The Classical concept of Freedom aims to bring together the antinomic notions of the Will and of

Reason. In turn, both the Will and Reason can have antithetical meanings when
considered in their autonomous decisional or heteronomous instrumental aspects: the
Will can have a decisional aspect as conscious Volition (voluntas, velle, arbitrium, Wollen)
and an operational one as blind insatiable Appetite (appetitus, conatus, want, Lust); similarly,
reason can have a substantive meaning as a faculty (Reason, Vernunft) allowing for the
human comprehension of Being (esse) which then makes possible the determination of
harmonious human goals (inter esse, human interests) by the autonomous Will; and an
instrumental one as a tool for consistent measurable action or calculation (intellect,
understanding, Verstand).
The inconsistency between Will and Reason arises from the fact that in Western philosophy the
Will has always been regarded as absolutely and autonomously free even free to
perpetrate evil (as liberum arbitrium indifferentiae). As Cacciari notes (DeCdP, c.p.60), in
Western rationalist thought, unlike the Eastern (from which Schopenhauer in particular
was first to draw keenly), freedom at least in the decisional sense has always been
predicated of the Will, and has also always been construed in the volitional sense as autonomous or ab-solute, that is, not subject to any restrictions or heteronomy and therefore
as consistent with the rule of Reason, given that a choice exercised inconsistently with
Reason cannot be free. As Kant insisted in the Second Critique (following Plato), to be
free, the Will must be able to restrain its appetite by being reasonable in its
substantive sense as Volition because, quite obviously, the will can be neither free in the
sense of autonomous nor instrumentally reasonable in its aspect as appetite.
And yet, if it is to be free even as volition, the will cannot be subordinate to Reason on pain of
making their compatibility tautologous, or even to reason in the limited instrumental
sense as the intellect, because this would turn the Will from an autonomous substantive
entity into a heteronomous instrumental one, similar to mere appetite, of which
freedom cannot be predicated except in the purely quantitative, self-seeking sense of
free-dom that is, the seeking of satisfaction to the detriment of all other wills.
Similarly and conversely, Reason cannot be free if it is to be consistent with appetite,
whilst freedom cannot be predicated of reason as intellect. The word arbitrium itself
gives the sense of the antithetical ambi-valence of the notion of Will: the human faculty of
arbitrium makes the decision-maker an arbiter in the sense that the Will is free to
decide; and yet this arbitration cannot be arbitrary but reasonable, that is, subject
to the rules of Reason or at least of reason or intellect whence the phrase liberum
arbitrium to emphasize the fact that the Will can be both free or unfettered and
reasonable.
Freedom is therefore inconsistent with Reason because the notions of Volition as well as that of
Appetite are incompatible with the restrictions that Reason must impose on Freedom by
virtue of its supposed internal consistency both logico-mathematical and also practicomoral. Thus, to the extent that the concept of Will must include that of Reason, Freedom
must be inconsistent with Reason, unless the two are defined tautologously that is, only
reasonable decisions by the Will can be said to be free. And this is the difficulty that the

negatives Denken from Hobbes to Heidegger has sought to overcome, as we shall see
presently. In pursuit of his genial theory of value-neutral (wert-frei) social science, Max
Weber mistakenly argues that only rational decisions are free, without noticing that
rationality here must also mean reasonableness or that Freedom must be reduced to
free-dom otherwise there could be irrational decisions in the sense of substantive
Reason [Wert-rationalitat] that could still be said to be free if they were carried out in an
instrumentally rational manner [Zweck-rationalitat]! Evidently, Weber did not intend
freedom in its substantive sense as Freedom, that is, as the union of Volition and Reason,
but only in its instrumental sense as free-dom, the union of appetite and calculation, as in
the scientific link between Want and Provision in neoclassical economic theory. In effect,
this free-dom becomes a form of co-ercion necessity in a political sense, not necessity
in a scientific sense given that Weber agreed that there are indefinite scientific ways or
means to attain stated goals or ends.
There are two concepts of freedom in classical liberal philosophical and political theory (cf. I.
Berlin, The Two Concepts of Liberty, and N. Bobbio, Kant e le due liberta in Da Hobbes a
Marx). The first concept combines the instrumental aspects of freedom appetite and
intellect - and sets its boundaries heteronomously, that is to say, through an external limit
to the Will as appetite: appetite and means to its satisfaction are rationally, though not
necessarily reasonably, regulated through limited provision of whatever individuals seek
to obtain imposed by external forces such as scarcity or other appetites or the State. This
is the negative meaning of freedom also known as liberty, according to which
freedom is whatever the appetite is allowed to do by scarce means and resources or by
other appetites either through sheer force (Hobbes, Schopenhauer) or by convention
based on labour or utility (cf. Lockes notion of labour, Mills utilitarianism,
Schopenhauers sym-pathy, Constants market-based liberalism). Here is the classic
definition of negative freedom what we call free-dom offered by Berlin:
I am normally said to be free to the degree to which no man or body of men interferes with my activity.
Political liberty in this sense is simply the area within which a man can act unobstructed by others. If I am
prevented by others from doing what I could otherwise do, I am to that degree unfree; and if this area is
contracted by other men beyond a certain minimum, I can be described as being coerced, or, it may be,
enslaved. (op.city., p.3)
Of course, as Berlin correctly implies, the inconsistency between freedom and reason cannot be
overcome by positing a natural or scientific or even logical necessity because what may be
impossible for the Will to achieve with one set of means may be possible with another,
what is impossible today may become possible tomorrow (flying to another galaxy, for
instance) depending on the means available, and in any case, any restriction on an
individuals aim, however unreasonable, is a restriction on its free-dom in the
instrumental sense. Freedom therefore may only be opposed to coercion if we adopt a
definition of necessity that allows of all means, however impractical or impossible. In
other words, contra Weber, even absolutely impossible or irrational volitions can be free,
and then the only obstacle to the Will is co-ercion and not physical-scientific necessity.
Even where human beings attempt the impossible are constrained by necessity -, any
attempt to restrain them from the attempt, however foolish it may be, must amount to co-

ercion and is therefore a matter for political deliberation. Berlin himself seems to agree
with this conclusion:
Coercion is not, however, a term that covers every form of inability. If I say that I am unable to jump more
than ten feet in the air, or cannot read because I am blind, or cannot understand the darker pages of
Hegel, it would be eccentric to say that I am to that degree enslaved or coerced. Coercion implies
the deliberate interference of other human beings within the area in which I could otherwise act.
You lack political liberty or freedom only if you are prevented from attaining a goal by human
beings.3 Mere incapacity to attain a goal is not lack of political freedom.4(loc.cit.)
By contrast, Hannah Arendt [in On Revolution], still clings to the distinction between necessity, to
which chance is opposed, and coercion, the opposite of freedom. The subtle difference
between the two positions lies in the fact that Berlin does not consider impossibility as
necessity, whereas Arendt does. But the impossible is not necessary because
necessity always implies a positive inducement to human action, whereas impossibility is
simply a statement of fact. Hence, it cannot be said that the laws of physics or indeed the
axioms of logico-mathematics tell us what is necessary: they tell us only what is
probable! This is what led Nietzsche to attack and refute the notion of physical-scientific
and logico-mathematical necessity, as we are about to see in connection with
Schopenhauer.

The limit of this negative conception of freedom is that if appetites are to be externally,
heteronomously, kept in check so as not to lead to self-destruction or mutual annihilation, then
they must be governed by Reason in its substantive sense, which is incompatible with appetite.
The extreme pessimism of this negative definition of freedom is evident in the
conceptualisation of freedom developed by Western liberalism, which is also the ideological
foundation of capitalism, and is evinced by the dismissive approach its theoreticians take to the
positive or rationalist concept of freedom.
I am free if, and only if, I plan my life in accordance with my own will; plans entail rules; a rule does not
oppress me or enslave me if I impose it on myself consciously, or accept it freely, having understood it,
whether it was invented by me or by others, provided that it is rational, that is to say, conforms to the
necessities of things. To understand why things must be as they must be is to will them to be so. Knowledge
liberates not by offering us more open possibilities amongst which we can make our choice, but by
preserving us from the frustration of attempting the impossible. To want necessary laws to be other than
they are is to be prey to an irrational desire - a desire that what must be X should also be not-X. To go
further, and believe these laws to be other than what they necessarily are, is to be insane. That is the
metaphysical heart of rationalism. The notion of liberty contained in it is not the 'negative' conception of a
field (ideally) without obstacles, a vacuum in which nothing obstructs me, but the notion of self-direction
or self-control. I can do what I will with my own. I am a rational being; whatever I can demonstrate to
myself as being necessary, as incapable of being otherwise in a rational society - that is, in a society
directed by rational minds, towards goals such as a rational being would have - I cannot, being rational,
wish to sweep out of my way. I assimilate it into my substance as I do the laws of logic, of mathematics, of
which I can never be thwarted, since I cannot want it to be other than it is. [15]
This is the positive doctrine of liberation by reason. Socialized forms of it, widely disparate and opposed to
each other as they are, are at the heart of many of the nationalist, communist, authoritarian, and totalitarian
creeds of our day. It may, in the course of its evolution, have wandered far from its rationalist moorings.
Nevertheless, it is this freedom that, in democracies and in dictatorships, is argued about, and fought for, in
many parts of the earth today. (Berlin, pp15-6)

Evident is the dismissive distaste with which Berlin addresses the rationalist or positive
concept of freedom and its metaphysical pretensions. Yet Berlin fails to explain why the
negative concept of freedom shared by liberalism in politics, empiricism in science, and
neoclassical economics should be any less metaphysical than that of rationalism!
Indeed, the flaws of the positive concept of freedom as a range of conduct autonomously
adopted by the Will either alone or in conjunction with other wills can be said to apply
equally to the negative definition of freedom (Berlin, loc.cit. p.8). To the extent that
human beings may decide autonomously to restrict their freedom in the sense of their
appetites or self-interests to a minimum, this restriction must be reasonable if it is not to
void freedom of its meaning! In other words, even the substantive sense of the Will as
volition cannot be consistent with Reason because its autonomy must be guided and
enlightened by Reason and also be limited and measured by (be commensurate with) the
intellect or instrumental reason because otherwise it degenerates into either insatiable
appetite or self-annihilating abnegation, which means that it can reduce itself to naught
(cf. I. Berlin, op.cit.).
Even Berlin acknowledges that indeed before we define freedom we need to define human being
itself:
This demonstrates (if demonstration of so obvious a truth is needed) that conceptions of freedom directly
derive from views of what constitutes a self, a person, a man. Enough manipulation of the definition of
man, and freedom can be made to mean whatever the manipulator wishes. Recent history has made it only
too clear that the issue is not merely academic. The consequences of distinguishing between two selves will
become even clearer if one considers the two major forms which the desire to be self-directed - directed by
one's 'true' self has historically taken: the first, that of self-abnegation in order to attain independence; the
second, that of self-realisation, or total self-identification with a specific principle or ideal in order to attain
the selfsame end. (Berlin, p10)
Still, yet again, we can see the negative slant that Berlin places on any attempt to theorise the
notion of self as anything other than the in-dividuum, the individual self or its ego-ity
[Ich-heit] as if any analysis based on other than empirical, that is to say present or
given, reality necessarily implied the manipulation of the human self! Once again,
Berlin is agitating the delusions of Utopianism as a barrier to the construction of a
rational society - and indeed as a screen and apology for the existing society of capital!
as is shown in the following passage:
But if we are not armed with an a priori guarantee of the proposition that a total harmony of
true values is somewhere to be found - perhaps in some ideal realm the characteristics of which we
can, in our finite state, not so much as conceive - we must fall back on the ordinary resources of
empirical observation and ordinary human knowledge. And these certainly give us no warrant for
supposing (or even understanding what would be meant by saying) that all good things, or all bad
things for that matter, are reconcilable with each other.[29] Nevertheless, it is a conclusion that cannot be
escaped by those who, with Kant, have learnt the truth that 'Out of the crooked timber of humanity no
straight thing was ever made[31 at fn.58]
The difficulty that Berlin is having arises from his inability to go beyond the notion of the human
self as belonging to an in-dividual an indivisible atom rather than to a speciesconscious being. Once more, Berlin remains trapped within the ontogenetic or
individualistic and empiricist mould, - a trap which is equally shared by Western

empiricism and rationalism alike, namely, their total allegiance to the metaphysical
autonomy or Freedom of the human mind or soul, of Ego-ity.

Classical liberal political theory assumes that the State is the holistic ethico-political ex-pression
and pro-duct of more fundamental social components that precede the State both
historically and analytically. The bourgeois theory of the State, known as liberalism,
shares this vision of the State with the added ingredient that society itself can be
separated into a scientific economic sphere governed by the laws of the market and
economic value, on one side, and a political sphere of public opinion guided by ethical
values, on the other. In other words, if Economics is the bourgeoisies scientific
rationalisation of capitalism, then Liberalism constitutes its quintessential political
ideology. Liberalism is the political expression of capitalism in that it proclaims that it is
possible to separate the economic sphere of social life which is the realm of necessity or
free-dom, that is, the rigid constraint of each individual free-dom imposed by the freedoms of others all understood strictly as individual freedoms (the optimal utilisation of
resources made scarce by the insatiable nature of individual self-interest whence the
dismal science this is the constraint that founds the scientificity of capitalist social
relations, the Objective Value of neoclassical economic theory) from the sphere of freedom
or public opinion in which individuals can air their most subjective beliefs, the Subjective
or Ethical Values of the liberal public sphere, without for that very reason, that is, by
reason of the ideal nature of opinions and beliefs upsetting the politico-technical
neutrality of the State which, again, is founded on the scientificity of Economics, that is to
say, on the liberalist presumption of the scientific workings of the self-regulating market
mechanism.
The subjectivity of these ethical values, their origin in the ideal freedom of the human will, and
the fact that this ethical-moral freedom can be founded exclusively on the objectivity
and scientific operation of the market mechanism and on the laws of Economics it
is these two factors combined that liberalism can exploit ideologically to vaunt its unique
affinity with democracy. The central tenet of liberalism is that democracy is socially
impossible unless the sphere of economic production and exchange is kept hermetically
separate and protected from the sphere of public opinion with its irrational ethicomoral and religious beliefs!
Locke and Constant are the great theoreticians of liberalism. For Locke, the separation of
economic and political spheres is made possible by the fact that it is possible to assign
individual property rights to resources by means of individual labour by which
Locke means also the labour of others exchanged like any other product of labour or
commodity. Constant goes further by treating liberalism as the social state that allows the
transformation of proprietary antagonism from war to commerce. In other words, for
Constant, commerce, or the Lockean appropriation of resources on the basis of
supposedly individual labour, leads not just to social peace guaranteed by a neutral
State, but also to international peace between nation-states on the basis of the disciplining
effect of property and capital movements between nation-states! This could not be

achieved without the existence of natural rights that precede the State. Here is
Constant:
War precedes commerce, because they are merely two different ways of achieving
the same endnamely, coming to own what one wants to own. If I want
something that you own, commerce i.e. my offer to buy it from youis
simply my tribute to your strength, i.e. my admission that I cant just take
the thing I want. Commerce is an attempt to get through mutual agreement
something that one has given up hope of acquiring through violence. (De la
liberte, p.3)
But the obvious objection arises that if commerce is chosen by the weaker party as a means to
obtain something from the stronger party that it could not obtain by force, then there is
no reason why the stronger party should keep to their part of the commercial agreement!
Constant is at once conceding that commercial transactions are founded on relationships
of force, and then insinuating that they are ideally based either on mutual consent or at
least on the wiles of the weak in enticing the strong to relinquish their possessions! Yet, if
commerce is based on mutual consent or better still, as liberal market ideology insists,
on equal exchange, then it is obviously something very different from war and cannot
be said to replace it. And if commerce is based on wiles and inducements if not outright
deceit, then there is still a foundation of violence, however veiled, in the commercial
transaction. Of course, Constants argument flies in the face of what lies at the heart of
liberalism the equal exchange on which the market mechanism supposedly rests,
which necessarily rests on the neutral pricing of exchange values that wars make
impossible to achieve! Hence, it is simply inarguable that commerce replaces war for
the simple reason that, if commerce is claimed to be based on unequal exchange, then it
is merely a form of violence akin to war which means that commerce will always
degenerate into war; and if commerce is instead claimed to be based on equal
exchange, then commerce and war are two completely incomparable forms of human
behaviour and interaction so that commerce cannot ever be said to be able to replace war!
The same argument would invalidate Nietzsches Genealogy of Morals that is, the
argument that morality replaces violence - except that in that case it is the
internalisation of morals and crystallisation of conventions that makes the thesis
more credible. Indeed, both theses become plausible only on the Hobbesian foundation
of mutual fear that is, commerce and morals as political conventions founded on the
equal capacity of individuals to harm one another.

Berlins smug and obtuse insistence on the superiority of empirical facts makes it inevitable that
he should cite and quote Joseph Schumpeter, perhaps the most sophisticated proponent
of empiricism in social science, in the very last paragraph of his influential essay on the
two conceptions of liberty:
Indeed, the very desire for guarantees that our values are eternal and secure in some objective heaven is
perhaps only a craving for the certainties of childhood or the absolute values of our primitive past.
'To realise the relative validity of one's convictions', said an admirable writer of our time, 'and yet
stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilised man from a barbarian. [J.
Schumpeter, CS&D, p.243] To demand more than this is perhaps a deep and incurable

metaphysical need; but to allow it to determine one's practice is a symptom of an equally deep,
and more dangerous, moral and political immaturity. (Berlin, op.cit., p.32)
Evidently, Berlin and Schumpeter are relying on the truth-fulness of empiricism, on its realism
as against the metaphysical need of rationalism, that is, against its presumed
intransigence and recalcitrance, according to Berlin, in the face of facts. Schumpeter
begins Chapter Two of his Theorie with this sweeping and suggestive summation:
The social process which rationalizes our life and thought has led us away from the
metaphysical treatment of social development and taught us to see the possibility of an
empirical treatment; but it has done its work so imperfectly that we must be careful in dealing
with the phenomenon itself, still more with the concept with which we comprehend it, and
most of all with the word by which we designate the concept and whose associations may lead
us astray in all manner of directions. Closely connected with the metaphysical
preconception. is every search for a meaning of history. The same is true of the postulate
that a nation, a civilization, or even the whole of mankind must show some kind of uniform
unilinear development, as even such a matter-of-fact mind as Roscher assumed (p.57)

The footnote at rationalizes was expanded for the English translation and reads as follows:
This is used in Max Webers sense. As the reader will see, rational and empirical here
mean, if not identical, yet cognate, things. They are equally different from, and opposed to,
metaphysical, which implies going beyond the reach of both reason and facts, beyond
the realm, that is, of science. With some it has become a habit to use the word rational in
much the same sense as we do metaphysical. Hence some warning against
misunderstanding may not be out of place.

Evident here is the maladroit manner and dis-comfort (not aided, and perhaps exacerbated, by
the disjoint prose) with which Schumpeter approaches the question of the meaning of history.
The Rationalisierung, which Schumpeter adopts from Weber, has made possible a scientific
empirical treatment of social development (Entwicklung), but has done so only imperfectly,
not to such a degree that we are able to free ourselves entirely of metaphysical concepts which
is why we must be careful in dealing with the phenomenon [of Entwicklung] itself.
Nevertheless, Schumpeter believes that it is possible to leave metaphysics behind and to focus
on both reason and facts, and therefore on the realm of science. In true Machian empiricist
fashion, Schumpeter completely fails to see the point that Weber was making in adopting the ante
litteram Nietzschean conception of Rationalisierung to which he gave the name. The social
process which rationalizes is an exquisitely Weberian expression: far from indicating that there
is a rational science founded on reason and facts that can epistemologically and
uncritically be opposed to a non-scientifc idealistic and metaphysical rationalism, Weber is
saying what Nietzsche intended by the ex-ertion of the Will to Power as an ontological dimension
of life and the world that imposes the rationalization of social processes and development in
such a manner that they can be subjected to mathesis, to scientific control! What Weber posits
as a practice, one that has clear Nietzschean onto-logical (philosophical) and onto-genetic
(biological) origins, Schumpeter mistakes for an empirical and objective process that is
rational and factual at once forgetting thus the very basis of Nietzsches critique of Roscher
and historicism, - certainly not (!) because they are founded on metaphysics (!), but because
they fail to question critically the necessarily meta-physical foundations of their value-systems,
of their historical truth or meaning!

Far from positing a scientific-rational, ob-jective and empirical methodology from which
Roscher and the German Historical School have diverged with their philo-Hegelian rationalist
teleology, Weber and Nietzsche before him were attacking the foundations of any scientific
study of the social process or social development that does not see it for what it is
Rationalisierung, that is, rationalization of life and the world, the ex-pression and mani-festation
of the Wille zur Macht! By contrast, Schumpeter believes that the mere abandonment of any
linearity in the interpretation of history, of any progressus (as Nietzsche calls it), is sufficient
to free his rational science from the pitfalls of metaphysics!
Berlin considers and acknowledges the limitations of the liberal worldview when human needs
other than those that have to do with claims on social resources are considered such as
the need for full participation in the conduct of social affairs:
This is the degradation that I am fighting against - I am not seeking equality of legal rights, nor liberty to do
as I wish (although I may want these too), but a condition in which I can feel that I am, because I am taken
to be, a responsible agent, whose will is taken into consideration because I am entitled to it, even if I am
attacked and persecuted for being what I am or choosing as I do. [22].
All this has little to do with Mill's notion of liberty as limited only by the danger of doing harm to others. It
is the non-recognition of this psychological and political fact (which lurks behind the apparent ambiguity of
the term 'liberty') that has, perhaps, blinded some contemporary liberals to the world in which they live.
Their plea is clear, their cause is just. But they do not allow for the variety of basic human needs. (Berlin,
op.cit., p.26)
Here at last, Berlin confronts the realistic limits of liberalism, and therefore of capitalism and
its market ideology, and their negative conception of freedom, as well as their utter
inability to provide a tenable foundation for human society, let alone participatory
democracy! (Exposing the repression by liberalist bourgeois regimes such as the
American Federation and the French First Republic of constituent power and democracy
in the interests of constituted order is the greatest merit of Hannah Arendts study On
Revolution, - a theme reprised in Antonio Negris Insurgencies.) The liberal State is a nonState, it is the dissolution, the dis-gregation of human society. As we are about to see, it is
the negatives Denken from Hobbes through to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche that exposes
pitilessly the nihilism of liberal political theory, and constitutes indeed its reductio ad
absurdum by exasperating its most fundamental assumptions which turn out to be just
as metaphysical as anything proffered by rationalism! For whilst Hobbes demonstrates
apodictically the impossibility of liberalism as a framework for a State conducive to a
human society founded on its assumptions on the human self, Schopenhauer epitomizes
the extreme pessimism implicit in these assumptions again to the extent that his
empiricism reveals the utterly unsustainable and self-dissolving nature of the liberal State
and of its society.
Hobbes was always keen to reduce human beings to their blind appetites or passions whilst at
the same time confining their volition to the instrumental exercise of reason: his political
theory is aimed at deriving the foundations of a rational State by reducing human action
as much as possible to the predictability of mathematics and mechanics. Obviously,
Hobbes believed that rationality could be imposed scientifically on the Will.

