The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

by Michael N Forster

  6.4 THE POST-SCHOPENHAUERIAN DEVELOPMENT

  I want now to look at the post-Schopenhauerian development, with a view to showing how it bears witness to the problem created by his contraction of PSR, and to charting Schopenhauer’s influence on late nineteenth-century philosophy. Distinguished in the following sub-sections are five systematic possibilities, mapped onto actual historical developments.99 Each represents a different move that, it may be thought, Schopenhauer may, or should, make in response to the difficulties generated by his attempt to persevere with substantive metaphysical claims while contracting reason. In each case I will note very briefly its arguable limitation from Schopenhauer’s perspective or a problem that it encounters.

  6.4.1 Modifying German Idealism from Within: Late Schelling

  Schelling’s late philosophy is of course not a development of Schopenhauer’s philosophy but an independent development within German Idealism, which was already underway, though it had not come to completion, by the time Schopenhauer came on the German philosophical scene.100 It merits consideration here nonetheless, in so far as the late Schelling may be regarded as attempting to modify German Idealism in a way that incorporates the conviction at the root of Schopenhauer’s project: Schelling had in clear view from 1804 onwards the very problem that appears to mark the limit of Schopenhauer’s philosophical system, namely how to express and explain, in discursive terms and with reasoned justification, the failure of the real to be the rational.

  In his Essay on Human Freedom of 1809 Schelling tries to revise the system of idealism in a way that will accommodate the possibility of evil, something which, he argues, Kant, Fichte, and by implication his own earlier forms of idealism had precluded. This involves Schelling in rethinking the Absolute, or God, as primordially will, without conceptual form or understanding, ‘blind longing’. Reason, on this account, is something that comes to be, in and through God’s volitional self-realization. The pattern mirrors Schopenhauer: first there is will, then there is the space of reasons; and the possibility of evil derives from the ‘excess’ of reality over reason, the residue of non-rational will carried over into rationally formed reality.101 What might be claimed therefore is that, though Schopenhauer’s reassertion of the unsolved problem of evil poses a challenge which the incurably optimistic systems of Fichte and Hegel cannot meet, the challenge is eventually met by Schelling.

  The notion that Schelling takes the wind out of Schopenhauer’s sails encounters, however, the following obstacle. True to Kant, Schelling identifies evil as such with human moral evil—and this allows Schopenhauer to grant for the sake of argument that Schelling’s revision to German Idealism might account for the evil that enters the world through human action, while denying that it does anything to acknowledge the evil which is written into the fabric of the world (the evil which, to take an example from a relevant context, incites Adrian Leverkühn to take back the Ninth Symphony).102

  The following four neo-Schopenhauerian developments divide into two groups, according to whether they either approach Schopenhauer from the angle of German Idealism and attempt to resolve the tension in his system by working it into that context, or on the contrary propose to cut him loose from it. The pair comprising the first group can be described as ‘metaphilosophically realist’, in the sense that they regard Schopenhauer’s metaphysical claims as aiming at plain theoretical truth (in accord with Schopenhauer’s own view of their logical character) and as having immodest, non-Kantian, absolutist import. They subscribe accordingly to what I called Schopenhauer’s ‘Western’/metaphysical model, eschewing the illusionistic dimension of Schopenhauer’s treatment of empirical reality.

  6.4.2 Union with Hegel: Eduard von Hartmann’s Philosophy of the Unconscious

  Eduard von Hartmann regards Schopenhauer’s attempt to annex a metaphysics of will to empirical reality as essentially correct, but as suffering principally from the defect that Schopenhauer fails to explain how conceptual structure enters the picture. The teleological metaphysics of Hartmann’s Philosophy of the Unconscious, published in 1869, grounds natural phenomena in a manifold of unconscious acts of will, unified ultimately under the single act of will which he calls the (All-One) Unconscious. Thus far Hartmann is following, and developing, Schopenhauer’s line in On the Will in Nature. Hartmann departs from Schopenhauer, however, by interpreting the teleological metaphysics of nature as revealing the existence of an original synthesis of Hegel’s Idee and Schopenhauer’s alogical Wille, the dual equiprimordial constituents of reality. Nature falls out of their union: the Idee furnishes natural kinds and the order of nature, while Wille gives these actual existence, bringing to life and imparting movement to Hegel’s ghostly edifice.

