The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

by Michael N Forster

  6.2.2 Schopenhauer’s Axiological Premise

  The second ground floor assumption of German Idealism controverted by Schopenhauer, I said, is its endorsement of Kant’s conception of the source of value, which represents in Schopenhauer’s eyes yet another abortive attempt to optimize reality.

  The pessimism that Schopenhauer famously advocates in opposition has, however, a more complex structure than his expositions of the doctrine allow readers to suppose, and this complexity is a consequence of his treatment of PSR.

  Schopenhauer’s argument often appears to be that the evil of the world derives from the negative hedonic balance sheet that necessarily characterizes human (and any other sentient) existence.27 However, in so far as its aim is to establish something about the metaphysical quality of the world, this argument fails to convince, relying as it does on a phenomenologically strained reduction of the objects of desire and valuation to hedonic states: that the satisfaction of every desire is followed immediately by the formation of a new one does not mean that things are not better for its having been satisfied; and in any case there is value, by ordinary lights, simply in being a creature that forms and acts on desires, beyond the experiences of satisfaction that doing so may or may not procure. Schopenhauer’s argument from the predominance of suffering is better viewed, however, not as the main point but merely as an auxiliary element in his case for pessimism, which has the following form.

  Ultimately Schopenhauer considers the evil of existence an incontestable given, belonging to the physiognomy of the world and not open to debate.28 The problem for Schopenhauer is to articulate this insight within the parameters available to him. To be sure, the contraction of PSR undermines directly attempts such as Leibniz’s to validate the world, and any other account (such as those of Schelling and Hegel) which rests on an appeal to final causes. It also cuts off the Kantian source of value in human freedom.29 But at the same time, the confinement of PSR to the interior of the world as representation appears to remove the basis for any rationally grounded negative assessment of the world or its contents considered collectively. Schopenhauer thus seems poised to embrace the sheer value-indifference of reality, in the manner of Spinoza, or any contemporary naturalist for whom talk of reality’s having either positive or negative intrinsic value is nonsensical, but doing this would not give him what he wants, which is, to repeat, recognition of the positive reality of evil, as an intrinsic, necessary feature of the world, inseparable from it.30 His task is to give sense to this idea.

  Now Schopenhauer is quite clear that practical consciousness, including the whole domain of value, is orthogonal to the world as representation: it is what gives the world as representation its ponderousness, its non-illusory quality, but it has no grounds within it; practical and axiological significance shines through objects, weighing them down, but reflecting nothing of their mere object-being.31 If the evil of the world as representation is to be demonstrated, therefore, it can only be by attention to the way in which it manifests what lies beyond it, namely, Wille.32 The crux of Schopenhauer’s case for pessimism consists accordingly in showing (1) that the world as representation derives from a reality which is intrinsically and necessarily without purpose, (2) that the world as representation does not merely reflect that underlying reality or reproduce it in appearance—which would suffice only for Spinoza’s conclusion of value-indifference—but reveals itself to be metaphysically defective in relation to it. Book II contains the demonstration of (1). The sections of WWR important for (2) are those in which Schopenhauer explains why, once we have achieved knowledge of Wille, the world as representation must be perceived as contradictory—an incoherent mis-expression in individuated form of a pre-categorial oneness or unindividuatedness, which moreover reproduces this incoherence within itself, in the form of the conflict of individuated wills with one another and within themselves.33 The relevant discussions are those, chiefly in Book IV, of (i) natural teleology (concerning the conflictual structure of the organic realm, which exhibits the ‘inner antagonism of the will’),34 (ii) sexual desire (the subordination of individual will to life to that of the species),35 (iii) eternal justice (which grasps individuation as a fault or ‘sin’, to be corrected),36 (iv) egoism and ethical conduct (the error of affirming one’s individuality, and its overcoming through higher knowledge),37 and (v) renunciation, resignation, and asceticism (rationally necessary denial of the will to live, consequent upon higher knowledge).38 The general character of things in the world, Schopenhauer says, is not imperfection but rather ‘distortion’, reflecting the fact that each thing is ‘something that ought not to be’.39

