From Kant to Schopenhauer - Joseph Belbruno

7/28/2019 From Kant to Schopenhauer - Joseph Belbruno

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From Kant to Schopenhauer

In this context, the Machian foundations of Austrian neoclassical theory (and, on theopposite side, the Austro-Marxist Neo-Kantian response to them) constitute an attempt

to remove the obscure veil (Nietzsche) that Kant had interposed between esse et

percipi, turning the adaequatio rei et intellectus into an adaequatio intellectus ad rem.Once the objective world is reduced to an inscrutable noumenon or thing-in-itself, it is

evident that all we have left for philosophical analysis is the world of phenomena, of

what we perceive - esse est percipi. This was the basis of Schopenhauers critique, andthe cause of Kants doubts in the OpPost concerning causality and the systematicity

of physics.

The principal point here is that the whence and wherefores are substituted with thewhat (Sch., WWV, p108) because the former are lost in the indefiniteness of sufficient

reason. The question is not one of being but of knowing, and only the being of the

ideas is determined. For Sch., Kants grosste Verdienst ist die Unterscheidung der

Erscheinung vom Dinge an sich (Appendix on Kant, beginning). It is thisUnterscheidung (we would say Trennung) that puts the question of nature and

causes beyond the purview of rational inquiry. We are left with the empiricism of thecausal relationship between events just as they appear. Morphology replaces aetiology;

process replaces meaning; form unseats substance; perception, rational inquiry. There are

no more qualitates occultae (p106), no explanations (108). Relativity andexchangeability triumph (cf. Simmel, S u N, ch 2, esp. pp24, 27).

Kant had sought to preserve the transcendental subject in the veryconsciousness/awareness by the thinking entity of its unity of apperception. If indeed

the identities of logic and mathematics were independent of experience in fact, as in thedivisibility of space, contradictory to it and yet were inconceivable withoutexperience, then the independence of these identities necessitated the existence of a

noumenon, a human reason that could not be reduced to a phenomenon or a mere

inexplicable appearance that was reduced/relegated to could discover/recoverautonomously the independent causal relations and synthetic a priori judgements that it

derived from the heteronomy of mere empirical induction or observation. (Cf. Forsters

The Transition from his commentary on OpPost re Kants Preface to 2nd edn of KRV

mention of giving back to nature what we derive from it).

For negative thought, such transcendence (independence from experience) did not

require the positing of, and stood in op-position to (Gegenstand), a reality, a world ofthings or noumena that lay behind the observable empirical phenomena. The subject

is no longer transcendental but mundane; it is of the World. Indeed, it is in the World

and it has become, through perception and the Vorstellung and the Verstand identifiedwith the World itself, the better to command it.

Kants hesitations in the OpPost reveal the Gap that allowed Schopenhauer to pour

scorn on Kantian metaphysics as the foundation of human experience and of science


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generally particularly where the transition to the systematicity of physics from

natural science hence the principle of causation was concerned. The illegitimacy of

compounding logico-mathematical rules with physical causation tormented Kant in hislast years. With Sch., it is impossible to conceive the stars above me as the complement

of a universe made meaningful and purposeful by Practical Reason through the

freedom/unconditionality of the Truth of its a priori judgements. Remember, it was theability of Pure Reason to discern a priori in-dependently of experience! the validity of

causation that made it necessarily in-dependent/autonomous against the heteronomy of

the object of perception and liberated it as practical Reason. This is the interiorrealm subject to the categorical imperative: the starry sky above me and the moral law

inside me. The connection of the Subject with the exterior world, the Object that is

also constituted by the community of practical reason, gives Kant the hope (What can

I hope?) that Practical Reason may follow the path of Truth followed by Pure Reason inthe sphere of causality in the physical sciences where Error is routinely defeated. (Cf.

Tsanoffs conclusions, pp19-20: 2 Kant regards speculative reason, however, as incapable of attaining

knowledgeof ultimate reality, and therefore he introduces the notion of practical reason.)

But with Sch., Reason has become purely instrumental and functional, even if there is

still a simulacrum of a nexus between logic-mathematics and science (p82). Truth forSch. is not what it is for Kant where the very possibility of truth in a priori judgements

leads directly to the postulation of Practical Reason: immediate perception is the

ultimate ground and source of truth (p100), even when it is a priori, as withmathematics. In Sch., Reason is only a higher level of conceptual abstraction, different in

degree but not in kind from the understanding, and easily confused with it (error confused

with illusion). We have therefore a wholly functional notion of truth defined now not in

terms of whences and wherefores but in terms of what, that is in purely instrumentaland functional predictive effectiveness. That explains why Sch. has difficulty

distinguishing Vorstellungen from Begriffen (pp53-4). (One could argue therefore contra

Tsanoff [pp19-20 below] that it is Kant rather than Schop. who relies on rigid distinctionsfor the sake of speculative thoroughness, whereas Schop.s real sin is, as he correctly puts

it, shallowness:

Kant's 'confusion' of the perceptual and

NATURE AND GENESIS OF EXPERIENCE. 21

the conceptual in experience is to be regarded, not as the failureto discriminate ultimate differences, but rather as the imperfect

realization and the inadequate expression of the underlying

essential unity of concrete experience, which cannot be reduced

to merely perceptual or conceptual terms. Kant's confusion

is the confusion of depths not yet clarified; Schopenhauer's

lucidity manifests epistemological shallowness. Later idealism,of course, brought to light much that escaped Kant himself

Thus, for Schop., Reason is neither good nor bad. Rational action and virtuous action are

entirely unrelated (p113). And the ultimate manifestation of practical reason is the

aloofness of the philosopher in his reflection, the differentiation with brutes,including inferior life forms (pp111-4) even down to indifference to suicide,

execution, duel, enterprises fraught with danger to life (p112-3). The objectification of


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the Will is the Body, which therefore shares no communion with the rest of humanity.

Even language occupies no special role in this system. Truly Sch. is the real prophet of

the understanding (Bosanquet quoted in Tsanoff, p40 and Heidegger follows with hisreproach that Kant neglected the imagination [sensibility]). And the Kantian

antinomies can be easily dispatched by Sch. now that all links with Dinge an sich have

been severed that is Kants great contribution/service (Appendix).

Transcendental Reason

Negatives Denken was not a return to solipsism or pure idealism far from it. It wassimply the realization that the synthetic a priori judgements could be analysed

independently of a Transcendental Subject from which these judgements emanated in

opposition to the anarchy or autonomy of the noumenon-linked phenomena. In otherwords, Kantian idealism exalted the Subject in op-position to a noumenal reality that it

could govern only mechanically or intuitively (like sight and touch hence

thoughts without perception are empty; perception without concepts is blind) but couldnot possess and by which in fact it was conditioned and relegated to a mere unity

of apperception, and only formally could aspire to transcendental status (akin to God) on

which morality [Sollen] and judgement [Urteilkraft] could be founded.It is unfortunate, though not difficult to explain, that Schopenhauer,whose keen criticism of the doctrine of the categories had

disclosed so many of its flaws, should have overlooked one of

Kant's most questionable distinctions, namely, that which he

makes between 'constitutive' and 'regulative' principles. This

distinction is employed by Kant with little consistency, although

the tendency is to discriminate between: (a) the fundamental

forms of intuition, the productive imagination, and the functions

of thought, which condition the possibility of all experience and

'constitute' its organization; and {h) the rational assumptionswhich, while not determining the actual form of experience,serve to rationalize the moral order and the aesthetic judgment.

The distinction, otherwise expressed, is between the mechanical

42 SCHOPENHAUER'S CRITICISM OF KANT.

categories of the Understanding, which Kant calls 'constitutive,'

and the teleological categories, the postulates of Practical Reason

and of the Esthetic Judgment, which he regards as 'regulative.'^

The incompatibility of this hard and fast distinction with any

interpretation of experience which attempts to do justice to itsorganic character is amply illustrated in Kant's own technical

procedure. The teleological categories are declared to be merely

'regulative,' because not 'constitutive' of experience mechanically

considered. But are the mechanical {i. e., 'constitutive')

categories constitutive of moral and aesthetic experience? Such

considerations, which Kant would have been the last to take

lightly, should have warned him of the untenability of a distinction

that negates the immanent unity of experience, which is the fundamental postulate of the Criticalphilosophy.

