledge of perception” (SW 3:76/WWR 2:77), and since “[c]oncepts and abstractions that do not ultimately lead to perceptions are like paths in a wood that end without any way out” (SW 3:89/WWR 2:88), it is evident that what I think about objects must be anchored in the data of immediate experience. It follows that when I 12

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think of sensible particulars, I cannot think of them as mind-independent; I can only think of them as coherent sets of appearances, or as objects for a subject. Assuming this is correct, we should endorse some form of phenomenalism: the Berkeleyan and Kantian view that “the things perceived by us as lying outside us are only our representations, and consequently are something we immediately perceive or apprehend” (SW 3:26/WWR 2:27). And since this view implies that the only objects we can think or talk about are objects of possible experience, it leaves nothing for a querulous skeptic to exploit: no dramatic discontinuity between seeming and being, no unbridgeable chasm between evidence and truth, no tertium quid between subject and object. (2) The distinction between perceptions and objects: According to metaphysical realism, our ideas or presentations are supposed to reflect a world which exists independently of them. Although this way of thinking about sense-perception may sound plausible, Schopenhauer argues that it is irremediably confused: “The distinction between the representation and the object of the representation is . . . unfounded” (SW 2:526/WWR 1:472). Why? Since perceptions are the only entities of which we have immediate knowledge, we cannot form a perception-independent conception of the objects which our perceptions are supposed to represent. Unless we can form such a conception, however, we cannot think of “things without the mind.” But if we cannot even think of mind-independent things, it is senseless as well as pretentious to describe our perceptions as representations of them. Hence the realist’s solid-seeming distinction between perceptions and objects quickly evaporates under analysis: “[W]e do not have within us a representation of the things lying outside us which is different from them” (SW 3:26/WWR 2:26). (3) The distinction between appearance and reality: Metaphysical realists are wont to stress that there is a great gulf fixed between appearance and reality, mind and world, subject and object, perceptions and things. But are these hoary dualisms and dichotomies defensible? Are they even intelligible? That the objective world would exist even if there existed no knowing being at all, naturally seems at the first onset to be sure and certain, because it can be thought in the abstract, without the contradiction that it carries within itself coming to light. But if we try to realize this abstract thought, in other words, to reduce it to representations of perception, from which alone (like everything abstract) it can have content and truth; and if accordingly, we attempt to imagine an objective world without a knowing subject, then we become aware that what we are imagining at that moment is in truth the opposite of what we intended, namely nothing but just the process in the intellect of a knowing being who perceives an objective world, that is, precisely what we had sought to exclude. (SW 3:6/WWR 2:8–9) When we think of a particular tree or rock, Schopenhauer declares, we invariably find ourselves constrained to think of it as experienced in some way – as seen, touched, tasted, smelled, or heard. And if thinking of a sensible particular cannot be distinguished from thinking of it as related (actually or potentially) to a mind, the reality of objects cannot be permanently held apart in thought from their appearance; for the two are internally related. Hence Berkeley and Fichte were essentially right: the idea of a world of objects which consciousness can never reach is a barren abstraction or unmeaning blank. 13

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(4) No object without a subject: Like many other idealists, Schopenhauer thinks he can subvert realism with a Gedankenexperiment of Berkeleyan provenance.

[T]he inadmissible character of the assumption of absolute realism, clung to so obstinately, can indeed be directly demonstrated, or at any rate felt, by the mere elucidation of its meaning through considerations such as the following. According to realism, this world is supposed to exist, as we know it, independently of this knowledge. Now let us once remove from it all knowing beings, and thus leave behind only inorganic and vegetable nature. Rock, tree, and brook are there, and the blue sky; sun, moon, and stars illuminate this world, as before, only of course to no purpose, since there exists no eye to see such things. But then let us subsequently put into the world a knowing being. That world then presents itself once more in his brain, and repeats itself inside that brain exactly as it was previously outside it. Thus to the first world, a second has been added, which, although completely separated from the first, resembles it to a nicety . . . I think that, on closer conviction, all this proves absurd enough, and thus leads to the conviction that that absolutely objective world outside the head, independent of it and prior to all knowledge, which we at first imagined we had conceived, was really no other than the second world already known subjectively, the world of the representation, and that it is this alone which we are actually capable of conceiving. (SW 3:11/WWR 2:12–13) Here is one way of reconstructing Schopenhauer’s thought-experiment. Step 1: Think of a particular object, place, or state of affairs: the Parthenon, for instance, or the Golden Gate Bridge, or your kitchen table. Step 2: Next, think of this thing as perceived or experienced. That is, think of the Parthenon as an object for a subject, or as it would appear to some hypothetical observer. Step 3: Compare the content of these two thoughts, and you will discover that thinking-of-the-Parthenon cannot ultimately be distinguished from think​ing-o​ f-the​-Part​henon​-as-e​xperi​enced​. Why is this? An object without a subject is inconceivable, Schopenhauer contends, because we can never think away the subject. Conclusion: The idea of a reality which could never be known or experienced by anyone in any way is vacuous: “[T]he assumption is automatically forced on us that the world, as we know it, exists only for our knowledge, and consequently in the representation alone, and not once again outside that representation” (SW 3:12/WWR 2:13).

1.6 Thesis 4: Metaphysical realism cannot be reconciled with the discovery that we have a priori knowledge of the law of causality. We can know nothing about how Nature works, Schopenhauer acknowledges, unless we can rely on the version of the principle of sufficient reason which asserts that every event or change must have a cause: The principle is that, if a new state of one or several real objects appears, another state must have preceded it upon which the new state follows regularly, in other words, as 14

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often as the first state exists. Such a following is called ensuing or resulting; the first state is called the cause, the second the effect. (SW 1:34/FR 38) Yet how can we be certain that this causal principle is universally and necessarily true? This was Hume’s overwhelming question: “Hume was the first to whom it occurred to ask whence this law of causality derived its authority and demand its credentials” (SW 1:21/FR 26). Once we have fathomed Kant's answer to this Humean riddle, Schopenhauer assures us, we will conclude that metaphysical realism is a dead option. (1) The relative validity of the law of causality: According to Schopenhauer, Hume demonstrated that the law of causality – “Every change has its cause in another change immediately preceding it” (SW 3:49/WWR 2:46) – cannot be derived from experience. Two possibilities remain: either this principle cannot be known, or it can be known independently of experience. If we say that the law of causality cannot be known, on the one hand, we must regard that principle as an article of metaphysical faith; and articles of faith, metaphysical or otherwise cannot be used as premises in philosophical proofs. If, on the other hand, we agree with Schopenhauer that the law of causality is a mind-made law or a priori truth, we cannot think that anything mind-independent must conform to it:

The law of causality, of course, can never enable us to set aside idealism by forming a bridge between things-in-themselves and our knowledge of them, and thus assuring absolute reality to the world that manifests itself in consequence of the application of that law … [T]he law of causality unites only phenomena; it does not, on the other hand, lead beyond them. With this law, we are and remain in the world of objects, in other words, of phenomena, and thus really in the world of representations. (WWR II: II, 19) What can we conclude? In the first place, Kant was right: trees and rocks must be appearances, because they are subject to the law of causality. In the second place, Kant was wrong and Fichte was right: things-in-themselves cannot be the causes of appearances, because nothing outside experience is subject to the law of causality. In the third place, Malebranche and Berkeley were right: the realist’s so-called “hypothesis” is ludicrous, because it cannot explain anything. (2) The distinction between sensation and perception: Following Reid’s lead, Schopenhauer draws a sharp distinction between sensation and perception:

For what a poor, wretched thing mere sensation is! Even in the noblest organs of sense, it is nothing more than a local specific feeling, capable in its way of some variation, yet in itself always subjective. Therefore, as such, this feeling cannot possibly contain anything objective, and so anything resembling intuitive perception. For sensation of every kind is and remains an event within the organism itself; but as such 15

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it is restricted to the region beneath the skin; and so, in itself, it can never contain anything lying outside the skin and thus outside ourselves. (SW 1:52/FR 53) Once Schopenhauer has drawn this distinction, he needs to explain how the raw material of sensation can be converted or transformed into the full-blown perception of objects in space and time. How can you see a tree or smell a rose, for instance, when the input consists of localized feelings which represent nothing outside your body? According to Schopenhauer, this dramatic conversion is brought about by the activity of the understanding – a faculty whose sole function is to apply the law of causality. To be more specific, the understanding spontaneously posits physical objects as the causes of our sensations, which it interprets or construes as effects: “[A]s with the appearance of the sun the visible world makes its appearance, so at one stroke does the understanding through its one simple function convert the dull meaningless sensation into perception” (SW 2:14/WWR 1:33).8 But if this principle is a condition of the possibility of perception, it cannot be derived from perception; its origin must be subjective. Consequently, whatever must obey that law can only be a phenomenon or an appearance: “[W]e certainly apply the law of causality, wholly a priori and prior to all experience, to the changes felt in our organs of sense. But on this very account, this law is just as much of subjective origin as these sensations themselves are; and therefore it does not lead to the thing-in-itself” (SW 2:596/WWR 1:532). Trees and rocks, Schopenhauer concludes, have no true or absolute reality; they are constructions manufactured by the understanding from the scanty data of sensation. (3) Science, theology, and metaphysics: Schopenhauer's Kantian stance on causality has three broader implications which merit a mention before we move on. First, scientism is absurd: since science depends on presuppositions which are only valid within the domain of possible experience, scientific knowledge is not knowledge of the way the world is in itself. Second, natural theology is doomed: since the law of causality is a synthetic a priori truth, it cannot be used to build a bridge between Nature (the world in space and time) and God (an extramundane cause). Third, metaphysics must be reformed: since the application of the principle of sufficient reason is confined to phenomena, there are certain “why-questions” – about the world as a whole, or about the way things are in themselves – which it makes no sense to ask.

1.7 Thesis 5: Metaphysical realism cannot be reconciled with the discovery that we have a priori knowledge of space and time. Metaphysical realists swear that Nature exists in its own right, that space and time are objective, and that trees and rocks are real sans phrase. According to Schopenhauer, however, what is ultimately real lies beyond space and time. To support this view, he draws inspiration from three sources: Plato, the Upanishads, and Kant. (1) The ideality of space and time: Like his hero Kant, Schopenhauer is convinced that we can know necessary truths about space and time prior to having any experience of the 16

Realism and Its Discontents

world. On one hand, it is quite clear that such knowledge would be nothing short of a miracle if space and time were objective or independent of us. On the other hand, our sure and prescient insight into their nature can easily be accounted for on the assumption that space and time are simply mind-made molds into which the stuff of sense must be poured and distilled. For if both elements have their origin in us, it is hardly surprising that truths about them are knowable a priori; indeed, it would be surprising if this were not the case.

[W]e are so deeply immersed in time, space, causality, and in the whole regular course of experience resting on these; we (and in fact even the animals) are so completely at home, and know how to find our way in experience from the very beginning. This would not be possible if our intellect were one thing and things another; but it can be explained only from the fact that the two constitute a whole; that the intellect itself creates that order, and exists only for things, but that things also exist only for it. (SW 3:10–11/WWR 2:12) If space and time are subjective forms with no independent reality,9 whatever appears under them has been conditioned by the mind of the knowing subject: “[S]pace and time are utterly foreign to the thing-in-itself and consequently have come not from what appears in the phenomenon, but from the intellect that perceives and apprehends this phenomenon” (SW 6:42/PP 2:40). Hence trees and rocks, far from being things-in-themselves, only exist through and for consciousness. (2) Primary qualities and the ideality of space: Here is an alternative formulation. Since Cartesian and Lockean primary qualities (such as extension and shape) are inconceivable without space, primary qualities cannot be distinguished from secondary qualities unless space is a fully objective or perceiver-independent aspect of reality. The realist's invidious contrast between the real and the merely apparent qualities of objects thus stands or falls with the thesis that space is a determination of things-in-themselves. Yet we now know that space has no reality or meaning apart from consciousness, because Kant has shown that it is merely a condition of perception. Primary qualities, Schopenhauer concludes, are no more objective or mind-independent than their secondary brethren: Kant explains all that Locke had admitted as qualitates primariae, that is, as qualities of the thing-in-itself, as also belonging to its phenomenon in our faculty of perception or apprehension, and this just because the conditions of this faculty, namely, space, time, and causality, are known by us a priori. (SW 2:495/WWR 1:444). So Berkeley glimpsed the truth, albeit through a glass darkly. (3) Space and time as the principium individuationis: If Kant is right about space and time, any philosopher who supposes that a world of mind-independent things is conceivable has failed to understand the basic conditions of objecthood. Why? Since noth17

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ing can be an object unless it can be distinguished from other things, we can only speak of objects where individuation is possible. However, Schopenhauer maintains that individuation is possible only within a spatiotemporal framework, because he is persuaded that “time and space [are] the principium individuationis” (SW 2:134/WWR I:137). Yet space and time, we have repeatedly been told, are only forms of our knowledge. Therefore, whatever exists as an object can only be a phenomenon or appearance. (4) The one and the many: Given that space and time exist only for subjects, plurality is conceivable only within the world of phenomena, because “plurality in general is necessarily conditioned by time and space, and only in these is conceivable, and in this respect, we call them the principium individuationis” (SW 2:151–2/WWR 1:152). Once we realize this, Schopenhauer claims, we will immediately see why it is a grotesque solecism or category mistake to speak of things-in-themselves. Nevertheless, we mustn’t conclude that the thing-in-itself is one in our ordinary sense of the term. Inasmuch as it is outside space and time, the thing-in-itself cannot be one in the same way that a tree or a rock is one, because there is nothing from which it can be distinguished: “It is itself one, yet not as an object is one, for the unity of an object is known only in contrast to possible plurality” (SW 2:134/WWR 1:138). Strictly speaking, what lies behind the veil of Maya is neither many nor one; it is an indivisible, undifferentiated whole. (5) Beyond the dualism of subject and object: According to Plato and the Upanishads, what is absolutely real – whatever truly and fully is – must be immutable and eternal. All natural phenomena, however, are impermanent; adrift on the shoreless sea of becoming, their mode of being is incurably defective: “The fundamental character of all things is their fleeting nature and transitoriness. In nature we see everything, from metal to organism, corroded and consumed partly by its own existence, partly through conflict with something else” (SW 6:101/PP 2:88). The world of endless flux apprehended by our senses may therefore be likened to an extended and coherent dream – a dream in which we live and move and have our being as individuals. Yet this is a dream unlike any other, Schopenhauer intimates, because here the dreamer only exists as an individual within the dream-world. For “just as there can be no object without a subject, so there can be no subject without an object, in other words, no knower without something different from this that is known” (SW 3:225/WWR 2:213); and since objects as such have no existence outside the world as representation, neither do the subjects which know them. It follows that what is absolutely real must lie beyond the dualisms of subject and object, mind and matter, knower and known. Conversely, whatever presents itself to us as a subject or an object can only be a phenomenal expression of an underlying reality which is neither.10

1.8 So, what exactly did Schopenhauer think was wrong with metaphysical realism? We now have an answer, or at least the makings of one, in the form of our five theses.11 “But why,” queries the weary reader, “does any of this matter? That is to say, how does your examination of Schopenhauer’s idealism enhance our appreciation of his system as a whole?” My reply is very simple: without idealism, Schopenhauer has no system. To substantiate this claim, I shall simply remind the reader of the steps which are supposed to lead us from the world as representation to the world as will. 18

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(1) Tables and chairs, trees and rocks, moon and stars: such things are neither illusory nor absolutely real. So, what is their metaphysical status? They are what Kant calls phenomena or appearances – entities conditioned by the mind-forged forms of space, time, and causality. Physical objects, then, are mind-dependent; the world is my representation. (2) Can I know what this world is in addition to being my representation? Kant famously thought this question was unanswerable in principle. Since things must conform to the structures of our minds in order to be known, he reasoned, what things are in themselves must remain a mystery. However, Kant’s agnosticism overlooks the fact that there is one object in the world whose inner nature I can discern or descry for myself–my body. (3) Although objects in space and time are mere appearances or phenomena, the object I call my body must be more for me than this; otherwise, I could not know or experience it as mine. My body must therefore be given to me in two ways: from the outside (as an object among objects) and from the inside (in a way in which only I know it, and in which I know nothing else). (4) Now the knowledge I have of my body from the outside (under the forms of space, time, and causality) is knowledge of it as a phenomenon or mere appearance. In contrast, the knowledge I have of my body from the inside (under the form of time alone) is supposed to be knowledge of what this object is in itself.12 The thing-in-itself, then, is the true being or essence of phenomena; it is what appears to us in perception, wearing disguises and masks made by our minds. (5) If I were only a knowing subject, my body would be an object like any other for me; I could not know it from the inside. When I act or move my body, however, I am aware of my body as my body; and when I am aware of my body as mine, I am aware of it as what we call will. Accordingly, my will (pace Descartes) is not the cause of my bodily movement; it is that movement, seen or experienced from the inside. (6) The experience of agency thus reveals to me what my body is in addition to being my representation. To put it another way, I now know what I am in myself. But am I alone in having an inner nature? If all other phenomena were nothing in themselves, solipsism would be a foregone conclusion, since in that case whatever existed would exist only as my representation. Yet solipsism is a preposterous doctrine – one which nobody in full possession of their faculties can possibly believe. (7) Two noteworthy conclusions can be deduced from the foregoing. First, every object or phenomenon must have an inner nature; second, this inner nature must be the same as mine. Assuming both claims are true, Kant was mistaken: far from being unknowable, the thing-in-itself – the unconditioned reality of which all spatiotemporal phenomena are the expression or objectification – is identical with what human beings apprehend in self-consciousness as will. And this thought is the cornerstone of Schopenhauer’s labyrinthine system – a system which has been erected on the ruins of realism.13

Notes 1 In quoting Schopenhauer, this chapter follows the translations of E.F.J. Payne (1966, 1974a, 1974b). 2 Idealists have understood the appearance / reality distinction in this way. See Royce (1897) and Hartshorne (1946). 3 A similar explanation of realism’s popularity was endorsed by Gramsci (1971).

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Douglas McDermid 4 See Wicks (2018) and Golomb (2020) on Schopenhauer’s anti-Semitism and its relation to his philosophy. 5 The term “egocentric predicament,” coined by Perry (1910), refers to the fact that objects cannot be known without being related to a subject. 6 See Segala (2021) for more on Schopenhauer's relation to Berkeley. 7 See Wicks (1993) for an assessment of Schopenhauer's attempt to naturalize certain Kantian insights. 8 According to Adamson (1876), Schopenhauer is in no position to say that sensations are caused by physical objects. For if objects are representations, objects depend on sensation; and what depends on sensation cannot cause it. 9 According to the “neglected alternative” objection put forward by Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg (1802-1872), the fact that space and time are a priori forms of our knowledge does not necessarily mean that space and time are not objective or mind-independent. Shapshay (2011) and Hogan (2022) explain how this objection looks from Schopenhauer's point of view. 10 Here Schopenhauer has more in common with an absolute idealist like F.H. Bradley (for whom the self is a mere appearance) than with Berkeley (for whom souls or spirits alone are fully real and substantial). 11 Additional support for certain claims made in this chapter can be found in McDermid (2002), (2003), (2004), (2012), (2018a), (2018b), and (2018c). 12 If I know my body under even one subjective form, however, my knowledge of it is still conditioned. How, then, can I possibly know what my body is in itself? For more on Schopenhauer’s somewhat puzzling claims about the thing-in-itself and our knowledge of it, see Janaway (1989) and (1999). 13 My thanks to David Bather Woods and Timothy Stoll for their helpful suggestions and editorial guidance.

Works Cited Adamson, R. (1876) “Schopenhauer’s Philosophy,” Mind 1: 491–509. Golomb, J. (2020) “The Inscrutable Riddle of Schopenhauer’s Relations to Jews and to Judaism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Schopenhauer. ed. Robert L. Wicks. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020: 425–454. Gramsci, A. (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks. eds. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey NowellSmith. New York: International Publishers. Hartshorne, C. (1946) “Ideal Knowledge Defines Reality: What Was True in ‘Idealism,’” Journal of Philosophy 10: 573–582. Hogan, D. (2022) “Schopenhauer's Transcendental Aesthetic,” in The Sensible and Intelligible Worlds: New Essays on Kant's Metaphysics and Epistemology. eds. Karl Schafer and Nicholas F. Stang. Oxford: Oxford University Press, (in press). Janaway, C. (1989) Self and World in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Janaway, C. (1999) “Will and Nature,” in The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer. ed. Christopher Janaway. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999: 138–170. McDermid, D. (2002) “Schopenhauer as Epistemologist? A Kantian Against Kant,” International Philosophical Quarterly 42: 209–229. McDermid, D. (2003) “The World as Representation: Schopenhauer´s Arguments for Transcendental Idealism,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 11: 57–87. McDermid, D. (2004) “Keeping the World in Mind: Schopenhauer´s Misunderstood Reductio of Realism,” Idealistic Studies 34: 263–283. McDermid, D. (2012) “Schopenhauer and Transcendental Idealism,” in The Blackwell Companion to Schopenhauer. ed. Bart Vandenabeele. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2012: 70–85. McDermid, D. (2018a) “A Dream Within A Dream: Idealism and Pessimism in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy,” in The Palgrave Schopenhauer Handbook. ed. Sandra L. Shapshay. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018: 107–128. McDermid, D. (2018b) “The Sensation / Perception Distinction in Reid and Schopenhauer,” The Journal of Scottish Philosophy 16: 147–162.

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Realism and Its Discontents McDermid, D. (2018c) The Rise and Fall of Scottish Common Sense Realism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Perry, R.B. (1910) “The Egocentric Predicament,” Journal of Philosophy 7: 5–14. Royce, J. (1897) The Conception of God. New York: Macmillan. Schopenhauer, A. (1966) The World as Will and Representation. trans. E.F.J. Payne. 2 volumes. New York: Dover. Schopenhauer, A. (1974a) On The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. trans. E.F.J. Payne. LaSalle, IL: Open Court. Schopenhauer, A. (1974b) Parerga and Paralipomena. trans. E.F.J. Payne. 2 volumes. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Segala, M. (2021) “Schopenhauer’s Berkeleyan strategy for Transcendental Idealism,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 29: 891–913. Shapshay, S. (2011) “Did Schopenhauer Neglect the ‘Neglected Alternative’ Objection?” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 93: 321–348. Wicks, R. (1993) “Schopenhauer's Naturalization of Kant's A Priori Forms of Empirical Knowledge,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 10: 181–196. Wicks, R. (2018) “Schopenhauer and Judaism,” in The Palgrave Schopenhauer Handbook. ed. Sandra L. Shapshay. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018: 325–349.

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2 SCHOPENHAUER’S REPRESENTATIONALIST THEORY OF RATIONALITY Logic, Eristic, Language, and Mathematics Jens Lemanski

2.1 Introduction Schopenhauer is a philosopher who until today has often been overshadowed by other thinkers: it is not uncommon for him to be regarded as a Kantian or a successor to German Idealism, a forerunner of Nietzsche, a critic of Leibniz or a rival of Hegel. His philosophy is not infrequently laden with prejudices stemming from the broad reception history of the 19th century: Schopenhauer is seen as a pessimist, an obscurantist and an irrationalist. Some reasons can explain how the prejudice of Schopenhauer as an irrationalist came about: Schopenhauer, on the one hand, argued in his major works that the force that works everywhere, which he called ‘the will’, is irrational. On the other hand, Schopenhauer does not seem to ascribe any greater value to logic, since he published only a few very short treatises on logic. The first reason given is certainly not wrong, even if the concept ‘arational’ would certainly be more appropriate than ‘irrational’ (see below). After all, the will does not necessarily act against the intellect, but above all independently of the intellect. The second reason given, however, why Schopenhauer is often considered an irrationalist, is obviously wrong, since it stems from a selective reading of Schopenhauer’s oeuvre or ignorance of Schopenhauer’s manuscript remains. Only a few years ago, the second reason that led to the prejudice that Schopenhauer was an irrationalist was slowly revised. Researchers have taken a closer look at Schopenhauer’s so-called logica major than their predecessors. In his lectures of the 1820s, he emphasizes that logic is one of the most important disciplines for the academic audience. This 200-page volume on logic is the center of his Berlin Lectures (= Schopenhauer 1913; cf. Regehly 2018), which are a revised and extended version of his main work WWR written for an academic audience. These lectures on logic, language and mathematics from the 1820s have been available in German in their entirety since 1913, but they were almost completely ignored by researchers until the mid-2010s. An English translation does not yet exist. 22

DOI: 10.4324/9781003048992-4

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Because of these writings, a new image of Schopenhauer emerges: especially the early Schopenhauer (up to the end of the Berlin period) no longer appears as an irrationalist or obscurantist but as an Enlightenment philosopher and theorist of rationality. His logic in particular, which is the linchpin of his philosophy of language and mathematics, also shows the rational underpinnings of his entire system: Schopenhauer is concerned with the reflection of the world in abstract concepts. This is the aim of his representationalist approach. To be able to represent the world with all its epistemological, natural philosophical, aesthetic and ethical phenomena, the philosopher needs a rational theory of the concept. Moreover, it is precisely on this theory that the whole of logic is based. Since logic is at the center of Schopenhauer’s theory of rationality, it will also be the main focus of the following chapter. Section 2 will introduce Schopenhauer’s logic, taking into account its connection to the philosophy of language. For Schopenhauer, language is the umbrella term under which he then subsumes logic and eristic. I will introduce eristic separately in Section 3, as it is a theory that can be used to help protect oneself from people who argue in a purposive rational manner. Schopenhauer’s philosophy of mathematics does not belong under the main concept of language but under the domain of the philosophy of science. Like philosophy, however, Schopenhauer grants mathematics a function within the sciences that is closely linked to logic. For this reason, it is presented separately in Section 4. Finally, Section 5 discusses Schopenhauer’s representationalist approach, emphasizing the importance of his theory of rationality.

2.2  Schopenhauer’s Logic The distinction between a logica major and minor goes back to scholastic teaching, in which bachelor students had to complete a basic minor logic (parva logicalia) and master students a major logic (logica magna) aimed at completeness. It was only in the course of the 19th century that the conceptual distinction was applied less to the course of study and more to the scope of logical texts: if one found both prolix and terse accounts of logic by authors, these were casually referred to as ‘logica major’ or ‘logica minor’ respectively. It is in this sense that one must also understand the conceptual distinction between one major and several minor logics in Schopenhauer's research: There are several minor logics in Schopenhauer’s published and unpublished writings, but only the detailed exposition in the lectures deserves to be called a logica major. The following texts are usually counted among the logica minor: WWR 1 §9; WWR 2 Ch.9 and 10; FR Ch.5 (esp. §§29–34); PP 2 Ch.2. However, all the logica minors, even taken together, do not have the scope of the logica major found in the present edition of the lectures (i.e., Schopenhauer 1913, Cap. 3).

2.2.1  Content of the logica major Schopenhauer’s great logic is at first sight divided into three parts: (1) Concept (ibid., 242– 60), (2) Judgment (ibid., 260–93), and (3) Inference (ibid., 293–356). This division of logic into three parts is typical in the paradigm of Aristotelian logic and has repeatedly been interpreted as an expression of strict compositionality: concepts form the basis of logic, from which judgments are then composed, from which inferences ultimately consist. Nevertheless, Schopenhauer is already well aware that this separation cannot be strictly carried out, since one uses judgments to talk about concepts and sometimes also draws conclusions. 23

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(1) After an introduction that deals primarily with reason, abstract knowledge, and the relationship between animals and humans (ibid., 234–42), Schopenhauer begins with the logic of concept. This conceptual logic is atypical for the modern era in several respects. Schopenhauer does not begin with the typical Aristotelian themes (predicables, categories, post predicaments) or Kantian content (conceptual distinction, conceptual origin, conceptual relations), but more generally with language and speech (cf. Koßler 2020). In doing so, he occasionally picks up traditional theoretical elements but deals primarily with topics such as language acquisition, translation theory, the relation of concept and intuition, metaphoric of the concept, and the diagrammatic representation of the metaphor ‘concept’ (cf. Dobrzański 2017). Almost all the topics following this chapter are presented according to this diagrammatic method. (2) In the chapter on judgment, Schopenhauer first discusses in detail the laws of thought, which are only hinted at in the WWR, and then goes into the properties of judgment. While the first topic has no relation to Aristotelian or Kantian logic, the division of properties into quantity, quality, relation, and modality is typically Kantian in nature (cf. Pluder 2020). In the context of this property theme, Schopenhauer also discusses the distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments. The last part of this chapter then deals with the traditional doctrine of conversion and contraposition (cf. Heinemann 2020). (3) The third chapter formally breaks with the entire didactics of logic in modern times: unlike almost all logic textbooks published to date, Schopenhauer’s aim in this chapter is only incidentally to teach his audience the means of correct reasoning. His aim is rather to reconstruct an Aristotelian primordial logic based on the criterion of naturalness (cf. Schüler et al. 2020). To this end, Schopenhauer goes through all the syllogisms established in (late) scholasticism, but replaces the scholastic method of proof with Euler diagrams (cf. Moktefi 2020) and at the same time argues against Kantian reductionism (i.e. the reduction of all syllogisms to one figure) and Galenic inflationism (i.e. the extension of the three Aristotelian figures with a fourth). After going through all the valid syllogisms, Schopenhauer summarizes his argumentation in a treatise on rules and reasons (Schopenhauer 1913: 323–26). There then follow even shorter, textbook presentations on polysyllogisms, and fragments of propositional logic, modal logic, enthymemes and fallacies (ibid., 326–56).​ These three large chapters are followed by an appendix in which Schopenhauer gives a very brief history of logic, describes the relationship between analytics and dialectics, and discusses the usefulness of logic. The logic proper (analytics) is then followed by the dialectic, in which the principles of diagrammatic logic are transferred to eristic (see below). The core of this entire logical analysis is based on the insight that every concept is a sphere. Unlike Kant, Schopenhauer does not take the forms of concepts and judgments from the textbooks but uses a ‘clue of diagrams’ (ibid., 272: ‘Leitfaden sind die Schemata’). If each concept is a sphere, then one only has to analyze all the layers that can possess two or more spheres (depicted by circles) in relation to each other, i.e. Figures 2.1–2.6. With this, one then has all the forms that two or more concepts can have in judgment. These forms correspond to Euler diagrams (Figures 2.2, 2.3 and 2.4​), to Gergonne diagrams (Figure 2.1, cf. Moktefi 2020), and to partition diagrams (Figure 2.6) that illustrate extremely complex issues (Demey 2020; Demey et al. 2021).​ 24

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Figure 2.1–2.6  Basic Diagrams

Schopenhauer uses these diagrams as basic forms in all areas of logic and philosophy of language and also interprets these diagrams in the sense of an extended syllogism. For example, figure 2.7 shows non-traditional judgments such as ‘Some not-A are B’ or also syllogistic inferences such as ‘All A is B, all B is C, therefore some A is also C’.

C B A

Figure 2.7  modus Barbara

2.2.2  History and significance of the logica major Schopenhauer’s logica major combines three great currents of logic: Aristotelian, Kantian, and Eulerian logic. While Kant's logic has only become relevant to modern logic again in recent years, Aristotle’s syllogistic and Euler’s diagrammatic logic have been increasingly received again in other fields outside philosophy in recent years, especially in computer science and psychology. From today’s perspective, Schopenhauer’s logica major is a sensational find, since it takes up precisely the Eulerian and Aristotelian elements again, which is also being taken up again by interdisciplinary research today. The lines of tradition that come together in Schopenhauer’s logica major can be sketched as follows: the Leibniz critic Leonhard Euler had reinvented a diagrammatic system of syllogistics in the 1740s, which he then made accessible to a wider audience in the 1760s. Despite Euler’s great reputation in the field of mathematics and physics, his philosophical and especially logical writings were quickly criticized and, in some cases, even censored by the then-influential Leibnizians in Central Europe. It was only Kant, with his transcendental philosophy mediating rationalism and empiricism, who made Euler’s diagrammatic approach to logic respectable again. From the 1810s onwards, numerous logics based on diagrams emerged that continued Euler’s and Kant’s approaches. Schopenhauer’s logica major is a document from the first generation of these post-Kantian diagrammatic systems. Until about 1880, these systems of logic based on intuition dominated, increasingly modifying and improving traditional Aristotelian syllogistic. Intuition here means, to 25

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put it simply, the imaginability or constructability a priori of geometric objects (such as Figures 2.1–2.6). Although Schopenhauer’s logica major was not known at all in the 19th century, his philosophy of mathematics, which was also based on intuition, boomed (see below). Then, in the 1880s, the so-called ‘crisis in intuition’ began: mathematicians distanced themselves for a long time from the representability of mathematical objects and logicians increasingly trusted symbolic logic and demanded axiomatization and calculi. Aristotle and Kant were considered outdated in logic and Euler’s diagrams misleading. When Schopenhauer’s logica major was published in 1913, the timing was therefore very unfortunate: a logic based on intuition had little chance of success in the 20th century. It was not until the 1990s that the time was favorable again to resort to logics like Schopenhauer’s. Artificial calculi were enriched by recourse to grammar-oriented Aristotelian logic, and the research on diagrams that emerged through the visualization possibilities of modern computers made a renaissance of Euler-like diagrams possible. However, it took until the mid-2010s for researchers to come across Schopenhauer's logic again, which until that time was not even known to experts in Schopenhauer research or to logic historians.

2.2.3  Current topics in research Up to today, many researchers also extract interesting results from the logica minores. Since around the mid-2010s, however, the logica major has moved further and further into the center of research. This is not only due to the reasons mentioned in the first two subsections, but also to the fact that the manuscript addresses a variety of topics that are particularly addressed by philosophers, linguists, computer scientists, and logicians in general. In the following, twelve keywords are used to briefly introduce individual trends of current research: (1) Use-theory of meaning and contextualism: Schopenhauer formulates a use-theory of meaning on p. 246 and justifies it through a contextual principle: learning a language happens through use (‘ex usu’), because the meaning of words is only learned in context. Researchers discuss whether and to what extent these formulations of Schopenhauer anticipate early analytic philosophy and whether there are parallels or even influences with authors such as Frege or Wittgenstein (e.g. Schumann 2020 and Chap. 35 in this book). (2) Translation theory: On p. 244ff., there is also a theory of translation formulated by Schopenhauer, which on one hand seems to anticipate the systematics of modern translation theories, but, on the other hand, also makes diagrammatic approaches in this discipline. Schopenhauer explains that there is either a 1:1, 1:1/n or 1:0 ratio between the meaning of words in a source and target language (cf. Lemanski 2021, chap. 2.1). (3) Cognitive linguistics and communication theory: Schopenhauer (1913, 242ff.) makes a clear distinction between abstract language, in which the meaning of words plays a major role, and speech, which refers concretely to objects of external experience. Linguists and cognitive scientists debate the extent to which these approaches harmonize with modern theories by Chomsky, Fodor et al. (cf. Dümig 2020).

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(4) Reism and reductionism: Schopenhauer (1913, 249ff.) formulates the thesis that all abstract concepts must be traced back to concrete concepts and that these must ultimately be traced back to intuition. In this, Schopenhauer comes closest to a theory called reism, which was advocated especially in the Lwów–Warsaw School (cf. Dobrzański et al. 2020). (5) Schopenhauer diagrams: As we shall see, Schopenhauer uses diagrams very extensively in semantics, logic, and eristics in a unique way. This is the center of his rational method and is therefore intensively researched (cf. e.g. Dobrzański et al. 2020). (6) Hermeneutics and language criticism: It is disputed to what extent Schopenhauer can be attributed to the hermeneutic school (cf. Schubbe & Lemanski 2019). Furthermore, some researchers argue for a reference to the linguistic-critical tradition of the 20th century (Birnbacher 2018; Xhignesse 2020). (7) Laws of thought: With his formulation of the laws of thought (Schopenhauer 1913, 261), Schopenhauer takes up a topic that was established in the Leibniz-Wolff school, then discussed more intensively by Fichte and finally in British logic of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Whether Schopenhauer represents an independent position in this series of philosophers has not yet been clarified (cf. Béziau 2020). (8) Metalogics: Although the Latin expression ‘metalogica’ can be traced back several centuries before Schopenhauer, Schopenhauer seems to have either anticipated or even coined the modern meaning of the expression ‘metalogical’ or ‘metalogic’ (cf. Béziau 2020). (9) Logical Geometry: It has already been shown recently for §9 of the WWR 1 that the logic diagrams it contains, which represent conceptual relations, anticipate the fundamental relations that are currently being investigated in the field of ‘logical geometry’ and ‘Aristotelian diagrams’ (Demey 2020; Demey et al. 2021). (10) Conversion theory: Schopenhauer’s theory of conversion (Schopenhauer 1913, 284ff.) is currently a puzzle for logic and Schopenhauer research. What is interesting about the conversion theory, however, is that it takes up the algebraic notation from the Wolffian school and modifies it in a direction later used in British logic (DeMorgan, Boole, Jevons and others). However, it remains a great mystery what Schopenhauer means by the ‘strange symmetry’ when he sets up his table of conversion rules (Schopenhauer 1913, 293). (11) Naturalness: Schopenhauer argues in his logic on inferences for a return to the original Aristotelian Organon, in which the syllogistic is determined by three-figure structures. Schopenhauer’s criterion, which brings him back to Aristotle, is the naturalness of logic that results from everyday language. Similar to the late Russell, Schopenhauer’s logical techniques correspond to mental acts, which are then supposed to be reflected in a natural logic (cf. Schüler et al. 2020). (12) Doctrine of Proof: Using some examples of syllogistics, Schopenhauer argues that axiomatic approaches always run into the skeptical problem of justification (Agrippa trilemma) and thus the foundations of all logic and mathematics run into a problem of justification (cf. Lemanski 2021). The first six keywords mentioned relate primarily to the philosophy of language, and the last six to logic. These twelve topics do not exhaust current research. Nevertheless, they should prove that the Berlin Lectures, in particular, have provoked some heated debates in just a few years, and also that Schopenhauer’s text offers the opportunity to discuss current

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problems in the philosophy of language, logic, linguistics and philosophy of mathematics widely in research and teaching on a classic author of philosophy. The philosophy and logic of the 21st century have said goodbye to the idea of the previous century that everything must be discussed anew and without reference to traditional doctrines, or else purely historically without a view into and for the future.

2.3  Schopenhauer’s Eristic The concept ‘eristic’ comes from the Greek ἐρίζειν (erizein) and means ‘contest’ or ‘quarrel’ and is personified in Greek mythology by the goddess Eris. Schopenhauer brings the concept closer to dialectics and sees eristics not as a component but as a counterpart of logic. ‘Dialectic’ (gr. διαλεκτική, dialektiké) means as much as ‘conversation’, and stands with Schopenhauer for the ‘sharing of opinions (historical conversations excluded)’ (ibid.). Thus, the latter concept refers to the philosophical discipline, since dialectic forms the dialogical middle piece between monological logic and polylogical rhetoric and should thus also constitute the connecting piece of this trivium to be renewed (cf. Chichi 2002, 163). In the following, I will first present the texts of Schopenhauer’s eristics (3.1), then go into the intention of this doctrine (3.2), and finally present some current topics of research (3.3).

2.3.1  Treatises on eristic Today, four texts by Schopenhauer are known in which he deals with eristics: (1) The first comprehensive text on eristics is found in the second part of §9 of the WWR 1, i.e., from the late 1810s. Here Schopenhauer explains the value and function of eristics and shows how to apply it with a few examples. (2) The second text on eristics is found together with the logica major in the manuscripts of the Berlin Lectures (Schopenhauer 1913, 363–366), on which Schopenhauer worked mainly in the 1820s. (3) The best-known manuscript on this subject has been edited under the title ‘Eristische Dialektik’ (Eristic Dialectics) by Arthur Hübscher and plausibly dated to the years 1830/31 (cf. MR 3:700). The work offers a short historical-systematic part on logic and dialectics as well as a part with ‘about forty’ (PP 2, 37; cf. Chichi 2002, 169, note 29) argumentative tricks, partly with practical case studies. (4) Revised fragments of the latter fragment were finally also used in 1851 in §26 of the second volume of PP 2. Texts (1), (3), and (4) are currently available in English translations. None of these texts is authoritative: in texts (1) and (2), Schopenhauer hints at wanting to work on the subject more extensively, and in text (4) that he had already done so but had not finally concluded the subject. Since texts (1), (2) and (4) thus refer to (3), this is the most significant document on eristics that we have from Schopenhauer. Nevertheless, there are also recognizable disadvantages with this fragment, i.e., (3): First of all, it is not recognizably connected to logic as texts (1) and (2) are. From a systematic perspective, it is helpful for the reader to first acquire the logic and then look at a theory that complements it. Since fragment (3) is not accompanied by a logic in which the diagrammatic methods are discussed (see above), this fragment has to do without an important element that is dominant in fragments (1) and (2): the linguistic analysis of eristic based on logic diagrams. Intensive research on fragments (1)–(4) has

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not yet taken place, which is why a complete evaluation and unification of eristic is still a desideratum of research.

2.3.2  Irrational argumentation and enlightenment prevention In WWR 1 §9, Schopenhauer distinguishes eristic from logic. The first part of Schopenhauer’s system is the doctrine of representation, which is divided into two areas: the doctrine of understanding (intuitive representation) and the doctrine of reason (conceptual representation). Whereas humans and animals share intuitive representation, only humans have access to conceptual representation. Schopenhauer divides the doctrine of reason into three faculties: (1) the faculty of language, (2) of science, and (3) of practical reason. The faculty of language includes, as described above, the philosophy of language and in particular logic. However, it also includes an eristic, which is supposed to protect against irrational reasoning, i.e., fallacies that are deliberately instrumentalized. For, if people violate rational principles of practical reason, they may use reason only to achieve their ends. This rationality of purpose is use of reason against reason and insofar, in the narrow sense of the concept, an irrational argument (Lemanski 2021 b). At this point, it should be obvious why it can make sense to reserve the concept of irrationality for human actions: the irrational is contrary to rationality (Hallich 2008, 453f.). Arationality, on the other hand, refers rather to an instance, such as the will, that is nonrational. But only conscious argumentation in which people violate the rationality principles of logic (and ethics) stands in a real oppositional relationship to rationality. One can visualize these relations employing a square of opposition (Figure 2.8), which represents the relations of contrariety, contradiction, subalternation, and subcontrariety. Schopenhauer defines these relations on p. 286. In brief, we can state: let us assume that Figure 2.2 shows ‘All A is B’, then it is in a

• contrary relation with Figure 2.3, if the latter depicts ‘No A is B’, • contradictory relation with Figure 2.4, if the latter shows ‘Some A is not B’. • subaltern relation with Figure 2.4, if the latter indicates ‘Some A is B’.

contrary:

No A is B.

All is B.

contradictory: subaltern:

Some A is not B.

Some A is B.

subcontrary:

Figure 2.8  Traditional Square of Opposition

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rational

non-rational

non-arational

irrational Pentagon of Rationality

Figure 2.9  Pentagon of Rationality

The two stated interpretations of Figure 2.4 (‘Some A is not B’, ‘Some A is B’) are then also in a subcontrary relation with each other. These four relations can be visualized with the help of the traditional logical square in Figure 2.8. In Figure 2.8, the relations are visualized on the basis of judgments. However, the relations of opposition can also be applied to classes, for example to the concept of rationality, as given in Figure 2.9, in order to understand its semantics. Schopenhauer already knew that oppositional relations could be applied to classes or concepts (cf. Demey 2020). We can now determine the relationship of the disciplines by paralleling types of rationality (Figure 2.9) with types of reasoning (Figure 2.1): logic examines logical relations; fallacies, on the other hand, are non-logical. But those who argue eristically use both logical and fallacious arguments. Eristic is therefore often equated with the so-called ‘rationality of purpose’, i.e., the form of rationality that someone uses to achieve their own goals, even if she deliberately applies fallacies in what appears to be a logical discussion. It can be said that in eristic, non-rational means are used in rational reasoning simply to win a debate. Since one only has to enforce these purposes on others and not on oneself, eristic is a dialogical discipline, logic a monological one. However, eristic is not a guide to irrational argumentation, as it is often portrayed, but a pure prevention tool (cf. Chichi 2002, 165, 170). This too has often been misunderstood and then given lurid titles such as ‘The Art of (Always) Being Right’. In one of his most famous treatises on eristic, Schopenhauer actually speaks several times of an ‘art of being right’ (Art of Being Right) or an ‘art of persuasion’ (MR 3:675). However, this should not be misunderstood as a guide to being right, but as a translation of the ancient expression ἐριστικὴ τέχνη (eristiké téchne). As with Aristotle, Schopenhauer is therefore concerned with identifying false inferences and making them recognizable. Similar to the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, Schopenhauer argues: if reason is a neutral instrument and can be used for both good and evil, it is useful to establish a scientific dialectic in the form of ‘general stratagems’ that protect against the dishonest use of natural dialectics. In text (3), Schopenhauer’s strategy is to give these stratagems names and descriptions to be able to expose them in conversation as irrational argumentation. These stratagems 30

Schopenhauer’s Representationalist Theory of Rationality logical reasoning

fallacious reasoning

logical

non-logical

eristic reasoning Pentagon of Reasoning

Figure 2.10  Pentagon of Reasoning

are reminiscent of logical fallacies, but they are introduced into a debate with rational considerations. In text (1) and (2), on the other hand, Schopenhauer’s strategy is to use Eulerian Diagrams in the form of graphs to build complex argument maps, as can be seen in Figure 2.9. The spheres of the concepts ‘traveling’ and ‘evil’, for example, lie apart, as in Figure 2.3. However, if a speaker wants to convince his discussant that traveling is evil, he constructs several non-necessary intermediate terms to lead from one concept to the other (cf. Lemanski 2022).​

2.3.3  Current topics in research Eristic has experienced increasing popularity since the 1980s, but there is still no consistent interdisciplinary research community in this field. Overall, it is mainly philosophers, lawyers, computer scientists, rhetoricians or ethicists who are interested in eristic. In the following, five keywords are presented that name individual topics of research: (1) Philosophical classification of eristic: Eristic is a discipline that only begins with Schopenhauer. Nevertheless, there are many precursors. What exactly belongs to eristics, however, is unclear: Aristotle’s Topics or the Sophistic Refutations come into question above all, but also the medieval treatises on fallacious reasoning. It also remains questionable with which contemporary disciplines eristic is related today: with argumentation theory, with rhetoric, logic, critical thinking, etc. (2) Legal argumentation: The precise embedding of eristic in legal doctrine is also still in its infancy. Among lawyers, Schopenhauer’s eristic is very much appreciated, but often very differently received and integrated into the contemporary canon (cf. Struck 2005). (3) Diagrammatics: As described above, some of Schopenhauer’s treatises on eristic are also based on logic diagrams. However, a precise investigation of logic diagrams in eristic is still pending (cf. Moktefi et al. 2018). Recently, it has been argued that it can be 31

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Figure 2.11  (WWR 1, § 9)

profitable to combine graph theory with diagrams in eristics to analyze the argument maps as given in Figure 2.11. (4) Ethics of argumentation: It has been assumed several times that Schopenhauer’s doctrine of irrational argumentation is connected to ethics of argumentation. It seems that Schopenhauer had to presuppose certain rules of discourse ethics to guarantee the violation of rationality. A stratagem of eristics, therefore, seems to be present when not only logical but also ethical principles have been violated (Lemanski 2021b). (5) Ludics: In the course of formalizing dialogical logic for legal informatics and AI, several attempts have been made in recent years to formalize Schopenhauerian eristic. The most promising approach comes from the field of ludics, a combination of proof theory and game-theoretic semantics (cf. Quatrini 2013). These five topics do not exhaust the research on Schopenhauer's eristic. Nevertheless, they should prove that this area has a strong connection to logic and offers possibilities for connection in many sciences.

2.4  Schopenhauer’s Philosophy of Mathematics Schopenhauer’s philosophy of mathematics deals primarily with Euclidean geometry and is strongly influenced by transcendental philosophy as well as by Schopenhauer’s math32

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ematical teachers (Bernhard Friedrich Thibaut and Franz Ferdinand Schweins). An essential point of Schopenhauer’s philosophy of mathematics concerns intuition, which is decisively emphasized here because it leads the theory of rationality out of difficulties of justification and connects it with a theory of transcendental understanding. I first discuss Schopenhauer’s writings on the philosophy of mathematics (4.1), then the proof-theoretical relationship to logic (4.2) and finally the current research topics (4.3).

2.4.1  Texts on the philosophy of mathematics As with eristic and logic, there are several treatises in which Schopenhauer wrote down a philosophy of mathematics: (1) The first more comprehensive treatise is found in the dissertation FR of 1814 (later edition: §39). Schopenhauer greatly expanded this treatise in later editions. (2) Another treatise is found in 1819 in WWR 1 §15. (3) In the Berlin Lectures, Schopenhauer brings together these previously existing treatises and expands them slightly (Schopenhauer 1913, 429ff.). (4) Also in WWR 2 Chapter 13, there are still theses on mathematics.

2.4.2  Schopenhauer’s intuitionism Unlike logic and eristics, Schopenhauer’s philosophy of mathematics does not belong to the faculty of language. As described above, there are three faculties in Schopenhauer’s theory of reason: language, knowledge, and practical reason. While Schopenhauer assigns logic and eristic to language, mathematics belongs to the faculty of science and knowledge. Nevertheless, there is a close connection between logic and mathematics. Schopenhauer’s philosophy is in fact in opposition with logicism and neologicism. Whereas logicism in the 18th century was mainly represented by Leibnizians and Wolffians, today it is mainly Fregeans and Wittgensteinians who dominate large parts of the philosophy of mathematics and logic. Like Kant, however, Schopenhauer is rather close to ‘intuitionism’, which is particularly expressed in the reference to intuition. Indeed, one of the main theses in Schopenhauer’s philosophy of mathematics is that good mathematical explanations cannot be grounded on logic, since logic itself requires justification. In order not to run into one of the skeptical tropes (infinite regress, circular reasoning, dogmatism), something outside of reason is needed that explains the reason. For Schopenhauer, this explanatory instance is understanding, which, however, consists of more than sensuality. Schopenhauer thus introduces a kind of empiricist meaning criterion but supplements it with the Kantian element of inner perception. For the explanation of a geometric figure, intuition is required, but this does not have to be empirical, it can also be intellectual. This results in a strong similarity between logic and mathematics. Just as Euler diagrams, for example, make the transcendental forms of perception visible and communicable, geometric figures also make Euclidean geometry verifiable and explainable. The explanatory moment, in particular, is crucial here: although logico-formalist approaches can also offer a knowledge-that (knowledge of facts), they prevent a precise knowledge-why (knowledge of reason). Schopenhauer’s core problem here is proof: A logical proof in Euclidean geometry explains that something is so, but it cannot explain why it is so. This is especially true for apagogic proofs, but also for all others. Geometric figures can not only visualize the proof more quickly and easily, but they can also give a reason for an explanation that cannot be seen through artificial systems in which everything is centered on axioms, postulates, and definitions. 33

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This approach of Schopenhauer has been received very differently by mathematicians in their now two-hundred-year history of reception. One can speak of three periods in the history of reception: (1) The assessments in the years between 1820 and 1880 are quite positive: Diesterweg, Kosack, Erdmann et al. received Schopenhauer’s philosophy of mathematics very favorably. (2) From the 1890s onwards, an almost abruptly negative and disparaging evaluation set in, driven especially by Weierstrass students and followers: Leonhard, Pringsheim, Klein et al. either strongly criticized Schopenhauer or made fun of his naive approach. (3) With Brouwer and Reidemeister, a more positive reception began again for the first time, paving the way for a renewed, positive interest in Schopenhauer’s philosophy of geometry from the 1990s onwards (Lemanski 2021, chap. 2.3). Since the middle of the 20th century, there have been isolated discussions of Schopenhauer’s philosophy of mathematics. In the history of Schopenhauer’s philosophy of mathematics, Schopenhauer’s fundamental intuitionist critique of logico-formalist programs has repeatedly been misunderstood: Several interpreters have denied Schopenhauer all knowledge of mathematics or have regarded him as an enemy of mathematics. However, one must differentiate more precisely here: After all, Schopenhauer does not criticize formalistic approaches in all areas. He knows that not every mathematical operation requires intuition. However, when it comes to the philosophical question of the ultimate justification of mathematics, non-intuitionistic programs always seem to run into justification problems, since they want to explain reason with reason, which cannot work for many reasons. In the lectures in particular, this is one of Schopenhauer’s main arguments, which he transfers from logic to mathematics. But this argument is also an expression of a well-considered theory of rationality.

2.4.3  Current topics in research Since the middle of the 20th century, Schopenhauer’s philosophy of mathematics has experienced renewed interest, which, however, often quickly collapses again. Many interpreters often pick up individual aspects of Schopenhauer’s texts in order to interpret them philosophically. Only in recent years have researchers who have a more sustained interest in individual themes of Schopenhauer’s philosophy of mathematics been found. In the following, only a few points that have been increasingly discussed in recent years are presented: (1) Mathematics didactics: An important point concerns not only the philosophical but also the didactic foundation of mathematics. Even if Schopenhauer’s theory is philosophically regarded as naïve, it may provide many didactic insights for this very reason. After all, the intuition-based nature of teaching mathematics has been increasingly practiced since the 1970s. (2) History of mathematics: Schopenhauer’s philosophy of mathematics is historically a hinged work since it combines elements of Leibnizian with Kantian theory, continues the insights of his teachers Schweins and Thibaut, and later also takes up aspects of the English-language debate (cf. Beziau 1993, Segala 2020, Lemanski 2021). (3) Intuitionism: The extent to which Schopenhauer’s theory also influenced the intuitionism of the early 20th century has not been intensively discussed to date. Some points seem to be systematically in obvious agreement with modern intuitionism, but here too many questions remain unresolved (cf. Koetsier 2005). 34

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(4) Diagrams: As in logic, the philosophy of mathematics is also based on visualizations. Schopenhauer offers an ideal basis for discussing current topics in the field of visual reasoning in mathematics. These topics mainly concern ‘observational advantages’ and shortcomings of diagrams (cf. Bevan 2020). (5) The problem of the mathematical grounding: Schopenhauer’s philosophy of mathematics is connected to the following questions: Can mathematics be based in its foundations on intuition or must this intuition be justifiably regarded as naïve? Are mathematically educated philosophers at all able to think through the intuitive position without prejudice or does the practiced view of the complex problems of mathematics already block the perspective of the essential? (cf. Costanzo 2020)

2.5  Schopenhauer’s Theory of Rationality and its Philosophical Significance The importance of Schopenhauer’s logic for the interpretation of his representationalist philosophy can already be seen in the subject, aim and method of the WWR, which is also repeated almost verbatim in the lectures (cf. Schopenhauer 1913, 550f.). Following Francis Bacon, Schopenhauer defines it as follows: The present philosophy at least is not remotely concerned with where the world came from or what it is for, but only with what it is. […] But such cognition is intuitive, concrete cognition: philosophy’s task is to reproduce this in the abstract […]. Accordingly, philosophy must be an abstract statement of the essence of the entire world, of the whole as well of all its parts. […] Philosophy will therefore be a collection of very universal judgements that have their cognitive ground directly in the world itself in its entirety, without excluding anything, in other words, in everything that is to be found in human consciousness; philosophy will be a complete recapitulation, a reflection, as it were, of the world, in abstract concepts. (SW 2:98–9/WWR 1:108–9) In the context of this selection of texts, there are several other passages, all of which are characterized by the fact that they revisit certain formulations that address the object, goals, and methods of Schopenhauer’s philosophy. The object of Schopenhauer’s philosophy is nothing less than the world. This is already announced in the title of the main work: it is about the world, which is analyzed either from the perspective of representation or of the will. In this context, the world means the diversity of what is intuitively or intellectually given. It is particularly important to note that Schopenhauer, as in the above quotation, emphasizes the quantity and multiplicity of the given. Thus, the world is not only to be understood as a universal concept but also acquires the quantitative connotation of expressing or representing a sum of particulars (cf. Lemanski 2021, chap. 1). Schopenhauer’s philosophy aims to conceive this diversity of the world as a whole in conceptual form. This is what one could call a representationalist approach. Philosophy represents in a conceptual form, precisely that which is phenomenally and concretely already given. But it does not do this without reason: with the repetition of the intuitive given world in the abstract concepts of philosophy, the object is ‘handing them over to knowledge’ (SW 2:98/WWR 1:109). Philosophy thus becomes a science, which in turn has the task of making, collecting, and preserving true judgments about certain subject 35

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matter. In the canon of sciences, philosophy has the task of coming to grips with the totality and at the same time skeptically questioning everything as a problem. But how does philosophy succeed in elevating the multiplicity of phenomena to the generality of knowledge? The method of Schopenhauer’s philosophy is logic. This, too, is already clear from the above quotation: philosophy makes use of intuition and then conceptual abstraction to represent the intuitive given in abstract concepts. This method of abstraction reduces the complexity of the world to a ‘collection of very universal judgements’. This method makes it obvious what an important role a theory of concepts and judgments must play in Schopenhauer’s philosophy since it is only this theory that can explain how philosophy as science can start from its object and finally reach its goal. The empirical-representationalist objective coined by Bacon is thus given a logical-rationalist method. That Schopenhauer’s entire system can be structured with the help of logic is made clear, for example, by the partition diagram in Figure 2.12, which is divided according to the principles of Figure 2.6 (cf. Demey et al. 2021). The circle represents the world, which is divided into will and representation in a contradictory way: either one can understand the world as representation (as in Books 1 and 3 of WWR 1) or as will (as in Books 2 and 4). Representation is again divided into understanding and reason, reason in turn, for example, into language, knowledge, and practical reason. If one were to extend Figure 2.10, one could now also subdivide language again into logic and eristic or knowledge into the sciences such as philosophy, mathematics, etc. Thus, one can continue this principle of division until one has divided Schopenhauer’s entire system from the most abstract concept of the world to the most concrete. Logic can now be divided into concepts, judgments, and inferences, and each of these concepts can be further divided. Thus, one can continue this principle of division until one has divided Schopenhauer’s representationalist system from the most abstract concept of the world to the most concrete with the help of logic and rationality. Logic thus becomes on the one hand a component of the representationalist system, but also the organizing principle of it on the other.

Causality Time

Space

Language

Representaon Understanding

Reason

THE WORLD Will

Figure 2.12   

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Science

Praccal Reason

Schopenhauer’s Representationalist Theory of Rationality

However, Schopenhauer hardly dealt with the judgments and inferences of logic in his published writings. On several occasions, this was seen as a shortcoming by critics, and not infrequently Schopenhauer was even labeled an enemy of logic because of his sparse explanations. Schopenhauer’s silence about logic in his published writings, however, is itself methodical and stems from a dictum that was prominently advocated in the Cartesian school: every human being has already mastered logic intuitively and thus not every human being needs to learn it as an academic discipline. The resulting discrepancy between academic and popular philosophy then becomes particularly evident in the lectures. These lectures, which are no longer aimed at the general public but at (future) professional philosophers, now have the task of expanding and presenting in-depth the theoretical methods that were left out of the published writings. From today’s perspective, Schopenhauer thus did his philosophy a disservice, because, after all, philosophical writings are primarily read and judged by professional philosophers. However, Schopenhauer saw things differently, as can be seen, for example, in WWR 1 §58: After the completion of the Enlightenment and at the end of the French Revolution, he now presented his writings, in his opinion, to those “who have acquired all the culture of a mature age.” (SW 2:320/WWR 1:298) In retrospect, this optimism of Schopenhauer is on the one hand hair-raising, but on the other hand, it also explains why Schopenhauer withheld his logic from the general public. Like Hegel, Schopenhauer had to give lectures on logic. At that time, logic was still a so-called “Fuchskolleg” (fox course), that is, the course that young foxes, i.e., students, had to complete. Hegel made a virtue out of the necessity of having to offer lectures on logic: he overloaded this logic lecture with his entire philosophy and then published it. Schopenhauer, too, tried to combine his lecture, which was often announced as logic, with his philosophy. If he had also published it, as Hegel did, we might have had a different picture of Schopenhauer’s theory of rationality today long ago. However, the fact that Schopenhauer not only adhered to the sharp separation of popular-general philosophy and specific subject philosophy throughout his life but also tightened it after the end of his academic career, and also prevented reception of his writings in the academic philosophy of the 20th century, which was characterized more by rationalism than representationalism. As this chapter has shown, current research offers numerous opportunities to explore Schopenhauer’s theory of rationality further, to think independently or to apply it to current fields of research. It is thus up to future generations of researchers to either creatively put Schopenhauer’s logic into service for their fields of research and make it fruitful for their philosophical interpretations, or to relegate the lectures to mothballs as a whimsical relic of an outdated syllogistic with strange drawings.

2.6 Acknowledgments The paper was supported by the project “History of Logic Diagrams in Kantianism’ (Thyssen-Stiftung). I thank the editors for their careful comments.

Bibliography Bevan, Michael (2020) ‘Schopenhauer on Diagrammatic Proof’, in Lemanski, J. (ed.) Language, Logic, and Mathematics in Schopenhauer. Basel: Birkhäuser, pp. 305–315. Béziau, J.Y. (1993). La critique schopenhauerienne de l'usage de la logique en mathématiques, O que nos faz pensar 5(07), pp. 81–88.

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Jens Lemanski Béziau, Jean-Yves (2020) ‘Metalogic, Schopenhauer and Universal Logic’, in Lemanski, J. (ed.) Language, Logic, and Mathematics in Schopenhauer. Basel: Birkhäuser, pp. 207–257. Birnbacher, Dieter (2018) ‘Schopenhauer und die Tradition der Sprachkritik’, Schopenhauer-Jahrbuch 99, pp. 37–56. Chichi, G.M. (2002) ‘Die Schopenhauersche Eristik: Ein Blick auf ihr Aristotelisches Erbe’, Schopenhauer-Jahrbuch 83, pp. 163–183. Costanzo, Jason (2020) ‘Schopenhauer on Intuition and Proof in Mathematics’, in Lemanski, J. (ed.) Language, Logic, and Mathematics in Schopenhauer. Basel: Birkhäuser, pp. 287–305. Demey, Lorenz (2020) ‘From Euler Diagrams in Schopenhauer to Aristotelian Diagrams in Logical Geometry’, in Lemanski, J. (ed.) Language, Logic, and Mathematics in Schopenhauer. Basel: Birkhäuser, pp. 181–207. Demey, Lorenz and Jens Lemanski (2021) ‘Schopenhauer's Partition Diagrams and Logical Geometry’, in Stapelton, G. et al. (eds.) Diagrammatic Representation and Inference. 12th international Conference, Diagrams 2021, September 28–30 2021. Proceedings. Berlin et al., pp. 149–165. Dobrzański, Michał (2017) Begriff und Methode bei Arthur Schopenhauer. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Dobrzański, Michał (2020) ‘Problems in Reconstructing Schopenhauer’s Theory of Meaning: With Reference to his Influence on Wittgenstein’, in Lemanski, J. (ed.) Language, Logic, and Mathematics in Schopenhauer. Basel: Birkhäuser, pp. 25–57. Dobrzański, Michał and Jens Lemanski (2020) ‘Reism, Concretism, and Schopenhauer Diagrams’, Studia Humana 9(3/4), pp. 104–119. Dümig, Sascha (2020) ‘The World as Will and I-Language. Schopenhauer’s Philosophy as Precursor of Cognitive Sciences’, in Lemanski, J. (ed.) Language, Logic, and Mathematics in Schopenhauer. Basel: Birkhäuser, pp. 85–95. Hallich, Oliver (2008) Die Rationalität der Moral: Eine sprachanalytische Grundlegung der Ethik. Paderborn: mentis. Heinemann, Anna-Sophie (2020) ‘Schopenhauer and the Equational Form of Predication’, in Lemanski, J. (ed.) Language, Logic, and Mathematics in Schopenhauer. Basel: Birkhäuser, pp. 165–181. Koetsier, Teun (2005) ‘Arthur Schopenhauer and L. E. J. Brouwer: A Comparison’, in Bergmans, L. and Koetsier, T. (eds.) Mathematics and the Divine. A Historical Study. Amsterdam: Elsevier, pp. pp. 571–595. Koßler, Matthias (2020) ‘Language as an “Indispensable Tool and Organ” of Reason: Intuition, Concept and Word in Schopenhauer’, in Lemanski, J. (ed.) Language, Logic, and Mathematics in Schopenhauer. Basel: Birkhäuser, pp. 15–25. Lemanski, Jens (2021) World and Logic. London: Colleague Publications. Lemanski, Jens (2021b) ‘Discourse Ethics and Eristic’, Polish Journal of Aesthetics 62, pp. 151–162. Lemanski, Jens (2023) ‘Logic Diagrams as Argument Maps in Eristic Dialectics’, Argumentation 37, pp. 69–89. Moktefi, Amirouche (2020) ‘Schopenhauer’s Eulerian Diagrams’, in Lemanski, J. (ed.) Language, Logic, and Mathematics in Schopenhauer. Basel: Birkhäuser, pp. 111–129. Moktefi, Amirouche and Jens Lemanski (2018) ‘Making Sense of Schopenhauer’s Diagram of Good and Evil’, in Chapman, P. et al. (eds.) Diagrammatic Representation and Inference. 10th international Conference, Diagrams 2018, Edinburgh, UK, June 18–22, 2018. Proceedings. Berlin et al., pp. 721–724. Pluder, Valentin (2020) ‘Schopenhauer’s Logic in its Historical Context’, in Lemanski, J. (ed.) Language, Logic, and Mathematics in Schopenhauer. Basel: Birkhäuser, pp. 129–143. Quatrini, Myriam (2013), “Une lecture ludique des stratagemes de Schopenhauer,” Influxus 2013. URL: http://www​.influxus​.eu​/article615​.html. Regehly, Thomas (2018) ‘Die Berliner Vorlesungen: Schopenhauer als Dozent’, in Schubbe, D. and Koßler, M. (eds.) Schopenhauer-Handbuch: Leben – Werk – Wirkung. 2nd ed. Stuttgart: Metzler, Stuttgar, pp. 169–179. Schopenhauer, A. (1913) Philosophische Vorlesungen, Vol. I. Ed by F. Mockrauer. (= Sämtliche Werke. Ed. by P. Deussen, Vol. 9). München. Schubbe, Daniel and Jens Lemanski (2019) ‘Problems and Interpretations of Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation’, Voluntas – Revista Internacional de Filosofia 10(1), pp. 199–210.

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Schopenhauer’s Representationalist Theory of Rationality Schüler, Hubert Martin and Jen Lemanski (2020) ‘Arthur Schopenhauer on Naturalness’, in Lemanski, J. (ed.) Language, Logic, and Mathematics in Schopenhauer. Basel: Birkhäuser, pp. 145–165. Schumann, Gunnar (2020) ‘A Comment on Lemanski’s “Concept Diagrams and the Context Principle”’, in Lemanski, J. (ed.) Language, Logic, and Mathematics in Schopenhauer. Basel: Birkhäuser, pp. 73–85. Segala, Marco (2020) ‘Schopenhauer and the Mathematical Intuition as the Foundation of Geometry’, in Lemanski, J. (ed.) Language, Logic, and Mathematics in Schopenhauer. Basel: Birkhäuser, pp. 261–287. Struck, Gerhard (2005), ‘Eristik für Juristen. Konzeptuelle Überlegungen und praktische Beispiele’, in Lerch, Kent D. (ed.) Die Sprache des Rechts. Vol. 2: Recht verhandeln. Argumentieren, Begründen und Entscheiden im Diskurs des Rechts. Berlin: de Gruyter, pp. 521–549. Xhignesse, Michel-Antoine (2020) ‘Schopenhauer’s Perceptive Invective’, in Lemanski, J. (ed.) Language, Logic, and Mathematics in Schopenhauer. Basel: Birkhäuser, pp. 95–107.

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3 SCHOPENHAUER’S METAPHYSICAL TWO-ASPECT ACCOUNT OF THE WORLD AND THE WILL TO LIFE Manja Kisner 3.1 Introduction In the appendix chapter ‘Critique of the Kantian Philosophy’ of his main work The World as Will and Representation (vol. 1, 1818/19), Schopenhauer acknowledges the great influence of Kant on his philosophical system. There is hardly a subject in his system that was not influenced by Kant in one way or another. According to Schopenhauer himself, this is even truer of his metaphysics of the will, which he develops based on Kant’s transcendental philosophy. This influence has been discussed exhaustively in the literature, and my intention here is not to address Schopenhauer’s reception of Kant in detail.1 I will instead focus on the importance of the Kantian distinction between things in themselves and appearances for Schopenhauer’s twofold account of the world as will and representation. Using the terminology of the contemporary Kant scholarship, I will argue that Schopenhauer develops an early metaphysical one-world and two-aspect interpretation of Kant, which serves as a basis for his own twofold account of the world.2 Schopenhauer interprets the Kantian thing in itself as will and describes it as the inner essence of everything – inorganic as well as organic nature. In this view, he clearly departs from Kant’s understanding of the thing in itself. The central questions that arise with regard to Schopenhauer’s notion of the will are how we can gain access to this allegedly metaphysical domain and what the characteristics of his will are. According to the interpretation that I develop here, Schopenhauer discusses two paths that lead us to his metaphysics of the will. The first is an introspective method, which I call Schopenhauer’s ‘philosophical psychology’ because it is based on the immediate, nonconceptual acquaintance with the will through feelings of pleasure and displeasure. By contrast, the second path, which I term ‘philosophical physiology’, follows the realisticobjective method of the empirical sciences. The latter also point – although in an entirely different way as the introspective psychological approach – to the necessity of an underlying metaphysical domain, even though they are not able to establish immediate access to the will on their own. Schopenhauer mentions the term ‘philosophical physiology’ in his essay On Will in Nature (1. ed. 1836, 2. ed. 1854), in which he tries to convince his readers that the empirical sciences of his time corroborate his metaphysics of the will. For this purpose, 40

DOI: 10.4324/9781003048992-5

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he discusses not only contemporaneous physiology but also other scientific disciplines. However, I want to show that it is the physiological account that is especially revealing for understanding his principle of the will as the will to life, a phrase that he uses in his main work as well as in the essay On Will in Nature. By looking at Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of the will from psychological and physiological perspectives, I will emphasize the importance of Kant for Schopenhauer’s twoaspect account of the world and show that with his understanding of the will as the will to life, Schopenhauer goes well beyond Kant’s transcendental philosophy. This testifies to the impact that life sciences had on his notion of the will.

3.2  Schopenhauer’s Two-aspect Interpretation of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism Kant’s account of transcendental idealism plays a crucial role in Schopenhauer’s philosophical system. In the appendix to The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer recognizes Kant’s distinction between things in themselves and appearances as ‘Kant’s greatest merit’ (SW 2:494/WWR 1:444) and argues that his own system follows Kant in this regard. This does not mean, however, that Schopenhauer agrees with Kant’s distinction on every point: he approves of Kant’s results, namely that we cognize only objects as appearances and not as things in themselves, but he criticizes the way that Kant introduced the thing in itself into his philosophy. Kant was not yet able to realize that appearances are the world as representation and that the thing in itself is the world as will (SW 2:499/WWR 1:448). Whereas Kant’s transcendental idealism and the interpretation of the thing in itself remain controversial in the Kant scholarship to this day, Schopenhauer proudly portrays himself as a defender of transcendental idealism. Thereby, he promotes a specifically metaphysical two-aspect interpretation of the distinction between things in themselves and appearances in his system. To further substantiate this reading of Schopenhauer, I will first briefly compare it with modern metaphysical two-aspect interpretations of Kant, from which I have borrowed this ‘two-aspect’ terminology. In Kant scholarship, we can roughly distinguish between two different kinds of twoaspect interpretations of Kant: metaphysical and methodological two-aspect interpretations.3 Methodological interpretations are most prominently represented by Prauss (1974) and Allison (1983). These readings do not focus on the question of what kinds of objects are appearances and things in themselves but on the methodological contrast ‘between two ways in which such objects can be considered in a philosophical reflection on the conditions of their cognition’ (Allison 2006: 1). Therefore, the focus of the methodological readings are epistemological and not metaphysical concerns. What Schopenhauer’s account offers is, however, not a methodological but rather a metaphysical reading of Kant that comes closer to the contemporary metaphysical two-aspect interpretations. Different versions of metaphysical two-aspect interpretations of Kant agree that Kant’s things in themselves and appearances do not designate two different kinds of objects but two different aspects of the same kind of objects. These interpretations, hence, offer a one-world account of Kant’s transcendental idealism, as Rae Langton’s and Lucy Allais’ metaphysical readings show. In her work Kantian Humility: Our Ignorance of Things in Themselves (1998), Langton poses an old question: ‘Are there two worlds, or one world considered two ways? Are appearance and thing in itself the very same? Kant seems ambivalent’ (Langton 1998: 12). In her proposal, Langton rejects a two-world interpretation and argues for a one-world 41

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account, which presumes that things in themselves have to be understood as a metaphysical substratum of appearances. Accordingly, for Kant, there must only be one set of things, but these things have different kinds of properties, either intrinsic or relational (Langton 1998: 13). As a result, the Kantian distinction between appearances and the things in themselves has both metaphysical and epistemological significance, although it does not allow for a two-world reading but only for a two-aspect interpretation: ‘A distinction between two sets of properties is a metaphysical distinction, but this one has epistemological significance’ (Langton 1998: 13). According to Langton, we can only cognize the relational properties of things, not their intrinsic properties; therefore, Kant claims that we can have no knowledge of things as they are in themselves, that is, no insight into the intrinsic nature of things. Lucy Allais offers another metaphysical interpretation of Kant, seeing him ‘as holding that the things of which we have knowledge have a way they are in themselves that is not cognizable by us, and that the appearances of these things are genuinely mind-dependent, while not existing merely in the mind’ (Allais 2015: 9). As the title of her book Manifest Reality: Kant’s Idealism and His Realism (2015) indicates, her focus is on the distinction between the properties of things that are manifestable and those that are not. Accordingly, appearances describe things that ‘are essentially perceptible or essentially manifestable’ (Allais 2015: 13). Thus, we can only cognize things as appearances, not things in themselves. One important consequence of her interpretation is that even though empirical reality is restricted to what can be presented to consciousness, this does not mean that what is presented only exists in our minds. Things also have an ontological reality, but what we can perceive is only their manifestable properties. Therefore, this account also relies on the assumption that there is only one set of objects but with different kinds of properties. For us as cognizant beings, the distinction between the different properties of objects is crucial and constitutes Kant’s transcendental idealism.4 In a similar vein as these recent metaphysical accounts, Schopenhauer also suggests a two-aspect interpretation of Kant’s transcendental idealism and adopts it for his own system. Although he admits that this reading is not yet fully explicit in Kant’s thought, he is convinced that his interpretation offers a consistent further development of Kant’s account.5 In the rest of the chapter, my task will be to further substantiate my thesis regarding Schopenhauer’s two-aspect view; here, I will simply summarize the main features of Schopenhauer’s twofold view of the world. The first part of Schopenhauer’s system – the world as representation – focuses on objects as they appear to us, a perspective that we have as rational and cognizant subjects. If the world only had this representational side, it would be without any real foundation, a mere ‘insubstantial dream or a ghostly phantasm’ (SW 2:118/WWR 1:123). However, Schopenhauer does not limit his account to the representational side; instead, he argues that we also have a completely different kind of access to the world – a non-representational one, which reveals the inner essence of the world. For this second perspective, another kind of knowledge is needed, namely the immediate knowledge of the will. Our immediate acquaintance with our will enables us to look at the world from another perspective and perceive it as will. Schopenhauer does not develop a two-world view but argues that there are two different sides from which we can describe one and the same world. This is very close to what modern metaphysical two-aspect interpretations point out. Like Allais, Schopenhauer conceives of the world of representations as manifestations of the will. This means that the will constitutes the inner essence of the world and, as such, has primacy over representations. In 42

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this sense, it gives the world its real foundation and ontological basis. Representations, by contrast, reflect only the manifestable, apparent side of the world, which is not independent of the world as will. As a result, Schopenhauer thinks that it is appropriate to interpret the will as the Kantian thing in itself. Although there are many differences in the details between contemporary metaphysical two-aspect views and that of Schopenhauer, the main features of these accounts are similar. But in comparison with later interpretations of Kant, Schopenhauer’s two-aspect account should not be understood as an explicit interpretation of what Kant said or meant to say. On the contrary, Schopenhauer does not try to convince the reader that he sticks to the letter of Kant’s philosophy – which would be a much more difficult and problematic endeavor – but emphasizes that he proposes the most plausible account of transcendental idealism inspired by Kant. In many respects, his system goes far beyond Kant’s account.

3.3  Schopenhauer’s Philosophical Psychology and the Immediate Knowledge of the Will After presenting a preliminary outline of Schopenhauer’s philosophical system as a metaphysical two-aspect account, I will focus in the next sections on how Schopenhauer understands the concept of will. In my view, two perspectives are useful in this regard. The first consists in looking at Schopenhauer’s philosophical psychology – as I suggest calling his approach in Book II of the main work – which explores our immediate acquaintance with the will. Second, I turn to its counterpart, Schopenhauer’s philosophical physiology, which looks at the will from another, external perspective but only to eventually bring us to the same conclusions. Already, the first step towards immediate acquaintance with the will is based on a twoaspect view: in this case, our two-aspect view of ourselves as individuals rooted in the world.6 As individuals, we experience ourselves from two perspectives, outer and inner. Schopenhauer explains this twofold view by focusing on the two functions of our bodies: The body is given in two entirely different ways to the subject of cognition, who emerges as an individual only through his identity with it: in the first place it is given as a representation in intuition by the understanding, as an object among objects and liable to the same laws; but at the same time the body is also given in an entirely different way, namely as something immediately familiar to everyone, something designated by the word will. Every true act of his will is immediately and inevitably a movement of his body as well: he cannot truly will an act without simultaneously perceiving it as a motion of the body. (SW 2:119/WWR 1:124) As we see in this quote, we can look at bodies, including ours, from the outside. In this case, we perceive our body as a representation. This external approach to the body is possible as long as we are also the subjects of cognition and possess the faculties that enable cognition, i.e., understanding and intuition. From this perspective, we perceive our body in the same way that we perceive all other bodies and all other objects. As Schopenhauer claims, our body is just an object among objects. At the same time, however, our own body – and only our own body – is given to us in a way that is entirely different from all other objects, namely as something immediately familiar to each of us, from the inside. We have a non43

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conceptual and immediate knowledge of our bodies, which is not based on understanding or intuition.7 What we experience through the body in this immediate way is the will. Schopenhauer asserts the identity of the will and the body: the will describes what we are, our inner essence, but also manifests itself, appears in the world; in this case, we can speak of the body as an object among other objects. Then, we perceive the body as a representation. More specifically, Schopenhauer claims that ‘bodily movements are nothing other than the visible manifestation of particular acts of will; they coincide perfectly and immediately with the acts of will as one and the same thing’ (SW 2:126/WWR 1:130–31). Through the identity between the will and the body, the two-aspect one-world view is expressed: An act of the will and an act of the body are not two different states cognized objectively, linked together in a causal chain, they do not stand in a relation of cause and effect; they are one and the same thing, only given in two entirely different ways: in one case immediately and in the other case to the understanding in intuition. An action of the body is nothing but an objectified act of will, i.e. an act of will that has entered intuition. (SW 2:119/WWR 1:124–25) Thus, we see that Schopenhauer distinguishes between the subjective perspective, which is based on our introspective, immediate acquaintance with our will, and the objective perspective, which is an objectification of the will. Continuing with the example of the body, this signifies that the body is an objectified act of the will. In this regard, it is meaningful that Schopenhauer rejects the causal link between the will and the body. In two-world views, the connection between the two different entities is possible in causal terms; Schopenhauer, for his part, argues explicitly against a causal connection and in favor of identity. The twofold account of our selves therefore paves the way for Schopenhauer’s two-aspect view of the world as will and representation. In this picture, however, the will characterizes the metaphysical level, which is ontologically primary, and the world as representation is therefore only secondary, the expression of the will. Consequently, the world as representation is not autonomous and independent. Why describe Schopenhauer’s immediate acquaintance with the will as philosophical psychology? Schopenhauer speaks of feelings, pain and pleasure to further expound on our immediate acquaintance with the will. More specifically, he claims that we have an immediate experience of the affections of the will. For him, these affections represent different feelings, of pain as well as pleasure. Our experience of feelings differs fundamentally from our knowledge of representations. Therefore, Schopenhauer considers it crucial to distinguish between feelings and representations: ‘it is quite wrong to call pain and pleasure representations: they are nothing of the sort, but rather immediate affections of the will’ (SW 2:120/WWR 1:125). Thus, it is through pleasure or displeasure that we are immediately aware of the will. The will is the most immediate thing in our consciousness. Schopenhauer asserts that ‘every affect immediately agitates the body and its inner workings and disturbs the course of its vital functions’ (SW 2:121/WWR 1:126). If nothing hinders the will, we experience the feeling of pleasure or comfort. Conversely, when something hinders the will, we experience pain. What Schopenhauer describes is then a kind of psychology of the will, which is not based on reason or understanding but on feelings. As a result, his metaphysics of the will is not super-sensible and transcendent but immanent and arises out of our elementary bodily 44

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and emotional needs. This psychological account is the first and most fundamental step on the path toward his metaphysics of the will.

3.4  Schopenhauer’s Philosophical Physiology and the Will in Nature So far, I have focused on Schopenhauer’s first-person standpoint and our individual experience of the will. Nonetheless, even in the first volume of his main work, Schopenhauer does not stop there; he thinks that we are also entitled to assume that the will is the essence of everything in nature. Therefore, he extends his account of the will not only to our fellow humans or animals but also to organic and inorganic nature. More specifically, according to his understanding, the will is the inner driving force of everything: The will is the innermost, the kernel of every individual thing and likewise of the whole: it appears in every blind operation of a force of nature: it also appears in deliberative human action; these differ from each other only in the grade of their appearing, not in the essence of what appears. (SW 2:131/WWR 1:135) The method he uses to extend the will to everything is based on analogy because he is well aware that he cannot logically or philosophically prove or deduce his thesis.8 Rather, his argumentation relies on an anthropomorphic approach, about which he is completely open: ‘we must learn to understand nature though ourselves, and not the other way around, understanding ourselves through nature’ (SW 3:219/WWR 2:207). Therefore, the starting point of his metaphysics of the will is our own intimate experience of the will; without it, we would be unable to say anything about the essence of the world. Thanks to this intimate experience, Schopenhauer can also proceed to the next level and identify the will with the thing in itself (SW 2:131/WWR 1:135). Thus, he adopts the Kantian concept of the thing in itself and gives it a new meaning: although Schopenhauer does not argue that we have direct knowledge of the will as the principle of everything – it is only through analogy with our own experience that we can come to this conclusion – the thing in itself as will is according to Schopenhauer not as completely unknowable to us as it was to Kant. As we can see, analogy is the key to Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of the will. Nonetheless, in the first volume of his main work already – and in other writings, in particular his later essay On Will in Nature – Schopenhauer also attempts to further substantiate his metaphysical approach from an empirical standpoint. In the abovementioned essay, Schopenhauer argues that natural sciences corroborate his metaphysics of the will. Hence, his immediate approach is not the only one that points to the metaphysics of the will. Moreover, in this work, he coins an interesting term, ‘philosophical physiology’, to point to the symbiotic relation between physiological research, which was on the rise at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries, and his metaphysical account.9 What does Schopenhauer understand by this term, and why is it relevant to his metaphysics of the will? First, Schopenhauer’s philosophical physiology is not materialistic. On the contrary, he rejects ‘a crass and stupid materialism of which the primary offence is not the moral bestiality of the ultimate results, but the incredible ignorance of first principles’ (SW 4:X/WN 305). He does not think that natural sciences in general, and physiology in particular, can reach the first principles by themselves. This means that nature cannot be sufficiently explained only by taking into account the principles of physics, chemistry, or physiology. As the good 45

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Kantian he believes he is, he opposes a ‘childishly naïve realism’ and takes metaphysics as the basis for natural sciences. At the same time, however, philosophical physiology should not succumb to the failures of traditional metaphysics. In this respect, Schopenhauer follows the Kantian critique of dogmatic metaphysics and turns against speculative theology as well as rational psychology. More specifically, he ascribes a pivotal role to Kant in the shift of focus from traditional to critical metaphysics and argues that Kant’s accomplishments were of great importance not only to philosophy but also to the life sciences and physiology: The three assumptions that Kant criticized in the ‘Transcendental Dialectic’ under the name of ideas of reason, and so excluded from his transcendental philosophy, have always hindered profound insight into nature until this great man brought about a complete transformation of philosophy. One such hindrance to the subject we are presently considering was the so-called rational idea of the soul, this metaphysical entity in whose absolute simplicity ‘cognizing’ and ‘willing’ were bound and fused into an eternally inseparable unity. So long as this was present, there could be no philosophical physiology, all the more since real, purely passive matter necessarily had to be posited along with it, as its correlate, as the substance of the body, as a selfexisting being, a thing in itself. (SW 4:18–9/WN 338–39) This quote shows that it is the traditional idea of the rational soul that hindered the possibility of philosophical physiology and was successfully rejected by Kant. As previously mentioned, for Schopenhauer, the Kantian distinction between knowable appearances and the unknowable thing in itself is crucial. Kant limited knowledge to appearances, excluding things in themselves; as a result, a dogmatic metaphysical knowledge of rational ideas is not possible. So far, Schopenhauer agrees with Kant. But as his approach in Book II of his main work illustrates, at the same time, he goes beyond Kant, arguing that we have a special acquaintance with the will, which, however, cannot be equated with a rational knowledge of the thing in itself. In this sense, Kant’s critique of metaphysics was, as Schopenhauer mentions in the quote above, crucial for rejecting rational ideas, and the prerequisite for philosophical physiology. Nevertheless, Schopenhauer’s interpretation of the metaphysics of the will goes beyond Kant, and his idea of philosophical physiology is something that Kant does not and would not address within the framework of transcendental idealism. The very specific Schopenhauerian interpretation of the thing in itself is the reason why he can speak of a point of contact between his metaphysics and empirical research. When Schopenhauer interprets the thing in itself as ‘the only truly real thing, the only original and metaphysical thing in a world where everything else is only appearance, i.e., mere representation’ (SW 4:2/WN 324), he already gives his notion of the will a realistic-objective meaning. As the ‘substratum of all appearances and hence of all nature’ (SW 4:2/WN 324), the will is the last point of explanation that empirical research cannot reach; it can, however, point to the will as the driving force of everything.10 In this way, the point of contact between different fields – scientific and metaphysical – is established. At the same time, Schopenhauer emphasizes that all objects as appearances are only the visible manifestation or objecthood of the will (SW 2:131/WWR 1:135). This, again, makes it clear that Schopenhauer really argues for a metaphysical one-world interpretation, albeit one in which the thing in itself cannot 46

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be conceived as something intelligible or super-sensible but rather as the non-rational, inner core of everything. As a result, the empirical sciences and philosophical physiology can observe and study these manifestations of the will. As long as metaphysics was understood in a traditional sense, philosophers and scientists were unable to combine their perspectives; Schopenhauer believes that overcoming the failures of the past is the achievement of his philosophy. More specifically, he contends that before Kant’s philosophy, traditional metaphysical views hindered not only philosophical progress but also the breakthrough in empirical sciences. To substantiate this, he points to the example of Georg Ernst Stahl – an influential chemist and physiologist at the beginning of the 18th century – who remained under the influence of traditional metaphysics and the idea of the rational soul. In Schopenhauer’s interpretation of his views, Stahl saw in the soul the force that directs and carries out the inner functions of organisms. Thus, the soul serves as the explanatory ground for bodily movements and, consequently, cognitive phenomena are seen as the ground for organic life. Schopenhauer rejects this idea as contradictory and untenable because the metaphysical domain cannot be equated with cognitive and rational faculties. The will is independent of cognition and one of the most important features of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of the will is, hence, ‘the total separation of will from cognition’ (SW 4:19/WN 339).11 This separation is made clear by his psychological perspective, which emphasizes the feelings of pain and pleasure as rational faculties to explain our experience of the will. This shift of focus from rational ideas to the experience of the senses is crucial to a new approach to philosophy and the sciences, which Schopenhauer takes pride in being the first to stress explicitly. Nonetheless, at the same time, he thinks that experimental research can never produce this new insight on its own and with its own means; instead, the experience of the will from the first-person standpoint is necessary here as well, as addressed in the last section: But physiologists would never have arrived at the truth that the final element in the ascending causal series is will by way of their experimental research and hypotheses; rather they recognize it in a completely different way: the solution to the riddle is whispered to them from outside their research, through the fortunate circumstance that in this case the researcher is at the same time himself the object of the research, and so experiences the secret of the inner process on this occasion; otherwise his explanation, just like the explanation for any other phenomenon, must come to a stop before an inscrutable power. (SW 4:27–8/WN 346) Here, Schopenhauer claims that researchers arrive at the truth about the inner essence of the world entirely differently from their other scientific theories and laws, namely through their own intimate experience of the will that they have as individuals and not as scientists. Why, then, can Schopenhauer claim that a point of contact between metaphysics and sciences is possible? Does this quote not show that these two domains differ essentially? Schopenhauer thinks that they describe two different standpoints but that empirical research can never explain its first principles. In physiology, one such principle is the life force (Lebenskraft) or formative drive (Bildungstrieb) that physiologists have postulated to describe the essential features of organic nature and living beings; however, they are not able to further explain these principles. Life forces or drives are only postulated to explain the strivings of organ47

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isms (their growth, tendency to preserve their lives, reproduction, etc.), but to Schopenhauer, these behaviors and characteristics are, in the end, only the manifestations of the will. Consequently, Schopenhauer turns the traditional hierarchies of the body and the intellect upside down: ‘Thus I first posit will as thing in itself, something completely original; second the body as its mere visibility, objectivation; and third, cognition as merely a function of a part of this body’ (SW 4:20/WN 340). Nevertheless, because Schopenhauer does not stop at the bodies and living beings but sees the will as the essence of everything in nature, of organic and inorganic nature, everything that happens in the world is only a manifestation of the primal will as the inner principle of everything. Philosophy cannot say much rationally about the will as the thing in itself; what Schopenhauer emphasizes is that we have completely different access to the will, non-rational and based on feelings and our own inner experience. As a result, for Schopenhauer, we can look at his metaphysics of the will from two perspectives: focusing on his philosophical psychology (the essential approach because the will is primary for Schopenhauer) or from the outside, by way of the realistic-objective method that empirical sciences and physiology offer. This second approach is not yet complete, but it also points to the necessity of metaphysics. Therefore, Schopenhauer believes that he has found a point of contact between philosophy and the sciences. Thus, it is once again clear that Schopenhauer’s account of the world as will and representation offers a metaphysical two-aspect theory, wherein the will as the thing in itself describes the eternal and indestructible principle of nature – the will in nature – which cannot function as an intelligible or super-sensible principle like the concept of the soul, and that the nature that we see is only a manifestation of this will. Hence, we can perceive the world in two different ways and from two perspectives.

3.5  Schopenhauer’s Will to Life In the previous section, we discussed Schopenhauer’s point of contact between philosophy and the natural sciences through the example of physiology. Since Schopenhauer defines the will as the inner essence of nature at large and not only of living beings, physiology is not the only discipline that leads us from an objective perspective to his metaphysics of the will. In the next chapters of On Will in Nature, Schopenhauer discusses other disciplines, from anatomy to physical astronomy, as well as popular but obscure topics such as animal magnetism. In this chapter, I will not discuss these other fields but keep to his perspective on philosophical physiology because I think that it presents all the main characteristics of Schopenhauer’s metaphysical two-aspect approach. There is another reason why I believe that Schopenhauer’s account of philosophical physiology must have a special place in the discussion of Schopenhauer’s philosophy. Schopenhauer opens his essay with physiology, but, most importantly, the reference to physiological research is also crucial for understanding Schopenhauer’s will as the will to life. More specifically, I argue that the physiological research of his times crucially influenced the conception of the will, namely as the will to life. To show this, I will again turn to the first and second volumes of his main work, in which he discusses the will to life in greater detail. I have emphasized that Schopenhauer conceives of the will as the thing in itself, and we can already see that according to his view, everything in nature is only a manifestation of the will. Schopenhauer cannot say much more than that the will is the inner driving force and essence of everything. Nevertheless, with the description of the will as the will to life, 48

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Schopenhauer brings in another characterization of the will that I will try to expand on further. How does Schopenhauer define the will to life, then? A very important claim in this regard is that ‘what the will wills is always life’: Regarded simply in itself, the will is just a blind and inexorable impulse, devoid of cognition; this is how we have seen it appear in inorganic and vegetative nature and their laws, as well as in the vegetative aspect of our own lives. With the emergence of the world as representation (which has developed to serve the will) the will obtains cognition of its willing and what it wills: namely, nothing other than this world, life, precisely as it exists. That is why we called the appearing world the mirror of the will, its objecthood: and since what the will wills is always life, precisely because life is nothing but the presentation of that willing for representation, it is a mere pleonasm and amounts to the same thing if, instead of simply saying ‘the will’, we say ‘the will to life’. (SW 2:323–4/WWR 1:301) Whereas in this quote it is not yet entirely clear if Schopenhauer uses the word ‘life’ to describe the visible world at large or rather in the usual sense, namely as restricted only to organic nature, in the second volume of The World as Will and Representation it becomes clear that what he has in mind is understanding nature as a process that strives toward life and organic existence. Here, Schopenhauer emphasizes very explicitly that the crucial characteristic of the will is its striving for life: every view of the world confirms and proves that the will to life, far from being an arbitrary hypostasis or even an empty phrase, is the only true expression of the world’s innermost essence. Everything strains and drives towards existence, towards organic existence if possible, i.e. towards life, and then towards the highest possible level of this: in animal nature it is obvious that will to life is the tonic note of its essence, its only immutable and unconditional property. (SW 3:399–400/WWR 2:365) This quote helps us to understand why Schopenhauer can, on the one hand, claim that the will is the essence of everything while thinking, on the other hand, that it is appropriate to call this will the will to life. Not all manifestations of the will take the form of life, but according to his view, everything in nature ‘strains and drives towards existence, towards organic existence if possible’. As a result, nature is not limited to inorganic nature, but the whole process and development of nature seem to aim to reach organic nature and take over the forms of organic life and living beings. This also explains why philosophical physiology holds such a prominent place in Schopenhauer’s account. But in this regard, we have to stress something else as well: Schopenhauer does not only use research in physiology, and the life sciences more generally, to corroborate his metaphysics of the will. Conversely, it is also important to mention that the life sciences exerted an important influence on Schopenhauer and his philosophical system.12 He uses biological terminology and the metaphor of life to describe his principle of the will. In this sense, he employs the language of the life sciences to characterize the metaphysical sphere, which goes beyond their scope. This does not mean that this biological terminology allows us to appropriately describe the will, but Schopenhauer employs this language to illustrate meta49

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phorically something that remains indescribable and, in its essence, eludes verbal description. This is exactly what he does when he uses the term ‘will to life’. We can observe this very well in his characterization of the will to life as striving: ‘striving is its [the will’s] only essence, and is not brought to an end by reaching any goal; it is therefore not capable of any ultimate satisfaction; obstacles can only detain it, while in itself it goes on to infinity’ (SW 2:364/WWR 1:335). The notion of striving (also tendency or driving force) was frequently used in the life sciences of the 18th century to describe the inner formative powers of organic life. Schopenhauer, however, uses this term not only to describe the nature of living beings but also in a more metaphorical sense, transferring it into the metaphysical realm, about which we cannot say much from cognitive and rational perspectives. Therefore, Schopenhauer’s biological terminology has to be interpreted, in the first place, in a metaphorical and analogical sense when used to characterize the will.

Notes 1 See my monograph Der Wille und das Ding an sich. Schopenhauers Willensmetaphysik in ihrem Bezug zu Kants kritischer Philosophie und dem nachkantischen Idealismus for a more detailed discussion of Kant’s influence on Schopenhauer (especially Kisner 2016a: 110–51 and 191-240). Moreover, recent studies on Schopenhauer’s reception of Kant include Welchman (2017) and Shapshay (2020). 2 For Schopenhauer’s two-aspect account I have already argued in Kisner (2016a: 138–42). In the present paper, I first summarize the results of that work and then expand (section 4 and 5) my analysis to Schopenhauer’s philosophical physiology and his notion of the will in nature and the will to life. 3 For a brief overview of different versions of two-aspect-interpretations see Rosefeldt (2007). 4 In Langton’s and Allais’ metaphysical interpretations of Kant the reference to Locke’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities plays an important role. In this, they take the same path as Schopenhauer, who interprets Kant’s distinction between things in themselves and appearances as expanding on Locke’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities: ‘Kant was led down this path by Locke (see Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, § 13, note 2). […] But this fairly obvious Lockean distinction stops at the surface of things and was only a youthful prelude, as it were, to the Kantian distinction. Kant started from an incomparably higher standpoint, and showed that what Locke had considered to be primary qualities, i.e. qualities of things in themselves, belong only to the way in which things appear in our faculty of apprehension; and this is the case precisely because we have a priori cognition of its conditions, space, time and causality. Thus, Locke took the thing in itself and subtracted the part that the sense organs play in appearance; but Kant subtracted the role of brain functions too (although not by that name), which gave infinitely greater meaning and a much more profound significance to the distinction between appearances and things in themselves’ (SW 2:495/WWR 1:444). 5 See SW 2:499/WWR 1:448: ‘Kant did not deduce the thing in itself properly but rather by means of an inconsistency, and he had to repent for this in the form of frequent and overwhelming attacks on this principal aspect of his doctrine. He did not directly recognize the will as the thing in itself, but he did take a huge, revolutionary step in the direction of this recognition, by demonstrating that the undeniable, moral meaning of human action is utterly different from and independent of the laws of appearance, and never explicable from these, but rather is something that touches directly on the thing in itself: this is the second main point of view with respect to his merit.’ 6 Schopenhauer’s account of immediate knowledge of the will I discuss in Kisner (2019: 105–24). In this paper, I emphasize the Fichtean background of Schopenhauer’s twofold account of individuals as cognizant and physical beings. Although the influence of Kant is undoubtedly crucial for Schopenhauer’s philosophy, other sources, too, played an important role in the development of his system; besides Fichte also Schelling as well as the life scientists, such as Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, are important – to mention only a few other influences.

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Schopenhauer’s Metaphysical Two-aspect Account of the World and the Will to Life 7 Here, we need to emphasize that for Schopenhauer also intuition (Anschauung) is actually intellectual (‘all intuition is intellectual’; SW 2:13/WWR 1:32) and he introduces the phrase Intellektualität der Anschauung in order to emphasize that intuition is related to our faculty of understanding. In this regard, Schopenhauer clearly departs from Kant’s notion of understanding as conceptual and discursive faculty. As a result, his account of immediate knowledge cannot be equated with intuitive knowledge and is of a different sort altogether. For a more detailed discussion of Schopenhauer’s conception of Intellektualität der Anschauung see Kisner (2016b). 8 See SW 2:125/WWR 1:129: ‘We now clearly understand our double cognition of the essence and operation of our own body, a cognition that we are given in two completely different ways; and we will go on to use this cognition as a key to the essence of every appearance in nature; and when it comes to objects other than our own body, objects that have not been given to us in this double manner but only as representations in our consciousness, we will judge them on the analogy with our body, assuming that, since they are on the one hand representations just like the body and are in this respect homogeneous with it, then on the other hand, what remains after disregarding their existence as representation of a subject must have the same inner essence as what we call will.’ 9 For the discussion of Schopenhauer’s philosophy of natural sciences see Morgenstern (1985). 10 Cf. SW 4:28/WN 345: ‘Wherever the explanation of the physical comes to an end, it runs into something metaphysical, and wherever this is open to immediate cognition, as here, will reveals itself.’ 11 Cf. SW 4:3/WN 324–25: ‘[C]ognition and its substrate, intellect, is a completely different phenomenon from will, merely secondary, accompanying only the higher levels of the objectivation of will, and is not essential to will itself, but is dependent on will’s appearance in animal organisms, and thus is physical, not metaphysical, as is will itself; that consequently absence of will can never be inferred from absence of cognition; rather, will can be demonstrated in all appearances of nature that are without cognition, not only vegetable, but inorganic as well; and so, unlike what everyone previously assumed, will is not conditioned by cognition, but cognition by will.’ 12 In this context, it should be mentioned that Schopenhauer was very well familiar with biological research already before he developed his own system. As a student in Göttingen, Schopenhauer attended the classes of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a famous German physician and physiologist, who in the 1780s introduced the idea of a formative drive (nisus formativus). In many regards, Schopenhauer’s idea of the will to life reminds one of Blumenbach’s formative drive as the inner power of organic nature. For more on Schopenhauer’s reception of Blumenbach see Segala (2013: 13–40) and Segala (2022: 305–310). Moreover, the terminology of life gained prominence also by the German idealists and romantics prior to Schopenhauer. The philosophical reception of life sciences was very much alive at the turn of the 19th century and also Schopenhauer’s philosophy reflects this increased popularity of life sciences in this period.

Bibliography Allais, L. (2015) Manifest Reality: Kant’s Idealism and His Realism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Allison, H. (1983) Kant’s Transcendental Idealism. An Interpretation and Defence. New Haven/ London: Yale University Press. Allison, H. (2006) ‘Transcendental Realism, Empirical Realism and Transcendental Idealism’, Kantian Review 11, pp. 1–28. Kisner, M. (2016a) Der Wille und das Ding an sich. Schopenhauers Willensmetaphysik in ihrem Bezug zu Kants kritischer Philosophie und dem nachkantischen Idealismus. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Kisner, M. (2016b) ‘In der Anschauung liegt die Wahrheit – Eine Analyse von Schopenhauers Intellektualität der Anschauung in ihrem Bezug zu Goethes Naturlehre’, in Schubbe, D. and Fauth, S. (eds.) Schopenhauer und Goethe. Biographische und philosophische Perspektiven. Hamburg: Felix Meiner, pp. 223–245. Kisner, M. (2019) ‘Fichte’s Moral Psychology of Drives and Feelings and its Influence on Schopenhauer’s Metaphysics of the Will’, International Yearbook of German Idealism 15/2017, pp. 105–124. Langton, R. (1998) Kantian Humility: Our Ignorance of Things in Themselves. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Manja Kisner Morgenstern, M. (1985) Schopenhauers Philosophie der Naturwissenschaften. Bonn: Bouvier. Prauss, G. (1974) Kant und das Problem der Dinge an sich. Bonn: Bouvier. Rosefeldt, T. (2007) ‘Dinge an sich und sekundäre Qualitäten’, in Stolzenberg, J. (ed.) Kant in der Gegenwart. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, pp. 167–209. Segala, M. (2013) ‘Einführung: Auf den Schultern eines Riesen. Arthur Schopenhauer als Student Johann Friedrich Blumenbachs’, in Stollberg, J. and Böker, W. (eds.) Arthur Schopenhauers Mitschriften der Vorlesungen Johann Friedrich Blumenbachs (1809–1811). Göttingen: Universitätsverlag, pp. 13–40. Segala, M. (2022) ‘Trieb and Triebe in Schopenhauer’s Metaphysics of Nature’, in Kisner, M. and Noller, J. (eds.) The Concept of Drive in Classical German Philosophy. Between Biology, Anthropology, and Metaphysics. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 299–322. Shapshay, S. (2020) ‘The Enduring Kantian Presence in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy’, in Wicks, R. L. (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Schopenhauer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 111–126. Welchman, A. (2017) ‘Schopenhauer’s Two Metaphysics: Transcendental and Transcendent’, in Shapshay, S. (ed.) The Palgrave Schopenhauer Handbook. London: Palgrave-Macmillan, pp. 129–149.

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4 SCHOPENHAUER’S THEORY OF SCIENCE Timothy Stoll

4.1 Introduction Chapter 17 of the second volume of The World as Will and Representation, “On Humanity’s Need for Metaphysics,” contains an extended critique of natural science. The critique aims to establish that scientific explanations can never satisfy our desire for “a true understanding of the world and of existence,” and that consequently “physical explanation, in general, and as such, still needs a metaphysical one that provides the key to all its presuppositions” (SW 3:191–92/WWR 2:182). This and the first volume’s corresponding discussion (SW 2:95–97, 113–118/WWR 1:106–108, 119–23) are situated at strategically crucial points of transition from Schopenhauer’s analysis of representation and its forms to the exposition of his noumenal1 metaphysics. While the former analysis follows at least the broad contours of Kant’s critical philosophy, the latter—with its attempt to establish “that the inner essence of any given thing is will” (SW 3:192/WWR 2:182)—marks a dramatic departure from it. Schopenhauer hopes to lend credence to this vitalist ontology by suggesting that it can fill an alleged explanatory gap left over by the sciences. As a result, Schopenhauer’s account of the nature and limits of scientific knowledge is of crucial significance for our understanding of his philosophical enterprise as a whole, and his claim to have reestablished metaphysics on a purely “immanent” basis (SW 3:736/WWR 2:657), in particular. For this project to succeed, Schopenhauer must have grounds for thinking that scientific explanations are essentially deficient that are independent of his other metaphysical commitments. Otherwise, that metaphysics only solves a problem of its own making. And indeed, rather than arguing from robust premises about the underlying nature of reality, Schopenhauer aims to show that “by their very nature, [scientific] explanations will not be enough” for understanding the natural world (SW 3:191/WWR 2:181). More specifically, he argues, all scientific explanations ultimately bottom out in appeals to fundamental natural forces—gravity or electromagnetism, e.g.—whose “inner nature” is thus scientifically inscrutable. Like the maligned Scholastic natural philosophy it replaced, modern science therefore rests, Schopenhauer contends, on “unfathomable occult properties” (SW 3:357/WWR 2:326).

DOI: 10.4324/9781003048992-6

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Schopenhauer’s strategy here is ingenious, inasmuch as it effectively turns the scientific revolution’s anti-Aristotelian rhetoric against modern science itself. Yet, it faces an obvious objection: to the extent that there is truth in Schopenhauer’s criticism of scientific explanation, it is susceptible to the charge of triviality. On pain of regress, any fundamental theory must make appeal to primitives—a point Schopenhauer himself seems to recognize (SW 2:78/WWR 1:91)—and so the mere fact that the fundamental forces of nature remain unexplained is no defect in theories appealing to them, as he evidently assumes.2 And if this is so, Schopenhauer’s metaphysical explanation of force in terms of his theory of will is without motivation. The aim of this chapter is to provide an account of Schopenhauer’s conception and critique of natural scientific explanation. In particular, I hope to show that, properly construed, his argument for the occultness of force is not susceptible to the above problem. As we shall see, Schopenhauer’s claim that forces are occult qualities is not merely a complaint that they are irreducible elements of our physical explanations, though this is an important part of his overall view. Toward this end, it will prove useful to appreciate certain facets of Schopenhauer’s intellectual context—in particular, the modern debates surrounding mechanism and the role of real “powers” in physics, as well as the conception of systematic understanding operative in the rationalist tradition in which he was reared. Before we turn directly to this context, however, we need a better sense of Schopenhauer’s official argument that there are certain essential limitations to scientific explanation.

4.2 Scientific Explanation and Its Limits The argument of WWR 2 Chapter 17 targets, in the first instance, a position Schopenhauer calls “genuine naturalism.” This is the view of “a physics3 that claimed that its explanations of things (of particular things from causes and things in general from forces) were really adequate and hence accounted exhaustively for the essence of the world” (SW 3:193/WWR 2:184). The argument, we shall see, aims to reveal a vicious circularity in this position, thus opening the way for Schopenhauer’s metaphysical project. Schopenhauer takes the standard modern view that the ultimate goal of natural science is the unification of diverse phenomena under universal, deterministic, and (ideally) mathematically expressible laws. These laws describe the fundamental causal regularities in nature, or the basic ways in which material objects can interact. Appreciating some features of Schopenhauer’s theory of causation is thus essential for understanding his conception of scientific explanation. On this theory, the causal relation is a relation between alterations (Veränderungen) of bodies or matter (SW 1:34–37, 43/FR 38–40, 46).4 In particular, it is a sufficient reason relation; if an alteration a causes an alteration b, then b must follow a (SW 1:34/FR 38). Schopenhauer conceives of such necessitation as a real making happen, and what makes it possible, on his view, for one alteration to bring another about is the existence of a causal power, or force, which is expressed in the interaction (SW 4:46/FPE 66). He illustrates the basic picture with the triboelectric effect: “that the amber now attracts the thread [Flocke] is the effect: its cause is the foregoing rubbing [Reibung] of the amber and its [the amber’s] present approach [to the thread]; and the presiding natural force which is active therein is electricity” (SW 1:45/FR 47, translation altered). On this picture, then, the amber’s being rubbed and changing location are the causes of the thread’s being attracted to it. However, the cause can bring about this effect here only because of the presence of an electrical charge in the amber; were there no charge, the same alteration in the amber’s 54

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location would not be followed by a change in the thread’s position. Generalizing the point, Schopenhauer holds that natural forces “are that in virtue of which [vermöge dessen] alterations or effects are possible at all, that which first confers the causes with causality, i.e. the capacity to be effective [Fähigkeit zu wirken]” (SW 1:45/FR 47, translation modified). An important result of this account, as Schopenhauer sees it, is that forces cannot properly be called causes (SW 1:46/FR 48; SW 2:155/WWR 1:155–56). Forces are not themselves alterations; they are rather that which first make it the case, or ground the fact that two alterations are causally related.5 Since it is the existence of the natural forces that explains why the causal regularities are as they are, and since laws of nature are expressions for these regularity relations, we can say that a law is “the norm that a force of nature follows, with respect to its appearance in the chain of causes and effects” (SW 1:45–6/FR 48).6 And since natural scientific explanation works by relating empirical phenomena to such laws, we can say that in all such explanations natural forces are ultimately implicated. With this account in hand, we can proceed to Schopenhauer’s argument for the scientific inexplicability of force. His reasoning may, I think, be plausibly reconstructed as follows (cf. SW 2:115, 165–69/WWR 1:121, 164–67; SW 3:191–97, 357/WWR 2:182–87, 326; SW 4:46/FPE 67): P1. All scientific explanation is causal explanation.7 P2. If there could be a scientific explanation of force, it would explain force by appeal to its cause. (Corollary from P1) P3. But, causation is possible only in virtue of force. Therefore, P4. If there could be a scientific explanation of force, it would explain force by appeal to something possible only in virtue of force. (P2, P3) But, the consequent of P4 is plainly circular.8 We should thus reject it and conclude: C: There can be no scientific explanation of force. This conclusion might not initially strike one as terribly noteworthy. But Schopenhauer draws from it a further, far more striking and, for his purposes, important lesson: C*: This whole type of explanation is merely conditional … and not remotely genuine or satisfying: this is why … everything and nothing is explicable physically. That absolutely inexplicable thing that pervades all appearances … points to an order fundamentally different from the physical order of things and that underlies it. (SW 3:196/WWR 2:186, emphasis added) Or, put otherwise, “every natural scientific explanation must ultimately end up in an occult quality, and hence something completely obscure” (SW 2:96/WWR 1:106–107).9 Yet, C* is by no means an obvious implication of C. From the fact that a kind of explanation relies on certain primitive explanatory principles (in this case, the natural forces), it does not seem to follow that such explanations must be fundamentally “obscure.” Yet, Schopenhauer would appear to draw precisely such an inference. An “occult quality,” he 55

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says at one point, is “one where it is no longer possible to ask why” (SW 2:96/WWR 1:106), and so the claim that natural forces are occult is naturally read as shorthand for the claim that there is no further explanation of them. A simple parody brings out the problem: Euclidean geometry contains no proof or explanation of the proposition “things which are equal to the same thing are also equal to one another.” So, Euclid’s first axiom, and anything derived from it, is incomprehensible and “occult.” One potential response to this line of objection would be to suggest that Schopenhauer’s criticisms of scientific explanation are not entirely epistemological in character, but rest partly on independent metaphysical commitments.10 After all, the argument in Chapter 17 aims to show that scientific explanations cannot satisfy what Schopenhauer calls humanity’s “metaphysical need.” And he there defines metaphysics as “cognition that claims to go beyond the possibility of experience … in order to disclose something about that which … conditions appearance” (SW 3:180/WWR 2:173). Thus, it might appear as though Schopenhauer’s conviction both in the existence of a transempirical, metaphysical order of things, and in the fact that we possess an inextricable need to search for the ultimate explanatory principles therein, is what ultimately underlies the claim that the empirical sciences are explanatorily inadequate. There can be little doubt that Schopenhauer’s idealist metaphysics partially explains his dissatisfaction with naturalism (e.g., SW 3:196/WWR 2:186), but there is good reason to think that he neither wishes to, nor really can, rest his argument against naturalism on this point. To suggest that scientific explanations are inadequate because they are not sufficiently metaphysical is plainly to beg the question against the naturalist—something Schopenhauer means to avoid: “it is important and necessary,” he insists, “that people be convinced of the untenability of an absolute physics; and all the more since this, genuine naturalism, is a view that continually and automatically urges itself on people, and can only be done away with through deeper speculation” (SW 3:194–95/WWR 2:185, emphasis added). Implicit in this remark, it seems to me, is the idea that the need for a metaphysical explanation of things is not, as it were, simply given to us (on the contrary, it is the naturalist view that “automatically urges itself” on us). Rather, it arises from a more general need for theoretical understanding that, Schopenhauer thinks, inevitably finds itself unsatisfied “on the path of empiricism itself” (SW 3:195/WWR 2:186, emphasis added).11 The impression Schopenhauer tends to give in Chapter 17 (and related discussions) is not that the metaphysical need explains our dissatisfaction with physics, but that our dissatisfaction with physics explains our metaphysical need.12 If it is to explain it in the sense of justifying it, however, Schopenhauer faces the above objection, namely, that the move from C to C* involves illicitly taking the sense in which force is scientifically inexplicable as implying that it is also incomprehensible and that science is explanatorily inadequate.

4.3 Historical Excursus: The Alleged Occultness of Newtonian Force The point that forces are incomprehensible “occult qualities” is one Schopenhauer repeats often and loudly (e.g., SW 1:46, 137/FR 48, 144/137; SW 2:145/WWR 1:147, 149/150, 155/156; SW 3:357/WWR 2:326; SW 6:150/PP 2:129). If the previous section’s reconstruction of Schopenhauer’s argument exhausts his grounds for this claim, then he is vulnerable to the above objection. Yet, it seems unlikely that Schopenhauer could have failed to appreciate this point. To see why, consider the fact that debates over the “occultness” of certain natural forces predate Schopenhauer by more than a century. Most famously, 56

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Leibniz charges Newton’s theory of gravitation with reviving “the occult qualities of the schools … under the specious name of forces” (Clarke & Leibniz 2000: pp. 62–63). Leibniz holds that, while that theory allows for powerful prediction of the phenomena, the literal positing of an attractive force operating immediately at a distance through empty space is incomprehensible. Defenders of Newtonian natural philosophy sometimes responded precisely by denying that the irreducibility of the gravitational force poses any special problems. So, in his preface to the Principia’s second edition, Cotes inveighs: Let those who so believe [that gravity is occult] take care lest they believe in an absurdity that, in the end, may overthrow the foundations of all philosophy. For causes generally proceed in a continuous chain from compound to more simple; when you reach the simplest cause, you will not be able to proceed any further. Therefore no mechanical explanation can be given for the simplest cause; for if it could, the cause would not yet be the simplest. Will you accordingly call these simplest causes occult, and banish them? (Newton 1999: p. 392) Similarly, Kant holds that “a fundamental force” is not an occult quality so long as “it does yield a concept of an acting cause, together with its laws, whereby the action … can be estimated in regard to its degrees” (MFNS 4:502, emphasis added). “It lies altogether beyond the horizon of our reason,” Kant admits, “to comprehend original forces a priori with respect to their possibility” (MFNS 4:534). But, since these forces (attractive and repulsive force) are associated with mathematically specifiable general laws, their irreducibility is wholly unproblematic—a sign that we have reached the end of inquiry, not that inquiry has foundered. Schopenhauer was familiar with these debates (SW 6:486/PP 2:411) and of course with The Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, a work which he cites frequently and clearly regards as one of Kant’s best. Schopenhauer himself even explicitly admits the general point underlying the Newtonian response. So, he says that the PSR is “the principle of all explanation, and hence itself incapable of further explanation; nor does it need one” (SW 2:88/WWR 1:99, emphasis added). This suggests that Schopenhauer appreciates that his objection must not simply target irreducible explanatory principles as such. Considering the Leibnizian charge in more detail can provide a clue to the true target of Schopenhauer’s critique. While Cotes and Kant present the charge as stemming from concerns with irreducibility, the heart of the disagreement between Leibniz and Newton really lies elsewhere. This is evident already from the fact that Newton himself does not assert the irreducibility of the gravitational force.13 Speaking on his behalf, Clarke contends only that “the means by which two bodies attract each other, may be invisible and intangible, and of a different nature from mechanism” (Clarke & Leibniz 2000: p. 35, emphasis added; cf. Newton 2014: p. 144). Indeed, Leibniz’s real issue with the Newtonian theory stems from his underlying mechanist convictions—his view that only physical explanations in terms of size, shape, and motion communicated through impact are truly comprehensible: “a body is never moved naturally [i.e. non-miraculously], except by another body which touches it and pushes it” (Clarke & Leibniz 2000: p. 44). The explanation of planetary orbits in terms of an attractive force therefore needs to be rejected in favor of an updated version of Descartes’s vortex theory.14 The underlying concern seems to be that we lack a kind of 57

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insight into the operation or inner workings of a force that acts immediately at distance that we possess in the case of mechanical causes, such as the impression of an impetus upon impact. In this light, Schopenhauer’s conception of occult explanations begins to come into focus. Occult qualities are causal powers into whose inner workings we lack a special kind of insight. Thus, he complains, “in the physical world, we do see this cause necessarily produce its effect, but we do not experience how it is actually able to do so, or what goes on inside” (SW 1:144/FR 137).15 Schopenhauer, of course, generalizes the complaint to all “original forces” in a way Leibniz does not. The reason that now suggests itself for this striking claim is not that Schopenhauer sees forces as irreducible, but that he sees them as irreducible specifically to the mechanical properties of matter. Indeed, as we shall see in §4.5, Schopenhauer accepts Kant’s dynamic theory of matter, explicitly presented as an alternative to the “mechanical natural philosophy” (MFNS 4:532–33). At the same time, a closer look at Schopenhauer’s theory of explanation reveals a rationale for retaining a Leibnizian dissatisfaction with anti-mechanist explanations that is uncharacteristic of Kant’s natural philosophy. I turn first to this theory.

4.4 Schopenhauer and Rationalist Accounts of Understanding All of the thinkers canvassed thus far, and indeed the modern epistemological tradition at large, see the ultimate goal of scientific inquiry as not merely knowledge, but understanding of the natural world.16 The key to interpreting Schopenhauer’s own position on this score lies, I believe, in appreciating the conception of systematic understanding he inherits from the rationalist tradition, which can be traced back to Aristotle’s account of epistēmē17 in the Posterior Analytics. On this view, understanding something requires comprehending the reason or explanation why it is thus and not otherwise (An. Post. 71b9–10).18 In the language of the German rationalist tradition, understanding x requires knowing x through its grounds, rather than through its “effects” or consequences.19 Knowledge of a mathematical theorem, for example, may fail to qualify as understanding if achieved only through indirect or “apagogic” proof. Such proofs, if sound, do yield certainty that the theorem is true, indeed, necessarily true. But, intuitively, they still fail to yield insight into this truth. Schopenhauer follows Kant20 in placing special emphasis on this point. Commenting on the proof of the 6th proposition of Book I of the Elements, which proceeds by reductio, Schopenhauer explains that “proof through demonstration of the ground of knowledge [Erkenntnisgrund] produces mere conviction (convictio), not insight (cognitio). … Therefore a demonstration of this kind usually leaves behind an unpleasant feeling … and here the lack of knowledge of why something is so is first felt through a given certainty that it is so” (SW 1:135/FR 128).21 Similar considerations suggest that understanding cannot be straightforwardly reduced to knowledge of a pair of propositions: p, and that p because q. One could know ‘p because q’, e.g., through disjunctive syllogism or on the basis of mere testimony, and in both cases intuitively lack the requisite “grasp” of, fail to “see,” how it necessitates p. It is noteworthy that this distinction between knowing something through its grounds and knowing it merely by its effects or results reflects the original sense of the distinction between a priori and a posteriori knowledge (e.g., Arnauld & Nicole 1996: p. 233; cf. Adams 1994: pp. 109–10, Risse 1970: p. 690)—a sense sometimes still found in Kant and Schopenhauer.22 58

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The view that understanding requires knowing something through its grounds generates an apparent dilemma. For, intuitively, if we do not understand that thing’s ground in turn, we fail to fully understand it as well. Either, then, there must be some facts that are accepted as primitive, in which case every explanation derived from them is based on something we do not understand, or there is an infinite regress of explanations, and understanding is constantly on credit. Aristotle recognizes this problem (An. Post. 72b5–30), as does Schopenhauer (SW 1:23/FR 28). The solution to the dilemma, for both, is to claim that there are some grounds into which a special kind of non-demonstrative or immediate insight is possible. For Schopenhauer, in particular, we possess such insight into those things which flow directly from the universal principles of knowledge, which are grounded in the intellectual forms of space, time, and the understanding: some truths “are evident, but not because of any proofs. We have direct cognition of something a priori certain: we are conscious of it with the greatest necessity because it is the form of all cognition” (SW 2:80/WWR 1:92–93). These principles include Euclid’s axioms, the causal law (that every new state is caused by some other state temporally preceding it (SW 1:34/FR 38)), and, crucially, the purely mechanical properties of matter (SW 3:55/WWR 2:50–56). Schopenhauer, then, accepts a relatively standard rationalist account of systematic understanding. Understanding something requires knowing it through its ground, which in turn involves not just knowledge of but insight into its necessity. First principles which have no further grounds can be understood in a different way, to the extent that one possesses immediate insight into them. This confirms that an explanatory principle’s being primitive is not, for Schopenhauer, sufficient to qualify it as incomprehensible.23 Rather, we may surmise, a principle is incomprehensible, and thus “occult,” just in case it cannot be known through any grounds and it is not an object of immediate insight (i.e., is neither a formal principle of cognition generally nor a corollary thereof).

4.5 Anti-Mechanism and the Limits of Scientific Understanding As we have just seen, Schopenhauer’s account of understanding allows certain irreducible principles of explanation to be objects of immediate insight. The requirement is that these principles flow directly from the universal forms of the intellect. In this respect, Schopenhauer is sounding a version of Kant’s famous dictum “that we can cognize of things a priori only what we ourselves have put into them” (KrV B xviii). Or, as Schopenhauer himself puts it, “natural phenomena … are more readily intelligible, the less empirical content they have, because they remain all the more in the realm of mere representation, whose forms, known to us a priori, are the principle of intelligibility” (SW 4:86/WN 394). Now, like Kant, Schopenhauer thinks that there is a “pure” or a priori element to natural science; certain of its explanatory principles do flow directly from the mere forms of representation. For example, he holds that Newton’s First Law—the inertial principle—"follows from the law of causality” (SW 2:79/WWR 1:91; cf. MFNS 4:543). He also takes a principle of the conservation of mass, and Newton’s definition of “quantity of motion” (cf. Newton 1999: p. 404) to both follow jointly from the intuitions of space, time, and causality (SW 3:55/WWR 2:53–54).24 Predictably, then, Schopenhauer will often draw the line between what is and what is not comprehensible in scientific theories precisely here. Thus, he says, “gravity for instance is an occult quality because it can be thought away and thus does not come from the form of cognition as something necessary, as is the case with the law of inertia, which follows from the law of causality” (SW 2:96/WWR 1:107, emphasis added).25 This is the 59

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reason, he explains, why there has been a general prejudice in favor of mechanism, “because mechanics makes use of the least number of primitive and therefore inexplicable forces while at the same time including many things that we can cognize a priori, and therefore depends on the form of our own intellect which, as such, entails the highest degree of intelligibility and clarity” (SW 3:342/WWR 2:313). The basic natural forces, however, are not mere formal principles, but the ultimate contents of experience (SW 2:149/WWR 1:150). This claim betokens Schopenhauer’s rejection of standard early modern mechanistic theories of matter. According to Descartes, for example, bodies are nothing more than inert extension—“the objects of geometry made real,” as Garber puts it (1992: p. 292). Newton similarly defines bodies simply as “quantities of extension” which God has endowed with impenetrability and motion (Newton 2014: p. 28). If this conception of matter were correct, then physics—the study of matter—would really be no more than a branch of mathematics. Citing Democritean atomism and the Cartesian vortex theory as examples, Schopenhauer notes the natural tendency of physics “to reduce the whole” of the physical world “to the object of mere geometry” (SW 2:146/WWR 1:147–48). “If this reduction were to succeed,” Schopenhauer admits, “then of course everything would be explained and grounded. … But all the content of appearance would disappear and only form would be left” (SW 2:147/WWR 1:148; cf. 1:166). No such reduction can work, since matter is not mere extension, but possesses irreducibly dynamical properties—indeed, it is in some sense reducible to such properties (e.g., SW 3:351–52/WWR 2:321–22; HN 2:300). What this indicates is that Schopenhauer’s critique of scientific explanation combines the Leibnizian view that only mechanistic properties of bodies are genuinely intelligible with an endorsement of Kant’s dynamic theory of matter (e.g., SW 2:590/WWR 1:527, SW 3:56/WWR 2:57, SW 3:342/WWR 2:313–14, 352/322; SW 6:118–19/PP 2:103). The Leibnizian intuition is supported by Schopenhauer’s view that mechanistic properties alone are grounded in the forms of the intellect and are thus the only basic physical principles to qualify as objects of immediate insight. But, Schopenhauer has a variety of reasons for adopting the view that matter is not purely mechanical, but possesses irreducibly dynamic properties. The most important reason stems from his endorsement of Kant’s view that “matter fills space, not through its mere existence, but through a particular moving force” (MFNS 4:497), the force of repulsion. Citing Kant explicitly, Schopenhauer observes that impenetrability “is not a solely negative quality, but the manifestation of a positive force” (SW 5:80/PP 1:70–71; cf. SW 3:350/WWR 2:320). Schopenhauer’s reference, here, is clearly to MFNS 4:502, where Kant distinguishes “absolute” or “mathematical” impenetrability, which he rejects, from “relative” or “dynamical impenetrability.”26 According to the conception of mathematical impenetrability that Kant associates with the “mechanical natural philosophy” (MFNS 4:532–34), matter is absolutely dense, and so cannot be compressed; appeal to bodies’ internal interstices then accounts for their varying densities and elastic properties. According to the dynamical conception, by contrast, matter is essentially elastic. Impenetrability, which distinguishes matter from the mere space it fills, is thus not brute solidity, but explained by an active (and thus measurable27) expansive force (cf. SW 3:345/WWR 2:316). So, even if a mechanistic reduction of all other forces to laws of collision could, per impossible, be successfully carried out, no total elimination force is possible (SW 6:119/PP 2:103–104). We are now positioned to explain Schopenhauer’s inference from C to C*. Since they cannot be explained scientifically, forces can be understood only if they flow from the forms of the intellect. They can be understood in this way, in turn, only if they are grounded in the 60

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mechanical properties of matter. But, matter itself is only made possible by force, not the reverse. Thus, there is no (non-metaphysical) way to have insight into force. It turns out, then, that Schopenhauer’s critique of science does not depend solely on epistemological points about the nature of scientific explanation, as he sometimes seems to imply. Rather, it rests too on a key tenet of his physical ontology.28 I argued above that resting his case on independent metaphysical premises would effectively beg the question against the naturalist. Schopenhauer’s reliance on a rejection of the mechanist ontology is not open to a similar charge. For, this ontology is one, he thinks, to which the naturalist is committed—it is, if not entailed by the best scientific theories of the day, at least the best interpretation of those theories.

4.6 Explaining the Inner Nature of Force Schopenhauer views natural science and his own brand of metaphysics as complementary, rather than competing, endeavors. If the argument detailed thus far is sound, then insight into the first principles of natural science requires a distinct mode of explanation. Schopenhauer’s vitalist metaphysics thus promises to yield an understanding of the inner nature of force unattainable through scientific methods alone.29 If successful, this project would itself also lend important credence to that metaphysical picture. For, as Schopenhauer puts it: My metaphysics proves itself to be the only one that actually has a common point of contact with the physical sciences, a point at which it has arrived from its own resources, so that the two actually connect and harmonize. And in fact this is not accomplished by twisting and forcing the empirical sciences to suit the metaphysics, nor by secretly abstracting the latter from the former in advance and then, in Schelling’s manner, finding a priori what it had learned a posteriori; rather, by themselves and without conspiring, both meet at the same point. (SW 4:1/WN 323) Schopenhauer, in other words, claims for his metaphysics of will a similar theoretical virtue as is possessed by an empirical hypothesis that predicts, rather than merely accommodates, the phenomena. Since that metaphysics explains the otherwise inscrutable forces presupposed by the sciences, without being developed expressly for that purpose, it receives, as it were, “empirical corroborations” from them (SW 4:2/WN 324). This, I take it, is the sense in which Schopenhauer believes his metaphysics can be appropriately considered “immanent,” despite being a theory of the nature of noumenal reality. What, then, are Schopenhauer’s reasons for thinking that his metaphysics actually illuminates the nature of force? Again, I think, they are rooted in a feature of the conception of understanding he inherits from the broadly Aristotelian tradition. According to this tradition, understanding essentially involves gaining a sense of familiarity with the thing understood. In order to satisfy our desire for understanding, then, an explanation must relate the explicandum to grounds or principles more familiar than it (cf. An. Post. 71b20–30).30 Call this the “familiarity principle.”31 As Schopenhauer himself puts it, “the unfamiliar must always be explained with reference to the familiar” (SW 3:739/WWR 2:660; cf. SW 6:106/PP 2:93). But, This substratum of all appearances and hence of all nature, is nothing other than that which is immediately familiar to us and with which we are intimately acquainted 61

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[jenes uns unmittelbar Bekannte und sehr genau Vertraute], that which we find in our innermost selves as will. (SW 4:2/WN 324, translation modified; cf. SW 2:133/WWR 1:137) And because “this will … gives to everything, whatever else it may be, the force in virtue of which it can exist and produce an effect [die Kraft veleiht, vermöge deren es dasein und wirken kann],” it follows that “any original force anywhere that manifests itself in physical and chemical appearances—indeed gravity itself … are simply identical with what we find in ourselves as will, with which will we have the most immediate and intimate acquaintance that is at all possible [von welchem Willen wir die unmittelbarste und intimste Kenntnis haben, die überhaupt möglich ist]” (SW 4:2–3/WN 324, translation modified). Schopenhauer suggests that we possess a deeper and more immediate understanding of how our motives move us to action than we do, say, of how a ball is propelled upon receiving an impetus (SW 3:219/WWR 2:207). If we accept the familiarity principle, and the claim that willing is immediately familiar, then Schopenhauer has the makings of a case that his metaphysics illuminates the nature of force. Now, although it possesses considerable historical pedigree, the conception of explanation on which this case relies no longer garners much support. Contemporary disinclination to accept the familiarity principle can perhaps be traced back to Hempel and Oppenheim’s influential criticisms of the view “that explanation means the reduction of something unfamiliar to ideas or experiences already familiar to us” (1948: p: 145). According to Hempel and Oppenheim, such reduction can be neither necessary nor sufficient for explanation. It cannot be necessary, since some good explanations—e.g., of free fall in terms of gravitation—explain a familiar phenomenon in terms of something less familiar. And it cannot be sufficient, since some alleged explanations satisfying the familiarity condition are mere metaphors.32 How compelling are these points as objections to Schopenhauer’s view? It is unlikely that Schopenhauer would be especially troubled by the first objection, since it arguably conflates two senses of explanation he would wish to keep apart. Schopenhauer would agree that gravity explains free fall, if by this is meant that there is a true causal account of free fall in terms of the Earth’s gravitational pull. In this sense, he is even willing to say “everything … is explicable physically” (SW 3:196/WWR 2:186). However, if by “explanation” is instead intended an account that also yields insight into or understanding of the phenomenon of free fall, then the objection is arguably question-begging. For, Schopenhauer has attempted to argue precisely that even scientific explanations fall short of being explanatory in this more robust sense. According to this sense, “nothing is explicable physically” (SW 3:196/WWR 2:186). To meet the second objection, Schopenhauer needs a case for thinking that force is legitimately characterized as will, not just that it is possible to conceive it on analogy with the will. His main strategy, here, is to appeal to the transcendental idealist view that the phenomenal world is a mere appearance of the noumenal world. Since Schopenhauer holds on independent grounds that noumenal reality is the will,33 and since natural forces are the ultimate content of appearance, not contributed by the intellect and its forms, it follows that force is in itself will. Mere analogizing cannot grant the understanding we seek, it is true. But, Schopenhauer’s vitalist interpretation of force is not a case of mere analogizing. Even if we accept all of this, however, it is still questionable whether Schopenhauer’s theory of will actually grants the sort of insight into force that he claims. Note that there 62

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is an important disanalogy between this account and his account of, say, how geometrical knowledge flows from the a priori intuition of space. As we have seen, Schopenhauer holds, in line with the rationalist tradition, that understanding requires insight into the necessity of the thing understood. Our immediate grasp of the nature of space, indeed, grants such insight into basic geometrical principles, e.g., that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, from which, in turn, more complex theorems can be derived. On Schopenhauer’s view, we simply “see” that such things cannot be otherwise. But this is manifestly not the case for force. Our immediate grasp of what it means to will does not in any way let us see, e.g., that the degree of attraction between any two bodies must be inversely proportional to the square of their distances.34 To suppose as much would be to assume that it was possible to prove Newton’s gravitational law a priori. Schopenhauer explicitly rejects Kant’s apparent attempt at such an a priori proof (SW 2:13/WWR 1:32; cf. Prolegomena 4:321). Like Kant, Schopenhauer does, as we have seen, think that certain laws of motion belong to pure mathematics and thus qualify as a priori, but these laws are precisely not those his theory of will is meant to illuminate.35 This shortcoming points, I believe, toward a fundamental tension at the center of Schopenhauer’s project. On the one hand, his metaphysics aims to explain the inner nature of force by conceiving it as an empirical manifestation of the noumenal will. The ambition here is something like a complete systematic account of reality as a whole. Schopenhauer’s theoretical project thus aims to adduce noumenal grounds for the behavior of force. Yet, at the same time, it is a crucial tenet of Schopenhauer’s philosophy that there is a radical contingency at the core of existence—the noumenal will is thoroughly groundless (e.g., SW 2:134/WWR 1:137–38). This latter claim plays a key role in both his theory of freedom (SW 2:338/WWR 1:313) and his doctrine of the negation of the will (SW 2:363/WWR 1:334). So, even if the inner nature of force is will, the radically contingent nature of the will itself, combined with Schopenhauer’s conception of understanding, suggests that this metaphysical explanation cannot achieve what it promises. Schopenhauer sometimes even seems to resign himself to precisely this conclusion: “the inner essence of those universal forces of nature … [is] unfathomable because it is groundless” (SW 2:149/WWR 1:150); only in mathematics and “pure a priori natural science … is cognition safeguarded from all obscurity, from any encounter with the unfathomable (the groundless, i.e. the will)” (SW 2:144/WWR 1:146).

4.7 Conclusion Whatever reservations may be had about his arguments, Schopenhauer’s dissatisfaction with the explanatory paradigm of the empirical sciences is, I think, at least understandable as a response to his particular historical moment—a moment at which those sciences had, after centuries of fealty, become more or less autonomous from metaphysics and, in the minds of some, rendered it obsolete. Schopenhauer’s ambition is to reassert, against the rising tide of naturalism, the rightful place of metaphysics in our total theoretical image of reality. In this respect, his critique of science set the stage for the theoretical debates that would shape the intellectual landscape in Germany later in the century, much as his pessimism proved decisive for the trajectory of normative thought during this period.36 In Emil Du Bois-Reymond’s declaration of seven Welträtsel unsolvable by physics (Bayertz et al. 2012: pp. 153–85), in Nietzsche’s insistence that physics is “not an explanation of the world” (1999: p. 28) and mockery of those who “naturalize in their thinking today” 63

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(1999: p. 35), or in Dilthey’s famous claim that only the human sciences, and not the natural sciences, can give us understanding (Verstehen), Schopenhauer’s legacy can be felt ­unmistakably.37

Notes 1 Schopenhauer objects to Kant’s official use of the term ‘noumena’ to mean things in themselves represented “solely through a pure understanding” (KrV A 254/B 310), on the grounds that this requires applying the categories (the basic functions of the understanding) to things in themselves (SW 2:563–66/WWR 1:504–506). Schopenhauer regards this as both a philosophical mistake and inconsistent with Kant’s restriction of the validity of the categories to appearances. I will nevertheless retain ‘noumenal’ as a convenient adjectival reference to ‘the world as it is in itself’ with the proviso that no specific commitments about the nature of the Schopenhauerian in-itself are intended here. The exact status of the thing-in-itself for Schopenhauer, and its connection with his doctrine of the will is an issue of immense difficulty and complexity. Özen (2020) provides an interesting discussion of the issue and recent approaches to it, with the conclusion that there is no underlying consistency to Schopenhauer’s position. 2 Young (2005: pp. 57–58) seeks to avoid this problem by suggesting that Schopenhauer’s complaint is actually that terms mentioning natural forces are all meaningless, since they fail to satisfy an “empiricist criterion of meaningfulness” Schopenhauer supposedly endorses (cf. Bozickovic 2012: p. 22). The attribution of an empiricist semantics to Schopenhauer is, I think, questionable. Even granting it, however, it is unclear why forces should fail to satisfy the criterion, since Schopenhauer treats them as the ultimate content of experience (SW 2:149/WWR 1:150)—a point that will be important below. In any event, Schopenhauer never, as far as I can tell, makes the argument Young and Bozickovic attribute to him. Instead, he always appeals to the fact that forces are the basis of all scientific explanation, and so cannot themselves be scientifically explained. The charge of triviality cannot be so easily avoided. Morgenstern (1985: p. 181) gestures at a solution, by distinguishing occult qualities from “irreducible presuppositions of natural science,” and claiming that the former term is used to indicate that “natural scientific explanation remains unsatisfying” (emphasis added). But the question is why Schopenhauer thinks natural forces are occult in this sense, if not merely because of their irreducibility. 3 Schopenhauer often uses the term Physik synonymously with ‘natural science’ (e.g., SW 4:4/WN 325; SW 3:190/WWR 2:172); this is the sense of the term here. 4 Schopenhauer’s account of causation suggests, but should be distinguished from, familiar eventbased theories. The Schopenhauerian notion of “alteration” implies the existence of substance— that in which the alteration takes place (SW 1:43–45/FR 46–47; SW 2:12/WWR 1:31). Certain important differences notwithstanding, Schopenhauer’s theory of causation resembles Kant’s more closely than it does, say, Hume’s or contemporary neo-Humean theories. Watkins (2005: pp. 390– 400) discusses in detail the important differences between Kantian and contemporary approaches to causation. 5 Further considerations bearing on this conclusion are explored by Carus (2020: pp. 152–54). 6 In treating laws as dependent upon the causal powers of matter, Schopenhauer’s account is Kantian in spirit. See, again, Watkins (2005: pp. 400–408) for a discussion of Kant’s view of laws. We should be cautious about attributing to Schopenhauer, as Jacquette (2015: pp. 67–69) comes close to doing, the quasi-Humean view that talk of laws and forces is merely a way of efficiently describing the mosaic of local matters of fact. Schopenhauer’s forces are real powers whose existence is already implicated in our recognition of causal regularities (SW 1:45/FR 47). 7 Science also has a classificatory function, which Schopenhauer calls “morphology” or “description”, but this is not its properly explanatory part. I discuss Schopenhauer’s distinction between scientific description and explanation, and its historical impact, in (Stoll 2018). 8 This claim can be challenged. P4 speaks generically of “force,” and while explaining force as such in terms of force seems circular, no circularity is obviously involved in explaining a force in terms of another force—say, friction in terms of electromagnetism. This infelicity notwithstanding, the argument can still go through so long as it is admitted that some natural forces are irreducibly primitive (cf. WWR 1:149; FR 48).

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Schopenhauer’s Theory of Science 9 Note, again, that this argument nowhere makes an appeal to any general criterion of meaning, much less an empiricist criterion. 10 Thanks to David Bather Woods and Christopher Janaway for independently raising versions of this response to me. 11 In this respect, I agree with Morgenstern (1985) and Young (2005: pp. 53–4) that the commitment to transcendental idealism does not figure directly in Schopenhauer’s argument here, as e.g., Hamlyn (1980: p. 77) seems to suppose. 12 Strictly speaking, it is only part of the explanation; Schopenhauer begins the chapter by emphasizing how the metaphysical need also arises from our confrontation with mortality and suffering (SW 3:175–90/WWR 2:169–81). 13 Newton took no official stance on the underlying cause of gravity, but his own preferred hypotheses, which he famously demurs from “feigning” in the Principia (1999: p. 943), were, at different times, an electric “spirit” and an elastic “aethereal medium” (see Query 21 of the Opticks [Newton 2014: pp. 169–70]). See Bernard Cohen’s introduction (Newton 1999: pp. 22–25, 280–92) for helpful commentary on this issue. 14 A theory Leibniz sought (unsuccessfully) to develop in the essay Tentamen de Motuum Coelestium Causis, published in the Acta Eruditorum in 1689. Doubtless with some rhetorical intent, the Principia’s second edition would criticize the appeal to vortices as itself an occult explanation (Newton 1999: p. 385). 15 Incidentally, this quote shows that it is not quite right to suggest, as Schroeder (2020) does, that the understanding supplies only a thin “Humean” conception of causation, and that Schopenhauer’s theory of will supplies the thicker notion of causal necessitation. Schopenhauer’s point is rather that there is a difference between knowing that something is necessary (which the understanding does), and having insight into its necessity. The next section explores this important distinction. 16 Carriero (2013) offers a compelling reading of the modern epistemological tradition as concerned primarily with understanding rather than “mere” knowledge. 17 A number of scholars have argued that the Greek epistēmē is better rendered as ‘understanding’ than ‘knowledge’ (see e.g., Burnyeat (1980: pp. 186–88), Nehamas (1985), and esp. Schwab (2015; 2016)). 18 Schopenhauer directly quotes this passage as an early instance of the PSR (SW 1:7–8/FR 12). Aristotle is here criticized for failing to distinguish sufficiently between “causes” proper and “grounds of knowing” (Erkentnissgründe), but Schopenhauer is sympathetic to the Posterior Analytics’ basic conception of explanation and understanding. 19 On the notion of knowledge through grounds in the German rationalist tradition, see Hogan (2009a). 20 See KrV A 789–90/B 817–18: “The direct or ostensive proof is, in all kinds of cognition, that which is combined with the conviction of truth and simultaneously with insight into its sources; the apagogic proof, on the contrary, can produce certainty, to be sure, but never comprehensibility of the truth in regard to its connection with the grounds of its possibility.” 21 In geometry it is always possible to supplement “merely” logical proofs with insight into a theorem’s “ground of being” (Seinsgrund) drawn from our a priori intuition of space (SW 1:137/FR 129), on which Euclid’s axioms rest (SW 1:134/FR 134). 22 As Byron Simmons points out in Chapter 20 of this volume (p. 284), Schopenhauer employs “a priori” in this older sense at SW 2:381/WWR 1:349 (cf. SW 4:v/PE 5). On Kant’s use of the older sense of a priori, see (Hogan 2009 a: pp. 371–72; 2009b: pp. 52–56), and for an argument that this sense of a priori plays a more fundamental role in Schopenhauer than is generally recognized (Hogan 2022). 23 Atwell (1995: pp. 62–63) is one of the few to explicitly recognize this crucial point. 24 The claims are found in Schopenhauer’s “table of praedicabilia a priori,” which is supposed to contain “all the fundamental truths rooted a priori in our intuitive cognition” (SW 3:53/WWR 2:50), and is intended as “an introduction and propaedeutic to [Kant’s Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science]” (SW 3:54/WWR 2:50) 25 Note that the relevant necessity here specifically involves flowing from the form of cognition. Repulsive force is a necessary property of matter, since we cannot “imagine matter without … the force of repulsion … for then it would lack impenetrability” (SW 3:350/WWR 2:320). But repulsion and impenetrability, their necessity notwithstanding, still remain occult (SW 2:116, 145,

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Timothy Stoll 147/WWR 1:122, 147, 149; SW 3:191, 357/WWR 2:182, 326). The importance of the force of repulsion is discussed below. 26 Friedman (2013: pp. 109–30) discusses the importance of this distinction to Kant’s natural philosophy in some depth. 27 Once again, this suggests Young cannot be right in supposing Schopenhauer’s problem to be that science “is unable to specify, in experiential terms, the meaning of its fundamental terms [viz. forces]” (2005: p. 68). 28 Viljanen (2009) offers a compelling discussion of Schopenhauer’s dynamist ontology, although I think he is incorrect to see that ontology as inspired by Spinoza and Leibniz. Schopenhauer’s notes on MFNS reveal Kant as the clear source (HN 2:299–300). 29 The connection between science and metaphysics may be less direct than I present it here. Segala (2017), for one, argues that Schopenhauer conceives of a distinct discipline of “philosophy of nature” as mediating the two (though Schopenhauer’s precise conception of this discipline, Segala argues, undergoes a variety of transformations throughout his career). 30 Aristotle’s own view distinguishes between what is more familiar “in relation to us,” and what is more familiar “by nature” (72a1ff.). It is the latter property that is at issue when assessing the relative primitiveness of an explanatory principle. This distinction seems to have largely gone missing in Schopenhauer. 31 Recognition of Schopenhauer’s reliance on something like this principle is longstanding (e.g., Janaway 1999: pp. 140–41). 32 As an example, Hempel and Oppenheim mention “neovitalistic” appeals to “vital force” (1948: p. 145). 33 Hamlyn (1980: pp. 94–97) and Jacquette (2007; 2015: pp. 82–92) offer plausible reconstructions of Schopenhauer’s main argument for this conclusion. 34 Schopenhauer does claim that it is a priori knowable that attractive force is a property of all matter (SW 6:123/PP 2:106), but this is different to claiming that it is a priori knowable that all matter observes Newton’s inverse square law. 35 Carus (2020: pp. 154–56) highlights further problems in Schopenhauer’s transition from force to will, especially concerning Schopenhauer’s entitlement to the claim that the will satisfies the familiarity principle. 36 Beiser (2014; 2016) has extensively charted this intellectual landscape. 37 My thanks to David Bather Woods and Christopher Janaway for helpful comments on an earlier version of this chapter.

Bibliography Adams, R.M. (1994). Leibniz: Determinist, Theist, Idealist. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Aristotle. (1984). The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation (Vol. 1). Ed. Barnes, J. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Arnaud, P. and Nicole, E. (1996). Logic or the Art of Thinking. Trans. Buroker, J.V. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Atwell, J.E. (1995). Schopenhauer on the Character of the World: The Metaphysics of Will. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Bayertz, K., Gerhard, M. and Jaeschke, W. (2012). Der Ignorabimus-Streit. Hamburg: Meiner. Beiser, F. (2014). After Hegel: German Philosophy 1840–1900. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. (2016). Weltschmerz: Pessimism in German Philosophy 1860–1900. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bozickovic, V. (2012). Schopenhauer on Scientific Knowledge. In: Vandenabeele, B. ed. A Companion to Schopenhauer. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 11–24. Burnyeat, M.F. (1980). Socrates and the Jury: Paradoxes in Plato’s Distinction Between Knowledge and True Belief. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 54, pp. 173–91. Carriero, J. (2013). Epistemology Past and Present. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 113(2), pp. 175–200. Carus, D. (2020). Force in Nature: Schopenhauer’s Scientific Beginning. In: Wicks, R. ed. The Oxford Handbook of Schopenhauer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 147–156.

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Schopenhauer’s Theory of Science Clarke, S. and Leibniz, G.W. (2000). Leibniz and Clarke: Correspondence. Ed. Ariew, R. Indianapolis: Hackett. Friedman, M. (2013). Kant’s Construction of Nature: A Reading of the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Garber, D. (1992). Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Hamlyn, D.W. (1980). Schopenhauer. The Arguments of the Philosophers. London: Routledge. Hempel, C.G. and Oppenheim, P. (1948). Studies in the Logic of Explanation. Philosophy of Science, 15(2), pp. 135–175. Hogan, D. (2009a). Three Kinds of Rationalism and the Non-Spatiality of Things in Themselves. Journal of the History of Philosophy, 47(3), pp. 355–382. ———. (2009b). How to Know Unknowable Things in Themselves. Nous, 43(1), pp. 49–63. ———. (2022). Schopenhauer’s Transcendental Aesthetic. In: Schafer, K. and Stang, N. eds. The Sensible and Intelligible Worlds: New Essays on Kant’s Metaphysics and Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jacquette, D. (2007). Schopenhauer’s Proof that Thing-in-Itself is Will. Kantian Review, 12(2), pp. 76–108. ———. (2015). The Philosophy of Schopenhauer. London: Routledge. Janaway, C. (1999). Will and Nature. In: Janaway, C. ed. The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 138–170. Kant, I. (1998). Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Guyer, P. and Wood, A. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. (2002). Theoretical Philosophy after 1781. Ed. Allison, H. and Heath, P. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leibniz, G.W. (1989). Leibniz: Philosophical Essays. Eds. Ariew, R. and Garber, D. Indianapolis: Hackett. Morgenstern, M. (1985). Schopenhauers Philosophie der Naturwissenschaft. Aprioritätslehre und Methodenlehre als Grenzziehung naturwissenschaftlicher Erkenntnis. Bonn: Bouvier Verlag. Nehamas, A. (1985). Meno’s Paradox and Socrates as a Teacher. Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, 3, pp. 1–30. Newton, I. (1999). The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. Trans. Cohen, I.B. and Whitman, A. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. ———. (2014). Philosophical Writings: Revised Edition. Ed. Janiak, A. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, F. (1999). Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden (Vol. 5). Ed. Colli, G. and Montinari, M. Berlin: de Gruyter. Özen, V.O. (2020). The Ambiguity in Schopenhauer’s Doctrine of the Thing-in-Itself. The Review of Metaphysics, 74(2), pp. 251–288. Risse, W. (1970). Die Logik der Neuzeit. Vol. 2. Bad Cannstatt: Frommann Verlag. Schopenhauer, A. (1970). Der handschriftliche Nachlaß. 5 Vols. Ed. Hübscher, A. Frankfurt am Main: Kramer. [Cited as HN (volume:page)] Schroeder, S. (2020). Schopenhauer and Hume on Will and Causation. In: Wicks, R. ed. The Oxford Handbook of Schopenhauer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 161–173. Schwab, W. (2015). Explanation in the Epistemology of the Meno. Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, 48, pp. 1–36. ———. (2016). Understanding epistēmē in Plato’s Republic. Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, 51, pp. 41–85. Segala, M. (2017). Metaphysics and the Sciences in Schopenhauer. In: Shapshay, S. ed. The Palgrave Schopenhauer Handbook. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Stoll, T. (2018). Science and Two Kinds of Knowledge: Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and the IgnorabimusStreit. Journal of the History of Philosophy, 56(3), pp. 519–549. Viljanen, V. (2009). Schopenhauer’s Twofold Dynamism. In: Pietarinen, J. and Viljanen, V. eds. The World as Active Power: Studies in the History of European Reason. Leiden: Brill, pp. 305–329. Watkins, E. (2005). Kant and the Metaphysics of Causality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Young, J. (2005). Schopenhauer. London: Routledge.

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5 REPRESENTING NOTHING Schopenhauer “Decoding” Acoustical Science Steven P. Lydon

What set music apart from other artforms, for Schopenhauer, was its capacity to bypass “representation” or the spatio-temporal determinations of ordinary experience. This was because music did not rely upon lyric or dramatis personae; tropes that appealed to the intellect. Music could interact directly with emotion, eliciting what Schopenhauer called the “will.” The will was the human faculty of volition but also the intangible spring for all life, desire, and activity. So despite being fully present to sensation, music was a profoundly metaphysical current within Schopenhauer’s philosophy. For contemporary readers, this represents a stumbling block and not owing to any inherent obscurity. In fact, the lucidity of Schopenhauer’s prose brings into view a more basic problem, which is for that reason all the more vexing: that metaphysical sentiment of any kind has become so remote from the present. How should one react today to the proposal that music expresses the will? When faced with this predicament, it helps to know Schopenhauer is in some respects closer to our era, and more distant from his own, than one might expect. In the eight-year period between The World as Will and Representation (1818) and E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “Review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony” (1810) – the culmination of Romanticism’s valorization of “absolute music”1 – Europe’s intellectual milieu had already changed considerably. During his formative years, Schopenhauer saw the consolidation of biology as an independent field, the ascent of empirical science, and the legitimation of electricity and magnetism.2 And more locally, but no less significantly, Schopenhauer had witnessed the decline of Naturphilosophie. This scientific wing of Jena Romanticism was espoused most notably by F. W. J. Schelling from 1795 but was losing steam by around 1810.3 Thus did Schopenhauer find himself in rather an unusual position. On the one hand, Schopenhauer received his intellectual formation from Jena. Schopenhauer inherited Immanuel Kant’s conceptual architecture and always admired literary authors such as J. W. von Goethe, Jean Paul Richter, and Ludwig Tieck. On the other hand, the era of empirical science was well and truly underway by 1818. So in just a few years, Jena began to fall out of sync with the present and Schopenhauer’s response was to cultivate a hard-nosed realism. Falling somewhere between Romanticism and empirical science, Schopenhauer’s thought was perpetually discordant, producing an outlook that Friedrich Nietzsche would later call “untimely.”4 68

DOI: 10.4324/9781003048992-7

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Thus was Schopenhauer riven by the competing demands of his era: a systematizing impulse that elevated artworks beyond all else; a pessimistic realism that insisted upon otherworldly asceticism; an ambitious metaphysics that sought legitimacy in empirical science. The present article highlights this third item. Although metaphysics was ordinarily defined in opposition to sensible experience, Schopenhauer dedicated himself to compatibilizing philosophy and empirical science. This did not imply that metaphysics drew its validity from experiment but Schopenhauer could not completely overlook how empirical science imparted relevance and legitimacy. And that was no mere practical exigency. It was Isaac Newton’s explanatory power, rather than his theoretical consistency, that overtook continental rationalism. Conceding that certain dimensions of nature were unknowable set transcendental philosophy into motion. And in time, the same empiricist impulse would highlight the widening gulf between theory and practice in Kant’s thought.5 It is under this lens one must interpret the references to experiment within Schopenhauer’s writing. These cases were not entirely casual; they testified that metaphysics could profitably refract the natural world. And given that Schopenhauer’s system largely remained unchanged during his career, this same motive informed his greatly expanded second volume of The World as Will and Representation (1844). It is consequently helpful to distinguish between traditional and what Frederick Beiser has called Schopenhauer’s “immanent” metaphysics.6 If Kant defined metaphysics as certainty beyond experience, then Schopenhauer reimagined metaphysics as certainty through experience. This involved a subtle but decisive change in the status of appearances. For Kant, the laws of appearances were knowable exclusively through quantity. Schopenhauer agreed with Kant and yet insisted that the “quality” of these appearances exceeded their purely mathematical explanation.7 Appearances therefore lent themselves to “interpretation” (Deutung, SW 2:49/WWR 1:64), “elaboration” (Auslegung, SW 2:282/WWR 1:265),8 and “deciphering” (entziffern, SW 2:391/WWR 1:357), processes through which essence may exclusively be inferred. This did not only represent a noumenal transgression on Schopenhauer’s part. It signified a reconceptualization of metaphysics itself, which no longer sought the “ground, emergence, and explanation of the world,” as Matthias Koßler put it, but rather its “meaning.”9 So while Schopenhauer never formalized a hermeneutics,10 it is fair to say that the practice of interpretation was integral to his philosophy. Schopenhauer’s engagement with empirical science, with its emphasis on precise measurement, brings these interpretative stakes into clear relief. And given its proximity to music, acoustical science would seem especially relevant. The name most prominently associated with acoustical science during Schopenhauer’s lifetime was Ernst Chladni. Chladni had earned his reputation with a compendium entitled Die Akustik (1802) and undertook public performances exhibiting self-invented musical instruments and natural phenomena across Europe.11 Among these curiosities were the “sound figures” (Klangfiguren): three-dimensional patterns in sand that emerged upon a metal plate (Figure 5.1). This phenomenon spurred considerable debate between conventional physicists and Jena’s Naturphilosophen.12 For these latter thinkers, the sound figures established the priority of dynamic over mechanical physics and elicited a “language of nature.” But the minutiae of this dispute need not detain us here. It is enough to observe that Schopenhauer consciously made his own sound figure references against this background. Chladni’s research provided Schopenhauer with an empirical foil to display his characteristic metaphysics; and allowed Schopenhauer to set himself apart from Jena’s previous generation.​ 69

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Figure 5.1  Ernst Chladni, Die Akustik (Leipzig; Breitkopf und Härtel, 1830), p. 284.

This article presents three representative examples of Schopenhauer’s encounter with acoustical science, which are drawn from across his career and addressed in chronological order. The first case stems from On Vision and Colours (1816), where Schopenhauer draws an analogy between Chladni’s sound figures and the eye’s physiological activity. This was responding to Goethe, who Schopenhauer had worked with on the Farbenlehre in the winter of 1813. The second example arrives in the first volume of The World as Will 70

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and Representation (1819). Here Schopenhauer appeals to Chladni’s acoustical research to support his view that sound is not logically consistent and therefore amounts to little more than appearance or representation. The third case occurs much later in WWR 2 (1844). Here the sound figures return as an emblem of the unconscious and its relationship to conscious thought. Given the implicit contrast with Jena’s interpretations – some fifty years old by this point – one can interpret Schopenhauer’s analogies as retractions from an external, objective world into empirical psychology and physiology. In these subtle reconfigurations, Schopenhauer grafts an established landmark of speculation onto new scientific territory. Before examining these cases, a bibliographical note seems appropriate. It is notable that Schopenhauer removed his earliest sound figure reference from later editions of VC but added and preserved them within later editions of WWR 2. How should one think about such emendations, given that Schopenhauer never fundamentally altered his philosophical position? One might argue, correctly I think, that these empirical references were contingent within Schopenhauer’s metaphysical system. But contingency should not be mistaken for unimportance. It was precisely the utility of Schopenhauer’s transcendental architecture to harvest empirical data or to reveal its philosophical significance. And this activity had philosophical stakes of its own. Jena had appropriated Newton’s third rule of reasoning to grasp a nature that lay beyond sensation.13 Schopenhauer came to believe this method went too far and thus reasserted Kant’s distinction between “constitutive” and “regulative” analogy; the former could support objective statements whereas the latter made judgments “as if” they were true. So for Schopenhauer, analogy was the point where his predecessors lapsed into speculation. This explains why Schopenhauer was so sensitive regarding his own use of analogy, repeatedly advising his reader to exercise caution and not infer too much. But Schopenhauer’s guilty conscience raises questions of its own. Given the associated risk, why did Schopenhauer repeatedly indulge analogy? One might speculate that Schopenhauer was mobilizing Jena’s literary inheritance against his own better judgment. Or perhaps analogy provided the interstice between metaphysics and empirical reality. Empirical references would demonstrate the relevance and interpretative power of Schopenhauer’s thought. It would consequently feel unsatisfying to frame analogy exclusively via the question of whether Schopenhauer breached Kantian limits. For today’s reader, this issue cannot help but seem historically local. What mattered for posterity was that analogy, in all its ambivalence, supplied the most vivid and impactful moments in Schopenhauer’s writing. These were the moments that fostered Schopenhauer’s longevity long after metaphysical sentiment had faded from the West; and not just within the discipline of philosophy, whose definition was to become ever more rigid and narrow, but also across the arts and humanities. So while Schopenhauer downplayed his own analogies as decorative or superficial, likely thanks to an overabundance of caution, his readers discerned something more: a productive tension between the desire to bypass, and yet to remain within, the limits of representation.

5.1  The Sound Figures and the Eye In the sound figures, Jena interlocutors envisaged a nature beyond sensation. The young Schopenhauer faced this legacy during his internship on Goethe’s Farbenlehre in the winter of 1813.14 But the relationship quickly soured when Schopenhauer published his own formal response, On Vision and Colours in 1816. Clearly, the two men had been worlds apart even at this formative stage of Schopenhauer’s development. This divergence was reflected 71

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in their respective sound figure interpretations. Whereas Goethe saw opportunity in the experiment, Schopenhauer provocatively reduced the sound figures to analogy. The term reduction is already controversial because analogy played an important role in Goethe’s Farbenlehre. The Kantian Schopenhauer granted analogy merely “regulative” validity i.e., license to treat analogy “as if” it was true. This qualified experience would have been blasphemy for any real protégé of the Farbenlehre. Goethe had sought to investigate the sheer visual experience of color, not to explain it away. From Goethe’s perspective, Schopenhauer lost the objective external world. Yet for his part, Schopenhauer might have responded that objectivity can only result from the (transcendental) subjective. Although Goethe had met Chladni in 1802, the sound figures were not incorporated into the Farbenlehre until 1820. But Goethe doubtless mediated to Schopenhauer the various interpretations that were circulating around Jena. In a subsection entitled “An Analogy,” Schopenhauer introduced the sound figures as an accompaniment to his physiological account of the eye.15 Schopenhauer is exceedingly cautious, segregating the section from his technical account and labeling the analogy “[incidental]” and “accidental” (SW 1:89–90/VC 295). This most likely owed to the controversy surrounding Kant’s regulative view of teleology. In an attempt perhaps to set himself apart from licentious speculators, Schopenhauer completely removed this section from his second edition in 1854. But this does not prevent us from recognizing the passage as an important point of contact between Schopenhauer and Naturphilosophie. Before addressing the sound figure analogy, Schopenhauer’s general goal bears repeating. To explain how sensible intuition becomes a mental representation, Schopenhauer divides the eye into two fundamental activities. One is the production of quantitative intensity, which supplies the range of shade from white to black. This range differs by degree, not kind. The second activity is the qualitative division of the retina into color pairs. Because colors exist in a “polarity,” they must be expressed through ratio (SW 1:35/VC 237). Taken together, these activities produce an image in the mind. This explains why, in the following section, Schopenhauer introduces the sound figure analogy to evoke the dual function of the retina. There are two ways to move the sand on the plate, he says: one is with a violin bow and the other a blunt strike. Both cases produce “vibration,” yet the former creates simultaneous interaction of motion and stasis, whereas the latter impacts the sheet as a whole (SW 1:89/VC 295). Schopenhauer says that this corresponds to the production of color and darkness/light respectively. Color stems from the interaction of elements, whereas light is their movement in unison. Schopenhauer uses the sound figure analogy to illuminate the eye’s operation. But despite his warning not to mistake these two very distinct objects, Schopenhauer offers the prospect of association beyond the senses. The previous section had culminated with the suggestion that the qualitative activity of the eye amounts to polarity. In the Farbenlehre, Goethe had similarly invoked polarity as the centerpiece of his sound figure analysis but fell short of applying the concept to the sound figures.16 Into this absence, Schopenhauer now presents the following hypothesis. The concept of polarity (and specifically the version Schopenhauer has expounded), might even be the fundamental concept of all polarity, under which magnetism, electricity, and galvanism can be subsumed, each of which is only the phenomenon of an activity divided into two halves that are conditional upon one another, have an affinity for one another, and strive after reunification. (SW 1:36/VC 238) 72

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Schopenhauer is suggesting that a range of physical phenomena – “magnetism, electricity, and galvanism” – derive from the eye, which furnishes the “fundamental concept of all polarity.” The dual poles that constitute polarities are “appearances” that are simply “divided into halves” in vision. Schopenhauer therefore embraces Kant (with an empiricist twist) by explaining physical phenomena via an appeal to the eye as an organ. But Schopenhauer simultaneously goes beyond Kant when he suggests that this process occurs beyond sensation. Herein Schopenhauer’s citation of Plato: “Now when our first form had been cut in two, each half in longing for its fellow would come to it again.”17 This citation is not merely decorative, as Plato had argued elsewhere that physical processes can occur beyond sensation. Schopenhauer does not expand on this modernized Platonic physics. But it is nevertheless striking that, in this early text, one discerns the basic outline of Schopenhauer’s two-fold hermeneutic process. First Schopenhauer withdraws cognition into the transcendental subject (and specifically the eye via an empiricist reading of Kant), and then proceeds to plumb these “appearances” for being itself (via Plato). Schopenhauer’s sound figure analogy in VC reinstates the subject/object opposition that Goethe had rejected and goes on to posit metaphysical claims of its own. Schopenhauer’s sound figure reference may therefore be understood as the deliberate negation of Goethean objectivity. Having confined the sound figures to analogy, Schopenhauer does not thematize the scientific viability of the experiment. Yet important conclusions may still be derived from his comments. If magnetism, electricity, and galvanism are indeed reflections of the eye’s activity, then so do the sound figures reflect this activity (SW 1:36/VC 238). But as analogy, the sound figures are subsidiary to vision because dynamic activity merely reflects the internal activity of the eye. Ultimately, the sound figures amount to projections of consciousness onto the world. Schopenhauer extracts significance from an apparently trivial analogy. That does not represent a Herculean intellectual feat on Schopenhauer’s part. It merely reflects the exercise of a consistent hermeneutic strategy, whether it is applied to a literary author like Goethe or an empirical experiment like the sound figures.

5.2  Chladni and the Rationality of Music This interpretative strategy remained in place when Schopenhauer published WWR 1 in 1819. Whatever scientific tendencies had prompted Schopenhauer’s distrust of Naturphilosophie in 1816 were by now surely consolidated. But from Schopenhauer’s perspective, neither Chladni nor his sound figures were corrupted by association. Schopenhauer in fact retains, and attempts to reframe, these well-known reference points. Given Chladni’s reception in Naturphilosophie, it is not without irony that Schopenhauer appeals to Chladni’s acoustical work to undermine the rationalism of G. W. Leibniz and fortify Kant’s doctrine of appearance. At the same time, Schopenhauer by no means wishes to dissolve the link between metaphysics and empirical science. Schopenhauer modifies Leibniz thus: “Music is an unconscious exercise in metaphysics, in which the mind does not know that it is philosophizing” (SW 2:313/WWR 1:292). Leibniz had claimed that being is founded in quantity. Schopenhauer now frames music via this lens: though music may appear detached from nature, it can be analyzed like any other phenomenon. At the same time, Schopenhauer notes that harmony must be the product of subjective consciousness. Schopenhauer introduces Chladni’s empirical research to recast as “appearance” Leibniz’s explanation of music. 73

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Directly following this intervention, Schopenhauer invokes Chladni’s Die Akustik to determine whether the system of musical notation is internally coherent or whether it is merely a practical construction. The investigation is prompted by a quirk of musical instrument production: perfect intonation is a physical impossibility. If one were simultaneously to play the highest and lowest possible notes on a perfectly tuned guitar, they would harmonize imperfectly.18 Moreover, if this guitar were to produce higher notes, the dissonance would increase proportionately. This phenomenon was generally attributed to failures in the manufacturing process. After all, a master luthier could better approximate perfection than his apprentice. But even if the instrument makers agreed that perfect intonation was physically impossible, or that it represented an ideal at best, they had no explanation as to why. Thus in §30 of Die Akustik, Chladni analyzes the system of notation itself.19 Harmony can remain agreeable, and hence mathematically coherent, only in relation to a given note. The further one moves from this note, the more imperfect its harmony. This cannot be detected by the ear until significant deformations occur but mathematically the phenomenon is visible even in the earliest stages. To demonstrate this, Chladni analyzes a simple progression. The Pythagorean monochord had established that intervals can be expressed as fractions. These fractions represent the point at which a string is divided and plucked, producing a note of lesser or higher pitch. An octave represents a ratio of 2:1, whereas 3:2 stands for a perfect fifth, and so on. The open monochord is called the “root note” and can represent any point on the harmonic spectrum. This being given, the relations stay mathematically consistent. However, applying the ratios at any other point on the monochord will result in deviations. If the keynote shifts due to a key change, for example, the ratios will generate increasingly dissonant intervals. Chladni portrays the deviation as follows:

g, c, f, d, g, c, 243: 162: 216: 180: 240: 160 3:2, 3:4, 6:5, 3:4, 3:2,

The intervals are represented in the lowest line, which correspond to the notes above. The non-fractional figures in the middle are used to compare the ratios more easily. Expressing the ratios in a single figure also supplies greater mathematical precision. The graph demonstrates that repetition occurs in the first and last two elements (g:c); it is here that the correlation would be expected to occur. However, a corruption has already emerged in the first repetition. This is enough to prove that the intervals are mathematically imperfect. The deviation grows with every successive octave to an increasingly obvious effect. Chladni concludes that the ratio will remain consistent for a given keynote within a certain range, producing intervals which are harmonically pleasing to the ear. But this is an arbitrary starting point in physical terms. That is to say: the laws of musical notation are correct, but only within a closed, artificial system. One could decide that C or D was the root note for musical purposes – but what validity does this hold, beyond mere convention? Chladni’s result supports the argument that musical intonation is not essentially rational, so mathematics can furnish only a practical description of music.20 In this result, Schopenhauer finds proof that nature’s semblance of order is an exigency of cognition. It confirms that “[a] completely pure harmonic system of notes is both physically as well as arithmetically impossible” (SW 2:314/WWR 1:294, my italics). For Schopenhauer, it is no coincidence that master luthiers never crafted the perfect instrument: the ideal is unobtainable because nature is not inherently quantitative. 74

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Chladni’s results suggest that music no longer refers to matter, but rather to the nervous configuration of the perceiver. Musical ratios have come a long way since the era of Pythagoras, when they expressed the fundamental structure of the universe. Having relinquished all association with the concept, the raison d’être of music is now to affect the senses. In Schopenhauer’s hands, Chladni’s negative evidence becomes a potent corrective to rationalist ontology. For Leibniz, music is perceptible by virtue of unconscious mathematical operations in the mind. Schopenhauer wishes to preserve this insight, albeit by restricting its validity to appearance. However, this changes entirely the character of the numerical designations. For numerals are no longer the essence of tone but rather ciphers for something else: they are viewed not as “the signified but rather themselves as sign” (SW 2:302/WWR 1:283).21 By distinguishing between “the signified” and the “sign,” Schopenhauer rejects the claim that essence is quantity, since quantity is merely a concept applied to the world. The resulting dissonance supplies evidence of a non-correlation between mind and being. But while this undoubtedly represents a withdrawal into Kantian subjectivity on Schopenhauer’s part, it is accompanied by a parallel maneuver. Leibniz’s ontological claims are reduced to appearance and simultaneously elevated by the interpretative potential of appearance as “sign.” So even while Schopenhauer expands the world’s interpretability, which now ubiquitously exhibits the will’s activity, he simultaneously insists that this meaning exists exclusively for the subject. The sound figures could never be Signatura rerum,22 because, for Schopenhauer, signs are essentially meaningless.

5.3  Sound Figures and the Unconscious The second reference to the sound figures occurs decades later; namely, in chapter 10 of WWR 2. Here Schopenhauer attempts to describe the relationship between conscious and unconscious knowledge. This requires an account of “syllogism” (judgment by another name), which Schopenhauer considers the basic unit of knowledge. Schopenhauer explains that judgment places two concepts into a logical relationship via the pure categories of understanding (such as quantity, kind, etc). The concepts within this judgment can also be related via their respective generality. Schopenhauer gives the following example: if “all diamonds are stones,” and “all stones are combustible,” then one may conclude that “some stones are combustible.” From these statements, one can infer that the conclusion was already contained in the premise, albeit unconsciously. Schopenhauer calls this “implicit” knowledge, i.e., knowledge that has not yet been explicated in judgments (SW 3:117/WWR 2:115). It is the relationship between implicit and explicit knowledge that Schopenhauer will thematize with his sound figure example. Noteworthy that Schopenhauer does not present an abstract but rather an anthropological theory of logic; it is the utility of unconscious knowledge, as opposed to its structure, that receives emphasis. And this utility extends to activities that no longer depend upon reflection: unconscious knowledge is an indispensable shortcut for abstract thinking. From this, Schopenhauer infers that most of our knowledge is implicit. Because its source has ordinarily been forgotten, great mental effort is needed to recover this knowledge and to reformulate it as conscious judgment. Schopenhauer therefore characterizes “analysis” as an unnatural endeavor. It is possible to know of and even act on something without being explicitly conscious of it. The mind contains a mass of sensible data, which is only ever partially organized into concepts. These concepts are described by Schopenhauer as equivalent to “words,” which are the basic unity of judgment from which conclusions are then formu75

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lated. Thinking therefore occurs for the most part without concepts. But words are the only way for us consciously to apprehend or know objects, which means that the process of our own thought is invisible to us. Schopenhauer accordingly calls language the “external” (or perceptible) manifestation of concepts; the judgments themselves occur “internally” within consciousness. So “words and sentences” are the “trace” of an unconscious process, which is reconstructed after the event (SW 3:119/WWR 2:117). And Schopenhauer now elaborates this analogy via the sound figures: “…the words and sentences in which [the syllogism] is expressed merely describes the trace that is left behind: they are to the syllogism what the sound figures drawn in sand are to the sounds whose vibrations they present” (SW 3:119/WWR 2:117).23 Words are the tangible expression of thought. But like the sound figures, words are only “the trace that is left behind.” The sound figures manifest Schopenhauer’s conviction that most thinking occurs unconsciously and that conscious thought is inherently contingent and derivative. As figures to tone, words recall thought after it has transpired. Though figures and words depend upon the bedrock of unconscious thought for their existence, their relationship to this substrate is by definition unknowable (since “knowledge” is made up of conscious judgments). So the sound figures exhibit an unknowable yet necessary relationship between language and unconscious thought; and this reflects Schopenhauer’s Kantian view that selfconsciousness can never exhaustively penetrate into its own foundation.24 On the surface, Schopenhauer’s analogy restates Kant’s sensible limits. Whereas the sound figures had evoked nature’s inherent order for the Naturphilosophen, the external reflects nothing but an internal or mental state for Schopenhauer. And this internal state in turn exhibits nothing but the inscrutability of the unconscious, whose operation is disclosed haphazardly if at all. This pessimistic streak is an innovation on Schopenhauer’s part and yet does not completely lack precedent. The literary author Jean Paul Richter, one of the few writers besides Tieck and Goethe that Schopenhauer admired, had incorporated the sound figures into a dramatic passage of Selina or on the Immortality of the Soul (1827). But next to Selina, Schopenhauer’s reference is shorn of pathos. Only the term “trace” remains to signal the fragility of consciousness and its unknowable relationship to the forces that govern it. Unlike Jean Paul, Schopenhauer never made the personal shift from optimism to pessimism and thus presumably had less to be disappointed by. Yet this blunt realism carries significance of its own. Schopenhauer does not just destructively criticize but repurposes the optimism of Naturphilosophie as substrate for the psychological re-interpretation of natural science. Schopenhauer’s sound figure analogy would go on to have an impactful afterlife through Friedrich Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lie in a Non-Moral Sense” (1873). Unpublished though it remained during Nietzsche’s lifetime, this article was incorporated into the canon of twentieth-century philosophy of language and literary theory during the 1970s. It is remarkable that the article’s two most-cited lines contain references to the sound figures. Where these references have been singled out in the scholarship, they have been interpreted without any mention of Schopenhauer.

5.4 Conclusion Many years passed between Schopenhauer’s two sound figure references and each refers to quite different things. But contextualizing them in terms of Schopenhauer’s system (which he did not ever fundamentally modify) reveals an underlying logic. In the first 76

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case, Schopenhauer has repurposed Goethe’s sound figure reference to describe the eye’s physiological operation. This may be interpreted as a return to Kantian subjectivity (in accordance with Schopenhauer’s empirically-oriented reading of Kant).25 In the second case, Schopenhauer has deflated the optimism of Naturphilosophie. This reveals how Schopenhauer has, through the sound figures, grafted an established landmark of speculation onto changed scientific territory. These references tacitly contrast with the previous Jena generation; and this discretion indicates that Schopenhauer’s attitude toward Naturphilosophie was not entirely destructive. Schopenhauer did not simply ignore the sound figures, which would have been the preferred strategy of hostile reviewers. It is more accurate to say that Schopenhauer reinterpreted Naturphilosophie from the Kantian standpoint and, in this way, sought to revivify Jena’s core motivations in a rapidly changing scientific context.

Notes 1 The term “absolute music” did not come into use until Richard Wagner but Carl Dahlhaus situates its origin in Jena around 1800. The Idea of Absolute Music, trans. Roger Lustig (University of Chicago Press, Chicago; London: 1991), 3. 2 A concise overview of these developments can be found in Dan Christensen, “The Ørsted-Ritter Partnership and the Birth of Romantic Natural Philosophy,” Annals of Science, 52 (1995): 153– 185. 3 John H. Zammito, The Gestation of German Biology Philosophy and Physiology: from Stahl to Schelling (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 340. 4 Friedrich Nietzsche, “Schopenhauer as educator” in Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge: 2012), 133. 5 Zammito, 322. 6 Frederick Beiser, Weltschmerz: Pessimism in German Philosophy, 1860–1900 (Oxford; New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2016), 30. 7 Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung I in Sämtliche Werke. Ed. Paul Deussen. München: R. Piper, 1911, 59. 8 I have amended the translation from “explanation” which is associated with causation and thus representation. It is important to flag the original German terms to keep track of parallels with Friedrich Schleiermacher and the hermeneutical tradition. 9 Matthias Koßler, “Nichts: zwischen Mystik und Philosophie bei Schopenhauer” in Philosophien des Willens: Böhme, Schelling, Schopenhauer, eds. Günther Bonheim and Thomas Regehly (Berlin: Weissensee, 2008), 76. My translation. 10 Frederick Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 253. 11 Myles W. Jackson, Harmonious Triads: Physicists, Musicians, and Instruments Makers in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Boston: MIT Press, 2006). 12 I provide an overview elsewhere: Steven Lydon, “The ‘Sound Figures’ and Naturphilosophie in A. W. Schlegel’s Lectures on Art History and Aesthetics,” Symphilosophie 3 (2021): 141–164. 13 Christensen, 163. 14 For details of their interaction, see Elsbeth Wolffheim, “Des Lehrers Bürden. Zur Kontroverse zwischen Goethe und Schopenhauer,” in Johnann Wolfgang von Goethe (München: Heinz Ludwig Arnold, 1982); W. Ostwald, Goethe, Schopenhauer und die Farbenlehre (Leipzig: Unesma Verlag, 1918). On the technical dispute between Schopenhauer and Goethe, see Dennis Sepper, Goethe Contra Newton: Polemics and the Project for a New Science of Color (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988); P. F. H. Lauxtermann, “Five decisive years: Schopenhauer’s epistemology as reflected in his theory of colors,” Studies in the history of philosophy of science, 18 (1987), 3: 271–291; “Hegel and Schopenhauer as partisans of Goethe’s theory of color,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 51 (1990), 4: 599–624; Robert A. Crone, “Schopenhauer on Vision and the Colors,” Documenta Opthamologica, 93 (1997): 61–71.

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Steven P. Lydon 15 “A Comparison” in the original translation. Schopenhauer uses “Ein Gleichnis” in the original German, which is also translatable to “analogy.” This latter term seems preferable because the English-speaking scholarship has since decided upon it. 16 J. W. Goethe, Sämtliche Werke: Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche I.25, ed. Dieter Borchmeyer et al. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1989–2013, 711–2. 17 Plato, “Symposium,” Plato: Complete Works (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 191A. Cited in SW 1:36/VC 238. 18 Today’s digital instruments only resolve the problem by artificially shifting the root note. 19 Ernst Chladni, Die Akustik (Leipzig; Breitkopf und Härtel, 1802). All translations my own. 20 I thank Alexander Rehding, whose article on Schopenhauer’s theory of music is forthcoming, for conversations on this topic. 21 The original translation reads: “which … are not the signified but, even in the first instance, the sign.” I have modified the original translation for clarity and accuracy. The original German reads “das Bezeichnete, sondern erst selbst als Zeichen.” 22 See F. W. J. Schelling, “Ueber das sogenannte Wetterschießen” of March 29, 1811 and “Bericht über den pasigraphischen Versuch des Professor Schmid in Dillingen,” of July 8, 1811 in Sämmtliche Werke II.2, ed. Manfred Schröter (C.H. Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, München: 1965). 23 I have modified the English translation from “acoustic figures” to “sound figures” because this clarifies the reference. The original German reads: “[Wörte und Sätze] verhalten sich zu [Denken], wie die Klangfiguren aus Sand zu den Tönen, deren Vibrationen sie darstellen.” 24 Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung I, 535. 25 Robert Wicks, “Schopenhauer’s naturalization of Kant’s a priori forms of empirical knowledge,” History of Philosophy Quarterly, 10 (1993), 2: 181–196.

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6 SCHOPENHAUER’S SYNOPTIC METAPHILOSOPHY1 Alexander S. Sattar

6.1 Introduction As the “enfant terrible of Classical German philosophy” (Zöller 2011: p. 388), Schopenhauer’s major ambition was to overcome the limits of cognition and gain metaphysical knowledge while retaining the achievements of critical philosophy – in his own words, to find a middle way “between the earlier dogmatic doctrine of omniscience and the despair of Kantian critique” (SW 2:507/WWR 1:455).2 Among his most fundamental and least studied achievements on this path was his metaphilosophy, understood as a systematic set of theories about the sources, nature, subject matter, aims, methods, and limitations of philosophy, or metaphysics.3 In this chapter, I attempt to do justice to the intricacy and originality of his metaphilosophy by discriminating between its several – quite divergent – strands and discussing the overarching, “synoptic” perspective that unites them. In Section 1, I outline Schopenhauer’s broadest definition of philosophy as the quest for truth. In Section 2, I consider Schopenhauer’s understanding of philosophy as an empirical metaphysics whose subject matter is the thing in itself, as supported by his epistemology and critique of Kantian understanding of metaphysics. Section 3 brings to light the unsurmountable limitations of empirical metaphysics, which turn it into either mysticism or a science among other sciences. In Section 4, I examine the conception of a transcendental metaphysics, which deals with representation alone and is thus immanent but also not really “metaphysical”, by Schopenhauer’s own definition. In Section 5, I consider Schopenhauer’s pragmatic approach to metaphysics, which ascribes to philosophy the task of a hermeneutical interpretation of the world as a hypothetical, abductive, fallible, and ever-ongoing procedure. As I argue in Section 6, a special case of such pragmatic metaphysics is one that satisfies the existential or “metaphysical need” of human beings. In Section 7, I elaborate upon the interpretation of Schopenhauer’s philosophy as a methodological perspectivism. On this reading, the different metaphilosophical approaches that coexist in his theory are mutually supplementing viewpoints on, or aspects of, the same thing, i.e., the world and self.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003048992-8

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6.2.  Philosophy as the Quest for Truth Schopenhauer’s general definition of philosophy is as lofty as it is polemical. In contrast to the “sophistry” the university professors live off, the business of genuine philosophy is “to strive after truth alone” (SW 3:xviii/WWR 2:12), which is the “highest and noblest endeavour of humankind” as a whole (SW 5:154/PP 1:129). This puts a serious epistemic obligation on philosophy, which “makes the claim – and therefore has the duty in all that it says – to be true in a strict and proper sense” (SW 3:183/WWR 2:175). What kind of truth, though, is philosophy’s object? In WWR 1, Schopenhauer calls the idea of the identity of body and will the “philosophical truth par excellence” (SW 2:122/WWR 1:127), yet it is but one very special truth out of all the propositions philosophy conveys. And whereas philosophy for Schopenhauer yields abstract knowledge, that idea is not really discursive, because it establishes “the connection between a judgment and the relationship an intuitive representation, a body, has to something that is not a representation at all” (ibid.). His more general definition of truth, which positions it within the realm of possible knowledge, states that it is “the relation of a judgement to something distinct from it which is called its ground” (SW 1:105/FR100). Complementing the correspondence theory with the coherence theory, he seems to strive to achieve a twofold goal. On one hand, the relationality of truth and the dependence of the corresponding judgment on an external ground serve to protect philosophy from Schwärmerei, because “intrinsic truth is a contradiction” (SW 1:107/FR 102). On the other hand, that ground may be something other than “objective reality,” such as coherence with the larger body of knowledge, or the impossibility of it being false. To illuminate, Schopenhauer distinguishes between four – very heterogenous – types of truth according to the type of the grounds the respective judgments have. The first kind consists in logical, or formal, truths, which have other judgments as their grounds and are thus based on inferences. A special case of logical truths are the truths of the fourth type called metalogical, insofar as they represent “the formal conditions of all thought that lie in our reason” in general (SW 1:108/FR103), i.e., the prerequisites of reason’s operations, and are known intuitively via reason’s reflection upon its conditions. Being entirely analytical, hence yielding no new knowledge, neither of these kinds of truths seems to be what occupies philosophy, which is instead concerned with the second and third kinds of truths mentioned in FR, namely empirical and transcendental truths. In empirical, or material, truths, “the judgement … is immediately grounded on experience,” that is, intuitive representations via the power of judgment (SW 1:107/FR102), or on inductive reasoning from such experience. Transcendental truths are grounded in both empirical experience and the conditions for the possibility of all experience in general, such as the principle of sufficient reason (PSR) or “most principles in Kant’s Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science” (SW 1:108/FR 103); apparently, they are to some significant extent based on deductions. Following these distinctions, Schopenhauer puts forward two different conceptions of philosophy, pursuing empirical and transcendental truth respectively.

6.3  The Rationale for an “Empirical” Metaphysics Unproblematically, as it seems, Schopenhauer on many occasions states that the foundations of metaphysics “must … certainly be empirical” (SW 3:201/WWR 2:190). Central to this understanding is his polemic against Kant’s contention that the principles of metaphysics “must … never be taken from experience,” whether outer or inner. Since the object 80

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of cognition is supposed to lie beyond experience, Kant explains, “metaphysical cognition must contain nothing but judgments a priori” (Prolegomena 4:265–266). In Schopenhauer’s eyes, this reasoning is fundamentally flawed. To begin with, Kant fails to bear the burden of proof for his thesis: “absolutely nothing is offered in defence of this cardinal claim except an etymological argument” (SW 2:506/WWR 1:454), namely the fact that “meta” refers to something beyond “physical”. Relatedly, Kant commits a petitio principii, because he “presupposes in advance that only what we know prior to all experience can reach farther than possible experience” (SW 3:200/WWR 2:190). In other words, Kant’s argument at no point involves experience itself but remains caught in a purely abstract framework. This is flatly wrong, Schopenhauer maintains, even disregarding the ultimate validity of the empirical approach. Since the question that is “the riddle of experience, i.e. the only world we have before us,” is given to us empirically, or a posteriori, and thereby “we are faced with the most important and difficult tasks,” it is our epistemic duty, unless it is proven otherwise, to look for its solution first and foremost in experience, which is “the richest of all sources of cognition” (SW 2:506/WWR 1:454; SW 3:200–201/WWR 2:190). Kant’s grave omission is all the less amenable in light of another epistemic obligation we have, namely to reach as complete a cognition of the world as possible, which a priori metaphysics is less likely to deliver than a philosophy “immediately grounded on experience”: We cannot have cognition of anything wholly and completely until we have gone completely around it and have reached the starting point on the other side. This is why we must not, like Kant, proceed merely from the intellect to the cognition of the world … but also … proceed from the world, taken as existing, to the intellect. (SW 3:329/WWR 2:302–3)4 Note that none of this requires metaphysical commitments but relies solely on the acceptance of certain principles of philosophical hermeneutics. Importantly, these arguments do not (yet) demand that philosophy actually be based solely on experience, but only assert that experience is one legitimate source of metaphysical cognition among others. As a matter of fact, Schopenhauer’s argument at this point offers only as much as the possibility of success for empirical metaphysics: “even if the root cannot be directly brought to light, certain data must still be obtainable to explain the connection of the world of appearances to the essence of the in-itself of things” (SW 3:328/WWR 2:302). Because experience could lead to valuable insights and is therefore worth investigating, Schopenhauer concludes, Kant’s failure to do justice to it is a fatal methodological blunder. However, things become more assertoric as soon as we leave general hermeneutics and grant the premises of Schopenhauer’s transcendental epistemology, which in turn entail very tangible ontological commitments. First, it states that all cognition – metaphysical included – originates in intuition, of which discursive thinking and abstract concepts are derivative (SW 2:WWR 1:57). Second, Schopenhauer makes a distinction between representation and thing in itself, whereby the former introduces the mere form of cognition, which is cognized a priori – and only a priori – and the thing in itself presents its content, or material, which is cognized a posteriori – and only a posteriori (SW 5:97/PP 1:85; SW 4:86/WN 393). This distinction – already metaphysically laden – comes from Kant’s epistemology, but Schopenhauer also appeals to a phenomenological corroboration, namely one’s inner experience of feeling the content that cannot be apprehended qua representation; in contrast 81

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to representations, which are per se neutral to us, that content is “immediately understood and has an interest that engages our entire being” (SW 2:113/WWR 1:119). At the same time, the thing in itself, the content of representation, is thinkable but incognizable, so that “in everything of which we have cognition, a certain something unfathomable to us is concealed, and we must admit that we cannot thoroughly understand even the commonest and simplest appearances” (SW 3:218/WWR 2:206). These two premises indicate that the “earlier conception of a purely a priori metaphysics is necessarily in vain (eitel),” because the a priori, “far from leading us beyond experience, gives merely a part of experience itself, namely the formal part … without content” (SW 3:200/WWR 2:190). This implies that metaphysics has to proceed from ground up to get to that “certain something” and reduce the use of abstract concepts to a mere vehicle for intuitively apprehended insights.5 Whether it is the outer experience of appearances, which are rooted “in the thing in itself, as expressions of its very own essence” (SW 5:97/PP 1:85), or, more properly, the inner experience of one’s body as “the single, narrow, gateway to truth” (SW 3:219/WWR 2:207), philosophy, on this reading, must be based on empirical principles.

6.4  The Double Impasse of Empirical Metaphysics Schopenhauer’s talk of “empirical foundations” may mislead us into believing that philosophy uses inductively collected data as a springboard to some other, non-empirical philosophizing. There is indeed reason for taking the empirical component to be “just” the beginning (see Section 5 and 6), but on multiple occasions Schopenhauer maintains that no other philosophical methodology is needed apart from the empirical one. Famously, in the introduction to WN, he takes the sciences to have “immediately arrived at the core of my metaphysics” by “proceeding from the purely empirical” alone (SW 4:ix/WN 305). Rhetorically exaggerating this point, Schopenhauer insists that experience, which the sciences harness, furnishes metaphysics with “such a strong and sufficient external proof of its truth and accuracy, that no greater proof is possible” (ibid.).6 However, this approach is based on problematic assumptions that have devastating implications for the conception of empirical metaphysics. Most importantly, the integrity of empirical metaphysics entails for Schopenhauer a very specific goal and subject matter, which runs counter to the premise that “the purely empirical” can “immediately” lead to the “core of metaphysics”. As pointed out above, the epistemological opposition of the form and content of experience is, for Schopenhauer, virtually identical with the equally central metaphysical opposition of “essence” and “only appearance”; the former is “the inner being of the world,” or the “kernel of nature,” and is the ultimate aim of metaphysics, whereas appearance “has a merely relative and conditional validity” and makes up the proper domain of the sciences (SW 2:38/WWR 1:55; SW 3:197/WWR 2:187). Hence, in contrast to the sciences, which ultimately do nothing but “chas[e] appearances to infinity, moving without end or goal like a squirrel on a wheel” (SW 2:322/WWR 1:300), “metaphysics aims beyond appearance itself to that which appears” (SW 3:197/WWR 2:187).7 In this sense, philosophy deals with and questions precisely what the sciences take for granted as their axioms (SW 2:97/WWR 1:108). In accordance with this, Schopenhauer defines (empirical) metaphysics as pertaining to a toto genere different thing than any other cognition under the PSR: By metaphysics I understand any cognition that claims [jede angebliche Erkenntniß] to go beyond the possibility of experience, which is to say beyond nature or the given 82

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appearance of things, in order to disclose something about that which in some sense or another conditions appearance; or, in common parlance, about what is hidden behind nature and makes it possible. (SW 3:180/WWR 2:173) Thus, the proper subject matter of philosophy is external and alien to all subjective conditions of knowledge – so foreign to them, in fact, that it is “something else [altogether], something … wholly and completely different from representation” (SW 2:118/WWR 1:123). Unfortunately, this cleft between representation and thing in itself harbors a serious problem, insofar as philosophy now runs the danger of becoming that which it is explicitly very different from, namely mysticism and illuminism (SW 6:9–12/PP 2:12–14). In contrast to the sciences and any cognition under the PSR whatsoever, both philosophy and mysticism have the thing in itself as their subject matter and constitute equally “justifiable attempts to establish the truth” (SW 6:11/PP 2:14). However, they differ significantly in the means they employ to obtain and convey it: while the philosopher resorts to reasoning and abstract concepts, since philosophy “should be communicable cognition, and therefore must be rationalism” (ibid.),8 the mystic proceeds non-discursively and at best allegorically. The problem is that this distinction is based on the conviction that philosophy, as opposed to mysticism and religion, deals with that which we can know about the transcendent (SW 5:153/PP 1:129) and that its discursive elements actually communicate something of substance about it. Metaphysics as an empirical enterprise is thus not only inductive, but also explanatory, descriptive, and assertoric. However, Schopenhauer later disavows these assumptions; instead, he proclaims the in-itself of the world to be bound to remain inexpressible, so that any philosophical attempt to approach it is doomed to turn into mysticism (SW 3:702–703/WWR 2:626–7).9 Even the elusive “negative cognition” Schopenhauer previously promised instead (SW 2:485/WWR 1:438) is a long shot in light of the unavoidable limits of any cognition of the transcendent, insofar as “where the thing in itself begins appearance ends, and consequently so does representation and with it understanding” (SW 6:98/PP 2:86). Because of this, Schopenhauer reasons, our intellect is “wholly unsuited to the problems we are raising, nor [is it] remotely appropriate for, or capable of, grasping their solution, even if this were given” (SW 3:737/WWR 2:658). In fact, the intellect cannot even understand the problem, because the only way to adequately articulate it would require a transcendent vocabulary (SW 3:206/WWR 2:195).10 What this suggests is that philosophy, being done by us humans, not only fails to communicate its insights without succumbing to mysticism, but it cannot even have any properly metaphysical insights in the first place. Thus, the “kernel of nature” that empirical metaphysics, as opposed to the sciences, supposedly has in its grip, remains “eternally inaccessible to our cognition” after all (SW 3:702/WWR 2:626). As Schopenhauer’s later reservations suggest, he became aware of this inconsistency with time (I shall turn to his solution in a bit). The second presupposition of empirical metaphysics runs counter to the first one, but leads to a similar problem. It states that the feat of “reaching farther than possible experience” (SW 3:200/WWR 2:190), which is literally impossible, can nonetheless be achieved, insofar as the content of appearances is, at least in one particular case, amenable to empirical cognition as discussed in the previous section. Famously, Schopenhauer advocates immediate cognition of the body as “the only thing that we are acquainted with directly and not, like everything else, given merely in representation” (SW 3:219/WWR 2:207). The opposition of “direct” cognition, which ex hypothesi conveys metaphysical insights, and 83

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“indirect” cognition, which is supposed to instruct us about appearances alone, is as important a dichotomy for the conception of empirical metaphysics as the principal heterogeneity of representation and thing in itself (cf. SW 3:328/WWR 2:302). So much so, in fact, that Schopenhauer at times even denies the inner cognition of the body as will the status of an intuition, “because all intuition is spatial” (SW 3:219/WWR 2:207). Yet recall that the rationale for an empirical metaphysics was precisely that all cognition comes from intuition, therefore metaphysical cognition should do so too (see Section 2), which contradicts the idea of its being “direct”. In other words, immediate cognition of the body must enter the realm of representation to become that “empirical fact” which Schopenhauer holds it to be (SW 6:12/PP 2:14), while at the same time admitting that every “act of representing … remains essentially in the realm of representation” (SW 6:98/PP 2:86), ruling out its potential for metaphysical cognition. Ergo, such “direct” cognition is impossible either as a representation, because then it wouldn’t be cognition of the thing in itself, or as a nonrepresentation, because in that case it wouldn’t be cognition of the thing in itself.11 It is presumably in order to address this problem that Schopenhauer in later texts jettisons the idea that cognition of one’s body is “direct” in the strict and absolute sense; instead, he describes it in comparatives and superlatives as cognition not “completely immediate” after all, but “far more direct” than the other kinds, which “enters most directly into appearance” and is “the closest and clearest appearance of the thing in itself” (SW 3:220–21/WWR 2:207–208). Accordingly, the revised version of empirical metaphysics has it that “even the inner perception we have of our own will in no way provides an exhaustive and adequate cognition of the thing in itself” (SW 3:220/WWR 2:207), since it is tainted by the a priori form of time and the subject/object division (ibid.). This – epistemically more modest – position better accounts for the possibility of cognizing the willing subject, but at the cost of becoming less metaphysically relevant. Instead of the promised cognition of something – toto genere, mind you – different from representation, Schopenhauer now offers something different from it only in degree – “the I [which] is not thoroughly intimate with itself … and hence remains a riddle to itself” (SW 3:220/WWR 2:208). While the first problem of empirical metaphysics threatens to turn it into mysticism, the second one thus runs the danger of downgrading it to the status of mere science. To sum up, empirical metaphysics faces a twofold predicament. Ontologically, its subject matter is supposed to be the thing in itself, but the latter is incognizable. Epistemologically, its whole raison d’etre is its appeal to direct cognition, but such cognition turns out to be impossible. In other words, empirical metaphysics is either not cognition of the transcendent or it is not cognition of the transcendent. Needless to say, this compromises that which Schopenhauer deems “most important” about his philosophy, “namely the transition from appearance to the thing in itself that Kant dismissed as impossible” (SW 3:213/WWR 2:202). To alleviate the paradox, Schopenhauer is forced to leave the terrain of “empirical” metaphysics altogether and reformulate not just the modus cognoscendi of philosophy but its very subject matter.

6.5  Transcendental Metaphysics as the Science of Experience and Immanent Dogmatism On the face of it, Schopenhauer’s rationale for introducing an empirical metaphysics rules out the understanding of philosophy as a quest for transcendental truth. Indeed, judgments producing transcendental truths are a priori “determined through just that through which 84

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experience itself is determined” (SW 1:108/FR 103), whereas the whole point of philosophy is to gain knowledge that is independent of such determinations. However, metaphysics need not be constructed “purely empirically” in its entirety – something that Schopenhauer seems to expect from it in general (see Section 2) and takes the sciences to be actually doing – (see Section 3). Another strategy Schopenhauer employs is to demand that only its foundations should be empirical, whereas the main body of philosophy, that is “first philosophy,” or “philosophy in the narrower sense,” is transcendental epistemology, or dianoiology and logic (SW 6:19/PP 2:21). Accordingly, the alternative understanding of philosophy as transcendental metaphysics shifts the focus from the external object to the internal condition for its possibility, in the spirit of Kant’s transcendental logic (KrV A 55ff./B 80ff.). Therefore, philosophy is completely immanent, and its subject matter is not the thing in itself, but representation (SW 3:736/WWR 2:657). To defend its autonomy over against the sciences, which also examine appearances, Schopenhauer highlights that philosophy, too, is a “science,” namely the “science of experience,” but its “theme” and “source” are “not particular experiences but rather the entirety of experience and its universal aspects” (SW 3:204/WWR 2:193). Thus, the task of philosophy is to provide “the correct explanation of experience as a whole” (SW 3:201/ WWR 2:190); that is, the most general and profound regularities of cognition, or the universal and essential in the particular (SW 5:3/PP 1:7). As such, philosophy has the advantage of being entirely accessible to the intellect, and communicable. Also, it is as close as can be to the degree of certainty typical of precise sciences: provided “experience in general and overall will never change its character for a new one,” the “correct system of metaphysics,” should it be “ever discovered,” will possess “the unvarying nature [Unwandelbarkeit] of a science cognized a priori” (SW 3:202/WWR 2:191). Such metaphysics is not hindered by the a priori conditions of cognition but feeds on them, which turns out to constitute the more profound sense of transcendentalism and the innermost spirit of the Kantian philosophy (SW 3:736/WWR 2:657). As Schopenhauer admits, this is the sense in which “transcendental truth” and “metaphysical truth” are synonyms in the first edition of his dissertation (FR 181), where he took over from Kant the notion of metaphysics in the first place (Schopenhauer 1911 pp. 18f). Granted this, why call it “metaphysics” if it does not go beyond physis? At this point, Schopenhauer’s identification of “critical” and “transcendental” philosophy (SW 2:498/WWR 1:447) comes in handy: in line with its etymology, he seems to suggest, critique makes distinctions, i.e., isolates the formal and the material of experience, and it is in doing so that it reveals the thing in itself, “even if only in a conditional way” (SW 3:203/WWR 2:192): The thing in itself must therefore express its essence and its character within the world of experience, and it must therefore be possible to interpret this essence and character from experience, and indeed from the material, not from the mere form of experience. Accordingly, philosophy is nothing other than the accurate, universal understanding of experience itself, the true interpretation of its sense and content. (SW 3:204/WWR 2:193) Note that, on this reading, the “kernel of nature” is not to be “cognized” anymore, but “interpreted,” and can be studied and even spoken of only “in its relation to appearance” (SW 3:204/WWR 2:192). Here, we can observe a possible link between the empirical and 85

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transcendental understandings of philosophy. Although Schopenhauer does not explicitly make this connection, his distinction between appearance and thing in itself appears to be related to his obligation to speak only negatively of the transcendent (see Section 3). To emphasize the legitimacy of this apophatic transcendentalism, Schopenhauer contrasts it with the old, transcendent, dogmatism, which explains the world from something external to it and is thereby evocative of Schopenhauer’s own empirical metaphysics; his own system, on the contrary, may be called “an immanent dogmatism, for its theorems are indeed dogmatic, yet do not go beyond the world given in experience” (SW 5:139/PP 1:119). Although Schopenhauer in general does not officially betray the ambitious project of reaching to the kernel of nature, the trend to understand metaphysics as transcendental seems to invalidate its bold claims to gain cognition of it in the strict sense, as such; specifically, it forces him to downplay or gloss over the role of the apprehension of one’s body as will. Indeed, philosophy as transcendental “analysis” of the world “into its ultimate components” (SW 5:139/PP 1:119) renders this type of experience exceedingly affective and subjective, as opposed to the unchangeable regularities of experience in general. It does not strive to construe a phenomenology of body as (most immediately) manifesting the thing in itself, as empirical metaphysics prescribes; on the contrary, transcendental philosophy “remains immanent and does not become transcendent” (SW 3:203/WWR 2:192) precisely because the body is the most immediate representation – one that “brings together outer and inner experience” (SW 6:19/PP 2:21).12 Transcendental metaphysics thus manages to dodge some vexing issues of empirical metaphysics; most importantly, it retains independence from both the sciences and mysticism in that it safely deals with the general composita of experience, which are unchangeable, accessible to a strictly immanent analysis, and can be communicated. But in doing so, it seems to throw the baby out with the bathwater, that is, to declare its insights, because immanent, not properly “metaphysical” by Schopenhauer’s own definition (see Section 2). Since those insights are not qualitatively different from the ones we gain by other means of investigation of the world as representation, we are in no better position to speak positively about that which lies under its mere surface. Whereas empirical metaphysics promises more than it can deliver, the transcendental approach promises too little; while the former ends with mystic negativity just where it touches upon its proper subject matter, i.e., the thing in itself, transcendental metaphysics does not even strive to reach that far. Ultimately, then, transcendental, or immanent, metaphysics does not prevent but ensures that “we keep bumping up against unsolvable problems as against the walls of our prison” (SW 3:737–8/WWR 2:658).

