The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century
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Schopenhauer’s distance from the project of unification arises in part from his avoidance of one of the key Kantian dualities: since Schopenhauer denies the existence of practical reason in the sense maintained by Kant,68 the doctrine of the primacy of pure practical reason—with all of the complications that it creates concerning the respective rights and interests, and the necessary strategies of integration, of practical and theoretical reason; issues of huge importance to Fichte and the early Schelling—does not figure at all for Schopenhauer, who instead straightforwardly identifies philosophy as such with theoretical philosophy, in Kant’s sense.69
Within this context, however, Schopenhauer reasserts Kant’s practical/theoretical duality in the form of the distinction of the world as Wille, which gives it, as noted, all of its practical significance, and the world as representation, which exists for the necessarily disinterested subject of knowing.70 Kant’s practical/theoretical distinction is conserved, therefore, through its outright identification with another core Kantian duality, that of appearances and things in themselves. This has a major implication, which refers us back to Schopenhauer’s rejection of Kantian practical reason and inversion of Fichte’s account of the will: if practical consciousness is analysed in terms of Wille, then Ought is reducible to Is; contrary to Fichte’s view of the absolute primacy of the Sollen, there can be nothing more to oughtness than awareness (in one mode or another) of the being of Wille.71 By virtue of its dualist architecture, then, Schopenhauer’s system stays closer to Kant than do the German Idealists, but in so far as Schopenhauer resolves all dualities into the single one of Wille and Vorstellung, Schopenhauer follows at least part of the way the unificatory vector of German Idealism.
There is a further respect in which Schopenhauer takes the side of German Idealism against Kant. Kant’s reservations concerning the possibility of systematic completeness are grounded on his thesis of the inherent limitations of human reason. Schopenhauer’s anti-monism, by contrast, is untethered from the idea of epistemic limitation. The distinction of Wille and representation is absolute in a sense not admissible for Kant: it represents a denial not just of the possibility of our forging a philosophical system with the strong unity sought by the German Idealists, but of the metaphysical possibility that Wille and the world as representation form a real unity. So, whereas Kant leaves it open, and necessarily thinkable, that the dualities within human reason are united at some point which transcends our cognitive powers—indeed the third Critique teaches that beauty and natural teleology at least point to (if no more) a unitary ground of the sensible and supersensible—Schopenhauer’s position is that the several roads of philosophical reflection which we must go down in our endeavour to solve the riddle of existence do not join up at any point.72 Again this is a direct implication of his contraction of PSR.
The next question to be considered is whether Schopenhauer succeeds in charting a clear course between Kant and Fichte-Schelling.
6.3 SCHOPENHAUER’S DIFFICULTIES
6.3.1 Wille as Ground of the World as Representation
Schopenhauer denies that the relation of the will or thing in itself to the phenomenon is a relation of causality.73 This follows from Schopenhauer’s contraction of PSR. But Schopenhauer does not allow the realm of the thinkable to coincide with the boundaries of the world as representation, nor does he confine explanation to relations between worldly objects, for the world itself ‘is to be explained solely from the will whose objectivity it is, and not through causality’.74
The problem is straightforward. So long as some element of explanation is involved in referring the phenomenal world to Wille—and Schopenhauer speaks readily of metaphysical Erklärung75—some employment of the categories of ground and consequent, as Kant would put it, must be present. The explanation may be non-causal, but it must nonetheless incorporate a ‘because’ relation. Without it, we are simply left with (at most) sub-propositional, non-conceptual awareness of the world as awash with a certain all-pervasive mental quality, the quality possessed by acts of will; and although this might provide the cue for some such metaphorical thought as that the world ‘insists itself’ or ‘exerts pressure’, obviously it will not provide Schopenhauer with a sufficient basis for any of the determinate discursive conclusions that he wants to extract from his grounding of phenomena on Wille.76
Viewed from another angle, the problem lies in Schopenhauer’s taking it for granted that the objectual world as such can pose a ‘riddle’ at all. In order to even form the thought of the world as constituting an explanandum which demands a metaphysical explanans—that is, as not simply explicable, and adequately explained, in so far as its contents are interrelated in accordance with PSR—it is necessary to suspend Schopenhauer’s contraction of PSR.77
The problem shows itself also in Schopenhauer’s axiology. Schopenhauer’s pessimism rests, I suggested, on the perception of a metaphysical dissonance, for which it is essential that the world of representation be ontologically subordinated to, and measured in terms set by, the world as Wille; this is what allows Schopenhauer to strike down, as normative illusions, the ends that human beings set themselves. But it may be wondered if this strategy succeeds. The mere judgement that one layer of reality is dependent on another may be necessary, but is it sufficient, for the negative assessment of the world as representation, its condemnation as ontologically defective? There is no obvious logical principle compelling us to take the stronger view, and there are grounds for thinking that in arriving at this verdict Schopenhauer relies on elements he is not entitled to. At key junctures Schopenhauer appeals to what he calls our ‘better consciousness’,78 but in so far as its superiority is merely asserted, it is open to the Kantian, or German Idealist, to object that Schopenhauer faces a hard choice: either the superiority of the standpoint that he recommends, from which we condemn the world as a cosmic mistake, is merely stipulated (or, as the Nietzschean may suggest, a matter of motivated taste); or it has normative foundations, in which case Schopenhauer has betrayed his own contraction of PSR to the world as representation, and his ‘better consciousness’ is playing the role of affording a higher level of reflection which Vernunft plays in Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. To put the point another way: the problem is that we are required to understand the ‘expression’ of Wille in the world of representation in a normative sense, since we are to judge that the latter is a mis-expression of the former; but a normative understanding of the concept is inadmissible given the contraction of PSR.
