Insight Editions · No. 52
The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer
Christopher Janaway (ed.) · Edited by Christopher Janaway
Essays examine Schopenhauer’s philosophy of representation and will, his accounts of knowledge, art, compassion, death and pessimism, and his influence on Nietzsche, Freud and Wittgenstein.
A study guide to The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer by Christopher Janaway (ed.), edited by Christopher Janaway. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
The Book in Brief
The argument in brief
The volume moves from foundations to system to legacy, and the map chains its central moves.
The argument map: from the single thought to the three great legacies.
How the book is built
The book follows the four Books of The World as Will and Representation (WWR): representation (chs. 1-4), will (5-6), art (7) and ethics and salvation (8-10). Three reception essays follow (11-13). Janaway frames the whole and returns for will (5) and pessimism (10). Citations pair Payne's English page with the Hübscher German edition (for example "W2 576/H. 3, 661"). That makes them checkable, and explains why so many slips show up. Contributors disagree openly: Guyer says Schopenhauer misreads Kant, Gardner says that break is what lets him reach Freud, and Glock finds the metaphysics untenable but the theory of will and agency alive.
How the chapters map onto the four Books of The World as Will and Representation, then onto its afterlife.
| Ch | Title (author) | In one line |
|---|---|---|
| Intro. | Introduction (Janaway) | An outsider whose "single thought" ends knowledge in abnegation. |
| 1 | Schopenhauer on the self (Zöller) | The self's traditional roles are kept, its content reversed: the core is will. |
| 2 | Schopenhauer and knowledge (Hamlyn) | Knowledge opens and closes the system, yet saving knowledge fits none of his types. |
| 3 | The Fourfold Root (White) | The dissertation blocks inference beyond experience; a physiological argument survives. |
| 4 | Kant and the methods of philosophy (Guyer) | Schopenhauer keeps Kant's results, drops his transcendental arguments. |
| 5 | Will and nature (Janaway) | "Will" gets a revolutionary use: the striving essence of all appearance. |
| 6 | Eastern thought (Nicholls) | Three shifts in the thing-in-itself, driven by Hinduism and Buddhism. |
| 7 | Ideas and imagination (Foster) | Art's foundation is perceptual grasp of Ideas; this defines bad art too. |
| 8 | The narrower sense of morality (Cartwright) | A descriptive virtue ethics of compassion that includes animals. |
| 9 | On death (Jacquette) | The paradoxes of death unravel at the question of suicide. |
| 10 | Pessimism (Janaway) | Existence is worth no more than non-existence; the roots lie in the self. |
| 11 | Nietzsche and Dionysus (Nussbaum) | The Birth of Tragedy uses Schopenhauer's surface to subvert his core. |
| 12 | Will and the unconscious (Gardner) | The anti-transcendental break makes possible a Freudian unconscious. |
| 13 | Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein (Glock) | From language as representation to language as will. |
Reading tips
- Mind the two "wills". The world-will (one, beyond individuation) and the individual character (fixed, one's essence) are easily run together; Gardner (12) shows why the difference matters.
- Check the decade. Most references stop around 1997. The Cambridge Edition translations (2009-2018) now replace Payne, so wording in later scholarship differs.
- Track "Idea". Capital-I Ideas are Platonic Forms grasped in art (ch. 7), not mental contents.
- Pessimism is about value. Janaway (10) separates "is life worth living?" from questions of meaning; Nussbaum (11) shows Nietzsche's answer.
Contributors and the disagreements that structure the volume
Twelve scholars write fourteen units (Janaway: Introduction, ch. 5, ch. 10).
| Unit | Author | Core verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Intro | Christopher Janaway | Single thought: cognitive self-realization ends in conative self-cancellation |
| 1 | Günter Zöller | Self reversed: will, not intellect, is the core |
| 2 | D. W. Hamlyn | Saving knowledge fits none of his categories |
| 3 | F. C. White | Fourfold Root clears inferential metaphysics; physiology survives |
| 4 | Paul Guyer | Same Kantian results, wrong method; misreads Kant |
| 5 | Christopher Janaway | Will as essence of appearance, not a thing behind it |
| 6 | Moira Nicholls | Eastern thought shifts the late thing-in-itself doctrine |
| 7 | Cheryl Foster | Art's foundation is perceptual grasp of Ideas from nature |
| 8 | David E. Cartwright | Narrower morality = descriptive virtue ethics with animals |
| 9 | Dale Jacquette | Death theory unravels over enlightened suicide |
| 10 | Christopher Janaway | Pessimism rooted in disowning the will-self |
| 11 | Martha Nussbaum | Nietzsche steals Schopenhauer's surface to kill resignation |
| 12 | Sebastian Gardner | Break with Kant made the Freudian unconscious thinkable |
| 13 | Hans-Johann Glock | Wittgenstein: from language as representation to language as will |
The volume's drama is disagreement, not consensus. Guyer says Schopenhauer misreads Kant; Gardner says that misreading is what opened the door to Freud. Hamlyn says salvific knowledge has no category; Janaway and Zöller still treat the single thought as organizing. Jacquette finds the death doctrine unravelled; Cartwright finds the narrower ethics still usable. Glock finds the metaphysics untenable and the theory of will and agency alive.
Where the Companion's essays agree, and where they split.
Citation practice and known fault lines
Payne English + Hübscher German (W1/W2, H. volumes) are the Companion's dual citation. No second edition of the Companion; the Cambridge Edition (2009-2018, Janaway gen. ed.) is now the standard critical English text.
Schopenhauer's single thought
An outsider with a common inheritance
Schopenhauer's thought took shape in 1810-1820, yet he was virtually unknown until the 1850s. He admired Rossini and Bellini but inspired Wagner, knew Goethe, met Hegel, and later shaped Thomas Mann, Nietzsche and the young Wittgenstein. His world is "an absurd, polymorphous, hungry thing that lacerates itself without end"; in truth it would have been better had nothing existed. Janaway hears the note in Edith Wharton's 1923 war novel and grants some justice to Adorno's jibe: "peevish ancestor of existential philosophy and malicious heir of the great speculators".
- Why analytic philosophy shuns him. He looks too literary and dogmatic, and he ranks art above science and makes the struggle for significance amid suffering his driving question; yet he "argues constantly" and is committed to truth.
- Why the Hegelian tradition shuns him. Beyond his contempt for the "career academics" Hegel and Fichte, his thought is brazenly ahistorical and apolitical: "un-German to the point of genius", as Nietzsche said.
- Why continental philosophy shuns him. Metaphysical conservatism, timeless truths, neglect by Heidegger and Levinas, and readers who take the later Nietzsche's insults at face value (wrongly, Janaway argues).
- Why he belongs anyway. He places himself in continuity with Hume, answers Descartes, debates Kant and Berkeley, criticizes Leibniz and borrows from Spinoza: an early, unique inhabitant of the post-Kantian world.
Why three traditions kept Schopenhauer at a distance, and why Janaway thinks he belongs anyway.
Piecemeal, he is the prototypical "aesthetic attitude" theorist, a theorist of musical expression, an early anti-Kantian virtue ethicist, the feminist critics' arch-misogynist, an adumbrator of the unconscious, Nietzsche's "old enemy" and Kant's sharpest critic on causality.
The single thought
Schopenhauer insists the book expresses one thought whose parts are organic: "no part is first and no part last", so the reader should read it twice. He never states it. Rudolf Malter (1988) proposed "the world is the self-knowledge of the will", a phrase Schopenhauer himself uses in the Manuscript Remains. John Atwell (1995) offers a fuller version that covers all four Books.
The four Books of The World as Will and Representation as stages of the single thought.
The four Books in brief
- Book I: the world as representation. Following Kant, objects are representations for a subject, ordered by the a priori forms space, time and causality. Concepts are "representations of representations": they give reason and language but are demoted throughout; reason is instrumental, confers no higher moral status, and is "unfruitful in art".
- The Fourfold Root (1813). The doctoral thesis splits the principle of sufficient reason ("nothing is without a ground") into four distinct kinds of grounding. Schopenhauer called it an essential prelude and rewrote it in 1847, losing, Janaway thinks, some of the lightness of the 1813 text.
- Book II: the world as will. Will is striving towards ends without rationality, consciousness or even mind: things are good because willed, not willed because good. "Everything presses and pushes towards existence." The decisive §18 confronts the pure subject, "an eye that cannot see itself", with knowledge of one's own body in action.
- Book III: art. In aesthetic experience willing ceases; a "pure subject of knowing" grasps (Platonic) Ideas, and the genius is one whose intellect works free of the will. The idea of a "higher consciousness" dates from notes of 1813-14.
- Book IV: ethics and salvation. Right and wrong, compassion, sexuality, death and the meaning of life end in the denial of the will, prepared by ascetic practice in Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism, despite his uncompromising atheism.
Janaway prefers Wille zum Leben as "will to life" rather than E. F. J. Payne's "will-to-live": it covers reproduction and works before any conscious desire. Several contributors even alter Payne's wording when quoting.
Pessimism, ethics and India
There is no absolute good, willing never ceases and is never satiated, and suffering is not redeemed: "we have not to be pleased but rather sorry about the existence of the world" (W2 576). The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics (1841) holds the best ethics: On the Basis of Morality grounds morality in compassion against Kant's imperative ("issued by whom?"), and On the Freedom of the Will defends determinism from unalterable character plus motives, rescuing responsibility through the intelligible character.
His favourite book was a translation of the Upanishads acquired while writing the main work; he ranks Hinduism with Plato and Kant and later studied Buddhism in earnest. Janaway accepts most of Atwell's thought but doubts that the world as a whole strives towards non-existence: will has no determinate aim and is indestructible, so it can cancel itself only in a particular individual.
- Aesthetics. Kant's disinterested pleasure needs no higher state of consciousness; Schopenhauer's will-less subject escapes life itself and claims art is more objective than science. Schopenhauer, not Kant, prefigures the "aesthetic attitude".
- Idealism. Schopenhauer reads Kant as akin to Berkeley and never accepts that transcendental idealism must reject ontology; calling representation a dream reveals an underlying metaphysical realism.
- Ethics and freedom. Kant's autonomous rational agent against compassion, a determined will and no God behind morality.
The later works and the contributors
- 1813. On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (doctorate).
- 1818. The World as Will and Representation appears in December with 1819 on the title page.
- 1836. On the Will in Nature, claiming the sciences confirm the will.
- 1841. The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics, from the Norwegian and Danish prize competitions.
- 1844. Second edition, adding a second volume of essays (ch. 19 will and intellect, ch. 44 sexual love, ch. 45 vanity and suffering) and revising Volume 1, including the Kant critique after discovering the 1781 A edition.
- 1847. Revised Fourfold Root.
- 1851. Parerga and Paralipomena ("works on the side and left-overs"), including the notorious "On Women", which brings fame.
- 1850s. Visitors, university study, a third edition of the main work.
Janaway calls "On Women" "a nasty, gratuitous piece of misogyny" drawn from jaundiced personal experience, with no interesting link to the philosophy. Because the system is tightly knit around will, representation, subject, object, intellect, individuation and the PSR, the essays overlap: Zöller and Hamlyn range across all four Books, White takes the Fourfold Root, Guyer Kant, Janaway will and nature, Nicholls India, Foster art, Cartwright ethics, Jacquette death, Janaway pessimism, and Nussbaum, Gardner and Glock the legacy in Nietzsche, Freud and Wittgenstein.
Four Books compressed, and the later works
Janaway's sketch of the four Books is the Companion's shared map:
- Book I. The world as representation: objects for a subject under the principle of sufficient reason; space, time, causality as forms; the Fourfold Root presupposed.
- Book II. The world as will: body as will objectified; will in nature from gravity to sexuality; intellect as tool of will.
- Book III. Art: will-less contemplation of Platonic Ideas; music as direct copy of the will; temporary escape from striving.
- Book IV. Ethics and salvation: justice and loving-kindness from compassion; eternal justice; denial of the will; the worst of worlds redeemed only by abnegation.
The single thought (Atwell via Malter) binds them: the double-sided world is the will's striving to know itself, so that, recoiling, it may annul its self-affirmation. Without Book III the thought is incomplete: art shows will-lessness as a rehearsal for the lasting quietus of Book IV.
Pessimism, India, and the contributors' map
Pessimism is not a mood bolted on. Once the essence of each individual is blind will to life, happiness is structurally frustrated, and the aim of existence becomes the knowledge that it would be better not to exist. Gospel Christianity (read as resignation), Brahmanism and Buddhism are enrolled as world-denying allies; Judaism, pantheism and university optimism as foes. Janaway flags the demonizing of Jewish thought in Parerga without endorsing it.
The Introduction then inventories the volume's contributors and their tasks: foundations (Zöller, Hamlyn, White, Guyer), system (Janaway, Nicholls, Foster), ethics and value (Cartwright, Jacquette, Janaway again), legacies (Nussbaum, Gardner, Glock).
Janaway's single thought as a loop from will's self-knowledge to its self-cancellation.
Prize essays, later fame, and why he "argues constantly"
The Norwegian Society crowned On the Freedom of the Will (26 Jan 1839, Trondheim). The Danish Society left On the Basis of Morality uncrowned (30 Jan 1840, sole entry). Parerga and Paralipomena (1851) finally brought fame. Janaway's polemic against three dismissals (analytic, Hegelian, continental) ends in a methodological claim the Companion enacts: Schopenhauer argues constantly, so each essay can test him. That is the brief for everything that follows.
Schopenhauer on the self
Self, will and intellect
The noun "the self" entered philosophy through Locke and reached German a few decades later; in Kant and his idealist successors the self is no longer one being among others but that through which all beings first come into view. Schopenhauer's quarrel with the tradition is over its identification of the self with intellect (understanding, reason).
- Will is independent of reason. Earlier accounts made will applied or practical reason; Schopenhauer makes it arational, "blind" striving.
- Will underlies the intellect. Will is not a supplement but the source of the self's very being, intellect included.
- Mind-body becomes will-body. The traditional mind-body relation is rethought as a will-body identity.
- Two selfhoods. One self is will-centred; another is achieved by cultivating the intellect, and the agent of the move from one to the other is the will itself, possibly by self-negation.
From Kant to Schopenhauer
Kant's "critical distinction" separates appearances from things in themselves: space, time and causality belong only to our ways of encountering things, and this restriction is what guarantees empirical realism. The status of the self is awkward here: besides the empirical self and the soul of rational psychology there is a third, transcendental self that bears the forms.
Schopenhauer makes two modifications. First, more consistently than Kant, appearances are nothing but representations (Vorstellungen) in the mind. Second, and radically, the thing in itself is will, revealed in conative and affective self-experience. Zöller denies this is a relapse into dogmatism: by restricting reason to cognition and rejecting Kant's practical postulates (immortal soul, personal God), Schopenhauer is "even less of a metaphysician than Kant", and his immanent metaphysics of will is part of the transcendental project, which he widens to include feeling and conation.
- Understanding versus reason. Understanding (Verstand) gives preconceptual, intuitive knowledge; reason (Vernunft) forms concepts from it. Against Kant, intuition is already intellectual: the prereflective use of causality carries us from sensation to an affecting object in space, a capacity shared by all animals.
- Will as covering term. "Will" groups Kant's faculty of desire with the feeling of pleasure and displeasure; its acts are non-representational, felt or lived rather than about anything.
Two subjects, one knot
Intellect and will function as the subject of cognition and the subject of willing. Neither is given as such: the knower is never known, and the willer is never felt, except through their states. The subject of willing is the immediate object of the subject of cognition: an intellect that is empty joins a will that is blind. Schopenhauer borrows Gellert's fable of the strong blind man carrying the seeing lame man on his shoulders.
- Becoming. Physical objects and causal connections, correlated with the understanding.
- Being. Mathematical objects (space, time), correlated with pure intuition.
- Knowing. Logical objects (judgements), correlated with reason.
- Acting ("law of motivation"). Psychological objects (acts of will), correlated with inner sense: a cognition, the motive, necessarily moves the will to a particular act.
Grounding holds only among objects, never between the poles of the subject-object correlation: the intellect does not ground the will, and what a motive causes is a particular act of willing, not will as such. The correlativity amounts to identity: knower and known are the same being in two functions. Schopenhauer offers no further insight, calling it the "miracle par excellence" and "the knot of the world".
Zöller's anatomy of the self: two subjects joined in one inexplicable identity.
Body and will are one
The living body (Leib) is the intellect's immediate object; knowledge of other objects is a typically unconscious inference from bodily sensation to its cause. Yet my body is also something I am: a movement is felt from within as my act of volition. Schopenhauer rejects a causal account of volition and bodily act; they are two sides of one reality prior to the mental-physical split. Unlike Kant's two philosophical ways of considering things, Schopenhauer's duality is lived: "the body is the will experienced externally, and the will is the body experienced internally".
The primacy of the will
Reflection adds that the two aspects are not of equal rank. The duality rests on a monism whose root is will: a three-tiered structure of will, act of will and bodily action. Underneath stands the character, Kant's intelligible character reworked, which Schopenhauer calls innate, constant and empirical (known only over time). The relation of will to its appearances is not grounding but objectivity (Objektität) or objectification (Objektivation); even my own will is known only in successive states.
The three-tiered self and the intellect's later revolt, in Zöller's reading of Books I-IV.
The self in the world
Externally observed causal laws stay at the surface: however predictive, they never show how a cause produces its effect. Only in our own volition do we see inside causation. A motive does not generate an act but calls it forth from the character: the cause is merely the occasion, which Schopenhauer explicitly links to Malebranche's causes occasionelles.
- Three kinds of force. Physicochemical forces act through cause in the narrow sense; plant forces through stimulus; animal and human forces through motive.
- Will without self. Every natural force is akin to the human will minus intellect: sheer striving without consciousness. Far from crowning the self, the world-as-will demotes it: "the cosmic expansion of the self's will leads to a will without self."
- Naturalized intellect. From an explicitly evolutionary angle, cognition emerges in animals as the medium of motivation; human concepts, speech and writing serve biological tasks and are ill-suited to theory, philosophy included. Commentators compare this displacement to Copernicus's (Spierling).
- The problem. The intellect conditions the world (and the body); the world (and the body, as brain) conditions the intellect. Critics since the nineteenth century call this an oscillation between transcendental idealism and materialism.
- Zöller's reply. The materialism is apparent: the will is "something spirit-like" (ein Geistiges), and both body and intellect are taken in two senses. The body that conditions the intellect belongs to the world as will; the body conditioned by it belongs to representation; the brain is the intellect viewed objectively. The model is Kant's "dual citizenship" of the moral subject in the Groundwork. Why one self occupies both roles stays an inexplicable basic fact.
The self by itself: art and ethics
In aesthetic experience the subject escapes the PSR: individuality falls away, and the object becomes a Platonic Idea, a preindividual "immediate objectivity of the will". Unlike Plato's Forms, Ideas emanate from ultimate reality (a neo-Platonic touch) and exist only for a pure subject of cognition that has temporarily disengaged from will and body, like the legendary Chinese painter who stepped into his picture and vanished. The transport is short-lived, but its possibility proves the radical heterogeneity of intellect and will.
In ethics the will is not forgotten but negated (verneint), a word from logic that marks it as an outcome of cognition. In a "colossal anthropo-cosmic analogy", evolution is the blind will adding awareness, culminating in a human who sees that individuation belongs only to appearances.
- Affirmation. One may embrace the insight that "he himself is that will of which the whole world is the objectification".
- Compassion. Seeing the will in everything that lives breaks egoism, leading to justice, then caritas, agape or pity (Mitleid).
- Denial. Cognition can act as a quietive (Quietiv), stilling the will through asceticism and resignation: "only cognition remains, the will has disappeared". But "no will: no representation, no world", and a will without world is a will without self.
Zöller's three outcomes of the insight that individuation belongs only to appearances.
Zöller's closing image is musical parody: Schopenhauer refits the idealists' story of self-realization (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel) with a reversed plot of self-loss and the bliss of self-dissolution.
Two subjects tightened: knower, willer, knot
Zöller's central diagram is the double subject. The subject of knowing is the limit of the world as representation: never object, never in space or time, the "I think" that accompanies all representations yet is not among them. The subject of willing is the same human being given as embodied agent, object among objects from without, will from within. Their identity in one person is the Weltknoten: not an argument's conclusion but the fact from which metaphysics starts.
Body and will are therefore not two things related by interaction. "Every true act of his will is also at once and inevitably a movement of his body" (W1 §18). The body is the will objectified, the will made representation. Resolutions that never become movements are incomplete willings; Schopenhauer later distinguishes them carefully in the freedom essay. Dualism (immaterial mind pushing material body) is rejected; so is reductive materialism that "forgets to take account of" the subject.
Primacy of will, and the self by itself
Once body = will as phenomenon, the intellect is demoted. Intellect is a tool of the will, a late evolutionary product (brain) serving goals the will already sets. In conflict, will wins: we believe what we need to believe; love, hate and fear bend judgement. The knowing subject that philosophy usually starts from is, for Zöller's Schopenhauer, a surface.
Two escapes from the will-dominated self appear in aesthetics and ethics:
- Art. Temporary will-lessness: the subject becomes pure mirror of the Idea.
- Ethics / asceticism. Seeing through individuation yields compassion; deeper still, denial of the will yields the saint's quietus.
Zöller on the self: double subject, bodily identity, will's primacy, two escapes.
- Kant. Unity of apperception; practical freedom as autonomy under the moral law; thing-in-itself unknowable.
- Schopenhauer (Zöller). Double subject tied in the world-knot; empirical unfreedom under character and motive; will as thing-in-itself known in bodily action, yet never as pure noumenon stripped of all form.
- Shared inheritance. Transcendental ideality of space and time; suspicion of rational psychology's immortal simple soul.
- Break. Schopenhauer's ethics of compassion replaces autonomy; his aesthetics of will-lessness replaces disinterested pleasure as the main escape hatch.
Psycho-machia: will produces intellect, intellect turns
Zöller's drama across four Books: will produces the intellect as its tool; intellect breaks free in aesthetic contemplation; cognition finally turns the will against itself. That "psycho-machia" sounds like German idealism "turned world-weary and unselfish". The better consciousness of the early manuscripts becomes the pure subject of knowing (art) and the subject of compassion/denial (ethics). The self keeps its traditional jobs (core of a person, better self, non-worldly correlate) with reversed content: blind will at the core, intellect as surface that can still revolt.