6.6  Pragmatic Metaphysics as the Hermeneutics of Nature To grant us a peek behind the curtains of nature after all, Schopenhauer puts forth a third conception of metaphysics, which I dub “pragmatic metaphysics”.13 The rationale behind calling it that is laid out throughout this section, as well as precisely what distinguishes this approach from the ones discussed above. Methodologically, its key feature is the abandonment of assertoric judgments establishing truth (see Section 1) in favor of problematic and hypothetical ones establishing probability. Teleologically, it strives to “establish a conceptual schema in order to help people to orient themselves in the world” (Lemanski 2017, 299). It builds on the transcendental understanding in that it retains immanency and “brings together outer and inner experience,” but pursues the goal of empirical metaphysics by conceiving of reality as a “conditioned appearance in which a being distinct from 86

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itself, … the thing in itself, presents itself” and by “attaining from appearance to that which appears, to what is hidden behind the former” (SW 6:19/PP 2:21). It does so, however, not by means of establishing a “truth”, either empirical or transcendental; instead, it teaches us to know, order and consider in context that which is present, viz. nature … [and] achieves an understanding of the total appearance by means of discovering its meaning [Sinn] and context [Zusammenhang] – comparable to deciphering the hitherto enigmatic characters of an unknown text. (ibid.) Like transcendental metaphysics, the pragmatic approach does not strive to “cognize” the thing in itself but “seeks a closer acquaintance with” it (ibid.; emphasis added); like empirical metaphysics, it is rooted in and verified by experience, to which it must be adequate. However, its primary subject matter can neither be the thing in itself nor the forms of cognition that constitute appearance. Rather, it is their meaning; in a sense, it is still cognition of appearance, but one that concentrates not on its formal content, or “experience in general,” but on its axiological dimension as actively and consciously produced by the philosopher. Insisting on philosophy’s immanent character, and suggesting the difference between “explanation” (Erklärung) and interpretation (Deutung, Auslegung), Schopenhauer maintains that philosophy “does not presume to explain the ultimate grounds for the existence of the world,” but rather sticks to representation and “simply provides the interpretation of what is given in the external world as well as in self-consciousness” (SW 3:737/WWR 2:657; emphasis added; cf. SW 2:259/WWR 1:245). While to empirical metaphysics experience is so decisive that it “can count as an arithmetic proof” (SW 4:5/WN 326), as a pragmatist Schopenhauer is more consistent with his conviction that “no truths in any form drawn from experience are ever unconditionally certain” but “have only an approximate general validity” (SW 3:93/WWR 2:92). But it is unlikely, he reasons, that the sense it brings into the world is merely accidental, and equally unlikely that an alternative interpretation of the given phenomena (at least as a whole) would yield a more meaningful reading. Hence, the truthfulness of a philosophical theory is measured by its ability to make sense of the present data, bringing order into the world, and put it in the right “context”; in Schopenhauer’s words, this means bringing harmony “to the profoundly heterogenous appearances of the world, a harmony that would not be perceived without it” (SW 3:204/WWR 2:193). Thus, to contribute to a positive and discursive cognition of what lies beneath the mere surface of appearances, philosophy need not jump over its head by striving to reach the thing in itself. Nor should it, however, confine itself to investigating the cognitive faculties that produce those appearances. The epistemological restrictions that hamper empirical metaphysics and void the transcendental approach of its properly “metaphysical” component fit neatly with the pragmatic approach: while concentrating on appearance, philosophy makes use of assumptions about the thing in itself to open up hidden meanings of the world, but without falling back on illegitimate claims about the transcendent. Hence the modest concession Schopenhauer makes by admitting that his philosophy is closest to truth “not at all in the sense of leaving no problem to be solved, no possible questions to be answered,” since “to claim such a thing would be a presumptuous denial of the limits of human cognition in general” (SW 3:206/WWR 2:194). However plausible and elucidating, a metaphysical theory can never be final; “whatever torch we might light and whatever space it might 87

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illuminate, our horizon will always remain bounded by deep night” (ibid.). The good news is that we do not need the absolute truth if the relative truths philosophy offers are fine as long as they “work”, i.e., help “reach a hypothesis concerning the meaning of the letters that allows for intelligible words and coherent sentences” (SW 3:204–205/WWR 2:193). Accordingly, Schopenhauer conceives of the advantages of his metaphysics not as proof of its truthfulness, but as strong evidence in favor of its validity. He contrasts this approach with “dogmatic” claims to absolute cognition à la Fichte or Hegel, whose philosophies rely on architectonic coherence [Zusammenhang], i.e. a coherence in which one part always supports another without the second supporting the first, so the foundation stone will ultimately support all the parts without itself being supported by any of them, and the summit will be supported without itself supporting anything. (SW 2:vii–viii/WWR 1:5) Yet the soundness of such systems is illusory, since a single error in the deduction threatens to topple the whole building, while their apodeictic certainty comes at the price of all of their propositions being trivial, empty, “boring,” “meagre and impoverished … since nothing can follow from a proposition than what it really already says” (SW 3:207/WWR 2:195). On the contrary, the heterogeneity of the truths of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, which “have all been discovered independently of each other” (SW 3:206/WWR 2:195), makes in his view for a stable “research program”, to take Imre Lakatos’ term;14 thanks to the diversity of its sources and the abductive method, it allows for introducing, along with the “hard core” of fundamental propositions, “auxiliary hypotheses”, which can be revised or rejected as required.15 The lack of absolute certainty can do no more harm to pragmatic metaphysics than pointing out that “the arithmetical squaring of a circle … is merely approximative anyway” can do to geometry (SW 6:13/PP 2:15): Repeated empirical confirmation brings induction (on which hypotheses rest) close enough to completeness that in practice it is treated as certain, and the fact that a hypothesis originated through induction is then considered as irrelevant as the incommensurability of straight and crooked lines is to the application of geometry. (SW 2:92–93/WWR 1:103) Schopenhauer himself distinguishes quite discretely between the different levels of certainty that different parts of his theory exhibit depending on how well they meet these criteria – spanning from explicating transcendental truths a priori, such as “the world is my representation” (SW 2:3/WWR 1:23) or the PSR, to his minor works and “auxiliary hypotheses” with lesser systematic weight, such as the Transcendental Speculations on the Apparent Deliberateness in the Fate of the Individual, which are but a “metaphysical fantasy” that contains “anything but definite explanation” and “may even not be much more than a groping and fumbling in the dark” (SW 5:213/PP 1:177).16 Characteristically, the core of his metaphysics of nature is built as an empirically informed pragmatic metaphysics containing both (nearly) apodeictic certainty and a good deal of guesswork. Specifically, its most fundamental premise, the identity of body and will, has only a tentative character as a denominatio a potiori, or naming based on the most prominent part, which can never be “demonstrated” but only “established by raising immediate conscious88

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ness” (SW 2:122/WWR 1:127). In making it a cornerstone of his metaphysics, Schopenhauer need not even clarify if cognition of one’s body as will is “immediate” and “direct” in the absolute or relative sense (see Section 3), as long as it is just intimate enough to serve as the key to the best interpretation of reality. Likewise, the next step of his argument, namely the analogy of will, is itself a hypothesis, which in its turn is based on a number of “assumptions,” such as the one that human beings are not “specifically, fundamentally and absolutely different in kind from the rest of the beings and things in nature, but rather different only in degree” (SW 3:192–93/WWR 2:183). By the same token, the conclusion that the will is the thing in itself, too, is but a “surmise” (Vermutung) (SW 5:243/PP 1:200, translation modified), or a regulative idea in Kant’s sense.17 Finally, despite the audacity of the Introduction to WN (see Section 2), the rest of the body of Schopenhauer’s Naturphilosophie, like “every doctrine of nature[,] is based on hypotheses that are often false and must then gradually give way to better ones” (SW 2:92/WWR 1:103).18 Setting aside the question whether the sciences ever actually corroborated it, Schopenhauer’s understanding of philosophy as pragmatic metaphysics is not without its internal tensions. The most salient of them is the hermeneutic circle that arises when we ask what it is that could confirm the theory: the world (SW 3:207/WWR 2:195; SW 5:139/PP 1:119; SW 6:13/PP 2:16), or consciousness, i.e., the theory itself (SW 3:205/WWR 2:193). At any rate, the understanding of philosophy as pragmatic metaphysics is arguably the closest Schopenhauer’s philosophy can get to fulfilling the sublime “duty” it takes upon itself, i.e., “in all that it says to be true in a strict and proper sense” (SW 3:183/WWR 2:175).

6.7  Pragmatic Metaphysics as the Hermeneutics of Existence For the most part, Schopenhauer follows in the footsteps of the Platonic-Aristotelian tradition in conceiving of philosophy as truth-seeking for its own sake, and maintains that philosophers “should do, and can do, nothing else” but bring the “truth to abstract knowledge, to reflection,” or “to transcribe a reflected image of the world into permanent concepts” (SW 2:453/WWR 1:410). However, in doing so he fails to do justice to or perhaps even realize one of the major novelties of his thought in the face of philosophy’s “identity crisis”, namely “its concern with the value of life” (Beiser 2016, 22).19 On rare occasions, Schopenhauer does abandon the traditional l’art pour l’art view of philosophy and propounds an existentialism avant la lettre. Most prominently, he argues in On Humanity’s Metaphysical Need that “the mother of metaphysics” is human beings’ very personal sense of wonder at their own existence – and the existential uneasiness it creates. As rational beings, humans reflect upon their existence and are baffled by its contiguity and finitude, which are aggravated by ineradicable needs and sufferings, and “the futility of all striving” (SW 3:176/WWR 2:169–70). Thus, “the philosophical sense of wonder is fundamentally disconcerting and depressing” (SW 3:190/WWR 2:181), which is square one of all philosophizing.20 Only later does this primordial goal of philosophy spur one to problematize the universal aspects of being, and this too only insofar as our existence is bound with it (SW 3:176–77/WWR 2:170). To cater to this need precisely, Schopenhauer puts forward not only a theory of the complete denial of will for the few, but also an understanding of philosophy as the “wisdom of life” (Weltweisheit), or “eudaemonology,” i.e., “the art of living life as pleasantly and happily as possible” (SW 5:333/PP 1:273). This move seems to be in tension with Schopenhauer’s conviction that “philosophy is always theoretical” and describes without ever prescribing (SW 2:319/WWR 1:297). Also, 89

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the very idea of eudaemonology as a set of “instructions to a happy existence” contradicts the “higher, metaphysical-ethical standpoint” that we are not born to be happy (SW 5:333/PP 1:273). However, recall that pragmatic metaphysics need not possess the absolute truth to be valid, i.e., to provide the best elucidation of the world, and its tentative, fallible, approximative, and hypothetical “truths” should do just fine. Likewise, its existential value depends on the quality of the guidance it offers for (practical) life.21 It need not strive to change the unchangeable intelligible character to make a difference; it suffices to change the empirical character, that is, lead the person to a better understanding of their essence. In practical life, Schopenhauer holds, “as long as our goal is still remote, we cannot even head for it in a straight line, but steer in its direction only approximately and by conjecture, and often have to change course and veer” (SW 5:499/PP 1:411). Philosophy as Weltweisheit is entitled to descend from that “higher standpoint” and “retain the ordinary, empirical standpoint” (SW 5:333–4/PP 1:274) precisely because it thereby becomes relevant in a matter of highest personal importance, which would otherwise remain unaddressed (SW 2:319–20/WWR 1:297f.). Despite this tension and the ever-changing existential circumstances, because of which the quest for value and meaning is as endless and tentative as it is in the hermeneutics of nature,22 it is the job of the hermeneutics of existence to perseveringly be searching for, or inventing, it.23

6.8  Switching Perspectives and the Absolute Perspective Schopenhauer’s conceptions of philosophy discussed so far can be summed up as follows: Empirical metaphysics

Transcendental metaphysics

Pragmatic metaphysics

Explanandum

Thing in itself (as opposed to representation), transcendent

General regularities and laws of experience (representation), transcendental

Closest discipline

Cosmology

Epistemology

Goal

Explanation (Erklärung), nomothetic, exhaustive, descriptive, theoretical

Modality of judgment Method Criteria of validity

Assertoric, falsifiable

Meaning of the world and self (beyond thing in itself and representation), immanent Axiology and philosophical anthropology Interpretation (Deutung, Auslegung), idiographic, approximative, prescriptive, practical Problematic, hypothetical

Inductive Empirical truth + “philosophical truth par excellence”

Assertoric, nearly apodeictic (Largely) deductive Transcendental truth

Abductive Probability, or heuristic value

Naturally, these divisions are not always clear-cut, and Schopenhauer can resort to a combination of them within the scope of one paragraph or argument without, apparently, taking 90

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notice of the tensions between them. Yet the strands or “ideal types” reconstructed here are contrary enough to raise the doubt whether he can at all square his different conceptions of philosophy with one another.24 Sometimes, they seem to follow or even replace one another in a chronological fashion as Schopenhauer’s philosophy evolves from the first edition of WWR 1, the Berlin lectures, and WN (empirical metaphysics); through WWR 2 and the later addenda to WWR 1 (transcendental metaphysics); up to WWR 2 and PP (pragmatic metaphysics). However, this progression does not necessarily reflect the development of Schopenhauer’s thought. For one, transcendental metaphysics takes up a leading role as early as in FR and appears to wear off by the time he publishes WWR 1.25 Also, in his later texts he relied on earlier manuscript notes, some dating back before 1818; for example, the later “hermeneutic” understanding of philosophy stems from as early as around 1812.26 However, the idea of a “systematic openness” in Schopenhauer’s philosophy offers a way to reconcile his polyphonic views of it.27 On this reading, the heterogenous approaches Schopenhauer employs are “standpoints” (Standpunkte) on one and the same subject matter, whose different aspects require constant shifting between them (Standpunktwechsel) to overcome their inevitable limits. This is true of competing and even contradictory philosophical theories, insofar as they derive from experience, not from mere a priori reasoning, which Schopenhauer with surprising generosity calls not “false” but “one-sided” and “relatively true,” “for each such apprehension is true only from a certain standpoint, just as a picture portrays the landscape from only one point of view” (SW 6:13/PP 2:16). Likewise, different parts of Schopenhauer’s own theory, equally fundamental and irreducible to one another (see e.g., SW 2:320/WWR 1:298; SW 5:100, 139, 334/PP 1:87, 119, 274), may be regarded as points of view which in tandem constitute the systematicity of his philosophy,28 even if each of them separately may be faulty. On this reading, every standpoint, even if it seems inconsistent on its own, requires supplements, not refutations (SW 6:13/PP 2:15–16), and complements all the others without there being an absolute one; like the city of Thebes, the core of his philosophy is accessible through a hundred gates from any side (SW 4:vi/OBM 6), and so is any part of the city.29 As I see it, Schopenhauer’s metaphilosophical approaches make use of the same method of shifting from one perspective to another in order to preserve the soundness and richness of the organic system as a whole (see Section 5). On its own, each of the individual approaches outlined in sections 2 through 6 faces challenges that only the other approaches can accept. The systematicity of the philosophy based on such methodology is thus constituted not only by the scope of the phenomena it covers, but also by its heuristic advantages, i.e., the variety of strategies it can resort to. That such a system is performatively backed up by one of its own parts, i.e., the rationale for and implications of pragmatic metaphysics, should, in the spirit of pragmatism, be conceived not as its weakness, or a logical circle, but as its strength, or a hermeneutic circle. Schopenhauer appears to presuppose that this self-moderating stance is the closest a philosophical theory can get to a meta-position, whose possibility he after all grants under the name of the “absolute truth” and “highest standpoint” (SW 6:13/PP 2:16). Keeping in mind, however, that this position is privileged not in the qualitative but rather in the quantitative sense, as primus inter pares, it allows Schopenhauer to recognize the potential of his philosophy as its own supplement and correction, or a self-adjusting and self-sustaining system – much like parts of an organism take care of its other parts, if need be.30 Thus, the most essential and potent principle of Schopenhauer’s philosophy may lie not in any of its subdivisions, but in the synoptic metareasoning that governs, checks, and makes them a unified whole. 91

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Notes 1 I am grateful to Jens Lemanski and Erik Eschmann for their helpful comments on the first draft of this chapter. This project was supported by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation. 2 See also (Booms 2003: pp. 41–64; Zöller 1995). 3 Schopenhauer tends to equate ‘philosophy’ and ‘metaphysics’ (e.g. SW 3:188/ WWR 2:179), and I shall use these notions interchangeably as well. 4 Cf. Morgenstern 1987, 593–97. 5 This is not to say that reason plays no role in (processing) intuitive apprehension, see Malter 1991, 50; Sattar 2021 b; Dobrzański 2017, 90–97. 6 On these grounds, it may be considered subject to verification and falsification, cf. Dobrzański 2017, 177. 7 See also Morgenstern 1986. 8 See also Dobrzański 2017, 187–91. 9 See also Janaway 2004, 199–200. 10 In fact, for Schopenhauer concepts are inevitably inadequate to the concrete phenomena, in any discourse, not only metaphysics; see Dobrzański 2017, 221–24. 11 Cf. Gardner 2016, 23. 12 It may be argued that the experience of oneself as will is also the proper subject matter of transcendental metaphysics (see Dobrzański 2017, 169, 175), but I don’t think that such experience has the required unchangeability (cf. ibid., 199), nor does it pertain – as will – to the form of cognition. 13 In the literature, a version of it has been called ‘hermeneutic’ (Schubbe 2010; Lemanski and Schubbe 2019), and for good reasons. However, there is uncertainty as to exactly what ‘hermeneutic’ is supposed to mean in this context (Schubbe 2018; 2019), because of which I find this label didactically infelicitous in the present context. By contrast, the ‘pragmatism’ of Schopenhauer’s fellow German idealists, with which his theory seems to conform, appears to be less ambiguous, see e.g., Emundts 2015; Gava and Stern 2017. 14 Cf. Lakatos 1970. 15 See also Birnbacher 1988, 11. 16 See also Cartwright 2020, 182–86. 17 Cf. Watkins 2021, 189; Sattar 2021 a. 18 See also Lorenz 2003, 255–60. 19 See also Möbuß 2016. 20 See also Haucke 2007; Schubbe 2010, 32–42; Angehrn 2006. 21 Cf. Schubbe 2012, 418–22. 22 Cf. Lange 2020, 81–83, 91. 23 See also Schubbe 2016, 91–92; 2010, 45–49. 24 See Birnbacher 1988, 12–15; Morgenstern 1987, 602. 25 See Welchman 2017. 26 See Sattar 2021 a. 27 See Koßler 2021. 28 See also Eschmann 2021; Schubbe 2010, 193–95, 198; Eschmann 2022, 179–186; Koßler 2006, 370–75; Dobrzański 2017, 259–68. 29 As Spierling (1984, 59) has it, there may not even be a ‘core’, something absolutely primordial; see also Lemanski and Schubbe 2019, 206; Schubbe 2010, 16–21, 25–31. This claim, however, can be criticized, see Eschmann 2021, 7–8, 12–14; Malter 1991, 53–54; Booms 2003, 139–46. 30 See also Lemanski 2012, 170ff; Koßler 2008, 53.

References Angehrn, Emil. 2006. “Das Leiden und die Philosophie”. In Die Ethik Arthur Schopenhauers im Ausgang vom Deutschen Idealismus (Fichte/Schelling), edited by Lore Hühn, 119–132. Würzburg: Ergon Verlag. Beiser, Frederick C. 2016. Weltschmerz: Pessimism in German Philosophy, 1860–1900. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Schopenhauer’s Synoptic Metaphilosophy Birnbacher, Dieter. 1988. “Induktion oder Expression? Zu Schopenhauers Metaphilosophie”. Schopenhauer-Jahrbuch 69: 15–29. Booms, Martin. 2003. Aporie und Subjekt : die erkenntnistheoretische Entfaltungslogik der Philosophie Schopenhauers. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Cartwright, David E. 2020. “Schopenhauer’s Haunted World”. In The Oxford Handbook of Schopenhauer, edited by Robert Wicks, 174–192. New York: Oxford University Press. Dobrzański, Michał. 2017. Begriff und Methode bei Arthur Schopenhauer. Beiträge zu Philosophie Schopenhauers 20. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Emundts, Dina. 2015. “Hegel as a Pragmatist”. British Journal for the History of Philosophy 23 (4): 611–631. Eschmann, Erik. 2020. “Die Natur als Produktivität und Wille. Zur Naturphilosophie Schellings und Naturmetaphysik Schopenhauers aus prozessphilosophischer Perspektive”. Beiträge zu Philosophie Schopenhauers 25. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. ———. 2021. “‘Von Innen oder von Außen, vom Centro oder von der Peripherie aus’. Schopenhauers Philosophie vom Standpunkt einer perspektivistischen Lesart.” Schopenhauer-Jahrbuch 102: 67–86. Gardner, Sebastian. 2016. “Schopenhauer’s Metaphilosophy: How to Think a World Without Reason”. In Schopenhauer’s Fourfold Root, edited by J. Head and D. Vanden Auweele, 11–31. London: Routledge. Gava, Gabriele, and Robert Stern. 2017. Pragmatism, Kant, and Transcendental Philosophy. New York: Routledge. Haucke, Kai. 2007. Leben und Leiden. Zur Aktualität und Einheit der Schopenhauerschen Philosophie. Berlin: Parerga. Janaway, Christopher. 2004. Self and World in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 2002. Theoretical Philosophy after 1781, edited by Henry Allison and Peter Heath. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2009. Critique of Pure Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Koßler, Matthias. 2006. “Schopenhauer als Philosoph des Übergangs”. In Nietzsche und Schopenhauer. Rezeptionsphänomene der Wendezeiten, edited by Marta Kopij and Wojciech Kunicki, 365–379. Leipzig: Leipziger Universitäts-Verlag. ———. 2008. “‘Standpunktwechsel’ – zur Systematik und zur philosophiegeschichtlichen Stellung der Philosophie Schopenhauers”. In Schopenhauer und die Schopenhauer-Schule, edited by Fabio Ciracì and Domenico M. Fazio, 45–60. Beiträge zur Philosophie Schopenhauers 7. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. ———. 2021. “Schopenhauer – Philosophie für die Welt”. Voluntas: Revista Internacional de Filosofia 12: 1–17. Lakatos, Imre. 1970. “Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes”. In Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, edited by Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave, 91–196. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lange, Steffen. 2020. Die Metapher in der Metaphysik: Eine Untersuchung über das metaphysische Konzept der Philosophie Arthur Schopenhauers. Schriftenreihe Boethiana 164. Hamburg: Verlag Dr. Kovač. Lemanski, Jens. 2012. “The Denial of the Will-to-Live in Schopenhauer’s World and His Association between Buddhist and Christian Saints”. In Understanding Schopenhauer through the Prism of Indian Culture, edited by Arati Barua, Michael Gerhard, and Matthias Koßler, 149–84. Berlin: De Gruyter. ———. 2017. “Schopenhauer’s World. The System of The World as Will and Presentation I”. Schopenhaueriana. Revista Española de Estudios Sobre Schopenhauer 2: 297–315. Lemanski, Jens, and Daniel Schubbe. 2019. “Problems and Interpretations of Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation”. Voluntas: Revista Internacional de Filosofia 10 (1): 199–211. Lorenz, Andreas. 2003. “Gewißheit versus Hypothese. Postmetaphysische Untersuchungen zur Philosophieauffassung bei Kant, Newton und Schopenhauer”. Düsseldorf: Heinrich-HeineUniversität Düsseldorf. Malter, Rudolf. 1991. Arthur Schopenhauer. Transzendentalphilosophie und Metaphysik des Willens. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog.

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Alexander S. Sattar Möbuß, Susanne. 2016. “Arthur Schopenhauer als Existenzphilosoph”. In Schopenhauer und die Deutung der Existenz. Perspektiven auf Phänomenologie, Existenzphilosophie und Hermeneutik, edited by Thomas Regehly and Daniel Schubbe, 94–109. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler. Morgenstern, Martin. 1986. “Die Grenzen der Naturwissenschaft und die Aufgabe der Metaphysik bei Schopenhauer”. Schopenhauer-Jahrbuch 67: 71–93. ———. 1987. “Schopenhauers Begriff der Metaphysik und seine Bedeutung für die Philosophie des 19. Jahrhunderts”. Zeitschrift Für Philosophische Forschung 41 (4): 592–612. Sattar, Alexander. 2021a. “Schopenhauers ‘hermeneutischer’ Metaphysik- und Kritizismus-Begriff vor dem Hintergrund seiner Kant-Rezeption”. Journal of the History of Philosophy 59 (2): 299–325. ———. 2021b. “‘Übung der Vernunft’ und ‘Übermaß des Intellekts’: Zur Funktion der Wissenschaft als Vorbereitung zur ästhetischen Erkenntnis bei Schopenhauer”. In Philosophie als Wissenschaft, edited by Nora Schleich, 243–258. Hildesheim: Olms Verlag. Schopenhauer, Arthur. 1911. Sämtliche Werke, edited by Paul Deussen. Volume 10. München: R. Piper. Schubbe, Daniel. 2010. Philosophie des Zwischen: Hermeneutik und Aporetik bei Schopenhauer. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. ———. 2012. “Schopenhauers Hermeneutik – metaphysische Entzifferung oder Explikation ‘intuitiver’ Erkenntnis?” Schopenhauer-Jahrbuch 93: 409–424. ———. 2016. “Existenzphilosophische Versuche an Schopenhauer”. In Schopenhauer und die Deutung der Existenz: Perspektiven auf Phänomenologie, Existenzphilosophie und Hermeneutik, edited by Thomas Regehly and Daniel Schubbe, 81–93. Stuttgart: JB Metzler. ———. 2018. “Hermeneutik”. In Schopenhauer-Handbuch, edited by Daniel Schubbe and Matthias Koßler, 357–361. Stuttgart: JB Metzler. ———. 2019. “Schopenhauer als Hermeneutiker? Eine Replik auf Thomas Regehlys Kritik einer hemeneutischen Lesart Schopenhauers”. Schopenhauer-Jahrbuch 100: 139–147. Spierling, Volker. 1984. “Die Drehwende der Moderne. Schopenhauer zwischen Skeptizismus und Dogmatismus”. In Materialien Zu Schopenhauers ‘Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, edited by Volker Spierling, 14–83. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Watkins, Eric. 2021. Kant on Laws. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Welchman, Alistair. 2017. “Schopenhauer’s Two Metaphysics”. In Palgrave Schopenhauer Handbook, edited by Sandra Shapshay, 129–149. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Zöller, Günter. 1995. “Schopenhauer and the Problem of Metaphysics: Critical Reflections on Rudolf Matter’s Interpretation”. Man and World 28 (1): 1–10. ———. 2011. “Schopenhauer’s Fairy Tale about Fichte”. In A Companion to Schopenhauer, edited by Bart Vandenabeele, 385–402. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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7 TIME, DEATH AND BOREDOM IN SCHOPENHAUER Existential Themes in His Theory of (Self-)Consciousness João Constâncio 7.1 Introduction “The life of our body is only a constantly checked dying, a constant postponement of death; […] our mental activity is a continuously delayed boredom” (SW 2:367/WWR 1:338], Schopenhauer writes in the first volume of The World as Will and Representation. This claim—that death and boredom structure, at all times, our existence as embodied self-conscious beings—is part of Schopenhauer’s theory of consciousness. Perhaps the crux of this theory is the doctrine of the “primacy of the will,” which holds ordinary consciousness to be essentially “desire” and, to the extent that desire involves feeling the lack of something desired, “pain”. But this doctrine of the primacy of the will is not enough for us to understand how our existence is structured by death and boredom (and not just by desire and pain). Understanding this requires some reflection on another central aspect of Schopenhauer’s theory of consciousness: the claim that, as Kant has shown, “the form of consciousness is time,” and time is nothing but “the form of the inner sense.” This chapter explores the connection between boredom, death and time in Schopenhauer’s theory of consciousness, as well as the existential questions raised by this connection. I shall begin with a succinct overview of Schopenhauer’s conceptions of the ideality of time and the primacy of the will as aspects of his theory of consciousness. We shall see that the theme of self-consciousness is the meeting point between these two conceptions. Then, I shall seek to explore Schopenhauer’s conception of death and boredom as elements of what he calls the “form of life” through the examination of six texts in particular: §57 and §58 of the first volume of The World as Will and Representation; chapters 41, 45, and 46 of the second volume; Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life.

7.2  Time (and the Self) Already in his first work, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, Schopenhauer follows Kant’s doctrine in his Critique of Pure Reason, and defines space as “the form of the outer sense” and time as “the form of the inner sense” (FR §§18–19). Space is, as such, the whole (not merely the compositum but the totum, the a priori unified whole) DOI: 10.4324/9781003048992-9

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which contains all possible places, or the totality of spatial relationships, or “positions”; time is the whole (again, not merely the compositum but the totum, the a priori unified whole) which contains all possible “nows,” or the totality of temporal relationships as relations of “succession” (e.g., FR §36). Their representation as (potentially infinite) totalities is objectively valid for all objects given to our senses, but is also merely “ideal,” or has a mere “transcendental ideality,” i.e., is not valid for “things in themselves,” although it establishes a priori (i.e., in necessarily and universally valid terms) what objects must be in order to be objects of our senses. Thus space is the “form” imposed on all possible objects of the “outer sense,” but this outer sense is itself “an object for the inner sense” (SW 1:30/FR 35). If the form of all possible objects of the outer sense were simply space, they would be absolutely static. But the representation of space is encompassed by that of time, i.e., by the intuitive representation of the succession of all our representations, including those given through our outer sense. It is for this reason that we represent movement and change in objects of the outer sense. It is not only space that is the condition of possibility for the representation of objects given in our outer experience; time is one too, albeit indirectly. Besides, if all we had were the representation of time—merely as a representation of the succession of our representations or the “form of the inner sense,” “there would be no simultaneity and therefore nothing persistent and no duration” (SW 1:29/FR 33). Space and time are conditions of the possibility for the representation of spatio-temporal objects (or “forms” imposed on them), but “only as filled are they perceptible” (i.e., only as filled by objects). As Schopenhauer puts it, “their perceptibility is matter” (SW 1:29/FR 33). The representation of time as the “form of the inner sense” would be empty, or imperceptible, if it did not determine the representation of material objects in space. But then, why is time the “form of the inner sense,” and not the “outer sense”? By ordering my representations into relationships of succession—or in other words, into a series of “nows”—time also functions as a condition of the possibility for the representation of I myself as the subject of these representations. Here, as typically in modern philosophy, the “subject” is the ὑποκείμενον of these representations, i.e., the “substratum” that remains as they change, or to put it another way, that in which they exist and to which they belong as representations. And so time is, primarily, the form of something that is not spatial: it is the form of all representations as representations and of their substratum as a non-spatial subject. Outer sense is indeed “an object for the inner sense,” and the inner sense “perceives the perceptions of the outer sense,” but, “with regard to the immediate presence [unmittelbare Gegenwart] of representations in its consciousness, the subject remains subordinate to the conditions of time as the form of the inner sense” (SW 1:31/FR 35). This also means that all representations take place in the present (Gegenwart). Their form being time, i.e., succession, they occur in the present as the “neutral point between the two divergent directions of time,” i.e., the past and the future (SW 1: 31/FR 35). The unification of inner and outer sense in the same mind or intellect or understanding is common to all animals (FR §20)1. An animal “is to be defined as ‘that which cognizes’” (SW 1:47/FR 49). Consciousness—in the sense in which Schopenhauer uses the term—is not a prerogative of the human being. All animals have consciousness of objects in space and time, and all animals have not only an outer sense, but also an inner sense which grants them, at least, a certain degree of consciousness of themselves. But space and time are not enough for there to be animal consciousness. The third condition is the intuitive (i.e., immediate, non-conceptual) understanding of causality, which enables an animal to represent what is presented to it in space and time as something different to itself (FR §20). 96

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According to Schopenhauer, animals have consciousness of objects because they are able to intuit something in space and time as being the cause for a variety of specific effects different from those of which the animal itself (the “subject”) is the cause. By doing this, the animal becomes conscious of an object as a motive for behaving in a certain way. The animal is “that which cognizes” because its essence is the cognition of motives for action (FR §20). The human being only differs from other animals to the extent in which, besides being endowed with an intellect capable of intuitively understanding space, time, and causality, it also has “reason.” Its intellect “is doubled: in addition to the intuitive, he also has abstract cognition, which is not bound to the present” (SW 1: 49/FR 50). Human reason transforms concrete intuitions into abstract thoughts (in other words, concepts), thus freeing human consciousness from the particularity of intuition and making communication through linguistic signs possible (see WWR 1 §8–§13, §23, §49). This is what it means to think. Non-human animals do not “think” (WWR 1 §8). They do have consciousness, as having consciousness is tantamount to perceiving objects and their changes in space and time in accordance with the principle of causality—or, to put it another way, it is to have experience of a world of spatial, temporal, and causal relationships. But this is indeed not the same as thinking. Thinking is to reason by means of concepts, i.e., by means of abstract representations.2 The claim that all animal consciousness cognizes the objects of perception as “motives” presupposes the second key aspect of Schopenhauer’s theory of consciousness: the “primacy of the will,” the doctrine that individual consciousness, as animal, empirical consciousness, pursues the ends of an originally unconscious (and hence non-individual) will. In other words, individual consciousness is not guided by a disinterested search for the truth regarding the objects of its experience, but rather by an “interest” which belongs to a will whose nature is independent of consciousness and whose ends have nothing to do with truth or knowledge. It is as he ponders the nature of self-consciousness (Selbstbewußtsein) that Schopenhauer makes the connection between the two central aspects of his theory of consciousness: time as the form of consciousness and the primacy of the will. Since Descartes, modern philosophy had presupposed that self-consciousness consisted of the subject of cognition’s self-awareness as precisely the subject of cognition (cogito me cogitare). But, according to Schopenhauer, this presupposition is false: since self-consciousness is a kind of consciousness, it necessarily involves not only a subject but also an object. If the “subject of cognition” is the subject of self-consciousness, then there must be something else which is the object of self-consciousness, and this can only be the “subject of willing” (SW 1: 140/FR 133), or simply “the will.” This subject (and not the “subject of cognition”) is the object of self-consciousness, i.e., what one cognizes in the cognition one has of oneself. This conception of self-consciousness is founded on two arguments. Firstly, the argument that introspection shows that the will is the internal nature of the body, or that the body’s internal nature is tantamount to an “I want,” and not an “I think,” or “I know” (see FR §42). The second argument is that it is impossible to know knowing, i.e., know the subject who knows, the “I” as pure “subject of cognition.” This is like an eye that cannot include itself in what it sees, an eye that can never be part of what is seen, a focal point from which we see what we can know but which cannot be seen or known. To imagine it at the same time as subject and object of self-consciousness amounts to duplicating what, in truth, is simple, for knowing by necessity implies knowing that one knows, i.e., implies consciousness of oneself as a knower, Therefore, a second act of consciousness that might 97

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be added to cognition and could take shape as a knowing of knowing, or knowing the subject of knowing (see FR §41), is actually unthinkable. Cognition is by its very nature apperceptive, self-consciousness is already part of any or all cognition, and cannot be added to a cognition that preceded it. Or, as Schopenhauer writes: “‘I know that I cognize’ says nothing more than ‘I cognize’” (SW 1:141/FR 134). And yet, according to Schopenhauer, this means precisely that self-consciousness is not tantamount to the cognition of the subject of cognition. The object of self-consciousness is not the subject of cognition, but rather the subject of willing. What Kant calls the “synthetic unity of apperception” is, as the “consciousness of an I,” the “focus” (Brennpunkt) of the entirety of our “brain’s” activity, i.e., of the intellect, but this “consciousness of an I” is a consciousness of a will. The “I” results from the identification of the subject of cognition with a will (WWR 1 §18, §27; WWR 2 Ch.22). The “primacy of the will” (WWR 2 Ch.19) implies a conception of consciousness, i.e., of knowledge or cognition, merely as a tool, a surface, and mirror for our will.3 These metaphors signify, ultimately, that the “I” of consciousness does not correspond to what we really are, but simply to the “efflorescence of the will” (SW 3:312/WWR 2:289), no more than its “phenomenon” or “apparition” (e.g., WWR 1, §18; WWR 2 Ch.18–22). What we really are is a will which, in itself, is “blind,” “unconscious.” Just as consciousness is, in itself, something that “has no will” (willenlos), in the same way our will is, in itself “without cognition” (erkenntnislos, SW 3:233/WWR 2:219). As regards this opposition between will and cognition (or consciousness), Schopenhauer says that it is “the basic character of my philosophy” (SW 3:567/WWR 2:511). And yet, this “basic character” involves the doctrine that in order for there to be an individual will— or that which Schopenhauer calls individuation—the “miracle” of opposites finding each other must take place, namely: the “miracle” that the will be conditioned by the cognition of distinctions in space and time (what Schopenhauer calls the principium individuationis). Insofar as self-consciousness, taken as one’s consciousness of oneself as an “individual” or “individual will,” is the meeting point of will and cognition, it is the “miracle par excellence” (FR §42; WWR 1, §18, §51; WWR 2 Ch.19). It is in Schopenhauer’s musings on the form of this miracle—on the “form of life” as the form of human self-consciousness qua human individuation—that the existential themes in question in this chapter arise.

7.3 Death For Schopenhauer, the opposition between will and cognition is complicated by the fact that the individual will never is solely individual: the “character” of the individual is inseparable from the character of the species to which one belongs (the famous “genius of the species” in WWR 2 Ch.44). Self-consciousness is the self-awareness of oneself as a single organism, but the ends an organism pursues are never divorced from its nature as a living organism and, in the case of a human individual, as an animal organism belonging to the species called homo sapiens. The “will” behind consciousness is the “will to life” (Wille zum Leben), which is much more than an individual drive for self-preservation. What matters for such a will is more than simply affirming an organism’s individuality and its finite lifetime. If that were so, one’s life might indeed be “easy and cheerful” (as it would be solely bent on satisfying its own personal interests), but what happens, on the contrary, is that the will “wills life absolutely and for all time,” for the simple reason that “it presents itself at the same time as the sex drive, which has an endless series of generations in view” (SW 3: 98

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651/WWR 2:583). The animal organism is sexual by nature; its “focal point” (Brennpunkt) is the genital organs.4 But not only that: for Schopenhauer, “will” is Nature itself, seen as a kind of force, energy or “blind striving,” the “focal point” of which is, in all species of flora and fauna besides the human, “the sex drive and its satisfaction” (SW 3:655/WWR 2:586). The act of procreation, in the guise of the sexual act, is the actual “solution to the riddle” of nature, “the kernel, the compendium, the quintessence of the world” (SW 3: 654/WWR 2:585). And this is why one’s “will,” i.e., the “will to life,” is Nature in opposition to intellect, knowledge, consciousness. It is Nature seen as “that which acts, drives, and creates without the mediation of the intellect” (SW 3:304/WWR 2:282). But what this actually implies is that the existence of an individual organism should be conceived as being the result of a process of individuation. The individual organism is an individual instantiation of that which is, generally speaking, its species, and this is just one of the general manifestations of what is, even more generically, nature, the will to life. In the case of animal organisms, this individuation is not only the object of third-personal cognition, but also of first-personal, for as we have seen, each animal organism is, by definition, “that which cognizes” (SW 1:47/FR 49): it is conscious of itself as something differentiated and individual in space and time, and is conscious of other differentiated and individual objects in space and time. In the consciousness the animal organism has of itself—and through it, the consciousness it has of other individual realities besides its own—the two opposites, will and cognition, meet, they coincide. And this coincidence is, from the moment of birth to that of death, a limitation of the infiniteness of time and space. The will appears as individual on every level illuminated by cognition. The human individual discovers his own finitude in infinite space and infinite time, and thus learns that he is vanishingly small compared to these. He is thrown into space and time and, given their boundlessness, his existence has only relative rather than absolute when and where: his position and duration are finite parts of a boundless infinity (SW 2:366/WWR 1:337). However, the decisive point is that, in the case of an animal organism from the homo sapiens species, the limitation of a finite lifetime involves the action of becoming conscious of such a lifetime, that is, of finitude. “[Non-human] animals live without any real conception [Kenntniß] of death,” and for this reason their lives are not only utterly, unreflectively at the mercy of the genius of the species’ demands, but are really nothing beyond the species: the non-human animal “enjoys the permanence of the species directly, since it is conscious of itself only as endless” (SW 3:529/WWR 2:480). The human being, on the contrary, has, as we have seen, “reason,” and therefore has a concept of his own death, which “necessarily” endows him with “the horrifying certainty of death” (SW 3:529/WWR 2:480, my emphasis). It is important to bear in mind that this conceptual certainty of death is not the cause of the fear of death. All animals fear death. This fear being instinctive, and not discursive, is nothing but “the converse of the will to life” (SW 3:531/WWR 2:482). Therefore, it is the converse of a will which is blind and hence independent from any kind of knowledge that might precede it or cause it. The will to life compels all animals to act in accordance with an “interest in self-preservation,” or, more literally, out of an instinctive “care” (Sorge) for their self-preservation (SW 3:531/WWR 2:482) and therefore, in fear of death. But this care, while being instinctive, does not grant the non-human animal the certainty that their lifetime is finite—that is to say, it does not give rise to anything resembling a certainty of death, 99

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and based on that, a conscious “limitation” of a finite time, i.e., of a finite interval of time one could be conscious of as one’s own or, put differently, as the finite time one is fated, destined to live. Without the concept and hence without the certainty of death, individuation is not—as in the case of the human being—a consciousness of oneself as a finite being. For this reason, the individuation of a non-human animal is but “mere consciousness of the present without that of the past or the future” (SW 3:656/WWR 2:587). An animal’s life is “to a certain degree akin to a single moment [Augenblick],” that is lived as if it were always the same moment—and as such a nunc stans (SW 3:655–56/WWR 2:587), a permanent, fixed “now,” which isn’t even recognized as a present moment differing from one that passed or another coming in the future. In this case, Schopenhauer asserts, “Here, incidentally, we see most clearly that overall, the form of life, or the appearance of the will with consciousness, is immediately and in the first instance purely the present: past and future are introduced only with humans, and in fact only conceptually; we have cognition of them in the abstract and, in any case, illustrated by means of pictures and the imagination” (SW 3:656/WWR 2:587). The non-human animal lives in the present, and yet the type of self-consciousness that subjectively characterizes and individualizes it does not even allow it to recognize the present moment qua present. The human animal also lives in the present—being an animal after all—but has no choice but to situate the present in which he or she lives within a finite whole, which is his or her lifetime. However, one cannot come to understand Schopenhauer’s reflection on the “form of life” without broaching the theme of desire. If, as we have seen, the object of selfconsciousness is the subject of willing, and if this subject is an individuation of the will to life in an organism whose focus is upon the genital organs, then life is desire: “Awoken to life from the night of the unconsciousness [Bewußtlosigkeit], the will finds itself as an individual in a world without end or limit, among countless individuals who are all striving, suffering, going astray; and it hurries back to the old unconsciousness, as if through a bad dream” (SW 3:657/WWR 2:588). The single organism thrown into an “only relative rather than absolute when and where” (SW 2:366/WWR 1:337)— thrown, that is, into a path across infinite space and time that itself is finite, beginning as it does with our birth and ending with death—is a striving, desiring organism among other striving, desiring organisms.5 Until the moment when it returns to the absence of consciousness from where it came before its individuation, it never stops desiring—and yet, sprouting from nature itself and the demands of its species, and not just from the need for self-preservation, desire is, due to its own nature, impossible to satisfy, insatiable—“an unquenchable thirst” (SW 2:367/WWR 1:338). And this involves two important aspects of Schopenhauer’s pessimism that touch upon the theme of what he calls the “form of life.” The first is the doctrine of the negative nature of satisfaction and therefore, of pleasure and happiness (WWR 1, §58; WWR 2 Ch.46): “we feel pain, but not painlessness; we feel worry, but not freedom from worry; we feel fear, but not security” (SW 3:659/WWR 2:590)—in such a way that desire, being the pain of not having what one desires, is precisely the kind of lack which is positively felt, while the moment of satisfaction is just the negation of this lack, the fading away and extinction of this pain. This shows “how essential suffering is to all life” (SW 2:366/WWR 1:337), that suffering is “grounded in our nature” and “therefore irremovable” (SW 2:374/WWR 1:343), the “unavoidability of pain” (SW 2:372/WWR 1:342). Given the desiring nature of the organism, the satisfaction of a desire and fading away of the pain it involved only sparks a new desire, which is a new source 100

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of pain. The latter is felt as a positive sensation, while the eradication of the previous one becomes immediately imperceptible. The second aspect is the doctrine that the form of the alternation between desire (i.e., pain) and satisfaction (i.e., the substitution of one pain for another) is transitoriness, or to put it another way, that time, the “form of inner sense” is the form of this alternation, and thus the “form of life.” The “nothingness”—the “vanity” or the “not being anything” (Nichtigkeit)—of “all objects of the will,” i.e., of the satisfaction of one’s desires, is synonymous with the “transitoriness” or “perishability” (Vergänglichkeit) of those objects, the fact that their existence consists in fading away and being immediately buried in a past (Vergangenheit) that becomes ever more distant as time goes by, i.e., in their transition to nothing (SW 3:658/WWR 2:589). To the extent that all objects of desire have this form, “all our pleasures and joys turn to nothing in our hands and we then ask in amazement where they had been” (SW 3:658/WWR 2:589). Our desire to take pleasure in life is like the punishment of the Danaids, eternally condemned to fill a sieve with water (SW 2:375/WWR 1:345); the objects of our desire are like “the wine Mephistopheles tasted in Auerbach’s cave”: they do look like wine, but are in fact just foam and vapor (SW 3:573/WWR 2:516). This transitoriness of not only the objects of our desire, but also of the very existence of a desiring organism like ours means that the “form of life” is that of “a constant dying”: such a being “only truly exists in the present, and the unchecked flight of the present into the past is a constant passage into death, a constant dying” (SW 2:367/WWR 1:337). The past has consequences in the present and the future, but beyond that, it means nothing to a desiring being, for what is at stake in desire is the present and, at each new moment, “our anticipation that a new future has opened up for us” (SW 2:373/WWR 1:342). And yet, the form of life, i.e., succession, determines that the present and the future constantly transition into the past: “the present is continually passing through his hands into the past; the future is completely unknown and always brief,” which means that even if “seen only from the formal side,” our entire life is “a continuous plunging of the present into the dead past,” indeed simply “a constant dying” (SW 2:367/WWR 1:337). But besides this, the form in question here is also a constant flux of “ongoing deception and disappointment” (SW 3:658/WWR 2:589). Desire is always but an “error” and “the delusion [Wahn] that you have found something in life that is not really there, namely lasting satisfaction” (SW 2:375/WWR 1:344, translation modified). Our existence “is happiest when we are least able to feel it: from which it follows that it would be better not to exist at all” (SW 3:660/WWR 2:590). It is for this reason that “the happiest moment for a happy person is when he goes to sleep, just as the unhappiest moment of the unhappiest person is when he wakes up” (SW 3:663/WWR 2:593). All in human life is, according to Schopenhauer, stained by the dynamics of “deception and disappointment”—and this already implies that human existence is something that ought not to be, something that would be better not to have ever existed at all. We, humans, are “like Phineus, when the Harpies ruined all of his food and rendered it inedible” (SW 3:662/WWR 2:592). Finally, this “constant dying” and “ongoing deception and disappointment” are, simultaneously, “a constant struggle against need [Not]” (SW 3:652/WWR 2:583), a “constant struggle against want [Mangel],” a “constant struggle for existence as such” (SW 2:370/WWR 1:340, SW 2:368/WWR 1:339, translation modified). Living is the struggle, at every instant, to keep the organism alive and, for this reason, to fight to avoid death. Not only is life “death always postponed,” but besides this, it is an “avoidance of death” (SW 2:369/WWR 1:339)—whether it be in the sense that it shadows us at every moment and 101

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obliges us to resist it in all sorts of ways (by eating, sleeping, keeping out of harm’s way, etc.), or in the sense that we have been molded by the need for “metaphysical consolation” for the fact that we are, from our birth, condemned to die (WWR 2 Ch.41). And of course “death has to win in the end”—though, even if we know this, we are wholly invested in our lives and we take great care to try to prolong them as much as possible, “just as someone might blow as big a soap bubble as they can, and try to get it to last for as long as possible, although being absolutely certain that it is going to burst” (SW 2:367/WWR 1:338).6 Schopenhauer wastes no opportunity to show how “the form of life” is common to human beings and to all other animals. But even so, he also makes sure to draw our attention to what determines the huge difference in the way humans and animals manifest this: given that we have a concept of our own death and thus the certainty that it will take place— whereas other animals fear death instinctively, but have no abstract cognition of it—we live with a quasi-permanent conceptual consciousness of the “form of life,” while other animals simply endure, so to speak, its effects. In our case, time is indeed “the form which makes comprehensible for our intellect” the nothingness of all that we desire (WWR 2 Ch.46), for as we have seen, our intellect is “double” and our self-consciousness, besides being apperceptive, is conceptual. We are the consciousness of our finitude, or transitoriness.7

7.4 Boredom According to what we have seen so far, the way in which we live the finite time of our lives is anything but homogeneous: the present is always painful, as it always covers up the happiness that we either expect from the future or imagine we possessed in the past “like a small dark cloud driven by the wind over the sunlit plains,” while on the other hand “the future is uncertain, and the past cannot be recovered” (SW 3:657–58/WWR 2:657). We live our finite lifetime not as a disinterested spectator giving equal weight to the past, present and future, but rather as beings spurred on by a will and anchored in the present, so that the weight we give to the past and the future is relative to their impact on the present. But besides this, the totality of the finite time allotted to each individual is such that, at each new moment, the past grows and the future diminishes: “Throughout our entire life we are always only of the present, never more. What differentiates it is the fact that in the beginning, we have a long future before us, but towards the end, we see a long past behind us” (SW 5:508/PP 1:419); thereby, our youth “possesses a short past and a long future,” and old age, “the reverse” (SW 5:528/PP 1:435). The structure of our finite lifetimes is dynamic. As the masterful phenomenological studies of Max Scheler in Tod und Fortleben and those of Martin Heidegger in Sein und Zeit showed, the dynamic of this structure is anything but a homogeneous succession of “nows” in infinite time. Each new “now” differs from the previous one first by adding one more moment to the extension of the time already past (an extension which is finite because it started at birth), and second by subtracting one more moment from the future (which is also a finite interval of time because it will end with death). Even if, as Schopenhauer maintains, our character is fixed and immutable since birth, our “temperament” changes—and does so in accordance with the “different hue” (Färbung) that the present acquires as our finite lifetime goes by (SW 5:508/PP 1:419). And so for example, the carefree days of our youth are inseparable from the fact that “going uphill, we do not see death, because it lies at the foot of the other side of the mountain”; but, halfway through our life, as we reach the other side of the hill, our days become more serious and 102

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less carefree (SW 5:514/PP 1:424). In our youth, life seems as if it knows no end (although, even then, we are somehow still aware of its finiteness), whereas in our later years, every day that we live “produces a sensation related to the one that a delinquent has at every step on his way to the gallows” (SW 5:515/PP 1:424). All this means that, in the case of human beings, boredom belongs to the “form of life,” as much as death and pain. Boredom is what Schopenhauer calls “the burden of existence” (SW 2:369/WWR 1:339).8 Our existence is “burdensome” because it is constantly threatened by the possibility of the satiation of our desires, or rather by the emptiness it leaves in its wake. As we have seen, desire is pain and the satisfaction of desire is a mere snuffing out of one pain, to give rise to new desires, and inevitably fresh pain. However, if once a desire has been satisfied we do not immediately find new objects of desire to occupy us or, as Schopenhauer puts it, so for a brief moment our “existence is secured,” then people “do not know what to do with it [their existence]” (SW 2:369/WWR 1:339, translation modified). The fulfilment of our desires leaves us with nothing to will. We end up without goals, ends, or purposes to chase after. In situations such as these, “the will retains its impulses even in the absence of any known motives” (SW 2:430/WWR 1:391), in such a way that the only thing that makes us do anything is then the burden of existence itself: “the second thing that sets people in motion [besides the “avoidance of death” or, which is the same, “the striving for existence”] is a striving to get rid of the burden of existence, not to feel it any longer, ‘to kill time’, i.e., to escape boredom” (SW 2:369/WWR 1:339). It is in this sense that the form of life “swings back and forth like a pendulum between pain and boredom” (SW 2:368/WWR 1:338). Obviously, this swinging motion is, in truth, between two types of pain: the pain of unquenched desire and the pain, perhaps even more horrible, of not having anything to desire—the pain of the “emptiness of the idle will” (SW 2:240/WWR 1:228), of “empty striving” without an object (WWR 1 §52, §58), a “feeling of the most horrible desolation and emptiness” (SW 2:430/WWR 1:391). The two extremes of this famous swinging pendulum of life are, on the one hand, famine, which is the most extreme form of need, lack, scarcity, unquenched desire (SW 2:369/ WWR 1:340), and the kind of boredom Schopenhauer generally identifies as “languor,” the Tamas-Guna of Buddhism, the form boredom takes which corresponds to an actual paralysis that engulfs one’s entire life (SW 2:379/WWR 1:348). Nothing in the human lifetime escapes the swing of the pendulum between these two extremes—nothing but possible manifestations of a third extreme, the “contemplation of beauty” as “pure cognition, the comprehension of the Idea conditioned by the liberation of cognition from the service of the will: the life of the genius (Sattva-Guna)” (SW 2:379/WWR 1:347–48). A considerable part of Schopenhauer’s reflection on boredom touches upon this idea: intellectually more adept people are much less beholden to boredom, for they find it easy to distance themselves from the subjectivity of their wills and to occupy themselves with “idealities” (which are inexhaustible), while the rest are condemned to constantly swing from pain to boredom and back again, for they busy themselves only with “realities” (whose interest rapidly fades). In truth, the vast majority of human beings are ignorant not only of the extreme of disinterested contemplation, but also of the remaining two, and for this reason their average lives are limited to going with the flow, “vacuously and meaninglessly,” like “mechanical clocks that are wound up and go without knowing why” (SW 2:379/WWR 1:348). And yet, even both the most trivial and the most contemplative of lives have weight, the weight of exposure to the confrontation with time as such: “we become aware of time in 103

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boredom [Langeweile], not in amusement [Kurzweil]”] (SW 3:660/WWR 2:590, translation modified). The actual words in German given to boredom and amusement could not be more pertinent to the phenomenon in question here: boredom is a “long while” (lange Weile), an hour where we feel the passage of time as such, and for this reason, drags; amusement is a “short while” (kurze Weile), an hour that flies by. “Hours pass more quickly the more pleasantly they are spent, and more slowly the more painfully” (SW 3:660/WWR 2:590). Schopenhauer’s reflection on boredom is likely to a large extent inspired by Pascal, in whose Pensées the back and forth between boredom (l’ennui) and amusement (le divertissement) play a central role.9 But the way in which Schopenhauer describes the relationship between boredom and amusement also anticipates the celebrated analysis of boredom in the work of Heidegger. For Schopenhauer, as later also for Heidegger, boredom is inseparable from the phenomenon of Zeitvertreib, a term generally translated as “pastime,” which literally means something like a “driving away of time.” Boredom is a “long while” precisely in the sense that it is a becoming conscious of time which originates an irrepressible desire to “drive away time,” to kill it as it passes agonizingly, almost as if it had stopped, and accordingly find something to do to pass the time, anything which will do to distract us. This leads us to the back and forth between boredom and amusement, between the feeling that, in manifesting itself as such, time has become too slow, a “long while,” and finding a distraction, which frees us from that unbearable feeling of the passage of time as such.10 But Schopenhauer’s reflection is perhaps far closer to Heidegger than Pascal in one very important respect. For Pascal, the to-and-fro is, so to speak, real, as the problem with amusement is simply the fact it is superficial, empty, actually nothing at all, a pleasure with no purpose—but in spite of this still effective as a distraction. However, for Schopenhauer, as we have seen, all pleasure is negative. If a person manages to get rid of her boredom by finding something to do and distract herself from the passage of time, she immediately goes back, as suggested by the image of the pendulum, to the clutches of desire and, as a result, to pain. First of all, this means that amusement finds no respite from the confrontation of time, but only changes the nature of this confrontation. The dynamic between desire and pain is one of avoiding death at all costs, therefore involves, as mentioned above, a vigilant “care” for one’s self-preservation (SW 3:531/WWR 2:482) which is tantamount to becoming conscious of the peril of death as “the temporal end of temporal appearance” (SW 3:553/WWR 2:500), i.e., the end of our individuation as conscious beings condemned to a finite lifetime. When we escape the burden of boredom through our amusement, we do not escape the burden of being conscious of our finitude. Or, more precisely: we never really free ourselves of the burden of boredom, which just is nothing other than the “burden of existence” itself. As Schopenhauer explains eloquently in his Manuscript Remains, our attempts to keep ourselves amused might be compared to curtains we draw to hide the emptiness of existence—but so that we never really succeed, as we still know (in a kind of knowing-without-knowing, or knowi​ng-fu​ll-we​ll-wi​thout​-want​ing-t​o-kno​w) that, on the other side of the curtains, there is only emptiness, not the El Dorado our desires promised us (MR 1:109). We can understand how this view of boredom shares common ground with Heidegger’s when we consider what he writes about the form of boredom in which we give ourselves an interval of time to indulge in some sort of amusement—by accepting an invitation for a dinner party, for example. During that interval of time, we feel genuinely entertained and even tell ourselves and others about how much fun we are having, only to realize a posteriori (for example, when we get home), that in truth we felt bored the whole evening while thinking we were distracted and not at all bored. Maybe something is not quite right 104

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in Schopenhauer’s image of the pendulum oscillating between pain and boredom, for when he expresses all his contempt for Sundays, card-playing, cigar-smoking and each and every sort of amusement devised to kill time and prevent people from confronting themselves with their bare existence (or with the passage of time as such), his view seems to be that, ultimately, amusement just is a form of boredom, and boredom is nothing other than one possible modification of the pain (or suffering) intrinsic to existence, and no distinct phenomenon.11 Of particular interest in this respect is the observation that boredom results from the primacy of the will. Insofar as willing is the truly decisive factor in human existence and cognition is secondary and tends to be no more than a serf of our will, the “element” in which we tend to live our lives is “action and reaction” (SW 2:370/WWR 1:340). When we are left to our own devices and feel the passage of time as such, we tend not to be able to handle it and seek any distraction to kill time, and the reason for this is the fact that we need to will, that is to say, to “feel action and reaction”: to give an example, when we scratch our name in places we visit, as if to oblige it to react to our presence; or it’s not enough for us to try to understand the nature of a strange and rare animal, but we annoy it, tease it, and play with it, so as not to be engulfed by a feeling of emptiness (SW 2:371/WWR 1:341).12 What this means is that our boredom and amusement belong to the “element” of “pain,” the constant flux of “ongoing deception and disappointment,” and only “pure cognition”—whether in the form of soothing but equally fleeting aesthetic contemplation, or in the more serious and potentially longer-lasting form of asceticism as “negation of the will”—is truly able, according to Schopenhauer, to interrupt the pain of individuation. Idleness, or free time, for he who knows the secret to the pure contemplation of the ultimate form of things is “the flower, or rather the fruit, of everyone’s existence” (SW 5:353/PP 1:290). And so we finally come to understand the way Schopenhauer sees the relationship between consciousness, time, death and boredom. Boredom presupposes not just the animal consciousness of death (i.e., the instinctive fear of losing one’s life), but also the kind of conceptual consciousness which gives us the certainty of the inevitability of death and with it the conception of our lifetime as a finite interval of time. This explains precisely why non-human animals do not feel bored. The most intelligent among them certainly suffer the monotony of a life in captivity, but this is not the same as feeling “the burden of existence,” i.e., feeling the inexorable forward motion of a finite lifetime as a void in which we are imprisoned, a coming to be and passing away of hours and days that never seem to end (since non-human animals are only aware of the present moment etc.). Humans feel boredom when they are forced to wait and, having nothing to occupy themselves with, seek but fail to find some pastime to distract themselves with; they feel boredom when they devote themselves to a pastime which was meant to relieve their boredom, but which becomes boring in itself (as happens with the philistines among the elites who desperately seek to fill their time with “sensuous pleasures” such as “ballet, theatre, society, card games, gambling, horses, women, drinking, travelling, and so on,” but who become essentially bored with it all in the end, for “sensuous pleasures are soon exhausted” (SW 5:365/PP 1:301); and human beings feel boredom when they succumb to languor and their will becomes, as it were, paralyzed because their entire existence—the totality of their finite lifetime—seems empty. Schopenhauer does not distinguish explicitly between the three types of boredom which, in brief, are those identified and analyzed by Heidegger in his work on boredom (Heidegger 1992: 89–249). But I believe there should be no doubt that Schopenhauer clearly saw the relation between boredom and the “form of life” as a form of human individuation—and 105

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this means: as a form of individuation in which consciousness of finitude is necessarily involved, and not just the (unconscious) occurrence of finitude. It is also true that Schopenhauer does not neglect to observe that, if human life were infinite, its monotony would result in a level of boredom (Überdruß) so great we would do anything to be free of our existence and go back to nothing. Individual existence is already in itself “an error,” and so “to demand immortality for an individuality really just means wanting to eternalize a mistake” (SW 3:563/WWR 2:507–508). However, in making this claim, Schopenhauer underlines precisely how such monotony would result from “the rigid inalterability and essential limitations found in every individuality as such” (SW 3:563/WWR 2:507). It would simply amount to the mere continuation, or “endless endurance” (SW 3:563/WWR 2:507), of a certain form of finitude, or “individuation.” Given that, in the case of human beings, individuation is marked by the consciousness of individuation, and that “consciousness consists in cognition” (SW 3:534/WWR 2:485), in order for us to feel boredom, a conceptual representation of the totality of one’s lifetime would still be needed. The certainty of our death might be replaced by the certainty of our immortality, and in this case, we would continue to live in the present, but with the difference that, at any given stage of our lives, we would be conscious of the totality of our past as a very short interval of time and of the totality of the future to come as a never-ending interval of time. Still the feeling of boredom would continue to depend on the possibility of conceptually representing, at the very least, the possibility of death, and through this representation intervals of time which could be lived (and anticipated) with the “feeling of the most horrible desolation and emptiness” (SW 2:430/WWR 1:391). The need for the conscious representation of a finite lifetime would be maintained, even if, objectively, the “endless endurance” of our individuation were confirmed, and even if the interval of time corresponding to our future were represented as being without end. The feeling that we are trapped in time and that time is passing and yet has become so slow (a “long while”) that it is as if it had stopped is an integral part of our experience of boredom. This is the experience of the “moment” (Augenblick) as described by Heidegger in his reflection on boredom.13 Also in Schopenhauer, we have the paradoxical claim that, on the one hand, we live with the certainty of death, while on the other we have a feeling of our “indestructibility,” since we are incapable of imagining our own death (WWR 2 Ch.41). Integral to the “burden of existence” is the feeling that we can never be free of it. As mentioned by Schopenhauer himself, Spinoza had already made the point that we live with the feeling that we live forever—and, for Schopenhauer, if it is true this feeling adds to the burden of existence, it is also true that we can, and should, take a certain “metaphysical consolation” (albeit tenuous) from the fact that while we can be sure that if our own existence as a conscious being might be ephemeral, our “essential nature” (the will as subsoil, or unconscious foundation of our nature) is, in fact, indestructible (WWR 2 Ch.41).14 We can now understand the motto of this article: “The life of our body is only a constantly checked dying, a constant postponement of death; […] our mental activity is continuously delayed boredom” (SW 2:367/WWR 1:338). What Schopenhauer calls “the life of our body” is an individuation of the will which includes not only the consciousness of our lives, but also the consciousness of our death, which means that individuation depends on self-consciousness as an apperceptive and discursive representation of our life as a finite interval of time. It is not only from an objective perspective that death should be understood as something merely postponed and hence certain. Death is also part and parcel of 106

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our subjectivity, namely as something represented as merely postponed. Objectively, death is “the destruction of the organism” (SW 3:535/WWR 2:485), but this destruction is the destruction of the material conditions which make consciousness possible: “consciousness is the life of the subject of cognition, or the brain, and death is its end” (SW 3:573/WWR 2:516); death is the moment when consciousness, the “lantern” which, during life, was at our will’s service, is “extinguished” (SW 3:572/WWR 2:515). And so, “viewed subjectively, death concerns only consciousness” (SW 3:535/WWR 2:485), for it is the moment when consciousness ceases to be, the end of conscious life. On the other hand, this means precisely, as Epicurus was the first to point out, that “death is nothing to us”: as Schopenhauer himself writes in his interpretation of Epicurus’ famous saying, “death itself exists for the subject only at the moment [Augenblick] when consciousness dwindles away to the point where brain activity ceases” (SW 3:535/WWR 2:485). If death is the snuffing out of consciousness, consciousness cannot go through the experience of it (that is, it can experience the moment before one dies as the moment when one is dying, but it cannot experience death itself). Subjectively, death is but the anticipation of the end of conscious life—and it is as such that it belongs to the “form of life,” i.e., the form that consciousness imposes on life in order to make its individuation possible. What Schopenhauer calls “our mental activity” (die Regmsamkeit unsers Geistes) is the stream of consciousness that comes to be when the will individuates itself in a physical body, so that, thereafter, it is steered by the cognition of specific motives to act. Once individuated, the will becomes desire, and is driven by desiring thoughts. Schopenhauer’s conception of desire has been excellently treated in the work of many commentators and scholars, and he himself comes back to it again and again: desire is in itself pain, and the satisfaction of one desire leads to either the forming of yet another desire (i.e., another pain), or a feeling of equally painful emptiness, which is the result of us being an individuated will condemned to dwell in the present and to live a time yet to come, but stripped (at least for the moment) of any object of desire. The point I have sought to explore in this article is, however, the following: according to Schopenhauer, boredom and the burden of existence are always present in our lives, that is to say: in self-consciousness, since in the case of human beings they belong to the “form of life”—even if in most cases they belong to it as something “continuously delayed,” or “permanently repressed” (fortdauernd zurückgeschoben, SW 2:367/WWR 1:338). Boredom is ever-present in desire, especially in amusement, and not only in satiety. This is because the avoidance of death and the burden of existence are not poles apart (as sometimes Schopenhauer’s own formulations appear to suggest), but rather two sides of the same coin, namely, two aspects of individuation as the consciousness of time and its finitude.15

Notes 1 On the concept of animal consciousness, see WWR 1 §6, §8; WWR 2 §19. 2 On Schopenhauer on concepts and consciousness, see Constâncio (2011). 3 On these three metaphors, see Constâncio (2011). 4 See WWR 1 §39, §60; WWR 2 Chapters19, 42, 45, 49. 5 As a finite being “thrown” into the realm of infinite space and infinite time, we are a being that does not really know where he is, a being whose metaphysical localization is problematic—a theme that goes back to Kant, but also to Pascal’s “two infinites” (the human being placed between an unknowable infinitely large and an unknowable infinitely small etc), as well as forward to Heidegger’s characterization of human “thrownness” (Geworfenheit) and, before that, Nietzsche’s conception, in his Truth and lying in a Non-Moral Sense (1999: 141), of “how insubstantial and

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João Constâncio transitory, how purposeless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature”—that is, in the “remote corner of the universe” in which it is destined to last no more than “a minute” within the infinity of time. 6 It is very interesting to note how Schopenhauer, in his reflections on the “avoidance [Flucht] of death,” anticipates Heidegger’s claim that “everyday Being-towards-death is a constant fleeing [Flucht] in the face of death (Heidegger 1986: 254/ 1962: 298, SuZ §51), and that this fleeing in the face of death, or “looking-away from the end of Being-in-the-world,” is an essential part of a more general characteristic of “everydayness”: the tendency to look away from oneself, that is, our everyday “fleeing [Flucht] in the face of [our] authentic existence” (Heidegger 1986: 424/ 1962: 477, SuZ §81). This latter theme—“everydayness” as a “looking-away from oneself” (Flucht vor sich selbst)—returns in both Heidegger’s and Schopenhauer’s analyses of boredom (see below). 7 This brings Schopenhauer much closer to Heidegger—that is, to the conception of human existence in terms of its “Being-towards-death” (Sein zum Tode) and “finitude” (Endlichkeit)—than the latter ever admitted. 8 The “burdensome character” of human existence (der Lastcharakter des Daseins, Heidegger 1986: 134/ 1966: 173, SuZ §29) is, again, a theme that is explored in Heidegger’s thought, without the acknowledgement of any debt to Schopenhauer’s groundbreaking reflections on it. 9 See Pascal, Pensées, especially chapter 8. in the Pléiade edition: Le divertissement (1914: pp. 11371148). 10 Heidegger makes explicit use of the literal meaning of the word Langeweile in order to define boredom: “Langeweile—die Weile wird lang [the while becomes long]” (Heidegger 1992: 228). Heidegger also makes extensive use of the idea of Zeitvertreib (a driving away of time = pastime) throughout his text, but so does Schopenhauer (e.g., WWR 1 §57, SW 5:349–50/PP 1:287–89). Schopenhauer, like Heidegger, makes it explicit that a Zeitvertreib is anything we use “against boredom” (SW 5:365–66PP 1:300–302). 11 Heidegger’s examples are strikingly identical with Schopenhauer’s, especially games, fidgeting or drumming with one’s fingers, and smoking a cigar as examples of the kind of “pastime” (Zeitvertreib) that we are allowed to indulge in during a wider “pastime” we devote ourselves to during a whole interval of time which we give ourselves as if to suspend our lives: compare Heidegger 1992: 168–171 with PP 1, 289–302/351–366, 367/445, 385/467, 393–394/ 478. Note also that Heidegger’s analysis conceives of the notion of “pastime” (Zeitvertreib) as a manifestation of our everyday tendency to engage in a “fleeing away from oneself” (Flucht vor sich selbst) and easing oneself from the “burden” (Last) of existence (e.g., Heidegger 1992: 180, 229, 234235, 246-249), which, as we already know, are originally Schopenhauerian themes. 12 It is this aversion to the absence of “action and reaction” which leads Nietzsche to argue that “the basic fact of the human will” is its “horror vacui” (GM III.1, III.28). Schopenhauer’s analyses of boredom are essential for Nietzsche’s conception of the human will in On the Genealogy of Morals and elsewhere. See Constâncio (2017). 13 For the Augenblick theme, see Heidegger (1992: 222-230, 236-237, 246-247 GA 29/30, §§32-38) and (1986: 328-331, SuZ §65). 14 The elaboration of precisely this Schopenhauerian “metaphysical consolation” as an intrinsic element of the cult of Dionysos in the tragic epoch of Greek culture plays a crucial role in the central argument of Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy. But what Schopenhauer calls “the contradiction between the fact that death is our end and the fact that we must still be eternal and indestructible” (SW 3:567/WWR 2:511) also plays a crucial role in Nietzsche’s mature philosophy. For the “eternal return of the same” is a reformulation of this “contradiction”: by identifying eternity with the eternal return of exactly the same events in space and time (thereby eliminating the Platonic conception of time as a mere shadow or appearance of an intelligible and really real eternity beyond it), Nietzsche’s doctrine depicts “death as our end” and yet also the eternal return of our life (and its end) as our “indestructibility” (thereby reformulating the latter as a temporal, immanent indestructibility, no longer as something belonging to our “essential nature” beyond time and our merely apparent individuation in time). 15 A translation from Portuguese to English of a first draft of this chapter was funded by Portuguese national funds through FCT—Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia under the project UIDB/00183/2020.

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References Constâncio, J. (2011) ‘On Consciousness: Nietzsche’s Departure from Schopenhauer’, NietzscheStudien 40, pp. 1–42. Constâncio, J. (2017) ‘Nietzsche and Schopenhauer: On Nihilism and the Ascetic “Will to Nothingness”’, in Shapshay, S. (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook to Schopenhauer, London: Springer/ Palgrave, pp. 425–446. Heidegger, M. (1986) Sein und Zeit, 16th edn, Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag (quoted as SuZ). Heidegger, M. (1992) Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik. Welt—Endlichkeit—Einsamkeit, Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann (quoted as GA 29/30). Nietzsche, F. (1999) The Birth and Tragedy and Other Writings, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pascal, B. (1914) Oeuvres Complètes, Paris: Gallimard/ Pléiade.

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8 “ZWAR EIN WISSEN, JEDOCH KEINE WISSENSCHAFT” Schopenhauer’s Ambivalent Philosophy of History Anthony K. Jensen

8.1 Introduction For scholars of Schopenhauer, interest in the philosophy of history is typically remote. For philosophers of history, interest in Schopenhauer is usually non-existent. Historically, Schopenhauer left little impact on theoreticians of historical explanation, judgment, objectivity, or teleology; and they left little on him.1 He had no personal respect for historicist philosophers in the romantic or idealist traditions; and they had none for him. Theoretically, Schopenhauer’s subjective idealism rendered any talk of history a merely phenomenal endeavor beneath the dignity of what he considered the genuine lover of wisdom; and for any historian or philosopher of history, Schopenhauer’s denial of the objective reality of time was a poison pill. Thus, Schopenhauer and the philosophy of history were at an impasse as a result of both historical fact and theoretical necessity. And with the exception of a few articles that mostly detail Schopenhauer’s antipathy to history, both parties have remained silent about the other, resigned that the as-yet fruitless tree was indeed a barren one.2 The state of the scholarly literature is, however, more neglectful than is warranted. Evident to even a cursory reader is that Schopenhauer everywhere marshals historical events, texts, figures, and episodes to either exemplify or illustrate what he believes he can otherwise demonstrate systematically. Beyond its rhetorical function, history also presents Schopenhauer the material data for at least his eudaimonistic defense of pessimism: that is, history enumerates in countless ways how the lives of human beings tend to contain more unhappiness than happiness – and are therefore not worth living. Moreover, among the most innovative of his followers – Bahnsen, Mainländer, Rèe, Hartmann, Burckhardt, Wagner, and Nietzsche – there was a common sentiment that history was the crucial element about which Schopenhauer failed to be, but should have been, more explicit. They saw themselves each in some way as being truer to the spirit of Schopenhauerianism by correcting the master’s system through careful attention to the philosophical implications of history. Knowledge of the past, some kind of Wissen, was not to be despised as merely the work of superficial minds.3 The uses and even in some cases entire systems of history they developed in the framework of Schopenhauerian philosophy suggests the tree was not quite so barren after all. 110

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As an attempt to bridge the gap between Schopenhauer and the philosophy of history, I previously published an article that implored a place for Schopenhauer at the historical theorist’s table.4 My argument was two-pronged, defending, on the one hand, the internal coherence of Schopenhauer’s critiques of historical theory and practice and, on the other hand, the prescience of his arguments as they anticipated sometimes by decades and sometimes by a century canonical philosophers of history like Windelband, Dilthey, Popper, W.H. Walsh, and William Dray.5 Here what I will argue takes the equally-important reverse course: that history deserves the attention of Schopenhauer scholars. This is not to say that history is some master key to unlock his system of Will – it isn’t. But Schopenhauer’s attitude toward history is, I contend here, more ambivalent than it would seem at first glance. This ambivalence is exemplified by Schopenhauer’s characterization of history as “zwar ein Wissen, jedoch keine Wissenschaft” – indeed a knowledge, but not a science. He repeats this characterization twice in his corpus: at SW 2:75/WWR 1:88 and SW 3:502/WWR 2:457. Although pithy, what it means, in the context of the passage quoted and in Schopenhauer’s philosophy generally is not immediately clear. It suggests an ambivalence that, if read uncharitably, introduces a number of inconsistencies. Read more charitably, that is, by trying to disambiguate historical knowledge as a Wissen that is not a Wissenschaft, the phrase belies the usual interpretation of Schopenhauer as dismissing history outright as an undignified intellectual pursuit. By means of that more charitable reading, I will show in successive sections: (1) in what respects Schopenhauer thought the knowledge history presents is inferior to Wissenschaft, (2) how history presents knowledge that is consistent with Wissenschaft, (3) the ways history compares and contrasts with what insight is produced by the poetic art, i.e., by Poesis, (4) and, finally, that history properly conducted can produce Wissen that stands as a crucial middle ground between Wissenschaft and Poesis, one that at least intimates the character of the Will through its representation of real historical facts. That middle ground, I argue, positions history as a key discipline that, when practiced rightly, intimates supra-phenomenal insights about the inner Idea of humanity through representational means.

8.2  Why Historical Knowledge is Inferior to Scientific Knowledge Scientific knowledge, or Wissenschaft, is not coextensive with whatever the sciences may produce. For Schopenhauer, Wissenschaft is a formal and systematic mode of thinking involving the deduction of particular facts from universal axioms as bound by the logic of the fourfold root of the principle of sufficient reason.6 The universal concepts that genuine sciences deal with – Newton’s laws of motion, Pascal’s law of pressure, Archimedes’ buoyancy principle – are not spatio-temporally bound in the sense that they are manifest only in certain objects in certain places at certain times. Although these laws are used to explain the change of unique and particular objects, their universality is, on the contrary, a function of their not being bound, as are empirical objects, by their spatio-temporality. Logical deduction from these universals to explain a particular occurrence in the phenomenal world presents scientific knowledge: Wissenschaft. There are several arguments Schopenhauer provides throughout his corpus as to why the sorts of knowledge claims historians offer cannot amount to those provided by the sciences. The most fundamental involves the necessity that history speaks of objects that are engaged in processes of change.

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The material of history … is the particular in its particularity and contingency, what is at one time and is never again to be, the transient complications of a human world that moves like a cloud in the wind, and which is often completely rearranged by the most trivial happenstance. From this standpoint, the material of history hardly looks like a subject worthy of the earnest and painstaking investigation of the human spirit which, precisely because it is itself so perishable, should choose to investigate what is imperishable. (SW 3:505/WWR 2:459) Beyond the poetic phrasing, Schopenhauer’s argument runs thusly: time and space are subjective conditions of experience and not a quality of objects in themselves; spatio-temporal objects are represented phenomenally according to the logical constraints of the fourfold root of the principle of sufficient reason; whatever is represented phenomenally is merely an intelligible surface of what something is noumenally; the objects of history are always understood as bound by the intuitions of space, time, and causality, in other words, as both particular and involved states of change; therefore, the objects of history are merely phenomena whose intelligibility is not intrinsic but only a matter of the logical relations of their representations. The intelligibility of scientific objects consists in the relation of the empirical phenomena to the universal laws that govern them. But in history, unlike Wissenschaft, there is no universal law – nothing that stands outside spatio-temporal and causal intuitions – from which any possible certainty can be deduced. Historians merely represent the phenomenal character of things, but can present no universal law insofar as that necessarily stands outside of time, and would be by definition, unhistorical (SW 341–2/WWR 1:316). “[A]n actual philosophy of history should not, like this, investigate what … always becomes and never is” (SW 3:507/WWR 2:461). Without reference to the supra-phenomenal universal, history presents a superficial compilation of particular characters in particular places at particular times doing particular things. As such, it is keine Wissenschaft. A second argument concerns a fundamental difference between historical knowledge and scientific knowledge with respect to the kinds of universals they employ. The properly classificatory sciences possess the most subordination, for instance zoology, botany, and also physics and chemistry […]; history on the other hand does not actually possess any subordination at all because historical universality consists in nothing more than overview of important historical periods. (SW 2:75/WWR 1:88) Wissenschaft explains the object or process in question by subordinating the particular to a universal. For example, it is a universal that the force generated in a process is equivalent to the mass of the object multiplied by the rate at which the object accelerates. Because that holds true for every object, the force of any particular object engaged in any particular process of change will be explained by subordinating that particular case to the universal. “[R]eal sciences soar above it, since they have won for themselves comprehensive concepts which they can use to master the particular” (SW 3:502/WWR 2:457). History cannot aspire to this gold standard of wissenschaftliche Erklärung. History treats particulars as particulars – that is to say, its research is filled with descriptions of particular kings, particular wars, and particular revolutions rather than of kingship, war, and revolution as universals that subsist as a concept beyond their particular instantiation. With that said, one 112

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might object that history does in fact employ universals, and indeed does so necessarily if propositions like “Henry the VIII was king” or “the French Revolution ended in 1799 with the formation of the Consulate” are meaningful. Predicating a particular object or state of affairs presumes the meaningfulness of that general conceptual predicate. Schopenhauer grants this objection (SW 3:503/WWR 2:457), seemingly in confutation of what he just argued in the preceding paragraph. The key is that he nuances what is meant by “universal” by pointing out the difference between the “objective universals” of Wissenschaft in comparison to the “subjective universals” of history. An objective universal is one that, insofar as it presents an unchanging subsistent Idea, manifests objectively within its accordant particular. It is discovered by the subject who can apprehend a universal within a set of particular objects or events without an inherent satisfaction of that subject’s will. A subjective universal, on the other hand, is one that presents an intellectual abstraction from observed qualities that associates otherwise unassociated objects or events. It is constructed by the subject who elects to abstract characteristics that somehow satisfy that subject’s will. An example of an objective universal would be a biological species, which, for Schopenhauer, is an Idea identifying the reality of a biological organism, something “more real” than the mere phenomenal object in which it is found (SW 3:506–7/WWR 2:460). An example of a subjective universal is indicated by words like patriot, economic crash, democracy, or Germany. Each, for Schopenhauer, is an association of the qualities of otherwise unique objects and processes that are considered meaningful insofar as they satisfy some need of the Will. “[They] accordingly have neither reality nor meaning, at least not directly but only indirectly, through their relation to the will of the individual” (SW 3:506/WWR 2:460). There is no reality in such terms beyond what has been bestowed by the intellectual act of the historian who so associates them. Although the meaning-bestowing association of unique particulars has all manner of uses – it’s useful to know whether a figure is a patriot or terrorist for any number of reasons – no conclusions can be drawn by subordinating the particular under the universal since the universal only has the characteristics that were selected from out of the associated particulars by the historian. “the particular is to this what the part is to the whole, but not what the case is to the rule, which is what we find in all genuine sciences, since they provide concepts, not mere facts” (SW 3:503/WWR 2:457). Consider the following distinction. By observing a cow, one can readily discern it has hooves, udders, eyes, a tail, etc. A scientist who comprehends both the concept of Kingdom Mammalia and also that this cow is a particular instantiation of that general concept will readily deduce that this particular cow has twelve pairs of cranial nerves, a dicondylic skull, and oil glands in their skin. By comparison, while it is obvious that tyrants act tyrannically and that revolutionaries revolt, beyond what qualities are already abstracted from individuals in order to construct the subjective universal in the first place, nothing further can be deduced. Wissenschaft subordinates particulars to objective universals in a way that enables the scientist to deduce rational necessities whereas the historian only coordinates qualities into subjective universals that serve some satisfaction of the will.7 A third argument as to why historical knowledge fails to measure up to Wissenschaft now involves not the kinds of universals but the kinds of laws they use as explanatory mechanisms. Where the natural sciences comprehend the relationships between objects and processes through the laws of mechanics, by which Schopenhauer means the logical relationships of space, time, and causality as bound by the fourfold root of the principle of sufficient reason, whenever history utilizes a law of explanation as to why people, societies, or nations do what they do, it is an internal law, specifically, what Schopenhauer calls the 113

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“law of motivation” (SW 1:157/FR 149; see also SW 2:34/WWR 1:51). History “is pragmatic to the extent that it derives [events] in accordance with the law of motivation, a law that determines the appearing will where it is illuminated by cognition” (SW 2:217/WWR 1:207). Mechanics can explain with perfect concision, regularity, and clarity the speed and parabolic vector a ball is thrown simply because that phenomenon is itself a function of the representational capacity to relate space, time, and causality. When it comes to the “inner life” or noumenal aspect of the ball, Wissenschaft is necessarily silent insofar as any spatiotemporal representation of a noumenon is a contradiction in terms. With history, the case is quite the reverse. The mechanics of how Lee Harvey Oswald’s bullet killed Kennedy is admittedly one of the more interesting intersections of physics and history; but even here the laws of mechanics are of little historical concern in comparison to the motivations of the key players. The “inner law” of Oswald, the law of motivation that led him to do what he did – that is the genuinely historical question. But, and this is Schopenhauer’s point, that law is not logically demonstrable in terms of the relations of space, time, and causality. The “law of motivation” is only felt by a sympathetic awareness, intimated by the represented facts of the case. As such, it allows she who apprehends it, first, a general apprehension for the striving and suffering common to all subjects and, second, a specific apprehension for how that applies to the particular historical case of Oswald by virtue of analogy with her own striving and suffering. But in no way is this “law” deducible in the conventional sense of a rational necessity with respect to the relationships of space, time, and causality. And therefore, because history relies on felt awareness of the inside world of its objects while science stands on firm ground knowing how its objects relate to one another through the laws of representation, historical knowledge does not measure up to Wissenschaft. The fourth key reason for the inferior position of historical knowledge involves exhaustiveness (SW 3:502/WWR 2:456). When Wissenschaft has discovered an axiomatic law to explain the workings of phenomena, it is exhaustive in two senses. First, scientific laws hold for all cases in the past, present, and future. The temperature at which water becomes steam is precisely the same in Ancient times as it is today; the law exhausts all possible instantiations. Second, once science has determined the law that relates phenomena in a particular way, no other explanation can be given that would contribute to the completeness of the explanation. The water has become steam for no other reason than it has reached the boiling point; the law exhausts all possible explanations. Schopenhauer notes that just the opposite is the case with history. From this immediately follows the essential imperfection of history, since the individuals and events are countless and endless. By studying history the sum of what is yet to be learned is not in the least diminished by everything that one has already learned. (SW 6:475/PP 2:402; see also SW 3:502/WWR 2:456). First, for whatever explanation is provided in a historical account, there are always further details, additional cases, and future occurrences that render whatever is claimed as merely provisional, something forever awaiting more data for confirmation. That there are seven surviving plays of Sophocles, that no stone-age Cretans navigated the Mediterranean – claims of this sort may be true, but merely provisionally so given ongoing historical research. Second, for whatever explanation is given, other interpretations of the stated facts lead to other explanations. Where gravity but neither atomic cohesion nor magnetism is said to cause the velocity of the falling object, different historians may well posit Lincoln’s sense of moral obligation 114

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or else his strategic cunning as the motivation to proclaim emancipation. Because no historical explanation is exhaustive as Wissenschaft is in either sense, history again falls short. Apart from these four key ways whereby history fails to achieve what Wissenschaft can, Schopenhauer has a litany of criticisms of history, which, while less serious philosophically, should at least be named here. Schopenhauer thinks a difference between history and science is that people read history in order to feel educated when they lack the mental fortitude to draw deductive conclusions (SW 6:474/PP 2:401). Because history lacks methodological rigor, it often lacks objectivity, ignores data contrary to its narratives, uses anecdotes uncritically, uses particular instances as proof of generalities, and in general is so infested with falsehoods that it ought not to be taught to young people (SW 6:476/PP 2:402; see also SW 3:507–8/WWR 2:461–2). Unlike science, wherein the original insights and inquiries are made in the course of its expression, history is an indirect and derivative copy of the event. That is, to read a scientific paper is to think alongside the scientist directly; to read history is to read the historian’s thought about the historical figure’s thought about an event, leaving only a rough and subjective depiction of what was the case (SW 6:476/PP 2:402). Unlike science, history is more interesting the more particular it is; but insofar as it is more particular, it is more unreliable, to the point that history comes to resemble fiction (SW 3:504/WWR 2:458). Finally, the contemporary celebration of history is a signpost of a culture in decline. Just as in the carnivals of Italian cities, one sees crazy masks running around among the people who soberly and seriously go about their business, so too in Germany today we see tartuffes swarming around between philosophers, physicists, historians, critics and rationalists in the costume of a period already centuries in the past, and the effect is burlesque. (SW 6:416/PP 2:351–2)

8.3  How History is Consistent with Wissenschaft Despite the several arguments by which Schopenhauer had relegated history to an inferior position vis-à-vis Wissenschaft, his position was actually more ambivalent, possibly to the point of being inconsistent. First, despite his insistence that history fails to apprehend the noumenal insofar as its claims are always set within spatio-temporal frameworks and thereby relegated to the phenomenal, he recognizes that this is a limitation common to science as well (SW 2:34/WWR 1:51). The sciences and history both pursue their objects within spatio-temporal frameworks. [T]he philosopher must make nature his object of study, and in fact its great, clear features, its main and basic character are where his problem arises. Accordingly, he will make the object of his scrutiny the essential and universal phenomena, that which is always and everywhere, whereas he will leave to the physicist, the zoologist, the historian, etc. those specialized, particular, rare, microscopic or ephemeral phenomena. He is concerned about more important things; the totality and magnitude of the world, its essential character, and basic truths are his lofty goal. (SW 6:52/PP 2:48) That historical claims are always situated within a spatio-temporal framework is at least in this passage fully consistent with physics, wherein all laws present some relation of space 115

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and time, and with zoology, which concentrates above all on the ways myriad creatures are empirically distinct from one another. As we saw earlier with history, “[S]cience has nothing to do with the inner essence of the world and can never go beyond representation” (SW 2:34/WWR 1:51). And again: “[N]atural science must therefore leave the inner essence of a stone just as unexplained as that of a human being” (SW 2:96/WWR 1:107).8 History and science are thus of a piece with respect to the phenomenality of their knowledge of objects. “There comes a point where natural science, indeed every science, leaves things as they are because its explanation of things […] cannot reach any further; […] in history it is the human race, with all its peculiarities of thought and will” (SW 2:97/WWR 1:107). In fact, it seems strange to bemoan that history provides merely phenomenal knowledge when, in fact, Schopenhauer thinks all knowledge, properly understood, is phenomenal. There can be at most, he thinks, an intellectual awareness [Anschauung] of non-spatial, non-particular, non-particular and therefore universal objects (SW 3:432/WWR 2:395). But this is not knowledge proper; and the objects of Anschauung are Ideas, not empirical objects whose domain is that of the understanding. Thus, if history, insofar as its judgments necessarily involve spatio-temporality, falls short of genuine apprehension of reality as it is in itself, then science and in fact all propositions conceived by human understanding bear the same failing. At least by this measure, then, history shares an important characteristic with science. Secondly, Schopenhauer had roundly criticized historians for their lack of objectivity. Of course, Schopenhauer’s standard thereof is rather more extreme than the “absence of bias” version assumed more commonsensically in history since Tacitus’s sine ira et studio. For Schopenhauer, objectivity entails knowledge free from the satisfaction of the Will. It is achieved only in the rarest cases of contemplation of Ideas. History, he thinks, rarely, if ever, achieves this since that of which it inquires is almost always put into some service for the historian’s will (SW 3:506/WWR 2:460). It may serve the historian’s Will to know what happened in the past in order not to repeat those mistakes in the future. It may serve the historian’s Will to overturn faulty interpretations. Especially among university professors, historical research may serve the Will in earning the comfortable living of a Brotgelerhte. Yet, in its capacity to satisfy the Will, history is likened to science by Schopenhauer himself. Therefore, wherever cognition of cause and effect, or some other grounds and consequences are at stake, thus in all branches of natural science and mathematics, as well as in history, or in discoveries and so on, the cognition sought after must be a purpose of the will. (SW 6:445/PP 2:376) Here history is fully consistent with science insofar as its effort to associate representations logically, too, is an effort to satisfy the Will. Generally speaking, the virologist wants to cure the disease; the paleontologist wants to explain prehistoric migrations; the melittologist wants to save the bees. None of these are problematic biases in the conventional sense of objectivity. But Schopenhauer’s point is that the scientific endeavor, like all associations of representations logically save for the contemplative apprehension of Ideas, is for the sake of satisfying the Will. As such, history again shares an important characteristic with Wissenschaft. Third, while Schopenhauer had already distinguished history and science on the grounds that, first, the laws employed by science are of the external world whereas those “laws” of 116

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history are of the internal world, and, second, the universals of science are objective while the universals of history are subjective, elsewhere in his corpus he seemingly disregards that distinction in order to indicate their continuity in similarly applying universals to particulars (SW 1:157/FR 149). As the sciences have their laws, Schopenhauer sometimes admits that history also applies the “law of motivation” in such a way that at least suggests predictable patterns. As the laws of science are Ideas, themselves inexhaustible by the empirical objects that participate in them, so is the internal law of motivation an Idea that guides history. “[H]istory poses the problem of the past deeds of human beings as a whole and en masse and has the law of motivation as organon’ and natural science poses the problem of matter and has the law of causality as organon” (SW 2:34/WWR 1:51). The difference now lies not in the identification or application of laws, but of which laws the respective fields make use. In history, the Idea is not the genus or species of beings. It is instead nothing less than the first intelligible objectification of the noumenal side of all reality: the Idea of the Will. Should she grasp that Idea of Will properly as a ceaseless striving and suffering, the historian ceases to wonder why a nation, having satisfied the needs of its people, will nevertheless cheat and steal from its neighbor at the first opportunity (SW 5:485/PP 1:399). The historian who apprehends the nature of reality as Will grasps immediately why peacemakers are martyred, why the most avaricious stand among the most wealthy, and why when the poor find themselves powerless against the rich they rob their fellow citizens instead. The eudaimonistic calculation at the heart of Schopenhauer’s pessimism is, like Hobbes’s slogan, grounded in a historical judgment that the life of a man has ever been nasty, brutish, and short. Thus, even if the laws and universals of history are different from those of the scientist, some places in Schopenhauer’s corpus at least suggest their utilization is equally weighted in terms of epistemic value. And again, history bares a distinctly wissenschaftlich characteristic.

8.4  Understanding History’s Value in the Framework of Poesis We have seen that Schopenhauer’s position on whether the kind of knowledge history achieves approaches Wissenschaft is deeply ambivalent. At times Schopenhauer is careful to distinguish them and at times Schopenhauer presents them as consistent or at least as sharing common traits. Whether that ambivalence is a matter of nuance or of inconsistency may depend on the charity of the reader. But at this point two conclusions can be drawn with certainty. First, this ambivalence in Schopenhauer’s evaluation of history itself is sufficient to dispel the common presumption that he was just dismissive or even hostile to history. Second, the same ambivalence admittedly doesn’t much help the reader of Schopenhauer determine history’s value within his system. We are left with the sense that, despite its many problems, history does seem to present knowledge – but in a form ambivalent in relation to Wissenschaft. This begs the question of what kind of Wissen history presents. To clarify, a reader notes that Schopenhauer, like Aristotle, framed history’s relation to science in juxtaposition with history’s relation to poetry. If history stands ambivalently to the representational knowledge procured by the sciences, Wissenschaft, then there is some hope that history may procure something equivalent to the insight produced by Poesis. Of course, Poesis holds an honored place, for Schopenhauer, insofar as it, among all the arts, is the only to communicate Ideas by means of words.9 So in using that term, I mean to distinguish the poetizing act as distinctive cognitive expression from its product, the written poem. Poesis is something wider than the produced poem, a mode of cognition whose end is 117

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to reveal the Ideas, the levels of objectification of the will, and to communicate them to the listener with the clarity and vivacity with which the poetic mind grasps them. Ideas are essentially intuitive: if, therefore, only abstract concepts are directly communicated by means of words in poetry, it is nevertheless clear that the aim is still to allow the listener to intuit the Ideas of life in the representatives of these concepts, something that can take place only with the help of the listener’s own imagination. (SW 2:286/WWR 1:269). By arranging figural language in rhetorically pleasing forms, Poesis appeals to the imagination in a way that incites intuition of Ideas. It does not prove in the way that science proves. But, like a chemist who by mixing solutions produces an unexpected precipitate, the poetizing consciousness seems to suggest the Idea standing behind, so to speak, its poetic instantiation. This would seem a promising context for comparing the work of history. Yet here, too, there is a deep ambivalence in Schopenhauer’s position. And here, too, his thought about their relationship may be inconsistent. History, which I like to reflect upon alongside poetry as its opposite (what is reported—what is invented), is to time what geography is to space. This is why the latter is no more a science in the actual sense than the former, because it too does not have universal truths for its objects, but only individual things […]. It has always been a favourite study of those who wanted to learn something without assuming the effort required by the real sciences which place demands on the understanding. […] Whoever like me cannot avoid always seeing the same thing in all history, just as in a kaleidoscope always the same things appear in different configurations with every turn, cannot share in this passionate interest, and yet will not criticize it either. […] [I]n history too we see the intellect preoccupied with what is entirely particular as such. As in the sciences, the intellect in every more noble conversation also rises to the universal. Yet this does not deprive history of its value. Human life is so brief and fleeting and spread out over such countless millions of individuals plunging in droves into the constantly gaping maw of oblivion, the monster who awaits them, that it is a very meritorious task to rescue anything at all from the general shipwreck of the world, such as the remembrance of what is most important and interesting, the main events and main figures. (SW 6:474–5/PP 2:401–2) The first significant difference between history and poetry is that the former treats the particular object of investigation as a particular and unrepeatable empirical object. Historians treat particular people, events, and places in their phenomenal conditions and empirically describable circumstances, therein overlooking what is universal: namely, the Idea of the person as it stands outside spatio-temporal circumstances (SW 2:271–2/WWR 1:256; see also SW 2:288–9/WWR 1:271). This is precisely what Poesis can supply. While it may depict empirical circumstances in the course of its verses, what is significant in poetry is the timeless, placeless universal Idea it communicates in such a way that encourages contemplation. Robert Frost’s “two roads” that “diverge in a yellow wood” may be a real place somewhere in New Hampshire or else in England at some time in 1915. But it hardly matters in comparison to what speaks to the eternal nature of human indecision, of the inalter118

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ability of change through the course of the seasons of life, of the contentment one feels at having blazed one’s own path rather than being satiated with conformity. Poesis expresses the inner Idea of its subject matter artistically but not representationally – not in terms of spatio-temporal particulars – in a way that history does not. The second key difference between history and the poetic art involves which of the two aspects of reality they find significant: the inner or the outer, that is, the noumenal or the phenomenal. The outer significance is the importance of an action in relation to its consequences in and for the actual world, and thus according to the principle of sufficient reason. Inner significance is the depth of insight into the Idea of humanity that the action opens up by bringing to light the aspects of that Idea that appear less frequently. It does this by clearly and decisively allowing self-expressing individualities to unfold their distinctive traits in circumstances that have been arranged to facilitate this. Only inner significance is relevant for art; outer significance is relevant for history. […] An action that is highly significant for history can be very common and ordinary with respect to its inner significance: and conversely, a scene from everyday life can have immense inner significance if it allows even the most hidden furrows of human individuality and human deeds and willing to appear in a bright and clear light. (SW 2:272/WWR 1:256) Consider Shakespeare’s poetic art as it portrays the first meeting of two star-crossed but otherwise insignificant Veronese teenagers: no more profoundly insightful expression of the inner feeling of forbidden passion had before or since been backdropped by a more historically insignificant event. By comparison, the most exhaustive historical documentation of wars, revolutions, and chart of economic growth over time – in no way does history compare to the poet’s power to depict figuratively the extraordinary interior within the quotidian exterior. Historical events are significant to the degree they influence other events. Wars are routinely if morbidly “ranked” by their death tolls, empires by their geographical areas or length in centuries. Poesis is rather like the painted icons of Christian Saints, where the historical backgrounds – the where’s, when’s, and how’s – have either been minimized or omitted altogether in order to capture the universal dolor mundi within each figure (SW 2:274/WWR 1:258). Unlike history, the value of the external circumstantial phenomena poetry depicts recedes in proportion to the profundity of internal emotional expression. Unlike poetry or art, in history a subject’s inner life recedes in proportion to increasing specificity and uniqueness of their external circumstances. At other times, though, Schopenhauer is more favorable with his comparison of history and Poesis. Instead of history’s empirical details covering over eternal essences, sometimes he likens history to a kaleidoscope (SW 6:474/PP 2:401).10 The fixed bits of colored plastic or glass in the object chamber are like the timeless Idea; the reflection tube’s mirrors are like the historian’s interpretations of actors and events, where with a twist of her wrist she reveals the same materials in ever-novel combinations and patterns, eadem sed aliter. Of course nothing prevents experience and undertaking [an investigation into intelligible characters]: nevertheless, when it is the essence of humanity itself that is unlocked for us through history or through our own experience, then we have already grasped the latter (and the historian the former) with artistic eyes, already grasped it poeti119

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cally, i.e., according to the Idea and not the appearance, according to its inner essence and not its relations. (SW 2:288/WWR 1:271) Whatever interest and amusement are provoked by the historian’s art, it intimates through literal rather than figurative language, through spatio-temporal representation of particulars rather than intuitive communication of universals what stands eternally and immutably underneath the change: namely, the striving and suffering of every phenomenal manifestation of Will. History investigates (Historîes) what poetry must invent (Poēsis), as Schopenhauer notes in the Greek, the infinite variations on a single theme of human weal and woe (SW 6:474/PP 2:401). And thus the particular wars, intrigues, political machinations, enslavements and emancipations, rises and collapses that happen in distinct spaces and times – all are the historian’s representational and not merely figural means to intimate what is forever the same story about humankind’s essence as embodied Will. “In the diverse forms of human life and the ceaseless change of events, they will regard only the Idea as enduring and essential, since the will to life has its most perfect objecthood in the Idea, whose different aspects are demonstrated in the qualities, passions, errors and strengths of the human race, in selfishness, hatred, love, fear, courage, frivolity, stupidity, slyness, wit, genius, etc., all of which, converging and coalescing in a thousand different shapes (individuals), ceaselessly stage the history of the world in both large and small scale” (SW 2:215/WWR 1:206; see also SW 2:273/WWR 1:257). History, therefore, can intimate by its representations what Poesis expresses by figural means: the real essence of humanity that stands beyond the appearances that its inquiries detail (SW 2:214–5/WWR 1:205).11 History and Poesis are thus consistent in aim if different in means.

8.5 Conclusion Just as with Wissenschaft, Schopenhauer was clear in showing both the inferiority of history in comparison to Poesis on the one hand, and their consistency on the other. It would be charitable to say that the ambivalence in Schopenhauer’s philosophy of history could be defended as a development in his thinking over time, as a matter of nuance in his argument, or insofar as his conflicting remarks were aimed at different targets. None of these three solutions, unfortunately, bears out. Against the “development” defense, several passages already cited show Schopenhauer sometimes holds consistent positions across books (e.g., compare SW 2:75/WWR 1:88; SW 3:501f./WWR 2:456f.; and SW 6:474f./PP 2:401f. on the view that history is deficient to science insofar as it eschews universals) and sometimes holds inconsistent positions within the same book (e.g., compare SW 2:96–7/WWR 1:107 to SW 2:214–5/WWR 1:205; or else compare SW 3:502–3/WWR 2:457 to SW 3:508– 9/WWR 2:462 on whether history apprehends the inner Idea of humanity). Against the “nuance” defense, Schopenhauer sometimes draws contrary conclusions from contradictory premises, e.g., that history is deficient insofar as it only treats the phenomenal character of its objects (e.g., SW 6:52/PP 2:48 or else SW 2:321/WWR 1:299); and yet that history is estimable insofar as it doesn’t merely treat the phenomenal character of its objects, but can unlock “the essence of humanity itself” (SW 2:288/WWR 1:271). As for the third defense, the problem is that Schopenhauer almost never names particular historians or historical theorists such that a reader could know who his specific targets are such that his disparate criticisms of them would hold water. Those historians with whom especially as a youth 120

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Schopenhauer had some limited contact were not typically the focus of his ire.12 Obviously, Schopenhauer disdained Hegel, Schelling, and their immediate circles;13 but most of the criticisms he levied aim less at the varieties of philosophical phenomenological historiography so much as attack what passed as history in professional academic circles.14 Schopenhauer’s inconsistent remarks about history with respect to its relations with science and poetry, therefore, cannot be excused on the grounds of there being different targets of his attacks, any more than on the grounds of development or nuance. Although the conclusion is not a desirable one, it really seems the case that Schopenhauer did not have a consistent formulation of the relationship of history to either Wissenschaft or Poesis. Even if such exculpatory strategies fail, there is nevertheless some hope of understanding Schopenhauer’s position as ambivalent but not inconsistent by assigning at least a vague dichotomy of targets in terms of how history is conducted: that is, a dichotomy between history performed well or poorly. Again, Schopenhauer doesn’t name names. His critiques and approbations are both targeted at a nameless idealized representative of the sins and possibilities of history. Even if his critique is weaker for not having any particular historian or philosopher in its crosshairs, it does communicate an effective list of qualities Schopenhauer would like history to either embody or avoid. And by tracing Schopenhauer’s thought in these many passages about what history ought and ought not aspire to instead of what it does and does not do, history’s real worth for Schopenhauer emerges as a unique avenue for intimating the Idea of the Will representationally. This line of argument admittedly does not clarify how Schopenhauer thought of history in comparison or contrast with Wissenschaft or Poesis. And it is admittedly apologetic and reconstructive rather than exegetical and analytical. But if such an apologetic reconstruction has value, it lay in helping the reader to comprehend more clearly what Schopenhauer meant in naming history a Wissen that is not a Wissenschaft. From the preceding discussion, the threads that emerge involve several aims history ought and ought not to seek if its products can be considered a genuine Wissen. First, history ought to focus on portraying particular individuals and events as they exemplify an Idea of Will. By that is meant concentrating only on those aspects of a historical figure that resonate as a characterization of humanity as a whole, on those aspects of events that intimate some feature of the common weal and woe of existence. In the same way that the meaning of Oedipus lies not in Sophocles’ depiction of him as a particular person with strange and entirely unique circumstances so much as the universal feeling of helplessness in the face of a transcendent fate, so too does the meaning of a Richelieu, a Gandhi, or a Churchill lie not in the empirical details and idiosyncratic circumstances of their lives so much as that inner world, the intelligible character, which the historian ought to illuminate in the course of intimating the universal significance of their figure. History ought not to bother with each and every movement of troops or supplies in a war so much as what the intelligible character of war is and why men have ever waged it. Different from Poesis, however, the manner in which history does this is by literal rather than figurative language, by means of intimating through factually true representations about real individuals rather than by rhetorically styled verses about idealized or fictional characters, by appealing to the understanding with facts rather than the imagination with figurative expressions. Proper history ought, second, to cease trying to emulate the sciences for the sake of explanation, prediction, and eventually social engineering. Having already shown how the law of motivation is not demonstrated by the fourfold root of sufficient reason so much as derives from a felt awareness, it cannot be used, as science uses its laws, to predict and 121

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control future states of affairs. The law of motivation is not proof that an agent must act in a particular way. Rather, by means of intimating that same unchanging intelligible inner essence of humanity as striving and suffering through its variety of costumes and settings, history properly conducted can have the same function as poetry, painting, or music in intimating the inner truth of reality as Will. Its presentations are not demonstrative but indicative of what I myself may feel in similar situations. Properly attuned readers of history, who attend the essences and not the shifting appearances, witness the dolor mundi common to all people at all times. “It is a very meritorious task to rescue anything at all from the general shipwreck of the world, such as the remembrance of what is most important and interesting, the main events and main figures” (SW 6:475/PP 2:401–2). While doing so does not prove, it can nevertheless intimate tendencies to feel – to Will – the same way. Thereby, it is hoped that through history the reader develops a sort of sympathetic awareness with those figures, the kind which both binds human beings to one another in recognition of our metaphysical identity and serves as the foundation for the ethical character. History intimates that the other in all its phenomenal distinctness is nevertheless me, once again. Tying these threads together to show what it ought and ought not to aspire to do, history emerges as a worthy and valuable Wissen and neither a Wissenschaft nor a Poesis. When this idealized history is properly conducted, it avoids the several criticisms that Schopenhauer had posed against history more generally. But the case for the importance of history for Schopenhauer is stronger than a sort of allowance. Although to be sure he never spells this out as such, history can serve a key function for Schopenhauer insofar as it becomes a means of apprehending through factual representations the first objectification of the intelligible Idea of the internal life of the human species. It does so not by the transcendental proofs of philosophy that appeal to reason. It does not do so by poetry’s figural linguistic effects that appeal to the imagination. Instead, history, in the very course of its understanding facts about phenomenal characters and their endlessly varied comings and goings within spatio-temporal frameworks, stands alone in using such representations to intimate that single noumenal reality within those many phenomenal surfaces. History points to, indicates, suggests, or signals what stands common to all and essential behind all the myriad of facts and characters it piles up. It can be put to good use, as Schopenhauer himself used it, to intimate what is expressed by Poesis and proven by philosophy: the true nature of life as suffering. The Will that is the noumenal aspect of all reality is, of course, ineffable. It cannot be represented. Scientific knowledge is of spatio-temporal phenomena; where Wissenschaft treats universals these are quantitative matters of space, time, and causality that reflect what is universal and necessary from the perspective of rational cognition but not of Will itself. In deep moments of aesthetic awareness, we lose sight of the spatio-temporal-causal chains that bind the rational understanding for an insight that presents the clear mirror of the nature of reality. Poesis, as a mode of art, can afford through its figural language a similar glimpse into this eternal and unchanging suffering and striving of Will. Therefore, as science is a spatio-temporal mode of representation that fails to express the Will and as Poesis expresses the Will but only in indirect figural presentations, history alone uses representations to describe phenomenal appearances in order to intimate the Will. And just here history owns a special place among the various modes of inquiry. What it presents through representational thinking about individuals and events intimates what the entirety of the world as Will is and what by implication we ourselves are as well. “[H]istory should be seen as the rational self-consciousness of the human race” (SW 3:509/WWR 2:462). This is why 122

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history is a Wissen all its own, a Wissen that is neither a Poesis nor a Wissenschaft. History tells forever the same story only with different settings and characters. Those settings and characters are phenomena that, with a turn of the kaleidoscope, reveal the nearly infinite combinations of the appearances of what is ultimately forever the same one thing. History intimates the Will. And while she who reads it does not by virtue thereof understand Will, she gradually reaches an intuitive apprehension that the very same Will that drives every phenomenally distinct action and change and motivation in the past is precisely and exactly the same as that which drives her. History, at its best, does not represent through its many various phenomena yet intimates through its representations of phenomena what is ultimately ineffable: our own noumenal identity as the Will. In this sense, history is to be regarded as the reason or the enlightened self-consciousness of the human race, and occupies the place of an immediate collective self-consciousness of the entire race, so that it is only through history that the human race is really made into a whole, into one humanity. (SW 3:509/WWR 2:462–3)

Notes 1 Those exceptions are mostly the reflections on history contained in Eduard von Hartmann, Julius Bahnsen, Nietzsche, Jakob Burckhardt, R.W. Emerson, Hans Vaihinger, and Theodor Lessing. None of them carried over Schopenhauer’s philosophy of history uncritically, especially not his subjective idealism about the phenomenality of time. But each in their own ways critiqued the historians of their day along Schopenhauerian lines and aspired to a certain “poetic” vision of history that revealed the ideal character of their subject matter beyond phenomenal appearances. 2 See Paul Gottfried, “Arthur Schopenhauer as a Critic of History,” Journal of the History of Ideas 36 [2] (1975): 331-8. Gottfried reduces Schopenhauer’s criticisms of history to a sort of childish jealousy toward Hegel, an interpretation still prevalent. For a response, see Harry Ausmus, “Schopenhauer’s View of History: A Note,” History and Theory 15 [2] (1976): 141-145. A more comprehensive, albeit still rather dismissive, paper is Alfred Schmidt, “Arthur Schopenhauer und die Geschichte,” Schopenhauer Jahrbuch (2002): 189–204. 3 Contra Gottfried (1975), 331f. 4 Anthony K. Jensen, “Schopenhauer’s Philosophy of History,” History and Theory 57 [3] (2018): 349–370. 5 Jensen (2018), 353f & 362. 6 “Science specifically means a system of findings, i.e., a unity of connected findings in opposition to a mere aggregate of the same. But what else than the principle of sufficient reason connects members of a system? The very thing that distinguishes any science from a mere aggregate is that each of a science’s findings follows from another as its ground” (SW 1:4/FR 9). 7 Schopenhauer suggests that certain genres of historical writing are not aimed to satisfy the Will, but only the intellect. He counts among them histories of literature and philosophy (See SW 6:593/PP 2:500; and SW 5:36–6/PP 1:31–2). The distinction seems prima facie problematic, however, insofar as the those would just as much have been written and read for the sake of satisfying curiosity, solving certain problems, or advancing one’s career. 8 Schopenhauer elsewhere does make some allowance for Goethe’s vision of the life sciences as “morphological”, that is, as being concerned with unveiling the unchanging Urphaenomen of a kind within all the various processes of change (SW 2:341–2/WWR 1:316). 9 I thank David Bather Woods for pointing out the tension in Schopenhauer’s attributing Ideas as the proper object of Poesis insofar as Schopenhauer more typically reserves that term to indicate the universal character of natural kinds. While I don’t disagree, I would suggest that, especially in relation to poetry, Schopenhauer’s term tends more to refer to the intuition of a universal beyond its spatio-temporal representation as a particular. 10 For a discussion see Ausmus (1976: 143).

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Anthony K. Jensen 11 Although his contemporary historians rarely realized such was the power of their discipline, Schopenhauer thought certain among the Ancients did (SW 2:289–90f./WWR 1:272f). 12 In his university days, the younger Schopenhauer had a brief correspondence with a number of important historical theorists – F. A. Wolf, Friedrich Schleiermacher, August Boeckh, and G. F. Creuzer – though mostly to petition for professional academic connections. See Arthur Schopenhauer, Gesammelte Briefe, ed. Arthur Hübscher, 2nd ed. (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1987), 7f, 55, 106. 13 The critique of the idealists revolves around alleged professional charlatanism, misappropriation of idealism, a failure to see that Will is more fundamental than any intellectual principle, and, with respect to our topic, both an unjustified reification of nation states (SW 3:506/WWR 2:460) and an overestimation of the changes of history in relation to the value of timeless essences (SW 3:505/WWR 2:449). By confusedly identifying becoming and essence, the idealist attempt to historicize philosophy was wrongheaded from the start: “people are infinitely remote from a philosophical knowledge of the world when they imagine that its essence can somehow […] be grasped historically” (SW 2:322/WWR 1:299). 14 The main exception to this rule involves Schopenhauer’s rejection of phenomenological history on the grounds that it misappropriates transcendental idealism in its taking becoming for genuine reality. From that main criticism several minor ones follow, including Hegel’s ruining a generation of young thinkers, his attempts to impress with superficial erudition, and his obsequious political optimism. But the Wissenschaft to which Schopenhauer so often compares history is by no means Hegel’s phenomenological conception of science, so much as it reflects the Enlightenment and positivistic conceptions of science.

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PART 2

Aesthetics and the Arts

9 SCHOPENHAUER’S AESTHETIC IDEOLOGY Michel-Antoine Xhignesse

9.1 Introduction Readers of this book are no doubt aware that Schopenhauer has never been a particularly popular philosopher, although he did enjoy brief popularity towards the end of his life, as well as in recent years. Schopenhauer’s relative obscurity is largely due to the outsized popularity of his Idealist contemporaries. But even today, when the Idealist project is dead in the water, you’d be hard-pressed to find many ethicists or meta-ethicists, for example, who have read Schopenhauer’s prize essay, let alone who teach it in their classes, or historians who assign Schopenhauer’s commentaries on Kant in an early modern or nineteenth-century German philosophy course. The situation is perhaps different in the arts, however, where his account of the value of art and music, and of the particular contributions of genius, have struck an intuitive chord with artists, especially musicians. In literature, his devotees included major authors from at least five languages, notably Borges, Conrad, Hardy, Mann, Proust, Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Zola (see Magee 1983: Ch. 18), although these seem to have been most influenced by his metaphysics more generally, rather than his aesthetics in particular. But his aesthetics, too, has exerted considerable influence on art, art history, and even the development of philosophical aesthetics, where historical surveys of the subfield do at least typically include him alongside Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche. Much of his impact on aesthetics has been indirect, however, proceeding by means of his influence on the likes of Mahler and Wagner (Magee 1983: Ch. 18, Goehr 1996, and Bonds 2014: Ch. 12), whose work, in turn, has come to inform the conventions and discourse surrounding our musical practices. Beethoven’s reputation as a musical genius, for example, owes its rationale in large part to Schopenhauer’s valorization of pure instrumental music, as channeled by Wagner (Goehr 1996: 201 and 223–4). I trust it is clear, then, that Schopenhauer was a major figure in the history of aesthetics. But what was it about his aesthetics that so captivated his illustrious readers? To what extent is it appropriate to separate his aesthetics from his metaphysics? And what role do the Platonic Ideas play in his aesthetics? Let’s find out!

DOI: 10.4324/9781003048992-12

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9.2 Metaphysics Schopenhauer’s aesthetics is intimately tied to his metaphysics, although—somewhat curiously—its uptake by artists and philosophers has been largely independent of that metaphysical underpinning.1 Schopenhauer’s reflections on aesthetics seem to speak to an experience artists have when they’re creating, even if his metaphysics doesn’t. Indeed, it is surprising the extent to which ideas grounded in a metaphysics predicated on a single key intuition have managed to lead a life of their own independently of that originating intuition. I shall not dwell too long on the metaphysics of Will—see Chapter 3 of this volume instead—but will simply sketch out the basics needed to have a full grasp of Schopenhauer’s aesthetic project, and the role which Platonic Ideas play in its articulation. It is no secret that the core of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics is his concept of Will, the eternal striving that he thought characterized the core of reality. The roots of this belief are buried in his reading of Kant, with whom Schopenhauer found himself mostly in agreement, particularly his distinction between the phenomenal world we interact with in ordinary experience and the noumenal reality which undergirds it. For Schopenhauer, the essence of Kant’s doctrine of the thing-in-itself could be boiled down to the Platonic statement that “this world that appears to the senses does not have true being, but is instead only an incessant becoming, it is and it is not, and apprehending it does not involve cognition so much as delusion” (SW 2:496/WWR 1:445). There is a useful parallel here to Plato’s allegory of the cave: recall that those chained in the cave can only see by the fire’s dim glow, and all they see are the shadows of reality. Accordingly, they believe that determining the order of the shadows’ succession is the key to wisdom. Here, Schopenhauer draws a parallel between phenomena (the shadows on the cave wall) and the Vedic tradition, equating phenomena with māyā, illusion: because the work of māyā is declared to be precisely the visible world in which we exist, a magic trick, an insubstantial, intrinsically inessential semblance comparable to an optical illusion or a dream, a veil wrapped around human consciousness, something that can be said both to be and not to be with equal truth and equal falsity. (SW 2:496/WWR 1:446) So: the world around us is akin to an illusion; it is not presented to us as it really is in itself. The trick, then, is to find some means of looking away from the shadows on the cave wall, past the fire, and to whatever it is that casts the shadows. But whereas Kant thought that noumenal reality is epistemically inaccessible, Schopenhauer believed he had discovered a back door to knowledge of the thing-in-itself, a way from the inside. Although we learn about objects in the world indirectly, through mediated perception, we have an insider’s view of our own consciousness, and so know about ourselves directly and immediately (SW 3:219/WWR 2:207).2 That aspect of our inner nature which we intuit in this way is what Schopenhauer calls “Will,” and he thinks it is characterized by constant striving, by a panoply of desires from which we can only ever be temporarily relieved. In particular, these are the desires essential to maintaining and propagating life—the desire to live, to feed and drink, to reproduce, etc. So, among all of the things which we perceive, our Will is the one which we know most immediately.3 It is at this point that Schopenhauer invokes Platonic Ideas (also called “Forms” today). Although he himself claims that his use of the term “Idea” is faithful to “the divine [Plato’s]” 128

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(SW 2:xii/WWR 1:8) original usage (SW 2:154/WWR 1:154), in many respects he steers closer to Kant’s “thing-in-itself”.4 According to Plato, the Idea of a thing is its timeless essence—a dog’s dogness, for example, or a triangle’s triangularity. Every individual object or entity has a measure of several different Ideas in it; Elsewhere the dilute calico, for example, has some quintessentially catlike attributes, some paradigmatically beautiful qualities, exhibits a measure of grayness, etc. But she isn’t catness personified, and she is beautiful, not Beauty itself; she represents a particular instance of those universal Ideas, no more and no less. She is constantly changing, whereas catness and Beauty are eternal. And that is why Plato thought that our epistemic access to the essence of the world is flawed: it necessarily proceeds inductively from particular instances of the Ideas, each of which paints an incomplete picture of its underlying essence. But Schopenhauer identifies Will as the essence of all things, as the noumenal reality. Like Kant, then, and unlike Plato, he is a monist: there is only one thing-in-itself, and it is Will; but it manifests (‘objectifies’) itself in many different ways. Beauty, catness, and grayness are just concepts which we derive by abstracting from the information given to us in perception. Concepts are the result of our attempts to impose rational, scientific order on the world; they are a heuristic device, nothing more. The Idea of a thing, however, is its mind-independent essence, and he departed from Kant in thinking that it was epistemically accessible—through intuition, rather than by means of rational deliberation. Will is lack, pain, and therefore suffering; it is desire, and desire is never sated, only postponed. The satiation of one desire brings only fleeting release because the satiated desire is replaced by an infinite number of new forms, all clamoring to be heard. Otherwise, when the desires are quiet, the human being is afflicted with a “terrible emptiness and boredom” such that “its essence and its being itself become an intolerable burden to it” (SW 2:368/WWR 1:338). Boredom is an interstitial emotion, one we experience in between the satiation of one desire and the drive to satisfy another. We could ask why this is so, but the answer lies right before us: it is this striving which keeps us in motion, keeps us alive—but “when existence is secured, [we] do not know what to do” (SW 2:369/WWR 1:339) any more, and fall prey to boredom, which we make every effort to stave off by “killing time” (SW 2:369/WWR 1:339). As Martin Thomas puts it, to be bored is to “experience the ‘pressure of the will’” without also having some particular motive for it to fix on (2014: p. 77). But while the Will’s influence is totalizing, Schopenhauer nevertheless believed that art offers us a partial escape from its demands. During moments of aesthetic contemplation, he argues, we sometimes break free—however momentarily—from the Will’s influence. We can pursue any number of activities to relieve this boredom, but non-mental activities are typically instrumental, and thus throw us back into the clutches of the Will. Many different kinds of mental activity will work to stave off boredom, but aesthetic experiences are special insofar as they involve intense focus directed towards no particular end. The degree of mental exertion involved thus shields us from the pressure of the will.5 It is to such moments that we must now turn our attention.

9.3  Aesthetic Experiences Some of us can rise above this lot, although so doing leaves us lonely and more susceptible to greater suffering (SW 2:370/ WWR 1:340). We can achieve this freedom in moments of aesthetic contemplation, when the phenomenon, the veil of māyā, no longer deceives us, and when the “motives that had previously been so violent lose their power, and in their 129

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place, complete cognition of the essence of the world acts as a tranquillizer of the will and leads to resignation, the abandonment not only of life, but of the whole will to life” (SW 2:299/WWR 1:280). In this case, one objectification of Will (the artwork) mirrors another (in us) and stills it (SW 2:262–63/WWR 1:248). And just as a mirror makes it possible for us to see ourselves, so does the artwork make it possible for us to glimpse the Will as the artist has seen it, momentarily free of the infinite play of desires. The viewer loves, but does not covet; enjoys, but does not desire; the viewer is content merely to wait and contemplate. Unfortunately, this experience cannot last, and soon the spell is broken, the viewer thrown back into the world of desire. Aesthetic experiences, thinks Schopenhauer, have two distinct sides to them: a subjective and an objective side (SW 2:230–35/WWR 1:219–23).6 Consider the experience of seeing the world laid out before your eyes after a hard day’s climb up a mountainside. Your legs are jelly, your thighs are burning, hunger gnaws at your belly and it’s hard to suck in enough air to make up for all the wheezing on the way up. But once you’re at the top and can see the vista before you, ringed by snow-capped peaks, all of that melts away; you stop thinking about the peanut butter sandwich in your bag, or wondering why you ever agreed to this stupid idea in the first place. Instead of collapsing, exhausted, you’re content (for a few moments!) to take in the view, which really is quite spectacular. I think it’s fair to say that this sort of thing is a commonplace experience, shared by most who have dared to brave a mountain’s slopes on foot. For Schopenhauer, examples like this one showcase the subjective side of aesthetic experience: when we are in the grip of an aesthetic experience, our Will disappears—we forget our pains and desires, and are simply content to take it in. In this respect, Schopenhauer follows the long eighteenth-century tradition (from Kant and others) of characterizing aesthetic experiences as disinterested; “Will-less”, in his terms. But whereas this tradition held up disinterestedness as an evaluative norm governing aesthetic judgments, for Schopenhauer the crucial point is that it is the experience itself—i.e., the psychological impression—which is disinterested. In other words, disinterestedness is a characteristic feature of aesthetic experiences, rather than a standard to which aesthetic judgments are held. This kind of aesthetic experience is called “subjective” because it is concerned with the (temporary) cessation of the Will in the experiencer, the subject of the experience. It is this subjective side of aesthetic experience which has captivated the interest of artists, aestheticians, and critics alike, most prominently composers such as Mahler and Wagner and their followers. Indeed, much ink has been spilled on the subject by critics such as Carl Fuchs, Franz Hueffer, Karl Friedrich Krause, Paul Schneider, and Wilhelm Tapper (Bonds 2014: 217–68).7 And it’s easy to see why: on this model, art relieves and releases us from the everyday, it offers us a peace of mind that we cannot otherwise achieve. This gives art a special, elevated status among cultural activities—and some arts, of course, offer us easier or longer-lasting access to this peace of mind than others. In this way, Schopenhauer’s aesthetics lends itself to a hierarchy of the arts, a pastime which has occupied art scholars since Aristotle, but which found a renewed emphasis from the sixteenth century on (see Porter 2009 and Young 2015). But Schopenhauer thought that there is also an objective side to such experiences: these brief moments give us “intuitive apprehension of the Platonic Idea” (SW 2:234/WWR 1:223). In other words, these moments act as direct epistemic conduits to noumenal reality. Platonic Ideas are thus directly perceived in aesthetic experiences, when the Will’s ephemeral distractions are stripped away and we “devote the whole power of our mind 130

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to perception,” focusing our attention on the “what” of the thing instead of its relations to us or other things (SW 2:210/WWR 1:201). Much less ink has been spilled on what Schopenhauer characterizes as the objective side of aesthetic experiences, likely because commentators have, until recently, tended to cast doubt on the importance of Plato’s Ideas to Schopenhauer’s system.8 I shall return to the importance of the Ideas in §5 and §6; but first, we should consider Schopenhauer’s account of artistic genius, since it marks one of his major contributions to aesthetics.

9.4 Genius Doubtless part of the appeal of Schopenhauer’s aesthetics among artists lies in his valorization of artistic genius. Genius, he thought, consists in the capacity to understand the inner nature of the world independently of the principle of sufficient reason (i.e., independently of the processes of deduction, induction, and inference which characterize our empirical understanding of the world); genius is the ability to intuit the Ideas of things independently of their individual manifestations (SW 2:229–30/WWR 1:218). And it is true that he thought that some people are better able to do so than others.9 But it may come as a surprise to readers to learn that Schopenhauer did not think this ability was in the exclusive purview of a select few—on the contrary, he thought that all people10 possessed this ability in some measure (SW 2:229/WWR 1:218). The proof, he thought, lies in the fact that we all have the capacity to appreciate works of art, to be moved by the beautiful and the sublime, and these are responses which require us to be able to recognize the Ideas being communicated by the artist, at least to some extent (SW 2:229, 293–94/WWR 1:218, 275-6). Of course, this does not mean that everyone makes full use of this capacity. Indeed, Schopenhauer was not particularly sanguine about the wider world’s ability to fully actualize that potential: the most excellent works of every art, the noblest products of genius, will always and necessarily remain closed books for the obtuse majority, inaccessible to them and separated from them by a wide gulf, just as the society of the prince is inaccessible to the rabble. (SW 2:276/WWR 1:260) Nevertheless, Schopenhauer believed that what distinguishes the artistic genius from an ordinary person is just that the genius is better able to part the veil of māyā and peer into the realm of the thing-in-itself, and to do so for a more sustained period of time (SW 2:229–30/WWR 1:218–19). Artists, for Schopenhauer, “[anticipate] the beautiful prior to experience” (SW 2:261/WWR 1:247). They do not extrapolate from experience to draw a kind of inductive inference about what is or is not beautiful; they simply intuit it a priori (SW 2:261– 62/WWR 1:247). The artist’s task is to “[allow] us to look into the world through [their] eyes” (SW 2:230/WWR 1:219) because they “[understand] nature’s half-spoken words” (SW 2:262/WWR 1:248). But the genius sees even deeper, and more completely, than the ordinary artist can: “by virtue of his objectivity the genius perceives with presence of mind [Bosonnenheit] all that others do not see. This gives him the capacity to portray nature so intuitively and vividly as a poet, or to depict it as a painter” (SW 6:446/PP 2:377). The genius also enjoys more stamina than most. For ordinary people in the throes of an aesthetic experience, the Will and their own relation to it briefly disappears, so that as I’m 131

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admiring Kenojuak Ashevak’s Majestic Owl (2011), for example, I am no longer cognizant of my erstwhile headache, the growling churn of hunger pangs, or the pressure in my bladder. I can’t look away, I am captivated, dazzled by the contrast between the work’s deceptive simplicity and its sophisticated composition. But the spell is easily—and quickly!—broken; the world of representation reasserts itself as my baby starts to cry (because he’s hungry, or bored, or has soiled his diaper), and just like that my epistemic access to the Idea is severed (SW 2:233/WWR 1:222). The genius, by contrast, is better able to sustain this kind of contemplation, and does so without the aid of a prop (the artwork): they enjoy a kind of “surplus of cognition” which allows them to become a “mirror of the essence of the world” (SW 2:219/WWR 1:209). But doing so comes at a cost, since in their creative action artists find themselves mirroring the Will itself, so that others may catch a glimpse of its inner workings. The result is that For [them] that pure, true and profound cognition of the essence of the world becomes a goal in itself: [they come] to a stop there. Hence, this cognition does not become a tranquillizer of the will for [them] […] for [them], it redeems [them] from life, not forever but rather only momentarily, and it is not yet [their] way out of life, but only an occasional source of comfort within life itself. (SW 2:316/WWR 1:295) As Dale Jacquette aptly characterizes it, this impressive ability to overcome one’s Will— futile as it is—makes the genius into something of an existential hero (2005: 146). No wonder, then, that Schopenhauer’s veneration of genius has struck such a chord among artists! In one stroke, it endows them with spectacular gifts, but also helps to explain why their talents may have gone unrecognized by their contemporaries, who are far more nearsighted than they. This heroic conception of genius went largely unchallenged11 until Linda Nochlin (1971) launched feminist aesthetics by observing that our concept of genius is inextricably tied to gendered social norms and systemically oppressive social practices, and offered a powerful structural explanation for unrecognized genius—women’s, in particular.12 That said, Schopenhauer’s genius is also, ideally, something of a naïf—someone who manages to show us a glimpse of the noumenal without necessarily trying to do so. As Schopenhauer puts it, the genius “reveals the innermost nature of the world […] just as a magnetic somnambulist explains things that he has no idea about when awake” (SW 2:307/WWR 1:288).13 Doubtless, this is because, as we shall see in §5 and §6, Schopenhauer prizes immediacy of communication, and the artist who consciously tries to communicate an insight into the Will necessarily makes use of concepts as intermediaries. This is why, as we shall see, Schopenhauer thought that music stood above the other arts (and composers above other artists): because music has managed to shed the shackles of spatial constraints and representations, and is governed only by the form of time (SW 307–308/WWR 1:288; SW 3:518/WWR 2:470).

9.5  The Hierarchy of the Arts The purpose of art, for Schopenhauer, is to facilitate knowledge of the Platonic Ideas, as they are objectified through the Will (SW 2:286, 298, 304/WWR 1:269, 279, 284; SW 3:481–82/WWR 2:439; see also Chansky 1988: p. 76). The difference between the various arts, he thought, has to do with the grades at which the Will objectifies the Ideas being 132

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expressed (i.e., how easy it is to come to know the essence of the Will through the Idea expressed) (SW 2:297/WWR 1:279; see also Taylor 1987: p. 46). The quality of our aesthetic experiences also depends on the grade of the Will’s objectification: low grades yield only the freedom from suffering that characterizes the subjective side of aesthetic experience, whereas high grades offer us the objective apprehension of the thing-in-itself (SW 2:250–51/WWR 1:237–8; see also Chansky 1988: 77–8). Schopenhauer thus elaborates a hierarchy of the arts, based on the degree of their objectification of the Will and the complexity of the Ideas expressed therein, so that the more completely an art form objectifies the Will, and the more complex the Idea it conveys, the higher it sits in the hierarchy. Architecture, for example, is at the very bottom of this hierarchy because (1) it exists primarily for practical purposes, and these tend to dominate the expression of the artform, and (2) because the Ideas which it conveys all pertain to spatial relations—gravity, cohesion, rigidity, and light—and thus are not very far removed from the principle of sufficient reason, meaning that they exist at very low grades of the Will’s objectivity (SW 2:253–55/WWR 1:239–43; SW 3:518–20/WWR 2:470–1). Fountainry (i.e., the design and emplacement of fountains; perhaps also aqueducts, water features, and the like) is in the same boat, except that it connects the Idea of gravity to fluidity rather than rigidity, and to formlessness and transparency rather than determinate extension (SW 2:257/WWR 1:243).14 Unlike the plastic arts, architecture and fountainry offer us the object itself, rather than a representation of it (SW 2:257/WWR 1:243). Now, one might think that this is a good thing, since it means that we are directly perceiving a thing rather than seeing it mediated by someone else’s perception. But while it is true that we are presented with the object itself, the problem is that this object appeals to our Will—it offers shelter, etc.—and thus remains, in its presentation, in thrall to the principle of sufficient reason. There is consequently less room for the objective presentation of the Ideas undergirding it, since these Ideas are necessarily shackled to a form built to serve specific real-world purposes which are intimately tied to the Will. This means that while architecture can overawe us fairly easily—its subjective aesthetic appeal is on display—it struggles to communicate the Ideas behind it to an extent that other arts do not. One step higher in the hierarchy is what Schopenhauer calls “landscape gardening,” which we might call, more simply, “gardening.” The beauty of a garden, of course, depends in large part on the natural objects which are found within (SW 2:257/WWR 1:243). Because these are living matter rather than brute substance, the Ideas which animate them are relatively complex, though not as complex as those found in sentient or sapient life. At the same time, however, there is much less room for the artist to communicate her insight to us, since she must express it using objects with a life and significance of their own. She can pick and choose which plants to plant and arrange them as she wishes, but here again, as with architecture, we find ourselves faced with objects themselves, still tied to the forms of the principle of sufficient reason. The objects of gardening (the plants) stand in for themselves, rather than the Idea of their species. Gardening is thus little more than architecture with more complex Ideas. Moving up the hierarchy, we come to landscape and still-life painting. These feature the same kinds of subjects as gardening and thus try to communicate the same Ideas.15 Unlike gardening, however, painting does not present the object of depiction to us directly; thus, a painted plant does not usually stand for a particular real-life analogue, but rather stands in for the Idea of the species—the Platonic Form of that plant or landscape, if you will. So, although the pleasures derived from this kind of painting are mostly subjective, they have a 133

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measure more objectivity than the arts we find lower down the hierarchy (SW 2:258/WWR 1:244). From landscape painting, we move on to animal painting and sculpture, where the objective side of aesthetic appreciation becomes more prominent than the subjective. This is because the Ideas characteristic of the species depicted are made manifest not just in their form (as with plants and raw nature), but also in their actions, gestures, and poses (SW 2:258–59/WWR 1:244–5). When we look at paintings of plants and landscapes, we see the world through the painter’s eyes, free from the (subjective) demands of the Will; we enjoy them primarily for their ability to quiet the Will in us, to grant us a moment of reprieve from its otherwise incessant demands (SW 2:258/WWR 1:244). This is also true, to a certain extent, of depictions of animals; but there, we also see the animal’s restlessness and intensity, its striving for life (SW 2:258/WWR 1:244)—its Will, in short. And the Will of the animal is a mirror for our own, although because the animal is not a rational creature, it is wholly driven by it (SW 2:259/WWR 1:245). Put another way, we see depicted plants thirdpersonally, relying on the artist’s perception of their Will; but with depicted animals, the artist makes their Will manifest for us in their actions and gestures, thus holding up a mirror to the unadulterated Will that animates us. Consequently, to the extent that the plastic arts are better able to capture an animal’s characteristic actions and gestures, they are able to communicate Ideas of greater complexity than the visual arts. With historical painting and sculpture, the subjective side of aesthetic pleasure recedes entirely into the background. Animal beauty, thinks Schopenhauer, consists in finding and depicting the most beautiful possible individual expression of the species; but transcendent human beauty pushes us immediately to consider beauty itself, divorced from its particular vehicle or the form of its species (SW 2:260/WWR 1:246). “The human body,” he tells us, “is a highly complex system of quite different parts, each of which has its vita propria, a life subordinate to the whole, yet characteristic” (SW 2:261/WWR 1:247). This makes it the highest grade of the Will’s objectification. But, to be clear, we should not conflate the fact that historical painting supposedly best communicates Ideas in visual form with art which is designed to express a concept. Art which aims to communicate concepts is mere allegory, according to Schopenhauer. Ideas, remember, are directly perceived and expressed immediately and wholly; allegories, by contrast, are expressed through the medium of another thing which suggests them (SW 2:279– 80/WWR 1:263). The result is that to the extent that Ideas are communicated, it is at several removes: what is perceived is not responsible for producing the effect; rather, it is abstract thought which does so. Allegorical works thus often detract from the communication of the Ideas. So much, then, for the hierarchy and value of the visual arts. It is worth noting that these artworks are directly connected to the form of space, since the material aspect of the plastic arts is all that exists. By the same token, they are indirectly connected to the form of time insofar as they depict life acting (SW 3:519/WWR 2:455). These depictions are all limited, however, by the fact that they make essential use of concepts to communicate their underlying Ideas—the concept of a horse or tiger, say, or the story of Judith and Holofernes. Above all these art forms, and at the opposite extreme from architecture, Schopenhauer ranks poetry and the literary arts, notably drama and tragedy, which he thinks gives us access to the most significant Ideas of all (SW 2:298–99/WWR 1:279-80). Nevertheless, poetry also finds itself inextricably bound up with the forms of space and time, and cannot step outside them—indeed, its interest for us lies partly in how it manages to make use 134

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of the two. This is because its medium is abstract concepts, and the skill in poetry lies in orchestrating concepts in such a way that they lose their abstract universality and instead come to communicate the poet’s perception of the thing-in-itself (SW 2:286/WWR 1:269). To this end, poets mobilize rhythm and rhyme to prime us to their message, and to hold our attention fixed on the poem itself, rather than allowing it to wander freely and re-enter into the cycle of desire (SW 2:287/WWR 1:270). Indeed, Schopenhauer thought that allegory is useful to poetry (as opposed to visual art) because poetry can convey allegories directly rather than merely suggesting them and hoping the audience draws the connection (SW 2:279–86/WWR 1:263–9–; SW 3:482–83/WWR 2:439–40). Poetry’s reliance on the juxtaposition of abstract concepts means that, compared to the visual arts, it is at a disadvantage when presenting the lower grades of the Will’s objectivity, because the inanimate world tends to reveal its nature all at once, in a single, discrete, perceptible event (SW 2:288/WWR 1:270). But when it comes to the higher grades of the Will’s objectivity, these do not reveal their inner nature all at once, nor are they necessarily pellucid to sensory perception. The nature of a human being, for example, is not adequately expressed in the statue of a beautiful, muscular nude, such as Laocoön and His Sons (c. 200 BCE - 70 CE), attributed to Agesander, Athenodoros, and Polydorus. In order to capture the essence of humanity, art needs to have recourse to the expression of actions, emotions, and thoughts—which is precisely why poetry is at a distinct advantage, since it does not rely on expressing itself through a single static object (SW 2:288/WWR 1: 270). Poetry is limited in its range of expression, however, by the fact that it depends necessarily on interpolating our own experience as a key to understanding it (SW 2:288/WWR 1:271). There is one exception to this hierarchy and its limitations, however, one art form which Schopenhauer thinks has shed the constraining influence of space altogether, and which has no need for concepts to convey its Ideas: music.

9.6 Music Music stands entirely outside Schopenhauer’s hierarchy of the arts. This is because music, he thought, does not copy any Ideas at all; rather, it is a direct copy of the Will itself (SW 2:302–303, 309–311/WWR 1:283, 289–91). A violinist plucks her strings to make us feel the joy or melancholy of the music; likewise, says Schopenhauer, “In real life and its terrors our will itself is that which is roused and tormented … we ourselves are now the vibrating string that is stretched and plucked” (SW 3:516/WWR 2:468452). But music also differs from the other arts in that it is immediately understood by everyone (SW 2:303/WWR 1:283–84); it acts directly on our emotions, whereas painting, sculpture, and the other arts can only do so through the intermediary of concepts (SW 3:513/WWR 2:465; cf. SW 2:279–81/WWR 1:263–4). So, for example, to understand Jacques-Louis David’s peerless painting, Napoleon Crossing the St. Bernard (1801–1805), viewers need to recognize that the figure depicted is Napoleon, they need to know who Napoleon was, they need to know what the St. Bernard is and why crossing it is such a big deal, and it would help them to understand the picture if they also knew a little about the Second Punic War and Hannibal’s signature achievements in that conflict. To understand Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, by contrast, all one need do is listen to it. Music, then, is entirely independent of the phenomenal world, it stands as a direct representation of the whole of the Will itself (SW 2:304/WWR 1:284–85). 135

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Indeed, Schopenhauer thought that the very structure of music echoed the gradations of the Will’s objectification: the melody stands as the highest grade of the Will’s objectification, while the bass notes of the harmony anchor its lower grades (SW 2:305–306/WWR 1:285–86). And just as human Will is characterized by a constant progression from desire to satisfaction and back to desire again, so too is the melody: Now the essence of a human being consists in the fact that his will strives, is satisfied, and strives anew, and so on and on […]; correspondingly, the essence of the melody is a constant departure, deviation from the tonic in a thousand ways […], always followed however by an eventual return to the tonic. (SW 2:307/WWR 1:287)16 Music’s succession of chords thus mirrors the succession of satisfaction and desire which characterizes the Will’s operation on and in the world (SW 3:522/WWR 2:473). Yet we must be careful not to lump all music together. Some music, after all, is purely instrumental, while other music has vocal and lyrical accompaniments; and even among pure instrumental music, some of it is representational (e.g., Vivaldi’s Four Seasons), while some is not (e.g., Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 1 in D minor Op. 13 [1895]). The introduction of lyrics—poetry, as Schopenhauer typically calls it—is really the introduction of concepts and Ideas into the composition and, thus, the dilution of its direct representation of the Will, of the work’s communicative immediacy.17 Accordingly, music is independent of poetry, although the two are often intermixed, as in song or opera (SW 3:512/WWR 2:465).18 But even when the two are packaged together, Schopenhauer thought that “the words” are just of secondary value (SW 3:512/WWR 2:465). The true value of music, he thought, is to be found in its ability to play on our emotional responses without recourse to real objects, to actually communicate pain or joy directly (SW 2:312/WWR 1:292). Thus, the music, as it is represented in the work’s score, exists independently of the song and its lyrics (SW 3:513–14/WWR 2:466). It is worth pausing here for a moment, because this point is of particular historical interest. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were a tumultuous time in musical history, due in no small part to the development of accurate musical notation. The period culminated in a number of significant attitudinal and conceptual changes among audiences, chief among them a new conception of music as featuring standalone, repeatable works. Until this point, music was primarily—though not exclusively—consumed as an accompaniment to something else whose appreciation took pride of place, and was composed for particular occasions such as dinner parties or church services. In other words, music was primarily conceived as a background accompaniment to conversation, dance, poetry, religious worship, etc.19 Because it was composed for particular occasions, music was not much repeated, especially not for different occasions (though particular passages were frequently borrowed for new occasions). Repetition was likewise hampered by the absence of an accurate score for the piece. The result was that music was seldom appreciated for its own sake, and composers enjoyed relatively little acclaim.20 In the absence of a score, the work’s performers were free to complete or interpret passages as they saw fit, and enjoyed greater prominence. With the advent of accurate notation, musical works became capable of outlasting their performances and being reproduced for new occasions. The result was increased admiration of particular composers, who now composed music to be enjoyed for its own sake rather than 136

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for some particular patron or occasion, as well as the paying of more focused attention to the musical work and its performance. In Lydia Goehr’s terms, our musical work-concept began to acquire regulative force at the close of the eighteenth century, and it quickly came to govern musical appreciation and practices. With the advent of this new work-concept, everything about our appreciative practices and performance standards changed, including the significance attributed both to musical works and to their composers. We thus find Schopenhauer at a critical juncture in music history, an early exponent of the musical work-concept as we understand it today. Schopenhauer thus set the stage for the contemporary ontology of music, which has largely focused on instrumental pure music, and in which Platonism, which maintains that musical works are abstract entities existing independently of their scores, is the dominant view.21 It should come as no great surprise that Schopenhauer believed that to the extent that a musical work imitates the Will, composers should not deliberately seek to do so with their music. This is because any such conscious attempt to communicate or replicate the Will will proceed by means of concepts and instead reproduce its representations, thus failing to directly express the Will itself (SW 2:311/WWR 1:291). This is what happens whenever music—or, indeed, any art—seeks to represent facets of the world. Clearly, Schopenhauer was not just an early champion of “absolute” music; he would (or should) have been a fan of non-representational works of visual art, too, had he lived to see the twentieth century. Non-representational art, such as Rothko’s color-fields, Pollock’s drip paintings, or Barbara Hepworth’s pierced forms does not seek to communicate the Ideas of particular things; like instrumental pure music, it communicates directly and without relying on real objects as an intermediary for conveying Ideas.22 Non-representational art, he would have thought, is a pure expression of Will.

9.7 Conclusion We can see, then, that Schopenhauer’s influence on aesthetics and art history has been considerable, if often indirect. His ideas are in large part responsible for our contemporary musical work-concept, for the philosophical emphasis on instrumental pure music, and for shaping a dominant—if problematic—view of artistic genius. Notice, however, that his influence lies more in the gist of his theories, rather than in the particulars. We can now see why that is: the details are rooted in a particular view of the world and its nature which is not widely shared. It is easy enough to get composers and musicians to agree that music is incredibly important—perhaps even the most important art form. But it is another matter entirely to get them to concede that music copies the Will! I hope I have shown that there is a great deal that is of interest—especially of historical interest—in Schopenhauer’s aesthetics. It should also be clear, however, that Schopenhauer’s aesthetics are intimately tied to the system he developed, and they do not travel as well outside that system as within it. Schopenhauer’s aesthetics are bound up in his metaphysics, and so rely on his readers sharing the same basic intuitions he has about the essence of the world. As we have seen, his aesthetics is also inextricably coupled with his account of the Platonic Ideas. Although this kind of Platonism has fallen out of fashion, elements of it are still dominant in certain corners of contemporary aesthetics, especially where the art in question is multiply realizable. The ontology of art is charged with the difficult task of untangling the mess of more or less arbitrary social practices and conventions which have 137

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haphazardly congealed into the modern-day artworld and its institutions. I hope that at least one of these historical threads has become a little less knotty.

Notes 1 Wagner is something of an exception; he seems to have been mostly concerned with Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, especially the place of the noumenal and the phenomenal, to the exclusion of much of Schopenhauer’s account of music. For Wagner’s own thoughts on the subject, see Allen (2014). 2 Quotations from Vol. 2 of The World as Will and Representation follow the translation of Payne (1966). 3 In Schopenhauer’s terms, our access to the Will is subject to the form of time but not that of space, since we have immediate access to it from within ourselves. 4 See Hein (1966) and Constanzo (2020) for detailed investigations of the extent of Schopenhauer’s Platonism. 5 On Schopenhauer’s treatment of boredom, see Fox (2022). 6 On the distinction between objective and subjective aesthetic experiences, see Shapshay (2012). There is also a third kind of beauty which derives from the harmony of the colors used in painting, but this is a subordinate kind of beauty which merely facilitates our apprehension of the Ideas, much as meter, rhyme, and rhythm do in poetry (SW 3:481–82/WWR 2:439). 7 The elephant in the room here is Eduard Hanslick, who was one of the principal exponents of musical formalism. Although there are clear parallels between Hanslick’s and Schopenhauer’s views on music, the extent to which Hanslick might have been influenced by Schopenhauer is a matter of some debate. See, e.g., Bonds (2014), Landerer and Zangwill (2017), and Sousa (2017). 8 Magee (1983), for example, suggests that references to the Ideas were tacked on as an afterthought. See also Hein (1966) and Hamlyn (1980), who are skeptical of Schopenhauer’s claimed deference to Plato. Chansky (1988), by contrast, argues that the Ideas are the proper objects of metaphysical knowledge, which is achieved through aesthetics—they thus occupy pride of place in Schopenhauer’s system. 9 Taylor (1987: 49), for example, suggests that Schopenhauer thought of the genius as a step above ordinary humans, just as humans are a higher grade of objectification of the Will than animals. To my mind, this is something of an overstatement, although it is true that Schopenhauer thinks that the genius suffers far more acutely from boredom than ordinary people do, since—much like Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot—mere existence isn’t enough to occupy their mental faculties (in this connection, see Fox 2022). 10 Well, all men, at any rate. 11 Although Nietzsche did deride Wagner’s Schopenhauerianism as a convenience for arrogating musical depth; the musician acts as “an oracle, a priest, indeed more than a priest—a kind of mouthpiece of the “in itself” of things, a telephone from the beyond” (1989: p. 103), so that their output is doubled: they emit music and metaphysics. 12 See also Battersby (1989) for a philosophical genealogy of our concept of genius, including Schopenhauer’s role in developing and promulgating it. Interestingly, Battersby reports that Schopenhauer’s mother was a writer of no little acclaim herself, although his jealousy of her success led to a permanent falling out (1989: p. 110). 13 This remark is about composers, but context makes it clear Schopenhauer has more than just runof-the-mill composers in mind. 14 Presumably fountainry, unlike architecture, also makes reference to the form of time in addition to that of space. 15 With the exception of still lives depicting prepared food, as was typical of the Dutch tradition, as opposed to the Spanish bodegón or Italian natura morta paintings. Depictions of prepared food and alcohol, Schopenhauer thought, are more likely to excite the appetite than to convey Ideas (SW 2:245/WWR 1:232). 16 For an analysis of Schopenhauer’s musings on musicology, see Ferrara (1996). 17 Kant, by contrast, took a dimmer view of instrumental pure music, because without the use of words and concepts, it cannot adequately engage the understanding (KU 5:324–5, 328–29). Kant

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Schopenhauer’s Aesthetic Ideology is not clear whether he considers it a fine art at all, as opposed to an art of the agreeable. In this connection, see Matherne (2014). 18 See also SW 2:309/WWR 1:289, where Schopenhauer asserts that music and poetry employ different languages. 19 These observations come from Goehr (1992: 176 and 148-202). 20 With some exceptions, such as Josquin; see J. Young (2005). 21 See, e.g., Wollheim (1980), Wolterstorff (1980), Levinson (1980), Kivy (1983), Davies (2001), and Dodd (2007). 22 Non-representational art should be distinguished from abstract art, which may represent objects, even if it doesn’t aim for verisimilitude.

Works Cited Allen, R. (2014) Richard Wagner’s Beethoven (1870): A New Translation. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press. Battersby, C. (1989) Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Bonds, M.E. (2014) Absolute Music: The History of an Idea. New York: OUP. Chansky, J.D. (1988) “Schopenhauer and Platonic Ideas: A Groundwork for an Aesthetic Metaphysics”, in von der Luft, E. (ed.) Schopenhauer: New Essays in Honor of his 200th Birthday. Lewiston: Edwin Mellon Press, 67–81. Costanzo, J. (2020) “Schopenhauer’s Interpretation of the Platonic Ideas,” International Journal of the Platonic Tradition 14(2): 153–75. Davies, S. (2001) Musical Works and Performances: A Philosophical Exploration. Oxford: OUP. Dodd, J. (2007) Works of Music: An Essay in Ontology. Oxford: OUP. Ferrara, L. (1996) “Schopenhauer on Music as the Embodiment of Will”, in Jacquette, D. (ed.) Schopenhauer, Philosophy and the Arts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 183–99. Fox, J.I. (2022) “Schopenhauer on Boredom,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 30(3): 477–95. Goehr, L. (1992) The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music. Oxford: OUP. Goehr, L. (1996) “Schopenhauer and the Musicians: An Inquiry into the Sounds of Silence and the Limits of Philosophizing about Music,” in Jacquette, D. (ed.) Schopenhauer, Philosophy and the Arts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 200–28. Hamlyn, D.W. (1980) Schopenhauer. London: Routledge. Hein, H.S. (1966) “Schopenhauer and Platonic Ideas,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 4(2): 133–44. Kant, I. ([1790] 1987) Critique of Judgment. Pluhar, W.S. (trans.). Indianapolis: Hackett. Kivy, P. (1983) “Platonism in Music: A Kind of Defense,” Grazer Philosophische Studien 19(1): 109–29. Landerer, C. and Zangwill, N. (2017) “Hanslick’s Deleted Ending,” British Journal of Aesthetics 57(1): 85–95. Levinson, J. (1980) “What a Musical Work Is,” Journal of Philosophy 77(1): 5–28. Magee, B. (1983) The Philosophy of Schopenhauer. New York: Oxford University Press. Matherne, S. (2014) “Kant’s Expressive Theory of Music,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 72(2): 129–45. Nietzsche, F. ([1887] 1989) On the Genealogy of Morals. Kaufmann, W.A. (trans.). New York: Vintage Books. Nochlin, L. (1971) “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?,” ARTnews. Porter, J I. (2009) “Is Art Modern? Kristeller’s ‘Modern System of the Arts’ Reconsidered,” British Journal of Aesthetics 49(1): 1–24. Schopenhauer, A. (1966) The World as Will and Representation. Vol. II, Payne, E.F.J. (trans.). New York: Dover. Shapshay, S. (2012) “Schopenhauer’s Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art,” Philosophy Compass 7(1): 11–22.

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10 ARTISTIC CREATIVITY AND THE IDEAL OF BEAUTY The Representation of Human Beauty in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy of Art Bart Vandenabeele According to Schopenhauer, artistic creativity comprises not merely contemplating and communicating universal essences or (Platonic) Ideas. As has been emphasized in the literature, artistic creativity, which is the hallmark of the genius, also involves imagination (Phantasie), thoughtfulness (Beschaulichkeit), and clarity of mind (Besonnenheit). These major characteristics of artistic genius are important and complex and have already been carefully studied in the literature.1 What is hardly ever tackled in the literature on Schopenhauer’s aesthetics, however, is a topic that is at least as complex and as crucial to grasping what artistic creativity involves, namely the problem of what Schopenhauer calls the ideal of beauty. This problem is deeply connected in many interesting ways to the general topic of the depiction of the human being in art, which Schopenhauer considers to be “the highest goal of art” (SW 2:248/WWR 1:235; cf. infra). In what follows, I critically examine Schopenhauer’s treatment of the theme of the ideal of beauty and the representation – or presentation, Darstellung – of human beauty in art. It is evidently impossible to treat all aspects of the complex problem of the ideal of beauty in Schopenhauer’s philosophy of art within the confines of this essay. I thus limit myself to major facets of this problem as they are discussed in connection with the artforms of sculpture, (historical) painting and lyrical poetry – three fascinating artforms, which Schopenhauer profoundly admired and thoroughly studied, but which have unfortunately received scant attention in (Anglophone) Schopenhauer scholarship.

10.1 Sculpture On Schopenhauer’s account of art and aesthetic experience, there are not merely different art forms but also different types of aesthetic pleasure that are related to different aesthetic objects or Ideas that are contemplated or represented. In the aesthetic apprehension of the inorganic and vegetative in nature as well as in art, Schopenhauer argues that the subjective aspect of contemplation, i.e., “the pleasure of pure will-less cognition will predominate, because the Ideas apprehended here are only the low objecthood of the

DOI: 10.4324/9781003048992-13

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will, and thus these appearances do not have any profound meaning of interpretive richness” (SW 2:251/WWR 1:237). Yet sculpture and painting are capable of presenting the highest grade of the will’s objectivation: the human being. When animals and especially human beings become the object of aesthetic intuition, the objective component of aesthetic contemplation will be more central, namely the apprehension of the Ideas that are cognized and “the pleasure will consist more in the objective apprehension of these Ideas, which are the clearest manifestations [Offenbarungen] of the will; this is because these exhibit the greatest multitude of forms, as well as a wealth of profoundly significant appearances, and reveal the essence of the will to us most completely, whether in its intensity, horror, satisfaction, or broken state” (SW 2:251/WWR 1:237–38). Since “human beings are more beautiful than anything else, and the revelation of the human essence is the highest goal of art” (SW 2:248/WWR 1:235), those art forms that depict human beings or express human beauty have a privileged role to play in the realm of art and human civilization. Let us first turn to the significance of the art of sculpture, which is, Schopenhauer insists, the art form that seems best “suited for affirming the will to life” (SW 3:478/WWR 2:436). Sculpture is a very important type of art, according to Schopenhauer, since it can express “the most complete objectivation of the will on the highest level at which it can be cognized”: the Idea of the human being. Schopenhauer avers that “[n]o object draws us into purely aesthetic intuition [Anschauen] as readily as the most beautiful human face and figure, the sight of which immediately suffuses us [uns ergreift] with an inexpressible pleasure and raises us above ourselves and all that ails us” (SW 2:260/WWR 1:246). This reveals a certain ambivalence that characterizes Schopenhauer’s aesthetic theory: on the one hand, natural beauty’s privilege consists in turning us most easily into a purely aesthetic, will-less subject that contemplates (Platonic) Ideas; on the other hand, Schopenhauer claims that art’s primary achievement is that it “facilitates so well an apprehension of the Ideas” (SW 3:423/WWR 2:387).2 Furthermore, it is remarkable that it is the beauty of the human face and figure which is capable of drawing us into purely aesthetic contemplation and delivering us from the thraldom of the will. It is not clear why, in contemplating paintings and sculptures of animals “we are occupied with the restlessness and intensity of the will that is portrayed,” whereas in apprehending human beauty we should be immediately absorbed in pure will-less contemplation. This ambivalence or tension becomes even more puzzling when we realize that, for Schopenhauer, the human being, which is the highest grade or “most complete objectivation” of the will, draws us as readily as possible into will-less intuition instead of arousing lust, yet that the highest grade of artistic creativity (genius) consists in turning human beings into objects of purely aesthetic, will-less contemplation, since human beings maintain the strongest and most diverse ties with the will, “and thus work counter to the goals of art,” which involve facilitating a transition from will-driven perception to pure, will-less contemplation. Thus, being the most eminent and highest grade of the will’s objectivation, human beauty will ease the transition from will-driven to will-less cognition, but because of its close connection to the will and its power to stimulate the will and arouse lust in the spectator, human beauty will hamper access to a state of pure, will-less consciousness. Hence, unsurprisingly, in the context of the analysis of the feeling of the sublime, Schopenhauer offers an example that is wholly in line with this paradoxical status of human beauty: the so-called sublime character, that is to say, the human being whose “will is not aroused by objects that are clearly well suited to arouse it,” and “will perceive the beauty of women without desiring them” (SW 2:244/WWR 1:231). 142

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Thus, in discussing human beauty and its vicissitudes, Schopenhauer seems to approximate the mental state of the aesthetic spectator and the resigned saint. Unjustly disregarding the sheer possibility of aesthetically perceiving erotic beauty, Schopenhauer insists that apprehending (even) the beauty of the human figure should not be accompanied by or mixed with erotic desire. Still, contrary to what commentators such as A. Philonenko (1980: p. 133) and M. Casucci (2016: p. 137) seem to suggest, Schopenhauer does not identify aesthetic and mystical consciousness, for aesthetic perception does not imply “denying” or “negating” (verneinen) the will. Even though pure aesthetic perception requires escaping the dominance of the individual will, it also focuses on what is essential in particular things, i.e., the (Platonic) Ideas, which are the most adequate objectivations of the metaphysical will, the kernel of the world. In this sense, aesthetic perception does not imply escaping from the will but actually approaching the (metaphysical) will, acquainting oneself with it and attending to it. Paradoxical as it may sound, on Schopenhauer’s account, aesthetic disinterestedness does not require us to abolish or negate willing altogether but does imply taking genuine interest in the essential features of the world and finding joy in them, and hence ultimately affirming the world instead of renouncing it.3 The genius of the sculptor does indeed consist in apprehending a human body disinterestedly and being able to convey it through an aesthetically pleasing image. This brief characterization of the activity of the visual artist is, however, rather superficial, for it reduces the artist to a keen observer who is also a skilled craftsman, and who can depict an ideal human body on the basis of a detailed study of human bodies in reality. Schopenhauer fiercely rejects this type of “mimetic” or, rather, naturalistic theory of art, but this does not imply that Schopenhauer’s theory has nothing in common with ancient mimetic theories at all, as B. Neymeyr (1996: p. 262) intimates. Yet Schopenhauer does argue that a visual artist cannot derive his or her cognition of the beautiful body solely from empirical experience; this peculiar kind of cognition is, at least partly, a priori: But what of art? – It is said to be the imitation [Nachahmung] of nature. – But how is the artist supposed to recognize the successful work of nature that is to be imitated and to find it among the unsuccessful works unless he anticipates the beautiful prior to experience? Moreover, has nature ever really produced a human being every part of whom was completely beautiful? – This is why it is said that the artist has to sort through many people to find scattered, individual beautiful parts and combine them into a beautiful whole: an absurd and meaningless view, since it refers us back to the question of how he is supposed to recognize precisely these forms as beautiful and the others not. […] No cognition of beauty is possible purely a posteriori and from mere experience: it is always at least partly a priori. (SW 2:261/WWR 1:247) Thus, cognition of the beautiful is (partly) a priori: it greatly differs not merely from empirical cognition but also from the modes of the principle of sufficient reason (time, space and causality), which are the formal, transcendental conditions of empirical experience. The anticipation (Antizipation) of (human) beauty operates rather differently: it concerns not the universal form of appearances, “the universal How of appearing,” which grounds mathematical and scientific knowledge, but “the content of appearances instead of the form, the What of appearing instead of the How” (SW 2:262/WWR 1:247). 143

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Thus the way in which something is artistically presented (in sculpture), is not merely the result of an imitation of certain elements in nature: Schopenhauer holds that a genius is not an imitator.4 Genius “understands nature’s half-spoken words, and then clearly enunciates what nature only stutters, imprinting in solid marble the beauty of the form that nature fails to achieve” (SW 2:262/WWR 1:248). This is, Schopenhauer claims, how the ancient Greek sculptors could discover the prototype (Urtypus) of the human figure: “only by virtue of such anticipation is it possible for all of us to recognize beauty” (SW 2:262/WWR 1:248). This extraordinary power of the artist to anticipate, i.e., to cognize a priori, what human beauty consists of is intimately related to what Schopenhauer calls the ideal, which is “the Idea to the extent that it is at least partly recognized a priori and becomes practical for art by supplementing what is given a posteriori by nature” (SW 2:262/WWR 1:248). This creative power is based upon the ontological premise of the identity of genius and the self-objectifying will or, as Schopenhauer puts it, “the fact that both the artist and the connoisseur are themselves the in-itself of nature,” for “only nature can understand itself” (SW 2:262–63/WWR 1:248). Thus Schopenhauer inherits from the mimetic theories of Antiquity and the Renaissance the idea of aemulatio: the power of the artist not merely to imitate but to surpass natural beauty. Genius confronts nature “as if to call out to her: ‘This is what you wanted to say!’” (SW 2:263/WWR 1:248) Interestingly, Schopenhauer emphasizes this power of anticipation, which is not restricted to the artist but also characterizes the art connoisseur, who recognizes in the artwork what nature failed to “enunciate.” The only difference between artist and connoisseur seems to be that the artist is able to communicate his or her a priori cognition to the audience, whereas the connoisseur cannot. Yet Schopenhauer’s theory of artistic creativity is more complicated than has been shown thus far. For although he argues that a priori cognition is a necessary requirement of artistic creativity and connoisseurship, he does not claim that this is also sufficient. Schopenhauer distances himself from and even ridicules “the absurd belief […] that the Greeks discovered the established Ideal of human beauty in an entirely empirical manner, by combining individual beautiful parts, exposing and noting down a knee here, an arm there” (SW 2:263/WWR 1:248) and argues that the naïve view of the artist as a mere imitator of empirical nature should be rejected, for (according to Schopenhauer) the naïve version of the theory of artistic mimesis cannot explain how an artist would know in advance why this or that body part would be suited to present an ideal human figure in a sculpture. However, Schopenhauer does not rest with this criticism and insists that a true genius’s anticipation of human beauty is not wholly separate from empirical perception. The genius’s imaginative, almost prophetic anticipation of human beauty does “require experience as a schema; it is only through this schema that what genius is conscious of obscurely and a priori is called into full clarity, and the possibility of insightful [besonnenes] portrayal begins” (SW 2:263/WWR 1:249).5 In chapter 36 of the second volume of The World as Will and Representation, which contains isolated remarks on the aesthetics of the visual arts, he again emphasizes this crucial aspect of artistic creativity. He stresses the importance of empirical experience, which is an absolutely necessary “stimulus, which is analogous to animal instincts” and enables artists “to invoke clear and determined cognition of the ideal from that obscure anticipation” (SW 3:478–79/WWR 2:436). This is how Schopenhauer explains that the ideal of human beauty originates in Greek sculpture, for (as Winckelmann had argued before) “the climate and customs of their country afforded [the Greeks] opportunities to see half-naked figures all day long, and even fully naked ones in the gymnasium.” (SW 3:479/WWR 2:436–37) 144

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10.2 Painting Whilst in sculpture beauty and grace are the main aesthetic virtues, in the art of painting several other aesthetic qualities come to the fore that are important not merely because they reveal other distinctive aspects of the human being, but also because they establish an interesting connection with what Schopenhauer considers the highest art form: music. Painting offers the possibility to convey expression (Ausdruck), passion (Leidenschaft) and character (Charakter) (see SW 3:478/WWR 2:436). Sheer beauty and grace, which are presented so magisterially and intensely in Greek sculptures, are not the main concern of painting. Yet Schopenhauer argues that painting surpasses sculpture in its ability to express the individuality of human beings. Schopenhauer makes the differences between the achievements of sculpture and (historical) painting plausible in several interesting ways. Through the usage of colour and rendering of gestures and facial expression (especially of the eyes), Schopenhauer argues, painting focuses on “the true character of the spirit, which comes forward in affect, passion, interplay of cognition and willing” (SW 2:266/WWR 1:251). Although color and the expression of the glance can contribute substantially to the beauty of the painting, they are really vital to express the character of the presented individual. Clearly, when discussing (historical) painting, Schopenhauer especially has portraiture in mind. Even though sculpture sometimes succeeds in rendering individual character, this is clearly the chief province of painting: individual character can be captured from a single viewpoint, whereas the peculiarity of the species as a whole (which is present in or as the Idea of the species) cannot. The two dimensions through which painting operates suffice to render visible the specific character of the individual. Yet this sharp distinction between painting and sculpture may not be as unproblematic as Schopenhauer thinks, for it is based on an equally sharp distinction between species and individual or the universal and the particular. According to Schopenhauer, sculpture is best equipped to render the species character of the human being (what he calls “the Idea of humanity”), whereas painting is the more suitable candidate to express the individual character by focusing on facial expression and body posture. Schopenhauer insists that Dutch seventeenth-century painters in particular would be the masters of depicting in a very moving way scenes that seem at first sight insignificant, ordinary or even banal. Especially their genre paintings, Schopenhauer insists, “excite a quiet, distinctive emotion [Rührung]” in the spectator (SW 2:272–73/WWR 1:257). We are moved by such paintings because of the contrast between the banality of the painted scene and the inner meaningfulness (innere Bedeutsamkeit) of the detailed rendering. Schopenhauer rightly remarks that the depiction of great historical events does not necessarily possess greater artistic value than that of ordinary ones (SW 2: 272/WWR 1:256). For what counts in art is not the outer significance of actions (their consequences in the history of mankind), but their inner significance (ibid.). The artistic value of genre paintings is to be situated in the fact that they enable us to discover the deep significance of ordinary actions or events. Despite Schopenhauer’s efforts to express his profound admiration for Dutch genre painting and despite his insisting on the importance of historical painting as an art form, these do not provide sufficient justification for the sharp distinction between sculpture and (historical) painting that Schopenhauer wishes to maintain. Again, a certain ambivalence seems to pervade Schopenhauer’s aesthetic doctrine of (Platonic) Ideas, which questions the distinction between the universal (the Idea) and the particular (the individual). This

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is not the place to offer a detailed analysis of Schopenhauer’s Platonic doctrine. We can limit ourselves to a fascinating thought about the Idea of the human being, which can be found in section 26 of The World as Will and Representation. In a passage in that section where he discusses the differences between human beings and other animals, he writes that “on the higher levels of the will’s objecthood – and with people in particular – we see individuality displayed prominently in the vast differences between individual characters” and “this phenomenon of the particularization of individual character distinguishes people from animals; and this is illustrated by the fact that in animals the sex drive seeks satisfaction without noticeable selection, while with people this selection is instinctively and unreflectively pursued to the point of violent passion” (SW 2:155–156/WWR 1:156). Schopenhauer adds the following intriguing comment to this: “Thus, every human being is a particularly determined and characteristic appearance of the human will, and can even be viewed to a certain extent as his or her individual Idea [sogar gewissermassen als eine eigene Idee anzusehn ist]” (SW 2:156/WWR 1:156–57). In section 45 he repeats this explicitly: “to a certain extent, as we said in the previous Book, each human being presents a completely distinctive Idea [jeder Mensch gewissermassen eine ganz eigentümliche Idee darstellt]” (SW 2:265/WWR 1:250). The twofold addition of the word gewissermassen might indicate a certain hesitation on the part of the otherwise so confident philosopher.6 Now this characterization of the human being is definitely relevant to a discussion of the value of (historical) painting, since Schopenhauer explicitly contends that “along with beauty as the character of the species, the arts devoted to the presentation of the Idea of humanity are also concerned with the character of the individual, which is what we really mean by character” (SW 2:265/WWR 1:250). Yet Schopenhauer also seems to realize that, despite the precarious status of the term “individual Idea” (i.e., the thought that each human being to a certain extent instantiates his or her unique Idea) the artistic presentation needs to be idealizing. When depicting human beings in art, one is still attempting to present the ideal of beauty. The character of the depicted individual should render a specific aspect of the Idea of humanity through the work of art: “Thus, although character as such is individual, it must nonetheless be apprehended and presented in ideal terms [idealisch], i.e., with an emphasis on its significance to the Idea of humanity in general (it contributes in its own way to the objectivation of this Idea): if this is not done, then the presentation becomes a portrait, a repetition of the particular as such, with all its contingencies. And as Winckelmann says, even the portrait should be the ideal of the individual” (SW 2:265/WWR 1:250). Thus, Schopenhauer argues that the individual has to be rendered in ideal terms, which means “with an emphasis [Hervorhebung] on its significance to Idea of humanity in general.” It is not fully clear what Schopenhauer actually means by this. Perhaps Schopenhauer wants to suggest that, ideally, some kind of balance needs to be achieved, whereby individual as well as species character are presented in the work of art. For the removal of the species character would result in caricature and the removal of the individual character would, or so Schopenhauer contends, result in meaninglessness (SW 2:266/WWR 1:251). Now, what Schopenhauer mentions in connection with portrait painting points to an important philosophical problem, which can be described as the relation between the general or universal and the particular or individual, and which pervades Schopenhauer’s account. A certain tension related to this problem reveals itself, especially in Schopenhauer’s treatment of human beauty in art. Time and again Schopenhauer emphasizes that art offers access to a universal Idea, which is a more or less adequate “objectivation” of the noume146

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nal will. A genuine artist (or “genius”) enables the spectator to discover the universal in an individual object or person or in a particular action or event. Thus we, as spectators, are granted insight into the core of things (or persons), which enables us actually to enjoy the world, no matter how dismal a place it may be. The remarkable fact that Schopenhauer suggests at least twice that each human being to a certain extent instantiates a unique Platonic Idea seems to blur the distinction between universality and individuality. Ideality and individuality are fused together in the portraiture of human beings: if an artist portrays a woman or a man, then both universal Idea and individual phenomenon become entwined. If we take Schopenhauer’s suggestion seriously that each human being somehow instantiates his or her unique Idea, it seems to follow that a portrait painting presents the universal in the particular (otherwise it would not be an artwork), but the universal that is conveyed is the unique Idea which the portrayed individual instantiates and not the universal Idea of humanity. Thus Schopenhauer’s allimportant principium individuationis does not seem to be applicable to portraiture: that this person appears in time and space does not seem to influence the status of the work of art (the portrait) as art. That the painter presents the unique Idea of the individual person – or, what Schopenhauer also calls, his or her intelligible character – implies indifference to the distinction between realism and idealism, for in the case of portrait painting individuality does not exclusively depend upon the a priori forms of time and space, but also on the thought that each human being instantiates his or her own unique Idea. Someone’s empirical character is the spatiotemporal manifestation of the individual’s unique Idea or intelligible character, which amazingly unites ideality and individuality.7 Schopenhauer thus distances himself (perhaps not intentionally) from a purely Platonic view, which he defends in the rest of his work and which qualifies the status of the (Platonic) Idea as a universal ante rem, which is a “unity shattered into multiplicity through the temporal and spatial form of our intuitive apprehension” and would be “the true and unique source for every genuine work of art” (SW 2:277/WWR 1:261). Within such a strictly Platonic framework it does not actually make sense to consider the possibility of “an individual intelligible character” or “an individual’s Idea”, since the forms of space and time are the only real principles of individuation: that which transcends space and time cannot be a particular individual. To put it crudely, on this view, only that which appears within space and time is individual, what is outside space and time is universal. Thus, in Schopenhauer’s aesthetic theory, the problem of individuation gains a strong pregnancy, since it tries to explain and (rightly) considers the possibility of expressing and disinterestedly contemplating an individual human being in ideal terms, and yet equally in his or her own unique and irreplaceable singularity. Schopenhauer’s self-proclaimed Platonism, which draws a strict parallel between the dichotomies of universality / individuality and ideality / phenomenality seems to be undermined by his nuanced and plausible view of the art of portraiture, unless one understands Schopenhauer’s doctrine as allowing for the thought that (the main traits of) a depicted individual’s character could, at least in principle, be shared by other individuals. Yet even granted this, it remains hard to see how, on Schopenhauer’s (Platonic) terms, the irreplaceable singularity of an individual human being could be fully reconciled with the painter’s effort to express the ideality (or universality) of an individual person. By complicating the distinction between ideality and phenomenality, Schopenhauer not only undermines the purely Platonic thrust of his aesthetic theory, but is also able to thematize the enigmatic nature of (the presentation of) human individuality. Since each human 147

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being to a certain extent embodies his or her unique Idea, the rendition of a human individual in a painted portrait (by, say, Titian or Rembrandt) will somehow fascinate differently than, say, a sculpture of a human figure (by, say, Michelangelo or Rodin), which (Schopenhauer argues) is aimed at presenting human beauty in the purity of its ideal shape without primarily focusing on the figure’s individuality. The thought that the human being is imbued with a certain mystery or enigma, or, at least, that great art succeeds in conveying this mysterious aspect, is of paramount importance. If we become intrigued by a portrait by Titian or Rembrandt, this is related to the discovery of a dark, unconscious side of human individuality or one’s “intelligible character”, which no mirror can reveal to us. A (good) work of art shows us this hidden side of our individual nature, since it evokes (what Winckelmann calls) the ideal of the individual. Schopenhauer seems to have sensed that, if art would be concerned merely with presenting the universal in and through the particular, art would become some sort of science that would simply convey universal categories or concepts in an intuitive way (anschaulich). Yet, no matter how cognitivist Schopenhauer’s aesthetic theory may ultimately be, for Schopenhauer art is sharply distinguished from science. Art embodies Ideas, not concepts: Ideas are “like living and developing organism[s],” which are inexhaustible, whereas concepts are abstract and discursive and “like dead receptacles” that are totally useless in art (SW 2:277/WWR 1:261). Schopenhauer defines the (Platonic) Idea as the intuitive, “adequate representative” (adäquater Repräsentant) of the concept. An Idea cannot be cognized by an individual who is dominated by his or her will, but only by a “genius and hence also [by] someone who, through an elevation of his cognitive powers usually occasioned by the works of a genius, is in the same state of mind as a genius [in einer genialen Stimmung]” (SW 2:276/WWR 1:260). Crucially, Ideas are endowed with generative powers and “develop representations that are novel with respect to concepts sharing the same name” (SW 2:277/WWR 1:261).8 Considering this characterization of the Idea, it is hard not to think of the role of the “aesthetic idea” in art that Kant develops in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, and which he defines as an imaginative intuition to which no concept can be fully adequate.9 Like Kant’s aesthetic idea, Schopenhauer’s (Platonic) Idea expresses an inexhaustible imaginative wealth, which surpasses the content of any discursive concept.10 “We are only entirely satisfied by the impression of an artwork,” Schopenhauer claims, “when it leaves something behind that we cannot reduce to the clarity of a concept however much we think about it” (SW 3:467/WWR 2:426). The intuitive, non-discursive and inexhaustible character of the (Platonic) Idea in Schopenhauer’s doctrine is crucial and is apparent from the emphasis he puts on the aesthetic value of sensory and affective components in painting, which are portrayed not just through gesture and facial expression, but also through “eyes and colouring,” and that greatly contribute to the beauty of the painting and can make palpable the intense presence of the portrayed individual (see SW 2:266/WWR 1:251–252). Despite the centrality of the (Platonic) Idea in Schopenhauer’s theory of art, in discussing painting Schopenhauer also broaches a peculiar, “independent” kind of beauty, which “has nothing to do” with apprehending Platonic Ideas. This distinct kind of beauty in painting even suggests, as has already been indicated, some sort of musicality. It has to do with the “tone” of the painting and is connected with color harmonies and the favorable distribution of light and shade: Although […] the true goal of painting, and art in general, is to facilitate our grasp [Auffassung] of the (Platonic) Ideas of the essence of this world, which puts us at once 148

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in the state of pure, i.e. will-less cognition, painting also has an independent beauty that has nothing to with this and which is produced by the simple harmony of colours, the agreeable arrangements of figures, the favourable distribution of light and shade, as well as the tone of the entire picture. This accompanying and subordinate type of beauty promotes the state of pure cognition and is to painting what diction, metre, and rhyme are to poetry; both are not what is essential, but what has the first and immediate effect. (SW 3:481–82/WWR 2:439) Thus, Schopenhauer draws a striking distinction between the “true goal of painting,” which is to facilitate our contemplation of Ideas and “an independent beauty that has nothing to do with this,” but which is brought about by the “tone of the picture” and other so-called “subordinate” elements. Yet how clear and convincing is the distinction between the true and the subordinate goals of painting on which Schopenhauer here insists? First of all, it is not immediately clear why “the agreeable arrangements of figures,” “the distribution of light and shade” etc. would offer a merely subordinate type of beauty. Secondly, why should that which has “the first and immediate effect” be merely subordinate to the true goal of painting? Are not the “simple harmony of colours” and “the agreeable arrangements of figures” really the hallmark of figurative painting? Thirdly, why does Schopenhauer maintain that this additional and subordinate (beigegebene, untergeordnete) type of beauty “has nothing to do” with the so-called “true goal of painting,” which is to grasp the (Platonic) essences of things, and which puts us at once in a state of pure, will-less cognition? This is rather odd, to say the least, for he explicitly claims that “this accompanying and subordinate type of beauty promotes the state of pure cognition,” which he identified earlier as the effect of the aesthetic contemplation of Platonic Ideas, which, after all, is – in Schopenhauer’s view – the true goal of painting (and of art in general)? The question thus arises whether Schopenhauer (like his predecessor Kant) does not unjustly consider the material, sensory aspects of art (such as the harmony of colors and the distribution of light and shade) as merely subordinate facets that would allegedly contaminate the formal purity of artistic beauty. Whatever the exact answer to these questions, it is clear that for Schopenhauer not merely sculpture but painting as well is limited in adequately rendering the complexity of the human being. Despite its genuine aesthetic interest and import, painting’s goal of revealing the essence of humanity will be superseded by the subtlety of literary language. Only literature (which Schopenhauer refers to as “poetry”) can ultimately surpass the limits of the visual arts and render the complexity and versatility of the human being in a more profound way, since it is no longer tied to the materiality of sculpture and painting. It is to Schopenhauer’s account of literature that we therefore now turn. Here I cannot discuss all literary genres that Schopenhauer treats in his philosophy and shall limit myself to a genre that is very important to Schopenhauer but has not often been discussed in the literature on Schopenhauer’s philosophy of art, namely lyrical poetry.

10.3  Lyrical Poetry Schopenhauer considers lyrical poetry the easiest literary genre to master and argues that “even someone who is not particularly distinguished can produce a lovely song when some strong, external source of inspiration [Anregung], some burst of enthusiasm [Begeisterung] 149

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intensifies his mental powers” (SW 2:293–94/WWR 1:275–76). In his book The Birth of Tragedy Friedrich Nietzsche fiercely condemns the “inferior” status of lyrical poetry in Schopenhauer’s account: “Who could fail to see that the lyric is characterized here as an imperfectly achieved art, suspended in mid-flight, as it were, and seldom reaching its goal, indeed as only half an art, the essence of which supposedly consists in the strange mixing of willing and pure contemplation, i.e. of the non-aesthetic and the aesthetic states?” (2011: p. 32). This is Nietzsche’s point of departure for his fierce criticism of the “entire opposition between the subjective and the objective (which Schopenhauer too, still uses to divide up the arts, as if it were some criterion of value)” and “which is absolutely inappropriate in aesthetics since the subject, the willing individual in pursuit of his own, egotistical goals, can only be considered the opponent of art and not its origin.” (ibid.) For, as far as the subject is an artist, he has already been liberated from his individuality and has, as it were, become “a medium, the channel through which the one truly existing subject celebrates its release and redemption in semblance [Erlösung im Scheine]” (ibid.), or so Nietzsche argues. Indeed, one of Schopenhauer’s central tenets is that aesthetic contemplation is not an empirical perception of a willing individual, but an objective contemplation of a pure, will-less subject. Schopenhauer’s term “objectivity” refers to the idea that the subject is liberated from his individual will (which is exactly the term that Nietzsche uses: von seinem individuellen Willen erlöst) and disinterestedly contemplates the aesthetic object. However, Schopenhauer does not allow for a complete redemption in illusion (Erlösung im Scheine), as Nietzsche argues. Whatever the value of Nietzsche’s criticism and alternative proposal, the problem with the status of lyrical poetry (compared with the epic genre and drama) in Schopenhauer’s philosophy is that he explains its inferiority by referring to the too large amount of subjectivity that is present in the lyrical genre. Does this imply that lyrical poetry is not compatible with Schopenhauer’s general view that art is the product of will-less, objective intuition and is based on the contemplation of Ideas? Put differently, are lyrical subjectivity and objective geniality compatible or not? A first step to answering these complicated questions is to acknowledge that Schopenhauer’s view of the lyrical genre is more complex than Nietzsche seems to suggest. To start, a lyrical poem (what Schopenhauer calls a “song”) is not merely the product of a willing individual: It is the subject of the will, i.e. one’s own willing, that fills the consciousness of the singer, often as a liberated, satisfied willing (joy), but even more often as a frustrated willing [als ein gehemmtes] (sorrow), always as affect, passion, as an excited state of mind. Besides this however and together with it, the sight of nature around him makes the singer aware of himself as the subject of pure, will-less cognition, whose imperturbable, blissful peace now forms a contrast with the pressure of ever-restricted, always needy willing: the sensation of this contrast, of this back-and-forth, is what the song as a whole really expresses and what in general constitutes the lyrical state. (SW 2:295/WWR 1:276–277) Schopenhauer here offers a fascinating account of the lyrical state of mind, which is reminiscent of his theory of the experience of the sublime.11 The above-mentioned “inferiority” of lyrical poetry gets a remarkable positive twist in this passage. That Nietzsche selects this passage to mock Schopenhauer’s “subjectivism” is odd, for here Schopenhauer’s account is really very close to Nietzsche’s own account of Greek tragedy, which “is bound up with the duality of the Apolline and the Dionysiac in much the same way as reproduction depends 150

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on there being two sexes which co-exist in a state of perpetual conflict interrupted only occasionally by periods of reconciliation” (2011: p. 14). What Schopenhauer describes as that which “constitutes the lyrical state” is ultimately a struggle between the passions and affects of the willing individual (the Dioysiac) and the pure intuitions of the will-less subject of cognition (the Apolline). From this point of view, lyrical poetry can no longer be a merely inferior type of literature, but is really one of the most important art forms, for this genre is the typical product of the “wonderful” unity of willing and knowing in the human being, which Schopenhauer calls no less than the miracle par excellence: in the lyrical mood, willing (the personal interest of goals) and pure intuiting of the surroundings presented, are wonderfully imbricated with each other […] the subjective mood, the affecting of the will colours the intuited surroundings in reflection, and these surroundings in turn colour the mood: the song proper is the imprint of the whole state of mind that is mixed and shared in this way. (SW 2:295/WWR 1:277) This suggests that lyrical poetry is really an eminent type of literary art and of art in general, for it ultimately unites the two conflicting poles that are at the heart of human existence: willing and knowing. There are still a number of other aspects of the lyrical genre that attenuate the inferior status of lyrical poetry and can render the above-questioned compatibility of the lyrical genre and geniality less implausible. First, in Schopenhauer’s view, the poet is “the universal human being” and is therefore able to transcend his own egocentric standpoint and present “everything that has moved a human heart, whatever issues forth from human nature in any situation, whatever dwells or broods in the breast of man” (SW 2:294/WWR 1:276). In this sense, “poetry,” i.e., literature, is the greatest artform, for it is able to thematize anything that deeply concerns humanity. Lyrical poetry too can thus be considered a major artform and the product of genuine artistic creativity. Second, in his treatment of artworks “that come on in one fell swoop [aus einem Guss]” Schopenhauer emphasizes that such works, such as a painter’s sketches, often have a more powerful effect on the spectator than “finished” artworks, because they are more evocative than other types of artwork and leave a lot to the spectator’s imagination (SW 3:465– 67/WWR 2:425–26). This type of so-called Werke aus einem Guss not just includes spontaneously composed melodies that arise “completely and without any reflection as if inspired” but also, and more importantly, “the genuinely lyrical poem, the plain song in which the deeply felt mood of the present and the impression of the surroundings flow out in words whose metre and rhyme come on their own, as if unintentionally” (SW 3:467/WWR 2:426). It is telling that Schopenhauer, who earlier characterized the lyrical genre in negative terms and questioned its compatibility with true genius, now argues that such works “enjoy the great merit of being works entirely of the enthusiasm of the moment, of inspiration, of the free impulse of genius […] and thus they are thoroughly enjoyable, without shell or kernel, and their effect is much more certain than that of the greatest works of art which have completed slowly and deliberately” (SW 3:467/WWR 2:426–27). Whatever the plausibility of Schopenhauer’s view, this does suggest that lyrical poetry is more valuable as art than seemed at first sight. A third and final component that enhances the artistic value of lyrical poetry is that it is deeply anchored in the power of imagination (Phantasie).12 Poetry, Schopenhauer 151

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holds, “appeals to the imagination alone, which it puts into action using only words” (SW 3:466/WWR 2:425). Although literature employs linguistic means and thus comes closest of all artforms to philosophy, a genuine poet does not convey concepts. The aim of literature, including lyrical poetry, is to allow the reader “to intuit the Ideas of life in the representatives of these concepts, something that can take place only with the help of the hearer’s [or reader’s] own imagination” (SW 2:286/WWR 1:269). “But in order to put this into effect given the goal, the abstract concepts […] must be arranged in such a way that the pattern of intersection of their spheres ensures that no concept can persist in its abstract generality” (ibid.). Thus, lyrical poetry does ultimately meet Schopenhauer’s standard of art, for it succeeds in facilitating the contemplation of the Ideas of human life. Those Ideas can be apprehended only intuitively and generate an experience of genuine beauty. The Platonic Ideas are intransitive intuitions: they cannot be translated into another medium without loss of their (inexhaustible) meaning. Thus, ultimately, not only painting, sculpture, but lyrical poetry too may offer profound insight into the complicated essence and beauty of the human being and is, therefore (and despite Schopenhauer’s hesitations), to be acknowledged as one of the more profound art genres.13

Notes 1 See e.g., Jacquette (1994); Janaway (1994: pp. 60–65); Salaquarda (2007, esp. pp. 125–129); Neill (2009, esp. p. 30–33); Des mond (2012, esp. p. 95–98); Kossler (2012, pp. 193–205); Vandenabeele (2015, pp. 15–31). 2 Schopenhauer sometimes intimates that, strictly speaking, only the genius can apprehend Platonic Ideas in natural objects: “they [i.e., Platonic Ideas] are accessible only to the genius and hence also to someone who, through an elevation of his cognitive powers usually occasioned by the works of genius, is in the same state of mind as a genius: this is why the Ideas are not absolutely but only conditionally communicable” (SW 2:276/WWR 1:260). However, the fact that Schopenhauer claims that ordinary people usually need the artworks of genius to be able to grasp Platonic Ideas seems to imply that this is not always necessary. 3 See Vandenabeele (2017: pp. 162–178). See also the final chapter of my (2015). 4 For Schopenhauer’s sharp distinction between genius and imitator, see: SW 2:277–78/WWR 1:261–262. See also KU 5:308. 5 For more on the genius’s ‘thoughtful awareness’ or ‘clarity of mind’ (Besonnenheit), see Kossler (2012). See also: Vandenabeele (2015: pp. 28–31). 6 Bryan Magee fails to notice Schopenhauer’s qualification ‘gewissermassen’ (‘to a certain extent’), which is mentioned twice: “In short, each human being instantiates a unique Platonic Idea” (Magee 1997: p. 150) 7 See WWR 1, §28, esp. SW 2:185–86/WWR 1:180–81. See also Philonenko (1980: p. 160). 8 For a critical analysis of the role of the Platonic Idea in Schopenhauer’s aesthetics, see Vandenabeele (2012: pp. 225–27). 9 See also Guyer (1997: pp. 355–361). The radical distinction between concept and Idea is one of the most important facets of Schopenhauer’s aesthetics and also one of the main differences between Schopenhauer’s and Hegel’s philosophy of art. 10 In his notes on Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment Schopenhauer insists that “what he [Kant] here says about aesthetic ideas holds of every sensible intuition, namely, that it contains more than the concept under which it is subsumed; therefore (as Kant maintains somewhere in the Critique of Pure Reason) there can be no concept of individual objects.” See Frauenstädt (1864: pp. 138–139). I wish to thank Tim Stoll for this reference. 11 For a detailed study of Schopenhauer’s theory of the sublime, see Vandenabeele (2015). 12 See e.g., SW 3:465–66/WWR 2:425. 13 I should like to thank Tim Stoll for his very helpful comments and suggestions.

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Bibliography M. Casucci, “Idea and Concept in Schopenhauer,” in J. Head & D. Vanden Auweele, eds., Schopenhauer’s Fourfold Root, New York / London, Routledge, 2016. W. Desmond, “Schopenhauer’s Philosophy of the Dark Origin,” in B. Vandenabeele, ed., A Companion to Schopenhauer, Oxford, Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. J. Frauenstädt (ed.), Aus Arthur Schopenhauers handschriftlichem Nachlaß. Abhandlungen, Anmerkungen, Aphorismen und Fragmente, Leipzig, F.A. Brockhaus, 1864. P. Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997. D. Jacquette, “Schopenhauer on the Antipathy of Aesthetic Genius and the Charming,” History of European Ideas, 18 (3), 1994, pp. 373–385. C. Janaway, Schopenhauer, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1994, pp. 60–65. M. Kossler, “The Artist as Subject of Pure Cognition”, in B. Vandenabeele, ed., A Companion to Schopenhauer, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, pp. 193–205. B. Magee, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1997. A. Neill, “Aesthetic Experience in Schopenhauer’s Metaphysics of Will,” in A. Neill & C. Janaway, eds., Better Consciousness: Schopenhauer’s Philosophy of Value, Oxford, Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. B. Neymeyr, Ästhetische Autonomie als Abnormität. Kritische Analysen zu Schopenhauers Ästhetik im Horizont seiner Willensmetaphysik, Berlin / New York, De Gruyter, 1996. F. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, edited by R. Geuss and R. Speirs, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011. A. Philonenko, Schopenhauer. Une philosophie de la tragédie, Paris, Vrin, 1980. J. Salaquarda, “Schopenhauers Hermeneutik der Religion(en),” in K. Broese, M. Kossler & B. Salaquarda, eds., Die Deutung der Welt: Jörg Salaquardas Schriften zu Arthur Schopenhauer, Würzburg, Königshausen & Neumann, 2007. B. Vandenabeele, “Schopenhauer and the objectivity of art,” in B. Vandenabeele, ed., A Companion to Schopenhauer, Chichester, UK, Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, pp. 219–234. B. Vandenabeele, The Sublime in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy, London / New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, pp. 15–31. B. Vandenabeele, “Beyond the principle of sufficient reason? Schopenhauer’s aesthetic phenomenology,” in J. Head and D. Vanden Auweele, eds., Schopenhauer’s Fourfold root, New York/London: Routledge, 2017, pp. 162–178.

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11 SCHOPENHAUER AND THE BEAUTY OF THE PAST Peter Poellner

11.1  The Poetry of the Past In Schopenhauer’s influential discussion of putatively will-less aesthetic contemplation in the Third Book of The World as Will and Representation, there is a fascinating passage in which he applies his account to explain a familiar and seemingly unrelated phenomenon— episodic recollection or imagining of the past in what might be called a nostalgic mode. The latter will be my topic in this paper. It is worth citing Schopenhauer’s central passage on it at length: Finally, it is also that blessedness of will-less perception which spreads so wonderful a charm over the past and distant, and by a self-deception presents them to us in so flattering a light. For by our conjuring up in our minds days long past spent in a distant place, it is only the objects recalled by our imagination, not the subject of will, that carried around its incurable sorrows with it just as much then as it does now. But these are forgotten, because since then they have frequently made way for others. Now in what is remembered, objective perception is just as effective as it would be in what is present, if we allowed it to have influence over us, if, free from will, we surrendered ourselves to it. Hence it happens that, especially when we are more than usually disturbed by some want, the sudden recollection of past and distant scenes flits across our minds like a lost paradise. The imagination recalls merely what was objective, not what was individually subjective, and we imagine that that something objective stood before us then just as pure and undisturbed by any relation to the will as its image now stands in the imagination; but the relation of objects to our will caused us just as much affliction then as it does now. (SW 2:234/WWR 1:198–9)1 As often with Schopenhauer’s remarks on everyday phenomena, his description resonates with a kind of experience many of his readers are likely to have had. It is an experience whose significance also occupied other major figures in the modern philosophical and literary canons. I am thinking here, especially of Sartre’s reflections on what he calls the ‘poetry’

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DOI: 10.4324/9781003048992-14

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of the past (Sartre 2003: 142–3; 1999: 197–9; see Section 3 below), closely connected with his theory of ‘unrealizables’, and of course, in the literary field, Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. What is distinctive of Schopenhauer’s analysis of this experience is that, unlike these figures, he accords it a cognitive significance. While it involves partial illusion, it is also disclosive of a dimension of the real—or at least, as Schopenhauer would insist, of what is objectively there to be disclosed although it remains unnoticed in our ordinary everyday relation to the world. It is this general thesis that I want to explore, starting with Schopenhauer’s own analysis. But first, what, more precisely, is the phenomenology of the sort of ‘nostalgic’ experiences Schopenhauer thinks can be accounted for by his theory of aesthetic contemplation? (I shall continue to use the familiar term ‘nostalgic’, without pejorative connotations, as convenient shorthand for the phenomenon described by him.) I think that what he has in mind is, in the first instance, a specific experiential contrast between the way we often experience other persons or worldly objects or events in directly encountering them, and the way these very same persons, objects or happenings are sometimes experienced in episodic recollections with intuitive (‘imagined’) components. The very same things that, when we were directly confronted with them, left us indifferent, or dissatisfied, or even irritated, are represented in the recollection without such negative valences, but instead as surrounded by a halo of positive significance, or as profoundly desirable, or indeed as beautiful—as Schopenhauer hyperbolically puts it: ‘like a lost paradise’. But we are not aware, typically, of any effort at embellishment, any idealizing activity on our part in thus representing them: what is recollected strikes us, without our own doing, as having been the way it appears in the recollection. A second kind of case which has a similar phenomenology, although Schopenhauer’s remarks do not specifically mention it, are certain apparently idealizing imaginative representations of the ‘past and distant’ in which what is thus represented has not been experienced by the subject at all, although it may be informed or colored by personal recollections. I am thinking here, for example, of such things as the nostalgic imaginative presentification of past or spatially distant events, or of a collective form of life, such as we find fictionalized in elegiac literature. While such works are sometimes wholly products of active projection (what I shall call nostalgic projection)—idyls or utopias made up by their authors and intentionally projected into the past or into some exotic location—they sometimes are not. In these latter cases, they are often based on passive, involuntarily ‘idealizing’, episodic recollections of the kind mentioned in the previous paragraph, but these are then actively fictionalized and endowed with a broader reference or significance by the author. An elegiac novel like Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March (1932) would be a prominent example of this process, but there are of course many others. Finally, a third type of case to which Schopenhauer’s remarks seem to apply is the experience of present objects as endowed with profound significance or beauty as relics of the past, or of what is ‘distant’ in other ways. Examples of this would be the Romantic fascination with ruins or, more mundanely, the way a place where one lived in the past sometimes touches one upon re-visiting it many years later. But even the kind of enjoyment tourists seek, and occasionally find, when visiting foreign or exotic cities sometimes has this character—when things go well, they see a specific beauty in them that their inhabitants ordinarily do not, and this is clearly connected with the fact that these places are remote from the practical concerns of the visitors’ daily lives.