This dictatorship of Reason that had started with Descartes also became the subject of

Heideggers Destruktion of Kant. Indeed, one may agree with Heidegger that Kants


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aim in the Critique is not to erect an epistemology but rather establish by formal means

the being of a reason that is a noumenon that can order the noumena op-posite to

it (Gegenstande). Kants interest is not in the things-in-themselves but rather in theVernunft/Verstand (Under-standing) hierarchy from perception to conception, which

must lead to a causa noumenon (in Aristotelian fashion, causa causans) free from the

heteronomy of causation and the physical world. This freedom or autonomy thenbecomes the Will, with its Ethik des reinen Willens, an aspect of praktische

Vernunft. From here it is a very short step to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and to

Heidegger, who is not in the least concerned with the possibility of synthetic a priorijudgements or meta-ta-physica in that Aristotelic sense, but rather with the Grund of

meta-physics, which is the Being of those beings that Kant (and Schopenhauer) had

left to themselves.

The pessimism (Schopenhauer) that followed had to do with the need to remove the

teleological and eschatological aspirations/delusions of Kantian idealist formalism

and at the same time eliminate the (bourgeois) antinomies (cf. Lukacs) occasioned by

the opposition between noumena and phenomena, the rupture or chasm that occurredand the projectio per hiatus irrationalem that it called for and that Kantian practical

reason hoped to bridge (Brucke from immanence to transcendence, see T. below).

Empiricism did this in its Machian form by eliminating even the possibility of ruptures

or salta in the perception of phenomena by encompassing them in a psychologicalsequence, a pictographic or psychological representation of reality (Cacciari, p40)

that goes back to Locke, then Hume (association of ideas, impressions) and Berkeley

(ideas in Gods mind, similar to Leibnitzs monads). Note also that with British

empiricism the realism of Platonic and Scholastic philosophy is refuted both in itstemporal (always psychological in any case) and its spatial dimension (contra

Descartess and Spinozas extension). In this sense, empiricism already questions

Newtons universe (cf. even Smiths Hist.ofAstr. so dear to the Austrians).

31 Relationships Since a cause and a beginning of existence are distinct ideas, according to the rstfi

part of the separability thesis, it follows that they are also distinguishable ideas. (Bayne)

The empiricist pictographic or sequential (one would say kinematic, slide show)notion of causality paved the way to Humes skepticism and Berkeleys empiricist

idealism.

For Hume, ideas and impressions are genuinely similar to each other. They are similar in two main

ways. First of all, both ideas and impressions are imagisticthat is, both impressions and ideas canbe thought of as being a type of picture.9 (Bayne, Kant on Causation, p5).

Now, this can also be turned very quickly into an argument that Kant cannot allow both

intuitions and concepts to be imagistic. Kant makes it clear that he believes that images are not

themselves general, and thus in the Schematism Chapter Kant writes:

No image [gar kein Bild] of a triangle would ever be adequate to the concept of a triangle in general.

For it would not attain the generality of the concept, which makes it valid for all triangles, . . . Still even

less does an object of experience or an image of the same ever attain the empirical concept.

(A141/B180) (ibid., p7).


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In general, according to Kant, concepts serve as rules that are used to organize (unify) our thought.

Sensible intuitions, however, can be thought of as being imagistic(pictorial) representations.Now, when

the question of application arises (Which intuitions, if any, are subsumed under this concept? Which

concept[s] does this intuition fall under?) we may be at a loss for direction. Intuitively we might think

that I must somehow compare some concept to some sensible intuition in order to see whether the

content of the concept, which is represented discursively in the concept, stands in the appropriate

relation to the content of some intuition, which is represented pictorially in the intuition. Yet this maynot be so easy.(p8)

From Hobbess man-machine to Berkeleys idealism the approach to reality is

mechanically subjective in the sense that the Subject is estranged from the Object andviews it in contemplation, from afar. This obviously originates with Descartess

methodical doubt which puts external reality on a par with dreams. Only the

consciousness of the doubting can persuade the Subject of its own reality. But theempiricists were quick to deny not only the Cogito (a syllogistic non sequitur on any

plane) but also the very id-entity of the Subject, as famously dis-abused by Hume.

Search as I may about a notion of I, I cannot find it, except by reference to some other

empirical impression or idea. The unity of the Subject is dis-solved, and so is thepossibility of causality, even before we start enquiring about the relationship between

things in themselves. The cinematic sequence is broken because only a unified Subject

can re-compose it.So it turns out that neither mathematical concepts nor empirical concepts stand in immediate relation to

sensible intuitions, but like pure concepts they too are always directly related to the schema of the

imagination (A141/B180). (P8)

Schemata for mathematical and empirical concepts are rules for producing spatial images that

are correlated with the concept. It is this spatial image, derived from the concept through its schema,

that can then be directly compared with sensible intuitions. Schemata for pure concepts, on the other

hand, are not rules for producing spatial images. For the schema of a pure concept of understanding

is something that cannot be brought into any image at all (A142/B181). Rather than being correlated

with a spatial image, a pure concept is correlated with a transcendental time determination. That is, thepure concepts are correlated with distinct temporal structures or relationshipstemporal images if

you like.14 (p9)

Unfortunately, when it comes time to spell out the details of how images, pure shapes in space, or

transcendental time determinations are produced from concepts via schemata Kant waves his hands

and mentions something about the Schematism being a hidden art in the depths of the human soul

(A141/B181). (p11)

In the Transcendental Deduction Kant believes he has shown that a consciousness cannot be

conscious of a representation unless that representation is uni edthat is, the representation is onefi

organized unit. It cannot be an14 KANT ON CAUSATION

unorganized set of various unconnected parts. Furthermore, Kant argues that a representation must

get its unity from the understanding because there is no combination in representations apart from

the understanding.17

This is the problem, the hiatus irrationalis, that Kant inherits. He seeks to bridge it

through a series of categories (Schematismus), from human intuition to the Verstand to

Pure Reason, that seek to govern apodictically the Object through the a priori synthetic

judgements that must culminate in the unconditionality of Pure Reason because aphenomenon cannot explain a sequence of phenomena, however long, and must


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therefore be toto genere different from that causally necessary sequence: it must be

unconditioned and of a different order from both the Dinge an sich and the world of

possible experience or perception. Tsanoff (p44):The unconditioned is unthinkable; and Kant himself, of course,

does not claim objective validity for the conception. He does,

however, regard the demand of reason for the unconditioned as

a regulative principle, "subjectively necessary. "^

In the third Critique Kant stresses the difference between what is required for nature and what is

required for an o rd e r of nature. Those things required for nature are constitutive while those things

required to produce an order of nature will be regulative. The constitutive things are again categories and

principlesthings that are required for the possibility of experience. Kant often calls these universal

[allgemeiner] laws of nature. In addition to this, understanding develops rules for explaining particular

aspects of nature.20 KANT ON CAUSATION

For example, one of the rules from the discussion on the paths of comets above: planets have circular

orbits. These rules are ones we come to know through experience, but because of a further requirement,

understanding must think these rules as laws (i.e., as necessary).26This further requirement is that

understanding also requires a certain order of nature in its particular rules27 (CJ,184).(Bayne, K.on

Causation.)As we saw back in chapter 1, a regulative principle is not a principle of the possibility of experience

and the empirical cognition of objects of sense, consequently not a principle of understanding

(A509/B537). Whereas a constitutive principle of understanding deals with the requirements for the

possibility of experience, a regulative principle of reason deals with only the unique way in which we

must proceed in the re ection aboutfl the objects of nature with the intention of representing a

thoroughgoing159 Conclusion

connected experience (CJ, 184).

Tsanoff doubts the validity of the distinction:It is unfortunate, though not difficult to explain, that Schopenhauer,

whose keen criticism of the doctrine of the categories had

disclosed so many of its flaws, should have overlooked one ofKant's most questionable distinctions, namely, that which hemakes between 'constitutive' and 'regulative' principles. This




of thought, which condition the possibility of all experience and

'constitute' its organization; and (b) the rational assumptions

which, while not determining the actual form of experience,

serve to rationalize the moral order and the aesthetic judgment.


42 SCHOPENHAUER'S CRITICISM OF KANT.categories of the Understanding, which Kant calls 'constitutive,'

and the teleological categories, the postulates of Practical Reasonand of the Esthetic Judgment, which he regards as 'regulative.'^

The incompatibility of this hard and fast distinction with any

interpretation of experience which attempts to do justice to its

organic character is amply illustrated in Kant's own technical


'regulative,' because not 'constitutive' of experience mechanicallyconsidered. But are the mechanical {i. e., 'constitutive')




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that negates the immanent unity of experience, which

is the fundamental postulate of the Critical philosophy.

[Note that grosso modo equilibrium is regarded by Mises as a regulative principle todeduce a priori human action a category or form of action. Hayek would see it as

constitutive a heuristic goal or guide for action.]

