Upload
others
View
3
Download
0
Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
University of Calgary
PRISM: University of Calgary's Digital Repository
Graduate Studies The Vault: Electronic Theses and Dissertations
2016
Schopenhauer's Pessimism and Kant's Moral
Argument
Reid, Walter Joseph
Reid, W. J. (2016). Schopenhauer's Pessimism and Kant's Moral Argument (Unpublished master's
thesis). University of Calgary, Calgary, AB. doi:10.11575/PRISM/27714
http://hdl.handle.net/11023/3195
master thesis
University of Calgary graduate students retain copyright ownership and moral rights for their
thesis. You may use this material in any way that is permitted by the Copyright Act or through
licensing that has been assigned to the document. For uses that are not allowable under
copyright legislation or licensing, you are required to seek permission.
Downloaded from PRISM: https://prism.ucalgary.ca
UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY
Schopenhauer’s Pessimism and Kant’s Moral Argument
by
Walter Joseph Reid
A THESIS
SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES
IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE
DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS
GRADUATE PROGRAM IN PHILOSOPHY
CALGARY, ALBERTA
AUGUST, 2016
© Walter Joseph Reid 2016
i
Abstract
In this thesis, I argue that Kant's Moral Argument (for the afterlife) gives good grounds to
reject Schopenhauer's pessimism. I begin by defining pessimism as the view that "life is not
choiceworthy," and dispelling some initial objections to it. Having established that pessimism
doesn't succumb to obvious objections, I develop three lines of argument that tell in favor of it,
each articulated in a chapter of its own that explains how Schopenhauer reconceives the
categories of, in order, will, goodness, and death. Schopenhauer’s overall argument moves from
will to goodness to death; and in the final section of the thesis I demonstrate how Kant's Moral
Argument undercuts the crucial assumption about death on which pessimism depends (i.e.
mortalism). I conclude by rejecting an evidentialist objection to the Moral Argument, according
to which evidence provides the only justifiable grounds for believing in anything, including,
crucially, in a just afterlife.
ii
Acknowledgements
I want to thank the many people from whom I received guidance and support on this
project. I am particularly thankful for the support of my philosophical teachers, including Mark
Migotti, Jeremy Fantl, Morny Joy, Joshua Goldstein, Allen Habib, Chris Framarin, Andres
Kraal, and Howard Hopkins. Their styles of teaching and writing have inspired and sustained my
own philosophical work over the past six years at St. Mary’s University and the University of
Calgary.
In the context of this project, I am particularly grateful to my supervisor, Mark Migotti,
whose inspiring teaching and writing ignited an interest in Schopenhauer that still burns strong to
the present day. I have learned a lot from Mark’s philosophical orientation, and the countless
hours he spent with me on this project improved it immensely. He has true philosophical talent,
and I couldn’t have asked for a better supervisor. I am also particularly grateful to Jeremy Fantl,
one of the few people in whom kindness and philosophical brilliance are found copiously and in
equal measure. Jeremy has supported me for many years, and I aspire to be a philosopher and
teacher of his caliber.
I also want to thank my long-term philosophical friends, Kyle Kinaschuck and Niall Roe,
both of whom have been trusty travel-partners along my philosophical journey. I’m particularly
thankful to Kyle for reading and editing an entire draft of the present work.
Finally, I’d like to thank my wife, Miriam Bronski, for being my best friend and helping
me with what matters the most. Thank you.
iii
Dedication
This thesis is dedicated to my most enduring philosophical mentor, Howard Hopkins.
iv
Table of Contents
Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………...i
Acknowledgement…………………………………………………………………………i
Dedication………………………………………………………………………………….ii
Part I: Schopenhauer's Pessimism
1.1 The Possibility of Pessimism…………………………………………………......1
Part II: Pessimism as Will, Goodness, and Death
2.0 Will
2.1 Will: Practical-Rational Judgement……………………………………………14
2.2 Schopenhauer’s Reconceiving of Will: Will as Effective Desire……………...18
2.3 Argument from Willing to Pessimism………………………………………....28
3.0 Goodness
3.1 Goodness as Objective and Unconditioned……………………………………..34
3.2 Goodness as Willed and Contingent…………………………………………….38
3.3 Argument from Highest Good to Pessimism……………………………………44
4.0 Death
4.1 Death as Ethical-Personal Immortality..........................................................…...51
4.2 Death as Impersonal-Deliverance……………………………………………….55
4.3 From Death as Impersonal Deliverance to Pessimism…………………………..59
Part III: Kant's Moral Argument against Pessimism
5.0 Kant versus Schopenhauer on the Intelligibility of Human Life
5.1 The Meaning of the Moral Argument……………………………………….…...66
5.2 The Evidentialism Objection to the Moral Argument……………………………69
v
Morality, by itself, constitutes a system. Happiness, however, does not do so, save in so
far as it is distributed in exact proportion to morality. But this is possible only in the intelligible
world, under a wise Author and Ruler. Such a Ruler, together with life in such a world, which we
must regard as a future world, reason finds itself constrained to assume; otherwise it would have
to regard the moral laws as empty figments of the brain, since without this postulate the
necessary consequence which it itself connects with these laws could not follow. Hence also
everyone also regards the moral laws as commands; and this the moral laws could not be if they
did not connect a priori suitable consequences with their rules, and thus carry with them
promises and threats. But this again they could not do, if they did not reside in a necessary being,
as the supreme good, which alone can make such a purposive unity possible. The Critique of
Pure Reason, 639
1
Part I: Schopenhauer’s Pessimism
Chapter 1: The Possibility of Pessimism
Arthur Schopenhauer believed that the deepest truth of which the human mind is capable
is the startling realization that “no life is, upon cold and mature reflection, preferable to non-
being.”1 This doctrine, named “Schopenhauer’s Pessimism,” is his most enduring contribution to
the history of philosophy, as it continues to inspire discussion almost two hundred years after the
original publication of The World as Will and Representation.2 It is a doctrine that admits of
varying interpretations, and it’s essential to define it right at the outset of this investigation. One
notable commentator, Julian Young, likens pessimism to the first Noble Truth of Buddhism: i.e.
that “all life is suffering.”3 Others, Jordi Fernandez and Bernard Reginster, characterize
pessimism as “the view that enduring happiness is impossible”4 following Schopenhauer’s own
remark that “everything in life proclaims that earthly happiness is destined to be frustrated or
recognized as an illusion.”5 A fourth, Mark Migotti, recognizes pessimism as including a
broader range of argumentatively related theses. That is, he sees pessimism as containing not
only a ‘metaphysical thesis’ that “life is suffering,” an axiological thesis that “there is no
unconditioned good,” and a conative thesis that “all willing is futile,” but also a prohairetic thesis
that “life is unchoiceworthy.”6 Migotti plausibly construes the first three theses are premises in
different arguments for the core, prohairetic conclusion that “life is unchoiceworthy.” Rather
than re-invent the Schopenhauerian wheel by trying to redefine it, I stick with Migotti’s account
1 Schopenhauer, The Wisdom of Life (New York: Courier Corporation, 2012) 12 2 198 years this December to be exact. 3 Young, The Death of God and the Meaning of Life (New York: Routledge, 2014), 84. 4 Reginster, The Affirmation of Life (Cambridge: First Harvard University Press, 2008), 22. 5 Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation (New York: Dover Publications, 1969) 573 6 Migotti, “Schopenhauer’s Pessimism and the Unconditioned Good.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 33 (4)
(1995): 643.
2
of claiming that the prohairetic thesis that life is unchoiceworthy constitutes the main claim of
Schopenhauer’s pessimism. To say ‘X is unchoiceworthy’ is to say it isn’t worthy of rational
pursuit or affirmation.7 Life being unchoiceworthy therefore amounts to the earlier quotation that
“life is not, upon cold and mature reflection, preferable to non-being.” I cannot, of course,
unpack this claim entirely right at the outset, but –for now—I hope to have established the
definition of pessimism under which I will be operating in this thesis.
Schopenhauer’s pessimism is, then, the view that human life is not choiceworthy.8 Such a
doctrine contradicts the widespread sentiment that life is choiceworthy: the vast preponderance
of people carry on their lives, marked with hopes, ambitions, and goals, acting as if there are
some goods worthy of pursuit. The student completes his credentials, falls in love, and settles
down to raise and support a family through his career; the worker strives to complete the
apprenticeship that will allow her to have the financial security required to pursue her hobbies;
and the artisan cultivates her craft until she achieves the highest creative expression of which she
is capable. These are but three personas among countless and the details of each individual’s life
varies infinitely, but in all cases -- mutatis mutandis – the fact remains that almost everyone acts
as if life were choiceworthy. The fact, in other words, that nearly everyone acts as if life is
choiceworthy must be contested with right at the outset of any thesis concerning whether life is
choiceworthy.
7 Following the Aristotelian account of prohairesis that I’ll explore later. For now, it’s important to note that
prohairesis is the process of rational decision making whereby one selects the means required to achieve an end
rationally judged as good. Saying that life is unchoiceworthy prohairectically speaking, then, is to say there’s no
final good in terms of which the pursuit of life itself is rendered intelligible. That is, life isn’t a means through
which one can achieve a highest, final good, so there is no reason to pursue it as a rational course of action. 8 It is noteworthy, at this point, to mention that Schopenhauer doesn’t credit himself with the creation of pessimism
as a doctrine: he believes that it’s found in many of the world’s great religious traditions. Instead, he prides himself
with the only philosophically defensible formulation of it. I, then, refer to “Schopenhauer’s pessimism” to denote his
version of pessimism, not to indicate that the doctrine is somehow uniquely his.
3
If Schopenhauer wants to advance the thesis that life is unchoiceworthy –contrary to
such widespread intuitions—he indeed owes argumentation for his position. The purpose of this
introductory section is not only to define pessimism, but also to demonstrate why it’s plausible
enough to warrant further philosophical attention, widespread intuitions to the contrary
notwithstanding. I therefore offer an introduction to and preliminary defense of pessimism in this
chapter: there are initial problems that confront Schopenhauer’s pessimism: i) he seems
implicitly committed to some form of optimism in his own writings –call this “The Inconsistency
Problem” and ii) life doesn’t seem to admit of being judged objectively as unchoiceworthy – call
this “The Objectivity Problem.” In what follows, I dispel the initial implausibility of pessimism
through providing a resolution to the preceding problems. The Inconsistency Problem will be
dealt with quickly, but The Objectivity Problem will require a more protracted treatment.
The Inconsistency Problem
I have stated that the main claim of Schopenhauer’s pessimism is that life is
unchoiceworthy. This stance seems inconsistent with not only widely shared sentiments, but also
some of Schopenhauer’s own remarks. For instance, in the Preface to Schopenhauer’s The
Wisdom of Life he insists there is an “art of ordering our lives so as to obtain the greatest
possible amount of pleasure and success, an art which may be called eudaemonology.”9 He
proceeds to define eudaemonology as the art of navigating through a life that “would be
decidedly preferable to non-existence; implying that we should cling to it for its own sake, and
not merely from the fear of death; and further, that we should never like it to come to an end.”10
How is Schopenhauer supposed to reconcile these remarks with his main claim that life is
9 Schopenhauer, The Wisdom of Life (New York: Cosimo Inc, 2007), 11. 10 Ibid., 1.
4
unchoiceworthy?
Prima facie, these remarks and the main claim constitute a flat-out contradiction: if life is
unchoiceworthy, then there’s no way to make existence decidedly preferable to non-existence;
but Schopenhauer’s eudaemonology presupposes there is a way to make existence preferable to
non-existence. One might be tempted to excuse the contradiction on grounds of Schopenhauer
simply changing his view: the text cited (i.e. The Wisdom of Life) was after-all originally
published in 1851, whereas The World as Will and Representation (in which Schopenhauer’s
pessimism was originally defended) was published in 1818. Thirty three years is more than
ample time for a philosopher to make doctrinal amendments. However, this simple-minded,
“modification view,” simply doesn’t make sense of Schopenhauer’s uniform endorsement of
pessimism throughout all his writings, including the very text under consideration. Indeed, in the
very next paragraph, Schopenhauer reveals that “now whether human life corresponds, or could
possibly correspond, to this conception of existence [i.e. a choiceworthy conception], is a
question to which, as it is well-known, my philosophical system returns a negative answer.”11
Schopenhauer’s commitment to pessimism, then, even during this later period is beyond
question. So how are readers supposed to make sense of this apparent inconsistency in his views?
The resolution is found within the following general principle: claiming that one can
pursue a choiceworthy course of action within a system S doesn’t imply that S itself is
choiceworthy (i.e. preferable to alternatives). For instance, there being a best course of action
(one most choiceworthy) as a slave does not imply that slave-hood is itself choiceworthy. Indeed,
there are clearly more choiceworthy ways of being a slave, given that one is already subjected to
that fate. One could, for instance, embrace destiny with a form of stoic equanimity instead of
11 Ibid., 1.
5
spending one’s meager amount of leisure time in self-pity over her plight as a slave.
I suggest that Schopenhauer offers a similar form of reasoning in the passage under
consideration. He is saying that given one is already a human being (which is itself an
unchoiceworthy state), there are courses of action that are more conducive to living well.
Schopenhauer’s pessimism is therefore consistent with his eudaemonology: the latter elaborates
the best way in which to pursue a choiceworthy life given that one is already alive, but that does
not imply life itself is choiceworthy. The consistency problem between Schopenhauer’s
pessimism and eudaemonology is therefore more apparent than real. There is, however, a more
pressing problem that threatens Schopenhauer’s pessimism: viz., its presumption that one can
make objective judgements about the choice-worthiness of life as a whole. It warrants a more
extensive assessment.
The Objectivity Problem
At this point, then, I want to address, but ultimately dismiss that objection with the hope
of heightening pessimism’s plausibility. The objection amounts to the claim that the choice-
worthiness of life can only be decided subjectively –i.e. from the point of view of an individual’s
own inner experiences with and evaluations of existence: this amounts to saying that
Schopenhauer’s objective claim that existence as such is unchoiceworthy cannot even be
possibly true. It is, so the objection goes, a kind of category error in which Schopenhauer
confusedly thinks one can make an objective pronouncement on an issue for which only
subjective evaluations are relevant. If Schopenhauer hasn’t dealt with this fundamental objection,
then the whole of his theory suffers refutations at the hands of the glib rejoinder that “I think my
life is worth living.” To dispel this objection right at the outset, and thereby deepen the appeal of
Schopenhauer’s pessimism, I will now try to spell it out and ultimately dismiss it.
6
I begin with clarifying the widely used philosophical terms “objective” and “subjective.”
The terms generally reference a relationship between a perceiving subject and some object. A
judgement becomes objective when it accurately represents the object rather than the subject’s
‘contributions’ to it; whereas a subjective judgement usually reflects a contribution that the
subject made to the object rather than the intrinsic nature of the object itself. For instance,
consider two people looking at a rope submerged in water. From a given angle the one person
can see the rope and judge “that is a rope” –an objective judgement; whereas the second person
might perceive from an angle at which the rope appears as a snake through an optical illusion,
and judge “that is a snake” –a subjective judgement. This should illustrate the distinction
sufficiently, but what would it take to make an “objective” judgement about the choice-
worthiness of life?