  The broad philosophical significance of his Philosophy of the Unconscious, Hartmann explains, is that it comprises an overcoming of the antinomy formed by Hegel and Schopenhauer, yielding a super-system in which their respective deficiencies are corrected: the Schopenhauerian element allows Hegel to answer the familiar charge of panlogicism, while Hegel provides the ideational structure which Schopenhauer is unable to account for.103

  The crucial, striking element in Hartmann’s neo-Schopenhauerian metaphysics is the notion of an absolutely original, unconditioned union of Idee and Wille. This presents the following difficulty. The union is either rational or not, but if it is not, then it is impossible to understand how Idee can be affected by Wille, while if it is, then Wille must lie already within the space of reasons. It seems that, if the union is possible, then Wille must be proto-ideational and Idee must be proto-volitional; in which case their union amounts to the actualization of each through the other, their mutual realization in a hylomorphic relationship (suggesting, perhaps, that Idee and Wille cannot after all be absolutely primitive). This might be counted an interesting new addition to the neoplatonic canon, and it is arguably the position that Hartmann ought to have taken, but it is not, in fact, how he wishes to conceive matters: the Idee-Wille synthesis, Hartmann maintains, is indeed unintelligible; we must regard it as an error or wrong,104 that can be characterized only in quasi-mythic terms (on the model of sexual union).105 And with this it becomes clear that, contrary to the expectations raised by talk of a Hegel–Schopenhauer synthesis, Hartmann has not eased the tension present in Schopenhauer concerning the relation of Wille to PSR, nor has he intended to do so: rather he has singled it out, theorized it explicitly, and reaffirmed it at the apex of his system. The gain in explicitness is, however, offset—from Schopenhauer’s point of view—by the way in which Hartmann’s reconfiguration appears to remove irrationality from the world and relocate it outside, in its mere ontological antecedents.

  6.4.3 Schopenhauer in the language of Hegel: Julius Bahnsen’s Realdialektik

  Whereas Hartmann aims to fortify Schopenhauer’s system by melding it with Hegel’s, his contemporary Julius Bahnsen recasts Schopenhauer’s central ideas in the terms of Hegel’s dialectic.

  According to Bahnsen, there are, as Hegel says, contradictions in reality—the blame for antinomy falls on the object, not the thinking subject—but these are, as per Schopenhauer, functions of its character as Wille, not of an autonomous dynamic of the Begriff. The contradictions arise because will inherently contradicts itself—to will is to will not-to-will: every desire aims at its own extinction. The space of reasons just is the appearing (Schein) of the self-contradicting activity of Wille, and PSR the ‘law’ which governs it.106 Because conceptuality is nothing over and above Wille’s manifestation of its self-negating essence, there is nothing within it, no potential for autonomy, that could lead to an overcoming of the world’s constitutive contradictions. Whereas Hartmann marries Wille with reason, its ontological equal, Bahnsen’s more authentically Schopenhauerian approach reduces reason to Wille; again, whereas Hartmann concedes to Hegel the genuinely rational character of reality as given to us, Bahnsen follows Schopenhauer in ascribing an irrational character to the conceptually formed world. Pessimism, the defence of which
(as noted earlier) presents Hartmann with a difficulty, is thus firmly reinstated.107

  Bahnsen’s metaphysics lacks nothing in strangeness, yet may be regarded as again a consistent development from Schopenhauerian premises. Bahnsen’s original contribution to neo-Schopenhauerianism lies in his substitution for the antagonism of PSR with Wille a primordial antagonism within Wille itself. This facilitates what Schopenhauer denied to be possible, namely, a grounding of PSR, thereby converting Schopenhauer’s absolute dualism into an absolute monism. In a supreme reversal of Wolff, PSR is derived from a principle of self-contradiction.

