Beginning in the mid-1860s, the neo-Kantians began to turn their attention to a new disturbing phenomenon on the cultural horizon: pessimism. There were two thinkers behind this phenomenon, two major champions of pessimism: Arthur Schopenhauer and Eduard von Hartmann. Schopenhauer’s main work, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung,1 first appeared in 1819 and, though ignored for decades, it had been rediscovered in the 1850s and had virtually become a cult classic by the 1860s. Hartmann’s chief work, Die Philosophie des Unbewussten,2 which was first published in 1869, was a huge and immediate hit, going through many printings and spawning a flood of polemical literature. The success of Schopenhauer’s and Hartmann’s work spoke for a new cultural phenomenon: pessimism was now the Zeitgeist.
This was a challenge the neo-Kantians could not afford to ignore. They soon rose to the occasion. Almost every major neo-Kantian had something to say about pessimism. From the mid-1860s until the early 1900s, Kuno Fischer, Otto Liebmann, Jürgen Bona Meyer, Friedrich Paulsen, Rudolf Haym, Alois Riehl, Johannes Volkelt, Hermann Cohen and Wilhelm Windelband wrote articles, essays, or book chapters about it. Such, indeed, was the interest in Schopenhauer that Fischer, Haym, Volkelt and Meyer wrote some of the first monographs on him.3 By the late 1870s, pessimism had replaced materialism as the neo-Kantians’ bête noire. Where there was once Büchner, Moleschott, Czolbe or Vogt, there now stood Schopenhauer and Hartmann.
But why were the neo-Kantians so troubled by pessimism? And why did it become so popular? Neither question is easy to answer.
Why pessimism should be a threat to neo-Kantians is not so obvious. Prima facie a good Kantian should not be especially concerned by Schopenhauer’s or Hartmann’s version of it. The central thesis of their pessimism is that life is not worth living because it brings far more suffering than happiness. A good Kantian, however, is a stoical soul who never expects life to bring him much happiness. He need not even contest the claim that life is not worth living if it is measured in eudemonic terms. Instead, he insists that the value of life has to be assessed in moral terms. So, even if life is suffering, the good Kantian still finds meaning in it by performing his moral duties and striving for the highest good. Progress towards a better world redeems all suffering and makes life worth living. This simple point should be enough, it seems, to disarm the threat of Schopenhauer’s and Hartmann’s pessimism.
Yet, on a deeper level, Schopenhauer’s pessimism was very disturbing for the good Kantian.4 For there was a quietistic message behind it that made all human endeavour meaningless, even when measured in strictly moral terms. The implication of Schopenhauer’s argument in the final chapters of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung is that all striving for a better world is pointless. No matter how much we struggle to improve it, we make no progress towards the highest good. We are like Sisyphus pushing his rock up the hill only for it to roll back down again. Rather than striving to create a better world, we should renounce our will to live and attempt to escape the world in religious and aesthetic contemplation. It was chiefly this quietism, for reasons we shall soon see, that so troubled the neo-Kantians about pessimism.
The reasons for the popularity of pessimism are even less clear. The public obsession with pessimism puzzled neo-Kantians themselves. Fischer and Meyer offered the explanation that it expressed the spirit of the times after the defeat of the Revolution of 1848.5 After the failure to achieve such basic liberal ideals as constitutional government and national unity, we are told, people lost faith in the old optimistic philosophies, which rested upon the hope of progress in history. Now that the forces of reaction had the upper hand, there seemed no way forward, so that idealism gave way to cynicism. This is how Fischer described the spirit of the times:
After the shipwreck of the attempts at national unity, after the days of Bronnzell and Olmütz, after the restoration of the alliance in Frankfurt am Main, there came the satyr song with its elegiac mood: “O, du lieber Augustin, everything is lost.” The only consolation went: “Ergo bibamus!”.6
So, on this reading, pessimism was a philosophy of disappointment and disillusionment, capturing a mood especially prevalent in the 1850s and 1860s. This interpretation cannot explain, however, why pessimism continued to be so popular in the 1870s, a decade which saw the fulfilment of liberal dreams. With the 1870s came the founding of the new Reich, victory over the French, the growth of representative government, and much technical and social progress. So, if political disappointment could explain the origin of pessimism, it could hardly account for its persistence. It was precisely the continuing popularity of pessimism, however, that puzzled neo-Kantians. Johannes Volkelt, a young neo-Kantian in Vienna, suggested this explanation for the phenomenon: the failure of social and political institutions to provide for the rising expectations of the masses.7 “Who can blame the spectator for lapsing into pessimistic reflections,” Volkelt wrote, “when he sees the spectre of mass poverty?” Volkelt, it seemed, had hit the nail on the head. For at least one prominent pessimist agreed with him. Agnes Taubert, the wife of Eduard von Hartmann, admitted that disappointment among the masses was indeed one reason for pessimism.8 She disagreed with Volkert, however, that one should try to encourage optimism, to give the masses hope to change their situation. Pessimism was the best remedy for the disaffection of the masses because it would teach them to limit their expectations and to restrain their desires. These expectations and desires had become unrealistic, increasing far beyond any social, political and economic means of fulfilling them. From pessimism, at least the people could learn that suffering and misery is a constant of human life, and that it prevails as much in the nobleman’s palace as in the peasant’s hut.
Taubert’s reactionary views reveal one crucial feature behind the controversy about pessimism: its political dimension.9 Many neo-Kantians were suspicious of pessimism, because they saw it as more of a doctrine of reaction than disillusionment. They regarded it as a reactionary weapon for keeping in check the hopes and ideals of the masses, who believed that they could make progress and change the world through political organization and action. What better way to take the wind out of their sails than to tell them there is no progress in history, that life is inescapable suffering, that it is futile trying to change the world, which always remains the same? Schopenhauer probably never had these political intentions in mind in formulating his pessimism in the early 1800s. But it was also no accident that his pessimism later conveniently served reactionary ends. For Schopenhauer’s political convictions were decidedly reactionary, and he had sided with the monarchy during the 1848 Revolution.10 A clause in his will gave money to soldiers wounded in battle with radicals and workers in Frankfurt.
Against Schopenhauer’s reactionary views, the neo-Kantians still upheld the old liberal faith, the old hope in social and political progress. It is in recognizing this political dimension behind pessimism that we can begin to see the motivation for the neo-Kantians’ battle against it. That battle was directed primarily against Schopenhauer’s quietism, which undermined all motivation to change and reform the world.
The neo-Kantian struggle against pessimism reveals one of its central and characteristic features as an intellectual movement: its faith in human autonomy, the power of human beings to change their world. We misunderstand this feature if we confuse it with optimism, which is for the neo-Kantian the belief in inevitable historical progress, the thesis that the laws of history are moving towards greater freedom and equality. For the neo-Kantian, optimism commits the same mistake as pessimism: by having us believe in the inevitablity of progress, in the necessity of historical development, it undermines the motivation of the individual to change his world. Optimism and pessimism are the two extremes to be avoided at all cost. The middle path between them is political realism, the recognition that each individual human being has the power and responsibility for political action to change his or her world.
To a scholar of Kant’s philosophy, this political realism is not likely to seem Kantian at all. Kant’s later writings on history make him into a cautious historical optimist, someone who believes that nature herself will bring forth a republican constitution. But, as we shall soon see, when it came to politics, the neo-Kantians were more neo-Fichtean than neo-Kantian. The revival of Fichte in the 1860s was a crucial force behind the revival of Kant himself. We shall examine the meaning of this Fichtean revival in Section 3.
Our task now will be to examine the neo-Kantian battle against Schopenhauer’s pessimism.11 We need to know the arguments as well as the motivations behind it. This will involve a survey of the highlights of the neo-Kantian polemic against pessimism.
