Arthur Schopenhauer - Delphi Collected Works of Arthur Schopenhauer (Illustrated)

The Collected Works of

ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

(1788-1860)

Contents

Delphi Classics 2017

Version 1

The Collected Works of

ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

By Delphi Classics, 2017

Collected Works of Arthur Schopenhauer

First published in the United Kingdom in 2017 by Delphi Classics.

Delphi Classics, 2017.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form other than that in which it is published.

ISBN: 978 1 78656 088 9

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Gdask, Poland, formerly the city of Danzig, part of the PolishLithuanian Commonwealth Schopenhauers birthplace

Schopenhauers birthplace house, ul. w. Ducha

Friedrich Eduard Meyerheims painting of the waterfront of Danzig in 1850

Schopenhauer as a young man

Translated by Mme. Karl Hillebrand

On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason is Schopenhauers doctoral dissertation, which he wrote in 1813, providing an elaboration on the classical Principle of Sufficient Reason. This theme is a powerful and controversial philosophical principle stipulating that everything must have a reason or cause. Schopenhauer revised and re-published his dissertation in 1847 and it would serve as the centrepiece for many of his later arguments in his major works.

The essay was composed shortly after the events of January 1813, following the disastrous defeat of Napoleons Grande Arme. As survivors were arriving in Berlin, the sick and wounded quickly filled up the hospitals and the risk of an epidemic grew high. A patriotic, militaristic spirit stirred the city and most of the populace, philosophers and students included, hoped that the French yoke could be thrown off. All this rapidly became intolerable to Schopenhauer, who ultimately fled the city, retreating to an inn in the small town of Rudolstadt near Weimar. It was here, from June to November of that year, that he wrote On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason .

After submitting the dissertation he was awarded a PhD from the University of Jena in absentia and private publication soon followed. Scarcely more than one hundred copies were sold; the rest were remaindered and, a few years later, pulped. A copy was sent to Goethe who responded by inviting the author to his home on a regular basis, ostensibly to discuss philosophy, but in reality to recruit the young philosopher into work on his Theory of Colours .

Schopenhauers epistemology, by direct admission, opens with Immanuel Kants theory of knowledge. Schopenhauer proclaims himself a Kantian, who has appropriated his predecessors most powerful accomplishment in epistemology, and who then claims to have merely extended and completed what Kant misapplied or had left undone. Schopenhauer argues that Kants chief merit lies in his distinction between the thing in itself and the phenomenal world in which it appears, i.e., the world as we represent it to ourselves. What is crucial is the realisation that what makes human experience universally possible to begin with without exception is the perceiving mind. The intellect synthesises perceptions from raw sensations to consequently abstract modified concepts built upon formed perceptions. Schopenhauer appropriates Kants forms of sensibility (space, time, and causality) and expands them into what he calls the understanding.

Thus, our understanding does not exist independent of our ability to perceive and determine relationships anchored in experience itself. Not only what we think in the abstract, but also our very perceptions are completely intellectual and subjectively determined via extraction, new formation and modified formulation.

Schopenhauers central proposition is the main idea of his entire philosophy the world is my representation. The rest of his work undergoes an elaborate analysis and explanation of this sentence, which begins with his Kantian epistemology, elaborated further in his explanation of the principle of sufficient reason. This is responsible for providing adequate explanations for any thing, or object that occurs in relation to a subject of knowing; of any representation possible there is always a possible question of why? that one can address to it. It amounts to what Schopenhauer has done, in his view, to extend and complete what Kant began in his Critique of Pure Reason .

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is considered a central figure in modern philosophy. Kant argued that the human mind creates the structure of human experience, that reason is the source of morality, that aesthetics arises from a faculty of disinterested judgment. Kant would have a major influence on the early work of Schopenhauer.

The Old University Building, University Jena, Thuringia, Germany

before the public, I am aware of the great difficulties of my task, and indeed can hardly hope to do justice to the Author. In fact, had it not been for the considerations I am about to state, I might probably never have published what had originally been undertaken in order to acquire a clearer comprehension of these essays, rather than with a view to publicity.