  Since the main work in substantiating pessimism has been done as soon as it has been established the world ought not to be, the role of the argument from suffering is limited. What it adds, through its reminder that human life does not merit our good opinion on account of its hedonic quality, is an uncommonsensical re-interpretation of hedonic experience in light of the metaphysics of will: Schopenhauer directs us to grasp pleasure and pain not phenomenologically but as manifestations of a purposeless dynamic.40 The painfulness and ubiquity of pain are therefore, in themselves, not what establishes the truth of pessimism: suffering is probative in the case for Schopenhauer’s doctrine only on account of what it displays regarding the irrational character of reality; his detailed portrait of man’s misery provides a posteriori corroboration of the metaphysical claim.41

  I will consider later whether this is cogent. For the present, the point is that Schopenhauer’s contraction of PSR, and his axiological vision, are interrelated and mutually supporting. If evil has positive reality, then this testifies to the limitedness of PSR, and if PSR is limited, then theodical strategies for explaining away the manifest evil of the world, and hence denying its positive reality, are blocked. Moreover, through the reduction of PSR to a mere relational structure for phenomena, the existence of evil is explained, as supervening on individuation: in Schopenhauer’s brilliant reversal of Leibniz, PSR is not what saves us from evil but the source of evil itself.

  6.2.3 Schopenhauer’s Inversion of Fichte: The Blindness of Wille

  Schopenhauer’s contraction of PSR, and his axiological vision, underpin his inversion of Fichte’s post-Kantian reconception of the subject as a primarily and essentially volitional conative being. In order to become clear about what exactly this comprises, it is necessary to look in some detail at the position Fichte develops in his System of Ethics.42

  Fichte begins, in Cartesian style, with the thinking of oneself. The task is to determine what this involves and how it is possible. Fichte argues that originally, at the level of the facts of ordinary consciousness, the I must find itself not as thinking, that is, as intellect, but as willing,43 and that to find oneself more specifically as a willing from which all that is foreign has been abstracted, as the task at hand requires, is to find oneself as a tendency (Tendenz), or faculty or power (Vermögen), towards self-activity. Alternatively put: I find myself as a tendency to determine myself absolutely, without any external impetus, or again, as a tendency to self-activity for self-activity’s sake.44

  And since, in thus finding oneself, one finds oneself as (identical with) that which is found, and since, equally, that which does the finding brings what it finds under the sway of concepts, the I in finding itself as a Tendenz grasps itself also as an intellect. Consciousness of self, as having both power and freedom, arises therewith: the I grasps itself as capable of giving itself determinations through concepts.45 The problem which now arises, according to Fichte, is that the conception which has been provided so far remains that of a mere power without actuality.46 Alternatively stated, the problem is that we have got only as far as an intellect that intuits itself as pure activity, standing in opposition to all subsisting and being posited.47 The solution, Fichte argues, is for the Tendenz to be thought to assume a more robust form, which he calls drive, Trieb, defined as ‘a real, inner explanatory ground of an actual self-activity—
a drive, moreover, that is posited as essential, subsisting, and ineradicable’.48 Fichte draws an analogy with the elasticity in a compressed steel spring as an inner ground of its activity.

  With this last shift, we are clearly approaching Schopenhauer’s conceptual neighbourhood. What should be emphasized for present purposes, however, are the features of this notion of drive which lock it into Fichte’s project. As we have seen, it is introduced by Fichte in the context of a transcendental enquiry into the possibility of self-consciousness. The problem set by self-consciousness can also be viewed, Fichte explains, in terms of the demand that we, in philosophical reflection, construct a concept, which we are to suppose available to the I itself, of the identity of subject and object. Now this demand, Fichte affirms, cannot be met: one cannot think of oneself as that identity, since thinking introduces the very distinction that the identity is to exclude. The concept remains, consequently, ‘a problem or task for thinking’, an ‘empty place’ which we designate with an X.49 The drive to absolute self-activity which constitutes the being of the I is, it follows, a drive which aims at the I in its entirety, the unthinkable identity of subject and object.

