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The Journal of Value Inquiry 32: 243–252, 1998. 243
c1998 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche on the Nature and Limits of
Philosophy
DANIEL TOUEY
Department of Philosophy, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA 19122, USA
1.
It takes some effort to imagine how truly remote we are from Friedrich Niet-
zsche and his world. This is a testament to his relentlessly oppositional stance
toward Western philosophy’s most deeply entrenched values and beliefs, and
his continuing usefulness for successive generations trying to make peace
with the traditions they embody. One of the salutary effects of Nietzsche’s
irreverentphilosophy is that it continually challenges us to re-think our famil-
iar notions of what a philosopher is. Two ideas that emerge from his early
work are especiallyprovocative in this regard. Thefirst, which is a dominant
theme in both The Birth of Tragedy and the early essay, “The Philosopher,” is
that the philosopher does much the same sort of work as the artist. Nietzsche
does not go so far as to equate the two, but he does suggest essential simi-
larities. The second idea, which is prominent in “First and Last Things” of
Human, All Too Human, suggests that the philosopher is always an apologist
for knowledge, who feels called upon to defend the seeming inadequacies
of knowledge’s usefulness for life. The notions are related, since the work
of both the artist and the philosopher have to do with finding life’s ultimate
significance, or judging the “value of existence.”1
These notions disturb the traditional idea of what philosophy is by deny-
ing two key rationalist assumptions: the first, that there is a strict boundary
between the creative, non-epistemic practices of the arts and the theoretical,
explanatory nature of philosophy; the second, what has always been taken for
grantedbyphilosophers– that knowledgeisgoodforits ownsake.Nietzsche’s
refusal to concede these basic philosophicalprinciples has a certain debunk-
ing charm; he appeals, perhaps, to our best negativeinstincts. As enured as we
are by now to such subversive digs against the Western intellectual tradition,
we may not fully register how truly radical Nietzsche’s assertions are, or how
vast their metaphysical, epistemological, and moral consequencesmay be. If
244 DANIEL TOUEY
they are more than revisionist posturing, it is important to evaluate them with
the best tools at our command.
But how seriously should we actually take them? One of the obstacles
for a serious evaluation is Nietzsche’s epigrammatic style; it often lends
drama, and perhaps even clarity, to the presentation of an idea, but masks its
real intellectual genesis, so that we must reconstruct its grounds for ourselves,
oftenrelyingon hints. Giventheirconsequences,we wouldliketo haveafuller
account of how the ideas of philosophers being like artists and philosophers
beingapologistsfor knowledge developout ofphilosophicalquestioningitself
than Nietzsche actually gives us.
In this regard we are lucky enough to have Schopenhauerto look to when
trying to understand Nietzschean themes. Showing just how Schopenhauer
influenced Nietzsche is not an easy task. But limiting ourselves to the two
notions of the philosopher as artist and as apologist for knowledge, much can
be gained by looking back at Nietzsche’s educator. Furthermore, by looking
at Schopenhauer in order to come to terms with the two radical Nietzschean
ideas, we may also come to see how the Nietzschean and Schopenhauerean
way of treating the problem of value or significanceprovides an alternative to
two other well-known positions on the nature and limitations of philosophical
activity, those of Plato and the early Wittgenstein.
2.
In Human, All too Human, Nietzsche wrote:
Until now, there has been no philosopher in whose hands philosophy has
not become an apology for knowledge. In this way, at least, every one
is an optimist, by thinking that knowledge must be accorded the highest
usefulness.2
Here he chides philosophersfor their compulsion to emphasize the usefulness
or significance of knowledge, and their fascination with the most important
things. He says that we should instead be content with the simple truths
that we can actually wrest from nature.3While in some places Nietzsche
maintains that they need not be grand truths, in others he takes the opposite
view, especially in “The Philosopher.”There he states that it is the appointed
role of the philosopher to find and emphasize what is valuable, against what
can be simply known with “certainty.”4The philosopher must restrain and
guide the “knowledge-drive” that indiscriminately seeks to bring whatever it
can under knowledge, valuing what is knowable for its own sake and ignoring
the task of finding out what is really important to know.5
ON THE NATURE AND LIMITS OF PHILOSOPHY 245
Nietzsche seems to be flirting with two long-standing, divergent philosoph-
ical views. Theone is to be content with what we actually can know, and to be
suspiciousof anytendencythat would leadus beyondthat.Theotherconcerns
a further question pertaining to value. Given what we know or could come to
know, what then is really worth knowing?