FROM the principal parts of Nature, Reason and Passion, have proceeded two kinds of learning,
mathematical and dogmatical : the former is free from controversy and dispute,
because it consisteth in comparing figure and motion only; in which things, truth, and
the interest of men, oppose not each other : but in the other there is nothing
indisputable, because it compareth men, and meddleth with their right and profit ; in
which, as oft as reason is against a man, so oft will a man be against reason. And from
hence it cometh, that they who have written of justice and policy in general, do all
invade each other and themselves with contradictions. To reduce this doctrine to the
rules and infallibility of reason, there is no way, but, first, put such principles down for
a foundation, as passion, not mistrusting, may not seek to displace; and afterwards to
build thereon the truth of cases in the law of nature (which hitherto have been built in
the air) by degrees, till the whole have been inexpugnable. (Dedication to De Homine)

Here it is clear that the rules and infallibility of reason Hobbess mathematical learning
whereby truth and the interest of men oppose not each other - are in complete opposition to
irrational Passion or self-interest Hobbess dogmatic learning whereby right and profit
meddleth with men by warping their allegiance to reason not merely in terms of
instrumental infallibility, but above all in terms of truth, by which Hobbes intends a
universal value and not just logico-mathematical consistency. For Hobbes, it is possible
to reduce this doctrine [dogmatical learning - that is, political and ethical science] to a
foundation [of Reason such] that passion may not displace it, and to base this foundation
on the truth of cases in the law of natureby degrees, till the whole is inexpugnable. In other
words, despite their appetite or passion, human beings are still able to follow the
dictates of reason to reach a political convention that is mutually beneficial and
universally valid and thereby preserve their individual lives by choosing freely to erect
a State that will guarantee social peace. Hobbess freedom, reason, life and peace are not
purely instrumental categories, for if they were there is no way that human beings could
place them above their egoism or passions. Clearly, these values must be universal
and not purely instrumental they form part of the make-up of the world, of the
constitution of the universe in a way that clearly invokes the transcendental if not divine
nature of human being.
In contrast to Hobbes, Locke conjectured a political theory in which human beings can give
themselves a rational political order a State - based on natural law or natural rights
(jusnaturalism) without first alienating their freedom. Such a freely-entered political
order preserves the natural rights possessed by humans in the state of nature, which
amounts therefore to a pre-political civil state (Bobbio, Da Hobbes a Marx). Like Hobbes,
however, Locke conceives a legal system erected by the State based on rights that derive
almost entirely from Labor and its pro-ducts Property -, with the difference that for
Locke property rights based on Labor exist in the pre-political or civil state or state of
nature they are natural rights -, whereas for Hobbes there can be no rights in the state
of nature but only in the State all rights must be positive.
As a concession to Hobbes, Locke admits that whilst Hobbess authoritarian state is not necessary,
it would become so were humans not to erect a neutral state to arbitrate their competing
claims to natural rights because, if their pre-statal society or pre-political state were to
descend into civil war into the clutches of Hobbesian passions then, according to
Locke, the ensuing civil war of the state of nature would continue indefinitely. In other
words, the conflictual Hobbesian state of nature is not congenital to humanity, and

therefore the mechanical authoritarian State devised by Hobbes is not inevitable. But if it
is not pre-empted by the erection of a political state, the Hobbesian state of nature may
well eventuate and thence, contra Hobbes, be impossible to escape via a Hobbesian social
contract. Lockes theory deals neatly with one of the principal objections to Hobbess
political theory, which is that if humans were originally in a bellicose state of nature, it is
impossible to imagine how they ever escaped it! Which is why the Hobbesian State
totters uncertainly between a state by political institution and one by historical
acquisition.
The obvious problem with Lockes theory is of course that it is impossible to identify the natural
rights that he takes for granted in setting out his theory of the liberal state. Indeed, the
same applies to Hobbes, because although his State is a state by conventional institution
and not by historical acquisition, it is impossible to see what role it can play in its civil
state (status civilis) in the evolution of its social life in all its aspects (economic and ethical)
apart from its role in the reception of the status quo, that is, the conditions that prevailed
in the state of nature, at the time of the establishment of the State. In other words, both
for Locke and Hobbes, either the State is an autonomous institution that, by that very
fact, will inevitably intervene in and interfere with its civil state, or else it is an entirely
neutral and mechanical entity that relies on the organicity or innate harmony of that
civil state in which case, again, it is hard to see why a State should be erected at all,
except in the Lockean sense of insuring against the degeneration of the civil
into a Hobbesian state of nature but then, why should it do so, and according to what law or
right can it function other than Lockes questionable natural law?
Yet, despite their obvious differences, the Reason of Hobbes and Locke, as well as that of Grotius
and Spinoza and Rousseau, is still the onto-theo-teleo-logical reason of the late
Renaissance, of Leonardo and Galileo and Newton, if not of Cusanus and Aquinas (cf. E.
Cassirer, Individual and Cosmos): it is not just an instrument, but also a guide to a universal
Truth, a human inter esse, - albeit, in Hobbess case, one understood as ultima or extrema
ratio. Hobbess State is a deus mortalis mortal indeed because it is the by-product of
human appetite, dire necessity (fear of death) and political convention, yet still a god
because of its derivation from the principles of innate reason. Hobbes keeps faith with
the notion that truth must prevail over passion, reason over egoism. This is why human
beings only surrender their freedom in foro externo, in the political sphere when erecting
the State, and then only ob metum mortis, upon fear of death, in dire necessity. But for
Hobbes human beings still preserve intact their freedom in foro interno in the smithy of
their souls, as Joyce might say which is where reason also ultimately prevails over
passions to erect the State. This decision requires in Hobbes an ultima ratio that is
founded on a human interest or inter esse (it is not, as in Schmitt, auf Nichts gestellt,
sprung out of nothing, as in Nietzsche). Indeed, both in Hobbes and Locke the social
contract is founded on the common human interests of preserving life and protecting and
advancing the acquisition of wealth estate - through Labor. (We shall see later in
connection with Schopenhauers political theory that in Hobbes the loss of my life
cannot found the State because no contractum unionis, let alone a contractum subjectionis
to the State, can be founded on life as pure self-interest! In this sense, Schopenhauers
notion of sym-pathy which founds the awareness of wrong instead of right brings

this alloyed self-interest closer to the erection of the State, like Lockes, than Hobbess
unalloyed axiomatic and mechanical notion of self-interest.)

It is this faith in the ability of reason as intellect to act as and surge to the status of Reason as an
autonomous guide to action (Practical Reason) that Schopenhauer, following Schellings
positive philosophy, will demolish in his radical critique of Kantian ethics and, as a
corollary, also in his critique of Hobbess authoritarian positivism and of Lockes liberal
jusnaturalism. For Hobbes and Locke, human reason is more than a calculative
instrument that facilitates the reaching of the social contract (that is, the con-tracting of
many interests into a common goal): for them, freedom and reason and truth are
universal values that can overwhelm passions and egoism to safeguard life and attain
social peace. Reason is a positive quality of the natural order that emerges from the
universal agreement of what Hobbes calls mathematical learning despite the fact
that human passions ensure the equally universal disagreement over metaphysics and
religion. The very possibility of mathematical learning the self-evident (irresistible for
Arendt, in The Life of the Mind) truth of logico-mathematics is conclusive proof of the
existence of Reason and is actual evidence of the possibility of overcoming dogmatic
learning by means of the mathematical.
But, as the tone of the passage below shows, whereas for Hobbes and Renaissance man the ability
of human beings to agree universally on logico-mathematical means (mathematical
learning) rather than on metaphysical and ethical ends and values (dogmatic
learning) reveals the existence of Truth as a supreme universal Value, for Schopenhauer
the neutral instrumentality of these truths shows the exact opposite of what Renaissance
man aspired to that is, the impossibility of universal values such as Reason and Truth or
indeed Freedom in its substantive sense:
Now, had it been wished to use Reason, instead of deifying it, such assertions as these must long ago have been met by
the simple remark that, if man, by virtue of a special organ, furnished by his Reason, for solving the riddle of the world,
possessed an innate metaphysics that only required development; in that
76 THE BASIS OF MORALITY.
case there would have to be just as complete agreement on metaphysical matters as on the truths of arithmetic and
geometry ; and this would make it totally impossible that there should exist on the earth a large number of radically
different religions, and a still larger number of radically different systems of philosophy.

The so-called universal truths of logico-mathematics belong to the realm of instrumental reason
and therefore lack any Value whatsoever because they are perfectly devoid of any content
or substance: in its perfect instrumentality, logico-mathematics is utterly devoid of any
inter esse! It is the very formalism of logico-mathematical truths their very
universality! that relegates them to the status of mere and pure instrument, of a
tool that takes the content of the use to which it is put and that therefore voids
them of any innate metaphysics, of any Truth! The fungibility of logico-mathematics, its
neutrality or invariance, is precisely what empties it of any content as truth. Far
from being its ultimate and insuperable instance, logico-mathematics exposes the
ultimate ineffectuality of Truth its Value-lessness. (I have called this Nietzsches
Invariance in my Nietzschebuch. A further discussion is in my The Philosophy of the
Flesh.)

This point, which we believe is of insurmountable importance for our interpretation of what is
commonly called science, natural or historical, may be re-stated as follows: human
action can never be said to be true or false because its practical effects can be neither;
similarly, formal identities are not and cannot be true or false because they are pure
identities without content or consequences, and, where they have practical
consequences, these can be neither true nor false. As Cacciari sums up the matter (in
Krisis, at p.59):
The nihilistic critique does not re-found, does not reformulate these problems. Its skepsis is radical: either
there is no sense or else the forms of reason discover a new logic, a new relationship with reality
forms and reality that are now found to be without substance. Either the nihilist situation is invertible only
ideologically, as in Schopenhauer or else that very misery of the formalism of reason, in which the crisis
of the Kantian a priori seemed to terminate, needs to be founded founded on the necessity, precisely, of
this formalism, of this loss of substantive nexus, of this definitive retreat of truth.

We will deepen and sharpen this analysis in our next piece on another, this time
rationalist, great liberal theoretician Benedetto Croce.
Tale e la stessa tragedia del soggetto. Per potere effettualmente, esso deve non solo disincantarsi
sulle proprie forme a priori, sulla verita e bonta del mondo, sullo schematismo tra forme e
mondo - ma deve altresi liquidare lestremo Valore, quello che anche il nichilismo piu radicale
aveva conservato, anzi: di cui era stato il piu accanito difensore, lautonomia della soggettivita, la via
interiore schopenhaueriana. Potere e integrarsi nel sistema, (K, p66).

In our last intervention we saw how the radical critique of the Western notion of
Freedom has led to the retreat of Truth and to the demise of the Subject in
favour of the recognition of necessity as the expression of the Will to Power.
Our aim throughout is to expose this Will to Power behind the entire political
enterprise that capitalism imposes on humanity under the guise of Science and
Technology. Capitalism in its political expression as liberalism thrives on the
neat separation of the sphere of necessity that of science, and most
preeminently the dismal science or science of choice called economics and
the sphere of freedom or public opinion which can be preserved if and only if
economic science is allowed to govern every human society rationally, that
is, according to its dictates.
The inconsistency between the strict determinism of economic science and the
loose irrationalism of public opinion, of the human spirit and the liberal arts, is
something that the bourgeoisie is quite happy to overlook because, on one hand,
it is keen to defend its exploitative rule as scientific whilst, on the other hand, it
wishes to promote its oppressive rule as the only way in which freedom of
expression can be preserved. The liberal State serves this specific role as Police

as an instrument that allows the co-existence of a dictatorial workplace in a free

society.
What we are doing here is to present a third way, an immanentist theory of the
human self and society, between the scientism of capitalist industrial production
and the liberalism of capitalist mass consumption.
The whole pyramidal structure from perception to conception, from intuition to
the intellect and reason, from conduction to deduction, has no other aim than to
explain how it is possible for human beings to share perceptions as knowledge
(Heidegger, Kantbuch, quoted in my The Philosophy of the Flesh)! It is the
claim to scientificity of this crystallisation of symbolic interaction that Nietzsche
shattered by exposing its con-ventionality. And it is instructive to see how
Benedetto Croce deals with this critique in the Logica. Having already tersely
lampooned the aestheticist critique of pure concepts which denies their
validity and existence in favour of sensuous experience and activity such as the
artistic, and then the mystical critique which, like Wittgensteins, insists that
what is truly worthwhile is what cannot be spoken of, Croce then turns to the
arbitrary or empiricist critique (which surely must count Nietzsche among
its proponents):
Ce (essi dicono) qualcosa di la dalla mera rappresentazione, e questo qualcosa e un atto di volonta,
che soddisfa lesigenza delluniversale con lelaborare le rappresentazioni singole in schemi generali o
simboli, privi di realta ma comodi, finti ma utili, (Logica, p10).
There is, they say, something that goes beyond mere representation, and this something is an act of
will that serves the function of universals by elaborating the particulars or single representing into
general schemes or symbols deprived of all reality but yet functional, - false yet useful.

Croce does not accept that concepts are conventions or, as he prefers to call
them on behalf of the critics, fictions. As proof of the erroneity of this
critique, Croce enlists the tu quoque; in other words, this arbitrarist
critique of logic and pure concepts is itself a logical argument based on concepts
and therefore it is either equally false like all logic, or else it must claim validity
on logical grounds, and thence confirm the validity of its concepts, and
therefore the validity of conceptual reality in any case (see Logica, p12). What
Croce fails to grasp is that, so far as Nietzsche is concerned, the crystallization
critique does not deny the reality of concepts and still less their validity;
indeed, if anything, it highlights and warns their validity, against their
effectuality. But this effectuality is made possible not by their

transcendental or pure status as timeless truths, for instance but rather

by their immanent status, by their instrumental character as an act of will.
Not the innateness of these concepts, not their truth, but their
instrumentality is what matters not Augustines in interiore homine habitat
veritas (cited and discussed by Merleau-Ponty in Phenom.ofPerception, at p.xi)
but the content of the act of perception is what constitutes life and the world for
us. Earlier, Croce had emphasized the active side of concepts as human
representations of intuited reality privileging yet again the spiritual nature of
concepts as dependent on intuition and experience yet separate from it.
Il soddisfacimento e dato dalla forma non piu meramente rappresentativa ma logica del conoscere, e
si effettua in perpetuo, a ogni istante della vita dello spirito, (p13).

Now, again, Croce draws a stark contrast between the two positions, his idealism
and what he calls scetticismo logico (p8):
La conoscenza logica e qualcosa di la dalla semplice rappresentazione: questa e individualita e
molteplicita, quella luniversalita dellindividualita, lunita della molteplicita; luna intuizione,
laltra concetto; conoscere logicamente e conoscere luniversale o concetto. La negazione della
logicita importa laffermazione che non vi ha altra conoscenza se non quella rappresentativa (o
sensibile come anche si suole dire), e che la conoscenza universale o concettuale e unillusione: di la
dalla semplice rappresentazione non vi sarebbe nulla di conoscibile, (pp7-8).
Logical knowledge is something beyond simple representation: the latter is individuality and
multiplicity, the former is the universality of the particular instance.the former is intuition and the
latter is concept.The negation of logic is tantamount to saying that there is no other knowledge than
by mere representations and that universal knowledge is an illusion.

But this contrast is almost palpably fictitious, opposing high-sounding concepts

in what is almost a play of words, and simply fails to tell us why and how
concepts and representations differ ontologically. Croce ends up rehashing the
Kantian Schematismus with the pure concepts of beauty, finality, quantity and
quality and so forth whose content is furnished by fictional concepts such as
universals (nouns) and abstract concepts like those of mathematics (cf. Logica,
ch.2 at p18). But in fact, as we try to show here invoking the aid of MerleauPontys phenomenology of perception, neither of Croces pre-suppositions of
logical activity, that is, intuition and language (see pp5-6 of Logica), is such that
logical activity can be separated onto-logically from them. Croce insists that a
concept must be expressible whence the essentiality of language to it, no less
than intuition or representation:

Se questo carattere dellespressivita ecomune al concetto e alla rappresentazione, proprio del

concetto e quello delluniversalita, ossia della trascendenza rispetto alle singole rappresentazioni,
onde nessuna.e mai in grado di adeguare il concetto. Tra lindividuale e luniversale non e
ammissibile nulla di intermedio o di misto: o il singolo o il tutto (Logica, pp.26-7).
No representation is ever capable of satisfying adequately the concept.Between the particular and
the universal no mixture or intermediate stage is possible: either all or nothing.

We have here once again the Platonic chorismos, the Scholastic adaequatio, the
Kantian noumenon, and the Fichtean hiatus irrationalis in other words, that
antinomy that requires a leap (trans-scendence) from experience to thought.
Except that what Croce believes to identify as a particular is already and
immanently identical with a universal: not only is a concrete experience already
a universal, but so is a universal abstraction also a concrete experience! (The
irrefutable proof of this reality that there is no hic et nunc - is the greatest merit
of Hegels great Preface to the Phenomenology.) Both are representations (cf.
Croces contrary argument on pp.28-9). This is the basis of Schopenhauers
critique of Kants separation of intuition from understanding and again from
pure reason, in the sense that the Kantian universal is toto genere different from
the particular and cannot therefore represent it separately in an ontological sense
either as Sinn-gebende totality and Subject-ity, or else as causal cousins, as Egoity, as Subject! Croces own categorization of these notions is at p.42 of the Logica:
La profonda diversita tra concetti e pseudoconcetti [identified with lidea platonica on p.41]
suggeri (nel tempo in cui si solevano rappresentare le forme o gradi dello spirito come facolta) la
distinzione tra due facolta logiche, che si dissero Intelletto (o anche Intelletto astratto) e Ragione: alla
prima delle quali si assegno lufficio di elaborare cio che ora chiamiamo pseudoconcetti, e alla
seconda i concetti puri.

Evident in all this is Croces obstinacy in seeking to differentiate, however vainly,

thought from perception or representation or intuition: - an effort that
must remain vain because no onto-logical priority can be given to thought over
matter and because indeed no thought is possible without perception and
vice versa. A world without thought would be a world without life, and a world
without life would not be a world at all! That is not to say that thought takes
precedence ontologically over the world because it is essential to the world;
the two are co-naturate. For universals and particulars, for abstract thought
and concrete intuition, to be able to enter into a practical real relation with each
other, they must participate (Nicholas of Cusas methexis) in the same
immanent reality! Indeed, it seems obvious to us that perception and thought are
immanently connected: methexis replaces chorismos. Here is Merleau-Ponty:

The true Cogito does not define the subjects existence in terms of the thought he has of existing and
furthermore does not convert the indubitability of thought about the world, nor finally does it replace
the world itself by the world as meaning. On the contrary it recognizes my thought itself as an
inalienable fact, and does away with any kind of idealism in revealing me as 'being-in-the-world'.
(PoP, p.xiii).
To seek the essence of perception is to declare that perception is, not presumed true, but defined as
access to truth. So, if I now wanted, according to idealistic principles, to base this defacto self-evident
truth, this irresistible belief, on some absolute self-evident truth, that is, on the absolute clarity which
my thoughts have for me; if I tried to find in myself a creative thought which bodied forth the
framework of the world or illumined it through and through, I should once more prove unfaithful to
my experience of the world, and should be looking for what makes that experience possible instead of
looking for what it is. The self-evidence of perception is not adequate thought or apodeictic selfevidence. The world is not what I think but what I live through [m.e.]. I am open to the world, I
have no doubt that I am in communication with it, but I do not possess it; it is inexhaustible.
'There is a world', or rather: 'There is the world'; I can never completely account for this everreiterated assertion in my life. This facticity of the world is what constitutes the Weltlichkeit der
Welt, what causes the world to be the world; just as the facticity of the cogito is not an imperfection in
itself, but rather what assures me of my existence, (PoP, pp.xvi-xvii).

Merleau-Ponty reiterates here the Nietzschean vivo ergo cogito, with the
peccadillos that he refers to the self-evident truth of perception (what is truth
if, as he immediately yet unwittingly corrects himself, it is not backed by some
absolute self-evident truth?) and then the obvious reference to the I, the
Husserlian transcendental ego or subject. Here is the inverted Platonism
that Nietzsche was first to attempt but only after he had lifted the veil of all the
Schleier-machers (veil-makers), chief among them his own educator, Arthur
Schopenhauer.
Metaphysical Foundation of Ethics

The Bounds of Free-dom: The Lutheran Re-definition of Classical Freedom in

Schelling and Schopenhauer
It is common to oppose the concept of freedom to that of necessity most notably in the
philosophical debate over determinism. Yet freedom is a political notion the opposite of coercion.
Once the notion of freedom is reduced to the opposite of necessity, then it becomes mere
chance or hazard or contingency and is reduced to an onto-logical problem. The fact is
that, as we are seeking to demonstrate here, there is no such thing as necessity, either logical or
scientific, so that all truths are contingent. But the fact that truth can be understood as
necessity- that the necessity of logic or science is what makes them true - and that
freedom can be mistaken for contingency means that truth and necessity can be abused or
be used instrumentally for the purpose of political coercion! By this process, freedom of the will
can be mistaken for a telos that, by positing the systematicity of life and the world as a

totality, becomes a quest for freedom from the will. This critique of the Western metaphysical
concept of freedom, which saw its epitome in the Freiheit of Classical German Idealism, is what
the negatives Denken has rightfully contributed to our understanding of freedom, whilst at the
same time, by denying the existence of freedom in a political sense (because it understands
freedom only ontologically), it denies the possibility of political freedom or else reduces it to
contingency, to superfluity (Sartres de trop, Heideggers de-jection and Dasein as pro-ject).
Freedom is understood then as universal Eris, as total conflict so that it is no longer a function
of the will but the will becomes a function of freedom understood as cosmic contingency.
Arendt correctly distinguishes between freedom (political) and contingency or chance
(ontological), pointing to their discrete opposites coercion or and logico-scientific necessity or
irresistibility. But she fails to see that there is nothing irresistible or true about logicomathematics and science, that these are contingent, and that therefore these (contingent,
arbitrary) conventions can be utilized for the purposes of coercion by erecting measurable
frameworks of conduct (institutions) that force human conduct and choices into measurable
channels or behavioral straitjackets. The irresistibility of mathesis can ec-sist only as a value, as
truth, and therefore as a will to truth that is internalized to coerce human behaviour. This
is the necessity of mathesis precisely, a restriction or channeling of human freedom
understood not ontologically (as contingency, which is categorically not, and can-not be affected
by mathesis) but rather politically. (Arendts discussion of these matters can be found in The Life of
the Mind and Lectures on Kants Political Philosophy as well as in On Revolution. We have reviewed
them at length in our The Philosophy of the Flesh.)
This transformation of the concept of freedom can be traced most lucidly in the work of Schelling
and Schopenhauer who can be identified as the founders of what we call negatives Denken.
The negatives Denken understands free-dom as the battleground of conflict between wills. For
Weber, for instance, the individual will acts freely if it acts rationally; and rationality is defined
as the wills choice of adequate means in pursuit of its own ends. This choice the will makes is
therefore con-ditioned by the choices of other wills in conflict with it. In essence, for Weber,
rationality is the game-theoretic strategy that is chosen by independent and conflicting wills freely
pursuing their irreconcilable ends or wants whose provision is scarce. The freedom of the will
is de-fined not intrinsically as in the Freiheit of German Idealism but rather instrumentally in
terms of the relationship of given means to projected ends. It is free-dom in the sense of room
to manoeuvre (Ellenbongsraum, Weber, in CPW) - to manoeuvre against other wills, that is. Thus,
there can be no freedom of the will in the objective genitive. It is the will that is a function of
free-dom, not the other way around which means that the freedom of the will has no positive
universalistic telos or inter esse, but is rather the op-posite, the contrary of this inter esse. For
the negatives Denken there is no freedom in an ab-solute, idealistic sense: freedom exists only as
contingency, as the opposite of necessity, not of co-ercion - onto-logically, not politically!
And insofar as there is freedom, as in Schopenhauer or Heidegger, this ec-sists only as
transcendence, as intelligible freedom (even in Kant), - something Nietzsche derided as
astute theology (vedi his scathing comment on Kant and on Schopenhauer in Twilight of the
Idols; and note the etymological link between theory and theo-logy, traced in W. Jaeger, Early
Greek Theology).

The negatives Denken replaces the Idealist Freiheit which, as we have seen, turns by reason of its
systematicity into a quest for freedom from the will, from its arbitrariness, with the
conversion of this teleological freedom into an instrumental free-dom, one that is intended
not as a telos, as an common human aspiration or inter esse, but rather as its opposite, as
contingence, a mere lack of conceptual or material necessity; and thus it conceives of the Will
as an antagonistic universal condition (Schopenhauers Weltprinzip, Nietzsches Wille zur
Macht) as the obverse of Kants Dinge an sich.
The de-struction of the telos of freedom invites and elicits the destruction of any system, of
any teleological rule by means of the exception. For the negatives Denken the exception is not
what con-firms the rule, not Hegels negation that is meaningfully re-absorbed by the negation of
the negation. (We are extending to ontology a notion applied by Carl Schmitt to politics, see his
The Concept of the Political. And see on this point, the insightful confrontation of Schelling and
Hegel in B. Matthewss Introduction to Schellings The Grounding of Positive Philosophy, and S.
Zizeks The Abyss of Freedom). No such repechage is possible. Instead, it is the exception that
determines the very essence of the rule, the truth of the system, by de-fining its limits. Schmitt
quotes from Kierkegaard (in PT, p15): The exception explains the general [the rule, the system] and
itself. Yet if the exception explains the general, it can do so only if it de-structs the general or
rule or system if it negates the system as a totality, as truth. Any attempt to erect the
system to a universal application as the Sozialismus, the Left, seeks to do in politics will result
only in the suppression of any free-dom that remains beyond the grasp of the system and
within the purview of the exception. Schmitt writes (op.cit., p.15):

It would be consequent rationalism to say that the exception proves nothing and
that only the normal can be the object of scientific interest. The exception confounds
the unity and order of the rationalist scheme.

Here the negatives Denken can conceive of the will only as a destructive force that works or
uses the world only in the sense of consuming it because the opposite, the will and
its Arbeit as the creation of wealth, would entail the possibility of a common-wealth, of
an inter esse common to all wills, and not merely a subjective greed-dom or appetitus. (See on all
this, our Capitalist Metaphysics.) This de-struction of truth, of the telos of freedom, entails
also the de-struction of Reason and the Ratio as the summum bonum of humanity, as the Platonic
Good. (Useful in this context is G. Lukacss Die Zerstorung der Vernunft but Lukacs takes for
granted the whole notion of a Marxian-inspired Ratio-Ordo.) In this perspective, not only can the
Logic not be a science as in Hegel and even in Kant where synthetic a priori judgements are
made possible by Reason, but it becomes a mere instrument of the intellect this last
understood as mere perceptions or intuition (Anschauung) or sensations (Empfindungen) in
accordance with causality and the principle of sufficient reason. Yet in much of the negatives
Denken - from Schopenhauer to Weber for instance -, the attachment to scientific intellect and
logical rationality, albeit conceived as instrumental faculties, remains steadfast. Later, Nietzsche
will ridicule this simplistic faith in the intelligible character and scientific and logical
rationality, although it was his Educator Schopenhauer who first insisted on the purely

instrumental, non-theological, ontological status of logic (see G. Piana, Commenti su

Schopenhauer., 2).

