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 philo- sophical thought. Powerful and radical, the ideas of these philosophers have often been contested, but they remain key to understanding current philo- sophical 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 thinkers philosophical ideas. Published titles The Philosophy of Gadamer 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 of Deleuze The Philosophy of Husserl Peter Sedgwick Burt Hopkins The Philosophy of Derrida The Philosophy of Kant Mark Dooley and Liam Kavanagh Jim OShea The Philosophy of Foucault The Philosophy of Kierkegaard Todd May George Pattison The Philosophy of Habermas 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 Dale Jacquette © Dale Jacquette, 2005 This book is copyright under the Berne Convention. No reproduction without permission. All rights reserved. First published in 2005 by Acumen Acumen Publishing Limited 15a Lewins Yard East Street Chesham Bucks HP5 1HQ www.acumenpublishing.co.uk ISBN: 1-84465-008-1 (hardcover) ISBN: 1-84465-009-X (paperback) British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Designed and typeset in Classical Garamond by Kate Williams, Swansea. Printed and bound by Biddles Limited, Kings Lynn. Contents Preface vii Acknowledgements x A note on texts and terminology xi Abbreviations xiii Introduction: Schopenhauers life and times 1 1 Schopenhauers 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 Schopenhauers 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 Schopenhauers 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 Schopenhauers 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 Schopenhauers 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 Wittgensteins debt to Schopenhauers 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 signsymbol 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 vii THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCHOPENHAUER Eastern mysticism and a penetrating if grotesque insight into the problems of life. The authors 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 Schopenhauers 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 Schopenhauers life work not merely as indispensable to a complete under- standing of the Western tradition, or of nineteenth-century German ideal- ism, but because Schopenhauers 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 Schopenhauers 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 Schopenhauers 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 Schopenhauers 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 Kants distinction between phenomena and thing-in-itself. He nevertheless rejects Kants attempt to demonstrate the existence of thing-in-itself, and, in the process, more significantly, he denies Kants 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 Schopenhauers 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, viii PREFACE however, that repeatedly draws readers back to Schopenhauers writings, to understand more clearly the remarkable chain of inferences by which he proposes to identify thing-in-itself as Will. Dale Jacquette ix Acknowledgements I am grateful to the series editor, John Shand, for inviting me to contribute this volume on Schopenhauer to Acumens series on Continental European Philosophy. The material for this book was first presented in seminar lectures on Schopenhauers philosophy at The Pennsylvania State University in spring 2003. The chapters were drafted in the summer immediately thereafter dur- ing the course of a bicycle trip through southern Germany along the Romantische Straße from Würzburg to Fuessen, and completed in the win- ter of 2004 while serving as Director for Penn States Athens Abroad Program in Greece. I am indebted to David Cartwright for perceptive suggestions for improvement of an earlier draft of the book, and to Dana Van Kooy and the Center for British and Irish Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, for assistance in tracking down elusive sources. I thank my wife and cycling partner Tina for her boundless patience and wise loving counsel. A note on texts and terminology Schopenhauers masterwork, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, was pub- lished as a single volume in 1818, and reissued in a revised and expanded two-volume second edition in 1844, followed by a third edition the year before his death in 1859. In its English translation as The World as Will and Idea or The World as Will and Representation, the books