But here Kant has gone too far and too fast in at least two respects: the firstis that a priori

synthetic judgements do not pertain to the physical world, to causation, but rather to

logico-mathematical id-entities that remain firmly in the domain of reason, not in themechanical one of objects however much these judgements might arise only with

experience.

Kant is committed to holding that through conceptual analysis alone it is not possible to prove the

causal principle. According to Kant, the causal principle although a priori is synthetic not analytic.

Something more than the analysis of concepts is required for the proof of a synthetic judgment.

According to Hume, if the causal principle is not a relation of ideas, then it must be a matter of fact.

According to Kant if the causal principle is not analytic, then it must be synthetic. For a synthetic claim

the concept of the predicate is not contained within the concept of the subject. That is to say, concept

of the predicate extends (goes beyond) the concept of the subject. Whether or not the concept of the

predicate is rightly applied to the concept of the subject cannot be determined by simply examining the

content of either or both of the two concepts. Since the correctness of a synthetic judgment cannot

be determined solely by the content of one or both of the two concepts, something else is required for

determining correctness. In order to prove a synthetic claim, we need some third thing to test our

claim against. Typically, we need some intuition in which the subject and the predicate are connected

as claimed.(Bayne, p32)

But then this something more, this experience must mean being tout court,intuition, and not just conscious perception. In other words, a priori synthetic

judgements alone contain already all the elements of what Kant himself styled as theGap (Forster), the hiatus irrationalis, the chasm between Subject and Object, being-in-itself and for-itself (consciousness). We need not go further into Naturgesetz, the

laws of physics to find this hiatus. All the bridges or projections in the world will

not help us trans-port ourselves, will allow this Transition (Ubergang) from the sphereof immanence to that of trans-scendence, from the Object to the Subject and vice

versa. Kants formalistic method, which in the end boils down to Cartesian rationalism,

simply will not do. Tsanoff:Kant says: "As in this way everything is arranged step by step

in the understanding, inasmuch as we begin with judging problematically,

then proceed to an assertory acceptation, and finallymaintain our proposition as inseparably united with the understanding,

that is as necessary and apodictic, we may be allowed

to call these three functions of modality so many varieties or

momenta of thought."^ The three characteristic stages in the

logical progression might well indicate three points of view in the

self-organization of experience, and in this sense Kant may be

justified in distinguishing three categories of Modality. Never

40 SCHOPENHAUER'S CRITICISM OF KANT.theless Kant's distinctions are too sharp and abstract: while he

suggests a process of logical development in the passage just


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quoted, he fails to explain the matter adequately and clearly to

emphasize the essential interdependence of these 'momenta of

thought,' which involve each other in the systematic organization

of experience.^

(Of course, that is Hegels starting point.) The second difficulty follows from the first,because if logico-mathematical id-entities are attributed to an unconditioned purereason rather than confined to instrumentality, then we introduce a formalistic

distinction between Vernunft and its concepts and Verstand as the intuitive unity of

experience and by so doing we introduce a regulative principle that smacks of

teleology. For Schopenhauer, Vernunft is simply the ability to connect ideas or concepts,not a higher faculty distinct from Verstand. It follows that causality is essentially

subjective and the role of science is simply to organize perception in a predictable

formula.

Contingency is relative, just as necessity is relative, and for

the same reason. Every thing, every event in the actual world"is always at once necessary and contingent; necessary in relation

to the one condition which is its cause; contingent in relation to

everything else."^ The absolutely contingent would be something

out of all relation: a thought as meaningless, Schopenhauer

insists, as the absolutely necessary, dependent upon nothing elsein particular. In both necessity and contingency the mind turns

PRINCIPLES OF ORGANIZATION IN EXPERIENCE. 39

back in search of explanation ; the necessary and the contingent

thus mean merely the relevant and the irrelevant in the process

of organization.

And this is what prompts Schop. to abolish the Kantian separation of Subject and Object

implicit in the distinction of bloss Erscheinung and Ding an sich. There are no mereappearances (bloss Erscheinungen), but rather different stimuli that constitute the

Vorstellungen connected by the Understanding-Reason esse est percipi in this sense;

existence and perceptibility are convertible terms (p4). It is no longer a question of

knowing the Vorstellungen, but of intuiting their being, because the knowing is intheir immediate perception and a priori knowledge of causality (Sufficient Reason).

Tsanoff:Kant's argument is summarized by Schopenhauer as follows: "If the conditionedis given, the totality of its conditions must also be given, and

therefore also the unconditioned, through which alone that totality

becomes complete. "^ But, Schopenhauer argues, this 'totality

of the conditions of everything conditioned' is contained in its

nearest ground or reason from which it directly proceeds, andwhich is only thus a sufficient reason or ground.* In the alternating

series of conditioned and conditioning states, "as each

link is laid aside the chain is broken, and the claim of the principleof sufficient reason entirely satisfied, it arises anew because the

condition becomes the conditioned."^ This is the actual modus

43


operandi of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. "Only through

an arbitrary abstraction," Schopenhauer says, "is a series of


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causes and effects regarded as a series of causes alone, which

exists merely on account of the last effect, and is therefore

demanded as its sufficient reason."^

Sufficient Reason defined by Kelly (Kants Ph. As Rectified By Schop.):CHAPTER VI

Schopenhauer's principle of the sufficient ground

The definition of this Principle is :" Nihil est

sine ratione cur potius sit quam non sit." There

is nothing without a ground for its being so.

AS RECTIFIED BY SCHOPENHAUER 31

The Root of this Principle

Our cognitive consciousness, appearing as outer

and inner sensibility (receptivity), intelligence,

and reason, is divided into subject and object, and

contains nothing more. To say that a thing is

an object of the subject^ means that it is ourpresentation, and that all our presentations

are objects of the subject. It will be seen

that all our presentations are connected together

by certain laws, which, so far as the form

is concerned, are a priori determinable, and that,

in consequence of this connection, nothing existing

separately and detached from the others can

become an object for us. This connection iswhat the Principle of the sufficient Ground in

its generality expresses, and assumes a different

form for the different classes of objects without

altering its general character. The word " root"

is used to indicate the relations that underlie

each class. It must be understood, however,

that there are not four distinct roots for the

four different classes of objects, but that thereis a common root manifesting itself in four

different forms. In other words, the root is

a fourfold one.

Sch. relegates reason to the sphere of immanence quite simply by abolishing the

dualism of Erscheinungen and Dinge an sich, by mixing the two together into a

Doppelcharakter (the object implies the subject implies the object) that makes theErscheinungen immediately ordered by the Verstand/Vernunft, without the need to

postulate a Gap between Subject and Object and between Verstand and Vernunft that

needs to be bridged. Tschauschoff (p26):

Die objektive Anschauung ist nach Schopenhauer durch und durcheine kausale Erkenntnis, d. h. eine Verstandeserkenntnis oder, wieer sich anders ausdrckt, die ganze Wirklichkeit ist fr den Verstand,durch den Verstand, im Verstnde" (W.a.W.u. V. 4. S.43).

Thus, for Schopenhauer, the distinction between Verstand as the moment of unifying

perception, as intuition, and Vernunft as the awareness of this ability (a kind of


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consciousness-in-itself and for-itself) simply evaporates. There is no need for this object

of experience to stand as an obscure veil between the Vernunft/Wille and the

perception of causality, the faculty of experience or intuition. (Tsanoff, pp20-2, butgood summary on pp23ff.)

Furthermore, there is also no need to distinguish between the perception of causalevents and their conceptualization by the Verstand because this is assumed to be

immediate in the unity or equi-valence or interchangeability or conversion

(WWV, p4) of esse and percipi.

Kants impossible task lay in his original rationalist assumption that perception of

Erscheinungen (appearances/phenomena) must be ordered rationally and already

transcendentally by an entity that he will ultimately call Pure Reason though he triesto dis-guise this with a whole chain of intermediate categories and faculties (Intuition,

Verstand).For better or worse, when we consider the meaning of the phrase object of representations in

the transcendental sense we will have to focus on representations. For transcendentally speaking an

object is no thing in itself, but rather only an appearance, i.e., representation (A191/B236).If this is true, then how can objects, which are themselves representations, be that which

ensures that our cognitions are not haphazardly or arbitrarily determined (A104). Kantsansweris that in

orderfor representationsto be objectsin this sensethey themselvesmustnot be associatedin a haphazardor

arbitraryway. That is, the representationsmustthemselvesbe connectedaccording to rules. In other

words, representations, in so far as they are in these relations (in space and time) connected and

determinable according to the rules of the unity of experience are called objects. (A494/522) (Bayne,

p109)

Now admittedly one can call everything, and even every representation, in so far as one is conscious

of it, an object, but what meaning this word has with regard to appearances, not in so far as they (as

representations) are objects, but rather only in so far as they signify an object, is a matter for deeper

investigation. (A18990/B23435) (Kant quoted in Bayne, p108)

The circularity in Kants reasoning or Transcendental Deduction from objects to

representations subject to rules is evident because the rules themselves will be whatturns representations into objects! Bayne cannot escape the difficulty:

Kants point is straightforward. The object is that which grounds the objectivity of cognition. If I take

some set of my representations to have an object, then I represent my cognition in this case as having

been constrained by the features of the object.1 (p109).