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11.2  Schopenhauer on Aesthetic Experience All these phenomena, then, are plausible targets of Schopenhauer’s analysis. Since that analysis is explicitly presented as an application of his account of aesthetic contemplation, let me first offer a brief outline of that general account. It revolves around three core ideas, whose heterogeneity generates internal tensions in the theory. The first and arguably the most central idea is that aesthetic contemplation is a conscious occurrence in which some ‘object’—the term here also covers persons, events, and states of affairs—that is intuitively present to the subject in perception or imagination is intuited in such a way that the subject’s individual ‘will’ is no longer engaged. The subject enters a condition of ‘will-less contemplation’, and this means in the first instance that the subject is not conscious of any practical interests or desires while, or as a result of, contemplating the object, neither selfcentered (egoistic) desires of the sort Schopenhauer thinks mostly dominate our lives, nor even moral desires some of us are sometimes capable of, concerning the suffering or wellbeing of others (SW 2:434–46/WWR 1:367–78). But the individual will for Schopenhauer manifests itself not just in narrowly practical desires and intentions (‘striving’), but also in ordinary theoretical interests, which are operative in everyday empirical cognition and which yield, among other things, the essentially technological methodology of the modern natural sciences (SW 2:114–7, 144–50/WWR 1:96–8, 121–5). And the individual will also manifests itself in psychologically valenced sensations such as pain and sensory pleasure (SW 2:120–1/WWR 1: 101), and in ‘every emotion and passion’ (SW 2:128/WWR 1:107). If aesthetic contemplation is to be, or to result in, a state in which the individual will is suspended, that state therefore would have to be free of all of these. According to Schopenhauer, as individuals we are objectifications of a will that incessantly wills its own continuation in each of its individual manifestations without end or final aim (SW 2:195, 363/WWR 1:164, 308–9), and any consciousness of oneself as an embodied individual with a spatio-temporal location is dependent on a simultaneous consciousness of one’s individual will in the broad sense outlined above (SW 118–23/WWR 1:99–103). It follows that, if aesthetic contemplation is genuinely will-less, it is a mode of consciousness which involves no awareness of oneself as an individual—its subject becomes, so to speak, a pure point of view on the world, for whom even its own body is not experienced as part of itself, but as merely another content in that world (SW 2:209–13/WWR 1:178–80). How such an even temporary suspension of individual willing is possible, if we are indeed nothing but manifestations of an ‘endless striving’ (SW 2:195/WWR 1:164), is of course the great mystery of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, but I shall not dwell on this point. In any case, the occurrence of such aesthetic suspension of the will, for Schopenhauer, depends on one of two factors: Either an inexplicable heightened individual capacity for it or, if this is absent, an object’s being such as to invite or facilitate it. If an object has this latter character, it is beautiful. Beauty is a matter of degree, and Schopenhauer holds that the most beautiful objects are those which most clearly and fully display, and make intuitable, the essence of the will in its highest—most self-conscious—species of objectification. Thus, ‘man is more beautiful than all other objects, and the revelation of his inner nature is the highest aim of art’ (SW 2:248/WWR 1:210). Now, in light of Schopenhauer’s broader views about the will, this tenet may at first seem strongly counter-intuitive, and indeed it does not seem to be Schopenhauer’s own final position on the matter. Why, we may ask quite generally, should the most clearly displayed essence of the aimlessly striving will in a phenomenon be particularly conducive to engen-

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dering a contemplative attitude towards what is displayed, in which that very will is temporarily suspended? Schopenhauer’s remarks suggest two answers to this question, depending on the nature of the phenomenon contemplated. At this point, I want to mention just one of them, which constitutes the second core claim of his theory. (I shall later address the other answer, involving the notion of the sublime, or something analogous to it). Schopenhauer holds that the clear and comprehensive display of the essence of an empirical phenomenon that is not clearly ‘hostile’ or ‘unfavourable’ to the individual will (cf. SW 2:246/WWR 1:208–9) facilitates an intuition of the relevant properties not merely as particular instances but as universals (SW 2:210–4/WWR 1:179–82). This is his famous theory of an intuition of Ideas, which he insists are Platonic entities beyond space and time (SW 2:205–7, 275–279/WWR 1:174–6, 233–5). In experiencing an object as beautiful, we literally intuit something universal that is instantiated by the object. If one is prepared to countenance this thought, it suggests at least part of an explanation of why such an apprehension necessarily involves a suspension of the individual will. In so far as I focus on a universal object as such, most of the desires we ordinarily have make no sense in relation to this object, since these ordinary desires involve causal interaction with particulars. I can appropriate, dispose of, consume, or seek to realize only items that have causal properties, but a universal has none of these, as Schopenhauer himself stresses. To be sure, Plato claimed in the Symposium that eros is at bottom a ‘wanting to possess the good forever’ (206A; emphasis added), and that what ultimately satisfies this desire is the vision of the Idea of the Good. But the possession involved in this is of a peculiar sort, since it consists merely in that very vision itself. Analogously, Schopenhauer could hold—although he does not actually say this, as far as I am aware—that in so far as my consciousness is focussed on a universal object as such, the only desires that make sense in relation to it are cognitive (including contemplative) ones. And if some particular—beautiful—objects, when attentively intuited, have the power to transport us into a state of focussing exclusively on what is universal in them, then it is not surprising that all ordinary willing should be suspended while in that state, since we are then wholly occupied with an object in relation to which such willing does not make sense. Schopenhauer himself sometimes may be taken to suggest that the direction of explanation should be the other way around: Because there has been a suspension of the will, we now intuit the universal via its particular instance while contemplating the latter. But not only would this leave wholly unexplained how ordinary willing can be, without the contribution of relevant knowledge or a suitable (that is, non-particular) objectual focus of conscious attention, spontaneously suspended in the first instance. It would also be evidently implausible: If indeed there is an intuition of universals, it is not clear why a suspension of all non-contemplative willing while attentively intuiting some empirical object should be sufficient for this. Nevertheless, there is a partial insight in this approach. It seems right to say that the suspension of many of our own interests and desires, especially of egoistic desires, is necessary for adequately understanding what an object represented by us is in its own empirical nature. But Schopenhauer’s claim is clearly stronger than this. Schopenhauer is emphatic that in aesthetic contemplation we do not merely intuit a particular and think about or judge its universal essential properties. Rather, we literally intuit the latter on the basis of an intuition of a particular, ‘representative’ object (SW 2:218/WWR 1: 185; also SW 2:214, 277–8/WWR 1:182, 234–5). He is not alone in thinking that there can be a perception of a universal on the basis of an intuition—perceptual and/or imaginative—of a particular exemplification of it.2 But his view, despite his 157

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protestations, does not properly align with Plato’s position, according to which there can be a vision of the Forms independently of their exemplifications. By contrast, the Ideas intuitively accessed in Schopenhauerian aesthetic contemplation seem to be universalia in rebus, like Aristotle’s substantial forms (as Schopenhauer sometimes acknowledges: SW 2:170/WWR 1:143). The third central claim in Schopenhauer’s theory of aesthetic contemplation concerns its value. His view is that the value of such contemplation lies in the ‘enjoyment’ (SW 2:250/WWR 1:212), ‘pleasure’, or ‘delight’ it affords (e.g., SW 2:315–6/WWR 1:266–7), and that this enjoyment consists in being liberated from individual willing (which includes, as we saw, ‘every emotion and passion’). This pleasure is thus negative in the sense that it consists in the temporary absence of the normal condition of ordinary, individual willing, the latter being predominantly a condition of suffering. Aesthetic enjoyment is the experience of the absence of this suffering. The deepest reason of why ordinary willing is mostly a condition of suffering—leaving aside brief moments of cognitive-affective illusion, on which more shortly—is that it nearly always manifests a conscious lack or deficiency (SW 2:365/WWR 1:309), and this experienced lack is just what is referred to by ‘suffering’ in Schopenhauer’s broad sense. Why should this be so? Schopenhauer’s thought is that any conscious desire for change, any ‘striving’, involves a dissatisfaction with things as they presently are, and hence it includes suffering. Ordinary, individual willing—willing that involves desires for some apparent good for us or for others qua individuals—nearly always includes a desire for change. Such willing could only be genuinely satisfied, and thus not be a condition of ever-renewed desire for change (and therefore of suffering) if it could attain a final ‘end’ or ‘ultimate aim’ (SW 2:364/WWR 1:308), an unqualified individual good whose presence would quench any further desire for change, giving ‘a satisfaction that lasts’ (SW 2:231/WWR 1:196). But such an end is impossible to attain for individual willing. This is so for metaphysical reasons—as individuals we just are objectifications of an endless striving—but Schopenhauer argues that there is also plentiful empirical evidence for his claim. As long as we do not negate or suspend individual willing altogether, our strivings never attain an end whose present realization is not experienced as involving ‘lack’, as dissatisfying and therefore entailing new desires for change. Schopenhauer acknowledges that it may sometimes momentarily seem to us as if our individual will had reached an end whose very presence does not immediately give rise to a desire for something currently lacking, and this is registered in moments of unqualified joy. But these experiences are based on a double error: Only the moment of appearance of these changes moves us with unusual strength, as … shouts of joy; but … these soon disappear because they rested on illusion. For they do not spring from the immediately present …, but only from the opening up of a new future that is anticipated in them. Only by … pleasure borrowing from the future could [it] be heightened so abnormally. (SW 2:373/WWR 1:316; emphasis added) Schopenhauer’s considered view, then, is this. Not only is there no lasting satisfaction—no lasting consciousness without experienced lack—afforded by the presence (the attainment) of any possible object of individual willing. Even any momentary satisfaction is not due, as it may mistakenly be taken to be, to the attained presence of some such object, but to erroneous anticipations of putative happiness-generating aspects or profiles of the object 158

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that are not yet present. As long as we are in thrall to individual willing we therefore suffer, except in those fleeting moments of joyful cognitive-affective illusion. The delight of aesthetic contemplation, in which individual willing is temporarily suspended, lies, then, in being liberated from the suffering which is our normal condition. Schopenhauer develops this thought in two directions: ‘the source of aesthetic enjoyment will lie sometimes rather in the apprehension of the known Idea, sometimes rather in the bliss and peace of mind of pure knowledge free from all willing, and thus from all individuality and the pain that results therefrom’ (SW 2:250/WWR 1:212). The latter kind of enjoyment tends to predominate when the object of contemplation exemplifies a lower grade of the will’s objectivity, such as plants or minerals, or their artistic representations. The former sort of enjoyment predominates when the phenomenon affording such contemplation exemplifies an Idea of a higher grade, especially that of the highest grade (ibid.). Schopenhauer’s point here has sometimes been interpreted as involving an admission, running counter to his textually dominant view, that there is a second and ‘positive’ kind of aesthetic delight, different from the negative pleasure of the temporary absence of individual willing and its attendant suffering, and deriving instead from the contemplation of higher-grade Ideas itself: a pleasure in cognition (Guyer 2005: 124–6). But this reading is difficult to square with Schopenhauer’s account of tragedy, which for him is the most significant, and presumably most valuable, representational art form. The best tragedies make intuitively perspicuous to the audience the essential nature of human existence—humans, due to their rational self-consciousness, being the highest-grade phenomena of the will. So, if Guyer’s reading were correct, it is above all in the theory of tragedy that we should expect an acknowledgement of the putative positive pleasure in cognition itself which he believes Schopenhauer to be committed to. But this is not what we find. In Schopenhauer’s mature development of his view of tragedy, he claims: At the moment of the tragic catastrophe we become convinced more clearly than ever that life is a bad dream from which we have to awake. To this extent, the effect of the tragedy is analogous to that of the dynamically sublime, since, like this, it raises us above the will and its interest … What gives to everything tragic … the characteristic tendency to the sublime, is the dawning of the knowledge that the world and life can afford us no true satisfaction … In this the tragic spirit consists; accordingly, it leads to resignation. (SW 3:495/WWR 2:433–4) This picture of the effect of tragedy, considered by Schopenhauer the most important representational art, is indeed not compatible with his view of aesthetic contemplation as negatively delightful purely on account of its purported will-lessness and concomitant absence of dissatisfaction. The idea that the best tragedies afford us an intuitive understanding of the general character of human existence through a representative, often fictional, example is by itself not clearly implausible. But can such intuitive knowledge be gained by contemplating the object without any involvement of individual willing as defined earlier? It cannot, since the suffering of humanity, grasped in its universality through an example, cannot be adequately grasped merely through contemplation, that is, through a certain kind of object-representation. For in its own fundamental character suffering is not an object, a Vorstellung in the narrow sense in which this contrasts with the ‘inner’ experience of willing (cf. SW 2:119, 125/WWR 1:100, 105). If I am to have intuitive acquaintance with that 159

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general fundamental character, I have to either live through the suffering myself or empathize with some real or imagined instance of suffering. Even if I come to experience what I empathize with as not (merely) an individual instance but as also disclosing a general property or character, any such experiential attitude shift, also for Schopenhauer, is possible only on the basis of the intuitive givenness of a (real or imagined) instance. And this implies, in the case of suffering, an engagement of my individual (not necessarily egoistic) willing. Moreover, the characteristic effect of tragedy on the audience, as Schopenhauer acknowledges, involves ‘fear and sympathy’ (SW 3:497/WWR 2:435), which in his view has as its object the suffering of mankind in general. This picture seems to be inconsistent with his textually prevalent view of aesthetic contemplation in at least three respects. First, the tragic effect depends on a lived-through, or empathetic, or simulated, understanding of suffering; second it involves fear and sympathy (compassion) on the basis of this. Both of these require the engagement of individual willing. But third, the ultimate intentional object of fear and sympathy, while certainly ‘general’ in the sense of being very comprehensive with ever-recurrent features—the miserable fate of humanity as a whole—is still particular, not a universal entity in anything like a Platonic sense. I cannot intelligibly fear or have compassion for a universal. Schopenhauer attempts to resolve these apparent inconsistencies of what is after all, by his lights, the most important case of representational aesthetic cognition with his general theory of aesthetic contemplation, as follows: [H]ow would it be possible generally for the presentation of the terrible side of life … to be capable of affecting us so beneficially, and of affording us an exalted pleasure? Fear and sympathy … certainly do not in themselves belong to the agreeable sensations; therefore they cannot be the end, but only the means. Thus the summons to turn away the will from life remains the true tendency of tragedy, the ultimate purpose of the intentional presentation of the sufferings of mankind … Now … we have found the tendency and ultimate intention of tragedy to be a turning towards resignation, to the denial of the will-to-live. (SW 3:497–500/WWR 2:435–7) Schopenhauer’s considered view on tragedy, then, is that we need to distinguish between the audience’s experience, with proper understanding, of the tragedy itself and the latter’s ‘tendency and ultimate intention’. The former is not ‘agreeable’—either negatively, or positively in Guyer’s sense. It is an experience of ‘shuddering’ (SW 2:301/WWR 1:255) at the general character of individual human existence, and of fear for, and sympathy with, human beings in general, on the basis of an (often fictional) instance, which is understood as exemplary or typical. This cognitive-affective experience, necessarily involving morally ennobled individual willing (cf. SW 2:439–46/WWR 1:371–78), has a tendency to bring about a different kind of willing altogether (SW 3:497/WWR 2:435), a condition of resignation or ‘denial’ of all individual willing—of desiring apparent goods either for one’s own person or for other individuals. And the latter condition (‘an exalted pleasure’; SW 3:497/WWR 2:435) resembles aesthetic contemplation of the beautiful in involving a cessation, albeit normally more permanent, of the individual will. The cessation of individual willing and such a condition’s preeminent value may thus be said to constitute the unity of Schopenhauer’s aesthetics (Janaway 1996: 57–58). But this unity lies, as it were, downstream from aesthetic experience itself, for this, as we have just seen in the case of tragedy, in its most important type is 160

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not and indeed cannot be one of suspension of the individual will. It is rather a cognitiveaffective experience of the general, agent-neutral value or disvalue of certain phenomena, an experience which requires ‘imagination’ (SW 2:219/WWR 1:186) as well as engagement of the individual will, but also a suspension or at least diminution of merely egoistic willing.

11.3  Understanding Non-projective Nostalgic Experience After this brief discussion of the central claims in Schopenhauer’s account of aesthetic experience, let me return to nostalgic experience, in which some aspect of the past, or some object perceived as symbolizing it, is given as beautiful or replete with positive value or significance. The picture of this emerging from the passage cited earlier (SW 2:234/WWR 1:198–9) is that we are particularly susceptible to it in situations of significant and unresolved present difficulty, when we do not or cannot simply immerse ourselves in practical action to overcome it: ‘when we are more than usually disturbed by some want’. Sticking for now to the central case Schopenhauer focusses on—that of episodic recollection—his view is that the mind is then drawn towards (‘conjur[es] up’) an imaginary, intuitive presentification of past objects or events, which now, without any active idealizing effort on our part, appear as possessing a ‘wonderful … charm’, even though they did not do so when we directly experienced them in the past. This is so, he argues, because what is intuitionally recalled or imagined are merely the objects of those past experiences without the relation to our individual will they had back then, hence without the accompanying dissatisfaction that standardly would have colored our experience of them in their actual presence. But they are also without relation to the contents of our unfulfilled present desires. Nevertheless, these memory images have the power to engage our attention, drawing it away from those present desires and their targets. The charm they now appear to have is therefore partly a matter of our consciousness being filled by those presented objects, the dissatisfactions associated with them in the past being ‘forgotten’, and one’s present conscious desires being temporarily suspended or at least receding into the non-attended conscious background. The account of the charm of those images thus far seems to fit Schopenhauer’s general account of the negative ‘delight’ of the aesthetic contemplation of beauty; it consists in the subject’s being intuitionally absorbed by an object and the dissatisfaction normally concomitant with individual willing being absent. But Schopenhauer here adds an element of illusion and error (‘self-deception’) to his story. The object imaginatively recalled strikes us as having been experienced, or indeed as having been, in the past just as it now seems in the recollection: ‘we imagine that that something objective stood before us then just as pure and undisturbed by any relation to the will as its image now stands in the imagination’ (SW 2:234/WWR 1:198; emphasis added). Presumably, Schopenhauer adds this point to accommodate an important aspect of the phenomenology of these experiences. They represent, specifically, a past object or happening as having had, at the time, the very charm that now suffuses our image of it, and they could not do this unless we imagine the object or event as having been back then just as we now imagine it, and unless we accept what we thus imagine at face value. But while Schopenhauer’s addition of such ‘self-deception’ to his account makes it more faithful to the phenomenology of nostalgia, it generates deep tensions with his broader theory. For it makes explicit that its object is not a universal (an Idea) but a particular object or happening temporally located at a particular point in the past. Or at least, it does so unless Schopenhauer wants to say that the particular event recalled is represented in nostalgia as 161

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exemplifying pastness in general—the Idea of the past. But I do not think that this is his point, and if it were, it would be quite implausible: The ‘charm’ of the nostalgic object does not attach to pastness as such, even if one were prepared to grant that we can have an intuition of pastness as a universal. It is not this that is, on any plausible construal, the object of nostalgic experience. It seems, then, that Schopenhauer’s ‘official’ theory of aesthetic delight does not apply to this kind of experience, although he takes it to illustrate the theory, just as it does not apply to the experience of tragedy. Nevertheless, it is worth exploring whether, among the various elements of Schopenhauer’s accounts of different sorts of aesthetic experience, there are not some which, suitably modified, are helpful for understanding this phenomenon. It is clear, to begin with, that the object of nostalgic experience belongs at least in part to his category of the beautiful, rather than of the sublime, for the experience normally occurs without subjective effort, involving no mental struggle to tear ourselves away from a negative affect towards a particular object that has an ‘unfavourable, hostile relation’ to our individual will (cf. SW 2:246/WWR 1:209). Rather, the object of nostalgic experience just as it appears in recollection or imagination seems of itself to invite and facilitate our contemplative dwelling on it. Schopenhauer initially speaks of this object as ‘past and distant’, and in one sense this may be read as a helpful pleonasm, for past events are themselves (temporally) distant from our current situation. But Schopenhauer of course has distance quite generally in mind. And the distance of their object seems indeed highly relevant to the nature of these experiences. But what is it about distance that makes for their aesthetic—or in Sartre’s term, their poetic—character? If temporal distance is what often helps to lend those objects their peculiar experienced charm, one might perhaps be tempted (contra Schopenhauer) to interpret the relevant experiences as analogous to certain involuntarily ‘idealizing’ imaginings of future ends we hope to attain, in particular ends from which we expect some profound or comprehensive and lasting fulfillment—completing a novel one has been working on for years, reunion with a long-absent lover, etc. Jean-Paul Sartre gives a central place in his analysis of intentional action to this kind of affect-charged, future-oriented imagining, and he offers subtle phenomenological descriptions of its structure. These descriptions may be taken as developing a point that we have seen Schopenhauer, too, acknowledges when he speaks of moments of ‘abnormally’ heightened ‘joy’ which sometimes springs from ‘the opening up of a new future that is anticipated in them’ (SW 2:373/WWR 1:316). I shall not go into the details of Sartre’s analysis here; suffice it to say that, like Schopenhauer, he regards these imaginary anticipations of future fulfillment as illusory.3 In any case, can nostalgic experiences of the sort presently under consideration perhaps be understood, pace Schopenhauer, as analogous to those illusion-involving anticipations of individual fulfillment in the futural distance? I suspect not, for at least two reasons. First, the role of anticipation is obviously crucial in those imaginings of future fulfillment, and the relevant anticipations, while invariably erroneous according to both Schopenhauer and Sartre, are not always manifestly irrational. By contrast, recalling a past experience that was in various ways troubled and unsatisfying at the time as if it had been wholly delightful, and taking that manner of presentation at face value as if it captured what happened just as it happened, is clearly irrational—it involves manifest factual error about what happened. Secondly, as noted at the outset, nostalgic experience is not necessarily or even typically about one’s own past at all, and it therefore does not necessarily include representations of one’s individual fulfillment, erroneous or otherwise, unlike the ‘idealizing’ anticipations 162

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analyzed by Sartre. It is a strength of Schopenhauer’s account that he acknowledges this, although I believe he goes astray in interpreting his own insight. But what remains correct in his account is that the contents of the more worthwhile nostalgic experiences—those that are not simply a product of obviously distorting and desire-driven nostalgic projection—are typically unrelated to the subject’s current practical projects and desires. We can have such experiences about a historical collective form of life, or about another person’s past life, even when we know that these could not possibly be ours and are not even relevant to our own practical situation. If this is right, then we might try the following as a suitably modified version of Schopenhauer’s analysis: What helps to generate the distinctive ‘charm’ of the objects of non-projective nostalgic experience is their distance from our current practical concerns. Such experience is typically about some putative aspect of the past partly because past objects and events, qua particulars, are unrelated to these concerns in the sense that they are, and are experienced as, in principle beyond our will: They are given as something that cannot be striven for at all. An analogous point applies whenever the object of non-projective nostalgic experience is given as remote or distant in a non-temporal sense. In cases where the experience is mediated through the perception of a present object (ruins, exotic locations visited on travels), these acquire the kind of beauty characteristic of the objects of such experience by functioning as symbols, stimulating imaginative representations of that which they symbolize for the spectator—namely, some putative aspect or mode of life remote from the spectator’s own primary current environment and any practical concerns associated with it. Sometimes the contents of these imaginings are motivated by conspicuous dissatisfactions with one’s present situation, owing a good part of their attraction to a pronounced contrast with that situation—for example, ancient Greek communal life as imagined by the young Nietzsche. These cases are often (not always) instances of nostalgic projection. But in many other cases, such a motive of mental flight from a present perceived as particularly unpleasant is not dominant or even entirely absent. It seems, then, that Schopenhauer gets something important right while misinterpreting his own insight. The experienced significance of the objects of non-projective nostalgic experience is partly due to their known distance from any possible willing—in the ordinary non-Schopenhauerian sense—on the part of the subject, including any self-centered volitions. However, this significance, pace Schopenhauer, accrues to them qua represented particulars. But if we cannot plausibly say that the objects of such experience are universals, we need a different explanation of their characteristic ‘charm’, experienced through a distinctive kind of pleasure. What is it about the known distance of the particular objects from our possible volitions that (sometimes) makes them appear as beautiful, and indeed what is this beauty? Here too, I think that Schopenhauer offers us a valuable clue—although he then develops this in ways that seem to me implausible—when he argues that in aesthetic contemplation we become objective (SW 2:246/WWR 1:209) in such a way that we no longer regard the object in terms of its relation to our individual will but only in terms of what it itself is (SW 2:209/WWR 1:178). This suggests the thought that in non-projective nostalgic experience our attitude tends to be objective in just this way, albeit in reference to a particular past object or happening, and what enables or facilitates such objectivity is the object’s distance—its being known not to be able to figure as a target of any possible volition on our part. And this is what gives rise, in a manner that remains to be explained, to the appearance of beauty. 163

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As Schopenhauer stresses, in normal everyday life, objects, other persons, and in some respects even we ourselves, are mostly experienced through the lens of our own current practical projects and desires. We largely take note of them, and of their properties, in so far as they relate to those interests in relevant ways, for instance as instrumentally useful or as obstructive or unserviceable to those projects, or as objects of desire (cf. SW 2:207–10/WWR 1:176–8). And we are also very often aware of others as relating to their environment, including ourselves, in just the same way. If everyday consciousness and the kinds of intersubjectivity characteristic of everyday practical life are mostly focussed on such relational properties of objects, and of ourselves and others, in so far as these are relevant for our and their respective present projects, then this warrants Schopenhauer’s claim that everyday consciousness is largely unconcerned with what these objects, ourselves, and others in themselves are. By contrast, as we have seen, an object’s distance and thus unavailability for our present projects, if it nevertheless captures our attention—which Schopenhauer thinks occurs especially when are tired of or more than usually dissatisfied with those projects (cf. SW 2:234/WWR 1:198)—facilitates a consideration of it in its own terms. But it is still not clear why this should make the object appear ‘delightful’—Schopenhauer’s own explanation having been shown to be unpersuasive. A further feature of certain kinds of aesthetic contemplation may perhaps supply what is missing in the account so far. Schopenhauer does not give it prominence, but he does occasionally acknowledge it or something close to it. He remarks, for example, that ‘the scenes and events that lie far in the past, along with the persons participating in them, assume an exceedingly charming appearance in our memory, which leaves behind everything inessential’ (SW 6:641/PP 2:542).4 He also says that a particularly beautiful object is one that invites disinterested contemplation due to ‘the completeness, united in it, of all the manifestations possible to the species’ (SW 2:248/WWR 1:210; emphasis added). And of course it is essential to the effect of tragedy as he conceives it that it should capture the totality of significant features of human existence in an example. Tragedy could not play the cognitive role attributed to it by Schopenhauer if the picture it presented of human life was partial or one-sided. Now completeness or totality, albeit in a somewhat different sense, is given a central place by Sartre in his account of the ‘poetry’ of the past: The human reality arises as such in the presence of its own totality or self as a lack of that totality. And this totality cannot be given by nature, since it combines in itself the incompatible characteristics of the in-itself and the for-itself. (Sartre 2003: 114) In one sense then the past, which is at the same time for-itself and in-itself, resembles value or self … Hence arises the fact that memory presents to us the being which we were, accompanied by a plenitude of being which confers on it a sort of poetry. That grief which we had—although fixed in the past—does not cease to present the meaning of a for-itself, and yet it exists in itself with the silent fixity of the grief of another, of the grief of a statue. (Sartre 2003: 142) What we call ‘beautiful’ or ‘good’ or ‘true’ suffering and what moves us is the suffering which we read on the faces of others, better yet in portraits, in the face of a statue, in a tragic mask. (Sartre 2003: 115; trans. modified) 164

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Sartre’s thought is that human existence consists in the pursuit of an apparently absolute value (‘totality’), which is in fact impossible: An existence that would combine simultaneously the characteristics of lived intentional consciousness (the for-itself), which always experiences itself as lacking something, and of object-being (the in-itself), sometimes simply referred to as ‘being’, which has no consciousness of lack. When we remember our own past, we represent it as an intentional object, and yet also (sometimes) imaginatively ‘from within’, and it then seems to us to combine the characteristics of in-itself and for-itself, thus seeming to ‘resemble’ a totality which can never be realized—that is, experienced as present— and it is this that accounts for its appearance as having a distinctive kind of beauty. Neither Sartre’s nor Schopenhauer’s construal of the role of completeness or totality can be quite right. Schopenhauer leaves it mysterious why the completeness of the intuited essential characteristics of an object should per se be more conducive to will-less contemplation of it than intuition of only some of those characteristics, or of inessential ones, while Sartre’s thesis, taken literally, implies that any mental state or event that is concurrently objectified by us and imagined from within—say, the current state of mind of an interlocutor—should appear to us as having the ‘poetic’ appearance he describes, which is evidently not the case. Nevertheless, the remarks of both philosophers give us important clues for understanding the phenomenon we are considering. The first can be extracted from Sartre’s remarks, although it is not quite Sartre’s own point. Often the ‘charm’ of the nostalgic ‘object’ is indeed partly due to the fact that, in nostalgic experience, a situation is given to us both as somehow involving lived experience (the for-itself) and as an object in the Sartrean, phenomenological sense, while previously, when we were actually in the situation, it could in important respects not be thus objectified—that is, we felt that we could not properly understand it or conceptualize it in its significance. For example, a certain fashion or cultural movement, such as the so-called counterculture of the 1960s, in retrospect can for some people take on the charm of a nostalgic object, although at the time when they lived through it, they experienced it mostly as a confusing, overwhelming chaos of events. This experiential contrast is typically connected with the fact that the meaning and import of various then-ongoing cultural developments was, and was felt to be, as yet unclear to those involved—as is usually the case with much of what happens in one’s present life-world. Yet, having receded into the past, those former novelties subsequently seem to them, and to us, to have become ‘objectifiable’ with respect to their significance. We, and they, now confidently conceptualize, for example, some of the counterculture’s motivations as wellmeaning but naïve, or its optimistic and radical aspirations as transient reflections of historically unprecedented economic expansion and security, soon to be superseded by crisis and economic retrenchment, and so forth. Yet the agents involved in those events at the time were of course not aware of those factors which for their later selves, or for us, now seem to reveal the merely relative and transient importance, or the conditioned nature, of many of the phenomena which agitated them. They were thus (often) fully, wholeheartedly engaged in cultural developments whose relative significance they felt unable to grasp—to objectify. In retrospect, those past, engaged selves therefore appear to their later selves, or to us, not wholly unlike children naïvely absorbed in, and fascinated by, spectacles and activities that the adults can ‘see through’. And at least since the Romantics we have been accustomed to seeing a peculiar charm in this, since it suggests a simpler, less fractured, less complex or alienated world relation than that which is typical of the lives of most adults in modernity. Modifying Sartre’s point, one might say that the charm which this sort, or aspect, of 165

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nostalgic experience seems to deliver is a matter of its representing a past (phase of one’s) life as wholly absorbed, engaged and fascinated by— though not necessarily happy in—its surrounding world (that is, as a for-itself), while simultaneously representing that which it was engrossed in (precisely because it could not fully conceptually master and objectify it), as ‘surpassed’ by us: as something we can understand, situate, objectify in its (merely) relative significance. And it is the combination of these two aspects that makes those past selves seem more ‘whole’, more ‘in tune with’ the world. Something very similar often explains the attraction, for travelers or tourists, of what seem to them simpler forms of life encountered in economically or technologically less ‘developed’ places. These kinds, or dimensions, of nostalgic experience are of course normally based on an error. The simplicity, or seeming naïvety, of the world-involvement of those past or otherwise distant selves is usually merely apparent, this appearance resulting from the vantage point of presumptive superior knowledge occupied by the nostalgic subject—who ironically may himself eventually become a nostalgic object for subsequent generations by dint of the very process just described. By contrast, Schopenhauer’s brief remarks on ‘completeness’ of the object as facilitating aesthetic contemplation, and on the tendency of memory to ‘leave[…] behind everything inessential’, suggest that some kinds of nostalgic experience potentially have a genuinely cognitive role, although they may also include an element of error or illusion of the sort mentioned above. What often gives the object of non-projective nostalgic experience its appearance of profound significance is the fact that it is imagined, in a certain sense, as a whole. We imagine, for example, another person or our past selves or even a historical collective not dispersed in some isolated quotidian situation or practical involvement—as we typically represent them in our current practical engagements—but rather in a broader perspective in terms of ‘what they are (or were) essentially about’—of their overall, deeper aspirations and ideals within a specific historical manifestation of the human condition, or in terms of what Sartre would have called their fundamental project(s). In those cases where the focus of the nostalgic experience is an individual event or encounter, it is not imagined or recollected in isolation, or in relation to our own current interests—hence not as it would typically be represented in a present practical context—but against that broader background just mentioned, for example, as an expression manifesting the aspirations, ideals, or ‘way of being’ of those involved. We may of course imagine all of this incorrectly, but what matters is that in this kind of experience we seem to ourselves to have imaginary access to what they are or were in their essential ‘totality’. In this mode of representation they show up (even if non-veridically) in terms of what really and fundamentally mattered to them and not in terms of their (or our)—often petty, and always fragmentary—practical concerns in everyday interactions. The full object of this kind of non-projective nostalgic imagination, then, is normally an individual or collective human life, or a completed phase of such a life, in its essential totality in the above sense. The perception of artifacts such as buildings, or tools and equipment belonging to such a life, often plays a role in such imagination, but these artifacts then function either as props or as symbols. Just like individual events or encounters, they are not themselves self-contained objects of such experience. And it seems difficult to make sense of a non-projective nostalgic experience whose object does not involve humans at all, say, a pre-human world. While this seems consistent with Schopenhauer’s remark that ‘man is more beautiful than all other objects’ (SW 2:248/WWR 1:210), it also suggests that Schopenhauer’s explanation of this is mistaken. Indeed, in Schopenhauer’s considered view, as his discussion of tragedy clarifies, normal human existence, bound as it is to individual 166

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willing, cannot in its totality be beautiful at all, but only ‘analogous’ to the sublime (SW 3:495/WWR 2:433). Yet non-projective nostalgic experience, in which the mind becomes effortlessly contemplative, does need to be understood at least partly in terms of beauty rather than sublimity. In it, an individual or collective—but still particular—human life in its totality, or a complete phase of such a life, appears under the aspect of beauty. It seems that what often generates this appearance is our imaginative or empathetic representation of that particularity ‘as a whole’, in its unique confrontation with the human predicament, including its hardships and sufferings, and of its attempts to find meaning in this predicament through the pursuit of some, often inarticulate, ideal. It is the object of that intuitive representation itself, rather than some imagined fulfillment of that pursuit, which constitutes the core of the significance seemingly encountered in this sort of nostalgic experience. This kind of experience is to some extent independent of whether we share the deeper commitments, ideals, or fundamental projects of those who are its objects. One can have it towards an earlier phase of one’s own or another person’s life even though one does not (or no longer) share the fundamental projects and vision of things that characterized that phase. A former communist can feel that way towards herself or her former comrades as they were in the long-gone days of their revolutionary struggles, while now regarding most of their political beliefs to be mistaken or even pernicious. But there seems to be a limit to this kind of content independence. While even comprehensive past error—false beliefs, including moral beliefs—or what one now regards as such, does not necessarily interfere with the beauty of the nostalgic object, the latter seems incompatible with what one now considers a comprehensively flawed affective orientation (a bad ‘will’, in Schopenhauerian terms). For example, it is impossible to feel nostalgic about a past phase of one’s life in which one’s fundamental project was the accumulation of possessions, if one now regards the feelings and desires constituting such an ‘ideal’ to be profoundly defective. The beauty of the human past thus depends on qualitative distinctions between different fundamental projects, as expressed in patterns of feelings and inclination, in terms of their value. Friedrich Schiller’s remarks on human beauty in his analysis of Anmut (grace) point in a similar direction, although his account of the relevant kind of value remains rather too closely linked to a Kantian conception of moral worth (Schiller 2005). Schopenhauer is of course also committed to evaluative distinctions among possible contents of individual willing: A just will is for him morally superior to a purely egoistic will, and a compassionate will is morally better than either of those (SW 2:434–46/WWR 1:367–78). But these differences in persons qua possible objects of aesthetic contemplation play no role in his account of beauty, including the beauty of the past. Let me end with another partial agreement between Schopenhauer’s account of what I have called non-projective nostalgic experience and the alternative picture I have offered. Schopenhauer says that an object that appears as beautiful when it is intuitively recalled could also appear that way when we are confronted with it as present: ‘Now in what is remembered, objective perception is just as effective as it would be in what is present, if we allowed it to have influence over us, if, free from will, we surrendered ourselves to it.’ (2:234/WWR 1:198) It’s just that we find it usually more difficult to adopt a contemplative stance towards real present objects, since then our individual, often egoistic, willing tends to get in the way. But the specific beauty that we sometimes see in the past and distant does not necessarily require distance, temporal or otherwise. On the alternative account I have offered, this also holds true. It is evidently possible intermittently to adopt the kind of objective and ‘totalizing’ stance that I have argued is characteristic of much non-projective nos167

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talgic experience also towards persons as they presently are—but, as Schopenhauer rightly says, the narrowness of current desires and of the associated practical exigencies all too often obstructs the kind of objectivity required for this. Nevertheless, there is one aspect of many nostalgic experiences to which the pastness of its object is arguably essential. I am referring to the kind of recollection (or imagination) whose particular human ‘objects’ are represented in the manner described above and also as having ceased to exist under the aegis of what Schopenhauer calls the principium individuationis. When nostalgic experience of the kind sketched above is about persons who are no longer alive, this characteristically adds a further dimension to the experience which bears some resemblance to what Kant and Schopenhauer refer to as the dynamically sublime. We are aware of those ‘objects’ as having finally succumbed to forces immeasurably greater than them and indifferent to their and our individual wills, including their and our fundamental projects and ideals. While this aspect of the experience can certainly not appropriately be described as ‘delightful’, there is, as the theoreticians of the sublime have insisted, a kind of qualified and conflicted positive affective valence in it. The latter’s source and content are, I think, twofold. First, in at least some of these cases, the death of those remembered in this mode appears to us as finally authenticating their commitment to their ideals or fundamental projects. That commitment, which we recollect or imagine—not necessarily correctly—as having been upheld in the face of death thus takes on a character resembling the heroic. It then appears to us, in Albert Camus’ phrase, as a ‘metaphysical revolt’ against the apparent absurdity of individual death, and it is this (imagined) insistence on meaning and value against the power of apparent absurdity that we experience as itself having profound value. Indeed, early Camus sometimes claims that it is the only value there is.5 Secondly, this kind of nostalgically contemplative experience itself, in its attitudinal aspect, presents itself as having a distinctive value in so far as it manifests a refusal to let the particularity of its object and its revolt against apparent meaninglessness fall into oblivion. In this respect, non-projective nostalgic experience about dead persons is itself an instance of the very attitude that partly constitutes the felt value of its object.

Notes 1 All translations from The World as Will and Representation (cited as WWR) are by E. F. J. Payne, in Schopenhauer (1969). 2 For similar views, see e.g., Husserl 1973, Investigation 2, sect. 1–4; and Sprigge 1970: Chs. 2 and 4. 3 For detailed discussion of Sartre’s account, see Poellner (2022: Ch. 5.4). 4 Thanks to David Bather Woods for alerting me to this passage. 5 ‘[Metaphysical revolt] is the certainty of a crushing fate, without the resignation that ought to accompany it. … That revolt gives life its value’. (Camus 1975: 53–54)

Bibliography Camus, Albert (1975). The Myth of Sisyphus. Trans. J. O’Brien. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Guyer, P. (2005). ‘Pleasure and Knowledge in Schopenhauer’s Aesthetics’. In: P. Guyer, Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Husserl, Edmund (1973). Logical Investigations. Trans. J. N. Findlay. 2 vols. London: Routledge. Janaway, Christopher (1996). ‘Knowledge and Tranquillity: Schopenhauer on the Value of Art’. In: D. Jacquette (ed.), Schopenhauer, Philosophy, and the Arts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Poellner, Peter (2022). Value in Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Roth, Joseph ([1932] 2013). The Radetzky March. Trans. M. Hofmann. London: Granta Books.

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Schopenhauer and the Beauty of the Past Sartre, Jean-Paul (1999). War Diaries. Notebooks from a Phoney War 1939–40. Trans. Q. Hoare. London: Verso. Sartre, Jean-Paul (2003). Being and Nothingness. Trans. H. Barnes. London and New York: Routledge. Schiller, Friedrich (2005). On Grace and Dignity. In: J. V. Curran and C. Fricker (eds.), Schiller’s ‘On Grace and Dignity’ in its Cultural Context: Essays and a New Translation. Rochester: Camden House. Schopenhauer, Arthur (1969). The World as Will and Representation. Trans. E. F. J. Payne. 2 vols. New York: Dover. Cited as WWR. Schopenhauer, Arthur (2015). Parerga and Paralipomena. Vol. 2. Trans. A. Del Caro and C. Janaway. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cited as PP 2. Sprigge, Timothy L. S. (1970). Facts, Words and Beliefs. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

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12 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF NICHTIGKEIT IN SCHOPENHAUER’S ACCOUNT OF THE SUBLIME Patrick Hassan 12.1 Introduction Schopenhauer is rightly included as one of the great contributors to 18th- and 19th-century investigations into the nature of “the sublime”—a distinctive and somewhat philosophically perplexing type of aesthetic experience. Despite the fact that Schopenhauer’s sustained critical attention to the sublime [das Erhabene] occupies relatively little of his published corpus—primarily §39 of The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 1—his observations have been much discussed. Schopenhauer entered the existing debate from a philosophically interesting angle: his idiosyncratic metaphysics uniquely augmented—and in some cases radically revised—the then prevailing conceptions of the sublime. Yet this has not always been fully appreciated. This paper has two aims. The first is to elucidate how: (1) Schopenhauer’s broader philosophical commitments to metaphysical monism and pessimism inform a decidedly existential account of the sublime that is interestingly distinct from competing positions, where “existential” is understood as concerning how a subject may, as a result of metaphysical insight, come to practically orientate themselves towards features of the world which are hostile to their aims of self-preservation and wellbeing. The second aim is: (2) to inquire as to what extent (if any) this account of the sublime could offer the conceptual resources for the more characteristically Nietzschean project of life affirmation (i.e., of finding life to be good or meaningful). Both of these aims, it will turn out, depend crucially on comprehending the importance of the concept of “nothingness” [Nichtigkeit] that Schopenhauer deploys as a part of his theory of the sublime; a feature which has yet to receive adequate treatment in this context. The paper ends by briefly drawing attention to how working through these issues reveals that prevailing assumptions about theism’s exclusive claim to certain fundamental human experiences—namely: a humbling sense of reverence and “sacredness”—are dubious. On the contrary, these experiences are shown to be possible in an atheistic framework, even one as thoroughly pessimistic as Schopenhauer’s, and are afforded by his account of the sublime, as it is interpreted here.

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12.2  Schopenhauer on the Sublime: An Existential Account While the origins of the concept of the sublime in European thought can be traced as far back as the 1st century, its emergence as a distinctive aesthetic category was cemented in the 18th century. A major point of reconfiguration that occurred at this point was the bifurcation of aesthetic experience into the sublime on the one hand and the beautiful on the other. In the work of Burke, Alison, Kant, Schiller, and others, the sublime was no longer continuous with beauty as the latter’s pinnacle, but a different kind of aesthetic experience altogether. In general terms, the beautiful came to be thought of as a wholly pleasurable experience, while the sublime was thought to be more phenomenologically complex. There are certain kinds of objects—grand mountain ranges, starry night skies, storms, avalanches, colossal cathedrals or temples, even wild animals—the contemplation of which is uniquely characterized by pleasure and a particular form of pain, namely: fear of a perceived threat to our self-preservation. Schopenhauer’s most consistent position on the beautiful and the sublime broadly accepts these terms of bifurcation. In doing so, he joined the ongoing endeavor to offer the most plausible answer to two further substantive questions: (a) what precisely is the source and nature of the pain essential to the sublime?; (b) how is the pleasure characteristic of an aesthetic experience produced from this pain? Schopenhauer’s most direct answer to both of these questions is captured in the following passage: he feels himself to be both an individual, a frail appearance of the will that can be crushed by the slightest blow of those forces, helpless against the might of nature, dependent, abandoned to chance, a vanishing nothing in the face of enormous powers; and yet at the same time the eternal, tranquil subject of cognition that, as the condition of all objects, carries and supports just this entire world … This is the full impression of the sublime (SW 2:242/WWR 1:229) The two points being made that correspond to the above are: (a) sublime objects generate pain by the feeling of enfeeblement that they induce; (b) pleasure, nonetheless, is occasioned by a timeless identification with the world as a whole, facilitated by temporary epistemic privilege as to the essential nature of reality. The finer details of this account are still obscure, however. Let us briefly explicate Schopenhauer’s theory, considering (a) and (b) in turn. Schopenhauer clarifies the manner in which sublime pain is generated by accepting the Kantian distinction between the “dynamically” and “mathematically” sublime, as laid out in the Critique of Judgement (KU 5:248–66). In cases of the dynamically sublime, we confront objects which are perceived as threatening to our physical being: there is “sight of a power that is incomparably superior to the individual and that threatens him with annihilation” (SW 2:242/WWR 1:229). The awesome power of natural forces are typical instances of this form of the sublime: Nature in stormy motion; the gloaming through threatening black storm clouds; enormous, barren, hanging rocks that interlock so as to cut off our view; rushing,

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foaming masses of water; complete desolation; the howling of the wind as it cuts through a ravine. Our dependency, our struggle with hostile nature, our will which is broken in this struggle, these now come vividly before our eyes (SW 2:241/WWR 1: 228–29) In such cases, the relatively pathetic status of our causal efficacy is made painfully aware to us. Mathematically sublime objects, on the other hand, operate not in virtue of any causal threat they present to the observer, but through making her “forcibly aware of the immensity of the world” (SW 2:242/WWR 1:230). Certain natural or man-made objects— the starry night skies, high mountains, Xerxes’s army crossing the Hellespont, St. Peter’s Cathedral in Rome—confront the observer with an immense scale of greatness relative to their own, making them strikingly intimate with the insignificance of their being: “from the mere presence of a mere magnitude in space and time, a magnitude immense enough to reduce the individual to nothingness” (SW 2:242/WWR 1:229).1 Schopenhauer adds further subtlety to Kant’s distinction by distinguishing between different types of triggers for the mathematically sublime. He writes that certain objects “arouse the impression of the  sublime by reducing us to nothingness  in the face of their spatial magnitude or their advanced age, i.e., their temporal duration, and yet we revel in the pleasure of seeing them” (SW 2:243/WWR 1:231, emphasis mine). Such objects (which could also be spatially immense) might include the “colossal ruins of antiquity”—e.g., the pyramids, the remains of Persepolis, or the coliseum—fossils, meteor fragments, and cave art. Schopenhauer appears to hold, plausibly, that temporal perspective alone—“reflecting on the millennia past and the millennia to come” (SW 2:242/WWR 1:230)—often makes us experience fearful inadequacy and futility characteristic of the mathematically sublime, yet he does not indicate whether it produces a stronger effect than other forms. In all cases of the mathematically sublime, however, we “feel ourselves reduced to nothing … like drops in the ocean, fading away, melting away into nothing” (SW 2:242/WWR 1:230). We shall return to the significance of this feature of “nothingness” imminently. Schopenhauer’s answer to how pleasure is produced from these painful impressions to give the full sublime effect is both highly distinctive and controversial. Put in broad terms, sublime pleasure occurs when there is calm contemplation [Betrachtung] of an object which produces the fearful pain and appreciation of the Platonic Idea it represents, despite the fact it legitimately threatens wellbeing. Here, the observer is “raised above [hinausgehoben] himself, his own person, his willing” (SW 2:238/WWR 1:226), and transcends his strivingbased empirical existence. Schopenhauer is adamant that, though there is a common element with the appreciation of beauty (i.e., the pleasurable contemplation of a Platonic Idea), the sublime is unique not just in the route via which we experience this pleasure, but in the qualitative nature of the experience itself. Contrary to orthodox interpretations of Schopenhauer’s account of the sublime, I believe he offers two distinct forms of this pleasurable elevation [Erhebung]. The first form is derived from the conscious struggle in resisting the will in the face of a threat to our personal wellbeing. Of the sublime, he says: that “state of pure cognition is gained only by means of a conscious and violent tearing free from relationships between the same object and the will (relationships that are recognized as unfavorable) by means of a free and conscious elevation over the will and the cognition relating to it” (SW 2:238/WWR 1:226). In wrestling free from the egoistic concerns that consume everyday experience, we enjoy that 172

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this freedom has been won, and become conscious of our strength to achieve this. Let us call this the Achieved Autonomy Thesis. The second form of elevation in sublime experience is derived from the transcendence of the egoistic perspective—i.e., of individual willing—and conscious identification with the world. Schopenhauer’s transcendental idealism, like Kant’s, maintains that the world as it appears to us is made possible by elements of our own cognition. The sublime brings to our attention that we, the “eternal, tranquil subject of cognition that, as the condition of all objects, carries and supports just this entire world, with the terrible struggles of nature merely as its representation” (SW 2:242/WWR 1:229). Unlike Kant, however, Schopenhauer is committed to a distinctive brand of monism, according to which the plurality of individual entities we perceive in everyday experience is merely an illusion manufactured by our cognitive faculties, and that all appearances are fundamentally manifestations of the same underlying reality. The elevation in recognizing ourselves as the epistemic supporter of the world is, consequently, an identification with it, and not a sense of pride in our superior cognitive capacities qua individual. Let us calls this the Identification Thesis. Schopenhauer draws the link between the epistemic point and the Identification Thesis explicitly towards the end of WWR 1, §39: our immediate consciousness that all these worlds really exist only in our representation, only as modifications of the eternal subject of pure cognition [nur als Modifikationen des ewigen Subjekts des reinen Erkennens], which is what we find ourselves to be as soon as we forget individuality, and which is the necessary, the conditioning bearer and support of all worlds and all times. The magnitude of the world, which we used to find unsettling, is now settled securely within ourselves: our dependence on it is nullified by its dependence on us. Yet we do not reflect on all this straight away; instead it appears only as the felt consciousness that we are, in some sense (that only philosophy can make clear), one with the world, and thus not brought down, but rather elevated [gehoben], by its immensity (SW 2:242–43/WWR 1:230) It is important to clarify exactly what the value and significance of sublime experience is for Schopenhauer. Both accounts of pleasurable elevation matter to Schopenhauer in wholly existential, as opposed to moral, terms.2 In the first form of sublime pleasure—the Achieved Autonomy Thesis—the freedom we win from the victorious struggle over our inclinations is valuable not because of how it may help us treat others, but because it furnishes the subject with an awareness of an important capacity for functionally (dis)engaging with a hostile world. The second form of sublime pleasure—the Identification Thesis—stems purely from a transcendent perspective of one’s place in the world relative to ordinary experience. In the final section of this paper, I shall return to some of the relevant ways in which sublime experience can shape our practical orientation towards the world. But for now, what is important to note is that Schopenhauer’s account does not seem to include a moral component, but is instead wholly existential.3 There has, however, recently been some resistance to this purely existential interpretation in the secondary literature. It will be instructive to briefly explain the motivation for this resistance, and why there are good reasons to think it is misplaced. The Achieved Autonomy Thesis, on the surface, looks remarkably close to the Kantian account of sublime pleasure, according to which one acknowledges one’s rational power over, and thus freedom from, one’s natural inclinations. On Kant’s view, pleasure is derived 173

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from the feeling of respect [Achtung] that the human observer has for their own rational natures: it “makes intuitable for us the superiority of the rational vocation of our cognitive powers over the greatest power of sensibility” (KU 5:257). Since, for Kant, this rational power is the basis of human autonomy—and thus, the source of our “dignity” [Würde]—the sublime has moral significance as an intimation of the demands of the moral law. Sandra Shapshay writes that Schopenhauer’s Achieved Autonomy Thesis indicates “a pronounced echo of Kant’s notion that one gains a felt recognition of one’s moral autonomy in sublime experience”, and while she notes that “Schopenhauer’s understanding of autonomy is more akin to the power of stoic detachment than Kant’s rational self-legislation” (Shapshay 2012a: 19; cf 2012b), she takes this to be evidence that Schopenhauer offers a “transformed” yet characteristically Kantian theory of the sublime. Sophia Vasalou goes further in locating a moral commitment in Schopenhauer’s account of the sublime that is noticeably Kantian in spirit, claiming that “it is evident that it is the notion of dignity or self-esteem that provides the happening of the sublime with its main dramatic theme” (Vasalou 2013: 38). A number of commentators have emphasized a broad continuation of Kantian themes in Schopenhauer’s theory of the sublime (e.g., Young 1987: 100; Wicks 2008: 105; Shapshay 2012 a, 2012b; Vasalou 2013: 35). This is understandable, after all in the appendix to WWR 1, Schopenhauer praises Kant’s theory of the sublime as “[b]y far the best part of the ‘Critique of Aesthetic Judgement’” (SW 2:630/WWR 1:562). However, despite this praise for Kant’s “correct classification” (SW 2:242/WWR 1:229) of the sublime and the maintenance of some of its key conceptual distinctions, his own account differs in fundamental ways relevant to our purposes. Schopenhauer himself claims that he “part[s] ways with [Kant] completely” concerning the sublime’s “inner essence” (SW 2:242/WWR 1:229). One of the respects in which there is a clear departure is that Schopenhauer’s own theory of the sublime will “allow neither moral reflections nor hypotheses from scholastic philosophy to play a role” (SW 2:242/WWR 1:230). This creates difficulties in drawing too close an affinity between Schopenhauer and Kant’s accounts in the way that the Achieved Autonomy Thesis might, by itself, suggest. While Shapshay can (and does) acknowledge this explicit rejection of a moral component to the sublime, at the same time recognizing a common conception of freedom in both positions,4 this passage is more of a problem for Vasalou’s interpretation, which places the highly moralized notion of dignity at the center of Schopenhauer’s view. Vasalou remarks that Schopenhauer rejects Kant’s moral freedom in the sublime only with “an impatient flick of the hand” (Vasalou 2013: 35); a flaw which obscures how close his own account is to Kant’s. However, this is hardly the case, and reflects too close a reading of §39 in isolation from the text as a whole. Schopenhauer’s attack on the allegedly uniquely human faculty of Vernunft that underpins Kant’s account of dignity and consequent demotion of reason to an instrumental status is both sophisticated and ubiquitous in his critique of Kant’s epistemology (see WWR 1, “Appendix”), and especially his ethics (see BM §3-11). More would need to be done, then, to discharge the burden proof for a moral reading that aligns with Schopenhauer’s own claims.5

12.3 Nichtigkeit Schopenhauer’s wholly existential account of the sublime departs from Kant’s position—as well as competing existential accounts—in a further way that concerns the nature and status of fear. For Kant, the fear we experience as a component of the sublime is superficial 174

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in an important way. As has been noted and criticized (e.g., Brady 2013: 156–157; Young 2013: 88, 157–160; Vandenabeele 2015: 107–108), Kant takes there to be no genuine fear in sublime experience: “We cannot pass judgement at all on the sublime in nature if we are afraid. For we flee from the sight of an object that scares us, and it is impossible to like terror that we take seriously” (KU 5:261). So for Kant, sublime pleasure can only occur “provided we are in a safe place” (KU 5:261). The puzzle of how sublime pleasure can occur is purportedly solved by making a distinction between an object’s intrinsic properties and our relation to the object. He holds that we can “consider an object fearful without being afraid of it” (KU 5:260), and illustrates this idea with the example of the fear of God: even if we do not transgress God’s laws and incur his wrath, we can be conscious of his power over us should we transgress them. The superficial fear in Kant’s theory of the sublime is a continuation of the view defended by Burke in his A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (PE) of 1757. While Burke, as is well known, described terror as “the ruling principle of the sublime” (PE, 58), he held that this terror is “capable of producing delight” only “if the pain is not carried to violence, and the terror is not conversant about the present destruction of the person” (PE, 4: VII). For Burke, the pleasure produced by sublime experience is derived precisely in the reassurance or relief from the conscious realization of this safety. In this way, the “pain and terror are so modified as not to be actually noxious” (PE, 4: VII). The fear is thus superficial because it is wholly imagined and hypothetical. However, Schopenhauer’s own view runs counter to Kant and Burke in this respect. He insists on a genuine “obtrusive, hostile relation” of sublime objects to the will; one that in “perceiving and acknowledging” those threats “that are terrible to the will”, the agent “consciously turns away from” (SW 2:238/WWR 1:226-227). There are two features of Schopenhauer’s account of the real fear in sublime experience that deserve special attention. The first concerns the painful sense of our “nothingness” [Nichtigkeit]—also described as our “insignificance” [Unbedeutsamkeit] or our feeling of being a “vanishing nothing” [ein verschwindendes Nichts]—that is provoked by sublime experience.6 This sense is important to Schopenhauer partly because it is provoked by genuine epistemic privilege about the nature of reality. Nichtigkeit is generated by being confronted with our meager spatial and/or temporal being (as in the mathematically sublime), or our pitiful causal inefficacy (as in the dynamically sublime). These channels of experience track the truth (according to Schopenhauer’s brand of monism) that we are mere empirical manifestations—badly distorted and inherently conflicted ones at that—of a metaphysically deeper, yet arational and purposeless, reality. The crucial point to underscore is that, for Schopenhauer, this feeling of Nichtigkeit is thus not merely a feeling, but also an objective condition in a way that it is not for Burke or Kant. We as empirical individuals really are pathetically unimportant when considered from a cosmic perspective: It is truly unbelievable how vacuously and meaninglessly [Bedeutungsleer] (viewed from the outside) and how dismally and insensibly (viewed from the inside) life flows away for the vast majority of human beings. It is a feeble yearning and a torment, a dream-like whirl through the four ages of life through to death, accompanied by a series of trivial thoughts. They are like mechanical clocks that are wound up and go without knowing why; whenever someone is begotten and born, the clock of human life is wound again so it can play the same hurdy-gurdy that has already been played 175

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countless times, movement by movement, beat by beat, with insignificant [unbedeutenden] variations. (SW 2:379/WWR 1:348) There is additional metaphysical significance to Nichtigkeit in the way in which Schopenhauer attempts to solve the paradox of the sublime. At present, it may be hard to see how—if we are genuinely (and justifiably) fearful of powerful or vast objects—pleasurable “elevation” can be experienced through calmly contemplating the Ideas. Schopenhauer’s distinctive solution to this puzzle begins with an initially obscure claim that in order to be both elevated and feel the pain of fear, there must be a “continual recollection” of the will while contemplating the Ideas. This is to say that a prerequisite for fear, which is an essential component of the sublime, is a threat to something’s interest in self-preservation. Without this, it seems there would be little to distinguish the sublime from the will-less pleasure of the beautiful after all. So there must be a will present in sublime experience, but the difficulty is in explaining how this can be so without undermining the possibility of elevation above it. Schopenhauer confronts this difficulty by drawing an important distinction between the threat that an object poses to a personal will, and the threat an object poses to “human willing in general [das menschliche Wollen überhaupt]” (SW 2:238/WWR 1:226). If an object is threatening to my personal will, and I maintain a view of the object in relation to my will, the fear for my personal safety will preclude any aesthetic contemplation generally, as Schopenhauer understands it. So in order to preserve the possibility of aesthetically appreciating the object, the “continual recollection” must be of the human will in general; a constant reminder of the object’s threat to humanity. As he states, the struggle to experience the sublime … must not only be achieved consciously, it must also be sustained and is therefore accompanied by a constant recollection of the will, although not of a particular, individual willing, such as fear or desire, but rather of human willing in general, to the extent that it is universally expressed through its objecthood, the human body. (SW 2:238/WWR 1:226). The experiences afforded by the sublime are thus, for Schopenhauer, transcendent in an extraordinary way: our emotions of fear are not personal in the everyday fashion orientated by our will. Instead, a unique and more universal manner of feeling is achieved; one that “stand[s] outside of all relations determined by the principle of sufficient reason” (SW 2:239/WWR 1:227), and which produces an identification with the world. A consideration of what Schopenhauer has to say about the “sublime character” is fruitful in grasping this point: “[w]hen he looks over the course of his own life with all its misfortunes he will not see his own individual fate so much as the fate of humanity in general, and thus he will conduct himself more as a knower than as a sufferer” (SW 2:244/WWR 1:231, emphasis mine). Nichtigkeit, again, is not merely a condition of the individual, but it is a property of humanity generally. Schopenhauer frequently highlights this mirrored relation between the character of the individual and that of the species. For example: As I have said, each human life, surveyed as a whole, displays the qualities of a tragedy and we see that life as a rule is nothing more than a series of dashed hopes, 176

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thwarted plans and errors recognised too late … This accords entirely with my world view, which regards existence itself as something that should not be, as a kind of going astray from which our knowledge of the same is supposed to bring us back. Mankind, ho anthrôpos, is in the wrong already generally speaking, inasmuch as he exists and is human, consequently it is wholly in keeping with this that also each individual human being, tis anthrôpos, surveying his life, finds himself thoroughly in the wrong. That he realises this generally is his redemption, and for this he must begin to recognise it in the individual case, i.e., in his individual course of life. For everything that applies to the genus applies also to the species. (SW 6:341/PP 2:289; cf. WWR 2 Ch.46) The individual and the species, like everything else in the empirical world, are mere manifestations of an aimless will. It is consciousness of the threatening relation of an object to humanity generally— the comprehensiveness of Nichtigkeit—which there is “continual recollection” of in sublime experience. This point has sometimes been overlooked in commentary (e.g., Brady 2013: 94–99; Vasalou 2013). Yet this is a mistake, I propose, for at least two philosophically interesting reasons beyond the role it plays for Schopenhauer in explaining the paradox of the sublime. First, the distinction puts distance between Schopenhauer’s existential position and competing existential positions such as (arguably) Burke’s, thereby better mapping the conceptual terrain. In Burke’s account the sublime is induced by a moment of confrontation with a personal threat (and for this reason might be labeled narrowly existential). Schopenhauer’s account, by contrast, is at least in large part constituted by an (accurately) perceived threat to humanity as such, and for this reason might be labeled widely existential. This broader existential viewpoint is one that Schopenhauer is more frequently concerned to take up (e.g., SW 2:101/WWR 1:111, SW 2:444/WWR 1:402; PP 2 §150, §172a). The second reason that overlooking or understating the distinction between the individual and general will is a mistake is that it may have implications for the project of life affirmation which gained interest in the latter half of the 19th century. This is the subject of the final section.

12.4  The Existential Implications of the Sublime: Nichtigkeit and Affirmation Schopenhauer was consistently committed to the truth of philosophical pessimism: the claim that given the predominance of pointless suffering intrinsic to existence, life is not worth living, and that non-existence is preferable to existence.7 Despite this commitment, Schopenhauer’s account of the sublime is constituted by a pleasurable identification with the natural world (as opposed to a feeling of superiority over it, following Kant). Recently, Bart Vandenabeele (2015) has argued that it is precisely this Identification Thesis that offers a Schopenhauerian basis for the affirmation of life as worth living. But if Nichtigkeit is a large part of what makes Schopenhauer’s theory of the sublime distinctive, how might this be possible? When Schopenhauer writes that the sublime offers “an elevation above one’s own individuality [das eigene Individuum]” (SW 2:243/WWR 1:230), this transcendence, achieved by piercing through the veil of Maya, is a “eureka moment” of clarity whereby we are no longer deceived. We grasp the fundamental unity of all things, and find a form of pleasure in becoming “one with the world” (SW 2:243/WWR 1:230). Vandenabeele harnesses this “joyful identification with the whole” for what he describes as “an aesthetic exemplar of 177

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a unique path toward embracing suffering instead of succumbing to life-denying forces” (Vandenabeele 2015: 168). Because a form of pain is an essential component in experiencing sublime pleasure, the idea is that the cause of this pain can be “justified”, “affirmed”, or found to be “meaningful” under the right conditions. In a crucial passage, Vandenabeele writes that: sublime phenomena and environments seem to justify aesthetically the very agony they cause. By occasioning pleasure through what is really rough, disharmonious, and disturbing, they contribute to deepening our valuation of life, including its disturbing and hostile facets. Sublime experiences offer sufficient energy to prevent us from collapsing under the burden of overwhelming life and stir up our desire to affirm even nature’s most horrifying and destructive phenomena. (Vandenabeele 2015: 168) This type of affirmation, Vandenabeele holds, is “not ultimately moral but fundamentally existential and life enhancing” because it shows “how pain can become exquisitely pleasurable and how even the utmost terror can be transformed into a joyful identification with and affirmation of the will to life” (Vandenabeele 2015: 120). On this view, the identification of the self with world is “joyful” because in transcending our ordinary experience as endlessly striving beings, we gain a close sense of what Vandenabeele calls the sacred: a “reaching beyond the empirical world” via a “metaphysical communion” with all appearances (Vandenabeele 2015: 174). It is this profound (and much longed for) sense of meaning bestowed to existence which is what makes the sublime such a powerful experience. Thus, part of the existential import of the sublime is its ability to practically shape our attitude towards life in a specific, affirmative manner: it offers “the amoral, aesthetic energy to rejoice in the bleak, horrific, and terrifying aspects of life” (Vandenabeele 2015: 168). As I suggested earlier, there is a prima facie tension in Schopenhauer’s commitment to pessimism and his characterization of life in terms of Nichtigkeit on the one hand, and (following Vandenabeele) any alleged life-affirming conception of the sublime on the other. Sublime experience may be thought to be psychologically beneficial in facilitating a positive affective disposition towards life, even if, as a matter of fact, life is fundamentally bad and thus unworthy of affirmative attitudes. But because Schopenhauer’s account of the sublime involves genuine metaphysical insight into the horrific truth about life, it is difficult to see how his account can offer the tools to find life joyous and worth living. Vandenabeele acknowledges this tension, and concedes that “Schopenhauer’s relentless pessimism prevents him from fully recognising this affirmative potential of the sublime and misses the opportunity of adequately developing its profound relation with the sacred”, continuing that his analysis nonetheless “hints at it by justly insisting on” the sublime’s “metaphysical significance” (Vandenabeele 2015: 175).8 However, the “affirmation” of life in this context is deeply ambiguous, and could mean one of at least three things: A1: Life (or the world) is, at the most fundamental level, good and valuable. A2: Life (or the world), is fundamentally bad, but can be made to appear good via aesthetic experience. A3: Life (or the world), is fundamentally bad, but the manner in which we realize this and adjust our behavior accordingly can nonetheless be meaningful. 178

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Vandenabeele appears ambivalent about which form of “affirmation” is relevant to Schopenhauer’s account of the sublime, and seems to run different versions together. In the passages presented, Vandenabeele speaks of “affirmation of the will to life”, of the “aesthetic energy” afforded by the sublime to “rejoice in the bleak, horrific, and terrifying aspects of life”, and even to “justify” them. Vandenabeele also approves of the idea that humans need to “give our existence unassailable meaning”, and views the sublime as a way to do this by offering “the road towards finding a home in the world, providing a “profound feeling of belonging” via a felt connection with the sacred (Vandenabeele 2015: 175). Each of these phrases can be read in the ways suggested above. Unfortunately, understanding affirmation in this broad sense—that is: as an umbrella term for A1-A3—may result in throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Though unorthodox, A1 has found varying levels of support from those who have taken Schopenhauer’s axiology and his commitment to monism to involve (or logically presuppose) a notion of the divine at the most fundamental level of reality (Mannion 2003: 217, 2020: 401; Ellis 2017; Shapshay 2022). The difficulty for such interpretations, however, is that they appear to fly in the face of Schopenhauer’s professed pessimism—which involves the frequent and explicit denial of A1, and the defense of its opposite—as well as his corollary disapproval of the pantheism associated with Spinoza, and also Schiller, Fichte and Schelling (SW 5:142/PP 1:121; PP 2 §69).9 For this reason, I agree with Vandenabeele that Schopenhauer’s pessimistic characterization of the world in terms of Nichtigkeit does preclude his affirmation in terms of A1. Alternatively, A2 would have it that the sublime presents the evils of the world to us in a way which makes them bearable for the subject to behold. This view is representative of, or at least very close to, the Nietzschean project of affirmation evident in his published works. While there are important changes in the way he approaches this project from the early 1870’s through to the late 1880’s, Nietzsche consistently held that the value of art in particular is in its ability to induce life-affirming feeling in aesthetic experience, precisely via illusion and manipulating appearance.10 The problem with attributing this form of affirmation to Schopenhauer, however, is that his account of the sublime—and aesthetic experience generally—involves genuine epistemic value: the subject momentarily breaks through the “illusoriness” [Scheinbarkeit] and “ghostly phantasm [luftgebilde]” (SW 2:118/WWR 1:123) of everyday experience and gains metaphysical insight. But it does not follow that either of these features of Schopenhauer’s thought—his pessimism or the epistemic value ascribed to the sublime—preclude A3, which construes “affirmation” in terms of finding a meaning to life. It is worth noting that in a passage from 1851, Schopenhauer takes there to be a “moral significance” to the world (where, as the context of the passage suggests, “moral” is used in a broad sense; perhaps closer to how contemporary philosophers might use the word “ethical”). Just after claiming that “Pantheism is by necessity optimism and therefore false”, he takes the thought that “the world has merely a physical but no moral significance” to be “the unholiest error, sprung from the greatest perversity of the mind” (SW 6:108/PP 2:94). But isn’t this a flat contradiction if existence is assigned the property of Nichtigkeit? This, of course, depends on how “meaning” is to be understood in this context, and to what it is being ascribed. Contemporary thought on this topic has tended distinguish between the “meaning of life”—whereby existence “in itself” or “as a whole” has cosmic significance, or not—and “meaning in life”—whereby a person’s life exhibits meaning, or not. Another contemporary trend has it that meaningfulness for the latter is not equivalent 179

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to wellbeing. Thus, it could be that one is extremely satisfied in one’s pleasure-seeking existence, yet has a meaningless life (perhaps as is the case of a person plugged into Nozick’s “experience machine”), and conversely, one could have a deeply meaningful but miserable life. Yet meaning or meaningfulness is typically treated as a cluster concept denoting some or all of the following (non-exhaustive and often-interlacing) features: (i) a life-trajectory that merits admiration; (ii) transcendence above one’s desired-orientated perspective; (iii) fulfillment of higher-order purposes; (iv) having a significant impact on one’s society or culture; (v) fulfillment of a deity’s plan; (vi) the successful pursuit of highly creative endeavors. None of (i)-(vi) need be moral in nature. There is plentiful evidence that Schopenhauer denies there is a “meaning of life.”11 However, there are, I believe, at least two kinds of meaningfulness that can be consistently attributed to a person’s life within the domain of Schopenhauer’s philosophy (which he too recognized), and that the sublime gives an approximation of: (1) meaningfulness in taking up an appropriate practical stance towards the world; (2) meaningfulness in a sense of affiliation with the world, and an impression of a mode of existence beyond or above mere striving to satisfy desires. On my reading of Schopenhauer’s first conception of meaningfulness, the connection between his soteriology and aesthetics is of central importance. For Schopenhauer there are a variety of practical stances one could adopt towards a life characterized by Nichtigkeit: suicide, fear, egoism, hedonistic indulgence, and so forth. These stances all embody an epistemic defect insofar as they remain in empirical illusion that merely perpetuates the will. But what the sublime offers, as Julian Young phrases it, is “an introduction, an intimation of the solution to the problem of life” (Young 1987: 100). This “riddle” [Rätsel] of existence, as Schopenhauer sometimes calls it, finds its genuine answer in the “highest moral goal” (SW 6:328/PP 2:279): salvation [Erlösung]. What the sublime provides is a brief glimpse into what the ascetic saint experiences on a more sustained basis. Having attained salvation, the ascetic possesses “consciousness of the nothingness of all goods and the suffering of all life” (SW 2:468/WWR 1:423), and has succeeded in “breaking” or “taming” their will to transcend the illusion of their individuality. While saintly detachment is probably not achievable for everyone, sublime experience furnishes for the subject a flash of a possible mode of existence that goes beyond empirical reality, where suffering is abolished, and one is no longer deluded by or affected by the will-driven inclinations of embodied experience. While for Kant the sublime is a phenomenal approximation of acting in accordance with the moral law as dictated by reason, for Schopenhauer the sublime is a phenomenal approximation of ascetic resignation and denial of the will to life.12 In this way, the meaning that Schopenhauer’s account of the sublime offers is deeply practical in the way it can orientate one’s response to a hostile world: it initiates the subject into the taking up of an appropriate stance towards existence, or what Schopenhauer calls cultivating the “anticosmic tendency” (SW 3:707/WWR 2:631). To conduct one’s life meaningfully then, is paradoxically to (1) recognize the futility and Nichtigkeit of the endless striving of everyday experience—“That [one] realizes [that life is meaningless suffering] generally is [one’s] redemption” (SW 6:341/PP 2:290); (2) to identify with the most fundamental substratum of reality that all appearances ultimately manifest in essence; (3) respond to this enlightened epistemic position appropriately, which for Schopenhauer entails only resignation from life. The subject of the sublime satisfies (1)-(2) temporarily, while the ascetic saint does so in a prolonged state and achieves (3). Crucially, what this account of sublime experience demonstrates is that one does not have to arrive at 180

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(1) and (2) through abstract philosophical reflection, thereby providing an overly cognitive account that excludes aesthetic experience. Vandenabeele is right to resist this. What makes the sublime so powerful and recognizable, according to Schopenhauer, is precisely in the “immediate consciousness” (SW 2:242/WWR 1:230, emphasis mine) of (1) and (2) that it affords, philosopher or not. So far I have outlined how Schopenhauer sees meaningfulness in a particular disposition to act—i.e., a “stance”—that can result from enlightenment about the Nichtigkeit of existence (e.g., resignation in the hope for salvation). But what of the second type of meaning? The Identification Thesis holds that metaphysical insight into the fundamental unity of all things via the sublime is pleasurable insofar as we are raised above the pointless and repetitive striving of ordinary embodied existence. In affording the feeling of integration, kinship, and also of detachment from trivial concerns, the sublime acts as a stimulant against the alienation or malaise that, in Schopenhauer’s view, is an expected product of more cognitively complex forms of sentient life. For this reason, sublime objects—magnificent buildings, towering volcanoes, starry night skies, ancient forests—might be described as “sacred” because they induce (at least temporarily) a pleasurable feeling of transcendence into a more eternal mode of existence; a glimpse into something beyond ordinary experience. Contrary to a popular view concerning the value of sublime experience, this meaning-endowing potential gives us reason to believe that the sublime is not instrumentally good merely in virtue of its ability to provoke resignation (and ultimately salvation). That Schopenhauer takes the sublime to possess that ability is clearest in his estimation of tragedies, which he describes as inducing the “the highest pitch [of the sublime]’’ (SW 3:495/WWR 2:450). Schopenhauer takes tragedies to offer “significant intimation as to the nature [Beschaffenheit] of the world and of existence” (SW 2:298/WWR 1:280), and their vivid presentation of the human condition to undermine the subject’s trust in the value of life, revealing its Nichtigkeit. This is the beginning on a path that culminates in the saintly ascetic, for whom “when he views his own suffering as a mere example of the whole and … treats it as one case in a thousand … the whole of life, seen essentially as suffering, brings him to the point of resignation” (SW 2:268/WWR 1:423). But as I have suggested, there is also instrumental value in the meaning-conferring experience of elevation that the sublime affords us. The radical transformation of consciousness characteristic of the sublime has importance insofar as it speaks to “man’s need for metaphysics” (see WWR Ch.17): the deeply human yearning for existential significance. This is true even if there is also instrumental value in the practical effects of such experiences directing the subject towards negation of the will to life.13 Consequently, when Vandenabeele writes that the sublime “is a high point in our demand that the world be meaningful to us, and our attempt to come to terms with its overwhelming and distressing aspects” (Vandenabeele 2015: 128), he is correct. But it is also correct that Schopenhauer does more than just “hint” at this capacity: he has the conceptual resources to consistently declare it, even given a pessimistic framework. By exploiting the difference between value-affirmation and meaning-affirmation, and by characterizing the latter in the ways given above, we can see that any concession that Schopenhauer’s pessimism precludes a form of sublime affirmation is misplaced. Schopenhauer’s pessimism does prevent him from affirming life, if what is meant by that is “finding life and the world to be good and justified”. But the sacred—a sense of an eternal nature beyond everyday utilitarian concerns—as well as meaningful deliberation—taking up an appropriate practical stance towards the world—is not precluded by Schopenhauer’s pessimism. On the 181

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contrary, he is explicit that this is one of the profound insights of Christianity which, like all good pessimistic religions, is an allegorical expression of a truth Schopenhauer claims to demonstrate philosophically: the world is a vale of tears from which we must hope to be saved. Redemption from the cycle of vain struggles to satisfy our desires is in renunciation; a metaphysical insight about our existential condition afforded by the sublime.

12.5 Conclusion It is often claimed that atheism precludes the possibility of what is perhaps a fundamental feature of the human experience: humbling reverence for something higher or more fundamental than one’s own concerns (be they self-interested or other-regarding). But one interesting implication of the view defended up to this point is how Schopenhauer’s account of the sublime can find functional parallels with religious accounts of the sacred, thus throwing this claim into question. Many theories of the sublime have been explicitly religious, be that through holding religious ideas or concepts to be themselves sublime (e.g., God’s infinite power, intellect, or love); religious works designed to venerate God or his glory (e.g., grand cathedrals, statues, iconography); religious practices (e.g., rituals and congregations, martyrdom and sacrifice); or through interpreting natural objects as sublime qua products of God’s creation (e.g., mountains, great lakes, deep forests). The latter view, for example, was explicitly held by Shaftesbury: All Nature’s Wonders serve to excite and perfect this Idea of their Author. ’Tis here he suffers us to see, and even converse with him, in a manner to our Frailty. How glorious is it to contemplate him, in this noblest of his Works apparent to us, The System of the bigger World (Shaftesbury 1773, Part III: 370) What makes Schopenhauer’s account of the sublime and the “sacred” uniquely interesting is not so much his atheism per se; secular accounts of the sublime were already offered by the likes of Burke, Kant, Schiller, and others. Rather, it is his unrelenting pessimism which characterizes existence as nightmarish. Even those who go further than simply denying the inherent goodness of the world as a creation of benevolent deity, and see existence only in terms of Nichtigkeit and suffering, can experience a sense of the sacred, and find meaning in living in a Godless and hostile world. On this point I agree with Vandenabeele, who writes that “[e]ven though aesthetic experience is not to be identified with religious experience, some (intense) aesthetic experiences, especially those that we tend to characterize as sublime, are often hard to distinguish from religious ones” (Vandenabeele 2015: 173). One of the great insights which pervades Schopenhauer’s texts is the recognition of the deeply human need to find some significance to our existence beyond the characteristic strivings of everyday experience. It is this which traditional religious narratives at least promise in a highly evocative and vivid manner, even if (according to Schopenhauer) the veracity of such narratives are only ever allegorical in nature. Sublime experiences—as temporary moments of elevation beyond everyday concerns—speak to this need, and for that reason seem remarkably similar to the experience of objects, locations, rituals, and congregations which tend to be identified with the sacred. For this reason, Vandenabeele is right to regard Schopenhauer’s position as “quasireligious” insofar as it involves a radical transformation of consciousness: we transcend 182

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our everyday concerns and emotions orientated by our will, and go beyond the ordinary suffering-ridden experience of the illusory empirical world.14 It is this practical-existential feature of the sublime which makes Schopenhauer of potential rejuvenated interest for a contemporary culture that has largely outgrown its theistic commitments, but not the need for meaning and metaphysical significance.15

Notes 1 Julian Young identifies a third category of the sublime in Schopenhauer, namely: the feeling of “total indifference of nature to oneself” (Young 2005: 118) that is produced by solitude in nature. While I am sympathetic to this claim, it need not be pursued here. 2 As will shortly become clear, though I am generally sympathetic to Bart Vandenabeele’s (2015) critique of Shapshay’s interpretation, in places he overstates the case and tends to overlook Shapshay’s acknowledgement of this very point. As she writes: “In contrast with Kant’s account, which makes use of our theoretical-rational vocation as a source of our prideful elevation, on Schopenhauer’s account the subject’s limitations are construed more existentially than cognitively: encounters with vast nature instill in us a sense of our smallness and existential insignificance. Our frustration does not arise, as it does on Kant’s account, from our inability to grasp the totality of the representations. Instead, for Schopenhauer, we are reduced to Nichts by the sheer vastness (in space and time) of the universe” (Shapshay 2012: 497). 3 Another interesting implication is that the pleasures inherent to the Achieved Autonomy Thesis and the Identification Thesis do not obviously look to be “negative” (i.e., pleasures in the cessation of striving), which would somewhat complicate Schopenhauer’s official view about the nature of pleasure (see WWR 1 §58). 4 As Shapshay recognizes, Schopenhauer’s account of freedom has nothing to do with the power of reason which, for Kant, grounds the moral law. Instead, Schopenhauer takes the ability to detach from inclination—like the ability to act compassionately rather than egoistically, and the capacity for ascetic resignation—as a deeply mysterious process of identifying the thing in itself as will. See Shapshay (2012: 501). 5 Further evidence for the absence of any moral component might be found in comparing the striking similarities between the “sublime character” (SW 2:244/WWR 1:231) and the ascetic saint (SW 2:461–62/WWR 1:417); both of whom achieve an objective detachment from their desires (but for different periods of time). Importantly, the transcending of the will includes transcending altruistic desires, which precludes Schopenhauer’s conception of virtue in terms of compassion. The philosophical import of this comparison then, is that not only does the sublime have no necessary moral significance for Schopenhauer, but sublime experience might ultimately be inimical to morality as he conceives of it. 6 E.F.J. Payne translates Nichtigkeit as “vanity” (in the sense of something being done in vain). Both “vanity” and “nothingness” are adequate in accounting for the futility of existence as Schopenhauer conceives it. But I shall maintain the German, partly to emphasize how it uniquely functions in Schopenhauer’s account of the sublime. 7 For attention to this view and Schopenhauer’s arguments for it, see Janaway (1999); Hassan (2021). 8 Vandenabeele also states that Schopenhauer’s “hints” are developed by Nietzsche; a claim he explores in greater detail in Vandenabeele (2003). While there are parallels between the two thinkers on the issue, I am skeptical as to whether they are significant enough to overshadow the many important differences in their philosophical projects. 9 A possible way out of this would be to deny Schopenhauer’s pessimism, or at least restrict it in some degree to an earlier period of his writing. The latter strategy is explored and defended by Shapshay (2019). For criticism of this view, see Hassan (2019). 10 For an account of how aesthetic experience plays this life-affirming role in Nietzsche, and specifically its implications for the value of suffering, see Hassan (2022). 11 However, this is sometimes complicated by the ambiguity of certain passages, e.g., SW 6:108/PP 2:94 quoted above). 12 To be clear, Schopenhauer often suggests aesthetic experience more broadly is a phenomenal approximation of ascetic resignation (see WWR 1, §68). Thus, while I don’t understand the sub-

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Bibliography Brady, Emily, (2013), The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature, Cambridge University Press. Burke, Edmund, (1968) [1759, 2nd ed.], A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, J. T. Boulton (ed.), University of Notre Dame Press. Ellis, Fiona, (2017), “Schopenhauer on Love”, in C. Grau and A. Smuts (ed.), Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Love, Oxford University Press. Frauenstädt, Julius, (1848), Ueber das Wahre Verhältniss der Vernunft zur Offenbarung, Carl Wilhelm Leske. Hassan, Patrick, (2019), Review: Sandra Shapshay, Reconstructing Schopenhauer’s Ethics: Hope, Compassion, and Animal Welfare (Oxford University Press, 2019), European Journal of Philosophy, 27(3): 805–808. ——— (2021), “Striving as Suffering: Schopenhauer’s A Priori Argument for Pessimism”, Philosophia 49(4): 1487–1505. ——— (2022), “Organic Unity and the Heroic: Nietzsche’s Aestheticization of Suffering”, in Daniel Came (ed.), Nietzsche on Morality and the Affirmation of Life, Oxford University Press. Janaway, Christopher, (1999), “Schopenhauer’s Pessimism”, in C. Janaway (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer, Cambridge University Press: 318–343. Kant, Immanuel, (1987) [1790], Critique of Judgment, Werner S. Pluhar (trans.), Hackett Publishing Company. Abbr: CJ. Mannion, Gerard, (2003), Schopenhauer, Religion, and Morality, Ashgate. ——— (2020), “Schopenhauer and Christianity”, in Robert Wicks (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Schopenhauer, Oxford University Press: 401–424. Shaftesbury, (1773), Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times: An Inquiry Concerning Virtue, or Merit. The Moralists: A Philosophical Rhapsody, John Baskerville. Shapshay, Sandra, (2012a), “Schopenhauer’s Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art”, Philosophy Compass, 7(1): 11–22. ——— (2012b), “Schopenhauer’s Transformation of the Kantian Sublime”, Kantian Review, 17(3): 479–511. ——— (2019), Reconstructing Schopenhauer’s Ethics: Hope, Compassion, and Animal Welfare, Oxford University Press. ——— (2022), “The Moral Perception of Inherent Value”, in Patrick Hassan (ed.), Schopenhauer’s Moral Philosophy, Routledge. Vandenabeele, Bart, (2003), “Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and the Aesthetically Sublime”, Journal of Aesthetic Education, 37: 90–106. ——— (2015), The Sublime in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy, Palgrave Macmillan. Vasalou, Sophia, (2013), Schopenhauer and the Aesthetic Standpoint: Philosophy as a Practice of the Sublime, Cambridge University Press. Wicks, Robert, (2008), Schopenhauer, Blackwell. Young, Julian, (1987), Willing and Unwilling: A Study of the Philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, Nijhoff. ——— (2005), Schopenhauer, Routledge. ——— (2013), The Philosophy of Tragedy: From Plato to Žižek, Cambridge University Press.

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13 SCHOPENHAUER ON MUSIC Andrew Huddleston

13.1 Introduction Among musicians, Schopenhauer has long enjoyed tremendous esteem. He was a great source of inspiration to Wagner and Mahler, to name just two notable examples. And it is not difficult to see why: Schopenhauer elevates music to the rank of the highest art: Music as an art form, he says, “stands completely apart from all the others” (SW 2:302/WWR 1:283). Whereas architecture, painting, and poetry grant insight through what Schopenhauer calls the “Ideas,” music has an immediacy in relation to its content, and this content is metaphysical. It is not, like those other art forms, an “imitation or repetition of some Idea of the essence of the world,” (SW 2:302/WWR 1:283) but instead a direct window onto this essence. Schopenhauer reaches this conclusion by reflecting on our experience of music: How can it have such an immediate and powerful effect on us? His answer is that it must be tapping into the very core of things. In what follows, I give further consideration to the details of Schopenhauer’s account of music. I begin by putting his theory into the context of late 18th- and early-to-mid 19th-century musical aesthetics. He is, as we shall see, by no means an outlier in investing music with this extraordinary power of insight. I go on to consider the two main aspects of Schopenhauer’s argument: i) the negative component, namely that music does not express the Ideas, as well as ii) the positive component, namely, that music conveys the Will—the inner noumenal essence of the world. It will perhaps come as no surprise that I will be incredulous about the latter positive claim. I will also suggest that the former claim is problematic, considered within the context of Schopenhauer’s system. Once we grant that other art forms can express the Ideas, why can’t music do so as well? Schopenhauer’s exegetes have tended to focus more on his positive claim than his negative claim; I by contrast spend more time on the less-well-explored negative claim in this chapter. At points in the discussion I will try to show how Schopenhauer can be brought in dialogue with considerations from more contemporary philosophy of music around issues of musical expressivity and musical profundity. In conclusion, I will ask whether anything can be salvaged of Schopenhauer’s ambitious claims for music. Schopenhauer, I will suggest in closing, might be right about the pheDOI: 10.4324/9781003048992-16

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nomenology, if not about the metaphysics and epistemology. Music, in some of its highest examples, can leave us feeling that it has put us in touch with the essence of the world. Even if it has not succeeded at doing so, it provides one valuable framework for our appreciation and experience of music. And even if music cannot do all Schopenhauer thought it could, it might still convey the Ideas, or insight of a similar kind, if not the Will.

13.2  Intellectual Background The two most important points of historical reference in Schopenhauer’s philosophy in general are Plato and Kant. In the aesthetics of music, Plato is most concerned with the effect of various musical modes on the character and soul.1 Kant, arguably Schopenhauer’s most influential precursor, describes music as the art of the “beautiful play of sensations” (KU 5:324). Schopenhauer’s metaphysical ambitions for music are in apparent contrast to this Kantian idea.2 But they are not an especially unique position in the period between Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) and the first volume of The World as Will and Representation (1818). This is a period of thinking about music in terms of what Mark Evan Bonds aptly describes as “disclosiveness” (2014: 112). The core idea is that music is limning the ultimate structure of reality. Such an idea is in fact an old one, but gets reanimated in this period of Early German Romanticism and German Idealism (Bonds 2014). An audience of the time would not have found these claims about music to be as off-the-wall as they may seem to many philosophical readers today. Despite the fact that Schopenhauer thinks of the German Idealists as obscurantist windbags (SW 2:XX/WWR I:14), there are quite a few affinities in their philosophical positions—particularly with Schelling.3 The idea that art will somehow intimate or put us in touch with the Absolute is one of the crowning ideas in Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism (1978 [1800]), and it is elaborated further in his Philosophy of Art lectures, given in the early 1800s (1989 [1854]). About music, Schelling writes as follows: The forms of music are the forms of the eternal things insofar as they are viewed from the real perspective, for the real side of the eternal things is that side from which the infinite is formed into the finite. Yet this same informing of the infinite into the finite is also the form of music, and since the forms of art in general are the essential forms of things, the forms of music are necessarily the forms of things in themselves or of the ideas viewed completely from their real side…music is nothing other than the perceived rhythm and harmony of the visible universe itself (Schelling 1989 [1854]: §83). As we shall see, the core idea is actually rather similar to Schopenhauer’s. But Schelling’s prose, quoted above, is characteristically difficult. Schopenhauer, by contrast, was a far more of a popularizer, with a knack for writing clearly and vividly, and thus able to win enthusiastic adherents in audiences outside philosophical circles. The idea of music being an intimation of the essence of the universe was in fact so common in the 19th century that, a few decades after Schopenhauer’s WWR 1, even the seeming arch-formalist Eduard Hanslick, after inveighing against seeing music as anything other than “tonally-moving forms,” goes on to say that these forms are expressing the great movements of the universe. He closes the first edition of On the Musically Beautiful (1854) as follows: 186

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Contrary to the reproach that it lacks content, then, music has content, which is no less a spark of divine fire than the beautiful in every other art. Only by relentlessly negating any and all other “content” of music, however, can one preserve its “substance.” For no intellectual-spiritual meaning can be derived from the vague feeling that might somehow serve as the basis of these other kinds of content, whereas such spiritual-intellectual meaning can be derived from the specific configuration of tones as a free creation of Geist using nonconceptual materials capable of incorporating Geist. In the psyche of the listener, furthermore, this intellectual-spiritual substance unites the beautiful in music with all other great and beautiful ideas. It is not merely and absolutely through its own intrinsic beauty that music affects the listener, but rather at the same time as a sounding image of the great motions of the universe. Through profound and secret connections to nature, the meaning of the tones elevates itself high above the tones themselves, allowing us to feel at the same time the infinite in the works of human talent. Just as the elements of music—sound, tone, rhythm, loudness, softness—are found throughout the entire universe, so does one find anew in music the entire universe” (quoted in Bonds 2014, 184). Hanslick, it must be noted, subsequently excised this exuberant passage from later editions of the text.4 Yet this brief foray into the intellectual context is meant to show that Schopenhauer’s strong claims for music’s capacities of metaphysical insight are by no means unique to him, but very much part of the intellectual air, in the decades preceding and following him.

13.3  The Negative Claim Before we turn to Schopenhauer’s most ambitious claim for music, let’s begin with Schopenhauer’s negative claim that music doesn’t convey the Ideas. He says: “What we recognize in [music] is not an imitation [Nachbildung] or repetition of some Idea of the essence of the world” (SW 2:302/WWR 1:283).5 In this way, he contrasts music with the other main art forms, whose highest aesthetic importance consists in communicating the Ideas. Now, all forms of aesthetic experience share the basic benefit of temporarily freeing us from the pains of willing (SW 2:230–36/WWR 1:219–24, esp. 219–21). But Schopenhauer further maintains that there is cognitive value in many forms of artistic experience as well: that is to say, the arts, in differing degrees, can communicate knowledge or insight.6 Architecture, painting, and poetry present this insight in the form of the Ideas; Music also communicates insight, but does so, as we’ve said, in a way that is supposed to bypass the Ideas. Yet why does Schopenhauer think music doesn’t express the Ideas? As a preliminary matter, we need to ask: What is an Idea for Schopenhauer? By choosing this term, Schopenhauer draws on the Platonic heritage of the notion of the Forms, via the etymology (eidos/Idee), and also makes this specific philosophical connection explicit. In one important sense, the Ideas would seem to be for Schopenhauer what the Forms are for Plato. But Schopenhauer never gives us a very well-delineated theory of what Ideas are. He says they are “particular species or the original, unchanging forms and qualities of all natural bodies, inorganic no less than organic, as well as the universal forces that manifest themselves according to natural laws” (SW 2:199/WWR 1:191). He also distinguishes them from concepts.7 While both Ideas and concepts are general, apprehension of Ideas is 187

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via intuition (SW 2:251–52, 276, 287/WWR 1:238, 260, esp. 269), meaning that we have a quasi-perceptual insight into them. Schopenhauer also gives us some paradigm examples of Ideas. Many of these are of natural species kinds (specifically of plants and animals). But Ideas are not limited to natural species kinds. He, for example, suggests as well that there are Ideas of humanity (den Menschen), which he distinguishes from human beings (die Menschen) (SW 2:288/WWR 1:271). The former Idea of humanity seems to concern humans not simply as a particular distinct species of natural animal, but instead seemingly as creatures whose “inner essence” is expressed in a more complex fashion in the “interconnected series of their actions and endeavors” (SW 2:288/WWR 1:271), as, for instance, depicted in history painting, literature, and tragic drama. Moreover, Schopenhauer seems to think there are Ideas of more abstract property/quality universals as well: e.g., rigidity (WWR 1:239). There is thus a question of the extension of the notion of an Idea: Are there Schopenhauerian Ideas of all universals, or just some? And if the latter, what marks off the extension of the Ideas, as opposed to other universals? Schopenhauer does not give us a clear account of this, and we will be revisiting these issues, where relevant, in what is to come. In any event, in Schopenhauer’s metaphysical hierarchy, Ideas occupy an intermediate position between the Will and concrete particular things. In this way, his view is unlike Plato’s, which would have Forms at the top of the metaphysical hierarchy. For Schopenhauer, at the very least in WWR 1, the Will is instead the essence of reality. Ideas are “adequate objectivations” of this Will. This means that these Ideas are specific ways for the Will to be, in the form of essences or natures or universals.8 The Will is objectified into universals or kinds (i.e., Ideas), and the specific things in which these Ideas are further instantiated. There is the Idea of lion(hood), and particular lions are at a further remove still. The underlying metaphysical status of these individual particular things is not entirely clear. The world, as we experience it, is broken up into individuated things and is governed by the Principle of Sufficient Reason. Sometimes Schopenhauer’s position seems to be the phenomenalist one that they are representations for some cognizing subject. Sometimes it seems as though individual things are something vaguely akin to modes of the one underlying substance, undulating into and out of existence, as the Will ebbs and flows: It all exists, and these are just parts of what exists. At other times, he seems to sign on to an analogue of the Platonic view that the Forms (or in Schopenhauer’s case the Will and the Ideas) are somehow more fully real than concrete particular things. In one of Plato’s most famous images, particulars are like shadows, compared with the sun-like Forms and Form of the Good in particular. At other times still, Schopenhauer’s suggestion appears to be that these individual things are, in an important sense, illusory. For example, Schopenhauer’s Buddhist-inspired argument (SW 2:323–37/WWR 1 §54) against egoism is premised on the idea that the self that is the locus of concern for so many people is actually not the substantial ego that they suppose it to be. Perhaps all of these strands are compatible. But whatever the outcome of those particular metaphysical debates, this should give us a rough sense of what Schopenhauer takes the Ideas to be. Now how about the art forms that express the Ideas? What is the mechanism through which this occurs? It will be helpful for our purposes, to begin with the other art forms and then compare them to music. Painting (of the representational/figurative sort Schopenhauer has in mind), poetry, and indeed even architecture, all, according to Schopenhauer, convey the Ideas. 188

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To alter Schopenhauer’s order of presentation and start with the case of painting: In figurative painting, specific things are depicted. But in aesthetic apprehension of these things, we see beyond the particularities and can have intuitive access to the Ideas through the painting. The level of this insight tracks the sort of Ideas that we perceive, and comes in degrees based on what is being depicted. Human subjects are higher than animals which are in turn higher than plants (SW 2:271/WWR 1:255), in the sense that the Will is most adequately objectified in the former (humans), less well in the latter cases (animals and plants). In history painting—the highest depiction of humanity in the visual arts—we have access to “particular aspect[s] of the Idea of humanity” (SW 2:271/WWR 1:255). The situation is similar in the case of poetry, broadly conceived (to encompass drama and novels, etc., in addition to epic and lyric poetry). It conveys the Ideas as well, and the same hierarchy is present. “The great subject-matter of poetry is thus the revelation of the Idea that is the highest level of the will’s objecthood,” namely in humanity (SW 2:288/WWR 1:270). There are general types of subjects, scenes, characters and situations, and these shine through in the specific things presented. “In the more objective types of literature, especially the novel, epic and drama, there are two ways in particular of achieving the goal, the revelation of the Idea of humanity: first, through the apt and profoundly conceived depiction of significant characters, and second, through the invention of significant situations in which these characters can develop themselves” (SW 2:296/WWR 1:278). Though poetry does deal, of necessity, with concepts and is mediated through language, what it communicates that is of aesthetic-cognitive significance is beyond these specific concepts and is something that needs to be grasped intuitively through the reading experience (SW 2:286–7/WWR 1:269). It is crucial for Schopenhauer’s argument that the apprehended insight is intuitive in form rather than conceptual. For this reason, Schopenhauer has a negative view of allegory, because, in his view, it deflects our attention from this intuitive experience to “a totally different, abstract, non-intuitive representation lying entirely outside the artwork” (SW 2:280/WWR I:263) which the allegory puts us in mind of. Poussin’s Horae (also known as Dance to the Music of Time) is one of Schopenhauer’s main examples (SW 2:280/WWR I:264). While Schopenhauer concedes that this is a very beautiful painting, qua allegory, he thinks it is aesthetically nugatory. Rather than communicating something intuitively, it directs our attention, by conventional designations, to something outside the painting. In this case, we are—or so it is often thought—brought to think of poverty, labor, riches, and luxury, and a progressive relation among them.9 Schopenhauer claims that the allegory is in essence like having an inscription or motto, designating those concepts and drawing the mind to them. One might of course want to resist here: The specific detail of the painting might far surpass an inscription in the artistically-specific way it draws our attention to what it allegorizes. But I think Schopenhauer’s thought is that what the Idea is of needs itself to be presented to our attention, and not simply allegorized. We have to see it—the particular— in order to see through it to the universal. In poetry, the situation is reversed from that of painting. Here “what is immediately given in language is the concept, and the foremost aim of poetry is always to proceed from this immediately given concept to what is intuited, which the listener’s imagination [Phantasie] must undertake to present (SW 2:283/WWR 1:266). Ultimately, the aesthetic-cognitive goal is that of reaching intuitive insight, and allegory is thought aesthetically deficient because it does not accomplish this. Though it is a “lower” art than painting or literature, architecture can also communicate the Ideas. Yet “Architecture is distinct from the visual arts and poetry in that it does not 189

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produce an imitation but rather the thing itself: it does not repeat the Idea that is cognized, as those other arts do in which the artist lends the viewer his eyes; rather, in this case, the artist orients the object properly for the viewer and facilitates his apprehension of the Idea by making the actual individual object express its essence clearly and completely” (SW 2:256/WWR 1:242). By way of example: The building is constructed out of stone, and it brings the viewer’s attention to the qualities of this stone itself. It thereby brings “some of the Ideas at the lowest levels of the objecthood of the will more clearly into intuition, namely: gravity, cohesion, rigidity, hardness, these universal qualities of stone…” (SW 2:252/WWR 1:239). Architecture might imitate something—a column might imitate a palm tree trunk, for instance—but the key ideas in architecture do not come via this imitation. Architecture might also have symbolic or allegorical functions, but again, Schopenhauer thinks of these, for the reasons outlined above, as aesthetically deficient. At its best, architecture is acquainting us in an intuitive way, through its materials, with the Ideas. We’ve so far seen how architecture, painting, and poetry communicate the Ideas. Music, according to Schopenhauer, supposedly does not do this. Yet just a few pages after this denial, Schopenhauer says, “In the lowest notes of harmony, in the ground bass, I recognize the lowest levels of the objectivation of the will, inorganic nature, the mass of the planet… Now, further, in all the ripienos that produce harmony between the bass and the leading voice that sings the melody, I recognize the entire sequence of levels of Ideas in which the will objectifies itself” (SW 2:304–5/WWR 1:285–6). Are these Ideas not communicated through the music? Schopenhauer’s claim appears to be that these Ideas are merely gestured at analogically in the music rather than actually being something we intuit through the music. He clarifies: “Still, despite the evidence of all these analogies, we must never forget that music has only an indirect relation to them, not a direct one, because it never expresses appearance but only the inner essence, the in-itself of all appearance, the will itself.” But why, we might ask, does it not (also) express appearance? Schopenhauer himself seems to be conflicted on this point. Music can, he thinks, imitate worldly sounds and/or be coupled with an illustrative title or program, as in Haydn’s The Seasons. Schopenhauer is rather sniffy about music of this form, however. Music must not be “an imitation mediated through concepts with conscious intentionality: otherwise music would not express the inner essence, the will itself, but would instead only give an unsatisfactory imitation of the will’s appearance” (SW 2:311/WWR 1:291). But what makes its imitation of the will’s appearance unsatisfactory? Why does a visual representation (e.g., a painterly depiction of a bird) take us to the Idea of something whereas a sonic representation (e.g., an excellent imitation of a birdsong) does not, in cases where its sonic dimension is particularly significant to the sort of this it is? Granted, Schopenhauer might find this sort of music lacking in profundity. Yet couldn’t we get to the Idea of hummingbird at least as well through music than through a painting of a hummingbird? Schopenhauer might seek to put emphasis on the “mediated through concepts with conscious intentionality” (SW 2:311/WWR 1:291) point. But does this really help to distinguish what composers do from what painters and poets do? At some level, the creation in any of these media, it would seem, must be “mediated through concepts with conscious intentionality.” A painter decides to paint a vase of flowers and conceptualizes this decision in terms of the relevant concepts. The genius of the artist, according to Schopenhauer, is then to go beyond this, transcending one’s own individuality and normal conceptualization in terms of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and intuiting what is essential and expressing this (WWR 1 §36–37; SW 6:444–47/PP 2:375–78). But why could the same thing 190

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not in principle happen with an object that is sonically rather than visually represented? Furthermore, what about natural phenomena that are themselves largely sonic—a thunderstorm, for example? To be sure, Schopenhauer does not give an explicit extension of what Ideas there are. If there are ideas of other natural phenomena (roses, lions, humans), why not of thunderstorms? The crucial distinguishing feature cannot be being alive, in the ordinary sense, because Schopenhauer also thinks there are the ideas of rigidity, hardness, gravity, and so on. Why not metereological phenomena and forces? To the extent that these are sonic objects or have a significant sonic component, wouldn’t we be best acquainted with them intuitively, through music? Schopenhauer, it seems to me, does not have good grounds for his denial that music does not express the Ideas. We might of course have doubts about whether any art forms can convey Ideas (or whether there are such things as Ideas, or whether we are in a position epistemically to intuit them). But once we, in the context of Schopenhauer’s system, countenance the existence of Ideas and art’s successful communication of them, it becomes difficult to say why music isn’t (sometimes anyway) doing so as well, whatever else it may allegedly be able to do in addition vis à vis deeper metaphysical insight. Even when music is not proceeding imitatively, it can, more generally, also acquaint us with the specific qualities of sounds themselves. The case is, I think, parallel to that of architecture: it, according to Schopenhauer, can acquaint us with the qualities of its building materials. Yet if architecture can bring to our minds the ideas of gravity, cohesion, rigidity, hardness, why can music not acquaint us with qualities of timbres, dynamics, and pitches of sounds? Indeed, how else could we possibly come to have acquaintance with the putative Ideas of these sonic qualities? Schopenhauer, to be sure, does not explicitly say that there are Ideas of these acoustic qualities or properties, and could wish to deny this. But what would be the principled basis for that restriction, once it has been admitted that there are Ideas of tactile qualities such as rigidity, hardness etc? Given Schopenhauer’s specific perceptualist epistemology of Ideas, it would in fact seem that perceptible qualities in general (whether tactile, or visible, or audible) actually have the best claim to be Ideas. For they are things whose essence or nature we can arguably best grasp—perhaps only grasp—through perceptual acquaintance with them via intuition. What, moreover, about qualities or properties that require duration to be grasped? Could music not acquaint us with something being speedy or slow? Surely it will do better at this than architecture, and is at least as good, if not better, than painting and literature. Again, Schopenhauer may wish to deny that there are Ideas of these universals, but he gives no cogent justification for this. Schopenhauer, it seems to me, glides too hastily over these possibilities, because he is set on his eventual conclusion about the metaphysical insight music can offer. Yet contra Schopenhauer, music is well-positioned, indeed in some cases uniquely well-positioned, to convey a number of Ideas. Indeed, Schopenhauer seems forced to admit this in the case of beautiful music. He notes that “in the beautiful we always perceive the essential and original forms of animate and inanimate nature, thus their Platonic Ideas” (SW 6:442/PP 2:374). Insofar as we perceive beauty in music, it would seem we thereby also perceive Ideas. Finally, let us turn to a familiar (though perhaps more controversial) domain where music also might be thought to convey the Ideas: namely, Ideas of emotions. Schopenhauer sees the highest forms of painting and literature as those which acquaint us with Ideas of humanity, including with emotive states presented, such as resignation and tranquility (SW 2:275, 298–99/WWR 1:259, 280). Why is a novel or a poem giving us insight in this way, 191

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while music is not? Why doesn’t music do something similar, in the way that it presents different forms of emotional experience? There is debate in the philosophy of music about whether music can express emotion and, if so, what the right theory of that is. Eduard Hanslick, mentioned earlier, is sometimes taken to be the standard-bearer of the view that music cannot express emotion.10 The predominant position, both before Hanslick in Schopenhauer’s time and nowadays, is that music does either represent or express emotion—or, as it is sometimes formulated alternatively in more recent literature, that music is “expressive” of emotion (Kivy 1981). There are various theories of this.11 Schopenhauer, for his part, seems to be on the side of the view that music can represent or express emotion. Melody, he notes, “paints every emotion, every striving, every movement of the will” (SW 2:306/WWR 1:287). Music expresses “the many different forms of the striving of the will, but it always also expresses satisfaction by eventually regaining a harmonic interval, and, even more, the tonic” (SW 2:307/WWR 1:288). He goes on to clarify that it doesn’t express someone’s particular emotion but expresses the character of emotion more generally. Music “does not express this or that individual and particular joy, this or that sorrow or pain or horror or exaltation or cheerfulness or peace of mind, but rather joy, sorrow, pain, horror, exaltation, cheerfulness and peace of mind as such in themselves, abstractly, as it were, the essential in all these without anything superfluous, and thus also in the absence of any motives for them” (SW 2:308–9/WWR 1:289).12 If music is conveying emotions—conveying them in their generality—why is it not thereby putting us in touch, in an intuitive way, with the Idea of these emotions, specifically their general form? Perhaps Schopenhauer would reply that music is merely providing certain analogies instead. But why are these simply analogies (as compared with what we might get through painting or poetry)? Indeed, Schopenhauer’s own expressly-stated point seems to be that the music takes us to “joy, sorrow, etc. in themselves [emphasis mine]…” Isn’t this a concession that music can give intuitive insight into the Ideas after all? Indeed, it might be thought that music is particularly well-positioned to acquaint us with how, as it were, emotions feel on the inside, as opposed to representations of them. If the point of aesthetic cognition of the Ideas is to get us to grasp the nature of the emotion itself, isn’t music then in an even better position to express the Ideas of emotions?13 There is of course a puzzle about how music can give us this insight. Yet it is not as though it is much easier to see how it is supposed to work for painting or literature, on Schopenhauer’s view, since these both go beyond what is specifically imitated to take us to the Idea in general. We must remember that this is supposed to be intuitive insight, not conceptual/propositional insight. It might, I suppose, be argued that there are no Ideas of emotions. But, again, what would the principled basis for this be? If there are instances of satisfaction or of sadness, presumably there is a universal explaining this commonality. Yet what is the ontological status of such universals? Are they Ideas? If not, why not? Ideas, we must remember, are objectivations of will, on Schopenhauer’s view. If lions, rigidity, gravity, roses, human beings, humanity as such, all can be objectivations of the will (specific ways for it to be), and have Ideas corresponding to them, it would be downright bizarre to deny that emotions can be as well, given the nature of what the Will is supposed to be, and what emotions by their nature are. Emotions and Will are, after all, prima facie much more related than roses or rigidity and the Will. In summary, the negative argument Schopenhauer levels is not well-founded. He denies that music can put us in touch with the Ideas, but his own views suggest that in fact, it can 192

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in four sorts of cases: Ideas of sonic objects, Ideas of sonic qualities, Ideas of emotions—and through the Ideas necessarily conveyed when music is beautiful. Even if Schopenhauer is right that music is also putting us in touch with the metaphysical core of things, it might be doing this as well. This point is important to make, it seems to me, because it can help establish that even if we don’t accept Schopenhauer’s more ambitious arguments for music’s capacity for metaphysical insight, we might nonetheless find music might be able to do something more modest (but still rather important) within the context of his system. Schopenhauer’s better point seems to me to be that music’s aesthetic value is not limited to or exhausted by its communication of the Ideas. It might be thought this was all he was trying to say all along, only not very precisely. In other words, communicating the Ideas is not what music at its best does.

12.4  The Positive Claim I would now like to turn to Schopenhauer’s positive argument for what he thinks music at its best does, namely putting us in touch with the metaphysical heart of things. The other arts, he says, “speak of the shadows, whereas music speaks of the essence” (SW 2:304/WWR 1:285). Music bypasses the ideas and expresses the inner core of the world. So now we might ask: How does Schopenhauer reach this conclusion? After all, pure instrumental music, from one perspective, can look like it is just a matter of form, with no significant extramusical content, let alone this sort of metaphysical content. Schopenhauer cites Leibniz’s remark that music is an exercise in mathematics where the mind doesn’t know it is doing arithmetic (SW 2:302/WWR 1:283).Yet Schopenhauer is dismissive of this view: If this were true, the pleasure we get from music would not, he claims, be any different from the sort of pleasure we get when the mathematical sums come out right. And if our relation to music were only like this, we wouldn’t be able to account for the profound experience we have of music, “the heartfelt joy with which we see the deepest recesses of our being [Wesen] given voice” (SW 2:302/WWR 1:283). We should, I suggest, see Schopenhauer as making a sort of abductive inference, which we might call the argument from experienced profundity. What would explain this profound experience we have of music? Music must be more than formal patterns; it must be getting at something very deep, namely, he thinks, at ultimate metaphysics. Modifying Leibniz’s remark, Schopenhauer says “‘Music is an unconscious exercise in metaphysics, in which the mind does not know that it is philosophizing’” (SW 2:313/WWR 1:292). Schopenhauer thus posits the explanatory conclusion that music’s content is the Will, which is our essence, and the essence of all that exists. He admits that while this conclusion is satisfactory for him, it is incapable of proof: This explanation is entirely sufficient for me as well as satisfactory for my investigation, and it will be equally insightful to those who have followed me thus far and agreed with my view of the world; nonetheless, I recognize that the explanation is fundamentally incapable of proof, since it assumes and lays down a relationship between music as representation [Vorstellung] and something that can fundamentally never be a representation (SW 2:303/WWR 1:284). Even if we grant this abductive line of argument, we might wonder, however, why we should reach all the way for the metaphysical explanation, instead of something more explanato193

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rily modest. By way of comparison: There is a parallel debate in contemporary philosophy of music surrounding musical profundity. Some think, roughly in the vein of Schopenhauer, that in order to be profound, music would need to be about something—to have some subject matter—that is itself profound, and to treat that subject matter in a suitable way (Ridley 2004; Dodd 2014). This is in line with what we tend to think about the non-musical arts. A novel is profound in virtue of the depth of its reflection on significant themes.14 Others, by contrast, think there is a disanalogy with music. Instrumental music—at least where there’s no text or program—is not about anything. We can explain our experience of profundity as a reaction to the formal features of the music, which does not represent, express, or point to anything beyond itself (Kivy 1991). But even for the former camp, it should be noted that we don’t need to resort to metaphysical explanation to account for the profundity. We might thus think that Schopenhauer has overreached in drawing this conclusion. He could have explained our profound reaction to music by seeing it as, for example, suitably expressive of emotion. Thus, in order to explain music’s profundity, we needn’t accept the stark dichotomy that either it is abstract form only or giving us insight into ultimate metaphysics. But if we put aside the issue of how Schopenhauer argues for this conclusion, what actually is the content of Schopenhauer’s claim? What does Schopenhauer mean when he says that music is, in one translation, a “copy” of the Will itself [Abbild des Willens selbst], or in another potential translation, a “portrayal” or an “image” of the Will itself (SW 2:304/WWR 1:285)? One natural reading here is that music is a representation of the will itself (emphasis mine) because it is not mediated through the Ideas, as other forms of artistic representation are. But it is still a kind of representation, wherein something (musical notes, musical phrases) stands for something else (the Will). Historically, a common and influential theory of how something represents something else is by resembling it.15 The picture thus represents the Duke of Wellington because it resembles him in key aspects. And perhaps Schopenhauer will want to say that music resembles the strivings of the Will and its representation thereby gives us intuitive insight into the nature of the Will. One of the main philosophical challenges here is that the will, if understood as Schopenhauer’s version of the Kantian thing-in-itself, is arguably beyond representation.16 Indeed, that seems quasi-definitional. Perhaps, though, we could simply understand this limitation to mean that the thing-in-itself cannot be represented, in that it cannot be conceptualized in terms of the cognition we have in ordinary experience. Music, Schopenhauer could be claiming, is the only adequate representative medium. Yet how could we compare music’s representation of the Will to the Will itself, to know that it was resembling it in an adequate way? At the time the Duke of Wellington was still around, people could compare the painting of the Duke of Wellington to the Duke himself and confirm that it was an adequate representation. But what is the analogue with music? Schopenhauer here, I take it, relies on his argument that we have introspective access to the Will. This gives us one form of insight into the Will, and supposedly enables us to recognize the resemblance between music and the Will.17 But could we be justified in thinking there is indeed such a resemblance?18 And even if there were such a resemblance, could music really be said to be giving us insight?19

13.5 Conclusion Schopenhauer, as we saw, admits that his ambitious theory of musical metaphysics is not verifiable, and that people will simply have to go along with him on this and seek to test 194

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his hypothesis through their own experience of music. In answer to this sort of worry, Schopenhauer’s line seems to be a form of quietism. He acknowledges that he can’t prove his theory of musical metaphysics, but is still willing to accept it. The more hard-nosed response to these theories would be a kind of skepticism. One might think that music is not doing what Schopenhauer supposes it is, or that there is very little evidence that it is doing so. No doubt more readers, among contemporary philosophical audiences anyway, will be drawn to this skepticism rather than to Schopenhauer’s quietism. But let’s bracket the question of whether Schopenhauer is right about the ambitious metaphysics he presents. He may nonetheless, I think, be right about the experience, or at least about what can be our experience of music. We might, in the case of certain pieces, think of it in the metaphysical terms Schopenhauer does. But it needn’t, I suggest, be the case that the music is actually delivering us insight, in order for us to engage fruitfully in this sort of listening experience. We can simply imagine that music is expressing such a content, while knowing (or strongly suspecting) that it has no such capability. Fictions are the stockin-trade of much aesthetic experience to begin with. So why not here as well? Mightn’t it enhance such an experience for us to be able to conceive it in these imaginative terms? We could listen to the music as if it is giving us this sort of profound metaphysical insight. In one sense, this retreat to imagination and fiction could inspire disappointment for the metaphysician of music. After all, an experience in which we get the real goods is more valuable than one in which we do not. But in the aesthetic domain, we might be concerned just as much about the richness and quality of the experience itself. Schopenhauer would, I think, have done well to stick to the Kantian line that metaphysical insight, of the sort he was after, is unreachable. But music at least gives us an intimation of what it would be like to reach it (Cf. Tanner 1992: 200). 20

Notes 1 Plato, Republic 398–403. See Janaway (1995: 102–103). 2 Kant is often taken to be the founding father of musical formalism, but this view has recently met with persuasive challenges in Young (2020). Cf. also Matherne (2014). 3 For a nice discussion of these affinities, see McAuley (2019). 4 Bonds (2014: 183). Hanslick’s claim, even in the later editions, remains that music has a higher content (a spiritual-intellectual content) and that attempts to formulate this content programmatically or emotively end up bastardizing it. 5 Cf. SW 3:512/WWR 2:465, where the position is reiterated: “Unlike all the other arts, music does not present the Ideas or the levels of objectivation of the will, but rather presents the will itself.” 6 Janaway (1996); Guyer (1996). 7 For further discussion, see Hein (1966), Hamlyn (1980: Ch. 6),White (2008), and Shapshay (2012: 14-15). 8 Julian Young gives a rather metaphorical explanation as follows: “According to this, the Platonic ideas are individual acts of will of the form: ‘Let there be lions’, ‘Let there be antelopes’ and so on.” (2005: 77). 9 As it happens, this is not entirely clear. See Bull (2005). 10 It is unclear whether this in fact what Hanslick was claiming. See Hanslick (2018 [1854]). His view instead appears to be concerned with whether music is significant or valuable because of the emotions it communicates. For further discussion, see Kivy (1990). 11 Levinson (1996: 90–128) offers one theory and a good overview of other views, as does Kivy (1981), Kivy (2001: Ch. 3). 12 When defining motive in relation to the Will, the motive is, in Schopenhauer’s terms, both the “occasion” and “material” of the Will—a cognition that has in view what the Will aims at, and that causes this act of Will (SW 4:14/FW 40).

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Andrew Huddleston 13 Note the apt skepticism in Tanner (1998: 49–50) about whether we can really understand emotions in abstraction in this way. Cf. also Budd (1985). 14 In Schopenhauer’s defense, it can sometimes seem as though literature and painting are much better situated when it comes to profundity. And granted, it is easier to tell, in the case of these art forms, what they are about. But when it comes to distilling what they have communicated, matters are far from straightforward. Any attempt at restating the theme or message of great painting, poem, or novel will almost inevitably end up being banal. On Schopenhauer’s view, the insight we get from these art forms will resist conceptual articulation and be intuitive, in the form of the Ideas. Cf. Dodd (2014). 15 This view is no longer as prominent, thanks to the objections levelled by Goodman (1976), though revised forms of the view still have notable contemporary adherents. A key rival theory, which would seem to have little traction for Schopenhauer in this context, is conventionalist. A star, for instance, represents a capital city on a map, because there is a convention to that effect, and words (phrases, sentences) represent things because of various conventions that underwrite this. 16 See the helpful discussion of this problem in Birtles (2021). 17 The relevant argument (see SW 2:130–33/WWR 1 §21–22) should be illicit by Schopenhauer’s own lights, and there is controversy about whether Schopenhauer in fact held such a view. He back-pedals from it decades later in WWR 2. See discussion on this point in Young (2005: 89–94) and Janaway (1989: 196–200). 18 See Goehr (1996) for a discussion of the limits of philosophizing about music. Cf. Alperson (1981). 19 Schopenhauer claims that music is the “true universal language which is everywhere understood” (SW 6:457/PP 2:387). 20 My thanks to Chris Janaway and Tim Stoll for their many helpful comments and suggestions.

References Alperson, P. (1981) “Schopenhauer and Musical Revelation,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 40: 155–166. Birtles, T. (2021) “In What Sense Can Music Be A Direct Representation of the Will in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy,” MA Thesis, Birkbeck College, University of London. Bonds, Mark Evan (2014) Absolute Music: The History of an Idea. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Budd, Malcolm (1985) Music and the Emotions: The Philosophical Theories. London: Routledge. Bull, M. (2005) The Mirror of the Gods: Classical Mythology in Renaissance Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dodd, J. (2014) “The Possibility of Profound Music,” British Journal of Aesthetics 54: 299–322. Goehr, L. (1996) “Schopenhauer and the Musicians: An Inquiry Into the Sounds of Silence and the Limits of Philosophizing About Music,” in D. Jacquette (ed.) Schopenhauer, Philosophy, and the Arts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goodman, N. (1976) The Languages of Art. Indianapolis: Hackett. Guyer, P. (1996) “Pleasure and Knowledge in Schopenhauer’s Aesthetics,” in D. Jacquette (ed.) Schopenhauer, Philosophy, and the Arts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hamlyn, D.W. (1980) Schopenhauer. London: Routledge. Hanslick, E. (2018 [1854]) On the Musically Beautiful, L. Rothfarb and C. Landerer (trans.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hein, H. (1966) “Schopenhauer and Platonic Ideas,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 4: 133–144. Janaway, C. (1989) Self and World in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ——— (1995) Images of Excellence: Plato’s Critique of the Arts. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ——— (1996) “Knowledge and Tranquility: Schopenhauer on the Value of Art,” in D. Jacquette (ed.) Schopenhauer, Philosophy, and the Arts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, I. (2000 [1790]) Critique of the Power of Judgment, P. Guyer and E. Matthews (trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kivy, P. (1981) The Corded Shell: Reflections on Musical Expression. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ——— (1990) “What was Hanslick Denying?” Journal of Musicology 8: 3–18. ——— (1991) Music Alone: Philosophical Reflections on the Purely Musical Experience. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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Schopenhauer on Music ——— (2001) An Introduction to the Philosophy of Music. New York: Oxford University Press. Levinson, J. (1996) The Pleasures of Aesthetics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Matherne, S. (2014) “Kant’s Expressive Theory of Music,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 72: 129–145. McAuley, T. (2019) “Ethics,” in S. Collins, P. Watt, and M. Allis (eds.) Oxford Handbook of Music and Intellectual Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press. Ridley, A. (2004) The Philosophy of Music: Theme and Variations. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Schelling, F.W.J. (1978 [1800]) System of Transcendental Idealism, P. Heath (trans.). Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press. ——— (1989 [1859]), The Philosophy of Art, ed. and trans. Douglas W. Stott. University of Minnesota Press, §83. Shapshay, S. (2012) “Schopenhauer’s Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art,” Philosophy Compass 7: 11–22. Tanner, M. (1992) “Metaphysics and Music,” in A. Phillips Griffiths (ed.) The Impulse to Philosophise. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——— (1998) Schopenhauer: Metaphysics and Art. London: Phoenix. White, F. (2008) “Schopenhauer and Platonic Ideas,” in B. Vandenabeele (ed.) A Companion to Schopenhauer. Chichester: Blackwell. Young, J. (2005) Schopenhauer. Abingdon: Routledge. Young, J.O. (2020) “Kant’s Musical Antiformalism,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 78: 171–181.

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14 THE MORAL WEIGHT OF ART IN SCHOPENHAUER Sandra Shapshay

14.1 Introduction Connections between moral and artistic value have pre-occupied philosophers, on and off, at least since Plato and Aristotle, but have really exercised Anglo-American aestheticians for the past twenty or so years (e.g., Gaut 2007, Carroll 1996 & 2013, Kieran 2003, John 2006, Eaton 2012, Harold 2011 & 2020, Anderson & Dean 1998, Clavel-Vásquez 2018, Stecker 2005, among others). At the heart of this debate, are two main questions, helpfully distinguished by Paul Guyer (Guyer 2008, p. 4). First is the ethical criticism question: Is such criticism of art legitimate; that is, do moral flaws in a work count thereby as artistic flaws and mutatis mutandis for moral merits of a work of art? And second, is the question of “aesthetic education;” that is, do artworks in general have an edifying, corrupting, or ethically neutral influence on us? One frustration of contemporary Anglo-American treatments of these issues is that they tend to take place in something of a moral-theoretical vacuum. Most thinkers do not take a stand on matters of moral theory; they aim to remain as agnostic as possible, relying simply on widely shared, non-controversial moral intuitions such as “cruelty is bad” or “racism is morally offensive.” Prima facie, this seems like a sensible, cautious policy. Yet, without signing on to some worked-out moral theory or other, one does not really plumb the depths of these questions concerning moral and artistic interaction, since one thereby operates without an adequate conception of moral value. A distinctive advantage, then, of exploring these questions with respect to thinkers like Kant and Schopenhauer is that they are treated within the context of an entire philosophical system. Of course, people will quarrel with parts (or perhaps the entirety) of these systems, but when trying to interrogate deeply the relationship between aesthetic and moral value, it’s instructive at least to have a system! Exactly where Kant’s aesthetics and philosophy of art stands with respect to the ethical criticism and aesthetic education questions is, as one would expect, complicated but ultimately pretty clear. A lot of scholarly work has been done on this topic (Guyer 1996; Henrich 1992; Cohen 1982; Zuckert 2007; See also Baxley 2005; Cannon 2011; and on the sublime in particular, Crowther 1989 and Clewis 2009). Far less clear is what 198

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Schopenhauer’s a­ esthetics has to say about these questions: This is the topic I shall aim to tackle in this paper. Where does Schopenhauer’s philosophy stand on the legitimacy of ethical criticism of art, and whether art, in general, is morally educative? Ultimately, I shall argue, that Schopenhauer, like Kant, makes no real trouble for the ethical criticism of art, and this despite the fact that for both thinkers aesthetic experience is disinterested (or, in Schopenhauer’s formulation, will-less [willenlos; interesselos]). But the reasons for the legitimacy of ethical criticism differ between them. On the second question—aesthetic education—I shall argue that there is a striking difference between Kant and Schopenhauer, and one that makes Schopenhauer the philosopher who, ironically, goes further than Kant in the direction of autonomism, in theorizing a greater separation of the moral and aesthetic realms in nineteenth-century aesthetics.

14.2  The Ethical Criticism Question: Kant as autonomist? In the process of offering an analysis of the pure judgment of beauty, Kant famously separates the pleasure in the pure judgment of taste from the moral realm as well as from the realms of practical and theoretical concerns. This is because, pure judgments of taste according to Kant are based entirely on a subject’s response to perceptual form, and the pleasure arising from the free-play of the imagination and understanding in the judging of that form. Thus, such pleasure is autonomous from all manner of interest: moral, utilitarian, religious, political, etc. as well as from concepts of what the object is supposed to be. For these reasons, Kant has been hailed as the father of formalism and autonomism in fine art. But this attribution is too quick, for, as Paul Guyer has rightly stressed, Kant, as well as other eighteenth-century theorists of the disinterestedness of the aesthetic, “did not intend to make a problem for ethical criticism of art” and did not argue for “the autonomy of art and the judgment of art from all ethical concerns and criticism” (Guyer 2008: 16, emphasis added). Indeed, Kant was not an opponent of the ethical criticism of art for two main reasons: First, he seems to hold that judgments about fine art [schöne Kunst] are all impure judgments of taste insofar as we can only make judgments of “adherent beauty” [anhängende Schönheit] not judgments of “free beauty” [freie Schönheit] about art, except perhaps for a narrow class or more ornamental works of art like wallpaper borders and free fantasias of music which can be judged in abstraction from the concept “work of fine art” (I should note that this claim is controversial; for defense see Shapshay, forthcoming). In other words, in judging paradigmatic works of art, Kant thinks that one always, and it seems ineluctably, takes into consideration the concept of art as well as notions of the perfection of the work’s kind or sub-kind. This is in contrast to aesthetic judging of free beauties of nature, e.g., a rose, where Kant thinks that one can easily take off one’s “botanist hat,” as it were, to engage with it as pure form rather than as a beautiful specimen of its kind. Second, the purpose of fine art for Kant is to express content, in the form of “aesthetic ideas”—these are sensible representations, which rouse the imagination to engage in a great deal of open-ended thought.1 Further, aesthetic ideas are typically moral ideas for Kant, and he goes so far as to suggest that if a work of art lacks specifically moral content, the subject will find the work ultimately trivial or worse repulsive, writing “[i]f the beautiful arts are not combined, whether closely or at a distance, with moral ideas, which alone carry with them a self-sufficient satisfaction” then they will “make the spirit dull” and the object will become “loathsome” (KU 5:326). 199

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Thus, with respect to Kant’s theory of art, it is largely moral content, and the subject’s reflection on and response to that content, that is integral to genuinely artistic-aesthetic experience. With these two elements of Kant’s theory of fine art—that (1) judgments about art are (merely) adherent judgments of beauty, and (2) genuine fine art involves the expression of moral-content-full aesthetic ideas—he really invites ethical criticism.

14.3  The Ethical Criticism Question: Where does Schopenhauer stand? It’s trickier to see where Schopenhauer stands on the ethical criticism question because he self-consciously moves away from Kant’s talk of aesthetic “judging” toward a discussion of “aesthetic experience” more broadly. As is well known, there are two necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for aesthetic experience: (1) the subjective condition—the state of “pure contemplation” [reine Kontemplation] of a natural object, environment or work of art, which he describes further as (i) pleasurable (though mixed with pain in experiences of the sublime), (ii) involving the suppression of the perceiving subject’s individuality (iii) consisting in the temporary liberation of cognition from service to the individual will-to-life. (2) the objective condition—the perception of Ideas, “the original, unchanging forms and qualities of natural bodies, inorganic no less than organic, as well as the universal forces that manifest themselves according to natural laws” (SW 2:199/WWR 1: 191). Or in the exceptional case of music, the perception of a copy of the Will itself—via the expression of universal feelings and strivings, shorn of particular context or motive. This characterization of aesthetic experience shows it to have two main values: hedonic (the pleasure of will-less contemplation) and cognitive (in perception of the essential features of the world). The value of natural beauty and low forms of art in Schopenhauer’s hierarchy like architecture and landscape architecture tend to derive more from its hedonic power; while the value of the higher arts in the hierarchy—especially painting, poetry and drama—tends to be more cognitive (Shapshay, Cambridge Critical Guide, forthcoming). Accordingly, Schopenhauer writes, the “true goal of painting, and art in general” is “to facilitate our grasp of the (Platonic) Ideas of the essence of the world” (SW 3:481–2/WWR 2:439;). And an art form is placed higher in the hierarchy of the arts, the more it enables perception of higher (more complex) objectivations of the will. Thus, at the top of the hierarchy of the arts (save music, which is strictly speaking off the hierarchy altogether since, for Schopenhauer, it bypasses the Ideas and expresses or “copies” the will directly) is tragic drama because it portrays the Idea of humanity—the most complex and thus highest objectification of the will—in its most objective light. But what does this picture of aesthetic experience and aesthetic value mean for the ethical criticism of artworks for Schopenhauer? Since the main purpose of any work of art for Schopenhauer is to facilitate our grasp of the essential features of the world, for instance, the Idea of gravity, light, plant life, all the way up the great chain of being to the Idea of humanity, it seems that criticism might take one of two forms: (1) Criticism of how well or badly a work facilitates our grasp of any given Platonic Idea. Call this facilitation criticism. 200

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A work might fail on this axis in two main ways. First—and this is quite explicitly handled in Schopenhauer’s aesthetics—a work of visual art might offer us a concept [Begriff] rather than an Idea [Idee; Platonische Idee]. On Schopenhauer’s view, a concept is a cognitive abstraction, it is a “unity reassembled from plurality by means of the abstraction of our reason.” (SW 2:277/WWR 1:261); whereas the Idea is “unity shattered into multiplicity through the temporal and spatial form of our intuitive apprehension.” (SW 2:277/WWR 1:261). In this way, Schopenhauer likens the Idea to a “living and developing organism” that we can perceive when we will-lessly contemplate nature, the world, life itself or via the productions of the artist. From the Idea we derive intuitive, particular, essential content about the world. By contrast, Schopenhauer likens the concept to a “dead receptacle” from which we “cannot take out more (through analytic judgments) than we have put in (through synthetic reflection).” (SW 2:277/WWR 1:261).2 So, for example, take an allegorical painting like Giovanni Bellini’s Allegory of Winged Fortune (Fig 14.1). In order to understand this painting, one must know the contemporary associations of the iconography. According to art critic, Matilde Battistini, the blindfolded figure’s “shock of hair in front” and baldness in back symbolizes the god Kairos who “embodies opportunity which can only be seized when coming toward you” (Battistini 2005, p. 312) not once it has passed you by. Further, the blindfold represents the arbitrariness in fortune’s favors and misfavors. The “winged demon” symbolizes ill fate, and so on.

Figure 14.1  Giovanni Bellini, Allegory of Winged Fortune 1490, Venice, Gallerie dell’ Accademia (Wikimedia Commons)

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What Schopenhauer objects to in such allegorical paintings is that they are works that aim to express a concept—here, fortune or luck—rather than an Idea: “consequently [the painting] directs the mind of the spectator away from the intuitive representation being presented to a totally different, abstract, non-intuitive representation lying entirely outside of the artwork.” (SW 2:280/WWR 1:263). Qua allegory, the painting is objectionable because it is essentially doing the job of a written inscription, and is thus inartistic, because the goal of art (save music) is to “communicate the apprehended Idea” to another mind, intuitively. By contrast, allegory is actually fine for Schopenhauer in poetry (and literature more generally) because words and concepts are the mediums of these linguistic arts. But even here the aim is to provoke the reader or listener’s imagination through simile, metaphor, parable and allegory in order to “evoke something intuitive” (SW 2:283/WWR 1:267), namely, an Idea. Schopenhauer likens the well-functioning of the rhetorical arts to chemistry: by mixing two liquids (conceptual material) the precipitate (intuitive knowledge of Ideas) comes out by way of the reader/auditor’s imagination. The second main way in which a work might fail on the axis of facilitation criticism, is not one that Schopenhauer, to the best of my knowledge, ever really countenances, but which seems to be a logical option on his aesthetic theory. This is the case where the work expresses an Idea rather than a concept, but it does not enable the aesthetic subject to intuit it very well, say, if the work is extremely difficult, like James Joyce’s Ulysses. In this case, the imagination of the reader is extremely taxed, to the point where—to recapitulate Schopenhauer’s chemistry metaphor above—it is very difficult for the liquids to form a precipitate of intuitive knowledge in the subject’s mind. A second form that criticism might take in Schopenhauer’s aesthetics is: (2) Criticism of the veridicality of the “Ideas” on offer in the work. Call this veridicality criticism. This would get at whether the artwork has expressed a veridical Idea, that is, a true, essential, intuitively perceptible feature of the world. Thus, it may be the case that a work, say, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice facilitates very well a perception of a particular vision of romantic love, a love that overcomes many obstacles and will prove ultimately quite satisfying for the lovers; in this way, the novel may succeed in terms of “facilitation” insofar as it succeeds in getting us to perceive vividly an Idea of romantic human love. But it might fail on the veridicality axis by giving us an overly rosy picture of romantic love. Schopenhauerian criticism on this score would hold that the Idea of love on offer in the novel falsifies the essence of human romantic love—by hiding the inevitable disappointment that comes from even the most promising, mature love affair. We might capture this criticism in more familiar terms as the artistic vice of “sentimentality.” Now veridicality criticism may or may not amount to ethical criticism, depending on whether the Ideas on offer have something to do with morality. But the Idea of humanity—the preoccupation par excellence of several art forms for Schopenhauer—will often implicate moral ideas. For instance, a tragedy like King Lear, is replete with moral ideas about human life. It presents Cordelia as an innocent, wise, truly loving and thus noble character. We are encouraged to have compassion for her undeserved suffering. It presents a deeply egoistic Lear, whose arrogance and love of flattery puts in motion the tragic proceedings, and we are meant to lament, fear and feel some compassion ultimately for his fate. It presents also cruel characters like Edmund, whom we are meant to fear and condemn. Now, for Schopenhauer, 202

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King Lear is in part a great work of art because it facilitates the perception of these veridical, essential moral features of the world. And in an ethical-critical vein, a critic can judge that this tragedy is great in part because it facilitates the recognition of moral truths about the world, by the lights of Schopenhauer’s ethics of compassion. But let’s say Shakespeare had written a different version of King Lear, let’s call it King Beer, that had instead expressed the notion that Cordelia’s compassionate love was just plain stupid; or that Lear’s egoism and love of flattery was praiseworthy; or that Edmund’s cruelty was exciting and admirable. In this case, Schopenhauer’s aesthetic theory would recommend negative, ethical criticism of this work on the grounds that the moral ideas on offer in it are false. Because a work of art’s purpose is to facilitate our perception of true, essential features of the world—Ideas––and King Beer facilitates perception of morally false ideas as part of the Idea of Humanity, the work would thereby be a deeply flawed qua work of art. It is important to note, however, that on Schopenhauer’s view, while ethical flaws would constitute aesthetic flaws, they wouldn’t be aesthetic flaws specifically because of their immorality, but rather because the Ideas on offer are false. So, ultimately, a work of art that involves moral ideas for Kant and Schopenhauer, may be legitimately criticized ethically if those moral ideas are false. For Kant, the rationale for such criticism is mediated through the imaginative free play that an artwork is meant to facilitate and the imaginative resistance that a spectator of sound moral cognition would mount against such false moral ideas, thus diminishing or even blocking free play (See E.H. Tuna, forthcoming). In other words, for Kant, if the moral ideas are false, e.g., a work expresses and endorses the idea that, say, the “ends always justify the means,” then this will diminish free play in a suitable (non-vicious) spectator, thus undermining the success of the work’s overall purpose. A moral failing is thereby also an artistic failing via this roundabout route. For Schopenhauer, the link between false moral ideas and an artistic flaw is actually more direct. If the moral Ideas purveyed by a work are false, the work is ipso facto, artistically flawed because the main purpose of a work of art is to express true Ideas. And the veridical criticism in this case would constitute ethical criticism, but really only under the umbrella of cognitive criticism. In the end, Schopenhauer is not so much an ethicist as he is a cognitivist: the problem with morally false Ideas in art is that they are false rather than immoral per se. In other words, for Schopenhauer, ethical criticism piggybacks on cognitive criticism.

14.4  Kant on Aesthetic Education Despite painstakingly separating the pleasure in pure aesthetic judgments from moral and other concerns, Kant drew some very suggestive connections between the overall domains of aesthetics and ethics:

• Interest in the beauty of nature (though not in art), for Kant, is the mark of a morally good soul.

• The experience of the sublime—even more than beauty—awakens the subject to her rational-moral vocation.3 • The experience of the beautiful and the sublime, paradigmatically in nature, constitutes moral preparation, for “the beautiful prepares us to love something, even nature, without interest; the sublime, to esteem it, even contrary to our (sensible) interest” (KU 5:267). 203

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• Works of fine art in expressing aesthetic ideas, give sensible form to moral ideas (KU 5:356)

• The experience of imaginative freedom in the (pure) judgment of beauty constitutes a

symbol of morality (KU 5:351–55), for the autonomy of the pure aesthetic judgment symbolizes the autonomy of the good will.

The last connection—beauty as the symbol of morality—culminates the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” and seems to be the most important connection. Guyer, for one, has argued that this is “the heart of Kant’s connection between aesthetics and morality”: “the view that it is only by preserving its freedom from direct constraint by concepts, even didactic concepts of morality itself, that the experience of beauty can serve the purpose of giving us a palpable experience of freedom, which is its deepest service to the needs of morality.” (Guyer 1996, 18). Indeed, Kant underscores this importance of pure aesthetic judgment insofar as here “judgment does not find itself subjected to a heteronomy from empirical laws” rather, “concerning objects of such a pure liking it legislates to itself, just as reason does regarding the power of desire.” (KU 5:353). For these reasons, on the aesthetic education question, I shall focus on how this symbolic connection in Kant is transformed in Schopenhauer’s aesthetics.

14.5  Schopenhauer on Aesthetic Education In contrast to Kant, Schopenhauer is rather laconic on the morally educative function of aesthetic experience in general and artworks in particular. At the end of Book III in WWR I and in his discussion of tragic drama, however, we do get a sense of the ways in which aesthetic experience connects to the ethical (broadly understood). In his summation of Book III, Schopenhauer avers that his lengthy discussion of art was needed in order to defend the “importance and high value of art (which are seldom sufficiently recognized)” (SW 2:315/WWR 1:294). Art importantly allows one to cognize the world as representation “on its own by breaking [cognition] free from the will, letting it be the only thing occupying one’s consciousness” (SW 2:315/WWR 1:294); art is thus the “the camera obscura that shows objects with greater purity and allows them to be surveyed and summarized more readily, the play within a play, Hamlet’s stage upon the stage.” (SW 2:315/WWR 1:295). In addition to art’s affording “a meaningful spectacle [Schauspiel]” (SW 2:315/WWR 1:295), Schopenhauer claims that aesthetic experience in general is “the most joyful and the only innocent side of life” (SW 2:315/WWR 1:294). The connections of the aesthetic to morality here seem to take two forms then: (1) In affording a “meaningful spectacle” we might take away important lessons including moral lessons from artworks. (2) Aesthetic experience in the world is “innocent” Let me address the innocence point first. Aesthetic experience is “innocent” for Schopenhauer, it seems, because as aesthetic subjects, we do not actively will. In not actively willing, we do not harm or cause suffering to

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others. We perceive the world merely as knowers rather than as sufferers. Insofar as aesthetic experience then constitutes a break from our normal egoistic strivings in the world, we are thus “innocent.” But note that while aesthetic subject may be “innocent” she is not described further as “morally good.” This makes good sense, within Schopenhauer’s system, because a moral subject does not look upon the world as a mere, will-less knower; rather, a moral subject looks upon others with compassion and is motivated to act so as to relieve or prevent the other’s suffering. She is a “co-sufferer” rather than a will-less knower. Thus, the aesthetic stance on the world might be innocent—because it is better than an egoistic or even worse a malicious stance on the world—but it is not itself a moral attitude for Schopenhauer. It is important to underscore that, for Schopenhauer, only actions done from the motive of compassion—that is, only actions undertaken out of the feeling of “suffering with” another, in order to prevent or alleviate the suffering of the other—have any moral worth. This is the main claim for which Schopenhauer argues in On the Basis of Morality and I shall return to this in what follows. But might aesthetic perception and knowledge lead to someone’s becoming a more compassionate agent? In other words, might aesthetic experience constitute a propaedeutic for a moral attitude and corresponding actions in Schopenhauer’s thought? The closest we see Schopenhauer coming to this position is when he discusses the effect of the best kinds of tragedies, for him. These are the ones where the misfortune … [is] introduced simply by means of people’s positioning with respect to each other, through their relationships … [This type] shows us the greatest misfortune not as an exception, not as something brought about by rare circumstances or monstrous characters, but rather as something that develops effortlessly and spontaneously out of people’s deeds and characters, almost as if it were essential, thereby bringing it terrifyingly close to us … then we shudder as we feel ourselves already in the middle of hell. (SW 2:300–301/WWR 1:281–2). Now we might think that the morally salutary part of this experience is that tragedies arouse compassion, the moral emotion for Schopenhauer. But the arousing of compassion is not the ultimate moral purpose of tragedy for him; rather, it is in the service of the ultimate end: To prod subjects toward resignation.4 Thus he writes in WWR 2, Ch. 37, The horrors on the stage confront him with the bitterness and worthlessness of life and hence with the nothingness of all his striving: the effect of this impression must be that he becomes aware, if only in an obscure feeling, that it would be better to tear his heart free from this life, to turn his willing away, not to love the world and life (SW 3:497/WWR 2:452) And in this way, the effect of tragedy is analogous to the effect of the dynamic sublime, since like this, it elevates us above the will and its interests and then brings us around to the point

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where we take pleasure in the sight of something precisely repugnant to our will … [it involves] the dawning of the recognition that the world, that life cannot afford us true satisfaction, and is therefore not worth attachment to it: this is the spirit of tragedy: and this is why it leads to resignation. (SW 3:495/WWR 2:450, emphasis added). Resignation is no-longer-willing. Since it is beyond willing altogether, resignation is ipso facto beyond compassion because compassion involves willing to prevent or alleviate the sufferings of another. Compassion is therefore non-egoistic willing, but willing all the same. Thus the heart of aesthetic education for Schopenhauer is not really moral education at all, for it is not a propadeutic for compassion. And this we learn from his discussion of the artform that arouses compassion par excellence. Rather, aesthetic experience in general, but especially sublime aesthetic experience, is a propadeutic for resignation. But isn’t resignation a part of morality, and thus in preparing us to become resigned, art and aesthetic experience is ultimately in the service of morality for Schopenhauer? This is a common way of interpreting Schopenhauer—that resignation is continuous with the morality of compassion—but I think it is important to separate the morality of compassion from resignation. I urge instead the view that resignation is not a part of morality in Schopenhauer—it is beyond morality, it is amorality. One might also think that resignation is part of ethics more broadly understood as eudaimonism: To be a resigned person is the way to have a better life than that of the egoistic, striving person. Notwithstanding the fact that the truly resigned person would have a rather short life—cut short presumably by voluntary starvation—it may be the case that resignation is a path to a happier life overall. That may well be the case, but eudaimonism and morality are separate matters for Schopenhauer. To defend this point, recall that the entire aim of “On the Basis of Morals” [Über die Grundlage der Moral (1840/41)] is to argue that the sole foundation of morality is the feeling of compassion. And he begins this essay with some praise for Kant having “purified [ethics] of all eudaemonism” (SW 4:117/OBM 123) before he chides Kant for leaving “over a secret connection between virtue and happiness, in his doctrine of the highest good …” (SW 4:118/OBM 123). So while it might be true that the resigned person (and, he suggests, the compassionate person as well who lives in a world where others are an “I once more” and where her “primordial relationship to everyone is one of friendship” (SW 4:272/OBM 254) has a happier life, the attainment of happiness is really beside the point of leading a moral life. The compassionate life could very well entail more personal suffering in the end but that would not make it any worse, from a genuinely ethical perspective for Schopenhauer. To bring the contrast between the aesthetic, the resigned and the moral/ethical subjects into greater focus, let’s look a bit closer at how Schopenhauer characterizes compassion. He describes the emotion as follows: [compassion is] the wholly immediate sympathy [Theilnahme], independent of any other consideration, in the first place toward another’s suffering, and hence towards the prevention or removal of this suffering … As soon as this compassion is alert, the well-being and woe of the other is immediately close to my heart, in just the same way, though not always to the same degree, as only my own is otherwise. (SW 4:208–209/OBM 200, underlining mine) 206

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Compassion on Schopenhauer’s view has three necessary ingredients: A phenomenological component: One feels embodied suffering with another, though the suffering surely won’t be as intense and will likely be qualitatively different from that suffered by the other. ii. A cognitive component: One has (a) typically a basic cognitive appraisal that another distinct individual is or might suffer, and (b) an intuitive insight into the shared essence of self and other. iii. A motivational component: The appraisal of another’s state as in (ii), as well as the cosuffering (i), arouse a desire to relieve or prevent the other’s suffering. i.

Thus, the moral subject perceives and acts in a non-egoistic but still will-full way: she suffers with another—she is a co-sufferer—and wills to prevent or alleviate the suffering of another. By contrast, the aesthetic subject is will-less (at least during the moments of contemplation) and does not suffer—except perhaps in an experience of tragic drama, but this suffering is transfigured into sublime pleasure. Ultimately, in aesthetic experiences—even sublime ones—the aesthetic subject is relieved from suffering. In sum, aesthetic perception is overall pleasurable, for the aesthetic subject is a mere knower rather than an active sufferer, or cosufferer, and participant in the world. The resigned subject is not the moral subject either. She looks upon the world as a mere knower, and no longer as a co-sufferer. She no longer feels compassion; she is beyond compassion, and thus, beyond morality, by the lights of Schopenhauer’s own moral system (For a fuller defense, see especially Chapters 1 and 2 of Shapshay 2019). The resigned subject, it seems, has achieved the permanent state of aesthetic will-lessness. In this way, the heart of aesthetic education—for Schopenhauer—is actually somewhat parallel to Kant’s notion of beauty as the symbol of morality. For Schopenhauer, aesthetic experience is a metonymy for will-less resignation. But insofar as resignation is beyond morality, this transformation of Kant’s “beauty as a symbol of morality” into Schopenhauer’s “aesthetic experience is a metonymy for resignation” really severs the educative link between beauty and morality. In its place, aesthetics become a propaedeutic for an attitude that goes beyond the morality of compassion. In this way Schopenhauer goes a step further than Kant toward autonomism, that is, toward seeing the aesthetic and the truly moral realms as distinct realms of value. The aesthetic realm in Schopenhauer’s system, in contrast to Kant, is not good preparation for the moral; it is not a place where compassion and a tendency toward compassionate action will ultimately be cultivated; rather, it constitutes a preparation for abandoning the moral altogether in resignation.5 Thus, while Kant has often been taken to be the father of “autonomism”—the position that the moral and aesthetic realms are two distinct realms of value—I think that this honor (if it is one) should really go to Schopenhauer. But what about the possibility of learning important moral lessons through art and deriving moral education in this cognitive manner? For example, we might come to understand quite intuitively (and thus in a vivid, perceptual, perhaps action-inducing manner) from Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment that killing even mean, miserly old ladies is the sort of thing that will haunt us to the end of our days, causing us even to seek out our own punishment (in the absence of a punishing God, for instance). Doesn’t it stand to reason that the intuitive recognition of such lessons would have an important, edifying function in human life? 207

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Indeed, I think that learning important moral truths intuitively through a work of art, on Schopenhauer’s system, might help with the “acquired character.” It is plausible that we would learn that such actions will come to get us in the end, one way or another, so we’d better refrain from doing them. But would taking away such a lesson constitute truly aesthetic moral education? The fundamental basis of morality for Schopenhauer has to do with the motives for our actions: Only actions done from a feeling of compassion have any true moral worth. If we refrain from killing miserly old ladies out of prudential reasons such as the one articulated above, we will certainly act better but we wouldn’t be better as people inasmuch as we haven’t become any more compassionate. But couldn’t the recognition of these moralintuitive insights from a novel like Crime and Punishment actually change the character, to make us more compassionate, and thus better people? Ultimately, according to Schopenhauer’s aesthetics, I think the answer is “no,” art really can’t change the character, making us more compassionate people. This is because the entire training of art—and aesthetic experience more generally—is to help us look at the world more objectively, as knowers rather than as sufferers. Even in our experience of tragic drama, the compassionate artform par excellence, though we suffer with the heroes and heroines to some extent throughout the drama, the work as a whole is aimed at getting us to transfigure that suffering into an aesthetic experience. That is to say, art trains us to transfigure life and the world, even the elements of life and the world that evoke our compassion, into something sublimely pleasurable as we behold it as a truth about the human condition. I think this is something that Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy saw so clearly in Schopenhauer’s aesthetics and philosophy of art. That is to say, the whole impulse of art, for Schopenhauer, is toward gaining intuitive knowledge of essential features of nature and life through will-less contemplation. In other words, the impulse of art is precisely to overcome will-full knowledge and will-full suffering. But compassion, and thus morality, is precisely about will-full (though non-egoistic) co-suffering.​ Thus, the aesthetic and the moral realms are really very distinct for Schopenhauer; whereas the aesthetic and (in my interpretation) the amoral realm of resignation are quite closely tied. Ironically, for Kant—who is often credited as the father of autonomism—aesthetic experience really is a propaedeutic for morality: The beautiful prepares us to love something (even nature) without interest; and the sublime to esteem even that which goes against our interest and to enliven our recognition of our moral vocation. For Schopenhauer, by contrast, the aesthetic prepares us—by fostering a cognitively rich experience of temporary will-lessness—to resign ourselves from having any interests at all, moral or otherwise.6

Notes 1 There is textual evidence that Kant thinks “aesthetic ideas” are present in beauty in general and not just in artistic beauty. For instance, he writes, “[b]eauty (whether it be beauty of nature or of art) can in general be called the expression of aesthetic ideas” (KU 5:320)). See Chignell, 2007 for defense of this continuity between beauty in nature and in art. I tend to read these passages, however, as Kant trying to interject more continuity into his aesthetic theory than is really warranted by his separate treatments of natural and artistic beauty. In this I have been influenced by Reiter and Gaiger (2018). I am indebted to Timothy Stoll for prompting me to address (rather briefly, admittedly) this ongoing controversy in Kant scholarship. 2 For an extensive and illuminating study of the differences between the concept and the Idea in Schopenhauer’s thought, as well as an explication of the difficult ontological status of the Ideas in his philosophy, see Dobrzanski 2017, especially Kapitel II.

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The Moral Weight of Art in Schopenhauer 3 Whether or not sublime experiences can be had with art as well as with nature on a Kantian view, however, remains a scholarly bone of contention. 4 There is some evidence that he views this as the aim of all art, if only implicitly. E.g., “we can gather from [the experience of beauty] how blissful life must be for someone whose will is not merely momentarily placated, as it is in the pleasure of the beautiful, but calmed forever, indeed extinguished entirely except for the last glowing spark that sustains the body and is extinguished with it.” (SW 2:461/WWR 1:417). Thanks to Timothy Stoll for pointing this out to me. 5 A passage from the Nachlass also supports Schopenhauer’s severing of the moral-aesthetic connection found in Kant: “Kant’s definition [Erklärung] of the sublime,” he writes, “is correct and admirable; except he is familiar with the better consciousness only in the sense of a moral incentive, and thus always reduces everything to it. His definition of the beautiful, on the other hand, is false. The beautiful is a species of the sublime, or rather, the sublime is a species of the beautiful, namely, the extreme of the beautiful.” (Frauenstädt ed., p. 129, emphasis added). Many thanks to Timothy Stoll for reminding me of this important contrast that Schopenhauer draws between his theory of the sublime—which involves, it seems, a non-moral better consciousness and that of Kant, which involves a “moral incentive.” 6 I am grateful to Timothy Stoll, David Bather Woods, Michal Dobrzanski, Colin Marshall, Ramona Marquez, and audiences at the University of Washington, and the conference “Kant And Schopenhauer in Dialogue” at the Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, organized by Alexander Sattar.

Bibliography Anderson, James and Jeffrey Dean (1998), “Moderate Autonomism”, British Journal of Aesthetics 38(2): 150–166. Battisini, Matilde (2005), Symbols and Allegories in Art (A Guide to Imagery). Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum Editions. Baxley, Anne Margaret (2005), “The Practical Significance of Taste in Kant’s Critique of Judgment: Love of Natural Beauty as a Mark of Moral Character”, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 63(1): 33–45. Cannon, Joseph (2011), “The Moral Value of Artistic Beauty in Kant”, Kantian Review 16(1): 113–126. Carroll, Noël (1996), “Moderate Moralism”, British Journal of Aesthetics 36(3): 223–238. ——— (2013), “Rough Heroes: A Response to A.W. Eaton”, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 71(4): 371–376. Chignell, Andrew (2007), “Kant on the Normativity of Taste”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 85(3): 415–433. Clavel-Vázquez, Adriana (2018), “Rethinking Autonomism: Beauty in a World of Moral Anarchy”, Philosophy Compass 13(7). DOI: 10.111/phc3.12501. Clewis, Robert R. (2009), The Kantian Sublime and the Revelation of Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Cohen, Ted (1982), “Why Beauty is a Symbol of Morality”, in Ted Cohen and Paul Guyer eds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 221–236. ——— (2002), “Three Problems in Kant’s Aesthetics”, British Journal of Aesthetics 42(1): 1–12. Crowther, Paul (1989), The Kantian Sublime: From Morality to Art. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Dobrzanski, Michal (2017), Begriff und Methode bei Arthur Schopenhauer. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Eaton, A.W. (2012), “Robust Immoralism”, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 70: 281–292. Gaut, Berys (2007), Art, Emotion, and Ethics. New York: OUP. Guyer, Paul (1996), Kant and the Experience of Freedom: Essays on Aesthetics and Morality. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. ——— (2008), “Is Ethical Criticism a Problem? A Historical Perspective”, in Garry Hagberg, ed. Art and Ethical Criticism. London: Blackwell, pp. 3–32. Harold, James (2011), “Autonomism Reconsidered”, British Journal of Aesthetics 51(2): 137–147. ——— (2020), Dangerous Art. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Sandra Shapshay Henrich, Dieter (1992), Aesthetic Judgment and the Moral Image of the World. Stanford: Stanford University Press. John, Eileen (2006), “Artistic Value and Opportunistic Moralism”, in Matthew Kieran, ed. Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art. London: Blackwell, pp. 332–341. Kant, Immanuel (2000 [1790]), Critique of the Power of Judgment. transl. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Kieran, Matthew (2003), “Forbidden Knowledge: The Challenge of Immoralism”, in Jose Luis Bermudez and Sebastian Gardner, eds. Art and Morality. London: Routledge. Merritt, Melissa McBay (2012), “The Moral Source of the Kantian Sublime”, in Timothy M. Costelloe, ed. The Sublime: From Antiquity to Present. Cambridge University Press, pp. 37–49. Reiter, Aviv and Ido Geiger (2018), “Natural Beauty, Fine Art and the Relation Between Them”, KantStudien 109(1): 72–100. Shapshay, Sandra (2019), Reconstructing Schopenhauer’s Ethics: Hope, Compassion, and Animal Welfare. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ——— (forthcoming), “Kantian Approaches to Ethical Judgment of Artworks”, in James Harold ed. The Oxford Handbook of Ethics and Art. Stecker, Robert. (2005), “The Interaction of Aesthetic and Ethical Value”, British Journal of Aesthetics 45(2): 138–151. Tuna, Emine Hande. (unpublished manuscript) “Kant on the Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance.” Zuckert, Rachel (2007), Kant on Beauty and Biology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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PART 3

Ethics, Politics, and Salvation

15 SCHOPENHAUER’S FIVE-DIMENSIONAL NORMATIVE ETHICS Colin Marshall and Kayla R. Mehl

A normative ethical system involves a set of standards by which to morally evaluate actions. Does Schopenhauer offer normative ethics in any significant sense? Some commentators have suggested he does not. D.W. Hamlyn writes: Schopenhauer’s ethics … depends on … a rather simple-minded dichotomy between self-regarding and other-regarding attitudes … . It says very little about malice, or about particular virtues and vices … . It might rightly be said that there is more to ethics than that … for example, there tends to be argument between those who favour utilitarianism and those who favour a more Kantian approach. Schopenhauer has next to nothing to contribute to such a debate.1 Similarly, though more charitably, Julian Young states: Schopenhauer regards “normative ethics,” the attempt to establish the fundamental principle or principles of morality over which Kant laboured so long and hard, as a non-discipline since it is simple common sense. The supreme principle of morality, as everyone knows, is just “harm no one; on the contrary help everyone as much as you can.”2 Though some recent commentators have found more complexity in Schopenhauer’s theory of the virtues than Hamlyn acknowledges,3 most seem to tacitly agree that Schopenhauer’s normative ethics is too simple to deserve much discussion.4 Hence, the majority of scholarship on Schopenhauer’s ethics focuses on other issues, such as his metaethics, his moral psychology, and the relation between ethics and the denial of the will.5 In this chapter, we argue that Schopenhauer’s normative ethics involves more complexity than is often recognized. To be sure, Schopenhauer did not write anything comparable to Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals, which provides a detailed moral taxonomy that is explicitly applied to a range of issues. Nonetheless, a closer reading of Schopenhauer’s published work shows that he engages in fairly detailed normative ethical theorizing, offering much more than a “simple-minded dichotomy” or “simple common sense.” In fact, we believe, if DOI: 10.4324/9781003048992-19

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we approach his writings with a moderately strong principle of interpretive charity, we can find a more complex evaluative approach to actions than in many contemporary ethical systems. We proceed as follows. In Section 1, we identify five distinct evaluative rankings of actions in Schopenhauer’s writings. The distinctness of these rankings generates an interpretive choice. Either Schopenhauer’s normative ethics is massively inconsistent, or else the five rankings are meant to assess distinct aspects or dimensions of actions. In Section 2, we explore the latter interpretive option. Taking a cue from Timothy Scanlon’s two-dimensional ethics, we argue that Schopenhauer can be read as having a consistent five-dimensional ethics. We also argue that properly understanding the role of moral principles for Schopenhauer helps preempt interpretive conclusions like Young’s. In Section 3, we aim to shed further light on Schopenhauer’s normative ethics by exploring one crucial case: actions arising from misplaced compassion within oppressive societies. When considered through the five dimensions, this case reveals some disturbing implications of Schopenhauer’s normative ethics. To keep our discussion manageable, we will largely set aside Schopenhauer’s views on three topics closely related to ethics: political justice, freedom of the will, and asceticism.6 We also focus our attention on Schopenhauer’s main discussions of ethics in the final editions of “On the Basis of Morals” in The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics and the first volume of The World as Will and Representation, though we occasionally draw from other works.

15.1  Five Moral Rankings of Actions In this section, we describe five ethical rankings of actions Schopenhauer offers. While these rankings partly overlap, we will argue that they are distinct. This will raise the question of the coherence of Schopenhauer’s normative ethics, which we will address in Section 2.

15.1.1 The Neminem principle Schopenhauer holds that the “principle or highest basic proposition” of ethics is “the shortest and most concise expression of the way of acting that it prescribes” (SW 4:136/OBM 139).7 There is such a principle, in Schopenhauer’s view, and it is one “over whose content all ethical theorists are really united”: “Harm no one; rather help everyone to the extent that you can [Neminem laede, imo omnes, quantum potes, juva]” (SW 4:137/OBM 140). Since Schopenhauer typically formulates this principle in Latin, we call it the “Neminem Principle.” Any other moral principle, Schopenhauer claims, is just an “indirect or oblique expression of that simple proposition” (SW 4:137/OBM 140). There is therefore some textual basis for Young’s claim that Schopenhauer just rejects complex ethical theorizing. For, taken at face value, the Neminem Principle sets two simple, absolute demands: no harming whatsoever, alongside helping exactly as much as one can. This implies (at most) a 4-tier ranking of actions: (1) (2) (3) (4)

Non-harming, maximally helpful actions Non-harming, non-maximally helpful actions Harming, maximally helpful actions8 Harming, non-maximally helpful actions 214

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Nothing in the Neminem Principle implies any finer-grain differentiations of actions. Consider two actions in which an agent neither harms nor helps as much as they can, say, one in which a billionaire gives $10 to charity and another in which that billionaire gives $10,000. If the Neminem Principle is the fundamental moral principle, it would seem that these actions would come out as morally equivalent – while contemporary readers might (in a consequentialist vein) be tempted to think that more helpful actions are better than less helpful ones, the principle itself does not imply that. Relatedly, nothing in the Neminem Principle implies that there must be a uniquely right action in a given situation. Elsewhere in BM, Schopenhauer identifies injustice or wrongness with harm or injury, and defines rightness as its negation: Injustice [Ungerechtigkeit], or wrong [Unrecht], always consists … in injury to another. So the concept of wrong is a positive one and precedent to that of right, which … designates merely the actions that one can perform without injuring others (SW 4:216–7/OBM 207; cf. SW 2:400/WWR 1:365).9 All tier 1 and tier 2 actions are right, while all tier 3 and tier 4 actions are wrong. Of course, there may be some situations in which there is only one available action in tiers 1 or 2. But the Neminem Principle gives us no reason to expect that there is always an answer to the question, “what is the right thing to do?”10 From a certain interpretive perspective, it would not be surprising if the Neminem Principle did constitute all of Schopenhauer’s normative ethics, since he often aims to reduce philosophy to simple propositions or insights. After all, Schopenhauer claims that his main work, The World as Will and Representation, “aims to convey a single thought” (SW 2:VII/WWR 1:5). Nonetheless, it turns out, Schopenhauer offers much more than the Neminem Principle – not just because he believes there are complications in applying the Principle (which he does11), but because he endorses what seem to be distinct evaluative approaches to moral action.

15.1.2  Moral worth of actions One of Schopenhauer’s primary aims in OBM is to identify “the criterion of actions of moral worth” (SW 4:203/OBM 196). He concludes that the criterion is compassion, in which: the ultimate motivating ground for an action, or an omission, resides directly and exclusively in the well-being and woe of someone other who is passively involved in it, so that the active party has in view in his acting, or omitting, simply and solely the well-being and woe of another and has nothing at all as his end but that the other should remain unharmed, or indeed receive help, support and relief. This end alone impresses on an action or omission the stamp of moral worth (SW 4:207/OBM 199) Hence, an action’s moral worth (or lack thereof) is a function of the agent’s motivating ground or end in acting. Actions with moral worth are done from the ground of compassion, which Schopenhauer later argues is constituted by literally feeling others’ suffering (something he thinks is possible only if all individuality is merely apparent12). 215

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The Neminem Principle does not appeal to agents’ motivations. Hence, where an action sits in the 4-tier ranking of actions is independent of whether it has moral worth.13 Consider an action that is done with pure compassion, but results solely in harm: attempting to pull someone away from a dangerous river but instead accidentally knocking them in. Such an action has moral worth, despite being in the fourth, lowest tier.14 Or consider an egoistic action that harms no one and maximally benefits others – for example, someone who puts out a dangerous fire solely to save themselves, but thereby also saves dozens of others at the same time. That action would have no moral worth, despite being in the first, highest tier. Hence, the Neminem Principle and the criterion of moral worth generate distinct rankings of actions. Setting the Neminem Principle aside, it is noteworthy that Schopenhauer’s theory of the virtues implies that there are multiple levels of moral worth (contrary to Hamlyn’s “simpleminded dichotomy” claim). Within compassion, Schopenhauer distinguishes justice and loving kindness as the cardinal virtues, from which all other virtues flow (SW 4:213/OBM 204). Justice is the first level of compassion and the most fundamental cardinal virtue. Just acts occur when an agent feels enough compassion to prevent them from harming others (SW 4:214/OBM 205). Actions of loving kindness require more. An action done out of loving kindness “does not merely hold me back from injuring the other but actually drives me on to help him” (SW 4:227/OBM 216). Compassion, depending on how lively and deeply felt it is, may drive one to help others at a cost to oneself. Some actions of loving kindness “consist in the exertion of my bodily or mental powers … in my property, in my health, freedom, and even my life” (SW 4:227/OBM 216). Schopenhauer carves out a special category for actions of loving kindness that involve self-sacrifice: these are actions in which compassion “goes as far as magnanimity and noble-mindedness” (SW 4:210/OBM 201).15 His favorite example of noble-mindedness is the folk hero Arnold von Winkelried, whose sacrifice for his native land brought about the Swiss army’s victory (SW 2:443, 611/WWR 1, 402, 545; SW 4:203/OBM 196). This complexity within Schopenhauer’s theory of virtues would seem to imply further differences in the moral worth of actions, and these differences would not always align with rankings based on the Neminem Principle. For example, an action done with magnanimity would seem to have the highest level of moral worth. However, such an action could be less than maximally helpful – not all actions of self-sacrifice yield any benefit to others. That would prevent it from occupying the Neminem Principle’s top tier of actions.

15.1.3  Magnitude of injustice In addition to the rankings of actions suggested by the Neminem Principle and the criterion of moral worth, Schopenhauer also suggests a way of quantifying the wrongness or injustice of actions: In every unjust action the wrong is the same in terms of quality, namely injury of another … . But in terms of quantity it can be very different. The difference in the magnitude of wrong does not appear to be property investigated as yet by moral theorists, but is recognized everywhere in real life … Matters are similar with the justice of actions. To elucidate this: e.g. someone who steals a loaf of bread when near to death from hunger commits a wrong – but how small his injustice is compared with that of a rich man who in some way deprives a poor man of his last possession … [T]he measure of this highly significant difference in the quantity of justice and injustice … 216

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is not direct and absolute … but mediate and relative, like that of sines and tangents. I put forward the following formula for this: the magnitude of my action’s injustice equals the magnitude of the ill I inflict on another by it, divided by the magnitude of the advantage I gain by means of it (SW 4:219/OBM 209–10)16 Schopenhauer does not offer a method of quantifying loving kindness. A parallel construction, however, would divide the magnitude of the benefit to another by the magnitude of the harm or disadvantage I undergo. To simplify our discussion, though, we focus solely on Schopenhauer’s proposed measure of injustice. Schopenhauer’s suggested measure of injustice generates yet another distinct ranking of actions. As with the Neminem Principle, the measure makes no reference to an agent’s motivations or ends, and concerns solely the resulting harms and benefits. So compare (A) our earlier case of someone accidentally killing while compassionately trying to help with (B) Schopenhauer’s case of the poor man stealing bread in order to survive. Only (A), being done from compassion, has moral worth, but since it yields less benefit to the agent and more harm than (B), it has a greater quantity of injustice than (B). Hence, the magnitude of injustice gives the opposite ranking of these actions than the criterion of moral worth. The measure of injustice also comes apart from the Neminem Principle‘s 4-tier ranking of actions. This is because the Neminem Principle says nothing about whether an action benefits the agent. Recall that the lowest tier is for actions that harm and do not maximally help, while the second lowest tier is for actions that both harm and maximally help. Now, imagine that the poor man in danger of starvation has to push a baker aside to get the loaf of bread, causing a bruise. Despite being in the bottom tier, the quantity of injustice of this action would be low (a bruise divided by averting death). Compare that with a case in which someone helps as much as they can but also causes massive harm: for example, a trolley scenario where a malicious agent’s only means of helping anyone (and achieving some mild malicious pleasure) is to save one person by having a trolley run over five other people. Such an action, being maximally helpful, would land in the third tier, but the quantity of injustice would be very high (five deaths divided by some mild malicious pleasure). Hence, Schopenhauer’s measure of injustice gives the opposite ranking of these actions than the Neminem Principle.

15.1.4  Expression of wrongness Next, consider a passage that appears shortly after Schopenhauer’s analysis of wrongness in The World as Will and Representation: the concept of wrong … expresses [drucken … aus] itself most perfectly, authentically, and palpably in concrete fashion in cannibalism … . After this comes murder … . Intentionally mutilating or even injuring someone else’s body – or indeed, any blow – can be seen as essentially the same as murder, differing only in degree. Wrongdoing manifests [stellt … dar] itself further in the subjugation of other individuals … and finally in the assault on someone else’s property, which, to the extent that we regard it as the fruit of their labour, is essentially the same as slavery, and is related to slavery as a simple injury is to murder (SW 2:395–6/WWR 1:361–2) 217

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Here, Schopenhauer offers another evaluative ranking, now by appealing to how actions manifest wrongdoing or express the concept of wrongness. Schopenhauer offers no parallel ranking of rightness or loving-kindness, though we might guess what that ranking might look like. Though this passage does not offer a general evaluative formula, its ranking of cannibalism below murder is sufficient to make it diverge from the other evaluative scales we have considered. With apologies for this unpleasant exercise of imagination, consider a pacifist cannibal, who merely takes bodies to eat from morgues, and only then when those bodies will not be missed. However disgusting we might find their actions, the cannibal’s harmless actions would be only in tier 2 from the Neminem Principle. Moreover, if those actions were done out of a compassionate desire to avoid injuring others, they would have more moral worth than malicious murder. Finally, since the cannibal’s actions bring about no harm, the quantity of injustice in such cannibalism would be nothing, whereas all cases of murder would involve a positive quantity of injustice.17 Hence, this evaluation in terms of the expression of the concept of wrongness yields different rankings from the other evaluations.

15.1.5  Eternal justice Finally, in §63 of WWR 1, Schopenhauer offers an account of eternal justice. Because, in his view, everything is an appearance of the same fundamental will, [e]verything that happens to the individual – indeed everything that can happen – is always right [Recht]. ... Eternal justice is at work: if human beings were not on the whole worthless, then their fate would not be on the whole so sad. (SW 2:415/WWR 1:378) Later, he describes eternal justice as a “balancing scale inseparably connecting the evil of the offense with the evil of the punishment” (SW 2:419/WWR 1:381). Like compassion, Schopenhauer holds, recognizing eternal justice requires one to see beyond the realm of appearance into how things are in themselves (see SW 2:418/WWR 1:380–1), though when consciousness of eternal justice is “misunderstood and falsified by the unclarified intellect,” it becomes the source of satisfaction in punishing individuals for their misdeeds (SW 2:422/WWR 1:384).18 While he is explicit that eternal justice is merely one species of justice, Schopenhauer does not claim that the notion of right he invokes here is merely one species – instead, this seems to be an application of his general definition of right in terms of injuring or harming others. For if the difference between individuals is merely apparent, then no harm is ultimately harm to an other. Hence, “[t]he tormenter and the tormented are one” (SW 2:419/WWR 1:381), which Schopenhauer takes as vindicating the Christian doctrine of original sin (SW 3:692/WWR 2:618). For our purposes, Schopenhauer’s key claim is that, when it comes to eternal injustice, everything that happens to any individual is right. The distinctness of this ranking of actions from the four others is straightforward. For all actions impact some other individual, and if everything that happens to any individual is right, then all actions are right. From the perspective of eternal justice, and only from this perspective, all actions are ranked as equivalent.

15.2  Towards a Coherent Reading of Schopenhauer’s Evaluative Rankings We have seen that Schopenhauer’s normative ethics includes more than the Neminem Principle, despite his claim that the latter is the basic principle of ethics. To be sure, 218

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Schopenhauer might just be massively inconsistent, and the divergences we described between different rankings might just show that his normative ethics is a jumble of looselyrelated ideas. We take that interpretive possibility seriously, and acknowledge there are textual reasons in favor of it.19 In this section, however, we explore a more charitable approach that makes Schopenhauer’s normative ethics internally coherent.20 Our explanation has two steps. First, we draw on Timothy Scanlon’s distinction between two dimensions in the moral assessment of actions, suggesting that Schopenhauer can similarly be understood as offering multiple dimensions of assessment. Second, we consider the role of principles in Schopenhauer’s moral psychology, with the aim of showing why Schopenhauer’s “basic principle of ethics” is so simple, containing no hint of the multiple dimensions of his normative ethics.

15.2.1  Moral dimensions Consider a case from post-Schopenhauerian ethics: during a war, a military officer decides to bomb a building containing both enemy combatants and civilians. According to the Doctrine of Double Effect, whether the action of bombing is permissible can depend on the officer’s intentions, in particular, whether the officer intended to kill the civilians or else merely foresaw that they would be killed. Against the Doctrine of Double Effect, Scanlon argues that we should distinguish the permissibility of an action from its meaning, where the latter is “the significance, for the agent and others, of the agent’s willingness to perform that action for the reasons he or she does.”21 According to Scanlon, an action’s permissibility does not essentially depend on an agent’s intentions or reasons. On the other hand, Scanlon claims, an action’s meaning does so depend, and meaning is what matters most to praise, blame, guilt, and related moral reactions. Hence, on Scanlon’s view, while the bombing might be permissible or impermissible regardless of the officer’s reasons for doing it, the action has a very different meaning if it was done with the intention of killing civilians than if that killing was merely foreseen, and so could call for different moral reactions. Scanlon ties the permissibility/meaning distinction to two roles that moral principles can have, where some principles are used by agents in deliberation about what it is permissible to do, while other principles are used in assessing the meaning of others’ actions. The former sort of principle can ignore agents’ intentions, whereas the latter sort of principle should take them into account. Because of this, the different sorts of principles might rank actions differently, e.g., a principle of permissibility might rank two actions as equivalent, while a principle of meaning might rank one above the other. We suggest that Schopenhauer’s complex normative ethics can be understood along broadly similar lines, though with more dimensions than Scanlon describes. First, the Neminem Principle offers direct guidance on how to act, and is arguably a Scanlonian principle of permissibility (though it is not obvious whether the tiers implied by the Neminem Principle line up with the contemporary permissible/impermissible distinction22). This principle is meant to guide agents in their actions, and this is plausibly why Schopenhauer gives it an imperatival form (more on this below). It is a principle whose home is the point of view of the acting agent. Second, the criterion of moral worth is meant to describe which actions call for our moral praise and blame, and so is not directly tied to the acting agent’s point of view. Schopenhauer’s views on praise and blame support this reading. According to Schopenhauer, a person’s “actions are … imputable to him morally” only when they are 219

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the “pure result” of “the individual character of the human being” (SW 4:99/FW 110) or, as he says elsewhere, “in what [an agent] is resides blame and merit” (SW 4:177/OBM, see also SW 6:252/PP 2:214; SW 3:678/WWR 2:606). Character, for Schopenhauer, is sharply distinguished from intellect, which is why the harm that results when one accidentally “pours out poison instead of medicine” is not “morally imputable” (SW 4:100/FW 110). Actions therefore have a certain meaning because of what they proclaim about the agent’s character: “Every good deed done with pure intention proclaims that he who commits it stands diametrically opposed to the world of appearance” (SW 2:233/PP 2:199). Yet virtuous agents are not primarily concerned with what is imputable to them, but instead with what will harm or help others. So we can expect these first two dimensions to come apart.23 So far, Schopenhauer’s dimensions line up relatively neatly with Scanlon’s. We propose, next, though, that Schopenhauer’s measure of the magnitude of injustice is an interesting mixed case. Like the Neminem Principle, it does not directly concern agents’ motivations, and instead considers only amounts of harming and helping. Like the criterion of actions’ moral worth, however, it is not supposed to play a role in agents’ deliberations. Schopenhauer claims that magnitudes of injustice shape other moral reactions, namely, indignation, and whether something is seen as an “abomination,” such as when Dante assigns traitors to the lowest circle of Hell (SW 4:220/OBM 210). Not coincidentally, we think, Schopenhauer offers his measure for the magnitude of injustice immediately after describing how, in his view, law-giving in a state should adopt the doctrine of right (Rechtslehre) from morality in order to ensure that “no one should suffer wrong” (SW 4:219/OBM 209), but without regard for what intentions lead to that wrong. Attitudes like indignation have a more social character than praise or blame. Hence, adapting Scanlon’s terminology, we might distinguish between actions’ individual meaning and their social meaning. Both impact our moral reactions, but while actions’ individual meaning shapes reactions concerning individual agents’ characters, actions’ social meaning shapes social reactions such as outrage we feel on behalf of some group.24 We suggest, therefore, that Schopenhauer’s rankings of actions in terms of the magnitude of their injustice concerns their social meaning, while the criterion of moral worth concerns their individual meaning. Next, when Schopenhauer ranks actions in terms of how well they express the concept of wrongness, we suggest his concern is simultaneously aesthetic and moral: how clearly an action presents the ultimate nature of injustice or wrongness. In Schopenhauer’s aesthetics, the value of a piece of (non-musical) art is partly a function of how clearly it manifests an unchanging Platonic idea.25 For example, architecture, as a fine art, presents universal qualities such as gravity, cohesion, and rigidity (SW 2:252/WWR 1:239), while a successful work of tragic drama portrays “the terrible aspect of life” (SW 2:298/WWR 1:280). Even apart from the fine arts, “every existing thing can be considered purely objectively and apart from all relation … making the thing an expression of an Idea” (SW 2:247/WWR 1:234). How does this connect to wrongness or injustice? For Schopenhauer, injustice arises because “the will needs to live off itself because there is nothing outside of it and it is a hungry will” (SW 2:183/WWR 1:179). Cannibalism (murderous or not) might not be the main thing that compassionate agents aim to avoid, the main action that elicits blame, or the worst social abomination, but it can nevertheless manifest or display the ugly root of injustice more clearly than any other action.26 Rankings of actions along this aestheticmoral dimension are therefore understandably distinct from other rankings. 220

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Finally, evaluations of actions in terms of eternal justice resemble those expressed in the Neminem Principle, but are made at a level of metaphysical insight that is incompatible with ordinary deliberation about how to act. Eternal justice concerns whether one being ever harms a distinct being, and since no beings are fundamentally distinct, the resulting evaluation is always the same. Ordinary deliberation about how to act, however, always occurs from a non-fundamental perspective, since ordinary deliberation takes beings to be distinct. The same is true with compassion, though matters are more complicated here. Schopenhauer is explicit that, in compassion, we recognize the otherness of the person suffering (SW 4:211–2/OBM 203). So the dimension of eternal justice is distinct from that of even compassionate agents who engage with others.27 In sum, Schopenhauer’s five distinct types of action evaluation can be understood as evaluations of five independent dimensions of actions, as opposed to indications of indecisiveness on Schopenhauer’s part.28 To be sure, one could raise further questions about the consistency of Schopenhauer’s normative ethics, and we have not argued that all of Schopenhauer’s ethical writings fit with our interpretive proposal. But similar challenges face interpreters of any complex ethical system.

15.2.2 The Neminem principle revisited The previous subsection offered a partial explanation of why Schopenhauer claims that the Neminem Principle is basic: it is basic within one dimension of moral assessment, which is consistent with other dimensions being governed by distinct rules. Nonetheless, we might still ask: why does the principle not provide agents with some guidance on how to differentiate actions within each tier and why it does not even hint at the other four dimensions of moral assessment?29 To answer these questions, it will help to consider how Schopenhauer understands moral principles. In particular, consider what Schopenhauer says about moral principles as “reservoirs”: out of the recognition of the suffering that every unjust action necessarily brings upon others, a recognition attained once and for all and sharpened by the feeling of enduring a wrong ... the maxim “Harm no one” emerges in noble minds, and rational deliberation elevates it to the firm resolve, formed once and for all, to respect the rights of everyone … . For although principles and abstract cognition in general are in no way the original source or prime basis of all morals, yet they are indispensable for a moral life, as the container, the reservoir in which the disposition that has risen out of the source of all morality … is stored so that it can flow down through supply channels when a case for application comes … . Without firmly formed principles we would be irresistibly at the mercy of the anti-moral incentives (SW 4:214–5/OBM 205–6) Here, Schopenhauer describes the three-step origin and the psychological role of moral principles. Both shed light on why moral principles, of which the Neminem Principle is the most basic, must be simple. First, the psychological and epistemological origin of moral principles is coarse-grained: a general recognition (“attained once and for all”) of the suffering that results from unjust action.30 That recognition is then “sharpened” by the feeling of enduring a wrong, but this 221

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sharpening sounds more like a matter of increased force than of increased precision. Finally, “rational deliberation” elevates this representation to a firm resolve concerning respecting others’ rights. This resolve is “formed once and for all,” though. The primary role of rationality here is again not to add precision, but to add firmness.31 By contrast, on Kant’s view, moral principles arise from reason itself, and so can arguably be expected to involve rational precision from the start. Second, the role of moral principles is to ward off anti-moral incentives: egoism and malice. Schopenhauer holds that “[e]veryone bears something downright bad inside, morally speaking” (SW 6:223/PP 2:191), and that egoism “towers above the world” (SW 4:197/OBM 190). Rationally determining which action is ethically optimal is not a luxury that Schopenhauer grants us – instead, principles offer a blunt psychological tool for restraining egoism and malice. So, to be useful, the Neminem Principle needs to be simple and absolute. A more complex principle that nodded to the other dimensions of moral assessment would stand less of a chance of helping avert unjust actions, since it would require more thought to apply. Likewise, a less absolutist principle that allowed for occasional harm and less-than-maximum help could too easily be co-opted by egoism (see SW 3:243/WWR 2:229). The Neminem Principle therefore sets absolute demands of no harm and maximum help even though Schopenhauer thinks that many actions that score high on some moral dimensions fall short of tier 1 of the Neminem Principle. In sum: the Neminem Principle is simple because of Schopenhauer’s anti-rationalist moral psychology, which gives moral principles a specific and limited role, not because he himself does not have more to say about normative ethics.32

15.3  An Objection: Misplaced Compassion in Oppressive Systems Though we do not have space to argue this here, we believe the above explanation can address some objections that have been raised to Schopenhauer’s ethics.33 In this final section, though, we describe what we see as a serious objection to his system: none of his dimensions of moral evaluation appropriately condemn actions motivated by compassion that occur in the context of oppressive systems.34 To be fair, Schopenhauer was an impressive critic of some oppressive systems, at least in comparison to other 19th-century German philosophers. He repeatedly condemned practices of slavery and of cruelty to non-humans,35 and accused other philosophers of promoting harmful complacency.36 His normative ethics, as we’ve interpreted it, is also well-equipped to identify various problems connected to social and political injustice. However, consider a passage in which Schopenhauer describes some moral paragons: if there is a threat to the collective well-being or the lives of the majority of individuals, this can outweigh any concern over your own individual welfare. In such a case, the character who has achieved the highest goodness and the most perfect magnanimity will sacrifice his life completely for the good of many others: this is how Codrus died, as well as Leonidas, Regulus, Decius Mus, Arnold von Winkelried, and everyone else who freely and consciously goes to a certain death for the sake of family or fatherland. (SW 2:443/WWR 1:402) At first pass, this might sound unobjectionable. But notice that Schopenhauer does not consider whether the “family or fatherland” for which these characters sacrificed themselves 222

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were oppressive ones. They were: Codrus, Leonidas, Regulus, and Decius Mus all presided (or supposedly presided) over states (Athens, Sparta, and Rome) in which slavery was common practice, and the Old Swiss Confederacy for which von Winkelried sacrificed himself was not without problems. The type of case we think Schopenhauer’s ethics gets wrong has this structure: a member of an oppressive class, out of compassion for other members of that same class, acts to preserve the status quo. The problem will be clearest if we assume (breaking with Schopenhauer’s examples) that the oppressive class forms the majority of the population in the relevant family or fatherland, and that a change to the status quo would make things dramatically better for the oppressed class. It is clear, in our view, that defenses of the status quo out of compassion would be morally problematic, but none of the five dimensions of Schopenhauer’s normative ethics implies this. That is because all these dimensions focus either on features of the agent or on how the agent immediately impacts others – no factor allows for moral assessment specifically in terms of broader social context or impact. First, actions of misplaced compassion could land in the highest tier of actions defined by the Neminem Principle. When Arnold von Winkelried, “embrac[es] as many enemy spears as he could” (SW 4:203/OBM 196), this might harm no one and help as much as he can – though the help would be exclusive to other members of the oppressive class.37 Second, such acts would have the highest kind of moral worth, demonstrating noble-mindedness or magnanimity – for Schopenhauer defines these virtues primarily by compassionate self-sacrifice, without constraints on who one should sacrifice for.38 Third, since this kind of act need not itself harm others, it might have no quantity of injustice, despite indirectly helping maintain an oppressive system.39 If, as we suggested above, the magnitude of injustice concerns the social meaning of actions, then the failure of this measure to take account of broader social contexts is especially concerning. Fourth, Schopenhauer plausibly takes such acts to most clearly express the nature of compassion. Recall that his aesthetics involves considering an object in isolation from all relations to other objects, and solely as the manifestation of an unchanging Platonic Idea. Because aesthetic-moral evaluation leaves out consideration of relations to other objects, it cannot take into account whether an action helps preserve an unjust system. Finally, since eternal justice yields the same ranking of all actions, nothing in that dimension of assessment would single out oppression-preserving actions as particularly problematic. One could, of course, modify Schopenhauer’s ethics to avoid these consequences. But these modifications would have to be far-reaching. Even if Schopenhauer did better on some sociopolitical issues than did, say, Hegel, his ethical views nevertheless show a certain level of political complacency. This is suggested by his characterizations of morally ideal agents: the good character lives in an external world homogeneous with his essence: others for him are not not-I, but are “I once more.” Thus his primordial relationship to everyone is one of friendship: he feels himself akin to all beings inside, immediately participates with sympathy in their well-being and woe, and presupposes with confidence the same participation on their part. Out of this grows the profound peace inside him and the reassuring, calm, satisfied mood that makes everyone feel good in his presence … . The magnanimous man who forgives his enemy and repays evil with good is elevated and gains the highest praise (SW 4:272/OBM 254-55, see also SW 2:441–2/WWR 1:400–1) 223

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In a truly egalitarian society, it could be morally appropriate to regard all others as friends, feel calm and satisfied, and repay all evil with good. However, this kind of attitude seems far from ideal in a society where systematic change is needed. Someone who felt a general calm satisfaction while benefiting (however indirectly) from practices of slavery in their society should hardly count as a “good character.” Along these lines, Schopenhauer suggests that the “really proper mode of address between human beings” might be, “my fellow-sufferer” (SW 6:323/PP 2:273) – which itself may show a lack of sensitivity to the differences between the moral situations of the oppressed and the oppressors (imagine a slaveholder addressing a slave in such terms!).40 For similar reasons, Schopenhauer does not seem equipped to appropriately assess the moral appropriateness of anger and indignation on the part of the oppressed.41 It is hard to see how oppressed people could see their oppressors as friendly, or how they could presuppose sympathetic participation from their oppressors. Tellingly, Schopenhauer gives the example of a poor man who returns a rich man’s lost purse (SW 4:219/OBM 209), and counts this as an exemplary instance of justice – not considering whether the rich man’s wealth might be the result of an unjust system. Seeing ethics as rooted in something deeper than the world of individuals and their contingent relations therefore seems to lead Schopenhauer to overlook moral problems arising from contingent (but morally significant) differences in social positions and levels of participation in oppressive systems.

15.4 Conclusion We have argued that Schopenhauer’s normative ethics is not, as Hamlyn and Young suggest, simplistic. Instead, Schopenhauer can be read as offering five dimensions of moral assessment for actions. This five-dimensional view, we believe, is attractive in various respects, and deserves attention from contemporary ethicists. Even so, we do not claim that Schopenhauer’s ethics is unproblematic. In particular, it seems to fail to condemn a range of actions involving misplaced compassion. However, no major ethical system in Western philosophy is without apparent problems, and perhaps further examination of Schopenhauer’s system will be fruitful, as have, e.g., careful examinations of Kant’s ethics.42

Notes 1 Hamlyn 1980, 147. 2 Young 2005, 175. 3 See esp. Hassan 2022. 4 For example, David Cartwright states that “Schopenhauer’s moral philosophy consists in an ethics of virtue rather than an ethics of principle, duty, or doing” (Cartwright 1988, 18, our emphasis). One significant exception to this trend is Puryear 2017. 5 See, e.g., Atwell 1990, Mannion 2003, Shapshay 2019, and Marshall 2021a. Schopenhauer claims that “philosophy is always theoretical … describing without prescribing”, because it cannot “guide action [or] shape character” (SW 2:319/WWR 1:297). While this might be read as a rejection of academic ethics as a means for guiding shaping character, it is compatible with normative ethics in the contemporary sense: one can well describe evaluative standards for actions and characteristics without taking those descriptions to themselves impact actions or shape character. See Stephen Puryear’s contribution to this volume for a related discussion. 6 For some relevant discussions, see Woods 2017, Magee 1997, 236–37, and Shapshay 2019, 22–25. 7 Schopenhauer denies that philosophy can be prescriptive in a strong sense, though he states that his views are analogous to prescriptive ethics. See SW 2:442/WWR 1:401, and Marshall 2017, 309 for discussion.

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Schopenhauer’s Five-dimensional Normative Ethics 8 The ranking of tier 2 over tier 3 actions is (weakly) suggested by the grammatical order of the principle’s clauses. 9 For an illuminating discussion, see Puryear 2017. Puryear points out that Schopenhauer does not count all actions that harm non-human animals as wrong, on broadly consequentialist grounds (e.g., “the will to life as a whole suffers less” (SW 2:440n./WWR 1:399n.) – which seems inconsistent with Schopenhauer’s definition of “wrong” (Puryear 2017, 255). 10 This point has sometimes been missed. For example, Sandra Shapshay reads Schopenhauer as holding that “an action of moral worth must also be the right thing to do” (Shapshay 2019, 162, our emphasis). Note that Schopenhauer has an additional relevant category: duties, as actions that it would be wrong not to perform (see SW 4:220/OBM 210). However, this does not meaningfully add to the four tiers, since he does not imply that dutiful actions are better than other actions that are merely not wrong. Nor does it imply there are uniquely right actions. Schopenhauer seems open to there being conflicting duties, generating cases in which every course of action is wrong. 11 E.g., “in many cases the infinitely … nuanced nature of the situation means that the right choice must flow directly from character: the application of purely abstract maxims either gives the wrong result... or cannot be acted on” (SW 2:72/WWR 1:85). 12 See Marshall 2021a, 787–89. 13 There is, of course, a thematic link between the Neminem Principle and the criterion of moral worth, but we disagree here with commentators such as Cartwright, who claims that the Neminem Principle “serves simply to summarize the lines of conduct to which moral worth is attributed” (Cartwright 2012, 255). One complication, pointed out by Puryear, is that Schopenhauer links rightness to motives at SW 2:399–400/WWR 1:365 (Puryear 2017, 253). Since the Neminem Principle aligns with the rightness/wrongness distinction, this would seem to link that principle and the criterion of moral worth. However, in the discussion that immediately follows (SW 2:400–1/WWR 1:365–6), talk of motive drops out entirely. 14 Schopenhauer does claim that whoever is “filled with [compassion] will reliably [zuverlässig] injure no one … [and] help everyone, as much as he is able” (SW 4:236/OBM 223). Given that Schopenhauer elsewhere recognizes the possibility of mistakes arising from compassion (e.g., SW 4:99/FW 110), however, this can be read as claiming that compassion gives rise to tier 1 actions other things being equal, or in ideal circumstances (see Marshall 2021b, 36). 15 The fact that Schopenhauer has this special sub-category within loving kindness is often missed in literature on his theory of virtues. See, e.g., Cartwright 2012 and Hassan 2022. 16 Taken at face-value, this passage commits Schopenhauer to some implausible results, such as there being less injustice or wrongness in murdering 40 people to get 40 cookies (a ratio of 1 death per cookie) than in murdering 2 people to get 1 cookie (a ratio of 2 deaths per cookie). In addition, Schopenhauer’s measure of injustice gives no result when there is no benefit to the agent, since this would be a case of dividing by 0. Note that Schopenhauer also offers a similar measure of the justice of omissions, which raises additional questions we cannot explore here. 17 It is possible that, in the relevant passage, Schopenhauer is focused on murderous cannibalism. Even so, it is hard to see how cannibalism would rank below murder by other evaluative measures. As Bill Waterson’s character Calvin proposes: “cannibalism ought to be considered grounds for leniency in murders, since it’s less wasteful“ (Calvin and Hobbes; June 3, 1993). 18 Part of the difference between compassion and insights into eternal justice is that, in compassion, we supposedly feel others’ suffering (see SW 4:211–2/OBM 203), whereas this does not appear to be part of the recognition of eternal justice (for more on this aspect of compassion, see Marshall 2021a). 19 One concerning fact is that Schopenhauer’s terminology does not consistently align with the distinctions described in Section 1. For example, he states that the Neminem Principle identifies which actions have moral worth (moralischen Werth) (SW 4:136/OBM 139), which would blur the first distinction from the previous section. Similarly, Schopenhauer elsewhere says that wrongness hinges on an agent’s aim in acting (SW 2:398–9/WWR 1:364), which contradicts his definition of wrongness in terms of harm or the boundaries of another’s will (though see Puryear 2017). Even on a charitable reading, therefore, we must grant that Schopenhauer’s presentation of his normative ethics is messy. 20 A different approach to making Schopenhauer’s views coherent was suggested to us by David Bather Woods: perhaps some evaluative rankings are downstream of others. For example, perhaps

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Colin Marshall and Kayla R. Mehl the tiers of the Neminem Principle apply only to actions that already meet the criterion of moral worth. We believe this approach is worth exploring, but will not attempt to do so here. 21 Scanlon 2010, 4. 22 Perhaps Schopenhauer would say that all wrong actions are impermissible. However, taken at face-value, the Neminem Principle itself demands helping as much as one can as unconditionally as it demands not harming. So even if not harming is sufficient for not acting wrongly, the Neminem Principle demands more than not acting wrongly. 23 See also SW 2:407/WWR 1:371 on the “inner meaning” of right and wrong. 24 For something like this distinction, see Strawson 1962 on personal vs. vicarious reactive attitudes. See SW 4:236/OBM 224 on cheating a rich man vs. a poor man out of a hundred thalers (which are both unjust, but the latter shows more of a lack of compassion), with the differences in “the reproaches of conscience and the blame from impartial witnesses.” None of this is to say that Schopenhauer’s measures of injustice get the matter right as presented – the problems noted above with the measure remain to be addressed. 25 See Shapshay 2012. 26 See also SW 6:214/PP 2:183 on “internal truths”. It would seem to follow that, when considered in an aesthetic mode, cannibalism is beautiful, since Schopenhauer takes “beauty” to express our cognition of an Idea in a thing. Yet Schopenhauer is committed to this anyway, since he claims that, considered in the appropriate way, “everything is beautiful” (SW 2:248/WWR 1:234). Even so, he allows that some things are humanly impossible to consider in an aesthetic light, including disgusting things (SW 2:245/WWR 1:232–3), and this is plausibly the case with cannibalism. 27 For more, see Marshall 2021a. Though Schopenhauer suggests the same cognition is involved in understanding the essence of virtue and in understanding eternal justice (WWR 1 2:418), understanding the essence of virtue is different from having compassion, that is, from being virtuous. 28 Schopenhauer arguably has two other evaluative, though less purely ethical, approaches to actions: one concerning whether actions bring us closer to ascetic resignation and one connected to ideal agency or acquired character. For relevant discussions, see Woods 2021, Hassan 2021, and Sean Murphy’s contribution to this volume. 29 Hassan claims that the principle is meant merely as a heuristic, and suggests it might be understood on the model of moral principles in a contemporary particularist moral framework (Hassan, 2022). We think this is a useful comparison. However, contemporary particularists typically hold that, for an agent in a specific circumstance, there are fine-grained facts about which actions it would be better or worse to perform, so that heuristics are useful as approximations of those fine-grained facts. For Schopenhauer, however, there are few fine-grained moral facts (perhaps only within the dimension of the magnitude of injustice), so the role of principles is fundamentally different. 30 By contrast, concrete instances of compassion can involve the apprehension of particular individuals’ suffering (see Marshall 2021a, 790–92). 31 To be sure, adding firmness to moral principles is not the only role Schopenhauer gives reason in agency. See, e.g., SW 2:102, 359–61/WWR 1:112, 331–2). 32 Schopenhauer took one moral paragons to be irrational in his finest moment: “when Arnold von Winkelried, with excessive magnanimity, caught all the enemy spears with his own body in order to secure victory and salvation for his countrymen, who would praise this as an extremely rational deed?” (SW 2:611/WWR 1:545). 33 See Marshall 2021b for a review of some objections. 34 David Bather Woods argues (convincingly) that Schopenhauer’s political philosophy supports systems of exploitation and oppression, but holds that his moral system “​​naturally lends itself to the moral criticism of exploitative behaviors” (Woods 2017, 316). For criticisms of Schopenhauer with some similarity to ours, see Atwell 1990, 109-13 and Cartwright 2012, 258. 35 See Woods 2017, 314–15, Puryear 2017, 259-61, and Shapshay 2019, 181–82 for helpful discussions. 36 For example, he accuses “the renewed Spinozism of our day” of turning ethics “into a mere introduction to a proper life in the state or the family, and it is this life, a complete, methodical, smug, and comfortable philistinism, that is supposed to be the final goal of human existence” (SW 3:677/WAR 2:605). 37 Crucially, the harm that Schopenhauer attributes to an action is always one of more or less immediate effects (or omissions).

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Schopenhauer’s Five-dimensional Normative Ethics 38 Hence, Schopenhauer’s system seems poorly equipped to condemn what Kate Manne labels “himpathy” (Manne 2017). 39 One could, of course, have a more expansive notion of harming, on which any action that helps uphold a harmful system thereby counts as harmful. Schopenhauer’s notion of harm does not appear to be that expansive, however. 40 Though see Shapshay 2019 for a convincing argument that Schopenhauer recognized some differences in suffering. 41 See, e.g., Cherry 2021. 42 For helpful comments and discussion, we would like to thank David Bather Woods, Patrick Hassan, Sean Murphy, Stephen Puryear, Sandy Shapshay, and Aaron Barker.

Works Cited Atwell, John E. 1990. Schopenhauer: The Human Character. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Cartwright, David. 1988. “Schopenhauer’s Axiological Analysis of Character.” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 42 (164 (1)): 18–36. ———. 2012. “Schopenhauer on the Value of Compassion.” In A Companion to Schopenhauer, edited by Bart Vandenabeele, 249–65. https://doi​.org​/10​.1002​/9781444347579​.ch17. Cherry, Myisha. 2021. The Case for Rage: Why Anger Is Essential to Anti-Racist Struggle. New York: Oxford University Press. https://doi​.org​/10​.1093​/oso​/9780197557341​.001​.0001. Hamlyn, D. W. 1980. Schopenhauer. London: Routledge. Hassan, Patrick. 2021. “Virtue and the Problem of Egoism in Schopenhauer’s Moral Philosophy.” In Schopenhauer’s Moral Philosophy, edited by Patrick Hassan, 77–102. London: Routledge. ———. 2022. “Schopenhauerian Virtue Ethics.” Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, 381–413. https://doi​.org​/10​.1080​/0020174x​.2019​.1629337. Magee, Bryan. 1997. The Philosophy of Schopenhauer. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi​ .org​/10​.1093​/0198237227​.001​.0001. Manne, Kate. 2017. Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny. 1st edition. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Mannion, Gerard. 2003. Schopenhauer, Religion, and Morality: The Humble Path to Ethics. Ashgate New Critical Thinking in Philosophy. Aldershot, Hants, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Marshall, Colin. 2017. “Schopenhauer and Non-Cognitivist Moral Realism.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 55 (2): 293–316. https://doi​.org​/10​.1353​/hph​.2017​.0030. ———. 2021a. “Schopenhauer on the Content of Compassion.” Noûs 55 (4): 782–99. https://doi​.org​ /10​.1111​/nous​.12330. ———. 2021b. “Schopenhauer’s Titus Argument.” In Schopenhauer’s Moral Philosophy, edited by Patrick Hassan, 31–51. Routledge. https://philarchive​.org​/rec​/MARSTA​-26. Puryear, Stephen. 2017. “Schopenhauer on the Rights of Animals.” European Journal of Philosophy 25 (2): 250–69. https://doi​.org​/10​.1111​/ejop​.12237. Scanlon, T. M. 2010. Moral Dimensions: Permissibility, Meaning, Blame. Reprint edition. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press. Shapshay, Sandra. 2012. “Schopenhauer’s Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art.” Philosophy Compass 7 (1): 11–22. https://doi​.org​/10​.1111​/j​.1747​-9991​.2011​.00453​.x. ———. 2019. Reconstructing Schopenhauer’s Ethics: Hope, Compassion, and Animal Welfare. Oxford University Press. Strawson, Peter. 1962. “Freedom and Resentment.” Proceedings of the British Academy 48: 187–211. Woods, David Bather. 2017. “Schopenhauer on the State and Morality.” In The Palgrave Schopenhauer Handbook, edited by Sandra Shapshay, 299–322. Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism. Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi​.org​/10​.1007​/978​-3​-319​-62947​-6​_15. ———. 2021. “Schopenhauer’s Sexual Ethics.” In Schopenhauer’s Moral Philosophy, edited by Patrick Hassan, 160–72. Routledge. Young, Julian. 2005. Schopenhauer. 1st edition. London; New York: Routledge.

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16 SCHOPENHAUER AND MODERN MORAL PHILOSOPHY Stephen Puryear

In her influential essay on modern moral philosophy, Elizabeth Anscombe counsels us to dispense with many of our most central moral concepts. The second of her three main theses is that the concepts of obligation, and duty—moral obligation and moral duty, that is to say—and of what is morally right and wrong, and of the moral sense of “ought,” ought to be jettisoned if this is psychologically possible; because they are survivals, or derivatives from survivals, from an earlier conception of ethics which no longer generally survives, and are only harmful without it. (1958: 1) She proceeds to identify this earlier conception of ethics as a divine law conception. Shorn from the framework of such a conception, she contends, these moral concepts become harmful and indeed lose their very intelligibility: Hume discovered the situation in which the notion “obligation” survived, and the notion “ought” was invested with that peculiar force having which it is said to be used in a “moral” sense, but in which the belief in divine law had long since been abandoned: for it was substantially given up among Protestants at the time of the Reformation. The situation, if I am right, was the interesting one of the survival of a concept outside the framework of thought that made it a really intelligible one. (1958: 6) Those of us who have abandoned the idea of a divine law should therefore dispense with these concepts. According to Anscombe, however, this does not amount to dispensing with morality itself. For we might instead revert to a pre-modern conception of ethics such as Aristotle’s, according to which we evaluate actions not as right or wrong, obligatory or impermissible, and so forth, but merely as belonging to some category of virtuous or vicious action, such as just or unjust, truthful or untruthful, and the like (8–9).

