Kant,
Schopenhauer, Sartre and Quine
Some
opinion about Arthur Schopenhauer runs toward preemptive dismissal
because of his attitudes about women. Schopenhauer was a meaningful
philosopher though, in my opinion, for two reasons/works.
One-Schopenhauer treated Kant’s Critique
of Pure Reason in a
little book called ‘The Fourfold Roots of Reason’ that reminds me
somewhat of Kant’s Prolegomena
to Any Future Metaphysics
that was a reduced scale summary of the larger Critique. The
Fourfold Roots of Reason
seems like the first book written after the Critique that shows a
practical comprehension of the work and makes useful points drawing
from it.
Schopenhauer's
second contribution to philosophy is more abstract and brief. It is
the epistemology paradigm for The
World as Will and Idea.
The fundamental outlook of the philosopher is somewhat existential
in regard to ontology and self. Briefly one exists and has will, and
also Idea for-oneself while the heterodox composition of reality
leaves a description or referent of that which is other-than-self as
Idea-in-itself. That paradox of internal idea meeting external
Idea-for-itself is an important, classical philosophical paradigm of
epistemology that philosophers such as Descartes and Sartre
contributed to as well. The epistemological line of inquiry continued
from Descartes through Kant and Sartre to epistemological researches
using symbolic logic and the philosophy of logic such as that of P.F.
Strawson in Individuals
and W.V.O. Quine in Word
and Object.
Besides
those two points I would also tend to be dismissive. Not only for his
attitudes and actions toward women, but also for his rather
convoluted or even pagan ideas on religion and world view that is
nevertheless rich and complex in error. Schopenhauer's world-view
with its dualism and the world-universe run by an evil demi-urge that
is fundamentally evil and shouldn’t exist is a syncretism combining
elements reminding one of Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Neo-Platonism
etc. Women were inferior creatures in Schopenhauer’s view as broken
forms. He seemed to lack an appreciation of the practical division of
labor in sexuality as well as any idea of the benefits advocates of
natural selection have pointed out involving genetics that makes two
sexes of one species superior to one. Schopenhauer was not a
Christian either, and his world view seems not antipathetic to that
of Nietzsche.
In
the Bible book of Genesis God creates the female sex so man would
have someone to interact with. With the appearance of sin-error,
dialectical genetic evolution was the default condition of mankind.
Adam and Eve were thrown into a thermodynamic maelstrom for good and
bad that Schopenhauer condemned as entirely evil.
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