Zöller: psycho-machia from will's tool to will's denial.
Self in the world, self by itself
Zöller's closing arc: the will-self is always already in the world as body among bodies, fighting for matter, space and time at every grade. The self by itself appears only when willing pauses: in aesthetic will-lessness and in ethical/ascetic denial. Those are not two selves metaphysically; they are one being under two stances. Art is temporary; compassion is partial seeing-through; denial is the stance that cancels the will's project. The traditional "better self" is rewritten as that capacity for pause and cancellation, not as a rational soul substance.
Zöller: in-the-world fighting self versus by-itself paused self.
Schopenhauer and knowledge
Three distinctions, one hidden assumption
Schopenhauer separates abstract knowledge (Wissen, the only knowledge "proper", which like Aristotle's demands seeing why a thing is so) from direct knowledge of objects (Erkenntnis, the general term). That is his only contribution to the question of the nature of knowledge that dominates modern epistemology. Otherwise knowledge is simply a subject-object relation, with two consequences: knowledge seems to entail consciousness, ruling out unconscious knowledge, and kinds of knowledge differ only as their objects differ.
- Direct versus abstract. Perceiving an object does not require seeing its ground; abstract knowledge does.
- Conditional versus unconditional. Knowledge of perceptual representations is conditional because its objects must stand in lawlike relations; knowledge of will is unconditional. The condition lies in the object, which "cannot stand by itself", not in the brain or the knower.
- Immediate versus mediated. Schopenhauer says knowledge of willing is "the one case of immediate knowledge" (W2 196), yet also calls the understanding's grasp of cause and effect immediate.
Why should the status of objects fix the status of knowledge? Hamlyn's answer is Schopenhauer's implicit idealism: if "no object without a subject" holds, objects are representations, and ontology is tied "too closely, one might think" to epistemology. Hence the Fourfold Root claim that "all objects of the subject are our representations" turns out not strictly true: the will is an object of knowledge that is no representation, and the Ideas are representations free of the principle of sufficient reason.
Four objects of direct knowledge
| Object | Direct? | Immediate? | Conditional? | Hamlyn's worry |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ordinary representations | Yes | No: given in a nexus | Yes: must stand in lawlike relations | Understanding passes from one intuition to another; "less than clear how" |
| Will in one's own action | Yes | Yes: the one case | No | Immediacy shows only that will is not a representation |
| Platonic Ideas | Yes | Not strictly: grades permit inference | No: an Idea stands by itself | Still depends on perception; like Aristotle's theoria |
| Saving insight | Seemingly | Unclear | Not knowledge of an object | Fits neither direct nor abstract knowledge |
Will: what immediacy can and cannot show
Will shows itself first in intentional bodily action, its objectification. Because the body is involved, action brings in representations, and an act of will is "only the nearest and clearest phenomenon of the thing-in-itself" (W2 197). Motives are "causes seen from within": what the agent sees as motives, others see as causes.
Hamlyn grants that our awareness of agency is not observation and is unlike any other knowledge. But immediacy is an obscure notion, and from the immediacy of knowledge little follows about its object, the same gap critics find in refutations of materialism from privileged access. At most the argument shows that will is not a representation. Identifying it with the thing-in-itself needs the further thesis that whatever is not representation is thing-in-itself, which Hamlyn had already judged weak (Schopenhauer, 1980). The pessimism and the metaphysics of sympathy inherit the weakness, while the insight into agency survives.
Hamlyn's gap: what the immediacy of willing licenses, and the extra step the metaphysics needs.
Ideas: contemplation as savouring
Ideas are "grades of the objectification of the will", which "scarcely helps". Hamlyn reads them as ideal prototypes, at once token and type, which explains the appeal to Plato's Forms. They are representations but cannot be conditional like perceptions; still, knowledge of them is secondary, since without perception we would have none. In art we become pure subjects of knowledge, a temporary respite and the first of two cases in which the will denies itself.
- Not strictly immediate. Schopenhauer claims identity of knower and known in contemplation, but if Ideas form grades, one can infer between grades, so their knowledge is direct without being immediate.
- Aristotle's theoria. Contemplation resembles Aristotelian theoria, which Hamlyn elsewhere calls intellectual savouring: one is caught up in the object so that nothing else matters. That makes it more than mere knowledge.
- Grades and detachment. Low-grade Ideas yield mainly will-less knowing; high-grade Ideas bring "objective apprehension" of the will's clearest revelations (W1 212), sitting oddly with art as escape from willing.
- Music. Music copies the will itself, yet even this apprehension rests on perception (hearing).
Knowledge-of and knowledge-that
Schopenhauer never relates knowledge of to knowledge that. Ordinary knowledge of a thing implies knowing something about it, even tacitly; even knowledge of willing can be knowledge that one is willing, minimally propositional (Hamlyn's own distinction between knowing that and knowing what one is doing). But propositional knowledge is concept-dependent, and Schopenhauer gives concepts and judgement to reason, not to the understanding. Here, Hamlyn says, he "deserted the insights which Kant had", for whom understanding and judgement go together.
Salvation by insight
The ethics rests on sympathy, grounded in the thought that underneath we are all one. A "seeing-through" of the principium individuationis produces virtue; by something like grace, a person may then acquire an aversion to his own nature and turn to asceticism, "deliberate breaking of the will" (W1 392). Yet only knowledge can abolish the will (W1 400).
- No ordinary knowledge. If it were, the knowledge in virtue would already deny the will.
- No object. It is not knowledge that reality is one will, nor of representations: an insight with practical consequences.
- A paradox, not a lacuna. Because knowledge carries so much weight, Schopenhauer owed an account; he offers none into which it all fits, so the will's self-denial "remains a paradox".
Hamlyn's route to salvation by insight, and the step his categories cannot hold.
- 3 distinctions: direct/abstract, conditional/unconditional, immediate/mediated.
- 4 objects of direct knowledge, one per Book of WWR.
- 1 case of immediate knowledge, by Schopenhauer's own count (W2 196).
- 2 self-denials of the will: temporary (art), permanent (asceticism).
Four objects mapped to the four Books
Hamlyn's anatomy is easiest to hold as a map from object of knowledge to Book of WWR:
| Object | Book | Mode | Immediate? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ordinary perception (spatio-temporal objects) | I | Direct, conditional | No (mediated by senses/understanding) |
| Own body as will | II | Direct, claimed immediate | Schopenhauer's only candidate (W2 196) |
| Platonic Ideas in art | III | Direct, unconditional (will-less) | Direct but not immediate; grades allow inference |
| Insight that denies the will | IV | Neither ordinary knowledge-that nor knowledge-of | Fits no category; remains a paradox |
The hidden assumption across all four is that knowledge is the system's load-bearing term. Epistemology, aesthetics and ethics stand or fall with whether Schopenhauer can keep direct / abstract, conditional / unconditional, and immediate / mediated from collapsing into each other.
Will's limits, and why Ideas are not quite immediate
Even the prize case, knowledge of one's own willing, fails full immediacy. We know that we will, and what we are doing, but not the will as thing-in-itself stripped of every phenomenal form. Inner sense still temporalises; the body is already object. Hamlyn's verdict: Schopenhauer oversells immediacy, then builds metaphysics on the oversell.
Ideas fare differently. They are "grades of the objectification of the will", which "scarcely helps" as analysis. Hamlyn reads them as ideal prototypes, token and type at once, hence the Platonism. They are representations, yet not conditional like ordinary perceptions. Knowledge of them is still secondary: without perception we would have none. Contemplation claims identity of knower and known, but if Ideas form grades, inference between grades is possible, so knowledge is direct without being immediate. Hamlyn's own gloss elsewhere, intellectual savouring, captures the surplus: one is caught up so that nothing else matters. That is more than bare knowledge, and it explains why high-grade Ideas (humanity in tragedy) sit oddly with art as escape from willing: they reveal the will's clearest shape even as they quiet the will in the subject.
Hamlyn's three distinctions applied to the four objects of knowledge.
Judgement, animals, and the desertion of Kant
Schopenhauer never relates knowledge of to knowledge that. Ordinary knowledge of a thing implies knowing something about it; even knowledge of willing can be minimally propositional. But he gives concepts and judgement to reason, so animals can perceive objects without judging. Hamlyn's charge: he "deserted the insights which Kant had", for whom understanding and judgement go together. Defenders (White; later non-conceptual-content theorists) treat the desertion as a strength. Hamlyn treats it as the crack through which the ethics' "seeing-through" has to pass without an epistemology that can hold it. Virtue arises from seeing that underneath we are one; asceticism from an aversion "like grace"; yet "only knowledge can abolish the will" (W1 400), and that knowledge is neither knowledge-that reality is one will nor knowledge of representations. The system assigns knowledge a job no listed kind of knowledge can do.
Direct, abstract, unconditional: the distinctions restated
Hamlyn's three distinctions, applied cleanly:
| Distinction | Pole A | Pole B | Where it matters |
|---|---|---|---|
| Direct / abstract | Perception, Ideas, bodily will | Concepts, science, words | Reason gives only secondary knowledge |
| Conditional / unconditional | Ordinary objects under PSR | Ideas (will-less), thing-in-itself | Art and metaphysics exit the PSR |
| Immediate / mediated | Claimed for bodily will | Senses, concepts, inference | Only candidate fails full immediacy |
Hamlyn: three distinctions that the salvific insight still escapes.
Knowledge-of versus knowledge-that remains untheorised. Animals perceive without judging (desertion of Kant). Virtue as seeing-through and asceticism as grace-like aversion both need a knowledge that abolishes will (W1 400) without being knowledge-that or knowledge-of representations. That is Hamlyn's permanent residue.
Why saving knowledge still will not fit
Hamlyn's conclusion restated without softening. Book IV needs a knowledge that abolishes the will. It cannot be knowledge-that (propositional grasp that all is one will), because such grasp can coexist with affirmation (the wicked can be clever). It cannot be knowledge-of Ideas, because that is still representational and temporary. It cannot be bodily immediate knowledge of willing, because that is the will's own self-feeling, not its denial. Schopenhauer reaches for metaphors of seeing-through, grace, and aversion. Hamlyn leaves the residue as a system-level failure of the object-first epistemology, not as a minor gap.
Hamlyn: three candidate knowledges that cannot abolish will.
The Fourfold Root
A treatise on elementary philosophy
Schopenhauer wrote On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason in 1813, aged twenty-five, gained his Jena doctorate with it, and paid for its printing; WWR followed in 1818. The 1847 edition is "almost another book", and White judges the 1813 text superior in style and coherence, free of the later "bitterness and grotesque rudeness". Still, WWR declares the essay presupposed throughout, and its First Book is the representation subject to the principle.
The principle in its general form says nothing is without a reason why it is rather than not. The everyday world contains four classes of object, each a representation, each ruled by its own form of the principle, and each bound by a double necessity: every item has a reason, and the reason necessitates it.
| Class | Objects | Form of the principle | Kind of necessity | What it rules out |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Real objects (tables, cats) | Becoming: every change has a cause | Physical | First causes, God as cause, causa sui |
| 2 | Concepts and judgements | Knowing: every truth rests on a ground | Logical | Ontological argument; reason as intuition of the supersensible |
| 3 | Time and space | Being: parts determine parts | Mathematical | Mathematics as a route to absolute reality |
| 4 | Individual wills | Acting: every action has a motive | Moral | Free, unmotivated choice |
Alongside this idealism, the essay holds a materialist theory of mind: the intellect is the brain. White warns that this combination produces problems "perhaps insoluble".
Real objects and causality
Real objects are "intuitive, complete, empirical representations". Intuitive means particular: Bucephalus is intuitive, the concept horse is not. Complete means having formal properties (time, space, causality), imposed by the intellect, and material ones (red, round, shiny). Time alone gives succession, space alone gives coexistence; perdurance needs both, and matter, which Schopenhauer identifies with causality, fills them. To be a real object is to affect and be affected.
- Only changes are causes. In the hammer-and-nail case the cause is the hammer's swing, not the hammer, or the nail would have moved five minutes earlier. Substances are eternal, so neither causes nor effects.
- Against first causes. If only changes cause and every change has a cause, then God, who does not change, cannot be a cause, a cause uncaused is incoherent, and causa sui is "laughable". The same verdict hits Absolutes, Egos and Kantian noumena, and any inference from subject to object.
- White's demurral. Schopenhauer is "quite unfair" to traditional theists, who mean by causa sui only that God needs no explanation.
"Perception is intellectual"
Schopenhauer gives more than a fifth of the 1847 edition to the proof that perception is created by the intellect, meaning here sensibility and understanding without reason. Sensations, "too meagre" to carry a world into our heads, are taken by the understanding as effects; it infers an outside cause, sensibility adds space and time, and the result is a perduring object. The inference is intuitive, not conceptual, and unlearned.
Schopenhauer's construction of a perceived billiard ball, as White reconstructs it.
The proof should start from formless data (colour, light, pressure), and White shows, by reversing Kant's thought experiment of stripping a body of its properties, that this is coherent. But Schopenhauer soon drifts into examples that presuppose real objects: two coins seen as one, the moon's size, retinal images turned upright. Worse, his materialism makes sensations bodily and the understanding the brain, so the data cannot be formless and the intellect, a real object, creates itself.
White's rescue: the brain's construction
White calls the "ruins" verdict unjustified. Take Mary seeing a billiard ball: light, retinal images, neuronal firings and a cortical "representation" are known; how she comes to see a red, round, shiny ball is not. Physics describes the ball as leptons, quarks and fields, not a continuous red surface. The simplest explanation of that disparity is that the ball as perceived is a construction of the brain, a "cerebral phenomenon": perception is intellectual after all.
- "Self-refuting." The premises posit brains and senses; the conclusion denies them. Reply: physicists start from cloud chambers and Geiger counters and conclude the world is not as it appears; Schopenhauer only goes further, to in toto representational.
- "Intellect as causa sui." Reply: self-creation describes appearances only; the world in itself contains no intellects. Schopenhauer himself mocks absolute materialism, which "leaves the subject out", with "the inextinguishable laughter of the Olympians" (W1 27).
Schopenhauer is no subjective idealist: the thing in itself is reached by "a quite different path", through the inside of things, "as if by treachery" (FR 119-20). He even allows representations a "metaphysical explanation", disconcerting given the essay's main thesis.
Concepts, truth and reason
Concepts are abstract and general, abstracted from perceptions, lodged in the brain: "representations of representations". Reason gives only secondary knowledge, of truths through words: "Every simpleton has the faculty of reason; give him the premisses and he will draw the conclusion." Primary knowledge and all great discoveries belong to the understanding.
- Four kinds of truth. Logical (from other judgements), empirical (from real objects: the cat is on the mat), transcendental (from the forms: two straight lines enclose no space), metalogical (from the laws of thought).
- The ladder removed. Deduction moves only from representations to representations, so the ontological argument fails.
- The boomerang. If all concepts derive from perception, we cannot reason to the Will, or even meaningfully talk or think about it.
Time, space and mathematics
Time and space are forms of sensibility but also objects of pure intuition, particulars made of parts. Their ontological (not causal or conceptual) interdependence is the principle of sufficient reason of being: a triangle's angles are as they are because its sides are. Arithmetic rests on counting in time. Geometry should be direct non-empirical perception, so Euclid's proofs are "a brilliant piece of perversity" (W1 70): true, but merely logical. This is a blow to the rationalist idea of mathematics as thought reaching absolute reality.
Willing selves and the "miracle"
We know ourselves directly, but as willers, never as knowers, since whatever is known is known as object. One being is known twice: outwardly as body, inwardly as will. The identity of knowing subject and willed self is the Weltknoten (world-knot), "the miracle par excellence". Motives are "causes seen from within": "here we stand behind the scenes" (FR 213). That bodies seen from within are wills is the "foundation stone" of the whole metaphysics, though the Fourfold Root offers only hints of the passage from individual wills to the Will.
Necessity, and two hidden arguments
Necessity is nothing but the inevitability with which a consequent follows its reason: only conditional relations are necessary, an "absolutely necessary" being is contradictory, and there are exactly four necessities (logical, physical, mathematical, moral). Since these "arise from the brain", rationalist metaphysics loses its premises; any metaphysics must rest on immediate knowledge.
White's scorecard of the arguments for idealism in the Fourfold Root.
- Object for a subject. That tables, considered as present to a subject, depend on a subject does not make tables depend on a subject sans phrase, any more than Mrs Smith, dependent on her husband as wife, is dependent on him simply.
- The Kantian argument. If the principle is known a priori, it comes from the intellect, so objects it constitutes are representations. But causation is not a priori: atoms decay without cause, matter had a beginning, and non-Euclidean geometries rival Euclid's.
- Conclusion. Only the physiological argument holds; if it does, knowledge of the thing in itself must be non-inferential.
Four truths, Euclid's perversity, and the world-knot expanded
White's treatment of the second and third classes fills out what the table only names. Concepts are "representations of representations", abstracted from perceptions, lodged in the brain, useful for planning, science and cooperation, yet providing no knowledge of absolute reality. "Every simpleton has the faculty of reason; give him the premisses and he will draw the conclusion. But the understanding supplies primary and therefore intuitive knowledge" (FR 113). Reason as a "faculty of the supersensuous" that intuits things in themselves is, for Schopenhauer, a fraud.
The four kinds of truth are not ornamental. Each grounds a judgement on a different class of reason:
- Logical. Grounded in other judgements (syllogistic conclusion).
- Empirical. Grounded in real objects ("the cat is on the mat").
- Transcendental. Grounded in the forms: "two straight lines do not enclose a space"; "nothing can happen without a cause".
- Metalogical. Grounded in the laws of thought: no predicate asserted and denied of a subject at once.
Because every ground is itself a representation, deduction never leaves the circle. The ontological argument fails; so does every rationalist ladder. The boomerang hits Schopenhauer too: if all concepts derive from perception, talk of the Will is threatened. White leaves that wound open; Nicholls and Janaway later try to close it by non-inferential acquaintance and by metaphor.
Time and space, the third class, are both forms of sensibility (in the brain) and objects of pure intuition, particulars made of parts. Their parts' interdependence is the principle of sufficient reason of being: the angles of a triangle are as they are because the sides are, not because of a cause or a concept. Arithmetic is counting in time. Geometry ought to be direct non-empirical perception; Euclid's proofs are "a brilliant piece of perversity" (W1 70): true as logic, false as a picture of how geometrical insight actually works. Rationalist hopes that mathematics reaches absolute reality collapse with that verdict.
White on why neither understanding nor reason can reach the thing in itself.
Motives as causes from within, and necessity's four faces
The fourth class is the willing self. We never know ourselves as knowers (the knower would become object), only as willers. One being is given twice: body from without, will from within. Motives are "causes seen from within"; "here we stand behind the scenes" (FR 213). That identity is the Weltknoten, the world-knot, "miracle par excellence", and the "foundation stone" of the later metaphysics, even though the dissertation only hints at the leap from many wills to one Will.
Necessity, finally, is nothing but the inevitability of consequent given reason. There is no absolutely necessary being; there are exactly four necessities (logical, physical, mathematical, moral), and because they "arise from the brain", rationalist metaphysics loses its premises. Any metaphysics that remains must rest on immediate knowledge. White's scorecard then follows: the "object needs subject" argument commits the Mrs Smith fallacy; the a priori-PSR argument fails if causation is not a priori (atomic decay, beginning of matter, non-Euclidean rivals); only the physiological argument survives, and with it the demand that knowledge of the thing in itself be non-inferential.
Mrs Smith, a priori causation, and White's survivors
White's scorecard needs the failed arguments named. "Object needs subject" collapses into the Mrs Smith fallacy: from "every experience is someone's" one cannot conclude "there is no unexperienced world" any more than from "every wife has a husband" one concludes "every woman is married". The a priori-PSR argument fails if causation is not a priori: White cites atomic decay, the beginning of matter, and rivals to Euclidean necessity. What survives is the physiological construction argument (Mary and the billiard ball) plus the demand that any path to the thing-in-itself be non-inferential.
White's survivors after the classic arguments fall.
Double necessity still structures each class: every item has a reason, and the reason necessitates it. That is why first causes, ontological arguments, mathematical routes to the Absolute, and unmotivated free choice are ruled out together, not piece by piece.
Materialism of mind meets idealism of objects
White's warning that the combination may be "perhaps insoluble" deserves its own beat. Real objects are intellect's construction; intellect is the brain, a real object; so the intellect appears as causa sui. White's rescue: self-creation describes appearances only; the world in itself contains no intellects. Absolute materialism that leaves the subject out earns the "inextinguishable laughter of the Olympians" (W1 27). Materialists retort that the brain is subject and object at once; White doubts that identity is possible even if Schopenhauer's dismissal is too quick. The dissertation's main thesis still stands for White: the everyday world supplies no reliable pointer to a thing-in-itself along the path of representations; the other path is "through the inside of things... as if by treachery" (FR 119-20).
White: idealism of objects plus materialism of mind.
Schopenhauer, Kant, and the methods of philosophy
Transcendental philosophy without transcendental arguments
Schopenhauer holds that we know the world in two ways: through representations of objects in space and time, and through our willing of our own bodily movements. On the first he accepts the core of transcendental idealism; on the second he rejects Kant's ban on knowledge of things in themselves, building a picture of existence as endless strife and an ethics of compassion "antipodal" to Kant's ethics of reason.
The root difference is method. Kant proves fundamental principles from "the subjective sources of the possibility of a cognition of an object in general" (A 148-9): reflection on the conditions of the possibility of experience. Schopenhauer instead claims to read the principles straight off perception:
Kant's two models of transcendental argument
Kant never gave a full account of his method, and his remarks suggest two models:
- Model 1: conditions of empirical knowledge. A priori concepts are shown to be conditions of any experience, even merely empirical (A 94; "possible experience" as contingent, A 736-7). Nothing synthetic a priori is assumed.
- Model 2: explaining given a priori knowledge. Starting from uncontested synthetic a priori cognition (geometry; the unity of apperception), Kant shows its conditions entail further a priori knowledge (B 40; Prolegomena, 1783).