Nietzsche says that every philosopher must answer this last question and
createhis own apologyforknowledge.It sometimesseemsthat the questionof
the significance of the philosophical enterprise itself does haunt philosophers.
Thelegend of the elderly Plato travelling to Syracuse to try torealize his notion
of the philosopher-ruler is an early example of a philosopher determined to
make the results of his work useful. But this, it could be argued, was a purely
external happenstance, a result of Plato’s personal desire to implement a
life’s work of theory into practical political application. Did Plato really feel
compelled to defend the very practice of philosophy?
The great promise of the Platonic and Socratic teaching is that underneath
the world of appearances there is a layer of true being that can be known.
The reason for the pursuit of knowledge of this region of truth is not simple
curiosity. Plato assumed that the ultimate foundationof things would not only
allow us to know what there truly is, but also how to act. Plato called the
ultimate source of being to agathon, or the Good.6The inquiries into what is,
and how to go about living the best sort of life, were not separated. Therewas
no disparity in the search for epistem´
e, or knowledge, and aret´
e, or virtue;
they were, as Socrates said of pleasure and pain, bound together like two
bodies with a single head.7Virtue was bound to result from knowledge since
the inquirer, being rational, would act in accordance with what he knew. Plato
had no need to defend philosophy, because its pursuit of pure knowledge,
theoria, was the only true guide to human action – what was later to be
termed praxis.
The positive evaluation of the relation of knowledge and value supported
by Platonic metaphysics has counterparts in philosophies that deny that there
is such a conjunction between what we can know and what reveals itself
as having value and importance. Wittgenstein asserts very simply in the
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus that “All propositions are of equal value.”8
In his inventory of what we can meaningfully say about the world, ethics,
along with aesthetics and religion, plays no part. What can be known never
yields what should be known. “Ethics is transcendental,” says Wittgenstein.9
It is an attempt to impart to the world a meaning from a standpointoutside the
world. It is mysticism. It is nonsense.10 However much we may respect the
motivation to give the world an ethical value, it has no part in philosophy.11
People who demand that philosophy assign value to things, and tell us how
to live the best life, misunderstand philosophy.
246 DANIEL TOUEY
Nietzsche’s challenge is foreign to these two philosophical approaches. The
problem of the valueof what we can know, as well as the problemof making
a principled distinction between the work of the philosopher and the artist,
are not raised within the philosophical horizons of Plato or the Wittgenstein
of the Tractatus. But should theygo unchallenged?
An apologetic philosopher in Nietzsche’s sense for whom the question
of significance was real and troubling was Schopenhauer. The metaphysics
of The World as Will and Representation is a struggle to establish a bond
between a purely theoretical philosophy and the presence of value in our
active, practical experience. To see how the problem of significance emerges
in Schopenhauer’s work we must trace the outline of his metaphysics.
The first book of Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation is
a formal account of knowledge. On Schopenhauer’s view, the world is one
of objects ruled by the principle of sufficient reason and I am the necessary
correlate subject of those objects, “the knower, never the known.”12 Iam
in possession of two faculties, understanding and reason. The understanding
allows me to order the objects of perception, and reason brings the multiplicity
of objects under one concept.
How does Schopenhauer move beyond the account of knowledge of Book
One of The World as Will and Representation? The continuity between the
content of Book One and the rest of the work is not always clear, but why
Schopenhauer moves on is evident. In Book Two, when Schopenhauer intro-
duces the concept of the will, it becomes clear that Book One may satisfyingly
account for knowledge, but not for experience. The account given in the first
book is incomplete.
It will be of special significance for us to obtain information about [the
representation’s]realsignificance, thatsignificance,otherwisemerelyfelt,
by virtue of which these pictures or imagesdo not march past us strange
and meaningless, as they would otherwise inevitably do, but speak to us
directly, are understood, and acquire an interest that engrossesour whole
nature.13
While Book One may adequately describe the purely theoretical relation
between a generic subject and the representations that it is confronted with,
it is false as a description of how any real subject approaches the world and
how the world spontaneously presents itself to that subject. I may be thought
of as a simple subject of knowledge, but I do not experience the world as
such. The question is not whether this realm of human experience exists, but
whether philosophy can say anything about it. Schopenhauer’s challenge is
that if philosophy is to be more than an epistemological adjudicator, it must
ON THE NATURE AND LIMITS OF PHILOSOPHY 247
be able to account for my experience of living in a world of significance and
value.