It is not necessity that is opposed to freedom, then. Freedom is a politico-ontological, hence ethicopolitical, concept that can only be opposed to coercion. The true opposite of necessity is
chance. Yet, because everything of which we are conscious can only ultimately be
attributed to chance because of the contingency of being (Heideggers Dasein) -,
necessity is a highly-charged term that is used to mask human activities that involve
coercion: necessity, if it exists, can do so only as an instinct, as dire necessity, the
preservation of life (as in Hobbess dira necessitas). (The definitive ontological and
epistemological proofs against necessity start with Nietzsche [Uber Wahrheit und Luge
through to Jenseits von Gut und Bose], through to Weber [The Methodology of the Social
Sciences], and then Heidegger [Sein und Zeit].) The sphere of economic activity and
production disguised as the sphere of necessity like all other forms of science and
technology is the major form of coercion in capitalist societies. (The inability of the
sharpest critical minds from Arendt [On Revolution], to Cacciari [Liberta e Tecnica] and
Zizek [The Abyss of Freedom], on the tracks of Heideggers late-romantic notion of
Technik [cf. the hideously anti-humanistic Brief am Humanismus], to understand this is
hard to believe. Arendt [also in The Life of the Mind and The Human Condition] still clings to
scientific necessity and logical irresistibility, whilst Cacciari and Zizek never go
beyond Heideggers basic premise of Da-sein.)
The ideological role of the sphere of necessity (economics, science and technology) in industrial
capitalism is aimed principally at narrowing the range of democratic choice available to
citizens as against the consumer choice imposed by the violence of capitalist industry
with its rational expectations:
(b) It can be demonstrated in still another way that indeterminism, to be consistent, would have to cripple
our efforts and abilities. If events in external nature did not turn out in accordance with necessary
laws, could we count on them? Could our mighty technological achievements have taken place
without our utilizing the laws of nature? Certainly not; only our knowledge of these laws gives us
such power, and this power grows in proportion to our knowledge. We would be powerless in the
face of the phenomena of the will if they did not unfold in accordance with necessary laws. We
would then neither know such laws nor be able to employ them in order to achieve our aims. No
matter how long we were acquainted with a person, we could feel no certainty as to his
future behaviour. Everything we experienced previously would be merely coincidental.
Correspondence among the cases observed would not rest upon a single underlying cause, nor
would a habit that has arisen construct incidentally a concomitantly determining principle.
Promises that we make or that are given us would not offer any security, for regard for a
particular agreement would no more be a determining ground for future action than would habit.
But along with the possibility of rational expectations about our mutual relations we would also
lose every sort of orderly union between people. The whole of human society would be destroyed.
No long-term undertaking would be possible; the most powerful force on earth, the human will,
would become unpredictable, and everything would be so completely veiled in doubt and
darkness that no one would be able to form a plan even for himself, let alone one requiring
assistants for its fulfilment. (Franz Brentano, The Foundation and Construction of Ethics, p.165.)

Because Brentano takes social cohesion as the resultant of individual decisions, he must then
postulate that individual wills are causally determined and therefore not free. And
because he understands freedom exclusively as the province or attribute of individual
wills, he is then unable to account for social cohesion (what we call social synthesis), so

that he unwittingly reverts, as he does above, to the collective human will! If the freewill advocates were right, argues Brentano,
the most powerful force on earth, the human will, would become unpredictable, and everything
would be so completely veiled in doubt and darkness that no one would be able to form a plan
even for himself, let alone one requiring assistants for its fulfilment.

Brentano senses that even if individual wills were causally determined indeed, we say, especially
if they were so! - this could still not explain the possibility of society, let alone its actual
existence! For why should wills that are individual be pre-determined or pre-ordained to
collective harmonious social action (much like Leibnizs monads)?
What makes social cohesion possible is not the predictability of wills taken individually or
ontogenetically but rather the inter-dependence of human needs (not necessity!) due to
their phylogenetic nature which is not contrary to their being free in an ontological and
then in a political sense. In contrast to Brentanos position, both Marx and Weber agreed
that it is this very Sozialisierung or rational expectations this very need, not
necessity! - that confutes determinism as the scientific basis of individual decisions,
because it shows that in fact it is the phylogenetic attributes of species-conscious human
beings the non-individuality of human needs, whether understood in a constructive
sense (Marx) or in a conflictual one (Weber, Schmitts friend and foe) that makes
possible the co-ordination of social labour through decisions, whether democratic or
authoritarian, that are ineluctably political and therefore free at least in an ontological
sense. (The further elaboration of these complex matters can be found in our Schmitt and
the Concept of the Political, in Part Two of our Weber-buch, and in Part Three of our
Nietzsche-buch, respectively from political, sociological, and ontological perspectives.)
For the bourgeoisie to disguise coercion under the cloak of necessity, it needs a set of ideological
tools that allow it to define social reality, and freedom in particular, in a way that
emarginates conscious democratic choice from the concept of freedom so that it becomes all
but irrelevant to our conception of social reality. It is not sufficient for the bourgeoisie to
impose the rule of capital, the wage relation: it must also present this rule as a Mussen
(Must), a choice made necessary by its scientific rationality, which makes it also a
Sollen (Ought).
For how else could choice, which implies the absence of logical or scientific necessity, become a
matter of scientific inquiry unless it could be travestied as a necessary choice? Herein
lies the key to the otherwise oxymoronic Robbinsian definition of economic science (cf.
Lionel Robbins, Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science) as the science of
choice. With Brentano and his psychologism (rational expectations), we are already at
the origins of the Austrian School, marginal utility (Menger), and finally neoclassical
economics (Walras). (Note that Brentanos strict determinism cannot even be compared to
Windelbands idiographic/nomothetic distinction, because this last presupposed the
existence of free individual choices but distinguished different levels of social scientific
analysis, - the individual biographic level for the idiographic and the collective level for the
nomothetic. The aporetic nature of this divide how can the historical turn to scientific
when we shift our focus from individual to society? - was exposed by Weber in Roscher

und Knies and F. Hayek in The Counter-Revolution of Science.) The trick lies in the wellhidden metaphysical-ethical assumption of bourgeois economics, disguised as
rigourous science, that the welfare (read, self-interest) that individuals (read,
fictitious atomised economic agents who in fact do not act at all cf. my Schumpeterbuch) can extract out of limited or given or scarce resources (but why scarce
unless we assume that in-dividuals are even possible and that their self-interests are
limitless?) is maximised (but how if self-interests are inscrutable except through the
market which leads to the vicious circle: individuals decide market prices and market
prices reflect their true decisions because they are made through the market mechanism?)
through the application of rationally and scientifically-selected choices of, again,
limited and scarce (on what criteria?) methods of production.
The question arises: how has this complex if inglorious feat come to pass? How could freedom be
transformed from a positive notion, a common human aspiration and universal goal or
interest an inter esse (common being) -, into a negative notion as the resultant of endless
and inextinguishable conflict between irreconcilable self-interests?

The ultimate impenetrability of the Object, of the Kantian thing-in-itself, means that no Subject or
Ego armed with whatever Reason will ever be able to reconcile appearance and reality,
operari and esse. All that we know are appearances (Vorstellungen), because Reality is a
qualitas occulta that com-prehends the totality of appearances as their meta-physical
foundation, their sub-stratum, but no empirical Subject or Ego or other entity from within
Reality can either initiate or even com-prehend them for the simple reason that Reality is neither
their causa causans, nor is it their totality or sum of appearances, - again, because Reality is
categorically different as their sub-stance, their being, their esse! In other words, the basis or
ground of Reality is not something that can be derived from within its ec-sistence, its
mani-festation, its ap-pearance, its epi-phenomenality, but rather it is something that is
the very foundation of these. Yet this is the very dual purpose that the Reason is called
upon to serve in Kants transcendental idealism as comprehension of the Object and as
agency upon the Object as the positing of the transcendental Subject and of its Freedom or
auto-nomy.
But how can the Subject be able freely to initiate and comprehend Reality when it is an
empirical part of this Reality subject to the very laws of Reason and nature to which
every other being is subject? If indeed the thing-in-itself, Re-ality, is knowable only
through phenomena or appearances, then there is no way in which even the totality of
such appearances perceived by a Subject armed with Reason can ever, first, causally affect
the thing-in-itself by initiating its causal chain, and second, be able to comprehend it in
terms both of understanding it, giving a sense to it, and also of encompassing it. The two
entities Subject and Object and the appearances that are the product of their
interaction (the Subjects perception of the Object) are categorically distinct, wholly
heterogeneous, and can therefore never affect each other. Either the Subject is yet another
thing-in-itself, in which case it is an operari subject to the necessity of natural laws and has
no free will, or else it is an autonomous entity that is neither a Subject nor a Reason (that

is, an entity conscious of itself, an id-entity), but is instead a substance that is immanent to
Reality and thereby constitutes its very Being (esse).
This is the fundamental starting point of the critique of Kants summation of Western philosophy
that will give rise to what we call here negatives Denken. The earliest statement of this
critique is to be found in Schellings critique of Kant and then extended with significant
modifications and additions by Schopenhauer. Kant had sought to bridge the Gap, the
anti-nomy, between the Thing-in-itself and appearances, between noumena and
phenomena, by invoking the necessity of a regulative principle that (a) could initiate
such phenomena (what Kant called Grundmass or Aristotles causa causans) and thus serve
as an autonomous Subject, and (b) could be their immanent sum-total (what he called
Inbegriff) without thereby being deducible from such a sum or totality on pain of
degenerating into a bad infinite. For Schelling and Schopenhauer, the chain of causality
to which the Thing-in-itself or Reality is bound cannot be abstractly deduced a priori
from a false infinity at the end of which there must be a transcendental substance or
category that can com-prehend it as its toto genere (categorically) op-posite Ob-ject
(Gegen-stand, standing against the Subject).
Put differently, there cannot be a Subject whose Freedom and Reason, upon which Kant relies,
can then found both Pure Reason as the rational entity and Practical Reason as the ethical
moment of Pure Reason whereby the free will is governed by rational rules that
lead to the Categorical Imperative. To indulge in such abstraction is to posit
axiomatically and quite unjustifiably, without a shred of empirical evidence, the very
conclusion that we are seeking to prove.
But how is it possible for a regulative ideal to execute such a foundational role? This
question becomes even more acute when Kant demands that this unconditioned
totality support and determine all the things of the world as their ground
[Grundmass], not [merely] as their sum [Inbegrif](B 607).61 It is hard to
overestimate the extent to which this distinction shapes Schellings thinking. For in
distinguishing between the necessary ground and the Inbegrif of all things that
follow from it(A 579/B 607),Kant makes clear the difference between an original
unconditioned necessity and a derivative yet still unconditioned sum-total of all
possible predicates(A573/B 601). But in demanding an original status for this
necessary being, Kant sets for himself a goal that appears impossible to
achieve from within his negative science. For an original ground cannot be
reconciled with the regulative function of an ideal, which, as an ideal, is
much more suited to delivering the sum-total of all possible predicates as
the result of an ongoing process of determination. Moreover, it would
appear that [39] an unconditioned ground must be more than merely
possible, that it must be actual, that is positive [be empirically and
intuitively rather than logically located], if it is to serve as the ground and
basis for the determination of all things by reason. This absence or lack of an
actual positive basis to support and receive all possible predicates is what Schelling
calls a hole in Kants critique, which he believes his positive philosophy can fill, and
indeed, with system resources Kant himself provides, yet fails to employ consistently
(II/3,168).
Accepting Kants claim that only an unconditioned ground can supply reason with a
systematic unity of the grounds of explanation(A 612/B 641), it follows that this
idea itself cannot be the result of an additive process, since such a process would be
never-ending, generating instead only what Kant calls a potentially unconditioned

ground. An actually unconditioned ground, in contrast, provides an absolute measure,

which Kant calls a Grundma.62 Such an absolute measure is categorically
different from the members of the series it initiates and supports, insofar as it is the
starting point of a process to which other members of that series are
subordinated(A 417/B 445). As Kant makes clear in the Critique of Aesthetic
Judgment, an Absolute of this kind lies jenseits (beyond) any external reflective
measure that depends on relative comparisons. As unconditioned, this Grundma is a
measure that is only equal to itself.63 Kant describes how this works in his account
of how the sublime generates a fundamental measure whose scope and force
exceeds our powers of conceptualization. Calling this unlimited force exuberance
[das berschwengliche], Kant states that it is, as it were, an abyss for our
conceptual powers, insofar as they fear to lose themselves therein.64 While what
Kant here describes is the encounter of our reflexive faculties with the sublime, the
functional purpose of this Grundma in the third Critique parallels that of the
unconditioned ground of the transcendental ideal in the first: both supply a ground
that is jenseits [beyond] the series they ground, and which serves as the unifying and
thus absolutely positive starting point of the reflective process of negation qua
determination. Applying the very same terms in Berlin, Schelling goes a step
further and maintains that the ground of explanation, and thus of reason,
cannot itself be immanent to reasons operations. It must instead be
jenseits of the series it grounds, so that this ground can be neither
reflexively appropriated nor conceptually articulated, since per definitum it
must precede our discursive analysis of it. (B. Matthews, Introduction to
Schellings The Grounding of Positive Philosophy, pp.38-9.)
Put in other words, Kants regulative or transcendental ideal cannot account for phenomena (be
their raison detre as initiation and comprehension) nor can it be derived from them
because (a) it is categorically different from these phenomena, and (b) it cannot be
immanent to them, least of all as their totality, which would result in a bad infinite,
because such immanence would prevent the transcendental ideal from initiating and
comprehending them. Kants Grundmass can neither initiate phenomena in a causal
sequence (as an Aristotelian causa causans), nor can it com-prehend them as their as their
totality or sum (Inbegriff) because it cannot at one and the same time be reflectively
conscious of them and yet be immanent to them! In other words, if it is to initiate
phenomena and their connection, the Subject or Reason cannot comprehend or be
immanent to them, and if it is immanent to them, then it cannot comprehend them
reflexively as their initiator, that is, transcend them as a conscious entity, as an identity ;
it cannot be their Subject or Grundmass and Substance or Totality or Inbegriff at one and the
same time. Thus, in Matthewss summary, and this is a crucial point,
[i]t is reasons demand for a positive existing being of unconditioned necessity that
ultimately forces reason to acknowledge its inability to ground itself from
within its own sphere of reflexive thought, a failure of self-grounding which
occurs when reasons compulsive movement comes face to face with the
necessary concept of that which groundlessly exists, and before which nothing
can be thought. This is what Kant calls the abyss of human reason, and
what Schelling terms das Unvordenkliche: that which just exists is precisely
that which crushes everything that may derive from thought, before which
thought becomes silent, and before which reason itself bows down
(II/3,161).It is perhaps here that we can see most clearly Schellings inversion
of the modern ordering of the cogito to being.(Matthews, loc.cit., p.48)

The Grundmass that Kant was searching for must be a substance that sub-tends reality and
appearances the world -, but it also cannot possibly be theorised as a Subject or an Egoity, a Self, an id-entity in other words, as an entity conscious of this Ground, because to be
conscious of the Ground, of the Substance of the World, would be equivalent to being
able to view objectively by being immanent to the object viewed - what is necessarily a
subjective view (a-spect, An-blick). Reason itself must logically presuppose that
existence, being, comes before its conceptualisation, before thought; reason itself must
have, literally, a raison detre, a reason for being that is first and foremost the reason of
being. In Schellings own words,
Existence, which appears as accidental in everything else, is here the essence. The
quod [the that] is here in the position of the quid [the what]. It is thus a pure
idea, and nonetheless it is not an idea in the sense that this word enjoys in the
negative philosophy [i.e. rationalist Western metaphysics]. That which just is
[das blo Seyende] is being [das Seyn] from which, properly speaking, every
idea, that is, every potency, is excluded. We will thus only be able to call it
the inverted idea [Umgekehrte Idee], the idea in which reason is set outside
itself. Reason can posit being in which there is still nothing of a
concept, of a whatness [Latin, quidditas], only as something that is
absolutely outside itself (of course only in order to acquire it thereafter, a
posteriori, as its content, and in this way at the same time to return to itself).
In this positing reason is therefore set outside itself, absolutely
ecstatic. (II/3,1623)76 (Schelling quoted in Matthews, loc.cit. at p.50)
But this being cannot be some thing that stands still in time; nor can it be the mere idea of
being as an abstract entity; instead, it must be our actual experience of being. Although
inverted, Schellings inverted idea still remains an idea; and although ec-static, it still
remains within the ambit of reason. But this ec-stasis is not derived from standing
outside the idea of reason that is derived from the interaction of the perception of
reality our representations of it - and its regulation by Reason: it actually comes from
penetrating the materiality of the thinking process the being of thought, which is the
experience of existence or ec-sistence or, better still, our awareness or intuition of existing
(vivo ergo cogito [Nietzsche], not cogito ergo sum [Descartes]). This awareness or intuition,
because it precedes thought and reason, is not and cannot be consciousness, which is still
in the sphere of thought, of cognition: it is rather awareness that is closer to intuition, and
therefore to the conative, not cognitive, human experience of existence!
This is the aspect, that of the Will, that Schopenhauer will develop, moving from Schellings still
idealistic stance to a more physiological, naturalistic and materialist and immanentist
position. For the moment, we shall limit ourselves to this formalist and idealist residuum
in Schellings critical advance on Kant transcendental idealism. For Schelling, again,
understands his inverted idea as the result of the logical priority of existence over
thought, of experience over theory: given that even thought must have a certain
materiality, then the ec-sistence of thought as a faculty must be prior to its conceptual
or discursive development intuition must be prior to Reason. (Cf. on all this, our
critique of Cacciari in Aesthetics vs. Aesthesis in relation to art as the problem of
philosophy.) Not only, but this very primacy of existence over thought must also
create an abyss, a chasm, a Fichtean hiatus at the very core of theory and Reason a
hole in Kants philosophy and in rationalism tout court. It is this abyss, this

impossibility of grounding thought and reason in their own essence because,

remember, existence is now the essence that determines instantly the contingency of
thought, the ineluctability of chance, of risk and therefore, for human beings, of
freedom. Here is Matthews:
The wish of rationalism for a perfectly complete and unchanging system of thought
promises for Schelling nothing less than the nightmare of absolute [54] boredom.
What is stronger than thinking? Wonder, amazement, ecstasy: all are volatile and
ambiguous catalysts capable of breaking through the mediation of reflective
thought, and thereby actually tying directly into our existence.
Herein lies the connection between ecstasy and alterity: reasons encounter with
both entails the risk that accompanies all real freedom, a risk that in turn is the
necessary condition for a philosophy that is not mythic, [and thus] like its political
counterpart, ideology, silences present and future debate by locating certainty and
closure in the non-historical and thus static now of eternity.
With this inverted idea, [] Schelling provides us with his final draft of the
premise missing from Kants critical edifice, a premise of brute
existence, whose alterity to thought provides Schelling with the actual
conflict and opposition necessary to drive a real dialectical process.
This processs trajectory of development betrays the unpredictable
markings of living freedom. And it is precisely from the perspective of this
chaotic field of the reciprocal interaction of thinking and being that Schelling
aims his critique of Hegels mythic animation of the logical concept.
(Matthews, pp.54-5)
Because freedom is understood here in its raw facticity, as naked intuition, as brute existence, it
follows that such freedom must precede all thought, all conceptualisation and therefore
also all consciousness because the primary quality of consciousness is precisely its
presumed discursivity and logic (cf. Wittgenstein). But as consciousness, as reflective
thought, this con-scientia would entail the human ability to isolate positively a common
goal, a common being, a human inter esse. Precisely because Schelling, and Schopenhauer
and Kierkegaard after him, posit freedom as a universal state that precedes all reflexive
thought as brute existence, this freedom in its crude immateriality, in its meta-physical
ether-reality, in its total absence of corpor-reality, can exist only as conflict and opposition
but this time not, as in Hegel, as a dialectical process intrinsic to thought and therefore
subject to the strict Logos the extrinsication of the Idea in history but rather as raw,
contingent, abysmal un-consciousness:
That primordial deed which makes a man genuinely himself precedes all individual
actions; but immediately after it is put into exuberant freedom, this deed
sinks into the night of unconsciousness. This is not a deed that could happen
once and then stop; it is a permanent deed, a never-ending deed, and consequently it
can never again be brought before consciousness. For man to know of this deed,
consciousness itself would have to return into nothingness. For man to know
of this deed, consciousness itself would have to return into nothing, into
boundless freedom, and would cease to be consciousness. This deed occurs
once and then immediately sinks back into unfathomable depths; and nature acquires
permanence precisely thereby. Likewise that will, posited once at the beginning,
and then led to the outside, must immediately sink into unconsciousness.
Only in this way is a beginning possible, a beginning that does not stop being
a beginning, a truly eternal beginning. For here as well, it is true that the
beginning cannot know itself. That deed once done, it is done for all eternity.
The decision that in some manner is truly to begin must never be brought to

consciousness; it must not be called back, because this would amount to

being taken back. If, in making a decision, somebody retains the right to reexamine his choice, he will never make a beginning at all, (F. Schelling,
Weltalters, quoted in S. Zizek, The Abyss of Freedom, p.32).

The Heideggerian reflex of this conception of freedom is made patently evident by Hannah
Arendts almost identical reprise in On Revolution:
206 On Revolution - Arendt
It is in the very nature of a beginning to carry with itself a
measure of complete arbitrariness. Not only is it not bound into
a reliable chain of cause and effect, a chain in which each effect
immediately turns into the cause for future developments, the
beginning has, as it were, nothing whatsoever to hold on to; it is
as though it came out of nowhere in either time or space. For a
moment, the moment of beginning, it is as though the beginner
had abolished the sequence of temporality itself, or as though the
actors were thrown out of the temporal order and its continuity.
The problem of beginning, of course, appears first in thought
and speculation about the origin of the universe, and we know
the Hebrew solution for its perplexities - the assumption of a
Creator God who is outside his own creation in the same way as
the fabricator is outside the fabricated object. In other words,
the problem of beginning is solved through the introduction of
a beginner whose own beginnings are no longer subject to
question because he is 'from eternity to eternity'. This eternity
is the absolute of temporality, and to the extent that the beginning
of the universe reaches back into this region of the absolute,
it is no longer arbitrary but rooted in something which, though
it may be beyond the reasoning capacities of man, possesses a
reason, a rationale of its own. The curious fact that the men of
the revolutions were prompted into their desperate search for an
absolute the very moment they had been forced to act might
well be, at least partly, influenced by the age-old thought-customs
of Western men, according to which each completely new
beginning needs an absolute from which it springs and by which
it is 'explained'.

The emargination of freedom from a positive human goal capable of conscious identification and
pursuit to a negative pre-reflexive human condition (as in thinkers from Pascal to Kierkegaard
to Heidegger and Sartre) is something that we shall enucleate and expose in our study of
Schopenahuers cognate metaphysics of experience.

The liberal bourgeois State the State of capital is founded upon the neat dichotomy between
the sphere of necessity that is, the economy whose laws are set by the dismal
science of economics and the sphere of freedom or public opinion. But how can these
seemingly incompatible spheres one deterministic and the other seemingly not - coexist in a society and in a State? How can the sphere of necessity or economics be
separated from that of freedom or politics when the economic behaviour of individuals is
clearly influenced by their political choices and, in turn, their political choices are
conditioned by their economic constraints? In other words, how can the liberal State claim
legitimately to be able to reconcile these seemingly incompatible social spheres? It is
obvious that the answer to this question, and ultimately the entire rationale of capitalism
its metaphysics, though its apologists and propagandists would never concede the
necessarily metaphysical nature of their ideology rests on the definitions of freedom

and necessity. What we are exploring here is the thinking process the development of
the theory that has led to the powerful ideology of capitalism as the marketplace
society founded on the osmotic relation between market economics and liberal State.
And we have started with the founders of what we call negatives Denken in Germany
Schelling and Schopenhauer.
Despite his express distaste for the German Idealists, Schopenhauers critique of Kant presents
obvious and striking similarities with Schellings; but he goes much further in stripping
off more layers of the Cartesian cogito. Just like Schellings, Schopenhauers critique of
Kant challenges two tenets of Cartesian rationalism derived from the cogito: the first,
which Kants critical idealism clearly confuted, is that there is a Subject, an Ego, whose
existence is proven not by the content of thought but from the very act of thinking. If
there are thoughts, Descartes reasoned, then there must be an id-entity, an Ego-ity (Ichheit) that thinks (cogito as co-agitare). Kant showed, however, that the mere act of thinking
does not and cannot prove the existence of an active thinker or Ego which must
therefore remain a transcendental Subject. But the second notion that Schelling and
Schopenhauer disputed and dispelled was one in which Kant himself was implicated
and that is that the very content of thought, its logical consistency its reasoning
showed the existence of a faculty of Pure Reason that required as a necessary premise of
this existence the dialectical pre-supposition (the intelligible character, as against the
Cartesian syllogistic deduction) of a thinking Subject that is autonomous and therefore
free from the heteronomy of the causal chain that links the phenomena induced by the
Object (the Thing in itself) and perceived by the Subject.
This practical inference from the very faculty of Pure Reason led Kant to postulate the existence
of a Practical Reason that could found at least transcendentally an entire formal ethics. Like
Schelling, Schopenhauer also strenuously denies the validity of such an inference first
and foremost because it is based on the Cartesian unbridgeable gap between the
Subject and its Object, the res cogitans the Soul - that perceives the world, and the res
extensa matter - that is the material world itself made up, in Kants words, of the Thingin-itself and the phenomena it produces.

If we wish to reach the real origin of this hypothesis

of Practical Reason, we must trace its descent a
little further back. We shall find that it is derived
ON THE BASIS OF THE KANTIAN ETHICS. 77
from a doctrine, which Kant totally confuted, but
which nevertheless, in this connection, lies secretly
(indeed he himself is not aware of it) at the root
of his assumption of a Practical Reason with its
Imperatives and its Autonomya reminiscence of
a former mode of thought. I mean the so-called
Rational Psychology, according to which man is
composed of two entirely heterogeneous substances
the material body, and the immaterial soul. Plato
was the first to formulate this dogma, and he endeavoured
to prove it as an objective truth. But it
was Descartes who, by working it out with scientific
exactness, perfectly developed and completed it.