To answer that question, one would need to specify the referent to which the judgement is
applied; in this case the referent is “human life,” but what exactly is human life? It cannot be just
the world as such, for the world is –in some sense—ontologically independent from human
beings: it could continue to exist even if humans didn’t. Human life is, then, more naturally
understood as the realm of human experience, i.e. the conjunction of mental experiences had by
the kind “human.” For the very notion of choice-worthiness presupposes an agent (imbued with
mentality) who can make choices in the first place. However, given the necessity of locating the
judgements about the choice-worthiness of life in mental experiences, there arises a serious
problem for Schopenhauer, who wants to claim that human life can be objectively judged as
choiceworthy: viz., it seems that only subjective judgements can be applied to the mental
experiences that can be rightfully called “human life.” Much can be said in favor of this
objection.
7
For starters, it seems like one’s beliefs about her own mental experiences aren’t in the
same epistemological category as beliefs about the world as such. This difference is explained, in
part, from the perspective of justification, because beliefs about one’s mental experiences (to
which subjective judgments apply) don’t collapse from the forms of defeaters that undermine
beliefs concerning the external world (to which objective judgements apply).
We can say –in general—that the following principle holds with respect to beliefs about
the external world, but not one’s mental experiences: Q defeats S’s belief that P if there’s at least
one external fact according to which not-P and S understands the implication not-P has for her
belief. I’m not concerned with defending the truth of this principle, since our task isn’t the
epistemology of defeaters. What I do want to stress, however, is that whatever the correct
account of defeat is, objective judgements about the external world don’t get defeated in the
same way that subjective judgements about one’s experiences do.
To illustrate, take the case of a person holding the belief “Inherent teleology explains the
development of species on earth” (P). P gets defeated when there’s some facts according to
which not-P and S understands those facts imply not-P, e.g. (“Evolution explains human
development”). Notice the general process that occurs when beliefs about the external world get
defeated: S (if he’s a rational agent) believes P is true owing to some facts and evidence, and
then some further external facts and evidence demonstrate not-P, after which his initial belief
gets defeated. To take the earlier example, the person judges “that is a snake” owing to an optical
illusion, but then later changes her judgement when confronted with the objective fact that it’s a
rope submerged in water. By contrast, it doesn’t seem like beliefs about our own psychological
states get defeated in the same way.
Indeed, it seems that only an individual gets to determine whether some facts count
8
against the truth of her internal mental states. One thinks, for instance, of the sadomasochist who
proclaims during some extremely painful activity that “this brings me pleasure” whereas all the
“objective” facts about the pleasure centers in the brain and the nature of the activity suggest that
“this is painful” should be the right response. It seems in these cases that appeals to objective
facts aren’t enough to undermine the truth value of the statements the person makes about her
own subjective experiences.
Philosophically speaking, the explanation for this dissimilarity (with respect to defeaters
for external beliefs vs. beliefs about one’s own happiness) is found in what philosophers of mind
call “introspective infallibility.” The idea behind introspective infallibility is famously expressed
in Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy in which he, after considering the possibility that
he’s deceived by an evil demon, concludes that “I certainly seem to see, to hear, and to be
warmed. This cannot be false.”12 Later philosophers, including the early Sidney Shoemaker,
would further refine this thesis into the concept of incorrigibility: “a statement P is incorrigible
just in case, if I make the judgment, it is not possible for anyone else to show that P is false.”13
Most importantly for present purposes, Shoemaker maintained that “among the incorrigible
statements are statements about mental states, e.g. statements about thoughts…and subjective
experiences.”14 From this brief discussion, we can gather that statements such as “I am happy”
“My life is worthwhile” – which represent one’s subjective experiences, and against which
Schopenhauer’s whole philosophy vehemently argues—are not subject to the same kind of defeat
as statements concerning the external world. Indeed, on Descartes’ and Shoemaker’s respective
accounts, those statements are ones to which only the individual’s own internal deliverances can
12 Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), VII:29 13 Shoemaker, “Self-Reference and Self Awareness.” Journal of Philosophy 65 (19) (1968): 555-597 14 Ibid.,
9
provide defeaters.
Transposed into our main discussion, these considerations elaborate the central objection
to the main claim of Schopenhauer’s pessimism: viz., it is a category mistake to assume that the
statement “life is unchoiceworthy” constitutes an objective judgement. Such a claim is an
inherently subjective statement insofar as the only truth-makers for it are one’s own subjective
evaluations of her mental states. The main claim of Schopenhauer’s pessimism therefore seems
to suffer refutation at the hands of the simple appeal to one’s own subjective intuition that “my
own life is choiceworthy.” If Schopenhauer can’t overcome this objection, his whole doctrine is
refuted easily and doesn’t merit further attention.
My strategy of response is to grant generously for the sake of argument that some
individual lives can be judged as choiceworthy from that individual’s insulated perspective. But
insist that such a concession is consistent with Schopenhauer’s pessimism. To begin explaining
this strategy, I return to the distinction between objective and subjective judgements.
An objective judgement is one that characterizes something mind-independent (i.e. what
it is rather than what one’s mind fabricates it to be). Now, I already established the difficulty of
offering an objective judgement of human life. Mental experiences constitute the latter, and those
experiences only admit of being judged subjectively. I can freely admit that someone
subjectively judges her own life to be choiceworthy. However, it would be false to assume that
it’s impossible to offer objective judgements concerning the choice-worthiness of life as a whole.
Indeed, there is room for objectivity when making judgements about the choice-worthiness of
life. In particular, rather than considering one’s own human life qua subject, one can analyze the
life of a human being as such. That is, life as a general member of the kind “human.” That is the
level of analysis at which Schopenhauer thinks one should make judgements concerning the
10
choice-worthiness of human life.
Now the objectivity of judgement is introduced here through replacing “one’s own
mental states” with “what it is like to be a human being in general” as the object of analysis. So
then the objection that it’s unintelligible to make objective judgements about the choice-
worthiness of life fails. One might, however, refuse this introduction of objectivity through
noting that there’s some special reason to favor one’s own mental experiences when judging the
choice-worthiness of life. One is, as it were, in a privileged position to judge the choice-
worthiness of her own life. Then, if the objection holds, one would still be stuck in the realm of
subjective judgements concerning life’s choice-worthiness, and pessimism couldn’t even get off
the ground. Having established that objective judgements concerning the choice-worthiness are
possible, I now want to embark upon the further task of showing that considering the human
being as such is also the preferable perspective. That is, the correct perspective from which to
adjudicate whether life is choiceworthy. I maintain there are two reasons for which the
perspective of the human being as such is preferable to assessing the choice-worthiness of one’s
own life: i) the choice-worthiness of one’s own life is often due to luck rather than objective
features universally shared of all human existences, and ii) judging from one’s own perspective
amounts to a failure of moral awareness. Let’s consider each in turn.
The subjective judgement that one’s own insulated life is choiceworthy isn’t reliable on
Schopenhauer’s view, for it depends upon luck. Philosophers are more than familiar with the
idea that luck isn’t sufficient to grant one’s judgement in other contexts. For instance, take
Edmund Gettier’s famous counter-example to the Justified-True-Belief Model of knowledge in
which the intrusion of luck proves to preclude knowledge: Jones has solid evidence for the false
proposition that “Smith owns a Ford,” (S) and S implies three disjunctive propositions (1)
11
“Either Smith owns a Ford or he is in Barcelona,” (2) “Either Smith owns a Ford or he is in
Boston,” and (3) “Either Smith owns a Ford or he is in Brest-Litovsk.” Then, through sheer luck,
Smith happens to be in Boston, and (2) ends up being true. Jones therefore has a justified true
belief concerning (2), but can’t be plausibly said to know it. One important presupposition here
is that luck precludes knowledge.15
I submit that a similar form of reasoning is relevant to the case of the insulated individual
whose life happens to be choiceworthy out of luck. If one is born into a set of circumstances that
are unchoiceworthy (as Schopenhauer suggests), it might still be the case that those
circumstances are disjunctively related to choiceworthy states. For instance, “Either one
experiences the suffering inherent in life or one experiences pleasure,” “Either one experiences
death-agony or one is free from anxiety,” etc. Now Schopenhauer affirms that the first disjuncts
in propositions of this kind are inherent to life, but also admits that the second disjuncts can
obtain for individuals who are lucky enough to have the right circumstances and dispositions.
One could easily imagine that an individual’s entire life –through luck—could be a conjunction
(or predominantly a conjunction) of the latter disjuncts. However, having that state for one self
through luck isn’t sufficient to prove that the underlying structure (i.e. life) is itself
choiceworthy. Assuming otherwise, is tantamount to the lucky winner who claims that the nature
of a lottery is to give money, while ignoring the countless multitudes who lost. Luck and
happenstance with respect to the choice-worthiness of one’s own life are insufficient to prove
that life as such is choiceworthy.
Now, I postpone defending the claim that such choiceworthy lives are in fact by-products
of luck until later in the thesis. What I need to note now is that any given individual’s life is
15 Gettier, “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” Analysis 23.6 (1963): 121-123.
12
susceptible to luck, and that fact favors assessing choice-worthiness from the perspective of the
human being as such. Returning to the earlier analogy, to learn about the set-up of a lottery one
needs to look at the full range of data instead of selectively picking the lucky winners. Likewise,
to learn about the structure of human life as such one needs to consider the most general
categories of that existence, rather than synchronic reifications of individual human luck.
Considering the full range of data (i.e. the most general categories shared by all human
existences), illustrates a more accurate picture into which the vitiating factor of luck cannot
creep. Aside from this epistemic reason to favor the perspective of the human being as such,
there’s also a moral one.
This moral consideration announces the second reason to prefer the objective perspective
of the human being as such: viz., people who assess life from the perspective of their individual
lives are suffering from a failure of compassion. To affirm one’s own choiceworthy isolated life
while the countless multitudes of humans and animals are greeted with untold pain and hardship
daily is “to make a bitter mockery of the untold suffering of humanity.”16 Such a person, to speak
in simile, is like the employee of a corrupt company, who, while personally benefitting from the
company, is nevertheless worthy of contempt, since he is complicit in affirming a business
whose very set-up and essential structure necessitates it will engender widespread suffering. Just
as an isolated employee’s well-being cannot be considered choiceworthy in light of the overall
suffering engendered by her company, so too an individual’s own happy life cannot redeem or
make choiceworthy an existence in which suffering is the inescapable norm. Or as Schopenhauer
himself remarks: “that thousands had lived in happiness and joy would never do away with the
16 Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation (Cambridge University Press, 2010), 326.
13
anguish and death-agony of even one individual.”17 When one assesses life from the appropriate
perspective (i.e. one that includes recognition of the “anguish and death-agony” of individuals),
he must conclude that life is unchoiceworthy. The isolated individual’s choiceworthy life (even if
there were such a life) therefore wouldn’t count against Schopenhauer’s pessimism. And it
certainly shouldn’t be appointed as the correct perspective from which to make judgements about
the choice-worthiness of life. I have therefore established not only that the objective perspective
is possible, but also that there’s two positive reasons to favor it over the subjective one.
The main claim of Schopenhauer’s pessimism can therefore be considered not only
possible, but also immune to the obvious objections from subjective judgements that people are
wont to make (e.g. that my own individual life seems choiceworthy). Indeed, one can objectively
judge that human life as such is unchoiceworthy. The task of showing the doctrine’s coherence is
the comparatively easier one. I now, in the ensuing chapters, need to offer actual evidence and
arguments for the truth of that objective judgement. In what follows, I demonstrate that
Schopenhauer does indeed offer justification for that objective judgement through re-conceiving
of three philosophical categories: will, goodness, and death.
17 Ibid., vol. 2, 576.
14
Part II: Pessimism as Will, Goodness, and Death
Chapter 2.0: Will
In this first chapter, I explore the relationship between Schopenhauer’s accounts of will
and pessimism. I proceed in three phases. First, I characterize some classical accounts of will as
background against which the pessimistic nuances of Schopenhauer’s own account can be
brought out. At this point, I examine the conceptual precursors to the will found in Plato and
Aristotle as well as a fully developed conception of the will in Kant. Second, with these
antecedents in place, I’ll explore how an important part of Schopenhauer’s pessimism consists in
a re-conceiving of them. Finally, the chapter concludes by highlighting the central argument
through which Schopenhauer attempts to link willing with pessimism.
Chapter 2.1: Will: Practical-Rational Judgement
In ancient philosophy, it’s unclear whether there is a full-blown conception of “the will”
per se, but one does find material out of which the will was later born. For instance, in Plato’s
Republic Book IV, the soul is conceived as having a tripartite structure: there is (i) “the part
with which it lusts, hungers, thirsts, and gets excited by other appetites without reason and
appetitive part, companion of indulgences and pleasures,” (the appetitive part of the soul); (ii) the
spirited part of the soul, and the rational part of the soul which governs the preceding -- “it is
appropriate that the reasoning part should rule, since it is really wise and exercises foresight on
behalf of the whole soul, and for the spirited part to obey and be its ally.”18 These parts
correspond, respectively, to the Greek concepts of epithumia, thumos, and boulesis. Now, our
purpose isn’t to offer the best exegesis of Plato’s theory of the soul, but is instead to point out an
aspect of his theory that acts as a precursor to the concept of will.
18 Plato, Republic (Harvard University Press, 2013), 74.
15
For Plato, this tripartite conception of the soul suggests that one can pick out certain ends.
In fact, the word boulesis refers to a faculty in the soul for desiring and picking out as an end that
which is good; one can, for instance, take the appetite for sexual gratification and “reign it in” –
to allude to the charioteer metaphor from the Phaedrus —in accordance with reason by, for
instance, directing it towards the intelligible, good end of marriage instead of unbridled
debauchery. From this classical account, we have then a notion of human action as teleological
in the sense of being able to choose ends and align the different parts of the soul towards them:
the soul can conquer inordinate desire through reigning it in and successfully re-directing it
towards ends conducive to fulfillment. But there isn’t yet the notion of the will as a voluntary
faculty of the soul for choosing actions distinct from the categories of epithumia, thumos, and
boulesis. One can act under the influence of passion as opposed to reason, but there is no clear
ontologically distinct faculty that makes voluntary actions independently from these tripartite
aspects of the soul.
The full-blown conception of the will as voluntary faculty gets further brought out by
Aristotle but doesn’t reach full expression until Kant.19 This account’s most relevant features are
found in Nicomachean Ethics Chapter 1.7 in which Aristotle presents his famous “function
argument.” Aristotle maintains that “for all things that have a function or activity, the good and
the 'well' is thought to reside in the function.” To discern “the good” for human beings, then, the
argument suggests we’ll need to learn the function of a human being as such. Here, Aristotle
isn’t concerned with enumerating a list of things people consider good: rather, he’s occupied
with the more philosophically demanding task of identifying a highest good, and whatever it may
19 Although we arguably have a conception of the will –modelled off the theological notion of the will of God—
present from the patristic period in Augustine.
