Arthur Schopenhauer's On the Basis of Morality is one of the funniest books ever written. Long before I got around to finishing the whole book, I had read its immortal first edition preface, in which AS takes the Royal Danish Society of Scientific Studies to task for passing over his essay in a prize contest.
We subsequently learn that Schopenhauer's contribution was the only entrant that year in the essay contest. The Royal Society still could not bring themselves to bestow this recognition upon it.
Schopenhauer surely gets the last laugh, since his famously non–prize winning essay has proved to be an immortal work of literature and philosophy, whereas who even remembers the existence of this Danish learned body? Who "rests in [their] mean flattery now," to borrow a phrase from Isaac Rosenberg?
Yet, upon re-reading the famous preface and finishing the book as a whole this past week, I found myself having to grudgingly admit that the Royal Society had somewhat more of a point than I had at first been willing to concede.
Their chief objection to Schopenhauer's essay, they state—in their formal "judgment" on this entry—is that it doesn't really answer the question.
The question posed for the essay contestants, the academicians note, was whether morality has its basis in some inherent category of the mind, or somewhere else entirely? In explaining their judgment, they clarify that what they really meant by this was that they were looking for someone to show the "nexus" between metaphysics and ethics.
Thus, the members of the Royal Society were really asking about what we would now call the "source of normativity." That is, they didn't just want someone to lay out a descriptive account of ethical feelings or behavior, but to explain why morality—regardless of its psychological origin or morphology—should be binding on us.
And I'm not sure AS ever actually achieves an answer to this in his essay.
In fairness, he points out that the Royal Society never actually specified in their prompt that they were looking for someone to show the connection between metaphysics and ethics. Besides, AS adds, he has a whole final section of the essay in which he attempts to do exactly that.
The Royal Society pooh-poohs this final section by saying that AS only included it as a "supplement." AS wants to know—reasonably enough—why labeling it a "supplement" diminishes its value or relevance.
The Royal Society then perhaps reveals the true source of their opposition. In the final line of the "judgment," they note that the essay includes injudicious and harsh language about other prominent philosophers of they age, which they find they simply cannot pass over in silence.
To which AS replies, in so many words: what, you mean that stuff I said about Hegel and Fichte? Those charlatans? Those "mystifiers"? Those cranks and half-wits and cheats? How could I do otherwise?
I think the subsequent centuries have vindicated Schopenhauer on this one. Here we are, almost two hundred years later, and Hegel still wears the Midas ears AS bestowed upon him.
But I'm still not persuaded AS actually accomplished exactly what the Royal Society asked for (maybe because it's an impossible task). I admit that phrasing the goal as showing the "nexus" between "metaphysics and ethics," is a confusing way to put it—particularly as AS does indeed deal with both topics in this essay. But I'm convinced what they really meant was this question of normativity.
AS proposes to tackle the question by what he calls the "analytical" approach—which he says "starts from facts either of external experience or of consciousness"—as opposed to the "synthetical" approach (Payne trans. throughout).
I found this to be a rather confusing use of terminology, since generally, in Kantian epistemology, we think of "analytic" methods as being ones that depend solely on deduction—hence, the opposite of any knowledge requiring "facts [...] of external experience or consciousness."
That is, analytic truths for Kant were a priori, and implied by the necessary internal implications of concepts themselves, rather than relying on any inductive insights arrived at empirically, i.e., a posteriori. The "analytic" domain therefore corresponds to Hume's "relations between ideas," as opposed to his "matters of fact," according to his famous "fork."
Of course, Kant also famously sought to establish a domain of synthetic a prior truths as well, which he claimed to have found in the necessary categories of all experience—things like time, space, and causality. But, for Kant, these foundational categories were the exception rather than the rule, in the realm of synthetic truth, which for the most part corresponds to inductive, empirical, and a posteriori knowledge.
