The philosophy of Schopenhauer

320 Pages·2005·20.24 MB·English

by  Schopenhauer

The Philosophy of
Schopenhauer
Continental European Philosophy
This series provides accessible and stimulating introductions to the ideas of
continental thinkers who have shaped the fundamentals of European
philosophical thought. Powerful and radical, the ideas of these philosophers
have often been contested, but they remain key to understanding current
philosophical thinking as well as the current direction of disciplines such as
political science, literary theory, comparative literature, art history, and
cultural studies. Each book seeks to combine clarity with depth, introducing
fresh insights and wider perspectives while also providing a comprehensive
survey of each thinker's philosophical ideas.
Published titles
The Philosophy ofGadamer
Jean Grondin
The Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty
Eric Matthews
The Philosophy of Nietzsche
Rex Welshon
The Philosophy of Schopenhauer
Dale Jacquette
Forthcoming titles include
The Philosophy ofDeleuze The Philosophy ofHusserl
Peter Sedgwick Burt Hopkins
The Philosophy ofDerrida The Philosophy of Kant
Mark Dooley and Liam Kavanagh Jim O'Shea
The Philosophy ofFoucaul t The Philosophy of Kierkegaard
Todd May George Pattison
The Philosophy ofHabermas The Philosophy of Marx
Andrew Edgar Mark Neocleous
The Philosophy of Hegel The Philosophy of Rousseau
Allen Speight Patrick Riley, Sr and Patrick Riley, Jr
The Philosophy of Heidegger The Philosophy of Sartre
Jeff Malpas Anthony Hatzimoysis
The Philosophy of
Schopenhauer
Dole Jacquette
McGill-Queen's University Press
Montreal & Kingston • Ithaca
© Dale Jacquette 2005
ISBN 0-7735-2980-2 (hardcover)
ISBN 0-7735-2981-0 (paperback)
Legal deposit second quarter 2005
Bibliotheque nationale du Quebec
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
All rights reserved.
Published simultaneously outside North America
by Acumen Publishing Limited
McGill-Queen's University Press acknowledges the financial support of
the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Development
Program (BPIDP) for its activities.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Jacquette, Dale
The philosophy of Schopenhauer / Dale Jacquette.
(Continental European philosophy)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7735-2980-2 (bound).—ISBN 0-7735-2981-0 (pbk.)
1. Schopenhauer, Arthur, 1788-1860. I. Title.
II. Series.
B3148J33 2005 193 C2005-900986-1
Designed and typeset by Kate Williams, Swansea.
Printed and bound by Biddies Ltd., King's Lynn.
Contents
Pre/izce vii
Acfewow/edgeraewts X
A note on texts and terminology xi
Abbreviations xiii
Introduction: Schopenhauer's life and times 1
1
Schopenhauer's idealism 11
2 Empirical knowledge of the world as representation: from
natural science to transcendental metaphysics 40
3 Willing and the world as Will 71
4 Suffering, salvation, death, and renunciation of the will to life 108
5 Art and aesthetics of the beautiful and sublime 145
6 Transcendental freedom of Will 180
7 Compassion as the philosophical foundation of morality 203
8 Schopenhauer's legacy in the philosophy of Nietzsche,
Heidegger and the early Wittgenstein 234
Notes 265
Bibliography and recommended reading 281
Index 291
V
For Tina, as always, with love
Preface
I came to Schopenhauer indirectly through a prior interest in the philosophy
of Wittgenstein. In particular, I wanted to understand what Wittgenstein
means in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 6.4211, when he says that "Ethics
is transcendent. Ethics and aesthetics are one." The secondary literature
hinted that Schopenhauer's philosophy might provide the key. While this was
a tantalizing clue, it did not by itself resolve my uncertainty, but only led to
more and more careful reading and rereading of Schopenhauer's works. It
was not long in this process before my original motives for studying
Schopenhauer ripened into a lasting involvement with all aspects of his
thought on its own terms and for its own sake.
As an undergraduate I read Schopenhauer's Fourfold Root of the Princi-
ple of Sufficient Reason and both volumes of The World as Will and Repre-
sentation in translation. This first exposure to Schopenhauer gave me a
rough idea of his philosophy and its relation to the philosophies of Plato and
Kant, just as at the time I had only a rough idea of the philosophies of Plato
