Philosophers

I've been reading Schopenhauer for the first time, and he claims to have developed metaphysics and ethics into one. Does anyone agree with this claim? I'm just a little perplexed, and I wonder if he really accomplished this.

Comments

It's a neat view: the world-in-itself is an undifferentiated "will" that we individuate through categories such as space, time, and causation which (following Kant) Schopenhauer thought that we bring to our experience of the world. These differentiated parts of the world-as-experienced include different people with conflicting desires and interests (i.e., conflicting bits of will). The metaphysical realization that in the realm beyond appearances there is only an undifferentiated will motivates the fundamental Schopenhauerian ethical attitude of compassion: to take on another's perspective as one's own is appropriate since the world beyond appearances is inter-subjectively undifferentiated.

I don't believe in a transcendental world beyond experience that has the properties Schopenhauer claimed for it. I believe in a real world that is (at least partly) mind-independent, but I don't think there are good reasons to hold that it is undifferentiated and will-full in Schopenhauer's sense. So, although I agree that compassion is fundamental to ethics, I don't think, alas, that the claim gets the metaphysical support Schopenhauer claimed for it. I suspect that most contemporary philosophers reject Schopenhauer's view for these or different reasons, but I don't know this with any certainty.

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