And this is just what brought its fallacy to light, as

demonstrated by Spinoza, Locke, and Kant successively.
It was demonstrated by Spinoza ; because his
philosophy consists chiefly in the refutation of his
master's twofold dualism, and because he entirely and
expressly denied the two Substances of Descartes,
and took as his main principle the following proposition
: " Substantia cogitans et substantia extensa
una eademque est substantia, quae jam sub hoc, jam
sub illo attributo comprehenditur.''^* The thinking substance, and substance in extension are
one and the self-same substance, which is contained now
under the latter attribute {i.e., extension), now under the
former {i.e., the attribute of thinking).
Ethica, Part II.,Prop. 7. Corollary.
^ It was demonstrated
by Locke ; for he combated the theory of
innate ideas, derived all knowledge from the sensuous,
and taught that it is not impossible that Matter
should think. And lastly, it was demonstrated by
78 THE BASIS OF MORALITY.
Kant, in his Kritik der Rationalen Psychologies as
given in the first edition. Leibnitz and Wolff were
the champions on the bad side ; and this brought
Leibnitz the undeserved honour of being compared
to the great Plato, who was really so unlike him.
For Schelling and Schopenhauer, the only inference that can be drawn from the Cartesian cogito is
not the existence of Reason as the logical content of thought, as Kant desumed, but rather
the very materiality of the act of thinking, not in the sense of the existence of a thinking
Subject or Ego but rather the mere, sheer, brute fact of existence. The act of thinking, like
that of perceiving and the two cannot be separated at this intuitive level (cf. Hegels hic
et nunc) -, demonstrates that existence is a fact whose proof is the very act of thinking:
yet, the act of thinking does not in the least prove the existence of Reason or of the Ego!
Schelling and Schopenhauer agree therefore with Kant that it is impossible to derive the
existence of an Ego from the act of thinking, but they go farther in denying also, contra
Kant, that the act of thinking shows the existence of Reason: Reason as a thinking faculty
is incapable of demonstrating both the existence of a Subject that originates phenomena
and of itself as the ability of the Subject to com-prehend that is, understand and
encompass - these phenomena!
It is this brute fact of existence, this contingency of thought and perception and intuition, that
engenders the freedom of being human, - but only as a beginning, that is, only as a
meta-physical state that lies beyond (jenseits) all human comprehension or consciousness.
Furthermore, the only reason possible within the phenomenic world is not the Reason
(Vernunft) of Western rationalism from Plato through the Schoolmen and the Renaissance
to German Classical Idealism, but only the heteronomous instrumental reason of the
intellect (Verstand) that is unable to comprehend itself and yet, because of this, is subject to
the strictest necessity and the most inescapable determinism.

Schelling and Schopenhauer accept with Kant and the entirety of post-Renaissance rationalism
the necessity of science: once we lower ourselves into the phenomenic world, the laws
of causality are universally valid and binding. But this necessity is only an experimental
one that changes with the changing phenomena that we experience: it is not a necessity
that reveals a universal or even divine absolute set of laws of nature or a rational
order that can be comprehended as a totality by human beings. Such comprehension
would necessarily entail the Freedom of the Subject that is capable of it. Yet this is
precisely the Totality that Schopenhauer says is impossible to reach. Thus, no Freedom as
a universal human ideal is possible. In Kellys summation of this crucial point:
Schopenhauer criticises Kant's conception of the thing-in-itself in the same manner in which he had
criticised his theory of the a priori character of the causal law.
Both doctrines are true, but their proof is false. "^ Kant argues that "the phenomenon, thus the visible
world, must have a reason, an intelligible cause, which is not a phenomenon, and therefore belongs to
no possible experience."^ But this is perverting entirely the meaning of the law of causality, which
applies exclusively to relations between phenomenal changes, and can therefore in no way account
for the phenomenal world as a hypostatized entity.

The necessity of the physical world cannot be proved absolutely. It can be only demonstrated
empirically through the principle of sufficient reason in the sense that whatever exists
has greater reason to be than what does not exist. It is pointless, therefore, to seek to
establish, as Kant did, the necessity of physical laws because such necessity can never
be established epistemologically; it is simply an empirical reality based on the fact that it
is always possible to establish empirically predictable connections between phenomena.
Only outside the world as we know it - the world of phenomena - is freedom possible; and
then not objectively, cognitively or consciously, but rather in a pre-conscious state.
Freedom and Reason are thus irreconcilably divorced: freedom is inconsistent with
reason unless it is placed beyond the conscious world of human perception in which,
of course, reason as the necessity of the causal chain (the laws of nature) reigns
supreme. Freedom can exist only with-out the World as we perceive it only beyond
the world of phenomena as they appear to us. But within the World, freedom is
impossible because the world of phenomena is ruled by the laws of nature as
established by reason. In this sense, once it is divorced from Reason, Freedom becomes
mere contingency or chance, mere Da-sein, and Reason is reduced to instrumental reason,
to mere intellect.
For Schelling as for Schopenhauer, to put it in the words of Malebranche whose epigram the latter
used in his essay On the Freedom of the Will, la liberte est un mystere freedom is a mystery. But
even in its mysterious shroud, what kind of freedom does Schopenhauer intend? To find out,
we need to understand how Schopenhauer absorbs and subverts though he claims simply to
invert Kantian metaphysics and ethics. The answer will also reveal the theoretical philosophical
underpinnings of neoclassical economic theory and of its political counterpart, liberalism.

The strict and absolute necessity of the acts of

Will, determined by motives as they arise, was first
shown by Hobbes, then by Spinoza, and Hume, and
also by Dietrich von Holbach in his Systeme de la

Nature ; and lastly by Priestley it was most completely

and precisely demonstrated. This point,
indeed, has been so clearly proved, and placed beyond
116 THE BASIS OF MORALITY,
all doubt, that it must be reckoned among the
number of perfectly established truths, and only crass
ignorance could continue to speak of a freedom,
of a liberum arbitrium indifferentiae (a free and
indifferent choice) in the individual acts of men. Nor
did Kant, owing to the irrefutable reasoning of his
predecessors, hesitate to consider the Will as fast
bound in the chains of Necessity, the matter admitting,
as he thought, of no further dispute or doubt. This
is proved by all the passages in which he speaks of
freedom only from the theoretical standpoint. Nevertheless,
it is true that our actions are attended with
a consciousness of independence and original initiative,
which makes us recognise them as our own
work, and every one with ineradicable certainty
feels that he is the real author of his conduct, and
morally responsible for it. But since responsibility
implies the possibility of having acted otherwise,
which possibility means freedom in some sort or
manner; therefore in the consciousness of responsibility
is indirectly involved also the consciousness
of freedom. The key to resolve the contradiction,
that thus arises out of the nature of the case, was
at last found by Kant through the distinction he
drew with profound acumen, between phaenomena
and the Thing in itself (das Ding an sich). This
distinction is the very core of his whole philosophy,
and its greatest merit.
The paramount inference to be drawn from this passage is that Schopenhauer carefully and
steadfastly situates the Will at the metaphysical interface between pre-conscious freedom
and conscious necessity. In other words, the Will serves the role of a metaphysical
osmotic membrane, so to speak, that allows for the philosophical reconciliation of the
unknowable Thing-in-itself, which opens up the sphere of freedom as a qualitas occulta, as
a mystery, on one side, with the knowable phenomena that belong to the sphere of
Necessity, on the other. For Schopenhauer, the greatest merit of his [Kants] entire philosophy
[consists in drawing] the distinction between phaenomena and the Ding an sich (Appendix to
WWR) as two entirely heterogeneous and categorically different entities. But Kants
greatest demerit was his vain attempt to bridge the Gap between the Thing-in-itself and
appearances, first, by understanding the Thing-in-itself as an actual thing, as a material
Object, and then by positing indeed requiring quite arbitrarily! - a Sub-ject or an entity
such as Reason separate from its Ob-ject and therefore opposed to it (Object in German is
Gegen-stand, standing against) that is yet able both to perceive or re-present this Ob-ject
through phenomena, and then in insisting that despite this antinomic opposition, despite
this chorismos, it is possible to identify a Pure Reason (reine Vernunft) by means of which
this Subject or Ego-ity (Ich-heit) can com-prehend, give sense to (Sinn-gebende), that is, be

both ground and sum of the phenomena produced by the Ob-ject and therefore provide
the indispensable adaequatio rei et intellectus in the guise of an ordo et connexio rerum et
idearum. (On this Kantian Gap, cf. Fichtes hiatus irrationalis and Lukacss antinomies
of bourgeois thought and see E. Forsters account, Kants Final Synthesis.)
So when Schopenhauer claims that it is through Kants doctrine that we reach this inversion, he
is really saying that Kants doctrine - the distinction between Ding an sich and phenomenon
-has allowed him to reach this inversion, but only by radically re-directing Kants distinction
inwards toward the sentient organs, past pure intuition and into the Will!
Del resto in tutta
la tradizione filosofica spesso presente lidea della metafisica intesa
come un sapere filosofico che integra il sapere scientifico, come
un ampliamento necessario del campo del sapere. Nel caso di
Schopenhauer le cose non stanno in questo modo. Certamente, nel
paragrafo di apertura del secondo libro del Mondo ( 17), le considerazioni
sulle scienze in genere e in particolare sulle scienze della
natura sembrano a tutta prima rammentare il vecchio discorso sulle
insufficienze del sapere scientifico e sulla necessit di una sua integrazione.
Ma si avverte ben presto che laccento del problema
nettamente spostato dal terreno propriamente conoscitivo ad un
terreno essenzialmente diverso, che mette in questione piuttosto il
nostro modo di essere nel mondo, di riferirci alle cose ed agli eventi
che accadono in esso il nostro modo di vivere questo rapporto, o
meglio ancora: di sentirlo. Naturalmente possibile anche nella
metafisica della tradizione cogliere questo aspetto come sfondo del
problema metafisico, ma ora esso nettamente in primo piano.
Potremmo forse dire addirittura che in Schopenhauer laccento si
sposta esplicitamente sul versante esistenziale, mentre si attenua
laspetto della metafisica come integrazione del sapere, come una
questione filosofica astratta. (G. Piana, Commentari su Schopenhauer, 3, p.7)

(After all, philosophy has often espoused the idea that metaphysics is a mode of knowing
that simply integrates scientific knowledge [as epistemology], as a simple broadening of
the field of knowledge. In Schopenhauer's case things are different. Certainly, in the
opening paragraph of The World [17], his considerations on science in general and natural
sciences particularly seem to harp back to the inadequacy of scientific knowledge and the
necessity of its integration. But one can sense immediately that the stress here is now
shifted from the cognitive ground to one decisively different, one that lays the emphasis on
our manner of being in the world, on the way we relate to things and events that happen in
it - on the way we live this relationship, or even better on how we sense it. Naturally, it is
possible to detect this aspect even in traditional philosophy, but now it is placed decisively
in the foreground. We could even say that in Schopenhauer the focus of philosophy has
been shifted explicitly to the existential aspect, whilst instead the aspect of scientific
integration [epistemology], as an abstract philosophical question, has been neatly
attenuated.)
It is here that Schopenhauer, just like Schelling before, effects his own inversion (Um-kehrung) of
Kants transcendental idealism but now no longer within the confines of Schellings
existentialism. In line with the critique of Kant propounded by Schelling, Schopenhauer contends
that the sphere toto genere different from the idea (from knowing and being known, from
Reason) is a sphere that lies beyond (jenseits, not just behind) the sphere of representations
or appearances, of the known-Object and the knowing-Subject.

"Upon the path of the idea one can never get beyond the idea; it is
a rounded-off whole, and has in its own resources no clue leading
to the nature of the thing in itself, which is toto genere different
EXPERIENCE AND REALITY. 65 - Tsanoff
from it. If we were merely perceiving beings, the way to the
thing in itself would be absolutely cut off from us. Only the
other side of our own being can disclose to us the other side of
the inner being of things. This path I have followed."^ Kant
is correct in holding that we are unable to arrive at the ultimate
reality of things by the road of knowledge; but he then proceeds
to deny the possibility of all metaphysics, thus ignoring,
in his Critique of Pure Reason, the paramount ontological significance
of non-cognitive experience.
Schopenhauer agrees with Kant that the representations or phenomena that we experience as
reality cannot possibly themselves stand for reality that there must be a Thing-in-itself that
stands for these phenomena, that constitutes their being, their sub-stance or esse-nce. This is
because, first, no amount of scientific learning will ever be able to account for the totality of
phenomena, for our experience of the world; and second, more important, it is because
phenomena themselves, even when connected by scientific regularities or laws, cannot go
beyond their status as mere phenomena or appearances (Kants blosse Erscheinungen) or
representations (Vorstellungen), even when we can connect them causally with one another.

The task of meta-physics, therefore, cannot be limited or confined to the cognition of mere
representations and their inter-connection (epistemology) because all this can ever tell us is that
phenomena are linked together, and even how they are so linked. But this epistemology or science
will never answer the question as to what these phenomena however connected really are,
what their substance is, unless we postulate like Kant the existence of an inscrutable Object (the
thing in itself) that stands behind or beneath them, as their sub-stance. But such a positing of
an inscrutable and unknowable Object will inevitably render it a qualitas occulta about whose
nature we can never know anything because by definition we are unable to experience or intuit it
directly! A metaphysics of knowledge (epistemology) is impossible; only a metaphysics of
experience, the intuition of the Will, as against its cognitive consciousness, is open to the intellect
(again, this is a clear echo of Cusanuss docta ignorantia).
It is the purely ideal nature of this Reason and then the formal nature of Practical Reason and
consciousness, of the self or Subject that can com-prehend the inscrutable Ob-ject it is this
transcendental Subject that Schopenhauer denies, because of the very irreconcilability of the
Kantian phenomenon and noumenon, because of their very anti-nomy. Kant has gone too far by
postulating these entities as the formal requirements of Reason, and then has not gone far enough
by failing to see that the thing in itself is not an entity from which the phenomena themselves can
be derived, which he agrees is impossible but rather a faculty that is intuitively reachable,
though not knowable, by us from the very nature of these phenomena, not from their cognitive
content from the information they convey but from our very experience of them!
La nostra domanda ora: Che cosa questo mondo oltre il
fatto che esso una nostra rappresentazione? Che cosa resta se si

prescinde dal divenire rappresentazione, ovvero dallessere rappresentazione?

Che cosa significa lintero mondo della rappresentazione?
Che cosa lessenza di questo fenomeno, che cosa si manifesta
in esso, che cosa la cosa in s? Questa domanda il problema fondamentale
della filosofia (Lez., II, p. 61). p.8. Berlin lectures.

(Our question now is: "What is this world beyond the fact that it is our perception? What is left of
it if we prescind from this representation, from its being merely a representation? What is the
essence of this phenomenon, what is manifested in it, what is the thing-in-itself? This question is
the fundamental problem of philosophy",)
To posit the Object independently of the Subject, as a thing, as Kant did with his transcendental
idealism, is to objectify the Subject (this is also the crux of Adornos critique of Hegels Objective
Spirit in Lectures on Negative Dialectics). Conversely put, with Schopenhauer, to know [the
subject] objectively is to desire something contradictory. As argued by Cusanus, empirical knowledge
can never surge to a totality the absolute because its character remains partial or
heteronomous. Similarly, this totality cannot be a causa causans because by definition all causes
must be the effect of a prior cause and therefore remain heteronomous. True autonomy or
freedom must belong to a sphere toto genere different from that of causality which in turn cannot
be absolute but merely instrumental, and is therefore incapable of com-prehension given its
heteronomous instrumentality. It is a sphere that generates the entire possibility of
experience as its innermost being. It is the Lichtung, the self-understanding of being, it is the
very being that interrogates being, the being in the world, which at once unifies known
and knowing, subject and object in an identical subject-object (Lukacs) because
"the thing in itself can, as such, only come into consciousness quite directly, in this way, that it is itself
conscious of itself; to wish to know it objectively is to desire something contradictory."*
It follows that there is no hiatus or chasm or lacuna between Subject and Object and that therefore
Phenomena or Representations are not images or aspects of the Object as perceived
passively by the Subject but are instead objectifications of the body not of the Subject! - as a
sentient entity itself they are a subject-object unity an identical subject-object. (It is now
pellucid, therefore, that the true source of Lukacss identification of the working class as the
identical subject-object of history in History and Class Consciousness is the direct result of
Schopenhauers critique of Kants idealism elaborated in a Hegelian dialectical-historical
dimension in which Schopenhauers Wirk-lichkeit [work-likeness] is transmuted into the centrality
of Labour [of work] in human history whereas, as we are about to see, for Schopenhauer this
reality or work-likeness is the Veil of Maya that uncovers the futility of Labour, of the Arbeit, of
its Strife and Pain [Leid] precisely the dis-utility of labour theorized in Neoclassical Economics. See
on all this our Capitalist Metaphysics.)
No Object or Reality stands behind the phenomena: no Subject can either initiate or fully
com-prehend (understand and encompass) them as a totality. Instead, the phenomena are the
actu-ality (Wirklichkeit), the mani-festation or re-presentation (Vor-stellung) of the Will intended
not as an Ego but as a life-force, as the Welt-prinzip.
"He[Kant] does not say, as truth required, simply and absolutely that the object is conditioned by the
subject, and conversely, but only that the manner of appearance of the object is conditioned by the

forms of knowledge of the subject, which therefore, come a priori to consciousness. But that now
which in opposition to this is only known a posteriori is for him the immediate effect of the thing in
itself, which becomes phenomEXPERIENCE AND REALITY. 63- Tsanoff
enon only in its passage through these forms which are given a priori/'^
And Kant fails to realize that "objectivity in general belongs to the forms of the phenomenon, and is
just as much conditioned by subjectivity in general as the mode of appearing of the object is
conditioned by the forms of knowledge of the subject; that thus if a thing in itself must be assumed, it
absolutely cannot be an object, which however he always assumes it to be, but such a thing in itself
must necessarily lie in a sphere toto genere different from the idea (from knowing and being known).
"2
CHAPTER IV. from Tsanoff.
Experience and Reality: The Will as the Thing-in-Itself.
A change of philosophical method is to be observed at this stage of Kant's exposition, which Schopenhauer
interprets as follows. Kant does not affirm, clearly and distinctly, the absolute mutual dependence of
subject and object in all possible experience.
Reality (ontology) cannot be found in an Object or a thing: it cannot be re-ality (Latin, res,
thing) as a sum or totality of things. Instead, quite to the contrary, the ultimate reality, the one
accessible to us, is the very experience of phenomena through our physiological faculties, both
mental and physical through the body. The phenomena and the Thing are irreconcilable, but the
path to the Thing lies through the intuition or experience of the phenomena themselves; not
through their cognitive or epistemological content but through their experiential content! Rather
than as an array of things (Re-ality), Schopenhauer understands reality, the world, from an
active standpoint not merely an existential one as did Schelling before him. What we are aware
of through the body and its perception or intuition of the world, well beyond its cognition as
consciousness, is the fact of Volition, that is, not merely of our ec-sistence, or even of our passive
perception of our being before thinking -, but above all of our active willing!
Here, the conatus or appetitus is much more in evidence than the perception, even than in
Schelling. Again, this critique is entirely similar to Schellings existential critique of Kants
transcendentalism; but it goes further in that it does not stop at the mere fact of existence or
contingency but penetrates the active character of human perception and intuition its purpose,
its being volition! Schelling saw only the materiality of thought, its being as ec-sistence:
Schopenhauer instead sees not just thought, but the entirety of human sensation, as the actual
inter-action of the body and the object in the representation as sensu-ality, as actu-ality
(Wirklichkeit).
We say of the body and not of the Subject or of the Ego, because, as we have demonstrated,
for Schopenhauer the Will must not and cannot be mistaken for a Subject or an I that wills! Even
one of the most perspicacious commentators on Schopenhauer falls into this understandable but
crucial error, as this quotation shows:
Cos si fa notare che potremmo sentire una forte resistenza
interna ad ammettere la concezione del corpo come pura rappresentazione,
una resistenza che il riconoscimento del corpo come
oggetto immediato non in grado di far venire meno. Questa resistenza
si spiega ora con il fatto che, facendo del corpo una rappresentazione
come tutte le altre si espone il corpo stesso, il mio corpo,
e dunque io stesso, alla possibilit che esso sia ridotto a pura parvenza.
Ma una simile riduzione entra in conflitto con lesperienza
che io ho di me stesso ed in particolare in quanto io costituisco me

stesso come un io che vuole. Dobbiamo ora osservare che lesperienza

dellio come un io che vuole anche esperienza del reale al suo massimo
grado ecco come si ripresenta in rapporto alle considerazioni
metafisiche il tema della realt! Ci che per me soprattutto reale
sono io stesso, quellio stesso che si percepisce in una inscindibile
unit con il corpo stesso si sarebbe tentati di pensare di essere qui
in presenza di una singolarissima e svisata ripresa, in un contesto e
con esiti tanto diversi, del tema cartesiano dellego cogito.
La massima realt da noi concepibile il nostro corpo. Il
proprio corpo per ciascuno la cosa pi reale (M., p. 143, Lez. II,
p. 81). La metafisica di Schopenhauer inizia proprio da questa affermazione
tanto notevole. In essa contenuta una conseguenza
molto forte: se non vogliamo che il mondo intero che ci appare,
con tutte le cose di cui esso costituito, animali, vegetali, e le stesse
altre persone da cui siamo circondati sia ridotto a pura parvenza fenomenica,
dobbiamo essere disposti ad attribuire ad ogni cosa
quella stessa realt che noi attribuiamo al nostro corpo. Ma ci significa
nullaltro che fare di ogni cosa un fenomeno della volont. O
sostenere, detto in altri modi equivalenti, che la volont lessenza
dei fenomeni, che essa la cosa in s di cui parlava Kant. (G. Piana, op.cit., 3, p.21)
([Schopenhauer's thesis] focuses on our resistance to the conception of our body as pure representation, a resistance that
our perception of our body as an immediate object can only strengthen. This resistance is explained by the
fact that the idea of the body, of my body, and therefore of myself, as a representation like any other, opens it
to the possibility of being seen as a mere appearance. But such a reduction comes into conflict with the
experience that I have of myself and particularly to the degree that that I constitute myself as an I that wills.
We must observe now that the experience of the I as an I that wills is also the experience of reality in its
highest degree - that is how we represent the notion of reality in metaphysical terms! What is real above all
for me is myself, that myself that is perceived as an inseparable part of my body - one is tempted here to see
in this thesis a singular and misconceived reprise, in a context and with outcomes that are so much different,
of the Cartesian theme of the ego cogito [ergo sum]. "The highest reality conceivable by us" [says
Schopenhauer] is our body. "One's body is for each of us the most real thing" [World]. Schopenhauer's
metaphysics starts from this affirmation so notable. In it is contained a very strong consequence: if we do not
wish that the entire world appears to us, with all the things that constitute it, animals, vegetables, and the
same persons who surround us, be reduced to a mere phenomenal appearance, then we must be prepared to
attribute to everything the same reality that we attribute to our body. But this means no more than to make of
every thing a phenomenon of the Will. Or to assert, put in other words, that the Will is the essence of
phenomena, that it is the thing in itself to which Kant referred.)

There are two possible confusions in Pianas otherwise accurate summary of Schopenhauers
radical inversion of Western rationalist metaphysics that need clarification: the first is that
Schopenhauers emphasis on the Will as a primal experience as an intuition conscious
of its being pure intuition is meant precisely at de-structing the concept of an I that
wills. Indeed, the whole point to the Will as a Welt-prinzip, a world-principle, as a
universal Will-to-Life (Wille zum Leben, which he therefore admits is ein Pleonasmus
[World, II, par.54]) is to deny that a Cartesian ego exists as an entity because for him the
Ego is only a faculty a force that wills and that is present universally. The second
confusion is that the Will is a faculty or property that belongs to individuals because, as
we have just explained, Schopenhauer sees it instead as a universal force that is
individualised in every aspect of existence, in every being (Fr. etant, Ger. Seiende) as
distinguished from Being (Etre, Sein) and this occurs through what Schopenhauer calls
the principium individuationis, by which he means that there would simply not be a
World if the Will could not assume a different ex-pression in each single being, so far
as beings can be isolated from Being.

In this regard, one may think that Schopenhauer has escaped what is our greatest criticism of
most philosophical and social theory that human beings can be understood
ontogenetically rather than phylogenetically. But in fact, because the Will is just like
Nietzsches, albeit very different, notion of Wille zur Macht a universal force that must
be individualised, then clearly it cannot serve as a phylogenetic approach to human
species-conscious being (Gattungswesen).
It is to this ethico-political aspect of Schopenhauers metaphysics that we will turn in our next
section.

Kant's proton pseudon (first false step) lies in his

conception of Ethics itself, and this is found very
clearly expressed on page 62 (R., p. 54) : " In a
system of practical philosophy we are not concerned
with adducing reasons for that which takes place,
but with formulating laws regarding that which
ought to take place, even if it never does take
place." This is at once a distinct petitio principii.
Who tells you that there are laws to which our
conduct ought to be subject ? Who tells you that
that ought to take place, which in fact never does
take place ? What justification have you for making
this assumption at the outset, and consequently
for forcing upon us, as the only possible one, a
system of Ethics couched in the imperative terms of
legislation ? I say, in contradistinction to Kant, that
the student of Ethics, and no less the philosopher
in general, must content himself with explaining and
interpreting that which is given, in other words,
that which really is, or takes place, so as to obtain
an understanding of it,..p28
Kant presumes to extend the a priori synthetic from the world of physical events (where
also it can be challenged as inapplicable) to that of morality. Schopenhauer has easy play
of this argument a simple non sequitur. For there is no causal relation whatsoever
between an action and a rule of action: one cannot be inferred apodictically from the
other except as a tautology devoid of content or as vacuous exhortation (wishful thinking).
Indeed, if the rule of action is defined in pure terms, it then lacks all practical
content whatsoever in other words, pure reason voids practical reason of its raison
detre. Pure ethics is a mirage. (See Basis, p99 to 103.)
We shall therefore with all
the greater interest and curiosity await the solution
of the problem he [Kant] has set himself, namely, how
something is to arise out of nothing, that is, how

out of purely a priori conceptions, which contain

nothing empirical or material, the laws of material
human action are to grow up. (Basis, p56.)

