Sandra Shapshay - Reconstructing Schopenhauer's Ethics - Hope, Compassion, and Animal Welfare-Oxford University Press (2019)

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RECONSTRUCTING SCHOPENH AUER’S ETHICS

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RECONSTRUCTING
SCHOPENH AUER’S ETHICS
Hope, Compassion, and Animal Welfare
Sandra Shapshay
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For Marcia Baron and Allen Wood, mentors and friends

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CONTENTS
Preface ix
Citations to Schopenhauer’s Works xiii
Introduction 1
1. A Tale of Two Schopenhauers 11
2. Schopenhauer’s Pessimism in Light of
His Evolving System 37
3. Freedom and Morality 97
4. Compassionate Moral Realism 139
5. A Role for Reason in Schopenhauer’s Ethics 193
Conclusion 211
Bibliography 215
Index 221
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PREFACE
This reconstruction of Schopenhauer’s ethics has been in the works

for nearly ten years, but my interest in Schopenhauer, and especially
his philosophy of value, dates back to a conversation that I had with
Arthur Danto while I was a graduate student at Columbia University.
We were discussing my interest in writing a dissertation on Kantian
aesthetics, which prompted him to ask: “Do you know who is the
most underrated and underappreciated philosopher in Western phi-
losophy?” I thought about this for a little while and then answered
gamely, “Hmmm . . . I don’t know . . . maybe Heidegger?” To which
he replied, “Schopenhauer!”
His somewhat enigmatic pronouncement sent me on a quest
to find the philosophical treasures locked up in this earlier Arthur’s
works, and my work focused at first on his aesthetic theory. But
I came to realize that it is his ethical thought that is probably the most
underrated part of this underrated philosopher, and the central aim
of this book is to defend an interpretation of his ethics as both an
original and promising contribution to the subject. Careful attention
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P r e fa c e
to especially Schopenhauer’s value ontology is rewarding not just for

our understanding of the history of ethics in the 19th century but
also for contemporary reflection in metaethics. Hopefully this work
contributes somewhat to making Schopenhauer a less underrated
thinker.
I have received substantial help with this project over the years.
I am grateful to the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD)
for a Faculty Research Grant for research at the Schopenhauer-
Archiv, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, in Fall 2009. Their support
also gave me the opportunity to have illuminating conversations
with Professor Matthias Koßler, President of the Schopenhauer-
Gesellschaft. Thanks are due also to the College Arts and Humanities
Institute (CAHI) at Indiana University– Bloomington, which
awarded me a Faculty Fellowship in 2012, providing me a teaching
release to concentrate on early chapters of this book.
Also beneficial was the chance to try out the arguments in these
chapters at several conferences and symposia. Thanks are due to
Alistair Welchman, who organized the Brackenridge Workshop on
the philosophy of Schopenhauer, University of Texas at San Antonio,
2013, and to Judith Norman, Bernard Reginster, and other speakers
and audience members who pressed a number of objections to the
views in Chapter 4 at that event. A symposium on Schopenhauer’s
views on love and compassion at the University of Ghent in 2013,
organized by Bart Vandenabeele, also provided a wonderful oppor-
tunity for Alex Neill and myself to try out some of the arguments
in Chapter 3, and I’m indebted to audience members at that event
for excellent discussion. I am also appreciative of the opportunity
to present drafts of chapters at the North American Division of
the Schopenhauer Society at the APA Central Division meetings
organized by David Cartwright, and at New York University’s an-
nual conference on Modern Philosophy in 2014, organized by Don
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P r e fa c e
Garrett, Béatrice Longuenesse, and John Richardson. The session

chair, Desmond Hogan, my commentator, Julian Young, and the
lively audience at NYU helped me to refine Chapters 4 and 5. My
colleague Marcia Baron very kindly organized a workshop on Kant
and Schopenhauer’s Aesthetics and Ethics at the University of St.
Andrews in 2014, and I benefitted very much from discussion there
with Kyla Ebels-Duggan, Kate Moran, Adrian Piper, Martin Sticker,
and Jens Timmerman. Finally, I’d like to thank the organizers of
the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 49th annual collo-
quium, for a chance to try out the ideas in Chapter 2, and to John
Richardson, whose astute commentary helped me to refine that
chapter enormously.
I am highly indebted to the few scholars who have paid sustained
and careful attention to Schopenhauer’s ethical thought, and espe-
cially to David Cartwright, Christopher Janaway, Julian Young, and
John Richardson, who read and commented extensively on drafts of
several chapters in this book. The interpretation on offer here also
developed in conversation with Alex Neill (with whom I co-authored
an earlier version of Chapter 3), Matt Altman, Judith Norman,
Elizabeth Millán, Fred Schmitt, Marco Segala, Alistair Welchman,
Dennis Vanden Auweele, Eric von der Luft, and Gudrun von Tevenar,
as well as with wonderful graduate students at Indiana University–
Bloomington, Sarah Adams, Uri Eran, Tristan Ferrell, Noam Hoffer,
Daniel Lindquist, Sean Murphy, and Levi Tenen.
Thanks are due to my editor at Oxford University Press, Lucy
Randall, who checked in with me at regular intervals for several years,
and who has shepherded this project to completion with the utmost
professionalism. I’d like also to signal my appreciation to my daugh-
ters, Molly and Marlena, who support their “working mom” every
day with their warmth, intelligence and zest for life, and to my hus-
band, Steve, for being a true partner in all things.
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P r e fa c e
Finally, this book would likely not have been possible without the
intellectual and moral support of my two philosophical role models,
colleagues, and friends, Marcia Baron and Allen Wood. And even
if the book would have been possible without them, it would have
been a far worse book had they not conversed with me extensively
throughout the entire process.
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CITATIONS TO SCHOPENHAUER’S WORKS
Works by Schopenhauer are referenced in the text parenthetically,

using the abbreviations listed below. Where available, I have used the
standard English translations in the Cambridge Edition of the Works of
Schopenhauer, general editor Christopher Janaway.
EFR Schopenhauer’s Early Fourfold Root: Translation and
Commentary [Über die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom
zureichenden Grunde] (original dissertation 1813), ed.
and trans. F. C. White (London: Ashgate, 1997).
FR On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason
[Über die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden
Grunde] (1847/1864), in On the Fourfold Root of
the Principle of Sufficient Reason and Other Writings,
ed. and trans. David Cartwright, Edward Erdmann,
and Christopher Janaway (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2015), 1–198.
FW Prize Essay on the Freedom of the Will [Über die Freiheit
des Willens] (1839), in The Two Fundamental Problems
of Ethics (1841/1860), trans. Christopher Janaway
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C i tat i o n s t o S c h o p e n h a u e r’ s   W o r k s
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009),

31–112.
GB Gesammelte Briefe, ed. Arthur Hübscher
(Bonn: Bouvier, 1978).
HN 1-5 Der handschriftliche Nachlaß, 5 vols., ed. Arthur
Hübscher (Frankfurt am Main: Kramer, 1970).
MR 1-4 Manuscript Remains, 4 vols, ed. Arthur Hübscher and
trans. E. F. J. Payne (Oxford: Berg, 1988). This is a
translation of HN vols. 1–4.
OBM Prize Essay On the Basis of Morals [Über die Grundlage
der Moral] (1840), in The Two Fundamental Problems
of Ethics (1841/1860), trans. Christopher Janaway
113–258.
PP I Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical
Essays [Parerga und Paralipomena] (1851), ed.
and trans. Christopher Janaway and Sabine Roehr
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
PP II Parerga and Paralipomena [Parerga und Paralipomena]
(1851), ed. and trans. Adrian Del Caro and Christopher
Janaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2015).
SW 1–7 Sämtliche Werke, ed. Arthur Hübscher
(Mannheim: Brockhaus, 1988), vols. 1–7.
VC On Vision and Colours [Über das Sehn und die Farben]
(1816/1854), ed. and trans. David Cartwright,
Edward Erdmann, and Christopher Janaway
199–302.
WN On Will in Nature [Über den Willen in der Natur]
(1836/1854), ed. and trans. David Cartwright,
Edward Erdmann, and Christopher Janaway
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C i tat i o n s t o S c h o p e n h a u e r’ s   W o r k s

303–460.
WWR I The World as Will and Representation [Die Welt als
Wille und Vorstellung], vol. I (1818/1844/1859), ed.
and trans. Christopher Janaway, Judith Norman, and
Alistair Welchman (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2014).
WWR II The World as Will and Representation [Die Welt als
Wille und Vorstellung], vol. II (1844/1859), trans. E. F.
J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1966).
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RECONSTRUCTING SCHOPENH AUER’S ETHICS

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1
Introduction
At the apex of his influence, from about 1860 up to the start of World
War I, Arthur Schopenhauer was known first and foremost as a phi-
losopher of pessimism, sparking an entire “pessimism controversy”
in German philosophy in the latter part of the 19th century.1 Still
today, his main reputation is as one of the few philosophers to have
argued that it would have been better never to have been, for “life is a
business which does not cover its costs” (WWR II, chap. 46, 574).
Otherwise put, since most of life is purposeless striving and suffering,
and there is no God to redeem it all in another life, ascetic resignation
from the will-to-life is the most justified response. This none-too-
cheerful outlook famously captured the attention of Nietzsche, who
spent much of his philosophical energies countering Schopenhauer’s
resignationism, and devising ways authentically to affirm life, in spite
of what he thought was Schopenhauer’s mostly correct diagnosis of
the human condition.2
1. For a detailed account of this controversy see Frederick C. Beiser, Weltschmerz: Pessimism in

German Philosophy 1860–1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
2. For two excellent accounts of Nietzsche’s grappling with Schopenhauer’s pessimism up
through his late works, see Christopher Janaway, Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsche’s
Genealogy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) and João Constâncio, “Nietzsche
and Schopenhauer: On Nihilism and the Ascetic ‘Will to Nothingness,’” in The Palgrave
Schopenhauer Handbook, ed. Sandra Shapshay (London: Palgrave- Macmillan, 2017),
425–446.
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Introduction
This book aims to complicate and challenge the predominant

picture of Schopenhauer’s ethical thought, and argues that while
the resignationist Schopenhauer—the one I shall call the “Knight
of Despair”—represents one side of this thinker, there is another
side, the “Knight with Hope,” and this aspect of his ethical thought
is in direct tension with the resignationist one. Although a few
commentators to date have aimed at reconstructing Schopenhauer’s
somewhat hopeful ethics of compassion (most notably, David
Cartwright, Christopher Janaway, John Atwell, and Gudrun von
Tevenar), they have generally held that Schopenhauer sees the com-
passionate person as attaining only a second-best insight into the na-
ture of the world and a second-best comportment within it.3 What
I shall call the “One Schopenhauer” view sees a neat hierarchy here,
with the greatest insight and comportment as embodied in saintly
resignation from life altogether. Yet, as I will suggest in what follows,
this traditional view masks several fundamental tensions between
his two ethical ideals. In contrast, I urge a “Two Schopenhauers”
view, for these two ethical ideals are actually mutually incompat-
ible. Accordingly, instead of reading Schopenhauer as having a hier-
archy of (1) resignationism, and (2) the ethics of compassion, one
should rather see these as competing ethical ideals in his thought, or
so I shall argue.
Although I do not believe Schopenhauer himself was aware of this
as a fundamental consistency problem within his ethical thought, he
does provide a separate elaboration of the ethics of compassion in his
On the Basis of Morals [Über die Grundlage der Moral], and this elabo-
ration is not terribly pessimistic and is decidedly non-resignationist.
Thus, I believe the Knight with Hope view not only constitutes a
3. Gudrun von Tevenar does evince some worries that the ethics of compassion and
resignationism are in tension in her essay, “Schopenhauer and Kant on Menschenliebe,” in The
Palgrave Schopenhauer Handbook, ed. Sandra Shapshay (London: Palgrave-Macmillan,  2017).
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Introduction
more defensible philosophical theory as such, but also is an inter-

pretation of Schopenhauer’s ethical thought that is what the thinker
actually did say at least some of the time. It is the main task of this
book to reconstruct the ethical theory that he presents in this work
especially.
Careful reconstruction of his ethics of compassion in On the Basis
of Morality in particular yields a very interesting hybrid theory of a
Kantian moral theory and sentimentalism à la Hutcheson, Smith and
Hume. In brief, my main claim is that Schopenhauer retains more
from Kant’s ethics (construed in a moral realist rather than construc-
tivist fashion) than commentators to date have acknowledged. What
he retained is the notion that human beings have inherent value that
calls for a certain kind of moral treatment. Schopenhauer departs
from Kant’s notion of rational nature as being “an end in itself ” and
having “dignity beyond all price,” however, widening the criterion
for having inherent value from Kant’s criterion, namely, having a ra-
tional nature, to “having a world” or “being a microcosm.” That is to
say, any sentient, conscious being who has a life that the being cares
about has some degree of inherent value for Schopenhauer. Further,
Schopenhauer departs from the notion that inherent value means
“absolute value” that trumps any other concern; rather, I argue, the
theory regards inherent value as coming in degrees and providing pro
tanto rather than absolute grounds for ethical treatment. I also argue
that according to Schopenhauer, we know the inherent value of sen-
tient beings via a feeling, namely, the feeling of compassion.
Thus, this moral realist foundation—the value ontology—is
complemented by sentimentalism in two ways. First, the feeling of
compassion plays a key moral-epistemic function in tracking inherent
value. And second, the ground for any action to have true moral
worth, for Schopenhauer, is that it was done out of the feeling of
compassion. So, in line with sentimentalists, feeling—especially the
feeling of compassion—is crucial to our understanding of the nature
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Introduction
of morality. Yet, the ultimate basis for the normativity of the feeling
of compassion is that it actually tracks the inherent value with which
sentient beings are endowed. Despite this sentimentalist aspect,
however, the theory really bottoms out justificationally in a moral re-
alism about inherent value.
This hybrid ethical theory offers a novel synthesis for the con-
temporary ethical-theoretical landscape and has several prima facie
attractions. First, by widening the scope of beings who count as
having inherent value, Schopenhauer’s ethics is far less anthropocen-
tric than is Kant’s, and enables him to incorporate concern for animal
welfare and rights much more easily into his system. Contemporary
Kantians are liable to tell rather complicated stories about there being
no direct duties to animals, only duties concerning them, or about an-
imals being morally considerable only because cruelty to them affects
the character of human beings in a negative fashion.4 These accounts
sound, ironically, a bit Ptolemaic in contrast to Schopenhauer’s
ethics, in which animals are directly, morally considerable.
Second, Schopenhauer’s value ontology consists of a spectrum or
degrees of inherent value, and thus, he can bring non-human animals
into the community of morally considerable beings without having
to bring them in as fully as human beings. This is at least prima facie
appealing to those for whom a strong animal rights view, such as
Tom Regan’s, is implausibly strong.5 Schopenhauer’s way of thinking
about inherent value as coming in degrees, then, is more akin to Mary
Anne Warren’s weaker animal rights view, and provides a systematic
justification for such a view.6
4. See, for instance, Barbara Herman, “We Are Not Alone: A Place for Animals in Kant’s
Ethics,” in Kant on Persons and Agency, ed. Eric Watkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2018), 174–191.
5. See Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2004).
6. Mary Anne Warren, Moral Status: Obligations to Persons and Other Living Things
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
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Introduction
Third, while Schopenhauer extends the realm of morally con-

siderable beings only to sentient beings who “have a world”—rather
than to all living beings such as plants, or to species and ecosystems as
a whole—the extension to all sentient beings nonetheless speaks to
many of the concerns of contemporary environmentalism. Insofar as
human beings should be compassionate toward non-human animals,
this provides prima facie grounds for protecting the habitat of those
animals as well. Further, Schopenhauer’s aesthetic theory provides a
separate and complementary ground from which to argue for envi-
ronmental protection on his system.
Notwithstanding these attractions, there are facets of
Schopenhauer’s system that make his ethical theory problematic.
As alluded to above, by the lights of Schopenhauer’s pessimism,
resignationism seems to be normatively preferred, undermining the
value of the ethical ideal of compassion. In Chapter 1, against the
standard “One Schopenhauer” view, which sees a neat hierarchy of
(1) resignationism, (2) the ethics of compassion, [and in the Parerga
and Paralipomena he throws in (3) eudaimonology as well], I urge
the “Two Schopenhauers” view: Far from there being a neat hier-
archy, there are fundamental tensions between resignationism and
the ethics of compassion. Ultimately, I shall argue, these are really
two incompatible ethical ideals.
In Chapter 2, I suggest that choosing between which of these in-
compatible ethical ideals is superior by the lights of Schopenhauer’s
own system depends on the “fulcrum of hope.” Whether we should
embrace the resignationist, pessimist Knight of Despair, the “Dürer
Knight” as Nietzsche called him, or whether we should rather em-
brace the Knight with Hope, as I shall call him, depends upon
whether according to his own system, there are good grounds for
hope. I shall argue that even on Schopenhauerian grounds we should
prefer the ideal of compassion to that of resignationism, and not just
because most of us will never get to salvation. Rather, it is because as
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Introduction
Schopenhauer’s own philosophical thinking evolved, there emerged

good grounds for hope. And where there are good grounds for
hope, resignation would actually constitute a misguided shirking
of one’s responsibility to “help everyone to the extent that you can”
(OBM, 162).
One of the main stumbling blocks to hope that the world can
get substantially better, however, are the static, Platonic Ideas. In
Chapter 2, I shall address the role of the Ideas in his system, and
I shall argue that we should see Schopenhauer’s own philosophy
as dynamic and that in the course of his intellectual development,
as he gets wind of proto-Darwinian thought, he comes to drop the
Platonic Ideas from his philosophy of nature. Another stumbling
block to hope is that it seems that Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of
will, even without the Ideas, constitutes good grounds for pessimism
and resignationism. Yet, Schopenhauer’s allegiance to transcendental
idealism prevents him from being an older-style transcendent met-
aphysician, one who could offer the identification of the thing-in-
itself as “Will” in a foundationalist way to prove that the sufferings
of the world cannot be significantly diminished. His identification of
the thing-in-itself with “Will,” I shall argue, should be understood as
“metonymic” and his metaphysics of will should be understood as
“hermeneutic” rather than transcendent.
By “metonymic” I mean that Schopenhauer names the whole (the
thing-in-itself) after its best known part, namely, one’s own “will” on
the strength of one’s non-observational knowledge of one’s own
willing—that I will—and the fact that it is the most immediate in-
tuition one has. By “hermeneutic” I mean that the model of meta-
physics that he outlines as the proper one is that of “deciphering”
or “interpretation” of the world. In offering such an interpretation,
the philosopher uses all of the phenomenological resources of inner
and outer experience, and seeks confirmation by the interpretation’s
ability to make sense of phenomena as a whole. Thus, appropriate
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Introduction
metaphysics, on my reading of Schopenhauer’s view, is similar to of-

fering a well-justified interpretation of a work of art. Like an artistic
interpretation, it should stand or fall on how well it accords with the
evidence in that work (in the case of the world, the empirical evi-
dence), and with how well it makes sense of the work as a whole.
Admittedly, one could offer an interpretation of the world that is
also transcendently metaphysical, and this is the way the standard
view would read Schopenhauer. I suggest, however, that especially
in the second volume of WWR, Schopenhauer offers an always im-
manent metaphysics. Further, I argue that his philosophical meth-
odology is coherentist rather than foundationalist, and this makes
his metaphysics of will far less capable of grounding pessimism than
most commentators have thought. Whether or not the sufferings of
the world can be significantly diminished is ultimately a question
to be addressed by experience, and settled on the basis of empirical
evidence.
In sum, from the first two chapters, I aim to show that we should
prefer the Knight with Hope. Schopenhauer’s thought develops from
1818 to 1859, and this development is one that supports—whether
Schopenhauer recognized this or not—the hope and compassion
position, and away from the resignation and renunciation position.
In this book, I am thus consciously emphasizing the strand present in
Schopenhauer’s writings that I find more appealing philosophically
than the one emphasized by the standard reading.
A third problem for seeing Schopenhauer as a bona fide ethicist is
his apparent hard determinism. In Chapter 3, I trace Schopenhauer’s
grappling with the problem of how freedom is possible from his
1813 dissertation and The World as Will and Representation (1818)
to his essay “On the Freedom of the Will” (1839), and I offer an in-
terpretation of Schopenhauer’s compatibilism that shows how it
departs from but is still similar to Kant’s compatibilism. Ultimately,
for Schopenhauer, though we are each born with an innate character
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Introduction
and are shaped largely by our empirical circumstances, still, rational

beings are responsible for their characters, and can shape and even,
albeit rarely, transform them.
In Chapter 4, I turn to the positive business of reconstructing
Schopenhauer’s Kantian/Sentimentalist hybrid ethics, which I term
“compassionate moral realism.”7 Contrary to those like Reginster and
Janaway, I argue that Schopenhauer holds that all sentient beings
are endowed with inherent value, and that this makes them mor-
ally considerable. The feeling of compassion plays a crucial moral-
epistemic role here as the means by which such inherent value is
known in Schopenhauer’s system. In other words, the feeling of com-
passion tracks inherent value. Further, I lay out Schopenhauer’s value
ontology, and the ways in which beings can have different degrees of
inherent value, based on the complexity of their sentient nature. In
this chapter, I also address some of the problems for Schopenhauer’s
robust—perhaps all-too robust—claim that the feeling of compas-
sion is both necessary and sufficient for actions to have moral worth.
In his main arguments for compassion as the sole basis of morality,
Schopenhauer does not take into account the role that reason seems
to play in both determining the right action to take, and in motiving
such actions (just actions in particular). Intent on diminishing the
importance of reason in ethics, Schopenhauer all but ignores its role
except that he sees the formulation of the rational, ethical principle
“harm no one; rather help everyone as much as you can” as an im-
portant “reservoir” for compassion, when the feeling is not actually
“flowing.” He also recognizes the need for reason in the political
7. Colin Marshall has a book in press as I write this, titled, “Compassionate Moral Realism,”
where he defends a novel metaethical position that is to some extent Schopenhauer inspired
(though other influences include Wollaston and Locke). Since I believe we independently
discovered this term I shall use it here to label Schopenhauer’s ethical system, noting that
my use should not be taken as synonymous with Marshall’s contemporary metaethical
position.
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Introduction
sphere, where it is required painstakingly to construct the legal ar-

chitecture that will keep the peace and protect rights as well as pos-
sible, and in the personal sphere, Schopenhauer recognizes the need
for and power of rational reflection in developing a more pro-social
“acquired character.” What Schopenhauer is really keen to defend in
OBM, however, is the notion that the ultimate source or foundation
of morally worthy action is the feeling of compassion. But any recon-
struction of Schopenhauer’s ethics, I argue, should acknowledge that
in the majority of cases where there is some moral perplexity to the
matter, the feeling of compassion is neither necessary nor sufficient
for acting in a morally worthy manner and needs to be supplemented
by rational reflection which channels compassion toward the right
action (known via reflection).
In Chapter 5, I aim to assuage these worries partially by
reconstructing the various roles that reason does seem to play in
Schopenhauer’s ethics and political thought. Then I utilize what he
says in these contexts to modify the picture he gives of the role of
reason in ethics. Finally, in the Conclusion, I highlight the novelties
of my interpretation as well as some of the attractions and lingering
problems in the Schopenhauerian ethical system I have reconstructed,
suggesting future lines of research into the ways that Schopenhauer’s
less anthropocentric ethics can support a moderate animal rights
view as well as a moderate environmentalism.
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1
Chapter 1
A Tale of Two Schopenhauers
I. THE TWO SCHOPENHAUERS VIEW
This book is the tale of two Schopenhauers: the Schopenhauer who is

the “Dürer Knight . . . [who] lacked all hope,” as Nietzsche called him,
and the Schopenhauer as the “Knight with Hope” as I shall call him.1
Nietzsche’s characterization of his “educator” as a “Knight” is
apt, because, perhaps of all of the German philosophers of the 19th
century, Schopenhauer was the most solitary, combative, and single-
minded figure of the era. Further, despite laboring largely in obscurity
until the decade before his death, Schopenhauer remained steadfastly
committed to elaborating his philosophical system and to the value
of that system. At the height of his despair that his contemporaries
would not recognize the value of his magnum opus, in the preface to
the second edition of that work, he writes poignantly, “[i]‌t is not to
my contemporaries, it is not to my compatriots—it is to humanity
itself that I entrust my now-completed work, in the confidence that
humanity will find some value in it, even if this value will only gain
recognition belatedly, this being the inevitable fate of all good things”
(WWR I, 11).
1. For Nietzsche, Schopenhauer is akin to the Dürer Knight insofar as he “lacked all hope
but desired truth.” Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann
(New York: Vintage Books/R andom House, 1967), 123, sec. 20; emphasis added.
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R e c o n s t r u c t i n g S c h o p e n h a u e r’ s  E t h i c s
As depicted in the famous Dürer engraving (see fig. 1.1),

accompanied only by his trusty horse and dog, this grim-faced, armor-
clad knight soldiers on through the battlefield of life, surrounded by
a multitude of evils represented chiefly by the satyr-like figure of the
devil and the hollow-eyed, snake-infested figure of death. Nietzsche
sees Schopenhauer as a philosophical knight, one who labors soli-
tarily to explicate the “riddle of the world” as best he can, without the
Fig. 1.1. Albrecht Dürer, Ritter, Tod und Teufel, copper engraving, 1513.
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A Ta l e o f Tw o S c h o p e n h a u e r s
slightest hope that this world full of suffering could be improved or is,
at bottom, even worth the trouble of explicating.
This Schopenhauer does battle with optimism, especially of the
philosophical variety propounded by Leibniz, Spinoza, and Hegel,
the doctrine that “presents life as a desirable state and man’s hap-
piness as its aim and object” (WWR II, 584). The optimism that
Schopenhauer is keen to combat is the doctrine that holds that
(a) life is a generally desirable state, (b) that the arc of history neces-
sarily involves the reduction of suffering and the increase of freedom
for human beings, and (c) that the purpose of human life is to be
happy. Optimism, for him, is not just a false but also a pernicious doc-
trine insofar as it leads people to feel that their largely miserable lives
constitute a bitter disappointment and even an injustice. By contrast,
the Knight of Despair thinks that Brahmanism, Buddhism, and gen-
uine Christianity—pessimistic religions—are correct to teach that
one should not expect happiness out of this life, for “everything in
life proclaims that earthly happiness is destined to be frustrated, or
recognized as an illusion” and “that all good things are empty and
fleeting” (WWR II, 573). To this Schopenhauer, “life is a business
that does not cover its costs”; the “world on all sides is bankrupt”;
and thus it would have been better never to have existed (WWR
II, 574). The doctrine in these pessimistic religions that the Knight
of Despair espouses is that (a) life is not a generally desirable state,
(b) the arc of history is not one that includes a necessary reduction in
suffering and increase in freedom, and (c) happiness is not the pur-
pose of human life. Given this state of affairs, the Knight of Despair
concludes that the best and most epistemically justified response to
the world is resignation, that is, to renounce the will-to-life in oneself.
This pessimistic Schopenhauer is the one whose audacity
captured the attention of Nietzsche and later writers like Thomas
Hardy as well as philosophers like Eduard von Hartmann and Philipp
Mainländer in the late 19th century. Although this “Pessimismus” had
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14
been, by Schopenhauer’s own account, fully developed between

1814 and 1818 (according to a letter to Julius Frauenstädt, 1855, GB
377), it took John Oxenford’s 1853 article “Iconoclasm in German
Philosophy” in the Westminster Review2—some 35 years after the
publication of Schopenhauer’s main work—for Schopenhauer to be
really discovered by the cultural elites in Europe as the great pessi-
mist. Even in Germany Schopenhauer was largely discovered by way
of a German translation of Oxenford’s essay in the Vossische Zeitung.
It is worth looking somewhat closely at Oxenford’s long review
essay of Schopenhauer’s major works in order to understand the re-
ception of Schopenhauer’s system in Europe. When one does, one
sees that the predominant means of discovery colors Schopenhauer’s
thought in a decidedly pessimistic hue. Indeed, the reception of
Schopenhauer into the 19th century and up to the present day has
been influenced by Oxenford’s initial emphasis on Schopenhauer as
what I am calling the Knight of Despair.
Oxenford starts with a description of Schopenhauer as a critic
of Hegel, Schelling, and Fichte, especially of their obscure academic
style and general optimism. He stresses, however, that Schopenhauer
is not merely a critic, but is also a clear, compelling system-builder.
While he lauds this system as “genial,” Oxenford stresses that it is also
profoundly depressing:
[Schopenhauer’s] doctrine . . . is the most disheartening, the

most repulsive, the most opposed to the aspirations of the
2. The original English article can be accessed through Project Gutenberg at the following
link: http://books.google.com/books?id=ungVAQAAIAAJ&pg=PP11&dq=%22westm
inster+review%22+%2B+%22iconoclasm+in+german+philosophy%22&ie=ISO-8859-
1&output=html. For a fascinating account of the role of British women writers, including
George Eliot, in the discovery of Schopenhauer’s work in England and then in Continental
Europe, see S. Pearl Brilmyer, “Schopenhauer and British Literary Feminism” in The Palgrave
397–424.
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15
present world, that the most ardent of Job’s comforters could

concoct. All that the liberal mind looks forward to with hope,
if not with confidence—the extension of political rights, the
spread of education, the brotherhood of nations, the discovery
of new means of subduing stubborn nature—must be given up
as a vain dream if ever Schopenhauer’s doctrine be accepted. In a
word, he is a professed “Pessimist”; it is his grand result, that this
is the worst of all possible worlds; nay, so utterly unsusceptible of
improvement, that the best thing we can do is to get rid of it alto-
gether, by a process which he very clearly sets forth. (393–394)
Oxenford thus frames Schopenhauer’s philosophy as first and fore-

most a thoroughgoing “Pessimism.” Later in the essay, he discusses
Schopenhauer’s more hopeful ethics of compassion, in which the
good person strives to relieve the suffering of others, but Oxenford
underscores that it is not the compassionate person who is
Schopenhauer’s ideal; rather, “[a]‌sceticism, that gradual extinction
of all feelings that connect us with the visible world . . . this is the
perfection of Schopenhauer,” and he concludes the essay by calling
Schopenhauer’s system one of “ultra-pessimism” (407). Oxenford’s
influential introduction of Schopenhauer to European elites certainly
cast Schopenhauer as a foe of modern progress, as “misanthropic”
and an “ultra-pessimist.”3

3. Christopher Janaway discusses the reception of Schopenhauer’s thought through
Oxenford’s article in his introduction to Parerga and Paralipomena, volume I [ed. and trans.
Sabine Roehr and Christopher Janaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014),
xiv]. Janaway notes that Schopenhauer did not like being called a “misanthrope” and never
describes his own philosophy in print as “Pessimism” but that the spirit of the age by the
1870s was rather pessimistic and so Schopenhauer’s resignationism struck a welcome
chord with many thinkers. See also Rüdiger Safranski, Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of
Philosophy, trans. Ewald Osers (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989), who believes that
the spirit of the age “met Schopenhauer halfway” though not he claims, as many believe,
due to a widespread pessimism—for the bourgeoisie at the time generally still believed in
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16
Yet, the “ultra-pessimist” label does not capture Schopenhauer’s

overall orientation; it is one-sided, a caricature of his system, or so
I shall argue in this book. One clue that the Oxenford picture is a
somewhat distorted one lies in the fact that Schopenhauer himself
disliked being called a “misanthrope” by Oxenford, and though he
does refer to “mein Pessimismus” in letters to friends in the 1850s, he
never refers in print to his own philosophy as a brand of “pessimism.”4
Schopenhauer’s reluctance to accept the “ultra-pessimist” and “mis-
anthrope” labels points us to another, less famous, less audacious
Schopenhauer, one who, I shall argue in the course of this book, has
much greater contemporary relevance for normative ethical theory,
namely, the Knight with Hope.
The Knight with Hope does not focus on a battle with optimism
in order to prove that life is not worth living; rather, he shines a bright
light on the myriad sources of suffering in the world in order to do
battle with rampant human egoism and malice, for the Knight with
Hope holds that the “chief source of the most serious evils affecting
human beings is the human being himself ” [die Hauptquelle der
progress—but due to a kind of realism and desire to adhere to the hard facts of experience
(330–332).
4. See Schopenhauer’s letter to Julius Frauenstädt, 1855 (GB, 377) in which he discusses Kuno
Fischer’s History of Modern Philosophy (Geschichte der neuern Philosophie, Band 2) and the
treatment Fischer gives to Schopenhauer within it. In this letter, Schopenhauer does not
object to Fischer’s calling his philosophy a “Pessimismus”; he objects rather to Fischer’s
view that Schopenhauer’s holding of this doctrine was historically determined: “und da
bin ich als Pessimist der nothwendige Gegensatz des Leibnitz als Optimisten: und das
wird daraus abgeleitet, daß Leibnitz in einer hoffnungsreichen, ich aber in einer desperaten
und malörösen Zeit gelebt habe: Ergo, hätte ich 1700 gelebt, so wäre ich so ein geleckter,
optimistischer Leibnitz gewesen, und dieser wäre ich, wenn er jetzt lebte!—So verrückt
macht die Hegelei. Obendrein aber ist mein Pessimismus von 1814 bis 1818 (da er komplet
erschien) erwachsen; welches die hoffnungsreichste Zeit, nach Deutschlands Befreiung,
war. Das weiß der Gelbschnabel nicht!” (Deussen, Briefwechsel 1799–1860). In his HN
“Adversaria” 1828 Schopenhauer does refer to his view as “Pessimismus” as well: “pan-
theism is essentially optimism, but my doctrine is pessimism” (HN 3, 506).
16
17
ernstlichsten Uebel, die den Menschen treffen, der Mensch selbst] (WWR
II, chap. 46). Accordingly, he laments the attitudes responsible for
the majority of human-made suffering:
the conduct of men towards one another is characterized as a

rule by injustice, extreme unfairness, hardness and even cru-
elty . . . The necessity for the State and for legislation rests on this
fact . . . How man deals with man is seen, for example, in Negro
slavery, the ultimate object of which is sugar and coffee. However,
we need not go so far; to enter at the age of five a cotton-spinning
or other factory, and from then on to sit there every day first ten,
then twelve and finally fourteen hours, and perform the same
mechanical work, is to purchase dearly the pleasure of drawing
breath. But this is the fate of millions, and many more millions
have an analogous fate. (WWR II, 578)
The Schopenhauer in this passage almost sounds like an ally of the

budding Social Democratic parties in Germany at the time, for he
identifies economic and social institutions, such as unbridled indus-
trial capitalism and African slavery, as the major culprits for human
suffering, and his tone is one of disgust at those whose egoism bring
them to exploit other human beings.5
5. Schopenhauer’s own politics, were, however, decidedly on the side of monarchical law and
order, largely because of his Hobbesian view of human nature—better to have a strong state
that keeps the peace rather than revolutionary anarchy in the streets! Notwithstanding, it
seems that he supported reforms to the monarchical order that would diminish suffering
without thereby falling into anarchy. For instance, he lauds the “great-hearted British” con-
stitutional monarchy for giving up “20 million pounds sterling to buy the negro slaves in
its colonies their freedom” (OBM, 218). For more on his actual political views and polit-
ical philosophy, see David Woods, “Schopenhauer, the State and Morality,” in The Palgrave
299–322.
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18
Further, Schopenhauer is outraged by Christian morals and

philosophers who follow in this tradition for enabling the suffering of
non-human animals at the hands of human beings:
Because . . . Christian morals give no consideration to animals,

they are at once free as birds in philosophical morals too, they
are mere ‘things’, mere means to whatever ends you like, as
for instance vivisection, hunting with hounds, bull-fighting,
racing, whipping to death in front of an immovable stone-cart
and the like—Bah! what a morals of pariahs, chandalas, and
mlechchas—which fails to recognize the eternal essence that is
present in everything that has life, and that shines out with un-
fathomable significance from all eyes that see the light of the sun.
(OBM, 162)
Inhumane treatment of animals constitutes a paradigm case of vice

for Schopenhauer, such that “[c]‌ompassion for animals goes together
with goodness of character so precisely that we can confidently assert
that anyone who is cruel to animals cannot be a good human being”
(OBM, 229).
In the above-quoted passages, Schopenhauer expresses a moral
horror at these potent, human-made sources of suffering to other
living beings. However, these expressions alone do not distinguish
the Knight of Despair from the Knight with Hope. What makes the
latter Schopenhauer truly distinct from the former is that he not only
highlights the myriad sources of suffering in the world, and he not
only evinces moral horror at these, but he also expresses hope that
things can get significantly better.
Even in his main work, WWR I, book IV, Schopenhauer displays
hope that the improvement of human institutions can prevent unjust
actions:
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19
It is conceivable that all crime could be prevented by a perfect

state, or perhaps merely by universal faith in a system of rewards
and punishments after death. (WWR I, 396, sec. 66)
And he displays hope that some measure of actual happiness can be

gained through virtue, conceived of as compassion:
By diminishing our interest in our own self, our anxious self-

solicitude is attacked at its root and confined: hence the peaceful,
confident cheerfulness that a virtuous disposition and good conscience
brings, a cheerfulness that appears more distinctly with every good
deed, since every good deed is one more confirmation for ourselves
of the reason for our mood. The egoist feels he is surrounded by
alien and hostile appearances, and all his hopes rest on his own
well-being. The good person lives in a world of friendly appearances: the
well-being of each of these appearances is his own well-being. Even if
the recognition of the overall lot of humanity does not make his
mood a happy one, the lasting recognition that his own being is in
all living things lends his mood a certain constancy and even cheer-
fulness. (WWR I, 400–401, sec. 66; emphasis added)6
Here, the way to attaining a “peaceful, confident cheerfulness” is

through the exercise of virtue, which for Schopenhauer is, first,
recognizing that one’s “own being is in all living things” and, second,
6. For more on the way moral excellence contributes to happiness, see OBM, sec. 22.
Although it should be noted that true joy, for Schopenhauer, seems reserved for those who
have negated life altogether: “the evil person suffers constant, searing, inner misery through
the violence of his will . . . In comparison, if the negation of the will has arisen in someone,
that person is full of inner joy and true heavenly peace, however, poor, joyless and deprived
his situation might look from the outside” (WWR I, 416). With respect to gains in peace and
joy, there seems to be a continuum here, from egoistic to the compassionate, and finally to
the resigned person.
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20
acting with universal compassion toward all sentient beings (those

capable of experiencing pleasure and pain). The peaceful cheerful-
ness is enjoyed because the good person “lives in a world of friendly
appearances” whereas the egoist feels surrounded by “alien and hos-
tile appearances.” What seems to make all of the difference between,
on the one hand, living in a world of friendly appearances, or, on the
other hand, living in a world of alien and hostile appearances, is one’s
attitude toward other living beings. If one has a “lasting recognition”
that one’s own being “is in all living things,” one can achieve a cheerful
and, it seems, pretty happy life.
What is more, by the time Schopenhauer writes On the Basis of
Morals (1839/40), he recognizes that actual progress can be made
to reduce the sources of human-made suffering and he even calls
on individuals and governments to follow the path of compas-
sionate reform. For example, he praises the British nation’s spending
“up to 20 million pounds” to buy the freedom of slaves in America
(OBM, 218).
To be sure, the Knight with Hope is still no philosophical opti-
mist along the lines of a Hegel or Marx. However, as shown above,
and as I will elaborate in Chapter 2, Schopenhauer evinces hope that
through compassionate acts, the painstaking reform of law, and the
development of more humane social and political institutions, suf-
fering of humans and animals may be somewhat reduced, and life can
get significantly better for sentient beings. Further, in line with the
previously cited passage on virtue as its own reward, it seems that
things could be improved to such an extent that life could be a good
thing, not just a less bad thing. After all, the life of the virtuous person
is a life he describes as one of “peaceful, confident cheerfulness” lived
in the midst of “friendly appearances”—this sounds pretty good, not
just less bad!7 Certainly those who suffer tremendously—even if
7. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pressing me on this point.
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21
virtuous—might not be able to attain a happy life, but Schopenhauer

singles out the egoist’s life as the paradigmatically bad one, for the
egoist experiences the anxious feeling of being “surrounded by alien
and hostile appearances” (WWR I, 400–401, sec. 66), whereas the
truly virtuous person—the one who sees his own sort of being in all
other living beings and who aims to reduce or prevent the suffering of
others—reaps his or her own happiness reward.
The upshot of close attention to Schopenhauer’s pessimistic
and optimistic claims is that one sees that the key fulcrum between
these two Schopenhauers is the question of hope, namely, are there
good grounds—even in Schopenhauer’s own system—to hope
that the world may be significantly improved, and that suffering
may be significantly reduced, such that life could be something
positive? How we answer this question should determine which
of the two Schopenhauers we should embrace for philosophical
reasons.
In other words, hope seems to be the key interpretative fulcrum
by which to interpret Schopenhauer’s ethical thought, for it is hope—
that life can be not only less bad but also something positive (in terms
of pleasure or some other value)—that pulls us back to desiring and
pursuing things in life:
The temptations of hope, the flatteries of the present, the sweet-

ness of pleasure, the well-being that falls to our personal lot amid
the distress of a suffering world ruled by chance and error, all this
pulls us back and fastens our bonds once more. (WWR I, 406)
And it is complete hopelessness that leads to resignation and renun-

ciation of the will-to-life:
In real life, we see that unfortunate people who have to drink to

the dregs the greatest amount of suffering and face a shameful,
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2
violent and often miserable death on the scaffold, fully lucid

but deprived of all hope, are quite often transformed in this
way . . . after complete hopelessness has set in . . . the negation of
the will to life has emerged. (WWR I, 420; emphasis added)
So one of the key questions of this inquiry is whether, by the lights

of Schopenhauer’s own system, we have better grounds for hope or
hopelessness? If there are good grounds for hope that suffering can
be significantly reduced in the world, and that life can be positively
desirable, then, philosophically, we ought to embrace the Knight
with Hope and mutatis mutandis for the Knight of Despair. This ques-
tion will be the subject of Chapter 2.
II. THE ONE SCHOPENHAUER VIEW
In contrast to my “two Schopenhauers” view, the traditional view is

to see only one Schopenhauer—the Knight of Despair—who holds
that the renunciation from the will-to-life constitutes the truest, most
ethical response to a world such as ours in which suffering is tremen-
dous, endemic, and unredeemed, and which cannot get significantly
better such that life would be positively desirable. On this view, there
is really no fulcrum on which the choice of which Schopenhauer to
embrace pivots. On the contrary, the One Schopenhauer view takes
it that there are no good grounds for hope within Schopenhauer’s
system, and thus the ethics of compassionate action is really a practi-
cally second-best and epistemically second-rate response to the world.
On this view, while compassion is certainly better than egoism, it is
nonetheless epistemically deficient in comparison to resignation be-
cause, while the compassionate person thinks life could be made pos-
itively good (and not just less bad), the resigned person sees through
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23
the “temptations of hope,” recognizing that life can never be non-bad.

