[스크랩] [綠野]쇼펜하우어 [Schopenhauer, Arthur, 1788.2.22~1860.9.21]

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)

 

 

 

 

 

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
Certainly one of the greatest philosophers of the 19th century, Schopenhauer seems to
have had more impact on literature (e.g. Thomas Mann) and on people in general than
on academic philosophy. Perhaps that is because, first, he wrote very well, simply and
intelligibly (unusual, we might say, for a German philosopher, and unusual now for any
philosopher), second, he was the first Western philosopher to have access to translations
of philosophical material from India, both Vedic and Buddhist, by which he was
profoundly affected, to the great interest of many, and, third, his concerns were with the
dilemmas and tragedies, in a religious or existential sense, of real life, not just with
abstract philosophical problems. As Jung said:

He was the first to speak of the suffering of the world, which visibly and glaringly
surrounds us, and of confusion, passion, evil -- all those things which the [other
philosophers] hardly seemed to notice and always tried to resolve into all-embracing
harmony and comprehensiblility. Here at last was a philosopher who had the courage to
see that all was not for the best in the fundaments of the universe.
[Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Vintage Books, 1961, p. 69]
Philosophers upon whom Schopenhauer did have a strong effect, like Nietzsche and even
Wittgenstein, nevertheless could not put him to good use since they did not accept his
moral, aesthetic, and religious realism. Schopenhauer is all but unique in intellectual
history for being both an atheist and sympathetic to Christianity. Schopenhauer's
system, indeed, will not make any sense except in the context of Kant's metaphysics.
For the purposes of the Proceedings of the Friesian School, Schopenhauer may be said
to have made three great contributions to the Kantian tradition, which supplement the
contemporary contributions of Fries:

 

He retained Kant's notion of the thing-in-itself but recognized that it could not exist as
a separate order of "real" objects over and above the phenomenal objects of experience.
Hence Schopenhauer's careful use of the singular rather than the plural when referring
to the "thing-in-itself." Kant left his "Copernican Revolution" incomplete by describing
the ordinary objects of experience as phenomena while leaving the impression that in an
absolute sense they were only subjective, with things-in-themselves as the "real"
objects. Schopenhauer favorably compares Kant to Berkeley, even though both Kant and
Schopenhauer reject a true "subjective idealism" in which objects exist in no way apart
from consciousness. Schopenhauer's point was that, like Berkeley, phenomena are all
there are when it comes to objects as objects. What stands over and above objects is
something else. For Berkeley that was only God. For Schopenhauer it was the Will as
thing-in-itself.

Schopenhauer abolished Kant's machinery of synthesis through the pure concepts of the
understanding, substituting his fourfold "Principle of Sufficient Reason." This misses
much of the point of Kant's argument in the First Edition Transcendental Deduction
and would not count as an advance on Kant if it did not also abolish the mistaken idea
in Kant that Reason, as he conceived it, could produce out of the mere formalism of
logic a substantive content to morality, aesthetics, etc. Schopenhauer does not have a
very good substitute when it comes to morality (as do Fries and Nelson), but he does
in aesthetics, which leads to,

Schopenhauer's strong sense of aesthetic value, to which he gives an intuitive,
perceptual, and Platonic cast in his theory of Ideas. Schopenhauer gave aesthetics and
beauty a central place in his thought such as few other philosophers have done. His
aesthetic realism is a great advance over Kant's moralistic denial of an objective
foundation for aesthetic reality. Beyond that lies a realistic appreciation of many
religious phenomena that is superior to Kant and conformable to insights that will later
be found in Otto and Jung. Schopenhauer could take religion seriously in ways that
others could not because of his pessimistic rejection of the value of life. This, indeed,
embodies its own distortions, but it is a welcome corrective, as Jung noted, to the
shallow optimism of most other philosophers. And it does faithfully highlight the
world-denying trend of important religions like Christianity, Hinduism, Jainism, and
Buddhism, which must be addressed by any responsible philosophy of religion.
Schopenhauer's metaphysics, as stated in his classic The World as Will and
Representation (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, 1818, 1844, 1859 -- E.F.J. Payne's
English translation, Dover Publications, 1966), is structured through a small set of
dichotomous divisions, displayed and color coded in the following table. Schopenhauer
prided himself on the simplicity of this in comparison to Kant, whose system he
compared to a Gothic cathedral. Hegel's metaphysics, which produced a potentially
infinite elaboration of Kant's threefold structures, Schopenhauer regarded as, of course,
nonsense.

