In Search of Schopenhauer's Cat: Arthur Schopenhauer's Quantum-Mystical Theory of Justice

1. Schopenhauer’s Life

Chapter 1 Schopenhauer’s Life An Incident The year was 1840. The place, Copenhagen. The event, a meeting of the Danish Royal Society of the Sciences. The members of the Society found themselves in a quandary. They had sponsored a prize essay contest three years earlier and had invited submissions on the topic of “The Source and Foundation of Morals.” It probably seemed to the Society to be an excellent moment in history for such a contest . Immanuel Kant had by that time been enshrined in the minds of European philosophers as the man who had at long last and perhaps even definitively established the rational and metaphysical foundations of morality. His work had by then been further systematized by Fichte, extended by Schelling, and explained by Hegel. It must have seemed, in 1837, as if a new “golden age” of speculative philosophy were dawning, and the Society’s contest would, perhaps, serve to identify some budding and worthy successor to the mantle of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. 1 Alas, in the three years that had gone by since the announcement of the contest, only one lone contestant had submitted an entry. It was a lengthy essay written in German by a somewhat obscure scholar who at the time did not even hold an academic post. Those facts were not, however, the reasons for the Society’s predicament. The trouble lay in the essay itself. The somewhat obscure scholar had referred to Kant’s famed Categorical Imperative as “absurd moral pedantry,” classified Fichte and Schelling as “philosophasters, dreamers, and visionaries,” and called the revered Hegel (who had only recently suffered a tragic death in a cholera epidemic) a “clumsy and senseless charlatan.” Then the essay went on to identify “compassion” as the source and foundation of morals.1 Having rejected , in an anything-but-compassionate manner, Kant’s account of the basis for morality and ethics, the essayist went on to embrace, quite heartily, Kant’s “transcendental aesthetic”2 and to argue from it to the conclusion that there is, at some unfathomable and unconscious level, a basic ontological oneness among human beings—a conclusion which he supported with references to the Vedanta of Hindu scripture. One can only imagine the perplexity of the members of the Society. After some delay, they decided not to award the prize at all. The following year, Arthur Schopenhauer, the then obscure scholar whose essay had been rejected by the Society, published the document independently, under the title On the Basis of Morality,3 2 1. Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Basis of Morality (1841), trans. E. F. J. Payne (1965; rev. ed., Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1995), 66, 79, 80 (hereinafter, Morality). 2. See Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason (1781 and 1787), trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965), 65–91 (hereinafter, Kant, Pure Reason). Essentially the term refers to Kant’s doctrine of the ideality of space and time. 3. Schopenhauer joined On the Basis of Morality with another essay On the Freedom of the Human Will and published both under the title The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics. The essay on the human will had been awarded a prize in a similar contest sponsored by the Scientific Society of Trondheim, Norway. and took the occasion to excoriate the Society itself as “a league of journalists sworn to glorify the bad.”4 The indignity of losing a contest in which one’s submission is the only entry might have explained the outburst as a momentary surrender to pique were it not for the fact that twenty years later, after his Parerga and Paralipomena5 had secured his fame (and only a month before his death), Schopenhauer published a second edition of the essay and once again took the occasion to vilify the Society with implications that it was a suppressor of truth, a stifler of brains and talent, and a supporter of the fame of windbags and charlatans.6 Schopenhauer, despite his immense capacity for taking and giving offense, indeed for wallowing in both, never seemed to understand why people would not take him seriously as the champion of compassion. Nor would he have understood how he could become, of all things, Adolf Hitler’s favorite philosopher.7 It was not that Schopenhauer was blind to his own deficiencies in the area of compassion. He simply did not seem to understand...