Schopenhauer’s Berkeleyan strategy for transcendental idealism

ABSTRACT

The paper focuses on Schopenhauer’s idealism and investigates how its elaboration was related not only to Kant but also to Berkeley – a theme generally overlooked by scholars. Schopenhauer viewed Berkeley and Kant as those who had shown the advantages of idealism but were not able to reconcile it with a satisfying metaphysics: they had both set the path, but the work remained to be finished – and his system would provide the resolution. The paper analyses the presence of Berkeley in Schopenhauer’s works (Section 2) and investigates why and how Berkeley became relevant for Schopenhauer’s project (Section 3). Sections 4–5 revisit the debate on Kant’s transcendental idealism and illuminate the role of Berkeley in both the first reactions to the Critique of Pure Reason and the genesis of German Idealism. Sections 6–7 contextualize and explain Schopenhauer’s strategy of praising Berkeley and espousing idealism as a doctrine that defined his own originality in post-Kantian philosophy.

KEYWORDS:

• Schopenhauer
• Berkeley
• Kant
• idealism
• metaphysics

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the two anonymous referees, whose comments and suggestions were very helpful in improving the first version of this paper.

Abbreviations

References to Schopenhauer’s works are abbreviated according to the Bibliography below. Page numbers refer to the German edition and are followed by reference to the page number of the English translation as listed in the Bibliography.

Citations from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, by page numbers in the original first (A) and second (B) editions, and Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics refer the Akademie edition as listed in the Bibliography.

Notes

1 Then they have focused on the question of whether Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of will might be considered as loyal to Kant’s critical strictures on knowledge. See for example: Baum, “Ding an sich und Erscheinung”; Riconda, “Il ‘criticismo compiuto’ di Arthur Schopenhauer”; Malter, Schopenhauers Transzendentalismus; Koßler, “The Perfected System of Criticism”.

2 On the distance of German Idealism from Berkeley and Kant, see the first section of Thielke, “Recent Work on Early German Idealism (1781–1801)” and Mureşan, “Berkeley and German Idealism”.

3 Schopenhauer’s appreciation of Berkeley was also motivated by the formulation of the so-called ‘likeness principle’ in § 8 of A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge. As shown by Shapshay, “Did Schopenhauer Neglect the ‘Neglected Alternative’ Objection?”, Berkeley’s view was essential to Kant and Schopenhauer’s thesis that the thing in itself must be aspatiotemporal.

4 Schopenhauer enriched this portrait with his own definition of idealism as negating “a matter existing in itself” (PP1:14/14) and opposed to realism (PP1:14n/14n) – whereas in 1844 he had claimed that Berkeley’s denial of matter established an antithesis between “idealism and materialism” (WWR2:15/16); see also WWR2:540/489.

5 McDermid, “The World as Representation: Schopenhauer’s Arguments for Transcendental Idealism”, 62–75.

6 Mattey, “Kant’s Conception of Berkeley’s Idealism” and Winkler, “Berkeley and Kant” analyse such a complicated relationship.

7 Allison, “Kant’s Critique of Berkeley”, 51–2; Janaway, Self and World, 62–5; Emundts, “Kant’s Critique of Berkeley’s Concept of Objectivity”, 141.

8 A founded worry, according to Nitzan, “Externality, Reality, Objectivity, Actuality” and Morgan, “Kant and Dogmatic Idealism”.

9 See Werke (Deussen), 122. It was almost certainly the first collection of Berkeley’s writings: The Works of George Berkeley, 1784.

10 In the second edition (1844), Schopenhauer added “It was already present in the sceptical considerations that served as Descartes’ point of departure” before the sentence on Berkeley (WWR1V:142/568.1). In the second volume, too, Berkeley was the first philosopher mentioned (WWR2:4/6).

11 McDermid, “The World as Representation”, 59: “Schopenhauer wants to wed epistemological idealism to ontological realism in the manner of Kant (a move that would have been anathema to Berkeley, whose idealism was both epistemological and ontological)”.

12 “Kant grounded the presupposition of the thing in itself in an inference according to the law of causality, namely that empirical intuition […] must have an external cause” (WWR1:516/463).

13 Leroy, “Influence de la philosophie berkeleyenne sur la pensée continentale”; Lamers, “Schopenhauer und Berkeley”.

14 Breidert, “Schopenhauer und Berkeley”, 374.

15 See Herder, Eine Metakritik zur Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 325. Schopenhauer cited Herder in his Dissertation, § 40.

16 It is probably related to Schopenhauer’s late discussion of the apparent opposition between Berkeley’s idealism and materialism in the Parerga (PP1:14n/14n) and in the Supplements (WWR2:540/489).

17 Breidert, “Zur Rezeption Berkeleys in Deutschland im 18. Jahrhundert” and “On the Early Reception of Berkeley in Germany”.

18 Besides Berkeley’s Works borrowed from the Dresden Library in 1815, he purchased the 1843 edition of the Irish philosopher’s works: The Works of George Berkeley. He also possessed the 1756 Samlung, Eschenbach’s first German translation of the Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous.

