Vanden Auweele’s book is a worthwhile attempt to place Schopenhauer in his historical context: more specifically, as a philosopher responding to Kant in the years following the great philosopher’s death (after all, the metaphysics of will is established, at least in its broad strokes, during Schopenhauer’s preparation of The World as Will and Representation, WWR, in the years 1813–18). Of course, Schopenhauer’s Kantian heritage has been recognized by many before (see e.g. Shapshay 2015), but Vanden Auweele’s innovation is to argue that the Kantian impact extends beyond Schopenhauer’s appropriation of a simplified Kantian epistemology, alongside the adoption of the distinction between phenomena and thing-in-itself: in fact, the metaphysics of will as a whole can be seen as an organic development of Kant’s ‘moral anthropology’, particularly bearing in mind his account of radical evil in Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason (Religion).
This is an ambitious work, attempting to trace Kantian influence across all aspects of Schopenhauer’s multi-faceted system and drawing upon a wide range of texts, including published works and correspondence, and considering many of the fundamental interpretative issues facing scholars today. Following an initial chapter (chapter 1) describing some details of Kant’s moral anthropology and its impact upon the post-Kantian tradition, Vanden Auweele provides what is undoubtedly one of the clearest examinations of Schopenhauer’s epistemology to date (chapter 2). He argues that Schopenhauer moves beyond Kantian epistemology by postulating four types of knowledge, separable by a twofold axis of mediate/immediate and representational/non-representational knowledge (p. 29). Establishing such an epistemological interpretative framework for Schopenhauer offers a handy way of tying the different aspects of his system together, encompassing the empirical cognition explored in book 1 of WWR, the inner cognition that offers a window into the thing-in-itself as will (book 2), aesthetic experience of the Ideas (book 3) and cognition that transcends even the Ideas, leading to compassionate actions and ascetic practices (book 4).
However, despite the promise of this interpretative approach, Schopenhauer’s appeal to the Platonic Ideas may prove problematic. In line with the two-fold axis framework, cognition of the Ideas is labelled as ‘immediate representational knowledge’ (pp. 61–2). Unfortunately, it is a matter of some dispute whether cognition of the Ideas in aesthetic experience is taken by Schopenhauer to be representational in nature: whilst he does at points seem to suggest that a kind of representing is going on – ‘the whole of consciousness is completely filled and engrossed by a single intuitive image’ (Schopenhauer Reference Schopenhauer2010: 201) – his claims regarding cognition of Ideas as taking place outside of the framework of the principle of sufficient reason (PSR) seem to imply that it cannot be representational, as the PSR is ‘the only form under which any representation … is possible or even conceivable’ (Schopenhauer Reference Schopenhauer2010: 23). It may be, then, that the Ideas remain as an unavoidably awkward part of Schopenhauer’s philosophical system, despite the potential interpretative usefulness of Vanden Auweele’s two-fold axis framework.
Chapter 3 revisits various interpretative issues connected with Schopenhauer’s metaphysical claims concerning the thing-in-itself as will, as well as the possibility of human freedom in a world as representation determined by the four forms of the PSR. One of Vanden Auweele’s innovations here is the claim that Schopenhauer’s metaphysical principle of will can be taken as a ‘metaphysicalization’ of Kant’s Willkür (pp. 112–15), which is revealed in Religion as an arbitrary faculty which tends to prioritize the incorporation of incentives of self-love into our maxims, at the expense of the moral law (see Kant Reference Kant1996: 74). Vanden Auweele claims that, through a process of philosophical organic development, Kant’s notion of Willkür as an aspect of a human being that rebels against our rational nature is extended, in Schopenhauer’s philosophy, to be a principle underlying all things that eschews all ‘normative control of restraint offered by rationality’ (p. 114). Such a claim has some plausibility as tracing a potential line of influence from Kant to Schopenhauer, particularly bearing in mind that the latter explicitly connects his notion of ‘will to life’ with the Kantian account of radical evil: ‘In any case people will call it radical evil, which suffices at least for those who are content to substitute a word for an explanation. But I say it is the will to life’ (Schopenhauer Reference Schopenhauer2015: 196).
However, it should be noted that this quotation comes from a work that was published as late as 1851, many decades after the initial formulation of the metaphysics of will, and that we have little evidence of Schopenhauer being familiar with Religion in early notes and WWR. As such, we may have to be sceptical of any claims of direct impact regarding the account of Willkür, as presented in Religion, upon Schopenhauer’s notion of will, and the reader may take this as somewhat diluting the thesis regarding the Kantian inheritance of the metaphysics of will. Vanden Auweele does accept this, to some extent, noting that there ‘is no proof whatsoever that Schopenhauer carefully studied Kant’s Religionschrift’ (p. 19) and that whatever knowledge he had of claims made in Religion may have been second-hand via Schelling’s Philosophical Inquiries into the Essence of Human Freedom (pp. 156–7).
