Schopenhauer, Religion and Morality

The Humble Path to Ethics

Gerard Mannion

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351901994
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This work challenges the textbook assessment of Schopenhauer as militant atheist and absolute pessimist. In examining Schopenhauer's grappling with religion, theology and Kant's moral philosophy, Mannion suggests we can actually discern a 'religious' humility in method in Schopenhauer's work, seen most clearly in his ethics of compassion and his doctrine of salvation. Given Schopenhauer's opinion of religion as the 'metaphysics of the people', his utilisation of and affinity with many religious ideas and doctrines, and the culmination of his philosophy in a doctrine of salvation that ends in the 'mystical', Mannion suggests that Schopenhauer's philosophy is an explanatory hypothesis which functionally resembles religious belief systems in many ways. Mannion further argues that Schopenhauer cannot claim to have gone any further than such religious systems in discerning the 'true' nature of ultimate reality, for he admits that they also end in the 'mystical', beyond which we must remain silent. Indeed, Schopenhauer offers an interpretation, as opposed to outright rejection of religion and his system gains the coherence that it does through being parasitic upon religious thought itself. Given current debates between theologians and philosophers in relation to 'postmodernity' and 'postmodern thought', this book illustrates that Schopenhauer should be a key figure in such debates.

I
SCHOPENHAUER AND RELIGION

Chapter 1
Schopenhauer’s Worldview: Hope or Despair?

An outcry has been raised about the melancholy and cheerless nature of my philosophy; but this is to be found merely in the fact that, instead of inventing a future hell as the equivalent of sins, I have shown that where guilt is to be found, there is already in the world something akin to hell; but he who is inclined to deny this can easily experience it.¹

Introductory Remarks

When Frederick Copleston, the eminent late historian of philosophy at the University of London, was invited to write a new preface for his book on Schopenhauer’s philosophy, he used the opportunity to revise or at least qualify some of the judgments which he had made concerning that philosophy some 30 years previously. The preface itself is telling in many aspects, but amongst the most significant statements which Copleston makes there is that, in assessing the philosophy of Schopenhauer, we must recognize that ‘A good deal depends … on our estimate of Schopenhauer’s overall vision of reality … Whether or not one mistrusts world-views, it is with reference to his own vision of reality that Schopenhauer has to be judged.’²

This book is primarily concerned with Schopenhauer’s ethical–soteriological thought and its relationship to religion, but it is important to recognize from the outset, as Copleston himself came to realize, that ‘Schopenhauer’s metaphysics and ethics are closely interlocked in one worldview’.³ This chapter will discuss the assessment that Schopenhauer’s worldview was a profoundly pessimistic picture of reality and what implications such an assessment has when judging the rest of his philosophy. There are two main schools of thought in relation to this worldview. First, there are those who believe that Schopenhauer’s pessimism permeates the whole of his philosophy to such an extent that his thought can best be characterized by the adjective pessimistic itself. We will call this the ‘absolutist’ view of Schopenhauer’s pessimism. Second, on the other hand, is the point of view closest to my own argument: that Schopenhauer’s pessimism serves a descriptive purpose, but by no means characterizes the ethical and soteriological aspects of his philosophy, which are actually more positive and hopeful in outlook than is often presumed. However, this is not to overlook the fact that many of the difficulties one encounters in assessing Schopenhauer on this matter are due to certain inconsistencies, contradictions and pockets of incoherence in Schopenhauer’s body of thought for which he must bear the burden of blame himself.

§1 The Misery of Existence

The standard textbook assessment of Schopenhauer as pessimist is illustrated amply in a work by the London-based Schopenhauer specialist, Christopher Janaway: ‘Schopenhauer’s philosophical pessimism resides in two connected theses: that for each individual it would have been better not to have been born, and that the world as a whole is the worst of all possible worlds.’⁴ In reflecting upon such judgements, one suspects that it is unlikely Schopenhauer may ever be able to escape from the title, ‘philosopher of pessimism’, with which Copleston crowned him half a century ago.⁵ Yet one needs to determine whether this serves as an accurate title. When Schopenhauer’s system is looked at as a whole, it can be seen that there exists a good deal of evidence to prove that such a label can be misleading and misrepresentative of the philosopher. At the very least, such a viewpoint does not present the ‘whole picture’, so to speak, with regard to Schopenhauer’s philosophy, but, firstly, it is necessary to illustrate why such an interpretation of Schopenhauer’s philosophy may have become widespread. As an example of his pessimism, the following passage is one of the more famous, in which Schopenhauer expresses his belief in the striving, suffering nature of life:

We feel pain, but not painlessness; care, but not freedom from care; fear, but not safety and security. We feel the desire as we feel hunger and thirst; but as soon as it has been satisfied, it is like the mouthful of food which has been taken, and which ceases to exist for our feelings the moment it is swallowed. We painfully feel the loss of pleasures and enjoyments, as soon as they fail to appear; but when pains cease even after being present for a long time, their absence is not directly felt, but at most they are thought of intentionally by means of reflection. For only pain and want can be felt positively; and therefore they proclaim themselves; well-being, on the contrary, is merely negative … our existence is happiest when we perceive it least; from this it follows that it would be better not to have it.⁶