- Not circular. Model 2 does not assume what it proves; its risk is implausibility, assuming as uncontroversial premises that are in fact highly controversial.
| Kant's argument | Starting point | Conclusion |
|---|---|---|
| Aesthetic (space, time) | We individuate distinct objects; or geometry is synthetic a priori | Space and time are a priori pure intuitions |
| Metaphysical deduction | All cognition takes the form of judgement | Categories correlate with logical functions |
| Transcendental deduction | I am conscious of representations as mine | Categories apply to all my experience |
| First Analogy | Determinate knowledge of change | Enduring substance |
| Second Analogy | Distinguishing objective from subjective succession | Universal causation |
| Third Analogy | Knowing coexistence in space | Interaction |
| Refutation of Idealism (B) | Determinate consciousness of my own inner states | Enduring objects outside me: a realist result |
The hidden second premise
From a priori knowledge Kant infers transcendental ideality: what we know prior to objects cannot be a property of things in themselves (A 26). Schopenhauer took this as obvious. Guyer says it is not: we know in advance that the next sound we hear will fall within the range of human hearing, without concluding that sounds lack the frequencies we hear. The best explanation of why we perceive objects may be that they really have the properties our faculties require.
Kant's actual argument needs a second premise: whatever we know a priori we know to be necessarily true, and anything true of mind-independent objects would be, for all we could know, only contingently true (A 48; the rejected "preformation system", B 168). No contemporary, Schopenhauer included, noticed this premise, which a modern friend of transcendental arguments would call Kant's cardinal error. Schopenhauer even places the a priori forms in the brain (W1 418, 421) without asking whether positing a real brain already undermines idealism.
Guyer's reconstruction of Kant's route to idealism, and the step nobody questioned.
Schopenhauer's blanket objection
The Fourfold Root refines Kant's own early distinction between logical and real relations (Negative Magnitudes, 1763: contradiction yields nothing, opposed forces yield equilibrium) into four kinds of determination. But it denies that the principle of sufficient reason can be proved or explained:
- No proof. Every proof reduces the doubtful to the established; at bottom lie the conditions of all thinking, which cannot be proved by anything further. Aristotle: "the principle of demonstration is not demonstration" (FR 32). The young Schopenhauer still exempts Kant's proof of the apriority (not validity) of causality, a split Kant "surely would not have understood".
- No explanation. "There is no principle for explaining the principle of all explanation; just as the eye sees everything except itself" (FR 229).
- The alternative. Philosophy is "a science in concepts", not of concepts, drawn from perception, the only source of all evidence (W1 452-3). Guyer borrows Merleau-Ponty's phrase "primacy of perception".
Guyer's verdict on the objection
- Against Schopenhauer. The objection fits arguments that try to prove the most fundamental premises, but not Kant's Analogies, which combine independently found forms of intuition and judgement to yield new principles. Schopenhauer could even have used his own fourfold division to see causality as arising from time plus logical entailment.
- For Schopenhauer. Kant himself concedes no ground can be given for why we have just these categories and forms (B 145-6). And the Analogies rest on the premise "time itself cannot be perceived" (A 176), which Kant never argues for: experience is not like a sports telecast with a clock in the corner. That is a deep but brute fact found by scrutiny, as Schopenhauer said.
Intuition, concept and judgement
The "Criticism of the Kantian Philosophy" says Kant's fundamental error is the "complete absence of any distinction" between abstract and intuitive knowledge (W1 473), and then blames Kant for the "monstrous assertion" that perception without concepts is no knowledge (W1 474). Guyer resolves the apparent contradiction:
- The real complaint. Kant draws the line too soon: for him categories must be added before there is any object, whereas for Schopenhauer perception already presents objects; understanding only locates them causally, and reason abstracts concepts.
- The misreading. Schopenhauer takes Kant's distinction to be phenomenological, two conscious states in sequence. For Kant intuition and concept are found by reflection on judgement; every conscious cognition is already a synthesis, which is close to Schopenhauer's own view.
- "Throw away eleven of the categories." Schopenhauer keeps only causality (W1 448). Guyer: no one else thought this possible, since causality applies to states of substances and requires generality (quantity).
- Judgement demoted. Schopenhauer moves judgement from understanding to reason, so animals perceive objects without judging; quantity, quality, categorical and disjunctive forms belong to reflection, while the hypothetical form expresses the principle of sufficient reason. Kant "would have been unmoved": complexity in judgement is evidence for complexity in the synthesis behind perception.
The Second Analogy: ship and house
Kant argues that since time itself is not perceived and every apprehension is successive, we can tell an objective succession only by causal rules: "I must therefore derive the subjective sequence of apprehension from the objective sequence of appearances" (A 193). The ship sailing downstream gives an irreversible order; viewing a house roof-to-ground or ground-to-roof is reversible (A 192).
Kant's Second Analogy in Guyer's reading: the order of perception is derived from causal laws.
- 1. "Both are events." Moving the eye from roof to basement is as much an event as the ship's sailing, explained by changes in one's own body (FR 124-5). Reply: Kant's examples isolate one condition at a time; his later notes (Reflections 6313-14, c. 1790) argue that even inner order needs an enduring object, our own body, "We are first object of outer sense to ourselves". Schopenhauer is continuing Kant, not refuting him; he disliked the B edition and never saw the notes.
- 2. Post hoc, propter hoc. A falling tile after I leave home, notes in a melody, day after night follow without being caused by their predecessors (FR 126-7). Reply: Kant requires only that the later state follow by a rule from something in the prior total state (A 193, A 198), which is exactly Schopenhauer's own concession.
- 3. An omniscient understanding. Knowing every succession through its causes would need knowledge of countless laws: "Kant has burdened the understanding with an impossibility" (FR 131). Reply: none; this one is genuine.
Why the third objection bites
The common defence (Paton, Beck) says Kant needs only the general principle that every event has some cause. Guyer rejects it: the irreversibility of the ship-perceptions follows only from particular laws about winds and currents. So on Kant's account we must know many particular causal laws, which seems false: early peoples knew day follows night without planetary mechanics.
- Epistemology, not psychology. Guyer's own reply (Kant and the Claims of Knowledge, 1987): Kant analyses the justification of temporal judgements, not their psychological genesis. Revising everyday judgements as science advances (Copernicus, the finite speed of light) is no objection.
- Friedman's bolder reply. On Michael Friedman's reading, Kant held the laws of Newtonian physics to be (impure) synthetic a priori, so we do know the key laws.
- The lasting point. Either way, Kant owes an account of how transcendental conditions relate to lived experience, an issue he "barely touched".
Guyer's balance sheet: what Schopenhauer's direct method gets wrong and right about Kant.
- P. F. Strawson. Revived the method in Individuals (1959) and The Bounds of Sense (1966).
- Barry Stroud. "Transcendental Arguments" (1968): at most they show what we must believe, not what is true.
- Stefan Körner and Richard Rorty. Pressed impossibility and verificationist objections (1969-71).
- Michael Friedman. Read Newtonian laws as synthetic a priori for Kant (1992).
Aesthetic arguments and the Refutation of Idealism
Guyer opens the catalogue of Kant's transcendental arguments with the Transcendental Aesthetic. In the B edition Kant distinguishes an exposition of space and time (what they are) from a deduction of their objective validity. Two routes run in parallel:
- From experience. We can individuate distinct objects and represent them as outside us and as successive only if space and time are a priori pure intuitions, not abstracted from sensation.
- From mathematics. Geometry and arithmetic are synthetic a priori; their necessity requires that the forms they describe be contributed by the subject.
Schopenhauer accepts both results (space, time as subjective forms) while treating the arguments as unnecessary elaborations of what perception already shows. Guyer's point is that this already reveals the method clash: Kant thinks the results need proof from the conditions of cognition; Schopenhauer thinks they need only scrutiny.
The Refutation of Idealism (B edition) is the odd one out. From determinate consciousness of my own inner states Kant concludes there must be enduring objects outside me. That is a realist result inside transcendental idealism. Schopenhauer, who preferred the A edition and called the B edition a corruption, never engages this argument carefully. Guyer notes the irony: Schopenhauer's own insistence that the knowing subject is also a bodily object among objects (FR 124-5) is close to Kant's later Reflections (6313-14, c. 1790): "We are first object of outer sense to ourselves".
Guyer on Kant's argument types: Aesthetic twin routes and the realist Refutation Schopenhauer skipped.
Categories reintroduced as forms of reason
After the blast that tells us to "throw away eleven of the categories", Schopenhauer quietly reintroduces them as conditions of judgement, not of perception. The move is Kantian in structure and anti-Kantian in ranking:
- Quantity springs from the extension of concepts: "Some trees bear acorns" / "All oaks bear acorns" (W1 455). Trees are already given in perception.
- Quality (affirmation, negation) lies "entirely within the province of our faculty of reason" (W1 455-6): "This seed is not an acorn".
- Categorical form is just "the form of the judgement in general" (W1 457); disjunctive form springs from the excluded middle (W1 459).
- Hypothetical form alone expresses the principle of sufficient reason, and gets its causal force only when applied to spatio-temporal perception (W1 456-7).
Kant "would have been unmoved". Phenomenological sequence (first see the oak, then judge about acorns) does not settle the source of the conceptual structure. For Kant, conscious perception is already a synthesis under categories; complexity in the judgements we can make is evidence for multiplicity in the synthesis, found by reflection, not by watching one conscious state succeed another.
Closing balance: blindness and lasting debt
Guyer's last pages refuse a simple win for either side. Schopenhauer's preference for the direct method left him blind to some of Kant's intentions: he misread the intuition/concept distinction as phenomenological, underplayed the Analogies' combinatory structure, and never saw that his own fourfold root could have underwritten a friendlier reading of causality as time plus entailment. Yet the same method let him press the one objection that still matters: on Kant's Second Analogy we seem to need knowledge of many particular causal laws, and Kant never explained how transcendental conditions hook onto lived experience.
Guyer links this gap to a later line of influence. Schopenhauer's distrust of transcendental arguments, and his insistence that philosophy fix what is evident in perception, feeds the temper of Wittgenstein more than that of the neo-Kantians. The Companion returns to that link in Glock (ch. 13). The methodological quarrel with Kant is therefore not a museum piece: it is one route by which nineteenth-century German philosophy enters twentieth-century philosophy of mind and language.
Ship, house, tile: the Third Analogy bite restated
Guyer's long middle on the Second Analogy is the chapter's proof case for method clash. Kant's ship sailing downstream: the order of perceptions is irreversible, so we must posit an objective succession grounded in causal laws. The unchanging house: we can scan roof-then-foundation or foundation-then-roof, so the succession is subjective. Schopenhauer's first counter: the house-scan is also an event (eye and body move); both sequences need causal explanation, only the starting point differs (object vs own body) (FR 124-5).
The third objection bites harder. To know that the ship's positions are objectively successive, Kant seems to need knowledge of particular causal laws (water, gravity, hull). Those laws are empirical. So the transcendental argument that was meant to secure causality in general already presupposes specific causal knowledge. The tile that falls after I leave my house shows succession without the departure causing the fall: sequence ≠ causation. Guyer's verdict: Schopenhauer here exposes a real gap in how transcendental conditions meet everyday experience, even while his own positive story (causality as the understanding's one form) remains too thin for Kant's combinatory Analogies.
Guyer: Schopenhauer's bite on the Second Analogy.
Two models of transcendental argument, and the blanket
Kant, on Guyer's reading, uses at least two models. Model 1: from the possibility of a kind of cognition (experience, mathematics) to a priori conditions. Model 2: from a premise about self-consciousness or inner sense to outer enduring objects (Refutation). Schopenhauer's blanket objection treats both as unnecessary once perception is scrutinised. Guyer grants the temper but denies the blanket: without something like Model 1, the a priori status of space, time and causality becomes a stare at experience rather than an argument. The Companion's later Gardner chapter will flip the evaluation: that same rejection of transcendental method is what lets Schopenhauer fill the mind with a non-rational core.
Hidden second premise and intuition vs concept
Guyer's "hidden second premise" reading: many transcendental arguments need not only "we have experience of type E" but a substantive claim about what E requires. Schopenhauer often grants E and rejects the substantive premise because he has already decided that perception without judgement yields objects. That is why the intuition/concept dispute is method-deep: for Kant, intuition without concepts is blind; for Schopenhauer, understanding adds causality to already-objectual perception, and reason's concepts come later. Throw away eleven categories, keep causality, then smuggle the others back as forms of judgement. Guyer: Kant would have been unmoved, because phenomenological order does not settle the source of structure.
Guyer: hidden premise and the intuition/concept fork.
Three Analogies and what Schopenhauer kept
Guyer's map of the Analytic of Principles, compressed:
| Analogy | Kant's claim | Schopenhauer's stance |
|---|---|---|
| First (substance) | Permanent substance underlies change | Matter = causality; substances eternal, neither cause nor effect |
| Second (causation) | Objective succession needs causal law | Accepts causality as understanding's form; rejects Kant's ship/house proof strategy |
| Third (community) | Coexistence needs reciprocal interaction | Largely sidelined; not rebuilt in the fourfold root |
The lasting debt Guyer grants: Schopenhauer saw that transcendental conditions must eventually meet particular experience, and that Kant under-explained that meeting. The lasting blindness: treating transcendental arguments as optional commentary on what scrutiny already shows, and so missing why Kant thought proof was required against skepticism and against dogmatic metaphysics. Gardner (ch. 12) will treat that blindness as historically productive. Guyer treats it as philosophical loss with a residual gain.
Guyer: Analogies map and the debt/blindness balance.
Direct scrutiny versus transcendental reflection
Guyer's opening contrast, kept explicit. Kant invents transcendental method: from the possibility of experience (or mathematics, or determinate self-consciousness) to a priori conditions that make it possible. Schopenhauer prefers direct scrutiny of experience, closer to Hume before him and to Husserl's phenomenology after him. He says the essential difference is that he starts from what perception shows, not from a reflected proof of conditions. Because Kant never gave one clean exposition of the method, and mixed analytic (Prolegomena) with synthetic (Critique) presentations, Schopenhauer felt licensed to treat the apparatus as optional. Guyer's chapter is the case that the license was overused: same results on space, time and causality; lost grip on why those results needed argument; productive only where it exposed the hook from transcendental conditions to everyday causal knowledge.
Guyer: two methods, shared results, parted evaluations.
Will and nature
The riddle and the secret passage
Book One of The World as Will and Representation gives an orderly account of objects for a subject. Book Two opens with a riddle: what is the inner nature (inneres Wesen) that these lawful relations do not reveal? Without an answer the world would pass by "like an empty dream", and we are "like a man who goes round a castle, looking in vain for an entrance" (W1 98-9). Elsewhere a "subterranean passage" from within "places us all at once in the fortress" (W2 195).
- The muddle reading. If the riddle is access to an unknowable Kantian thing in itself, Schopenhauer seems to claim to know the unknowable.
- Atwell's reading. John Atwell (1995) says the problem is readability: the world threatens to be alien (fremd), "hieroglyphics that are not understood", a cryptograph to decipher.
- The self as test case. As pure subject I would be "a winged angel's head without a body", my own movements strange. But I am not a riddle to myself, because my actions are mine: "From yourself shall you understand nature, not yourself from nature."
Human willing is bodily
Schopenhauer's theory of action is anti-volitionalist and anti-dualist: "Every true act of his will is also at once and inevitably a movement of his body"; act and movement are "one and the same thing, though given in two entirely different ways" (W1 100). Resolutions about the future are "mere deliberations of reason" until carried out.
- Willing as development. A wish becomes a resolve, which becomes an act of will, which is a deed: "until the deed it can be altered" (Freedom of the Will).
- Dual aspect. The body is given as representation, an object among objects, and immediately as will, "a bridge between the inner and the outer worlds" over a "bottomless abyss".
- Severed nerves. If a motor nerve is cut, "my will can no longer move" the arm (W2 250); Janaway suggests the act is a conscious bodily event that would have become action in a normal body.
Janaway's reading of willing as one process, from wish to deed, that is identical with bodily action.
Will as the inner nature of everything
Willing is then naturalized. Every organism tends towards local ends under the overarching end of life. Things differ only in how they are moved:
| Causal relation | Where found | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Cause pure and simple | Inorganic nature | Gravitation, magnetism, crystal growth |
| Stimulus | Plants, organic functions | Light-seeking movement, digestion |
| Motive | Animals and humans | Action caused by perceptions and judgements |
Three premises carry Schopenhauer from my will to the world's: my willing gives uniquely immediate self-knowledge; science is incomplete and needs a metaphysics of inner nature; and on pain of unintelligibility, my inner nature cannot differ from that of reality. So I "must recognize the inscrutable forces" in all bodies "as identical in kind with what in me is the will, and as differing from it only in degree" (W1 124-6).
- Not panpsychism. Janaway rejects reading this as Nagel's panpsychism: in gravity or plant growth the one principle manifests "dully and blindly", not as mind. Most of nature is mindless will.
- Between dualism and materialism. There is no immaterial substance, but materialism is "the philosophy of the subject who forgets to take account of himself".
- Why the word "will"? Schopenhauer warns that no one should think a stone moves by a known motive; we know will "much better than anything else". The reply works only if "will" means striving towards an end in general.
- The stone objection. How could a thing that never acts or experiences be in its own nature what I find in self-conscious agency? Janaway calls this an "admittedly severe" difficulty.
- 1. Will. An essence I share with everything in the world.
- 2. Will to life. An essence I share with organic nature: "the real self is the will to life" (W2 606).
- 3. Intelligible character. My individual, unchanging will, "like the signet on a thousand seals" (Basis of Morality), from which conduct follows: operari sequitur esse.
- The tension. If space and time individuate, the thing in itself is undivided; yet character 3 is individual. A late Parerga passage concedes "how far its roots here go, is one of those questions which I do not undertake to answer".
Will and sexual nature
The will exceeds and uses the individual, most plainly in sex. "The genitals are the focus of the will", the brain the focus of intellect; the sex drive is "the kernel of the will to life" (W2 513-14), "a malevolent demon" slipping love-notes into "ministerial portfolios and philosophical manuscripts" (W2 533-4).
- Two levels. The lover idealizes one irreplaceable person; underneath, all is aimed at "the generation of an individual of a definite disposition" (W2 535).
- Eugenic aesthetics. "A slight downward or upward curvature of the nose has decided the happiness in life of innumerable girls." Schopenhauer "would doubtless have spoken of the selfish gene"; the will of the species directs us while we think we choose.
No freedom of the individual will
Given my character and motives, I could not have willed otherwise. Motives only redirect a will that always seeks the same; like a stream, its course is shaped by obstacles and its own nature. Georg Simmel (1907): "I do not will by virtue of values... but I have goals because I will continuously and ceaselessly." This displacement of the rational self is among Schopenhauer's most influential ideas.
Schopenhauer's 1839 prize essay on the freedom of the will, as Janaway summarizes its argument.
- Schopenhauer. Freedom is moved "up to a region which lies higher": we are responsible for our being and essence, a "free act" outside time (FW 97-9).
- Nietzsche. "The fable of intelligible freedom": the argument shows responsibility groundless, and only Christian moral attachment hid this.
- Janaway. It is "desperately unclear" what act this could be; if I merely act from my nature like a shark or a tidal wave, nothing justifies my feeling of responsibility. The real job of free will-in-itself is to allow the will's self-denial.
Can we know the will is the thing in itself?
Schopenhauer seems to hold both (a) no knowledge of the thing in itself and (b) the thing in itself is will, a contradiction Janaway himself pressed in 1989. Repairs:
- Acquaintance outside representation. Our own will is known not by representation. But willing is an object for a subject and occurs in time, so it is representation; Schopenhauer admits inner knowledge keeps time: the thing in itself "has to a great extent cast off its veils, but still does not appear quite naked" (W2 196-7).
- Bold versus circumspect. The bold stance claims direct access to my "in itself"; the circumspect stance treats inner willing as the thinnest veil, where surmise is easiest. Schopenhauer wavers.
- Young's trichotomy. Julian Young posits a third world between appearance and noumenon. Janaway: no textual basis; §§19-29 say outright about thirty times that will is the thing in itself, and Schopenhauer never deleted them.
- Atwell's two senses. Better: will is "the thing in itself in appearance", while the absolute thing in itself is unknowable because "being-known of itself contradicts being-in-itself" (W2 198).
| Aspect (after Atwell) | What it is | How known |
|---|---|---|
| World as representation | Spatio-temporal, causally linked objects | Empirically, and by its a priori forms |
| World as will (thing in itself in appearance) | Undifferentiated inner nature of all objects | Immediately in one's own case; by philosophical reflection for the rest |
| Absolute thing in itself | What the will is apart from appearing | Unknowable in principle |
Janaway's conclusion: will as the essence of appearance, not a hidden cause behind it.
Sexuality, species-will, and the eugenic mask
Janaway's section on sexual love is the sharpest empirical illustration that will exceeds the individual. The body has systems that keep the organism alive and systems aimed at life beyond the organism. Genitals are the "focus of the will"; the brain is the focus of the intellect, itself still an instrument of will-to-life. The sex-drive is "the kernel of the will to life... the concentration of all willing" (W2 513-14).
At the level of conscious lovers, the beloved appears unique, idealised, non-substitutable. At the explanatory level this is a stratagem:
Schopenhauer's conception is openly eugenic: passion "turns on what is to be produced and on its qualities"; a slight curve of a nose can decide a life "for the type of the species is at stake". He would have spoken of the "selfish gene", Janaway remarks, had he known genes; instead he speaks of the "will of the species" and even of the will-to-life of the as yet unconceived child drawing the parents together. The kernel of our nature is shared with the species and, in that sense, indestructible across generations. The unique intensity and occasional ruinous seriousness of sexual passion are, for him, evidence that we are meeting the core.
Janaway on sexual love: conscious idealisation as the species-will's stratagem.
Intelligible character versus the One will
A structural tension runs through the chapter. Ethics needs the claim that individuality is phenomenal only (so compassion can see through the principium individuationis). Action theory needs an intelligible character unique to me, "like the signet on a thousand seals", present in every act, determining empirical character under the law of causality (operari sequitur esse).