Schopenhauer points out that the world considered solely as representation
simply does not jibe with our own experienceof ourselves and of the world. In
Book One he does not explain why the world appears to us as it does. We are
not pure knower, “winged Cherub without a body,” but an individual “rooted
in that world.”14 We are involved in the world, Schopenhauersays, because of
the fundamental condition of being embodied. One of the representations in
the world, the object side of which is our own body, is not only known in the
usual way. We know our body in two different ways: as object among other
objects but also in a way that Schopenhauer says is altogether different.15
The nature of this second kind of knowledge is difficult to characterize, but
is “a knowledge which everyone possesses directly in the concrete, namely
as feeling.”16 This way of knowing the body is something everyone already
understands; Schopenhauer’s task is first to help us characterize it in the right
way,as knowledge of the will, and then to showthat our immediate experience
does not exhaust our knowledge of the will. It may be that the whole purpose
ofSchopenhauer’sworkistoshowthis. The difficultyof doing so is expressed
in this passage:
Thus our knowledge, bound always to individuality and having its limi-
tation in this very fact, necessarily means that everyone can be only one
thing, whereas he can know everything else, and it is this very limitation
that really creates the need for philosophy.17
In seeking to grasp the what rather than the how of the world, we must use our
knowledge of our own bodies as a “key.”18 In metaphysicswe try to achieve
the same kind of insight that we are afforded into ourselves as a result of
being something. We must be able to know the world outsideof the principle
of sufficient reason as groundless.
Schopenhauer created an undeniable problem for himself. By choosing to
continue beyond the limits of the kind of knowledge subject to the principle
of sufficient reason, he needs to justify the claim that anything can still be
known. He is describing a kind of knowledge that cannot be adequately
stated, but must be lived through. He cannot prove that the world is will,
but only describe what the willing subject’s experience of the world is like.
The plausibility of his insight about the body, and its extension to aesthetics,
religion, and ethics, must rely on a kind of knowledgethat everyone already
has. In referenceto our knowledge of virtue in Book Four he says:
248 DANIEL TOUEY
But it is a direct and intuitive knowledge that cannot be reasoned away or
arrived at by reasoning; a knowledge that, just because it is not abstract,
cannot be communicated, but must dawn on each of us.19
Schopenhauer’s method is not to build a systematic knowledge of the world,
but to review the different areas of knowledge, including natural science,
aesthetics, and ethics, in light of the fundamental insight into the complex
state of being an embodiedsubject. This is how the what of the world can be
known.
Some philosophers might objectthat any knowledge which cannot be com-
municated is notreally knowledgeat all. Certainly Schopenhauerwould agree
that it is not knowledge in the sense of the account given in Book One. He
would insist, however, that this kind of knowledge is more primary than the
more traditional concept of knowledge.20 It resists abstraction because it can-
notresideina dead concept.21 Anyone who denies thismorefundamentalkind
of knowledge has fallen prey to the same mistake as all those philosophers
who, Schopenhauer says, misunderstood“the miracle kat’exoch´
en,” which is
the pairing, in human beings, of knowledge and the will.22 In exploring what
a person is, previous philosophers have put too much emphasis on knowledge
and ignored the will. Schopenhauer reverses that order. In arguing against the
traditional idea of freedom,he writes:
The maintenance of an empirical freedom of the will . . . is very closely
connected with the assertion that places man’s inner nature in a soul that
is originally a knowing, indeed really an abstract thinking entity, and only
in consequence thereof a willing entity. Such a view regarded the will as
of a secondary nature, instead of knowledge, which is really secondary.23
Schopenhauer says that this misconception leads to the fallacy that we can
first find out the truth, and then on that basis decide what to do, and act on it.
He chides Descartes and Spinoza, for instance, for their rationalist prejudice
in reducing the will to the faculty of judgement. But it is a position that they
themselves inherited and is the same as the Platonic scheme outlined earlier.