It was a bleak picture of human life that Arthur Schopenhauer painted in the fourth and final part of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. The central thesis of his pessimism is simple: “all life is suffering” (I, 426; §56).12 This suffering is inescapable, constant and unbearable. That is the hard fact of life, though few are willing to recognize it, because they are so caught in the snares of their desires that they never ask themselves where they lead, why they pursue them and what is the point of it all. The major premise of Schopenhauer’s pessimism is his most basic metaphysical principle: that the heart of reality, the thing-in-itself, consists in the will, which consists in a blind, ceaseless striving without end or purpose.13 This will determines, and appears in, all human thoughts, deeds and desires. Because we are forever willing, we are forever desiring; but all desire is by its very nature suffering, because it consists in a felt need or lack. To free ourselves from this pain, we struggle to satisfy our desires; but the satisfaction never lasts very long. No sooner have we satisfied one desire than we have another. While desire is long, satisfaction is short, lasting only for a moment. And while pain is a reality, a positive quality, whose presence is all too keenly felt, pleasure is only a privation, a negative quality, the momentary relief and release from suffering. So life is caught in a constant cycle of desire and desperation, a cycle whose only purpose is to prolong itself. Should this cycle pause for a moment between desires, then we suffer an even worst fate: boredom (428; §57). Boredom makes our very existence unbearable, and so we struggle to escape it. How? By restarting the cycle, of course. So, according to this grim picture, life is a grim struggle for existence, where existence serves no value or purpose at all. Life is ceaseless torment, inescapable suffering, only occasionally and briefly relieved when we satisfy our desires. No matter how many cliffs we avoid in the course of our struggle to survive, there is one we know that we cannot avoid, and that is the worst of all: death (429; §57).
As bleak as this picture was, Schopenhauer still held out the prospect of salvation. He painted life in such dire terms only in the hope that we, or at least a few among us, would see through it, renounce it, and finally escape it. Although he taught that all our thoughts, actions and feelings are manifestations of the will, he still held that we can stand outside and above the will through acts of intellectual insight which reveal to us the futility of desire and the source of suffering.14 Once we gain such insight, we have the power to deny the will, to renounce all its promptings and urgings, and to lead an ascetic life of contemplation. Such a life will be serene and peaceful, Schopenhauer promised (I, 529; §68). This was his version of the stoic ideal of atarxia, of the Christian concept of “rebirth” and “grace”, of the Buddhistic doctrine of nirvana or enlightenment. Of all these variants, Schopenhauer preferred most the Buddhistic one. According to Fischer, Schopenhauer was deeply serious about his Buddhism, which he hoped would become the new religion of the West.15 He saw himself as its sage, his book as its gospel.
The neo-Kantians’ response to Schopenhauer’s pessimism could not have been more negative.16 They scrutinized its every premise, presupposition and conclusion, and rejected them all. Such hostility is prima facie surprising, given that good Kantians are not prone to celebrating the joys of life, and given that they are ready to concede that the world is a miserable place when measured by eudemonic standards. What motivated their animosity, though, was less Schopenhauer’s bleak portrait of life than the conclusions he wanted to draw from it. For political and ethical reasons, the neo-Kantians were utterly opposed to the very ethic that Schopenhauer wanted to promote: denunciation of the will, renunciation of life, resignation about the ways of the world. For the neo-Kantians, this was tantamount to surrender to the evil forces of this world; the point of our lives was not to escape the world but to change it. Since so much was at stake, Schopenhauer’s pessimism would have to be defeated, eradicated root and branch. And so, nearly for four decades, stretching from the 1860s until the early 1900s, the neo-Kantians would fight Schopenhauer on many occasions, whenever energy and time permitted.17
One central strategy in the neo-Kantian campaign against Schopenhauer’s pessimism was to undermine its claim to scientific or philosophical status. In one form or another, Windelband, Paulsen, Liebmann, Meyer and Riehl all followed this strategy.18 They contended there could be no proof for Schopenhauer’s doctrine, either empirical or a priori, and that it was ultimately more a statement about his personal attitude than a genuine metaphysical fact about the world. According to this line of argument, whether life is worth living is a question of value, and so it is a matter for each individual to decide on the basis of his or her own experience. Who was Arthur Schopenhauer to tell everyone that their lives are pointless or worthless? In advocating his pessimism as if it were some kind of deep metaphysical truth, Schopenhauer had made a fundamental confusion between fact and value. Questions of value cannot be determined on the basis of pure reason alone; we can use all kinds of ends or criteria to assess the value of life, all of which are perfectly rational; which conclusions we reach depends on which we apply. Windelband, who developed this line of argument most fully and rigorously,19 contends that there could be only one way to make an objective thesis about the value of existence: if we knew the purpose for which the world was created, then we could tell whether it was good or bad; it would then be a matter of simply seeing whether the world fit its purpose or not. But there is no way of knowing, Windelband argued, what the purpose of life is in itself; because metaphysics is impossible, as Kant rightly taught, we have no means of knowing reality as a whole.
One variation on this strategy, which was pursued by Paulsen and Meyer,20 is that Schopenhauer’s pessimism could be scientific or philosophical only if there were a kind of hedonic calculus, that is, a method of comparing the pleasures and pains of this life and determining which outweighs the other. Although they knew that Schopenhauer never claimed to be in possession of such a calculus, they still maintained that it is a presupposition of his argument, because it is only by showing the predominance of suffering over happiness, of pain over pleasure, that he can justify his claim that life is not worth living. But such a presupposition, Paulsen and Meyer argued, is absurd, for the simple reason that it is impossible to make such comparisons. Pleasures and pains are very heterogeneous, and to determine their value we have to assess not only their quantities but also their qualities. Paulsen pointed out that it is impossible to determine for even a single ordinary day in a person’s life whether pleasures or pains predominate. For that to work, we would have to assign numerical values to the most heterogeneous pleasures and pains. But how do we measure, Paulsen asked, the pleasure of a good breakfast against the displeasure from eating burnt soup for dinner? And how do we determine the pleasure of reading a good book against the displeasure of hearing disturbing background noise? If we cannot calculate the sum of pleasures and pains on a single day, then how are we to do that for a whole human life? And then for human life in general?
In his defence, it has to be said that Schopenhauer never intended to provide empirical justification for his theory.21 His argument on behalf of pessimism was supposed to be a priori, based on general facts about human life, desire and pleasure. The case for pessimism rested for him more on metaphysics than on ordinary experience. It also has to be said, however, that the neo-Kantians were aware of Schopenhauer’s intentions on this score, which they duly countered with a priori objections of their own. Schopenhauer’s pessimism, Paulsen, Meyer and Volkelt contended, rests on a faulty understanding of pleasure as well as desire. Schopenhauer assumes that pleasure is extrinsic to action, as if it were a reward attained at the end of an activity. But this fails to see that pleasure is often instrinsic to action, that it derives from its very doing.22 There is a very big difference between the pleasure of gratification, which comes at the end of an action, and the pleasure of doing, which comes from acting itself. The sensation of satiety after a full meal, the feeling of rest after exertion, are pleasures of gratification; the enjoyment of playing the piano, or of reading a good book, are pleasures of doing. So Schopenhauer’s concept of pleasure is too narrow, derived entirely from pleasures of gratification, as if they were the sole kind of pleasure. This mistake is a crucial premise to his pessimism, however, because it assumes that the active pursuit of pleasure has to be painful, a source of suffering, when it can be entirely enjoyable.
Schopenhauer also goes astray, Windelband, Riehl, Paulsen, Meyer and Volkelt charged,23 in attributing solely a negative significance to pleasure, as if it were nothing more than freedom from the pain of desire. Schopenhauer’s argument for this thesis is insufficient: the mere fact that desire attempts to eradicate some need does not mean that its satisfaction consists only in the removal of the need. There can still be some positive feeling in the satisfaction of the need. And, although we feel pleasure more intensely when we free ourselves from pain, we still have feelings of pleasure when we have not felt privation beforehand. Are there not pleasant surprises in life?
