The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century
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7 Cf. Jürgen Habermas, Das Absolute und die Geschichte. Von der Zwiespältigkeit in Schellings Denken (Bonn: Bouvier, 1954); Karl Jaspers, Schelling. Größe und Verhängnis (München: R. Piper, 1955); Walter Schulz, Die Vollendung des deutschen Idealismus in der Spätphilosophie Schellings (Stuttgar:t Kohlhammer, 1955).
8 For a detailed reconstruction of this period and thought see Iain Hamilton Grant, Philosophies of Nature after Schelling (London/New York, NY: Continuum, 2006).
9 I have laid out the details of this transition and the accounts involved in Markus Gabriel, Der Mensch im Mythos. Untersuchungen über Ontotheologie, Anthropologie und Selbstbewußtseinsgeschichte in Schellings “Philosophie der Mythologie” (Berlin/New York, NY: De Gruyter, 2006) and Transcendental Ontology: Essays in German Idealism (New York, NY/London: Continuum, 2011).
10 See, for instance, SW, XII, 109. I discuss this further in Der Mensch im Mythos, §§12, 17.
11 This idea has been further developed by Hans Blumenberg, Arbeit am Mythos (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2001) and Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953–96) but is even present in Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, tr. G. E. M. Anscombe (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 1969), §94. On this see Markus Gabriel and Slavoj Žižek, Mythology, Madness, and Laughter: Subjectivity in German Idealism (London/New York, NY: Continuum, 2009), pp. 68–71.
12 On this distinction see Robert Brandom, Tales of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 94–9.
13 Axel Hutter, Geschichtliche Vernunft.
14 Cf. F. W. J. Schelling, “Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism,” in F. Marti tr. and ed., The Unconditional in Human Knowledge: Four Essays (1794–1796) (London: Associated Presses, 1980), pp. 156–218.
15 Cf. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, tr. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2008).
16 SW X, 93.
17 On this see Peter Szondi, An Essay on the Tragic (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).
18 Cf. W. v. O. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1960), pp. 21–5.
19 On this see Gerold Prauss, Kant und das Problem der Dinge an sich (Bonn: Bouvier, 1989); Markus Gabriel, An den Grenzen der Erkenntnistheorie—Die notwendige Endlichkeit des Wissens als Lektion des Skeptizismus (Freiburg/München: Alber, 2008); Markus Gabriel Die Erkenntnis der Welt. Eine Einführung in die Erkenntnistheorie (Freiburg/München: Alber, 2013).
20 Cf. Slavoj Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Other Matters (London: Verso, 1996), p. 14.
21 Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is almost Certainly False (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2012), p. 17.
22 Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, p. 85.
23 Cf. Markus Gabriel, Der Mensch im Mythos, p. 101.
24 For a defense of Schelling as an actual forerunner of species evolution see R. J. Richards, Did Goethe and Schelling Endorse Species Evolution? (Forthcoming, 2013).
25 Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Logic, tr. J. Michael Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), AA 09:93.
26 Markus Gabriel, Das Absolute und die Welt in Schellings Freiheitsschrift (Bonn: Bonn University Press, 2006).
27 SW VII, 357.
28 On these connections see first and foremost Manfred Frank, Auswege aus dem Deutschen Idealismus, pp. 375–414.
29 On this see in particular Wolfram Hogrebe, Die Wirklichkeit des Denkens. Vorträge der Gadamer-Professur (Heidelberg: Winter, 2007).
30 Cf. SW III, 165; SW X, 107.
31 SW VII, 336.
32 SW VII, 336.
33 I call this theory-design “transcendental ontology” in Markus Gabriel, Transcendental Ontology.
34 Cf. Markus Gabriel, Das Absolute und die Welt in Schellings Freiheitsschrift.
35 For a similar argument see Thomas Nagel, The Last Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) and Mind and Cosmos.