But the ineluctable question remains: how can representations themselves be constrained

by the features of the object? Clearly, at all times Kant is positing a Realitat, a solid

reality of Dinge an sich that lies behind or beneath the ordered consciousness ofthe Subject from Intuition all the way to Pure Reason. By so doing, Kant is also then

presupposing not only the transcendental a priori character of experience, but also the

ability of pure reason to lend a systemic order to the individual, separate, empiricallydis-covered laws of physics: there must be something like an a priori elementary

system of the moving forces of matter if physics is to be possible as a systematic

science, (Forster, Kants Final Synthesis, p11).


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Earlier, in the KdU, Kant had observed that Nature, for the sake of judgement, specifies

its universal laws to empirical ones according to the form of a logical system, (in

Forster, KsFS, p6). And in the Preface to the 2nd edn of the KRV there is the famousreference to giving back to nature what we have found empirically in it: in other words,

the discovery of regularities in nature from the constitutive principles must then

correspond to a unity of reflective judgement or regulative principles that givessystematicity to the natural laws themselves (yet another bolster to Kants mythical

architectural symmetry derided by Schop., alles gute sind drei). Shortly before this

formulation, Kant describes Galileos experiments (ball and slide) virtually as a Machianthought-experiment, that is an empirical demonstration (that which reason must seek

in nature, not fictitiously ascribe to it [Forster, p11]) of regularities or laws that have

already been projected by reason and regulative principles. The OpPost was intended to

supply the Transition (Ubergang), the bridge or projectio per hiatus irrationalembetween observation and generalization, between perception and concepts.

Oftentimes when Kant discusses rules, he writes of them as being the means by which unity is

produced in something. For example, when Kant is comparing reason(Vernunft) with

understanding(Verstand) he states that the understanding may be a faculty[Vermgen] of the unityof appearances by means of rules, so reason is the faculty[Vermgen] of the unity of the rules of

understanding under principles. (A302/B359) (Bayne, p108).

The possibility of experience is thus that which gives all our cognitions

a priori objective reality. Now experience is founded on the synthetic

unity of appearances, i.e., on a synthesis according to concepts of the object of appearances in general,

without which it would not even be cognition, but only a rhapsody of perceptions that would not fit to-

gether in any context according to rules of a thoroughly connected (possible) consciousness, consequentlyit would also not fit into the transcendental and necessary unity of apperception. Experience thus has

principles of its form a priori lying at the foundation, namely, general rules of the unity in the synthesis of

appearances. (A15657/ B19596) (Bayne, p108).

[Kant and Judgement]

Schopenhauer does away with the Ubergang altogether. Instead he replaces Kants

dualism of noumena/phenomena, of subject/object, of perception/concept, ofVerstand/Vernunft with the unity of the Vorstellung, which already encapsulates the

logical interdependence of subject and object. Thus the Erscheinungen occasioning

Vorstellungen are sui generis and immediately causally connected qua Vorstellungen tothe Verstand and thence to the Vernunft. There is no mediation between these

categories; no obscure veil separates experience from Realitat which now becomes

all active as Wirklichkeit/Actuality. Tschauschoff again (p27):Dieser Prozess der Objektivation, den der Verstand an denEmpfindungen vollzieht, die uns durch die Sinne zugefhrt werden,ist kein bewusst reflektierender, sondern ein intuitiver, unbewussterProzess. Im Anschluss daran unterscheidet Schopenhauer eine intuitiveund eine diskursive Erkenntnis.

And Tsanoff:


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This is the way Schopenhauer reads his Kant. The Critique

of Pure Reason, he thinks, treats experience as the result of the

conceptualizing of the perceptual material, by which process this

material of sensation first becomes organized and real. Now he

finds perception in no need of such conceptual transformation,for it possesses in itself all the concrete reality that is possible

in experience. Thinking owes its whole significance to the perceptualsource from which it arises through abstraction. " If we

hold firmly to this, the inadmissibleness of the assumption becomes

evident that the perception of things only obtains reality

and becomes experience through the thought of these very things

18SCHOPENHAUER'S CRITICISM OF KANT.

applying its twelve categories. Rather in perception itself theempirical reality, and consequently experience, is already

given; but the perception itself can only come into existence

by the application to sensation of the knowledge of the

causal nexus, which is the one function of the understanding.

Perception is accordingly in reality intellectual, which is just

what Kant denies."^

It follows that the Dinge an sich cannot consist of objects or a Realitat that lie

behind or beneath or at the end as a quaestio occulta (or causa finalis) of experience.

The Dinge an sich must be an entity toto genere separate and different from the realm ofexperience and reason, from perception and conception, which are entangled in the Veil

of Maya. (Hegel will have a different answer.)

It is in positing this distance between the thing-in-itself and the rational a priori

awareness of it in Pure Reason a gap that no Schematismus or Ubergang can bridge

- that Kant (Tsanoff, p18) prepares the ground for Schopenhauerian pessimism and theunfoundedness of the world of possible experience (Kant) or the World of

Vorstellungen (illusionism or mysticism in Schop.) in that Practical Reason cannot be

the necessary implication of the unconditioned coming from the perception andconception of the conditioned (Tsanoff, p38), and consequently it too is conditioned

by the veil of Maya or the wheel of life. Only the Will can comprehend/envelop the

World of Vorstellungen and thus become the ultimate Ding an sich the obverse and

the ground of the world of immediate perception. Like Janus again, Will enters whereVorstellungen exit and it exits where they enter. But even Heidegger attacks Kant on the

autonomy of Reason in its metaphysical moment and also as Will subject to formal

rational and logical Imperatives in its ethical aspect.

Above all, Sch. lays the foundations of Machism (Tsanoff, p26). (Tsanoff proceeds,

pp26ff, to argue why the two moments of reason need to be distinguished categoricallyin that consciousness-in-itself already contains the for-itself but as a separate moment

[Kants momenta of thought mentioned on p40] that goes beyond the perception and

becomes aware of the conceptualized form of perception itself inevitably, he

quotes Hegel, p28. Schopenhauer is identified thus as the real prophet of theunderstanding, as does Hegel, p40.)


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Because Reason is not separable from the Understanding, even the Will in its

objectification as body, though not in its character as the objectification of the Ding an

sich, is part of the causality it understands so that the Will-as-body is immersed inthe World and is subject to its causation, to the Law of Sufficient Reason, like any

Vorstellung.

Body as Objectified Will

Schop.s system is based entirely on the critique of Kants transcendental idealism. What

Kant transcended was more than Humes skepticism; it also seeks to supplant the

British utilitarian empiricism that had portrayed human beings as individuals in

isolation from and in competition with one another. Kant sought to place the Subject atthe centre of a universe that was more than mechanical or subjective, one that was also

ethical. But the result of the categorical ascension from constitutive to reflective

principles was the apotheosis not so much of Reason, of the Ratio-Ordo, but rather of its

freedom from contingency, and therefore of its existential manifestation as willsubject to the Naturgesetz and yet restrained only by formalistic ethical laws derived

from its rational introspection in accordance with rules.

The rules therefore could acquire the requisite universality only if they could

encompass the thing in itself because so long as this remained out of the reach ofeither Reason or intuition or perception the very necessity of a priori judgements and of

causality could not be founded. Schop.s critique marks the reappropriation of the

object by the subject through the sheer renunciation of the substantive rationality of

human knowledge. Schop. accepts the formality of human experience, its introspectiveconventionality by re-dimensioning the claims of Reason, indeed by reducing it to a

mere intellectual mechanism, a function whose truth can be only formal and

instrumental, always contingent and limited to the neighbourhood of sufficientreason.

The very limitation of reason, its inability to prove or think its ultimate reality isturned by Schop. into the freedom of immersion in existence. His theory of reality

can then admit only a nihilistic Will that cannot derive any reflective or practical

guidance from reason, which indeed is now confined to the mechanical and instrumental

realm of Wirklichkeit or action to the sphere of immanence on the same plane asthe Verstand.

