The Thing-In-Itself and the Phenomenological Realm: Cartesian Antinomical Unity in the Irrational Schopenhauerian Will

Schopenhauer is an eclectic unity of antinomies. He was a committed atheist, but a passionate Platonic ontologist advocating for robust metalogics who rejected the Naturalism and Newtonian mechanical reductionism of the Enlightenment. He was an anti-metaphysical metaphysician; a subjectivist but not an idealist, a Kantian but not a moralist. In reaction to his unwitting enemy Hegel, he developed an ateleological understanding of reason that led to his perspectivism (a rejection of Aristotelianism in favor of Platonism). He sees himself as solidly within the 3,000-year-old Judeo-Platonic continuum; pointing to the fact that Plato read Moses, and that there has been a Hellenistic influence on the proto-Jewish tribes from the beginning, and vice versa. For Schopenhauer, the nature of reality is fundamentally dependent on the subject's attention to it, a Platonic framework that is historically rejected by atheistic anti-metaphysics including his acolyte Nietzsche. According to Schopenhauer, the subject, or individual human being, is the source of all knowledge and experience, and that all individuals are equal in this respect, creating an unconscious, transpersonal reality. Schopenhauer believed that the subject is the only thing that can be known with certainty in mimicry of Descartes, and that all other things are known only through the subject's perceptions and representations, giving real form to sense-perception. Nietzsche took this rejection of Socrates even further, arguing that there is no subject, no "I" to know. In Parerga and Paralipomena he writes, "On the whole, philosophy of all times may be regarded as oscillating like a pendulum between rationalism and illuminism, i.e., between the use of the objective and the subjective source of knowledge," and one can view his entire philosophical project through this lens. He is on the edge between the metaphysicians and anti-metaphysicians, as Heidegger noted "Schopenhauer is the last great Western philosopher who could still think metaphysically."

Schopenhauer maintains a clear metaphysical subject-object (energy/essence) divide, arguing that the "subject" is the source of all knowledge and experience, and that all individuals are united in this trans-personal consciousness. But Schopenhauer's understanding of reason was antimetaphysical and ateleological; Reason tells us nothing about history and is not a means to an end, but an end in itself. Rather, in his rejection of Hegelianism, it is simply a product of the subject's Will-To-Live. This ateleological understanding of rationality is related to his pessimistic worldview, in which he saw human existence as ultimately meaningless and futile, and only redeemed through a recognition of the irrationality of the Self and a primordial return to the Will-to-Live. His anti-Socratic philosophy would be taken up by Nietzsche in particular, but also by Kafka, Camus, Hemmingway, and Tolstoy.

Pessimism, Subjective Idealism and Nietzchean Reading of Schopenhauer

He wrote in multiple languages- primarily German, of course, but published his 1830 Theoria colorum and 1819 Cursus vitae in Latin, and knew French, Greek and English. He corresponded with English publicists and worked on English translations of Kant, showing an impressive command of English. Schopenhauer was a dedicated acolyte of Kant, but an enemy of his fellow lecturer at the University of Berlin, Hegel. He saw himself as a finisher or perfecter of Kant, removing the Super-rational a priori metaphysical positions and developing a pessimistic, subjective idealism which inverted Kant's Transcendental Idealism and Ethics. His understanding of the unknowability of the will is thoroughly Kantian. He was the first major German philosopher to reject the idea of the world existing according to rational principles- in other words, he rejected the ration, Teleological understanding of human history championed by Hegel. This foreshadowed the pessimistic anti-metaphysical positions of Schopenhauer's biggest fan- Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche's Perspectivism is rooted in Schopenhauer's iteration of Kant's Epistemology, and owes his rejection of Anthropological Teleology and a fixation on the Will-to-Live which was the basis of his Will-to-Power. Schopenhauer has not enjoyed posthumous fame like Hegel and Kant, but through Nietzsche he is still widely read. The Honey Badger of Philosophy attacked Schopenhauer the least. There wasn't a single philosopher who didn't go way out of his way to brutally tear apart, even poor Richard Wagner had two books written against him denouncing him as a sham of an artist. In his 1876 Untimely Reflections he praises Schopenhauer:

I am one of those readers of Schopenhauer who, after reading the first page of him, know with certainty that they will read all the pages and listen to every word he has ever said. My confidence in him was there at once and is the same now as it was nine years ago

And even after he changed his mind on Wagner, he never denounced Schopenhauer, only lightly criticized his work. Nietzsche believed Schopenhauer was not Pessimistic enough and went to light on religious thinking: “Schopenhauer's religious-moral interpretation of man and the world, it is also certain that he was mistaken about the value of religion for knowledge." and later accusing him of being a "Metaphysical philosopher" (a sick burn in these circles). And this is exactly what makes Schopenhauer interesting- he was a kind of Platonic Atheist. He writes "My readers know that I accept the word idea only in its original, the Platonic, sense".

He tried to create a new regime which maintained the knowability of the object through rejecting a priori metaphysics (exactly as Nietzsche did), while denying an external rationality, making him a semi-Platonist. Phenomena exists through Ontology, as in Platonism: "After I had to reject Kant's doctrine of the categories just as he himself rejected Aristotle's, I want to point here to a third way to achieve the intended by way of suggestion". Even though he attacks the very idea of metaphysics, he uses a Platonic Ontological Noumena-Phenomenal divide to describe human consciousness, and rejects an independent rationality apart from the mind. Both the Subject and the Object exist within the knowing consciousness. The Subject's self-consciousness contains the entire afferent-efferent divide. This is not Platonic Idealism, for understanding is rooted in experience with the Object. His version of the principle of sufficient reason. To do this, he circumvents hundreds of years of philosophy and returns to Leibniz's Enlightenment Principle of Sufficient Reason, which he uses as the foundation for his entire project.