36 For this reason Schelling has often been read as a predecessor of Freud, which is in part correct. See Odo Marquard, “Schelling—Zeitgenosse incognito,” in H. M. Baumgartner, ed., Schelling. Einführung in seine Philosophie (München: Alber, 1975), pp. 9–26; H. M. Baumgartner, ed., Transzendentaler Idealismus, romantische Naturphilosophie, Psychoanalyse (Köln: Verlag für Philosophie Dinter, 1987); Elke Völmicke, Das Unbewußte im Deutschen Idealismus (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005); Slavoj Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder and The Abyss of Freedom (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997); Matt Ffytche, The Foundation of the Unconscious: Schelling, Freud, and the Birth of the Modern Psyche (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Freud himself explicitly refers to Schelling, most famously in his essay on “The Uncanny,” in Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, tr. D. McLintock (London: Penguin Classics, 2003). It should be noted, however, that Freud himself has a strong tendency to think of reasoning itself as a deterministic system and even associates philosophical systems with forms of neurosis and psychosis. Schelling’s point, though, is that reason is precisely not mad in the sense of an obsessive repetition of some occurring thought pattern. He considers madness as a contrast necessary to acquire the full concept of reason. All he is committing to is that creatures capable of reasoning are essentially creatures capable of madness, but that there is no such thing as a full-blown madness of reason. For further discussion of this point see Markus Gabriel, “Autonomie, Normativität und das Problem des Scheiterns der Subjektivität,” in J. Nida-Rümelin and E. Özmen eds., Welt der Gründe. Deutsches Jahrbuch Philosophie 4 (Hamburg: Meiner, 2012), pp. 607–24.
37 F.W.J. Schelling, “Stuttgart Private Lectures,” in T. Pfau, tr. and ed., Idealism and the Endgame of Theory: Three Essays by F.W.J. Schelling (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994); SW VII, 470.
38 SW VII, 391.
39 SW VII, 352.
40 To be slightly more precise, one of course has to admit the further option that there is no X which is either Solon or wise, so there are cases of error where nothing is Solon or wise.
41 English quote from Emil L. Fackenheim, “Schelling’s Philosophy of Religion,” in J.W. Burbidge, ed., The God Within: Kant, Schelling and Historicity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), p. 209, n. 3. Original quote in Heinrich Heine, Die romantische Schule, in: Sämmtliche Werke (Leipzig: Insel, 1910–15), Vol. 5, 5:294.
42 F. W. J. Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, tr. and introduction J. Love (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2006), pp. 71–2; SW VII, 410–11.
43 Cf. Karl Jaspers, Schelling. Größe und Verhängnis; Jürgen Habermas, Das Absolute und die Geschichte; Manfred Frank, Der unendliche Mangel an Sein.
44 Cf. Walter Schulz, Die Vollendung des Deutschen Idealismus.
45 Cf. Markus Gabriel, Der Mensch im Mythos.
46 SW XI, 291.
47 SW XI, 313.
48 On this see Edward Allen Beach, The Potencies of God(s): Schelling’s Philosophy of Mythology (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994); Markus Gabriel, Der Mensch im Mythos.
49 SW XI, 318.
50 SW XI, 318.
51 Gottlob Frege, “Dialogue with Puenjer on Existence,” in P. Long and R. White tr., Posthumous Writings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 60. Translation slightly altered.
52 Cf. SW XI, 389, where Schelling speaks of “elevation to selfhood (Erhöhung in Selbstheit).”
CHAPTER 6
SCHOPENHAUER (1788–1860)
SEBASTIAN GARDNER
6.1 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 between Kant and Nietzsche.1 My aim here is to consider 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 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 achieved 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 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.
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.
