Extracción de datos de un dispositivo móvil con la herramienta BlackLight

Hume’s arguments for objecting to reason-based morality (which, unlike Schopenhauer’s, are not direct criticisms of Kant for obvious reasons of

chronology) can be briefly summarised as follows: there are natural inclinations such as feelings of sympathy and there are social conventions which are learnable and which change through time. Our particular notion of morality is informed by these two influences and reason plays no part in this framework:

the course of the argument leads us to conclude that since vice and virtue are not discoverable merely by reason, or the comparison of ideas, it must be by means of some impression or sentiment they occasion, that we are able to mark the difference betwixt them.

(Hume, in Aitken, 1972, p. 43) Hume also says ‘Morals excite passions, and produce or prevent actions. Reason of itself is utterly impotent in this particular. The rules of morality, therefore, are not conclusions of our reason.’ (Hume in MacIntyre (ed.) 1965, p. 185.). Or, even more succinctly ‘Morality…is more properly felt than judged of…’ (Hume, in Aitken, 1972, p. 43).

Schopenhauer’s position here is, I believe, ambiguous. Firstly, in agreement with Hume, he is critical of the idea of reason alone as the arbiter of morality; that is an

abstract form of reason-as-such in Schopenhauer’s case. Secondly he agrees with Hume that reason is a slave of the passions and lastly he introduces mysticism and Indian philosophy to the discussion of morality, claiming that the mystical and the True are contained in both Brahmanism and Buddhism – views which have nothing at all in common with Hume.

Schopenhauer uses alternative terminology to Hume but basically expresses the same view that reason is the slave of the passions when he tells us that ‘Reason, like the cognitive faculty in general, is something conditioned by the organism…’

(OBM §6, Payne, 1995, p. 64), and that the will directs reason rather than the other way round ‘the intellect…[is]…in the service of the will…’ (PP2, §1, Payne, 1974, p. 4) and ‘the intellect…is originally destined to serve the will alone…’

(Ibid., p. 9) or, putting the same thing another way ‘knowledge is serviceable to the aims of the will, and in this way reflects the will…[my italics]’ (WWR2, XLVII, Payne, 1969, p. 610), or in more detail but expressing the same idea:

the outwardly directed intellect, as mere organon for the purposes of the will and consequently something merely secondary, is nevertheless only a part of our entire human nature. It belongs to the phenomenon and its knowledge merely corresponds thereto, since it exists solely for the purpose of the phenomenon.

(PP2, §1, Payne, 1974, p. 11)

Mysticism and Indian Philosophy

Although Schopenhauer accepts Hume’s line that reason is a slave of the passions he is left with only a part-Humean account. He wants to go on and explain, as much as he feels able, how morality comes to be and this takes him to mysticism and Indian philosophy. I shall say more on this later, but for now I would like to provide a very brief overview of Schopenhauer and mysticism. On this subject Schopenhauer says:

The readers of my Ethics know that with me the foundation of morality rests ultimately on the truth that has its expression in the Veda and Vedanta in the established mystical formula tat tvam asi (This art thou) which is stated with reference to every living thing, whether man or animal, and is then called the Mahavakya or Great World.

In fact, we can regard the actions that occur in accordance with it, for example those of benevolence, as the beginning of mysticism.

Every good or kind action that is done with a pure and genuine intention proclaims that, whoever practises it, stands forth in absolute contradiction to the world of phenomena in which other individuals exist entirely separate from himself, and that he recognizes himself as being identical with them.

(Ibid., §115, p. 219) What Schopenhauer ends up with is something which he accepts cannot entirely satisfy us: ‘The ultimate basis on which all our knowledge and science rests is the inexplicable.’ (Ibid., §1,p. 3) or, expanding on this:

[the intellect]…is a mere superficial force, clinging to the surface of things, and grasping mere species transitivae, not their true being. The result is that we cannot understand and grasp a single thing, even the simplest and smallest, through and through, but in everything there is something left over that remains entirely inexplicable to us.

(Ibid., p. 3) I do not believe this is as strange as it may seem since the subject matter – unknowable noumenal Will manifested as knowable phenomenal representations – is part observable and part metaphysical. Schopenhauer may simply be

constrained by what is available to the limited human mind in the same way that the realm of the saņsāric world is all you can explain to another in the same realm and neither of you can explain what it is to live in an animal realm or to experience nirvāňa even if you have done so.⁴³ Schopenhauer has a similar problem and a superficial reading may give the impression that he is confused whereas a more detailed reading should give the impression that he cannot help but seem that way. Schopenhauer is well aware of this problem:

In all the centuries, poor truth has had to blush at being paradoxical;

and yet it is not her fault…I too am well aware of the paradox which this metaphysical explanation of the primary ethical phenomenon must have for western scholars, accustomed as they are to ethical foundations of quite a different kind; yet I cannot do violence to truth.

(OBM §22, Payne, 1995, p. 213)

He returns again to Indian philosophy and says:

On the contrary all I can bring myself to do in this circumstance is to show by quotation how that metaphysics of ethics was the fundamental view of Indian wisdom already thousands of years ago.

(Ibid.)

And, having established that our explanations of the foundations of ethics cannot be without flaws, Schopenhauer returns to the mystical and to Indian philosophy:

Now it is precisely here that the mystic proceeds positively, and therefore, from this point, nothing is left but mysticism. Anyone, however, who desires this kind of supplement to the negative knowledge to which alone philosophy can guide him, will find it in its most beautiful and richest form in the Oupnekhat [Schopenhauer’s version of the Upanişads].

(WWR2, Ch. XVII, Payne, 1969, p. 612) We can see how Schopenhauer’s thought developed then diverged significantly from points of agreement with Hume until it could in no way be regarded as Humean despite having the common thread of compassion running throughout.

43 In a Western example, the prisoner from Plato’s cave is incapable of explaining what he experienced outside to the remaining prisoners when he returns (Republic 514a – 518b). In fact when Socrates is directly asked by Glaucon to explain the Good, which exists beyond the world of change and delusion, he cannot do so except by analogy (Republic 506d-e; beginning of Book VI in older translations).

This is an admittedly brief sketch of Hume and Schopenhauer on virtue and vice but it is enough to expose the point of departure for Schopenhauer who insists that there is a root source of compassion which transcends not only the individual, the society and fashions of character, but also the entire phenomenal realm altogether and is to be found in the noumenal oneness of the world as Will. This is very unlike Hume’s account of sympathy.

Chapter 3: Contemporary Criticisms of Schopenhauer’s