Arthur Schopenhauer was born in Danzig,
now Gdańsk, in 1788. His family had been rich Hanseatic merchants for generations. And
the upbringing he received was aimed not at an academic life, but at training him to step
into an international business. However, he had no interest in the family firm, he insisted
on going to university instead. And thereafter, he used his private means to finance a
lifetime of independent study and writing. His doctorate thesis has become a minor
classic, in spite of its title: On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. And
he was still in his 20s during the four years when he composed his masterpiece, The World
As Will and Representation, which was published in 1818, the year in which he was 30.
From then until his death in 1860 at the age of 72, he published a great deal, but all of
it was to extend or elaborate or enrich the philosophical system which he had constructed
in his 20s, and from which he never departed. He produced a huge collection of essays called
"Parerga and Paralipomena", and two short but pungent books on ethics called "The Basis
of Morality" and "The Freedom of the Will". There was also a little book called, "On the
Will in Nature", designed to show that his ideas were supported by discoveries in science.
Most important of all, he published a revised edition of The World as Will & Representation
which was more than twice the length of the original volume. There are several
remarkable things about him. Although in direct succession to Kant's, his
own work was securely in the mainstream of Western philosophy, he was genuinely knowledgeable
about Hinduism and Buddhism, and is the only major Western philosopher to draw serious
and interesting parallels between Western and Eastern thought. He was the first major Western
philosopher to be openly and explicitly atheist. He placed the arts higher in the scheme
of things and had more to say about them than any other important philosopher. And
perhaps partly for that reason, his influence on creative artists of the front rank has
exceeded that of any other philosopher of the modern era. He was himself among
the supreme writers of German prose. Many of his sentences are so brilliantly
aphoristic that they've been torn out of context by the hundred and published separately
in little books of epigrams. Intellectually, this is a catastrophe, because it obscures the
fact that Schopenhauer is first and foremost a system-builder, whose philosophy
can be understood only as a whole. Of the books in print about him in English
at the time of making this program, I have to confess to you that the longest & most recent
is by me. But I can't very well interview myself, so I've invited the author of one of the others to
come along and discuss Schopenhauer with me. My guest is, in any case, the most
distinguished living historian of philosophy in the English language: Frederick Copleston,
Emeritus Professor at the University of London. In addition to his extended treatment of
Schopenhauer in his 9 volume History of Philosophy, he's written a separate book about him called:
Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher of Pessimism. Well, Professor Copleston, I think the place
we ought to start is by addressing ourselves to the question of what it was that Schopenhauer
set out to do. Perhaps I should let you take that up. Well, Mr. Magee, I think that,
like other original philosophers, a great many of them, Schopenhauer
wanted to understand the world in which he found himself, the world in which he lived.
Or one can say, he tried to form a coherent, unified interpretation of human experience;
or to gain conceptual mastery over the world of phenomena, the plurality
of phenomena. I think that is it. And to do that, Schopenhauer thought that it
was necessary to identify the underlying reality. When asked why he thought that there was
an underlying reality to identify, I suppose that the reason, one main reason, is that he
started from the premises of Immanuel Kant. And that he thought that the way in which
we see the world is a human perspective; that the human mind is pre-programmed to see
the world in certain ways. We can't, for example, experience objects except as situated in space
and time, as subject of spatial-temporal relations and as subject to the relation of causality. But it obviously doesn't follow that because
things appear to one in a certain way that that is how they are apart from the way in
which they appear, as they are in themselves. Kant certainly took it that the concept of a thing-in-itself
as not as that which appears, can be considered in distinction from the appearance, was a
sensible idea, and Schopenhauer took that over. I think this is such an important idea and we're going to come back to it in different
ways, but it's worth going over again because it's difficult, I think, for people who are
new to it to really get hold of it sometimes. Kant had argued that all possible experience
can only come to us through our faculties, through our sensory & mental apparatus. And
therefore, what we could experience depended not only on what there is "out there" to experience,
but also on the nature of the faculties that we possess -- what our faculties could handle,
what they do to what they handle, how they handle it and so on. So that all
experience as such is subject-dependent. And he went on from that to argue that therefore
we could see total reality as being divided into two. There are things as they are in-themselves
independently of being experienced, and to such things we have no means of access.
