Schopenhauer, Arthur

SCHOPENHAUER, ARTHUR. - Philosopher, b. in Danzig on 22 Feb. 1788, d. in Frankfurt am Main on 21 Sept. 1860. Educated in France and in England, he spent part of his adolescence traveling with his parents in Europe. At about the age of eighteen he was placed in a commercial house in Hamburg, where his father Henry Floris, a well-to-do liberal merchant, had taken up residence from the time Danzig had passed to the Prussians. Having lost his father (probably by suicide), he obtained permission to continue his interrupted studies and moved with his mother Johanna Trosiener, a noted writer, to Weimar. Here he met, within the circle of his mother's acquaintances, Wieland and Goethe, with whom he came together over an interest in the theory of colors. At Göttingen and at Berlin he had as his teachers of philosophy Schulze (v.) and Fichte (v.). During this time, both in the Indian sacred texts translated by Anquetil Duperron and in Plato and Kant, he sought motives for the expression of a pre-existing pessimism (v.). He received his doctorate at Jena in 1813 after a studious isolation in the small town of Rudolstadt, deliberately chosen out of patriotic indifference and pacifism; then, for about 5 years, he worked in Dresden on his capital work. In 1818-19 he traveled in Italy: in Venice, where he stayed longer, he made marriage plans, but he abruptly turned away from them, having become jealous of G. Byron. Having qualified in philosophy (as a private lecturer), he attempted teaching in Berlin in rivalry with Hegel (v.). He won no approval either as a teacher or as an author, and he had confirmation of this in the years that followed a new journey to Italy (1822-23). He retired, in 1831, to Frankfurt, where in his last decade the fame he desired reached him. He died, neither prepared nor disposed, of a sudden chest ailment.

Works: Über die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichendem Grunde (Rudolfstadt 1813; doctoral thesis).

S. there distinguishes the principle of cause from the principle of reason, presenting the latter as an a priori norm of our representations, from whose connection according to four forms the world results. Here, in a Fichtean manner, the idealism of the Kantian doctrine is developed. Über das Sehen und die Farben (Leipzig 1816): it is the result of the conversations that S. had with Goethe about the theory of colors. Of these a physiological explanation is given in which, as in the preceding work, the realistic presupposition of an intellect Kantianly separated from sensible intuition is excluded. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung with a Kritik der kantischen Philosophie in the appendix (ibid. 1818): principal work. It consists of four books, of which the first two set out S.'s epistemological-metaphysical doctrine and the last two his soteriological doctrine. The world, which is a representative phenomenon (v.) (bk. I) of the blind Rumanian Will (bk. II), can be overcome, in the order of knowledge, by aesthetic intuition that passes beyond its principle (bk. III) and, in the order of the Will, by the renunciatory conversion of the same (bk. IV). This work appeared enlarged, in the 2nd ed. (ibid. 1844), by a volume of Supplements. Über den Willen in der Natur (Frankfurt am Main 1836): there S.'s cosmological doctrine is set out, which partly takes up again the argument of bk. II of his principal work and, among other themes, also treats of magic. Die beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik (ibid. 1841): a) Preisschrift über die Freiheit des Willens, an energetic critique of phenomenal human operari which, according to S., sequitur esse; b) Über die Grundlage der Moral; in antithesis to Kantian ethical rationalism (which he notably misunderstood), S. intends to vindicate the spontaneity of virtuous action by founding it on the feeling of compassion. Parerga und Paralipomena (2 vols., Berlin 1851): a collection of minor treatments of a popular and divulgative character. Of a similar kind are the Neue Paralipomena, published after the philosopher's death through the work of E. Grisebach, who edited the publications of the Schopenhauerian unpublished writings: A. S. Handschriftlicher Nachlass (4 vols., 2nd ed., Leipzig 1895-96).

(by courtesy of Dr. B. Degenhart)
SCHONGAUER, MARTIN - St. John on Patmos. Engraving.