If the thing-in-itself is beyond space and time, it is beyond individuation. Then "my" intelligible character should not be mine. Janaway flags a late concession in Parerga (P2 227): individuality "does not rest solely on the principium individuationis" but is "rooted in the thing-in-itself, the will of the individual"; "how far its roots here go" he will not answer. The short answer "what I am in myself is will" therefore packs three thoughts:
| Sense of "my will" | Shared with | Work it does |
|---|---|---|
| Will as such | Everything | Metaphysical unriddling of nature |
| Will to life | Organic nature | Continuity of striving, nutrition, sex |
| Individual intelligible character | No one else | Responsibility, style of action, ethics of character |
Unfreedom, and why "I could have done otherwise" misleads
Once the subject is read as phenomenon of will, the thinking self is not the origin of bodily action. Motives determine the will's manifestation as motives determine a stone's fall, given its nature. The feeling of Eigenmächtigkeit (self-determination) that accompanies acts is real as feeling and false as metaphysics: it registers that the act flows from what I am, not that I could rewrite what I am in the moment of choice. Freedom, if anywhere, belongs to the intelligible character as thing-in-itself, outside the causal series, not to empirical choosing. That is why, for Janaway's Schopenhauer, moral training is training of knowledge and attention, not libertarian self-creation.
Grades of will in nature: from gravity to genius
Janaway's middle section on will as inner nature needs the ladder Schopenhauer climbs. Starting from human bodily willing (the only case given from within), he extends by analogy:
| Grade | Phenomena | How will shows |
|---|---|---|
| Forces | Gravity, rigidity, electricity, magnetism, chemical affinity | Blind, lawlike striving without knowledge |
| Plant | Vegetation, growth, tropisms | Blind driving force; no mind |
| Animal | Perception, motive, movement | Will plus knowledge for ends |
| Human | Reason, foresight, art, denial | Will plus abstract knowledge; can turn against itself |
Materialism tries to build upward from forces to life to mind and "forgets to take account of" the subject. Schopenhauer builds downward from the only inner we have. We do not understand gravity's inner nature more than an animal's; both are will at different grades. Plants show will without mind; calling plant movement mental is a category mistake on this ladder.
Janaway: will's grades from force to the human who can deny will.
Riddle, secret passage, and the essence reading
The world as representation is a "riddle" or "cryptograph". The "secret passage" is one's own body: known as object among objects and as will from within. Janaway's preferred reading refuses a second world behind appearances. Will is the essence of the world of appearance, a decoding that disenchants rather than consoles. That reading softens the contradiction with unknowability, fits the natural continuum of grades, and still leaves the late Nicholls shifts (further aspects beyond will) as a real textual problem rather than a pseudo-problem.
Cause, stimulus, motive: three causal relations
Janaway recovers Schopenhauer's triad of causal relations along the grades:
| Relation | Where | Mark |
|---|---|---|
| Cause proper | Inorganic | Equal action-reaction; no knowledge |
| Stimulus | Plant (and physiology) | Response not equal to input; still no motive-knowledge |
| Motive | Animal / human | Causation through knowledge; human motives can be abstract |
Human willing is peculiar only in taking abstract motives. It remains as necessitated as a stone's fall given its nature. The prize essay on freedom separates freedom of action (I can do X if I will X) from freedom of will (I could have willed otherwise). Self-consciousness seems to confirm freedom because I feel the act as mine; metaphysics reads that feeling as recognition that the act flows from what I am (operari sequitur esse), not as evidence I could rewrite my essence mid-choice. Motives alter the direction of effort, never the will itself.
Janaway: three causal relations and the freedom essay's cut.
The influences of Eastern thought on Schopenhauer's doctrine of the thing-in-itself
Three shifts after 1818
- Knowability. Early and often, the thing-in-itself is "nothing but what we know directly and intimately as the will". Later passages concede that inner knowledge "is not wholly adequate", being tied to the form of representation and to time.
- Nature. Volume one says the world is "entirely representation" and "entirely will". Later he asks what the will is "quite apart from the fact that it manifests itself as will" (W2 198): the thing-in-itself gains further aspects, the objects of awareness of those who have denied the will.
- Description. Six passages call "will" a description only in a metaphorical sense; two later ones explicitly align this with the East, citing the Bhagavad Gita: "Undivided it dwells in beings, and yet as it were divided". Here "we fall into mystical and metaphorical language".
Nicholls rejects the deflationary reading that "will" merely names what we meet through the fewest phenomenal forms. That reading clashes with Schopenhauer's many plain assertions, removes his main advance over Kant, and makes his argument weak: as Janaway and Young note, fewer veils need not mean a truer view. Kant's influence or reaction to critical reviews (Höffding's suggestion) cannot be the whole story, since Schopenhauer scorned critics.
How much did he know, and when?
Schopenhauer met the orientalist Friedrich Majer in his mother's Weimar salon after his 1813 dissertation, which mentions no Eastern thought. Nicholls counts references:
| Source | Buddhism | Hinduism |
|---|---|---|
| Manuscript Remains 1813-18 | about 2 | at least 20 |
| Manuscript Remains 1818-60 | at least 20 | about 45 |
| WWR vol. 1 (all editions) | about 8 (5 added after 1818) | over 50 |
| WWR vol. 2 (1844, 1859) | at least 30 | over 45 |
- Hindu sources. Chiefly the Oupnek'hat, Anquetil-Duperron's Latin version (1801-02) of Dara Shikoh's Persian Upanishads, and the Asiatic journals. A partial Rig Veda edition came only in 1838 and the Latin Gita in 1823. The Oupnek'hat was "the consolation of my life and will be that of my death".
- Buddhist sources. Before 1818 almost only the Asiatic Researches, mainly on Burmese Buddhism, as Schopenhauer admits. On the Will in Nature later recommends twenty-six works he owned, only two published before 1818.
- His library. At least 130 items of orientalia (Grisebach), about 150 (Hübscher).
Nicholls's timeline of Schopenhauer's Eastern reading, with the shift she attributes to it.
Influence or mere agreement?
Schopenhauer disclaims dependence. The Upanishads' utterances could be derived from his thought, "although conversely my thought is by no means to be found in the Upanishads" (1818 Preface); of Buddhism, "in my philosophising I have certainly not been under its influence". Nicholls weighs these against other remarks:
- 1816. "I do not believe my doctrine could have come about before the Upanishads, Plato and Kant could cast their rays simultaneously into the mind of one man."
- 1849. The Dresden notes of 1814-18 show "the fermentative process of my thinking"; "even in 1814 (in my 27th year) all the dogmas of my system... were established".
- Her verdict. Since contact began only in late 1813, either the Upanishads struck suddenly and decisively, or (more plausibly) core ideas developed over four years with Hindu input.
Advaita Vedanta: parallels and two gaps
Nicholls follows Copleston in comparing Schopenhauer with Advaita (non-dualist) Vedanta, whose main exponent is the eighth-century Sankara. Schopenhauer cites Windischmann's Sancara (1833).
- Shared. Brahman = Atman mirrors macrocosm = microcosm; one will and one subject outside space and time; the true self is not the empirical ego; the plural world is maya; two levels of truth, perceptual (root of egoism) and mystical (root of goodness).
- Gap 1: value. Brahman is a Holy Power, ground of the true, good and beautiful. Schopenhauer's will is the source of suffering; he reads Brahma's creation as "a sinful act", admitting this interprets "transparent" mythology.
- Gap 2: access. In Advaita higher truth comes only through yoga and special consciousness; Schopenhauer says ordinary introspection reveals the thing-in-itself.
Nicholls argues the tension between a suffering will and a value-grounding Brahman helps explain the second shift. She speculates that, had he lived longer, Schopenhauer might have said the thing-in-itself is not will at all but solely what the saved are aware of; will would be the "esoteric but non-noumenal essence" of the world (echoing Young). His late remark that he left "the sphere of illuminism" free "without setting even one foot thereon" fits this drift.
Reading the method
Nicholls's argument is circumstantial: she pairs dated textual changes with dated reading. That gives her two strengths. The Prajna-Paramita footnote and the 1859 Spence Hardy references are datable additions, so the sequence is secure even where the motive is not. And because she lists every Eastern reference with its edition, readers can check each step against the appendix. The weakness is the gap between correlation and cause: the same shifts could come from Schopenhauer's own internal pressures, notably the difficulty, of knowing a thing in itself through time-bound introspection. Nicholls concedes as much by saying Eastern ideas explain the shifts "in part".
Buddhism: Four Noble Truths
Specialists disagree on which Buddhism he knew: Dauer stresses Mahayana; Copleston and Kishan see only common themes; Nanajivako posits Burmese Theravada, then Tibetan Mahayana, then Ceylon Pali Buddhism; Abelsen says the links stay "atmosphere rather than content". Nicholls compares general doctrine:
| Buddhist teaching | Schopenhauer's counterpart |
|---|---|
| 1. Life is suffering | Pessimism: endless, inescapable suffering |
| 2. Origin in craving (thirst) | Aimless striving of the will |
| 3. Cessation through ending craving | Salvation by denial of the will |
| 4. Eightfold Path | Seeing through individuation, then compassion, then ascetic withdrawal |
| Samsara under causal nexus | World as representation under the principle of sufficient reason |
| Non-self (anatta); rebirth without individuality | Fleeting consciousness; the will endures through births and deaths |
Nicholls's mapping of Buddhist liberation onto Schopenhauer's path to denial of the will.
Nirvana and the relative nothing
Following Walpola Rahula and Huntington, Nicholls describes nirvana as unsayable, neither positive nor negative, not annihilation (there is no self to annihilate), realizable in this life, and in Mahayana no different from samsara seen rightly.
- Schopenhauer's echo. Denial is "not... the annihilation of a substance, but the mere act of not-willing"; what replaces existence is nothing "in our eyes"; the Buddhists "call that existence Nirvana". The term "God" could stand for "an unknown x".
- Shared ground. Both are beyond ordinary language, neither is nihilism, both end craving and suffering.
- The difference. Schopenhauer's phrasing ("that which hitherto willed no longer wills") assumes a substance ontology, an enduring propertied thing-in-itself, which Buddhism refuses (though the Yogacara school is charged with a substrate).
- Why it matters. A "relative nothing" only makes sense if the thing-in-itself has aspects other than will, the second shift. Grasping that nirvana does not end all value may have driven it.
For Nicholls, the late Schopenhauer separates ordinary from enlightened consciousness, bringing him closer to what he took to be Buddhist and Hindu epistemology.
Nicholls's causal story: Eastern reading drives three changes in the doctrine of the thing in itself.
Sources, counts, and the 1818 hinge
Nicholls builds her influence claim on a citation census across the Manuscript Remains and both volumes of WWR:
| Period / work | Buddhism | Hinduism |
|---|---|---|
| MR 1804-1818 | ~2 | ≥20 (after 1813) |
| MR 1818-1830 | ≥15 | ~30 |
| MR 1830-1860 | ≥7 | ~15 |
| W1 (1818 + later notes) | ~8 (5 added later) | >50 (7 added later) |
| W2 (1844/1859) | ≥30 | >45 |
Hindu interest is early and steady from 1813; Buddhist interest rises sharply after 1818, when European sources improve. Schopenhauer himself notes in W2 that before 1818 Europe had "only a very few accounts of Buddhism... confined almost entirely to a few essays in the earlier volumes of the Asiatic Researches", mostly on Burmese Buddhism. By his death his library held at least 130 items of orientalia; in On the Will in Nature ("Sinology") he lists twenty-six Buddhist works he "possess[es] and know[s] well".
Early Hindu sources are the Oupnek'hat (Anquetil-Duperron's Latin from the Persian) and the Asiatic journals (Asiatic Researches, Asiatisches Magazin, Asiatic Journal). References to the Vedas, Puranas and Bhagavadgita before the texts themselves were available in translation often come from journal articles. A. W. Schlegel's Gita appears only in 1823; part of the Vedas in European translation only in 1838. That chronology matters for Nicholls: the metaphysics of 1818 was formed under Hindu, not Buddhist, pressure.
Nicholls's chronology: Hindu input before the system, Buddhist input as it is revised.
Advaita in detail: six parallels, Brahman as sustainer
Nicholls, following Copleston, aligns Schopenhauer with Advaita Vedanta (Sankara), which he met via Windischmann's Sancara sive de Theologia Vedanticorum. Advaita's core: Brahman = Atman; one Absolute and one Self (not the empirical ego); the world as distinct from Brahman is maya; two levels of truth (mystical release vs common-sense/religious description).
Her six parallels:
- Will as thing-in-itself sustains the world, as Brahman sustains the cosmos.
- Will objectified in individuals = macrocosm/microcosm identity.
- One will and one knowing subject outside space and time.
- Essential nature ≠ empirical consciousness (timeless One vs transient ego).
- Will alone real; the world apart from it illusory.
- Two awarenesses: perceptual (egoism) and mystical (moral goodness).
Two gaps remain decisive. First, will as source of immense suffering clashes with Brahman as Holy Power; Schopenhauer's references treat Brahman almost only as sustainer/creator (the days and nights of Brahma, periods of ages), never as beatific absolute. Second, early Schopenhauer makes the thing-in-itself knowable to normal consciousness via bodily willing, whereas Advaita reserves higher truth for yogic release. Nicholls reads the later narrowing of knowability and the turn to metaphorical language as Schopenhauer edging toward that Advaita epistemology without abandoning the will-vocabulary.
Why Eastern thought explains the shifts better than Kant alone
Critical reviews and residual Kantianism can explain the first shift (knowability narrowed). They do not explain why Schopenhauer also widens the nature of the thing-in-itself beyond will, or why he reaches for unsayability and Buddhist prajnaparamita. Nicholls's causal claim is comparative: only a sustained Eastern engagement accounts for all three movements together, and for the late habit of stating his own doctrines in Indian and Buddhist vocabulary. The Companion's closer look already flags her Oupnek'hat dating; App's archival work corrects the library story while strengthening her broader thesis that Indian input shaped the metaphysics before 1818.
Three shifts timed and contrasted
Nicholls's thesis stands or falls with the three shifts stated as dated contrasts:
| Shift | Early (to ~1818/W1) | Late (W2, later editions, Parerga) |
|---|---|---|
| Knowability | Thing-in-itself = what we know "directly and intimately as the will" | Inner knowledge "not wholly adequate"; still in form of representation and time |
| Nature | World "entirely representation" and "entirely will" | What will is "apart from" manifesting as will; further aspects for deniers of will |
| Description | "Will" used as literal metaphysical name | "Will" often metaphorical; Bhagavad Gita "undivided yet as it were divided"; mystical language |
Kantian criticism and residual caution can motivate shift 1 alone. Shifts 2 and 3, and the habit of restating doctrines in Indian and Buddhist vocabulary, need the Eastern engagement. Influence is not mere agreement: chronology (Hindu before 1818, Buddhism rising after), citation counts, and the 1816 Upanishads-Plato-Kant confession outweigh the Prefaces' denials.
Buddhism: Four Noble Truths and relative nothing
Nicholls's Buddhism section pairs the Four Noble Truths with Schopenhauer's pessimism and soteriology: suffering; origin in craving/will; cessation; path. Nirvana as "relative nothing" (nothing relative to the will's world, not absolute blank) matches late talk of a remainder after denial that is not another object for the PSR. Prajnaparamita unsayability tracks the metaphorical turn. The gaps remain: Schopenhauer never becomes a Buddhist; will as suffering-source still fights beatific Brahman; normal bodily acquaintance still differs from yogic release. Her claim is explanatory superiority for the bundle of shifts, not identity of systems.
Nicholls: Eastern pressure on the three shifts.
Influence versus mere agreement
Nicholls's method section: parallels alone could be coincidence or shared Kantian/Platonic inheritance. Influence needs chronology, citation density, self-ascription (1816 rays confession), and explanatory gain (why all three shifts together). Mere agreement would predict symmetric early Buddhist and Hindu impact; the record shows Hindu early, Buddhism later. Official denials (W1 Preface; limited pre-1818 Buddhist sources) are weighed against notebooks and library lists (130+ oriental items; twenty-six Buddhist works "known well"). App's lending-register work corrects the Majer/Oupnek'hat anecdote and still supports pre-1818 Indian formation of the will metaphysics.
Nicholls: tests that turn parallel into influence.
Nirvana, relative nothing, and denial of the will
Nicholls's late comparison of nirvana and denial of the will is the payoff of the Buddhism pages. Three agreements: (1) neither is adequately sayable in ordinary language; (2) neither is nihilism that cancels all value; (3) both end craving/willing and thus suffering. Schopenhauer's "relative nothing" (nothing relative to the will's world) lets him deny that salvation is blank annihilation while still refusing to describe a positive object under the PSR. Mystics and saints touch aspects of the thing-in-itself other than will; that is shift 2 in soteriological dress.
The tension she flags: relative nothing seems to require that there be further aspects; early "entirely will" left no room. Eastern vocabulary (maya, Brahman/Atman, prajnaparamita, Four Noble Truths) becomes the late Schopenhauer's preferred way to state what Kantian vocabulary blocked. Influence here is not conversion: he remains a European metaphysician using Indian and Buddhist thought as explanatory pressure and legitimating parallel, especially for the path from affirmation to denial.
Nicholls: nirvana and denial as parallel unsayable ends of craving.
Advaita gaps that remain after the parallels
Even with six parallels (sustainer; micro/macro; one will and knower outside space-time; essence ≠ empirical ego; will real / world illusory; egoistic vs mystical awareness), two gaps never close. Will as engine of immense suffering fights Brahman as Holy Power; Schopenhauer's Brahman citations stress creation/sustenance (days and nights of Brahma), not beatitude. Early knowability via ordinary bodily willing fights Advaita's reservation of higher truth for release. The late narrowing of knowability and the turn to metaphor are, on her reading, Schopenhauer moving toward Advaita epistemology without dropping the will-word. That is influence as drift, not as replacement.
Deflationary "will" rejected
Nicholls rejects the reading (Young; pressures in Janaway) that "will" merely names what we meet through the fewest phenomenal forms. That deflation makes the advance over Kant evaporate and weakens the argument that inner awareness reveals essence. She counts six passages where "will" is already called metaphorical, and later ones that align the metaphor with the Bhagavad Gita and mystical speech. The metaphorical turn is therefore textual, not an interpreter's rescue. Combined with the knowability narrow and the "further aspects" widen, it yields her drift thesis: late Schopenhauer speaks more like a thinker under Eastern pressure than like the 1818 dogmatic identifier of thing-in-itself with will.
Nicholls against deflation: three textual pressures on 'will'.
Ideas and imagination: Schopenhauer on the proper foundation of art
Kernels and husks
Schopenhauer studied medicine before philosophy and kept up with science all his life, yet he trusts aesthetics, not science, to reveal metaphysical truth. Science differs from common sense only in form: it is systematic, but still oriented to goals and causes, still in the service of will. It surveys the husk of nature, "the intestines of intestinal worms and the vermin of vermin", while ignoring its kernel.
- Husk. Etiology and morphology: objects under the principle of sufficient reason and individuation.
- Kernel. Will in its objective manifestations, the concern of philosophy and art.
- No rivalry. Against Israel Knox, who tied genius to madness as the result of treating art as "antagonistic and superior to science", Foster stresses that the two "go hand in hand, considering the same objects from different points of view". Art is a separate, equally potent method.
The Ideas are timeless species-types, the most adequate objectifications of will at each grade: gravity at the bottom, plants about halfway, humans at the top, where each person expresses an individual Idea. Schopenhauer's imagery throughout is of veils, masks and stages: art is "the play within the play", the stage on the stage in Hamlet.
Foster's account of how art passes the genius's insight to the ordinary viewer.
The boundaries of ordinary intellect
For most people intellect is will's vassal, a tool for finding food scaled up to human needs. Yet anyone can meet will immediately in the body, the point where "the thing-in-itself enters the phenomenon most immediately". Here Foster finds a "mild paradox".
- Avenue 1: the body. Immediate, non-representational, available to the will-driven ordinary intellect.
- Avenue 2: the Idea. Representational, available only to will-less contemplation.
- Horn A. If bodily access is already the most intimate, there is no need for art to reveal will, which weakens art's epistemic role and the ideal of unity.
- Horn B. If we must link the two, the attempt is itself an act of willing, which defeats aesthetic salvation.
- Foster's verdict. The oneness of will in self and world is an "analogous unity only, intellectual in character". Salvation comes neither from the body nor from inference, but from immersion in will-less knowing, fostered by art.
The reflective productivity of genius
Foster finds a pattern linking the two avenues: reflection. Moving from will in oneself to the force "that shoots and vegetates in the plant", the crystal and the magnet requires continued reflection; and the genius is "reflective" in the same sense, conscious of the "whirl and tumult of life" rather than absorbed in it.
- Anyone can feel will through the body, but connecting it to other things needs reflective consciousness.
- Ordinary people rarely manage this, flung into life's tumult.
- The genius has a surplus of intellect and turns reflection on the world, apprehending Ideas in nature.
- The work of art distils the Idea so that even ordinary people get a temporary respite, provided they "contribute from their own resources" through imagination.
The genius indulges in "constant play" while others stay in "dull seriousness". In contemplation, subject and object seem to merge: "we lose ourselves entirely in this object... clear mirror of the object". Foster compares W. H. Auden's praise of the "eye on the object look", the first flaker of flints who forgot his dinner, as the germ of civilization. Philosophers preserve such insight as "a dried and colourless mummy" of concepts; artists through productive imagination.
Plato turned upside down
| Question | Plato (Republic) | Schopenhauer |
|---|---|---|
| How are Ideas grasped? | By intellection, after mathematics and dialectic | By perception, will-less contemplation |
| What does art copy? | Individual things, at several removes from reality | The Idea itself |
| Status of images | Lowest rung; linked to appetite | Ladder up to the Idea for ordinary viewers |
| Concept vs Idea | Confused, by Schopenhauer's lights | Concept built from many; Idea falls into many |
| Mere imitation | Disparaged (Republic, Ion) | Also disparaged: leave room for imagination |
Schopenhauer calls Plato's disdain for poetry "one of the greatest and best known errors of that great man". The Idea is glimpsed by the genius at the level of the visible world, filtered "downward" into images, which lead the ordinary viewer "upward". Both thinkers prize enduring truths and reject literal copying: "the very best in art... must be born in the beholder's imagination".