  Of greatest importance for present purposes, however, is Bahnsen’s novel articulation of Schopenhauer’s core thesis. Bahnsen takes from Hartmann a term that is absent from Schopenhauer, antilogisch, in order to characterize the essence of Wille.108 He does so because he wishes to conceive Wille not as merely outside reason in the familiar and innocuous sense in which for bald naturalists nature and efficient natural causality lie outside the space of reasons, but as contrary or antagonistic to reason.109 This notion makes sense, however, only if Wille’s opposition to reason is a relation distinct from opposition in the material sense of conflicting causality, for example, the clash of physical forces, which is merely alogical or non-logical. The relation must instead comprise, or have a character akin to, logical opposition. The only thing that can be thought to stand opposed to logic as such is contradiction, the Contradictory. Bahnsen’s Antilogische provides for this not through dialetheism, the true conjunction of contradictory assertoric propositions, but through contradiction in will: performative, as opposed to constative, contradiction. Bahnsen’s Wille thus opposes reason in the mode of refuting or falsifying it, by dint of the fact that reality as a whole and in all of its individual forms—all possible candidates for satisfying or exemplifying reason—has in essence the nature of an impossible undertaking (a striving with the incoherent content: ‘to will-not-to-will’).

  Bahnsen’s Realdialektik unpacks and sharpens Schopenhauer’s claim that Wille is ‘foreign’ to PSR, but makes no advance with the problem that we have been tracking in Schopenhauer. According to Realdialektik, the relation of thought to reality too must exhibit contradiction, meaning that no philosophical system which grasps reality adequately can give a full and complete account of its capacity to do so; Bahnsen’s claim to knowledge of the self-contradictory essence of Wille is no less precarious than Schopenhauer’s claim to knowledge of the grounding of the world in Wille.110

  Hartmann and Bahnsen give a fair idea of what can be done with Schopenhauer by reworking his thought in the terms of German Idealism. The alternative is to abandon the aspiration to plain theoretical truth. This may be buttressed by the suggestion that just as, according to Schopenhauer, Kant allowed the Leibnizian-Wolffian philosophy which comprised his proximate target to condition and compromise his own system,111 so Schopenhauer, too much under the spell of the idea of Philosophy-as-System, made the same mistake with respect to German Idealism. Two such ‘metaphilosophically anti-realist’ construals of Schopenhauer’s philosophy suggest themselves. They are independent but not exclusive, and both are associated with Nietzsche.

  6.4.4 ‘Aestheticist’ Reconstrual of Schopenhauer

  If Schopenhauer’s system cannot lay claim to theoretical truth, it may still be construed expressively or aesthetically, or perhaps as a case of ‘showing’ what cannot be said, and in such terms a species of validity claimed for it. Whether or not such an approach counts as a poor second best, or entails a complete abandonment of cognitive ambition, will depend upon what general view is taken of the significance of aesthetic presentations and of the capacity of philosophical thought to attain theoretical truth; in the case of Wittgenstein’s rendering of Schopenhauer’s insights in the Tractatus, for example, it is not at all clear that cognitive inferiority is implied.

  An anti-realist understanding of Schopenhauer underlies Nietzsche’s non-committal use of his metaphysics in The Birth of Tragedy, where the Schopenhauerian dissolution of nature into a trans-phenomenal will is compared to a ‘light-image [Lichtbild] that healing nature holds up to us after we have glimpsed the abyss’.112 Though Schopenhauer himself barely wavers in his commitment to the unqualified truth of his system, there are moments when his concept empiricism may seem to draw him in such a direction—philosophy is described as merely depositing in concepts ‘a reflected image [reflektirtes Abbild]’ of the inner nature of the world.113

  One way of developing this line in Schopenhauer’s own terms would be to claim that his philosophical system stands in the same sort of relation to man, or the human condition, as a work of art does to the Idea that it realizes. Since tragedy is for Schopenhauer the form of art that expresses most perfectly the Idea of man,114 Schopenhauer’s metaphysics would count as a theorization not essentially different from a tragic work but simply more abstract. The measure of the success of his system would consist, at least in part, in the application of criteria appropriate to a work of art—verisimilitude, resonance, hermeneutic traction, and so on. That Schopenhauer’s philosophy lends itself readily to such a perspective is testified by its extraordinary track record of literary inspiration.