As discussed above, this is the interpretation of Schopenhauer that
Oxenford presented, and that has prevailed to the current day.
On the canonical One Schopenhauer view, then, there aren’t
two distinct and incompatible Schopenhauerian stances on the world
as I have adumbrated above, namely, that of the Knight of Despair
who applauds renouncing the will-to-life and that of the Knight with
Hope who applauds compassionate action. Rather, the life of com-
passion is valuable only instrumentally, as a step along the path to
“salvation” from the will-to-life in complete renunciation, though
one might think nonetheless that compassion has intrinsic value for
the one whose suffering is eased. Yet, even from the point of view
of the one helped by another’s compassionate action, on the One-
Schopenhauer, pessimistic view, the compassionate person’s action
to try to diminish another’s suffering only seems beneficial to the
one who is helped, for fundamentally the “help” might only further
chain the “helped” to the will-to-life! Those saintly few who can re-
sign themselves from willing—and ipso facto from compassionate
willing—thus embody the highest wisdom and take the normatively
preferred course; but for those of us who cannot or will not be saints,
acting out of genuine compassion expresses some degree of wisdom
and is the morally next best course of action, though it remains episte-
mically and ethically deficient.
Christopher Janaway nicely sums up the “merely instrumental
view” of the morality of compassion as follows:
The person who is so morally good that the distinction between

him-or herself and others begins to fall away, feels all the suf-
fering throughout the world as if it were his or her own. This
leads to resignation, brought about by sedation of the will or
its recoil away from life. One grasps the utter lack of value in
living and willing as an individual at all. Only by undergoing
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24
such an extreme redemptive transformation in consciousness,

an extinction of the personality that consists in the cessation or
self-negation of willing, can the individual’s existence attain gen-
uine worth; and morality has value ultimately, not in its own right,
but as a step towards this self-denial of the will. (2009a, xxxviii;
emphasis added)
There is a good deal of textual support for Janaway’s reading of the sec-
ondary, merely instrumental importance of Schopenhauer’s ethics of
compassion within his system, and of the higher epistemic standpoint
embodied in renunciation. In chapter 48 of WWR II, for instance,
Schopenhauer describes the moral virtues—justice [Gerechtigkeit]
and philanthropy [Menschenliebe]—as a “means of advancing self-
renunciation, and accordingly of denying the will-to-live” (WWR II,
606). He also applauds early Christianity for its recognition that “the
moral virtues are not really the ultimate end, but only a step towards
it” (WWR II, 608). Further, he describes the psychological transi-
tion from compassion to renunciation that he thinks is bound to take
place in a person who truly exercises the moral virtue of justice:
true righteousness, inviolable justice . . . is so heavy a task, that

whoever professes it unconditionally and from the bottom of his
heart has to make sacrifices which soon deprive life of the sweet-
ness required to make it enjoyable . . . and thus lead to resigna-
tion. (WWR II, 606)
Similarly, Schopenhauer holds that the virtue of Menschenliebe when

seriously exercised leads “even more quickly” to resignation because
“a person [who] takes over also the sufferings that originally fall to
the lot of others” takes on a “hard lot,” and consequently “clinging to
life and its pleasures must now soon yield, and make way for a uni-
versal renunciation . . . [and] denial of the will” (WWR II, 606–607).
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25
Two reasons emerge from these passages for the almost inevi-
table transition from true moral virtue to renunciation. First, the task
of genuine justice and philanthropy will come to seem rather futile—
a local, minute decrease in an endless ocean of suffering. Second, re-
ally serious exercise of these virtues is such as to divest a person of
the pleasures she takes in her own life, leading to greater detachment
from her own will-to-life.
Finally, textual support for the traditional view can be found in
Schopenhauer’s Parerga and Paralipomena. In the introduction to his
“Aphorisms on the wisdom of life [Aphorismen zur Lebensweisheit]”—
where he offers guidance for a happy existence, such that one
would choose such an existence over non-existence (PP I, 313)—
Schopenhauer admits that the “eudaimonology” he is offering
“abandons entirely the higher metaphysical ethical standpoint to
which [his] real philosophy leads.” Thus, he writes, “the whole dis-
cussion here to be given rests to a certain extent on a compromise,
in so far as it remains at the ordinary empirical standpoint and firmly
maintains the error thereof ” (PP I, 313).
Yet, while there is clearly a good deal of textual support for the tra-
ditional, merely instrumental view of Schopenhauer’s ethics of com-
passion, some of its entailments create tensions within his thought
approaching the level of paradox, and this gives us systematic and
philosophical reasons to pursue the Two Schopenhauers view.
III. ONE OR T WO SCHOPENHAUERS?
One tension between Schopenhauer’s resignationism and his ethics

of compassion lies in the fact that the latter is still proclaimed as an
ethical ideal in its own right, normatively to be preferred to egoism or
malice. And yet compassion—unlike egoism and malice—actually
works in a manner that is antagonistic to the ideal of renunciation.
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26
Similarly, the ideal of renunciation works in a manner contrary to the

ideal of compassion, as I shall explain further below. Insofar as there
really is a mutual antagonism between these ethical ideals, however,
this certainly complicates the view of compassion as merely of instru-
mental value for achieving resignation.8
What’s more, I’d like to suggest that there are really two funda-
mental tensions within Schopenhauer’s ethical thought that have
gone largely unnoticed by commentators. The first lies between the
two distinct parts of Schopenhauer’s ethical principle: “Harm no one;
rather help everyone to the extent that you can,” [Neminem laede; imo
omnes, quantum potes, iuva] (OBM, 140), and the second lies within
Schopenhauer’s claim that compassionate action—understood as
preventing or alleviating the suffering of others—is actually beneficial
to the recipients of that action. I shall address these tensions in turn.9
On the first tension, namely, the one lying within Schopenhauer’s
ethical principle itself, it should be noted that the principle does not
function within his system as the Categorical Imperative does in
Kant’s. Schopenhauer’s ethical principle is not the source or founda-
tion of morality, but rather is simply a reservoir for that source which
is the feeling of compassion. Nonetheless, the principle encapsulates
the maxim of a morally good person (OBM, 205), and having such a
principle is, for Schopenhauer, “indispensable for a moral life, as the
container . . . in which the disposition that has risen out of the source
of all morality, which does not flow at every moment, is stored so that
it can flow down through supply channels when a case for application
8. The only other scholar to my knowledge who has drawn attention to the real tension be-
tween Schopenhauer’s ethics of compassion and his resignationism is Gudrun von Tevenar
in the final section of her “Schopenhauer and Kant on Menschenliebe,” in The Palgrave
261–282.
9. This section draws on a paper I co-authored with Tristan Ferrell titled “Compassion or
Resignation, that is the Question of Schopenhauer’s Ethical Thought,” Enrahonar (October
2015), accessible at http://revistes.uab.cat/enrahonar/article/view/v55-shapshay-ferrell.
26
27
comes” (OBM, 205). As I understand Schopenhauer’s metaphor of

the principle as “container” or reservoir for compassion, the prin-
ciple may be called on in moments of rational reflection in order to
act morally, even when one is not feeling occurrent compassion. By
acting in accordance with the dictates of the principle, even though
one is not motivated to act immediately by the feeling of compas-
sion, one at least acts in accordance with (though not from) virtue,
to borrow a Kantian distinction but relating it to “virtue” rather than
to “duty.”
Thus, while the principle is imperatival in form, it is not impera-
tival in force, for the principle is meant only to capture the modus op-
erandi of the truly morally good person, who, as a matter of empirical
fact, is motivated by compassion to harm no one, but rather to help
everyone to the extent that she or he can. If a person is not motivated
by compassion, however, she or he may still act rightly insofar as she
or he follows the dictates of the principle—in this way the principle
serves as a reservoir for compassion that is not actually flowing.
Living in accordance with the principle “Harm no one; rather
help everyone to the extent that you can” is extremely demanding
given the nature of organic existence. On Schopenhauer’s proto-
Darwinian view, organisms are essentially driven by the will-to-life,
which ineluctably involves competition with other living beings for
the basic means to sustain life and propagate the species. This com-
petition brings tremendous suffering to self and others in its wake.
In the human world as well, ordinary relationships result in tre-
mendous suffering. This is well conveyed, for Schopenhauer, through
bourgeois tragedies in which “morally ordinary characters in eve-
ryday circumstances are positioned with respect to each other in such
a way that their situation forces them knowingly and clear-sightedly
to cause each other the greatest harm without the injustice falling on
one side or the other” (WWR I, 281–282). Given Schopenhauer’s
view of the affirmation of the will-to-life as inevitably causing harm
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28
and suffering to others in the animal and human world alike, the in-
junction to “harm no one” whether the “one” is a human being or
non-human animal is actually impossible to live up to insofar as one
continues to participate in the will-to-life at all. Thus, it seems the only
way strictly to live up to the “harm no one” part of the principle is to
give up willing altogether through renunciation.
But what of the other half of the principle: “help everyone to the
extent that you can”? This second part is decidedly not served by re-
nunciation, for the truly resigned person no longer actively helps an-
yone. Schopenhauer describes the transition from moral virtue to
ascetic renunciation as one from “loving others as himself and doing
as much for them as for himself ” to having a “loathing for the essence
that is expressed as his own appearance, the will-to-life” (WWR I,
407). Consequently, the person on the way to achieving salvation is
“careful not to let his will attach itself to anything, and tries to steel
himself with the greatest indifference toward all things” (WWR I,
407); and for the fully resigned person “this world of ours which is so
very real with all its suns and galaxies is—nothing” (WWR I, 439).
The resigned saint seems to have achieved an existence that is beyond
all caring and ipso facto beyond all compassion as well.
However, it is precisely caring for others—and, more particularly,
the action motivated by such caring—that is called for by the second
half of the moral principle. It would seem, then, that renunciation is
actually opposed to the second part of the moral principle, “help eve-
ryone to the extent that one can.” Except perhaps if you hold that re-
nunciation helps others as much as one can by modeling the attitude
that would be best for them too. The possibility of helping others by
“modeling” renunciation might seem to offer a way to harmonize
these two parts of the principle, but it cannot do all of the work re-
quired for two reasons: First, non-human animals are incapable of
renunciation, and thus modeling will not help them at all; second,
sainthood is an exceedingly rare option for human beings, and so a
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29
very tenuous way to “help others as much as you can.” Thus, despite
some help to others that might come from modeling resignation,
compassionate affirmation of the will-to-life, while non-egoistic, is
clearly anti-resignationist as well.
The result of this analysis therefore uncovers a dilemma within
Schopenhauer’s ethical principle. On the one hand, in order fully
to honor the “harm no one” part of the principle, resignation is in
order. On the other hand, if one resigns, one is thereby not “helping
everyone to the extent that one can.” It looks as though we cannot
simultaneously, fully honor both parts of the principle—and this
despite the fact that its wording would appear to imply that we can.
Schopenhauer never acknowledges this dilemma. As it stands, then,
Schopenhauer’s ethics— when followed conscientiously— entails
that we choose between two mutually exclusive parts of an eth-
ical principle. And what is more, choosing either entails violating
the other!
To complicate matters further for the standard One Schopenhauer
view, there is a second major tension within Schopenhauer’s ethical
thought represented by his notion that compassionate action—
understood as preventing or alleviating the suffering of others—
actually benefits others. Schopenhauer certainly describes the
alleviating of suffering for others as a benefit to them: The virtue of
justice is defined as a disposition to refrain from harming or to pre-
vent harm to others, and the virtue of loving-kindness/philanthropy
[Menschenliebe] is described as a disposition to actively sacrifice
something (one’s time, bodily or mental exertions, wealth, health,
freedom, or even one’s life [cf. OBM, 216]) in order to help alleviate
another’s suffering or prospective suffering. These virtues therefore
clearly aim at the good of others in the form of prevention of or
lessened suffering. And they are virtues rather than vices precisely be-
cause they do so. But can preventing or lessening another’s suffering
be consistently construed as a good for the recipient of compassion
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30
within Schopenhauer’s system? When one looks closely at what

Schopenhauer says about the nature of salvation, it seems not.
In chapter 49 of WWR II, titled “The Road to Salvation,”
Schopenhauer elaborates the two paths to negation of the will-to-
life he set out in WWR I. These paths involve the recognition of the
essential, irredeemable suffering of existence that is cognized, on
the one hand, from the cases of others, or, on the other, from “one’s
own immediate feeling of suffering” (WWR I, 424). In this supple-
mentary chapter, Schopenhauer stresses that very few people will
achieve salvation along the first path via recognition of the suffering
of others; it is rather, personal suffering that has the greatest promise as
a “sanctifying force” (WWR II, 636):
The [first] way, leading to just the same goal [renunciation] by

means of mere knowledge and accordingly the appropriation of
the sufferings of a whole world, is the narrow path of the elect,
of the saints, and consequently is to be regarded as a rare excep-
tion. Therefore, without that [path of personal suffering] it would
be impossible for the majority to hope for any salvation. But we
struggle against entering on this path, and strive rather with all
our might to prepare for ourselves a secure and pleasant existence,
whereby we chain our will ever more firmly to life. (WWR II, 638)
Without personal suffering, for Schopenhauer, the majority of us

have no hope of reaching salvation—which he holds as the highest
good.10 Thus, perversely, it seems that compassionate measures
10. Schopenhauer is not terribly explicit about the kinds of personal suffering that help to-
ward renunciation, but he does allude to the “grave misfortunes” that one sees in dramatic
tragedy as being particularly effective kinds, as well as the experience of awaiting execution
for a capital crime. Toward the end of chapter 48 in WWR II, for instance, Schopenhauer
recaps several newspaper accounts of murderers, who seem to have achieved renunciation
of the will-to-life and fully welcome their death while awaiting execution. For instance,
he quotes the Limerick Chronicle on the case of “Mary Cooney . . . [who was] so deeply
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31
taken by others to prevent or alleviate our suffering may not be in

our truly best interests after all! If one takes a narrow view of things,
compassionate action may appear beneficial; but in the broad
view—with an eye toward salvation through renunciation—this is
precisely the sort of action that will help to “chain our will ever more
firmly to life,” thereby leading us away from the possibility of salva-
tion. Now, it could be that the person one is aiming to help through
compassionate action could not attain salvation, and in this case, the
action would actually be beneficial. So the problem I am outlining
here is a kind of epistemic paradox: How does one know that the
person one supposedly “helps” through compassionate action is not
thereby being harmed insofar as this “help” hinders her on the path
to salvation?11
I should note, however, that this epistemic paradox of the
beneficial-yet-for-that-reason-potentially-harmful aspect of compas-
sion is limited to actions directed at beings capable of salvation, that
is to say, for Schopenhauer, rational beings. Compassionate actions
are non-problematically beneficial to animals who he believes are
incapable of salvation (either though the renunciation of the will-
to-life by personal suffering or by an understanding of the suffering
of others). In the case of rational animals, (paradigmatically) adult
human beings, the problem is that the compassionate actions that re-
duce the suffering of such beings also stand to diminish their progress
toward salvation. In light of Schopenhauer’s apparent commitment
to the normative primacy of renunciation, it would seem that egoistic
or malicious actions toward rational beings may be, for all we know,
better for them instrumentally, insofar as ratcheting up their suffering
sensible of her crime . . . that she kissed the rope which encircled her neck, and humbly
implored God for mercy” (WWR II, 632).
11. I am grateful to Allen Wood for pointing out that the paradox is really an epistemic one.
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32
may lead them to unchain themselves from their will-to-life, and fur-
ther along the path toward salvation.
I hope to have shown in this discussion that the standard picture
of a continuum of morally worthy options culminating in renunci-
ation masks the fact that compassion and renunciation seem upon
closer investigation to be, in large part, mutually exclusive ethical
ideals. If this analysis is correct, instead of an unproblematic hier-
archy between morally worthy ways of being:
1. Renunciation of the will-to-life

2. The life of compassionate action
where 2 tends psychologically, logically, and ethically to lead

to 1, Schopenhauer’s ethical system confronts a person with a
choice between which of two fundamentally incompatible ideals one
should honor.
Renunciation of the will-to-life OR The life of compassionate action

(“harm no one”) (“help everyone to the extent
that you can”)
What I suggest, then, is that the traditional picture of the

ethics of compassion as a step in the right direction but ultimately
a way station to the normatively preferable option of renunciation
masks a fundamental conflict at the heart of Schopenhauer’s ethical
thought: Renunciation is likely hindered by many acts of compas-
sion; and compassionate action is likely undermined by renuncia-
tion. Notwithstanding and perhaps oblivious to this antagonism,
Schopenhauer puts forth an ethics of compassion as a bona fide
ethical ideal inasmuch as compassionate action benefits another
by lessening his or her suffering; yet in light of the common path
to resignationism, that is, through personal suffering, the act of
32
3
lessening a rational being’s suffering would likely be counterproduc-

tive for helping her reach salvation, and is thus not a clear benefit to
another at all.
IV. TOWARD A RESOLUTION OF THE DUALITY
The natural question to ask is what to make of the two Schopenhauers

and the two diametrically opposed ethical ideals found together in
his thought? Was Schopenhauer himself aware of this contradiction?
Is it possible to resolve this duality in his ethical thought?
To answer the second question, I do not believe Schopenhauer
was aware of the problem within his ethical thought, namely, that
the ideal of compassion is antagonistic to the ideal of resignation and
vice versa. The closest he comes to acknowledging these tensions is
in his willingness to take up different evaluative standpoints in turn
in his works. He takes up the standpoint of compassion in OBM; he
takes the standpoint of eudaimonology in PP; and the standpoint of
resignationism in the latter parts of WWR I, book IV. He recognizes
these as distinct standpoints, but instead of recognizing antagonisms
between them, he attempts to impose a neat epistemic and ethical
hierarchy among them. In descending order of ethical goodness and
insight, the hierarchy goes as follows: (1) resignationism, (2) the
ethics of compassion, (3) eudaimonology. Schopenhauer never
explores the aforementioned antagonisms especially between 1 and
2, I believe, because he thought he could successfully rank them in
order. The fact that he offers an exposition of the ethics of compas-
sion in WWR I, book IV as a long prelude to the topic of resignation
further heightens the appearance of the merely instrumental view of
compassion as a way toward salvation and renunciation, and all of
this well explains why the standard picture emphasizes salvation and
renunciation to the exclusion of hope and compassion.
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34
What I shall argue in this course of this book, however, is that we

should resist this natural interpretative temptation. I shall argue that
even on Schopenhauerian grounds we should prefer the ideal of compassion
to that of resignationism, and not just because most of us will never get to
salvation. Rather, it is because even within Schopenhauer’s philosophy there
are good grounds for hope. And where there are good grounds for hope,
resignation would actually constitute a misguided shirking of one’s re-
sponsibility to “help everyone to the extent that one can.”
In Chapter 2, I shall argue that we should see Schopenhauer’s own
philosophy as dynamic and that in the course of his intellectual devel-
opment, Schopenhauer’s own grounds for pessimism become weaker.
But as I have argued, from the start, there was a tension in his thought
between the ethics of compassion and resignationism, and the key ques-
tion in choosing between them is—are there good grounds for hope?
In sum, I shall argue in what follows that the way to resolve the
two Schopenhauers is to see his thought as developing from 1818
to 1859, and to see that development as one that better supports the
hope and compassion position. In this book, I am thus consciously
emphasizing the strand in Schopenhauer that not only do I find more
appealing than the one emphasized by the standard reading, but that
is also the strand that gains systemic support with certain evolutions
in his own thought.
One major philosophical attraction of my dynamic reading is
that anybody who actually cares about ethics will find him more ap-
pealing than the pessimistic life-hating Schopenhauer we have all
come to know and love (or hate, or pity, or laugh at). I think there
are good philosophical reasons for embracing the Knight with Hope.
Further, when these two distinct and incompatible modes of
Schopenhauer’s ethical thought are separated, the ethics of compas-
sion, which has been largely eclipsed by the resignationism,12 can be
12. Except by David Cartwright, who calls the ethics of compassion his “narrower sense of
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35
fully reconstructed. And when it is, some surprising continuities with

Kant’s ethics emerge. I shall argue in what follows that Schopenhauer’s
ethics of compassion, when liberated from its “second best” status offers
a novel ethical theory for the contemporary landscape: It’s a theory that
combines Kantian and moral sense aspects, and offers a less anthropocen-
tric ethical vision.
morality,” quoting Schopenhauer’s own description thereof in WWR II, c hapter 47. See
David E. Cartwright, “Schopenhauer’s Narrower Sense of Morality,” in The Cambridge
Companion to Schopenhauer, ed. C. Janaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1999) 252–291.
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36
37
Chapter 2
Schopenhauer’s Pessimism
in Light of His Evolving System
I. THE TRADITIONAL INTERPRETATION—

SCHOPENHAUER AS THE KNIGHT
OF DESPAIR
As alluded to in Chapter 1, Schopenhauer’s thought has played a kind

of niche role in accounts of the history of Western philosophy: He is,
first and foremost, the arch pessimist of the 19th (or really, any) cen-
tury, bent on showing that suffering is the essential keynote of sen-
tient existence, and that all of this suffering goes unredeemed in an
atheistic world. Given these facts, it would have been better for all of
us “never to have been.”
According to this traditional view of Schopenhauer’s main
doctrines, he denies the possibility of any significant historical prog-
ress, recommending instead resignation and ascetic denial of the will-
to-life as the truest and best response to this depressing condition.1
Consequently, these doctrines made Schopenhauer a marginal figure
1. For a classic, albeit breezy encapsulation of the traditional view, see Bertrand Russell’s
chapter on Schopenhauer in his A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1945). Russell begins by saying that Schopenhauer is a pessimist in a tradition
that is optimistic, and believes reform to be “ultimately futile.”
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38
in the largely optimistic 19th century, when philosophers saw signs

of progress everywhere, until the 1850s, when thinkers became more
attuned to the economic and spiritual miseries accompanying mo-
dernity, and the spirit of the age “met him halfway.”2
In light of the niche status of Schopenhauer today, it’s “a sur-
prising fact,” as Fred Beiser has recently reminded us, “that Arthur
Schopenhauer was the most famous and influential philosopher in
Germany from 1860 until the First World War”3 and sparked an en-
tire controversy—the “pessimism controversy”—among some now
lesser-known figures in Germany, such as Eduard von Hartmann and
Philipp Mainländer, in addition to being the driving influence on the
early Nietzsche.
And it is as the “arch pessimist”—the thinker who spurred the
Pessimism Controversy and prompted Nietzsche to offer a justifica-
tion of existence—that Schopenhauer is most remembered today.
For example, Karl Löwith, in his classic From Hegel to Nietzsche,
understands the importance of Schopenhauer’s thought in the 19th
century as follows:
[In the 1850s] Schopenhauer in particular became the philos-

opher of the hour, “sitting like a speculative Job upon the ash
heap of finiteness,” thereby gaining the regard of Kierkegaard.
This world of suffering is produced by blind “will” and “idea”
can give no better counsel than to cease to will. The history of
German philosophy has not recognized the full significance of
this reaction4
2. Rüdiger Safranski, Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1991), 330.
3. Frederick C. Beiser, Weltschmerz: Pessimism in German Philosophy 1860– 1900
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 13.
4. Karl Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche, trans. David E. Green (New York: Columbia
38
39
S c h o p e n h a u e r’ s P e s s i m i s m
More recently, Susan Neiman in her original and important

recasting of the history of modern philosophy, Evil in Modern
Thought, characterizes Schopenhauer’s thought as first and foremost
pessimistic:
Schopenhauer’s dry elegance masks a despair so thoroughgoing

that it may even remain untimely for darker epochs. . . . His work
was devoted to showing that suffering is the essence of existence.
Only the form of the pain is a matter of accident. Our lives move
between pain and boredom; we are pushed toward the one in an
effort to avoid the other.5
And in his study of pessimism as a philosophical and more broadly

cultural movement from Rousseau to Cioran, Joshua Dienstag
regards Schopenhauer as a key figure, characterizing his version of
pessimism as holding “not that our civilization or morality are de-
clining, but rather that human beings are fated to endure a life
freighted with problems that are fundamentally unmeliorable . . . [due
to] the unalterable conditions of our daily existence.”6
The traditional view thus sees Schopenhauer’s philosophy as,
above all, pessimistic, and furthermore, unwavering in this outlook.
What I’d like to suggest in this chapter is that while there is textual
evidence to support this traditional interpretation of Schopenhauer
as the unwavering arch pessimist and proponent of resignation, this
interpretation ignores some important evidence of Schopenhauer’s
own intellectual development toward being a less pessimistic thinker
from the 1830s on. I shall argue that the traditional view presents a
5. Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (Princeton,

NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 197.
6. Joshua Dienstag, Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2009), 85; emphasis added.
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40
one-sided, static picture of Schopenhauer’s thought that is really a

caricature, a caricature we would do well philosophically to avoid
today. Instead, I shall urge that we embrace a new interpretation
of Schopenhauer by seeing his philosophy as dynamic rather than
static, and recognizing that in the course of his intellectual devel-
opment, his work evinces a softening of this pessimism as he im-
plicitly acknowledges that his own grounds for pessimism have
become weaker.7 Although he himself did not encourage such a
developmental reading of his philosophy—in fact, his publication
habits actually discourage a developmental reading—nonetheless,
I seek to show that his published thought in fact undergoes an im-
portant evolution from 1836 (On Will in Nature) to 1851 (Parerga
and Paralipomena), and that the main drivers of this change are, first,
his steadfast allegiance to and study of the natural sciences; second,
and relatedly, his discovery of proto-Darwinian evolutionary theory;
and third, the greater methodological awareness he evinces about
his own metaphysics in works subsequent to WWR I, wherein he
underscores what I call the hermeneutic character of his metaphysics.
In the 1840s and 1850s, Schopenhauer got wind of evolutionary-
biological thought and came to embrace the proto-Darwinian view
of Robert Chambers concerning the origin and evolution of species.
7. To my knowledge, only A. O. Lovejoy (1911) and Julian Young (1987; 2005) have argued
that there is significant intellectual development in Schopenhauer’s thought. Lovejoy makes
the case that Schopenhauer abandons his Platonic, static view of species and recasts his met-
aphysics of will in ways consistent with evolutionary biology from the 1840s, and I agree
with him on this; however, Lovejoy does not connect this change with a implicit jettisoning
of the Ideas from his philosophy of nature or with a softening of Schopenhauer’s pessimism
as I shall do in this chapter. Young argues that Schopenhauer goes from being a transcendent
metaphysician in WWR I to an only transcendental metaphysical thinker in WWR II. I agree
with Young that there is development in Schopenhauer’s thought in this regard, and attempt
in what follows to offer greater precision on how his metaphysical views evolve from WWR
I to WWR II. I shall argue that the identification of the thing-in-itself with “Will” should be
understood as metonymical, and that his later view of his own metaphysics should be un-
derstood as immanent and hermeneutic.
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41
My main thesis in this chapter is that while Schopenhauer evinces no

inclination explicitly to revise his system on the basis of this hugely im-
portant doctrinal change, his embrace of evolutionary biology entails
profound systemic reverberations that he implicitly acknowledges in
PP. What is more, I believe that taking care to work out these sys-
tematic reverberations yields a philosophical system, and especially
an ethical theory, of significant contemporary interest. This is why, as
I alluded to above, we would do well to leave behind the traditional
view of Schopenhauer as, above all, the arch pessimist, and embrace
another strand of his thought, an axiological position that emerges
especially from his essay On the Basis of Morality, that I shall call and
develop in Chapters 4 and 5 compassionate moral realism.
II. SCHOPENHAUER’S PRE-DARWINIAN
THOUGHT AND PESSIMISM
Although Schopenhauer originally formulated his system some

forty years before the appearance of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species
(1859), several of Schopenhauer’s immediate followers, scientists,
and philosophers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries saw
Schopenhauer’s system as proto-Darwinian.8 Prima facie, this view
of the scientific-modernity of Schopenhauer’s philosophical system
seems quite reasonable. Although his system is metaphysical (in
a manner I shall detail later in this chapter), it does anticipate sev-
eral facets of an evolutionary-biological understanding of the natural
world: The Will, which Schopenhauer identifies as the thing-in-itself,
8. Ludwig Noiré was the first to associate Schopenhauer and Darwinian thought in his Der
monistische Gedanke. Eine Konkordanz der Philosophie Schopenhauers, Darwins, Robert
Mayers und Lazarus Geigers, 1875; see also A. O. Lovejoy, who details how Schopenhauer
came to embrace a mutationist-evolutionary understanding of species in “Schopenhauer as
an Evolutionist,” The Monist 21 (1911): 195–222.
41
42
objectifies itself into a world of phenomena, in which living beings

struggle incessantly for existence and to perpetuate themselves (un-
consciously, however, largely in the service of their species) against
other biological beings, with no further telos.9 Thus sketched, his
metaphysical picture is broadly compatible with the Darwinian view,
which holds that modification of species takes place through (1) a
struggle for survival, (2) natural selection, and (3) inheritance (later
theorized as involving also random mutation).
Yet there is a fundamental problem with seeing Schopenhauer’s
philosophy as expounded in the World as Will and Representation as
consistent with evolutionary biology: the Ideas. Introduced in book
II of the main work, the Ideas are posited to account philosophically
for the fundamental forces and basic kinds of beings in nature. The
reason he felt pressed to introduce them was his observation that
scientists had tried and failed to explain the evolution of life on the
planet from chemical and mechanical processes. Neither had they
been able to account for the existence of particular species of plant
and animal life solely through such laws. Schopenhauer concludes in
WWR I that this scientific avenue had come to a dead end, and, like
Kant, thought it absurd to think there could be a Newton for a blade
of grass (WWR I, 167, sec. 27). In order to explain philosophically
the existence of plant and animal species as well as the existence of
fundamental forces of nature, he believed he was licensed to posit
Ideas, the definite grades of the objectification of the will. He warns
us, however, not to forget that “in all the Ideas, i.e. in all the forces of
inorganic nature and all the configurations of organic nature, it is one
and the same will” entering into objecthood (WWR I, 27, 168).
9. Although all living beings, including plants, are involved in this striving and struggle
for existence, only sentient beings—beings capable of feeling pain and pleasure, which
Schopenhauer takes to include most animals but to exclude most if not all plants—are
proper objects of moral concern. I will take up the question of Schopenhauer’s value on-
tology in Chapters 4 and 5.
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43
Schopenhauer stresses two main points about the Ideas: first,

that they should be thought of in a Platonic sense, as the “unattained
models of the countless individuals in which they are expressed”
and as the “determinate and fixed level of the will’s objectification”
(WWR I, 155) rather than nominalistically, “as abstract productions
of scholastic, dogmatizing reason” (WWR I, 154). Second, insofar as
Ideas are not representations, they are thereby independent of space,
time, and causality, and are thus timeless and changeless.10
While the positing of Ideas for fundamental natural forces may be
consistent with a Darwinian perspective, positing Ideas to explain the
existence of distinct plant and animal species is certainly not. This is
because the Ideas are fixed, given their ontological status, whereas the
theory of evolution holds precisely that species come into existence,
are modified, and sometimes pass out of existence through natural
selection.11 From an evolutionary perspective species are anything but
the fixed, “unattained models” of the countless individuals that make
up the biological world.
The role of the Ideas in Schopenhauer’s system has been a bone
of scholarly contention for some time, and Schopenhauer utilizes
them in WWR in two distinct ways: In his philosophy of nature (akin
to Platonic forms) and in his aesthetic theory (as representations of
10. For an account of how Schopenhauer follows Kant in arguing for the exclusive subjectivity
of spatio-temporal form, and thus for the view that the thing-in-itself must be independent
of space and time, see my “Schopenhauer and the ‘Neglected Alternative’ Objection,”
Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 93, no. 3 (2011): 321–348. For an alternative pro-
posal that locates this adherence to a deep understanding of Kant’s argument for this in
the “Transcendental Aesthetic,” see Desmond Hogan “Schopenhauer’s Transcendental
Aesthetic,” in Kant’s Metaphysics, eds. Karl Schafer and Nick Stang (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, forthcoming).
11. This might appear too quick a conclusion, namely, that the Ideas and evolutionary theory
are incompatible. After all, it is possible that there are Ideas for all the species that could or
will evolve, and that these Ideas exist eternally, but that particular organisms instantiating
such Ideas come into existence and pass out of existence through evolution. I will address
this as a way of marrying the Ideas and evolutionary theory, but will dismiss it as philo-
sophically unattractive because it seems egregiously ad hoc.
43
4
the essential features of the phenomenal world). Chris Janaway, for

one, has argued that the Ideas seem to occupy an impossible onto-
logical position in Schopenhauer’s monistic metaphysical system.12
Bryan Magee recommends that they should be excised altogether in
a rational reconstruction of Schopenhauer’s thought.13 I would like
to spend some time here getting clear on what role the Ideas actually
play in WWR I, since, I shall argue, it is precisely with respect to his
doctrine of the Ideas that one sees a good deal of intellectual develop-
ment of Schopenhauer’s thought from the main work to later works
of the 1830s–1850s.14
II.1. The  Ideas
The lengthiest discussion of the Ideas in WWR I occurs in book III,
where they are theorized as the objects of art and aesthetic experi-
ence, save that of music.15 True art is held to arise out of an apprehen-
sion of an Idea, and “all art aims to communicate the apprehended
Idea” (WWR I, 263).16 Every quality of matter, for Schopenhauer, in-
cluding the most general, such as gravity, cohesion, rigidity, fluidity,
reaction to light, counts as an Idea, and these most general ones are the
Ideas presented par excellence through architecture. Moving up the
12. Christopher Janaway, Schopenhauer: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1994), 16–19.
13. See Magee, 1997 in his “Criticisms” chapter. Also, John E. Atwell, Schopenhauer on the
Character of the World: The Metaphysics of Will (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1995), 129–130, makes this point quite forcefully.
14. Intellectual development is also in evidence with respect to Schopenhauer’s views on
freedom, as will be treated in Chapter 3.
15. Music constitutes an important exception in Schopenhauer’s aesthetic theory. Its object
is the metaphysical will itself as expressed in the striving of all manner of being, but espe-
cially that of human beings. “Appropriate music” is non-programmatic, for Schopenhauer,
and thus does not seek to represent objects in the world of representation; it thus bypasses
the Ideas altogether.
16. See also WWR I, sec. 49.
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45
cognitive-objective ladder of the arts, the aim of artistic fountainry,

for example, is to reveal the objectivation of the will in fluid rather
than rigid substances; landscape gardening is said to “[perform] the
same service for the higher levels of vegetable nature” that architec-
ture and fountainry perform for non-living nature (WWR I, 243).
Painting and sculpture treat predominantly the human form and en-
able the perception of the Idea of humanity. These latter art forms
also represent the individuality of human beings, facilitating per-
ception of each person’s special Idea insofar as “to a certain extent,
the human individual as such has the dignity of an Idea of his own”
(WWR I, 251).17
Finally, the aim of poetry, in which Schopenhauer includes all
forms of literature and drama, is to facilitate perception of various
Ideas through the medium of abstract concepts communicated by
means of words. It can range over all of nature, but is especially apt
to express the Idea of humanity in their complex actions, thoughts,
and feelings. The various genres of poetry express different facets of
this Idea of humanity: lyric poetry (including song) expresses the
interior thoughts and feelings of humanity as a whole; the novel,
epic, and drama are more “objective” types of literature which ex-
press the Idea of humanity through the portrayal of significant
characters in significant situations; and at the top rung of poetic
art lies tragedy, whose goal is the “portrayal of the terrible aspect
of life” where “the unspeakable pain, the misery of humanity, the
triumph of wickedness, the scornful domination of chance, and the
hopeless fall of the righteous and the innocent are brought before
us” (WWR I, 280).
17. The notion that each person has his or her own “special Idea” would seem, prima facie, to
support the notion that Schopenhauer holds that every possible individual person, as well
as every species, has an eternal Idea, but that instantiations thereof come into and out of
existence in time.
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46
In the context of Schopenhauer’s aesthetic theory, then, we see

that the Ideas are the essential features of the phenomenal world that
are perceived by an aesthetic subject. They are ipso facto necessarily
representations. Yet, Ideas are a special sort of representation; insofar
as they are intuited free from the principle of sufficient reason, they
are in a sense, “pure” representations intuited in and through sensory
experience with spatio-temporal objects attended to in a relatively
will-less manner.
However, as sketched above with respect to Schopenhauer’s
philosophy of nature, the Ideas have another side: They are not
merely representations but also have a metaphysical existence as the
“unattained models” of the fundamental forces and species in nature.
Presumably, for Schopenhauer, these are the same Ideas considered
in two ways, for Schopenhauer utilizes the same term “Ideas” or in-
terchangeably “Platonic Ideas” for both: Metaphysically, they are the
natural kinds or species of individual plants and animals as well as
the fundamental groundless forces of nature; aesthetically, the Ideas
are representations, and constitute the essential, timeless, changeless
features of the world as representation when attended to in a will-less
manner.18
However, from attention to the aesthetic context of his discus-
sion of Ideas, one might think that Schopenhauer is not referring
to the same Ideas as in his Naturphilosophie, for there seems to be a
greater specificity and multiplicity of the aesthetic Ideas than there
is in his philosophy of nature. For instance, in the aesthetic context,
there are Ideas not only of fundamental forces of nature—gravity and
mass—and plant and animal species but also Ideas of rigid matter
18. The question of how closely Schopenhauer follows Plato with respect to the Ideas is taken
up by Wolfgang-R ainer Mann in “How Platonic Are Schopenhauer’s Platonic Ideas?,” The
Palgrave Schopenhauer Handbook, ed. Sandra Shapshay (London: Palgrave-Macmillan,
2017),  43–63.
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(cohesion, hardness, the reaction to light) and of fluid matter (form-

lessness, transparency, effortless mobility), as well as the aforemen-
tioned Ideas of the individual character of human beings, and the
Idea of humanity as seen in a series of interconnected human actions,
with respect to universal emotions and passions, and in its comic and
tragic sides.
Yet, while it is true that aesthetic Ideas have a greater specificity,
Schopenhauer is still referring to one and the same set of Ideas.
The key difference between the Ideas of his philosophy of nature
and the Ideas of aesthetic experience lies in the latter’s connection
to matter, for “every appearance of an Idea, since it has entered as
such into the form of the principle of sufficient reason, or into the
principium individuationis, must present itself in matter as a material
quality” (WWR I, 238). Thus, what makes the difference between
the Naturphilosophie and the aesthetic context is that the Ideas are
perceived in aesthetic experience in and through spatio-temporal
objects and environments, or representations thereof in art, and thus
they are not perceived in their metaphysical distinctness. In prin-
ciple, one cannot grasp the metaphysical Ideas directly because they
are independent of the conditions for the possibility of perceiving
them at all—namely space and time. Nonetheless, perception of
aesthetic Ideas constitutes an epistemic movement away from ordi-
nary perception toward the perception of these fundamental natural
kinds. Otherwise put, the Ideas appear to us in aesthetic experience
as refracted through their connection with matter.
But the metaphysical side of the Ideas raises a thorny and re-
vealing question for Schopenhauer’s system: How can the Ideas be
plural if they are independent of space and time, what Schopenhauer
refers to repeatedly as the principium individuationis? Recall that it is
precisely because the metaphysical will is independent of space and
time that Schopenhauer holds it is “one” in the sense of being foreign
to plurality (WWR I, 25, 153). So, it would stand to reason that since
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the Ideas are similarly independent of space and time, they should
also be held to be “one” in the sense of being foreign to plurality. But
this is clearly not the case—the Ideas are plural, for Schopenhauer.
How so?
Schopenhauer’s implicit answer to this question is that there is an-
other sort of individuation at work with respect to the Ideas, an indi-
viduation different in kind from that in the world of representation.19
He holds that each Idea is distinct because it is a distinct “act of the
Will” (Willensakt):
we can view these different Ideas as separate and intrinsically

simple acts of the will, in which its essence expresses itself to
a greater or lesser extent: but the individuals are themselves
appearances of Ideas (and thus of these acts), in time, space and
multiplicity. (WWR I, 179, sec. 28)
Insofar as we can have no empirical intuition of these “acts of the

Will,” for this process does not transpire in the world of representa-
tion, we can have no knowledge, strictly speaking, of this sort of in-
dividuation. Nonetheless, the concept of a “Willensakt” need not be
an empty one—lacking in the cognitive content provided by sensible
intuitions—within Schopenhauer’s system. In order to show how
this is so, I will need to address briefly the nature of Schopenhauer’s
metaphysics of will as explicated in WWR I.
Elsewhere, I have argued that Schopenhauer relies on a “poetic
intuition” to draw his fundamental conclusion that the world is ulti-
mately “Will,” despite the fact that the thing-in-itself, by the lights of
transcendental idealism, cannot be an object for a knowing subject.
19. I say “implicit” here because Schopenhauer evinces no explicit recognition of the individ-
uation problem of Ideas in his system, though he attempts to resolve it quietly at the end of
WWR I, book II.
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49
In this way, Schopenhauer applied a strategy pursued by Kant in the

third Critique to give some sensible representation to a concept of
something that lies beyond the “bounds of sense.” Kant attempted to
do this for the concept of the “good will” by appealing to the experi-
ence of beauty as a symbol of the morally good—that is, the auton-
omous good will, which lies beyond the bounds of sense, is felt to be
operationally similar to the experience of beauty, and thus the experi-
ence of beauty provides some sensible-albeit-only-symbolic support
for the concept of the good will.
Schopenhauer adopts a similar means for making a merely
thinkable concept—the thing-in-itself—to some extent sensible,
transforming the Kantian symbolic relationship (between beauty and
the morally good) into one that I term “metonymic.” In a nutshell,
the metonymic relationship is between, on the one hand, one’s first-
personal feeling of embodied volition, and on the other hand, the
thing-in-itself: Through one’s non-observational knowledge of one’s
own willing—that I will—and the fact that it is the most immediate
intuition one has, one gains a sensible intuition—though not an en-
tirely unmediated one—through a part (the human individual) to
the whole (the world as it is in itself).20
Nonetheless, Schopenhauer is careful to note that while the cog-
nition one has of his or her own will is “the most immediate cognition
there is” (WWR 1, 127), it is still cognitively conditioned by the form
of time, “time being the form in which my body (like every other
object) appears” (WWR I, 216). So we have gotten very close to im-
mediate access to the thing-in-itself, and in WWR II, Schopenhauer
characterizes this insight as “a kernel of the phenomenon different
20. For the full argument for this interpretation, see my “Poetic Intuition and the Bounds
of Sense: Metaphor and Metonymy in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy,” eds. Christopher
Janaway and Alex Neill, special issue on Schopenhauer, European Journal of Philosophy 16,
no. 2 (August 2008): 211–229.
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50
from the phenomenon itself,” yet the access is still veiled by the form
of time. And even a thin veil is still a veil, and so this insight “can
never be entirely separated from the phenomenon, and be regarded
by itself as an ens extramundanum” (WWR II, 183). Accordingly, we
still do not have a Schellingian “intellectual intuition” of the in-itself
of the world even in our most immediate experience of our own acts
of will. So why does Schopenhauer think that he can go ahead and
identify the thing-in-itself with will on the strength of this most-but-
not-entirely immediate first-personal insight?
On my view, Schopenhauer knows he cannot justify making this
identification as a piece of transcendent metaphysical doctrine, for he
recognizes that the thing-in-itself can never be a true object of knowl
edge: “This thing-in-itself (we will retain the Kantian expression as a
standing formula) can never be an object, because an object is only its
appearance and not what it really is” (WWR I, 135). However, if we
want to “think objectively” about it, if we want to take a stab at solving
the riddle of the world, then our best bet is to use the clue we have
from the most nearly immediate cognition we have. Schopenhauer cer-
tainly wants to offer a solution to the riddle of the world; he wants to
decipher it, and so he names the thing-in-itself “will.” But note in the
passage below how he qualifies this identification:
It is nonetheless fair to say that we are only using a denomination

from the superior term [a denonimatio a potiori] that gives the
concept of will a broader scope than it had before. . . . Accordingly,
I will name the genus [the thing-in-itself] after its most impor-
tant species [the human will]; the more intimate and immediate
cognition we have of this species leads to the mediated cognition
we have of all the others. (WWR I, 135–136)
By signaling that he is “only using a denomination from the superior

term [a denonimatio a potiori]” to identify the thing itself as “will,” he
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signals that he is not using the “is” of ordinary predication (e.g., “S is

P”). Rather, he announces that he is only using a poetic device to name
the thing-in-itself “will.” This device is one that I call “metonymic” in-
sofar as it names the whole according to one of its parts (typically
the best-known part). According to dictionaries of Schopenhauer’s
day, “denominatio a potiori” meant something like “after or ac-
cording to the main part or feature does a thing get its name.”21,22
This is the kind of identification at work when, for example, one

says that “the crown” set out on horseback to meet the Spanish ar-
mada. Here, “the crown” is a part that stands for the whole, Queen
Elizabeth I, or perhaps for a less tangible whole, the determina-
tion or the power of the monarch. Similarly, Schopenhauer uses
the term “will” (the best-known part) to stand for the whole (the
thing-in-itself), in order to illuminate what strictly speaking cannot
be known.
To sum up this excursus into Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of
will, we see that Schopenhauer is carefully qualifying the knowledge
claim involved in the identification of the thing-in-itself with the term
“will”: First, the thing-in-itself can never be an actual object of cogni-
tion; second, if we try to think of it objectively, we’ll need to use a fig-
urative device, the denominatio a potiori or metonymy, naming what
cannot be a direct object of knowledge after its best-known part; and
third, even our access to its best-known part—to one’s own will—is
21. The Meyers Konversations-Lexikon, edition 1885–1892, glosses “a potiori” as: “dem
Hauptteil, der Mehrzahl nach, z. B. a p. fit denominatio, seinem Hauptteil nach erhält ein
Ding seine Benennung” (Bibliographisches Institut 1885–1892, 1:695).
22. Dale Jacquette, in his “Schopenhauer’s Proof that the Thing-in-Itself is Will,” Kantian Review
12, no. 2 (2007): 76–108, presents a reconstruction of what he terms Schopenhauer’s
second (later) argument for the identification of the thing in itself as will that is similar
to mine, except that he does not draw as much attention to the part/whole identification
that I am calling “metonymic,” and he does not think that Kantian epistemic scruples hold
Schopenhauer back from claiming transcendent metaphysical knowledge.
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mediated through the form of time, and so that access is not entirely
immediate.
Another misinterpretation that Schopenhauer is keen to head
off regarding his identification of the thing-in-itself with “will” is
the view that all manifestations of the metaphysical will would have
cognitive-intentionality (that is to say, consciously-willed actions).
For Schopenhauer, only human beings and non-human animals
would constitute manifestations of the will with this sort of inten-
tionality, but he is concerned that the method by which he identifies
the thing-in-itself with “will,” however, threatens to create “a state of
perpetual misunderstanding” insofar as the insight into the thing-in-
itself is drawn from our own double knowledge of our bodies (WWR
I, 136). What we need to keep in mind to avoid this understanding is
that the insight we have into the metaphysical will from our own case
gives us the “the key to knowledge of the innermost essence of nature
as a whole” (WWR I, 134), but it is a key that nonetheless depends
on empirical knowledge in order to flesh out the basic insight into the
Will as “blind striving.” Thus, Schopenhauer maintains some signifi-
cant Kantian epistemic scruples regarding how far these first-personal
insights may be utilized to further characterize the metaphysical will
beyond calling it “purposeless striving” [blinde Streben], and “one”
(in the sense of being independent of the principium individuationis
of the phenomenal world, namely, space and time).
To return to the discussion of the place of the Ideas in
Schopenhauer’s philosophy of nature, as Willensakte, the Ideas may
be construed to be on an epistemic par with the concept of the met-
aphysical will, for we can have metonymical insight into this process
by virtue of our first-personal experience of the way our own acts are
individuated, that is to say, by their intentional objects and in time.
Thus, he can utilize the same argumentative strategy to give some sen-
sible content to the concept of a Willensakt, albeit without being able
to furnish a direct sensible intuition thereof. Although Schopenhauer
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does not explicitly invoke this strategy in the case of the Willensakt—
the Idea—it is one that was available to him and which he uses
as the main way to move beyond Kant to say something positive
about the thing-in-itself, though by his own lights, still remaining
faithful to transcendental idealism.
Given this account of the individuation of the Ideas as distinct
Willensakte, even if there were no human beings to perceive them
through phenomena, they would still exist, for they are the time-
less, changeless acts of the will qua thing-in-itself “entering into the
form of representation, into objecthood” (WWR I, 27, 168). In other
words, if there were no human beings to perceive spatio-temporal
objects, nonetheless, the act of the will qua thing-in-itself would still
transpire on this view regardless of whether the will’s acts fully enter
into objecthood, that is, as an object for a perceiving subject.
We now have a fuller picture of the place of the Ideas in
Schopenhauer’s system: In Schopenhauer’s philosophy of nature,
they are the distinct Willensakte that constitute the unattained models
for every species of animal, plant, and natural force. Call these “Ideas
A.” These include the intelligible character of each individual human
being, which he also calls a Willensakt. Thus, he writes, “not only
the empirical character of every person but also of every species of
animal, indeed every species of plant, and even every original force
of inorganic nature, can be seen as the appearance of an intelligible
character, i.e., of an extra-temporal, indivisible act of will” (WWR I,
28, 180). By contrast, Ideas from Schopenhauer’s aesthetic theory
are representations; they are the essential features of things in the
phenomenal world, as seen through particular objects and, par excel-
lence, through works of art. Call these “Ideas B.”23
23. In Schopenhauer’s aesthetic theory, Ideas B do depend on their being in some sense “of ”
Ideas A for their deep, cognitive significance. Thus, insofar as Schopenhauer jettisons Ideas
A from his system, Ideas B would need to be reconceived in some manner that retains their
objective, cognitive significance. Although I cannot do justice to this issue in this inquiry,
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54
II.2. “Ideas A” and Evolutionary Theory

While the spatio-temporal individuals that instantiate Ideas A come
and go, and interact causally, Ideas A (which appear first and fore-
most in WWR I, book II) are held to be unchanging, and do not enter
into causal relationships in the phenomenal world. In the interaction
of spatio-temporal individuals Schopenhauer allows that new species
may come into existence and species may go extinct in the sense of
having no instantiations of the Ideas in the world of appearance. But
on Schopenhauer’s view the templates of fundamental forces and
empirical species are fixed. It is this facet of Ideas—their timeless
fixity—that seems to be in direct contradiction with an evolutionary
account of species change.
But perhaps not. If the process of objectification into spatio-
temporal particulars need not be complete in each case, then
Schopenhauer can simultaneously and consistently hold, on
the one hand, that Ideas of species are timeless and changeless
Willensakte and, on the other, that the evolutionary story of spe-
cies modification is true. So long as the process of the objectifi-
cation of the Will may stop at Ideas without leading inevitably to
spatio-temporal instantiations of these Ideas, then it seems that
the evolutionary account of species origin and modification may
be consistently held simultaneously. For instance, take the Idea of
the species “velociraptor.” Approximately 75 million years ago, this
Idea qua Willensakt was instantiated in spatio-temporal, individual
velociraptors and thus entered fully into objecthood (notwith-
standing the fact that there were no human beings to perceive them,
let alone perceive them aesthetically). Then approximately 70 mil-
lion years ago there were no longer any individual instantiations of
I will gesture a bit later at how a reconstruction of Ideas B might go without Ideas A in
Schopenhauer’s system.
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5
this Idea. Let us assume that the Darwinian account of evolution

explains how the first instantiations of the Idea velociraptor arose,
and how the last instantiation passed out of existence. What results
from simultaneously holding on to the timeless, changeless Ideas as
well as an evolutionary view of species origination and extinction,
is a two-tiered view of, on the one hand, eternal Ideas that may or
may not fully enter into objecthood in the world of representation;
and, on the other hand, a level of biological individuals engaged in
a mutual struggle for survival where, in the process, new individuals
arise that constitute a full instantiation of Willensakte. On this pic-
ture, the struggle among biological individuals for existence seems
to have the ability to cause or at least occasion somehow the
Willensakt to enter fully into objecthood, and to cause or occasion
it to cease such objectification. Further, insofar as there is a “special
Idea” for every individual human being, Schopenhauer would need
some account for how these “instantiations” come into and out of
existence as well.
In this manner, Schopenhauer could hold that the Ideas qua
Willensakte are mere possibilities for the fundamental forces and kinds
of biological beings that exist in the world of representation. On this
view, individual velociraptors can come into being because there is an
Idea of velociraptor, and each human individual can come into being
because there is a special Idea for each person, but the reasons why
they come into being at a particular time and go out of existence at an-
other time will be explained in a Darwinian manner. However, while
this modal view of Ideas need not extend the concept of causality or
time beyond the bounds of sense, it certainly lacks parsimony to the
point where it seems suspiciously ad hoc. Thus, a major drawback
of the modal view of Ideas is that if the Darwinian story about the
origin, evolution, and possible extinction of species is correct, then
positing Ideas to ground the very possibility of these species seems
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to violate Occam’s razor, it seems to multiply entities needlessly.24