and Kant. It was insufficient background later on to help me clarify what I
now see as the early Wittgenstein's debt to Schopenhauer's transcendental-
ism, not only in the identification of ethics with aesthetics and his concept
of the metaphysical subject or philosophical I, but in every aspect of his
philosophical semantics and its applications in the Tractatus^ including the
sign-symbol distinction and picture theory of meaning.
What I discovered in reacquainting myself with Schopenhauer is the
explanatory power of his dual aspect conception of the world as Will and
representation. However useful the study of Schopenhauer has been to my
understanding of later episodes in the history of philosophy, it is his philo-
sophical system standing on its own that has meant increasingly more to my
own reflections in metaphysics, ethics and aesthetics, and in my efforts to
come to terms with all the comedy and tragedy of the human condition.
Schopenhauer combines mid-nineteenth-century scientific philosophy with
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THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCHOPENHAUER
Eastern mysticism and a penetrating if grotesque insight into the problems
of life. The author's captivating philosophical prose, the extraordinary
rancour and passion that shine through on every page, and the ingenious
fitting together of so many diverse kinds of knowledge from so many differ-
ent branches of study, contribute to making Schopenhauer's thought a most
audacious philosophical enterprise, with an astonishing array of implications
for metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, aesthetics,
philosophy of logic, mathematics, science and religion. We delve into
Schopenhauer's life work not merely as indispensable to a complete under-
standing of the Western tradition, or of nineteenth-century German ideal-
ism, but because Schopenhauer's reflections, if true, no matter how abstruse,
offer something that philosophy in our more cynical and still positivistic age
has abandoned as beyond the reach of responsible enquiry: a single key to
unlock all the philosophical difficulties and religious and psychological
mysteries surrounding the facts of life and death.
I approach Schopenhauer critically, as a logician and dyed-in-the-wool
analytic philosopher. I do so, however, I believe, with more genuine sympa-
thy for his project and its conclusions than most scientifically trained scholars
typically take away from his pages. While there are numerous excellent
introductions to Schopenhauer's thought, and new studies on special topics
in his philosophy appear every several years, I devote more attention than I
have seen in other expositions to Schopenhauer's main and most controver-
sial contribution to metaphysics - the arguments by which he hopes to prove
that thing-in-itself is Will. My reason for examining Schopenhauer's reason-
ing in such detail is that it is specifically by these considerations that he claims
to have surpassed Kant as the greatest of all his philosophical precursors.
Schopenhauer enthusiastically adopts Kant's distinction between phenomena
and thing-in-itself. He nevertheless rejects Kant's attempt to demonstrate the
existence of thing-in-itself, and, in the process, more significantly, he denies
Kant's conclusion that thing-in-itself is unknowable, merely conceivable,
noumenon. By offering a glimpse of the hidden nature of thing-in-itself as
Will, Schopenhauer goes far, perhaps too far, beyond his teacher. He thereby
sets in motion a cascade of implications for other fields of philosophy in the
understanding of science, natural history, religion, art and every phenomenal
and transcendental aspect of social and political reality. Schopenhauer pur-
sues many of these finer points in his later writings and revised editions of his
major works, all of which can be understood as supplements to The World as
Will and Representation.
The unified synthesis of so many different lines of thought and their
sweeping consequences makes Schopenhauer's philosophy, if correct in its
principal assertions, one of the most groundshaking, all-encompassing
worldviews ever to appear in the history of ideas. It is this elephantine if,
vm
PREFACE
however, that repeatedly draws readers back to Schopenhauer's writings, to
understand more clearly the remarkable chain of inferences by which he
proposes to identify thing-in-itself as Will.
Dale Jacquette
IX