19 “Berkeley in Germany is a sad story”: this is the beginning of Breidert, “On the Early Reception of Berkeley in Germany”, 231.

20 About the loans, see Werke (Deussen), 105, 120–1. The works of Tennemann and Tiedemann in his private library are listed in MR5, 177–8.

21 Tiedemann, Geist der spekulativen Philosophie, 619–47; Buhle, Geschichte der neuern Philosophie, 86–99; Tennemann, Grundriß der Geschichte der Philosophie, 327–30 (Schopenhauer later purchased the 1812 edition of the Grundriß). Tennemann, Geschichte der Philosophie devoted a section to Berkeley (404–7) and one to Berkeley’s Idealism (407–17).

22 Schopenhauer commented “no object without a subject” as a sentence “which cannot possibly be denied by any reflective person and whose insight at once appears to be simple, certain and universal” (MR2:399n/463n).

23 Henry Sidgwick, “Kant’s Refutation of Idealism” called the reply in the Prolegomena (§ 13, Annotations II and III) the “realistic answer” and the Refutation of idealism in the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason the “transcendental answer”.

24 His library contains books by Feder, Hamann, Jacobi, Herder, and Schulze. On Jacobi he wrote in a notebook of 1812–13 (see MR2:366–71/425–32).

25 Even if Feder had left Göttingen in 1782, his 1787 Ueber Raum und Caussalität zur Prüfung der Kantischen Philosophie was published at Göttingen by Dieterich.

26 In Zugabe zu den Göttingischen Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen, 19th January 1782, 40–8.

27 This was the conclusion of the Garve-Feder review (48/58). On Feder’s insistence that Kant’s idealism did not differ from Berkeley’s, see Beiser, The Fate of Reason, 171, 181–4.

28 Winkler, “Berkeley and Kant” has suggested that Kant’s reference to the empirical idealism (A:368–9/426) was probably not intended to confront the Irish philosopher.

29 Mensch, “Kant and the Problem of Idealism: On the Significance of the Göttingen Review”. The roughness of the review was probably encouraged by the publication of a new German translation of Berkeley’s Three Dialogues in the same 1781: it contributed to bringing to the fore the traditional idealistic doctrine and its unwelcome sceptical outcomes at the exact moment of Kant’s revolutionary approach to idealism (Förster, The 25 Years of Philosophy, 48–53), thus inflaming Feder, “the Lockean ringleader” (Beiser, The Fate of Reason, 180), who insisted on putting Kant together with Berkeley in Raum und Kausalität (1787).

30 It is the case of Moses Mendelssohn, who misunderstood Kant’s idealism and presumed that it ended up with the negation of the things-in-themselves and ultimately of the external world (Beiser, The Fate of Reason, 105–6).

31 Breidert, “On the Early Reception of Berkeley in Germany”, 231 speaks of “the scandal of Kant’s refutation of idealism”. It was not only a matter of ignorance, though. Around the years of the Critique, the philosophy of common sense transferred from Scotland to Germany a doctored rendition of Berkeley as a sceptic – which contributed to the hostility against Kant’s idealism in different philosophical circles (Kuehn, Scottish Common Sense in Germany, 208–37).

32 Two examples show the importance of those books: WWR1:562n/502n refers to Schulze’s Kritik der theoretischen Philosophie (1801) and Feder’s Über Raum und Causalität (Schopenhauer misquoted the title as Ueber Zeit, Raum und Kausalität); WWR1, 48/63 mentions Herder’s Metakritik, 274–5 and refers to Hume as quoted by Herder.

33 See Schopenhauer’s transcript in Fichte, Die späten wissenschaftlichen Vorlesungen II: 1811.

34 On such a revision, see Rockmore, “Kant, Fichte, and Transcendental Idealism”.

35 He read and commented on Fichte’s Grundriß der Wissenschafstlehre (1795) and Schelling’s Abhandlungen zur Erläuterung des Idealismus der Wissenschaftslehre and Vom Ich als Prinzip der Philosophie: see MR2:343–4/395; 311/349; 308/345.

36 Waxman, Kant’s Anatomy of the Intelligent Mind, chap. 8.

37 Snow and Snow, “Was Schopenhauer an Idealist?”, 633 even claimed that his metaphysics of the will took him “far beyond the conceptual framework of idealism”.

38 Another element which specifies Schopenhauer’s epistemology and makes it very different from Kant and the philosophical tradition is the role of the body. But discussing this aspect would take far from the main subject of this paper.

39 The story is quite entertaining and is partially narrated by Schopenhauer himself, who proudly recalled having convinced Johann Karl Friedrich Rosenkranz, at the time editor of Kant’s works, of the importance of the 1781 edition of the Critique. Actually, Rosenkranz published the first edition and presented the second’s variations in appendix. The story is narrated by several biographies of Schopenhauer. See the most recent: Cartwright, Schopenhauer. A Biography, 424–9.

40 As shown by Shapshay, “Did Schopenhauer Neglect?”.