CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by UCL Discovery 1 Schopenhauer's Deconstruction of German Idealism Sebastian Gardner Introduction Arthur Schopenhauer occupies a central position in the narrative of nineteenth-century philosophy: though first and foremost an idealist, Schopenhauer belongs also to its naturalistic current, and with regard to many other central tendencies of the age – including the turn towards the practical, at the expense of the early modern image of man as reality-reflecting reason, the elevation of art to a position of near parity with philosophy, and the exploration of proxies for traditional religion – Schopenhauer again occupies a pivotal role; in a way that deserves to be found puzzling, Schopenhauer provides the key connecting link of Kant with Nietzsche.1 My aim here is to consider 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. 273–274. 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 below: 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 2 Schopenhauer's philosophy from the perspective of German Idealism, an approach which, I will try to show, takes us to the heart of his project and allows us to understand how a philosopher only one step removed from the philosophy of the Enlightenment could provide crucial impetus to late modern anti-rationalism. Some preliminary remarks are needed concerning this contextualization. Schopenhauer's intention was not of course to provide simply a critique of German Idealism, but rather to present a 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 Vorstellen, 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). 3 self-standing, independently intelligible system, the grounds of which are contained in basic facts of consciousness and accessible to anyone who is able and willing to reflect on these in the unobscured light of Kant's first Critique. Nor again is Schopenhauer's target – the world-view he intends his system to confute – identified narrowly with the positions of Fichte, Schelling, or Hegel: it comprises, much more broadly, the dominant tendency operative within all the major schools of Western philosophy, namely, their directedness towards an optimistic solution to the riddle of the existence of the world. It is possible, therefore, to detach Schopenhauer's philosophy from all consideration of German Idealism, or to consider it, as much commentary does, only in relation to Kant and Nietzsche, but there are sound reasons for instead understanding his system abreactively – as in the first instance an attempt to simultaneously undermine, appropriate, and recast the legacy of German Idealism. It is a matter of historical record that Schopenhauer in the earliest years of his philosophical formation had extensive exposure to the lectures and writings of Fichte and Schelling, with whom he engages more closely in his early notebooks than with any other figures in the history of philosophy with the exception of Kant.2 Approaching Schopenhauer with this in mind allows better sense to be made of Schopenhauer's ideas than can be got simply by placing them directly alongside Kant's, Schopenhauer's departures from whom often seem oddly under- motivated:3 Schopenhauer's return to Kant is a return from German Idealism, conducted in light of 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 Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), Ch. 4. 3 Christopher Janaway, in Self and World in Schopenhauer's Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 141–142, 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 4 its misconstrual (as he perceives it) of Kant's thought. It is of course in relation to Kant alone that Schopenhauer asks for his system to be considered, but we can understand without difficulty the reasons why Schopenhauer would have wished to write German Idealism out of his philosophical ancestry.4 German Idealism represents for Schopenhauer the culmination of the optimistic tendency of Western philosophy and theology, which it equips with the most advanced modern articulation,5 its distinctive historical position consisting in its having recognized the profound and original advance made by Critical philosophy yet perversely refused to grasp its anti-optimistic vector.6 Finally, Schopenhauer's central metaphysical claims allow themselves to be understood as negations of key claims in German Idealism. Schopenhauer's philosophy represents, I therefore suggest, the result of an attempt to as it were re-run the post-Kantian development – the attempt beginning in the 1790s to fix Kant's problems – on the basis of a rejection of two crucial assumptions of Fichte and Schelling. The first of these is their reaffirmation of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR), to which they grant unrestricted scope and authority. The second concerns the value of our existence and that of the world, which is held, following Kant, to be secured by the moral Fact of Reason, meaning that value in general is grounded on freedom and enters the world primordially through the exercise of pure practical reason. On the basis of his controversion of these two fundamental assumptions, Schopenhauer inverts the significance of the concepts which he, completing his own extension of Kant's philosophy, borrows from Fichte and Schelling. 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, 644–645: all German Idealism is Spinozistic, and therefore optimistic. 6 See MREM, 13: Kant exposed the contradictions in the lie which is life. 5 The net result is a system which has much of the formal structure and outward appearance of the German Idealist systems but a directly contrary import. Schopenhauer does not quite affirm the thoroughly disenchanted view of the world that the German Idealists attempted to show need not be accepted as the price of modernity, but the residue of enchantment which he allows to continue to attach to our existence is relocated outside the objectual world, in the form of its negation: the world itself inherits the 'nothingness', the 'lack of an ultimate purpose or object' and 'absence of all aim', of its metaphysical ground.7 Though Schopenhauer officially repudiates the Spinozistic nihilism that F. H. Jacobi warns of as the inevitable upshot of Kantianism8 – on the somewhat thin basis that his doctrine of the negation of the world endows it with (inverted) moral-metaphysical significance9 – his proximity to it can hardly be exaggerated: Schopenhauer reaffirms Spinoza's anti-theism, determinism, materialist tendency, naturalistic view of human motivation, and reductionist account of value. I. Schopenhauer's strategy 1. Contraction of the Principle of Sufficient Reason 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, 645–646. 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, 590–591. 6 The first part of Schopenhauer's strategy is presented in The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, his first publication and a work to which he frequently refers back, declaring its conclusions to be presupposed by the argument of WWR.10 Fourfold Root presents itself in the first instance as a historical review conjoined with a systematic analysis of PSR, but it is clear from the outset that it is not intended as a neutral account of the different ways in which PSR has been invoked or may be understood.