Критика кантовской философии Артура Шопенгауэра

1818 philosophical work by Arthur Schopenhauer

"Critique of the Kantian philosophy" (German: "Kritik der Kantischen Philosophie") is a criticism Arthur Schopenhauer appended to the first volume of his The World as Will and Representation (1818). He wanted to show Immanuel Kant's errors so that Kant's merits would be appreciated and his achievements furthered. At the time he wrote his criticism, Schopenhauer was acquainted only with the second (1787) edition of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. When he later read the first (1781) edition, he said that many of Kant's contradictions were not evident.

Kant asserted that metaphysics is knowledge a priori, or before experience. As a result, he concluded that the source of metaphysics cannot be inner or outer experience. Schopenhauer claimed that metaphysics must understand inner and outer experience in order to know the world and not empty forms. Kant did not prove that the material for knowing the world is outside of the experience of the world and merely in the forms of knowledge. Kant's writing was obscure. Kant took the Greek word noumena, which meant "that which is thought," and used it to mean "things in themselves." (See Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Book I, Chapter 13: "Anaxagoras opposed what is thought (noumena) to what appears or is perceived (phenomena).") Kant tried to create a logical, overly symmetrical system without reflecting on its contents. He didn't clearly explain the meaning of and relationships between represented objects, representing subjects, existence, truth, illusion, error, sensations, judgments, words, concepts, perceptions, understanding, and reason.

He went too far when he claimed that the schemata of the pure concepts of the understanding (the categories) are analogous to a schema of empirically acquired concepts. A schema of empirical perception is a sketchy, imagined perception. Thus, a schema is the mere imagined form or outline, so to speak, of a real perception. It is related to an empirical abstract concept to show that the concept is not mere word play but has indeed been based on real perceptions. These perceptions are the actual, material content of the empirical abstract concept. A schema of pure concepts is supposed to be a pure perception. There is supposed to be a schema for each of the pure concepts (categories). Kant overlooked the fact that these pure concepts, being pure, have no perceptual content. They gain this content from empirical perception. Kant's schemata of pure concepts are entirely undemonstrable and are a merely arbitrary assumption. This demonstrates Kant's purposeful intention to find a pure, a priori analogical basis for every empirical, a posteriori mental activity.

Kant defined reason as the faculty or power of principles. He claimed that principles provide us with synthetical knowledge from mere concepts (A 301; B 358). However, knowledge from mere concepts, without perception, is analytical, not synthetical. Synthetical knowledge requires the combination of two concepts, plus a third thing. This third thing is pure intuition or perception, if it is a priori, and empirical perception, if it is a posteriori. According to Kant's principle of reason, everything that is conditioned is part of a total series of conditions. The essential nature of reason tries to find something unconditioned that functions as a beginning of the series. But Schopenhauer claimed that the demand is only for a sufficient reason or ground. It extends merely to the completeness of the determinations of the nearest or next cause, not to an absolute first cause. Kant claimed that everyone's reason leads them to assume three unconditioned absolutes. These are God, the soul, and the total world. The unconditioned absolutes are symmetrically derived by Kant from three kinds of syllogism as the result of three categories of relation. Schopenhauer stated that the soul and the total world are not unconditioned because they are supposed, by believers, to be conditioned by God. Schopenhauer also stated that everyone's reason does not lead to these three unconditioned absolutes. Buddhists are nontheists. Only Judaism and its derivatives, Christianity and Islam, are monotheistic. Exhaustive and extensive historical research would be needed to validate Kant's claim about the universality of reason's three unconditioned absolutes.

Kant claimed that virtue results from practical reason. Schopenhauer claimed that, to the contrary, virtuous conduct has nothing to do with a rational life and may even be opposed to it, as with Machiavellian rational expediency.

In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant claimed that the understanding was the ability to judge. The forms of judgments were said to be the basis of the categories and all philosophy. But in his Critique of Judgment, he called a new, different ability the faculty of judgment. That now resulted in four faculties: sensation, understanding, judging, and reason. Judgment was located between understanding and reason, and contained elements of both. Kant's interest in the concept of suitability or expediency resulted in his investigation regarding knowledge of beauty and knowledge of natural purposiveness.