16
be he argues it must exhibit the following three features: (i) “it is desirable for itself, (ii) it is not
desirable for the sake of some other good, and (iii) all other goods are desirable for its sake.”20
Aristotle’s answer to the question of what fulfills these features, that which constitutes the
function of human beings as such, is unequivocal: it is eudemonia. Or, to borrow the now famous
line, “it is the activity of the soul in accordance with virtue.”21 For the function argument, then,
Aristotle (a) starts with the claim that human beings as such have a function (which constitutes
their goodness), and (b) ends with the conclusion that the good for human beings is rational
activity of the soul. The highest good, then, consists in the fulfillment of this human function.
The argument can be summarized as follows:
1. A kind’s goodness is found in fulfilling its function.
2. Rational activity of the soul is the function of the kind “human being.”
Therefore, the goodness of the kind “human being” is this rational activity of the soul
(i.e. Eudaimonia).
The argument, as it stands, is formally valid, but the theory of will backing how humans are
supposed to achieve this final good isn’t spelled out fully. Instead, we get a theory of human
action relying on the following resources. Aristotle incorporates the categories of epithumia,
thumos, and boulesis, highlighting the latter as the faculty through which we come to desire that
which is good as an end for conduct. He further introduces the notion of prohairesis, as the
faculty for determining the means to achieving those ends. According to Charles Kahn,
prohairesis can be further understood as “the point of confluence between our desire for a goal
and two rational judgments: first, our judgment that the goal is a good one, and, second, our
20 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 2014), 36. 21 Ibid., 55
17
judgment that this action is the best way to pursue it.”22
Aristotle’s theory of action, then, contains at least three components relevant to our
discussion: (i) voluntary actions (which aren’t necessarily chosen in the sense of prohairesis just
mentioned). For instance, Aristotle considers acting under the influence of thumos as an instance
of voluntary action, but it isn’t “chosen” since one didn’t rationally deliberate about the means
for achieving the goal of that action. We also have (ii) that range of actions that are in fact
chosen since we selected the means for them (i.e. prohairesis). And finally (iii) the notion of
boulesis, a rational desire for that which is good or beneficial. Now to say, as Charles Kahn
points out, that Aristotle lacks a conception of the will, is to say that there isn’t a single concept
through which (i), (ii), and (iii) are all unified: a single faculty accounting for the directing of
ourselves in accordance with our desire for the good via means we’ve deliberately chosen.
One finds such a full-blown conception of the will in the Medieval period onwards, but
for the present purposes of understanding the background of Schopenhauer’s pessimism, I focus
on a figure of more direct relevance: viz., Immanuel Kant. In Kant, one finds the notion of what
I’ll call Willing as Practical-Rational Judgement, an account that subsumes much of the ancient
traditions while also clarifying and adding to them.23 Willing as Practical-Rational Judgement
states that willing (construed as a single unified faculty) is a process through which one (i)
judges certain ends as good (i.e. choiceworthy), and then (ii) determines the modes of
comportment required to attain those goods. Willing, in other words, is the process of what
philosophers call “practical reason.”
For Kant, practical reason is “a practical faculty given to us” through which one can
22 Khan, The Question of “Eclecticism”: Studies in Later Greek Philosophy (University of California Press, 1988),
240. 23 Kant, The Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (Cambridge University Press, 1998).
18
judge certain ends as good and “select the means towards those ends.” This means-ends
distinction follows Aristotle’s distinction between prohairesis and ends, but with Kant one finds
them unified through the idea of the good will. The Good Will is the proper use of practical
reason whereby one judges the end as good (and out of duty) pursues the means to it. There is
then, for Kant, a faculty whereby one judges ends are choiceworthy and good, and then
deliberates about the proper means for realizing them.
The important presuppositions of Willing as Practical-Rational Judgement are then,
unsurprisingly, the following: (i) there are choiceworthy goods worthy of pursuit, and (ii)
humans can realize them through the proper use of practical reason. We define the will as such
since both the classical accounts and now Kant identify willing as a process in which one (a)
judges certain goods as worthy of pursuit, and then (b) performs the behaviors required to attain
them successfully. This denotes that willing encompasses not only the judgement that X is in fact
good, but also the practical acts of attaining that good X successfully.
Now, it is my contention here, that a fundamental theme of Schopenhauer’s pessimism is
his denial of Willing as Practical-Rational Judgement. Once we’ve properly understood willing,
we’ll realize that there aren’t things to be judged as worthy of pursuit, and our wills aren’t
capable of performing the practical process of successfully pursuing them anyways.
Chapter 2.2: Schopenhauer’s Reconceiving of Will: Will as Effective Desire
The central contention of this section is that Schopenhauer replaces “Willing as Practical-
Rational Judgement” with “Willing as Effective Desire.” Willing as Effective Desire maintains
that willing consists of two features: (i) a blind process of ceaseless desiring, and (ii) a lack of
agent-causation between reason-states and behaviours: i.e. there’s no rational subject who can
pick reasons on which to act. Rather, actions are just the immediate expression of the Will over
19
which the “agent” exerts no control or causal influence. We consider each feature in turn.
For Schopenhauer, the will is indeed a blind ceaseless desiring force. He states this
almost verbatim: the will is a “blind ceaseless, striving force” which keeps the subject of willing
“continually on the turning wheel of Ixion,...always scooping water in the sieve of the Danaids,
and as the eternally thirsting Tantalus.”24 To gain greater understanding of this first feature of
Willing as Effective Desire, it’s necessary to situate it within the Kantian framework in which it
has intelligibility.
Here, attention must first be paid to the second chapter of WWR I, The Objectification of
the Will, in which Schopenhauer offers the most comprehensive treatment of his metaphysics of
willing. This passage itself assumes the reader’s familiarity with Immanuel Kant’s transcendental
idealism propounded four decades prior in The Critique of Pure Reason. I will not digress into an
analysis of transcendental idealism, but will only mention the parts apropos to the present task.
Elsewhere, in section 17 volume 1 of Parerga and Paralipomena, Schopenhauer takes it that:
Transcendental is the philosophy that makes us aware of the fact that the first and
essential laws of this world that are presented to us are rooted in our brain and are therefore
known a priori. It is called transcendental because it goes beyond the whole given
phantasmagoria to the origin thereof. Therefore, as I have said, only the Critique of Pure
Reason and generally the critical (that is to say, Kantian) philosophy are transcendental.25
For present purposes, the passage (i) references the Kantian thesis that the transcendental
subject possesses faculties through which representations of the world are created, and (ii)
implies that there’s a distinction between those representations and the thing-in-itself (i.e. the
24 Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, (Cambridge University Press, 2010) Book 3, 196 25 Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena (Oxford University Press, 1974), 82.
20
ding an sich) they represent. Alternatively, one could say that the mind mediates experiences by
creating a representational filter into which the actual nature of the world cannot penetrate. We
perceive only images but not the real thing they betoken.
Schopenhauer –as I said-- assumes this distinction between representations of the world
and the thing-in-itself, echoing it again in section 17 of The Objectification of the Will through
his discussion of how the natural sciences are designed to classify “those phenomena known by
us only as our representations.”26 Beginning in section 18, however, he quickly insists on
reconstructing the epistemological bridge between the noumenal and phenomenal world (i.e.
between things as they appear to me—as represented by the natural sciences, on the one hand;
and things as they are in themselves—as experienced non-representationally by embodied
beings, on the other). As Schopenhauer writes:
To the subject of knowing, who appears as an individual only through his identity with
the body, this body is given in two entirely different ways. It is given in intelligent perception as
representation, as an object among objects, liable to the laws of these objects. But it is
also given in quite a different way, namely as what is known immediately [i.e. non-
representationally] to everyone, and is denoted by the word will.27
Here, we learn that embodied subjects are privy to a unique form of knowledge, for they
experience not only the external representations of their body, but also the non-representational
willing that lies, as it were, on the “inside” of those representations. Willing, then, is the inner
nature of the world.
For Schopenhauer, willing isn’t simply the sphere of activity connoted by the English
26 WWR I, 67 27 Ibid., Book 1, 100
21
word “volition.” Rather, for Schopenhauer, willing is rooted in the Will (die Wille), a blind
metaphysical force characterized by blind ceaseless striving and desire. He writes: “the will, as
the thing-in-itself, constitutes the inner, true, and indestructible nature of man; yet in itself it is
without consciousness.”28 He continues that without consciousness, this surging force, i.e. the
Will “dispenses entirely with an ultimate aim and object. It always strives, because striving is its
sole nature, to which no attained goal can put an end. Such striving is therefore incapable of final
satisfaction.” Here, Schopenhauer makes a leap that might appear incredible to some readers:
from the claim that willing is the inner nature of the world, he infers that willing is a blind
ceaselessly desiring force. Now many may concede that we access ourselves as willing forces
internally, but how does that undermine the ability to direct the will rationally? This inference
requires further explanation, since –as stated so far—it doesn’t follow.
The answer to this question takes us to a consideration of the second feature
characterization of Schopenhauer’s view of Willing as Effective Desire: viz., the lack of agent-
causation between reason-states and behaviours: i.e. there’s no rational subject who can pick
reasons on which to act. Rather, actions are just the immediate expression of behaviours over
which the “agent” exerts no control or causal influence. Indeed, Schopenhauer explains the a-
rationality of the will through showing that there’s no agent “behind the scenes” causing
behaviour.
In the classical accounts we surveyed, there was first a subject who judges that X is good,
then directs his desires and willing towards the process resulting in the successful achievement of
X. I, for instance, judge that procreation is a good, and then desire the process resulting in a
procreative action of my body and ultimately progeny: this whole process constitutes the process
28 Ibid., Book 2, 19, 201
22
of Willing as Practical-Rational Judgement. However, for Schopenhauer, there is no separate and
prior process of deliberation that results in the willing of bodily activity: instead, bodily activity
is reducible to and indeed identical with willing and desire itself. He writes:
The act of will and the action of the body are not two different states objectively known,
connected by the bond of causality; they do not stand in the relation of cause and effect;
but are one and the same thing, though given in two entirely different ways, first quite
directly, and then in perception for the understanding. The action of the body is nothing
but the act of will objectified, i.e. translated into perception.29
Schopenhauer hereby denies the claim that the will causes bodily activity. There is no causal
relationship between the will and behaviour: the latter is simply the objective description of the
former that we access through phenomenal perceptions. There is then, for Schopenhauer, no
moment of judgement that X is good, on the basis of which we initiate the practical process of
desiring and acting towards X. There is no subject prior to the act, through whom we judge the
good, and then causally execute behaviours. There is only the blind process of desiring and
willing that is itself identical with those behaviours.
Schopenhauer’s proposal here might sound absurd, especially in light of our own folk-
psychological experiences of ourselves as first deliberating and then using our wills and desires
to bring about behaviours causally. But the underlying idea here is far from unique to
Schopenhauer, and receives support from the opponents of folk-psychological accounts of
willing and action, to whom many will be significantly more sympathetic. There is, for instance,
an interesting affinity between the Schopenhauerian remarks just made, and the position
endorsed in Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind:
29 Ibid., Book 1, 100-102
23
The clown’s tripping and tumbling are the workings of his mind, for they are his jokes….
Tripping on purpose is both a bodily and a mental process, but it is not two processes,
such as one process of purposing to trip and, as an effect, another process of tripping. Yet
the old myth dies hard. We are still tempted to argue that if the clown’s antics exhibit
carefulness, judgement, wit, and appreciation of the moods of his spectators, there must
be occurring in the clown’s head a counterpart performance to that which is taking place
on the sawdust. …There must be some shadow-operation which we do not witness,
tallying with, and controlling, the bodily contortions which we do witness.30
From these passages, we can now gather how Schopenhauer’s re-visioning of willing is
supposed to imply pessimism.
There is, to quote Ryle’s famous phrase, no “ghost in the machine:” no need, in other words, to
postulate an ontological duality between the body and mental faculties of willing and
deliberation. They have two senses but only one referent: they are different vocabularies that
refer to the same phenomenon. There is, then, no need to postulate a faculty of volition that
spookily causes bodily activity.
Schopenhauer’s argument belongs within the same tradition. Rather than postulating two
ontological categories (viz., bodies and faculties of volition) and having to explain the causal
relationship between them, Schopenhauer insists that there is no additional faculty above the
body. Rather, the body is just the manifestation of the desiring will – the will as experienced
through the filters of phenomenal perceptions. Will and body are two words for what is
ultimately the same thing under a different description.
Now despite having the virtues of being supported by Ryle’s considerations and offering
30 Ryle, The Concept of Mind, (London: Hutchinson, 1949), 13.
24
a resolution to the causation problem (i.e. how the will causes bodily activity), some might still
think that Schopenhauer’s reduction of the body to will isn’t plausible. One worry concerns cases
where the execution of the will is temporally distanced from the behaviour it intends to carry out:
that is, cases of willing something in the future. Take, for instance, the case of someone who
wills that he’ll finish his essay after the television show ends. He wills at time T1 that he’ll
complete the assignment after the show at some later time T2. Here, there seems to be a temporal
disconnect into which some kind of causation can creep. The man wills to finish the assignment,
and his resolve later causes his bodily actions of writing it, yet in those later instances of
behaviour the act of will doesn’t seem present (for the simple reason that it occurred in the past).
Willing and bodily activity, then, wouldn’t be identical. This possibility of future willing would
seem to undermine Schopenhauer’s claim that the will and body are identical (and hence his
corollary claim that the former is foreclosed from rationally directing the latter). But fortunately
for Schopenhauer, he anticipates precisely this objection.
He maintains that: “resolutions of the will relating to the future are mere deliberations of
reason about what will be willed at some time, not real acts of will. Only the carrying out stamps
the resolve; till then, it is always a mere intention that can be changed.”31 Schopenhauer accounts
for purported instances of future willing through claiming they are mere intentions. This seems
sound, since the opponent is claiming a causal relationship between willing and behaviour such
that the will causes the latter to come about. But in cases of future willing, the will often wasn’t
sufficient to cause the corresponding behavior. The man often “wills” to complete the
assignment but through akrasia or whatever other mechanisms fails to bring about his actions. It
is more natural then, to say the person intends future actions, but doesn’t will them until they are
31 WWR, 100
25
actually manifest behaviorally. Otherwise we are stuck with the puzzle of explaining why certain
instances of “willing” have causal efficacy whereas others don’t.