As Tsanoff summarises the point (in Schopenhauers Criticism of Kantian Experience),

His own Basis of Morality
contains a vigorous attack upon the fundamental principles
of Kant's ethical theory. According to him, Kant "founds . . .
his moral principle not on any provable fact of consciousness,
such as an inner natural disposition, nor yet upon any objective
relation of things in the external world, . . . but on pure
Reason, which ... is taken, not as it really and exclusively
is,an intellectual faculty of man,
but as a self-existent hypostatic
Essence [an entity], yet without the smallest authority."^ The second
Critique inconsistently retains what was declared untenable
in the 'Transcendental Dialectic', by the obvious subterfuge of
raising the speculative reason into a genus, and then deducing
from it a second species, practical reason,a procedure similar
to that accounting for the origin of immaterial substance, and
as inconsistent as it is useless in the solution of the ethical
problem.^ Through the road of knowledge, through understanding
and reason, we can arrive at perception and conception
respectively; but cognition is always restricted to phenomena,
the thing-in-itself is unknowable.

For Schelling as for Schopenhauer, to put it in the words of Malebranche (whose epigram the
latter used in his essay On the Freedom of the Will), la liberte est un mystere freedom is a
mystery. But even in its mysterious shroud, what kind of freedom does Schopenhauer
intend? To find out, we need to understand how Schopenhauer absorbs and subverts though
he claims simply to invert Kantian metaphysics and ethics. The answer will also reveal the
theoretical philosophical underpinnings of neoclassical economic theory and of its political
counterpart, liberalism.
Classical philosophy, from Plato to Kant, never distinguishes between the
transcendental subject and mechanical action: the one is the Subject of the
other even ultimately as the divine Ab-solute (free from all laws). In Schelling and
then in Schopenhauer, on the contrary, there is no Subject to take this conscious
responsibility or Freedom: there is only a sense of responsibility, but no actual
consciousness of an authorial entity, an Ego-ity or Subject that assumes it.
Freedom and consciousness are irreconcilable (Zizek, The Indivisible Remainder, p.18,
calls it an ontological incompatibility). Therefore, Freedom can only exist as free-dom,
as chaos, as chance or hazard or possibility.
Thus, for the negatives Denken, even the necessity of the physical world cannot be proved
absolutely. It can be demonstrated only empirically through the principle of sufficient reason

in the sense that whatever exists has greater reason to be than what does not exist. Freedom
and Necessity must co-exist in a special way. It is pointless, therefore, to seek to establish, as
Kant did, the ab-solute necessity of physical laws which is an oxymoron because a
necessity that can be established ab-solutely (without any further laws) is an epistemological
contradiction. Necessity is simply an empirical reality based on the fact that it is always
possible to establish empirically predictable connections between phenomena. Only outside
the world as we know it - the world of phenomena and consciousness - is freedom possible;
and then not objectively, cognitively or consciously, but rather in a pre-conscious state.
Freedom can exist only with-out the World as we perceive it only beyond the world of
phenomena as they appear to us and therefore beyond human consciousness. And there this
Freedom can exist only as free-dom. Freedom and Reason are thus irreconcilably divorced: because Freedom is inconsistent with consciousness, and therefore with Reason which can be
understood only in the light of consciousness. For the negatives Denken the only reason
accessible to consciousness is instrumental reason. Therefore, within the World, within the
world of consciousness, Freedom is impossible because the world of phenomena is ruled by the
laws of nature as established by instrumental reason. Within the conscious world of human
perception and of phenomena, instrumental reason as the necessity of the causal chain (the
laws of nature) reigns supreme and unchallenged. In this sense, once it is divorced from
Reason, Freedom becomes mere contingency or chance, mere Da-sein: Freedom becomes freedom both within and without the world of consciousness, the world of perception. And Reason,
bereft of Freedom, is reduced to instrumental reason, to mere intellect. Only instrumental
reason can be conscious, because it is not free. Freedom and Reason are incompatible because
the former needs to be conscious to be free and the latter needs to be free to be Reason and
because Freedom is incompatible with consciousness, Freedom and Reason must also be
incompatible. The only reason possible is conscious and therefore unfree, necessary
instrumental reason. The only freedom possible is unconscious freedom or free-dom, which
thus is compatible with instrumental reason but not with the Reason of classical philosophy.
[The central apory here is that consciousness is possible only as consciousness of necessity.
Yet clearly what we mean by consciousness is precisely the opposite, that is, the awareness of
freedom, the ability to make (conscious) decisions! De-cision is an incision in being that makes
time possible. How is this consistent with physis and telos in Western philosophy? Freedom
alone intended as the agreement of freedom and reason can reconcile physis and telos in
the sense that physis is the unfolding of Freedom.]

Human action, the operari, therefore is not and cannot be the pro-duct of an autonomous or free
Subject in the sense of a Sub-ject properly conscious of its Freedom, of an Ego-ity, because
no autonomous cause not even the Absolute, not even God - can ever initiate a
heteronomous chain of cause and effect and still less com-prehend, in the sense of
consciously and totally explain, its existence so as to guarantee its scientific validity, its
status as Truth! If every cause must have an effect, the instrumental reason or intellect or
understanding (Verstand) that can trace the causal connections between events can never
also explain and under-stand (Lt., sub-stantiare, stand under) them ab-solutely
(unconditionally) freely. Its under-standing of reality can be only instrumental, only a
tool conjectured by humans never ab-solute in a quasi-divine, theo-logical sense as it
is even in Hobbes. Kants hesitations in this regard in the Third Critique and in the Opus
Postumum are quite sobering; his recourse to an intuitus originarius (discussed by
Heidegger in his Kantbuch and in his commentary on Leibniz and Schopenhauer in Part
Two of The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic) and his assertion that he had to limit the
scope of human knowledge so as to preserve faith is quite (sit venia verbo!) revealing!
(Cf. on this Heideggers treatment of inverted Platonism in his Nietzsche.)

It is here that Schop departs from this antinomic triumvirate, this unholy trinity (all
good things come in threes, he quipped in WWR) the Subject, the Object, and the
Phenomena.
This doctrine of the coexistence of Freedom and
Necessity I regard as the greatest of all the achievements
of human sagacity. With the Transcendental
Aesthetics it forms the two great diamonds in the
crown of Kant's fame, which will never pass away.
The theory itself, and the whole question regarding
the nature of Freedom, can be better
understood if we view them in connection with a
general truth, which I think, is most concisely
expressed by a formula frequently occurring in the
scholastic writings : Operari sequitur esse. In other
words, everything in the world operates in accordance
with what it is, in accordance with its inherent
nature, in which, consequently, all its modes of
expression are already contained potentially, while
actually they are manifested when elicited by external
causes ; so that external causes are the means
whereby the essential constitution of the thing is
* I.e., What is done is a consequence of that which is.
THE INTELLIGIBLE AND EMPIRICAL CHARACTER. 119
revealed. And the modes of expression so resulting
form the empirical character ; whereas its hidden,
ultimate basis, which is inaccessible to experience,
is the intelligible character, that is, the real nature
per se of the particular thing in question. Man
forms no exception to the rest of nature ; he too
has a changeless character, which, however, is strictly
individual and different in each case. This character
is of course empirical as far as we can grasp it, and
therefore only phaenomenal ; while the intelligible
character is whatever may be the real nature in
itself of the person. His actions one and all, being,
as regards their external constitution, determined
by motives, can never be shaped otherwise than in
accordance with the unchangeable individual character.
As a man is, so he his bound to act. Hence
for a given person in every single case, there is
absolutely only one way of acting possible : Operari
sequitur esse.

The Kantian Ding an sich, then, is not the Ob-ject. It is the intelligible character of
the empirical objectification, of the operari and of the World, so that now the Ding an

sich is no longer a Thing: it is a faculty a force that comes from within ex-perience, that ob-jectifies and extrinsic-ates itself in the world; it is something outside Time
and Space because it originates with them! This would be the equivalent of Kants
transcendental subject were it not for the fact that it is not a Subject, not an entelechy
or an essent or even an entity: it is a faculty, a force, a Welt-prinzip; it is Life as a
force; it is the Will. This is the hidden, ultimate basis, which is inaccessible to
experience of Freedom only thus The theory itself, and the whole question regarding
the nature of Freedom, can be better
understood if we view them in connection with a
general truth, which I think, is most concisely
expressed by a formula frequently occurring in the
scholastic writings : Operari sequitur esse.
Operari sequitur esse. By reprising this Scholastic formula in his searing critique of Kants ethical
formalism and transcendental idealism (v. The Basis of Morality), Schopenhauer seems
only apparently to uphold the fundamental tenet of Western metaphysics that life and
the world are divided into permanent reality or sub-stance (what stands under
appearances or supports re-ality, thing-iness) and transient ap-pearance (what is a
partial re-presentation [Vorstellung] or view [Anschauung] of reality), between the
supra-sensible and the sensible worlds. For Western metaphysics since at least the preSocratics and Plato, it is Being (esse) that determines the actu-ality of the world, its
workings (Wirk-lichkeit) or operation (operari). For Western metaphysics Being is the
causa causans or the first cause of all that ec-sists: all else are mere appearances (Kants
blosse Erscheinungen). Yet, in total contrast, Schopenhauers re-assertion of the principle
that actuality follows being constitutes a radical inversion (Um-kehrung) of the Platonic
chorismos, properly theorised by Descartes and then by Kant, because although Being
remains the fundamentum or Weltprinzip in the guise of the Will, this Being or Will is no
longer the Subject Idea (Plato), the res cogitans (Descartes) or Reason (Kants Vernunft)
that both initiates and comprehends the Object the res extensa, the thing-in-itself. It is
this bringing together, this fusing of mind and body - or better, this com-prehension
of body by mind, of Object by Subject - that is the ultimate aim of Western metaphysics
since its origins in ancient Greek natural theology and that forms the object of
Schopenhauers fierce critique of German Idealism. That is the ultimate philosophical
quest articulated in the Scholastic adaequatio intellectus et rei (congruence of mind and
thing). As we know, this adaequatio has never been achieved in Western metaphysics and
has degenerated either in the adaequatio intellectus ad rem (materialism), or else in the
adaequatio rei ad intellectus (idealism). For Schopenhauer, once again, and later above all
for Nietzsche - no such adaequatio is possible because the intellect can never reach the
status of a Reason that can com-prehend the World. Hence, the rationalist goal of Western
metaphysics a Reason that is a conscious Subject or entity like Kants or Hegels - is only
an astute theology (Nietzsche in Twilight) - sterile in its very formal purity and
therefore incapable of providing the order and connection between things and ideas.
Yet this failure is not what matters to Schopenhauer or Nietzsche! The negatives Denken does not
hanker for or mourn the failure of German Idealism properly to conceptualize Freedom:
rather, it riles at and derides the attempt to do so! (Cf. Cacciari, DCP) For Schopenhauer,
no separation between mind and body is possible, not indeed because the two can be

reconciled rationally as both Kant and Hegel pretended to do this is the real meaning
of the Freedom (Freiheit) of German Idealism -, but rather because esse est percipi because
to be is to be perceived and therefore all that we know about life and the world is that
they are the unity of Will and Representation, the identical subject-object.

Freedom belongs only to the intelligible

character, not to the empirical. The operari
(conduct) of a given individual is necessarily
determined externally by motives, internally by his
character; therefore everything that he does necessarily
takes place. But in his esse (i.e., in what
he is), there, we find Freedom. He might have
been something different; and guilt or merit attaches
to that which he is. All that he does follows
from what he is, as a mere corollary. Through
Kant's doctrine we are freed from the primary error
of connecting Necessity with esse (what one is),
and Freedom with operari (what one does); we
' I.e., his acts are a consequence of what he is.
120 THE BASIS OF MORALITY.
become aware that this is a misplacement of terms,
and that exactly the inverse arrangement is the
true one. Hence it is clear that the moral responsibility
of a man, while it first of all, and obviously,
of course, touches what he does, yet at bottom
touches what he is; because, what he is being the
original datum, his conduct, as motives arise, could
never take any other course than that which it
actually does take.

To the extent that the awareness of the autonomy of esse is recognized, the Kantian
perspective applies: whereas before it was in the realm of action, in the operari, that
freedom was located, whilst the character or essence or nature (esse, Wesen,
physis) was interpreted as necessity, as determined, now instead it is the former that
is necessary or conditioned and the latter that is free or unconditioned, and
determinant not even regulated a priori.
So that it is the esse (what one is) which in reality is accused by
conscience, while the operari (what one does) supplies
the incriminating evidence. Since we are only
conscious of Freedom through the sense of responsibility;
therefore where the latter lies the former must
THEORY OF FREEDOM. 121
also be; in the esse (in one's being). It is the
operari (what one does) that is subject to necessity.
But we can only get to know ourselves, as well as
others empirically; we have no a priori knowledge [consciouness]
of our character.

(The Lutheran provenance of this hypothesis ought to be evident.)

Not Motivation, then, explains human behaviour, but character, which is as

inscrutable and impenetrable as nay, it is the Thing in itself! Whereas Kant identified
the Ding an sich with the Ob-ject, Schop has turned it into a transcendental Sub-ject
with a special character. Kant had derived the Subject from the need for Freedom to
comprehend Necessity, because Necessity in-vokes Freedom (cf. Cusanuss unity of
opposites). And this Freedom is the very Ratio, the Pure Reason that makes possible
the a priori synthetic judgements derived from our pure intuition and are filtered through
the understanding. Pure Reason is the rule-making faculty that is conscious of its ability
to make rules, and that is therefore auto-nomous because it is subject only to its own
rules, to Logic. The Ding an sich therefore is the Ob-ject that is perceptible only as
phenomena that are regulated ultimately by rules emanating from Pure Reason.
The individual, with his immutable, innate character,
strictly determined in all his modes of expression
by the law of Causality, which, as acting through
the medium of the intellect, is here called by the
THE INTELLIGIBLE AND EMPIRICAL CHARACTER. 117
name of Motivation,the individual so constituted
is only the phaenomenon (Erscheinung). The Thing
in itself which underlies this phaenomenon is outside
of Time and Space, consequently free from all
succession and plurality, one, and changeless. Its
constitution in itself is the intelligible character,
which is equally present in all the acts of the
individual, and stamped on every one of them,
like the impress of a signet on a thousand seals.
The empirical character of the phaenomenonthe
character which manifests itself in time, and in
succession of actsis thus determined by the intelligible
character; and consequently, the individual,
as phaenomenon, in all his modes of expression,
which are called forth by motives, must show the
invariableness of a natural law. Whence it results
that all his actions are governed by strict necessity.

Note how this position contradicts Windelbands nomothetic/idiographic categorization

of human activity (history) in the sense that whereas it antithetically transforms
idiosyncratic individual behaviour into nomothetic (scientifically measurable)
social behaviour, the Schelling-Schopenhauer hypothesis says that all behaviour
(individual and social) is nomothetic and yet metaphysically or ontologically
free. In both cases, there is no distinction between ontogenesis and
phylogenesis because both approaches begin and end with the in-dividuum in the
sense that no Gattungs-wesen is countenanced.

Ch7:
Schops discussion of the link between ethics and metaphysics, before he undertakes the
foundations of ethics in Part 3, are described so tersely in Ch7 as to make this possibly
the best summary of his philosophy I have encountered; thus, it is important to sift
through it carefully.

This where one can see the similarity with Heideggers notion of transcendental
imagination as a bridge between pure intuition and understanding where the latter
remains, unequivocally, a purely mechanical function that cannot be elevated to Pure
Reason (see my Heideggers Kantbuch). These criticisms had already appeared in
Schopenhauers Essay on the Freedom of the Will. Kantian Practical Reason is initially the
offspring of the freedom of the will, but soon under the regulative principle of Pure
Reason it becomes subordinated to a Logic that Schopenhauer shows is only
instrumental and phenomenic - that is belongs only to the intellect (Verstand) as a
mechanical application of formal reasoning (conception) to the world as Vorstellung
(perception). (See Basis, ch4, c. p.73, with reference to intuition and causality or
sufficient reason.) Thus, pure reason pretends to arrogate to itself the right to dictate
categorical imperatives that rule the conduct of the Will! The dichotomy of lower
heteronomous perceptive intuition and higher autonomous pure reason Schop
correctly traces back to Descartess influence on Kant, a transcendental distinction
rejected by Spinoza (see Note at end of Ch4 of Basis). For Schop., this is the height of
imposture, the sublime Ohnmacht of the Ratio-Ordo the impotent pretence of moral
Theology. (Heidegger makes an identical criticism without even acknowledging Schop!
See my Hs Kbuch.)
Kant does not, like Aristotle, nominate a causa causans, because that would be to posit as
meta-ta-physika an original source (a pleonasm), a primus inter pares of beings,
which is a bad infinite. We need not (!) a Fichtean projectio per hiatus irrationalem,
but rather a veritable force or spring, the esse, of this causal chain a source that
is the causal chain (Heideggers pure now-sequence) but intuited ec-statically, as
being-outside-itself. And this is precisely how that esse is to be under-stood, comprehended. The esse is the nature of the operari but it is not yet another being (etant,
Seiende), it is not another link in the chain of causality. Rather, it is the being of being
(Etre, Sein), the eternal dimension of being, its timeless horizon of which time is
only an aspect (cf. Zizek, The Abyss of Freedom, - in Heidegger it is eternity that is an
aspect of time).
It is the Will, not the Kantian Thing in itself intended as the Ob-ject, that is the qualitas
occulta of the World, and it is the Wills Representations of the World that constitute

the totality of our knowledge. Not, once again, the Totalitat of the Ratio-Ordo so
desperately sought by Western metaphysics, not the totality of the Freiheit of the Will with
its theo-logical origins in the Soul of pre-Socratic Greece but quite to the contrary an
instrumental totality whereby it is not the Will that is free to act, to decide, but rather it is
the impenetrability of the Will, its unknowability, that constitutes the free-dom, the
contingency, the sheer poss-ibility that envelops it, that con-ditions its operari, its reality
intended not as the totality of things but as the actu-ality (Wirk-lichkeit) of the World as
will and representation. All that we can consciously know are the causes and effects of
human perception that we can link together only empirically and instrumentally. Here lies
the distinction between the Renaissance Reason of Leonardo, Galileo and Hobbes and the
reason of the negatives Denken. For Western Humanism, Freedom is a function of the
Will; for the negatives Denken instead it is the Will that becomes a function of free-dom!
The belief that beneath or behind or beyond these instrumental connections there is an
underlying Reality, a supra-sensible world of Values is quite simply fanciful; as
Nietzsche put it, the real world has become a fable (Twilight of the Idols). (Hannah
Arendts nearly total misreading of Nietzsche in this regard if both the real and the
apparent world have disappeared, she quips, then nihilism is all that is left is due to
her inability to understand that neither Schopenhauer nor Nietzsche are seeking to
condemn morally the world for its lack of Freedom, but rather they deny the existence
of this Freedom itself they certify the death of God!)
It is hard to overestimate the importance of this inversion (Ver-kehrung) both of the distinction
between appearance and reality and of the concepts of Freedom and Reason, and
therefore of Necessity and the Self or Ego-ity (Ich-heit) operated by Schopenhauer and
later by Nietzsche: here for the first time is the full re-elaboration of the concepts of
metaphysical reality and of freedom and therefore of metaphysics and ethics - not as
functions of the Will intended as the free volition of the human Subject ab-solved
from all necessity, of human spontaneity and liberum arbitrium as the quasi-divine
faculty of the human spirit or soul. Instead, the human will and the reality or World
that it confronts are now seen as functions of the sheer contingency of the World, of
the sheer instrumentality of Life. (Cf. on this elaboration so fundamental to the entire
negatives Denken, Heideggers seminal work on Schellings Treatise on the Essence of Human
Freedom.)

For these reasons the obliteration of the freedom of the Subject and its subordination to
instrumental reason or intellect (Kants Verstand or understanding) -, Schopenhauers
thought represents the essential crossroads of and underlying link between the
mechanicism of Machiavelli and Hobbes, political liberalism from Locke to Mill and
Constant, empiricism from Berkeley to Mach, the utilitarianism of bourgeois socioeconomic theory, and relativism from Nietzsche to Heidegger: it represents, as it were,
the interpretative key to the most important developments in Western philosophical,
scientific and political thought concomitant with the rise of the capitalist bourgeoisie. (In
our series on Capitalist Metaphysics, we have shown how Schopenhauers thought is
fundamental to understanding the most essential categories of bourgeois economic
theory from Neoclassical marginalism to the Austrian School.)

Before Schopenhauer, all of Western thought had presumed the meta-physical (beyond physics)
freedom of the Subject or Spirit as against the necessity of the physical world
because, as Kant postulated, only an independent, autonomous entity an Ego and its
Reason could be able to com-prehend and so ex-plicate the natural world with its
physical laws. By contrast, the most central concept in Schopenhauers philosophy,
which represents the consecration of the negatives Denken from its origins in Hobbes to its
positive elaboration in liberal political philosophy and finally in Nietzsches nihilist
ontology, is the Principle of Sufficient Reason which states, quite simply, that whatever is
has greater reason to be than what is not.
That which I say necessitateth and determinateth every action, that he may no
longer
doubt of my meaning, is the sum of all those things, which, being now existent,
conduce and
concur to the production of that action hereafter, whereof if any one thing now were
wanting,
the effect could not be produced. This concourse of causes, whereof every one is
determined
to be such as it is by a like concourse of former causes, may well be called (in
respect they
were all set and ordered by the eternal cause of all things, God Almighty) the decree
of God.
According therefore to this answer of St. Paul, I
answer J. D.s objection, and say, the power of God alone, without other help, is
sufficient
justification of any action He doth. That which men make amongst themselves here
by pacts
and covenants, and call by the name of justice, and according whereunto men are
counted and
termed rightly just or unjust, is not that by which God Almighty's actions are to be
measured
or called just; no more than His counsels are to be measured by human
wisdom.
Power irresistible justifieth all actions really and properly, in whomsoever it
be found. Less power does not. And because such power is in God only, He must
needs be
just in all His actions. And we, that not comprehending His counsels, call Him to the
bar,
commit injustice in it.
Hobbes on Freedom and Necessity
This is how Hobbes marries positivism and jusnaturalism (cf. Bobbio): Here clearly Hobbes is
saying that it is possible to divine the divine plan (Providence) from the very fact that a
Plan exists that there are laws or Power, physical and mechanical laws from which
all effects and causes can be derived. Already for Hobbes, the bourgeois era has firmly
established the belief that whatever is predictable or determinable is eo ipso, by itself, by
that very reason justified. In fact, justice does not even come into it given that the
outcome is presumed to be inevitable: the manipulation of the world is seen as
scientific and therefore true and therefore just because it is powerful. The
justice of a particular effect is not finally apparent to humans, but the Reason of the

overall Plan is: Power irresistible justifieth all actions really and properly, in whomsoever it be
found! Hobbes just like Schopenhauer but unlike Nietzsche never disputes the
existence of causation; hence the irresistibility of Power is its own justification. Auctoritas,
non veritas, facit legem: indeed, legality is here identical with the irresistibility or
inexorability of a law - it is what makes it law -, because authority or power, not
truth or justice, are the indispensable condition for the law and they are a sufficient
condition, too! This sufficiency is what all rationalists contest but, ironically, only a nonrationalist like Nietzsche questioned the notion of scientific necessity!
The ultimate circuitousness of this notion of scientific necessity is illustrated by Hobbes himself in
the starkest terms post hoc ergo propter hoc!
For there is hardly any one action, how
casual soever it seem, to the causing whereof concur not whatsoever is in
rerum natura,
(par.XXI)
(180) XXXIV. For the seventh point,that all events have necessary causes,it is there
proved, in that they have sufficient causes. Further, let us in this place also suppose
any event
never so casual, as, for example, the throwing ambs-ace upon a pair of dice, and see
if it must
not have been necessary before it was thrown : for, seeing it was thrown, it had a
beginning,
and consequently a sufficient cause to produce it, consisting partly in the dice,
partly in
outward things, as the posture of the partys hand, the measure of force applied by
the caster,
the posture of the parts of the table , and the like. In sum, there was nothing
wanting which
was necessarily (181) requisite to the producing of that particular cast; and
consequently the
cast was necessarily thrown. For if it had not been thrown, there had wanted
somewhat
requisite to the throwing of it, and so the cause had not been sufficient. In
the like manner it
may be proved, that every other accident, how contingent soever it seem, or how
voluntary
soever it be, is produced necessarily;
The obvious problem with this argument is that it is never possible to know what causes are
sufficient to determine a certain event because such knowledge can only be a posteriori,
that is, after the event!
In Schopenhauer, the Hobbesian necessitas is no longer dire because all human actions are
necessary, not just those imposed by the fear of death, because they are operari. He sees the
Will as the qualitas occulta, as the real thing-in-itself, and therefore as not free in its
appearance or objectification, but free only in its esse, in its being. Hobbes instead is forced
into a distinction between necessity and compulsion because he needs to leave room for
political necessity as the cause for the creation of civil society or political society or
status civilis or the State.