And then there's things as they appear to us, the world of appearances, the world as it
comes to us through experience, and that's what we know; that's the world of common
sense, the world of science, our total world. Now, Schopenhauer took this up from Kant
and said now can we get any pointers, can we get any hints from a close analysis of this
world of experience as to what it might be that underlies it, as to what it might be
that lies behind it? That at least is part of the thought, isn't it? Yes, it is.
I think it's important to remember that for Schopenhauer there can be only
ONE underlying reality. Kant himself took it as a matter of common sense, I think, that
if there's the table as it appears, then there must be the table as it is in-itself; and
if the carpet as it appears, then there's the carpet in-itself; that there are a multitude
of things-in-themselves. But of course, if we think away spatial & temporal relations
and the causal relation, there's no means of distinguishing one thing from another.
So that if the underlying reality transcends space and time and causality, and is
quite other than the world of phenomena, then there can only be one. The plurality or
multiplicity belongs to the world of phenomena but the underlying reality must be a "one".
These ideas that we're dealing with are really so difficult that I think THAT is worth going
over again as well. I think it'll help a lot of people. Schopenhauer argued that for one
thing to be different from another thing, for anything to be different from anything
else at all, this idea of differentiation only made sense with reference either to
time or to space or to both. If two things are identical in time AND identical in space, then
they're identical, period, they're the same thing. So, the notion of there being
different things, in the plural, could only apply to this world of our
experience, this world of space and time. Outside that world it could make no sense
whatever to talk of anything being different from anything else. And therefore --
I'd just like to complete this thought. Therefore, whatever there is outside
this world of our experience must be one and undifferentiated. And in taking
that step from Kant, he thought Kant had been wrong in talking about things, in the plural,
in-themselves, things as they are in themselves; that it must be one undifferentiated
something that lies behind this world. Now, in saying that he took an enormous stride
towards one of the central beliefs of Hinduism and Buddhism. Those religions also believe
that behind this highly differentiated, plural, variegated world of phenomena, there is one
single, undifferentiated something that manifests itself as this world. And one striking thing
is that Schopenhauer didn't get the belief from Buddhism or Hinduism. He got it by arguing
from premises that he derived from his predecessor Western philosophers. And then discovered
that he'd reached a conclusion which was similar to that of the Buddhists and the Hindus.
Yes. Well, I'd like to go back a moment to what you've been just saying about the only one
underlying reality. I think that if one starts from the premises of Immanuel Kant -- I mean, I wouldn't
myself, but if one does -- then Schopenhauer was right, because there's no means of
distinguishing one thing-in-itself from another except as a matter of common sense.
There's no formal way of distinguishing once you accept the Kantian
premises that Schopenhauer did. Taking the argument to the next stage,
so to speak, Schopenhauer thought that if we analyze this world of phenomena, we
might get from it some clues as to what the underlying one -- which he called, following
Kant, the "noumenon" or the "no-u-menon", it's a word from the Greek -- we might
get some idea of what the noumenon is. And I think his great starting point was this.
Kant had argued that all our knowledge of material objects must come to us and it
can come to us only through our senses and there be, as it were, put together by our minds.
Schopenhauer said well this is almost exactly right but there is one absolutely crucial
exception to it which amazingly Kant seems to have overlooked. And that is that
for every individual one of us, there is one unique physical object in the world, which we
know in the way Kant says we know physical objects but we also know in a radically and entirely
different way, namely directly from inside: and that is ourselves, our own bodies,
our own persons. They are physical objects in the way that any other physical object
is a physical object. And they can be seen and touched and heard and known in all the
ways that other physical objects are known. But each one of us, in addition to that, has
immediate non-sensory knowledge of this one physical object from inside, directly. And
Schopenhauer thought that this knowledge of a physical object from inside might provide
us with the key to the inner nature of things. That's what he thought. Personally, I think
that if one starts with Kant's premises, then one must accept Kant's agnosticism. I don't
see that there's any way of getting out of it. But certainly, you're quite right, of course,
that that is what Schopenhauer thought, that there was an access through the body.