In fact, this puzzle of explaining why some mental acts of willing and deliberation don’t
cause their corresponding instance of behavior is a problem faced more significantly by the
classical accounts, and it is one to which Schopenhauer can provide a very simple answer. The
problem, to clarify, is accounting for akratic action: cases in which S knows action A is good,
desires and wills to do A, but through some weakness of will ends up doing not-A. These cases
require some serious philosophical explanation within the classical theories of willing. They
postulate two ontological categories: an agent and its actions. When all of the agent’s reasons
suggest action A, and she desires to do A, but her action ends up being not-A, its difficult to
explain how that happened. Plato dodges the problem through saying that one always acts on
what she thought was the good, but we know of cases in which a person identifies something as
not good but does it anyways (e.g. the self-destructive behavior of an addict). It is a problem
faced by the classical accounts for which they provide implausible solutions.
The problem indeed only exists for Willing as Practical-Rational Judgement, since the
judgements are supposed to be the determiners to which the will and subsequent practical actions
conform. An individual first judges X to be good, and then acts in accordance with that
judgement. However, from the Schopenhauerian perspective of Willing as Effective Desire,
akratic action is easily explained: those mental acts of judgement (i.e. one’s “reason states”)
aren’t even a part of the causal process through which actions are brought about. Rather, akratic
actions demonstrate and disclose the primacy of the will: the blind, irrational process of the will
ultimately determines what actions how about. And whatever phantasms of the imagination are
conjured up ultimately have nothing to do with what one wills. Reason states aren’t even a part
26
of the causal process of action, so there is no problem of akratic action for Schopenhauer.
Therefore, far from counting against Schopenhauer, the problem of future willing brings out the
further issue of akratic action that validates his theory over the classical one.
Schopenhauer’s theory of Willing as Effective Desire, then, appears to be a plausible one.
But how does he reach the core conclusion of pessimism (i.e. that life cannot be participated in)
from that theory? He achieves this connection through a third concept: suffering. The idea here is
that since the will cannot achieve fulfilling ends, willing agents will inevitably experience
suffering. And since suffering is not a state of affairs that can be justifiably affirmed, (and it is
the essence of life), it follows that life itself cannot be justifiably affirmed. At this point, we’ll
briefly defer spelling out the main argument from which that conclusion is supposed to follow.
And will instead focus first on the exegetical task of explaining how Schopenhauer’s
reconceiving of the will is supposed to support his pessimistic position that life cannot be
participated in.
The explanation for how his account of the will supports pessimism returns to the concept
of Eudaimonia, a state whose very possibility Schopenhauer denied at the beginning of this
section. In Willing as Practical-Rational Judgement, we learned that human fulfillment consisted
in the will being directed towards intelligible ends. Eudaimonia, then, consisted in the will
properly directing itself towards intelligible ends selected as being rationally desirable. The
problem that Schopenhauer’s Willing as Rational-Practical Judgement poses for this picture is
two-fold: the a-rational, ceaseless will is such that either (i) those ends cannot be achieved, or (ii)
if they are achieved, they won’t secure Eudaimonia.
(i) and (ii) are both initially spelled out in the following passage: “absolutely every
human life continues to flow between willing and attainment. Of its nature the wish is pain;
27
attainment quickly begets satiety. The goal was only apparent; possession takes away its charm.
The wish, the need, appear again on the scene under a new form; if it does not, then dreariness,
emptiness, and boredom follow, the struggle against which is just as painful as is that against
want.”32 Here, we learn that believing in a Eudaimonistic satisfaction of the will (which is
achieved through attaining a rational aim or goal) follows from a form of synchronic reification:
i.e. taking one moment of temporary satisfaction in abstraction from the enduring, diachronic
interplay between desire, willing, satisfaction, and suffering. In reality, all temporary
satisfactions are only apparent, since they contain the seeds of their own destruction. (i) and (ii)
are then further spelled out in another passage: human existence swings “like a pendulum to and
fro between pain and boredom, and these two are in fact its ultimate constituents.”33 From the
preceding two passages, we learn the way that Schopenhauer’s reconceiving of the will is
supposed to generate pessimism.
In Willing as Rational-Practical Judgement, the interplay between human faculties was
conducive to Eudaimonia. Recall that it started with a judgement, which reason could constrain
and allow the will to direct towards an intelligible end resulting in human fulfillment. Willing as
Effective Desire results in a much starker picture.
We start with desires (which are themselves ceaseless and never ending). These desires
(which are themselves expressions of the a-rational and ceaseless life force die Wille), then
direct the subject towards certain ends. Then, an end is either (a) not achieved, in which case un-
fulfillment results (i.e. suffering), or (b) the end is achieved, in which case boredom (which is
also conceived as a form of suffering) results. This revised conception of the a-rational, ceaseless
32 WWR 1: 314 33 WWR 1:312
28
will therefore shows that life is essentially suffering.
So far we’ve explained –exegetically—some of the reasons for which Willing as
Effective Desire is supposed to imply pessimism. We have, however, deferred detailing the main
argument through which that reasoning is supposed to be established. That is the task undertaken
in the present section.
Chapter 2.3: Argument from Willing to Pessimism
I maintain that the central argument for Schopenhauer’s pessimism can be formulated as
follows. I, following Migotti and others, call it ‘The Argument from Suffering:’
1. Desire leads to lack
2. Lack leads to suffering
3. Therefore, insofar as we desire suffering is inescapable
4. Desire is unavoidable
5. Therefore, suffering is inescapable (i.e. essential to life)
6. Suffering is not choiceworthy
7. Therefore, life is not choiceworthy (i.e. pessimism is true)
This is the skeleton of the argument onto which we now want to graft some conceptual flesh. The
first three premises lead to a crucial subordinate conclusion of the argument. Schopenhauer’s
commitment to the first two premises seems beyond dispute. He explicitly endorses the first
premise’s view that all desires arise from a lack: “...all striving springs from want or deficiency,
from a dissatisfaction with one’s own state or condition.”34 And likewise subscribes to the
second premise that lacking results in suffering: “we call its [i.e. the lacking will’s] hindrance
34 WWR: 1: 309
29
through an obstacle placed between it and its temporary goal, suffering.”35 Suffering is, then,
defined for Schopenhauer as the state of the will lacking (i.e. failing to achieve the satisfaction of
a given goal). From these two premises, we reach the subordinate conclusion of premise three:
insofar as we desire suffering is inescapable. This is a fairly simple chain of reasoning: all
instances of desire are from lack, and all instances of lacking constitute suffering, so it follows
that as long as we desire suffering is inescapable. Now finding a case of desire-less action would
be the obvious counterexample to this argument: for then we could act (i.e. will) without
suffering.
In premise four, desire-less action is precisely the possibility at which Schopenhauer
takes aim through affirming that desire is unavoidable. For Schopenhauer, the reasoning behind
this premise harkens back to the earlier observation about the identity of willing and action.
Recall that for Schopenhauer, to exist means to be constituted as a willing being, a ceaseless
series of desires. And actions are themselves identical with instances of willing: the former are
simply the phenomenal manifestations of the latter. So, willing without desire would be
tantamount to willing without acting, a possibility Schopenhauer has already explicitly
precluded. From the argument above then, we can conclude that suffering is inescapable. And
since suffering cannot be considered choiceworthy we have the final conclusion of the argument,
namely that life is not choiceworthy (i.e. Schopenhauer’s pessimism). So Schopenhauer’s
commitment to the argument is incontrovertible, but the extent to which we should accept it as a
decisive justification for pessimism remains questionable.
The possibility of there being choiceworthy forms of suffering is the primary obstacle to
the argument. We’ll call this “The Objection from Choiceworthy Suffering.” Unsurprisingly, the
35 Ibid., 309
30
basic idea is that there are cases in which actions can involve suffering but also be choiceworthy,
and therefore that premise six in Schopenhauer’s argument from suffering doesn’t establish his
pessimistic conclusion that life cannot be participated in. Let’s consider the case for
choiceworthy suffering.
There seem to be two kinds of action in which choiceworthy suffering can occur. The
first involves actions in which the suffering is justified through being a necessary means to
achieving some higher end; and the second involves actions that contain their goal or end inside
their very performance. The first can be called “Instrumental Action” (henceforth, IA), and the
second “Telically Closed Action” (henceforth, TCA).
IAs have a very familiar structure: Action A is an IA if A is performed for the sake of
some greater good X. Take, for instance, the cases mentioned frequently in theodicies: Job
continued to act through his suffering, because it was necessary to acquire the moral character
God required of him. Here, suffering isn’t considered choiceworthy for its own sake, but can still
be classified as choiceworthy all things considered: it is instrumentally justified through some
good external to it. The permissibility (or to use our word, “choice-worthiness”) of suffering in
cases of IA are explained through a “domino effect of obligations.” Normally, we think suffering
is unchoiceworthy since there’s some prima facie obligation not to affirm it. We refuse to
dismember someone because it would inflict suffering on him and we have an obligation against
that. However, there are cases in which we have an overarching obligation that nullifies the
prima facie one. Suppose, for instance, one has an overarching obligation to protect his country
in times of war. And dismembering an enemy solider is a necessary means through which one
can fulfill the overarching obligation. Then, we see the domino effect of obligations: the
obligation not to dismember the person gets “knocked down” by the obligation to protect one’s
31
country in times of war.
Kant’s Law explains that effect: it states that if one has an obligation to X, then one can
X. This “ought implies can” principle explains the knocking down of the prima facie obligations.
To take our earlier case: if one ought not to inflict suffering on someone, then one can avoid it.
However, since one ought (all things considered) to protect his country, and inflicting suffering
is necessary to do that, then one cannot avoid it. One is therefore released from the obligation to
avoid affirming suffering.
Now, I maintain that a similar form of reasoning can impute the argument from
suffering’s crucial sixth premise that suffering is not choiceworthy. The reasoning begins by
affirming that suffering is not choiceworthy in itself, but then invokes IAs, in which Kant’s Law
justifies discharging one’s prima facie obligation to avoid affirming suffering. Suffering is not
choiceworthy then, but our moral obligation to avoid it gets discharged since it’s a necessary pre-
condition for fulfilling some overarching obligation. Life, for instance, may indeed have many
moments of suffering that aren’t in themselves choiceworthy, but we have no obligation to
disaffirm suffering and renounce the world, for those sufferings allow us to achieve some greater
goods. IAs therefore seem to refute the argument from suffering’s sixth premise.
I contend that TCAs (the second kind of action listed above) also refute the sixth premise.
One (for our purposes) important example of TCAs is familiar to deontologists, and involves the
performance of actions that constitute the fulfillment of duty. I contend this kind of action
constitutes another case of choiceworthy suffering. I’m referring to cases in which one suffers
from an action, but that action instantiates the fulfillment of a moral duty.36
36 I say “instantiates a moral duty” to emphasize that the action itself is the fulfillment of the moral duty, rather than
the action being done for the sake of some moral duty that spookily exists in abstraction from it. The duties should
32
For instance, a plausible way of construing the moral obligations engendered through a
nuptial promise is to see them as a series of actions demanded by a vow. When I promise to love
someone “for better or for worse,” my moral obligations here get instantiated as a series of future
actions in which I live out that vow. It’s easy to conceive of cases in which I affirm my own
suffering through living out my martial vows. Perhaps one’s husband becomes a dysfunctional
schizophrenic, and continuing to live out the marital vow results in tremendous suffering. Yet
one has a duty to sustain the bonds of love, so the suffering becomes choiceworthy. The living
out of the marital vows is choiceworthy then, and indeed even obligatory although it results in
great suffering. So it seems that premise six in the argument from suffering succumbs to cases of
IAs and TCAs.
Now, we have offered –briefly—two cases in which suffering seems to be choiceworthy,
contrary to premise six in the argument from suffering. Rather than offer Schopenhauerian
responses to their specifics, I want to highlight how the success of both examples presupposes a
commitment to precisely that idea which Chapter Two demonstrates as being Schopenhauer’s
next target: namely, the idea of a highest good. In the case of IAs, we must assume there’s some
unconditionally good end for the sake of which one’s actions are performed. If there aren’t final
goods for the sake of which we perform an action, then the suffering in that action cannot be
justified. There would be no redemption of the suffering, since there would be no justifying good
for the sake of which that suffering was endured. So the very reasoning behind IA as a
counterexample to the argument from suffering’s sixth premise necessitates that there is indeed
some highest good. Likewise, in the case of TCAs, one cannot fulfill her demands to the good
be construed here as grounded in reason and not existing in abstraction from the performances of and deliberations
about them.
33
unless that good obtains. If, to use our example, there was no actual good of living out one’s
marital vows, it wouldn’t make sense to endure suffering for the sake of allegiance to a goodness
that is ultimately illusory.
Schopenhauer’s riposte to our objections is therefore antecedently presupposing his
arguments concerning the lack of an highest good in the world. We should then proceed directly
to the assessment of Schopenhauer’s account of goodness, for –at the very least—his argument
from suffering relies antecedently on his arguments for the lack of a highest good. Without
establishing the absence of an highest good, he cannot demonstrate his pessimism.
Schopenhauer’s denial of the highest good is thus the topic to which our second chapter will now
turn.
34
Chapter III: Goodness
This third chapter features a similar three-fold format to the second. First, I begin with a
historical genealogy of the concept of goodness, as it’s articulated in Plato, Aristotle, and Kant.
Second, with this contextualization in place, I proceed to show how Schopenhauer’s re-
conceiving of that conception of goodness expresses an important part of his pessimism: namely,
that pessimism results from the realization that there’s no highest good in the world. Finally, we
conclude by considering a central argument through which Schopenhauer attempts to infer
pessimism from his re-conceived conception of goodness. Ultimately, in this chapter, I
demonstrate that Schopenhauer’s argument from the absence of a highest good to pessimism
presupposes mortalism (i.e. the thesis that the person is annihilated at death). This subordinate
conclusion sets the stage for the fourth chapter on death.
Chapter 3.1: Goodness as Objective and Unconditioned
I begin then with some classical conceptions of goodness, that consider goodness as
being objective and unconditioned. While classical conceptions of goodness are far from
monolithic, there’s enough commonality to draw out several themes for our purposes. As in the
last section, we begin with Plato, proceed to Aristotle and end in Kant. After this sketch is in
place, we’ll be able to identify the features of the classical account whose falsity Schopenhauer
believes to imply pessimism.
In Plato, his conception of goodness is made explicit in the widely discussed Allegory of
the Cave from The Republic. Disclosing the effects of education on the soul is the purpose of the
passage, but it also serves my purposes of understanding the Form of the Good. In the allegory
itself, Plato (through the character of Socrates) invites Glaucon to imagine a cave where people
are chained to face a wall on which the shadows of figures are cast. Sounds are heard by the
35
prisoners, and they falsely believe them to emanate from the shadows. Then, Glaucon is asked to
imagine how the prisoners were freed from their shackles and gradually brought out of the light:
“suppose...that someone should drag [the prisoner]...by force, up the rough ascent, the steep way
up, and never stop until he could drag him out into the light of the sun.”37 The sun, in this
allegory, symbolizes the Form of the Good, and the objects in the cave represent those
incomplete representations of reality. – mere appearances and illusions.
