Christopher Janaway

This paper elucidates and interrogates Schopenhauer’s notion of will and its relation to ideas about the unconscious, with the aim of addressing its significance as an exercise in philosophical psychology. Schopenhauer aims at a global metaphysics, a theory of the essence of the world as it is in itself. He calls this essence will (Wille), which, to put it briefly, he understands as a blind striving for existence, life, and reproduction. Human beings have the same essence as all other manifestations of will in the world, and this has several consequences for Schopenhauer's conception of humanity. Neither rationality, nor intentional action, nor consciousness is primary or foundational in human beings. The true core of the personality is not the self-conscious ‘I’ or subject of knowledge, but rather the will, which is fundamentally blind and without knowledge, but which interacts with the intellect almost as an agent distinct from it. Schopenhauer makes a number of psychological observations about the interplay of intellect and will. These include the omnipresence of sexual desire in or beneath our experience; the persistence of desires and affects unknown to the self-conscious intellect; the will's capacity to prohibit representations in the intellect that are liable to arouse certain emotions; and the occurrence of madness when memories painful to the will are shielded from the intellect and arbitrary representations are substituted.

The article argues against various proposals to treat the term 'beauty' as standing for a single, generic concept of aesthetic value, which has application both to natural objects and to art. It argues that in Kant's aesthetic theory 'beauty' must be treated as ambiguous because in the case of art, but not in that of nature, part of beauty is the expession of aesthetic ideas. This gives rise to the dilemma: either beauty is always the ultimate aesthetic value of any thing, in which case there is no single account of beauty to be had that covers both art and nature, or being beautiful is the same for both art and nature, but must constitute only part of the aesthetic value of art. It is argued that certain late twentieth century theories of beauty do not overcome this problem.

This series of lectures was originally scheduled to include a talk on Schopenhauer by Patrick Gardiner. Sadly, Patrick died during the summer, and I was asked to stand in. Patrick must, I am sure, have been glad to see this series of talks on German Philosophy being put on by the Royal Institute, and he, probably more than anyone on the list, deserves to have been a part of it. Patrick Gardiner taught and wrote with unfailing integrity and quiet refinement in the Oxford of the 1950s, '60s, '70s and '80s, when the changing fashions in philosophy, and Oxford philosophy in particular, were quite remote from his own central interests. He went his own way, radically but quite undemonstratively. His book on Schopenhauer, originally published in 1963, was a beacon in the night as far as English-language publications on that philosopher are concerned. It is still a leader in the field, and I am pleased to say it has been re-issued just this year after being out of print for too long. Patrick worked in aesthetics, on Kant, and on the German Idealists, showing an expertise and a fondness for Fichte which now seem well ahead of their time. He also contributed well known books on Kierkegaard and on the philosophy of history. I am honoured to be invited as Patrick's replacement. He was a true pioneer, whom all of us working in these several fields that have now grown more fashionable and more populated should pause to salute

Schopenhauer defends the view that emotions impair cognition, while Nietzsche apparently replies that they are ineliminable from cognition, and that they enhance it. Schopenhauer argues that human individuals are naturally disposed to comprehend their environment in affective terms. At the same time, his evaluative position concerning this relation is negative: cognition is spoiled, warped, or tainted by its inability to shake off the emotions, desires, or drives that belong to human nature. Human individuals are not cut out for cognition proper, unless they become ‘pure subject of cognition’ in aesthetic experience, or in total self-negation of the will. Nietzsche accepts something analogous to Schopenhauer’s descriptive position: the self is a complex of drives and it is primarily these drives and their associated affects that interpret the world. But he firmly rejects Schopenhauer’s evaluative stance. He denies the possibility of a pure, objective, affect-free cognition. Nietzsche argues for a reversal of Schopenhauer’s evaluative stance: cognition is improved by affect, and by multiplying affects. This is a key point in Nietzsche’s so-called perspectivism im Genealogy III, 12. The view that Nietzsche regards affects as necessary for cognition has been challenged as either trivial or implausible by recent commentators. The essay addresses these challenges, arguing that it is quite plausible for Nietzsche to be holding such a view, and that it can be construed in ways that make it a more attractive view in itself.

With the publication of the Parerga and Paralipomena in 1851, there finally came some measure of the fame that Schopenhauer thought was his due. Described by Schopenhauer himself as 'incomparably more popular than everything up till now', the Parerga is a miscellany of essays addressing themes that complement his work The World as Will and Representation, along with more divergent, speculative pieces. It includes his 'Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life', reflections on fate and clairvoyance, trenchant views on the philosophers and universities of his day, and an enlightening survey of the history of philosophy. The present volume offers a new translation, a substantial introduction explaining the context of the essays, and extensive editorial notes on the different published versions of the work. This readable and scholarly edition will be an essential reference for those studying Schopenhauer, the history of philosophy, and nineteenth-century German philosophy.

This volume of translations unites three shorter works by Arthur Schopenhauer that expand on themes from his book The World as Will and Representation. In On the Fourfold Root he takes the principle of sufficient reason, which states that nothing is without a reason why it is, and shows how it covers different forms of explanation or ground that previous philosophers have tended to confuse. Schopenhauer regarded this study, which he first wrote as his doctoral dissertation, as an essential preliminary to The World as Will. On Will in Nature examines contemporary scientific findings in search of corroboration of his thesis that processes in nature are all a species of striving towards ends; and On Vision and Colours defends an anti-Newtonian account of colour perception influenced by Goethe's famous colour theory. This is the first English edition to provide extensive editorial notes on the different published versions of these works.