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Anscombe’s essay ranges widely over the history of ethics: she discusses Aristotle, Hume, Bentham, Kant, Mill, Butler, Sidgwick, and others. But one person conspicuously absent from her discussion is Schopenhauer, who argued along strikingly similar lines more than a century earlier.1 He too maintains that concepts such as the moral ought, along with related concepts such as that of a moral imperative or moral law, can derive their intelligibility only from a divine lawgiver. And he too contends that we should abandon these concepts. Yet his critique differs from hers in at least two significant respects. The first is that he offers reasons for abandoning these concepts that differ from and indeed cut deeper than Anscombe’s. The second is that the concepts implicated in his critique differ in part from those mentioned by Anscombe. They do indeed include that of the moral ought, as well as those of moral imperative, command, and law. But they do not include the concepts of moral right and wrong, or of moral duty or obligation, which according to Schopenhauer can be given a perfectly good sense outside the framework of a divine law conception of ethics. From his perspective, Anscombe could be said to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. In another work (Puryear 2022), I treat at length of the parallels between these two accounts and of the first difference. Here my focus will be the second point of disagreement: namely, whether the notions of moral right and wrong, and of moral duty and obligation, are implicated in the critique of the moral ought. According to Schopenhauer, in contrast to Anscombe, they are not. My aim will be to develop Schopenhauer’s accounts of these notions, accounts which neither advert to nor presuppose a divine lawgiver. I begin, in Section 1, by briefly surveying Schopenhauer’s critique of the moral ought, a critique which I see as fundamentally in agreement with Anscombe’s. In the remaining sections, I turn to Schopenhauer’s accounts of the other notions. Section 2 concerns what he sees as the most fundamental of them, the concept of wrongdoing or wrong action. Section 3 then turns to the notion of right action and of rights, as things that can be possessed. Finally, Section 4 concerns the notion of moral obligation or duty. Through reflection on these accounts, I hope to show that we can accept the critiques of Schopenhauer and Anscombe, and thus dispense with the imperative in ethics, while retaining a distinctively modern conception of morality.

16.1  Schopenhauer’s Rejection of the Moral Ought In his prize-essay On the Basis of Morality, Schopenhauer objects to Kant’s conception of ethics in terms of command, law, and duty: Separated from the theological presuppositions from which they issued, these concepts really lose all meaning as well, and if, like Kant, one thinks to substitute for them by speaking of an absolute ought and unconditioned duty, then one is turning the reader away with words for food, really giving him a contradiction in terms to digest. That ought has any sense [Sinn] and meaning [Bedeutung] only in relation to threatened punishment or promised reward. (SW 4:122–3/OBM 127–8) An ought, Schopenhauer claims, can have no sense or meaning apart from a threatened punishment or promised reward. But a moral ought purportedly binds us more strongly

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than could any ought stemming from a threat or promise issuing from a mere creature. This threatened punishment or promised reward must therefore issue from a divine authority. Accordingly, if separated from their “theological presuppositions”—that is, from the presupposition of a divine lawgiver—these concepts lose all sense and meaning. As Anscombe puts it, they cease to be intelligible. We may wonder why an ought, or more precisely a binding ought, can have no sense or meaning apart from an external incentive. Schopenhauer casts a bit of light on this topic by invoking Locke: That ought has any sense [Sinn] and meaning [Bedeutung] only in relation to threatened punishment or promised reward. Thus, long before Kant was thought of, Locke already says: “For since it would be utterly in vain, to suppose a rule set to the free actions of man, without annexing to it some enforcement of good and evil to determine his will; we must, where-ever we suppose a law, suppose also some reward or punishment annexed to that law.” (On Understanding, Bk. II, ch. 33, §6). So the ought is necessarily conditioned by punishment or reward [...]. But once those conditions are thought away the concept of ought remains empty of sense. (SW 4:123/OBM 128) Locke’s point is simple: to suppose a rule of conduct apart from an associated reward or punishment would be in vain; hence laws, not being in vain, must consist in a rule of conduct together with an associated reward or punishment. Essentially the same point was made by Locke’s contemporary, Samuel Pufendorf, in his On the Duty of Man and Citizen According to Natural Law (1673). There he defines law as “a decree by which a superior obliges one who is subject to him to conform his actions to the superior’s prescription” (Bk. I, Ch. 2, §2/1991: 27). He then explains that the law acquires this power to oblige, this binding quality, from the threat of punishment: Every complete law has two parts: the one part in which what is to be done or not done is defined, and the other which declares the punishment prescribed for one who ignores a precept or does what is forbidden. For because of the wickedness of human nature which loves to do what is forbidden, it is utterly useless to say “Do this!” if no evil awaits him who does not, and similarly, it is absurd to say, “You will be punished”, without first specifying what deserves the punishment. (Bk. I, Ch. 2, §7/1991: 29) Even more instructive is the account of Schopenhauer’s contemporary, John Austin. In his The Province of Jurisprudence Determined (1832), he defines law as a generally applicable command, and command as the intimation of a wish together with a threatened sanction: If you express or intimate a wish that I shall do or forbear from some act, and if you will visit me with an evil in case I comply not with your wish, the expression or intimation of your wish is a command. A command is distinguished from other significations of desire, not by the style in which the desire is signified, but by the power and the purpose of the party commanding to inflict an evil or pain in case the desire be disregarded. If you cannot or will not harm me in case I comply not with your wish, the expression of your wish is not a command, although you utter your wish in 230

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imperative phrase. If you are able and willing to harm me in case I comply not with your wish, the expression of your wish amounts to a command, although you are prompted by a spirit of courtesy to utter it in the shape of a request. (Lecture I/1995: 21) Austin then adds: “Being liable to evil from you if I comply not with a wish which you signify, I am bound or obliged by your command, or I lie under a duty to obey it” (Lecture I/1995: 22). Imperatives or laws, and more generally all commands or oughts, thus presuppose a threat of punishment (or perhaps a promise of reward) because that is the only possible source of their binding quality.2 Apart from the external incentive, all we have is a mere intimation of a wish, not a genuine law or command. Why, then, does a binding ought (law, command, imperative) lose all sense and meaning apart from an external incentive? Because the binding force of such an ought must have a source, and this source cannot be conceived as anything other than an external incentive, that is, a threatened punishment or promised reward. In the case of morality, as we have said, this external incentive could issue only from a divine authority. Hence, the kind of ought (law, command, imperative) we call moral must derive from a divine lawgiver. After making essentially the same point, Anscombe argues that we should reject the central concepts of modern moral philosophy because the divine law conception of ethics from which they derive their intelligibility “no longer generally survives” (1). According to Schopenhauer, however, the problems with the moral ought run deeper. Most fundamentally, the problem is not that the moral ought is out of step with currently prevailing views, but rather that the very idea of such an ought is contradictory and thus ought to be abandoned not just by those who reject the idea of a divine lawgiver but by every right-thinking person. For one thing, if we join Kant in conceiving the moral ought as essentially unconditioned, then that concept harbors a contradiction, since any ought that binds must in fact be conditioned, namely, by a threat or promise.3 This concern might of course be sidestepped by simply eschewing the Kantian conception of the moral ought as unconditioned. But a deeper problem remains, one that concerns the opposition between self-interest and morality. As Schopenhauer explains: It is simply impossible to think of a commanding voice, whether it come from within or from without, except as threatening or promising: but then obedience towards it will indeed be prudent or stupid, according to circumstances, yet always self-interested, and so without moral worth. [...] Thus the contradiction-concealing assumption of an unconditional, absolute ought avenges itself. (SW 4:123–4/OBM 128)4 It is of the essence of such an ought—and likewise of the moral law or a moral imperative—that it induces us to act or forbear acting in certain ways. According to Schopenhauer, however, it can do so only through a threat of punishment or promise of reward and thus only through an appeal to self-interest. Yet insofar as an action springs from self-interest, he thinks, it lacks moral worth. Hence, this sort of ought essentially works against morality and thus cannot without inconsistency be described as “moral”. The very idea of a binding moral ought is in this sense a disguised contradiction.5 For this reason, above all, Schopenhauer rejects the concept of a moral ought and the related concepts of moral law and moral command or imperative.6 He does not, however, 231

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go so far as to reject the other concepts mentioned by Anscombe, namely, “the concepts of obligation, and duty—moral obligation and moral duty, that is to say—and of what is morally right and wrong” (1958: 1). On his view, as we will see, the latter concepts can be given a perfectly good sense without imputing to them an overriding binding force and thus without presupposing a divine lawgiver. Let us now turn to his accounts of these concepts, starting with what Schopenhauer considers the most fundamental of them, that of wrong.

16.2  Wrong Action Although the German Unrecht is lexically posterior to Recht, Schopenhauer believes “we must keep to the concepts, not the words” (SW 2:400/WWR 1:365); and he considers the concept wrong to be both historically and conceptually prior to the concept right. The original phenomenon was that of being wronged by another, and actions came to be called “wrong” when they involved someone being wronged by another. This in turn led to the idea of right action as the negation of wrong action, and as we will see in Section 4, to the idea of moral obligation or duty. Accordingly, Schopenhauer begins with an analysis of the concept wrong and then defines those of right, obligation, and duty in its terms. Anscombe has a rather different take. She maintains that the concept morally wrong has its roots in certain legal concepts: “‘morally wrong’ is the term which is the heir of the notion ‘illicit,’ or ‘what there is an obligation not to do’; which belongs in a divine law theory of ethics. [...] for what obliges is the divine law—as rules oblige in a game” (1958: 17–18). Anscombe offers this genealogical thesis in support of her contention that morally wrong essentially includes the idea of a special binding force and thus cannot coherently be retained apart from a divine law conception of ethics. She even goes so far as to claim that this concept “seems to have no discernible content except a certain compelling force, which I should call purely psychological” (1958: 18). If Schopenhauer is right, however, then wrong—that is, morally wrong—is both historically and conceptually prior to concepts such as law and obligation, and thus need not be understood to include in its essence the idea of a binding force. Schopenhauer analyzes what it means to wrong someone as a kind of encroachment (Einbruch) on the territory of that individual’s will (SW 2:394–5/WWR 1:360–1). What this means, expressed less metaphorically, is that one individual wrongs another, at least to a first approximation, when the former acts so as to prevent the latter’s will from attaining its object. This happens in the first instance when an individual thwarts the will of another through some kind of violence or coercion. So, if A restrains, assaults, or murders B, then A interferes with B’s will and thus wrongs B. But it also happens, more subtly though no less perniciously, when through cunning or deceit one is made to serve another’s will rather than one’s own (SW 2:398–9/WWR 1:363–4). Schopenhauer casts additional light on his view when he describes the act of wronging as the denial of another’s will “through the stronger affirmation of my own” (SW 2:400/WWR 1:365). Similarly, in his discussion of the virtue of righteousness (Gerechtigheit), that is, the disposition not to wrong others, he claims that the righteous (gerecht) person will not inflict suffering on others “to enhance his own well-being” (SW 2:437/WWR 1:397) and that the essence of righteousness, its innermost being, lies in the intention (Vorsatz) “not to affirm your own will to the point where it negates other appearances of the will by forcing them to serve yours” (SW 2:438/WWR 1:397–8). What Schopenhauer appears to be getting at in these remarks is that wronging involves not 232

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merely impeding the will of another but doing so with a view to affirming one’s own will over that of the other, or in other words, to elevating one’s own aims or interests above the other’s. An encroachment thus constitutes a wrong if (and only if) it implies that the encroacher assigns greater importance to her own well-being than to that of the one on whose will she encroaches. Such encroachments may take one of two basic forms. Schopenhauer gestures toward this when he notes that we feel dissatisfaction with our actions not simply because we have acted egoistically but because “we have acted too egoistically, with too much regard for our own well-being and too little for that of others, or because we have indeed made into our ends the woe of another for its own sake without advantage to ourselves” (SW 4:173–4/OBM 172). Accordingly, a wrongful encroachment may stem from what he calls “extreme egoism” (äußerster Egoismus) (SW 4:200/OBM 194), which involves pursuing one’s own ends without proper regard, or even with deliberate disregard, for others. Even worse, it may be an expression of malice (Bosheit), in which the mistreatment of another is not the means to one’s end, but the end itself. According to Schopenhauer’s analysis, then, an action is wrong—that is, morally wrong—just in case it thwarts the will of another out of malice or excessive egoism. As I noted above, Anscombe considers the idea of a binding force or obligation to be essential to and perhaps even exhaustive of the concept morally wrong. She therefore sees no way that it can coherently be retained in the absence of belief in a divine law and she chides her contemporaries for “depriving ‘morally ought’ of its now delusive appearance of content” while at the same time retaining the “atmosphere” or “psychological force” (8, 17–18) of the term by helping themselves to the concept morally wrong. But here I think we can see that Anscombe has somewhat misdescribed the situation. She is quite right that a concept of moral wrongness that includes the idea of a binding force has no place in an ethics that eschews divine commands. It is a mistake, however, to think that such a concept of moral wrongness is the concept of moral wrongness, the only such concept. In truth, there are different ways of conceiving moral wrongness and thus different concepts of moral wrongness. One of those concepts is the one Anscombe imputes to her contemporaries, which involves the idea of a binding force and hence should be abandoned. But another concept with at least as good a claim to being a concept of moral wrongness is the one that emerges from Schopenhauer’s analysis; and this concept in no way traffics in the idea of a binding force. When he analyzes wrong in terms of thwarting the will of another out of malice or excessive egoism, there is no suggestion that we should not or must not thwart the will of another, or that we ought not to wrong anyone, at least in the moral sense of these terms. Yet this concept is no less a moral one; for to deny the will of another out of malice or callous indifference is surely to wrong that individual in a moral sense. Schopenhauer’s concept of moral wrongness does not therefore “retain the atmosphere” of the moral ought and hence is not implicated in his critique of the latter concept. From this perspective, Anscombe has cast her net too wide, by lumping the concept of moral wrongness together with those such as law, command, and ought, which really should be abandoned.

16.3  Right Action With his analysis of morally wrong action in place, Schopenhauer turns to his account of its opposite: morally right action. Since the former consists in a kind of injury to another, he concludes that this concept “is a positive one and precedent to that of right, which is 233

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negative and designates merely the actions that one can perform without injuring others, i.e. without doing wrong” (SW 4:216–7/OBM 207).7 He expresses the same idea more fully in the main work: It follows from this [analysis] that the concept of wrong [Unrecht] is the original and positive one: the opposite one of right [Recht] is derivative and negative. For we must keep not to words but to concepts. In fact, there would never have been any talk of right if there were no wrong. The concept right contains namely only the negation of wrong, and subsumes every action that does not overstep the boundary presented above, i.e., that is not a negation of the other’s will through the stronger affirmation of one’s own. That boundary therefore divides, with respect to a merely and purely moral determination, the entire field of possible actions into those which are wrong or right. (SW 2:400/WWR 1:365, translation modified) An action is therefore morally right, according to this account, just in case it does not involve the affirmation of one’s own will to the point of denying the will of another; or, to put the point in more concrete terms, just in case it does not thwart the will of another out of malice or excessive egoism. In addition to this analysis of right action, Schopenhauer offers an inchoate but nonetheless coherent account of rights, things which can be possessed. These too he defines in terms of not-wronging another. In the first instance, he defines a right as the ability to do something, or to take or use something, without wronging anyone. Thus, a person can be said to have a right to breathe air, to be on public lands, to admire the starlit sky, and so forth, because none of these actions would wrong anyone. Similarly, I have a right to defend myself against some act of violence or cunning because such a response, at least if not excessive, would not wrong my attacker (or anyone else). But I do not have a right to do anything that would wrong another. So I do not have a right to assault, steal, trespass, or insult. This basic sense of a right corresponds to what Hohfeld calls a privilege and others more appropriately call a liberty.8 Schopenhauer sometimes gives the impression that, in his view, all rights are liberties in this sense. For example, he remarks that “human rights [Menschenrechte] are easy to define: Everyone has the right to do anything that does not injure another” (SW 6:257/PP 2:218). But clearly he does not mean to limit rights merely to liberties; for in various places he chides other philosophers for denying that animals have rights (SW 3:742/WWR 2:662; SW 1:98/FR 93; SW 4:238, 243/OBM 226, 229–30; SW 6:394/PP 2:333–4, 376), his point being not the trivial thought that animals can do many things without wronging others, but rather that animals can be wronged, that our conduct toward them has moral significance, even apart from its bearing on ourselves and other humans. He contrasts the view that animals have rights with the belief that animals are mere things with which we can do as we please. Likewise, he equates the view that they lack rights with “the delusion that our actions towards them are without moral significance” (SW 4:238, 243/OBM 226). Obviously, the rights he has in mind in these contexts concern not what can be done without wronging another, but what cannot be done by others without wronging the right-holder. To have a right in this sense is just to be capable of being wronged, as when we say, for instance, that a person has a right to humane treatment, because to treat her otherwise would be to wrong her. These rights correspond roughly to what, following Hohfeld, we now call claims. More precisely, 234

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they are negative claims, since they concern not the provision but the withholding of something, namely, the interference of another. Besides liberties and negative claims, Schopenhauer also recognizes the existence of positive claim-rights. Unlike negative claims, which are general in the sense that they express facts about the right-holder’s relationship to all moral beings or at least all moral agents, positive claims are those that arise because one or more moral agents enter into an agreement with the right-holder. Thus, if A enters into an agreement with B to provide the latter with some good, but then reneges on the agreement, A wrongs B. So in accordance with the idea of a right as the negation of a wrong, Schopenhauer recognizes that the agreement between A and B endows B with a right to the promised good from A. This right is a claim because it expresses what A cannot do, or rather cannot fail to do, without wronging B. But since it is a right to the provision of something positive (i.e., the good) rather than to the absence of something positive (i.e., interference), the right is positive. B’s right is therefore a positive claim. As with the notion of wrong from which they derive, these concepts of morally right action and of the various kinds of (moral) rights do not include, and should not be thought to include, so much as a whiff of the moral ought. There is no suggestion here that one must, or has to, or ought to perform right actions, or respect the rights of others. Accordingly, these concepts likewise fall outside the scope of the critique of the moral ought.

16.4  Duty and Obligation We come now to the concept of duty, or obligation, in the moral sense of the term. This concept of course figures centrally in the ethics of Kant, who may be viewed as essentially reducing morality to a system of duties, i.e., to a matter of what we have a duty either to do or to forbear doing. But Schopenhauer complains that Kant and others have given duty “too great an extension” and that it “forfeits all its peculiar character and gets lost if, as in morals hitherto, one wants to call every praiseworthy way of acting duty” (SW 4:220/OBM 211; see also SW 4:125, 213/OBM 129, 204). To correct this error, Schopenhauer proposes to restore the true limits of the concept. He begins by noting that a duty is something owed and thus a kind of indebtedness (SW 4:220/OBM 211). To have a duty to speak truthfully is just to owe others the truth; to have a duty to help others is just to owe them my assistance; and so forth. As such, a duty cannot be imposed on someone, as an ought can, but must rather be assumed by that person (SW 4:124/OBM 129). To put the point in terms of rights, for me to have a duty to another is for that other to have a right to something from me; and for someone else to have a right to something from me is for me to lack a right that I would otherwise have. For I naturally have a right to what is mine, and such a right—that is, a moral or natural right—cannot be taken from me: it can only be relinquished by me. A duty must therefore be assumed through some kind of consenting act. As a rule, Schopenhauer thinks, this act takes the form of an explicit and mutual agreement between parties, though he does recognize one exception: the case of a parent’s duty to their children, where the obligation arises not through an agreement but “immediately through a mere action, because the one to whom one has it was not yet there when one assumed it” (SW 4:221/OBM 211).9 From this it follows that duty has a much narrower extension than it does on the Kantian view. In part this is because most morally good or praiseworthy actions are not ones we have undertaken a commitment to perform. If I come across a stranger in need, it would 235

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indeed be morally good and praiseworthy for me to help that person. But unless there is some underlying agreement or commitment in place, I do not have a duty or obligation to help that person. In contrast, if I have agreed to help you in exchange for a wage, which you have already paid, then I do have a duty to help you. It might be objected that even if this is so, we still owe things to one another even apart from an agreement; for example, I could be said to owe you my noninterference, just as you owe me your noninterference. The problem with this line of thinking, I believe, is that properly speaking only something positive can be owed. I can owe another person my labor, or money, or some other possession of mine, etc., but I cannot, properly speaking, owe someone the mere absence of something, such as my noninterference in their affairs. Thus, I cannot have a duty not to wrong others, or more broadly, not to act in a morally bad way. I can have a duty only in cases where I owe some positive thing to another. Another respect in which Kant’s conception of duty falls wide of the mark, from this point of view, concerns the subjects of duties, that is, the range of beings to whom they apply. According to Kant, what the moral law commands is a duty for all rational beings as such, so that when we reach the point in life at which we achieve rationality, we immediately find ourselves saddled with a vast number of duties, i.e., debts. On Schopenhauer’s view, however, this is far from the case. Since duties must be assumed, one cannot merely find oneself with duties just by virtue of one’s status as a rational being. Accordingly, it is not true that what is a duty for some rational beings is a duty for all rational beings. As with the concepts of rights and right action, and in keeping with the conception of duty as a form of indebtedness, Schopenhauer defines duty in terms of the concept wrong: to have a duty (or obligation) to φ, he maintains, is just for it to be the case that to not φ would be to wrong someone (SW 4:220–2/OBM 210–2). I thus have a duty to perform any action that I could not fail to perform without wronging another. So, for instance, in our previous example, A has a duty to provide B with the promised good, because if A were to fail to provide that good, then A would be wronging B. But A does not have a duty to help others in general, since to withhold help from them would not be to wrong them. Contrary to this, it might be thought that a person in need would will to be helped by me, so that if I did not offer that help, I would be thwarting that person’s will. In that case, if my refusal to help sprung from some form of malice or excessive egoism (e.g., thinking that I am more important than this other person), then it would follow on Schopenhauer’s analysis that I am wronging that person and thus that I have a duty to help them. This is not, however, how Schopenhauer sees it. On his view, “denying help to those in urgent need, calmly observing someone starve to death while you have more than enough, although cruel and diabolical, are not wrong” (SW 2:400/WWR 1:365). This is because the one who declines to help another does not thereby encroach on the territory of the other’s will. Declining to help might well disappoint that will, but that is not the same as negating it or encroaching on its territory. In contrast, if I agree to provide someone with some good, then that promised good is transferred (as it were) from the territory of my will to the territory of the other’s, so that if I then refuse to provide the good, I am indeed encroaching on the territory of the other will and thus wronging that person (assuming that I do so out of malice or excessive egoism). From this we can see that duties, as understood by Schopenhauer, correlate in a way with rights. When A enters into an agreement with B, A assumes a duty. But by the same token, B acquires a claim. Likewise, since such agreements always involve a mutual exchange of goods—A agrees to provide B with some good only because B agrees to provide something 236

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in return—B also assumes a duty and A also acquires a claim. Further, since such agreements always involve a mutual exchange of goods, the rights acquired by the parties are positive claims. Duties in Schopenhauer’s sense may therefore be said to correlate specifically with positive claims. Schopenhauer’s statements about duty might seem in one respect inconsistent. In his critique of the moral ought, discussed above in Section 1, he assimilates the concept of moral duty (or obligation) to those of the moral law or moral ought, which he dismisses as contradictory. For instance, he equates the imperative form in ethics with the “doctrine of duty” (SW 4:122, 125/OBM 127, 129). He says that the concepts of ought and duty are “very closely related and almost identical,” the lone difference being perhaps that “ought as such can also rest on sheer compulsion, while duty presupposes obligation, i.e. the acceptance of duty” (SW 4:124/OBM 129). Despite this assimilation, however, he does not simply dismiss the concept of moral duty, as he does its close relatives. Rather, he thinks it can be retained and given a legitimate sense. What gives? To resolve this apparent inconsistency, we should note that when Schopenhauer criticizes Kant’s conception of duty, his stated target is duty “taken in this unconditioned sense” (SW 4:125/OBM 127). It may well be that duty in this sense is “almost identical” to the moral ought and hence suffers from the same problems. If we understand duty as Schopenhauer proposes, however, then the concept need not be thought to face the same difficulties. In the first place, duty in his sense is conditioned and is thus not contradictory in the way that an unconditioned duty would be. Second, duty in his sense is conditioned specifically by a consenting act—typically a mutual agreement between humans—and not by a threat of punishment that must issue from a divine authority. Hence, it does not fall prey to the objection, which Schopenhauer levels against Kant’s doctrine of duty, that it presents us with a theological ethics disguised as a philosophical one (SW 4:122–23/OBM 127–8). Finally, duty in Schopenhauer’s sense differs fundamentally from the concepts of moral law, imperative, and ought—and even from that of duty in the unconditioned sense—in that it is not conceived to operate through a binding force. As we saw in Section 1, the very idea of a moral law or ought essentially includes the idea of a binding force, a force that must come from the threat of some punishment. It was this fact about the moral ought that gave rise to Schopenhauer’s deepest objection to the concept. But his conception of duty as an action the failure to perform which would wrong someone does not include the idea that one is bound to perform that action, just that if one does not perform it, one would thereby wrong someone. Duty in his sense does not therefore operate through self-interest and so can coherently be considered moral in nature. I have suggested that Schopenhauer’s conception of wrong contains nothing of the special binding force traditionally imputed to the moral ought. Accordingly, if moral duties consist by definition in those actions which we cannot fail to perform without thereby wronging another, then it would stand to reason that these concepts likewise contain nothing of that binding force. Yet Schopenhauer does seem to acknowledge, at least indirectly, that there is a binding force associated with duties. Just after presenting his account of duty in On the Basis of Morality, in a discussion of the morality of lying, he notes that “The binding nature of promises and contracts rests on the fact that, if they are not fulfilled, they are the most solemn lie whose intent, to exercise moral compulsion over others, is all the more evident given that the motive for the lie, the performance by the opposite party, is expressly announced” (SW 4:222/OBM 212). Schopenhauer does not explain himself well here, but I suspect he has something like the following thought in mind: namely, that failing to fulfill a 237

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promise or contract renders one’s commitment such an evident and serious lie that one who does so can expect to incur various penalties, such as a loss of trust or the disapprobation of others, and is thus in a way bound by a threat of punishment. The same would presumably hold true for the mutual agreements that typically lie at the basis of duties, so that these agreements, though not the duties themselves, would have a binding quality. It should be emphasized, however, that duties as understood by Schopenhauer, while often accompanied by a binding force, are not themselves conceived as operating through such a binding force, and thus are not implicated in his critique of those concepts, like that of the moral ought, which are conceived as operating through such a force.10

16.5 Conclusion Like Anscombe, Schopenhauer believes that we should abandon the moral ought, together with any other putatively moral concepts that essentially involve the idea of a special binding force. In contrast to her, though, he does not put the concepts of moral right and wrong, or of moral duty or obligation, in this category. Instead, he offers analyses of these concepts which show that they need not be understood to involve such a binding force. On his view, one’s action is wrong just in case one thereby negates the will of another out of malice or excessive egoism. An action is right just in case it is not wrong. And one has a duty (or obligation) to φ just in case one cannot fail to φ without thereby doing wrong. So understood, these concepts do not suffer from the defects of the moral ought and thus can be retained. Accordingly, the proper conclusion to draw is not that we should abandon modern moral philosophy and return to something like the ethics of Aristotle, but that we should abandon those parts of modern moral philosophy that are essentially prescriptive, while retaining the rest.11

Notes 1 Regarding Anscombe’s familiarity with Schopenhauer, Roger Crisp (2014: 77) reports the following: “Professor Peter Geach has told me (in private conversation, for which I am most grateful) that, as far as he knows, Anscombe had little direct knowledge of Schopenhauer’s work, but that he and Wittgenstein would certainly have talked to her about Schopenhauer.” 2 Schopenhauer follows Locke in supposing that one could be bound by either a threat of punishment or a promise of reward. In contrast, Pufendorf and Austin hold—more plausibly—that binding requires a threat of punishment. As Austin explains, “Rewards are, indisputably, motives to comply with the wishes of others. But to talk of commands and duties as sanctioned or enforced by rewards, or to talk of rewards as obliging or constraining to obedience, is surely a wide departure from the established meaning of the terms” (Lecture I/1995: 23). 3 For further discussion of this objection, see Puryear (2022: 21–23). 4 See SW 2:620/WWR 1:553 for another statement of the argument. 5 For further development and discussion of this point, see Puryear (2022: 23–28). For a contrasting perspective, see Shapshay (2019: 146), who imputes to Schopenhauer the view that “the only moral laws we have any knowledge of are humanly constructed laws of society, e.g., the civil law” (see also Shapshay 2019: 149). Although such laws do prescribe and proscribe certain behaviors, they are not properly speaking moral laws, on Schopenhauer’s view, because they essentially operate through appeals to self-interest. Concerning Schopenhauer’s critique of Kant’s ethics more generally, see, e.g., Tsarnoff (1910); Young (1984); Cartwright (1999: 254–263); Welsen (2005); Hassan (2022: 2–10). For other criticisms of the moral ought, see Foot (1972); Slote (1982); Williams (1985: 174–196); Taylor (2000: 139–177); Taylor (2002: 77–84); see also Capaldi (1966) for an argument that Hume means to reject “ought” as a moral category.

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Schopenhauer and Modern Moral Philosophy 6 Schopenhauer formulates the fundamental principle of morality somewhat misleadingly as an imperative, i.e., “Harm no one; rather help everyone as much as you can” (SW 4:136/OBM 140). Despite being in the imperative mood, however, this principle does not command but merely expresses what sorts of action have moral worth: “The principle or the highest basic proposition of an ethics,” Schopenhauer writes, “is the shortest and most concise expression of the way of acting that it prescribes, or, should it not have an imperative form, the way of acting to which it ascribes genuine moral worth” (SW 4:136/OBM 139). His principle may therefore be viewed as an indicative dressed up as an imperative. 7 In support of this, Schopenhauer cites the following statement from Hugo Grotius, who he describes as “the father of the philosophical theory of justice”: “Right is here nothing other than what is just, and that more in the negating sense than in the affirming, in so far as right is what is not unjust. (The Law of War and Peace, Book I, ch. 1, §3)” (SW 4:217/OBM 207). 8 Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld, Fundamental Legal Conceptions. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1919. 9 It may be objected, with good reason, that if we can assume duties tacitly by the mere act of procreation, then we can presumably assume a range of duties in similar ways, as for example when one breeds or adopts animals. For more on this see Puryear (2017: 260–261). 10 The same point may be made about right and wrong action: we may in a sense be bound to do what’s right and not to do wrong, in consequence of the threat of certain penalties (e.g., social), but this binding force merely attends right and wrong action. Unlike laws, commands, and imperatives, right and wrong action are not conceived by Schopenhauer to operate through such a binding force. 11 For helpful comments on previous versions of this material, I would like to thank David Bather Woods, Colin Marshall, and my audience at the meeting of the North American Division of the Schopenhauer Society at the 2018 Central Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association, Chicago.

References Anscombe, G. E. M. 1958. “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Philosophy 33(124): 1–19. Austin, John. 1832 [1995]. The Province of Jurisprudence Determined, ed. Wilfrid E. Rumble. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Capaldi, Nicholas. 1966. “Hume’s Rejection of ‘Ought’ as a Moral Category,” Journal of Philosophy 63(5): 126–37. Cartwright, David E. 1999. “Schopenhauer’s Narrower Sense of Morality,” in Christopher Janaway (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 252–92. Crisp, Roger. 2004. “Does Modern Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 54: 75–93. Foot, Philippa. 1972. “Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives,” The Philosophical Review 81(3): 305–16. Hassan, Patrick. 2022. “Schopenhauerian Virtue Ethics,” Inquiry 65(4): 381–413. Hohfeld, Wesley N. 1919. Fundamental Legal Conceptions. New Haven: Yale University Press. Pufendorf, Samuel. 1673 [1991]. On the Duty of Man and Citizen According to Natural Law, ed. James Tully. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Puryear, Stephen. 2017. “Schopenhauer on the Rights of Animals,” European Journal of Philosophy 25(2): 250–69. Puryear, Stephen. 2022. “Schopenhauer’s Rejection of the Moral Ought,” in Patrick Hassan (ed.), Schopenhauer’s Moral Philosophy. Abingdon: Routledge Press. Shapshay, Sandra. 2019. Reconstructing Schopenhauer’s Ethics: Hope, Compassion, and Animal Welfare. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Slote, Michael. 1982. “Morality Not a System of Imperatives,” American Philosophical Quarterly 19(4): 331–340. Taylor, Richard. 2000. Good and Evil. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Press. Taylor, Richard. 2002. Virtue Ethics: An Introduction. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Press.

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Stephen Puryear Tsanoff, Radoslav A. 1910. “Schopenhauer’s Criticisms of Kant’s Theory of Ethics,” The Philosophical Review 19(5): 512–34. Welsen, Peter. 2005. “Schopenhauer’s Interpretation of the Categorical Imperative,” Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia 61(3/4): 757–72. Williams, Bernard. 1985. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Young, Julian. 1984. “Schopenhauer’s Critique of Kantian Ethics,” Kant Studien 75: 191–212.

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17.1 Introduction Everyone knows someone who cannot, as the expression goes, get their stuff together (usually, more colorful language is chosen to describe this condition). Indeed, someone has probably already come into your mind. But what are we saying or doing when we ascribe this condition to a person? One thing we seem to be doing is calling attention to some defect in how they are going about things. It’s not insignificant that the language used here is broad and vague, for what the person in question is failing to ‘go about’ in the right way is itself a broad, vague, and very large object. What they are failing to go about in the right way is life; more specifically, they are failing to go about their own life in a way that would allow us to judge that they’ve got their stuff together. A few examples will help us escape vagueness and zero in on the agential defect in question. First, there’s the friend who bounced between studying Finance, Communication, and French in college, who then joined the Peace Corp, who then returned home and pursued a Master’s degree in education, who then taught for a few years in public schools before getting bored, who then took different odd jobs in the city for a while, and who the last time you spoke to them said they met someone and they’re thinking of starting a mushroom farm together, that, or they might get their pilot’s license and fly private jets. Second, consider the friend in graduate school who has an immense capacity for philosophical conversation, possesses one of the keenest, most perceptive intellects you’ve come across, yet they rarely complete any of their writing, have been kicking around one paper for the entire time you’ve been studying together (despite having loads to say on innumerable topics), and who seems on track for being kicked out of the program. Finally, and getting more mundane, there’s the acquaintance who every time you dine together can’t for the life of them make a decision about what to order that they are satisfied with. No sooner is their order out of their mouth, the waiter walking away, that they’re bemoaning their choice. And you’re left thinking to yourself: ‘Again?! They’re expressing order regret again? Why can’t they ever be sure of what they’d like to eat? Don’t they know what they like?’ I believe that each of these examples illustrates some aspect of the phenomenon of a person’s not having their stuff together, of a person’s not going about things in the right way. DOI: 10.4324/9781003048992-21

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As noted already, I take this particular problem to be one we are all familiar with. At this point, we can raise a few questions about it: (1) What is causing these agents to not have their stuff together? (2) How is it that this condition comes to count as an agential defect? (3) How can it be remedied? There are surely other questions one could ask as well. For instance, we might wonder whether there is a unified causal explanation in the offing that would show all three of the above-described agents to be suffering from the same defect. And if not, then that might push us in the direction of saying that the condition of one’s not having their stuff together not only takes on many different forms (as the examples clearly attest), but it can be explained in many different ways. In other words, one could argue there isn’t one thing that is going on when an agent doesn’t have their stuff together. Going this route is tempting largely for the reason that there doesn’t seem to be anything significantly in common in terms of missteps between the case of a person who can’t settle on their life’s vocation and the case of a person who can’t settle on what to order for dinner. But is that true? Should we really be so skeptical about securing a unified explanation of the state these three agents are in? At least one philosopher from the German tradition doesn’t think so. According to Arthur Schopenhauer, what unifies our examples is that in each case we are confronted with an agent who lacks self-knowledge. The first doesn’t seem to know what they want to do with their life; the second hasn’t recognized either that their current work habits are not suitable for success in graduate school, or, more harshly, that they are not suited for the academic life; and the third hasn’t figured out what they really like to eat. But Schopenhauer has more to say on the matter than this. Setting aside the third example for a moment (we’ll come back to it later), what Schopenhauer will say about the first two agents is that their lack of self-knowledge is evidence that they have not achieved a certain state, he might permit us to call a ‘state of mind’, which he names ‘the acquired character’ (den erworbenen Charakter) (SW 2:357/WWR 1:329).1 We can get an initial sense of the notion by considering the following passage from the prize essay on free will: It is only the precise knowledge of his own empirical character that gives the human being what we call acquired character: someone possesses this who knows his own properties, good and bad, precisely, and thereby knows for certain what he may entrust to himself and demand of himself, and what he may not (SW 4:50/FW 69–70) As an initial foray into this terrain, what we should take away from this passage is Schopenhauer’s claim that self-trust informed by precise (and accurate) self-knowledge is one of the important marks of acquired character. Thinking again about one of our examples, part of what might be wrong with our friend who is exhibiting signs that they are not suited for academic life is that they mistrusted to themselves a life they are not in fact suited to live. For example, perhaps they trusted themselves to overcome their poor undergraduate work habits now that they were in graduate school. But this wasn’t to be. Or, more seriously, perhaps they entrusted their decision to pursue the academic life to themselves, only to see that they’re now coming up short. There are of course many stories we can tell about 242

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why our friend is in the spot they’re in (diminished desire; a sober assessment of job prospects; crippling depression). But those won’t concern us here. What matters is seeing that, on some occasions, a lack of acquired character is exactly the right kind of explanation to give of a case where an agent does not have their stuff together.2 What I aim to do in this chapter is offer Schopenhauer’s notion of the acquired character as a philosophical illumination of the familiar condition we’ve been discussing so far of an agent’s ‘not having their stuff together’. As we’ll see, by introducing the acquired character into his reflections on human action and agency, Schopenhauer means to weave a certain eudaemonistic strand through his ethics. This, at any rate, is how I understand his claim that the acquired character ‘is not as significant for ethics proper as it is for life in the world’ (SW 2:363/WWR 1:334). For though it is true that Schopenhauer rejects eudaimonism as a theory of morality in the ‘narrower sense’, namely, the sense having to do with the grounds of our other-regarding motivations and actions, it doesn’t follow that he is without a picture of individual flourishing, that is, a picture of what it is for our lives as a whole to go better or worse. It will become clear that the central ingredient that causes one’s life to end up for the better in the sense relevant to individual flourishing is self-knowledge regarding one’s individual character, as well as the sense of personal autonomy that follows in its wake.

17.2  The Acquired Character The way to enter Schopenhauer’s discussion of acquired character is by seeing that he subscribes to an empirical model of self-knowledge. According to Schopenhauer, ‘it is only a posteriori, through experience that we get to know ourselves, just as we get to know other people’ (SW 2:356/WWR 1:329).3 This is an important claim to keep in mind. If the self-knowledge of the kind relevant for individual flourishing is primarily acquired on the basis of experiencing oneself acting and being in the world, then it follows that there is no ‘substitute for experience’, as the popular saying goes, when it comes to getting to know ourselves. This helps us to see that part of what Schopenhauer aims to do with his discussion of acquired character is take seriously that bit of our everyday ethical outlook which assigns significant value to ‘life experience’. This point about the value of life experience becomes especially clear in Schopenhauer’s main statement of acquired character, which comes in Book IV, §55 of The World as Will and Representation. We must first learn through experiences what we want and what we can do: until then we do not know it, we are characterless, and we will frequently have to be driven back onto our own true path by sharp blows from the outside. But if we finally learn this lesson, we will have achieved what the world calls character, the acquired character. This is nothing other than the greatest possible familiarity with our own individuality: it is the abstract and therefore clear knowledge of the invariable qualities of our own empirical character, of the dimensions and directions of our mental and physical abilities, and thus of the total strengths and weaknesses of our own individuality. (SW 2:360/WWR 1:331) It is clear from the passage that Schopenhauer conceives of acquired character as an achievement of a robust sort of practically-oriented self-knowledge. The achieved self-knowledge is ‘practically-oriented’ because it concerns, as he tells us, what I ‘want’ and what I ‘can 243

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do’. Knowing what I want in the sense relevant here could mean knowing something small about myself, for example, the way I like to take my coffee, my favorite flavor of ice cream, or the kinds of shirts I tend to find stylish. It could also mean knowing something larger about myself, like my moral priorities or fundamental projects. In this case, we might say that a person of acquired character knows how they want their life to go as well as what they wish to spend the bulk of their time doing. Here again Schopenhauer seems to be gesturing at a bit of commonsense talk, like when a grown adult who devoted their life to veterinary science recounts the moment when they just knew that what they wanted to do with their life was help animals. The example of the veterinarian also helps us see what Schopenhauer has in mind when he says that persons of acquired character know what they ‘can do’. Such persons have accurate knowledge of their abilities and capacities. Part of the story of how our veterinarian came to know that they wanted to devote their life to helping animals will likely include a bit about how they came to see that they had a talent for the kinds of activities required of that profession. For instance, maybe in their youth they had the formative experience of rescuing a baby robin that had fallen from its nest and nursing it back to health. Looking back on their choice to devote themselves to animal well-being, they see that this particular experience was the catalyst for that decision. Schopenhauer also mentions how persons of acquired character know the strengths and weaknesses of their individuality. Later in the discussion, he will say that by investigating ‘where our strengths and weaknesses are, we will develop our salient natural talents, make use of them, try to apply them however we can, and go where they are appropriate and effective’ (SW 2:360/WWR 1:332). And so part of what is involved in acquired character is that we come to know the sorts of activities that we have a knack for. But I don’t think we should limit this claim to practical abilities. It also seems true to say that a person who really knows themselves will possess some knowledge of their emotional strengths and weaknesses as well, and they can use this knowledge to structure their lives in such a way that they possess some level of control over their emotional output, perhaps by finding the right context for someone with their emotive orientation. Consider that we expect a good veterinarian to not just be technically excellent at their craft, but to also possess certain emotional capacities. They should be patient, calm under pressure, and exhibit grace in their interactions with individuals grieving the loss of a pet. If I enter the veterinary profession, yet find myself so emotionally invested in the animals I care for to the point where I cannot perform my surgical duties well, say, because my compassion for their suffering is interfering with the task at hand, then that is some evidence that I do not have the right emotional orientation for this role. Maybe I am better suited for expressing my love of animals in a different context, one where my compassion can truly be felt as a strength, rather than a weakness of my character. On the flip side, we might think that no matter how skilled at surgery someone is, if they’re incapable of showing understanding toward the families whose pets they work on, always interacting with them in a cold and robotic fashion, or simply passing that emotional labor off to their assistants, then perhaps their technical prowess would be best expressed in a different line of work.4 At this point, we’re in position to comment directly on the unifying theme of the examples discussed so far, namely, that people are often mistaken about themselves. Not only do we lack accurate knowledge of the actual abilities and capacities we have, whether physical, practical, or emotional, but, even when we do have such knowledge, we still might 244

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lack knowledge of the domains or ‘atmospheres’ that are best suited to our abilities and capacities. ‘Just as fish do well only in water, birds in the air, and moles underground’, Schopenhauer tells us, ‘everybody can do well only in the atmosphere they find congenial; not everyone, for instance, can breathe in the atmosphere of a court (SW 2:359/WWR 1:331). You might take yourself to have the abilities and capacities for veterinary work, only to come to find out that you are too emotionally overwhelmed in that sort of setting. Notice that this need not mean that you were wrong about the fact that compassion is a predominant feature of your individual character. It very well could be. It’s just that you were wrong about the context in which your compassion could best express itself. But now that you know that this atmosphere is not suitable for you to express your compassion in a way that is both good for yourself and others, you will be able to rethink exactly how it is that you can attain this more positive expression. Maybe what you discover is that you’re better suited for volunteering at the animal shelter a few days a week. For Schopenhauer, from this point on it will make sense to say that you have truly achieved some share of acquired character; that you have, in Julian Young’s (1987: 59) words, come to ‘understand the subtle chemistry’ of your individuality. At the very least, you will have come to understand that aspect of your individual chemistry concerning your compassionate disposition and the sorts of activities it suits you for. It is worth pausing for a moment to think about an implication of what has just been said. The claim one might wish to contest is that a person can attain a ‘share’ or degree of acquired character. The worry is that Schopenhauer speaks at times as if acquired character is an all-or-nothing affair, which means it cannot come in degrees. For example, he talks about acquired character as being ‘a third’ kind of character, one we should place alongside an agent’s empirical character and intelligible character (SW 2:357/WWR 1:329). And just as empirical and intelligible character doesn’t come in degrees, neither does acquired character. There is also his remark that acquired character ‘is only acquired over the course of a life and through contact with the world’ (ibid.). Here, it sounds like ‘acquiring’ acquired character is some singular achievement which you either accomplish at some point in your life or you don’t. On the other hand, if acquired character is acquired ‘over the course of a life’, as Schopenhauer says, then that would suggest its boundaries are more fluid. Otherwise, why wouldn’t Schopenhauer simply be more specific about the precise point in life at which one is likely to achieve it? Perhaps because there is no such point. Think of the friend bouncing between career paths. Given their trajectory, they may not ever know what it is they want to do with their life. Or maybe they finally figure it out when they open their mushroom farm. Now consider the wholehearted butcher, the person who has been butchering since they were a teenager. If acquired character is about knowing what one wants and where one’s talents lie, then we should say that the mushroom farmer achieves acquired character late in life, whereas the butcher achieves it much earlier. But then this suggests that the butcher exemplifies acquired character for a longer period of time than the mushroom farmer. In short, they got their stuff together much sooner than the mushroom farmer. But notice that even here we’re still talking about acquired character with respect to just one aspect of a person’s life, i.e., their career or vocation. Schopenhauer would likely admit that there is a higher final stage of acquired character, a stage at which one truly comes to embody the Delphic wisdom, that is, when they finally know themselves in a comprehensive sense.5 The idea would be that acquired character consists of a degree of self-knowledge 245

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below which one has not yet achieved the final stage, despite nevertheless having enough self-knowledge to exhibit acquired character in several domains. And, of course, that might be a good thing: it could mean that one is keeping their options open with respect to what they want most in life. This brings us to another problem with acquired character, which is that as an ideal it encourages a narrowing of horizons. A central element of acquired character is what Schopenhauer calls ‘self-restraint’ (Selbstüberwindung). According to Schopenhauer, if we have acquired character that means ‘we will always exercise self-restraint and avoid projects where we do not have much natural aptitude; we will guard against unsuccessful efforts’ (SW 2:360/WWR 1:332). Earlier, he explains the value of self-restraint in terms of the form of agency it allows us to avoid. If we could act like children at a fair, grabbing at everything that tickles our fancy without stopping to make up our minds, this would be a wrong-headed attempt to change our line into a plane: we would zigzag all over the place without getting anything done. (SW 2:358/WWR 1:330) Notice the parallel between the child at the fair and the friend who can’t make up their mind on what to do with their life, or even the acquaintance who never seems to know what it is they really want to order at the restaurant. For Schopenhauer, what attends their lack of self-knowledge is a lack of self-restraint. For it’s possible that they’ve already landed on something they enjoyed doing, and which drew on their capacities, and yet they lacked the self-restraint to stick with it. And if this is not the case, then we can still make sense of the idea that part of the reason acquired character came late in life for our mushroom farmer is that it was only then that they exercised self-restraint, for example, by seeing clearly that this line of work really did play to their strengths, a realization which then closed off other enticing possibilities.

17.3  Reason, Maxims of Character, and Well-constituted Agency More needs to be said to show why Schopenhauer finds this narrowing of possibilities to be crucial for individual flourishing. But first, I want to treat an additional aspect of the discussion of acquired character that is directly relevant to the issue at hand. What I have in mind is the role Schopenhauer assigns to reason when it comes to achieving acquired character, as well as the particular problems it causes in pursuit of it. As we’ve seen, what we find in the discussion of acquired character are several claims to the effect that many of an agent’s practical missteps in matters small and large are adequately explained by appealing to their lack of self-knowledge. Interestingly, rather than blame this epistemic deficiency on an individual’s particular reflective shortcomings, Schopenhauer opts instead to place the blame on our rational capacities themselves. In other words, there is something about reason generally speaking that gets in the way of accurate self-knowledge. This is worth dwelling on. Reason, Schopenhauer tells us, is ‘the faculty of concepts’ (SW 2:614/WWR 1:548). Concepts are ‘universal, non-intuitive representations’ (ibid.). We form concepts via a process of ‘abstraction’, where what gets abstracted and stored in a concept is some feature shared by several particular intuitive representations or empirical perceptions. From this 246

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Schopenhauer thinks it follows that a concept is a ‘unity reassembled from plurality by means of the abstraction of our reason’ (SW 2:277/WWR 1:261). For example, after experiencing several intuitive representations of an object being used to hold a liquid, and then that same object being brought to a person’s mouth, with the liquid traveling down their throat, our reason abstracts from this plurality of representations and forms the concept ‘cup’ (it might also form the concept ‘taking a drink’). Likewise, after multiple encounters with fluffy, four-legged, obedient, and treat-loving animals, a child forms the concept ‘dog’ via rational abstraction. This process iterates for any instance of concept formation; and therefore for any instance of conceptual knowledge acquisition. We find an interesting application of this element of Schopenhauer’s epistemology in his discussion of acquired character. He is interested in the role that reason, with its knack for abstraction, plays with respect to the acquisition of practically-oriented self-knowledge and our subsequent character-expressive behavior. As it turns out, reason’s offerings in this area are something of a mixed bag. Although we’d like reason to perform the helpful task of determining the unified character underlying the plurality of actions that we are all capable of performing so that we might know, of the many actions we perform, which are in fact expressive of who we really are, what often ends up happening is the opposite. Instead of walking us toward knowledge of our individual character, reason walks us away from it. This is because these rational qualities show him and even reproach him with what is appropriate for human beings in general, as a species character, and what is possible in willing and doing. This impedes his insight into what he alone wills and what he alone can do, by virtue of his individuality. He finds in himself a disposition for all the many human aspirations and abilities; but without experience, he is not aware of the extent to which these are present in his individuality: and if he now limits himself to projects that are in keeping with his character, there will be certain moods and moments when he will feel impelled in the opposite direction, towards incompatible schemes that must be entirely repressed if he wants to pursue the first set of projects without disruption (SW 2:357–8/WWR 1:330).6 Here, Schopenhauer shows how the ‘abstraction of our reason’ gets in the way of our achieving genuine self-knowledge of our individual character, and therefore in the way of our acting in ways that are expressive of who we are. Unfortunately, Schopenhauer is disappointingly opaque when it comes to working out the details of this element of his philosophical psychology. He looks to be saying that reason causes us to have a natural interest in understanding ‘human beings in general’, that is, in understanding the human as a species, where this interest then gets in the way of self-understanding.7 In heeding to this interest, we end up succumbing to a fairly large set of false beliefs regarding our own individuality; in particular, we end up with false beliefs about the sorts of motivations and actions we are individually disposed toward. That we could be so misled about our own individuality is explained by the fact that we all have the species character ‘human being’. From having this species character it follows that we each have within us a disposition toward every possible action-type that the human being is capable of. Thus, when we see how other people are behaving, we might think to ourselves that we too can behave that way, for we too are human. This might not in itself pose a problem, since Schopenhauer thinks that some of these species dispositions will in fact turn out to 247

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be our individual dispositions, and when we act on just those we’ll be in a good place. The trouble starts when we witness actions brought about by a human disposition that is not really ‘present’ in our own individuality, yet we mistakenly believe that we too are capable of being that way. Recall the analogy between the person lacking acquired character and the child at the fair. The child surveys all of the goodies available to them, believes they can have them all, and runs around snatching them up, only to find out that some of what they grabbed did not suit them (‘Garlic popcorn? Gross!’). The same point applies to the human being who faces the challenge of discovering which individual character, of all the ones they could have, they actually have. For example, reading the news, we might witness that the human species is capable of acting courageously in the face of great personal danger, and from that we might believe that we too are disposed to courageousness. And maybe we are. But we have to be sure we understand what courage looks like for us; that is, we have to understand the differentiated expression courage finds in us. It might not be the same expression it finds in someone suited to fighting wildfires or campaigning for workplace reform. If this is what I think courage must look like after reading the news, I might conclude that this is how it must be with me. And so I set about fighting wildfires or campaigning for workplace reform, when really my sort of courage is better realized in a different set of circumstances. If this happens to me, Schopenhauer thinks (a) that I lack acquired character, and (b) that my conduct in these domains will leave me feeling embarrassed and dissatisfied with myself. This second point is relevant to the question of why narrowing our horizons would be valuable for us, since doing so will help us avoid the embarrassment and self-dissatisfaction of acting in ways that are not suitable to, because not expressive of, our individual character. The agent who lacks acquired character in the way just described is someone who ‘will not set off on a straight line but rather take a shaky, crooked line, deviating, wavering, turning back, and setting himself up for pain and remorse […]’ (SW 2:359/WWR 1:331). Schopenhauer has a name for this kind of person: they are what he calls ‘characterless’ (charakterlos). Of course, such a person does not lack an essential way of being in the world; we all have a character in that sense as a matter of metaphysical fact.8 Rather, the characterless person is the person who has not been reflectively vigilant and single-minded enough to discover just those human dispositions that find a home in the individual manifestation of the human character (the human will) that they are. Instead, ‘he sees before himself, in matters both great and small, everything that human beings can and do achieve, and does not yet know what portion of this is appropriate or practicable or even just enjoyable for himself’ (ibid.). We can see, then, that to avoid the state of characterlessness, agents must direct their reflective powers to the task of uncovering a certain unity within a plurality; they must discover the actions that are expressive of their unified individual character within the plurality of actions they are capable of performing given their species character as human (actions which they may very well feel disposed to perform from time to time). Indeed, not only must they discover their individual qualities of character, but they must also discover the differentiated form of expression that quality will take in them. Not everyone is courageous, compassionate, or impatient in the same way; not everyone who loves animals should be a veterinarian. One lesson to draw from the preceding discussion is that when it comes to the relationship between reason and individual character, we do want to take advantage of ‘the abstractions of our reason’, but we want to do so in a very particular way. When it comes 248

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to acquired character, Schopenhauer believes we should use our rational/reflective capacities to arrive at ‘the abstract and therefore clear knowledge of the invariable qualities of our own empirical character’. It follows from what Schopenhauer says about reason’s concern with abstraction that if self-knowledge is abstract, then it will have some measure of generality to it. Still, instead of seeing this generality in terms of reason informing us about what ‘human beings in general’ are capable of doing, Schopenhauer sees it in terms of our coming to know our individual character on the basis of an abstraction from the various dispositions we find in ourselves and the various actions we observe ourselves performing.9 It is self-directed reflection of this kind that is central to the initial task of acquiring selfknowledge of my own individuality. Now while it is true that Schopenhauer thinks that much self-knowledge comes about through experience, in order for a person to actually achieve acquired character they have to do something with that experience-informed self-knowledge, something that again draws on our rational capacities. For Schopenhauer, abstract reflection on our individual character ‘enables us to organize the unalterable role of our own person in a thoughtful and methodical manner […] and under the direction of solid concepts, we can also fill gaps in it left by whims or weaknesses’ (SW 2:360/WWR 1:331–2). A crucial element of the kind of self-organization Schopenhauer discusses here is the formation of a certain kind of maxim, what I will call a maxim of character. He says that having acquired character means that ‘[we] have now put the ways of acting that are necessitated by our individual natures into clear and conscious maxims (Maximen), maxims that are always present to us’ (SW 2:360/WWR 1:332). He adds that we will ‘follow these maxims as deliberately as if they had been learned, without ever being led astray by a present impression or the fleeting influence of mood’ (ibid.). The claim here is that actions performed from a maxim of character have a kind of decisiveness that actions performed from some other state or for some other reason lack. In saying that someone who acts this way is not influenced by moods or whims, Schopenhauer means they are someone who has circumscribed the portion of the species character that befits them, thereby insulating themselves from other dispositions that would get in the way of their individual character’s expressing itself. Not only does this give their conduct a kind of decisiveness, but it also gives it a kind of seamlessness as well. And this is something that is lacking in the case of the characterless agent who, again, is more likely to be seen ‘fumbling around’ as they try to figure out what they ‘really want and are capable of doing’ (ibid.). Schopenhauer doesn’t appear to place any restrictions on just how coarse or fine-grained the content of a maxim of character must be. All of the following would count: Black coffee: Take your coffee black (for that is how you like it best) Tongue biting in general: Bite your tongue (for you tend to make little comments when they’re not appropriate) Tongue biting around Ed: Bite your tongue around Ed (for you don’t like him, but there’s no need to be combative and to make him feel bad about himself) Each of these is a subjective principle of action aimed at streamlining the agent’s behavior in a certain practical context.10 Hence, Schopenhauer’s description of someone who acts on maxims of character as needing only ‘to apply general principles to the individual case in order to reach a decision right away’ (ibid.). Rather than dawdle over how I’ll take my coffee, as the novice does, I have a principle that handles my actions in this domain. Hearing 249

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someone in my presence mispronounce the name of a German city, I give the desire to make a little correcting comment no weight; I simply bite my tongue; and I will be especially vigilant about biting my tongue when it is Ed who mispronounces the word, since our personal history makes it such that that sort of thing could very quickly ruin the night for everyone involved. It is important to recognize the everydayness of these maxims of character, since this indicates the ways in which Schopenhauer’s discussion of acquired character has implications for the smaller aspects of life as well. I think it would be a mistake to think that the only thing Schopenhauer is trying to accomplish with the notion of acquired character is to remind us how important it is that we get the big decisions in our life right. Rather, part of what is going on in the discussion of acquired character is that we’re being offered a picture of well-constituted agency, that is, of what it is for agency to function well. The idea is that well-constituted agency consists of a certain underlying functional arrangement involving an agent’s individual character, her capacity for reflective cognition, and her actions. What results from this is the formation of maxims of character which, when acted upon, result in actions that are expressive of the agent’s character and which therefore leave the agent satisfied.11 Thus, while it is true that ‘basic’ agency in Schopenhauer need not involve anything more than an issuance of will in action, quite a lot more needs to happen if one hopes to attain the sort of agential fluency that is constitutive of acquired character.12 To see this, we need only to remind ourselves of the deficiencies that befall the characterless agent, who by now looks like a prime candidate for someone who does not have their stuff together. Schopenhauer is explicit that characterless agents ‘act like novices (als Neulinge)’ (SW 2:360/WWR 1:332). This indicates that he means to distinguish between different levels of competence within agency itself, where it is clear from what we’ve seen that the characterless agent is lacking a certain competence when it comes to their exercises of agency that the person of acquired character is not. Schopenhauer will describes the novice as one who ‘will not set off on a straight line but rather take a shaky, crooked line, deviating, wavering, turning back, and setting himself up for pain and remorse’ (SW 2:359/WWR 1:331). Earlier, we saw him describing such persons as zig-zagging and ‘fumbling’ in their actions. By contrast, we know that persons of acquired character exhibit a seamlessness in their conduct due to their self-knowledge and the single-mindedness and self-assurance that this seeds. From this it would seem to follow that the main weakness of the characterless person is that they are indecisive. Because they don’t know who they are, characterless persons don’t know what they want and what they are capable of, making them indecisive on matters small and large.

17.4  Indecisiveness and Violence to Character Once we see the way Schopenhauer intends the acquired character to be offered as a remedy to agency-undermining indecisiveness, we can start to make sense of the idea that there is a unified explanation of the agential defect on display in the three examples I began the chapter with. At least one thing that the person who never knows what to order and the person who can’t get their life together have in common is that they are indecisive. The former lacks decisiveness when it comes to what they like to eat, the kinds of foods that make them happy; the latter lacks it with respect to what they want for themselves in life. Two very different forms of indecisiveness, no doubt, but two forms of indecisiveness all the same. 250

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But surely, the thought goes, it is much worse for us to be indecisive about what we want to do with our lives than it is to be indecisive about what we really like to eat. After all, openness in one’s gustatory preferences seems like a good thing as it allows us to experiment with all different sorts of foods. Of course, the same can be said about life, up to a point. An objection I’ve been putting off for a while would say that there’s nothing wrong with the person who spends their whole life sampling different vocations. Schopenhauer will agree, provided that person knows that that is what they want for themselves and is satisfied with the results. The wholehearted wanderer is a very different kind of person than the one who wanders, zigzags, and fumbles because they don’t know what they want and what they can do. What this tells us is that our impartial judgments about whether or not a person ‘has their stuff together’, and whether they are going about things in the right way, do not always track the person’s own assessment of their situation. You might very well have a talent in quite a lot of areas, and so derive pleasure from dabbling a bit in each. It is easy to imagine a person who excels at mushroom farming, teaching, and piloting, and who spends their life doing all three. But it is just as easy, Schopenhauer says, to imagine someone who spends a good portion of their life teaching when that is not where their talent lies.13 Similarly, we can imagine someone who is so committed to trying new foods, perhaps because they wish to cultivate a kind of cosmopolitanism in their culinary taste, that they’ve never discovered their go-to meal, the thing that can lift them out of a depressive episode. Nor do they have a go-to dish, the thing that brings upon them an endless barrage of compliments from their friends when they make it. In this case, they seem to be missing out on some good; perhaps we should call it the good of having a settled personality. ‘Nonsense,’ the refrain goes: ‘you’d have to be completely oblivious to not have settled on a go-to meal’. That’s probably true. Though I think by now we can see that one of the lessons Schopenhauer wishes to draw from his discussion of acquired character is that we should not underestimate how oblivious to ourselves we can be. There are all sorts of reasons why a person might not wish to admit to themselves that they don’t like what they’re doing, or that they don’t know who they are. Maybe they’re wishing to keep up the appearance they’ve presented to the world (and to themselves) of the person they are. Imagine the inner dialogue of a person who feels completely out of place in fine dining environments: ‘Why am I here? I can’t believe I had to wear a certain kind of shoe to get in; and that I had to go out and buy the stinkin’ things! If only my grandfather could see me. Oh, well, the things you do early in the relationship, right?’ If this is something that only happens from time to time, there isn’t much to worry about: it won’t disrupt one’s having a settled personality. Yet, if this is the kind of environment one continues to put themselves in despite not feeling comfortable in it, and if one brushes off those feelings, then it seems we do have a case of someone trying to keep up appearances and playing games with themselves in the process. But we can only engage in this kind of self-directed subterfuge up to a point. If we take things too far, we inevitably do ‘violence’ to our individual character (SW 2:359/WWR 1:331). While Schopenhauer does not fully spell out all that this involves, we are safe in assuming that part of what it means to do violence to oneself is that you have done something to jeopardize your conception of your own worth. When he remarks that only certain people ‘can breathe in the atmosphere of a court’, part of what he is saying is that the person who pursues a legal career despite not finding that atmosphere congenial has committed the wrong against themselves of not acknowledging their own worthiness to live a 251

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life suited to their individual character. This is why he says that a good source of evidence that one has done such violence is feelings of worthlessness and self-dissatisfaction. The following remark is revealing: Imitating other people’s qualities and idiosyncrasies is much more shameful than wearing other people’s clothes, because it is a judgement we ourselves pass on our own worthlessness (SW 2:361/WWR 1:333).14 There is, however, a philosophical problem in allowing Schopenhauer to even say that one person is capable of imitating another, since that would imply that one is able to take on traits and styles of behavior that go against their individual character. But if our individual character is fixed, as he often says it is, this shouldn’t be possible. As far as I can tell, the way around this is to remind ourselves of the significant role that reason and reflective cognition play in structuring our behavior and getting to know ourselves. It is because we’re rational that our actions do not express our character from the word ‘go’. And yet our rationality in the form of experience-informed and reflective self-knowledge is also what is going to allow us to achieve the state where we do, on balance, tend to act in ways that are expressive of our individual character, i.e., the state of acquired character.

17.5  Taking Stock I began this chapter with some examples meant to illustrate the familiar phenomenon of persons who do not have their stuff together. I then posed the following questions about the examples: (1) What is causing these agents to not have their stuff together? (2) How is it that this condition comes to count as an agential defect? (3) How can it be remedied? What I’ve argued here is that Schopenhauer’s notion of acquired character provides a good set of answers to these questions. To recap, with acquired character in hand, we can answer question 1 by saying that the cause of an agent’s not having their stuff together is lack of self-knowledge of their individual character. Turning to question 2, Schopenhauer will say that lack of self-knowledge brings about characterlessness, a state in which an agent experiences indecisiveness with regard to a plethora of matters relating to their wants and abilities, and which, when taken to an extreme, leads to violence to self and feelings of self-worthlessness; it also disrupts their chances at having a settled or coherent personality. This condition undermines agency in that it causes an agent to act without self-restraint and without defined maxims of character. And this, I think we should say, gets in the way of the agent’s achieving a robust form of personal autonomy. Finally, turning to question 3, we now see that Schopenhauer’s remedy to this condition is that we work to achieve a substantial degree of self-knowledge of our individual character, and, on the basis of that self-knowledge, proceed to act in ways that are expressive of who we are. As a concluding thought, I would like to briefly note a connection between Schopenhauer’s discussion of acquired character and a thesis floating around contemporary ethics which Dale Dorsey (2016) calls ‘the normative significance of self’ (henceforth NSS). According to 252

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Dorsey, ‘the standard account of the normative significance of self […] holds that facts about an individual’s self (such as their projects, commitments, practical identities and so forth) create or give rise to new reasons’ (2016: 6). Dorsey cites as an example of this Christine Korsgaard’s remarks on the normative import of an agent’s ‘practical identity’. For Korsgaard, Practical identity is a complex matter and for the average person there will be a jumble of such conceptions. You are a human being, a woman or a man, an adherent of a certain religion, a member of an ethnic group, a member of a certain profession, someone’s lover or friend, and so on. And all of these identities give rise to reasons and obligations. Your reasons express your identity, your nature; your obligations spring from what that identity forbids. (Korsgaard 1996: 101) While I don’t wish to argue here that Schopenhauer shares all of the NSS theorist’s commitments (I don’t have the space left for that), I am persuaded that his notion of the acquired character commits him to something approximating NSS. For, as we’ve now seen, one of the guiding ideas behind the acquired character is that there is value for us in acting in ways that are expressive of who we are; and that there is almost no value in trying to be somebody we are not, given the feelings of self-dissatisfaction and self-worthlessness doing so engenders. And, where there’s value in acting as oneself, there seem to be reasons and obligations to do the same.15 The problem of course is that NSS tends to be developed against the backdrop of either constructivist, relativist, or subjectivist theories of value.16 And as recent work on Schopenhauer’s ethics reveals, such theories do not sit well with some of his other expressed commitments.17 But I leave sorting through this mess for a different day.

Acknowledgment Thanks to David Bather Woods for his many helpful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.

Notes 1 For some extant discussions of the acquired character see Gardiner 1963, Young 1987, Atwell 1990, and Shapshay 2019. For worries whether Schopenhauer can truly accommodate the picture of agency this notion implies, see again Atwell 1990 as well as Cooper 1998. 2 Not only that, but it can also be the right way to explain the accompanying devastating feeling that one is failing at life, the only one they have. 3 Whether Schopenhauer means for this ‘empirical model’ of self-knowledge to apply to knowledge of what we believe as well as knowledge of our character is not something that should concern us here. For our purposes it is enough that it applies to knowledge of our individual character. 4 Then again, one could argue that they don’t care at all about the emotional intelligence of their doctor or veterinarian as long as they get the job done. But that itself is not an argument that there are better and worse forms of emotional attunement when it comes to certain professions such that in certain cases mastery of the technical skill involved may not be enough to make one a good fit for that line of work. 5 For an argument that those interested in self-knowledge ought to spend more time considering it along the lines of the Delphic model, see Renz (2017). 6 For additional discussion of this passage see Atwell (1990: 126–128). 7 Schopenhauer talks about this in his aesthetics, where he attributes our interest in art forms which specialize in presenting us with perspicuous representations of determinate character types, like historical painting and literature, to our interest in understanding the human character in its variegated expressions. See e.g., WWR 1 §48 and §51.

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Sean T. Murphy 8 ‘Just as each thing in nature possesses forces and qualities that react to determinate influences in a determinate way and constitute the character of the thing, a human being has his character as well, from which motive call forth his actions with necessity’ (SW 2:339/WWR 1:313). 9 A different reading of these passages would take Schopenhauer to be casting doubt on the thought that reason has any appropriate role to play in the discovery of one’s individual character at all, given its tendency to generalize. If what we’re doing here is trying to get specific about ourselves, then we might need to call on intuitive cognition, rather than rational cognition to get the job done. This is an interesting possibility, though one I am not going to explore here. The difficulty would lie in explaining what it means to grasp one’s individual character ‘intuitively’, and, likewise, how one can be sure that such an intuition is not mistaken. At least in the case of a rational grasp of one’s character, there can be some standard one could appeal to in judging whether one has grasped things accurately, namely, the wide variety of self-experiences which one is subsuming under the concept ‘X’s individual character’. It is interesting, however, that Schopenhauer sometimes likens an agent’s intelligible character to the Platonic Idea of their character (e.g., SW 2:188–9/WWR 1:183). And since the Platonic Ideas are grasped via intuitive intellect, there could be something to the idea that our individual character is grasped in the same manner. 10 Note the intriguing parallel with the role Schopenhauer assigns moral principles in his discussion of compassion, namely, as reservoirs of compassion. ‘Without firmly formed principles’, Schopenhauer says, ‘we would be irresistibly at the mercy of the anti-moral incentives when they are excited into affects by external impressions’ (SW 4:215/OBM 206). Thus, in both discussions principles are praised for their ability to help us avoid acting on whims. In the case of compassion, we avoid anti-moral whims; in the case of acquired character, we avoid the whims that would cause us to act in ways that are not reflective of our individual character. 11 There is a fruitful connection to be made between Schopenhauer’s discussion of acquired character, especially the idea of maxims of character and their relation to personal autonomy and Michael E. Bratman’s (2007) ‘planning theory’ of autonomous self-government. Indeed, I believe that what we find in the discussion of acquired character is a non-homuncular, reductionist model of autonomy of the kind we find in Bratman. And by taking satisfaction with oneself to be closely associated with successful agency, Schopenhauer also would appear to align himself with the work of another reductionist theorist of autonomy, namely, Harry Frankfurt (1988). I discuss these issues at greater length in my forthcoming. 12 For a discussion of ‘fluent agency’ in contemporary work on agency see Railton (2009). 13 Atwell worries that this is absurd, since the suggestion is that one could be ‘really’ good at something and never know it; similarly, one could be ‘really’ compassionate despite never acting that way. See Atwell 1990: 134. 14 In his discussion of ‘Schopenhauerian virtue ethics’, Patrick Hassan notes that this claim puts Schopenhauer at odds with Aristotelian virtue ethics, since it is his prescription that we precisely do not try to imitate others, not even the paragons of virtue. See Hassan (2019: 25). 15 If this line of thought has any legs at all, then it might be nicely suited as a response to Nietzsche’s criticism of Schopenhauer’s ethics of compassion, namely, that it fails to take account of the normative importance that an agent’s own interests have for her as her own, not in virtue of their epistemic proximity to her, but in virtue of the role they play in her individual flourishing. For an excellent discussion of this, see Reginster (2015). 16 Along with Korsgaard, Dorsey also lumps Bernard Williams into this camp, who in certain essays, like those found in Williams (1981), appears to advocate for a kind of value subjectivism or relativism. 17 For interpretations of Schopenhauer has a value realist, especially when it comes to moral value, see Marshall (2017) and Shapshay (2019).

References Atwell, J. E. (1990) Schopenhauer: The Human Character, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Bratman, M. E. (2007) Structures of Agency, Oxford: Oxford University Press Cooper, D. E. (1998) ‘Self and Morality in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche’, in C. Janaway (ed) Willing and Nothingness: Schopenhauer as Nietzsche’s Educator, Oxford: Oxford University Press: 196–216.

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Acquired Character Dorsey, D. (2016) ‘The Normative Significance of Self’, Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 10, no. 1: 1–24. Frankfurt, H. (1988) The Importance of What We Care About, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gardiner, P. (1963) Schopenhauer, Baltimore: Penguin Books. Hassan, P. (2019) ‘Schopenhauerian Virtue Ethics’, Inquiry, DOI: 10.1080/0020174X.2019.1629337 Korsgaard, C. (1996) The Sources of Normativity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marshall, C. ‘Schopenhauer and Non-Cognitivist Moral Realism’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 55: 293–316. Murphy, S.T. Self-Knowledge and Reflection in Schopenhauer’s View of Agency, Inquiry, DOI: 10.1080/0020174X.2023.2178029 Railton, P. (2009) ‘Practical Competence and Fluent Agency’, in D. Sobel and S. Wall (ed) Reasons for Action, Oxford: Oxford University Press: 81–115. Reginster, B. (2015) ‘Sympathy in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche’, in E. Schliesser (ed) Sympathy: A History, Oxford: Oxford University Press: 254–285. Renz, U. (2017) ‘Self-Knowledge as a Personal Achievement’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 117, part 3: 253–272. Shapshay, S. (2019) Reconstructing Schopenhauer’s Ethics: Hope, Compassion, and Animal Welfare, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Williams, B. (1981) Moral Luck, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Young, J. (1987) Willing and Unwilling: A Study in the Philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers.

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18 A SCHOPENHAUERIAN SOLUTION TO SCHOPENHAUERIAN POLITICS David Bather Woods

18.1  Schopenhauer and Hobbes On political matters, Schopenhauer admits his large debt to Hobbes: ‘Hobbes,’ he says, ‘gave an entirely correct and unexceptionable account of the origin and function of the state’ (SW 2:408/WWR 1:372). Indeed, on certain issues, Schopenhauer’s political philosophy is identical to Hobbes’s. Like Hobbes, Schopenhauer claims that the state of nature is a ‘war of all against all’, and, accordingly, ‘reflective reason very quickly invents the institution of the state, which, arising out of mutual fear of mutual force, forestalls the disadvantageous consequences of universal egoism’ (SW 4:198/OBM 192). The similarities between Schopenhauer and Hobbes can, however, be overstated. Unlike Hobbes, Schopenhauer’s story of the state’s origins is prefaced by ‘a chapter in morals’ (SW 2:404/WWR 1:368). The ‘pure doctrine of right’, as Schopenhauer calls it, is a chapter in morals insofar as it is concerned with the inner significance of people’s actions. Politics, by contrast, is concerned with nothing else but the lawful management of the harmful external effects of these actions. Since, according to Schopenhauer, the pure doctrine of right precedes positive legislation, not every matter of right and wrong is a product of legal convention; some matters are naturally right or wrong. Of these natural rights and wrongs, many are deeply important to the foundation of the state. Moral rights to property, for example, derive from the pure doctrine of right, as do the rights to compel and to punish (SW 2: 409–410/WWR 2:373). Because moral rectitude alone is not a terribly compelling force, however, the implementation of these rights, in which we all have an obvious prudential interest, depends upon the might of the state. Egoism, on the other hand, is a compelling force, and here we find our way back to Hobbes. Provided with the right set of selfinterested incentives, e.g., avoidance of punishment, egoism can be used to motivate people to behave in a way that outwardly mirrors the actions of those who would be inwardly disinclined from wrongdoing. Hence, there is a complex relationship between morals and politics for Schopenhauer: the state does, in fact, have some sort of moral bedrock, insofar as many of the rights and goods that it protects do have independent moral significance; nevertheless, the actual motivations and operations of the state are firmly based on nonmoral grounds. 256

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A Schopenhauerian Solution to Schopenhauerian Politics

In previous work, I have argued that the relationship between morals and politics creates a tension in Schopenhauer’s politics (Woods 2017). I formulated this tension in terms of the ‘impartiality objection’ to moral contractarianism. According to this objection, it is essential to the success of any moral theory that it gets the extensional character of morality right (Southwood 2010: 42): it should not unduly favor one group over another in the matter of who is included in the scope of moral concern and who is excluded from it. Hobbesian forms of contractarianism fall victim to this objection because a civil society based on a social contract that springs from rational egoism is unlikely to achieve impartial moral relations given the independent reality of certain power imbalances: since relatively powerful rational egoists stand to lose far more in personal freedom than they gain in personal security by making contracts with beings less powerful than themselves – perhaps infinitely more, if any additional legal protection is rendered superfluous by the level of protection that their own independent power already provides – they lack reasons to form contracts with these beings, who are thereby excluded, unacceptably, from the moral sphere. Schopenhauer is not a moral contractarian – this is the very distinction from Hobbes that he is at pains to point out – but rather a political contractarian only: politics and law are based on the social contract for him, but not morality. Morality is based on compassion alone. Still, insofar as the social contract is, for him, the external structure that protects citizens from suffering the same wrongs that are delineated by the pure doctrine of right, Schopenhauer too must get its extensional character correctly into alignment with morality. His political state may not be animated by morals, but by his own logic it should have the same scope of inclusion as it would if it were. And since the outlook of Schopenhauer’s moral philosophy is remarkably inclusive, taking in virtually every living creature that suffers, and abolishing the illusory distinctions between human beings, his political philosophy, I previously argued, ought to be proportionately expansive too. In this chapter, I revisit and reformulate this problem, and this time I will attempt to provide a solution. My solution borrows an item from Schopenhauer’s moral philosophy, namely his general view on the place of reason and principles in moral life. I argue that Schopenhauer’s views on this issue provide the scope for an alternative social contract that springs from compassion rather than egoism, and that the introduction of this new contract does minimal violence to the rest of Schopenhauer’s official political philosophy. Towards the end, I will review how far this solution would take us away from the original spirit of Schopenhauer’s politics, and whether traveling this distance might in fact be a good thing.

18.2  The Problem of Schopenhauerian Politics Schopenhauer’s discussions of moral philosophy tend to begin, not with positive morality, but with the amoral or anti-moral tendencies that disincline us from morally good behavior. His pure doctrine of right is no different: not by accident, it begins with the moral concept of wrong. The concept of wrong, he argues, ‘is the original and positive one’, whereas the concept of right is ‘the negation of wrong’ (SW 2:400/WWR 1:365). Wrong is the ‘violation of the boundaries of someone else’s affirmation of will’ (SW 2:394/WWR 1:360). Selfaffirmation of the will is the natural disposition of every living creature, and while in itself it is morally innocuous, when it becomes so excessive that it violates the same self-affirmation that is found in another living creature, then it becomes wrong. This, of course, is an inevitable turn of events: in practice, it is impossible to lead one’s life without encroaching on someone else’s will, especially if everyone is left to their own devices. 257

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Doing right, accordingly, is simply not doing wrong: it is to refrain from actions that cross the boundary of someone else’s will (SW 2:400/WWR 1:365). The moral virtue that corresponds to doing right is voluntary justice: a voluntarily just person is disposed not to assert themselves at the expense of others and thereby do them harm (SW 4: 212–14/OBM 203–205). Just as the concept of right is essentially negative, according to Schopenhauer, so is the moral virtue of justice. It does, however, have a positive virtue as a counterpart, namely loving kindness (Menschenliebe, more literally the love of humanity), and together they are the passive and active forms of the compassion on which all genuine moral action is based. Marking himself out from Hobbes once again, compassion is an essential component of human nature according to Schopenhauer; it is ‘an undeniable fact of human consciousness’ (SW 4:213/OBM 204; see also SW 4:246–47/OBM 232–33). Human beings are not a species whose members are merely contingently capable of compassion; to be compassionate is an essential part of what it is to be human, hence why ‘humanity’ and ‘compassion’ can be used as synonyms: we could ask a person who is acting callously to ‘show a little’ of either one. Still, compassion is not our default mode. Rather, compassion combats ‘the anti-moral powers that dwell within me’ (SW 4:213/OBM 204); it is an inner form of restraint on the natural self-affirmation that inclines all of us towards wrongdoing. From his pure doctrine of right, Schopenhauer derives a sequence of several moral rights that are centrally important to his vision of the political state: the right to acquire, protect and exchange property (as effectively an extension of one’s own bodily self-affirmation); the right to self-defense (as negating the original positive wrong); the right to enforce a binding contract (as a form of self-defense against wrongful deceit); and even, off the back of the latter, the state’s right to punish (as the right to enforce the terms of the political contract) – although the purely moral right to punish cannot rightfully be implemented independently of positive legislation, making it, unlike the others, a mixture of natural right and social convention (SW 2:393–414/WWR 1:360–77; see Woods 2017). As mentioned, however, Schopenhauer is about as hopeful as Hobbes that compliance with any such rights as these can be achieved by the motivating force of their moral content alone: everyone has an interest in seeing these rights protected and implemented, but not typically out of concern for seeing the right thing done. Instead, a structure for establishing and enforcing these rights must be constructed out of our own self-interest. This structure – namely the state – is therefore a morally hollow one, but it at least stands in a relationship of pre-established harmony with a body of true moral substance, namely the pure doctrine of right.1 Whereas the pure doctrine of right, as a moral doctrine, is concerned with doing wrong, politics and legislation are concerned with being wronged, and more specifically with preventing it (SW 2:406/WWR 1:370). For this reason, Schopenhauer aptly calls the theorist of political rights an ‘inverted moralist’, and it is by switching focus from the active side of wrongdoing to the passive side of being wronged that the moral concepts of the pure doctrine of right are converted into their juridical counterparts, i.e., what is legally right or wrong (SW 2:407/WWR 1:371). Consequently, if the state perfectly achieves its main aim, then it will be identical in appearance to a perfectly moral society (SW 2:408/WWR 1:372) – or almost, since Schopenhauer accepts that even the state will not be able to alleviate moral injustices in matters that ought to remain private (SW 2:413/WWR 1:376–77). It will not thereby be a morally perfect society, because it is motivated by non-moral rather than moral incentives. But where benefits can be derived from the mere appearance of perfect moral justice, these benefits are real enough: from the point of view of reducing harm, the motives hardly matter. 258

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That positive legislation must take its cues from the pure doctrine of right is not only a matter of capturing a prudential good, however. It is, in fact, a necessary condition of positive legislation that it is grounded in the pure doctrine of right in some way, according to Schopenhauer. That is, it is not even positive law at all unless it is also morally right: But only when the positive legislation is essentially and thoroughly determined under the guidance of the pure doctrine of right, with this doctrine providing a demonstrable ground for each of its statutes – only then is the resulting legislation actually positive law, and the state a legal association, a state in the true sense of the word, a morally admissible institution, not an immoral one. Otherwise, the positive legislation lays the foundation for a positive wrong, and it is itself a publicly admitted, enforced wrong. (SW 2:409/WWR 1:373) From this we learn that the scaffolding of positive law that upholds the pure doctrine of right is not only a way to reduce harm, but also a way to ensure that the state itself remains on the correct side of the dividing line between moral right and wrong. The cost of not doing so, Schopenhauer suggests, would be legally enshrining moral wrongdoing. At first glance this might seem like a moral condition on the foundation and constitution of the legal state. However, based on this evidence alone, it is undecidable whether the state’s obligation not to do what is morally inadmissible is in fact due to its primary and purely legal obligation to prevent its citizens from being harmed. The state would, after all, completely undermine itself if it not only failed to protect its citizens from wrong but positively contributed to them being wronged. This leaves it an open question whether this apparently moral condition must really be met out of moral motives: while all the state’s operations are required to be morally admissible, it is unclear that even in this they are required to be so on moral grounds. Schopenhauer is clear and explicit that the state springs from pure egoism. Every prudent rational egoist ought to realize that although, as a matter of fact, they are not compelled by the pure doctrine of right, still they stand to derive benefits from its being universally observed: at the cost of their freedom to harm others, they gain protection from being harmed themselves (SW 2:405/WWR 1:369). The state, then, is not set up in opposition to egoism per se, but rather the potential, harmful consequences of egoism, and it uses an expanded form of egoism as the means to achieving its aim: ‘the state emerges out of a cumulative, collective egoism that is fully aware of itself as such, and proceeds methodically from a one-sided standpoint to that of the universal’ (SW 2:408/WWR 1:372). Hence Schopenhauer’s origins story that illuminates the prudential need for the state resembles the one told by Hobbes, as he himself is the first to point out: ‘as soon as any group of people is released from all law and order[,] then at once we clearly see the war of all against all that Hobbes described so perceptively’ (SW 2:393/WWR 1:359). It is of course true that if citizens collectively and successfully refrained from all wrongdoing, then they would thereby also benefit from avoiding being wronged themselves. To this extent, rational egoists do have a prudential interest in bringing about a state that guarantees such an arrangement; and, granted the assumption that the rational egoist ought to act on this interest all things considered, Schopenhauer’s story comes true: we would indeed get ‘from a one-sided standpoint to that of the universal’ (SW 2:408/WWR 1:372). Unfortunately, however, this assumption is not trivial. For, while it may be true of some rational egoists, it is certainly not true of them all that establishing the state along these lines 259

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is the only or best way to achieve the end of protecting themselves from being wronged. What the state provides, according to Schopenhauer, is a compelling form of power that natural rights alone lack; the wholly powerless therefore are indeed wholly dependent upon it for their own much-needed protection. But the more independently powerful a person is or becomes, the less that a state of this kind is of any use to them; the more, in fact, it is an obstacle in their way. A rational egoist would hardly deserve the name if they accepted any cost to their liberty to achieve ends that, with a reasonable degree of confidence, they could equally well achieve without accepting these costs. None of this is yet to say that the state does not have its origins in rational egoism, but rather that, if it does, then it remains unclear how such egoism is supposed to get us to a truly universal standpoint, and why the state would not simply serve to entrench the asymmetrical power relations from which a one-sided form of egoism profits, rather than lend its power to the rights of the powerless. Unless Schopenhauer can shed further light here, then he cannot explain how the political contract that springs from egoism is the same contract that is supposed to produce even the mere appearance of a morally just society.

18.3  Reason and Principles in Moral Life My proposed solution to this problem in Schopenhauer’s politics borrows an item from his moral philosophy, namely his view on the proper function of moral principles. As has been noted in the literature (Marshall 2017: 308–309), while Schopenhauer strenuously objects to legislative-imperative – i.e., Kantian – forms of ethics (SW 4:120/OBM 125), and while he claims that principles ‘are in no way the original source or prime basis of all morals’, he still considers moral principles to be ‘indispensable for a moral life’ (SW 4:214/OBM 205). He expands on these views – all too briefly – in his presentation of the virtue of moral justice. Since, as already mentioned, voluntary moral justice is negative according to Schopenhauer, it requires agents somehow to be responsive to suffering that is merely potential; unlike kindly aiding someone who is obviously in need, voluntary moral justice instead requires non-interference with those who may be perfectly fine just as they are. For this reason, a compassionate response, which is more easily prompted by the sight of actual suffering, may not be prompted by cases of this general and highly common kind. It is the primary role of moral principles, then, according to Schopenhauer, to assist with meeting the requirements of moral justice even in these kinds of cases: … it is by no means required that compassion is actually aroused in every single case, where anyway it would often come too late: rather, out of the recognition of the suffering that every unjust action necessarily brings upon others, a recognition attained once and for all and sharpened by the feeling of enduring a wrong, i.e., that of someone else’s superior power, the maxim ‘Harm no one’ emerges in noble minds, and rational deliberation elevates it to the firm resolve, formed once and for all, to respect the rights of every one … For although principles and abstract cognition in general are in no way the original source or prime basis of all morals, yet they are indispensable for a moral life, as the container, the reservoir in which the disposition that has risen out of the source of all morality, which does not flow at every moment, is stored so that it can flow down through supply channels when a case for application comes. Thus in the moral sphere things are as they are in the physiological, where e.g. the gall bladder is necessary as a reservoir for the products of the liver, and in many similar 260

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cases. Without firmly formed principles we would be irresistibly at the mercy of the anti-moral incentives when they are excited into affects by external impressions. (SW 4:214–15/OBM 205–206) On paper, this provides a neat solution to the problem of how to sustain a stable pattern of morally correct behavior even in cases when, due to the absence of actual suffering, the compassionate incentive is not aroused: by acting out of compassionate principles instead, the agent remains in accordance with the requirements of compassion even while they are not at that time directly acting out of compassionate feeling. While the context suggests that in this passage Schopenhauer has cases of refraining from doing harm in mind, his solution would also seem to work in cases where actual suffering is in fact present but for whatever reason it fails to arouse compassion in the agent: that is, lapses in compassion. There is, then, a limited but not negligible role for reason to play in moral life even for Schopenhauer. While, again, it is ‘not [the] source’ of the virtuous life and plays merely a ‘subordinate role’, the application of reason is nevertheless ‘necessary’ insofar as it ‘sustains’ our general resolutions and provides maxims that ‘struggle against the weakness of the moment’ and lend ‘consistency to action’ (SW 2:69/WWR 1:83). In the same respect Schopenhauer also reserves a place for reason in the artistic life: not, once again, as the ultimate source of artistic genius, but rather to support with the execution of the genius’s necessary tasks – with getting the work done, in other words – ‘since genius is not at one’s beck and call’ (SW 2:69/WWR 1:83). It falls to reason generally to go about implementing what flows from the genuine sources of both moral and artistic value, because access to these sources is inconstant and involuntary and therefore cannot be counted on as the sole sustaining force. If recognition is the muse, reason is the manager. There are, nevertheless, a few puzzles to resolve in interpreting Schopenhauer’s view on the proper function of rational principles in moral life. The first is just how essential principles are to morality: can a person be moral without principles for Schopenhauer? The claims that principles are ‘necessary’ and ‘indispensable’ would seem to suggest that, indeed, the adoption of some principles is a necessary condition of morality. Note, however, first that Schopenhauer’s initial claim is that ‘it is by no means required that compassion is actually aroused in every single case’: in other words, not that morality requires principles, but rather that it does not require the actual arousal of compassion. If morality requires principles in any sense, then, it requires them only in case the arousal of compassion fails. Moreover, before introducing his views on moral principles, Schopenhauer makes the following remarks: The first degree of the effect of compassion, then, is that it intervenes to obstruct those sufferings about to be caused to others that arise out of myself in consequence of the anti-moral powers that dwell within me, calls out ‘Stop!’ to me and places itself as a defensive shield before the other, which protects him from the injury that my egoism, or malice, would otherwise drive me to. In this manner there arises from this first degree of compassion the maxim ‘Harm no one’, i.e. the principle of justice, a virtue which has its exclusive, purely moral origin, free of any admixture, here alone and which can have it nowhere else, because otherwise it would have to rest upon egoism. If my mind is receptive to compassion up to that degree, then it will restrain me wherever and whenever I might use the suffering of others as a means to achieve my ends. (SW 4:213–14/OBM 204–5). 261

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While this passage states that the principle of justice arises from the first effect of compassion and thus the agent is provided with a maxim for moral action, it also suggests that arousal of the compassionate incentive is itself sufficient to stop an agent in their tracks before they can inflict the harms that would otherwise result from the anti-moral incentives of egoism or malice. Principles, therefore, are not altogether necessary for performing actions of genuine moral worth, not even those of the negative variety that is voluntary justice; rather, such justice is the first effect of the arousal of compassion itself. This interpretation of Schopenhauer’s position on the matter might seem to contradict remarks of his such as the following: ‘In consequence of what has been said, compassion still operates only indirectly in the individual actions of the just person, through the mediation of principles’ (SW 4:215/OBM 206). These remarks seem to imply that any resistance at all to the anti-moral incentives strongly depends upon having the right moral principles, and that compassion in its negative form of justice only ever operates indirectly through such principles. In fact, however, these remarks only relate to the more specific and limited sense in which principles really are necessary and indispensable for moral life. Specifically, while principles are not necessary for every genuinely moral action, and thus in this sense are not necessary for morality, since the compassionate incentive alone, provided that it is actually present, is sufficient for that, they are necessary for structuring a life so that it generally and reliably proceeds in a morally correct way overall. This is because, in practice, it is virtually inevitable that the compassionate incentive will not always be actually present, especially in those cases where the suffering is merely potential and thus compassion is hardest to arouse. Principles are not necessary for morally good action, but they are necessary for a morally good life, i.e., a sustained pattern of morally good action. Other interpretative puzzles concern the alleged reliability of reason and the questionable authenticity of moral actions performed merely out of rational principles. So far, Schopenhauer has characterized the place of reason in moral life as if reason provides us with the necessary resolve to carry forward and carry out the maxim of justice that arises from our intuitive compassionate recognition of the suffering that is caused by unjust actions. A little later, however, he makes the following remarks: If one surveys the several virtues and vices that Aristotle placed together for a brief summary in his book On Virtues and Vices, one will find that all of them can be thought of only as inborn properties, and indeed can be genuine only as such. If instead they were assumed voluntarily as a consequence of rational deliberation, they would really amount to dissemblance and would be ungenuine; and so their endurance and reliability under the stress of circumstances could not be counted upon at all. (SW 4:250–1/OBM 236–7) Here Schopenhauer appears to suggest that virtues that are voluntarily adopted after a process of rational deliberation are, in fact, neither genuine nor reliable. This would seem to undermine some of his earlier remarks on the proper function of rational moral principles, where the main quality of reason that made it so indispensable was the resoluteness and consistency that it could lend to moral life as compared to the inconstancy of moral intuition. In his defense, perhaps in this passage Schopenhauer only has in mind moral virtues with purely rational voluntary origins and thinks only that these specific kinds of virtues turn out to be false and flighty. By contrast, in the previous discussion of the function of rational 262

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principles, the moral maxim to harm no one, while it is admittedly sustained by rational means, at least initially emerges from an arousal of compassionate moral intuition. Still, it is unclear yet why this origin, however genuinely moral it may be, would make the subsequent adoption and application of the emergent moral principles any more genuine or reliable than purely rational inculcation. Twice while discussing the function of moral principles, Schopenhauer indicates that applying them requires ‘self-control’, although he does not expand any further on what exactly he means by self-control other than ‘[h]olding the principles firm and following them in spite of the motives that work against them’ (SW 4:215/OBM 206), and he says nothing precise about the source of such self-control. He does at least imply, firstly, that exercise of self-control requires ‘abstract or rational cognition’ (SW 4:215/OBM 206), since it is due to a lack of such cognition that animals have no resolve or self-control at all. He also implies that it is due to such cognition that a human agent can grasp, and therefore be moved by, ‘what is remote, absent, past or future and cognizable only by means of concepts’ (SW 4:215/OBM 206). Taken together, then, we can interpret what Schopenhauer here means by resolve and self-control to be the rational ability, i.e., through abstraction and projection, to represent as motives morally relevant facts beyond what is intuitively perceivable in the concrete present moment, as opposed to being wholly and exclusively responsive to that moment. Without such help from reason, our moral responsiveness would be severely limited, including, among other things, unresponsiveness to the harms to which the principle of justice refers, since they are merely potential harms. With the help of reason, however, the scope of our moral outlook is much wider. The metaphors that Schopenhauer uses to illustrate his views on the function of rational moral principles can be interpreted along these lines. He characterizes such principles as ‘the container, the reservoir’ in which the ‘disposition’ that arises from the genuine source of morality is ‘stored so that it can flow down through supply channels when a case for application comes’ (SW 4:214/OBM 205). These metaphors threaten to obscure as much as they clarify what Schopenhauer means: how exactly is compassion reserved and rereleased? What he seems to mean, however, is that, after intuitively recognizing the connection between unjust actions and suffering, the morally just agent may be moved to adopt and apply a principled moral outlook that has already accounted for the suffering of others even when such suffering is merely potential. In this way, the first degree of the effect of genuine compassion is, by rational means, spread across innumerable other deserving cases.

18.4  Compassionate Contractarianism Schopenhauer’s theory of moral principles is evidence that in his view human beings can raise the principle of justice to the status of a relatively firm resolve on non-egoistic grounds. This provides the scope for a revision to the social contract at the heart of his form of political contractarianism, such that it would no longer be questionable whether its successful implementation could meet its goal of producing even the mere appearance of perfect moral justice. Indeed, on the following proposal, it would necessarily meet at least this goal. On this proposal, the state is still founded as the socially approved power by means of which citizens are externally motivated, and thereby compelled, to observe their own resolution not to harm others. This, notably, is no different at all from its original founding purpose in Schopenhauer’s official political philosophy; there, too, citizens have in theory resolved not to harm one another on pain of punishment by the state. The difference, how263

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ever, lies in the initial incentive to form this resolution and whose harm is the object of its focus. Instead of the Hobbesian egoistic incentive to protect oneself from being harmed by others, which is indeed the animus of Schopenhauer’s official political philosophy, the revised social contract is animated by the compassionate incentive directly to protect others from being harmed by oneself. The state’s purpose, in short, would be to uphold by external measures the same principle of justice that arises as the first effect of genuine compassion. This contract, then, is based less on a Hobbesian distrust of others and more on a distrust of ourselves with respect to our ability to uphold the principle of justice without any external assistance. It is, in effect, a kind of ‘Ulysses contract’: that is, a form of advance directive whereby an agent who anticipates a lapse in their competency, i.e., their desires, judgment, control, or resolve, is nevertheless held to the better wishes of their former self. Ulysses contracts are so named after the famous episode of Homer’s Odyssey in which Odysseus orders his crew to block up their ears and bind him to the mast so that he alone can hear the Sirens’ song without being seduced over to the rocks on which the Sirens live and consequently wrecking his ship (see Elster 2000). Ulysses contracts, like Odysseus’s original motive, are often egoistic: they ensure that our own considered interests continue to be served even when we are not well placed to observe them all by ourselves. The proposed Ulysses contract, however, is an unusually compassionate one: it would be as if Odysseus bound himself to protect the Sirens from the harms that he might do to them. A remarkable amount of the remainder of Schopenhauer’s official political philosophy can remain intact on this proposal. Operationally, the state can still be based on egoism even if, in a sense, it initially arises from compassion. For example, the proposal is perfectly compatible with Schopenhauer’s existing theory of punishment. While the state’s right to punish is partly grounded in its moral and legal right to hold citizens to the terms of the political contract, the general justifying aim of punishment, according to Schopenhauer, is ultimately deterrence: ‘the immediate purpose of punishment in the particular case is the fulfillment of the law as a contract. But the only purpose of the law is to deter people from encroaching on the rights of others’ (SW 2:410–1/WWR 1:374). Consequently, ‘the law and its implementation, i.e. punishment, are essentially directed to the future, not the past’ (SW 2:411/WWR 1:374). The compelling force of punishment depends, of course, on selfinterested aversion to being punished. None of this needs to change on the above proposal; all that needs to be reviewed, if anything, is whether the state’s laws and their corresponding punishments are suited to deterring citizens from committing the wrongs to others which they have resolved not to do, rather than the wrongs committed by others which they aim to avoid. The state’s sole remit is still to uphold the passive side of the pure doctrine of right: it still aims to provide protection from being wronged, rather than aiming to inculcate the virtue of voluntary moral justice. The only difference, once again, is that on this proposal the state’s remit is motivated, and thus its scope determined, by citizens’ aversion to making others the victims of their own wrongdoing, rather than their aversion to becoming victims themselves. Additionally, this reapplication of Schopenhauer’s theory of moral principles in his political philosophy sidesteps any potential problems with either authenticity or reliability. There are no difficulties with authenticity simply because, according to Schopenhauer, authenticity is not important to politics, certainly not in the way that it is to morality, where genuine compassion is the essential criterion of moral worth. As an inverted moralist, the political theorist aims to produce not authentic moral goodness but only its external benefits. There are no difficulties with reliability either because political agents, unlike authentically moral 264

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agents, are not reliant on either the compassionate incentive or even some version of inner self-control. Rather, as per the Ulysses-style political contract, they are bound to observe justice by purely external means, namely self-interested aversion to the legal threat of punishment. Above all, this solution solves the problem with Schopenhauer’s political philosophy. On Schopenhauer’s official political philosophy, in theory, the principle of justice would be externally reinforced by legal measures, but only if it were true – yet it is not clear that it is – that collective rational egoism would alight upon the principle of justice in the first place. On this proposal, however, the principle of justice is already directly selected for external reinforcement, and so the scope of political justice cannot but coincide with that of moral justice. If political justice fails to resemble moral justice, then, on this account, it could only be due to our poor implementation of it, i.e., errors in our legislation and its execution. Putting aside matters that properly lie outside of political justice anyway according to Schopenhauer – from the profound, i.e., ‘countless evils that are absolutely essential to life’, to the trivial, i.e., ‘quarrels between individuals’ – its successful implementation on this proposal really would enable the state to achieve its goal of ‘ultimately removing all kinds of evil to bring about something approaching a utopia’ (SW 2:413/WWR 1:377). It really would, in other words, resemble the perfect realization of moral justice, even though to some extent it would still be its mere appearance, since the reasons for obeying the principle of justice, at least on an operational level, have here been converted from moral ones arising from one’s inner disposition, to non-moral ones arising from external legal threats. The rational egoist of Schopenhauer’s official political philosophy should not be alarmed: in theory, they were in favor of this arrangement anyway, due to the self-interested benefits they reasoned that they could derive from the universal appearance of justice, although in practice, with sufficient independent social power, there was little to stop them from arranging things so that they could gain those benefits without having to sacrifice so much of their own liberty. They might now enjoy even fewer freedoms to do wrong, but they are no less protected from being wronged than before. Most importantly, those who were previously likely to be unacceptably excluded from the scope of political justice, namely the socially powerless, will have no fewer freedoms and yet many more protections, not least because beforehand they had virtually none of either.

18.5  On Compassionate Grounds The above Schopenhauerian solution to Schopenhauerian politics assumes that compassion can substitute for egoism as the initial incentive that gives rise to the political state. Some might doubt this assumption. It is not so clear that an appeal to compassion can be used to justify the ways of the state to its citizens in the same way as appeals to egoism. However, firstly, it is worth recalling that appeals to compassion need not take the place of egoism at every level. As Schopenhauer himself says, ‘The state is set up under the correct assumption that pure morality, i.e. morally grounded rightful action, cannot be expected; otherwise, of course, the state itself would be quite superfluous’ (SW 2:408/WWR 1:372). Morally motivated obedience to the law, for example, is not realistic to expect of every person at all times. Here, as in Schopenhauer’s official political philosophy, egoism must be used against itself to prevent its own potentially detrimental effects. Instead, the appeal to compassion need only be made at the level of a general justification for the state’s existence. For such a justification to work it would not require that all 265

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subsequent forms of obedience to the state are universally and exclusively based on moral grounds, but only that all human beings can recognize as their own incentive the compassionate grounds on which the state is initially erected. The question, then, is whether the latter, still large, but more limited expectation of humanity is a reasonable one. Schopenhauer’s own remarks on the rarity of compassion may present an obstacle here. In some places he stresses that compassion is rare, and certainly rarer than egoism. In his theory of moral principles, for example, he makes a note of the fact that the principle of justice emerges as an abstract maxim (only?) in ‘noble minds’ (SW 4:214/OBM 206), which at least implies that it is a mark of some distinction. Furthermore, in no uncertain terms, he claims that moral justice is always surprising and exceptional when it does occur: ‘how small is the extent of genuine, freely willed, disinterested and unadorned justice to be found among human beings, how it always strikes us simply as a surprising exception’ (SW 4:216/OBM 207). ‘And yet,’ he later claims, ‘it happens every day’: Everyone has experienced it in himself; it has not been foreign to even the most hardhearted and selfish person. It occurs daily before our eyes in individual things, in small things, wherever from an immediate urge, without much deliberation, one person helps another and runs to his assistance. (SW 4:229–30/OBM 218) Given the right stimulus, according to Schopenhauer, ‘compassion is constantly ready to come forth actually’ (SW 4:216/OBM 207). Although the ‘three fundamental ethical incentives of human beings, egoism, malice, compassion, are present in each one in different and incredibly diverse proportions’ (SW 4:252/OBM 238), they are nonetheless all typically present in some proportion in any given person. To make sense of Schopenhauer’s claims that compassion is on the one hand exceptional and on the other a daily occurrence, then, we need only accept that most of the rest of our daily activities are egoistic. We therefore need not conclude that compassionate beings are exceptional according to Schopenhauer – in fact they are found universally – but rather only that truly compassionate acts are, and even then, only relative to egoistic ones. Additionally, although the principle of justice is said to emerge as an abstract maxim in ‘noble minds’, the recognition from which it emerges, namely ‘the recognition of the suffering that every unjust action necessarily brings upon others’ (SW 4:214/OBM 205), Schopenhauer suggests is intuitively recognized by all. It presents itself in the ‘obscure feeling’ that we call ‘pangs of conscience’, which on some level accompany all wrongdoing (SW 2:395/WWR 1:361). True pangs of conscience are of course a primary example of when fellow-feeling ‘come[s] too late’ (SW 4:214/OBM 205), as in the case of the murderer who ‘is seized instantly and with terrible clarity by those pangs of conscience whose meaning we have just given in dry and abstract terms, and which inflicts a life-long, incurable wound on any peace of mind’ (SW 2:395/WWR 1:361). But Schopenhauer also suggests that ‘shrinking back in the face of a prospective murder’, too, is explained by ‘the boundless devotion to life pervading all living things’ (SW 2:395/WWR 1:361). The intuitive recognition on which compassion is based does not always come too late, then. We can therefore readily assume that human beings are always on some level susceptible to appeals to compassion: 266

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compassion … does not rest on presuppositions, concepts, religions, dogmas, myths, upbringing and education, but instead is original and immediate, resides in human nature itself, and for that very reason stands firm beneath all relationships and shows itself in all lands and times. Thus appeal is confidently made to it everywhere, as to something necessarily present in every human being. (SW 4:213/OBM 204) We must assume, given Schopenhauer’s other remarks, that such appeals are not always sufficient on their own to prevent every act of wrongdoing, or else there would be no need for the state as Schopenhauer envisages it, or anything like it. Nevertheless, we may also assume that every human being, egoistically motivated as they might ordinarily be, can at the same time be brought to recognize, as a general justification for the state, the principle of justice as such. After all, a citizen can recognize both that they must obey the law or else they will be punished, and that they must do so or else they will harm others, and it may be due to the inconstancy of the latter as a motivating force that they will assent to being bound instead by the former.

18.6  The Moral Meaning of the State How far does this Schopenhauerian solution to Schopenhauerian politics take us away from Schopenhauer’s official political philosophy? In some respects, it seems, no distance at all: All these individuals share the faculty of reason, which enables them not only to recognize the particular case (as with animals), but also to achieve an abstract overview of the whole, the total context. Now this faculty of reason quickly gave people insight into this source of suffering and made them concerned to diminish it, or even remove it where possible, through a collective sacrifice that would nonetheless be outweighed by the collective advantage that ensued. As pleasant as it may be to the egoism of an individual to do wrong in certain cases, still, it necessarily correlates with another individual’s experience of being wronged, and this is a source of considerable pain to that other individual. Now reason, which takes in the whole picture, emerged from the one-sided standpoint of the individual to which it belonged, and momentarily liberated itself from its attachment to this individual. This freed it up to see that the pleasure one individual gets in doing wrong is always outweighed by the relatively greater pain another individual experiences in being wronged. (SW 2:405/WWR 1:369) The state, as officially envisaged by Schopenhauer, emerges from a collective commitment to cooperate in refraining from harming one another. This commitment, supported by the use of reason, is based on the incentive of decreasing the suffering known to be caused by unconstrained egoism. Successful implementation of this commitment would satisfy that incentive, i.e., this kind of suffering would be radically reduced or even eliminated. In other respects, however, there is a potentially transformative difference. All of the above, according to Schopenhauer’s official word, can and does arise from egoism alone. The passage above continues: ‘everyone was afraid that he would experience the pain of being wronged much more frequently than the occasional pleasure of doing wrong’ (emphasis added). Any person reasoning in such a way, however universalistic their preferred out267

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come might be in form, is clearly not entirely liberated from a one-sided perspective, for they are still factoring their own interests into their deliberation. Hence, the political contract is ‘easily devised and gradually perfected by egoism’ (SW 2:405/WWR 1:369–70). The enlightened standpoint from which the state allegedly emerges, and which resembles genuine moral enlightenment, is in fact achieved by a thoroughly non-moral route. According to the Schopenhauerian solution, by contrast, the initial incentive to eliminate suffering is non-egoistic. What difference does this make? Arguably, it transforms the moral meaning of the state: more specifically, it implies that it might have a moral meaning at all. Schopenhauer finds various ways to deny that the state is any sort of genuinely moral institution. He holds Kant partly responsible for encouraging variations on the mistaken view that the state has anything really to do with morality: Kant’s doctrine of right, which falsely derives from the categorical imperative the establishment of the state as a moral duty, has given rise even recently to the very peculiar and mistaken notion that the state is an institution for fostering morality, that it emerges from the striving for morality, and that it is thus erected against egoism. (SW 2:407/WWR 1:371) Schopenhauer may have in mind Kant’s view that exiting the state of nature is not only prudent but morally required. Its moral necessity derives from the natural moral right to freedom, which in the state of nature is wrongfully unsecured. ‘It is therefore [morally] necessary,’ Kant says, ‘as soon as men come close to exercising their reciprocal freedom, that they leave the status naturalis, to come under a necessary law, a status civilis’ (AA 27:590). For Kant, the state of nature is only a thought experiment – ‘the status naturalis does not exist at all, and never has’ – which is designed to illuminate the state’s moral necessity, rather than a hypothesis about how the state came to be. It is doubtful, Kant suggests, that human beings even have the correct moral constitution to bring about a state on these grounds alone: ‘it would have to be a state of angels’, he says. He does accept, however, that the same well-organized state can arise from ‘self-seeking inclinations’ and thereby ‘the human being is constrained to become a good citizen even if not a morally good human being’ and hence: ‘The problem of establishing a state … is soluble even for a nation of devils’ (AA 8:366). Schopenhauer is therefore right that establishing the state is a moral requirement for Kant but is perhaps being unfair to blame Kant for enabling the views either that the state fosters morality or that it strives for morality. In all likelihood, when Schopenhauer criticizes those who in this way grossly overstate the state’s significance – ‘the narrow-mindedness and shallowness of the philosophasters who in pompous phrases depict the state as the highest purpose and the blossom of human existence’ (SW 6:258/PP 2:219) – he has in mind figures like Hegel, to whom he attributes ‘the scandalous doctrine that the destiny of human beings merges with the state’ (SW 5:164/PP 1:138). In any case, it is certainly Schopenhauer’s view that the establishment of the state as a moral duty is falsely derived from the categorical imperative. Stated this way, Schopenhauer’s official view is compatible with there being something like a moral duty to establish the state, but only that it would be wrong to derive such a duty from the categorical imperative: the falsehood would be rooted in the derivation, not the derived. This points to a deeper disagreement between Schopenhauer and Kant on this score: Schopenhauer rejects the very idea of a categorical imperative, and so will of course object to anything being derived from it. He is in fact open to some interpretation of the notion of moral obliga268

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tion, so long as it rests on its proper grounds: ‘moral obligation rests upon a presupposed reciprocity, and consequently is thoroughly egoistic and receives its interpretation from egoism, which, under the condition of reciprocity, prudently sees its way to a compromise’ (SW 4:157/OBM 157). On this interpretation, the imperative from which any obligation to establish the state would derive is not categorical, ‘but in fact a hypothetical one, tacitly based on the condition that the law I set up for my acting, when I elevate it to being universal, also becomes a law for my suffering, and under this condition, as the potentially passive party’ (SW 4:157/OBM 158). Once again, egoistic interests are factored into this deliberation, making it questionable whether this is really a moral obligation at all, or at least revising the sense in which it is moral. An obligation, for Schopenhauer, is necessarily ‘the acceptance of duty’ (SW 4:124/OBM 129, emphasis added), and it is only by obligating themselves in the first place that agents are in any way morally bound to obey their duties. Prior to that acceptance, they are under no obligation at all.2 On the Schopenhauerian solution to Schopenhauerian politics, citizens of a state become so by assuming a moral obligation, but of yet another variety. The grounds on which they accept this obligation are not egoistic, indeed are anti-egoistic. This obligation is therefore moral in a sense additional to Schopenhauer’s meaning: not only do I opt to bind my will, but I do so, at least initially, on moral grounds. I do so not on the grounds of the categorical imperative, but on those of compassion.3 How could this fail to transform the moral meaning of the state? True, the state still would not make us moral, nor require morally perfect beings; it would not be a precondition of morality, nor its apotheosis. But the reorientation of politics so that it was founded on a direct commitment to save others from becoming the victims of our own wrongdoing would still, surely, make it a significant moral achievement.4

Notes 1 For more on Schopenhauer on the state, see Norberg (2023), Chapter 19 in this volume. 2 See Puryear (2023), Chapter 16 of this volume. See also SW 4:220–2/OBM 210–2. 3 See SW 4:136–8/OBM 139–40 on the crucial importance of grounds to moral theory. 4 My sincere thanks to Tim Stoll and Jakob Norberg for comments on an early version of this paper. I am grateful to audiences at a panel of the North American Division of the Schopenhauer Society organized by Sandy Shapshay for the APA 2020 Central Division Meeting, and at the PostKantian European Philosophy Seminar at the Department of Philosophy, University of Oxford, organized by Manuel Dries, Joseph Schear, and Mark Wrathall.

References Elster, Jon. Ulysses Unbound: Studies in Rationality, Precommitment, and Constraints. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Marshall, Colin. ‘Schopenhauer and Non-Cognitivist Moral Realism’. Journal of the History of Philosophy 55, no. 2 (2017): 293–316. Norberg, Jakob. ‘Schopenhauer’s Critique of the State’. In The Schopenhauerian Mind, edited by David Bather Woods and Timothy Stoll. London: Routledge, 2023. Puryear, Stephen. ‘Schopenhauer and Modern Moral Philosophy’. In The Schopenhauerian Mind, edited by David Bather Woods and Timothy Stoll. London: Routledge, 2023. Southwood, Nicholas. Contractualism and the Foundations of Morality. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Woods, David. ‘Schopenhauer on the State and Morality’. In The Palgrave Handbook to Schopenhauer, edited by Sandra Shapshay, 299–322. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

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19 SCHOPENHAUER’S CRITIQUE OF THE STATE Jakob Norberg

Scholars have generally agreed that Schopenhauer made no significant contribution to political thought. A recent short biography of Schopenhauer states that he was “singularly uninterested in political philosophy” (Lewis 2012: 57), an introduction to a thirteen-article companion to his philosophy speaks of the “brazenly ahistorical and apolitical cast of Schopenhauer’s thought,” (Janaway 1999: 2), and a monograph with a synoptic overview of his thought states that his philosophical system is “totally free from the political turmoil of his time” (Atwell 1995: ix). Even an entry on Schopenhauer in a multi-volume encyclopedia of political thought begins with the admission that he had “relatively little concern for political philosophy” just as he was largely indifferent to “the politics of his day” (Cartwright 2015: 1). A few recently published highly illuminating article-length treatments of Schopenhauer’s conception of law and the state do not change the overall picture (Jordan 2009; Winkler 2013; Woods 2017): Schopenhauer devoted himself to several major areas of philosophy, such as epistemology, metaphysics, aesthetics, and ethics, but dedicated fewer than one hundred pages to legal and political matters in an oeuvre of nearly 3,500 pages (Würkner 1989: 84–85). Yet the relative brevity and even narrowness of Schopenhauer’s comments on political philosophy were partly intentional, for Schopenhauer’s objective was to offer a critique of politics, in the sense of a delimitation of its task and domain of legitimacy and relevance. He did not dispute the importance of politics, which for him consisted in the rational management of a volatile, conflictual world. Political action and especially the erection of a state are completely indispensable, Schopenhauer argued, because the properly formed state can protect people’s lives and property and thus very concretely prevent, but not eliminate, suffering. At the same time, Schopenhauer did not think that political coordination embodied the highest and most complete human response to the pain of existence, and it did not deserve the more detailed and passionate treatments he reserved for saintly compassion or the ascetic negation of the will. Schopenhauer’s deliberate circumscription of politics as a tool of rational, self-interested human beings to keep latent societal chaos at bay set him apart from many thinkers in his own age, known for expansive, often grandiosely aspirational conceptions of politics. Schopenhauer’s lifetime (1788–1860) coincided with the French Revolution, drawn-out 270

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Napoleonic wars, multiple territorial reconfigurations of German lands, legal emancipation from feudal privileges and obligations, and the rise of industrial manufacturing, all transformative political, economic, and social developments that sparked debates on fundamental issues such as popular sovereignty, constitutional rights, national unity, and pervasive immiseration. Responding to the challenges of the era, German philosophers produced accounts of justified political revolution (Fichte), perpetual international peace (Kant), kingdoms sustained by bonds of love (Novalis), the modern state as a complex ethical system (Hegel), or society as emancipated, egalitarian collaboration (Marx), to name just a few examples. Against the backdrop of this parade of visions, Schopenhauer’s reflections on politics are deflationary. For Schopenhauer, the state fulfills its function by serving strictly as a device of law enforcement and deterrence and should not present itself as the source of profound and meaningful social cohesion: the state is not supposed to edify human beings and organize their ethical existence, embody their collective cultural or ethnic identity, or provide them with some higher mission or purpose. For Schopenhauer, politics was not the medium of existential meaning or redemption. Schopenhauer’s writings on politics were thus deliberately, even polemically minimalist, and he said so explicitly. He combined his reflections on the aim and means of politics with critical comments on German professors who, according to him, were virtually incapable of speaking about the law or the state without indulging in a bombastic rhetoric of hollow abstractions (SW 6:256/PP 2:217). The actual character of politics itself, Schopenhauer assured the reader, was “quite simple and comprehensible” and did not necessitate a laborious treatment cloaked in pompous phrases (SW 6:256/PP 2:217). Scholars are thus not wrong to note Schopenhauer’s apparent disinterest in the realm of politics, because he set out to define this realm narrowly and speak about it soberly; the relative brevity and simplicity of his political thought was precisely the point. Except politics are not “simple and comprehensible,” not even in Schopenhauer’s works. His basic conception of politics can be found in concentrated areas in his oeuvre: in The World as Will and Representation, especially, he equated politics with the contractual establishment of a centralized state that uses its monopoly over the means of coercion to keep its subjects safe from the harm they would inflict upon each other in its absence. Over time, however, Schopenhauer began to indicate that the state can operate more reliably if it inspires acceptance and even reverence in its subjects, something it can achieve by addressing not just their desire for material safety but also their existential and spiritual needs. The state can do this, he conceded, when the elite that controls the apparatus of rule strategically allies itself with the institutions, practices, and idioms of religion and even philosophy. Schopenhauer first assigned a rigorously specified mission of material protection to the state but then noted that it could fulfill this mission more effectively if it was seen to embody loftier ideals. As a consequence of this entanglement of statehood with other needs and aims than legal and punitive regulation of interpersonal affairs, Schopenhauer could not quite limit his account to one particular place in his system or one particular section of his works. Instead, the role of the state appears here and there as a minor concern in other sections on topics such as religion, philosophy, and education. For Schopenhauer himself, the price of this paradox of state effectiveness turned out to be high. In carrying out its task of protection that he so clearly endorsed, German governments of his own time considered philosophy a discipline suited to elite training and a source of public justifications of rule. Consequently, they took control of university appointments, a process which, in Schopenhauer’s own estimation, played a major role in his exclusion from 271

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the academic world. In the end, Schopenhauer was a casualty of the instrumentalist attitude of state elites whose strategy he himself had explained, and his treatment of the state as a necessary device of social stabilization must be read together with his rants against governmental supervision of philosophy.

19.1  Schopenhauer’s Leviathan For Schopenhauer, politics is necessary because of the conflictual, schismatic character of the world (Ruggieri 2016). Conflict arises because humankind is composed of ferocious egoists who battle each other for resources. The pervasive egoism in turn has deep roots in the very constitution of the world as will and representation. As incarnations of the blind, unceasing will, Schopenhauer argued, all beings naturally seek to sustain and reproduce themselves. Yet as perceiving beings, human individuals view the world as consisting of multiple, contoured objects located outside of themselves, of varying relevance for their own unending sequence of projects, but unable to compete with the supreme priority of their own selves. Endlessly driven by will, insatiably desirous, individual human beings thus understand themselves as separate from all others, value themselves higher than all others, and consequently disregard the needs and wishes of others. This natural and nearuniversal egoism, Schopenhauer thought, entails a terrible “conflict between individuals” (SW 2:392/WWR 1:359) that threatens to take the form of outright mayhem. To encapsulate the condition of endless strife, Schopenhauer more than once referred to human society as a latent “war of all against all,” a phrase he drew from Thomas Hobbes’s De Cive (SW 2:393/WWR 1:359). Schopenhauer considered several ways to manage or even heal the world of conflict, such as compassion of such saintly radicality that it can dissolve the boundaries between individuals or a practice of asceticism so rigorous that it can quiet the will. In the former case, the individual gazes beyond the appearance of enmity among contoured persons and grasps the underlying metaphysical unity of all. In the latter case, the individual ceases to will and thus withdraws from conflict altogether. Yet Schopenhauer also implied that these strategies would always fail to scale. Schopenhauer deemed a constant attitude of profound compassion or rigorous ascetic renunciation viable for a handful of remarkable figures but far too demanding for a much larger population of incurable egoists. The war of all against all, he held, is too large a problem for it to be solved by exceptional forms of sainthood and holiness. Like the phrase bellum omnium contra omnes, Schopenhauer drew the solution to the problem of perpetual strife from Hobbes. It was Hobbes who argued that human beings can overcome the “condition of war of everyone against everyone” (1994: 80) through establishing a “mutual covenant” (1994: 109) that transfers the right to govern to a sovereign entrusted with keeping the peace. By this act, a multitude of individuals forms a civic unity, and the contracting parties protect themselves from war through their universal subjection to a centralized organ of compulsion, a “Mortal God” or a Leviathan able to quell manifestations of anarchy (Hobbes 1994: 109). In Schopenhauer’s language, the will “splintered” in the realm of representation can be reunited once again, but then only “externally,” namely by means of an agreement that binds the acting parties together but does not dissolve their boundaries or mute their desires (SW 2:399/WWR 1:365). In this scenario, the egoists fearful of one another decide to disarm and voluntarily transfer the means to protect them into “the hands of a force […] infinitely superior to the power of each individual,” a 272

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figure able to compel everyone to respect the integrity of others (SW 4:194/OBM 188). As a result of this calculated and coordinated act of concentrating force, all individuals together exit the condition of a war; they found a state. And through this foundation of statehood, Schopenhauer claimed, humanity enters a “civilized” stage of history (SW 5:404/PP 1:333). Schopenhauer considered the construction of a state important, indeed indispensable for society. From an elevated, philosophical perspective, however, he thought it was ultimately an unsatisfactory and incomplete solution to the woes of the world. To begin with, a state is a feat of reason. In his tract on the freedom of the will, Schopenhauer explicitly grounded the construction of statehood in linguistically mediated rationality. In contrast to animals, humans are able to condense their sensory perceptions into “universal concepts” or subsume many individual phenomena under single abstractions and then designate these abstractions with words, which in turn can be combined in countless configurations (SW 4:33/FW 56). In other words, humans think. This thinking allows them to distance themselves from the immersion in immediate situations and engage in circumspection, retrospection, and prognostication. They cease to be motivated solely by whatever they encounter in the moment and can make cross-situational plans for their long-term self-preservation. Specifically, rational thought enables egoistic individuals to understand that the gain from taking something from another person will quickly be “outweighed” by the pain of attacks suffered at the hands of many others (SW 2:405/WWR 1:369). This cost-benefit analysis of the long-term personal risks of anarchy compels the individual to join with others and establish a collectively agreed-upon scheme of mutual protection. And thanks to conceptuality and language being shared among humans, this plan of action can be collectively coordinated, which allows for the construction of a state. In an abbreviated summary of how linguistically mediated reason enables cooperation, Schopenhauer singled out the state as one of the most formidable examples of human achievement: “Reason accomplishes its greatest feats only by means of language: the coordinated action of many individuals, the systematic interplay of many thousands, civilization, the state” (SW 2:44/WWR 1:60). Statehood does not perfect human existence, Schopenhauer believed, but it makes it more bearable, and thus stands as a major accomplishment of reason. Despite his praise of statehood as a key achievement of conceptuality and rationality, however, Schopenhauer also hinted at its limits. State formation serves to contain the ubiquitous aggression of egoistic individuals by means of a synchronized delegation of force, but it remains the result of self-interest rationally pursued, not self-interest abandoned. To quote a Hobbesian formulation that sounds congruent with Schopenhauer’s terminology, a plurality of individuals can find a way to “reduce all their wills […] unto one will” (1994: 109), but they do not thereby cease to will. Rather, through the submission of all to one central authority, humans aggregate and concentrate their multiple wills in a sovereign for the purpose of establishing peace. Their unity then resides in the artifice of statehood that represents the multitude (Caygill 1989: 29), not in a compassionate merging with others or a metaphysical insight into the illusory nature of individuality. At no point, then, does the state that creates and enforces legal norms help its egoist subjects to overcome their narrow commitment to themselves. It has its origin in their desires and is constructed to allow them to satisfy their egoistically focused needs in the safer setting of mutual protection. With a state in place, Schopenhauer described, the “boundless egoism of almost all, the malice of many, the cruelty of some” can no longer come into prominence, but this is only because “compulsion has bound all” (SW 4:194/OBM 188). Individuals aggregate their wills for an instrumental reason, their aggressions rationally organized rather than transcended, and 273

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even though they are disarmed, watched over, and sanctioned, they remain particles of will. Schopenhauer deemed the state a necessary precondition for entering the domain of civilization, but then the “civilized world,” he also reminded the reader, is nothing but a “great masquerade” (SW 6:224/PP 2:192). In Schopenhauer’s account, the state is a primary accomplishment of rationality and conceptuality as well as an embodiment and continuation of narrow self-interest. Its successful construction depends on an alliance between reason and self-interest, in which linguistically mediated strategic thinking serves anxious egoisms. In a pithy formulation that combines these two aspects, Schopenhauer called the state a “masterpiece of the selfcomprehending, rational, accumulated egoism of all” (SW 4:194/OBM 188). From the perspective of the history of endless human suffering, the state that keeps order and peace stands as a formidable achievement, and yet from the perspective of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, it still comes across as something of a makeshift solution, a measure needed for the majority of human beings who cannot transcend individualization and the impulses of will through more radical forms of compassion and self-abnegation. Called upon to mitigate the war of all against all, the state handles the effects of a defectively structured world, but does not seek to resolve its fundamental problem, namely the discordant relationship between will and representation, the symptom of which is individual egoism. In Schopenhauer’s view, statehood contains violence but does not eradicate it, and provides some relief but not redemption. In the context of his own era, this made him a minimalist political thinker.

19.2  The Critical Delimitation of Politics In his treatment of politics as the rationally structured management (but not abolition) of inevitable human strife, Schopenhauer assigned a restricted function to the state, that of keeping order and peace among chronic egoists, and underlined that it must be seen as a “mere institution of protection” (SW 6:258/PP 2:218). In line with this definition, Schopenhauer also argued that the state should never demand more from its subjects than lawful and orderly behavior. It should ensure that its subjects comply with the law without asking if they are morally virtuous and authentically sensitive to the plight of others. Whether individuals refrain from violations of the rights of others because they are truly good or because they are deterred by punishment is of no significance to the state (Marcin 2020: 313). State-sponsored inculcation of morality, Schopenhauer believed, would be inconsistent with its proper focus, and any attempt by the state to promote the good on a large scale would also inevitably fail, since virtue is ultimately rooted in the individual’s congenital and permanent character (Jordan 2009: 177). As a device of protection, the state should therefore limit itself to the effort of reducing interpersonal strife and not dabble in futile attempts at reeducation. As David Bather Woods has summarized Schopenhauer’s sequence of characterizations of the state, its construction is not morally motivated, it is not obeyed on moral grounds, it cannot concern itself with the moral significance of actions, and, finally, should not seek to reform the morality of its subjects (2017: 312). Against the backdrop of Schopenhauer’s sharp distinction between morality and lawfulness, one can speak of his critical delimitation of the state: it is an organization with a clearly delineated purpose and it should assume no further tasks. Schopenhauer even indicated that a state burdened with an educative mission would be corrupted: “If we assign 274

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other aims besides that of protection,” he stated, “this can easily endanger its true aim” (SW 3:684/WWR 2:611). How exactly additional tasks would jeopardize the core assignment Schopenhauer never quite spelled out in great detail. In his tract on morality, he suggested that a state focused on moral edification would threaten people’s “personal freedom and individual development” (SW 4:217/OBM 208), but as Neil Jordan points out, this invocation of liberal-sounding freedom was uncharacteristic to say the least (2009: 176). If Schopenhauer was truly committed to a vision of how civic rights promote the free development of all, he would probably have written about it and explained it at some length, which he never did. In a late letter to his friend the jurist Johann August Becker, Schopenhauer praised Wilhelm von Humboldt’s conception of the state’s character and purpose in the posthumously published treatise The Limits of State Action but admitted that he had only read a “passage [eine Stelle]” (GB 424). Schopenhauer’s conception of delimited state ambitions was not primarily motivated by a Humboldtian vision of freedom from state interference as a condition of individual flourishing but rather a wish to keep government focused on the dangers of anarchy. Schopenhauer’s worry about the corruption of the state’s function become even clearer in his comments on politics and religion. Concerned like Hobbes with the terror of religious wars, Schopenhauer believed that the alignment of a state’s monopoly of violence with religious demands for orthodoxy would create a combined “machine of state and religion” determined to impose a conformity of beliefs (SW 4:217/OBM 208). When intransigent zealots controlled the levers of state power, Schopenhauer indicated, one could expect tribunals of faith, forced conversions, and gruesome killings of nonconformists. A state that set out to defend a particular religious faith and silence heretics would likely come to betray the purpose for which it had been constructed, namely the protection of its subjects. Yet even in moments when Schopenhauer conjured the specter of violent state campaigns for religious orthodoxy, one can spot moments of ambivalence. It is not clear that he consistently disapproved of the alliance between religion and politics, the church and the state, because he recognized the state’s interest in shoring up its authority by endowing itself with a halo of piety and faith. In the very same paragraph in On the Basis of Morality where he recalled the menace of “inquisitions, autos da fé, and religious wars” (SW 4:217/OBM 208), he cited the Roman historian Quintus Curtius’s claim that “[n]othing rules the masses as effectively as superstition,” and that fickle and savage people, once captured and calmed by religion, are more likely even to obey their “priests rather than their leaders” (SW 4:218/OBM 208). A close relationship between the state and a religious caste can, Schopenhauer implicitly conceded, be beneficial to governments that wish to pacify restive crowds. Despite the memory of religious wars, he could observe that politics and religion can be combined in different ways to various effects. If zealotry infiltrates the state and leads it to impose a homogeneity of faith, the result might be interrogations, purges, and armed conflicts, and hence the end of the state as the guarantor of peace. But if a government can somehow ally itself with a priestly caste and harness the persuasive force of superstitions and delusions, achieving a strategic alliance between “altar and throne” (SW 6:381/PP 2: 323), it may succeed better in its task of providing order and security. Schopenhauer’s goal was thus not to separate religion from the state for the sake of some abstract purity or neatness. Instead, he was concerned with the state’s overarching aim of protection and how it could most easily and lastingly be achieved under different circumstances. If religious teachings helped render a population more compliant, the state could put them to use for the purpose of societal stabilization. Schopenhauer thus defined the 275

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purpose of the state narrowly as maintaining order and security, but implied that it could fulfill this function more efficiently by claiming – or rather feigning – to represent religious values and ideals that transcend those of “mere” protection. As Schopenhauer would experience himself, however, a purely instrumental display of religious commitment on the part of the state could not be insulated from corrupting effects on state practice, and his most vehement criticisms of contemporary governments targeted their attachment to religious doctrines, an attachment that he himself had explained.

19.3  Altar and Throne: The Strategy of State Sanctification In The World as Will and Representation from 1818, Schopenhauer presented a rationalistic account of the state as constructed by wary egoists for the purpose of mutual protection; he did not explore the relationship between politics and religion. Starting with On the Basis of Morals (1841) and continuing in the second edition of The World as Will and Representation (1845) and Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), however, he did address the interconnections among politics, religious doctrines, and popular faith. When Schopenhauer discussed the issue, he mostly referred to ancient and pre-modern authors such as Curtius and Machiavelli (SW 4:217–8/OBM 208; SW 6:381/PP 2:323); the question of the state’s prudent reliance on religious institutions and practices was an old one. Yet he may also have been influenced by currents in his own era, which witnessed contentious debates about the scriptural justification for governmental authority and the idea of a Christian state (Beiser 2020: 11). Schopenhauer certainly read the main work of David Friedrich Strauß, whose seminal 1835 book Das Leben Jesu argued that the gospel narratives were myths, that is, imaginative emanations of a distinct collective culture, rather than credible accounts of actual historical events (Beiser 2020: 6, 66–72). Schopenhauer even declared Strauß a hero of scrupulous rational inquiry (SW 5:286/PP 1:235). Importantly, Strauß’s work provoked intense political reactions rather than merely theological ones, because his critical re-examination of the life of Jesus unsettled established analogies between the divine person of Christ as the incarnation of God, on the one hand, and the royal sovereign as God’s personal representative in the body politic, on the other (Beiser 2020: 11; Breckmann 1999: 137). A critical, historically oriented theologian, Strauß suggested to politically aware contemporary readers that moderns should not accept the authority of the bible at face value (Beiser 2020: 9), and that a still-favored theological conception of royal political sovereignty possessed no secure scriptural foundation. Schopenhauer did not participate directly in the ensuing discourse involving orthodox conservatives and radical secularists, Christian monarchists and left-wing Hegelians, and seems to have dismissed prominent representatives of both fronts. Schopenhauer read the Young Hegelian Ludwig Feuerbach’s 1841 radically secularist work The Essence of Christianity and had mixed judgments. There were “good parts [gute Stellen],” he admitted in conversation with his acquaintance the composer Robert von Hornstein in the late 1850s (Schopenhauer 1971: 218), but in his own copy of the book, he scribbled more than once in the margin that Feuerbach was “drunk [besoffen]” (Jeske 2018: 268; Hübscher 1973: 22). When he read a work on the doctrine of right by one of the period’s foremost and most influential advocates of Christian monarchy, Friedrich Julius Stahl, he dismissed it as nothing but “stupid, miserable gossip [dummes, elendes Geträtsche]” in an 1854 letter to his friend and discipline Julius Frauenstädt (Schopenhauer 1978: 339). From the 1830s 276

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and on, then, Schopenhauer followed the contemporary trend and pondered the association of state and church, but he was neither a believing defender of the Christian state (like Stahl) nor a radical intent on debunking traditional theological justifications for political hierarchies (like Feuerbach). Schopenhauer’s concern was rather the government’s strategic deployment of religious beliefs for the sake of stability, which made him too pragmatic and instrumentalist in his attitude for the conservatives and too fearful of a completely secularized state for the radicals. Schopenhauer took note of how sovereign rule could be supported by religion and had some doubts about the efficacy of any state that openly presents itself as an instrument of protection and nothing beyond that, even though this was his conception of its mission. The state may at its core be a rational construction for the benefit of its self-interested subjects, but to ensure its effectiveness, it should perhaps best not be understood as such among the population. Schopenhauer seems to have suspected that collective egoism alone, however ingeniously configured, can fail to inspire awe and adherence. In Schopenhauer’s idiom, the state can ensure its effectiveness by means of an alliance with religion, or, more specifically, by assuming “care for the metaphysical need of its members” (SW 4:217/OBM 208). The metaphysical need arises in humans because of their advanced intelligence and capacity for linguistically mediated reflection. Afflicted by the agonies of life, human beings are struck by the enigmatic nature of existence, and the more prone to reflection they are, the more they will crave some illumination. It is this puzzlement born of reflection that Schopenhauer termed the “metaphysical need” (SW 3:175/WWR 2:169), because wonder stands at the beginning of a search for an ultimate, metaphysical explanation for the existence and constitution of the world rather than knowledge of any particular phenomenon. While the metaphysical need generates philosophical reflection, religions, too, purport to uncover the meaning of an opaque existence; they provide an “interpretation of life” meant to explain, guide, and console (SW 6:344/PP 2: 293). In contrast to philosophy, however, religions satisfy the persistent human existential quest with the help of allegorical stories more suited to the intellectual capacity of the great majority (Welsen 2021: 294). Just as there is popular poetry or popular wisdom, there is popular metaphysics (Welsen 2021: 294). Religions can function as instruments of governance, Schopenhauer further believed, because they were developed to cater to a strong and ineradicable need in humans in a way that inspires popular reverence. In his account, religious elites can wield an unmatched influence over peoples because humans everywhere look for beliefs that will give meaning to the pain of their lives, and they will also be grateful, loyal, and even obedient to those who can satisfy this need by means of narratives, symbols, and practices. It is, Schopenhauer argued, the “fundamental secret and age-old cunning of all preachers everywhere” to have correctly detected and found ways to fill the metaphysical need of humans and then to use the faith of their followers to “lead and rule them to their heart’s content” (SW 6:384/PP 2:325) It is, finally, for this reason that the “more clever” regents will do what they can to ally themselves with priests (SW 6:384/PP 2:325). Governments, Schopenhauer indicated, are more likely to be followed and accepted by their subjects when they are seen as affiliated with an institution that clarifies the meaning of life and offers guidance and solace. If a prince follows the advice to present himself as a “model of true religiosity” (SW 6:381/PP 2:323), even a divinely ordained ruler, his rule will align with a system of beliefs and practices designed to illuminate existence and render suffering bearable. In Schopenhauer’s view, then, regimes can try to consolidate state power, and thereby better ensure the protection of 277

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their subjects, by means of reliance on religion as the popular form of existential consolation. The willingness of subjects to accept a particular regime can be enhanced when the state stands together with religious institutions that teach human beings to accept hardships and pain more generally. As a mere device of protection, the state is of course designed to satisfy fundamental needs, such as the desire for personal safety, security of possessions, and general sense of order and predictability in a world shadowed by strife among belligerent egoists. According to Schopenhauer, however, it may not be quite enough for the state to ensure order and provide mutual protection and thereby minimize suffering in a material sense; a more robust allegiance to its rule can be achieved if it constructs an intimate association with an institution that interprets suffering. Paradoxically, basic needs of safety and security are more effectively and sustainably satisfied by a state that understands the significance of seemingly higher-order needs arising out of existential puzzlement. To best achieve its minimalist aim, the state might have to go beyond it. With this position, however, Schopenhauer was at odds with the more prominent and recognizable ideological coteries and networks of his time. Contrary to contemporary conservatives who held on to the idea of a Christian state with the monarch representing God’s will in the world (Thornhill 2007: 159), he viewed religious claims as politically useful but not, philosophically speaking, true. And contrary to contemporary radicals who wished to humanize and historicize the sacred and fully demystify and democratize the state (Toews 2011: 637), Schopenhauer did not passionately reject religious means of forging loyalty among the ruled.

19.4  State Sanctification and University Philosophy: Schopenhauer’s Dilemma Schopenhauer defined politics in contrast to morality and religion and cautioned against transgressions of the boundaries of state action. The state, he believed, should enforce legislation and not seek to reform and edify its subjects. Under the influence of traditional Machiavellian counsels and contemporary politico-theological debates, however, he nonetheless saw how regimes could benefit from performances of religious piety. Yet as we shall see in this final section, his work also observed the negative effects of the church-state alliance. Most importantly, Schopenhauer himself experienced how the close association of “altar and throne” came to compromise the integrity of philosophy in a way that obstructed the reception of his own philosophical system. In Schopenhauer’s broader analysis, state dependence on religious support typically affects philosophy due to the age-old rivalry between theologians and thinkers, religious leaders and philosophical schools. Religion and philosophy share the goal of responding to the metaphysical need of humankind, but they speak in different idioms to different audiences; philosophy is argumentative and addresses a small intellectual elite whereas religion uses symbols and stories to speak to the great majority. Despite the segregated audiences, religious leaders tend to want to supervise and constrain the open-ended search for truth constitutive of philosophy, and jealously strive to maintain what Schopenhauer called a “monopoly on metaphysical cognition” (SW 3:207/WWR 2:195). To a priestly caste craving complete control of the supply of metaphysical insight, he added, philosophy will appear as an “undocumented worker,” philosophers as a shady “horde” on the margins of society, and hence in urgent need of control (SW 3:207/WWR 2:196). When the state draws on doctrines and practices of organized religion to shore up its effectiveness, Schopenhauer also indicated, it adopts this suspicion of philosophy and like278

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wise begins to watch out for and stifle dissidence. This does not mean that it will forbid philosophy, but Schopenhauer thought that governments will seek to advance the teachings most suitable to their exercise of power. The typical German state of Schopenhauer’s time allowed philosophy to be taught at university, but then selected for special “protection” the philosophical system it deemed most useful for its purposes and mobilized “powerful, material means” to silence all its philosophical rivals (SW 6:6/PP 2:9). In the German context that Schopenhauer knew and experienced, the promotion of state-friendly philosophy involved government control of the system of education; ministries and ecclesiastical bureaucracies ensured that the ideas taught at the universities aligned with the religiously inflected selfpresentation of the state. No unpredictable truth-seeking was allowed to undermine the teachings of established religion, which provided the government with ideological support. In Germany, Schopenhauer wrote, university philosophy was a “philosophy by government order” and as such little else than a “paraphrase and apology for the religion of the land” (SW 5:149–51/PP 1:125–26). As a result of the state’s ideological control over university instruction in German lands, Schopenhauer also noted that institutionalized philosophy attracted mostly docile and careerist individuals. A typical professor of philosophy, Schopenhauer claimed in a long diatribe against university philosophy, will not care much about the internal consistency or illuminating power of a new philosophical system, but instead determine whether it harmonizes with the “doctrines of established religion” and thus serves the “interests of the government” (SW 5:134/PP 1:134). For those who enter philosophy in a period of state tutelage, the search for truth, he indicated, will never be the primary concern. In this way, political authority propped up by religion, a phenomenon which Schopenhauer understood pragmatically and certainly did not forcefully reject, ultimately came to correlate with philosophical mediocrity, which he did detest and rail against. When he discussed the reliance of the state on religious sources of support, Schopenhauer remained calm and analytical; he endorsed the objective of a strong state, and despite his knowledge of past religious wars and campaigns for orthodoxy, he accepted the state’s mobilization of religious beliefs for the sake of stability. From his perspective, the cooperation between an institution of material protection and an institution of metaphysical satisfaction might help maintain law and order. Yet when he considered how German governments brought philosophy in line with the state-supportive official religion through control of the university system, he could become agitated and launch into rants: a philosophy “bound to established religion as the chained dog to the wall,” he exclaimed, “is only the exasperating caricature of the highest and noblest endeavour of humankind” (SW 5:154/PP 1:129). The state’s use of philosophy, he wrote in a notebook in 1832, defiled a holy vocation of mankind and thus amounted to “sacrilege [Sakrilegium]” (Schopenhauer 1974: 98). As a proud philosopher, Schopenhauer reacted indignantly to restrictions on the unbiased quest for metaphysical truth, but the chaining of philosophy that upset him so deeply was the outcome of the state’s effort to consolidate and sustain itself, and to rule partly via control of philosophy as a formidable means of persuasion directed at the “future educated class, which actually controls state and society” (SW 5:306/PP 1:173). In this context, he could not avoid the question of why his own philosophy was rejected. In his notebook from the early 1840s, he admitted that he himself never shaped his philosophy to fit the “needs of the state [Bedürfnisse des Staats]” (Schopenhauer 1974: 288), and that, as a consequence, his thought was of no use to the government. More specifically, he understood that his frank ideas about irrepressible sexual desire and the will to life would strike a university audi279

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ence as “downright indecent [recht unanständig]” (Schopenhauer 1974: 288). His philosophical ideas were correct, he obviously believed, but he could still admit that they were not suitable lecturing material. More generally, Schopenhauer’s deflationary account of the indispensable but morally and metaphysically limited benefits of statehood would likely have been too honest for a government seeking to drape itself in theological justifications. Schopenhauer understood the state’s use of religion but did not himself profess that religion; he observed the political utility of religious practices and beliefs but offered no further grounds for holding them (Fawcett 2020: 19). No wonder, then, that the governments of German states found no real use for him. Schopenhauer wanted a state able to carry out its duty of providing protection as effectively as possible, and he also wanted freedom for philosophers to pursue fundamental questions without restrictions. As a reconstruction of his own arguments shows, he could not quite have both: his understanding attitude toward the idea of a theologically justified state ran counter to his vision of philosophy as an uncompromised investigation of metaphysical truth. The resulting tension between Schopenhauer’s political and philosophical preferences structured his life and career, or his non-career. As a rentier in the first half of the nineteenth century, made anxious by political volatility and violent transformations (Cartwright 2010: 514), the mature Schopenhauer approved of a state ready to use any instrument of governance, any “tool of the state” (SW 5:179/PP 1:151), for the sake of maintaining order and peace. Yet as an aspiring academic who had repeatedly tried and failed to establish himself as a university scholar, especially in Prussia in the 1820s, he resented the government-controlled educational system focused on instilling reverence toward the state. In a roundabout way, Schopenhauer himself was a casualty of the Leviathan he envisioned. Critical contemporaries noticed the contradiction in Schopenhauer’s political thought. In an amendment to his will added in 1852, Schopenhauer stated that funds from his estate would go to a foundation, set up by conservatives in Berlin, that supported Prussian soldiers who had been wounded during the 1848 revolution, as well as the survivors of those who had fallen in the tumult (Cartwright 2010: 517; Houben 1930: 472). This donation, he explained, served to recognize soldierly sacrifices for the restoration of the legal order, a gesture in line with his conception of the fundamental task of the state. For Schopenhauer, lawfulness and public order were paramount political aims. When news of the will came out in the press after his death, however, some Schopenhauer readers were surprised, since the philosopher had publicly and consistently attacked the Prussian universities and the state-friendly Hegelian philosophy that pervaded them. To a sarcastic contemporary such as the liberal author and publicist Karl Gutzkow, Schopenhauer’s will revealed a great irony (Houben 1930: 473): the deceased thinker had berated the Prussian university system but also wanted to honor the Prussian soldiers who had fought democratic rebels in German cities; state repression was apparently needed in the streets but state control was loathsome in the lecture halls of the university. As we have seen, the irony encapsulated the tensions of Schopenhauer’s political philosophy.

References Atwell, J. (1995) Schopenhauer on the Character of the World: The Metaphysics of Will. Berkeley: University of California Press. Beiser, F. (2020) David Friedrich Strauß, Father of Unbelief: An Intellectual Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Schopenhauer’s Critique of the State Breckman, W. (1999) Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cartwright, D. (2010) Schopenhauer: A Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cartwright, D. (2015) “Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860),” The Encyclopedia of Political Thought, edited by M. Gibbon. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 1–2. Caygill, H. (1989) The Art of Judgement. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Fawcett, E. (2020) Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hobbes, T. (1994) Leviathan, edited by E. Curley. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. Houben, H. (1930) “Der Fall Gutzkow/Schopenhauer,” Süddeutsche Monatshefte, 27: 468–96. Hübscher, A. (1973) Denker gegen den Strom. Schopenhauer: gestern – heute – morgen. Bonn: Bouvier Verlag. Janaway, C. (1999) “Introduction,” The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer, edited by C. Janaway. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1–17. Jeske, M. (2018) “Ludwig Feuerbach,” Schopenhauer Handbuch: Leben – Werk – Wirkung, edited by D. Schubbe and M. Koßler. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 264–70. Jordan, N. (2009) “Schopenhauer’s Politics: Ethics, Jurisprudence, and the State,” Better Consciousness: Schopenhauer’s Philosophy of Value, edited by A. Neill and C. Janaway. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 171–88. Lewis, P. (2012) Arthur Schopenhauer. London: Reaktion Books. Marcin, R. (2020) “Schopenhauer on Law and Justice,” The Oxford Handbook of Schopenhauer, edited by R. Wicks. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 311–27. Ruggieri, D. (2016) “The Metaphysics of Conflict: Some Reflections on Schopenhauer’s Politics,” Revista Voluntas: Estudos sobre Schopenhauer, 7.1: 140–54. Schopenhauer, A. (1971) Gespräche, edited by A. Hübscher. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Friedrich Frommann Verlag. Schopenhauer, A. (1974) Der handschriftliche Nachlass, vol. 4.1, edited by A. Hübscher. Frankfurt am Main: Waldemar Kramer. Schopenhauer, A. (1978) Gesammelte Briefe, edited by A. Hübscher. Bonn: Bouvier Verlag. Thornhill, C. (2007) German Political Philosophy: The Metaphysics of Law. London: Routledge. Toews, J. (2011) “Church and State: The Problem of Authority,” The Cambridge History of NineteenthCentury Political Thought, edited by G. Steadman-Jones and G. Claes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 603–48. Welsen, P. (2021) Grundriss Schopenhauer: Ein Handbuch zu Leben und Werk. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag. Winkler, R. (2013) “Schopenhauer’s Critique of Moralistic Theories of the State,” History of Political Thought, 34.2: 296–323. Woods, D. (2017) “Schopenhauer on the State and Morality,” The Palgrave Schopenhauer Handbook, edited by S. Shapshay. London: Palgrave, 299–322. Würkner, J. (1989) “Staatsidee und Schopenhauer-Welt,” ARSP: Archiv für Rechts- und Sozialphilosophie, 75.1: 82–103.

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20 SCHOPENHAUER’S PESSIMISM Byron Simmons

20.1 Introduction The most fundamental axiological questions concern the value of existence: Is the world something that ought to be? Is life a gift to be cherished? Is existence preferable to nonexistence? Optimists answer such questions in the affirmative, pessimists answer them resoundingly in the negative. But while optimists and pessimists offer vastly different answers to these questions, they nevertheless proceed from a common starting point: namely, the observation that the world and life are marked by suffering and death (see SW 3:176–7/WWR 2:170). Optimists seek to provide a theoretical justification for this suffering. They might, to this end, insist that this is the best of all possible worlds or else take the existence of our world to be ‘justified by itself and therefore praise it’ (SW 3:187/WWR 2:179). All is well, they might declare; ‘Whatever is, is right’.1 For since ‘everything which exists be according to a good order and for the best’, there can be ‘no such thing as real ill in the universe, nothing ill with respect to the whole’.2 ‘All partial Evil’ is thus ‘universal Good’.3 Optimists maintain, moreover, that human existence is ‘a gift to be gratefully acknowledged, given by a supreme good governed by wisdom and therefore intrinsically praiseworthy, laudable and joyful’ (SW 3:653/WWR 2:585). But they needn’t deny that our existence contains various trials and tribulations; they simply take them to be accidental and avoidable, while life itself is taken to be ‘a desirable state’, the goal of which is to be happy (SW 3:671/WWR 2:600). Pessimists, on the other hand, aim to show that there can be no practical compensation for suffering. They might insist that our world, far from being the best, ‘is in fact the worst of all possible worlds’ (SW 3:669/WWR 2:598), or otherwise declare that ‘we should be sorry rather than glad about the existence of the world; that its non-existence would be preferable to its existence; [and] that it is something that fundamentally should not be’ (SW 3:661/WWR 2:592; cf., SW 3:187–8/WWR 2:179). Pessimists maintain, moreover, that human existence ‘far from having the character of a gift, has the completely opposite character of guilty indebtedness. The collection of this debt appears in the form of the urgent requirements, tortured desires, and endless need, all introduced by human existence itself’ (SW 3:665–6/WWR 2:595). Life, accordingly, is ‘a constant suffering’ (SW 3 271/WWR 282

DOI: 10.4324/9781003048992-24

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2:252). It has no goal except perhaps for ‘the recognition that we would have been better off not existing’ (SW 3:695/WWR 2:620). It should be clear that optimism and pessimism, so described, are not so much precisely specified theses as they are broadly characterized pictures. They bring together a variety of contrary—and not merely contradictory—claims, which might include: (1) a claim about the comparative goodness or badness of our world, about whether it is among the best or the worst of all possible worlds, (2) a claim about the intrinsic goodness or badness of our world, about whether it is justified by itself or something which should not really exist, or (3) a claim about the overall value or disvalue of human life or conscious existence, about whether it is better or worse than complete non-existence. These two pictures might be developed in different ways, but it is a general commitment about the value of existence which best brings them into focus.4 Optimism received its first systematic exposition in G. W. Leibniz’s Theodicy (1710). God, being a supremely perfect being, was disposed by his very nature to create the best of all possible worlds: this supreme wisdom, united to a goodness that is no less infinite, cannot but have chosen the best. For a lesser evil is a kind of good, even so a lesser good is a kind of evil if it stands in the way of a greater good; and there would be something to correct in the actions of God if it were possible to do better … . [S]o it may be said … that if there were not the best (optimum) among all possible worlds, God would not have produced any. (G 6:107/H 128) Leibniz’s argument is a priori in the pre-Kantian sense: it proceeds from the cause to its effect, namely, from the nature of God (which is prior) to the value of the world (which is posterior). Leibniz’s system of optimism was quickly accused of failing to conform to Christian dogma and was later satirized in Voltaire’s Candide (1759).5 But it was not until the nineteenth century that the optimist’s central commitment to the value of existence came under sustained philosophical attack. In the first volume of The World as Will and Representation (1818), Arthur Schopenhauer argued that if optimism were true, happiness would be ‘our being’s end and aim’6 and must thereby be possible for us; but since it is not possible for us, optimism must be false. It was, however, really only in the supplementary essays contained in the second volume of The World as Will and Representation (1844) that Schopenhauer attempted to provide arguments not just for the falsity of optimism, but for the truth of pessimism as well. I will attempt to provide a synoptic reading of these arguments. In sections 2–3, I will present Schopenhauer’s best-known argument against optimism and discuss some standard objections. In sections 4–6, I will examine some supplementary arguments which Schopenhauer developed in response to these kinds of objections. And, in sections 7–8, I will turn to Schopenhauer’s arguments for pessimism, which, unlike his arguments against optimism, focus not on the value or disvalue of life’s contents, but on the ways in which life as a whole is structurally defective.

20.2 The a priori Argument Schopenhauer’s best-known argument against optimism appears in §§56–58 of the first volume of The World as Will and Representation.7 He there sets out to investigate

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the primary, elementary characteristics of human life at the most universal level, with a view towards convincing [us] a priori that human life is dispositionally incapable of true happiness, that it is essentially a multifaceted suffering and a thoroughly disastrous condition. (SW 2:381/WWR 1:349) This investigation, much like Leibniz’s argument above, would appear to be a priori in the pre-Kantian sense: it proceeds from our essence as will (which is prior) to its manifestation in the world, i.e., to human life or conscious existence (which is posterior). Schopenhauer intends to show that the unavoidable suffering in human life is grounded in our essence. Pain and suffering are not, as the optimist maintains, accidental and avoidable, but are instead ‘essential … and unavoidable’ (SW 2:372/WWR 1:342). It is not pain and suffering but rather happiness, which, being purely negative, is only an accidental part of our existence. Schopenhauer’s argument proceeds in two steps: he, first, argues that given our inner essence as will, human life is a multifaceted suffering which is ‘thrown back and forth between pain and boredom’ (SW 2:371/WWR 1:341); he then argues that since ‘[a]ll satisfaction … is actually and essentially only ever negative and absolutely never positive’ (SW 2:376/WWR 1:345), pain and boredom ‘are the ingredients out of which [life] is ultimately composed’ (SW 2:368/WWR 1:338). He thus concludes that life is not just a multifaceted suffering, it is also a thoroughly disastrous condition: one in which ‘[t]rue and lasting happiness is not possible’ (SW 2:378/WWR 1:347) and cannot, therefore, be the goal of our existence. Let’s begin with Schopenhauer’s account of human desire, which helps to underwrite his argument. The essence of every individual human being, we are told, is will: ‘a striving without aim and without end’ (SW 2:379/WWR 1:347, see also SW 2:193–6/WWR 1:187–9). But to strive is to suffer (see SW 2:365/WWR 1:336). And since our will is a constant striving, it cannot latch onto any end or goal and remain satisfied by its attainment. For, in order to achieve lasting and permanent satisfaction from the attainment of some end, we would need to have that end as our ultimate goal. But in the absence of such a goal, we are left to strive after one thing and then another. Every satisfaction is, then, ‘only the beginning of a new striving’ (SW 2:365/WWR 1:336); the willing which constitutes our essence is, thus, ‘fully comparable to an unquenchable thirst’ (SW 2:367/WWR 1:338). We can now proceed to Schopenhauer’s argument. The first step is to show that due to our essence as will, our lives are multifaceted suffering. There are, Schopenhauer maintains, two fundamental sources of human suffering: want, on the one hand, and, boredom, on the other (see SW 5:355–6, 363/PP 1:292, 299). Want, or need, arises from lack, from deficiency. For given our essence as striving, we cannot but strive to fill some lack or deficiency: we desire to remove it. This provides us with definite objects to will: when, for example, I am hungry, I desire food and aim to satisfy my hunger; when you are thirsty, you desire water and aim to quench your thirst. The attainment of these objects becomes a temporary goal which we strive to achieve. But the inhibition of such a goal is suffering, and it is experienced as pain. Boredom, unlike want and need, arises from an absence of deficiency, from emptiness. For when we lack definite objects to will, our inner essence as striving and willing asserts itself not as a desire, but as a ‘longing without a definite object’ (SW 2:196/WWR 1:189). We still strive, we still will, but ‘the absence of a new desire is empty longing, languor, boredom’ (SW 2:307/WWR 1:287). We experience boredom as ‘an intolerable burden’ (SW 2:368/WWR 284

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1:338), ‘a feeling of the most horrible desolation and emptiness’ (SW 2:430/WWR 1:391), and thereby seek to escape it. We are set in motion by ‘a striving to get rid of the burden of existence, … to escape boredom’ (SW 2:369/WWR 1:339).8 But when this striving is thwarted, we are led to suffer, and ‘the struggle against [boredom] is just as tormenting [quälend] as the struggle against want’ (SW 2:370/WWR 1:340, translation modified). Thus, since we must always move between a state of deficiency and a state of the absence of deficiency, our lives will contain a multifaceted suffering: they will swing ‘back and forth like a pendulum between pain and boredom’ (SW 2:368/WWR 1:338). Any happiness we might manage to achieve will inevitably be interrupted and is therefore dispositionally unstable.9 The second step is to establish the negativity thesis. For even if Schopenhauer were to have shown that we are ‘dispositionally incapable’ of lasting happiness, he would not have shown that life does not contain moments of pure joy, and thus that it is ‘a thoroughly disastrous condition’. There might, for all that has been said, still be some intrinsically desirable, positive state of pleasure that lies between pain and boredom. In order to rule out this possibility, Schopenhauer attempts to motivate the thesis that ‘[a]ll satisfaction, or what is generally called happiness, is actually and essentially only ever negative and absolutely never positive’ (SW 2:376/WWR 1:345). There is, Schopenhauer argues, no positive state of pleasure: because a desire, i.e. lack, is the prior condition for every pleasure. But the desire ends with satisfaction and so, consequently, does the pleasure. Thus satisfaction or happiness can never be anything more than the liberation from a pain or need … . (SW 2:376/WWR 1:345) Pleasure, on this account, is essentially connected to the satisfaction of a desire, i.e., a striving for a definite object to fill some lack. It arises when we become aware of a move from a painful state of want, need, or lack, to a painless state where our desires are satisfied. But we do not feel anything simply in virtue of being in a painless state. For, unlike a state of lack or pain which is positive, there is nothing to be given to us directly. There is nothing about a painless state itself which could drive us to remain in it. A painless state can, however, appear pleasant when compared to a painful one from which we have been released. Indeed, Schopenhauer goes so far as to insist that being pleased by the recollection of ‘needs, illnesses, wants and similar things that we have survived … is the only way for us to enjoy our present possessions’ (SW 2:377/WWR 1:346).10 He concludes that since our lives contain a multifaceted suffering without any positive pleasures, no true or lasting happiness is possible for us, and so cannot be the goal of our existence. Instead, our existence is a thoroughly disastrous condition in which pain and boredom ‘are the ingredients out of which it is ultimately composed’ (SW 2:368/WWR 1:338). Life, then, is a miserable journey whose final and unavoidable goal is death (see SW 2:369/WWR 1:339). We simply do not exist—as the optimist maintains—to be happy. There is nothing about human life that could make it preferable to non-existence. Thus, optimism is ‘not only an absurd, but even a truly wicked way of thinking, a bitter mockery of the unspeakable sufferings of humanity’ (SW 2:385/WWR 1:352).

20.3  The Standard Objections to the a priori Argument There are three standard objections to this argument. The first targets the claim that desiring implies pain and suffering: I might, for example, desire world peace, good weather, or 285

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maybe just a quiet place to sit and think, but the frustration—or non-satisfaction—of these desires does not thereby seem to cause me pain. I suffer them only insofar as they happen to me. Schopenhauer would thus appear to conflate mere non-satisfaction with genuine dissatisfaction.11 This objection fails, however, to appreciate Schopenhauer’s special use of ‘desire’ as an active striving after a definite object intended to fill some need or lack. When we desire something in this sense, we do not merely sit back and idly wish for something to happen. We must actively strive to attain a definite object, not just passively hope for some state of affairs to obtain. It is because desiring is an active striving, an ‘anxious activity’ (SW 5:363/PP 1:299), born out of a dissatisfaction with our condition, and aimed at filling some need or lack, that ‘[t]he nature of every desire is pain’ (SW 2:370/WWR 1:340). A second, more serious, objection targets the negativity thesis: there are, it would seem, positive states of pleasure which do not depend upon the satisfaction of a desire. There are some pleasures that would seem to be experienced directly: when we savor a delicious meal, marvel at some past accomplishment, or anticipate some future event, the pleasures we experience would seem to have an extendable duration and a consistent intensity. But if these pleasures merely arise from the satisfaction of a desire, we should expect them to diminish as the lack or need they fill diminishes. And yet what we find instead is that we are sometimes seemingly held suspended in a pleasurable state.12 There are, moreover, other pleasures that would seem to arise in the absence of a pre-existing desire: when the smell of someone cooking in the other room comes to me unbidden and unannounced, when the taste of a new food strikes me as a surprise, or when the sound of beautiful music awakens me from my slumbers, I can enjoy these things and take pleasure in them. I don’t need to have actively desired or even passively wished for any of them beforehand. Nor would my enjoyment of these things seem to depend upon a recognition that my current state is comparatively better than some prior state in which I lacked them. For, I can take pleasure in these things without first diverting my attention away from them. Thus, the pleasure that I experience in these cases does not appear to arise from the recognition that I am no longer in a disadvantageous state. It would instead appear to arise from the fact that I am drawn to stay in my present, pleasurable state.13 There are, finally, certain pleasures that arise not at the end of some activity, but during that very activity itself: my enjoyment of going for a run, reading a good book, or dancing at a party, does not come when I finish my run, when I get to the end of the book, or when I stop dancing. It is present throughout these activities. It comes not from having done something, but from doing it. It would seem that there are pleasures of action, not just of satisfaction.14 There would thus appear to be a variety of different positive states of pleasure. In response to this objection, Schopenhauer might grant, for the sake of argument, that there are positive pleasures, but insist that they are either few and far between or else greatly outweighed by pain. He claims that ‘if we were to call everyone’s attention to the terrible pains and torments [Quaalen] their lives are constantly exposed to, they would be seized with horror’ (SW 2:383/WWR 1:351, translation slightly modified), and insists that if we ‘stop and compare the sum of all possible joys that a human being can have in his life with the sum of all possible sufferings that can afflict him in his life’, the balance will be clear (SW 3:661/WWR 2:591, cf. HN 3:459/MR 3:501). Life, he maintains, contains far less pleasure than pain. It is a living hell. The main problem with this response is that absent any kind of hedonic calculus, none of Schopenhauer’s evocative thought experiments or moving depictions of life’s suffering are 286

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likely to persuade a recalcitrant optimist.15 Indeed, Schopenhauer was not content to insist, on the basis of any particular facts about the will’s manifestation in the world, that life— or the world itself—contains less pleasure than pain. For he feared that any such insistence ‘could easily be considered a simple declamation of human misery’ (SW 2:381/WWR 1:350). Thus, if Schopenhauer is to concede—even just for the sake of argument—that there are positive states of pleasure, he will need to find some other way to demonstrate the falsity of the optimist’s claim that life is a desirable state whose goal is to be happy. A third, and potentially devastating, objection targets Schopenhauer’s evaluative inference: even if his descriptive characterization of life as suffering were correct and life were to contain far less pleasure than pain, he wouldn’t have succeeded in showing anything about the value of life; at least, not without adopting an extreme form of hedonism according to which pleasure and pain alone have intrinsic value. For our lives might contain other sources of value: they might be valuable on the whole not because of anything they contain, but because they are engaged in the potentially painful pursuit of something meaningful, valuable, or worthwhile; or life might even be an end in itself, our mere existence might simply be a blessing, it might just be good to be alive. Thus, a sophisticated optimist might insist that pleasure is not the only—or even the most valuable—gift which life bestows upon us.16 Schopenhauer was not content, however, to rest his case against the optimist on the a priori argument. In the years that followed the publication of his magnum opus, he sought to bolster his case by providing additional arguments against optimism. Many of these arguments first appeared in the manuscript-book Adversaria (1828–1830), and were later reworked into the second volume of The World as Will and Representation (1844) and the Parerga and Paralipomena (1851). They can, I think, be seen as conceding to the optimist that there might be positive pleasures and as granting, moreover, that they aren’t the only goods in life. But, as we shall see in sections 4-6, Schopenhauer thinks that we are fundamentally mistaken about the value we assign to such goods.

20.4  The Bad Business Argument Schopenhauer’s primary supplementary argument against optimism appears in chapter 28 of the second volume of The World as Will and Representation.17 He there aims to show that even if life is not ‘in fact a constant suffering’, it is ‘at least … a business that does not cover its costs’ (SW 3:271/WWR 2:252). The argument begins with the observation that the strength of our efforts is vastly disproportionate to—and, thus, cannot be explained or justified by—the value of our aims. For If … we compare people’s restless, serious, and laborious strivings with what they get from it, or even what they could get, then the disproportion … becomes apparent, since we know that what is to be attained is utterly inadequate as an animating force for explaining that movement and restless drive. (SW 3:408/WWR 2:372) We must exert a tremendous amount of energy either to stay alive or else to occupy our time. But what does, or could, this get us? ‘What’, as Schopenhauer puts it, ‘is a brief deferral of death, a slight alleviation of need, a postponement of pain, a momentary silencing of desire’ (SW 3:408/WWR 2:372)? What, we might add, are all the positive pleasures we 287

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might manage to experience in life?18 Are any of these things really worth the effort we put into them? Schopenhauer’s answer is a resounding: ‘No!’ If we look at both the indescribable artfulness of the preparations, the inexpressible wealth of the means, and the paltriness of what was aimed at and what was achieved side by side, then we are forced to realize that life is a business whose revenues fail by a long way to cover its costs. (SW 3:403/WWR 2:368) But if there is such a ‘clear disproportion between effort and reward’, then our attachment to life is ‘objectively foolish’ (SW 3:407/WWR 2:372), and ‘cannot be grounded in its object’ (SW 3:271/WWR 2:252). Thus, given the fact that the strength of our efforts is vastly disproportionate to the value of our aims, it follows that our attachment to life is based on a gross overestimation of its value. This argument does not target optimism directly: it does not show that life is no better than non-existence. It should, however, help to undermine our confidence in the value of life ‘so that our will might turn away from it’ (SW 3:658/WWR 2:589). But it aims to do this without denying the existence of positive pleasures or appealing to hedonic considerations. For Schopenhauer is not here weighing the value of life’s pleasures against the value of its pains, he is comparing the actual value of life’s goods to their perceived value. The main problem with this argument is that Schopenhauer has yet to justify the claim that life’s goods aren’t as valuable as we take them to be. He has simply assumed that we devote all our efforts ‘for something that has no value’ (SW 3:407/WWR 2:372). But, as we will see in the following sections, Schopenhauer attempted to provide two auxiliary arguments for this assumption.

20.5  The Boredom Argument In chapter 11 of the second volume of the Parerga and Paralipomena, Schopenhauer puts forward a transcendental argument for the intrinsic worthlessness of existence.19 The argument begins with the observation that boredom is possible, that it is something that we can—and sometimes do—experience. For ‘boredom is precisely the sensation of the emptiness of existence’ (SW 6:305/PP 2:259). Whenever we are ‘reduced to existence itself’, i.e., whenever our existence is unaugmented by anything that might otherwise adorn it or distract us from it, ‘we are transported by its lack of substance and its nothingness—and that is boredom’ (SW 6:306/PP 2:259). But, the argument continues, the intrinsic worthlessness of existence is a necessary condition for the very possibility of boredom: we could only be struck by ‘the utter desolation and emptiness of existence’ if there were ‘no true genuine substance to it’ (SW 6:305/PP 2:258–9); we could only become bored with our existence if it were intrinsically worthless. For, as Schopenhauer puts it, [i]f life … had a positive value and real substance in itself, then there could be no boredom; instead mere existence in itself would have to fully satisfy us. (SW 6:305/PP 2:259) An intrinsically valuable existence would be capable of fully satisfying anyone who turned their proper attention to it. It would immediately be recognized as valuable. And yet, when 288

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all else fades away and we come to stand before our very existence itself, we are confronted by its utter desolation and emptiness. Thus, given both that boredom is possible for us and that the intrinsic worthlessness of existence is a necessary condition for the very possibility of boredom, it follows that our existence must be intrinsically worthless. The boredom argument, if successful, would not show that optimism is false. But it would help to strengthen Schopenhauer’s overall case against it. There is, however, one crucial objection to this argument. For the possibility of boredom does not obviously depend upon the emptiness of existence. We might become bored not because we direct our attention toward existence and see its lack of value, but because we direct our attention away from existence and fail to see its value. Thus, the intrinsic worthlessness of existence is not a necessary condition for the possibility of boredom. In response to this objection, Schopenhauer might point out that this suggestion flies in the face of experience. For, as he observes, being distracted from our existence—whether by the poverty of need or the wealth of the mind—is necessary for starving off boredom, which sets in with the ‘lethargy of the will and of cognition bound up with it’ (SW 2:377/WWR 1:347). We thus experience boredom not when we direct our attention away from our existence, but when we are forced to face it.20

20.6  The Nothingness Argument In chapter 46 of the second volume of The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer sought to show not just that our very existence is worthless, but that everything that adorns it—everything we might hope to achieve in life—is ultimately worthless as well.21 The argument begins with the claim that nothing that is fleeting and transitory can have any real value. An object’s value is, Schopenhauer maintains, reflected by its existence in time. It is only because something has no value, and thus no genuine substance, that it can fade away. Time is the form in which the nothingness of things appears as their perishability, in that by virtue of it [they] turn to nothing in our hands and we then ask in amazement where they had been. This nothingness itself is therefore the only thing objective about time, i.e. that aspect of the essence in itself of things that correspond to time, and so that of which time is the expression. (SW 3:658/WWR 2:589) It seems, then, that anything ‘which in the next moment no longer exists and completely vanishes like a dream has no value’ (HN 3:567/MR 3:616), while anything with real, objective value must thereby enjoy a kind of permanence: it can neither lose its existence nor its value.22 But, the argument continues, everything in life, everything we want, and everything we might hope to achieve is fleeting and transitory. For, as Schopenhauer puts it, everything must present itself in time, even we ourselves. As such, life is, in the first instance, like a payment made to us only in copper pennies and for which we must nevertheless then provide a receipt; the pennies are the days, the receipt is death. Ultimately time pronounces nature’s judgment on the value of all of the beings appearing in it, by annihilating them (SW 3:658–9/WWR 2:589) 289

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Thus, given both that everything we might hope to achieve in life is impermanent and that nothing that is impermanent can have any real value, it follows that nothing we could hope to achieve has any real value, and thus that all of our endeavors are ultimately pointless. The nothingness argument, if successful, would show that optimism is false. For if nothing in life has any real value, life cannot be any better than complete non-existence. There are, however, at least two objections to this argument. The first is that it is not clear that everything in life is impermanent.23 For we can compose beautiful songs and write powerful novels. But, when we do, we would seem to create abstract objects: Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony cannot be identified with any particular performance; George Eliot’s Middlemarch cannot be identified with any particular copy. These works might someday be irretrievably lost, and future generations might eventually forget that they ever existed, but once they are brought into existence, they enjoy a kind of permanence. For they would seem to exist outside of space and time. They are, in this respect, neither fleeting nor transitory. Thus, attempting to create certain works of art is not a pointless endeavor. A second, more serious, objection is that something can be intrinsically good without being eternal.24 Schopenhauer would seem to conflate the plausible suggestion that an object has a property intrinsically only if it has that property at every time it exists with the implausible suggestion that an object has a property intrinsically only if it has that property at every time whatsoever. Indeed, it is the latter suggestion that seems to lurk behind Schopenhauer’s claim that anything that is intrinsically valuable must enjoy a kind of permanence. But while this might undermine the motivation for the claim that whatever is fleeting and transitory is, ultimately, of no real significance, I suspect that this claim enjoys an intuitive force that is stronger than anything that might be said for or against it.25 The thought that nothing is of any lasting value can be a source of existential dread, but it can also be a potential source of comfort. For not only will all the good things in life pass away, but all our pain and all our suffering will someday be nothing as well. It too is fleeting, and so it too would seem to be of no real significance. But, then, given that none of life’s contents have any real value, it would seem to follow that being and nothingness are equally valuable. It would thus seem that any argument for the claim that our existence is somehow worse than non-existence, must be based on something other than a claim about the value or disvalue of life’s goods and evils. Indeed, as we will see in sections 7–8, Schopenhauer’s case for pessimism focuses not on the value of life’s contents, but on the ways in which life as a whole is structurally defective.

20.7  The Compensation Argument Schopenhauer presents an argument for pessimism in chapter 46 of the second volume of The World as Will and Representation.26 The argument begins with the claim that if life—or the world—were something whose existence we should be glad about, the suffering which marks it would have to be repaid by the goods it contains, otherwise there would be no reason to prefer it to the ‘blissful calm’ (SW 6:318/PP 2:269) or ‘peace’ (SW 3:665/WWR 2:595) of non-existence. But, as Schopenhauer insists, even assuming that there are positive pleasures, it is fundamentally beside the point to argue whether there is more good or evil in the world: for the very existence of evil already decides the matter since it can never be repaid [getilgt], and therefore cannot be compensated [ausgeglichen], by any good 290

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that might exist alongside or after it … . For even if thousands had lived in happiness and delight, this would never annul the anxiety and tortured death of a single person; and my present well-being does just as little to undo my earlier suffering. (SW 3:661/WWR 2:591, translation modified) There is, Schopenhauer thinks, a parallel between the interpersonal and the intrapersonal case: for just as the goods enjoyed by one person can never repay the evils suffered by another, so too the goods that one person enjoys at one time can never repay the evils which that very same person suffers at another. In both cases, the goods and evils in question are experientially partitioned off. It thus follows both that the world as a whole will contain uncompensated evils if the life of even a single individual contains evils which are not repaid by any goods in that life, and that the life of a single individual will contain uncompensated evils if, at even a single time, that life contains evils which are not repaid by any goods at that time.27 It does not matter, then, whether there are any positive pleasures. Our lives could be full of such pleasures, but if they are not simultaneous with our suffering, they cannot touch that suffering in our experience and thus cannot repay it at all. It is ‘impossible’, then, for ‘the sufferings and plagues of life … to be fully compensated [völlig ausgeglichen] by its pleasures and well-being’ (SW 3:662/WWR 2:592, translation modified). Thus, it seems that life is something whose existence ‘we should be sorry rather than glad about’, something whose ‘non-existence would be preferable to its existence’, and ‘something that fundamentally should not be’ (SW 3:661/WWR 2:591–2). This argument is, however, subject to three objections. The first is that it is simply not the case that evils suffered by one person can never be repaid by goods enjoyed by another. Parents, for instance, often make sacrifices for the present or future well-being of their children—even to the point of giving up their lives for them. But given that we might gladly make such sacrifices with no benefits to ourselves, it seems that the evils which we voluntarily undergo can be repaid by the goods that those we care about enjoy. Thus, it is simply false that the goods enjoyed by one person can never help to repay the evils suffered by another. A second, related objection is that while the ills we suffer in the present might not always be repaid by the goods we enjoy in the future, that is not to say that they can never be repaid. For what might be the exception in the interpersonal case is the norm in the i­ntrapersonal case. We tend, after all, to care about our future selves. And, based on such a concern, we might presently elect to undergo various hardships. But when we voluntarily suffer for the sake of our future projects or well-being, our present ills would seem to be repaid by future goods. Thus, it appears to be false that the goods that one person enjoys at one time can never help to repay the evils which that very same person suffers at another. In response to these objections, Schopenhauer might grant, for the sake of argument, that compensation is possible when we voluntarily undergo hardship for the sake of someone we care about (such as our children or our future selves), and focus on the pain and suffering we endure as infants. For we do not as infants have any concern for our future selves. So we cannot as infants elect to suffer evils for the sake of our future well-being. Thus, assuming that there is some time during our infancy when we suffer various evils that are not repaid by any simultaneous goods, our lives will all contain uncompensated evils. The third objection comes from the claim that life—and the world as well—is just an end in itself. Our existence is simply a blessing. We don’t need any additional goods to help repay life’s evils. For our mere existence rather than anything that adorns it already does 291

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that. The suffering we endure as infants would, in this case, be immediately compensated by our very existence. Indeed, as even Schopenhauer admits, if ‘the world and life were an end in themselves [Selbstzweck]’, their existence would need ‘neither to be justified through reasons nor redeemed by consequences’ (SW 3:662/WWR 2:592). In response to this objection, Schopenhauer seems to suggest that the existence of evil provides us with evidence that the world is not an end in itself. For were the world an end in itself, the world’s evils would not ‘have their roots in the origin of things, or in the inner core of the world itself’ (SW 3:190/WWR 2:181). But, in that case, their existence would somehow need to be explained: perhaps by appeal to the freedom of the will (see SW 3:190/WWR 2:181), or perhaps by appeal to existing forms of government (see SW 6:275/PP 2:233). Schopenhauer thinks, however, that these evils are best explained as having their existence at the root, in the inner core, of the world itself. Indeed, he ultimately maintains that ‘because it would be better for our situation not to exist, everything around us bears the trace of this—just as everything in hell reeks of sulphur’ (SW 3:662/WWR 2:592).

20.8  The Mismatch Argument In some places, Schopenhauer provides the seeds for a different argument for pessimism based upon the fundamental mismatch between the value of life and our attachment to it. He takes it to have been established that life has no objective value. Thus our ‘attachment to life cannot be grounded in its object’ (SW 3:271/WWR 2:252). It can, he tells us, be grounded only in its subject. It is not however grounded in the intellect, it is not a result of deliberation and is absolutely not a matter of choice; rather this life-willing is something self-evident: it is a thing prior to the intellect itself. We are ourselves the will to life: thus we must live, well or badly. It is only by keeping in mind that this attachment to this life, which is of such little value [so wenig Werth], is entirely a priori [i.e., from the will] and not a posteriori [i.e., from life], that we can explain the overwhelming fear of death inherent in all living things … which would be lost if life were assessed at its objective value [objektiven Werthe]. (SW 3:271/WWR 2:252–3, translation slightly modified) It is, Schopenhauer tells us, part of our very nature to value life. And, yet, this life that we cannot help but value is itself utterly worthless and ‘ought to be detested’ (SW 3:409/WWR 2:373). This is a bad situation to be in. And it isn’t a situation in which we are accidentally placed. Indeed, the entire human race ‘ceaselessly stirs itself, strives, drives, suffers, struggles, and performs the whole tragicomedy of world history’ over and over again, it ‘preserves in such a mockery of existence’ for ‘as long as it is even possible for anyone to do so’ (SW 3:408/WWR 2:373). Thus, it is the fact that life essentially has this mismatched character that makes it something which should not be.

20.9 Conclusion It should now be clear that while Schopenhauer’s case against optimism primarily focuses on the value or disvalue of life’s contents, his case for pessimism does not. It focuses on the ways in which life as a whole is structurally defective: either because the evils we suffer are 292

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not properly repaid by the goods we enjoy or else because we are essentially compelled to chase after something that is utterly worthless.28

Notes 1 Pope ([1733–34] 2016: Ep. I, 294). 2 Shaftesbury ([1711] 1999: 164–165). 3 Pope ([1733–34] 2016: Ep. I, 292). 4 I thus take the above claims to give expression to an evaluative conception of optimism and pessimism, which should be distinguished from both a psychological conception, where optimism and pessimism are inclinations to take a positive or a negative view of things, to believe in the best or worst possible outcomes (to be disposed, for example, to the glass as half-full or as halfempty), and an historical conception, where optimism and pessimism are claims that humans grow better or worse in society, that world history is slowly progressing or declining. For helpful discussion, see Dahlkvist (2007: 13–14, 31–37), van der Lugt (2021: 9–13), and Segev (2022: 1–11). 5 For a helpful overview of the reception of Leibniz’s optimism, see Strickland (2019). For a more comprehensive survey, see Caro (2020). 6 Pope ([1733–34] 2016: Ep. IV, 1). 7 This argument has been widely discussed in the secondary literature. See, for instance, Young (1987: 56–61), Cartwright (1988: 56–59), Soll (1988: 110–112), Janaway (1999: 327–335), Young (1987: 209–218), Reginster (2006: 106–123), Fernández (2006), Gemes and Janaway (2012: 287–288), Soll (2012), Vasalou (2013: 127–141), Beiser (2014: 402–407), Vandenabeele (2015: 18–23), Beiser (2016: 49–51), Vanden Auweele (2017: 130–136), Hassan (2021), and van der Lugt (2021: 342–345). 8 On the currently dominant interpretation, Schopenhauer takes boredom to result from the frustration of a will to will, i.e., from the frustration of a second-order desire to have—or, variably, to pursue the objects of—first-order desires. This interpretation is endorsed by Reginster (2004: 54–55, 2006: 122–123, 2007: 21–25, 2012: 351–352), Young (2005: 210–213), Fernández (2006: 660–662), and Vanden Auweele (2017: 132–134). For dissenting opinions, see Fox (2022), who takes boredom to arise not from the frustration of a will to will, but from the frustration of a will to cognize, i.e., of a desire to engage in mental activity, and Woods (2019: 996–997), who takes the torment of boredom to be ‘an objective, albeit introspective, sensation’, not the ‘mere subjective feeling’ which corresponds with ‘the frustration of a second-order willing’. 9 Leibniz claimed, in the New Essays (1704), that ‘happiness is a lasting state of pleasure, which cannot occur without continual progress to new pleasures’ (G 5: 180/RB 194). Similarly, Bolingbroke maintained, in his posthumously published Fragments or Minutes of Essays, that happiness is ‘a continued permanent series of agreeable sensations or of pleasure’ ([1754] 1841: 364). But if Schopenhauer is correct, this kind of happiness cannot last for very long since it will inevitably be interrupted by pain or boredom. 10 See the discussion of impure pleasures in Plato’s Republic IX, 538b–585a, which Schopenhauer himself refers to when presenting the negativity thesis at SW 4:210/BM:202. Also relevant is Kant’s discussion of pleasure and pain in Anthropology 7:230–2. 11 This objection is raised by Young (1987: 58), Cartwright (1988: 57–59), Soll (2012: 112), Young (2005: 217–218), and Soll (2012: 302–304). It is discussed by Janaway (1999: 329–330) and Hassan (2021: 1492–1493). 12 This version of the objection was raised by Hartmann (1869: 541–543/1884: vol. 3, 13–15), Meyer (1872: 6–7), Volkelt ([1900] 1907: 240–241), and Simmel (1907: 89/1986: 64). It has been raised more recently by Janaway (1999: 333), Soll (2012: 308), and Simmons (2021: 124). It should be distinguished from a similar objection raised by Windelband ([1876] 1911: vol. 2, 214), Paulsen (1896: vol. 1, 267–8/1899: 291), and Riehl (1903: 211), which takes Schopenhauer to claim that there is no experience of pleasure at all, and then insists that there is something that we experience when we satisfy a painful desire. 13 This version of the objection was raised by Windelband ([1876] 1911: vol. 2, 214), Paulsen (1896: 268/1899: 291–292), Volkelt ([1900] 1907: 240), and Riehl (1903: 211). It has been raised more

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Byron Simmons recently by Reginster (2006: 111, 117–118), Soll (2012: 309–310), Vandenabeele (2015: 21–22), and Simmons (2021: 124). 14 This version of the objection was raised by Meyer (1872: 17), Paulsen (1896: vol. 1, 271– 272/1899: 294–296), Volkelt ([1900] 1907: 238–239), Riehl (1903: 219), and Simmel (1907: 76–77/1986: 55–56). It has been raised more recently by Young (1987: 58), Soll (1988: 112, 2012: 303), Migotti (1995: 649), Young (2005: 217–218), Vasalou (2013: 135–141), and Vandenabeele (2015: 21). For discussion, see Beiser (2014: 404–405) and Hassan (2021: 1496– 1497). 15 Schopenhauer has, in fact, been criticized on just this point. See, for instance, Meyer (1872: 11–12) and Paulsen (1896: vol. 1, 265–266/1899: 289–290). For discussion, see Beiser (2014: 404, 2016: 177–178). 16 This objection was raised by Riehl (1903: 218–219) and Volkelt (1907: 248). It has been raised more recently by Janaway (1999: 334), Young (2005: 218–219), Vasalou (2013: 132–135), and Vandenabeele (2015: 22). 17 This argument first appeared in the manuscript-books Foliant [272-7] in 1827 and Adversaria [182-4] in 1829 (see HN 3: 326-9, 531-2/MR 3: 358-60, 579-80). It is discussed in Volkelt ([1900] 1907: 243–246). 18 As Kant puts it in the Critique of Judgment: ‘It is easy to decide what sort of value life has for us if it is assessed merely by what one enjoys (the natural end of the sum of all inclinations, happiness). Less than zero: for who would start life anew under the same conditions, or even according to a new and self-designed plan (but one still in accord with the course of nature), which would, however, still be aimed merely at enjoyment?’ (KU 5:434n) 19 This argument first appeared in the manuscript-book Adversaria [196] in 1829 (see HN 3: 542-3/ MR 3: 590-1). It is discussed in Woods (2019: 966) and Fox (2022: 488–494). 20 Indeed, as Kant claims, boredom is ‘the disgust with one’s existence, which arises when the mind is empty of the sensations toward which it incessantly strives’ (Anthropology 7:151). Thus, ‘even if no positive pain stimulates us to activity, if necessary a negative one, boredom, will often affect us in such a manner that we feel driven to do something harmful to ourselves rather than nothing at all. For boredom is perceived as a void of sensation by the human being who is used to an alteration of sensations in himself, and who is striving to fill up his instinct for life with something or other’ (7 232-3). 21 This argument first appeared in the manuscript-book Adversaria [186, 225] in 1829 (see HN 3: 533-4, 566-7/MR 3: 581-2, 615-16). An earlier version from 1820 can be found in the manuscript-book Reisebuch [77] (see HN 3: 26-7/MR 3: 30-1). It would later appear in the manuscriptbooks Pandectae [364] in 1837 and Spicilegia [103] in 1838. It is discussed in Volkelt ([1900] 1907: 259–264) and Riehl (1903: 210). 22 Or, as Schopenhauer puts it elsewhere, ‘Time is that by virtue of which everything at every moment turns to nothing in our hands, whereby it loses all true value [wahren Werth]’ (SW 6:301/PP 2:255). 23 A similar objection was raised by Volkelt ([1900] 1907: 261–262). 24 A similar objection was raised by Riehl (1903: 210). 25 It is, for example, a major theme of Ecclesiastes and is eloquently expressed in chapter 4 of Tolstoy’s Confession. 26 This argument first appeared in the manuscript-book Adversaria [335, 346-7] in 1829 (see HN 3: 641, 650-1/MR 3: 696-7, 706). It is frequently mentioned in the secondary literature but is usually treated as a curiosity and is rarely discussed in much detail. See Hartmann (1869: 547–8/1884: vol. 3, pp. 21–23), Windelband ([1876] 1911: vol. 2, 216–217), Volkelt ([1900] 1907: 247), Simmel (1907: 12, 88–93/1986: 10, 63–66), Young (1987: 56–57, 68), Cartwright (1988: 61–62), Janaway (1994: 96–97), Migotti (1995: 651 n 13), Pauen (1997: 104–105, 110), Janaway (1999: 332), Dahlkvist (2007: 49–51), Vandenabeele (2015: 32 n 10), Beiser (2016: 48), Vanden Auweele (2017: 136), van der Lugt (2021: 348–350), and additional references in Simmons (2021: 133 n 2). For detailed discussion, see Simmons (2021) and Bather Woods (2022). 27 I defend this interpretation in Simmons (2021). For criticism, see Bather Woods (2022). 28 I would like to thank Dante Dauksz and Timothy Stoll for helpful comments on previous versions of this paper.

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Bibliography Bather Woods, David (2022) ‘The Standard Interpretation of Schopenhauer’s Compensation Argument: A Nonstandard Variant’, European Journal of Philosophy 27/5: 961–976. Beiser, Frederick C. (2014) The Genesis of Neo-Kantianism, 1796–1880. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Beiser, Frederick C. (2016) Weltschmerz: Pessimism in German Philosophy, 1860–1900. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bolingbroke, Henry St. John ([1754] 1841) ‘Fragments or Minutes of Essays’, in The Works of Lord Bolingbroke, vol. 4. Philadelphia: Gary & Hart. Caro, Hernán D. (2020) The Best of All Possible Worlds? Leibniz’s Philosophical Optimism and Its Critics 1710–1755. Leiden: Brill. Cartwright, David E. (1988) ‘Schopenhauer on Suffering, Death, Guilt, and the Consolation of Metaphysics’, in Schopenhauer: New Essays in Honor of His 200th Birthday, ed. Eric von der Luft. Lewison, NY: Edwin Mellon Press: 51–66. Dahlkvist, Tobias (2007) Nietzsche and the Philosophy of Pessimism: A Study of Nietzsche’s Relation to the Pessimistic Tradition: Schopenhauer, Hartmann, Leopardi. Uppsala: Uppsala Studies in History of Ideas. Fernández, Jordi (2006) ‘Schopenhauer’s Pessimism’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 73/3: 646–664. Fox, Joshua (2022) ‘Schopenhauer on Boredom’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 30/3: 477–495. Gemes, Ken and Janaway, Christopher (2012) ‘Life-denial versus life-affirmation: Schopenhauer and Nietzsche on pessimism and asceticism’. In, Vandenabeele, Bart (ed.) Companion to Schopenhauer: Blackwell Companions to Philosophy. Oxford, GB. Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 280–299. Hartmann, Eduard von (1869) Philosophie des Unbewussten. Berlin: Duncker. Hartmann, Eduard von (1884) Philosophy of the Unconscious, 3 vols, trans. William Chatterton Coupland. New York: Macmillian and Company. Hassan, Patrick (2021) ‘Striving as Suffering: Schopenhauer’s A Priori Argument for Pessimism’, Philosophia 49/4: 1487–1505. Janaway, Christopher (1994) Schopenhauer. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Janaway, Christopher (1999) ‘Schopenhauer’s Pessimism’, in The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer, ed. Christopher Janaway. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 318–343. Leibniz, G.W. (1875–90) Die philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz [G], 7 vols, ed. C. J. Gerhardt. Berlin: Weidmann. Leibniz, G.W. (1985) Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil [H], ed. Augustin Farrer, trans. E. M. Huggard. La Salle, IL: Open Court. New Essays on Human Understanding [RB], ed. and trans. Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Meyer, Jürgen Bona (1872) Weltelend und Weltschmerz: Eine Rede gegen Schopenhauer’s und Hartmann’s Pessimismus. Bonn: Marcus. Migotti, Mark (1995) ‘Schopenhauer’s Pessimism and the Unconditioned Good’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 33/4: 643–660. Pauen, Michael (1997) Pessimismus. Geschichtsphilosophie, Metaphysik und Moderne von Nietzsche bis Spengler. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Paulsen, Friedrich (1896) System der Ethik mit einem Umriss der Staats- und Gesellschaftslehre, 4th ed., 2 vols. Berlin: Hertz. Paulsen, Friedrich (1899) A System of Ethics, trans. Frank Tilly. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Pope, Alexander ([1733–34] 2016) An Essay on Man, ed. Tom Jones. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Reginster, Bernard (2004) ‘Happiness as a Faustian Bargain’, Daedalus 133/2: 52–59. Reginster, Bernard (2006) The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Reginster, Bernard (2007) ‘Nietzsche’s “New Happiness”: Longing, Boredom, and the Elusiveness of Fulfillment’, Philosophic Exchange 37/1: 17–40.

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Byron Simmons Reginster, Bernard (2012) ‘Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Wagner’, in A Companion to Schopenhauer, ed. Bart Vandenabeele. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell: 349–366. Riehl, Alois (1903) Zur Einführung in die Philosophie der Gegenwart. Leipzig: Teubner. Schopenhauer, Arthur (1970). Der handschriftliche Nachlaß [HN], 5 vols, ed. Arthur Hübscher. Frankfurt am Main: Kramer. Schopenhauer, Arthur (1988–90). Manuscript Remains in Four Volumes [MR], trans. E. F. J. Payne, ed. Arthur Hübscher. Oxford: Berg. Segev, Mor (2022) The Value of the World and of Oneself: Philosophical Optimism and Pessimism from Aristotle to Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shaftesbury, Lord [Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of] ([1711] 1999) Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Simmel, Georg (1907) Schopenhauer und Nietzsche: Ein vortragszyklus. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot. Simmel, Georg (1986) Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, trans. Helmut Loiskandl, Deena Weinstein, and Micheal Weinstein. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Simmons, Byron (2021) ‘A Thousand Pleasures are Not Worth a Single Pain: The Compensation Argument for Schopenhauer’s Pessimism’, European Journal of Philosophy 29/1: 120–136. Soll, Ivan (1988) ‘Pessimism and the Tragic View of Life: Reconsiderations of Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy’, in Reading Nietzsche, ed. Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 104–131. Soll, Ivan (2012) ‘Schopenhauer on the Inevitability of Unhappiness’, in A Companion to Schopenhauer, ed. Bart Vandenabeele. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell: 300–313. Strickland, Lloyd (2019) ‘Staying Optimistic: The Trials and Tribulations of Leibnizian Optimism’, Journal of Modern Philosophy 1/1: 3, 1–21. Vandenabeele, Bart (2015) The Sublime in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Vanden Auweele, Dennis (2017) The Kantian Foundation of Schopenhauer’s Pessimism. London: Routledge. van der Lugt, Mara (2021) Dark Matters: Pessimism and the Problem of Suffering. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Vasalou, Sophia (2013) Schopenhauer and the Aesthetic Standpoint: Philosophy as a Practice of the Sublime. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Volkelt, Johannes (1907) Arthur Schopenhauer: Seine Persönlichkeit, seine Lehre, seine Glaube, 3rd ed. Stuttgart: Frommann. Windelband, Wilhelm ([1876] 1911) ‘Pessimismus und Wissenschaft’, in Präludien: Aufsätze und Neben zur Einführung in die Philosophie, 4th ed., 2 vols. Tübingen: Mohr: 218–243. Woods, David (2019) ‘Seriously Bored: Schopenhauer on Solitary Confinement’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 27/5: 959–978. Young, Julian (1987) ‘A Schopenhauerian Solution to Schopenhauerian Pessimism’, SchopenhauerJahrbuch 68: 53–69. Young, Julian (2005) Schopenhauer. London: Routledge.

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21 SCHOPENHAUER’S PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION Jonathan Head

Schopenhauer’s philosophy of religion treads the more traditional ground of such things as the arguments for the existence of God, the problem of evil, and the relationship between religion and philosophy, while also considering aspects of religion that are more intrinsically connected to his wider philosophical concerns, such as how pessimistic different religious belief systems are, as well as the social functions that established religions fulfill. As with his treatment of the results of the natural sciences, Schopenhauer tends to focus on those questions that help him to outline and reinforce his fundamental commitment to the metaphysics of will, and thus we cannot expect a systematic philosophy of religion from him; rather, we find scattered remarks across many of his works on a variety of topics related to the topic of religion. Schopenhauer certainly had mixed feelings about religion, both as a social phenomenon and with regard to its impact on the individual religious believer. On the one hand, religion is an unhealthy dogmatism that relies for its ongoing power on the indoctrination of youth, it can skew our view of the world, and often serves to hold back important progress in science and philosophy; but on the other, it is a vehicle by which the masses can be helped to glimpse real insights into the nature of life and the world, albeit through a veil of myth and allegory, as well as acting to sustain their moral conscience and the social order. Schopenhauer’s own ambivalence is most explicitly captured in a dialogue included in the “On Religion” section of PP 2, where two characters, Demopheles and Philalethes, debate the merits of religion, and is also signaled in his attempt to separate good religious systems from bad, depending on the extent to which they reflect his pessimistic view of the world and contain some of the mystical elements that somewhat characterize his account of the denial or negation of the will. In what follows, I will discuss these elements of Schopenhauer’s philosophy of religion, beginning with his account of how religious belief systems meet a universal need of human beings, the “need for metaphysics,” and how they can stand alongside philosophy in offering an understanding of the true nature of things.

