Schopenhauer and the Cartesian Tradition

Schopenhauer and the Cartesian Tradition TED HUMPHREY IN THIS CENTURY, we have relegated Schopenhauer to a position outside the mainstream of modern philosophy, primarily, I suspect, because his metaphysical views, some would say excesses, do not accord with our more analytical and otherwise circumspect attitudes. Our neglect also derives from not knowing just how he fits into the historical flow, for rather than comprising part of the flood of idealism that swept Germany in the first half of the nineteenth century, he seems to have been only an isolated spring that soon ran dry. This perception of him is unfortunate. His thought was not unrelated to the dominant philosophical tradition , as his writings' profuse admiring and critical references to its major and minor figures attest; nor did he fail to influence those who came after him, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Sartre, among others. Our reason for finding it difficult to fit Schopenhauer's thought into the dominant tradition of philosophy extending from I)escartes to the present is that we regard his views as wildly deviating from it, particularly in metaphysics and epistemology. This is a mistake. Actually, his metaphisical and epistemological views were deeply influenced by Kant's, and are importantly similar to Hobbes's and Hume's, and this alone is sufficient to force admission that he is part of the mainstream. But because Schopenhauer follows the tendency in Hobbes and Hume to attribute predominance of the will and passions over reason in human nature, he tends to offend the rather more Cartesian and Kantian tendencies of our present age. Just how (1) Schopenhauer fits into the Cartesian tradition and (2) his views extend crucial positions of one of that tradition's branches become clear only when we examine the relations among being, reason, and will in the theories of its major figures. In this paper I will restrict the discussion to Descartes, Hume, Kant, and Schopenhauer--and in them to only the most central points--with the intent of showing that Schopenhauer is an important figure in our philosophical tradition and that his arguments , correcting and extending as they do doctrines crucial to that tradition, warrant our attention and respect. Severalpersonsread earlierversionsof this paperand madenumerouscomments,for whichI am most grateful. I want particularlyto mentionProfessors MichaelJ. White,John D. Stone, ThomasAuxterand JerroldLevinson,whosemeticulouscommentspreventedseveralblunders.The mistakesthat remainare, of course, myown. [191] 192 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY The analysis begins with a discussion of Descartes's views, which I use to define the main issues at stake and to illuminate what I think is close to the preferred view in our tradition on the relations among being, reason and will. Descartes is most exercised about the relation of reason to being, and questions about will arise for him only in a very circumscribed context; however, considerations about the will are crucial to how, with respect to their predecessors, Hume, Kant, and Schopenhauer conceive and develop their positions regarding being and reason. In fact, among these four writers I find a continuing dialectic over the relations among being, reason, and will---a dialectic that extends to the views of other figures in the modern tradition. Paying attention to it, even in the present proscribed context, yields important clues about the strategies, development and goals of modern philosophy. As they develop their positions about the relations among reason, will and being, I find that Kant's views are importantly analogous to Descartes's and Schopenhauer's to Hume's. Further, Schopenhauer expands Kant's criticisms both of Humean skepticism and Cartesian rationalism. Here one find Schopenhauer a thinker of considerable complexity, inventiveness and subtlety--but then this is the manner in which Schopenhauer saw himself. The dialectic I discern shows that history repeats itself. However, the moral of this is not that if we are ignorant of history we are bound to repeat it, but rather that ff we are sufficiently acquainted with history, we can, with intelligence and ingenuity, repeat and extend it to our advantage. I. THE FIRST PHASE A. Descartes's Assertions. Descartes's first truth, Cogito ergo sum, is an unequivocal sign of his rationalism. It implicitly contains his predilection to the views that with respect to the relation between...