Prevailing Trends of late 19th & 20th Century Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 – 1860)

1) Rationalism (Reason) • He is the most widely read philosopher in Germany. He called Hegel’s absolute
2) Empiricism (Actual experience) spirituality a “philosophy of absolute nonsense”. He criticized the bourgeois world
3) Utilitarianism (Judging according to the utility or use) with:
4) Pragmatism 1) Its vision of present as alone real
These Trends stemmed from: 2) Its rationality answering merely to pragmatic needs.
1) Enlightenment 3) Its self-abasement before “materialism” of science.
2) Great changes following: The concept of Will to live & The Unconscious
a) American revolution • He took Kant’s phenomena and noumena as his starting point for his concept of the
b) French Revolution will to live.
c) Industrial Revolution • He argued that reason was in bondage to practical motives of the will to live which is
We can relate these trends by the idea of reason concentrated in: 1- Sexual act 2- Unconscious and irrational desire to perpetuate life.
Thinkers of 19th Century Europe • He viewed will as the unique noumenal (internal) reality in a Kantian sense:
With Bourgeois Against Bourgeois 1- Largely unconsciously 2- often repressive 3- intimate union with memory and sexuality
1. Economic liberalism 1. Romanticism •His concept of the will to live overlaps with Freud’s notion of the unconscious.
• Smith – Ricardo – Malthus 2. Anarchists •He points out that the reason is a slave to the will, infected by motives and interests.
2. Utilitarianism • William Godwin – Baudelaire •The will is the profoundest source of motivation and the primordial means of our
• James Mill – John Mill – Jeremy • French symbolists engagements with the world.
Bentham 3. Christian and Utopian Socialists
• He sees will as a blind, irrational, purposeless force which drives the subject like a
These advocates were built on the 4. Victorian writers
• Carlyle – Ruskin – William clockwork
Philosophical and political foundations of:
• Rousseau – Locke - Hume Morris – Arnold Human Subject Schopenhauer vs Hegel
Relation of Kant & Hegel to Enlightenment • He described human subject as a far cry from the ideal Hegelian subject.
1. The prevailing trends of the bourgeois achieved concurrence in Kant’s ➢ Hegelian subject’s intellectual and ethical behavior is collected rationally by the
dialectic. requirements of a rational state.
2. Kant’s system involved Romanticism’s insistence on the unity of subject and ➢ Schopenhauerian subject was driven by hardly accessible motives and harbored a
object, and the notion of all-encompassing totality. perpetual tension and struggle between its constituting elements.
➢ The unity and totality are fragmented by the forces of increasingly Death & Sexual instinct
industrialized and commercialized world. • He also anticipated Freud’s account of the life and death instincts.
3. Hegel’s historical centrality signifies the ability of bourgeois thought to • He held that death is the “true result and to that extent the purpose of life”.
achieve a unified vision of humanity and the world. • The sexual instinct is the “embodiment of the will to live”
Heterological Trend Reality & Ideas & Genius
1. It’s an alternative tradition started by Schopenhauer which reacted against • Like Plato, he sees reality (the true content of phenomena) in the world as embodied in
Hegle’s philosophy as the embodiment of bourgeois principles. ideas. These ideas are timeless, existing “outside and independently of all relations”
2. Schopenhauer rejected the idea of progressive civilization, belief of • The kind of knowledge that apprehend ideas is “art, the work of genius”
perfection, and the progress of individual that depends on reason alone. • Schopenhauer equates (compares), the “gift of genius” with the achievement of the
3. The Heterological tradition was carried on by Feminists – Bergson – Freud. impersonal and completely objective perspective.
4. They challenged the idea of truth through reason and emphasized the role • Genius is the capacity to know not individual things but their ideas, the essential form
of emotion, the body, sexuality, unconscious and pragmatic interests. of their entire species.