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

11. Eternal Justice

Chapter 11 Eternal Justice [I]n all that happens or indeed can happen to the individual, justice is always done to it.1 We return now to Schopenhauer’s decidedly nontheistic philosophy , and to his doctrine of the affirmation of the will-to-live. Transferred to the human level, the affirmation of the will to live, the so-called “law of the jungle,” is usually regarded as socially inappropriate , even morally wrong. In that context, then, Schopenhauer’s theory of justice deals directly and intensely with what philosophy and theology refer to as the problem of evil. In most systems of ethics and in most systems of moral theology, the problem of evil is a stumbling block, or even an embarrassment, but not in Schopenhauer’s, and its solution lies at the very heart of his metaphysics.2 Most systems either founder or else wallow in circumlocutions when they 93 1. WWR-1, 351. 2. See WWR-2, 643. confront the fact of the existence of evil in the world and try to reconcile it with either an all-good God or with the supposed essential goodness of human nature. The problem is impossible to avoid and must be confronted in any system of ethics. Schopenhauer recognizes it in our common, everyday experience that “sees the wicked man, after misdeeds and cruelties of every kind, live a life of pleasure , and quit the world undisturbed. It sees the oppressed person drag out to the end a life full of suffering without the appearance of an avenger or vindicator.”3 The conventional explanation, remarkably consistent over the centuries and across many cultures, posits a judgment after death in which the oppressor receives his or her “comeuppance” and the oppressed his or her reward. In contemporary times, that explanation seems not to be wearing well, and a century and a half ago it ill suited Schopenhauer, who quoted Euripides to impugn it: Do you think that crimes ascend to the gods on wings, and then someone has to record them there on the tablet of Jove, and that Jove looks at them and pronounces judgement on men? The whole of heaven would not be great enough to contain the sins of men, were Jove to record them all, nor would he to review them and assign to each his punishment. No! the punishment is already there, if only you will see it.4 Schopenhauer’s explanation is intriguing: “[T]he punishment is already there, if only you will see it.” What Schopenhauer means may become clearer if we take a slight and brief digression. 94 3. WWR-1, 353–354. 4. WWR-1, 351, n. 45. The quoted language is from Euripides, Stobaeus, Eclog., I, c.4. Schopenhauer and Gandhi Earlier in this study, it was mentioned that Schopenhauer was Adolf Hitler’s favorite philosopher.5 It is a strange irony that Schopenhauer may have had a limited and indirect influence on the thought of Hitler’s contemporary and his moral antithesis, Mohandas K. Gandhi, the sainted Mahatma of India. It is no secret that Gandhi was greatly influenced by the religious and moral writings of the writer Leo Tolstoy.6 It is perhaps less well known that Tolstoy was quite familiar with the philosophy of Schopenhauer.7 That is not to say that Gandhi necessarily took some philosophical principles from Schopenhauer, even indirectly. Whatever principles Gandhi could have taken indirectly from Schopenhauer were more directly and more readily available in Gandhi’s own native Hinduism and in his understandings of the essence of the Christianity to which he had been exposed. It is merely to suggest that there may be a consonance between the thoughts of the man who did not practice what he preached and the man who did, with Tolstoy’s thought providing the resonance. The sympathetic vibrations are nowhere clearer than in the solutions each propounded to the problem of evil. Schopenhauer’s solution to the problem of evil is presaged quite Eternal Justice 95 5. See, e.g., Payne, 115; Toland, 85; and Fest, 69, 200. Very likely the attractiveness of Schopenhauer’s thought to Adolf Hitler lay in the reasons it was attractive to Richard Wagner. Schopenhauer’s understanding of the Platonic Ideas led to a very strong and liberating theory of aesthetics which Wagner, his contemporary, heartily embraced, and which, a century later, gave a feeling of vindication to...