  Fichte’s drive is, therefore, necessarily engaged with the space of reasons, inseparable from conceptuality, and constituted by a telos. It will come as no surprise to learn that it enjoys also a necessary connection with morality. The drive to self-activity, Fichte argues, manifests itself in and as a thought, which Fichte identifies with the categorical imperative, in the form of the principle of autonomy.50 Because the I in its entirety, the X of subject–object identity, cannot be grasped, the drive to self-activity must take the form of an approximation to it, consisting in ‘a reciprocal determination of what is subjective by what is objective and vice versa’; and to proceed with this reciprocal determination, Fichte argues, is to act under the (self-given) law of self-sufficiency, which excludes determination of the I by the Not-I.

  It is a consequence of this transcendental theory that Fichte can claim to have reconstructed Kant’s thesis of the equivalence of freedom and the moral law,51 and also to have effected a unification, not furnished by Kant, of practical and theoretical reason, finally putting beyond doubt the capacity of reason to be practical.52

  Thus far, drive has been understood without any reference to the subject’s phenomenology, but it is a general methodological requirement of the Wissenschaftslehre that its model be shown to accord with the facts of ordinary consciousness. Fichte adds accordingly an account of how, and in what form, drive shows up in ordinary consciousness, namely as a feeling of drive, called ‘longing’ (Sehnen): an ‘indeterminate sensation of a need’ which is ‘not determined through the concept of an object’.53 The feeling of drive is therefore the final manifestation of an underlying structure which has the character of a quintessentially rational task (Aufgabe), postulate (Postulat), or ‘ought’ (Sollen).

  If we now return to Schopenhauer, we can see immediately the various respects in which he, while endorsing Fichte’s insight that the metaphysical core of the subject consists in drive, turns Fichte’s theory on its head.54 What Fichte takes as merely the most superficial manifestation of rational end-directed conation, the feeling of drive, is treated by Schopenhauer as primary, and as a sufficient basis for metaphysical extrapolation.55 Schopenhauer, furthermore, takes volitional feeling in isolation from representational consciousness, whereas it belongs to the central thrust of Fichte’s argument that will and representation are reciprocally determining.56 On the basis of this isolated datum, Schopenhauer infers the essentially non-teleological and non-conceptual character of Wille. Given Schopenhauer’s contraction of PSR, the inference is indisputably valid: there is indeed nothing in the bare phenomenal feeling of drive or will which invites, or could possibly warrant, the complex and abstract structure which Fichte takes it to manifest; Fichte’s interpretation of the facts of consciousness can get a purchase only because he assumes, as PSR entitles him to do, that there must be a reason for the existence of feeling, both in general and in this instance, as a type of mental state.57 Fichte’s claim that ‘the I itself has to be considered as the absolute ground of its drive’, and that ‘this drive appears as a freely designed concept of an end’,58 is thus inverted: Schopenhauer treats drive, impersonally conceived and directed to no end, as the ground of the I.59 Released from individuation, purposeless drive is ready to assume the role of substrate of the objectual world as such.