  The essential point at any rate is that if Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of Wille are viewed aesthetically, then they are discharged from the task of explanation: the distinction between answering and simply evoking the ‘riddle of the world’ disappears, and with it the tension created by his contraction of PSR. Also affected, however, is Schopenhauer’s axiological conviction: that the world is intrinsically and positively evil must now be regarded as something other than a straightforward fact about its nature.

  6.4.5 ‘Practicalist’ Reconstrual of Schopenhauer: Nietzsche

  Nietzscheans may welcome the earlier conclusion that Schopenhauer fails in his endeavour to deconstruct German Idealism as showing the necessity of taking a greater initial distance from the legacy of idealism in order to overcome it. Nietzsche’s own deconstruction of Schopenhauer’s pessimism is well-known and needs only brief rehearsal. According to Nietzsche, what it means for the will or the practical to have primacy is not just for the intellect to be, as a factual matter, causally subordinate to the will, à la Freud. Certainly it entails that philosophical thought should reflect on its own motivation, but more deeply it means, metaphilosophically, that values, taken to be themselves non-metaphysical, replace metaphysical truth-claims in our understanding of the practical, and that philosophical reflection makes legitimate appeal to values in determining how to conceptualize the world. Practical orientation is understood with indifference to metaphysical questions (thus to some extent in a more Kantian way), and henceforth depth psychology replaces metaphysics in providing practical and axiological guidance. And this practical turn can be given a Schopenhauerian justification: Nietzsche’s contention is that if the contraction of PSR is carried through consistently (and on his account there is further to go in dethroning reason) then practical and axiological concerns cannot be regarded any longer as topics in, or as subject to the authority of, metaphysics.

  In this light, Nietzsche argues, Schopenhauer’s own ground floor conviction that evil has positive reality must be re-examined, from which it emerges that this metaphysical judgement is a mere symptom of a defective constitution, lacking in truth and expressive of a stance towards the world which has no privileged rationality. Nietzsche thus converts Schopenhauer’s categorical judgement that the world is evil, is such that it ought not to be, into an act of will, a bare imperative of world-rejection. The respective claims of optimism and pessimism, keenly debated in the late nineteenth century, form for Nietzsche an antinomy resting on a false presupposition, and its dissolution opens up new horizons.

  Both the realist and the anti-realist developments can claim to stay true to the spirit of Schopenhauer’s project; Hartmann and Bahnsen may be regarded as restoring it to its terminus a quo, and Nietzsche as articulating its terminus ad quem. The latter i
s doubtless more congenial to us now, but its limitation—again, from Schopenhauer’s point of view—is worth noting. What holds Schopenhauer within metaphysics is not a failure to grasp the possibility of saying farewell to the whole business of trying to say something about the essence of the world: the basis for that post-metaphysical option is set out clearly in Fourfold Root. The reason why Schopenhauer does not take it is that the evil of existence is, for him, a hard fact, a fact so hard that only the thing in itself can do justice to its reality. From this angle, the primary task, the difficulty of which was not lost on Nietzsche, is to persuade Schopenhauer out of his conviction of the theoretical character of his insight; in other words, to demonstrate that the anti-realist reconstrual does not—as it will appear to Schopenhauer—amount to a loss of reality and betrayal of his insight.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Abbreviations employed in reference to Schopenhauer’s works:

  BM Prize Essay on the Basis of Morals

  FR On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason

  FW Prize Essay on the Freedom of the Will

  MREM Manuscript Remains: Early Manuscripts (1804–1818)

  MRCD Manuscript Remains: Critical Debates (1809–1818)

  PP Parerga and Paralipomena, Vols. I–II

  VgP Vorlesung über die gesammte Philosophie

  WN On the Will in Nature

  WWR The World as Will and Representation, Vols. I–II