Angels and Demons: A Radical Anthology of Political Lives by Tony McKenna;

Author:Tony McKenna; [McKenna, Tony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-78904-021-0
Publisher: John Hunt (NBN)
Published: 2019-03-28T16:00:00+00:00

This, then, concludes our examination of Schopenhauer’s fundamental ontology. It should be apparent by this point that the raison d’etre of Schopenhauer’s philosophy lies in the endeavour to neutralise the historical method and its social-evolutionary and revolutionary implications. The means by which this is to be accomplished require and demand a sustained attack on the Hegelian dialectic on two fronts. Firstly, the subject-object dialectic is annulled and converted into an abstract identity which is carried by the mystical-aesthetic encounter with the Idea or Platonic Form of an object, thereby neutering the possibility for historical activity and historical change by removing its basis in human labour as the mediating term in the subject-object interrelation. Secondly, the dialectic which opens up between time and matter is dissolved and these things are held apart in an insuperable opposition which renders matter timeless and impervious to genuine change – while in the same moment, divorced from matter, time is realised as a subjectivist facet of the individual ego, decoupled from historical movement, thereby removing the possibility of genuine, qualitative historical change (historical time).

Across these foundations is cast the long shadow of the will principle, a Kantian thing-in-itself which Schopenhauer provides with a vitalist slant, and which smuggles into the world perhaps the most pronounced form of nihilism ever known to philosophy. The isolated, abstract individual locked into the unremitting, meaningless but all-pervasive struggle to prolong a lonely existence set against a backdrop of an infinite, indifferent universe; such a struggle is conducted, not just at the conscious level, but is one which infuses the very fabric of being and resonates its every particle. There is, ultimately, only one respite, only one form of cosmic relief which the individual might enjoy, and that comes from the contemplative encounter with the pure form which dissolves within itself the semblance of individuality, and thus annuls the very thing which carries the will. Here we see how Schopenhauer’s philosophy is guided with a certain tragic honesty; in turning away from the notion of the individual as a socio-historical being, in removing him from the chain of historical development, Schopenhauer conscientiously reaches the conclusion that without history, man is nothing. For it is nothingness which Schopenhauer’s philosophy inevitably and ultimately propels him toward, and in the concluding sentence of his magnum opus this is made abundantly clear with desolate, echoing finality: “[T]o those in whom the will has turned about and has denied itself, this world of ours, as real as it is, with all its suns and galaxies, is – nothing.”107

In the final analysis then, Schopenhauer’s philosophy is a form of Kantianism, but one which is far less sophisticated and methodologically consistent than its progenitor, and thus the insoluble contradictions of Kantianism are reproduced in Schopenhauer only in a more exacerbated and exaggerated fashion. The problem of the thing-in-itself is handled by Schopenhauer in a rather naive way; he simply asserts his brand of vitalism and, later, superimposes the Platonic forms, in order to mediate the (noumenal) will with the world.

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