The only difficulty is, it seems to me, that our idea, even our idea of an ultimate reality, belongs,
on those premises, to the world of phenomena, and there's no way outside the circle
and beyond there simply lies silence as Wittgenstein was to say in the Tractatus.
However, it's quite perfectly true that Schopenhauer thought there was a hint given through
our experience of our bodies, yes. I would want to defend Schopenhauer up to
this point in the argument because he makes the point that the knowledge that we have of
ourselves directly from inside is not knowledge of Kant's thing-in-itself, and there are two
or three very important reasons why it's not. One is that the knowledge we have of ourselves
from inside is still only a kind of superficial knowledge. Decades in advance of Freud, he argued
very specifically and at length, that most of our own inner life and motivation
and so on, is unknown to us; that our actions and our speech and our decisions are,
for the most part, unconsciously motivated. So that in a very important sense,
we don't even know our full inner selves. Another reason why he thought it wasn't
knowledge of Kant's thing-in-itself is that it exists in the dimension of time, though
it doesn't exist in the dimension of space. And time can be a characteristic
only of this world of ours. And there was a third reason which I think is worth
mentioning and it's this: Schopenhauer argued that all knowledge must be of a dual form:
subject and object, knower and known, observer and observed. For there to
be any knowledge at all of anything, you must have something that's
grasped and something that's grasping it. And this differentiation can--for reasons
that we were giving only a few minutes ago in a different context--differentiation can
only exist within this phenomenal world, this world of experience, and therefore it's
only in this world that there can be knowledge or there can be consciousness. Yes,
that Schopenhauer anticipated Freud in remarkable ways is perfectly true and helps
to show the importance of Schopenhauer in the history of thought, I think. But of course
it's also true, I think, that all our ideas of the infraconscious, the idea that there
is an infraconscious, that all belongs to the phenomenal world. And there we are.
I mean, Kan't premises, Kant's conclusion. Now, we must start to say something about
how he did point across the gulf, as it were, towards the noumenon. He thought that there
was something about this inner experience of ours that gave us a clue as to what the
ultimate nature of things outside this world is. Can you take up the story from there? Well, I'd
say, for example, that my bodily movements for Schopenhauer would be expressions
of desire or he used the word 'will'--perhaps unfortunately--but one might use 'force' or
'energy'. But, at any rate, if I move my arm, I will to move my arm. For Schopenhauer, as
later for Wittgenstein, there's no entity called "the will" that is distinct from the movement
of the arm and causes it, but the volition is the inside, as it were, of the movement
and the physical movement is the outside; not trying to the deny that there is some inside.
And if we consider that and, as you say, the unconscious motivation that lies behind a good
deal of our actions, we can, at any rate, get the idea of a reality as a kind of infraconscious, below-
conscious drive, that Schopenhauer called "Will", and that perhaps some better name can be
given to, as 'force' or 'energy', something of that kind. But we have that hint as to the
nature of the ultimate reality as an unconscious striving; a striving for existence, for life,
for self-assertion.....you can describe it in various ways, of course. Yes,
he thought that if we analyze this world of experience, the world of science
if you like, the world of common sense -- which does consist for the most part of matter
in motion, and most of it is matter in colossal amounts. I mean, galaxies & solar systems
and so on, traveling through the cosmos at gigantic speeds approaching that of light.
So the whole material universe consists of matter in motion to a degree that, so to speak,
defies our imagination to really conceptualize it. And he argued--I mean, there were steps in the
argument that we haven't time to go through-- but he argued, following on from Kant, that
what is ultimate in all this must be energy. He argued that matter is, as it were, instantiated
energy; that a physical object is a space filled with force; that ultimately all matter
must be transmutable into energy. And it's very striking, I think, that that
particular doctrine of his has been entirely borne out by 21st-century science. When the
physicists in our century arrived at this conclusion they thought they were propounding
something revolutionary and incredible, but in fact, Kant and Schopenhauer arrived
at this conclusion over 100 years before them by pure, rational, reasoning of
it out from ordinary experience. Yes. When one's talking about theoretical
physics, one has to remember that so many physicists are sometimes loath to say that
the terms such as 'energy' and so on, denote any reality of use within the
framework of theoretical physics, but that it can't be taken that there's some kind
of metaphysical reality called "energy" or so on. But I can quite see the point of substituting
"energy" for Schopenhauer's "will". Well, you're attributing to me a
step I don't quite take. I mean... Well, I'm glad.