To put the point in another way, this account does not accord well
with Schopenhauer’s own methodology in his philosophy of nature.
Recall how the Ideas were introduced there, namely, to account for
the existence of fundamental forces and natural kinds that could not
be explained by science.25
And when one looks closely at works from the 1830s on, one sees
that Schopenhauer himself seems to have recognized that science
was beginning to explain the origin and modification of species, thus
rendering what I’m calling “Ideas A” otiose. In On Will in Nature (first
published 1836, revised 1854), for example, he points to the will as
manifesting itself in various phenomena in the natural world, but he
is curiously silent on the doctrine of the Ideas that was so important
in the WWR.
By the time of his late work Parerga and Paralipomena (1851)
Schopenhauer explicitly adopts the evolutionary view of species mod-
ification. In section 91 of PP volume II, for instance, Schopenhauer
holds that “every new and higher species [has] arisen through the
fact that that enhancement of the foetus-form once exceeded by a
stage the form of the mother carrying it.” And this view that a new
species originates out of a generatio aequivoca in utero applies just
as well to the case of human beings. Accordingly, Schopenhauer
writes in evolutionary fashion, “We will not disguise the fact that we
should . . . have to imagine the first human beings as having come
24. Perhaps there could still be a legitimate use for Ideas if they were to refer to “viable”
combinations of traits, what some biologists have referred to as “Gestalts.” I will leave this
to the philosophers of biology, however, to determine whether a reconstruction along
these lines would be fruitful.
25. Atwell, in his Schopenhauer on the Character of the World: The Metaphysics of Will, 129–130,
makes this point quite forcefully. See also Bryan Magee, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) in his “Criticisms” chapter. Unlike Magee, how-
ever, I don’t think the Ideas can be dropped from his philosophy of nature without signifi-
cant consequences for the rest of the system, as I shall detail below.
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in Asia from the pongo (the parent of the orang-utan) and in Africa
from the chimpanzee, though not as apes, but directly as human
beings.”26 Schopenhauer credits this theory to the then anonymous
author of the Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (6th ed. 1847,
originally 1844), later discovered to be Robert Chambers.27
Keeping up with advances in science, Schopenhauer himself
comes to drop all reference to the Ideas as a way to account for the
existence of species. They might still play a role with respect to the
fundamental forces of nature—so long as these could not be further
reduced by scientists—but Schopenhauer himself does not continue
to use the Ideas for this purpose either. From his later silence on
the Ideas in his philosophy of nature, it appears that Schopenhauer
has himself applied Occam’s razor to Ideas A in his system. In other
words, since he had only posited Ideas to explain what science could
not explain, it makes sense that Schopenhauer would himself jettison
Ideas A from his system once he realized science had explained the
origin and evolution of species.
My evidence for the claim that Schopenhauer himself jettisons
Ideas A from his system, however, is largely negative. One does not
find any explicit repudiation of the Ideas in his philosophy of na-
ture, but rather only Schopenhauer’s own silence on them in his later
works. Notwithstanding, this silence speaks volumes insofar as it
comes at points where one would precisely expect Schopenhauer not
to be silent.
26. Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, trans. E. F. J. Payne (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1974), 2:153. Citations to PP volume I are to the newer transla-
tion by Sabine Roehr and Christopher Janaway, Cambridge Edition of the Works of
Schopenhauer, 2014.
27. Darwin saw this work as an important albeit scientifically flawed precursor to his theory,
and believed it was instrumental in preparing the public for his Origin of Species. The
Vestiges was the only “evolutionist” work widely known to English-speaking readers in
the 1840s and 1850s. (See John van Whye’s entry on Chambers at www.victorianweb.org,
accessed August 15, 2015).
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In volume II of the WWR, which follows the outline of the main

work, providing supplemental chapters to each book, one might ex-
pect to find a chapter elaborating on the Ideas in Schopenhauer’s
Naturphilosophie; instead, while there is supplemental discussion of
the Ideas B (the objects of art and aesthetic experience), namely in
chapter 29, “On Knowledge of the Ideas,” the only prolonged dis-
cussion of Ideas A occurs in c hapter 28, “Characterization of the
Will-to-Live” where, in the context of describing how organisms
expend tremendous amounts of energy and endure all manner of
anxiety and hardship to maintain themselves and perpetuate their
species, Schopenhauer writes that the world “regarded purely objec-
tively” looks as though “nature were concerned only that, of all her
(Platonic) Ideas, i.e. permanent forms, none should be lost.” Here
Schopenhauer rehearses the doctrine of Ideas he has expounded in
WWR I, book II, but in this later volume he distances himself from
the doctrine, writing, “Accordingly, it looks as if she [nature] had so
thoroughly satisfied herself in the fortunate invention and combina-
tion of these Ideas . . . that her only concern now was that any of these
fancies might be lost, in other words, that any one of those forms
might disappear from time and the causal series. For the individuals
are fleeting, like the water in the stream; the Ideas, on the other hand,
are permanent” (WWR II, 352). But this view of things, he claims,
constitutes a rather “puzzling view if nature were given to us only
from outside, and thus merely objectively.” Ultimately, he continues,
it is the understanding afforded by the notion of the will-to-life—
crucially, not the doctrine of Ideas—that does real explanatory work,
for the will-to-life “now gives us at one stroke the explanation that
was never to be found on the merely objective path of the represen-
tation” (WWR II, 352). In this sole extended invocation of Ideas
A in WWR volume II, the doctrine of the Platonic Ideas thus seems
to have become demoted to something that appears to us as puz-
zling, and which takes an explanatory backseat to the phenomenon
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of the will-to-life. In a previous chapter of WWR II, chapter 26 “On

Teleology,” it is noteworthy that there is not a single mention of the
Ideas here to account for distinct species—as there was in WWR
I—rather Schopenhauer points only to the will-to-life and explains
that the appearance of design in nature is the result of the “completely
blind working of nature [that] coincides in the result with the appar-
ently intentional” (WWR II, 335).
Even more strikingly, by the time of Parerga and Paralipomena
(1851) we see a resolute silence on Platonic Ideas where precisely we
would have expected such attention. In a section of his “Fragments
for the History of Philosophy” devoted to Plato, one would expect
from the extensive treatment given the Ideas in WWR I, and the fact
that Schopenhauer insists on calling his own doctrine of the Ideas
“Platonic,” that he would address the topic of the Ideas here as well.
Surprisingly, Schopenhauer makes no explicit mention of Plato’s
doctrine of the Ideas in this section. What is more, rather than praising
Plato for this doctrine here, as he had done in WWR I, Schopenhauer
instead chides Plato for the view that there can be pure cognition
without intuition: “For we see that cognition without intuition,
which the body brings about, has no material . . . [and] all thinking
is a physiological function of the brain, just as digestion is of the
stomach.”28 Thus, in this late work, Schopenhauer really downplays
the doctrine of the Ideas so important in WWR I.
Further, in the same late work, in section 10 on Scholasticism,
Schopenhauer addresses the controversy between nominalism and
realism, and here refers to Plato’s doctrine of the Ideas as being at the
heart of Scholastic realism, but, again, he offers no praise for Plato’s
doctrine here and makes no mention of adopting this view and mar-
rying it to Kant’s transcendental idealism, as he had done at the start
of book III, WWR I.
28. PP I, 45.
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In sum, it is quite striking that a doctrine he explicitly borrowed

from Plato in the first volume of his main work, to explain the exist-
ence of species and fundamental forces in nature, should get barely a
mention and no praise at all in his last published work. To my mind,
this bespeaks a quiet but significant evolution in his own thought
that Schopenhauer does not wish to acknowledge explicitly. Proto-
Darwinian accounts of the origin of species that Schopenhauer comes
to accept explicitly, coupled with the metaphysical notion of the
will-to-life, can now do the explanatory work in his Naturphilosophie
previously done by the Platonic Ideas, rendering them otiose. Thus,
I hold that Schopenhauer quietly gets rid of them from his system.
III. SCHOPENHAUER’S EVOLVING
UNDERSTANDING OF HIS OWN
METAPHYSICS
Despite the caveats I listed above that show Schopenhauer to be

qualifying his identification of the thing-in-itself with “will” even in
WWR I, Schopenhauer’s metaphysical pronouncements can at times
seem quite bold, as in the following passage:
Only the will is thing in itself: as such, the will is by no means

a representation, it is quite different in kind from representa-
tion: all representations, all objects are the appearance, the vis-
ible manifestation, the objecthood of the will. The will is the
innermost, the kernel of every individual thing and likewise of
the whole. (WWR I, 135)
While it sounds here as if Schopenhauer is offering a transcendent

metaphysical doctrine, what I’d like to suggest is that we take him in
such passages as being less careful than he should be by the lights of
the aforementioned caveats in WWR I, and less careful than he will
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be in the later WWR II. In his considered view, elaborated at length in

WWR II, c hapter 17, “Man’s Need for Metaphysics,” he is clearer that
he is not offering a metaphysics in a transcendent sense, but rather, an
immanent metaphysics in what I call an hermeneutic sense.29
For Kant, the one legitimate sense of metaphysics is the transcen-
dental one, knowledge of the synthetic a priori conditions of experi-
ence; and with this, for Kant, we should be humble and satisfied. On
moral grounds, we may legitimately hope that there is a God, a soul,
and an afterlife in which happiness will be proportionate to moral
desert, but we cannot have theoretical knowledge of these and other
traditional themes of metaphysics.
Schopenhauer holds that Kant had indeed destroyed traditional
metaphysics as it was done by Spinoza, Leibniz, and Wolff, but he
also recognizes that there is a universal, human desire to have such
traditional metaphysical questions addressed, and he does not think
that human beings will ever be satisfied with Kantian humility about
the nature of the world as it is in itself. Unlike non-human animals,
where will and intellect are closely aligned, Schopenhauer sees that
in human beings they are sufficiently separated such that we feel “sur-
prised” at our own existence (WWR II, 160). We wonder at our own
works, at our inevitable death, at the apparent vanity and fruitless-
ness of human effort, and at the existence of evil, wickedness, and
suffering (WWR II, 171). From this wonder arises a “metaphysical
need,” a need for “an interpretation” of the world. This need also
explains why “the really materialistic as well as the absolutely scep-
tical systems have never been able to obtain a general or lasting influ-
ence.” (WWR II, 162). In terms of popular appeal, materialism and
skepticism have long lost out to metaphysical philosophies and even
29. This section of the chapter draws on my essay titled “The Enduring Presence of Kant in
Schopenhauer’s Philosophy,” in The Oxford Handbook to Schopenhauer, ed. Robert Wicks
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2019).
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more so to religions, which not only meet the metaphysical need but
also perform the dual function of being the “guiding star of their ac-
tion” as well as “the indispensable consolation of the deep sorrows of
life” (WWR II, 167).
Testimony to this metaphysical need can be found in the
“[t]‌emples and churches, pagodas and mosques, [that exist] in all
countries and ages, in their splendor and spaciousness” (WWR II,
162). The task for philosophers, as Schopenhauer sees it, is not to
rest with Kantian humility but rather to furnish an interpretation of
the world that is based in experience, and well-supported by the phil-
osophical and empirical evidence. Accordingly, he describes his own
metaphysical endeavor as follows:
The whole of experience is like a cryptograph, and philosophy is

like the deciphering of it, and the correctness of this is confirmed
by the continuity and connection that appear everywhere. If only
this whole is grasped in sufficient depth, and inner experience
is connected to outer, it must be capable of being interpreted,
explained, from itself. (WWR II, 182)
The model of metaphysics that he outlines as the proper one is that

of “deciphering” or “interpretation” of the world in which the philos-
opher uses all of the phenomenological resources of inner and outer
experience, and seeks confirmation by the interpretation’s ability to
make sense of phenomena as a whole. Thus, appropriate philosophy
(metaphysics) is similar to offering a well-justified interpretation of a
work of art. Like an artistic interpretation, it should stand or fall on
how well it accords with the evidence in that work (in the case of the
world, the empirical evidence), and with how well it makes sense of
the work as a whole. Now, one could offer an interpretation of the
world that is also transcendently metaphysical, and this is the way the
standard view would read Schopenhauer. But as I will argue in what
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follows, Schopenhauer is intent, especially in the second volume of

WWR, on offering an interpretation of the world that remains im-
manent, and is always bound up with the phenomena that are to be
explained.30
In order to illustrate the difference between my hermeneutic
reading of Schopenhauer’s approach to metaphysics and the tradi-
tional reading of Schopenhauer as a more old-style, transcendent sort
of metaphysician, it is helpful to look at how Robert Wicks frames
the Schopenhauerian identification for the thing-in-itself with will.
Wicks writes,
If the thing-in-itself is not essentially Will, however, then there

is no reason to expect that the world as representation will pre-
sent a violent appearance. This is the problem. As we know,
Schopenhauer accounts for the daily world’s violence in refer-
ence to a single, blind Will that our PSR divides into individuals
that stand against each other. Individuals selfishly and aggres-
sively oppose each other owing to the metaphysical fact that
their inner nature is blind Will, not because the nature of reality
merely appears to us to be in itself Will, or because Will is only
one of possibly an infinite number of the thing-in-itself ’s other
dimensions.31
Here Wicks presents Schopenhauer as utilizing his breakthrough—

the thing-in-itself is will—as a “metaphysical fact.” This secure
fact then leads us “to expect” that the world as representation will
present as violent. According to Wicks’s characterization here,
Schopenhauer’s methodology seems to be foundationalist: Get the
30. I am grateful to Alistair Welchman for pressing me on this point.

31. Robert Wicks, Schopenhauer (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 131; emphasis added.
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metaphysical facts straight, and then they will be able to predict the
character of the phenomena.
By contrast, instead of seeing Schopenhauer as foundationalist
in his methodology, I see him as a coherentist: Starting from the
arguments in favor of transcendental idealism, and then adding to
this the all-important first-personal insight into oneself as will, he
names (metonymically) the thing-in-itself “will.” In this, we have
a key (rather than a “metaphysical fact”) for interpreting the phe-
nomena. By “key,” I mean that Schopenhauer believes that the met-
onymical identification of the thing-in-itself with “will,” should
“unlock”—to stick with the metaphor—the deep metaphysical struc-
ture of the world as representation as far as we can understand it, but
that this interpretation of the deep metaphysical structure is still in
need of empirical support. In this regard, the “key” is a special sort
of hypothesis, one based on a unique first-person insight that is more
immediate than any other, rather than a metaphysical posit, fact, or
secure starting point. Thus, on my view, we should not then take
the key itself as infallibly predictive—as Wicks above seems to take
it—instead, we must look to experience of the phenomenal world to
confirm or disconfirm the insight. Happily, for Schopenhauer, expe-
rience does confirm that he is on the right track, and much of On Will
in Nature consists of detailing how the best science of his day does
actually confirm the key to interpreting the world. To sum up, the
major difference between Wicks’s view and mine is that, on my view,
it is the evidence from experience that gives us good reason to think the
key is right; on its own, we do not have a secure, metaphysical posit
that yields infallible predictive power about the phenomenal world.
Thus, I think it is a live possibility for Schopenhauer that the empir-
ical evidence might disconfirm it. My view has the virtue of making
sense of Schopenhauer’s many assertions about the importance of his
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On Will in Nature, as it provides the empirical “confirmation” that the

key is correct.32
Further evidence for reading Schopenhauer as having a back-and-
forth, coherentist method between philosophical argument/insight
and experience of the phenomenal world comes in his criticism of
Kant for not trying to address nagging metaphysical questions at
least in part with empirical evidence:
But does it not rather seem positively wrong-headed that, in

order to solve the riddle of experience, in other words, of the
world which alone lies before us, we should close our eyes to it,
ignore its contents, and take and use for our material merely the
empty forms of which we are a priori conscious? (WWR II, 181)
Similarly, he faults those who have tried to address metaphysical

questions for lack of consistency between their theories and the em-
pirical evidence:
Thus, for example, the optimism of Leibniz conflicts with the

obvious misery of existence; Spinoza’s doctrine that the world
is the only possible and absolutely necessary substance is in-
compatible with our wonder and astonishment at its existence
and essential nature; Wolff ’s doctrine that man has existentia and
essentia from a will foreign to him runs counter to our moral re-
sponsibility for actions. (WWR II, 184)
32. While Schopenhauer adduces empirical support for his notion that the world is ultimately
“will” already in WWR I, he still felt the need to publish an entire work On Will in Nature
dedicated to mustering empirical support for his view, utilizing the latest developments
in the natural sciences. What I’m calling the “hermeneutic” view of Schopenhauer’s met-
aphysics makes sense of his motivation to offer the latest scientific corroborations of his
metaphysics of will.
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6
In contrast to foundationalist thinkers like Spinoza, Leibniz, and

Wolff, the “key” to deciphering the “riddle” of the world consists
in “combining at the right place outer experience with inner, and
making the latter the key to the former” (WWR II, 181), but confir-
mation that one has deciphered the world of phenomena correctly
comes from the fact that it allows us to “perceive agreement and
consistency in the contrasting confusion of the phenomena of this
world” (WWR II, 185).
It is important to underscore, however, that throughout this en-
deavor to decipher the world correctly, Schopenhauer shows himself
to be faithful to transcendental idealism. The right sort of meta-
physics, he writes,
remains immanent, and does not become transcendent; for it never

tears itself entirely from experience, but remains the mere inter-
pretation and explanation thereof, as it never speaks of the thing-
in-itself otherwise than in its relation to the phenomenon. This,
at any rate, is the sense in which I have attempted to solve the
problem of metaphysics, taking into general consideration the
limits of human knowledge which have been demonstrated by
Kant. (WWR II, 183; emphasis added)
From this quote, one sees that the view that Schopenhauer is
maintaining explicitly in his second volume of WWR is that his
metaphysical enterprise is not transcendent but, rather, remains im-
manent and always circumscribed by and consistent with Kant’s tran-
scendental idealism.
I believe that this evolution in his thinking about his own meth-
odology and immanent metaphysics, as well as the development of
his thinking about the origin of species and hence his downplaying
of static Ideas, have profound ramifications for the justification of his
(in)famous pessimism, ramifications to which I now turn.
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IV. RAMIFICATIONS FOR PESSIMISM
If I am correct that in response to the development of evolutionary

biology, Schopenhauer implicitly jettisons his own doctrine of the
Ideas from his Naturphilosophie, certainly by the time of the Parerga
and Paralipomena, what relevance if any does this have for his system
in general and, for the purpose of this chapter especially, for his phil-
osophical pessimism? According to Bryan Magee, for one, jettisoning
the Ideas would have no major ramifications at all for Schopenhauer’s
system.33 By contrast, I believe it does have far-reaching ramifications
for Schopenhauer’s system,34 and especially for his doctrine of pes-
simism: Insofar as his doctrine of the Ideas secures a conviction in
the fixity of species, without this metaphysical constraint on spe-
cies character and especially on the species character of humanity,
Schopenhauer’s doctrine of pessimism loses a good deal of its a priori
support.35 In addition, as treated above, Schopenhauer calls each
person’s intelligible character a “special Idea.” Insofar as the doctrine
of Ideas secures a conviction of the fixity of each individual intelligible
character, without this doctrine in place, there opens up the possibility
of intelligible character change as well. Further, Schopenhauer him-
self recognizes that the “unparalleled advances in the collective nat-
ural sciences” of the 19th century, “in respect of which every previous
age seems one of childhood,” can—along with other influences such
as Kant’s philosophy and the Western discovery of Eastern religious
33. Magee writes, “I am not convinced that the Platonic Ideas—adduced primarily to explain
the existence of genera and species—are necessary to Schopenhauer’s philosophy at all.”
Bryan Magee, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1997), 239.
34. As mentioned previously, the dropping of Ideas A from his system also has repercussions
for his aesthetic theory, insofar as the cognitive significance of Ideas B relies on their con-
nection to Ideas A. A bit more on this shortly.
35. I am grateful to John Richardson for extensive discussion of this section of the chapter.
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68
thought—transform “the fundamental philosophical convictions of

educated Europe” (OBM, 119).
Before delving further into these ramifications, though, it
would be good to get clearer on what Schopenhauer’s pessimism
(as expounded especially in WWR I, book IV, and volume II, espe-
cially chapter 46) really amounts to. The pessimistic doctrine that
Schopenhauer espouses in these works is that (a) there is a tremen-
dous amount of undeserved and unredeemed suffering in the world;
(b) this is an extremely bad-making feature of existence, and there
is a preponderance of this bad-making feature over any good-making
features of existence; and (c) this situation cannot get substantially
better in time. Schopenhauer offers both a priori and a posteriori
reasons to support these claims. But it is claim (c) that really marks
Schopenhauer’s thought as pessimistic, and, as I shall argue, it is the
possibility that human nature can change—as secured by an evolu-
tionary theory of species—that stands in direct tension with this key
claim of Schopenhauer’s pessimism. Note, however, that I am not
claiming that Schopenhauer took over certain strands of evolutionary
optimism prevalent in the 19th century, which claimed the existence
of an evolutionary logic that tends to improve human beings and re-
duce suffering in the world; rather, evolution as Schopenhauer un-
derstood it simply secures the possibility for human nature to change
for the better or for the worse.36
IV.1. Evidence for (a) There Is a Tremendous Amount

of Undeserved and Unredeemed Suffering in the World
Schopenhauer adduces empirical evidence from observation and
testimony to underscore the tremendous amount of suffering that
36. I am grateful to John Richardson and the audience of the UNC Chapel Hill 49th
Philosophy Colloquium for prompting me to clarify this point.
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69
sentient creatures undergo in the course of their lives. It is notable

for my main argument in this chapter that he holds that the most im-
portant source of human suffering comes from human institutions
and points to specific ones prevalent in 19th-century Europe and the
United States:
The chief source of the most serious evils affecting man is man him-
self; homo homini lupus. He who keeps this last fact clearly in view
beholds the world as a hell, surpassing that of Dante by the fact that
one man must be the devil of another. . . . How man deals with man
is seen, for example, in Negro slavery, the ultimate object of which
is sugar and coffee. However, we need not go so far; to enter at the
age of five a cotton-spinning or other factory, and from then on to
sit there every day first ten, then twelve and finally fourteen hours,
and perform the same mechanical work, is to purchase dearly the
pleasure of drawing breath. But this is the fate of millions, and many
more millions have an analogous fate. (WWR II, 578)
Additionally, Schopenhauer draws attention to the suffering of non-

human animals at the hands of human beings who view them as mere
instruments for their use:
Because . . . Christian morals give no consideration to animals,

they are at once free as birds in philosophical morals too, they
are mere “things,” mere means to whatever ends you like, as for
instance vivisection, hunting with hounds, bull-fighting, racing,
whipping to death in front of an immovable stone-cart and the
like. (OBM, 162)37
37. It should be noted that Schopenhauer is somewhat unfair to Kant here, who is the main ex-
emplar of anthropocentric “philosophical morals.” While Kant does view animals as mere
things, he actually condemns vivisection, hunting, and other cruel practices regarding
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70
But apart from human-made sources of suffering, Schopenhauer also

adduces evidence of tremendous suffering involved in the struggle for
existence in the natural world. In a remarkable passage, Schopenhauer
comments on this perpetual struggle for existence via an anecdote
from the botanist and geologist Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn:
in Java he [ Junghuhn] saw an immense field entirely covered

with skeletons, and took it to be a battlefield. However, they were
nothing but skeletons of large turtles . . . . These turtles come this
way from the sea, in order to lay their eggs, and are then seized
upon by wild dogs . . . with their united strength, these dogs lay
them on their backs, tear open their lower armour, the small
scales of their belly, and devour them alive. But then a tiger often
pounces on the dogs. Now all this misery is repeated thousands
and thousands of times, year in year out. For this, then, are these
turtles born. For what offence must they suffer this agony? What is
the point of this whole scene of horror? The only answer is that the
will-to-live thus objectifies itself. (WWR II, 354; emphasis added)
Ordinary competition among animals for the means of sustaining life

and procreation thus brings tremendous suffering in its wake.
One might think that aristocratic and bourgeois human beings,
those who are free from the abovementioned sources of suffering,
may at least lead largely happy lives, but here too, Schopenhauer
adduces empirical evidence that such lives involve tremendous suf-
fering. Whereas the poor are plagued by want, the well-to-do are
plagued by boredom, and Schopenhauer holds that ordinary human
animals. Thus, Kant’s considering animals as things rather than as persons does not entail
the conclusions Schopenhauer draws from it on behalf of “Christian ethics.” I am sure that
many Christians—think of St. Francis of Assisi for a prominent example—would also dis-
agree that “Christian ethics” justifies such practices.
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relationships involve a great deal of suffering (WWR I, 281–282).38

Think here of bourgeois tragedies by Ibsen or more anachronisti-
cally, George Bernard Shaw, Eugene O’Neill, and Arthur Miller, to
get a sense of the varieties of this sort of suffering Schopenhauer has
in mind.
Furthermore, Schopenhauer views most of this suffering as un-
deserved (or at least under-deserved). He assumes a thoroughgoing
atheism, and so does not seek to justify this suffering by virtue of orig-
inal sin; rather, he sees the victims of all of this suffering as rather in-
nocently going about their lives as naturally dictated by their inborn
will-to-life: Taking Junghuhn’s turtles for example, Schopenhauer
asks rhetorically, “For what offence must they suffer this agony? What is
the point of this whole scene of horror?” His answer is, of course, that there
is no point; the turtles are not guilty of anything, they were simply
born into this cycle, namely the manner in which “the will-to-live
thus objectifies itself.”
In the human realm too, while there are exceptionally wicked
people who bring about tremendous suffering, it seems as though
morally ordinary people, acting in ways largely dictated by their in-
born will-to-life, their inborn egoism—the desire for security, to be
comfortable—bring about tremendous suffering to other humans
and non-human animals. Complicating my discussion of the unde-
served nature of much suffering, however, is his doctrine of “eternal
justice” introduced in sections 63 and 64 in WWR I. In these
sections, Schopenhauer suggests that because we are all, at bottom,
manifestations of the one metaphysical will, “the torturer and the
tortured” are one, and hence no one is entirely innocent or guilty.
38. In addition to these empirical arguments, Schopenhauer does offer an a priori argument to
the effect that the will-to-life is essentially either suffering from dissatisfaction or suffering
from boredom. I will treat what I see as rather grave problems for this attempt at a priori
support for pessimism in what follows.
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One way to read this doctrine is to conclude that there really isn’t
any “undeserved suffering” after all because individuation is illusory
and thus we all share equally in guilt and innocence. But this is far
too quick a reading since Schopenhauer is clearly morally outraged
at individual human beings (the guilty) who exploit and abuse slaves,
factory workers, and non-human animals, and he does not hold that
the victims (the innocent) of these institutions and actions deserve
to be treated so badly on account of “eternal justice.” In his discus-
sion of ethics and politics, the virtue of justice is seeking to pre-
vent or mitigate harm to others, and just institutions aim to secure
individual rights precisely not to be harmed or wronged in various
ways. If everyone really deserved to be harmed insofar as they are al-
ways already guilty of harming, given the notion of “eternal justice,”
Schopenhauer’s discussions of ethical and political justice would
make little sense. Thus, I believe an interpretation of “eternal jus-
tice” more in keeping with his ethical and political theory is to see
it as the view that by virtue of our affirming the will-to-life at all, we
ineluctably inflict suffering on others to some extent, and so merely
going on with the business of living does imply some guilt, though the
more vehemently one affirms one’s will-to-life, the more guilty one
becomes, and mutatis mutandis the person who wills less egoistically,
incurs less guilt. Yet incurring some guilt for harming others just by
living at all does not mean that a person forfeits his or her rights to be
treated fairly by others. This goes for the more complex non-human
animals as well, for Schopenhauer, insofar as he holds that they too
have moral rights.
To take a common example of how this interpretation of the
eternal justice notion could be applied, most humans eat other an-
imals, and even vegans at the very least appropriate some of the en-
vironment needed by other living beings to pursue their lives. Thus,
merely by striving in this world at all, we are responsible for some
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measure of suffering to others, so to some extent we are guilty, and

insofar as we are made to suffer by others, there is a kind of eternal
justice at work here. Notwithstanding, this basic affirmation of the
will is inborn in us, and Schopenhauer thinks we have also have a
right to take measures to ensure our survival, so we are also to some
extent innocent. Thus, by striving at all to sustain ourselves, we are
both innocent and guilty: This is the human and non-human animal
condition.
The ethical point that Schopenhauer stresses soon after these
sections on “eternal justice” supports this less extreme interpre-
tation of the doctrine. In section 66, Schopenhauer writes that a
noble-minded  person
is aware that the difference between himself and others, which is

so great a gulf for the evil person, belongs only to a fleeting and
illusory appearance: he recognizes, immediately and without in-
ference, that the in-itself of his own appearance is the in-itself of
other people’s too, that it is the will to life, and that it constitutes
the essence of every single thing and is alive in all things; indeed,
he recognizes that this extends even to animals and the whole
of nature: which is why he does not want to hurt animals either.
(WWR I, 399)
His point is that since living beings all share the same essence, we
ought to try to minimize the suffering that we inflict, though we can
never be fully free of the guilt of inflicting suffering so long as we live.
Along these lines, in OBM, Schopenhauer suggests that if we can live
healthfully as vegetarians, we should, and if we cannot, we should at
least strive to minimize the suffering we inflict on animals we raise for
food, by, for instance, using chloroform before they are slaughtered
(OBM, 231).
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IV.2. Assessment
The empirical evidence of the existence of great suffering in the
world is quite remarkable, and I believe Schopenhauer did the gen-
erally optimistic tradition of Western philosophy a service by casting
a bright light upon the manifold sources of suffering from unjust so-
cial institutions, cruel treatment of human and non-human animals,
and the suffering which is entailed by the Darwinian struggle for ex-
istence. Notwithstanding, as pointed out by several commentators
(Young, Hamlyn, Magee), Schopenhauer’s case for the predomi-
nance of suffering in our lives ignores the evidence that there are
manifold sources of positive pleasure, happiness, and even joy in the
world. Striving in the service of projects—such as writing this book
(even if there will be the pain of the inevitable unfavorable review!),
raising a child, learning a musical instrument, playing soccer, cooking
and sharing a meal with friends and family, doing any kind of mean-
ingful work or volunteer service quite well—can be absorbing and
satisfying, notwithstanding the attendant difficulties and frustrations
involved in all of these enterprises.39
Even in the case of Junghuhn’s turtles, while they meet with a hor-
rible death, their lives up to that point—and sea turtles typically live
for 80 years!—may have included quite a bit of pleasure. It’s far from
clear that the horrible end would necessarily outweigh the pleasure
such that it would have been better for the turtles never to have been.
Schopenhauer would likely counter these criticisms of his empir-
ical case with the a priori claim that desiring must always be painful
from a conceptual analysis of “desire,” for desire always involves a
lack, and lacks are always painful. Accordingly, he holds in WWR II,
39. Further, in his aesthetic and ethical theories, Schopenhauer suggests that there are other
goods and evils in life than pleasure and pain; there are goods such as the attainment of
knowledge and moral virtue, and the evils of ignorance and having a predominantly ego-
istic or, worse, malicious character.
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c hapter 46 that all pleasure is merely negative, for it is the relief from
pain or temporary satisfaction of a lack (WWR II, 575). But there are
difficulties with this putatively a priori approach for supporting the
claim of overwhelming suffering in the world. First of all, the concept
of “desire” is not a synthetic a priori concept; it is, rather, an empirical
one. And according to his epistemology, empirical concepts derive
their content and meaningfulness from corresponding intuitions.
Thus, the ultimate source of our information about the nature of de-
sire or striving should, by the lights of Schopenhauer’s own system,
come from experience. Since it is the case for many people that their
experience of desire involves quite a bit more positive happiness than
Schopenhauer would allow, this certainly casts doubt on his analysis
of the concept of “desire.” Although he is surely right that millions of
people suffer from want; and that the prosperous are often plagued
by boredom; and that the lives of many animals—especially those
raised by human beings for food and labor—are full of suffering, and
that even the death agony of wild animals is horrible, on the empir-
ical evidence alone, Schopenhauer’s first tenet of pessimism is on
shaky ground. At the risk of invoking a cliché, the empirical evidence
he adduces is all of a “glass half empty” type, ignoring the manifold
sources of positive pleasure and joy in the world as seen from a “glass
half full” perspective.
However, couldn’t Schopenhauer utilize the metonymic strategy
I described above to offer some sensible support for the notion that
the metaphysical will is essentially not just “blind striving” but also,
by its nature, painful striving?40 In other words, first-person introspec-
tion on one’s own willing, because more immediate than any other
representation we have, enables him, on his view, metonymically to
identify the thing-in-itself with “will.” And I have sought to extend
this argumentative strategy on his behalf to the characterization of
40. I am indebted to an anonymous reviewer for pressing me on this point.
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Ideas A as Willensakte, given that we experience our own willing as

somewhat individuated acts of will. So why not extend the argumen-
tative strategy again to offer a characterization of the will (qua thing-
in-itself) as further, painful striving, since at least Schopenhauer’s
introspection on the nature of human willing reveals it always to in-
volve a more-or-less painful experience of a lack. Thus, why shouldn’t
we see Schopenhauer’s metonymic argument as allowing him to gen-
eralize from his first-personal access to his will, to world’s essence as
not just blind but also painful striving?
Although this seems like the right argumentative strategy for
Schopenhauer to pursue in order to adduce a priori grounds to sup-
port his pessimism, the extension of the metonymic approach to fur-
ther flesh out the nature of the Will is only as good as the putative
first-person insight that one’s own willing is predominantly painful.
And while the first-person insight that one wills—that we care and
strive—seems universally shared and available, that the affective va-
lence of this caring and striving is predominantly painful is far more
controversial. It is controverted by the aforementioned experiences
of caring about and striving to, say, write books, pursue meaningful
work, raise children, play sports, and pursue friendships and romantic
relationships that, for many people, are not predominantly painful.
In response to this, Schopenhauer might say that these dissenters
are deluded, and that his study of his own will reveals that there is a
structural dissatisfaction that others just aren’t adequately noticing.
Indeed, I do think Schopenhauer has revealed a somewhat de-
pressing structure of desire that affects many of us: We strive for
that job, romantic partner, honor or achievement, and quite a bit of
angst comes along with these pursuits, but even once we’ve attained
that long-anticipated object of desire, it quickly loses its lustre, we
become bored, and the cycle of dissatisfaction, disappointment, and
boredom continues ad infinitum. Schopenhauer certainly highlights,
in clear and vivid terms, this all-too-common human phenomenon,
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what Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics feared would reduce human

existence to an endless, futile chain of desiring—if life had no ulti-
mate telos.41 Yet, what I believe Schopenhauer has not satisfactorily
supported is the notion that all of this striving must be painful. Here
is where I believe an Aristotelian perspective is a salutary correc-
tive: Striving activity that exercises human capabilities in a virtuous
way can actually be quite pleasant.
Further, evidence that the prospects for significant pleasure and
joy in life might not be so dim can be gained through Schopenhauer’s
own philosophy of music. According to his account of “absolute”
music, one gains as close an insight into the nature of the metaphys-
ical will as is possible. But unlike the experience of tragedy, the in-
sight one gains through aesthetic engagement with music is not
characterized as sublimely nauseating, and Schopenhauer never
suggests that an experience with absolute music does or should lead
one to a sense that one ought to negate the will-to-life. Given that
music affords us, among all of the arts, the most immediate insight
into the nature of the metaphysical will, one would expect it to be
even more of a downer than tragedy, but this is far from the case, as
Schopenhauer writes that an aesthetic experience with music affords
us “that heartfelt joy with which we see the deepest recesses of our
being [Wesen] given voice” (WWR I, 283). In fact, the experience of
all of the arts constitutes “the most joyful and the only innocent side
of life . . . it therefore may be called the blossom of life in the full sense
of the term” (WWR I, 294–295). Aesthetic experience especially of
music constitutes for Schopenhauer a potent source of insight and
pleasure, which he describes in terms that strongly suggest that the
pleasure is in fact positive, for “a heartfelt joy” [jene innige Freude] and
“the most joyful [die erfreulichste] . . . side of life” do not sound merely
like the lessening of or relief from pain.
41. Chapter 2 in book I, 1094a18-22.
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IV.3. Evidence for (b) All of This Suffering Constitutes

an Extremely Bad-Making Feature of Existence
That beings who, without being particularly morally corrupt, for they
are simply pursuing their inborn will-to-life, should suffer tremen-
dously in doing so is, for Schopenhauer, an extremely bad-making
feature of existence. He is frankly disgusted by this state of af-
fairs: “What is the point of this whole scene of horror?” he asks with
respect to the turtles in Junghuhn’s anecdote.42 But he is especially
outraged at human beings who inflict harm on non-human animals
and at the systems of morals, Christian and Kantian, that he sees as
encouraging this inhumane treatment of animals:
Bah! what a morals of pariahs, chandalas, and mlechchas—

which fails to recognize the eternal essence [das ewige Wesen]
that is present in everything that has life, and that shines out with
42. In this claim one sees a pronounced split between Schopenhauer and Nietzsche even in
the latter’s most Schopenhauerian work, The Birth of Tragedy. Nietzsche offers a complex
aesthetic justification of this world full of suffering. Schopenhauer actually considers and
rejects (albeit a far less complex) aesthetic justification, in WWR II, chapter 46, offered
by “an optimist” who “tells me to open my eyes and look at the world and see how beau-
tiful it is in the sunshine, with its mountains, valleys, rivers, plants, animals and so on.
But is the world, then, a peep-show? These things are certainly beautiful to behold, but
to be them is something quite different.” For Schopenhauer, the value of the beauty of
the world—which he does not dispute—does not compensate for or justify the badness
of the suffering incurred by sentient beings. Alex Neill and I have argued elsewhere that
the superlative value Schopenhauer accords dramatic tragedy among the genres of poetry,
despite the pain involved in experiencing such works, shows that he does not hold on
to a purely hedonic theory of value. See Alex Neill, “Schopenhauer on Tragedy and the
Sublime,” in Companion to Schopenhauer, ed. Bart Vandenabeele (Oxford, UK: Blackwell,
2011), and Sandra Shapshay, “The Problem with the Problem of Tragedy: Schopenhauer’s
Solution Revisited,” British Journal of Aesthetics 52 (2012): 17–32. Consequently, I believe
Schopenhauer is a value pluralist, but one who holds that aesthetic and cognitive value,
though genuine, cannot compensate for or justify the tremendous disvalue of so much
suffering. Thus, while Nietzsche agrees that Apollonian beautification involves illusion,
and that the Dionysian brings us to reality, Nietzsche believes that sublime Dionysian ex-
perience of the world has the power to “justify it,” whereas, for Schopenhauer, no aesthetic
appreciation of the world can effect such a justification.
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unfathomable significance [unergründlicher Bedeutsamkeit] from

all eyes that see the light of the sun. (OBM, 162)
The fundamental reason why he sees the suffering of sentient beings

as a really bad-making feature of existence, however, is somewhat dif-
ficult to fathom.
One might think it is for Classical-Utilitarian reasons: Pain is the sole
intrinsic evil; pleasure the sole intrinsic good; insofar as he believes the
balance is tipped so far toward pain this is reason to lament the current
state of affairs. Indeed, Schopenhauer’s business-accounting metaphor,
“[l]‌ife is a business that does not cover its costs” (WWR II, chap. 46,
574), would encourage such a reading. Presumably, then, if life did
cover its costs—i.e., pleasure outweighed pain—then the world would
be pretty good for a Classical Utilitarian. But Schopenhauer is more in-
dividualistic and far less aggregative than a Classical Utilitarian; instead
he holds largely, it seems, by virtue of the a priori argument about the
dissatisfaction that is essential to the will, that even if “thousands had
lived in happiness and joy [this] would never do away with the anguish
and death-agony of one individual” (WWR II, 576). In other words, the
essential painful structure of willing, which brings with it undeserved
evil, for Schopenhauer, “would still be sufficient to establish . . . [that we
should be] sorry about the existence of the world; that its non-existence
would be preferable to its existence” (WWR II, 576). Fundamentally,
then, Schopenhauer parts ways with Classical Utilitarians by denying
that the evil of undeserved suffering can ever be “wiped off” or “bal-
anced” by the good that exists “along with or after it” (WWR II, 576).43
43. This seems like an extreme and implausible position at first glance, but I think it gains plau-
sibility when one reflects on the nature of evil. For instance, the evil of millions of innocent
people, terrorized and killed in the gas chambers of the Holocaust cannot ever be “wiped
out” or “compensated” for by millions of others who lead happy lives. That the world has
contained—and still does contain such human-made evils (to take just a couple of recent
examples, the systematic slavery and ritualized rape of thousands of girls and women by
ISIS or the Trump administration’s policy to separate would-be migrant parents from their
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So it might seem that Schopenhauer’s profound disgust at the ex-

istence of undeserved suffering shows him to be a “mis-vitalist,” who
holds that life in general is a bad thing and that individual lives are bad
things and thus it would have been better for all living beings never
to have been. Christopher Janaway attributes something like this
“mis-vitalism” to Schopenhauer insofar as Janaway interprets him
as holding that, (1) there is no value in living, and (2) all sentient
beings are ultimately but equally worthless. Accordingly, Janaway
writes,
Finally, Schopenhauer thinks that suffering is not valueless

in the end: its worth lies in its potential to make one realize
that no value can be found in living. . . . [S]‌uffering can be
redeemed, for Schopenhauer, by its power to generate the
knowledge that I, as much as every other living manifes-
tation of will, am nichtig—worth nothing, in vain. . . . To
speak the diagnostic language Nietzsche adopts in the Third
Essay of the Genealogy, Schopenhauer hereby assigns an as-
cetic “meaning” to suffering: that it can reveal the individual
human being who lives, strives, and procreates as lacking gen-
uine value.44
Taking into consideration Schopenhauer’s ultimate embrace of re-

nunciation as embodying the highest wisdom, this twofold mis-
vitalism is a reasonable interpretation, and there is quite a bit of
textual support for this reading, especially from WWR II, section
46, where he offers his most extended defense of pessimism and
children at the US Southern border, traumatizing thousands of children) is a horrific fea-

ture of the world we live in. Nonetheless, recognition of and lament at the fact of forever
uncompensated evil does not entail that especially the human world cannot progress to a
world that contains less evil.
44. Christopher Janaway, Beyond Selflessness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 73.
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concludes that “nothing can be stated as the aim of our existence ex-
cept the knowledge that it would be better for us not to exist” and
“existence is certainly to be regarded as an error or mistake, to return
from which is salvation” (WWR II, 605).45
But while these passages certainly lament the actual lives
that sentient beings lead, I think it is a mistake to conclude that
Schopenhauer is a mis-vitalist in the sense of holding that living
beings, especially sentient living beings, are without value, are
worthless, for this view seems directly controverted by the passage
I’ve quoted a couple of times now in which Schopenhauer writes
of living, sentient beings as having an “unfathomable significance”
[unergründlicher Bedeutsamkeit] and of non-human animals in par-
ticular as having a “worth” [Werte] that calls for “moral considera-
tion” [moralischer Berücksichtigung] similar to that of human beings
(OBM, 162).
Thus, I think the reason at the heart of Schopenhauer’s claim
that suffering is a very bad-making feature of the world is not
Classical-Utilitarian, nor is it that at bottom all living creatures are
worthless; rather, his reasoning is more individualistic and rooted in
a realist espousal of inherent value present in all conscious beings,
beings who are endowed with “the eternal essence that is present
in everything that has life.” This “eternal essence,” Schopenhauer
writes, “shines out with unfathomable significance from all eyes
that see the light of the sun”—it seems from this passage, and
Schopenhauer’s views against happiness and joy “balancing” or
“compensating” for evil, that it is not pleasure or pain that ulti-
mately matters, morally speaking, but rather subjects, or beings who
“have a world” themselves who matter from a moral perspective.
In other words, the ultimate value in the scheme of values is the
45. I am grateful to John Richardson and Christopher Janaway for pressing this reading of
Schopenhauer’s pessimism.
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individual sentient being, and pain and pleasure are only good or
bad derivatively, insofar as they are good or bad for that sentient
being. Thus, for Schopenhauer, the pleasures and pains of subjects
matter because subjects matter, not the other way around. An ad-
mittedly extreme illustration of his value ontology can be found in
Schopenhauer’s treatment of the life of Jesus. He hails Jesus Christ
as the exemplar of valuable humanity, whose goodness—in his
striving for justice and universal compassion—certainly made his
life of tremendous value, despite the badness of his disappointment
in his disciples, the angst he experienced that God had forsaken
him, and, of course, the agony on the cross.46 On my interpretation,
such a person is not only intrinsically valuable for Schopenhauer
insofar as he is full of the “eternal essence” in all living beings, but
also because he had a life worth living, that is, because he attained
the apex of good character. I suspect other later figures who led sim-
ilarly virtuous lives—lives of incredible compassionate action—
like Harriet Tubman, Mahatma Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King
Jr., and Mother Teresa, would be prime examples of lives that are
eminently worth living, despite the tremendous attendant suffering
their conduct brought them.
To sum up, that “subjects of a life”—to borrow Tom Regan’s
term— matter, morally speaking (in ways beyond being mere
receptacles of pain and pleasure), is an unargued assumption in
Schopenhauer’s work, but one, I believe, that he takes to be intui-
tively obvious to anyone endowed with a modicum of moral senti-
ment, that is, the feeling of compassion. I will argue further for this
view in Chapter 4.
46. On the notion that Christ is Schopenhauer’s primary example of the saint, I have
been influenced by Dennis Vanden Auweele’s insightful paper “Schopenhauer’s
Christology: Suffering and the Highest Good,” presented at the APA Central Division
Meeting, Chicago, February 2018.
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IV.4. Evidence for (c) That This Situation Cannot Get

Substantially Better in Time
That the dismal human and animal condition is inameliorable is the
claim that really marks out Schopenhauer’s doctrine as pessimistic.
Thinkers such as Hegel, Marx, and even J. S. Mill would have agreed
to a large extent with (a) and (b) with respect to human lives, though
they would not have thought much at all about animal suffering, but
they would certainly part ways with Schopenhauer at (c), for they all
held that suffering would or could be significantly reduced, through
moral, rational and technological progress.47
Why does Schopenhauer hold that significant progress toward
less suffering of subjects cannot transpire? Here, empirical evidence
will not suffice, as no amount of experience can show that suffering
cannot be significantly reduced. To support the claim, Schopenhauer
needs to adduce a priori reasons to.
In addition to the aforementioned arguments, namely, that dis-
satisfaction is essential to willing and the unacceptability of even a
single case of undeserved suffering—both of which, I have aimed to
show, do not adequately support his pessimism—the main a priori
reason Schopenhauer adduces to support this central pessimistic
claim is the monistic and yet empirically fractured nature of the met-
aphysical will. Insofar as we can gain insight into the thing-in-itself,
47. Perhaps more surprisingly, Kant held a rather grim view of the prospects for human hap-
piness in this life due to his embrace from 1777 on of a psychology of pleasure and pain
derived from Pietro Verri that is remarkably Schopenhaurian. See Susan Meld Shell,
“Kant’s ‘True economy of human nature’: Rousseau, Count Verri and the problem of hap-
piness,” in Essays on Kant’s Anthropology, eds. Brian Jacobs and Patrick Kain (Cambridge,
NY: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Even though Kant held that pain will always out-
weigh pleasure in human life, he does not see this as an argument against human prog-
ress because this is to be measured rather in pragmatic and moral, not hedonic, terms.
Likewise, Hegel and Marx would also mark human progress in pragmatic and moral
rather than hedonic terms, though J. S. Mill—at least according to his official doctrine
of utilitarianism—would indeed mark progress in (sophisticated) hedonic terms. Many
thanks for Allen Wood for drawing my attention to these parallels.
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for Schopenhauer, we come to understand it as blind striving (blinde