The most weighty objection against Schopenhauer’s a priori argument for pessimism concerned the chief concept behind it, the will. The neo-Kantians doubted that this pivotal concept could be given any definite meaning at all. Schopenhauer’s will did not have any definite motive or purpose. But what kind of will is that, Otto Liebmann asked, that does not have a motive or end?24 If I have a will, I have to will something; my will needs a specific object. Liebmann found it strange that Schopenhauer’s will is the source of the human body, when all the desires he ever knew presupposed the existence of the body. For his part, Meyer could not understand Schopenhauer’s claim that the essence or inner nature of a human being consists in the will. We are supposed to know this through some kind of immediate intuition of ourselves. But though it is true that we are always conscious of ourselves as acting, it does not follow that this acting is always a form of willing; it might consist in thinking or feeling as much as willing.25 Many years later Alois Riehl pressed home these kinds of criticisms.26 He maintained that the concept of a will is only an abstraction, which we derive from particular acts of will, every one of which depends on a motive or purpose. In depriving the will of motives and ends Schopenhauer was confusing it with simple desire, because though desires have no conscious purpose, the will must have one by its very nature as a distinctively human form of volition.27
No less problematic was the metaphysics Schopenhauer based on his theory of the will. He had claimed that the will is the inner nature not only of human beings but of all things, whether animate or inanimate. Whoever knows that the will is his inner nature, Schopenhauer said, will want to generalize this for everything else, so that their inner nature too consists in the will.28 For Liebmann, Meyer, Haym and Riehl, however, this was a speculative leap of astonishing proportion. “Never have the basic limits of speculation been treated with more nonchalance than with this inference”, Liebmann wrote.29 This was “a tightrope walker’s leap over a metaphysical chasm”. For his part, Meyer found Schopenhauer’s inference to be bolder than anything undertaken by the Naturphilosophen.30 And Riehl held Schopenhauer’s concept of will to be so mysterious that he could not understand how it could explain the entire world: this was a true explanation obscurum per obscurius.31
Fischer, Meyer, Haym, Riehl and Volkelt were quick to point out the main difficulty in Schopenhauer’s theory of redemption.32 Schopenhauer had maintained that the will is the guiding force behind the intellect, which is essentially only a tool to determine the means for its ends.33 But if this is so, how does human knowledge, which derives from the intellect, free itself from the will and allow us to stand above human striving? Somehow, the intellect is both bound by the will yet liberates us from it. Keenly aware of this difficulty, Schopenhauer tried to address it at the close of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung.34 But his solution simply begged the question: he merely restated his conviction that knowledge could change the direction of the will (I, 547; §70). How it could do this was the very question at issue. In the end, Schopenhauer seems to put his trust in all the reports and stories about Christian and Buddhistic spiritual life. But it never seemed to have occurred to him, as it later did to Nietzsche, that even this apparently ascetic life could be just another subconscious form of the will, the ultimate expression of the will to power. Given this difficulty, it is hardly surprising that the neo-Kantians were sceptical whether, on Schopenhauer’s premises, there could be any deliverance from suffering, any redemption from the striving of the will.
All that we have said above is an abstract of just some of the neo-Kantian polemic against Schopenhauer’s pessimism. The polemic was much richer, subtler and more nuanced than we can recount here. We must keep in perspective, though, the secondary importance of this polemic. Ultimately, it was only a means to an end: undercutting Schopenhauer’s quietism, his attempt to sabotage the effort to change the world. Just why the neo-Kantians were committed to undermining this quietism, just how and why their own philosophy was deeply activitist, is a question that we must now address. Only when we understand the sources of their activism will we be fully in a position to understand the motives and rationale behind their attitude towards pessimism.
Scholars of the 19th century tend to think of pessimism as a phenomenon peculiar to that century, one that begins in the 1860s with the rehabilitation of Schopenhauer and the publication of Hartmann’s Philosophie des Unbewussten (1869). But pessimism was very much a problem of the 18th century too. Its most powerful spokesman was Jean Jacques Rousseau, who, in his first discourse (1750),35 had put forward the provocative thesis that the progress of the arts and sciences is not improving but corrupting morals. That thesis was a great challenge to the Enlightenment, whose first article of faith had been that the progress of civilization, the growth of the arts and sciences, would improve life and morals.
Among those philosophes and Aufklärer shocked by Rousseau’s thesis was Kant himself, who was devoted to the cause of Enlightenment. Though it is only implicit, Kant’s response to Rousseau’s pessimism is central to his mature philosophy. If Kant were to defend the cause of Enlightenment, and indeed the value and authority of reason itself, he had to respond to Rousseau’s pessimism. Since the neo-Kantian critique of Schopenhauer’s and Hartmann’s pessimism in the 19th century grew out of Kant’s response to Rousseau’s pessimism in the 18th century, we first need to take into account Kant’s attitude towards Rousseau.
Kant’s critique of Rousseau appears in his famous 1784 essay on world history, ‘Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht’.36 Although Kant never mentions Rousseau in this essay, its thrust and content become fully meaningful only when we take into account its intended target: Rousseau’s pessimism. The nub of Kant’s critique is that the mechanism of nature leads inevitably towards the ideals of freedom and equality of a republican constitution, which is a better condition for mankind than the state of nature, where human beings never develop their natural powers. Kant’s response is based upon his teleological theory of nature, according to which everything in nature works towards the full realization of all the natural capacities of man. The mechanism by which nature achieves this end is the “unsocial sociability” of mankind, which consists essentially in competition among individuals for power, property and prestige (Herrschsucht, Habsucht, Ehrsucht). Such competition forces people to develop their natural capacities. In competing for power, property and prestige, people are compelled to work hard, to use their wits, and to learn new skills and tools, all of which develops their natural powers and intelligence. Kant admits that without this mechanism “man would live an Arcadian pastoral existence of perfect concord, self-sufficiency and mutual love”, which is the perfect portrait of Rousseau’s state of nature. But in that idyll they would not develop their natural powers, so that they would be “as docile as the sheep they tended”. So, though the price of civilization is the loss of pastoral happiness, the reward is the development of our natural powers. Kant pressed home his argument against Rousseau by claiming that the very same mechanism would eventually lead to the creation of a republican constitution, a state devoted to the ideals of freedom and equality. Sheer self-interest inclines everyone towards a republican constitution, because it alone gives everyone maximal freedom to pursue property, power and prestige without the interference of others. The republican constitution is for Kant a regulated or managed form of “unsocial sociability”, which naturally leads to the maximum development of human powers. Thus Rousseau’s lost freedom and equality would be regained through political means, through the creation of a republican constitution, which was the greatest task facing humanity. And so, with a brilliant twist of the dialectical knife, Kant had turned Rousseau’s argument against him. The very mechanism that Rousseau saw as a source of civilizations’s discontent—competition and the workings of amour propre—Kant saw as the source of its beneficence.
Implicit in Kant’s argument against Rousseau is the concession that happiness would be lost with the progress of culture. Kantian agents would be more perfect, rational and self-realized than Rousseauian noble savages; but they would not be happy. This was not so much a lacuna in Kant’s argument but the reflection of an important underlying principle. For Kant had disputed whether happiness is the proper measure of the value of life and existence. If nature gave us reason so that we could become happy, he had argued, then it has chosen a very ineffective instrument indeed, because we would actually be happier if we ran our lives by instinct alone.37An argument for pessimism based on eudemonic considerations alone, Kant was saying, would reduce human beings down to animals and fail to see the true purpose of their reason: acting not according to laws but for the sake of laws, that is, for the sake of moral principle.38
For Kant, then, the measure of the value of existence should be not eudemonic but moral. Or, as he famously put it, the purpose of life is not to be happy but to be worthy of happiness, that is, to live our lives for the sake of moral ideals.39 There is one ideal to which all human beings have a duty to contribute: the highest good, the perfect proportion between personal happiness and moral merit. This ideal went hand-in-glove with Kant’s ideal of a republican constitution, which would enshrine principles of distributive justice, which apportion reward with desert. The moral duty to realize the highest good, to strive for the ideals of a republican constitution, would seem to make political action the final answer to the Rousseauian pessimist. Kant seemed to be saying against Rousseau: if we only strive for the ideal of a republican constitution, we will achieve, or at least approach, the freedom and equality of the lost state of nature. Life will have a purpose after all, and all our struggles can make a difference, making life worthwhile after all.
Yet, as much as Kant seems to imply this, he had placed severe constraints on human political action. He did not believe in the powers of co-ordinated political action, in human beings coming together and achieving through their own efforts grand republican ideals.40 Success in political endeavours depends too much on fortune, on the beneficent guiding hand of providence. That the republican constitution will eventually come into being depends not on us, Kant held, but the mechanism of nature, which ultimately involves providence, the divine design behind nature. In the end, then, Kant’s response to pessimism rests on religious faith, the belief in the power of the creator to guide human beings towards their final end.