THE STRUCTURE OF SCHOPENHAUER'S METAPHYSICS
THE WILL, transcendent Thing-in-Itself, Books II & IV REPRESENTATION
THE SUBJECT, Upanishadic Unknown Knower, Book I THE OBJECT
Plato's IDEAS, objectivity free of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, Book III SPACE &
TIME, governed by the Principle of Sufficient Reason, Book I
BODY, Immediate Object of the Will EXTERNAL OBJECTS

The basic distinction in Schopenhauer's metaphysics is between representation and the
thing-in-itself. The thing-in-itself turns out to be will. The will is introduced in Book
II of The World as Will and Representation, where its manifestations in nature are also
examined. That supplies, in effect, Schopenhauer's philosophy of science, which has its
embarrassing aspects: Schopenhauer did not understand the new physics of light and
electricity that had been developed by Thomas Young (1773-1829) and Michael Faraday
(1791-1867). He disparaged the wave theory of light, which Young had definitively
established, as a "crude materialism," and "mechanical, Democritean, ponderous, and truly
clumsy" [Dover, p. 123]. Unfortunately, Schopenhauer does not seem to have understood
the evidence for Young's discoveries about light, or even for Newton's -- he still clung
to Goethe's clever but clueless theory of colors. Schopenhauer also required that there
be a "vital force," though that would still be part of respectable science for a while to
come yet. Nevertheless, Schopenhauer would have been happy to learn how his beloved
qualitates occultae would return in force with quantum mechanics: Things like
strangeness, charm, baryon number, lepton number, etc., are exactly the kinds of
irreducible types he demanded.

Book IV of The World as Will and Representation is also about the will, but now in
terms of the denial of the will. The denial of will, self, and self-interest produce for
Schopenhauer a theory both of morality and of holiness, the former by which
self-interest is curtailed for the sake of others, the latter by which all will-to-live
ceases. Schopenhauer's greatest eloquence about the evils, sufferings, and futility of life,
and its redemption through self-denial, occur there.

On the representation side of his metaphysics, which occupies Books I and III of The
World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer must deal with two areas that exercise
their own claims to be considered things-in-themselves. First, at the beginning of Book
I, comes the Subject of Knowledge. Schopenhauer's thought there is refined by his
reading of the Upanishads, where the Br.hadaran.yaka Upanis.ad distinguishes the
Subject of Knowledge, the Unknown Knower, from all Objects of Knowledge, from
everything Known. Schopenhauer accepts that distinction, and also that the Subject is
free of the forms of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (space, time, causality, etc.).

But the subject, the knower never the known, does not lies within these forms [i.e.
space, time, plurality]; on the contrary, it is always presupposed by those forms
themselves, and hence neither plurality nor its opposite, namely unity, belongs to it. We
never know it, but it is precisely that which knows wherever there is knowledge.
[Dover, p. 5]
Since the Upanishads themselves posit an identity of the Subject, the Atman or Self,
with Brahman, the transcendent Supreme Reality, Being itself, one could not confess
surprise if Schopenhauer were to identify the Subject with Kant's transcendent
thing-in-itself. He does not, however -- deciding, rather arbitrarily it must seem, to
retain the Subject as an Unknowable side of representation, distinct from all Objects.

In Book III of The World as Will and Representation Schopenhauer turns to his theory
of Ideas, which he says are the same as Plato's Ideas, and which are also free of the
forms of space, time, and causality. For Schopenhauer, it is through the Ideas that all
beauty is manifest in art and nature. Again, it would not be surprising if Schopenhauer
took the Ideas to be transcendent realities, especially when that is precisely what Plato
thought about his own Ideas; but, as with the Subject, Schopenhauer keeps them in
representation, as the nature of Objects in so far as they are free of the Principle of
Sufficient Reason. The bulk of Book III is then occupied with the examination of
individual forms of art, culminating in music.

The final distinction, although it is one of the earliest made, in Book I, is that between
the body and the other objects of representation in space and time. For Schopenhauer,
the body is known immediately and the perception of other objects is spontaneously
projected, in a remaining fragment of Kant's theory of synthesis and perception, from
the sensations present in the sense organs of the body onto the external objects
understood as the causes of those sensations. The body itself, in Book II, becomes the
most immediate manifestation of the will, a direct embodiment of the will-to-live.