Only in the absolutisation of reason, in its moment as consciousness for itself, canreason become aware of its being something else, of its being immersed in Being - but

still subject to it, consciousness only of its being objectification of the Ding an sich! -

and therefore of its existence as Will, as will to life whose objectification is thebody. We have now two new themes, that of will and that of Entwicklung, that will

await the mediation of Darwin to become the Nietzschean Wille zur Macht (Simmel).


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In light of the influence on Mach attributed to Berkeley, it is important to stress the

instructive and paramount differences between the positions of British empiricism (to

which Berkeley belongs despite the subjective idealist sobriquet) and Schop.s critiqueof Kant in paving the road to Machism. The distinction lies in the fact that British

empiricism from Hobbes to Hume involves a subjectivism of both experience and

values (also based on experience) that does not theorise the relationship of Subject toObject in its practical ethical and political dimension. The empiricist perspective

is entirely within the world of human perception; it does not seek to pose the problem

of the thing in itself even when, as in Berkeley, it denies its content as matter.British empiricism is profoundly subjective, its world view is cinematic or

imagistic or pictographic and delivers a passive, inert, contemplative Subject more

interested in the theory of knowledge (how we learn things) than in the theory of reality

(what things are, in themselves [an sich] and fur uns).

Empiricism is a form of pragmatism and this is how it will be handed down to Mach.

But not without the all-important mediation of Kant and Schop., after which it will

become not just a Weltanschauung but rather a Lebensphilosophie. That is why Schop.could rightly claim that Kants grosste Verdienst was to distinguish between

Erscheinungen and Dinge an sich because the British empiricists never inquired into orenquired about the thing itself and the active or practical role of the Subject in the

world. For Kant as well as for Schop., the world will no longer be something to be

interpreted, to be contemplated or observed from without; rather it will be aWirklichkeit that encompasses the Ich (the I think) as also an I will whether in its

formalistic Kantian or in its negative Schopenhauerian or in its dialectical Hegelian

directions. Reason is no longer a receptive or reflective entity: it now yields, whether

in its formal or dialectic or in its negative (anti-)dialectic guise, a Will that is eitherfree or from which the Subject has to be freed a free will that is either a freedom

to will or a will to freedom, and then a Pouvoir-Vouloir or a Vouloir-Pouvoir.

A World separates the truth of the empiricists and the truth of the post-Kantians

contemplative the former (a stable, immutable adaequatio mentis et rei that challenges the

Newtonian mechanistic vision of reality [Berkeley, Hume] and even of self-identity[Hume]) and the activist notion of truth canvassed by the latter (cf. the Cassirer-

Heidegger diatribe over precisely this aspect, with the Neo-Kantians taking the extreme

formalist and contemplative version of Kants meta-physics; see also Heidegger on Das

Wesen der Wahrheit and Simmels scathing review of Schopenhauers Metaphysikdes Willens, ch.2), where truth becomes an Entwicklungsprozess in the historial

being of Dasein. By separating Erscheinungen and Dinge an sich, Kant is opening up

the entire question of how truth is more than the simple correspondence oradaequatio of the intuition (intellectus) with the thing (res), but rather the

Weltvernunft, the transcendental process of regulating the intellect to the thing.

Machism lies at the crossroads of the discovery of this processuality, of not moving

beyond the instrumentality of reason (as equal to Verstand in its mechanical character)

whereby not only the vision of the world (Weltanschauung) becomes subjective, but

also its entire unfolding, its entire actuality or action or Wirklichkeit as against


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Realitat. The empiricists had a subjective perspective on what they considered to be

objective truth, even in the skeptical Humean version. But Machism replaces this

truth with sheer functionality through the critique of Kant and Kants critique ofHume although this fact will be made explicit by Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, not by

Schop. or Mach. (Cf. Simmel on Relativitat and Traum, pp24-36.)

Thus, Schop.s empiricism becomes more than materialistic or mechanical: it

becomes instrumental, neutral from a meta-physical viewpoint indeed, it

becomes anti-metaphysical and scientific in its instrumentality (the body isobjectified Will). That is why Berkeleys insight that the world is my idea cannot be

carried deeper than its vague universal tone to the particulars of Kants analysis

(WWV, pxxv and p4). Similarly, Humes skepticism is derived from the inability of

experience understood uncritically as evident to yield the principle of causationor sufficient reason, whereas Schop. makes it the very foundation of experience. For

Hume, then, the world exists independently of the idea (Vorstellung) and refers us

back to those objects that the subject cannot com-prehend.

Hence, realism and idealism face dogmatism and skepticism in an endless squabble over

the nature of reality and knowledge (WWV, pp15-6). Hobbes and Hume remain in arealistic world where objects make impressions on minds or ideas need to be

objectified in God (Berkeley, discussed on p4). This is still a Newtonian world; their

world and their utility are commensurable through a commonality of experienceand possessive individualism respectively.

Mach preserves the validity of Newtons mechanics but from a radically different

epistemological perspective that removes the dualism of mind and matter co-ordinated by a universal truth (however hard to detect, as in Hume), and resolves it in

the phenomenology of Will an extreme subjectivism that does not preserve

egoism and utility as an inter-subjective entity, an inter-esse of sorts that liesaccanto allaffermazione del sistema newtoniano (Cacciari, Krisis, p.31, see pp.29ff).

Thus, Classical Political Economy was founded inevitably on the labour theory ofvalue that even Smith (the father of GE, Arrow-Hahn) could not avoid as the

matter/substance, the substratum or Kantian ether of economic enquiry. With

Machism and the neoclassics, the individual becomes a bottomless pit or black hole of

utility/will in which truth is only an instrument and no common-ality or inter-esse is epistemologically possible. I neoclassici definiscono un sistema generale

dequilibrio [di mercato] che parte dalla individualitaeconomica concreta e ne segue

lo sviluppo fino alla costituzione di un sistema che non e se non lincontro, empirico,impotente a operare qualsiasi metamorfosi, tra gli interessi specifici di ogni

individualita (Cacciari, p29) interests that will remain inscrutable and insubstantial

except as observable relative prices. How to reconcile or co-ordinate these interestswill become the principal problem of economics either providentially (Smith) or

abstractly (GE) or a priori (Misesian praxeology, game theory, rational expectations) or

technically-empirically in GE framework (Hayek-Robbins science of choice) or


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through evolutionary institutional factors (immanent, in Hayek and NIE or

transcendental, in Schump and innovation).

[Matters of interest: Hobbes finds the volitional source of the contractual or conventional

basis of the status civilis in the ultima ratio of the self-preservation of self-interested

individuals: the fear of death leads to the agreement to alienate individualindependence which never existed in the status naturae. The state of nature is a state of

civil war by definition so it is only a hypothetical state that justifies or rationalizes the

civil state. Loasby offers the same self-preservation arising from the division of labouras a founding principle for co-ordination. But the two notions are very different.

Exchange is a dira necessitas only if one presupposes individual labours, instead of

social labour, which is historically and anthropologically the reality. In that case there

is no exchange in the sense intended by Smith. So we are still in need for a reason forco-ordination. Moreover, even if one allows the dira necessitas of exchange, it still does

not lead to co-ordination because there is no alienation of individual freedom to a

sovereign central market authority.

The other matter is Lowiths discussion of the Zeitgeist as a possible reference or link to

Simmels Entwicklung in his work on Schop. and Nietzsche.]

Even Schop.s pessimism, easily reminiscent of Hobbess but infinitely more complex in

its trans-formation of the Subject into a Will, goes well beyond the Vorstellungen to theactive deontological exhortation of the A-skesis, piercing the Veil of Maya,

renouncing the World and the Will itself to achieve a unity with reality, a Nirvana

that, in effect (as Cacciari brilliantly explains), only serves to re-presentthe World the

renunciation of the Vor-stellungen leads us back to the Dar-stellung of the World! (Thisis the impasse confronted by Nietzsche with the Ubermensch.)

As we have seen, Vernunft and Verstand are merely mechanical properties ofimmediate perception (p199)

Thus knowledge generally, rational as well as merely sensuous, proceeds originally fromthe will itself, belongs to the inner being of the higher grades of its objectification as amere mechane, a means of supporting the individual and the species, just like any organ of

the body.Originally destined for the service of the will for theaccomplishment of its aims, it remains almost throughoutentirely subjected to its service: it is so in all brutes andin almost all men.

But if immediate perception has an intuitive dimension that links the Vorstellungen

causally by virtue of the principle of sufficient reason, then the deontological status ofthe entity, the awareness that perceives even the body as its objectification this

entity must have certain characteristics: - first, it is not a practical entity in the

ethical-moral Kantian sense of practical reason; secondly, it must be aware of itself only

in its totality, be one (p166), have no multiplicity (p166 and169, also Kant-Platosection, pp221-7) but not as an id-entity or subject or self or forma substantialis.