Implicit in this dichotomy –between the Forms and mere appearances—is a
philosophically relevant distinction between appearance and the evil, on the one hand, and reality
and the good, on the other. Appearances are that which is subject to change and not the
ultimately real constituents of reality; and reality is that which is timeless and hence good.
Indeed, for Plato, the very definition of a natural evil seems to be that which destroys and hence
that which engenders change: “’then whenever one of these [i.e. a natural evil] is present in
something, it makes the thing to which it is present bad, and in the end, it dissolves it entirely and
destroys it?" ---"Of course.”38 The evil, then, is that which causes change and the deterioration of
a thing –in a word: becoming. It is, for instance, the rot in the wood the disease in the body, that
which leads to their fading away. By contrast, the Form of the Good possesses eternal durability,
as we learn in the Timaeus (37E6–38A6).
For Plato, then, the Good is construed as an objective (i.e. mind, and convention-
independent value) in the world. Indeed, more than being objective, it is even construed as being
amongst the most real things in existence. It is not a nominal category created by human beings,
but is instead a participant in an eternal, timeless order of things. It exists out in the world as a
37 Plato, The Republic Book VII, (Penguin Group Inc), 365-401 38 Ibid., 609
36
locus of value.
In Aristotle, one again finds a similar picture of objective-intrinsic goodness emerging,
although it’s rendered significantly more immanent than the Platonic Form of the Good. I earlier
mentioned that the term Eudaimonia expresses Aristotle’s immanent conception of the human
good, but didn’t proffer a complete account of it. Eudaimonia gets defined as “the activity of the
soul in accordance with virtue” (arête), but that warrants further elaboration. Etymologically
speaking, the term comes from the Greek eudaimon, which is itself composed of two further
parts: eu, meaning “well” and daimon, meaning “divinity” or “spirit.” Some have ventured to
claim the term means living well in accordance with a divinity (i.e. living the kind of life
befitting a god or a life that a god would approve of), and others have opted for the idea that the
term is synonymous with eu zen, meaning living well or having a flourishing life. In either case,
my primary concern is not with elaborating what eudaimonia consists of, but is rather with
identifying the ontological status it is supposed to enjoy.
The ontological status of the good is suggested in an important passage from the Ethics,
in which Aristotle insists: “if among the ends at which our actions aim there be one which we
wish for its own sake, while we wish the others only for the sake of this, and if we do not choose
everything for the sake of something else (which would result in an infinite regress, so that all
desire would be futile and idle, it is clear that this one end will be the good and indeed the
highest good.”39 This passage implies that, for Aristotle, unless there’s a final objective, highest
good, there would be an infinite regress of contingent goods; and therefore no final good in terms
of which the pursuit of all the others would be justified. From this passage one can easily infer
what the ontological status of the good is supposed to be for Aristotle: it must be construed as a
39 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (Harvard University Press, 1982), 1094a19-27
37
single objective good, whose value is intrinsic (i.e. is not derived from its extrinsic relation to
anything else).
Kant remains within this tradition of seeing goodness as objective and unconditioned,
although his definition of the good differs. Rather than conceiving of the good as a Form, or
Eudaimonia, Kant insists that the only unconditionally good thing in the world is the Good Will.
Indeed, in a famous passage from The Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, one reads:
“nothing can be possibly be conceived in the world, or even out of it, which can be called
good without qualification, except a good will.”40 For Kant, then, the highest good is a good will.
For all other things possess only a qualified goodness insofar as they can be used for bad ends.
For instance, the virtues of intelligence and prudence are generally considered goods, but they
only have conditional goodness since they can be deployed towards the unjust ends of, say,
criminal activity or miserly self-concern.
The ontological status of this good is, moreover, objective and intrinsic. It is objective
insofar as its validity holds a priori for the kind of beings humans are (the good will doesn’t
admit of variation and isn’t beholden to convention). It is an expression of “universal laws” by
which all rational agents are bound. And the good will is again an intrinsic good: its value
doesn’t depend upon anything extrinsic to itself or even its ability to have efficacy in the world
for achieving specific ends. Indeed, as Kant writes: “even if this person's will has no power at all
to accomplish its purpose; not even the greatest effort on his part would enable it to achieve
anything it aims at, ... the good will of this person would still sparkle like a jewel all by itself.”41
Kant here is insisting that the good will is of intrinsic value insofar as it retains its worth even in
40 Kant, The Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, (Cambridge University Press, 1996), 17. 41 Ibid., 18
38
the absence of being able to effect any good within the world. It is, then, beyond question that for
Kant, just as much as for Plato and Aristotle, goodness is conceived as a kind of objective
intrinsic value, an unconditional source of value.
Now it is my contention that a primary part of Schopenhauer’s pessimism is his denial of
this vision of Goodness as objective and intrinsic. And indeed a replacement of it with what I’ll
call Schopenhauer’s view of Goodness as willed and contingent.
Chapter 3.2: Goodness as Willed and Contingent
Now, as with our section on willing, I want to highlight the fundamental assumption on
which the preceding accounts of goodness depends; for the refusal of that assumption marks the
meaning of Schopenhauer’s pessimistic re-conceiving of the category goodness. The assumption
is that there’s –in fact—some objectively and unconditionally good things in the world (i.e.
things that are good for their own sake and independent of our desires, or conventions, or
whatever other subjective-determinates might make something good). To understand
Schopenhauer’s pessimism as –in part—a re-conceiving of the category goodness—let’s explore
his challenge to that assumption.
The classical view of goodness as objective and intrinsic presupposes ontological realism
concerning the category of goodness: goodness –whether it be a monolithic Form of the good, as
in Plato, philosophical contemplation, as in Aristotle, or the good will, as in the Kantian
account—is conceived as an objective category: something that exists out in the world
independent of our beliefs, desires, intentions, and conventions. Goodness, then, brings objective
value into the world: something out there that makes the world good independently of us. Yet,
Schopenhauer denies precisely that account of goodness –as objectively bringing value into the
world—and his pessimism can be –in part—understood through that denial.
39
In World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer defines goodness through a
distinction between relative and unconditional goodness: relative goodness is “the fitness or
suitableness of an object to any definite effort of the will[;]”42 whereas unconditioned goodness
is “an object’s ability to achieve total satisfaction of the will’s efforts.”43 This means that the
goodness of something consists in its capacity to satisfy the human will. An apple, for instance,
is good insofar as it satiates one’s will not to hunger. Through defining goodness as a function of
a thing’s capacity to satisfy the will, Schopenhauer inverts the classical account of goodness.
In the view of goodness as objective and intrinsic, one desires or wills to attain something
because it is recognized as a good. One’s mind goes out into the world and discovers things as
goods worthy of pursuit. For Schopenhauer that very process is inverted: something is good
because one desires and wills it, whereas with goodness as objective and intrinsic one desires or
wills it because it is good. There is, then, no objective goodness in the world according to
Schopenhauer. There is only conditionally valuable objects, ones that gain goodness from the
quality we imposed upon them.
While denying unconditional goodness, Schopenhauer still offers (in a widely-discussed
passage) an ersatz highest good. After claiming that a highest good “cannot be conceived,”44 he
mentions:
However, if we wish to give an honorary, or so to speak an emeritus, position to an old
expression that from custom we do not like entirely to discard, we may, metaphorically
and figuratively, call the complete self-effacement and denial of the will, true
willlessness, which alone stills and silences forever the craving of the will; which alone
42 WWR 1: 360 43 Ibid., 360 44 Ibid., 362
40
gives that contentment that cannot again be disturbed; which alone is world-redeeming;
and which we shall now consider at the conclusion of our whole discussion; the absolute
good, the summum bonum; and we may regard it as the only radical cure for the disease
against which all other good things, such as all fulfilled wishes and all attained happiness,
are only palliatives, anodynes.45
Here, it is important to understand how Schopenhauer has inverted the view of goodness
as objective and intrinsic. If there’s no unconditioned or highest good, it is thought that the moral
project of participating in life is fundamentally irrational. The idea here is a familiar one:
practical reason discovers there to be certain ends amongst which we should choose. There must,
moreover, be some highest good (whether it be monolithic or plural) towards which all our
instrumental ends are directed. There has to be some ultimate reason for which we act –a final
good that brings value and purposes to all our strivings. Otherwise, human actions are just futile
endeavors to aim at a target that can never be hit. It is my contention that a fundamental meaning
of pessimism (brought out by this extended discussion of goodness) is the tragic realization that
no such final goal or end obtains. There’s no final value in terms of which the individual
moments of human life acquires a deeper significance. There is instead just an endless series of
actions devoid of any more significance than what our desires choose to impose upon them.
In a particularly bleak passage, Schopenhauer characterizes this pessimistic vision of a
world without any overarching value or highest good in life:
It is really incredible how meaningless and insignificant when seen from without, and
how dull and senseless when felt from within, is the course of the life of mankind. It is weary
longing and worrying, a dreamlike staggering through the four ages of life to death, accompanied
45 Ibid., 362
41
by a series of trivial thoughts. They are like clockwork that is wound up and goes without
knowing why. Every time a man is begotten and born the clock of human life is wound up anew,
to repeat once more its same old tune that has already been played innumerable times,
movement by movement and measure by measure, with insignificant variations. Every
individual, every human apparition and its course of life, is only one more short dream of the
endless spirit of nature, of the persistent will-to-live, is only one more fleeting form, playfully
sketched by it on its infinite page, space and time; it is allowed to exist for a short while that is
infinitesimal compared with these, and is then effaced, to make new room. Yet, and here is to be
found the serious side of life, each of these fleeting forms, these empty fancies, must be paid for
by the whole will-to-live in all its intensity with many deep sorrows, and finally with a bitter
death, long feared and finally made manifest.46
There is, then, no final good in terms of which human life gains meaning and
significance. Just the blind a-rational striving of the will to live (die Wille) constantly bringing
beings back into eternal oblivion no sooner than they had emerged from it. Or, to repeat this
same pessimistic sentiment in the eternal soliloquy of Macbeth:
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
46 Ibid., 321-322
42
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Schopenhauer’s pessimism (within the context of my discussion of goodness), is not only this
tragic insight that life lack the highest good required to make it signify something. There’s also a
second reason why the lack of highest good suggests pessimism: viz., Schopenhauer thinks that
without a highest good, the only rationally acceptable way to comport oneself through life is
through the denial of it. Now this might sound paradoxical, but attention to Schopenhauer’s
theory of asceticism makes sense of it.
Schopenhauer’s theory of asceticism contains what we can call the “soteriological
paradox of willing.” The paradox consists of two seemingly incompatible propositions: (i)
affirming life is obligatory, and (ii) affirming life is impermissible. Prima facie, (i) and (ii)
constitute a deontic contradiction: if affirming life is obligatory, then it’s not impermissible, but
that consequent contradicts (ii). And Schopenhauer subscribes to both propositions: affirming
life is obligatory, since not-affirming one’s life at a given moment (i.e. suicide) is taken as
immoral by Schopenhauer. In suicide, one denies the will-to-live (die Wille) for the wrong moral
reasons. Rather than denying the will because of its lack of a highest good or tendency to create
suffering for all sentient beings, one instead denies the will for its impact on one’s own person:
Far from being denial of the will, suicide is a phenomenon of the will's strong
affirmation. For denial has its essential nature in the fact that the pleasures of life, not its
sorrows, are shunned. The suicide wills life, and is dissatisfied merely with the condition
on which it has come to him. Therefore he gives up by no means the will-to-live, but
merely life, since he destroys the individual phenomenon. He wills life, wills the
43
unchecked existence and affirmation of the body; but the combination of circumstances
does not allow of these, and the result for him is great suffering.47
To avoid this failure of moral awareness, Schopenhauer claims we must be committed to (i). But
he likewise insists upon the seemingly contradictory proposition that affirming life is
impermissible, as we can see from his commitment to the view that asceticism and denial of the
will to live is “the highest moral ideal.” Indeed, instead of affirming his own individuality (as the
suicide does), the ascetic denies his own ego’s self-referential pleasures, and is thereby able to
realize that all beings are essentially one. That is, while the illusory phenomenal world creates a
diversity of different beings (through the principle of individuation), all beings are ultimately the
same in essence: all are manifestations of the one, unindividuated Wille. So, then, it seems life
both ought and ought not to be affirmed. How can one reconcile this apparent contradiction?
Schopenhauer achieves a reconciliation between these two propositions through
circumscribing the referent to which the term “life” refers. In the proposition “affirming life is
obligatory,” the term life doesn’t refer to life qua an individual, but rather life qua the ascetic,
whose primary project is to overcome individuality through a systematic denial of self-referential
desires. Once the desires have been burnt away, there is only that state of suffering-free
willlessness (which Schopenhauer, to recall, identified as the ersatz highest good). In the second
proposition “affirming life is impermissible,” the terms life denotes life qua an individual, the
endless series of sufferings, strivings and illusions, that state of sound and fury, signifying
nothing (i.e. our Shakespearean description of a world without a highest good). An upshot of this
distinction concludes our discussion of Schopenhauer’s re-conceiving of the category of
goodness. It shows that, for Schopenhauer, the following tragic insight arises out of a
47 Ibid., 390
44
consideration of a world without a highest good: life can only be permissibly participated in
through the denial of one’s individuality. One’s life qua an individual cannot be permissibly
participated in. There is no good to be had in life as an individual –salvation only comes through
emancipation for the individual’s ensnarement to the Wille.
Chapter 3.3: Argument from Highest Good to Pessimism
From this exegetical discussion of the connection between Schopenhauer’s re-conceiving
of goodness and pessimism, I hope to have drawn out two themes, relating to an argument for
pessimism. The first theme is that pessimism follows the objective absence of a highest good in
the world; and the second theme is that (morally speaking) the most choiceworthy pursuit is one
which denies participation in life (viz., asceticism). I –influenced by Mark Migotti-- call the
argument that captures these themes, “The Argument from the Highest Good.”48
It features the following, simple form:
1. If life is choiceworthy, then it contains a highest good.
2. Life does not contain a highest good.
3. Therefore, life is not choiceworthy.
The argument is clearly valid, containing a simple modus tollens style inference. And
Schopenhauer subscribes to the reasoning behind the premises. He insists that if the pursuit of
conditionally good things is justified, then there’s some final, highest good that can be attained
through them, a highest final good. However, Schopenhauer repeatedly insists “there is no
highest good, no absolute good, for it, but always a temporary good only.”49 This conclusion
results from an earlier passage in which Schopenhauer argues the following: “the good is,
48 This argument was originally formulated by Mark Migotti in his “Schopenhauer’s Pessimism and the
Unconditioned Good” (1991). 49 WWR1:362
45
according to its concept, ton pros ti, hence every good is essentially relative, for it has its
essential nature only in its relation to a desiring will. Accordingly, absolute good is a
contradiction; ... it signifies a final satisfaction of the will, after which no fresh willing would
occur.”50 Schopenhauer’s argument then follows from his theory of will through two simple
steps: (i) his argument that goodness is “essentially relative” (i.e. good equals subjective
satisfaction of one’s will), and (ii) that nothing ever satisfies the will. So since nothing ever
unconditionally satisfies the will, there is –on Schopenhauer’s definition—no highest final goods
in terms of which all human actions can be justified. Schopenhauer is then clearly committed to
the argument, exegetically speaking.