(122) XIX. But the distinction of free from compulsion and free from
necessitation, I acknowledge. For to be free from compulsion, is to do
a thing so, as terror be not the cause of his will to do it. For a man is
then only said to be compelled, when fear
makes him willing to it; as when a man willingly throws his goods into
the sea to save
himself, or submits to his enemy for fear of being killed. Thus all men
that do any thing from
love, or revenge, or lust, are free from compulsion : and yet their
actions may be as necessary
as those that are done upon compulsion; for sometimes other passions
work as forcibly as
fear. But free from necessitation, I say nothing can be; and tis that
which he undertook to

disprove.
Note how Hobbes sees compulsion only as the possibility of imminent death to save himself,
for fear of being killed: for to be free from compulsion is to do a thing so as terror be
not the cause of his will to do it: in other words, conversely put, for Hobbes to act under
compulsion is to do a thing when terror is the cause of a will to do it! And by terror here
is clearly meant the ob metum mortis. Compulsion is dira necessitas in the sense of
alienation of free-dom or self-interest in foro externo to preserve ones life. This does not
remove free-dom in foro interno, which Hobbes understands as residual self-interest
but here necessity intervenes because all actions must be necessitated by a cause.
The problem Hobbes faces is that of accounting for the ability of in-dividuals to agree to a status
civilis the exit from the status naturae on the basis of preserving their supreme,
ultimate self-interest their individual life. But how does this ultima ratio preserving my
own life turn into agreeing to preserve life in general? This is where Schopenhauers
notion of wrong seems to be more appropriate and coherent because there is the
element of sym-pathy involved. But then Schopenhauer cannot explain why a State is
needed at all! Essentially, Schopenhauer follows Locke into the same trap the benign
state of nature. Because in Locke as indeed in Schopenhauer - the state of nature
contains already the possibility of a civil society that can exist without a State, it is then
impossible to justify the erection of a State, of a political society, except as insurance
against the possibility of civil war. Furthermore, Lockes and Schopenhauers state of
nature allows for natural rights, whereas Hobbess more mechanical theory simply
cannot do so because rights exist only within the State.
(In Hobbes the loss of my life cannot found the State because no contractum unionis, let alone a
contractum subjectionis to the State, can be founded on life as pure self-interest! Hobbess
parable of the sailor throwing his possessions overboard to avoid sinking is inconsistent
because it dissects neatly but without proper explanation the sailors life from his
possessions as components of his self-interest. If we are to distinguish different types
or categories of self-interest, then Hobbess political theory is mortally wounded because
life and not just my life becomes a common human interest. In this sense,

Schopenhauers notion of sym-pathy which founds the awareness of wrong instead

of right brings this alloyed self-interest closer to the erection of the State, like Lockes,
than Hobbess unalloyed axiomatic and mechanical notion of self-interest. But then, in
turn, Locke and Schopenhauer are just as incapable as Hobbes to distinguish Egoism
from Sym-pathy!)

Like all Renaissance and Enlightenment thinkers, Hobbes attributes mundane necessity to the
ultimately Divine, Ab-solute Ratio-Ordo which is identical with Freedom intended as the
summum bonum. But already this nexus between Reason and the Good is loosened, amounting to
a form of agnosticism whereby the Divine Plan is above all Inscrutable and Mechanical rather
than Provident whereas it is vehemently denied by the atheistic and empiricist Schopenhauer.
In Schopenhauer, the pre-destination is not just agnostic, but downright noxious in that all willing
is futile and freedom is reduced to pure hazard, chance or possibility. Bourgeois-era thinkers
have come to identify chance the ec-sistence of Da-sein with freedom, which is a political
concept long before it became a metaphysical one! For Hobbes and all other empiricist
theoreticians until the negatives Denken, such a schism between freedom (understood as chance)
and Reason (turning free-dom into Freedom) was unthinkable in that Necessity was always
subordinated to the Absolute (divine Freedom), whereas for the negatives Denken necessity is a
purely empirical fact and freedom can only stand for free-dom, for chaos, for the pre-temporal.

So let us look at the via interiore by means of which Schop arrives at Nirvana.
Here it is that Schopenhauer attempts to improve upon Kant,
by asserting the possibility of an immanent metaphysics, a metaphysics
of experience. Philosophy, he says, begins where science
leaves off, it takes things up and "treats them after its own
method, which is quite distinct from the method of science. "^
This essential difference in method Schopenhauer indicates in no
vague terms. Science is concerned with the systematic connection
of differences. But in the conative consciousness the differences
of the World as Idea vanish into one immediate unity,
and scientific knowledge is transmuted into a consciousness of
will, which demands no explanation, starts from nothing, points
to nothing, but is itself an unending immediate striving. Schopenhauer,
therefore, denies, on the basis of Kant's own epistemological
results, the possibility of metaphysics, if by metaphysics
is meant the scientific explanation of the inmost nature of the
thing-in-itself as such, considered apart from its manifestation
in consciousness. But he emphatically affirms the possibility of
a metaphysics of experience, in terms of its completest and most
immediate, i. e., most real manifestation. Will.
In this sense, then, Schopenhauer asserts that his own metaphysics
of Will is the key to the world-riddle. His test of the
metaphysical ' realness ' of any phase of experience is in terms of
a unity which absorbs multiplicity. This unity, however, is not
the result of the abstracting process of conception, but, in contrast
to the mediate character of all thought, is concrete, i. e., immediately

present in consciousness. Schopenhauer seeks his ultimate

reality in some specific aspect of experience, or rather in
^La philosophie de Schopenhauer, Paris, 1890, p. 35.
2G.. I, p. 128; H.K., I, p. 107.
72 SCHOPENHAUER'S CRITICISM OF KANT.
some one sort of experience, in which, as in the apex of the cone,
all the various radii may somehow vanish and be lost in one undifferentiated
unity. The ' real ' is conceived by him as opposed
to and contradistinguished from the rest of experience, which is
thereby declared illusory. The ultimate unity is possible, on
Schopenhauer's basis, only by means of the erasure of the
organized multiplicity of phenomena. Reality is not truly revealed
by its phenomenal appearance; rather it is the World as Idea
the fleeting shadow of the Real, its veil of Maya. All the organization
and coherence implied in the Principle of Sufficient Reason
avail us nothing in the solution of the ultimate problems of
experience. To learn metaphysics, we must unlearn science:
this is the spirit of Schopenhauer's theory of reality.
The result of such a conception of metaphysics for the interpretation
of the reality now recognized as Will, is not difficult to
foresee. We know ourselves as willing in our separate acts of
striving. But it is precisely this our knowledge of the conative
that introduces the element of multiplicity and makes impossible
the complete metaphysical unity. Our consciousness of willing
is metaphysically 'real,' not by virtue of its being conscious, but
in spite of it,by virtue of its being Will. The Will-Reality [Wirklichkeit]
as such, the metaphysical kernel of the universe, is not in time,
because it absorbs all multiplicity in itself. Consciousness, inevitably
temporal in character, is itself a mere accident of the
metaphysical Real. The ultimate thing-in-itself is non-temporal,
unconscious, irrational, free. "The will in itself is without consciousness,
and remains so in the greater part of its phenomena.
The secondary world of idea must be added, in order that it
may become conscious of itself."^ Will is the prius, the Weltprincip;
nous is secondary, intellect is the posterius, a derivation
and a mere appearance of the thing-in-itself. To urge the
primacy of the intellect over the will, is therefore an "enormous
proton pseudon and fundamental hysteron proteron.''^
"It is the unconscious will," Schopenhauer insists, "which
constitutes the reality of things, and its development must have
G., II, pp. 323-324; H.K., III, p. 12.
2G., II, p. 230; H.K., II, p. 409.
EXPERIENCE AND REALITY. 71
advanced very far before it finally attains, in the animal consciousness,
to the idea and intelligence; so that, according to me,
thought appears at the very last."^
II, pp. 314-315; H.K., III. p. 2.

It may be true that the Will itself is timeless for Schop. this would correspond with
Freuds Es, the Unconscious -; but it is evident that our only mode of perception, our
consciousness or intuition [Anschauung] of the Will, must have time as its essential
dimension or horizon that is, intuition is essentially being-in-time as a unity of both
concepts revealed by the ex-per-iri, going through time, of experience! The Will

is timeless only because it is the Ding an sich, the qualitas occulta, not because it lies
outside the sphere of intuition or experience! This is how Schop puts it,
"When in any phenomenon a knowing consciousness is added to that inner being
which lies at the foundation of all phenomena, a consciousness
which when directed inwardly becomes self-consciousness, then
that inner being presents itself to this self-consciousness as that
which is so familiar and so mysterious, and is denoted by the [67] word will.
P68 Tsanoff:
The world of perception is directly apprehended
by the knowing subject, through the faculty of the understanding
and its one category of cause-effect, resulting from the union
of space and time. Its cognitive directness is in marked contrast
to the abstract character of conception, with its multitude of
artificial abstractions and formal laws, lacking all application to
direct experience. But perception and conception alike, Schopenhauer
holds, lack the immediacy of the conative experience.
In the willing consciousness the entire intellectual web of the
World as Idea is swept aside; the multiplicity of things in space
and time, which hides the metaphysical oneness of all reality
from the knowing subject, is no more; the one ultimate condition
of the possibility of consciousness alone remains,time. This
the consciousness of man cannot efface without effacing itself.
"The will, as that which is metaphysical, is everywhere the boundary-stone of every investigation,
beyond which it cannot go. "2 No "systematically connected insight" into this metaphysical unity of Will
is possible; the inevitably temporal character of our consciousness makes us unable to grasp the thing
in-itself once for all in its inmost nature.
'G., II. pp. 373-374; H.K.. Ill, pp. 65-66.
2G., II, p. 421; H.K., III, p. 116.
3G.. II, p. 379; H.K.. III. p. 71.

This con-nection, this nexus between the Freedom of the Will and causality, between Freedom
and Reason, Freedom and Necessity, and therefore between intellect and thing, between
Sub-ject and Ob-ject, is precisely what Schopenhauer rejects in his critique of Kants
idealism, and in his critique of the Hobbesian account of the origin of the State, even as
he accepts the infallibility of logico-mathematics and scientific causality their
necessity but only as instrumentality at the service of the Will. For Schopenhauer,
reason is indeed an instrument or tool of coercion; it is neither a source of universal
human values such as the primacy of preserving ones life, nor is it dire necessity (an
obvious pleonasm) as in Hobbess decision by humans to alienate their innate freedom ob
metum mortis (upon fear of mutually-threatened death) a decision that is at once
dictated by the dira necessitas, the fear of violent death, which the state of nature imposes
on individuals, and yet free because based on life as a supreme human value! Nor is it
to be found indeed in Lockes natural rights arising from Labor as the foundation of
society.

For Hobbes only dire necessity (compulsion) can lead to the status civilis, to the suppression of
self-interest for the preservation of ones life. For Schopenahuer instead the State can be
derived from self-interest, from Egoism which takes into account the long-term
consequences of pure self-interest. Hobbess theory of the State is far more mechanicalrational than Schopenhauers in that it specifies what kind of necessity selfpreservation - will lead to the State, whereas Schopenhauers necessity falls back on the
perception of wrong. Schopenhauer is saying that Hobbess self-interest is too
unilateral in that it fails to allow for the perception of wrong. For Hobbes, this
perception would contradict the notion of self-interest, which must be unalloyed.
As we shall see, although Schopenhauer agrees with Hobbes that human self-interest is in conflict
with instrumental reason if it clashes too violently with the self-interest of others, he
denies that the decision to erect a State or any other human decision can be a product of
Reason in any universal scientific-mechanical sense, but only in an instrumental one
because it is part of the instrumental use of reason that it calculate also the long-term
implications of self-interest. The interaction of self-interest and reason Schopenhauer calls
Egoism (WWR, pars.61-2). Thus, Schopenhauers own appeal to reason as intellect to
derive the origins of morality and of the State falls into an even greater difficulty than
Hobbess in the sense that the formers instrumental or calculative reason plays a function
that belongs properly to substantive or Practical Reason in a Kantian sense. Hobbes
restricts the sphere of the State to that of self-preservation, whereas Schopenhauer
extends it to wrong or indeed Com-passion (Mit-Leid).
The recognition of the profoundly antithetical nature of the Classical notions of freedom and
reason is what sets Schopenhauer apart from Hobbes and Locke and all the positivist and
jusnaturalist thinkers of the Renaissance and opens the way to a reconsideration of these
notions, especially freedom, from a metaphysical viewpoint. Whereas Hobbes cannot
explain how Reason can be at once consistent with and yet prevail over egoism to found the
State, Schopenhauer cannot explain how instrumental reason can be consistent with the
State without turning into Reason. Hobbes cannot explain why selfish human beings can
prefer the State, the alienation of freedom in foro externo, over dying; and Schopenhauer
cannot explain how selfish human beings can form a State and preserve their freedom in
foro interno. Hobbesian universal Reason is inconsistent with self-interest and
Schopenahuers instrumental reason is inconsistent with the State. Yet, it is precisely
the validity of the Kantian attempt to subtract Reason from the
instrumental/heteronomous necessity of mathematics so as to preserve human
Freedom of the Will (autonomy) that Schopenhauer refutes and so will Nietzsche more
consistently later. Schopenhauer dispenses with Reason altogether, but then fails to
account for the existence of human society and the State in spite of universal egoism and
conflict.
By denying compulsion in the making of the State, Schopenhauer dispenses with the compatibility
of Freedom and Reason and is thus already far advanced on Hobbes in a materialist sense.
Yet by clinging to the reality of the Ego and its irreducible self-interest however
deterministically understood as the Will or the obverse of the Kantian thing in itself -, he

simply condemns liberalism to failure as a political theory. (Nietzsche will later dispense
with the Ego altogether.) Hence, Hobbesian political theory shows the logical
impossibility of liberalism, that is, the incompatibility of freedom in both internal and
external fora in a State of self-interested individuals. The necessity of the economy
cannot be reconciled with the freedom of politics.

In this regard, Schopenhauer is mistaken when criticizing Hobbes for failing to see that rights
in the sense of prevention of wrongs must exist in the state of nature because Hobbes
only intended by rights legally enforceable rights, not merely the perception of
wrong, which in any case boils down first to dis-possession (possession is the only
reality in the state of nature), and then to the immediate threat to life (in the struggle for
possession). Unlike Schopenhauer, Hobbes does not fall into the error of moralizing selfinterest and possession by appealing to an instrumental, cognitive sense of con-science or
com-passion or sym-pathy that requires the intervention of substantive reason, which
Schopenhauer has excluded in principle!
It is essential to understand that Schopenhauer, like Hobbes, does not base himself on natural
rights as the foundation of the State, and most strenuously not as derived from any
positive concept of value-creation such as Labor, which is what happens in Locke. For
Schopenhauer all positive rights are based on negative wrongs and the ability of
individual Egoism to utilize reason as cognition of the pain that certain actions can inflict
on oneself. The State is not therefore a positive institution designed or contracted to
establish and promote, let alone defend, positive natural rights arising from a positive
human shared quality a Value like Labor or a summum bonum. Not at all! The aim of the
State can only be negative that of preventing harm or wrong; it arises purely out of
the mechanical, defensive, self-preserving nature of human Egoisms. Again, there is no
universal human interest here, as the preservation of ones Life (here is the contradiction
between my life and Life) may be in Hobbes; there is only Egoism. But in that case the
difficulty arises that, given that Egoisms can relinquish their self-interest or appetite or
free-dom only to a limited degree and not absolutely as in Hobbes, then the determination
of the precise limits of the State becomes impossible except if instrumental reason turns
into the ethics of the Mit-Leid if it turns, that is, into something more than calculative
reason or intellect into a faculty with a moral-ethical sense (which is the intelligible
character that Nietzsche derided in Schopenhauer and why he took Hegels dialectic of
Vergeistigung far more seriously as a problem). (Cacciari in PNeR.)

In a Note on The Theory of Freedom, Schop elucidates the scope of his inversion
and, in the process, gives us an insight in his thinking process and a delightful link with
Heidegger:
He who is capable of recognising the essential
part of a thought, though clothed in a dress very
different from what he is familiar with, will see,
as I do, that this Kantian doctrine of the intelligible
and empirical character is a piece of insight already
possessed by Plato. The difference is, that with Kant
it is sublimated to an abstract clearness ; with Plato
it is treated mythically, and connected with metempsychosis
[in that the soul chooses which body to inhabit],
because, as he did not perceive the ideality
of Time, he could only represent it under a temporal
form. (Basis, p121)

This is extremely interesting: for we can see how Heidegger had simply to stand
outside this temporal form and hypostatize time as the horizon of the Will or the
Platonic soul, so that now these are transmuted into Da-sein, that is, pure intuition in
the horizon of time, being understood not as temporal form intra-temporally
but as outside itself, as ec-static being, as ec-sistence, being there. But by confining himself strictly to this horizon of time, Heidegger avoids all the problems that
entangle Schop immediately. First and foremost, how can the Will objectify itself?
Second, what differentiates the Will in its worldly objectifications? Third, how can
the Will lack identity or agency and still be active? Fourth, is the Will then not yet
another qualitas occulta?
Returning to Schopenhauer, it is hardly too much to say that
his whole argument is specious. The fact that in Kant's admittedly
confused way of treating perception and conception he sees
nothing but a solemn warning against undue adherence to an
ideal of 'architectonic symmetry,' shows how hopelessly he
misconceives both the aim and the fundamental trend of Kant's
'Critical' method.^ Kant's 'confusion' of the perceptual and
^Kr. d. r. V., p. 311; M., p. 253. Cf. the introductory sections of the 'Transcendental
Dialectic' especially Kr. d. r. V., pp. 299 fif., 305 ff., 310 ff., 322 ff.;
M., pp. 242 ff., 247 ff., 252 ff., 261 ff.
2 Kant regards speculative reason, however, as incapable of attaining knowledge
of ultimate reality, and therefore he introduces the notion of practical reason.
But this problem will more naturally come up for discussion in the sequel.
3 Mere textual criticism of Kant's Critiques is sure to lead one astray, unless
the fundamental spirit of his philosophy is kept constantly in mind. As Richter

NATURE AND GENESIS OF EXPERIENCE. 21

the conceptual in experience is to be regarded, not as the failure
to discriminate ultimate differences, but rather as the imperfect
realization and the inadequate expression of the underlying
essential unity of concrete experience, which cannot be reduced
to merely perceptual or conceptual terms. Kant's confusion
is the confusion of depths not yet clarified; Schopenhauer's

lucidity manifests epistemological shallowness. Later idealism,

of course, brought to light much that escaped Kant himself;
but Kant was far more nearly right than Schopenhauer when he
said: "Thoughts without contents are empty, intuitions without
concepts are blind. . . . The understanding cannot see, the
senses cannot think. By their union only can knowledge be
produced."^
The fundamental defect of Schopenhauer's epistemology
is to be found in his constant endeavor to explain one abstract
phase of experience in terms of another, supposedly prior, phase,
really the vice of the older rationalism,instead of reading
both into the organic unity which embraces both and derives
its own meaning precisely from such systematization of aspects
meaningless in abstract isolation. The relation between the
organizing principles of experience is for Kant, not one of formal
subsumption, but of organic interdependence. Experience involves
both perception and conception, the one as much as the
other; its progressive organization consists in the gradual
evolution of the two, which unifies them in one concrete process.
The perceptual content is essentially meaningful, and the
application of the categories brings out what is implicit in it.
Schopenhauer's universals are the universals of the old scholastic
logic, abstractions which do not exist outside of its text-books
and are alien to concrete experience. Conception, in the true
Kantian sense, is no mere attenuated perception, but the significant
aspect of experience. Conceptions, or, perhaps better,
puts it: "Es ist wirklich nicht so schwer, wenn man sich nur an den wortlichen
Text der Kritiken halt, Rationalismus und Empirismus, Dogmatismus (im weitesten
Sinne) und Scepticismus, Idealismus und Realismus aus ihnen herauszulesen"
{op. cit., pp. 91-92). And again, with special reference to Schopenhauer's procedure:
"Kantische Elemente hat Schopenhauer aufgenommen, Kantisch fortgebildet
hat er sie nicht" {op. cit., p. 77).
iKr. d. r. V., p. 51; M., p. 41.

22 SCHOPENHAUER'S CRITICISM OF KANT.

meanings, are involved in experience from the very beginning;
they are not merely its abstract terminus ad quem, as Schopenhauer
would have it.^ Universality means, not erasure of
details and differences, but their gradual organization from a
point of view ever growing in catholicity. The progress of
knowledge is not from perception to conception, but from less
concrete to more concrete organization of both.
iG.. II. p. 55; H.K., II. p. 213.

Valiantly made, Tsanoffs objection is impeccable. What purpose does it serve to replace
Kants critique with Schopenhauers? Is the latter not rather, by exasperating the formers
categories (the Hegelian where is it written?), exasperating his own critique and by
reflection adopting the Scholastic categories denounced by Tsanoff and of which
Schopenhauers entire oeuvre is always redolent?
Phenomenalistic idealism
and voluntaristic materialism, aesthetic quietism and ethical
nihilism, are advocated one after another; and, while the criticism

of Kant's principles often lays bare the concealed inconsistencies

of the Critical system, the solutions offered are as often inadequate.
Is not the real explanation of the situation to be found
in the fact that Schopenhauer is not the true successor of Kant
at all? Instead of being a neo-rationalist, as Kant, on the whole,
remained, he is fundamentally an irrationalist, so far as his
attitude towards ultimate reality is concerned. He is keen in
perceiving and criticising Kant's confusion of various aspects
and elements of experience; but, instead of tracing their immanent
organic unity, which Kant imperfectly realizes and formulates,
he goes so far, in almost every case, as to assert their actual
separation. This was seen to be true of his treatment of perception
and conception, understanding and reason. Instead of
recognizing their unity in the concrete process of knowledge,
Schopenhauer dogmatically separates them in a scholastic manner,
thus substituting a lucidly wrong theory for Kant's confusedly
right one. (P.75)

Schopenhauer returns to the identification of metaphysics and ethics in the introduction to

The Basis, and in so doing he absorbs the latter into the former precisely by taking
that neutral standpoint, by seeking to stand outside morality and therefore outside the
corpor-reality of being, of life. Nietzsche will flagellate him not for this, but for resmuggling the ethical concepts back into the immoralist conception of the Will (cf
TotI, part on untimely thinker); because instead of accepting Life, Schop the
pessimist, the decadent, the nihilist recants his nihilism for the comfort of sympathy
(Mitleid with-pain or co-suffering), an ethics akin to that of Christianity. What
Nietzsche denies is mostly this renegade, apostatic flight from nihilism, not pursuing
it to the end, not so much the notion of the Will, which returns as Will to Power,
which is the acceptance of the World, the affirmation of Life, not its rejection and
Entsagung, renunciation.

This is what lies behind the Scholastic operari sequitur esse (actions follow being).
This is so because the totality of the causal chain cannot be com-prehended through
yet another link in the chain (an elephant or camel on the back of which the world
rests) or what Heidegger would style as an intra-mundane or intra-temporal,
therefore spatial, cause. There is an antinomy (here comes Lukacs) between Freedom
and Necessity, which Schopenhauer incorrectly calls a contradiction almost in a
Hegelian sense. If everything is determined, Schopenhauer asks Kant, what determines
the determining entity? This is a bad infinite.
Schop sees a contradiction: man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains. Again we
find here Hobbess in foro interno and externo distinction the Cartesian inheritance.
But, as we will see, it is Schops trans-mutation of Kants distinction that will enable
him to dis-card the Cartesian ego (oops!). Objectively, human actions can be described
casuistically, either in mechanical manner or else in terms of conditioning. The
operari can be described objectively, behaviouristically or positively (Comte) so that
the principle of sufficient reason applies. The motives behind the operari are knowable,

discernible even manipulable, if so wished. And yet we know that at the source of
this operari must lie an ultimate cause that is impossible to identify, either empirically
or even (contra Kant) a priori. The reason is that this ultimate cause must be toto
genere, toto caelo different from the causal chain of events, the sufficient reason and
therefore it must be categorically incapable of com-preheding, under-standing, be
conscious of, this chain of causation a priori; it can be so only a posteriori, empirically:
this is its intelligible character.
Schop. intimates from the outset that ethics must be derived from metaphysics, as
Kant prescribed (Grndl.d.Met.d.Sittens).
His own Basis of Morality
contains a vigorous attack upon the fundamental principles
of Kant's ethical theory. According to him, Kant "founds . . .
his moral principle not on any provable fact of consciousness,
such as an inner natural disposition, nor yet upon any objective
relation of things in the external world, . . . but on Pure
Reason, which ... is taken, not as it really and exclusively
is,an intellectual faculty of man,
but as a self-existent hypostatic
essence, yet without the smallest authority."^ The second
Critique inconsistently retains what was declared untenable
in the 'Transcendental Dialectic', by the obvious subterfuge of
raising the speculative reason into a genus, and then deducing
from it a second species, practical reason,a procedure similar
to that accounting for the origin of immaterial substance, and
as inconsistent as it is useless in the solution of the ethical
problem.^ Through the road of knowledge, through understanding
and reason, we can arrive at perception and conception
respectively; but cognition is always restricted to phenomena,
the thing-in-itself is unknowable.
G., Ill, pp. 510, 511; Basis of Morality, tr. by A. B. Bullock, London, 1903.
pp. 44, 45. For a fuller discussion of this problem, cf. the writer's article on
"Schopenhauer's Criticism of Kant's Theory of Ethics," The Philosophical
Review, Vol. XIX, No. 5, Sept., 1910, pp. 512-5342G.. Ill, pp. SI I ff.; Bullock, pp. 45 ff.
'C/. R. Behm, Vergleichung der kantischen und schopenhauerischen Lehre in
Ansehung der Kausalitat, Heidelberg, 1892, p. 39.

