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* * *
1 The main broad feature of nineteenth-century thought not exhibited by Schopenhauer—and which he in fact opposes vigorously—is its historical turn: see The World as Will and Representation [1st edn. 1819; 2nd edn., revised and enlarged, 2 volumes, 1844], 2 vols., trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1969), Vol. I, pp. 273–4. Further references to this work are abbreviated WWR, followed by volume and page number. References to other writings of Schopenhauer’s are given by the following abbreviations and are to the editions cited here:
BM Prize Essay on the Basis of Morals [1840], in The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics, trans. David E. Cartwright and Edward E. Erdmann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
FR On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason [1st edn. 1813, 2nd edn. 1847], 2nd edn. trans. E. F. J. Payne (LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court, 1974).
FW Prize Essay on the Freedom of the Will [1839], in The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics, trans. David E. Cartwright and Edward E. Erdmann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
MREM Manuscript Remains: Early Manuscripts (1804–1818), ed. Arthur Hübscher, trans. E. F. J. Payne, Manuscript Remains in Four Volumes, Vol. 1 (New York: Berg, 1988).
MRCD Manuscript Remains: Critical Debates (1809–1818), ed. Arthur Hübscher, trans. E. F. J. Payne, Manuscript Remains in Four Volumes, Vol. 2 (New York: Berg, 1988).
PP Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays [1851], 2 vols., trans. E. F. J. Payne (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974).
VgP Vorlesung über die gesammte Philosophie d.i. Die Lehre vom Wesen der Welt und von dem menschlichen Geiste. In vier Theilen. Erster Theil: Theorie des gesammten Vorstellens, Denkens und Erkennens, in Theorie des gesammten Vorstellens, Denkens und Erkennens. Aus dem handschriftlichen Nachlaß [1820], hrsg. u. eingeleitet von Volker Spierling (München: Piper, 1986).
WN On the Will in Nature: A Discussion of the Corroborations from the Empirical Sciences that the Author’s Philosophy has Received Since its First Appearance [1836], ed. David E. Cartwright, trans. E. F. J. Payne (Oxford: Berg, 1991).
2 On Schopenhauer’s early years, see Arthur Hübscher, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer in its Intellectual Context: Thinker against the Tide, trans. Joachim T. Baer and David E. Cartwright (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1989), Chs. 5–6, and David E. Cartwright, Schopenhauer: A Biogr
aphy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), Ch. 4.
3 Christopher Janaway, in Self and World in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 141–2, similarly affirms the need to set Schopenhauer in historical context in order to understand his departures from Kant. For analyses of Schopenhauer’s epistemology and metaphysics, see, in addition to Janaway, Julian Young, Willing and Unwilling: A Study in the Philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1987) and Schopenhauer (London: Routledge, 2005), and John E. Atwell, Schopenhauer on the Character of the World: The Metaphysics of Will (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
4 As he does explicitly at WWR I, 416, and PP I, 132.
5 WWR II, 644–5: all German Idealism is Spinozistic, and therefore optimistic.
6 See MREM, 13: Kant exposed the contradictions in the lie which is life.
7 WWR I, 149, 164.
8 The ‘notion that the world has merely a physical, and no moral, significance is the most deplorable error that has sprung from the greatest perversity of mind’ (PP II, 102). Schopenhauer distinguishes his position from the ‘Neo-Spinozism’ described by Jacobi at WWR II, 645–6.
9 See Schopenhauer’s claim to have solved the age-old problem of demonstrating ‘a moral world-order as the basis of the physical’, WWR II, 590–1.
10 For example, WWR I, xiv.
11 The critical intention becomes more pronounced in the amplified second edition of 1847, but is clear even in the first (1813).
12 FR 14–16, 18–19, 228–9.
13 FR, 162–3, 232.
14 FR, 234. See also FR, 2–4, 231; WWR II, 641; and VgP, 494. I discuss Fourfold Root in more detail in Sebastian Gardner, ‘Schopenhauer’s Contraction of Reason: Clarifying Kant and Undoing German Idealism’, Kantian Review 17, 2012, 375–401, Section 3.
