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THE SCHOPENHAUERIAN
MIND
Abbreviations
Notes on Contributors
Introduction
PART 1
13 Schopenhauer on Music
Andrew Huddleston
17 Acquired Character
Sean T. Murphy
20 Schopenhauer’s Pessimism
Byron Simmons
Before Schopenhauer
After Schopenhauer
Index
ABBREVIATIONS
Why this book now? The simplest answer is that the field of
Schopenhauer studies can easily accommodate it. While recent years
have seen the appearance of many fine companions and handbooks
on Schopenhauer, including The Cambridge Companion to
Schopenhauer (ed. Christopher Janaway, 1999), A Companion to
Schopenhauer (ed. Bart Vandenabeele, 2012), The Palgrave
Schopenhauer Handbook (ed. Sandra Shapshay, 2018), and The
Oxford Handbook of Schopenhauer (ed. Robert Wicks, 2020), there
is still endless room for novelty in Schopenhauer studies. Moreover,
and if the above list and recent news of The New Cambridge
Companion to Schopenhauer (eds. Sandra Shapshay and Colin
Marshall, forthcoming) are any indication, the Anglophone world’s
interest in Schopenhauer's philosophy stands now at something of a
historic high. As the latest in this line of distinguished compendia,
The Schopenhauerian Mind offers readers both new perspectives on
core areas of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, as well as treatments of
more neglected, but no less fascinating and important, aspects of his
thought, context, and legacy.
The book presents new research in Schopenhauer’s theoretical
philosophy, including new interpretations of his metaphysics of the
will and representation, his theories of rationality, science, acoustics,
self-consciousness, and his meta-philosophy. While Schopenhauer’s
philosophy of art and aesthetics is rightfully well-trodden ground, we
include groundbreaking work on its application to human beauty,
temporal beauty, moral beauty, musical beauty, and specific modes
of aesthetic experience such as the sublime. Perhaps the largest
area of recent growth in Schopenhauer studies has been in his
practical philosophy and philosophy of value, with Schopenhauer’s
ethical theory, metaethics, moral psychology, political philosophy,
philosophy of history, philosophy of religion, and philosophy of
pessimism, receiving renewed and increasing attention. All of these
topics find new treatments here. As if that were not enough, the
volume also presents new essays on Schopenhauer’s place in the
history of philosophy, and indeed on his own thoughts on the history
of philosophy, including both European and non-European traditions,
as well as on his reception of such figures and schools as Herodotus
and the Greek tragedians, the Stoics, Spinoza, Rousseau, Goethe,
and Hegel. And finally, the volume concludes with chapters on
Schopenhauer’s legacy among other thinkers, writers, and artists,
including Kierkegaard, Wagner, Mann, Wittgenstein, Adorno,
Murdoch, and Borges. Most of these figures before and after
Schopenhauer have never been covered in other companion
volumes. These nearly forty newly commissioned essays, in sum,
present yet more sides to the multifarious Schopenhauer.
We owe a large debt of gratitude to all of the fine scholars who
are responsible for the growth and health of contemporary
Schopenhauer studies, especially, of course, those who have
generously contributed a chapter to this volume. Throughout the
process, we have been consistently delighted and heartened by the
superb quality of their work. The achievements of these scholars are
especially extraordinary given that this project was started in earnest
just before the coronavirus pandemic, meaning that all of this high-
quality work was produced under conditions of immense pressure,
fear, confusion, often sadness, and of course illness. In the words of
Max Horkheimer, first published in 1961 but just as relevant today:
‘There are few ideas that the world today needs more than
Schopenhauer’s—ideas which in the face of utter hopelessness,
because they confront it, know more than any others of hope.’ In
their triumph over adversity, these fine scholars join Schopenhauer
in this paradoxical form of hope.
David Bather Woods and Timothy Stoll
PART 1
Douglas McDermid
DOI: 10.4324/9781003048992-3
1.1
Why was Schopenhauer implacably opposed to “that natural and
childlike realism in which we are all born, and which qualifies one for
every possible thing except philosophy” (SW 2:17/WWR 1:xxiv)?1 If
the explanation I advance in this chapter is essentially sound, his
critique of metaphysical realism deftly weaves together ideas and
arguments from Plato, the Upanishads, Descartes, Malebranche,
Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Reid, Kant, and Fichte. Before I say anything
about Schopenhauer, however, a few preliminary remarks about
realism are in order.
1.2
According to metaphysical realism, a razor-sharp distinction must be
drawn between the reality and the appearance of a physical object:
between the tree as it is apart from us, on the one hand, and the
tree as it appears to us in perception, on the other. To avoid
confusion, it must immediately be added that the metaphysical
realist does not regard this distinction as mere epistemological
shorthand, or as a convenient way of contrasting one's fragmented
and imperfect consciousness of a thing (how it may initially seem or
appear to me) with an ideally complete and coherent understanding
of its nature (how the thing really and truly is).2 No; our realist
insists that objects are ontologically prior to appearances, that trees
and rocks exist in their own right, and that their fundamental
attributes exist independently of anyone’s perceptions of them. The
gist of her creed, we might say, is that the world is not our
representation, that things in space and time are not constituted by
“such stuff as dreams are made of,” and that there is an epistemic
gap between appearance and reality which can never be closed
completely, at least in theory.
This view is so familiar and trite that we may forget to ask why
anyone would subscribe to it. How can such forgetfulness be
remedied? A brisk review of four pleas for realism will remind us of
the phenomena which that doctrine is meant to clarify, as well as the
principles which its purveyors tend to take for granted.
1.3
Thesis 1: The view that physical objects are mind-
independent is most emphatically not self-evident,
axiomatic, indubitable, or a first principle of common sense.
Modern European philosophers tend to present what they call
“metaphysical realism” as if it were little more than a pedantic re-
statement of what sane human beings have always and everywhere
believed about the nature of things. Schopenhauer strenuously
objects to this way of proceeding, and he isn’t afraid to tell us why:
That is to say, the colors we glimpse and the flavors we savor are
not woven into the fabric of the universe; they exist only in relation
to creatures with our constitution. Yet if what I am immediately
aware of always has qualities that nothing purely objective or
external can have, nothing is self-evident to me except the existence
of subjectively conditioned phenomena – mere appearances,
presentations, or impressions.
This, then, is Schopenhauer’s first thesis about metaphysical
realism: if objects exist independently of our perceptions, no beliefs
about trees and rocks can be epistemically basic or foundational,
because “the subjective alone is the immediate” (SW 5:82/PP 1:72).
However, some beliefs about trees and rocks will qualify as
foundational if objects are identified with presentations, since the
latter are known immediately. Hence the factitious and intractable
“problem of the external world” is a problem for metaphysical
realists, but not for idealists.
1.4
Thesis 2: If metaphysical realism is true, we cannot know
how things are in themselves; we can only know how they
appear from our point of view, or in relation to our all-too-
human faculties.
Having argued that metaphysical realism is not self-evidently true,
Schopenhauer now argues that it is not true at all. Along the way, he
calls our attention to a curious paradox: the epistemological
consequences of metaphysical realism contradict common sense, yet
common sense is an authority to which realists confidently appeal
and gladly defer.
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