Schopenhauer is a chaotic read, and due to his depth, has been interpreted in very different directions. His style is calm and peaceful, but you sit down and get through 800 pages of chummy, positive Ontologic reasoning only to get to the conclusion "there's no meaning in anything and all life is worthless". Nietzsche at least lets you know it's not going to end well from the first sentence. There's never any positive vibes coming from Nietzsche. Nietzsche wrote in his book "The Birth of Tragedy":

Schopenhauer's philosophy is the most consistent expression of a truly pessimistic view of life. He saw the universe as a vast and senseless striving, a blind and insatiable will, whose only end is the production of an endless series of individuals who are doomed to suffer and perish. He saw life as a constant and unending struggle, in which the strong prey upon the weak and the weak are ground to dust under the heels of the strong.

However, Nietzsche also criticized Schopenhauer's pessimism as being ultimately nihilistic and life-denying, writing:

Schopenhauer's pessimism is not a healthy and life-affirming pessimism, but a diseased and life-denying pessimism. It is the pessimism of the weak and the defeated, of those who have given up the struggle and have lost faith in life. It is the pessimism of those who have exhausted themselves in the struggle and have nothing left but despair.

Nietzsche developed his own philosophy, which he called "philosophy of the eternal recurrence" which is a rejection of Schopenhauer's pessimism. He believed that life should be embraced, even with all its suffering, and that individuals should strive to live life to the fullest, accepting that everything happens in an endless cycle of birth and rebirth. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche both admit that their tenacious pursuit of truth in an Atheistic, rationalistic context is indebted to the Judedo-Christian tradition they arose from. In the Antichrist Nietzsche admits:

“Will to truth" might be a hidden Will to Death… In this way the question: why science? leads back to the moral problem-what is the use of morality at all, if life, nature, history are "immoral"?... we recognize that we godless and anti-metaphysicians, also still take our fire from the fire kindled by a millennia-old faith, that Christian faith which was also Plato's faith that God is truth, that truth is divine.... But how, if this just becomes more and more implausible, if nothing more proves to be divine, except error, blindness, lies, - if God himself proves to be our longest lie?

Schopenhauer's emphasis on the importance of ethics and virtue, as well as his concept of the "will to live" as the fundamental drive that he builds his subjective idealism upon. His Subjectivism is not to be equated with traditional Platonic Idealism, however. In a letter written in Berlin in 1831 to a Thomas Campbell, a publisher in London, he explains why his Ontology is Platonic broadly, but not Platonic Idealism. He had to constantly defend his notion of Subjective Idealism from the accusation that it is mere Platonic Idealism. Note that this is not a translation, he wrote this letter in English:

Whatsoever is to be manifested to us as an object, must be manifested to our perception. But all our perceptions are effected by the means of our senses: for the understanding does not perceive intuitively, it only reflects. Now as by what has been hitherto proved, the senses never nor even in any respect whatever, manifest to our cognizance the things as they are in themselves, but merely their appearances, which are no more than the ideas of our sensitive faculty, it follows that we must deem all the bodies, along with the space wherein they subsist, to be nothing more than mere ideas in our minds and that consequently they exist nowhere else but only in our thoughts. Now is not this clear idealism?

[pure Platonic] Idealism consists in maintaining that there exist no other but thinking beings and that all things besides, which we deem to perceive are merely the ideas of those thinking beings without any really outward object corresponding to them. Now on the contrary what I say is this: things subsisting extrinsically of us are manifested to us as objects of our senses; but nothing do we know of what they may be in themselves, our knowledge of them extending no further than to their appearances i. e. to the ideas, which they produce in us by affecting our senses. Accordingly I certainly allow bodies extrinsical of us to exist i. e. things which, though entirely unknown to us as to what they may be in themselves, yet come into our notice by means of the ideas, which we acquire from their influence on our sensitive faculty: to these things we apply the name of bodies, meaning by this term merely the appearance of an object unknown to us indeed, but not the less real. May this be called Idealism? Why, it is the very reverse of it.

That we may, without detracting from the real existence of outward things, assert that a good many of their qualities do not belong to those things in themselves, but only to their appearance and accordingly have no existence of their own and independent of our ideas of them, this is a truth that has been generally received an allowed long before Locke's time; but more especially since it. Of this kind are warmth, colour, taste &c. Now not the slightest argument can be alleged to shew it as inadmissible, that I, upon weighty reasons, reckon to the mere appearance besides the above mentioned also all the remaining qualities of bodies, those, I say, which are called primary ones, as extension, place and space in general with all its dependencies, such as impenetrability or materiality, form and the like. As little, therefore, as he may be styled an Idealist, who maintains the colours to be no qualities adhering to the objects themselves, but only to our organ of sight as modifications thereof; as little is my doctrine liable to be called idealistical, merely because I find, that still more, nay all the qualities constituting the perception of a body appertain merely to its appearance. For by this I do not, as real Idealism does, even the existence of the appearing things, but only shew that we can never through the medium of senses know them so, as they are in themselves. I should be glad to know, how my positions ought to be constituted in order to contain no Idealism. No doubt I ought to say that the idea of space is not only perfectly congruous to the relation in which our senses stand to the objects (for that is what I have said) but also that it is perfectly resembling those objects; a position to which I cannot attach any sense, no more than to this that the sensation of red in my eye bears a resemblance to the quality of the Cinnober that occasions it.

On the Basis of Morality is an analysis of Kant's 1785 Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. In it, he argues that Kant was wrong about determining the morality of actions solely from duty. He calls Kant's Categorical Imperative "cold and arrogant", something Nietzsche called "Kantian distastefulness" and Nietzsche would expound upon the inconsistencies in Kantian ethics. However, he cannibalized Kant's emphasis on Will. In Kant's Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, he writes:

There is nothing in the world, or even outside of it, that can be considered good without restriction, but only a good will. Understanding, wit, power of judgment, and whatever else the talents of the spirit may be called, or courage, determination, perseverance in resolution as qualities of temperament are undoubtedly good and desirable in some intentions; but they can also become extremely evil and harmful if the will…is not good…. For without principles of good will they can become most evil… The good will is good not by what it brings about or accomplishes, not by its suitability for the attainment of some predetermined end, but solely by the Will.