6.2 SCHOPENHAUER’S STRATEGY
6.2.1 Contraction of the Principle of Sufficient Reason
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. The work’s chief concern is to show, negatively, that confusions of different senses of ground or reason (Grund) have played a decisive role in metaphysical reasoning, and, positively, to offer a radically original, minimal account of the principle’s content.11 Schopenhauer identifies PSR with the conjunction of four principles: (i) the law of causality, requiring changes in real objects to have efficient causes; (ii) the condition on true judgement, that it has a ground outside itself; (iii) the mutual determination of all parts of space and time; and (iv) the law of motivation governing acts of will. Characteristically metaphysicians have confused the first two, especially in proofs of God’s existence, reflecting their illicit conviction that the order of things is in essence that of thought.12
The full force of Schopenhauer’s devaluation of PSR becomes clear in his nominalist answer to the question whether it constitutes one principle or many. Though drawn at times to talk of a unitary Grund ‘presenting itself in a fourfold aspect’,13 ultimately Schopenhauer rejects the notion of a ‘ground in general’ (einen Grund überhaupt),14 reducing PSR to an aggregate and leaving no scope for the formation of a novel, non-empirical conception of Grund such as those freely employed by the German Idealists.15 The concept of reason in general or as such becomes a mere abstraction; what unifies the four principles is simply their fundamental character and epistemic immanence, that is, our knowledge of them as constituting the form of objects within the world as representation. It follows that PSR extends only to the phenomenon, not to the thing in itself or ‘inner essence’ of things, to which it is entirely ‘foreign’.16 The implications of its contraction are, as Schopenhauer at one place spells them out: that ‘the laws of the faculty of reason are not absolute laws’; that ‘there is just as little unconditioned as conditioned, just as little God as world’; that the question of how the world and nature have arisen can be likened to ‘the talking of one who is still half in a dream’; and that in the realm beyond nature ‘there is really no why and no wherefore’.17
Schopenhauer’s contraction of PSR goes hand in hand with his concept empiricism, according to which concepts arise only from intuitive representations, formed by abstraction from immediately given data in much the way that British empiricism tells us.18 This avoids returning us to Hume’s denial of all objective necessity, as an orthodox Kantian might object, because on Schopenhauer’s account experience itself—intuitive representation, in his terminology—contains seams of necessity, defined by the four sub-forms of PSR.19 Where Schopenhauer departs from Kant is in his claim that no independently originating concepts are brought
to the data of intuition or are required to make possible cognition of objects. And this denial of the pre-existence of concepts in any form, along with the impossibility of forming new concepts not already implicated in PSR-structured experience, is taken by Schopenhauer to entail the strict meaninglessness of any employment of concepts outside the domain of representation. The scope which Kant allowed to remain for employment of the unschematized categories—to provide the necessary foundation for our thought of problematic objects, ideas of reason, and exercise of pure practical reason—is thereby eliminated: conceptuality and the world as representation are rendered co-extensive, and the Kantian faculty of reason is collapsed into the understanding. Schopenhauer supports this conclusion by arguing that Kant’s central argument for the necessity of differentiating Vernunft from Verstand, the Antinomy of Pure Reason, is bogus.20
What drove Schopenhauer to this major departure from Kantian doctrine—and indeed to focus, in his very first work, on an officially antiquated piece of philosophical apparatus with unmistakeable Leibnizian-Wolffian connotations—is his perception of what inevitably happens when PSR is allowed to remain in the partially deflated yet fundamentally intact state that Kant leaves it in: to wit, the spectacular reinflation which it receives at the hands of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel.21 After Kant had reduced the positive epistemic significance of PSR to (i) the principle of causality and (ii) the regulative function of reason,22 the German Idealists reinstate the principle through their demand for absolute systematic completeness, and embark on the (in Schopenhauer’s eyes, futile) business of formulating new conceptions of what may count as a Grund, their speculative innovations involving transcendent use of Kant’s categories.23
The German Idealist reinflation and redeployment of PSR, as well as evincing the epistemic hubris that Kant sought to curb, has a substantive implication which makes it especially objectionable to Schopenhauer. PSR is connected closely in early modern rationalism with the ontological argument, which Schopenhauer sees the German Idealist systems as attempting to revive: Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre is ‘Onto-theology’,24 and Schelling ‘venerates the ontological proof’, of which Hegel’s ‘whole pseudo-philosophy’ is really a ‘monstrous amplification’.25 Schopenhauer views his situation and role in the history of philosophy as reproducing that of Kant: just as Kant pitted himself against the Leibnizian-Wolffian school, so Schopenhauer takes up arms against German Idealism, aiming to achieve a more decisive outcome by a more direct and far-reaching attack on PSR.26