Yes. [LAUGHTER] No. I mean, what I wanted to say was this. Schopenhauer argues that what is ultimate in this world of phenomena, in his world of experience
is energy. And at the scientific level, and speaking from the standpoint of our own day,
he can be said to have been remarkably pre-voyant on that, to have been correct. Now, he says
that the metaphysical, the underlying noumenon is whatever manifests itself as this energy
throughout the cosmos, I mean, in the stars in the solar system, in animals, in trees,
in falling stones, in ourselves, in everything. It's the unconscious energy that forms us
in the womb that makes our organs work while we sleep and so on. And I understand him
as saying that the nearest we come to getting any glimmering of what that is in experience
is the experience we have inside ourselves of the energy, the go, the force, the will
to exist, the will to survive; that somehow ultimate irreducible push or drive
which is underlying to everything else. Yes. But then of course, Schopenhauer wasn't
indifferent to the underlying reality, was he? I mean, he adopted quite definite attitudes,
negative attitudes towards it, disvaluing it. And "energy" is such a neutral word. I mean, it's hard to say whether one approves of
energy or disapproves of energy, likes energy or doesn't like energy; very difficult to say.
Whereas Schopenhauer, as we're both very well aware, had very definite
attitude towards the ultimate reality in its manifestations. But I think it
would've been better if he'd used the word "energy" because he decided to
give the name "Will" to this metaphysical reality and I think that's misled people ever
since, because we can't help associating the idea of a personality with a will,
or the idea of an aim with a will; when Schopenhauer himself reiterates at different
points in his writings that he doesn't mean that, that in HIS sense of the word "will"
everything has a will. A dead star or a stone has as much will as you or I. It is simply the
metaphysical substratum, as it were, in everything. That it's not personal, not alive, not
organic, has no aim, and so on. I think it's misled people and an impersonal word like
'energy' would've been very much better in my view. Well, I think you're quite right on that particular point. My own point that I was hinting at
was that as Schopenhauer looked on the ultimate reality as perfectly revolting
and was willing to speak of it on occasion even in moral terms as wicked--I mean, one
wouldn't naturally be led to think of energy as revolting or as not revolting, at least
I wouldn't. And certainly not as wicked! So, that's what I meant. He has this
definite attitude towards the ultimate real-- and towards its manifestation of
course: this world, empirical world. Now, perhaps we can, as it were, change
our tack a little and confront that head-on. Up to this point in our discussion, we've
been sketching what Schopenhauer's picture of reality was, what he thought the overall picture
was. Now let's talk about his attitude towards it. He thought that the world was an appalling place, a terrible place. He thought it was full
of injustice, disease, repression; that in the hospitals and prisons of the world were
full of people going through the most appalling sufferings and tortures; that nature was red in
tooth and claw; that in every hour of every day, thousands upon thousands of animals are
tearing each other to pieces alive and devouring each other alive; and that the whole
thing is a sort of appalling nightmare. It's an incredible vision, and it's expressed
in prose of such dramatic power that no one who's ever read it is likely to forget it.