Such passages helped to fuel the assessment of Schopenhauer as being primarily a pessimist in worldview and thus a nihilist with regard to belief systems. His literary skill struck a chord with those predisposed towards literary melancholia and hence it was not difficult for many to make the leap from such vivid descriptions of misery to the conclusion that it is Schopenhauer’s metaphysics in toto which logically entails that all is suffering and misery and cannot be otherwise. There is evidence to suggest that this view might be true in so far as his metaphysics of the will and philosophy of nature are concerned, but once one moves into a consideration of the later stages of his World as Will and Representation (namely, the ethical– soteriological sections of that work) it can be called into question.

However, if the world is to be understood as the manifestation of a striving force, the will, which is described in such terms as ‘blind’ and ‘purposeless’, it is not surprising that a logical connection was made between Schopenhauer’s more negative and his more speculative writings. So, again, one might deduce he is of the belief that there is no hope for humanity when one reads a passage such as the following:

… happiness lies always in the future, or else in the past, and the present may be compared to a small dark cloud driven by the wind over the sunny plain; in front of and behind the cloud everything is bright, only it itself always casts a shadow. Consequently, the present is always inadequate, but the future is uncertain, and the past irrecoverable. With its misfortunes, small, greater and great, occurring hourly, daily, weekly, and yearly, with its deluded hopes and accidents bringing all calculations to nought, life bears so clearly the stamp of something which ought to disgust us, that it is difficult to conceive how anyone could fail to recognise this, and be persuaded that life is here to be thankfully enjoyed, and that man exists in order to be happy. On the contrary, that continual deception and disillusionment, as well as the general nature of life, present themselves as intended and calculated to awaken the conviction that nothing is worth our exertions, our efforts and our struggles, that all good things are empty and fleeting, that the world on all sides is bankrupt, and that life is a business that does not cover the costs, so that our will may turn away from it.⁷

Indeed, Schopenhauer’s more popular essays, written later in his life, were to contain much more ‘worldly wisdom’ of this depressing tone. Yet to base one’s judgement of Schopenhauer’s entire philosophy upon such passages, as many did and still do, is to overlook many positive aspects which are more in tune with the tone of his metaphysical system as a whole.⁸ Thus, it has been said that ‘In the second half of the nineteenth century people make acquaintance with Schopenhauer without getting to know the metaphysical core of his doctrine.’⁹

In particular, familiar counter-arguments will point out that his philosophy of aesthetics and art, his ethics and doctrine of salvation, would not so induce one to conclude that this was a ‘philosopher of pessimism’, for these sections of his philosophy are concerned with escaping from and alleviating the suffering and misery in the world. The more pessimistic aspects, such as those illustrated above, are in many ways the product of his empirical observations of the world and his assessment of history.¹⁰ As Thomas Bailey Saunders, one of Schopenhauer’s earliest translators, remarked: ‘To deny that life was a miserable business was in [Schopenhauer’s] view futile; the only question was how to explain the misery.’¹¹ Saunder’s argument is simply that Schopenhauer is taking the volume of misery in the world as something which is a matter of fact and beyond dispute. As Saunders continues, Schopenhauer asks: ‘Why … do we always speak of a future world as a better, if we were not profoundly convinced that the present is fundamentally bad?’¹² Thus the counter-arguments suggest Schopenhauer’s writings on the misery of the world are not, as such, logically based upon his metaphysics, although in many instances he attempts to interpret the suffering and misery of the world in terms of the latter.

What is meant by this statement is that his metaphysics does not entail the inevitability of suffering and evil (and therefore absolutist pessimism as a worldview) in a necessary sense. Nonetheless, here is encountered one of the more fundamental tensions and possible contradictions in Schopenhauer’s philosophy. The question is whether his metaphysics leads necessarily to a world of evil and suffering or whether there is a ground for hope. Many interpretations of his philosophy take the former view, with some minor scope allowed for the latter. This work seeks to argue for the latter view, but also recognizes the tension between such a view and Schopenhauer’s convictions concerning the reality and volume of the misery in the world. However, such an empirical appreciation of the suffering in the world does not necessarily run counter to a hopeful system of ethics and doctrine of salvation (even if, as in parts of Schopenhauer’s work, the manner of expression appears to create such opposition). Indeed, Radoslav Tsanoff has gone so far as to suggest that philosophies of negation and despair can be seen as inverted theories of value: ‘The pessimist condemns and despairs of the world for reasons which may be just as enlightening to the searcher after values of life as the reasons which lead his neighbour to trust in man’s immortal destiny.’¹³

In addition to such considerations, and in order to appreciate fully the empiric...