The arts, grade by grade
Schopenhauer was better placed than Kant, Hegel or Schelling to write on the arts: a daily flautist until his final months, a close student of works, and a guest of the Weimar salon where his mother Johanna, a bestselling author, received Goethe. The balance between the subjective side (peace of the pure subject) and the objective side (the Idea) shifts with the grade depicted:
| Art | Grade of will shown | Dominant side |
|---|---|---|
| Architecture, hydraulics | Gravity vs rigidity; fluidity | Subjective peace |
| Horticulture | Plants (beauty mostly nature's own) | Subjective |
| Still life, ruins, interiors | Inanimate; the artist's calm transferred | Subjective |
| Scenery painting proper | Plants in habitats | Balance |
| Animal painting, sculpture | Restless animal will | Objective |
| Human sculpture | Beauty (species) and grace | Objective |
| Historical painting | Individual character | Objective |
| Poetry: lyric, epic, tragedy | Human action through time; tragedy shows will's self-denial | Rising objectivity |
| Music | Will itself, not Ideas | Outside the ladder |
- Architecture. Its "sole aesthetic material" is the conflict of gravity and rigidity; it must not imitate flowers or bodies.
- Character. In humans the species and the individual come apart, so the arts must show both beauty and character. Sculpture suits beauty (seen from many angles); painting suits character (seen from one viewpoint).
- History vs poetry. History is like a view from a mountain: much, nothing distinct. There is more inner truth in poetry and biography.
- Poetry from concepts. The poet combines clear concepts as a chemist combines clear fluids, to precipitate the concrete.
- Tragedy. The highest representational art: "the summons to turn away the will from life". Comedy affirms life; Schopenhauer distrusts its message.
Music: the will heard directly
Music is "the innermost kernel preceding all form", an immediate copy of the will rather than of Ideas. Its structure mirrors the grades of nature, while program music and opera (a hybrid best left unmixed) are criticized.
Schopenhauer's analogy between the layers of harmony and the grades of will, as Foster presents it.
Foster's own proposal: music best unifies self and world because both inner will and music are temporal and felt, like a heartbeat one both hears and feels. Following Lydia Goehr, music is "pure temporal process"; the musical genius lets the will's dynamic pass "to the hands... and not through concepts".
Bad art: losing the foundation
Every genuine work must arise from perception: "Every good painting, every genuine poem, bears the stamp of the frame of mind it depicts"; "from concepts arise the works of mere talent".
- Decorative whimsy in architecture distracts from gravity's pull on stone.
- Allegory turns the viewer from the image to an abstract concept "outside the work of art"; its degenerate form, symbolism, links sign and meaning by arbitrary convention.
- Fashion and topicality fade with their context; "the Ideas alone are permanent".
- Verse is secondary: truth's best adornment is nakedness, so a great Idea in prose may outweigh one in verse.
Foster's semiotic summary: will is indexical in ourselves and iconic in art, never purely symbolic.
Foster's test for bad art: each fault replaces perception of the Idea with something conceptual.
The mild paradox: two avenues to will that will not unify
Foster's sharpest critical move is the mild paradox at the join of Books II and III. Schopenhauer gives two routes to the will:
- Route A. Immediate self-awareness in bodily willing: "the point where the thing-in-itself enters the phenomenon most immediately" (W2 197). Ordinary, will-driven, non-representational.
- Route B. Representational awareness of Ideas in art (or music's direct copy of the will). Will-less, aesthetic, catalyzed by genius.
If Route A is already the most intimate access, why must the ordinary intellect seek Ideas at all? If a link must be forged, the forging is itself an act of willing, which cancels the will-lessness that makes aesthetic knowledge possible. Foster tests two rescues and rejects both:
- Art reveals Oneness. Art overcomes illusory plurality. But seeking that link is still goal-governed intellect.
- Without art, self-knowledge is solipsistic. Ideas point to a world beyond the self. Same problem: the extension is an intellectual endeavor.
So the posited oneness of will-in-self and will-in-Ideas is analogous only, "intellectual in character", not a metaphysical fusion. Salvation for the ordinary person still comes neither from Route A nor from the inference, but from immersion in the pure subject of knowing that art alone reliably triggers.
Foster's mild paradox: intimate will in the body versus will-less Ideas in art.
Genius, Auden, and the contagion of reflectiveness
What bridges the gap in practice is not a proof but a contagion. Anyone can feel will in the body; few can reflect from that feeling to the inner nature of plants, crystals and magnets (W1 109-10). The genius has an "excess of intellect" that turns from the job of living to "constant play". In contemplation the object becomes Idea; subject and object feel as if they blend ("clear mirror of the object", W1 178-9). Foster quotes W. H. Auden's "eye on the object look": the first flint-flaker who forgot dinner, the first shell-collector who remained celibate. That look is the germ of civilization and of Schopenhauerian aesthetic consciousness alike.
The path for the ordinary intellect:
- Genius reflects on a beautiful natural object.
- Pure subject of knowing arises; object raised to Idea.
- Productive imagination resituates the Idea in a work.
- The work calls forth the pure subject in the ordinary viewer.
- Viewer "contribute[s] from his own resources" (W2 407); imagination plus reflection link inner body-experience to outer forms.
Art is therefore not optional decoration. It is the external impetus without which most minds stay inside egoistic willing. Philosophy encodes the same intuition in "dried and colourless" concepts (MR 3 23); art leaves a body that can re-ignite the state.
Grades of art and why architecture is almost physics
Foster's survey of the arts follows the grades of the will's objectification. Low grades (inorganic nature, plant) suit the visual arts of mass and growth; higher grades (animal, human) suit sculpture, painting, poetry; tragedy shows human Idea at the point where will turns against itself; music bypasses Ideas entirely.
Architecture is the limit case. Its "sole aesthetic material" is the conflict of gravity and rigidity. It must not imitate flowers or bodies; as soon as it does, it loses the Idea it alone can show. That is why Foster treats bad art as loss of foundation: genre painting that chases anecdote, music that illustrates concepts, architecture that disguises load-bearing as ornament. Each fails by substituting a foreign grade or a concept for the Idea the medium can actually carry.
Arts grade by grade: the full ladder
Foster follows Schopenhauer's ladder of arts as grades of the will's objectification. All items:
| Art | Grade of Idea | Proper material / risk |
|---|---|---|
| Architecture | Lowest: gravity vs rigidity | Load and support; risk: ornament disguising force |
| Hydraulics / fountain art | Fluidity and gravity | Water's will-like streaming |
| Horticulture | Plant grade | Living growth; risk: excessive interference |
| Landscape / still life / ruins | Plant and inorganic | Nature's shapes without anecdote |
| Sculpture / animal painting | Animal | Species character in the individual |
| Historical painting / poetry | Human Idea | Character, action, tragedy |
| Tragedy | Will turning on itself | Resignation glimpsed |
| Music | Bypasses Ideas | Direct copy of the will itself |
Music is the exception that proves the hierarchy's point: as a flutist who practised daily into old age, Schopenhauer gives music ontological privilege. Bad art, for Foster, is always loss of foundation: starting from concepts, charming the will (cuisine of the eyes), or assigning a medium the wrong grade (architecture imitating flowers).
Foster: grades of art from gravity to music's bypass.
Plato turned upside down, and kernels vs husks
Plato's Ideas are more real than particulars; Schopenhauer's Ideas are grades of will's objectification, still representation, reached by will-less perception rather than dialectic. The ordinary intellect stays among husks (PSR, motives, concepts). Genius cracks to the kernel (Idea) by excess intellect freed from service. Philosophy dries the same insight into colourless concepts; art keeps a body that can re-ignite the state in others. That is why aesthetics, for Foster, is not a side chapel but a load-bearing wall of the system.
Bad art catalogue
Foster's negative definition completes the positive ladder. Bad art: (1) starts from concepts not perception; (2) charms the will (sensuous allure as end); (3) assigns a medium the wrong grade (architecture as floral imitation; programmatic music illustrating concepts); (4) genre anecdote that never rises to Idea; (5) allegory that stays at abstract representation of representations. Each fails the proper foundation: perceptual apprehension of Ideas drawn from nature (or music's direct copy of will). The mild paradox remains: bodily will is more immediate, yet ordinary salvation still needs art's immersion.
Foster: five ways art loses its foundation.
Music: outer technique, inner copy of will
Foster's music pages: Schopenhauer the daily flutist treats music as the art that bypasses Ideas. Outer significance (mathematical proportions, symphonic symmetry) is secondary. Program music that paints scenes is "simple realism" he rejects. Yet music's structure still symbolises the will's life: bass as crude will, harmony as grades, melody as articulate desire and thought. Metaphysically this matters because music is effective without conceptual mediation, and because it is the clearest aesthetic analogue of Book II's claim that will is the inner of all. The mild paradox sharpens here: if music already copies will directly, why do the Idea-arts matter? Foster's answer returns to contagion and ordinary intellect: most people need the visual and poetic ladder; music is the summit and the exception, not a replacement for the grades.
Foster on music: bypass of Ideas with structured symbolism.
Schopenhauer's narrower sense of morality
Ethics from dawn to twilight
Schopenhauer's thinking was ethically driven throughout. In 1813 he envisaged a philosophy that would be "metaphysics and ethics in one". On the Will in Nature claims more right than Spinoza to call its metaphysics "ethics". Parerga (1851) says his "real philosophy" culminates in a "higher metaphysical-ethical standpoint". Yet his fame rests on the metaphysics of will and his notoriety on pessimism, and the commentary has fixed on salvation. Cartwright thinks the salvation themes contain "some of the most problematic and unconvincing dimensions" of the system; the narrower ethics, which Iris Murdoch praised for its "humane wisdom", is where he can still speak to current moral philosophy.
- Five contributions. A critique of Kant that anticipates modern objections; a descriptive virtue ethics of character and moral psychology; a unified theory of virtues and vices; affinities with Eastern thought; and moral status for animals.
Demolishing Kant's ethics
Schopenhauer revered Kant's theoretical philosophy but called his practical philosophy a catastrophe born of love of architectonic symmetry, fame and old age. He spent over one-third of On the Basis of Morality attacking it, because "opposites illustrate each other". Atwell says he lists most criticisms of Kant made in two centuries; Cartwright says that is "not far from the mark", though the critique is uneven and sometimes rests on selective readings.
| Charge | Schopenhauer's argument | Later echo |
|---|---|---|
| Begging the question | Kant assumes ethics gives laws for what ought to happen, without proof (a petitio principii) | Critiques of law conceptions of ethics |
| Theological roots | "Du sollt nicht lügen" copies the Decalogue; ought, duty and law need a divine commander; the postulates smuggle back God, immortality and reward | Anscombe, "Modern Moral Philosophy" (1958) |
| Imperatives are hypothetical | The universalization test works only via self-interest ("if you want help, help others") | Foot, "Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives" (1972) |
| Respect is obedience | "Necessity" of duty is a "forced paraphrase of the word ought" | Virtue-ethics critiques of duty |
| Cold benefactor | Doing good without feeling is repugnant; compare art made by rules | Schiller's satire Scruple of Conscience |
| Reason is not virtue | Reason is instrumental and morally neutral; great wickedness needs reason | Humean and sentimentalist ethics |
| Strange a priori | An a priori law with no certain instances; a "Delphic temple in the human soul" | Doubts about the "fact of reason" |
- Objection. The universalization examples show how to test a maxim, not what motivates obedience; Schopenhauer confuses the two.
- Kant's answer on motive. Respect (Achtung) for the law can move us from duty, even against inclination.
- Schopenhauer's rejoinder. Kant himself admits we have no certain instance of acting from duty, and in the Groundwork says "all human reason is inadequate" to explain how pure reason can be practical. What "cannot be either conceived as possible or proven as actual has no credentials for its existence".
- Modern verdict. Cartwright cites Henry Allison: Schopenhauer's reading is often superficial, though Allison agrees the Groundwork deduction failed.
The quotation Schopenhauer gives as the categorical imperative ("Act only in accordance with that maxim which you can at the same time will to become a universal law for all rational beings") is, Cartwright notes, not a formula Kant ever used, though close to Groundwork 4:421.
Traditions as supporting evidence
Schopenhauer does not rest on private intuition. His moral principle, Neminem laede, imo omnes, quantum potes, juva ("Injure no one; on the contrary, help everyone as much as you can"), states something on which "all teachers of ethics are really in agreement". Appeals to Eastern and Western traditions play a secondary role: they show his intuitions are not idiosyncratic. Cartwright denies this is a vicious circle, because the real confirmation is explanatory power: a system that keeps the traditions' insights while giving the totality of human experience a unified explanation, which the traditions themselves could not.
- Ethics as psychology. Like Thomas Nagel in The Possibility of Altruism, Schopenhauer treats ethics as part of moral psychology with a metaphysics attached. Unlike Nagel, he resolves it into will, not reason, and reads metaphysics out of behaviour rather than into it.
- Interior morality. Approbation targets the intent or willed end, not consequences. Looking at a deed "from the inside" ties action to character, and character to the metaphysical will.
- Degrees. Everyone is susceptible to all three main incentives in varying degrees, and a character's moral value is a function of which motives dominate.
Four incentives
Every action aims at someone's weal (Wohl) or woe (Wehe): one's own or another's. That yields four incentives.
| Aims at | Own | Another's |
|---|---|---|
| Weal | Egoism: morally indifferent | Compassion (Mitleid): moral worth |
| Woe | Unnamed: ascetic, not moral value (footnote, W2; letter to Becker, 1844) | Malice (Bosheit): reprehensible |
Schopenhauer's four incentives, sorted by whose weal or woe the action ultimately aims at.
Egoism and malice: a theory of vice
Like Dante, Schopenhauer shows the inferno before paradise. Cartwright values the result: virtue ethicists have kept "an almost total silence on the subject of vice" (Christine McKinnon), while Schopenhauer offers a unified theory of it.
- Egoism is "the natural standpoint". Each grade of will fights for another's matter, space and time. The egoist treats himself as the centre of the world and would prefer the world's destruction to his own. Only humans can be self-interested (eigennützig), because only they plan with reason.
- Egoism is morally ambivalent. Harm to others is a means, not an end, so egoism yields indifferent acts, but its conflicts ground a Hobbesian state that deters wrong (Malter: preventing suffered wrong is the theme of his political theory).
- Extreme egoism. Maxim: "Help no one; injure all if it brings you advantage". Its "brutal" vices: intemperance, lust, avarice, injustice, hardness of heart, pride.
- Malice is "devilish". It is non-egoistic like compassion, aiming at another's woe. Vices: envy, ill will, Schadenfreude, perfidy, revenge, cruelty. It is worse to know another's interests and act against them than to ignore them.
- Envy of fortune (wealth, status) can be consoled by hope; envy of nature (beauty, intelligence) is hopeless and becomes "a Proteus of stratagems to wound without showing itself".
- Schadenfreude appears where compassion should be: "the worst trait in human nature", an "impotent cruelty". Because Schopenhauer's is a morality of disposition, the inclination counts even if never acted on.
- Cruelty proper comes from an excessive will to life that suffers excessively and seeks relief in the sight of another's pain ("the Neros and Domitians... Robespierre").
- Is it egoism after all? S. I. Benn: pleasure in another's suffering is no less disinterested than pleasure in another's good fortune; Atwell disagrees. Cartwright suggests Schopenhauer's analysis fed Nietzsche's ressentiment.
Compassion: the moral incentive
"Only insofar as an action has sprung from compassion does it have moral worth." Schopenhauer argues first by elimination (justice and philanthropy aim at another's good, so neither egoism nor malice moves them), then by derivation.
- The great mystery. Compassion requires that the difference between me and the other, "the very basis of my egoism", be eliminated to a degree. It is literal: against Ubaldo Cassina (1788), we do not imagine the pain as ours; "we feel his pain as his". The happier we are, the more susceptible we become.
- Justice: first degree. A negative, restraining response: compassion "opposes and impedes" harm I intend. My own experiences have the jus primi occupantis, so restraint is needed. Principles let compassion work "not so much actu as potentia".
- Philanthropy: second degree. A positive impulse to help, up to sacrifice of property, health, freedom and life.
- Animals. "Whoever is cruel to animals cannot be a good human"; Kant's treatment of animals as mere means reflects Christian morality.
- Collective compassion. Britain's twenty million pounds to end colonial slavery is his example.
Cartwright's reconstruction of how one motive generates the two cardinal virtues and their particular virtues.
- 1839: essay written for the Royal Danish Society; the only entry, yet refused the prize.
- Over one-third of the text attacks Kant.
- 3 incentives treated (egoism, malice, compassion), plus 1 unnamed in a footnote.
- 2 cardinal virtues, "from which all the virtues flow".
- 1847: Schopenhauer calls the work "the most important ethical work that has appeared in the last sixty years".
William Frankena later agreed that justice and benevolence are the two cardinal moral virtues from which the rest derive.
Character and its metaphysics
Virtues and vices are "qualities of the will", innate and ineradicable: "The wicked man is born with his wickedness as much as the serpent is with its poisonous fangs". Teaching can change only means: "The head becomes clear; the heart remains unreformed."
Schopenhauer's scale of moral character, graded by how sharply the agent separates self from others.
The scale explains why Schopenhauer thinks morality cannot be taught. Instruction can show the egoist that small sacrifices buy larger advantages, or help a good character act more consistently with its nature, but it never changes ultimate ends.
Narrower morality versus the higher standpoint
Cartwright's framing distinction is easy to lose under the fame of pessimism. Schopenhauer's "real philosophy" culminates in a "higher metaphysical-ethical standpoint" (P1 313): death, eternal justice, sexual love, asceticism, salvation as denial of the will, the claim that it would be "better for us not to exist" (W2 605). That is Book IV's climax. "Morality in the narrower sense" (W2 589) is different: the empirical theory of virtue and vice, incentives and character, set out most fully in On the Basis of Morality (1839/1840). Iris Murdoch praised that book for "much humane wisdom on the subject of morals". Cartwright's claim: only the narrower sense shows how Schopenhauer still contributes to contemporary moral thought (virtue ethics, animal ethics, anti-deontology).
The Danish prize essay spent over one-third of its length demolishing Kant before building. "Opposites illustrate each other, and my foundation (for ethics) is, in essentials, diametrically opposed to Kant's" (BM 47). Nowhere else is Schopenhauer so extreme against his ancestor.
Four incentives, complete
The incentive table is the chapter's framework and must be complete:
| Incentive | Direction | Moral status | Signature |
|---|---|---|---|
| Egoism (Egoismus) | Own well-being | Non-moral default | Endless; the will's ordinary voice |
| Malice (Bosheit) | Another's woe | Vice | Rare pure form; cruelty for its own sake |
| Compassion (Mitleid) | Another's well-being / against their woe | Only moral incentive | Immediate participation in another's suffering |
| Asceticism (limit case) | Own woe / denial | Beyond narrower morality | Belongs to the higher standpoint |
Egoism is not yet vice; it is the baseline. Malice is egoism's dark twin, willing another's pain as such. Compassion alone founds justice (do no harm) and loving-kindness (help). Character decides which incentive dominates; metaphysics then explains why compassion is possible: the same will in both beings, seen through the veil of individuation.
Cartwright's narrower morality: from Kant demolished to compassion as sole moral incentive.
Animals, virtues, and the current reassessment
Because moral status tracks suffering, not reason, animals enter the moral community. That is one of Cartwright's strongest links to present debates. The other is genealogical: Schopenhauer anticipates the late-twentieth-century turn from law-and-duty ethics back to character and virtue. His critique of Kant's opening move (assuming there are moral laws about what ought to happen even if it never does) is a petitio charge that virtue ethicists still recognise. Cartwright does not claim Schopenhauer invented contemporary virtue ethics; he claims he is one of its unpaid ancestors, and that the narrower writings, not the salvation doctrine, are where the debt is collectible.
Kant demolished: the points that still feed virtue ethics
Cartwright's Kant critique, compressed to the lines that anticipate today's virtue-ethics revolt:
- Petitio of the ought. Kant assumes ethics gives laws for what ought to happen even if it never does (BM 52). He never shows there are such non-empirical moral laws.
- Theological residue. Unconditioned ought still smells of command; without a commander the concept thins.
- CI as disguised hypothetical. "Help others" binds if you want help when needy; the egoist who never needs help is unmoved. So the form is not truly categorical.
- Duty vs inclination. Moral worth that excludes compassion as "mere inclination" inverts lived moral phenomenology: we praise the person moved by another's pain, not the one who acts from duty against sympathy.
- Legislative form. Treating ethics as law-giving mirrors legal and religious models Cartwright's Schopenhauer replaces with character and incentive.
The constructive replacement is empirical: observe what actions we actually credit with moral worth; find the incentive (compassion); unify virtues (justice = do no harm; loving-kindness = help) and vices (egoism's excess; malice); ground animal standing in shared suffering. Character is fixed as intelligible character; change of conduct comes through knowledge, not libertarian self-rewriting.
Cartwright: from Kant demolished to compassion-centred virtue ethics.
Traditions as evidence, not authority
Christian, Hindu and Buddhist sayings appear as supporting evidence that compassion is the widely recognised moral core, not as revelation that founds ethics. That keeps the narrower morality philosophically autonomous while explaining Schopenhauer's taste for Eastern and Gospel formulations. The higher standpoint (denial, eternal justice) remains available but is not required for the virtue theory to stand.
Virtues, vices, and animals inside the circle
Cartwright's unified theory, items complete:
Virtues from compassion. Voluntary justice (do not harm; respect the line another's body and means draw); loving-kindness / pure philanthropy (positive help); magnanimity as compassion's high form. Vices from egoism and malice. From egoism's graded self-affirmation: intemperance, lust, selfishness, avarice, covetousness, injustice, hardness of heart, pride, arrogance. From malice: cruelty, spite, the rare pure will to another's pain. "Reasonable" and "vicious" can coexist: great wickedness needs intellect.
Animals enter because egoism and compassion track striving and suffering, not reason. Non-human animals strive for well-being and can suffer; the metaphysics of one will under individuation gives them standing without a social contract. Character (will) is the metaphysical locus of moral evaluation; actions express the kind and degree of incentives that move a fixed intelligible character. That is why Cartwright can call the narrower ethics a descriptive virtue ethics with contemporary bite.
Cartwright: virtues, vices, animals from one incentive theory.
Schopenhauer on death
Life as a constant dying
Schopenhauer's pessimism makes work, privation, misery and suffering, crowned by death, "the aim and object of our life" (W2 584). Optimism is "the unwarranted self-praise of the real author of the world, namely of the will-to-live", and it is pernicious, because it makes people think they are owed happiness.
- Time drains life. Real existence is only the present, whose "unimpeded flight into the past is a constant transition into death". The past is a repository of what is dead and no longer anything.
- Body as deferred death. "Just as our walking is only a constantly prevented falling, so is the life of our body only a constantly prevented dying."
- Soap bubble. We blow life "as long and as large as possible, although with the perfect certainty that it will burst".