In Schopenhauer's enfolding of the Subject-Object paradigm into the Noumenal Will (the only true thing-in-itself), he also located morality in the direct experience of Eternality by the Consciousness subject to Will. The consciousness is controlled by the Will, not vice versa as Kant believed. He rejected the Teleology of Reason, an anti-Socratic perspective that claims one cannot know oneself, but only external objects because the Will is the only thing that can experience the External world. In this way, he is an anti-existentialist which Camus and Nietzsche are deeply indebted to in their claims that one cannot know oneself. Schopenhauer hated Humean Heteronomy as much as Kant did, but came to a similar subjective semi-Buddhist definition of morality. The Morality of an action is determined by the displeasure (the consciousness of guilt) experienced by the Will, so the actions of man must be congruent to the all-determining Will, which is the location of freedom. In order to be moral, Schopenhauer argues one must remove desire to attain harmony. Nietzsche would criticize this perspective in Human, All too Human, and move to an even more deterministic historical-darwinistic understanding of morality. Morality itself, Nietzsche argued, is nothing but an illusion, an absurd social construct, created by the herd-morality of the weak to subdue the strong world-historical creators.

Schopenhauer's melodramatic sexism is as comedic as Nietzsche's. Nietzsche has an entire section of Beyond Good and Evil where he essentially argues that women are not fully human, a position obviously resulting from his life-long and sometimes public rejections by multiple women. Schopenhauer likewise muddied his philosophy with pettiness resulting from drama with the opposite sex. He was sued by a Caroline Marquet on 4 October 1824, who alleged that he grabbed her by the neck and threw her out of the room, resulting in the Schopenhauer-Marquet trials where this became a public spectacle. In an essay title Über die Weiber (About Women), he writes:

Women are much more often guilty of judicial perjury than men. It could even be questioned whether they should be admitted to the oath. - From time to time the case is repeated everywhere of ladies who don't want anything secretly pocketing and stealing something in grocers' shops.

The entire essay is of this nature- pure comedic pettiness from an otherwise great mind. 

Schopenhauer was tremendously racist, justifying his racism through his Modernist Social Darwinism, and you see quite a bit of that here. Schopenhauer repeatedly argues for the superiority of in passages that are as horrifying as Nietzsche's: "The most sociable of all men are said to be the negroes, just as they are also decidedly intellectually backward: according to reports from North America, in French newspapers (le Commerce, Octbr. 19, 1837), the blacks, free and slaves, lock themselves together in great numbers, in the narrowest space, because they cannot look at their black stump-nosed faces often enough." His Utilitarianism was taken to the next level by Nietzsche, who was open in his calls for genocide of the "lesser men", albeit not along like of race but "greatness". Nietzsche's early Darwinian-Historical approach is found throughout Schopenhauer's understanding of the origin of morals: "all honor is ultimately based on considerations of utility".

Schopenhauer's 1851 Versuch über das Geisterseeing und was damit zusammenhängt is a response to the popularity of Edmund Swedenborg's clairvoyant claims and the broader pan-European debate about ghosts and spirit-seeing. It is a riff on Kant's 1766 “Dreams of a Ghost-Seer, Explained by Dreams of Metaphysics”, which takes a very critical look at Swedenborg's claims and his popular metaphysical works. Here he recapitulates his entire neo-Platonic nesting of phenomena within noumena, seeing the phenomenon of clairvoyance as a biological-psychological projection of the will, because "the will as a thing in itself is outside the principii individuationis (time and space) by which individuals are separated". He cites ancient and modern examples of supernatural experiences, including Goethe's doppelganger experience, from which Dostoyevsky wrote The Double. Schopenhauer practiced a bizarre hybridized atheistic neo-Platonist materialism, seeing all reality as object except the will. Here he touches on the ancient mind-body problem, but ultimately dismisses spirit apparitions as "directly nothing more than a vision in the brain of the spirit-seer. These visions, as well as religious experiences, are still crucial to discerning the inner workings of consciousness and the enigmatic will”. Like Jung a century later, Schopenhauer believed that magic touches on something transcending space-time and has an unknown empirical basis or "practical metaphysics”. He points to Descartes for restoring a Natural-Supernatural divide:

The whole demonology and spiritology of antiquity and the Middle Ages, as well as their related view of magic, is based on the still unchallenged realism, which was finally shaken by Cartesius. Only the idealism that gradually matured in more recent times leads us to the point of view from which we can reach a correct judgment about all those things, thus also about visions and apparitions of spirits.

Kant, oddly enough since he was a Lutheran Platonist, was much harsher on supernatural experiences, calling Swedenborg a lying charlatan and denying all spirit-seeing. Nietzsche, not surprisingly, mocked Schopenhauer for his dabbling with the supernatural as well as his admiration for Kant (Nietzsche hated Kant) in The Scarlet Dawn:

Consider whether anyone has a good will for the knowledge of moral things who from the outset feels blessed by the belief in the incomprehensibility of these things! One who still honestly believes in illuminations from above, in magic and apparitions of spirits and the metaphysical ugliness of the toad!

