Rethinking the Will and Idea of Sociology in the Light of Schopenhauer's Philosophy

Abstract

Most accounts of sociology's origins ignore the role of Schopenhauer's philosophy andAn de siecle German philosophy in general in favor of a Kantian, positivistic scenario. Thus contemporary sociological theory remains trapped in Kant's dismissal of the noumenon, or the thing-in-itself, as unknowable. Evidence is presented to suggest that Schopenhauer's philosophy in particular influenced many of sociology's precursors, among them Durkheim, Simmel, Freud, Weber and Tonnies. Schopenhauer attempted to recover Kant's noumenon by renaming it the will, thereby informing a vocabulary that included 'the other side' of the phenomenon, including the unconscious, habit, perception, intuition, and judgment. The implications of recovering Schopenhauer's achievement for contemporary sociological theory as well as understanding its origins are discussed. It is curious that in most textbooks, secondary sources, as well as treatises, sociologists posit something like a straight line from the optimistic, rationalist philosophies that informed the works of SaintSimon, Comte, and Kant to current sociology. No acknowledgement is usually made of the long intellectual detour from that era to ours through what Ellenberger' calls theJin de siecle spirit exemplified by Schopenhauer's philosophy, the Romantic and pre-Romantic forces that led up to it, and his many disciples, especially Nietzsche. For example, Schopenhauer's philosophy is not even mentioned by such well-known theorists as Parsons2 and Habermas.3 Sociology presents itself as Kant's phenomenon) with the noumenon missing. Thus, today's sociology is mainly cognitive, conceptual, abstract, behavioral, cultural and anything but biological, perceptual, or even genuinely empirical. This is because it tries to derive empiricism from Kant's a priorism, a move that Schopenhauer considered impossible. In contradistinction to these and other one-sided Tlle Briti.sh lourn(lt of Sosiology I 'O/U777t () .tltN16eR^ 9 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.225 on Thu, 09 Jun 2016 06:12:23 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 272 Stjepan G. Mestrovic approaches to sociology's roots, it seems that Arthur Schopenhauer's philosophy, not Comte's or Kant's philosophies, constituted the starting point for much, if not most, turn of the century thought. What happened to sociology's noumenon, its early emphasis on 'the heart', habits, the unconscious, the perceptual, the will to life, 'the body' and its appetites? The seriousness of neglecting the 'other' side of sociology is evident from evaluating the extent of Schopenhauer's influence as well as the consequences of remaining trapped in Kant's claim that the noumenon, the thing-in-itself, is forever out of reach to knowledge the very claim that Schopenhauer attempted to transcend. Thus, the present-day account of sociology's origins is both distorted and limiting. This is immediately evident from comparing Kant's legacy with Schopenhauer's. Neo-Kantianism leads to preoccupations with abstractions, concepts, rationality, and phenomenalism, whereas Schopenhauer argued that the 'heart' was stronger and more important than the mind, a move that leads to emphasis on intuition, empiricism, induction, the unconscious, and unmasking the surface, illusory aspects of phenomena. If one examines the works of most social theorists from Parsons to Habermas, it seems that Schopenhauer's emphasis on the 'heart' and its derivatives has been deliberately suppressed in favor of rational, cognitive psychologies and sociologies. Regardless of one's preference with regard to the antagonistic unity between the 'heart' and 'mind', the point is that Schopenhauer's stature as a philosopher in the wake of Kant is too great to simply ignore as it has been in contemporary sociology. Georg Simmel attests to Schopenhauer's importance in his equally neglected Schopenhauer and Niettsche,4 which was not translated into English until 1986. Other notable authors who have traced the impact of Schopenhauer's philosophy in particular and German philosophy in general on turn of the century thought as a whole include Robert Bailey in his Sociology Faces Pessimism,5 Baillot in his Infuence de la thilosothie de Schopenhauer en France,6 Henri Ellenberger in his Discovery of the Unconscious,7 Janik and Toulmin in their Wittgenstein's Vienna,8 Georg Lukacs in his Destruction of Reason,9 Bryan Magee in his Philosothy of Schopenhauer,'° and even Alan Bloom in Closing of the American Mind, 1 1 although this list is not exhaustive. 1 2 Even by positivistic standards, it is a verifiable fact that turn of the century German philosophy played an important role in the genesis of the . .