Streben). At bottom, there is just one unindividuated ultimate reality,
but in the empirical world of particular organisms, the metaphysical
will manifests itself as individual beings endowed with a will-to-life.
Each one of these organisms strives to perpetuate itself and its spe-
cies, and in doing so must compete against other manifestations of
the metaphysical will.
Consequently, he writes,
Everywhere in nature we see conflict, we see struggle, we see

victory changing hands; . . . [this is the] internal rupture that is
essential to the will. Each level of the will’s objectivation is in con-
flict with the others over matter, space and time. (WWR I, 171;
emphasis added)
This rupture and competition among particular organisms is es-

sential to the will insofar as it becomes objectified into individuals
because those individuals have, with rare exceptions, no choice
but to compete with other manifestations of the will. There is
simply no other way to affirm one’s will to life but to compete more
or less ruthlessly with others: “the will needs to live off itself be-
cause there is nothing outside of it and it is a hungry will. Thus,
pursuit, anxiety and suffering” (WWR I, 179). This individual,
embodied condition and the consequent “universal struggle,” for
Schopenhauer,
is most clearly visible in the animal kingdom, which feeds off the
plant kingdom, and in which every animal in turn becomes food
and prey for another . . . So the will to life constantly lives and
feeds off itself in its different forms up to the human race, which
overpowers all others and regards nature as constructed for its
own use. . . . this is the same human race in which this struggle,
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this self-rupturing of the will, reveals itself with the most terrible
clarity and man is a wolf to man. (WWR I, 171)
In brief, the “pursuit, anxiety and suffering” that we observe as the

keynote of all sentient existence must transpire, for Schopenhauer,
due to the metaphysics of the will. The only way this could disappear
is if the metaphysical will no longer objectified itself into individual,
living, striving beings.
However, this is where Schopenhauer’s own evolving view of
his metaphysics and philosophical methodology are relevant. As
suggested above, Schopenhauer emphasizes more in his later work
(WWR II) the hermeneutic nature of his metaphysics, and takes
pains to show that he does not conceive of his metaphysics as tran-
scendent, but rather as an immanent interpretation of the phe-
nomena. Given the sort of metaphysical methodology he embraces,
the identification of thing-in-itself with will cannot be used in a
foundationalist manner to show that the world cannot get sub-
stantially better. His metaphysics must always be responsive to the
empirical evidence, and there may be actual empirical evidence of
progress.
Further, Schopenhauer does acknowledge that human beings—
by virtue of the faculty of reason—may detach from the will-to-life
and thus from their natural egoism to varying degrees: in the attitudes
of aesthetic contemplation, compassion, and even in rare cases, as-
cetic renunciation of the will-to-life. And since Schopenhauer singles
out human beings as a major source of the suffering of animals as
well as other humans, why couldn’t human moral progress, say, in the
form of greater humane treatment of animals, more widespread vege-
tarianism, and increased egalitarianism among human beings signifi-
cantly reduce the amount of suffering in the world?48
48. It might seem from the way I have reconstructed Schopenhauer’s doctrine of pessimism
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The reason why Schopenhauer answers this question in the neg-

ative in WWR I is his static picture of human history, and the justifi-
cation for this static view is, first and foremost, the timeless, changeless
Ideas. In a particularly clear statement of Schopenhauer’s pre-
Darwinian, static view of the natural world for instance, he invokes
the Ideas: “We must assume that there was a universal and reciprocal
adaptation and conformity between all those appearances of the
one will, albeit a conformity removed from all temporal determina-
tion . . . since the Idea lies outside of time” (WWR I, 184).
And the Ideas again undergird Schopenhauer’s view of the static
nature of human history:
Now the same thing necessarily holds for the unfolding of that
Idea which constitutes the most complete objecthood of the
will: i.e. the history of the human race, the thronging of events,
the changing times, the many shapes that the form of human life
takes in different countries and centuries—all this is only the ac-
cidental form of appearance of the Idea; it does not belong to
the Idea itself, in which alone is found the adequate objecthood
of the will, but only to the appearance, which comes under in-
dividual cognition, and is as alien, inessential and indifferent to
the Idea itself as the figures are to the clouds that show them, the
shapes of the eddies and foam are to the stream, and the images
of trees and flowers are to the ice. (WWR I, 205)
that he holds an entirely hedonic theory of progress, and, accordingly, a purely hedonic
theory of value. As alluded to in an earlier footnote, I believe Schopenhauer is a plu-
ralist about value, holding that conscious beings themselves have inherent value and thus
the welfare of such beings has value, and further that cognitively-rich artistic and phil-
osophical projects are valuable. Notwithstanding, Schopenhauer holds that it is an ex-
tremely bad-making feature of the world that sentient beings suffer so much, even though
human beings at least can at the same time attain other, non-hedonic things of value, e.g.,
knowledge.
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Due to the eternal, unchanging nature of the Idea of humanity—and

the timelessness and changelessness of this Idea is metaphysically
guaranteed for Schopenhauer—human history cannot produce any
really new arrangement. This is his main, a priori reason for thinking
that significant progress is not possible.
Accordingly, and in direct challenge to Hegel, Schopenhauer
writes that the world is like “Gozzi’s dramas, always populated by
the same characters with the same plans and the same destinies: al-
though naturally the motives and events differ from play to play; nev-
ertheless, the spirit of the events is the same” (WWR I, 206); indeed,
with Ideas A in place, the spirit of the events is and must remain the
same because the Idea of humanity is static.49
49. In the context of an extensive battle with philosophical optimism (especially of the
Leibnizian “best of all possible worlds” variety), Schopenhauer does present an
argument—and I believe he is serious about this—that this is the worst of all possible
worlds (WWR II, 583). The argument relies on the scientific data available to him at
the time. He reasons that since (1) astronomers inform us that there is currently a very
precarious physical balance in our planetary system; and (2) geologists would assert a
similarly precarious balance in the geology of our planet (as glimpsed by the “playful
hints” at larger destructions seen in “the earthquakes of Lisbon, of Haiti, the destruction
of Pompeii”); and (3) climate scientists would tell us that “an insignificant alternation of
the atmosphere, not even chemically demonstrable, causes cholera, yellow fever, black
death” and that “a very moderate increase of heat would dry up all rivers and springs”
making life impossible for animals including human beings, most of whom, already live
on the edge of survival, then (4) if the world were physically organized in a manner just
a bit worse than at present, then life would not even be able to exist at all on this planet.
(5) Since life does exist on our planet, therefore this must be the worst of all (physically)
possible worlds.
Note that this argument makes no reference to the Ideas or the will-to-life, but simply
to scientific evidence of the precariousness of the physical conditions for life on the planet.
Schopenhauer gives no reason here why human technological progress, for example,
advances in earthquake-proof engineering, medicine, and climate science could not help
to make conditions for living beings better. Only the Ideas, and specifically, the Idea of
humanity, could play a role here to ensure that such progress to overall happier living
conditions could not truly be made. Interestingly, he does not invoke the Ideas here for
this purpose.
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IV.5. Jettisoning Ideas A, Effect on Pessimism

Given the importance of the Ideas A (as static kinds of species and
features of reality) for supporting the view that nothing significantly
new can come out of human history, by jettisoning Ideas A from
his system, Schopenhauer takes away the key epistemic ground for
holding that what one glimpses in Ideas B are truly the essential,
timeless features of the phenomenal world, rather than a glimpse at
what might simply be an enduring but in principle changeable feature
of existence. In other words, without Ideas A in his system, and given
a proto-Darwinian view of the evolution of species, Schopenhauer
loses the rationale for holding that human nature cannot change, for
better or for worse, over time.
It might be argued, however, that so long as Schopenhauer can
maintain that the character of the metaphysical will manifests itself as
the will-to-life in the phenomenal world, he can still maintain a static
view of human nature as determined thoroughly by servitude to the
will-to-life. Thus, one might hold that even without the intermediate
step of objectification of the will at various static grades via the Ideas,
the unchanging character of the metaphysical will as evidenced in the
world of representation in the will-to-life affords grounds for holding
that Ideas B afford us knowledge of the essential, timeless features of life,
rather than simply enduring ones.
Although this is a plausible way to save the view of Ideas B as
offering us a glimpse at timeless, essential features of the phenom-
enal world, it does not square with the myriad possibilities within
Schopenhauer’s system for human beings not to be slaves to the will-
to-life (as will be treated further in Chapter 3). Schopenhauer does
see human beings as capable of resisting, redirecting, or renouncing the
will-to-life: There is first the ability of the human intellect to engage
in aesthetic experiences of the beautiful and the sublime; second,
there is the ability to suppress egoism and act in a compassionate
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manner; and third, rare individuals can suppress the will-to-life per-
manently in asceticism. Exactly how the intellect can do these things
is deeply mysterious on Schopenhauer’s view; it seems to involve, in-
eluctably, the human being’s intelligible character. Insofar as the in-
telligible character is one of Ideas A, then these Ideas would still have
an important role to play in his system. Insofar as the doctrine of the
intelligible character can be detached from Ideas A—say, by its being
justified by transcendental idealism as well as the “unshakeable feeling
of freedom” that Schopenhauer maintains at the end of his essay “On
the Freedom of the Will”—they can more easily fall into desuetude
in his system. Nonetheless, the possibility of such freedom from the
will-to-life—which Schopenhauer certainly espouses—undermines
an entirely deterministic picture of the will-to-life in human life.
Therefore, without Ideas A in his system, the view that Ideas B af-
ford insight into necessarily fixed aspects of existence is unsupported.
Further, the evolutionary view of species gives us positive reason to
think that the nature of various biological species and, most impor-
tantly for us, human nature changes through time (though it may
change very slowly).
This leads, however, to an important systemic worry raised
earlier: Can one retain Ideas B in Schopenhauer’s system without
Ideas A? I think one can. Schopenhauer espouses two main values
in aesthetic experience, hedonic and cognitive value. Through will-
less cognition, Schopenhauer claims, we not only enjoy a pleas-
urable break from striving, but also come to know the truth about
the essences of things, presumably, the Ideas A of which contingent
individuals are instantiations. But what is to guarantee the objective,
cognitive value of aesthetic experience if there are no longer Ideas
A in Schopenhauer’s system?
Following Julian Young, there is an option here, one that involves
not so much jettisoning as metaphysically deflating the Ideas B. Young
has argued that the sense and coherence of Schopenhauer’s aesthetic
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theory can be maintained by construing the objects of aesthetic expe-

rience as simply ordinary perceptual objects viewed in a special way,
so that what is essential—what makes them what they are—comes
to the fore. Accordingly, Young writes, “the important thing to no-
tice [about this view] is that perceiving an Idea ([, e.g., of] water)
is a matter of perceiving an ordinary object ([,e.g., a brook) with
one’s attention focused on [its] essential and away from its inessen-
tial aspects.”50 On this reconstruction of Ideas B in Schopenhauer’s
aesthetic theory, they are actually representations of the enduring but
not necessarily eternal aspects of ordinary perceptual objects and
environments. Notwithstanding, gaining insight into the enduring
features of reality constitutes a cognitive gain even if one no longer
glimpses the static features of the world of representation.
A virtue of this reconstruction is that it does not do too much
violence to Schopenhauer’s appeal to the Ideas in book III, for while
his “official” view is clearly that the Ideas in book III are one and the
same as those of book II, the tenor of his discussion in the former
is significantly different from that of the latter. Schopenhauer al-
ways maintained that the Ideas in aesthetic experience are squarely
representations, purified representations, but representations none-
theless: as he says, “the Platonic Idea [in aesthetic experience] is nec-
essarily an object, something cognized, a representation” (WWR I,
32, 197). Further, there is no discussion in the aesthetic context of
an extra-temporal Willensakt with the corresponding implication that
Ideas B are independent of human subjects.
Recall also that Schopenhauer holds that each person has a
special Idea, an intelligible character qua Willensakt, and that this
is supposed to be similarly fixed qua Idea A. Given a more devel-
opmental, evolutionary view of species, the static view of a person’s
50. Julian Young, Willing and Unwilling (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), 93.
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intelligible and empirical character is similarly undermined. Given

Schopenhauer’s views on the possibility of transcendental freedom
as well as the actual cases of freedom from the will-to-life evinced
in the cases of aesthetic experience, compassionate action, and re-
nunciation, it seems that without timeless, changeless Ideas A cor-
responding to the intelligible characters of human individuals,
he would have to admit the possibility that a person can exercise
some voluntary control over his or her own character. But insofar as
Schopenhauer’s system must allow for the possibility of voluntary
control over one’s own character, further support for Schopenhauer’s
pessimism is lost.
Notwithstanding, pessimism may still gain some support from
what Schopenhauer concludes about the futile and painful nature of
desire, views which he gleans from experience and observation, as
well as from what he is able to say about the character of the world
as will as it appears to our experience. Granting the force of the
criticisms I have raised of Schopenhauer’s a priori arguments for pes-
simism, thus far, we see that without Ideas A, and his presumption
that Ideas A may be perceived in aesthetic experience as Ideas B, the
doctrine of pessimism loses further putative a priori support, and no
matter how good as Schopenhauer’s empirical evidence is for pessi-
mism, it cannot ground the view that progress is not possible.
Consistent with this ramification for Schopenhauer’s pessi-
mistic doctrine, there is evidence in Schopenhauer’s later works that
the view of the inameliorability of sentient existence is weakening.
By the time Schopenhauer writes On the Basis of Morality (1839/
40), he recognizes that actual progress can be made to reduce the
sources of human-made suffering and he even calls on individuals
and governments to follow the path of compassionate reform. For
example, he praises the British nation’s spending “up to 20 million
pounds” to buy the freedom of slaves in America (OBM, 218). He
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also lauds the founding of animal protection societies in Europe, es-

pecially in England:
We see this fine-feeling English nation distinguished before all

others by a striking compassion for animals that manifests itself at
every opportunity and has had the power to move the nation . . . to
fill by legislation the loophole that religion leaves in morals. For
precisely this loophole is the cause of animal protection societies
being needed in Europe and America, which themselves can be
effective only with the help of the law and the police. (OBM, 229)
Finally, he recognizes that the work of civic organizations, especially

in securing legal change, can bring about real moral change and re-
duce suffering. Again, with respect to the animal protection move-
ment and laws against animal cruelty, Schopenhauer writes rather
optimistically that “[e]‌verything adduced here gives evidence that
the moral chord in question . . . is gradually beginning to sound in the
occidental world” (OBM, 231).
To be sure, this later Schopenhauer is no philosophical optimist: He
doesn’t think that this is the best of all possible worlds (Leibniz), or
that the world must get better because of a necessary rational structure
(Hegel), nor that the world is a self-justifying divine cause (Spinoza).
Nor does he see an optimistic logic within evolution as some 19th-
century evolutionary theorists held. Finally, he does not see life as a
gift, to be thankfully accepted. He is still convinced that (1) the world
is and will always be full of unredeemed suffering—for nature involves
an internecine struggle for existence rather than a peaceable kingdom;
(2) the fact of evil cannot be “wiped off” or “compensated” for by one’s
later happiness, the happiness of others, or other aesthetic or cognitive
values; (3) the sources of suffering seem to outweigh the sources of
happiness and tranquility, and finally; (4) there is no providential God
to redeem all of this suffering in an afterlife.
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However, as shown above, Schopenhauer evinces hope that

through compassionate acts, the painstaking reform of law, and the
development of more humane social and political institutions, the
suffering of sentient beings may be somewhat reduced and life can
get significantly better for humans and animals alike.
Finally, in his late work, the Parerga and Paralipomena,
Schopenhauer goes so far as to offer a “eudaimonology” or
“instructions to a happy existence” in his Aphorisms on the wisdom
of life. The Aphorisms begins with an epigraph from Nicholas
Chamfort: “Le Bonheur n’est pas chose aisée: il est très difficile de le trouver
en nous, et impossible de le trouver ailleurs.” Note that while happiness
is not an easy thing to find [n’est pas chose aisée], it’s not an impos-
sible thing to find especially, as Schopenhauer advises, when one looks
toward internal sources. Although even in this work, Schopenhauer
acknowledges that “[i]‌n order to be able to develop such a doctrine,
I have had to abandon completely the higher, metaphysical-ethical
standpoint to which my philosophy proper leads” (PP I, 273), none-
theless, he offers a modest recipe for an existence that would be de-
cidedly preferable to non-existence:
A calm and cheerful temperament resulting from perfect health

and lucky bodily organization, a clear, lively, penetrating and ac-
curately comprehending understanding, a moderate, gentle will,
and consequently a good conscience—these are advantages for
which no rank or wealth can compensate. (PP I, 278)
V. CONCLUSION
There are, I believe, significant philosophical attractions of the

post-Darwinian-turn Schopenhauer. First, it brings Schopenhauer’s
system in greater conformity with evolutionary thought, casting it in
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a more scientifically modern light. Second, dropping Ideas A from the

system is in line with Schopenhauer’s own rationale for introducing
them, namely, the thought that the existence of distinct species of
plant and animal life could not be explained scientifically. Insofar as
science came to offer a good explanation for the origin and develop-
ment of species, Ideas A, by Schopenhauer’s own lights should fall into
desuetude.51
Adopting this proposed, and metaphysically deflated view of
Ideas B, however, has far reaching consequences for Schopenhauer’s
ethical thought. To work out all of the ramifications of this recon-
struction for Schopenhauer’s self-described organic system is be-
yond the scope of this chapter, but as I have argued, the loss of Ideas
A entails that Schopenhauer loses a priori support for holding a
static picture of human nature and human history.52 This means that
human nature may very well change over time, for better or for worse.
So on this proposed reconstruction, while there will always be a great
deal of suffering in the world entailed by the struggle for existence,
the grounds for pessimism about progress would rest only on empir-
ical grounds, that is, on relatively enduring features of the world, but
not necessarily static ones. Therefore, progress toward a better world
(with less suffering and more justice) may indeed be possible; it is
51. It is important to note, however, that Schopenhauer did not take the opportunity to re-
move or downplay mention of the Ideas A in republished versions of WWR I and II in
1859. The case I’m making here for Schopenhauer letting Ideas A fall into desuetude rests
on what I see as his overall tendency to downplay them, especially where one would expect
re-endorsement of the doctrine. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pointing out
that there are actually new passages in the 1859 edition of WWR I and II (see especially
WWR II, chaps. 41 and 48) that add references to the “Idea of Man.”
52. Since Schopenhauer always retains a transcendental-idealist metaphysics, calling himself
a “Kantian” even in his last work, the ramifications of Darwinian evolutionary thought
on Schopenhauer’s system would be limited by this allegiance. One sees the effect of
Darwinian thought much more profoundly on a more naturalistic thinker like Nietzsche.
For a meticulous reconstruction of thoroughgoing Darwinian influence on Nietzsche, see
John Richardson, Nietzsche’s New Darwinism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
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certainly not ruled out. This allows Schopenhauer as the Knight with
Hope, and accordingly his ethics of compassion, to come to the fore,
over his resignationism.
Schopenhauer apparently had neither the time nor inclination to
go back and determine what this new proto-Darwinian view would
mean for his system, but one sees a decided turn toward a less pessi-
mistic outlook in OBM and PP, toward an outlook better described
perhaps as compassionate realism rather than “ultra-pessimism”
(Oxenford), a view I shall reconstruct in Chapter 4.53
53. I am grateful to David Cartwright, Christopher Janaway, Alex Neill, John Richardson,
Alistair Welchman, Robert Wicks, and Allen Wood for their help on earlier drafts of this
chapter.
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Chapter 3
Freedom and Morality
I. DETERMINISM AND ETHICS?
In contrast to 18th-and 19th-century thinkers like Kant, Hume,

Hegel, Marx, and Mill, who, to varying degrees, have been impor-
tant sources for contemporary normative ethical theory, most
philosophers do not consider Schopenhauer to be helpful for
thinking about ethics.1,2 One of the main reasons for this is one that
I have tried to dispel thus far, namely, that Schopenhauer’s extreme
pessimism leads only to the recommendation of resignation. But
there is another reason why Schopenhauer has been neglected as an
1. Much of this chapter is modified from my essay titled “Schopenhauer’s Early Fourfold Root
and the Ghost of Kantian Freedom,” in Schopenhauer’s Fourfold Root, eds. Jonathan Head
and Dennis Vanden Auweele (London: Routledge, 2017), 80–98. My thinking on this topic
has developed in steady dialogue with Alex Neill, with whom I co-authored “Moral and
Aesthetic Freedom in Schopenhauer’s Metaphysics,” Internationales Jahrbuch des Deutschen
Idealismus/International Yearbook of German Idealism, eds. Jürgen Stolzenberg and Fred
Rush (May 2013): 245–264.
2. Encapsulating this general neglect by philosophers, Bertrand Russell stresses
Schopenhauer’s pessimism and largely dismisses him from academic philosophical consid-
eration, writing that he has always appealed more to “artistic and literary people in search of
a philosophy that they could believe” than to professional philosophers. A History of Western
Philosophy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2008, originally published 1945). A notable
exception is Iris Murdoch, who praises Schopenhauer’s moral insights in her 1982 Gifford
Lectures at the University of St. Andrews, published as Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals
(New York: Penguin, 1994).
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ethical theorist that I shall address in this chapter. It is widely held

that Schopenhauer espouses hard determinism, the view that human
beings (in addition to non-human animals) are determined to act as
they do on the basis of psycho-physical laws. But insofar as human
beings cannot act other than they do, it makes little sense to hold that
they ought to act differently, so without the presumption of freedom
it makes little sense to offer a normative ethical theory.3 One might
think this too quick, however, for surely I can be caused to act dif-
ferently in the future even if I can’t freely choose to do so. And so
why can’t a normative theory have this kind of impact on me, even
if it is not (in Kantian fashion) working through my freedom? There
are two problems I see with this line of thought. First, normative
ethics (and, really, any philosophy at all) makes an appeal to one’s
rational freedom. Just as I am doing now, the theorist offers reasons
to accept a thesis, reasons which appeal to a person’s freedom to con-
sider, critique, reflect upon, and possibly choose to accept or reject
the view on offer. Thus, in doing general normative ethics, one im-
plicitly assumes that hard determinism is not true, at least as pertains
to one’s rational freedom. Yet this reply might not really address the
hard determinist’s position, insofar as one might hold that we may
be rationally free (free to make up one’s mind on the basis of the evi-
dence presented), but not practically free, that is, free to do what one
chooses. Couldn’t offering a general normative theory still be con-
sistent with a more restricted view in which hard determinism is true,
say, by offering guidance on how we ought to cause others to act?
But while this seems a promising way to go, by taking this position
the normative theorist who embraces practical, hard determinism
3. Arguably, it would still make sense to offer an evaluative theory of ethics, namely, one that
delineates and defends a certain picture of the good and the right without prescribing that
people conform to this picture. As I have discussed in the previous chapters, however,
Schopenhauer actually enjoins human beings to bring about better treatment of human
beings and animals, and so does prescribe certain attitudes and actions.
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9
falls into a performative contradiction. Insofar as any normative the-

oretical enterprise offers guidance on how we ought to cause others to
act, by this very fact it means that the theorists still believe, to some
extent, we are practically free: Insofar as we ought to cause others to
act in a certain manner, this implies that we must be practically free
to cause others to act in a certain manner. Hence hard practical deter-
minism is, again, assumed to be false by the very nature of the enter-
prise of doing normative ethical theory.
In the preceding chapters, I have argued that we should embrace
a developmental rather than static picture of Schopenhauer’s phi-
losophy, and that with respect to his ethical thought in particular
Schopenhauer begins as the Knight of Despair but gravitates more
and more in his writings from the 1840s toward the Knight with
Hope. This development allows the ethics of compassion to come to
the fore as the preferable option to resignationism; insofar as prog-
ress toward a world with significantly less suffering is possible and
even actual, the ethical ideal of justice and compassion emerges as
normatively preferable to that of resignation, the latter of which is
actually tantamount to shirking one’s responsibility to bring about
such progress.4
4. Schopenhauer sometimes writes that his ethics is only descriptive rather than prescriptive.
For example, in WWR I, book IV, he writes “My only goal [in this book] can be to present
both [the affirmation and negation of the will-to-life in various degrees] and bring them to
the clear cognition of reason, but without prescribing or recommending one or the other,
which would be as foolish as it would be pointless, since the will in itself is absolutely free
and wholly-self-determining, and there is no law for it” (WWR I, 311). Although it would
seem from such a statement that he does not offer a normative ethical theory, this is too
quick. Schopenhauer does hold that there are morally better and worse attitudes to have,
and he advocates that people adopt the former over the latter, so he does “prescribe” certain
attitudes and actions. But he does not hold that it is possible to uncover a prescriptive law,
à la Kant, because he does not think that a rational person’s will is obligated by such a law.
As I shall treat in Chapter 4, however, he does hold that the attitude and actions of a com-
passionate person are normatively preferable to those of the egoist or malicious person, and
that we ought to strive for the former over the latter.
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10
Yet the traditional view of Schopenhauer as a hard determinist

has made his ethical thought seem unpromising for contemporary
theorizing.5 In contrast to this prevailing scholarly view, which,
I should note, shares in the misperception of Schopenhauer’s views
as static, I shall argue for the following thesis: While one sees quite a
lot of intellectual development in Schopenhauer’s views on freedom,
he never embraces hard determinism; rather, from his earliest to his
final writings on freedom, Schopenhauer espouses a Kantian-style
compatibilism interwoven with varying degrees of mysterianism.6
II. THE 1813 DISSERTATION VIEW ON FREEDOM
One of the areas of major revision between the 1813 dissertation

version of the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason and
5. Dale Jacquette, for one, does not call Schopenhauer a “hard determinist,” but in a lengthy
chapter on his views on freedom, Jacquette writes: “For two reasons, there can be no mean-
ingful human freedom in Schopenhauer’s system. First, the actions undertaken by moral
agents, like all events in the phenomenal world are governed by the fourfold root of the prin-
ciple of sufficient reason, and in particular by causal laws . . . Secondly, Schopenhauer regards
the character of each willing subject . . . [as] unalterable, incapable of change.” The Philosophy
of Schopenhauer (Chesham: Acumen, 2005), 186. In a recent, highly nuanced treatment of
Schopenhauer’s views, Christopher Janaway holds that while Schopenhauer attempts to
offer a theory of transcendental freedom in FW, his account—involving the Kantian in-
telligible/empirical character distinction—is incoherent, and thus, he should have just stuck
with the hard determinism propounded in most of that essay. “Necessity, Responsibility and
Character: Schopenhauer on the Freedom of the Will,” Kantian Review 3 (2012): 431–457.
6. By “mysterianism,” I mean the view that some philosophical problems, in this case, the na-
ture of freedom, are completely intractable given the kinds of cognitive faculties human
beings have. By “varying degrees,” I signal that one may hold that these problems will forever
be intractable (the strongest degree) to the view that perhaps someday, if human faculties
develop additional cognitive capacities, then we might be able to make progress on these
tough questions (a weaker degree). The most outspoken proponent of mysterianism with
respect to the mind-body problem, free will, and other philosophical problems is Colin
McGinn. See The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World (New York: Basic
Books, 1999), esp. chap. 7. But before him Thomas Nagel argued for mysterianism with re-
spect to the problem of consciousness in “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” Philosophical Review
83 (1974): 435–450.
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the 1847 version is chapter 7, “On the fourth class of objects for the
subject and the form of the PSR governing it.” This chapter concerns
only one object for the faculty of representation, namely, “the subject
of the will” (EFR, 50).7 In the dissertation version of this section,
Schopenhauer holds that the subject of willing, considered as distinct
from the subject of knowing or the “I” but, nonetheless, mysteri-
ously identical to it, is only knowable in introspection via particular
acts of one’s own willing. Ultimately, the subject of willing/knowing
or the “I” is “a perduring state” independent of time and space, and
identifiable as the Kantian “intelligible character” (EFR, 55–56).
Schopenhauer holds that the intelligible character is causally related
to bodily acts in time and is also able to “exert a causal influence . . . on
the knowing self ” in mental acts of attention and memory (EFR, 58).
In the dissertation, then, one sees Schopenhauer attributing a
causally efficacious spontaneity to the subject of willing or the intel-
ligible character, thus aligning himself with a broadly Kantian, two-
worlds view of freedom. Furthermore, in this early work, he clearly
regards the “phenomenon of freedom [as] having its roots in reason
and possessed by humans alone” (EFR, 57). Thus, he is explicit in
his allegiance to Kant’s view of freedom as rational spontaneity, and
he lauds Kant’s treatment as “an incomparable and wholly admirable
masterpiece of profound human thought” (EFR, 56).
After the completion of his dissertation, however, Schopenhauer
comes to grapple with the criticism leveled famously by F. H. Jacobi
and G. E. Schulze (the latter of whom was Schopenhauer’s teacher
at Göttingen). As the objection goes, in the CPR, Kant had illegiti-
mately applied the category of causality to things in themselves, since
the principle of causality, by the lights of the Critical system itself,
may only be applied intra-phenomenally. In Jacobi’s much-quoted
7. Schopenhauer’s Early Fourfold Root, transl. and commentary by F. C. White

(Aldershot: Avebury Press, 1997), 50.
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synopsis of the objection, without the assumption of things in them-

selves as causally related to phenomena, “I could not get into the
system; with it, I could not stay.”8 Implicated in this general criticism
is the rational spontaneity view of freedom, for it too involves an ap-
plication of causality extra-phenomenally to a thing-in-itself (in this
case, the intelligible character).
This objection led Schopenhauer to revise his allegiance to the
Kantian view of freedom in WWR I and in his essay “On the Freedom
of the Will.” Accordingly, in his revision of FR in 1847, Schopenhauer
excises the view that the intelligible character is a spontaneous cause
of mental and bodily actions. Instead, he substitutes a two-aspects
view that regards the actions of the body as the visibility or objectifi-
cation of the will—two sides of the same coin, as it were. Along with
this change, he also excises the view that the intelligible character—
through the faculty of reason—exerts a causal influence in the phe-
nomenal world, holding instead that “the influence which the will
exercises on knowledge is based not on causality proper, but on
the identity . . . of the knowing with the willing subject” (FR, 214–
215).9 Willing, on the one hand, and mental and bodily actions, on
the other, are now regarded as two metaphysical aspects of the same
event; Schopenhauer no longer holds that in cases of free will, the
latter may be caused by the rational spontaneity of the intelligible
character.
Given this revision, the natural question to ask is then what
becomes of the role of the intellect or the faculty of reason in this new
picture? I suggest that focusing on this question is quite revealing, for
Schopenhauer’s official pronouncements on the role of the faculty of
8. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi quoted in Immanuel Kant, Philosophical Correspondance 1759–

1799, ed. Arnulf Zweig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 22.
9. On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, trans. E. F. J. Payne (La Salle,
IL: Open Court, 1974).
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reason, which are generally deflationary, belie the actual role the fac-
ulty of reason seems to play in several contexts where Schopenhauer
implies that the subject exerts free will. Schopenhauer’s official pro-
nouncement on the faculty of reason (from his 1813 dissertation
through PP) is that reason:
(a) is distinctive to human cognition

(b) is the faculty that abstracts concepts from experience
and imposes four modes of explanation—the four roots
of the principle of sufficient reason—onto experience as
well as onto our judgments10
(c) can exert control over human action in the sense of
helping us to achieve what we will in a more effective
manner—either for the sake of goodness or wickedness
(d) is not purely practical in the sense of giving or motivating
a rational being to follow the moral law
Thus, in contrast to Kant, Schopenhauer explicitly demotes the

power of reason or, more generally, “the intellect” from being a tran-
scendent, spontaneous cause in the phenomenal world and the giver
of the moral law, to being merely the faculty of concepts and ratioci-
nation that came into being to serve the individual will-to-life and is
enlisted generally in that service.
Yet, Schopenhauer’s official position on the power of reason or
the intellect conflicts with his unofficial position, which reveals itself
most clearly in his theory of the sublime and in his discussion of as-
cetic renunciation of the will-to-life. This unofficial position retains
the earlier Kantian position, namely, a role for the spontaneity of the
intellect in exerting freedom in the phenomenal world, though this role
is badly under-theorized in his writings. In pithier terms, there is a
10. See The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, chap. 5; WWR I, sec. 3.
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specter haunting Schopenhauer’s views on freedom: the specter of

Kantianism!
III. DETERMINISM
In FW, Schopenhauer grants that human beings may possess both

physical and intellectual freedom, but he construes these in purely
negative terms: In the case of physical freedom, it is freedom from
material obstacles that would prevent one from doing what one wills;
and in the case of intellectual freedom, it is freedom from cognitive
impairments, both internal (such as madness or intoxication) and
external (such as deception or illusion grounded in extra-subjective
factors). However, the key philosophical question Schopenhauer sets
out to answer in this essay is not whether I can do what I will, but
rather whether I can will what I will (FW, 6). In other words, is my
will motivationally constrained such that I could not possibly will but
in the manner that I do? This is the question of whether we are free
in a moral sense, the question of whether human beings are endowed
with liberum arbitrium indifferentiae, and this is the primary question
he sets out to answer in his prize-winning essay.
In sections 1–4 of FW, Schopenhauer’s answer is that one is not
free to choose what one wills. His grounds for this conclusion rest
largely on his epistemological doctrine that the Principle of Sufficient
Reason is the a priori form of all human experience. Accordingly, the
natural world is universally causally determined. As he puts it, “all
changes that occur in given objects in the real external world are there-
fore subject to the law of causality, and thus always occur as neces-
sary and inevitable, whenever and wherever they occur.—To this law
there can be no exception” (FW, 24–25). The psychological realm is
also entirely subject to the causal nexus: In this regard, the only dif-
ference between a rock and a rabbit, for example, is that the rabbit’s
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Empirical
Presentation of a motive ☐ Action
Character
Fig. 3.1. Determinism and the empirical character.
behavior is governed by the causality of motives on the rabbit’s nature.

Schopenhauer defines “motivation” as “causality that passes through
cognition” (FW, 27). Thus, given the nature of the rabbit, the presen-
tation of a certain perception—say, that of a fox bounding toward
it—provides a sufficient motive for the rabbit’s flight, which follows
with strict necessity.
The same holds true for human beings, though with two no-
table differences. First, unlike the rabbit’s, the motives that operate
in human psychology are typically presented in consciousness
in conceptual and linguistic form. And second, Schopenhauer
holds that, unlike rabbits, human beings have unique, indi-
vidual characters, not just the character of their species.11 These
differences notwithstanding, given the particular empirical char-
acter of a human being (empirical inasmuch as it is known a pos-
teriori), if that human being is presented with certain motives,
Schopenhauer holds, the resulting action follows with necessity,
as depicted in figure 3.1.12
It is crucial to Schopenhauer’s conception of the matter that for
human beings, “the individual character is inborn; it is not a work of
11. Schopenhauer does allow that in more cognitively complex animals such as dogs and ele-
phants individuals may show a greater degree of individuality as well.
12. In principle, then, one could accurately predict a human being’s actions, but in practice—
given that one only comes to know a person’s individual character, including one’s own,
through much experience, and that discerning the competing motives in a human being’s
consciousness is a complex business—this is likely to be difficult.
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art or circumstances subject to chance, but that of nature herself ”

(FW, 46), and further, that individual character is unchangeable. He
offers two a priori reasons in support of this position. First, given
his view of the Principle of Sufficient Reason as the a priori form of
our objective experience, any spontaneous action, one that actually
formed character from nothing rather than one which flowed from
a character, would constitute an “inexplicable miracle—an effect
without a cause” (FW, 40); but the mind has no form for conceiving
an effect without a cause, which is to say that the idea lacks real sense.
This leaves open the possibility of modification of character through
habituation in a manner that is not entirely spontaneous, but this
option is foreclosed in Schopenhauer’s thought by his second main
reason for accepting determinism, namely, the a priori law that every
existentia presupposes an essentia, that is, “everything that is must also
be something, must have a definite essence” (FW, 51). Human beings,
like everything else in nature, have essential qualities with which they
are born.13
Although Schopenhauer takes the empirical character to be
fixed, individuals may learn through experience “what we want
and what we can do” as well as “the dimensions and directions of
our mental and physical abilities” and our “total strengths and
weaknesses” (WWR I, 331). If people acquire “knowledge of the
invariable qualities of [their] own empirical character” then, he
suggests, they have developed “acquired character” [den erworbenen
13. In addition, Schopenhauer offers a quasi-empirical reason for the inborn and unchange-
able nature of the empirical character. By analogy with all other kinds of beings in nature,
the empirical character of a human being must be like a force. Since forces of nature are
original and unchangeable, so too must be the empirical character (FW, 49–50). Finally,
Schopenhauer offers some pretty weak empirical reasons to bolster his case, writing that
“[w]‌e can obtain confirmation of this truth from daily experience; but the most striking is
obtained when after twenty or thirty years we meet an acquaintance again and soon spot
in him precisely the same old tricks as before” (FW, 44). Also, we never trust anyone who
has deceived us in the past and mutatis mutandis for those we have previously trusted.
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Charakter]. Schopenhauer’s terminology here is somewhat mis-

leading inasmuch as it suggests that an individual can “acquire”
a different character from her empirical one. What is really being
“acquired” here is empirical self-knowledge. Schopenhauer’s point is
that a person may learn how most effectively—i.e., in a manner that
is socially acceptable and in keeping with his physical and mental
abilities—to achieve what he inevitably wills if he acquires empir-
ical self-knowledge. To illustrate: imagine a heavy drinker, Bill, who
has ruined his personal life by mistreating his family when drunk.
In Schopenhauer’s terms, one of Bill’s empirical character traits is
that he is “alcoholic.” After hitting rock bottom, Bill joins Alcoholics
Anonymous to work its twelve-step program. In doing so, he may
come to recognize a fact about his empirical character, namely that
he is essentially alcoholic. In Schopenhauer’s terms, if he acquires
such knowledge, he now has “acquired character.” What this really
amounts to, however, is the possibility of a difference in his behavior,
on the basis of his acquired “empirical self-knowledge,” despite the
fact that his empirical character remains unchanged. Bill no longer
believes that he can go to the bar and have “just one little drink.”
He realizes that this former belief of his is false and was perhaps, all
along, self-deceptive, and knows that, as soon as he puts himself in
that situation, motives will act on his empirical character with the
force of necessity, and he will arrive home drunk (see fig. 3.2). Once
he has “acquired empirical self-knowledge,” however, he can refrain
Empirical
Motive ☐ Drinks to excess
Character
Readily available alcohol
Fig. 3.2. Bill, pre-AA: wills incompatible things (1) to get drunk; and (2) to
have a good family life.
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from putting himself in situations where he will be tempted to drink.

He can consciously avoid bars and parties where alcohol is being
served. Note, on this picture (see fig. 3.3), he still wills to drink but
he also wills to be a good father and husband, too, and he realizes
that the former desire is incompatible with the latter. By acquiring
empirical self-knowledge, he can utilize his intellect or faculty of
reason to avoid the situations where he will, necessarily, get drunk—
for he is, essentially, alcoholic—as this behavior conflicts with what
he also wills, namely, to have a happy family life.
A similar but more extreme use of reason to govern our prac-
tical affairs in order better to attain what we desire is evidenced on
Schopenhauer’s account by the Stoic sage who “presents in an ideal
form the most complete development of practical reason in the true
and authentic sense of the word” (WWR I, 113). The Stoic sage
desires happiness but recognizes that desire and attachment are the
chief obstacles thereto, and so he looks to reason to detach from de-
sire in order to achieve peace of mind (ataraxia).
Indeed, for Schopenhauer, rational human beings—unlike non-
human animals—can attain a measure of relief from suffering in this
way, for if we can retreat into reflection we become “like actors who
Faculty
Utilizes the of
reason
To avoid the motive

Empirical
Readily available alcohol ☐ Drinks to excess
Character
Fig. 3.3. Bill, post-AA: uses his intellect to achieve (2) at the expense of (1).
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109
have played our scene, and now take our seats among the audience
before we have to return to the stage; anything may now happen
on the stage, even the preparation of our own death, and, looking
out from the audience, we view it with equanimity [Gelassenheit]”
(WWR I, 112).
It is important to note, however, that Schopenhauer does not
equate the ability to achieve equanimity [Gelassenheit] through ra-
tional reflection with true moral virtue, as did the Stoics. In fact,
he believes that this use of reason to achieve equanimity can be
put in the service of great virtue or great wickedness. Crucial for
this chapter, this sort of “practical reason” does not constitute
freedom of the will for Schopenhauer. The Stoic sage does not ac-
tually change what he wills, namely, to achieve happiness; rather,
he uses reason to detach from his desires in order better to attain
happiness. Thus, reason is used in the Stoic case in a manner akin
to (albeit more extremely than) the case of Bill the recovering al-
coholic; that is, practical reason is employed better to achieve what
one wills. In other words, reason is used as a means for managing
our lives in a more enlightened self-interested manner. In stark con-
trast to Kant, then, Schopenhauer holds that the only “true and
authentic sense” of pure practical reason is the ability to “retreat
into reflection” in order to manage one’s affairs more efficaciously
or even to gain some measure of tranquility. Notwithstanding,
Schopenhauer does hold that this ability lends human beings a
kind of dignity that animals cannot have, but he underscores that
“there is no other sense in which we can talk of [human] dignity”
(WWR I, 117).14
14. As shall be treated in the following chapters, this sense does not endow human beings with
a different kind of moral status or moral considerability, albeit it does ground a higher de-
gree of moral considerability.
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10
IV. FREEDOM: THE TWO PATHS TO PEACE
On the basis of the thoughts outlined above—that human beings

have inborn, unalterable empirical characters and that the law of
causality operates with strict necessity in the psychological as well as
the physical realm—Schopenhauer declares that “we have entirely
suspended from human action all freedom and have recognised
that such action is thoroughly subject to the strictest necessity”
(FW, 83).
Yet, this official pronouncement conflicts with Schopenhauer’s
characterization of the subject of aesthetic experience and of the
person who renounces the will-to-life, for these subjects seem to be
possessed of intellectual freedom, a freedom not only to deal with
their own empirical character more efficaciously (e.g., in the case of
Bill and the Stoic sage above) in the service of what they ultimately
will, but also to choose to act out of character, in a manner contrary to
what they will, and even to change their own empirical character.
In aesthetic experience, as he understands it, a subject “loses him-
self ” in his contemplation of an object in such a way that “what is
thus known is no longer the individual thing as such, but the Idea, the
eternal form, the immediate objectivity of the will at this grade [of its
manifestation in the phenomenal world]” (WWR I, 179). In this way,
the subject loses herself as a willing subject, putting her desires and
strivings on hold. More starkly, for the denier of will, “knowledge of
the whole, of the inner nature of the thing-in-itself,” “present in a high
degree of distinctness,” “becomes the quieter of all and every willing”
(WWR I, 379, 378).
Implicit in these pictures of aesthetic and ascetic experience, it
would appear, is a conception of the subject not merely as an instru-
mentally enlightened willer, but further as a free subject, a subject
who can choose, to varying degrees to detach from her empirical
character and to act differently from how her will-to-life dictates. In
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1
contrast to the post-AA Bill and the Stoic sage, these are not cases
of the use of the intellect in enlightened service to the will-to-life to
attain happiness; rather, these seem like cases where the intellect ac-
tually opposes the will-to-life and its myriad desires.
Consider, for example, Schopenhauer’s account of what he
describes as “the transition that is possible, but to be regarded only
as an exception” from ordinary experience to aesthetic experience.
He writes:
Raised up by the power of the mind [die Kraft des Geistes], we re-
linquish [aufhört] the ordinary way of considering things, and
cease to follow under the guidance of the forms of the principle
of sufficient reason merely their relations to one another, whose
final goal is always the relation to our own will. Thus we no
longer consider the where, the when, the why, and the whither
in things, but simply and solely the what. Further, we do not let
abstract thought, the concepts of reason, take possession of our
consciousness, but, instead of all this, devote [hingiebt] the whole
power of our mind [die ganze Macht seines Geistes] to perception,
sink ourselves completely therein, and let our whole conscious-
ness be filled by the calm contemplation of the natural object
actually present, whether it be a landscape, a tree, a rock, a crag,
a building, or anything else. (WWR I, 178; emphasis added)
Schopenhauer’s language here would seem to imply that the subject

of aesthetic experience becomes such by virtue of a deliberate intel-
lectual act that breaks the normal, will-driven, conditioned course of
experience: we “do not let abstract thought take possession” of our
minds, Schopenhauer says; we “relinquish the ordinary way of con-
sidering things.” A few lines later, he suggests that “a knowing indi-
vidual raises himself . . . to the pure subject of knowing” (WWR I, 178;
emphasis added). In PP II, Schopenhauer writes that in aesthetic
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12
contemplation “I disregard” and “set aside” the contemplated object’s

position in time and space (PP II, 417). These remarks suggest that
in making the transition from ordinary to aesthetic experience the
subject deliberately chooses to break free of the demands of his will
and the grip of the principle of sufficient reason—to break free, that
is, of what Schopenhauer elsewhere refers to as “the law of causa-
tion.” While it is still possible to read this transition as resulting from
a different causal force working on us, presumably a different part of
our psychological constitution, in the case of resignation, to which
I shall now turn, it is even clearer that there isn’t another sort of causal
mechanism at work.
In his discussion of resignation, Schopenhauer again appears to
be working with a conception of the subject as essentially a free sub-
ject, one with the capacity to choose or decide whether to affirm or
to deny the will-to-life. The latter option is modeled most clearly,
he suggests, in certain works of tragedy, such as Calderón’s La vida
es sueño and Shakespeare’s Hamlet, where we see that “after a long
struggle and much suffering, the noblest people eventually renounce
forever the goals they had, up to that point, pursued so intensely,
as well as renouncing all the pleasures of life, or even willingly and
joyfully giving them up” (WWR I, 280). “Willingly giving them
up” sounds very much like something that one willfully decides to
do. And Schopenhauer is clear that while such renunciation of the
will-to-life, initiated by a subject’s recognition of the contradiction
of the will with itself, is often accompanied by great personal suf-
fering, renunciation “does not follow from suffering with anything
like the effect from its cause, but rather the will remains free. In fact,
this is the only place where its freedom emerges directly into ap-
pearance: which explains why Asmus expressed so strong an aston-
ishment over ‘transcendental alteration’ ” (WWR I, 422; emphasis
added). In other words, in these cases we have a subject choosing
what he wills—willing out of character, as it were—and not merely
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13
changing how he attains what he wills by virtue of his empirical

character.15
These remarks concerning the possibility of aesthetic experience
and renunciation of the will-to-life are, on their face, in clear ten-
sion with the determinist position that Schopenhauer defends in the
earlier sections of book IV of The World as Will and Representation and
in his “Prize Essay on the Freedom of the Will” that I have outlined
above. Indeed, far from hiding from this tension, Schopenhauer him-
self draws our attention to it, noting laconically that “[t]‌his might
be thought at odds with the earlier discussion of the necessity that
accrues to motivation as much as it does to every other form of the
principle of sufficient reason [and, he might just as well have added,
his discussion of aesthetic experience] . . . Far from wanting to re-
scind this, I am calling it back to mind” (WWR I, 430).
Paul Guyer, for one, has recognized the same tension here
with respect to Schopenhauer’s aesthetic theory. He construes
Schopenhauer as holding that the transition from ordinary to aes-
thetic experience must be “the consequence of an active, even vio-
lent adoption of a cognitive attitude by the individual mind,” so that
“we actively will . . . to free ourselves from the will.” Thus he notes
quite rightly that there is “something unsettling” and “an air of par-
adox about Schopenhauer’s account.”16
15. Here it sounds as though the only free choice would be to deny the will-to-life, and thus to
act in a manner contrary to one’s empirical character, but this is not the case. Schopenhauer
does think that rational beings may freely affirm will-to-life as well. In such a case one
wouldn’t be acting “out of character” but, rather, choosing to act in harmony with one’s
empirical character. What would be “out of character,” in the affirmation case, would be the
free choice to affirm the will-to-life. From an epistemic point of view, however, it would be
very hard to tell if a person freely affirms the will-to-life and much easier to detect cases of
denial of the will-to-life.
16. Guyer reads Schopenhauer as offering “a description of contemplation as the consequence
of an active, even violent adoption of a cognitive attitude by the individual mind.” See
Paul Guyer, “Pleasure and Knowledge in Schopenhauer’s Aesthetics,” in Schopenhauer,
Philosophy, and the Arts, ed. D. Jacquette (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996), 116.
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14
So the natural question to ask, then, is how is Schopenhauer’s

determinist position—namely, that a human being cannot will in
a manner that is inconsistent with his fixed, empirical character—
consistent with Schopenhauer’s characterization of the subject of
aesthetic experience and the ascetic renouncer as apparently acting
in a manner that is inconsistent with her empirical character? That
is, how can Schopenhauer square his determinism with the ways
in which aesthetic and ascetic subjects seem to be possessed of the
freedom precisely to act out of character?
V. WILL-LESSNESS AND PASSIVITY:

BEAUTY AND RENUNCIATION
Despite Schopenhauer’s characterization of the transition from ordi-

nary experience to aesthetic experience and denial of the will-to-life
in such active terms, there may be scope for seeing those transitions
as something with respect to which the subject is essentially passive,
as not dependent on any free act of intellect, and hence as consistent
with his determinism. Some of what he has to say about the expe-
rience of beauty suggests this possible route to squaring his deter-
minism with his account of the aesthetic and ascetic subjects.
Although his first description of the experience of beauty, in
section 34 of WWR I, characterizes it in active terms as involving
a “transition” [Uebergang] brought about when cognition “tears it-
self free” from service to the will [indem die Erkenntniß sich vom
Dienste des Willens losreißt] (WWR I, 200), by section 39, the ex-
perience of the beautiful is characterized as involving a much more
passive-sounding “transport into a state of pure contemplative in-
tuition” [das Versetzen in den Zustand des reinen Anschauens] that
“occurs most easily when objects meet that state halfway” by “virtue
of their intricate . . . clear and determinate form” (WWR I, 225).
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15
Beautiful objects, Schopenhauer holds, have an “obliging character”

that “accommodates” the transition into a state of will-lessness in a
perceiver; such objects “turn readily into representatives of their
Ideas” inasmuch as the perception of them does not provoke ac-
tivity of will. And when presented with such an object under certain
conditions—roughly, conditions in which the demands of the will
are not pressing—its “intricate . . . clear and determinate” form can
become salient for a subject, bringing her to the point where she may
be transported “into a state of pure contemplative intuition” (WWR
I, 225).
Schopenhauer’s thought here is that under such conditions the
subject “loses” her awareness of her individuality, and experiences
beauty, because (a) the demands of the will are not pressing (the sub-
ject is not hungry, say, or afraid, or otherwise excited), (b) the ob-
ject presented to consciousness does not present any direct motives
to her will, and (c) the object is constituted in such a way that for a
subject in these conditions the Idea that the object instantiates—its
essential character, so to speak—is particularly accessible.17 In short,
although in experience of the beautiful a subject has certainly slipped
out of the normal, conditioned course of experience, no decision
or choice or act of will on the subject’s part is required to make that
happen: All that is required is a certain sort of object and a relative
calmness of will in the subject.
This picture of the experience of beauty as essentially something
with respect to which the subject is passive is reflected in some of
what Schopenhauer has to say about the possibility of renunciation,
or denial of the will-to-life. The latter may be “attained,” he maintains,
via either of two pathways. On the first path, “the veil of Maya, the
principium individuationis, is lifted from a human being’s eyes to
such an extent” (WWR I, 405) that “[h]‌e recognizes the whole,
17. (b) and (c) are in effect different ways of stating one and the same condition.
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16
comprehends its essence, and finds that it is constantly passing away,

caught up in vain strivings, inner conflict and perpetual suffering”
(WWR I, 405–406). This recognition “becomes the tranquillizer
[Quietiv] of all and every willing” in him. And the tranquillizer
(Schopenhauer also describes it as “silencing” or “suppression” or
“breaking”) of a person’s individual will makes it possible for the
person to “renounce” (“negate,” “deny”) the will-to-life, the “kernel”
not only of “his own appearance” but of the world in general (WWR
I, 407).
The more common path to renunciation, however, lies via “the
personal experience of suffering—not just the recognition of suf-
fering . . . [For] [o]‌nly a very few people find it enough to begin with
pure cognition which, seeing through the principium individuationis,
first produces the most perfect goodness of disposition and universal
human kindness, ultimately enabling them to recognize all the suf-
fering in the world as their own, thus bringing about the negation of
the will. . . . For the most part, the will must be broken [gebrochen]
by personal experience of great suffering before its self-negation can
come into play” (WWR I, 419). As these remarks set it out, then, the
difference between the two paths to renunciation is as follows: on the
first, knowledge leads to the quietening of the individual will, which
makes denial of the will-to-life possible; on the second, suffering leads
to the quietening of the individual will, which makes denial of the
will-to-life possible.
Schopenhauer’s initial characterization of both paths looks con-
sistent with the view that the experience of renunciation, like the ex-
perience of the beautiful, is one with respect to which the denier of
the will-to-life is passive. In other words, these transitions into will-
lessness just happen to the subject and are not brought about by any
spontaneous, free choice of the intellect. Those who find themselves
on the second pathway, after all, are unlikely to have brought their
suffering on themselves, or at any rate, not in the sense that they have
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17
deliberately sought it out as a means to renunciation. Their suffering,

that is, is something with respect to which such a person is passive;
and if that suffering does indeed break her individual will, and if that
does lead to her denial of the will-to-life in general (neither of which,
as Schopenhauer sees it, are inevitable), neither of the latter depends
on any decision of hers. Regarding the first pathway, the position is
even clearer: On this, it is the acquisition of knowledge that leads to
quieting of the individual will and allows denial of the will-to-life in
general, and Schopenhauer is unequivocal in holding that “cognition
and insight as such are independent of free choice,” so that “negation
of the will, that entrance into freedom cannot be forced by any inten-
tion or resolution” (WWR I, 432).
There is a complication with respect to Schopenhauer’s declara-
tion that all knowledge and insight do not depend on choice, for he
also says, in reference to “the second path leading to the negation of
the will” that “unlike the first, this path does not proceed through
pure cognition of the suffering of a whole world that one freely takes
upon oneself [das man sich freiwillig aneignet], but rather through
the feeling of one’s own boundless pain” (WWR I, 420). The impli-
cation in this passage is that it is only the second path that doesn’t
involve any volition at all, and it suggests that some knowledge may
be attained by free choice. Notwithstanding, it is possible to read
Schopenhauer’s account of ascetic renunciation as an experience that
happens to a subject, that is, as an experience to which the subject is
passive.
VI. WILL-LESSNESS AND AGENCY:

ASCETICISM AND SUBLIMITY
However, recognition of these considerations about the experience

of beauty and the two pathways to renunciation, as Schopenhauer
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18
construes them, is not sufficient to dispel all worries about the ten-
sion between his determinism and his accounts of aesthetic experi-
ence and of denial of the will-to-life. It is true that the experience of
beauty sounds, as he often characterizes it, entirely passive. So too will
be the experience of many of those who attain denial of the will-to-
life via great personal suffering, which, although it “frequently leads
to a full resignation,” Schopenhauer suggests, does so “often not until
the presence of death” (WWR I, 419). But even if the experience of
beauty is the most common kind of aesthetic experience, it is not the
only kind; and even if the most common route to renunciation is one
along which the denier of the will-to-life is carried passively, there is,
as we have seen, more than one route to renunciation.
With regard to renunciation of the will-to-life attained via the first
pathway, Schopenhauer makes the following point:
[W]‌ e must not think that, after cognition has become a

tranquillizer of the will and given rise to the negation of the
will to life, it will never falter and that it can be relied upon like
inherited property. Rather, it must constantly be regained by
steady struggle. Since the body is the will itself . . . as long as the
body lives, the whole will to life still exists as a possibility and
constantly strives to enter actuality and flare up again in all its
blazing heat. Thus we find that the peace and blissfulness we
have described in the lives of saintly people is only a flower that
emerges from constant overcoming of the will, and we see the
constant struggle with the will to life as the soil from which it
arises . . . Thus we also see people who have succeeded at some
point in negating the will bend all their might to hold to this
path by wresting renunciations of every sort from themselves,
by adopting a difficult penitent way of life and seeking out every-
thing they find unpleasant: anything in order to subdue the will
that will always strive anew. (WWR I, 418)
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19
These remarks suggest that even if the initial transition into denial of
the will-to-life is something with respect to which the subject is pas-
sive, maintaining this state requires a conscious, voluntary, “constant
struggle,” indeed a struggle “with all [one’s] might.” Schopenhauer
goes on to give a series of examples that reinforce the idea that the
ascetic path to renunciation is one that requires agency: examples of
ascetics who seek to mortify the flesh in various ways, illustrating,
for example, that “the first step in asceticism” is “[v]‌oluntary, perfect
chastity,” and that further steps include “voluntary and intentional
poverty,” fasting, and self-castigation (WWR I, 407–408).18
The problem posed by the apparent willfulness of at least some
cases of renunciation of the will-to-life is compounded when we re-
call that aesthetic experience comprises not only the experience of
beauty but also that of the sublime. While beautiful objects accom-
modate the transition into the state of will-lessness in a perceiver in-
asmuch as they do not provoke activity of will, Schopenhauer holds
that sublime objects or states of affairs, by contrast, stand in “a hos-
tile relation to the human will in general (as it presents itself in its
objecthood, the human body) and oppose it, threatening it with a su-
perior power that suppresses all resistance, or reduc[es] it to nothing
with its immense size” (WWR I, 225). Sublime objects and states of
affairs, that is, are recognized by the subject as threatening in some
sense, and that recognition is an impediment to transition into will-
less contemplation of them. Despite this, Schopenhauer insists, such
contemplation of the sublime is possible. He writes,
18. It is worth noticing here that Schopenhauer’s initial characterization of the difference be-
tween the two paths to denial of the will-to-life—which has it that on the first, knowledge
leads to the quieting of the individual will, which makes denial of the will-to-life possible;
whereas on the second, suffering leads to the quieting of the individual will, which makes
denial of the will-to-life possible—is misleading. In fact, his view is that denial of the will-
to-life per se depends on knowledge; the real difference between the two paths is that in the
second, but not the first, that knowledge is acquired as a result of personal suffering.
119
120
With the sublime, on the other hand, that state of pure cogni-
tion is gained only by means of a conscious [bewußtes] and vi-
olent tearing free from relationships between the same object
and the will . . . by means of a free and conscious elevation over
the will and the cognition relating to it [ein freies, von Bewußtseyn
begleitetes Erheben über den Willen]. This elevation must not only
be achieved consciously, it must also be sustained and is there-
fore accompanied by a constant recollection of the will, although
not of a particular, individual willing, such as fear or desire, but
rather of human willing in general. (WWR I, 226)
Like most cases in which a person arrives at denial of the will-to-life,

indeed all such cases in which denial is not closely followed by the
person’s death, experience of the sublime requires active sustenance or
maintenance. But as Schopenhauer characterizes it, experience of the
sublime also requires active initiation; it is achieved by the subject’s
violently tearing away her attention from the threat posed by the ob-
ject to her individual will (WWR I, 226).
Thus, with respect to the sublime, if not to the beautiful, Guyer’s
suggestion that in Schopenhauer’s view the transition from ordinary
to aesthetic experience is “the consequence of an active, even violent
adoption of a cognitive attitude by the individual mind,” in which
“we actively will . . . to free ourselves from the will,” looks entirely
accurate.
I suggest that in Schopenhauer’s account of the active ascetic
and the active subject of sublime experience, we see unmistakable
traces of the Kantian rational spontaneity view, a view that he offi-
cially repudiates in his post-dissertation writings.19 Since the atavistic
19. My claim does depend on the assumption that the will can only “turn against itself ” if the
power of reason endows it with such freedom. Alternatively, one might think that the will
may still be caused to so turn by some trait within will itself. But Schopenhauer’s language
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12
role of spontaneous, intellectual freedom is most apparent in his dis-

cussion of the experience of the sublime, and since the experience of
the sublime was also quite revelatory, for Kant, of rational freedom
in both its moral and theoretical vocations, it is important to look
more closely at Schopenhauer’s account of sublime response and its
parallels with Kant’s account.20
VII. THE GHOST OF KANTIAN FREEDOM
In his description of the experience of the sublime, Schopenhauer

alludes to a second-order consciousness both of liberating oneself
and having been liberated from the will and its cares; this second-
order consciousness is accompanied, he writes, by the feeling of
“exaltation” (Erhebung) above the will (über den Willen). In the fol-
lowing above- cited passage, Schopenhauer adumbrates, without
clearly distinguishing, these two moments of self-consciousness in
his discussion of the phenomenology of the sublime:
With the sublime, on the other hand, that state of pure cogni-
tion is gained only by means of a conscious [bewußtes] and vi-
olent tearing free from relationships between the same object
of a conscious, purposive, rational choice to turn away from the will seems to suggest the
former option.
20. It is not surprising that the Kantian view of freedom as rational spontaneity would survive
most clearly in Schopenhauer’s own account of sublime response. Kant’s theory of the
sublime comes in for high praise in his appendix to WWR I, and in his Studienhefte entry
on the third Critique (1808–1811) where one sees that Schopenhauer was clearly moved
by it: “How true and fine is what he says about the sublime!” He qualifies this appraisal
only as follows: “only a few things in his language and the fatal faculty of reason [die fa-
tale Vernunft] are to be overlooked.” For a fuller account of Schopenhauer’s relations to
Kant in his theory of the sublime, see my “Schopenhauer’s Transformation of the Kantian
Sublime,” Kantian Review 17, no. 3 (2012): 479–511.
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12
and the will . . . by means of a free and conscious elevation over

the will and the cognition relating to it [ein freies, von Bewußtseyn
begleitetes Erheben über den Willen]. This elevation must not only
be achieved consciously, it must also be sustained and is there-
fore accompanied by a constant recollection of the will, although
not of a particular, individual willing, such as fear or desire, but
rather of human willing in general. (WWR I, 226)
According to this passage, the experience of the sublime consists of

a process that involves three distinct moments, two of which involve
self-consciousness. The three moments succeed each other in the
subject’s mind in the following order: (1) The conscious act of self-
liberation: the subject is conscious that she is freely liberating herself
from the threatening relationship of the object to her individual will;
(2) aesthetic tranquility: after having achieved this liberation and
exaltation above the will, she enjoys the will-less contemplation of
the object and experiences the “as if disembodiment” constitutive of
experiences of the beautiful, but in order for the experience to re-
main one of the sublime rather than transferring over into that simply
of the beautiful, there is a further moment in sublime experience,
(3) consciousness of the fact of liberation, that is, the subject must
additionally become conscious of herself as having been liberated—
and now as being exalted above the pressures of the individual will.
And this consciousness of being exalted above the will needs to be
maintained by a continuous “recollection of the will.”
Thus, the two moments of self-consciousness come in moments
1 and 3, namely, (a) the consciousness of oneself as in the process of
liberating oneself from the pressures of the will-to-life, and (b) the
consciousness of oneself as having achieved this liberation, i.e., of
being now exalted above the will-to-life. This second moment of
self-consciousness needs to be maintained by a “continual recollec-
tion” (steten Erinnerung) of the will, but not of the individual’s own
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123
will, for a recollection of this will would be tantamount to anxiety

and would destroy the will-lessness necessary for having aesthetic ex-
perience at all.21 Most important for understanding Schopenhauer’s
views on freedom, this account of the phenomenology of the sublime
reveals a continuing allegiance to Kant’s theory of freedom as intel-
lectual spontaneity with some modifications. This becomes clearer
if we compare and contrast Kant’s theory of the sublime with that of
Schopenhauer.
In Kant’s aesthetic theory, the mathematical sublime affords
a felt recognition of our supersensible nature—reason in its the-
oretical vocation; the dynamical sublime affords a felt recogni-
tion of our supersensible nature—reason in its moral vocation. As
I reconstructed it above, by Schopenhauer’s account we gain two
sorts of cognitive content from sublime experience. First, and explicit
on his view, we perceive the Platonic Ideas B: the essential features of
the phenomenal world. The second sort of cognitive content, how-
ever, is not fully fleshed out in Schopenhauer’s writings; it enters the
picture only in high degrees of the mathematically and dynamically
sublime, and is gained by the two aforementioned moments of self-
consciousness in this aesthetic experience. Schopenhauer holds that
21. So the question then arises: How can there be a constant recollection of the will that does
not overturn truly aesthetic experience of the sublime by replacing it with actual fear?
Schopenhauer resolves this problem by making a distinction between the recollection
of the individual will and the recollection of human willing in general (das menschliche
Wollen überhaupt). In order to persist in sublime experience, rather than switching to an
experience of the beautiful—either by losing self-consciousness of one’s liberation from
the will or falling out of aesthetic experience entirely by becoming anxious or afraid for
one’s individual self—the subject needs to be reminded that the object being aesthetically
contemplated is a threatening sort of object to humankind in general. Perceptually under-
standing the Ideas in “objects” or phenomena such as raging storms at sea (the objective
side of aesthetic experience) serves to keep that thought present to mind. So long as the
subject attends only to the relationship between these Ideas and humankind rather than
to himself personally, and manages to persist in contemplation of those Ideas while feeling
self-consciously elevated over his individual will, as Schopenhauer’s theory explains it, he
will remain in an experience of the sublime.
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in such experiences we gain an immediate but only felt understanding

of what he calls “the twofold character of [the subject’s] conscious-
ness” (die Duplicität seines Bewußtseyns) (WWR I, 229).
This twofold nature consists at once in (a) the feebleness of
the human individual qua natural being (who is “helpless against
the might of nature, dependent, abandoned to chance, a vanishing
nothing in the face of enormous powers” [WWR I, 229]), as well as
(b) the powerfulness of the subject qua supersensible being, that is,
as the “eternal, tranquil, subject of cognition that, as the condition
of all objects, carries and supports just this entire world . . . [who]
calmly apprehends the Ideas, free from and foreign to all need and all
willing” (WWR I, 229).
I suggest that there are two distinct forms of the subject’s “power-
fulness” that the subject experiences in the sublime on Schopenhauer’s
view. I shall refer to these as “Power 1” and “Power 2”:
P1: the subject’s sense of having the rational/intellectual power to

resist the demands of the will-to-life.
P1 is the sense of oneself as having negative freedom, that is, the

ability not to be determined by the pressing demands of bodily
existence. In Kantian terms, this negative freedom—the ability
to resist the pull of inclination—is accompanied by positive
freedom (autonomy), that is, the ability to act in accordance
with and from the moral law. Although Schopenhauer explicitly
repudiates the categorical imperative—as will be treated in the
following chapter—his theory of the sublime does, nonetheless,
embrace the view that nearly all human beings are capable of ac-
tively resisting for a time the demands of egoistic striving in order
to contemplate aesthetically. Sublime experience offers precisely
a felt, self-conscious recognition of this ability. This felt recogni-
tion of negative freedom comes out most clearly in the following
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passage in which Schopenhauer offers his most extensive explana-

tion of tragic pleasure, what he terms the “highest degree of the
dynamically sublime”:
The horrors on the stage hold up to him [the spectator] the

bitterness and worthlessness of life, and so the vanity of all its
efforts and endeavours. The effect of this impression must be
that he becomes aware, although only in an obscure feeling, that
it is better to tear his heart away from life, to turn his willing away
from it, not to love the world and life. Thus in the depth of his
being the consciousness is then stirred that for a different kind of
willing there must be a different kind of existence also. For if this
were not so then how would it be possible generally for the pres
entation of the terrible side of life, brought before our eyes in
the most glaring light, to be capable of affecting us so benefi-
cially, and of affording us an exalted pleasure? (WWR II, 435;
emphasis added)
In this passage, one sees Schopenhauer’s clearest description of

P1: the sense of power deriving from a felt recognition of one’s
ability to detach oneself from the will-to-life and to “will differ-
ently.” Note that Schopenhauer describes this insight in highly ac-
tive terms: the subject becomes aware that it is better “to tear his
heart away from life,” “to turn his willing away from it,” “not to
love the world and life.” Schopenhauer here describes an insight
into one’s negative freedom. While he has a far different under-
standing than Kant concerning the nature of this freedom, since
he repudiates the notion of rational self-legislation via the moral
law, it is nonetheless autonomy in the sense of the power to resign
ourselves from the goods of life and thus to enjoy a “different kind
of willing” and a “different kind of existence” from the natural one
characterized by the will-to-life.
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P2: the subject’s sense of her existence as transcending the

phenomenal world.
P2 is the sense that, in addition to being part of nature, one is

also part of the “in itself ” of the world of representation. In an ex-
ample of a high degree of the mathematically sublime, for example,
Schopenhauer evokes this felt understanding as follows:
When we lose ourselves in the contemplation of the infinite

extent [die Unermeßlichkeit] of the world in space and time,
reflecting on the millennia past and millennia to come,—or
indeed when the night sky actually brings countless worlds be-
fore our eyes, so that we become forcibly aware of the immen-
sity of the world,—then we feel ourselves reduced to nothing,
feel ourselves as individuals, as living bodies, as transient
appearances of the will, like drops in the ocean, fading away,
melting away into nothing. But at the same time, rising up
against such a spectre of our own nothingness, against such a
slanderous impossibility, is our immediate consciousness that
all these worlds really exist only in our representation, only as
modifications of the eternal subject of pure cognition, which is
what we find ourselves to be as soon as we forget our individ-
uality, and which is the necessary, the conditioning bearer and
support of all worlds and all times. The magnitude of the world,
which we used to find unsettling, is now settled securely within
ourselves: our dependence on it is nullified by its dependence
on us.—Yet we do not reflect on all this straight away; instead
it appears only as the felt consciousness that we are, in some
sense (that only philosophy makes clear) one with the world,
and thus not brought down, but rather elevated, by its immen-
sity. (WWR I, 230)
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In this description of the phenomenology of high degrees of the

mathematically sublime, there is a pronounced echo of Kant’s expla-
nation of the painful pleasure involved in such experiences. There is
the “immeasurability” [die Unermeßlichkeit] of the aesthetic object,
the painful recognition of the subject’s own limitations, but also a
pleasurable-prideful recognition of the subject’s own supersensible
status—as part of the in-itself of the world—which contrasts with our
apparent humiliation as natural beings. But in contrast with Kant’s ac-
count, which makes use of our theoretical rational vocation as a source
of our prideful elevation, on Schopenhauer’s account the subject’s lim-
itations are construed more existentially than cognitively: Encounters
with vast nature instill in us a sense of our smallness and existential
insignificance. Our frustration does not arise, as it does on Kant’s ac-
count, from our inability to grasp the totality of the representations.
Instead, for Schopenhauer, we are reduced to Nichts by the sheer vast-
ness (in space and time) of the universe. But, confronted with this
painful recognition, there arises nonetheless a pleasurable recognition
of the subject’s own status as “beyond” nature. For Schopenhauer, the
subject is “beyond” nature qua epistemological supporter of the entire
world of representation and as “one with” the in-itself of the world or
metaphysical will. And while this “merely felt” consciousness of the
subject’s epistemological power and ontological status is “made clear
only by philosophy,” nonetheless, he holds, it is responsible for the
sense of exaltation we experience in what would otherwise constitute
a depressing experience of our own individual insignificance.
In sum, despite Schopenhauer’ attempt to excise Kant’s rational
spontaneity view of freedom entirely from his philosophical system,
his account of the active subject of sublime experience involves un-
mistakable traces of it. Not only must the subject exercise attitu-
dinal control in order to experience the sublime, but the subject also
becomes aware of this capacity for attitudinal control—to free herself
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from the demands of her will-to-life and to will differently—in such

aesthetic experiences.
One might seek to minimize this retention of the Kantian rational
spontaneity view as a peculiarity of his theory of the sublime, as a
relic of his former Kantianism in a part of his aesthetic theory where
he followed Kant quite closely. Yet, the “ghost of Kantian freedom”
also appears quite suddenly and unexpectedly in the final section of
On the Freedom of the Will, and thus should not be discounted as a
careless relic of his former view.
VIII. THE LIMITS OF DETERMINISM
As described above, the bulk of Schopenhauer’s prize essay on the

freedom of the will is devoted to establishing the truth of deter-
minism; however, in the essay’s all-important concluding section he
changes tack. Having “entirely removed all freedom of human action
and recognized it as thoroughly subordinate to the strictest necessity,”
he suggests, he has taken us to “the point where we shall be able to un-
derstand true moral freedom, which is of a higher kind” (FW, 83). He
goes on: “[f]‌or there is still a fact of consciousness which . . . I have so
far entirely disregarded. This is the perfectly clear and certain feeling
of responsibility for what we do, of accountability for our actions—a
feeling that rests on the unshakeable certainty that we ourselves are
the doers of our deeds” (FW, 83). In the last few pages of the essay,
Schopenhauer suggests that the existence and indeed the character
of “true moral freedom” can be inferred from this “fact of conscious-
ness,” allowing him to answer in the affirmative the question set by
the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences: “Can the freedom of the
human will be proved from self-consciousness?”
The argument of these last few pages goes, in essence, as
follows:
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(1) We have an “unshakeable certainty that we ourselves are

the doers of our deeds”;
(2) This feeling is based on the recognition that with respect
to any individual’s action, “quite another action, indeed
the action directly opposed to his own, was after all en-
tirely possible and could have happened, if only he had
been another”;
(3) Thus, “the responsibility he is conscious of relates only
provisionally and ostensibly to the deed, but fundamen-
tally to his character; it is for this that he feels himself
responsible”;
(4) “And it is for this that others hold him responsible, as their
judgment forsakes the deed at once in order to discover
the qualities of the doer . . . their reproaches go back to
his character” (In general, Schopenhauer suggests, “the
epithets of moral badness . . . are predicates more of the
human being than of actions. They are attached to the
character.”);
(5) “Where guilt lies, there must responsibility lie also: and
since the latter is the sole datum from which the con-
clusion to moral freedom is justified, freedom must also
lie in the very same place, that is in the character of the
human being—all the more so, as we have sufficiently
convinced ourselves that it is not to be encountered di-
rectly in individual actions, whose occurrence, given the
presupposition of the character, is strictly necessitated”
(FW, 106).
At this point, Schopenhauer in effect faces a dilemma. On the one

hand, he takes himself to have “disclosed” the fact that we are in some
sense free, appealing to “data” that amount to “a fact of consciousness,”
and to have identified the “location” of that freedom in character. On
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the other hand, as he takes himself to have demonstrated earlier in

the essay, “the character is inborn and unalterable.” To escape the di-
lemma, as one would suspect given the previous discussion of the
sublime and his dissertation, he appeals to Kant’s account of the rela-
tion between empirical and intelligible character:
[T]‌he empirical character, like the whole human being, is as

an object of experience a mere appearance, hence tied to the
forms of all appearance, to time, space and causality, and subor-
dinate to their laws. On the other hand, the condition and basis
of this whole appearance is the human being’s intelligible char-
acter . . . which is independent of those forms. (FW, 86)22
It follows that to the intelligible character “there certainly also

pertains absolute freedom, i.e., independence from the law of cau-
sality. . . . This freedom is, however, transcendental.” And in virtue of
it, “all deeds of the human being are his own work, however neces-
sarily they issue from the empirical character upon its coincidence
with motives” (FW, 108).
The “intelligible character” is in Schopenhauer’s terms best un-
derstood as what he elsewhere describes as a special, “specific Idea”
(cf., e.g., WWR I, 183); that is to say, as a particular, indeed unique,
mode of objectification of “the will as thing-in-itself ” in an individual
human being. Suffice it to say, the intelligible character “is the will
as thing-in-itself, to the extent that it appears in a particular indi-
vidual, to a particular degree” (WWR I, 315–316); otherwise put,
it is “an extra-temporal and thus indivisible and unchanging act of
22. Schopenhauer attests to his full adherence to Kant’s distinction between the empirical
and intelligible characters, and believes that this distinction grounds the “doctrine of the
coexistence of freedom with necessity.” Kant’s doctrine, he suggests, affords “a thorough
knowledge of the compatibility of human freedom with necessity” (FW, 73).
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will [Willensakt], whose appearance . . . is the empirical character”

(WWR I, 316).
The freedom of the intelligible character, then, derives from—
indeed, just is—the freedom of “the will as thing-in-itself,” which is
fundamentally a matter of independence of the forms of the Principle
of Sufficient Reason, and hence of the law of causality. Freedom in
this context is not to be construed in terms of freedom of action or
decision, but rather in terms of the fact that no deterministic account
of how or why an individual’s intelligible character is as it is—that is,
about how or why “the will as thing-in-itself ” is objectified in just this
way in this individual—is available. Given, then, that an individual’s
empirical character is as it is inasmuch as it is the manifestation in the
phenomenal world of her intelligible character, and that there is no
deterministic story to be told about why or how her intelligible char-
acter is as it is, then there can be no deterministic story—or at least
none that points beyond the individual—about why her empirical
character is as it is. It follows that although her actions are the result
of the presentation of motives to her empirical character, and hence
wholly empirically determined, her intelligible character remains free
and somehow under her control, thus it makes sense to hold her re-
sponsible for her (voluntary) actions. And in this double-sidedness
of the subject lies moral or transcendental freedom: the subject is in-
deed the doer of her deeds.
In Book IV of The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer
appeals to just this latter notion of freedom in his discussion of the
apparent tension between his determinism and his account of the
possibility of denial of the will-to-life—a tension, as I have argued
above, that is no less pressing with regard to his account of aesthetic
experience.23 Earlier, I noted that Schopenhauer is unembarrassed
23. His failure to acknowledge this may simply be due to the fact that in WWR his account of
the sublime comes before he has explicitly spelled out his determinist position.
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by this tension; as he says, “We have now finished presenting what

I have been calling the negation of the will. This might be thought
at odds with the earlier discussion of the necessity that accrues to
motivation as much as it does to every other form of the principle of
sufficient reason . . . Far from wanting to rescind this, I am calling it
back to mind” (WWR I, 429–430). He goes on:
The contradiction between our claim, on the one hand, that

there is a necessary determination of the will through motives
in accordance with character, and our claim, on the other hand,
that it is possible to completely abolish the will, is only the rep-
etition in philosophical reflection of a real contradiction which
comes when the freedom of the will in itself, a freedom that
knows no necessity, interferes directly in the necessity of its ap-
pearance. (WWR I, 430)24
This remark echoes others that he has made in passing. Earlier, for
example, he says that “[in] someone who has achieved the cognition
that leads him [in Folge welcher] to renounce and negate the will to
life that fills all things and drives and strives in all things . . . [t]‌he
freedom of this will first emerges in him alone, making his deeds an-
ything but ordinary” (WWR I, 412–413). Again: “In general, the ne-
gation of the will does not follow from suffering with anything like
the necessity of an effect from its cause, but rather the will remains
24. Schopenhauer continues: “The key to reconciling these contradictions is that the state in
which the character is removed from the power of the motive does not proceed immedi-
ately from the will, but rather from an altered mode of cognition. . . . when we see through
this principium individuationis, we immediately recognize the Ideas, indeed the essence of
things in themselves, as being in everything the same will, and from this cognition comes
a universal tranquillizer of willing” (WWR I, 430). This restates the thought discussed
above, namely, that one cannot will oneself away from the will, but it does not help with
the ascertaining the relationship between cognition and transcendental freedom.
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free. In fact, this is the only place where its freedom emerges directly
into appearance [in die Erscheinung eintritt]” (WWR I, 422).
Denial of the will-to-life, he repeats, “is the only act of the freedom
of the will that emerges into appearance” (WWR I, 425). And, fi-
nally: “The only time this freedom can manifest itself directly in ap-
pearance [unmittelbar in der Erscheinung sichtbar werden kann] . . . is
when it brings to an end the thing that appears” (WWR I, 430).
The metaphors employed in these remarks, which have the
freedom of the will as thing-in-itself “appearing in,” “entering into,”
and “becoming immediately visible in” the phenomenon, are less
than fully transparent. It is clear that Schopenhauer is attempting to
describe some kind of relationship between the intelligible character
and the world of representation in terms other than causal. What this
relationship amounts to seems to be this: a denier of the will-to-life
(or indeed a subject of aesthetic experience) is a subject in whom
intellect has broken free of its servitude to the individual will, so that
it is no longer restricted to knowledge governed by the forms of the
Principle of Sufficient Reason; in such a case, the intellect is free in
just the sense that the will as thing-in-itself is free, i.e., unconstrained
by the forms of the Principle of Sufficient Reason; in such a case,
then, the freedom of the intellect mirrors the freedom of the will as
thing-in-itself.
But this surely does not give us much of an account of transcen-
dental freedom. What Schopenhauer owes us—what his invocation
of the freedom of the will as thing-in-itself in this context promises—
is an account of how the freedom of the will as thing-in-itself explains
the possibility that the intellect of an individual may break free of its
servitude to that individual’s will in such a way that she may act “out
of empirical character,” and may also thereby bear moral responsi-
bility for her own empirical character. The thought that when the in-
tellect does break free of its service to the individual will it presents
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an image of the freedom of the will as thing-in-itself hardly amounts

to that.
Most troubling in this account of transcendental freedom is the
utter silence on the role of reason in this picture. But surely there
must be some story to tell that involves the faculty of reason since,
for Schopenhauer, it is only that faculty that distinguishes us from
non-human animals, and it is only rational beings, it seems, who are
possessed of transcendental freedom. Further, knowledge of suffering
(either from observation or personally gained) seems to be crucial
in “bringing about” ascetic renunciation, though not “as an effect
from a cause”; and the intellect’s desire for knowledge of Ideas seems
to be crucial for the subject to experience threatening objects and
environments as sublime. Yet, Schopenhauer never clarifies the role
of the intellect or reason in these cases.
Another apposite quotation regards the way in which the intel-
lect comes to dominate, seemingly by its own autonomous power,
the will in aesthetic experience:
What makes this state [aesthetic experience] difficult and there-

fore rare is that in it the accident (the intellect), so to speak,
subdues and eliminates the substance (the will), although only
for a short time. Here also are to be found the analogy and even
relationship of this with the denial of the will. (WWR II, 369)
In this passage, Schopenhauer claims that the intellect “subdues”

[bemeistert] or “eliminates” [aufhebt] the will at least temporarily
along the same lines as in the more permanent denial of the will.
Exactly how this works remains a mystery, but Schopenhauer’s lan-
guage certainly suggests a spontaneity of the intellect that has the
power to bring about out-of-empirical-character consequences in the
phenomenal world.
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As I argued above, this freedom amounts to no more than the fact

that no deterministic story can be told about why the intelligible character
is as it is; again, then, freedom here amounts simply to being unac-
countable in terms of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and not to
anything that explains the capacity of the intellect to break free of its
servitude to the individual will, such that an individual would bear
responsibility for his or her own empirical character.
Here we have arrived at the central tension in Schopenhauer’s
mature view of freedom. On the one hand, he vouchsafes the pos-
sibility and actuality of moral freedom, that is, the possibility
of choosing what one wills between two diametrically opposed
options, and its compatibility with determinism by virtue of Kant’s
distinction between the empirical and intelligible character, a doc-
trine to which Schopenhauer in his own words “entirely subscribes”
(FW, 82, 73). Yet, he repudiates the rational, spontaneous-causal
story that Kant utilizes to fill in the details of how this compatibilism
makes sense.
Exactly how it is that the human being can contemplate aestheti-
cally in a sublime response (actively detaching herself from egoistic
striving for a time), and deny the will-to-life altogether remain in-
eluctably mysterious on Schopenhauer’s account, but one thing
is clear: He seeks to distance himself from the Kantian location of
freedom in pure practical reason. Thus, Schopenhauer parts ways
from Kant in the demotion of reason in his account of transcendental
freedom. In excising the role of reason in this story, however, the ul-
timate source of this felt power to turn away from the goods of life,
to will differently, becomes, for better or worse, more obscure. In
sum, he keeps the intelligible/empirical distinction in place, locating
transcendental freedom in the in-itself aspect of the world, but
Schopenhauer excises the rational-spontaneous causal story from his
overall Kantian picture, putting nothing else in its place.
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IX. CONCLUSION
Schopenhauer himself appears unembarrassed by what I have

suggested here amounts to a significant lacuna in his account of the
matters discussed above. We “can also understand what the most ex-
cellent Malebranche could mean in (correctly) saying: ‘freedom is a
mystery’ ” (WWR I, 431). In the end, then, Schopenhauer seems con-
tent to leave unexplained and mysterious the relationship between
the freedom of the will as grounded in the intelligible character, on
the one hand, and the capacity in rational beings for aesthetic ex-
perience, denial of the will-to-life, and moral responsibility for our
character.25
With respect to transcendental freedom, then, Schopenhauer’s
system has it that there just are points at which explanation comes to
an end, and that this is one of them. Far from being a hard determinist,
I hope to have shown that Schopenhauer holds a compatibilism be-
tween the determinism of the natural world and human freedom
along the lines of Kant, but this compatibilism undergoes a subtle
but significant development from Schopenhauer’s dissertation
(1813) to his mature views on freedom as expounded in his essay
“On the Freedom of the Will” (1839). While the “mechanism” for
this freedom must remain a mystery according to Schopenhauer’s
epistemology, for the nature of the intelligible character lies outside
the bounds of legitimate application of the PSR and thus beyond the
possibility of explanation, the possibility of freedom is vouchsafed by
Schopenhauer’s metaphysics and the actuality of freedom is attested
25. He quotes the same line at the end of the Prize Essay. This is by no means an unfamiliar
move in Schopenhauer’s work; consider for example his characterization of the identity of
the subject of knowing with the subject of willing as the “miracle par excellence” (WWR
I, 126, 277), and his suggestion that the “inner essence of music” is “nonetheless . . . fun-
damentally incapable of proof ” (WWR I, 284). It seems that some topics must remain
forever mysterious, on Schopenhauer’s view.
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to in aesthetic experience, in asceticism, and in the ineluctable feeling

of responsibility for our characters.
Yet, despite the intentional excising of the Kantian “causality
through freedom” view from the later version of the FR and other
post-dissertation writings, the ghost of Kantian freedom as rational
spontaneity continues to haunt Schopenhauer’s thought. The ghost
appears whenever Schopenhauer offers some phenomenological de-
tail on the degrees of will-suppression and will-denial that are pos-
sible for humans to achieve: in sublime aesthetic experience, and
in conscious turns toward renunciation. In these phenomena there
seems to be a role for reason or the intellect, and its spontaneous
choice that “enters into” the phenomenal world, that Schopenhauer
leaves permanently under-explored.
In this chapter, I have detailed how and why he shifted from a
“two-worlds” Kantian view in his 1813 dissertation to a “two-
aspects” Kantian view in his prize-winning essay “On the Freedom
of the Will” (1839) and in his revised FR (1847). I have argued that
his mature view supports the possibility and actuality of freedom,
though in his refusal to speculate on the “mechanism” of this
freedom (and specifically its connection to reason or intellect), he
embraces “mysterianism.” Notwithstanding the mysterianism that
Schopenhauer brings to his mature theory of freedom, it supports—
albeit mysteriously!—rather than undermines a prescriptive ethical
theory, and it is to that theory that I now turn.
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Chapter 4
Compassionate Moral Realism
I. INTRODUCTION
In this chapter, I reconstruct Schopenhauer’s ethical theory. As with his

metaphysical system as a whole, his ethical theory is in part a rejection
but also a development of Kant’s ethical theory. His major departure
from Kant—and it is a serious departure!—is the jettisoning of the
Categorical Imperative and indeed the imperatival form of morality
as a whole, for reasons echoed famously in the 20th century by G. E.
M. Anscombe, Philippa Foot, and others. In its place, Schopenhauer
puts the feeling of compassion as the foundation of morality, and as the
sole criterion for actions of moral worth.
What is really novel in Schopenhauer’s ethics, though, and what
has not been appreciated sufficiently by commentators, is his syn-
thesis of elements of moral sense theory and a realist foundation he
retains from Kant’s ethics, a synthesis I call “compassionate moral re-
alism.”1 In order to support the realism of this interpretation, I will
first offer an analysis of his criticisms of Kant’s ethics in On the Basis of
1. At the time of this writing, Colin Marshall, whose work I admire, has a book in press called
“Compassionate Moral Realism,” where he lays out a novel metaethical position that is
to some extent Schopenhauer inspired (though other influences include Wollaston and
Locke). I believe we independently discovered this term “compassionate moral realism,”
and so I shall use it here to label Schopenhauer’s ethical system, noting that my use should
not be taken as synonymous with Marshall’s contemporary metaethical position.
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Morals [Über die Grundlage der Moral] (also translated as On the Basis
of Morality). Careful attention to these criticisms reveals that while
he jettisons the CI as the foundation for morality, and repudiates
the notion of a human being as “an end-in-itself ” and having abso-
lute value or “dignity beyond all price,” Schopenhauer nonetheless
retains (in modified form) a variant of the moral realism at the base
of Kant’s “Formula of Humanity” (FH), replacing the criterion for
having fundamental inherent value for Kant, namely, having a ra-
tional nature, with being-a-sentient-subject, being a “microcosm,” or
“having a world.”2
Next, I argue for this realist construal of Schopenhauer’s
ethics pace Reginster and Janaway who hold that commitments in
Schopenhauer’s theory of value entail that he must deny any notion
of inherent value. Although in WWR I section 65 Schopenhauer
does suggest that all value is constructed by valuers, I shall argue that
this constructivist view of value, for him, represents a morally defi-
cient picture, and that a truer picture of value is to be found in the
intuitive understanding of the compassionate person. That is to say,
when one looks at the world through the lens of compassion, one
recognizes the inherent moral value of sentient subjects. Otherwise
put, the feeling of compassion tracks inherent value.
In “Schopenhauer and Non-Cognitivist Moral Realism,” Journal of the History of

Philosophy 55, no 2 (2017): 293–316, Colin Marshall argues that Schopenhauer should be
understood as a moral realist of a distinctive kind, namely, one who is a noncognitivist about
moral judgments but who believes there are objective moral facts. I agree with this view in
broad strokes.
2. It is important to note that I am treating Kant as a moral realist, as commentators such as
Allen Wood, Paul Guyer, Karl Ameriks, Rae Langton, Patrick Kain, and others have done,
rather than as a Constructivist, along the lines of Christine Korsgaard, Onora O’Neill,
Barbara Herman, and Andrews Reath, among others. While it goes beyond the scope of
this chapter to wade into the right way contemporary scholars should understand Kant,
I do think that Schopenhauer interpreted Kant as a moral realist, and since my focus is on
Schopenhauer’s criticism and appropriation of Kant, I feel licensed to treat Kant’s ethics, in
this dialectical context, in a moral realist fashion.
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C o m p a s s i o n at e M o r a l R e a l i s m
I will defer to the following chapter the vexed role of reason, pre-
viously discussed in the context of his views on freedom in Chapter 3,
with respect to his ethical theory proper. While Schopenhauer ex-
plicitly demotes the faculty of reason in ethics from the lofty status
it enjoys in Kant’s theory, I shall argue that he nonetheless can and
should retain, within the broad lines of his ethical theory, a role for
reason as an indispensable reflective complement to the feeling of
compassion.
II. OBM, OVERVIEW
Schopenhauer explicates his thoughts on ethics in book IV of WWR

I, in chapter 47 of WWR II, the chapter “Reference to Ethics” in
On Will in Nature, and in the essay “On Ethics” in PP II, but the
fullest treatment he gives to this topic is found in his essay “On the
Foundation [Fundament] of Morals [Moral]” (1839) later published
with his prize-winning essay on the freedom of the will under the
title the “Prize Essay on the Basis of Morals” [Preisschrift über die
Grundlage der Moral] (1841), and so it is on this essay that I will
largely focus in this chapter.
He wrote OBM for a prize competition established by the
Royal Danish Society of Sciences as a response to the following
question:
Is the source and basis of morals to be sought in an idea of morality

that resides immediately in consciousness (or conscience) and
in an analysis of the remaining basic moral concepts that arise
out of it, or in another cognitive ground? (OBM, 114)
Despite his being the only entry, he famously did not win the
prize; it seems, the judges found Schopenhauer’s handling of his
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contemporaries, especially Fichte and Hegel, to be outrageously

disrespectful.
In 1841 Schopenhauer published this essay along with his actual-
prize-winning essay “On the Freedom of the Will” (1837) under
the heading of “The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics” [Die
beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik]. Not one to turn the other cheek,
Schopenhauer took the opportunity to preface the work with a
scathing indictment of the judging practices of the Royal Danish
Society and of the Hegelian obscurantism he thought had befogged
the society along with the entire moral-philosophical landscape of
continental Europe.
Given the prize- competition circumstances, Schopenhauer
needed to write OBM incognito, without utilizing the resources
of his metaphysical system worked out in WWR I. Accordingly, he
describes his method in the essay as “analytic,” meaning that he “starts
from facts either of outer experience or of consciousness . . . as the
primitive phenomenon” (OBM, 117) rather than as “synthetic,” that
is, deriving the foundation for ethics from his metaphysical system.
By virtue of this method, he admits, his explication of the objec-
tive foundation of morality must be incomplete, as “[m]‌etaphysics
of nature, metaphysics of morals and metaphysics of the beautiful
mutually presuppose one another and do not complete the expla-
nation of the essence of things and of existence as such until they
are combined” (OBM, 117). Notwithstanding these constraints on
the original prize-essay, we may treat OBM as the definitive expo-
sition of his ethical theory, rather than as a parergal discussion of
ethics from his main work since (1) he refers readers of WWR I in
its second and third editions precisely to OBM for his fullest dis-
cussion of ethical themes, and (2) the published version from 1841
does—despite the insistence on an “analytic” approach—include a
final section that links, albeit briefly, his ethics with his metaphysical
system.
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As I reconstruct it, in the course of the essay, Schopenhauer offers

a four-stage argument that answers in the negative the prize question,
“Is the source and basis of morals to be sought in an idea of morality
that resides immediately in consciousness (or conscience) and in an
analysis of the remaining basic moral concepts that arise out of it?”
In place of an idea of morality residing immediately in conscience he
offers a “very slender” foundation for morality—the feeling of com-
passion. While the feeling of compassion does not “dazzle” like the
idea of a Categorical Imperative, he believes it at least provides a solid
foundation for morality, and draws an analogy between his answer to
the prize question and Cordelia’s modest declaration to her father: In
contrast to eloquent but false speeches, he will offer instead a poor
and humble truth (OBM, 118).3
II.1. Stage One of Schopenhauer’s Argument

The first stage of his argument that the real foundation of morality
is the feeling of compassion is to clear a new path for ethics by going
through the Kantian path, demolishing its errors and retaining its
truths. Nearly 40 percent of Schopenhauer’s essay consists in a sus-
tained, critical engagement with Kant’s “great reform of morals”
(OBM, 121), but it is important to note, and often overlooked,4 that
3. Schopenhauer also likens his own answer to the prize question to “Columbus’s egg” solu-
tion to the challenge of standing an egg on its end. As the story goes, Columbus crushed
slightly the end of the egg, allowing it to stand up unaided on its end—a pretty obvious
solution in hindsight, but no less ingenious for that reason.
4. David Cartwright, for example, writes that “[c]‌ertainly, Schopenhauer criticized Kant’s met-
aphysics and epistemology, but he did so in a way that he perceived as maintaining some
fidelity to Kant. But instead of criticizing Kant’s ethics to correct it . . . Schopenhauer aimed
to demolish Kant’s ethics to the ground for the erection of his own moral foundations.”
See “Schopenhauer’s Narrower Sense of Morality,” in The Cambridge Companion to
Schopenhauer, ed. C. Janaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 254. A no-
table exception is Margot Fleischer, who does spend some time in her book Schopenhauer
als Kritiker der Kantischen Ethik: Eine kritische Dokumentation (Würtzburg: Königshausen &
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before launching his criticisms, Schopenhauer lavishes praise on

Kant for giving the science of morals “a basis that had real advantages
over the previous ones” (OBM, 121), and proclaims that while his
ethics is “diametrically opposed to Kant’s in its essential points” it is
notwithstanding “the direct path” to his own (OBM, 122).5
He praises Kant for four main reasons:
(1) he destroyed speculative theology (OBM, 119)

(2) he purged ethics of eudaimonism (OBM, 123), though
Schopenhauer holds that in Kant’s doctrine of the
“highest good” moral worth and happiness “come to-
gether in a dark, out of the way chapter” (OBM, 123)
(3) he drew the empirical/intelligible character distinction
which shows the compatibility of freedom and necessity
(OBM, sec. 10, 172ff)
(4) he recognized that the moral value of human conduct
“has a meaning that goes beyond all possibility of expe-
rience” and thus provides “the genuine bridge to what
he calls the intelligible world, the world of noumena, the
world of things in themselves” (OBM, 123)
After highlighting these genuine advances made by Kant’s ethics,