The conditional premise is one about which Goodness ad Objective-Intrinsic Good
agrees. For instance, in a passage cited by Migotti, Aristotle writes: “if among the ends at which
our actions aim there be one which we wish for its own sake, while we wish the others only for
the sake of this, and if we do not choose everything for the sake of something else (which would
result in an infinite regress, so that all desire would be futile and idle), it is clear that this one end
will be the good, and indeed the highest good.”51 Migotti gives a further and highly plausible
formulation of this argument in Schopenhauerian terms:
If every alleged good were good only in virtue of its relationship to something else
distinct from itself, then it would not finally be intelligible how anything could be good at
all; and if the goodness of any alleged good were finally unintelligible, nothing could be
justifiably called “choiceworthy” (since intelligible choice of its nature aims at perceived
50 Ibid., 362 51 Migotti, “Schopenhauer’s Pessimism and the Unconditioned Good” Journal of the History of Philosophy 33 (4)
(1995): 654.
46
good), including, by instantiation, human life itself.52
I consider this argument to be sound. However, it only establishes the conditional premise that if
life lacks a highest good, then it isn’t choiceworthy. The crux of the issue thus remains whether
there is a highest good. At this point, then, I don’t want to dispute the conditional premise, but
will instead focus on a problematic presupposition of the minor premise (i.e. that there is no
highest good). My strategy for contesting the minor premise involves showing its assumption of
mortalism (i.e. the thesis that the individual is annihilated at death).
My argument isn’t a new one (indeed it can be found in Kant), but I hope the connection
that I make between it and Schopenhauer’s pessimism will be. I intend to establish the
dependence of the minor premise on mortalism through showing how immortalism guarantees its
contradictory (i.e. the existence of the highest good). Kant establishes that very dependence
through his Moral Argument:
1. Moral actions aim at the highest good
2. If there’s a highest good, then there’s an afterlife
3. If moral action is perfectly coherent, then there must be a highest good
4.Therefore, one is rationally required to hope there’s an afterlife (and hence a highest good)53
In premise one, Kant endorses similar considerations to the ones found throughout the
classical tradition: all actions aim at some perceived good. Many think that the teleological
model of action (i.e. that actions are means within a structure of practical reasoning for achieving
an end) is contrary to the deontological spirit of Kant’s ethics. However, the picture isn’t that
simple. While Kant insists that the justification for a moral action is found deontologically (in its
52 Ibid., 655 53 Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (Cambridge University Press, 1997), 120.
47
satisfaction of a moral maxim), and not in its teleological fulfilment of some end. He still insists
that actions themselves are teleologically structured: actions are selected as means for the
attainment of some end. They therefore have goals at which they aim, even if they cannot be
morally justified on the basis of their achievement of that end.
This includes, in the context of premise one, the fact that Kant considers the aim or goal
of moral actions to be the fulfillment of the highest good. For Kant, the highest good is
construed as “a state in which happiness is proportioned to virtue.”54 In other words, a state in
which the acts of the virtuous are met with happiness, and the wicked do not prosper. So while
Kant is obviously opposed to viewing happiness as a justification for a moral action, he
nevertheless insists that the highest aim of the moral life is to have the fulfillment of one’s duties
align with one’s personal happiness. The question then arises of whether there is such a highest
good.
In premise two and three, Kant grapples with this question and its relationship to the
intelligibility of moral action. Concerning premise two, Kant takes it as empirically obvious that
the highest good doesn’t obtain within this world: happiness is not proportioned to virtue.
Indeed, he insists that “without a God and a world invisible to us now, but hoped for [i.e. the
afterlife], the glorious ideas of morality are, indeed, objects of admiration, but cannot be the
springs of purpose and action.”55 This passage, taken in context, is meant to imply that the
afterlife is necessary to achieve a reconciliation of happiness and virtue, since the world doesn’t
guarantee they’ll be a connection between them. Experience teaches that the good suffer and the
wicked prosper. Moral agents must therefore hope for the after-life to ensure that their actions
54 Ibid., 120 55
48
remain intelligible (i.e. that there is some good the pursuit of which gives ultimately meaning
and significance to the actions of their lives).
Through claiming that the afterlife is necessary to make moral action intelligible, I am
not saying that morality depends upon the afterlife or a God who is supposed to supply it. Rather,
the claim is that moral action becomes incomplete (in the sense of lacking full intelligibility)
without postulating it. The reason for this is found within Kant’s Ought Implies Can (OIC)
principle. Namely, if one has an obligation to do something, then it must in principle be possible
actually to do it. Transposed into the context of the argument, OIC entails that if pursuing the
highest good is an intelligible enterprise, then it is something that one can obtain. However, if
one didn’t believe in the afterlife, then one could not obtain the highest good. One would
therefore be engaged in the unintelligible act of pursuing an end one knows she cannot obtain,
and moral action would consequently be unintelligible, albeit one would remain bound to act
ethically. Indeed, as Kant writes in a largely overlooked passage from his Lectures on Ethics:
“We are obliged to be moral. But morality implies a natural promise: otherwise it could not
impose any obligation upon us. We owe obedience only to those who can protect us. Morality
alone cannot protect us.”56 The meaning of this somewhat enigmatic passage is that while moral
duties exist independently from consideration of God and the afterlife, moral action remains
incomplete without the promise that the ends of morality and the ends of one’s personal
happiness will be aligned. And the alignment of those ends can only be guaranteed through the
afterlife. Or as Mark Johnston writes: “in the case of Kant, this [i.e. theism as allegiance to the
good] need not rest upon the base idea of the afterlife as the incentive to be moral, but on the
56 Kant, Lectures on Ethics (Hackett Publishing, 1963), 82.
49
better idea that morality by its nature requires the support of the afterlife.”57 The idea, then, is
that belief in the afterlife is rationally required (as the argument’s conclusion above states). For
without belief in the afterlife, one cannot have the guarantee that moral action is intelligible
insofar as there’s no assurance that it will complete its aim of having happiness proportioned to
virtue.
That is to my mind the most plausible rendition of Kant’s Moral Argument. I now want
to begin the task of making its relevance to Schopenhauer’s pessimism more explicit. It’s
important to note that Kant essentially agrees with a core claim of pessimism: namely, that the
world, in and of itself, doesn’t provide justification for a choiceworthy life. Life is not
choiceworthy through itself since there’s no evidence for a highest good in terms of which moral
actions become intelligible. In Schopenhauer’s argument, he concludes that since there’s no
highest good in the world, one can infer that life isn’t choiceworthy (i.e. pessimism). The
absence of the highest good is inferred from there being insufficient evidence for it in the world.
Kant agrees there’s insufficient evidence for it in the world, but nevertheless upholds the
necessity of believing in the highest good and affirming the choice-worthiness of life. How does
Kant do this?
Kant contends that while evidence cannot support the highest good and its concomitant
judgements of the choice-worthiness of life, one can still ground them through hope. Kant’s
statement of this contention is unequivocal: “without a God and a world, invisible to us now, but
hoped for [i.e. the afterlife], the glorious ideas of morality are, indeed, objects of approbation and
of admiration, but cannot be the springs of purpose and action.”58 Taken together with the earlier
57 Johnston, Surviving Death (Princeton University Press, 2012), 12 58 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (Boston: Bedford, 1929), 639.
50
discussion, this passage discloses the Kantian response to Schopenhauer’s Argument from the
Highest Good. It demonstrates that the argument presupposes mortalism (i.e. that the human is
annihilated at death). However, if immortality is something for which we can legitimately hope,
then it’s hard to see how the Argument from the Highest Good can succeed. Indeed, the afterlife
provides precisely that assurance of the highest good that its second, minor premise denies. To
adjudicate Schopenhauer’s pessimism then, the Argument from the Highest Good is insufficient.
One also needs to look at the plausibility of immortality, a doctrine whose falsity the argument
presupposes. Death, and that for which one can hope beyond this life, is therefore the topic to
which the fourth chapter will now turn.
51
Chapter IV: Death
In this penultimate chapter, I follow the same three-fold structure of the preceding ones.
The chapter begins with tracing a classical account of death, in opposition to which
Schopenhauer devises his own. At this point, ideas of death from Plato to Kant are considered.
The view of Death as Ethical-Personal Immortality will emerge from the discussion: it defines
death as having two features (i) immortalism (i.e. that the person exists forever), and (ii) cosmic
justice (i.e. that happiness will ultimately be proportioned to virtue post-mortemly). Secondly,
the chapter then explicates how Schopenhauer’s conception of death, that I’ll call Death as
Impersonal Deliverance consists in the denial of (i) and (ii). Finally, the paper then identifies that
the argument from Death as Impersonal Deliverance to pessimism as the central inference on
which all the arguments for pessimism I’ve considered depend. With that claim in place, I will
have accomplished a full characterization of the meaning of and arguments for pessimism, and
will finally be in a position to assess its truth value in the fifth and final chapter.
Chapter 4.1: Death as Ethical-Personal Immortality
In this section, I want to explore death as Ethical-Personal Immortality, which, again, has
two defining features: (i) immortalism, and (ii) cosmic justice. I begin with Plato before
addressing Kant, whose treatment of the Moral Argument (earlier discussed) for the after-life
will prove important for our purposes.
Plato’s treatment of death is impressively diverse, but for present purposes we want to
telescope in on, first, the assumption of immortalism and, second, the assurance of cosmic justice
found in the Myth of Er from book X of The Republic.
Plato indeed endorses the view of death as a gate way to personal immortality. In the
Phaedo, for instance, readers find the widely discussed “affinity argument” for the immortality of
52
the soul. The argument runs as follows: there are two ontological categories in the world –as was
discussed earlier: the Eternal Forms and the temporal world of illusions. The mind partakes in
the attributes of the former more than the latter, so it’s likely that the soul –like the Forms—is an
eternal, incorruptible entity. One then concludes by analogy that the soul is more likely to be
immortal given its affinities with immortal things.59
Now my goal here isn’t to defend particular arguments for the existence of the soul, but is
instead to note how Plato repeatedly assumes a picture of immortality (if it’s true) to consist of
an immortalization of the person –that is, one’s personal soul continues to exist beyond the death
of its corresponding physical body. This immortalist picture is assumed throughout not only
Plato’s arguments for immortality, but also the myths from which readers gather his commitment
to a second feature of immorality: viz., cosmic justice.
Indeed, the Myth of Er , for instance, Plato conceives of a moral universe in which the
wicked are punished after death and the good receive just reward. The myth itself recounts a
(presumably hypothetical) cosmology where that could occur.
It begins with the character Er (the son of the Pamphylian Armenius), who after being
slain in battle was taken home to be buried. On the twelfth day of lying on his funeral pyre “he
returned to life and told them what he had seen of the other world.” I quote Er’s post-mortem
experience at length:
…when his soul left the body he went on a journey with a great company, and that they came
to a mysterious place at which there were two openings in the earth; they were near together, and
over against them were two other openings in the heaven above. In the intermediate space there
were judges seated, who commanded the just, after they had given judgment on them and had
59 Plato, Phaedo (G.M.A., 1977), 78b484b8
53
bound their sentences in front of them, to ascend by the heavenly way on the right hand; and in
like manner the unjust were bidden by them to descend by the lower way on the left hand; these
also bore the symbols of their deeds, but fastened on their backs… Then he beheld and saw on
one side the souls departing at either opening of heaven and earth when sentence had been given
on them; and at the two other openings other souls, some ascending out of the earth dusty and
worn with travel, some descending out of heaven clean and bright…., and they went forth with
gladness into the meadow, where they encamped as at a festival; and those who knew one
another embraced and conversed, the souls which came from earth curiously enquiring about the
things above, and the souls which came from heaven about the things beneath. And they told one
another of what had happened by the way, those from below weeping and sorrowing at the
remembrance of the things which they had endured and seen in their journey beneath the earth…
while those from above were describing heavenly delights and visions of inconceivable beauty.
After recounting this, Plato has Socrates inform Glaucon that the whole story “would take too
long to tell,” but insists that the passage just quoted contains the following message: “he [i.e. Er]
said that for every wrong which they had done to any one they suffered tenfold” and likewise for
those who performed good in life “there were blessings as great.” We have, then, a cosmological
view whose eschatology secures the highest good. The world, on this view, is perfectly just:
happiness is proportioned to virtue, since those who are good receive their just reward in the
afterlife, whereas the wicked atone for the misdeeds that went unpunished on earth.60
Here, we find the crucial assumption that even though the world is not a fundamentally
just place, there is a realm beyond the world through which it is secured. The wicked may
prosper and the just might suffer, but the world at large is still fair: the scales of justice are
60 Plato, Republic, 614-621.
54
balanced in the after-life. there is cosmic justice, since the actions that one performs ultimately
achieve the end of the highest good: i.e. in the afterlife or the eschaton, happiness will be
proportioned to virtue. The good will achieve beatitude and the wretched will suffer for their
heinous crimes. This conception of Death as Ethical-Personal Immorality therefore undermines a
central claim of Schopenhauer’s pessimism, viz., that there’s no highest good. While there may
be no such good in this life, one nevertheless ought to affirm the choice-worthiness of existence
as such since the highest good can be achieved after death: there is a direct causal connection
between one’s actions in this life, and attaining the highest good in the next.
One sees, then, that Death as Ethical-Personal Immortality contains two theses: (i)
immortalism (the thesis that the person exists eternally), and (ii) cosmic justice (the view that the
happiness will ultimately be proportioned to virtue).
Having explained the account of Death as Ethical-Personal Immortality, I now want to
expose (briefly) its relevance to Kant’s Moral Argument against Schopenhauer. Recall the Moral
Argument:
1. Moral actions aim at the highest good
2. If there’s a highest good, then there’s an afterlife
3. If moral action is perfectly coherent, then there must be a highest good
4.Therefore, one is rationally required to hope there’s an afterlife (lest moral action becomes
unintelligible).
For Kant then, the choiceworthiness of life presupposes belief in the afterlife. For without it the
task of pursuing the highest good is rendered unintelligible, and without a highest good there are
no –as I earlier established—choiceworthy goods that make the process of practical action
intelligible to begin with. One needs to assume that she can achieve the ends of ethics through
55
having happiness proportioned to virtue, but without a perfected state of the afterlife its
impossible to justify that assumption. The crux of the whole argument for pessimism then, is
whether the account of Death as Ethical-Personal Immortality, endorsed in different forms by
Plato, and Kant, actually holds. That is, are there good reasons to believe that its two features
obtain: (i) personal immortality, and (ii) cosmic justice. It is, however, a central contention of
Schopenhauer’s that these features don’t obtain. In fact, his analysis of death is aimed at a
straightforward denial of them.