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In other words, this ultimate entity is a qualitas occulta for which the world is my

Vorstellung, where my refers to this qualitas occulta which, therefore and in turn,

must be the thing in itself of which no Vorstellung can be formed and no aetiologycan be given (p158 and p176) except in its manifestations, which are the cause of the

Vorstellungen, but whose cause in turn, that is, the cause of the wills manifestation

or objectification as Vorstellung, cannot be known by the Vernunft/Verstand but can beintuited in its totality as a Will, as a qualitas occulta, as the cause of the

Vorstellungen, and therefore as thing in itself that is groundless.

As a qualitas occulta, this entity without id-entity/self-hood, conscious of its being

but not of its substance or whatness or quidditas or forma substantialis (p162), is

the awareness of the totality of causes and effects that are the object of the

Vorstellungen without which the object would have no being, and whose being isthis knowing on the part of the Vernunft/Verstand (p166). It is the objectification of

the thing-in-itself the will (p227) This entity therefore has a principium

individuationis, not an identity or self-consciousness; it is not a multiplicity (p226-7).

It has a source but has no cause and no place it is indivisible or in-dividual andethereal in the sense of in-substantial and therefore not a meta-physical entity. But

it is a force of nature: It acts, it decides but without a particular reason, with-outexplanation (Simmel, Energie, p36) like Spinozas stone in mid-air (p164) it thinks

it is free, and yet it is truly free even as it obeys all the laws of nature in its

objectification as Vorstellung (p162 and 174-5, 183, p226-7) because its only self-awareness is as a motivation (Motif) or an even deeper character (p164 and 180)

that is original (source, fons et origo) yet in-explicable, un-founded. Schop. says

that it is groundless (p170).

Unlike Kant, therefore, it is not the regulative principle of pure reason that necessitates

its self-consciousness as freedom of the will under the rules of pure reason itself in its

moment as practical reason. No such ethical-rational formalism is allowed, no Ratio-Ordo lies behind the appearance of the World because the World is already the

Vorstellung which is the manifestation, not of a Realitat, but rather of a Wirklichkeit,

an actuality that is constituted by the Will itself as its objectification. This is how thephilosophia perennis is side-lined, circum-vented. The Will is a force of nature that

com-prehends, envelops itself, an extrinsic-ation that is not a Fichtean Ich or Hegelian

Idea or indeed a Kantian dialectic of transcendental idealism whereby the introspective

discovery of a priori judgement is proof of the existence of pure reason in itsregulative, practical-volitional aspect. Instead, Vernunft/Verstand itself is a

mechanical adaptation of the Will from its elemental state (grade, below) to its

higher manifestations (grades) or teleology in its pursuit of life.

And if this will is in-divisible, irrepressible, universal and insatiable (Simmel calls it

Energie, p36) in its manifestations as Vorstellungen, as the world, then its singularmanifestations must express a conflict or strife or polarity (Yin and Yang,

p187) that results in higher manifestations or adaptations of the Will through the

subduing assimilations of lower manifestations or adaptations (p190 circa), spurring

each being to the idealof beauty in its species (p191).


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Thus everywhere in nature we see strife, conflict, and alternation of victory, and in it we shallcome to recognise more distinctly that variance with itself which is essential to the will. Everygrade of the objectification of will fights for the matter, the space, and the time of the others.The permanent matter must constantly change its form; for under the guidance of causality,mechanical, physical, chemical, and organic phenomena, eagerly striving to appear, wrest the

matter from each other, for each desires to reveal its own Idea. This strife may be followedthrough the whole of nature; indeed nature exists only through it :

192 THE WORLD AS WILL. bk. ii.Yet this strife itself is only the revelation of that variance with itself which is essential tothe will. This universal conflict becomes most distinctly visible in the animal kingdom. Foranimals have the whole of the vegetable kingdom for their food, and even within the animalkingdom every beast is the prey and the food of another; that is, the matter in which its Ideaexpresses itself must yield itself to the expression of another Idea, for each animal can onlymaintain its existence by the constant destruction of some other. Thus the will to live everywherepreys upon itself, and in different forms is its own nourishment, till finally the human race,because it subdues all the others, regards nature as a manufactory for its use.Yet even thehuman race, as we shall see in the Fourth Book, reveals in itself with most terribledistinctness this conflict, this variance with itself of the will, and we find homo hominilupus.

Here, endlich, we have the apotheosis of vitalism, the will to life, as strife leads toVernunft in a pyramidal metamorphosis of adaptations (p209) that can be called

teleology (pp201 ff) the Entwicklung Simmel talks about that leads from Hobbes to

Nietzsche.

It is this sense-lessness of the will, this lack of ultima ratio, except as qualitas occulta,that displays the vanity of the world, the Veil of Maya the futility of all attainments and

satisfaction: the satisfaction of a wish is the annihilation of that wish, the ultimate proof

of the nothingness of the wish itself, its evanescence (p253). Hence, therenunciation of the will as a force, the negation of its strife or suffering endless

and vain is the identification of the pure subject of the will with the World itself

through contemplation, which allows the consciousness of the will achieved through

the mechanical reflection of reason to detach itself from its bondage, from thenecessity (principle of sufficient reason) of its objectifications.

Science itself is mere instrumentality, systematic ordering of the World of Vorstellungen it is immanence that cannot penetrate the Dinge an sich; science cannot transcend these

manifestations of the will (p229). Only by sublimating the strife or suffering of the

will to live through Art and contemplation of the world (p229, 240), which is the

admiration of the Idea, can the pure subject become non-will. (We have here the Janus-faced character of the attainment-exit of Nirvana-equilibrium something Myrdal grossly

miscomprehends as meaningless and without content! Just as Carnap dispatches

Heideggers metaphysics as meaningless.)

Yet we shall see in the Third Bookhow in certain individual men knowledge can deliveritself from this bondage, throw off its yoke, and, free from


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all the aims of will, exist purely for itself, simply as aclear mirror of the world, which is the source ofart.Finally, in the Fourth Book, we shall see how, if thiskind of knowledge reacts on the will, it can bring aboutself-surrender, i.e., resignation, which is the final goal, andindeed the inmost nature of all virtue and holiness, andis deliverance from the world. (p199)

Simmel catches this Doppelcharakter of the Will (operari): wirZuschauer u. Akteure,

Geschaffene u. Schaffende sind, p31, foreshadowing Nietzsches expression diegeschaffene Menschen (in HATH1 rePoets). There are pantheisticand monistic

and mystic tones (Simmel, p28, p38, p62-3) as well as Freudian ones (the fragmentation

of the Subject/Self [p54], sublimation) and Darwinian/vitalist (adaptation of the willin its con-ditioned aspect, p57) that lead to insoluble antinomies (undifferentiated

unity of will against its multiple manifestations, self-lessness of will against awareness

both of its being and of its mechanical aspect as Verstand, the volitional unity of willand polarity of the strife [Kampf] for Life, posed by what obstacle or opposition?

pp58 ff; hence, the purpose-lessness of the Will [Zwecklosigkeit p68] which, on the

other hand, supports the Wertlosigkeit of the world and the preponderance of Leidover Lust because the attainment of pleasure/wish nullifies its object and defeats the

purpose).

Schop. intimates instead from the outset that ethics must be derived from metaphysics, as

Kant prescribed (Met.d.Sittens). The Grundprobleme der Ethik opens with the Machiavelli-

Hobbesian distinction between what men ought to do and what they actually (wirklich) do.

The inability of Kant to bridge the gap between the Ding an sich and Pure Reason, indeed the

very formal purity of that Reason that could found its essence only upon the postulate of an all-encompassing transcendental Freedom at the end of the causal chain immanent to human

intuition and the Verstand subject to rules this very gap or distinction (Unterschied) that

Schop. recognized as Kants greatest contribution to metaphysics can be bridged only by the

force (a fortiori) of human experience - the principle of sufficient reason, according to which

the fact that something exists is the very ground or reason for its existence.

The chain of causality, therefore, cannot be abstracted from into a false infinity at the end of

which there must be a transcendental substance or category that can com-prehend it as its

op-posite (ob-ject or Gegen-stand) the freedom and reason upon which Kant wishes to

erect or found both Pure Reason as the rational entity and Practical Reason as the ethicalmoment of Pure Reason whereby the free will is governed by rational rules that lead to

the Categorical Imperative. To indulge in such abstraction is to posit unjustifiably the veryconclusion that we are seeking to prove. Not only is the Categorical Imperative nowhere to be

seen empirically, in reality; but also nowhere is it written: it is a delusion both empirically in

terms of observable human nature and formally in terms of the internal consistency of its ethical

content or Diktats. Kantian Practical Reason is initially the offspring of the freedom of the

will, but soon under the regulative principle of Pure Reason, of a Logic that Schop. shows is

only instrumental and phenomenic - that is belongs only to the Verstand/Vernunft as a

mechanical application of formal reasoning to the world as Vorstellung- pretends to

arrogate to itself the right to dictate categorical imperatives that rule the conduct of the will!


