Christopher Janaway

There are two familiar strategic approaches to Kant's Critique of Judgement which commentators have not always found easy to combine. One would regard the work as fitting snugly into Kant's enterprise as the keystone that absorbs the forces of his theoretical and practical philosophies, uniting them and itself into a single sound structure. That Kant saw it this way is obvious from his Introduction to the Critique. But the other approach has sometimes seemed more fruitful: start with the Analytic of the Beautiful and take it not as the completion but as the beginning of something, a treatise which, in offering possibly the fullest and most rigorous account of the autonomy of aesthetic judgement, plays a foundational role in the discipline now known as aesthetics. On this approach questions concerning morality and the unity of Kant's philosophy can be set aside for attention later, if ever

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.

The article argues that Schopenhauer seeks to defend art against Plato's critique, but that he does so by adopting two distinct strategies that to some extent conflect: a 'cognitivist strategy' according to which art provides the most objective knowledge of reality, and an 'aesthetic experience' strategy, in which there is a peculiarly aesthetic state of mind which gives our pleasure in art a value of its own. The truly unifying notion in Schopenhauer's aesthetic theory is that of tranquil, will-less contemplation, a state of non-identification with the striving, suffering, bodily individual that one is. The Ideas testify to the endurance of Schopenhauer's early Platonic ambitions, but they do not really produce a convincing theory. At one end of the spectrum, the Ideas are otiose: pleasure is in the tranquility of contemplation, which may well be of an empirical object. At the other end of the spectrum, apprehension of the Ideas serves an all-important cognitive function, but our pleasure cannot stem from our knowing the horrifying Idea of humanity per se. Rather, the key to the satisfaction we take in tragedy is, in Schopenhauer's account, the will-lessness of sublime resignation in face of the Idea.

Arthur Schopenhauer is something of a maverick figure in the history of philosophy. He produced a unique theory of the world and human existence based upon his notion of will. This collection analyses the related but distinct components of will from the point of view of epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, aesthetics, ethics, and the philosophy of psychoanalysis. This volume explores Schopenhauer's philosophy of death, his relationship to the philosophy of Kant, his use of ideas drawn from both Buddhism and Hinduism, and the important influence he exerted on Nietzsche, Freud, and Wittgenstein.

Schopenhauer is considered to be the most readable of German philosophers. This book gives a succinct explanation of his metaphysical system, concentrating on the original aspects of his thought, which inspired many artists and thinkers including Nietzsche, Wagner, Freud, and Wittgenstein. Schopenhauer's central notion is that of the will--a blind, irrational force that he uses to interpret both the human mind and the whole of nature. Seeing human behavior as that of a natural organism governed by the will to life, Schopenhauer developed radical insights concerning the unconscious and sexuality which influenced both psychologists and philosophers.

Against the claim that Nietzsche’s early and late views on confronting the truth about human existence differ widely, this article argues that in The Birth of Tragedy tragic art is affirmative of life and not limited to beautifying illusion, while later works still contain the idea that artistic production of beauty is a falsification necessary to make existence bearable for us. Nietzsche did not start with the view that art’s value lies in sheer illusion, nor end with the view that truth should be confronted wholly without illusion, but is ambivalent on this issue throughout

In their recent book The Soul of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, Maudemarie Clark and David Dudrick claim that Nietzsche takes Plato’s theory of the soul to be ‘a hypothesis, which his own psychology is an attempt to refine’. This essay accepts that claim, but argues for a more streamlined account of the relation between Nietzsche and Plato than Clark and Dudrick give. There is no justification for their suggestion that Nietzsche diagnoses an ‘atomistic need’ as responsible for what he objects to in Plato’s model. The claim that ‘reason’ is a motivationally inert set of cognitive capacities is not necessarily a point of disagreement with Plato. Nietzsche’s psychology does not require a generalized ‘will to value’ as a counterpart to the will to truth. Clark and Dudrick fail to recognize the Platonic soul-elements as drives, and that the element which for Plato should govern in the best of souls can be interpreted as closely analogous to Nietzsche’s will to truth

With the publication of 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', 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 essays on method, logic, the intellect, Kant, pantheism, natural science, religion, education, and language. 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.

One feature of my book (Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsche's Genealogy) that is perhaps worth some comment is the historical background that I place Nietzsche against.2 It is noteworthy, I think, that in GM P, Nietzsche mentions just two thinkers as his antagonists: Schopenhauer and Rée. My aim was to take these thinkers, the former still somewhat underread by Nietzsche commentators (though the situation is improving) and the latter very poorly studied until recently, and map out Nietzsche’s position as structured in opposition to them in the first instance. Why does this matter? First, some of the detail of what he says in certain places makes better sense if these are his targets. Just to give some examples, the famous passage on perspectives and affects in GM III:12 is directed against conceiving “objectivity” as the stance of a “pure, will-less, painless, timeless subject of knowledge,” which is precisely Schopenhauer’s view of objectivity (attainable in aesthetic experience). Nietzsche’s preoccupation with attacking compassion (Mitleid) stems from the fact that compassion is the sole moral incentive in Schopenhauer’s ethics. Again, the account of the origins of morality given by the so-called English psychologists with which Nietzsche opens GM I is demonstrably Rée’s account; as is the account of punishment as deterrence criticized in GM II for confusing the uses or meanings of a thing with its origins. In general, if we are to get a picture of what is truly bugging Nietzsche, as it were, it may be helpful to take a closer look at his targets. For example, much [End Page 124] has been made recently about Nietzsche opposing theories of morality that are based on a particular notion of free will, that of the causa sui, uncaused cause, neutral subject of free choice, and so on. Well, yes, Nietzsche is opposed to such theories, but if that were his dominating concern, why would he be so explicitly against Schopenhauer and Rée, both adamant determinists? Alternatively, we may think that Nietzsche’s main point is to oppose theistic metaphysics: but both his named antagonists are already decided atheists. Recently it has been suggested that Nietzsche’s guiding aim is to oust everything supernatural or transcendent and establish a strict form of naturalism. That is one of his aims, but although Rée at least is as strict a naturalist as you could want in the late nineteenth century, Nietzsche nonetheless represents himself as saying no to everything he found in Rée’s book The Origin of the Moral Sensations—and even Schopenhauer, though overall a metaphysician offering a global account of the thing in itself that Nietzsche must oppose, believes that the empirical world can be correctly described in wholly causal, materialist terms. It seems to me important that Nietzsche treats as his principal opponents thinkers who are atheists, naturalists, and determinists—not because they hold these positions but on other grounds, which we should seek to clarify. What unites Schopenhauer and Rée—and I think Nietzsche makes this very clear in GM P—is the centrality they give to “the unegoistic” in their account of morality or, as Nietzsche says, to “the value of the unegoistic, of the instincts of compassion, self-denial, self-sacrifice” (GM P:5).

Janaway provides a detailed and critical account of Schopenhauer's central philosophical achievement: his account of the self and its relation to the world of objects. The author's approach to this theme is historical, yet is designed to show the philosophical interest of such an approach. He explores in unusual depth Schopenhauer's often ambivalent relation to Kant, and highlights the influence of Schopenhauer's view of self and world on Wittgenstein and Nietzsche, as well as tracing the many points of contact between Schopenhauer's thought and current philosophical debates about the self.