6.3.2 Schopenhauer’s Two Models
The foregoing points to a tension in Schopenhauer’s metaphysics. Two ideas essential to Schopenhauer’s position are, first, that there is no properly intelligible relation between Wille and the world as representation, and, second, that the latter must be regarded as a higher species of illusion, as the ‘veil of Maya’.79 What this naturally suggests is that the expression of Wille in the world as representation consists in its objectification (Objektivation) in the sense of the subject’s making an object of cognition, a Vorstellung, out of Wille. Although cognitively nothing is achieved thereby, since the PSR-defined formal structure of cognition falsifies Wille, the character of Wille as purposeless striving shows up in the concrete, non-formal features of the world as representation.
Here the relation of Wille to representation is grasped from the angle of the subject. This model, which we might call epistemic or perhaps ‘Eastern’, tallies of course with Schopenhauer’s claim to be upholding Kant’s insight into the ideality of empirical objects, and arguably provides a ground for pessimism, in so far as its derealization of the world as representation strips the objects of human valuation of genuine reality. It also agrees with the conception of ethics as founded on compassion,80 and it helpfully allows Schopenhauer to dismiss, as reflecting a misunderstanding of his position, the question of the nature of the overarching unity of the world(s) of Wille and representation.81 If the sphere of Vorstellung is an illusion, so too is its correlate,
the transcendental subject, the ‘existence’ of which, along with the world of objects, can be attributed to epistemic error and held to be dissolved through its correction.
This model is, however, by no means consistent with everything in Schopenhauer’s picture. It is doubtful in the first place that it fits with the reading of expression demanded by the idea that Wille constitutes the inner Kern of the subject and other individuated entities,82 a conception underlined in Schopenhauer’s philosophy of natural science, which demands metaphysical grounds for natural phenomena.83 In particular, the epistemic model does not cohere with the claim that Wille finally achieves cognition of itself. Some of Schopenhauer’s statements suggest that attributing self-knowledge to Wille just means that one of its individuated products has self-knowledge (or perhaps: knows itself to be an individuated product of Wille), but the full story of denial of the will does require that Wille itself, not merely its individual human objectifications, achieve genuine cognitive (and, thereby, practical) reflexivity.84 The epistemic model thereupon gives way to a metaphysical (or ‘Western’) conception, familiar from Schelling, according to which reality undergoes a real transformation in so far as it assumes a new form in human subjectivity.85 The expression of Wille in the world as representation now amounts to Objektivation in the quite different sense of Wille’s making itself into an object, by giving itself determinate form,86 and its being an object of cognition, an object for a subject, becomes secondary, a supervening consequence of the self-expressive activity of Wille. Here the relation of Wille to representation is grasped from the angle of Wille.
This shift of conception rationalizes the doctrine of denial of will, but it creates difficulties for all of the elements that the epistemic model makes sense of. In particular it interferes with the argument for pessimism. If Wille in fact becomes the world as representation, then there is scope for deeming the latter a transcendence of the former, a newly created, higher reality which sets its own terms of evaluation: if Wille has ceased to be blind and acquired a real teleology, then the ends projected by sentient beings cannot be cancelled as metaphysical errors.87
Thus, although the two versions of Objektivation—epistemic objectification by the subject, and Wille’s metaphysical self-determination—are not inconsistent, and might be taken as complementary views of the same event, which is perhaps how Schopenhauer wishes to think of them, the two models have, as we have seen, contradictory implications for key theses in Schopenhauer’s philosophy. That Schopenhauer may indeed have granted both models a place in his metaphysics, invoking them in different contexts without appreciating their incompatibility, is rendered likely by his assertion of a grounding relation between Wille and representation not governed by PSR: in so far as the relation is indeed in reality one of ground and consequent, the metaphysical model is implied; in so far as it eludes PSR, it can consist only in epistemic error.