21.1  Religion and the Need for Metaphysics At its best, religion is a genuine expression of a deep-seated need for metaphysics that offers, in an accessible manner, truthful insights into the nature of the world and human DOI: 10.4324/9781003048992-25

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experience. Schopenhauer argues that our metaphysical need is grounded in a realization of the riddle of existence: that the world could not have been the case, that our life is full of pain and suffering (when it might not have been), and that we are all facing death, with an uncertainty about what, if anything, comes after (see SW 3:175f./WWR 2:169f.). All this strikes us as a riddle because of the inevitable questions these supposed facts raise: why do we exist when we might not have done so? Why is there anything at all? Why do we have to endure so much pain and suffering, when our lives could have conceivably been so much better? Why do we have to die when we perhaps could have lived forever? Answering these questions, Schopenhauer argues, is a need that is universally felt by human beings, and systems of religion and philosophy are fundamentally geared to fulfilling this task. As a result, for Schopenhauer, metaphysics is the fundamental manifestation of an existential concern that is felt to some extent by a rationally reflective being. Religion is just one outgrowth of our human interest in finding some resolution to this concern. This view offered by Schopenhauer can be contrasted with that of Nietzsche, who argues in The Gay Science that metaphysics is not in fact grounded in a genuine need of the intellect, but rather stems from erroneous religious thinking: The metaphysical need is not the origin of religion, as Schopenhauer has it, but only a late offshoot of it. Under the rule of religious ideas, one has got used to the idea of “another world (behind, below, above)” and feels an unpleasant emptiness and deprivation at the annihilation of religious delusions … . But what led to the belief in “another world” in primordial times was not a drive or need, but an error in the interpretation of certain natural events, an embarrassing lapse of the intellect. (2001: 131; § 151) According to Nietzsche’s view, metaphysics is in effect a religious hangover, the attempt to sustain a commitment to a (non-existent) transcendent realm following the death of God. Not only is metaphysics not something we genuinely need, but it is also fundamentally misleading as part of the shadow that religious thought continues to cast over humankind. Schopenhauer, on the other hand, is clear that religion, as a form of metaphysics, does seek to meet a genuine need felt by human beings. Our wonder at the world gives rise to a need for fundamental explanations about the world and our lives within it, and the pull of religion is that it provides just these kinds of explanations in a manner that is palatable for a wide audience. As an example of this, Schopenhauer notes that a doctrine of immortality can help assuage some of our concern regarding the prospect of death, as well as offering a narrative of what might happen to us. Indeed, if we consider religious belief systems we can see the fundamental importance they attribute to the promise of immortality: Interest in philosophical or religious systems is inspired most strongly by the dogmas of continuation after death: and even if religious systems focus on the existence of their gods and seem most eager to defend this, it is fundamentally only because their dogmas of immortality are linked to these gods and are considered inseparable from them: this is really all that matters to them. (SW 3:177/WWR 2:170) 298

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Arguably, our concern with death does not arise from “an error in the interpretation of certain natural events,” as Nietzsche would have it, but is rather a deeper existential concern that is largely unavoidable for human beings. In offering a doctrine of the afterlife, religions are able to answer this concern in (as we shall see) more or less consoling and truthful ways. Some religions are better at meeting this metaphysical need than others depending on the extent to which it is able to offer genuine insights into the essence of the world. Schopenhauer singles out the Hinduism of the Upanishads as particularly successful in this regard, due to being written by individuals “who had both greater energy in their powers of intuitive cognition and also a more accurate cast of mind, which made them capable of a purer, more immediate grasp of the essence of nature” (SW 3:178/WWR 2:171). If a religion is brought about by those who have a deeper intuitive grasp of the essence of things, then the belief system that results will provide more accurate explanations of things and thus will more satisfactorily meet our metaphysical need. This is not to say, though, that there is a sense of complete satisfaction of our metaphysical need available to us via a religious belief system, and thus there will always be a feeling of unrest and of straining to break through the illusory nature of our experience. We are merely speaking here of religions providing a degree of satisfaction, of quelling our painful metaphysical need to some limited extent, and of some limited grasp or cognition of the truth, rather than of finding peace in this world (which is impossible, as far as Schopenhauer is concerned, without negating or denying the will) and gaining knowledge of the essence of the world as it is apart from our experience. While both philosophy and religion are intended to meet the need for metaphysics in a similar way, the audience for the latter is much wider than for the former. Schopenhauer argues that most people are “incapable of investigation or thought and will never grasp the deepest and most difficult truths in the proper sense” (SW 3:183/WWR2:175), and so religious belief systems attempt to offer explanations behind a veil of myth or allegory, rather than attempting to provide truths in a direct manner. The value of a religion will depend on the extent to which those allegories successfully provide a wide audience with the insights necessary to satisfy to at least some extent their metaphysical need. One issue we can consider here concerns the connection Schopenhauer posits between cognizing the truth and receiving consolation. As David Cartwright rightly points out, “describing the world correctly and deriving consolation from a description of reality are two separate demands unless consolation simply follows from a correct description” (1988: 65), but it is by no means obvious that a correct description of the world will console us. Thus, it seems an unmerited assumption on the part of Schopenhauer that a cognition of the truth will be accompanied by consolation. In response to this potential difficulty, Schopenhauer might argue that all human beings have a sufficient intuitive grasp of the nature of the world, prior to philosophical or religious reflection, that would render any fundamentally misleading belief system as ultimately discomfiting and unsatisfactory. If we were sat on a ship with sirens blaring and the crew running around, we would rather know that the vessel was sinking, and we would gain some comfort from that knowledge, at least relative to the discomfort of having a sense that something was wrong but not knowing what was actually happening, or being told incorrectly that the crew were just running a drill, despite the looks of concern on their faces. In addition, as I have argued elsewhere (see 2021: 19f.), there does seem to be a natural consoling effect of being given an explanation for why something bad and avoidable has occurred: for example, understanding why a loved one died may help a family gain closure and feel some consolation. Thus, while it is certainly possible in principle that gaining the truth 299

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and finding consolation could conflict, Schopenhauer arguably has good reason to posit a strong connection between the two, given our intuitive sense of the nature of the world and the naturally consoling effect of an explanation that coheres with it. There is just a sense in which a false metaphysical explanation will feel wrong and thus will leave us discomfited rather than consoled. As a result, the connection between the consolatory and cognitive aspects of satisfying the metaphysical need is mutually reinforcing, though the cognitive aspect seems to have primacy in the sense that gaining the truth will naturally lead to consolation for us. Schopenhauer argues that the easiest way to determine which religions are of higher value, with regard to being accurate and satisfying the metaphysical need, is to consider how pessimistic they are. Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism are particularly praised for their pessimistic teaching of “a harsh guilty indebtedness of the human race by virtue of its very existence” (SW 3:693/WWR 2:619), and their shared “recognition that we would have been better off not existing” (SW 3:695/WWR 2:620). Contrasted with these belief systems are those which offer more optimistic views of the world and human existence, such as Islam, the religion of the ancient Greeks, and Judaism. Dennis Vanden Auweele has clarified the distinction between optimistic and pessimistic religions in Schopenhauer’s thought by identifying some criteria operative in his work for finding a suitably pessimistic religion (see 2014: 60–65): (1) existence is understood as a kind of harm or punishment, (2) a claim that there are no natural means of gaining salvation from this world, and (3) a practical commitment to compassion and self-denial. If a religion reflects Schopenhauer’s pessimistic worldview through their teachings, albeit through a veil of allegory, then there is value in that religion (although it ultimately falls short of Schopenhauer’s own philosophy, which offers insights in a more direct manner suitable for those who have the intellect and leisure to consider metaphysical matters). One question we might consider then is precisely what role the idea of God plays in Schopenhauer’s account of religion. What is the source of the idea of God, and does it have a legitimate allegorical role to play in meeting our metaphysical need? Schopenhauer sees the idea of God as a kind of anthropomorphic projection that is conceived as an intelligent cause of the world (see SW 5:122/PP 1:105). On the basis of our experience of ourselves as a being with both will and intellect, we assume that just the same kind of being acts as a transcendent ground of all things. We generate such an idea not as a result of a purely intellectual process, but in fact to satisfy the will. One of Schopenhauer’s most important claims is that our individual wills are insatiable: we are constantly seeking after the satisfaction of new desires, and even when we do achieve something we want, this passes quickly and is only replaced with another painful desire. However, the world is something that is almost always unamenable to the satisfaction of our desires (there are limited resources, other people often get in our way, and so forth), and the will experiences great fear and frustration as a result. In order for the will to gain comfort and the feeling of some sort of control over the world, we project the existence of a God who can potentially be persuaded to order things so we can get what we want, in contrast to the unchanging universal laws of nature: as Schopenhauer states, such [gods] can be assumed, like other persons, to be receptive to entreaty and adulation, service and offering, thus to be more tractable than rigid necessity, the inexorable, unfeeling forces of nature and the obscure powers of the course of the world. (SW 5:125/PP 1:108) 300

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In essence, gods are postulated to give the individual will another, potentially more secure, avenue by which it can be satisfied. Events in the natural world and the actions of others often hinder us from achieving what we want, so we imagine divine beings who, as very powerful or even omnipotent beings, can be persuaded to give us what we desire more easily. One implication of this is that all attempts at rational theology and arguments for the existence of God are illegitimate, in that they fundamentally misunderstand the nature of religious faith. As Schopenhauer argues, belief in God is not something we are reasoned into: “The intellect must create a God [for the believer], so that their hearts (wills) enjoy the relief of praying and the comfort of hope; but not conversely, meaning they do not pray because their intellect has correctly deduced a God” (SW 5:126/PP 1:108). When we compare the theologies of different religious traditions, Schopenhauer claims, we often find the notion that God is available to answer prayers and in other ways be cajoled into satisfying our desires. Such a feature of a given religion demonstrates that this faith is grounded in the needs of the will, and is not a result of a rationally-persuaded intellect: the theoretical part of the theology of all the peoples is very different as regards the number and nature of the gods; but that they can and do help if we serve and worship them – this they all have in common, because it is what is important… [This] is the birthmark whereby we recognise the origin of all theology, namely, that it has sprung from the will, from the heart, not from the head or from cognition. (SW 5:126/PP 1:108) In Schopenhauer’s account, belief in God becomes yet another expression of our inherent egoism. We are desperate to stamp our will upon an intransigent world, to the extent that we postulate a transcendent being who can potentially be persuaded and cajoled into giving us what we want. In offering this account of the source of belief in God, Schopenhauer admits that his approach is influenced by the theory proposed by David Hume in his Natural History of Religion (a text that he had admired for many years – see MR 3:197-199). Hume had shown that the most effective “proof” of the existence of God was the ceraunological proof … [namely] the proof grounded in the human feeling of helplessness, impotence and dependence in the face of the infinitely superior, inscrutable and mostly ominous powers of nature. Added to this is the natural human tendency to personify everything, and finally also the hope of achieving something with pleas, flattery, and even gifts. (SW 2:607/WWR 1:542) Belief in God is thus grounded not in the highest aspects of ourselves (as would be claimed by religious believers), but in fact in our basest desires. This Humean approach to religious belief, which Schopenhauer broadly follows, therefore significantly undermines any attempt to establish a rational basis for belief in the existence of God, which is the focus of the next section. Before we move on, though, we might consider whether there is some tension in Schopenhauer’s account of religion here. So far, we have come across two key claims concerning the nature of religious belief: (1) some religious belief systems (including Christianity, 301

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which includes a commitment to the existence of God) can offer truthful insights into the essence of the world, albeit through a veil of allegory, and (2) belief in God is an untrustworthy projection based on the needs of the will. In response to these claims, we might wonder how Christianity can be viewed as passing Schopenhauer’s test regarding meeting the metaphysical need and being rightfully pessimistic, while having a central commitment to the existence of God. It seems that the only way around this potential tension is to separate out some of the moral teachings and other doctrinal commitments (such as Christology) as those aspects of Christian thought which are allegorically truthful from those untrustworthy elements such as belief in God. Schopenhauer seems to have viewed Christianity in this way, as having genuine insights based around the example and moral teachings of Christ, that can be held largely in separation from the false beliefs connected with Jewish theism and optimism (see the contrast drawn between Judaism and a “genuine Christianity” (SW 3:185/WWR 2:177) that is true in an allegorical sense). We may question, though, whether belief in God is as detachable from these teachings as Schopenhauer supposes. There is a good argument for thinking that Christ’s teaching, including his moral teaching, and indeed all Christian thought is suffused with a commitment to the existence of God, and that Schopenhauer is perhaps mistaken in thinking that a pessimistic core of teaching shorn of God can really be found.

21.2  Arguments for the Existence of God Schopenhauer argues that any attempt to prove the existence of God through rational argumentation is illegitimate, insofar as it assumes that religious claims are literal, rather than allegorical, in nature. In contrast to philosophy, which should try to convince us through rational means, “religions demand faith, i.e., a voluntary acceptance that it is so” (SW 3:184/WWR 2:176), and as we saw in the previous section, the postulation of the existence of God is a result of projection of the will, rather than being grounded in any kind of intellectual deduction or inference. As a result, any rational argument for the existence of God fundamentally misconstrues the nature of religious belief. In addition to this, Schopenhauer offers a variety of objections to the usual arguments for God’s existence throughout his works. In the “Fragments for the history of philosophy” section of PP 1 in particular, Schopenhauer gives an extended critique of these arguments, stating that they overstretch themselves by attempting to establish the necessity, rather than the mere possibility, of God. He begins with raising a number of points against the cosmological argument, which seeks to infer the existence of God as a cause of the universe. As might be expected from a Kantian, Schopenhauer argues that causal laws apply only within our experience, and so it is an illegitimate application of the notion of causation to think of the world as having a transcendental cause. Schopenhauer discusses the misapplication of the law of causation elsewhere, where he states that “we are not justified in applying such a principle to the eternal order of the world and to all that exists in it external to and independent of the function of our cognitive faculty from which this principle has arisen” (SW 1:93/FR 90). As a result, the very idea of the world being created through a causal relation to a transcendental ground “is a wholly idle notion incapable of proof” (SW 5:114/PP 1:99n.). From the standpoint of our outer experience, Schopenhauer argues that we see things sustaining themselves through “their inner, intrinsic vital force” (SW 5:114/PP 1:99n.), and so we have no empirical justification for positing a first cause of the universe. Neither can we accept 302

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the cosmological argument from a non-Kantian, rationalist standpoint, for (1) we cannot argue from effect to cause with any certainty, (2) we can only conceive of effects as necessary (given their causes) and not causes themselves, and (3) the theist should (by need of consistency) continue applying the law of causality to God, which would lead to an infinite regress of causes (see SW 5:114/PP 1:98f.): as Schopenhauer states, causality is not like a “hackney cab, which one can send off after [reaching] one’s destination”, but something that must (on pain of consistency) be pursued ad infinitum, “like the broom brought to life by Goethe’s sorcerer’s apprentice, which once set in motion will not stop running” (SW 1:38/FR 41). Following on from his discussion of the nature of causation in FR (see SW 1:34–36/FR 38f.), Schopenhauer also argues that the application of the law of causality is restricted to alterations in the form of matter, and does not apply to the existence of matter itself: so, we cannot legitimately conceive of matter as having been caused in the manner envisioned in a theist account of creation (see SW 5:114/PP 1:99). With regard to the design argument, Schopenhauer treats it as an attempt to elucidate the supposed result of the cosmological argument. While the cosmological argument (if successful) merely shows the existence of a first cause, the design argument attempts to argue inductively from features of nature to more specific features of the first cause, with a view to establishing a being that more closely resembles the personal God envisioned by the JudeoChristian tradition: “its method consists in enhancing that presupposed first cause of the world into a being that knows and wills by attempting to establish this ground by means of induction from the many consequents that can be explained through such a ground” (SW 5:115/PP 1:99). Schopenhauer argues that the design argument is given merely as support for the cosmological argument, and so as the latter has already been dispatched, the former can be also. The manner in which the success of the design argument is supposed to rest entirely on that of the cosmological argument is not entirely clear: Schopenhauer points out the fact that the former is inductive (and so cannot achieve certainty), while the latter is deductive, but that is not sufficient to show argumentative dependency in the manner he assumes. Perhaps sensing that this line of argument is a little weak, Schopenhauer goes on to argue that the design argument itself is based on “a false basic view of nature” (SW 5:115/PP 1:99), in that it reverses the ontological priority of will over intellect. We use our intuition to identify teleology in the world of our experience, and on that basis make the incorrect assumption that such teleology itself must be brought about by an intellect. As Schopenhauer states elsewhere, the sense of wonder that threatens to overwhelm us when we consider the endless purposiveness of the structure of organic beings is due fundamentally to the natural but false presupposition that [these signs of teleology] … as we apprehend and judge it by means of cognition, and thus along the path of representation, has also been produced in the same way; hence, that as it exists for the intellect, it was also brought about by an intellect. (SW 3:373/WWR 2:341) As the only way we can experience teleology is through our cognition, we incorrectly assume that it can only be brought about by cognition, and this forgets one of the main tenets of Schopenhauerian philosophy, namely, that will is the primary thing in existence, and intellect is only a secondary phenomenon. Further, Schopenhauer argues, the supposition of a 303

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divine intellect as a ground of nature is a reflection of wishful thinking guided by the will: given that “the situation we find ourselves in” is a “constant state of worry, anxiety, and need” we feel the inclination to optimistically assume an intellect that will offer some sort of salvation “as a palliative, which is then established and maintained in spite of the loudly screaming testimony of an entire world filled with misery” (SW 3:665/WWR 2:594f.). Given the weight of evidence, however, such an assumption is entirely without basis. Thus, we are wrong to posit an intellect as the ground of nature because of teleology in the world. In addition, we can consider Schopenhauer’s treatment of the ontological argument. In both FR and PP1, Schopenhauer attributes the error of the ontological argument to an illegitimate move from the principle of sufficient reason of knowing (logical explanation) to that of becoming (causal explanation), which is a way of putting the familiar Kantian point that one cannot derive actual existence from mere analysis of concepts. By analyzing the predicates of an idea such as a perfect being, one can at most establish some logical truths about the idea but nothing in terms of existence. The point is intensified by Schopenhauer’s argument that the notion of existence is merely smuggled into the concept of something else in order to obtain the desired result: at any opportunity, someone contrives a concept assembled out of all sorts of predicates, taking care, however, that among these, either plainly or nakedly, or, as is more decorous, wrapped up in another predicate, e.g., “perfection,” “immensity,” or something of the sort, there is also a predicate of reality or of existence … . Now accordingly, anyone can fetch the predicate of reality or existence from his arbitrarily contrived concept, and therefore there is now supposed to be an object corresponding to the concept, independent of it, existing in actuality! (SW 1:10f./FR 15) The nonsense of moving from the principle of sufficient reason of knowing to that of becoming becomes clear when we realize that one could smuggle the notion of existence into all sorts of different ideas and try to argue on that basis that something must exist that corresponds to that idea. Schopenhauer writes, after introducing the predicate of existence into the subject by means of manipulating the concept of “perfection” or “actuality” … we cannot fail to find it there again subsequently and to expose it through an analytical judgement. However, this in no way demonstrates the justification for asserting the whole concept. (SW 5:116/PP 1:100) The ontological argument essentially begs the question by having the notion of existence hidden away in advance all along, and thus it is quite unsurprising and uninformative to find the necessary existence of God as its conclusion. Finally, Schopenhauer accuses Kant of capitulating to “speculative theology” by following his demolition of the traditional arguments for the existence of God with the notion of a practical postulate. According to Kant, given the nature of our moral commitments, aimed at a state of complete good in which virtue is rewarded with happiness, we have good reason to commit ourselves to the existence of a God that can bring about such a good (see e.g., Kant’s discussion in KpV 5:124f.): indeed, if we do not believe that God exists, morality will in fact only be illusory. Schopenhauer argues that this constitutes an illegitimate move by sneaking 304

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the divine back into rational discourse as a practical postulate which one can have good reason to hold as being true, when in fact Kant’s own approach at most shows that God can be a useful idea alone for making sense of our moral commitments. Thus, in line with his allegorical account of religion described above, Schopenhauer interprets the Kantian God as only offering a useful myth for us to make sense of the moral notions that we have: If well understood, [Kant’s] account says nothing other than that the assumption of a just God who rewards and punishes after death is a useful and adequate regulative schema for the purpose of interpreting the serious, deeply felt ethical significance of our conduct and also of guiding this conduct itself; thus in a sense it is an allegory of truth. (SW 5:118/PP 1:102) According to Schopenhauer’s reading of the proper Kantian approach, the notion of God is only legitimately used within the scope of practical reason, that is with regard to understanding the moral law and guiding our conduct, and therefore only has a legitimate pragmatic use with regard to understanding our moral ideas. Crucially, he argues, this does not commit us to any sort of theoretical or dogmatic belief in the actual existence of God. So, Schopenhauer argues, the Kantian approach should not be read as offering a new moral argument for the existence of God, having sufficiently dispatched the traditional arguments for the existence of God in the Critical philosophy.

21.3  Religion as a Social Phenomenon As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, Schopenhauer clearly has mixed feelings about religion, and this includes his view of the role of religion in society. This is reflected in the dialogue between two characters, Demopheles and Philalethes, on religion that appears in §174 of PP 2. The names of the two characters reveal their roles in the dialogue, with Demopheles’ name reflecting this character’s propensity for considering the good or utility of religion for the people, regardless of its truth, while Philalethes is the lover of truth, who prioritizes wisdom above all other considerations. While Demopheles argues that religion has a vital social role to play in offering “an interpretation of life” to the masses that acts “as a guide to conduct and as consolation in suffering and death” (SW 6:344/PP 2:283), thus following some of the argument we find in Schopenhauer’s account of the need for metaphysics, Philalethes worries about the socially and intellectually deleterious effects of religious intolerance, as well as the impact of indoctrination in childhood. In order to be persuasive, religion needs to present itself to the masses as being literally true, even though in fact it is only offering allegories. Due to this need to present itself as literally true, and the fact that one cannot be reasoned but only persuaded into faith (due to its allegorical nature), religion often turns to intolerance and dogmatism, which ultimately holds back the progress of the development of knowledge in society. Philalethes argues that this dogmatic, overreaching tendency of religion in society is particularly illuminated in the way churches try to play a large role in childhood, when individuals are most susceptible to external influence: the aim [of religion] is to take control of this tender age. By these means, much more so than by threats and accounts of miracles, the doctrines of faith take root. That 305

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is, when people in early childhood are repeatedly taught certain fundamental views and doctrines with unusual solemnity and with an air of the highest urgency … the individual will practically be as helpless to doubt those teachings as he is to doubt his own existence. (SW 6:345f./PP 2:294) When all children are indoctrinated in this manner, there are very few who are able to challenge the ideas they have been taught, and so the realm of ideas in a society remains largely stagnant. Our religious views also fundamentally affect the way we view the world, and so the falsity of religious belief (insofar as it could be optimistic or pretend to be literally true) could mean that “the whole of human knowledge is falsified by them through and through” (SW 6:349/PP 2:297). As philosophy and religion are making competing attempts at offering literal explanations of things (though philosophy is only genuinely achieving this), philosophical progress is undermined in particular by the intellectual intransigence imposed on individuals through indoctrination in childhood. However, the negative effects of indoctrination go even deeper than this, as far as Philalethes is concerned, for our ideas are able to affect our conduct towards others, and the intolerance of religion too often leads to violence that would never have been carried out otherwise (see SW 6:346/PP 2:294f.). Philalethes also rejects the argument that religion is required to maintain social order amongst the masses, on the basis that law and order were maintained amongst the ancient Greeks even though they “really did not have religion in our sense of the word” (SW 6:352/PP 2:299). It must be noted, though, that this is not a view that Schopenhauer himself really subscribes to, as the notion that the ancient Greeks did not have a religion (even in his own specific sense of the word) strains credibility, and he does in fact refer to the “religion of the Greeks” (SW 6:353/PP 2:418) in his own voice later on in PP2. In fact it is generally speaking around this point that the focus of the dialogue moves to Demopheles, where we are given some of Schopenhauer’s concessions regarding the value of religion, despite the drawbacks voiced by the character of Philalethes. First, Demopheles argues that “it is important [for the sake of social order] to restrain the brutal and lowly dispositions of the masses” (SW 6:350/PP 2:298), which religion is most effective in accomplishing. Elsewhere, Schopenhauer does admit that “theism may provide support for morals, but support of the crudest kind” (SW 5:129/PP 1:111), given that it makes purely compassionate actions almost impossible in adding an egoistic element to our motivation, of wanting to please God to gain various rewards. Further, Schopenhauer complains that theism can undermine morality by removing accountability for our actions. If our very being and constitution are a creation of God, and our actions are ultimately grounded in our constitution, then we may wonder why it is us, rather than God, who should be held morally responsible for what we do. Schopenhauer states that, with regard to any created being, it “is inevitable that the author of its existence and its constitution, as well as the circumstances in which it has been placed, is also the author of its actions and its deeds, which are determined by all this with such certainty as a triangle by two angles and a line” (SW 5:130/PP 1:112). When we reflect upon the manner in which our character depends upon God, it seems that everything we do is determined. True freedom requires aseity, and this is precisely what we cannot have if we are created beings. However, Schopenhauer may have thought that such considerations would not impact upon the moral motivation of the masses, who would be unlikely to reflect upon their own freedom in this way. So, religious 306

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belief can still help with the moral conduct of the masses, albeit in a rather crude way that contains some egoistic motivation. Second, Demopheles denies that religions do proclaim to be entirely literal, in that they often admit that they are teaching mysteries which, he states, “is basically only the theological technical term for religious allegory” (SW 6:354/PP 2:301). We saw earlier that one of Schopenhauer’s criteria for a valuable religion is that it admits it teaches mysteries, rather than being able to provide direct teachings concerning the most fundamental matters. Third, Demopheles argues that it is vital for each individual’s metaphysical need to be met, in order that we receive the assurance and consolation required to go in living in a difficult world, that our moral convictions receive psychological support, and that we are given an intellectual viewpoint through which we are able to understand the world, at least in a limited sense (see SW 6:355f./PP 2:302f.). As Philalethes points out, this leaves us with a rather mixed view of religion as a kind of “pious fraud”, in which “the priests become a peculiar cross between swindlers and teachers of morals” (SW 6:356/PP 2:303), but nevertheless this seems to be where Schopenhauer’s reflections on the nature of religion as a social phenomenon had left him. We find therefore quite a nuanced view expressed in his work, according to which religion brings great benefits both to the individual and society, while also providing motivation for terrible actions and intellectual repression. Regardless of the intellectual abilities of the masses, as Demopheles argues (see SW 6:358f./PP 2:304f.), most people in society will not have the resources to engage in sustained philosophical reflection, and yet they have a need for understanding the world that must be satisfied, and so religion is the second-best option that provides this necessary framework for approaching the world and the fundamental questions which we are left with (as well as having some social value in helping to maintain order and moral relations between individuals). Schopenhauer believes it would be better if we could dispense with religion entirely, and all become more philosophical in our thinking, but he is very doubtful that we could ever reach a situation in which this is possible.

21.4  Room for God? Finally, as for Schopenhauer’s own religious commitments, he is certainly an atheist in the sense that he does not believe in the existence of the kind of personal God claimed by the theist religious traditions, and this is reflected in a worldview that leaves little space for religious hopes of a world overseen by an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God who promises everlasting bliss in a future life (though Schopenhauer does largely fail to explicitly discuss his atheism in his published works). In this vein, Matthew Alun Ray argues that Schopenhauer’s “ontology was nevertheless as utterly atheistic as any that could be imagined. Schopenhauer’s metaphysics is, in intention, intrinsically atheistic and so Schopenhauer does not require a separate argument to establish his atheism” (2003: 31). David Berman (see 2014: 1610) has however identified at least one explicit argument for atheism in Schopenhauer’s corpus, in a passage from WWR 2 in which we find a denial of the possibility of a perfect intelligence. In this passage, Schopenhauer makes three related points. First, a more perfect intelligence than a human intellect could not exist because it would have already achieved the insights gained by the human individual who abolishes themselves, and so this self-aboli307

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tion would have already happened. Human intelligence is sufficient for abolition of the self and so there could not be a being who is more intelligent: For it is plain that human intelligence already provides the will with insight enough for it to negate and abolish itself, and so individuality and hence intelligence (as a mere tool of the individual, and so of animal nature) ceases to exist. (SW 3:700/WWR 2:625) For a being with perfect intelligence, there is no development towards the kind of insights that bring about negation of the will in human individuals; rather, there would be instantaneous, complete insight that leads immediately to abolition. Schopenhauer suggests this by, in his second point, arguing that there would be nothing for a perfectly intelligent being to learn, and so “what remains for such an intelligence except mere repetition and its boredom throughout all of endless time?” (SW 3:701/WWR 2:625). Once a being has grasped the unity and essence of all things, there is nothing left for it to learn, and so it must abolish itself (or perhaps live in an eternity of painful boredom, which is hardly how theists would characterize the experience of God). As his third point, Schopenhauer argues that all intelligence “can only be a reaction to a will” and so given that “all willing is an error, the final work of the intelligence is the abolition of this willing” (SW 3:701/WWR 2:625). A perfect intelligence could not remain a perfect intelligence, for it would recognize that the will that it serves (and in which it has its ultimate ground) ought not to be, and so it would abolish itself. Thus, “even the most perfect intelligence possible can only be a transitional stage” (SW 3:701/WWR 2:625) to something else. In other words, given our understanding of intelligence as something that is in service to the will and has the ultimate aim of abolishing itself, we cannot conceive of the ongoing existence of a perfect intelligence, to which the theist is committed. However, Schopenhauer’s argument can be questioned, on the basis that it does not account for the possibility of an intelligence that is different in kind from ours, namely, an intelligence not in the service of a will. In arguing that a perfect intelligence would immediately cease to exist, Schopenhauer assumes that all intelligences have the abolition of the will that enslaves them as its teleological endpoint. A divine being, though, would not necessarily be in such a position; indeed, according to intellectualist conceptions of God, the divine will is shaped by a prior intellectual recognition of what is good. Schopenhauer’s argument, therefore, only succeeds if we assume that the perfect intelligence will be significantly like ours, and this is perhaps something that we should not accept. It must be noted, though, that this passage is not intended as a knockdown argument against the existence of God. Schopenhauer is merely seeking to show that “we have no reason to assume that there are more perfect intelligences than those of humans” (SW 3:700/WWR 2:625). Given that we have no justification from our experience for positing the existence of a perfect intelligence, then we have no reason to believe in the existence of God, as claimed by theists. We could perhaps conceive of an intelligence that is not enslaved to a will (though Schopenhauer arguably would not even allow this, as even those who have tranquilized the will are still prey to the will-to-live reasserting itself as long as they still have a physical body: see SW 2:462f./WWR 1:418), but we have no reason to believe that there is such a one. Perhaps, though, Schopenhauer’s philosophy does in fact ultimately leave the question of the existence of God open. Schopenhauer does not claim that we have a complete 308

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cognition of the will as thing-in-itself, and on a number of occasions emphasizes the fact that our individual will offers only a partial glimpse into the essence of things: for example, Schopenhauer notes that our inner cognition of individual acts of will “still possesses the form of time, as well as the forms of being-cognized and recognized in general. Thus, although the thing in itself has largely thrown off its veils in inner cognition, it still does not emerge fully naked” (SW 3:220/WWR 2:208). Given that we do not have a complete cognition of the will as thing-in-itself, there may be elements of the essence of the world that we are not aware of: as Gonzalez argues, as far as Schopenhauer is concerned, “the will as purely noumenal can and may have qualities, determinations and modes of existence other than that which is experienced in the phenomenal realm” (1992: 315). Mannion, further, argues that Schopenhauer’s ethics of compassion reflects a moral order that must include some kind of “guarantor” of values that promises that the peace glimpsed through acting compassionately is attainable on a more permanent basis, and the will cannot play such a role (see 2003: 215). Therefore, at least in principle, Schopenhauer cannot entirely rule out the claim that the essence of the world is something like God. Gonzalez also points to the possibility of attaining an experience of “relative nothingness” after the negation or denial of the individual as suggesting that there may be more to the essence of the world than what appears to us as will. Schopenhauer makes this link himself when he argues that the will that has negated itself “has stepped entirely out of the phenomenon and for our knowledge, that is to say in contrast to the world of phenomena, has passed over into empty nothingness. If the will were absolutely the thing-in-itself, this nothingness would be absolute instead of being just a relative nothingness as I have described it” (MR 3:41). Were there nothing other than the will cognized as it appears to us, then the individual who had negated the will would experience absolutely nothing. However, we can see that such an individual has achieved some state of bliss, which has been called “ecstasy, rapture, enlightenment, unity with God etc.” (SW 2:485/WWR 1:438), and shows that there must be more to the essence of the world than that revealed through reflection on our own acts of will. We find the suggestion, through the examples of such enlightened people, that there is light as well as darkness in the essence of the world, and Gonzalez argues that this dimension of Schopenhauer’s philosophy therefore contains “a tacit admission that the pristine noumenon has an ulterior reality other than the one that appears in time” (1992: 317) that could leave conceptual room open for theism within his thought. It is certainly the case that, given the epistemic limits laid down by Schopenhauer, there is some conceptual space for the existence of a God in his metaphysics of will. However, it must be said that this space is rather small, given the characterization of the world we are presented with. At the very most, Schopenhauer’s God would be a very distant one indeed. Even given the possibility of the deleterious effects of sin on the world, the theist is committed to there being at least some glimmer of goodness in creation, and this is something that Schopenhauer’s philosophy rules out. It is not just that the world is filled with pain and suffering; it is that things are so bad that it would be better for us to have never existed. Such a view is fundamentally contradictory to the theist notion that our being created by God was good for us. Schopenhauer recognizes the fundamental tension that would arise if one attempted to fuse theism with his view of the world, given the impossibility of seeing the phenomenal realm as a creation of an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God: But generally what screams too loudly against such a view of the world as the successful work of an omniscient, all-benevolent and at the same time omnipotent being 309

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is the misery of which it is full, on the one hand, and on the other hand the obvious imperfection and even burlesque distortion of its most perfect of phenomena, the human. Here lies an irreconcilable dissonance. (SW 6:320/PP 2:271) Once his pessimistic view of the world is accepted, Schopenhauer finds it impossible to imagine that one could also hold that nature is the creation of God, and so the “room for God” in his philosophy must be said to be vanishingly small.

Bibliography Berman, D., 2014. “Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Atheism”. In: D. Leeming, ed., Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion, 2nd ed. Boston: Springer, pp.1610–1611. Cartwright, D., 1988. “Schopenhauer on Suffering, Death, Guilt, and the Consolation of Metaphysics”. In E. v. d. Luft, ed., Schopenhauer: New Essays in Honor of His 200th Birthday. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, pp.55–66. Gonzales, R., 1992.  An Approach to the Sacred in the Thought of Schopenhauer. San Francisco: Mellen Research University Press. Head, J., 2021. Schopenhauer and the Nature of Philosophy. Lanham: Lexington Books. Kant, I., 1996. Practical Philosophy. Ed. M. Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mannion, G., 2003. Schopenhauer, Religion, and Morality: The Humble Path to Ethics. Aldershot: Ashgate. Nietzsche, F., 2001. The Gay Science. Ed. B. Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ray, M., 2003. Subjectivity and Irreligion: Atheism and Agnosticism in Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Aldershot: Ashgate. Vanden Auweele, D., 2014. “Schopenhauer on Religious Pessimism”. International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 78(1), pp.53–71.

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22 WAYS TO SALVATION On Schopenhauer’s Theory of Self-negation and Salvation Mathijs Peters

22.1  A Single Thought Schopenhauer famously opens the Preface to the first edition of The World as Will and Representation with the claim that his magnum opus ‘aims to convey a single thought’ (SW 2:VII/WWR 1:5; see also SW 4:142/WN 442; Janaway 2010, xii–xiii). He explains this idea as follows: ‘A single thought, […], however comprehensive it might be, must preserve the most perfect unity. If it is divided up in order to be communicated, the various parts must still be organically coherent … .’ (SW 2:VIII/WWR 1:5). This chapter concerns one of the most intriguing ‘parts’ into which Schopenhauer’s ‘single thought’ has been divided up: his soteriology, which revolves around two so-called ‘ways to salvation’ (SW 3:729/WWR 2:650). Together with his moral philosophy, Schopenhauer discusses this part in the last of the four books that make up The World as Will and Representation, characterizing this book as ‘the most important’ and ‘most serious’ (SW 3:529/WWR 2:480) of the four. Many scholars have noted, however, that this part contradicts various key arguments on which Schopenhauer’s philosophy rests as a whole, which would undermine the claim that he develops ‘a single thought’ (see for example Cartwright 1999, 253; Janaway 1987, 284–5). After a discussion of the various ways to salvation that Schopenhauer describes, as well as of this state itself, I focus in this chapter on these problematic aspects and end with my own reading of his soteriology.

22.2  Complete Will-less-ness It is impossible to understand Schopenhauer’s discussion of ways of salvation without embedding these ways in his metaphysical system and his pessimism. As outlined in other chapters in this collection, the former revolves around a fundamental difference between an ‘ideal’ empirical reality that Schopenhauer calls the world-as-representation, and a metaphysical world ‘beyond’ or ‘beneath’ this reality that he names the world-as-will. As manifestations of this will, he observes, our lives are filled with experiences of unsatisfied longings and cravings and therefore, in his view, with suffering and pain (SW 3:664/WWR 2:594 ff.). This idea, in turn, forms one of the pillars of his pessimism, which is discussed

DOI: 10.4324/9781003048992-26

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in more detail in other chapters as well. Let me therefore summarize his pessimism with three of his characteristic claims. The first is the following: ‘There is only one innate error, and it is that we exist to be happy. It is innate in us because it coincides with our existence itself …’ (SW 3:729/WWR 2:650). The second is his statement that the human individual is ‘something that should not at all exist’ and is ‘wrong’ (SW 6:322/PP 2:274). The third goes as follows: ‘Life is deeply submerged in suffering and cannot escape it: we enter into life in tears, its course is basically always tragic, and the exit from it, even more so’ (SW 3:732/WWR 2:651–2). These three claims seem to indicate that, according to Schopenhauer, it is impossible for human beings to constitute any kind of long-lasting relief. After all, they suggest that we are thrown, to use an existentialist phrase, into an existence plagued by inescapable and endless desiring and suffering – in fact, he writes that ‘distress’ is ‘essential to life’ (SW 6:309/PP 2:309). However, it is precisely in light of these deeply pessimistic observations that Schopenhauer develops his soteriology. Below, I will discuss the two ‘ways to salvation’ that he describes in this context, but first I want to provide a general idea of what salvation, according to Schopenhauer, entails. It is important to note firstly that his characterization of humans as manifestations of an endless and overpowering form of striving that cannot be satisfied and that causes suffering, suggests that these ways to salvation, in some way or another, need to result in a situation in which the will ‘inside’ of us is quietened, denied or even overcome. Indeed, at several places Schopenhauer describes salvation as revolving around a state of ‘complete will-lessness’ (SW 2:448/WWR 1:406) and emphasizes the radical character of the process leading up to this state as follows: ‘we need a complete reconfiguration of our meaning and essence, i.e. a rebirth that results in redemption’ (SW 3:693/WWR 2:619). And somewhere else: ‘salvation is something entirely alien to our person, and it points to the fact that salvation requires us to negate and abolish precisely this person’ (SW 2:482/WWR 1:435). That this ‘complete reconfiguration’ revolves around a denial of the will is made even clearer by Schopenhauer’s rejection of suicide: even though the decision to kill oneself would seem to present us with a way of escaping a life of misery and suffering, he argues that someone who wants to commit suicide still ‘wills life’ and therefore still affirms the will as manifested in themselves (SW 2:471–2/WWR 1:425–6). A suicidal person, this means, is ‘just’ not happy with the specific conditions under which they live, and would have wanted to continue living if these conditions had been different and if they had therefore been able to satisfy their desires. Such a person, in other words, still lives with and in the illusion that happiness can be found (SW 6:328–9/PP 2:279). This latter observation brings me to a second aspect of Schopenhauer’s soteriology: salvation is also related to the development of a form of cognition, awareness or recognition of the fact that we are mere individual manifestations of a more essential metaphysical will, and that it is this condition that causes our suffering. In this context, he refers several times to various theories, worldviews and religions that, according to him, emphasize the idea that we need to open our eyes to an essential truth, obscured by the illusory reality in which we live as individuals. Schopenhauer frequently praises Plato, for example (SW 2:496/WWR 1:445–6; SW 6:332/PP 2:282), for substantiating his own claim that ‘nature is only the image, the shadow of our will’ (SW 3:694/WWR 2:605).1 He also finds helpful observations in the Upanishads, often citing rather mystical formulations to describe the idea that the world we take for reality is, in fact, a mere illusion (SW 2:496/WWR 1:446). In this context, Schopenhauer frequently employs the phrase ‘veil of maya’ (SW 2:299/WWR 312

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1:280) to refer to our earthly existence and furthermore praises, among others, forms of Buddhism, Brahmanism, Sufism and the esoteric writings of Meister Eckhart (see for example SW 3:693–4/WWR 2:619–20).

22.3  Two Ways to Salvation Let me now focus on the two ways that Schopenhauer describes as resulting in this state of ‘complete will-lessness’. The first overlaps with his moral philosophy, which, as discussed in other chapters in this volume, revolves around the idea that incentives that he characterizes as ‘moral’ are categorically opposed to those that are ‘egotist’. The latter flow from the, in his view, false and illusory belief that every individual is a separate being and solely responsible for their own well-being: they flow, in other words, from a perception of the world that is ruled by the principium individuationis, and they contribute to human beings making this world a ‘hell’ for each other (SW 6:319/PP 2:270).2 On the other hand, the experience of Mitleid, which refers to ‘mit-leiden’ or ‘suffering with’ (see Constâncio 2017, 430) and is sometimes translated as ‘compassion’ and sometimes as ‘sympathy’,3 relates to the world ‘beyond’ the principium individuationis. This is the case, in his view, because it is based on the experience of a ‘oneness’ with other suffering creatures – both human and animal (see SW 2:440/WWR 1:399) – that is possible because, essentially, we all are manifestations of the same, essentially undivided will. Schopenhauer writes: ‘sympathy is to be defined as the empirical emergence of metaphysical identity of the will through the physical multiplicity of its appearances’ (SW 3:691–2/WWR 2:617). Mitleid, in other words, to some extent transcends the boundaries that exist ‘in’ the world-as-representation between individual beings, making the will burst through our individuation and making it possible for one individual to feel ‘with’ the suffering of another individual (SW 4:211/BM 203). This is where the above-mentioned cognition comes into play: since the world-as-representation is an illusion or a ‘veil’, according to Schopenhauer, the experience of Mitleid presents us with a moment during which we, to some extent, pierce through this illusion and are provided with a glimpse of the true nature of the world. Mitleid might therefore result in the development of awareness or cognition of this illusory nature. Indeed, he even characterizes virtue as ‘practical mysticism’ because ‘it springs in the end from the same knowledge that makes up the essence of all true mysticism and is truly explicable in no other manner’ (SW 4:273/BM 255; see also Came 2012, 245). This ‘recognition of the whole, of the essence of things in themselves’, he goes on, may then become ‘the tranquilizer of all and every willing’ (SW 2:448/WWR 1:405) and eventually result in will-less-ness. This ‘tranquilizer’ may take different forms: an important part of Schopenhauer’s discussion of the first way to salvation concern asceticism, which he links to practices revolving around ‘complete chastity’ (SW 2:459/WWR 1:415), ‘voluntary and intentional poverty’ (SW 2:451/WWR 1:408), and even the welcoming of ‘every bit of suffering that comes to [one] from the outside’ (SW 2:451/WWR 1:408). Again, this way to salvation concerns a denial of will, because it directly thwarts this will as it is manifested in the body. In Schopenhauer’s own words: ‘As he mortifies the will itself, he also mortifies its manifestation, its objecthood, the body’ (SW 2:451/WWR 1:409). Again, furthermore, Schopenhauer frequently refers to religious saints and mystics found in Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism and other religions and traditions to illustrate this aspect of the first way to salvation (SW 2:452/WWR 1:409). 313

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At several places, he indicates that asceticism often follows the experience of Mitleid: those who have, through Mitleid, taken up the suffering of the world as their own, he suggests, will gradually work towards a state of salvation by voluntarily and actively inflicting suffering on their own bodies. He describes the relation between these ways as the ‘transition from virtue to asceticism’ (SW 2:449/WWR 1:407) and writes about the practitioner of asceticism: ‘he is no longer satisfied with loving others as himself and doing as much for them as for himself […]. Accordingly, he renounces the essence that appears in himself and is already expressed through his body’ (SW 2:449/WWR 1:407). Suffering also plays a crucial role in the second way to salvation, or ‘δευτερος πλους’ (‘second voyage’, see SW 3:724/WWR 2:645 n.), described by Schopenhauer. This time, however, it concerns suffering that is directly and personally experienced, caused by our existence as manifestations of will. Characterizing suffering together with knowledge, as a ‘school’ (SW 6:340/PP 2:289), he writes in this context: ‘suffering is in fact the cleansing process through which alone, in most cases, a human being is saved, i.e. led back from the false path of the will to life’ (SW 3:731/WWR 2:652). This reference to ‘most cases’ is crucial, since it indicates a normative distinction between the first and the second ways to salvation. As Schopenhauer states after descriptions of individual suffering in the second volume of The World as Will and Representation: All these considerations provide a more precise explanation for what […] was designated with the phrase ‘second way’, i.e. cleansing, turning of the will, and redemption brought about by the suffering of life. This is without a doubt the most frequent path. For it is the path of the sinner, and that is what we all are. The other path reaches the same destination by cognition alone and hence by making the suffering of the whole world one’s own; it is the narrow road of the elect, the saints, and should therefore be seen as a rare exception. (SW 3:734/WWR 2:654) Both ways to salvation that Schopenhauer describes, in other words, revolve around suffering. The first one revolves around a form of awareness brought about by the suffering of others, sometimes even leading to the suffering of oneself as caused by the practice of asceticism. The second way also consists of personal suffering, but this time it is not instigated by ‘cognition alone’ but it is the result of one’s existence as a manifestation of will.

22.4  Denial and Affirmation Now that I have described the two ways to salvation that can be discerned in the fourth book of The World as Will and Representation, I want to explore Schopenhauer’s references to the state of salvation itself in more detail. This also brings me to the above-mentioned contradictions, since it is in the different descriptions of the state of salvation that, according to many commentators, we find claims and arguments that conflict not only with each other but also with the other ‘parts’ that would together shape Schopenhauer’s ‘single thought’. These conflicts mainly concern two interrelated issues: the role of will and the role of cognition. Let me first focus on the issue of will by dividing it into three ‘sub-problems’. These problems all revolve around the observation that there seems to be no way ‘around’ will as the metaphysical kernel of the universe, problematizing Schopenhauer’s references to ‘com314

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plete will-less-ness’. The first is caused by the observation that Schopenhauer, as we have seen above, seems to suggest that the state of salvation is reached once one has completely denied the will. In the first volume of The World as Will and Representation, we indeed find the following characterization of a ‘he’ who has reached salvation: ‘Nothing can worry him anymore, nothing more can excite him, because he has cut all the thousands of threads of willing that keep us bound to the world and which, in the form of desires, fears, envy and anger, drag us back and forth amid constant pain’ (SW 2:462/WWR 1:417). A question that immediately rises in the attentive reader of these passages, of course, is how one can turn against or even disconnect oneself from something that, Schopenhauer also states throughout his works, makes up anything and everything that exists. The second, slightly different but related sub-problem concerns the ‘voluntarily’ and ‘deliberate’ aspects of asceticism: how can one will not to will if our minds are determined by the same will that would be denied? As Bryan Magee puts this in his study of Schopenhauer’s life and work: ‘there is simply no way in which we can be the decisive agents in the denial of our own willing’ (1997, 242; see also Came 2012, 245–6; Jacquette 1999, 312). The only way in which Schopenhauer seems to be able to claim that one can will not to will seems to be (1) by postulating that there is some ‘part’ of will that remains and that, in some way or another, wills its own denial or, at least, the denial of a large part of itself; and/or (2) by postulating that the denial of the will is not based on an act of volition. The latter idea seems to be suggested by the many passages in which Schopenhauer describes self-denial as something that is beyond the control of the subject, since it revolves around the will denying itself. He writes, for example, in a passage on grace: [T]he self-abolition of the will begins with cognition, but cognition and insight as such are independent of free choice; consequently, that negation of the will, that entrance into freedom cannot be forced by any intention or resolution, but rather emerges from the innermost relation of cognition to willing in human beings, and thus arrives suddenly, as if flying in from outside. (SW 2:478–9/WWR 1:432)4 A passage like this seems to indicate that it is not a person, individual or self that turns against the will because this person has autonomously decided to do so, but that it is the will itself denying its own nature ‘in’ this person, individual or self. These descriptions would, to some extent, explain why self-denial ‘happens’ to people without their own involvement, but they still leave the question unanswered of how the will can will not to will. A third sub-problem is discussed by Janaway (2016), in which he observes that, at several places, Schopenhauer refers to salvation as the summum bonum – the highest good. This is a problem, Janaway writes, since Schopenhauer also argues, as described somewhere else in this volume, that ‘goodness’ refers to that which lies in line with will and ‘badness’ to that which thwarts it (2016, 650, 654). This suggests, Janaway observes, that salvation can only be characterized as the summum bonum if it, in some way or another, affirms the will instead of denying it (2016, 663). Again, there seems to be no way around will.

22.5  Forms of Cognition The second confusing aspect of Schopenhauer’s descriptions of salvation concerns the role played by forms of cognition, which I want to split up into two sub-problems. The first 315

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arises because Schopenhauer at some places seems to indicate that cognition mainly plays an instrumental role on the path to salvation, but at other places also suggests that salvation consists of a state of ‘cognizing’ itself. This does not have to be a problem, since the two do not necessarily exclude each other, but it does become problematic once we link this first sub-problem to the second one. But let me first discuss the different ways in which Schopenhauer refers to cognition as both instrument and goal. In the passage on Mitleid that I cited above, he refers to recognition ‘of the inner nature of the thing-in-itself’ as becoming ‘the tranquilizer of all and every willing’. This could imply that the state of salvation is different from this recognition, which means that recognition itself is merely part of the process of quieting the will; of the way to salvation. At the same time, certain passages in Schopenhauer’s works also suggest that cognition itself constitutes the state of salvation, or that a form of cognition or awareness at least accompanies this state. In the first volume of The World as Will and Representation, for example, he writes the following about the condition of someone who has denied the will: ‘Only cognition remains; the will has vanished’ (SW 2:486/WWR 1:439). This, of course, raises several questions, related to the first two above-mentioned ‘sub-problems’ concerning will: how can cognition ‘disconnect’ itself from will if Schopenhauer also claims that it is a mere tool or ‘organ’ of will (SW 6:332/PP 2:282; SW 3:267–8/WWR 2:249; see also Mannion 2003, 272)? And what or who ‘has’ this cognition – cognizes – once the will has ‘vanished’? An indication can be found in the third book of The World as Will and Representation, in which Schopenhauer discusses aesthetic experience. The details of his aesthetic theory, which revolves around his own interpretation of Platonic Ideas, have been explained in other chapters in this volume and I will therefore not repeat them here. What is important for my analysis, is that Schopenhauer understands the experience of beautiful works of art as consisting of a brief and momentary form of will-less-ness that is accompanied by a cognition of the pure Ideas represented, according to him, by works of art. When we ‘view’ these Ideas, which do not stir the will ‘inside’ of us or are related to it, Schopenhauer argues, we come to experience a form of will-less-ness (see Janaway 1989, 298). This experience, therefore, forms a model, as it were, of long-lasting salvation. Indeed, Schopenhauer describes the links between aesthetic experience and the two above-discussed ways of salvation as follows, again emphasizing the important role that cognition plays not in reaching this state but in this state itself: We may recall from the Third Book that the aesthetic pleasure in the beautiful largely consists in the fact that we have entered into a state of pure contemplation, momentarily suppressing all willing, i.e. all desires and concerns. […] We can gather from this how blissful life must be for someone whose will is not merely momentarily placated, as it is in the pleasure of the beautiful, but calmed forever, indeed extinguished entirely […]. Such a person who, after many bitter struggles with his own nature, has ultimately prevailed completely, remains as only a pure, cognizing being, as an untarnished mirror of the world. (SW 2:461–2/WWR 1:417) In this state, Schopenhauer writes on the same page, the subject becomes the ‘eternal subject of cognition’, and observes: ‘Life and its forms merely glide before him, like a fleeting appearance’ (SW 2:462/WWR 1:417). If we understand this experience as a ‘model’ for sal316

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vation, then Schopenhauer again seems to suggest that some form of cognition forms part of the experience of salvation, and is not (only) a way of reaching salvation. The unclarity of the relation between cognition and salvation rises as well because of the second sub-problem that I want to discuss in this context. This problem is caused by the idea, which we can also find in Schopenhauer’s works, that it is impossible to grasp what salvation entails because it lies beyond the conditions under which we can develop cognition at all. In a footnote, for example, he observes that since ‘normally’ cognition is in service of the will, the ‘mystics of every religion’ describe conditions in which ‘all and every cognition comes to a complete halt, together with its basic subject-object form’ (SW 3:703/WWR 2:626). Somewhere else, he argues that after its denial the will does not ‘produce’ intellect anymore, which again suggests that we cannot know (let alone describe) what happens after this denial (SW 6:332/PP 2:282). At these places, he therefore claims that this state can only be alluded to negatively, as a ‘transition into an empty nothing’ (SW 2:484/WWR 1:409). Schopenhauer links this idea to observations on the limits of our intellect as a ‘mere tool of the will’ that keeps ‘bumping up against unsolvable problems as against the walls of our prison’ (SW 3:737–8/WWR 2: 658).5 He concludes: ‘when my teaching reaches its highest point, it assumes a negative character, and thus ends with a negation,’ adding: ‘this is precisely where the mystic proceeds positively; from this point onwards, nothing remains but mysticism’ (SW 3:703/WWR 2:626–7).

22.6  Two Forms of Will The two previous sections, I hope, indicate that Schopenhauer seems to fragment his ‘single thought’ into several contradicting claims that make it difficult to understand them as ‘organically’ forming one whole. He does this by suggesting that, on the one hand, salvation forms a summum bonum and that we cannot escape our essence as will, and on the other hand by stating that it is formed by one’s denial of will, the latter of which would imply that it is possible for the will – which makes up everything that exists – not to will. Furthermore, he also does this by claiming that, on the one hand, cognition is an instrument on the path to salvation and, on the other, that it constitutes salvation itself. Lastly, at some places he indicates that salvation cannot be grasped or described at all, since the cognizing subject ceases to exist once it has reached true salvation. It is not entirely clear to what extent Schopenhauer is aware of these contradictions. His references to a ‘single thought’, after all, suggest that his soteriology would form one organic part of this thought as well. Indeed, he writes that the different ways to salvation that he describes, including ones that revolve around a form of cognition about the nature of the universe, are so closely related that they eventually come to be entwined, whether the person following these ways wants this or not: Quietism (i.e., the cessation of all willing), asceticism, (i.e. the intentional extirpation [ertödtung] of one’s own will) and mysticism (i.e., consciousness of the identity of one’s own inner being with that of all things, or the kernel of the world) stand in the closest of connections, so that someone professing one of them will gradually be led to adopt the other as well, even against his principles. (SW 3:704/WWR 2:628)6 At other places, however, Schopenhauer clearly indicates that his philosophy contains contradictions, but justifies this by linking them to his above-mentioned observations on the 317

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limits of philosophical thought. He writes, for example, in the second volume of The World as Will and Representation: I have never been rash enough to claim that my philosophy leaves no questions unanswered. Philosophy in this sense is really impossible: it would be a doctrine of omniscience. But ‘it is right to go to the limit if there is no further path’ [est quadam prodire tenus, si non datur ultra]: and there is a limit; reflection presses on to it, and can illuminate the night of our existence this far, even though the horizon always remains dark. I reach this limit with my doctrine of the will to life that affirms or negates itself in its own appearance. But to want to go further than this is, in my view, like wanting to fly out of the atmosphere. We must stay within the atmosphere, although new problems arise from ones that have been solved. (SW 3:679/WWR 2:606–7) Schopenhauer, in other words, seems to acknowledge here that there are problems with his soteriology, but at the same time suggests that this will happen to any philosophy that tries to solve the riddle of existence. Perhaps, it could therefore even be argued that Schopenhauer’s many references to examples of saints and mystics denying the will and reaching salvation should be understood as driven by the deliberate attempt to confront his theory with a praxis that refuses to completely bow down to this same theory, preserving the riddle of existence and forcing theoretical reflection to acknowledge its limitations. However, this idea still does not solve the question of how, precisely, we should understand the tension between Schopenhauer’s references to denying and being will, or the issue of how and why a denial of will can be and is characterized as the summum bonum. Of course, it could be argued that Schopenhauer ‘simply’ presents us with different understandings of salvation that cannot be unified into one theory, or even that his understanding of salvation contains so many contradictions that this part of his thought, as Magee suggests for example, should be ‘given up’ (1997, 242–3). In the following, however, I want to focus on interpretations that take the idea seriously that Schopenhauer’s philosophy does present one organic whole. I believe that the most convincing of these interpretations revolve around the idea that Schopenhauer, in some way or another, has to postulate the existence of two metaphysical ‘levels’ or ‘dimensions’ beyond the world-as-representation. Several authors have defended versions of this interpretation,7 but I will only focus on the one developed by Christopher Janaway, since I find it the most consistent. In the above-mentioned article on the riddle presented by Schopenhauer’s characterization of salvation as the summum bonum, Janaway argues that we should understand Schopenhauer as referring to two ‘kinds of willing’ (2016, 662): the first is in some way related to the individual and results in the suffering we experience as individual embodied beings, and the second concerns a desire that turns against this individual form of willing; a desire to escape from suffering. Following the way to salvation, we come to deny the former in the name of the latter, this suggests, and it is with the help of the latter, which Janaway characterizes as a ‘counter-will’ (2016, 664), that this denial can be characterized as the summum bonum. In his introduction to the second volume of The World as Will and Representation, Janaway observes that Schopenhauer himself suggests this as well by stating that his observations on the limits of philosophical thought make it possible to ask the following question: ‘What would I be if I were not the will to life?’ (SW 3:737/WWR 2: 658). Janaway writes: ‘what he has called negation may be 318

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another form of will, but we cannot provide an account, limited as we are by our existence as finite individual beings’ (2018, xxxvi). Janaway (2016) observes, however, that even though Schopenhauer’s employment of the phrase ‘summum bonum’ forces us to postulate these two forms of will, this interpretation still threatens a ‘contradiction at the heart of [Schopenhauer’s] metaphysics’ (2016, 665). This contradiction rises, he writes, because the idea that Schopenhauer would refer to two ‘forms’ of will still conflicts with his rejection of suicide for affirming will (Janaway 2016, 667–8). Furthermore, it still cannot explain, he writes, how and why the metaphysical core of what one is – the individual will – could turn against itself and result in a form of salvation (2016, 665–6). Janaway observes that this issue could, perhaps, be solved by referring to the form of cognition that, as discussed above, Schopenhauer describes at several places.8 This suggestion would revolve around the idea that salvation, for Schopenhauer, eventually comes down to the idea that the person who has denied the will becomes an ‘empty’ onlooker to, or ‘consciousness’ of the universe, comparable to Kant’s ‘unity of apperception’ (see also Janaway 1989, 296). This suggestion lies in line with Janaway’s observation, made in Self and World in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy, that in his early works Schopenhauer continuously refers to a ‘better consciousness’ that would be antithetical to our ‘ordinary empirical consciousness’. Whereas the latter refers to knowledge of a changing spatiotemporal world, the former would come close to a Platonic notion of the soul, and revolve around insight into the kernel of the universe. Even though he does not use this term in his later works, Janaway argues, it continued to play a pivotal role in Schopenhauer’s philosophy, returning in his references to a ‘pure subject of knowledge’ (see Janaway 1989, 273–4). However, as Janaway observes as well, this interpretation again sparks the question how salvation can be the summum bonum, since this ‘consciousness’ or ‘pure subject of knowledge’ would still be removed from will. It seems, therefore, that interpretations of Schopenhauer’s references to salvation either end up in a defense of a will-less form of consciousness or cognition, or in some sort of postulation of a dimension of ‘will’ that is different from the willing that we deny on the path to salvation. Both positions, however, contradict each other.

22.7  A Last Glowing Spark In this last section, I want to substantiate the suggestion, made in different ways by Janaway and others, that in order to make sense of Schopenhauer’s conflicting references to salvation we need to postulate that the German philosopher refers to two ‘kinds’ of will. In addition to Janaway’s approach, which highlights the idea of a disembodied ‘better consciousness’ or ‘pure subject of knowledge’, and which does not explicitly discuss the relationship between corporeality and the coming about of a ‘counter-will’, I want to do this by foregrounding several specific references that Schopenhauer makes to embodiment. The aim of this reading is therefore not to present a new interpretation or to solve the problems discussed above. Instead, my main goal is to foreground the important role that the body plays in Schopenhauer’s philosophy. His descriptions of human beings as embodied subjects, after all, form one of the most intriguing aspects of his thought, making him an intellectual forerunner of the fields of existential phenomenology, embodied cognition and evolutionary biology. A highlighting of Schopenhauer’s references to embodiment, I believe, results in the idea that ways to salvation consist of the following three steps. The first step goes as fol319

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lows: the will, objectified in an individual human body (Schopenhauer defines the body as the will’s ‘objecthood’, see SW 2:451/WWR 1:409), reaches consciousness ‘in’ or ‘through’ this human individual and develops cognition of the fact that it is imprisoned ‘as’ or ‘in’ an object. This cognition is not abstract in nature but should be understood as a ‘waking up’ of the will, which suddenly ‘sees’ its real situation and realizes that its individual existence is an ‘error’ or ‘dream’ that causes suffering. Often (but not always), this goes hand in hand with Mitleid, which makes the will aware of the universal nature of suffering, caused by this ‘error’ and, again, of the actual one-ness of its essence ‘beyond’ the worldas-representation. The step can be substantiated with the help of several passages in which Schopenhauer reflects on the difference between human and non-human animals, observing that whereas both are individual embodied objectivations of will, only the latter has developed a capacity that enables them to reflect on what they are and, therefore, that provides an opportunity for the will to realize what it is and to understand that it is unfree. He characterizes the suffering of non-human animals, for example, as a ‘tormented, fearful will in thousands of forms’ that does not have ‘the freedom to redemption which is conditioned by soundness of mind’ (SW 6:342/PP 2:290). He furthermore observes in a beautiful passage, which resonates with the phrase homo homini lupus, that ‘the hungry wolf sinks its teeth into the flesh of its quarry with all the necessity of a rock falling to earth, and there is no possibility of it recognizing that it is the mauled as well as the mauler’ (SW 2:478/WWR 1:431). He also writes that, in contrast with other creatures, ‘humanity is the only level on which the will can negate itself, turning entirely away from life. While the will fails to negate itself, every birth provides it with a new and different intellect – until it has recognized the true nature of life and as a result wants no more of it’ (SW 3:733/WWR 2:653). This brings me to the second step: once the will has woken up ‘in’ this situation, it starts rebelling against the individualizing mall in which it has been ‘squeezed’ and imprisoned. Again, we can use the metaphor of waking up: the will now tries to stay awake by refusing to fall asleep again. This attempt to stay awake suggests that it is here that the will splits up: this struggle, after all, takes place between a will that has become aware of itself on the one hand, and strivings and cravings that try to pull it back to sleep ‘into’ its individual vessel on the other. Concretely, this means that the former part of will turns away from as many desires and motives that are linked to its existence as an individual being (hunger, thirst, sexual desires, etc.) as possible, even actively thwarting them, for example through forms of asceticism. Descriptions of the transition to this second step can be found in passages in which Schopenhauer states that self-denial concerns the will turning against itself as individual embodied phenomenon and then wanting to distance itself from this phenomenon. He discusses this process as follows by, again, emphasizing the transition from virtue to asceticism and using the metaphor of imprisonment: As we have shown, the moral virtues, that is to say justice and loving kindness, (when pure) from the fact that the will to life sees through the principle of individuation and recognizes itself again in all its appearances; as such, the virtues are in the first place a sign, a symptom that the appearing will is no longer entirely imprisoned in that delusion, but rather that the disillusionment has already begun; so one could say metaphorically it is already beating its wings to fly away. (SW 3:695/WWR 2:621). 320

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This ‘flying away’ should, according to my reading, be understood as the awakened part of will ‘burning up’ as many of the strivings and desires that are rooted in and focused on the individual vessel in which it has woken up as possible. Schopenhauer uses the metaphor of ‘burning up’ in the following passage: [T]he person who will have the least fear of becoming nothing in death is the one who has recognized that he is already nothing, and who therefore does not take any more interest in his individual appearance, since cognition has, as it were, burned and consumed the will in him, so that no will, and thus no craving for individual existence is left in him. (SW 3:699–700/WWR 2:624, my emphasis). This passage is confusing, but I want to argue, partly inspired by Janaway’s interpretation described above, that Schopenhauer suggests here that on the path to salvation the will that has woken up targets and extinguishes individual willing. This then leads to a third and last step: eventually, this process of self-denial goes so far that the will comes extremely close to ‘burning up’ its individualizing prison: the body. Crucial, however, is that this has not yet happened completely in most of the conditions that Schopenhauer describes in several passages on salvation: these conditions, I believe, still circle around a utopian form of salvation that cannot be described and that we might not even reach, which means that they are still located on the brink before complete nothingness. After all, in order to experience the transition to salvation, one still has to have a body and mind, which means that one remains an individual, embodied objectivation of will that still desires complete nothingness. It is here that, I believe, his references to embodiment should be foregrounded. At two places in The World as Will and Representation Schopenhauer describes a condition in which the will has almost been extinguished, referring to the body as still present in the form of what he calls a ‘trace’ (Spur) or ‘spark’ (Funke).9 The first of these is part of a passage cited above, and again emphasizes cognition: [H]ow blissful life must be for someone whose will is not merely momentarily placated, as it is in the pleasure of the beautiful, but calmed forever, indeed extinguished entirely except for the last glowing spark that sustains the body and is extinguished along with it. (SW 2:461/WWR 1:417, my emphasis) In the second passage, Schopenhauer describes ‘those who have overcome the world’ as people ‘in whom the will, achieving full self-cognition rediscovers itself in everything and then freely negates itself, and which then only needs to wait for the last trace of the will to disappear along with the body that it animates’ (SW 2:486/WWR 1:438, my emphasis) These two passages suggest, I believe, that the consciousness or cognition that many commentators link to the state of salvation still has a material dimension: Schopenhauer describes conditions in which the body, as objectivation of will, has been denied right until the moment it is extinguished. However, this body, including the self that is this body, still exists, otherwise there would be no such thing as a self experiencing this form of peacefulness and this form of cognition. The contemplation of beautiful artworks, I want to argue, presents us with a ‘preview’ of this situation (in a similar vein, Came [2012, 35] calls it a 321

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‘signpost’): during this contemplation, individual willing disappears for a brief moment. Still, however, it must be accompanied by the body, since otherwise it would not be able to perceive a work of art at all or to be ‘touched’ by it. Still, in other words, a shred of embodiment remains. This means that, according to this reading, the condition that Schopenhauer describes in most passages on salvation revolves around an in-between moment on the border between existence and nothingness, balancing on the line between the material and the ‘post-material’, as it were floating in a liminal space between individual willing and an indescribable ‘something else’. This might explain why this condition is still characterized by a last trace of longing; a longing for a nothingness. And it is in light of this longing, which permeates the last trace of embodiment on the border with nothingness, that salvation appears as the summum bonum: a highest good that is presented as such by a will that longs for nothing else than its own disappearance. It is also this longing, furthermore, that provides the condition that Schopenhauer describes with a utopian element, indicated by the word ‘wait’ in the above-cited passage: in these passages, the will circles around but does not reach a longed-for vacuum, since it still exists as an individual corporeal ‘trace’ or ‘spark’ in the material world. What happens after this liminal moment, when the ‘last glimmering spark’ has truly died out together with the body, I believe, cannot be described within the framework of Schopenhauer’s philosophy. As he writes in a passage in ‘Additional Remarks on the Doctrine of the Affirmation and Negation of the will to life’: Counter to certain silly objections I maintain that the negation of the will to life in no way signifies the annihilation of a substance, but the mere act of not-willing; the same thing that willed hitherto wills no more. Since we know this being, the will, as thing in itself merely in and through the act of willing, we are incapable of saying or grasping what else it is or does after it has given up this act; this is why negation for us, who are the appearance of the will, is a transition to nothingness. (SW 6:331/PP 2:281)10 Again, the passages indicate that it is impossible to know what lies beyond the walls against which his philosophy eventually crashes but over which it wants to leap, driven by a utopian longing for nothingness. The ‘nothingness’ that Schopenhauer here describes, therefore, is still a ‘relative nothingness’ that is linked to a waiting self that is kept alive by a ‘last glowing spark’, imprisoned within its own limited framework of knowledge.

22.8 Conclusion This brings me to the conclusion of my overview of Schopenhauer’s soteriology and of my own reading of this part of his ‘single thought’. My reading, we have seen, mainly substantiates the claim – developed by Janaway and others – that we need to postulate two ‘forms of willing’ to make sense of Schopenhauer’s descriptions of salvation: individual willing on the one hand, and a desire to eradicate this willing on the other, the latter born in the will’s essential freedom beyond the world-as-representation. Indeed, Schopenhauer states: ‘the negation of the will does not follow from suffering with anything like the necessity of an effect from its cause, but rather the will remains free. In fact, this is the only place where its freedom emerges directly into appearance …’ (SW 2:467/WWR 1:422, my emphasis). 322

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I have tried to foreground the idea that an important aspect of Schopenhauer’s thought – his concern with human beings as embodied selves – provides us with additional arguments regarding the coming about of these two levels. It is because the will is born in the prisons of our individual bodies, this reading suggests, that it ‘splits up’ and starts longing for the freedom it has/had beyond the principium individuationis. Self-denial is therefore not an individual act, but it is something that ‘happens’ to a person because the will finds itself imprisoned in that person’s individual body and, through this imprisonment, negatively becomes aware of the freedom it has ‘lost’ and that can not ‘appear’. Before the self dissolves into a nothingness that cannot be described, however, it is still embodied as an individual manifestation of will. In certain passages, furthermore, Schopenhauer himself even seems to claim that it is already in this liminal condition, which comes about because of the tension between will manifested as individual body – and therefore as individual willing – on the one hand, and on the other the essential freedom of the will ‘directly emerging’ ‘in’ this body, that we find glimpses of the state of salvation. Of course, I realize that this reading raises several questions and, as the many interpretations developed by other commentators, also conflicts with several claims that Schopenhauer himself makes throughout his works. Most importantly, my emphasis on corporeality conflicts with Schopenhauer’s own references to a completely immaterial and ‘pure’ form of cognition. Again, my reading therefore mainly perpetuates the problems already discussed above instead of solving them. However, solving these contradictions and conflicts in a completely satisfying manner might be impossible, I believe, and perhaps this is Schopenhauer’s own way of negating our thirst for knowledge; our will to cognition. Nevertheless, I hope that my reading emphasizes an, in my view, crucial aspect of his thought: his concern with corporeality, which makes Schopenhauer’s philosophy the crossing point of several theoretical and intellectual traditions of the time in which he lived: German idealism, a proto-Darwinian naturalism, a Spinozistic embodied materialism, and forms of Western and Eastern mysticism. Even though his soteriology contains several contradictions, I want to conclude with the observation that it is also precisely in struggling with this part of his theory that we come to reflect on the riddles of our existence as human, embodied animals, as well as on the limits of our thought. And these struggles still make Schopenhauer into one of the most intriguing and inspiring philosophers of the nineteenth century.

Notes 1 Using a fitting phrase, Janaway describes Schopenhauer’s philosophy as ‘Platonism turned sour’ (1989, 274). 2 In this context Schopenhauer refers favorably to Hobbes’s phrase that homo homini lupus: ‘man is a wolf to man’ (SW 2:175/WWR 1:172; SW 3:683/WWR 2:610). 3 On the different meanings of ‘compassion’ and ‘sympathy’, see Mannion 2003, 200–1. I will use the word Mitleid in this chapter. 4 Both Came (2012, 246) and Janaway (2016, 652) analyze this passage in their discussions of Schopenhauer’s understanding of salvation. 5 For a comparison with Wittgenstein’s ladder-metaphor in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, see Hannan 2009, 141. 6 I have slightly changed this translation by adding two parentheses (after ‘willing’ and ‘asceticism’) to come closer to the original German. 7 Gerard Mannion, for example, argues that ‘behind’ the will that forms the origin of our suffering, there must be a true ‘in-itself’ that is ‘analogous to theistic interpretations of ultimate reality and the ground of existence’ (2003, 237). Julian Young, in turn, argues that to make sense of

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Mathijs Peters Schopenhauer’s references to salvation the ‘thing-in-itself’ must be understood as lying beyond the will, the latter presenting merely a concept used by Schopenhauer to explain phenomena in nature (see Young 1987, 77). Atwell offers a slightly different interpretation, which revolves around the idea that the will, as discussed by Schopenhauer, forms the ‘thing in itself as appearance’ (1995, 127). Salvation, in his view, eventually revolves around the will becoming one with itself, beyond the individual willing in the form of which we know the will (see Atwell 1995, 172). This interpretation partly forms a response to Patrick Gardiner’s claim that Schopenhauer presents two forms of mystical awareness, one revolving around insight into our ‘true’ nature’, the other around a much deeper and ungraspable essence (see Gardiner 1963, 299). 8 Janaway (2016, 666) observes that this has been suggested by Rudolf Malter (1991). 9 Atwell (1995, 160) refers to this trace as well. 10 On the similarities and differences between Schopenhauer and Nietzsche’s observations on this will to nothingness, see Constâncio 2017. On Nietzsche’s related critique on Schopenhauer’s ethics, see Mannion 2003, 204–6.

Bibliography Atwell, J.E. (1995) Schopenhauer on the Character of the World: The Metaphysics of Will. Berkeley: University of California Press. Came, D. (2012) ‘Schopenhauer and the Metaphysics of Art and Morality’ in B. Vandenabeele (ed.) A Companion to Schopenhauer. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 237–48. Cartwright, D.E. (1999) ‘Schopenhauer’s Narrower Sense of Morality’ in C. Janaway (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 252–92. Constâncio, J. (2017) ‘Nietzsche and Schopenhauer: On Nihilism and the Ascetic “Will to Nothingness”’ in S. Shapshay (ed.) The Palgrave Schopenhauer Handbook. London: Palgrave, pp. 425–46. Gardiner, P. (1963) Schopenhauer. Baltimore: Penguin Books. Hannan, B. (2009) The Riddle of the World: A Reconsideration of Schopenhauer’s Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jacquette, D. (1999) ‘Schopenhauer on Death’ in C. Janaway (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 293–317. Janaway, C. (1989) Self and World in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Janaway, C. (2010) ‘Introduction’ in A Schopenhauer (ed.) The World as Will and Representation Volume 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. xii–xlvi. Janaway, C. (2016) ‘What’s So Good about Negation of the Will?: Schopenhauer and the Problem of the Summum Bonum’ in Journal of the History of Philosophy, Volume 54, Number 4, October 2016, pp. 649–69. Janaway, C. (2018) ‘Introduction’ in A. Schopenhauer (ed.), The World as Will and Representation Volume 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. xiii–xxxvi. Magee, B. (1997) The Philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Malter, R. (1991) Arthur Schopenhauer: Transzendentalphilosophie und Metaphysik des Willens. Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboogs. Mannion, G. (2003) Schopenhauer, Religion and Morality: The Humble Path to Ethics. Hants: Ashgate. Vandenabeele, B. (2012) ‘Introduction: Arthur Schopenhauer: The Man and His Work’ in B. Vandenabeele (ed.) A Companion to Schopenhauer. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 1–8. Young, J. (1987) Willing and Unwilling: A Study in the Philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers.

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PART 4

Before Schopenhauer

23 PHILOSOPHY CONTRA HISTORY? Schopenhauer on the History of Philosophy Sabine Roehr

Schopenhauer is not usually thought to accord much philosophical importance to the historiography of philosophy. It is rather his contemporary, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, born barely a generation before him, whose philosophical approach to the history of philosophy dominated the first half of the nineteenth century. But in fact, Schopenhauer included two essays dedicated to the history of philosophy—Sketch of a History of the Doctrine of the Ideal and the Real and Fragments for the History of Philosophy—in the first volume of Parerga and Paralipomena. This work, published in 1851 together with a second volume, decades after his magnum opus, The World as Will and Representation, finally brought about the wider reception of his work that he had hoped for all his life. It is curious then that the two abovementioned pieces have not attracted more attention among interpreters of his philosophy. As I will attempt to show here, this might be the result of Schopenhauer’s rather idiosyncratic approach to writing such a history. The two essays differ in important ways with respect to what they attempt to achieve. Sketch of a History of the Doctrine of the Ideal and the Real covers modern philosophy from Descartes to Schopenhauer’s own philosophical system. Its focus is on the philosophical problem of the ideal and the real, of the subjective and the objective in cognition. Fragments for the History of Philosophy goes back to western philosophy’s ancient Greek beginnings in the Presocratics and again ends with brief remarks on his own philosophy. Neither text addresses the purpose of the history of philosophy in any systematic fashion, although Schopenhauer starts Fragments with a witty analogy, characterizing the act of reading it as “letting somebody else chew our food” (SW 5:35/PP 1:31). Indeed, it is hard to see why anybody would read such works of history when the original writings of the philosophers are, for the most part, readily available. But why then does he bother to write such a history himself? In the case of Sketch, Schopenhauer’s motivation may be obvious. Based on his conviction that the problem of the ideal and the real is the “primordial philosophical problem” (SW 5:4/PP 1:8), he outlines its treatment from Descartes, whom he credits with first fully recognizing it, through Malebranche, Leibniz, Spinoza, Berkeley, to Locke, and, in a very cursory way, to Hume and Kant, before concluding with a, again very short, presentation of his own answer, identifying the ideal with representation and the real with the will. In DOI: 10.4324/9781003048992-28

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an appendix, Schopenhauer justifies his omission of the foremost idealist thinkers of his time—Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, and Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel—going so far as to deny them the title of philosophers, instead calling them “sophists.” His motivation, thus, is in part polemical: to show that he himself has solved the problem of the ideal and the real and those three have not. In contrast, Fragments has a more extensive scope, covering the period from the Presocratics to Schopenhauer’s own philosophy. In the first, shorter part of the essay, he covers, after the Presocratics, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, the Neoplatonists, the Gnostics, Scotus Erigena, Scholasticism, and Francis Bacon. Fragments is also more extensive in that it discusses a wider range of philosophical problems. However, it is obvious that Schopenhauer throughout picks problems that interest him from the perspective of his own philosophical system. He starts the chapter on the Presocratics with remarks on the distinction between phenomena and noumena as found in the Eleatic philosophers and further elaborated by Parmenides, who anticipates Kant’s and his own transcendental distinction between appearance and thing in itself. He commends Empedocles for replacing the role of the mind in ordering the world with that of the will and for his “resolute pessimism” in recognizing “the misery of our existence,” which he then links to the “original wisdom … of Brahmanism and Buddhism” (SW 5:37–40/PP 1:32–35). And he points out the insight of ancient philosophers such as Anaximenes, Empedocles, and Democritus into the origin of the universe, which was in modern times confirmed and further elaborated by Kant and Laplace (SW 5:41/PP 1:36). The second, longer part, on “The philosophy of the moderns,” investigates philosophers starting with Descartes based on the idea of a philosophical system, looking for elements in philosophers’ systems of thought that, in his words, “do not balance out,” that, in contrast to correctly solved mathematical problems, leave a “remainder” or, in the language of chemistry, an “insoluble precipitate.” One of his examples of such a “remainder” is the “universal and admirable purposiveness of nature,” which finds no place in materialist systems. Another is the existence of evil in the world, which neither theistic nor pantheistic systems of thought can explain (SW 5:72–73/PP 1:64). Needless to say, he is convinced that his own philosophy does not leave a “remainder” but accounts of the universe in a complete metaphysical system.1 Fragments’ polemical intention is different from that of Sketch, directed for one against those who forgo reading the original philosophical writings for the rehashed accounts of historians of philosophy, and second against the historians themselves, these “parasite[s] of philosophy,” who as “salaried” academics “can scarcely have read a tenth of the writings of which [they] give[] an account” (SW 5:35–36/PP 1:31). In both cases, Schopenhauer’s wrath is evoked by the ignorance of original philosophical writings. In general, Schopenhauer’s complaint against histories of philosophy is that they impede the search for truth, in those who rely on them instead of the original philosophical writings and also in those who churn them out for a living. A sentence from the preface to the second edition of The World as Will and Representation 1 comes to mind, which throws additional light on this point: “But it is a strange fact about philosophical meditations that only what someone has thought through and investigated for himself can later be of use to someone else” (SW 2:xx/WWR 1:14). In other words, providing a history of philosophy can only be useful if it is a product of intense immersion in, and independent evaluation of, original philosophical works.2 As there are scant comments by Schopenhauer on his own practice of the historiography of philosophy, I will start out by looking at his concepts of history and philosophy and the 328

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related concept of truth (I). The second section functions as a brief interlude that describes the “historical turn” that philosophy took with Kant and some of his followers, culminating in Hegel’s philosophy of the history of philosophy (II). Against this background, I investigate Schopenhauer’s own approach to the history of philosophy (III). In conclusion, I briefly discuss his own assessment of the purpose of writing a history of philosophy.

23.1 Given the lack of an explicit conception of the historiography of philosophy in Schopenhauer, it seems useful to start out with his concepts of history and philosophy to see whether they can throw light on the two texts that concern us here. History, as he explains in Chapter 38 of the second volume of The World as Will and Representation, does not rise to the rank of science. History deals with particular facts, which it cannot, like a science, deduce from universal concepts: “It never achieves cognition of the particular by means of the universal but must grasp the particular immediately and thus, as it were, creep forward on the field of experience” (SW 3:502/WWR 2:457). Therefore, it cannot aspire to a system, like the sciences; it deals with particulars, not “concepts, classes and species” (SW 3:503–4/WWR 2:458). History is knowledge, not science. As such, history represents the very opposite of philosophy: To the extent that the subject matter of history is really only ever the particular, the individual fact, and to the extent that it views only these things as real, it is the exact counterpart and opposite of philosophy, which looks at things from the most universal standpoint and is explicitly concerned with the universal that remains identical across all individuals. (SW 3:504/WWR 2:458) Nor can world history be constructed “organically” and interpreted as proceeding according to a “shallow optimism,” as Schopenhauer accuses Hegel of advocating (SW 3:505/WWR 2:459). There is no progress in history; change is only part of the world of phenomena. In the realm of noumena—the will—everything stays eternally the same. The true philosophy of history consists in the insight that throughout all these endless alterations with their chaotic noise, we are only ever faced with the same, identical, unchangeable essence …; the true philosophy should therefore recognize what is identical in all events … the same humanity. … The motto of history in general would have to be: “the same, but in different form” (SW 3:507–8/WWR 2:461).3 As such, the study of history reveals its true value: Although only coming in second after literature in respect of determining the essence of humanity, it provides human beings with the ability to reflect on, become conscious of themselves—history is “the rational self-consciousness of the human race” (SW 3:509/WWR 2:462). Thus, the true value of the study of history is to be found in unveiling a level much deeper than superficial historical facts, namely an unchanging, eternal essence underlying it all. However, this can only be grasped with the help of philosophy, which deals with the universal, with ideas, with absolute truth, and with “finished thoughts abstracted from 329

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life” (SW 6:5/PP 2:9). At the same time, “a true philosophy cannot be spun out of mere abstract concepts, but instead must be grounded in observation and experience, inner as well as outer” (SW 6:9/PP 2:12). Philosophy is concerned with “the essence of human life,” which is “completely present in every present moment” and as such exists “eternally” (SW 3:504/WWR 2:458). It is concerned with truth: “truth alone is for all time” (SW 6:15/PP 2:17). So can philosophy and history—with philosophy being concerned with the unchanging, “what exists eternally,” and history with the “transient,” “what is at one time and is never again to be”—unite in the history of philosophy (SW 3:505/WWR 2:459)? Schopenhauer is pessimistic. “Those who hope to become philosophers by studying the history of philosophy should instead gather from [this history] that philosophers, just as much as poets, are born only, and more rarely at that” (SW 6:8/PP 2:12). An article by Martial Gueroult on the philosophy of the history of philosophy can help shed light on the complex relationship between the two. Gueroult observes that philosophy presents itself as an expression of the truth and as something timeless and eternally valid, since truth is by definition timeless. And on the other hand it arises from the moment one considers the fact that philosophy also presents itself as a series of doctrines succeeding one another in time and swallowing up one another in the completed past. … Hence the problem: how to reconcile the historicity of philosophy with the philosophical truth of all philosophy. (1969: p. 564) Philosophy as a search for timeless truth is itself a phenomenon in time, thus factual, and subject to changes in history, both with respect to different doctrines and changing conceptions of its own “essence.” This is the paradox of a history of philosophy, or, to be more precise, even a conception of philosophy that assumes the existence of eternal truth needs to admit the role of a progression of ideas, with later ones building on earlier ones, and thus introduce the aspect of time into what is claimed to be timeless, because otherwise, it would be incomprehensible that this timeless truth has not always been known. However, this is still different from a notion of philosophical progress in which time itself plays an essential role, as in the idea of temporal stages following upon one another with necessity. How does Schopenhauer solve this paradox? I am going to claim that, on the one hand, he comes down in favor of timeless truth and is distrustful of any role of time as a relevant factor of progress in the history of philosophy, but, on the other, he does think that progress takes place, although not in a chronological manner. To attempt an analogy: If history is the rational self-consciousness of humanity, as quoted above, then the history of philosophy may turn out to be the rational self-consciousness of philosophy, looking for that which stays the same throughout its history, the same, identical, unchangeable truths, which are discovered though only gradually.

23.2 The history of philosophy became a proper part of philosophy itself with Immanuel Kant. What has been called the “historical turn” in philosophy—a concept coined by Karl Ameriks—arguably started with Kant’s critical philosophy.4 In his Critique of Pure Reason, we find the beginnings of the idea of a history of the faculty of reason itself, in the very last 330

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chapter of the “Transcendental Doctrine of Method,” called “The history of pure reason,” whose title, Kant emphasizes, “stands here only to designate a place that is left open in the system and must be filled in the future” (KrV A 852/B 880). Ten years later, in the “Loose Sheets About the Progress in Metaphysics,” he reflects further on “a philosophizing history of philosophy,” noting that “philosophizing is a gradual development of human reason and this cannot proceed, or even begin, in an empirical manner ….” As such, this history is not “historically or empirically possible but rationally, that is, a priori.” A history of philosophy is itself philosophy; it is “philosophical archeology” (AA 20:340f.).5 The post-Kantian philosopher Karl Leonhard Reinhold6 further pursued this project, first in his seminal Letters on the Kantian Philosophy and later in his essay Ueber den Begriff der Geschichte der Philosophie.7 In the Letters, Reinhold introduced the idea of a “need of reason,” interpreting Kant’s critique of reason as responding to the need of the times, as the centuries-long struggle between faith and reason culminated in the pantheism controversy of the first half of the 1780s.8 He also made use of the concept of the “spirit of the times,” which he took over from Johann Gottfried Herder.9 In contrast to the relativism implied by Herder’s historicism, Reinhold pursued a systematic philosophy based on a single principle of consciousness that would rise to the level of a science. This philosophy was to represent the final stage in the development of different philosophical doctrines, providing the capstone to Kant’s critique of reason, which in turn had represented an advancement over previous systems by negotiating the divide between dogmatism and skepticism. Kant’s critique of reason answered the need for moving beyond the deepening chasm between faith and reason, and Reinhold’s own philosophy answered the need for systematically grounding Kant’s critique of reason and popularizing its results.10 In the essay mentioned above, Ueber den Begriff der Geschichte der Philosophie, Reinhold argues that the history of philosophy has its place within the discipline of philosophy as “the presentation of the scope of changes that the science of the necessary relation of things, or the fate that the striving for such a science, has experienced from its origin up until our own times” (2016: p. 109).11 It is therefore intimately connected to his concept of philosophy as a system of rational knowledge, taking its cue from Kant’s “scholastic concept” of philosophy as “the system of all philosophical cognition” (KrV A 838/B 866). Its history provides “the historical grounds [Gründe] for the genesis of every system in the respective state of the human spirit in general, and especially in the individual spirit of its founder” (Reinhold 2016: p. 111). It interprets older philosophies “according to the hitherto unrecognized universally valid principles of reason common to all human beings” (ibid., 117), suggesting that older philosophical systems can only be fully understood from a later, higher standpoint of reason. Following in the footsteps of philosophers such as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Herder, Reinhold conceives of reason itself as a human faculty that evolves historically. However, by combining their historical approaches with Kant’s systematic one, the idea of a rational, a priori history of reason, he creates a systematic conception of the history of philosophy as tracing the teleological progression of reason through the ages.12 In the following decades, the “historical turn” in philosophy evolved in different ways and directions, reaching from popular writings commenting on contemporary political, social, and religious issues—Fichte’s early writings come to mind—to reflections on the nature of the history of philosophy—Schelling’s “Allgemeine Uebersicht der neuesten philosophischen Litteratur” (1797/98), which denies the possibility of a history of philosophy, since it can never be conducted a priori—to Hegel’s contestation of Reinhold’s assessment 331

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of the state of philosophy at the beginning of the nineteenth century in his Differenzschrift, and to the various projects of a history of consciousness. In his attempt to provide a foundation for Reinhold’s principle of consciousness and a deduction of the concept of representation, Fichte reconceived transcendental philosophy as a “history of the human mind,” not an actual history but a systematic, a priori one based on the philosopher’s reflection on the original act of the “I” of positing itself and the additional acts of positing the Not-I, etc. The Wissenschaftslehre (doctrine of science) presents this history, which Fichte initially calls a “pragmatic” one. As Daniel Breazeale explains: Inasmuch as the Wissenschaftslehre contains a complete inventory of all the acts that constitute the system of the human mind, it is not only a “pragmatic” but also a “systematic” history of the same. … this is precisely the goal of Fichte’s pragmatic history: to construct the system of the human mind in the form of a complete description of the series of necessary acts of the same (2001: p. 694).13 This project of a history of self-consciousness culminates in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), which provides a principle for the progressive succession of stages of consciousness and self-consciousness in its “strictly internal, phenomenological critique of forms of apparent knowledge” (Westphal 2019: p. 56). Hegel’s later Lectures on the History of Philosophy are the result of this idea of a history of consciousness, as he applies it to the history of philosophy. Thus, he claims in an address preceding the 1820 Introduction to the Lectures: “Philosophy is rational cognition, the history of its development must itself be rational, the history of philosophy must itself be philosophical” (1986: p. 468).14 The outward, historical development of philosophical thinking is the expression of its inward, logical development. “In accord with this [the idea of this parallel development], I maintain that the succession of philosophical systems in history is the same as the succession in the logical derivations of the categories of the Idea” (Hegel 1985: p. 22, italics in original). Hegel describes philosophy as an “organic system” that unfolds historically like “a living being [Lebendigkeit],” driven by a “drive (Trieb)” for truth to “develop [entwickeln] itself.”15 Philosophy consists in “one Idea in the whole and in all its members, just as in a living individual one life, one pulse beats in all its limbs” (1985: p, 21). The logical development of this idea appears in “empirical form,” in “time,” as the “history of philosophy” (1985: p, 22).16 Therefore, it is clear “that the study of the history of philosophy is the study of philosophy itself … But in order, in the empirical shape and historical appearance of philosophy, to recognize its progress as the development of the Idea, one must of course have at one’s disposal knowledge of the Idea” (ibid.). In other words, the history of philosophy needs to be philosophical, or, philosophy is history of philosophy. However, this position leads to an important question, namely whether the idea of a philosophical history of philosophy is connected to a specific conception of philosophy, one that identifies philosophizing with, as Kant puts it, “a gradual development of human reason.”17 The observation by Klaus Erich Kaehler is important here, who emphasizes that in Kant and Hegel, “the role of the history of philosophy is an inherent consequence of their philosophical positions” (1982: p. 28). I want to claim that Schopenhauer’s own philosophical position does not allow for such a role. 332

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23.3 Schopenhauer writes against the dominant conception of the history of philosophy in that his concept of philosophy does not assign a systematic place to its history. Whereas philosophers from Reinhold to Hegel have in common an interest in a history of reason, consciousness, or spirit, Schopenhauer’s rejection of time as a relevant factor in the history of philosophy is explicit: Finally, we will not be doing history and calling it philosophy …. This is because we feel that people are infinitely remote from a philosophical knowledge of the world when they imagine that its essence can somehow (however delicately concealed) be grasped historically. Yet this is the case with anyone whose views of the intrinsic essence of the world include a becoming or a having-become or becoming-becoming, anyone who attributes the slightest significance to the concepts of earlier or later, and consequently who implicitly or explicitly looks for and locates a beginning and an endpoint for the together with a path between them along which the philosophizing individual can recognize his own location. In most cases, such historical philosophizing produces a cosmogony, which admits of many variations, or else a system of emanation, or a doctrine of the fall …. The truly philosophical way of looking at the world, i.e. the way that leads beyond appearances and provides cognition of the inner essence of the world, does not ask where or whence or why, but instead, always and everywhere, asks only for the what of the world. (SW 2:322–23/WWR 1:299–300) This passage, which dates from the first volume of The World as Will and Representation (1818), is a clear reference to the history of philosophy of the idealist period of German philosophy. It predates Hegel’s extensive lectures on the history of philosophy but follows on that philosopher’s initial effort to trace the—historical as well as logical—development of the human spirit in his Phenomenology of Spirit from 1807. Schopenhauer does not think the real, as opposed to mere appearances, develops in time: “While history teaches us that things were different in every age, philosophy is concerned to bring us the insight that things have been, are, and will be entirely the same in all ages”18 Time is of no essence in the search for truth. Schopenhauer accuses those who assign it a substantial role in the historical development of ideas of remaining in the realm of appearances and missing what is truly essential, namely the will: Only inner processes, to the extent that they concern the will, have true reality and are actual events; because only the will is the thing in itself. … Hegelians, who go so far as to view the philosophy of history as the main purpose of all philosophy, should be referred to Plato, who tirelessly repeats that the subject matter of philosophy is that which does not change but always remains the same, not what is sometimes one way and sometimes another. Everyone who establishes such constructions of the course of the world, or, as they call it, history, has failed to understand the principal truth of all philosophy, namely that the same thing exists throughout all of time, that all becoming and coming to be is only an appearance, that the Ideas alone are permanent and time is ideal. This according to Plato, this according to Kant. (SW 3:506/WWR 2:460) 333

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Thus, it would seem that Schopenhauer’s approach to the history of philosophy is the exact opposite of that of philosophers from Reinhold to Hegel. But that is not quite the case. Rather it finds itself somewhere in the middle between the extremes of timeless Platonic ideas on the one hand and Hegelian parallelism of historical and logical development of spirit on the other. Schopenhauer was, after all, a man of his times and not immune to the idea of a “spirit of the times.” Moreover, both his histories of philosophy end with the same “presumptive air of finality” that Ameriks (2006: p. 11) attributes to Reinhold and the early Hegel. Indeed, Schopenhauer assigns to time a role that clearly goes beyond Herder’s historicist position, referring to a progressive development of philosophical thought in relation to the “spirit of the times,” understood broadly as the state of ideas in any given epoch. For instance, in a long paragraph toward the beginning of Sketch about pantheism, Schopenhauer refers to the possible feeling of surprise that pantheism did not gain complete victory over theism already in the seventeenth century; since the most original, beautiful and thorough European expositions of it … all became known during that period, namely through Bruno, Malebranche, Spinoza, and Scotus Erigena. … This seems to prove that the insight of individuals cannot prevail as long as the spirit of the age is not ripe to receive it. (SW 5:6/PP 1:9) What then led to its prevalence in his own time, “even if only in Schelling’s eclectic and confused revival”? Because Kant had “cleared the way for it, whereby the spirit of the age got prepared, just as a ploughed field for the seed” (ibid.).19 For Schopenhauer, the development of ideas is more closely related to individual philosophers than it is for Reinhold, who tends to describe stages of philosophical development in terms of abstract systems, or for Hegel, who defines it in societal terms.20 He contrasts his own conception with the “presumption of Hegelian historians of philosophy, who present every system as necessarily occurring and, constructing the history of philosophy a priori, prove to us that every philosopher had to think exactly what he did think and nothing else.” Against this position, he holds that philosophical systems are the work of individual and unique minds … minds that are as individual as they are rare, so that Ariosto’s “nature made him and then broke the mould” applies to every one of them to the fullest extent – as though another would have written the Critique of Pure Reason if Kant had died of smallpox (SW 5:209/PP 1:176).21 Once an idea—a seed—has been planted by one philosopher, it exists in the world, but it may lie dormant for centuries before another philosopher picks it up and develops it further. Thus, in Sketch, Schopenhauer treats the problem of the ideal and the real as a problem that only modern western philosophers have extensively dealt with, since Descartes became “aware” of it, “uncovered” it, implying that this “primordial philosophical problem” had always existed but was only recognized by him. And Descartes could only recognize it “after the necessary reflectiveness (Besonnenheit) had first been awakened in [him], who was struck by the truth that we are initially limited to our own consciousness and that the world is given to us only as representation” (SW 5:4/PP 1:8)22 “It was through him that this scruple entered philosophy and was bound to continue to trouble people until it was 334

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thoroughly laid to rest” (SW 5:3–4/PP 1:7–8). However, Schopenhauer finds a “trace” of it in Plotinus’s “doctrine of the ideality of time,” whom he credits with “in fact already pronounc[ing] Kant’s ideality of time” (SW 5:4/PP 1:8). In On Philosophy and Its Method, he reaffirms this assessment when he asserts that “only the inwardly directed philosophy, proceeding from the subject as that which is directly given, that is the philosophy of the moderns since Descartes, is on the right path, and therefore the ancients overlooked the main thing” (SW 6:17/PP 2:20). Schopenhauer makes three distinct points: One, that it is possible for entire periods of philosophy to “overlook” fundamental ideas. Second, that the history of philosophy does not develop in gradual stages but in leaps, with the most important idea appearing only late, roughly 2000 years after the beginning of western philosophy.23 Three, that progress in philosophical thought is the work of exceptional individual philosophers; indeed, it is the work of geniuses.24 Would the primordial problem in philosophy have been recognized had not Descartes formulated it? That is not clear. But once it has been brought into the world, it is there to be built upon until solved. For example, Malebranche “grasped the problem itself, in its full extent, more clearly, more seriously, and more deeply than Descartes” (SW 5:5/PP 1:9). But there is no straight-out progression; forward steps can be followed by backward ones. Thus “the profound thoughts of Malebranche first give rise to Leibniz’s preestablished harmony,” which Schopenhauer dismisses as “absurd” (SW 5:6/PP 1:10). Consequently, Spinoza had to “start again directly from Descartes” but was prevented from progressing further than he actually did by the baggage of traditional concepts and assumptions, such as “God,” “substance,” or “perfection.” At the same time, he already expressed the idea of transcendental idealism, even “if only in a general way,” which would later be more “clearly expounded by Locke and especially by Kant” (SW 5:11/PP 1:14). Finally, Schopenhauer himself takes “an additional step,” which he believes will be the last one, “since [he has] solved the problem around which all philosophizing has revolved since Descartes by ascribing all being and cognition to the two elements of our self-consciousness”—referring to representation as the ideal and the will as real (SW 5:20/PP 1:21–22). The history of ideas does not run parallel to their logical development. It seems insight into fundamental truths can happen at any time in history, as demonstrated by Schopenhauer’s habit of quoting philosophers from various time periods, cultures, and schools of thought without considering their historical or systematic place. Nevertheless, when he credits Descartes as having awakened to the “necessary reflectiveness” of recognizing the problem of the ideal and the real, he hints at just such a development of reason, since reflectiveness represents a progressive form of reason. But this is a development that happens within individual philosophers who are ingenious enough to advance philosophical thinking in the right direction. Schopenhauer contends that only an intellect free of selfinterest, one that is not in the “service of the will,” can successfully pursue truth for its own sake by means of “rational deliberation, impartial consideration and honest exposition, that is the proper, normal employment of reason as such” (SW 5:22ff//PP 1:22ff.). A true philosopher pursues ideas in a completely disinterested manner. In contrast to knowledge pursued in the service of the will, which is always directed toward particular things, “willless” cognition is trained upon the universal … the mind must be truly idle in order to actually philosophize; it must not pursue purposes and hence not be steered by the will, instead, it 335

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must devote itself undividedly to the instruction imparted by the intuitive world and one’s own consciousness (SW 6:4/PP 2:7–8).25 Only then can it grasp the fundamental truth of the world: “The world is my representation”: – this holds true for every living, cognitive being, although only a human being can bring it to abstract, reflective consciousness: and if he actually does so he has become philosophically sound [die philosophische Besonnenheit ist bei ihm eingetreten] (SW 2:3/WWR 1:23). So where does this leave Schopenhauer as a historian of philosophy? Kaehler characterizes Kant’s approach to a history of philosophy a priori as an “as if,” a merely regulative concept, a schema that can guide a historian of philosophy in interpreting it, but not in imposing it on the empirical history as it actually happened. In “Loose Sheets,” Kant asks “whether a schema of a history of philosophy could be conceived with the help of which the epochs [and] the opinions of the philosophers from the existing reports could coincide, as if they had had this schema itself before their eyes and had proceeded in the cognition of these accordingly” and answers the question with a “Yes! namely if the idea of a metaphysics of human reason inevitably arises and reason feels a need to develop it, but this science is wholly preordained in the soul though only embryonically” (AA 20:342).26 But again, we encounter a distinction between systematic philosophy and history of philosophy, empirically given in time, which from Kant’s critical perspective cannot be overcome.27 Hegel, on the other hand, “indeed claims that the historicity of philosophy belongs to its truth” (Hegel 1985: p. 38). The logical development of the idea appears empirically as the history of philosophy. “Thus philosophy is a system in development, and this is the history of philosophy too” (ibid., p. 21). Sketch is conceived with such a schema in mind, whose actual history Schopenhauer traces from Descartes to his own philosophy. However, this development does not happen in response to “needs” or the “spirit” of the times; it is rather the work of individual great philosophers who, thanks to their exceptional rational reflectiveness, progressively build on their predecessors and “seed” the “spirit of the times,” instead of merely responding to it, as lesser philosophers do. As their reflectiveness increases, so does their ability to think freely and become aware of the metaphysical character of the world. Reason and its advanced form of reflectiveness are not the goal but the tool to achieve a clearer view of the world, which consists in manifestations of the will. The will itself does not develop; it has been and is and will be the same from the beginning. Given his different concept of philosophy, and especially metaphysics, from that of the dominant philosophies of his time, the study of the history of philosophy is not an integral part of the study of philosophy for Schopenhauer. Thus, we should ask again Why does he write such a history, and What does it consist in? In his essay On University Philosophy, he provides the following rationale for teaching such a history: Although it is always better to read the original works themselves, teaching a history of philosophy, succinctly delivered and to be completed within one semester, reaching from Thales to Kant, so that, as a consequence of its brevity and lucidity, it 336

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allows as little leeway as possible for the Herr Professor’s own views and acts merely as a primer for the student’s own future study. … I want to limit academic lectures to the purposes of a general orientation in the field of previous philosophical achievements, eliminating all explanations as well as all pragmatism of delivery that tries to go further than demonstrating the unmistakable links between successively occurring systems and previous ones. (SW 5:208–9/PP 1:175–76) Teaching the history of philosophy thus is useful for students, providing them with a “general orientation.” His use of the term of a limited “pragmatism of delivery” provides the same connotation of usefulness. Also in Fragments, he advocates for the usefulness of “a collection of important passages and essential chapters of all the principal philosophers … put together in chronological-pragmatic order” (SW 5:36/PP 1:32). As mentioned in the last section, Fichte too speaks of a “pragmatic history of the mind.” However, Schopenhauer’s understanding of the term owes more to Kant than to Fichte. Kant uses it in several works, most obviously in his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View.28 In the Groundwork, Kant distinguishes between “technical,” “pragmatic,” and “moral imperatives” and, in a footnote, defines a history as “ composed pragmatically when it makes us prudent, that is, instructs the world how it can look after its advantage better than, or at least as well as, the world of earlier times” (G 4:417n.).29 It is in this sense of useful instruction that Schopenhauer employs the term. However, he does not propose to provide such a history himself (SW 5:36/PP 1:32). What he does is something different. In Sketch, he presents a history of philosophy from Descartes up to his own philosophy guided by its fundamental principle, combining Kant’s idea of a philosophizing, a priori history of philosophy, which cannot be done historically or empirically, with just such an empirical history, following the forward and backward steps of individual philosophers in modern times—Malebranche advancing over Descartes, Leibniz badly backsliding into the absurdity of his preestablished harmony, Spinoza starting “again directly from Descartes,” and so on (SW 5:6–9/PP 1:10–12). All of these philosophers attempted to grasp the fundamental truths that have existed eternally, gradually building on one another’s insights, until Schopenhauer completed the system by taking one more step beyond Kant, identifying Kant’s thing in itself, which the German idealists had tried to eliminate in various ways, with the will and relegating all other cognition to the realm of representation. If nothing else, Sketch should thus be useful to students of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, in that it provides them with Schopenhauer’s interpretation of philosophers important in the history of philosophy from the perspective of his own philosophical system.

Notes 1 In §14, “Some remarks on my own philosophy,” Schopenhauer notes that he never had to worry about “the agreement of my propositions …; for the agreement later correctly happened by itself, as all propositions came together, being for me nothing but the agreement of reality with itself” (SW 5:140/PP 1:120). 2 Schopenhauer’s insistence on independent thinking (Selbstdenken) places him in the tradition of Enlightenment thought; Kant’s “Sapere aude!” comes to mind. Indeed, reading histories of philosophy in place of the original works is bound to prevent such independent thinking. Kant’s opening remarks to his Prolegomena come to mind as well: “There are scholars for whom the history

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Sabine Roehr of philosophy (ancient as well as modern) is itself their philosophy; the present prolegomena have not been written for them” (Prolegomena 4:255). 3 Schopenhauer uses the Latin phrase “Eadem, sed aliter.” In the words of Alfred Schmidt: “To put it in Hegelian terms, Schopenhauer does not even enter the internal historical dialectic of identity and non-identity but views history as such … as a superstructurally superficial structure resting on an unconscious deep structure that needs to be uncovered philosophically: on the will” (2002: p. 199f.; my translation). 4 For a full account of this phenomenon, see (Ameriks 2006) 5 I. Kant, “Lose Blätter zu den Fortschritten der Metaphysik [Loose sheets on the progress of metaphysics],” 340f. 6 Ameriks deems Reinhold “the prime inaugurator, or at least the major catalyst, of the momentous ‘historical turn’ that western philosophy has taken in the last two centuries” (2006: p. 185). Schopenhauer personally met Reinhold in Weimar in 1809 and subsequently sent him a copy of his dissertation, The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (1813). David Cartwright mentions the similarities between Reinhold’s fundamental principle of consciousness as he laid it out in his “elementary philosophy,” which relies on “facts of consciousness,” and the first chapter in Schopenhauer’s WWR 2, where he stresses that “consciousness alone is immediately given and so the foundation of philosophy is limited to facts of consciousness: i.e. it is essentially idealistic” (WWR II, 8 [H 5]) (2016: p. 210). For similarities in Reinhold’s and Schopenhauer’s philosophical approaches, see also Bondeli (2014). 7 Briefe über die Kantische Philosophie, first published in Der Teutsche Merkur (August 1786– September 1787), later revised in book form: vol. 1 Leipzig: Göschen, 1790; vol. 2 Leipzig: Göschen, 1792. English translation: Letters on the Kantian Philosophy (2005). 8 He thus adds the aspect of temporality to Kant’s systematic concept of the need of reason to reach the unconditioned. 9 Herder’s historicism represented the view that “history takes the form of a sequence of ‘spirits’, each expressing the thought of its own distinctive era,” providing a “sequentially related multiplicity of highly varied and often incommensurable insights” (Ameriks 2006: p. 2). 10 As a recent commentator remarks: “[Reinhold’s] own system of elementary philosophy is considered to be the goal of a path philosophizing reason has taken, encountering striking theoreticalconceptual hypotheses since Plato and Aristotle. Thus, with a view to more recent times, Locke, Leibniz, Hume and Kant are repeatedly portrayed as four precursors who have successively helped the fact of consciousness (which is to be understood as the foundation of all philosophical knowledge) to a more complete determination” (Bondeli 2015: p. 70). 11 Translations from Reinhold’s “Ueber den Begriff der Geschichte der Philosophy” are my own. 12 In the words of Ameriks, Reinhold held the “general view that philosophical advances usually incorporate both historical and systematic approaches, and that this occurs through a process of dialectical development within the whole history of culture, which culminates in reason’s reconstructive narrative of its own fulfillment” (2016: p. 180). 13 Schopenhauer uses the same term—“pragmatic”—for his history of philosophy, but in a different sense. See below. 14 Most other quotes from this text follow the available English translation (Hegel 1985), which leaves out parts of the text and changes italicization. 15 In the words of Allegra de Laurentiis, philosophy for Hegel is a “speculative organic system,” thinking making itself the object of thinking, “self-referentiality” (2005: p. 15f.). I have benefited greatly from consulting de Laurentiis’s article. 16 See also Hegel’s explications regarding the “metaphysics of time.” Time plays an essential role, one that goes beyond mere succession, as one of the “self-externalities” of spirit. Spirit, that is, the human mind, either in its individual or social/cultural form, needs to externalize itself in nature in order to get to know itself, and it does so, first of all, abstractly, in space and time, its immediate and mediate “self-externalities” (see also Hegel’s Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, §§ 251ff.). 17 Kant, “Lose Blätter,” 340. 18 At the end of his essay “Les postulats de la philosophie de l’histoire [The postulates of the philosophy of history],” Gueroult quotes Schopenhauer at SW 2:327–8/WWR 1:304, “Above all, we need to recognize clearly that the form of the will’s appearance (which is to say: the form of life or of reality) is really just the present, not the future or the past” (Gueroult 1986: p. 443).

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Philosophy Contra History? 19 Schopenhauer uses the image of planting seeds also in other places. For example, in the Appendix to WWR 1 he writes in reference to nominalism and realism that “[t]his latter conflict was the late development of a seed already present in the opposed tendencies of Plato and Aristotle” (SW 2:566//WWR 1:506). But just as the initial, almost unconscious awareness of a truth can grow into a full-blown philosophical truth, erroneous ideas grow too. Referring to the aftermath of the Kantian philosophy, he observes: “just as the mistakes princes make are paid for by whole peoples, so the errors of great minds spread their malign influence over whole generations, even for hundreds of years, growing and proliferating until in the end they degenerate into monstrosities” (SW 2:46/WWR 1:61). 20 Reinhold views the history of philosophy in terms of doctrines. For example, he often describes the progress in the relationship between reason and faith in terms of the doctrines of dogmatic theism, atheism, supernaturalism, and dogmatic skepticism. Hegel, on the other hand, explains the spirit of the times as the “spirit of a people,” which finds its supreme expression in philosophy: “philosophy is the supreme blossom [höchste Blüte] of this entire shape of history; it is the conceptual root [Begriff], the consciousness, and the spiritual essence of the whole situation, the spirit of the age as the spirit present in thinking itself” (1985: p. 25, translation altered). 21 Incidentally, Hegel criticized pragmatic history, “which labours to bring events into connections of cause and effect, ground and consequent,” as demanding that we understand a thing just by knowing its history, which he finds insufficient since lacking an underlying idea (1985: p. 35). 22 The concept of “Besonnenheit” is central for Schopenhauer, already appearing at the very beginning of WWR 1. The concept was a familiar one in Enlightenment and Romantic circles, starting with Herder’s Treatise on the Origin of Language. Schopenhauer certainly encountered it in Fichte’s Berlin lectures “On the facts of consciousness” during the winter semester 1811/12, where Fichte introduced the concept of “absolute reflectiveness” (absolute Besonnenheit), referring to the “higher consciousness” of the Wissenschaftslehre, the cognition of cognition itself. For Schopenhauer, it comes to mean specifically the “clear consciousness of the world as represented” (Novembre 2016: p. 326). See also Koßler (2006). 23 Though already present in ancient Indian Vedanta philosophy (see SW 2:4–5/WWR 1:24). 24 In § 31 of WWR 2 (On Genius) Schopenhauer characterizes works of art, poetry, and “even philosophy” as products of “intuitive cognition” capable of grasping Ideas in the Platonic sense. “The basic feature of the genius is always to see the universal in the particular …, the essence of things in general.” The genius possesses “clarity of mind [Besonnenheit]” (SW 3:430–37/WWR 2:393–399). 25 Schopenhauer’s contempt for Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel is based on his conviction that these three philosophers were incapable of such will-less pursuit of truth. That is his main criticism of these three “sophists,” whom he dismisses as philosophers in the Appendix to Sketch, for the reason that they put their own individual self-interest before their impartial search for truth (SW 5:22–23/PP 1:22–23). 26 Already in the third chapter of “The Transcendental Doctrine of Method” in the Critique of Pure Reason, titled “The architectonic of pure reason,” Kant characterizes philosophy, understood as “the system of all philosophical cognition,” objectively as “the archetype [Urbild] for the assessment of all attempts to philosophize, which should serve to assess each subjective philosophy, the structure of which is often so manifold and variable. In this way philosophy is a mere idea of a possible science, which is nowhere given in concreto, but which one seeks to approach in various ways until the only footpath, much overgrown by sensibility, is discovered, and the hitherto unsuccessful ectype [Nachbild], so far as it has been granted to humans, is made equal to the archetype” (KrV A 838/B 866). 27 Kaehler concludes: “Here too remains the insurmountable real distinction between empirical reality, the world of appearances in space and time, and rational ideality, thanks to which there is at most an ‘object in the idea’, whose application in the interpretation of appearances can only be methodically legitimized as a maxim of the faculty of judgment in so far as it is reflective” (1982: p. 35f.). 28 “Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being; pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself” (Anthropology 7:119). 29 This accords with older uses of “pragmatic history,” meaning “instructive” or “didactic” (see Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie online, art. “pragmatische Geschichte” [Manfred Hahn]).

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References Ameriks, K. (2006). Kant and the Historical Turn: Philosophy as Critical Interpretation. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Bondeli, M. (2014). Reinhold und Schopenhauer: zwei Denkwelten im Banne von Vorstellung und Wille. Basel: Schwabe Verlag. ——— (2015). “The History of Philosophy as Progress towards a System of Reason,” From Hegel to Windelband: Historiography of Philosophy in the 19th Century. Ed. G. Hartung and V. Pluder. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter, 63–80. Breazeale, D. (2001). “Fichte’s Conception of Philosophy as a ‘Pragmatic History of the Human Mind’ and the Contributions of Kant, Platner, and Maimon,” Journal of the History of Ideas 62, 4: 685–703. Cartwright, D. E. (2016). Historical Dictionary of Schopenhauer’s Philosophy, art. “Karl Leonhard Reinhold,” Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Gueroult, M. (1969). “The History of Philosophy as a Philosophical Problem,” The Monist 53, 4 [Oct. 1]: 563–587. ——— (1986). “Les postulats de la philosophie de l’histoire,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 91, 4 [Oct.-Dec.]: 435–444. Hahn, M. (1971–2007). Art. “pragmatische Geschichte,” Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie Online. Ed. J. Ritter, K. Gründer, and G. Gabriel. Basel: Schwabe. Hegel, G. W. F. (1970) Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, Part II: Philosophy of Nature, trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ——— (1977). The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, trans. H. S. Harris and W. Cerf. Albany: SUNY Press. ——— (1985). Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, II Berlin Introduction (1820), trans. T. M. Knox and A. V. Miller. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ——— (1986). Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie III, Anhang: “Berliner Niederschrift der Einleitung. Angefangen am 24.X.1820,” Werke 20. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. Kaehler, K. E. (1982). “Kant und Hegel zur Bestimmung einer philosophischen Geschichte der Philosophie,” Studia Leibnitiana 14, 1: 25–47. Kant, I. (1942). “Lose Blätter zu den Fortschritten der Metaphysik.” AA 20. ——— (1997). Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. and ed. by M. Gregor, with an introduction by Ch. M. Korsgaard. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. ——— (1998). Critique of Pure Reason, trans. P. Guyer and A. W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. ——— (2004). Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics that Will Be Able to Come Forward as a Science, trans. G. Hatfield, in: Kant. Theoretical Philosophy after 1781, ed. H. Allison and P. Heath. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——— (2006). Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, ed. R. Loudon, with an introduction by M. Kuehn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Koßler, M. (2006). “‘Der Gipfel der Aufklärung’. Aufklärung und Besonnenheit beim jungen Schopenhauer [“The Height of Enlightenment”: Enlightenment and Reflectiveness in the Early Schopenhauer],” Vernunft der Aufklärung – Aufklärung der Vernunft. Ed. Konstantin Broese, A. Hütig, O. Immel, and R. Reschke. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 207–217. De Laurentiis, A. (2005). “Metaphysical Foundations of the History of Philosophy: Hegel’s 1820 Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy,” The Review of Metaphysics 59 [Sept.]: 3–31. Novembre, A. (2016). “Das ‘Losreißen’ des Wissens: Von der Schopenhauer’schen Nachschrift der Vorlesungen Fichtes ‘Ueber die Tatsachen des Bewusstseins’ und ‘Ueber die Wissenschaftslehre’ (1811/12) zur Ästhetik von Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung,” Fichte-Studien 43: 315–335. Reinhold, K. L. (2016). Letters on the Kantian Philosophy. Karl Ameriks (ed.), James Hebbeler (trans.). Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ——— (2016). Ueber den Begriff der Geschichte der Philosophie, in: Beyträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie. Ed. Georg Gustav Fülleborn. Züllichau/ Freystadt: Frommann, 1791; republished in Reinhold: Auswahl vermischter Schriften I. Ed. M. Bondeli/S. Imhof, Reinhold Gesammelte Schriften 5/1. Commented edition. Basel: Schwabe, 101–118.

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Philosophy Contra History? Schelling, F. W. J. (1797/1798). “Allgemeine Uebersicht der neuesten philosophischen Litteratur [General outline of the newest philosophical literature],” Philosophisches Journal einer Gesellschaft teutscher Gelehrten. Ed. Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer and J. G. Fichte. 7, 2 and 8, 2. Schmidt, A. (2002). “Arthur Schopenhauer und die Geschichte,” Schopenhauer-Jahrbuch 83: 189–203. Westphal, K. R. (2019). “Kant, Hegel and the Historicity of Pure Reason,” The Palgrave Hegel Handbook. Ed. M. F. Bykova and K. R. Westphal. London: Palgrave/Macmillan, 45–64.

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24 SCHOPENHAUER, EUROPE, AND EUROCENTRISM Christopher Janaway

24.1 Introduction In this chapter, I shall examine Schopenhauer’s attitudes toward European and non-European cultures, peoples, and elements of intellectual history. I begin with a very broad understanding of Eurocentrism as any explicit or implicit attitude according to which ‘Europe is more advanced than the rest of the world and stands at the centre and summit of history’ (Stone 2017: 91). Though it is common to hold that Eurocentric attitudes still persist today in many domains, the highpoint of a robust form of Eurocentrism is often located in the nineteenth century. It has even been suggested that ‘to be a European c. 1800 was to locate oneself within this course of historical progress and so, tacitly or overtly, in the region of the world that one identified as being at the centre of history … A European c. 1800 was a selfconfident Eurocentrist’.1 But ‘Europe’ can refer to more than just a geographical region. It also characterizes an evolving civilization based, in particular, around Christianity and can connote various contrasts between Europe’s traditional inhabitants and other populations. Factors associated with Eurocentrism are colonialism and beliefs in a racial superiority of Europeans. The economic, political, and cultural domination exercised over non-European peoples, the theoretical and practical separation of human beings into divergent racial categories, and narratives in which Europe has an essential or inevitable superiority form a familiar composite. There is room for some skepticism about the supposed monolithic nature of Eurocentrism in the nineteenth century and about the extent to which racial, political, and intellectual components can all be homogenized into a single outlook. The historian Suzanne Marchand questions the influential ‘totalizing, global view of European–oriental relations’ that stems from Edward Said’s Orientalism and suggests, ‘It is far too simplistic to say that nineteenth-century Europeans always thought of themselves as a united group, over and against “the oriental other”’ (Marchand 2009: xxii–iv).2 Against such a background, Arthur Schopenhauer, a nineteenth-century thinker who lived solely in Europe from 1788 to 1860 but who prided himself on his sympathetic attitude toward non-European cultures, provides an interesting case. Just where did Schopenhauer stand on Europe and Europeans and their place in the world vis-à-vis other people and cultures? It might seem surprising 342

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that this question needs to be asked, since, to put it mildly, Schopenhauer is not well known for social or political attitudes that would count as ‘liberal’ or ‘progressive’. We should beware of judging Schopenhauer by today’s standards. But even for his own day, his outlook presents itself as conservative and prejudiced against societally less privileged others. As a wealthy householder, he despises the ‘mob’ and proudly relates how he offered the use of his opera glasses to snipers targeting them during the revolution of 1848.3 As a comfortably situated male, he writes his egregiously offensive essay ‘On Women’, in which he ridicules the modern (European) conception of the ‘lady’ (Dame) who is owed equal rights with men (SW 6:657/PP 2:557). My question is: As a white European, how does he regard those who are not white and not European? The answer, I shall suggest, is in some ways unexpected. In the last two decades of his life, and particularly in the 1850s,4 Schopenhauer expresses intellectual and ethical sympathies with Asians and Africans and presents Europeans as misguided outliers or moral delinquents. In this respect, Schopenhauer’s stance seems antithetical to Eurocentrism. However, once we raise this issue, we find an interesting complex of attitudes, some of which must also be categorized as Eurocentric. My essay reflects this apparent doubleness. I shall first build a case for withholding the simple description of ‘Eurocentrist’ from Schopenhauer. To make this case, we can cite: (1) Schopenhauer’s denial that there is a historical world progress in which later-developed cultures are necessarily more advanced; (2) his view that whiteness is an aberration from the human norm and that there is no white race; (3) his condemnation of Europe’s arrogance and cruelty in its treatment of African and Asian peoples; (4) his valorization of Asian, and in particular Indian,5 culture as intellectually and morally superior to that of Europe; (5) his claim that Greek and Christian foundations of European thought have an Indian origin; and (6) his claim that Europe will come to benefit from retrieving an ancient wisdom to be found in India. However, before we rush to laud Schopenhauer as someone entirely at odds with his time, we should consider features that place him (perhaps inevitably) more securely within a Eurocentric framework. Here I shall adduce the following: (7) Schopenhauer believes in physiological racial differences that would show Africans, in particular, to be ‘naturally’ deficient in intellect and in certain ways ‘closer to animals’; (8) he pictures Indian intellectual culture in a highly romanticized manner, as a homogenous ‘ancient source of wisdom’ whose function is arguably to be Europe’s opposite pole; (9) his prime motivation is to critique and reform European culture itself; and (10) 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.

24.2  World history A particular kind of Eurocentrism is associated with a Hegelian outlook on historical progress. Wilhelm Halbfass offers the following sketch of Hegel’s view: ‘The way of the “Weltgeist” [world-spirit] leads from the East to the West. The Occident supersedes the Orient …. Compared to Europe, Asia, and India in particular, is “static”, without the dynamics of progress which characterizes European history’ (Halbfass 1988: 88). ‘Progress’ here consists in the ongoing development of rationality and the increase in ‘consciousness of freedom’,6 which for Hegel advances in stages through Ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, Christianity and more recent developments in the Christian (and principally ‘Germanic’) world up until his own day. Thus, history proper embraces the Graeco-Roman-Christian

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world, and what is other than Europe is regarded as having no real history. If Schopenhauer is less often discussed along with Eurocentrism, one reason may be his antipathy to all things Hegelian. Schopenhauer diverges from Hegel in taking a fundamentally different view of history. In his view, ‘Hegelians should be referred to Plato, who tirelessly repeats that the subject matter of philosophy is that which does not change but always remains the same, not what is sometimes one way and sometimes another’ (WWR 2, 460). If nothing fundamentally changes, there is no necessary world-historical process and a fortiori no ‘summit of history’ on which to plant Europe’s flag: The true philosophy of history consists in the insight that throughout all these endless alterations with their chaotic noise [Wirrwarr] we are only ever faced with the same, identical, unchangeable essence that behaves the same today as yesterday and always: the true philosophy should therefore recognize what is identical in all events, in ancient as well as in modern times, in the Orient as well as the Occident; and in spite of all differences in particular circumstances, in costumes and customs, it should always look out upon the same humanity. (SW 3:508/WWR 2:461) Rather than believing in a global historical progress, Schopenhauer favors the opposite extreme, according to which modern humanity is in a kind of decline away from its common past, and the very antiquity of certain cultural products certifies their truth and profundity: it seems that in earlier ages … those who were significantly closer to the origin of the human race and the well-springs of organic nature than we are at present also had both greater energy in their powers of intuitive cognition and also a more accurate cast of mind, which made them capable of a purer, more immediate grasp of the essence of nature and thus able to satisfy the metaphysical need in a worthier fashion: thus arose among the Brahman forefathers, the Rishis, the almost superhuman [übermenschlichen] conceptions that were later recorded in the Upanishads of the Vedas. (SW 3:178/WWR 2:171; SW 3:543/WWR 2:492) It is not that Schopenhauer believes there is no progress at all. But progress is always local and contingent, governed, for example, by environmental factors: ‘tribes that migrated early to the north’ (i.e. Europeans) gained their ‘high level of civilization’ simply because they were ‘forced to develop all their intellectual powers and invent and refine all their arts in a struggle with the multifarious necessity occasioned by the climate’ (SW 6:169/PP 2:144). There is moral progress too. As examples of such progress in Europe, Schopenhauer applauds the abolition of the slave trade and the establishment of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals.7 However, these are improvements from a scandalously low base, in which large-scale inhuman cruelty was tolerated. The fact that such improvements could be made in the first place is very much to Europe’s detriment. And the greatest progress, for Schopenhauer, would be to realign ourselves intellectually and morally with the timeless essence that earlier, non-European cultures allegedly grasped so clearly.

24.3  Europe’s Iniquity Schopenhauer is critical of several kinds of European activity toward other cultures. He dismisses the efforts of missionaries to convert populations to Christianity as arrogant folly: 344

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We … send English clergymen and Moravian linen-weavers out to the Brahmans now out of compassion and want them to know better and to understand that they are made of nothing and should be grateful and pleased about it. But the same thing happens to us that happens to someone who fires a bullet at a rock. Our religions will absolutely never take root in India. (SW 2:421/WWR 1:383–4) In India … the Brahmans respond to the lectures of the missionaries with condescending smiles, or with a shrug of the shoulders, and generally among these people the missionaries’ attempts at conversion have consistently failed, despite the most convenient opportunity. (SW 6:347/PP 2:295) Thus, the religion Europe offers to Indians is puny compared to what they already have. Against conventional Eurocentric preconceptions, it is India, not Europe, that is superior. By far the greatest iniquity that Europe perpetrates, upon which Schopenhauer repeatedly vents his passionate condemnation, is slavery, ‘whose final purpose is sugar and coffee’ (SW 3:663/WWR 2:593).8 In the ‘long catalogue of inhuman cruelties that have accompanied Christianity’, the worst is the extermination of a large part of the native inhabitants of America and the population of that part of the world with negro slaves dragged there out of Africa, without right, or any semblance of right, torn away from their families, their fatherland, their part of the world and condemned to endless convict labour. (SW 4:234/OBM 222) Schopenhauer deplores ‘the most extreme cruelty toward the slaves, the most unjust oppression of the free blacks, lynch-law, frequent and unpunished assassination’ and more (SW 6:270/PP 2:228). He is well-informed of the evidence: Slavery and the internal slave-trade in the United States of North America: being replies to the questions transmitted by the British Anti-Slavery Society to the American Anti-Slavery Society. London, 1841. 280 pp, price 4s. in cloth. This book constitutes one of the most severe indictments against humanity. No one will set it aside without horror, few without tears. For whatever the reader of this book may have ever heard, or thought or dreamed about the unfortunate condition of the slaves, indeed, about human harshness and cruelty, will seem trivial to him when he reads how those devils in human form, those bigoted, church-going scoundrels, strict observers of the Sabbath, especially the Anglican preachers among them, treat their innocent black brothers, who by injustice and force have ended up in their infernal claws. … [T]hey are an infamous stain on the whole of humanity. (SW 3:226/PP 2:193) In his essay On the Basis of Morals, Schopenhauer assigns moral praise to Britain for ending its slave trade, which he presents as though it was an act of pure moral compassion.9 In his view, compassion must be universal, because of a metaphysical monism found in the Upaniṣads and Advaita Vedānta, which holds that all individuals are not ultimately dis345

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tinct.10 Although European thinkers, from the Eleatics through to Schelling, have also been metaphysical monists,11 for him the doctrine is ‘first and foremost’ that of the Upaniṣads, whose assertion tat tvam asi (‘you are that’) he thinks best encapsulates the monist view in its ethical manifestation.12 So if some Europeans have grasped the metaphysical truth that grounds the ethics of universal compassion, they have unknowingly been playing out an Indian heritage. This confluence of ideas—universalist ethics traced to an Indian origin and used to denounce European moral infamy—makes a good prima facie case for viewing Schopenhauer as at least in some respects non-Eurocentric. As he sees it, non-Europeans (most emphatically Africans) are as worthy of compassionate treatment as anyone. This is a truth that Europeans have systematically disregarded with heinous immoral results, and to grasp that truth in its finest expression, they should turn to the works of an ancient nonEuropean (Indian) culture.

24.4  Original Blackness Schopenhauer’s talk of black and white human beings as ‘brothers’ may be more than a conventional trope, given the following rather surprising statements: I would like to express my view that human beings do not naturally have white skin, and that by nature they have black or brown skin, like our ancestors the Hindus; as a result, no white person has ever emerged from the womb of nature, and there is no white race, however much has been said about it; instead every white person is bleached. Human beings have been driven into a north quite alien to them and where they survive only like exotic plants that need to spend the winter in a hothouse, and over the course of the millennia they have become white. (SW 3:627/WWR 2:563) In a related passage, Schopenhauer states, ‘to divide people, childishly, into white, yellow and black races, as still happens in all the books, is evidence of great prejudice and lack of reflection’ (SW 6:167/PP 2:142),13 and he goes on to propose a dramatic symbolic change: [T]he Adam of our race would have to be thought of as black … and it is ridiculous when painters represent this first human being as white, in the colour that originated through paling. Furthermore, since Jehovah created him in his own image, then he too should be depicted as black in works of art. (SW 6:168/PP 2:143) Schopenhauer has no belief in the likes of Adam or God, but he recognizes that such figures have mythological or allegorical significance. He thinks they should be shown as black to convey an appropriate story of human origins. If Adam is figurative for all of us (humans), then his portrayal as black would show how we (Europeans) are aberrant from human blackness. Later, he employs terminology in an unexpectedly reversed direction, saying that African people are rightly repulsed by the white complexion because it is ‘a degeneration and unnatural’ (SW 6:168/PP 2:143). So here is one kind of Eurocentrism that Schopenhauer rejects: being white is no index of any kind of centrality, superiority, or essential difference. ‘White’, for him, is not even a race at all, but an accident of climate and migration. The white peoples of Europe appear as an off-centre, peripheral type of human, deviant from an 346

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original common blackness, and are even called exotisch, a term more often applied to the ‘East’ from a European perspective. We might for a moment think that Schopenhauer has dramatically (but of course coincidentally) paralleled the recent ‘out of Africa’ theory of human origins. But this thought would be inaccurate for a couple of reasons. First, Schopenhauer accepts the existence of distinct races with origins in different places: ‘the human race quite probably originated in only three places, because we have only three distinctly separate types which point to original races, the Caucasian, the Mongolian and the Ethiopian’ (SW 6:166/PP 2:142). These may seem to be the ‘white, yellow and black races’ under different names. But Schopenhauer’s point is that color is not the essential distinguishing feature between races. Geographical contingency accounts for color, because the origin of any human beings ‘could only have taken place between the tropics, because in the other zones the newly originated human being would have perished in the first winter. … Now in the torrid zones humans are black or at least dark brown’ (SW 6:166/PP 2:142). The hypothesized ‘three places’ of human origin must all have been tropical, and all human ancestors, whether Caucasians, Mongolians, or Ethiopians, must have been black or brown. Second, Schopenhauer is not thinking primarily of Africa, given his reference to ‘our ancestors the Hindus’. Schopenhauer treats India as Europe’s cultural ancestor through its influence on Greek philosophy and especially on Christianity. Here he seems to conflate cultural ancestry with genetic ancestry. The same conflation is apparent when he says that ‘the native, primitive religion of our stock [Stamm]’ is ‘Asiatic’ (SW 4:112/OBM 119) and speaks of India as ‘this cradle of the human race [Menschengeschlecht] or at least of the race [Rasse] to which we belong’ (SW 6:378/PP 2:320). This melding of cultural inheritance and genetic inheritance conceived in terms of race is characteristic of much nineteenthcentury thinking, as are some of Schopenhauer’s other, more troubling ideas, to which we now turn.

24.5  ‘Closer to Animals’ Against the background of a contemporary racial theorist such as Gobineau,14 who deliberately sets himself in opposition to ‘the liberal dogma of human brotherhood’ (Gobineau 1915: 38), Schopenhauer’s views so far appear distinctly liberal and egalitarian. However, some other passages open up a different prospect: Negroes have more bodily strength than the people of other races, consequently what they lack in sensibility they make up for in irritability; of course in this manner they are closer to animals, all of which have more muscle strength in relation to their size than does a human being. (SW 6:176/PP 2:150) One is inclined to suspect that those parts of the brain lying directly beneath the temples are particularly active in thinking, when we consider that as a result of the most recent research the skulls of idiots as well as Negroes are consistently inferior to other skulls solely in width, hence from temple to temple. Meanwhile, by contrast, great thinkers have unusually wide heads, from which even Plato’s name is derived. (SW 6:181/PP 2:154) 347

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A racist assumption underlies this train of thought. ‘Negroes’ are assumed to be ‘inferior’ in their intellectual capacity in order to support a speculation about physiognomy.15 The result, from today’s perspective, seems so clearly a case of Eurocentric racism as to be almost a parody. This reminds us that Schopenhauer’s views belong after all to the world of the 1850s, when similar notions were commonplace. Still, we might wonder how Schopenhauer can believe that all human beings stem from black or brown ancestors, champion universal compassion that encompasses the sufferings of ‘black brothers’, and yet at the same time assume they are intellectually inferior and ‘closer to animals’. However, although Schopenhauer is here making racist assumptions, he is not being inconsistent in seeing Africans as ‘closer to animals’ while at the same time deploring their treatment as slaves. In his view, non-human animals themselves are just as deserving of compassion as human beings: their suffering matters morally and cruelty toward them is equally an abomination. Schopenhauer congratulates Britain in much the same terms for establishing societies for the protection of animals and for abolishing the slave trade.16 Given that ‘the eternal essence that is present in everything that has life … shines out with unfathomable significance from all eyes that see the light of the sun’ (SW 4:162/OBM 162), no sentient being should be any less deserving of compassion than any other. We must regard other animals also ‘as our brothers’ (SW 4:245/OBM 231). So holding the view that some humans are in a sense ‘closer to animals’ does not by itself constrain Schopenhauer to change his stance on the way they should be treated. However, despite his apparent insistence that all suffering beings matter equally, Schopenhauer is prepared to make discriminations. He argues that ‘in nature the capacity for suffering keeps pace with intelligence’ (SW 4:245/OBM 231), and this has the consequence that it is permissible for northern Europeans to use non-human animals instrumentally. They can work for us, as long as we do not treat them cruelly (SW 4:245/OBM 231), and we can eat them: ‘compassion for animals must not lead us so far that we … should have to refrain from animal food’ (SW 4:245/OBM 231). Therefore, he argues, we (‘in the North’) are permitted to eat animals (having used chloroform so as to kill them without undue suffering) and indeed must do so on pragmatic grounds, since otherwise we would lack sufficient nutrition (SW 4:245/OBM 231). So some of ‘our brothers’ can permissibly be treated as means, not ends. Schopenhauer never suggests that the instrumental use of some human beings for the benefit of others is permissible. But for what reason would he consider it impermissible? If the question of whether a sentient being can be treated as a means is dependent on its degree of intelligence and if there is no essential moral difference between human and non-human beings, can there be any absolute prohibition on treating some human beings as means, at least in some ways, given that human intelligence is held to come in degrees, some of which have a supposed racial basis? Schopenhauer rules out the idea that humans have some absolute value by virtue of being human. The Kantian notion of ‘human dignity’ is ‘a shibboleth for all clueless and thoughtless moral theorists … a hollow hyperbole in whose interior … there nests a contradiction in terms’ (SW 4:166/OBM 165). Such dignity (Würde) is supposedly ‘a non-comparative, unconditioned, absolute worth [or value: Werth]’, but there can be no such thing, he argues, because worth is an essentially comparative concept: the worth of something is always ‘in comparison with another’ (SW 4:166/OBM 166). This leaves it open that humans have greater worth than non-humans. In his discussion of Stoic ethics, he seems to accept that reason ‘allows us to participate in the highest degree in that dignity which attaches to us as rational beings distinct from animals’, adding ‘in fact, there is no other sense in which 348

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we can talk of dignity’ (SW 2:107/WWR 1:117). So when he inveighs against the Western ‘total differentiation between human being and animal’ as scandalous (see SW 4:238–34/ OBM 226–31), it turns out to mean that all sentient beings deserve some degree of moral respect, which may vary widely in line with their degree of intelligence. If Schopenhauer holds that all humans deserve not just different degrees of moral respect, but all an equal degree, it is at least unclear on what grounds he would justify that view, given his view that there are racially grounded differences in intelligence and that being human per se confers no absolute moral worth.

24.6  A Romanticized India The treatment of animals is one instance of Schopenhauer’s comparative disfavor toward European practices. By contrast, he consistently praises Asian civilizations generally, and India, in particular, for being morally superior to Europe with regard to animal welfare and morally superior in general.17 These are sweeping claims, which he does little to support with any detailed evidence. A number of his other claims about India have a similar character. Schopenhauer’s philosophical interaction with Indian sources has many facets, from scholarly reception to some cross-cultural engagement that is rightly hailed as innovative. Unlike many previous European thinkers, he does not simply catalog Indian thought as a distant part of history but interacts philosophically with its ideas in a novel way. Indian thought energizes, in particular, his accounts of suffering, self, and salvation. Nonetheless, Schopenhauer undeniably has a tendency to oversimplify. He writes sometimes as though ‘India’ speaks with one voice about a whole range of topics, including philosophical idealism, pessimism, ‘the nothingness of earthly happiness’, ‘the need for redemption … by means of the negation of the will’, ‘an existence prior to birth along with a continuation after death’, and so on.18 One striking feature of these supposed commonalities is that they portray a whole civilization as being in agreement with Schopenhauer’s own philosophical system. But another is that they reveal, in Schopenhauer’s eyes, deficiencies in European thinking. Again, India, not Europe, is to be preferred. In some ways, Schopenhauer is perpetuating an attitude to India that is characteristic of the earlier phase of Romanticism. ‘The Romantic interest in India’, writes Wilhelm Halbfass, ‘was inseparable from a radical critique of the European present’ (1988: 83). In this earlier period, writers such as Herder, Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel, and others, looked back to ancient India as an age characterized by an innocence and wholeness that Europe needed to regain. Friedrich Majer, who introduced Schopenhauer to Indian thought,19 was part of this movement and held the conviction that ‘the religious and philosophical situation in Europe could only be rectified through a return to the Indian origins’ (Halbfass 1988: 73). Schopenhauer perpetuated a similar attitude for nearly a further half-century, filtered through his own idiosyncratic concerns. While the nascent European discipline of Indology moved on and at least attempted a more objectively focused, text-based form of scholarship,20 Schopenhauer’s views remained in a time-lag, as witness to his insistence to the end of his days that Anquetil Duperron’s 1801 Oupnek’hat version of the Vedic texts was superior to all more recent translations.21 Looking back to an idealized India of the past can be a different form of Eurocentrism, not in the sense of treating European culture as superior but that of conjuring up an India that is everything Europe is not in order to show Europe its very antithesis. Amartya Sen identifies ‘exoticism’ as a persistent trait of the Western imagination (Sen 2006: 150–3). B. 349

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K. Matilal criticizes Schopenhauer in similar terms, saying that he ‘round[ed] up a mystical picture of Indian philosophy which came to be very romantic and mystical’ (Matilal 2002: 397), a picture skewed because it omitted India’s achievements in rational argumentation—in effect, its philosophy. Schopenhauer was neither the first nor the last to polarize ‘Oriental mysticism’ against ‘Western rationalism’. Nor has it been exclusively Europeans who have done so. As Ankur Barua writes, some Indian representatives of neo-Hinduism later ‘presented Indian “philosophy” in oppositional terms to European “philosophy”, the latter characterized as “merely rational, analytic and located on the empirical plane”, the former as “essentially spiritual” (Barua 2012: 218). But, Barua continues, such dichotomies ‘have now been … shown to be yet another European construct which was foisted upon the natives’ (Barua 2012: 218). On this view, certain elevations of India as ‘superior’ to Europe are no less Eurocentric than views that consider India inherently ‘behind’ in terms of progress or ability. Either way, ‘India’ becomes a European construct created to function as Europe’s ‘Other’. When Schopenhauer idealizes some elements of Indian thought, does he regard it as philosophy? In later German practice, there developed ‘an essentially restrictive view of the history of philosophy … which was to eventually dominate nineteenth and early twentiethcentury thinking and which explicitly excluded the Orient, and thus India, from the historical record of philosophy’ (Halbfass 1988: 146). Despite his openness to India (as he saw it), Schopenhauer himself already falls in line with this exclusionary norm to some extent in his extensive ‘Fragments for the History of Philosophy’ published in the 1850s (SW 5:35– 145/PP 1:31–124). Here, ‘history of philosophy’ begins with the Pre-Socratics and proceeds through Classical and Hellenistic Greek thought, the Christian Middle Ages, and then philosophy from Descartes onward, in what is still a familiar manner. Although Schopenhauer gives Indian thought sympathetic mentions fairly frequently in the ‘Fragments’, by way of illustrative comparison or contrast,22 one can read Eurocentric bias into the way he conceives the basic pattern of philosophy’s history. India’s insights may be superior, even ‘superhuman’, but it is at least ambiguous to what extent he sees them as belonging within a history of philosophy as such. Schopenhauer clearly distinguishes philosophy from religion and holds that although the latter is a useful kind of metaphysics that can convey truths allegorically, it can never do so literally, and so is only a kind of ersatz for philosophy.23 If he sees Indian thought as specifically religious in character, he seems again to share in the Eurocentric construction that idealizes Indian culture in polar opposition to a distinctively ‘philosophical’ West.

24.7  Recovering Indian Origins Schopenhauer’s overarching vision of India as a contrast with Europe is that of a culture set in an ancient past, when superior minds were able to satisfy humanity’s metaphysical need by grasping timeless truths. But he thinks that Europe, unbeknown to itself, is all along secretly aligned with India, and the essential task for Europeans is to realize that their own ancestral religion, Christianity, contains profound ‘Indian’ truths at its core. Here are some of Schopenhauer’s expressions of the similarities he finds: Loving kindness … was first brought into language theoretically and put forward as a virtue … by Christianity, whose greatest merit consists precisely in this — though only with respect to Europe, since in Asia boundless love of one’s neighbour had already 350

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been the object both of teaching and prescription and of practice a thousand years earlier. (SW 4:226/OBM 215–6) the true spirit and inner core of Christianity, as with Brahmanism and Buddhism, is an understanding of the nothingness of earthly happiness, a complete disdain for such happiness and a turn in the direction of a completely different, even opposite existence. (SW 3:507/WWR 2:461) [T]he great fundamental truth of Christianity as well as Brahmanism and Buddhism, namely the need for redemption from an existence given over to suffering and death, and our ability to attain this redemption by means of the negation of the will, that is, by assuming a decisive stand in opposition to nature, this is incomparably the most important truth that there can be. (SW 3:722–3/WWR 2:644) For Schopenhauer, such doctrinal alignments are no accident. They betray an even tighter bond with India, in that European Christianity is descended from India via cultural transmission. Schopenhauer indulges in all sorts of hypotheses about how this transmission occurred, which we need not detail here.24 The gist of his genealogical case is that ‘The Christianity of the New Testament … is Indian in spirit and therefore, more than likely, Indian in origin too, even if only via Egypt’ (SW 3:558/WWR 2:504), or again, the morals of Christianity … show the greatest agreement with those of Brahmanism and Buddhism …; thus we can scarcely doubt that … they stem from India and may have come to Judaea by way of Egypt — so that Christianity would be a reflection of the original light of India from the ruins of Egypt. (SW 4:241/OBM 228) In other words, the best explanation for the alleged similarities of doctrine is actual historical transmission.25 Europeans are already more ‘Indian’ than they realize. Nietzsche famously expressed alarm that, in following some of Schopenhauer’s central ethical doctrines, Europe would bring about its own demise: here I saw the beginning of the end, the standstill, the backward-glancing tiredness, the will turning against life, the last sickness gently and melancholically announcing itself: I understood the ever more widely spreading morality of compassion … as the most uncanny symptom of our now uncanny European culture, as a detour to a new Buddhism? To a Buddhism for Europeans? To—nihilism? (On the Genealogy of Morality, Preface: 5) Nietzsche’s rather complex relationship with Buddhism and other Indian thought is too big a topic for this paper. But to the extent that he thought Europe was becoming too ‘Indian’ in its intellectual and ethical life, he is confronting Schopenhauer, who found it in need of rediscovering how Indian it already was. Schopenhauer predicted that ‘Our religions will absolutely never take root in India …. On the contrary, Indian wisdom flows 351

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back to Europe and will change the very foundations of our knowledge and thought’ (SW 2:421/WWR 1:383–4). Schopenhauer and Nietzsche are united in the conviction that there is something deeply wrong with the Europe of the nineteenth century. Schopenhauer is the more optimistic: if Europe can unlearn its aberrant ways and rediscover the mainstream of universal human wisdom that India allegedly preserves, things may improve. By contrast, Nietzsche foresees disaster for Europe if it takes on an Indian character. What matters to both, however, is primarily the cultural fate of Europe. In that sense, both are critical Eurocentrists: critical of contemporary Europe but using a simplified notion of ‘India’ to exemplify to a European readership what, for better or worse, their Europe could become.

24.8  Pro-Indianism and Anti-Judaism Schopenhauer views the Christian New Testament as Indian in spirit and in origin. An essential part of this vision is that it came to be linked to the Jewish ‘Old Testament’ by a kind of unfortunate accident. For Schopenhauer, Christianity is not Jewish either in spirit or in origin. That ‘light from India’ that Christianity reflects ‘fell unfortunately on Jewish soil’ (SW 4:241/OBM 228). Writing on the topic of Schopenhauer’s attitude to the Jews, Jacob Golomb has sought to focus upon what he terms Schopenhauer’s ‘metaphysical anti-Judaism’ (Golomb 2020: 425). This in effect consists in a theoretical opposition to monotheism, which Golomb carefully distinguishes from any ‘anti-Semitic feelings [Schopenhauer] might or might not have entertained in his everyday life’ (437). For instance, Schopenhauer had personal friends who were Jewish and showed no negative attitude toward them.26 Thus, Golomb argues that ‘Schopenhauer was less an anti-Semite than he was an anti-Theist who defied all monotheistic religions’ (444). It is true that in many cases, Schopenhauer’s adverse mentions of Judaism aim at an exceedingly narrow target, namely the Genesis doctrine of a single personal creator God making a world where everything was good, a doctrine which he finds both absurd and pernicious in its influence.27 So narrow is Schopenhauer’s view here that, for him, to be Jewish is to be monotheistic and to be monotheistic is to be Jewish.28 This metaphysical anti-Judaism per se may not amount to anti-Semitism in any obvious sense of the contemporary term. But to leave matters there is too simple. First, as Golomb concedes, Schopenhauer’s rhetoric, especially in the 1850s, becomes openly antiSemitic, making repeated references to the ‘Jewish stench’.29 But a further, less appreciated aspect is Schopenhauer’s persistent contrasting of Judaism with India. The undertones concerning what this division means for the notion of Europe and Europeanness are disturbing. Alexei Pimenov has recently written that in Schopenhauer the features of the late nineteenth and twentieth century Aryanmyth-discourse are quite distinctive. Specifically, his approach represented the earliest example of Indophilia serving as a theoretical basis for Judeophobia and, further, as a rejection of the European Christian civilization, based on viewing the latter as cut off from its original Indian roots due to the Jewish influence. (Pimenov 2020: 5) I shall suggest that this vision is closer to the truth than that advanced by Golomb. Schopenhauer does not say in so many words that Europeanness excludes Jewishness, but he conducts an analogous distancing campaign in the arena of Europe’s most distinctive cultural inheritance, Christianity. Though an atheist, Schopenhauer wants to preserve 352

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a version of Christianity free of any admixture of Judaism.30 His most brazen proposal is that Christianity must have the doctrine of monotheism separated from it as something inessential. The New Testament … must somehow be of Indian origin, as attested to by its thoroughly Indian ethics which takes morality to the point of ascetics, its pessimism and its avatar. But precisely through these it stands in decisive, profound contradiction to the Old Testament …. For when that Indian doctrine stepped onto the soil of the promised land, the task arose of unifying the knowledge of the corruption and misery of the world, its need for redemption and salvation by an avatar along with the morality of self-denial and penance, with Jewish monotheism and its ‘Everything was very good’. And it succeeded as well as it could, namely as well as two so completely heterogeneous and indeed opposed doctrines could be unified. A tendril of ivy, needing support and something on which to cling, twines itself around a rough-hewn post, adapting always to its twisted shape, reproducing but dressing it with its own life and charm until we are presented not with the post but instead with a welcoming sight. This is how Christ’s teaching, stemming from Indian wisdom, has covered the rough trunk of Judaism, which is entirely different from it; what had to be preserved of its basic form was transformed by his teaching into something different, something lively and true which appears to be the same, but is really something different. (SW 6:404/PP 2:342) In other passages, this ‘heterogeneity’ appears in terms of ‘naturalness’ and ‘cleanliness’: [H]ow the Oupnek’hat thoroughly breathes the holy spirit of the Vedas! … Everything here breathes Indian air and original, nature-related existence. And oh how the spirit is washed clean here of all the Jewish superstition inoculated in it early on, and of all the philosophy that indulges in this superstition! (SW 6:422/PP 2:356–7) There are many such passages. The rhetoric of foul-smelling doctrines and of escaping into a ‘cleaner’, more ‘natural’ air makes it hard not to see Schopenhauer as at least participating in a historical shift toward a vision of a ‘purer’ Europe, associated with some mysterious Indian origin and dissociated from anything Jewish. According to Gobineau, an influential source of such thinking, the ‘Aryans’ were white people who founded the civilization of India, while the Germanic peoples who ‘transformed the Western mind … were Aryans’, and ‘there is no true civilization, among the European peoples, where the Aryan branch is not predominant’ (Gobineau 1915: 211–12). Schopenhauer does not use the term ‘Aryan’. But he thinks that Europe’s true cultural inheritance is Indian, and he is prepared to blend that claim with hints of purer genetic ancestry: ‘Christianity, whatever might be said, has Indian blood in its veins and thus a constant tendency to rid itself of Judaism’ (SW 1:128/FR 120). He urges Europeans, in effect, to come to a truer understanding of themselves by retrieving an ancient heritage and banishing alien elements from their self-conception. In philosophical terms, those elements are principally theism, creation ex nihilo, and philosophical optimism. But in a seemingly arbitrary way, 353

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Schopenhauer also blames Judaism for postulating a differential moral status for humans and animals: ‘The Jewish view of the animal world must be driven out of Europe due to its immorality’ (SW 6:400/PP 2:339).31 He repeatedly singles out Judaism as the designated ‘impure’ origin of all such views that are opposed to his own, using the vocabulary of expulsion and cleansing. Schopenhauer could not foresee the atrocities toward Jewish people that were to come in Europe, events which by his own moral principles he must condemn outright, as he does the slave trade. But, knowingly or not, Schopenhauer is swimming in the same broad historical stream as Aryan propagandists of his day and beyond.

24.9 Conclusion On the evidence examined, we must conclude that Schopenhauer is an eccentric Eurocentric. There are some forms of Eurocentrism that he lacks. In his view, Europeans are neither central to the world nor inexorably superior to non-Europeans, either by virtue of spearheading a systematic pattern of world progress, or because of any higher moral standing, or by virtue of being typically white. On the contrary, he holds that whiteness is a physical degeneration, that much that is culturally valuable in Europe is in fact owed to its half-hidden preservation of archaic ideas and values from India and that Europeans’ treatment of nonEuropean humans and non-human animals reveals Europe’s morality to be lagging behind that of Asia. In some respects, Europe is a deviant latecomer that needs to look beyond its present-day self-conception toward an Indian antiquity whose inheritance it will ultimately be able to discover within itself. In other respects, Schopenhauer is at best ambivalent. On the one hand, where there are intellectual advances in Europe compared with other parts of the world, he attributes them to climate, not to any form of essence or necessity. In line with his belief that black people have no essential difference from white Europeans, he shows genuine sorrow and anger over the fates of African people and genuine commitment to their equal moral status as ‘brothers’. On the other hand, he believes in distinct races and is prepared to rank their degrees of intelligence in stark physiological terms in a continuous hierarchy of types from Plato through to non-human animals, with potentially troubling consequences for his moral universalism. Finally, however, Schopenhauer’s very preoccupation with criticizing and improving Europe is itself Eurocentric. He often turns to India in order to show Europeans that their morals and their metaphysics have deteriorated away from an ‘almost superhuman’ ideal. When he does so, he participates in, and in turn intensifies, a European fantasy that prior to Europe there was a homogeneous, mystical paradise that can somehow be retrieved. Schopenhauer considers Europe’s most authentic religious and genetic inheritance to be ‘Indian’, in contrast with ‘Judaic’ elements that he finds both unfortunate and extraneous. In this respect, his devotion to the idealized India serves as a thesis, not so much about India but rather about what does and does not properly belong to Europe, rightly conceived.32

Notes 1 Stone 2017: 94, here characterizing the view of Glendinning 2017. 2 Marchand notes that Said ‘left the Germans out of his analysis’ (xviii), and she doubts there is such a thing as ‘“the image of the Orient” all Germans possessed or the “discourse on the Orient” they all purportedly shared’ (xx). 3 See letter to Julius Frauenstädt, 2 March 1849 (GB, 234).

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Schopenhauer, Europe, and Eurocentrism 4 Some passages cited below from pre-1850 works (OBM, WWR 1 and 2) are additions made to editions of 1859 or 1860, or Schopenhauer’s late handwritten annotations incorporated posthumously by editors. 5 In what follows, I concentrate on India and leave out of account Schopenhauer’s keen interest in China, seen in its most concentrated form at SW 4:128–39/WN 431–39. 6 See Stone 2017: 87–9. 7 See SW 4:230, 242–5/OBM 218, 229–31. Shapshay 2019 emphasizes the latter as a progressive aspect of Schopenhauer. 8 Here and in other passages, Schopenhauer also condemns the blighted lives of European factory workers in precisely the same terms as he does the treatment of Africans (see also SW 6:106, 270/PP 2:93, 228). 9 See SW 4:230/OBM 218. 10 See Janaway 2022. 11 See SW 4:268–70/OBM 251–3. 12 Schopenhauer also holds that this ancient Indian wisdom is an originating influence upon Christianity and some aspects of ancient Greek thought. For the alleged influences on Greek thought, see SW 2:421/WWR 1:383; SW 3:560/WWR 2:505; SW 5:40, 43–4, 63–5/PP 1, 35, 38–40, 55–7. On Christianity, see sections ‘Recovering Indian Origins’ and ‘Pro-Indianism and Anti-Judaism’ below. 13 As a source for the division of races by color, Schopenhauer cites the theory of Buffon, from an 1844 work by Flourens (SW 6:169/PP 2:144). 14 Essai sur l’inégalité des Races Humaines (1853–5). Schopenhauer refers to this book, though only to endorse Gobineau’s slogan that the human being in general is the ‘evil animal par excellence’ (SW 6:228/PP 2:195). I cite the 1915 English translation of the Essai. 15 Thanks to David Bather Woods for clarifying the structure of the argument here. 16 See SW 4:242–4, 230/OBM 229–30 and 218–19. 17 See especially SW 4:234, 241, 248/OBM 222, 228, 234; SW 6:237, 254, 393, 399/PP 2:202, 216, 333, 338. 18 See, for example, SW 3:507, 558–9, 578–9, 723/WWR 2 461, 504, 521, 644; SW 6:40, 390–1, 402/PP 2:38, 331, 340. 19 See GB 261. 20 Marchand 2009 gives a comprehensive account of the development of German Orientalistik. 21 See SW 6:421–2/PP 2:356–7. We might also mention that Schopenhauer, a talented linguist who mastered English, French, Greek, Latin, Spanish and Italian, seems never to have taken steps to learn Sanskrit or any other non-European language. 22 See SW 5:40, 43–4, 59, 69, 118, 123, 136/PP 1:35, 38–41, 52, 61, 102, 106, 116–17. 23 See SW 180–6/WWR 2:173–8; SW 6:352–60/PP 2:300–6. 24 For samples, see SW 3:715–7/WWR 2:638–40; SW 6:402–9/PP 2:340–6. 25 Schopenhauer can be seen as heir to a long tradition here, in light of Marchand’s finding that ‘European, and especially German scholarly orientalism in the nineteenth and even early twentieth centuries remained powerfully rooted in humanistic traditions that reach back into the early modern or even Hellenistic world and are rooted in the interpretation of Jewish and Christian scriptures’ (Marchand 2009: 1). 26 Schopenhauer does however advocate that Jewish emancipation should advance no further and that increased inter-marriage with Christians would be good as it would result in there being no more Jews: ‘Then after a hundred years there will be only very few Jews left, and soon thereafter the ghost will be exorcized, Ahasuerus buried, and the chosen people themselves will not know where they have gone. However, this desirable result will be thwarted if the emancipation of the Jews is taken so far that they obtain political rights and so participation in the government and administration of Christian countries’ (SW 6:281/PP 2:237–8). 27 See, e.g., SW 5:112–38/PP 1:97–118. 28 See SW 6:280/PP 2:237. 29 Foetor Judaicus. See SW 4:240, 249/OBM 228, 235; SW 5:78/PP 1:69; SW 6:394, 395, 423/PP 2: 334, 335, 357. For some background on the term, see Wicks 2017: 344. See also: ‘Spinoza … could not break free from the Jews: a vessel “retains the smell of what used to fill it”’ (WWR 2, 662). It is usually the doctrine of theism that Schopenhauer represents as ‘smelling bad’. But in a

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Christopher Janaway late unpublished note, he applies the term to individual Jewish people (MR 4 392). (The allusion seems to have had common currency; for example, in Moby-Dick (1851) the narrator says, ‘the people of the middle ages affected to detect a Jew in the company, by the nose’ (Melville 2003: 449).) 30 For Schopenhauer on Christianity, see Janaway 2017. 31 Schopenhauer inveighs against the lack of consideration for animals in Christian morality and in Kant’s principle of humanity (SW 4:164/BM 162). But in many places he traces this attitude back to Judaism because of its ‘biblical’ origin. 32 Thanks to Ken Gemes, Sandra Shapshay, Gudrun von Tevenar, and David Bather Woods for comments on earlier drafts.

Bibliography Anquetil-Duperron, Abraham Hyacinthe, Oupnek’nat (id est, secretum tegendum) (Argentorati: Levrault, 2 vols, 1801–2). Barua, Ankur, ‘Indian Philosophy and the Question of the Self’, in Irina Kuznetsova, Jonardon Ganeri, and Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad (eds.), Hindu and Buddhist Ideas in Dialogue: Self and No-Self (Surrey: Ashgate, 2012), 217–29. Glendinning, Simon, ‘European Philosophical History and Faith in God A Posteriori’, Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 91 (2017): 63–82. Gobineau, Arthur de, The Inequality of Human Races, trans. Adrian Collins (London: William Heinemann, 1915). Golomb, Jacob, ‘The Inscrutable Riddle of Schopenhauer’s Relations to Jews and Judaism’, in Robert L. Wicks (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Schopenhauer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 425–451 Halbfass, Wilhelm, India and Europe (New York: SUNY Press, 1988). Janaway, Christopher, ‘Schopenhauer’s Christian Perspectives’, in Sandra Shapshay (ed.), The Palgrave Schopenhauer Handbook (London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2017), 351–72. Janaway, Christopher, ‘Schopenhauer’s “Indian” Ethics’, in Patrick Hassan (ed.), Schopenhauer’s Moral Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2022), 173–92. Marchand, Suzanne L., German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Matilal, Bimal Krishna, ‘India without Mystification: Comments on Nussbaum and Sen’, in Jonardon Ganeri (ed.), The Collected Essays of Bimal Krishna Matilal, Vol. 1: Mind, Language and World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 386–401. Melville, Herman, Moby-Dick, or, the Whale (New York: Penguin Books, 2003). Nietzsche, Friedrich, On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998). Pimenov, Alexei, German Nationalism and Indian Political Thought: The Influence of Ancient Indian Philosophy on the German Romantics (London: Routledge, 2020). Said, Edward W., Orientalism (London: Penguin, 2003). Sen, Amartya, The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity (London: Penguin Books, 2006), 139–60. Shapshay, Sandra, Reconstructing Schopenhauer’s Ethics: Hope, Compassion, and Animal Welfare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). Stone, Alison, ‘Europe and Eurocentrism’, Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 91 (2017): 83–103. Wicks, Robert, ‘Schopenhauer and Judaism’, in Sandra Shapshay (ed.), The Palgrave Schopenhauer Handbook (London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2017), 325–50.

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25 SCHOPENHAUER ON THE PESSIMISM, FATALISM, AND SUPERSTITIONS OF HERODOTUS AND THE GREEK TRAGEDIANS Mor Segev 25.1  Greek Optimism and the Pessimism of Greek Tragedy and Historiography In SW 3:721/WWR 2:643, Schopenhauer describes a positive transformation that he thinks Christianity has brought upon “the European peoples”: it disclosed to them the metaphysical meaning of existence and therefore taught them to look away from the narrow, impoverished and ephemeral earthly life and to stop viewing it as an end in itself, but rather to view it as a state of suffering, guilt, trial, struggle, and purification, out of which, through moral worthiness, severe renunciation and denial of one’s own self, one can raise oneself to a better existence, although one that is incomprehensible to us. The perpetual suffering and inevitable death inherent in the human condition on the one hand and the potential redemption from that condition through self-nullification on the other, which for Schopenhauer are symbolized by Adam’s fall and Christ’s crucifixion, respectively, amount to what he says “is incomparably the most important truth that there can be” (SW 3:723/WWR 2:644). The reason why such an important truth was propagated in Europe only with the rise of Christianity, though it already had been arrived at by Buddhism and Brahmanism long beforehand, is that it happens to be “completely opposed to the natural tendency of the human race” (ibid.). For that reason, that truth was “completely novel for the Greeks and the Romans, who entered fully into life and did not look seriously beyond it” (SW 3:722/WWR 2:644). For Schopenhauer, absorption in the observable world and its phenomena, without recourse to (or indeed any desire for) an escape through salvation or personal immortality, is the mark of optimistic religions, taking the world as is, including the lives of human beings within it, to be perfectly good and satisfactory. Though Judaism is a case in point, he argues, it is also responsible for the introduction of the Fall of Adam, which, Schopenhauer thinks, is both at the core of “authentic and original Christianity” and symbolic of the truth of pessimism, according to which “existence is certainly to be seen as a mistake from which redemption is a return” (SW 3:695/WWR 2:620). The fact that Judaism – otherwise DOI: 10.4324/9781003048992-30

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an optimistic religion, by and large – introduces that narrative is “its redeeming feature”, for him (ibid.). “Only Greek paganism and Islam”, Schopenhauer concludes, “are entirely optimistic” (ibid.). The truth of Christian faith, Schopenhauer claims, “stand[s] in contrast to the false, shallow, and pernicious1 optimism presented by Greek paganism, Judaism and Islam” (SW 3:716/WWR 2:639), and it is indeed due to its pessimism that Christianity “was able to defeat … Judaism and Greek and Roman paganism”, whose optimistic outlook overlooked a truth “deeply and painfully felt by all” that, once exposed, proceeded to recruit adherents to the ranks of Christianity (SW 3:188/WWR 2:179).2 For Schopenhauer, the Greeks’ optimistic absorption in and satisfaction with earthly existence was incongruent with the sophistication and accomplishments of their civilization, and it is therefore little wonder that glimpses of the truth of pessimism are to be witnessed in some prominent Greek thinkers and their endorsement of metempsychosis – an idea which, though not entirely accurate in its popular form (SW 3:576/WWR 2:518–9), is nevertheless representative of the ideas, at the core of Schopenhauer’s pessimistic approach, that “the present generation [of people] is, in its true kernel, substantially identical to the previous one” (SW 3:578/WWR 2:521) and that there is indeed a “metaphysical identity of all beings” (SW 3:690/WWR 2:616): The ancients, although far advanced in almost every other respect, remained children when it came to the main point, and were surpassed by even the druids, who taught metempsychosis. The fact that a few philosophers like Pythagoras and Plato thought differently changes nothing as far as the whole is concerned. (SW 3:722/WWR 2:644) Pessimism in antiquity is not confined to these two philosophers, however. Schopenhauer cites Clement of Alexandria’s list of quotations of ancient Greek expressions of pessimism, which he thinks is faithful to the original (albeit not conducive to Clement’s critical purposes) (SW 3:714/WWR 2:636–7). The list includes, apart from Plato and Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Orpheus, Pindar, Herodotus, and Euripides (ibid.). And, elsewhere, Schopenhauer himself locates pessimistic tendencies also in Homer, Theognis, and Sophocles (SW 3:673–4/WWR 2:601–2).3 Apart from Sophocles and Euripides, Schopenhauer associates Aeschylus with pessimism, describing the “theme” of his work as the mutual causation of “crime” and “misery”, as well as the “horror and desolation”,4 brought about by the operation of the will-to-live in us (SW 3:653/WWR 2:584). Indeed, it appears that ancient Greek history and tragedy for Schopenhauer are pessimistic as such. As he thinks, the progress made by Greek civilization, combined with the overall optimistic nature of Greek religion, inevitably meant that “the opposing tendency had to get an airing in tragedy at least” (SW 3:695/WWR 2:620). And the very invention of the art-form by the Greeks is evidence of their sensitivity to the “wretchedness5 of existence” (SW 3:672/WWR 2:601). In turn, historians in antiquity, beginning with Herodotus, “portray the individual so that the aspect of the Idea of humanity expressed in it comes to the fore” (SW 2:290WWR 1:273). When considered according to the unified “Idea of human beings”, individuals turn out for Schopenhauer to “share in suffering and eternal death”, symbolized in Christianity, once again, by Adam (SW 2:479/WWR 1:432; cf. SW 3:722/WWR 2:643–4), as well as the potential of salvation through resignation, symbolized by Christ (SW 2:388/WWR 1:355). The “Idea of human beings”, in other words, reveals the truth of Schopenhauer’s philosophical pessimism, and the ancient historians, by 358

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highlighting that Idea in their depictions of historical figures, have aligned themselves with that truth. It is true that, specifically with regard to their success in truly capturing and conveying the human condition, Schopenhauer sees ancient historians as superior to modern ones (SW 2:290–1/WWR 1:273), whereas he thinks that tragedy has improved significantly in modernity (SW 3:495–6/WWR 2:450-1). Nevertheless, the affinity between history and tragedy in ancient times, in Schopenhauer’s estimation, is remarkable and instructive. For him, both are inherently pessimistic, in stark contrast to the zeitgeist of ancient Greece, and both indeed seem to appear on the scene as an inevitable counterforce to the prevailing optimistic tendency of their day. In what follows, we shall compare in detail Schopenhauer’s treatment of Herodotus, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides – in his published writings, his Nachlass, and his marginal notes on his private copy of Herodotus – and determine, based on that comparison, the reasons why and the ways in which he thinks ancient tragedy and history functioned similarly. We shall see that, for Schopenhauer, certain features Herodotus shares with the Greek tragedians explain both their similar philosophical leaning toward pessimism and their reversion to optimism in the final analysis. In particular, Schopenhauer thinks that both Herodotus and the tragedians, though they manage to express the true essence of humanity through the poetic depiction of individuals and correctly adhere to the view that human suffering is both prevalent and inevitable, nevertheless fall prey to superstitious conceptions of divinely ordained portents and fate, which brings them perilously closer to the optimism of their age.

25.2  Herodotus’ Pessimism Schopenhauer compares history both to science and to poetry, ultimately concluding that it is inferior to both, for a similar reason.6 History and poetry both have human beings as their principal subject matter. But history concerns itself with the observation of human actions and interactions, i.e., with individual phenomena, whereas poetry deals with the universal, and affords a glimpse into the “interior of humanity as a whole”, i.e., the “Idea of human beings” mentioned above (SW 2:294/WWR 1:276). When ancient historians do treat particulars in a way that reveals the identical Idea shared by them, Schopenhauer thinks, they do so not qua historians but qua poets (SW 2:290/WWR 1:272–3). Indeed, history is deficient by comparison to poetry not only in its subject matter but also in its degree of accuracy, for Schopenhauer. Historians are tasked with recording events comprehensively – a daunting project which they inevitably fall short of accomplishing fully. By contrast, poets, who are concerned with conveying “the Idea” or “inner being” of humankind (SW 2:289–90, 294/WWR 1:272, 276), strive merely to represent “the essence of their own self” (SW 2:289/WWR 1:272). “Their model stands firm, clear and brightly illuminated before their mind”, and they are therefore able to “show us the Idea purely and clearly” (SW 2:290/WWR 1:272). In WWR II.38 (“On History”), Schopenhauer clarifies his view of the status of history as a field of knowledge. History is not a science strictly speaking, since “it never achieves cognition of the particular by means of the universal”, but rather deals directly and exclusively with particulars, and because it deals with “what existed at one point and then no longer”, rather than with “what always exists” (SW 3:502/WWR 2:457). This contrast is felt especially strongly when comparing history to philosophy, which “is concerned to bring us the insight that things have been, are, and will be entirely the same in all ages” (SW 359

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3:504/WWR 2:458). History by and large obscures the point, central to philosophy, that “the essence of human life, as of nature in general, is completely present in every present moment and requires only a depth of comprehension to be exhaustively recognized” (ibid.). By “philosophy”, in this context, Schopenhauer has in mind specifically philosophy properly practiced. Hegelian philosophy, which to Schopenhauer’s mind is “pseudo-philosophy”, for him goes astray precisely in taking “appearance to be the essence in itself of the world”, whereas in truth “[o]nly inner processes, to the extent that they concern the will, have true reality and are actual events; because only the will is the thing in itself” (SW 3:505–6/WWR 2:459–60). The Hegelians thus erringly “believe that there should first be coming into being and becoming” and proceed to investigate history as a principal part of their theorizing, with the intention of “construct[ing] it according to a present plan of the world which holds that everything is for the best” (SW 3:507/WWR 2:460). This view, which exalts “miserable7 earthly happiness” (ibid.), thus amounts to optimism, directly at odds with “the true spirit and inner core of Christianity”, as well as of “Brahmanism and Buddhism”, namely, “an understanding of the vanity8 of earthly happiness, a complete disdain for such happiness and a turn in the direction of a completely different, even opposite existence” (SW 3:507/WWR 2:461). Although historians have the tendency to steer away from the eternal “Idea of human beings” and to concentrate instead on individuals and their fleeting lives and actions, they need not do so and have not always done so, as Schopenhauer thinks. As he says, “the inner essence, the significance of appearances”, i.e., the true nature of human beings, “can never be completely lost in the historian’s way of looking at things, and can still be found and recognized (at least by those who are looking for it)” (SW 2:289/WWR 1:271–2). It is thus possible for historians to avoid tediously examining the minutiae of human affairs and to convey the truth concerning the human condition, though, as far as Schopenhauer is concerned, they act “with artistic eyes” whenever they do so (SW 2:288/WWR 1:271). Indeed, in Schopenhauer’s estimation, this is precisely what one finds in the first works of history, beginning with Herodotus. He says: The great ancient historians are therefore poets when it comes to particulars, where they have no information, e.g. in the speeches of their heroes; indeed, the whole way in which they treat their material tends towards the epic: but this is just what lends unity to their portrayal and lets them retain the inner truth even where the outer is inaccessible to them, or even falsified. … they portray the individual so that the aspect of the Idea of humanity expressed in it comes to the fore. (SW 2:290/WWR 1:272–3) Ancient historiographers are generally in the habit of composing speeches on behalf of the historical persons figuring in their reports. Thucydides famously states expressly that, given the difficulty of recounting speeches accurately, he has elected to report his subjects as saying the things that should have been said by them (τὰ δέοντα: 1.22.1). Schopenhauer’s point in the passage quoted above is that taking such liberties enabled the ancients to write history poetically and thereby to attain a far greater degree of truth than that of their modern counterparts.9 Indeed, this ancient approach to history extended beyond the report of speeches to the depiction of (often fabricated) dialogues and the presentation of events as divinely ordained.10 As we shall see, Schopenhauer, in his private notes on Herodotus, interprets occurrences of all of these kinds as useful devices for conveying certain truths about human nature. 360

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As mentioned above, it is the same eternal nature of humanity which poets have an insight into that is also explored and conveyed by (adequate) philosophers, in Schopenhauer’s view. Unsurprisingly, then, it is these same ancient historians, and above all Herodotus, whom he sees as writing, not only poetically, but also philosophically. He says: The true philosophy of history consists in the insight that throughout all these endless alterations with their chaotic noise, we are only ever faced with the same, identical, unchangeable essence that behaves the same today as yesterday and always. (…) If you have read Herodotus, then from a philosophical perspective you have already studied enough history. Because there you find all the ingredients of subsequent world history: the activities, deeds, sufferings and fate of the human race as it develops from the qualities mentioned as well as from the physical, earthly lot. (SW 3:507–8/WWR 2:461–2) The emphasis on “sufferings” in this description is not coincidental. As the “identical element” discovered by the historians working poetically or philosophically, Schopenhauer sees specifically “the basic qualities of the human heart and head – many bad ones, few good” (SW 3:508/WWR 2:461).11 It is thus a pessimistic philosophical evaluation of human nature that the great historians of antiquity have aligned themselves with (as we would suspect, given Schopenhauer’s report of, and apparent adherence to, Clement’s list of pessimistic ancient thinkers, which includes Herodotus, as we have seen; cf. SW 3:714/WWR 2:636-7). As we shall see presently, Schopenhauer’s notes on Herodotus show his detection of many occurrences of just such a philosophical pessimistic insight.12 In line with his general statement concerning the philosophical insight making its way to the speeches reported by the ancient historians, Schopenhauer mentions that “[a]ccording to Herodotus, Xerxes wept at the sight of his immense army when it occurred to him that of all these men no one would be alive in a hundred years” (SW 6:590/PP 2:498). The reference is to Hist. 7.46-7, where Herodotus portrays a dialogue between Xerxes and his uncle Artabanus. Xerxes’ explanation of why he is weeping during this dialogue, apart from what Schopenhauer directly reports, also includes the fact that he has been driven “to have compassion over how brief the entirety of human life is” (κατοικτεῖραι ὡς βραχὺς εἴη ὁ πᾶς ἀνθρώπινος βίος). Artabanus’ response is hardly comforting. As he says, even during such a brief life, given the misfortunes (αἱ συμφοραί) and the diseases (αἱ νοῦσοι) abounding in it, no one is by nature happy (εὐδαίμων πέφυκε) enough to be able to avoid wishing, indeed frequently, to die rather than to live. Xerxes, for his part, accepts the correction to his position. The resulting consensus amounts to a view closely reminiscent of pessimism as Schopenhauer himself formulates it, e.g.: “this [human] existence is a kind of mistake or false path … it is the work of an originally blind will whose most fortunate development is to come to itself in order to abolish itself” (SW 3:653–4/WWR 2:585). And, elsewhere, Schopenhauer refers to Artabanus’ very statement from Hist. 7.46 while elaborating on his own views that “as far as the life of the individual is concerned, every life history is a history of suffering” and that “our condition is so miserable that complete non-being would be decidedly preferable” (SW 2:382–3/WWR 1:350). Instructively, Schopenhauer does not mention the speaker or the context in which it is found in Herodotus, instead stating simply that this is “what was already argued13 by the father of history” and “has not been disproved since” (SW 2:383/WWR 1:351). Schopenhauer, true to his description of ancient historians as expressing philosophical insight using their subjects as mouthpieces, 361

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then interprets the dialogue between Xerxes and Artabanus as an expression of Herodotus’ own pessimism. In his private note on this part of Herodotus’ text, he marks the entire dialogue (underlining Artabanus’ contribution) and gives it a Latin title fitting his interpretation of the text in WWR: “Dialogus Pessimistorum philosophicus” (“a philosophical dialogue between pessimists”) (see Figure 25.1).14 Schopenhauer thus sees this occurrence in Herodotus as a piece of philosophical writing in which the characters arrive at and express a fundamental truth concerning the grim nature of the human condition. Another place in Herodotus that Schopenhauer cites in support of his pessimism is Solon’s proclamation in Hist. 1.32 that “a human being is entirely chance/misfortune” (πᾶν ἐστι ἄνθρωπος συμφορή). Schopenhauer cites this text in SW 3:164/WWR 2:158, in the context of explaining that a “misfortune” (Unfall) or an “aggravation” (Widerwärtigkeit) does not call for anger or anguish, inasmuch as “the human being really is ... a creature in the greatest need of help, subject to countless misfortunes (Unfällen) both small and large, every day and every hour…”.15 Clearly, then, Schopenhauer reads συμφορή at Hist. 1.32.4 as “misfortune”. By contrast, translators standardly render συμφορή in Herodotus’ text, and in Schopenhauer’s reference to it, as “chance”.16 A brief consideration of the context in which the statement is made reveals reasons in support of both readings. In Hist. 1.31-2, Solon tells Croesus about the “happiness” (εὐδαιμονίη) of Cleobis and Biton. The latter two, he recounts, once dragged the statue of Hera to a temple during a festival, the oxen designated for the task having been delayed in the field, upon which both men expired, presumably from exhaustion. By their example, the goddess has shown “that it is better for a human being to die than to live” (ὡς ἄμεινον εἴη ἀνθρώπῳ τεθνάναι μᾶλλον ἢ ζώειν). This text (which Schopenhauer marks with a double line on his copy of Herodotus) has been taken to convey the idea, “common in Greek literature”, that “[d]eath is welcomed as an escape from troubles”, comparable to Sophocles’ OC 1225 and Theognis 425-8,17 two texts that Schopenhauer himself cites as evidence for Greek pessimism (cf. SW 3:673–4/WWR 2:602). Schopenhauer seems to be reading Hist. 1.32.4 as a reaffirmation of this pessimistic thought. It is true that in 1.32.5, upon learning that Croesus is offended by not being considered as happy as “commoners” such as Cleobis and Biton, Solon responds by telling Croesus that he could not in principle assess his (Croesus’) life as happy until it is over and can be shown to have had “luck” (τύχη) on its side, so that Croesus would be in a position “to end life well, having all fine things”. This would seem to motivate the reading of συμφορή at 1.32.4 as “chance”, insofar as Solon speaks of both good and ill fortune as the factors relevant to determining a person’s happiness or lack of happiness. However, the discussion building up to this conclusion speaks in favor of Schopenhauer’s interpretation. Immediately before stating that “a human being is entirely a συμφορή”, Solon says that “during a long existence one has many things to see, and many things to experience, which one would not like to”, and that in a life consisting of 26,250 days, no two days are alike and “none at all brings forth a similar circumstance” to that of another. Thus, the conclusion that follows, i.e., that “a human being is entirely a συμφορή”, would seem to mean that human life is governed not so much by chance as by specifically unfavorable circumstances. Furthermore, at Hist. 7.46 Herodotus has Artabanus speak of the overwhelming συμφοραί that, together with sickness, make human life, brief though it is, nevertheless seem too long (Hist. 7.46-7; see above).18 At times, Herodotus in fact steps outside of his historical narrative to state a philosophical opinion in his own voice. In Hist. 7.152, he discusses Xerxes’ treaty with Argos, and the 362

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Figure 25.1  Hist. 7.46 (and part of 7.47) in Schopenhauer’s copy of Herodotus Source: Herodoti Halicarnassei Historiarum Libri IX, eds. F.W. Reiz and G.H. Schäfer. Vol. 1 part 2 (Leipzig, 1800). Digitized by the Universitätsbibliothek J.C. Senckenberg Frankfurt am Main [2016]: urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:2-263131. Page [187] 181.

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Argives’ message to Xerxes’ son, Artoxerxes, asking to reconfirm their friendly relations. Herodotus purports not to know accurately the details concerning the affair, although: I do know thus much: that if all human beings were to bring together their private evils in public, wishing to trade with their neighbors, having peered closely into their neighbors’ evils each of them would take away for themselves those they came in with. (7.152.2) Though subsequently applied specifically to the assessment of the case of the Argives and their alleged betrayal by siding with Xerxes against the Greeks,19 the point that Herodotus is making in this text can be taken, and is indeed formulated, quite generally. Schopenhauer, for his part, marks it on his copy of Herodotus, and adds the following comment as a corollary to Herodotus’ statement: “therefore, [I know that] all are miserable (ergo omnes miseros esse)” (see Figure 25.2). As far as Schopenhauer is concerned, then, Herodotus commits himself to a pessimistic worldview, not only using his characters but also in his own voice. Finally, Herodotus, for Schopenhauer, expresses pessimism not only in the various statements that he either makes himself or attributes to others but also through anthropological observation. In Hist. 5.4, which Schopenhauer in his copy of Herodotus marks with a double line and titles “Thraces flentes” (weeping Thracians), Herodotus reports the custom of the Thracian Trausi of bewailing the birth of a baby on account of the evils (κακὰ) anticipating it, relating “all the human sufferings” (τὰ ἀνθρωπήια πάντα πάθεα), and of playing and enjoying themselves upon the departure of a person, given the evils that that person has escaped and the happiness (εὐδαιμονίη) that that person has gained thereby. Schopenhauer regards this passage, as well as attestations of the Thracian practice by other Greek authors, such as Plutarch, as evidence (Beleg) of “the Greeks [being] deeply affected by the wretchedness of existence” (SW 3:672/WWR 2:601; cf. Reisebuch: 171).20 The relevant text from Plutarch (De audiend. poet. 36e-f) records a similar practice described “in poetry” (ἐν τοῖς ποίημασι), taken from Euripides’ Cresphontes (Fr. 449, Nauck), and “very much cited in antiquity”.21 Neither Plutarch nor Euripides mention the Thracians in this regard. However, it has been noted that Euripides himself “may be indebted to the account of the customs of the Thracian Trausoi at Herodotus 5.4”,22 as he clearly is for Schopenhauer, for whom it is the impact of the Thracians on the Greek zeitgeist, through influential authors such as Herodotus, Euripides, and Plutarch, that serves as evidence for the Greek awareness of “the wretchedness of existence” (see the citation above).

25.3  The Pessimism of the Greek Tragedians Tragedy, as Schopenhauer thinks of it, presents to us “the terrible side of life”, whereby “we feel called upon to turn our will away from life, to stop wanting and loving it” (SW 3:495/WWR 2:450). The “tragic spirit”, as he puts it, lies in “the recognition that the world, that life cannot afford us true satisfaction, and is therefore not worth attachment to it” (ibid.). By direct contrast to “the trite, optimistic … world-view”, which seeks “poetic justice”, “[t]he true sense of tragedy is the deeper insight that the hero does not atone for his particular sins, but for original sin instead, i.e. the guilt of existence itself” (SW 3:299– 300/WWR 2:281). Reverting once again to the Fall of Adam as the quintessential symbol of pessimism, Schopenhauer here directly links the fundamental idea behind tragedy to 364

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Figure 25.2  Part of Hist. 7.152 (and part of 7.153) in Schopenhauer’s copy of Herodotus Source: Herodoti Halicarnassei Historiarum Libri IX, eds. F.W. Reiz and G.H. Schäfer. Vol. 1 part 2 (Leipzig, 1800). Digitized by the Universitätsbibliothek J.C. Senckenberg Frankfurt am Main [2016]: urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:2-263131. Page [236] 230.

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the expression of that worldview. And this idea, Schopenhauer claims, ultimately “leads to resignation” (SW 3:495/WWR 2:450).23 It is true that Schopenhauer thinks that the ancient Greek tragedians generally failed to carry this pessimistic realization to its natural conclusion and fell short of expressing resignation (SW 3:496/WWR 2:451), and we shall return to his account of the shortcomings of ancient tragedy. Nevertheless, he credits the Greeks with having invented tragedy which, even in its nascent form, systemically negates the optimistic tendency prevalent in Greek religion and culture by exposing the true human condition in all its “wretchedness” (Elend) (SW 3:672/WWR 2:601).24 Schopenhauer finds the expression of a pessimistic evaluation of human life in all three surviving tragedians. We have already noted that he characterizes Aeschylus’ work as centering on “crime”, “misery”, “horror”, and “desolation”, resulting from the will-to-live and its operation in human life (SW 3:653/WWR 2:584). Fundamentally, therefore, Schopenhauer sees Aeschylus’ tragedies as aligning with his own view, according to which all life, and especially human life, is doomed to constant struggle and suffering (WWR 1 §61), unless and until the will-to-live has been rendered inoperative or denied (SW 2:470/WWR 1:424). Indeed, Schopenhauer privileges Aeschylus over the other Greek dramatists. In SW 3:599/WWR 2:540, he pairs him with Shakespeare, labeling both “the greatest dramatists”, and, even when he groups the ancient tragedians together and characterizes their works as inferior to modern tragedies, he makes the point of referring to him as “the great Aeschylus” (SW 3:496/WWR 2:451). It is therefore regrettable that, although Schopenhauer frequently quotes Aeschylus in his notebooks (Pandectae II, 55, p. 102 [from Prometheus Bound]; Philosophari 64 [from Agamemnon]; Quartant 47, p. 41 [from Eumenides]), he does not discuss his plays at length. One might at least partially reconstruct Schopenhauer’s reasons for admiring Aeschylus from his attitude toward Prometheus Bound.25 In Quartant 41, pp. 37-8 (MR 3:224, Payne),26 Schopenhauer, like Plato in the Protagoras (which he cites), interprets Prometheus as symbolizing “the advantage man has over the animal, the thought for the morrow”. However, as Schopenhauer is quick to add, this advantage comes along with a remarkable disadvantage: man must atone for this privilege of foresight by the incessant torment of cares and worries which no animal knows. Care is the vulture which gnaws at the liver of the shackled Prometheus. (ibid.) This is precisely what Schopenhauer himself thinks distinguishes humans from other animals. As he puts it in SW 3:64/WWR 2:66, “animals … experience infinitely less suffering than we do, because they are not aware of any other sufferings than those brought about directly in the present”. Prometheus thus encapsulates what for Schopenhauer accounts for the immeasurable suffering undergone by human beings during their lifetime, and he must think of Aeschylus’ choice of him as a tragic hero as a most apt one for that reason. Schopenhauer discusses the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides more directly and elaborately. Both figure in his list of representative historical examples of pessimistic insight in SW 3:672–5/WWR 2:601–3, specifically, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex 1225, expressing the sentiment that it is best for humans not to be born and second best for them to die quickly, and Euripides’ Hippolytus 189, stating that all human life is painful (ὀδυνηρός) and that there is no respite from toils (πόνων). Schopenhauer praises Sophocles’ depiction of his hero in Philoctetes as “cry[ing] out”27 – a feature that he thinks most definitely would have been 366

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acted out on stage – for its effect and service for “truth” and “the complete presentation of the Idea” (SW 2:269/WWR 1:254). The “Idea” that Schopenhauer has in mind here, as is made clear in the preceding chapter, is once again the “Idea of humanity”, which “reveal[s] the essence of the will to us most completely” (SW 2:251/WWR 1:238), and which arts such as tragedy aim at revealing through “the presentation of [an] individual” (SW 2:265/WWR 1:250). Sophocles is praised, then, for his use of the anguish of an individual character to represent the miserable condition of humanity as a whole. In line with that assessment, Schopenhauer also praises Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. In Foliant I, he makes the point that, standardly, ancient tragedians refrain from affecting their audience by means of “the interesting” (das Interessante) – i.e., “that which wrings sympathy or concern from the individual will” (…) quite like that which we feel in the case of actual events where our own person is involved” (pp. 2-3 [MR 2:69–70, Payne]). Instead, these playwrights tend to depict “events that were almost always known to everyone” and would hence surprise no one (pp. 13-14 [MS 2:74–5]). Sophocles, in Oedipus Rex, defies this norm and manages to produce a “masterpiece[]”, effectively employing “the interesting” as an element (ibid.). Though Schopenhauer does not elaborate on his statement concerning the play, we may do so on his behalf. Sophocles’ version of the Oedipus narrative differs considerably from earlier ones. Perhaps most significantly, whereas both the Iliad (23.677-680) and the Odyssey (11.271-277) relate Oedipus’ continued rule over Thebes after the revelation of his transgression, Sophocles of course depicts him as spending the rest of his life in exile.28 It must be either this or a similar deviation from standard versions of the Oedipus myth that Schopenhauer had in mind in arguing that Oedipus Rex employs “the interesting” to affect its viewers. An ancient Greek audience seeing Oedipus Rex for the first time would presumably be surprised by, and curious about, its ending, which is not trivially different from the standard version and brings up questions, e.g., concerning the possible link between Odeipus’ actions and his fate. Since Schopenhauer ranks Oedipus Rex as a “masterpiece”, he must think that its usage of “the interesting”, which involves the depiction of events cognizable exclusively through the principle of sufficient reason, was ultimately in the service of the true object of art, i.e., arriving at “knowledge of the (Platonic) idea” (Foliant I, pp. 3-4, 14-15 [MR 2:70–1, Payne, 75–6, Payne]). Take the surprising exile of Oedipus. Surely, that element of the play contributes to the expression of the human condition (or the “Idea of humanity”) as embodied by Oedipus’ misfortune and torment. Sophocles’ wise artistic choice, Schopenhauer would say, was to modestly incorporate an “admixture of the interesting”, which in its “feebler degree” – after all, the lion’s share of the plot of the play would have been known to its original audience – is useful toward achieving the true purpose of art (Foliant I, p. 14 [MR 2:75, Payne]). Indeed, as Schopenhauer goes on to argue (Foliant I, p. 15 [MR 2:76, Payne]), “with dramatic and narrative works an admixture of the interesting is necessary”, in part due to the tediousness that would result from a novel or play that is entirely “devoid of interest”. Finally, a fragment of Euripides (Fr. 506, Nauck) states that Zeus does not administer justice by examining and weighing the aberrations of humans, but rather “justice is somewhere near here, if you wish to look”. Schopenhauer quotes this fragment in SW 2:414/WWR 1:377 and he takes it to affirm what he calls “eternal justice”, i.e., the notion that all suffering and misery in the observable world are due to this world being a representation of the will, which makes the world culpable for, and justly deserving of, this pitiable condition (WWR 1 §60, §63; SW 3:692/WWR 2:618). As for human beings, in particular, “if [they] were not on the whole worthless, then their fate 367

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would not be on the whole so sad” (SW 2:415/WWR 1:378). By attributing a recognition of this idea to Euripides, Schopenhauer once again sees his work as a precursor to his own pessimistic project. It is fair to conclude that Schopenhauer thinks that the Greek tragedians are generally eminently successful in capturing the suffering unique and essential to human existence, and the pessimistic conclusions that follow from it. Indeed, special credit is given to them for inventing a genre so well designed to achieve that purpose, and for doing so within a culture generally inimical to pessimistic insight. As we shall see, for Schopenhauer, it is precisely that tension between their insight and the views prevalent in the culture in which they write that also accounts for a certain (understandable) shortcoming in the efforts of these dramatists (by contrast to modern ones), which they share with Herodotus.

25.4  Superstition, Fate, and Fatalism Despite his appreciation for ancient historiography and tragedy, Schopenhauer also takes issue with both. He describes Greek (and Roman) paganism as “for the most part an obvious personification of the forces of nature” and scorns those “men” who “were ever serious about these childish religions”, like Herodotus at Histories 9.65 (SW 6:385/PP 2:326). There, Herodotus discusses the Battle of Palataea and says that though it took place in the vicinity of the temple of Demeter, Persian soldiers were remarkably only killed outside of the temple. The reason, he says, was that the goddess prevented the Persians from entering the temple, which they had desecrated. In his copy of Herodotus, Schopenhauer comments on this passage as follows: “Herodotus’ extraordinary superstition makes one wonder, because at II.53 he has said that the history of the gods is affirmed by convention (Superstitio Herodoti egregia eo magis miro, quod L. II, c. 53, Deorum Historiam a pactis dictam dixerit)” (see Figure 25.3). In Hist. 2.53, Herodotus states that traditional Greek representations of divinity are relatively recent, as they begin with Homer and Hesiod both of whom in his estimation, lived at most four hundred years before him. For Schopenhauer, this remark points to skepticism concerning the reliability of traditional conceptions of the gods, which is difficult to square with Herodotus’ own endorsement of those very conceptions (e.g., in Hist. 9.65).29 Schopenhauer criticizes ancient Greek tragedy for a similar adherence to a superstitious conception of the gods and their effects on human life. Tragedy, by making us realize that life “is not worth attachment to it”, (ideally) “leads to resignation” (SW 3:495/WWR 2:450). To achieve this result most effectively, the dramatist must bring the tragic occurrence “close to us”, thereby revealing the potential destruction of our own happiness and life “at any moment”, and the tragedies that do so best are those that present “the greatest misfortune” as resulting “effortlessly and spontaneously out of people’s deeds and characters” (SW 2:300–1/WWR 1:281–2). However, Schopenhauer thinks, ancient tragedies fail to attain that result and instead depict misfortune either as caused by some extraordinarily wretched character (such as Phaedra in Euripides’ Hippolytus and Creon in Sophocles’ Antigone) or, most frequently, as occurring through “blind fate” (as in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Women of Trachis) (SW 2:300/WWR 1:281). The Greek tragic hero, whose tragic misfortune is thought of as externally caused, does not inspire “renunciation” (SW 2:301/WWR 1:282). Such heroes are either consoled by revenge or some earthly goods, or are otherwise “composed [gelassen], but not resigned [resignirt]” (SW 3:496/WWR 2:451).30 They “acquiesce[] in an unalterable fate and the inflexible will of the gods”, but do not negate their own will-to-live (ibid.). 368

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Figure 25.3  Part of Hist. 9.65 (as well as 9.66 and part of 9.67) in Schopenhauer’s copy of Herodotus Source: Herodoti Halicarnassei Historiarum Libri IX, eds. F.W. Reiz and G.H. Schäfer. Vol. 1 part 2 (Leipzig, 1800). Digitized by the Universitätsbibliothek J.C. Senckenberg Frankfurt am Main [2016]: urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:2–263131. Page [396] 390.

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It is worth emphasizing that what Schopenhauer objects to in Herodotus and the Greek tragedians in these texts cannot be their use of traditional depictions of divinity per se, false though such depictions may be (as we have seen, he is quite capable of commending Herodotus, e.g., for depicting Hera as having conveyed a pessimistic insight through the events surrounding Biton and Cleobis in Hist. 1.31-2). Nor does he object to their view of the inevitability, prevalence, and predictability of human suffering, with which he again agrees. Consider the following passage: The fatum, the εἱμαρμένη of the ancients is nothing more than the certainty brought to our consciousness that everything occurring through the causal chain is firmly bound and therefore happens with strict necessity, according to which the future is already perfectly fixed, certain and precisely determined, and in it nothing can be changed any more than in the past. In the fatalistic myths of the ancients, only the foreknowledge of it can be regarded as fabulous (fabelhaft), if we abstract here from the possibility of magnetic clairvoyance and second sight. Instead of trying to discount the basic truth of fatalism with frivolous babble and silly excuses, one should attempt to understand it properly and clearly and to recognize that it is a demonstrable truth which provides an important datum for comprehending our highly enigmatic existence. (SW 6:251/PP 2:213) Schopenhauer does think that there is evidence for “second sight”, “magnetic clairvoyance”, and prophetic dreams, and he takes such phenomena to demonstrate empirically the truth at the basis of ancient fatalism, viz., the view that “the future is already perfectly fixed” (SW 5:215/PP 1:178–9; cf. Cogitata I, p. 242; Adversaria, pp. 574-7; SW 2:180/WWR 1:176; SW 4:40/FW 61).31 He notes in this context the observation that upon an occurrence of “second sight” one tends to attempt to prevent the predicted event, only to then realize that this very effort has contributed to the fulfillment of the prediction, and he argues that it is the very same phenomenon that is described both in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex (in which Oedipus attempts to thwart a premonition of him killing his father and marrying his mother by fleeing to Corinth, only to discover later on that a man he had killed and the wife he had taken were in fact his parents), and in Herodotus 1.35-43 (where the story is told of Croesus who, upon dreaming that his son Atys will be killed by a spear, sends his guest Adrastus to watch over Atys during a hunt of a wild boar, only to later discover that Adrastus’ spear had missed the boar and killed Atys) (SW 5:216/PP 1:179). What, then, is nevertheless unacceptable or “fabulous” in these ancient accounts, as far as Schopenhauer is concerned? In his view, the trouble begins with the explanation given in these accounts to such occurrences of foreknowledge, issuing from either an oracle or a dream (ibid.), and in both cases taken to reflect “the inflexible will of the gods” (SW 3:495– 6/WWR 2:450–1). The clearest example of Schopenhauer’s attitude toward this explanation of foreknowledge is to be found in a comment he makes on Herodotus 8.65. In that chapter, Herodotus relates the story of Dicaeus and Demaratus who, while visiting Eleusis at a time during which Attica is deserted, see a cloud of dust and hear a cry resembling the sounds made at the annual procession of the Eleusinian mysteries. Dicaeus, an Athenian, interprets the sound as “divine” (theion), signaling that the gods will help the Athenians and annihilate Xerxes and his army. Commenting on this event, Schopenhauer writes the following on the margins of his copy of Herodotus (see Figure 25.4):

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Figure 25.4  Part of Hist. 8.65 in Schopenhauer’s copy of Herodotus. Schopenhauer’s Latin subtitle – “a portent of miracles” – is already indicative of his dismissive attitude toward the interpretation presented in it. In SW 2:26/WWR 1:44, he defines “stupidity in the original sense of the word” as “an obtuseness in applying the law of causality”, which leads to the acceptance of “magic and miracles”. Source: Herodoti Halicarnassei Historiarum Libri IX, eds. F.W. Reiz and G.H. Schäfer. Vol. 1 part 2 (Leipzig, 1800). Digitized by the Universitätsbibliothek J.C. Senckenberg Frankfurt am Main [2016]: urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:2-263131. Page [311] 305.

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Haec interpretatio falsa est: imo δευτερα σκοπιᾳ praeviderunt pompam Eleusiniam proximo anno futuram. The interpretation here is false: in truth they have foreseen the future Eleusinian procession the following year by second sight. As Schopenhauer is suggesting here, the reported event may well have occurred, and the sight and sound perceived by the two men may well have had predictive potential. But, in Schopenhauer’s view, Dicaeus’ interpretation of the event as a divine portent is wrongheaded, and in fact leads to an erroneous conclusion with regard to the future event signified by it – rather than a sign sent by the gods, this was a standard occurrence of the observable phenomenon of “second sight” presaging exactly the event perceived (the Eleusinian procession) rather than some other event symbolized by it. Whereas the traditional gods are acceptable as mouthpieces announcing truths about the human condition (as Hera does in Hist. 1.31-2), Schopenhauer indicates, it is seriously misleading and pernicious to present either divine decision or “blind fate” as the sole cause of that condition and its inalterability. For Schopenhauer, strict determinism, adhered to by Herodotus and the Greek tragedians and supported by observations of “second sight”, helps to show why as humans we all suffer tremendously, repeatedly, and inevitably. However, it can only do this explanatory work when combined with the appreciation of the will as the metaphysical substratum of all phenomena. In SW 3:742–3/WWR 2:663, Schopenhauer presents his philosophical system as offering an alternative both to “fatalism”, described there as the view that attributes the “existence of the world” to “some absolute necessity which … does not admit of further explanation”, and to the (theistic) view attributing the existence of the world to “the free act of will of a being located outside the world”. Schopenhauer’s alternative offers a midway position, according to which the world “arises” from the free act of the will that constitutes its (and our own) essence, though “once appearance exists, its course is an absolutely necessary one” (SW 3:743/WWR 2:663). Since the source of the necessary chain of events in the phenomenal world is will, continuous suffering among all conscious beings is inevitable. As Schopenhauer puts it, “willing and striving constitute” the “entire essence” of “an animal and a human being”,32 and “the basis of all willing … is need, lack, and thus pain, which is its [sc. an animal’s or a human being’s] primordial destiny by virtue of its essence” (SW 2:367/WWR 1:338). It is for this reason that Schopenhauer says that “the greatest misfortune”, such as that forming the subject matter of tragedy, “develops effortlessly and spontaneously out of people’s deeds and characters, almost as if it were essential” (SW 2:300–1/WWR 1:282). Both the Greek tragedians and Herodotus standardly and usefully illustrate the inevitability and prevalence of suffering inherent in the human condition. For Schopenhauer, however, both go wrong in presenting a notion of fate incorporating the “fabulous” (hence, false) element of foreknowledge based on presumed access to the workings of certain external agents, thus missing the true source of human suffering (namely, one’s will-to-live) and, a fortiori, failing to appreciate the possibility (and desirability) of resisting it through resignation. Indeed, the association between the necessary chain of misfortunes constituting the human condition and divine intentions, specifically, implies that anything resulting from such intentions, including prevalent and continuous suffering, ought not to be further analyzed so as to be resisted. Recall that what Schopenhauer primarily takes issue with in ancient Greek religion is its uncompromising optimism, i.e., its appraisal of the world and all its parts, including human life, as perfectly satisfactory and valuable (see section 25.1; 372

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cf. WWR 2 Ch.48). This characterization goes hand in hand with his attribution to Greek religion of “the personification of individual parts and forces of nature” (SW 6:401/PP 2:339). These forces were not simply “personified” by Greek religion. They were deified. And, thus, every natural occurrence and all events in one’s life were thought of by adherents of that religion as divinely managed. But if one believes that it is the gods – immortal and immensely powerful and wise beings – who are responsible for all occurrences in human life, then one should also believe that all such occurrences are managed satisfactorily.33 For Schopenhauer, whereas Herodotus and the Greek tragedians laudably recognize and express the “wretchedness” (Elend) of the human condition, thereby paving the way toward revealing the truth of pessimism in the face of the overall optimistic tradition from which they emerge, they are nevertheless incapable of breaking with that tradition altogether.34 In the final analysis, they, too, still seek and accept a rationale and a justification, grounded in divine will and intervention, for the suffering consistently and inevitably undergone by human beings, and thus revert to optimism of the kind dominant in their immediate environment.35, 36

Notes 1 Rendering verderblichen with Payne (1969) (the Cambridge translation has “corrupt”). Elsewhere, Schopenhauer discusses explicitly the deleterious effects of optimism, as he sees them (cf., e.g., WWR Ch.46). 2 I discuss Schopenhauer’s criticism of Jewish optimism in Segev (2022), chapter 1. 3 I discuss Schopenhauer’s views on Greek pessimism further and compare it to Aristotle’s treatment of that topic in Segev (2022), esp. chapter 4. 4 Rendering Gräuel und Verwüstung with Payne (1969) throughout. 5 Rendering Elend with Payne (1969) throughout. 6 For a recent extensive discussion of Schopenhauer’s view of history and its enduring relevance and impact on subsequent philosophers and historians, see Jensen (2018). Jensen (2018: 356–8) discusses Schopenhauer’s contrast between history and art, science, and philosophy, but also argues that Schopenhauer assimilates history to science insofar as both “are constrained by the individuated Will of their investigators”, unlike “art and philosophy”. 7 Translating armsälige with Payne (1969). 8 Translating Nichtigkeit with Payne (1969). 9 See also Jensen (2018: 365), who adduces Plutarch and Diogenes Laertius as further examples of ancient historians meeting Schopenhauer’s criteria. 10 See Godley (1975: xv–xvi). Godley both draws the connection to poetry and makes the point that accuracy is sacrificed in Herodotus for the sake of “moral edification”. 11 See also Jensen (2018: 366). 12 However, as we shall see, Schopenhauer also ridicules Herodotus for accepting certain superstitions. 13 The Cambridge translation renders anführt here as “mentioned”. 14 Schopenhauer’s copy of Herodotus (in the 1778–1800 Leipzig edition by F.W. Reiz and G.H. Schäfer, vol. 1) has been digitized by the Universitätsbibliothek J.C. Senckenberg, GoetheUniversität Frankfurt am Main (2016): urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:2-222543. Transcriptions and translations of his notes on this text are my own. 15 As Tim Stoll has pointed out to me, Unfall could also be translated as “accident”, occupying a middle ground between “misfortune” and mere “chance”. Schopenhauer’s coupling of Unfall with Widerwärtigkeit in the context of his reading of Herodotus, however, would seem to tip the scale toward ill fortune. 16 For Herodotus, see Godley (1975) and Mensch/Romm (2014), ad Hist. 1.32.4. For Schopenhauer, see Payne (1969) and the Cambridge translation, ad WWR 2 Ch.16 17 See How/Wells (1912) ad loc. and Becker (2010: 20-1), who compares Hist. 1.31-2 to the pessimism of Greek tragedy and Schopenhauer’s view of it (without, however, commenting on Schopenhauer’s engagement with Herodotus’ text).