In the conflict he suffered between the contemplative vocation and sensual ardor, S. recognizes the very drama of the universe, which is representation and will. The will is a turbid, painful craving; the representation, which culminates in philosophy, aesthetically intuitive, in the objectivity of the Absolute, is in itself limpid light (Die Welt, I, § 15; II, 17, 34). Not such, however, is the representation that reveals things and individuals. Discovered through a process of analogy by us, who grasp ourselves in inner experience, and immediately, as will, they are nothing but the correlate of our constitutive deficit (ibid., I, § 18-19): the knowledge one has of them and of the world to which they belong is therefore mere illusion. S., identifying phenomenon with illusion, employs to certain effects the Kantian phenomenalism which, in full divergence from the idealists Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, he considers founded on the basic certainty of the noumenon (v.). The unknowable noumenon is precisely the being that lies at the foundation of knowing: it is the Will in its original irrational dynamism. Although it, thus understood, is not a subject (v.), S. gives it an object (v.) by presenting it in the capacity of will to live (Wille zu leben) which devises the means to realize itself (ibid., I, § 35). Here S. follows the schemas of Neoplatonic emanatism, ascending with it to the traditional Plato of the archetypal ideas. In these the Will, which by projecting itself into the manifold fixes their models on this side of time, has its first stage of objectification; then there is the passage from the typical ideas to individuals (second stage) by virtue of the principle of sufficient reason quadruply determined: principium essendi (space and time); principium fiendi (cause and effect); principium cognoscendi (principle and consequence); principium agendi (motive. Cf. Über die vierfache Wurzel, § 46). Everything that falls within this framework, which is like the scaffolding on which the Will builds the edifice of its definitive objectification, is worthless and inconsistent: a worthy work of the blind author. Naturally there is no exception for man, who, individuated in space and time, acts on the basis of motives. In conformity with this S. devalues and denies both history, devoid of a true end and of progress (Die Welt, I, § 58), and the virtue of works, reducible to a far-sighted egoism (ibid., § 70). Value and virtue enter the scene only then: when the egoistic illusion withdraws from it and, in withdrawing, determines the simultaneous vanishing of both the individual and the action. Indeed the maxim of right, which constitutes for S. the first chapter of morality, sounds negatively: neminem laede. The ethical imperative that is added to it, completing and surpassing it, imo omnes quantum potes iuva (Über die Grundl. der Mor., 17), affirms only the positivity of a feeling that negates reason. And this feeling is pity (Mitleid). In pity or compassion (exchanged and confused by S. with the Pauline ἀγάπη because of the inexperience of a real sociability [ibid., 18]), man, having repented of the deception of individuation, lives the suffering of others noumenally and precisely for that reason as his own. S. nevertheless cannot explain how such a repentance occurs, incompatible with man who is such because he is phenomenon; he therefore has recourse, always in his own way, to another Christian concept: that of Grace. Authentic virtue, not obligatory, is a true miracle of Grace (of the Grace that is immanent in us [Die Welt, I, § 70]) and is not the only miracle, nor the last. The prince-miracle is the ascesis (beyond evil as much as beyond good) relating to the conversion of the Will which, abdicating itself as Noluntas, leaves us limpid knowers; free even from the Mitleid of morality (ibid., 7, § 68; II, § 48). And beyond this miracle, holiness, there is the other, however non-durable it may be, of aesthetic contemplation (on whose plane the arts are born). In it the subject crosses the phenomenon and, reaching, beyond the sphere of illusory concepts presided over by the principle of reason, the eternal idea, becomes a participant in it (ibid., I, § 36). S., in this regard, speaks of a loss in the object of the individuality that reaches it (the empirical individuality already given as exclusive) but in effect his Platonism fecundly exceeds, in a positive mystical sense, both the epistemological letter that depresses it and the irrationalism that formally subordinates it with the relative overturning of concepts and of values. S. aspires (and this is his true, even if implicit, exigency) to the foundation of a mysticism in a pure reason that provides the criterion for judging the worldly empirical ratio as deceptive and substantiated with blindness. On the basis of this exigency S. seeks to reintegrate as persons the subjects denied as phenomenal individuals, making a Platonic idea (v.) correspond to each of them in the intelligible world. Restoring in this freedom and responsibility, he shows on the other hand, how, above the Brahmanic and Buddhist negations, the ascetic Nothingness must be filled with an absolute positivity (Die Welt, I, at the end). All this goes to prove how a certain contemporary nihilistic metaphysics, of evident Schopenhauerian inspiration despite the disclaimers of its founder (Heidegger), is defined within the limits of S. (cf. T. Moretti Costanzi, L'ascetica di Heidegger, Rome 1949; id., Circa un giudizio dello Heidegger sulla mia «Ascetica di Heidegger», in Teoresi, 6 [1951], pp. 11-17).

S. declared himself an atheist, but perhaps he was such only with respect to the pre-Christian and anti-Christian God (the "Judaic God," as he called him) established by worldly humanism. From the intention of condemning this impiety in the name of Christianity, S. was led to contradict it with his pessimistic metaphysics. His thought is substantially a Gnostic heresy (cf. Ch. Renouvier, Schop. et la métaphysique du pessimisme, in L'année phil., 1892).

In the field of the vast bibliography on S., for exhaustive information the Jahrbuch der S. Gesellschaft, Kiel 1912-48, is above all of value. Here we limit ourselves to indicating the studies that are of greatest interest from a Christian point of view: E. Seillière, S., Paris 1912; G. Faggin, A. S. e la mistica, in Sophia, 1 [1933], pp. 430-35; and 2 [1934], pp. 84-105; P. Mignosi, S., Brescia 1934; U. A. Padovani, S., Milan 1934; T. Moretti Costanzi, S., Rome 1942. The best-known general works on S., cited everywhere, are: K. Fischer, S. (Gesch. d. n. Philos., 9), Heidelberg 1893; 3rd ed. ibid. 1908; J. Volkelt, A. S., Stuttgart 1900; A. Covotti, La vita e il pensiero di A. S., Turin 1909; Th. Ruysen, S., Paris 1911. For information concerning the person and family of S., the most exhaustive work is that of R. Borch, S., Berlin 1941. Recent bibl. in G. A. De Brie, Bibliographia philosophica 1934-45, I, Utrecht-Brussels 1950, pp. 455-59; G. Faggin, S., il mistico senza Dio, Florence 1951.

Teodorico Moretti Costanzi