In chapters 4-7, Vanden Auweele discusses the interconnected topics of Schopenhauer’s ethical theory of compassion, his philosophy of religion, aesthetics and ascetics respectively. As part of his wider argument regarding Schopenhauer’s Kantian inheritance, Vanden Auweele rightly draws attention to the often-overlooked, remarkably positive, attitude towards religion in WWR (pp. 160–6). Schopenhauer sees the proper function of historical religions as offering allegorical representations of pessimistic truths in a manner palatable to the common individual, and as a result, we can rank differing religions with regard to their success in fulfilling this function: for example, Christianity is praised for conveying pessimistic truths ‘profoundly and painfully felt by everyone’ (Schopenhauer Reference Schopenhauer1969: 170), whilst Judaism, and the Greek and Roman religions, are castigated as being far too optimistic in their outlook. Such an assessment, Vanden Auweele suggests, is akin to the famous ‘second experiment’ undertaken in Kant’s Religion, in which we evaluate historical religions in relation to the manner in which they are amenable to morality, embodied in a ‘pure rational system of religion’ (Kant Reference Kant1996: 64). Thus, Kant and Schopenhauer both seem to hold a view of religions as ‘vehicles’ for deeper truths, a function which different historical religions realize with varying degrees of success: for the former, they ideally carry the essence of a pure religion of reason, for the latter, they allegorically point towards the metaphysics of will. Such a philosophical parallel between Kant and Schopenhauer, persuasively established by Vanden Auweele, certainly raises interesting interpretative possibilities and will undoubtedly inspire more work on this topic.
Though Vanden Auweele has produced a high-quality examination of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, there are some minor difficulties that I would like to point to before I conclude. First of all, in order to establish his thesis of organic development from Kant to Schopenhauer, the discussion often needs to consider some aspects of Kant’s complex philosophy. Due to space constraints, and the fact that this is a monograph focused on Schopenhauer, these discussions may be more brief than the reader might like, and often skip over quite contentious issues in the literature on Kant (as I have already mentioned). In particular, Vanden Auweele’s discussion of Religion, a text which continues to inspire a constant stream of publications, could be seen as presenting a questionable reading of the text, and one which may have required a little more justification.
In order to establish his thesis more firmly, Vanden Auweele takes a rather more pessimistic reading of Religion, and Kant’s moral anthropology more generally, than may be warranted by the text: for example, Kant’s discussion of the hopes we can have for gradual improvement in life in this world (see Kant Reference Kant1996: 89–92), and the possible establishment of the ethical community on the social level (see Kant Reference Kant1996: 162–3), is comparatively overlooked, yet these discussions in Religion give it a rather more optimistic tenor than if one had focused primarily on the account of radical evil (though attention is given to the hoped-for Kantian revolution in disposition, as a potential parallel with Schopenhauer’s negation of the will (pp. 140–1). Vanden Auweele also seems to assume a rather reductive approach to Christianity on the part of Kant in Religion, suggesting that his interest in historical religion is limited to its ability to ‘inspire and cultivate moral action’ (p. 159), a thesis which some Kant scholars would subscribe to, but certainly not all (for one example of an interpretation of Religion which would resist such a reductionist reading of Kant’s approach to Christianity, see Palmquist Reference Palmquist1992).
In addition, Vanden Auweele often refers to Schopenhauer’s ‘non-reductive naturalism’ in a number of different contexts, but never thoroughly explains precisely what he means by this term, which can be used in a number of different ways. A wide range of very different philosophers (Aristotle, Spinoza, Hume and Nietzsche, to name but a few) have been labelled as ‘naturalists’, with the consequence that it might not be immediately obvious what is meant when Schopenhauer is called one. Throughout the book, the ‘naturalism’ of the metaphysics of will is said to have various implications: for example, it is taken to imply that moral duties should extend ‘beyond the boundaries of humanity’ (p. 128), that the distinction between sensuous and rational motives ‘cannot be one of quality, but merely of strength’ (p. 121), that ‘strict phenomenal action-determining applies to any and all forms of being’ (p. 99), and that ‘all cognition depends on the brain for its execution’ (p. 85), but we may be left wondering precisely what it is that has such wide-ranging consequences for Schopenhauer’s philosophical commitments.
At points, Vanden Auweele seems to be suggesting a kind of ontological naturalism that implies both monism and an emphasis on human beings as an equal part of nature, amongst all other elements of both organic and inorganic nature: it is stated that Schopenhauer’s naturalism may have been inspired primarily by Spinoza (pp. 50–1), a hint which is unfortunately left unexplored and may do little to enlighten the reader who is not immediately au fait with the finer points of Spinozism, and elsewhere Vanden Auweele writes that ‘[the] logic of Schopenhauer’s philosophy is to work towards a unique sense of metaphysical naturalism (like Hume), which explains the philosophical essence of everything by means of one “nature”, namely will’ (p. 43) (a statement which raises questions about the kind of Hume being assumed here). The problem is that it may indeed be right to call Schopenhauer a naturalist in certain senses, but not in others, and thus more explanation would have been useful. For one thing, Schopenhauer is surely not the kind of methodological naturalist that results in the ‘science of human nature’ proposed in Hume’s Treatise (for more on Hume’s methodological naturalism, see Kail Reference Kail2009: 7), and for another, he is not the sort that would claim that ‘nature’ is metaphysically foundational, as he states that it is only a manifestation of a deeper principle.
This is a well-argued and comprehensive contribution to the literature, and will undoubtedly garner much critical attention, particularly with the 200th anniversary of The World as Will and Representation falling in 2018. It is to be hoped that this work signals a new reconsideration of Schopenhauer’s brilliant and unsettling philosophical system by scholars in the years to come.