Egoism as manifestation of the Will

In describing Egoism as the overriding motivation empirically observable as inducing

human action, Schop offers us at the same time the most dramatic description of the
operari of the Will:
The chief and fundamental incentive in man, as in
animals, is Egoism, that is, the urgent impulse to
exist, and exist under the best circumstances.


Now this Egoism is, both in animals and men, connected in the closest way with their very
essence and being ; indeed, it is one and the same thing. For this reason all human actions, as a
rule, have their origin in Egoism, and to it, accordingly, we must always first turn, when we try to find
the explanation of any given line of conduct; just as, when the endeavour is made to guide a man in
any direction, the means to this end are universally calculated with reference to the same all-powerful
motive. Egoism is, from its nature, limitless. The individual is filled with the unqualified desire of
preserving his life, and of keeping it free from all pain, under which is included all want and privation.
He wishes to have the greatest possible amount of pleasurable existence, and every gratification that
he is capable of appreciating; indeed, he attempts, if possible, to evolve fresh capacities for enjoyment.
Everything that opposes the strivings of his Egoism awakens his dislike, his anger, his hate: this
is the mortal enemy, which he tries to annihilate.

It appears from this that Schop is no longer basing himself on empirical observation, but
rather is extrapolating from his original metaphysical intuition of the Ding an sich as the
Will to live. It is the introspectivity of this intuition and its temporal form that makes
it solipsistic. Because the Will is inscrutable and unobservable, only intelligible, it
follows that its objectification is boundless, unlimited that its lan can be checked
only by other Wills to live manifesting themselves as the world. It follows that the
only limit to the objectification of the Will is posed by contrary Wills.
...
The ultimate reason of this lies in the fact that
every one is directly conscious of himself, but of
others only indirectly, through his mind's eye ; and
the direct impression asserts its right. In other
words, it is in consequence of the subjectivity which
is essential to our consciousness that each person
is himself the whole world ; for all that is objective
exists only indirectly, as simply the mental
picture of the subject ; whence it comes about that
everything is invariably expressed in terms of self-consciousness.

There is a certain looseness in Schops terminology. We must distinguish between the

mental or intellectual ability of individuals as a manifestation of the Will and the Will
itself. They are two different things in that the Will is a force, an impetus, an lan it
must not be confused with a subject or an ego or with self-consciousness. These
objectifications may induce in the body a sense of identity, but in fact this identity
is only a by-product of the objectification, of the phenomenality of the Will in the
world constituted by other Wills which pose a limit to its objectification.
The only world which the individual
really grasps, and of which he has certain knowledge,
he carries in himself, as a mirrored image fashioned
by his brain ; and he is, therefore, its centre. Consequently
he is all in all to himself ; and since he
ANTIMORAL INCENTIVES. 153
feels that he contains within his ego all that is real,
nothing can be of greater importance to him than his
own self.^ Moreover this supremely important self, this
microcosm, to which the macrocosm stands in relation
as its mere modification or accident,this, which is

the individual's whole world, he knows perfectly well

must be destroyed by death ; which is therefore for
him equivalent to the destruction of all things.
Such, then, are the elements out of which, on the
basis of the Will to live, Egoism grows up, and like a
broad trench it forms a perennial separation between
man and man.

The necessary outcome is that each individual (body) must be restrained by an external
force from the threat of mutual annihilation:
Now, unless
154 THE BASIS OF MORALITY.
external force (under which must be included every
source of fear whether of human or superhuman
powers), or else the real moral incentive is in
effective operation, it is certain that Egoism always
pursues its purposes with unqualified directness ;
hence without these checks, considering the countless
number of egoistic individuals, the bellum omnium
contra omnes ^ would be the order of the day, and
prove the ruin of all. Thus is explained the early
construction by reflecting reason of state government,
which, arising, as it does, from a mutual fear of
reciprocal violence, obviates the disastrous consequences
of the general Egoism, as far as it is
possible to do by negative procedure.

Of course, Schop fails to explain how this reflecting reason can manage the early
construction of state government. In this we see the inferiority of Schops theoretical
construct to Hobbess, superior for its theorization of the alienation of individual
freedom, its subtler empiricist theory of the self, and more scientific mechanicism, and
the historical antecedent of civil war in the status naturae prior to the status civilis.
Schops negative procedure (part of the negatives Denken) still serves to highlight the
hypothetical status of the bellum civium and the conventional early construction of
the State. But whereas his construction is exclusively conventional, Hobbes manages to
present his Commonwealth as a historical state by acquisition precisely by
combining the Necessity of self-interest with the forum internum of reason in the
willful alienation of Freedom in the ultima ratio of self-preservation. This is
something Schops Will and his critique of Freedom cannot do (cf Cacciari, DCP,
p64).
Now, the early construction involves two elements: reflecting reason, which
represents Egoism guided into self-interest, and the assumption of possession into
this early construction of state government, which is the status civilis.
The term Eigennutz (self-interest) denotes Egoism, so far as
the latter is guided by reason, which enables it, by
means of reflection, to prosecute its purposes system150ANTIMORAL INCENTIVES. 151

atically; so that animals may be called egoistic,

but not self-interested (eigennutzig). I shall therefore
retain the word Egoism for the general idea.

Schop next tackles the question of property rights, and he seems to follow Hobbes once
again:
In point of fact, the general correctness of conduct which is
adopted in human intercourse, and insisted on as
a rule no less immovable than the hills, depends
principally on two external necessities ; first, on legal
ordinance, by virtue of which the rights of every
man are protected by public authority ; and secondly,
on the recognised need of possessing civil honour,
- in other words, a good name, in order to advance
in the world.
Such are the two custodians that keep guard on
the correct conduct of people, without which, to
speak frankly, we should be in a sad case, especially
with reference to property, this central point in human
life, around which the chief part of its energy and
138 THE BASIS OF MORALITY.
activity revolves. For the purely ethical motives to
integrity, assuming that they exist, cannot as a rule
be applied, except very indirectly, to the question of
ownership as guaranteed by the state. These motives,
in fact, have a direct and essential bearing only on
natural right ; with positive right their connection is
merely indirect, in so far as the latter is based on the
former. Natural right, however, attaches to no other
property than that which has been gained by one's own
exertion ; because, when this is seized, the owner is
at the same time robbed of all the efforts he expended
in acquiring it. The theory of preoccupancy I reject
absolutely, but cannot here set forth its refutation.^
Now of course all estate based on positive right ought
ultimately and in the last instance (it matters not
how many intermediate links are involved) to rest
on the natural right of possession. But what a
distance there is, in most cases, between the title deeds,
that belong to our civil life, and this natural
righttheir original source !

But then, how can altruistic or compassionate behaviour be explained? For this also is
observable:
But, for this
to be possible, I must in some way or other be
identified with him ; that is, the difference between
myself and him, which is the precise raison d'etre
of my Egoism, must be removed, at least to a certain
170 THE BASIS OF MORALITY.

extent. Now, since I do not live in his skin, there

remains only the knowledge, that is, the mental
picture, I have of him, as the possible means whereby
I can so far identify myself with him, that
my action declares the difference to be practically
effaced. The process here analysed is not a dream,
a fancy floating in the air ; it is perfectly real, and
by no means infrequent. It is, what we see every
day,the phaenomenon of Compassion ; in other words,
the direct participation, independent of all ulterior
considerations, in the sufferings of another, leading to
sympathetic assistance in the effort to prevent or remove
them ; whereon in the last resort all satisfaction and all
well-being and happiness depend. It is this Compassion
alone which is the real basis of all voluntary justice
and all genuine loving-kindness. Only so far as an
action springs therefrom, has it moral value ; and all
conduct that proceeds from any other motive whatever
has none.

So the question now turns on how this difference or wall between persons that is
constituted by Egoism can be removed.
No doubt this operation is astonishing, indeed hardly
comprehensible. It is, in fact, the great mystery of
Ethics, its original phaenomenon, and the boundary
stone, past which only transcendental speculation may
dare to take a step. Herein we see the wall of
partition, which, according to the light of nature (as
reason is called by old theologians), entirely separates
being from being, broken down, and the non-ego to
THE ONLY TRUE MORAL INCENTIVE. 171
a certain extent identified with the ego. I wish for
the moment to leave the metaphysical explanation
of this enigma untouched, and first to inquire
whether all acts of voluntary justice and true loving kindness
really arise from it. If so, our problem
will be solved, for we shall have found the ultimate
basis of morality, and shown that it lies in human
nature itself. This foundation, however, in its turn
cannot form a problem of Ethics, but rather, like
every other ultimate fact as such, of Metaphysics.
Only the solution, that the latter offers of the
primary ethical phaenomenon, lies outside the limits
of the question put by the Danish Royal Society,
which is concerned solely with the basis ; so that
the transcendental explanation can be given merely
as a voluntary and unessential appendix.

Thus, the breaching of the wall of partition separating ego from non-ego is possible:
but the possibility can be accounted for only by metaphysics, not by ethics. The scope of
ethics starts from its basis, and the basis lies in human nature. All that matters for

ethics is that the source of certain ethical behaviour can be established empirically. But
the foundation of that source is to be found in metaphysics.
Gratias agamus Machiavello et huiusmodi scriptoribus, qui aperte et
indissimulanter proferunt quid homines facere soleant non quid facere debeant F.
Bacon, De Augmentis Scientiarum
It is evident from Bacons encomium, however, that the Renaissance still saw Ethics as a
separate endeavour we are led back to the perspective of Machiavelli [virtu] and
Hobbes [Reason] - from that of a behavioural science such as psychology or sociology or
ethnography. Not so for Schopenhauer. If indeed the empirical or observable side of
human action is causally determined, it follows that ethics must also become an empirical
science aetiology or casuistry - because the basis [Grundwerke] of morality can no
longer be ideal but real, empirical. Equally, if the Will is unobservable but knowable only
intuitively as the qualitas occulta, the life-force or impetus behind its objectification
as the world, it follows that our theory of ethics cannot start from quid homines facere
debeant, because the freedom of the Will is only contingent deprived of any
ethico-moral content -, but rather from quid ei facere solent. The Kantian Sollen and
the Moral Theology to which it gives rise disappear from view, become intangible.
The objection will perhaps be raised that Ethics
is not concerned with what men actually do, but
that it is the science which treats of what their
conduct ought to be. Now this is exactly the position
148 THE BASIS OF MORALITY.
which I deny. In the critical part of the present
treatise I have sufficiently demonstrated that the conception
of ought, in other words, the imperative form of
Ethics, is valid only in theological morals, outside of
which it loses all sense and meaning. The end which
I place before Ethical Science is to point out all the
varied moral lines of human conduct ; to explain
them ; and to trace them to their ultimate source.
Consequently there remains no way of discovering
the basis of Ethics except the empirical.

Now, the objective historical observation of human beings leads us to the conclusion that
what keeps human beings from harming one another is the overwhelming force of the
State: take away the State and all the moral rules and ethical standards quickly fall
apart, revealing a desolate landscape of aggression, the Hobbesian bellum omnium contra
omnes.

Mirror to the World: Ethics as Excrescence of Metaphysics

Empirical Basis of Ethics

Simmel catches this Doppelcharakter of the Will (operari): wirZuschauer u. Akteure,
Geschaffene u. Schaffende sind, p31, foreshadowing Nietzsches expression die
geschaffene Menschen (in HATH1 rePoets). There are pantheisticand monistic and
mystic tones (Simmel, p28, p38, p62-3) as well as Freudian ones (the fragmentation of
the Subject/Self [p54], sublimation) and Darwinian/vitalist (adaptation of the will in its
con-ditioned aspect, p57) that lead to insoluble antinomies (undifferentiated unity of
will against its multiple manifestations, self-lessness of will against awareness both of
its being and of its mechanical aspect as Verstand, the volitional unity of will and
polarity of the strife [Kampf] for Life, posed by what obstacle or opposition? pp58
ff; hence, the purpose-lessness of the Will [Zwecklosigkeit p68] which, on the other
hand, supports the Wertlosigkeit of the world and the preponderance of Leid over
Lust because the attainment of pleasure/wish nullifies its object and defeats the
purpose).

Tsanoff at p65:
Nevertheless, Kant's theory of freedom, untenable though
it is in its technical form, serves to indicate his realization of the
inadequate and incomplete character of his epistemology and its
implications. The doctrine of the transcendental freedom of
man's will recognizes implicitly, Schopenhauer maintains, that
in man necessity is phenomenal only, and that in him the thing-initself manifests its inner nature in the form of Will. "What,
then, Kant teaches of the phenomenon of man and his action
my teaching extends to all phenomena in nature, in that it makes
the will as a thing-in-itself their foundation. "^ For man is not
toto genere different from the rest of experience, but differs only
in degree. The World as Idea is, as Kant says, purely phenomenal;
but it does not exhaust reality. "As the world is in one
aspect entirely idea, so in another it is entirely will. A reality
which is neither of these two, but an object in itself (into which
the thing in itself has unfortunately dwindled in the hands of
Kant), is the phantom of a dream, and its acceptance is an ignis
fatuus in philosophy."^ The path of objective knowledge does
not lead us to the real nature of things, and so far Schopenhauer
is in thorough agreement with Kant. But "the thing in itself can,
as such, only come into consciousness quite directly, in this way,
that it is itself conscious of itself; to wish to know it objectively
is to desire something contradictory."* The thing-in-itself
is unknowable, precisely because it is not a matter of knowledge
but is in its inmost essence Will.
iG., I. p. 638; H.K., II. p. 118. Cf. G., IV, p. 115
2G.. II, pp. 201-202; H.K., II, p. 377.
'G., I, p. 3S; H.K.. I, p. 5
*G., II, p. 227; H.K.. II, p. 405.

It follows quite obviously that when Schop is asking Kant for the e-vidence, the
observability of his Moral Law, he is already placing Kants Ethics fuori giuoco,

off-side, by asking the impossible: the scientific demonstration of a deontological

rule. Kant, for his part, had made the opposite error: the petitio principii of do what is
moral because it is moral, whence Schops objection rifled from the outset: Who tells
you? (ch2, Basis), or where is it inscribed? (P52, ch4, Basis) But from this point
morality can only be understood as praxis, because we too can ask Schop why must
morality be written somewhere or be a physical or natural observable and e-vident
reality? We cannot turn Kants Freedom (the will) into Necessity (the Categorical
Imperative, which is another version of reciprocity or lex commutativa, as Schop
shows on p85): but the will must be applied and there is a judgement we must make
on how to do this whereby we do not turn the freedom of the will (poter volere, power
to will) into another necessity (volere potere, will to power). An obligation that is
absolute is a contradictio in adjecto (Basis, pp32-3) because it turns heteronomy
(obligation, something external and constraining the will) into autonomy (a free
decision of the will), whereby the free will constrains itself! And so goes the circulus
vitiosus.
The ancients, then, equally with the moderns, Plato
being the single exception, agree in making virtue
only a means to an end. Indeed, strictly speaking,
even Kant banished Eudaemonism from Ethics more
in appearance than in reality, for between virtue and
happiness he still leaves a certain mysterious connection;
there is an obscure and difficult passage in
his doctrine of the Highest Good, where they occur
together ; while it is a patent fact that the course of
virtue runs entirely counter to that of happiness.
But, passing over this, we may say that with Kant
the ethical principle appears as something quite independent
of experience and its teaching ; it is transcendental,
or metaphysical. He recognises that human
conduct possesses a significance that oversteps all
possibility of experience, and is therefore actually the
bridge leading to that which he calls the "intelligible
" ^ world, the mundus noumenon^ the world of
Things in themselves.

Kant's proton pseudos (first false step) lies in his

conception of Ethics itself, and this is found very
clearly expressed on page 62 (R., p. 54) : " In a
system of practical philosophy we are not concerned
with adducing reasons for that which takes place,
but with formulating laws regarding that which
ought to take place, even if it never does take
place." This is at once a distinct petitio principii.
Who tells you that there are laws to which our
conduct ought to be subject ? Who tells you that
that ought to take place, which in fact never does
take place ? What justification have you for making
this assumption at the outset, and consequently
for forcing upon us, as the only possible one, a

system of Ethics couched in the imperative terms of

legislation ? I say, in contradistinction to Kant, that
the student of Ethics, and no less the philosopher
in general, must content himself with explaining and
interpreting that which is given, in other words,
that which really is, or takes place, so as to obtain
an understanding of it, and I maintain furthermore
that there is plenty to do in this direction, much
more than has hitherto been done, after the lapse
28THE IMPERATIVE FORM OF THE KANTIAN ETHICS. 29
of thousands of years.
Every obligation derives all sense and meaning
simply and solely from its relation to threatened
punishment or promised reward. Hence, long before
Kant was thought of, Locke says : " For since it
would be utterly in vain, to suppose a rule set to
the free actions of man, without annexing to it some
enforcement of good and evil to determine his will ;
we must, wherever we suppose a law, suppose also
some reward or punishment annexed to that law
{Essay on the Human Understanding, Bk. II., ch. 33,
6). What ought to be done is therefore necessarily
conditioned by punishment or reward ; consequently,
to use Kant's language, it is essentially and inevitably
THE IMPERATIVE FORM OF THE KANTIAN ETHICS. 33
hypothetical, and never, as he maintains, categorical.
If we think away these conditions, the conception
of obligation becomes void of sense ; hence absolute
obligation is most certainly a contradictio in adjecto.
A commanding voice, whether it come from within,
or from without, cannot possibly be imagined except
as threatening or promising. Consequently obedience
to it, which may be wise or foolish according to
circumstances, is yet always actuated by selfishness,
and therefore morally worthless.
The complete unthinkableness and nonsense of
this conception of an unconditioned obligation, which
lies at the root of the Kantian Ethics, appears
later in the system itself, namely in the Kritik der
Praktiscken Vernunft: just as some concealed poison
in an organism cannot remain hid, but sooner or later
must come out and show itself. For this obligation,
said to be so unconditioned, nevertheless postulates
more than one condition in the background ; it assumes
a rewarder, a reward, and the immortality of the
person to be rewarded.
This is of course unavoidable, if one really makes
Duty and Obligation the fundamental conception of
Ethics ; for these ideas are essentially relative, and
depend for their significance on the threatened penalty
or the promised reward. The guerdon which is
assumed to be in store for virtue shows clearly enough

that only in appearance she works for nothing. It

is, however, put forward modestly veiled, under the
name of the Highest Good, which is the union of
Virtue and Happiness. But this is at bottom nothing
else but a morality that derives its origin from
34 THE BASIS OF MORALITY,
Happiness, which means, a morality resting on selfishness.
In other words, it is Eudaemonism, which
Kant had solemnly thrust out of the front door of
his system as an intruder, only to let it creep in
again by the postern under the name of the Highest
Good. This is how the assumption of unconditioned
absolute obligation, concealing as it does a contradiction,
avenges itself. Conditioned obligation, on
the other hand, cannot of course be any first principle
for Ethics, since everything done out of regard for
reward or punishment is necessarily an egoistic
transaction, and as such is without any real moral
value. All this makes it clear that a nobler and
wider view of Ethics is needed, if we are in earnest
about our endeavour to truly account for the significance
of human conducta significance which
extends beyond phaenomena and is eternal.

Negatives Denken to Political Economy

173
Whereas the nature of satisfaction, of enjoyment, of
happiness, and the like, consists solely in the fact
that a hardship is done away with, a pain lulled :
whence their effect is negative. We thus see why
need or desire is the condition of every pleasure.

This is the core of the negatives Denken. If the Weltprinzip is indeed the Will, the WeltSchmerz, and the ultimate and limitless force behind human operari is represented by its
esse, the Will, then it follows that the objectification or manifestation of this Will, its
operari can only be a manifestation of Egoism. Therefore, the wall of partition
separating ego from non-ego must entail the non-creativeness of the operari, its
inability to serve as a dialectic of human need leading to the trans-formation of the
world in a constructive ethical and pro-ductive sense. Not only is the Summum Bonum,
the Good, the Kantian Practical Reason why, even the Divinity, God! not only are
these impossible, but also the very positive content of Value is negated in that
Value, the Arbeit, becomes pure Negative, sheer Egoism that at best can be equaled
consciously with the identification or sympathy of the ego with the non-ego through
the common (Mit) feeling of Pain (Leid) namely, through Com-passion or SYmpathy (Mit-Leid). This is the true meaning of negatives Denken. All Values become
negative because they must start from the Egoistic satisfaction of individual needs
and desires that cannot in any way give rise to comm-union, to com-unitas, to
species-conscious being or to dialectical self-consciousness that extrinsicates the Idea

(Reason) in the world. Foolish to insist on the Subject. Senseless to invoke the Ratio and
Logic except as instrumental reason. Ir-rational Irr-tum, Error to insist on a RatioOrdo for the world a telos, a conatus, a humanity that goes beyond the mere feeling
of Co-Pain (play on Fr. co-pain, friend) intended as Mit-Leid, Com-passion (Lt.
patire, suffer).
The biggest victim of this over-turning of the traditional Ethics and Metaphysics of the
philosophia perennis from prima philosophia to Scholastic theology has to be their
historical institutional expression Christianity. Nietzsches invective begins here.
(We will see that Schop ultimately falls back on this Idea as a Platonic notion in the
Entsagung of the Will and its sublimation in Nirvana which evoked Nietzsches
derision of decadent pessimism. But the force of Schops inversion and upsetting and
bouleversement, sconvolgimento of all hitherto known philosophia perennis is as
devastatingly thoroughgoing as it is thoroughly dis-concerting.)
The operari of the Will is the mechanical, empirical and therefore necessary
objectification of a force, an impetus that cannot be quelled or extinguished.
Consequently, its activity or actuality, its Wirk-lichkeit, its objectification as operari,
its actus is end-less in that its every attain-ment is necessarily only momentary and by
no means final: it is merely negative because it is inexhaustible. In its pure unalloyed
and undifferentiated Egoism, the Will has neither a purpose nor a finality its only
aim it to satisfy its being or nature as desire. But this force or impetus is the Will as
Ding an sich, as the other side, the beyond of consciousness and the Self: therefore it
is the qualitas occulta that is unknowable though detectable, unquenchable though
intelligible. Its every act then is the out-come of an unfathomable drive: and as a result
it must be experienced by consciousness as privation, as negation, as need, as
suffering, as pain (Leid).
Every operari, the Arbeit, is not the creation of positive wealth therefore, but rather the
negation, the extinction of a need, of a desire, of a drive. The Arbeit, because it is an
operari, is not in the realm of Freedom but in that of Necessity, its Motivation is
dictated by its character. What is positive is not the operari, but the world that it
works, that it utilizes, that it annihilates, that it consumes. The Arbeit does not
pro-duce, because it utilizes the world as it finds it. Instead, it merely transforms so
as to satisfy a desire, a need. Therefore, the Arbeit is a consumption of existing values:
it is folly to believe that it creates or pro-duces value. Value is in the thing that
Arbeit uses, that it ad-operates (ad-operari), and in the out-come or pro-duct of this
consumption or use or ad-operation, not in the operari itself, not in the Arbeit! It is the
thing, the tools and the matter that the Will works to quench its desire and quell its
need it is these that have utility.
Labour does not have utility but it is an operari that consumes matter: in return, it is
rewarded with the utility of the pro-duct. The exchange is between the utility of the
materials that labour consumes and the marginal product that results from this
consumption paid as wages to compensate for the dis-utility of labour. Those who
possess utility can exchange it with labour so as to satisfy their Will; those who do

not possess utility need to apply, to ex-ercise, to ad-operate the Arbeit so as to obtain the
utility of its marginal product to satisfy their desires or their needs. It follows that labour
has dis-utility, it is the negative of utility, just as utility is the positive gratification
of negative need, desire objectified in the body by the Will.
Capital represents the deferral of gratification; it is a saving of utility as deferred
consumption; it is a sacrifice, a renunciation. Its marginal product repays its owner with
interest, that is, the utility that equals the deferred consumption of the utility of
capital. Labour, the operari, is by contrast the immediate gratification of need. It is absurd
to speak of the marginal utility of labour: at most one could speak of the marginal
product of labour! What is meant instead is the utility of the marginal product of the
capital consumed by labour (otherwise known as wages) that rewards and extinguishes
its dis-utility, its effort, its Leid. Where utility and need meet, where they equate
each other, there is an extinguishment of both: the two nullify each other. That point is
Nirvana, the extinguishment of need, the satisfaction of all needs (Robbins) - in other
words, equi-librium.
From the foregoing considerations we see that in
the single acts of the just man Compassion works
only indirectly through his formulated principles, and
not so much actu as potentia ; much in the same way
as in statics the greater length of one of the scale beams,
owing to its greater power of motion, balances
the smaller weight attached to it with the larger on
the other side, and works, while at rest, only potentia,
not actu ; yet with the same efficiency.