Das Kollektive Unbewusste & Jungian Archetypes

One of the most critical aspects of Schopenhauer is the fact that his constructs are still utilized to this day in modern Psychology. Schopenhauer's concepts of the Unconscious, the will and archetypal thinking deeply influence modern Psychoanalysis, primarily through Freud, who referred to it as Das Unbewußte (the unconscious mind). Freud was an avid reader of Schopenhauer's work and was particularly interested in his ideas about the role of the unconscious in human behavior. The entire idea of the Unconscious mind is rooted in Schopenhauer- his frameworks were adopted by the Zurich circle to found Psychology. The entire field of Analytic Psychology is framed in these conceptions of the bewusst/ unbewusst. One of the key concepts that Freud borrowed from Schopenhauer is the idea that the unconscious mind is the primary driver of human behavior, as he believed that the will, or the unconscious drive to survive and reproduce, is the source of all human actions. Freud, in turn, developed the concept of the "id," which he believed to be the unconscious source of all human desires and drives. Nietzsche was heavily influenced by these concepts- The notion of the mind being partially 'shadow' or uncontrollable is ancient, and not unique to Schopenhauer, but his phraseology and development of the idea is a critical link in the chain to modern day Psychology. Nietzsche, for instance, was very explicit in his belief that much of human cognition exists outside of the "limelight" of consciousness, and that the mind is decentralized with "little gods" controlling some parts of it. In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche refers to him as a psychologist:

Schopenhauer, the last German who comes into consideration (who is a European event equal to Goethe, equal to Hegel, equal to Heinrich Heine, and not merely a local, a "national" one), is as a psychologist of the first rank: namely, as a maliciously ingenious attempt, in favor of a nihilistic overall devaluation of life, precisely the counter-instances, the great self-affirmations of the the "will to life", the exuberance-forms of life into the field.

Schopenhauer's concept of the collective unconscious/ "das kollektive Unbewusste", is a central aspect of how he developed his metaphysical recommendation of the Will-to-Live. In "The World as Will and Representation" he writes:

The human species, like every other species, has a certain collective character, determined by its position in the great chain of being and determined by the conditions of its existence, which conditions, as far as they are objective and belong to the essence of the species, are imprinted in the collective mind.

Schopenhauer believed that the collective unconscious was responsible for shaping human culture and society, and that it could be studied through an examination of the common elements found in myths, legends, and religious beliefs across different cultures. Most of his understanding of Platonic Forms in the Collective Unconscious is Kantian in nature, whom he saw as his teacher, writing "I for my part, who have spent all my life in metaphysical studies believe him to be the greatest philosopher that ever lived and think him and Goethe the only first rate geniuses that Germany ever produced." He believed that this collective unconscious was a source of the universal human Forms, such as the drive for self-preservation and the desire for pleasure, and that it was the source of the archetypes, universal symbols and images that are present in all human societies. Schopenhauer was ahead of his time biologically, arguing of the phylogenetic continuum of morality, which Nietzsche would expand greatly upon in his The Genealogy of Morals, correctly pointing to the epigenetic lineage of moral sensibilities:

The instincts of self-preservation, of propagation, and of caring for offspring, are common to all animal species and are therefore imprinted in the species' essence and in the collective mind.

This Typological thinking was critical to Carl Jung's theory of the collective unconscious, which was developed several decades later. However, Jung saw the collective unconscious as a source of unconscious mental processes and symbolic representations, while Schopenhauer viewed it more as a store of shared knowledge and experiences. Jung also merged it with Neurology through the groundbreaking work of his frienemy Freud and the new Quantum and Temporal Physics from his lifelong personal friend Einstein. Schopenhauer is a critical link in this continuum from the Post-Socratic Greeks to modern Philosophy and Psychology. Schopenhauer considered himself as a continuator of the ancient Greek philosophy, as did Nietzsche, seeing his ideas as the continuation of the ancient wisdom and the reviver of the Platonic ideas. He wrote in his work "Parerga and Paralipomena":

The wisdom of the ancient Greeks has been handed down to us by the most trustworthy tradition, and it is an eternal possession for those who are capable of receiving it. I have always looked upon it as the most precious treasure of mankind, and have always felt that I was merely a trustee for the coming generations.

Schopenhauer: Rationalistic Neo-Platonism

Schopenhauer enjoys little fame in the modern Philosophic studies but was critically influential on some of the biggest names in history- Kafka, Freud, and Nietzsche among them. Like Kant, he is responding to English Empiricism, borrowing heavily from Kant but then developing a bizarre new type of Platonism which is deeply pessimistic and directs the mind towards Nihilism. This is an echo of Christian Platonic metaphysics- as Nietzsche aptly said, "Christianity is Platonism for the masses", for perhaps the most Platonic statement ever uttered is “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of all knowledge”. The idea of Logos is inherently Platonic- it is consciousness which begins the reality of the material world. This is not to say that the physical world is not real- Platonists see the physical world as truly real, unlike Aristoteleans who's materialism folds in and creates the unknowability of the Object and non-existence of the Thing-In-Itself. To Schopenhauer, Kant is correct that the world is Idea, and Hume is wrong in assuming the human consciousness is a blank slate. We can never interact with the Object in an unmediated way, without forms preceding the encounter. So as far as the external world and the basic epistemology it is concerned, Schopenhauer is a pure Kantian. However, he turns to Kant when it comes to the internal world. Schopenhauer argues that consciousness is a thing-in-itself and can be experienced a priori because it is Noumena, not Phenomena, but that it is one unified thing- Will. The pure, unmediated will to which all of reality is subject. This emphasis on Will is critical to Nietzsche and post-Hegelian philosophers and is inherently anti-Socratic because this conception of Will is a-teleological and independent of consciousness. He is very critical of Spinoza, calling Hegel a copycat of Spinoza, but here he inverts Spinoza's conatus concept. As such, one cannot know oneself, so this anti-Socratic view of consciousness means that phenomena manifest themselves to us within noumena within a power-praxis that cannot be controlled.

Schopenhauer's argument that reason is subject to Will is a critical shift that would be expounded upon by Nietzsche, leading to Freud's entire philosophic project. The Will is the soul to Schopenhauer, and this 'soul' is not our own. From the brutality of this existence where we are oppressed and enslaved by the Will, art is the only escape. Here Nietzsche's Art-Philosophy begins to make sense in light of this deification of the experience of Art. Kafka was a reader of Schopenhauer, and one can see this emphasis on suffering being meaningless and inescapable. Beauty, then, is an anchor of reality. Tolstoy summarizes Schopenhauer's Aesthetics as such in his 1898, "What is Art?":

According to Schopenhauer (1788-1860), the will is objectified in the world at various stages, and although the higher the stage of its objectification, the more beautiful it is, each stage has its own beauty. Detachment from our individuality and contemplation of one of these stages of will's manifestation gives us consciousness of beauty. All people, according to Schopenhauer, have the ability to cognize this idea in its various stages and thus free themselves for a time from their personality. The genius of the artist, however, has this ability in the highest degree and therefore manifests the highest beauty.