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Mor Segev 18 How/Wells (1912) also cite Hist. 7.49.3 as a parallel to 1.32. In that text, Artabanus tells Xerxes that “αἱ συμφοραὶ rule human beings, and not human beings τῶν συμφορέων”. The context is Artabanus’ communication to Xerxes of the idea that both land and sea at this time work against him. Thus, συμφοραὶ there, too would seem to mean specifically unfavorable circumstances rather than mere chance. 19 See How/Wells (1912) ad loc. 20 How/Wells (1912), commenting on the pessimism expressed in Herodotus’ depiction of Solon at Hist. 1.31, also connect that text to Herodotus’ account of the Thracian Trausoi here at 5.4. 21 Hunter/Russell (2011: 207). 22 Hunter/Russell (2011: 207). 23 See Nussbaum (1999: 355–6) for a discussion. 24 For a rebuttal of Schopenhauer’s views on tragedy, see Kaufmann (1968: 290–6); Nussbaum (1999: 356–7); and Becker (2010: 34–5). See also Kaufmann (1968: 297–8) and Nussbaum (1999: 363–71) on Nietzsche’s criticisms of Schopenhauer’s view of tragedy. For a different take on Nietzsche’s attitude toward Schopenhauer’s view of tragedy, see Young (1992: 47–54, 135–7). 25 While the authenticity of the play is in doubt, Schopenhauer quotes it as genuine. Schopenhauer’s assumption is understandable since, as Griffiths (1977: 1–2) notes, “[t]he first discordant voice” concerning the authenticity of the play “was raised by R. Westphal in 1869”, nine years after Schopenhauer’s death, and “[t]he first to deny Aeschylean authorship outright was A. Gercke” in 1911. 26 Translations of the MR are taken from Payne. 27 Sophocles represents Philoctetes’ cries of pain phonetically throughout the play, e.g., ἆ ἆ ἆ ἆ (Phil. 781); παπαῖ, φεῦ (Phil. 785). 28 Cingano (1992: 1); Dawe (2006: 1). 29 Apart from Hist. 9.65, Schopenhauer similarly comments on Herodotus’ religious beliefs elsewhere. In Hist. 8.129, Herodotus ascribes the entrapment of the Persians by the tide during the Siege at Potidaeae (following the opinion of the Potidaeans, which he argues is correct) as being administered by Poseidon in retaliation for their desecration of his temple. Schopenhauer, on his copy of Herodotus, entitles this passage “Superstitio Graecorum et Herodoti”. 30 Translation from Payne (1969), ad loc. Cf. Becker (2010, 22–3). 31 In his copy of Herodotus, Schopenhauer ascribes a fatalistic view to him, commenting on chapters 1.91 and 9.16 (see also SW 5:221/PP 1:183–4). 32 Modifying the Cambridge translation’s “animals and human beings”, following Payne; consequently, I take “sein ganzes Wesen” in the next sentence to be referring back to “des Thieres und des Menschen”. 33 It is true that, as famously presented, e.g., in Xenophanes’ fragments and in Plato’s Euthyphro and Republic, the traditional Greek gods are involved in conflicts and engage in questionable behavior. Nevertheless, in support of Schopenhauer’s point, there certainly is also a popular notion of divine providence in classical Greece. On this point, see Parker (1992). Granted, Schopenhauer himself associates the “providence” (pronoia) of “a personal being”, which he considers “superficial and false”, with Christianity, and describes it as a deviation from the more “mysterious” notion of fate (heimarmenē) in Greek tragedy and history (SW 5:221/PP 1:184). However, he goes on in that text to assimilate the ancient notion of fate to the notion of “the guiding genius of each individual”, and to argue that both that idea and the Christian conception of providence are anthropomorphic, differing only in fate being depicted as “blind” and the “genius” and providence as “sighted” (SW 5:223/PP 1:185). That “anthropomorphistic difference”, he concludes, “disappears and loses all significance in regard to the innermost, metaphysical essence of things, in which alone we must seek the root of that inexplicit unity of the contingent and the necessary, which constitutes the secret controller of all things human” (ibid.). 34 Becker (2010: 22–3) argues that, for Schopenhauer, the shortcoming of the Greek tragedians lies in their retention of the (pre-Christian) “belief in the essential reality of the phenomenal world, and in the desirability of life within its confines”. Becker (2010: 224–5) goes on to argue that Schopenhauer “was blind to” the Greek tragedians’ sense of cosmic order. But Schopenhauer’s treatments of the tragedians and Herodotus, surveyed above, show that he is both aware of that feature and profoundly critical of it.

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Schopenhauer on Herodotus and the Greek Tragedians 35 Burckhardt (1998: 85–124), while reading Herodotus and the Greek tragedians (inter alios) as conveying Schopenhauerian pessimism, arguably takes issue with Schopenhauer’s attribution of optimism to Greek culture when he criticizes the attribution of fortune and happiness to the Greeks beginning in the eighteenth century as “one of the most tremendous historical falsifications that have ever occurred” (ibid. 86). He also strays from Schopenhauer’s understanding of the conception of fate in Greek mythology, stating that “its emphasis is not on the justice of fate but on its inevitability” (ibid. 92) and that Greek “[p]essimism takes little account of the gods because they were not the creators of the world” (ibid. 99). Nevertheless, Burckhardt does acknowledge optimistic elements, e.g., in Anaxagoras and even in (parts of) Plato (ibid. 96–8). 36 I am grateful to Tim Stoll for very helpful and detailed comments on a previous version of this chapter and to those present at my presentation on Schopenhauer’s aesthetics in David Weberman’s “philosophy in art” course at the Central European University during the winter semester of 2022.

References Becker, D., “Schopenhauer on the Meaning of Tragedy: Vision and Blindness”, Schopenhauer-Jahrbuch 91 (2010), 15–31. Burckhardt, J., The Greeks and Greek Civilization, ed. O. Murray, trans. S. Stern (New York: St Martins Press, 1998). Cingano, E., “The Death of Oedipus in the Epic Tradition”, Pheonix 46 (1992), 1–11. Dawe, R.D. (ed.), Sophocles: Oedipus Rex (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Godley, A.D. (trans.), Herodotus (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975). Griffiths, M., The Authenticity of Prometheus Bound (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). How, W.W. and Wells, J., A Commentary on Herodotus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912). Hübscher, A. (ed.), Arthur Schopenhauer: Manuscript Remains in Four Volumes, trans. E. F. J. Payne (Oxford: Berg, 1988). Hunter, R. and Russell, D. (eds.), Plutarch: How to Study Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Jensen, A.K., “Schopenhauer’s Philosophy of History”, History and Theory 57 (2018), 349–70. Kaufmann, W., Tragedy and Philosophy (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1968). Mensch, P. (trans.) and Romm, J. (ed. and comm.), Herodotus: Histories (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2014). Nussbaum, M.C., “Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Dionysus”, in C. Janaway (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 344–74. Parker, P., “The Origins of Pronoia: A Mystery”, in A. D. E. Cameron (ed.) Apodosis: Essays Presented to Dr. W. W. Cruickshank to Mark His Eightieth Birthday (London: St Paul’s School, 1992), 84–94. Payne, E.F.J. (trans.), Arthur Schopenhauer: The World as Will and Representation (New York: Dover, 1969). Segev, M., The Value of the World and of Oneself: Philosophical Optimism and Pessimism from Aristotle to Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022). Young, J., Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

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26 SCHOPENHAUER ON STOICISM AS A WAY OF LIFE AND ON THE WISDOM OF LIFE1 Keith Ansell-Pearson

26.1 Introduction In this chapter, I consider the contribution Schopenhauer can make to an appreciation of an art of living centered on the wisdom of life. Although his reflections on this topic sometimes intersect with his appreciation of Stoic teaching as a way of life, they are also in places advanced independently of such a teaching. There are two main sources for considering Schopenhauer’s reception of the Hellenistic teachings of philosophy: the two volumes of WWR and the ‘Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life’ in PP 1.2 Although Schopenhauer’s philosophy is consistently worked out and upheld across these texts, it is also the case that the treatment of the wisdom of life we encounter in PP 1 is less bound to his metaphysically supported philosophy of profound pessimism about existence, with the result that he is able to offer his readers inspiring recommendations for living well, including recommendations that may surprise us, especially given his commitment to the idea that the greatest wisdom consists in the negation and rejection of existence. In WWR 2 Schopenhauer makes it clear that he regards Stoic equanimity, which aims to disarm all misfortunes by being prepared for and contemptuous of them, as little more than ‘cynical renunciation’ that ‘makes us into dogs, like Diogenes in the barrel’. However, ‘The truth is: we should be miserable and we are miserable’ (SW 3:663/WWR 2:593). In PP, by contrast, Schopenhauer locates several sound principles of living in Stoic doctrine, and this is in accord with the empirical standpoint he has chosen to pursue in this work. As he tells his readers in the introduction to ‘Aphorisms on the wisdom of life’, the idea of a ‘wisdom of life’ refers to the art of living life as pleasantly and happily as possible, and the instructions it offers are to be regarded as part of eudaemonology. Although he explicitly tells us in this introduction that he himself does not adhere to such an ‘ology’ and its belief that human beings are capable of living such a life, in this work he has decided to unfold a doctrine by abandoning ‘completely the higher, metaphysical-ethical standpoint to which my philosophy proper leads’ (SW 5:333/PP 1:273; see also SW 5:365/PP 1:300). Although Schopenhauer holds that the immanent, empirical standpoint, which lends support to eudaemonology, commits an innate error, readers of his writings, such as myself, who have no interest in a transcendent, metaphysical standpoint – one in which the ‘truth’ 376

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about the whole world and universe is revealed with respect to every conceivable aspect of existence and with extreme conclusions drawn from this ‘truth’ – can find much instruction in the contribution he makes. This is not to say that Schopenhauer’s philosophy is not misguided when taken, as it is offered, as a metaphysics, and it certainly in my view draws wrong and unnecessary conclusions about existence, conclusions that are far too extreme. I thus dissent from the arrogant viewpoint Schopenhauer is most keen to promote about his philosophy, namely, that no system prior to his has demonstrated so clearly the strong and intimate link that he alleges must exist between ‘metaphysics’ and ‘ethics’. I see no logical, rational, or even existential necessity that leads from a recognition of the terrible and treacherous character of existence to the Buddhist-inspired ethics of self-denial and compassion advocated in book four of WWR 1. It is because I hold to this appreciation of Schopenhauer that I think we have good reasons for choosing PP 1 over WWR 1 when it comes to wanting to think about how we can most fruitfully construe his relation to the tradition and conception philosophy as an art of life and as a way of life. From the attempt to develop an honest appreciation of human existence, which is what Schopenhauer is to be most admired for, it is possible that all kinds of different ways of life can be cultivated. Nothing dictates that we need to live a miserable life, and certainly nothing determines that we should live such a life. In his ‘Aphorisms on the wisdom of life’ Schopenhauer covers many of the topics that we need to attend to in our efforts to cultivate a mature and wise way of life for ourselves, and he is a source of tremendous illumination on them.

26.2  Schopenhauer on Stoicism as a Way of Life Stoicism is the Hellenistic school of philosophy that Schopenhauer treats most extensively in his writings, and his own recommendations on the happy life are best appreciated in the context of his frequent utilization of the teachings of Seneca and Epictetus. Schopenhauer has an original and incisive appreciation of Stoic doctrine. The original character of his reception of the teaching manifests itself in his appreciation of the Stoic sage. Schopenhauer conceives Stoicism – embodied in the figure of the sage – not as a straightforward teaching of virtue but rather as ‘the most complete development of practical reason in the true and authentic sense of the word, the highest peak a human being can attain using only reason, where the distinction between humans and animals shows itself most clearly’ (SW 2:103/WWR 1:113). Instead of approaching Stoic doctrine as is standardly done as one of virtue and in stark contrast to Epicurean doctrine where the stress is placed on the cultivation and enjoyment of pleasures, including the pleasure of existing, Schopenhauer thinks we will fare better if we construe it as a guide to a way of life, notably a rational way of life, in which the chief end and aim is the attainment of happiness through peace of mind. In this appreciation virtuous conduct is conceived as a means rather than an end. It is on this point that Schopenhauer wishes to divorce Stoic teaching and practice from ethical systems that focus directly on virtue, such as the doctrine of the Vedas, Plato, Christianity, and Kant. According to Schopenhauer, then, when the Stoics teach that virtue is the highest good, this is with reference to the ultimate end of life, which is happiness gained through inner tranquility and peace of mind or ataraxia. Stoicism is, therefore, to be approached as a special form of eudaimonism (SW 2:108/WWR 1:118). In his reception of Stoic teaching, Schopenhauer draws mainly on the writings of Seneca and Epictetus, with a strongly expressed preference for the former and with no references 377

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in his writings to Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations (as the work is known to us today).3 In the admiration he has for Seneca as a writer and a thinker Schopenhauer follows in the footsteps of Montaigne.4 He confesses to finding Seneca’s writings ‘energetic, ingenious, and well thought-out’ (SW 5:57/PP 1:51; he also uses a line from Seneca’s Natural Questions as the epigraph to PP 2). By contrast, he finds the Discourses of Epictetus, which in effect are lessons of Epictetus recorded by his pupil Arrian, not only digressive in form but also, and more importantly, inconsistent in content and so making for an unreliable guide to authentic Stoic doctrine. This is because, according to Schopenhauer, Arrian introduces into the doctrine foreign elements that smack ‘of a Christian-Jewish origin’ (SW 5:58/PP 1:52). He finds the main evidence for this in the theism that is found on virtually every page and that is also utilized to support the morals. This is to get Stoic doctrine fundamentally wrong for Schopenhauer since in the doctrine God and the world are one and there is no reliance on, or appeal to, a God that wills and commands, or ‘a provident human being of a God’ (SW 5:59/PP 1:52). According to Schopenhauer Stoicism is to be understood as a species of pantheism and of the kind that flies in the face of any sermonizing, such as we are faced with when we read Arrian. We find this pantheism clearly expressed, he argues, in Seneca’s book Natural Questions, where God is depicted as the soul of the universe (SW 3:175/WWR 2:168; see Seneca 2010). Arrian also misses, for Schopenhauer, the essential character of the ideas of Cynicism and how they influenced Stoic ethics. He presents the Cynic as someone who seeks to be who s/he is for the sake of others and not to be a figure of disgust, but this, maintains Schopenhauer, is to completely neglect the self-sufficient character of the way of life of the old and genuine Cynics (see Epictetus on the Cynics in Epictetus 2008: Book III, part III). Sometimes in Arrian, he holds, we hear a Stoic but sometimes we also hear a Christian ascetic, and overall the book is written in a scolding and reproachful tone. Despite the distaste that he expresses for the book Schopenhauer does think we can find genuinely Stoic ideas in it here and there, and he himself will freely draw upon it as the occasion warrants in ‘Aphorisms on the wisdom of life’. In considering Schopenhauer on the wisdom of the ancient philosophers and on the ancient schools of philosophy, the extent of his admiration of Aristotle should not be overlooked. Indeed, in the ‘Aphorisms on the wisdom of life’ he appears to admire him more than any other ancient philosopher, and it is in Aristotle that he locates what for him is a key principle of the art of living, namely, that the prudent human being (phronimos) strives not for pleasure but for a state of painlessness (SW 3:165/WWR 2:159; see Aristotle 1976: VII, 12). In the chapter on ‘counsels and maxims’ in ‘Aphorisms on the wisdom of life’ Schopenhauer states that he regards Aristotle’s insight as ‘the supreme rule of all wisdom of life’; its truth is based on the recognition that whereas the nature of all enjoyment and happiness is negative, the nature of pain is positive (SW 5:431/PP 1:355; see also SW 2:376–81/WWR 1:345–49). It is by drawing on Aristotle’s insight and dictum, as well as on Voltaire (‘Happiness is nothing but a dream, and pain is real’), that Schopenhauer is able to finesse eudaemonology in accordance with his own philosophy: such an ‘ology’ is to be recognized as a euphemism in which ‘living happily’ is to be best understood as ‘living “less unhappily”, hence in a tolerable way’ (SW 5:433/PP 1:356). Life is something to be endured or weathered, something to get through, and it is one of the consolations of old age that the labor of living is now behind us. Schopenhauer now evinces his conception of the sage: ‘The fool runs after the pleasures of life and sees himself cheated: the sage avoids evils’ (SW 5:433/PP 1:357). The sage is someone who will not be encouraged by optimism and who 378

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appreciates well that the surest way not to become deeply unhappy is by not wanting to be very happy (SW 5:435/PP 1:359). According to Schopenhauer the striving for a painless existence, practiced with rational insight and acquired knowledge of the true constitution of the world, produced Cynicism, and it is from Cynicism that Stoicism emerges. Cynicism pursued the endeavor with rigorous consistency, following it, in fact, to its furthest extremes. Schopenhauer elaborates on this claim about the Cynics in WWR 2, noting that they ‘chose the path of the greatest deprivation in order to achieve the most painless life, and fled all pleasures as snares that would only deliver one over to more pain’ (SW 3:167/WWR 2:161; see also SW 5:435/PP 1:358). This ‘spirit’ of Cynicism is to be found expressed, Schopenhauer insists, by Seneca in his On Peace of Mind (see Seneca 2014). It is by paying attention to what Schopenhauer says in the supplements to WWR 1 §16 in WWR 2 that we can best appreciate his reasons for holding Stoic teaching in some esteem. The Stoic view is that human suffering always arises from a mismatch between human desires and wishes and the actual way of the world. Clearly, one of these needs to change to fit the other, and the clear perception of the Stoics is that while the way of things is not under our power, our will is. Schopenhauer then astutely notes: ‘This adjustment of willing to the way of the external world, and thus to the nature of things, is very often what is understood by the ambiguous phrase “living according to nature”’ (SW 3:173/WWR 2:166–67). When expressed as a doctrine of freedom we get the key insight that what makes one free is not the satisfaction and attainment of one’s desires or cravings but their suppression. For the Stoic, the happy life is a harmonious life in which we live in concord with ourselves. Schopenhauer cites Seneca on this and from Epistle 92: ‘What does a happy life consist in? In security and imperturbable peace. It is achieved by greatness of soul and by constancy that adheres to what is correctly known’ (SW 3:174/WWR 2:167; see Seneca 2015: 341–349). For Schopenhauer, then, Stoicism is best understood as a very particular type of eudaemonist teaching, and it differs from Indian, Christian, and Platonic ethics, because it has no metaphysical tendency or transcendent goal; rather, for Stoicism the goal is an entirely immanent one, namely, a life of imperturbability that is attainable in this life and that characterizes the mode of existence sought by the wise human being. It is in accordance with these insights, especially the insight into the immanent character of its way of life as a life of wisdom, that Schopenhauer develops his appreciation of Stoicism and its key teachings in PP 1, where he himself has chosen to adopt the immanent perspective. Schopenhauer’s appreciation of Stoicism as ‘spiritual dietetics’ is an incisive and deeply informed one, and part of the reason for this is owing to the character of his own philosophical thinking with its insights into fate, or the way of the world, and suffering. The depth of his insights means that he can advance an original understanding of Stoic teaching and its practice as entailing a specific way of life: This however is not a happy state but only the calm endurance of suffering seen as inevitable. Of course there is greatness of soul and dignity in bearing the inevitable in silence and tranquillity, remaining constant in melancholy peace while others pass from exaltation to despair and from the latter to the former. – Accordingly Stoicism can also be thought of as spiritual dietetics according to which the mind must be hardened against unhappiness, danger, loss, injustice, treachery, betrayal, disdain and the idiocy of men just as the body can be hardened against the influences of the wind and weather, against hardship and exertion. (SW 3:174–75/WWR 2:168) 379

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When taken as a whole Schopenhauer judges Stoic ethics to be a valuable and estimable attempt to adapt human reason – and reason, he notes, is the great privilege of being human – to an important and salutary end, namely, and through the mastery of the passions, raising human beings above the suffering and pain that every life encounters and so allowing them to participate ‘to the highest degree’ in the dignity that attaches itself to rational beings and as distinct from merely animal ones (SW 2:107/WWR 1:117; see also SW 3:163/WWR 2:157). The Stoics, then, are part of the group of practical philosophers who endeavor to carry concepts over into life. However, for Schopenhauer, this is merely an attempt or effort made by human beings, and the success of the Stoic way of life cannot be guaranteed. The problem with Stoicism resides in the very desire to live a blessed life since, Schopenhauer maintains, and in accordance with the fundamental insights of his philosophy, it is ‘completely contradictory to want to live without suffering’ (SW 2:108/WWR 1:117). Schopenhauer ends his treatment of Stoicism in WWR 1 §16 by unfavorably contrasting the Stoic with both the Indian sage or voluntary penitent and the Christian savior. The problem with the Stoic ideal of the sage is that it cannot be offered as a living one that possesses an inner poetic truth; rather, the figure of the sage in Stoicism is ‘stiff and wooden, a mannequin that no one can engage with and who does not himself know what to do with his own wisdom’ (SW 2:109/WWR 1:118). In short, the Stoic sage cannot educate humanity because he has rendered himself non-human: his ‘perfect composure, peace, and bliss really contradict the essence of humanity’ (SW 2:109/WWR 1:118). In sharp contrast, Christ is a figure ‘full of the depths of life’ and who conveys to human beings ‘the greatest poetical truth’ since he stands before them – ‘with perfect virtue, holiness and sublimity’ – ‘in a state of the utmost suffering’ (SW 2:109/WWR 1:118). For Schopenhauer, then, we might conclude, Stoicism suffers from the delusion that as human beings it is possible for us to transcend our humanity, and hence Christ needs to be seen as the actualized embodiment of the poetic truth of the human condition. Like other intellectual figures, such as Montaigne and Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, albeit in terms unique to his philosophical thinking, expresses both an admiration for Stoicism and a deep-rooted skepticism about it.5 This skepticism centers on whether the completely rational way of life sought by the Stoics is (a) attainable and (b) even desirable. Schopenhauer does not want us to simply lament the fact that the mastery of the suffering of life through reason and concepts is seldom, if ever, found, but rather to comprehend the reasons as to why this must necessarily be the case (SW 2:372/WWR 1:342). The issue of desirability centers on the need, as he sees it, to come up with a figuration of the sage that can adequately and deeply convey to human beings the poetical truth of what it is to be human.

26.3  Schopenhauer on the Wisdom of Life I now want to examine how Schopenhauer unfolds a doctrine on the wisdom of life in PP 1. I shall note the occasions when his recommendations also intersect with Stoic teaching. I will first highlight the presuppositions of his thinking and then focus on some key aspects of his contribution to the wisdom of life. First, though, let me note something important about his contribution. One aspect of Schopenhauer’s approach to this wisdom we should find especially admirable is his commitment to knowledge over judgment. The main aim, he says, is to develop a ‘clear and thorough understanding’ of the ‘true and very sad nature of human beings as they mostly are’ (SW 5:484/PP 1:399). To obtain such a mature understanding requires that ‘no trait of 380

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particular meanness or stupidity that strikes us in life or in literature should ever become the object of annoyance or anger, but only of knowledge’ (SW 5:485/PP 1:399). This knowledge consists in learning from an array of observable things about existence, such as understanding (1) that life is like a game of chess in which one draws up a plan, but then much is dependent on what your opponent decides to do, and in life one’s opponent is fate itself (SW 5:499–500/PP 1:411); (2) that although the form of human life may vary everywhere we observe it we can see the same elements at work, ‘whether it is lived in a hut, at court, in a monastery, or in the army’ (SW 5:498/PP 1:410). In this respect life can be compared to the images in a kaleidoscope: although we see something different in every turn of it we always have the same thing before our eyes (SW 5:498/PP 1:410); (3) we can profit from the wisdom of ancient writers who recognized that there are three forces operating in the world. These are prudence, strength, and luck, and it is the last one that we need to appreciate as being the most powerful force in our lives. Although we may ultimately wish to regard chance as an evil force, it is also necessary to know that it is the acknowledgment of the role played by chance in life that shows us ‘that all merit is powerless and counts for nothing compared to its favour and grace’ (SW 5:499/PP 1:410); (4), finally, knowing what is inevitable and necessary in and about life has a calming effect on us, and whoever is imbued with this knowledge ‘will first willingly do what he can, but then willingly suffer what he has to’ (SW 5:505/PP 1:416). Two key presuppositions inform and guide Schopenhauer’s contribution to the wisdom of life. The first is that all human beings, regardless of class, status, and wealth, are the same in the sense that each one of us is stuck in our consciousness and the same persona exists in each one of us, namely, ‘a poor comedian with his wants and worries’ (SW 5:337/PP 1:276). The second presupposition is that no one can escape their individuality, and this means two things for Schopenhauer. The first is that the subjective sphere is incomparably more essential for our happiness and our pleasure than the objective sphere; the second, and following from this insight, is that we should employ the power we have at our disposal to use our given personality to the greatest advantage, for example, pursuing aspirations that are in accordance with it and striving after the kind of education appropriate to it; in short, developing ‘the way of life suitable for it’ (SW 5:340/PP 1:279). Like the ancient schools of philosophy, then, Schopenhauer is recommending we do not invest our energies and hopes in the pursuit of external goods (the ‘objective’), such as fame, fortune, rank, honor, and so on, but rather concentrate them on ourselves and on developing knowledge of our own personalities (the ‘subjective’). We need to realize that it is the deliberate and immoderate pursuit and struggle for happiness, glamour, and enjoyment – in the form of pleasures, possessions, rank, and honor – that lead us to experience the greatest misfortunes in life (SW 5:436/PP 1:359). Here Schopenhauer cites from book ten of Plato’s Republic: ‘No human affair is worth great trouble’ (ibid.; see Plato 1992: X, 604b). The same sentence is also cited by Nietzsche but who, and intriguingly, adds to it a ‘nevertheless…’ (Nietzsche 1995: aphorism 628). The first topic I wish to focus on in my consideration of Schopenhauer’s contribution to the wisdom of life concerns his thoughts on ‘the subjective goods’ that he thinks constitute the primary and most important elements in our happiness. They include for him things such as having a noble character, a capable mind, a happy temperament, a healthy body, and a cheerful spirit. His thoughts on the latter are especially interesting to reflect upon in the light of Nietzsche’s contention that Schopenhauer’s philosophy is ‘the mirror image of an ardent and melancholy youth’ (Nietzsche 2013: aphorism 271) and so does not reflect the wisdom of a 381

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mature mind. When we read Schopenhauer ourselves, however, we find him maintaining that of all the subjective goods we might want to consider and reflect upon, ‘what makes us most immediately happy is a cheerful spirit’ (SW 5:344/PP 1:283). He expands on this as follows: Whoever is cheerful has good reason to be, namely the fact that he is. No other quality can completely replace every other good the way this one can. People may be young, beautiful, rich, and honoured; but if we wish to judge their happiness, we will ask whether they are cheerful. (SW 5:344/PP 1:283) Such cheerfulness is evident, he thinks, when we reflect on ‘the plain truth’, which is also ‘the superlative of a truism’, that whoever laughs a lot is happy and whoever cries a lot is unhappy (SW 5:344/PP 1:283). One important reason why the cheerful spirit can value itself is owing to the fact that it is ‘the genuine coin’ of happiness, as opposed to fake paper money, since it makes such a spirit immediately happy in the present, and it is the present for Schopenhauer that is the only truly real or actual dimension of time (this is ‘the indivisible present’ that exists between ‘two eternities’, ibid.). Schopenhauer cites from Seneca’s remarkable Epistles: ‘Regard every single day as a single life’ (SW 5:443/PP1:365; see Seneca 2015: 402–403). The cheerfulness Schopenhauer has in mind has nothing to do with wealth and everything to do with health, and it is the flourishing of perfect health, he maintains, that entails cheerfulness. To enjoy such health requires practicing an art of life in which we avoid all excesses and debaucheries, as well as all violent and disagreeable emotions, along with avoiding prolonged mental exertion, the assumption of brisk movement daily, cold bathing, and dietary measures. Here Schopenhauer fully agrees with Aristotle’s stress on the prime character of life, namely, that it consists in movement (SW 5:345/PP 1:284). The extent to which one’s happiness is dependent on cheerfulness of mood, and this in turn on the state of our health, manifests itself when we reflect on the impression made on us by the same events or external circumstances on vigorous days with what takes place when sickliness has made us anxious and even morose. On this point, Schopenhauer finds a concordance with Stoic teaching, notably as found in Epictetus’s insight that what disturbs human beings are not things themselves but rather their opinions and views about things (SW 5:346/PP 1:284; see Epictetus 1948: section V). If we are not healthy in mind and body then the subjective goods, along with the qualities of our intellect and temperament, become depressed and may even wither away. For Schopenhauer, there is a good reason why in human greetings we inquire about another’s state of health and take the trouble to wish well-being to one another. Of course, it is necessary for Schopenhauer to consider the affect and state of melancholia, and this is what he goes on immediately to do, noting astutely that even in a state of strong health it is possible for a melancholic temperament and gloomy mood to prevail. Here he may well be reflecting on his own personality, though the veracity of his insight cannot, I think, be said to be reducible to this. He concurs, in fact, with Aristotle’s wellknown insight that all excellent and superior human beings are melancholic, and he finds evidence for this in his own insights into genius and how in this case we find an excess of nervous energy and of sensibility in general (he also draws on the insights of Plato and Shakespeare to validate his claim; see also Schopenhauer’s treatment of madness, melancholy, and genius in SW 2:225–28/WWR 1: 215–17). 382

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Schopenhauer’s insights into melancholy do not, as might be supposed, serve to render his claims about the cheerful spirit invalid; they simply add another dimension to his appreciation, and that is both rich and profound. In fact, and like Nietzsche, he is keen to make recourse to physiology or the state of the body in order to explain human morbidity: ‘when a pathological affection of the nervous system, or the digestive organs, plays into the hand of innate “discontent”, then it can reach such a high degree that persistent dissatisfaction produces weariness of life’ (SW 5:348/PP 1:286). It is clear that for Schopenhauer feelings about life, such as depression and suicide, as well as an overwhelming feeling of inner emptiness, have specific causes that are empirically identifiable. This also explains why he can find profound truth in Seneca’s claim that ‘all stupidity suffers from weariness with itself’ and the statement of Jesus ben Sirach that, ‘The life of the fool is worse than death’ (SW 5:351/PP 1:289). If we wish to be happy the best we can aim for is to be sufficient in ourselves, and on this topic, Schopenhauer is in accord with the teachings of the ancients who teach the value of autarchy, including Aristotle, the Stoics and the Epicureans: ‘what we have in ourselves is more than ever important, since this will hold up the longest’ (SW 5:354/PP 1:291). He thus agrees with Horace in his epistle to Maecenas that it is the greatest folly to lose ‘on the inside in order to gain on the outside’, that is, to relinquish one’s inner peace, leisure, and independence for the sake of glamour, rank, pomp, and title. This, he wryly notes, is what Goethe did and what, by following his own genius, he has not done (SW 5:355/PP 1:292). Further on in the ‘Aphorisms’ Schopenhauer adds: ‘To fulfil ourselves, to be everything to ourselves, and to be able to say “All my possessions I carry with me”, is surely the quality most conducive to our happiness’, and he once again refers to the insights of Aristotle, notably his insight that ‘Happiness belongs to those who suffice themselves’, which Schopenhauer says cannot be asserted enough (SW 5:355/PP 1:292). Schopenhauer also recognizes that it is not possible to be truly and entirely ourselves without the endurance of solitude: ‘In solitude the wretched person feels his whole wretchedness and the great mind the full extent of its greatness; in short, everyone becomes aware of himself as what he is’ (SW 5:447/PP 1:369). Being a member of society involves mutual accommodation and feeling the pressure of displaying an agreeable temper. But, as Schopenhauer astutely notes, ‘whoever does not love solitude, also does not love freedom; for only when we are alone, are we free’ (SW 5:447/PP 1:369). Once society is recognized as something ‘insidious’, concealing behind an appearance of diversion, communication, sociable pleasures, ‘great and often irremediable evils’ – and here I think Schopenhauer is right – then a major area of study for the young needs to be that of ‘learning to tolerate solitude’ as a source of happiness and peace of mind (SW 5:449/PP 1:370). It is, in fact, through the practice of solitude that we come to learn the value of self-reliance. Schopenhauer cites Cicero on precisely this point: ‘Whoever is completely on his own and relies on himself, cannot but be perfectly happy’ (SW 5:449/PP 1:370). It is on account of our lack of selfreliance that we immerse ourselves in the rituals of society and undertake travel to foreign lands, and we do so as a way of hiding our inner emptiness and escaping the tedium of life (SW 5:450/PP 1:371).6 The love of solitude is not to be thought of as our natural state or as an original tendency since when we enter the world we do so with parents, siblings, and a community; rather, then, it develops as a result of experience and reflection (SW 5:453/PP 1:373). Indeed, we might consider the love of solitude to represent a mature state of mind. These insights of Schopenhauer may have inspired Nietzsche when he thinks about solitude. In several aphorisms, Nietzsche draws attention to the benefits of solitude. In a typically witty insight, he writes: 383

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“Only the solitary man is evil,” cried Diderot and immediately Rousseau felt mortally wounded. Consequently, he admitted to himself that Diderot was right…Whoever is evil is at his most evil in solitude: also at his best – and consequently, to the eye of anyone who everywhere sees only playacting, also at his most beautiful (Nietzsche 2011: aphorism 499). Although Nietzsche esteems solitude in similar terms to Schopenhauer, he also maintains that one’s solitude can be practiced whether one finds oneself in the milling crowd or in a place of quietude (2011: aphorism 473), and he departs from him in the tremendous value he accords to friendship (1974: aphorism 14). In addition, Nietzsche holds that solitude, and the distance from things it affords us (be it our friends or our love of music), provides us with the distant perspectives we sometimes need to think well of things (2011: aphorism 485). We go into solitude so as not to drink out of everyone’s cisterns. Amid the many I live like the many and don’t think as an I; after some time I always feel then as if they wanted to ban me from myself and rob my soul – and I turn angry toward everyone and fear everyone. Then I need the desert to turn good again (2011: aphorism 491; see also aphorism 524). Nietzsche clearly echoes the concerns of Schopenhauer when he states that the most widespread deficiency in today’s type of education and upbringing is that ‘no one learns, no one strives toward, no one teaches – to learn to endure solitude’ (2011: aphorism 443; see also 2014: 273, 284, 289). In practicing the good life or happy life Schopenhauer also counsels us not to come under the spell of the semblance of things, be it the semblance of joy or even the semblance of wisdom itself, such as academies and philosophical lecterns. He alerts us to the fact that so many of the splendors of life are mere semblances, ‘just like theatre decorations’ and where the essence of the thing is missing. In such instances of the apparent enjoyment of life, all we are encountering is ‘the advertisement, the suggestion, the hieroglyph of joy’ (SW 5:437/PP 1:360). As he astutely observes, when joy turns up for us in life it typically ‘slips in uninvited and unannounced, by itself, quietly, and without ceremony, often at the most unimportant, most trivial occasions, under the most mundane circumstances, indeed anywhere but at glamorous or glorious events’ (SW 5:437/PP 1:360). In reflecting on the misfortunes and mishaps of life, including our own errors of judgment, Schopenhauer warns us against becoming self-punishers. However, the fatalistic standpoint that encourages us to view everything that happens as happening out of necessity is to be regarded as too one-sided when offered as a rule of life. Although such a standpoint may suit our need for some immediate relief and reassurance when facing our misfortune, the practice of ‘wholesome self-chastisement’ can greatly benefit us since it can aid our instruction and desire to improve ourselves. This self-chastisement needs to come into play in those cases when our own negligence and recklessness are in part to blame for the situation we find ourselves in and that we come to lament. Although this means having to inflict upon ourselves ‘the great pain of dissatisfaction with our own self’, we cannot be educated, he thinks, except by voluntarily undergoing such torment (SW 5:462/PP 1:381). Key to this task of perfecting oneself is the need to maintain a tight rein on our imagination, lest we build castles in the air, which the imagination likes to do and at its leisure. It is 384

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worth citing Schopenhauer at some length on this issue of the dangers of the flights of the imagination since he is offering some profound counsel, and anyone who has ever been subject to intrusive thoughts that invade and afflict the mind will be able to readily recognize the scenario he is depicting: when we have surrendered to black thoughts (blue devils), they have brought images close to us that do not vanish so easily. For the possibility of a thing in general is certain, and we are not always able to measure the degree of its likelihood; then possibility turns into probability, and we have delivered ourselves up to anguish. Therefore, we should look at things that concern our weal and woe only with the eyes of reason and judgement, and operate with dry and cold deliberation, with mere concepts and in the abstract. We should leave the imagination out of this, for it cannot judge, but brings mere images before our eyes that agitate the mind in a useless and often very painful manner. This rule should be most strictly followed in the evening. For just as darkness makes us timid and lets us see dreadful figures everywhere, so obscurity of thought has an analogous effect, because every uncertainty gives rise to insecurity. (SW 5:462–63/PP 1:381–82) It should come as no surprise that Schopenhauer goes on next to discuss the importance of certain external factors for understanding our moods and attending to the needs of our individual personality, such as our state of health, sleep, nourishment, temperature, weather, and environment. Furthermore, not only is it necessary to rein in the imagination if our wish is to live well, but there is also the need to ensure that we do not allow the imagination to represent and picture wrongs, harms, insults, losses, and affronts that we have previously suffered. This is simply because if we allow this then all the hateful passions will be ignited and come to pollute our mind, including indignation, rage, resentment, and so on. Schopenhauer observes that even in the most noble and illustrious human being there exists the disposition to the most base and vulgar elements of human animal nature (SW 5:465/PP 1:383). In recommending we endeavor to pacify the mind with reason and concepts Schopenhauer is not advocating that we lead a dull or boring life. He fully appreciates the need for us to have resistances and opportunities to overcome obstacles, and he also recognizes that the more power we have at our disposal and over ourselves the greater will be our chances of becoming a master of life. Let me cite him on these points: To labour and fight against resistance is a human need, as digging is for moles. The stagnation produced by the contentment of a lasting pleasure would be unbearable to us. Overcoming obstacles means the full enjoyment of our existence; they might be of a material nature, as in acting and doing, or of an intellectual nature, as in learning and investigating; struggling with them and winning make us happy. (SW 5:468/PP 1:386) A key component in becoming a master in life, or one’s own unique sage, is the need to master the emotions or passions. Schopenhauer does not follow the Stoics in advocating their complete extirpation; rather, his recommendation is that we learn how to moderate the passions and know we are doing this for good reason, neither erupting in joy nor breaking out into lamentations. We do this because we have learned that all things are changeable and 385

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not constant, with the result that a situation can be transformed at any moment. In addition, through the experience of life we learn that our own judgments are often deceptive in terms of judgments we make about what at any point in time we think is either beneficial for us or harmful for us: we may moan at one time about something that afterwards turns out to be a genuine good or we may rejoice about something that later becomes a source of great suffering to us. Although in WWR 2 Schopenhauer labels the Stoics a ‘bunch of braggarts’ (SW 3:172/WWR 2:165), in PP 1 he draws intellectual sustenance from the Stoic attitude toward life: it teaches us never to forget the human condition but rather to always remember ‘what a sad and miserable lot human existence is in general, and how innumerable the evils are to which it is exposed’ (SW 5:504/PP 1:415). It is only based on an appreciation of such insights into the character of life that we can, in fact, be motivated and instructed into living existence in terms of some actual way of life.

26.4 Conclusion In conclusion, I wish to make some observations about Schopenhauer’s contribution to the teaching of a ‘wisdom of life’ by bringing Nietzsche into the picture. Nietzsche typically reads Schopenhauer’s philosophy as little more than the expression of a melancholic youthful personality (for example, 2013: aphorism 271). However, melancholy goes much deeper in Schopenhauer than mere youthfulness since it reflects his deepseated pessimism about existence and what he, and many of us sometimes, calls ‘the human condition’. Schopenhauer, in fact, agrees with Nietzsche on the point about youth but also maintains that serenity is a characteristic of old age (SW 5:523/PP 1:431). He notes, for example, that our youth is characterized by ‘cheerfulness and vital energy’, which in part rests on the fact that at this point in our lives, we are going uphill and so do not see death lying at the foot of the other side of the mountain. Thus, as we age a ‘gloomy seriousness’ will inevitably replace our youthful spirits. Moreover, as Schopenhauer astutely notes, when we are young time unfolds at a much slower pace, with the result that the first quarter of our life is both the happiest and the longest. As life draws to a close we are left wondering where it has gone (SW 5:515–16/PP 1:424–25). It is important to appreciate that Schopenhauer is equating old age not with vital or sunny ‘cheerfulness’ but with a deep ‘serenity’. This is a ‘serenity’ that comes about because of accepting things as they are and knowing, if we are honest about the matter, that they will never change, perhaps even ‘knowing’ that humankind is doomed. Such a ‘serenity’ contrasts sharply with the Heiterkeit (serenity or cheerfulness) that characterizes Nietzsche’s mature philosophy, and where it is presented as part of a stance of fearlessness and hopefulness in the face of the ‘greatest recent event – that “God is dead,” that the belief in the Christian god has become unbelievable’ (Nietzsche 1974: aphorism 125). For Nietzsche, the consequences of this event are not to be regarded as what we might think and expect: ‘They are not at all sad and gloomy but rather like a new and scarcely describable kind of light, happiness, relief, exhilaration, encouragement, dawn’ (ibid.). It is only in his early writings that we find in Nietzsche an appreciative reception of Schopenhauer as a philosopher of wisdom. In Schopenhauer as Educator (1874) his greatness is said to consist in the fact that he deals with the picture of life as a whole by paying attention to all the different facets of life, including the vital need to cultivate a life of wisdom as a way of life. Because he has this picture, Nietzsche notes, Schopenhauer can 386

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regulate the sciences for himself and avoid becoming enmeshed in a web of conceptual scholasticism. Schopenhauer thus awakens for Nietzsche a powerful need for us moderns just as Socrates did in ancient times: a need not for knowledge but for wisdom. Although Nietzsche expresses his admiration for Schopenhauer in these terms, there is no indication even in this early period of his intellectual development that he subscribes to any of Schopenhauer’s most fundamental doctrines, such as his teaching on the denial of the will to life and an ascetic withdrawal from life. However, it is perhaps curious that nowhere in his early appreciation does Nietzsche draw his reader’s attention to the wide-ranging and pertinent insights Schopenhauer has into how we can best cultivate a life of wisdom. This neglect continues into the reception of Schopenhauer we encounter in Nietzsche’s middle and late writings, where the appreciation becomes openly hostile. This should not surprise us, however, since his futurism clashes fundamentally with Schopenhauer’s deep-rooted pessimism. Unlike Schopenhauer, Nietzsche does not ever seek a fixed solution to ‘the human condition’, for example, in the figure of Christ. Nietzsche describes Christ as having ‘the warmest of hearts’, but herein, in this ‘unintelligent goodness’, lies a great danger. Nietzsche spells out the danger in terms of a contradiction: the warm, sympathetic heart yearns passionately for the elimination of life’s violent and savage character, but it fails to recognize that it is this very passion that takes fire and heat from the energies of life. Thus, the warmest heart, embodied most nobly in the figure of Christ, ‘wants to eliminate its own foundation, to destroy itself, which is to say: it wants something illogical, it is not intelligent’ (Nietzsche 1995: aphorism 235). Nietzsche thus appeals to a different conception of the perfect sage, one whose teaching will work against any excessive desire for unintelligent goodness and the promotion of ‘human stupidity’, so obstructing the engendering of a Christ. As Nietzsche sees it, this is a necessity if our faith is in life and its development and continual enhancement.7 Nietzsche invites us to reflect on the desire to attain the perfect State as a lasting site of the good life; although we may dream of such a State and site would it not come at the cost of ruining the soil from which great intellects and powerful individuals grow? This is ‘the great energy’ of life that Nietzsche labels ‘Dionysian’, and in my view, the best presentation he gives of this is in the penultimate aphorism of Beyond Good and Evil. Here Dionysus is portrayed enigmatically as the ‘tempter god’ and a ‘philosopher’ who possesses the intellectual and personal virtues of courage and honesty, as well as philosophy’s traditional ‘love of wisdom’. Such a philosopher-god is presented by Nietzsche as the teacher of selfcultivation and self-mastery, he is ‘the born pied piper of consciences whose voice knows how to descend into the underworld of every soul’. This ‘god’ loves humans, conceived as ‘agreeable, brave, ingenious’ animals who know how to make their way through every labyrinth and who he seeks to make ‘stronger, more evil, and more profound, and even ‘more beautiful’ (Nietzsche 2014: aphorism 295). The contrast I am drawing here with Schopenhauer reveals, then, a quite fundamental difference between the two thinkers and highlights a distinctive feature of Nietzsche’s thinking, namely, its concern with the future. Schopenhauer famously has no hope for the future. The solution to the problem of existence for human beings is aesthetic (contemplation) and ascetic (renunciation). Georg Simmel astutely noted that Schopenhauer’s pessimism is not drawn from positive pain so much as it is derived from ennui, including the dulling monotony of days and years. Moreover, this is the point that is most relevant to what I am seeking to highlight in my conclusion: ‘It is the absence of the idea of evolution which 387

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condemns the world and mankind to always being the same, without solace’ (Simmel 1986: 8–9). At the present juncture of our human evolution we may experience a deep sympathy with Schopenhauer and consider his pessimism to be well-founded, but we may also find it hard, even in the face of knowing the worst and intuiting that the very worst may be yet to come, to give up on Nietzsche’s ‘highest’ hope. This is the de-theologized hope that human beings will be delivered from the spirit and bonds of revenge and come to establish new peoples and create a new earth by remaining true to it (Nietzsche 1969, ‘Of Old and New Law-Tables’).8

Notes 1 My thanks to David Bather Woods for his helpful comments on a draft of this essay and for suggestions on improving it. 2 My focus in this chapter is on Schopenhauer’s reception of Stoic teaching. His thoughts about Cynicism will be covered as part of developing an appreciation for his reception of Stoicism. He has very little to say in his writings, unsurprisingly given his commitment to metaphysics, about the ancient Skeptics – they are not covered, for example, in his ‘Fragments for the History of Philosophy’ in PP 1. For his reception of Epicurus see SW 2:231/WWR 1:219-220, SW 3:540/WWR 2:489, and SW 5:367/PP 1:303. 3 What we know as the book, Meditations, was not in fact a book written by the emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius for publication, not even for others, but a set of notes, aide memoires, Stoic quotations, and sketches of the art of living he wrote first and foremost for himself and as a set of spiritual exercises. The title, Meditations, is a modern invention, dating back to the seventeenth century, and as a manuscript it is perhaps best understood by the title To Himself (ta eis heauton), or as Pierre Hadot has it, Exhortations to Himself. It is by this title that the work was known in much earlier times. See Hadot (1998). 4 See Montaigne, ‘Defence of Seneca and Plutarch’, in Montaigne (1943: Book Two, essay 32). See also for valuable insight, Friedrich (1991: 60–66). 5 For Montaigne see the insights developed by Friedrich (1991: 60–66). For Nietzsche see The Gay Science (Nietzsche 1974), aphorisms 12, 122, 305, 306, 326, and 359. For insight into the reception of Stoicism in nineteenth-century German philosophy, including Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, see Ure (2016). 6 Compare Emerson when he notes in his essay ‘Self-Reliance’: ‘The soul is no traveler; the wise man stays at home…Traveling is a fool’s paradise’ (Emerson 2000: 149–150). 7 Although Nietzsche thinks a Stoic way of life is capable of greatness, he is equally critical of it as a way of life. As the eternal guardian of his castle the Stoic becomes, ‘insufferable for others, difficult for himself, and impoverished and cut off from the most beautiful fortuities of his soul. And, also, from all further instruction. For one must be able to lose oneself occasionally if one wants to learn something from things different from oneself’ (Nietzsche 1974: aphorism 305). 8 For aphorisms on hope in Nietzsche’s corpus see Human, all too Human 71, The Gay Science preface, 268-272, 343, and The Anti-Christ 23. A great deal of the narrative of Thus Spoke Zarathustra is informed by appeals to hope (see also the denouement to the second essay of On the Genealogy of Morality). He is most critical of the hope for a ‘beyond,’ which is a hope that people who suffer from life need and that cannot be refuted by any reality. For instructive insight into ‘hope’ see the recent study by Adam Potkay that features a discussion of Nietzsche in its coverage (2022: 255–264).

Bibliography Aristotle (1976), Ethics, trans. J. A. K. Thomson (Harmondsworth: Penguin). Emerson, Ralph Waldo (2000), The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: The Modern Library). Epictetus (1948), The Enchiridion, trans. Thomas W. Higginson (Indianapolis: The Liberal Arts Press). ——— (2008), Discourses and Selected Writings, trans. Robert Dobbin (London: Penguin).

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Schopenhauer on Stoicism as a Way of Life and on the Wisdom of Life Friedrich, Hugo (1991), Montaigne, trans. Dawn Eng (Berkeley: University of California Press). Hadot, Pierre (1998), The Inner Citadel: The ‘Meditations’ of Marcus Aurelius, trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Montaigne (1943), The Complete Works, trans. Donald M. Frame (New York: Everyman’s Library). Nietzsche, Friedrich (1969), Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin). ——— (1974), The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House). ——— (1995), Human, All Too Human, trans. Gary Handwerk (Stanford: Stanford University Press). ——— (2011), Dawn: Thoughts on the Presumptions of Morality, trans. Brittain Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press). ——— (2013), Mixed Opinions and Maxims, trans. Gary Handwerk (Stanford: Stanford University Press). ——— (2014), Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Adrian del Caro (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Plato (1992), Republic, trans. G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis: Hackett). Potkay, Adam (2022), Hope. A Literary History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (2010), Natural Questions, trans. Harry M. Hine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). ——— (2014), ‘On Tranquility of Mind’, in Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Hardship and Happiness, trans. Elaine Fantham (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), pp. 182–209. ——— (2015), Letters on Ethics, trans. Margaret Graver and A. A. Long (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Simmel, Georg (1986), Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, trans. Helmut Loiskandl, Deena Weinstein, and Michael Weinstein (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press). Ure, Michael (2016), ‘Stoicism in Nineteenth-century German Philosophy’, in John Sellars (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of the Stoic Tradition (Abingdon and New York: Routledge), pp. 287–303.

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27 SCHOPENHAUER ON SPINOZA Animals, Jews, and Evil Yitzhak Y. Melamed

To Pandora and Rico, my barking friends As a result of the Kantian critique of all speculative theology, German philosophizers have almost all thrown themselves back on Spinoza so that the whole, well-known series of failed attempts that go by the name of post-Kantian philosophy is simply and tastelessly dressed up Spinozism, hidden under all sorts of incomprehensible language and distorted in other ways as well. (SW 3:741/WWR 2:661)1

27.1 Introduction Schopenhauer’s attitude toward Spinoza is anything but simple. On the one hand, in numerous passages in his writings, Schopenhauer expresses clear admiration both of Spinoza, the person, and of his philosophy.2 Schopenhauer does not hesitate to associate himself with the “hen kai pan” slogan of German Spinozism: The “One and All”, i.e., the fact that the inner essence in all things is absolutely one and the same, has already been grasped and understood by my age, after the Eleatics, Scotus Erigena, Giordano Bruno, and Spinoza has taught it in detail (SW 3:739/WWR 2:659). Schopenhauer’s endorsement of key Spinozistic doctrines, such as monism and perhaps also the critique of free will, have led some scholars to describe Schopenhauer’s monism of the will as nothing but a “transformation of Spinoza’s abstract monism,”3 while others have argued that “there is more Spinozism than Kantianism in Schopenhauer’s system.”4 According to Samuel Rappaport, Schopenhauer’s sympathy for Spinoza led him to stress some bizarre biographical coincidences, such as the fact that Spinoza died on February 21 (1677), while Schopenhauer was born on February 22 (1788).5 But there were also genuine biographical similarities between the two. Both Schopenhauer and Spinoza were sons of wealthy merchants and were expected to replace their fathers in the family business.6 Both had a deep interest in medicine.7 Schopenhauer’s family was of Dutch origin. If we add to 390

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all this the fact that in Berlin Schopenhauer studied under Fichte and Schleiermacher,8 both of whom had deep interest, perhaps even admiration, for Spinoza, we can better understand Schopenhauer’s close attachment to Spinoza. But on the other hand, many of Schopenhauer’s notes on Spinoza smack of deep and gross racist hatred; in the marginalia on Spinoza’s books in Schopenhauer’s personal library, we find frequently the note: “Ecce Judaeus,”9 and when Schopenhauer argues that Spinoza could not break from the Jews, he adds: “a vessel retains the smell of what used to fill it” (SW 3:742/WWR 2:662). We will shortly return to the issue of smell. Schopenhauer’s philosophical engagement with Spinoza spreads over many fronts, and an adequate – not to say, complete – treatment of the topic should cover at least the following issues: Schopenhauer’s critique (and misunderstanding) of Spinoza’s pivotal concept of causa sui;10 Schopenhauer’s claim that Spinoza confused reason [ratio] and cause [causa];11 the relationship between Schopenhauer’s and Spinoza’s monisms;12 the eminent role that both philosophers assign to causality;13 and finally, Schopenhauer’s view of the world as a macroanthropos, as opposed to Spinoza’s attack on anthropomorphic thinking.14 An attempt to reconstruct a genuine philosophical dialogue between Schopenhauer and Spinoza should begin by setting the record straight and clarifying the former’s mis-readings of the latter (and there are quite a few of this kind15). We could also benefit from comparing Schopenhauer’s reception of Spinoza’s with that of Schopenhauer’s German contemporaries.16 Regrettably, our space here is limited, and so if we wish to treat any of the issues in any depth, we must restrict the scope of the current chapter. For this reason, I have decided to concentrate on two central issues: animal rights (Part I) and evil (Part II). These issues are, clearly, at least as important as the others listed above.

27.2  Part I: The Dog, the Jew, and the Absent Spider Schopenhauer was a dog-lover. His two French poodles, Butz and Atman, provided him with affectionate company in the lonesome last twenty years of his life. Regrettably, his attitude toward other living beings was somewhat less generous. In his major work, The World as Will and as Representation, Schopenhauer charges Spinoza with contempt for animals: [Spinoza’s] contempt for animals which he declares to be without rights, mere things for us to use, is entirely Jewish and, at the same time, in conjunction with pantheism, absurd and repulsive: Ethics IV, Appendix, ch. 27. (SW 3:742/WWR 2:662, italics added)17 As we shall shortly see, Spinoza never “declared” that animals are without rights. In fact, the very opposite is the case. To see this, we will look closely at §27 of the Appendix to Part IV of the Ethics. But before we do that, we need to clarify why Spinoza’s contempt for animals would be alleged as “entirely Jewish.” The following passage from Schopenhauer’s Parerga and Paralipomena might not ultimately provide us with a satisfying answer to the last question, but it definitely teaches us a thing or two about contempt simpliciter. [I]n his unworthy as well as false propositions regarding animals (Ethics IV, appendix, ch. 26, and in the same part, prop. 37, scholium.), Spinoza speaks the way a Jew 391

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understands it, in accordance with chs. 1 and 9 of Genesis, so that we others, who are accustomed to more pure and worthy doctrines, are overpowered by the “Jewish stench” [foetor judaicus]. Dogs he does not seem to have known at all. The shocking sentence with which ch. 26 begins: “Besides men, we know of no particular thing in nature in whose mind we may rejoice, and whom we can associate with ourselves in friendship or any sort of fellowship”, is best answered by a Spanish man of letters of our day (Larra, pseudonym Figaro, in El doncel, ch. 33): “El que no ha tenido un perro, no sabe lo que es querer y ser querido.” (He who has never kept a dog does not know what it is to love and be loved.) (SW 5:78/PP 1:68–9, italics added) What are the horrific “Jewish” views of animals stated in Genesis Ch. 1 and Ch. 9? According to Mor Segev’s sensible suggestion,18 what Schopenhauer had in mind is Gen. 1:28-2919 and Gen. 9:3.20 In these two verses, God blesses Adam and Eve, grants them dominion over the other animals, but restricts their nourishment to fruits and vegetables only (Gen. 1:30 restricts the nourishment of the other animals to vegetables and plants as well). In the other chapter cited by Schopenhauer (i.e., Gen. 9:3), God tells Noah, after the flood, that from now on, he is allowed to consume animal flesh (but under some restrictions, see Gen. 9:4). Gen. 9:3 clearly refers back to Gen. 1:29-30: while in the earlier verses, both humans (i.e., Adam and Eve) and the other animals are told that they may consume only “‫[ ירק עשב‬green herbs],” the later verses tell Noah, that henceforth, the flesh of other animals is permitted for human consumption, just like the “‫[ ירק עשב‬green herbs].” The conclusion an intelligent reader should have from comparing Gen. 1:28-29 with Gen. 9:3 is that, from the point of view of the Biblical narrator, human beings were not originally permitted to consume meat and that only after the flood, as God realized the imperfection of his creatures (both humans and animals, see Gen. 6: 6-7 and 12), God made a compromise and allowed human beings to consume meat (with some restrictions against cruel killing. See Gen. 9:4).21 How far this is from contempt or cruelty toward animals I shall let the readers judge for themselves. (In passing, let me note that despite his ample talk against cruelty toward animals, Schopenhauer was not vegetarian.)22 Does this mean that Schopenhauer was not an intelligent reader? Not necessarily. Prejudices and racist hatred have their own psychological dynamics, and if anyone has any doubt about Schopenhauer’s antisemitism, let us have a look at another passage, where Schopenhauer shares with us some further words of wisdom about “Jewish stench.” The good Lord, foreseeing in his wisdom that his chosen people would be dispersed throughout the world, gave to its members a specific odor whereby he could everywhere recognize and discover them, namely the foetor Judaicus. (Manuscript Remains 4:392)23 I very much doubt Schopenhauer’s accusation that “in Judaism” animals have no rights, deserves anything other than ridicule and disgust, but to set the record straight, let me note that “‫[ צער בעלי חיים‬the religious command to relieve the distress and pain of animals]” is a severe religious obligation which, according to most rabbinic authorities, not only permits (in many circumstances) desecration of the Sabbath in order to help an animal but also 392

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implies a prohibition on hunting, the fattening of geese, and any harm to animals which is not immediately required for the sustenance of human lives.24 Let’s turn now to Spinoza and see whether Schopenhauer’s words are justified in his case. Sections 26 and 27 of the Appendix to Part IV of the Ethics – the passages mentioned by Schopenhauer in the quotes above – read: §26. Apart from, men we know no singular thing in nature whose Mind we can enjoy, and which we can join to ourselves in friendship, or some kind of association. And so whatever there is in nature apart from men, the principle of seeking our own advantage does not demand that we preserve it. Instead, it teaches us to preserve or destroy it according to its use, or to adapt it to our use in any way whatever. §27. The principal advantage [utilitas] that we derive from things outside us – apart from the experience and knowledge we acquire from observing them and changing them from one form into another – lies in the preservation of our body. That is why those things are most useful to us which can feed and maintain it, so that all its parts can perform their function properly.25 Sections 26 and 27 of the Appendix rework and explain Spinoza’s claims about vegetarianism, which appear earlier in Part IV of the Ethics, and it would be helpful to have these claims as well before our eyes. [T]he law against killing animals [legem illam de non mactandis brutis] is based more on empty superstitions and unmanly compassion [muliebri misericordia] than sound reason. The rational principle of seeking our own advantage teaches us the necessity of joining with men, but not with the lower animals [brutis], or with things whose nature is different from human nature. We have the same right against them as they have against us. Indeed, because the right of each other is defined by his virtue, or [seu] power, men have a greater right against the lower animals than they have against men. Not that I deny that the lower animals have sensations [Nec tamen nego bruta sentire]. But I do deny that we are therefore not permitted to consider our own advantage, use them at our pleasure, and treat them as is most convenient for us. For they do not agree [conveniunt] in nature with us, and their affects are different in nature from human affects. (see IIIp57s)26 There is something peculiar in Spinoza’s talk about a law [lex] against killing animals. I am not aware of any seventeenth-century Dutch civil law which prohibited the consumption of meat. The fact that Spinoza describes this law as superstitio vana seems to indicate that he has in mind a practice of one of the established religions. Given the fact that Kabbalism was quite common in early modern Jewish Amsterdam and that vegetarianism was quite common among the Kabbalists,27 I suspect that Spinoza’s words here refer to this Kabbalist tradition (as well as the severe restrictions on the consumption of meat placed by the laws of Kashrut). No matter what the precise historical target of Spinoza’s criticism of vegetarianism was, the gist of his argument is pretty clear. At bottom, Spinoza assumes that on the metaphysical level animals are not that different from human beings: they “have sensations” and mental life;28 and in another text, Spinoza seems to express a reservation about the common view 393

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of animals as irrational.29 Human beings might enjoy a higher degree of rationality, and a greater complexity of mental life,30 but unlike Descartes and Kant,31 Spinoza does not think that human beings are distinguished by rank from the other animals or that there is an abyss between humanity and the rest of nature. Just like us, the lower animals have mental lives and rights. Still, claims Spinoza, human beings have more rights than the lower animals, because rights are just reflections of power relations,32 and usually – but not always33 – human beings have more power than other animals. So far, I find Spinoza’s argument quite reasonable (though I do not necessarily share his understanding of rights). Now comes the issue of friendship. For Spinoza, the greatest benefit I can have from another entity is friendship (and Schopenhauer seems to think highly of friendship as well). According to §26 of the Appendix to Ethics IV, the essential features of friendship are (i) the ability to enjoy the mind of another being and (ii) empowerment by forming a new and stronger individual comprised of the two friends.34 Spinoza thinks that I cannot become a friend of a wolf (nor can the wolf consider me a friend) because we do not have the same affects (i.e., emotions). I do not have the same affects as the wolf because the affects (and the emotional life) of every animal are at least partly determined by the essence of that animal. To the extent my essence is different from the essence of the wolf, our affects must be different as well,35 and, as a result, claims Spinoza, we can neither enjoy the mental lives of other animals nor can we form a new and empowered individual by bonding with animals. The counterexamples to this line of reasoning are pretty obvious. A blind person is clearly empowered by bonding with a Labrador, and for all I can tell, Spinoza’s considered view should be that it is absolutely irrational for the blind person to use his dog for any other purpose. Can we become friends with Labradors? Here I think the real question is what do we understand by friendship? Can we enjoy the minds of other animals? Here too the question is what do we mean by this notion (“enjoy the minds”)? If enjoying the mind of another being requires linguistic communication, our ability to enjoy the minds of wolves and dogs is limited. But if enjoying their minds is just the communication of affections, Schopenhauer may well be right to observe that dogs may be our best friends. Of course, Spinoza would most likely ridicule the notion of friendship with a being whose thoughts you do not really understand. (Or, perhaps, the last thing you need from a friend is for them to burden you with their thoughts? If so, dogs are indeed your ideal friends). Spinoza’s claim that we cannot become friends of other animals because we do not share the same essence (or nature) also faces a significant challenge from within his system. A major unresolved problem in Spinoza’s philosophy is the question whether two (or more) particulars can share the very same essence.36 Spinoza’s claims about animals in E4p37s1 seem to indicate that he thinks that human beings share at least a significant part of their essence with each other (for otherwise, their affects will not be similar and they could not form friendship). But if partial overlap of essence (and the resulting partial overlap of emotions) suffices to secure friendship, why not assume that even a somewhat more restricted overlap of essence (and emotions) should also suffice to secure a certain degree of friendship with animals? From a different angle, we might raise doubts about Spinoza’s commitment to the claim that “all men share the same common nature.”37 In the Theological Political Treatise, Spinoza mocks the view that there are different species of men (presciently denouncing the basis of various forms of modern racism);38 yet, in the Ethics, immediately following his explanation of the difference in affects between humans and lower animals, Spinoza notes: 394

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“Finally, from P57 it follows that there is no small difference between the gladness by which a drunk is led and the gladness a Philosopher possesses. I wished to mention this in passing” (E3p57s). E3p57, to which the last quote refers, states: “Each affect of each individual differs from the affect of another as much as the essence of the one differs from the essence of the other.” Spinoza’s appeal to E3p57 in order to explain the difference between the gladness of the drunk and that of the philosopher clearly implies that he considers the essence, or nature, of the two types of people to be distinct as well. Obviously, the difference in nature between the philosopher and the drunk may well be more modest than the difference in nature between the drunk person and his dog. Yet, these differences seem to be a matter of degree rather than a clear-cut dichotomy between humans and non-human animals.39 If, on some occasions, a drunk person may benefit from the friendship of a philosopher (in spite of the fact that the two do not share the very same essence), why can’t the drunk person form some sort of friendship with the dog (despite the difference in essence between the two)?

27.3  Part 2: Evil and Pantheism Schopenhauer’s most substantial criticism of Spinoza lies in the claim that pantheism40 necessarily leads to the denial of the abundant presence of evil in the world, and to the affirmation of life and its joys. The fact that Spinoza everywhere explicitly and emphatically praises joyfulness and stipulates it as condition and sign of every praiseworthy act, but completely dismisses all sorrow… all this he does only out of love for consistency. For if this world is a god, then it is an end in itself and must rejoice in its existence and praise it, so “Jump, Marquise! Always merry, never sad!” Pantheism is essentially and necessarily optimism. (SW 5:78/PP 1:68. Italics added ) Strictly speaking, we can conceive of a pantheism that is not that optimistic. If all things are in God, but God is anxious and depressed,41 pantheism would lead to deep pessimism. Obviously, the view of God as a perfect being would normally exclude the idea that God could be depressed. Thus, it would be fair to say that on the common perception of God as perfect, pantheism is likely to lead to the affirmation of this world as it is. Since one’s modus ponens is another’s modus tollens, Schopenhauer argues that the abundance of evil in the world suffices to refute pantheism: Any pantheism must ultimately founder on the unavoidable demands of ethics, and then on the evils and sufferings of the world. If the world is theophany then everything that human beings (and in fact even animals) do is both divine and excellent; there can be nothing to complain about and nothing to praise more than anything else; and thus no ethics…Pantheism is completely unviable in the face of the world’s terrible aspect… If we go into the interior [of the world] and include its subjective and moral aspects, with their preponderance of need, suffering and misery, of dissention, evil, insanity, and perversity; then we will soon become horribly aware that we have anything but a theophany before us. (SW 3:677–78/WWR 605–6) 395

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Spinoza’s view of the world as “both divine and excellent” has very concrete historical sources, claims Schopenhauer; it is only because Spinoza began with Judaism that he ended up with his fanciful optimistic pantheism. Had he begun “impartially” with the true nature of things, he would have reached a very different conclusion (SW 5:74– 75/PP 1:65–66): For Spinoza his eternal substance, the inner essence of the world, which he himself calls Deus, has even in its moral character and its value, nothing other than Jehovah, the creator-God who applauds his creation and finds that everything has turned out very well, that “everything was very good.” Spinoza did no more than remove his personality. For Spinoza too, the world, and everything in it, is entirely excellent and as it should be, and people have nothing more to do than “live act, and preserve their existence, in accordance with the principle of seeking their own advantage” (E4p67)… they should enjoy their lives, as long as they last… In short, it is optimism. (SW 3:741/WWR 2:661) Just as in the case of animal rights, Schopenhauer presents virtually the very same criticism against both Spinoza and “Judaism.” Both perceive the world as “entirely excellent,” and as a result both leave no room for any ethics, that is, for any attempt to improve the world.42 Why does Schopenhauer think that Judaism is so optimistic? Schopenhauer claims that Judaism provides an “optimistic creation story” (SW 3:712/WWR 2:635), repeatedly citing Gen. 1:31 “and everything was very good” (e.g., SW 3:716, 717, 741/WWR 2:638, 640, 661). At no point in his discussion does Schopenhauer pause to ask whether it makes any sense to reduce the complexity of a literary tradition spanning two and a half millennia to a simple championing of one chapter from the Bible (important as it is). Were Schopenhauer to do so (and had he any access to this vast literature), he would have observed that there is no shortage of pessimistic sources within Judaism. We could begin with a brief midrash by Rabbi Meir, the main voice of the Mishna, who expounded Gen. 1:31 by rendering “‫והנה‬ ‫[ טוב מאוד‬and everything was very good]” by “‫[ והנה טוב מוות‬and death was good/better].”43 We would then proceed to the unresolved Talmudic dispute over whether “it is better for a human being to be created, rather than not to be created.”44 Then we may turn to the pretty common rabbinic attitude toward theodicy, that is, that divine justice should rule the world, though it is hard to square with our experience.45 The discussion of these and numer��ous other sources is likely to result in a much more complicated picture, but it is pointless to preach the need for a nuanced and serious observation to someone, like Schopenhauer, whose main analytic tool – at least in the study of Judaism – is a blunt axe. Overall, I find Schopenhauer’s understanding of Spinoza’s attitude toward “evil” quite correct. Spinoza has little patience for this notion. Cognition of evil, claims Spinoza, is inadequate cognition (E4p64), and “if the human mind had only adequate ideas, it would form no notion of evil [notionem mali]” (E4p64c). For Spinoza, evil is a mutilated human construct. “Whatever seems immoral, dreadful, unjust, and dishonorable, arises from the fact that [one] conceives the things themselves in a way which is distorted, mutilated and confused” (E4p73s).46 In the Appendix to the first part of the Ethics, Spinoza includes “good and evil” [Bonus et Malus] in the list of notions that are entia, non rationis, sed imaginationis.47 Spinoza provides a fascinating cognitive genealogy of evil that is based on his nominalism. We conceive things as evil by comparing them with things we consider similar and then judging how much better 396

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things could have been. When making this comparison, we rely on universals. For example, when we think of Dostoevski’s Raskolnikov murdering his landlady, we compare him with other men by using the universal “human being.” We observe that most particulars that fall under this universal are capable of mercy and do not kill old ladies. Thus, we conclude that Raskolnikov’s act is evil, insofar as it is less perfect (i.e., deprived of a perfection that naturally belongs to it) than our notion of “human being” (the universal itself being merely an abstraction from the particulars we encounter). In a similar way, we conclude that the earthquake in Lisbon was evil, because in other areas, the Earth’s crust does not cause such devastation. Now, for Spinoza, all this is just illusionary thinking, resulting from a self-centered anthropomorphism. When we attribute to God the belief that something is evil, we err even further in thinking that God, “like his creatures, had sympathy with some things and an antipathy for others” (Ep. 19| IV/90/30; emphasis added). From the objective and true perspective of God, there is no evil. God knows every entity in its particularity, not through universals. “God does not know things abstractly, and does not make such general definitions” (Ep. 19| IV/92/1). There was no evil in the occurrence of the earthquake in Lisbon because this piece of land was not deprived of any perfection with which God, or nature, could have endowed it. It was as perfect as any other event on Earth. From Schopenhauer’s point of view, Spinoza’s “solution” to the problem of evil may seem quite astonishing, even devastating, but this is a direct result of one of the main lines of Spinoza’s thought: his battle against anthropomorphism and the demand that the “proper order of philosophizing” is to contemplate first the divine nature, and only then try to understand particular things from that perspective (E2p10s2 |II/93).48 From the divine and objective perspective, there is nothing imperfect or evil. Spinoza’s counterfactual, “if the human mind had only adequate ideas, it would form no notion of evil” (E4p64c), seems to concede that in reality we do not have only adequate ideas (cf. E2p40s and E3p1), and to that extent, we do form notions of evil. Evil is what prevents us from having some good (E4d2). This notion changes according to what we take to be the good. For the drunkard, preventing him from opening the whiskey bottle is evil. For the philosopher, evil is what prevents her from “approaching nearer and nearer to the model of human nature that we set before ourselves” (E4pref| II/208/20). Here, however, there is an interesting paradox. The greatest good of those who seek virtue is knowledge (E4p36d), and so the model the philosopher attempts to achieve through the process of gradually increasing her knowledge is one in which all her ideas are adequate. What prevents us from having only adequate ideas is – for the philosopher – “evil.” But per E4p64c, we can certainly know that a person who has the notion of evil does not have only adequate ideas. Thus, it would seem that having the notion of evil is evil. Undoubtedly, there were many things which prevented Schopenhauer from achieving his goals and which undermined what he took to be the good and just state of things: diseases (minor and major), earthquakes, the fact that he would not live for three thousand years (not to say eternity), and even a certain, nasty G.W. F. Hegel who stole the philosophical glory Schopenhauer deserved. If it helps you, Spinoza would tell Schopenhauer, please feel free to call each and every one of them “evil.” However, Spinoza would continue, you should have long ago realized that the world does not exist for your sake (or for anyone’s sake). From Spinoza’s perspective, Schopenhauer got rid of the mythical belief in divine creation, but he was still stuck in the anthropocentric belief that the world – for some mysterious reason – was supposed to fit his desires. “It doesn’t; grow-up,” Spinoza would conclude. 397

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Notes 1 Unless otherwise marked, all references to Spinoza’s works and letters are to Curley’s translation (1985/2016). I rely on Gebhardt’s critical edition (Spinoza Opera, 1925)) for the Latin text of Spinoza and cite the texts in this edition by volume/page/line numbers. I use the following standard abbreviations for Spinoza’s works: TP –Political Treatise [Tractatus Politicus], TTP –TheologicalPolitical Treatise [Tractatus Theologico-Politicus], and Ep. – Letters. Passages in the Ethics will be referred to by means of the following abbreviations: a(-xiom), c(-orollary), p(-roposition), s(cholium), and app(-endix); “d” stands for either “definition” (when it appears immediately to the right of the part of the book) or “demonstration” (in all other cases). Hence, E1d3 is the third definition of part 1 and E1p16d is the demonstration of proposition 16 of part 1. I would like to thank Zach Gartenberg, Mor Segev, Tim Stoll, and Jason Yonover for their most astute comments on earlier drafts of this paper. 2 Thus, for example, he describes Spinoza as “great mind” (SW 5:78/PP 1:69)(and “a very great man” (SW 3:742/WWR 2:662) and notes: “Spinoza’s Ethics is throughout a mixture of the false and the true, the admirable and the bad” (SW 5:78–79/PP 1:69). 3 Clemens 1899: p. 69. Such transformations are not rare among the German Idealists. In Melamed (2020), I show that significant parts of Schelling’s 1801 Darstellung meiner System der Philosophie consist of quotes from Spinoza’s Ethics in which “Deus” is replaced by “Vernuft.” 4 Brann 1972: p. 196. 5 Rappaport 1899: p. 117. 6 Wicks 2021: §1. 7 Schopenhauer completed medical school, while Spinoza’s circle of friends contained numerous physicians. 8 Wicks 2021: §1. 9 See Brann 1972: p. 195. 10 “The true emblem of causa sui is Baron Münchausen, who, clamping his legs around his horse as it sinks into the water pulls the pigtail up over his head and raises himself and the horse into the heights; under this emblem, put: causa sui” (SW 1:15/FR 20). Cf. Moreau and Laerke 2022: p. 430. For Schopenhauer’s misreading of Spinoza’s causa sui as merely a “cognitive ground” rather than an efficient cause, see SW 1:13–14/FR18 (§8). On Spinoza’s definition of causa sui, see Melamed (2021). 11 See, for example, SW 1:12–13/FR, 17-18. 12 For a helpful discussion of this issue, see Segev, “Schopenhauer’s Critique of Spinoza,” 557–8. 13 For a helpful discussion of Schopenhauer’s claim that all the Kantian categories are reducible to causality, see Wicks 2021: §3. In Spinoza, causality is co-extensive with conception and is more extensive than the in alio relation. Thus, in principle, both conception and inherence could be reduced to causation (see Melamed 2013: Ch. 3). Whether Spinoza actually carried out such a reduction is a topic I cannot discuss adequately here. 14 In this context, Schopenhauer writes: “it is clearly more accurate to teach understanding of the world from human beings rather than human beings from the world” (SW 3:739/WWR 2:659). For Schopenhauer, the human will is given to us directly, and we should therefore understand the world in terms of the will which is most directly given to us. For Spinoza’s systematic attack on anthropomorphism, see the appendix to Part One of the Ethics. Cf. Melamed 2010: pp. 155–61. 15 See, for example, Schopenhauer’s frequent reference to the Spinoza’s attributes of extension and thought as “accidents” (FR 155) or “modes” (SW 5:77–78/PP 1:68). 16 Like the German Idealists, Schopenhauer frequently claims that Spinoza revived the philosophy of the Eleatics (see, for example, SW 5:76/PP 1:66–67 and SW 3:739/WWR 2:659. Cf. Hegel 1995: vol. 3, pp. 257–8). Like Hegel (e.g., 1995: vol. 3, pp. 252–3), Schopenhauer claimed that Spinoza did not belong to his century. However, unlike Hegel (and the rest of the German Idealists), Schopenhauer argued that Spinoza’s proper home was in Hinduism. See Brann 1972: 183. 17 Italics added. The view of animals as mere things is Kant’s, not Spinoza’s. See the opening to Kant’s Anthropology: “[A human being] is an entirely different being from things, such is irrational animals, with which one can do as one likes” (AA 7:127). Spinoza assigns a significant degree of rationality to animals, thus rejecting Kant’s bifurcation between persons and things. 18 Segev 2021: p. 565.

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Schopenhauer on Spinoza 19 “28: And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion [‫ ]ורדו‬over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. 29: And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for nourishment [‫]לאכלה‬.” I have used the King James translation but corrected the misleading last word of verse 29. 20 “3: Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things.” 21 The view that humanity was originally prohibited to kill animals for nourishment has been endorsed by numerous rabbinic authorities. See, for example, Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Sanhendrin, 59b. 22 Schopenhauer justifies a carnivorous diet for health reasons, arguing that humans are originally and naturally herbivorous but became dependent on meat upon migrating to colder regions (SW 6:169–70/PP 2: 144). I am indebted to Mor Segev for pointing out this source to me. 23 Quoted in Wicks (2017: p. 349, n. 24). 24 The Babylonian Talmud (Tractate Baba Metzia, 32b) debates whether the obligation to assist animals in distress is Biblical (and thus, most severe) or merely a rabbinic enactment (in which case, the obligation would have been less strict). Eventually, it rules that the obligation is strictly Biblical (Tractate Shabbat, 128b). 25 E4App§§26-27. 26 E4p37s1| II/236/34-237/10. Italics added. 27 Isaac Luria, perhaps the greatest Kabbalist of all time, is said to have avoided killing any animals, mosquitos and lice included (Vital 2020: Haqdama 38). On a personal level, I can attest that my father’s grandfather (after whom I am named) was a Kabbalist and a vegetarian. 28 See E2p13s| II/96/26-97/16. In Ep. 32 (IV/171/11-12) Spinoza ascribes reasoning to a worm. For further discussion of this issue, see Melamed (2023: Part 1). 29 See E3p57s| II/187/5, where Spinoza discusses “animals that are called irrational [quae irrationalia dicuntur].” My italics. 30 See E2p13s| II/97/8-14. Cf. E2p14. 31 For Kant’s view of humanity as being by “rank [Rang] and dignity entirely different from other things, such as irrational animals,” see Anthropology 7:127. Notice that, unlike the views of Kant, Descartes, and other humanists, Spinoza’s argument for the impossibility of friendship with animals due to our heterogenic nature need not assume that our nature is in any sense better than other animals. I am not useful as a friend to my spider, just as she is not useful as a friend to me. 32 See, for example, TTP Ch. 16 (III/189/24) and Ep. 50 (IV/240/20-24). Spinoza’s understanding of rights reflects the medieval and early modern view of rights as privileges. Against this background developed the much more recent notion of universal civil or human rights. 33 A lion which devours a human being or a bull which kills the matador prove themselves to be more powerful than the relevant human being and, to that extent, to have more right. 34 “[If], for example, two individuals of entirely the same nature are joined to one another, they compose an individual twice as powerful as each one” (E4p18s). 35 “Both the horse and the man are driven by a Lust to procreate; but the one is driven by an equine Lust, the other by a human Lust. So also the Lusts and Appetites of insects, fish, and birds must vary. Therefore, though each individual lives content with his own nature, by which he is constituted, and is glad of it, nevertheless that life with which each one is content, and that gladness, are nothing but the idea, or soul, of the individual. And so the gladness of the one differs in nature from the gladness of the other as much as the essence of the one differs from the essence of the other” (E3p57s. Italics mine). 36 For texts supporting the view that essences are not sharable, see E2d2, E2p37d, and E3p6. For texts supporting the view that essences are sharable, see E1p9s2, E1p17s (II/63/20), and E4p18s (II/223). 37 TP Ch. 7| III/319. 38 TTP Ch. 3| III/47/2. 39 Who then would be most useful to the drunk person? If usefulness is determined merely by having very similar essence, it would seem that another drunk person would be more useful to the original drunkard than a philosopher. On the other hand, in several other passages Spinoza asserts that no one is more useful to a human being than a rational human being (E4App§9).

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Yitzhak Y. Melamed 40 In this paper I do not distinguish between pantheism and panentheism, because this distinction will have hardly any effect on my claims. For a detailed discussion of the distinction, see Melamed (2018). 41 On can find an example of such dark pantheism in the 1920s poetry of Uri Zvi Greenberg, a giant of Hebrew poetry. For a brief discussion of his expression of this anxious and depressed pantheism, see Stahl (2020: pp. 67–9). 42 Cf. Segev 2021: pp. 559–61. 43 Midrash Rabbah, Genesis IX, 5. Rabbi Meir’s exposition is based apparently on the graphic similarity between the Hebrew words ‫ ׳מאוד׳‬and ‫“( ׳מוות׳‬very” and “death” respectively). 44 Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Eruvin, 14b. 45 “‫[ אין לנו לא משלוות הרשעים ולא מיסורי הצדיקים‬We can make sense neither of the serenity of the wicked nor of the torments of the righteous]” Mishnah, Tractate Avot, Ch. IV, 15. 46 Cf. TTP Ch. 16| III/191. The next page is mostly adapted from Melamed, Spinoza’s Metaphysics, 36–7. 47 E1app| II/81/30, 82/17, and 83/15. 48 Cf. Melamed 2013: pp. xv–xvii.

Bibliography Babylonian Talmud. 1952. Ed. Rabbi Dr. I. Epstein. London: Soncino Press. Brann, Henry Walter. 1972. “Schopenhauer and Spinoza” Journal of the History of Philosophy 10: 181–196. Clemens, Ernst. 1899. Schopenhauer und Spinoza. Leipzig. Hegel, G.W.F. 1995. Lectures on the History of Philosophy. Translated by E. S. Haldane and F. H. Simson. 3 vols. London: University of Nebraska Press. Kant, Immanuel. 2007. Anthropology, History, and Education. Edited by Günter Zöller and Robert B. Louden. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Melamed, Yitzhak Y. 2010. “Spinoza’s Anti-Humanism: An Outline” in Carlos Fraenkel, Dario Perinetti, and Justin Smith (eds.), The Rationalists. Kluwer: New Synthese Historical Library, 147–66. ———. 2013. Spinoza’s Metaphysics: Substance and Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2018. “Hermann Cohen, Spinoza, and the Nature of Pantheism” Jewish Studies Quarterly 25: 171–180. ———. 2020. “‘Deus sive Vernunft: Schelling’s Transformation of Spinoza’s God” in G. Anthony Bruno (ed.), Schelling’s Philosophy: Freedom, Nature and Systematicity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 93–115. ———. 2021. “Spinoza’s causa sui” in Yitzhak Y. Melamed (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Spinoza. Oxford: Blackwell, 116–125. ———. 2023. “Spinoza’s Anti-Humanism: Value and Dignity” in Nandi Theunissen and Sarah Buss (eds.), Rethinking the Value of Humanity, Oxford: Oxford Univeristy Press, pp. 74–96. Midrash Rabbah im kol ha-Mefarshim. Two volumes. Vilnius: Rem Brothers Press, 1855. Moreau, P.F., and Laerke, M. 2022. “Spinoza’s Reception” in Don Garrett (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza (Second Edition). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 405–443. Rappaport, Samuel. 1899. Spinoza und Schopenhauer. Halle: R. Gaertners. Segev, Mor. 2021. “Schopenhauer’s Critique of Spinoza’s Pantheism, Optimism, and Egoism” in Yitzhak Y. Melamed (ed.), Blackwell Companion to Spinoza. Hoboken: Blackwell, 557–567. Spinoza, Benedict. 1925. Opera. 4 volumes. Edited by Carl Gebhardt. Heidelberg: Carl Winter. ———. 1985–2016. The Collected Works of Spinoza. 2 vols. Ed. and tr. Edwin Curley. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Stahl, Neta. 2020. The Divine in Modern Hebrew Literature. New York: Routledge. Vital, Hayim. 2020. Sha`ar ha-Gilgulim. Jerusalem: Simchat Chaim Press. Wicks, Robert. 2017. “Schopenhauer and Judaism” in Sandra Shapshay (ed.), The Palgrave Schopenhauer Handbook. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 325–349. ———. 2021. “Arthur Schopenhauer” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2021 Edition), Edward Zalta (ed.), URL=.

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28 COMPASSION, EGOISM, AND SELFLESSNESS Schopenhauer’s Problematic Debt to Rousseau David James

In On the Basis of Morality, Schopenhauer claims that his identification of compassion (Mitleid) as the basis or foundation (Grundlage) of genuinely moral actions has no precedent in the writings of the ‘school-philosophers’, among whom he includes the Stoics, Spinoza, and Kant, but that it does have in its favor ‘the authority of the greatest moralist of the entire modern age’, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who is also described as ‘the profound knower of the human heart’ (SW 4:246/OBM 232). Schopenhauer then cites passages about compassion or pity (pitié) from Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men and Emile. Thus it is evident that Schopenhauer regards the idea of the moral value of compassion as the theme that most closely connects his philosophy with Rousseau’s. Yet, although Schopenhauer’s and Rousseau’s accounts of compassion converge in some key respects, we shall see that there is at least one fundamental difference. This difference concerns a stronger claim about the motivational force of compassion relative to egoism that Schopenhauer makes. This stronger claim will be identified as the source of certain difficulties that make his debt to Rousseau an ultimately problematic one.

28.1  Rousseau and Schopenhauer on Compassion: Some Common Themes In the Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men, Rousseau identifies two basic principles of human nature: the desire for self-preservation and well-being, on the one hand, and an aversion to witnessing the suffering of any sentient being, especially another human being, on the other: Hence disregarding all the scientific books that only teach us to see men as they have made themselves, and meditating on the first and simplest operations of the human Soul, I believe I perceive in it two principles prior to reason, of which one interests us intensely in our well-being and our self-preservation, and the other inspires in us a natural repugnance to seeing any sentient Being, and especially any being like ourselves, perish or suffer. (OC 3: 125–6; DI 127)

DOI: 10.4324/9781003048992-33

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The second original feature of human nature, an instinctive aversion to witnessing the suffering of other sentient beings, is explained in terms of the feeling of compassion experienced in relation to such beings. In the Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men, Rousseau characterizes this sentiment in such a way that the capacity to experience it is not sufficient to distinguish human beings from other animals. Compassion is a natural impulse that does not require reflection. It is therefore a sentiment of which other animals are capable and that they do, in fact, display in their reactions toward the sufferings of other members of the same species (OC 3: 154; DI 152). Schopenhauer also views compassion as something that possesses a natural, impulsive character, for he defines it as the ‘wholly immediate, indeed instinctual sympathy for the sufferings [Leiden] of others’ (SW 4:227/OBM 216). In On the Basis of Morality, Schopenhauer adopts an ‘analytic’ procedure that ‘starts from facts either of outer experience or of consciousness’, which, in this case, is the fact that human beings perform moral actions and praise such actions while condemning other actions that are incompatible with them. The intelligibility of such moral actions and judgments can be adequately explained only by identifying a ‘grounding fact’ and ‘primitive phenomenon’ (SW 4:110/OBM 117). For Schopenhauer, the identification of this basis or foundation of morality will consist in the discovery of a motive that is sufficient to explain the performance of actions of the relevant type, just as a sufficient cause for any given effect must be identified. It is possible to explain many actions that can be described as ‘appropriate’ or ‘just’ in terms of motives of self-interest and self-love, as when individuals accept the existence of legal or social norms and behave in conformity with them because they recognize that the benefits of doing so, such as security, social order, and the protection of rights, outweigh the costs. Moreover, they may obey these norms through fear of the sanctions attached to violations of them. This appearance of morality is emphasized by a moral skepticism that argues that there is no natural morality, that is, a morality which is independent of human convention and institutions, and that morality is instead ‘an artefact through and through, a means invented for better restraining the selfish and wicked human race’ (SW 4:186/OBM 182). Schopenhauer, however, rejects this moral skepticism, on the grounds that a natural non-egoistic motive capable of explaining moral actions can be identified. This motive is the feeling of compassion experienced in relation to another being that is suffering. Thus Schopenhauer’s argument rests on a distinction between egoistic and nonegoistic motives, the claim that these are the only possible types of motive, the claim that egoistic motives cannot explain genuinely moral actions, and the claim that compassion is the only possible example of a non-egoistic motive. The moral motive must nevertheless have some relation to ‘well-being and woe’ (SW 4:205/OBM 198). We may assume that this is because it will only then possess sufficient force not only for people to act at all but also for them to resist powerful desires for self-preservation, security and material, emotional, and psychic well-being whenever the satisfaction of these desires is not compatible with that which morality demands of them. If the motive of genuine moral actions cannot be self-love, broadly construed as the concern to satisfy desires of one’s own that, at most, relate only indirectly to others, then it must concern the well-being and woe of someone or something other than the agent who acts morally. Compassion satisfies this requirement because it motivates actions whose aim is either to avoid harming other beings or to help them by alleviating their suffering or removing its causes without any concern for one’s own interests and selfish desires (SW 4:207/OBM 199). 402

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From this brief account of Schopenhauer’s argument for the claim that compassion is the ultimate ground of genuine moral action, some features that are common to his and Rousseau’s accounts of the moral value and significance of compassion emerge. First, compassion is something natural with a spontaneous, impulsive character. Second, compassion is opposed to egoism, which is treated as an independent human drive. Third, compassion motivates both negative and positive moral actions, that is, both actions aimed at avoiding harm to others and actions aimed at helping others. By performing such actions individuals exhibit the corresponding virtues, namely, justice and a love directed toward all human beings (Menschenliebe). Schopenhauer claims that the principle of moral action can accordingly be formulated in the following way: ‘Harm no one; rather help everyone to the extent that you can’ (SW 4:137/OBM 140). Although Rousseau speaks of how a human being ‘is restrained by Natural pity from doing anyone harm’ (OC 3: 170; DI 166), it would be wrong to claim that for him the role of compassion is reducible to the negative one of preventing human beings from acting in ways that harm others.1 Rather, compassion may also motivate people to perform spontaneous benevolent actions that positively help others: ‘It is pity that carries us without reflection to the assistance of those we see suffer’ (OC 3: 156; DI 154). Yet these common features conceal some important differences. One such difference concerns the extent to which compassion is limited by egoism. Schopenhauer’s account of the moral value and significance of compassion commits him to the claim that the motive for action provided by this emotion must be sufficient to outweigh, and even to silence, egoistic motives that would constitute powerful obstacles to the performance of the relevant type of action whenever the two types of motive turn out to be incompatible in the same situation. Indeed, actions that manifest a love of other human beings could not otherwise be explained, given the high degree of self-sacrifice, and thus selflessness, that they typically require of human beings. As we shall see, this is not true of Rousseau’s views on the relation between compassion and self-love, because for him there is an ordering of them that makes actions performed from the type of motive provided by compassion conditional on either the absence of the motive of self-love or this motive’s alignment with the motive of compassion in the same situation.

28.2  The Limits to the Compatibility of Compassion and Self-Love Rousseau provides a clear answer to the question of the extent to which the motive of compassion is limited by the motive of self-love. Although a human being will never harm another sentient being ‘as long as he does not resist the internal impulsion of commiseration’, there is one justified exception to this rule, namely, ‘when, his preservation being involved, he is obliged to give himself preference’ (OC 3: 126; DI 127). This statement implies a natural ordering of self-love and compassion that makes the performance of actions motivated by compassion conditional on whether they conflict with the demands of self-love. This natural ordering of self-love and compassion becomes evident in the educational program presented in Emile. Since self-love and compassion form the two most basic elements of human nature, the educational program proposed in Emile must incorporate both of them. Education involves a process, and we should therefore not expect self-love and compassion to form the direct objects of Rousseau’s educational program at the same time. Rousseau describes various ways in which self-love forms the first object of this educational program. The overriding concern at this stage is to develop in the pupil the aptitudes required to satisfy 403

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his basic physical needs without making him dependent on others. Only later is an attempt made to awaken a sense of compassion in the pupil and to direct this sentiment toward the right objects. This reflects the natural order in which self-love is primary, so that its demands must be satisfied before all others. An alignment of self-love and compassion is nevertheless required to achieve an inner harmony within the individual that consists in the absence of any conflict between these two fundamental elements of human nature. How does Rousseau explain the possibility of this inner harmony? The second book of Emile describes various practical tasks by means of which the pupil is taught to judge objects in their causal relations with one another and in relation to his own body, leading to the development of foresight. In the next book, Rousseau proceeds to show how the pupil’s ability to judge objects according to their utility leads him to gain knowledge of laws that explain the relations between things, so that it is no longer a matter of how they merely appear to him. At this stage, judgment serves the desire for selfpreservation and the desire for well-being, in that the satisfaction of these desires depends on the pupil’s ability to judge correctly when interacting with his immediate environment in a genuinely independent manner. This instrumental reasoning is appropriate to the relevant stage of education: ‘It is by their palpable relation to his utility, his security, his preservation, and his well-being that he ought to appraise all the bodies of nature and all the works of men’ (OC 4: 458-9; E 187). Yet the pupil must come to regard and to treat other human beings as more than means to his ends if he is to establish moral relations with them: So long as his sensibility remains limited to his own individuality, there is nothing moral in his actions. It is only when it begins to extend outside of himself that it takes on, first, the sentiments and, then, the notions of good and evil which truly constitute him as a man and an integral part of his species. (OC 4: 501; E 219-20) Moral relations presuppose the ability to judge what is morally good and bad, for they concern the appropriate treatment of others and certain expectations with respect to how they ought to treat us. This implies a higher form of reasoning whose content is moral ideas. Compassion plays an essential role in the production of such ideas because it explains the development of a moral sensibility: ‘We have made an active and thinking being. It remains for us, in order to complete the man, only to make a loving and feeling being – that is to say, to perfect reason by sentiment’ (OC 4: 481; E 203). Although compassion no longer has the purely impulsive character that Rousseau emphasizes in the case of pre-social human beings whose capacity to reason remains largely unactualized, and thus undeveloped, it is still a natural sentiment, though one that remains merely latent. This sentiment is first awakened by means of a proper understanding of the human condition, which consists in an awareness of the evils that human beings, including oneself, suffer or can suffer. Like any sentient being, the pupil has experienced suffering in the form of physical pain. This personal experience of suffering is a necessary condition of human empathy, whereas ‘[t]he man who did not know pain would know neither the tenderness of humanity nor the sweetness of commiseration. His heart would be moved by nothing. He would not be sociable; he would be a monster among his kind’ (OC 4: 313-14; E 87). It is not, however, a sufficient condition, for the pupil knows only what it means to suffer in his own person. The pupil must also be made to sense that other human beings experience the same, or similar, forms of suffering. The tutor’s task is therefore to make the pupil aware of how the 404

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miseries of life, not happiness, are what are most common to human beings and that the miserable conditions in which other human beings, especially the poor, find themselves are not ones that he himself can be certain to avoid in the course of his life, despite his present good fortune, given how his position in society may undergo a radical reversal because of personal or social factors beyond his control. This shows how awakening the sentiment of compassion in the pupil depends on appealing to a sense of well-being that minimally requires the absence of pain. In this respect, compassion is not independent of self-love. A responsiveness to the suffering of others implies that there is nevertheless a latent natural sentiment of the relevant kind, which must be awakened now that it no longer spontaneously manifests itself. Once this sentiment has been awakened, the pupil’s reactions to the suffering of other sentient beings will be similar to the reactions of primitive human beings, for he will experience ‘gut reactions at the sounds of complaints and cries, the sight of blood flowing will make him avert his eyes; the convulsions of a dying animal will cause him an ineffable distress before he knows whence come these new movements within him’ (OC 4: 505; E 222). As we have seen, the pupil’s reason has previously been developed in such a way that it possesses a purely instrumental character. Thus, experiencing the sentiment of compassion is required to counteract a type of reasoning that would otherwise reduce everything to the status of a means to an end, including other human beings. Yet this is not to say that the motive of compassion can override the motive of self-love in those situations in which these two motives prove to be incompatible. For, although Rousseau describes pity as ‘the first relative sentiment which touches the human heart according to the order of nature’ (OC 4: 505; E 222), the fact that pity is ‘the first relative sentiment’ does not mean that it is more primary than every sentiment that is non-relative in the sense that it does not entail a relation to another being with respect to the possibility of experiencing it. The first, and most fundamental, of such non-relative sentiments is a concern for one’s own life and well-being. The way in which the alignment of self-love and compassion ultimately remains a contingent affair because the primacy of the former may assert itself and will inevitably do so in those situations in which its demands prove to be incompatible with the moral demands of compassion is shown by how we can pity others only when we ourselves are not suffering to the same extent and at the same time as they are. For if we ourselves were simultaneously suffering at least as much as they are, then our self-love would lead us to care only about ourselves: ‘When one has suffered or fears suffering, one pities [plaint] those who suffer; but when one is suffering, one pities only oneself’ (OC 4: 514; E 229). This implies that even the pupil who undergoes the educational program outlined in Emile would suppress the natural sentiment of compassion whenever obeying its demands would be incompatible with the equally natural, but more immediate and forceful, sentiment of self-love. From this we can see that the sequential order in which self-love and compassion form the objects of Rousseau’s educational program is not only a consequence of the developmental nature of this program. Rather, this sequential order corresponds to the natural order in which compassion ultimately remains subordinate to self-love. In certain situations, the alignment of these two fundamental elements of human nature will not be possible, and the primacy of self-love will then assert itself. This is simply a case of human nature manifesting itself.2 Thus it is natural for an individual to prefer himself or herself to others in such situations, and it is even ‘good’ that he or she does so: ‘The love of oneself is always good and always in conformity with order’ (OC 4: 491; E 213). 405

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Schopenhauer, in contrast, is committed to the claim that compassion can be the stronger motive even when it is incompatible with egoistic motives, thereby enabling an individual to resist the demands of self-love and even to silence them. He does not, however, downplay the motivational force of self-love. Indeed, he stresses it, and one way in which he does so concerns the kind of purely instrumental attitude and relation to others whose transcendence Rousseau’s account of compassion is meant to explain: This egoism, then, that we are all brimming with … peeps out from under all veils that are draped over it. It shows chiefly in our immediately seeking out in everything that comes before us, as if by instinct, simply a possible means to some one of the many ends we constantly have. … It practically resides in the nature of the human glance to seek in everyone else a possible means to our ends, in other words an instrument: but whether the instrument, when used, will perhaps have to suffer more or less is a thought that follows on much later and often not at all. (SW 4:163/OBM 163) Schopenhauer’s understanding of the task of a philosophical account of morality implies that it must nevertheless be possible to identify a motive capable of overriding the demands of self-love, for only a motive of this kind can explain the type of action that ‘provokes astonishment and wins applause’ on account of the selflessness that is evident when one human being helps another human being in such a way that he or she ‘leaps over’ the ‘wide trench’ that egoism has dug between him or her and the other human being (SW 4:198/OBM 191). Thus Schopenhauer commits himself to a stronger claim concerning the motive of compassion than Rousseau does. I shall now identify two issues connected with this stronger claim. The first issue concerns the alleged completely non-egoistic nature of compassion. The second issue concerns the question as to why society is as Schopenhauer describes it, if compassion is a motive that is genuinely capable of overriding the demands of self-love.

28.3  Compassion, Egoism, and Selflessness According to the account of compassion that Rousseau provides in Emile, experiencing this emotion is possible only because of each individual’s personal experience of past suffering and his or her ability to anticipate future suffering. Thus experiencing compassion for others depends on memory and imagination. It does not, therefore, require that one is suffering at the precise moment when one experiences this sentiment in relation to others: ‘To pity [plaindre] another’s misfortune one doubtless needs to know it, but one does not need to feel it’ (OC 4: 514; E 229). Nevertheless, Rousseau stresses how compassion transports one human being outside himself or herself in such a way as to produce an affective identification with the suffering of another human being, as when he states that ‘[i]t is not in ourselves, it is in him that we suffer’ (OC 4: 505-6; E 223). He goes so far as to suggest that there is a sense in which a human being who pities another human being suffers together with him or her, as when he claims that the pupil who forms the object of the educational program set out in Emile ‘suffers when he sees suffering’ (OC 4: 545; E 251). The idea of suffering in another human being while not directly experiencing this human being’s suffering and the idea of suffering with another human being in the sense of suffering at the same time as he or she suffers can be explained in the following way. 406

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There is an affective identification with another human being’s suffering that is sufficient to motivate one human being to aid this human being. The claim that we suffer together with the person in relation to whom we experience the sentiment of compassion can then be interpreted to mean that although we do not experience the same immediate suffering nor the same degree of it as he or she does, our memory of our own suffering and the exercise of our imagination enable us to put ourselves in the position of the suffering person who forms the object of our compassion. There is, then, a sense in which we can (re)produce his or her suffering within ourselves. Moreover, this experience of another human being’s suffering produces feelings of discomfort and disturbance in us that are contrary to our own emotional well-being and harmony. This may by itself be sufficient to motivate us to seek to remove the ultimate source of these feelings, which is the suffering experienced directly by another human being that we imaginatively produce in ourselves. The desire to rid ourselves of the suffering that we experience while witnessing the suffering of another human being is a motive that can be traced back to self-love, on the one hand, and to the sentiment of compassion that we experience in relation to other human beings, on the other. It is therefore not the case that actions of the relevant type are completely selfless ones. Rather, self-love plays an important role in motivating them. Moreover, self-love acts as a constraint on such actions, in that the moral demands of compassion cannot be so burdensome as to be incompatible with the demands of self-love. The stronger claim to which Schopenhauer is committed is that compassion alone must be the motive, because otherwise an action would be motivated by self-love and thus not be a genuinely moral one. This complicates the issue of how one suffers ‘in’ or ‘with’ another being. For if a human being is to be sufficiently motivated to act morally, despite the costs to himself or herself, then he or she must be conscious of the other being’s suffering and affected by it in such a way that he or she not only ceases to remain indifferent to this suffering but is also motivated to act contrary to the demands of self-love if necessary. For Schopenhauer, the only possible explanation of this degree of selflessness is that the other being’s suffering is experienced as if it were one’s own suffering, even though one is conscious that this is not, in fact, the case: But then how is it possible that a suffering that is not mine, that does not afflict me, should nonetheless become a motive for me, should move me to acting, just as immediately as only my own suffering otherwise does? As we have said, only – despite the suffering’s being given to me as something external, merely by way of external intuition or testimony – by my feeling it as well, feeling it as mine, yet not in me, but in another. (SW 4:229/OBM 218) The suffering that we experience in our own person (‘feeling it as mine’) is here sufficient to motivate one human being to seek to alleviate another being’s suffering or to remove its causes (‘become a motive for me’). From this we can see that although the suffering is external in the sense that I do not directly experience the suffering of another being as I do my own suffering, this does not exclude an identification with this suffering that is so intense that it becomes in some sense my suffering as well. Indeed, this degree of intensity is required because Schopenhauer, unlike Rousseau, denies that it is merely a matter of imagining another being’s suffering (SW 4:211/OBM 203). Thus, when confronted with another 407

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being’s suffering, one genuinely suffers ‘with’ this being that one recognizes to be physically distinct from oneself. Experiencing the suffering of another being as if it were one’s own suffering does not require that the latter is of the same kind as the former. This would in any case not be possible with respect to physical suffering. Schopenhauer nevertheless claims that ‘I suffer as well in him, despite the fact that his skin does not enclose my nerves’ (SW 4:229/OBM 218). What might this mean? One possible explanation is that the being in relation to which I experience a feeling of compassion is in physical pain, and my knowledge of this fact produces in me a psychic pain or some other form of emotional or mental discomfort. If, however, it is in this way that one experiences the suffering of another being, then it might be objected that one is ultimately motivated by the desire to remove one’s own suffering by alleviating the suffering of another being or removing the causes of this suffering. In other words, the suffering of another being causes one to suffer, and it is this suffering that one directly experiences that motivates one to alleviate the other being’s suffering or to seek to remove its causes. Although this type of explanation of what motivates a compassionate human being is consistent with Schopenhauer’s claim that compassion moves one to act ‘just as immediately as only my own suffering otherwise does’, it would mean that it is one’s own well-being that ultimately matters, thereby making an egoistic motive the foundation or ground of moral actions. Schopenhauer’s need to avoid this conclusion explains his insistence on how it remains clear and present to us at every single moment that he is the sufferer, not us: and it is precisely in his person, not in ours, that we feel the pain, to our distress. We suffer with him, thus in him: we feel his pain as his and do not imagine that it is ours. (SW 4:211/OBM 203) Yet does Schopenhauer succeed in explaining how it is not ‘our distress’ that motivates us, thereby avoiding the objection that the motive of action is ultimately an egoistic one?3 If he does not, then his explanation of how we can suffer with another being would be compatible with the idea that self-love as well as compassionate feelings play a role in motivating moral actions. The extent to which human beings can be motivated by feelings of compassion may then be limited by the demands of self-love, in that the degree of suffering that I experience can never be more than, or even only equal to, the degree of suffering experienced by another being. For if I were to suffer as much or more so than the other being, I would become so concerned with my own suffering and the desire to alleviate it or to remove its causes as to be unresponsive to the other being’s suffering. Schopenhauer, in contrast, maintains that another’s well-being becomes the direct motive in such a way as to result in the subordination of one’s own well-being to it and that one immediately wills the other’s well-being and experiences his or her woe as if they were one’s own to such an extent that the ‘total distinction between me and the other, on which precisely my egoism rests’ is removed ‘at least to a certain degree’ (SW 4:208/OBM 200). Clearly, then, Schopenhauer needs to defend the strong claim that compassion can motivate actions in a way that entails the denial of Rousseau’s weaker claim that compassion can motivate actions only if there is no conflict between its demands and the demands of selflove. Moreover, unlike Rousseau, Schopenhauer needs to show that self-love has no role to play in motivating moral actions. This brings me to Schopenhauer’s attempt to explain compassion itself in metaphysical terms. 408

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Schopenhauer concedes that although he may have proved that compassion is the only possible moral incentive, this ‘primitive phenomenon’ itself needs to be explained in terms of some ultimate ground and thereby demands a metaphysics (SW 4:260–61/OBM 245). The type of explanation in question requires beginning with the consequences and identifying their ground, just as Schopenhauer had previously begun with the existence of moral (that is, nonegoistic) actions and then identified the only incentive that can explain them (SW 4:263/OBM 247). From this we may conclude that the metaphysical explanation aims to explain how it is possible for an individual to be motivated by a concern for another being’s well-being to such an extent that the demands of compassion are sufficient to outweigh or even to silence the demands of self-love. In §22 of On the Basis of Morality Schopenhauer argues that at the metaphysical level, as Kant’s transcendental idealism has demonstrated, there is no individuation and thus no plurality because the conditions of them, the forms of space and time, are true only of appearances. Egoism, which presupposes individuation because it concerns experiencing oneself and one’s interests as being distinct from other selves and their interests, is therefore essentially illusory, even if it is true at the level of ordinary experience. The absence of any fundamental distinction between oneself and others explains how the well-being and suffering of others can become one’s direct concern, a concern that announces itself in feelings of compassion and the corresponding incentive not to harm others but to help them. If, however, there is ultimately no difference between one individual and another individual at the metaphysical level because there is essentially no individuation whatsoever, then it becomes difficult to see how one can meaningfully apply possessive pronouns such as ‘her’ or ‘yours’ in relation to the well-being or suffering of someone in relation to whom one experiences feelings of compassion, for the well-being and suffering of others would be identical with one’s own well-being and suffering. This absence of any difference between oneself and others can, in fact, be said to avoid the original problem rather than confronting it, in that this problem is about how one individual can establish a moral relation to another individual, and the existence of a relation of this kind presupposes sufficient individuation because otherwise there would be no individuals who could relate to one another in the relevant way. This is Rousseau’s understanding of the nature of the problem, as is evident from the following passage from Emile: The child raised according to his age is alone. He knows no attachment other than those of habit. He loves his sister as he loves his watch, and his friend as his dog. He does not feel himself to be of any sex, of any species. Man and woman are equally alien to him. He does not consider anything they do or say to be related to himself. ( OC 4: 500; E 219) This passage describes an indifference toward a distinctively human world. Although the pupil perceives other human beings, his understanding of them is such that they appear to him as mere things, or, at best, as things to which he is emotionally attached.4 The pupil is not completely indifferent to other human beings, for they do possess an instrumental value for him. Moreover, the emotional attachment to his sister or to his friend produced by habit suggests that the pupil does not value other human beings only because they are useful to him. Yet this attachment can be explained in terms of how their presence contributes to his sense of general well-being and thus ultimately in terms of self-love. Compassion remedies this impoverished relation to other human beings because it leads the pupil to care about them and to develop an interest in how well or how badly their lives 409

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are going measured in terms of their goals and values. From this we can see how awakening this sentiment in the pupil is necessary to produce genuine moral relations between him and other human beings. As we have just seen, this sentiment depends on the non-identity of persons and on recognition of how they have their own goals and values, which can, for Rousseau as for Schopenhauer, also be expressions of self-love and therefore potential obstacles to actions motivated by compassion. Unlike Rousseau, however, Schopenhauer implies that compassion can be the stronger motive even when it is incompatible with selflove when he speaks of ‘characters of rare goodness’ who ‘take someone else’s suffering to heart more than their own, and thus make sacrifices for others, through which they suffer more than the one they helped suffered before’ (SW 4:253/OBM 239). If we look more closely at what Schopenhauer has to say about these characters of rare goodness, another fundamental difference between his and Rousseau’s account of compassion, and especially the relation that exists between it and egoism, emerges. It is not surprising that Schopenhauer describes such characters as rare, given how he himself claims that ‘The chief and fundamental incentive in a human being, as in an animal, is egoism, i.e. the urge to existence and well-being’ (SW 4:196/OBM 190) and that egoism is ‘the first and principal power, though not the only one’ (SW 4:198/OBM 192). Schopenhauer’s portrayal of society and the state reflects this predominance of egoism: law and social norms conceal the self-interest, greed, and malice that motivate people, so that reading crime stories or descriptions of conditions of anarchy provides the best guide to the true moral nature of human beings. The state, insofar as it guarantees social order and security, can be understood as the ‘masterpiece of the self-comprehending, rational, accumulated egoism of all’ (SW 4:194/OBM 188). Within the legal and political framework provided by the state, individuals pursue their selfish interests and view one another as mere means to their ends. The non-egoistic attitude toward others that Schopenhauer explains in terms of compassion and the metaphysics that explain it must then appear to be a rare phenomenon that may not manifest itself in a sufficiently unambiguous way. Indeed, Schopenhauer acknowledges that there are significant obstacles to determining whether the grounds of actions that externally conform to the demands of justice are truly moral because the motivation not to harm others can be explained in terms of fear of legal sanctions or the pressure to conform to social norms. There are nevertheless acts of human kindness and self-sacrifice that cannot be explained in terms of egoistic motives, at least not without introducing dubious claims, such as the claim that a human being is willing to suffer for the sake of another human being and even to sacrifice his or her own life for this other human being purely in order to achieve a good reputation or posthumous fame. In contrast, Rousseau’s claim that the motive of self-love will necessarily outweigh the motive of compassion whenever they turn out to be incompatible in the same situation threatens to make such acts unintelligible. Nevertheless, one might ask why society assumes an antagonistic form in which egoism must be constrained by law and coercive measures, making actions that are motivated by compassion alone appear exceptional. Schopenhauer’s answer to questions of this kind appeals to the idea of character in such a way as to indicate another significant difference between the position that he adopts and the one that Rousseau adopts. This difference concerns the connection between the motive provided by compassion and social factors. Schopenhauer claims that there are three fundamental ethical characters and corresponding motives: egoism, malice, and compassion. The differences in character are said to be ‘inborn and ineradicable’ (SW 4:249/OBM 235). Thus character is something ‘original’ 410

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and ‘unalterable and thus inaccessible to all improvement by way of correction through cognition’ (SW 4:251/OBM 237). Because actions proceed from character through the mediation of motives that determine the will, each person ‘will be predominantly provoked by those motives for which he has overwhelming receptivity’ (SW 4:254/OBM 239). From this it follows that a person with an entirely egoistic character would act only from egoistic motives, whereas a person with an entirely compassionate character would not only act justly but also in a way that manifests a love of other human beings. In the case of people with an egoistic character, the need for laws and coercion is evident, whereas in the case of people with a compassionate character it is conceivable that there would be sufficient social harmony in a world inhabited only by such people because they would spontaneously help one another as well as refrain from harming one another, thereby making laws and coercion unnecessary. Yet Schopenhauer rules out the possibility of an exclusively egoistic character or an exclusively compassionate character. Rather, individuals have mixed characters, of which egoism, malice, and compassion all form elements (SW 4:201/OBM 194). Yet, his portrayal of society implies the predominance of egoism in people’s characters and the rarity of characters in whom the motive of compassion will be sufficiently strong to outweigh egoistic motives in such a way that they are disposed to act selflessly. Schopenhauer’s account of human nature resembles the one that Rousseau presents in the Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men, insofar as selflove and compassion both form integral features of human nature. There is nevertheless a fundamental difference, because for Rousseau there is an original equilibrium between self-love and compassion, so that although the motive of compassion can never override the motive of self-love, it is equally true that only rarely do the demands of compassion come into conflict with the demands of self-love. This equilibrium is destroyed, however, by the emergence of reflection that accompanies the development of social relations, whose prior absence is explained in terms of the isolated and materially self-sufficient mode of existence that human beings originally enjoyed.5 The natural, but ultimately contingent, alignment between the demands of self-love and the natural sentiment of pity is then increasingly threatened, because human beings are more likely to be motivated by self-love to suppress this natural sentiment and to act in ways that directly harm others in their attempts to secure and further their own interests. Reason is here viewed as nothing more than a faculty that identifies and employs suitable means to given ends and thus presupposes the overriding value of the ends of self-love. These ends can be thought to include the avoidance of the pain or discomfort caused by witnessing the suffering of another sentient being and the discomfort caused by feeling oneself obliged to help another human being when doing so is likely to involve significant costs to oneself. This leads human beings to suppress the pure, natural movement of compassion with the aim of not having to experience unpleasant feelings or a burdensome sense of obligation, leading Rousseau to speak of how reason ‘turns man back upon himself … separates him from everything that troubles and afflicts him’ (OC 3: 156; DI 153). As the narrative of the Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men develops, society comes to resemble ever more closely the type of society described by Schopenhauer. One might therefore say that Rousseau alerts us to how it becomes more difficult to maintain a state of equilibrium between the egoistic and compassionate aspects of human nature within one’s own self the more society is characterized by a conflict of interests and inequalities of wealth and power, for self-love will then increasingly demand 411

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the suppression of any feelings of compassion, given the costs involved in allowing compassion to motivate one’s actions. This suppression of the natural sentiment of compassion is especially understandable, and even justifiable, in the case of people whose material conditions and lack of social power are such as to increase the costs attached to the performance of other-regarding actions motivated by compassion. This does not, however, stop Schopenhauer appealing to the example of someone in this type of situation who acts selflessly. This is the poor person who willingly returns something in its original condition to its wealthy owner, even though he or she may easily have kept it for himself or herself (SW 4:191/OBM 186). At the same time, a wealthy person provides the example of someone who may appear to exhibit the virtue of justice, but only because there is no conflict between the demands of justice and the demands of egoism. Rather, justice serves egoism rather than constraining it: [T]he rich man is often really someone of unimpeachable rectitude, because he is attached to a rule with all his heart and upholds a maxim on whose observance rests everything he possesses, together with the great deal of advantage he has over others because of it, with the result that he binds himself in full earnest to the principle ‘to each his own’ and does not deviate from it. There is in fact an objective devotion of this kind to trust and faith, with the resolve to hold them sacred, which rests simply on the fact that trust and faith are the basis of all free intercourse among human beings, and of good order and secure possession, so that they are often to the benefit of us ourselves and in this respect must be upheld even by making sacrifices – just as one also spends something on a good piece of land. (SW 4:189/OBM 184) Schopenhauer’s explanation of the rarity of genuinely selfless actions in terms of character invites the following question once his portrayal of society is taken into account: Is the fixity of character that he himself accepts not an illusion, in that, as Rousseau implies, character is a product of society rather than being that which explains the antagonistic nature of society and the absence of a sufficiently strong sense of compassion presupposed by the existence of laws and institutions that enforce them? Rousseau suggests that if society itself were different, then a greater equilibrium between self-love and compassion might be achieved, if not a situation in which the motive of compassion could ever override the motive of self-love. Compassion would, in fact, be less necessary in this society than in a competitive but ‘just’ society structured by legal norms that, as Schopenhauer himself acknowledges, secure the interests of some social groups while ignoring the type of suffering associated with material deprivation. Perhaps, then, Schopenhauer’s identification of compassion as the basis or ground of morality is bound up with his view of society as an arena of regulated conflict that demands selfless acts on the part of the poor while securing the interests of the rich by draping a veil of justice over their egoism. This is because the need for compassion becomes greater because of the increase in suffering caused by legal and social structures whose existence is explained in terms of the prevalence of egoism but whose justifiability is not itself critically examined. One might even go so far as to say that this is a case of how compassion limits ‘the abolition of injustice to fortuitous love of one’s neighbour’ and thereby ‘accepts as unalterable the law of universal estrangement which it would like to alleviate’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 80).6 412

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Notes 1 For an example of this narrow account of the role of pity, see Althusser (2015, 118). In Emile, Rousseau emphasizes that the sentiment of compassion is sufficient to motivate actions that extend beyond refraining from harming others: ‘I have not supposed that when he sees unhappy men, he would have only that sterile and cruel pity [cette pitié stérile et cruelle] for them which is satisfied with pitying [contente de plaindre] ills it can cure. His active beneficence soon gives him understanding [des lumières] which with a harder heart he would not have acquired or would have acquired much later’ (OC 4: 545; E 251). 2 One may ask why Rousseau understands human nature in such a way that self-love will necessarily override compassion whenever these two motives prove to be incompatible in the same situation. For the argument that the explanation of this ordering of self-love and compassion is an autobiographical one that concerns an attempt at self-justification on Rousseau’s part, see James (2022). 3 One response would be to claim that a person is not, in fact, motivated by the end of putting a stop to his or her compassionate suffering, because this suffering itself is the product of consideration of the actual or potential suffering of another human being, which is the true focus. See Shapshay (2019, 157). It could nevertheless be the case that the compassionate suffering produced by the experience of witnessing another human being’s suffering may become so powerful that the end of removing it, rather than the end of alleviating the suffering of another human being or removing the causes of it, proves in the end to be the primary motive and objective. 4 For this reason, it is appropriate to describe the pupil as an egoist at this stage of his education. Schopenhauer suggests that certain undesirable moral characteristics follow simply from being an egoist. For the egoist is described as someone for whom there is ‘a strong dividing wall between himself and everything outside him’, and for whom the world is therefore ‘an absolute not-I’, with the result that his relationship to it is ‘a primordially hostile [feindliches] one: and because of that the fundamental tone of his mood becomes spitefulness, suspicion, envy, schadenfreude’ (SW 4:272/OBM 254; translation slightly modified). Rousseau can be seen to want to show that such negative moral characteristics do not follow from the pupil’s egoism, given how he exhibits no evidence of them, so that the connection between egoism and these characteristics must be viewed as a contingent one, whereas Schopenhauer implies that it is a necessary one. 5 For more on Rousseau’s account of the process through which social relations emerge and the effects of these relations, see James 2021, 55ff. 6 I thank David Bather Woods and Sandra Shapshay for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this chapter.

References Althusser, Louis (2015), Cours sur Rousseau (1972). Montreuil: Le Temps des Cerises. Horkheimer, Max and Adorno, Theodor W. (2002), Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (Ed.), Edmund Jephcott (Tr.). Stanford: Stanford University Press. James, David (2021), Practical Necessity, Freedom, and History: From Hobbes to Marx. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ——— (2022), ‘Autobiography and the Construction of Human Nature: Rousseau on the Relation between Self-love and Pity’. In Vojtěch Kolman and Tereza Matějčková (eds.), Perspectives on the Self: Reflexivity in the Humanities. Berlin: De Gruyter. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1959–1995), Œuvres complètes, 5 vols. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond (Eds.). Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Cited by volume and page number (= OC). ——— (1979), Emile, or on Education. Allan Bloom (Tr.). New York: Basic Books (= E). ——— (1997), Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men. In: The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings. Victor Gourevitch (Ed. and Tr.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (= DI). Shapshay, Sandra (2019), Reconstructing Schopenhauer’s Ethics: Hope, Compassion, and Animal Welfare. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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29 KANT’S MONSTROUS CLAIM Schopenhauer on the Intuitive Understanding and the Cognition of Causes Alejandro Naranjo Sandoval

29.1 Introduction Without a doubt, Kant’s critical philosophy is one of the greatest influences on Schopenhauer’s thought. Schopenhauer recognizes as much in the Appendix to The World as Will and Representation, appropriately entitled “Critique of the Kantian Philosophy,” where he acknowledges that “however different [his] line of reasoning is from that of Kant, it has clearly been very heavily influenced by Kantian ideas, it necessarily presupposes them, and takes them as its point of departure” (SW 2:493/WWR 1:443). As this passage already suggests, Schopenhauer is an ambivalent reader of Kant’s philosophy—at times, he presents himself as a studious follower of Kant and a loyal defender of his doctrines; at other times, he is instead a fierce critic of Kantian orthodoxy and a vocal proponent of the heterodoxy. Kant’s ambivalent influence on Schopenhauer has been studied most closely in relation to the latter’s metaphysical views. Some indebtedness is clear. For example, Schopenhauer explicitly takes up Kant’s distinction between appearances and things in themselves and even identifies it as Kant’s “greatest merit” (SW 2:494/WWR 1:444). Beyond this, however, widespread disagreement in the literature arises. Some scholars hold that, contra Kant’s claim that we cannot have positive, substantive cognition of things as they are in themselves (i.e., the so-called doctrine of “noumenal ignorance”), Schopenhauer holds that things in themselves are knowable, given his own positive metaphysics of the will and his claim that the will is knowable—indeed, knowable immediately (SW 2:130/WWR 1:134).1 Others argue that Schopenhauer remained squarely within the Kantian orthodoxy of denying cognition of things in themselves.2 Despite what Schopenhauer sometimes suggests, cognition of the will does not provide unmediated, objective insight into noumenal reality.3 The present chapter concerns another aspect of Schopenhauer’s mature thought, which is similarly influenced by Kant’s critical philosophy—once again by both borrowing from it and opposing it—but which has been relatively neglected: his philosophy of mind and the distinction between the faculties of sensibility, the understanding, and reason.4 In this context, we find a stark assessment of the Kantian philosophy, namely, what Schopenhauer claims to be “Kant’s major and fundamental mistake,” that is, “the failure to distinguish between abstract, discursive cognition, and intuitive cognition” (SW 2:562/WWR 1:503). 414

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In fact, it is a “monstruous claim” to hold that there is a continuity between reason and the understanding (ibid.). As a replacement and antidote for Kant’s inadequate account of the cognitive faculties, Schopenhauer presents his own idiosyncratic theory about their relation in multiple texts throughout his career, including the Fourfold Root, On Vision and Colors, and his magnum opus, The World as Will and Representation. One of his main contentions is that the intellect and intuition turn out to be much more closely intertwined than Kant allowed. In fact, Schopenhauer holds the following two mirroring claims: (i) The understanding is intuitive (e.g., SW 2:539/WWR 1:483) (ii) Intuition is intellectual (e.g., SW 2:525/WWR 1:471). In what follows, I reconstruct Schopenhauer’s account of the tight relation between the cognitive faculties as captured by these mirroring claims, with an eye to how they constitute a departure from Kantian orthodoxy. As will become clear, this turns out to be somewhat delicate. First, one might worry that such claims are merely rhetorical, meant more to embarrass Kant’s terminology than to introduce a positive theory of the faculties. I argue that once these claims are properly disentangled, they present a complex and sophisticated theory of the cognitive faculties. Second, one might worry that the resultant account of the faculties resembles, at least at first glance, the claims that Kant himself makes about the influence of the understanding in perceptual experience. Nonetheless, a clear and substantive disagreement between Schopenhauer and Kant—and a diagnosis of the latter’s “monstrous claim”—emerges from this analysis: Schopenhauer holds that there is a distinctive kind of cognition of causation whose explanatory structure is not intelligible. Although it satisfies a version of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) that relates spatiotemporal causes to each other, it does not abide by the version of the principle (the principium rationis sufficientis cognoscendi) which supports the formation and articulation of true judgments. At the bottom of his dissatisfaction with Kant’s theory of the faculties, then, is Schopenhauer’s psychological claim that the understanding’s cognition of causation is indiscriminate, that is, blind and unsystematic, and so non-conceptual, as well as the metaphysical thesis that not all explanations are intelligible and the grounds for true judgments.

29.2  Kant’s Theory of the Faculties: The Functional Independence of Sensibility and the Understanding Let us start by providing a general synopsis of Kant’s theory of the cognitive faculties. One of the cornerstones of critical epistemology is the distinction Kant makes between the faculties of sensibility (Sinnlichkeit) and the understanding (Verstand). The guiding idea behind this distinction is that for us to obtain substantive cognition about an object, the mind must be able to receive information about it as well as make that information intelligible by means of its own representations: “Our cognition arises from two fundamental sources in the mind, the first of which is the reception of representations (the receptivity of impressions), the second the faculty for cognizing an object by means of these representations (spontaneity of concepts)” (KrV A 50/B 74). As with most of his doctrines, the details prove to be subtle, if not obscure. For our purposes of ascertaining Kantian orthodoxy as Schopenhauer would receive (and ultimately reject) it, the following elementary outline suffices. 415

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Sensibility is the faculty of receptivity, that is, the capacity of the mind to be affected and hence receive representations. The exercise of our faculty of sensibility issues a characteristic kind of representations, namely, what Kant calls “intuitions” (Anschauungen; Latin: intuitio). Intuitions have their own functional characterization, namely, they are singular and immediate representations of objects. The case of a posteriori intuitions is instructive. When we have a visual experience of the Milky Way through a telescope, its light impinges upon our eyes, which in turn causes us to form an intuition of it, namely, a representation about it which is singular (since it is about a particular object, the Milky Way) and immediate (since it does not require any further cognitive machinery, such as concepts or judgments). The understanding, on the other hand, is the faculty of spontaneity, that is, the capacity of our mind to bring about representations on its own. The understanding enjoys its own distinctive kind of mental representations, namely concepts, whose formation it is responsible for (if they are empirical) and which it subsequently deploys to form judgments and inferences about objects. Concepts are general and mediate representations of objects. For example, a conceptual representation of galaxies concerns galaxies in general, and it is mediate in that it requires further cognitive machinery, such as the concepts of “stars” or “planets,” to yield representations about objects (KrV A 50-1/B 74-5, A 320/B 376-7; AA 9:36, 9:91). A lot of the details in the foregoing overview are the subject of much scholarly dispute.5 For our purposes, however, the following two takeaways are most important. 1. Functionalism: The faculties and the mental representations associated with them can be given an operational or functional characterization. A functional characterization of a mental capacity or a mental state is a description of the role it plays in mental processing, as well as of its main features, especially those that are unique or distinctive to it. Kant’s corpus is replete with such characterizations. The main point of interest to us is that a mental state which satisfies X’s functional characterizations can, on that basis, be said to be X-like, even if, potentially, it is not an instance of X. This insight will help explain certain surprising claims which Schopenhauer makes.6 2. Functional independence: The understanding and sensibility are separate and independent, at least in the sense that they can be given independent functional characterizations, each irreducible to the other. Kant is careful to provide definitions of each of the faculties that are self-contained and do not reference the definition of the other cognitive faculty.7 The kind of mental states that correspond to each faculty, too, correspond to it exclusively.8 Concepts are exclusively intellectual, and intuitions are exclusively sensitive. It is clear, then, that Schopenhauer’s mirroring claims that the intellect is intuitive and that intuitions are intellectual are meant to be provocative subversions of Kant’s theory of the faculties. To a Kantian ear, they sound as implausible as the claims that stimulants are tranquilizing and tranquilizers are stimulating.9 In fact, a reader might wonder whether Schopenhauer’s claims should be taken any more seriously or whether they are merely meant to be an irreverent—yet insubstantial— reversal of Kant’s own position. We should reject this reading. Schopenhauer’s mirroring claims express his own welldeveloped positive theory of the faculties and the robust relation between intuition and 416

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intellect. The strategy foreshadowed above helps us untangle his views on the matter. The intellect is intuitive because its representations satisfy the functional characterization of intuitions, and intuitions are intellectual because they satisfy the functional characterization of the understanding. Hence, the main tasks before us, which I take up in the next two sections, are showing that the intellect and intuitions satisfy part of each of those respective functional characterizations. Before turning to this, however, we must note two further aspects about Kant’s theory of the cognitive faculties which will be relevant to Schopenhauer’s view. 3. Teamwork: The joint work of the understanding and sensibility is required for the acquisition of a kind of robust, substantive mental state about objects, which Kant calls cognition (Erkenntnis; Latin: cognitio). Despite the functional independence of sensibility and the understanding, Kant believes that both cognitive faculties can work jointly, and in fact, their joint work is required for the formation of cognition about objects, since each of them makes a distinctive and exclusive contribution. As the oft-quoted passage summarizes, “without sensibility no object would be given to us, and without understanding none would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind” (KrV A 51/B 75). We will want to keep this central Kantian thesis in mind to compare it with Schopenhauer’s own proclamations about the intellectual nature of intuition, since they might seem to resemble, if not outright reiterate, it. Schopenhauer would resent the comparison, however. Not only does he not accept Kant’s claim that concepts are required for cognition, he outright repudiates it: Kant’s astonishing lack of reflection concerning the essence of intuitive and abstract representation leads him … to make the monstrous claim that without thinking, which is to say without abstract concepts, there is no cognition of objects, and that because intuition is not thinking, it is not cognition at all and is nothing more than a mere affection of sensibility, mere sensation! (SW 2:562/WWR 1:503) The puzzle is how to reconcile these two claims from Schopenhauer, namely, that intuitions are intellectual but concepts are not required either for intuitions or for cognizing objects. Within the Kantian system, after all, the understanding is the faculty of concepts. Part of the answer is that Schopenhauer’s taxonomy of the faculties departs from Kant’s own. The understanding is no longer be associated with concepts—instead, concepts are only in the purview of the faculty of reason (Vernunft), a separate, higher faculty which is unique to human beings, whereas animals are similar to us in having a faculty of understanding (e.g., SW 2:27/WWR 1:45). Accordingly, the last piece of Kantian doctrine which we’ll need in our analysis is: 4. Continuity: The faculty of reason is continuous with the faculty of the understanding. They share the most significant part of their functional characterizations. Importantly, both are capable of producing and deploying concepts, judgments, and inferences. Like the understanding, reason is capable of forming and deploying concepts (e.g., KrV A 310-1/B 366-8), judgments (e.g., A 305/B 361), and inferences (e.g., A 303-5/B 359-61). 417

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Despite these similarities, Kant often emphasizes some features of reason meant to differentiate it from the understanding. In the introduction to the Transcendental Dialectic, he distinguishes them topically, by claiming that the understanding deals with rules, whereas reason is “the faculty of principles” (A 299/B 356). Elsewhere, he claims that the inferences of reason differ from those of the understanding by requiring the syllogistic derivation of a proposition from a general principle (AA 9:120, 9:115). In the Appendix, Schopenhauer surveys these and other attempts at distinguishing reason from the understanding, deeming them all “incomplete and erroneous” (SW 2:511/WWR 1:459). If both reason and the understanding are equally capable of forming and deploying concepts, Schopenhauer contends, it is splitting hairs to insist that they are different cognitive faculties. More pressing yet, it is implausible to hold that some such uses of concepts correspond not just to an “entirely different” faculty but also to one which is supposed to be “vastly superior” and unique to human beings (SW 2:512/WWR 1:460). As we will see in Section 29.5, Schopenhauer’s antidote to Kant’s thoroughly confused account of reason is an entirely different taxonomy of the faculties which rejects the continuity between reason and the understanding. But first, we need to delve into Schopenhauer’s distinctive theory of the understanding and the sense in which it is intuitive.

29.3  The Intuitive Understanding Whereas for Kant the understanding is the spontaneous faculty of cognition, as well as the faculty of concepts, for Schopenhauer the understanding has one and only one function: the intuitive cognition of causal relations: The work of the understanding always consists in the immediate apprehension of causal relations. … All understanding is an immediate, and therefore, intuitive apprehension of causal connection. (SW 1:77/FR 75-6; cf. SW 1:31, 71/FR 35, 70; SW 2:30, 539/WWR 1:47, 483) The influence of Kant’s functionalism is clearly felt in passages like these, where the understanding is given a characterization in terms of its work or function. The function of the understanding is to cognize causal relations, where such cognition is immediate, in a sense yet to be specified. However, Schopenhauer rejects Kant’s claims to the functional independence of sensibility and the understanding. The very characterization of the understanding suggests that it involves an immediate (and therefore intuitive) cognition of causal relations. But what does this mean? Here, I argue that, for Schopenhauer, the function of the understanding is to form and deploy (i) cognitions of spatiotemporal causal relations which are (ii) immediate and (iii) non-conceptual. Each of these three components deserves further discussion. (i) Cognition is, for Schopenhauer, the broadest kind of representation. As a matter of conceptual fact, it seems, it involves “two essential, necessary, and inseparable halves,” namely, a subject—who is acquainted with the representation and on whom its existence depends—and an object—to which the representation refers or is about (SW 2:5-6/WWR 1:25; cf. SW 1:27/FR 30).10 As in Kant, the object must conform to certain subjective forms of representation. However, Schopenhauer expands Kant’s own list: for him, the “most 418

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essential—and therefore most general—forms of all objects” are “space, time, and causality” (SW 2:6/WWR 1:26). Of course, Kant includes “causality” as one of the twelve categories of experience, that is, the a priori concepts whose objective validity he ventures to prove in the Transcendental Deduction in the first Kritik. As such, causality has a similar status within the mind as other categories such as those of “substantiality,” “necessity,” and “relation” (KrV A 80/B 106). Although he agrees that causality is a contribution of the mind, however, Schopenhauer denies that causality is a concept, granting it instead the same status as the forms of space and time.11 The full import of this recategorization—or, perhaps better, decategorization—of causality will become apparent in Section 29.5, when we discuss Schopenhauer’s sharp distinction between understanding and reason. For now, the crucial point is that his functional characterization of the understanding does not involve reference to concepts or to spontaneity. Instead, the function of the understanding is the cognition of causal relations: To have cognition of causality is the understanding’s only function, its single capability—and it is a great and sweeping one with many applications and an unmistakable unity behind each of its manifestations. (SW 2:13/WWR 1:32) Schopenhauer specifies that we can either cognize the causal relation between “one’s own body and other bodies” or between two such external bodies (SW 1:77/FR 75). This, plus the clarification that one’s own body “is situated within the forms of all cognition, in space and time” (SW 2:6/WWR 1:25), entails that causal relations hold only in the realm of spatiotemporal objects. In particular, it is more accurate to say that alterations (i.e., changes in objects) are the relata of causality since “there is absolutely no sense in saying that an object is the cause of another” (SW 1:35/FR 39). We can say, then, that the understanding involves the cognition of causality holding between spatiotemporal alterations. But what is the nature of the causal relation itself? Schopenhauer follows the familiar Malebranchean conception of causation. His rationale for including causality as an additional form of cognition, over and above the forms of space and time, is that spatial contiguity and temporal succession are not enough for causation. To say that a certain alteration A causes another alteration B, it is not sufficient that A and B are spatially contiguous or temporally successive. Causation involves a stronger connection, perhaps a necessary relation between A and B, or a rule determining their connection: All the countless conceivable appearances and states of affairs could coexist in infinite space without restricting each other; or they could succeed each other in infinite time without mutual disturbance. But in these cases there would not be any necessary relation between states of affairs and no need for a rule to determine that relation— indeed, such a rule could never be applied. Consequently, even with coexistence in space and change in time, there still would not be causality. (SW 2:10-1/WWR 1:30) So, assuming that causality is a contribution of the mind to our cognition of objects, it must be an additional contribution, irreducible to spatial or temporal relations. 419

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According to Schopenhauer, the deeper metaphysical connection holding between A and B is that of explanation. Appreciating this requires a brief detour into the Fourfold Root essay, where Schopenhauer mounts a wholehearted defense of the celebrated PSR, namely, the doctrine that “nothing is without a reason why it is” (SW 1:5/FR 10). His defense relies on carefully disambiguating between four different versions of PSR which his predecessors had supposedly confused, often to disastrous philosophical consequences. Only two of the versions of the PSR are relevant to us.12 On the one hand, there is the PSR of becoming, also known as the principium rationis sufficientis fiendi, namely: If a new state of one or more real objects appears, then there must be another, previous state from which the new one follows according to a rule. … Such a sequence is called a consequence, the first state a cause, the second an effect. (SW 1:34/FR 38) The PSR of becoming states that any spatiotemporal alteration has an antecedent spatiotemporal alteration as a cause. Two notes about this principle are in order. First, Schopenhauer is quick to clarify that correct applications of the PSR of becoming concern the alterations of real (i.e., actually occurring) objects (cf. SW 1:25/FR 29; SW 2:10/WWR 1:29). Merely possible or imaginary objects can be given potential causal explanations, but these are incorrect applications of the PSR (SW 1:89/FR 86). We can say, then, that the normative domain of the PSR of becoming is reality, that is, the realm of actually occurring spatiotemporal alterations. Second, for it to be caused by A, alteration B must follow “according to a rule.” Somewhat frustratingly, Schopenhauer does not specify the level of generality of the relevant rule. It makes some difference whether the rule is particular (e.g., “whenever this billiard ball is struck in this way, it proceeds to move in this other way”) or general (e.g., “when billiard balls in general are stuck in way X, they proceed to move in way Y”). We’ll have some occasion to discuss this further. For now, the point is simply that Schopenhauer continues to follow a Malebranchean conception of causation, which builds some kind of regularity into causal relations. The PSR of knowing, in contrast, concerns not spatiotemporal objects and their alterations but rather judgments, understood (following Kant) as mental representations involving the logical connections of two or more concepts (SW 1:105/FR 100). The PSR of knowing provides the conditions under which any such judgment is true, namely, when it is supported by sufficient cognitive grounds: If a judgment would express knowledge [eine Erkenntniss], it must have a sufficient ground, and on account of this property it receives the predicate true. (SW 1:105/FR 100) Sufficient cognitive grounds can be, for example, logically antecedent judgments from which it is inferred validly (FR §30). Note that only true judgments have sufficient cognitive grounds supporting them. False judgments are either entirely unsupported or their support is insufficient. These two versions of the PSR are separable and ought to be carefully distinguished. Whereas the PSR of becoming applies to spatiotemporal alterations and has reality as its normative domain, the PSR of knowing applies to judgments and its normative domain is truth. However, both versions of the PSR are alike in that they both provide explanations 420

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of their objects. In fact, Schopenhauer holds that “the principle of reason is the principle of all explanation”: any application of the PSR aims to be explanatory, in that it provides an answer to a “why” question (SW 1:156/FR 148, cf. SW 2:95/WWR 1:106). Spatiotemporal alterations are explained by antecedent alterations causing them; judgments are explained by the sufficient cognitive grounds which support them. We are now ready to elucidate the sense in which the understanding cognizes causal relations. According to Schopenhauer, the PSR of becoming, which he often calls the “law of causality,” is the “single and only form” of the understanding (SW 1:52/FR 53). In other words, the understanding necessarily abides by the law of causality, that is, every represented spatiotemporal alteration can be given a causal explanation, and, perhaps more importantly, the understanding is disposed to cognize such an explanation: “The understanding completes [its] business only through its own form, which is the causal law” (SW 1:71/FR 70). To say that “cognition of causality is the understanding’s only function,” then, is to say that it is the function of the understanding to explain spatiotemporal alterations by representing their spatiotemporal causes. (ii) The foregoing gives an account of the content of the representations of the understanding. But what is the nature of our grasp of them? Schopenhauer says that it is immediate. But what does this mean? Schopenhauer devotes the entirety of §19 of the Fourfold Root to discussing the relevant sense of immediacy. There, he states: With regard to the immediate presence of representations in its consciousness, the subject remains subordinate to the conditions of time alone as the form of inner sense. So only one clear representation can be present to the subject at one time. … That representations are immediately present means: … they become cognized … only in time and, indeed, at the neutral point between the two divergent directions of time, which is called the present. (SW 1:31/FR 35) There is much to unpack in this passage, including regarding the role of time as the form of inner sense and the claim that only one representation can be present to the subject at a time. For our purposes, however, it is most important that immediacy is phenomenological notion. For a representation to be immediate is for it to command the attention of the subject.13 After all, the idea behind the claim that only one representation can be immediately present at a given time is presumably that the spotlight of attention cannot be simultaneously shared by two representations. All by itself, the phenomenological reading of immediacy does not disallow the possibility that conceptual representations could be immediate. Other passages, however, clarify that immediacy also requires that the representation’s presence in the subject’s mind be direct, in the sense of being automatic or unaided. For example, this is the sense in which our grasp of the proposition that the past is “absolutely irrevocable” while the future is “inexorable” is immediate: It is not through causality, but rather immediately, as through its mere existence, that the present hour… has tossed the passing hour into the bottomless abyss of the past and made it eternally nothing. This cannot be understood through mere concepts, nor clarified through them; rather, we recognize it quite immediately and intuitively. (SW 1:26/FR 30) 421

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An immediate representation enjoys a kind of direct phenomenological presence in the subject’s mind, even if she lacks the concepts to articulate its content. (iii) In particular, the immediate perception of causality does not rely on concepts or inferences. We don’t immediately represent a cause because we hypothesize that it must be present, the way that an astronomer might posit the presence of a large astronomical body from observed light deflection. This would require some degree of careful, deliberate reflection, as well as the application of previously acquired knowledge. Instead, the immediate representation of causes happens automatically and effortlessly, without the aid of concepts or judgments. In WWR, Schopenhauer says that this representation of the mind as it “refers back” from a perceived effect in the body to its cause “does not take place in reflection and is not voluntary; rather it is immediate, necessary, and certain” (SW 2:13/WWR 1:33). In On Vision and Colors, he claims that it precedes “all experience” (SW 1:8/VC 213-4). In the Fourfold Root, he claims it occurs “without the assistance of reflection, i.e., of abstract knowledge by means of concepts and words” (SW 1:71/FR 70). The complete independence of our immediate cognition of causation from experience suggests that it is entirely indiscriminate: any represented effect leads to an immediately cognized cause. Hence the understanding’s power to refer effects back to causes is both ever-active, blindly positing causal precedents for any observed effect, and hyperactive or promiscuous, often cognizing causal connections where none really hold.14 We are now ready to fully explicate the first of Schopenhauer’s mirroring claims, namely, that the understanding is intuitive. The function of the understanding is to form representations of causal relations which are immediate, in that they are phenomenologically directly present to the mind without any further aid. We directly represent the connection between an effect and its cause without needing to use concepts or inferences. From this, Schopenhauer draws the conclusion that the representations of the understanding are intuitive, as in the passage that opened the present section: “All understanding is an immediate, and therefore, intuitive apprehension of causal connection” (SW 1:77/FR 76).15 Schopenhauer assumes Kant’s functional characterization of intuitions in terms of immediacy—the understanding is intuitive precisely because its representations satisfy this functional role.16,17 At the same time, however, he starkly rejects his claim that the cognitive faculties are functionally independent. Far from being the faculty of concepts, the understanding is, by its very function, an intuitive faculty. There’s another way in which Schopenhauer rejects the independence of the cognitive faculties: intuitions, he says, are intellectual. We now turn to this separate yet related claim.

29.4  Intellectual Intuitions It is a fixture of Schopenhauer’s philosophy of mind that empirical intuitions—that is, intuitions which result from external objects impinging our senses—are intellectual: Empirical reality and consequently experience is already given in the intuition itself: but the intuition too can only come about by applying cognition of the causal nexus (which is the sole function of the understanding) to the sensory sensation. Accordingly, intuition is truly intellectual, which is precisely what Kant denies. (SW 2:525/WWR 1:471; cf. SW 1:53, 79/FR 54, 77; SW 1:7/VC 213) 422

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The claim that intuitions are intellectual is best understood as partly genetic and partly functional. For Schopenhauer, the empirical intuitions are intellectual because they result from the exercise of the active faculty, namely, the understanding. To be precise, the understanding (i) brings about empirical intuitions (ii) as well as their objects and their features (iii) by means of intuitive cognition of causal relations. Once again, each of these points requires discussion, although the groundwork we’ve laid so far will be of much help to us. (i) According to Schopenhauer, mere receptivity is incapable, all by itself, of furnishing representations of objects. Our sense organs’ passive reaction to being affected by external objects produces sensations (Empfindungen), but these don’t count as representations or cognitions of objects. In some passages, Schopenhauer indicates that sensations are entirely reducible to bodily alterations. In the case of touch, for example, sensations correspond to the suite of purely spatiotemporal alterations on one’s skin resulting from the pressure exerted by the external object: “If … I lay my hand on a flat surface, or instead grasp a ball of some three inches in diameter, then in both cases it is the same parts of my hand that sense the pressure” (SW 1:55/FR 56). For the case of vision, sensation is said to be “nothing more than a varied affection of the retina” (SW 1:58/FR 58; cf. SW 2:520/WWR 1:466). Other passages suggest that sensations might have a phenomenological component. For example: [Visual sensations] can be reduced to the impression of light and dark, including their immediate degrees, and to the impression of colours proper. … For what provides the sensation in vision is … quite similar to the view of a palette with many bright blobs of colour. (SW 1:57-8/FR 57-8; cf. SW 1:9/VC 215) These sensations, says Schopenhauer, would “remain in the consciousness” of someone who is standing before a certain vista, even if their understanding “is suddenly completely taken away (perhaps through damage to the brain)” (SW 1:58/FR 58).18 Whatever sensations might amount to, Schopenhauer is clear that they fall short of constituting cognition of objects. Hence, as the opening lines of §1 of On Vision and Colors explain, sensations are “meaningless states” and are “not anything similar to a cognition.” Intuition, on the other hand, is a kind of “perception” (Wahrnehmung) or “apprehension of objects” (SW 1:7/VC 213). For that reason, the empirical intuitions cannot proceed from mere passive affection and must always involve an active mental process. The understanding is the active faculty of the mind which produces empirical intuitions from the “raw stuff” provided by bodily sensations. Accordingly, the passage continues: For intuition, i.e., for cognition of an object first of all requires that the understanding refer any impression that the body receives to its cause, placing this cause in a priori intuited space, as the cause from which the effect proceeds, thus recognizing the cause as acting, as actual. (SW 1:7/VC 213) The disagreement with Kant is already apparent. It is a central feature of Kant’s claim of the functional independence of sensibility and the understanding that each of these two faculties are responsible for the formation and use of a distinctive kind of mental state. In particular, one of the two fundamental sources for our cognition is “reception of rep423

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resentations (the receptivity of impressions)” (KrV A 50/B 74). Schopenhauer explicitly condemns the view expressed in this passage, on the grounds that any state resulting from mere receptivity cannot hope to constitute a representation of the object:19 [The A 50/B 74 passage] is false: because it would entail that the impression, which is the only thing we are merely receptive to, and which therefore comes from without and is all that is really “given”, is already a representation or even an object. But the impression is nothing more than a mere sensation in the sense organs, and it is only the understanding (i.e., the law of causality) and space and time, the forms of intuition, that our intellect transforms this mere sensation into a representation, which now exists as an object in space and time. (SW 2:520/WWR 1:466) It is now clear why empirical intuitions can be said to be intellectual. They satisfy part of the functional characterization corresponding to the understanding: namely, they are the result of the active, spontaneous faculty. Though it remains to be seen whether they can be said to be intellectual in other ways, this counts as conforming to a fundamental, elementary part of how Kant had conceived of the faculty of the understanding.20 Once again, Schopenhauer takes up Kant’s functional characterizations of the faculties only to later subvert them: the claim that intuitions result from the active faculty already constitutes a major departure from Functional Independence. (ii) The understanding is not only responsible for the formation of intuitions as mental states but also for the formation of the very object that the intuition is about, as well as many of its features. Hence Schopenhauer’s discussion of tactile sensations continues: If I press my hand against the table, then in the sensation that I receive from this lies absolutely nothing of the representation of the firm cohesion of the parts of this mass, indeed nothing even similar; rather, it is only when my understanding passes from the sensation to the cause, that it constructs a body that has the properties of solidity, impenetrability, and hardness. (SW 1:55/FR 56; cf. SW 2:13-4/WWR 1:33; SW 1:7/VC 213) Like any other cognition, intuitions have objects. What those objects are is not dictated by the sensations that accompany them. His argument to this effect relies on the observation that the impressions lack many of the central features of the object. Revisiting the case of vision is illustrative:21 What is immediately given here is limited to the sensation of the retina. … This impression is thoroughly subjective, i.e., existing only within the organism and under the skin. Thus without the understanding we would only become conscious of these as particular and various modifications of the sensation in our eyes that would not be similar to the shape, position, proximity or distance of things outside us. (SW 1:57-8/FR 57-8) The object of the intuition has a spatiotemporal shape, position, and distance relative to us which the sensation lacks. More generally, sensation lacks the qualities of objects such as solidity, impenetrability, and hardness. What is more, sensations lack anything that is “even 424

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similar” to such qualities (cf. SW 1:7/VC 213). Instead of being the result of mere sensations, then, the object and its objective properties are the result of our active faculty of the understanding. (iii) How does the understanding construct or create empirical intuitions and their objects? The answer is simple, given our discussion in the last section regarding the functional characterization of the understanding. Empirical intuitions are the result of one family of applications of the understanding’s general function of providing immediate cognition of causal relations, namely, what one might call empirical applications. Empirical applications of the understanding are those that result from external objects impinging on our senses. In these cases, the understanding treats the sensation as an effect and hence proceeds, in its characteristic fashion, to refer back from the sensation to a perceived cause. The changes that every animal body experiences are … sensed; and in so far as this effect is referred back to its cause, the intuition arises of this cause as an object. This referring is not a conclusion drawn from abstract concepts; it does not take place in reflection and is not voluntary; rather it is immediate, necessary, and certain. It is the mode of cognition of the pure understanding. (SW 2:13/WWR 1:33; cf. SW 2:27/WWR 1:45) The posited cause is the object of the intuition. Similarly, the understanding produces the features of the object depending on the specific features of the sensation. This is easy to see in the case of location. Since the understanding provides cognition of the causal relations holding between spatiotemporal alterations, the object it represents as the cause of the sensation is posited as having a location. The same applies for other spatial properties, such as shape (SW 1:55/FR 56). As usual, the cognition of the causal relation between the posited object and the sensation is immediate and non-conceptual. It is entirely indiscriminate and inarticulate. The understanding represents something as the cause of the sensation, yet without apprehending what kind of thing it is or much about it besides what it immediately cognizes from the sensation. It is for that reason that the understanding “confirms” the properties of the object—the represented cause of the sensations might turn out to be inaccurate and in need of revision or wholesale rejection. Such cases are common in Schopenhauer’s discussions of empirical intuitions: The understanding presupposes causes which are usual and familiar to it, immediately intuiting these causes. … This is so … in the moon’s appearing greater in the horizon; … in the painted relief we take for real; in the movement of a shore or bridge on which we are standing as a ship passes by. (SW 1:71/FR 70; SW 1:15-6/VC 220-1) We have disentangled the second strand of Schopenhauer’s mirroring claims that the understanding is intuitive and the intuition is intellectual. Empirical intuitions are genetically intellectual in that they, as well as their objects and their objective features, result from the intellectual faculty, namely, the understanding—but that is not all. The understanding does not simply cooperate in the formation of empirical intuitions. Empirical intuitions are also functionally intellectual, in that they result from the characteristic function of the understanding, namely, the immediate cognition of causal relations. They do not require a 425

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distinct treatment, but instead enjoy the same explanation as any other representation of the understanding.22 Unlike Kant, who posited an entirely separate faculty of sensibility to account for the acquisition and processing of intuitions, Schopenhauer can rest on his laurels, having already explained how the understanding works.

29.5  Kant’s Monstrous Claim: Why Deny the Continuity of Reason and Intellect? At this point, one might legitimately wonder whether Schopenhauer has overstated the difference between Kant’s theory of the faculties and his own. The claim that intuitions are intellectual, after all, seems to resemble Kant’s view that the joint work of the understanding and sensibility is required for the acquisition of a kind of substantive mental state about objects, which Kant calls cognition (Teamwork). Both posit that the understanding plays an active role in our everyday empirical experience with objects, including by shaping its very content, and that complete passivity or sensibility is not enough for the formation of cognitions (understood in this more robust, Kantian sense). The difference, Schopenhauer would insist, is that in his view the understanding’s influence on our cognition of objects does not rely on concepts. For Kant, “intuitions without concepts are blind” (KrV A 51/B 75). Schopenhauer denounces this view, calling it “the monstrous claim that without thinking [Denken], which is to say without abstract concepts, there is no cognition of objects, and that because intuition is not thinking, it is not cognition at all” (SW 2:562/WWR 1:503). Instead, he reserves concepts—and the mental states which result from them, judgment and inference—for reason, construed as an entirely separate faculty. In effect, Schopenhauer rejects Continuity. Instead, he holds that both faculties are distinct, and the understanding operates without the aid of reason and the concepts corresponding to it: The understanding is clearly and completely distinct from reason, the cognitive faculty specific to human beings; and even in human beings, the understanding, considered in itself, is unreasonable [unvernünftig]. Reason can only ever know [wissen]; intuition remains for the understanding alone and is free from the influence of reason. (SW 2:29-30/WWR 1:47; cf. SW 2:100/WWR 1:111; SW 1:71, 101/FR 70, 96) For Schopenhauer, the understanding’s function is the immediate cognition of causal relations. His work on the cognitive faculties constitutes a prima facie possibility proof that the mind’s active faculty can be characterized in such a way that it can accomplish a complex cognitive task (producing our cognition of causes) while working with relatively humble tools (without concepts or inferences). In turn, the simplicity and cognitive austerity of Schopenhauer’s account of the understanding might give us some weak, defeasible reason to prefer it over one which, like Kant’s, is more cognitively involved. But presumably, Schopenhauer has deeper reasons for preferring his theory of the faculties—after all, considerations regarding simplicity hardly seem enough to warrant the sharpness of his criticism that Kant’s “failure to distinguish between abstract, discursive cognition, and intuitive cognition” is his “major and fundamental mistake” (SW 2:562/WWR 1:503). In fact, one might worry that Schopenhauer’s view is unpalatable in other ways, rendering simplicity as perhaps a valid yet ultimately negligible reason to favor it. 426

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Two main concerns come to mind regarding Schopenhauer’s functional characterization of the understanding: one might think that (i) he packs too much into it by allowing it to furnish cognition of causation, especially in the course of its empirical applications; or that (ii) he packs too little into it by depriving it of conceptual representations, thereby rendering it incapable of delivering the kinds of mental states which seem plausibly related to the mind’s active faculty. In the remainder of this chapter, we will respond to these two concerns on Schopenhauer’s behalf and, by doing so, elucidate his ultimate motivations for his distinctive way of carving out the functional work of the cognitive faculties. (i) Is Schopenhauer’s functional characterization of the understanding too expansive? Hume comes to mind, as the claim that immediate cognition of causal relations is involved in sense perception seems to run into his skeptical objections against the impression of necessary connection. Hume’s objections rely on the claim that the data provided by the senses are far too impoverished for us to be able to derive from them a necessary connection between two things of the kind that many philosophers had thought was central to causation: When we look about us toward external objects, and consider the operation of causes, we are never able, in a single instance, to discover any power or necessary connexion; any quality, which binds the effect to the cause, and renders the one an infallible consequence of the other. (Hume 1975, p. 63) There are many ways of precisifying this general objection, but we will concern ourselves with only two relevant options here. A first form of the objection: the senses only indicate what happened in single interactions between objects, whereas a causal relation involves a universal or exceptionless relation between them. Schopenhauer is not susceptible to this version of the objection. As we had mentioned before, Schopenhauer is often reticent about the level of generality relevant to the causal regularities detected by the understanding. There is good reason to think that the intuitive cognition of causal relations as holding between particulars as opposed to between kinds. He states, for example, that “because sensibility and understanding can only grasp one object at a time, intuitive cognition only ever applies to a particular case; it reaches only what is nearest and no further” (SW 2:63/WWR 1:78). Hence, his claim that the understanding has “a full, immediate, intuitive cognition of the way a lever, or a block and pulley, or a cogwheel works” (ibid.) is best read as being about a specific lever, block and pulley, or cogwheel and not about things in those categories in general. As Schopenhauer is quick to clarify, the understanding’s focus on particular objects does not preclude it from cognizing genuine regularities. In fact, the very statement of the PSR of becoming—the form of the understanding—specifies that effects follow from their causes “according to a rule [regelmäßig]” (SW 1:34/FR 38). The best way to square these puzzling claims, I suggest, is to construe the understanding as detecting localized, non-systematic regularities. On the one hand, the understanding teaches how this particular cogwheel works—that it pushes a particular contiguous and movable cogwheel into rotating clockwise by rotating clockwise. As stated, this generalization is silent on whether similar objects work similarly, as well as whether its ultimate explanation might be as part of a larger body of knowledge. Reason, on the other hand, elucidates how kinds of things work. It might teach, for example, that any cogwheel rotating clockwise pushes any con427

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tiguous and movable cogwheel into rotating counterclockwise. What’s more, it might also place this knowledge within a general, organized body of information—say, it could appeal to the laws of mechanics in explaining the behavior of cogwheels. As Schopenhauer summarizes, “every sustained, complex, systematic activity must start out from and be guided by … abstract knowledge” and “the understanding does not suffice” for these activities (SW 2:63/WWR 1:78). A second form of Hume’s objection: the senses only indicate the mere temporal and spatial relations between objects, whereas a causal relation involves an intelligible, explanatory connection between them.23 An impression of causation would allow us to “discover” a power or connection “[binding] the effect to the cause,” but no such power or connection can be detected. Once again, Schopenhauer is not an ideal target for Humean concerns, due to his views on the independence of the different versions of the PSR. Earlier we distinguished two different guises of the PSR. The PSR of becoming states that any spatiotemporal alteration has an antecedent spatiotemporal alteration as a cause. Its normative domain is reality: it only correctly applies to real objects and their alterations. The PSR of knowing states that any true judgment is true if it is supported by sufficient cognitive grounds. Its normative domain is truth, since false judgments lack sufficient cognitive grounds. The crucial point is that there is no relation of priority between any of the versions of the PSR. Not only do they apply to different kinds of entities (the PSR of becoming to spatiotemporal alterations, the PSR of knowing to judgments), but they are also explanatorily irreducible to each other. As Schopenhauer makes clear, “no single form of the principle of sufficient reason has priority over any of the others.” (SW 2:88/WWR 1:99; cf. SW 1:25/FR 29). Each version of the PSR provides an explanation for the entities in its domain, and such explanations are non-transferrable to other domains. The explanation of the judgment “when billiard balls are struck in way X, they proceed to move in way Y” includes the relevant laws of impact as cognitive grounds. The explanation of the billiard ball being caused to move across the table includes the antecedent cause of another billiard ball hitting it. Each of these explanans is fully incapable of accounting for the other’s explanandum. Presumably, the idea is that, all by themselves, general laws of collision cannot explain a particular instance of motion. On the one hand, a specific occasion for applying the rules must occur first, and on the other, the occurrence of a particular spatiotemporal alteration is an inadequate—because incomplete—ground of cognition for the judgment that so-so motion follows from alterations of that type. Schopenhauer neatly expresses this point: “that which is correctly cognized by understanding is reality,” whereas “that which is correctly cognized by reason, is truth, i.e., a judgment that has a ground” (SW 1:71-2/FR 70; cf. SW 1:16/VC 220). In slogan form, truth and reality are independent realms, each corresponding to a distinctive kind of explanation. The kind of explanatory link which the understanding cognizes between two alterations is essentially spatiotemporal, that is, squarely within the realm of reality. Hence, causal explanations of this kind do not abide by the principium sufficientis cognoscendi. Their structure is non-intelligible, in the sense that, all by themselves, they never constitute sufficient grounds on which to support a judgment. There is no sense in which the agent could “discover,” at least in the sense of forming fully grounded true judgments, the relation between causally related spatiotemporal alterations. Of course, such cognition could be the first step in a more sustained inquiry about a certain causal relation, which could ultimately culminate in the formation of true judgments about it. Merely having immediate cognitions, however, is hopelessly insufficient for this aim. 428

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We have, then, the first of Schopenhauer’s substantive motivations for positing a strong distinction between the understanding and reason. The mind’s active cognitive faculty is capable of detecting regularities, but regularities which are non-systematic and don’t appeal to general kinds or principles. Instead, the regularities detected by the understanding are, though genuinely explanatory, particular and localized. Moreover, such explanations are non-intelligible, and they provide access to reality without automatically expanding our insight into truth. (iii) Is Schopenhauer’s theory of a concept-less, inference-less understanding too impoverished? For Janaway, the answer is yes. In his view, Schopenhauer’s way of carving out the cognitive faculties fails to heed a fundamental Kantian insight: namely, that concepts play a necessary and unavoidable role in our empirical perception of objects: Since one of Kant’s achievements is commonly held to be the realization that the empiricist picture of the passive reception of data required radical alteration, and that it was precisely the mind’s active judging capacity that had been left out, the denial of the necessity of concepts for perception must seem today to be a retrograde step. (Janaway 1989, p. 165) In effect, by removing concepts from the repertoire of the understanding, Schopenhauer throws away the baby with the bathwater. Even here, however, we find that Schopenhauer heavily borrows from Kant while departing from his views in interesting and informative ways. Like Kant, he holds that the active faculty contributes to our everyday empirical cognition of objects. Furthermore, both agree that one of the main contributions of the understanding is the cognition of causal relations. The difference properly construed simply is that, for Kant, causality is a concept, whereas Schopenhauer holds that cognition of causality is immediate and non-conceptual. Regarding this more specific debate, it is not at all obvious that Schopenhauer should follow the Kantian orthodoxy. In fact, we’ve already seen one substantive motivation to deviate from it: cognizing the causal relations between objects amounts to placing them in the realm of reality, that is, cognizing them as nodes within a network of actual causal sequences. This is entirely independent, he thinks, from providing intelligible explanations for them in terms of their grounds, in the way that a faculty of judging or concepts would be wont to do. But is Schopenhauer’s only motivation for denying the conceptuality of causation the metaphysical doctrine of the independence of the PSR of being and the PSR of knowing? By way of conclusion, I offer one last substantive motivation, this time concerning a point we had already introduced but can now draw out further. For Schopenhauer, the understanding’s cognition is ever-active, indiscriminate, and entirely independent from the assistance of “reflection” and “abstract knowledge,” which are distinctive of reason (SW 1:71/FR 70). This has profound consequences for his theory of causation, many of which are made apparent in the course of Schopenhauer’s discussion of the first Kritik’s Second Analogy of Experience. As the title of FR §23 indicates (namely, “Disputation of the Proof of the Apriority of the Concept of Causality Advanced by Kant” (SW 1:85/FR 82)), Schopenhauer reads the Second Analogy as providing arguments for the a prioricity of causation, including the claim that causality is a conceptual contribution of the understanding to experience. In Schopenhauer’s reconstruction, Kant’s argument relies on the observation that the mind 429

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is seemingly capable of discriminating between genuine and non-genuine instances of causal relations. Certain sequences of events, such as our perception of the boat floating downstream, are cognized as objective successions: namely, as involving the genuine causal relation between an antecedent alteration and a consequence. Other sequences, like the succession of the different sides of a house we experience as we walk around it, are cognized as mere subjective successions, given that they lack any such conformity to real causal chains (SW 1:85/FR 83). Part of the purported explanation of our capacity to discriminate between objective and mere subjective successions is that the mind is endowed with the concept of causality, which it applies differentially depending on certain conditions (whatever those might be).24 In other words, the mind discerns when it is suitable to apply the law of causation and when it is not: [Kant] asserts that the objectivity of the succession of representations, which he explains as their conformity with the succession of real objects, is simply cognized through the rule by which they follow one another, i.e., through the law of causality. … But if my judgment is not supported by the law of causality, the sequence in my apprehension does not justify any judgment about the objective sequence. (SW 1:85-6/FR 83) For Schopenhauer’s Kant, it is essential to our cognition of causation that it plays a discerning, discriminating role—and differentiating between genuine instances and non-instances is exactly the kind of thing that concepts allow us to do. But, Schopenhauer argues, this is a misdiagnosis of the eagerness with which the understanding detects causal relations. In fact, qua representations, objective and subjective successions are not importantly different. They both involve the cognition of causation, given that they are alterations of spatiotemporal objects. I assert that the two cases are not all that different, that both are events, the cognition of which is objective, i.e., a cognition of alterations of real objects, which are recognized as such by the subject. Both are alterations of the position of two objects relative to one another. (SW 1:86/FR 83) There is much to unpack in this passage, including the sense of relative motion at play in both objective and subjective successions. However, the central point is that, for Schopenhauer, the understanding marks no important distinction between them, treating them both as involving alteration and hence causation. Prior to the intervention of concepts and the abstract knowledge of reason, the understanding is not sensitive to whatever might be the difference between objective and subjective successions. Instead, it is promiscuous, blind, and indiscriminate, even failing to mark a difference between perceived alterations which might be the result of the mere changes in the subject’s position and those which result from changes in the positions of external objects. Schopenhauer’s final reason for rejecting Kant’s view about the continuity of reason and the understanding, then, is the view that the latter capacity is much more uncritical and undiscerning than Kant recognized. Once the work of the understanding is construed to be immediate, indiscriminate, and non-conceptual, a pressing question remains: what, if any, is the difference between sensibility and the understanding? Sensation is narrower, topically speaking: it concerns only 430

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the immediately cognized causes of alterations in our sense organs. It is also likely accompanied by a distinctive phenomenology. Relative to their similarities, however, these differences between sensibility and the understanding might seem vanishingly insignificant.25 Though surprising and thoroughly unorthodox from a Kantian perspective, this is perhaps to be expected from someone who thinks that the intellect is intuitive and intuitions are intellectual.26

Notes 1 Wicks 2008; Jacquette 2007; ch. 7 of Janaway 1989. 2 Hogan (2022) stands out within the camp of scholars who emphasize the continuity between Kant and Schopenhauer in this regard. He argues that, in the critical period, Kant holds that certain noumenal facts are unknowable not just because our cognitive capacities are not suited to the task but rather because they lack a ground or explanation. According to Hogan, Schopenhauer followed Kant in espousing this kind of noumenal unknowability. 3 Shapsay 2020; Atwell 1995. 4 Notable exceptions include De Sousa (2019) and ch. 5 of Janaway (1989). 5 For a recent discussion of Kant’s functional characterizations of the faculties, see Watkins and Willaschek (2017). For an in-depth study of Kant as a precursor to functionalism, see Meerbote (1989). 6 Watkins and Willaschek (2017, pp. 94–5) note that Kant himself put functional characterizations to this use in his work. Following the present analysis, Schopenhauer exploits this feature of functional characterizations as well. 7 Perhaps, as some so-called “conceptualists” hold, intuitions are always accompanied and aided by concepts, in which case they depend on each other at the level of instantiation. For our purposes, the crucial point is that Schopenhauer rejects the independence of the faculties at the functional level, not just at the level of their operation. See ch. 7 of Allais (2015) for a well-argued rejection of conceptualism, as well as an overview of the debate. 8 “These two faculties or capacities cannot exchange their functions. The understanding is not capable of intuiting anything, and the senses are not capable of thinking anything” (KrV A 51/B 75). 9 Kant famously considers the possibility of an intuitive understanding in §§76-77 of the third Kritik. However, he holds that this kind of understanding is unlike that of human beings—for example, such an understanding “would have no objects except what is actual” (KU 5:402). The idea of a human intuitive intellect would sound oxymoronic to a Kantian ear. 10 See Janaway (1989, p. 134) for a convincing argument that the best way of understanding Schopenhauer’s notion of an “object” is as being the intentional object of the representation. 11 Schopenhauer states that he has provided “the only correct proof of the a prioricity of the causal law” in §21 of the FR, though the details are complicated and motivated, it seems, by his idealism (SW 1:52-3/FR 53-4). 12 For a discussion of the four versions of the PSR, see Hogan (2022). For a discussion of why Schopenhauer subscribes to the PSR at all, despite it being associated with pre-Critical, dogmatic metaphysics, see Gardner (2019). 13 Some passages suggest that immediacy also has an epistemological component amounting to something like self-evidence (e.g., SW 2:77-8/WWR 1:90-1). We can set aside this component here, given our focus on the relation between the faculties and not epistemology. 14 Janaway proposes an account of immediate cognition of causation in terms of knowledge-how. This would then explain why it is non-conceptual, since knowing how to engage in an activity does not require concepts, judgments, or “the ability to formulate what one knows in propositional form” (Janaway 1989, pp. 162–3). We have seen, however, that Schopenhauer holds that all applications of the principle of sufficient reason are explanatory, that is, they involve the answer to a “why” question. It is not clear that know-how could provide such an answer. 15 In passages like this one, Schopenhauer claims that the work of the understanding is exclusively to furnish intuitive cognition of causal relations (cf. SW 2:13, 539/WWR 1:32, 483). This stronger claim is separable from the more modest view we’re discussing.

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Alejandro Naranjo Sandoval 16 Schopenhauer often states that the representations of the understanding are not only intuitive but are in fact intuitions (e.g., SW 1:76/FR 75; SW 2:66/WWR 1:80). This suggests that satisfying their functional characterization is sufficient to make a mental state count as an intuition. 17 Interestingly, Schopenhauer seems to disregard singularity, which, recall, is also included in Kant’s account of intuitions. Many scholars have thought that singularity, in either a semantic or syntactic sense, is central to them (e.g., Hintikka 1969; Howell 1973). Instead, Schopenhauer seems to fit squarely within a tradition of Kant scholarship, defended most famously by Charles Parsons, which emphasizes immediacy as a kind of “phenomenological presence to mind” (Parsons 1992, p. 66). As another example of his rejection of singularity, Schopenhauer holds that the Platonic ideas are “adequate representations of concepts”—and so in some sense general—while being “thoroughly intuitive” (SW 2:276/WWR 1:260). 18 See also Schopenhauer’s discussion in §11 of WWR of sensation as “corporeal feeling,” which involves “something that is present to consciousness” (SW 2:61/WWR 1:76). 19 For this objection to have any bite against Kant, he needs to have held the view that intuitions are representations of objects. Although he does say as much (e.g., KrV A 320/B 376-7; AA 9:33), it has proven difficult to explain the sense in which they are representational. For a useful review of some of the main issues, see McLear (2017). 20 A complication. Earlier we pointed out that Schopenhauer rejects Kant’s characterization of the understanding in terms of its spontaneity. But Schopenhauer accepts that the understanding is active—for example, it “transforms” (SW 2:520/WRR 1:466) and, in its starkest form, “creates” intuitions (SW 2:14/WWR 1:33). He simply denies that spontaneity provides the differentia which sets apart the understanding from other cognitive faculties. 21 In some passages, Schopenhauer claims that sensation “merely furnishes the occasion” for the understanding to act (SW 1:57/FR 57). This would suggest that no feature of the object derives from sensations. Yet other passages state that the understanding merely “recasts” (SW 1:53/FR 54) or “transforms” (WWR 1:466) the data of sensation, which seems to imply that at least some features of the sensation survive in the object. 22 If empirical intuitions retain the possible phenomenological aspect of sensations noted in n. 18, it might seem that they are somewhat unique among the representations of the understanding. Recall, however, that their phenomenological aspect does not contribute any objective features. Hence, qua cognitions of the objective features of objects empirical intuitions are not functionally dissimilar from any other representations of the understanding. 23 A related version of this objection concerns the purported necessity of causal relations: the senses only indicate what happens in actual interactions between objects, whereas a causal relation involves a necessary connection between them. Earlier, we noted that Schopenhauer admits necessity into the nature of causal relations. Crucially, however, he holds that all necessities correspond to explanatory links (SW 1:41/FR 44). In fact, sometimes he claims that “the concept of necessity… has no true content … other than that of the appearance of the consequent when its ground is given” (SW 1:91/FR 87). Tentatively, then, we can say that, for Schopenhauer, this third version of the objection should be treated in much the same way as the second. 24 Schopenhauer is not alone in reading Kant’s Second Analogy as a transcendental argument which relies on the premise that we have mental capacities to differentiate objective vs. subjective successions. For accounts of a similar kind in the modern literature, see Pereboom (1995) and Dickerson (2004). 25 Perhaps, the perception of space and time as the a priori forms of intuition provides the locus for a deeper division between intellectual and sensible cognitions. After all, Schopenhauer holds that an entirely separate version of the PSR—the PSR of being—corresponds to this kind of cognition (FR §35). An examination of a priori intuitions will have to await a future occasion. 26 Special thanks to Kathleen Cruz, Grace Delmolino, Sven-Erik Rose, Carey Seal, Timothy Stoll, Michael J. Subialka, Stefan H. Uhlig, and Chunjie Zhang for helpful feedback in this and previous drafts of the paper.

References Allais, Lucy. Manifest Reality: Kant’s Idealism and His Realism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

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Kant’s Monstrous Claim Atwell, John. Schopenhauer and the Character of the World: The Metaphysics of Will. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995. de Sousa, Luis. “Schopenhauer on Perception, Consciousness, and Self-Awareness” in Schopenhauer’s Fourfold Root, edited by Jonathan Head and Dennis Vanden Auweele. New York, NY: Routledge, 2019. Dickerson, A. B. Kant on Representation and Objectivity. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Gardner, Sebastian. “Schopenhauer’s Metaphilosophy: How to Think a World without Reason” in Schopenhauer’s Fourfold Root, edited by Jonathan Head and Dennis Vanden Auweele. New York, NY: Routledge, 2019. Hintikka, Jaakko. “On Kant’s Notion of Intuition (Anschauung)” in The First Critique: Reflections on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, edited by Terence Penelhum and J.J. MacIntosh. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1969. Hogan, Desmond. “Schopenhauerʼs Transcendental Aesthetic” in The Sensible and Intelligible Worlds: New Essays on Kantʼs Metaphysics and Epistemology, edited by Karl Schafer and Nick Stang. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Howell, Robert. “Intuition, Synthesis, and Individuation in the Critique of Pure Reason.” Noûs, vol. 7, 1973: pp. 207–32. Hume, David. An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding in Enquiries concerning Human Understanding and concerning the Principles of Morals. Edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge, 3rd ed. revised by P. H. Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. Jacquette, Dale. “Schopenhauerʼs Proof that the Thing-in-Itself Is Will.” Kantian Review, vol. 12, no. 2, 2007: pp. 76–108. Janaway, Christopher. Self and World in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Kant, Immanuel. “Jäsche Logic” in Lectures on Logic, edited and translated by J. Michael Young. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. ———. Critique of Pure Reason. Edited and translated by Paul Guyer and Allen Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. ———. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Edited and translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. McLear, Colin. “Intuition and Presence” in Kant and the Philosophy of Mind: Perception, Reason, and the Self, edited by Anil Gomes and Andrew Stephenson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Meerbote, Ralf. “Kant’s Functionalism” in Historical Foundations of Cognitive Science, edited by J. C. Smith. Dordrecht, Holland: Reidel, 1989. Parsons, Charles. “The Transcendental Aesthetic” in The Cambridge Companion to Kant, edited by P. Guyer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 62–100. Pereboom, Derk. “Self-Understanding in Kant’s Transcendental Deduction,” Synthese, vol. 103, 1995: pp. 1–42. Shapshay, Sandra. “The Enduring Kantian Presence in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy” in The Oxford Handbook of Schopenhauer, edited by Robert Wicks. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Watkins, Eric and Willaschek, Marcus. “Kant’s Account of Cognition.” Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 55, no. 1, 2017: pp. 83–112. Wicks, Robert. Schopenhauer. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008.

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30 IN AGON WITH GOETHE: PARERGA AND PARALIPOMENA 2 Adrian Del Caro

30.1  Parerga and Paralipomena 2 as Swan Song in the Key of Goethe Schopenhauer wrote to the publisher Brockhaus in 1850, concerning the manuscript for Parerga and Paralipomena: “After this I do not propose to write anything more; because I want to prevent myself from bringing into this world weak children of old age who accuse their father and vilify his reputation” (PP 2:xiv). These are not the words of an author whose writings are being ignored but of one who is keenly aware of and concerned for the image he has shaped through his writings since his first book in 1813. The presentation of PP 2 demonstrates how Schopenhauer wanted to be remembered at this high point of his productivity; we can expect that the book included, to some extent, everything that mattered to him—and if his earlier books were carefully and thoughtfully prepared, this is especially the case for his final book. I submit that Schopenhauer not only knew his star was rising in 1850, he also knew what was at stake in emerging as a German luminary at this time in history. Goethe died in 1832, but his memory was still fresh, and there was no heir apparent. In the 1870s Nietzsche would tell us how Goethe transcended German nationhood: “He lived and continues to live only for the few: for the many he is nothing except a fanfare of vanity that we blow across the German borders from time to time” (WS 125).1 Indeed, when Thomas Mann, in his indignation and anguish, wrote Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man during WW I, he defended Wilhelminian Germany, and likewise the authoritarian state, while invoking Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Wagner as his intellectual “triple star” (Mann 1960: 71–72). Goethe would be reclaimed by Thomas Mann after WW II, but Mann could not navigate by Goethe’s star during his pre-democratic phase—he needed to call upon more conservative “German” mentors, as he saw them. Schopenhauer’s positioning of himself relative to Goethe in 1850 is merely the prehistory of Mann positioning himself during WW I and immediately following WW II: German intellectuals after Goethe simply could not afford to ignore his star, for in terms of intellectual and cultural history, Goethe is the lodestar across space and time. Schopenhauer was masterful in dealing with Goethe personally, in what could be called an agon, and more importantly, he was masterful in using his experience with Goethe, Goethe’s works, and Goethe’s image to fashion himself as the successor to Goethe in the German imagination. The many quota434

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tions and allusions to Goethe in PP 2 are not mere window dressing or stylistic flourishes; Schopenhauer had been in personal agon with Goethe over color theory, and he became the leading authority on art and genius, certainly in philosophical circles, in the latter half of the nineteenth century. When Schopenhauer and Goethe became collaborators on color theory in 1813, Goethe was already sixty-four years old, therefore very close in age to Schopenhauer’s father who died in 1805, likely by suicide (b. 1747). Putting aside any emotional or psychological baggage that the young Schopenhauer might have experienced in connecting with Goethe, it is clear that Schopenhauer was just launching his career with the publication of his dissertation On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (1813), which he had sent to Goethe and which the latter had read, prompting him to engage Schopenhauer as a potential ally in matters of color theory. The notion or thought that Schopenhauer could emerge as the true successor to Goethe would have started here (if not earlier, in his mother’s salon where Goethe was a visitor), both because Goethe was already advanced in age and because Schopenhauer found him to be vulnerable in color theory and in broader matters of philosophy. Janaway explains that PP 2 “was the first work of Schopenhauer’s to gain a relatively wide audience, and with its publication in 1851 there finally came some measure of the fame that Schopenhauer thought his due” (2015: p. xv). Quoting Schopenhauer’s biographer to the effect that “the changed spirit of the time met him half way,” Janaway goes on to delimit the main historical forces: the failed revolutions of 1848, the decline in Hegel’s influence, the growth of scientific materialism, and the cultural repercussions of what Nietzsche called “the death of God” (2015: p. xvi). Intrigued by the fact that Schopenhauer found his public precisely in the 1850s and with the PP volumes, Janaway delves by arguing that it was not just Schopenhauer’s cultural conservatism (being out of step with “the time of now,” etc.) that won hearts, but “his many happy deflations of pretension and his sheer wit as a writer.” These factors, he continues, along with Schopenhauer’s “vehement atheism and refusal of optimism, his account of human beings as living, striving parts of nature,” positioned him to engage with the times (2015: pp. xxxii-xxxiii). These are important observations that merit further discussion. The skills that Janaway ascribes to Schopenhauer are those of genius—insight that deflates pretension and the constant display of a quickness of wit are beloved in their own right, and not every thinker has these. Even more telling, in my view, and closer to Goethe’s earlier efforts and inclinations are the unapologetic atheism and the celebration of human beings as “living, striving parts of nature,” a profound theme of philosophy of nature and the very substratum of Goethe’s Faust. Goethe, the classicist and modern pagan, the humanist colleague of Wilhelm von Humboldt and Friedrich Schiller, survived and echoed in Schopenhauer to the extent that these traits reminded readers of Goethe’s works and Goethe’s style as a human being. If the second half of the century missed Goethe and longed for someone of his stature and disposition, here was Schopenhauer, openly and frequently reminding readers of his profound admiration for Goethe and his unique relationship with him. Schopenhauer was not averse to referring to himself as the rightful heir of Kant on philosophical grounds, so we should not impute to him any modesty or reticence in staking a claim to be the rightful heir of Goethe on matters of color theory and philosophy in general. Nietzsche provides valuable clues as to why German readers may have been inclined to indulge Schopenhauer’s oft-implied affinity with Goethe. In Schopenhauer as Educator Nietzsche proposes that Schopenhauer does not remind us of scholars, but he does remind 435

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us “a bit” of Goethe, “and otherwise not at all of any German model” (SE 2). The compliment here is three-fold: Schopenhauer and Goethe are not reminiscent of scholars; Schopenhauer actually puts one in mind of Goethe, if only a bit; and Schopenhauer does not remind one of Germans at all, with the sole exception of Goethe, who was of course exceptional in any case as a human being. Nietzsche appears to be saying that greatness is not to be found among scholars or among any individuals who are too German. But lest we forget: Schopenhauer’s fame began during a historical upswing and resurgence of German (specifically Prussian) hegemony, so while Nietzsche’s writing in the 1870s can be critical of German nationalism, this does not mean that German readers in general are not capable of celebrating Goethe as their own national treasure. Another tie that unites Goethe and Schopenhauer is how they were treated by their contemporaries; there is a kind of inquisitorial censure in which, according to Goethe, Germans excel, namely “absolute silence” (SE 3). Nietzsche may have been on the receiving end of some of this “absolute silence” himself, but in any case, he is elevating Goethe and Schopenhauer by suggesting that their contemporaries used silence as censure. Taking his cue from Schopenhauer, Nietzsche calls him Kant’s successor and “a guiding light of Germans” (SE 3). High praise, to be sure, but so far, Nietzsche has not anointed Schopenhauer as the heir of Goethe. In chapter four, he names three modern figures whose effect has been transformative: Rousseau, Goethe, and Schopenhauer (SE 4). Goethe as an individual corrects the excesses of Rousseau, but Goethe is not complete—only Schopenhauer, of the three, is complete (SE 4). This is as close as Nietzsche comes to designating Schopenhauer as the heir of Goethe. In chapter six, Nietzsche revisits his observation that Goethe and Schopenhauer do not resemble scholars, who are sterile, have a natural hatred for fruitful humans, and are the cause of historical animosity between geniuses and scholars. According to Nietzsche, scholars want to kill nature to “dissect and understand” it, whereas the genius wants to intensify nature to promote new living nature (SE 6). Here once more is the tie that binds Goethe and Schopenhauer as proponents of Naturphilosophie; they manifest genius and show a healthy reliance on nature, while they both reject the objectifying stance of modern science as it emerged, for example, in Francis Bacon and Newton. Nietzsche next offers a plausible reason for why Schopenhauer was referred to as the “completer” of Goethe. It was Schopenhauer’s “indescribable fortune” to experience genius up close, not only in himself “but outside himself, in Goethe: through this double reflection, he became enlightened and wise regarding all scholarly goals and cultures. By virtue of this experience, he knew how the free and strong human being must be constituted” (SE 7). We will see in due course that Schopenhauer himself stressed this “indescribable fortune” when making his many remarks about Goethe. The Danish literary historian Georg Brandes, often referred to as the founder of modern comparative literary study, described the phenomenal success and notoriety Goethe experienced with the publication of The Sorrows of Young Werther in 1774. Three French translations appeared between 1776 and 1777; English translations began in 1779; Chinese paintings depicting scenes from Werther were displayed in the captain’s cabin of a merchant vessel in 1779; Napoleon read the novel repeatedly on his Egyptian campaign, and he knew it so well he conversed with Goethe about it in 1808; Danish imitations of Werther were penned by Ingemann and Sibbern; parodies were written (Nicolai); the book was banned by religious authorities; ballets were performed; elaborate fireworks entitled “Werther’s Reunion with Lotte in Elysium” were performed in Vienna in 1781 (Brandes 1922: 168– 71). It was Goethe who coined the term “world literature” (Weltliteratur) in 1827, when 436

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“he believed that the Germans would have an honorable role in this process. The world’s nations appear to Goethe to cast their gaze at Germany, praising and criticizing, imitating and rejecting its output” (Pizer 2006: 33). Pizer goes on to describe how, in the dawning years of Weltliteratur, Goethe worked to “configure the world and conjure stability and plenitude within the regional and the particular in his narratives,” thereby providing a model for how authors might “come to grips with the demise of their national identity in a transnational, multicultural age” (Pizer 2006: 40). We can picture Schopenhauer and Nietzsche quite at home in this transnational context, each of them grateful in his own way for the achievements of their distinguished predecessor, each manifesting his own vision for an atheistic, art-inspired future, but for the moment, let us imagine from the perspective of Germans the cultural vacuum that ensued with the death of Goethe. Who would be capable even in the slightest of harnessing and manifesting the effects of Goethe in the spheres of science, art and letters? The task or mission orientation of Schopenhauer is something from which he seldom wavered, or as Janaway formulates it, “Schopenhauer writes with unshaken confidence that he is right, and often castigates both the public and the intellectuals of his day for their errors and stupidity” (2015: p. xxx). If we accept now Lauxtermann’s reasoning that Schopenhauer possessed a “somewhat peculiar psychological make-up” and that he leveraged his outsider role, ultimately adopting “the dual legacy of Kant and Goethe” (Lauxtermann 2000: 39), this legacy would consist of and rest upon philosophy, science, and art. Moreover, the blending of the arts into philosophy in the manner of Schopenhauer had never before been attempted—his project, as Lauxtermann points out, “was rooted in experience” (ibid, 39). Is it any wonder, then, that the second half of the nineteenth century witnessed Schopenhauer’s inspiration in Wagner and Nietzsche? Not even Goethe had delivered for music what Schopenhauer was able to promise on its behalf, and notwithstanding the dismal failure of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy From the Spirit of Music (1872, original title), the second half of the century was clearly in the mood for pessimism and music, all the more so as the century wound to a close and Nietzsche finally came into his own in the late 1880s and 1890s.2

30.2  The Structural and Thematic Presence of Goethe in PP 2 Schopenhauer quotes richly from a wide variety of sources, ancient and modern, ranging from Plato to Voltaire in matters of philosophy and from Cervantes to Byron in literature. A few writers and thinkers are quoted or referenced more than twenty times, but none by my count receives as much attention as Goethe, whose works and name are invoked approximately forty times. Twelve individual Goethe works are quoted, most notable among them is Faust, five individual short poems, with several additional mentions of or allusions to Goethe that are independent of the quoted material. These Goethe reminders or markers are found in sixteen of the total thirty-one chapters, beginning in chapter one and concluding with chapter thirty. As for the various uses to which these mentions are put, I propose three basic rubrics: 1) Goethe’s texts are used to illustrate or sharpen a point that Schopenhauer has made; 2) allusions to Goethe’s works, biography, or habits are used to demonstrate an affinity between Goethe and Schopenhauer; and 3) Goethe’s words or his example are redirected against Goethe, in those rare but significant instances when Schopenhauer articulates his differences with Goethe. In this section I will treat Faust last, both because there are numerous quotes from and allusions to this work and because it 437

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is the single work of Goethe that bears the greatest resemblance to Schopenhauer’s philosophical project.3 Chapter 2, “On logic and dialectic,” §26, from the first rubric, lays out the implication of disputing or debating with an outmatched opponent, whereby the weaker will inevitably resort to mud-slinging and other desperate ruses to cover up his inadequacies. Goethe’s lines from West-Eastern Divan are quoted here to good effect: Never let yourself be lured To inconsistent prattle: Wise men will stoop to an ignorant word, When ignorants are in the battle. (SW 6:36/PP 2:26) In addition to bolstering Schopenhauer’s point regarding the need for evenly matched disputants, Goethe’s words also reflect his own life-long skill in not getting dragged down; his stature could be maintained in part by following his own advice. Chapter 3, “Some thoughts concerning the intellect,” §49, describes individual human inadequacy on the basis of the blind will that occupies each person and contaminates cognition; Schopenhauer first quotes the Indian proverb “no lotus without a stem,” then he quotes Goethe’s Proverbial: The Tower of Babylon cast its spell, They cannot be united! Now each man has his inner hell, Copernicus included. (SW 6:68/PP 2:62) Once more, these words are carefully chosen to illustrate the flawed hopelessness of human individuals, who must rely on their own faulty reasoning and will be forever separated from one another. The larger lesson or framework in this case is that both Goethe and Schopenhauer play down the individual while preferring to foreground the universals that manifest in and across historical individuals (Schopenhauer’s reliance on Platonic Ideas and Goethe’s elevation of individuals to universals). In the same chapter Schopenhauer discusses genius in terms of its lack of practicality and its negative impact on a person’s happiness, for which he quotes Tasso: “The laurel crown’s glow, where it shows for you, / Is more a sign of sorrow than of luck” (SW 6:77/PP 2:69). The historical Tasso was preferred by Goethe as a vehicle to explore his own ambiguity as a member of the court of Duke Karl August, so the allusion to genius here is autobiographical; the poet-genius is a misfit in society and at court, tragically stranded by his own impracticality in Tasso’s case. Chapter 6, “On philosophy and natural science,” §79, discusses metals as opposed to water as conductors of heat; the former will rapidly acquire and give up heat because heat merely adheres to substances from which it differs, whereas it causes a chemical combination with water, to which heat has a real affinity, hence ice and heat form water. One can illustrate this using Goethe’s Elective Affinities, whereby a faithful woman “is bound to a man as latent heat is to water; the faithless paramour, on the other hand, has only brushed him from the outside, like heat on metal” (SW 6:125/PP 2:108). Chapter 7, “On colour theory,” §107, uses a quote from Egmont, “we want to behave as we can,” to describe the philosophical but resigned response that Germans will need to have when they realize how they have wronged Goethe in rejecting his color theory (SW 6:212–13/PP 2:181). Chapter 10, “On the indestructibility of our true essence by death,” §141, has Thrasymachus quot438

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ing Goethe’s early drama Satyros, whose hero boasts: “The world has nothing like me far and nigh: / For God is God, and I am I” (SW 299/PP 2:253). The strong individualism displayed by Thrasymachus is rejected by Philalethes, who argues that all expressions of individualism are illusory: “individuality is not a perfection, but a limitation, hence to be rid of it is not a loss but rather a gain” (SW 300/PP 2:254). The critique of the individual reminds us here somewhat of Schopenhauer’s use of Proverbial above. In chapter 10, §147, Schopenhauer quotes from the poem “Spirit Greeting,” referring to it as “Goethe’s beautiful song” insofar as he was aware of it as Schubert’s composition; “Spirit Greeting” (GeistesGruß) is an early version of Margarete’s ballad of the King of Thule, which foreshadows her Liebestod. Schopenhauer is underscoring that a human being’s “essence and striving are obviously doomed to annihilation” and are therefore in vain—if these had any worth, they would not have non-existence as their goal. He continues: “The feeling for this also underlies Goethe’s beautiful song: High on the ancient tower stands The hero’s noble spirit” (SW 6:306/PP 2:259-60, translation modified). We note that Schopenhauer invokes the feeling expressed by Goethe’s song: in this case, he is not only quoting from a literary work, but he raises that artwork to the second power by capturing its musical effect as a poem set to music. In Goethe’s poem, the hero’s spirit speaks courage to the “little boat of humankind” that sails far below the fortress; he spent half his life in heroic pursuits, the other half resting from his toils. Chapter 15, “On religion,” §181, again calls on Tasso, this time to bolster the case that religious faith cannot be forced by external authorities. Tasso explains to the princess that he and Lenore are not getting along, there is no love between them, only visible effort on her part: “One feels intention and one feels annoyed” (SW 6:417/PP 2:353). At this point, Schopenhauer reminds his readers that he had already enlisted Condorcet in §174 to help him make the same point: “Faith is like love: it cannot be forced” (ibid.). Highly critical of the poetic license exercised by Dante in the Divine Comedy and Inferno, Schopenhauer proposes in chapter 19, “On the metaphysics of the beautiful and aesthetics,” §229, that the Inferno is nothing but “an apotheosis of cruelty” and “the illustration of outrageous absurdities and constant scenes of execution” (SW 6:472/PP 2:399). Goethe’s Proverbial is reprised here to mock Dante’s bad taste: “Whatever’s true in whatever place, / I say it out loud and with a straight face” (ibid.). §229 is followed by three very brief sections in a row, in which Goethe is quoted or mentioned. §230 praises Homer as an objective poet who describes things with “those predicates which they deserve generally and absolutely,” adding “Among the poets of our time Goethe is the most objective, Byron the most subjective” (SW 6:473/PP 2:400). §231 comments on the consistency of Egmont as a character who takes life easily and follows through by taking death easily as well (ibid.). In §231, Schopenhauer points out that Goethe was probably inspired by frescoes in the Academy of Arts in Venice when he wrote Iphigenie: the frescoes depict gods “enthroned on golden seats at golden tables in the clouds, with the toppled quests below in the nocturnal depths” (ibid.). Iphigenie is the daughter of Tantalus, whose house was brought down by the gods and whose family was cursed through the ages. This cluster of gems regarding Goethe has the overall effect of comparing him favorably to Dante, Homer, Byron, and Jean Paul, while highlighting some of the skills Goethe displayed as an objective poet (what Schiller and Nietzsche would term “naïve”). 439

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While it is sometimes the case that Schopenhauer is also using these Goethe markers to suggest an affinity between himself and Goethe, in the second grouping of allusions to Goethe this self-referential feature is more obviously the case. So, for example, in chapter 3, “Some thoughts concerning the intellect in general and in every aspect,” §38, he quotes from Riemer’s Mitteilungen über Goethe (1841) that our thoughts come to us when walking or standing, extremely rarely while sitting (SW 6:58/PP 2:52–53). Good thinking does not always happen on demand, he argues, and we must leave ourselves open to thoughts that arrive unbidden or spontaneously. Goethe is again invoked in chapter 3, this time in order to describe his activity and composure during battle in Champagne; in a fortress in Luxemburg, Goethe “immediately takes up the notebooks of his theory of colour,” thereby leaving behind “a model that we who are the salt of the earth should follow, namely always to apply ourselves undisturbed to our intellectual life, no matter how our personal life is seized and shattered by the storms of the world” (SW 6:79/PP 2:70–71). This seemingly heroic compartmentalization, reminiscent of the metaphor Schopenhauer used in WWR to describe the captain sitting in a tiny boat tossed by raging seas (SW 2:416/WWR 1:379), trusting in the principium individuationis, likewise uses the pronoun we to carve out an elite intelligentsia (salt of the earth). In a more outward vein, physicists are lambasted as “crude peasants” in chapter 6, §79, for philosophizing about metaphysics, in which they are out of their element; the Xenien of Schiller and Goethe is quoted: “Wretched, empirical devil, you don’t even know the stupid / In your own selves, it is Oh! A priori stupid” (SW 6:121/PP 2:105–106).4 This allusion to Friedrich Nicolai, a favorite detractor of Goethe and a favorite target of Goethe’s attacks, shows Goethe dealing out blows, dispensing harsh criticism with a gusto often seen in Schopenhauer; he and Goethe were brothers in arms, so to speak, in dispatching lowly critics. In chapter 8, “On ethics, §118, Schopenhauer invites us to consider how in Shakespeare and Goethe, “each character while standing there and speaking is perfectly right, even if it were the devil himself;” Schiller, meanwhile, “likes to paint the devil black,” and his characters display morals that resonate with Schiller’s own (SW 6:248/PP 2:211). Here we are reminded of the praise of Homer as an objective poet, but an additional affinity is Schopenhauer’s preference for keeping one’s morals out of the game—Schiller was not a genius in the style of Homer or Goethe but instead a “sentimental” thinker whose creations would always be tainted by his excessive rationalizing and moralizing. Demopheles invokes “the laws of elective affinity” in chapter 15, explaining that, for example, there is a “low school metaphysics for the learned plebs, and a higher one for the elites,” such that Kant’s “lofty teachings” first had to be mediated for the schools by lesser thinkers; Goethe’s “one size does not fit all” from the poem Take to Heart is quoted at this point (SW 6:360/PP 2:306). In chapter 18, “Some mythological observations,” §196, Schopenhauer explains how people find allegory even when it is not intended, “a choice sample of this is provided by Goethe’s incomparably beautiful fairy tale of the green snake.” Citing Düntzer’s Studies of Goethe’s Works (1849), he adds that Goethe had no allegory in mind when he wrote Fairy Tale; moreover, “I knew about it already for a long time from personal remarks made by Goethe” (SW 6:434/PP 2:367). Schopenhauer comes across here as a trusted insider, a confidant, and the observation gives him yet another opportunity to remind us of how Goethe is in his own moment when creating characters, good or evil, not engaging in sentimental moralizing or allegories. Goethe’s lifelong occupation as minister at the court of Weimar-Saxony, as well as his upbringing in a wealthy household, clearly shielded him from the indignities that lesser 440

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writers had to endure, and Schopenhauer appreciated this independence, as indicated in chapter 19, §217. A man who is compelled to live off his poetic talents resembles a girl who lives off her charms: “Both profane for base profit what should be the free gift of their innermost nature.” He warns that one should not “degrade your Muse to a whore,” but instead follow the example set forth in Goethe’s poem The Singer; this humble poet eschews material rewards at court, where he delights his sovereign, asking only to drink once from a cup of gold. Schopenhauer elaborates now on the difference between poetry and philosophy: “the poet does not need to acquire great knowledge and science, as is the case with the philosopher,” hence the poet’s material needs are smaller. The philosopher, however, “cannot very well practise another occupation” due to the demands of philosophy, yet he should avoid becoming a sophist; the best wisdom Schopenhauer can give here is to follow Ecclesiastes 7:11: Wisdom is good with an inheritance and helps one to see the sun (SW 6:457/PP 2:386). By quoting a famous Goethe poem to illustrate his point that neither poets nor philosophers should work for money, that is, as professionals, Schopenhauer is upholding the sanctity of the muse at the same time that he is pointing out the particular suitability for their craft of independent poets and philosophers. This observation can also be read as a poke at his professional rivals, of course, the professors of philosophy, but it does not escape scrutiny that a poet vs. philosopher juxtaposition is also at play here, which I will explore in greater detail in the section on Faust below. Chapter 20 “On judgment, criticism approbation and fame,” §242, launches a detailed critique of envy that includes this skillful observation: “Envy is the sure sign of something lacking, and so when directed at merit, of a lack of merit” (SW 6:492/PP 2:415). Gracián, Cervantes, and Goethe are all quoted roughly to the effect that if someone displays greatness and merit, they should be free to say so out loud and to value themselves highly; he refers to “Goethe’s well-known statement, which angered many, that ‘only scoundrels are modest’” (ibid.). The Goethe quote is from the poem Accountability, in which a character called “the master” speaks these self-assured words. There is a somewhat Nietzschean genealogical energy to this Goethe quote, with its unmasking of a widely revered virtue. Schopenhauer has rallied strong allies to his own cause of speaking freely about his own excellence. He is able to invoke Goethe again in a related context in chapter 23, “On writing and style,” §281, where he emphatically agrees with Goethe that “Nowhere is there more dishonesty than in literature” (SW 6:543/PP 2:459). While the context here is the much hated practice of anonymous reviews and criticism, surely the “scoundrels” who insist on anonymity suffer from envy, and great minds like Goethe and Schopenhauer will see alike on this point. On the very next page of this section, Rousseau is brought in to reinforce Goethe, this time using a lengthy quote from Riemer’s book of 1841 (SW 6:544/PP 2:460). The straight-on attack style will be preferred by genuine thinkers who hide neither behind modesty nor anonymity. §283 of this chapter finds Schopenhauer railing against the abuses of the German language, the widespread (as he sees it) flouting of grammatical rules, and deviating from established norms, which he likens to a universal mania. Goethe, however, had written: “To live for one’s own senses is uncouth: / The noble strive for order and for law” (SW 6:571/PP 2:482). Inasmuch as this is the classicist Goethe speaking, the measured, confident advocate of classical restraint, we have to wonder why Schopenhauer here quoted a draft from The Natural Daughter, as opposed to the famous poem Nature and Art. The classical temperament in any case is what is at stake here and what appears to be absent in the German usage of Schopenhauer’s day. In the penultimate chapter of PP 2, “On noise and sounds,” §378, which happens to be the last mention of Goethe in the book, Schopenhauer claims his affin441

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ity with Goethe by declaring that in the personal utterances “of almost all great writers, for instance, Kant, Goethe, Lichtenberg, Jean Paul, I find complaints about the anguish caused to thinking men by noise” (SW 6:679/PP 2:575). Having commented now on a variety of contexts in which Schopenhauer demonstrated his affinity with Goethe through shared traits or kindred thoughts and inclinations, I turn next to his treatment of Faust. Faust is an eminently quotable work and most writers who quote Goethe will rely on it. I pointed out in an earlier essay on Schopenhauer’s intellectual relationship with Goethe that scholars see in Faust, the hero, prominent features of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, foremost among them striving as a fundamental and highly redeemable drive. (Del Caro 2020: 21; Neymeyr 2016: 316; Bell 1994: 265; Wittkowski 1991: 383, 385, 393.). There I also wrote: “striving is proto-Goethean material and characteristic of the Faust temperament and ethos” (ibid.). There is a special significance to the Faust quote found already in chapter 1, which is used to introduce §18: What you received but as your father’s heir, Make it your own to gain possession of it! (SW 6:15/PP 2:18) Lütkehaus has commented in depth on the father-son dynamic that seems to be in play whenever Schopenhauer measures himself against Goethe (Lütkehaus 1992: 79; Del Caro 2020: 12). These Faust lines are spoken in relation to his own father, whose legacy he has squandered; they reveal Faust in a depressed, suicidal state and on the verge of committing suicide. Schopenhauer appropriates these lines in order to argue that “It is of great value and use to discover, independently and before we know it, what thinkers before us have already discovered” (ibid.). It is insufficient to receive insight second hand, through book learning, as if through an inheritance—one should strive to reach insight or understanding through one’s own experiences, in which case, he assures us, “one gains confidence and steadfastness for championing it [what one thinks on one’s own] against any contradiction” (ibid.). In these lines I see a metaphor for how Schopenhauer engaged in an agon with Goethe, at first regarding color theory but later more generally, as he began to gain confidence in himself as the successor to Kant and Goethe. This is the first example in PP 2 of Schopenhauer redirecting the force of a Goethe insight against Goethe; wherever Faust displays the admirable trait of striving or self-overcoming, Schopenhauer feels empowered to “make it his own,” and he is not deterred by the stature of his opponent—on the contrary, there is no modesty or humility in him vis-à-vis Goethe. Thus in chapter 3, §42, Schopenhauer takes Schelling to task for the charlatanism of demonstrating a priori “that which can only be known a posteriori.” Schelling is lampooned now in the lines that Goethe gave to Mephistopheles: “Enter: Philosopher, and lo! / He proves to you it must be so” (SW 6:62/PP 2:56–57). In order to expose Schelling as a sloppy thinker who hides behind philosophical charlatanism, the ironic, anti-philosophy words of Mephistopheles form an apt expression of the absurdities one might encounter in the works of Schopenhauer’s rivals. In the context of Faust, we should note that Mephistopheles is disguised in Faust’s academic robe, pretending to be Faust the professor and academic adviser, here expounding on the relative merits of majoring in logic. Inasmuch as Schopenhauer is here ridiculing a favorite target, the Goethe quote proves to be an effective stick with which to beat Schelling—but there is more to come when the situation changes later on. In chapter 7, “On colour theory,” §103, Schopenhauer reprises these same lines, but what precedes and follows them is well worth quoting at length: 442

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Accordingly the most universal and supreme truth of his entire theory of color is an explicit, objective fact that he himself quite properly calls urphenomenon. With that he considered everything done; a proper “it is so” was for him everywhere the ultimate goal, without his having craved an “it must be so”, and indeed this enabled him to mock: Enter: Philosopher, and lo! He proves to you it must be so. Now that is why he was a poet after all and not a philosopher, i.e., not animated or possessed, as you wish, by a striving for the ultimate grounds and the innermost relation of things. And for precisely this reason he had to leave me the best harvest, as gleanings, insofar as the ultimate satisfaction and the key to everything that Goethe teaches are to be found in me alone. (SW 6:192–93/PP 2:164) The same Faust lines perform a double duty; first by chastising Schelling for his sloppy reasoning in matters of describing nature, then by chastising Goethe, ironically and with a touch of schadenfreude, for being a mere poet-simpleton and for mocking the philosophers. We saw a glimpse of this dynamic above, where I discussed Schopenhauer’s chapter 19 quote from Goethe’s poem The Singer, but here in Chapter 7, we find the genuine nub of the issue. Mephistopheles’ words, not Goethe’s as such, disrespectful and scornful of the logician-philosopher, are now elevated to a criticism of Goethe’s work in science, as if to say that the poets should stick to their poetry. Goethe is accused of the precise behavior that Mephistopheles attributes to logicians, and Schopenhauer doubles down by asserting that Goethe could not even be expected to get to the heart of the matter in color theory, since he was “not a philosopher.” To add insult to injury, it is almost as if Schopenhauer claims to be the true interpreter and successor of Goethe: we will find what Goethe meant, so to speak, only in Schopenhauer. Defrocking Goethe as a scientist of color theory is combined with demoting him to a mere poet, while Schopenhauer elevates himself both in relation to color theory and vis-à-vis Goethe as a thinker.5 Whatever else Schopenhauer writes about Goethe in PP 2 has to be reconsidered in the light of this incredibly audacious put-down, in which the poet’s own words are used to attack him and in which the poet-thinker Goethe is rudely exposed as a mere dilettante. We should recall that Schopenhauer had published his own On Vision and Colors in 1816, which he republished in 1854 using “much of the material” that appears in PP 2 chapter 7 (PP 2:xxv). It must have been of considerable importance to him to include this critique of Goethe in his last work, both for the purpose of setting the record straight regarding who had the superior (or “actual”) color theory, as well as for the purpose of simultaneously elevating Goethe and himself on the world stage.6 Most of the quotes of Faust are used mainly to illustrate and sharpen points. Schopenhauer is annoyed that people seem more interested in the historical Faust than Goethe’s Faust: “People are not interested in the form, i.e., in the treatment and representation, but instead in the matter: they are material” ( SW 6:89–90/PP 2:79-80).7 In a discussion about sleep in relation to the life force, he argues in favor of staying awake when we occasionally wake earlier than we planned rather than falling asleep again. He uses a rare quote of Faust II: “Cast it off, the shell of sleep,” which refers to the recuperating, slumbering Faust in the first scene of Part II (SW 6:175/PP 2:149). Philalethes disagrees with the use of myths and dis443

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tractions to soothe the raging, rioting masses, claiming “It is false that the state, justice and law cannot be upheld without the help of religion and its articles of faith.” Mephistopheles is quoted at the point where he tries to seduce Faust with promises of the “pleasing arts,” which of course Faust rejects in favor of making his wager (SW 6:/350–51PP 2:298–99). In referring to the drunken behavior of the students in Auerbach’s Cellar, on whom Faust and Mephistopheles play cruel tricks, Mephistopheles promises that “their bestial estate / Will soon be splendidly revealed.” Schopenhauer uses this Goethe quote in his chapter “On Physiognomy” to help make the point that a person’s face is determined by nature, and its subsequent “closer examination” will only result in our fooling ourselves about them (SW 6:674–75/PP 2:571).

