47 See Fichte, System of Ethics, p. 42.
48 Fichte, System of Ethics, p. 44.
49 Fichte, System of Ethics, pp. 45–6.
50 Fichte, System of Ethics, pp. 48–63.
51 Fichte, System of Ethics, pp. 55–6.
52 Fichte, System of Ethics, pp. 56, 59–60.
53 Fichte, System of Ethics, pp. 101–3. Fichte denies that willing can be identified with, or that it originally manifests itself as, feeling (pp. 46–8, 85), but nonetheless presents the connection as necessary.
54 See Schopenhauer’s criticism of Fichte’s theory of willing in MRCD, 406–8, 413–14; willing, Schopenhauer counters, ‘cannot be defined’.
55 See WWR I, 109–10.
56 Fichte, System of Ethics, pp. 81–7; in addition to the objects on which I act, my willing itself must be represented.
57 Thus Fichte analyses feeling as ‘sheer determination’, ‘a mere determinacy of the intellect, without any contribution on the part of the intellect’s freedom’, System of Ethics, p. 102. Compare Schopenhauer’s brief definition of feeling in WWR I, 51. Karl Fortlage, in his 1845 review of the second volume of WWR (extracted in Volker Spierling (ed.), Materialen zu Schopenhauers “Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung” (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984), pp. 119–26), defends Fichte: Schopenhauer’s concept of will without intelligence is, he argues, incoherent; in systematic terms, Schopenhauer represents merely an intermediation in the transition from Kant to Fichte (and Schelling).
58 Fichte, System of Ethics, p. 103.
59 Even if Schopenhauer’s non-Fichtean concept of will owes something to the Urwille posited in Schelling’s Freiheitsschrift as primal being, Ursein—Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom and Matters Connected Therewith [1809], trans. Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2006), p. 21—Schelling does not invert Fichte’s conception in the manner of Schopenhauer: the Urwille is without understanding yet not independent of it, because it is a yearning or desire for it, and is prescient, ahndend, of it; ‘the understanding is really the will in will’, and it joins with yearning to form God’s omnipotent and freely creative will. Schopenhauer’s low estimate of Schelling’s essay, as a bad reworking of Jakob Böhme, is in MRCD, 353–4, and FR, 22–3, and it is dismissed once again in PP I, 26. The substantial criticism made by Schopenhauer, reasserting once again the contraction of PSR, is that Schelling interpolates the ground-consequent relation within God (FR, 22). In PP I, 132, Schopenhauer denies Schelling’s influence.
60 See WWR I, §5.
61 WWR I, 99 and 103.
62 In response to Fichte, Schopenhauer asserts that the I ‘is merely intuitively perceivable’: ‘an I is something found merely as a fact, something simply given’ (MRCD, 73). Schopenhauer’s refusal to accept that there is a problem concerning how the I can become an object for itself is explicit in comments on Schelling, MRCD, 381 and 383.
63 To be fully clear, the transcendental question is not raised; what is raised is a question concerning the inter-relations of facts of consciousness, which Schopenhauer answers by reference to bodily awareness. The body cannot provide an answer to the transcendental question, since, even if awareness of embodiment provides an explanation of how volitional as opposed to representational consciousness is possible, as Schopenhauer asserts (WWR I, 100–1), the identification of oneself with one’s body is presupposed and not accounted for. It is also noteworthy—as another aspect of the inversion that I have been pointing to—that Schopenhauer’s assumption that the body explains volitional awareness reverses the order in Fichte, who derives the physical power of efficacy from the practical principle governing the I and the necessity of determining one’s freedom: see Fichte, System of Ethics, pp. 71–91.
64 See MRCD, 466–72, where Schopenhauer repudiates the task of transcendental logic, viewing it as rendered redundant by the appreciation that the understanding is a faculty of intuitive perception. Schopenhauer’s rejection of transcendental argumentation is explored in Paul Guyer, ‘Schopenhauer, Kant, and the Method of Philosophy’, in Christopher Janaway, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). See, however, Rudolf Malter’s transcendental reconstruction of Schopenhauer, ‘Schopenhauers Transzendentalismus’, Schopenhauer-Jahrbuch 66, 1985, 29–51, and Günter Zöller’s comments in ‘Schopenhauer and the Problem of Metaphysics: Critical Reflections on Rudolf Malter’s Interpretation’, Man and World 28, 1995, 1–10.