15 See FR, 234.
16 For example, WWR I, 128, 163; WWR II, 579; PP II, 94.
17 MRCD, 430–1.
18 ‘[I]f we wish to call any concept objective, then it must be one which demonstrates its origin and object in sensuous feeling (the five senses)’ (MRCD, 357); ‘concepts have no meaning other than their relation to intuitive representations (whose representatives they are)’ (MRCD, 471). See also FR, 15, 146–8; WWR I, 39–42; and MRCD, 298–9, 468.
19 To clarify their relation: Schopenhauer’s account of PSR does not presuppose and is not argued for via his concept empiricism. Schopenhauer’s concept empiricism, however, is not independent of his account of PSR, since this is presupposed by his account of the intuitive representations from which concepts are formed. What concept empiricism adds to the contraction of PSR is the closing of a loophole which the transcendent post-Kantian might seek to exploit, viz., the possibility of novel conceptual construction.
20 The theses of all four antinomies are, Schopenhauer argues, groundless: dialectical illusion is purely one-sided, and the world infinite in all its dimensions. See MRCD, 480–5; WWR I, 492–501; and VgP, 492–6.
21 ‘Just as though Kant had never existed, the principle of sufficient reason is for Fichte just what it was for all the scholastics, namely an aeternae veritas’ (WWR I, 33). That Fichte alerted Schopenhauer to the importance of PSR is suggested by his annotated lecture notes. In a lecture transcript from 1811 Schopenhauer records Fichte’s identification of Wissenschaft with ‘the region of reasons or grounds’, which is ‘supernatural or spiritual’, and of the Wissenschaftslehre with ‘the reason or ground of all knowing’ (MRCD, 22, 28). In WWR I, 33, Fichte is charged with construing the ego-world relation, on the basis of PSR, as a ground-consequent relation.
22 See Béatrice Longuenesse, ‘Kant’s Deconstruction of the Principle of Sufficient Reason’, in Kant on the Human Standpoint (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
23 Again and again Schopenhauer returns to the point that German Idealism rests on a transcendent and hence illegitimate employment of a priori concepts, especially that of causality: MRCD, 22, 359, 372, 376, 378–9, 384–6. In an annotation to lectures from 1811–12, Schopenhauer identifies Fichte’s fundamental mistake with his ‘failure to understand Kant’s teaching’ (‘possibly due to a defect in Kant’s doctrine’) that explanation stops with immanent causes, and describes Fichte’s appeal to the I qua ‘principle’ as a concealed attempt to circumvent this restriction (MRCD, 64; see also 124 and 134). Note that Kant too, on Schopenhauer’s account, fell victim to the illusion cast by PSR (MRCD, 463n.), and bears some responsibility for the German Idealist development (MRCD, 64, 412; FR, 164, 176; VgP, 252–3).
24 MRCD, 111.
25 FR, 16; see also FR, 21–3.
26 See WWR I, 418, 510–11.
27 WWR I, §57, and Book IV, passim; PP II, Ch. 12. On this argument, see Christopher Janaway, ‘Schopenhauer’s Pessimism’, in Christopher Janaway (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
28 As Nietzsche recognizes: ‘The ungodliness of existence was for him something given, palpable, indisputable…unconditional and honest atheism is simply the presupposition of the way he poses his problem’ (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 2nd edn. [1887], trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), §357, 307). That it has axiomatic status is shown by the way in which it is invoked: see, for example, MRCD, 391; and WWR II, 577, 581–4, 643. It is the original motor, and a condition of, philosophical reflection: see WWR II, 171, 579, and note 40.
29 Directly through its implication of psychological determinism, and indirectly through its elimination of ideas of reason, undermining all of the special devices employed by Kant to conserve human freedom in the face of the causal principle.
30 In his very earliest notes, from 1808–9, Schopenhauer describes the world as ‘only an image of an actual evil existing in eternity…the (Platonic) Idea of that real, inexplicable and unconditioned evil’ (MREM, 9).