Schopenhauer launches two main (intertwined) criticisms:
(1) Kant makes a “groundless” and “fictitious” assumption

that ethics is legislative-imperatival in form, i.e., that it
Neumann, 2003), 21–22, discussing Schopenhauer’s praise of Kant’s ethics before turning
to his sustained critique.
5. Schopenhauer focuses his criticisms of Kant’s ethics on the Groundwork of the Metaphysics
of Morals for two reasons: First, its subject is precisely the same as Schopenhauer’s, namely,
to discover the foundation of morality; and second, he thinks it is Kant’s most acute and
systematic of his work on ethics (see OBM, sec. 3).
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145
takes the form of laws for what ought to happen, and spe-
cifically the form of a “categorical imperative.”
(2) Kant erroneously grounds the source of ethics in reason,
specifically pure practical reason.
I would like to spend some time exploring both of these criticisms, for
it is often claimed that Schopenhauer throws out the entire Kantian
ethical framework, and starts over from a kind of blank slate of ex-
perience alone. Even David Cartwright, one of the most astute and
sympathetic scholars of Schopenhauer’s ethics, sees his rejection of
Kant’s ethics as total, writing “[p]‌rior to stating his empirical method
of ethics, he had spent over one third of his ‘On the Basis of Morality’
vigorously and harshly criticizing Kant’s practical philosophy, which
he categorically rejected.”6
One of the central aims of this chapter is to motivate an alterna-
tive view, namely, that Schopenhauer actually retains some impor-
tant elements—especially the realism—of Kant’s ethics, but on a
modified basis. I interpret Kant’s ethics, following Allen Wood, Karl
Ameriks, Paul Guyer, and others in a realist fashion, and I believe
Schopenhauer did as well.7 As I hope to show, a close attention to his
6. David Cartwright, “Schopenhauer on the Value of Compassion” in A Companion to

Schopenhauer, ed. Bart Vandenabeele (Oxford: Blackwell, 2012), 251.
7. For Wood’s interpretation of Kant’s ethics in a realist, rather than constructivist, fashion, see
his Kant’s Ethical Thought (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1999) and
Kantian Ethics (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2008). For canonical
constructivist readings see Christine Korsgaard, Creating a Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge,
England: Cambridge University Press, 1996) and Onora O’Neill, Constructions of Reason
(Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1989). In general, Schopenhauer
interprets Kant’s philosophy in the more metaphysical “two worlds” or “causality” fashion
than the more epistemological “two aspects” or “identity” view; hence Schopenhauer’s
strong preference for the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason and his praise of the
Prolegomena. Interestingly, Schopenhauer’s own version of transcendental idealism is well
characterized as a metaphysical version of a two-aspects or identity view: The world has two
sides, the world as we represent it, and the way it is in itself, as will—but these two sides are
not related causally; rather, the world of representation is the “objectification” of the world
as will.
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criticisms of Kant’s ethics reveals that he does not disagree with all of
the fundamental elements of Kant’s ethical theory, and that some of
these survive in Schopenhauer’s positive ethical theory.
Before turning to the elements of Kant’s ethics that
Schopenhauer retained, let us have a closer look at his criticisms.
On the first, Schopenhauer holds that while Kant had shown in the
CPR that there are a priori laws of nature—secured by virtue of
our cognitive faculties which impose them upon experience—and
that human beings are subject to psychological laws (the “law of
motivation” in Schopenhauer’s terms), the only moral laws we have
any knowledge of are humanly constructed laws of society, e.g., the
civil law. Thus, he holds, a moral law independent of human rules
and institutions may not be assumed to exist without any further
proof. Unfortunately, Kant does not adduce any further proof for
the existence of such a moral law.8 So Schopenhauer concludes that
Kant begs the question about the foundation of morality, assuming
rather than proving that its foundation is a universal law for the ra-
tional will (OBM, sec. 4).
One might worry about Schopenhauer’s analysis at this point, for
why would a philosopher as brilliant as Kant beg such an important
question? Schopenhauer offers a twofold diagnosis: First, thousands
of years of Judeo-Christian theological ethics and its conception of
God as lawgiver had burrowed its way deep into the unconscious of
this eminent philosopher; second, he thinks Kant was so delighted
by his separation of a priori from a posteriori cognition of the natural
8. Schopenhauer does not think that Kant can rely on an empirical “fact of reason” as proof of
the moral law insofar as he is offering a “metaphysics of morals” not an empirical psychology
of morality. Nor does Schopenhauer think that the feeling of freedom—a feeling which
Schopenhauer himself views as ‘unshakeable’—indicates that we are bound by a moral law.
As treated in Chapter 3, Schopenhauer believes that the feeling of freedom indicates that
we are responsible for our actions because “we could have been” otherwise, that is we are in
some mysterious way responsible for our character, but he does not think this reveals that
we are categorically bound by a moral law.
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world (the realm of what does happen), that he attempted to apply

the same brilliant Copernican turn in the world of morals, positing
an a priori law for what ought to happen (OBM, 133). With respect
to this second facet of the diagnosis, Schopenhauer stresses that
Kant “does not ground his moral principle on any demonstrable fact
of consciousness at all, such as an inner disposition . . . [for] [t]‌hat
would be an empirical basis”; rather, he grounds ethics on a priori,
pure concepts (OBM, 134).
Unfortunately, Schopenhauer claims, Kant had been widely but
mistakenly interpreted at the time as having grounded ethics on
an empirical “fact of reason”—an option suggested in the second
Critique—but that it is clear from the Groundwork, the key text for
Kant’s views on the metaphysical foundation of morality, that he
does not ground ethics on any empirical survey of human nature,
but rather on a priori concepts deriving from pure practical reason.9
The second major criticism, closely intertwined with the first, is
that Kant posits reason as the source of morality, the lawgiver of the
moral law. Insofar as one accepts the imperatival form of morality,
as well as Kant’s destruction of speculative theology, it makes good
sense to accord this role to reason: The faculty of Reason is the nat-
ural candidate faculty for the source of this a priori law, just as the
Understanding is held to be the source of the a priori categories of
experience. However, if—as Schopenhauer holds—the assumption
of an a priori moral law is groundless, so too is the assumption of the
source of that putative law in reason.
Ultimately, Schopenhauer regards Kant’s ethics as an-
swering the Danish Society’s prize-essay question squarely in the
9. Schopenhauer certainly believed that Kant’s “fact of reason” had been interpreted as an em-
pirical fact, but it’s not clear that anyone ever did interpret Kant in this way. After all, a “fact
of reason” is clearly no ordinary empirical fact, but one with an a priori content even though
we become aware of that content experientially.
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affirmative: Starting from the a priori concept of “duty,” of which

we are aware via conscience, and analyzing this concept, one comes
to the source of morality, namely, a moral law—the Categorical
Imperative— legislated by reason to all rational beings. I shall
leave aside the important and interesting question of the fair-
ness of Schopenhauer’s criticisms, as my purpose is to reconstruct
Schopenhauer’s ethical theory in light of how he understood (or
misunderstood) Kant. Bearing this task in mind, it is crucial to note
that his main criticism of Kant’s ethics is that it starts off from the
assumption of the imperatival form of morality (that it consists in a
law for what ought to happen), a view that gains its plausibility from
thousands of years of Judeo-Christianity and the Decalogue, but
which really constitutes an unfounded assumption when looked at in
an entirely secular light. After launching these criticisms—centered
on Kant’s Formula of Universal Law (FUL) of the CI—Schopenhauer
comes around, in section 8 of OBM, to criticize another possible
starting point of Kant’s ethical theory—centered on Kant’s Formula
of Humanity (FH). This is the formula of the CI that has been stressed
by realist interpreters of Kant’s ethics, namely, the fundamental belief
in the inherent value of rational nature.10 In what follows, I shall re-
turn to Schopenhauer’s criticism of FH and especially the notion that
rational nature has absolute, inherent moral value, in order to deter-
mine to what extent he adheres to and distances himself from this
alternative starting point of Kant’s ethical system.
10. Although he does not seek to reduce Kant’s ethical theory or presentation thereof to FH,
the intrinsic value of rational nature is the key starting point for Allen Wood’s reconstruc-
tion of Kant’s ethical thought. In my view, while Schopenhauer rejects the first and the
third formulations of the CI, the ultimate value upon which his own theory is founded is,
as I shall argue, something very much like FH except that he denies that rational nature
is the only thing intrinsically valuable, and instead recognizes a hierarchy of intrinsically
valuable types of beings in place of Kant’s single value. I shall explicate this interpretation
in what follows.
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II.2. Stage Two of Schopenhauer’s Argument

If Schopenhauer is right that we cannot legitimately assume a moral
law for all rational wills, and that the only moral laws we know of
are those constructed by human societies, then an alternative, non-
Kantian approach is needed in order to investigate the source of
genuine morality. Schopenhauer recommends an empirical path, sar-
castically giving ethical theorists “the paradoxical advice first to look
around a little in human life” (OBM, 181). When we do look around
in human life, what do we see?
First and foremost, we see a lot of egoism. This egoism is tethered
and tempered by the state, law, public opinion, and social pressures,
but it is almost always present in human conduct. Second, we see
malice. Some people deliberately set out to harm others, but these
people stand out as somewhat rare, against the all-too-common back-
drop of egoism. If this survey of human characters were the extent
of things, one might expect Schopenhauer to embrace moral skep-
ticism, but he is not quite finished with the survey. In addition, we
also see some genuinely altruistic acts of loving-kindness and impartial
justice.
He takes the existence of such actions as a fact gleaned from ex-
perience. In answer to skeptics, such as psychological egoists, about
altruism Schopenhauer writes that while he is not really addressing
himself to such skeptics (OBM, 196), nonetheless, they may be
countered by the fact that the most natural, reasonable interpretation
of some just or kind actions is that they are done out of a truly altru-
istic, “disinterested loving-kindess [uneigennütziger Menschenliebe]”
or “freely willed justice” [freiwilliger Gerechtigkeit] (OBM, 186). Of
course, some of these actions may just seem non-egoistic, but are
actually done for ostentation, or from some ulterior, egoistic mo-
tive, but at least some cases seem quite implausibly explained in this
manner: Poor men who return wallets intact to their owners; and
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the selfless valor displayed by Arnold von Winkelried who cried,

“ ‘Comrades, dear confederates, care for my wife and child’ and then
embraced as many enemy spears as he could” (OBM, 196). While
the psychological egoist can offer self-interested explanations of such
apparently altruistic actions, they ring epicyclical, and Schopenhauer
thinks his readers will be similarly unimpressed, so decides to pay no
more attention to these skeptical worries.11
II.3. Stage Three of Schopenhauer’s Argument

Given the observational evidence that human beings act in predom-
inantly egoistic ways, are sometimes malicious, but also commit
acts of genuine altruism and free-willed justice, Schopenhauer sets
the task of ethical theory as clarifying and explaining these “ways
of acting among human beings that are extremely morally di-
verse . . . [tracing] them back to their ultimate ground” (OBM, 189).
What Schopenhauer is most interested in offering here is a meta-
physics of morality; he never works out a ramified, general normative
theory from his reflections on the basis of morality, and while some
general-normative lessons can be drawn from them, this requires a
lot of bold reconstruction.
He starts this clarification and explanation with a survey of
common, pre-theoretical moral beliefs, and begins with the empirical-
psychological observation that there are actions to which people gen-
erally assign moral worth, and these are actions which (a) do not aim
at our own, individual well-being (they are not egoistic actions), and
11. Schopenhauer is, in general, not exercised by skepticism, either of a theoretical or practical
sort. It’s just not his project to defeat serious skeptics. Regarding external world skepti-
cism, what he calls “theoretical egoism” he writes, “Of course, theoretical egoism can never
be disproved: still, it is only ever used in philosophy as skeptical sophism, i.e. for show. As
a genuine conviction it can only be found in a madhouse: accordingly, it should be treated
with medication, not refutation” (WWR I, 129).
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they certainly (b) do not aim at harming others (they are not mali-
cious actions), but are rather (c) non-egoistic actions aimed to prevent
woe or to promote the well-being of others.
Schopenhauer supports this claim by the observation that for most
people “the discovery of a self-interested motive entirely removes the
moral worth of an action if it was the only motive” (OBM, 197) and
that when we perform altruistic actions, “there is the fact that they
leave behind a certain satisfaction with ourselves, which is called the
approval of conscience; just as for their part the actions opposed to
them, those of injustice and unkindness, even more those of malice
and cruelty, receive an opposite internal self-judgment” (OBM, 197).
Thus, Schopenhauer begins his positive argument for the foundation
of morality by relying on common moral intuitions about which
actions have moral worth, and concludes that only other-regarding
actions, done predominantly for the sake of the well-being of others,
cohere with common-sense views on the subject.
After canvassing common views about the moral worth of
actions, Schopenhauer offers an analysis of what that non-egoistic
ground or incentive is that leads us (reliably) to promote the well-being
of another or to prevent woe to another? I specify “reliably” here be-
cause Schopenhauer is looking for an incentive [Triebfeder] that is
essentially connected (both logically and causally) to actions gener-
ally considered morally worthy. What that particular incentive is, and
the receptivity for it will constitute the ultimate ground of morality
for Schopenhauer. And further, cognition of this ground is the foun-
dation of moral theory.
When Schopenhauer investigates the reliable incentive that drives
actions of genuine altruism (actions of loving-kindness and freely
willed justice toward others), what he finds is compassion [Mitleid].
Compassion constitutes that “poor and humble truth” alluded to at
the start of Schopenhauer’s essay. In other words, Mitleid, he holds, is
the sole non-egoistic incentive that leads us by its essence to promote
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the well-being of another or to prevent woe to another, and thus

constitutes the sole foundation of morality.
The etymology here is illuminating: It is to “suffer with”
(mit = with, leiden = to suffer), paradigmatically to suffer with an-
other being. He proceeds to offer a detailed analysis of what com-
passion consists of. 12 He sees compassion [Mitleid] as sharing in the
feeling of the other’s suffering, rather than merely apprehending the
other’s suffering intellectually, what some might call today “empathy”
or insight into the feelings of another, but without necessarily suf-
fering along with the other.13 Second, he emphasizes that compassion
12. One might think that non-egoistic actions that aim at the well-being of others may also be
motivated by Mitfreude that is, a feeling of “rejoicing with another,” but there is no talk of
this emotion in Schopenhauer. As David Cartwright has explained it, “In Schopenhauer’s
world, there is no rejoicing with another because there is no joy to have with another.
There is only suffering to have with another.” Cartwright, “Schopenhauer on the Value
of Compassion,” 257. The supposed lack of joy we can have with another, is compli-
cated, however, by Schopenhauer’s own account of music, in which he holds that there
can be a general experience of cheerfulness and even joy, writing that music expresses
universal feelings “joy, sorrow, pain, horror, exaltation, cheerfulness and peace of mind
as such in themselves, abstractly” (WWR I, 289; emphasis added). The experience of
these emotions—though admittedly stripped of particular context—can in principle
be shared sympathetically between composer/musician and audience (especially if you
take an expressivist view of music) and perhaps even amongst listeners. In just such an
expressivist vein, he writes that music affords a “profound pleasure with which we see the
deepest [emotional] recesses of our nature find expression” (WWR I, 262). Presumably,
this “profound pleasure” holds for all those who share “human nature” and thus it seems
that music allows for shared human feelings not just of sadness and anxiety but also of
joy. Notwithstanding, there is something abstract and impersonal about such shared joy
in music; it’s not the kind of particular joy one might share with a friend upon the birth
of a child, or a promotion at work. In the final analysis, Schopenhauer’s omission of any
discussion of Mitfreude seems not too damaging insofar as Freude is not painful and thus
would not immediately motivate one to perform some action to try to relieve it since there
is obviously nothing in Freude to relieve and everything in it to prolong! Thus, I think,
Schopenhauer can somewhat safely ignore this sympathetic positive emotion when
talking about the source of morally worthy actions, which seem more naturally to respond
to people’s potential or actual suffering, of which there is in any case a tremendous amount.
13. Martha Nussbaum draws such a distinction between empathy and compassion. On her
view, even a torturer can have empathy for the tortured, in fact, such empathy might be
instrumental in helping him torture more effectively, but compassion is an emotion that
works counter to such actions, insofar as it motivates one to seek to relieve or prevent
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is feeling immediately another’s suffering, as one typically feels only

one’s own. He therefore rejects what we would call today the “sim-
ulation theory” of compassion, which had been advanced in the
18th century by Ubaldo Cassina. According to Cassina, compassion
involves projecting oneself imaginatively into the shoes of the suffering
other, as it were, so as to experience indirectly the other’s suffering.
Schopenhauer glosses this as a “momentary deception of fantasy, as
we ourselves substitute ourselves in place of the sufferer” (OBM,
203). On the basis of this imaginative simulation, for Cassina, we feel
what it is like to be the other by feeling oneself “into” the other’s situa-
tion. Schopenhauer rejects this view of compassion as misdescribing
the phenomenon. As opposed to Cassina, he thinks that compassion
is not a matter of feeling oneself imaginatively into the place of the
other; it is rather an immediate sharing of the feelings of that other being.
In other words, for Schopenhauer, in compassion, we do not project
ourselves imaginatively into the shoes of the other and then imagine
what we would feel like if we were in his place; rather, the suffering
with another is feeling that other person’s suffering immediately,
while still maintaining a sense of one’s separateness from the other:
[In a feeling of compassion] it remains clear and present to us

at every single moment that he is the sufferer, not us: and it is
precisely in his person, not in ours, that we feel the pain, to our
distress. We suffer with him, thus in him: we feel his pain as his,
and do not imagine that it is ours. (OBM, 203)
Schopenhauer supports his view by pointing to a (somewhat du-

bious) observation from life: “indeed, the happier our own condi-
tion is and the more the consciousness of it thus contrasts with the
the suffering of another. See Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of

Emotions Cambridge (Cambridge University Press, 2001), 327–334.
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position of the other, the more receptive we are to compassion”

(OBM, 203). The key point here is that compassion involves both
(1) a keen sense of the separateness of the other, but also (2) the im-
mediate consciousness of the other’s suffering (or prospective suf-
fering) which afflicts one with suffering as well, and drives one to try
to relieve or prevent that suffering if one can.
In his identification of compassion as the sole foundation of mo-
rality, Schopenhauer is clearly staking out a very strong claim, namely,
that acting predominantly out of the feeling of compassion is both a neces-
sary and sufficient condition for an action to have moral worth. Although
he regards this claim as a “poor and humble” truth, he obviously has
a lot of work to do to support it!
Much of that work takes the form of a case study that functions as
a thought experiment to lay bare our deepest moral intuitions and to
show that his view is supported by “the utterances of universal human
feeling” (OBM, 219). He asks us to imagine two young men, Caius
and Titus, each of whom is involved in a separate love triangle. In
order to win the affections of their respective beloveds, these young
men decide to kill their rivals and we are asked to assume that both
have plans that will keep them safe from discovery and suspicion.
As the time draws near to the planned murder, however, they both
“desist after a struggle with themselves” (OBM, 220). Schopenhauer
directs us now to imagine that each young man is to give an “honest
and clear account of the grounds” for abandoning his resolve to
murder the rival. For Caius, the reader is invited to choose among
many possible accounts, and to compare any and all of them with the
account to be supplied later by Titus:
• He was held back by religious scruples, “such as the will of

God, the retribution to come, the future judgment and
the like.”
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• He offers a Kantian account: “I reflected that the maxim of

my conduct in this case would not have been suitable for
yielding a universally valid rule for all possible beings, in that
I would have treated my rival solely as a means and not at the
same time as an end.”
• He offers a Fichtean ground, stating that “[e]‌very human
life is a means to the realization of the moral law: therefore
I cannot . . . destroy someone who is meant to contribute to
that same law.”
• He offers a Wollastonian account: “I have deliberated that
that action would be the expression of an untrue proposition.”
• With Hutcheson he says: “The moral sense, whose sensation,
like those of any other sense, are not further explicable, deter-
mined me to refrain from it.”
• With Adam Smith he says: “I foresaw that my action would
have aroused no sympathy at all for me in those who
witnessed it.”
• With Christian Wolff he says: “I recognized that in doing that
I would be working against my own perfection and also not
promoting anyone else’s.”
• Or with Spinoza he says: “To a human being there is nothing
more useful than a human being: therefore I was unwilling to
kill a human being.” (OBM, 220)
In contrast to all of these possible accounts, Schopenhauer gives the

ground of compassion to Titus, who explains it as follows:
As it came to the arrangements and I therefore had to occupy

myself for the moment not with my passion but with that rival
of mine, then it became fully clear to me for the first time what
was really supposed to be happening to him now. But then
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compassion and pity [Erbarmen] seized me, I felt sorry for him,
I could not find the heart to do it: I was unable to do it. (OBM,
220–221)
Schopenhauer now challenges “every honest and unprejudiced

reader” to determine
1. “Which of the two is the better human being?”

2. “Which of the two would he rather assign his own fate to?”
3. “Which of the two was held back by the purer incentive?”
By answering these questions according to one’s own immediate

moral feelings about the matter, and not in the grip of a favorite eth-
ical theory, he believes, we will agree that Titus is the better person,
that Titus is the one to whom we’d rather assign our fate, and that
Titus’ incentive—the ground of compassion—is the purer one.
Insofar as we do answer the questions in this way, we have intuitive
support that compassion is the sole basis of morality (OBM, 221).
I believe there is a lot of wisdom in this thought experiment, and it
is extremely useful for clarifying one’s intuitions about what gives an
action moral worth. But it is useful to dig deeper into Schopenhauer’s
preferred answer: Why exactly would we answer these questions in
favor of Titus? To hone in on this, recall Schopenhauer’s claim that
common moral views have it that what gives an action moral worth
is that it is done (a) non-egoistically, and that the action (b) aims
at the well-being (or prevention of woe) to another being. To this,
Schopenhauer wants us to add the notion that an action of moral
worth would be grounded in a way that would be causally linked to
the kind or just action. In the case at hand, he is looking also for an
incentive that would then reliably stay the hand of someone sorely
tempted to commit murder, to wit, the question: “Which of the two
would he rather assign his own fate to?” In other words, if we were
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potential victims, which is the ground on which we would rather con-

sign our fate?
To recap, it seems that the truly moral ground must satisfy the
following three criteria:
(a) It is non-egoistic.
(b) It essentially aims at the promotion of the well-being of
(or prevention of woe to) a particular other.
(c) It is a reliable incentive to kind or just actions.
According to Schopenhauer, only Titus’s account—the account of

compassion that leads him to renounce his murderous plot—seems
to conform to these three criteria. First, Titus’s focus is non-egoistic.
One might think that perhaps Titus was driven to end his own com-
passionate suffering, but as Titus explains it, in making the murder
arrangements he was forced to occupy himself “not with my passion
but with that rival” and he comes to realize “what was really supposed
to be happening to him [the rival].” He is squarely focused on the po-
tential suffering of the rival, and not in lessening his own sympathetic
suffering. Second, his incentive of compassion aims to promote the
well-being of (or more properly in this case the prevention of woe to)
another. By virtue of feeling sorry for the rival, he no longer wishes to
harm but rather to prevent harm to him. Finally, compassion reliably
incentivizes such just actions: Since he “could not find the heart to do
it” because he felt compassion for him, he was therefore “unable to do
it” (OBM, 220–221). The feeling of compassion is thus essentially
related to his just action for it is a feeling that blocks his very ability to
carry out the harmful deed.
With this thought experiment, Schopenhauer has at least pro-
vided some support for the claim that the feeling of compassion can
in some circumstances be sufficient to give an action moral worth. Yet,
we need to analyze the competitor grounds in order to give us reason
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to think that compassion is, further, necessary to give an action moral

worth. That is to say, in the case at hand, we need to ascertain what is
deficient in each of the competitors such that an action incentivized
by one of them would fail to give that action moral worth by dint
of failing to meet at least one of three criteria above. Further, for
Schopenhauer’s argumentative strategy to work, we should be sat-
isfied that he has canvassed all plausible competitor grounds as he
clearly aims to do.14 By interrogating more closely these disfavored
grounds, we get a clearer sense of why Schopenhauer thinks compas-
sion is not just sufficient but also necessary for an action to have moral
worth, since each one of Caius’s possible grounds fails to satisfy at
least one of the three desiderata above.
The religious ground, “such as the will of God, the retribution to
come, the future judgment and the like,” falls short of giving the ac-
tion moral worth insofar as it is either egoistic (one fears punishment
in an afterlife) or relates to respect for God, rather than concern for
the weal or woe of the particular other whose well-being is at issue.15
Similarly, with the Wolffian or Wollastonian ground, it is an abstract
notion of perfection or truth (respectively) rather than the would-be
victim that the agent considers, making it problematic as a ground for
an action’s moral worth.
Kantian or Fichtean concern for the moral law, while clearly
non-egoistic, seems again to fall short of the criterion that the moral
14. One might fault him for ignoring the incentive to act on the principle of utility (how-
ever one construes it), but this objection can be defused since the aim to bring about the
greatest happiness for the greatest number (Act Utilitarianism) or to act on the basis of a
rule that ultimately does the same (Rule Utilitarianism) can be handled in a manner sim-
ilar to that of the other grounds he does address.
15. I think if one has the incentive of compassion, and genuinely cares about the well-being of
the other, but that one has cultivated this compassion only because God has told him or
her to do so, this ground would nonetheless pass muster as a moral one for Schopenhauer.
The key reason why the religious motive as described in his thought experiment is morally
deficient is that the person is concerned not to harm another out of respect for God, rather
than out of concern for the well-being of the human being in question.
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incentive be particular-other-regarding, for the immediate focus here

is, again, on an abstraction, namely, the moral law. One might see this
dismissal of the Kantian ground as far too quick, however, insofar
as it does involve an explicit concern not to use the other as a mere
means. But for Schopenhauer insofar as this concern for the other is
chiefly tied to concerns about respect for the moral law or respect for
humanity in general rather than concern for the well-being or woe of
that particular rival, it will nonetheless constitute a deficient incen-
tive from a common moral perspective. In the next chapter, however,
I will seek to bridge the gap between these two grounds and show
how a Schopenhauerian could see the Kantian ground as a good
backup for compassion, in a manner similar to the way he conceives
of his principle “harm no one; rather help everyone as much as you
can” as a useful reservoir for compassion, when compassion itself is
not occurrently flowing.
This notion of utilizing a rational principle as a backup for occur-
rent compassion, however, suggests that the Kantian agent may have a
more reliable ground than the compassionate one. But Schopenhauer
suggests that the agent who is incentivized by the Kantian or Fichtean
concern for the moral law would not be as reliably moral as the com-
passionate agent. In asking the question, “Which of the two would
he rather assign his own fate to?” Schopenhauer clearly thinks that
Titus—who feels an immediate compassion or pity for the rival—
would be the safer bet over a Kantian Caius, who is concerned to
refrain from murder by virtue of his thought that his behavior would
not be consistent with the moral law. In other words, Schopenhauer
implies, in a sentimentalist vein, that a feeling such as compassion is
more strongly and consistently incentivizing than a thought about
what the moral law requires us to do (more on this line of reasoning
and problems engendered by it in what follows).
When he turns to sentimentalist accounts of moral worth,
however, the grounds in the style of Hutcheson and Smith fare no
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better: The sentimentalist ground attributed to Hutcheson, while

based in a non-egoistic feeling, is phrased in such a manner as to
ground the action in reference to a “moral sense, whose sensations,
like those of any other sense, are not further explicable, [and which]
determined me to refrain from it.” This incentive seems to be defi-
cient for Schopenhauer because it is focused on the existence of a
moral sense itself rather than on the particular-other individual in
question and his weal or woe, whereas the truly moral incentive, for
Schopenhauer, is, again, particular-other-regarding. Otherwise put,
for Schopenhauer, the moral worth of an action does not derive from
the fact that it is based in adherence to a natural sentiment qua nat-
ural sentiment, but rather, from the fact that it is other-regarding and
aims at the well-being of that particular other.
Schopenhauer makes a similar criticism of the Smithian ground
(as he construes it), “I foresaw that my action would have aroused
no sympathy at all for me in those who witnessed it,” for while this
incentive is non-egoistic, neither is it altruistic insofar as it makes no
reference to the particular life of the would-be victim, but rather to
the sympathy or lack thereof that would be generated in an impartial
spectator. And, as he describes both the Hutchesonian and Smithian
grounds, they are not strongly or consistently motivating: Ultimately,
one could just not care about what one’s natural sentiments dictate or
how an impartial spectator would feel about one’s proposed action;
whereas, by contrast, the feeling of “compassion and pity [Erbarmen]”
has the power all on its own to “seize” the would-be murderer, leaving
him without the “heart to do it.” Presumably, if one is truly “seized” by
compassion and pity, he or she just cannot decide to do the harmful
action anyway, for the feeling seems to have robbed him or her of all
motivational resources for doing it.
There is something rather strange, however, in Schopenhauer’s
handling of the sentimentalist grounds, for it seems to conflate (a) the
feelings that these sentimentalists would prescribe as the correct
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16
ones, e.g., the feeling of sympathy, or widened sympathy—which

may be synonymous with Schopenhauer’s feeling of compassion,
and (b) the metaethical justifications for the feeling of sympathy (or
a widened sympathy) as the right one, namely, that it derives from a
moral sense, or that it would be approved of by impartial spectators.
It seems as though Hutcheson and Smith may actually be on the same
page as Schopenhauer as to the morally correct incentive in this case,
but that he really differs from them in the metaethical justifications
for sympathy/compassion as the sole ground of an action with moral
worth in this case.16
Now that we have examined the problems Schopenhauer sees
with the competitor grounds, where does this thought experiment
leave us? If one grants the basic setup of Schopenhauer’s thought
experiment and his account of the rival grounds (notwithstanding
the caveats about Kant, Hutcheson, and Smith I mentioned above),
it leaves us with a prima facie case in favor of compassion as the sole
incentive that conforms to all three common intuitions about what
gives an action moral worth. By a process of eliminating all other rival
incentives in the extant moral-philosophical landscape with respect
to this case study, it does go some way toward supporting the claim
that the feeling of compassion is both necessary and sufficient for an
action to have moral worth.
However, Schopenhauer has not shown us that the incentive
of compassion is necessary and sufficient to give any action at all
moral worth, because he has only attended to this one particular case
study. Yet there are many kinds of morally charged cases, and some
16. Another way to understand the difference between Schopenhauer and these sentimentalists
is to say that for Schopenhauer compassion is the ultimate or final incentive, whereas for
the sentimentalist there is a more ultimate reason for feeling the compassion. However, as
I will seek to argue in what follows, I believe Schopenhauer also believes there is an ulti-
mate reason for the normativity of compassion, and that is the inherent value of all sentient
beings, which compassion tracks.
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of these strongly suggest that acting out of immediate compassion

would be neither necessary nor sufficient for an action to have moral
worth. Consider, for example, the case of giving alms to a person
experiencing homelessness, a situation that most people living in
cities face on a daily basis. We might be led by our feeling of compas-
sion to give some small change or even a couple of bills, but this may
very well be the morally wrong action to perform if it, say, merely
enables the person’s heroin addiction and delays or prevents the
person’s seeking out a better life in the long term. In such a case, we
might upon reflection realize that our immediate feeling of compas-
sion that moves us to share in the person’s suffering and to reach into
our wallets, should be resisted so that the person might instead seek
out social services available to him to better his circumstances.
This sort of case prompts us to want to make, with Kant, an im-
portant distinction between “right actions” and “right actions that are
done from the correct motive” (in Kantian terms, actions that accord
with duty and actions that not only accord with but are done from
duty). In order for an action to have moral worth, it seems quite im-
portant that the action be at least the right thing to do, regardless of
our motive in doing it. All things considered, however, giving alms
to a person experiencing homelessness out of a feeling of compas-
sion might be the wrong thing to do insofar, say, as it prolongs that
person’s heroin addiction, allowing him to get his next fix, instead
of steering him out of desperation toward more long-term help. In
such a case, we see that acting immediately on the motive of compas-
sion is not sufficient to give an action moral worth—whereas it may
be sufficient to give Titus’s action of refraining from murdering his
rival moral worth—because an action of moral worth must also be
the right thing to do, and in order to determine what that is, we would
need (at least in the case of the alms-giving) some reflection.
Now one might reply on behalf of Schopenhauer that in the
case of the homeless person the morally worthy action is the one
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undertaken by virtue of the feeling of compassion to alleviate the

other’s woe in an enlightened way: If one thinks that giving alms is not
what will truly benefit the person, and one decides not to give him
money but instead to help him contact a local social worker (perhaps
even taking him to the social-service office) out of compassion, well
then this is the action that has moral worth. However, the problem
with this response is that the action of genuine moral worth (being
the right thing to do plus the right incentive) then seems to necessi-
tate a significant moment of reflection on how best to help the partic-
ular other in question. As described by Schopenhauer, the immediate
feeling of compassion on its own does not involve or necessitate such
a moment of reflection or deliberation on how best to relieve the
other’s suffering, and thus on its own seems insufficient to give an ac-
tion moral worth because it does not necessitate that a person try to
ascertain what the right action in this case really is.
What is more, consideration of another sort of morally charged
case casts doubt on whether compassion is even necessary for an
action to have moral worth. Our pre-reflective notion of justice,
for instance, plausibly includes a kind of impartiality, of giving to
each what is his due regardless of our particular, possibly parochial
feelings. So, for instance, the virtue of justice might involve inflicting
punishment on someone—increasing a person’s woe—in a manner
that would run counter to compassion, making compassion not just
not necessary for an action to have moral worth, but actually a mo-
tive that runs counter to that which gives a just action moral worth.17
Take, for example, a case where a juror is contemplating whether
or not to sentence a child abuser to a five-year jail term. The imme-
diate feeling of compassion for the criminal would likely stand in the
17. David Cartwright makes this criticism of Schopenhauer’s ethics, and draws the conclusion
that compassion cannot really be the sole source of the virtue of justice. See Cartwright,
“Schopenhauer on the Value of Compassion.”
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way of common feelings about what the virtue of justice requires in

this case, namely, impartiality and a sense of fairness. Schopenhauer
could claim that the morally relevant compassion in this case is for
the victim or would-be victims of the criminal not for the crim-
inal himself, but there are two problems with this response: First,
as discussed above, one would need in addition to one’s immediate
feelings of compassion to add moments of reflection on that compassion
and a rational assessment thereof in order to determine the propriety
and/or proper object of one’s compassion. It could very well be that
feelings of compassion for the abused child might also stand in the
way of what impartiality requires of the juror, insofar as it swamps any
compassion, say, for the criminal who, perhaps, himself was abused
as a child. But then, by this fact, we see that compassion alone is not
sufficient—contrary to what Schopenhauer seems to be claiming—
to give an action moral worth, rather, one also needs reflection on the
propriety and/or proper object of one’s compassion. The second
problem is that compassion does not even seem to be necessary for
actions of moral worth in the case of the juror. So long as a juror,
with all due diligence with respect to the evidence and application
of the law, decides impartially to send a criminal away for his crimes,
merely out of a sense of fairness, this seems to fit common moral
intuitions about what constitutes a sufficient exercise of the virtue of
justice. We generally do not demand that a just person in such a case
be acting centrally out of compassion for the victims of such crimes,
but rather only that she aims to discharge her obligation to fairly and
impartially apply the law. Thus, with a different sort of case from that
of Caius and Titus, but which still involves an action that requires
“freely willed justice,” we see that the feeling of compassion is neither
necessary nor sufficient to perform an action of moral worth.
Another case in which it seems that compassion is not even nec-
essary for actions of moral worth is the case of trying to help a friend
prepare for a coveted job interview. Let’s say that your friend already
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has a fine job—she is not suffering in her current position; she just
would like to attain an even higher achievement. Wouldn’t the action
of trying to help her attain this aim have moral worth even if she isn’t
suffering, and thus no compassion is ever involved?18
Finally, an additional problem with Schopenhauer’s thought ex-
periment is that there is a lot that could be said in defense of these
various alternatives. First, one could argue that Schopenhauer has
not well captured the actual incentive that these theories espouse. As
alluded to above, on behalf of Hutcheson and Smith, for example,
one might claim that the incentive for an action that conforms to the
moral sense is not to live by the moral sense itself qua moral sense, or to
do what an impartial spectator would approve of but rather, sympathy
for the other. Second, even if we agree with the way Schopenhauer
encapsulates the incentives of impartial moral theories like that of
Kant that ask us to reflect on our immediate feelings (including that
of compassion) in order to consider whether acting on them would
be morally right, there is much that can be said in favor of such impar-
tial theories as I have argued above.
Continuing with the analysis of Schopenhauer’s thought experi-
ment, when we are asked to consider, from the point of view of the
victim, which man we’d rather entrust our fate to, Titus does seem
to come out on top. But take the case of the drug-addicted person
experiencing homelessness. If you were the one struggling with ad-
diction, would you rather be met with the person who would imme-
diately sympathize with you and thus enable your next fix, or would
you rather trust your fate to the person who would reflect more care-
fully on what morality requires in the situation, perhaps declining
your request for money, but calling up the social service agency to
get you some professional help?
18. I’d like to thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this sort of case where the motive
of compassion seems entirely unnecessary for this sort of action to have moral worth.
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16
This issue concerning the necessity of reflection in actions of

moral worth recalls the controversy over the “one thought too many”
objection to impartial moral theories raised originally by Bernard
Williams. The crux of the dispute is whether a moment of reflection
is always required to do the right thing in any morally ambiguous sit-
uation, or whether acting out of immediate compassion, sympathy or
loyalty might not only be a morally justified response in some cases,
but is actually morally required in some cases. The sort of case that
pulls in these directions is a case, say, of a shipwreck where a husband
is faced with a decision to save his wife or a total stranger, when he
can clearly only save one. Williams and others have thought that the
only morally appropriate response here is immediately to save one’s
spouse over a stranger, without deliberation, whereas Kantian and
other impartial theories require even a moment of deliberation in
Such morally ambiguous circumstances.
Unfortunately, Schopenhauer does not address these sorts of
controversies about acting out of an immediate feeling of compas-
sion. His theory is in line with Williams’ intuition in the shipwreck
case but problematic in many other cases that seem more clearly to
call for reflection. On his behalf, in Chapter 5, I will return to whether
he might be able to incorporate an important role for rational re-
flection in his ethical thought, to handle cases like that of the drug-
addicted homeless person, and others that favor partisans of rational
reflection in morality.
Perhaps sensing that his thought experiment is not nearly as de-
cisive as he had originally claimed, Schopenhauer does not want
to rest his entire case on it, and adduces other common moral
intuitions to support his view. Additional support, he believes,
comes from the fact that what really “outrages our moral feeling,”
what we really cannot forgive and what fills us with moral horror
is cruelty, and the ground for this is that cruelty is the opposite of
compassion. Thus, Schopenhauer believes that what we really find
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reprehensible in a case like “a mother who murdered her five-year

old boy by pouring boiling oil down his throat” or an Algerian
who in a fight with a Spaniard “tore the other man’s whole lower
jaw bone clean off and carried it away as a trophy, abandoning him
still alive” (OBM, 221) is that these individuals had the opposite
feelings to compassion. When we ask how such an immoral action
is possible, we explain it by the person’s lacking even a modicum
of compassion, a feeling that would temper the malice, rather than
reaching for any other explanation. I find this bit of reasoning to be
compelling, especially when faced with shocking cases of moral de-
pravity. For example, when viewing an exhibit on Nazi atrocities
during WWII, and the ways in which ordinary, middle-class, edu-
cated Germans willingly participated in the systematic murder of
Jews, communists, Roma and Sinti people, homosexuals, and many
other so-called “Untermenschen” for the Third Reich, the thought
that keeps pressing to the forefront of my mind is “how could these
people be so lacking in the feeling of compassion for their fellow
human beings?” Of course, there was a lot of preparation by the
Nazis to help people get rid of or at least dampen their feelings of
compassion (the propaganda, the grand spectacles, the blaming of
especially Jews and communists for poor economic conditions, stir-
ring up religiously based anti-Semitism, and so on), but still, there is
something mind-boggling about how people who are not sociopaths
could act so cruelly—even taking pleasure in the suffering of others
in many cases—with so little compassion for other human beings.
More recently, in a PBS article from July 5, 2018 concerning the
Trump administration’s policy to separate would-be migrant parents
from their children at the US Southern border, there were accounts
of border guards actually taunting the parents of young children
they were forcibly taking away from them. One mother reports that,
“[o]‌ne of the officers asked me, ‘In Guatemala do they celebrate
Mother’s Day?’ When I answered yes he said, ‘then Happy Mother’s
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Day’ because the next Sunday was Mother’s Day. I lowered my head
so that my daughter would not see the tears forming in my eyes. That
particular act of cruelty astonished me then as it does now. I could
not understand why they hated me so much, or wanted to hurt me
so much,” she wrote as part of her statement.19 No doubt, in order to
carry out these “zero-tolerance policy” orders, such border guards
would likely have to steel themselves against feeling normal human
compassion for these parents and children, but as this migrant
mother relates, there is indeed something “astonishing” about those
who go out of their way to inflict further acts of cruelty.
In further support of the notion that compassion is the real foun-
dation of morality, and in a manner reminiscent of his Caius and Titus
thought experiment, Schopenhauer offers a bit of ordinary language
philosophy (avant la lettre), asking what is the sense of the question
“how is it possible to do such a [morally horrific] thing”? In ordinary
language, it is decidedly not:
• How is it possible to fear so little the punishments of

future life?
OR
• How is it possible to act on a maxim that is so highly unsuited
to becoming a universal law for all rational beings?
OR
• How is it possible to be so negligent of one’s own perfection
and that of others?
Instead, ordinary speakers would explain the sense of the question

as “How is it possible to be so much without compassion?” And he
concludes that since the greatest moral reprehensibility of an action
19. https://w ww.pbs.org/newshour/politics/my- son-i s-not-the- same-new-testimony-

paints-bleak-picture-of-family-separation (accessed on July 15, 2018).
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stems from cruelty, its opposite, compassion, must be the true moral
incentive.
Additional evidence from ordinary language comes from the
cognitive dissonance in saying “[t]‌his human being is virtuous, but
he knows no compassion” or “[h]e is an unjust and wicked human
being; yet he is very compassionate” (OBM, 223). These statements
strike us as paradoxical, he claims, precisely because the foundation
of genuinely kind or just actions is compassion.
I think these considerations do help to support the notion that
there is an important place for feeling, and especially the feeling of
compassion, in morally worthy actions. In actions that are obviously,
seriously wrong—killing rivals, cruelly murdering children, leaving a
man to die a horrible death instead of showing mercy, taunting a mi-
grant mother upon taking away her child—heeding one’s immediate
feelings of compassion is clearly the right thing to do and seems prima
facie to be a morally laudable motive for doing the obviously right
thing. But in more morally ambiguous situations, Schopenhauer has
not shown us that heeding one’s immediate compassion is the right
thing to do and thus he has not shown that compassion is the sole
source of morality, for morally ambiguous situations require at least a
moment of reflection on what the right thing to do really is, and there
is a role for reason here which Schopenhauer, unfortunately, seems in
this thought experiment entirely to ignore.
Another advantage that Schopenhauer adduces in favor of the
feeling of compassion as the sole basis of morality is the fact, he writes,
that “the moral incentive I have expounded . . . also takes animals into
its protection, who are cared for so irresponsibly badly in the other
European moral systems” (OBM, 226). Here, Schopenhauer believes
he is tapping into deep moral intuitions that we have—intuitions that
have been unfortunately squelched and perverted by most Western
moral systems—that non-human animals are not so different from
human beings. In fact, he writes, “what is similar between animal
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and human, both psychologically and somatically, is incomparably

more,” and that, accordingly, we should not to treat animals cruelly.
Schopenhauer believes that in our heart of hearts, we don’t believe
that someone who is cruel to animals can be a good person (OBM,
229), and not just because that person would be likely to harm other
human beings, but because that person lacks compassion for the indi-
vidual animals themselves. Here, Schopenhauer does raise a bona fide
difficulty for many other moral theories, many of which are at pains
to explain why we ought to afford non-human animals themselves
moral consideration. Although this is not a decisive point against
other ethical theories, which can and have in various ways tried to
accommodate the common intuition that we ought to give animals
moral consideration for the animals’ own sake, as I hope to show in
what follows, the fact that Schopenhauer’s ethical thought brings
non-human animals capable of feeling pain into the realm of the
morally considerable in an intuitively compelling manner is a major
strength of his view. He was ahead of his time on this, and for our
contemporary sensibilities, he seems to be tracking a facet of what
may of us would think as moral progress: taking animals’ lives and
their suffering seriously, from a moral point of view.
Finally, Schopenhauer acknowledges that in espousing compas-
sion as the basis of morality, he is going against the tide of Western
moral philosophy, opposing the Scholastics, the Stoics, Spinoza, and
Kant, who “reject and disparage compassion outright” (OBM, 232),
but he does find some allies in the West, especially in J. J. Rousseau,
and in the East, in Chinese and Hindu philosophies.
Before moving on to the last stage of Schopenhauer’s argument,
however, let me sum up the strengths and weaknesses of the case
that I believe he has thus far made for compassion as the sole basis
of morality. Although he makes a good case that compassion can
be in some morally obvious cases a sufficient moral incentive (for ex-
ample, in the Caius/Titus thought experiment), he does not show
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17
in OBM (or anywhere else in his writings) what he really set out to
show, namely, that the feeling of compassion is both necessary and
sufficient for any action to have moral worth. As I have argued above,
compassion is insufficient for an action to have moral worth in cases
where additional reflection is required to figure out what acting
rightly in a situation really entails (e.g., the case of the drug-addicted
homeless person); and it seems unnecessary—and even contrary to
what morality requires, especially in cases where impartial justice is
called for (e.g., the case of the juror). In the majority of cases where
there is some moral perplexity to the matter, the feeling of compas-
sion needs to be supplemented by rational reflection and possibly by
other incentives (to carry out impartial justice, for instance) in order
to capture two common moral intuitions about what gives an ac-
tion moral worth: first, that it be the right action in the situation, and
second, that it be done from the right ground which may not be the
feeling of compassion in all cases. These two intuitions are not dealt
with at any length by Schopenhauer, but in Chapter 5, I will address
these deficiencies in his ethics and aim to reconstruct a role for ra-
tional reflection in it.
II.4. Stage Four: The Metaphysical Stage