One might say that the most interesting aspect of Schopenhauer's metaphysics consists
of the turns not taken. The reason why the Subject and the Ideas should be held
separate from the Will sometimes seems only to be that this is necessary to produce
the degree of pessimism that Schopenhauer requires: The will must be blind and
purposeless; but as the Subject it would not be blind, and as the Ideas it would consist
of all the meaning and beauty of the Platonic World of Ideas. Indeed, Jung would later
see the process by which his Archetypes are instantiated, in the "individuation" of the
Self through the "transcendent function," as the means by which consciousness is
expanded and life made meaningful:

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in
the darkness of mere being. [Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 326]
Although the theory of art Schopenhauer presents in Book III, by which the Ideas are
instantiated much like Jung's Archetypes, might seem to describe meaning enough for
anyone's life, Schopenhauer just cannot imagine that it is good enough. Probably it is
not, since few enough people find meaning in life through art. Where they have always
found it is in religion, and Schopenhauer passes on to that ground with his theory of
holy self-denial. But not all religion is the denial of self or of life; and Schopenhauer is
conspicuously unsympathetic with religions, like Judaism and Islam (or, for that matter,
Confucianism and Taoism), that do not maintain the level of world-denial that he thinks
necessary for "true" holiness. Thus his theory fails as phenomenology of religion. only
Otto can explain holiness in both world-affirmation and world-denial. But no one would
ever accuse Schopenhauer of overlooking the evils of life or misunderstanding, as is all
too common among Western intellectuals today, the motivation of world-denying
religions.

An excellent bust of Schopenhauer by the great German sculptress, Elisabet Ney, can
still be seen in her studio in Austin, Texas, where she and her husband had immigrated
from Germany. After his experience sitting for the bust, Schopenhauer is said to have
wondered if, desipte all his misogyny, women could after all be great artists.

 

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Arthur Schopenhauer, on "the Professors of Philosophy"

The Soliloquy in Hamlet

"Schopenhauer and Freud," by Christopher Young & Andrew Brook

History of Philosophy

Philosophy of Religion

Metaphysics

Schopenhauer on Home Page

Home Page

Copyright (c) 1996, 1998 Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved

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Arthur Schopenhauer, on "the Professors of Philosophy"

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The three Prefaces of The World as Will and Representation present remarkable
changes in Schopenhauer's tone. The first, from 1818, is, as Schopenhauer says, advice
on how the book is to be read, including the instruction that readers go to his doctoral
dissertation, on the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, first. They
better have read Kant, also. It is clear that Schopenhauer expects a lot from his readers.
It later becomes clear that he doesn't get it.

A second edition of the book was not published until 1844 -- 26 years later. Even then
there was no great demand for it, the publisher was unenthusiastic, and, evidently,
Schopenhauer had to defray some of the costs of publication himself. The Preface to the
second edition reflects the disappointment that Schopenhauer had experienced during this
period. He had given up teaching after making no headway whatsoever against Hegel's
popularity.

I constantly saw the false and the bad, and finally the absurd and the senseless,
standing in universal admiration and honour....[Dover edition, p. xviii]
During his last years in Berlin, his scheduled lectures were apparently not even given,
since there were no students (he was only paid by the student, which is why the
lectures were scheduled at all). Even after Hegel died in 1831, the tide of Hegelianism
was still ascendant. Schopenhauer retired to a largely uneventful, private, and solitary
life, living off his prudently maintained inheritance.

The tone of the second preface is thus bitter and scornful. The "professors of
philosophy" who ignored him and adored Hegel were little better than fools to
Schopenhauer -- dishonest, self-serving, and sophistical fools at that. But it is there
that Schopenhauer's analysis, however embittered over his own disappointments, is
something more than just sour grapes:  He anticipates the corrupt rent-seeking that can
result when learning is wedded to bureaucratic authority and income:

Now what in the world has such a philosophy [i.e. Schopenhauer's] to do with that
alma mater, the good, substantial university philosophy, which, burdened with a hundred
intentions and a thousand considerations, proceeds on its course cautiously tacking, since
at all times it has before its eyes the fear of the Lord, the will of the publisher, the
encouragement of students, the goodwill of colleagues, the course of current politics, the
momentary tendency of the public, and Heaven knows what else? Or what has my
silent and serious search for truth in common with the yelling school disputations of the
chairs and benches, whose most secret motives are always personal aims? [ibid. p. xxvi]
Of course, the precise tack of current "substantial university philosophy" has changed a
bit. Fear of the Lord, or even the tendency of the public, can now be safely ignored,
since modern fashionable thought is irreligious far beyond anything anticipated or
desired by Schopenhauer, while the whole academic community has so esotercized and
insulated itself that the general public hasn't got a clue what it does or even says. Safe
in their own taxpayer subsidized enclaves, "the professors of philosophy" find that the
"goodwill of colleagues" is supreme, with its own special, distilled version of the "course
of current politics," since ideological conformity has become so important that it now
even has its own name:  "Political Correctness."