Philosophers in the neo-Kantian tradition shared Kant’s basic optimism, even if they did not accept the details of his theory of history. They reaffirmed his belief in progress, his hope that humanity, through constant striving and effort, could at least approach, if not attain, the ideals of a republican constitution. They were less willing to accept, however, Kant’s teleology and theology. Not ready to rest their faith in providence, which they saw as a residue of the old theology, they believed instead in the power of the human will and the efficacy of direct action. Man had to take control over his own fate, and he could not wait for providence or nature to do things for him. If people would only work together in political associations, they could transform the political order and make progress towards Kant’s grand ideals.
The locus classicus for this activist response to Rousseau’s cultural pessimism is the fifth of Fichte’s famous lectures on Die Bestimmung des Gelehrten,41 which he delivered in Jena in 1794. Here Fichte argued against Rousseau that we should see moral corruption as the result of a specific culture and state—that of the ancien régime—and not as the result of culture and the state in general. While Rousseau pined for the lost golden age of nature, where men lived in peace, justice and harmony, he should have realized that this is achievable only in a republican constitution. What he saw behind us in the past, Fichte declared, we should now put ahead of us in the future as a goal for human striving. Fichte’s remedy for Rousseau’s pessimism was thus political activism. His lectures closed with a rousing call to political action: “Act! Act!, that is what we are here for.”42 No one believed more passionately than Fichte in the powers of the human will to transform its world.
It was Fichte’s radical Promethean faith—not Kant’s belief in providence—that entered into the mainstream of the neo-Kantian tradition.43 The deep strain of Fichtean activism in the neo-Kantian tradition first became apparent in the early 1860s. It was in the beginning of this decade that several prominent neo-Kantians—Kuno Fischer, Jürgen Bona Meyer, Rudolf Haym and Eduard Zeller—celebrated Fichte for his political activism on behalf of the liberal-national cause. The occasion for their celebration lay in their own need to reassert their liberal and national ideals, which had been defeated in 1848, but which had forever remained in their hearts. After Kaiser Wilhelm I came to the throne in 1861, it was imperative to remind the new monarch of his potential future role in creating German unity. Who better than Fichte to remind his majesty of his duties? For in his Reden an die deutsche Nation Fichte, still very much the firebrand of 1794, called upon Germans to resist their French occupiers and demanded the creation of a single German nation.44 In the early 1860s that Fichtean ideal seemed more timely than ever, especially for those liberals who never lost faith in German unity. Given that Fichte was the right messenger, the only question was when to call upon him. What better opportunity than the centenary of his birth, May 1862? Speakers could affirm their liberal-national cause through Fichte without raising the suspicions of censors. And so, on March 3, 1862, the Berlin chapter of the Deutsche National Verein—a liberal-national organization of some 25,000 members advocating German unity under Prussian leadership—resolved to celebrate the centenary of Fichte’s birth, leaving it to other local chapters to organize their own events. Those other chapters were more than happy to follow suit. Thus on May 19, 1862 there were celebrations of the Fichte centenary throughout Germany.45 Some 2,500 individuals participated in the Berlin celebration alone. Among the neo-Kantians, Fischer, Meyer and Haym gave speeches.46
The Fichte-Feier of 1862 was of the greatest importance for the rehabilitation of Kant, who piggy-backed on Fichte’s success.47 For it was made clear through the many speeches that the father of Fichte’s liberal ideals, and the founder of his philosophy, was Immanuel Kant. It was Fischer who spearheaded this Fichtean interpretation of Kant, for he had argued in the third volume of his Geschichte der Philosophie that Kant’s philosophy was completed through Fichte.48 This was true not only with respect to Kant’s theoretical philosophy, Fischer argued, but also with regard to his practical philosophy. Just as Fichte eliminated the thing-in-itself from the theoretical philosophy, so he removed the last vestiges of religious hypostasis, namely, the belief in providence, from his practical philosophy. Fichte’s great advance over Kant was in seeing that we could change the world through our own actions, and that we did not have to rely on or wait for providence. As Fischer described Fichte’s activism in his centenary address: “Kant had reformed philosophy, Fichte wanted reform through the Kantian philosophy.”49
It was with this optimistic Fichteanism that the neo-Kantians would confront the phenomenon of pessimism in the 1860s. Just as Fichte had refused to accept Rousseau’s pessimism, so the neo-Kantians would react against Schopenhauer’s and Hartmann’s fashionable Weltschmerz. For all the differences between Rousseau’s pessimism and its 19th-century German variants, there was still a common denominator: the belief that political action is futile, that we cannot remove the sources of human calamity through striving. The real problem with Schopenhauer’s pessimism lay for the neo-Kantians in its quietism, its belief that it is necessary to resign to the evils of life because they are inescapable and irremediable. We now need to take a closer look at that quietism and see how the neo-Kantians reacted to it.
“Abandon all hope you who enter here” would have been a fitting motto for Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. For in every possible way Schopenhauer undermines his reader’s hopes of making a difference to life and improving the world. In Book IV of his pessimistic masterpiece Schopenhauer builds his case, piece by piece, for why the only appropriate response to life lies in resignation, in the denial of the will to life. Why is all hope futile? Schopenhauer gives several reasons. First, even if we created the perfect state, there would still be many evils intrinsic to life itself (I, 478; §62). The only purpose of the state is to prevent people from harming one another; but it cannot provide them with happiness. And even if all conflicts between people were resolved within the state, there would still be conflicts between states. Second, virtue cannot be taught, because it rests upon inner disposition and innate character rather than external behaviour; all the constraints of the law and all the inducements of education act only upon external behaviour.50 This means that all attempts to create virtue through political reform and education cannot succeed. Third, there is no progress in history, but everything stays the same. “The motto of history should be ‘eadem sed aliter’ [the same but in a different way].”51 The Hegelian doctrine of reason in history, the thesis that history conforms to ends and progressively realizes them, rests upon a confusion of the contingent realm of fact with the necessary truths of reason. Fourth, cosmic justice does not consist in an ideal world where happiness is in proportion to merit but in the real world just as we see it before us; whatever happens is right just because the will wills it, and whatever the will wills is just because it wills it (I, 480; §63). Hence world justice is the course of the world itself. Rather than judging the world by moral standards extrinsic to it, we should learn to adjust to its own immanent standards of justice. We should resign ourselves to whatever happens, however horrible, because it is just, a manifestation of that cosmic will which is the source of all justice.
Schopenhauer’s quietism was essentially a rehabilitation of the old Christian and Buddhistic ethic, which preached salvation by self-denial and renunciation. No one was more aware of the historical provenance of his doctrine in this regard than Schopenhauer himself. “The true spirit and core of Christianity,” he wrote, lay in “the recognition of the nothingness of earthly happiness, the complete contempt for it, and the turning towards a completely different, even opposed existence.”52 In the penultimate chapter of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung Schopenhauer went out of his way to stress the affinity of his teaching with the old Christian ethics.53 No, Schopenhauer did not believe in God or the kingdom of heaven; but he did expressly rehabilitate the concepts of sin, grace, deliverance and redemption, where redemption lay in withdrawal from the world and renunciation of all striving of the will.54
Nothing could be more opposed to this quietistic Christian ethic than Fichte’s Prometheanism. Rather than resigning oneself to the world and attempting to escape it, Fichte preached rebelling against it and striving to transform it. The very will Schopenhauer wanted to renounce Fichte wanted to enflame. While Schopenhauer saw the striving of the will as the chief source of mankind’s problems, Fichte viewed it as the sole means for its redemption, because only through that striving could it achieve the ideals of a republican constitution. Nowhere is Fichte’s opposition with the Christian tradition more apparent than in his claim that the unification of all striving Fichtean agents would be nothing less than God.55 Of course, this is an ideal these agents would never reach; but they could make progress towards it, approaching it if not attaining it.