In choosing a different approach, Schopenhauer cannot expect to retain the
same standards of proof that would apply to the kind of knowledge dealt with
in Book One of The World as Will and Representation. The kind of answer
that we can reasonably expect from him is determined by the kind of question
he is asking.
Asking how a thing came to be yields the world of representation. This is
the realm of the natural scientist, the historian, and the psychologist. It is also
the realm of the philosopher, in so far as he is interested in laying out the
ON THE NATURE AND LIMITS OF PHILOSOPHY 249
structure of this kind of knowledge. In contrast, asking whata thing is yields
the realm of being. The metaphysician has nothing to do with causes, or the
ground of appearances through other appearances. That is not philosophy but
etiology.24 The metaphysician attempts to describe what is uncaused. The
kind of demonstration that natural science is capable of does not apply to
metaphysical exposition. Traditional metaphysics has indeed used the forms
of proof and demonstration proper to logic and mathematics, but this is not
Schopenhauer’s method. He does not pretend that the foundation of meta-
physics is something that can be known in the traditional sense, which can
serve as a foundation for causal demonstration. The kind of knowledge that
Schopenhauer is concerned with is something that could never be accessed
by reason alone.
That is not to say that we dispense with reason. But we cannot expect our
reason to be able to adequately express what we know only through being
something.
Philosophy can neverdo more than interpret and explain what is present
and at hand; it can never do more than bring to the distinct, abstract
knowledge of the faculty of reason the inner nature of the world which
expresses itselfintelligibly to everyone in theconcrete, that is, as feeling.25
Schopenhaueranswersthequestionabout philosophy’ssignificancebybasing
his metaphysics on what is most immediate and known by everyone. The
methodis not tobuilda philosophy andthentryto relateittowhat issignificant
in our lives, but to raise to philosophical status what is already significant for
us.26 If we do not approve of his use of the term “feeling,” then we can
replace the expression with: that we which we only could know by virtue
of being embodied individuals. Philosophy’s task is to interpret and explain
this. But as Freud said, in a discussion of the so-called oceanic feeling that
betrays Schopenhauer’s influence: “It is not easy to deal scientifically with
feelings.”27 Schopenhauer regards that feeling as something that gives us
access to something important. He does not explain it away psychologically,
asFreud does, or regard it as nonsense,as Wittgensteindoes,butdefinesit as a
realm of legitimate philosophical inquiry. At the same time he acknowledges
that the form of exposition that we are used to cannot monopolize this sort of
investigation. What follows is that there is no unique way of expressing the
substance of metaphysics.
From such knowledge [of the Ideas of the world] we get philosophy as
well as art; in fact, we shall find in this book that we can also reach that
250 DANIEL TOUEY
disposition of mind which alone leads to true holiness and salvation from
the world.28
Thatphilosophy, art,andreligionshould be so closely relatedisnotsurprising,
if we keep in mind that they all have the same ultimate ground – our own
experience as embodied, willing subjects. All three are only expressions
of this fundamental knowledge, and none can exhaustively capture what is
known intuitively. The differences among them are in the end stylistic and
expository. There is no principle for deciding beforehand which of these
methods of exposition is most capable of revealing the truth about the world.
Philosophy’s purely theoretical purpose is to bring an intuitive, existential
knowledge into abstract representation.
Between the two [intuitive and abstract knowledge] is a wide gulf; and,
in regard to the inner nature of the world, this gulf can be crossed only
by philosophy. Intuitively, or in concreto, every man is really conscious
of all philosophical truths; but to bring them into his abstract knowledge,
into reflection, is the business of the philosopher, who neither ought to
nor can do more than this.29
In philosophy, the concrete knowledge that we already have is “expressed in
abstract terms and free from everything mythical.”30 Philosophycannot claim
to be more profound than art or religion. It may in fact speak with a “feeble
tongue” in comparison.31 But by eschewing myth it gives us the clearest
possible view of what is groundless, without ever being fully adequate to the
original intuitive knowledge upon which it is based. An abstract concept is
never autonomous but must always return to a living idea for its force and
relevance.
3.
Through an examination of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, Nietzsche’s state-
ments about the philosopher’s need to justify knowledge, and the way that
philosophers and artists play much the same role, become plausible. It is
important, however, to strategically evaluate Schopenhauer’s account, to see
what has been gained and what has been lost in his apology for knowledge.