Tolstoy argued at points that life was ultimately meaningless and futile, which led him away from Russian Orthodoxy and towards an unanchored individualistic subjective spirituality, in mimicry of Schopenhauer's teaching of the irrational will. His characters have a will to live, but that will is always in vain, because the desires of the will are ultimately futile. The collective unconscious is also a subtle element in Tolstoy's work. The role of suffering is also prevalent in Tolstoy, but where the influence of Schopenhauer and the normal drudgery of Russian literature begins is hard to tell. The suffering endured by the character in Tolstoy's work is not salvific as it is in Dostoevsky's, and this seems to be the influence of Schopenhauer. Dostoevsky responds to Schopenhauer (and Hegel) in his early existentialist work Notes from the Underground.

Hegel's Horrible Very Bad No Good Philosophy

Schopenhauer is known for his comedic dismissal of Hegel and anything he said. Like Nietzsche's hatred of Socrates, and his life-long tilt at Richard Wagner's windmill, Schopenhauer made it clear that Hegel was just the worst. Schopenhauer also hated Wagner, but Hegel was at the top of his list. His arguments about what precisely was wrong with Hegel were a bit hazy. A quick glance at his biography reveals his “unintelligible rage” was based on professional jealousy at least partially. Schopenhauer not only lived in Hegel's shadow, but his fame at the university of Berlin cut his personal career short. For every 100 students to sign up for Hegel's lecture, only one signed up for Schopenhauer. His arguments against Hegel are not nuanced. All of his works are laced with the insults of a 7-year-old: "the well-known clumsy charlatan Hegel" and Hegelianism is "whishy-washy windbaggery" and modern philosophy has been ruined by the "thoroughly pathetic patron Hegel". Nietzsche criticized Schopenhauer's attacks on Hegel, and saw them as an antinomy:

with his unintelligent rage at Hegel, he succeeded in breaking the whole last generation of Germans out of connection with German culture... in the struggle with the English mechanistic depravity of the world, Hegel and Schopenhauer (with Goethe) were united, those two hostile brother-geniuses in philosophy, who strove to separate from each other according to the opposite poles of the German spirit and thereby wronged each other, as only brothers wrong each other…

Schopenhauer was sharpened by Kant's Rherotic, and maintained a commitment to the Kantian notion that philosophy should serve as a clarifier of thought, rather than a creator of complex, mystifying systems. Hegel's massive metaphysical world of thought certainly contradicts this principle. Different epistemologies seem to be at the base of this divergence in their metaphysical positions. While Hegel conceives of knowledge as a constant process of dialectic, with a belief in the possibility of the absolute's complete self-realization and the attainment of absolute knowledge, Schopenhauer disputes this optimistic claim. He presents a pessimistic perspective on human knowledge, asserting its limits and limitations. According to Schopenhauer, our knowledge is inherently subjective. It is limited to the representations of our consciousness and the prism of "will. And this will is wildly irrational and unknowable. Kant likewise did not build out a philosophy of the will, arguing that for now it is unknowable to philosophy, and Schopenhauer enshrines this thought as a dogma. Since the whole world is a representation formed by our subjective consciousness, and beneath this representation, the world is essentially "will"-an aimless, irrational force. His claim is a direct rejection of Hegelian idealism, which holds that the Absolute, or the totality of all things, is essentially rational and becomes increasingly self-conscious through a World-Spirit dialectical process.

The Irrational Will: Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and the Unknowable Self

Pererga und Paralipomena is Schopenhauer's collection of 37 philosophic texts including various essays, aphorisms, poems, and fables, published in a two-volume format. The title works are transliterations of ancient Greek works for "side works" and "addendums". Its subject matter is broad and touches on everyday life and very specific subjects. This collection summarizes Schopenhauer's life works outside of his 1819 Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. This contains his Aphorisms to Life Wisdom, poetry, fables, extensive commentaries on Kant, and even his 1851 "Attempt on ghost seeing and what is connected with it". Schopenhauer was critically influential on Nietzsche, and many Nietzschean themes are explicitly broken out here, including his Anti-Socratic, Anti-Metaphysical and Pessimistic understanding of the power of the Will.

In the shadow of Kant and his great enemy Hegel, Schopenhauer attempts to tear down all of Socratic Western Philosophy, a task Nietzsche took up wholeheartedly after him. He refers to Fichte, Schiller, and Hegel as "mere Sophists" and not real Philosophers. Hegel's writings are nothing but "monstrous combinations of words that cancel and contradict each other, so that the mind struggles in vain to think anything at all, until at last it sinks down exhausted, gradually destroy in him the ability to think so completely that, from then on, hollow, empty phrases are taken for thoughts." As Schopenhauer's hatred of Hegel comes off as pure comedy, so Nietzsche's hatred of Christianity is difficult to read seriously. Hegel's philosophy according to Schopenhauer is too blue, too red, too tall, too short, too long, not long enough, too good, too bad, too Socratic, and not Socratic enough; it is the origin of everything bad and has ruined the whole world.

In his autobiography (Ecce Homo) written mere months before his psychotic break from reality and subsequent death, Nietzsche declares:

I have a terrible fear that one day I will be pronounced guilty of having been the only one who really understood Schopenhauer.

And perhaps he was right- he really was the only one who took all of Schopenhauer's ideas in their totality and developed them further.