But that was his view of the way things are. And therefore that the underlying metaphysical
reality must be such as to express itself in these terms, and must therefore be
something terrible, something nightmarish. That's why he is renowned, quite
rightly, for being a pessimist. Yes. A pessimist above all philosophers;
a bleak, black view of reality. And of course, he didn't leave it there, did he? I mean, he had suggested some ways out, the
temporary way through aesthetic contemplation through art, through creation of art & through
the appreciation of art, which stills desire and selfishness and longing and hostility
and conflict for the time being, at any rate. Just as one can go into an art gallery and
look at the pictures without desiring anything, but then, of course, one comes out
and runs into a cafe or a pub, and need and desire reassert themselves. But it's a
temporary way out. I think it was a mistake for Schopenhauer to bring in at that point the
Platonic Ideas as the intermediate between the ultimate reality and the work of art because
I don't see there's much place in his system. But he's quite right in making a distinction between the aesthetic attitude towards things
and the attitude of trying to appropriate them and use them for one's own advantage. It's
quite true there, there is a temporary way out. Yes, you're making the point that he thought
that the aesthetic attitude was disinterested. Normally, if I see a plate of food I think in terms of
eating it, this is something for my own sustenance or to satisfy my lusts or desires or greed
or just simply hunger or whatever it might be. Whereas, if I see a Dutch painting of a
plate of food, I don't see it in that light at all. I see it as an entirely sort of impersonal,
disinterested way and then I'm conscious of its presence or absence of the aesthetic
qualities such as beauty or lack of beauty it may be, but it's quite a different way of looking at things.
One point that I think is worth drawing attention to in Schopenhauer's aesthetic is that
he did think that the arts provided us with a special way of knowing things. And by that
very token, he did not regard them as a means of expression. If I produce a work of art, what
I'm doing primarily according to Schopenhauer isn't expressing my emotions or giving expression
to my feelings, it's expressing insight or knowledge into something about the way things are. I think what can give meaning to that is in
the idea that was going around when I was an undergraduate in the 20s, propagated
largely by Clive Bell's significant form. One might put that instead of the Platonic
Ideas, something like that. I think it's... As to the idea of truth in art, I think it's a
very interesting subject and a difficult subject and I've never really made up my
mind about it as to the truth in art. I think one must have -- though it's rather off
the point -- an analogical view of truth in which truth according to the context can be understood
in different ways as corresponds in one context but not, I think, in art. It wouldn't, it would be
another kind of truth and that has to be examined. I think it's a perfectly respectable line of
thought, certainly, and one well worth pursuing. I certainly [wasn't] making a critical remark
about Schopenhauer's use of the Platonic Ideas. I didn't mean to say that I didn't think there
was anything is in view of art, because I do, I think it is very well worth considering, certainly.
And it's had an enormous appeal to many great artists. Oh, yes, certainly. Who obviously
therefore thought that it corresponded to their conception of what it was they
were doing. Undoubtedly, undoubtedly. I think we must move on now to a
consideration of Schopenhauer's morals. What would you say was the place for morality
or ethics in a world as painted by Schopenhauer? Well, as you know, Schopenhauer insists that as there's one ultimate reality, and each one
of us is identical with that one ultimate reality, therefore, in some sense, we're all one,
ultimately. And he uses that for advocating compassion, sympathy, Agape, love as distinct
from erotic love, I mean, as distinct from Eros... I mean, that's very noble that he should
uphold that idea of compassion and so on. It's difficult to see how each one of us
is an embodiment of that horrible reality that there's much room for mutual love. Conflict would've been more like it, I should have thought. But at any rate, he certainly, undoubtedly
values love against hatred and compassion rather than cruelty and so on. I certainly
don't want to question those valuations of Schopenhauer, far from it. But ultimately
of course, as we're all the one will and the will is something horrible, the
ultimate ideal can only be turning against the ultimate reality. I'd like to keep these
two notions separate for the moment. Before we move on to his idea of turning against reality,
I'd like just to say a little more about his view of morals and ethics, because it was, in a sense, applied
metaphysics in a rather unusual sense for a philosopher He had, as you say, this metaphysical view
that we were all ultimately "one". And again, that is in common with some religions.