It is not privileged information that at present it is easier to advance in the profession
by hanging around well-known colleagues and massaging their egos than by an effort
at articulating a fundamental disagreement. [Tom Rockmore, on Heidegger's Nazism and
Philosophy, U. of California Press, 1997, p. 23]
The United States Constitution prohibits the granting of any "Title of Nobility," but
tenured academia has achieved an unaccountable status, with a secure, indeed sinecure,
living at the public purse, that would be the envy of any nobility that might have to
ride out and gather rents directly from the peasants. The modern IRS takes care of
that. Teaching, the ostensive purpose of academic employment, becomes less and less
onerous, while a vast output of esoteric research, intelligible only to the cognoscenti, is
the key to further status and privilege. Academic conferences are now the subsidized
and tax-deductible festivals of "the corybantic shouting with which the birth of the
spiritual children of those of the same mind is reciprocally celebrated..." [p. xxv], usually
at the most pleasing venues available, from Hawaii to Manhattan to Paris.

Nothing about this, therefore, would surprise Schopenhauer in the least -- let alone that
Hegel is still held in high regard, while many of his spiritual descendants explicitly
advocate the irrationalism and incoherence that is merely evident in Hegel's practice, not
in his own claims to rationality.

Schopenhauer's brief third Preface, from 1859, after the influence of Hegel had finally
faded and Schopenhauer had become somewhat recognized and influencial, reflects some
vindication:

If I also have at last arrived, and have the satisfaction at the end of my life of seeing
the beginning of my influence, it is with the hope that, according to an old rule, it will
last the longer in proportion to the lateness of its beginning. [p. xxviii]
Indeed, Schopenhauer's influence, although persistent, is still limited, ironically for many
of the same reasons that it was in his own day. The greatest value of Hegel's method
was always that it could generate almost limitless verbiage without really saying
anything. This is invaluable for an academic career today, where journals and books can
be filled many times over with tireless, but stupefying, rehearsals of the same popular
shibboleths. That these will never really mean anything to anybody -- indeed, they are
usually of the form that nothing means anything, or that only power matters -- is far
less important than the status, income, and, indeed, power that they foster.

What is most distressing, however, is that the moral, practical, and intellectual
equivalent of Hegelian philosophy should have come to flourish in great measure
because of the ascendancy of Hegel's own patron, the Prussian State -- by which
Prussia itself, long gone, continues to live in the institutions of welfare and police power
that all modern states have adopted from it. Thus, compulsory public education for the
purpose for state propaganda, the disarmament of citizens to prevent resistance to
authority, public pensions to make everyone dependent on government ("social security"),
peacetime military conscription, and universal state identification papers -- all originated
by Prussia -- are now supposedly enlightened features of the so-called democracies.
Indeed, Hegel himself may have coined the word "police" (Polizei), from the Greek word
for "state," polis. This may be the most suitable monument of all to Hegelianism.

 

 

쇼펜하우어 ( Arthur Schopenhauer, 1788~1860)

" 世界 는 나의 表象이다."

《의지와 표상(表象)으로서의 세계》(1819)

