The World as Will and Idea, Vol. II — Arthur Schopenhauer, trans. Haldane & Kemp
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The translator’s English as printed (R. B. Haldane & J. Kemp). The original-language text is not held; names are romanised as the translator printed them.
is remarkable ; before him it was in the same position as it still occupies in England.
This merit of Kant's is connected with the fact that the unreflecting pursuit of the laws of the phenomenon, the elevation of these to the position of eternal truths, and thus the raising of the fleeting appearance to the position of the real being of the world, in short, realism undisturbed in its illusion by any reflection, had reigned throughout all preceding philosophy, ancient, mediaeval, and modern.
Berkeley, who, like Malebranche before him, recognised its one-sidedness, and indeed falseness, was unable to overthrow it, for his attack was confined to one point. Thus it was reserved for Kant to enable the idealistic point of view to obtain the ascendancy in Europe, at least in philosophy ; the point of view which throughout all non-Mohammedan Asia, and indeed essentially, is that of religion.
Before Kant, then, we were in time ; now time is in us, and so on. Ethics also were treated by that realistic philosophy according to the laws of the phenomenon, which it regarded as absolute and valid also for the thing in itself.
They were therefore based now upon a doctrine of happiness, now upon the will of the Creator, and finally upon the conception of perfection ; a conception which, taken by itself, is entirely empty and void of content, for it denotes a mere relation that only receives significance from the things to which it is applied.
" To be perfect " means nothing more than " to correspond to some conception which is presupposed and given," a conception which must therefore be previously framed, and without which the perfection is an unknown quantity, and consequently has no meaning when expressed alone.
If, however, it is intended tacitly to presuppose the conception " humanity," and accordingly to make it the principle of morality to strive after human perfection, this is only saying : " Men ought to be as they ought to be," — and we are just as wise as before. In fact " perfect " is very nearly a mere synonym of " complete," for it signifies that in one given i6 CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY.
case or individual, all the predicates which lie in the conception of its species appear, thus are actually present. Therefore the conception " perfection," if used absolutely and in the abstract, is a word void of significance, and this is also the case with the talk about the " most perfect being," and other similar expressions. All this is a mere jingle of words. Nevertheless last century this conception of perfection and imperfection had become current coin ; indeed it was the hinge upon which almost all speculation upon ethics, and even theology, turned. It was in every one's mouth, so that at last it became a simple nuisance. We see even the best writers of the time, for example Lessing, entangled in the most deplorable manner in perfections and imperfections, and struggling with them. At the same time, every thinking man must at least dimly have felt that this conception is void of all positive content, because, like an algebraical symbol, it denotes a mere relation in abstracto. Kant, as we have already said, entirely separated the undeniably great ethical significance of actions from the phenomenon and its laws, and showed that the former directly concerned the thing in itself, the inner nature of the world, while the latter, %.e., time, space, and all that fills them, and disposes itself in them according to the law of causality, is to be regarded as a changing and unsubstantial dream.
The little I have said, which by no means exhausts the subject, may suffice as evidence of my recognition of the great merits of Kant, — a recognition expressed here both for my own satisfaction, and because justice demands that those merits should be recalled to the memory of every one who desires to follow me in the unsparing exposure of his errors to which I now proceed.
It may be inferred, upon purely historical grounds, that Kant's great achievements must have been accompanied by great errors. For although he effected the greatestp. 17 revolution in philosophy and made an end of Scholasticism, which, understood in the wider sense we have indicated, had lasted for fourteen centuries, in order to begin what was really the third entirely new epoch in philosophy which the world has seen, yet the direct result of his appearance was only negative, not positive. For since he did not set up a completely new system, to which his disciples could only have adhered for a period, all indeed observed that something very great had happened, but yet no one rightly knew what. They certainly saw that all previous philosophy had been fruitless dreaming, from which the new age had now awakened, but what they ought to hold to now they did not know. A great void was felt ; a great need had arisen ; the universal attention even of the general public was aroused. Induced by this, but not urged by inward inclination and sense of power (which find utterance even at unfavourable times, a3 in the case of Spinoza), men without any exceptional talent made various weak, absurd, and indeed sometimes insane, attempts, to which, however, the now interested public gave its attention, and with great patience, such as is only found in Germany, long lent its ear.
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