And therefore, that in doing you an injury, I am in some significant ultimate sense injuring
myself. And that my ultimate oneness with you is really the basis of morality, the basis
of compassion, the basis of empathy. It's why I should behave towards you in morally
approved ways and not behave towards you in aggressive ways. And
you were quite right to say that there's an apparent conflict between regarding
the metaphysical, the ultimate metaphysical reality as awful and evil and nightmarish in the way
we were talking about a few moments ago, and regarding it in this context as the basis
of compassion, empathy, and morality in general. I would like at this point to say that the
famous fact-value distinction applies as much to Schopenhauer, in my opinion, as it does
to anyone else. That is to say, that you can accept his view or a great deal of his view
about how things are, about what reality is, without accepting his evaluation of
it or taking up his stance towards it. And I say that with feeling because,
in fact, I'm an example, I think, of this. I do regard very large parts of Schopenhauer's
philosophy -- by no means all of it -- but large parts of it I regard as being valid and as
having enormously rare and important and genuinely deep insights. And I
think it casts great illumination. But I'm not a pessimist in Schopenhauer's
sense at all. In other words, I accept his picture of the way things are, to an important degree,
but I don't at all take up his view of it all as being a nightmare or whatever it may
be. So I would go along with the ethics of Schopenhauer -- in fact, I think his ethics
is very well-founded -- and wouldn't want to as it were, keep that part of his
philosophy with which it's in conflict. As you know, a good many philosophers
now question the fact-value distinction... I think it has an indispensable use myself,
because one must distinguish, for example, between the way in which people behave and the
way in which they ought or ought not to behave. The two propositions are different
types, that's perfectly obvious. On the other hand, I don't think myself, that
one can have any interpretation of the world that doesn't contain value judgments --
value judgments of importance, of significance and so on -- anymore than you can have a
history that goes beyond mere chronology and that really tells a significant, coherent story.
You can't have a history without value judgments. I don't believe in value-free
history or value-free metaphysics. So although I'm willing to accept some distinction,
I'd be very careful about applying it myself and simply saying, well, we can have this
interpretation of the world on the one hand which is value-free & then the set of valuations
on the other, because I don't think things work out in quite that way, you know.
No, I didn't think they work out in quite that way either. I was merely making the
point that you could have a lot of Schopenhauer and I was always careful not to say all
but only a lot of Schopenhauer's view of the way things are, without
sharing HIS value judgments. I would have other value judgments and I
would entirely agree with you that you can't have a view with no value judgments.
I think that's absolutely correct. But now, let us move on, as it were, to the
final stage of Schopenhauer's philosophy, when he, taking his value judgments,
seeing that reality in all or in most of its manifestations is an evil, a frightening, a
nightmarish thing. The final step in his philosophy, which some have embraced and others have
found impossible even to understand sometimes is he says we must reject this. Ultimately,
we must reject reality, we must deny reality; the famous denial of the will. Can you
perhaps try to explain a little more about what's involved in that concept?
Well, I'd say that if you turn... Well of course, he entirely approved of the asceticism,
self-mortification, and so on, that one can find in several of the world religions, advocated
at any rate, and practiced in the past. And he thought that constituted a stage
on the way towards a kind of final rejection of the will -- I don't quite know what form
that would take -- but it would take, I suppose, the form of entry into a Buddhist Nirvana
interpreted as nothingness. Well Schopenhauer would say that it may possibly have qualities
of which we know nothing and can know nothing. But as far as we're concerned, to turn against
the ultimate reality as we form a conception of it is to turn to nothingness, to nonexistence.
That's why I would say that in spite of all the real resemblances between, say, Christianity,
Buddhism, and Schopenhauer's philosophy, there is a fundamental difference between his
attitude and, say, that of the Christian, the Muslim, and the Orthodox Jew, because they believe in
God, they certainly wouldn't regard it as desirable that one should chuck God overboard or
deny the ultimate reality in that sense. So there, it seems to me, there is a gulf. But
more important -- because people might sweep that aside and say, well, I'm neither a
Christian nor a Muslim nor a Jew -- but even in terms of Schopenhauer's own philosophy, I don't
see how it's possible to turn against the will because it's the will that has
to deny itself; I AM the will. And if this ultimate reality is going to deny --
how's it gonna deny itself, in and through me? It can't produce nothingness exactly. I don't see how... The more I think about it, the more difficult I
find to envisage that ultimate rejection of the will as taking place when the will itself has got to do it. Before we finish this discussion, I'd like us
to say a word or two about Schopenhauer's influence on other people. He's had enormous
influence on creative artists and I referred to that. I didn't name any, but one might
name Wagner, an enormous influence, Turgenev, an enormous influence; in fact,
lots of major novelists of the last 100 years: Conrad, Thomas Hardy, Proust, Thomas Mann, etc.