31 WWR I, 95 and 98–9.
32 Note that the mere ‘emptiness’ or nullity (Nichtigkeit) of the world as representation in the sense of its insubstantiality and illusoriness (Scheinbarkeit) consequent upon the purely relational constitution of phenomena (WWR I, 7, 366; VgP, 474–7), is not sufficient for pessimism (life’s dream-likeness does not of itself make life a bad dream or a dream that ought not to be dreamt).
33 This metaphysical contradiction, note, is to be distinguished from the actual contradiction which constitutes denial of the will to live (WWR I, 288, 301). The former, which obtains between the two worlds or world-aspects, is realized and becomes explicit in the latter, which obtains between the phenomenon and itself (as its self-renunciation) or between Wille and the phenomenon (WWR I, 402–3).
34 WWR I, 144–9, 161.
35 WWR II, Chs. 42 and 44, esp. 538–40.
36 WWR I, 331 and §63; WWR II, 580–2, 604; PP II, 301–2. See also the remarks on tragedy, WWR I, 252–5.
37 WWR I, §61, §§64–6.
38 WWR I, §68.
39 PP II, 304. ‘[I]ndividuality is really only a special error, a false step, something that it would be better should not be’ (WWR II, 491–2; see also WWR II, 579 and 604).
40 We are to grasp the flow of hedonic experience, its repeated cyclical relapse into some or other mode of suffering, as it were formally (rather in the way that we, Schopenhauer supposes, apprehend Wille in music). Schopenhauer reformulates the idea interestingly in the assertion (directed against Schelling) that I find myself necessarily ‘not in an absolute state’ but rather in ‘a state from which I crave release’, described as ‘the motive of all genuine philosophical endeavour’ (MRCD, 360, 361, 365).
41 Just as natural science, according to Schopenhauer’s argument in On the Will in Nature, corroborates the metaphysics of will. It is to be noted that Schopenhauer has also an axiological argument for his pessimistic metaphysics (mirroring Kant’s claim that moral interest argues for the truth of transcendental idealism): his metaphysics are required—once the contraction of PSR has been accepted�
��in order to preserve the possibility of salvation in the face of our mortality (WWR II, 643–4). More broadly, Schopenhauer offers the inducements that—again, given the results of Kant’s philosophy—no other way of endowing suffering with meaning, or of rescuing any truth in Christianity, is available (MREM, 10; MRCD, 338; WWR I, §70; WWR II, Ch. 48).
42 This is a clearer and much revised reworking of material in Part Three of the 1794–5 presentation of the Wissenschaftslehre: J. G. Fichte, Foundations of the Entire Science of Knowledge, in The Science of Knowledge, with the First and Second Introductions, ed. and trans. Peter Heath and John Lachs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 256–68. Schopenhauer’s critical comments on Fichte’s System of Ethics are in MRCD, 399–406. It is in this text of Fichte’s that Johann Friedrich Herbart, in his highly critical review of the first volume of WWR (‘Rezension, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung von Arthur Schopenhauer. Leipzig, bei F. M. Brockhaus. 1819’, Hermes, oder, Kritisches Jahrbuch der Literatur 20, 1820, 131–48), claims to find already formulated Schopenhauer’s thesis that will comprises the inner essence of the subject.
43 For the reason that thinking requires something objective set in opposition to it, if it is to become an object, whereas willing, at the level of facts of consciousness, stands necessarily in opposition to something objective: J. G. Fichte, The System of Ethics according to the Principles of the Wissenschaftslehre [1798], ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale and Günter Zöller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 26.
44 That there is a ‘sake’ or aim—separating Fichte from Schopenhauer at the outset—is crucial. Schelling, in his still Fichtean System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), trans. Peter Heath (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1978), p. 35, considers and rejects the possibility that the self’s activity is fundamentally ‘blind’.
45 And only through concepts, Fichte, System of Ethics, p. 42.
46 The I’s finding itself as a Tendenz has not, we now see, been sufficiently accounted for; Fichte, System of Ethics, pp. 43–4.
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