65 The list is not complete. Reinhold is absent, and does not figure in Schopenhauer’s published works, even though his own approach has similarity with Reinhold’s conception of analysis of the facts of consciousness. Fichte criticized this conception and to some degree, in rejecting Fichte, Schopenhauer is returning to Reinhold’s plainer view of Critical method. Hegel is also missing from Schopenhauer’s early notebooks. In later writings Schopenhauer focuses on the metaphysical results of Hegel’s Logic, which he regards as a variant of Schelling’s position (PP II, 27–8); nowhere (to the best of my knowledge) is the method of the Phenomenology discussed in any detail by Schopenhauer.
66 They are ‘seen and grasped a priori’; a priori laws are simply ‘given to the understanding’ (MRCD, 335–6). The post-Kantian to whom Schopenhauer here comes closest is Fries. In comments on Aristotle Schopenhauer asserts that ‘there is no knowledge of knowledge’ (MRCD, 454). Note the extremely minimal definition of transcendental philosophy at PP II, 9, as starting from consciousness rather than things; the fuller account at PP I, 82–4, identifies it merely with the thesis of the a priori origin (‘rooted in our brain’) of the essential laws of the world.
67 The ‘main tendency of the Kantian philosophy’ is instead ‘to demonstrate the complete diversity of the real and the ideal’ (PP I, 86; see also 25).
68 See MRCD, 337–8; WWR I, 522–3; VgP, 418–20. For a concise statement of his anti-Kantian, broadly Humean view, see MRCD, 351.
69 WWR I, 271, 285. Schopenhauer conserves Kant’s idea of the special connection of ethical conduct with metaphysical truth (e.g. WWR I, 384; WWR II, 600), but without Kant’s cognitive privileging of the ‘practical point of view’. Ethical action is for Schopenhauer an enacting or acting out, a symbolization within the world as representation, of the reality of Wille, cognition of which is theoretical.
70 WWR II, 499.
71 Schopenhauer celebrates Kant’s notion of ‘a point of view where the moral law appears not as an ought (Sollen) but as a being (Sein)’ (MRCD, 326–7). See the criticism of the imperatival form of Kantian ethics in §4 of BM, 136–43. The shift of idiom, from Sollen to Sein, is pursued in Schopenhauer’s account of human freedom, in terms of intelligible character: see FW.
72 In a comment on Schelling, Schopenhauer complains of his forcing a false unity on the human subject, ‘as a bridge to unite the two worlds’: the genuine, critical philosopher by contrast is ‘content to have…recognized the twofold nature of his being’, which ‘appears to him as two parallel lines which he does not bend or twist in order to unite’ (MRCD, 376–7). If they meet, it is in a sphere accessible only to the mystic. True philosophy, ‘instead of uniting the two heterogeneous worlds into monstra…will always try to separate them more completely’ (MRCD, 412).
73 For example, MRCD, 489, WWR I, 120, 140, 502–7.
74 MRCD, 489; see also WWR I, 507.
75 For example, PP II, 91; contrary to his own explicit claim, in WWR I, 80, that Erklärung is the establishment of ‘the relation of the phenomena of the world to one another according to the principle of sufficient reason’.
76 I do not know of any passage where Schopenhauer addresses this issue, and it may be asked why he does not do so. At one place Schopenhauer appears to address the similar though even more basic problem of how it is possible for us to think (form a concept of) will at all, given its heterogeneity with representation and non-conformity to PSR: ‘[T]he concept of will is of all
possible concepts the only one that has its origin not in the phenomenon, not in the mere representation of perception, but which comes from within, and proceeds from the most immediate consciousness of everyone’ (WWR I, 112). If Schopenhauer can be allowed this on the basis of his concept empiricism, then we can conceptualize features of or phenomena in the world not tied to PSR. But what still cannot be accounted for is the relation between Wille and Vorstellung required by his metaphysical ‘because’ claim: there can be no ‘immediate experience’ of because-ness (or, if there can, then we have intellectual intuition after all). My conjecture is that Schopenhauer supposes implicitly that the ‘because’ relation, or all that he needs it to amount to, is given immediately in the experience of bodily willing. The relation of (i) my (subjective experience of my) willing my arm to rise, and (ii) the objective event (in the world as representation) of my arm’s rising, is declared to be a relation not of causation but identity (WWR I, §18). Schopenhauer may suppose that this intuition of the will–body nexus—our immediate grasp of it as identity-like yet asymmetric, with body depending on will and not vice versa—provides what is needed for his metaphysical extrapolation. This construal of his thinking gets support from his emphatic claim that we discover in self-consciousness a meeting point of subject and object, and of phenomenon and Wille (WWR I, 102; WWR II, 497). But again—even granting this ‘miracle par excellence’—this does not solve the problem of how we come to think this intuited ontological fact in the way Schopenhauer requires, namely as a quasi-causal quasi-identity. For this reason, Schopenhauer can get no mileage out of pressing a distinction between ‘the subject of knowing’ and the ‘subject of representation’: even if non-representational cognition is possible, its content must still be thought; else it is mystical (and Schopenhauer denies that his metaphysics are ‘illuminist’: PP II, 10).