Through his account of what metaphysics is, he has ensured that philosophy
will have to do with what is significant. But because metaphysics is based
upon a kind of experience that resists being fully captured in the systematic
form demanded by science, and so seems to have more affinity with art and
religion than anyvision of a purely rationalenterprise, he has openedit up to
ON THE NATURE AND LIMITS OF PHILOSOPHY 251
a charge of nonsense. That Schopenhauer did not stop with Book One, and
ventured into a region of experience that lacked a Kantian stamp of approval,
can be interpreted as either an act of foolishness or courage. Based as it is
on metaphysical claims which cannot be demonstrated in accord with the
mundane knowledge of Book One, whether or not we wish to regard what
Schopenhauer does afterwards as philosophy depends on what our preference
is for the extension of the term “philosophy.” But there are consequencesfor
the choice. If we reject the larger extension, we have greatly limited the
subject-matter of philosophy. If we accept it, then we must also concede, as
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche do, that the philosopher sometimes does much
the same work as the artist and the religious thinker. Philosophy is a cre-
ative projectof working out the implications of a fundamental human insight,
embodied and intuitive, that is itself non-rational. The consequences for the
self-image of philosophy are unsettling.
Schopenhauer manages to absorb the Platonic and Wittgensteinian posi-
tions, while avoiding the major weaknesses of each. With Plato he might
agree that philosophical knowledge is bound up with significance and val-
ue, but point out that it is not clear that its significance is anything like the
Good. There is no naive optimism about the usefulness of philosophy in
Schopenhauer.That would be to privilege knowledge over will, as he accuses
Descartes and Spinoza of doing. With Wittgenstein he would probably agree
that what can be known scientifically and with the strictest standard of ratio-
nality contains nothing that points to value or significance. But philosophy,
on Schopenhauer’s view, is not limited to this realm; it must also account for
our actual experience of living in a world that is full of immediate signifi-
cance. Schopenhauer’s way of doing philosophy thus avoids Plato’s optimism
and Wittgenstein’s limitations because of that which he chooses to examine,
which is not only the faculty of knowing but also the phenomenon of willing.
The pairing of the two is what Schopenhauer called a “miracle”: the condition
of being. To acknowledge that as philosophy’s proper study is to see that it
cannot help but be concerned with issues of human relevance.
Notes
1. Friedrich Nietzsche, “The philosopher,” in Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Niet-
zsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870’s, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale (New Jersey:
Humanities Press International, 1979), p. 10.
2. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Of first and last things,” Human, All Too Human, trans. Marion Faber
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 17.
3. Ibid., p. 15.
4. Nietzsche, “The philosopher,” p. 13.
5. Ibid., p. 17.
6. Plato, Republic, 518d.
252 DANIEL TOUEY
7. Plato, Phaedo, 60c.
8. LudwigWittgenstein,Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,trans.D.F.PearsandB.F.McGuin-
ness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961), p. 71.
9. Ibid.
10. Ludwig Wittgenstein, “A lecture on ethics,” in Ethics: Selections from Classical and
Contemporary Writers, ed. Oliver A. Johnson (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston,
1984), p. 383.
11. Ibid., p. 385.
12. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Vol. I, trans. E.F.J. Payne
(New York: Dover, 1969), p. 5.
13. Ibid., p. 95.
14. Ibid., p. 99.
15. Ibid., p. 102.
16. Ibid., p. 109.
17. Ibid., p. 104.
18. Ibid., p. 117.
19. Ibid., p. 370.
20. Ibid., p. 125. Here there is an unmistakable affinity with the thought of the later Wittgen-
stein.See LudwigWittgenstein,On Certainty, ed.G.E.M. Anscombeand G.H. vonWright,
trans. Denis Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe (New York: Harper & Row, 1972).
21. Schopenhauer, op. cit., p. 235.
22. Ibid., p. 102.
23. Ibid., p. 292.
24. Ibid., pp. 121–122.
25. Ibid., p. 271.
26. See M. Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), p. vii.
27. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents,inGreat Books of the Western World,
Vol. 54 (Chicago: Encyclopedia Brittanica Inc., 1990), p. 767.
28. Schopenhauer, op. cit., p. 274.
29. Ibid., p. 383.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid.