Christopher Janaway

The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer

Introduction Christopher Janaway 1. Schopenhauer on the self Gunter Zoller 2. Schopenhauer and knowledge David Hamlyn 3. The fourfold root Frank C. White 4. Schopenhauer, Kant, and the methods of philosophy Paul Guyer 5. Will and nature Christopher Janaway 6. The influences of Eastern thought on Schopenhauers Doctrine of the Thing in Itself Moira Nicholls 7. Ideas and imagination: Schopenhauer on the proper foundation of art Cheryl Foster 8. Schopenhauers narrower sense of morality David E. Cartwright 9. Schopenhauer on death Dale Jacquette 10. Schopenhauers pessimism Christopher Janaway 11. Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Dionysus Martha C. Nussbaum 12. Schopenhauer, will, and the unconscious Sebastian Gardner 13. Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein: representation as language and will Hans-Johann Glock.

Schopenhauer, Kant, and the Methods of Philosophy

TRANSCENDENTAL PHILOSOPHY WITHOUT TRANSCENDENTAL ARGUMENTS As the title of his magnum opus, The World as Will and Representation , suggests, Schopenhauer held that we know the world in two different ways, through our representations of objects in space and time and through our experience of our ability to move our own bodies by willing to do so. In his account of our knowledge of the world through representation, he accepted the core of Kants transcendental idealism, the view that the spatial and temporal forms in which experience presents objects to us, as well as the basic structure of the concepts by means of which we think about and judge these objects, above all the category of causality, are impositions of our own minds on our experience, that is, they reflect the structure of our own perception and conception of reality but not any structure that reality has in itself independently of our representation of it. In his account of our knowledge of the nature of reality through our own will, however, Schopenhauer rejected Kants inference that transcendental idealism, while it allows us to conceive of certain features of how things may be in themselves by means of our categories, and even to adopt certain postulates about them for the sake of our practical reason, that is, morality, completely precludes us from having any actual knowledge of them.

Ideas and Imagination

The reader who, instead of being keen to learn, is intent only on finding fault, will simply not learn anything. He likes to criticize. Arthur Schopenhauer AESTHETIC CONTEMPLATION: A PRELUDE Schopenhauer devoted more than one-quarter of his principal work, The World as Will and Representation , to aesthetics. The chapters on aesthetics occupy the third section in both volumes of that work and depend for their clarity as much on the metaphysical theory that precedes them as on an acquaintance with the particular arts discussed. For Schopenhauer, genuine aesthetic experience, though rare, leads directly to an apprehension of metaphysical truth, to the core of genuine knowledge. This emphasis on aesthetic experience in obtaining knowledge is unusual, however, for by the middle of the nineteenth century the epistemological authority of the scientific method was pervasively secure throughout Europe. No stranger to the empirical scientific disciplines, Schopenhauer began higher studies in a faculty of medicine and made progress for more than two years before switching to philosophy, which would become his life’s work. Although he insisted on separate emphases for science on the one hand and philosophy on the other, Schopenhauer nevertheless felt it prudent to corroborate his metaphysical claims by attempting to show their appearance in phenomena validated through scientific observation.

The Republic of Art and Other Essays

Contents: The topics analysed and discussed in this book include the definability, ontological status, meaning, theories, and evaluation of art - Morality and literary criticism - Beauty - Aesthetic experience and aesthetic judgement.

Attitudes to suffering: Parfit and Nietzsche

Abstract In On What Matters, Derek Parfit argues that Nietzsche does not disagree with central normative beliefs that ‘we’ hold. Such disagreement would threaten Parfit’s claim that normative beliefs are known by intuition. However, Nietzsche defends a conception of well-being that challenges Parfit’s normative claim that suffering is bad in itself for the sufferer. Nietzsche recognizes the phenomenon of ‘growth through suffering’ as essential to well-being. Hence, removal of all suffering would lead to diminished well-being. Parfit claims that if Nietzsche understood normative concepts in Parfit’s objectivist sense, he would not disagree with the claim that suffering is bad in itself – that intrinsic facts about suffering count in favour of our not wanting it. I argue that Nietzsche would disagree. Suffering for Nietzsche is not merely instrumentally necessary for psychological growth, nor is it easy to construe it as something bad in itself that contributes value as part of a good whole. Suffering that can be given meaning through growth is something we have reason to want. Suffering that remains brute and uninterpreted is something we have reason not to want. But for Nietzsche, suffering as such has no invariant value across all contexts.

Schopenhauer on the aimlessness of the will

ABSTRACT Schopenhauer asserts that ‘the will, which is objectified in human life as it is in every appearance, is a striving without aim and without end’. The article rejects some recent readings of this claim, and offers the following positive interpretation: however many specific aims of my specific desires I manage to attain, none is a final aim, in the sense that none terminates my ‘willing as a whole’, none turns me into a non-willing being. To understand Schopenhauer’s claim we must recognize his central contrast between happiness and will-lessness. Happiness is the satisfaction of individual desire, but no act of will that succeeds in satisfying individual desire is the attainment of a final aim, in that none brings about a conscious state in which the subject experiences no more unfulfilled desires. Such a state is the ultimate goal of existence, in Schopenhauer’s view, but happiness does not provide a route along which it can be attained.

Schopenhauer’s Christian Perspectives

The chapter upholds Nietzsche’s view that Schopenhauer’s values represent a Christian “ascetic moral perspective” while “dismissing faith in God .” Schopenhauer is an atheist, but he espouses Christian values of selfless compassion and ascetic release from the world and claims that Christianity represents truths allegorically. The chapter evaluates the resulting position.

On learning and the learned

When we see the many different institutions for teaching and learning and the vast throng of pupils and masters, we might imagine that the human race was very much bent on insight and truth; but here appearances are deceptive. The masters teach in order to earn money and aspire not to wisdom, but to the semblance and reputation thereof; the pupils learn not to acquire knowledge and insight, but to be able to talk and chat and to give themselves airs. Thus every thirty years a new generation appears in the world, a youngster who knows nothing about anything. It now wants to devour, summarily in all haste, the results of all human knowledge that has been accumulated in thousands of years, and then to be cleverer than all the past. For this purpose, the youngster goes off to the university and picks up books, indeed the newest and latest, as the companions of his time and age; only everything must be short and new, just as he himself is new! He then begins to judge and criticize for all he is worth. Here I have not taken into account at all the professional studies proper.

Thinking for oneself

Just as the largest library, badly arranged, is not so useful as a very moderate one that is well arranged, so the greatest amount of knowledge, if not elaborated by our own thoughts, is worth much less than a far smaller volume that has been abundantly and repeatedly thought over. For only by universally combining what we know, by comparing every truth with every other, do we fully assimilate our own knowledge and get it into our power. We can think over only what we know, and so we should learn something; but we know only what we have thought out. Now it is true that we can arbitrarily apply ourselves to reading and learning, but not really to thinking. Thus just as a fire is kindled and sustained by a draught of air, so too must thinking be through some interest in its theme, which may be either purely objective or merely subjective. The latter exists solely in connection with our personal affairs; the former, however, is only for minds who think by nature, to whom thinking is as natural as breathing, but who are very rare. Thus with most scholars there is so little of it.

On reading and books

Ignorance degrades a man only when it is found in company with wealth. A poor man is subdued by his poverty and distress; with him his work takes the place of knowledge and occupies his thoughts. On the other hand, the wealthy who are ignorant live merely for their pleasures and are like animals, as can be seen every day. Moreover, there is the reproach that wealth and leisure have not been used for that which bestows on them the greatest possible value.