But perhaps in a discussion which is about philosophy, what we ought to concentrate on is not
that so much as his influence on other major thinkers. And I think three stand out in
importance: Nietzsche, Freud, and Wittgenstein, in chronological order, as having been very
obviously & strikingly influenced by Schopenhauer between his day and ours. Could you perhaps
say something about his influence on Nietzsche? As you know, Nietzsche regarded Schopenhauer as
an educator, and his early work with Schopenhauer as educator indicates, I think, that he thought
of Schopenhauer as a man who wasn't content with the superficial view of things, but
looked underneath and wasn't afraid to look the world and history in the face. And didn't
try & gloss over everything as Leibniz did with talk about the best of all possible worlds,
but really looked the world in the face and was therefore a man of mental integrity.
He also entirely agreed with Schopenhauer's subordination of intellect to will, in its first
instance, the servant of the will. And also I think he regarded Schopenhauer as a man
of great independence of character who didn't allow his views to be dictated by society,
or by his predecessors, for the matter of that, or other philosophers,
but thought them out for himself. But he came, of course, to criticize, as you
know, Schopenhauer, in the course of time, for his turning away from life. And although
it's been said of Nietzsche by Professor Crane Brinton that the great yeasayer spent most
of his life saying no, Nietzsche did officially uphold the affirming of the world as it is.
And, in a way, I sympathize with Nietzsche because I think if the world is as Schopenhauer
said it is, then the best thing is to try and alter it for the better. I don't say
that Nietzsche -- well, he thought... I mean, I wouldn't agree with Nietzsche's
idea of what would be for the better, but there I do agree with Nietzsche. But on the
other hand, he never ceased to admire Schopenhauer and revere him as a man who'd set him on the
right path, away from convention, a great questioner. Well, I think we must now turn finally to the latest of the great thinkers who was directly
influenced by Schopenhauer: namely Wittgenstein. Perhaps you'd like to conclude this discussion by sayin'
a little about Schopenhauer's influence on Wittgenstein. Thank you. Yes well that's of course quite clear, isn't it? I mean, from the material
preparatory to the Tractatus in the notebooks & in the other manuscripts,
the debt of Wittgenstein to Schopenhauer is made quite clear. And in the Tractatus
itself, this idea to which you referred earlier in our conversation of the correlation between the
subject and my world, that is strong in Wittgenstein. There's I and my world. And that
the I, the epistemological subject, is, as it were, the boundary of my
world, it's not an object in my world. Because if I try to think of myself, then
it's the I that's trying to think of myself. But it's on the borderline, as it were, of the world.
That comes straight out of Schopenhauer. Then the famous saying in the Tractatus that
if all of the problems of science were answered, the problems of life wouldn't have been touched.
That also really comes from Schopenhauer, I think. And it's also noteworthy that in the
Tractatus, Wittgenstein makes a distinction between the will as the bearer of ethics,
of which he says nothing can really be said, -- that's the meta-phenomenal will --
and the will as a phenomenon, which forms part of the subject matter of psychology
rather than of philosophy, for the author of the Tractatus. And, therefore, there is
that distinction between the metaphysical will, I think, metaphenomenal will and the
phenomenal will, which also can be traced, I think, to Schopenhauer. I should say
that Wittgenstein, in the course of time, became less and less Schopenhauerian,
in the sense that he became less and less addicted to forming a system, whereas as you
said much earlier, Schopenhauer was certainly a system builder. There is a kind
of embryo system in the Tractatus, but there's very little, as we all know,
in the later writings of Wittgenstein. But still, he undoubtedly was strongly
influenced by Schopenhauer. And in fact, he's about the only major philosopher of the past, that
was in no sense contemporary, that Wittgenstein really read and studied and digested at all.
So, it shows that the influence of Schopenhauer by no means ended with the 19th century,
but as you said earlier, has lived on into the 20th century, and is embodied in
one of the most famous philosophers of our century and time. Thank you
very much Professor Copleston.
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