77 At WWR II, 640, Schopenhauer comes close to conceding that the further metaphysical questions which, he allows, his system does not answer, ‘cannot be thought by means of the forms and functions of the intellect’. The question is why this is not true also of the metaphysical questions which, he maintains, his system does answer.
78 MREM, 23, 46, 72; MRCD, 19, 373, 374, 376, 416, 430, 431. It is exhibited in virtuous conduct, and associated with genius. Plausibly Schopenhauer’s notion of better consciousness owes something to Fries’ conception of Ahnung.
79 WWR I, 8, 17, 523.
80 To amplify: it allows the apparently inchoate thought entertained by the virtuous agent—viz., that I should act benevolently because I am the suffering other and do not exist as ‘I’ (see BM, 211–13)—to be validated as tracking the incoherent shape of reality as presented to a subject who has grasped that the world as representation is mere illusion.
81 As it does the notion, which Schopenhauer allows to suggest itself, and which we will see is developed by Hartmann, that Wille gives birth to transcendental subjectivity in order to restore itself to tranquillity, and so is not blind after all.
82 In statements such as: ‘The will appears in everything, precisely as it determines itself in itself…all finiteness, all sufferings…belong to the expression of what the will wills, are as they are because the will so wills’ (WWR I, 351).
83 See WWR I, §27; WWR II, Ch. 26; PP II, Ch. 6; and WN. Also relevant is Schopenhauer’s endorsement of occasionalism, WWR I, 138.
84 This is required if Wille is to, as Schopenhauer says, ‘freely abolish itself’ by ‘relating such knowledge to itself’ (WWR I, 285, 288). It is also implied by the notion that, in the individual’s denial of the will to live, the freedom which Wille alone can possess is manifest, ‘immediately visible’, in the phenomenon (WWR I, 402; see also 403 and 404).
85 See Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom.
86 Thus Schopenhauer talks of Wille, reflexively, as ‘objectifying itself’ (sich objektivirenden Willens), ‘entering the form of representation’ (in die Form der Vorstellung eingegangen ist) and thereby ‘becoming knowable’ (WWR I, 115, 120, 506).
87 The Western model does not therefore cohere with the abolition of Wille itself (in addition to the world as representation), which Schopenhauer seems to say follows from denial of the will to live (WWR I, 410–11). This claim appears to demand both models: in order for quieting of Wille, as opposed to mere dissolution of illusion, to ensue from the denial, it is necessary that Wille be genuinely present in the phenomenon; but if it is so present, then Wille has genuinely become a sphere of individuated objective entities, and it is unclear how it can retract its self-transformation.
88 WWR I, 272–3; WWR II, 640; PP II, 6–9.
89 Reflected in his (semi-paradoxical) statement that philosophy is ‘conditioned knowledge of the absolute’ (MRCD, 358–9).
90 Schopenhauer lays claim to ‘absolute truth’ (‘in so far as such a truth is in general attainable’), WWR II, 472; will is ‘that which is absolutely real in every being’, PP II, 95.
91 ‘[T]he word being means “being known through the senses and the understanding”’ (MRCD, 421).
92 WWR II, 497, ‘the two heterogeneous sides of the world…are absolutely incommensurable’.
93 WWR I, 410; WWR II, 610–14.
94 As he acknowledges: WWR II, 640–1. WWR II, 579: ‘even the most perfect philosophy will always contain an unexplained element, like an insoluble precipitate or remainder’.