6.3.3 Between Kant and German Idealism
In addition to the doubling of Eastern–epistemic and Western–metaphysical models, a separate tension can also be identified in Schopenhauer, occurring at a more fundamental, metaphilosophical level, and which is consequent upon the complex movement of his philosophy away from German Idealism and back to Kant, and then again forward from Kant to reoccupy the territory of German Idealism. I claimed earlier that Schopenhauer asserts an absolute distinction of will and representation, entailing the impossibility of a real unity of Wille and the world as representation. Such a claim, not hedged by any Kantian epistemic qualification to the effect that dualism is simply the best that our cognitive powers can manage, is what Schopenhauer needs in order to counter German Idealism’s monism at its own level. But such absolute dualism, as it may be called, sits ill with Schopenhauer’s avowed commitment to immanence and the standpoint of ordinary empirical consciousness.88
It is consequently fair to describe Schopenhauer as seeking to negotiate a way between two opposed positions:89 on the one hand, Kant’s view that only perspectival conclusions, judgements about the nature of things relativized to our cognitive capacities and having only the status of necessities of representation, are licensed; and on the other, the non-perspectival absolutism of the German Idealists, which rejects Kant’s separation of mere necessities of representation from the true necessities governing things as they really are.90 Schopenhauer internalizes both approaches to metaphysics, and seeks to combine them in a novel way. The product is a conception of two worlds, which are not so much ontologically unequal in virtue of their possessing a different degree of reality according to a single measure, as ontologically heterogeneous in so far as each is associated with and defined by a different conception of what being consists in: in the case of Wille, being is conceived as intrinsically antithetical to cognition, and in that of Vorstellung, it is identified with it.91 Though we must treat the two conceptions as bearing on the same world, their heterogeneity entails that the relation between them cannot be grasped.92 This feature is present also, to some degree, in Kant’s account—in so far as Kant denies that the relation of appearances and things in themselves is open to theoretical cognition—but it becomes problematic in Schopenhauer in a way that it is not in Kant, in virtue of the fact that, as we have seen, Schopenhauer eliminates the basis supplied by Kant for the co-thinkability of the two worlds, namely the categories.
Schopenhauer’s accommodation of mysticism fits into this picture in the following way.93 In so far as Schopenhauer counters German Idealism’s monism with an absolute dualism, Schopenhauer appears exposed to charges of incompleteness: a whole range of questions is, he acknowledges frankly, left unanswered.94 Mysticism provides a solution: Kant’s modest, epistemically qualified, perspectival conception of philosophical knowledge is re-invoked at the outer limit of Schopenhauer’s system as a ground for legitimating mystical claims, allowing Schopenhauer to acknowledge his system’s explanatory limitations while reaffirming its philosophical completeness.
One final observation may be made, concerning the way Schopenhauer recasts Kant’s distinction of appearances and things in themselves. As noted previously, Schopenhauer’s contracted PSR differs from Kant’s principles of experience in not owing its truth to any normatively defined epistemic function (of ‘making experience possible’) that it performs for us. The knowledge we have of PSR is instead of a kind that, in Kant’s terms, belongs (like the claims of the German Idealists) to dogmatic metaphysics: it specifies the entire intrinsic constitution of a type of object (albeit a very special type, which includes cognition within its constitution). Our knowledge of the sphere defined by PSR is thus not mere perspectival knowledge, in the way that for Kant knowledge of appearance counts as a mere perspective on something (unknown) that is not itself appearance. Furthermore, although knowledge of the world as representation is not knowledge of a substance—since it does not contain the condition of its own existence—its (unique and sufficient) ontological requisite, namely, Wille, is known to us. We know, therefore, both the essence and the ground of the world as representation. Now, just as Schopenhauerian Vorstellung is not Kantian Erscheinung, so Schopenhauer’s thing in itself is not Kant’s, and in Kant’s terms, Schopenhauer’s claims to knowledge of the world as representation—namely, as constituted internally by PSR and grounded externally on Wille—is already knowledge of a thing in itself: though Schopenhauer’s contraction of PSR restricts its domain, PSR enjoys with respect to that domain the same kind of absolute metaphysical validity as it enjoyed (with respect to being in general) for Spinoza and Leibniz. In this unexpected way, Schopenhauer’s development of Kant’s transcendental idealism, which he intended as a radical alternative to the Fichte-Schelling form of post-Kantianism, ends up, in the respect indicated, firmly on their side.95
If the difficulties I have indicated are genuine, then Schopenhauer’s deconstruction of German Idealism does not succeed. To press the point home: it is a consequence of the foregoing that the very charges that Schopenhauer lays against Schelling can be l
evelled against his own system. Schopenhauer repudiates the intellectually intuited ‘indifference point’ of Schelling’s identity philosophy, claiming that Schelling’s positing of an absolute unity of the subjective and the objective violates the principle of contradiction and results in mere pseudo-concepts.96 But if Schopenhauer requires us to think the world as a superimposition of two dissociated conceptions, then he puts us in the same position as that which he criticizes in Schelling. The ‘either-or, neither-nor, both-and’ character of Schelling’s point of indifference is reproduced in the structure of Schopenhauer’s system, which hinges on a supposition of the very same order—namely, that Wille can both be and not be the world as representation. The same combination of conjunction and exclusive disjunction is involved. The difference from Schelling is only that Schopenhauer has not made the supposition formally explicit, and chooses to describe our knowledge of the coming together of Wille and the world as representation as mere ‘negative knowledge’.97 But again it does not look as if the negative character of our knowledge creates a real difference: Schopenhauer may not talk of a faculty of intellectual intuition, or develop a theory of construction in concepts, but still he must posit a capacity to grasp in some manner the nexus of Wille and representation, on pain of foregoing the claim that philosophical knowledge is involved here at all.98