Chapter 4.2: Death as Impersonal-Deliverance
Schopenhauer’s own account of Death as Impersonal Deliverance denies Death as
Ethical-Personal Immortality, and a deep meaning of Schopenhauer’s pessimism can be
ascertained through understanding that denial. It is my contention that Schopenhauer’s account
of Death as Impersonal Deliverance contains two salient features: (i) an impersonal view of
immortality, and (ii) a denial of ethical eschatology (i.e. in the end there’s no justice for the
individual).61 I now exegetically explicate each feature.
Schopenhauer’s view on death and immortality isn’t as clear-cut as those of other
atheists. In the famous Epicurean argument about death, it is assumed there that once death
arrives “we are not.” For death is considered the annihilation of everything that constituted one’s
61 I should note that Schopenhauer does indeed have a vision of cosmic justice, and even devotes section 63 of
WWR I to his conception of “eternal justice.” However, his vision of cosmic justice is purely pessimistic, and lacks
any assurance that happiness will be proportioned to virtue. Rather, he argues "If we want to know what human
beings, morally considered, are worth as a whole and in general, let us consider their fate as a whole and in general.
This fate is want, wretchedness, misery, lamentation, and death. Eternal justice prevails, if they were not as a whole
contemptible, their fate as a whole would not be so melancholy. In this sense we can say that the world itself is the
tribunal of the world. If we could lay all the misery of the world in one pan of the scales, and all its guilt in the other,
the pointer would certainly show them to be in equilibrium.” The world is then surprisingly on Schopenhauer’s view
just, but the vision of justice only serves to reinforce his pessimism: for the nearly ubiquitous wretchedness and evil
of human beings is coupled with a nearly ubiquitous level of “punishment” in the form of sickness, misery, disease,
and ultimately death. But bracketing this pessimistic vision of “justice” it indeed fair to attribute a lack of cosmic
justice in the traditional sense to him: i.e. justice as happiness being proportioned to virtue.
56
self. However, for Schopenhauer, while the subject does indeed die, his impersonal essence as
will and thing-in-itself is nevertheless immortal. I call this, for the sake of simplicity, impersonal
immortality.
Schopenhauer characterizes the impersonal nature of immortality in Section XLI of
WWR II, On Death and its Relation to the Indestructibility of Our Inner Nature. Death as
Impersonal Deliverance assumes mortalism (insofar as it affirms that the individual ceases to
exist), but also affirms the deliverance from one’s individuated being to the indestructible life-
force of the will-to-live, which is itself immortal. That is, at the moment of death, one’s person
as empirical willing subject of suffering and striving ceases to exist, but one’s inner nature as the
will-to-live continues to endure. Schopenhauer explains this type of immortality through an
example: “because the strong arm that three thousand years ago bent the bow of Ulysses no
longer exists, no reflective and well-regulated understanding will look upon the force that acted
so energetically in it as entirely annihilated.”62 He extrapolates this example to the entire human
person: while the particular individual, who was animated by the life-force of will, ceases to
exist, that animating force itself is indestructible. So there is, for Schopenhauer, a definite sense
in which one is immortal, but his account nevertheless denies the first fundamental claim of
Death as Ethical-Personal Immortality; viz., mortalism.
However, Death as Impersonal Deliverance also belies the second feature of Death as
Ethical-Personal Immortality, namely cosmic justice. Schopenhauer replaces the eschatological
moments of justice in the earlier accounts with a vision of death as being capable of achieving (at
most) deliverance from suffering. Rather than death being a gateway to a state in which
happiness is finally proportioned to virtue, Schopenhauer envisions it as a final release from the
62 WWR 2: 471
57
shackles of suffering and willing, a release in which one’s individuality fades away. To explain
how death constitutes such a deliverance for the individual, it’s necessary to examine
Schopenhauer’s discussion of time.
At the beginning of the section, Schopenhauer insists that fear of death, “which is the
greatest of all anxieties,”63 arises from a misunderstanding of the relationship between time and
being. In the western world, he claims the great metaphysical and religious systems “...teach man
that he came but recently from nothing, that consequently he has been nothing throughout an
eternity,”64 and that he will soon return to that “absolute nothingness.”65 Or, if the system is of a
religious orientation, the eternal nothing and flash of fleeting existence are usually followed by
“an imperishable and immortal state.”66 In either case, there remains a problem concerning the
being of the individual and time.
If one assumes no afterlife, then one is left with a story in which the being fortuitously
arises from the eternity of non-being that preceded its birth, lives a fleeting existence, and then
recedes back into an eternity of oblivion. If, on the other hand, one assumes an afterlife, then the
story becomes one in which the being doesn’t exist for an eternity, lives a brief life, and then
enters a post-mortem state whose characteristics are in some ways determined by the actions of
that brief life. In both instances, a host of philosophical problems arise from trying to explain the
individuated subject’s relationship to time: e.g. what happens to the subject after the death of its
body? When does the subject die? etc.
For Schopenhauer, this entire philosophical stance (of viewing the subject as a separate
63 Ibid., 470 64 Ibid., 464 65 Ibid., 487 66 Ibid. 488
58
entity whose relationship to time requires explanation and induces philosophical conundrums) is
manifestly misguided. For it fails to recognize the ideality of time: viz., that time is not—as Kant
argues—a real property of the external world but is rather an a priori category through which we
structure experiences in the first place. For Schopenhauer, there ultimately is not ontologically
differentiated subject whose mortality or immortality is in question. There is only the timeless
will that objectifies itself as the illusory phenomenal forms that one experiences temporally.
Deliverance, on this model, consists of the realization that the phenomena in the external
world and most importantly one’s own person, are not ultimately real things that can be born or
die. There is no death! There is then, a form of impersonal deliverance promised by
Schopenhauer’s account of death, for it reveals that there ultimately is no separate self about
whose immortality one must be concerned. Rather, what one calls “the self” is the an
instantiation of the eternal, timeless Will to which the terms “birth” and “death” do not apply.
“One” is the eternal, to speak as a mystic might.
This seems to provide a kind of deliverance insofar as it reveals that death and the fear of
it, regarded respectively “as the greatest of evils, and the greatest of anxieties,”67 are ultimately
both unfounded. Death is an illusion about which one need not be afraid and that one will never
ultimately undergo. In the same instance, however, this alternative vision of deliverance plays
directly into the hands of a pessimism vision of the world.
Indeed, there can be no cosmic justice amidst such a world, since the actions that
individuals perform ultimately have no final effect on their destinies. This is a threat to goodness,
and the moral life more generally, for it demonstrates that what one does in this life (whether one
was a saint or the most immoral of men) ultimately has no final significance. That consideration
67 Ibid., 470
59
(i.e. that death threatens goodness) is, to my mind, the main argument for Schopenhauer’s
pessimism, although it hasn’t yet been stated anywhere in the Schopenhauer literature. The
assessment of that argument is therefore the task to which the final section of this chapter turns.
Chapter 4.3 From Death as Impersonal Deliverance to Pessimism
This section formulates what I consider to be the central and most significant argument
for pessimism, one that culminates the highest good argument:
1. If life is choiceworthy, then there’s a highest good.
2. There is no highest good.
3. Therefore, life is not choiceworthy.
Now, at the end of chapter two, it was demonstrated that this argument depends crucially on the
assumption of mortalism. It was agreed, by Kant and Schopenhauer, that the world has no
highest good. The realization of the highest good must therefore require an afterlife through
which goodness can be purported to virtue. Yet, as I’ll argue, Schopenhauer’s final and central
argument for pessimism belies that possibility. The argument can be stated as follows, The
Argument from Mortalism:
1. If there’s a highest good, then there’s an afterlife
2. There is no afterlife
3. Therefore, there’s no highest good
This argument, taken together with the Argument from the Highest Good, imply pessimism.
Before I consider the cogency of the argument, it’s important to establish that Schopenhauer is
actually committed to it exegetically. A good measure of textual evidence has already been cited
to support Schopenhauer’s commitment to the second premise, so the crucial task is establishing
that he links the absence of a highest good with mortalism. To demonstrate that Schopenhauer
60
pledges allegiance to that link, I show how his reasoning can be plausibly situated in a tradition
that take death to threaten goodness. Hereafter, I examine that tradition, and then show how
Schopenhauer’s reasoning fits directly into it.
An ancient suggestion that death threatens goodness is found in the book of Ecclesiastes
in a passage that Schopenhauer himself quotes:
So I turned to consider wisdom and folly. . . . Then I saw that wisdom excels over folly as
light excels over darkness. The wise have eyes in their heads, but the fools walk in darkness. But
then I remembered that the same fate befalls us all, wise and foolish alike. And I said to myself,
“What happens to the fool will happen to me also. Why then have
I been so very wise?” And I came to see that this wisdom also is vanity. There is no enduring re
membrance of the wise or of the fools, for in the days to come all will have been long forgotten.
The wise die just like the fools. . . . So I hated life, because what is done under the sun was
grievous to me; for all is vanity and a chasing after wind.68
Here, a prized form of goodness, namely, “wisdom” is having its value called into
question by death. Later, this same suspicion about the value of wisdom extends to all goods:
“everything that confronts them is vanity, for the same fate comes to them all, to the just and the
unjust, to the good and the evil, to the clean and the unclean, to those who sacrifice and to those
who do not sacrifice.”69 In these passages, the central idea is that death threatens goodness. And
the reasoning behind that conviction, stated in Kantian terms, is that happiness is not
proportioned to virtue. Whether one pursued the goods of wisdom, virtue, etc, is ultimately just
vanity and of no consequence, because the same fate ultimately befalls the person who sought
68 Ecclesiastes 2:12-17 69 Ibid., 9:2-3
61
their opposites of ignorance and vice. Whether one was good or evil doesn’t ultimately matter
since there’s no highest good attained through life; one simply and ultimately, irrespective of
one’s conduct, falls back into the abyss of nothingness after death.
Situating Schopenhauer’s argument within this tradition, I can begin to explain premise
one’s claim that “if there’s a highest good, then there’s an afterlife.” The idea starts with the
claim established earlier, namely, that there’s no highest good within this world. Then, a
necessary condition for the claim that there’s no highest good for human beings in general is that
there’s no accessible world in which such a highest good could obtain. The primary candidate for
such a world is, of course, the afterlife as traditionally construed. So precluding the possibility of
such a world ends up being a necessary condition for affirming there’s no such good for human
beings.
The explanation of the inference goes further, however, when we consider the
contrapositive of the premise: if there’s no afterlife, then there’s no highest good. Now the claim
that there being no afterlife is a sufficient condition for undermining a highest good seems
somewhat extreme. Yet that is precisely the claim upheld by the tradition in which I intend to
place Schopenhauer’s argument. Recall that in Ecclesiastes “everything is vanity” in the face of
inevitable annihilation. No matter what one does, her actions will never amount to the attainment
of the highest good, since annihilation befalls the just and unjust alike. In Kantian terms,
happiness is never ultimately proportioned to virtue, so the choiceworthiness of pursuing life and
all its goods is called into question. Pessimism seems inevitable.
Schopenhauer, on my reading, is making a very similar argument with respect to the
connection between mortalism and highest good: i.e. that death threatens the highest good. The
argument is implicit in how he discusses the meaninglessness of life, which culminates in
62
nothing greater than death. He writes: “every time a man is begotten the clock of human life is
wound up anew, to repeat once more its same old tune that has already been played innumerable
times, movement by movement and measure by measure, with insignificant variations...each of
these fleeting forms [i.e. human lives] must be paid for by the whole will-to-live in all its
intensity with many deep sorrows, and finally with a bitter death, long feared and finally made
manifest.”70 Here, one finds a picture of existence in which every human life has no ultimate
consequence or significance, and culminates in death. Schopenhauer appears committed to the
threat that death poses to goodness in this passage. For if one assumed the opposite, viz., that the
seemingly inconsequential moments of life culminated in an afterlife, then his pessimism would
be seemingly impossible to countenance. Indeed, there would be an overarching process through
which the seemingly futile actions of this life would be connected to the attainment of the highest
good. For instead of life’s actions being futile and never adding up to anything, the choice of –
for instance—pursuing virtue in this life would ultimately culminate in the attainment of
beatitude afterwards: happiness would be proportioned to goodness. Yet, the inevitable terminus
of our existence in death, as mentioned in the passage, precludes such a process. This passage
contains an implicit endorsement of the reasoning I ascribe to Schopenhauer, but some readers
might demand a more explicit commitment to it.
That desideratum is satisfied through referencing Schopenhauer’s atheism. In the first
volume of World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer only makes use of the term
“atheism” once, but it demonstrates his commitment to the inference (i.e. “if there’s a highest
good, then there’s an afterlife”). In the passage, Schopenhauer mentions “the debate between
materialism and theism, in other words, between the assumption that a blind chance, or an
70 WWR 1: 322
63
intelligence arranging from without according to purposes and concepts, had brought about the
world.”71 The theistic side of the debate assumes that “if something in nature is suitable and
appropriate, it is a work of intention of deliberation, of intelligence.”72 Teleology is the concept
invoked here: if things in nature appear to possess a purposiveness, then there is some end
towards which they are directed. Assuming that the whole of nature is arranged so that things
within it possess a purposiveness, has, to many philosophers, suggested a divine designer (i.e.
God). In the context of ethics, for instance, assuming that one’s actions can be successfully
directed towards the achievement of the highest good (i.e. that virtue and happiness will
ultimately align) assumes a divine being who guarantees that acts of virtue will correspond with
happiness in the afterlife (since no such correlation exists observably in natural laws). Yet, as is
well-known, Schopenhauer insists that no such divine designer exists. There is God in the world,
as evidenced through the total lack of anything more than illusory teleology, but there is instead
only the blind Will. However, without such a God, to provide an afterlife in which happiness is
proportioned to virtue, all the evidence suggests that no highest good can obtain (since one
doesn’t find such a correlation in the ordering of the natural world either).
To my mind, then, the central argument for Schopenhauer’s pessimism hinges on the
assumption of mortalism. To demonstrate that contention, I want to revisit briefly the structure of
the arguments in each of the preceding chapters. Three arguments were explicated as part of a
cumulative case argument for pessimism, and the first two were found to have a premise
dependent upon the subsequent one.
In Chapter Two, ‘The Argument from Suffering’ emerged from my discussion of the
71 WWR 1: 400 72 Ibid., 400
64
category of willing in Schopenhauer:
1. Desire leads to lack
2. Lack leads to suffering
3. Therefore, insofar as we desire suffering is inescapable
4. Desire is unavoidable
5. Therefore, suffering is inescapable (i.e. essential to life)
6. Suffering is not choiceworthy
7. Therefore, life is not choiceworthy (i.e. pessimism is true)
At the point, it was established that the argument’s success hinged crucially on the sixth premise
that “suffering is not choiceworthy.” However, the ability to establish the truth of that premise
presupposed a discussion about whether there are any highest goods that can make the category
of choiceworthy action intelligible in the first place.