This Fichtean Promethianism was the ultimate motivating force, the guiding spirit, behind the neo-Kantian critique of Schopenhauer’s pessimism. While it is constantly present and presupposed, it is not always made explicit. There are places in the neo-Kantian polemic, however, where it emerges explicitly and unmistakably. One of these places appears in one of the earliest reviews of Schopenhauer’s Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung: Herbart’s justly appreciative yet highly critical review, which appeared in Hermes in 1820.56 At the close of his review Herbart focuses on Schopenhauer’s controversial remarks that optimism is not only an absurd but a pernicious way of thinking because it makes light of “the inexpressible suffering of humanity”.57 To this “declaration” Herbart responds with one of his own: that he regards himself as an optimist, not of the dogmatic theoretical kind that Schopenhauer rails against, but one of a more practical kind. He confesses that he is an optimist “by disposition” (der Gesinnung nach), which means that, though the world is a bad place, he is disposed to do as much as he can to make it a better one. This practical optimist believes that the physical sufferings of humanity are bearable, but that the real source of human unhappiness lies in “social relations”, which it is the duty of all humanity to address. Herbart then likens the fate of humanity to something very mundane that he has seen lately: an untended bean garden. The beans are growing out of the earth in great profusion; but because their growth is wild, only a few of the plants prosper, preventing others from growing to their full height or even suffocating them from lack of light. If these less fortunate beans had consciousness, they would become Schopenhauerian pessimists. They would whine about the useless urge to life, they would pity one another, and then they would find solace in the “denial of the will to life”. But, Herbart asks, is their situation really so hopeless? What these beans are lacking is a few good gardeners who know how to place poles to direct their growth, so that all can grow to a great height. The moral is clear: what humanity needs is just a few good reformers who know how to regulate its affairs through wise laws and institutions. Though by the 1820s Herbart had long since outgrown Fichte’s metaphysics, his response to Schopenhauer betrayed his lingering Fichtean activism. For his response was precisely that of a Fichtean educator of humanity, who believed that the world could indeed become a better place if we reformed its social and political institutions through the education of its youth. That old Fichtean faith never died in Herbart and it dictated in no small measure his reaction to Schopenhauer’s pessimism.
Another revealing neo-Kantian response to Schopenhauer’s quietism appears in Meyer’s illuminating 1886 essay ‘Weltlust und Weltleid’.58 Meyer explicitly considers the quietistic implications of Schopenhauer’s pessimism. What would most people do, he asks, if they were faced with the option of ending their life with all its burdens? They might choose to end it all, just as Schopenhauer predicts. But, Meyer then adds, they would also probably be like the overburdened man in the fable: as soon as he saw death approaching, he quickly picked up his load again. His one fervent wish is only for a little help in lightening his burden. The moral of the story is plain enough: there is nothing instrinsically insufferable about life; if people only help one another, they will find life bearable. Writing in the late 1880s, Meyer finds the persistent popularity of pessimism puzzling. He notes the great achievements of the times, the creation of national unity, victory on the battlefield, technical and social progress. These are no times for “a dark lament about the world”, he claims, because we can now all have faith again in “the moral world order”. But Meyer makes it clear that this faith ultimately rests not on the workings of providence, still less the laws of history, but in the power of our own individual actions. His Fichtean activism reveals itself loud and clear when he declares that we should now create this world order through our own deeds. Man is not born to suffer evil, to lament misery or to resign himself to the evils of the world; rather, the purpose of life is to fight evil and misery. Our greatest happiness lies in striving “to create and promote the welfare of humanity through service to the ideas of the good, beautiful and true.” We can even derive pleasure from this striving, so that one day we can declare with Posa: “Life is still beautiful!”
The neo-Kantian attitude towards Schopenhauer’s quietism is illustrated most beautifully and simply by a late essay of Otto Liebmann’s, ‘Trilologie des Pessimismus’, which appeared in his Gedanken und Thatsachen.59 The trilogy tells the story of three pessimists: Hegesias, an ancient philosopher, who teaches suicide as the only solution to life’s problems; Timon the misanthrope, who, after becoming the victim of fraud and treachery, retires from humanity and decries its evil nature; and Buddha, who preaches renunciation of desire and the value of withdrawal from the world. Liebmann finds all these attitudes understandable but ultimately too extreme. Life is neither a heaven nor a hell. But we should not pretend to play the role of the ancient gods and to look down upon it as if it were a tragedy or comedy. “Rather, we should fight and we should act.” (262). The pessimists and optimists of this world fail to see that life or existence in itself is neither good nor evil. These are relative qualities, depending on the attitude of human beings to things. And whether things are good or bad depends not only on how we look at them but upon what we do with them (266).
Although there are other instances of this Promethian faith in the neo-Kantian polemic, the examples we have chosen here make it especially clear, striking and piquant. By now it should be fully clear that the battle between neo-Kantianism and pessimism was indeed ultimately one between Fichtean activism and Schopenhauerian quietism. This is not to say, however, that this was the only source of friction between the neo-Kantians and Schopenhauer. One final issue remains. While this issue does not strictly concern Schopenhauer’s pessimism, it does concern his politics and his relation to the post-Kantian tradition in general. Since this issue has been important for the reception of neo-Kantianism, it is important that we discuss it here.
In the late 1840s Schopenhauer wrote an essay for his collection Parerga und Paralipomena on philosophy in the universities, ‘Über die Universitäts-philosophie’,60 in which he called into question the whole practice of teaching philosophy at universities. Schopenhauer criticized professors of philosophy as servants of religion and the state, as modern sophists who were more interested in living from philosophy than living for it. Schopenhauer’s chief targets were Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, but he also did not hesitate to take aim at some early neo-Kantians, most notably Fries and Herbart. Although Schopenhauer did not live to see the rise of the neo-Kantian movement in the 1860s, there could be little question what he would have thought of its members. Since most neo-Kantians were professors at universities, they too would have been victims of his wrath.
Thanks to its malicious tone and ferocious wit, Schopenhauer’s essay proved very popular and became highly successful. Neo-Kantianism has been living under its shadow ever since. Schopenhauer’s essay helped to solidify the reputation of neo-Kantianism as a conservative movement which endorsed the social, political and intellectual status quo.61 Schopenhauer’s criticism of university philosophy, which was later endorsed by Kierkegaard and the young Nietzsche,62 has also been very influential in forming the conception that creative, innovative philosophy in the 19th century took place outside the university. To many, such philosophy seems to have been the work of Schopenhauer, Marx, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, who were not academics. These are the grand revolutionary thinkers of the 19th century, we are told, and they are enshrined today in the textbooks,63 and written about ad nauseum. Since the neo-Kantians, as university philosophers, have fallen out of this scheme, they have been almost entirely neglected.
Because of the influence of Schopenhauer’s essay, we do well to consider its claims and contents; and, in the interests of fairness, we should see what neo-Kantians had to say about it.
Schopenhauer’s essay is for the most part a screed, lambasting and lampooning the university philosophers, who are chiefly Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. Schopenhauer refers to their work in the most scurrilous and derogatory tones. Since he condemns it wholesale and never subjects it to a detailed examination, it would be pointless to give any weight to his diatribes. The reader learns nothing about what is problematic in the philosophy of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. What is obvious to all is Schopenhauer’s motives in making this criticism, which he makes painfully apparent in several passages.64 Desperate for literary fame, Schopenhauer feels that the university professors have completely ignored his work and that they have refused to give it the recognition it deserves. He writes as if there were a conspiracy against him, as if the whole academic establishment were scheming to deny a fair hearing to his writings. This raises the hypothetical question: what if Fichte, Schelling or Hegel had written favourable reviews of his work? In that case would Schopenhauer have railed against them?
It would be a mistake, though, to dismiss Schopenhauer’s essay as a failed polemic.65 For all its bombast, vitriol and wounded vanity, it put a finger upon a real problem with university philosophy. Schopenhauer’s main point is that university philosophy is hopelessly compromised because it cannot teach anything contrary to religion and state. The philosopher is the employee of the state, which can exert censorship over him. We cannot expect the state to do otherwise, Schopenhauer argues, because it is not in its interests to employ someone to criticize, either implicitly or explicitly, its policies or its official religion. However, philosophy requires, Schopenhauer rightly insists, complete intellectual freedom, the right to take an investigation wherever it might lead, whatever the consequences for conventional morality, religion or state. Philosophy simply cannot serve two masters, truth and the world. In making this point Schopenhauer was taking on the mantle of Lessing, who had argued for such freedom of enquiry in the 18th century. But he was taking Lessing’s campaign on behalf of free enquiry a step further, pointing out that the dangers to it lay as much in the university as in press censorship. It would be foolish to underrate the importance of Schopenhauer’s criticism, which points out a danger that continues to exist in state universities to this day, especially in Germany, where every professor is a civil servant.
