Reconstructing Schopenhauer's Ethics

Abstract

At the apex of his influence, from about 1860 up to the start of World War I, Arthur Schopenhauer was known first and foremost as a philosopher of pessimism, sparking an entire “pessimism controversy” in German philosophy in the latter part of the 19th century. Still today, his main reputation is as one of the few philosophers to have argued that it would have been better never to have been. Reconstructing Schopenhauer’s Ethics: Hope, Compassion, and Animal Welfare aims to complicate and challenge the predominant picture of Schopenhauer’s ethical thought. The reconstruction is novel in three main ways. First, it views Schopenhauer as a more faithful Kantian than most commentators have been apt to recognize. Second, it sees Schopenhauer’s philosophy as an evolving rather than static body of thought, especially with respect to the place of the Platonic Ideas in his system. Schopenhauer’s views in the philosophy of nature changed as he encountered proto-Darwinian thought, and this change weakens Schopenhauer’s own grounds for pessimism. A third novelty is the claim that there are really two Schopenhauers rather than one as concerns his ethical thought, for the tensions between his ethics of compassion and resignationism are so acute that we ought to see Schopenhauer as giving us two mutually incompatible ethical ideals.