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For Schop., this is the height of imposture, the sublime Ohnmacht of the Ratio-Ordo the impotent

pretence of moral Theology.

Critique of Kant with Hegel in mind (essays rejected because of invective).

Kantian formalism rejected. Separation of noumena and phenomena already destroys the basis for

formalist ethics. Benthamite utilitarianism also because it reconciles individual wills so that

labour is seen as source of synthesis-osmosis-value through constructive character. Competition

has only a distributive role in the market mechanism.

The Will is an operari, striving in the world of other manifestations of will, adapting to this

world and therefore evolving. Labour therefore cannot amount to creation of utility but to its

use: labour/operari consumes the world in search of satisfaction. The evanescence of

the world means that the drive (Trieb) of the Will toward satisfaction defeats itself. That is the

source of pain (Leid) countering the search for Pleasure (Lust).

Entsagung is the intellectual awareness of the Verstand/Vernunft to refrain and restrain the Willfrom seeking Lust, the utility of the world.. Hence dualism of satisfaction/Nirvana (Robbins,

Nirvana is satisfaction of all needs).

It is of vital importance that Entsagung is the culmination of an intellectual effort to masterthe will. In this role, the intellect is a mechane a means for directing the otherwise blind

drive of the will it is the equivalent of the Kantian concepts emanating from Pure Reason

even in its Practical moment, and of the Freudian superego or ego where the Will is the Es/Id.

Phenomenology instead sought to return to Cartesian transcendence by decreeingapodictic rules of thought determined a priori. And the Neo-Kantians sought to

circumvent Kantian agnosticism through the autonomy and universality of logic and

judgements, including ethical maxims.

In each of these cases it was the Ding-an-sich that was eliminated from the field of

enquiry so that what were once appearances or phenomena came now to represent

(Vorstellungen) the totality of experience - and therefore to constitute as science ahistorically specific politicalstrategy of capitalist command. What we will attempt here

is to highlight the strategic features of this attempt in the sense that thegoalof the theory

was to establish the rules of agame that, if adhered to or enforced by its participants,would be effective in ensuring the practical political survival/reproduction of capitalist

social relations.

This is the way Schopenhauer reads his Kant. The Critique

of Pure Reason, he thinks, treats experience as the result of the

conceptualizing of the perceptual material, by which process this

material of sensation first becomes organized and real. Now he

finds perception in no need of such conceptual transformation,

for it possesses in itself all the concrete reality that is possiblein experience. Thinking owes its whole significance to the perceptual


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source from which it arises through abstraction. " If we

hold firmly to this, the inadmissibleness of the assumption becomes

evident that the perception of things only obtains reality

and becomes experience through the thought of these very things

iG., I. pp. 563-564; HK.. II, p. 38-2G., I, p. 564; H.K., II, p. 39-

3G., I, pp. 564-565; H.K., II, p. 39-18SCHOPENHAUER'S CRITICISM OF KANT.

applying its twelve categories. Rather in perception itself the

empirical reality, and consequently experience, is already

given; but the perception itself can only come into existence

by the application to sensation of the knowledge of the

causal nexus, which is the one function of the understanding.Perception is accordingly in reality intellectual, which is just

what Kant denies."^

Schopenhauer thinks that Kant makes a triple division: (i)

the idea, (2) the object of the idea, and (3) the thing-in-itself.

"The first belongs to the sensibility, which in its case, as in that

of sensation, includes the pure forms of perception, space and

time. The second belongs to the understanding, which thinks it

through its twelve categories. The third lies beyond the possibilityof all knowledge."- The confusion seems evident to

Schopenhauer: "The illicit introduction of that hybrid, the objectof the idea, is the source of Kant's errors,"^ he says. All we

have in concrete knowledge and experience is the Vorstellung;

" if we desire to go beyond this idea, then we arrive at the question

as to the thing-in-itself, the answer to which is the theme of my

whole work as of all metaphysics in general."^ With this epistemological

hybrid, i. e., the 'object of the idea,' "the doctrine

of the categories as conceptions a priori also falls to the ground."^

iG., I, p. 566; H.K., II, p. 40.

2G., I, p. 567; H.K.. II. p. 41; Kr. d. r. V., pp. io8f.; M., pp. 89 f.

'G., I, p. 567; H.K., II, p. 41.^G., I, pp. 567-568; H.K., II, p. 42.

'G., I, p. 567; H.K.. II, pp. 41-42.

It should be noted that Schopenhauer does not recognize

what, after all, is Kant's real distinction between understandingand reason, the distinction, namely, between understanding as

the faculty by which we deal with the conditioned and reason as

the faculty which demands the unconditioned. The understanding

itself Kant seems to treat in a twofold manner: (i) understanding

in the wider sense, as the fundamental principle of

objectivity in experience, including within itself the immanently

organizing function of the productive imagination; and (2)^

understanding in the narrower sense, as the faculty of judgmentor interpretation, operating primarily through the categories..

This distinction is of great importance for the interpretationof Kant's pure concepts of the understanding; and it should

be noted that Kant explicitly limits the application of the

understanding to finite experience, to the sphere of the conditioned.

On the other hand, Kant holds: "It is the peculiar

principle of reason (in its logical use) to find for every conditioned

knowledge of the understanding the unconditioned, whereby

the unity of that knowledge may be completed. "^ The pure


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concepts of the understanding, the categories, find their meaning

and their sphere of operation in the organic interdependence of

'C/., in this connection, Richter's treatment of 'Verstand' and 'Vernunft' as

used by Kant and Schopenhauer, Schopenhauer's Verhaltnis zu Kant in seinenGrundziigen, pp. 144 ff.

"^Kr. d. r. V., p. 307; M., p. 249.20 SCHOPENHAUER'S CRITICISM OF KANT.

the different sides of conditioned experience. The concepts

of pure reason, on the other hand, or the 'Transcendental Ideas,'

as Kant calls them, are explicitly concerned with the unconditioned

ground of experience; they refer to "something to which

all experience may belong, but which itself can never becomean object of experience."^ In this sense the distinction between

pure understanding and pure reason, in Kant's technical procedure,

tends to correspond to the distinction between theory of

knowledge and theory of reality.^

Returning to Schopenhauer, it is hardly too much to say thathis whole argument is specious. The fact that in Kant's admittedly

confused way of treating perception and conception he seesnothing but a solemn warning against undue adherence to an

ideal of 'architectonic symmetry,' shows how hopelessly he

misconceives both the aim and the fundamental trend of Kant's

'Critical' method.^ Kant's 'confusion' of the perceptual and

^Kr. d. r. V., p. 311; M., p. 253. Cf. the introductory sections of the 'Transcendental

Dialectic' especially Kr. d. r. V., pp. 299 fif., 305 ff., 310 ff., 322 ff.;M., pp. 242 ff., 247 ff., 252 ff., 261 ff.2 Kant regards speculative reason, however, as incapable of attaining knowledgeof ultimate reality, and therefore he introduces the notion of practical reason.

But this problem will more naturally come up for discussion in the sequel.3 Mere textual criticism of Kant's Critiques is sure to lead one astray, unlessthe fundamental spirit of his philosophy is kept constantly in mind. As Richter

NATURE AND GENESIS OF EXPERIENCE. 21

the conceptual in experience is to be regarded, not as the failure

to discriminate ultimate differences, but rather as the imperfect

realization and the inadequate expression of the underlying

essential unity of concrete experience, which cannot be reduced

to merely perceptual or conceptual terms. Kant's confusion

is the confusion of depths not yet clarified; Schopenhauer's

lucidity manifests epistemological shallowness. Later idealism,

of course, brought to light much that escaped Kant himself;

but Kant was far more nearly right than Schopenhauer when he

said: "Thoughts without contents are empty, intuitions withoutconcepts are blind. . . . The understanding cannot see, the

senses cannot think. By their union only can knowledge be

produced."^

The fundamental defect of Schopenhauer's epistemology

is to be found in his constant endeavor to explain one abstract

phase of experience in terms of another, supposedly prior, phase,

really the vice of the older rationalism,instead of readingboth into the organic unity which embraces both and derives


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its own meaning precisely from such systematization of aspects

meaningless in abstract isolation. The relation between the

organizing principles of experience is for Kant, not one of formal

subsumption, but of organic interdependence. Experience involves

both perception and conception, the one as much as theother; its progressive organization consists in the gradual

evolution of the two, which unifies them in one concrete process.The perceptual content is essentially meaningful, and the

application of the categories brings out what is implicit in it.