염세사상의 대표자로 불린다. 단치히 출생. 은행가와 여류작가인 부모 덕택에 평생 생활에 걱정 없이 지냈다. 1793년 단치히가 프로이센에 병합되자 자유도시 함부르크로 이사하였고, 1803년에는 유럽 주유의 대여행을 떠났다. 1805년 그를 상인으로 만들려던 아버지가 죽자, 고타의 고등학교를 거쳐 1809년부터는 괴팅겐대학에서 철학과 자연과학을 배우고, G.E.슐체의 강의를 들었다. 이어 1811년에는 베를린대학으로 옮겨, J.G.피히테와 F.E.D.슐라이어마허를 청강하였으며, 《충족이유율(充足理由律)의 네 가지 근원에 관하여 U ber die Vierfache Wurzel des Stazes vom Zureichenden Grunde》(1813)로 예나대학에서 학위를 받았다. 그러나 이 때를 전후한 사교가인 모친 요한나와의 불화·대립은 유명한데, 이로 인해 햄릿과 같은 고뇌에 빠졌고, 그의 독특한 여성혐오, 여성멸시의 한 씨앗이 싹텄다. 바이마르에서 살면서 J.W.괴 테와 친교를 맺었고, 그에게서 자극을 받아 색채론(色彩論)을 연구하여 《시각과 색채에 대 하여 U ber das Sehen und Farben》(1816)를 저술하였다. 또한 동양학자 F.마이어와의 교우(交友)로 인도고전에도 눈을 뗬다. 드레스덴으로 옮겨 4년 간의 노작인 저서 《의지와 표상(表象)으로서의 세계 Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung》 (1819)를 발표하였다. 이탈리아를 여행한 후 1820년에 베를린대학 강사가 되었으나, G.W.F. 헤겔의 압도적 명성에 밀려 이듬해 사직하고, 1822∼1823년의 이탈리아 여행 후 1831년에는 당시 유행한 콜레라를 피해서 프랑크푸르트암마인으로 옮겨가 평생을 그곳에서 살았다. 그 의 철학은 Ⅰ.칸트의 인식론에서 출발하여 피히테, F.W.J.셸링, 헤겔 등의 관념론적 철학자 를 공격하였으나, 그 근본적 사상이나 체계의 구성은 같은 ‘독일 관념론’에 속한다. 그러나 플라톤의 이데아론(論) 및 인도의 베다철학의 영향을 받아 염세관을 사상의 기조로 한다. 즉, 그는 칸트와 같이 인간의 인식의 대상으로서 눈앞에 전개되는 세계는 시간 ·공간 ·카테고리(category), 특히 인과율(因果律)이라는 인간의 주관적인 인식의 형식으로 구성된 표상일 뿐, 그것 자체로서 존재하는 것은 아니라고 주장한다. 따라서 세계 전체는 우리들의 표상이며 세계의 존재는 주관에 의존한다. 세계의 내적 본질은 ‘의지’이며, 이것이 곧 물 (物) 자체로서, 현상은 이 원적(原的) 의지가 시간 ·공간인 개체화(個體化)의 원리 (principium individuationis)에 의하여 한정되는 것이라고 한다. 다시 말하면 물 자체를 인식 불가능으로 한 칸트와는 달리, 그는 표상으로서의 현상세계(現象世界) 배후에서 그것을 낳게 하는 원인이 되는 물 자체를 의지로써 단적으로 인식가능하다고 주장한다. 또 세계의 원인인 이 의지는 맹목적인 ‘생에 대한 의지’ 바로 그것일 수밖에 없다고 말한 다. 이 형이상학설을 배경으로 할 때, 인간생존의 문제는 이 의지에서 출발하여 인과적 연쇄 에 의해 결정되는 세계에 사로잡히지 않고 어떻게 벗어날 수 있는가라는 문제가 남는다. 그 러나 삶은 끊임없는 욕구의 계속이며, 따라서 삶은 고통일 수밖에 없으므로 이로부터 해탈 (解脫)하는 데는 무욕구의 상태, 즉 이 의지가 부정되고 형상세계가 무로 돌아가는 것[열반 (涅槃)]에 의해서만 가능하다고 설파한다. 그는 이와 같이, 엄격한 금욕을 바탕으로 한 인도철학에서 말하는 해탈과 정적(靜寂)의 획득 을 궁극적인 이상의 경지로서 제시하였고, 또한 그렇게 하여 자아의 고통에서 벗어나면서부 터 시작되는 타인의 고통에 대한 동정, 즉 동고(同苦:Mitleid)를 최고의 덕이자 윤리의 근본 원리로 보았던 것이다. 그의 철학은 만년에 이르기까지 크게 인정을 받지 못하였으나, 19세 기 후반 염세관의 사조(思潮)에 영합하여 크게 보급되었다. 의지의 형이상학으로서는 F.W.니체의 권력의지에 근거하는 능동적 니힐리즘의 사상으로 계 승되어 오늘날에도 큰 영향을 미치고 있으며, 그 밖에도 W.R.바그너의 음악, K.R.E.하르트 만, P.도이센의 철학을 비롯한 여러 예술분야에 상당한 영향을 끼치고 있다.

 

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