Despite his Platonic divide of the world, Schopenhauer is decidedly Anti-Socratic in his denial of the Self. And as such, he criticizes all of Western Philosophy utilizing Socrates' style of Aphorisms. Pessimism is inevitable in an anti-metaphysical worldview since there is no Nous and no broad Subject-Object divide (except between the Will and everything else), leaving one in a thoroughly Solipsistic universe since the Self is unknowable to the self. In his The World as Will and Idea, Schopenhauer re-published Hume's Essays on Suicide, where he praised the practice and argued it was a brave and necessary act. Schopenhauer writes "Suicide can also be seen as an experiment, a question that one asks nature and wants to force the answer to: namely, what change the existence and the knowledge of man experiences through death. But it is a clumsy one: for it cancels the identity of the consciousness that would have to hear the answer." Camus, it is obvious to see, was heavily influenced by Schopenhauer's nascent Nihilism. His title of Chapter II "Of What One Is" mimics Nietzsche's "How to be what one is". They share a deeply elitist, Pessimistic and Individualistic worldview. All of human life is inherently vain, since "The world is just hell, and people are on the one hand the tormented souls and on the other hand the devils in it." Happiness is an illusion- a disease of the mind of the weak. It’s hard not to see Nietzsche’s misanthropy in every paragraph. The will, then, is the source of all morality, and a departure from this point is the source of evil:

Affirmation of the will to life, world of appearance, diversity of all beings, individuality, egoism, hatred, malice originate from one root; and just so on the other hand world of the thing in itself, identity of all beings, justice, love of man, negation of the will to life. If now, as I have shown sufficiently, the moral virtues already arise from the realization of that identity of all beings, but this lies not in the appearance, but only in the thing in itself, in the root of all beings; then the virtuous action is a momentary passage through the point to which the permanent return is the negation of the will to life.

Nietzsche's early emphasis on Greco-Roman mythology as a descriptor of the Dasein is found here in Schopenhauer: "In Prometheus, the human precaution is personified, the thinking of tomorrow, which man has before the animal. That is why Prometheus has the gift of prophecy: it means the ability of thoughtful foresight." Even his style is partially attributed to Schopenhauer's Socratic irony in his Aphorisms. Nietzsche took the odd styles of Schopenhauer's artful philosophy and hyperbolized it. Schopenhauer was a Kantian, even including poetries written to Kant beyond the veil. He was a Platonist even more so than Kant at points, as shown by his commentaries on Spiritualism. He wrote primarily against Kant's eudaemonological understanding of the will being the source of morality, while keeping a heavy emphasis on will. Schopenhauer's "Will-to-Life" became Nietzsche's "Will-to-Power". The Will is a Thing-In-Itself, Suri Generis and an Ontologic Prime: "The will in us is, however, a thing in itself, existing for itself, a primary, independent thing, the one whose appearance in the spatially observing brain-apprehension presents itself as an organism." This is English skeptical Empiricism filtered through a Pseudo-Buddhist understanding of Pain resulting from "the inhibition of the will" because "Knowledge, in itself, is always painless. The pain strikes only the will."

Schopenhauer meets Leibnitz: The End of Aristotelianism’s Regression Ad Infinitum

As Marx’s dissertation on an Epicurean version of Hegelianism defined his entire philosophic-economic project, so Schopenhauer’s dissertation on the Principle of Sufficient Reason defines his entire career. This work was his dissertation for his Ph.D. from the University of Jena (also Hegel's Alma Motta). Leibniz's Enlightenment Principle of Sufficient Reason, developed from Aristotelianism’s hybridization with medieval Catholicism immediately following the Great Schism, is the basis of Schopenhauer’s criticisms of Kant and the foundation of his later works. This is a distinct variation that builds out Leibnitz's Monadology in four directions- Becoming, Knowing, Being, and Willing. With this principle, he would build out his hybridized Platonic-Aristotelean worldview.

What Leibniz would later intellectualize as the Enlightenment Principle of Sufficient Reason was introduced along with a new Judicial Soteriology through Anselm of Canterbury into the West. Luther developed this Medieval Aristotelian principle into Claritas Scriptura, the metaphysical foundation of Sola Scriptura "Bible alone" Christianity. While he saw himself as returning to a mythical "bible-based" form of Christianity that never existed, he was a product of his medieval environment, and distilled Medieval Catholic rationality into new forms of existing Catholic dogmas. Protestantism is the purification of Catholicism, not a repudiation, and only dogmatized the fallacies of Aristotelianism, creating a waking Christian-Atheism. In other words, Luther encoded the Subject-Object collapse in his doctrines.

With the replacement of Logos-Rationality with Enlightenment-Rationality, Schopenhauer argues that the West became dogmatically Atheistic at the Reformation. In other words, the very fact that Western Christians tried to "prove" the existence of God demonstrates they are already Atheists, and they just don't know it yet.

Schopenhauer piggy-backs on Kant's criticism of Aristotelian logical proofs for and against the existence of God, utilizing Kant’s categorization (and broadly his entire Epistemology) of Cosmological, Ontological, Physico-Theological, and identifies a new category- the Keraunological proof, a category into which he places Kant's Moral-Teleological proofs:

The cosmological proof, to which that apostrophe applied and with which we intend here, actually consists in the assertion that the proposition of the cause of becoming, or the law of causality, necessarily leads to a thought, by which it is itself annulled and declared null and void. For one arrives at the causa prima (absolute) only by ascending from the consequence to the cause, through a series of any length: but one cannot stop at it without annulling the proposition of the cause…. This a priori certain sempiternity of matter (called persistence of substance) is, like many other, equally certain truths, forbidden fruit for the professors of philosophy; therefore they sneak past it with a shy side glance... going back to an unconditional cause, to a first beginning, is by no means found in the essence of reason, is, by the way, also factually proved by the fact that the primal religions of our race, which even now have the greatest number of confessors on earth, i.e. Brahmanism and Buddhism, do not know such assumptions, nor do they allow them, but rather lead the series of mutually dependent phenomena up to infinity.