  6.2.4 Schopenhauer and the Meta-Critical Problem

  The flat disagreement between Fichte and Schopenhauer concerning the nature of drive or will goes back to their philosophical starting points and widely divergent views of the problems that need to be solved. We see here what a large part is played in generating Schopenhauer’s metaphysical conclusions by his prior refusal of the German Idealist agenda. In taking transcendental subjectivity as an unconditional basic element in his analysis of representation in Book I of WWR, and in asserting that it stands in a relation of bare Korrelation with objects,60 Schopenhauer rejects implicitly the Kantian idea, which Fichte preserves, that the subject’s object-consciousness must be treated as an explanandum. Schopenhauer’s discarding of Kant’s theory of synthesis is closely connected with this rejection: on Schopenhauer’s account, the subject is necessary for objects qua their correlate, but it is not involved in constituting the unity fundamental to objecthood in the way that Kant hypothesizes, just as the subject’s unity of consciousness receives for Schopenhauer no explanation of its possibility by reference to the unity of objects. Again, when in Book II Schopenhauer raises the question of how the subject of representation comes to cognize itself as an individuated content of the objective world,61 the question is understood—this we can infer from the way in which it is answered—as precisely not involving a solution to the problem of self-consciousness as Kant and Fichte understand it: Schopenhauer simply lays it down that the subject of thought is able to grasp itself as one and the same in representing and willing, in other words, that the bare phenomenal having-of-feeling involved in volitional episodes suffices for a grasp of myself as willing.62 The question with which Fichte labours, concerning the very possibility of the I’s attributing efficacy to itself, is nowhere raised.63

  All in all, then, a range of transcendental questions formulated and addressed in the Transcendental Deduction and elsewhere in Kant, taken by Fichte and the later German Idealists to frame the task of post-Kantian philosophy, are set aside by Schopenhauer, whose form of post-Kantian idealism is to that extent appropriately described as, in the strict sense, non-transcendental.64 Whether this implies a reversion to ‘dogmatism’ or otherwise constitutes a weakness is a separate matter, about which something will be said in the next section. For the present, it may simply be noted that a clear rationale for Schopenhauer’s divergence from Kant and his rival post-Kantians can be located, once again, in his axiological commitments, in so far as the transcendentalist ambition of excogitating transparent foundations for knowledge and value implies a determination to discover the world to be rational through and through.

  Support for this non-transcendentalist construal can be found in Schopenhauer’s early notebooks, in which he works through major positions occupied in the early post-Kantian development. Included here are Schulze’s scepticism, J. F. Fries’ and Jacobi’s Glaubensphilosophie, Fichte’s subjective absolute idealism, Schelling’s Naturphilosophie and Real-Idealismus, and all of the other innovations contained in Schelling’s writings up to and including the Freiheitsschrift. Schopenhauer had therefore a wide range of post-Kantian options at his disposal.65 What is striking in the early notebooks, however, is the absence of any sustained constructive engagement with the meta-Critical issues thrown up by Kantian philosophy. Schopenhauer records his dissatisfaction with all of the positions on offer, availing himself of their mutual criticisms, but proposes no answer of his own to the question of how propositions about non-empirical matters can be known and their truth ascertained
. Nor, as I indicated earlier in emphasizing Schopenhauer’s non-transcendentalism, is this deficiency remedied in WWR. Arguably, the best construal of Schopenhauer’s position on meta-Critical issues is as a kind of semi-sceptical return to naivety: Schopenhauer appears to suppose that, since none of the ambitious and innovative post-Kantian developments yield an improved account of Kant’s position, the Critical method is best regarded as a practice of simply reading off metaphysical truths directly from the facts of consciousness.66 The Kantian task of proving transcendental propositions is eliminated, and the vital Kantian question of whether what we are necessitated to think corresponds to how things themselves must be, is overtaken by the metaphysical assertion of two worlds, one constructed within representation and the other unrepresentable.

  6.2.5 The Architecture of Schopenhauer’s System

  There is another respect, connected with the foregoing, in which Schopenhauer’s project contrasts with that of the German Idealists. As we have seen, Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre has as one of its principal aims the exposure of a common root of Freedom and Nature, and of the practical and theoretical. The German Idealists’ project of unification—their aim, taking its cue from the third Critique (as they understood it) yet going beyond it, to comprehend Kant’s dualities in a single system in such a way as to exhibit their common source as an essential unity—is not shared by Schopenhauer.67 Schopenhauer does not, however, merely reaffirm the necessity of an incompletely unified, multi-component system of philosophy of the sort that Kant considers the most that human reason can achieve. His relation to the post-Kantian unificatory project is more complex.