Granted that there is some merit to Schopenhauer’s criticism, the question remains whether it applies to the neo-Kantians. Were they university philosophers as Schopenhauer portrays them? It has to be said that Schopenhauer’s portrait was not only unfair but contemptible. Schopenhauer writes as if all university philosophers were obedient and obsequious servants of the state, who would write their philosophy to suit government policy and religious dogma. Against this, we have to consider the harsh and blunt reality: that from the 1820s to the 1860s, the formative years of neo-Kantianism, most neo-Kantians were persecuted or even prosecuted by the state. They stood by their convictions and writings; and they were punished for it, often at great personal cost. This was the case for Fries, Beneke, Fischer, Zeller and Lange.
What was the neo-Kantian reaction to Schopenhauer’s essay? Though they did not know the essay itself, the early neo-Kantians knew well enough the views that went into it. Even before its publication in the 1850s, Schopenhauer’s tirades about Fichte, Schelling and Hegel were well known, sprinkled as they were throughout Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. As critical as they were of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, the early neo-Kantians never once endorsed Schopenhauer’s diatribes. They felt that his remarks went beyond the pale of civilized criticism, and that they were simple ventings of envy and sour grapes. The young Beneke censured Schopenhauer’s diatribes as “unworthy of a philosopher”; and Herbart went out of his way to show how Schopenhauer’s ideas resembled those of his old teacher, Fichte. That the world is the self-consciousness of the will, Herbart pointed out, was a central theme of Fichte’s later philosophy.
Three later neo-Kantians, Haym, Paulsen and Fischer, responded explicitly to Schopenhauer’s views on university philosophy. In his Arthur Schopenhauer,66 one of the first monographs on the philosopher and surely one of the most savagely critical, Haym scoffed at Schopenhauer’s claim that his essay was the greatest invective since Cicero’s In Verrem. This piece was nothing more than arrogant bluster, “a series of noisy insults” (94). Haym reaffirmed Herbart’s and Beneke’s points about the uncivilized manner of Schopenhauer’s diatribes. Never before and since had there been such unabashed rudeness in literary discourse. “Schopenhauer’s crudity is pure, positive and undisguished crudity.” (89) The tone in which he expressed his views about Fichte, Schelling, Herbart and Hegel was that in which sailors, coachmen, street ruffians and fishermen’s wives cursed one another. This animosity had nothing to do with his opposition to their ideas but had everything to do with his personality, especially his arrogance, his belief in his own genius and the admiration it deserved (91). Schopenhauer’s diatribes were at their most shameless when it came to his attacks on Fichte. Haym reiterated Herbart’s point that Schopenhauer had failed to acknowledge his great debt to Fichte. After Plato and Kant, no philosopher influenced Schopenhauer more than Fichte (54–55). Haym implied that one reason for the bitterness of Schopenhauer’s polemic against Fichte and Schelling is that he felt threatened by them: he knew their ideas were similar to his own, and to protect his originality he declared his contempt for them (93). Rather than agreeing with Schopenhauer about the dangers of university philosophy, Haym averred that nothing would have helped Schopenhauer more than employment at a university (87–88). If he had remained at the university, he would have learned to clarify and develop his ideas, because he would have to make his philosophy more comprehensible to students and to respond to the objections of colleagues. He would also have learned more about the different sciences, and would have adapted his ideas to the latest research. Instead of learning in these ways, Schopenhauer responded to university life with scorn and turned inwards and isolated himself, repeating over and over again the same ideas he had in his early years.
Paulsen and Fischer took the response to Schopenhauer’s diatribe to a new level: their target was not the philosophy but the man. This approach, already implicit in Haym, was developed by Paulsen in an 1882 essay ‘Arthur Schopenhauer’, which was later republished as part of his 1901 book on pessimism, Schopenhauer, Hamlet, Mephistoteles.67 Only when we consider Schopenhauer’s pathology, Paulsen argued, can we begin to make sense of some of his opinions, especially those concerning university philosophers (53). No one can take seriously Schopenhauer’s belief that there was a conspiracy of university professors against him (48–49). This belief becomes comprehensible only when we consider the two dominant characteristics of his personality: an extraordinarily high opinion of himself and his craving for recognition, especially through literary fame. What, Paulsen asks, did Schopenhauer really expect from these professors? Reviews, citations, refutations? Hardly. What he wanted was admirers, disciples and acolytes, people who would pay homage to his genius (51). The university professors, whose very intellectual independence he doubted, were in fact much too independent to give him the discipleship he wanted. While Haym thought that an academic career might have done Schopenhauer some good, taking off the rougher edges of his testy personality, Paulsen thought that Schopenhauer knew himself well enough not to persist in a career so unsuitable for his nature (32). Never would he have settled for the stuff of academic routine, setting exams, grading papers and sitting on committees. He thought too much of himself to bother with such routine and petty matters. Behind all Schopenhauer’s contempt for university philosophers, Paulsen perceptively said, lay his class consciousness, his patrician self-esteem, which made him look down upon those from a lower social stratum who had to make their money from publications and lectures (21).
Kuno Fischer treated the problem of Schopenhauer’s character in a short tract published in the 1890s, Der Philosoph des Pessimismus.68 It is fair game to consider not only Schopenhauer’s philosophy but also his character, Fischer argued, given that he saw himself as the leader of a new sect of Western Buddhism (416–417). He pointed out the great discrepancy between Schopenhauer’s personal life and his own pessimism. Here was a man who preached the value of ascetism, but who lived the life of a bon vivant. And here was a man who prized humility and self-denial, but who was obsessed with his own literary fame. The discrepancy between Schopenhauer’s philosophy and character disappear, however, if we measure his life by aesthetic rather than ethical standards. For Schopenhauer, as a child of the Romantic age, saw himself as a genius, and this was a role he played throughout his life (420–421). In his larger monograph, Schopenhauers Leben, Werke und Lehre,69 Fischer applied the same kind of approach to Schopenhauer’s views on university philosophy. Here he points out two very revealing discrepancies between Schopenhauer’s life and philosophy. While these discrepancies do not undermine the validity of Schopenhauer’s criticisms of university philosophy, they do cast serious doubts on his motives. The first discrepancy concerns Schopenhauer’s own desire for a university career. Schopenhauer was himself a university philosopher, and on several occasions flirted with the idea of a university career, Fischer points out. Though he lectured for only one semester in Berlin, he remained inscribed as a Dozent for ten years, even making use of that formality to impress a prospective British publisher. Since Schopenhauer was no success as a university lecturer, and since he also sought, but failed to attain, a position in Heidelberg, it seems that his spleen about university philosophy was motivated by envy and resentment. The second discrepancy is more serious. In his essay Schopenhauer portrays himself as the 19th-century Lessing, whose fundamental ideal is freedom of enquiry. Yet when the reaction came in the 1850s, Schopenhauer was beside himself with joy when left-wing university professors had their venia legendi revoked.70 To his reactionary mind, the materialists, the left-wing Hegelians and the liberals all got what they deserved. Rather than championing academic freedom and liberty of press, Schopenhauer turned out to be champion of censorship.
Fischer had an understandable reason for pursuing these ad hominem criticisms. For Schopenhauer’s rant about university professors had impugned not only their integrity but also his own. He pointed out that insinuations about servility were completely unfair when it came to thinkers like Ludwig Feuerbach, David Friedrich Strauß, Theodor Vischer, Bruno Bauer and Arnold Ruge, who had all been victims of state persecution, and who had all abandoned their ambitions for a university career because of their convictions and writings.71 Fischer might well have included in that list two of his neo-Kantian contemporaries: Eduard Zeller and Friedrich Lange. Last but not least, though he was too modest to mention it, he could have added himself. While Schopenhauer did note that Fischer had been banished,72 this hardly satisfied Fischer, who rightly believed that Schopenhauer’s portrait of his contemporaries was a scandal that made light of the fact of their very real suffering and persecution.