30.3  Color Theory as a Platform for Supplanting Goethe Safranski emphasizes how important color theory had been to Goethe, concluding that “Goethe felt misunderstood in what was for him the main thing” when his color theory was not warmly received, prompting him to approach Schopenhauer (Safranski 1987: 268–69). Goethe was initially intrigued by Schopenhauer because the latter was a neophyte who could be won over to Goethe’s color theory, especially since Schopenhauer, too, rejected Newton’s theory (Lütkehaus 1992: 81–82).8 Lütkehaus stages the seemingly promising relationship in terms of “the Olympian whose Achilles heel is colour theory,” encountering a young philosopher who is keen on teaching his own new system; their exchange of letters reveals Goethe’s wisdom about human beings and Schopenhauer’s “ruthless frankness,” as if these were Goethe’s letters to a prodigal son (Lütkehaus 1992: 79). As Janaway frames the encounter, Schopenhauer embarked on “the one exceptional collaboration” of his career, not as the disciple intended by Goethe, “but in fact convinced of the superiority of his own thinking on the matter” (Janaway 1994: 5). In the lengthy (10 pages of print) Sept. 3, 1815, letter to Goethe, occasioned by the lack of response from Goethe once Schopenhauer had mailed him his own theory of color, the latter maintained that Goethe’s so-called theory was merely a “systematic collection of many and manifold facts,” whereas Schopenhauer’s actual theory was a “unified whole” (Lütkehaus 1992: 15–18).9 I discussed this letter in greater detail (cf. Del Caro 2020) elsewhere, but here I simply repeat that Schopenhauer’s pained, at times anguished response to being snubbed by Goethe made clear he was neither a pupil nor a sympathetic ally of Goethe—he was his opponent, indeed one who now demanded that Goethe acknowledge the superiority of Schopenhauerian color theory, even as he maintained that he remained a faithful and devoted servant of the master. For his part, Goethe had tried to extricate himself from communicating directly with Schopenhauer by asking the latter to correspond with his associate Dr. Seebeck, but Schopenhauer was having none of it, lashing out instead with this rejoinder: “Your Excellency has other preoccupations now, perhaps in the higher region of the creative arts” (Lütkehaus 1992: 20–23).10 By painting him as a remote, indifferent poet too busy to traffic in the more demanding medium of science, Schopenhauer signaled his poet envy as well as the strategy he would use henceforth to simultaneously praise and blame Goethe. Safranski relates how the writers Lenz and Kleist had been “nearly broken” as suitors of Goethe’s affection, yet Schopenhauer “remained true to himself and his philosophy, maintained his veneration for the master, and lost himself neither in veneration nor in spasms of self-confidence” (Safranski 1987: 278). Safranski’s words need to be interrogated: it is by no means a foregone conclusion that Schopenhauer did not lose himself in spasms of confidence, and 444

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his veneration for the master was of a highly qualified nature. In his letters, Schopenhauer is rhetorical, hyperbolic, scornful, pleading, scolding, and rude—one could continue. In public, he was critical of Goethe without subjecting him to the utmost scorn and ridicule, but even then, some of his published comments are damning with faint praise, others are thinly veiled insults. The public strategy was to invite comparison between himself and Goethe by openly praising the master, and insofar as it never came to an open, public feud or scandal, nor to outright banishment by Goethe, Schopenhauer’s strategy was effective. In order to be seen as Goethe’s heir, and particularly in order to be seen as the German thinker who offered a plausible alternative to Newton’s color theory, Schopenhauer had to have some form or degree of blessing from Goethe. In my earlier analysis of their encounter, I wrote: “Had he burned his bridges with Goethe, it is doubtful indeed whether Germany would have clasped him [Schopenhauer] to her bosom as she did finally in the 1850s and 1860s” (Del Caro 2020: 17). Today I propose that there was more at stake in effectively playing this long game: had he burned his bridges with Goethe, Schopenhauer would have never risen to the stature of Goethe’s successor and heir, which is how he regarded himself and how he wished to be regarded by the German reading public. An immediate objection might be raised against my thesis based on the fact that Schopenhauer, unlike Goethe, was an unapologetic anti-Semite and misogynist who made a point of including anti-Semitic as well as misogynistic writings in PP 2, his last book and swan song. My point, however, is that the inclusion of these unsavory aspects of his thought actually contributed to his fame and appeal in the 1850s and 1860s—these were decades in which the name and work of Goethe still resonated, to be sure, but the times were far more congruent with the spirit of Prussian authoritarianism than with Goethe’s erstwhile humanistic cosmopolitanism. In chapter 21, §250, Schopenhauer in a Socratic gesture praises dilettantes over professionals, and he opens this section quite dramatically by claiming: “So then even Goethe was a dilettante in color theory. Here a word or two about that!” (SW 6:512/PP 2:432). The claim is followed by sympathetic formulations of Goethe’s prowess: “For I have to say that the fate of Goethe’s colour theory is flagrant proof of either the dishonesty or the complete lack of judgement of the German scholarly world” (SW 6:512/PP 2:433). His indignation toward scholarly Germans becomes even more amplified: When the greatest mind of a nation makes something the main study of his life, as Goethe did with color theory, and it gains no acceptance, then it is the responsibility of the governments which fund academies to order an investigation of the matter by a commission, as happens in France with things that are far less significant (SW 6:513/PP 2:433). We will try to unravel some of Schopenhauer’s wiles in a brief treatment below of the Goethe-album remarks he appended to chapter 7 on color theory, but for now, let’s take stock of what he has revealed about Goethe: dilettante, greatest mind of the nation, made color theory his main study, gained no acceptance, shame on the government, there ought to be laws against this kind of thing, etc. Of course, Schopenhauer elevates dilettantism as Socrates had elevated amateurism versus Sophism, but the pattern of damning with faint praise is easily inferred when one considers his previous remarks about Goethe the poet and poets generally as distinguished from philosophers. At some point readers begin to digest the news that Goethe was ignored, that he was mistreated as a failure, and that Schopenhauer has and is the remedy. 445

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So, for example, in the section entitled For the Frankfurt Goethe-album, written for the centenary of Goethe’s birthday in 1849, he bemoans the “grievous and outrageous injustice suffered by Goethe with respect to his colour theory” (SW 6:211/PP 2:180). The tone of indignation omits the fact that Schopenhauer himself offered a rival theory in which he laid out Goethe’s limitations. He uses the same opportunity to cast Goethe and himself as misunderstood and neglected by specialists and scholars, insisting: the authority of the greatest man that the nation has to show for itself, along with Kant, and moreover in a matter which he pursued his whole life long as his main concern, should have more weight than the many thousands of such tradesmen put together (SW 6:212/PP 2:181). Here, too, Goethe is elevated “along with Kant,” with the clear implication that Schopenhauer should be listened to because he is their heir and successor. Next, he waxes even more personal: “If only those high-ranking gentlemen would hear my voice and, since it pleads for justice for our greatest departed countryman, acquiesce to it without first seeking the advice of those who themselves share the guilt through their irresponsible silence!” (SW 6:213/PP 2:181). Schopenhauer here instantiates himself as the only trusted authority for rectifying the wrongs committed against Goethe. The solitary, misunderstood, and impractical genius is again referenced in chapter 3, §58, where Schopenhauer explains that a genius works without reward, handing down his property to humankind. Goethe’s Artist’s Apotheosis is quoted: “And so I toiled, none recognized me, / No pupils brightened up my lot” (SW 6:91/PP 2:81). Once again, there may be an autobiographical dimension to Schopenhauer’s motivation for this quote. Earlier I discussed §242 where Schopenhauer elaborated on envy and its relation to modesty, which Goethe characterized as belonging only to scoundrels; in §242, we revisit envy, this time in the context of Seneca’s “silence of envy” or what Schopenhauer interprets as “this malicious and treacherous silence.” He quotes Goethe’s West-Eastern Divan to the effect that we should not expect recognition from the many or the few, unless it brings to light what we ourselves aspire to (SW 6:494/PP 2:417). To this, Schopenhauer adds a telling followup: “That is, at bottom everyone who confers fame in his own or a related field deprives it of himself; he can only praise at the expense of his own validation” (ibid.). If we take him on his word here, then it appears that Schopenhauer, too, would have difficulty conferring fame upon anyone in a related field (say color theory). On the other hand, seen from Goethe’s perspective, he would have had difficulty conceding merit to Schopenhauer’s theory, inasmuch as doing so would have cut into the merit of his (Goethe’s) theory. We return now to the immediate objection that could be raised against the notion of arguing that Schopenhauer would see himself, or even encourage others to see him, as Goethe’s true and legitimate heir. The biggest obstacles as I see them are the extremely unphilosophical treatment of Judaism and Jews, along with the equally unphilosophical treatment of women—either one of these might disqualify Schopenhauer as a credible successor to the “Olympian of Weimar.” Of course, Goethe was not an Olympian, but a modern, as Ernst Behler reminded us, who would have “put himself into the camp of the moderns” (Behler 1993: 99). Janaway describes how Schopenhauer’s use of the phrase “Jewish stench” is “calculated to convey a level of physical revulsion that is quite extraneous to the philosophical issues at hand” (2015: p. xxxii); railing against “the time of now” in the chapter “On 446

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women,” also “turns out to be of a piece with Schopenhauer’s conservatism” (ibid.). The argument as I make it for Schopenhauer as a competitor of Goethe is that Schopenhauer regarded himself as Goethe’s heir—not his equal, his clone, or his continuator in all matters of thought. Where he claims kinship with Goethe, where he defends Goethe’s stature and castigates scholars who preserve silence, and where he pointedly refers to Goethe as the greatest man Germany has ever produced—this is the context in which Schopenhauer wants to be the heir. If we widen the lens for an intellectual-historical approach to the issue, we must concede that Weimar classicism as represented by Goethe was only a provisional step in the direction of German democracy. Todd Kontje addresses the later nineteenth century’s appropriation of Goethe for its “conservative political agenda within the Prussian dominated Second Empire.” He explains that Goethe “was first depoliticized into an ahistorical Olympian expressing the spirit of the German people and then transformed into a Faustian figure inspiring Germany in its drive toward its national and imperial power” (Kontje 2018: 82). Goethe was a force from virtually the moment he stepped onto the German stage in the 1770s, and as a force, his energies and his aura could and would be exploited throughout the ages by various camps and causes. The Goethe depicted by Kontje coexisted quite neatly indeed with Schopenhauer who was coming into his own in the 1850s and 1860s; the Prussian zeitgeist was obviously comfortable with Schopenhauer, not in spite of his antidemocratic tendencies but because of them. Schopenhauer tried and succeeded in taming or channeling some of the force that Goethe represented, meanwhile the shaping and claiming of Goethe’s force has yielded a “new” Goethe after WW II, as “antinationalist prophet of world literature,” such that Kontje writes “the author once appropriated by nineteenth-century nationalists has become the patron saint of twenty-first century cosmopolitanism” (ibid.). So far I have comprehensively addressed the literal and symbolic presence of Goethe in PP 2, within the confines of a single essay, and certainly not with the rigor that still needs to be applied to exploring Schopenhauer’s engagement with Goethe. One very important dimension of the book remains, and it, too, factors into my argument: the appendix “Some Verses.” The poems can and should be read as poems in their own right—and here it is significant that Schopenhauer concludes his final book of philosophy with his own poetry. We know from the tenets of his philosophical system that poetry speaks from a different place than philosophy, that it is more closely related to music, and therefore more likely to express genius than some of the other higher forms of culture. We are reminded of Socrates in his last days, as Nietzsche describes him in The Birth of Tragedy, the “despotic logician” who suddenly turns into a mystic and begins to practice music, after neglecting Dionysus his entire life (BT 14). Schopenhauer gives us a masterful preamble to the relatively few verses he had penned throughout his life, this time not couched in the language of philosophical argumentation, but translated as it were into an idiom far more inclusive and accessible. He first meekly apologizes for including the poems “because one cannot be poet and philosopher at the same time.” Then he explains his motivation for including the poems: Now since people dare to show their subjective inner selves more freely in poems, under the guise of metre and rhyme, than in prose, and generally communicate in a more purely human, more personal and in any case quite different way than in philosophemes, and precisely by doing so get a bit closer to their readers, so I make the 447

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sacrifice to those future sympathetic readers of a few attempts at poetry, mostly from my youth, presenting them here in the expectation that they will thank me for it. (SW 6:692/PP 2:586) The principle of individuation is lifting here, allowing the unsheltered Arthur Schopenhauer to extend an invitation. The last word of Parerga and Paralipomena 2 is the quatrain called Finale. Structurally, at least, the last word is granted to the poet, or perhaps better, it is loaned to him, insofar as this poet is the philosopher Schopenhauer intent on celebrating his victory and elevating his ego. The exhaustion as well as the self-praise were earned; there is no self-effacement, no loss, or submerging of the ego; in agon with one of the greatest thinkers of modernity, opposed by him and all others, Schopenhauer battled through and prevailed. Exhausted now I stand, my race is run, The weary brow can scarcely bear its laurels: Yet I look fondly on what I have done, Forever unperturbed by others’ quarrels (SW 6:698/PP 2:591).

Notes 1 For Nietzsche’s texts, I have referred to Nietzsche (1988, 2013). Citations are by section number and use the following title abbreviations: BT = The Birth of Tragedy; SE = Schopenhauer as Educator; WS = The Wanderer and His Shadow. 2 Lauxtermann (2000) also claims that Goethe was not wrong in failing to recognize Schopenhauer as his true heir, though it remains unclear to me whether Lauxtermann is limiting his claim to color theory or to serving as Goethe’s heir overall. Lauxtermann adds that Goethe “surely had some personal reasons for keeping this self-appointed pretender at arm’s length” (72–73). 3 In WWR1, sections 35 and 36, Schopenhauer features two Faust innovations by Goethe. §35 sets up a hypothetical according to which the earth spirit (der Erdgeist) would reassure us that there is no actual loss or gain in the world of appearances, instead, “infinity will always stand open, undiminished, for the return of any event or work that was strangled in its infancy” (SW 2:217/WWR 1:207). Inasmuch as Goethe coined the term “earth spirit” and made it a key feature of Faust’s motivation, it is fascinating to see Schopenhauer’s appropriation and personification of the earth spirit here. Just pages later, in §36, he reveals that he still has Goethe in his thoughts when he writes: “This is why people have always considered the activity of a genius as inspiration (as in fact the name itself indicates), the activity of a superhuman being distinct from the individual himself and which takes possession of the individual only periodically” (SW 2:221/WWR 1:212). We trace this thought to Goethe because he is referred to directly later in this section, where Schopenhauer defends his theory of colors and lists Goethe as another genius who was not good at mathematics (ibid.). But the term “superhuman” draws our immediate attention due to the fact that Goethe put this term into modern circulation, in the crucial scene where the Earth Spirit is conjured by Faust, who cannot bear to look at it; the Earth Spirit scornfully calls Faust “superman” and a “writhing worm” (Faust I, lines 489, 498). 4 See Klaus L. Berghahn, “Maßlose Kritik: Friedrich Nicolai als Kritiker und Opfer der Weimarer Klassiker,” Zeitschrift für Germanistik vol. 8, No. 1 (1987), p. 55. (50–60). 5 Since Goethe worked on Faust throughout his lifetime, from the early 1770s until its final publication in 1832 after his death, it might be inferred from a reading of these lines that Schopenhauer construed them as an attack on him personally, but that could not be the case; these lines were written very early on, long before the two worked together on color theory in 1813. However, Schopenhauer “might” appear later on in Faust II as the student whom Mephistopheles had “advised,” now arrogant and quite obnoxious; Lütkehaus (97, 103) refers to this scene added in 1829 as treating Schopenhauer’s subjectivism (Faust lines 6787-94).

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In Agon with Goethe: Parerga and Paralipomena 2 6 Schopenhauer’s truly revealing thoughts about Goethe are found in his letter to him of Sept. 3, 1815, which I have described in a previous essay as “stunningly bold” and reminiscent of the undelivered letter Franz Kafka had written to his father. I provide greater detail about Schopenhauer’s letter and his own color theory in “Schopenhauer’s Intellectual Relationship with Goethe,” pp. 10–14. 7 Essentially the same point is made in Ch.23 §274, where the public is criticized for being too interested in material versus form, for “reading more about Goethe than by him” (SW 6:538/PP 2:455). 8 Janaway in PP 2 observes that “Schopenhauer could never get past his impression that Newton had produced a manifest absurdity by claiming that a single white light was really at the same time a bundle of different coloured lights” (p. xxv). 9 Cf. this statement from the PP 2 chapter on color theory: “Even Goethe, who to be sure investigated and discussed the effect, the given phenomenon, and so the sensation in the eye, far more than others, did not yet go far enough in this, since otherwise he would have had to arrive at my truths, which are the root of all theory of colour and contains the grounds of his” (SW 6:189/PP 2:161). 10 Another possible dig at Goethe, though smaller, is in Ch.23 “On writing and style,” §275, where S. claims that once a thought reaches the borderline of words, it becomes petrified and is dead; where it begins to live outside of us, the thought ceases to live within us. Goethe’s poem Saying, Gainsaying (Spruch, Widerspruch) is quoted, with Schopenhauer adding: “After all, even the poet says:” (SW 6:/539PP 2:456) Goethe is not named here—“even the poet” happens to be Goethe.

References Behler, Ernst. (1993). German Romantic Literary Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bell, Matthew. (1994). Goethe’s Naturalistic Anthropology: Man and Other Plants. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Berghahn, Klaus. (1987). “Maßlose Kritik: Friedrich Nicolai als Kritiker und Opfer der Weimarer Klassiker” Zeitschrift für Germanistik Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 50–60. Brandes, Georg. (1922). Goethe. Berlin: Paul Franke Verlag. Del Caro, Adrian. (2020). “Schopenhauer’s Intellectual Relationship with Goethe: An Ambivalent Affinity” in Robert L. Wicks, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Schopenhauer. New York: Oxford University Press, 9–28. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. (1976). Faust. A Tragedy, trans. Walter Arndt, ed. Cyrus Hamlin. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Janaway, Christopher. (1994). Schopenhauer. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. (2015). “Introduction” in Adrian Del Caro, Christopher Janaway, Trans. and ed. Arthur Schopenhauer. Parerga and Paralipomena. Short Philosophical Essays. Volume 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, xiv–xxxiii. Kontje, Todd. (2018). Imperial Fictions: German Literature Before and Beyond the Nation-State. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Lauxtermann, Paul. (2000). Schopenhauer’s Broken World- View: Colours and Ethics Between Kant and Goethe. Dordrecht: Springer-Science+Business Media. Lütkehaus, Ludger. (1992). Arthur Schopenhauer. Der Briefwechsel mit Goethe und andere Dokumente zur Farbenlehre. Zurich: Haffmans Verlag. Mann, Thomas. (1960). Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen in Gesammelte Werke in 12 Bänden, vol. XII. Berlin: S. Fischer. Neymeyr, Barbara. (2016). “Das ‘Labyrinth des Lebens’ im Spiegel der Literatur. Zur exemplarischen Funktion der Faust-Tragödie und anderer Werke Goethes in Schopehauers Ästehtik und Willensmetaphysik” in D. Schubbe and S. Fauth, eds. Schopenhauer und Goethe. Biographische und philosophische Perspektiven. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 299–335. Nietzsche, Friedrich. (1988). Schopenhauer als Erzieher in G. Colli and M. Montinari, eds. Friedrich Nietzsche. Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Einzelbänden, vol. 1. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

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Adrian Del Caro ———. (2013). Human, All Too Human II and Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Human, All Too Human II (Spring 1878–Fall 1879), trans. with an Afterword, by Gary Handwerk in A. Schrift and D. Large, eds. The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, vol. 4. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Pizer, John. (2006). The Idea of World Literature: History and Pedagogical Practice. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Safranski, Rüdiger. (1987). Schopenhauer und Die wilden Jahre der Philosophie. Eine Biographie. Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag. Wittkowski, Wolfgang. (1991). “Goethe and Schopenhauer: A Phenomenology of the Final Vision in Faust II” Analecta Husserliana Vol. 37, pp. 383–408.

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31 SCHOPENHAUER AND HEGEL Stephen Houlgate

31.1  Schopenhauer on Hegel Schopenhauer, famously, loathed Hegel. Yet this was not always the case. As David Cartwright notes, “in 1813, Hegel was outside of Schopenhauer’s philosophical orbit, although he was not completely unknown to Schopenhauer”.1 That summer Schopenhauer was lent a copy of Hegel’s Science of Logic (1812), but he returned it later in the year, noting that he did not read “such things”.2 In 1820 he was more positive and remarked that Hegel had the “kindness” to approve the topic of his test lecture at the University of Berlin “with the greatest willingness”.3 In subsequent years, however, things change dramatically, and Schopenhauer unleashes what Nietzsche calls his “unintelligent rage against Hegel”.4 He accuses Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel of being “sophists” who lack intellectual “honesty” (SW 5:22/PP 1:22). Yet he judges Hegel to be the worst, for the others are at least “men of talent”, whereas he is a “crude, mindless charlatan” who serves up nothing but “nonsense” (SW 1:40; 4:147/FR 43; OBM 149). Moreover, Hegel produces his “nonsense” to “throw dust” in his readers’ eyes and “mystify” them (SW 5:25/PP 1:25). Indeed, he is like “a cuttlefish, creating around itself a cloud of darkness so that no one can see what it is” (SW 4:7/WN 328). Hegel engages in mystification, we are told, to deceive readers into thinking he is more profound than he is and thereby to secure his academic position. In this way, Schopenhauer remarks, “the interest of the person is satisfied, that of the truth betrayed” (SW 5:24/PP 1:24). The same self-interest leads Hegel to pander to the “religion of the country” and venerate the state as the “ethical organism” in which people fulfill their “determination”, like “the bee in the beehive” (SW 5:24, 157, 164/PP 1:24, 132, 138). Hegel thus turned philosophy, “the daughter of reason”, into “a tool of the State’s purposes, of obscurantism and protestant Jesuitry”; and in so doing he hid behind the “most senseless gibberish that has ever been heard, at least outside the madhouse” (SW 4:85/FW 99). Schopenhauer was proud and cantankerous,5 but he especially disliked Hegel because he regarded the man and his philosophy as “the source for all of his failures”.6 He held Hegel responsible — through the latter’s unmerited popularity and deleterious effect on students — for his lack of academic success and the failure of his major work, The World DOI: 10.4324/9781003048992-36

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as Will and Representation (1818), to attract the wide readership he felt it deserved. Two events in particular provoked Schopenhauer’s resentment toward his “philosophical antichrist”.7 First, after requesting the right to do his habilitation and hold lectures at the University of Berlin, Schopenhauer was permitted to give a test lecture on 23 March 1820 to an audience that included Hegel. During the discussion Hegel and Schopenhauer had a minor dispute about the “motivation” of animals and the meaning of the term “animal functions”.8 Nonetheless, Hegel voted to allow Schopenhauer to hold lectures. Moreover, he did so in full knowledge that Schopenhauer had asked that his lectures in the summer semester be scheduled at the same time as Hegel’s — a request that outraged other colleagues.9 When Hegel and Schopenhauer gave their lectures, students flocked to hear Hegel, but only five turned up to hear Schopenhauer. He discontinued the course before the semester ended and eventually left Berlin in May 1822.10 He returned in 1825 and, with characteristic stubbornness, again scheduled his lectures at the same time as Hegel’s — with a similar result. No philosophy students came to hear him, and in winter 1826–7 he attracted just three medical students.11 Schopenhauer blamed Hegel for the failure of his lectures, even though Hegel “did nothing personally to derail Schopenhauer’s academic career”.12 His hatred of Hegel then became more intense over the years until, in On Will in Nature (1836), he launched the first of numerous public diatribes against his enemy (see SW 4:XXII, 7/WN 314, 328). The second event to fuel Schopenhauer’s hatred was his failure in 1840 to win a prize from the Royal Danish Society of Sciences for his essay “On the Basis of Morals”, even though his was the only entry. One reason listed by the Society for not awarding a prize was that in the essay “several distinguished philosophers of recent times are mentioned in such an indecent fashion as to provoke just and grave offence” (SW 4:276/OBM 258). Schopenhauer took this to refer principally to Hegel, so in the preface to the first edition of The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics (1841), which contained the essay, he reaffirmed his “unqualified damning judgment” on Hegel’s “pestilential influence” (SW 4:XVIII/PE 14). Yet Schopenhauer also had philosophical disagreements with Hegel. Above all, he contends, the “fundamental thought” of Hegel’s “pseudo-philosophy” is “absurd”: namely, to make the universal concepts, which we abstract from empirical intuition and which hence arise through thinking away determinations [Wegdenken von Bestimmungen], … into the primary, the original, the truly real. (SW 5:173/PP 1:145-6) For Hegel, “thinking itself in the proper sense, or concepts, were to be identical with the essence in itself of things”. Accordingly, “logic was to be at the same time the true metaphysics”, and so “we only needed to think, or let concepts rule, in order to know how the world outside is absolutely constituted”. This, however, has the absurd consequence that “everything haunting a skull would at once be true and real” (SW 5:30/PP 1:29). Furthermore, Schopenhauer notes, Hegel ignores Kant’s insight that concepts get their content from sensuous intuition and without the latter are “empty”.13 This in turn reduces Hegel’s texts to “meaningless verbiage” (SW 5:23/PP 1:23). Another problem is that Hegel abandons the principle — governing “the normal employment of reason” — that there should be reasons or “grounds” for our thoughts. 452

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Schopenhauer cites the following lines from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) to support his charge: it is not difficult to see that the way of asserting a proposition, adducing reasons [Gründe] for it, and in the same way refuting its opposite by reasons, is not the form in which truth can appear. Truth is its own self-movement. (GW 9:35/PS 28) Schopenhauer then adds: “it is not difficult to see that whoever puts forward such a thing is a shameless charlatan who wants to fool the simpletons” (SW 5:24/PP 1:23-4). As Schopenhauer points out, Hegel replaces thought based on “reasons” with the “selfmovement of concepts” (SW 5:23/PP 1:23). Such movement, however, remains incomprehensible to Schopenhauer and, he claims, is designed to make the young “stupid and wholly incapable of any thought”: for Hegel’s “monstrous conjunctions of words … cancel and contradict each other, so that the spirit torments itself in vain to connect some thought to them, until it finally sinks down exhausted” (SW 5:25/PP 1:24). Equally reprehensible, Schopenhauer thinks, is the fact that the “self-movement of concepts” — or “the pure selfthinking of the absolute Idea” — is equated by Hegel with the “immediate apprehension of the divine”: for this confirms that Hegel aims “to pass off the matters of state religion as the findings of philosophy” (SW 1:123/FR 116). A further reason for Schopenhauer’s rejection of Hegel is that the latter understands the world to be governed by reason or the “Idea”, whereas Schopenhauer insists it is the expression of an irrational, blindly striving will.14 Hegel’s philosophy — especially his philosophy of history — thus exemplifies the “optimism” we see in Leibniz, to which Schopenhauer opposes his implacably pessimistic view that life is not “rational” at all but mainly full of “misery” (Elend) (SW 3:205 / WWR 2:194). For Schopenhauer, history shows us the same suffering, and the same underlying will, in all humanity — “what is identical in all events, in ancient as well as in modern times, in the Orient as well as the Occident”. By contrast, Hegel understands world history as “a whole following a plan” (ein planmäßiges Ganzes) that leads to “a fat, comfortable and substantial state”. Such an understanding betrays a “shallow optimism” because it substitutes the fiction of historical progress for the fact that “the basic qualities of the human heart and head” — “many bad ones, few good” — remain unchanged (SW 3:505-8/WWR 2:459-61). Moreover, Schopenhauer writes, Hegel’s conception of history also rests on “a crude and shallow realism” that considers “appearance” in time to be “the essence in itself of the world”. It thus ignores Kant’s transcendental idealism, according to which “all becoming” is mere “appearance” and “time is ideal” — the mere form of human cognition (SW 3:5056/WWR 2:459-60). Hegel goes wrong, therefore, by failing again to accept the insights of Kant (and, indeed, Plato). Schopenhauer also complains that Hegel does not understand science or nature. After their disagreement in 1820 about the term “animal functions”, he refers to Hegel as “Monsieur Know-nothing”.15 In the first preface of The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics, he then subjects three passages on nature from Hegel’s Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1827) to his withering critique. In the first passage, Hegel maintains — mistakenly — that magnetizing iron alters its density or “specific gravity”: 453

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when a bar of iron, evenly balanced on its fulcrum, is magnetized, it loses its equilibrium and shows itself to be heavier at one pole than at the other. Here the one part is so affected that without changing its volume it becomes heavier; the matter, without increase in its mass, has thus become specifically heavier [specifisch schwerer]. (GW 20:293/EPN 127 [§293 Remark]) In response, Schopenhauer delights in pointing out the error and mocking the “syllogism” he takes to lead to it. This syllogism proceeds as follows: If a bar supported at its centre of gravity subsequently becomes heavier on one side, then it falls to that side; but an iron bar falls to one side once it has been magnetized: therefore, it has become heavier in that place. This is a “worthy analogue”, Schopenhauer writes, to the inference: “All geese have two legs, you have two legs, therefore you are a goose”, and it shows Hegel’s profound “lack of understanding” (Unverstand) (SW 4:XXI/PE 17). In the second passage, Hegel maintains that “gravitation directly contradicts the law of inertia; for, by virtue of the former, matter strives out of itself [aus sich selbst] towards the other” (GW 20:266/EPN 63 [§269 Remark]). For Schopenhauer, however, neither being attracted nor being “pushed away” (gestoßen) by another body contradicts the law of inertia, but each presupposes that law: for each involves the “occurrence of an external cause that removes or alters the hitherto pertaining [bestehend] rest or movement” — the body’s current inertial state. Indeed, Schopenhauer insists, the law of inertia “flows immediately” from that of causality and is just its “converse”: for, whereas the latter law states that “every alteration is brought about by a cause”, the law of inertia simply states that “where no cause intervenes, no alteration occurs”. Anything that would contradict the law of inertia — as Hegel claims of gravitation — would thus contradict the law of causality too. In so doing, it “would contradict what is certain a priori”, and to advocate that is once again to display a “lack of understanding”, indeed impudent “stupidity” (Albernheit) (SW 4:XXII-XXIII/PE 17-18). In the third passage, Hegel notes that those who explain elasticity through the “invention of pores” admit “in principle that matter is perishable [vergänglich], not absolute”. Yet, he continues: in practice this admission is resisted …; so that in fact matter is regarded only as affirmative, as absolutely self-subsistent, eternal. This error springs from the general error of the understanding [Verstand] that what is metaphysical is only a “thoughtthing” alongside, i.e. outside actuality. (GW 20:296-7/EPN 135 [§298 Remark]).16 Schopenhauer’s response is characteristically blunt: What fool [Dummkopf] has ever conceded that matter is perishable? And which one calls the opposite an error? — That matter persists, i.e. that it does not come into existence and perish like everything else …— this is a cognition a priori, as firm and certain as any mathematical one. 454

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Hegel — the Danish Academy’s “distinguished philosopher” — thus again shows his ignorance and proves himself to be a “teacher of absurdities” (SW 4:XXIII-XXIV/PE 18-19).

31.2  Hegelian Responses to Schopenhauer Schopenhauer did not have extensive knowledge of Hegel’s philosophy.17 Yet he quotes from Hegel’s Phenomenology and Encyclopaedia, and expressions he attributes to Hegel (such as the “self-movement of concepts”) also indicate some familiarity with the latter’s texts. So how well did he understand Hegel? Consider first Schopenhauer’s objections to Hegel’s claims “that bodies can become heavier” through being magnetized, “that gravitation contradicts the law of inertia”, and “that matter is perishable” (SW 4:XXIV/PE 19). As already noted, Hegel is wrong to claim that the “magnetic inclination” (or downward dip) of a balanced iron bar is due to an increase in density.18 Schopenhauer, however, is himself wrong to assert that Hegel’s claim rests on a faulty syllogism. Hegel’s argument is not that magnetism increases the density and weight of one end of the bar because whatever “falls to one side” does so by becoming heavier. He thinks that magnetism in particular increases density, and that this example disproves a theory in contemporary physics. According to this theory, material parts of the same size always weigh the same and so do not differ in density. Bodies of the same weight thus have the same number of material parts and so differ in volume and thus density only because of the number of empty spaces or “pores” they contain. For Hegel, such “pores” are an “invention” (Erdichtung) made necessary by the initial assumption — itself a “formal a priori invention” — that matter comprises “parts” identical in weight and volume (GW 20:293/EPN 127 [§293 Remark]). He believes, however, that magnetizing iron proves both inventions to be erroneous and redundant. It does so by showing that a body can change its density without changing its volume, or the number of identical “parts” it is supposed to contain, because the matter constituting it itself becomes denser (and so increases its mass).19 This change in the matter’s density in turn removes the need for “pores” in the body. The fact that Hegel is mistaken in claiming that magnetism alters density does not undermine his philosophical point: that matter differs in density and “pores” are thus an unnecessary invention of the “understanding” with no basis in experience. Schopenhauer notes Hegel’s denial that density rests on “difference in porosity” (SW 4:XX/PE 16), but he shows no grasp of, or interest in, Hegel’s argument. He is concerned only to highlight what he sees as Hegel’s unintelligent reliance on an obviously invalid syllogism. One reason — besides personal animosity — why Schopenhauer is not interested in Hegel’s argument is that he accepts the principle Hegel criticizes, namely that matter is unchanging. This becomes apparent in Schopenhauer’s brusque dismissal of the third passage in which Hegel contends that “matter is perishable, not absolute” (because it contains the moment of negation). For Schopenhauer, there is no room for argument here: the states of matter can change, but matter is itself unalterable. Indeed, the idea that matter could change is unimaginable “because the form of our understanding does not admit it” (SW 4:XXIII/PE 18). Schopenhauer thus sees no need to examine Hegel’s conception of matter because he knows “a priori” that he is right (and, from experience, that Hegel is a Dummkopf). Schopenhauer’s critique of Hegel’s second passage also rests on his “a priori” certainty: namely, that gravitation presupposes, rather than contradicts, the law of inertia. In his view, 455

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when one body attracts another, it changes the latter’s inertial state through external causality. Since he regards such causality as a necessary form of the principle of sufficient reason, and as a necessary condition of experience, he sees no need to examine why Hegel thinks that a gravitating body strives “out of itself” to unite with other bodies. In his view, Hegel simply lacks an understanding of causality, inertia, and gravity. Hegel’s conception of gravity is, however, more subtle and insightful than Schopenhauer recognizes. In his philosophy of nature, Hegel derives matter, logically, from space, time, and motion and so conceives of matter initially as enduring, self-identical space that moves. Matter is thus inherently in motion: “just as there is no motion without matter, so too, there is no matter without motion” (GW 24, 3:1208/EPN 44 [§261 Addition]). Material bodies are “inert” (träge) insofar as they preserve their state of motion (or relative rest) until that state is changed by the external impact or “thrust” (Stoß) of another body (GW 20:2568/EPN 47-9 [§§264-5]). Yet they also exhibit their own “immanent” motion toward other bodies — motion that is not the result of any external cause. Such “gravitational” motion is evident in bodies that fall freely to the ground (according to Galileo’s law) (GW 20:2615/EPN 56-9 [§§267 and Remark]). Note that, in contrast to Schopenhauer, Hegel does not understand gravity to be a force. It is simply a body’s inherent motion toward other bodies. Bodies are thus not attracted by one another, but actively gravitate toward one another. Note, too, that every inert body gravitates in this way; in this respect, pace Karl Popper, Hegel acknowledges the identity of inert and gravitating mass.20 Yet, in his view, inertial and gravitational motion are also at odds with one another: for the former preserves its identity (until it is altered by an external cause) whereas gravitation is matter’s inherent endeavor to lose its identity in a union with other matter. Gravitating matter thus challenges the principle of identity to which abstract “understanding” clings.21 Schopenhauer, who in many respects exemplifies such “understanding”, remains largely ignorant of Hegel’s account of matter and gravity. Yet he is correct in some of his claims about Hegel’s logic. Hegel does maintain that thought discloses the “essentialities” (Wesenheiten) of things and that, accordingly, “logic coincides with metaphysics” (GW 20:67/EL 56 [§24]). Pace Schopenhauer, however, this does not mean that “everything haunting a skull would at once be true and real” (SW 5:30/PP 1:29). Thought discloses the truth — the nature of being — only when it proceeds in the right way, only when (in Schopenhauer’s own words) it is thought “in the proper sense”. More precisely, thought reveals the nature of being when it frees itself from all assumptions and presuppositions that usually determine, and can distort, our comprehension of the world. For Hegel, philosophy or “science” should thus be preceded by “total presuppositionlessness” (gänzliche Voraussetzungslosigkeit) — a requirement that is fulfilled when thought freely “abstracts from everything, and grasps its own pure abstraction, the simplicity of thought” (GW 20:118/EL 124 [§78 Remark]).22 This “simplicity” in turn is just the indeterminate being of thought — thought as sheer indeterminate being. By setting aside all assumptions about itself, therefore, thought reduces itself to pure being and so becomes the thought of such being. In Hegel’s words, the beginning of logic “may presuppose nothing, must not be mediated by anything or have a ground …. It must therefore be simply an immediacy, or rather only immediacy itself” — pure and simple being. “The beginning is therefore pure being”, and logic coincides with metaphysics — the science of being (GW 21:56/SL 48). Hegel’s argument here is reminiscent of Descartes’ cogito argument in the Meditations. For Descartes, if we strip away all we take for granted about thought (and the world), we 456

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are left with “I am, I exist” — the existence of the “I” that is irreducible “so long as I think that I am something”.23 Hegel, however, takes the reduction of thought a stage further and removes the “I” itself. This leaves us simply with thought as “being, pure being — without any further determination”: being that is the beginning of a new metaphysical logic (GW 21:68/SL 59).24 In contrast to Hegel, Schopenhauer rejects the idea that philosophy can be “presuppositionless”. “In philosophy”, he writes, “every method that is allegedly presuppositionless [voraussetzungslos] is hot air, since something must always be regarded as given in order to proceed from it” (SW 6:35/PP 2:34). From Hegel’s perspective, however, this assertion is itself merely a dogmatic presupposition that prevents further reflection on the matter; and, like Descartes, Hegel thinks that thought must set aside all such presuppositions — about itself and the world — if it is to discover the true nature of things, of being itself. How, though, is thought to proceed to further insights? What is the method of Hegel’s speculative logic? Hegel’s answer is clear: if more is to be learned about being — than that it is pure being — that “more” must arise because being determines itself in our thinking. As he puts it, “it can only be the nature of the content that moves itself in scientific cognition” (GW 21:7-8/SL 9-10). The method of Hegel’s logic thus consists in letting being determine itself: “if pure being is taken as the content of pure knowing, then the latter has to step back from its content, [and] allow it free play [ihn für sich selbst gewähren zu lassen] without determining it further” (GW 21:59/SL 50). In other words, we must become passive in our thinking of being (and of the “Idea” that being proves to be): Philosophical thinking proceeds analytically in that it simply takes up its object, the Idea, and lets it go its own way [dieselbe gewähren läßt], while it simply watches the movement and development of it, so to speak. To this extent philosophising is wholly passive [passiv]. (GW 23, 3:960/EL 305 [§238 Addition]) As we proceed through Hegel’s logic, therefore, we follow the “movement of being itself” (GW 21:66/SL 56). Yet being proves to be not just pure being but quality, quantity, essence, and eventually self-determining reason, or what Hegel calls “concept” (Begriff) and “Idea” (Idee). From the perspective of the end of Hegel’s logic, therefore, the “movement of being” is to be understood as the “movement of the concept” or “the self-movement of the absolute Idea” (GW 12:237-8 / SL 736-7). Such “self-movement” in turn incorporates the self-movement of all the categories that emerge from being — categories that are not only forms of being but also forms of thought or concepts. (The “concept” is thus one of many concepts in Hegel’s logic.) Yet note that, for Hegel, we, as thinkers, are not purely passive in speculative logic but also active: for we set out the “movement of being”. We do so by rendering explicit what is implicit in a category and thereby bringing a new category to the fore. Indeed, Hegel writes, “the whole course of philosophising … is nothing else but the mere positing [Setzen] of what is already contained in a concept” (GW 20:125/EL 141 [§88 Remark]). Yet our activity of rendering explicit (or “positing”) is wholly determined by what is implicit in each category and so by what each itself makes necessary. Through our activity, therefore, we follow passively the logical development, or “self-movement”, of the categories themselves.25 Schopenhauer appears unaware of the active side to Hegel’s method. Nonetheless, he comes close to the truth when he says that, for Hegel, human beings “only had to give 457

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free play (dialectical self-movement) to their thoughts” to reveal the nature of being (or, in Schopenhauer’s sarcastic words, “all mysteries of heaven and earth”) (SW 5:31/PP 1:30). Furthermore, he is right that, in setting out the “self-movement of concepts”, Hegel rejects the familiar method of “asserting a proposition” and “adducing reasons [Gründe] for it” (SW 5:23-4 / PP 1:23-4). Yet he fails to understand, or is simply unmoved by, Hegel’s reasons for rejecting the method of “adducing reasons”. For Schopenhauer, that method just is the proper way to think: all judgments laying claim to truth must have a “ground of knowledge” (Erkenntnisgrund) (SW 1:105/FR 100-1). For Hegel, however, any “grounds” or reasons we give for our thoughts and judgments are themselves “in need of further reasons, and so on ad infinitum” (GW 9:45/PS 40); so thinking on the basis of reasons “admits of no certain and ultimate ground” (GW 20:57-8/EL 40 [§16 Remark]). Whatever reasons we adduce in our thinking, therefore, rest ultimately on ungrounded assumptions and so are ultimately no more than assumptions themselves — assertions without proper justification. Thinking on the basis of “reasons” is thus not as rational as it thinks it is. As we have seen, Hegel’s alternative to such thinking is to set all assumptions aside and begin from indeterminate being and then to render explicit what is made necessary by such being — that is, to do speculative logic. Since such logic articulates what is necessary in being (and thought) and does so without prior assumptions, it is thoroughly rational; indeed, for Hegel, it is the only thought that is completely rational. If, therefore, we want to think rationally, and not rely on hidden assertions, we must eschew “reasons” and follow the immanent development of thought and being. Speculative logic is thus not a space of reasons (Gründe) but the space of pure reason (Vernunft) — the reason or “Idea” that being proves to be. Schopenhauer, however, ignores Hegel’s reasons for preferring reason over “reasons”, and sees in Hegel’s dialectic only “absolute nonsense [Galimathias]” (SW 5:31/PP 1:30).26 As already noted, Schopenhauer also considers Hegel’s texts to contain meaningless “verbiage” for another reason: he understands concepts to be abstracted from “empirical intuition” and to require such intuition to have content or meaning, but he sees no empirical component in the categories in Hegel’s logic (SW 5:173/PP 1:145-6). Like Kant, however, Hegel distinguishes pure categories from empirical concepts, and his logic derives only the former from the “simplicity” of thought. Furthermore, for Hegel (though not for Kant), categories have “content” in their internal logical complexity or “concretion”, and so do not need to be made “sensible” (sinnlich) to have “sense” (Sinn) (GW 21:32/SL 27-8, and KrV B 299). Yet they underlie all empirical concepts and indeed empirical perception: “sensory consciousness is therefore aware of the object only as a being, a something, an existing thing”, all of which are pure categories of thought (GW 20:424/EPM 147 [§418 Remark]). For Schopenhauer, empirical intuition of objects is “intellectual” in being structured by causality, but it does not presuppose concepts (which are all derived from such intuition) (SW 2:15, 48-9/WWR 1:34, 63-4).27 By contrast, Hegel agrees with Kant that empirical intuition of objects requires pure categories through which the very form of being an “object” is introduced into consciousness.28 Hegel departs from Kant, however, in arguing that categories are not just forms of thought, but also belong to being itself.29 Indeed, he claims, they and their inherent “dialectic” structure nature and history. Neither of the latter is purely rational for Hegel: nature, in its “impotence” (Ohnmacht), is shot through with contingencies that continue to haunt history (GW 20:239-41/EPN 22-4 [§250 and Remark]). Yet Hegel thinks that reason, or 458

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the “Idea” — as well as causes identified by natural science — makes necessary different “stages” of nature, such as gravity, light, and organic life (GW 20:238-9/EPN 20 [§249]). In history, too, the “cunning of reason” leads, through the self-interested “passions” of individuals, to the emergence of modern states that are — not perfectly, but more or less — free. World history is therefore “the progress of the consciousness of freedom” (VG 63, 105/LPWH 54, 89).30 Hegel thus rejects Schopenhauer’s claim that “the basic qualities of the human heart and head” remain unchanged, and he emphasizes the significant differences between the religious, political, and ethical practices of the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and moderns. Pace Schopenhauer, however, there is no “shallow optimism” in Hegel’s view of history. Hegel does not overlook the obvious violence and suffering in history, on which Schopenhauer focuses; indeed, he calls history the “slaughter-bench” (Schlachtbank) on which the “happiness of nations” and “virtue of individuals” are sacrificed (VG 79-80/LPWH 68-9). Yet he thinks that, despite this violence, and sometimes through it, social and political institutions of genuine freedom have arisen in some modern states — states that are not just like “beehives” but guarantee freedom of property, action, and profession (see GW 26, 3:140910/PR 239-40 [§265 and Addition]). Hegel thus rejects Schopenhauer’s grimly pessimistic view of history — which sees in it little but “confusion and wreckage” (VG 80/LPWH 69) — but he does not do so through “optimism”. Rather, he detects in history’s “confusion” a clear development, driven not only by passion but also by reason, toward increasing human freedom.

31.3  Differences and Similarities Between Schopenhauer and Hegel Schopenhauer shows some familiarity with Hegel’s thought, but clearly fails to do it justice. He does not, in Hegel’s words, “enter into the power of his opponent and place himself within the circle of his strength” (GW 12:15/SL 512), but his aim is primarily to expose Hegel as an unintelligent charlatan. Yet even if Schopenhauer had sought to understand Hegel’s thought, he would still have been dissatisfied since some differences between the two thinkers are so stark. First, Schopenhauer defends Kant’s transcendental idealism, whereas Hegel rejects it and maintains that space and time, though indeed a priori forms of our intuition, also belong independently to nature itself (and are made necessary by the logic of being).31 Second, Schopenhauer conceives of thought, or cognition, principally as the “instrument” of the will (SW 2:345/WWR 1:319), whereas Hegel conceives of the human will itself (in contrast to animal instinct) as thought’s drive to realize its purposes in the world (see GW 26, 3:1067/PR 26 [§4 Addition]). Third, Schopenhauer commends the ascetic “negation” (Verneinung) of the will, which aims to extinguish bodily desires, and he sees such asceticism as the cornerstone of Christian ethics (see SW 2:449-61; 3:717-19/WWR 1:406-17; 2:640-1). Hegel, by contrast, rejects asceticism and the “monkish” virtues of chastity, poverty, and obedience, and he defends, as more truly Christian, the “ethical” principles of marriage, “rectitude” (Rechtschaffenheit) — the virtue of earning a living through one’s own work — and individual freedom (which entails obedience to what is ethical and rational, rather than to divine “authority”) (see VPW 828-9, 878-82). Hegel derives his understanding of the world from a systematically presuppositionless beginning and so considers it well-founded, whereas he would regard Schopenhauer’s views as dogmatic assumptions. For Schopenhauer, however, Hegel is an ignorant charlatan who 459

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undermines Kant’s legacy. It is hard, therefore, to envisage any real reconciliation between the two. Yet there are similarities, even points of agreement, between them.32 Both Hegel and Schopenhauer admire Dutch painting and the music of Mozart and Rossini, though Schopenhauer was evidently discomfited by the thought that Hegel shared his esteem for Mozart’s Magic Flute.33 Both endorse Goethe’s theory of color, though bizarrely Schopenhauer appears to blame Hegel for the failure of Germans to accept that theory.34 Both are also critical of reductionism in science and philosophy and insist that humans, animals, plants, and inorganic bodies cannot all be understood through the same (physico-mechanical) principles (see SW 2:168-70/WWR 1:166-7, and GW 24, 3:1267/EPN 115 [§286 Addition]). Both philosophers also emphasize that human subjectivity is embodied. Schopenhauer stresses repeatedly that an individual’s cognition is “mediated” by the body (see SW 2:118/WWR 1:124), and Hegel, too, insists that thinking involves “bodiliness” (Leiblichkeit) (and that, consequently, “lack of habit and long continuation of thinking cause headaches”) (GW 20:418/EPM 132-3 [§410 Remark]). Yet Schopenhauer appears to fall into a paradox that Hegel avoids: for Schopenhauer, cognition is mediated by the brain, indeed the whole body, but the body itself belongs to the world of “representation” (Vorstellung), which only exists for the knowing subject (see SW 3:277/WWR 2:258). The paradox is resolved by giving priority to transcendental idealism, according to which the subject is the “bearer of the world”, that is “always presupposed” by objects, and the idea that the body conditions cognition merely belongs to the way this subject understands its relation to nature (see SW 2:5-6, 35-7/WWR 1:25, 52-4). For Hegel, however, there is no paradox to resolve: for the human “spirit” (Geist) emerges from nature, which is its “presupposition” (GW 20:381/EPM 9 [§381]).35 A further similarity between Hegel and Schopenhauer is suggested by Schopenhauer’s claim that love and compassion involve “recognizing oneself” in others — an idea also found in Hegel.36 Closer attention, however, reveals a significant difference between the two philosophers. For Schopenhauer, the “self” I recognize in the other is not my individual self but the will that is identical, and suffers, in both of us. Indeed, what becomes apparent in compassion is that all individuality — though empirically real — is ultimately an illusion, belonging to the “veil of māyā”, and that we are all one will (SW 2:439-41, 447/WWR 1:399-400, 405).37 For Hegel, too, mutual recognition involves recognizing one’s identity with others — for example, as persons with rights (see GW 14, 1:52/PR 55 [§36]). Yet I also recognize my own self in another self, whose “individuality” (Einzelnheit) I recognize and who recognizes mine in turn (and in neither case is such individuality illusory) (see GW 20:432/EPM 162 [§436]). For Hegel, therefore, in contrast to Schopenhauer, the consciousness of being different individuals belongs to, and is not displaced by, the recognition of a common identity (and individuals are thus not as such irredeemably egoistic).38 Hegel and Schopenhauer also assign different roles to individuality in aesthetic experience. Both follow Kant in understanding the experience of beauty to be “disinterested”, and both depart from Kant by understanding such experience to be a form of cognition. Furthermore, both take this experience to bring to mind something universal that each calls “Idea”. For Schopenhauer, Ideas objectify the metaphysical will and include unchanging natural “forces” (such as gravity) and the unchanging “forms and qualities” of objects (including human beings) (SW 2:199/WWR 1:191). These Ideas are neither spatiotemporal nor 460

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s­ubject to causality — so they express the will but are not caused by it — but they manifest themselves in individual spatiotemporal objects. They do so, however, only insofar as they are known by the subject under the a priori forms of its cognition — especially space and time, which constitute the “principle of individuation” (SW 2:134/WWR 1:137). The Ideas, therefore, do not give themselves the form of concrete, spatiotemporal ­individuality.39 Objects in nature or art are beautiful, for Schopenhauer, when they “facilitate” (erleichtern) the recognition of Ideas (SW 2:247-8 / WWR 1:234-5).40 They do so through their individual features — the shape of a body or the actions of a dramatic hero — but the latter are not themselves the main focus of attention. Although individual objects are beautiful, they are so only because the subject sees the unchanging, universal Ideas in and through them.41 In contemplating those Ideas, the subject no longer desires individual objects themselves or has a practical interest in them: it no longer relates such objects to its individual will. It thus sheds its own individuality (and a priori forms of cognition) and becomes the “pure subject of cognition”. It does not, of course, become purely this “pure subject”, because it sees the Ideas in the individual, spatiotemporal objects before it. Yet the aesthetic pleasure it enjoys resides in being released from individual desire and its attendant suffering — in being, in part, “the pure will-less, painless, timeless subject of cognition” (SW 2:211/WWR 1:201-2). For Hegel, beauty is the “sensuous shining [Scheinen] of the Idea”, specifically of the Idea of freedom (VÄ 1:151/A 1:111). In contrast to Schopenhauer’s Ideas, however, the universal, as Hegel conceives it, individuates itself and so informs individuals through its own logic (rather than through being known by a subject) (see GW 12:34-5, 49-52/SL 531-2, 546-9). As Hegel remarks, “‘the animal’ does not exist, but is the universal nature of individual animals” (GW 23, 3:819/EL 56 [§24 Addition 1]). Freedom, as something universal, thus necessarily takes individual (especially human) form in art and in life. In art, individuality is idealized and lacks the “warts and all” of everyday reality; but beautiful characters remain free “independent individuals”, even when, as in Greek drama, they are moved by “universal powers”, such as the family or state (see VÄ 1:290/A 1:223). Aesthetic contemplation in turn “cherishes an interest in the object in its individual [einzeln] existence” (VÄ 1:60/A 1:38). Art also addresses spectators as concrete individuals in their specific historical circumstances — not as pure timeless subjects. For this reason, Hegel maintains, art works must sometimes be revised to suit particular audiences (see VÄ 1:358/A 1:277). Yet, somewhat like Schopenhauer, Hegel thinks that genuine art elicits what he calls a “theoretical” response in which we look or listen without desire and without feeling moved to practical action. Desire, Hegel states, cannot “let the object persist in its freedom” but seeks to use or consume it. Aesthetic contemplation, by contrast, is of “a liberal kind” that lets individual objects be what they are — without subordinating them to my interests — and delights in the freedom and life they express (VÄ 1:57-8, 155-6/A 1:36-7, 114).

31.4  Concluding Thoughts More should be said about each of these examples, but I will end with two further similarities between Hegel and Schopenhauer that can, perhaps, resolve two problems in Schopenhauer’s thought. 461

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The first problem is this: how can Schopenhauer claim to know that the “thing in itself” (Ding an sich) is will? In Kant’s view, we know nothing about things in themselves (except that they are not in space or time, because the latter, as a priori, are merely “subjective conditions of sensibility”) (KrV B 42-3, 49-51). In Schopenhauer’s view, however, I know that my body in itself is will, and I can then infer, by “analogy”, that every other object in itself is will, too (SW 2:125/WWR 1:129). What justifies Schopenhauer’s claim? As “subject of cognition”, he writes, I find myself to be one with my body (and thus to be an individual), but my body is “given in two entirely different ways”: once as “representation”, as an object among objects, and once as inner will. More specifically, when another object affects my body, I feel pleasure or pain within the latter, which are “immediate affections of the will” — the “momentary willing or not-willing of the impression the body is undergoing” (SW 2:119-20/WWR 1:124-5). These feelings (and their “gradations”) are not themselves representations: they are not objects, like my body, there in space. They are what I feel, as it were, on the inside of my body. As Rudolf Malter puts it, therefore, “in the horizon of representation” — the experience of my body — there arises “something nonrepresentational” (ein Nichtvorstellungshaftes).42 Accordingly, I take this inner will, which is distinct from representation, to be what my body is “in itself” (SW 2:123/WWR 1:128). Yet I know my will “only in its individual acts, which is to say in time”: I know it only in its appearance (SW 2:121/WWR 1:126). There is, however, a distinction, for Schopenhauer, between appearance and the “thing in itself” (see SW 2:134 / WWR 1:137). So how can I claim that my will is not just an appearance but what my body is in itself? The answer lies in Schopenhauer’s quasi-Hegelian conception of the “in itself”. In his logic, Hegel argues that what something is in itself is not hidden but shows itself in the thing’s relations to other things (GW 21:108-11/SL 93-6).43 In other words, “essence must appear” — essence is “self-revealing” (GW 11:323, 368/SL 418, 464). Schopenhauer has a similar conception of the “thing in itself” and “appearance”, for he understands the former to be “what appears” in the latter: das in ihr Erscheinende. “Appearance” in turn is the “manifestation of what appears” (SW 3:203-4/WWR 2:192-3). This conception allows Schopenhauer to claim that the will within us is not mere appearance but manifests our essence — the “thing in itself” that is itself will. (It also allows us to consider how, besides our own body, other objects — to whose “inside” we do not have access — express and manifest the will.) Yet Schopenhauer retains a Kantian understanding of the “in itself” alongside his quasiHegelian conception. Accordingly, he insists, the thing in itself appears to us “in the very thinnest covering [Verhüllung]” — the form of time — and an aspect of it thus remains unknown. This is not now to deny (with Julian Young) that the thing in itself is will.44 Yet we can never know what it is “quite apart from the fact that it … is cognized as will”: for “being-cognized inherently contradicts being-in-itself and everything we cognize is as such only appearance” (if not always “representation” in the full sense) (SW 3:221/WWR 2:209). Schopenhauer thus combines a quasi-Hegelian and a Kantian conception of “beingin-itself”: for him, the thing in itself is, and manifests itself as, will, but the latter does not exhaust the former. If one bears this in mind, his claim that we know the thing in itself to be will, through its appearance in us, is not as internally inconsistent as one might think. The second problem is the following. According to Schopenhauer, the metaphysical will objectifies itself as the Ideas. It objectifies itself, however, for the subject that is the correlate of the Ideas and knows them as they appear in space and time. This “subject of cognition” does not itself objectify the will.45 Yet it is “ultimately the will itself, or its expression”, 462

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because it arises from the will with the Ideas. The will thus knows itself in the “world” it produces: “the world is the self-cognition of the will” (SW 2:329-30, 485/WWR 1:306, 437). If, however, the subject is an expression of the will, how can it detach itself from the will — in aesthetic experience and asceticism — and achieve “will-less” cognition? Looking at Schopenhauer through Hegelian eyes can again, perhaps, resolve the problem. There is a superficial similarity between the self-cognition of the will, described by Schopenhauer, and the process, described by Hegel, through which absolute reason, or the “Idea”, comes to self-consciousness in human beings (or “spirit”).46 Yet they are different processes, not least because Schopenhauer’s blindly striving “will” is not rational in Hegel’s distinctive, developmental sense. There is, however, another conceivable similarity between the two processes. Hegel maintains that “contradiction” (Widerspruch) “moves the world” (GW 23, 3:895/EL 187 [§119 Addition 2]). It does not exhaust the world, since many contradictions in the latter get resolved; but it is found in the “dialectic” through which categories and phenomena turn into their opposites and so prove to be precisely what they are not.47 Contradiction, for Hegel, is thus a form of self-negation or “negativity”.48 Schopenhauer also asserts that the will is characterized by “inner self-contradiction” and “inner conflict with itself” (SW 2:314, 419/WWR 1:294, 381), and it is tempting to understand such contradiction as “negativity” in a broadly Hegelian sense. If we do so, the will can be conceived as expressing its “inner conflict”, and negating itself, by giving itself — in the Ideas — the objectivity it does not have in itself. The will also manifests itself in its objective “appearance”; but it manifests itself in what, intrinsically, it is not. As already noted, the subject of cognition, as the correlate of the will’s “objectivation”, does not objectify, or manifest, the will in the way natural forces or objects do. Yet it, too, is an expression of the will — an expression through which the latter knows itself. Equally, however, the subject, as knowing subject, is not itself will. It is thus will in the form of its utter negation: pure knowing. In embodied individuals, Schopenhauer insists, cognition serves the will’s desires and interests. Yet in aesthetic experience and asceticism the knowing subject detaches itself (or becomes detached) from such desires and turns into the pure “will-less” subject (see SW 2:211, 486/WWR 1:201, 439). This detachment, however, simply renders explicit the fact that the subject, as knowing, is already the negation of will — the will as its own negation. There is, therefore, no inconsistency in the idea that this subject is an expression of the will that can detach itself from the will. It can do the latter because, as knowing subject at all, it is will that has negated itself — will that is not will. There is, of course, a difference between aesthetic experience and asceticism: for the latter, but not the former, involves the free act of the will itself in which it “abolishes itself” (sich aufhebt) (SW 2:449, 467/WWR 1:407, 422). This act, however, is made possible by the subject’s “altered mode of cognition”. More precisely, the subject sees through the “principle of individuation” and recognizes the will as the source of all suffering (SW 2:464, 477/WWR 1:419-20, 430). This insight in turn “quietens” the will with which the subject is identified: for it leads this will to feel “loathing” (Abscheu) for its own “essence” and to “turn away” from itself. The will thus freely “gives up [aufgibt] and negates the will to life” and thereby ceases willing — except for “the last glowing spark that sustains the body” (SW 2:448-9, 456, 461/WWR 1:406-7, 412, 417). Yet this “self-abolition” (Selbstaufhebung) of the will does not leave absolutely nothing. It leaves the detached subject contemplating the relative “nothing” to which the objects in its world are reduced by the extinction of its will 463

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(and, possibly, experiencing the mysteries of the “thing in itself” beyond will) (SW 2:478, 485-7/WWR 1:432, 438-9).49 In Hegelian terms, this detached subject is the will that survives its self-negation in the form of its own utter negation — non-will or pure knowing.50 Clearly, these last points require further consideration. There is, however, a nice irony in the thought that Hegelian ideas might remove apparent inconsistencies from Schopenhauer’s philosophy (without thereby proving him right). Indeed, I hope to have shown that the relation between Schopenhauer and Hegel is altogether more complex and interesting than Schopenhauer would have us believe.

Notes 1 Cartwright (2010), 195. 2 Nicolin, ed. (1970), 113. 3 Nicolin, ed. (1970), 212. 4 Nietzsche (2002), 94 [§ 204]. Published translations cited in this essay have occasionally been amended (as here). 5 Safranski (2001), 141–5. 6 Cartwright (2010), 368. 7 Cartwright (2010), 374. 8 Nicolin, ed. (1970), 212–13. 9 Nicolin, ed. (1970), 202, and Cartwright (2010), 362–5. 10 Cartwright (2010), 365, 411. 11 Cartwright (2010), 429–30. 12 Cartwright (2010), 366. 13 On concepts and intuitions in Schopenhauer and Kant, see SW 2:48-9 / WWR 1:63-4, and KrV B 33, 75. 14 See Cartwright (2010), 378. 15 Nicolin, ed. (1970), 212–13. On Hegel’s extensive knowledge of natural science, see Houlgate (2005), 118–20, 138–56. 16 Schopenhauer cites the 1827 edition of Hegel’s Encyclopaedia, which (unlike the 1830 edition cited here) omits the words “only as affirmative”. 17 Schmidt (1988), 43–4. 18 See Schleiden (1988), 59. 19 Hegel’s phrase “without increase in its mass” should thus be understood to mean: without the addition of a “number [Anzahl] of material parts” to one end of the iron bar (or subtraction of such “parts” from the other end) (see GW 24, 1:338; 2:1093). 20 See Popper (1966), 2:27. 21 See Houlgate (2005), 136–7. 22 See Houlgate (2022), 1:51-3. 23 Descartes (1984–91), 2:17. 24 See Houlgate (2022), 1:107-10. 25 On method in Hegel’s logic, see Houlgate (2022), 1:59-99. 26 For Schopenhauer, the “principle of sufficient reason” has limited validity, leaving natural forces “groundless”. Unlike Hegel, however, he sees no problem with such an idea (SW 2:147-9 / WWR 1:149-50). 27 See Janaway (1989), 160–1. 28 See Houlgate (2022), 1:3-7, 19-22. 29 GW 21:45 / SL 39: “the pure concept as true being”. 30 See also Houlgate (2008), xxxii-xxxiii. 31 See SW 2:17, 518/WWR 1:36, 465; GW 12:26, 253/SL 523, 752-3, and GW 20:444-5/EPM 178-9 [§448]). 32 On nineteenth-century attempts to “combine” Hegel and Schopenhauer, see Schmidt (1988), 41–2. 33 Cartwright (2010), 366–7. 34 GW 20:318-22/EPN 196-200 [§320 Remark], and SW 6:209/PP 2:178.

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Schopenhauer and Hegel 35 Spirit, however, is the “truth” of nature — it renders explicit the freedom implicit in nature — and in that logical sense it is “absolutely first with respect to it”. 36 See SW 6:335/PP 2:284, and VÄ 2:182/A 1:562. 37 See Janaway (1989), 282–3. 38 See Houlgate (2005), 204–5. 39 The empirical “character of every individual [einzeln] human being” is a “particular Idea” — corresponding to a “distinctive act of will” which is the “intelligible” character — but Ideas do not place themselves in space and time (SW 2:188-9/WWR 1:183). 40 The exception is music, which is a “copy of the will itself” (SW 2:310/WWR 1:290). 41 See SW 3:487/WWR 2:444, and Gardiner (1967), 206. 42 Malter (1988), 53. 43 See Houlgate (2022), 1:189-93. 44 Young (2005), 98. 45 Cognition “belongs to” the will’s “objectivation”, to the Ideas of animal and human life; but the subject of cognition, for which these Ideas exist, is not itself an Idea since it is not an object (SW 2:5-6, 181/WWR 1:25-6, 177). (Note, however, that this subject identifies itself with the individual animals and human beings in the world of “representation” and “finds itself” in each case to be a different cognitive individual — even though, as subject, it is the same in all of them [SW 2:6, 118/WWR 1:26, 123-4].) 46 See Desmond (1988), 109–10. 47 On dialectic, see GW 20:119/EL 128 [§81]. 48 On negativity, see GW 21:103/SL 89. 49 See also, on mysticism, SW 3:703-4/WWR 2:627-8. 50 For Hegel, too, freedom involves “giving up” the primacy of one’s will; but this means becoming “a just and ethical human being”, not eliminating desire and becoming a “will-less creature” (VPR 1:259-60/LPR 1:359). For Hegel’s distinctive conception of “Aufhebung”, see GW 21:94-5/SL 81-2.

Bibliography Abbreviations for works by Hegel A: Hegel, G.W.F. (1975). Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art. Translated by Knox, T.M. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. EL: Hegel, G.W.F. (1991). The Encyclopaedia Logic (with the Zusätze). Part I of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences with the Zusätze. Translated by Geraets, T.F., Suchting, W.A. and Harris, H.S. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. EPM: Hegel, G.W.F. (2007). Philosophy of Mind. Translated by Wallace, W. and Miller, A.V. With Revisions and Commentary by Inwood, M.J. Oxford: Clarendon Press. EPN: Hegel, G.W.F. (1970). Philosophy of Nature. Being Part Two of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830). Translated by Miller, A.V. With Foreword by Findlay, J.N. Oxford: Clarendon Press. GW: Hegel, G.W.F. (1968 ff.). Gesammelte Werke. Edited by the Rheinisch-Westfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften. 31 vols. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag. LPR: Hegel, G.W.F. (1984–7). Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. Edited by Hodgson, P.C. Translated by Brown, R.F., Hodgson, P.C. and Stewart, J.M. 3 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press. LPWH: Hegel, G.W.F. (1975). Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. Introduction: Reason in History. Translated by Nisbet, H.B. With an Introduction by Forbes, D. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. PR: Hegel, G.W.F. (2008). Outlines of the Philosophy of Right. Translated by Knox, T.M. Revised, edited and introduced by Houlgate, S. Oxford: Oxford University Press. PS: Hegel, G.W.F. (1977). Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by Miller, A.V. With Analysis of the Text and Foreword by Findlay, J.N. Oxford: Oxford University Press. SL: Hegel, G.W.F. (2010). The Science of Logic. Translated and edited by di Giovanni, G. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Stephen Houlgate VÄ: Hegel, G.W.F. (1970). Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik. Edited by Moldenhauer, E. and Michel, K.M. 3 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. VG: Hegel, G.W.F. (1970). Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte. Band I: Die Vernunft in der Geschichte. Edited by Hoffmeister, J. 5th ed. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag. VPR: Hegel, G.W.F. (1983–5). Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion. Edited by Jaeschke, W. 3 parts (in 4 vols.). Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag. VPW: Hegel, G.W.F. (1976). Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte. Band II-IV. Edited by Lasson, G. 2nd ed. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag.

Other texts cited Cartwright, David E. (2010). Schopenhauer. A Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Desmond, William (1988). “Schopenhauer, Art, and the Dark Origin”, in Schopenhauer. New Essays in Honor of his 200th Birthday. Edited by von der Luft, E. With a Foreword by Taylor, R. Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, pp. 101–22. Descartes, René (1984–91). The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. Translated by Cottingham, J., Stoothoff, R. and Murdoch, D. 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gardiner, Patrick (1967). Schopenhauer. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Houlgate, Stephen (2005). An Introduction to Hegel. Freedom, Truth and History. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell. Houlgate, Stephen (2008). “Introduction”, in Hegel, G.W.F. Outlines of the Philosophy of Right. Translated by Knox, T.M. Revised, edited and introduced by Houlgate, S. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. vii–xxxiii. Houlgate, Stephen (2022). Hegel on Being. 2 vols. London: Bloomsbury. Janaway, Christopher (1989). Self and World in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Malter, Rudolf (1988). Der Eine Gedanke. Hinführung zur Philosophie Arthur Schopenhauers. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Nicolin, Günther, ed. (1970). Hegel in Berichten seiner Zeitgenossen. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag. Nietzsche, Friedrich (2002). Beyond Good and Evil. Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Edited by Horstmann, R.-P. and Norman, J. Translated by Norman, J. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Popper, Karl (1966). The Open Society and its Enemies. 5th ed. 2 vols. London: Routledge. Safranski, Rüdiger (2001). Schopenhauer und die wilden Jahre der Philosophie. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch. Schleiden, Matthias Jakob (1988). Schelling’s und Hegel’s Verhältnis zur Naturwissenschaft. Zum Verhältnis der physikalistischen Naturwissenschaft zur spekulativen Naturphilosophie. Edited by Breidbach, O. Weinheim: VCH. Schmidt, Alfred (1988). Idee und Weltwille. Schopenhauer als Kritiker Hegels. Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag. Young, Julian (2005). Schopenhauer. London: Routledge.

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PART 5

After Schopenhauer

32 “EITHER SHUDDER OR LAUGH” Kierkegaard on Schopenhauer Patrick Stokes

32.1 Introduction The legacy of GWF Hegel is vast and diffuse, but perhaps one of his most important contributions to philosophy lies in the enemies he made. Something about the expansiveness of Hegel’s claims and their pretensions to a world-historical importance that overturns everything that comes before – and the fervor with which his followers took up these claims – seems to have irritated certain writers in remarkably productive ways. Two such thinkers stand out in particular: Arthur Schopenhauer and Søren Kierkegaard. Both were somewhat eccentric, “outsider” figures within their own intellectual contexts (while nonetheless being materially and culturally privileged); both are thinkers who were vastly more influential after their deaths than during their lifetimes. Both railed against Hegel and Hegelianism, with Schopenhauer famously scheduling lectures at Berlin to clash with Hegel’s (Cartwright 2016: 10), and Kierkegaard running up against an increasingly Hegelian hegemony among the Danish academic and ecclesiastical establishments, with whom he had far more significant disagreements than with Hegel himself (Stewart 2003). Both wrote philosophical prose with uncommon flair and, where deserved (and sometimes even where not), masterful invective. Above all, both were incisive observers of human psychology, alive to the myriad ways in which we flatter, anesthetize, delude, excuse, and lie to ourselves. Beyond these thematic and stylistic similarities, however, lie fundamental disagreements. Schopenhauer’s project is atheistic and syncretic, drawing on Indian religious traditions as freely as it does figures like Kant. Kierkegaard’s project remains a fundamentally theological one, bound by Lutheran orthodoxy. It is not straining the point too much to say that the soteriologies we find in Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard are Dharmic and Abrahamic, respectively: an Upanishad-inspired emphasis on the underlying unity of phenomena married to a quasi-Buddhist conception of life-as-suffering, on the one hand, and a thoroughly Christian view of sin and atonement, on the other. Given these basic divergences, then, we might expect any encounter between the two philosophers to be unproductive. Happily, this is not the case, and we know this because such an encounter did in fact happen, albeit one-way. In a series of journal entries from 1854, Kierkegaard describes his DOI: 10.4324/9781003048992-38

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reactions to Schopenhauer, registers his admiration, and also finds himself compelled to stake out his differences with a writer whom he otherwise found not merely entertaining but utterly beguiling: “A.S. is undeniably an important writer; he has interested me a great deal, and despite total disagreement, I have been surprised to find an author who affects me so much” (Kierkegaard 2017: 356). In the margin of this journal entry, Kierkegaard is even struck by those initials, “A.S.”: “Curiously enough, I am called S.A. So we have an inverse relation to one another” (Kierkegaard 2017: 356). The awkwardly forced parallel – A.S. refers to Schopenhauer’s given name and surname, while S.A. is the initials of Kierkegaard’s two given names, Søren Aabye – suggests that Kierkegaard sees in Schopenhauer both an uncanny reflection and a sort of demonic inversion of his own authorship (Stokes 2007). Sadly, this reception only runs one-way. While German reviews of Kierkegaard’s Danish works appear as early as 1845 and some partial translations of his late anti-church polemics appear in 1856, the first full-length German translations of Kierkegaard don’t appear until the 1860s (Malik 1997: 50, 126–7, 219). It seems highly unlikely that Schopenhauer had ever heard of Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard, by contrast, is aware of Schopenhauer at least as early as 1837 via the discussion of Schopenhauer in Poul Martin Møller’s Thoughts on The Possibility of Demonstrating Human Immortality, though he does not begin to pay sustained attention to Schopenhauer until 1854, in the last eighteen months of his life. Given how late this reading of Schopenhauer comes in Kierkegaard’s life, scholars disagree as to how influential Schopenhauer could possibly have been for Kierkegaard. A century ago Eduard Geismar (1926) argued that Schopenhauer was partly responsible for the connection in Kierkegaard’s very late writings between asceticism and Christianity, not to mention his late misogyny and condemnation of marriage. Simonella Davini (2007), by contrast, argues that Schopenhauer exerts no real influence on Kierkegaard’s already mature thought at all; Kierkegaard is simply drawn to specific elements of Schopenhauer’s work that resonate with his own existing interests and views. Hence we find Kierkegaard excited by Schopenhauer’s attacks on journalists and Hegelians but apparently uninterested in, say, his aesthetics. Regardless, Kierkegaard’s comments on Schopenhauer are valuable for a number of reasons. For one thing, they provide a candid insight into Schopenhauer’s reception outside Germany among his intellectual contemporaries. More than that, Schopenhauer seems to act as a sort of whetstone for Kierkegaard, provoking him to sharpen his own stance on what it is for an author to live their own categories authentically. In diagnosing what he takes to be a serious performative contradiction in Schopenhauer’s stance, Kierkegaard throws light on what his own authorial project demands of him, which is, ultimately, his martyrdom.

32.2  Schopenhauer in Scandinavia The Nordic countries play an outsized, if brief, role in Schopenhauer’s career. In 1839, Schopenhauer’s essay on the freedom of the will won an essay prize sponsored by the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences. Buoyed by his success in Trondheim, Schopenhauer then responded to a call from the Royal Danish Academy for an essay addressing the question of the basis of morality. So confident was Schopenhauer of success that in his submission letter to the Academy he proposed to publish both essays in a single volume, each essay having been awarded a prize by a Nordic learned society. It is not hard to imagine Schopenhauer’s reaction to being denied the prize by the Danes, despite being the only entrant, and nor do 470

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we have to imagine it, as he makes his fury perfectly clear in his preface to the published edition of the essay. In the preface, Schopenhauer shows fairly convincingly that the Academy’s judgment is simply wrong on its own terms. The prize question, written in Latin, was not well-framed, and while the jury’s report suggested Schopenhauer had misunderstood the prompt, it appears it was the jurors themselves who did not quite understand their own question. In any event, it seems unlikely that the judgment had very much to do with Schopenhauer’s substantive answer to the essay question. The judges note, at the end of their judgment, that “several distinguished philosophers of recent times are mentioned in such an indecent fashion as to provoke just and grave offence” (SW 4:276/BM 248). Schopenhauer leaps on this as evidence that the judges were scandalized by the essay’s invective against Fichte (“a man whose teaching never left him any time for learning” [SW 4:82/OBM 178]), Hegel (“the crude, mindless charlatan” (SW 4:147/BM 149]), and Hegelians (“Mr. Feuerbach, a Hegelian (c’est tout dire [that says it all])” [SW 4:184/OBM 180]). Schopenhauer appears to have been told by his Swedish friend Adolph Leonard Nordwall, possibly long after the fact (Cartwright 2010: 485 n.36), that the Danish judge was Hans Lassen Martensen, later Bishop of Zealand and as such de facto head of the Church of Denmark and arch-nemesis of one Søren A. Kierkegaard. Given Martensen was one of the key drivers of the increasing Hegelian hegemony of Danish intellectual life, this suspicion is understandable. Many commentators since have shared the assumption that Schopenhauer, like Kierkegaard, simply ran into a wall of Danish Hegel partisans who brooked no opposition. In fact, Schopenhauer was misinformed: Martensen wasn’t even a member of the Academy at the time of the essay prize (Pasgaard-Westerman 2020: 31–2). Nonetheless, the jury did comprise figures who were very much part of the Copenhagen intellectual and ecclesiastical establishment that Kierkegaard became so vehemently opposed to. The head of the jury, F. C. Sibbern, may in fact have guessed who the author of the essay was, having apparently met Schopenhauer briefly in Berlin and knowing of his work more generally through contemporaries such as Poul Martin Møller. In any event, Sibbern was unlikely to warm to an essay that was repeatedly dismissive of conventional, theology-friendly, “ought”-based ethics. Ironically, in his confidential report to the other jurors, Sibbern actually compares the author of the essay to Hegel: “his barely half-ripe philosophy could have found much support in the Hegelian philosophy” (Pasgaard-Westerman 2020: 34). The comparison is not meant to be complimentary to either party. The second juror was even less likely to be sympathetic: Jakob Peder Mynster, Martensen’s immediate predecessor as Bishop of Zealand – another clerical opponent of Kierkegaard’s, albeit one Kierkegaard refrained from attacking publicly while Mynster was alive out of respect for Kierkegaard’s late father’s friendship with the bishop. So while Schopenhauer did not in fact run afoul of a cabal of Danish Hegelians, he nonetheless did find his ambitions dashed by the same climate of intellectual gatekeeping as Kierkegaard did. Yet if Kierkegaard realizes Schopenhauer’s “thunderstorm of coarse epithets” (Kierkegaard 2017: 359) are in fact directed toward many of his own enemies, he betrays no hint of schadenfreude. Rather, Kierkegaard is amused at Schopenhauer’s venal demand for recognition from his provincial colleagues: Representing as he does – and with such talent – a view of life that is so misanthropic, he is so extremely delighted, so seriously delighted, that the Scientific Society in Trondheim (Good Lord, in Trondheim!) has crowned his prize essay. It does not 471

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occur to him that perhaps that scientific society has taken it as a rare bit of good fortune that a German has sent them an essay. Pro dii immortales! [by the immortal gods!] And when Copenhagen failed to crown another prize essay by S., he rages over it, quite seriously, in the introduction to the published version. (Kierkegaard 2017: 359) The “quite seriously” here is telling. As we’ll see, what this points to, for Kierkegaard, is a sort of performative contradiction: Schopenhauer presents a certain view of worldly goods and accolades, yet in his own attitude toward these goods he fails to express the life-view he preaches. Schopenhauer is, Kierkegaard notes, an otherwise dab hand with irony, so why does he never apply irony to himself and his own position? Kierkegaard’s discussions of Schopenhauer do, in fact, suggest an answer. To understand why Schopenhauer never seems to fully embrace the asceticism he recommends, we first need to grasp Schopenhauer’s understanding of the problem of suffering that asceticism is meant to solve.

32.3  Life as Suffering Despite their differences, there are several points on which one might expect Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard to agree. One of these, as alluded to above, is their disdain for Hegel and more particularly (in Kierkegaard’s case) his acolytes, though their disagreements with Hegel are importantly different. Schopenhauer seems to have regarded Hegel simply as “clumsy and mindless” (SW 2:496/WWR 1:445), “slapping together senseless, raving tangles of verbiage such as had only ever been heard in lunatic asylums” (SW 2:508/WWR 1:456) while Kierkegaard thinks of Hegelianism as implicitly removing the thinking subject from existence (e.g. Kierkegaard 1983: 43–4) – a kind of intellectual and spiritual suicide (Marino 1985) – and incoherently claiming that logical categories are somehow conditioned by time (e.g. Kierkegaard 1981: 12). Fascinated both by the apparent inversion between A.S. and S.A.(K) and by Schopenhauer’s “incomparably coarse” (Kierkegaard 2017: 358) turn of phrase when describing the German professoriate, Kierkegaard applies this dialectic to Schopenhauer’s use of the insult windbeutel – “wind bag” (and also a somewhat unappetizing German name for profiteroles). The word tickles Kierkegaard, who “envies” the Germans for having it. Yet he also accepts that “there must be continual need” for the word in Germany, whereas “We Danes do not have the word, nor is that to which it refers characteristic of us Danes. It simply does not lie in the Danish national character to be a windbag.” The Danes’ corresponding fault is windsluge or “wind-sucking.” This refers to a habit some horses have of swallowing air (often while gurgling) as a sort of nervous tic. “This more or less defines the relationship,” according to Kierkegaard: “A German to make wind and a Dane to swallow it.” In Berlin Schopenhauer had dealt directly with the arch-windbag, Hegel, while Kierkegaard finds himself surrounded by the uncritical and suffocating ranks of Danish Hegelians such as Martensen and Johan Ludvig Heiberg, who gulp down what Hegel expels (Kierkegaard 2017: 394–5). Anyone who knows both Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard, either by reputation or direct acquaintance with their work, might also expect to find a further point of agreement on the universality of suffering. Both have, after all, a reputation for gloom that is not entirely undeserved. Yet it is precisely on the nature of suffering that Kierkegaard registers a fundamental divergence from Schopenhauer. 472

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For Schopenhauer, the origin of suffering is essentially metaphysical in character. Suffering is not, as Patrick Hassan puts it, “merely an accidental feature of life which one might eradicate, but a fundamental feature of what it means to exist as a human being” (Hassan, 2021). If each of us is simply a phenomenal expression of a single, undifferentiated, underlying will, then suffering qua dissatisfaction would seem to be inevitable, even allowing for contingent moments of pleasure or repose. To desire is of necessity to feel a lack, a privation. All striving is therefore a response to a kind of painful absence and as such contains a tacit assumption that if only we can get the thing we are striving for, the corresponding feeling of privation will go away. But this hope for fulfilment depends upon the ultimately illusory way in which the phenomenal world appears to carve itself into discrete objects of desire. Every desire appears in some sense self-contained – I want this thing and no other – but each is in fact an expression of the same formless willing, which in itself can never be satisfied. The result is the impossibility of rest within a single satisfaction. For Schopenhauer, our goals and desires “always delude us into believing that their fulfilment is the final goal of willing,” but “as soon as they are attained they no longer look the same and thus are soon forgotten, grow antiquated and are really, if not admittedly, always laid to the side as vanished delusions.” (SW 2:196/WWR 1:189). What we generally call happiness on this model is not really fulfillment but cycling through desires and satisfactions rapidly enough that we don’t notice that underneath it all lies “a fearful, life-destroying boredom, a wearied longing without a definite object, a deadening languor” (SW 2:196/WWR 1:189). Kierkegaard speaks of Schopenhauer’s “Indian melancholia [Tungsind, ‘heavy-mindedness, gloom’]” (2017: 393) in relation to suffering, and what is perhaps most gloomy in Schopenhauer’s picture is the rejection of the assumption that our frustrations are only contingent and the world could in principle be otherwise and better than it is. That possibility is foreclosed by pleasure itself being part of the problem of suffering. Whatever his disagreements with the Stoic response to suffering, especially its counsel of suicide as a possible response, Schopenhauer is very much in agreement with the Stoic diagnosis of “lively pleasure” as ultimately an error, because such pleasures are necessarily temporary and contingent, “on indefinite loan to us from chance, and can therefore be recalled at a moment’s notice” (SW 2:105/WWR 1:115). Error and delusion, of course, are not necessarily the same thing as suffering. But what Schopenhauer discerns here is essentially the Buddhist principle of dukkha, often translated as “suffering” or “unhappiness” but perhaps more accurately rendered “unsatisfactoriness.” Pleasurable experiences are dukkha just as much as unpleasant ones are, precisely because our joys are fleeting. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s recollection of weeping in the back of a taxi at the sudden realization he would never again be as happy as he was at that moment (Fitzgerald 2005: 111) neatly sums up the dukkha of happiness. “No achieved object of willing gives lasting, unwavering satisfaction,” Schopenhauer tells us; our joys are “only ever like the alms thrown to a beggar that spares his life today so that his agony can be prolonged until tomorrow” (SW 2:231/WWR 1:219–20). Suffering is a key preoccupation of Kierkegaard’s work, reaching its apogee in a series of religious discourses from 1847 collectively known as the “Gospel of Sufferings.” The meaning, use, and significance of suffering are for Kierkegaard ultimately a theological problem, and one that he addresses in explicitly theological “upbuilding” texts rather than in his more overtly philosophical writings. Yet although fundamentally a Christian thinker, Kierkegaard regards Schopenhauer’s rejection of Christianity as “his business” and thinks Schopenhauer nonetheless is “an author of considerable significance … who will be of significance precisely in relation to Christianity” (Kierkegaard 2017: 393).1 Moreover, 473

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Kierkegaard tells us he has no objection to “the fact that Schopenhauer rages energetically against this ‘vile optimism’ at which Protestantism in particular excels.” Kierkegaard may well have been thinking of the passage in The World as Will and Representation where Schopenhauer warns us “Do not think for a moment that Christian doctrine is favorable to optimism; on the contrary, in the Gospels, ‘world’ and ‘evil’ are used as almost synonymous expressions” (SW 2:385/WWR 1:352). “I am very pleased,” declares Kierkegaard, “that S. shows that this optimism is in no way Christianity” (Kierkegaard 2017: 393). Thus far, at least, Kierkegaard can see in Schopenhauer a fellow traveler, if not exactly an ally, in his campaign against the smug complacency and self-satisfaction of the nineteenth-century Lutheran establishment. Yet Kierkegaard objects to the Schopenhauerian claim that life is necessarily suffering. “Undeniably, there is something false in his Indian melancholia: to live is to suffer” (2017: 393). He rejects this metaphysical view of life as necessary suffering because he is committed to the view that “to be Christian is to suffer, which of course is also the teaching of the New Testament.” We might think that if life is suffering, then ‘to be Christian is to suffer’ is true a fortiori. Yet this move would reduce Christianity to a “pleonasm, a superficial remark, nonsense” and rob it of “its dialectic, its basis,” and “with this, Christianity vanishes” (2017: 393). Far from declaring that life is necessarily suffering, Kierkegaard claims that Christianity “brings Jewish optimism to bear” (2017: 393) in its analysis of the worldly, holding that to live un-Christianly can allow one to live quite comfortably and successfully, in this world at least. It does so, on Kierkegaard’s view, precisely in order to emphasize what Christianity requires of its adherents: a renunciation of these goods in the name of Christianity, instead of a Stoic resignation, which, as Kierkegaard approvingly notes, Schopenhauer exposes as just another form of eudaimonism. The “Indian” view of life-as-suffering is at once too pessimistic and not pessimistic enough: living is not necessarily suffering, but “to be Christian is to suffer, including the necessity of suffering for the teaching” (2017: 394). In some respects, Kierkegaard may here seem to be attacking a straw man version of Schopenhauer. It is not the case for Schopenhauer, any more than for the Buddha or the Upaniṣads, that life is inescapable suffering, for there are at least some exceptional individuals who escape suffering either aesthetically or ascetically (Hassan 2021; drawing on Young 1987). Even for the arch-pessimist Schopenhauer, there is some prospect of salvation. Yet for Kierkegaard, the way in which Schopenhauer presents the possibility of escape itself generates a serious ethical problem.

32.4  The Ethical Objection Buddhism is not a religion of revelation; its teachings are understood as the outcome of enlightened but nonetheless human rational inquiry. Hence it makes a priori claims about the nature of existence – namely that it is dukkha and that the solution to this problem is to rid oneself of taṇhā, “attachment” or “desire” – but does so on the basis of both human cogitation and, crucially, human observation. For Schopenhauer too, the unsatisfactoriness of life is an a priori given. Having satisfied ourselves intellectually of this fact by “investigating the primary, elementary characteristics of human life at the most universal level,” we could then proceed to “arouse a much more vivid conviction in ourselves if we wanted to take a more a posteriori approach” (SW 2:381/WWR 1:349). Like Siddhārtha Gautama, the young prince who will become the Buddha, we can sneak 474

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out of the comfort of our palace and see for ourselves the ubiquity of squalor and suffering in the world. The problem with such an approach, according to Schopenhauer, is that apart from abandoning “the standpoint of universality that is essential to philosophy,” the catalog of the world’s horrors is so vast and all-encompassing that we’d simply never be able to stop (SW 2:381/WWR 1:349) The extent to which Schopenhauer is engaged in a purely a priori argument for the necessity of suffering is debatable. While Schopenhauer clearly took the evidence he marshaled for the horrors of existence to be a supplement to an essentially metaphysical derivation of pessimism, Hassan (2021) provides good reasons to think that the a priori and a posteriori are more tightly interdependent than this. Schopenhauer’s project is still an empirical project in some sense. Yet regardless of whether Schopenhauer arrives at the ubiquity of suffering via empirical observation or deductive reasoning, the point remains that recognizing this ubiquity is an achievement of human inquiry. In one sense it is not much of an achievement, given how pervasive the evidence of life’s suffering turns out to be, yet there is nonetheless some minimal effort and discernment required to see just how bad things really are: Everyone who has woken up from the first dreams of youth, has paid any attention to his own experience or that of other people, has looked into life, into the history of the past as well as the present age, and finally into the works of the great writers –such a person (unless the indelible imprint of some prejudice has crippled his judgement) will certainly recognize the result, that the human world is the realm of accident and error which have a mercilessly free hand in matters both great and small, and are joined by stupidity and evil in brandishing the whip: thus it is that everything better makes its way with difficulty, that nobility or wisdom rarely appear, have an effect, or receive an audience, and that the absurd and perverse assert their mastery in the realm of thought, the trite and the tasteless in the realm of art, and the evil and underhanded in the realm of deeds, with only brief interruptions. On the other hand, excellence of any kind is only ever an exception, one case in a million, and even when it manifests itself in some enduring work, then afterwards, once it has survived the rancour of its contemporaries, it continues in isolation; it is preserved like a meteorite that has come from a different order of things than currently prevails. (SW 2:381/WWR 1:350; my emphases). It does not seem hard, in other words, to conclude that the world is a resolutely terrible place and that suffering and privation unavoidably have the upper hand. Yet not everyone, it seems, can reach that conclusion. As Kierkegaard sums things up: I have two objections in particular against [Schopenhauer’s] ethics. His ethical view is this: either through the intellect, that is, intellectually, or through suffering (δευτερος πλους), the individual comes to see through the entire wretchedness of this existence and then decides either to kill or mortify the lust for life; here is asceticism; and then contemplation, quietism, is attained through thoroughgoing asceticism. – And this is something the individual does out of sympathy (here is A. S.’s moral principle), because he sympathizes with the whole of the misery that is existence – hence he sympathizes with the misery of others, which is: to exist. (Kierkegaard 2017: 356) 475

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So this progress in understanding depends upon either intellect, circumstance, or both. To see the truth of things – that to exist is to suffer, that the principium individuationis is ultimately an illusion and we are fundamentally identical with all suffering others, and that the only solutions are asceticism and selfless contemplative absorption – requires some combination of luck and sound reasoning. (That luck might simply consist in having the good fortune to be alive at a time when it is possible to read Schopenhauer!) Kierkegaard has a long-standing suspicion of any argument that links ethical success or insight to intellectual talent or special ability. On Kierkegaard’s reading, Schopenhauer “turns ethics into a matter of genius – but this is precisely an unethical view of ethics” (2017: 358). A view of ethics that excludes most agents from taking part in ethics altogether is not, in Kierkegaard’s view, fit for purpose. It also threatens to engulf Schopenhauer in a fatal contradiction between his moral theory and its normative entailments. As Schopenhauer makes clear in his essay for the Royal Academy, he regards compassion as the wellspring of all morality: “Only in so far as an action has sprung from it does that action have moral worth: and every action that proceeds from any other motives whatever has none” (SW 4:208–9/OBM 200). If that is the case, objects Kierkegaard, then the very motivation Schopenhauer claims underlies all morally valuable action should also motivate us not to share that idea: Here I must object that I could almost sooner be tempted to turn things around, and to do so – be it noted – out of sympathy [Sympathie]. Whether, in fact, an individual comes to asceticism by way of original intellectuality, because he sees through the misery of everything, or more precisely, the misery of existing – or he is brought by way of suffering to the point of letting things come to a total collapse, of breaking with everything, breaking with existence itself, i.e., of breaking with the desire to exist (asceticism, mortification), which, in the face of the many minor plagues, of plague after plague, can be a consolation to him – just as, when one is unable to perspire in a situation of agonizing heat, it can be a relief when sweat bursts forth – in both cases I would turn the question this way: Might not sympathy be precisely what would hinder him, prevent him, from going to that extreme – sympathy for those thousands upon thousands who live in the happy delusion that life is joy and whom he thus would only disturb, make unhappy, without being able to help them out to where he is? (Kierkegaard 2017: 356) In other words, if you really are motivated by compassion, shouldn’t you keep your gloomy theory about being motivated by compassion – a theory that will be of no help to many, perhaps even most people – to yourself? Kierkegaard here presents Schopenhauer’s theory of suffering as generating something analogous to what are known in contemporary ethics as self-effacing reasons (e.g. Keller 2007). A moral theory is self-effacing when it tells us we should not be motivated by the very motives proper to an action; for instance, if a theory were to say that selfless altruism is morally justified because it promotes the welfare of all agents including the selflessly altruistic agent herself. As Michael Stocker puts it in a nowclassic paper, in such cases, “to the extent that you live the theory directly, to that extent you will fail to achieve its goods” (Stocker 1976: 461). In this case, Schopenhauer claims (at least on Kierkegaard’s reading of him) that he wants to lead his reader to see that compassion is the wellspring of morality, when that self-same compassion demands he leave his reader in their state of blissful ignorance. 476

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Of course, says Kierkegaard, there is a risk here – and here we can note again that both Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer are deeply attuned to the danger of lying to ourselves to avoid doing what we know on some level is right – that we will feign compassion. “I willingly concede,” says Kierkegaard, “that here it is terribly easy for the deceptiveness that does not itself dare to the utmost, to conceal itself and thus create the appearance of sympathy” (Kierkegaard 2017: 356). It would be easy enough to evade the demands of asceticism by convincing oneself that one did so not out of a love of comfort or worldly reward but out of a compassionate concern not to make other people uncomfortable. At this point, Schopenhauer could simply respond that he is not presenting himself as motivated by compassion. As such, Kierkegaard’s moral argument fails, because it relies on the mistaken assumption that the person putting forward the argument is themselves acting from sympathy rather than merely theorizing about it.2 We can philosophize about morality without seeking to act morally ourselves, and while we might be open to moral censure for doing so (more on this below), we are not necessarily entangled in a performative contradiction just by doing so. Or to put it more bluntly, Schopenhauer never claimed to practice what he preaches. And this leads into Kierkegaard’s second, yet primary, objection to Schopenhauer: exempting himself from his own system.

32.5  Schopenhauer as Hypocrite? Kierkegaard’s entire critique of nineteenth-century intellectual culture was very largely about the way in which authors and their readers acted as if they were somehow positionless in relation to what they write and read, as if one can discuss normative claims without being subject to those same claims. For Kierkegaard, the only legitimate path for forsaking the ethical in this way would be if one is “the exception,” someone called to set ethical mutual intelligibility aside for the sake of a higher religious purpose. The problem with that, however, is that as we’ll see below, Schopenhauer’s attitude to worldly esteem tells against the possibility of his being such an exception. The concept of an individual as a justified “exemption” from certain ethical or worldly demands is a persistent one in Kierkegaard’s writing. The locus classicus is Abraham, as presented in Fear and Trembling, the “father of faith” who, in obedience to God, must suspend his allegiance to human ethics in order to submit to the absurd demand to sacrifice his son Isaac. Kierkegaard clearly regards himself as an exception in a less grandiose, though no less religious, sense: called to a higher purpose that his contemporaries cannot understand, he is to forsake marriage, career, and ultimately even life itself in service to his authorial mission. At the same time as Kierkegaard is reading Schopenhauer, he is also on the cusp of the final, decisive, and fatal phase of his career. In attacking the Danish Church, including clerical bastions of Danish Hegelianism, Kierkegaard would be burning his few remaining bridges in a fairly spectacular fashion – and in a way that, arguably, cost him his life.3 Against that background, it is understandable that Kierkegaard, so beguiled by Schopenhauer as a writer, would be especially sensitive to any discrepancy between Schopenhauer’s philosophy and his actuality as a person. Kierkegaard is impressed by Schopenhauer’s claim that the only honest people are merchants (SW 6:225/PP 2:192), who at least have the honesty to admit that they cheat (Kierkegaard 2017: 352). Yet he also thinks that Schopenhauer does not buy his own wares: he peddles asceticism as a cure to the evils of life, yet “When one has read through A. S.’s ethics, one experiences that – honest as he of course is – he himself is not an ascetic of this sort” (2017: 356). Schopenhauer 477

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“certainly prides himself on being a genius,” yet “it has not pleased him (or nature) to have him become a genius in the area of asceticism and mortification” (2017: 358). Schopenhauer diagnoses successfully that Stoicism is essentially just another form of eudaimonism (SW 2:108/WWR 1:118). It commends a sort of suspended indifference toward life, yet it is also, ultimately, a counsel of how to live well. Yet the same risk, according to Kierkegaard, lies in Schopenhauer’s asceticism, given its fundamental assumption that life is suffering. If life is in fact terrible in the way Schopenhauer claims, then a renunciation of life is ultimately not ascetic at all. Unlike Schopenhauer’s asceticism, Kierkegaard thinks Christian asceticism avoids this contradiction precisely because it declares that existence is not necessarily suffering. It demands renunciation but maintains that the things to be renounced nonetheless have value – otherwise giving them up would in fact be no loss at all. For example, “if one were to say, ‘Wealth is an evil. Now show your asceticism by giving your wealth away,’ there is a self-contradiction in this, for if that is the case then it is not asceticism to give away one’s wealth” (Kierkegaard 2017: 394). Yet Schopenhauer himself isn’t an ascetic who is really a crypto-eudaimonist, according to Kierkegaard, because he hasn’t even taken his own advice to adopt asceticism. Schopenhauer does not offer “a contemplation attained via asceticism,” but “a contemplation that relates contemplatively to that asceticism” (Kierkegaard 2017: 356). It is “always dubious to teach an ethic that does not exercise such power over the teacher that he himself expresses it” (2017: 358). In such a meta-position on ethics, “frightful things can conceal themselves – a corrupt species of melancholic carnality, item a profound misanthropy, etc.” (2017: 356). In Schopenhauer’s case, perhaps the worst thing hiding in this stance is not his vitriol4 but a hypocritical disconnect between his philosophical commitments and his monstrous professional pride. Again, for Schopenhauer himself, this need not present any particular problem. Moral theory and moral practice are different things, and one must not scruple to do the former for fear of being critiqued on the grounds of the latter. For instance, in response to the possibility that his critique of Kant’s theory of conscience might be taken as evidence that Schopenhauer lacks conscience himself, he insists his critique “is a matter of theory, not of practice, and the purpose is not preaching morals but a rigorous examination of the ultimate ground of ethics” (SW 4:170/OBM 169). In turn, the act of making such a distinction between theory and practice is, for Kierkegaard, itself a form of moral evasion, an attempt to create a space in which the theorist is somehow exempt from responsibility for what they are doing with their time. Trying to discern the content of morality theoretically is all too often, on Kierkegaard’s telling, a way of excusing ourselves from doing what we already know to be required of us. The ethical commands of the New Testament, for instance, are each couched in the sort of remark “that could become difficult to understand in only one way – if a literature came into existence in order to interpret it” (Kierkegaard 1990: 34–5). If the Royal Academy jurors were repelled by Schopenhauer’s vicious disdain for other philosophers, Kierkegaard is clearly somewhat tickled by it. Schopenhauer has learned to despise the professional caste who “live off philosophy under the guise of teaching it” and thereby “conspire with the whole of worldliness, which regards them as the true philosophers, inasmuch as it is, after all, their field, i.e., it is their way of making a living” (Kierkegaard 2017: 358). This is precisely Kierkegaard’s discovery too – and a charge that he was preparing to level at the ecclesiastical establishment as well, who in Kierkegaard’s view live by selling a degraded version of Christianity to the masses. Yet despite being “incomparably coarse in this connection” (2017: 358), Schopenhauer despises the profes478

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sors while wanting their acclaim. For all his command of rhetorical irony, there is nothing ironic in his relation to his contemporaries. Schopenhauer “relates to recognition in straightforward fashion; it is something he has wanted, sought” (2017: 360). He is utterly thrilled to be lauded by the Norwegians and no less enraged to be snubbed by the Danes. Where Kierkegaard takes irony to be an essential stage in the development of religious selfhood, reflecting an individual’s break with immediacy on the path to a deeper self-understanding, Schopenhauer remains staunchly and unironically concerned for worldly acclaim. For all his scornfulness, he does not express his superiority over his contemporaries by playfully pretending to go along with their rituals of recognition, but takes part in these rituals ingenuously and in earnest. And “in this respect [A.S.] does not resemble S. A. at all … I find it inconceivable that so significant a thinker, so excellent an author, as S. has so little irony in his character (though he has much of it in his style), so little of the lightness of superiority” (2017: 359). Should Schopenhauer come at last to be acclaimed by his peers, then “I wager one hundred to one that he – that he will be pleased as punch, that it would absolutely not occur to him to cut that garbage down – no, he’ll be delighted” (2017: 359). That prediction arguably came to pass, with Schopenhauer rather insufferably declaring in 1859 that “I too have finally arrived,” hoping that his nascent influence on philosophy, “according to an old rule, will last all the longer, since it was so late starting out” (SW 2:XXXI/WWR 1:22). Kierkegaard’s charge here is in part one of simple hypocrisy. Schopenhauer preaches asceticism and a disdain for his peers, yet he wants the very un-ascetic pleasure of being praised by those he condemns. But this is just part of a wider lack of genuine moral character linked to the lack of existential irony and a corresponding lack of self-insight. Kierkegaard’s final judgment is scathing: S. is not a man of character, has no ethical character, does not have the character of a Greek philosopher, much less that of a Christian police officer. If I could speak with him, I am sure he would either shudder or laugh if I applied this criterion to him (Kierkegaard 2017: 358).

32.6  The Negative Exemplar No doubt Schopenhauer would indeed have either shuddered or laughed at the unflattering comparison Kierkegaard draws between Schopenhauer’s persecution by his contemporaries and that of Christ, “the Exemplar.” Jesus is offered worldly power and rejects it, and this is in some sense essential to genuine martyrdom. “A worldly quest at which one fails is one thing – to refuse worldly triumph that has been offered, and then to be sacrificed: this is something else. Only this latter constitutes being sacrificed.” So while Kierkegaard is prepared to accept that Schopenhauer has “been mean-spiritedly made a sacrifice by all this professorial villainy,” his cannot be regarded as an “ethical, religious sacrifice – for he would have much preferred to be celebrated” (Kierkegaard 2017: 360). Sure, Schopenhauer might reply, and why not? Do the talented and industrious not deserve to be celebrated for their work? From Kierkegaard’s increasingly extreme religious viewpoint of the 1850s, however, it may well be right to celebrate the merits of others but not to want to be celebrated for our own. True ethical striving requires a sacrifice, the only earthly reward of which is further mockery and abasement. What, then, should Schopenhauer have done in his fight with the professors? The right course of action, according to Kierkegaard, would be for Schopenhauer to bring things to a crisis. Instead of leading “a withdrawn existence, occasionally emitting a thunderstorm 479

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of coarse epithets – which are ignored” (Kierkegaard 2017: 359) he should instead take the fight up to the enemy: Go to Berlin. Move the stage for these scoundrels out into the street. Endure being the most notorious person of all, recognized by everyone. Then keep up a sort of personal relationship of understanding with these scoundrels, so that one sees them together on the street, and so that if possible, everyone knows that they know one another. This, you see, undermines that vileness of ignoring. That is what I have practiced – on a smaller scale, of course – here in Copenhagen: they become fools with their ignoring. And then I have even dared to do one additional thing – precisely because I have been placed under religious command – I have voluntarily dared to expose myself to being caricatured and ridiculed by the whole mob, from the simple people to the aristocrats, all in order to explode illusions, and all so that they will take note that what is being put forward here is not a profane objection that accepts the help of the mob, but a godly objection, which therefore even dares to rebuff the mob when it wants to applaud a victory. (Kierkegaard 2017: 359) Perhaps this, finally, is where Schopenhauer’s real significance for Kierkegaard lies. While A.S. amuses and even tantalizes S.A., the former is every bit the inversion of the latter that the somewhat gerrymandered initials suggest. Schopenhauer has exposed himself to the crowd and seeks its approval; Kierkegaard has done so and seeks a kind of martyrdom. Schopenhauer counsels asceticism yet wants to be something in the world; Kierkegaard too preaches “dying to the world,” but must now confront just what that really means. Perhaps just as much ego and self-regard ultimately lies in Kierkegaard’s path as Schopenhauer’s; when Kierkegaard tells the doctors admitting him to Frederick’s Hospital that he is there to die as the apotheosis of his religious mission (which they duly jotted down in his case notes), there is something altogether too theatrical going on. But the negative example of Schopenhauer arrives in Kierkegaard’s mind at precisely the right moment, when he is steeling himself for a final showdown that, as he may have sensed even in 1854, he would not and could not survive. In yet another appreciative journal entry on Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard commends Schopenhauer to his contemporaries as a “counter-poison” to the cloying optimism that both authors are keen to reject: Just as during epidemics one puts something in one’s mouth to avoid, if possible, becoming infected by breathing the disease-laden air, so could one recommend to students of theology who must live here in Denmark amid this nonsensical (Christian) optimism, that they ingest a little dose of S’s Ethics every day to protect themselves against infection from this nonsense. (Kierkegaard 2017: 380) Yet Kierkegaard tells us he himself does not need this protective measure, for “I am protected in another way” (2017: 380). His protection too is a kind of counter-poison, one that will ultimately kill the patient. What Kierkegaard ultimately got from Schopenhauer was, perhaps, some of the courage to take it.

Notes 1 In his journals Kierkegaard tends to abbreviate “Christianity” [christendom] to “Xstd,” which his recent translators have rendered “Xnty”; where this occurs in the passages quoted here I have here spelled this out as “Christianity” for the sake of clarity.

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“Either Shudder or Laugh” 2 Thanks to David Bather Woods for suggesting this important objection. 3 Never in good health and presumably weakened by the stress of his final confrontation with the Danish church, Kierkegaard collapsed in the street in October 1855 and died a month later at the age of forty-two. The cause of death is believed to be spinal tuberculosis. 4 Nor, we might note, his misogyny, something the late Kierkegaard in particular was not innocent of either; see, for example, Watkin (1991).

References Cartwright, David E. (2010), Schopenhauer: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). ——— (2016), Historical Dictionary of Schopenhauer’s Philosophy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers). Davini, Simonella (2007), ‘Schopenhauer: Kierkegaard’s Late Encounter with His Opposite’, in Jon Stewart (ed.), Kierkegaard and His German Contemporaries, Tome I: Philosophy (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources; Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate), 277–88. Fitzgerald, F. Scott (2005), My Lost City: Personal Essays, 1920–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Geismar, Eduard (1926), Søren Kierkegaard, hans Livsudvikling og Forfattervirksomhed (2; Copenhagen: Gads). Hassan, Patrick (2021), ‘Striving as Suffering: Schopenhauer’s A Priori Argument for Pessimism’, Philosophia, 49 (4), 1487–1505. Keller, Simon (2007), ‘Virtue Ethics is Self-Effacing’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 85 (2), 221–31. Kierkegaard, Søren (1981), The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin, eds Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, trans. Reidar Thomte (Kierkegaard’s Writings; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). ——— (1983), The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening, eds Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Kierkegaard’s Writings; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). ——— (1990), For Self-Examination/Judge for Yourself! eds Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Kierkegaard’s Writings; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). ——— (2017), Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, Volume 9: Journals Nb26–Nb30 (Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, 9; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Malik, Habib C. (1997), Receiving Søren Kierkegaard: The Early Impact and Transmission of His Thought (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press). Marino, Gordon D. (1985), ‘Søren Kierkegaard: The Objective Thinker is a Suicide’, Philosophy Today, 29 (3), 203–12. Pasgaard-Westerman, Martin (2020), ‘Strictly Incognito? Schopenhauer’s Prize Essay on Morals and the Royal Danish Academy’, Schopenhauer Jahrbuch, 101, 23–74. Stewart, Jon (2003), Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Stocker, Michael (1976), ‘The Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories’, Journal of Philosophy, 73 (14), 453–66. Stokes, Patrick (2007), ‘Kierkegaard’s Uncanny Encounter with Schopenhauer, 1854’, in Roman Kralik and Peter Sajda (eds.), Kierkegaard and Great Philosophers (Acta Kierkegaardiana Vol.2) (Sociedad Iberoamericana de Estudios Kierkegaardianos). Watkin, Julia (1991), ‘The Logic of Søren Kierkegaard’s Misogyny 1854–1855’, Kierkegaardiana, 15, 82–92. Young, Julian (1987), Willing and Unwilling: A Study in the Philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff).

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33 WAGNER AND SCHOPENHAUER Mark Berry

33.1 Introduction It is a productive peculiarity of intellectual history that the second rather than the first half of the long nineteenth century (up until the First World War) constitutes the age of Schopenhauer. The disjuncture between Schopenhauer’s biography and his influence on others is striking. Whereas we think of Hegelianism—and Wagnerism—as existing and growing in importance from the time Hegel and Wagner wrote their most celebrated works, Schopenhauerism only came into being at the end of Schopenhauer’s life, more than a generation after the publication of The World as Will and Representation. Prior to that, Schopenhauer had no public profile. The tragicomedy of his bizarre, unreciprocated vendetta against Hegel, ‘Monsieur Nichtswisser [Know-nothing],’ only made sense to a world that had heard of Hegel’s antagonist (Cartwright 2010, 364–5). Part was simply chance; part, however, was consonance—ironically, for one so vehemently opposed to Hegel and Hegelianism—with a broader spirit of the age. A climate of post-1848 revolutionary failure, especially following Louis-Napoleon’s 1851 coup d’état, was conducive to what Friedrich Engels scorned as ‘the vapid reflections of Schopenhauer, which were fashioned to fit the philistines,’ and the resurgence of ‘a certain neo-Kantianism, whose last word was the eternally unknowable thing-in-itself, that is, the bit of Kant that least merited preservation.’ (Engels 1970, 61–2) The 1851 publication of Parerga and Paralipomena widely struck a chord—in the philosophical world, but also beyond—and continued to do so for decades to come. Schopenhauer proved the modern artist’s philosopher par excellence. From Tolstoy to Schoenberg and from Hardy to Beckett, Schopenhauer’s latter influence was as widespread as it was profound. In no case, however, did it run deeper than in Wagner’s.

33.2  Conversion and Beyond Wagner was an early, lifelong convert, though perhaps an unlikely one, since, unlike many of his 1848–9 comrades, he retained his revolutionary socialist politics until the end. His first encounter came via another socialist artist-in-exile, the poet Georg Herwegh. In May

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1852, Wagner and Herwegh were visiting the writer Eliza Wille on her estate outside Zurich. Wille, an annual visitor to Schopenhauer in Frankfurt, recounts these writings, ‘quite new’, having made the ‘deepest impression’ on both her husband and Wagner (Wille 1935, 33). Assuming this happened—there is no direct testimony from Wagner—the composer seems not to have revisited Schopenhauer on the page until, in 1854, Herwegh, knocking on an open door, effected a reintroduction and urged detailed study. This had Wagner ‘reflect further on my own feelings with a well-timed word’: … [Schopenhauer’s] insight into the essential nothingness of the world of appearances, he contended, lies at the root of all tragedy, and every great poet, and even every great man, must necessarily feel it intuitively. I looked at my Nibelung poems and recognised to my amazement that the very things I now found so unpalatable in the theory were already long familiar to me in my own poetic conception. Only now did I understand my own Wotan myself and, greatly shaken, I went on to a closer study of Schopenhauer’s book. (Wagner 1983, 509–10) It was, essentially, a religious conversion, described by Thomas Mann as ‘the great event in Wagner’s life’ (Mann 1976, 330). It was the great philosophical event, at least, eclipsing even encounters with Ludwig Feuerbach and Mikhail Bakunin and as important in its way as participation in the Dresden uprising (Berry 2013a, 2013b, 2013c). Thereafter, Schopenhauer’s book ‘never left me … by the summer of the next year I had already gone through it for the fourth time. Its gradual effect on me was extraordinary and, at any rate, decisive for the rest of my life.’ (Wagner 1983, 510) Given Schopenhauer’s advice that, to make sense of his book, two readings would be necessary, ‘and in fact with considerable patience the first time’, this already marks out Wagner as an unusually avid Schopenhauerian (SW 2:VIII/WWR 1:6).1 Wagner eagerly, if often idiosyncratically, adopted—or better, moved toward—Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, his Young Hegelian materialism (above all Feuerbach’s) transformed, though never erased, by an idealism that owed less to Hegel and more to Schopenhauer and, increasingly, to Kant too. Priority shifted from the principium individuationis to its overcoming in oneness and from the phenomenal to the noumenal world, with obvious implications for the importance (or otherwise) of politics, perhaps especially revolutionary politics. Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of music occasioned a reversal both in Wagner’s operatic theory and, more ambiguously, in his practice. Schopenhauer would remain with Wagner in his thoughts, conversations, writings, dramas and his subconscious for the rest of his life and, in reception, beyond. Eight days before Wagner died, his wife Cosima recorded a dream in which he drew ‘attention to a flock of nightingales, but Sch. Had already noticed them’ (Wagner C. 1978–80, 2/1003). Asked ‘whether he thought that much still remained to be discovered in the philosophical field after Schopenhauer,’ Wagner answered, ‘To be described, much; to be discovered, I think not’ (Wagner C. 1978–80, 1/116). Schopenhauer was also clearly the pivotal figure in Wagner’s later turn toward Kant (which, like that toward Schopenhauer, could never quite rid Wagner of abiding Hegelianism). ‘“If Schopenhauer and Kant were really understood”, Wagner once asked Cosima, “how could new philosophical books possibly keep on emerging?”’ (Wagner C. 1978–80, 2/392) Much as they had after Plato and Aristotle, no doubt, yet although Wagner’s thoughts often turned to Plato (and Socrates) too, it is telling that he mentioned Schopenhauer and Kant here. ‘Hardly had Kant discovered’ ide-

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ality, Wagner lamented on another occasion, ‘when everybody,’ especially Fichte, ‘started making nonsense of it’ (Wagner C. 1978–80, 2/388). That thought was surely mediated by Schopenhauer. However, as one might expect, this was a Schopenhauer—a Kant too—adapted, varied, questioned, and transformed, as much by musico-dramatic treatment as by Wagner’s sometimes eccentric, unsystematic intellectual method. Wagner was no mean aesthetician; Opera and Drama (1851) stands as a crucial work of nineteenth-century Hegelian musical aesthetics, Beethoven (1870), similarly on the Schopenhauerian side. He was, though, above all a composer and dramatist. It was in musical dramas, which necessarily operate differently from treatises, that ideas were most fruitfully developed and tested. This examination of a singular Schopenhauerian mind is structured around them.

33.3  From Hellenism to Renunciation: Der Ring des Nibelungen The four dramas of the Ring afford a singular, complex case for that singular mind, Wagner’s work encompassing more than a quarter of a century, both before and after his conversion. The latter period was significantly longer, yet that imbalance is reweighted by the fact that, with one exception of rewriting, the text of Wagner’s poems, as he preferred to call them, had been completed (in reverse order) before serious engagement with Schopenhauer, perhaps before any at all.2 Actual influence on writing was therefore restricted to the music and to verbal revision, though what Wagner (and others) considered to be its message(s) continued to develop, often in Schopenhauerian terms. One does not necessarily grasp or make sense of a whole until it has achieved its final state and often not even then. The role a part of that whole—say, a character in a novel or drama—plays may change radically, affording different readings to his earlier as well as to his later appearances. Wagner’s claim of mid-1850s reconsideration conforms with his practice. Two years after the first complete performance, Cosima recorded Wagner, proud yet still wounded by Schopenhauer’s personal rejection two decades previously, telling her: It does not say much for Schopenhauer that he did not pay more attention to my Ring des Nibelungen. I know no other work in which the breaking of a will (and what a will, which delighted in the creation of a world!) is shown as being accomplished through the individual strength of a proud nature without the intervention of a higher grace, as it is in Wotan. … At supper he returns to this and says: ‘I am convinced Sch. would have been annoyed that I discovered this before I knew about his philosophy— I, a political refugee, the indefensibility of whose theories had been proved by his disciple [journalist, Ernst] Kossak on the basis of his philosophy, since my music is supposed to have no melody. (Wagner C. 1978-80, 2/52) Thus Wagner’s Schopenhauerian reading, like his socialist and other readings, persisted until his death. It was no flash-in-the-pan insight at the height of enthusiasm. Wagner—this comes to the heart of practice as dramatist first, philosopher second—rarely proceeded in conventional Socratic fashion. A problem presented in an earlier work or an earlier reading of a work was addressed in a later work or reading, often as a starting point. That helps make for absorbing drama and fascinating intellectual history, if not the cleanest and most analytical of philosophy. 484

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What was the crux of this re-evaluation? Wagner owned that he had ‘constructed a Hellenistically optimistic world … which I held to be entirely realisable if only people wished it to exist, while at the same time seeking somewhat ingeniously to circumvent the problem of why they did not’. It had required ‘a complete revolution in my rational outlook’ to realize that there could be no moral action, ‘except in the sense of renunciation’. (Wagner 1987, 357–8, translation slightly modified; Wagner 1967, 8/153) A drama inspired by the fall of the gods—related to the fall of the old political and religious order—acquired further meanings, additional rather than replacements, as mid-century Europe failed to turn in the way revolutionaries such as Wagner and Bakunin had hoped. What Wagner at one stage had anticipated would be performed in celebration by a post-revolutionary society had become by 1851 something more of a memorial, to explain ‘to the men of the Revolution the meaning of that Revolution, in its noblest sense,’ though transformation (almost) always remained deferred rather than canceled (Wagner 1967, 4/116). Superimposed upon the downfall of Wotan and the gods at the hands of the hero Siegfried and his revolutionary sword were Wotan’s renunciation and breaking of the will, as well as the redemption both of Wotan and his daughter Brünnhilde, his ‘will’. Siegfrieds Tod, ‘Siegfried’s Death’, became Götterdämmerung, ‘Twilight of the Gods’. There are Schopenhauerian qualities even to Das Rheingold, the first and reddest of the Ring dramas, in which the dwarf Alberich steals gold from the Rhine, converting it from a thing of beauty into capital, and the god Wotan builds the divine fortress of Valhalla, both sacrificing love for power. Wagner may have gone so far as to read back into the opening Prelude, an evocation of the Rhine in which the Ring both opens and closes, what he found in Parerga and Paralipomena both on dreams’ affinity with the operatic overture, which should ‘prepare us for an opera,’ albeit not ‘too explicitly and clearly, but only as we foresee what is to come in dreams’ (SW 6:464/PP 2:392) and on their allegorical significance: Time is that arrangement of our intellect by virtue of which that which we conceive of the future appears not to exist at all now; this illusion disappears, however, when the future has become the present. In certain dreams, in clairvoyant somnambulism and in second sight this illusory form is suspended temporarily, which is why the future then manifests itself as the present. (SW 6:45/PP 2:42) For in Wagner’s autobiography, he tells of a ‘vision’ he experienced in La Spezia, arising from a ‘somnambulistic state,’ stricken as he was by dysentery, ‘in which I suddenly had the feeling of being immersed in rapidly flowing water’ (Wagner 1983, 499). It does not especially matter whether Wagner made the connection with his drama at the time or only later, or even whether it happened at all (Deathridge 1985, Darcy 1989). It is more important that Wagner wanted us to believe so—and probably did himself, bestowing on the first notes of his magnum opus a Schopenhauerian blessing (if not from Schopenhauer himself, who considered Wagner a better poet than composer). Loge’s closing denunciation, born of Young Hegelian critique of church and state, of Wahn (illusion) in the gods’ fortress of Valhalla surely acquired new Schopenhauerian, idealist meaning with the passing of time: ‘They hasten to their end, they who imagine [wähnen] themselves so strong and enduring. I am almost ashamed to associate myself with them; I am tempted to transform myself once again into flickering flames.’ His soliloquy retains Bakunin-like pyromania, yet it may be read as deepening in metaphysical critique, 485

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denouncing a world of illusion and semblance for its political misdeeds but also for the fallacy of thinking itself reality. Perhaps that lies in neither Valhalla nor the Rhine but in something else at which only the earth goddess Erda’s mysterious appearance and cryptic foretelling of Götterdammerung have as yet hinted. Wagner’s and Schopenhauer’s—as well as Feuerbach’s—strong grounding in the common currency of German Romanticism may be as important here as influence, but Wagner was ripe for conversion when the time came. In the second installment, Die Walküre, in which we turn to the power of human love, Wotan’s conversion to something approaching Wagner’s own Schopenhauerism and, beyond it, to an anti-politics Wagner never adopted commences in earnest. Having fatally compromised the foundations of his power, temporal and spiritual, through political sins, even in extremis turning to inciting anarchist challenge through his own unacknowledged son, the Volsung hero Siegmund, Wotan realizes his plan has thrown up another political snare. If he personally has framed a situation in which a ‘free’ hero will rescue him from his own misdeeds, the hero is not free at all. Self-pityingly, Wotan laments: ‘In my own fetters am I caught: — I, most unfree of all men!’ He begins to edge toward realization that the answer may lie in renunciation of political power—and, as yet only dimly, even of the phenomenal world itself. The orchestra speaks more gravely and digs deeper into the situation than words ever could. That is arguably itself a Schopenhauerian realization, certainly at odds with Wagner’s earlier aesthetics and in line with what he had by now—by the time of musical composition—read in The World as Will and Representation. An orchestral motif often dubbed ‘Wotan’s frustration’ ebbs and flows according to the increasingly sorry state of Wotan’s mind, ultimately accumulating symphonic momentum that propels the drama to fuller confession of his misdeeds (to Brünnhilde, in the following scene). The tragedy of politics, perhaps inevitable and certainly extending beyond his own particular politics, will now necessitate the sacrifice of his son. Wotan must ‘murder him [Siegmund] whom I cherish, foully betray him who trusts me!’ As Wagner read in Schopenhauer at just the time he was composing the music to this work, it is when man deliberates upon past actions that his existence becomes ‘so much more harrowing than that of animals’ (SW 2:352/WWR 1:324). The ring of power Wotan had been willing to possess at almost any cost he bequeaths in disgust to the son, recently born, of his arch-rival Alberich: ‘That which most disgusts me, I grant as your inheritance: godhead’s vain luster: may your envy lustfully gnaw it away!’ Wotan now desires one thing alone: ‘the end’. ‘Observe him closely!’ Wagner counseled his former Dresden assistant and fellow revolutionary, August Röckel. ‘He [Wotan] resembles us to a tee; he is the sum total of present-day intelligence’ (Wagner 1987, 310). Wotan’s dilemma is theirs; it remains ours, as a pre-revolutionary audience, too. That ‘end’ Wotan desires, couched first more in personal and political terms, takes on greater metaphysical meaning as the series of dramas progresses. If there is a case for seeing that Walküre scene as the ultimate turning point (Aristotelian peripeteia) of the Ring, the stronger candidate comes with the beginning of the third act of Siegfried, whose composition marked the return to the Ring after an extended break of twelve years between 1857 and 1869 (save for the second act’s orchestration), during which Wagner had deepened and tested his Schopenhauerism in the writing of Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger. The Prelude to Act III could not have been written by the composer of the earlier Siegfried. Its quasi-symphonic writing depends on the experience of Tristan in particular (on which see below) but also on Schopenhauer, once more in difficult yet productive conflict-cumcoexistence with Hegel. 486

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Musical, dramatic, and conceptual meaning are at one in a contrapuntal concatenation of motifs that owes much to the liberation Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of music helped grant Wagner as composer. He now need not worry about ‘absolute music’ gaining the upper hand over ‘drama’, secure in the knowledge that innermost drama and meaning lie in music which, in its ‘inexpressible intimacy’, expresses ‘the inner essence, the in-itself of the world (which we think through the concept of will, after its clearest expression) … with the greatest determinateness and truth’ (SW 2:312/WWR 1:292). At the same time, conceptual meaning remains and is strengthened by Wagner’s motifs’ associative combination and transformation (among other things, associative tonality and tonal relations included). On stage, this is both a world-historical moment and, in apparent rejection or transcendence of world-history, a turn against Hegelian historicism toward Schopenhauer (Berry 2014, 35). In musical retelling and analysis of ‘the story so far’, telling us, like Wotan’s verbal narrations, new things from new standpoints, we feel—Wagner always insisted on the ‘emotionalisation of the intellect’—what has brought Wotan (now the resigned ‘Wanderer’) to the point of renunciation of his proto-Nietzschean will to power (Wagner 1994, 215; Berry 2019, 112–6). And so he does in the ensuing scene, finally renouncing not only political ambition but the Will itself. The die is cast. Not only will Siegfried, the ‘free hero’ Siegmund was not, fall; he will do so as the gods’ rule comes to an end. Wagner’s difficulties in settling on a version of the final scene of Götterdämmerung—in sharp contrast with the rest of his poem, which he barely revisited—tell their own, fascinating tale. The drama retains the anti-theological and political meanings it had always had but acquires further layering. The final scene of November 1848, the so-called ‘Bakunin ending’, had Brünnhilde read the ring’s runes, hearing and understanding the Norns’ primeval wisdom. She therefore returns the ring to the Rhine, delivering the Nibelungs from Alberich’s (implicitly capitalist) enslavement. She calls on Wodan (Wagner’s initial spelling) to rejoice in Siegfried as the ‘freest of heroes’, now ready to join the god in Valhalla. It is uneasy power sharing, perhaps, but Wagner was still an employee of the king of Saxony. That was soon replaced with Brünnhilde proclaiming blessed redemption in death to Wodan; Siegfried would still be greeted by Wodan’s ‘brotherly gods’. The so-called ‘Feuerbach ending’, written in 1852, is still more revolutionary-Hellenistic. Brünnhilde rejects evils such as private property, custom, and contract and foretells a ‘world without rulers’, in which ‘love alone’ will rule. The 1856 ‘Schopenhauer ending’, by contrast, assumed a strikingly metaphysical, even Buddhistic, tone, distant from optimistic Hellenism. Brünnhilde rejects the ‘homes of desire and illusion’ (Wunschheim and Wahnheim), closing the gates of ‘eternal becoming’. Redeemed from reincarnation, her eyes opened by the catastrophe erotic love has unleashed, she has seen ‘the world end’. Such preoccupations are Schopenhauer’s as much as Wagner’s, indeed more so, for Wagner proceeded to reject that conclusion too, at least in words, awarding his mysteriously oracular orchestra the final say. Yet that was arguably truer to Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of music—and certainly to Wagner’s stature as a dramatist. More than either Siegfried or Brünnhilde, Wotan remains the central figure, although he does not appear on stage in Götterdämmerung.3 His is the abiding musical presence in world-weary resignation that breathes the air first of death and decay, through renunciation, to closing redemption. It is a Schopenhauerian journey and a persistent preoccupation for Wagner, which sat uneasily with his politics. ‘That is why fearing death as an annihilation is like thinking that the evening sun could complain: “Woe is me! I am sinking into 487

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eternal night”’ (SW 2:331/WWR 1:307). Instead, ‘The terror of death is for the most part due to the false illusion that the I vanishes and the world remains. But the opposite is true: the world disappears.’ (SW 3:573/WWR 2:516) Brünnhilde, after all, saw the world end. Indeed, ‘for the most part, the will must be broken by personal experience of great suffering before its self-negation can come into play,’ something Wotan has certainly learned. Then we see a man who has gone through all the stages of increasing difficulty brought to the brink of despair amid the most violent resistance, –we see him suddenly retreat into himself, recognize himself and the world, change his whole being, raise himself above himself and all suffering; purified and sanctified by this suffering, with unassailable peace, blissfulness and sublimity, we see him willingly renounce everything that he had previously desired with such violent intensity, and cheerfully embrace death. (SW 2:464/WWR 1:419) Those words might have been written for Wotan. This mystical element of ‘resignation’ grew on reading of Schopenhauer, as ‘the final goal, indeed the innermost essence of all virtue and holiness,’ that is, ‘redemption from the world’ (SW 2:182/WWR 1:177). Wotan has salvation from politics yet also from the world itself, from the unquenchable thirst for knowledge he first attempted to sate at the spring of whispering wisdom, even from the tragic curse of existence. Schopenhauer had distinguished himself from ‘almost all the heroes of the ancients’ and from ‘Stoic equanimity’. Hippolytus, for example, had submitted to the gods’ will and to fate, yet never relinquished the will to live. The Stoics had merely expected and endured evils, without taking the crucial step both Schopenhauer and increasingly Wagner ascribed to certain religions: Christianity (at least properly understood, shorn of much, though not all, of the Old Testament), Buddhism, and Hinduism. Christian tragedy offered an example of, perhaps a path to, redemption by renouncing ‘the entire will to life, a joyful forsaking of the world, conscious of its worthlessness and nothingness’ (SW 3:496/WWR 2:451). The Ring began to take its place in this tradition, as, Wagner’s worship of Attic tragedy notwithstanding, would the rest of Wagner’s oeuvre, including that written earlier. Revisions to Der fliegende Holländer and Tannhäuser made that shift clearer, the latter’s Tristan-ized Venus now a forerunner of Parsifal’s Kundry, though it also left its mark on Wagner’s— and our—understanding of passages and works left untouched. Like Schopenhauer and Hegel, Wagner recognized, as he always had, the crucial importance of Christian subjectivity and, broadly speaking, welcomed its introduction. At any rate, it could not be undone. Resignation, it must be stressed, is one crucial strand in a complex conclusion, almost infinitely amenable to interpretation; Bakunin, Feuerbach, and others remain. Wagner’s dramas, it bears repeating, are dramas not treatises. Like those men and women who survive this twilight—of the gods, not humanity—‘moved to the very depth of their being’ according to Wagner’s stage directions, we must decide which lessons, if any, to draw.

33.4  Eros Transfigured: Tristan und Isolde Renunciation is also Tristan’s destination, albeit via a different route. Both a Dionysiac celebration and a world-weary indictment of romantic love, this is the sole Wagner music drama whose initial conception postdates acquaintance with Schopenhauer. Unsurprisingly, then, it is generally considered to show Wagner at his most unambiguously Schopenhauerian. 488

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Even here, though, the strong countervailing force of sexual love threatens to invalidate that claim. Like most successful dramas, Wagner’s tend not to deal with the either/ or. Schopenhauer’s philosophical—and verbal—clarity is not the aim, far from it. Given a journey from conception to completed work, that journey is embodied in the completed work (insofar as a work realized in performance may ever be considered ‘complete’). If less arduous and involved and arguably more ambiguous, than that of the Ring, there is a shift toward Schopenhauer from a starting point already closer. Little of the political realm remains; there is relatively little in the way of action at all (assuming we consider ‘action’ in a narrow, stage sense Wagner moves beyond). Wagner’s prose sketch had drawn to a close, Götterdämmerung-like, with ‘The bystanders are profoundly moved,’ prior to concluding, ‘Marke blesses them’. However, in 1859, summarizing the work’s concerns for his muse, Mathilde Wesendonck, Wagner omitted not only King Marke’s forgiveness but even Tristan’s agonies as he prepares to tear off his bandages and finally extinguish the light. Action or Handlung of Wagner’s own description (rejecting ‘opera’ for a German translation of Greek ‘drama’) had been transferred to the noumenal world: ‘redemption: death, dying, destruction, never more to waken!’ (Wagner 1912–14c). Wagner would then read this back into Siegfried when composing its music more than ten years after Tristan; or perhaps it had been there all along in its exultant, frightening closing hymn to ‘Lightening love, laughing death!’ ‘In the afternoon,’ Cosima records, ‘R. plays me his third act,’ extending from the Prelude discussed above to Siegfried’s discovery of the sleeping Brünnhilde, ‘great emotion. “The kiss of love is the first intimation of death, the cessation of individuality, that is why a person is so terrified by it”’ (Wagner C. 1978–80, 1/137). Tension between erotic love and self-abnegation was present from the outset, as a letter to Liszt makes clear. Wagner had become: … exclusively preoccupied with a man who—albeit only in literary form—has entered my lonely life like a gift from heaven. It is Arthur Schopenhauer, the greatest philosopher since Kant … His principal idea, the final denial of the will to live, is of terrible seriousness, but it is uniquely redeeming. Of course, it did not strike me as anything new, and nobody can think such a thought if he has not already lived it. But it was this philosopher who first awakened the idea in me with such clarity. … I have yet found a sedative which has finally helped me to sleep at night; it is the sincere and heartfelt yearning for death: total unconsciousness, complete annihilation, the end of all dreams—the only ultimate redemption! — (Wagner 1987, 323) Slightly wearied by the demands of the Ring, Wagner expects: that I must still complete the Nibelung pieces … But since I have never in my life enjoyed the true happiness of love, I intend to erect a further monument to this most beautiful of dreams, a monument in which this love will be properly sated from beginning to end: I have planned in my head a Tristan und Isolde, the simplest, but most full-blooded musical conception; … I shall then cover myself over, in order—to die. (Wagner 1987, 323–4) Note Wagner’s claim of a ‘full-blooded musical conception’. That his conception was at least as much musical as verbal, scenic, or conceptual, arguably more so, not only marks 489

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it out from Wagner’s other dramas but brings it closer to Schopenhauer’s metaphysics. His first sketch, two years later, was indeed musical in nature, though priority is not really the issue; work on verse and music proceeded in tandem. Drama, the surging, and finally (perhaps) renunciation of the Will is very much the orchestra’s province, words and stage action often its representation or conceptualization. In 1859, having completed Tristan, Wagner wrote: ‘I herald … my score as the most musical that I have written and that I ever will’4 (Wagner 1967–, 11/235). It is also his most extreme, chromatically hastening toward though never reaching Schoenberg’s (or Liszt’s) precipice of atonality, though always, be it noted, in the service of expression of an extremity that envelops, extends, and even leaves behind the narcotic, of a love whose power is ultimately too great not only for this world but for those in its thrall. Even in Tristan, we need hope—and indeed joy. Tristan and Isolde find fulfillment in each other: in sex, in the moment, as well as in expectation and reflection. Without hope, without the call heralding Isolde’s ship, there would be no conflict, no chiaroscuro, and no drama. The ambiguous transformation of the Shepherd’s ‘alte Weise’ (‘old melody’) echoes uncomfortably, even sardonically, yet in the moment overwhelmingly both the clarion call from Florestan’s dungeon (Fidelio) and the transition from darkness to light between the scherzo and finale of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Here is testimony to the importance of Beethoven, of Schopenhauer, and above all of Wagner’s reading and revision of both in the light of each other (on which see below). There is not, admittedly, much in the way of Hamlet’s gravediggers’ humor; that is reserved for Die Meistersinger. But ‘pure’ tragedy, like ‘pure’ metaphysics, does not make a drama; it probably does not make a philosophy either In its broader metaphysics, this is a world in which night is elevated over day, which for Wagner is to say the ultimate, noumenal reality over the world of phenomena. Only at night can Tristan and Isolde live, love, and truly die. Only then can the heightened sensitivity and awareness that are both the nature of the work and its subject matter be brought quasiliturgically into being. ‘What, is it the light I hear?’, Tristan’s reverse-synesthetic question posed on the cusp of extinction, is only intelligible in this particular context. Likewise verbal ruminations, whose meaning musical congress makes abundantly clear, on the extinction of separate identity in a new being, ‘Tristan und Isolde’: ‘this sweet little word, and,’ as Isolde puts it. This second-act love duet harks back to Novalis’s Hymns to the Night, coming close at times to referential allusion; it is, however, a Romanticism strongly mediated by Schopenhauer (whose relationship to Novalis and other key figures of German Romanticism is itself often underplayed). In this duet, whose heightened, overwhelming reality of nocturnal intercourse sweeps all before it, we discover the root of the claim advanced in an 1858 letter intended for Schopenhauer, in which Wagner presents sexual love as itself a ‘path to salvation in self-knowledge and self-unification of the Will—and not only the individual will’ (Wagner 1912–14b). Wagner never completed this fragment, opening with words on ‘the common suicide of two lovers thwarted by external circumstances’ from Schopenhauer’s chapter on ‘The Metaphysics of Sexual Love’ (SW 3:608–51/ WWR 2:547–82). Nor, wisely, did he send it. In that chapter, Schopenhauer argues that ‘the strongest and most active of all motives’, which never ceases to interrupt ‘every hour the most serious occupations’ and which leads far more often to tragedy or at least unhappiness than to happiness, results only in prolonging the agony of existence, standing quite opposed to denial of the Will. ‘[L]overs are traitors, secretly plotting to perpetuate all this need and vexation, which would otherwise quickly come to an end’ (SW 3:643/WWR 2:576). Not 490

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only would Wagner’s presumption in correcting Schopenhauer by carelessly upending his philosophy have infuriated; it is also inconsistent with much of Wagner’s own drama, in which the ‘sensualism’ of his Young German and Feuerbachian past proves every bit as destructive as Schopenhauer had warned. The nature of the ‘love’—Wagner means many different, even contradictory things by this—Tristan and Isolde feel for one another is ultimately Schopenhauerian. It engenders only suffering; it destroys; it ends in death for at least one of them (the nature of Isolde’s final ‘transfiguration’ is less clear) and for others. It is the true successor to that darkest of ‘comedies’, Mozart’s Così fan tutte. It stands in line with the Ring’s exposition of love as a form of power, preferable to many others, yet still power, that is, with Wagner’s (and Brünnhilde’s) shift from Feuerbach’s love-communism toward Schopenhauerian renunciation. Yet, also ultimately, it is celebrated—not despite its agonies but on account of them. This is, as Michael Tanner has argued, astutely connecting Tristan to Bach’s St Matthew Passion, ‘the Passion of passion’ (Tanner 1996, 140). In Roger Scruton’s evocative summary, ‘Wagner devised [here] a new task for art: to retrace the steps from romance back to ritual, to move backward from the open, self-explaining narrative to the rite in which the human truth can be shown but not told’ (Scruton 2004, 195). It is a quintessentially modernist move, one of his greatest legacies, and it is soaked in Schopenhauer. Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, Schoenberg’s expressionism, Eliot’s Waste Land, and even the plays of Beckett are but a stone’s throw away.

33.5  Return to the Phenomenal World: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg It may seem odd to consider Die Meistersinger, Wagner’s only mature comedy—unless we count Siegfried—an almost equally Schopenhauerian work, but that may be to misunderstand comedy, Schopenhauer, and Wagner in equal measure. Initially conceived in the 1840s as a satyr-play-like response to the Minnesingers of Tannhäuser, Meistersinger assumed a similar role vis-à-vis Tristan, its immediate predecessor and fellow Ring-interloper. Wagner made the connection explicit with a highly unusual intertextual reference, quoting the Tristan-chord when the cobbler-poet Hans Sachs—the bass, like Wotan, supplanting the tenor Walther as hero—tells Eva: ‘My child, of Tristan und Isolde, I know a sad play. Hans Sachs was clever and wanted nothing of Lord Marke’s fortune.’ An air of quotation, real or imaginary, permeates apparently diatonic harmonies, rendering them more fragile, less genially grounded, and, returning us to Schopenhauer, more dreamed. Carl Dahlhaus called this ‘a “second diatonicism” in the same sense that Hegel spoke of “second” nature: a diatonicism that has expanded to include chromaticism’ (Dahlhaus 1979, 113). At least some of the drama is heard as if through Tristan, its extremities embedded in the harmonic and dramatic background. This is no mere ‘return’ to bright C major but an equivocal renewal. That is how much of the stage action may be understood too: what to do when we return to the day, to the sunlight, yet cannot forget what we have learned? We sense that Sachs is the author of the action, even of the work; he is not only a cobbler and a poet, but a philosopher—a strikingly Schopenhauerian one at that. He knows, as he tells us in his ‘Wahn monologue’, that the phenomenal world is one of illusion, explicitly turning inward from (Hegelian) history in this, Wagner’s most historically grounded of operas. ‘Wahn! Wahn! Everywhere Wahn! Wherever I look with enquiring eyes, into chronicles of the city and the world, to find the reason why, even unto drawing of blood, people torment and flay one another in useless, mad rage,’ he finds the ‘old Wahn’, which must be ‘mastered’. And 491

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so, having turned inward, he must turn outward once more, in knowledge of terrible metaphysical truths, yet ready to manipulate them, to manipulate Wahn itself, in order (as when he rejected Eva, knowing her heart to lie with Walther) to stay sane. As Tanner observes, ‘We have to find some way of coping,’ a trickier and nobler task than many might think (Tanner 1994, 92). Having mastered his own feelings, Sachs guides those of Eva, Walther, and arguably the whole of Nuremberg. He similarly guides Walther’s art through the necessary discipline required for inspiration to take enduring form. He mediates between old and new, tradition and innovation. A glow-worm that could not find its mate the preceding night set all manner of chaos in motion. (The second act culminates in a town riot.) ‘Now let us see how Hans Sachs will do it, how he will finely direct Wahn, so as to make a nobler work.’ Sachs-Wagner has shown us what Nuremberg on the surface might and, for the most part, must be in order that it and its inhabitants may endure the trials of existence. The festal Prelude and final scene are not all; they are predicated upon darker forces, adumbrated in the Wahn monologue and, still more so, in the preceding Prelude (to Act III). Its deep sadness, indeed depression, at the actual state of things, at knowledge of the noumenal world, attests to comedic depth at least equal to that of Mozart or Shakespeare. If Bach, increasingly important to Wagner, underlies (anachronistically) the communal world of Nuremberg on the cusp of Reformation, the profound, subjective, and often highly chromatic inwardness that appealed to so many Romantics in the age of Bach’s rediscovery speaks here. So too does the neither dissimilar nor dissimilarly inspired Innigkeit of late Beethoven. Indeed, a kinship between this Prelude and the first movement of Beethoven’s C-sharp minor String Quartet, op.131, has often been noted. Not long after completing Die Meistersinger, Wagner wrote his Beethoven essay for the composer’s 1870 centenary. One of the works discussed is that very Quartet, op.131, whose complex intensity had long captivated him (Kropfinger 1991, 47–8). The long, opening Adagio, probably the saddest thing ever said by musical notes, I should like to describe as awakening on the morning of a day “which, throughout its long course, will not grant a single wish, not one!”. And yet, it is a prayer of penitence, a deliberation with God, in faith, on the eternal Good. (Wagner 1912–14a, 118) Having led us through a now deeply unfashionable programmatic reading—never intended as definitive ‘meaning’ but rather as a way in for the bemused—Wagner summarizes the finale: This is the dance of the world itself: wild desire, painful lamentation, love’s entreaty, highest bliss [höchste Wonne, which might be a quotation from Tristan, but is not], grief, sensuality, and sorrow; there are flashes of lightning, rolls of thunder: and above all the monstrous minstrel [Spielmann], compelling and bewitching all, surely and proudly leading us … to the abyss; – he smiles at himself, since this conjuring was but a game to him. – So the night beckons him. His deed is done. (Wagner 1912–14a, 118–9) Frederic Jameson has claimed to be ‘stunned by the philistinism of this “allegorical reading”’, his term, not Wagner’s. ‘Leaving aside,’ Jameson scolds, ‘the narcissistic evocation 492

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of the genius and his transcendence of an essentially Schopenhauerian world of suffering’ (Jameson 2019, 120–21). Why, though, leave them aside? The ‘genius’, for what it is worth, is Beethoven rather than Wagner, but more important: understand this in the light of Schopenhauer and Die Meistersinger, and we see and hear a humanist treatment of how to continue to live in an agonizing world, how to manipulate the Wahn of our divine tragicomedy of existence, so as to make it work and even, on occasion, to lend succor. Wagner’s artistry extends to interpretation. The puritanical ravages of the ‘authenticity’ movement notwithstanding, Wagner’s Beethoven remains emphatically ours. As we read in The World as Will and Representation: Looking at purely instrumental music, a Beethoven symphony shows us the greatest confusion, yet resting on the most perfect order, the most violent struggle that in the next moment turns into the most beautiful accord: it is ‘the discordant concord of the world’ [rerum concordia discors], a true and perfect copy of the essence of the world. (SW 3:514/WWR 2:467) Wagner’s Beethoven—our Beethoven—is in good part Schopenhauer’s too.

33.6  Redemption to the Redeemer: Parsifal Wagner always intended Parsifal as his final drama. And it was so, ideas for a projected Buddhistic work, Die Sieger (‘The Victors’), finding their way into the broader project of this Bühnenweihfestspiel (‘stage-festival-consecration-play’). We may smile at the unwieldy designation, but like Tristan’s Handlung and the Ring’s Bühnenfestspiel (no ‘consecration’), it signals determination to distance Wagner’s musical mystery play from operatic tradition and other contemporary manifestations. Ever the German idealist, Wagner had long seen the Athenian polis as an embodiment of harmony between the individual and society, private, and public, with art and its performance at the very heart, even at the apex of that harmony (Berry 2006, 17–21). The Ring, first intended as a post-revolutionary celebration, took on new meanings when revolution did not come or rather did not play out as anticipated. In Tristan, Schopenhauerian method and material ironically reinstated a Romantic-Hegelian idea of the art work as religious, albeit arguably in a more cultic fashion than the Ring. Meistersinger permitted the ‘people’ a say in aesthetic judgment, while nonetheless demarcating both their membership and sphere. Parsifal, written explicitly for Wagner’s new festival at Bayreuth, combined elements of all, though circumstances dictated something less democratic than Wagner’s first and probably enduring dream. A pre- or nonrevolutionary gathered congregation of initiates held out both a Young Hegelian promise of political liberation and a Schopenhauerian promise of metaphysical liberation, in subject matter as well as mode of performance (and reception). Tristan’s ritualism persisted, especially in the first and third acts, set in the male religious community of Monsalvat. That ritualism is expressed musically, not least in the two passages of ‘Transformation Music’, taking us to the Temple of the Grail, as well as in words and stage action. In the first act, Parsifal, the ‘pure fool’ long foretold, arrives to witness the community’s decay, symbolized and in some sense caused by Amfortas’s wound. The wound that will not heal was incurred when Amfortas had turned upon him the holy spear he was pledged to protect, led astray by fleshly desire (for Kundry). 493

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The spear has thus been lost to the renegade knight Klingsor, to whose magic other fallen knights and Kundry stand in thrall. On returning to the community in the third act, Parsifal, previously a mere fool, now ‘enlightened through compassion’, can return the spear from Klingsor’s realm, heal Amfortas’s wound, and initiate Monsalvat’s renewal. Kundry is released to die, to end the hell of perpetual existence through reincarnation: ‘Primaeval temptress, rose of Hell! You were Herodias and what else?’ The sleep for which she has eternally longed has now come: ‘if we view people as beings whose existence is a punishment and atonement, – we already have a more accurate view.’ (SW 3:666/WWR 2:595) The final, enigmatic call, ‘Redemption to the Redeemer’ indicates a healthier future, in which not only Parsifal but Christianity might both be redeemed and act as a redemptive force. Hegelian progress is reborn in a Schopenhauerian altarpiece that seems, at its close, to betoken or at least to herald the pacification of the Will. Those acts frame a triptych’s central panel, set in a decadent, magic kingdom in which Klingsor, self-castrated in a tragic, unsuccessful attempt to master his baser urges, holds sway yet can never satisfy himself. Parsifal successfully resists temptations of the flesh, first from the Flower Maidens and more seriously from Kundry in order to regain the spear and more fundamentally to learn Schopenhauerian compassion or fellow-suffering (Mitleid). Having felt Amfortas’s suffering for himself, Parsifal can now understand what he previously observed with incomprehension and thereby return to Monsalvat to heal its, as well as Amfortas’s, wound. Realization of the reality and error of existence, of the unreality of the phenomenal world, is the agent of conversion. But if this seeing through the principium individuationis, this immediate cognition of the identity of the will in all of its appearances, is present at a high degree of clarity, If the veil of māyā, the principium individuationis, is lifted from a human being’s eyes to such an extent that he no longer makes the egoistic distinction between his person and that of others, but rather takes as much interest in the sufferings of other individuals as he does in his own … then it clearly follows that such a human being, who recognizes himself, his innermost and true self in all beings, must also regard the endless suffering of all living things as his own, and take upon himself the pain of the whole world. (SW 2:447/WWR 1:405) Wagner was preoccupied with ideas of redemption long before encountering Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer reinforced that preoccupation and helped transform its nature. Parsifal might have been written without Schopenhauer, though Tristan might not; we shall never know. All works considered above would, however, have turned out considerably different if they had been. So too would the cultural legacy we have come to know as Wagnerism. In many cases, his work has been the vessel through which Schopenhauerian ideas have passed, for Nietzsche as for Thomas Mann and for Richard Strauss as for Schoenberg. That, however, is a story for another day.

Notes 1 Quotations from The World as Will and Representation follow the translation of E.F.J. Payne (Schopenhauer 1966). 2 See above on Eliza Wille’s claim. For further detail on the complex compositional history of poem and music, see Berry and Vazsonyi (2020), 18–24.

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Wagner and Schopenhauer 3 Arguably, Wotan should be seen. Wagner’s stage directions signal that he and the other gods should appear in Valhalla at the close, prior to its immolation. They are almost never observed, though, if only for reasons of practicality. 4 Wagner’s own emphasis.

Bibliography of Works Cited Berry, Mark (2006): Treacherous Bonds and Laughing Fire: Politics and Religion in Wagner’s ‘Ring’ (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate). Berry, Mark (2013a): ‘Feuerbach, Ludwig Andreas,’ in The Cambridge Wagner Encyclopedia, ed. Nicholas Vazsonyi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 1245. Berry, Mark (2013b): ‘Bakunin, Mikhail,’ in ibid., 30–31. Berry, Mark (2013c): ‘Dresden uprising (May 1849),’ in ibid., 106–107. Berry, Mark (2014): After Wagner: Histories of Modernist Music Drama from ‘Parsifal’ to Nono (Woodbridge and Rochester: Boydell). Berry, Mark (2019): ‘Nietzsche and Wagner,’ in The New Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche, ed. Tom Stern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 97–120. Berry, Mark and Vazsonyi, Nicholas (2020): ‘Introduction,’ to The Cambridge Companion to Wagner’s ‘Der Ring des Nibelungen’, ed. Mark Berry and Nicholas Vazsonyi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 1–55. Cartwright, David E. (2010): Schopenhauer: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Dahlhaus, Carl (1979): Richard Wagner’s Music Dramas, tr. Mary Whittall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Darcy, Warren (1989): ‘Creatio ex nihilo: The Genesis, Structure, and Meaning of the Rheingold Prelude,’ in 19th-Century Music, 13/2, 79–100. Deathridge, John (1985): ‘Cataloguing Wagner,’ in The Richard Wagner Centenary in Australia, ed. Peter Dennison (Adelaide: University of Adelaide), 193–197. Engels, Friedrich (1970): ‘First Preface to “Anti-Dühring”: “On Dialectics,” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,’ Selected Works, 3 vols (Moscow: Progress), 58–65. Jameson, Frederic (2019): Allegory and Ideology (Verso: London and New York). Kropfinger, Klaus (1991): Wagner and Beethoven: Richard Wagner’s Reception of Beethoven, tr. Peter Palmer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Mann, Thomas (1976): ‘Sufferings and Greatness of Richard Wagner,’ in Essays of Three Decades, tr. H.T. Lowe-Porter (Knopf: New York), 307–352. Schopenhauer, Arthur (1966): The World as Will and Representation, tr. E.F.J. Payne, 2 vols (New York, Dover), vol. 2. Scruton, Roger (2004): Death-devoted Heart: Sex and the Sacred in Wagner’s ‘Tristan und Isolde’ (New York: Oxford University Press). Tanner, Michael (1994): ‘Richard Wagner and Hans Sachs,’ in Richard Wagner: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, ed. John Warrack (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 8397. Tanner, Michael (1996): Wagner (London: HarperCollins). Wagner, Cosima (1978–80): Cosima Wagner’s Diaries, ed. Martin Gregor-Dellin and Dietrich Mack, tr. Geoffrey Skelton, 2 vols (London and New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich). Wagner, Richard (1912–14a): ‘Beethoven,’ in Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen, eds. Richard Sternfeld and Hans von Wolzogen, 16 vols in 10 (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel), vol. 9, 61–126. Wagner, Richard (1912–14b): ‘Metaphysik der Geschlechtsliebe,’ in ibid., vol. 12, 291. Wagner, Richard (1912–14c): ‘Tristan und Isolde: Vorspiel; Vorspiel und Schluß),’ in 12, 346. Wagner, Richard (1967–): Sämtliche Briefe, eds. Gertrud Strobel, Werner Wolf, Hans-Joachim Bauer, and Johannes Forner (Leipzig: VEB Deutscher Verlag für Musik/Breitkopf und Härtel). Wagner, Richard (1983): My Life, tr. Andrew Gray, ed. Mary Whittall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Wagner, Richard (1987): Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, tr. Stewart Spencer, ed. Barry Millington and Stewart Spencer (London: Dent). Wagner, Richard (1994): Oper und Drama, ed. Klaus Kropfinger (Stuttgart: Reclam). Wille, Eliza (1935): Fünfzehn Briefe Richard Wagners mit Erinnerungen und Erläuterungen (Munich: Oldenbourg).

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34 THOMAS MANN ON SCHOPENHAUER A Philosopher of the Future? Paul Bishop

Nowadays Thomas Mann is best known as a novelist and short story writer, celebrated as the author of ‘Death in Venice’ (1912), Buddenbrooks (1901), and The Magic Mountain (1924). But he was also an influential essayist and cultural theorist, who shifted from a primarily nationalist conception of culture in his Reflections of an Unpolitical Man (1918) — ‘German tradition is culture, soul, freedom, art, and not civilization, society, voting rights, and literature’ —1 to a more universalist conception (see his remark in a letter to Klaus Mann of 22 July 1939: ‘To inherit is an art in itself; for inheriting, in the final analysis, is culture’).2 Having elsewhere discussed Schopenhauer’s impact on Thomas Mann,3 here I wish to consider that impact more closely by examining Mann’s seminal, if often overlooked, essay on Schopenhauer that appeared in 1938, and, in this way, I hope to reawaken interest in Mann as a cultural commentator and to explore his approach to Schopenhauer as one that can help establish the philosopher’s continuing significance in our own time. Thomas Mann’s essay was first published in English under the title ‘Presenting Schopenhauer’ as the introduction to The Living Thoughts of Schopenhauer, published as a volume in the Living Thoughts Library edited by the graphologist Alfred O. Mendel.4 The slightly longer original German manuscript is held in the Thomas Mann Archive in Zurich, and it contains at the end the following remark: ‘Begun in Küsnacht, completed in New York, 18 May 1938’. This brief note points to the curious story behind the essay, for Mann’s motivation in writing it was essentially commercial.5 While the work was a commercial commission, Mann threw himself into the project with immense enthusiasm, as around sixty or so entries in the diary from this time indicate, and he ended up writing what is arguably one of the finest and most insightful pieces of commentary ever to have been written about Schopenhauer, a figure perhaps best-known to the English-speaking world at the time through the description of him in P.G. Wodehouse’s Carry On, Jeeves (1925) as ‘a grouch of the most pronounced description’. After all, in 1895 Mann had purchased the second volume of The World as Will and Representation, and in ‘A Sketch of My Life’ (1930) he recalls that reading it was one of his formative experiences.6 As he observed in Reflections of an Unpolitical Man, his novel transferred that reaction to Thomas Buddenbrooks,7 or as he wrote in 1936, this part of Buddenbrooks was ‘a

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monument’ erected to the memory of that impression.8 It was an impression that seems to have marked him for life: as Mann wrote on 13 March 1952 to Ferdinand Lion, reading Schopenhauer had been ‘the strongest reading-experience of [his] youth’, adding, ‘I hardly need to “return” to him, for I have never really left or lost him’.9 The structure of Mann’s essay on Schopenhauer can be set out as follows: A. Introduction B. Schopenhauer’s sources (1) Plato (2) Kant C. The aesthetic state D. Ethics E. Pessimism and the will F. Death Interlude: How to read Schopenhauer G. Politics H. Classicism vs Romanticism (a) Schopenhauer as classical humanist (b) Nietzsche’s reception of Schopenhauer (c) Goethe and Schopenhauer (d) problem of classicism vs. Romanticism resolved → modernity I. Psychology J. Conclusion: Schopenhauer and the future Consequently this chapter will offer a close reading of this essay, following the structure of Mann’s argument, explicating his references, and clarifying his central claim about the significance of Schopenhauer. It will demonstrate how Mann (a) presents Schopenhauer’s philosophy as turning on its conception of aesthetics; (b) argues that his philosophy has not just an ethical but an experiential dimension; (c) highlights the union of pessimism and humanism in Schopenhauer’s thought; and (d) emphasizes the so-called ‘futurity’ of Schopenhauer (i.e., his significance for Mann’s time — and our own).

34.1 Introduction ‘Schopenhauer’ opens with a general remark by Mann, stating that ‘the pleasure we take in a metaphysical system, the gratification purveyed by the intellectual organization of the world into a closely reasoned, complete, and balanced structure of thought, is always of a pre-eminently aesthetic kind’ (372), and aesthetics turns out to be central to Mann’s argument about Schopenhauer — and about life. This point about aesthetics in Mann’s opening sentence anticipates his later comments on Schopenhauer himself, hinting at a link between ‘metaphysics’ and ‘aesthetics’ that can be found in ‘joy’ (die Freude). For, on Mann’s account, joy arises just as much from the ‘intellectual organization’ of the world into a ‘structure of thought’ as it does from the shaping and ordering activity of art (Kunst). Translating ‘metaphysics’ and ‘aesthetics’ into ‘truth’ and ‘beauty’, Mann is surely alluding to Keat’s famous equations of these terms — in his ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ with its concluding lines, ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye

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need to know’ — when he writes that ‘truth and beauty must always be referred the one to the other’ (372). Without truth, Mann argues, beauty would be ‘an empty chimera’. And as for truth, Mann reminds us of the question put to Jesus by Pilate in the Gospel according to John (chapter 18, verse 38), ‘What is truth?’ (372). Mann acknowledges the contribution of Kant (without actually mentioning him by name at this point) when he notes that our concepts (Begriffe) and intuitions (Anschauungen) of the phenomenal world serve an immanent, not a transcendent, purpose, i.e., they tell us about the world for us, not about the world in itself. The definition Mann gives here of the phrase mundus phaenomenon echoes a passage in WWR 2, chapter 22, ‘Objective View of the Intellect’ (SW 3:325/WWR 2:299). And yet the human urge to transcendence draws on the conviction that the core of our own being and the ground of the world (Weltgrund) are the one and the same and that the phenomenal world nevertheless affords us some insight into ‘the true essence of things’ (373). Thus the conclusion drawn by Faust in his opening monologue in the first scene of Part One when he sighs, ‘And see there is nothing we can know!’ (l. 364), is vindicated, revealing the (Fichtean and Hegelian, respectively) notions of ‘intellectual intuition’ and ‘absolute thought’ as hubristic folly. From the perspective of (Kantian) critical philosophy, the philosophy of German Idealism sounds like the ‘wind-baggery’ (Windbeutelei) that Schopenhauer himself held it to be in his critique of Hegel (see SW 2:XX/WWR 1:14). Yet this conviction that our innermost selbst (unser eigenstes Selbst) is rooted in the universal ground (Weltgrund), which might equally deserve the label Windbeutelei, opens up the possibility of ‘an artist’s conception of the world’, a conception founded on the unity of the human being (i.e., heart and senses, and body and soul). Mann posits the existence of a ‘mysterious law’ that ‘binds’ feeling (Gefühl) to form (Form) and unifies them, so that ‘a conception of the world born in passion, lived and suffered with the whole human being, will always bear the stamp [das Gepräge] of the beautiful’ (373). This conception, Mann says, will emerge as an ‘intellectual novel’ (Geistesroman), as ‘a symphony of ideas’, or, in other words, as ‘a work of art’ (373). On this account, the best way to approach the philosophy of Schopenhauer, which turns on its conception of aesthetics, is through art itself, in which ‘suffering … is resolved [erlöst] in form, so beauty vouches for its truth’, i.e., of the truth of the work of art (373).

34.2  Schopenhauer’s Sources For this reason, Mann describes Schopenhauer’s philosophy as ‘an artist-philosophy par excellence’, not because of its aesthetics (as a theory of art), nor because of its style (for all its eloquence and elegance), but because it is essentially the expression of ‘a dynamic artistnature, which cannot reveal itself in any other way than as the personal creation of truth, convincing by virtue of its having been lived and suffered’ (374). In support of this view of Schopenhauer, Mann cites remarks by Tolstoy,10 Wagner,11 and Nietzsche — both the early Nietzsche of The Birth of Tragedy (1872) and ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’ (1874), and the late Nietzsche of Ecce Homo in which a discussion of Tristan is said to reveal ‘no estrangement but, on the contrary, much passion’ (374).12 Mann’s first expositional move, however, is to relate Schopenhauer back to Plato — selfevidently a crucial figure in the history of philosophy but also one of particular significance for Mann.13 On Mann’s account of Plato, the objects in this phenomenal world lack real existence, inasmuch as they are ‘always becoming’ and ‘never are’ (374). In terms of the 498

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famous allegory of the cave, they are no more than ‘shadows’. By contrast, reality pertains to the ‘eternal Ideas’, exemplifed by Mann with reference to the ‘idea’ of the lion or leonitas as opposed to the single, empirical lion (although it might perhaps be better exemplified with reference to the example of, say, the concept of justice). Mann relates Plato back to his own introductory considerations: with his ‘pedagogic aim of leading the human mind to higher things and making it capable of new achievements’, Plato is responsible for having introduced ‘the scientific spirit’ to the West (376). By distinguishing between the appearance and the idea, between the empirical and the spiritual, between the phenomenal world and the true world, and between temporality and eternity, Plato’s achievement is said to be not just intellectual, it was also moral in its elevation of the ideal to the status of sole reality and in its corresponding devaluation of the senses in relation to the mind (thereby anticipating the Christianity that would follow it). This led to the sensory attachment to mortal appearance being placed under the sign of ‘sin’, so that ‘salvation and truth are found only by those who turn toward the eternal’; in short, Plato’s philosophy points to the link between science and ascetic morality (376). (In so arguing, Mann is following the interpretation of Plato given by Schopenhauer in WWR 1 §31.) At the same time, Plato’s philosophy points in the direction of art. Now this may appear an odd move, given the famous discussion of poets in book 3 and book 10 of the Republic and its banishment of imitative poets and poetry from the ideal state. But Mann is less interested in the Plato of the Republic than he is in the Plato of the Timaeus, quoting Plato’s well-known definition of time in that dialogue as ‘the moving image of eternity’ (37d). The context of this remark is the discourse on the world-soul, where God plans to create the visible cosmos (κοσμος), and the circle of the Same (where the stars will go) and the circle of the Other (where the planets will go) are still empty, hence invisible, yet in motion (37c-d).14 (Mann takes his shortened form of this quotation from SW 2:207/WWR 1:198 and follows Schopenhauer’s interpretation of it.) Accordingly, just as one could describe the demiurge as the artist who creates the world, so the conception of the world as ‘a colourful and moving phantasmagoria of pictures which are transparent for what is ideal and spiritual’ is an eminently aesthetic one (376). Within this view of the world, the task of the artist is an essentially mediatory one, having ‘a hermetic-magical role as mediator between the upper and the lower world, between idea and appearance, spirit and sense’ (376). Although Mann describes this view as hermetic (i.e., relating to the ancient Greek deity, Hermes), it could also be described as erotic or daimonic (i.e., pertaining to Eros as a daimon who, in the Symposium, is said to mediate between the divine and the mortal) (Plato, Symposium, 202b-203a).15 Instead, Mann turns to the symbolism of the moon and the sun as explained by Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815–1997) in his Mother Right: An Investigation of the Religious and Juridical Character of Matriarchy in the Ancient World (1861).16 On the one hand, these references to the Hermetic and to lunar symbolism sound very esoteric; on the other, there is an important stylistic point about aesthetics: namely, that the mediating position of art between spirit and life is ‘the source of its irony’ (377). It is a point to which Mann will return (and so shall we). For Mann, then, Plato is less important as a metaphysician and more so as an artist (377). Indeed, Mann posits that a philosophy has an effect, not simply (or not at all) because of its ethics (or what Mann calls Weisheitslehre) but through its experiential dimension or its Welterlebnis. As Nietzsche put it in poetic form in his Nachlass, ‘What he taught is accom499

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plished; / What he lived will stand: / Just look at him — / He was a slave to no one!’17 Briefly, Mann touches on the way that, just as Plato’s ascetic-scientific and ultimately aesthetic message proved to be open to misuse, so Schopenhauer’s teaching was exploited by Wagner, but this point remains undeveloped.18 Instead, Mann turns to the second of Schopenhauer’s sources, Immanuel Kant (17241804), described as being of ‘an extremely and exclusively intellectual nature, very aloof from art but correspondingly closer to critique’ (378). On Mann’s account, Kant is a kind of Plato redivivus: in the second half of the eighteenth century in Prussia, Kant taught ‘something very like the premises laid down two thousand years before by the Athenian thinker’ and his ‘fundamental concept […] is closely related to Plato’s’ (378). Both distinguish between the ‘immanent’ and the ‘transcendent’ (or ‘transcendental’), both explain the visible as ‘appearance’, and both regard ‘the true reality’ as lying ‘“beyond” the appearance, whether one calls that reality the ‘Idea’ (Plato) or ‘the Ding an sich’ (Kant). Now whether Kant can be so closely identified with Plato or not, this was certainly Schopenhauer’s view, as reflected in WWR 1 §31 and his description of them as ‘the two greatest philosophers of the West, – are certainly not identical, but are nonetheless very closely related and distinct in only one respect’ (SW 2:201/WWR 1:193). (This distinction involves the ontological status of the Ideas as forms.)19 In turn, Schopenhauer’s key move is said to be in identifying the ‘Idea’ or ‘the Ding an sich’ in a way that Plato (for whom the Ideas was pure forms) and Kant (who denied these forms) did not — namely, with the will. This identification of the ‘Idea’ or ‘the Ding an sich’ with the will has two consequences: first, the objectivation (Objektivierung) of the will (or its expression in the phenomenal world of time and space) causes its original unity to become a multiplicity, a process designated by the term principium individuationis (cf. SW 2:134/WWR 1:137–38). And second, inasmuch as it is the objectivity (Objektität) of the will in space and time, the world is ‘representation’ (Vorstellung), including the individual’s self-representation, namely ‘by means of the knowing intellect, which the will at the higher stages of its objectivation created to be a light to it’ (379; cf. SW 2:178–79/WWR 1:173–75). This notion of ‘higher stages’ reveals Schopenhauer to be both a mystic and an extremely modern intellectual mind: a mystic, inasmuch as the world is conceived (to use a Scholastic term, found in Albertus Magnus) as a nunc stans,20 i.e., as ‘an abiding Now of unclouded and eternal ideas’ (380) and a modern thinker, inasmuch as the highly un-Scholastic primacy of the will over the intellect leads to a rationalization of our drives (unsere Triebe zu rationalisieren). This second point is, Mann argues, key to grasping the reputation of Schopenhauer as a philosopher of pessimism, which arises logically from his philosophy (and his psychology) of the will. The world as an objectivation of will according to the principium individuationis is inevitably a world of suffering in which each individual is pitted against the others — allegorized in the story of Thyestes, one of the damned in Tartarus, who was served his own sons by his brother, Atreus, and devoured them, and summed up in the saying attributed to Plautus, homo homini lupus (man is a wolf to man). In fact, Greek mythology provides Schopenhauer with one example after another of the sheer horror of existence: Ixion, who was expelled by Zeus from Olympus and consigned to Tartarus, where he was bound by Hermes to a fiery wheel that never stopped spinning; the Danaïdes, who killed their husbands on their wedding night and were punished in Tartarus by being forced fill a leaking bathtub which could never be filled; Tantalus, who was forced to stand in a pool of water beneath a fruit tree, unable to pick the fruit or to drink the water; and Theyestes, who eats of his own flesh and blood (see above). 500

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34.3  The Aesthetic State In this view of life as, if not hell itself, a foretaste of hell, there is a decidedly Christian-cumPlatonic note. What Plato had begun with his gently ascetic and pessimistic devaluation of the senses through the spiritual (das Geistige) as the sole source of truth and salvation has, in Schopenhauer’s system, become most grimly reasserted and reinforced (383). At the same time, the Christian note can be found in the doctrine of redemption (Erlösungslehre) offered by Schopenhauer’s philosophy of the will: a redemption brought about by the intellect (der Intellekt) in a particular mode, a state where ‘the miracle comes to pass: knowledge tears itself free from the will, the subject ceases to be merely individual and become the pure, will-less subject of knowledge’ (384). Such a state is, of course, the aesthetic state, defined by Kant (as paraphrased by Nietzsche) in the formula, ‘Beautiful is what gives us pleasure without interest’ (KU 5:203–11).21 On this Kantian definition Schopenhauer is said to have put a Platonic twist, drawing on the ‘latent aestheticism’ of the Platonic doctrine of ideas: ‘The ideas! It was they for which, in the aesthetic state, appearances — these images [Abbilder] of eternity — became transparent; the gaze open for them — that was the great, pure, sunlike, objective intuition [Anschauung], by means of which only the genius, […] and with him the appreciative recipient, was rewarded by the aesthetic work’ (384). On this account, philosophy teaches that ‘the gaze of art is the gaze of genius-like objectivity’ and, recalling his earlier dictum that the mediating position of art between spirit and life is ‘the source of its irony’ (377), Mann argues that ‘irony and objectivity belong together and are one’ (385). Presumably this is because irony involves a disinterest similar to the disinterest of objectivity, a canceling-out of desire by stating something and withdrawing it at the same time. In WWR 2, chapter 8, ‘On the Theory of the Ludicrous’, Schopenhauer himself offers a theory of the comic in which he defends the proposition that ‘irony is objective’ (SW 3:110/WWR 2:107). Surveying the famous passage where Schopenhauer describes the state associated with Apollo, the god whose epithets include Hecaërgus (Ἑκάεργος) or Hecebolus (Ἑκηβόλος), i.e., the ‘far-shooting’ and Musagetes (Μουσαγέτας) or Musegetes (Μουσηγέτης), i.e., ‘leader of the Muses’, as the state where ‘the wheel of Ixion stands still’ (SW 2:231/WWR 1:220), Mann concludes that ‘the aesthetic state was but the prior stage to a perfected one’ (385). For in this final state ‘the will, only temporarily satisfied in the aesthetic, would be once for all outshone by knowledge, would be banished from the field, and be annihilated’, so that the perfection of the artist would be the saint (385). In other words, Schopenhauer’s aesthetics is ultimately an ethics.

34.4 Ethics Then, as now, the notion of ethics, deriving from the ancient Greek ēthikós (ἠθικός), i.e., ‘relating to one’s character’, and êthos (ἦθος), i.e., ‘character, moral nature’, is often misunderstood. Mann is at pains to point out that, in the case of Schopenhauer, the ethical deed is done ‘out of feeling [Gefühl], out of an intuitive recognition of truth, that was based on “seeing through” [Durchschauung], just as is the aesthetic state’ (386). What matters, then, is less the deed than its source: or, in the technical terms that Mann takes over from Schopenhauer’s WWR 2, chapter 41 (‘On Death and its Relation to the Indestructibility of Our Inner Nature’), the ethical deed lies ‘not in doing but in being, not in operari but in esse’ (387) (cf. SW 3:582/WWR 2:524). The political dimension of this notion had been explored by Mann in Reflections of an Unpolitical Man in the chapter entitled ‘Bürgerlichkeit’;22 here 501

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in this essay, Mann considers Schopenhauer’s conclusions in light of the distinction, which he takes over from Kant, between ‘empirical’ and ‘intelligible’ character. This distinction lies at the heart of Kant’s antinomy of freedom, which ascribes a dual character, i.e., both an empirical and an intelligible one, to the individual human being as a single agent. For Kant, at the root of the sensory or empirical self lies a self that he calls ‘intelligible’ (A538/ B566). This intelligible character of the mind is defined by Kant as ‘a power which is not an object of sensible intuition but through which it can still be the cause of appearances’ (A538/B566). The surprise at this doctrine expressed by one of Kant’s contemporary critics, the Lutheran theologian Hermann Andreas Pistorius (1730-1798), has not lessened in the subsequent two centuries (but Henry E. Allison has argued that the distinction is crucial to Kant’s project to provide a transcendental framework for a unified theory of agency).23 Schopenhauer requires this distinction in order to defend his proposition of the freedom of the will (a subject of his prize-winning essay of 1839, ‘On the Freedom of the Will’), without which such ‘moral and aristocratic concepts’ (as Mann calls them) as guilt (Schuld) and merit (Verdienst) would not make sense (387). The notion of the ‘intelligible’ character has, as its base, a ‘mystical truth’ that, far from ‘invalidating’ the twin conceptions of guilt and merit, makes them ‘even more awe-inspiringly profound’ (388). At this point, Mann takes issue with a phrase used by Goethe in Dichting und Wahrheit (Part Three, book 11), where he writes about one of his tutors at the University of Strasbourg, the professor of history, rhetoric, and law, Johann Daniel Schöpflin (1694-1771), that ‘his good fortune was the result of innate and carefullycultivated merits, without any troublesome exertion’.24 Mann reacts strongly against this notion of ‘innate merits’, describing the locution as ‘an absurd phrase from any logical or moral point of view’, since ‘“merit” is entirely and by definition a moral concept, and something innate, such as beauty, cleverness, nobility, talent — or, expressed in terms of fate, good fortune — cannot logically be a case of merit’ (388). (Mann may be right as far as the distinction between ‘empirical’ and ‘intelligible’ character is concerned, but the passage from Dichtung und Wahrheit also hints at the existence of a third kind of character, defined by Schopenhauer as ‘acquired’ character.)25 Mann concludes this section by reflecting that merit must involve an issue of choice or the expression of a will antecedent to the phenomenon — which is ‘exactly what Schopenhauer maintains when in his harsh and aristocratic way he declares that each of us, whether fortunate or unfortunate, receives what we deserve’ (388).

34.5  Pessimism and the Will Mann’s next move is to point out that, from a Schopenhauerian perspective, these variations in fortune are illusory, because ultimately everything — even individuation itself — is illusory (Unterschiedenheit als Täuschung) (388). Drawing on Schopenhauer’s argument in WWR 1 §63, §64, and §68, Mann examines Schopenhauer’s reprise of the Hindu metaphysical notion of the ‘veil of Māyā’, another way of expressing the principium individuationis (388). From this perspective, the fear of death makes no sense, since death is ‘the setting right of an error’, inasmuch as ‘every individual is an error’ (389). In the dialogue between Uddalaka and his son Śvetaketu in the Chandogya Upanishad, this doctrine appears at the end of a section and is subsequently repeated as a refrain: tat tvam asi, translated variously as ‘thou art that’, ‘that thou art’, or ‘that art thou’ (Chandogya Upanishad, 6.8.7).26 This saying can be interpreted in various ways, as the leading Vedantic schools have done: according to the Advaita school, the saying posits the absolute equality of tat, referring to ultimate reality or Brahman, and tvam, referring to the self or Atman; according to the 502

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Vishishtadvaita school, it means that the individual self is a part of the whole (i.e., tat or Brahman); while according to the Dvaita school, the saying should in fact read, atat tvam asi, i.e., ‘thou art not that’, meaning that the soul is not god. Following Schopenhauer, Mann translates tat tvam asi as meaning ‘this art thou’ (‘dies bist du’) (SW 2:420/WWR 1:382), and as signifying that, when the veil of Māyā is lifted, ‘love and goodness are sympathy [Mitleid]’ (391). Again following Schopenhauer (in WWR 1 §67 and §68), Mann identifies two Western analogues of this idea: first, in Spinoza, who argues in his Ethics (part 3, proposition 27, corollary 3, scholium) that ‘benevolence is nothing else but desire arising from compassion’.27 On Mann’s reading of this passage, ‘that temporary, redeeming quiesence of the will, on which the happiness of the aesthetic state is based — finds in the renunciant, the ascetic, the saint its completion’ (392). And second, in the words of the German mystic Angelus Silesius (c. 1624-1677) in the Cherubinischer Wandersmann, book 1, §275, ‘Man bringeth all into God’: All things do love thee, Man, and thickly round thee throng: They run to thee because they would to God belong.28 This quotation concludes Mann’s outline of the central arguments of Schopenhauer’s main work, The World as Will and Representation. Mann expresses his admiration for Schopenhauer’s choice of title for this work, which reduces its massive body of thought to ‘the shortest formula’ (392). He describes it as ‘a truly phenomenal book’ (392), as ‘a symphony in four movements’ (394, cf. 392), and as an entirely self-contained or self-referential book: a book ‘based on itself, saturated with itself, confirming itself inasmuch as it is and does what it says and teaches […] a nunc stans, the abiding presence of its thought’ (393). As a result, Mann applies to Schopenhauer’s work the following lines from Goethe’s West-östicher Divan, ‘Book of Hafis’: Your song revolves as vaulted constellations, End and beginning are re-iterations, The import of the middle clear akin To that which ends as it did begin.29 The title of this poem by Goethe is apt: it is ‘Unlimited’, and it conveys the universal import of Schopenhauer’s work, its status as (in Man’s words) ‘a work of such cosmic unity and all-enclosing power of thought’ (393).

34.6 Death Consequently, Mann finds himself more persuaded by Schopenhauer’s philosophy than by that of his great opponent, G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831). Alluding to an apocryphal anecdote about how Hegel once told his students, ‘Gentlemen, I can say: I not only speak the truth, I am the truth!’, Mann contrasts this stance with Schopenhauer’s more modest, yet more powerful, declaration in his Fragments for the History of Philosophy, §14 (‘Some remarks on my own philosophy’), where he says, ‘Thus humanity has learnt a few things from me that will never be forgotten, and my writings will not perish’ (SW 5:141/PP 1:120). In fact, death turns out to be the touchstone by which the truth of Schopenhauer’s philoso503

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phy is measured, echoing Schopenhauer’s own words in the opening of WWR 2, chap. 41 (‘On Death and Its Relation to the Indestructibility of our Essence in Itself’): ‘Death is the real inspiring genius or Musagetes of philosophy’ (SW 3:529/WWR 2:480) — a proposition reinforced by Socrates’s own definition of philosophy in the Phaedo as a kind of ‘training for dying’ (67e) and corroborated by Nietzsche’s remark in his letter to Erwin Rohde of 8 October 1868, ‘In Wagner, as in Schopenhauer, I like the ethical air, the Faustian odor, Cross, Death, Grave, and so on’.30 Mann has his own place in the reception of this aspect of Schopenhauer, to be found in the chapter entitled ‘On Death’ in his early novel, Buddenbrooks, and Mann now quotes extensively from this chapter. These passages from Buddenbrooks form a bridge to an interlude in which Mann considers how best to read Schopenhauer. Recalling his own enthusiasm as a twenty-two or twenty-three-year-old for the ‘metaphysical magic potion’ of Schopenhauerian philosophy (396), Mann enunciates the principle that ‘one can think in the sense of a philosopher, without in the least thinking in accordance with his sense’. Accordingly, Mann defends his technique of mixing Schopenhauer with Nietzsche, illustrating the point made earlier in his essay about the experiential dimension of a philosophy, which means that a philosophy is often influential less though its morality and its teaching [Weisheitslehre], which is the intellectual blossom its vitality, than through this vitality itself, its essential and personal aspect — in other words, more through its passion [Leidenschaft] than through its wisdom [Weisheit] (396). (Similarly, in ‘Schopenhauer as an Educator’ [1874], Nietzsche presents Schopenhauer as an educator in the sense of teaching, not specific doctrines, but how to think independently.) In this sense, Mann goes so far as to describe artists as ‘“betrayers” of a philosophy’, citing Wagner’s (mis)use of Schopenhauer in the ‘erotic conception of the world’ — i.e., in Schopenhauerian terms, sexuality as the ‘focal point of the will’ (SW 2:390/WWR 1:356) — in Tristan und Isolde (396). Consequently, artists ‘understand’ a philosophy in their own (emotional) way, reflecting the primacy for art of ‘emotional, passion-produced results’, whereas philosophy, as a schoolmistress, feels itself attached to moral ones (397). This reflection on the relation of art to philosophy leads to a further one on the relation of art to religion and to Schopenhauer’s view (in PP 2, chapter 15, ‘On Religion’, §175) of religion as ‘the metaphysics of the people’ (Metaphysik fürs Volk) (SW 6:344/PP 2:293).31 Correspondingly, Schopenhauer sees religion as offering truth in allegorical form, whereas philosophy offers it pure and pristine: The moral results of Christianity up to the most extreme asceticism are found with me grounded rationally and in the connection of things, whereas in Christianity they are grounded in mere fables. The belief in these disappears further every day; thus people will have to turn to my philosophy (SW 5:141/PP 1:121). The notion that, in religion as philosophy, one must distinguish between exoteric and esoteric truth (and that, when one becomes unacceptable, the other must become a substitute for it) leads to the conclusion that philosophy’s view of morality requires confirmation by religion, not the other way round; there is no doubt, Mann argues, that ‘a philosopher 504

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finds himself reassured by the agreement of the moral issues of his world-theory with the teachings of religion’ (397). Schopenhauer’s condemnation of suicide on the grounds that it represents an act of assertion, not of renunciation, on the part of the will, is a case in point; Mann recalls the gentle irony with which Gretchen responds to Faust’s declaration of faith in the ‘Martha’s Garden’ scene in Faust I, ‘the turn of phrase / Is something different, but I presume / What Parson says means much the same’ (ll. 3459-3461).32

34.7 Politics In terms of Schopenhauer’s relation not simply to religion but also to politics, Mann cites the passage in ‘On Philosophy at the Universities’ where Schopenhauer talks about the ‘difficult task’ of governing and comes to the conclusion (quoting Faust I, ll. 2093-2094), ‘I praise God for each day’s bliss / That the Roman Empire’s not my business’.33 By contrast, for Hegel the state was (in Schopenhauer’s words) ‘the absolutely perfect ethical organism’, and ‘the whole aim of existence’ was represented as originating in the state — a view that Schopenhauer describes as ‘an apotheosis of philistinism’ (SW 6:258/PP 2:219)! Mann’s view that Hegel’s philosophy leads directly to Communism and Fascism derives, however, as much from Schopenhauer (who claimed that ‘the Hegelian apotheosis of the state is carried on into Communism’) as it does from the critique of the German-Jewish philosopher and Social Democrat, Siegfried Marck (1889-1957), published as an article in 1935.34 Yet Mann is critical of Schopenhauer’s antipolitical stance: on the one hand, he suggests that Schopenhauer himself had seen how the Hegelian view of the state as an absolute could turn into Communism (PP 1, 145) and he agrees with Schopenhauer’s suspicion of Hegel’s ‘revolting doctrine that man’s destiny is identified with the state, somewhat like that of bees in a beehive; whereby the highest goal of our existence is entirely withdrawn from view’ (SW 5:156/PP 1:131). On the other, however, Mann refers disapprovingly to Schopenhauer’s behavior (as described by Schopenhauer himself in his letter to Julius Frauenstädt (1813-1879) of 2 March 1849) during the Revolutions of 1848–1849 (when he lent his opera-glasses to an officer shooting at the crowd of people — or, as he called them, the souveraine canaille — on the barricades) and to his bequest in his will to a fund for invalid Prussian soldiers and their families (398-400). Taking Kant’s phrase (originally used in his definition of beauty) about ‘disinterested intuition’ (interesselose Anschauung) and applying it to Schopenhauer’s political outlook, Mann roots Schopenhauer’s ‘unpolitical, anti-political — that is to say, conservative — stance’ in his core philosophical principles (398–399). ‘Objective intuition’ (objektive Anschauung) — which constitutes the work of the genius and means that the genius is characterized by Objektivität, i.e., ‘the ability of maintaining a state of pure intuition [sich rein anschauend verhalten], only as cognizing subject, as “the clear eye of the world”’ (399; cf. SW 2:219/WWR 1:209) — represents an aesthetic outlook. Mann traces this apolitical stance back to Goethe and summarizes its outlook as follows: ‘Art and philosophy are quietist (for pure objectivism is quietism)’ and ‘they certainly do not want to change anything, they want only to contemplate it’ (399). This link between Schopenhauer’s anti-political stance to his aesthetics is one of the major achievements of Mann’s essay, and it reflects Mann’s own struggles to connect art to politics in his own practice as a writer. At the same time, Mann recognizes that Schopenhauer’s anti-political, anti-revolutionary outlook was also a matter of temperament: as such, it reflects not just the atmosphere of ‘death, cross, and grave’ (as Nietzsche put it) out of which his philosophy arises but also his German middle-class intellectual background (deutsche Geistesbürgerlichkeit) — in its 505

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intellectual and inward nature, its conservativism and its remoteness from democratic pragmatism, its lack of freedom, its absence of politics, or, in Schopenhauerian terms, its ‘gift of pure genius’ (reine Genialität) (cf. SW 2:218/WWR 1:208–209), Schopenhauer’s background was, Mann believed, profoundly German (400). For Mann, such anecdotal details from Schopenhauer’s life as his old-fashioned elegance, his regular daily walk, his financial canniness, his embrace of the Aristotelian principle that ‘the reasonable individual seeks, not pleasure, but absence of pain’,35 his methodical work pattern (from which we could all learn a lesson), and his emphasis (expressed in his letter to Goethe of 11 November 1815) on the virtues of fidelity and honesty are all said to confirm this analysis (400).

34.8  Classicism vs Romanticism Mann turns to his penultimate topic — the extent to which Schopenhauer considered himself to be a representative of classical humanism — by noting Schopenhauer’s rejection of the Middle Ages, seen through the prism of Romanticism as priestly swindle and knightly chivalry (as reflected, for instance, in his comments in Parerga, chapter 15, ‘On Religion’). Is Schopenhauer, Mann wonders, a classical humanist or is he really a Romantic? There is plenty that speaks for his classical humanism: his study of ancient languages and literature; his travels on the ‘Grand Tour’; his participation in the culture of Weimar through the circle around his mother, Johanna Schopenhauer; his fluency in Greek and Latin; his knowledge of natural science; and, above all, his theory of the aesthetic: his doctrine that genius is the purest form of objectivity is, in Mann’s view, both Apollonian and Goethean (401). Schopenhauer’s view of the highest vocation of humankind is symbolically embodied in the Apollo Belvedere (Figure 34.1), as evoked (very much in the arch-classicist spirit of Winckelmann) by the final paragraph of WWR 1 §33: ‘the far-seeinge head of the god of the Muses sits so freely on its shoulders that it seems entirely wrenched away from the body and no longer subject to its cares’ (SW 2:209/WWR 1:200). For Mann, this passage is a textbook-case of humanism, in which art, knowledge, and the dignity of human suffering are fused into a single image of pessimistic humanism (402). Here lies, in Mann’s view, the originality of Schopenhauer’s thought: namely, that in the human being, as the highest objectivation of the will, the will is illuminated by the brightest knowledge, but that, as knowledge approaches clarity and consciousness is heightened, so suffering increases, reaching its highest degree in the human being and, while varying across individuals, attaining its ultimate peak in the genius (403). And here lies, for Mann, a point of connection to Nietzsche who, in Beyond Good and Evil, §270, remarks that ‘it almost determines the order of rank how profoundly human beings can suffer’,36 thus revealing, in Mann’s view, Nietzsche’s ‘complete dependance to the very last on Schopenhauer’s aristocratism in the capacity for suffering, in the ennobling calling of humankind — and of its highest type, the genius — to suffering’ (403). This calling is said to determine the two ‘great possibilities’ envisaged by Schopenhauerian humanism for the human being: (1) art and (2) sanctification (Heiligung). Hence our choice lies between ‘the possibility of the aesthetic state as the will-free intuition of the ideas’ and ‘the possibility of final redemption through the self-renunciation of the will-to-live as the artist ascends to the loftier state of ascetic saintliness’ (403). This second possibility grants us a great opportunity: ‘to reverse the great error and mistake of being’ and to become ‘the secret hope of the world and of all creatures’, a conception described by Mann as one of ‘great mystical beauty’ (403). As such, it serves as a corrective to Schopenhauer’s misanthropy and confirms the union of pessimism and humanism in his thought (403). Mann confesses that he is more interested in 506

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Figure 34.1  Apollo Belvedere.

this ‘conception of great mystical beauty’ and less in ‘the truth of Schopenhauer’s interpretations, particularly his exposition, derived from Kant, of the beautiful and of the aesthetic state, especially its “disinterestedness”’ (403). Mann recalls how this notion of ‘disinterestedness’ had been mocked by Nietzsche who, as a Dionysian thinker, developed a reaction and a response to Schopenhauer’s views on art and on asceticism, turning ‘against the apparent negativity of productive and receptive aesthetic pleasure, as freeing oneself from the torture of the will’ and ‘against the negativity of pleasure altogether, thus against pessimism itself’ (403). Nietzsche sees Schopenhauer’s pessimism as ultimately rooted in the confrontation between a ‘true world’ and an ‘apparent world’, confirmed for Nietzsche in Kant’s remark that he subscribed to the view expressed by the Italian economist, historian, and philosopher, Pietro Verri (1728–1797), in his On the Nature of Pleasure and Pain (1774) that ‘the only moving principle of man is pain’, that ‘pain precedes every pleasure’, and that ‘pleasure is not a positive state’.37 These statements are, Mann notes, entirely in line with Nietzsche’s own view that ‘pleasure is a kind of pain’.38 On Mann’s account, Nietzsche’s greatest debt, never repudiated, to Schopenhauer is to his aesthetics. The view that the in-itself of life, the will, existence itself, is a constant suffering, partly miserable, partly horrible; on the other hand, the same thing as representation alone, purely intuited, or repeated in art, free from pain, affords a meaningful spectacle [bedeutsames Schauspiel] (SW 2:315/WWR 1:295), 507

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returns in Nietzsche as the justification of life as an aesthetic phenomenon,39 albeit with the following significant shift: that Nietzsche gives Schopenhauer’s thought ‘an intellectual twist into the anti-moral, intoxicated, affirmative, into a Dionysianism of the justification of life’, in which Schopenhauer’s pessimism ‘is difficult to recognize, but persists in another hue, with another label and different gestures’ (404). On this account, Nietzsche remained a Schopenhauerian: rather than an optimist, he is (echoing The Gay Science, §370) a bacchantic pessimist, embracing ‘a form of assent to life which is not primary and naïve, but an overcoming, a “Nevertheless” that is wrested from suffering’ or, in other words, a heroism; this concept of the heroic, which is inherent in Dionysianism and derives from pessimism, can be found in Schopenhauer too: ‘A happy life is impossible; the best a human being can attain is a heroic course of life’ (SW 6:342/PP 2:290). Nevertheless, Mann urges a certain caution in regard to Schopenhauer’s humanism or his classical Apollonianism. Schopenhauer’s ‘extremism’ and ‘the ‘grotesque-dualistic antithesis in his nature’ point toward his Romanticism, something that removes him further from the Goethean sphere than he could ever have been conscious of (404–405)—and from the Kantian sphere as well, reflected in his identification of the Ding an sich with ‘will, drive, dark passion’ (405). Even Schopenhauer’s asceticism belongs to ‘a Romantic world of contrasts and has as its premise terrible experiences of the will, of drive, of passion, and deep suffering’ (405). For Mann, the figure of the saint as the consummation of the artist marks out Schopenhauer as a philosopher of the drives and as a philosopher of the emotions — not as a Kantian, with an emphasis on the world of thought. This analysis is confirmed by the position occupied in Schopenhauer’s system by sexuality: namely, as the focus of the will (WWR 1 §60). And it is on this point that Mann launches his critique of Schopenhauer. What if, Mann asks, instead of his bipolarity, contrasts, and conflicts and his opposition of drive and spirit, passion and knowledge, and ‘will’ and ‘representation’ Schopenhauer had reconciled them in the genius? If he had conceived of art not as ‘spiritual objectivation’ but as ‘the productive and life-enhancing union and reciprocal saturation of both spheres, more fascinating than each can be, whether sexual or spiritual, by itself’? If, in other words, he had not been Schopenhauer, but Goethe (406)? Goethe’s view of sexuality and spirituality, as reflected in the line, ‘Since all life is love maturing, / And the life of life is spirit’ (Denn das Leben ist die Liebe, / Und des Lebens Leben Geist),40 is said by Mann to be ‘happier, healthier, “more classical”, more unpathological […] more un-Romantic’ than Schopenhauer’s (406). Then again, given that Goethe, in ‘one of the formulas in which one may capture his greatness’, succeeded in ‘unit[ing], in his happier way, the classical and the Romantic in himself’, the cards are inevitably stacked in Goethe’s favor. In the end, Mann decides to resolve the problem of whether Schopenhauer is classical or Romantic by withdrawing both terms in favour of the term ‘modern’ (modern), and as an eminently ‘modern’ thinker, Schopenhauer occupies a mediating position between Goethe and Nietzsche, on the following grounds: vis-à-vis Goethe

• more ‘modern’ • more suffering • more difficult 508

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vis-à-vis Nietzsche

• more ‘classical’ • more robust • healthier This distinction between Goethe and Nietzsche provides a bridge to Mann’s final point. Nowhere can Schopenhauer’s modernity be clearly seen than in his position as ‘the father of all modern psychology’ (408).

34.9 Psychology For Mann, there is a clear lineage from Schopenhauer via Nietzsche’s psychological radicalism to Freud and the various psychoanalytic schools. (To be sure, Mann’s definition of psychology is a broad one, exemplified by the exchange between Eduard and Charlotte in Goethe’s Elective Affinities, where Edouard says about Ottilie, ‘She is an entertaining person’, to which Charlotte replies: ‘Entertaining? She never opened her mouth’.) In Schopenhauer’s casual remark about how ‘people deceive themselves by staging apparent cases of hastiness that are really secretly deliberate actions and that ‘we fool and flatter no one more than ourselves with little games like this (SW 2:350/WWR 1:323), lie ‘whole chapters, yes, volumes of analytic unmasking-psychology in nuce’ (408). Given that, in his speech delivered in Vienna on 9 May 1936 in celebration of Freud’s eightieth birthday and entitled ‘Freud and the Future’, Mann had explored in greater detail the affinities between Schopenhauer’s notion of the will and Freud’s concept of the id, Mann does not pursue this discussion here.41

34.10 Conclusion Instead, he turns to his conclusion. Although Mann describes his essay as an attempt to sketch the worldview of a figure ‘little known to the present generation’, how much more apposite do those words sound today, when Schopenhauer is virtually forgotten. Mann’s essay is timely for other reasons, too. His aim of transmitting to ‘a generation, whose feeling of humanity is in a state of severe crisis’, the idea of the relation between pessimism and humanism, is surely no less urgent now than it was in the late 1930s, given the disappearance of humanism from the discourse of the academy. In an entirely different way from the first third of the twentieth century (and in ways that Mann could not even have imagined), might not the first two decades of the twenty-first century also be said to have reacted against ‘classical rationalism and intellectualism’ and to have ‘surrendered to an admiration of the unconscious and to a glorification of instinct’ (409)? Have we not, in our own way, thrown ourselves onto ‘the side of life’42 and are we not too ‘palpably in need for a corrective to restore the balance’ (409)? Mann pushes his argument further. Schopenhauer is not just ‘modern’, he is ‘futuristic’ (zukünftig), and Mann powerfully evokes the characteristics that make Schopenhauer arguably a philosopher for our own times: the elements of his personality, their chiaroscuro composition [hell-dunkler Zusammenhang], the mixture in him of Voltaire and Jakob Böhme,[43] the paradox of his classical, pellucid prose […]; in short, what I call his pessimistic humanity (409). 509

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Seen in this light, Mann’s positioning of Schopenhauer as ‘herald[ing] the temper of a future time’ seems itself almost prophetic in its vision of a new humanity, one that is ‘beyond dry reason and idolatry of instinct’ — a humanity that has aesthetics at its heart, because ‘art, accompanying humankind on its painful journey to self-realization, has always already been there [war schon immer am Ziel]’ (410). Although in many ways conventional in its presentation of Schopenhauer’s central theses, Mann’s essay can now stake a claim to be recognized as a significant and original piece of interpretation because of its insistence on the relevance of Schopenhauer’s philosophical achievement. Just as ‘the enduring Ideas of essences standing fast like the rainbow in the waterfall’ (SW 3:514/WWR 2:467), so does ‘the present […] with its content’ (SW 2:328/WWR 1:304) and so too does Schopenhauer’s philosophy over our time and times to come. Indeed, it could be argued that Mann should really have entitled his essay ‘Schopenhauer and the Future’.

