Schopenhauer: Arguments of the Philosophers

Like most biographies of Schopenhauer, this book focuses on his greatest work, The World as Will and Representation (WWR). The author was Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, London, when this book was written. After a brief Introduction, David Hamlyn devotes 30 pages to Schopenhauer's PhD thesis, On the Four-fold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason - basically, a classification of different kinds of causes and effects. Schopenhauer supports Kant's classification of mathematics, space and time as synthetic a priori concepts. Here, Schopenhauer identifies knowledge with consciousness. Thus, the principle of causality is presupposed in perception and cannot be derived from perception.
After a short chapter on the relation between Schopenhauer's Will and the ideas of Plato and, more particularly, Kant, Hamlyn tackles first The World as Representation and then The World as Will, the first two Books of Schopenhauer's major work. When Schopenhauer opens with `The world is my idea', the meaning is that all we can know of the world is what we perceive through the senses - elaborating a view found earlier in Kant (and Locke). A difficulty with this view in Schopenhauer, as Hamlyn points out (again drawing on the Fourfold Root) is that `the relation between sensation and perception is not a causal one, even if it presupposes the law of causality.' This is because the concept of causality, being innate, is part of Kant's noumenal and Schopenhauer's Will.

The chapter on The World as Will identifies Will, as does Schopenhauer, as Kant's unknowable Thing-in-itself or noumenal dimension of the world. However, Hamlyn says it would be wrong `to take the will as being . . . a kind of force which permeates nature and which thus governs all phenomena,' though that is precisely the view that emerges from another of Schopenhauer's works, On the Will in Nature. Elsewhere, Schopenhauer compares the role of will to that of God, except that will is essentially evil rather than good - but then Schopenhauer was an atheist. Will is the source of our continual questing in the natural world, which leads to human discontent (the dukkha of Buddhist philosophy) and violent competition in the animal world.

The next chapters of Hamlyn deal with art and ethics, the subjects of Books 3 and 4 of WWR. Schopenhauer sees will as the will to live and, despite our continual torment, he says that suicide remains a `useless and foolish act'. The route to escape the anxiety of life is through art and music.

The purpose of this series (The Arguments of he Philosophers) is to provide a contemporary assessment and history of the entire course of philosophical thought. Each book constitutes a detailed, critical introduction to the work of a philosopher of major influence and significance.