Yet, in his preface to the first edition, Schopenhauer describes his approach in this work as proceeding on an "analytical and a posteriori" basis. I would have thought that, for a Kantian, this should be a contradiction in terms. The analytic is always a priori, not a posteriori, in Kantian epistemology, since analytic truths derive from the necessary internal implications of ideas, not from empirical observation.
AS says that he did not emphasize the "nexus" between "metaphysics and ethics" that the Royal Society apparently sought because, if he had put his metaphysics at the front of the book, "the principle of ethics would have had to be derived synthetically from it[.]"
But since the Society seemed to ask contestants to set aside any metaphysical dogmas and assumptions, writes AS, "the nature of the question rendered necessary an analytical establishment of the fundamental moral principle, in other words, a foundation drawn from the reality of things without the assumption of any metaphysical system."
I still get the sense here that AS is using "analytic" and "synthetic" in a highly idiosyncratic way. I would think that it is synthetic knowledge, not analytical knowledge, that is "drawn from the reality of things," whereas it is analytic knowledge that can be deduced a priori from the necessary implications of concepts themselves—i.e., Hume's "relations between ideas"—and which therefore could be deduced from a set of metaphysical assumptions.
I don't say AS is not entitled to his own use of terminology and his own spacial metaphors, but his borrowing from Kant's epistemology here, while reversing the conventional meanings of the relevant terms of art, is a bit misleading.
Now Kant, as is well known, was not looking for an a posteriori or empirical basis for morality. He did not seek to draw his moral law "from the reality of things," as AS would put it. Instead, he sought to argue that the basic moral law—the categorical imperative—could be added to those necessary mental categories, those essential preconditions of our entire perceiving apparatus, that he had already found in the synthetic a priori.
AS, though, has a good rejoinder to this. While it was understandably attractive to Kant to try to resolve the question of normativity by simply adding the moral law to the list of other necessary mental equipment in the synthetic a priori—right up there with time, space, and causality as a fundamental category of mind—Schopenhauer suspects that this is a case of someone who has found a hammer treating everything he encounters as a nail.
"We sometimes see a doctor who has applied a remedy with brilliant success henceforth prescribe it for almost all diseases," AS writes; "I liken Kant to such a man."
After all, AS writes, morality actually has exceptionally little in common with the other Kantian categories. Space, time, and causality are things we must presuppose even to perceive something happening in the world around us in the first place. We cannot even conceive of a world without them. We cannot even picture to ourselves in our heads an object that would exist outside of these three categories.
Whereas, it is perfectly thinkable to imagine people violating the moral law. Indeed, Schopenhauer writes, we see it happen every day. Violating the moral law may even be more the rule than the exception among human beings.
Plus, there is no inherent self-contradiction in simply asserting a law of selfishness and egotism. If someone says: "I will treat others worse than how I want to be treated myself," they may be a jerk, but they are not asserting anything that is logically inconceivable or inherently paradoxical.
Disguised in Kant's formulation of the categorical imperative, AS argues, is really an appeal to reciprocity, which is always founded on self-interest. And while such a principle of "I'll scratch your back and you scratch mine" might be a valid rule of thumb for navigating most practical life amongst equals, it would provide no ultimate metaphysical basis for morality that we could appeal to, if we imagine a confrontation with a being infinitely more powerful than ourselves.
Anyone who wants to imagine ways we could try to make some hypothetical future super-powerful AI "singularity" show mercy to us should heed AS's words on this point. Suppose a being were always "confident perhaps of [their] mental and bodily superiority, [...] then, assuming there is no other foundation of morals but the Kantian," they could very well "will injustice and uncharitableness as a universal maxim."
AS argues that our daily experience of morality also counsels against any Kantian account of its origins. In practical life, when we do something moral, it is never because we engaged in some purely a priori deduction as to the necessary logical implications of ideas. And if we do something immoral, we generally regret it in a way wholly different from how we regret a merely logical inconsistency or fallacy.
