Schopenhauer's The World As Will and Representation by Wicks Robert

Author:Wicks, Robert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2016-04-26T16:00:00+00:00

SECTION 5. BOOK IV, ETHICS AND ASCETICISM, §§53–71

§53: AESTHETIC AWARENESS AS THE WAY TO PHILOSOPHY AND ETHICS

Schopenhauer begins Book IV with some reflections on the nature of philosophy and on his own philosophical method—a method which issues from a relatively time-free awareness—as it contrasts with the methods of Kant and Hegel, which rely respectively upon Aristotelian logic and dialectical reason. Anticipating Karl Marx’s well-known lines from 1845—“Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it”—Schopenhauer agrees that philosophy can only interpret, explain, and intellectually clarify what we have experientially before us.34 Just as studying philosophical theories will not by itself give birth to philosophical visionaries, neither will an accurate aesthetic theory produce great artists, nor will a good moral theory necessarily increase the number of noble people. With such sober observations, he turns from the aesthetic theory of Book III to the philosophy of human activity, which he refers to as “practical philosophy” or “ethics.”

Schopenhauer distinguishes the kind of ethical theory he will be presenting and advocating—one grounded in experience and issuing from the question of whether existence itself is valuable or not—from Kant’s ethics. His theory will not be advancing, as did Kant, a theory of duty, nor will it be formulating a procedure to specify moral principles. Neither will the theory use reason to speculate about the foundations of morality that lie beyond the realm of possible experience. Abstract concepts will not be among the core items in Schopenhauer’s ethics.

Schopenhauer also contrasts his philosophical method from the historical style of philosophizing that Hegel represents, offering a curious and thought-provoking argument against Hegel and historically centered philosophizing in general. According to Hegel, human history has been developing, and continues inevitably to develop, toward an ideal cultural condition that is thoroughly rational, self-conscious, and free. In the ancient oriental world, as Hegel notes in his lectures on the philosophy of history, the general recognition was that only one person was essentially free, for example, in Egypt, the Pharaoh. In classical Greece and Rome, some people were among the free, as citizens were distinguished from slaves; in contemporary times and in light of the French Revolution, we now realize that all people are potentially free and equal to each other as humans.35 He accordingly perceives across history, a logical progression in freedom from “one,” to “some,” to “all,” as is found in formal tables of logical judgments. This defines one strand of the underlying logic that Hegel believes informs the course of human history.

Schopenhauer disagrees with theories that postulate some rationally structured goal that human society is supposedly developing toward and is expected eventually to reach, maintaining that if time is infinite, then an eternity has already passed. If an eternity has already passed, then everything that has been in a process of becoming would have already become what it had been aiming to become. It consequently makes no sense to conceive of ourselves as presently in the midst of a developmental process toward a thoroughly rational condition.

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