Schopenhauer sees the replacement of Platonic-Logos Rationality with Aristotelian Rationality in Medieval Catholicism as the crux of the downfall of Western Christendom, a theory that became a reality in the 20th century with the secularization of Protestant countries. Protestant apologists have been locked into the Tautology of the Munchausen Trilemma, regressing Ad Infinitum with their perceived enemies which they created, the material Atheists. This descent towards Atheism is fueled by Protestantism. Protestant countries inevitably become Atheistic, and Schopenhauer, just like Nietzsche, celebrated "bible-believing" and "faith-alone" Protestantism to create modern Atheism:

Protestantism, by eliminating asceticism and its central point, the merit of celibacy, has actually already abandoned the innermost core of Christianity and is to that extent to be regarded as apostasy from it. This has become evident in our days in the gradual transition of Christianity into the flat rationalism, this modern Pelagianism, which in the end boils down to a doctrine of a loving father who made the world, and who, if one only submits to his will in certain respects, will also provide for an even much prettier world afterward (the only complaint about which is that it has such a fatal entrance). This may be a good religion for comfortable, married, and enlightened Protestant pastors: but it is not Christianity.

Hegel made an identical point about the absence of any kind of asceticism in Protestantism, as evidenced by the lack of any monasteries. This thread can be pulled by asking the simple question “why do Protestants not fast?” despite Jesus himself commanding it- “When you fast…” not “if you fast”. To Hegel, this lack of serious asceticism was a canary in a coal mine that signaled a metaphysical shift which would eradicate Christianity if the foundations were not fixed, which he attempted to. As Protestantism finishes it's descent into Post-Modernism in the 21st century, Schopenhauer remains vindicated in his prediction that "Bible believing" Christianity is self-destructive and the bedrock of modern Leftism.

Epicureans do not have monasteries: the Evangelical-Atheist Continuum

Schopenhauer is nostalgic towards his Protestant upbringing, crediting "bible-believing" faith with his path towards atheism. He begins with Hegel's dialectical view of Protestantism, a view Hegel might have had to garner favor from the political powers which cared and fed him, in the same way that he taught the State is the ultimate moral authority and must not be questioned. Hegel believed that Protestant countries would be the most deeply Christian, while the 19th century proved the exact opposite. Wherever Protestantism spread, Atheism followed immediately and Socio-Political fanaticism filled in the vacuum. France, Switzerland and the Netherlands, formerly Calvinistic, and Germany, formerly Lutheran, are among the most Atheistic places on earth now, while Catholic Bavaria, Orthodox Greece, has changed little in the last 200 years. Protestantism was accepted by European leaders for this exact reason- it allowed them to do whatever they wanted, starting with Luther's benefactor Phillp the Landgrave of Hesse supported and defended the Reformation under Luther's support for his polygamy, which Luther defended with his newfound right to interpret the Bible "apart from tradition." Hence Schopenhauer's observation that "non-denominational" Christianity is specifically designed to support lifestyle, not Holiness, is not only philosophic but simply a historic fact. The reformation was born out of a desire to escape morality and ethics. Schopenhauer mimics Erasmus' observation that all the Reformers did was universalize the papacy and make indulgences free, rendering every Protestant their own infallible source of hyper-localized tradition:

The essence of Protestantism is individualism, which necessarily leads to subjectivism, and this, in turn, to the denial of objective truth...Protestantism was an attempt to free religion from the control of a corrupt and worldly priesthood, but it has not succeeded in completely freeing itself from the influence of dogmatic authority. In many cases, the authority of the individual conscience has simply been replaced by the authority of the Church or the state. This has resulted in a religious system that is still susceptible to abuse and corruption, and is therefore not a true expression of the religious spirit.

Tolstoy continues this thought in his Study of Dogmatic Theology:

And how can I fight, strive for good, in what one I understood before good deeds, when the main dogma of faith is that man himself can do nothing, and everything is given by grace.

Hegel notes in his Encyclopedia this "Assoretic" or Aristotelian tendency from Anselm to modern Protestantism- Cosmological proofs of the existence of God are metaphysically declarations of Atheism, a symptom of spiritual disease. Schopenhauer notes that all Atheism, including his own, are the inevitable result of this rationalized Protestantism:

But the defect in Anselm's argumentation, which, by the way, Cartesius and Spinoza as well as the principle of immediate knowledge share with it, is that this unity, which is pronounced as the most perfect or also subjectively as the true knowledge, is presupposed, i.e. only assumed as in itself. This hereby abstract identity is immediately opposed by the difference of the two determinations, as has also long since been done against Anselm, i.e., in fact, the idea and existence of the finite is opposed to the infinite, because, as noted earlier, the finite is such an objectivity, which is at the same time not appropriate to the purpose, its essence and concept, is different from it, - or such an idea, such a subjective, which does not involve existence

Hegel, who initially defended the Reformation in his 1793 Thesis defense "De Ecclesiae Wirtembergicae renascentis calamitatibus”, later began to see the reactionary anti-philosophy stance of Protestantism as metaphysically identical to Atheism. He never condemned the hand that fed him (after all, he was only allowed to print at the mercy of the Protestant authorities), but began to criticize Protestantism deeply in his later works. In the Preface to the Philosophy of Right, he writes:

This obstinacy is the characteristic of modern times, besides being the distinctive principle of Protestantism. What began with Luther as faith in the form of feeling and the witness of the spirit, is precisely what spirit, since becoming more mature, has striven to apprehend in the concept in order to free itself... What lies between reason as self-conscious spirit and reason as present actuality, what separates the former from the latter and prevents it from finding satisfaction in the latter, is the fetter of some abstraction or other which has not been transformed into the concept.

Schopenhauer made a similar observation from his own experience from growing up Protestant and becoming an Atheist, and the secularization of only the Protestant areas of Germany, but not the Catholic areas (Bavaria is still 90% Catholic, while Protestant Baden-Wurttemberg is primarily Atheist).

