Preface

Summary

I came to Schopenhauer indirectly through a prior interest in the philosophy of Wittgenstein. In particular, I wanted to understand what Wittgenstein means in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 6.4211, when he says that “Ethics is transcendent. Ethics and aesthetics are one.” The secondary literature hinted that Schopenhauer's philosophy might provide the key. While this was a tantalizing clue, it did not by itself resolve my uncertainty, but only led to more and more careful reading and rereading of Schopenhauer's works. It was not long in this process before my original motives for studying Schopenhauer ripened into a lasting involvement with all aspects of his thought on its own terms and for its own sake.

As an undergraduate I read Schopenhauer's Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason and both volumes of The World as Will and Representation in translation. This first exposure to Schopenhauer gave me a rough idea of his philosophy and its relation to the philosophies of Plato and Kant, just as at the time I had only a rough idea of the philosophies of Plato and Kant. It was insufficient background later on to help me clarify what I now see as the early Wittgenstein's debt to Schopenhauer's transcendentalism, not only in the identification of ethics with aesthetics and his concept of the metaphysical subject or philosophical I, but in every aspect of his philosophical semantics and its applications in the Tractatus, including the sign-symbol distinction and picture theory of meaning.

What I discovered in reacquainting myself with Schopenhauer is the explanatory power of his dual aspect conception of the world as Will and representation.