- Byron's Euthanasia. Schopenhauer quotes: "'Tis something better not to be."
Schopenhauer's picture of life as dying: the present streams into a dead past, and each act of living only postpones the end.
Why only humans fear death
"The animal learns to know death only when he dies, but man consciously draws every hour nearer his death" (W1 37). Hence philosophies and religions. Reason and the need for metaphysics arrive together: the will, rising through nature to reflection in man, "marvels at its own works" and for the first time "stands consciously face to face with death". Man is an animal metaphysicum, and "Death is the real inspiring genius or Musagetes of philosophy" (W2 463), which is why Socrates called philosophy preparation for death.
- Jacquette's objection. Field observation suggests higher animals show some awareness of death, in avoiding danger and reacting to the death of kin. Awareness of death is neither necessary nor sufficient for self-consciousness.
- Jacquette's concession. Animals still do not live in anticipation of their own death as we do, and death's special epistemic relation to human self-consciousness shapes much of culture.
- Knowledge without concepts. All our concepts come from the will's objectification, so death "remains for us a mere negation". Each death is nature's question to the will: "Have you had enough? Do you wish to escape from me?" (W2 609).
Inevitable, yet unreal
Death "must triumph, for by birth it has already become our lot", playing with its prey "only for a while before swallowing it up". Yet, given the appearance/thing-in-itself distinction, birth and death are alike unreal. They belong to the principium individuationis. Neither the Will nor the subject of knowing "is in any way affected by birth and death" (W1 275), and life accompanies will "as inseparably as a body is accompanied by its shadow".
A vanitas still life
Jacquette compares Schopenhauer's death writing to a Dutch vanitas canvas: skull, pocket watch, overturned glass.
- Nobody would relive it. No sincere person "will ever wish to go through it again"; citing Herodotus (vii, 46), everyone has wished not to live through the following day. "The shortness of life... may perhaps be the very best thing about it."
- Death sanctifies. If suffering sanctifies, death does so more: before any corpse we feel awe, "the guard gets under arms". Death is "the résumé of life", showing that all striving was "vain, fruitless, and self-contradictory" (W2 636-7).
- Zero-sum bookkeeping. "Who would go on living life as it is, if death were less terrible? And who could bear even the mere thought of death, if life were a pleasure?" (W2 578-9).
- Least afraid. "He will be least afraid of becoming nothing in death who has recognized that he is already nothing now" (W2 609).
- The sick soul. Jacquette links prolonged suffering to William James's anhedonia.
The suicide problem
If life is suffering and death is unreal, why not hasten it? Schopenhauer refuses: ordinary suicide is "a vain and therefore foolish action" (W1 280-1). "Only by a false illusion does the cool shade of Orcus allure him."
| Question | Kant | Schopenhauer |
|---|---|---|
| Ground of objection | Moral: the self-love maxim cannot be a universal law of nature | Metaphysical: suicide affirms the will it hopes to escape |
| Where is the contradiction? | Self-love that both improves and destroys life | Willing life while rejecting its conditions |
| Is suicide "wrong"? | Yes, a breach of duty to oneself | "Wholly meaningless phrase"; no one has a more indisputable right than over his own life |
| Verdict on the other | (none) | Kant's argument "has never yet restrained... anyone who is weary of life"; suicide under great suffering is an actual law of nature |
- Against Stoic suicide. The Stoic "blessed life" hides a contradiction, like "the costly phial of poison" among a despot's ornaments.
- Admiration. Ordinary minds think suicides insane, yet thinking minds feel "a certain admiration", because "suicide comes from a resolve of the intellect, but our willing of life is a prius of the intellect" (W2 240). Jacquette sees an anticipation of Camus: "There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide."
- The awkward experiment. Suicide "abolishes the identity of the consciousness that would have to listen to the answer" (P2 311).
Jacquette's challenge
Jacquette rejects Copleston's reading that suicide is futile because the Will persists anyway: if nothing anyone does affects the Will, there is no sound objection to suicide by someone not deluded about what it achieves. Schopenhauer's real point is subtler: "what everyone wills in his innermost being, that must he be". But consider the enlightened Schopenhauerian who wills only to end empirical consciousness. To call that will-to-live looks stipulative; it is more naturally a will-to-die, and the decision "may not be as hopelessly metaphysically confused" as Schopenhauer claims.
Three deaths in Schopenhauer's ethics, ordered from affirmation of the will to its complete denial.
The three cases make the challenge concrete. Schopenhauer condemns the first as confused, says nothing convincing about the second, and approves only the third, which on his own account is not chosen by anyone: the will has simply ceased.
Is any of this consoling?
The notes press a further question: can the higher view of death console?
- Schopenhauer. Death is "the great reprimand" to the will-to-live and its egoism, "a punishment for our existence": "You are the product of an act that ought not to have taken place" (W2 507). In 1813 he calls death "a debt contracted through life".
- Only existence devoted to affirming the will creates guilt; for one who has denied the will, death holds "no terror".
- Janaway's worry. If my death has no great significance in the order of things, by the same reasons my life has as little. Is that consoling? "Schopenhauer appears to think so."
- Schopenhauer's 1815 consolation. Man may console himself "by looking back at the immortal life of nature, which he himself is"; and if the will has turned, "death is no longer a suffering".
Two attitudes to one event: what death means depends on whether the will is still affirmed.
The ascetic's starvation
Schopenhauer makes one exception. The saint who fasts and mortifies himself until "even the necessary will to maintain the vegetative life of the body" ceases "ceases to live merely because he has completely ceased to will" (W1 400-1). No other method qualifies: intending to cut short the agony would already be affirmation. The idea dates from his 1813 notes, which know "only two instances".
- Whose act? If the starvation is not willed, Jacquette asks, how can it redound to the saint's credit? It is good only because the world then holds less willing, which is equally true of death by accident, disease, or even murder (following Simmel).
- Why not now? If death is the aim and suffering sanctifies, Schopenhauer can neither explain why one should prefer death nor why one may avoid suffering. Any preference is already a sublimated will-to-live.
- A tension in the chapter. Jacquette says Schopenhauer finds "nothing morally objectionable in principle" in suicide, yet the Parerga passage he cites in note 15 offers "the only valid moral reason against suicide" (it blocks real salvation). The objection is metaphysical, but Schopenhauer calls it moral.
- Citation slips. Janaway's Schopenhauer (Past Masters) is dated 1996; it was first published by OUP in 1994. James's publisher is "Longmans, Greene" (Green), and Schopenhauer's Stoic image appears as a "costly phiol". The Socratic definition is Plato's (Phaedo), as Schopenhauer reports.
Suicide, Camus, and the three deaths scored
Jacquette's chapter turns on a framework of three deaths. Ordinary despairing suicide affirms the will: the agent wills life and rejects only its conditions, like a sick man stopping a painful cure. The enlightened Schopenhauerian who wills only the end of empirical consciousness is Jacquette's hard case: calling that will-to-live is stipulative; it looks like a will-to-die. Ascetic starvation alone is approved, and precisely because it is not chosen: the will has ceased, so vegetative life stops.
Kant vs Schopenhauer on suicide must stay complete: Kant finds a moral contradiction in the self-love maxim; Schopenhauer finds a metaphysical confusion (affirmation disguised as escape), denies that "wrong" applies ("wholly meaningless phrase"), and still calls the Parerga block on salvation "the only valid moral reason against suicide". Jacquette flags that tension: metaphysical objection, moral label.
Against Stoic suicide Schopenhauer hears a hidden contradiction (the "costly phial of poison" among a despot's ornaments). Yet he grants thinking minds feel "a certain admiration", because suicide comes from a resolve of the intellect while willing of life is a prius of intellect (W2 240). Jacquette hears Camus: the one truly serious philosophical problem. The awkward experiment remains: suicide abolishes the consciousness that would hear nature's answer, "Have you had enough?"
Jacquette's challenge: why the enlightened should not choose death.
Consolation, vanitas, and the credit problem
The vanitas still life (skull, watch, glass) gathers the rhetorical force: no one would relive life; death sanctifies; shortness may be life's best feature; he who knows he is already nothing fears becoming nothing least. Consolation splits: death as "punishment for our existence" (W2 507) versus Atwell's reply that birth is not a motivated crime, and Janaway's worry that if death lacks significance so does life. The 1815 note offers looking back at "the immortal life of nature".
The critical credit problem closes the chapter. If starvation is not willed, why credit the saint rather than death by accident, disease or murder (Simmel)? If death is the aim, why prefer living on, and why avoid suffering? Any preference is already sublimated will-to-live. Jacquette's verdict stands: the theory unravels at the enlightened person's choice.
Indestructible Will, destroyed person
Jacquette's central paradox compressed: something in us says death is not absolute annihilation (W1 324), yet what survives is Will as thing-in-itself in the diluted sense in which trees and rocks are never fully annihilated. No memories, expectations or empirical personality survive. Parerga: life is a dream, death an awakening, and the person belongs to the dream. Birth and death are unreal as features of the principium individuationis; the subject of knowing and the Will are unaffected (W1 275); life accompanies will "as a body is accompanied by its shadow".
Jacquette: what death destroys and what it cannot.
Humans alone live in anticipation of death (animal metaphysicum); Jacquette concedes higher animals show some awareness but not our cultural form. Philosophies and religions are answers to that anticipation; "Death is the real inspiring genius or Musagetes of philosophy" (W2 463).
Schopenhauer's pessimism
Schopenhauer's question
Nietzsche called "unconditional and honest atheism" the "locus of Schopenhauer's whole integrity": once Christian meaning goes, "Schopenhauer's question" comes "in a terrifying way: Has existence any meaning at all?" (Gay Science §357). Ordinary life is marked by Nichtigkeit, nothingness (Payne's "vanity" loses its force). But Schopenhauer mostly speaks in the vocabulary of value: is life a business that covers its costs, is the world bankrupt, is it the best or worst possible? Without immaterial souls or a supernatural design, we face the question as material, biological individuals.
Optimism as wickedness
The word "pessimism" arrives late. The 1819 first edition only condemns optimism: lead the "most hardened and callous optimist" through hospitals, prisons, slave-hovels and battlefields, and he will see what this "meilleur des mondes possibles" is. Optimism is "not merely an absurd, but also a really wicked way of thinking, a bitter mockery of the unspeakable sufferings of mankind" (W1 326). The 1844 second volume begins to name pessimism as the preferred view.
| Pessimistic, "world-denying" | Optimistic, "shallow" or "wicked" |
|---|---|
| Gospel Christianity, properly read | The Hebrew Bible and Judaism |
| Brahmanism | "Jewish-Protestant rationalism" |
| Buddhism | "University philosophy", up to and including Hegel |
| Tragedy (no "poetic justice") | Pantheism, Spinoza's above all |
- Religions sorted by value. Their fundamental difference is not mono-, poly- or atheism but whether they are optimistic or pessimistic. Christianity overcame Judaism and paganism solely in its pessimism (W2 170).
- Monotheism as root. Starting from God, not from the world, produces optimism; pantheism is an "ill-advised God" amusing himself by becoming this world. "Spinoza... could not get rid of the Jews."
- Janaway's judgement. In Parerga especially there is "a demonizing of Jewish thought". What really offends Schopenhauer is simple: the idea that the world is a fine place, or that it and we are here for any purpose at all.
- A worse viable world. Add one extra week of pointless pain to every sentient being; nothing suggests such a world could not continue.
- "Actually" confuses. The question is how many non-actual worlds would be viable, not how many actual ones there are.
- Fossils. The vanished world of extinct creatures was surely our world, and it did "continue to exist".
- The squirrel. In the 1859 edition, an anecdote of a squirrel mesmerized by a snake in Java is called "important... as an argument for pessimism".
- Verdict. The argument is "very far from convincing", but it "comes late in the day" and carries no real weight.
Happiness as elusive or illusory
"Everything in life proclaims that earthly happiness is destined to be frustrated, or recognized as an illusion" (W2 573). Happiness (Glück) is the satisfaction of willing; it happens, but it lacks the weight we give it.
- Time distorts. "Happiness lies always in the future, or else in the past, and the present may be compared to a small dark cloud driven by the wind over a sunny plain." "The enchantment of distance shows us paradises that vanish like optical illusions."
- Possession takes away the charm. Every lover will feel "an extraordinary disillusionment after the pleasure he finally attains".
- No absolute satisfaction. "Every satisfied desire gives birth to a new one."
- The youth's mistake. The world is not "the abode of a positive happiness"; this "hunt for game that does not exist" ends in real misery. "The undeceiving comes too late."
- Educative pessimism. Seek nothing positive from a world that owes you nothing, and minimize pain.
Will to life
Each of us is an organism, and organisms strive; the end governing all others is survival and reproduction. This will is blind: not a quasi-mind, but the principle that organizes me "just as it organizes a snail or an oak tree". It is an unchosen goal: as Simmel put it in 1907, "I do not will by virtue of values... but I have goals because I will continuously". And it has no ultimate aim: "striving is its sole nature, to which no attained goal can put an end" (W1 308).
- Good is relative. Good is "fitness or suitableness of an object to any definite effort of the will" (W1 360). Schopenhauer inverts the rationalist claim that we will what we see as good.
- No summum bonum. An absolute good would be a final satisfaction after which no willing occurs, which is as inconceivable as time beginning or ending.
The structure of willing
Suffering is "the will's hindrance through an obstacle"; satisfaction is attaining its temporary goal. Janaway diagrams the cycle and shows Schopenhauer must make every state but one into suffering.
Janaway's diagram of willing (a to d). Every route returns to striving (a), which itself presupposes painful lack; attainment (b) is the only respite.
- State c: suffering. Striving on regardless is the wheel of Ixion, the sieve of the Danaids, the thirst of Tantalus (W1 196).
- State a: striving is lack. "All striving springs from want or deficiency... and is therefore suffering so long as it is not satisfied" (W1 309).
- State d: boredom. Life "swings like a pendulum to and fro between pain and boredom" (W1 312). Remove us to a Utopia where "pigeons flew about ready roasted", and people "would die of boredom or hang themselves" (P2 293).
- State b: negative. Satisfaction is "always negative only", deliverance from pain; it is "like the mouthful of food that... ceases to exist for our feelings the moment it is swallowed" (W2 575).
- Cartwright. Having a desire does not entail misery: I can want to keep the good health I have; ordinary dissatisfaction often lacks the intensity and tone that go with real misery.
- Janaway. Schopenhauer speaks of Streben, striving or trying, which is episodic and aims at change. To strive to keep my health is to see the world-without-my-striving as deficient. And the claim is not misery but some degree of painful lack in every episode.
- Janaway's concession. A parallel passage (W1 196) says "all willing springs from lack", including wish and desire, which "weakens my case" and strengthens Cartwright's.
From suffering to "better not to be"
Schopenhauer admits most people "strive... with enough success to protect them from despair, and enough failure to preserve them from boredom" (W1 327). So why prefer non-existence? Two arguments carry the weight.
| Argument | Claim | Janaway's objection |
|---|---|---|
| Ubiquity of suffering | Every state of willing is suffering or neutral; "all life is suffering" (W1 310) | Rests on the negativity of satisfaction, which is false |
| Sheer existence of suffering | "The mere existence of evil decides the matter"; a thousand pleasures do not outweigh one pain (Petrarch) | Suffering cannot erase past happiness either; on your happiest day, torments are forgotten too |
| Worst possible world | Any worse world could not exist | Viable worse worlds are easy to imagine |
Objections
- Positive satisfaction exists. Simmel: Schopenhauer overlooks "the positive moment of happiness" that differs from sleep and death, the other two states that end suffering. Relativity, brevity and a surplus of pain do not show that no felt satisfaction occurs.
- The road can be pleasant. "Expected happiness is truly experienced" (Simmel). Practices like mountaineering prolong struggle on purpose; a lift to the summit would remove the point.
- Stark hedonism. Schopenhauer assumes value lies only in felt pleasure and pain, ignoring activities of self-sufficient value.
Same description, opposite verdicts: Janaway separates the pessimistic picture of life from the evaluation drawn from it.
Affirmation, denial and the self
The deepest layer is who we are. Schopenhauer answers No to suicide and Yes to living on while detached from willing. The summum bonum, if the term is given "an emeritus position", is "complete self-effacement and denial of the will" (W1 362), "abnegatio sui ipsius; for the real self is the will to life" (W2 606).
| Stance | Higher-order attitude to the striving body | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Ordinary life | Implicit affirmation: pursuit of goals as the point of existence | Cycle of lack and replenishment |
| Boredom | Still affirms goals as the locus of value; misses having any | Suffering from emptiness |
| Suicide | Affirms life, blames its conditions | "Just because the suicide cannot cease willing, he ceases to live" |
| Denial of the will | Self-identification shifts to the pure subject of knowing | "Contentment that cannot again be disturbed" |
- The tertiary "I". The knowing I is like "the image in the focus of the concave mirror"; "far from being the absolutely first thing (as Fichte taught)... it is at bottom tertiary", after organism and will (W2 278).
- Victim of one's real self. The will feels to the rational subject like an alien agency; we cannot choose whether we strive. Animals lack the competing "I", so they cannot see themselves as victims.
- Aesthetic foretaste. In contemplation "we are, so to speak, rid of ourselves"; the saint has "cut all the thousand threads of willing" (W1 390).
- No act of will. Denial cannot be willed. It comes by the "second sailing" of overwhelming suffering, or by the saint's knowledge that individuality is illusion.
Schopenhauer's layered self, as Janaway reads W2 278: the knowing 'I' comes third, so salvation means identifying with the least real layer.
From suffering to "better not to be": the missing inference
Janaway's thin middle sections need the full chain. Will to life is not a further desire among others; it is what we are. Every organism, and every force, is its expression. Happiness is satisfaction of willing; because willing is endless, happiness is structurally elusive. Time distorts (happiness always past or future); possession kills charm; every satisfied desire births a new one. The "one inborn error" is that we exist in order to be happy (W2 634): our body is that error's "monogram".
The leap from "life is suffering" to "better not to exist" is not automatic. Janaway insists the catalogue of horrors and the religious scoreboard are symptoms, not the root. The root is metaphysical self-disowning: value appears only when we cease to affirm the will that we are. Affirmation keeps the business of life open and bankrupt; denial closes the books.
Janaway: how pessimism moves from will-structure to the value verdict.
Objections, affirmation, denial
Standard objections: pleasure is real; many lives go well; tragedy's beauty contradicts wholesale rejection; the "worst world" proof fails (add a week of pain; fossils; "actually" confuses). Janaway grants the worst-world argument is "very far from convincing" and late. He holds the deeper case: once the self is will, optimism about one's own essence is the error. Affirmation (ordinary life, sexual love as species-will) and denial (compassion's partial seeing-through, ascetic quietus) are not moods but stances toward that essence. Art pauses willing; ethics and salvation reverse it. Nietzsche will keep the diagnosis and refuse the cure.
Optimism wicked, religions sorted, structure of willing
Janaway's early machinery, kept complete. Optimism is wicked when it is not mere shallow talk: it mocks unspeakable suffering (W1 326). Religions sort by optimistic vs pessimistic, not by mono/poly/atheism. Pessimistic: Gospel Christianity properly read, Brahmanism, Buddhism, tragedy without poetic justice. Optimistic: Hebrew Bible/Judaism, Jewish-Protestant rationalism, university philosophy, pantheism/Spinoza ("could not get rid of the Jews"). Janaway names the Parerga "demonizing of Jewish thought" as a stain, not a side point.
Structure of willing: desire → brief satisfaction → new desire; boredom when desire pauses; pain as positive, pleasure as negative (removal of pain). From that structure plus the metaphysics of the will-self, not from the squirrel anecdote or the worst-world proof, comes "better not to exist".
Janaway: religious scoreboard and the structure that drives the verdict.
Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Dionysus
Thinking as dreaming, and the body as will
Schopenhauer turns Kant idealist: we do not look at the world through eyeglasses that structure it, but into mirror glasses that give back "what we ourselves are and have made up". From Indian thought comes the web of maya: "Life and dreams are leaves of one and the same book" (W1 17-18), a claim he backs with Shakespeare, Plato, Sophocles, Pindar and Calderón.
- The body is still representation. It is our "immediate object", but intimacy does not take it outside the veil: for the knowing subject "this body is a representation like any other" (W1 99).
- But we also move. There is "a striving, desiring, straining something about us that does not coolly contemplate", and this is will: "Every true, genuine, immediate act of the will is also at once and directly a manifest act of the body" (W1 101).
- The body shows its will. "Teeth, gullet, and intestinal canal are objectified hunger; the genitals are objectified sexual impulse" (W1 108). Nussbaum draws the image Nietzsche would draw: the best sensory glimpse of will is a chorus of dancing limbs, set to music (the mimesis of will, W1 §52), and, stressing sexuality, a chorus of satyrs.
- Not intelligent. Qua will, a human being exercises "neither perception nor thought", no different from animals or stones.
- Not artistic. Will neither makes things up nor transforms itself; it is "brutish, unformed, undisciplined", and even drains the creator's energy.
- Not self-aware. Erotic urge represents no object and no self; it is "a generalized urge to merge with what it cannot itself conceive or see".
- Painful. Willing is bound up with deficiency and pain.
Four arguments against willing
Nussbaum unpacks the dense paragraph of W1 196 (Ixion, the Danaids, Tantalus) into four distinct arguments, which show Schopenhauer "steeped in Platonic and Hellenistic, as well as Eastern, thought".
| Argument | Text | Nussbaum's gloss |
|---|---|---|
| Impure source | "All willing springs from lack... and thus from suffering" | Plato: appetite contingent on pain is "impure", not choice-worthy in itself |
| Piecemeal satisfaction | "for one wish that is fulfilled there remain at least ten that are denied" | Desires are met piecemeal, so the subject is always longing |
| Brevity | desire lasts long, "fulfilment is short and meted out sparingly" | "Demands and requests" suggest the labour of sexual pursuit |
| Illusory satisfaction | "the alms thrown to a beggar"; the sieve of the Danaids | The Danaids, as in Plato, Gorgias 493a, and Lucretius III: no stable resting point |
The conclusion: true happiness, understood in Epicurean and Indian fashion as freedom from pain and disturbance, is impossible under the will. And will is what makes us attend to particulars: I notice this dog because I fear it may bite me; I get enmeshed in one beloved person because of sexual need.