Notes 1 See Mann (1983), pp. 16–18. 2 See Mann (1965), p. 107. 3 See Bishop (2002); Bishop (2012), esp. pp. 337–338; and Bishop (2020). For the most comprehensive discussion to date of Mann’s reception of Schopenhauer, see Reents (1998). 4 See The Living Thoughts Of Schopenhauer: Presented by Thomas Mann. [The Living Thoughts Library, ed. Alfred O. Mendel], trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter, R.B. Haldane and J. Kemp. New York and Toronto: Longmans, Green & Co., 1939. The translations offered here are adapted from H.T. Lowe-Porter’s version of ‘Schopenhauer’ as reprinted in Mann (1947), pp. 372–410 (page references in text). In preparing this chapter I have consulted the editorial notes by Hermann Kurzke and Stephan Stachorski in Mann (1995), pp. 419–431. 5 On 2 December 1937, Mann was approached by the New York publisher Longmans, Green & Co. and invited to write an introduction to an anthology of texts by Schopenhauer for $750. A week or so later, Mann agreed for $800. Almost immediately, between 17 and 22 December, Mann began his research for the essay. By mid-January of the following year, he began writing the piece in Arosa, and by early February, the first half of the essay had been completed. He picked up where he had left off in mid-February and because his writing was interrupted by his journey to America (his fourth), he did not complete the work until mid-May 1938 during his stay in New York. Golo Mann undertook to shorten the work for the publisher, which was translated into English by Mann’s usual translator, H. T. Lowe-Porter. The full essay appeared in German the same year in Stockholm, published by Bermann-Fischer Verlag. 6 Mann (1974), vol. XI, p. 111. 7 Mann (1974), vol. XII, p. 72; cf. vol. IX, p. 561. 8 Mann (1974), vol. IX, p. 483. 9 Mann (1965), p. 249. 10 See Tolstoy’s letter to Afanasy Fet of 30 August 1869, in Tolstoy (1978), p. 221. 11 See Wagner’s letter to Liszt of late 1854, in Wagner and Liszt (1900), p. 45. 12 Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, ‘Why I am so Clever’, §6; in Nietzsche (1992), p. 31. 13 For discussion of how Plato’s Phaedrus informs ‘Death in Venice’ on an imagistic, thematic, and conceptual level, see Kelley (1976) and Effe (1985). 14 Plato, Timaeus, 37c-37d; in Cornford (1997), pp. 97–98. 15 See Plato (1989), pp. 554–555. 16 See Bachofen (1967), p. 148. 17 Nietzsche (1980 = KSA), vol. 11, 28[11], 303; cf. Lukàcs (1981), p. 198. 18 For further discussion, see Magee (2000), pp. 126–173; and Karnes and Mitchell (2020). 19 For varying interpretations of Schopenhauer’s understanding of Platonic Ideas, see Hein (1966); Neeley (2000); White (2012); and Mann (2017).

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Thomas Mann on Schopenhauer 20 The concept of the nunc stans (or the ‘abiding Now’) derives from the Platonic definition of time as ‘a movable image of Eternity’ (εἰκὼ κινητόν αἰῶνος) in the Timaeus (37d5), a passage cited by Schopenhauer at the conclusion of §32 of WWR 1 (SW 2:207/WWR 1:198). See Schnarr (1984). 21 Cf. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, III.6 22 Translated by Walter D. Morris as ‘Burgherly Nature’, in Mann (1983), pp. 71–106. For further discussion, see Kamenetsky (1962). 23 For further discussion, see Allison (1990), pp. 29–53 (chapter 2, ‘Empirical and intelligible character’). 24 See Goethe (1881), p. 411. Cf. Mann’s comments in his 1922 essay ‘Goethe and Tolstoy’: ‘Goethe, half-maliciously, half-paradoxically going about to deprive the word “merit” of the moralistic flavour that clings to it, likes to talk about “inborn merit”. Everybody is free to call this a logical contradiction. But there are cases where logic is confronted by a metaphysical certainty higher than itself’ (Mann [1947], pp. 93–175 [p. 124]). 25 See WWR 1 §55 (SW 2: 357–62/WWR 1: 329–34). 26 Olivelle (1998), pp. 247–253. 27 Spinoza (1955), p. 149. 28 Angelus Silesius (1932), p. 184. 29 Goethe (1974), pp. 34–35. 30 Nietzsche (1996), p. 33. 31 Compare with Nietzsche’s jibe about Christianity as ‘Platonism for “the people”’ (Platonismus fürs Volk) in the Preface to Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche [1968], p. 193). 32 Goethe (2001), p. 97. 33 Goethe (2001), p. 55 (translation adapted). 34 See Marck (1935). In this article Marck suggests a link between Hegelian philosophy and Fascism, but when, in his diary entry for 27 December 1935, Mann comments favorably on this article, he places a different emphasis: ‘Read in the “Tage-Buch” a good article on Hegel and Nat[ional] Socialism as opposites’ (Mann [1978], p. 228). 35 See ὁ φρονιμος το αλυπον διωκει, ου το ἡδυ (quod dolore vacat, non quod suave est, persequitur vir prudens), i.e., ‘a man of practical wisdom pursues what is free from pain, not what is pleasant’; Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, book 7, chapter 11, 1152b15; in Aristotle (1984), p. 1821; and cf. Schopenhauer, SW 5:431/PP 1:355). 36 Nietzsche (1968), p. 410. 37 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, §698; cf. Nietzsche (1980 = KSA), vol. 10, 7[233], 314; and Nietzsche (2019), p. 280. Kant paraphrases Verri’s words from Idee sull’indole del piacere (1774) in Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, §58 (7:226), using the German translation by Christoph Meiners, Gedanken über die Natur des Vergnügens (1777) (see note 193 in Nietzsche [2019], p. 664). 38 The Will to Power, §490; cf. Nietzsche (1980 = KSA), vol. 11, 40[42], 650. 39 In his ‘Attempt at a Self-Criticism’ added in 1886 to the second edition of The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nietzsche highlighted the phrase which, in all, occurred three times in his book, namely, ‘that the existence of the world is justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon’ (Attempt §5; cf. §5 and §24). 40 Lines spoken by Suleika in ‘Book of Suleika’ in the West-östlicher Divan, trans. Whaley, pp. 138– 139. 41 See ‘Freud and the Future’ in Mann (1947), pp. 411–428. 42 Compare with Nietzsche’s concept of die Partei des Lebens: in Ecce Homo Nietzsche presents himself as speaking on behalf of ‘the party of life’ (die Partei des Lebens) (EH BT §4). 43 The figures of Voltaire (1694–1778) and Jakob Böhme (1575–1624) represent, respectively, the classical Enlightenment and the German mystical elements of Schopenhauer’s thought.

References Allison, H.E. (1990) Kant’s Theory of Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Aristotle (1984) Complete Works, ed. J. Barnes, 2 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Vol. 2. Bachofen, J.J. (1967) Myth, Religion, and Mother Right: Selected Writings of J.J. Bachofen, trans. Ralph Manheim. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Paul Bishop Bishop, P. (2002) ‘The Intellectual World of Thomas Mann’, in R. Robertson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Mann. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 22–42. Bishop, P. (2012) ‘Schopenhauer’s Impact on European Literature’, in B. Vandenabeele (ed.), A Companion to Schopenhauer. Chichester: Wily-Blackwell, pp. 333–348. Bishop, P. (2020) ‘Schopenhauer’s Fin-de-siècle Reception in Austria’, in R. Wicks (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Schopenhauer. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 535–555. Cornford, F.M. (1997) Plato’s Cosmology: The “Timaeus” of Plato. Indianapolis, IN, and Cambridge: Hackett. Effe, B. (1985) ‘Sokrates in Venedig: Thomas Mann und die «platonische Liebe»’, Antike und Abendland 31(1): 153–166. Goethe, J.W. (1881) The Autobiography of Goethe: Truth and Poetry: From My Own Life, trans. J. Oxenford, vol. 1, Books I-XIII. London: Bell. Goethe, J.W. (1974) West-Eastern Divan/West-oestlicher Divan, trans. J. Whaley. London: Wolff. Goethe, J.W. (2001) Faust, trans. W. Arndt, ed. C. Hamlin, 2nd edn. New York and London: Norton. Hein, H. (1966) ‘Schopenhauer and Platonic Ideas’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 4(2): 133–144. Kamenetsky, C. (1962) ‘Thomas Mann’s Concept of the “Bürger”’, CLA Journal 5(3): 184–194. Karnes, K.C. and A.J. Mitchell (2020) ‘Schopenhauer’s Influence on Wagner’, in R. Wicks (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Schopenhauer. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 517–534. Kelley, A. van B. (1976) ‘Von Aschenbach’s Phaedrus: Platonic Allusion in Der Tod in Venedig’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 75(1/2): 228–240. Lukàcs, G. (1981) The Destruction of Reason, trans. P. Palmer. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. Magee, B. (2000) Wagner and Philosophy. London: Allen Lane. Mann, T. (1947) Essays of Three Decades, trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter. London: Secker & Warburg. Mann, T. (1963) Briefe, 1889–1955, ed. E. Mann, 3 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, Vol. 2. Mann, T. (1965) Briefe 1948–1955 und Nachlese, ed. E. Mann, 3 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, Vol. 3. Mann, T. (1974) Gesammelte Werke, 2nd edn. 13 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Mann, T. (1978) Tagebücher 1935–1936, ed. P. de Mendelssohn. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Mann, T. (1983) Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man [1918], trans. W.D. Morris. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing. Mann, T. (1995) Essays, vol. 4, Achtung, Europa!, ed. H. Kurzke and S. Stachorski. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Mann, W.-R. (2017) ‘How Platonic Are Schopenhauer’s Platonic Ideas?’, in S. Shapshay (ed.), The Palgrave Schopenhauer Handbook. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 43–63. Marck, S. (1935) ‘Wieder einmal: Prozeß Hegel’, Das Neue Tagebuch 3(52): 1242–1245. Nietzsche, F. (1968) Basic Writings, ed. And trans. W. Kaufmann. New York: Modern Library. Nietzsche, F. (1980) Sämtliche Werke [Kritische Studienausgabe], ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari, 15 vols. Munich; Berlin and New York: dtv; de Gruyter. Nietzsche, F. (1992) Ecce Homo, trans. R.J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Nietzsche, F. (1996) Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. And trans. C. Middleton. Indianapolis, IN, and Cambridge: Hackett. Nietzsche, F. (2019) Unpublished Fragments from the Period of “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” (Summer 1882-Winter 1883/84) [The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, vol. 14], trans. P.S. Loeb and D.F. Tinsley. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Neeley, S.G. (2000) ‘Schopenhauer and the Platonic Ideas: A Reconsideration’, Idealistic Studies 30(2): 121–148. Olivelle, P. (1998) The Early Upaniṣads: Annotated Text and Translation. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Plato (1989) Collected Dialogues, ed. E. Hamilton and H. Cairns. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Reents, Edo (1998) Zu Thomas Manns Schopenhauer-Rezeption. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann.

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Thomas Mann on Schopenhauer Schnarr, H. (1984) ‘Nunc stans’, in J. Ritter and K. Gründer (eds.), Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, rev. R. Eisler, 13 vols. Basel and Stuttgart: Schwabe, 1971–2007. Vol. 6, Mo-O, cols 989–991. Silesius, A. (1932) Angelus Silesius: Selections from “The Cherubinic Wanderer”, trans. J.E.C. Flitch. London: George Allen and Unwin. Spinoza, B. (1955) On the Improvement of the Understanding; The Ethics; Correspondence, trans. R.H.M. Elwes. New York: Dover. Tolstoy, L. (1978) Letters, ed. And trans. R.F. Christian, 2 vols. London: Athlone Press; University of London. Vol. 1. Wagner, R. and F. Liszt (1900) Briefwechsel zwischen Wagner und Liszt, 2 vols. Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel. Vol. 2. White, F.C. (2012) ‘Schopenhauer and Platonic Ideas’, in B. Vandenabeele (ed.), A Companion to Schopenhauer. Chichester: Wily-Blackwell, pp. 133–146.

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35 WITTGENSTEIN’S RECEPTION OF SCHOPENHAUER A Systematization and Evaluation Michał Dobrzański

Wie meine Vorstellung die Welt ist, so ist mein Wille der Weltwille. L. Wittgenstein, Notizbücher 1914–1916, 17.10.16

35.1 Introduction Most scholars today accept the general claim that Schopenhauer’s philosophy had an impact on the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein1. However, current work on this impact hypothesis (as we may call it) faces a number of specific difficulties. First, the impact hypothesis is analyzed predominantly either by Wittgenstein or by Schopenhauer scholars but rarely by people who know both of them similarly well (cf. Lemanski 2016: 171f.). This is not surprising, as both philosophers are associated with very different philosophical traditions. Wittgenstein is a key figure of analytical philosophy and is also strongly associated with the Anglo-Saxon tradition. Schopenhauer is mostly viewed as a rogue representative of Classical German Philosophy, who broke with its tradition, remained a singularity in the history of philosophy (Beiser 2016: 13), and gave foundations at best to pessimism and the philosophy of life (cf. Russell 1946: 786f.; Copleston 1994: 287ff.). Therefore, there have been few scholars who have profound knowledge of both philosophers, as the traditions with which they are associated have been going on different paths for a long time. Second, the realization that Schopenhauer’s philosophy could provide an important key to understanding Wittgenstein goes back to the 1950s and 1960s, when his appointed editors, G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, pointed out this influence (Anscombe 1965; Wright 2001). Bryan Magee in his book about Schopenhauer quotes P. T. Geach’s statement from 1957, in which it is said that Schopenhauer’s influence on Wittgenstein “can be asserted with absolute certainty” (Magee 1997: 310). Back then, the understanding of Schopenhauer’s philosophy was quite different from today’s. Von Wright, for instance, says that he does not know how the interest in Schopenhauer could relate to Wittgenstein’s interest in logic or the philosophy of mathematics (Wright 2001: 6). Anscombe points out that it should be analyzed in reference to the “actual Schopenhauer” and not “the mythical Schopenhauer of popular repute” (Anscombe 1965: 12). S. Morris Engel remarks that

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“Schopenhauer is certainly not generally known to have made any startling contributions to logic and language” (Engel 1969: 287). Only in recent years has it come to attention that Schopenhauer was far more deeply concerned with topics present in Wittgenstein, such as language and logic, than it might seem from the mere reading of WWR 1. This blind spot in his reception probably stems from the fact that Schopenhauer’s interest for such topics is most prominently displayed in his lesser-known works (e.g. in the FR or WWR 2) and, especially, in the Berlin lecture manuscripts from the 1820s, which, although published in 1913, have not yet been translated into English and only recently have been critically edited in German2. In WWR 1 itself he devotes curiously little attention to the problem of language, mainly on the few pages of §9. This obscures its role in his philosophy, and even though he asks his readers in the preface of the WWR 1 to read the FR first (SW 2:IX–X/ WWR 1:7), probably most readers start with the WWR 1 anyway and hardly go beyond it. The analytical inclinations of Schopenhauer’s philosophy have been pointed out, for instance, by Janaway (1989: 228), and some scholars even argue that he might be viewed as a proto-analytic philosopher due to his field of research and writing style (Jacquette 2005: 261; Birnbacher 2020: 72). Generally, systematic research on these aspects of his thinking is a very recent matter (Dobrzański 2017; Lemanski 2020). Third, although there already is a vast number of articles on Schopenhauer’s impact on Wittgenstein, most of them tend to focus only on selected problems and provide mixed arguments from different categories, both biographical and systematic. This leads to confusion, and although there is actually a good amount of discussions and evidence, it is difficult to get a bigger picture. Fourth, Wittgenstein’s philosophy is usually divided into an early and a late period, between which his method underwent a “fundamental shift of focus” (McGinn 1997: 5). The TLP and the PI3 are the standout examples of their respective periods. In research on Schopenhauer’s impact, there is a clear tendency to focus on the early period, which can even be shown by comparing the number of articles concerned with both texts (Lemanski 2016: 176f.). The problem with that is that even if the impact can be demonstrated for the early period, this might not necessarily be conclusive for the later period, as within Wittgenstein scholarship there is a debate about the continuity (or lack of it) between the periods. Given the number of problems underlying the impact hypothesis, my aim is not to discuss all findings, as this cannot be done within one chapter4, but rather to categorize them and present examples for each category. This should provide a holistic picture of the issue and, in my opinion, speaks in favor of further research. Generally, the findings can be grouped into (i) historical and biographical arguments, (ii) terminological parallels in texts, and (iii) parallels in philosophical ideas. The last group is by far the most problematic, as looking for similar philosophical ideas in any two authors is an undertaking very prone to confirmation bias. However, in the case of Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein, type (i) arguments provide strong foundations for formulating type (ii) arguments, and both of them together seem to justify the formulation of type (iii) arguments. In other words, even without demonstrating parallels between Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein’s thought, we can argue in favor of the impact hypothesis. Therefore, it seems plausible to look for philosophical parallels as well. The categories mentioned above provide the structure for the chapter. In the first two sections, I summarize the extant historical and biographical evidence for the impact hypothesis. In the third section, I reconstruct the most strongly discussed terminological parallels between Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein, separately for the latter’s early and late periods. 515

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In the fourth section, I suggest ways in which Schopenhauer’s philosophical ideas seem to provide a theoretical background for selected topics in Wittgenstein’s philosophy. I focus here on the later period, as it has been largely omitted in discussions. Finally, I provide an outlook on the value of further research.

35.2  Historical Context Ludwig Wittgenstein lived between 1889 and 1951. The first two decades of his life, which he spent mainly in Austria, overlapped with the time when Schopenhauer’s popularity in German-speaking countries reached its peak and was immense. From 1877 to 1911 there were at least five editions of his works in German, and, until the late 1930s, the Reclam publishing house alone claimed to have sold about 750,000 copies of his writings (Beiser 2016: 13f.). This popularity was also strong in the capital of Austria-Hungary, Vienna. It started already in the 1860s (Bishop 2020: 536) and by the 1890s Schopenhauer apparently was the most widely read philosopher (Janik and Toulmin 1973: 164) who exercised great influence on the intellectual life of the city (Luft 1983: 54). He was the subject of both analyses and private discussions of key intellectual figures of Austria, including journalists, writers, philosophers, painters, and even musicians. Some prominent examples include the writer Rudolf Kassner (Luft 1983: 69) and the popular satirical magazine “Die Fackel,” edited and written by Karl Kraus (Janik and Toulmin 1973: 74; Bishop 2020: 542). Arthur Schnitzler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and also the younger generation of Austrian writers, such as Robert Musil, all read Schopenhauer (Bishop 2020: 543f.). The then-famous Otto Weininger claimed his influence, as did Franz Mauthner, a philosopher concerned with language (Janik and Toulmin 1973: 71, 123). Outside of literature, Gustav Klimt, the most recognizable painter of that period, appears to have been influenced by Schopenhauer’s philosophy, although it is debatable whether he received the ideas from him directly or rather through Wagner or Nietzsche, both of whom are known Schopenhauer readers. The sculptor Max Klinger, whose Beethoven statue was on display together with Klimt’s Beethoven frieze as a Gesamtkunstwerk in the Secession Building in 1901, was also strongly influenced by Schopenhauer, and both his and Klimt’s works displayed there have been interpreted as showing Schopenhauerian themes (Janik 2017: 94; Bishop 2020: 547f.). The musician Gustav Mahler, who attended the social meetings organized by the Wittgenstein family, once bought someone Schopenhauer’s works as a present and is known to have made references to his philosophy (Janik and Toulmin 1973: 18, 109). This establishes the claims that Austria’s intellectual circles during Wittgenstein’s youth were significantly shaped by Schopenhauer and the peak of his reception took place in the generations born in the 1870s and 1880s, that is, in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s generation (Luft 1983: 68). Furthermore, the position of the Wittgenstein family in these circles was not irrelevant. It had already belonged to the upper circles of Austrian society for some generations, but its status was elevated yet further by Ludwig’s father Karl Wittgenstein, a very wealthy man who withdrew himself from his former businesses in favor of becoming a patron of intellectuals and artists. The family’s seat Palais Wittgenstein was an important meeting point for various intellectuals in Vienna, and Karl also sponsored artists by, for instance, funding the construction of the famous Secession Building, the most iconic exhibition hall of the period. His outstanding role led Gustav Klimt to refer to him as the “Minister of Fine Arts” (Monk 2016: 5ff.). 516

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In other words, Schopenhauer was “in the air” when Ludwig Wittgenstein was young. The people with whom he had contact were vividly discussing him, the surrounding objects of art and music were interpreted in Schopenhauerian spirits and the general framework of Vienna and Austria’s intellectual life has been described as having an affinity for Schopenhauer (Luft 1983: 61; Bishop 2020: 544f.). It should be noted, too, that Wittgenstein was not the only Austrian philosopher from that time influenced by Schopenhauer. Other examples include figures as philosophically distant as the Vienna Circle’s Moritz Schlick (Luft 1983: 69; Leinfellner 1985; Textor 2018) and Sigmund Freud (Gardner 1999; Atzert 2005; Bishop 2020: 538–40). Some factors may have obscured this context. First, Wittgenstein’s philosophy was most strongly received in English-speaking countries, and this reception failed to realize that his philosophy was, in fact, not untypical for Viennese intellectual culture, which was little known in England (Janik and Toulmin 1973: 19ff.). Second, this intellectual culture has been quite overshadowed by a dominating narrative of how continental philosophy, especially German philosophy, developed (Luft 1983: 53). A possible reason for this is that the Austro-Hungarian Empire ceased to exist during Wittgenstein’s lifetime, and therefore its intellectual history could easily become overshadowed. Third, Schopenhauer was not precisely a mainstream philosopher in the second half of the twentieth and in the twenty-first centuries, neither in English-speaking countries (Luft 1983: 54n.) nor in continental Europe. Possibly, it was much easier to understand the Schopenhauerian traces in Wittgenstein’s thought for his Austrian contemporaries than it is now for us, as we have lost the sense of what role Schopenhauer’s philosophy once played in shaping philosophical debates.

35.3  Biographical Evidence Wittgenstein was reluctant about admitting his influences (Magee 1997: 333), but Schopenhauer is one of the exceptions. We know that Wittgenstein had read him (Janik and Toulmin 1973: 260). He was probably introduced to it by his sister Margarete at the brink of the twentieth century, when he read The World as Will and Representation (Janik and Toulmin 1973: 172; Monk 2016: 6f.), possibly before 1906 (Anscombe 1965: 11; cf. Schroeder 2012: 381n.). There are also several accounts of his still remembering having read the book in the 1930s from his friends and colleagues such as G. H. von Wright or A. J. Ayer (Jacquette 2016: 60f.). From the accounts of his British friends, we also get to know more about the character of his interest in Schopenhauer. Both P. T. Geach and G. E. M. Anscombe underline that he was strongly impressed by Schopenhauer’s doctrine of the “world as idea” (“world as representation” according to modern translations), which struck him as being fundamentally right, but not so much by the doctrine of will (Anscombe 1965: 11; Magee 1997: 310f.). Given that von Wright and Anscombe were appointed by Wittgenstein as his literary heirs (Erbacher 2020), such statements should be treated seriously. Additionally, there is a manuscript remark written down by Wittgenstein in 1931 and published in Culture and Value in which he explicitly names Schopenhauer as one of his influences, next to Boltzmann, Hertz, Frege, Russell, Kraus, Loos, Weininger, Spengler, and Sraffa (Wittgenstein 1998a: 16). Admittedly, in the quotation Schopenhauer’s name does not especially stand out, and from the editor’s footnote we also know that the comment first included only Frege, Russell, Spengler, and Sraffa, and other names, including Schopenhauer, Kraus, or Weininger, were added later on (Wittgenstein 1998a: 101), but in 517

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Culture and Value, Schopenhauer’s name appears more often. Including the above quotation, his name is mentioned six times in connection with various topics, such as music or literary style5. These remarks stem from manuscripts written in 1931, 1937, between 1939 and 1940, and, finally 1948. Additionally, in Philosophical Grammar, the manuscript which was also written in the 1930s, Schopenhauer is mentioned in the context of his notion of will (Wittgenstein 1974a: 144). A few further appearances of Schopenhauer’s name in other manuscripts also stem from this period.6 Apart from direct mentions in manuscripts, we also have several accounts of Wittgenstein orally referring to Schopenhauer. Theodore Redpath, his student, recalls Wittgenstein saying about Schopenhauer: “Well, he was a philosopher.”7 Drury, on the other hand, remembers his talking about Schopenhauer with Wittgenstein with the latter saying that Schopenhauer “is not deep in the sense as Kant and Berkeley” are (Schroeder 2012: 367, 378). We also have some accounts of Wittgenstein quoting Schopenhauer in conversations (Janik and Toulmin 1973: 194).

35.4  Terminological Parallels 35.4.1  Early Period All this shows that Schopenhauer was somehow present in Wittgenstein’s thinking and substantiates the investigation of his philosophical texts in this regard. It is easiest to trace Schopenhauer’s influence on Wittgenstein’s early philosophy since the joint analysis of the TLP and the NB provides one direct reference to his name (cf. Gardiner 1963: 278). It can be found in the remark from 2.8.16 of the NB, which also uses Schopenhauer’s terminology and quite obviously refers to his philosophy: It would be possible to say (à la Schopenhauer): It is not the world of Idea that is either good or evil; but the willing subject8 (2.08.16). In the following notes, Schopenhauer is not mentioned by name any more, but Wittgenstein seems to refer to many problems of his philosophy. Many of these remarks correspond to statements from the TLP, especially those toward the end of the book. This provides a strong foundation for claiming Schopenhauer’s direct impact on the book, and, indeed, Schopenhauer’s influence on early Wittgenstein has also been discussed most deeply by scholars (Jacquette 2016: 61). These discussions often point out parallels in terminology and metaphors between Schopenhauer’s texts and the TLP (and the corresponding notes in the NB). One such example is the metaphor of the eye not being part of the field of vision (e.g. Gardiner 1963: 65). Wittgenstein uses it to represent the problem of the metaphysical subject not being part of the world (TLP, 5.633, NB 4.8.16 ff.). The metaphor can be found in Schopenhauer at least twice. One appearance is in the revised edition of the FR from 1847, in § 50: Accordingly, the principle of reason itself, i.e., the connection that it expresses in any of its forms, cannot be further explained because there is no principle to explain the principle of all explanation – like an eye, which sees everything except itself. (SW 1:156/FR 148) 518

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Another is found at SW 3:326/WWR 2:300. While neither of the quotations explicitly speaks about the subject, Schopenhauer obviously is referring to it. The principle of reason is something that is inherent in the subject and constitutes the core of the transcendental subject’s ability to construct the world of phenomena. The next popular example is the use of the notion that the individual is the “microcosm,” as it encompasses the two possible dimensions of knowing the world. It appears at SW 2:193/WWR 1:187 and in a quite similar sense in the TLP, 5.63 (and, correspondingly, NB, 12.10.16) (cf. Bishop 2020: 546). One of the most strongly discussed examples is the metaphor of throwing away a ladder after having climbed it (e.g. Gardiner 1963: 226; Magee 1997: 319n.; Jacquette 2016: 66). Schopenhauer uses it as an argument in favor of intuitive cognition and remarks that “books and studies are merely rungs of the ladder” leading to the summit of knowledge, which are left behind after being climbed (SW 3:87/WWR 2:86). Wittgenstein uses a similar metaphor in TLP, 6.54 to imply that his propositions formulated in the TLP, once understood, become nonsensical. They are the ladders that can be thrown away after having been climbed. Thus, the remark actually relativizes the whole content of the TLP9, which makes it play a special role in the interpretation of the book.10 Some lexical parallels brought up in favor of the impact hypothesis are more problematic. This includes the concept of viewing the world “sub specie aeterni” or “sub specie aeternitatis,” which appears in TLP, 6.45, and NB, 7.10.16 (cf. Gardiner 1963: 278). Both passages are discussions of the problem of the cognition of objects which is detached from time and space and transcends the phenomenal. They indeed seem to refer to Schopenhauer’s elucidations in WWR 1 § 34, where he says that the mind conceives things “sub aeternitatis specie” (SW 2:211/WWR 1:202), but the formulation itself is Spinozian and is quoted as such by Schopenhauer. Yet another example of this problematic kind is Wittgenstein’s reference to “Kant’s problem of the right and the left hand” and fitting a glove on it in TLP, 6.36111. The problem of difference between the right and left glove is discussed by Schopenhauer in FR §36, also in reference to Kant (SW 1:131/FR 124). In this case, Wittgenstein’s reconstruction of the problem is more similar to the original presentation of the problem in §13 of the Prolegomena (4:286) but, if read together with the previous 6.3611, it seems that he refers to the problem discussed by Schopenhauer under the name of the “Principle of the reason of being” in FR §36, which states that in case of certain objects it is impossible to name their causes. Wittgenstein seems to be repeating precisely this remark with reference to the same example from Kant. However, what connects all these cases is not only the similarities in terminology but also the fact that Schopenhauer’s respective elucidations seem to provide a fitting contextual background for Wittgenstein’s rather curt and esoteric remarks. This fact might have led Magee to making the strong claim about the TLP that “Everyone who reads it perceives that an unarticulated framework of ideas is tacitly presupposed by it: that framework is derived almost entirely from Schopenhauer – though, characteristically, his name is never mentioned” (Magee 1997: 316). This also led various scholars to attempt to actually articulate this framework. One can be found in Jacquette: “It is an almost palpable presence in the semantic theory, from the distinction between sign and symbol, to the theory of aesthetics and ethics as one, the transcendence of logic, mathematics and all semantic form, and the concept of the metaphysical subject or philosophical I.” He also mentions parallels between the notion of will (Jacquette 2005: 260) and, more recently, points out that Wittgenstein’s 519

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tractarian differentiation into signs and symbols can be interpreted as a linguistic application of Schopenhauer’s distinction of representation and will, which allows us to fully understand Wittgenstein’s thought at the time (Jacquette 2016: 61). Despite the various objections that may be and in fact have been raised regarding both lexical and philosophical similarities between Schopenhauer and early Wittgenstein, in general the voices in favor of the impact hypothesis regarding Wittgenstein’s early writings outweigh those against it.11

35.4.2  Late Period The question of whether Schopenhauer can also be considered an influence in the case of Wittgenstein’s later works is far more controversial. On the one hand, several researchers have been pointing out that the limitation of analyses of Schopenhauer’s impact only to early Wittgenstein should be overcome (Janik 1992: 76; Jacquette 2016: 72). The strongest case was, again, presented by Magee, who claims that the Schopenhauerian framework of Wittgenstein’s thought might be seen as something that conjoins his early and late thoughts (Magee 1997: 324f.). Others disagree. Schroeder points out that “the mature Wittgenstein regarded Schopenhauer as a thinker whom he had exhausted: who would not repay further study” (Schroeder 2012: 378). This goes back to the “shift of focus” in Wittgenstein’s philosophy mentioned above. Because of that, one could argue that even if the TLP was influenced by Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein later abandoned this framework, and Schopenhauer’s influence on his later philosophy should not be understood as positive and direct (Schroeder 2012: 380). On the other hand, Schopenhauerian themes do not seem to completely disappear from Wittgenstein’s later writings,12 and the biographical information presented above also implies that Schopenhauer was somehow present in late Wittgenstein’s thinking, although this is much more difficult to demonstrate. In the case of Wittgenstein’s late writings, attempts have also been made to demonstrate Schopenhauer’s influence by means of lexical parallels. The most prominent examples include “family resemblance,” pointed out by Engel (1969: 287), and “form of life,” pointed out by Magee (1997: 326) (cf. Glock 1999: 456f.). Both, however, have been disputed by Schroeder. He points out that “family resemblance” was a term generally popular in German philosophy, and Schopenhauer never applied it specifically to the problem of language (Schroeder 2012: 378). This is correct, even if it somehow obscures the fact that Schopenhauer’s frequent use of the term anticipates the notion of similarities which are difficult to specify, albeit with regard to biology (SW 2:115, 171, 183–4/WWR 1:121, 168, 179). As far as “form of life” is concerned, Schroeder wrongly alleges that the term does not appear in the single-word form as “Lebensform” in Schopenhauer’s writings but only in the formulation “Form des Lebens” (Schroeder 2012: 378). It does, as has been pointed out by Lemanski (2016: 178). Indeed, in WWR 2, there is a passage where Schopenhauer literally talks about the “Lebensform:” So perhaps this simile might also work: let us picture the human race as a composite animal, a life form [Lebensform] of which examples are found in many polyps, particularly marine polyps … Just as each individual animal of this type is distinguished by the head portion, while the lower portion, with the shared stomach, connects them all in the unity of a single life process, so similarly, human individuals are dis520

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tinguished by the brain with its consciousness, while, by contrast, the unconscious portion … is a life shared by all. (SW 3:371/WWR 2:339) Still, whether this simile can be seen as the direct source of Wittgenstein’s concept of the form of life is a complicated question. Schopenhauer’s application of the term is used to explain the metaphysical unity between individual human beings and Wittgenstein’s application points to the problem of language (cf. PI, 19). Another example of a possible terminological borrowing might be the use of the term “Urphänomen” (translated as “proto-phenomenon”) in the PI, 654, which Wittgenstein additionally puts in quotation marks.13 Schopenhauer frequently uses this term, which he himself seems to have taken from Goethe (SW 4:56/VC 256, translated as “urphenomenon”), to point to something that cannot be further explained (e.g. SW 4:110/OBM 117) (this time given as “primitive phenomenon”), in a sense quite similar to Wittgenstein’s use of the term. Leaving aside single-word lexical similarities, we can find in the PI some discussions of problems that appear in Schopenhauer and for which Wittgenstein uses similar terminology14. One such example can be found in the PI, 175–176. In remark 175 Wittgenstein analyzes the difference between arbitrarily doodling on a piece of paper and consciously copying the doodles. He points out that we tend to experience these two actions as being different. Then, in 176, he discusses one possible explanation of the difference as experiencing “the ‘because,’” of the second action (i.e., of making the copy while looking at the original doodle). The point is made that the specific experience of being influenced and guided (in this case by the original doodle) cannot be described as a phenomenon, and – Wittgenstein adds – this “contains the germ of the idea that the will is not a phenomenon.” This last remark strongly resembles one of Schopenhauer’s most important systematic claims, made in WWR 1 §18, that the will is something “entirely different in kind” from representation (i.e., phenomenon) (SW 2:122/WWR 1:127), but still something which can be experienced immediately. It constitutes the content of what Schopenhauer calls “the philosophical truth,” the very foundation of his whole metaphysics. Also, the notion of experiencing “the because” can be traced back to Schopenhauer. In FR §43, while analyzing the problem of willing, he comes to the conclusion that “motivation is causality seen from within” (SW 1:145/FR 137). In other words, our motivated actions in which we are guided by some external influence can be seen as immediately experiencing causality. In his remark about experiencing the “because” Wittgenstein seems to be referring to this idea15. Similarly, the analysis of the phenomenon of willing, which starts with remark 611 and goes on for a dozen or so further remarks, seems to be strongly indebted to Schopenhauer (Schroeder 2012: 375ff.). In these remarks, Wittgenstein analyzes the experience of willing in relation to bodily movements, especially raising one’s arm. He starts with a remark seemingly formulated in Schopenhauer’s terminology: “the ‘will’ too [is] only ‘idea’ [Vorstellung].” Then, in 612, he discusses the difference between intentional bodily movements (raising an arm) and unintentional ones (thudding of the heart), and in 613 he says: I can’t will willing; that is, it makes no sense to speak of willing. This, interestingly enough, is a conclusion for which chapter 1 of Schopenhauer’s “On the Freedom of Will” seems to provide the premises: 521

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given that we are enquiring about the freedom of willing itself, this question would accordingly frame itself thus: “Can you also will what you will!” – which comes out as if willing depended on yet another willing lying behind it. And supposing this question was answered in the affirmative, the second would immediately arise: “Can you also will what you will to will?” and in this way the matter would be pushed up higher into infinity. (SW 4:6/FW 34) Schopenhauer comes precisely to the conclusion that it makes no sense to speak of willing, providing once again what seems to be a more explicit formulation of Wittgenstein’s thought. It is even more interesting, as it can be found in a book which is seldom, if ever, analyzed in terms of having influenced Wittgenstein. In the consecutive remarks in the PI Wittgenstein goes over to investigating the difference between willing and wishing with the conclusion that willing cannot be brought about by wishing (614–616). In 615 he formulates a sentence put into quotation marks, as if he were quoting someone other than himself: Willing [Wollen], if it is not to be a sort of wishing [Wünschen], must be the action itself. It cannot be allowed to stop anywhere short of the action. Schroeder points out that this is probably an indirect quotation from Schopenhauer. The difference between wishing and willing is a problem with which Wittgenstein has already been concerned in the NB, when Schopenhauer’s influence was obvious, and, more importantly, the solution of the problem which Wittgenstein is discussing here is Schopenhauer’s (Schroeder 2012: 376). Indeed, we can find several passages where Schopenhauer says something very similar, both in WWR 1 §18 and in “On the Freedom of Will” (SW 4:17/FW 42), but the most similar version appears in WWR 2: “there is really no causal connection between the act of will and the action of the body: for they are immediately identical” (SW 3:281/WWR 2:261). Eventually, in PI, 630, Wittgenstein’s analysis of willing turns into an investigation of the grammar of the language game connected with “willing.” This is a very Wittgensteinian approach to philosophical problems. However, most of what comes before that, including the discussion of possible accounts of willing, seems to happen in reference to Schopenhauer. The terminology used is very similar, and the problem itself – the investigation of the experience of willing and its relation to bodily movements, which constitutes the foundation of Schopenhauer’s introduction of the concept of will – is explicitly present in Wittgenstein’s philosophy.

35.5  Philosophical Parallels This influence is something which Schroeder, despite his reservations about the impact hypothesis, also acknowledges (Schroeder 2012: 380), and it provides good insight into how Schopenhauer’s influence on Wittgenstein can be understood more broadly. On this reading, the impact hypothesis states that Schopenhauer set the stage for Wittgenstein’s philosophy by creating a specific pool of philosophical problems. It is expressed, for instance, by Jacquette: Wittgenstein’s later philosophy … after losing affection for Schopenhauer’s transcendental idealism, would not have been what it became if it had not first been seasoned 522

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in a system of thought that emphasized a transcendental reality, of thing-in-itself as Will, including all that his might be regarded as implying for ethics and aesthetics, and, in Wittgenstein’s example more immediately, for logic, semantics and the limits of philosophy. (Jacquette 2005: 261) From this perspective, terminological similarities play only an auxiliary role. The focus is no longer on proving whether Wittgenstein took a certain term or metaphor from Schopenhauer but on finding passages in which Wittgenstein critically examines philosophical ideas formulated or anticipated by Schopenhauer. Lexical similarities can only help to find them. As is the case with the notion of willing, such problems might even appear in both Wittgenstein’s early and late writings (cf. Schroeder 2012: 376), thus establishing a shared background for his philosophy (as Jacquette and Magee claim). This procedure can be exemplified in the following instance. At a certain stage of the PI Wittgenstein directs his attention to the problem of privacy of mental states and wonders, in remark 284, how we can know that another individual is actually experiencing a sensation (e.g., pain) and not just acting as if they were experiencing it. In remark 287, he then suddenly defines the conviction that someone else is in pain as “pity,” which in the original reads “Mitleid,” the pivotal term of Schopenhauer’s ethics. Of course, this might be merely a coincidence of the same term. However, if we read the passage through a Schopenhauerian lens, we might see that the whole problem of how we can actually know that another individual, to whose mental states we do not have direct access, is in pain or has any mental states at all is a problem with which Schopenhauer is seriously concerned in a number of his works. Additionally, in OBM he examines it especially with reference to pain by asking how, in ethical actions, we are able to remove the “total distinction between me and the other.” The answer appears to be simple – by “cognition” of the other’s suffering, which is known as the “phenomenon of compassion [Mitleid].” In the next step, Schopenhauer admits that it is impossible to give an explanation of this phenomenon without recourse to metaphysics (SW 4:208f./OBM 200f.). In other words, he asks the question of the possibility of knowing other individuals’ sensations and concludes that the solution is inexplicable without metaphysics. The problem also appears in WWR 1 §19, in the form of the question about “theoretical egoism, which considers all appearances outside of the individual to be phantoms.” Schopenhauer admits that theoretical egoism (solipsism) cannot be disproved but also adds that it can be found in earnest only “in a madhouse” (SW 2:124/WWR 1:129). This has led various researchers to conclude that Schopenhauer simply dismissed the solipsistic stance with a rhetorical argument and was not further interested in it (e.g., Schroeder 2012: 371; Ware 2015: 110; Sötemann 2021). He indeed seems to rhetorically dismiss ontological solipsism, but we should not miss that he admits that it formally cannot be disproved and, most importantly, is further concerned with the problem of access to the inside dimension, or the thoughts, of other beings. The problem prominently reappears in WWR 2 Ch.7, in the form of the claim that cognitions are not conceptually communicable because they arise from private experiences, which might be dubbed as epistemic solipsism: If intuitions were communicable, then there would be something worth communicating: but in the end, everyone must remain inside his own skin and skull, and nobody can help anyone else. (SW 3:79–80/WWR 2:80) 523

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Schopenhauer says here that we actually have no access to other people’s mental states and therefore can never know how they understand what we are saying. It is perhaps not too much to say that trying to solve this problem constitutes a good part of Wittgenstein’s investigations. The problem of solipsism is present in his writings from both periods and in the later period takes up the form of the question about the status and grammar of psychological concepts (Schroeder 2012: 380). For example, it appears in PI, remark 420, in the discussion whether it is possible to view other human beings as “automata” that “lack consciousness” (a picture fairly reminiscent of Schopenhauer’s others being “phantoms”) or in the problem that we have to communicate with others without knowing whether they have experiences we are talking about (PI, vi; Wittgenstein 1958a: 181). Although Wittgenstein’s ultimate solution to the problem is different – he comes to the conclusion in PI, 293, with his famous beetle-in-the-box metaphor, that the question of mental states is irrelevant (cf. McGinn 1997: 161ff.) – we should not miss the fact that the problem, which he tries to solve, is explicitly formulated by Schopenhauer in several passages: How can we assume with certainty that other people have mental states? Of course, with his solution Wittgenstein overcomes a tradition which reaches back further than Schopenhauer’s remarks, but it is remarkable how much attention both of them dedicate to deliberating on this issue (cf. Griffiths 1974: 115f.). Another example of a philosophical parallel that can be traced both in Schopenhauer and throughout Wittgenstein’s writings, possibly even the most crucial one, is the conviction that language itself is actually a philosophical problem and that it is the source of philosophical confusion. This was pointed out as early as 1969 by Engel: to both philosophers, conceptual confusion is something we are almost unavoidably led into; that this is so because of something either in our own nature or because our concepts, being ambiguous and lacking clear boundaries, give rise to superficial resemblances; that these resemblances have far-reaching consequences not only for ordinary discourse but for both science and philosophy, etc. (Engel 1969: 294). Recently a similar claim has been made by Dieter Birnbacher (2020: 111). Indeed, Schopenhauer’s awareness of language as a problem seems to lead him to depart from the path of the classical German philosophers, especially from Kant, who does not seem to give it much importance (Forster 2012: 488). In contrast, Schopenhauer on several occasions shows and makes explicit that language generates problems. One important example of this is his analysis of how the ambiguity of concepts enables reason to be led completely astray (Engel 1969: 292ff.). Engel’s reconstruction starts, unfortunately, with reference to The Art of Controversy, which is actually only a consequence of what Schopenhauer has to say about the nature of concepts. His crucial assumption is that it must be possible for us “to trace each concept […] back to the intuitions from which [...] it is itself immediately derived” (SW 3:76/WWR 2:77), which is connected with his theory that all concepts are created by abstraction from intuitive perceptions, understood as loss of information and, therefore, determination (cf. Dobrzański 2017: 79f.). In consequence, conceptual knowledge is always ambiguous, conceptualization always generates many possible results (SW 2:58f./WWR 1:73f.), and language is always inadequate.16 Additionally, Schopenhauer interprets the process of conceptualization as an individual and private one. In other words, conceptual philosophizing is prone to leading us astray: 524

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tossing around abstract concepts as if they were algebraic equations (a procedure that is called dialectic these days) does not give secure results as real algebra does, because the concept represented by the word in such cases is not a fixed and precise quantity such as is designated by algebraic variables, but is instead unstable and ambiguous and can expand and contract. (SW 3:79/WWR 2:79–80) There are several examples of Schopenhauer solving philosophical problems by pointing out that they are founded on abusing concepts consisting in detaching them from their original, intuition-bound meaning (cf. Xhignesse 2020: 103f.). This can be seen in the remark that the concept of freedom “refuses to enter into a direct bond with the concept of the will” and therefore, to discuss the freedom of will we actually need to shift the usual meaning of the concepts (SW 4:7ff./FW 35ff.) – which results in the confusion of asking whether we can will what we will. Another example of such an approach can be seen in Schopenhauer’s criticism of the substantialization of the concept of “good” by many philosophers, found in WWR 1 §65. Instead, he proposes to “trace the concept of good back to its meaning” and, significantly, does that by showing how it is usually used in language: “we talk about good food, good roads, good weather, good weapons, good omens, etc., in short, we call everything good that is just as we want it to be” (SW 2:425–6/WWR 1:387).17 Such analyses are strongly reminiscent of the Wittgensteinian program formulated in PI, 116: “one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language-game which is its original home? – What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.”18 The idea that language can be divided into “metaphysical” and “everyday” uses also has strong connections to Schopenhauer’s line of thought, and can be traced back to his distinction of four types of truth in the FR, Chapter 5, §§ 29-33. Truth is defined as “the relation of a judgment to something distinct from it which is called its ground” (SW 1:105/FR 100). In the next step, Schopenhauer names four types of objects (other judgments, empirical objects, forms of intuitive empirical cognition, and formal conditions of thought) that can become grounds of judgments and therefore distinguishes four types of truths: (i) logical truth, (ii) empirical truth, (iii) transcendental truth, and (iv) metalogical truth19 (SW 1:105ff./FR 100ff.). Significantly, these four types of truth constitute a closed catalog of uses of language which fulfills the criterion of truth, and all these uses somehow refer judgments to the world of phenomena (either to its objects – mental and real, or its transcendental forms – empirical and logical). With that, a clear limit for legitimate use of language is drawn, and its application to questions transcending the phenomenal world, including metaphysical questions, is implicitly excluded. Schopenhauer makes reference to this point in WWR 1 §18 while introducing the concept of will. He points out that when talking about metaphysics, he will not be talking about truth in any of the senses enumerated in FR. Instead, he introduces an additional type of truth, “philosophical truth” (SW 2:122/WWR 1:127). Thus the limit between philosophical and scientific language is drawn, and, perhaps, the metaphilosophical problem is cast, which will concern Wittgenstein throughout his philosophical career: How can we use language for philosophy and metaphysics and can we at all?

35.6  Conclusion and Outlook In this chapter, I hope to have provided an outlook on the different dimensions of discussions of Schopenhauer’s impact on Wittgenstein. Even though I have attempted to system525

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atically categorize different types of arguments, my presentation must remain sketchy in terms of specific parallels, each of which probably requires an in-depth analysis on its own. Many of them I could not discuss, for instance, Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein’s shared interest in the nature (or even the phenomenology) of thinking, or the question of whether thoughts are visual. A systematic reconstruction and evaluation of all these parallels and a synthetic summary of the findings remain tasks for further research. Therefore, it is important to pose the question about the value of such analyses. In my opinion, it lies in a shift of focus in our understanding of the history of philosophy in the last two centuries. Demonstrating the Schopenhauerian background of Wittgenstein’s philosophy enables us to go beyond the traditional interpretation of Schopenhauer and realize the role that he possibly played in the development of modern approaches to philosophy, including – perhaps still surprisingly – the analytical tradition. Such a perspective enables us to view Wittgenstein in a different light, too. By showing that he was influenced by the problems formulated by Schopenhauer, we might be able to better see that his philosophy was not as radically isolated from the German and continental tradition as it is often presented. For example, by bringing Schopenhauer into the game, we might also see more clearly that Wittgenstein’s accounts of willing and bodily movements stand in a long tradition, including both Descartes (Matsuda 2015) and German idealists (Zöller 2018). Generally, it enables us to view Wittgenstein’s philosophy rather as a development of something which had already started with Schopenhauer’s ambivalent attitude toward German idealism, consisting of his simultaneous appreciation of Kant and his criticism of the German idealists, and especially of their use of language, founded on his theory of concepts (cf. Xhignesse 2020: 102ff.). This has already been pointed out (Luft 1983: 73), but surely needs further research. As Jacquette remarked, “we can only hope to understand Wittgenstein’s intellectual development spanning both major periods of his thought by bringing Schopenhauer prominently into the story” (Jacquette 2016: 68). By doing so, we might perhaps also contribute to bridging the chasm between continental and analytical philosophy.

Notes 1 This chapter is a result of the research project No. 2019/33/B/HS1/03003 financed by the National Science Center (Narodowe Centrum Nauki, NCN), Poland. 2 The first edition of the lectures, which includes Schopenhauer’s extensive discussion of language and logic, was published in 1913 as Schopenhauer (1913). The new German edition is Schopenhauer (2022). 3 For references to Wittgenstein’s works I will be using the following abbreviations: TLP for the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein 1974b), NB for the Notebooks 1914-1916 (Wittgenstein 1998b), and PI for the Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein 1958a). Other titles will be given in full. 4 A helpful and synoptic summary of authors and topics in this field can be found in the form of a table in Lemanski (2016: 76f.). 5 Schopenhauer is mentioned on the following pages of Culture and Value: 30, 40, twice on page 41, and 82. 6 I checked this with the online Wittgenstein Advanced Search Tools, a cooperation between the Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen (WAB) under the direction of Alois Pichler and the Center for Information and Language Processing at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich (CIS) under the direction of Max Hadersbeck. The tool can be accessed here: http://wittfind​.cis​.uni​-muenchen​.de/ 7 Obviously, the italics in the quotation stems from Redpath and not Wittgenstein himself.

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Wittgenstein’s Reception of Schopenhauer 8 The German original reads: “Man könnte (Schopenhauerisch) sagen: Die Welt der Vorstellung ist weder gut noch böse, sondern das wollende Subjekt.” To the modern reader the reference to Schopenhauer’s terminology might be obscured by the fact that, nowadays, “Vorstellung” is translated as “representation,” as in E.F.J. Payne’s well-known translation from 1958. This choice is retained in modern translations and not “idea.” Additionally, the English translation of the second part of the sentence is in my opinion far from obvious because of the ambivalence of the German version, which could also be translated as: “It would be possible to say (à la Schopenhauer): The world as representation is neither good nor evil; but [it is] the willing subject.” This does not seem to change the overall intention of Wittgenstein’s remarks but makes the Schopenhauerian stance that the world is will more prominent. 9 It has also been pointed out that the ending of TLP, including its famous claim about our having to “pass over in silence,” bears structural similarity with the WWR 1 ending, where the whole object of Schopenhauer’s analysis, the world, is presented as “nothing,” once we have been able to adopt a new point of view (cf. SW 2:487/WWR 1:439; Weimer 2018: 439). Another structural parallel worth mentioning is that both FR and TLP seem to be projects of delimitation of legitimate use of language, which both authors then abandon – Schopenhauer in the WWR, when he introduces an additional type of truths (“philosophical truth”), not included in the FR, and Wittgenstein in the PI, where he criticizes “the author of the Tractatus” (i.e. himself). See also point 4 of this chapter. 10 What has been out of focus is that it also keeps reappearing in other Wittgenstein’s writings, where the ladder represents a proof. Prominent examples of this use include the Philosophical Remarks (Wittgenstein 1975: 179), Philosophical Grammar (Wittgenstein 1974: 301), Culture and Value (Wittgenstein 1998a: 10), among others (cf. Gakis 2010). Neither has it been often drawn to attention that this metaphor appears in Buddhist writings (Daye 1994: 93ff.), which is one possible source from which Schopenhauer might have taken it. However, the idea of gradually approaching truth is itself a classical philosophical figure of speech. It is rather the idea of leaving the whole ladder behind which constitutes the main similarity between Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein. (I thank Jens Lemanski for this last remark). 11 For a voice downplaying this influence, see Iczkovitz (2012: 29) and Schroeder (2012: 367). 12 Another voice in favor of this, pointing to the Schopenhauerian notion of will playing a role in Wittgenstein’s considerations of the connection between psychology and mathematics throughout his career, can be found in Poręba (2017: 258). 13 I am obliged to Timothy Stoll for pointing this out to me. 14 It has been argued that the list contains at least twenty, and probably even more, examples (Lemanski 2016: 177). 15 This seems to have concerned Wittgenstein in several texts. Remarks on this topic can be found in The Big Typescript, seen as crucial for understanding Wittgenstein’s transition from his early to late period. In Chapter 61 he discusses immediately experiencing causality, which is followed by several remarks formulated precisely in the terminology used by Schopenhauer in the FR. Wittgenstein mentions the confusion of “reason and cause” (“Grund & Ursache”) and problems with “causal connection” (“Nexus”). In Chapter 85 the discussion is continued, adding “Motive” to the terminology, and Wittgenstein even seems to paraphrase Schopenhauer’s claim from the FR “Motivation ist die Kausalität von innen gesehen,” when he says “Das Motiv ist nicht eine Ursache ‘von innen gesehen’” (Wittgenstein 2005). A similar discussion appears in The Blue Book, where Wittgenstein also discusses confusing reasons with causes and points out “the ambiguous use of the word ‘why’” (Wittgenstein 1958b: 15). He apparently is concerned with Schopenhauer’s argument from §50 of FR that once one arrives at the end of reasons and asks “why,” a cause, not a reason, will be given, as these can be easily confused. The terminological and substantial similarity between Schopenhauer’s claims in FR and Wittgenstein’s discussions of the problem is striking and it only substantiates Anscombe’s opinion that he must have read the FR, which can be found in McGuinness (2005: 39) and was probably expressed directly by Anscombe to McGuinness. I am obliged to Amadeusz Just for his contribution regarding this problem. 16 See Alexander Sattar’s chapter in this volume, p. 83. 17 Further examples of Schopenhauer’s application of this method and the discussion of its relevance for analytical philosophy can be found in Weimer (2018: 345).

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Michał Dobrzański 18 Lemanski even suggests, with recourse to the Berlin lectures, that in Schopenhauer there are anticipations of a use theory of meaning and the context principle (Lemanski 2016: 185f.), but this is disputed (Schumann 2020: 80f.). However, until now it has not been possible to determine whether Wittgenstein had actually read Schopenhauer’s lectures. It would have been chronologically possible, as they were published in 1913, but there is no further evidence for that other than the parallels Lemanski pointed out. For a critical analysis of this argument, see Weimer (2018: 345f.). 19 Glock argues that the term “metalogic” itself, which appears in Philosophical Grammar, is taken from Schopenhauer (Glock 1999: 456f.). For more on the term in Schopenhauer, see Beziau (2020).

Works Cited Anscombe, G. E. M. (1965) An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. New York: Harper & Row. Atzert, S. (2005) ‘Zwei Aufsätze über Leben und Tod: Sigmund Freuds Jenseits des Lustprinzips und Arthur Schopenhauers Transscendente Spekulation über die anscheinende Absichtlichkeit im Schicksal des Einzelnen’, Schopenhauer-Jahrbuch, 86, pp. 179–194. Beiser, F. C. (2016) Weltschmerz: Pessimism in German Philosophy, 1860–1900. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Beziau, J.-Y. (2020) ‘Metalogic, Schopenhauer and Universal Logic’, in Lemanski, J. (ed.) Language, Logic, and Mathematics in Schopenhauer. Cham: Springer, pp. 207–257. doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-33090-3_13. Birnbacher, D. (2020) Schopenhauer. Eine Einführung. 2nd edn. Ditzingen: Reclam. Bishop, P. (2020) ‘Schopenhauer’s Fin de Siècle Reception in Austria’, in Wicks, R. L. (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Schopenhauer. Oxford University Press, pp. 534–555. doi: 10.1093/oxfor dhb/9780190660055.013.30. Copleston, F. (1994) A History of Philosophy. Vol. VII. New York: Doubleday. Daye, D. D. (1994) ‘Major Schools of the Mahāyāna: Mādhyamika’, in Prebish, C. S. (ed.) Buddhism: A Modern Perspective. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Dobrzański, M. (2017) Begriff und Methode bei Arthur Schopenhauer. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Engel, S. M. (1969) ‘Schopenhauer’s Impact on Wittgenstein’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 7(3), pp. 285–302. doi: 10.1353/HPH.2008.1167. Erbacher, C. (2020) Wittgenstein’s Heirs and Editors. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi: 10.1017/9781108878111. Forster, M. N. (2012) ‘Kant’s Philosophy of Language?’, Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, 74(3), pp. 485–511. doi: 10.2143/TVF.74.3.2174106. Gakis, D. (2010) ‘Throwing Away the Ladder before Climbing It’, Republication by the Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen, 2013. http://wab.uib.no/agora-alws. Original publication in Papers of the 33rd IWS. Kirchberg am Wechsel: ALWS 2010, pp. 98–100. Gardiner, P. L. (1963) Schopenhauer. 1997th edn. Bristol: Thoemmes Press. Gardner, S. (1999) ‘Schopenhauer, Will, and the Unconscious’, in The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer. Cambridge University Press, pp. 375–421. doi: 10.1017/CCOL052162 1062.013. Glock, H.-J. (1999) ‘Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein’, in Janaway, C. (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer. Cambridge University Press, pp. 422–458. doi: 10.1017/CCOL0521621062.014. Griffiths, A. P. (1974) ‘Wittgenstein, Schopenhauer, And Ethics’, in Vesey, G. (ed.) Understanding Wittgenstein (Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures). London: MacMillan, pp. 96–116. doi: 10.1007/978-1-349-15546-0_7. Iczkovitz, Y. (2012) Wittgenstein’s Ethical Thought. New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan. Jacquette, D. (2005) The Philosophy of Schopenhauer. Chesham: Acumen. Jacquette, D. (2016) ‘Wittgenstein and Schopenhauer’, in Glock, H.-J. and Hyman, J. (eds.) A Companion to Wittgenstein. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, pp. 57–73. doi: 10.1002/9781118884607. ch3. Janaway, C. (1989) Self and World in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Wittgenstein’s Reception of Schopenhauer Janik, A. (1992) ‘Wie hat Schopenhauer Wittgenstein beeinflußt?’, Schopenhauer-Jahrbuch, 73, pp. 69–77. Janik, A. (2017) Wittgenstein’s Vienna Revisited. London and New York: Routledge. Janik, A. and Toulmin, S. (1973) Wittgenstein’s Vienna. New York: Simon & Schuster. Leinfellner, W. (1985) ‘A Reconstruction of Schlick’s Psycho-Sociological Ethics’, Synthese, 64(3), pp. 317–349. Lemanski, J. (2016) ‘Schopenhauers Gebrauchstheorie der Bedeutung und das Kontextprinzip’, Schopenhauer-Jahrbuch, 97, pp. 171–195. Lemanski, J. (ed.) (2020) Language, Logic, and Mathematics in Schopenhauer. Cham: Springer International Publishing (Studies in Universal Logic). doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-33090-3. Luft, D. S. (1983) ‘Schopenhauer, Austria, and the Generation of 1905’, Central European History, 16(1), pp. 53–75. doi: 10.1017/S0008938900010888. Magee, B. (1997) The Philosophy of Schopenhauer. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Matsuda, K. (2015) ‘Descartes and Schopenhauer on Voluntary Movement: Why My Arm Is Lifted When I Will Lift It?’, Journal of Human Environmental Studies, 13, pp. 35–40. McGinn, M. (2002) The Routledge Guidebook to Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. London: Routledge. McGuinness, B. (2005) Young Ludwig. Wittgenstein’s Life 1889–1921. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Monk, R. (2016) ‘Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Sketch of His Life’, in Glock, H.-J. and Hyman, J. (eds.) A Companion to Wittgenstein. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, pp. 5–20. doi: 10​.1002​ /9781118884607​.ch0a. Poręba, M. (2017) Wolność i metafizyka. Eseje z filozofii pierwszej. Warszawa: PWN. Russell, B. (1946) The History of Western Philosophy. London: George Allen and Unwin. Schopenhauer, A. (1913) Arthur Schopenhauers handschriftlicher Nachlaß. Philosophische Vorlesungen. Erste Hälfte. Theorie des Erkennens. Edited by P. Deussen and F. Mockrauer. München: R. Piper & Co. Schopenhauer, A. (2022) Vorlesung über Die gesamte Philosophie. Edited by D. Schubbe, J. WerntgenSchmidt, and D. Elon. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag. Schroeder, S. (2012) ‘Schopenhauer’s Influence on Wittgenstein’, in Vandenabeele, B. (ed.) A Companion to Schopenhauer. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, pp. 367–384. doi: 10​.1002​/9781444347579​.ch24. Schumann, G. (2020) ‘A Comment on Lemanski’s “Concept Diagrams and the Context Principle”’, in Lemanski, J. (ed.) Language, Logic, and Mathematics in Schopenhauer. Cham: Springer, pp. 73–84. doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-33090-3_5. Sötemann, C. H. (2021) ‘Realität der Außenwelt’, in Schubbe, D. and Lemanski, J. (eds.) SchopenhauerLexikon. Paderborn: Brill Fink (utb.). Textor, M. (2018) ‘Schlick on the Source of the “Great Errors in Philosophy”’, Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 4(1), pp. 105–125. doi: 10.1017/apa.2018.14. Ware, B. (2015) Dialectic of the Ladder: Wittgenstein, the Tractatus and Modernism. London, New Delhi, New York, Sydney: Bloomsbury Academic. Weimer, W. (2018) ‘Analytische Philosophie’, in Koßler, M. and Schubbe, D. (eds.) SchopenhauerHandbuch. Stuttgart: Metzler, pp. 345–349. Wittgenstein, L. (1958a) Philosophical Investigations. 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell. Wittgenstein, L. (1958b) The Blue and Brown Books. Preliminary Studies for the ‘Philosophical Investigations’. 19th edn. Oxford: Blackwell. Wittgenstein, L. (1974a) Philosophical Grammar. Edited by R. Rhees. Oxford: Blackwell. Wittgenstein, L. (1974b) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuiness. London, New York: Routledge. Wittgenstein, L. (1975) Philosophical Remarks. Edited by R. Rhees. Oxford: Blackwell. Wittgenstein, L. (1998a) Culture and Value. Edited by G. H. von Wright, H. Nyman, and A. Pichler. Oxford: Blackwell. Wittgenstein, L. (1998b) Notebooks: 1914–1916. Edited by G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright. Oxford: Blackwell. Wittgenstein, L. (2005) The Big Typescript TS 213. Edited by C. G. Luckhardt and M. A. E. Aue. Malden, Oxford, Carlton: Blackwell. Wright, G. H. von (2001) ‘A Biographical Sketch’, in Malcolm, N. (ed.) Ludwig Wittgenstein. A Memoir. 2nd edn. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Michał Dobrzański Xhignesse, M.-A. (2020) ‘Schopenhauer’s Perceptive Invective’, in Lemanski, J. (ed.) Language, Logic, and Mathematics in Schopenhauer. Cham: Springer, pp. 95–107. Zöller, G. (2018) ‘Action, Interaction and Inaction: Post-Kantian Accounts of Thinking, Willing, and Doing in Fichte and Schopenhauer’, Philosophical Explorations, 21(1), pp. 108–121. doi: 10.1080/13869795.2017.1421694.

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36 MELANCHOLY AND PESSIMISM Adorno’s Critique of Schopenhauer Brian O’Connor

Adorno’s references to Schopenhauer, across the Gesammelte and Nachgelassene Schriften, are in the hundreds. Sometimes the name is casually invoked, with fleeting allusions that amount to little or nothing. In a number of places, however, Adorno does not appear to be very far from Schopenhauer. Indeed, the closeness is intriguing given the fundamental differences we might expect to find between a philosophy that carefully curates a pessimistic perspective and one where melancholy and belief in the possibility of an improved world stand side by side in irresolvable tension. At his most enthusiastic Adorno will acknowledge a range of arresting insights to be found in Schopenhauer while also suggesting that those insights are, in fact, located within a set of wider and mistaken commitments. There is, though, no overarching sense that Adorno perceives Schopenhauer as someone with whom he must grapple in the way he does with the two great bourgeois philosophers – as he sees them – Kant and Hegel. Those are figures Adorno perceives to have either momentous claims to important truths or valuable methods. Equally, Adorno devotes concentrated energy to certain philosophers – Husserl or Heidegger, most notably – whose positions repel him but who, nevertheless, interestingly yet blindly embody the disordered varieties of reason produced by modernity. Adorno, formally at least, does not appear to situate Schopenhauer at these levels of significance. Less formally, however, the relationship turns out to be more complex than the unsystematic presentation of ideas would suggest. Negotiation with Schopenhauer’s position occasionally, and quite creatively, provides Adorno with a foil against which to express some of his more distinctive views about experience in contemporary society. It is because Schopenhauer is keenly aware of the suffering of humanity that Adorno reverts to him time and again. Adorno consistently maintains, however, that Schopenhauer is committed to an incorrect explanation of that suffering and consequently has no plausible solution to it. Like many others Adorno looks past the metaphysical architecture of Schopenhauer’s theory of the will. The idea of a single striving will that underpins every action in the universe is of no interest to him. Rather, he reads Schopenhauer as a philosopher of life, focusing mainly on Schopenhauer’s observations about the world around him. He comments principally on Schopenhauer’s recognition of the all-pervasiveness of suffering, his critique of the principle of individuality and the correlative thesis of self-renunciation, the DOI: 10.4324/9781003048992-42

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pessimistic viewpoint, the interpretation of boredom as an index of the condition of the world, and aesthetic experience as freedom. His treatment of these themes is always marked by the worry that the world Schopenhauer presents is a misperception of the social world, the real world that contains historically determined and changing human needs. Unlike his friend and collaborator Max Horkheimer, he takes that to be a terminal limitation in Schopenhauer’s philosophical standpoint. Whereas Horkheimer is content to assume that Schopenhauer’s portrait of the misery of existence is not detached from ‘sociological knowledge’1, Adorno can find only an essentialization and therefore a contextually indifferent account of that misery. Schopenhauer’s claims are, Adorno maintains, too often either abstract negations of the established world and the philosophical thinking that goes with it or produced by an ahistorical form of interpretation. In what follows we shall see how Adorno’s critical perspective is articulated through his engagement with what he takes to be the core areas of significance in Schopenhauer’s philosophy.

36.1 Suffering Adorno’s earliest published remarks on Schopenhauer appear in the Habilitationsschrift on Kierkegaard, which he completed in 1933. In that work he embraces Schopenhauer as a philosopher whose thought, as he puts it, ‘mourns a bad reality’.2 He is apparently appreciative of Schopenhauer’s interest in suffering in its particularity, in what it does to people and to their experience. In characterizing Schopenhauer’s position as one of mourning Adorno is evidently drawing on the psychoanalytic notion of the subject’s withdrawal from a world that no longer contains what it loves. Mournfulness, according to the Freudian view, finds around it only a depleted emotional environment, one devoid of any capacity to offer a satisfying experience. In this sphere suffering can only be bad: it has no positive value; it does not ennoble us, make us admirably stronger, or enhance our humanity. Adorno later contrasted Schopenhauer’s compelling perspective with that of Wagner whom he accuses of aggrandizing suffering by representing it as an interesting, indeed elevating mode of being. (The Parsifal figure is the case in point.) Schopenhauer, however, was keenly insistent on, as Adorno put it, the ‘very shabbiness and meanness’ of the misery of the world.3 In this respect he makes an important break ‘with the theodicy of suffering’4: he refuses to give suffering meaning. However, there is, Adorno points out, an evident tension between Schopenhauer’s faithful expression of suffering as it actually is (in contrast again with Wagner) and the systematic contention that, as Schopenhauer himself puts it, ‘lack, privation, suffering are positive and announce themselves directly’ (SW 2:377/WWR 1:346). Positivity, after all, is a value only within a system. Nothing is inherently positive in that sense. Adorno typically worries about philosophical theories that have a systematic intent: they ultimately subordinate the insights that originally motivated them to the interests of a particular organized thought model. In this way, consistency, Adorno holds, triumphs over insight. Schopenhauer falls into this very practice with his claim that anything that occludes or interrupts suffering – including even moments of ‘happiness’ (SW 2:377/WWR 1:346) – is ‘negative’ in nature, a temporary but unsustainable denial of the essentially unalterable truth of our condition, that is, its ‘positive’ state. This tidy categorization of life’s qualities, where suffering must be positive, bolsters the thought that suffering is ineradicable.5 Of course, one might come to believe that anyway on the basis of a considered examination of human history. Adorno suspects, however, that Schopenhauer reaches that conclusion in opposition to his own better instincts. 532

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His humane perspective – evident not least in his concern for animals, Adorno observes6 – appears to constitute a lament about suffering, to make a complaint about something that should not be and to entertain a conceivable world where suffering is, indeed, negative. This appraisal is characteristic of Adorno’s perception of Schopenhauer, that his captivating capacity for ‘experienced thought’7 – that is, for bearing witness to the deficits of ordinary experience – is repeatedly distorted by an overarching systematic impulse. It directs the traffic of his thinking. A contrast, again, with Horkheimer is notable. Horkheimer held that for ‘Schopenhauer the good is far more the ephemeral, thought, and appearance, than that which keeps reproducing itself’, and hence, in a way, the good – or absence of suffering – is a negative state of affairs.8 Horkheimer, then, finds in Schopenhauer a model for our current world, where the conditions that keep us in a state of anxiousness are more enduring than those moments of contentment or independence we might sometimes hope to enjoy. This interpretation self-evidently works at a highly general level insofar as it does not seek, as Adorno does, an explanation of the self-reproducing background to human experience, the background that is detached from all concerns with human happiness. This notion will be developed further below.

36.2  Negation of the Will to Live Adorno does not pretend to be an innovative reader of Schopenhauer or to offer reconstructions that might rival scholarly alternatives. His grasp of Schopenhauer’s official positions tends to be conventional and rarely points to anything that those casually acquainted with the latter’s work would not easily recognize. The originality of Adorno’s views comes through in his conclusions about what Schopenhauer’s main claims really mean. This generally involves characterizations of Schopenhauer’s ideas in terms that would have seemed rather alien and quite irrelevant to Schopenhauer himself. That interpretative approach is on view in Adorno’s comments on Schopenhauer’s thesis that suffering is a direct consequence of the restless will to live and that the solution to suffering therefore lies in a negation of the will. One might expect Adorno to speedily reject this thesis on the basis that it places life above the political space that is at the core of Adorno’s own program. However, Adorno’s perception of the negation move is nuanced. Once again, he draws a contrast with Wagner’s position as a means of finding some truth – that is, an idea that cannot be dismissed as a mere philosophical fancy or ideological prejudice – in Schopenhauer’s claim. Wagner had appropriated the notion of the negation of the will but had converted it into a noxious ethics. According to Adorno, Wagner’s version of the negation of the will to live amounts to ‘compliant admiration’ for the forces of the world that cannot be withstood.9 Wagner effectively promotes obedience toward what one understands to be one’s fate. Whatever its redemptive value might be thought to be, that obedience makes no intelligible claim to freedom. Schopenhauer, by contrast, Adorno maintains, never loses sight of the act of negation as an act of freedom. Negation is a gesture toward rejection of ‘the vicious circle of blind fate’.10 In this respect – in however attenuated and unusual a form – it represents a complaint about reality, not, pace Wagner, a misunderstanding of our duties toward reality. The capacity to complain evinces a willingness to protect oneself from reality or to assert oneself against it. In Adorno’s work we see him argue that complaint is a form of freedom and indeed perhaps constitutes the first step toward freedom under present historical circumstances where options for emancipation and reform are closed off by a highly administered and ideological social totality. On this point, at least, Adorno 533

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seems to share Horkheimer’s generalistic appreciation of the significance of Schopenhauer’s rejection of reality. And there is, for Adorno, a further sympathetic insight to be gained from Schopenhauer’s notion of negation. Adorno correctly believes that negation of the will to live is in part defended by Schopenhauer on the basis of a concern about the opacity of our motivations: ‘the necessity of their operation is hidden from even the agent himself’ (SW 2:351/WWR 1:324). We do not really have reliable access to what we are or to what drives our desires. Experience teaches us, if we are willing to abandon those agent-centric myths produced by human vanity, that we are impelled by forces that have no interest in our happiness. Knowledge of that fundamental principle of life brings us to a solution: to negate the desire to act. It is a ‘renunciation [that] is not grounded in any motives at all’ (SW 2:394/WWR 1:360): it is the response to the objective order of things as interpreted by philosophy. Adorno, thanks no doubt to his own negativistic approach to moral action, approves of the move, which involves ‘recognizing one’s own blindness and thereby escaping from it’.11 Adorno’s particular worries, of course, are directed at the socially constructed normative sphere rather than at life itself. We live within an historical order in which the reification of human life is a second nature. Exploitation and manipulation are normalized by modes of thinking that turn human beings into valueless things. We cannot take on a new set of moral values by some act of will that is assuredly free of that second nature. Freedom from second nature does not involve a fantastical transition to a space where one’s motivations are utterly transparent to oneself and firmly under control. Freedom of a more plausible and historically attuned kind is met when we at least begin to realize what lies behind much of what we take to be perfectly real. Schopenhauer, Adorno maintains, is rare among the great philosophers in acknowledging both the blindness and the limited form of reactions to it that are available to us. That, though, is not to pretend that Schopenhauer has the same ideas about which motivations – based on their sources – are especially suspect. The affinities between Adorno and Schopenhauer on this point should not therefore be drawn too closely. Schopenhauer’s notion of negation is hardly, after all, a political moment. His insight into suffering may be more sensitive to the problems of existence than Wagnerian fatalism or indeed Nietzschean affirmation. It is not though, for Adorno, adequate to a reality whose suffering is historical rather than supposedly necessitated by the unchanging and neutral structure of the world. A metaphysical explanation of the source of suffering can find a solution only in metaphysics. This is what Adorno takes Schopenhauer’s negative act to be: it is the ‘comforting idea’ that the end of suffering can be resolved in a negation that separates life from history.12 One might hesitate to agree with Adorno’s perception of that move as one Schopenhauer regarded as comforting, given that it involves the ‘renunciation’ of the ‘temptations of hope’ (SW 2:448/WWR 1:406). What Adorno is getting at, though, is that the pains of the world do not so easily yield to an act of the will. It is wishful thinking to see the negation of the will as a solution to all forms of suffering. As Adorno puts it: in a world that knows of things far worse than death and denies people the shot in the neck in order to torture them slowly to death, the doctrine of the denial of the will to live itself has something of the innocence for which Schopenhauer criticized the theodicies of philosophers.13 By taking the systematic approach, in short, Schopenhauer loses the texture of the world. This criticism evidently resiles from Adorno’s earlier appreciation of Schopenhauer’s sensitivity to the shabbiness of suffering. The point now being made is that Schopenhauer offers 534

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a facile proposal for the elimination of suffering which cannot speak to the complexities and ingenuity of human cruelty. Suffering, after all, does not come down to the innumerable disappointments of life, the frustrations of desire, or the anticlimax of gain. Our reaction to these experiences is not entirely outside our own powers. Through some special effort we may surrender our involvement with the spheres of life we know can cause us pain. The suffering human beings like to inflict on each other is another matter. No attitude of the will can lessen the damage it does to its victims. Just as we ought to ask of Nietzsche, Adorno argues, that he explains ‘what has or has not to be affirmed’, we need to know which features of life need to be negated.14 Can all of it be mastered or relinquished? The ‘total subsumption’ of everything under destructive and blind processes of the will, Adorno maintains, is, in the end, a philosophical move (made all the easier by a selective view of the forms of suffering).15 It is an unvariegated analysis of what is actually the case. And furthermore, it has the troubling implication of allocating human cruelty to the blind processes of the universe – it is just more pain – rather than perceiving it as a mode of action that emerges within particular historical, human-made circumstances. Hence Adorno’s view of Schopenhauer’s thesis as abstract negation: it is negation without differentiation. The misery of existence, Adorno believes, is both worse and better than Schopenhauer had proposed. It is worse precisely because the world cannot be overcome by negation of the will to live: ‘There is no way out of the closed context of immanence’.16 That is, there is no ready-made, alternate existence to which we can turn to escape what we currently endure. If there were then perhaps hope for relief from the world would be realistic. Adorno’s historical materialist perspective underpins his lack of sympathy with that proposal. Rather, if we are to confront suffering it must be by dealing with the world within which we find ourselves. And we will do so without much confidence that we can resist or certainly defeat the historical forces that have given us the world we have. If, at the same time, Schopenhauer really thought the world was hell he could not, Adorno claims, have found such a perfect salvation lying available within it. If salvation is even conceivable then the world is, Adorno also contends, better than the one described by Schopenhauer. It is not reducible to a simple principle of total suffering.17 This reductionistic bias is ascribed by Adorno to Schopenhauer’s affinities with those global judgments of reason proffered by the idealist philosophers Schopenhauer appeared otherwise to reject.18

36.3 Pessimism Schopenhauer’s notion of the identity of the world with suffering aligns him famously with radical pessimism. It entails that no sustained good can be produced by human actions since those things we call good – for example, happiness or peace – are ‘negative’. They prove feeble in the face of the restless human will which appears structured to torment itself. As Schopenhauer himself puts it: We have been investigating the primary, elementary characteristics of human life at the most universal level, with a view toward convincing ourselves a priori that human life is dispositionally incapable of true happiness, that it is essentially a multifaceted suffering and a thoroughly disastrous condition. (SW 2:381/WWR 1:349) Recognition of this state of affairs should lead to a disassociation from action prompted by desires that will never deliver any form of enduring happiness. The thesis that the world 535

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cannot produce any ‘positive’ good, Adorno complains, ‘may prevent us from taking any action at all’.19 This is an interesting observation if cast in the context of a longstanding criticism of Adorno himself, namely, that in his ‘negative dialectics’ an allegedly hyperbolic philosophical interpretation of the reach of ideology effectively erodes any ground for positive political recommendations and therefore, considered political action. If Adorno’s philosophy excludes politics at the most basic level then it too has no good reason to recommend purposeful action geared toward change. Adorno’s supposed pessimism, as Lukács quotably charged, is the thinking of a resident of the ‘Grand Hotel Abyss’ (a phraseology he had, in fact, first used against Schopenhauer), a luxuriating, somehow self-satisfying contemplation of social reality and its intractable structures.20 Furthermore, Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment is invariably ranked among the twentieth century’s more pessimistic assessments of the historical process. The very processes of progress – for example, emancipation from superstition through science, from feudalism through an evolved model of subjectivity – ultimately ensnare human beings in new forms of unfreedom and dependence. No proposals about how that process might be subverted or overcome appear to be acceptable. Yet Adorno seems anxious to differentiate his position from what he takes to be the philosophical principle of pessimism that guides Schopenhauer’s thinking. Once converted into a principle, Adorno argues, pessimism attempts to make itself true by abandoning the existential considerations which give rise to the sense that life largely disappoints. It forestalls the very idea of change in that it holds that ‘everything is fundamentally flawed’ and each and every attempt ‘to change the world’ is ‘doomed’.21 Adorno, by contrast, cannot endorse a position that satisfies itself in advance of the futility of any endeavor to change the world. This is, again, an interesting claim from the point of view of Adorno’s own controversial commitments. Adorno’s alleged pessimism – like Schopenhauer, it is not a label he himself adopted – is perhaps better captured as melancholy, a word he himself used to describe the vocation of philosophy – the ‘melancholy science’ in contradiction to Nietzsche’s – in the wake of the catastrophes of his times.22 It is marked to its core by the sense of what is lost, of who has suffered, and of the obstacles to articulating, never mind bringing about, a better world. Adorno understands this perspective to be justified by what we witness in history. But he manifestly believes that his position does not and should not bind us to the inevitability of the world in its current form, even if ways beyond it appear to impose insuperable challenges to our imaginations. The very notion of a historical stance – whatever conclusions it reaches at any given time – is necessarily open to the possibility of change. Philosophy cannot seriously entertain a teleology where everything is inevitably and irreversibly in decay. Adorno therefore sees Schopenhauer as committed to ‘a denial of history … a conception of history as no more than the dreary repetition of eternal sameness or perhaps even … decline’.23 The historical perspective should involve, then, not only an interest in the story of societal change but of qualitative diversity within the world. Schopenhauer, by negative contrast, is unable – because he is not an historical thinker – to appreciate the world and its possibilities. His mournful perspective is hardened into a pessimistic theory. If there is relief from suffering it cannot – again as Schopenhauer’s commitments oblige him to maintain – lead to any change in the world. Compassion, for instance, can reduce the suffering inflicted, but it has no capacity to lead to any general change.24 An example of this might be found in the growing concern in the modern world for the welfare of animals, a concern of some significance, indeed to Schopenhauer himself, as noted above (cf. SW 2:440/WWR 1:399). Yet the existence of societies for the prevention of cruelty to 536

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animals has hardly impacted the industrialization of slaughter and an oversupply – leading to waste – of animal products. The few creatures who benefit from human decency are an infinitesimally small number compared with those who are bred to fuel a business model based on consumer choice. Hence compassion in this sphere, as in others, is evidently no indication of our readiness for radical social reform or a new moral order. It somehow leaves the world itself untouched even as it reduces the misery of interpersonal competition. We might observe that it is unclear how the universal practice of compassion – something Schopenhauer’s theory does not exclude – would not improve the world as we know it. Individual actions, however, appear to carry no weight against the unalterable, misery producing structure of the world. Pessimism in this way, unlike melancholy, is not an attitude of experience but one of ongoing conviction.

36.4 Boredom Schopenhauer contends that boredom is an ever-present possibility for human beings in all situations. It can be subdued temporarily, but only when we find activities that are absorbing enough to distract us. He writes: the same thing can also be seen in human endeavors and desires, which always delude us into believing that their fulfillment is the final goal of willing; but as soon as they are attained they no longer look the same and thus are soon forgotten, grow antiquated and are really, if not admittedly, always laid to the side as vanished delusions; we are lucky enough when there is still something left to desire and strive after, to carry on the game of constantly passing from desire to satisfaction and from this to a new desire, a game whose rapid course is called happiness and slow course is called suffering, so that the game might not come to an end, showing itself to be a fearful, life-destroying boredom, a wearied longing without a definite object, a deadening languor. (SW 2:196/WWR 1:189) There is little likelihood that we will always be fortunate enough to be struck by desires which give rise to consuming pursuits. Such experiences are categorically ‘negative’ in temporarily arresting the default mode of tormenting boredom. That is Schopenhauer’s principle. The fundamental cause of boredom is ineradicable willing. Wanting can be occupied by certain desires which Schopenhauer tends to characterize as discrete objects (to finish this book, to win that person’s love, or to gain society’s esteem). Once the object of desire is attained it is no longer willed but merely held, and this, Schopenhauer claims, is dissatisfying. The desire was in the pursuit, not the attainment. Willing, nevertheless, goes on as it must ‘in a terrible emptiness’ (SW 2:368/WWR 1:338). And when it is without an object of desire it is ‘empty longing, life chilling boredom’ (SW 2:379/WWR 1:347). That, in Schopenhauer’s view, is what gives rise to the tortuous and unsettling experience we call boredom: the will to act that is without any activity with which to connect itself. Life, ordinarily, is the business of managing distraction and thereby forestalling boredom. It takes the form of repeating cycles in which there is boredom, distraction, fulfillment of the distraction, and boredom again. Boredom belongs among the inventory of experiences Schopenhauer sees as ‘positive’, and this is precisely because it is produced by that willing that is inscribed in all nature: 537

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That all happiness is of a negative rather than positive nature, and for this reason cannot give lasting satisfaction and gratification, but rather only ever a release from a pain or lack, which must be followed either by a new pain or by languor, empty yearning and boredom (SW 2:377/WWR 1:346). Adorno challenges the view that boredom is an intrinsic characteristic of human nature, proposing that Schopenhauer’s ‘anti-historical’ mind prevents him from considering that boredom is, rather, linked to social circumstances.25 The struggles of life are too easily identified as features of human nature rather than ‘as products of history’.26 Schopenhauer is unable to see that his commitments are ‘bourgeois through and through’27: the world of his formation is taken to be the world in its essence. Adorno claims that Schopenhauer’s view of boredom is, in fact, encased in socially conventional assumptions about work. There is, Adorno acknowledges, an undeniable tendency to boredom in the modern world, but this is because we have been taught only to be active in a particular way, not because human nature requires that activity. In the conditions of alienated labor ‘free time’ or leisure, Adorno claims, will often be experienced as boredom simply because free time is not independent of the conditions of labor. It may be restorative, but its ‘rhythm’ comes from the formative process of alienated labor itself. As he puts it: ‘Boredom is a function of life under the compulsion to work … Boredom need not necessarily exist’.28 With surprising brightness, Adorno maintains that boredom could be absent when people are ‘truly autonomous’, that is, in a position to fully determine what they do.29 A radical social transformation, however, would seem to be required to remove the work compulsion. In this case, it appears that Adorno has fallen into an abstract negation of his own kind. Whereas Schopenhauer sees boredom as an ineluctable feature of human life – one which can be avoided only by negating the will itself – Adorno too readily and exhaustively identifies boredom with current social practices.

36.5  Critique of Individuality Adorno credits Schopenhauer with several key innovative criticisms of the supposedly pure or transcendental ‘I’ that is a central principle of much of early German idealism. He finds these criticisms in one part of Schopenhauer’s work that is thematically separate and distinguishable from the metaphysical conception of the principium individuationis. The first of them rests on an ‘anthropological-materialist turn’ which targets the purism of the idealist ‘I’.30 Adorno attributes this criticism to a passage from Schopenhauer’s On the Basis of Morality (SW 4:131/BM 134–5) where Kant is criticized for proposing that the faculty of reason is an abstraction from a single species. Rejection of that abstraction entails undermining the notion of an ‘I’ that can possess any level of reality – other than notionally – in independence from its wider material conditions. Adorno adds a linguistic edge to this criticism, maintaining that the very idea of an abstract ‘I’ actually eliminates the possibility of its own assertion. This is because as an abstraction it removes itself from all connection with the world and thereby from the only context that can give it intelligibility. The very notion or meaning of an ‘I’ necessarily implies a system of wider relations (an ‘I’ can be part of a ‘we’ or be viewed as a ‘she’ or ‘he’). The idealists’ ‘I’, however, is conceived without those relations (there is no transcendental ‘she’ or ‘they’). An ‘anthropological-materialist’ response, then, relocates the ‘I’ within the full spectrum of the species’ properties. A cor538

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relative claim Adorno takes from Schopenhauer’s insight is that the abstraction of the ‘I’ makes mysterious its status as a supposed locus of consciousness. It is no longer rooted in the physicality of human life. Familiar worries about the relations between a supposed ‘I’ and the personal ‘me’ are drawn from this. As well as attributing a materialist critique of the idealist ‘I’ to Schopenhauer, Adorno also finds in him a set of arguments which allow us – as Hegel also had, he says – to see ‘through the moment of illusion in individuation’.31 Schopenhauer rejected ‘the mythical deception of the pure self’, a favored thesis of bourgeois philosophy.32 Of course, Schopenhauer did not do so in terms of Marxism or any other social theory. What is of importance for Adorno is Schopenhauer’s contention that individuation itself – not simply the fact of living – is the locus of all suffering.33 The external forces – contrasting with the internal or constitutive properties of the individual – which produce suffering lie outside Schopenhauer’s purview. Nevertheless, Adorno endorses Schopenhauer’s claim about the illusion of individuation because he sees it as offering an explanation of the tendency we have to deny our dependency. As he puts it: ‘the ego, as Schopenhauer explained by the myth of Maya’s veil, makes even the insight into its dependence difficult to gain for the subjective consciousness’.34 Radical individuation – whether we offer a genetic explanation in Schopenhauer’s or Adorno’s terms – not only separates us from others, it also occludes awareness of the degree to which we are not self-constituted. Individuation, of this type and in this way, flatters the ‘subject’s autarky’ just as it deceives it.35 There is also a psychological issue at stake here. The self is not independent of others, nor is it fully self-present. It is to some degree obscured by itself. Introspection does not reveal it in its totality since we uncover a range of motives and experiences that we do not always wish to associate ourselves with. Yet they are there, Adorno claims in sympathy with Schopenhauer: ‘Absolute egoity defies experience’.36 Selfawareness or self-consciousness, then, cannot be of the order implied by idealism.37 Of course, Schopenhauer is not simply a critic of the individuated self. He also proposes a way beyond it in the form of a specific act of self-renunciation: ‘the voluntary self-abolition of the will to life’ (SW 2:394/WWR 1:360). Adorno understands this move to be the wrong response to the insights offered in Schopenhauer’s critique of the principium individuationis. As we have seen, Adorno’s criticisms of Schopenhauer tend to take two forms: either Schopenhauer is adopting an ahistorical perspective or employing abstract negations – that is, simple inversions – as solutions to whatever he sees as the sources of suffering. Abstract negations effectively simplify reality because they understand reality in one category only (i.e., as the thing to be negated). This approach ignores the multifarious aspects of its composition. As Adorno puts it in relation to Schopenhauer’s solution to the problem of the principium individuationis: ‘the abstract negation of individuality is not all there is to the dialectics of individuation and universality’.38 In other words, the supposed delusion of individuation is not broken simply by negating individuation. Indeed, we might think that Schopenhauer’s ‘anthropo-materialist’ thesis could point toward a broader conception of individuality – an interpersonal one – rather than at its elimination. Although also a critic of the idealist ‘I’ Adorno does not harbor a global suspicion of individuality. It is possible to move beyond individuality in its hypostatized form without dissolving it. Adorno tasks us with appreciating the contribution of sociality to the genesis of the self. An attenuated rather than negated subject emerges from that revision. Adorno, we might note, never goes so far as to conceive subjectivity as the play of intersubjective forces. An implication of Adorno’s comparatively moderate answer to the principium individuationis is that individuality (not, that is, radical individuation) need not be understood 539

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as suffering by necessity. To construe it that way could justify its radical negation since it might be the only conceivable way to deal with its essential, unalterable inner nature. But Adorno, again, believes that individuality is more complex than suggested by idealism and also that it contains more potential than is permitted by Schopenhauer’s flattened response. Once we cease thinking of individuality as necessarily radically individuated it need not be considered as the locus of suffering. Certainly, it would suffer without end were it really no more than an isolated phenomenon, failing to connect as it would like with others since it is intrinsically incapable of connection and hurting itself in its attempts to affirm itself against and in contrast with others through forms of life that are marked by envy, competition, and defeat. But happiness, though fleetingly rare in contemporary society, is possible, Adorno maintains. We might suggest that the unusual character of Adorno’s critical theory is owed to its attempts to reach beyond its own melancholia and direct us to possible sources of simple happiness. That possibility would be precluded, however, were individual experience to be disavowed and negated. On that basis Adorno therefore claims that ‘the happiness of individuation’ is consistently ‘libelled’ by Schopenhauer as well as Wagner.39 Schopenhauer’s systematic mission requires that libel as it entraps him within the binary of a full acceptance of hardened individuation, where happiness is eternally elusive or its negation, annihilation. The latter does not, of course, produce happiness either. Rather, it simply undercuts the key condition upon which suffering depends. Schopenhauer’s thesis of self-denial replicates the conventional self, albeit in a purely negative form, in so far as it too excludes the possibility of happiness. The ‘escape’ from the ‘will’ as a supposed ‘negative absolute’ is in this way a self-deceiving move which leaves the distribution of happiness and suffering in the world as it is.40 Adorno finds a further troubling implication in what he sees as Schopenhauer’s binary world of the suffering individual or its negation. He argues that those options leave us without an intelligible sense of freedom. Among Adorno’s complex of ideas about freedom is the claim that freedom would not be possible were there no underlying impulse which is not produced at the ego level and is not reducible to reasons. Freedom, he claims, ‘feeds upon the memory of the archaic impulse’.41 It cannot be conjured up in the manner recommended by Kant, that is, by means of the process of enacting the moral law through universally valid reasons. Reasons are secondary to freedom itself and, indeed, often distort the will to act if they are directed against the impulse itself. As Adorno puts it: ‘a certain archaic element is required for there to be such things as free impulses, or spontaneous modes of behaviour that are not triggered by reasons’.42 He worries that Schopenhauer’s global negation of the will to live must also annihilate the very impulse that underpins the possibility of freedom. ‘Schopenhauer’s metaphysics’ he writes, ‘regresses to a phase before the awakening of genius amidst the mute world. He denies the motive of freedom, the motive men remember for the time being and even, perhaps, in the phase of total unfreedom’.43 The abstract negation of the principium individuationis then turns out to be the elimination of virtually all sources of human fulfillment, and this includes the impulse that gives rise to freedom which Adorno believes is inscribed in some sense – certainly obscurely – in the individual. Schopenhauer is, of course, willing to pay that price. But this leaves him open to Adorno’s concern that his thought aligns with the needs of a society that would be threatened by criticism from within but can comfortably live with negativistic fantasies of internal exile. In view of Adorno’s substantial contribution to aesthetic theory one might expect him to have at least some interest in Schopenhauer’s wide-ranging and deep-reaching ideas 540

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about art. There is, in fact, little evidence of that from his texts, other than several inconsequential citations. What does, however, resonate with him is Schopenhauer’s notion that aesthetic experience offers some level of release from the miseries generated through the principium individuationis. In aesthetic ‘contemplation’, as Schopenhauer puts it, ‘we are no longer conscious of ourselves as individuals but as the pure will-less subject of cognition’ (SW 2:247/WWR 1:234). Among Adorno’s own claims about aesthetic experience is that it can contrastively illuminate the deficits of life within contemporary reified society. In this regard, it is, Adorno states, in sympathy with Schopenhauer’s idea that aesthetic experience represents freedom ‘from the empirical’ and from ‘the totality’.44 Schopenhauer’s notion of aesthetic experience, Adorno writes, ‘breaks through the spell of obstinate self-preservation’45, that it thereby has the ‘ability to transcend the business of mere self-preservation’.46 Of course, Adorno and Schopenhauer have quite differing views of what exactly the challenges of self-preservation amount to. For Adorno self-­ preservation is a historical matter since the empirical world to which we must adjust is a historical-materialist one. It contains norms that, critical theory generally claims, are distinctive to capitalism and the rationalized lifeworld. Without adaptation to those norms individuals are excluded and helpless. In the reified world, particularly described by Adorno, the experience we undergo within the norms of self-preservation is little more than strategic negotiation. That is what he means by ‘empirical’: the world as found today. Individuals manipulate the world around them in accordance with what they perceive to be their best interests within sets of options that appear to lie beyond change. Instrumental interactions become second nature. The subject – the acting individual – is always dealing with objects – the outside world – with a view to making them conform with itself and its purposes. In that way objects are impoverished because they are perceived as little more than what is inscribed in them by subjects who anxiously preserve themselves through reduction of those objects. The subject’s experience is correlatively diminished by its inability to find the world – themselves, other people, nature – a source of creative and renewing possibilities. Aesthetic experience, as Adorno captures it, is quite the opposite of this. He describes as mimetic the apparently undistorted experience that is evident in engagement with aesthetic phenomena: the subject adjusts to the object as it attempts to find affinity with it. This adjustment is a restless process. The object places unfolding demands on a subject who will freely respond to them. This, Adorno writes, is ‘the unimpaired corrective of reified consciousness’.47 Part of its significance is its emancipating contrast with the ‘empirical’, though it is rarely thematized in that way by most who could claim it. Nevertheless, the contrast stands for ‘the plenipotentiary of an undamaged life in the midst of mutilated life’.48 Adorno recognizes Schopenhauer’s significance in uncovering this very oppositional dimension of aesthetic experience. He notes that Schopenhauer had identified the experience of music as ‘the world once over’49 as though ‘cleansed of immediate purposes’.50 It is experience that is freed of exploitation by the experiencer, in contrast with the productions of the culture industry which generate a numbing and repetitive pleasure, where the subject remains conscious of its positionality as a mere consumer. And in so far as it can be interpreted as an act of social criticism aesthetic experience is ‘indeed a form of temporary suspension, as Schopenhauer would have it, a temporary suspension of the principium individuationis’51, that is, in Adorno’s terms, a suspension of a subject positionality that understands itself to be inherently separate from everything else in the world. Schopenhauer here might be thought to challenge his own allegedly pessimistic thoughts about radical individuation 541

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and, as construed by Adorno, provide a glimpse of a different kind of home for human beings in the world. *** We have seen that Adorno, unlike Horkheimer, does not perceive Schopenhauer as a particularly congenial voice as far as the project of understanding and thereby weakening the grip of contemporary society is concerned. Indeed, at one extreme, Adorno thinks, Schopenhauer’s philosophy lends support to an attitude of historical indifference. It must regard changing structures as little more than new surfaces to a world already cast within an unchangeable essence. It is evident, at the same time, that Adorno finds Schopenhauer difficult to neglect. No philosopher before, or perhaps since, was as willing to look at human experience without recourse to mythologies of consolation, naïve hope or, most importantly, acceptance. The Schopenhauer that Adorno gives us exists within that complex of apparent blindness and searing insight.

Notes 1 Max Horkheimer, ‘Schopenhauer Today’, in Critique of Instrumental Reason, trans. Mathew J. O’Connell et al. (London / New York: Verso, 2012), p. 69. 2 Theodor W. Adorno, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 8. 3 Theodor W. Adorno, In Search of Wagner, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London / New York: Verso, 1991), p. 146. 4 Theodor W. Adorno, Lectures on Negative Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Polity, 2008), p. 104. 5 Theodor W. Adorno, Ontology and Dialectics, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge: Polity, 2019), p. 240. 6 Theodor W. Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), p. 145. 7 Adorno, Kierkegaard, p. 8. 8 Horkheimer, op. cit., p. 74. 9 Adorno, Wagner, p. 145. 10 Ibid. 11 Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy, p. 104. 12 Theodor W. Adorno, Metaphysics: Concept and Problems, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), p. 105. 13 Ibid. 14 Adorno, Lectures on Negative Dialectics, p. 18. 15 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), p. 377. 16 Ibid., p. 403. 17 Ibid. 18 Theodor W. Adorno, History and Freedom, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), p. 259. 19 Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy, p. 64. 20 Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (London: Merlin Press, 1971), p. 22. 21 Adorno, History and Freedom, p. 8. 22 I am grateful to Raymond Geuss for his insightful thoughts, in correspondence with me, on this distinction. 23 Ibid., pp. 81–82. 24 Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy, p. 173. 25 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London / New York: Verso, 1978), p. 175. 26 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 396.

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Melancholy and Pessimism 27 Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 175. 28 Theodor W. Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 171. 29 Ibid. 30 Theodor W. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 1993), p. 16. 31 Ibid., p. 45. 32 Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 153. 33 Theodor W. Adorno, Notes to Literature, vol. II, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), p. 125. 34 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 219. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid., 279–280. 37 Ibid., p. 280. 38 Ibid., p. 326. 39 Adorno, Wagner, p. 153. 40 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 377. 41 Ibid., p. 221. 42 Adorno, History and Freedom, p. 213. 43 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 377. 44 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: The Athlone Press, 1997), p. 15. 45 Ibid., p. 346. 46 Theodor W. Adorno, Sound Figures, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 6. 47 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 330. 48 Ibid., p. 117. 49 Ibid., p. 138. 50 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetics, trans. Wieland Hoban (Cambridge: Polity, 2018), p. 46. 51 Ibid., p. 123.

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37 IRIS MURDOCH AND SCHOPENHAUER Miles Leeson

Although Iris Murdoch classified herself as a ‘Wittgensteinian Neo-Platonist’ in her later life, she was schooled in the analytical tradition at Oxford and was a tutorial fellow in philosophy at St Anne’s College from 1948 until she was compelled to leave in 1963; she subsequently taught at the Royal College of Art, London, until she ceased teaching for good in 1967. This is not to say that Murdoch gave up philosophy, indeed her major contributions to the subject appeared after she left academia: in 1970 with The Sovereignty of Good, a landmark collection in moral philosophy, and her magnum opus, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992), which developed and synthesized her earlier thoughts on ethics, theology, aesthetics, and literature. Upon her death, she left an unpublished monograph on Heidegger, which is currently being prepared for publication.1 Although she studied classical philosophy at Oxford, she swiftly developed an interest in contemporary European thought (primarily the work of Marx and, later, the Existentialists) and its antecedents, including the work of Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer’s work grew in prominence during her life. In her early years, he was one philosopher among many she was attracted to, but she later came to see him as a bridge between Plato and Wittgenstein, as well as an interlocutor between Eastern and Western philosophy. Schopenhauer was a primary influence as she refined her conception of metaphysics in her final published work, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992), and as she attempted to create a workable model of a demythologized religion (specifically Christianity) that would prove both satisfactory and universal. As he grew in prominence in her thought, she returned to his work with renewed interest. In this extract from Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals she primarily draws on The World as Will and Idea, the title of the version she was drawing on: Schopenhauer here [in WWI] expresses a new (modern) definition of metaphysics or metaphysical craving (one which would be acceptable to Plato) when he speaks of our finite nature together with our passionate desire to understand ‘the world’ which we intuit ‘as a whole’. Metaphysics must be connected with a mystical state. (Murdoch 1992: 79)

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There is a good deal of shared interest expressed, both here and throughout her final philosophical work. Schopenhauer and the later Murdoch posit belief in a godless ‘doctrine of salvation’ and account for this by suggesting a complementary dialogue between morality and reality. She finds a kindred spirit for her task of demythologizing Christianity and creating a workable framework for considering ethics and individual autonomy. Gerard Mannion sees ‘that both thinkers believe that their espousal of a two-way account of the relation between knowledge of reality and morality (both elements being part of the schema of a godless “doctrine of salvation”) does not, in the end, appear contradictory but is rather a consistent position to adopt’ (Manion 2010: 136). However, Murdoch is only partially aligned with elements of Schopenhauer’s thought; Kant’s concept of duty, for example, is non-negotiable for her, and yet she praises his readability and engagement with the reader. She writes, in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, that ‘Schopenhauer’s relationship to his reader is relaxed, amiable, confiding, that of a kindly teacher or fellow seeker. He tells stories and makes jokes. Wittgenstein does not relate to a reader, he passes by leaving a task behind.’ (Murdoch 1992: 79–80) In what follows I will outline Murdoch’s early engagement with Schopenhauer’s work, how this comes to a culmination in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, and discuss the impact that his work had on her late fiction, specifically The Green Knight (1993). Although Murdoch frequently claimed to keep her two major disciplines separate, Schopenhauer’s thought can be seen to undergird the narrative development of her penultimate novel, written during the final revisions of Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. This is not to say that she is uncritical of his work; as we shall see she has serious concerns over his conceptualizing of ‘the will’ and she highlights what she perceives as the ‘outrageous simplicity’ of his worldview. (Murdoch 1992: 32) In any event, that Schopenhauer became a touchstone for Murdoch should not be surprising given her position outside the strict analytical trends in philosophy in the late twentieth century; that Schopenhauer’s work was also undervalued during the majority of his own life reinforced this connection.

37.1  Engagement with Schopenhauer It is difficult to pinpoint the exact timing of Murdoch’s first engagement with Schopenhauer, but it is clearly much earlier than has previously been thought. A reference to him appears in her working journal, dated June 1945 to May 1947, ‘Dialectic wh. leads philosopher to deny himself as fachmensch [sic]. Schopenhauer & Nietzsche stress this.’ (Murdoch 1947: 197). At this point in her nascent career, Schopenhauer seems very much to be one among many continental philosophers (alongside Marcel, Kant, Buber, Kierkegaard, and, of course, Sartre) and authors (Proust, Camus, and Queneau) that she is rapidly imbibing to form her worldview; there is also evidence that she discussed Schopenhauer’s work with Elizabeth Anscombe in June 1948 (Murdoch 1948: 101). That she alights on Sartre should be no surprise given that she met him briefly in 1945 and wrote her first monograph, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953), on his thought, although by this time she had perceived the inherent flaws in his version of existentialism. However, the engagement with concerns, such as suffering, power, the will, the ego, and much else besides (all of which underpin the entirety of her fiction and philosophy), is formed during this period as Murdoch spends time working for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency in Austria following the Second World War: that she would be drawn to Schopenhauer’s work, then, is not unusual. She may well have developed her interest in his work via her friend and colleague Patrick Gardiner, a philosopher at 545

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Oxford who was a major figure in raising the profile of Schopenhauer in the early 1960s; indeed, Gardiner’s Schopenhauer (1963) is among the works in the Iris Murdoch Special Collections at the University of Kingston and is underlined, and sidelined, throughout. Murdoch’s working library – now known as her Oxford library as it was moved from her former home in Oxford to the Iris Murdoch Special Collections at Kingston University, where it now resides – contains all of Schopenhauer’s major works, including On the Basis of Morality (the most well-used and replete with annotations and marginalia), all three volumes of The World as Will and Idea, Studies in Pessimism, The Wisdom of Life, The Art of Literature, and On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. As Murdoch did not date, or indeed annotate, all of these, it is difficult to produce a timeline, but it is clear from the dates of publication that she regularly returned to Schopenhauer’s work and continued to purchase English translations. The most heavily used of these are the threevolume set, all of which have extensive underlining and pages of notes at the end, On the Basis of Morality which is clearly very well read with marginalia and notes throughout, and Essay on the Freedom of the Will, which again has substantial notes and comments on the endpapers. We do know that she was reading his work in early 1976 just prior to giving her Romanes Lecture at Oxford on Plato which later became ‘The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists’ (Murdoch 1978: 43). Her set of The World as Will and Representation, for example, has substantial notes on the endpapers of all volumes, along with marginalia, side-lining, and underlining of passages she thought key; all three are clearly well read. In the second volume, she is actively working out her reading when she writes ‘We object to Schop as we object to Hume. Yet his idea of essence, app[earance]/reality = soul [?] is deep’.2 The work of transcribing Murdoch’s marginalia is a mammoth task, and one that has had little attention paid to it thus far. However, Frances White notes this concerning Murdoch’s copy of On the Basis of Morality: Her copy of On the Basis of Morality has notes, underlinings and marginal annotations throughout. They are in untidy rapid writing using biro and not pencil, both factors suggesting she read this work in later rather than earlier years. A page of notes inside the back cover is continued on the blank page opposite the Contents page, including, ‘Justice and compassion basic!’ It is compassion which Schopenhauer brings into sharp focus against Kant’s deontological approach to justice. Murdoch is much struck by this. (White 2018: 190) She highlights, in her journal from 1981 to 1992, the debt owed by both Wittgenstein and Heidegger to Schopenhauer, and these ideas are transformed, in part, into Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals following the development of her Gifford Lectures, which were not wellreceived, in 1982. Arguably she starts to lean more heavily on Heidegger from the mid-80s onward as her monograph on his work develops, and there are scant references in the draft of this to Schopenhauer to suggest an ongoing, sustained engagement with him. In short, she said what she needed to about his work in the Metaphysics although he has an enduring impact on her later fiction.

37.2  Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals Murdoch’s major work of philosophy, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, contains her most sustained engagement with Schopenhauer’s thought; indeed she dedicates an entire chapter 546

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to working through his philosophy, and how she perceives him as a bridge between Plato and Wittgenstein. She encapsulates what he means to her work in the tenth chapter ‘as an example of empiricist know-all, confused metaphysician, and simple-hearted…[a] cheerful pessimist’ (Murdoch 1992: 297–298). It is a little unfair to quote this out of context, so it is best to give an overview of her perception of him from chapter three of the Metaphysics, simply entitled ‘Schopenhauer’. There is a brief introduction to the philosophy of Schopenhauer in the previous chapter, ‘Fact and Value’, and this is discussed in relation to the philosophy of the early Wittgenstein. Here it is arguable that the outline Murdoch draws is a more generalized one based on her earliest reading, although it is clear that her interest in Schopenhauer’s notion of the will is of primary importance. How, she asks, are we to overcome the ego and our own innate selfishness? She suggests, much as she does in her fiction, that contemplation of artwork and attention to the individual are of paramount importance. She goes on to note how important Schopenhauer was to the early Wittgenstein, how both thinkers rejected Kant’s categorical imperative alongside his conception of duty. She also suggests that we ought to consider the segregation of Schopenhauer’s two worlds alongside the distinction of will and idea and how they might function in her own work. This feeds into her own conception of fact and value that she has been developing since the 1950s. The difficulty with Metaphysics is a Guide to Morals is that so many thinkers, at turns complementary and diverse in outlook, are wedded together in both this chapter and throughout the work. What Mariëtte Willemsen sees as the ‘entanglement’ of Wittgenstein and Schopenhauer is developed in Murdoch’s third chapter but with the added complication of a comparison of Plato and Kant. This has meant, at least until relatively recently, that the work as a whole has not been sufficiently considered. Although Murdoch simply entitles her third chapter in Metaphysics ‘Schopenhauer’, this is not to say she does not refer to a wide range of other philosophical and theological thinkers. As Willemsen points out ‘the chapter on Schopenhauer is dense in content, and freely, associatively structured’ (Willemsen 2019: 83). To begin, Murdoch lists three central points of Schopenhauer’s WWI and this is the central discursive work undertaken in this chapter. First, she pays some attention to his theory of art, especially in relation to his notion of perpetual struggle. Clearly this engagement with his aesthetic thought chimes with her own; in essence the need to go beyond the particular into a universal idea to reach beyond, toward the Platonic form. Second, she sees Schopenhauer’s vision of art having a particular status, but also notes that there is a central requirement for contingency. Third, she points out that music ought to be separated from visual art much as Schopenhauer considered due to its having an immediate effect on the individual, their emotional state, and will. Of perhaps greater interest, however, is Murdoch’s sustained critique of Schopenhauer’s conception of the will in relation to moral progress. She perceives him to be stating that, although art may provide temporary transcendence of a sort, this is only a brief respite from our own ego-hampered vision of the world and of each other. Murdoch goes on to side with her reading of Plato who, although critical of art (and of course poetry in particular), nevertheless is a believer in systematic progress. She asks where freedom is to be found and concludes that Schopenhauer’s system does not allow for this due to the hard determinism of the will in every aspect of life; this is a misreading of his work, which in fact includes a ‘higher viewpoint’ from which Kantian ‘transcendental freedom’ is seen to be possible (SW 4:96/FPE 107–8; cf. Janaway 2012), but Murdoch was not always clear in regard to the work of others, especially in Metaphysics: one thinks of her discussions of 547

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Derrida, for example. As she says ‘Schopenhauer’s will is, with Nietzsche’s, and that of the later Heidegger, one of the nastiest’ (Murdoch 1992: 61). So why does she spend an entire chapter of her major philosophical work discussing him? It appears that her primary interest is in the metaphysical concerns of Schopenhauer and his radical proposal of a ‘salvation by dying to the world’ (Murdoch 1992: 61). This asceticism chimes with her own interest in Buddhism that has been developing for at least fifteen years, and this interest finds voice in the later chapters of Metaphysics. Murdoch is also keen to point out that Schopenhauer’s dualism of will and representation is dissimilar to Plato’s distinction between reality and appearance, which is against the normal comparative reading of the two. Murdoch sides with Plato and cannot, in this regard, describe morality as essential to human life and flourishing; as for Schopenhauer’s work, she believes that morality is not something that is central. She draws on his statements regarding aesthetic withdrawal from life and highlights that the individual must be active in the world. She does, however, draw distinctions between his work in WWI and his work On the Basis of Morality; she is much keener on the latter as it deals with the virtues of justice and compassion, and she reads Schopenhauer as saying that compassion is grounded in nature and that through sympathizing with an individual’s predicament we participate in their suffering. He is keen, she believes, to contrast his own consideration of compassion with the Kantian conceptions of duty and right conscience, and she highlights that he rejects this because they are dogmatic and ethically dependent upon theology. She continues, once again, to forge links between Schopenhauer’s notion of compassion and her earlier interest in both Platonic philosophy and her growing interest in the asceticism of Eastern mysticism. However, Murdoch continues to attack his conception of the will and its determinism, and she sees him arguing that ‘guilt and merit lie in what we are, not in what we do’ (Murdoch 1992: 66), which she finds not only confusing but unpersuasive. If we are unable to rise above determinism, she believes, then compassion cannot reach its fullness. In addition, she prefers the Kantian approach, in which there is the possibility of moving beyond the naked will. If the will, as described by Schopenhauer, is correct then, she concludes, there are only limited opportunities to move against determinism; this applies not only to human life but to animal life as well, which anticipates a neo-Darwinian theory regarding reproduction and survival. What we must do then, Murdoch believes, is make room in our ethics for a form of moral progress. Second, she believes that a return to the Platonic cave is not equal to the aesthetic withdrawal from the world as it is only the latter that removes the concepts of morality. And finally, and perhaps most important for Murdoch at this juncture, we cannot dispense with the concept of duty as set out by Kant, to do so would remove the necessity to attend to the other: compassion alone cannot compel the individual. Whether Murdoch has read Schopenhauer well, or not, I would direct readers to consider the entirety of the third chapter of Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals to decide for themselves. There is a fairly straightforward divide in the two parts of this chapter: in the second she considers the notions of mysticism and freedom. Murdoch gives us her own definition of what mysticism, or rather a Mystic, is, ‘a Mystic is a good person whose knowledge of the divine and practise of the selfless life has transcended the level of idols and images’(Murdoch 1992: 73). I think this is particularly important as it is here that Murdoch brings in her interest in Buddhism alongside drawing together Schopenhauer’s work and that of classical Christian Mystics, particularly Meister Eckhart to whom Schopenhauer 548

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also refers regularly. The question is, however, how to reconcile Schopenhauer’s mysticism with that of Murdoch. She certainly sees his vision as a step on the path to clarity, and his instincts toward nature are also embraced by her. Perhaps where they part company is on the question of practical compassion; conceptualizing mystic freedom then is one thing, but putting these perceptions into a practical layout is quite another. However, she does note that his ‘eye for detail’ (Murdoch 1992: 69) is in harmony with his concern for the natural world. The chapter ends with the highlighting of Wittgenstein’s famous Riddle toward the end of the Tractatus. But why is this here? Murdoch is trying to link Schopenhauer’s notion of ‘the world in our existence presents itself necessarily as a Riddle’ (Murdoch 1992: 78) with Wittgenstein’s notes in the Tractatus on the mystical and the ineffable: Murdoch believes that both Wittgenstein and Schopenhauer are talking about the same matter, an absolute metaphysical truth, in the form of Riddle. She is agreeing with Schopenhauer here, but there needs to be a mystical solution to this conundrum. It is worth clarifying here, I think that we may well have two kinds of mysticism in operation in the mind of Schopenhauer. First, he finds it rather mysterious that anyone should act in a moral way at all, and Murdoch, in her Metaphysics, and he are both undertaking the same task in using a metaphysical enquiry to contend with the mystery. What Murdoch does do, that Schopenhauer does not, is try to provide practical means by which people can move toward a more selfless life. He is quite clear that engaging with his work will not provide any guidance (SW 2:319/WWR 1:319), and Murdoch requires our moral development to be a lived reality. Second, and this is also highlighted in their respective projects, is the focus on the ‘saintly resigner’ or, for Murdoch, the mystic who retires from life (here she would have in mind Julian of Norwich and Meister Eckhart, both found within her final work of philosophy; for Schopenhauer on Eckhart, see also SW 2:450–8/WWR 1:408–14 and SW 3:703–36/627–56). For Schopenhauer, this is a renunciation of the metaphysical grounding on which our evaluations are based, namely, the will to life (see SW 2:487/WWR 1:439), whereas Murdoch sees these mystical figures – both inside and outside mainstream religion, it must be pointed out – as showing us a path to the good. At the end of the chapter Murdoch writes, ‘in spite of his metaphysics and his mysticism, Schopenhauer may in general appear as a genial empiricist’(Murdoch 1992: 77). Of course, we may see Schopenhauer’s mysticism as being based upon his rigorous empiricism. So, considering these factors we may see that Murdoch is oddly closer to Schopenhauer than she gives herself credit for. Her need for a form of third space in between Schopenhauer and Kant is highlighted in this chapter, and it is certainly clear that although Murdoch believes that we can go further than Schopenhauer’s thought we need to ground ourselves in the form of practical mysticism (for Iris, his conception of the inner motive drawing us outwards) that he recommends. This is not to say, however, that she dispenses with the Kantian argument regarding the concept of duty, as this still needs to be part of her own metaphysical picture. As she says, ‘there is no divinity and no supreme good in his system, but there is a scattering of sensitive understanding’ (Murdoch 1992: 63) and her own sensibility encompassed both embodied mysticism, alongside the need to move incrementally toward the good. This, then, is the crucial point of difference. For Schopenhauer there is nothing external to the moral agent that compels them to act morally, it is their own motives that do so and how this is possible is, to him, shrouded in mystery. For Murdoch, there is an external factor – the Good – that draws us toward it and demands a moral response from us toward the other. 549

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37.3  The Influence on Her Fiction For many readers of this volume, it may seem odd to give space to discussing the influence that Schopenhauer had on Murdoch’s fiction. Surely, as she defended the clear distinction between her philosophy and fiction this is at odds with her vision of her work and denigrates her late fiction? In my earlier monograph Iris Murdoch: Philosophical Novelist (2010) I made a case for seeing her entire output as firmly conjoined, and I continue to believe this (Leeson 2022). It seems clear that, as Murdoch was writing Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, her unpublished work on Heidegger, and her penultimate novel The Green Knight (1993) concurrently, some slippage between these modes must be apparent. Indeed, her turn to a more reflective, interiorized form of fiction, which arguably begins with The Sea (1978), makes these connections even more visible on the page. As Anne Rowe has stated in relation to The Green Knight: The novel is, in part, a critique of Schopenhauer’s view that the only escape from egoism is a denial of will, which is achieved by an asceticism that lies beyond virtue … Salvation, for Schopenhauer, is achieved only by dying to the world because he thought that only what is extreme would crack the ego. In this novel, however, spiritual growth is achieved through immersion in the world, not through rejecting it. (Rowe 2019: 179) To read The Green Knight as an expression of the variety of ideas produced in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals is not a worthwhile endeavor: it would do a disservice to both books. However, this is not to say that elements of Murdoch’s late philosophy do not have a distinct bearing on her fictional work; certainly, the chapter on morality and religion in Metaphysics (which discusses the need for morality in a secular world founded upon a mythologized Christian base) alongside the earlier chapter on Schopenhauer are, I would argue, key to understanding the underpinnings of her late fiction. For Murdoch, a central idea related to both her fiction and philosophy is how language can be appropriated to enable transcendence, indeed we see this throughout her fictional work from Under the Net (1954) onward. The perception of others is central to both Wittgenstein and Plato (as well as Simone Weil, who is the lens through which Murdoch reads Plato) and therefore must be inextricably linked to human experience and moral development. I believe Murdoch’s views on Schopenhauer, critiqued in part through this novel, can help explain this. The Green Knight is set in London at an indeterminate point, but certainly post-Second World War it revolves around the home of Louise Anderson, a widowed mother of three daughters: Aleph, Sefton, and Moy. Other central characters of importance are the three male figures: Clement Graffe, his brother Lucas, and the ‘green knight’ of the novel, Peter Mir. Lucas, a quasi-Nietzschean figure, has been missing for months following a bizarre incident in which he defended himself from an alleged mugger; it appears he struck the assailant so hard that he died. Clement was also present. However, it later transpires that the ‘mugger’ was in fact an innocent bystander, Peter, who was trying to prevent Lucas from murdering his brother. In intervening Peter receives the blow to save Clement, but in doing so he is then owed a debt, as he sees it, by Lucas. Mir claims that his life and mental health have been severely impacted and that he has come to seek retribution; although it appears as if Peter is dead, he has only been wounded by the blow. As the novel plays out, Peter meets on a number of occasions with the brothers and the surrounding court of characters, 550

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and later a duel is suggested, although this is replaced by a figurative re-enactment with the main players present. At the very moment of this meeting, there is a flash of light, and the onlookers believe Peter has somehow become transfigured, although he falls to the ground unconscious; however, at a final meeting days later Peter inflicts a small wound on Lucas and considers the matter dealt with. The novel, then, opposes two power figures whose figurative and literal conflict is central to the development of the narrative. This is not to say, of course, that this is the totality of the drama which occurs. I use ‘drama’ here as the novel lends itself to a dramatic reading. Murdoch continues with her fascination with Shakespearian form as well as applying Greek mythology, Christian symbolism, and Arthurian legend. Although the major philosophical influence surrounds Peter and Lucas and, to a lesser extent, Bellamy James and Father Damien (two lesser characters involved with their own sub-plot), it would be unwise to overlook the role of the other players as they all perform a specific function within the novel. Peter J. Conradi believes that ‘Like Shakespeare’s romances too, The Green Knight resembles a dream and is often intensely theatrical’. In Murdoch’s early work, the ‘crystallinity’ inherent in her ‘closed’ novels enables the philosophy to come to the fore: in The Green Knight something rather different is happening and a different approach to considering the philosophical underpinning is needed. Conradi believes that ‘Although this is Murdoch’s most contrived and strongly shaped plot, it nonetheless contains her most realized and sympathetic characters’ (Conradi 2001: 361). It is difficult to disagree with this except to mention the stereotypical Murdochian creations that one finds at the periphery of the narrative. The plot reworks the Middle-English poem ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ with Mir often referred to as possessing green items of clothing and also being a member of the Green Party as well as carrying the weight of the Christ allegory. Lucas then echoes Gawain in a rather perverse manner, and the inflicting of a small wound by Peter enhances this symbolism. So how might we consider Schopenhauer in relation to the narrative? It is important to understand the relationship of Schopenhauer to Kant as it informs, along with Schopenhauer’s influence on Nietzsche, the underpinning of the novel. For both Kant and Schopenhauer, the empirical world and the world of phenomena are one and the same thing. Necessarily, the forms of the world are subject-dependent as Murdoch alludes to in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. However, Schopenhauer’s development of Kant’s thought is central to seeing The Green Knight correctly: what is the connection between the world as it is in itself and the world as it appears to us? He accepts the Kantian view that the world as it is in itself can never be directly known, but he wonders if a detailed analysis of the latter – the world as we see it on an everyday level – might give us some indication of what it must be. In this indirect way, Schopenhauer is trying to get at the nature of underlying reality much as Murdoch is trying to do with this novel. This has important implications for Murdoch as a Wittgensteinian neo-Platonist, as she wishes to see herself as the ‘ordinary’ language that we use to posit ourselves within the world must be understood as aiming toward a form of reality. If it does not, then we are leading ourselves away from any form of ‘the good’ and denying ourselves the possibility of transcendence. This is a rather difficult philosophical position to understand, so it may be best if we see Schopenhauer’s idea of ‘the will’, not unlike Nietzsche’s ‘will to power’, as being reliant on an understanding of spatial phenomena. If two things are identical in terms of time and space then they must be the same thing – so we can talk only about things existing in the world as we know it – therefore whatever is outside our world of understanding (for Schopenhauer this virtually meant outside the actual world) then we cannot discuss it, as it is undifferenti551

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ated: this view is also central to early Wittgenstein, of course. Murdoch does not hold this belief to be true, and neither does the later Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations, as her Platonic vision of transcendence is at odds with Schopenhauer’s insistence that whatever is behind the world is undifferentiated and ‘one’: an unknowable thing. This is a fascinating view as, at this late stage in her career, Murdoch’s interest in Buddhism and Eastern mystic thought is beginning to find a voice in her work and can be seen echoed in the selfless actions of Mir and the insistence by Moy of a ‘life force’ within all objects, animate or inanimate. Decades before Freud made his pronouncements on the psyche, Schopenhauer argued that an individual’s inner life and the motivation behind our actions and speech, remain, for a large part unknowable and unconsciously motivated: Thus we see already that we can never arrive at the real nature of things from without. However much we investigate, we can never reach anything but images and names. We are like a man who goes round a castle seeking in vain for an entrance, and sometimes sketching the façades. And yet this is the method that has been followed by all philosophers before me. (Schopenhauer 1889: 128; see SW 2:118/WWR 1:123) Murdoch would agree with his theory that our knowledge of ourselves from the inside is false as it does not reflect reality as it really is. Lucas Graffe’s major failing is his insistence on relying on his own inner thoughts. In refusing to see his brother as anything more than an object of distraction, he fails to comprehend the nature of his own reality. In a discussion with Clement, he gives voice to his inner demons: ‘But don’t tell him not to come? Were you sitting in the dark?’ ‘Yes, I have been scalded and bleached, light hurts my eyes, in the dark they glow. In a century or two this planet will have been destroyed by external cosmic forces or by the senseless activity of the human race. Human life is a freak phenomenon soon to be blotted out. This is a consoling thought. Meanwhile we are surrounded by strange invisible entities, possibly your angels.’ (Murdoch 1993: 72) Murdoch believes this notion to be descended from what Plato pointed to as a lower form of Eros. ‘Other debased descendants of Eros are the “Wills” of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and the libido of Freud’ (Murdoch 1992: 490) all of which are contrary to comprehending ‘the other’ and analogous to earlier forms of debasement that can also be found in A Severed Head, The Time of the Angels, and The Philosopher’s Pupil. Another interesting echo of Schopenhauer’s ‘will’ can be found in the actions of Moy. Moy is perhaps the most unsatisfactory character in the novel as she rarely moves beyond the two-dimensional persona that Murdoch creates for her. Sefton and Aleph each have an outer life connected with a form of real vision, but Moy is stranded with her unrequited love of Clement and concern for the inanimate. However, she is useful for embodying Schopenhauer’s view of ultimate reality that he relates in On the Suffering of the World (SW 6:309–24/PP 2:262–75), which deals with what he saw as a morally corrupt and wicked world. His first statement promotes the idea that: If suffering is not the closest and most immediate goal of our life, then our existence is the most inexpedient thing in the world. For it is absurd to assume that endless 552

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pain, which springs from the distress that is essential to life and of which the world is everywhere full, should be pointless and purely accidental. Our sensitivity for pain is almost infinite, while that for pleasure has narrow limits. Each individual misfortune appears to be an exception, to be sure, but misfortune generally is the rule. (SW 6:309/PP 2:262) Moy, and to some extent Peter (perhaps we could also include Bellamy), is attuned to this idea and each suffers in the world accordingly. Peter suffers a loss of freedom and memory, Bellamy suffers a loss of a spiritual director in the form of Father Damien and his dog Anaz, and Moy loses her childhood innocence as the family, and wider circle of friends, is disbanded at the end of the novel. Moy is sensitive to this (Murdoch uses the archaic ‘fey’) and with some sadness realizes that this dispersal must come to pass; this is mirrored in the return of her stone to its original position. Where does this fit in with Schopenhauer’s concern for the metaphysical? Murdoch believes that Much of his [Schopenhauer’s] moral philosophy refers itself to salient features of his metaphysic (the Will objectified as egoism for instance), but can be discussed without clarification (if such were possible) of the questions raised above …. The will to live is something fundamental (Murdoch 1992: 98). She certainly agrees with Schopenhauer that there is a universal energy, or will, that causes us to fight for our existence but is ultimately unconvinced by his moral philosophy and insists that we must stick fast to a Platonic vision of the good. In short, in order to leave our ‘inner cave’ of self-observation and emerge into the external world of real moral vision we cannot look to Schopenhauer. For Murdoch, he comes perilously close to Nietzsche’s vision that a great man is a law unto himself. ‘Truth-telling, says Schopenhauer, may be important but it is not fundamental. All sorts of reasonable lying is in order’ (Murdoch 1992: 63). This may well be rooted in Murdoch’s deep engagement with Schopenhauer’s On the Basis of Morality where he defends the moral necessity of lying under certain conditions (such as the protection of the innocent from the marauder) but without these determining factors a lie remains morally indefensible; this certainly separates him from Kant in this respect (SW 4:222–6/FPE 212–5). And so it is Lucas, the specter of Nietzsche that haunts the novel, that is shown to be a demonic power figure. However, his later seduction of Aleph and escape to the United States removes him from ultimate judgment, which may be a poor aesthetic choice by Murdoch, or conversely seen as her non-judgmental form of fiction writing. In any event, it is clear that Murdoch is on the side of Clement and Bellamy, and has the desire to set them free from the malign influence of Lucas. Although it is simplistic to see this as a straightforward philosophical point it is certainly there in her thinking. So, while some caveats remain (and there are convincing arguments to be made between Lucas and Peter in regard to separate theologies) I remain convinced that an engagement, and critique, of Schopenhauer’s work lies behind the novel.

37.4 Conclusion It is worth reflecting then that, although there are some central areas of thought that both Murdoch and Schopenhauer hold in common, the difficult framing of ‘the will’ is, perhaps, 553

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the most difficult to equate. Murdoch holds that ‘Good, not will is transcendent’ (Murdoch 2014: 69) and is firmly of the belief that there is a role to play for Kant’s concept of duty. For a time, Schopenhauer’s thinking came to mean much to her, and he is a useful interlocutor in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, deserving of the detailed analyses she gives to his work. While not as vital to her worldview as Plato, Freud, Wittgenstein, and Weil (who herself made a study of Schopenhauer) he becomes a figure who grows in prominence and widens Murdoch’s scope, linking key thinkers in her pantheon. Both believe that it is egoism that is the prime motivating factor in our unenlightened relationships, and as Manion states, ‘to move towards true salvation, we must attempt to defeat the hold of such ceaseless craving upon us or, in Schopenhauer’s terms, to “deny the will” as fully as possible’(Manion 2010: 141) and yet we do so without reference, in his work, to anything beyond the physical. That he provides us with a ‘shadowy picture of a (metaphysical) pilgrimage’ (Murdoch 1992: 33) is not, ultimately, enough to satisfy Murdoch. Her neo-theology, while operating without a belief in a personal savior, cleaves far closer to Christianity (albeit a ‘demythologized’ one) than Schopenhauer’s thinking does and they ultimately part company.

Notes 1 An edited and annotated edition of this unpublished monograph is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. The original is part of the Iris Murdoch collection at the University of Iowa, although a copy also resides in the Iris Murdoch Special Collections at the University of Kingston. 2 Endnotes to Vol. 2 of Murdoch’s copy of the text held in the Iris Murdoch Collections at the Kingston University Archive.

References Conradi, P.J. (2001) The Saint and the Artist. London: Harper Collins. Janaway, C. (2012) ‘Necessity, Responsibility and Character: Schopenhauer on Freedom of the Will’. Kantian Review, 17(3), pp. 431–57. Leeson, M. (2010) Iris Murdoch: Philosophical Novelist. London: Continuum. Leeson, M. (2022) ‘Is Iris Murdoch a Philosophical Novelist?’. In Hopwood and Panizza (eds.) The Murdochian Mind, London: Routledge. Mannion, G. (2010) ‘A ‘Godless’ Road to Redemption? The Moral Visions of Arthur Schopenhauer and Iris Murdoch’. Schopenhauer Jahrbuch, 91, pp. 135–62. Murdoch, I. (1947) Journal 5, 1945–1947. Unpublished. Kingston University Archive. Murdoch, I. (1948) Journal 6, 1948. Unpublished. Kingston University Archive. Murdoch, I. (1978) Journal 12, 1975–1978. Unpublished. Kingston University Archive. Murdoch, I. (1992) Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. London: Penguin Vintage. Murdoch, I. (1993) The Green Knight. London: Chatto and Windus. Murdoch, I. (1993) Heidegger: Pursuit of Being. Unpublished. Iowa University Archive. Murdoch, I. (2014) The Sovereignty of Good. London: Routledge. Rowe, A. (2019) Iris Murdoch. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Schopenhauer, A. (1889) The World as Will and Idea. Boston: Ticknor and Company. White, F. (2018) ‘It’s like brown, it’s not in the spectrum’: The Problem of Justice in Iris Murdoch’s Thought. In Browning (ed.), Murdoch on Truth and Love, pp.183–210. Willemsen, M. (2019). Schopenhauer and the Mystical Solution of the Riddle (MGM Chapter 3). In Dooley and Hämäläinen (eds.), Reading Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, pp.79–91.

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38 SCHOPENHAUER IN LATIN AMERICA Borges, Funes, and the Poetry of Thought Elizabeth Millán Brusslan1

Schopenhauer as a Balm against Positivism Schopenhauer’s influence, central to the development of post-Kantian philosophy, extended to the American continent. Schopenhauer’s work became especially important in Latin America, where it helped to fuel the anti-positivist sentiment shaping late nineteenth-century philosophical movements in the region. Indeed, as the Latin American philosophical tradition transitioned into its foundational phase (c. 1910–1940) and the grip of positivism loosened, more thinkers began to consider the role that Schopenhauer’s thought could play in the development of philosophy in countries such as Mexico and Argentina. The generation of thinkers who first rejected the central tenets of positivism became known as “the founders,” a label coined by Francisco Romero (Argentina, 1891–1962). The group of founders included: Alejandro Deústua (Peru, 1849–1945), Alejandro Korn (Argentina, 1860–1936), Enrique Molina (Chile, 1871–1964), Carlos Vaz Ferreira (Uruguay, 1872–1958), Raimundo de Farias Brito (Brazil, 1862–1917), José Vasconcelos (Mexico, 1882–1959), and Antonio Caso (Mexico, 1883–1946), among others. These thinkers grew disenchanted by the promise of progress offered by positivism, a movement that seemed to deny freedom and limit knowledge to that which could be reduced to empirical matters, a realm guided by strictly causal laws. Under such a view of the human condition, it was argued by the above-mentioned critics of positivism that the realm of value, both ethical and aesthetic, was threatened to extinction, as was human freedom. Hence, “the founders” rejected the moves that positivists wanted to make. Deústua in particular responded to the limitations of positivism by developing an aesthetic theory in his influential Estética (Aesthetics, 1923), where he claimed that aesthetic value is the source of all value. This “value of all values,” as he calls it, is the product of free activity whose essential function consists in the creation and contemplation of an ideal aside from any practical intent. In contrast to the essentially instrumental character of other values, aesthetic value constitutes its own end, generating a completely disinterested activity, the creation of beauty. For Deústua, aesthetic value involves “the ideal of expansion without norm, which is the essence of creative imagination.” Aesthetic value then “creates morality in human coexistence.”2 By rooting ethical, and also legal and political DOI: 10.4324/9781003048992-44

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values in aesthetic value, Deústua was rejecting the order the positivists wanted to establish. Schopenhauer’s view of poetry fits well into this new aesthetic order. Political considerations also factored into the general disenchantment with positivism. In some countries, such as Mexico, positivism was associated with a dictatorship that had been overthrown; in others, such as Cuba, Comtian positivism was believed to support the colonial status quo against the possibility of independence to which many Cubans aspired.3 For countries that had suffered first under Spanish oppression and then under a succession of dictators, setting freedom aside seemed too high a price to pay for the promise of progress. Indeed, freedom had become the battle flag, so if positivism could not make room for freedom, then positivism must be abandoned. In 1909 a group of young intellectuals in Mexico, who later acquired well-deserved renown in the fields of philosophy and literature, founded the Ateneo de la Juventud (Atheneum of youth). They studied the philosophical classics, especially Plato and Kant, and contemporary philosophers who had rejected positivism in Europe, such as Henri Bergson (1859–1941) and Benedetto Croce (1866–1952). The influence of Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), whose thought was a counterweight to the narrow, scientific emphasis of positivism, also gained traction. In what follows, I will look carefully at one aspect of Schopenhauer’s work that was especially relevant to the sort of aesthetic revolution that took shape in Latin America as the wave of positivism receded. Schopenhauer’s view of poetry found a welcome reception because it highlighted the central role aesthetics played in taking us to the heart of humanity. Schopenhauer claims, in fact, that poetry is more valuable to culture than history is. In Argentina, long after the Ateneo de la Juventud had opened a rich aesthetic path in Latin America, one of the region’s greatest writers, Jorge Luis Borges, wrote a short story, Funes, el memorioso/Funes the Memorious,4 that can be taken to be a whimsical illustration of the dangers of positivism and the promise of poetry. In the first section of the paper, I will give an overview of Borges’ story so that we can address the ways in which Funes serves to illustrate some of the points about poetry’s value that Schopenhauer develops. In providing the details of Schopenhauer’s account of why poetry is more valuable than history, I shall highlight the new order that Schopenhauer gives us to understand reality, an order that favors uncertainty and the infinite horizon of our understanding over certainty and final words. This new order is, or so I shall I argue, precisely what we find illustrated, albeit indirectly (in that fabulous way that Borges’ writing points us to deep philosophical truths) in Borges’ story, Funes, which is a kind of case study in practice of what Schopenhauer gives us in theory.

38.1  Borges, Funes, and the Creation of a New Order Borges was a most philosophical writer and a writer very well versed in philosophy: indeed he can, with good justification, be called a literary philosopher.5 Schopenhauer for his part was a most literary philosopher; composers admired him; literary figures, such as Borges, reference him in their work.6 Magee documents Schopenhauer’s influence on Borges by way of a convincing testimonial: [w]hen I met Borges some time ago and remarked that I was about to embark on writing a book about Schopenhauer he became excited and started talking volubly about how much Schopenhauer had meant to him. It was the desire to read Schopenhauer in the original, he said, that had made him learn German; and when people asked him, 556

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which they often did, why he with his love of intricate structure had never attempted a systematic exposition of the world-view which underlay his writings, his reply was that he did not do it because it had already been done, by Schopenhauer.7 Given his interest in and admiration for Schopenhauer’s philosophy, it should not surprise us that we find direct references to and abundant traces of Schopenhauer’s views in Borges’ work. Borges was not the only writer shaped by Schopenhauer’s work: the artistic vision shaping Schopenhauer’s work resonated with some of the best artists working in his wake. Some of his “outlandish” theses, which might be rejected by philosophers, found a welcoming home in the minds of artists.8 One such thesis is that poetry holds more importance and has many advantages over history. To illustrate the implications of Schopenhauer’s claims about poetry’s importance and the advantages it holds over history, we can turn to a discussion of one of Borges’ most compelling short stories, Funes el memorioso. Funes is certainly a story that confronts the reader with philosophical ideas. As Agassi observes, one could read Funes the Memorious as “a short story or as a thought experiment about a Lockean mind with total recall” (op. cit., p. 288). I would like to suggest that we could also read Funes as an endorsement of Schopenhauer’s claims about the value of poetry for society. Funes is a story that takes shape under the influence of Schopenhauer’s view of poetry as developed in The World as Will and Representation: in it, we witness the devastating effects of a life lived merely with total recall of sensory data and no poetry at all Borges’ story opens with these lines: I recall him (though I have no right to speak that sacred verb—only one man on earth did, and that man is dead) holding a dark passionflower in his hand, seeing it as it had never been seen, even had it been stared at from the first light of dawn till the last light of evening for an entire lifetime. (p. 131) We quickly learn the full name of the man with impeccable memory, Ireneo Funes, “known for certain eccentricities, among them shying away from people and always knowing what time it was, like a clock” (p. 132). Funes is reported to have been “bucked off a half-broken horse on the ranch in San Francisco” and “left hopelessly crippled” (p. 132). The narrator tells us “that Funes never stirred from his cot, his eyes fixed on the fig tree behind the house or on a spiderweb” (p. 132). We are told that the narrator, having brought several volumes in Latin with him from Buenos Aires to Fray Bentos, the small town in Uruguay where Funes lived, was contacted by Funes, who learned of the books. The narrator recounts that Funes “begged that I lend him one of the books that I had brought along with a dictionary, ‘for a full understanding of the text, since I must plead ignorance of Latin’” (p. 133). In the letter requesting the books, Funes’ “penmanship was perfect, the letters exceptionally well formed; the spelling was that recommended by Andrés Bello: i for y, j for g´” (p. 132).9 The narrator thinks the request is some sort of joke, as he puts it: “I didn’t know whether to attribute” such a request “to brazen conceit, ignorance, or stupidity” based as it was on “the idea that hard-won Latin needed no more teaching than a dictionary could give” (p. 133). In order to “fully disabuse Funes” of the idea that a dictionary could teach him Latin, the narrator sends him Quicherat’s Gradus ad Parnassum and Pliny’s Naturalis historia. The narrator is then suddenly called to Buenos Aires to check on his ailing father, and before leaving the town of Fray Bentos, he returns to Funes’ house to retrieve his books. 557

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The narrator hears a voice “emerging from the shadows” “reciting a speech or a prayer or an incantation” (p. 134). Funes is reciting the first paragraph of “the twenty-fourth chapter of the seventh book of Pliny’s Naturalis historia” (p. 134). Most fittingly, “the subject of that chapter is memory: the last words were ut nihil non iisdem verbis redderetur auditum” (p. 134). Funes shocks the narrator with his fluency in Latin. Funes can recite passages in Latin, but does he really know the language? Borges’ story pushes the reader to question not only what it means to know a language, but also what it means to know and to think at all. While Funes’ exceptional memory has the benefit of making language retention fast and seemingly effortless, there is a cost to his superhuman memory. Funes’ memory becomes his curse: “Funes remembers not only every leaf of every tree in every patch of forest, but every time he had perceived or imagined that leaf” (p. 136). Funes inhabits a dizzying world, one in which he cannot understand how the word ‘dog’ should capture the “dog of three-fourteen in the afternoon, seen in profile” and the one of “three-fifteen, seen frontally” (p. 136). He takes in each detail of the world and cannot forget any detail, becoming lost in a maze of unconnected details, with no unifying principle. In short, Funes “was virtually incapable of general, platonic ideas” (p. 136). Indeed, though he had “effortlessly learned English, French, Portuguese, Latin,” the narrator suspects “that he was not very good at thinking” (p. 137). For “[t]o think is to ignore (or forget) differences, to generalize, to abstract. In the teeming world of Ireneo Funes there was nothing but particulars—they were virtually immediate particulars” (p. 137). Funes’ “implacable memory” takes in the world, much in the way a recording machine would, but there is no room for thought, let alone the poetry or the “art of putting the imagination into play through words.” Funes is weighed down by the facts of the world, and cut off from thought itself. Funes, we are told at the end of the story, dies of pulmonary congestion in 1889, at the age of 21, metaphorically suffocated, one could say, by the sheer multitude of individual phenomena. Borges emphasizes that Funes has no access to ideas. As we shall see, according to Schopenhauer, poetry gives us the truth of the idea. A poetical lens on the world is freeing, whereas the lens of mere facts is stifling, stultifying, and ultimately deadly. In the case of Funes, too many facts became deadly and his mind became a place cramped with information, leaving no room for thought or play; in the case of culture, as the critics of positivism divined, an exclusive focus on facts to the detriment of all other aspects of the human condition kills progress and blocks our access to the value of our culture.

38.2  Schopenhauer’s Aesthetic Humanism A strong aesthetic humanism underlies Schopenhauer’s views of poetry. In his short, illuminating introduction to Schopenhauer’s work, Janaway uses the distinction Schopenhauer makes between history and poetry to raise an important point about the idea of humanity: Schopenhauer is fond of contrasting the arts with history. He takes a high-handed line, and often uses the opportunity to disagree with the Hegelian conception of history. In his view, the essential kernel of human beings is always the same, not liable to local variation or change over time. Thus he makes the startling pronouncement that “The chapters of the history of nations are at bottom different only through the names and dates; the really essential content is everywhere the same” [see SW 3:505/WWR 2:459]. History, he maintains, co-ordinates merely facts about the changing surface of humanity, and can never get beyond this. The contrasting form 558

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of discourse is poetry: “paradoxical as it may sound, far more real, genuine, inner truth is to be attributed to poetry than to history” [see SW 2:289/WWR 1:272]. “Genuine, inner truth” is supposedly truth about what does not change, that is, the Idea of humanity.10 Schopenhauer not only places poetry above history, but above all forms of art. Poetry and music share a global appeal, and, according to Schopenhauer, have the greatest effect of all art forms: neither are unheeded nor fall victim to the neglect that often plagues paintings, for example. For Schopenhauer, the Idea of humanity is most vividly brought to us through poetry: Because literature presents its images in the reader’s imagination, it has the advantage that the more detailed execution and subtler features play out in each person’s imagination in the manner best suited to his individuality, the reach of his knowledge, and mood, and therefore stir him most vividly. By contrast, the visual arts are not so accommodating; in their case, a single image, a single form must be enough for all: but this image will always bear, in something, the mark of the individuality of the artist or his model, as a subjective or accidental supplement, not as an effective one; although this becomes less true the more objective the artist is, i.e. the more of a genius he is. From this alone we can partially explain why works of literature have a much stronger, deeper, and more universal effect than pictures and statues do: for the most part, pictures and statues leave the ordinary people cold, and in general the visual arts have the weakest effects. An odd illustration of this is the frequent discovery of pictures by great masters in private houses and all manner of locations where, over the course of so many years, they have not been hidden or concealed but have simply hung there unnoticed and thus without effect. … By contrast, a beautiful heart-warming melody will always spread around the world, and a superior poem will always pass from nation to nation. (SW 3:484–5/WWR 2:441–2) According to Schopenhauer, poetry not only brings us closer to truth than history can; it effects a change in people that is stronger than other art forms can bring about, and its influence spreads so that it is capable of transforming society. Hence it should not surprise us that the Latin American thinkers battling oppressive positivism would look to poetry and to Schopenhauer’s work for tools to fight that battle. Funes is the victim of a mind that cannot leave individual facts and connect his impressions to ideas, which would lift him from the subjective realm to the objective realm, to Platonic forms, to thought itself, and to the universal effect to which Schopenhauer makes reference. Privileging poetry and ranking its importance higher than that of history came with risks. As Günter Zöller indicates, Schopenhauer’s “complete philosophical system, as contained in the first edition of his main work, The World as Will and Representation, was concluded by the end of 1818—which makes him, and not Hegel, the author of the first completely executed post-Kantian philosophical system.”11 Yet Schopenhauer was never given proper credit for his role in shaping post-Kantian philosophy. His embrace of poetry surely played a role in his dismissal from the grand Von Kant bis Hegel narrative, a narrative that becomes more interesting when Schopenhauer’s contributions are properly countenanced. 559

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Schopenhauer made poetry a focus of his philosophical work and, as we have seen, placed its value above that of history. This should not surprise us, because Schopenhauer took aesthetic issues quite seriously. As Cheryl Foster indicates, “Schopenhauer devoted more than one-quarter of his principal work, The World as Will and Representation, to aesthetics.”12 In a section from The World as Will and Representation (Volume 2, Section 37), titled “On the Aesthetics of Poetry”, in the very first lines of the section, Schopenhauer writes: “I would like to propose as the simplest and most accurate definition of poetry that it is the art of putting the imagination into play through words ” (SW 3:484/WWR 2:441). In the chapter “On the Inner Nature of Art”, Schopenhauer further elucidates the tight relation between the spirit of art and the imagination, writing that “the very best aspect of art is too intellectual to be given directly to the senses: it must be born in the imagination of the spectator, although begotten by the work of art.” (SW 3:465/WWR 2:425). As we saw in Borges’ tale of Funes, Funes was condemned to the world of his senses, suffocated by the total recall of every single bit of data his eyes captured, with none of the liberating play of the imagination or the realm of ideas. The poet takes us where our senses cannot: “Excellence in poetry, as in chemistry, allows one to consistently obtain precisely the precipitate one has in mind” (SW 2:287/WWR 1:269). As an example of the power of poetry, Schopenhauer mentions a poem that presents the delight of the southern climate, one which “uses only a few concepts to precipitate out before the imagination.” Schopenhauer’s reference is to the following lines from Goethe: Soft blows the wind that breathes from that blue sky! Still stands the myrtle and the laurel high. (SW 2:287/WWR 1:270) These lines are able to activate the imagination in part because of the musicality of the language that Goethe creates. Schopenhauer emphasizes “the hearer” when speaking of poetry, and links poetry to song (SW 2:286/WWR 1:269 ff.). Schopenhauer links the power of poetry to its musical elements of rhythm and rhyme, which are “quite special to poetry”: Rhythm and rhyme are very special resources for poetry. I can think of no other way to explain their incredibly powerful effect than this: owing to their fundamental connection to time, our representational faculties have a peculiarity that makes us follow any regularly recurring sound internally and join in, as it were. Rhythm and rhyme thus become a way of holding our attention, since we follow the performance more willingly; but also they lead us, blindly and prior to any judgement, to chime in with the performance – and this gives it a definite and emphatic power of persuasion, independent of all reasons. (SW 2:287/WWR 1:270) Recall that Funes was “known for certain eccentricities” among them “knowing what time it was like a clock.” While poetry’s musicality creates a connection to the idea of time and its rhythm, Funes, trapped in a world without poetry, was tethered to isolated moments of time, to the wind-up mechanism of the clock, with all of its fatalistic symbolism. Poetry releases us from the mechanical realm. The critics of positivism saw this, Borges saw this, and Schopenhauer’s vision illuminates the liberating path that poetry opens. Poetry gives 560

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us: “the revelation of the Idea that is the highest level of the will’s objecthood, the presentation of human beings in the inter-connected series of their actions and endeavours” (SW 2:288/WWR 1:270–1). Poetry is more important to us than history because history gives only the truth of the phenomenon, whereas poetry gives us the truth of the idea. Hence history is individual, whereas poetry is universal. We can recall the fate of poor Funes in Borges’ short story; Funes is a character trapped in the particulars that surround him, but as Borges reminds us “to think is to ignore (or forget) differences, to generalize, to abstract” (p. 137). Similar to the fate of Funes, the historian risks trapping us in a world cluttered with phenomena, without access to the truth of ideas, hence marooning us in a world of fact bereft of thought. According to Schopenhauer, we get to the idea of humanity through poetry; poetry takes us to the inner truth of our culture. Poetry takes us where history cannot. Schopenhauer tells us that, “for anyone wanting to know humanity in its inner essence … immortal poets hold out a much truer and clearer image than the historians ever could” (SW 2:291/WWR 1:273). The inner significance of what appears is given to us in poetry (SW 2:291/WWR 1:274). Poetry provides the mirror of humanity (SW 2:294/WWR 1:276), history gives us mere facts without a unifying vision of humanity itself. Schopenhauer clearly stipulates that poetry is an art that has its power through words. Yet the power of poetry goes far beyond mere words. For Schopenhauer, poetry, much like music, takes us to the heart of reality, and to truth that even history cannot reach: to the very idea of humanity. Poetry, in contrast to other forms of art, such as painting and sculpture, exercises “a much stronger, deeper, and more universal effect than pictures and statues do” (SW 3:484/WWR 2:441). For Schopenhauer poetry is at the core of the aesthetic humanism that shapes his aesthetics. In particular, the aesthetic humanism that emerges from the work of Schopenhauer is moored in the deep connection he sees in poetry’s connection to truth. Schopenhauer viewed human knowledge as a set of questions to be asked, which would never be fully answered; for to deny this, he claims, “would be a presumptuous denial of the limits of human cognition in general.” Schopenhauer goes on to express our finite condition in a most poetic way: “Whatever torch we might light and whatever space it might illuminate, our horizon will always remain bounded by deep night” (SW 3:206/WWR 2:194)).13 Schopenhauer was well aware that human knowledge is limited and finite, and hence, a movement like positivism, with its presumption of certitude would not have held any appeal for him. His focus on the power of the aesthetic to light our way held much appeal for those thinkers looking for an alternative to the reductionist view of human knowledge offered by the positivists. It is not surprising that some of the greatest artists turned to Schopenhauer’s work and, indeed, helped rescue it from oblivion. Thomas Mann was one of many literary artists who turned to Schopenhauer’s work. Mann’s account of the struggle between intellect and will that Schopenhauer stages in his work captures the essence of the blessings of art that Schopenhauer brings into focus for us: But the intellect—is it not the creature of the will, its instrument, its light in the darkness, destined only for its service? It is, and so remains. And yet—not always, not in all cases. Under peculiar, happy,--ah, verily, under blissful—conditions; in exceptional circumstances, then, the servant and poor tool may become master of his master and creator, may get the better of him, emancipate himself, achieve his own independence, and, at least at times, assert his single sovereignty, his mild, serene and all-embracing rule. Then the will, put aside and shorn of power, falls into a bland and peaceful 561

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decline. There is a state, where the miracle comes to pass, that knowledge wrenches itself free from will, the subject ceases to be merely individual and becomes the pure, will-less subject of knowledge. We may call this the aesthetic state. This is one of the greatest and profoundest of Schopenhauer’s perceptions. And however frightful the accents he commands in describing the tortures of the will and the domination of the will, in equal degree his prose discovers seraphic tones, his gratitude speaks with surpassing exuberance, when abundantly and exhaustively he discourses of the blessings of art.14 Günter Zöller puts the same point in more succinct yet no less dramatic terms: Schopenhauer … supplement[s] his account of the self and the world as will with a story of a cosmic struggle between the will and the intellect. Originally one of the will’s own creatures, the human intellect can emancipate itself either temporarily (in the experience of great art) or entirely (in religious ascesis) from the tyranny of the will.15 Schopenhauer is well aware of art’s role in freeing us from our bondage to the will. The blessings of art Mann summons as he recounts Schopenhauer’s account of the struggle between the will and the intellect and the emancipation of which Zöller speaks in describing the same “cosmic struggle” give rise to a break and the creation of new forms of expression. In his tale of Funes, trapped in a world of phenomena with no access to ideas, Borges shows us what a world without the miracle of the will freeing itself from intellect is like. Funes is trapped in a dark world where the blessings of art do not illuminate it. The blessings of art do not come because we have absolute certainty about a given work’s meaning. In fact, Schopenhauer equated a full understanding of a work of art with being disgusted. As he writes: Now if, when contemplating a work of visual art or reading literature or listening to music (which aims to portray something determinate), we see ultimately rise to the surface, shining through all the wealth of artistic means, the clear, cold, delimited, sober concept that formed the kernel of the work; and if the entire conception of this work consists only in clear thinking and is therefore fundamentally exhausted once it has communicated this concept, then we feel disgust and repulsion because we see we have been deceived and cheated of our interest and attention. We are only entirely satisfied by the impression of an artwork when it leaves something behind that we cannot reduce to the clarity of a concept however much we think about it. The mark of this hybrid origin from mere concepts is that the author of an artwork was able to explain in clear words what he intended to present before he went to execute it: because then his entire goal could have been reached through these words themselves. That is why it is such an unworthy, even idiotic undertaking when people these days often try to reduce a work of Shakespeare or Goethe to some abstract truth that it was supposedly trying to communicate. (SW 3:466–7/WWR 2:426) There is aesthetic satisfaction in letting go of the view that we can have absolute certainty of the meaning of certain ideas, which, like works of art, take us beyond the limits of 562

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our finite knowledge. In “On the Inner Nature of Art” (Chapter 34 of Volume 2 of The World as Will and Representation), Schopenhauer clearly distinguishes between works of art and philosophy, claiming that while they share a common goal, that of working “towards a solution to the problem of existence” (SW 3:463/WWR 2:423), which is the search for the answer: What is life? they are different. While “[e]veryone must place himself before a picture as he does before a prince, waiting to see whether and what it will say to him” (SW 3:464/WWR 2:424), the same is not true of works of philosophy. Philosophy, Schopenhauer tells us, tries to render this wisdom actually and explicitly, so that in this sense philosophy is to the visual arts what wine is to grapes. What philosophy promises to provide would be an already realized cash profit, as it were, a solid and lasting possession; while what comes from the achievements and works of art is only something that always has to be created anew. But this is why philosophy makes terrible demands, hard to fulfil, not only on those who create works of philosophy, but on those who enjoy them. Thus its public remains small, while the public for the arts is broad. (SW 3:464–5/WWR 2:424) What Schopenhauer considered the “condition of aesthetic effect” and “a fundamental law of all the fine arts,” that is, the excitement of the imagination brought about by the work of art, is well illustrated by Borges’ tale of Funes and his memory.

38.3  Concluding Remarks Schopenhauer saw history as a catalog of facts, with poetry as an “art of putting the imagination into play through words”—freeing us from our bondage to the will. His work served to give hope to young Latin American critics of oppressive political orders that wanted to stifle cultural expression with too narrow a notion of progress. In Borges’ story of Funes, a wretched figure whose mind becomes crammed with so many facts that there is no room for thought, nor for those blessings of art, the free play of the imagination that gives us poetry and ultimately freedom, we find a strong critique of positivism. Illuminated by the insights of Schopenhauer and Borges, we should be quite wary of any attempt to reduce the story of our culture to a heap of lifeless facts. A recognition of the value of all values in the aesthetic realm takes us to the true path to progress and ultimately to beauty.

Notes 1 With thanks to the editors for their very helpful remarks on an earlier version. I am also grateful to the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at DePaul University for a summer research grant. 2 See Estética general (Lima: Eduardo Rávago, 1923), Pt. 2, Chap. 2, 424-440. In English, Latin American Philosophy for the 21st Century. The Human Condition, Values, and the Search for Identity, eds. Jorge Gracia and Elizabeth Millán (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2004): 183–192. For a more recent discussion of the relation between ethics and aesthetics, see Art and Morality, eds. Sebastian Gardner and José Luis Bermúdez (New York: Routledge, 2003). 3 For more on the reception and development of positivism in Latin America, see William D. Raat, “Leopoldo Zea and Mexican Positivism: A Reappraisal,” in The Hispanic American Historical Review, Feb. 1968, Vol. 48, No. 1: 1–18, Susanna Nuccetelli, An Introduction to Latin American Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), and Leopoldo Zea, Pensamiento Positivista Latinoamericano (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1980).

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Elizabeth Millán Brusslan 4 The story is usually translated as Funes, His Memory. The matter of translating the Spanish title into English is not simple, but I do believe that Funes the memorious is a better rendering of what Borges had in mind than Funes, His Memory. In an interview with Roberto Alfianao, Borges was asked about the title and the translation into English of his story. He tells Alfiano that “I entitled the story, “Funes el memorioso”: a title that suits the story” (p. 29). Alfiano then responds, “Borges, in English, ‘Funes the Memorious’ must sound odd since the word ‘memorious’ does not exist” (p. 29). Borges replies: “True, that word does not exist in English, and it does give the story of a grotesque character, an extravagant character. On the other hand, in Spanish—although I don’t know if anyone has used the word ‘memorioso’—if one heard a man from the country say: ‘Fulano es muy memorioso’ (that fellow is very memorious), one would certainly understand him. So that, as I said, I think that the original title goes well with the story. Now, if one seeks an equivalent in another language, for example, in French, by using the word ‘memorié’ or some other similar word, the reader is led to see it as a mental state. Thus this title evokes the story of a very simple and unfortunate character killed at an early age by insomnia” (p. 29). All references to Funes are to Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Viking, 1998). 5 An excellent collection that highlights the relation between Borges’ work and philosophy is Literary Philosophers. Borges, Calvino, Eco, eds. Jorge J.E. Gracia, Carolyn Korsmeyer, and Rodolphe Gasché (New York: Routledge, 2002). 6 In Bryan Magee’s, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), an entire chapter (Chapter 18) is dedicated to “Schopenhauer’s Influence on Creative Writers” (pp. 403–414). There is also a chapter on “Schopenhauer and Wagner” (pp. 350–412). 7 Magee, op. cit., p. 413. 8 I take this way of describing some of Schopenhauer’s claims from an essay by J. Agassi in “Philosophy as Literature: The Case of Borges,” Mind, Vol. 70, No. 314 (April 1970): 287–294. 9 This reference to Andrés Bello connects to the theme of order that I am emphasizing. Bello (1871–1865) was committed to helping Venezuela and other newly independent nations create a new order and develop as independent nations. He saw language as central to the development of independent nations in the region. Grammar and rules of language were elements of the order he thought would lead the region forward. For more on this, see Iván Jaksic, Andrés Bello. Scholarship and Nation-Building in Nineteenth-Century Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 10 Christopher Janaway, Schopenhauer. A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 82. 11 Günter Zöller, “German Realism: The Self-Limitation of Idealist Thinking in Fichte, Schelling, and Schopenhauer,” in The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, ed. Karl Ameriks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 200–218, at p. 201. 12 Cheryl Foster, “Ideas and Imagination: Schopenhauer on the Proper Function of Art,” in The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer, ed. Christopher Janaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 213–251, at p. 213. 13 For more on the details of Schopenhauer’s view of our finite nature, see Sophia Vasalou, Schopenhauer and the Aesthetic Standpoint. Philosophy as a Practice of the Sublime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), esp. Chapter 6 “An ethics of redescent?” 14 Thomas Mann, “Presenting Schopenhauer,” in Thomas Mann Presents the Living Thoughts of Schopenhauer (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1940), 1–30, at p. 13. 15 Zöller, “German Realism,” 200–218, at p. 210.

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INDEX

Note: Page numbers in bold and italics refer to tables and figures and followed by ‘n’ refer to notes. acoustics: appearances 69; conscious and unconscious 75; see also sound figures; music see Chladni, Ernst; sound figures 70–73 action: dissatisfaction with our actions 233; human rights 234–235; wrong as the denial of another’s will 232 Adorno, Theodor W. 1, 531–542; anxiousness, state of 533; boredom 537–538; exploitation and manipulation 534; individuality 538–542; melancholy 536; mournfulness 532; pessimism and moral order 535–537; principium individuationis 538; self-renunciation 539; social transformation 538; will to live 533–535; see also aesthetics Advaita Vedānta 345, 502 Adversaria 287, 370 Aeschylus 358–359, 366 aesthetics 1, 129–131, 133, 138n6, 141, 156–161, 170–171, 178–179, 181, 183n12, 187, 195, 199–200, 204–208, 316, 460, 463, 532, 541; and asceticism 453–454; compassion, components 205, 207; contemplation, theory of 157–158; co-suffering 208; emotion, description 206; and ethics 203–204; eudaimonism 205; experience, description 207; fear and sympathy 160; intuition of ideas 157; Kant on 203–204; see also Kant, Immanuel; mode of consciousness 156; momentary satisfaction 158; and morality 204–205; motives for actions 208; māyā 129–130; (Platonic)



ideas, doctrine of 145; pleasure in cognition 159; quality of 133; resignation 160, 205; Schopenhauer on see Schopenhauer, Arthur; symbol of morality 204; tragedies 205; value of aesthetic contemplation 158; will-less contemplation 156; see also art afterlife 299 Agesande 135 Allais, Lucy 41–42; Manifest Reality: Kant’s Idealism and His Realism 42 Ameriks, Karl 330, 334 Anaximenes 328 animal magnetism 48 Anquetil-Duperron, Abraham Hyacinthe 349 Anscombe, Elizabeth 214, 228–233, 238–239, 514, 517, 545 appearance: doctrine of 41, 73; and the idea 499–500; and reality 6, 548; and things in themselves, distinction 41, 414, 462–463 Archimedes 111 Aristotle 66n30, 229, 328; epistēmē 58; insight and dictum 378; Posterior Analytics 58; Sophistic Refutations 31; stress on prime character of life 382; substantial forms 158; syllogistic 25; value of autarchy 383; On Virtues and Vices 262 art: aesthetics see aesthetics; allegorical works 134; animal painting and sculpture 134; architecture 133; artistic creativity and beauty 141–152; contemplation of ideas of human life 152; creative power 144; ethical criticism of 199; hierarchy

565

Index of 132–135; highest grade of the will’s objectivation 142; historical painting and sculpture 134; human beauty 142–143; ideality and individuality 146; inspiration and enthusiasm 149; Kant as autonomist 199–200; see also Kant, Immanuel; landscape and still-life painting 133; of living, principle of 378; moral and artistic value 198, 209n5; objective presentation of the ideas 133; (Platonic) ideas, doctrine of 145–146; power of imagination 151–152; quality of aesthetic experiences 133; sculpture see sculpture; significance of 204; theory of 200; visual artist 143; see also painting; poetry artificial calculi 26 asceticism 69, 105, 214, 272, 313–315, 317, 320, 459, 463, 470, 472, 475–480, 504, 507–508, 548, 550 Ashevak, Kenojuak 132; Majestic Owl 132 astronomy 48 Athenodoros 135 August, Karl 438 Aurelius, Marcus 378; Meditations 378, 388n3, 456 Austin, John 230–231; The Province of Jurisprudence Determined 230 autonomism 207 Auweele, Dennis Vanden 300 Ayer, A. J. 517 Bachofen, Johann Jakob 499; Mother Right: An Investigation of the Religious and Juridical Character of Matriarchy in the Ancient World 499 Bacon, Francis 35–36, 328, 436 Bahnsen, Julius 110 Bakunin, Mikhail 483, 485, 487–488 Barua, Ankur 350 Battistini, Matilde 201 Battle of Palataea 368 Beethoven 68, 127, 135, 484, 490, 492–493, 516; Fifth Symphony 68, 135, 490; Ninth Symphony 290 Behler, Ernst 446 Beiser, Frederick 69 Bellini, Giovanni: Allegory of Winged Fortune 1490 201 Bello, Andres 557 Bentham, Jeremy 229 Bergson, Henri 556 Berkeley, George 5, 6, 10, 13, 15, 17, 327, 518 Berlin Lectures 22, 27–28, 33, 91, 339n23, 527n18 Birnbacher, Dieter 524

blackness: climate and migration 346–347; genetic inheritance 347 Boltzmann, Ludwig 517 Book of Genesis 7 Book of Hafis 503 boredom 102–107, 108n10, 288–289, 537–538; activities to relieve 129; consciousness, time, death and boredom, relationship 105–107; desire and 103–105; pastime 104, 108n11; temperament 102 Borges, Jorge Luis 1, 127, 556–557, 560, 562, 563 Brahmanism 7, 313, 328, 351, 357, 360 Brandes, Georg 436 Brito, Raimundo de Farias 555 Brouwer, L. E. J. 34 Buddhism 7, 103, 300, 313, 328, 351, 357, 360, 474, 488, 548, 552; Buddhist-inspired ethics of self-denial and compassion 377; dukkha, Buddhist principle of 473 buoyancy principle, Archimedes’ 111 Burckhardt, Jakob 110, 375n34 Burke, Edmund 171, 175, 177, 182 Butler, Joseph 229 Byron, Lord George 437, 439 Camus, Albert 168 Cartwright, David 299, 451 Caso, Antonio 555 Casucci, M. 143 causality 11, 14–17, 19, 36, 55, 59, 96–97, 112–114, 117, 122, 143, 303, 391, 419, 421, 424, 429–430, 454, 456, 458, 461, 521; causation, theory of 54, 64n4; principle of 97 causa sui, concept of 391, 398n10 Cervantes 437, 441 Chandogya Upanishad 502 character: characterlessness 248, 250; Delphic wisdom 245–246; indecisiveness and violence 250–252; maxim of 249–250; self-knowledge, model of 242–243, 253n3; self-restraint 246; self-trust 242; species 247–248; strengths and weaknesses 244–245 Chladni, Ernst: appearance, doctrine of 73; Die Akustik 69, 70, 74; non-correlation between mind and being 74–75; and rationality of music 69–75; signified and sign 75; system of musical notation, analysis 73 Christianity 12, 300–302, 313, 342–345, 347, 350–353, 355n12, 357–358, 360, 374n32, 377, 470, 473–474, 478, 488, 494, 499, 504, 544–545, 551, 554; asceticism 478; and Europeans 357;

566

Index monarchy 276–277; New Testament 352; and suffering 474 Cicero 383 classicism: Dionysianism 507–508; extremism 508; humanism 506; and Romanticism 497; see also Romanticism; Weimar 447 cognition: aesthetic experience 316; see also aesthetics; brief and momentary form of will-less-ness 316; cognition and salvation 317; cognitive faculties, theory of 415–418, 426–430; forms of 315–317; principle of 59; recognition of the inner nature 316; state of ‘cognizing’ itself 315–317 color-fields, Rothko’s 137 color theory 435, 438, 442–446 common sense, principle of 7 Communism 505 compassion: contractarianism 263–265; definition 402; degree of selflessness 407; egoism 265, 403, 406–412, 413n4; goodness 410; inequalities of wealth and power 411–412; legal and social norms 410; and malice 410–411; memory and imagination 406; morality 402; moral principles, theory of 264–265; nonegoistic attitude 402, 410; phenomenon of 523; political contractarianism 263; punishment, theory of 264; rarity of selfless actions 412; reservoirs of 254n10; role in motivating moral actions 406–408; Rousseau and Schopenhauer on 401–403; self-interest and self-love 402, 407; self-interested benefits 265; and selflessness 406–412; sentiment of pity 411, 413n1; society and the state 410; see also self-love Comtian positivism 555 Conradi, Peter J. 127, 551 consciousness: principle of 331; theory of 478 conversion and contraposition, doctrine of 24 counterculture 165 coup d’état 1851 482 Croce, Benedetto 556 Curtius, Quintus 275–276 Dahlhaus, Carl 491 Dante, Alighieri 220, 439; Divine Comedy and Inferno 439 David, Jacques-Louis 135; Napoleon Crossing the St. Bernard 135 Davini, Simonella 470 death 98–102; avoidance of 103, 107, 108n6; fear of 99; metaphysical consolation 102, 108n14; negative nature of satisfaction, doctrine of 100–101

Debussy, Claude 491 Democritus 328 Demopheles 297, 305–307, 440 denial and affirmation 314–315; asceticism, voluntarily and deliberate aspects 315; denial of the will 315, 534; salvation as summum bonum 315; self-abolition 315; sub-problems 314 Descartes, René 5, 8, 9, 57, 60, 97, 327–328, 334–337, 350, 394, 526; cogito argument in the Meditations 456–457; vortex theory 56 desire: goals and 473; pleasure and 285–286; satiation of 103; Schopenhauer’s conception of 107; for selfpreservation 404, 427; see also boredom; Schopenhauer, Arthur Deustua, Alejandro 555–556 Diesterweg, Adolph 34 dilettantism 445 Dilthey, Wilhelm 64, 111 division, principle of 36 dogmatism 8, 33, 84, 86, 297, 305, 331 Dorsey, Dale 252–253 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 207; Crime and Punishment 207–208 double effect, doctrine of 219 Dray, William 111 dreams 5–6, 370, 485, 489 drip paintings, Pollock’s 137 Du Bois-Reymond, Emil 63 Duperron, Anquetil 349 duty and obligation 235–238; duty, definition 236; indebtedness 235; ought and duty 237; promises and contracts 237 egoism 256, 265, 403, 406–412, 413n4; and malice 222; and rational egoist 259; theoretical 523; see also compassion Eleatics 346, 390 Eliot, George: Middlemarch 290 Empedocles 328, 358 Epicurus 107 ethics 501–502; and aesthetics, connection 203–204; of argumentation 32; concept of 229–230, 260; ethical criticism of art 199; Platonic 379; principle of 218–219; Schopenhauerian virtue 254n14; of selfdenial and compassion 377; state as the ethical organism 451; see also normative ethics Euclidean geometry 32–33, 56 Euler, Leonhard 24–26; diagram 26, 31, 33; logic 26; mathematics 25 Euripides 358–359, 364, 366–368; Cresphontes 364

567

Index Europe: anti-Judaism 352–354, 355n26; discriminations 348; Eurocentrism 342–344, 346, 349, 354; iniquity 344–346; missionaries, efforts 343–344; pro-Indianism 352–354; slavery 345, 347–348; see also blackness

presence 437–444; West-Eastern Divan 438, 446, 503; wisdom 441, 444 Gospel of Sufferings 473 Greeks: and Christianity and Europeans 357; and Judaism 357–358; mythology 28, 500, 551; optimism and pessimism 357–359; paganism 358; pantheistic and monotheistic views 358, 374n32 Gueroult, Martial 330 Gutzkow, Karl 280 Guyer, Paul 159–160, 198–199, 204

familiarity principle 61–62, 66n35 Fascism 505 Ferreira, Carlos Vaz 555 Feuerbach, Ludwig 276, 483, 486–488, 491; The Essence of Christianity 276 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 5, 9, 13, 15, 27, 88, 179, 328, 331–332, 337, 391, 451, 471, 484 force 61–63, 64n8; familiarity principle 61–62; noumenal will, empirical manifestation 63 Foster, Cheryl 560 Frauenstadt, Julius 276, 505 Frege, Gottlob 26, 33, 517 Freud, Sigmund 509, 517, 532, 552, 554 Friedrich, Georg 328 Fuchs, Carl 130 Gardiner, Patrick 324, 545; Schopenhauer 546 Gautama, Siddhārtha 474 Geach, P. T. 238, 514, 517 Geismar, Eduard 470 genius 131–132, 138n9, 138n12; definition 131; difference from ordinary person 131; heroic conception of 132; immediacy of communication 132 German idealism 22, 186, 222, 323, 498, 526, 538 Gnostics 328 Gobineau, Arthur de 347, 353 God: atheism 307–310; existence of 302–305; intelligence 307–309; Kantian notion 304–305; see also Kant, Immanuel; speculative theology 303–305 Goehr, Lydia 127, 137 Goethe, J. W. von: Accountability 441; Artist’s Apotheosis 446; charlatanism 442–443; Dichting und Wahrheitc 502; Elective Affinities 438, 509; Farbenlehre 71–72; Faust 435, 437, 441–444, 445n3, 447, 448n3, 448n5, 498; Mephistopheles 444; The Natural Daughter 441; Nature and Art 441; occupation as minister 440–441; Proverbial 438–439; reminders or markers 437–439; Schopenhauer’s relationship to 442; sexuality and spirituality 508; The Singer 441, 443; The Sorrows of Young Werther 436; structural and thematic

Halbfass, Wilhelm 343, 349 hallucination 6 Hanslick, Eduard 138n7, 186–187, 192; On the Musically Beautiful 186 Hardy, Thomas 127, 482 Hartmann, Edward von 110 Hassan, Patrick 473, 475 Haydn 190; The Seasons 190 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 397; aesthetics and asceticism 453–454, 461–463, 484; concept and idea 454, 456–457; desire 461, 463; Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences 453; Eurocentrism 343–344; Hegelianism 469, 472, 482; history 453, 459, 558; law of inertia 453, 455; lectures 37, 333, 452; left-wing Hegelians 276; love and compassion 460; motivation of animals 452; music 460; mystification 451; paintings 459; Phenomenology of Spirit 332–333, 453; philosophy 280, 329, 332, 334, 360, 452–453, 455, 471, 554; reason 452–453, 456–458; and Schopenhauer 451–455, 459–461; see also Schopenhauer, Arthur; Science of Logic 451; self-negation or negativity 453, 463; spirit, development of 334; state as ethical organism 451; transcendental idealism 459 Heiberg, Johan Ludvig 472 Heidegger, Martin 102, 104–105, 531, 544, 546, 548, 550; Sein und Zeit 102 Hempel, C.G. 62 Hepworth, Barbara 137 Herder, Johann Gottfried 331, 334, 349 Herodotus 1, 357–364, 367–369; history and poetry 359; human nature and sufferings 360–361; pessimism 369; Solon’s proclamation 362, 374n20; Thracian practice 364; Xerxes 361–363, 363 Hertz, Heinrich Rudolf 517 Herwegh, Georg 482 Hinduism 299

568

Index history: explanatory mechanisms 113–116; idea of will 117, 122; Kingdom Mammalia 113; lack of objectivity 116; philosophy of 110–120; and poetry, difference 118–119, 123n9; scientific knowledge 111–115; time and space 112; Wissenschaft 111, 113, 115–117; writing, genres of 123n7 Hobbes, Thomas 117, 256–259, 264, 272–273, 275; contractarianism 257; De Cive 272; on morality 257; Schopenhauer and see Schopenhauer, Arthur; state of nature 256 Hoffmann, E. T. A. 68; Review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony 68 Homer 264, 358, 368, 439–440; Odyssey 264, 367 Horkheimer, Max 2, 412, 532–534, 536, 542; Dialectic of Enlightenment 536 Hornstein, Robert von 276 Hubscher, Arthur 28, 276; Eristische Dialektik 28 Hueffer, Franz 130 human origins, theory of 347 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 275, 435 Hume, David 5, 15, 229, 300, 327; Natural History of Religion 301 Husserl, Edmund 531 idealism 7, 11, 15, 110, 123n1, 124n13, 147, 349, 539–540; German 22, 186, 222, 498, 526, 538; transcendental 41–43, 46, 124n14, 173, 186, 335, 409, 453, 459–460, 522 imagination 118, 121–122, 141, 151–152, 154, 156, 161–162, 166, 168, 189, 195, 199, 202, 218, 384–385, 406–407, 536, 555, 558–560, 563 immortality, doctrine of 298 independent thinking 337n3 India: Aryan 353; Buddhism 351–352; Christianity 352–353; cultural engagement and transmission 349– 351; Jewish view 352, 354; Oriental mysticism 350; religion and doctrines 350–351; Romanticism 349 individuation, principle of 320, 448, 461, 463, 531 intelligibility, principle of 59 interpretive charity, principle of 214 intuitions 7–8, 33, 97, 157, 416; applications of the PSR 420–421; cognition of spatiotemporal causal relations 418– 419; crisis of 26; empirical intuitions 425–426, 432n22; formation of 424–425; functional independence

424; functionalism, influence of 418; genetic and functional 423; immediate perception of causality 422; intellectual 422–426, 432n17; intuitive understanding 418–422; intuitionism 33–34; intuition of ideas 157; logical proof in Euclidean geometry 33; opposition with logicism and neologicism 33; posited object and the sensation 425; principium rationis sufficientis fiendi 420; role of time 421; sensations 423; sense of immediacy 421–422; transcendental forms of perception 33; understanding and reason, distinction 419 Jacquette, Dale 132, 519, 522, 526 Jameson, Frederic 492–493 Janaway, Christopher 311, 315, 318–319, 429, 435, 437, 444, 446, 515, 558; The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer 1 Jordan, Neil 275 Joyce, James 202; Ulysses 202, 264–265 Judaism 7, 300, 302, 343, 352–354, 357, 396, 446; anti-Judaism 352–354 Julian of Norwich 549 Kaehler, Klaus Erich 332 Kant, Immanuel: absolute or mathematical impenetrability 60; aesthetic education 203–204; aesthetics and philosophy of art 198, 200; aesthetic state 501; agnosticism 19; antinomy of freedom 502; appearance, doctrine of 41, 73; as autonomist 199–200; beauty, notion of 207; cognitive faculties, theory of 415–418, 426–430; conscience, theory of 478; constitutive and regulative 71–72; Critique of Pure Reason 95, 330, 334, 339n27; Critique of the Power of Judgment 148, 158n10, 186; duty, doctrine of 236–237, 545, 554; dynamically and mathematically sublime 171; and ethical criticism of art 199; ethics, concept of 229–230, 260; functionalism 418; human dignity, notion of 348; ideality of time 335; intuitionism see intuitions; matter, dynamic theory of 58, 60; metaphysical and methodological two-aspect interpretations of transcendental idealism 41; The Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science 57, 80; Metaphysics of Morals (Kant) 213, 544–546, 548, 550–551, 554;

569

Index moral ought, concept of 231; moral principles 167, 222; music as beautiful play of sensations 186; neo-Kantianism 482; orthodoxy 414; phenomena or appearances 19; purpose of fine art 199; reductionism 24; self-legislation 174; stance on causality 16; sublime, theory of 171–175, 180; synthetic unity of apperception 98; thing in itself 40–41, 45–46, 128–129, 194, 414, 462; Transcendental Deduction 419, transcendental freedom 547; transcendental philosophy 25, 40–41, 85; see also transcendental idealism; unity of apperception 319; use of the term ‘noumena’ 64n1 Kassner, Rudolf 516 Kierkegaard, Søren 1, 469–481, 532, 545; asceticism 478–479; Christianity and suffering 474; Danish works 470–471; Dharmic and Abrahamic 469; ethical objection 474–477; Gospel of Sufferings 473; Indian melancholia 472–474; pessimism 475; philosophy and actuality, discrepancy 477–478; principium individuationis 476; and Schopenhauer 470–472, 477–479; see also Schopenhauer, Arthur; Stoic diagnosis of lively pleasure 473; suffering and privation 473–475; Upanisads 474 Klein, Lawrence E. 34 Kleist, Heinrich von 444 Klimt, Gustav 516 Klinger, Max 516 knowledge: abstract 24, 80, 89, 422, 428–430; scientific 111–115; unconscious 75 Kontje, Todd 447 Korn, Alejandro 555 Korsgaard, Christine 253 Kraus, Karl 516–517 Krause, Karl Friedrich 130 Lakatos, Imre 88 Langton, Rae 41–42; Kantian Humility: Our Ignorance of Things in Themselves 41 Leeson, Miles: Iris Murdoch: Philosophical Novelist 550 Leibniz, G.W. 22, 73, 193, 293n9, 327, 337, 453; issue with Newtonian theory of gravity 57–58; Leibnizians in Central Europe 25–26; Leibniz-Wolff school 27; logicism 33; mechanistic properties of matter 60, 283–284; music 75, 193; and Newton 57; preestablished harmony 335; a priori in pre-Kantian sense 283; Theodicy 283

Lenz, Karl Gotthold 444 Leonhard, Euler 25, 34 Locke 5, 9, 17, 50n4, 230, 238n2, 327, 335 logic: abstract knowledge 24; artificial calculi 26; clue of diagrams 24–25, 25; concept 23; inference 23; intuition 25–26; logica minor 23; in modern times 24; research topics 26–28; Schopenhauer diagrams 27; significance 25–26 Loos, Adolf 517 Lutkehaus, Ludger 442, 444 Machiavelli, Niccolò 276, 278 Magee, Bryan 315, 318, 514, 519–520, 556 Mahler, Gustav 127, 130, 185, 516 Mainländer, Philipp 110 Majer, Friedrich 349 Malebranche, Nicolas 5, 15, 327, 334–335, 337, 419–420 Mann, Thomas 434, 483, 494, 510n5, 561; aesthetic state 501; Buddenbrooks 496, 503, 504; classicism and Romanticism see classicism; death 505–506; Death in Venice 496; essay and sources on Schopenhauer 497–500; ethics 501–502; Freud and the Future 509; intellectualism and rationalism 509; and Kant see Kant, Immanuel; The Living Thoughts of Schopenhauer 496; The Magic Mountain 496; pessimism and the will 499–500, 502–503, 505–506; philosophy 498–499; principium individuationis 502; Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man 434, 496, 501; religion 504–505; A Sketch of My Life 496; truth and beauty 497–498 Mannion, Gerard. 309, 316, 545 Martensen, Hans Lassen 471–472 Marxism 539 materialism: scientific 435; Young Hegelian 483 mathematics: diagrams 35; Euclidean geometry 32; history of 34; intuitionism see intuitions; philosophy of 33 Matilal, B.K. 350 matter, 58, 60 māyā 11, 18, 128–129, 131, 177, 312, 460, 494, 502–503, 539 Mendel, Alfred O. 496 metaphilosophy: philosophy 80, 90, 90–91; PSR see principle of sufficient reason; strands or “ideal types” 89–91; transcendental truth and metaphysics 80, 84–86; see also philosophy metaphysics: critical and transcendental philosophy 85; definition of 56, 82–83; as empirical enterprise

570

Index 83; eudaemonology 89–90; as hermeneutics of nature and existence 86–90; immanent dogmatism 69, 86; indirect and direct cognition 84; philosophical physiology see physiology, philosophical; Platonic ideas 128–129; positive and discursive cognition 87; rationale for 80–82; realism 5, 7–16, 18; reality as conditioned appearance 86–87; representation and thing in itself, distinction 81–82, 84; as science of experience 84–86; transcendental 79, 90–91; two-aspects, transcendental idealism see transcendental idealism; will as the essence of all things see will Mill, John Stuart 229 Molina, Enrique 555 Mǿller, Poul Martin 470–471; Thoughts on The Possibility of Demonstrating Human Immortality 470 monotheism, doctrine of 353 Montaigne, Michel de 378, 380 morality 213, 260–266; actions 214–217, 403; cognition, abstract or rational 262–263; justice 216–218, 225n18, 225n27, 260– 267; moral ought 229–232; Neminem principle 214–215, 225n13; punishment or reward 229–230, 238n2; rightness, definition 215; self-control 263; selfsacrifice 216; virtues 216, 262–263; wrongness 217–218, 225n16 motivation, law of 114, 117, 121–122 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 460, 491–492; Magic Flute 460 Murdoch, Iris 1, 544–554; Buddhism 552; duty and right conscience 548–549, 554; The Green Knight 545, 550–551; influence on fiction 550–553; Iris Murdoch Special Collections 546; Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals 544–551, 554; Under the Net 550; The Philosopher’s Pupil 552; Sartre: Romantic Rationalist 545; and Schopenhauer see Schopenhauer, Arthur; A Severed Head 552; The Sovereignty of Good 544; The Time of the Angels 552; truth and will 551, 553 music 135–137; absolute 68, 77n1, 137, 487; communication of ideas and emotions 188–194; compared to poetry and painting 136, 189, 196n14; configuration of tones 187; melody 192– 194; Plato’s musical modes 186; PSR see principle of sufficient reason; quietism 195; Schopenhauer on 185–195; see also Schopenhauer, Arthur; succession of chords 136–137; will 136, 188

Mynster, Jakob Peder 471 mysticism 79, 83–84, 86, 313, 317, 323, 350, 548–549 naturalism 54, 56, 63; natural theology 16; and physiological relativity 12; protoDarwinian 323; supernaturalism 339n21 Naturphilosophie 68, 72–73, 76–77, 89, 435–436 negative nature of satisfaction, doctrine of 100 Neminem principle 214–215, 219, 221–222, 225n13 Newton, Isaac 56–57, 60, 63, 65n13, 69, 71, 111, 436, 444–445, 449; color theory 435, 438, 442–446; First Law 59; mechanical natural philosophy 57–58; occult explanations 56–58 Nichtigkeit, significance of see nothingness, concept of Nicolai, Friedrich 440 Nietzsche, Friedrich 22, 68, 76, 110, 127, 387, 556; Beyond Good and Evil 387, 506; The Birth of Tragedy 150, 208, 437, 447, 498; The Gay Science 298, 508; Schopenhauer as Educator 386, 435, 498; “On Truth and Lie in a Non-Moral Sense” 76 Nochlin, Linda 132 normative ethics: actions 219–220; anti-moral incentives, egoism and malice 222–224; injustice 220; moral dimensions 219– 224; see also character; morality nostalgic experience: absolute value (totality) 165; aesthetic delight, theory of 162– 163, 165–166; episodic recollection 161; moral worth 167; see also Kant, Immanuel; non-projective 161–168; nostalgic mode 154; objects of 162–163, 166–167; past and distant 155–156, 162, 164; principium individuationis 168 nothingness, concept of 170, 174–177, 183n8; continual recollection 176; individual and species, relation 176–177; ruling principle of the sublime 175 Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg) 349, 490; Hymns to the Night 490 omniscience, doctrine of 79, 318 Oppenheim, Paul. 62 original sin, doctrine of 218 Oswald, Lee Harvey 114 painting: goal of 149; Platonic ideas and phenomenality 145–148; portrait painting 146; and sculpture 145 pantheism 179, 331, 334, 378, 391, 395–396; evil and 395–397; optimistic 396

571

Index Parmenides 328 Pascal, Blaise. 104, 111 Paul, Jean 68, 76, 439 permissibility, principle of 219 pessimism: Aeschylus’ tragedies 366; bad business argument 287–288; boredom argument 288–289; compensation argument 290–292; eternal justice 367; existence of evil 290; expression of pessimistic evaluation 364; Fall of Adam 364; of the Greek tragedians 364–368, 374n33, 375n34; guilty indebtedness 282; interpersonal and the intrapersonal 290; Leibniz’s system of optimism 283; life as suffering 287; mismatch argument 292; negativity thesis 285–286; nothingness argument 289–290; objections to the a priori argument 285–287; pessimistic characterization of the world 179; pessimists and optimists on suffering 282; pleasure and desire 285–286; a priori argument 284–286; sources of human suffering 284–285; tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides 366–367; tragic spirit 364 Philalethes 297, 305–307, 439, 443 Philonenko, Alexis. 143 philosophy: absolute truth and highest standpoint 91; conceptions of 90; empirical truth 80; essence of human life 330; fundamental truth of the world 336; German philosophy 333; historical turn in philosophy 330; history of 327–337, 339n21; history of faculty of reason itself 330–331; ideal and the real, problem of 328, 334; moral 239n6; need of reason 331; philosophical meditations 328; principle of consciousness 329– 330, 332; PSR see principle of sufficient reason; resolute pessimism 328; spirit of the times 334–335, 338n17, 339n21; tenets of 447; transcendental idealism 335; transcendental truths 80; usefulness of teaching 337 physiology, philosophical: immediate knowledge of will see psychology, philosophical; life force or formative drive 47; rational idea of the soul 46; see also metaphysics; will, objecthood of 40, 45–48 Pistorius, Hermann Andreas 502 planetary orbits, explanation of 57 Plato 5, 16, 18, 73, 128, 328, 344, 347, 354, 358, 366, 377, 437, 497–501, 544, 546– 548, 554, 556; aestheticism of Platonic doctrine of ideas 501; appearance and

reality, distinction 548; idea of a thing 129; Murdoch as Wittgensteinian Neo-Platonist 544, 551; Neoplatonists 328; notion of the forms 187–188; notion of the soul 319; Platonic doctrine 145–146; Platonic ethics 379; (Platonic) idea 130–131, 137, 141–143, 145–149, 152, 157, 160, 172, 181, 200, 220, 223, 254n9, 316, 334, 367, 432n17, 558; Platonic vision of transcendence 552; Platonism 137, 138n4, 147; species 133, 141–143, 145 Pliny: Naturalis historia 557–558 poetry: Apolline and the Dionysiac, duality of 150–151; Herodotus on 359; and history, difference 118–119; humanity through poetry and music see music; poetry; inspiration and enthusiasm 149; lyrical 149–152; music, independent of 136; of the past 154–155; power of imagination 151–152; spontaneously composed melodies 151; Werke aus einem Guss 151 polarity, concept of 72–73, 508 politics: Christian monarchy 276–277; morality and lawfulness 274–276; political contractarianism 263; Schopenhauerian see Schopenhauer, Arthur; state and religion 274–276 Polydorus 135 Popper, Karl 111, 456 Presocratics 327–328 pressure, law of 111 principium individuationis 17–18, 98, 147, 168, 313, 323, 440, 476, 483, 494, 500, 502, 538–541 principle of sufficient reason 14, 16, 80, 95, 111–113, 119, 123n6, 131, 133, 143, 176, 188, 190, 304, 367, 415, 428, 431n14, 456 Pringsheim, Alfred 34 Proust 127, 155; In Search of Lost Time 155 PSR see principle of sufficient reason psychology, philosophical: immediate knowledge of will 43–45, 50n6; pleasure or comfort 43–44 Pufendorf, Samuel 230; On the Duty of Man and Citizen According to Natural Law 230 punishment, theory of 264 quantities of extension 60 quantity of motion 59 Quicherat, Louis Marie: Gradus ad Parnassum 557 quietism 195, 317, 475

572

Index Rappaport, Samuel 390 rationality: Berlin Lectures 22; continental rationalism 69; irrational argumentation, doctrine of 32; logic 23, 36–37; see also logica major; method of abstraction 36; of purpose 30; rationalism 37; representationalist approach 35; significance and philosophy as science 35–37 realism: absolute 6, 13–14; description 6–7; egocentric predicament 8; idealism 18– 19; natural and childlike realism 5, 46; Schopenhauer’s thought-experiment 14 reason: abstract, discursive and intuitive cognition 426–427; doctrine of 29; and intellect 426–431; reason for rejecting Kant’s view 430–431; versions of PSR 428, 431n12 redemption, doctrine of 501 Redpath, Theodore 518 Rèe, Paul 110 Reid, Thomas 5 Reinhold, Karl Leonhard 331, 333–334, 339n21; Letters on the Kantian Philosophy 331 reism 27 religion: belief in God 300–302; doctrine of immortality 298–300; indoctrination and need for metaphysics 297–302, 306; and life in society 305–307 representation, doctrine of 29 Revolutions of 1848–1849 280, 482, 505 Richter, Jean Paul 68 right, doctrine of 220, 256–259, 264, 268, 276 Romanticism 68, 186, 349, 486, 490, 497, 506, 508 Romero, Francisco 555 Roth, Joseph 155; The Radetzky March 155 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 1, 384, 401–412, 436, 441; Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men 401–402, 411; Emile 401, 403–406, 409 Rowe, Anne 550 Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences 470 Russell, Bertrand. 27, 517 Safranski, Rudiger 444 Said, Edward 342; Orientalism 342 salvation: affirmation and negation 314–315, 320, 322; asceticism 313; cognition 313, 315–317; doctrine of 545; experience of Mitleid 313–314; forms of will see will; principium individuationis 313; self-denial and self negation 311, 321, 323, 463–464 Sartre, Jean-Paul 154, 155, 162–163, 165–166, 168

Scanlon, T.M. 214, 219–220 Scheler, Max 102; Tod und Fortleben 102 Schelling, F. W. J. 61, 68, 121, 179, 186, 328, 331, 334, 346, 442–443, 451; System of Transcendental Idealism 186 Schiller, Friedrich 167, 171, 179, 182, 435, 439–440 Schlegel, Friedrich 349 Schneider, Paul 130 Scholasticism 328 Scholastic natural philosophy 53 Schopenhauer, Arthur: abstract or rational cognition 263; aesthetic humanism 555, 558–563; see also aesthetics; Aphorisms on the wisdom of life 95, 376–378; on compassion 266–267; see also compassion; art of life, practice of 382; On the Basis of Morals 205, 206, 214, 229, 237, 275, 276, 345, 401–402, 409, 452, 523, 538, 546, 548, 553; Borges’story 557–558, 560, 562, 564n4; compassionate contractarianism 263–265; Comtian positivism 555; consciousness and persona in humans 266, 380–381, 561; dual legacy of Kant and Goethe 437; egoism 259–260, 265; emotions or passions 385–386; On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason 95, 338n7, 435, 546; Fragments for the History of Philosophy 327, 350, 503; Funes el memorioso 557; German nationhood 434; and Goethe, uniting factors 435–436; good life or happy life, practice of 384; and Hobbes see Hobbes, Thomas; On Humanity’s Metaphysical Need 89; in Latin America 555–563; melancholic temperament 382–383, 386; metaphilosophy see metaphilosophy; moods, external factors of 385; moral meaning of the state see state; moral principles, theory of 264– 265; see also morality; Mortal God or a Leviathan 272–274; Naturphilosophie 68, 72–73, 76–77, 89, 435–436; New Order, creation of 556–558, 564n9; against oppressive positivism 559; Parerga and Paralipomena 276, 287–288, 327, 391, 434–448, 482, 485; poetry, power of 559–561; see also poetry; political contractarianism 263; politics of 256–269; positive virtue 258; positivism and politics 555, 563n3; principle of justice 262; punishment, theory of 264; reason and principles in moral life 260–263; right and wrong 258–259; self-control 263; solitude 383–

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Index 384; statehood 273; On the Suffering of the World 552; thought-experiment 14; The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics 214, 452–453; On University Philosophy 336; virtues 254n14, 262– 263; On Vision and Colours 70–71, 415, 422–423, 443; voluntary moral justice 260; On Will in Nature 40–41, 45, 48, 452; wisdom of life 380–386; The World as Will and Representation 40–41, 44, 48–49, 53, 68–69, 95, 144, 146, 154, 170, 186, 214–215, 217, 243, 271–272, 276, 283, 287, 289–290, 311, 314–316, 318, 321, 327–329, 333, 414–415, 474, 482, 486, 496, 503, 517, 546, 557, 559–560, 563 Schopenhauer, Johanna 506 science: causation, theory of 54–56, 64n4; force 55–58, 61–63, 64n8; occult qualities 55–58; rejection of mechanist ontology 60–61, 66n28; scientific understanding 30, 54–56, 59–61 Scotus Erigena 328 Scruton, Roger 491 sculpture 141–144; creative power 144; human beauty 142–143; a priori cognition 144 seeking own advantage, principle of 393, 396 self-consciousness, theory of see boredom; death; time self-love: and compassion and compatibility 403–406; educational program 403; self-preservation and pity 404–406; see also morality Sen, Amartya 349 Seneca: Natural Questions 378; On Peace of Mind 379 sensibility: cognitive faculties, theory of 417; description 415; functionalism 416; and reason 414–415, 418; teamwork 417; and understanding 415–418 Shapshay, Sandra: The Palgrave Schopenhauer Handbook 1 Sibbern, F. C. 436, 471 Sidgwick, Henry 229 Silesius, Angelus 503 Simmel, Georg 387 Socrates 328, 387, 445, 447, 504 Sophocles 114, 121, 358–359, 362, 366, 368, 370; Oedipus Rex 366–368, 370 sound figures 69; and the eye 71–73; Kant’s regulative view of teleology 72; and unconscious 75–76 Spengler, Oswald 517 Spinoza, Benedict: carnivorous diet 399n22; contempt for animals 391–394; evil and pantheism see pantheism; and

Schopenhauer’s antisemitism 391–392; Spinozism 390; Theological Political Treatise 394, 398n1; vegetarianism 393 Sraffa, Pierro 517 Stahl, Friedrich Julius 276 Stahl, George Ernst 47 state: Christian monarchy 276–278; Leviathan see Schopenhauer, Arthur; metaphysical need 277–278; see also metaphysics; notion of moral obligation 267–269; politics 271, 274–276; religion 277– 279; sanctification 276–278; status civilis 268; status naturalis 268; and university philosophy 278–280; see also philosophy Stocker, Michael 476 stoicism 377–380, 388n7; admiration of Aristotle 378–379; Cynicism 379, 388n2; equanimity 376, 488; existing, pleasure 377, 380; Hellenistic school of philosophy 377; Stoics 1, 328, 383, 385–386, 401, 488; writings of Seneca and Epictetus 377–378 Strauß, David Friedrich 276; Das Leben Jesu 276 Strauss, Richard 494 sublime, theory of 171–175, 180, 183n3, 183n5; meaningfulness 179–180; Nichtigkeit and affirmation 177–182, 183n1; pantheism see pantheism; pleasurable elevation, forms of 172–174; prima facie tension 178; and the “sacred” 182; soteriology and aesthetics 179–180; sublime for Kant see Kant, Immanuel suffering: absence of actual suffering 261; of another 206–207, 215, 263, 404, 406– 408, 413n3; characterization of life as 287; compassionate 413n3; co-sufferer 205; and death in human condition 357; in form of physical pain 404–405; freedom from 133, 159; Gospel of Sufferings 473; justification for 282; life as 472–474; material deprivation 412; pain and 284–285, 291, 298, 309, 311, 380, 404; and privation 475; source of 267, 534; and striving 114, 117, 120, 122; violence and suffering 459; way to salvation 314; will-full co-suffering 208 superstition: about human 372–373; depictions of divinity 370; and fatalism 368–373, 369; foreknowledge 370, 371, 372; see also suffering syllogism 75 Tanner, Michael 491–492 Tapper, Wilhelm 130 thing-in-itself, doctrine of 128

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Index Thomas, Martin 129 Thucydides 360 Tieck, Ludwig 68, 76 time: ideality of time, doctrine of 335; intuitions and perceptions 97; self-consciousness 96–98; and space 95–96; will and cognition 97–98 Tolstoy, L. 127, 482, 498 transcendental idealism 46, 124n14, 173, 186, 335, 409, 453, 459–460, 522; interpretations 41–43; manifestations of the will 42–43 treatises on eristics: art of being right 30–31; Berlin Lectures 28; doctrine of reason and understanding 29–31; rationality and reasoning 30–31 ; research topics 31–32; value and function 28–29 Turgenev, Ivan 127 unconscious knowledge 75 understanding, doctrine of 29 United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency in Austria 545 Upanishads 5, 11, 16, 18, 299, 312, 344–345, 469, 474 Vandenabeele, Bart 175, 177–179, 181–182, 183n2, 183n8; A Companion to Schopenhauer 1 Vasconcelos, Jose 555 Vedas, doctrine of 377 virtue 216, 254n14, 262; of being human 348; theory of 216; see also morality Voltaire 283, 378, 437, 509; Candide 283 Wagner, Richard 1, 110, 127, 130, 138n11, 185, 434, 437, 482–494, 498, 500, 504, 516, 532–534, 540; absolute music 487; Christian subjectivity 488; claim of ‘full-blooded musical conception’ 489–490; conversion 482–484; Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg 491–493; element of resignation 488; enlightenment through compassion 494; erotic love and self-abnegation 489; German Romanticism 486; and Hegel 486; ideas of redemption 494; influence on writing 484; metaphysics of music 483, 487; musical dramas 484; nature of the ‘love’ 491; Nuremberg, trials of existence 492; Opera and Drama 484; Parsifal 493–494; postrevolutionary society 485; religious conversion 483; renunciation 484–488;

Ring’s Bühnenfestspiel 488–491, 493; Romanticism 490; and Schopenhauer 482–494; see also Schopenhauer, Arthur; Schopenhauerianism 138n11; Stoic equanimity 488; tradition and innovation 492; tragedy of politics 486; transformation music 493; Tristan’s Handlung 488–491, 493; Wagnerism 482 Walsh, W. H. 111 Waste Land (Eliot, T.S.) 491 Weininger, Otto 516–517 Wicks, Robert 1; The Oxford Handbook of Schopenhauer 1 will: affirmation of 178–179, 257, 315, 319, 322; and the body 43–44, 46, 48, 51, 83–84, 86, 97, 313, 318, 321, 460, 462–463, 522; and cognition 47, 49, 51n11, 98, 122; freedom of 63, 292, 323, 502, 521–522, 525; to life 48–50, 51n8; and natural forces 45–48, 54, 61–63; negation of the will, doctrine of 63; objectification of 19, 44, 48, 51, 117–118, 122, 130, 133–134, 136, 138, 142, 146, 156, 158, 190, 195, 200, 321, 463, 465, 500, 506; pessimism 312; primacy of the will, doctrine of 95; satisfaction and suffering 312; as the thing in itself 48–49; will-lessness 159, 207, 208 Wille, Eliza 483 Willemsen, Mariette 547 Windelband, Wilhelm 111 Winkelried, Arnold von 216, 222–223 Wittgenstein, Ludwig: Berlin lecture manuscripts 515; compassion 523; Culture and Value 517–518; early period 516–520; interest in the nature 526; language, problem of 521, 524–525; notion of will 519–520, 522; Philosophical Grammar 518, 527n10, 528n19; Philosophical Investigations 552; philosophical parallel 521–525; see also philosophy; Schopenhauer’s impact 514–525; see also Schopenhauer, Arthur; terminology 515–518, 521, 523; truth and freedom 525; Wittgensteinians 33 Wodehouse, P.G.: Carry On, Jeeves 496 Wright, G. H. von 514, 517 Young, Julian 180, 183n1, 213, 245 Zola, Émile 127 Zöller, Günter 559, 562

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