Schopenhauer's universals are the universals of the old scholastic

logic, abstractions which do not exist outside of its text-books

and are alien to concrete experience. Conception, in the true

Kantian sense, is no mere attenuated perception, but the significantaspect of experience. Conceptions, or, perhaps better,

puts it: "Es ist wirklich nicht so schwer, wenn man sich nur an den wortlichenText der Kritiken halt, Rationalismus und Empirismus, Dogmatismus (im weitesten

Sinne) und Scepticismus, Idealismus und Realismus aus ihnen herauszulesen"{op. cit., pp. 91-92). And again, with special reference to Schopenhauer's procedure:"Kantische Elemente hat Schopenhauer aufgenommen, Kantisch fortgebildet

hat er sie nicht" {op. cit., p. 77).iKr. d. r. V., p. 51; M., p. 41.


meanings, are involved in experience from the very beginning;

they are not merely its abstract terminus ad quern, as Schopenhauer

would have it.^ Universality means, not erasure of

details and differences, but their gradual organization from a

point of view ever growing in catholicity. The progress ofknowledge is not from perception to conception, but from less

concrete to more concrete organization of both.

iG.. II. p. 55; H.K., II. p. 213.

38 SCHOPENHAUER'S CRITICISM OF KANT.One should keep clearly in mind that, while the Principle of

Sufficient Reason itself, being a ' metalogical truth,' is axiomaticand incapable of proof, nevertheless everything which comes

under its regulation, has its meaning, truth, and reality precisely

in reference to something else. Hence, Schopenhauer insists,

the thoroughly relative character of all necessity becomes evident.

Nothing is necessary in itself, but solely by virtue of something

else upon which it depends and in which it finds its meaning.

Necessity is thus the general way of expressing this coherence,

this multiform organization in experience, of which the Principle

of Sufficient Reason is, for Schopenhauer, the most general

statement. If once this relative character of necessity is comprehended,

the meaning of contingency becomes obvious. Kant'sconfusion on this point is due to his adherence to the abstract

rationalistic notion of the contingent (as that of which the nonexistence

is possible), opposed, on the one hand, to the necessary

(that which cannot possibly not be), and, on the other hand,

to the impossible (that which cannot possibly be).^ This Aristotelian

conception of the contingent^ in Kant results from "sticking

to abstract conceptions without going back to the concrete andperceptible."^ As a matter of fact, contingency is nothing more


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nor less than the denial of necessity in a particular case, i. e.,

'"absence of the connection expressed by the principle of sufficient

reason. "*

Contingency is relative, just as necessity is relative, and for

the same reason. Every thing, every event in the actual world"is always at once necessary and contingent; necessary in relation

to the one condition which is its cause; contingent in relation toeverything else."^ The absolutely contingent would be something

out of all relation: a thought as meaningless, Schopenhauer

insists, as the absolutely necessary, dependent upon nothing else

in particular. In both necessity and contingency the mind turns

iC/. K. d. r. v., II ed., p. 301; M., p. 198; G.. I, p. 594; H.K., II. p. 70.^ Ibid. Schopenhauer refers here to De generatione et conuptione, Lib. II, C.-9

et II.

'G.. I. p. 594; H.K.. II, p. 71. ...-.

*G., I, p. 591; H.K., II, p. 67.

'G., I. p. 591; H.K., II, p. 68.

PRINCIPLES OF ORGANIZATION IN EXPERIENCE. 39

back in search of explanation ; the necessary and the contingentthus mean merely the relevant and the irrelevant in the process

of organization. If one considers merely the given event byitself, merely the effect, without looking for the explanatory

cause which necessitates it and makes it contingent with respect

to everything else, then one understands the meaning of the

immediately existing, the actual, the thing as directly apprehended.

The actual in nature, however, is always causally related,

hence also necessary here and now. If, on the other hand,

the mind abstracts from this 'here' and 'now,' and presents to

itself all the laws of nature and thought, physical and metaphysical,i. e., known to us a posteriori and a priori respectively/

then the conception of possibility arises, which means compatibility

with our conceptual systems and laws, without referenceto any particular time and place. That which is inadmissible

even from this abstract point of view, Schopenhauer calls the

impossible. This development of the conceptions of necessity,

actuality (existence), and possibility, showing as it does their

common basis in the one Principle of Sufificient Reason, demonstrates,Schopenhauer asserts, " how entirely groundless is Kant's

assumption of three special functions of the understanding for

these three conceptions. "^

A comparison of this outline of Schopenhauer's conclusions

with Kant's summary of his own treatment of the modality of

judgments, will illustrate the difference between the two positions.

Kant says: "As in this way everything is arranged step by step

in the understanding, inasmuch as we begin with judging problematically,then proceed to an assertory acceptation, and finally

maintain our proposition as inseparably united with the understanding,that is as necessary and apodictic, we may be allowed

to call these three functions of modality so many varieties or

momenta of thought."^ The three characteristic stages in the

logical progression might well indicate three points of view in the

self-organization of experience, and in this sense Kant may be

justified in distinguishing three categories of Modality. Never


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iG.,I. p. 592; H.K., II. p. 69.

^G.. I, p. 593; H.K.. II. p. 69.

2Kr. d. r. V.. p. 76; M.. p. 63

40 SCHOPENHAUER'S CRITICISM OF KANT.theless Kant's distinctions are too sharp and abstract: while he

suggests a process of logical development in the passage justquoted, he fails to explain the matter adequately and clearly to

emphasize the essential interdependence of these 'momenta of

thought,' which involve each other in the systematic organization

of experience.^ On the other hand, Schopenhauer is quite unable

to realize the organic character of concrete experience, which

implies, not the absorption of possibility and actuality into necessity,but their proper correlation in the systematic whole. In

his constant tendency to make hard and fast distinctions, to the

neglect of the concrete unity of the system of experience, Schopenhauer

represents what Hegel called ' the standpoint of the understanding.'

As Professor Bosanquet says: "The real prophet of

the understanding . . . was Schopenhauer. His treatment of

the principle of sufficient reason as at once the fundamental axiom

of human science and the innate source of its illusions, forms anultimate and irreversible criticism on the aspect of intelligence

which consists, to sum up its nature in a popular but not inaccuratephrase, in explaining everything by something elsea process which taken by itself is necessarily

unending and unsatisfying.

"^ 'C/. in this connection Bosanquet's analysis and criticism of Kant's treatment

of Modality, Logic, Vol. I, pp. 377 ff.

^Op. cit.. Vol. II. pp. 81-82.

It is unfortunate, though not difficult to explain, that Schopenhauer,whose keen criticism of the doctrine of the categories had

disclosed so many of its flaws, should have overlooked one of

Kant's most questionable distinctions, namely, that which hemakes between 'constitutive' and 'regulative' principles. This




of thought, which condition the possibility of all experience and'constitute' its organization; and (b) the rational assumptions

which, while not determining the actual form of experience,

serve to rationalize the moral order and the aesthetic judgment.



categories of the Understanding, which Kant calls 'constitutive,'

and the teleological categories, the postulates of Practical Reason

and of the Esthetic Judgment, which he regards as 'regulative.'^The incompatibility of this hard and fast distinction with any

interpretation of experience which attempts to do justice to itsorganic character is amply illustrated in Kant's own technical


'regulative,' because not 'constitutive' of experience mechanically

considered. But are the mechanical {i. e., 'constitutive')





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that negates the immanent unity of experience, which

is the fundamental postulate of the Critical philosophy.

"It is the peculiarprinciple of reason (in its logical use)," Kant says, "to find for

every conditioned knowledge of the understanding the unconditioned,whereby the unity of that knowledge may be completed."^

Now Schopenhauer insists that the whole plausibility

of Kant's conception is due to its abstractness. Kant's argument

is summarized by Schopenhauer as follows: "If the conditioned

is given, the totality of its conditions must also be given, and

therefore also the unconditioned, through which alone that totalitybecomes complete. "^ But, Schopenhauer argues, this 'totality

of the conditions of everything conditioned' is contained in its

nearest ground or reason from which it directly proceeds, and

which is only thus a sufficient reason or ground.* In the alternating

series of conditioned and conditioning states, "as each

link is laid aside the chain is broken, and the claim of the principle

of sufficient reason ent

From Kant to Schopenhauer - Joseph Belbruno

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