chapter 9 Plato’s Conception of Time at the Foundation of Schopenhauer’s Philosophy Robert Wicks When commonly thinking about Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy, Plato’s influence does not immediately come to mind. Schopenhauer’s reputation as a “pessimist” is probably the first thought, and if one’s acquaintance is more than passing, his belief that a meaningless, blind “Will” is at the bottom of all things quickly follows. Perhaps next, in no particular order, are his vanguard incorpo- ration of Asian thought into Western philosophy, his bitter condemnations of G.W.F. Hegel and salaried university professors, the uncomfortable anecdote of his having angrily thrown a noisy cleaning woman down a staircase in a fit of frustration, and for those who are more well-versed, his deep and abiding influence on Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche. Concerning Plato, most scholarly discussions of Schopenhauer tend to con- centrate on the status and role of Platonic Ideas in his philosophy, usually in reference to how they inform Schopenhauer’s aesthetic theory.1 This is a fruit- ful approach, as circumscribed as it is, and we will consider Schopenhauer’s understanding of Platonic Ideas near the end of this essay. More important, however, is to situate such an inquiry within the context of the more funda- mental recognition that Schopenhauer’s initial reading of Plato, a philosopher he often called “the divine”, set the groundwork for Schopenhauer’s philosoph- ical ascension to a so-called better consciousness through art, morality and asceticism. In the absence of this wider context, it is easy to overlook how Plato’s ini- tial influence kindled the driving insight at the foundation of Schopenhauer’s philosophy—an insight more deep-seated than Schopenhauer’s famous metaphysical apprehension that the world is Will. This is his appreciation of the nature of time as “the moving image of eternity”, as Plato described it in the Timaeus (37c–e). Upon this, Schopenhauer set his more characteristic view that the spatio-temporal world is a prison of endless frustration, a view 1 The primary textual location for Schopenhauer’s aesthetics is The World as Will and Representation, Volume i (wwr i), Book iii, §§30–52. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004285163_010 Plato’s Conception of Time 193 itself inspired significantly by Plato’s allegory of the cave (Rep. 514a–520a) and the Epinomis. In this essay, we will develop these points of Platonic inspiration for Schopenhauer to illustrate how profoundly and extensively Plato’s thought shaped Schopenhauer’s philosophy. 1 Schopenhauer’s Early Encounter with Plato’s Writings In 1809, at the age of twenty-one, Schopenhauer began his university stud- ies at Göttingen. Prior to this, he had served until age nineteen as a business apprentice according to his father’s wishes, after which he completed a couple of years of university preparation.2 At the advice of his philosophy instructor in Göttingen, Gottlob Ernst Schulze (1761–1833), Schopenhauer carefully read Plato and Kant to establish a basis for studying other philosophers. Schulze’s advice was long-lived: for the rest of his life, Schopenhauer typically employed Platonic and Kantian lenses to interpret the world around him. After two years in Göttingen, motivated to develop his knowledge by attend- ing the lectures of one of the leading philosophers of the time, Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814), Schopenhauer concluded his university training with two additional years (1811–13) at the University of Berlin—a newly-established university which had started classes a year before, in 1810. Among his courses, Schopenhauer attended lectures on Plato’s dialogues given by the philologist, August Boeckh (1785–1867). Boeckh was then publishing on Plato’s doctrine of the world (1810), although his class appears to have been a review for Schopenhauer, judging from the latter’s manuscript notes and later correspon- dence. In light of his experience reading Plato in both Göttingen and Berlin, however, we can say that by 1812, at age twenty-four, Plato’s philosophy, as well as Kant’s, was firmly rooted in Schopenhauer’s mind. This combination of Plato and Kant bore negatively on Schopenhauer’s reception of Fichte’s lectures, which, despite an initial enthusiasm, were soon experienced as obscurantist and intellectually misguided.3 2 Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer (1747–1805) died when Arthur was seventeen, and Arthur con- tinued with the business apprenticeship for two more years in respect for his father. 3 When he was writing his dissertation in 1813, within a year of having attended Fichte’s lec- tures, Schopenhauer wrote in his notebooks that he regarded Fichte’s philosophizing as motivated mainly by a merely technical, theoretical concern with Kant’s notion of the thing- in-itself, rather than by a genuine perplexity about the nature of the world. As such, he did not regard him as a true philosopher (MR i: 81, §112 [Rudolstadt 1813, Q])..