I mentioned Schopenhauer and Kant in my post on free will. That's not because I'm an expert on them. I only know them from secondary sources. However, I know enough about them to know that it's not worth my time to study them in detail. That goes for other famous thinkers as well, with Karl Marx as a typical example that most people can relate to. We know what communism is. We don't need to read Das Kapital to form an opinion.
What is most interesting about great thinkers is not so much their conclusions as their observations. Their conclusions are usually pre-conceived and therefore not as well thought out as they may seem. However, their observations can be quite enlightening. Marx made a number of lucid observations about factory life that anyone can agree on. The same can be said about Schopenhauer when it comes to the human psyche. As stand alone observations, this is all great stuff. But if we try to follow their reasoning from observations to conclusion, we're struck by how complex and contrived everything becomes. Only those determined to accept the conclusion from the start will fail to notice the rather dodgy logic being used.
This illustrates the futility in trying to convince people of ideas through logic and argument. Ideas are not accepted through logic, but through emotion and general popularity. Communism didn't find widespread support in the 20th century through logic and reasoning. It found support because a lot of people wished the conclusions in Marx's work to be true.
This tendency to be driven primarily by emotion over reason is not limited to the ignorant and stupid. We all carry this in us, at least according to Schopenhauer. What separates thinkers like Schopenhauer from other people is not so much their ability to elevate themselves above emotions, but their desire to explain and defend their ideas through logic and argument. In this sense, Schopenhauer becomes his own paradox. He knew the futility of argument, yet he never tired of defending his work on metaphysics through reasoning and logic.
Schopenhauer would have objected to my mention of him in my post on free will. He was an atheist, so the will described in his work doesn't have any kind of purpose. His will is a meaningless striving for existence. However, in doing this, he merely separates the will from the ego which he fails to explain. The ego is something that can to some extent direct our will. This much he says, but leaves it otherwise unexplained. The irony in this is that he operates with two levels of existence, just like the Bible, but denies that it is similar. He too has a material world and a spirit that directs it, so why the complicated attempt to explain it in terms different from the Bible? The answer to this lies probably in the way German society was organized in his time, rather than in any real objection to the concept of a purposeful spirit that directs our actions.
Schopenhauer was very much an individualist. He loved to think things through for himself, and he hated any kind of dogma. He also detested career academics like Hegel. He could not stand the self importance that such people projected, and the constant fawning and praise that society lavished upon Hegel's obscure writings revolted him. Why not level the playing field and play hard ball without anyone running to hide behind dogma or obscurity? What Schopenhauer longed for was something distinctly un-German. He wanted something far less dogmatic and hierarchical. Yet, this made him in many ways a typical example of the other type of German, namely the stormy passionate German that we find in Nietzsche and Wagner, both heavily influenced by Schopenhauer.
The irony in all of this is that I suspect that Schopenhauer would have been quite drawn towards Bible interpretations had he lived in our day and age. Dogma has moved from religion to science. We can discuss religion, but not science. As a consequence, an individualist like Schopenhauer would find more to ponder in the Bible and less to argue about in science. With academia still as stifling as it ever was, Schopenhauer would have been an outsider. His views about things would have been more or less the same, his observations and opinions too. But his work may have allowed for an explanation of the ego. He might at least have opened the possibility of the ego being a manifestation of God's free will.
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| Arthur Schopenhauer |
By Ludwig Sigismund Ruhl - Schopenhauer-Archiv der Stadt- und Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt am Main, Public Domain, Link
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