But let us leave aside all these ad hominem points, which do nothing to address the main philosophical issue. In one of the few philosophically valuable passages of Schopenhauer’s screed he complains that the university philosophers have been ignoring, for the sake of theology, the most fundamental question of all, the question of existence or whether life is worth living.73 This complaint was later made by Karl Lӧwith against the neo-Kantians, who, he had argued, had lost sight of this problem, which later became so important for Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and the neo-Hegelians.74 We will soon see that that there is some justice to this complaint, because the neo-Kantians originally defined philosophy as the logic of the sciences, leaving out of account its traditional ethical concerns.75 It is necessary to add, however, that the neo-Kantians themselves became aware of this shortcoming and revised their definition accordingly. If in the 1860s and early 1870s they saw philosophy as nothing but the logic of the sciences, in the 1880s and 1890s they broadened the definition of philosophy to include ethics and the question of the value of life. Philosophy should no longer be simply science, the neo-Kantians believed, because it also had to be a worldview.
For the neo-Kantians, then, no less than Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, the question of the value of existence eventually became a central issue. But they differ from these 19th-century giants in one important respect: for them, the problem of the value of existence is fundamentally a political problem. Though the state is no remedy for all human suffering, the creation of a just state, based on principles of liberty, equality and fraternity, does make life much more bearable and so much more worth living. Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, in their view, had made suffering an eternal part of the human condition, neglecting the importance of society, the state and history in shaping the fate of human beings. The neo-Hegelians would make similar criticisms of these Lebensphilosophen, who they regarded as insufficiently historical. But the neo-Kantian position also differs from the neo-Hegelians in one important respect: it denies the Hegelian faith in historical inevitability and the rationality of history. For the neo-Kantians, the only thing that will make the world more rational is our own actions, taking the responsibility for our world into our own hands and striving to create better laws and institutions.
The great virtue of the neo-Kantian position is that it gave hope while avoiding the hypostases of providence or reason in history. It rightly admonishes us that existence can be worthwhile, that life can be worth living, but only if we make it so. That was the ultimate neo-Kantian credo, which emerged so clearly in their response to pessimism. This was the lesson handed down to the neo-Kantian socialists of the early 20th century, to Franz Staudiger, Eduard Bernstein and Karl Vorländer.76
1 Arthur Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1819).
2 Eduard von Hartmann, Philosophie des Unbewussten: Versuch einer Weltanschauung (Berlin: Duncker, 1869). The book was reprinted eight times in the 1870s alone. Windelband referred to the “meteorhaften Erfolg” of Hartmann’s work, ‘Die Philosophischen Richtungen der Gegenwart’, in Grosse Denker, ed. Ernst von Aster (Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1911), II, 365. On Hartmann, see Otto Braun, Eduard von Hartmann (Stuttgart: Frommann, 1909).
3 Rudolf Haym, Arthur Schopenhauer (Berlin: Reimer, 1864); Jürgen Bona Meyer, Arthur Schopenhauer als Mensch und Denker (Berlin: Carl Habel, 1872); Kuno Fischer, Schopenhauers Leben, Werke und Lehre, Zweite Auflage, Band IX of Geschichte der neuern Philosophie (Heidelberg: Winter, 1898); Johannes Volkelt, Arthur Schopenhauer. Seine Persönlichkeit, seine Lehre, sein Glaube (Stuttgart: Frommann, 1900).
4 At least Schopenhauer’s pessimism was disturbing. Whether Hartmann’s pessimism was so is another question. Hartmann protested that his pessimism was not quietistic but only eudemonic, that is, it held that there is more suffering than happiness in life. See his Philosophie des Unbewussten, Zweite Auflage (1870), pp. 642–646, 675–76. Hartmann advocated what he called an “evolutionary optimism”, according to which history is progressing towards greater moral perfection. He attempted to distance his own pessimism from Schopenhauer’s quietism. See Hartmann’s ‘Mein Entwicklungsgang’ in Gesammelte Studien und Aufsätze (Berlin: Duncker, 1876), pp. 38–40; and ‘Mein Verhältnis mit Schopenhauer’, in Philosophische Fragen der Gegenwart (Berlin: Duncker, 1885), pp. 25–37. In his ‘Kant als Vater des Pessimismus’, Zur Geschichte und Begründunng des Pessimismus (Berlin: Duncker, 1880), pp. 1–64, Hartmann enlisted Kant into the pessimistic cause, arguing that he advocated the same eudemonic pessimism and evolutionary optimism as himself. The neo-Kantians were not convinced. See his dispute with them in Philosophische Fragen der Gegenwart, pp. 112–120.
5 Fischer’s explanation is in Schopenhauers Leben, Werke und Lehre, pp. 97–103, and in his Der Philosoph des Pessimismus, in Kleine Schriften (Heidelberg: Winter, 1898), II, 401. Meyer’s explanation is in his essay ‘Weltlust und Weltleid’, in Probleme der Weltweisheit, Zweite Auflage (Berlin: Allgemeine Verein für Deutsche Literatur, 1887), pp. 293–295.
6 Fischer, Schopenhauers Leben, Werke und Lehre, p. 101.
7 Johannes Volkelt, ‘Die Entwicklung des modernen Pessimismus’, Im neuen Reich II (1872), 952–968, p. 967.
8 Agnes Taubert, Der Pessimismus und seine Gegner (Berlin: Duncker, 1873), pp. 103–105, 114–117.
9 This political dimension has been stressed by Klaus Köhnke, Entstehung und Aufstieg des Neukantianismus (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986), pp. 327–336.
10 On Schopenhauer’s political views, see Fischer, Schopenhauers Leben, Werke und Lehre, pp. 97–103.
11 The neo-Kantians were also active in combating Hartmann’s pessimism. See, for example, Rudolf Haym, Die Hartmann’sche Philosophie des Unbewusstseins (Berlin: Reimer, 1873); Johannes Volkelt, Die Entwicklung des modernen Pessimismus (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1872); and Jürgen Bona Meyer, Weltelend und Weltschmerz. Eine Reden gegen Schopenhauer’s und Hartmann’s Pessimismus (Bonn: Marcus, 1872). The dispute with Hartmann’s pessimism would be, however, another chapter.
12 Cf. Schopenhauer, I, 436–437, §57. All references to Schopenhauer’s works will be to Arthur Schopenhauer. Sämtliche Werke, ed. Wolfgang Freiherr von Löhneysen (Stuttgart: Insel, 1968), Roman numerals refer to volume numbers and Arabic numerals to page numbers. “§” indicates the chapter or section number. WWV stands for Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung.
13 WWV, I, 165, §20; 174, §23; 240, §29; 427, §57.
14 WWV, I, 5 15, 540, §68; and I, 547, §70.
15 Fischer, Schopenhauers Leben, Werke und Lehre, p. 104. Some of Schopenhauer’s hopes for a new Western Buddhism appear in WWV, I, 487; §64.
16 Here the one exception is Johannes Volkelt’s Schopenhauer, which attempts to provide a balanced appraisal of Schopenhauer’s pessimism. See pp. 212, 229, 231, 246–247, 257. Volkelt found Schopenhauer’s pessimism a worthwhile antithesis to optimism and the “Fortschrittsphilister”.
17 In some respects the campaign against pessimism continued well into the 1920s. See Heinrich Rickert’s Die Philosophie des Lebens (Tübingen: Mohr, 1920), which takes issue with Schopenhauer on several occasions, pp. 18, 21, 139, 162. Yet in other respects Schopenhauer had become less important by the 1920s, downgraded to a precursor of more dangerous figures, especially Nietzsche.
18 See Windelband, ‘Pessimismus und Wissenschaft’ (1876), Präludien, ninth edition (Tübingen: Mohr, 1924), II, 218–243; Friedrich Paulsen, ‘Gründen und Ursachen des Pessimismus’, Deutsche Rundschau 48 (1886), 360–381; Liebmann, ‘Trilogie des Pessimismus’, in Gedanken und Thatsachen (Straßburg: Karl Trübner, 1902), II, 265–266; Jürgen Bona Meyer, Arthur Schopenhauer als Mensch und Denker, pp. 44–45; and Alois Riehl, Zur Einführung in die Philosophie der Gegenwart, Fünfte Auflage (Leipzig: Teubner, 1919), p. 187.
19 Windelband, ‘Pessimismus und Wissenschaft’, pp. 23–33.
20 Paulsen, ‘Gründen und Ursachen des Pessimismus’, pp. 361–362, 367; Meyer, ‘Weltlust und Weltleid’, pp. 263–264.
21 WWV, I, 443, §59; 426, §56.
22 Thus Paulsen, ‘Gründen und Ursachen des Pessimismus’, p. 365; Meyer, ‘Weltlust und Weltleid’, p. 269; Volkelt, Schopenhauer, p. 214.