95 This result is not so surprising, when we recall Schopenhauer’s alignment of Kant’s idealism with that of Berkeley (WWR I, 434–5, 444; WWR II, 8), whose idealism is by Kant’s lights a form of transcendental realism. The point can thus be put as follows. Schopenhauer makes clear that his understanding of Erscheinung takes an extra, Berkeleyan step beyond Kant’s (VgP, 482–9), and because for Schopenhauer the subject–object relation is one of bare Korrelation, and the object’s existence consists in its relatedness to the subject (as it does for Berkeley, on one reading), our mode of cognition, Erkenntnisart, is for Schopenhauer not a (merely formal) condition to which objects are subject and hence relativized in so far as they are cognized (as it is for Kant), but an (unrelativized) ontological component of those objects (as they are an sich).
96 For example, MRCD, 342, 359–60, 371–3, 391, and WWR I, 26. Schopenhauer is on weak ground here, in so far as his own claim to possess the concepts of object, subject, and Korrelation, which define the sphere within which PSR operates, appears to assume intellectual intuition or its equivalent.
97 WWR I, 410; WWR II, 612.
98 It is highly significant in this context that Schopenhauer describes Kant’s account of intellectual intuition in §76 of the Critique of the Power of Judgement—passages inspirational for the German Idealists, and which, one might think, Schopenhauer ought to have dismissed as one of Kant’s regrettable errors—as ‘the pith of the Kantian philosophy’ (MRCD, 326–7).
99 I provide only selective coverage; for a comprehensive view of Schopenhauer’s influence and successors, see Fabio Ciracì, Domenico M. Fazio, and Matthias Koßler (eds.), Schopenhauer und die Schopenhauer-Schule (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2009).
100 See note 59.
101 The details of the later Schelling’s view of reason do not belong here, but it is worth indicating the basic difference between his and Schopenhauer’s respective contractions of PSR. This may be viewed in terms of their different attitudes to the thesis of the absolute identity of being and knowing maintained in Schelling’s identity philosophy of 1801–2. This Schopenhauer simply negates by asserting its antithesis, that is, that being (in itself) and knowing are absolutely alien to one another. Schelling by contrast thereafter continues to regard the identity thesis as containing truth, but not as ontologically primary, the important point being that, though the domain conforming to PSR is ultimately restricted, Schelling regards it as intelligibly continuous with its pre-rational ground. Thus in the Freiheitsschrift, Schelling locates the birth of reason in God’s self-groundi
ng, to which it is related teleologically (Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, p. 30). In his later philosophy of revelation, the relation between PSR and what lies outside it is formulated in terms of the (again intelligible and ultimately complementary) relation of negative to positive philosophy: see The Grounding of Positive Philosophy: The Berlin Lectures [1842–3], trans. Bruce Matthews (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007), esp. pp. 127–54.
102 Whether the objection succeeds depends on whether Schelling’s suggestion that man’s moral evil infects creation at large can be sustained: see Michelle Kosch, Freedom and Reason in Kant, Schelling, and Kierkegaard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 103–4.
103 For a selection of Hartmann’s criticisms of Schopenhauer, see Eduard von Hartmann, Philosophy of the Unconscious: Speculative Results According to the Inductive Method of Physical Science [1st edn., 1869], trans. William Chatterton Coupland (from the 9th edn, 1882) (London: Kegan Paul, 1931), Vol. I, pp. 29–31, pp. 117–19; Vol. II, pp. 101–2, pp. 339–43; and Vol. III, pp. 149–51. Hartmann reads the Hegel–Schopenhauer relation through the lens of Schelling’s distinction of negative and positive philosophy, Hegel supplying the Was or Wie of things and Schopenhauer the Daß. To that extent, Hartmann’s manoeuvres may be viewed as an exploration of the first option, that is, as resolving Schopenhauer into late Schelling.
104 Hartmann, Philosophy of the Unconscious, Vol. II, p. 273, and Vol. III, pp. 124–5.
105 Hartmann, Philosophy of the Unconscious, Vol. II, Ch. XV, Sect. 2.
106 Julius Bahnsen, Der Widerspruch im Wissen und Wesen der Welt. Princip und Einzelbewährung der Realdialektik (Berlin: Grieben, 1880), p. 206.
107 Bahnsen, Der Widerspruch im Wissen und Wesen der Welt, p. 210. Hartmann’s case for pessimism is made in Philosophy of the Unconscious, Vol. III, Ch. XIII.
108 Hartmann denies that the will as such is anti-logical; it is merely alogical, and becomes anti-logical only in its act (Philosophy of the Unconscious, Vol. III, pp. 124–5).
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