Schopenhauer

Abstract

AS the Kantian leaven works, philosophy shows less and less of an inclination to quit what Kant de scribed as the fruitful bathos of experience. No doubt many a structure is still reared around us, “pinnacled dim in the intense inane,” but that is simply because philosophy, more than any special department of know ledge, is exposed to the inroads of the uninstructed. But here, as elsewhere, the honest inquirer will find a con sensus of competent opinion which estimates these piles at their true value. Serious workers pass by on the other side without controversy, lest perchance they should be as those on whom the tower of Siloam fell, On the other hand, only confusion of thought can lead people to identify philosophy with science, and to suppose that, when they have reckoned over the list of the sciences, they may erect a stone to the great god Terminus. For, though the matter of philosophy is the same as that of the sciences (and not, according to the current myth, a spider-like product of intestinal origin), yet the point of view from which the common material is regarded is ab initio different. Science, in its whole extent (including psychology), deals with the world of objects, whereas the first task of philosophy is to remind scientific men of the abstraction which they have been making—and for their own purposes rightly making—by showing them that the world of objects is unintelligible without a subject to which it is referred. Having rectified this fundamental abstraction, philosophy proceeds, as theory of knowledge, to a critical analysis of the conceptions which, as ultimate presuppositions or working hypotheses, the different sciences are based. The notion of the atom and of infinite space may be mentioned as two of the earliest cases where such criticism is required. The result of such a criticism is to show that no science can say of its “facts” that they are absolutely true, because they cann ot be stated except in terms of the conceptions or hypotheses which are assumed by the particular science. But conceptions such as those of space or atom are found to dissolve in self-contradiction when taken as a statement of the ultimate nature of the real. It follows, therefore, that they must be regarded as only a provisional or partial account of things. The account they give is one which may require to be superseded by—or rather, which inevitably merges itself in—a less abstract statement of the same facts. In the new statement, the same “facts” appear differently, because no longer separated from other aspects that belong to the full reality of the known world. For the philosopher is essentially what Plato in a happy moment styled him, συνοπτικός, the man who insists oh seeing things together; and philosophy, in her office as critic of the sciences, aims at harmonising the notions on which they respectively rest, and thereby reaching a statement of the nature of the real which may claim to overcome the abstractness of the several provisional stages represented by the different sciences. The World as Will and Idea. By Arthur Schopenhauer. Translated from the German by R. B. Haldane, M.A., and J. Kemp, M.A., Vol. I. (London: Trübner and Co., 1883.)