The final stage of Schopenhauer’s argument takes a metaphys-
ical turn, and this is highly significant for contrasting his ethical
thought with that of the sentimentalists. In the final analysis,
Schopenhauer’s ethics does not bottom out in empirical feeling,
a natural “moral sense” of compassion, or even idealized feeling.
What ultimately makes compassion normative for us is that it
constitutes an implicit recognition or expression of a deeper meta-
physical truth, and this thought actually puts him closer to realists
like Spinoza and Kant than to sentimentalists like Hutcheson,
Hume, and Smith.
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172
Thus far in OBM, Schopenhauer has relied on experience and ob-

servation of moral phenomena; he has relied on a survey and analysis
of common moral intuitions, and on attention to ordinary language;
and he has offered a thought experiment to try to capture our deep
intuitions about morality. Yet, while he believes he has explained the
empirical facts of morality, he has not really shown that the feeling of
compassion objectively accords with the way the world is. Otherwise
put, he has only shown us how people generally do think and feel
about morality—in his view, that it’s based on compassion—but he
has not yet shown that people ought to feel compassion. Thus, at the
start of section 21, he puts the problem, and the need for a metaphys-
ical turn in his argument as follows:
Meanwhile I see very well that in this way the human mind
does not yet find its ultimate satisfaction and tranquility. As at
the end of any phenomenon which, while it explains everything
comprehended under it and following from it, nonetheless re-
mains unexplained itself and presents itself as a riddle. So the de-
mand for a metaphysics also makes itself felt here. (OBM, 245)
I interpret this “demand for a metaphysics” of morality as the desire to

know why the compassionate person is truly better than the egoistic
or malicious person, not just from the point of view of commonsense
moral views, but objectively speaking better, from the point of view
of the universe, to paraphrase Sidgwick and later, Thomas Nagel. In
other words, while we do generally praise the compassionate indi-
vidual and decry the malicious one, are we all fundamentally justified
in doing this? Or are we in some way fundamentally mistaken and in
the grip of an illusion about the normative ranking of these different
characters?
To further motivate a metaphysical exploration of morality,
Schopenhauer points to the nagging ethical-metaphysical tendency
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173
in human life. All religions have an “ethical-metaphysical tendency,”

he writes, to identify the good person with belief in the highest-
metaphysical reality, God; and the bad person as the non-believer
(OBM, 247). And even non-religious people, when dying, look to
their moral character as of ultimate significance in life (OBM, 246).
So Schopenhauer puts the question that prompts the metaphysical in-
vestigation in another way: What is the point of connection between
philosophical ethics and philosophical metaphysics? Is the good
person the one who really sees the world aright, in its most profound
metaphysical light? Or might the good person be mistaken about the
fundamental nature of the world (to anticipate Nietzsche, perhaps
the good person is really in the grip of an illusion, and the one who
sees the world most truthfully goes “beyond good and evil”)?
Despite his claim that he will follow the analytic method
throughout OBM, Schopenhauer’s answer in the last section of the
essay draws on his transcendental idealism and, what I have called,
his hermeneutic metaphysics. He suggests that the compassionate
person is not just approved of by morally sensitive people, but has also
gotten things objectively right by virtue of the following argument:
(1) The good person makes less of a distinction between

the “I” and “not-I” than does the egoist or the malicious
person (the latter of whom makes the greatest distinc-
tion)20 (OBM, 249).
(2) While the egoist’s outlook (seeing great distinctions be-
tween “I” and all “not-Is”) may be empirically justified,
it is not justified from the transcendental perspective.
20. Schopenhauer does not hold that the good person makes no distinction between “I” and
the “not-I,” for recall in his account of compassion that the compassionate agent always
recognizes the separateness of persons, and that the suffering with which she shares occurs
in the other.
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174
Schopenhauer relies here on Kant’s transcendental aes-

thetic, the idea of the exclusive subjectivity of spatio-
temporal form, and his own argument for the monism of
the “essence” of the world—as Will—that manifests itself
in all appearances (OBM, 251).
(3) Therefore, the outlook on the world of the compassionate
person is metaphysically correct, though empirically un-
justified, and the egoist and malicious person are in meta-
physical error, though empirically justified.
Drawing on his transcendental- idealist metaphysics, then, he

supports the claim that an outlook and a practice of compassion is
not merely the expression of common moral intuitions about what is
right and good, but is further an expression of metaphysical wisdom.
In other words, the compassionate person has got it metaphysically,
objectively right; the egoist and malicious person are metaphysically,
objectively in error.
So what exactly is the deep, metaphysical wisdom that the com-
passionate person intuitively understands that the egoist and the ma-
licious person do not? I will offer an account of this knowledge in the
next section. As a preview, let me say that I see Schopenhauer as of-
fering, in this moral-metaphysical turn a “value ontology” including
a nuanced account of moral status that is highly relevant for contem-
porary ethics. Although he has been rather unsuccessful thus far in
supporting the notion that compassion is the sole source of actions
of moral worth, I shall argue that he is more successful in motivating
the epistemic value of compassion, that is to say, the way that com-
passion tracks value. I believe this value ontology and the epistemic
role of compassion in revealing it is the most important contribution
Schopenhauer makes to the history of ethics. My aim in what follows
in this chapter is to outline this value ontology.
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175
III. INTERPRETING SCHOPENHAUER’S
METAPHYSICS OF MORALS
In the course of his illuminating study of Nietzsche’s Genealogy, ti-

tled Beyond Selflessness, Christopher Janaway offers an insightful char-
acterization of the basic metaphysical foundation that supports the
objectivity of Schopenhauer’s ethics of compassion as, namely, the “es-
sential parity of all beings who strive and suffer” insofar as they “share
a single common essence or inner nature.”21 Janaway suggests that this
essential parity may be interpreted in two ways: First, in a substantively
metaphysical way, i.e., as holding that individuation is transcendentally
ideal and that the common essence of all phenomena is the metaphys-
ical will; and second, in an axiological way, i.e., as a claim that “there
is nothing of any fundamental importance about the individual that
I am” such that, from a universal moral standpoint, “it is a matter of
indifference whether my ends are promoted and the other’s thwarted,
or vice versa.”22 Although Schopenhauer certainly develops the meta-
physical interpretation of the “essential parity of all beings who strive
and suffer” in the final section of OBM (also in WWR I and II), as
delineated at the end of the previous section, there are also textual
grounds for holding the axiological interpretation (though, as I shall
detail in what follows, even the axiological interpretation involves a
metaphysical commitment). Further, the axiological interpretation is
more attractive philosophically, and thus is the one I shall pursue.
Janaway also pursues the axiological interpretation, but
understands this essential parity as consisting in the fact that, from
the universal moral standpoint, no one is any more or less worthy
21. Christopher Janaway, Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsche’s Genealogy (Oxford: Oxford

22. Janaway, Beyond Selflessness, 62.
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176
of suffering than any other being because, from that ultimate stand-
point, we’re all worthless. Accordingly, Janaway writes,
suffering can be redeemed, for Schopenhauer, by its power to

generate the knowledge that I, as much as every other living
manifestation of will, am nichtig—worth nothing, in vain. . . . To
speak the diagnostic language Nietzsche adopts in the Third
Essay of the Genealogy, Schopenhauer hereby assigns an ascetic
‘meaning’ to suffering: that it can reveal the individual human
being who lives, strives, and procreates as lacking genuine value.23
As discussed in Chapters 1 and 2, taking into consideration

Schopenhauer’s ultimate embrace of renunciation as embodying the
highest wisdom, this is quite a reasonable interpretation.
Yet, if one holds the Two Schopenhauers view, and brackets
the Knight of Despair to pursue the Knight with Hope strand of
Schopenhauer’s thought, then another interpretation of this essential
parity of striving beings emerges that I shall call the “inherent value”
interpretation. According to this interpretation, all sentient beings—
that is, all beings capable of pain and pleasure—have positive, in-
herent value. On this view, then, it is a parity of the intrinsic worth of
all sentient beings (beings who “have a world” that matters to them),
rather than a parity of the intrinsic worthlessness of all beings, that
gives content to the claim that another’s ends are prima facie on a
level with one’s own.
Support for my interpretation opposite to that of Janaway can be
found in the context of Schopenhauer’s critique of Kant’s Formula of
Humanity of the Categorical Imperative, and derives from what I see
as the retention of Kant’s moral realism, though in altered form. For
the reasons explicated at the start of Section II above, Schopenhauer
23. Janaway, Beyond Selflessness, 73.
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17
is entirely unsympathetic to Kant’s Formula of Universal Law (FUL)

as well as to the third formula of the CI (Formula of Autonomy, FA),
but his criticisms of the Formula of Humanity (FH) are more nar-
rowly focused and nuanced. In OBM section 8, he criticizes this
formula largely for its deeply counter-intuitive and for him deeply
offensive implications of the moral non-considerability of animals.
Here, Schopenhauer is critical of Kant’s describing persons as “ends
in themselves,” and thereby having “dignity beyond all price” for he
claims that an “end” properly refers only to the goal or aim of willing
rather than to the being who does the willing. He also objects to the
terminology that human beings have “absolute worth” (OBM, 161),
as he holds that “worth” is a comparative term, and thus, that there is
no content that can be given to the notion of “absolute” worth, just as
there can be no content given to notions of the “highest” number or
the “largest” space. While numbers and spaces are, in a certain sense
“real,” they are only real with reference to a system of other numbers
and other spaces.
Ultimately, the crux of Schopenhauer’s criticism of Kant’s FH,
however, is the view that there is no sharp distinction between the moral
worth of human and non-human animals. Schopenhauer does not be-
lieve that the ability to set one’s own ends rationally endows a being
with an incommensurable value—a “dignity beyond all price.” The
only sense of human dignity that Schopenhauer allows consists in
the more modest view that human beings may achieve some relief
from suffering via rational reflection and Stoic equanimity (WWR I,
107). However, his denial of “dignity beyond all price” need not and
does not entail in his ethical thought that human beings lack inherent
value tout court. While it might seem to be the case that Schopenhauer
jettisons the view that anything has inherent value—and this is how
Janaway reads him, namely, that everything at bottom is worthless—
and thus that the axiological, inherent value interpretation, which
rests the moral considerability of all striving and suffering beings on
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178
their positive inherent value, cannot be tenable, I hope to show in

what follows that Schopenhauer employs a notion of inherent moral
value in his ethical thought.24
My suggestion, however, seems on the face of it to conflict with
Schopenhauer’s other commitments in the metaphysics of value.
Bernard Reginster, for one, has argued on the basis of WWR I, sec-
tion 65, 387 that Schopenhauer rejects the notion of intrinsic value,
and holds a univocal, instrumental view of “good” that means “that
which satisfies an individual will.” He adduces the following passage
in support: “we call everything good that is just as we want it to be,”25
and he glosses this assertion as something’s agreeing with some desire
of ours is a necessary and sufficient condition for our calling it good. Thus
he concludes that the only sense of “good” in Schopenhauer is that
which satisfies an individual’s desires, and that there can be no in-
trinsic goodness according to Schopenhauer. If this is the case, then
the axiological, inherent value view is a non-starter, because the only
sense of “good” for Schopenhauer is one that is constructed and rela-
tive to the desires of an individual subject.
But Reginster’s interpretation fares badly when the passage is
read in context, for Schopenhauer is considering the conditions
upon which we call something “good,” not as such the conditions in
virtue of which something really is good. This can be seen in the fact
that Schopenhauer is explicit in section 65 that his subject matter
is “[what] is intended in the concept of good” (WWR I, 387). The
24. As I shall detail shortly, Bernard Reginster also holds that Schopenhauer rejects any no-
tion of intrinsic goodness. My views in this section developed in sustained discussion with
Tristan Ferrell and Chris Janaway.
25. See “Compassion and Selflessness,” in Nietzsche, Naturalism and Normativity, eds.
Christopher Janaway and Simon Robertson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012),
160–182; 162 (cf. Reginster, The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism
[Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006], 98–99, 173–174).
178
179
concept of good is—as are all concepts for Schopenhauer—an ab-

stract representation, or a higher-order representation of intuitive
representations (cf. WWR I, sec. 9). But, for Schopenhauer, “true
virtue does not arise from abstract cognition in general, but must
come from intuitive cognition that recognizes in another individual
the same essence as in its own” (WWR I, 394). Compassionate ac-
tion is the form of true virtue, and so we must look to the sort of intu-
itive cognition that Schopenhauer describes in the feeling of genuine
compassion in order to hone in on exactly what is being intuitively
known as “good” here.
Recall that the feeling of compassion, for Schopenhauer, consists
in an immediate sharing in the suffering of another, all the while
keeping in mind the separateness of the other. In this feeling, then,
the “intuitive cognition that recognizes in another individual the
same essence as in its own” might be given at least two different
interpretations:
(1) I (the compassionate person) recognize intuitively

that the suffering other and I both share the same es-
sence, namely, the metaphysical Will (the metaphysical
interpretation).
(2) I (the compassionate person) recognize intuitively that
the suffering other and I matter (morally speaking) in a
similar way (the axiological interpretation).
The axiological interpretation may be given a further interpretation

along the lines Janaway has suggested:
(2a) I recognize intuitively that the other is, at bottom, worth-

less, in the same way that I am ultimately worthless.
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180
Or along the lines that I have suggested:
(2b) I recognize intuitively that the other has positive inherent

value, at bottom, just in the way that I have inherent value.
Given that the intuitive cognition involved in compassion is sup-

posed to play a role in motivating a person to try to prevent or re-
lieve the suffering of another, it seems the most natural interpretation
of the intuitive knowledge at work in a feeling of compassion is 2b
rather than 2a, for why would a perception of another and oneself as
worthless motivate someone to positive action? Wouldn’t a percep-
tion of one’s own and another’s worthlessness more properly moti-
vate resignation, fatalism, or some other inertia or quietism rather
than an active, ameliorating response?
If, indeed, the most attractive reading of the intuitive cogni-
tion at the basis of true virtue is the recognition of another’s in-
herent value or, otherwise put, the other’s intrinsic goodness, this
complicates Reginster’s univocal, instrumental reading of “good” in
Schopenhauer. If true virtue consists in part in the recognition of the
inherent, moral value in another—or the other and oneself as intrin-
sically “good”—there certainly seems to be another sense of “good”
implied in Schopenhauer’s thought. There is “goodw ” (good for an
individual will) or instrumentally good, and there is “goodim,” intrin-
sically, morally good.26
Further, Schopenhauer can hold that human and non-human ani-
mals have positive inherent value without having absolute value or “dig-
nity beyond all price.” And Schopenhauer seems to utilize the idea of
inherent value for human beings and non-human animals in several
26. I am grateful to Christopher Janaway for pressing me on this point. For his handling of the
different senses of “good” and especially the notion of the “highest good” in Schopenhauer’s
thought, see his “What’s So Good about Negation of the Will?: Schopenhauer and
the Problem of the Summum Bonum,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 54, no. 4
(2016): 649–669.
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18
passages regarding the kind of treatment owed to these beings. In a

previously quoted passage in which Schopenhauer chides Kant (and
Western theological ethics generally) for its lack of regard for non-
human animals, he writes:
Bah! What a morals of pariahs, chandalas, and mlechchas—

which fail to recognize the eternal essence [das ewige Wesen] that
is present in everything that has life [in Allem, was Leben hat], and
that shines out with unfathomable significance [unergründlicher
Bedeutsamkeit] from all eyes that see the light of the sun. But that
form of morals recognizes and gives consideration solely to its own
valuable species [Aber jene Moral kennt und berücksichtigt allein die
eigene werthe Species] whose distinguishing mark, reason, is for it
the condition on which a being can be the object of moral con-
sideration. (OBM, 162; emphasis added)
Here Schopenhauer espouses not the equal worthlessness of “every-

thing that has life,” but rather their equal inherent value, which value
he describes as the “unfathomable significance” [unergründlicher
Bedeutsamkeit] of all living beings. This significance “shines out” from
“all eyes that see the light of the sun”; thus, presumably, the signifi-
cance can be directly perceived in and by the many sentient animals
with whom we interact, such as horses, dogs, cows, etc. From this
passage, then, it seems that Schopenhauer does not object to Kant’s
recognition of and consideration for the inherent value of human
beings as such, but rather to his calling it “absolute worth,” and to his
seeing only human beings as inherently valuable. Thus, what he is
criticizing is recognizing inherent moral value only in one’s own “val-
uable species” [werthe Species] and not in the other valuable species
of sentient beings around us.
Another passage that supports the inherent value interpreta-
tion comes again from Schopenhauer’s discussion of what he sees
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182
as the bias against non-human animals in Western theological

ethics:
European priestliness . . . in its profanity thinks it cannot go far

enough in its denial and defamation of the eternal essence [des
ewigen Wesens] that lives in all animals; whereby it has laid down
the basis for the hardness and cruelty to animals that is cus-
tomary in Europe. (OBM, 227; emphasis added)
What European theological ethics has “denied” and “defamed” seems

not to be the parity of the worthlessness of all animals—after all, it
makes little sense to say that worthlessness can be “defamed”—but
precisely the parity of their inherent value obtaining by virtue of the
“eternal essence” living in all of them.
In these passages Schopenhauer appeals to an inherent value of all
sentient beings that is comparative—rather than absolute—and thus
may come in degrees. His key point against Kant is that it is not the pos-
session of reason which endows a being with inherent value, thereby
making that being morally considerable and even a holder of rights;
instead, it is sentience or being the “bearer of a world” that makes one
morally considerable. In what follows, I shall return to the all-important
question of exactly which characteristics one must have to be morally
considerable on Schopenhauer’s view. Since it is in virtue of the “eternal
essence”—does this refer to the metaphysical will?—that beings are
endowed with “unfathomable significance,” we will need to investigate
further the grounds on which Schopenhauer attributes inherent value
to beings. The details of this account, however, must be pieced together
from various passages. From those I have adduced thus far it is unclear,
for example, whether all living beings should be understood as morally
considerable or perhaps only the subset of living beings that are sen-
tient, or even something narrower still, such as a being, following Tom
Regan, that is the experiencing subject of a life.
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183
Leaving aside for the moment the question of the proper scope
of compassion, the compassionate outlook is clearly objectively,
normatively preferable to the egoistic or malicious outlook for
Schopenhauer. This is because, first, those beings with cognition—
sentient beings who possess intuitive knowledge— are “bearers
of a world” (WWR I, 358), and from an egoistic perspective, each
cognizing individual feels as though he or she is “a microcosm equal in
value to the macrocosm [the entire world]” (WWR I, 358). What the
compassionate person recognizes intuitively—contra the egoist—is
that another individual has the same essence as herself, and ipso facto,
the value of the other’s microcosm is (roughly) equivalent to her own,
and both equivalent to the macrocosm, and this comports with the
metaphysical truth about the world. In other words, Schopenhauer’s
explanation for the moral objectivity and normativity of the attitude
of compassion is that other sentient beings matter morally speaking in
the same way as one’s own microcosm matters—the inherent value
of all of these microcosms is (roughly) on a par.27
Another passage, from WWR I, that supports this axiological, in-
herent value view is Schopenhauer’s characterization of the “practical
egoist” or the moral skeptic. He draws an explicit parallel between
the “theoretical egoist,” or the external world skeptic/solipsist, who
thinks only he exists; and the “practical egoist” who “does exactly the
same thing [as the theoretical egoist] in practice, namely considering
and treating one’s own person as the only actual one, and others as
mere phantoms” (WWR I, 129). Here, “the only actual one” could be
read in the sense of “the only actual one who exists,” but if that were
27. One might wonder if the claim here is that others matter as I do, or whether the claim is that
others’ “worlds” matter to them in the same way as mine does to me? I take Schopenhauer
to be holding the former, namely, a metaphysical claim about the roughly equal inherent
value of sentient beings, rather than the latter, which is an empirical claim about the sim-
ilarity in the foundational psychological make-up of other beings. I take it that the above-
cited quotes concerning the “unfathomable significance” of the “eternal essence” that lives
in all beings licenses the former, metaphysically robust claim.
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184
the case, the practical egoist would not really differ at all from the
theoretical egoist. Rather, “the only actual one” seems more naturally
read as “the only one who matters” from a practical standpoint. Thus,
the practical egoist certainly treats himself as though he matters, and
he is not mistaken in this, for Schopenhauer—he really does matter;
his mistake is in treating everybody else as a “phantom” as though
they didn’t matter in the same way he matters.
Schopenhauer’s reasoning for the roughly equal inherent value
of sentient beings should not be construed along the lines of the
Classical Utilitarian who holds that the only things that matter intrin-
sically are pleasure and pain; on the contrary, Schopenhauer holds
that sentient beings themselves—qua microcosms—matter and that
these sentient beings themselves have “unfathomable significance” ob-
jectively and not just to themselves. Indeed, it is precisely because
these beings themselves have unfathomable significance that their
pleasure or pain matters. This positive inherent value of (at least)
sentient subjects also explains why the clearest expression of the
fundamental principle of ethics is for Schopenhauer “Harm no one;
rather, help everyone to the extent that you can.” If Schopenhauer
held, like a Classical Utilitarian, that the sole intrinsic good were
pleasure and/or lack of pain and suffering, then the first part of the
principle “harm no one”—a principle that respects the separateness
of persons—would not be stressed as it is in Schopenhauer’s ethics.
Insofar as harming some would bring about far less suffering and
far more pleasure for everyone else, then, all things considered, the
Classical Utilitarian must endorse it.28 This is not Schopenhauer’s
view. He understands the ethics of compassion as enjoining us to
harm no one even if doing so would bring about better consequences
all things considered.
28. I am putting to one side, of course, sophisticated Rule-Utilitarian attempts to ground a
view of rights as trumps in the principle of utility.
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IV. A HYBRID ETHICAL THEORY
On this reconstruction, Schopenhauer’s ethics of compassion offers

a hybrid Kantian-Moral Sense theory of ethics. In a Kantian vein,
the feeling of compassion is normative, for Schopenhauer, because
it tracks the actual positive inherent value of sentient beings. In saying
this I do not ignore the aforementioned significant departures from
Kant’s ethics.29
Nonetheless, I should note before pressing the differences that
it has largely gone unnoticed by commentators that Schopenhauer’s
ethics of compassion actually retains several elements of the Kantian
picture. For example, while Schopenhauer jettisons the notion of the
absolute worth or “dignity beyond all price” of humanity, his ethics
retains the commitment to the inherent value of human beings,
though, for Schopenhauer, it is qua living, striving, cognizing subject
of a life at all—i.e., qua microcosm—rather than qua rational being—
that endows humans with that value.
Related to the crucial difference from Kant regarding the norma-
tive force of the feeling of compassion is Schopenhauer’s moral epis-
temology. According to Schopenhauer, the inherent value of living
beings is known exclusively via intuitive knowledge (of which feeling
is a species), rather than—on Kant’s view—through any empirical
or synthetic a priori “fact of reason” (cf. WWR I, 394). With respect
to his moral epistemology, then, it seems Schopenhauer comes
closer to moral sense theorists insofar as the feeling of compassion
29. To recap these, Schopenhauer rejects the imperatival form of ethics and the Categorical
Imperative as the supreme principle of morality, though he retains his own formula of the
supreme principle in “harm no one, rather help everyone as much as you can.” But this
seeming imperative functions only as a rule of thumb and, especially, as a reservoir for the
feeling of compassion; encapsulating rather than legislating the conduct of the ideally vir-
tuous person. Another crucial departure is that the feeling of compassion is, pace Kant, the
foundation of all actions with moral worth (OBM, 199).
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186
is epistemically privileged over conceptually mediated cognition on

his view. And while Schopenhauer agrees with Kant that even the
simplest and least educated person can have a morally good char-
acter, he diverges from him with respect to the reason for this. For
Schopenhauer, even the simplest person (as well non-human an-
imals with emotional lives) can embody the highest ethical insight
insofar as she is endowed with innate compassion and through this
feeling she tracks the “unfathomable significance” of other sentient
beings. Not perceiving this inherent value in another is the result of
a human being’s or animal’s character being predominantly egoistic
or malicious.
Further, one sees in Schopenhauer’s explicit likening of moral
skepticism, or “practical egoism” to external-world skepticism, that
no amount of reasoning will convince another that other sentient
beings matter in the same way as oneself; morally speaking, one simply
has to feel it, by having the feeling of compassion. Thus, Schopenhauer
implies that practical egoism (like theoretical egoism) “can never be
disproved . . . accordingly it should be treated with medication [or
perhaps in the case of practical egoism, incarceration], not refuta-
tion” (WWR I, 129).
To return to the issue of the axiological interpretation’s metaphys-
ical commitment alluded to earlier, Schopenhauer explicitly agrees
with Kant that actions of moral worth have a metaphysical import.
It is for this reason that after a long empirical investigation of moral
phenomena in OBM, Schopenhauer believes he must turn to a “met-
aphysical explanation” in order to show that the person who acts out
of compassion has gotten things objectively right, whereas the ego-
istic and malicious agents have gotten them objectively wrong. The
metaphysical reason that he gives for why the compassionate person
sees things aright, and the malicious and egoistic person sees things
incorrectly, discussed above, is that ultimately all sentient beings
share the same metaphysical essence, and from the perspective of the
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187
world as will, the distinctions between us qua spatio-temporal beings

are an illusion. This reason corresponds to the robustly metaphysical
interpretation of Schopenhauer’s ethics of compassion. By contrast,
the inherent value interpretation that I’ve been pressing does not rely
on the notion of individuation as illusory from the perspective of the
world as will. Instead, the inherent value interpretation makes a more
modest metaphysical claim insofar as it holds the “essential parity” of
all sentient beings rests on an appeal to an objective moral fact of the
matter. Thus, on my reconstruction, Schopenhauer’s ethics embraces
moral realism, which is indeed a metaphysical commitment, but
widens the scope of the beings that have inherent value from rational
beings to sentient subjects of lives, or “microcosms.”
V. SCOPE AND DEGREES OF MORAL

CONSIDERABILITY
There are a number of questions raised by this reconstruction

of Schopenhauer’s value ontology. The proper role for reason in
a Schopenhauerian ethics will be addressed in the next chapter.
But here I’d like to address the question of scope. Given that all
beings, including even non-living beings such as rocks and pools
of water, are for Schopenhauer at bottom “will,” it would seem that
anything endowed with the “eternal essence” [ewiges Wesen]—
which seems most naturally interpreted as the metaphysical will—
would be morally considerable on this view. It is apparent from
the above-cited passages, however, that the “unfathomable signif-
icance” which calls on our feelings of compassion and justice is
had only by living beings—beings that manifest the will-to-life
[Wille zum Leben]. In these passages Schopenhauer is outraged
by the lack of moral consideration afforded specifically animals
in most Western ethical systems and he rails specifically against
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cruelty to beings with “eyes capable of seeing the light of the sun.”
Specifically, the question that confronts us is: Insofar as, say, plants
(which do not appear sentient) and insects (who could be sentient
but only to a very limited degree) manifest the will-to-life, should
Schopenhauer have held that all living beings are endowed with
inherent value and are thus morally considerable?
Here is a place where Schopenhauer’s thought requires fairly
heavy reconstruction. Notwithstanding, I do think that he lends
himself to a nuanced reconstruction in terms of “degrees of in-
herent value” and corresponding degrees of moral considerability.
Schopenhauer’s system is in general characterized by degrees (e.g., he
talks of grades of the manifestation of the metaphysical will captured
by the doctrine of the Ideas; grades of insight into the metaphysical
reality—in aesthetic experience, compassion and resignation—and
these correspond to degrees of will-lessness). Kant’s ethical system,
on the other hand, is in general characterized in more either/or
terms: There are persons who have absolute worth or mere things;
there is action from duty or merely in accordance with duty, etc. To
use a prosaic metaphor: Schopenhauer’s ethical system is a dimmer
switch whereas Kant’s is a straight on/off switch.
But the question is which beings are endowed with various
degrees of inherent value, and are thus morally considerable, on
Schopenhauer’s view, and why? The criterion seems to be sentience
and especially the capacity to suffer. The “dimmer switch” involves
degrees of the complexity of this sentience and capacity to suffer.
Take the following as a sketch of the pertinent gradations:
i. First and highest is the degree of value and moral

considerability inherent to human beings. Human beings are
the most complex sentient creatures, and, for Schopenhauer,
are capable of more acute suffering from rarified psycholog-
ical sources. That said, human beings are also the only beings
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capable of more effectively combating suffering through

reason.
ii. Second, and descending, is the degree of value inherent to
sentient, cognizing subjects, that is, the non-human ani-
mals we might describe, after Tom Regan, as “experiencing
subjects of a life.”30 These animals experience emotions and
have lives which matter to them, but are not as complex as
human beings and are not as capable of the rarified psycho-
logical sources of suffering.
iii. Finally, there are beings that are not conscious of themselves
as experiencing subjects of a life but that are still capable of
suffering and of feeling pleasure.
These gradations exhaust the scale of morally considerable beings or

those beings who have moral status to varying degrees. Non-sentient
living beings, however, such as plants, that are endowed with the
“will-to-life” would not, however, possess some degree of inherent
value for this reason. Further, rocks, soil, and pools of water, though
they are manifestations of the metaphysical will, do not have in-
herent value on the axiological interpretation I am urging. Rather,
what makes a being morally considerable to some degree on the “in-
herent value” interpretation is being a microcosm, that is, being the
“bearer of a world,” which means being a sentient, cognizing being.
On this interpretation, whereas plants and inorganic beings are not
morally considerable, this does not mean they should not be given
some kind of consideration as well, but the sort that is aesthetic rather
than moral.
Here is how this distinction might be drawn in a principled
way: Beings that have feelings or representations of their own value
30. See Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2004).
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are appropriately responded to compassionately, and therefore,

morally. Compassion constitutively involves one’s feeling with/as
the other. Plants, rocks and pools of water do not—presumably—
have feelings. It is not the fact that sentient living beings have or are
instances of will-to-life, then, that makes them morally considerable,
but the fact that this will-to-life is something to/for them. That is, they
have feelings and representations concerning this life. The absence of
such representations suffices for excluding a being from moral con-
sideration; it is enough to say that the being does not have inherent
value, though it may have many other sorts of value such as aesthetic
and instrumental value, and these other sorts of value might be very
potent indeed (giving us, say, greater reasons perhaps to preserve a
tree over a particular colony of minimally sentient insects).
To sum up, I take it that Schopenhauer restricts the scope of
moral consideration to beings that can care—in some measure—
about their lives. Again, such care need not require rational self-
consciousness. But it does require some consciousness and capacity
to feel pain and pleasure. Thus only those beings to/for whom their
lives are an object of their care and concern have inherent value and
are thus the appropriate objects of our compassion.
Indeed, Schopenhauer’s many passages on the rights of non-
human animals and of their enjoined compassionate treatment by
human beings show that he maintains that all sentient beings should
be given more than aesthetic consideration. And yet he maintains
that human beings—by virtue of their complexity, individuality,
and more rarified kinds of suffering—are owed the highest degree
of moral consideration, including even respect for their individuality
and freedom. Accordingly, he describes all of the will’s manifestations
as “[forming] a pyramid, of which the highest point is man” (WWR
I, 28). But there is nothing in Schopenhauer’s writings to suggest
that some human beings are worth more than others, and he has
very harsh things to say about racist slave traders who take people,
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without right, from their homelands and away from their families. So
I take it that Schopenhauer (unlike, say, Nietzsche) puts all human
beings on a par with respect to moral considerability insofar as all
human beings share these basic features of psychological complexity,
individuality, having an intelligible character, and transcendental
freedom.
VI. CONCLUSION
On the inherent value interpretation of Schopenhauer’s ethics of

compassion, we should understand the “essential parity of all beings
who strive and suffer” as deriving from the inherent value of these
beings qua “bearers of a world.” This axiological interpretation
differs from the robustly metaphysical interpretation which views all
manifestations of the metaphysical will, including even such beings
as rocks, rivers, and trees, as thereby sharing in inherent value.
On the inherent value interpretation, however, all manifestations
of will are proper objects of aesthetic consideration, and thus, of aes-
thetic respect. But only sentient animals are the proper objects of not
just of aesthetic consideration, but also of compassionate or moral
consideration. And while human beings, due to their complexity,
are the subjects of a higher degree of moral consideration than
less complex, non-human animals, there is no reason to think that
Schopenhauer would maintain that the moral consideration owed
human beings is different in kind.
A significant philosophical attraction of this reconstruction
is that it offers a novel ethical-theoretical hybrid of Kantian and
moral sense theories of ethics, which gives a prima facie appealing
account of the basis of moral status and the rationale for its coming
in degrees. However, as I also hope to have shown in this chapter,
there are some lingering problems about Schopenhauer’s ethics of
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compassion. Contra Schopenhauer, it does not seem that compas-

sion is necessary or sufficient for giving any action moral worth.
Specifically, the virtue of justice raises the issue that compassion
alone may be too immediate and parochial to motivate us to act
rightly, and there seems to be an indispensable role for rational
reflection that has simply gone missing in Schopenhauer’s entire
account of ethics.
In his defense, one should recall that Schopenhauer’s main aim
in OBM is to answer the basic question of the source of morality—
ultimately a metaphysical or in anachronistic terms, a metaethical
question—not to furnish a complete general normative theory, and
he has gone some way toward supporting the notion that compassion
is necessary and sufficient for an action to have moral worth in some
very obvious cases of moral rights and wrongs. Yet, in considering
what right action consists in, in a variety of cases, especially in morally
ambiguous cases, one sees that compassion cannot be the whole story re-
garding the basis of morality. Actions of moral worth sometimes seem
to require rational reflection in addition to, and sometimes counter
to, the immediate feeling of compassion. In the next chapter, I inves-
tigate to what extent Schopenhauer’s ethics may incorporate a bona
fide role for such rational reflection.
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Chapter 5
A Role for Reason
in Schopenhauer’s Ethics
I. THE FACULTY OF REASON

IN SCHOPENHAUER’S THOUGHT
In WWR I, book I, Schopenhauer lays out a clear division of labor be-

tween the faculty of the Understanding [der Verstand] and the faculty
of Reason [die Vernunft]. The former’s function is “the immediate
cognition of relations of cause and effect” and “intuition of the actual
world, as well as all cunning, sagacity and talent for discovery . . . are
quite clearly nothing other than manifestations of this single func-
tion” (WWR I, 61–62). Reason also has one function, according to
Schopenhauer; it is “the formation of concepts” (WWR I, 62) and
a concept is a representation of a representation [Vorstellung einer
Vorstellung] (WWR I, 63).
Possession of Understanding is common to human and non-
human animals; accordingly he believes that we all share the same
sort of non-conceptual perception and intuitive knowledge [intuitive
Erkenntniβ]. But possession of Reason separates human and non-
human animals, on his view, and enables us to have in addition ab-
stract or conceptual knowledge [Wissen] (WWR I, 27).
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This additional sort of knowledge comes with some disadvantages,

but also many practical advantages over animals. As seen in the pre-
vious chapter, Schopenhauer tends to downplay the role of reason in
ethics, and he tends throughout his writings to highlight similarities
rather than differences between human and non-human animals, but
let’s look more closely at the ways in which, for Schopenhauer, reason
does distinguish us from animals.
On the disadvantage side, the faculty of reason affords additional
means of suffering—that is, we may suffer in anticipation of the fu-
ture and from surveying the past—whereas, Schopenhauer believes,
non-human animals live and are capable of suffering only in the pre-
sent (WWR I, 59–60). Yet, there is a compensating advantage of the
faculty of reason in the ability to achieve Stoic equanimity with re-
spect to our sufferings; thus, he writes,
So it is noteworthy, indeed marvelous, that we human beings

always lead a second, abstract life alongside our concrete life. In
the first we are subject to all the storms of reality and are prey
to the influence of the present: we must strive, suffer and die,
just as animals do. But our abstract life, as it appears before us
in rational contemplation, is the calm reflection of the first life
and the world it is lived in . . . In this realm of peaceful deliber-
ation what had previously possessed us completely and moved
us deeply, now appears cold, colourless and strange to the
eye: here we are simply onlookers and spectators. In this retreat
into reflection we are like actors who have played our scene, and
now take our seats among the audience before we have to return
to the stage; anything may now happen on the stage, even the
preparation of our own death, and, looking out from the audi-
ence, we view it with equanimity [Gelassenheit]. (WWR I, 112)
It is important to note, however, that this ability to achieve equa-

nimity [Gelassenheit] can be put in the service of great virtue or
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A R o l e f o r  R e a s o n
great wickedness, and constitutes the full extent of “pure practical

reason” for Schopenhauer. As described in the previous chapter,
he does not think the faculty of reason issues a categorical impera-
tive, nor does it motivate morally worthy actions. In stark contrast
to Kant, then, Schopenhauer holds that it is only this modest sense
of pure practical reason, the ability to “retreat into reflection,” that
lends human beings a kind of dignity that animals cannot have, but
he underscores that “there is no other sense in which we can talk
of [human] dignity” (WWR I, 117). Crucially, this sense of human
dignity, for Schopenhauer, does not endow human beings with a
different kind of moral status or moral considerability, albeit it does
ground a higher degree of moral considerability as outlined in the
previous chapter.
Another advantage of reason, especially in conjunction with lan-
guage, is the ability for human beings to coordinate their actions,
though like equanimity this ability is a double-edged sword from a
moral point of view. Reason and language enable “the systematic in-
terplay of many thousands, civilization, the state, the preservation of
past experience . . . the communication of truth, the dissemination
of error, thought and poetry, dogmas and superstitions” (WWR I,
60). Thus, Reason, with the help of language, can coordinate people
into peaceful or warlike societies, free or repressive states; it can
communicate truth or disseminate error; it can produce profound
or shallow philosophy, insightful religious dogmas, or pernicious
superstitions.
II. THE USES OF REASON FOR ETHICS

AND POLITICS
Surveying Schopenhauer’s philosophy of value as a whole, however,

it seems he recognizes four positive ways—eudaimonistically and
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morally speaking—in which reason may be employed in ethics and

politics.
(1) The use of reason to devise civil laws and liberal political
systems that keep the peace, provide the conditions that sup-
port industry and the development of culture, protect the rights
of people and animals, and deter rights violations through
punishment1
Schopenhauer thinks that all political systems are imperfect and

tend to lead to despotism, but that the best system yet devised up
to his time was hereditary monarchy (especially when the monarch
is an enlightened one, like King Frederick the Great). The reasons
Schopenhauer gives for his political preference are pretty dubious,
but happily they need not concern us here. For our discussion there
are two main points to take away from his political philosophy. The
first is that while even the best state cannot and should not try to
make people morally good, and even though the state ultimately
rests for its justification on Hobbesian enlightened egoism, a good
state can do a lot to bring about the semblance of voluntary justice,
and even the semblance of justice is very significant for human well-
being. Accordingly, Schopenhauer writes that it is “conceivable that
all crime could be prevented by a perfect state . . . Politically, much
1. I agree with David Woods’s assessment that “on the whole, Schopenhauer fits fairly neatly
into the lineage of Hobbes and Locke, as a natural law theorist and common-sense advocate
of the social contract.” Woods details a separation between how Schopenhauer conceives of
political justice, a.k.a. “temporal justice,” which is based on a self-interested social contract,
and his moral philosophy—the virtues of “freely-willed justice” and Menschenliebe—which
is based in compassion. This makes it difficult for Schopenhauer to justify a moral critique of
politics, which he explicitly does in regards to slavery and animal welfare. See David Woods,
“Schopenhauer, the State and Morality,” in The Palgrave Schopenhauer Handbook, ed. Sandra
Shapshay (London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2017), 299–322.
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would be gained—morally, nothing at all, just that life would be less

of a mirror to the will” (WWR I, 396; emphasis added).2
I would like to underscore here that while Schopenhauer does
not see the use of reason for political progress to have any moral ef-
fect on people, he does think it can make life “less a mirror of the
will.” Thus, we have an instance where Schopenhauer sees that reason
can make a genuine difference in improving conditions for human
beings and non-human animals alike, even if it doesn’t improve
anyone’s character.
Second, his discussion of the ability of a good state to make people
act with the semblance of voluntary justice shows that Schopenhauer
does employ a distinction between acting rightly (not violating the
rights of others; keeping up one’s end of the social contract bargain)
and acting rightly for the right reasons (that is, not violating the rights
of others from the incentive of compassion). From the discussion of
OBM in Chapter 4, it was not clear if Schopenhauer really utilized
such a distinction, but from his political philosophy, we see that he
clearly does. In what follows, I reconstruct a role for reason in de-
termining what the right action would be, regardless of whether the
right action is done from a morally worthy incentive.
(2) The use of reason in gaining an “acquired character” that

causes less suffering to the individual herself and others
Schopenhauer thinks we can use reason to create a more perfect

state, and thus to make human life less of a mirror of the will; simi-
larly, he also believes we can use reason in one’s own life, to create a
more perfect self—in the sense of understanding and working better
within the confines of one’s empirical character—in order to make
2. Quoted in Woods, “Schopenhauer, the State and Morality,” 312. Note that here we definitely
get a sense of Schopenhauer as the Knight with Hope.
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one’s personal life less a mirror of the will. Recall the discussion in
Chapter 3 of Bill, the alcoholic, who is on the verge of ruining his
family life. Although he cherishes his family life, he also cherishes the
bottle. But if Bill uses his faculty of reason to understand his own (es-
sential) character as an alcoholic, and then rearranges his life carefully
to avoid alcohol (by joining AA and working its twelve-step program,
for instance), then he will have developed “acquired character” [den
erworbenen Charakter]. His acquisition of self-knowledge and the ra-
tional planning he employs for behavior modification enables him to
lead a more socially acceptable, better life that causes overall less suf-
fering to himself and others. So here we have, as in politics, the use of
reason to create the semblance of a morally better self. Bill still wants
to drink to excess, his character has not changed on this picture, but
he uses his reason in order to attain what he wills in a more pro-social
manner. Thus, attaining “acquired character” does not amount to
acquiring a morally better character. Nonetheless, we have another
case where Schopenhauer recognizes that reason can help to amelio-
rate lives, on a personal level.
(3) The use of reason or “the intellect” somehow mysteriously to

change one’s moral character
This use of reason is certainly the most under-theorized case in

Schopenhauer’s work, but as I described toward the end of Chapter 3,
reason (or “the intellect”) does seem to play a role in sublime aes-
thetic experience, in enabling us to overcome our typical will-to-life
driven responses (e.g., fight or flight protective responses) in order to
engage aesthetically (i.e., will-lessly) with objects and environments
that are vast and existentially and/or physically threatening, or with
works of art like dramatic tragedies that confront us with the truly
grim side of life. Further, in Schopenhauer’s discussion of ascetic res-
ignation, it seems that reason/the intellect plays a role in enabling a
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person to overcome the will-to-life altogether. In Chapter 3, I referred

to this use of reason—as a kind of spontaneous force for acting out
of character—in Schopenhauer’s thought as the “ghost of Kantian
freedom.” In his account of the active ascetic and the active subject
of sublime experience, we see unmistakable traces of the Kantian
rational spontaneity view of freedom, a view that Schopenhauer
embraces in EFR then officially repudiates in his post-dissertation
writings, but which continues to haunt—for better or for worse—his
discussion of these phenomena.
(4) The use of reason to formulate a moral principle that can

serve as a moral “reservoir” when compassion is not flowing
Schopenhauer offers the principle “Harm no one; rather help eve-

ryone to the extent that you can” (OBM, 140) as a concise expres-
sion of “the way of acting . . . which has genuine moral worth.” And
he states, rather grandiosely, that “every other moral principle [that
has been offered by moralists] is to be regarded as a circumlocu-
tion, an indirect or oblique expression of [his] simple proposition”
(OBM, 140).
As discussed in Chapter 4, it is only when a person refrains from
harming or helps someone from the feeling of compassion that an ac-
tion would have genuine moral worth. Notwithstanding, keeping
the moral principle “firmly formed” in one’s mind, he writes, is “in-
dispensable for a moral life” (OBM, 206). These views seem to be
in tension, for how can a moral principle be so indispensable for a
moral life, when Schopenhauer also holds that actions with moral
worth require only “intuitive cognition, the simple grasp of the con-
crete case, to which compassion responds at once without further
mediation of thought” (OBM, 232)? How exactly does this square
with the notion that the correct moral principle is “indispensable”
for a moral life?
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Schopenhauer utilizes an extended metaphor to explicate the

proper role of the moral principle. He likens it to a “container” or
“the reservoir” of compassion. The principle holds “the disposi-
tion that has risen out of the source of all morality, which does not
flow at every moment,” so that compassion “can flow down through
supply channels when a case for application comes” (OBM, 205).
Unpacking the metaphor a bit, we see that compassion is obviously
the “water,” the substance of morality, but that it does not flow in
people all (or even much) of the time. reason, however, can formulate
a principle in abstract concepts that encapsulates and expresses the
moral disposition of compassion, and rational reflection can serve to
keep the principle “firmly formed” in one’s mind in order to provide
a “reservoir” for this precious moral fluid, so that when the occasion
arises for the application of compassion, “it can flow down through
supply channels.”
In analyzing this colorful, extended metaphor, it seems that
Schopenhauer obliquely acknowledges an “indispensable” role for
reason in morality in the following ways: (a) in formulating moral
principles, (b) in reflection on the moral principle in order to apply
it in a given case, (c) in reminding people to act in a genuinely moral
way, in cases where the water of compassion should “flow down
through supply channels,” and (d) in reminding people to act with a
semblance of morality, such that even when the compassion does not
actually flow one nonetheless acts intentionally rightly.
With these positive functions for reason in mind, let us re-
visit Schopenhauer’s Caius/Titus thought experiment discussed in
Chapter 4. Recall that Titus refrains from murdering his rival out of
the incentive of compassion, saying,
As it came to the arrangements and I therefore had to occupy

myself for the moment not with my passion but with that rival
of mine, then it became fully clear to me for the first time what
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was really supposed to be happening to him now. But then

compassion and pity [Erbarmen] seized me, I felt sorry for
him, I could not find the heart to do it: I was unable to do it.
(OBM, 220–221)
And Schopenhauer thinks this is the “purer” ground, as opposed

to the panoply of Caius’s grounds that we are asked to entertain.
But let’s take a closer look at especially the principle-based, reflec-
tive, Kantian ground that Caius gives, in light of the “indispensable”
role that Schopenhauer believes moral principles (and by extension
reason) plays in a moral life. Recall that the Kantian ground goes as
follows:
I reflected that the maxim of my conduct in this case would not

have been suitable for yielding a universally valid rule for all
possible beings, in that I would have treated my rival solely as a
means and not at the same time as an end. (OBM, 220)
While the first part of this ground, “I reflected that the maxim of my
conduct . . . would not have been suitable for yielding a universally
valid rule” is based in FUL, and Schopenhauer has very little sym-
pathy for that particular formula of the Categorical Imperative; he
does have greater sympathy for FH on which the latter part of the
ground, “I would have treated my rival solely as a means and not at the
same time as an end,” is clearly based. Furthermore, Schopenhauer
ultimately holds that a moral principle like FH really says the same
thing, albeit more verbosely, as “harm no one,” what he calls “the
principle of justice” (OBM, 205).
So what is wrong with the abbreviated, FH version of this ground?
In fact, reflecting on and acting on the basis of this principle, even in
the absence of actual compassion, fares quite well from a moral point
of view for Schopenhauer. To wit, he writes,
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[h]‌owever, it is by no means required that compassion is actu-

ally aroused in every single case [of acting justly], where anyway
it would often come too late: rather, out of the recognition of
the suffering that every unjust action necessarily brings upon
others, a recognition attained once and for all and sharpened by
the feeling of enduring a wrong . . . ‘Harm no one’ emerges in
noble minds, and rational deliberation elevates it to the firm re-
solve, formed once and for all, to respect the rights of every one.
(OBM, 205)
In this passage, Schopenhauer suggests that a person can act in a mor-

ally worthy way by adhering to the moral principle “harm no one”
even when it is not the case that “compassion is actually aroused.” It
seems enough that a person has recognized the truth of the principle,
has recognized that the principle is ultimately based in compassion
insofar as it arises out of “the recognition of the suffering that every
unjust action necessarily brings upon others,” and then acts according
to the principle in a given situation.
Thus, applying these thoughts to the Titus/Caius case, while
Titus’s incentive springs directly from the moral source, the Kantian
Caius seems to be utilizing a legitimate principle as a reservoir for
compassion. In this way, even though he doesn’t feel compassion for
his would-be victim in the moment, he still acts in a morally worthy
manner. And it is clear that Schopenhauer does not fault people for
utilizing principles in this way; in fact, he writes, “[w]‌ithout firmly
formed principles we would be irresistibly at the mercy of the anti-
moral incentives when they are excited into affects” (OMB, 206). He
goes so far as to praise people for the “self-control” they evince by
holding fast to (correct) moral principles “in spite of the motives that
work against them” (OBM, 206).
Accordingly, it seems that the passages in which Schopenhauer
lauds the role of moral principles—and by extension the rational
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reflection that creates, inculcates, and applies them—should lead

him to change his answers to the questions he poses about the Titus/
Caius thought experiment.
1. “Which of the two is the better human being?”