23 Thus Windelband, ‘Pessimismus und Wissenschaft’, p. 237; Riehl, Einführung, pp. 182, 189; Paulsen, ‘Gründen und Ursachen des Pessimismus’, p. 363; Meyer, ‘Weltlust und Weltleid’, pp. 258, 270; Volkelt, Schopenhauer, p. 216.
24 Otto Liebmann, Kant und die Epigonen (Stuttgart: Schober, 1865), pp. 191–192.
25 Meyer, Arthur Schopenhauer als Mensch und Denker, p. 32.
26 Riehl, Einführung, p. 177.
27 Riehl, Einführung, p. 178.
28 WWV, I, 169–170; §21. Cf. WWV, I, 165, §19.
29 Liebmann, Kant und die Epigonen, p. 194.
30 Meyer, Arthur Schopenhauer als Mensch, p. 38.
31 Riehl, Einführung, pp. 178–179.
32 Fischer, Schopenhauers Leben, Werke und Lehre, p. 514; Meyer, Arthur Schopenhauer als Mensch, p. 45; Haym, Schopenhauer, pp. 31–32; Riehl, Einführung, pp. 183–184; and Volkelt, Schopenhauer, pp. 262–264.
33 WWV, I, 225; §27. Cf. 245–246; §33. See especially Kap. 19, ‘Vom Primat des Willens im Selbstbewußtsein’, WWV, II, 259–316.
34 Schopenhauer poses the difficulty on several occasions, admitting that the self-renunciation would involve a contradiction in the will itself. See WWV, I, 397, §55; 414, §55; 457, §62. He finally addresses it in sections §§68 and 70. At §70 he states that the core of the difficulty is resolved by noting that, according to his theory, the will does not have to deny itself because its direction is changed by an act of insight independent of the will. But this does not address the question of how there can be such insight independent of the will. Schopenhauer distinguishes between knowledge of the intellect following the principle of sufficient reason and the immediate knowledge involved in knowing my own inner nature. While the former kind of knowledge is directed by the will, the latter is not. This distinction, though, does not really help him. One still wants to know why such immediate knowledge, given the omnipotence and omnipresence of the will, is free from its direction. In the end, Schopenhauer wants us to accept at face value the claims of mystics and spiritualists about their transcendent, life changing experiences. But if these really are facts, they are not in accord with his metaphysical theory.
35 Jean Jacques Rousseau, Discours sur les sciences et les arts, in Œuvres complètes, eds Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), III, 1–30.
36 Kant, Schriften VIII, 15–31.
37 See Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, IV, 395–396.
38 Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, IV, 412.
39 KrV, B 833–837.
40 See Kant’s ‘Über den Gemeinspruch: Das mag in der Theorie richtig sein, taugt aber nicht für die Praxis’, AA VIII, 308–312. On the ineliminable metaphysical and theological dimension of Kant’s ideals, see my article ‘Moral Faith and the Highest Good’, in The Cambridge Companion to Kant and Modern Philosophy, ed. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 588–629.
41 Fichte, Sämtliche Werke, ed. I.H. Fichte (Berlin: Veit, 1845–1846), VI, 335–346.
42 Fichte, Sämtliche Werke, VI, 345.
43 On the enormous influence of Fichte on neo-Kantianism in the 1860s, see Köhnke, Entstehung und Aufstieg, pp. 186–194. For Fichte’s importance for neo-Kantianism in the early 20th century, see Hermann Lübbe, Politische Philosophie in Deutschland (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1974), pp. 194–205.
44 It is noteworthy that Fichte’s concept of national unity is more cultural than political; Fichte wants to realize a national German character; but he does not envisage a single national German state. What matters to him is simply that different German states have a common program of education to realize this character. He even states that it is indifferent to him whether there is one or many German states. See Fichte, Reden an die deutsche Nation, Sämtliche Werke VII, 397–398, 437–438. For the political purposes of the Fichte-Feier, however, this was an embarrassing nicety that it was better not to mention.
45 On the extent of these celebrations, see the chart and map in Köhnke, Entstehung und Aufstieg, pp. 190–191.
46 Jürgen Bona Meyer, Über Fichte’s Reden an die deutsche Nation (Hamburg: Meissner, 1862); Rudolf Haym, Eine Erinnerung an Johann Gottlieb Fichte (Berlin: Reimer, 1861); Kuno Fischer, ‘Johann Gottlieb Fichte’, in Akademischen Reden (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1862), 1–75. Zeller wrote an appreciative account of Fichte only two years earlier, ‘Johann Gottlieb Fichte als Politiker’, Historische Zeitschrift, 40 (1860), 1–35.
47 Here I follow Köhnke, Entstehung und Aufstieg, pp. 188, 193.
48 Kuno Fischer, Immanuel Kant: Entwicklungsgeschichte und System der kritischen Philosophie, Band III of Geschichte der neuern Philosophie (Mannheim: Bassermann, 1860), 344. Fischer’s interpretation was extolled by Carl Fortlage in an enthusiastic review, ‘Kuno Fischers Darstellung der Kant’schen Philosophie’, in the Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung Nr. 16, April 18, 1861, pp. 285–291, esp. 288. Fortlage praised how this Fichteanized version of Kant’s philosophy made “der Mensch sein eigener Herr”.
49 Fischer, ‘Johann Gottlieb Fichte’, p. 13.
50 WWV, I, 501–503, §66; and WWV, I, 405–406, §55.
51 See ‘Über Geschichte’, WWV, II, 563–573, p. 570.
52 WWV, II, 563–573, p. 569.
53 WWV, I, 547–554, §70.
54 See especially WWV, I, 520, §68; I, 548, §70.
55 Fichte, ‘Vorlesungen über die Bestimmung des Gelehrten’, Werke VI, 310.
56 Johann Friedrich Herbart, Review of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (Leipzig, 1819), Hermes, Stück 3 (1820), 131–149, in Sämtliche Werke XII, 56–75.
57 WWV, I, 447, §59.
58 Meyer, ‘Weltlust und Weltleid’, pp. 253–295.
59 Liebmann, Gedanken und Thatsachen, II, 235–267.
60 Schopenhauer, Sämtliche Werke, IV, 171–242.
61 The locus classicus for this conception of neo-Kantianism is Karl Löwith’s influential Von Hegel zu Nietzsche (Zurich: Europa Verlag, 1941), pp. 135, 136.
62 See Section 8 of Nietzsche’s ‘Schopenhauer als Erzieher’, which uncritically adopts Schopenhauer’s entire position. Sämtliche Werke, ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1980), I, 411–427.
63 The latest reference work to endorse this conception is Nineteenth-Century Philosophy: Revolutionary Responses to the Existing Order. Volume 2 of The History of Continental Philosophy, eds Alan Schrift and Daniel Conway (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010). See my review of this work in The Notre Dame Philosophical Review, August 25, 2011.
64 See Schopenhauer, Sämtliche Werke IV, 176–177, 225–226.
65 This is Fischer’s assessment, Schopenhauers Leben, Werke und Lehre, pp. 493–494.
66 Haym, Arthur Schopenhauer (Berlin: Reimer, 1864). All references in parentheses are to this edition.
67 Friedrich Paulsen, Schopenhauer, Hamlet, Mephistopheles: Drei Aufsätze zur Naturgeschichte des Pessimismus, Dritte Auflage (Stuttgart: Cotta Nachfolger, 1911). All references in parentheses are to this edition.
68 Kuno Fischer, Der Philosoph des Pessimismus. Ein Charakterproblem. (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1897). Reprinted in Kleine Schriften (Heidelberg: Winter, 1898), II, 389–446. All references are to this later edition.
69 Kuno Fischer, Schopenhauers Leben, Werke und Lehre, pp. 87–88, 492–494.
70 Fischer, Schopenhauers Leben, pp. 98–99.
71 Fischer, Schopenhauers Leben, p. 87.
72 Schopenhauer, Sämtliche Werke IV, 176.
73 Schopenhauer, Sämtliche Werke IV, 233.
74 Löwith, Von Hegel zu Nietzsche, pp. 135, 136.
75 See Part III Introduction, Section 2.
76 On these figures, see Hermann Lübbe, Politische Philosophie in Deutschland (Munich: deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1974), pp. 111–123.