Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Schopenhauer on the Self
- 2 Schopenhauer and Knowledge
- 3 The Fourfold Root
- 4 Schopenhauer, Kant, and the Methods of Philosophy
- 5 Will and Nature
- 6 The Influences of Eastern Thought on Schopenhauer’s Doctrine of the Thing-in-Itself
- 7 Ideas and Imagination
- 8 Schopenhauer’s Narrower Sense of Morality
- 9 Schopenhauer on Death
- 10 Schopenhauer’s Pessimism
- 11 Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Dionysus
- 12 Schopenhauer, Will, and the Unconscious
- 13 Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein
- Bibliography
- Index
8 - Schopenhauer’s Narrower Sense of Morality
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Schopenhauer on the Self
- 2 Schopenhauer and Knowledge
- 3 The Fourfold Root
- 4 Schopenhauer, Kant, and the Methods of Philosophy
- 5 Will and Nature
- 6 The Influences of Eastern Thought on Schopenhauer’s Doctrine of the Thing-in-Itself
- 7 Ideas and Imagination
- 8 Schopenhauer’s Narrower Sense of Morality
- 9 Schopenhauer on Death
- 10 Schopenhauer’s Pessimism
- 11 Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Dionysus
- 12 Schopenhauer, Will, and the Unconscious
- 13 Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Arthur Schopenhauer's philosophizing was motivated by ethical questions and concerns from its dawn to its twilight. In 1813, as he initiated his labour on his main work, The World as Will and Representation (1819), Schopenhauer envisioned a philosophy that would be metaphysics and ethics in one. Seventeen years later, with the vain hope of drawing an audience sufficient to justify a second edition of his unsuccessful main work, he published his additional reflections on the philosophy of nature as On the Will in Nature, in which Schopenhauer claimed more entitlement than Spinoza to call his metaphysics 'ethics.' And in his final book, Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), which provided Schopenhauer with his first taste of the fame he desired so desperately, he wrote that his 'real philosophy' culminated in a 'higher metaphysical-ethical standpoint' (PI 313/H. 5, 333), something he self-consciously suspended to produce the eudemonology articulated in the essay 'Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life'. As the great Schopenhauerian scholar Arthur Hübscher has noted, Schopenhauer 'placed the ethical attitude at the centre and conclusion of his thinking.' The ethical attitude, however, was also at the beginning of his philosophical thought.
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- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer , pp. 252 - 292Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999
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