2. “Which of the two would he rather assign his own fate to?”
3. “Which of the two was held back by the purer incentive?”
In light of this discussion of the role of reason in morality, the

answer that Schopenhauer gives to question 1, “Titus,” should no
longer be obvious. Certainly, Titus acts in a manner that is closer to
the actual source of morality, but the Kantian Caius demonstrates
principled self-control and utilizes a principle that could very well
be construed as a reservoir for compassion, and this seems that it
should be equally virtuous insofar as Schopenhauer writes that
“it is by no means required that compassion is actually aroused
in every case [of acting justly]” (OBM, 205). It seems that the
only thing potentially lacking from the Kantian Caius is the fur-
ther recognition that the principle he is utilizing is based in com-
passion. Insofar as his justification for the principle he’s acting
upon is unclear, however, it seems that the issue of whether this
Kantian Caius or compassionate Titus is the better person is sim-
ilarly unclear.
On question 2, the answer again is no longer so clear in light
of his discussion of the importance of moral principles. Insofar as
Schopenhauer believes that “[w]‌ithout firmly formed principles we
would be irresistibly at the mercy of the anti-moral incentives when
they are excited into affects” (OMB, 206; emphasis added), the
Kantian Caius seems to be the more trustworthy sort. Perhaps Titus’s
compassion was flowing on this particular occasion, but without the
“firmly formed principle” of “harm no one” in his mind, he might very
well have been “at the mercy of the anti-moral incentives.” Perhaps all
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things considered, one would fare better by assigning one’s fate to the
Kantian Caius.
On question 3, which of the two was held back by the purer in-
centive, it does seem that Schopenhauer’s answer should remain
“Titus,” insofar as “purer” means something like closer to the gen-
uine source of morality. But what I believe this discussion of princi-
ples has revealed is that while compassion is the purer incentive, for
Schopenhauer, acting on the basis of reflection on correct principles—
namely, the principle that “stores” and “releases” compassion-—counts as
a moral incentive as well. Presumably, however, if the principle is being
acted upon in a person who does not evince feelings of compassion
to any great extent, the principle would not be functioning as a reser-
voir, thus casting doubt on whether this sort of Caius would truly be
acting on a moral incentive.
Where does this leave us with respect to Schopenhauer’s account
of moral motivation? I believe by the lights of Schopenhauer’s own
discussion of the salutary role of reason in ethics, he should acknowl-
edge some pluralism about moral motivation: One can perform
actions of genuine moral worth (exercising the virtue of justice or
philanthropy), insofar as one acts immediately on the basis of com-
passion, or insofar as one acts out of respect for a “firmly formed,”
correct moral principle like “harm no one” or “help everyone to the
extent that you can” insofar as that principle serves as a reservoir for
compassion. And thus, while it may be that the person who acts di-
rectly from the feeling of compassion acts more “purely,” the person
who acts out of respect for correct principles also, it seems, acts in a
manner that has moral worth.
Given this modification to his account of moral motivation,
are there other ramifications for his ethical theory? Indeed, I think
there are. The conclusion of the Caius/Titus thought experiment
was meant to support the notion that the incentive of compassion is
both necessary and sufficient for acting in a genuinely moral fashion.
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205
Taking into consideration his discussion of moral principles, it now

seems that Schopenhauer’s considered view should be that the feeling
of compassion is sufficient, but not necessary for acting in a genuinely
moral fashion, because cases where people act justly out of respect
for correct principles also qualify as virtuous.
Yet, despite this modification, Schopenhauer would still be in-
tent on defending the sufficiency of compassion for actions of moral
worth. In a passage just following his acknowledgement of the indis-
pensable role of principles for a moral life, he does still suggest that
intuitive cognition, “the simple grasp of the concrete case” plus an
immediate response of compassion “without further mediation of
thought” (OBM, 232) is sufficient for morally worthy action.
III. THE ROLE OF REASON AND CHALLENGES

FOR SCHOPENHAUER’S ETHICAL THEORY
I would now like to revisit the main problems I raised for

Schopenhauer’s ethics at the end of Chapter 4, to see if taking into
consideration the role of reason, adumbrated above, helps to address
these worries. To recap, the criticisms were the following:
1. Although Schopenhauer makes a good case that compassion

can be in some morally obvious cases a sufficient moral incen-
tive (for example, in the Caius/Titus thought experiment),
he does not show that compassion is sufficient in non-obvious
cases, for in such cases additional reflection seems required to
determine the morally right course of action (e.g., the case of
giving money to the person experiencing homelessness).
2. In some cases of just action, e.g., the case of the juror, acting
out of immediate compassion seems unnecessary, and worse,
might even conflict with acting rightly in such a case.
205
206
Taking into consideration the role of reason that Schopenhauer sees

as indispensable in both ethics and politics, I think he would agree
that in non-obvious cases, compassion needs to be supplemented by
rational reflection and by reflection on ethical principles in order to
determine the morally right action to take. Perhaps one could further
extend Schopenhauer’s metaphor of the reservoir by seeing reason
here as playing the role of “channeling” compassion in appropriate
ways. Thus, reason might be seen in these non-obvious cases as in-
dispensable not just for storing up compassion, but also for directing
it into the proper channels. Reason needs to play this latter role be-
cause, while in some “concrete cases” intuitive cognition alone can
easily grasp the moral salience of the situation, many cases are not
so concrete. Clearly, Schopenhauer recognizes this in the political
sphere, where reason is required painstakingly to construct the legal
architecture that will keep the peace and protect rights as well as pos-
sible. Also in the personal sphere, Schopenhauer recognizes the need
for and power of rational reflection in developing a more pro-social
“acquired character.” What Schopenhauer is really keen to defend is
the notion that the ultimate source or foundation of morally worthy
action is the feeling of compassion, such that one can ultimately sup-
port those principles on the feeling that recognizes the fundamental
value of other sentient beings. Thus, I think a Schopenhauerian
should acknowledge that in the majority of cases where there is some
moral perplexity to the matter, the feeling of compassion is neither
necessary nor sufficient for acting in a morally worthy manner and
needs to be supplemented by rational reflection, which channels com-
passion, and by moral principles, which store compassion.
Regarding the worry that in some cases compassion is not only
not necessary but may be counter-productive for morally worthy
conduct, I believe that the concession Schopenhauer should make
above, namely, that in non-obvious cases, compassion ought to be
supplemented by reflection, is operative here as well. In the case of
206
207
the juror, while he or she might feel immediate compassion for the
accused, the situation is not an obvious one, and reflection is re-
quired to determine the right course of action. In this case, reflection
would likely yield the directive not to act on one’s immediate feelings
of compassion for the accused, but rather to take a larger view, and
perhaps redirect compassion toward the victim, or apportion com-
passion to each in varying degrees. In this way, rational reflection
would be indispensable for “directing” or “channeling” compassion
toward the just action.
IV. CONCLUSION
To sum up, I think the ways in which Schopenhauer acknowledges an

important role for reason (in rational reflection and formulating and
applying abstract principles) can help his account of morally worthy
action address the above problems, but he needs to acknowledge that
this account of reason’s role in ethics makes him a pluralist about morally
worthy incentives. In the final analysis, however, Schopenhauer is not
terribly concerned with working out a general normative theory, à
la Kant’s Doctrine of Virtue or Doctrine of Right. His focus is squarely
on the basis or source [die Grundlage] of morals. Whether morally
worthy actions can or must be mediated by rational reflection is re-
ally a secondary question for him, for his main aim is to answer the
question of the ultimate foundation for morally worthy action. What
is its source? Where does it truly bottom out? And the answer that
Schopenhauer is really committed to is that, at bottom, this source is
the feeling of compassion.
I think there is something quite valuable for contemporary eth-
ical reflection in Schopenhauer’s insistence on this point. First of
all, it does cohere with the intuitions behind the “one-thought-too-
many” school of thought. In some cases, where the right thing to do
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208
is plainly obvious—refraining from killing one’s rival; saving one’s

beloved spouse over a complete stranger if you can only save one;3
plucking a drowning child out of a fountain even if you will ruin your
leather shoes—the morally right thing to do from the right incen-
tive is simply to act immediately from compassion. Indeed, there are
some cases where rational reflection, beyond a quick intuitive ap-
praisal of the facts of the situation, is just not necessary, and might
even pervert one’s behavior from a moral point of view.
But more importantly, I think the insistence on compassion as the
ultimate source of morally worthy action is interesting for contempo-
rary theorizing because, as I argued in Chapter 4, we should see the
feeling of compassion as doing key epistemic work in his theory by
tracking inherent value. By focusing on this inherent-value-tracking
function of compassion, we see why Schopenhauer insists that the
feeling of compassion is the “purer” incentive. It is purer because it is
more immediately in touch with what is truly, inherently valuable in
the world, namely, beings who “have a world,” that is, conscious, sen-
tient beings. Compassion is a direct, immediate response to the value
of another being, whereas, in a rationally mediated response to other
beings there are abstractions that intervene between the inherent
value in another and the self. The latter response is more mediated,
and ipso facto less pure.
Certainly, sometimes, in morally complex situations, the less
pure, more mediated-by-reason response is the better one. But in the
morally obvious situations, an immediate compassionate response, a
response to another’s inherent worth or value, is the mark of the truly
good person, for a really good person makes “less of a distinction than
3. In the drowning spouse/stranger scenario, I’m assuming that for most people, their imme-
diate compassion would favor the loved one, but it could be the case that a person has taken
such a universal view of things, that his or her immediate compassionate response would not
be partial in this way.
208
209
everyone else between himself and others” (OBM, 249; emphasis in the
original). Rather than seeing a “thick partition” between the “I” and
the “not-I,” the good person, who responds to others’ suffering or the
prospect of their suffering with compassion, sees an “I once more”
rather than a “not-I” (OBM, 254). Thus, the compassionate person
places “someone else’s I . . . on a par with his own” (OBM 249). In
other words, the compassionate person feels and acts as though the
“other I” matters in the same way that “I” matters; we are on a value
par. And Schopenhauer holds that the compassionate person sees the
value landscape aright, for this is the way it is objectively speaking.4
Thus, while rational principles and rational reflection may be in-
dispensable as means of storing and channeling compassion in intel-
ligent ways, a container is just a container, and a channeler is just a
channeler; they are not equivalent to the truly valuable stuff being
contained and channeled. That ultimately valuable stuff is moral-
metaphysical insight, which is the ultimate source of all morally
worthy conduct.
4. As treated in Chapter 4, Schopenhauer supports this claim with his metaphysics, which
utilizes transcendental idealism to suggest that metaphysically speaking, we’re all one, in
the sense of being ultimately non-individuated. The robustly metaphysical interpretation
of Schopenhauer’s ethics makes a great deal of this grounding in a non-individuated met-
aphysical will, which is certainly complicated by what he says about intelligible characters.
My axiological view of how we should understand Schopenhauer’s metaethics, however,
does not emphasize this part of Schopenhauer’s case, and has the advantage of harmonizing
better with his adherence to the doctrine of intelligible characters.
209
210
21
Conclusion
The reconstruction of Schopenhauer’s ethical thought on offer here

constitutes a novel way of interpreting this philosopher in three main
ways. First, it views Schopenhauer as a more faithful Kantian than most
commentators have been apt to recognize: Along the lines of Julian
Young, John Atwell, and David Cartwright, this book has endeavored
to give a more fully fleshed out reading of Schopenhauer’s identifi-
cation of the thing-in-itself with “will” that is metonymic, so that he
does not overleap bounds on what can be legitimately predicated of
the “in-itself ” of the world as representation. Additionally, this inter-
pretation reads Schopenhauer’s metaphysics as immanent and “her-
meneutic”—offering an interpretation of the world as at bottom blind,
striving “will”—that is based on a coherentist methodology similar to
a Rawlsian reflective equilibrium avant la lettre. But perhaps the most
surprising facet of this proposal is to see Schopenhauer as retaining
some parts of Kant’s ethics in his own ethical theory, and especially in
his value ontology. To my knowledge, the only scholar who has seen
continuities in this regard—specifically as related to Schopenhauer’s
philosophy of religion and the grounds for pessimism—is Dennis
Vanden Auweele.1 Otherwise, it has been taken as pretty much
1. Dennis Vanden Auweele, The Kantian Foundation of Schopenhauer’s Pessimism

(London: Routledge, 2017).
211
21
Con clusion
common scholarly knowledge that Schopenhauer is intent on razing

Kant’s ethics to the ground, so that he can start afresh on a new foun-
dation. And while Schopenhauer does offer a new foundation for
his ethical theory in the feeling of compassion as the basis of mo-
rality, insofar as compassion tracks inherent value, he retains, albeit
in widened scope, the realist foundation for Kant’s ethics.
A second novelty of the interpretation given in this book is
that it sees Schopenhauer’s philosophy as an evolving rather than
static body of thought, especially with respect to the place of the
Platonic Ideas in his system. While other scholars have recognized
changes, especially with respect to the tempering of transcendent-
metaphysical ambitions in WWR II (Young, Atwell, Cartwright),
only some very early commentators (Noiré, Lovejoy) have suggested
that Schopenhauer’s views in the philosophy of nature changed as
he encountered proto-Darwinian thought, and to the best of my
knowledge no one has connected this change to a weakening of
Schopenhauer’s own grounds for pessimism, one of the main claims
made in this book.
A third novelty is the claim that there are really two Schopenhauers
rather than one as concerns his ethical thought. Although David
Cartwright refers to Schopenhauer’s ethics of compassion as his
“ethics in a narrower sense” (resignationism being Schopenhauer’s
ethics in a wider sense), to my knowledge no other scholar has seen
the tensions between his ethics of compassion and resignationism
as being so acute that we ought to see Schopenhauer as giving us
two mutually incompatible ethical ideals. The Knight of Despair
and the Knight with Hope distinction helps to capture the real
incompatibilities between the resignationist and the compassionate
moral realist sides of Schopenhauer’s ethical thought.
It is my hope that this reconstructed version of Schopenhauer’s
ethical theory—compassionate moral realism—will provide an in-
teresting option for the contemporary ethical-theoretical landscape.
212
213
Con clusion
It offers a hybrid Kantian moral realist/sentimentalist theory that is

not entirely anthropocentric and includes an intuitively appealing
value ontology insofar as it admits of degrees of inherent value based
on complexity of the type of being’s conscious “world,” and on sen-
tience rather than on an all-or-nothing-at-all criterion such as “ra-
tionality.” Thus, with respect to applied ethical debates about animal
rights, a Schopenhauerian value ontology of degrees of inherent value
puts this theory into the animal rights camp, but in a more moderate
way—closer to Mary Anne Warren’s “weak animal rights” position,
rather than, say, Tom Regan’s strong theory of animal rights.
Further, inasmuch as Schopenhauer’s value ontology widens the
scope of the moral community to sentient beings with a “world,” it can
also support a moderate environmentalist position, basing a broad
range of environmental protections not just on the rights and welfare
of human beings, but also on that of non-human animals. However,
while Gary Varner has aimed to show that Schopenhauer’s thought
lends support to deep ecology, and the moral considerability of plants,
and ecosystems as a whole, I agree with David Cartwright that the in-
dividualism of Schopenhauer’s ethics mitigates against seeing him as
a partisan of environmental holism. Further, I believe the criterion
for having inherent value for Schopenhauer, namely, being a con-
scious, sentient being, rules out inorganic nature, plants, species, and
very minimally sentient beings from having moral considerability.2 In
my view, the value of plants, species, and environments as a whole,
in Schopenhauer’s ethical thought, would need to be seen as instru-
mental and/or aesthetic rather than inherently moral. Yet, grounds
for protection of living but non-sentient parts of the environment

2. See Gary Varner, “The Schopenhauerian Challenge in Environmental Ethics,”
Environmental Ethics 7, no. 3 (1985): 209–230, and David Cartwright, “Varner’s Challenge
to Environmental Ethics,” Environmental Ethics 9, no. 2 (1987): 189–190.
213
214
Con clusion
may be adduced from Schopenhauer’s thought, indirectly from the

rights of sentient beings or from aesthetic considerations.
Ultimately, this work aims to correct an overemphasis in the en-
tire history of Schopenhauer reception on his pessimism. Indeed,
parts of his philosophy do show him to be the sort of “ultra-pessimist”
Oxenford and Nietzsche and pretty much everyone else has seen him
to be, but Schopenhauer’s ethical thought is much more than this.
Underneath the grimly sensational layer of resignationism lies a sur-
prisingly nuanced ethical theory. Although parts of this system are
badly under-theorized, such as the positive role of reason in ethics
and the ways in which empirical character may change, with the kind
of philosophical, rational reconstruction I have endeavored to do
here, I believe that another, more attractive picture of this thinker has
started to emerge. There is still a lot of work to be done to turn this
picture into a robust, Schopenhauerian general normative theory,
and to work out Schopenhauerian approaches to applied-ethical is-
sues; hopefully, this work has provided a good start along that path.
214
215
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Young, Julian (1987). Willing and Unwilling. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff.
Young, Julian (2005). Schopenhauer. New York: Routledge.
220
21
INDEX
acquired character, 94, 106–7, 198, 206 Schopenhauer’s lack of, 4, 9, 35, 69n37, 213
acronyms of works, xiii–xv in Western ethics, 18, 69, 182, 187
action, malicious, 31–32 Atwell, John, 2, 44n13, 56n25, 211–12
actions, morality of. See morality of actions
aesthetic theory, Kant’s, 123 beauty
aesthetic theory, Schopenhauer’s. See also experiences of, 114
beauty; sublime, Schopenhauer’s and “good will” concept, 49
theories of the as passive experience, 114–15, 118
versus determinism, 114, 118, 131 and will, 115, 123
freedom of subjects, 110–13, 137 of the world, 78n42
Guyer on, 113, 120 business accounting metaphor, 1, 13, 79
Ideas B, reconstruction in, 89–90
Ideas in, generally, 43–47, 53 Caius and Titus thought experiment
music in, 44n15 Caius, as Kantian, 155, 158–59, 201–3
values in, cognitive and hedonic, 89 compassion in, 157–59, 161, 200
and will-lessness, 115, 123 moral grounds in
will versus intellect in, 134 Caius’s, 154–55, 201
animals competing,  158–61
and the categorical imperative, 177 correct, 157
compassion towards, 18, 31, 170 Titus’s, 155–56,  200–1
inherent value of, 4, 180–82, 189, 191 and moral principles, 200–4
Junghuhn’s turtle anecdote, 70–71, 78 overview of, 154–58
protection of, English, 92 problems with, 165, 202–4
reason, as lacking, 193 Titus, superiority of, 157, 159
rights of, 4, 213 Cartwright, David, 34n12, 143n4, 145,
suffering of, 18, 69–71, 78–79 152n12, 163n17, 211–13
understanding, faculty of, 193 Cassina, Ubaldo, 153
in Western morality, 18, 69, 182, 187 Categorical Imperative, the
will, as manifestations of, 52, 61 and animals, 177
anthropocentrism. See also inherent value criticisms of, 146–48, 177
in Kantian ethics, 4, 69n37 Formula of Autonomy (FA), 177
221
2
I ndex
Categorical Imperative, the (cont.) simulation theory of, 153

Formula of Humanity (FH), 140, 148, towards animals, 18
176–77, 181–82, 201 value ontology of, 174
Formula of Universal Law (FUL), 148, compassion, Schopenhauer’s ethics of. See
177, 201 also compassionate moral realism;
Chambers, Robert, 40, 57 ethical principle, Schopenhauer’s;
chapter overviews, 6–9 inherent value
character about, 152
acquired, 94, 106–7, 198, 206 versus Classical Utilitarianism, 184
alcoholism example, 107–8, 198 as descriptive versus prescriptive, 99n4
dilemma of, 129–30 and inherent value, 8–9, 183–84
empirical instrumental interpretation of, 23–24
and determinism, 131 intuitive cognition in, 179–80, 205–6
and freedom, 105–6, 110, Kantian aspects of, 145, 171, 176, 185
113–14,  130–31 as Kantian-Moral Sense theory hybrid,
versus intelligible, 130–31, 135 185, 191
individual and determinism, 105–6 metaphysics of
intelligible (Kantian) axiological interpretation, 191
and determinism, 131, 135 and ethical-metaphysical
versus empirical, 130–31, 135 tendency,  172–73
and freedom, 90–91, 130–31, 133 moral basis, 171–74, 186–87
and Ideas A, 91 reasons for investigating, 172–73
and intellectual development, transcendent idealism, 209n4
Schopenhauer’s,  101–2 as truth, 171
nature of, 136 wisdom,  173–74
and representations, world of, 133 moral epistemology of, 185–86
and the will, 101 juror thought experiment, 163–64, 171,
moral,  197–98 205, 207
Christianity morality as basis of
animals and morality in, 18, 69, 78 animal cruelty argument, 169–70
Kant, influence on, 69n37, 146, 148 in Caius and Titus thought experiment,
moral virtues in, 24 157–59, 161, 203
as pessimistic, 13 versus cruelty, 166–68
Classical Utilitarianism, 79, 81, 184 as insufficient, 161–63, 169, 192
compassion. See also suffering as insufficient and unnecessary, 206
correctness of, objective, 173–74 language argument, 168–69
definition of, Schopenhauer’s, 153–54, metaphysics of, 171–74, 186–87
179, 190 strengths of, 170, 207–9
versus empathy, 152n13 as sufficient and necessary,
epistemic value of, 174, 184–85 151–54,  157–58
and happiness, 20 as sufficient but unnecessary, 163–65,
and inherent value, 186, 208–9 169, 205
and justice, 151, 163–64, 171, 187, 192 weaknesses of, 171, 191–92
as normative, 185 and Western philosophy, 170
pessimistic views on, 23 moral realism of, 186–87
and resignation problems with, 191–92, 205
as causing, 23–24 realism in, 145, 171, 176, 186–87
comparisons between, 2, 22, 32 reason, roles of, 206
as countering, 25–26, 32–33 reflection, role of, 163–67, 169, 192, 205–6
as preferable to, 34–35, 99 and reflection, rational
222
23
I ndex
as necessary, 163–66, 169, 192,  205–7 environmentalism, 5, 9, 213–14

as unnecessary, 208 epistemology, Schopenhauer’s
scope of, 187–91 and compassion, 174, 184–85
compassionate action empirical concepts in, 75
as beneficial to others, 26, 29 and the Principle of Sufficient Reason,
epistemic paradox of, 31–33 104, 136
and inherent value, 179–80 and the sublime, 127
morality of, 151–54, 157–58 equanimity, 109, 177, 194–95
resignation, as causing, 24, 30–31 eternal justice, principle of, 71–73
resignation, as hindering, 31–33 ethical-metaphysical tendencies,  172–73
as virtue, 179 ethical principle, Schopenhauer’s
compassionate moral realism. See also and Caius/Titus thought
compassion, Schopenhauer’s experiment,  200–4
ethics of; ethical principle, compassion, necessity of, 202–3
Schopenhauer’s; inherent value container metaphor, 27, 185n29, 200
and animal rights, 213 dualism in
categorical imperative, rejection awareness of, Schopenhauer’s, 33
of,  139–40 compassionate action
compassion, as foundation, 139 paradox,  29–33
Formula of Humanity in, 140 ideals, mutually exclusive, 32–33
versus Kant’s ethical theory, 139 overview, 26
overview of, 2–5, 8 resignation dilemma, 26–29
problems with, overview of, 5 resolving,  33–35
reason in, 8–9 and evolutionary theory, 27
value of, 212–13 versus Formula of Humanity, 201
compatibilism, 7–8, 100, 135–36 functioning of, 26–27
concepts, 75, 193 and inherent value, 184
versus intuitive cognition, 199–200
determinism, Schopenhauer’s. as moral incentive, 204
See also freedom versus resignation, 26–29
versus aesthetic theory, 114, 118, 131 text of, 8, 26
and character versus will-to-life,  27–28
acquired,  106–7 ethics. See compassion, Schopenhauer’s
empirical versus intelligible, 131, 135 ethics of; compassionate moral
individual,  105–6 realism; ethical principle,
hard,  98–100 Schopenhauer’s; Kantian ethics;
and insight, 117 morality of actions; reason
intellectual development in, 136–37 eudaimonology, 5, 25, 33, 93
and knowledge, 117 evils, 16, 61, 69, 74n39, 79, 81, 92
and qualities, essential, 106 evolutionary theory
and resignation, 114, 116–17, 131–33 and the ethical principle, 27
and self-knowledge,  107–8 and human nature, 68, 88–91
and will, 104–5, 108–9 and Ideas A, 54–60
Dienstag, Joshua, 39 and Ideas generally, 42–43
“Dürer Knight,” the, 11–13 and intellectual development,
Schopenhauer’s, 40–41, 56–57,
empirical character 60, 67
and determinism, 131 overview of, 43
and freedom, 105–6, 110, 113–14, 130–31 and Schopenhauer’s system, 41–42
versus intelligible, 130–31, 135 and will, 41–42
223
24
I ndex
facts of reason, 147n9 happiness

Formula of Autonomy (FA), 177 and desire, 75
Formula of Humanity (FH), 140, 148, internal sources of, 93
176–77, 181–82,  201 and pessimism, 13, 74
Formula of Universal Law (FUL), 148, in Stoicism, 108–9
177, 201 suffering, as not countering, 79, 81, 92
freedom. See also determinism in Utilitarianism, 158n14
in aesthetic experience, 110–14 from virtue, 19–21
alcoholic example, 107–8 hard determinism, 98–100
and character history, static view of, 86–88
acquired, 94, 106–7 hope, 5–6, 21–22, 34. See also “Knight with
empirical, 105–6, 110, 113–14,  130–31 Hope” view
intelligible, 90–91, 130–31, 133 human beings. See also freedom; reason,
evidence of, 136–37 faculty of; suffering
of intellect, 104, 133 dignity of, 109, 140, 177, 185, 195
and intellectual development, essential qualities of, 106
Schopenhauer’s, 100–4, 113 and Ideas, special, 45, 55, 67, 90
lack of, 105–9 inherent value of, 177, 180–81,
moral, 128–29, 131, 133, 135–36 188,  190–91
physical, 104 metaphysical needs of, 61–62
rational spontaneity view of (Kant) self-knowledge, empirical,  106–8
and intellectual development, special Ideas of, 45, 55, 67, 90
Schopenhauer’s, 100–4, 113, as static, 88
137, 199 understanding, as having, 193
Jacobi’s criticism of, 102 will and determinism, 105–9
overview of, 101–2 will-to-life of,  88–89
and resignation, 137, 199
Schopenhauer’s allegiance to, 101–3, 123 Ideas
and the sublime, 120, 121n20, 123, of aesthetics, 43–47, 53
127–28, 137, 199 and beauty, 115
reason’s role in, 135, 199 and history, 86
and resignation, 110, 112–14, individuation of, 48–53
131–33,  137 in matter, qualities of, 44
and responsibility, feeling of, 128–29, metaphysical aspects of, 46–47
136–37,  146n8 in nature, philosophy of, 42, 46–47, 53
and self-knowledge, empirical, 106–8 (See also Ideas A)
and the sublime, 124–25 as non-Darwinian, 43
tensions in, unresolved, 135–36 as non-representational, 43
in tragedy, dramatic, 112–13 Platonic aspects of, 43, 46
transcendental, 91, 100n5, 130, special, 45, 55, 67, 90
133–36,  191 time and space, independence from,
true moral, 128–29 47–48,  86
of the will, 104–5, 112–13, 131, 133 and will, metaphysical, 48, 52
as Willensakte, 48, 52–53
gardening, 45 Ideas A
Gelassenheit (equanimity), 109, 177, 194–95 definition of, 53
Gerechtigkeit. See justice and evolutionary theory, 54–60
good, concept of, 74n39, 178–80 and history, 87–88
Guyer, Paul, 113, 120 instantiations of, 54–55
224
25
I ndex
and intellectual development, in Ideas A concept, 44, 56–60

Schopenhauer’s, 44, 56–60 in Ideas B concept, 90
and intelligible character, 91 in metaphysics, 60–66, 85
removal of overviews of, 34, 40, 99
aesthetic experience, impact on, 89–90 pessimism, away from, 88–95, 212
evidence for, negative, 57–60, 94n51 prior work on, 40n7
evolutionary theory, as cause of, 57 intelligible character, Kantian
Ideas B, impact on, 88–89, 94 and determinism, 131, 135
internal logic of, 94 versus empirical, 130–31, 135
pessimism, ramifications for, and freedom, 90–91, 130–31, 133
67–68,  88–93 and Ideas A, 91
as timeless, 54–55 and intellectual development,
as Willensakte, 52–55, 76 Schopenhauer’s,  101–2
Ideas B nature of, 136
and aesthetic theory, 89–90 and representations, world of, 133
definition of, 53 and the will, 101
and Ideas A, removal of, 88–89, 94 intrinsic goods, 180
inherent value
of animals, 4, 180–82, 189, 191 Jacobi, F. H., 101–2
attribution of Jacquette, Dale, 100n5
question of, 182 Janaway, Christopher, 2, 15n3, 23–24, 44,
via compassion, 186, 208 70,  175–76
via intuitive knowledge, 180, 183, 185 Jesus Christ, 82
via sentience, 3, 182, 184, 213 Junghuhn’s turtle anecdote, 70–71, 78
axiological (parity) theory of, 179–80, justice
186–87,  191 and compassion, 151, 163–64, 171,
versus Classical Utilitarianism, 184 187, 192
definition of, 176 definition of, 29
degrees of, 188–89 eternal,  71–73
egoist examples, 183–84 as ethical ideal, 82, 94, 99
and environmentalism, 213–14 existence of, 149–50
and ethical principle, Schopenhauer’s, 184 and resignation, 24–25
of humans, 177, 180–82, 188, 190–91 the state, role in, 196–97
Kantian, 185, 211
of life generally, 78–79, 81 Kant, Immanuel. See also Categorical
and moral considerability, 189–91 Imperative, the; intelligible
moral realism of, 4 character; rational spontaneity;
Reginster on, 178 sublime, Kant’s theory of the
scope of, 187–91 aesthetic theory of, 123
and sentience, 3, 8, 81–82, 140, 182, 184, Critique of Pure Reason,  101–2
189, 213 facts of reason, 147n9
spectrum of, 4 influence of, 3
and suffering, 188–89 on metaphysics, 61
instrumental goods, 180 as moral realist, 140n2
intellectual development, Schopenhauer’s right actions, 162
and determinism, 136–37 Schopenhauer on, 61, 65, 78
and evolutionary theory, 40, 56–57, 60, 67 and sense boundaries, 49
and freedom, 100–4, 113, 137, 199 on suffering, 83n47
and hard determinism, 100 transcendental aesthetic, 174
225
26
I ndex
Kantian ethics. See also Categorical metaphysics, Schopenhauer’s.

Imperative, the See also compassion,
anthropocentrism in, 4, 69n37 Schopenhauer’s ethics of;
aspects retained by Schopenhauer, 145, morality of actions; will
171, 176, 185, 211, 212 as coherentist, 64–65
criticisms of, Schopenhauer’s empirical evidence, role of, 64–65
ethics as imperatives, 144–48 ethical-metaphysical tendencies,  172–73
Formula of Humanity, 148, as hermeneutic, 6, 61–66, 173, 211
176–77,  181–82 human need for, 61–62
grounds of, 146–47 of Ideas, 46–48, 52
Judeo-Christian thought, 146, 148 as immanent, 211
moral law, 146, 149, 158–59 intellectual development in, 60–66, 85
reason as source of morality, 145, 147 of morality, need for, 172–73
either/or terms, use of, 188 overview,  6–7
inherent value criteria, 3 and transcendental idealism, 66, 94n52
and Judeo-Christian thought, 146–148 metonymic devices, 6, 49, 51–52, 64,
praise of, Schopenhauer’s, 75–76,  211
143–44,  145n7 “misanthrope” label, 16
reason as source of morality, 147 mis-vitalism,  80–81
reflection, importance of, 166 Mitleid, 151–52. See also compassion
right actions, 162 moral considerability, 189–91
“Knight of Despair” view. See also morality of actions. See also compassion,
pessimism; resignation from Schopenhauer’s ethics of; ethical
will-to-life principle, Schopenhauer’s
“Dürer Knight,” the, 11–13 addiction thought experiment, 162,
influence of, 13–14 165–66,  171
origins of, 14–15 beliefs regarding, common, 150–51, 156
overviews of, 2, 22–23 Caius and Titus thought experiment
usefulness of, 212 Caius, as Kantian, 155, 158–59, 201–3
“Knight with Hope” view Caius’s moral grounds, 154–55, 201
about, 16–17, 23 compassion in, 157–59, 161, 200
accuracy of, 2–3 moral grounds, competing, 158–61
and compassion, 95, 212 moral grounds, correct, 157
happiness, possibilities of, 19 and moral principles, 200–4
institutions, improving, 18–19 overview of, 154–58
and intellectual development, 34, 99 problems with, 165, 202–4
overviews of, 2, 23 Titus, superiority of, 157, 159
strengths of, 7 Titus’s moral grounds, 155–56, 200–1
and suffering, 20 compassion as basis of
usefulness of, 212 animal cruelty argument, 169–70
in Caius and Titus thought experiment,
life, 18, 78, 81, 181 157–59, 161, 203
literature, 45 versus cruelty, 166–68
Löwith, Karl, 38 as insufficient, 161–63, 169, 192
as insufficient and unnecessary, 206
Magee, Bryan, 44, 56n25, 67 language argument, 168–69
malicious action, 31–32 metaphysics of, 171–74, 186–87
Menschenliebe (philanthropy), 24–25, overview of, 143
29, 204 and reflection, rational
226
27
I ndex
as necessary, 163–66, 169, “On the Foundation of Morals” (OBM).

192,  205–7 See also morality of actions
as unnecessary, 208 on altruism, 149–51
strengths of, 170, 207–9 altruistic versus egoistic action, 150–51
as sufficient and necessary, argument of
151–54,  157–58 empirical observations (stage
as sufficient but unnecessary, 163–65, two),  149–50
169, 205 on Kantian ethics (stage one), 143–48
weaknesses of, 171, 191–92 metaphysics (stage four), 171–74
and Western philosophy, 170 morality of actions (stage three), 150–71
criteria for, 157 overview of, 143
cruelty,  166–67 compassion, 143, 151–54
metaphysical foundations of conscience in, 151
axiological interpretation, 175–76, on egoism, 149–50
179–80,  186–87 on empiricism, 149
compassion, 171–74,  179–80 Formula of Humanity, criticisms of, 177
ethical-metaphysical tendency,  172–73 goal of, 192
as goal, 150 Kant’s ethics in
individual parity interpretation, 175–77 criticisms of, 143–48
inherent value interpretation, 176–82 elements retained, 145–46
transcendental-idealist,  173–74 praise of, 144
and moral law, Kantian/Fichtean, 158–59 method in, 142
motivations for, plurality of, 204–7 Mitleid,  151–52
reflection, necessity of, 163–67, 169 prize question, answer to, 143
religious grounds, 158 publication of, 142
“right actions,” 162–63 writing of, 141–42
sentimentalist grounds, 159–61 optimism, 13–14, 16, 65, 68, 87n49, 92
Smithian grounds, 160 Oxenford, John, 14–16
moral skepticism, 186
Murdoch, Iris, 97n2 painting, 45
music, 44, 74, 77, 152n12 personal suffering, 30–31
mysterianism, 100, 137 pessimism. See also pessimistic doctrine;
resignation from will-to-life;
Neiman, Susan, 39 suffering
Nietzsche, Friedrich versus Classical Utilitarianism, 79, 81
Darwin, influence of, 94n52 compassion in, 23
“Dürder Knight” epithet for Controversy of, 1, 38
Schopenhauer, 5, 11–12 and desire, 91
Schopenhauer, influence of, 1, 13, 38 “Dürer Knight,” the, 11–13
versus Schopenhauer, 78n42 existence, as error, 81
Nussbaum, Martha, 152n13 intellectual development away
from,  91–95
“One Schopenhauer” view and happiness, 13, 74
about, 2, 22 and hope, question of, 21
compassion in, 23 and Ideas A, removal of, 67–78, 88–93
ethical dilemmas problematizing, 29 identification with Schopenhauer, 214
persistence of, 23 mis-vitalism in,  80–81
resignation and moral virtues in, 24–25 “One Schopenhauer” view, 2, 22–25, 29
textual support for, 25 overview of, 1, 68
227
28
I ndex
pessimism(cont.) facts of, 147n9

and Oxenford’s review, 14–16 and freedom, 134–35, 199
will in, 75–76, 79, 84 and free will, 102–3
“worst of all possible worlds” function of, 193
argument, 87n49 human dignity, as sole source of, 195
Pessimismus, 13–14, 16 in humans versus animals, 193–95
pessimistic doctrine and language, 195
about, 68 politics, uses in, 196–97
bad-making feature of existence (b) resignation, role in, 198–99
about, 68 and self-improvement,  197–98
evidence for, 78–82 and the sublime, 198
improvement, impossibility of (c) and suffering, 194
evidence for, 83–87 versus understanding, 193
evolutionary theory, tensions uses of, 109
with, 68 Reginster, Bernard, 178
intellectual development religion, 13, 62, 92, 173, 211.
regarding,  88–93 See also Christianity
suffering, tremendous amount of (a) resignation from will-to-life
about, 68 agency, as requiring, 118–19
evidence, assessment of, 74–77 basis of, 13
evidence for, 68–73 and compassion
pleasure, exception of, 74 as cause of, 23–24
philanthropy, 24–25, 29, 204 comparisons between, 2, 22, 32
pleasure, 74–75,  81–82 as countering, 25–26, 32–33
political philosophy, 196–97 as preferable to, 34–35, 99
practical egoism, 186 and compassionate action, 24, 30–33
principles, moral, 202–3 determinism, fit with, 114, 116–17
versus ethical principle,
rational spontaneity, Kantian Schopenhauer’s,  26–29
and freedom, Schopenhauer’s ethics, as shirking, 34
theory of, 101–3, 123 freedom, as act of, 131–33, 137
and intellectual development, freedom as requirement for, 110, 112–14
Schopenhauer’s, 100–4, 113, and hope, 21–22
137, 199 and intellect, freedom of, 133
Jacobi’s criticism of, 102 and justice, 24–25
overview of, 101–2 maintenance of, 118–19
and resignation, 137, 199 moral virtues advancing, 24–25
and the sublime, 120, 121n20, 123, as passive experience, 116–18
127–28, 137, 199 paths to, 30
reason in pessimism, 23
and acquired character, 198 and philanthropy, 24–25
in compassionate moral realism, 8–9 reason, role in, 198–99
definition of, Schopenhauer’s, 103 source of, 1
equanimity, as enabling, 194–95 and the sublime, 124–25, 135
ethics, uses in suffering, as cause
moral character, changing, 197–98 knowledge of, 30, 115–18,
moral principles, 199–200, 204, 207 119n18, 134
reflection,  206–7 personal experience of, 30–31,
right actions, determining, 197 116–17,  119n18
228
29
I ndex
and suffering, reduction of, 85–86 Stoicism, 108–9, 194

and virtue, 25, 28 sublime, Kant’s theory of the
as wisdom, highest form of, 23, 80 dynamical, 123
Russell, Bertrand, 97n2 mathematical, 123, 127
and rational spontaneity, 120, 121n20,
Sainthood, 2, 23, 28, 30, 82, 118 123, 127–28, 137, 199
salvation. See resignation from will-to-life versus Schopenhauer’s, 120–21,
Schopenhauer, Arthur. See also “Knight 124–25,  127
of Despair” view; “Knight sublime, Schopenhauer’s theory of the
with Hope” view; “Two consciousness, second-order, 121
Schopenhauers” view freedom in, negative, 124–25
about, 11 Ideas, perception of, 123–24
discovery of, 14 Kantian freedom in, 121–28
as dynamic thinker, 34, 40 mathematical,  126–27
influence of, 38 Power 1, 124–25
on Kant, 61, 65, 78, 120 Power 2, 124, 126
“One Schopenhauer” view of, 2, process of, 122
22–25,  29 reason, role in, 198
Oxenford’s review of, 14–16 and resignation, 124–25, 135
politics of, 17, 196 self-consciousness in,  121–24
reputation of, 1, 38, 97 subject of, as active, 119–20
on science, 67 and tragic pleasure, 125
unwavering pessimist view, 16, 37–39 and will, 119, 122–25
Schopenhauer’s system. See also compassion, suffering. See also compassion
Schopenhauer’s ethics of; ethical aesthetic justifications for, 78n42
principle, Schopenhauer’s; ameliorating, hope for, 20, 91–92
freedom; Ideas; morality of ameliorating, impossibility of, 83–87
actions; will; will-to-life animal, 18, 69–71, 78–79
animals in, 4 desire as, 74–77
degrees, use of, 188 and eternal justice doctrine, 71–73
and the ethical principle, 26 evidence for, 68–73
and evolutionary biology, 41–42 and existence, struggle for, 18, 70
and freedom, Kantian, 121–28 goodness question, 29–30
hope in, 22 as inevitable, 70–71
Ideas in, 43–44 and inherent value, possession of, 188–89
Oxenford on, 14–16 and institutions, 17, 20, 69, 72, 74, 92–93
post-Darwin advantages,  93–94 knowledge of, 30, 115–18, 119n18, 134
Schopenhauer’s commitment to, 11, 14 meaning of, ascetic, 176
undertheorization in, 214 minimizing, imperative to, 73
Schulze, G. E., 101 personal, 30–31, 116–17, 119n18
sculpture, 45 versus pleasure, 74
sentient individuals and reason, faculty of, 194
inherent value of, 3, 8, 81–82, 140, 182, redemption of, 80
184, 189, 213 in relationships, 71
parity theory of, 179–80, 186–87, 191 resignation, as leading to, 30, 115–16
pleasure of, 82 as self-caused, 17, 69
suffering of, 82 and self-knowledge, empirical, 108–9
worth of, 81–82 and “Two Schopenhauers” view, 17–18
sentimentalism, 3–4,  159–61 as undeserved, 71
229
230
I ndex
suffering (cont.) of animals, 52, 61

will as causing, 84–85 and beauty, 115
and will-to-life, 18,  72–73 as the body, 118
and determinism, 104–5, 108–9
tragedy, dramatic, 30n10, 45, 77–78, 112–13 and evolutionary theory, 41–42
transcendental freedom, 91, 100n5, 130, freedom of, 104–5, 112–13, 131, 133
133–36,  191 and Ideas, 48, 52
true moral freedom, 129–30 and intelligible character, 101
“Two Schopenhauers” view. See also ethical metaphysics of
principle, Schopenhauer’s; cognition of, self, 49–51
intellectual development, cognitive intentionality, 52
Schopenhauer’s; “Knight of and Ideas B, 88
Despair” view; “Knight with metonymic explanation of, 6, 49, 51,
Hope” view 64, 211
definition of, 2 and music, 77
novelty of, 212 suffering, as causing, 84–85
and Oxenford’s review, 14–16 as thing in itself, 6, 50–53, 60, 75
resolving,  34–35 as painful striving, 76, 84
suffering in, 17–18 in pessimism, 75–76, 79, 84
versus representations, 60
understanding, faculty of, 193 and the sublime, 119, 122–25
Utilitarianism, 79, 81, 83n47, 158n14, 184 suffering, as cause of, 84–85
the world as, 48–50, 187
value ontology, Schopenhauer’s, 3–4, will, denial of. See resignation from
8, 85n48, 174, 213. See also will-to-life
inherent value Willensakte (acts of the Will), 48, 52–55, 76,
Vestiges of the Natural History of 90, 131
Creation, 57 Williams, Bernard, 166
virtue. See also compassionate action; justice will-to-life. See also resignation from
compassionate action as, 179–80 will-to-life
and equanimity, 109 affirming, 113n15
happiness through, 19–21 competition of, 84
inherent value, recognition of, 180 ethical principle, tension with, 27–28
intuitive cognition, as source, 179–80 of humans, 88–89
philanthropy, 24–25, 29, 204 and inherent value, 189–90
and resignation, 25, 28 resisting, human capability of, 88–89
suffering, as causing, 27–28, 72
Wicks, Robert, 63–64 “worst of all possible worlds”
will. See also will-to-life argument, 87n49
in aesthetic theory, Schopenhauer’s, 115,
123, 134 Young, Julian, 89–90, 211
230

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i

RECONSTRUCTING SCHOPENH AUER’S ETHICS

Hope, Compassion, and Animal Welfare

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

© Oxford University Press 2019

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

You must not circulate this work in any other form

CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress

Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America

For Marcia Baron and Allen Wood, mentors and friends

This reconstruction of Schopenhauer’s ethics has been in the works

to especially Schopenhauer’s value ontology is rewarding not just for

Garrett, Béatrice Longuenesse, and John Richardson. The session

Works by Schopenhauer are referenced in the text parenthetically,

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009),

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015),

RECONSTRUCTING SCHOPENH AUER’S ETHICS

1. For a detailed account of this controversy see Frederick C. Beiser, Weltschmerz: Pessimism in

This book aims to complicate and challenge the predominant

more defensible philosophical theory as such, but also is an inter-

Third, while Schopenhauer extends the realm of morally con-

Schopenhauer’s own philosophical thinking evolved, there emerged

metaphysics, on my reading of Schopenhauer’s view, is similar to of-

and are shaped largely by our empirical circumstances, still, rational

sphere, where it is required painstakingly to construct the legal ar-

A Tale of Two Schopenhauers

I. THE TWO SCHOPENHAUERS VIEW

This book is the tale of two Schopenhauers: the Schopenhauer who is

As depicted in the famous Dürer engraving (see fig. 1.1),

Fig. 1.1. Albrecht Dürer, Ritter, Tod und Teufel, copper engraving, 1513.

been, by Schopenhauer’s own account, fully developed between

[Schopenhauer’s] doctrine . . . is the most disheartening, the

present world, that the most ardent of Job’s comforters could

Oxenford thus frames Schopenhauer’s philosophy as first and fore-

Yet, the “ultra-​pessimist” label does not capture Schopenhauer’s

the conduct of men towards one another is characterized as a

The Schopenhauer in this passage almost sounds like an ally of the

Further, Schopenhauer is outraged by Christian morals and

Because . . . Christian morals give no consideration to animals,

Inhumane treatment of animals constitutes a paradigm case of vice

It is conceivable that all crime could be prevented by a perfect

And he displays hope that some measure of actual happiness can be

By diminishing our interest in our own self, our anxious self-​

Here, the way to attaining a “peaceful, confident cheerfulness” is

acting with universal compassion toward all sentient beings (those

7. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pressing me on this point.

virtuous—​might not be able to attain a happy life, but Schopenhauer

The temptations of hope, the flatteries of the present, the sweet-

And it is complete hopelessness that leads to resignation and renun-

In real life, we see that unfortunate people who have to drink to

violent and often miserable death on the scaffold, fully lucid

So one of the key questions of this inquiry is whether, by the lights

II. THE ONE SCHOPENHAUER VIEW

In contrast to my “two Schopenhauers” view, the traditional view is

the “temptations of hope,” recognizing that life can never be non-​bad.

The person who is so morally good that the distinction between

such an extreme redemptive transformation in consciousness,

true righteousness, inviolable justice . . . is so heavy a task, that

Similarly, Schopenhauer holds that the virtue of Menschenliebe when

One tension between Schopenhauer’s resignationism and his ethics

Similarly, the ideal of renunciation works in a manner contrary to the

comes” (OBM, 205). As I understand Schopenhauer’s metaphor of

within Schopenhauer’s system? When one looks closely at what

RECONSTRUCTING SCHOPENH AUER’S ETHICS

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

© Oxford University Press 2019

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

You must not circulate this work in any other form

RECONSTRUCTING SCHOPENH AUER’S ETHICS

I. THE TWO SCHOPENHAUERS VIEW

Fig. 1.1. Albrecht Dürer, Ritter, Tod und Teufel, copper engraving, 1513.

Yet, the “ultra-pessimist” label does not capture Schopenhauer’s

By diminishing our interest in our own self, our anxious self-

7. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pressing me on this point.

virtuous—might not be able to attain a happy life, but Schopenhauer

II. THE ONE SCHOPENHAUER VIEW

the “temptations of hope,” recognizing that life can never be non-bad.

1. Renunciation of the will-to-life

Renunciation of the will-to-life OR The life of compassionate action

IV. TOWARD A RESOLUTION OF THE DUALITY

I. THE TRADITIONAL INTERPRETATION—

one-sided, static picture of Schopenhauer’s thought that is really a

cognitive-objective ladder of the arts, the aim of artistic fountainry,

II.2. “Ideas A” and Evolutionary Theory

of the will-to-life. In a previous chapter of WWR II, chapter 26 “On

If the thing-in-itself is not essentially Will, however, then there

Here Wicks presents Schopenhauer as utilizing his breakthrough—

30. I am grateful to Alistair Welchman for pressing me on this point.

But does it not rather seem positively wrong-headed that, in

thought—transform “the fundamental philosophical convictions of

IV.1. Evidence for (a) There Is a Tremendous Amount

Additionally, Schopenhauer draws attention to the suffering of non-

But apart from human-made sources of suffering, Schopenhauer also

relationships involve a great deal of suffering (WWR I, 281–282).38