It is the potentia that belongs to the sphere of freedom, and the actus that stands in
that of necessity: just as capital or saving is the mediate cause of value and not the
immediate (Stigler, Bohm-Bawerk), the potential the utility that will then be acted
upon, operated and worked by the (needy) Arbeit that is the Leid or pain or need
to be satisfied by consuming capital! Continuing the analogy, it is in Nirvana or at
equi-librium that the potentia is at its full and the actus is therefore imperceptible
there is no movement, no Dynamik, merely Statik, and therefore stagnation. (On
stagnation in Schump and Keynes, see one of the essays in Marx-Keynes-Schump
collection.)
It will now be seen that injustice or wrong always
consists in working harm on another. Therefore
the conception of wrong is positive, and antecedent
to the conception of right, which is negative, and
simply denotes the actions performable without injury
to others ; in other words, without wrong being done.
That to this class belongs also whatever is effected
with no other object than that of warding off from
oneself meditated mischief is an easy inference. For
no participation in another's interests, and no sympathy
for him, can require me to let myself be
harmed by him, that is, to undergo wrong.(P183)

The theory that right is negative, in contradistinction

to wrong as positive, we find supported by Hugo
Grotius, the father of philosophical jurisprudence.
The definition of justice which he gives at the beginning
of his work, De Jure Belli et Pads (Bk. I.,
chap. 1., 3), runs as follows :

Jus hie nihil aliud^

quam quod justum est, significat, idque negante magis
sensu, quam aiente, utjus sit, quod injustum non est}
The negative character of justice is also established,
little as it may appear, even by the familiar formula :
"Give to each one his own." Now, there is no need
to give a man his own, if he has it. The real
meaning is therefore : " Take from none his own."
Since the requirements of justice are only negative,
they may be effected by coercion ; for the Neminem
' Justice here denotes nothing else than that which is just,
and this, rather in a negative than in a positive sense ; so that
what is not unjust is to be regarded as justice.
184 THE BASIS OF MORALITY.
laede can be practised by all alike. The coercive
apparatus is the state, whose sole raison d'etre is to
protect its subjects, individually from each other, and
collectively from external foes. It is true that a few
German would-be philosophers of this venal age
wish to distort the state into an institution for the
spread of morality, education, and edifying instruction.
But such a view contains, lurking in the background,
the Jesuitical aim of doing away with personal freedom
and individual development, and of making men
mere wheels in a huge Chinese governmental and
religious machine. And this is the road that once
led to Inquisitions, to Autos-da-fe, and religious wars.
Frederick the Great showed that he at least never
wished to tread it, when he said : " In my land every
one shall care for his own salvation, as he himself
thinks best." Nevertheless, we still see everywhere
(with the more apparent than real exception of North
America) that the state undertakes to provide for
the metaphysical needs of its members.

In the passage above we can virtually encapsulate the entirety of liberal thought. This
is indeed the summit of Political Economy, the balance of the Political (the liberal
State of Law) and the Economic, the equilibrium of demand and supply in the selfregulating market governed by the private egoistic self-interest of personal freedom and
individual development! Here is the civil society, the burgerliche Gesellschaft, that
reconciles the positive rights of citizens with the protection of the negative do-no-harm
sphere of bourgeois self-interest.
We have seen that " wrong " and " right " are
convertible synonyms of " to do harm " and " to

' There is no more efficient instrument in ruling the masses

than superstition. Without this they have no self-control;
they are brutish ; they are changeable ; but once they are
caught by some vain form of religion, they lend a more willing
ear to its soothsayers than to their own leaders.
THE VIRTUE OF JUSTICE. 185
refrain from doing it," and that under " right " is
included the warding off of injury from oneself.
It will be obvious that these conceptions are independent
of, and antecedent to, all positive legislation.
There is, therefore, a pure ethical right, or natural
right, and a pure doctrine of right, detached from
all positive statutes. The first principles of this
doctrine have no doubt an empirical origin, so far
as they arise from the idea of harm done, but per se
they rest on the pure understanding, which a priori
furnishes ready to hand the axiom : causa causae
est causa effectus. (The cause of a cause is the cause
of the effect.) Taken in this connection the words
mean : if any one desires to injure me, it is not I,
but he, that is the cause of whatever I am obliged
to do in self-defence ; and I can consequently oppose
all encroachments on his part, without wronging him.
The Doctrine of Right is a branch of Ethics,
whose function is to determine those actions which
may not be performed, unless one wishes to injure
others, that is, to be guilty of wrong-doing ; and
here the active part played is kept in view. But
legislation applies this chapter of moral science
conversely, that is, with reference to the passive side
of the question, and declares that the same actions
need not be endured, since no one ought to have
wrong inflicted on him. To frustrate such conduct
the state constructs the complete edifice of
the law, as positive Right. Its intention is that
no one shall suffer wrong ; the intention of the
Doctrine of Moral Right is that no one shall do
wrong.^(P186)

The empirical, observable basis of Ethics is therefore self-defence or self-preservation.

Whereas Kant teaches do what is moral because it is moral, and Hegel teaches do what
is moral because it reconciles (Versohnung) conflicting interests, Schop teaches do
whatever preserves your self-interest. But the question arises, how do I determine
where my self-interest ends and those of others begins? How can the State, by positive
law, mediate individual self-interest? Obviously, the task is impossible unless we can
impose a limit to egoisms by means of reflective reason: Schop requires an almost selfevident approach to the de-finition of self-interest or enlightened egoism, which only
Political Economy can give and on which the State of positive law can be erected.
It is asserted that beasts have
no rights ; the illusion is harboured that our conduct,

so far as they are concerned, has no moral significance,

or, as it is put in the language of these codes, that
" there are no duties to be fulfilled towards animals."
Such a view is one of revolting coarseness, a barbarism
of the West, whose source is Judaism. In philosophy,
however, it rests on the assumption, despite all
evidence to the contrary, of the radical difference
between man and beast, a doctrine which, as is well
known, was proclaimed with more trenchant emphasis
by Descartes than by any one else : it was indeed the
necessary consequence of his mistakes. When Leibnitz
and Wolff, following out the Cartesian view, built up
out of abstract ideas their Rational Psychology, and
constructed a deathless anima rationalis (rational
soul) ; then the natural claims of the animal kingdom
visibly rose up against this exclusive privilege, this
human patent of immortality, and Nature, as always
in such circumstances, entered her silent protest.(P218)
Those persons must indeed be totally blind, or
else completely chloroformed by the foetor Judaicus
(Jewish stench), who do not discern that the truly
essential and fundamental part in man and beast is
identically the same thing. That which distinguishes
the one from the other does not lie in the primary
and original principle, in the inner nature, in the
kernel of the two phaenomena (this kernel being
in both alike the Will of the individual) ; it is found
in what is secondary, in the intellect, in the degree of
perceptive capacity. It is true that the latter is incomparably
higher in man, by reason of his added faculty
of abstract knowledge, called Reason ; nevertheless
this superiority is traceable solely to a greater cerebral
development, in other words, to the corporeal difference,
which is quantitative, not qualitative, of a single
part, the brain. In all other respects the similarity
between men and animals, both psychical and bodily,
is sufficiently striking. So that we must remind
our judaised friends in the West, who despise animals,
and idolise Reason, that if they were suckled by their
mothers, so also was the dog by Ms. Even Kant fell
222 THE BASIS OF MORALITY.
into this common mistake of his age, and of his
country, and I have already administered the censure ^
which it is impossible to withhold. The fact that
Christian morality takes no thought for beasts is a
defect in the system which is better admitted than
perpetuated.
(8) It is perhaps not impossible to investigate and
explain metaphysically the ultimate cause of that
Compassion in which alone all non-egoistic conduct
can have its source ; but let us for the moment

put aside such inquiries, and consider the phaenomenon

in question, from the empirical point of view,
simply as a natural arrangement.
But it was Kant who first completely cleared up
this important point through his profound doctrine
of the empirical and intelligible ^ character. He
' Are we to believe it true that we can only be thoroughly
good by virtue of a certain occult, natural, and universal
faculty, without law, without reason, without precedent?
^ The good man out of the good treasure of his heart
bringeth forth that which is good ; and the evil man out of
the evil treasure of his heart bringeth forth that which is
evil.
' V. Note on "intelligible," Part. II, Chapter I
{Translator.)
ON THE ETHICAL DIFFERENCE OF CHARACTER. 241
showed that the empirical character, which manifests
itself in time and in multiplicity of action, is a
phaenomenon ; while the reality behind it is the
intelligible character, which, being the essential
constitution of the Thing in itself underlying the
phaenomenon, is independent of time, space, plurality,
and change. In this way alone can be explained what
is so astonishing, and yet so well known to all who
have learnt life's lessons,the fixed unchangeableness
of human character.
Du bist am EndeWAS du bist.
Setz' dir Perrucken auf von Millionen Locken,
Setz' deinen Fuss auf ellenhohe Socken:
DU BLEIBST DOCH IMMER WAS DU BIST}

But the reader, I am sure, has long been wishing to

put the question : Where, then, does blame and merit
come in ? The answer is fully contained in Part II.,
(Chapter VIII., to which I therefore beg to call
particular attention. It is there that the explanation,
which otherwise would now follow, found a natural
place ; because the matter is closely connected with
Kant's doctrine of the co-existence of Freedom and
Necessity. Our investigation led to the conclusion
that, once the motives are brought into play, the
Operari (what is done) is a thing of absolute
necessity ; consequently, Freedom, the existence of
which is betokened solely by the sense of responsibility,
cannot but belong to the Esse (what one is).
No doubt the reproaches of conscience have to do,
' In spite of all, thou art stillwhat thou art.
Though "wigs with countless curls thy head-gear be,
Though shoes an ell in height adorn thy feet:
Unchanged thou eer remainest what thou art.
V. Goethe's Faust, Part I., Studirzimmer.

(Translator.)
ON THE ETHICAL DIFFERENCE OF CHARACTER. 249
in the first place, and ostensibly, with our acts, but
through these they, in reality, reach down to what
we are; for what we do is the only indisputable
index of what we are, and reflects our character just
as faithfully as symptoms betray the malady. Hence
it is to this Esse, to what we are, that blame and
merit must ultimately be attributed.

Thus, only the other side of our own being, that is, being perceived as thrown-ness,
as Dasein, can disclose to us the other side of the inner being of things which leads us
to the paramount ontological significance of non-cognitive experience and therefore
not just to Da-Sein but also to the being of beings. This is the true precursor of
Nietzsche and Heidegger: the fundamental distinction between being of being and
knowledge of being the forgetfulness Heidegger uncovers, right from his early
critique of Kant!
The doctrine of the transcendental freedom of
man's will recognizes implicitly, Schopenhauer maintains, that
in man necessity is phenomenal only, and that in him the thing-initself manifests its inner nature in the form of Will. "What,
then, Kant teaches of the phenomenon of man and his action
my teaching extends to all phenomena in nature, in that it makes
the will as a thing-in-itself their foundation. "^ For man is not
toto genere different from the rest of experience, but differs only
in degree. The World as Idea is, as Kant says, purely phenomenal;
but it does not exhaust reality. "As the world is in one
aspect entirely idea, so in another it is entirely will. A reality
which is neither of these two, but an object in itself (into which
the thing in itself has unfortunately dwindled in the hands of
Kant), is the phantom of a dream, and its acceptance is an ignis
fatuus in philosophy."^ The path of objective knowledge does
not lead us to the real nature of things, and so far Schopenhauer
is in thorough agreement with Kant. But "the thing in itself can,
as such, only come into consciousness quite directly, in this way,
that it is itself conscious of itself; to wish to know it objectively
is to desire something contradictory."* The thing-in-itself
is unknowable, precisely because it is not a matter of knowledge
but is in its inmost essence Will.

Continuing from p71 above, Tsanoff comments,

This position leads Schopenhauer
to materialistic excesses. The whole world of perception
and conception, of body and matter, which he formerly regarded

as intellectual in character, he now describes in terms of the bodily

organism.^ The intellect is reduced to a tertiary position, being
the instrument necessitated by a complete organism, which is
secondary and is itself the embodiment of the one and only
Prius, the blind unconscious Will. The intellect is accordingly
a function of the brain, which, again, is the will-to-perceive-and-think
objectified, just as the stomach is the embodiment of the
will-to-digest, the hand, of the will-to-grasp, the generative
organs, of the will-to-beget, and so on. "The whole nervous
system constitutes, as it were, the antennae of the will, which it
stretches towards within and without."^
The relation in which the development of knowledge stands
to the gradual objectification of the Will is conceived by Schopenhauer
with curious inconsistency. In this respect, there are
some apparent differences in point of view between certain passages
in Schopenhauer's earlier and later works; but there seems
to be no sufficient ground for maintaining any fundamental
change of attitude on Schopenhauer's part. Schopenhauer might
seem to hold two fundamentally opposite positions. On the
one hand, he says: "The organ of intelligence, the cerebral system,
together with all the organs of sense, keep pace with the
increasing wants and the complication of the organism."* This
conclusion follows logically from Schopenhauer's theory of the
absolute bondage of intelligence; but it does not account for the
obvious facts of consciousness. Is the highest development of
intelligence always accompanied by a corresponding intensity of
'will,' in Schopenhauer's sense of that term? How is the 'disinterestedness'
of thought at all possible on such a basis? Scho
II, pp. 314-315; H.K., III. p. 2.
2 Schopenhauer's 'physiological-psychological' method, which here manifests
itself in terms so extreme, is nevertheless implied in his very starting-point, . e.,
in his distinction between perception and conception. Cf. Richter, op. cil., pp. 139 f.
3G., II, p. 299; H.K., II, p. 482.
*G., II, p. 237; H.K., II, p. 416.
74 SCHOPENHAUER'S CRITICISM OF KANT.
penhauer, evidently realizing the difficulty of the situation,
seems to shift his position. The gradual objectification of the
Will, he says, is accompanied by a gradual 'loosening' of the
intellect from its will-ground. In the course of its development,
the intelligence gradually obtains freedom from the brute will impulse,
and evolves an ideal world of its own, a world of knowledge,
subject to universal laws of nature. This is the World as
Idea, which Schopenhauer regards as at once the manifestation
and the very antithesis of the World as Will. But the intellect
"may, in particular exceptionally favoured individuals, go so far
that, at the moment of its highest ascendancy, the secondary or
knowing part of consciousness detaches itself altogether from the
willing part, and passes into free activity for itself."^ Thus, in
the man of genius, "knowledge can deliver itself from this
bondage, throw off its yoke, and, free from all the aims of will,
exist purely for itself, simply as a clear mirror of the world. "^
This is the aesthetic knowledge of the Platonic Ideas, a unique
consciousness of unity, different alike from the metaphysical
unity of the Will and from the abstract unity of conception.
No discussion of the problems raised by Schopenhauer's
Theory of Art seems to be called for here, inasmuch as it has

no direct bearing upon his criticism of Kant. It should be

noted, however, that Schopenhauer finds himself obliged to
reassert the autonomy of the intellect, which his metaphysic
has put under the bondage of the ultimate Will. This autonomy
of the intellect, in the passionless contemplation of works of art,
is, nevertheless, only a passing phase. The real solution of the
world-riddle is stated by Schopenhauer, not in aesthetic, but in
ethical terms. The liberation of intelligence from the tyrant
Will becomes complete and final only when the will is denied in
the supreme act of self-renunciation. This denial of the will,
to be sure, involves the cessation of consciousness, the total
effacement of all phenomenal multiplicity, and the sinking into
the nothingness of Nirvana. Enlightened by intelligence, the
will of man may be led to realize the brute-like character of its
iG.. II, p. 238; H.K., II. p. 417'G., I, p. 214; H.K., I, p. 199EXPERIENCE AND REALITY. 75
nature, and, directing itself against itself, achieve its own self-annihilation.
The denial of the will is really the denial of its
striving towards multiplicity; it is the denial of that impulse
in it which leads to its objectification in phenomena,the denial
of the will-to-self-perpetuation, of the will-to-become-manifest,
of the will-to-live. This is what Schopenhauer means when he
says, at the end of The World as Will and Idea: "We freely acknowledge
that what remains after the entire abolition of will
is for all those who are still full of will certainly nothing; but,
conversely, to those in whom the will has turned and has denied
itself, this our world, which is so real, with all its suns and milky
waysis nothing."^
iG..
I. p. 527; H.K., I, p. 532.

TRANSITION TO NEO-CLASSICS and Phenomenology

Critique of Kant with Hegel in mind (essays rejected because of invective). Schop. does
not conceive of the Will as self-consciousness. This Hegelian notion would at once
remove Kants greatest discovery, the distinction of Dinge an sich and Vorstellungen,
because the dialectic of self-consciousness removes the Will as Ding-an-sich, and the unity
of Subject-Object that Schop is postulating. No dialectic is possible between
consciousness, its awareness of its being-in-the-world and therefore self-consciousness
through the positing of the Other (its self-alienation as the Other), and the operari through
the annihilation of the world that leads to its independence from the Other as well as the
extrinsication of the Idea in the world. In Hegel it is the interaction of the I with the world
as negation, not as Object, that posits the emancipation of Self from the Other. The I and
the Thou are mediated by labour; the interaction of Herr (wealth) and Knecht (servitude)
is through labour and leads to the supersession of the relationship.
The Will is sheer mechanical use of the world, of its objectification. Its operari is not
mediation but a simple instrumental manifestation of subjectivity (Cacciari, PNeR, p31).
No value can be created through the objectification of the Will: rather, it is the world
itself that satisfies the Will. Schopenhauer still remains within the classical confines of

the Puritanical and Protestant ascetic Entsagung of consumption. This is not so with
Bohm-Bawerk and the neo-classics who unabashedly and shamelessly posit and assert it as
Life (hence, the positive theory of capital a title that has perplexed many Cacciari,
p30).
Kantian formalism rejected. Separation of noumena and phenomena already destroys the
basis for formalist ethics. Benthamite utilitarianism also because it reconciles individual
wills so that labour is seen as source of synthesis-osmosis-value through constructive
character. Competition has only a distributive role in the market mechanism.
The Will is an operari, striving in the world of other manifestations of will, adapting to this
world and therefore evolving. Labour therefore cannot amount to creation of utility but to
its use: labour/operari (Arbeit) consumes the world in search of satisfaction. The
evanescence of the world means that the drive (Trieb) of the Will toward satisfaction defeats
itself. That is the source of pain (Leid) countering the search for Pleasure (Lust). This leads
straight to Gossen, also in the re-ordering of the Gesellschaft away from the post-Hegelian
emanationism of Historismus and toward its scientific, research- and result-oriented
relativism in Dilthey (Gadamer, TaM, p223) and Schmoller that beyond the superficial
Methodenstreit powerfully asserts the Individualitat of the market society and its competitive
equilibrium. (Again, Cacciari, pp30ff.)

Entsagung is the intellectual awareness of the Verstand/Vernunft to refrain and restrain the
Will from seeking Lust, the utility of the world. Hence dualism, or inter-face, the
Janus-bifrons of satisfaction/Nirvana. For Robbins, Nirvana is satisfaction of all needs,
which is identical with equilibrium, the extinction of all needs. Thus final satis-faction
of a need is its extinction is its ful-fillment, or Voll-endung, that is, com-pletion in its
double sense of ful-filment (com-pletion as full-ness) and extinction (completion as finish,
end).
It is of vital importance that Entsagung is the culmination of an intellectual effort to
master the will. In this role, the intellect is a mechane a means for directing the
otherwise blind drive of the will it is the equivalent both of the Kantian concepts
emanating from Pure Reason even in its Practical moment, and of the Freudian
superego or ego where the Will is the Es/Id (cf Freud, C&ID, ch7 re super-ego).
[Note that for Freud there is no oceanic feeling (first page of CID Romain Rolland)
similar to Schops sympathy; and that he equates this feeling more with religion. Note
also the Arbeit as search for self-preservation, as Arbeit/operari which Freud does not
sublimate because of his analytical stance which (like Nietzsche) sur-passes Schop in
seeing the necessity of this (its non-transcendence a la Schop) but (unlike Nietzsche)
he does not exalt as Wille zur Macht but treats as indistinguishable from Thanatos. Like
Nietzsche, Freud wonders aloud in ch7 whether humans might not be better without the
strictures of the super-ego (guilt, and Kultur as well!) and places conscience as fear of
loss of the love of others (Nietzsche speaks of protection but so does Freud) ahead of
instinctual repression until conscience is learned or interiorized (a garrison within a
conquered citadel [p71] is his metaphor for the super-ego the citadel is the ego)

through social institutions and the roles are reversed. He then briefly touches on
communism and social equality, repeating verbatim Nietzsches position on equality
is unjust. Again, as with Nietzsche, Freud takes an ontogenetic approach to
psychoanalysis in that even the Arbeit is seen as an external constraint, as toil, as
annihilation of the world in Hegelian fashion. This elision of Arbeit/operari from the
sphere of freedom of the will is something Nietzsche will eschew with his
immanentistic opposition to the hidden transcendentalism of the nihilists. Similarly,
Nietzsche will sub-tract art from the cultural repression of the instincts. Note that on
pp86-87 Freud confronts the problem of distinguishing between individual and
civilization in what is a crucial discussion to understand his perspective. But note the
reference to immortal enemies on p92 with reference to Eros and Thanatos.]
Phenomenology instead (from Dilthey to Husserl cf Gadamer in TaM) sought to return
to Cartesian transcendence by decreeing apodictic rules of thought determined a priori.
(And the Neo-Kantians sought to circumvent Kantian agnosticism through the autonomy
and universality of logic and judgements, including ethical maxims.) In this attempt, they
overlooked Kants desperation in the Ubergang his inability to extend logic and
mathematics to causality in the physical world (PNeR, p61). Gadamer notes Husserls
attempt to defend himself against charges of atavistic Kantian objectivism from
Heidegger [p236] whose first major work was devoted to this critique. (Cf Palmer on
KPM.) Both were attempts to rescue philosophy from the sciences, and the sciences form
their Krisis. But the need to replace subjectivity as substance with experience or
intentionality and, finally, with the Lebenswelt shows how deep-seated was the influence
of Schopenhauer on Husserl in particular, whose Log.Unter. exercised in turn decisive
influence on Dilthey (Gadamer, p236).
In each of these cases the Ding-an-sich (much the same way in which it becomes
qualitas occulta in Schop and therefore beyond our ken) replaces as Lebenswelt what
were once appearances or phenomena (Vorstellungen) behind which once stood the
inscrutable Object. Phenomenology seeks to transcend the universal equivalence of the
Will to rescue the Sinn-gebende of the Ratio-Ordo, by categorizing experience
(Erlebnis) as a horizon or historical consciousness (cf Gadamer, pp238-9 on Lebenswelt
and, more explicitly Husserl on Hume, pp239-40. Note also historicist stress on research
dating from Ranke). Gadamer is quite wrong, then, to seek to reconcile this
Lebensphilosophie or even (Heidegger) Welt-anschauung with Hegels dialectic of
Selbstbewusstsein because this last contains a radically different notion of the world
from what is clearly the Schopenhauerian Kant-critical and Cartesian transcendental
idealist genealogy of Diltheyan hermeneutics and Husserlian phenomenology.
(On all this, cf Nietzsche, TotI, Reason in Philosophy, par1 re body. Par3:
Logic as symbolic convention. In the same part, see refs. to language and
will. Also, How the true world and Konigsbergers things; Schop in par5 and
The Four Errors, esp. par8 which owes much to Schop on whom see also
Skirmishes of an untimely man. Cf. Lowith on Heideggers interpretation of
Nietzsche on value, pp111ff, and political economy, p113; ref to Schop on p117

and p118 on Vollendung. The suit discusses also the notion of appearance, ref to
Plato, which is almost inspired by Schop-Mach.)

Machism and the neo-classics pivot instead on the equivalence of wills as the
rationalization of the rules of the game that, if adhered to or enforced by its participants,
would be effective in ensuring the equilibrium of the wills in a liberal order understood as
natural/spontaneous or logical constituting in fact, like Political Economy, the
practical political survival/reproduction of capitalist social relations. The Ordoliberals are
the best expression of the practical implementation of these ideas in the German Soziale
Marktwirtschaft.
These are readings of Schopenhauer that remain within the ambit of Nirvana as the
culmination of Askesis, of the Entsagung as the renunciation of the operari. But Nirvana is
Janus-faced (Janus bifrons): like equilibrium, it exits as it enters; once reached, the operari
and the world, even in its mirrored form, return and become embodied, so that the
Sollen of the Arbeit, its inter-esse, its inter-action or even the correlation of the I-Thou
in the Husserlian Lebens-welt of Erlebnisse (Gadamer) all this returns as Freiheit, as
Ohn-macht.
As Cacciari shows, the Nietzschean supersession of Schopenhauer as Educator will lead
far away from these toward Weber, toward Schumpeter and Heidegger. But Cacciari ably
distinguishes between the initial phase of transformation of economic theory, from Gossen
through Jevons and Bohm-Bawerk, when the inversion of value theory into the positive
theory of capital takes place, when the will to power of the new theory is in full
vehemence against the demands of the emerging working class, from the later equilibrium
theory that constitutes both a socialist dream of a balanced economy (Walras) or of a
consumerist heaven (Hayek/Mises/Robbins) that accomplishes the goals of Political
Economy. Here the socialist utopia of the Law of Value meets the neoclassical liberal
Nirvana of equilibrium in the foundation of anti-monopolistic free competition.
(Cacciari, PNeR, pp29ff. But see W.Sombarts Socialism discussed in PhiloAnte
ofSoE.)
Cacciaris own account of the Ubergang from Schopenhauer to the later negatives
Denken suffers from the fact that he hides the full significance of das Wille that replaces
the Kantian Subjekt and Hegels Geist. Schopenhauer takes up fully Kants dichotomy and
antinomy of Dinge an sich, or the Object, and the Vorstellungen or Erscheinungen the
experience of which he tries to re-compose in a transcendental Subject. And this is
dictated by the iron necessity and certainty of scientific laws, of hypothesis and
deduction. Despite the doubts and perplexities of the Opus Postumum, Schopenhauer
removes these certainties and laws from the sphere of rational reflection to that of
pragmatic experience (Erlebnis) by invoking the principle of sufficient reason. (Dilthey
does too in the Intro. to Geisteswissenschaften, without referring to Schop.) But as
Tsanoff shows in the passage below, several aspects of the critique appear unfounded and
capricious. They fail to respond to the quite apparent ability of human beings to lend
meaning and order to the world, if only for practical purposes. Under cover of exploding
the bourgeois allegiance to the Ratio-Ordo, Cacciari is engaging in a specious

mystification of that historical process that can with all the reservations and provisos and
distinguo and caveats admissible be placed under the rubric of progress.