Art as a doctor for attention
Art calls perception back to general forms and away from our interests: we consider "no longer the where, the when, the why, and the whither in things, but simply and solely the what" (W1 178). We become "a clear mirror of the object", a "pure, will-less, timeless subject of knowing" (W1 199), and the self-forgetting also promotes sympathy. But the state is unstable: "who has the strength to remain in it for long?"
- Tragedy's special role. It nourishes the aesthetic attitude and also, by its content, reminds us why to leave the will: "the terrible side of life... the irretrievable fall of the just and the innocent" (W1 252-4).
- Resignation as the lesson. Knowledge acts "as a quieter of the will", producing "the giving up not merely of life, but of the whole will to life itself".
- The Stoic parallel. Epictetus defined tragedy as "what happens when chance events befall fools" and urged detached spectatorship; Schopenhauer's spectator is closer to this Stoic reconstruction than to anything in the Athenian theatre.
- What fits. The fluidity of identity: individuation is "temporary, factitious". Agave's recognition of Pentheus is a passage from near-blind will to clear representation.
- What does not fit. Euripides' Dionysus is "a playwright, a stage director, a most subtle and versatile actor"; the desires he arouses are neither unintelligent nor disordered.
- No original sin. The play shows Dionysian energy as "glorious and terrible, transfiguring and pitiless, fertile and fatal", but never calls the body evil or birth filthy. Original sin is "altogether foreign to Greek tragedy".
- No festival of renunciation. The Dionysia "were not celebrations of renunciation of the will to life".
Nietzsche's Dionysus: artistic passion
The opening of The Birth reads like a précis of Schopenhauer projected back into antiquity: Apollo goes with dreaming, visual art and general form, Dionysus with intoxication, sexuality and loss of the principium individuationis; even the veil of maya appears. Readers who knew Schopenhauer would fill the gaps, which also explains Wilamowitz's irritation at modern categories imposed on the Greeks. Yet the break comes "almost immediately", in four moves.
Nussbaum's four subversions of Schopenhauer in The Birth of Tragedy, each a lifelong Nietzschean theme.
- Representation answers need. Apollo and Dionysus are drives (Triebe) and "energies that are satisfied". Ordering the world is practical, and often works through self-deception, a line running to "On Truth and Lying" (1873); Schopenhauer had said "Logic is... without practical use" (W1 46).
- Desire is intelligent. Dionysian experience is enchantment and ecstasy, a heightened sense of freedom, harmony and unity; one becomes "a work of art". Both drives are "art impulses... which burst forth from nature herself". Hence the motto from Ovid: "Nitimur in vetitum", we strive for the forbidden.
- Art is for life. Nietzsche names the Kantian-Schopenhauerian demand for "pure contemplation devoid of interest" as a dogma of the era (§5). Later: "Art for art's sake: a worm chasing its own tail"; the psychologist asks whether art does not "praise? glorify? choose? prefer?".
- Affirmation. The deepest break is with the ethics of pessimism: joy in life, the body and becoming, especially once the world is seen as chaotic and cruel.
Life in the perspective of art
"How differently Dionysus spoke to me! How far removed I was from all this resignationism!" (Self-Criticism §6, 1886). Nietzsche also confessed he had "spoiled Dionysian premonitions with Schopenhauerian formulations". Nussbaum therefore starts from two clearer later texts.
- Art against denial. Nature is "false, cruel, contradictory, seductive, without meaning" (WP §853). Art is "the great means of making life possible, the great seduction to life", "anti-Christian, anti-Buddhist, anti-nihilist par excellence", a state where suffering is "willed, transfigured, deified".
- Art as good will to appearance. Science reveals that error conditions knowledge; without art "Honesty would lead to nausea and suicide". "As an aesthetic phenomenon existence is still bearable for us" (GS §107).
- Same discovery, opposite response. Both see no intrinsic meaning. Schopenhauer's person becomes nauseated with life; Nietzsche's is filled with pride in human artistry: how much more wonderful to have invented so many stories and "to dance so many daring and improbable dances".
How tragedy seduces back to life
Tragedy shows "the terrible destructiveness of so-called world history as well as the cruelty of nature", and the spectator is "in danger of longing for a Buddhistic negation of the will" (§7). Like Hamlet, he has "looked truly into the essence of things... and nausea inhibits action". Schopenhauer's spectator stops here; Nietzsche's does not.
Two tragic spectators: both reach the same insight into horror; the satyr chorus decides which way the spectator leaves the theatre.
- The satyrs. The chorus is "the saving deed of Greek art", "a symbol of the sexual omnipotence of nature", not the sexuality "of a mere ape" but "sublime and divine".
- Dancers who dream. "The Dionysian reveler sees himself as a satyr, and as a satyr, in turn, he sees the god." The chorus generates the Apollonian vision of the hero, and the hero is Dionysus himself in a mask.
- Art as healer. She is "a saving sorceress, expert at healing", turning "nauseous thoughts about the horror or absurdity of existence into notions with which one can live".
- Self-reliance, not guilt. Greek tragedy confronts us with one world, chancy yet rich, with no redeeming "beyond", and the spectator "becomes a work of art and an artist".
An art of this-worldly love
Each subversion became a mature theme: cognition and need (Gay Science, Beyond Good and Evil), the intelligence of the body (Zarathustra), art and need, and the alternative to pessimism. The 1886 preface rejects the "metaphysical comfort" of Faust's Christian romanticism for "the art of this-worldly comfort". Nussbaum closes with WP §808 (spring 1888).
- Plato's Phaedrus reversed against Schopenhauer. The lover grows wings; love's madness is magnanimous.
- Illusion that becomes real. Love corresponds to no prior order, yet "its fiction-making makes fictions that are gloriously there".
- The shocking claim. Art is not free of practical interest; it is the outgrowth of an erotic interest, and the better for it.
How Nietzsche's answer to Schopenhauer matured, on Nussbaum's account.
- Leaning on the Nachlass. Two of the clearest texts (WP §853, §808) come from The Will to Power, a posthumous compilation of notebooks. Nussbaum flags the dating dispute for §853 but not the status of the collection.
- A tension in the gods. Her summary pairs Dionysus with "the awareness of particularity" and also with "the absence of a clear individuation". This fits her reading of will as fixing on particulars, but it sits awkwardly with The Birth, where Dionysus breaks the principium individuationis.
- Fairness to Schopenhauer. Calling him an "obsessive and sexually tormented personality" is ad hominem; his account of disinterested attention stands or falls on its own.
- Citation slip. Note 9 runs "MR 3, 260/H. 6, 650-63; H. 3, 636-40; Hn. 3, 238": the German page references are out of step with the English ones they pair with.
- The "Bacchae" frame. The essay began as half of an introduction to C. K. Williams's Bacchae (1990), so it judges Schopenhauer partly by fit to one play.
Apollo and Dionysus rewritten: from costume to weapons
Nussbaum's stealth thesis needs the full transformation. At first, Apollo ≈ Representation and Dionysus ≈ Will in Greek dress. Schopenhauer's four marks of will (not intelligent, not artistic, not self-aware, painful) set the target. Nietzsche denies the first three and rewrites the fourth: pain becomes a condition of exuberant life, not a verdict against it.
Both Apollo and Dionysus become need-inspired, worldly, practical. Apollonian dreaming is no longer cool detachment; it answers a practical need for beautiful appearance. Dionysian intoxication is artistic passion, not brutish lack. Tragedy then seduces back to life: the spectator affirms existence through the image of its worst pains, rather than recoiling into resignation. The Bacchae's cruel, amoral Dionysus is closer to this rewritten energy than to Schopenhauer's will-as-deficiency.
Nussbaum: Nietzsche borrows Schopenhauer's surface to overturn resignation.
Art as doctor, and this-worldly love
Schopenhauer's art is a doctor for attention: it breaks the will's grip on particulars (this dog that may bite, this beloved needed sexually) and opens will-less seeing of Ideas. Nietzsche keeps the medical metaphor and changes the prescription. Art does not teach escape from life; it teaches a love of life that has looked at suffering and still says yes. The "amor fati" trajectory is already seeded, Nussbaum argues, in the way The Birth of Tragedy transforms Dionysus from will's pain into life's excess. Reading BT without the Schopenhauer it overturns misses the stealth.
Four marks of will, and what Nietzsche keeps
Nussbaum's four marks again, with Nietzsche's response line by line:
| Mark of will (Schopenhauer) | Nietzsche's move in BT |
|---|---|
| Not intelligent | Denied: Dionysian wisdom is a kind of knowing |
| Not artistic | Denied: Dionysus is an art-impulse of nature |
| Not self-aware | Denied: tragic chorus becomes aware through form |
| Painful / deficient | Rewritten: pain as condition of exuberant affirmation |
Nussbaum: four marks rewritten so tragedy can seduce back to life.
Thinking as dreaming (maya, Calderón, one book of life and dreams) and the body as will (teeth = hunger, genitals = sexual impulse) are the Schopenhauerian optics Nietzsche borrows before turning them against quietism.
Schopenhauer, will, and the unconscious
Schopenhauer's psychoanalytic insights
Schopenhauer offers no integrated theory and no Oedipus complex (his doctrine of fixed character rules out a developmental story). Yet he "formulated the key concepts of Freud's metapsychology", mostly in volume two of The World as Will and Representation.
| Freudian idea | Schopenhauer's version |
|---|---|
| Consciousness is a surface | The surface of a globe or a sheet of water; a magic lantern that shows one image at a time |
| Ego serves the drives | Will "brings forth consciousness for its own ends"; cognition is "already something secondary, a mere product" |
| Repression | Will "prohibiting the intellect from having certain representations" that would arouse shame or humiliation |
| Wish fulfilment | The intellect pacifies its master "as a nurse does a child, with fairy-tales" |
| Neurosis and trauma | Madness as a failure of memory when an idea is too painful; "a violent casting out of one's mind" by "putting into the head" of something else |
| Primacy of sexuality | "The invisible central point of all action and conduct"; "the cause of war and object of peace" |
| Superego, dreams, religion | Conscience and irrationality; dreaming as inward-directed brain activity; the Dialogue on Religion behind The Future of an Illusion |
- Spying on oneself. We learn "the real resolutions and secret decisions" of our own will "like those of a stranger"; the intellect must "surprise the will in the act of expressing itself".
- The will's double attitude. It has "an inclination in one respect for a representation it abhors in another"; it then "forces the intellect to obey".
- Purposes beyond the agent. Sexual love is the delusion by which the will of the species is felt as the individual's good, so actions show "a purposiveness which transcends their own conception".
- A shared world-view. Both share a political conservatism and a conviction that "the best of which people are capable collectively is very little".
Gardner concludes that Schopenhauer is, for intellectual originality, "the true philosophical father of psychoanalysis". But Freud denied reading him early, and Gardner takes the denial at face value.
Routes of influence to Freud, as Gardner sketches them: diffuse and indirect, with Hartmann's massively influential book as the connecting link.
- The connecting link. Eduard von Hartmann's "massively influential" Philosophy of the Unconscious (1869), which Freud cites in The Interpretation of Dreams. Its syncretism makes the concept "nebulous and elusive" in a way it is not in Schopenhauer.
- Freud's real hero. Gardner points instead to Feuerbach, whom the young Freud called (letter of 7 March 1875) "one whom I revere and admire above all other philosophers".
- The deeper route. True influence runs "both deeper and less direct", through a change in how the whole of reality is imagined.
Which "will"? A puzzle in Schopenhauer
It is tempting to equate Schopenhauer's will with Freud's Ucs. or id. Gardner blocks this twice.
- Wrong scale. Freud's id is individuated like persons; the world-will is trans-personal, beyond individuation. (Jung's archetypes and impersonal psyche fit Schopenhauer better.)
- Wrong part. The will as individual character includes conscious agency, so Schopenhauer has no one part of the mind that is at once unconscious, individual and made of will.
- Wrong kind of conation. Schopenhauer's paradigm of will is voluntary bodily movement, "the nearest and clearest phenomenon of the thing-in-itself". The id consists of motivational states with intentional content. Bodily willing is non-representational; motives represent an end.
- Two famous misreadings. Thomas Mann said Schopenhauer's will is "entirely identical" with the id and his intellect with the ego; Freud said the unconscious will "is equivalent to the mental instincts". Gardner judges both incorrect.
So does "will" mean raising one's arm or signalling, bodily volition or intentional action? Hamlyn and Young take the second reading. Gardner argues for the first, for two reasons.
- Exegesis. If will meant intentional action, its "nearest and clearest phenomenon" would be resolving and deciding, close to Kant's practical reason. Yet Schopenhauer denies that resolves are "real acts of will" and stresses the body.
- Blindness. Only bodily willing makes sense of the will's blindness, and thus of his pessimism. At the core of every action is something free of any representation of an end. So "we act because we will, rather than will in order to act"; rational action is "a mere occasion for will".
The cost and the repair. Restricting will to bodily willing seems to push desire and emotion over to cognition. Gardner's repair has two steps.
- Abstraction. Subtract from bodily willing everything psychological. What remains, "pure awareness of striving" (O'Shaughnessy: "spirit in motion"), is also present in desire: "though a desire is not a doing, to desire something is to be in a state which is of the same nature as a doing".
- Degrees. Motivational states are "an especially intense expression of will", as the sexual organs are on the bodily plane. Will must be in phenomena, more in some than others, and not only behind them all.
- Payoff. The "horizontal" relations among phenomena (will over intellect, falling water "raging" over rock) can then corroborate the "vertical" metaphysics. This also restores the parallel with Freud.
What Freud added: partition
Freud's unconscious is more than ordinary psychology relabelled because it is partitive. The mind is made of distinct systems, with different contents, laws, functions and developmental stages. Schopenhauer has only "a trace of this": parts as aspects, and the contrast of intellect and will. Hence a strict test: on a loose criterion, "the unconscious was first discovered by Plotinus". Freud's concept is empirically determinate, fixed by an integrated theory with criteria of application. Schopenhauer's is not, so strictly they do not share a concept of the unconscious.
Four pictures of the unconscious
The essay sorts its many candidates by one question: what job does the unconscious do in the theory? The answer separates figures who look alike on the surface.
Four conceptions of the unconscious compared by Gardner: only the last two are realist, and only Freud's is partitive.
- Latent, not dynamic. Leibniz's minute perceptions, and Kant's "field of obscure ideas", which shows "only the passive side of man", are unconscious through lack of clarity. Nothing pushes them out of view.
- Transcendental. The idealists' unconscious is posited to explain how experience is possible. Its content comes from conditions of possibility, not from observed motives.
- Realist and dynamic. Schopenhauer's will acts on the intellect: it bars representations, distorts judgement, and seeks its satisfactions in disguise.
- Partitive. Only Freud adds a mind made of systems with their own laws. That is the step from an intuition to a theory with criteria of application.
Two routes from Kant
Common evidence (dreams, slips, unbidden thoughts, and Schopenhauer's asylum tours in Berlin) is "a shallow explanation". The real question is what in his project let a metaphysician reach Freud. Gardner begins with Kant, who opened two routes to the unconscious.
Gardner's map: Kant opens two routes to the unconscious; only the second leads towards Freud, and only Schopenhauer took it.
- Route 1: transcendental synthesis. We are conscious of the products of synthesis, not the activity, so the synthesizing subject may be called unconscious. It is "not 'something merely logical'": the Copernican revolution needs it to be real in some sense.
- Route 2: representations without the "I think". In a letter to Herz (26 May 1789), Kant allows sensory representations that never reach the unity of self-consciousness. They could still "carry on their play in an orderly fashion" and "even have an influence on my feeling and desire, without my being aware of them". This route has the affinity with Freud.
The absolute idealists' unconscious
| Thinker | Form of the unconscious | Why it is not Freud's |
|---|---|---|
| Fichte | Positing activity of the absolute "I" (implicit, not his term) | A condition of experience, not a motive |
| Schelling | Nature as the self's unconscious productive imagination; art unites conscious and unconscious | Objective and subjective at once; surd elements in analysis, not human motivation |
| Hegel | The an sich of consciousness; the "feeling soul" into which mind lapses in madness | Regression and division, but rational and "degraded" consciousness only alternate; no neurosis |
- Hegel's near miss. He has regression and mental division, "in advance of Schopenhauer" here. But he never makes the unconscious co-active with reason. Doing so would contradict "the conception of rational autonomy" at the heart of his system.
- Schelling's 1809 will. "There is no other Being than Will. Will is primordial Being" sounds like Schopenhauer, who read the essay. Yet it is "a will of the understanding", close to Kant and Fichte.
Why Schopenhauer is not transcendental
Transcendental philosophy, on Gardner's narrow definition, has three marks: it answers Cartesian skepticism, refuses appeal to how things really are, and makes self-consciousness the first principle. Schopenhauer lacks all three.
- No anti-skeptical aim. Phenomena are maya, and "theoretical egoism" is an impregnable fortress he does not try to storm.
- Realist explanation. The world is a "riddle", a "cryptograph" to be deciphered by its real kernel; the thing in itself is immanent in phenomena "in a way that makes no sense for Kant".
- Self-consciousness misleads. It breeds the illusions of free will and of thinking over willing.
- No subject-object problem. He asserts the correlativity of subject and object as quasi-analytic, dismissing Kant's question to Herz (1772) about the ground of representation's relation to its object. He sides with Berkeley, and treats action as stimulus and response.
Is Nietzsche the missing link?
A neat story runs from metaphysics (Schopenhauer) through purified naturalism (Nietzsche) to science (Freud). Gardner rejects it, while granting that Nietzsche's disunity of the self comes closer to Freud.
- The naturalist's dilemma. Either Freud's clinical methods do not matter, and then he cannot vindicate Nietzsche. Or they do, and Nietzsche's anticipations are only "inspired guesses".
- Motives are not refutations. Psychoanalytic motive-ascription says nothing about truth, so naturalism would leave Nietzsche a "dogmatic naturalist", no more threat to reason than Hume.
- A transcendental Nietzsche. Nietzsche continues Kant and Fichte's primacy of the practical. For the "sole fact of reason", duty, he substitutes a negative fact: consciousness of decadence and impending nihilism. "Life" replaces the interest of practical reason.
- Schopenhauer in reverse. Nietzsche relocates the will in a transcendental context, "doing to Schopenhauer, in reverse, exactly what Schopenhauer did to Kant". The ascetic ideal rests on the demand that suffering have a meaning, a motive with "no analogue" in psychoanalysis.
The argument in six steps
Gardner's essay is long and dense, but its structure is simple.
- The parallels are real. Schopenhauer states repression, wish fulfilment, the primacy of sexuality and the subordination of intellect before Freud.
- The identifications are wrong. World-will is not the id, and his intellect is not the ego, so the parallel lies in structure, not in matching parts.
- Will is bodily striving. Read as blind striving present in degrees, will can stretch to desire and emotion without turning into practical reason.
- Kant left two doors open. The idealists could use only the transcendental one, because they kept the method.
- Schopenhauer took the other door. Having dropped the method, he could treat mental life as natural phenomena expressing a non-rational reality.
- Nietzsche went back through the first door. His unconscious is a transcendental device of critique, which is why he is further from Freud than he looks.
The irrationalisation of existence
The deepest debt is background. Psychoanalysis presupposes that desire (Trieb, wish, phantasy) is autonomous from cognition and cannot be fully stated as reasons for action. That needs the end of the Enlightenment hope of finding "uniquely rational structures in the mind", and so a new image of reality as a whole. Simmel called it the "Vernichtung des Vernunftcharakters des Lebens", and Schopenhauer gave it "its clearest and most trenchant articulation".
- A Janus position. Schopenhauer stands where rationalist humanism and scientific naturalism split. He shows each an inverted image of itself: humanism as "bad Christianity", naturalism in caricature.
- Left behind by his own success. Our culture is now so naturalist that his "metaphysical detour" is unnecessary. Freud only had to deny that the mental equals the conscious, and never had to argue with Kant.
- Horkheimer's summary. "Degrees of reality are not degrees of perfection", a thought he calls "infinitely modern".
- Schelling's date. The System of Transcendental Idealism is dated 1801; it was published in 1800 (Cotta, Tübingen).
- Simmel's publisher. The Simmel translation is given as "Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986"; Chapter 10 correctly has University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, 1986.
- Volume slip. Note 4 cites "W1 135-40, 238-9/H. 3", but H. 3 is volume two, so this should be W2.
- Out-of-order pairing. Note 90 pairs "W2 205-6" with "H. 4, 41-2; H. 3, 228-30", which is out of order.
- Hartmann's date. The Coupland translation of Hartmann is dated 1931 (a reprint); it first appeared in the 1880s.
- Typos. Note 26 reads "unconcious".
- Translating Simmel. "Demotion" for Vernichtung (annihilation) softens the claim Gardner relies on.
- Interpretive cost. Tying will to bodily movement fits blindness and pessimism. But Gardner admits some readers "find nothing remaining" after his abstraction; his reply simply sets functionalism aside.
Four pictures of the unconscious, and Freud's partition
Gardner's taxonomy must stay complete. Pre-Freudian "unconscious" talk splits into at least four pictures:
- Dispositional / latent. Ideas not presently conscious (ordinary psychology).
- Transcendental condition. What makes experience possible (Fichte's positing; Kantian conditions).
- Metaphysical ground. Nature or absolute as productive behind phenomena (Schelling; Schopenhauer's world-will).
- Dynamic motive. Wishes that shape thought and action while remaining unknown (Freud's target).
Schopenhauer supplies (3) with a structure that looks like (4): repression-like forgetting, sexuality's primacy, intellect as tool. Freud adds partition: id / ego / superego as agencies, clinical method, and a refusal to equate mental with conscious. World-will ≠ id; intellect ≠ ego; the parallel is structural.
Gardner's route: why dropping Kant's method reached a Freudian unconscious.
Why Nietzsche is not the missing link
The neat metaphysics → Nietzschean naturalism → Freud story fails Gardner's tests. Either Freud's clinical methods do not matter (then Nietzsche is not vindicated) or they do (then Nietzsche's anticipations are inspired guesses). Motive-ascription is not refutation of reason. Nietzsche relocates will in a transcendental critique (primacy of the practical, consciousness of decadence), "doing to Schopenhauer, in reverse, exactly what Schopenhauer did to Kant". That is why he is further from Freud than the popular story says. The deepest debt remains Schopenhauer's irrationalisation of existence: desire autonomous from cognition, Simmel's annihilation of life's reason-character, Horkheimer's line that degrees of reality are not degrees of perfection.
Psychoanalytic parallels listed, and the will-puzzle
Gardner's opening inventory of Schopenhauer's proto-psychoanalytic insights should be kept as a checklist:
- Primacy of sexuality and the sex-drive as kernel of will-to-life.
- Intellect as tool of will; reasons as rationalisations.
- Unconscious willing shaping love, character, and what we notice.
- Repression-like forgetting and self-concealment.
- Dream and madness as will speaking when intellect loosens.
- Wish structure in motivation (before Freud's wish-fulfilment vocabulary).
The will-puzzle: which "will"? World-will as thing-in-itself is too metaphysical for Freud; empirical motives are too shallow for Schopenhauer's claim. Gardner's resolution: read will as blind bodily striving present in degrees, stretchable to desire and emotion without becoming practical reason. That middle reading supports structural parallel without false identity of parts (will ≠ id, intellect ≠ ego).
Gardner: from proto-psychoanalytic checklist to structural parallel.
Absolute idealists' near misses
Fichte's unconscious positing, Schelling's productive nature and 1809 will-as-primordial-Being, Hegel's feeling-soul and madness: all touch unconscious structure. None makes the unconscious co-active with reason in the Freudian sense, because doing so would wreck rational autonomy. Schopenhauer, having dropped transcendental method while keeping subjective idealism's skin, could. That is Gardner's historical claim in one line.
Madness, dreams, sexuality: the checklist expanded
Gardner's textual parallels that make the Freudian comparison non-casual:
- Madness. A violent "casting out of mind" of what the will cannot bear; present falsified by fictitious connection with an imaginary past. Function: protect against unbearable knowledge. Arresting anticipation of early Freud on repression and the protective construction of symptom.
- Dreams. A function distinct from waking imagination; will speaks when intellect's censorship loosens. Not yet Freud's wish-fulfilment algebra, but the same architecture of disguised will.
- Sexuality. Supreme in the content of motivation; kernel and concentrated expression of will-to-life; lovers do not apprehend the species-purpose. Freud later cites Schopenhauer for corroboration on sexuality's range.
- Repression structure. Forgetting and self-concealment serve the will; intellect does not neutrally report.
- Responsibility. Freud denies that one can disavow moral responsibility for dream contents; Schopenhauer's fixed character already ties ownership of will's expressions to the person.
Gardner: five proto-psychoanalytic structures before partition.
These remain structural parallels. World-will is still not the id; clinical method and agency-partition are Freud's. The historical claim is only that Schopenhauer's anti-transcendental naturalism made such a psychology thinkable.
Two routes from Kant, restated
Gardner's fork: from Kant, one door keeps transcendental method (idealists: drop subjectivity of idealism, keep the method). The other keeps subjective idealism's skin and drops the method (Schopenhauer). Both, in Kant's terms, relapse into dogmatism for opposite reasons. Only the second door lets nature, including mental life, be read as expression of a non-rational reality in the disenchanted style Freud needs. Nietzsche, relocating will as transcendental critique, goes back through the first door. That is why the missing-link story fails.
Gardner: Kant's two doors and who walked which.
- "Schopenhauer's Contraction of Reason: Clarifying Kant and Undoing German Idealism", Kantian Review 17:3 (2012), 375-401, which develops the anti-transcendental reading here;
- "Psychoanalytic Theory: A Historical Reconstruction", a symposium with Béatrice Longuenesse, Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 86 (2012);
- "Post-Schopenhauerian Metaphysics: Hartmann, Mainländer, Bahnsen, and Nietzsche", in the Oxford Handbook of Schopenhauer, ed. Robert Wicks (OUP, 2020), ch. 26;
- The Transcendental Turn, co-edited with Matthew Grist (OUP, 2015).
Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein
An analytic philosopher before his time
Schopenhauer reached a wider public than most philosophers and shaped Wagner, Mann and Proust, Lebensphilosophie, existentialism and the unorthodox Marxists. Analytic philosophy is the exception, which Glock calls unjust: "his work features at least as many analytic arguments as theirs".
- Causation. He anticipated Mill's critique of Hume (invariable succession is not causation) and Bennett's critique of Kant's Second Analogy.
- Ethics. Like modern analytic ethicists, he argued that the Categorical Imperative cannot ground altruism: it fails for someone confident she will never need help.
- Style of attack. His polemics combine "intelligence, aggression, and irony". But his positive system "seems to collapse under even the gentlest analytic probing" (Janaway).
What Wittgenstein said, and what Magee made of it
- And: "He is not deep in the sense that Kant and Berkeley are deep."
- The 1931 list. Wittgenstein listed his influences as "Boltzmann, Hertz, Schopenhauer, Frege, Russell, Kraus, Loos, Weininger, Spengler, Sraffa".
- Magee's maximal reading. Magee wrote of "Schopenhauer's all-pervasive influence". He doubted much would remain of the Tractatus without Schopenhauer, Frege and Russell. He cited Wittgenstein's confession, "I really only think reproductively".
Kant is a confound. Wittgenstein read the Critique of Pure Reason as a prisoner of war in 1918, rated Kant above Schopenhauer, and absorbed Kantian ideas through Hertz and through Frege and Russell's problems. So influence must be traced with "side glances at the overall Kantian tradition". Some debts are Kantian, some Schopenhauerian (the anti-intellectualism), and some unassignable.
I. Philosophy, logic and mathematics
Both stand in Kant's critical tradition, but they move in opposite directions. Schopenhauer circumvents Kant's ban on metaphysics; Wittgenstein radicalises it.
| Question | Kant | Schopenhauer | Wittgenstein |
|---|---|---|---|
| Is metaphysics a priori? | Yes (transcendental) | No: "perception is throughout the source of knowledge" | Yes: philosophy is "above or below the natural sciences, not beside them" |
| What are the limits? | Of knowledge | Crossed by inference to the best explanation | Of meaningful discourse, drawn only "in language" |
| Beyond the limit | Unknowable noumena | The will, knowable | Only nonsense |
| Model of metaphysics | Reflective turn | Aristotelian: experience "as a whole" | Linguistic reflective turn |
| Status of logic | Analytic; some truths "tautological" | Laws of thought; all analytic truths tautological | Tautologies in which factual information cancels out |
- Glock's verdict on Schopenhauer's metaphysics. His charge against dogmatic metaphysics (optimism and rationalism) is "harsh but, in my view, just". But it is unclear how an inference to the best explanation reaches a thing in itself that is unknowable in principle.
- The ladder. Tractatus 6.54's ladder appears in Mauthner and in Schopenhauer. Wittgenstein's version is "heroic but ultimately self-refuting"; later, grammatical propositions avoid the trap.
- Language: not the book. Schopenhauer anticipated an anti-mentalist point (understanding needs no images in the hearer's mind). But "grammar is related to logic as are the clothes to the body". For Wittgenstein, language and thought are internally related.
- Representation: an indirect source. Making representation rather than experience central may have "paved the way" for depiction (Abbildung) in the Tractatus. Hertz's models are a likelier proximate source.
- Tautology: overrated. Magee said Wittgenstein got "his most important idea" (tautology) from Schopenhauer. Glock answers that the term runs from Kant's Logik to Coffey, Russell and Frege; Schopenhauer uses it only once of note.
- Real debt: anti-intellectualism. The intellect is "a mere tool in the service of the will". Via Spengler, this roots logic and mathematics in human practice, now social rather than biological.
Glock's two strands of influence in logic and mathematics: the claimed debt (tautology) is weak; the real one (anti-intellectualism) runs through Spengler to practice.
II. Ethics and aesthetics
Both write great German prose, but differently: Schopenhauer tells "a gripping philosophical yarn" like a composer. The Tractatus is marmoreal (closer to Spinoza), the Investigations lighter (closer to Lichtenberg). On theory they converge, linking ethics and aesthetics in three ways: the link is close; both centre on contemplation; and it is forged by mysticism.
Where the early Wittgenstein follows Schopenhauer on value, and where he departs.
- Schopenhauer's picture. Art and compassion release us from the will. Aesthetic experience asks "about the what alone", not where, when, why or whither, and the subject becomes "pure will-less, painless, timeless".
- Wittgenstein's tighter fusion. "Ethics and aesthetics are one" (TLP 6.421), probably via Weininger: "logic and ethics are fundamentally the same". All three are transcendental; ethics and aesthetics are also transcendent.
- The why and the that. Science asks how the world is; the mystic marvels "that it is" and looks with "a happy eye".
III. Transcendental solipsism
"The limits of my language mean the limits of my world" (TLP 5.6) is the hinge between the logical and mystical parts of the Tractatus. Following Peter Hacker's Insight and Illusion, Glock argues Wittgenstein did condone a transcendental solipsism, and that it came from Schopenhauer.
- Shared imagery. The subject is like the eye that "sees everything except itself". It is an "extensionless point", a limit, a "microcosm" (Paracelsus, via Weininger).
- In his own voice. "I am my world. (The microcosm.)" and "what the solipsist means is quite correct". His only complaint is that the solipsist tries to say what can only be shown.
- Linguistic turn. Signs become symbols through "thinking the sense", so meaning needs acts of a willing subject: "Things acquire 'meaning' only in relation to my will".
- Compatible with realism. It never asserts "I am the only person that exists"; it collapses into pure realism.
Half right on both sides. Lange says Wittgenstein abandoned the solipsism; Janaway says Wittgenstein could get it from Schopenhauer only by misreading him. Glock thinks Wittgenstein saw that Schopenhauer's escape route fails. Schopenhauer called theoretical egoism irrefutable, then fled to a non-individual will. But the first sentence still says "my representation". Salvation by identity with the universe either loses the self or turns altruism into a gigantic egoism. Hence: the world-will must be "in a higher sense my will".
IV. Will and intentionality
This is the least explored and, for Glock, the most important area. Early Wittgenstein rejected the metaphysics of will. "The world is independent of my will" (TLP 6.373); my body is "a part of the world among others"; the will is either a psychological phenomenon or an ethical attitude. But the Notebooks already slip back. Willing, unlike wishing, "is acting", and "the act of will is not an experience", which is "precisely Schopenhauer's position".
Glock's arc: from language as representation to language as will, using Schopenhauer's insight against his metaphysics.
- Against the empiricist will. If willing were "merely an experience", it would be something that "comes when it comes". But that is just what we do not say of intentional action (PI §611-21).
- Schopenhauer on both sides. He saw that the agent is not merely an experience. Yet his determinism leaves the intellect awaiting the decision "as it would that of a foreign will". That "makes a nonsense of agency".
- The "Schopenhauerian conception". "The will isn't something I see happen, it's more like my being involved in my actions, my being my actions" (PG 144).
- Doing in the ordinary sense. Subtract the arm rising from raising one's arm and nothing experiential remains. But no noumenal doing remains either: the difference lies in context and capacity.
Representation presupposes will. A proposition does not represent reality "off its own bat": "it is not the picture which intends, but we must intend something by it". Whether "Napoleon was impetuous" means Napoleon I or III depends on commitments, not on images; "no process could have the consequences of meaning". Moore's paradox shows the same. Only creatures who can avow, explain and answer for their thoughts can think at all.
Why analytic philosophy still keeps its distance
Gardiner (1963) blamed the decline of metaphysical speculation, but metaphysics has since staged a comeback. Glock's diagnosis is a pincer. Reductionists like the naturalistic, deterministic anthropology but dislike the "literary" style and "existentialist" themes. Wittgensteinians like those but distrust a single cosmic force behind everything, human action included.
Four zones of influence: logic, ethics, solipsism, will
Glock organizes the debt under four headings. Philosophy, logic and mathematics: both are critical heirs of Kant, moving opposite ways. Schopenhauer circumvents the ban on metaphysics by perception; Wittgenstein radicalises the ban into limits of meaningful discourse. Schopenhauer's contempt for academic logic and his view that mathematics rests on intuition leave traces, but Frege and Russell dominate the technical core of the Tractatus.
Ethics and aesthetics: early Wittgenstein's ineffable ethics of the willing subject, the world as a limited whole, and the alignment of ethics with aesthetics, echo Schopenhauer's will-less wonder and the ethical as outside representation. Transcendental solipsism: the eye/visual-field analogy, the metaphysical subject as limit not part of the world, and Notebooks purple passages identifying world with life, show Schopenhauerian form even when Russell's acquaintance principle also presses. Solipsism "collapses into pure realism" (TLP 5.64) as the other side of that austere limit view.
Will and intentionality: the later move from language as picture to language as use, action, form of life is, for Glock, the deeper continuation: from representation to will. Intention, expectation and wishing cease to be inner pictures and become embedded in practices. Analytic philosophy still keeps its distance because the positive system collapses under gentle probing, while the arguments (causation, free will, altruism and the CI) remain under-credited.
Glock: Wittgenstein's path from Schopenhauerian representation to will.
Why analytic philosophy still keeps its distance
Glock's closing diagnosis: Schopenhauer wrote analytic arguments before the brand existed, yet his system looks dogmatic and literary. Wittgenstein's dismissive remarks ("crude mind") coexist with the 1931 influence list. Magee's maximal reading overreaches once the "reproductive" quotation's anti-Jewish context is restored. The live inheritance is not the world as will but the analysis of willing, agency and the limits of representation. That is why the Companion ends here: the insight travels; the doctrine does not.
Ethics, aesthetics, and the willing subject
Glock's middle sections: early Wittgenstein's ethics is the ethics of a willing subject for whom the world waxes and wanes as a whole. Value does not lie in the world of facts (TLP). That parallels Schopenhauer's placement of ethics outside representation and alongside aesthetics. Contemplation that sees the world sub specie aeterni echoes will-less aesthetic wonder. Mysticism's ineffability matches saying/showing.
The later shift does not erase the debt; it relocates it. Intention is no longer an inner act preceding movement (the Schopenhauerian identity of will and action is nearby), but a pattern in a form of life. Language-games that order, promise, confess or pray are exercises of will in the practical sense, without a world-will underneath. Analytic distance remains because textbooks teach Frege-Russell-Moore, not Schopenhauer's arguments on causation, free will and the CI.
Glock: ethical will in the Tractatus to practical will in the Investigations.
Main Points
Twenty takeaways
- One single thought organizes everything. Knowledge of the world, pursued to the end, leads the will to deny itself: "cognitive self-realization leads to conative self-cancellation" (Introduction).
- The self keeps its old jobs, with new content. The core of a person is blind will; the intellect is its tool, which can still break free in art and in renunciation (Zöller).
- Saving knowledge fits no category. Schopenhauer classifies knowledge by its objects, so the final, salvific insight has nowhere to go in his own scheme (Hamlyn).
- The principle of sufficient reason stops at experience. The Fourfold Root rules out inference to God or the Absolute; the strongest surviving argument rests on the physiology of perception (White).
- Same results, different method. Schopenhauer keeps Kant's forms of intuition and causality but drops transcendental argument for direct scrutiny of experience, and so misreads Kant repeatedly (Guyer).
- "Will" is a revolutionary word. It names the striving essence of everything from gravity to love, and is best read as the essence of appearance, not a thing behind it (Janaway).
- The thing-in-itself shifted. Under Hindu and Buddhist influence, the late Schopenhauer moved from knowing the thing-in-itself as will to a reality of which will is one aspect, reached by saints and mystics (Nicholls).
- Art grasps Ideas through perception. The genius sees the Platonic Idea in nature; art that starts from concepts or charms the will is bad art (Foster).
- Compassion is the basis of morality. The narrower ethics is a descriptive virtue ethics, a theory of virtues and vices with animals inside the moral circle (Cartwright).
- Death is not annihilation, but suicide is pointless. Killing the body affirms the will it hopes to escape; the theory unravels over why the enlightened should go on living (Jacquette).
- Existence is worth no more than non-existence. The verdict comes from the metaphysics of the self: we must disown our own essence before life can have value (Janaway).
- Nietzsche borrowed the surface to subvert the core. Apollo and Dionysus begin as representation and will and end as weapons against resignation (Nussbaum).
- The break with Kant made the unconscious thinkable. Reading nature directly as a non-rational reality, Schopenhauer reached a proto-Freudian unconscious that the idealists could not (Gardner).
- Wittgenstein went from representation to will. The early ethics of the willing subject gave way to language as action and form of life (Glock).
- Intellect serves will. Reasons often rationalize what the will has already chosen, a theme carried from Book 2 to Freud (chs. 1, 5, 12).
- Aesthetic contemplation is a pause, not a cure. Art suspends willing temporarily; only denial of the will is lasting (chs. 1, 7, 10).
- Character is fixed. Each person has an unchangeable individual character, so freedom lies in being, not in doing (Introduction, chs. 5, 8).
- The system strains at its seams. An unknowable thing-in-itself that is known as will, and saving knowledge without a category, are the recurring fault lines (chs. 2, 5, 6, 9).
- His ideas travel without the metaphysics. Nietzsche, Freud and Wittgenstein each kept the insight and dropped the doctrine (chs. 11-13).
- Read him as an arguer. Against the image of a literary mood, the essays show a philosopher who "argues constantly" and can be tested (Introduction, ch. 13).
How the strongest takeaways connect: from the single thought to the heirs who kept the insight.
Where the essays split: consistency, Kant, and what survives.
Frameworks and mental models
These are the reusable tools the essays draw from Schopenhauer, each a way to test what really drives a judgment or a choice.
| Name | What it says | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| Primacy of will | Desire sets the goal; intellect finds reasons afterwards | A justification looks suspiciously tidy |
| Fourfold root | Four kinds of "why": cause, logical ground, mathematical ground, motive | An argument mixes kinds of explanation |
| Limits of inference | Principles valid inside experience license nothing beyond it | A model is used far outside its data |
| Will-less contemplation | Seeing without interest reveals the type, the Idea | Judging design or evidence free of stake |
| Compassion test | An act has moral worth only if aimed at another's weal or woe | Checking motives behind "ethical" policy |
| Fixed character | People act from a stable character; motives only trigger it | Predicting behaviour under new incentives |
| Value vs meaning | Ask what an existence is worth, apart from what it means | Weighing a project's real benefit |
| Surface and core | Borrow a vocabulary to subvert what it was built for | Reading a reformer who uses old terms |
Who's who
| Person | Role in the book |
|---|---|
| Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) | Subject of every chapter |
| Christopher Janaway | Editor; Introduction, chs. 5 and 10 |
| Immanuel Kant | Chief source and foil (1-5, 12, 13) |
| Plato | Source of the Ideas in art (7) |
| Fichte, Schelling, Hegel | Idealist rivals Schopenhauer despised (4, 12) |
| The Upanishads, the Buddha | Eastern sources for the thing-in-itself (6) |
| Friedrich Nietzsche | Heir and critic (11, 12) |
| Eduard von Hartmann, Sigmund Freud | Route to the unconscious (12) |
| Ludwig Wittgenstein | Analytic heir (13) |
| Richard Wagner, Thomas Mann | Artistic readers (Introduction, 11, 12) |
Frameworks index: every list the Companion needs intact
| Framework | Chapter | All items |
|---|---|---|
| Four classes of PSR | White 3 | Becoming / Knowing / Being / Acting |
| Four kinds of truth | White 3 | Logical / Empirical / Transcendental / Metalogical |
| Four objects of knowledge | Hamlyn 2 | Perception / Bodily will / Ideas / Salvific insight |
| Four incentives | Cartwright 8 | Egoism / Malice / Compassion / Ascetic limit |
| Four arguments against willing | Nussbaum 11 | Impure source / Piecemeal / Brevity / Illusion |
| Three deaths | Jacquette 9 | Despairing / Enlightened / Ascetic starvation |
| Gardner's six steps | Gardner 12 | Parallels real; IDs wrong; will=bodily striving; two Kant doors; Schopenhauer's door; Nietzsche returns |
| Four unconscious pictures | Gardner 12 | Latent / Transcendental / Metaphysical / Dynamic |
Master map: foundations, system, value, legacies.
A closer look
The Companion's strength is adversarial clarity: each essay states where Schopenhauer succeeds and where he breaks. Recurring fault lines are (1) an unknowable thing-in-itself somehow known as will, (2) salvific knowledge with no epistemological category, (3) suicide and the enlightened agent's choice, (4) Kant misread or productively broken. No second edition of the Companion exists; the Cambridge Edition of Schopenhauer's works (2009-2018) is now the standard English critical text beside Payne.
Who's who (quick)
| Name | Role in this volume |
|---|---|
| Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) | Subject: WWR 1818/19, 1844; FR 1813/1847; BM 1839/40; Parerga 1851 |
| Christopher Janaway | Editor; Intro, Will and nature, Pessimism |
| Kant / Hegel / Nietzsche / Freud / Wittgenstein | Chief interlocutors and heirs across chs. 4, 11-13 |
| Iris Murdoch / Bryan Magee / John Atwell | Cited interpreters of ethics, influence, single thought |
Agreement, split, travel
Three final compressions. Agreement: will over intellect; he argues constantly; heirs keep insights and drop the system. Split: Kant (misread vs productive break); system (organic vs fault-lined); pessimism (argument vs temperament). Travel: Nietzsche (surface against resignation), Freud (unconscious via anti-transcendental nature), Wittgenstein (representation to will in language). Use the frameworks index above as a checklist when rereading any chapter.
Synthesis close: what travels, what is left behind.
About this book
The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer by Christopher Janaway (ed.), 1999. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
Insight Editions · rajeshrmahapatra.com/insight-editions
- One single thought organizes everything. Knowledge of the world, pursued to the end, leads the will to deny itself: "cognitive self-realization leads to conative self-cancellation" (Introduction).
- The self keeps its old jobs, with new content. The core of a person is blind will; the intellect is its tool, which can still break free in art and in renunciation (Zöller).
- Saving knowledge fits no category. Schopenhauer classifies knowledge by its objects, so the final, salvific insight has nowhere to go in his own scheme (Hamlyn).
- The principle of sufficient reason stops at experience. The Fourfold Root rules out inference to God or the Absolute; the strongest surviving argument rests on the physiology of perception (White).
- Same results, different method. Schopenhauer keeps Kant's forms of intuition and causality but drops transcendental argument for direct scrutiny of experience, and so misreads Kant repeatedly (Guyer).
- "Will" is a revolutionary word. It names the striving essence of everything from gravity to love, and is best read as the essence of appearance, not a thing behind it (Janaway).