Christopher Janaway

Plato's writings about the arts play a foundational role in the history of aesthetics, not simply because they are the earliest substantial contribution to the subject. The arts are a central, rather than a marginal topic for Plato, and for him the whole of culture must reflect and inculcate the values that concern him. His philosophy of art (as we would call it) is closely integrated with his metaphysics, ethics and politics. We shall examine in outline the major issues that a reading of Plato is likely to raise for modern aesthetics.

Gives an account principally of Schopenhauer's essay On the Freedom of the Human Will. He argues that human willing is determined by the combination of motives and the character of the agent. Self‐consciousness is not capable of deciding whether or not the agent could have willed otherwise, but an objective view dictates that all actions are necessitated by their cause. Despite this, Schopenhauer argues that our sense of being responsible for our actions remains, and he attempts to account for it in terms of a responsibility for our intelligible characters.

Schopenhauer's philosophy was formed during the years 1810–18. This chapter looks at the influences that shaped it, principally Kant, but also Plato, and the Upanishads. Schopenhauer aimed at a synthesis of these influences. Although indebted to Kant for the framework of his thought, he developed a conception of metaphysics and a ‘better consciousness’ of objective reality that would be free from the limitations imposed by Kant. Schopenhauer's antagonistic relationship with Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel is also mentioned.

Kant's central contribution to theoretical philosophy was the position he called ‘transcendental idealism’. Schopenhauer also adopted transcendental idealism, though he wanted to modify Kant's position considerably, as evidenced in his long ‘Critique of the Kantian Philosophy’ appended to The World as Will and Representation. This chapter outlines Kant's idealism, comparing it with the idealism of Berkeley, examining the limitation of knowledge to appearances as opposed to the thing in itself, and the a priori principles that govern the world of empirical objects. Schopenhauer's often critical reception of these notions is emphasized, against the background of problems with transcendental idealism that had been raised by Kant's immediate successors.

Gives some of the background to the reception of Schopenhauer's philosophy by both Wittgenstein and Nietzsche, and then examines the influence on each of them of Schopenhauer's conceptions of self and will. In Wittgenstein's early notebooks and Tractatus, the notion of the subject's not being a part of the world and of happiness lying in not willing are distinctly Schopenhauerian notions. Wittgenstein's later pre‐occupation with the relation of willing and acting show a lasting influence from Schopenhauer. In Nietzsche's case, The Birth of Tragedy is transparently influenced by Schopenhauer's views on the thing in itself and individuation, while the later doctrine of will to power is designed as an alternative to Schopenhauer's will to life. Nietzsche's later philosophy makes continual reference to Schopenhauer even in its determination to oppose metaphysics and the unitary ‘I’.

Outlines the ways in which Schopenhauer alleges that value is to be attained by an escape from or denial of the will that is our essence. Schopenhauer's pessimism involves a negative assessment of the life of insatiable striving and egoism to which the will condemns the individual. Aesthetic experience provides an escape into a will‐less state of consciousness. Ethics is founded on the recognition that individuation is basically illusory and egoism an erroneous impulse to action. Finally, Schopenhauer speaks of a mystical vision in which one does not distinguish oneself as an individual from the whole, a state in which one reaches denial of the will.

Schopenhauer conceives the will as metaphysically primary, as the thing in itself that underlies all phenomena, but also as having primacy over the intellect in human psychology. Experience is a function of the brain, which receives a teleological explanation as furthering the life of the organism. This is one example of Schopenhauer's conception of will to life, a blindly striving principle that manifests itself throughout individuals in the empirical world. The chapter examines the coherence of Schopenhauer's philosophy of the self as will with his notion of the pure subject or ‘I’.

Looks at the legacy Kant left for theorizing about the subject, taken in two senses: the subject of will and action, and the subject of experience and knowledge. Kant argues for transcendental freedom, producing a conception of the self as subject of free will, while claiming that the agent's actions, as part of the empirical world, are causally determined. He argues also that the ‘I’ is not a substance, but must be conceived as existing over and above its experiences as their unitary subject. Both discussions of the subject are extremely influential on Schopenhauer.

The central claim of Schopenhauer's metaphysics is that the thing in itself is will. He arrives at this by way of an observation about self‐knowledge: I can know myself only as willing or active, not as subject of knowledge. He claims that this unique knowledge gives access to my essence, and moves from this to the claim that the world in itself is will, of which the plurality of empirical things is an objectification. The chapter examines the problem of knowing the thing in itself at all. It is argued that Schopenhauer's conception of the thing in itself as will is a response to questions familiar in post‐Kantian philosophy, and there is a brief comparison with Schelling's conceptions of will and nature.

Addresses the question of the relevance of Schopenhauer's philosophy to a present‐day audience. Schopenhauer raises questions concerning I‐thoughts, in which one makes ascriptions to oneself without needing to identify oneself as an object in the world. He also provides a prototype of the thought that the ‘I’ cannot be conceived wholly as a disembodied or transcendental pure subject, but must be an active and embodied agent. Schopenhauer's dichotomy of subjective and objective viewpoints is argued to be parallel to the conceptions developed by Thomas Nagel.