I therefore consider it an error on the part of the rationalists, if in their dogmatics they attempt to prove the existence of God otherwise than from Scripture: they do not know, in their innocence, how dangerous this short-sightedness is to their own cause.

In other words, the Protestant tendency to attempt to prove the existence of God using Cosmologic, Ontologic or Moral-Teleological proofs, is already itself a declaration of Atheism in its Aristotelian rejection of the Subject-Object divide. Because of this de-evolution in the Western world, Protestants cannot “preserve their subjective freedom in that which is in and for itself rather than in something particular and contingent”- which is the exact same metaphysical problem that precedes the onset of Atheism. From Hegel’s view, Atheism and Protestantism are intricately related to each other and are locked in a self-sustaining antinomy. You can see this clearly even today on a social level: most of the leading Atheist apologists are former Protestants (Dawkins, Hitchens etc), and there is little difference in the attitude and character of the leading Evangelical and Atheist apologists- both categories are famous for their self-righteous hubris. Hegel argues that this is because they utilize the same Metaphysics borrowed from the Enlightenment. He notes in Good and Conscience that the result of this is the abandonment of Protestantism altogether: “Many Protestants have recently gone to the Catholic Church, and they have done so because they found their inner life empty and grasped as something fixed, at a support, even if it was not exactly the stability of thought which they caught”. Because medieval Christianity has viewed the individual as inherently separate from the rational world, it negates the synthesis to the universal by ways of a negative loss of self.

To Hegel, one of the external indicators of the failure of post-enlightenment, rationalist Christianity is the disappearance of the Anchorite; the absence of whom is a sign that religion is based on emotional need on the ‘external contingent’, not genuine encounters with metaphysical realities by the Consciousness. The decline of dedicated ascetics and their monastic communities was a warning of the metaphysical problems in the foundation of the West; a form of Christianity without Monasteries is not Christianity. (SL § 3) The lack of monasteries in Protestantism represents the rejection of Stoicism for the adoption of Epicureanism, which is exactly what Erasmus noted when he said the Reformation "Fled Judaism so that they may become Epicureans". This new Epicurean ethos replaces the Logos as the core animating energy driving Protestantism with lifestyle and comfort, the natural result of the Solas. Conservative "bible-believing" Christians and progressive "non-denominational" Christians are all practicing shades of Epicureanism within their Fundamentalism (i.s. Non-Essentialists and the other hundreds of thousands of euphemisms they use to describe themselves). And there are no stoics to be found in the ranks of Protestants anymore, only social moralism. The Stoic-Kantian ideal has been completely replaced with Epicureanism within "non-denominational" low-church Protestantism. Schopenhauer notes:

Protestantism, by rejecting celibacy and actual asceticism in general, as well as its representatives, the saints, has become a blunted, or rather broken-off Christianity, lacking the pinnacle: it runs out into nothing.... Protestantism, by eliminating asceticism and its central point, the merit of celibacy, has actually already abandoned the innermost core of Christianity and is to that extent to be regarded as apostasy from it. This has become evident in our days in the gradual transition of Christianity into the flat rationalism, this modern Pelagianism, which in the end boils down to a doctrine of a loving father who made the world, and who, if one only submits to his will in certain respects, will also provide for an even much prettier world afterward (the only complaint about which is that it has such a fatal entrance).

This may be a good religion for comfortable, married, and enlightened Protestant pastors: but it is not Christianity.

Despite Christ commanding "When you fast...", not "if you fast", fasting and any other form of asceticism is not practiced at all, except as a novelty. There is no fear of God in any Protestant movement or denomination; no attempt to deny the flesh outside of what is socially convenient within the external moralistic structures (i.e. Epicureanism). Because there is no longer asceticism of any kind, there is no fasting, often no liturgical calendar at all, no confession, often no communion, and no monasteries. Stoicism has been completely stripped out and replaced with Epicureanism. Evangelicalism manifests Bishop Erasmus' prophecy perfectly- Judaism has been completely abandoned for Epicureanism. On every level, "bible believing" low-church Protestantism is difficult to distinguish from Atheism- metaphysically, socially, and ascetically. There is only a thin Presuppositional difference on the surface; the entire substructure is shared. Atheism and "bible believing" Protestantism are metaphysically identical in their denial that local reality can be observed without A Priori mediating forms. This pure Subjectivity masquerades as a belief in absolute revelation, but the only divine revelation Protestants submit to is their subjective interpretation enabled by self-deceptive traditionlessness. In order for one to rely on the "Bible alone" principle, then one must assume that reality is directly knowable without a Transcendent trans-personal Forms to the consciousness, i.e., Subjectivism. Sola Scriptura is a declaration of Atheism, the replacement of the authority of God with the tyranny of the Individual; Luther is the father of modern Atheism with the universalization of the Papacy.

The Subjectivism inherent in the Reformation principles not only destroys faith itself, but generates the Pathological Political ideologies that take its place, most notably Marxism in Post-Protestant Germany, an element of Modernism and the new(ish) Postmodern "Gender Revolution". Without Luther, there would be no purple-haired Post-Modernism. While "Conservative Christians" and Left-wing Post-Moderns see each other as enemies, they have become mirror images of each other. I have never seen the principles of Sola Fide and Sola Scriptura (Claritas Scriptura- i.e. Nominalism) more clearly expressed than in this Left-Wing Postmodern Moral Relativity. Leftist Socio-political demagoguery is the apotheosis of the "Bible alone". Post-Modern relativists define their identity as the antipodal opposition to Religious Fundamentalism, but the reality is that they are the purification and development of it into a deeper, more pernicious fundamentalism. Schopenhauer’s intricate Antinomical system of reconciliation is an attempt to chart a path out of this Subjective desert of this Enlightenment-Reformation collapse of the Subject-Object dichotomy and the resulting disenchantment of reality.