As usual, he started from abstract concepts in order to know concrete perceptions. Kant started from the abstract judgment of taste in order to investigate knowledge of beautiful objects of perception. Kant was not concerned with beauty itself. His interest was in the question of how a subjective statement or judgment about beauty could be universally valid, as though it concerned an actual quality of an object.

Kant asserted that the subjective statement that nature seems to have been created with a premeditated purpose does not necessarily have objective validity or truth. Kant claimed that the apparently purposive, deliberate constitution of organic bodies cannot be explained from merely mechanical causes. (" it is absurd for man even to entertain any thought that maybe another Newton may some day arise to make intelligible to us even the genesis of but a blade of grass from natural laws that no design has ordered [i. e., from mechanical principles].") (Critique of Judgment, §75). Schopenhauer said that Kant didn't go far enough. Schopenhauer stated that one province of nature cannot be explained from laws of any other province of nature. He listed examples of separate provinces of nature as being mechanics, chemistry, electricity, magnetism, crystallization, and organics. Kant had only asserted this regarding the organic and the mechanical.

In The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer (1999), the philosopher Paul Guyer wrote an article titled "Schopenhauer, Kant, and the Methods of Philosophy." In it, he compared the methods of the two philosophers and in so doing, discussed Schopenhauer's Criticism. In explaining how objects are experienced, Kant used transcendental arguments. He tried to prove and explain the fundamental principles of knowledge. In so doing, he started by indirectly conceptually reflecting on the conditions that exist in the observing subject that make possible verbal judgments about objective experience. In contrast, Schopenhauer's method was to start by a direct examination of perceived objects in experience, not of abstract concepts. The fundamental principles of knowledge cannot be transcendentally explained or proved, they can only be immediately, directly known. Such principles are, for example, the permanence of substance, the law of causality, and the mutual interactive relationships between all objects in space. Abstract concepts, for Schopenhauer, are not the starting point of knowledge. They are derived from perceptions, which are the source of all knowledge of the objective world. The world is experienced in two ways: (1.) mental representations that involve space, time, and causality; (2.) our will which is known to control our body. Guyer stated that Schopenhauer raised important questions regarding the possibility of Kant's transcendental arguments and proofs. However, even though Schopenhauer objected to Kant's method, he accepted many of Kant's conclusions. For example, Kant's description of experience and its relation to space, time, and causality was accepted. Also, the distinction between logical and real relations, as well as the difference between phenomena and things in themselves, played an important role in Schopenhauer's philosophy. In general, the article tries to show how Schopenhauer misunderstood Kant as a result of the disparity between their methods. Where Kant was analyzing the conceptual conditions that resulted in the making of verbal judgments, Schopenhauer was phenomenologically scrutinizing intuitive experience. In one case, though, it is claimed that Schopenhauer raised a very important criticism: his objection to Kant's assertion that a particular event can be known as being successive only if its particular cause is known. Otherwise, almost all of Schopenhauer's criticisms are attributed to his opposite way of philosophizing which starts with the examination of perceptions instead of concepts.

Michael Kelly, in the preface to his 1910 book Kant's Ethics and Schopenhauer's Criticism, stated: "Of Kant it may be said that what is good and true in his philosophy would have been buried with him, were it not for Schopenhauer "

Immanuel Kant himself predicted a response to Schopenhauer's argument that he redundantly repeated the ancient command: "don't do to another what you don't want done to you", that is, the Golden Rule, and famously criticized it for not being sensitive to differences of situation, noting that a prisoner duly convicted of a crime could appeal to the golden rule while asking the judge to release him, pointing out that the judge would not want anyone else to send him to prison, so he should not do so to others. Kant's Categorical Imperative, introduced in Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, is often confused with the Golden Rule. Also, it is exactly for being cold and dead because it is to be followed without love, feeling, or inclination, but merely out of a sense of duty, both in the theory and in its practice, that the Categorical Imperative is absolute, metaphysical and moral.