In Chapter Three, I therefore investigated whether any such goods exist. From the
discussion, ‘The Argument from the highest Good’ emerged:
1. If life is choiceworthy, then it contains a highest good.
2. Life does not contain a highest good.
3. Therefore, life is not choiceworthy.
This argument sought to justify the first argument’s sixth premise through showing that reality
lacks the highest good required to make actions choiceworthy. This second argument was itself
reliant upon a further presupposition: that mortalism holds (i.e. the present life is the only source
from which a highest good can be justifiably affirmed). The question of whether there’s an
afterlife is therefore paramount to the argument.
Indeed, in Chapter Four, the analysis of death explicitly revealed that the highest good
65
argument’s denial of life’s choice-worthiness necessitated precluding the after-life. The
following argument was considered:
1. If there’s a highest good, then there’s an afterlife
2. There’s no afterlife
3. Therefore, there’s no highest good
It was established that Schopenhauer stands within a tradition that considers the lack of an
afterlife as threatening the highest good. In light of this argument, and the two prior argument’s
dependence upon it, the crux of the entire case for pessimism becomes whether there is reason to
believe the afterlife obtains. If the afterlife obtains, then pessimism is false; and if the afterlife
does not obtain, I haven’t offered any convincing reason to refute the three arguments formulated
in favor of pessimism. The plausibility of belief in the afterlife is therefore the topic to which the
final chapter now turns.
66
Part III: Kant’s Moral Argument against Pessimism
Chapter 5.0: Kant versus Schopenhauer on the Intelligibility of Human Life
In this chapter, I establish that Kant’s Moral Argument gives good grounds to deny
pessimism, since it justifies believing in an afterlife in which the highest good obtains. The
claim, in other words, is that the afterlife provides a good in terms of which the choice-
worthiness of life becomes intelligible: it makes sense to affirm life and pursue goods, since the
universe it arranged in such a way that acting appropriately will guarantee realization of those
goods. In the chapter, I defend this claim in two phases. First, I begin by reiterating the Moral
Argument, and specify what “one ought to believe in the afterlife” means. Second, I consider an
objection to the argument: what I’ll call the Evidentialism Objection: namely, that one isn’t
justified in believing something unless one has good evidence for it; but ultimately find that
objection to be unsatisfactory. With this defense of the Moral Argument in tact, I will hope to
have established my main thesis that Kant’s Moral Argument gives good grounds to deny
Schopenhauer’s Pessimism.
Chapter 5.1: The Meaning of the Moral Argument
Let’s begin by reiterating the Moral Argument:
1. Moral actions aim at the highest good
2. If there’s a highest good, then there’s an afterlife
3. If moral action is perfectly coherent, then there must be a highest good
4.Therefore, one is rationally required to hope there’s an afterlife (lest moral action becomes
unintelligible).
Instead of defending the argument’s truth value at this point, I want to investigate what it means,
and how that meaning is supposed to impugn pessimism. In particular, I’m concerned with
67
investigating what exactly the conclusion means and its relationship to pessimism. The
conclusion is that one is rationally required to believe in the afterlife. Another way of saying that
S is rationally required to X is to say that S ought to X. However, there are many ways to
interpret the modal term “ought,” and it’s important to clarify them.
Given that the conclusion implies an “ought,” looking at that term’s meaning is a natural
starting point. Most semanticists note that “ought” captures a variety of meanings, of which the
following are examples:
1. Prudential: Mark ought to save his money
2. Teleological: One ought to use quality materials to build an enduring structure
3. Epistemic: The car ought to arrive in New Haven tonight (given its speed)
4. Bouletic: Boaz ought to attend his mother’s funeral (given her desires)
5. Deontic: Everyone ought to alleviate suffering
The conclusion’s “ought” is teleological: it is assuming that belief in the afterlife is a
necessary presupposition for making moral action intelligible in the world. Indeed, the highest
good is a world in which everyone is happy, but their happiness must stem from moral virtue (to
satisfy the demands of justice, for a world populated with happy but wicked beings wouldn’t
constitute the highest good in any plausible sense). In the actual world, however, as
Schopenhauer and Kant concur, there is neither enduring happiness nor a necessary connection
between happiness and virtue. One is then left with a choice: one can either accept that there’s no
highest good, the pursuit of which makes human action choiceworthy or intelligible (and thereby
become a pessimist); or one can believe in the afterlife, and thereby have a doxastic structure
through which human action again becomes intelligible. Kant’s main claim is that one ought, as
a postulate of practical reason, believe that there’s an afterlife to avoid the pessimistic and indeed
68
rebarbative horn of this dilemma.
That main claim is paramount to a central argument for pessimism. In Chapter Four, the
following was formulated as an argument on which the other two arguments for pessimism
depend:
1. If there’s a highest good, then there’s an afterlife
2. There’s no afterlife
3. Therefore, there’s no highest good
Now Kant’s Moral Argument impugns premise two. Now, of course, the conclusion of Kant’s
Moral Argument is not that there is, factually speaking, an afterlife. Rather, it impugns the
argument indirectly through showing that the confidence one can have in that premise is aporetic
at best, and that practical reason demands one should in fact denounce it.
The dialectic between Schopenhauer and Kant thus far can be summarized as follows:
Schopenhauer begins by offering a case for the claim that life is unchoiceworthy, one which
crucially hinges on the assumption of mortalism. The Kantian can then respond by claiming that
the truth of the crucial argument’s second premise is aporetic at best. And, in fact, there is an
obligation in practical reasoning to denounce the crucial second premise. Therefore, one ought
not to affirm that premise, and one cannot have confidence that the arguments for pessimism
succeed.
This mode of response is persuasive to many, but it is liable to an important objection:
viz., that since one lacks sufficient evidence for belief in the afterlife, she is unjustified in
holding it. I call this the Evidentialism Objection. Since the success of the Kantian response to
Schopenhauer hinges crucially on refuting this objection, I devote the concluding portion of my
thesis to it.
69
Chapter 5.2: The Evidentialism Objection to the Moral Argument
The Evidentialism Objection states that my application of Kant’s Moral Argument
presupposes a false principle: viz., S can be justified in believing P at time T without sufficient
evidence for P at T. This objection traces back to William Clifford’s Evidentialist principle that
“it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe anything upon insufficient
evidence.”73 The idea here is that one can only hold justifiable belief in P at a given time when
one’s evidence supports belief in P at that time; the contrapositive is, of course, relevant here,
insofar as it implies one shouldn’t believe in the afterlife unless there’s sufficient evidence for it.
Now there are cases in which this reasoning indisputably holds. For instance, if a
physician holds the belief that a patient is healthy, but failed to run the appropriate diagnostic
tests, then she would be culpable. Even if –and this is the somewhat more controversial point—
the patient was healthy, the physician would still be culpable. For, according to evidentialism, it
is intrinsically culpable to hold beliefs for which one has insufficient evidence. This same
reasoning seems to apply in most other cases, mutatis mutandis.
On this objection, then, believing in the after-life is an unacceptable stance to take, since
it’s based upon insufficient evidence. Believing in the afterlife may indeed provide a framework
through which human action becomes intelligible One therefore cannot appeal to it when trying
to refute Schopenhauer’s pessimism. To eliminate this objection, I (a) show there are cases in
which one can permissibly believe in the absence of evidence, and (b) demonstrate that belief in
immortality satisfies the features of such cases.
The strategy is to devise cases in which S can justifiably believe P, but S lacks sufficient
73 Clifford, “The Ethics of Belief.” Philosophy: The Quest for Truth. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010,
135.
70
evidence for P. For that would undermine the evidentialism on which the objection to the Moral
Argument depends. Before devising such cases, I need to say a word about the relationship
between evidence and belief itself. While I concur with R. J. Collingwood’s claim that “when we
try to define ‘evidence,’ we find it very difficult,”74 I believe that the following account –taken
from Jaegwon Kim-- of evidence should be sufficient for the current purposes.
Kim claims “one thing is 'evidence' for another just in case the first tends to enhance the
reasonable-ness or justification for the second.”75 This passage implies a normative relationship
between evidence and justification. Whenever E is evidence for P, E enhances the justification
for P. Assuming, as the evidentialists do, that justification is a virtue of beliefs, there is likewise
a transitive relationship between evidence and belief. Evidence generates justification and
justification generates belief. The degree of one’s evidence is proportioned to the degree of one’s
justification, which is in turn proportioned to the degree of one’s belief. Another –stronger—
way of stating the relationship upheld by evidentialists is in terms of supervenience. X
supervenes on Y if and only if Y guarantees the presence of X. In this context, evidentialist claim
that belief supervenes on evidence insofar as whenever S and S* have evidence E for P, both will
believe P. This statement of the relationship between evidence and belief provides a clue for
constructing a case against evidentialism.
Pragmatic encroachment cases, defended by Jeremy Fantl and Matthew McGrath (among
others), demonstrate that belief doesn’t always supervene on evidence – contrary to
evidentialism. These cases state that practical factors (what they call “stakes” impact whether
one knows). This means that two people may have identical evidence, but cannot both have a
74 Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956). 75 Kim, “What is Naturalized Epistemology?” Philosophical Persepectives 2, Epistemology, Ridgeview Publishing
Co: 381-405
71
justified belief in light of the stakes. For instance, suppose Smith and Jones both possess
identical evidence with respect to the proposition that “my flight leaves to Chicago at 13:30”
(F).They both checked the flight screens, the original ticket displays that time, and the airport
schedules are generally uniform, etc. Smith and Jones would generally be said that have a
justified belief that F given their evidence. However, suppose further that Smith is a
neurosurgeon who needs to arrive in Chicago punctually to perform a life-saving transphenoidal
surgery on his brain cancer patient. Many claim that since the stakes are raised in Smith’s case,
his evidence no longer warrants a justified belief that F. To fulfill his epistemic duties, he should
check the flight schedule every 30 minutes to preclude the highly unlikely but possible chance
that his flight got switched. This pragmatic encroachment case undermines the supervenience
thesis forwarded by the evidentialists: it shows that identical evidence doesn’t always imply the
same state of justified beliefs.76
The purpose of this section is not to assess the success of pragmatic encroachment. Such
an exercise would go far beyond the parameters of the current project. However, I do want to
stress that such cases give good grounds on which to deny evidentialism. Before I proceed to the
second task of explaining how believing in the afterlife is a justified case of not proportioning
one’s belief to the evidence, I want to mention a further kind of case in which the evidentialist’s
supervenience thesis fails.
I argue that interpretation disrupts the supervenience between beliefs and evidence. That
is, there are cases in which two people have identical evidence, but each justifiably arrives at
different beliefs owing to the non-evidentiary influence of interpretations. To illustrate this, take
the following example of Chris, Eric, and Jasmin. Suppose that Chris and Eric both have
76 Fantl and McGrath, Knowledge in an Uncertain World (Oxford University Press, 2009)
72
identical evidence about Jasmin’s character. Both have witnessed the same behaviours, her
reactions under a broad series of circumstances, and other phenomena relevant to gaining hetero-
psychological knowledge. Chris, having a European cultural framework, comes to believe that
Jasmin is assertive; whereas Eric, having an Asian cultural framework, comes to believe that
Jasmin is rude. This seems like a more than reasonable occurrence, and in fact happens quite
frequently. The point I’m trying to illustrate is that what evidence implies is sometimes not
immediately entailed by the evidence itself, but is instead the result of interpretation. Both Chris
and Eric have identical evidence with respect to Jasmin’s character, but each winds up with a
different belief.
The easiest way to explain this, on my view, is that evidence and justified beliefs aren’t
bijectively related: that is, there isn’t a one-to-one correlation between bodies of evidence and
justified beliefs. This would, of course, imply that the supervenience thesis between beliefs and
evidence fails.
Now, I believe that I have presented two plausible cases in which beliefs and evidence
aren’t connected through a supervenience relationship. This, to my mind, undercuts
evidentialism. What I hope to establish now is that believing in the afterlife can possibly be
construed as at least one of the cases in which evidentialism breaks down. I now proceed to that
task. I think the paradigmatic case of permissibly believing without evidence occurs when
there isn’t decisive evidence for either position, i.e. when one is faced with an aporia. An aporia
occurs when there’s an impasse in thought owing to the inability to prove either of two
contradictories. The afterlife is precisely such a case in which evidence cannot be decisively
called to testify in favor of either position. In such cases, one is naturally invited to decide her
beliefs on the basis of non-evidentiary factors.
73
That reasoning is precisely in the spirit of Kant’s Moral Argument. Since evidence cannot
decisively decide the matter, and it’s not –as I just established—impermissible to believe in the
absence of sufficient evidence, one ought to decide her beliefs on the basis of other criteria. This,
in turn, invites hoping for that which would ground all that one can value, namely the highest
good. Even though one cannot prove the highest good, there’s no positive reason against it. And
in fact one is rationally required to hope for it to make human life as a whole coherent.
Now, I admit that these remarks in no way prove that the highest good exists, or even that
Kant’s Moral Argument is certainly sound. What I do hope to have established, however, is that
Kant’s Moral Argument has a certain appeal given its ability to ground that which matters most
for goodness in human life (viz., the highest good). And it is immune to the strongest objection
against it (viz., the evidentialist one considered above). Therefore, unless and until one offers a
successful refutation of the Moral Argument, I believe that we ought to hope (along with Kant)
that there is indeed a highest good that undercuts the pessimistic vision of the world offered by
Schopenhauer.
References
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 2014)
Clifford, “The Ethics of Belief.” Philosophy: The Quest for Truth. New York: Oxford University
Press, 2010, 135.
Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956)
Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (University of Notre Dame Press, 1990)
Fantl and McGrath, Knowledge in an Uncertain World (Oxford University Press, 2009)
Gettier, “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” Analysis 23.6 (1963)
Johnston, Surviving Death (Princeton University Press, 2012),
Kant, The Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (Cambridge University Press, 1998)
Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (Cambridge University Press, 1997), 120
Kant, Lectures on Ethics (Hackett Publishing, 1963), 82
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (Boston: Bedford, 1929), 639
Khan, The Question of “Eclecticism”: Studies in Later Greek Philosophy (University of
California Press, 1988)
Kim, “What is Naturalized Epistemology?” Philosophical Persepectives 2, Epistemology,
Ridgeview Publishing Co: 381-405
Migotti, “Schopenhauer’s Pessimism and the Unconditioned Good.” Journal of the History of
Philosophy 33 (4) (1995)
Plato, Republic (Harvard University Press, 2013), 74
Plato, Phaedo (G.M.A., 1977), 78b484b8
Reginster, The Affirmation of Life (Cambridge: First Harvard University Press, 2008)
Ryle, The Concept of Mind, (London: Hutchinson, 1949)
Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation (New York: Dover Publications, 1969)
Schopenhauer, The Wisdom of Life (New York: Courier Corporation, 2012)
Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena (Oxford University Press, 1974), 82
Shoemaker, “Self-Reference and Self Awareness.” Journal of Philosophy 65 (19) (1968)
Young, The Death of God and the Meaning of Life (New York: Routledge, 2014)