In fact, most of us recognize—AS writes—a sharp distinction between being "wrong" in a purely rational sense and being "wrong" in a moral sense.
If we ignore the "mystifications" of the academies, then, and try to ask ourselves what is really happening when we perform a moral action, AS observes, we see that in these instances, we are really obeying the internal impulse of a moral feeling: namely, compassion.
But if all we have managed to do, then, is to provide a descriptive psychological account of why people, on a daily basis, engage in some forms of moral behavior—without explaining why they are obliged to or ought to—then I see the Royal Danish Society's point that AS has not really answered the question. (Though AS would reply that he simply rejects any notion of an inherent obligation or ought-ness as theology in disguise.)
I think this is what they were getting at when they wrote that they had hoped for more insight not only into descriptive ethics, but into how this ethics connects to metaphysics, or the fundamental nature of things.
Of course, in that famous "supplement," AS seeks to proffer some of what they seek, by offering us a glimpse of the metaphysics he elaborated more fully in The World as Will and Representation.
Schopenhauer was an honest enough philosopher, however, to realize that any metaphysics could only be speculative at best. Anticipating modern logical positivism, he pointed out that Kant's categories really draw the outer limit of what we can know. Beyond the phenomenal realm we perceive through these categories—into the realm of the numinous—we simply cannot penetrate, except through intimations.
AS could—like the logical positivists—have simply stopped there, then, and declared that the noumenon is unknowable by definition, and that any assertion about its nature would be sheer nonsense.
But if we can hypothesize anything about this unknowable realm, he says, it is that it would have to be a fundamental unity, which we only perceive under the illusion of plurality due to the categories of our perception. He argues that morality is one of the ways we get a glimpse behind this veil. In moments when we surrender egotism, he says, we perceive the fundamental nature we share with other living beings.
This, for Schopenhauer, is also the only way to reconcile the inescapable fact of determinism (which is easy enough to establish philosophically), with our no less inescapable sense of moral responsibility. When we experience guilt or regret, he writes, it is not really our choices that we lament. We are perfectly aware internally, after all, that we could not have done otherwise, given the motives that were at work at the time within us. Rather, what we regret is our weakness that led us to that choice.
We regret, that is to say, what we are, rather than what we did.
This, too, for Schopenhauer, is an intimation of the noumena—a glimpse behind the veil of merely phenomenal reality. We regret because we know, in these moments, that outside the category of time through which we perceive reality, existing eternally and timelessly, there is a great underlying will to life in the universe that chooses not what we are going to do, from moment to moment, but what we are—and that chose for us the current body and character we possess.
As the poet John Davidson described a similar doctrine, in his great poem "Thirty Bob a Week":
I woke because I thought the time had come;
Beyond my will there was no other cause;
And everywhere I found myself at home,
Because I chose to be the thing I was;
And in whatever shape of mollusc or of ape
I always went according to the laws.
I have no idea if this picture of ultimate reality is true or not. Schopenhauer didn't purport to know either. But I certainly think it's interesting. And it may even be as plausible as any other metaphysical system yet devised.
It may not be enough to satisfy the academicians. But it might be the best we can hope to do. For achieving certainty about the metaphysical realm, the noumenon, is precisely what has been ruled out for all time by the Kantian insight—his "Copernican Revolution," as he called it, in epistemology.
And this, surely, is why more elaborate metaphysical doctrines, which claim for themselves some dogmatic certainty, are fundamentally dishonest. This is why the proponents of such dogmas—the innumerable Hegelians and Fichteans and system-builders that Schopenhauer rails against in his preface—are always so many "charlatans" and "mystifiers" in just the way he describes.
This is why, as the poet James Thomson (a.k.a. Bysshe Vanolis) put it: "all the oracles are dumb or cheat / Because they have no secret to express;" for "none can pierce the vast black veil uncertain," and "there is no light beyond the curtain[.]" The thing-in-itself, if it even exists, must always remain invisible and unknowable.
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