This is the latest version of the beginning of a comparative study of the role of the State in economic theory that deals with the theoretical foundations of "the social synthesis" - that is, the "stuff" that may hold human societies together. Kant, of course, in reference to bourgeois society called "die ungesellige Geselligkeit" (the unsociable sociability) - a phrase that beautifully encapsulates the nature and the timeliness of this study. I will update it from time to time. Happy reading!
The Classical concept of Freedom aims to
bring together the antinomic notions of the Will and of Reason. In turn, both
the Will and Reason can have antithetical meanings when considered in their
autonomous decisional or heteronomous instrumental aspects: the Will can have a
decisional aspect as conscious
Volition (voluntas, velle, arbitrium) and an operational
one as blind insatiable Appetite (appetitus,
conatus, want, Lust); similarly, reason can have a substantive meaning as a
faculty (Reason, Vernunft) allowing
for the human comprehension of Being (esse)
which then makes possible the scientific determination of human goals (inter esse, human interests) by the
autonomous Will; and an instrumental one as a tool for consistent measurable
action or calculation (intellect, understanding, Verstand).
The inconsistency between Will and Reason
arises from the fact that in Western philosophy the Will has always been
regarded as “absolutely and autonomously free” – even free to perpetrate evil
(as liberum arbitrium). As Cacciari
notes (DeCdP, c.p.60), in Western thought, unlike the Eastern (from which
Schopenhauer in particular was first to draw keenly) freedom at least in the
decisional sense has always been predicated of the Will, and has also always
been construed in the volitional sense as auto-nomous or ab-solute, that is,
not subject to any restrictions or heteronomy. And this is the difficulty that
the negatives Denken from Hobbes to
Heidegger has sought to overcome, as we shall see presently.
Yet, as Kant insisted
(following Plato), to be “free”, the Will must be able to restrain its appetite
by being “reasonable” in its substantive sense as volition – because, quite
obviously, the will can be neither free nor reasonable in its
aspect as appetite. And yet, if
it is to be free even as volition, the will cannot be subordinate to Reason on
pain of making their compatibility tautologous, or even to reason in the
limited instrumental sense as the intellect, because this would turn the Will
from an autonomous substantive entity into
a heteronomous instrumental one,
similar to mere appetite, of which “freedom” cannot be predicated except in the
purely quantitative, self-seeking sense of “free-dom” – that is, the seeking of
satisfaction to the detriment of all other wills. Similarly and conversely,
Reason cannot be free if it is to be consistent with appetite, whilst freedom
cannot be predicated of reason as intellect. The word “arbitrium” itself gives the sense of the antithetical ambi-valence
of the notion of Will: the human faculty of arbitrium makes the decision-maker an
“arbiter” in the sense that the Will is
“free” to decide; and yet this “arbitrage” cannot be “arbitrary” but
“reasonable”, that is, subject to the rules of Reason or at least of reason –
whence the phrase “liberum arbitrium”
to emphasize the fact that the Will can be both free or unfettered and reasonable.
Freedom is therefore inconsistent with Reason because the notions of Volition as well as that of Appetite are incompatible with the restrictions that Reason must impose on Freedom by virtue of its supposed internal consistency – both
logico-mathematical and also practico-moral. Thus, to
the extent that the concept of Will must include that of Reason, Freedom must be
inconsistent with Reason, unless the two are defined tautologously – that is, only reasonable decisions by the Will can be said to be free.
In pursuit of his genial
definition of freedom as rationality rather than
Reason, Max Weber mistakenly argues that only “rational” decisions are free,
without noticing that “rationality” here must also mean “reasonableness” –
otherwise there could be irrational decisions in the sense of substantive
Reason [Wert-rationalitat] that could still be said to be free if they were carried out
in an instrumentally rational manner
[Zweck-rationalitat]! Evidently,
Weber did not intend freedom in its substantive sense as Freedom, that is, as
the union of Volition and Reason, but only in its instrumental sense as free-dom, the union of appetite and
calculation, as in the
scientific link between Want and Provision in neoclassical economic theory. In
effect, this free-dom becomes a form of co-ercion – necessity in a political
sense, not “necessity” in a scientific sense given that Weber agreed that there
are indefinite scientific ways or means to attain
stated goals or ends.
There are two concepts of freedom in
Classical philosophical and political theory (cf. I. Berlin, The Two Concepts of Liberty, and N.
Bobbio, “Kant e le due liberta’” in Da
Hobbes a Marx). The first concept combines the instrumental aspects of
freedom – appetite and intellect - and sets its boundaries heteronomously, that is to say, through an external limit to the
Will as appetite: – appetite and means to its satisfaction are rationally, though not necessarily reasonably, regulated through limited
provision of whatever individuals seek to obtain imposed by external forces
such as scarcity or other appetites or the State. This is the “negative”
meaning of freedom also known as “liberty”, according to which freedom is
whatever the appetite is allowed to do by scarce means and resources or by
other appetites either through sheer force (Hobbes, Schopenhauer) or by
convention based on labour or utility (cf. Locke’s notion of labour, Mill’s
utilitarianism, Schopenhauer’s sym-pathy, Constant’s market-based liberalism).
The limit of this conception is that if appetites are to be externally,
heteronomously, kept in check so as not to lead to self-destruction or mutual
annihilation, then they must be governed by Reason in its substantive sense,
which is incompatible with appetite.
This conclusion impacts directly on the
second definition of freedom as a range of conduct autonomously adopted by the Will in conjunction with other wills.
In other words, even the substantive sense of the Will as volition (voluntas, velle, Wollen) cannot be
consistent with Reason because its autonomy must be guided and enlightened by
Reason and also be limited and measured by (be commensurate with) the intellect
or instrumental reason – because otherwise it degenerates into either
insatiable appetite or self-annihilating abnegation, which means that it can
reduce itself to naught (cf. I. Berlin, op.cit.).
To the extent that human beings may decide autonomously to restrict their freedom
in the sense of their appetites or self-interests to a minimum, this
restriction must be reasonable if it
is not to void freedom of its meaning!
The inconsistency between freedom and reason cannot be overcome by positing a
natural or scientific necessity because what may be impossible for the Will to
achieve with one set of means may be possible with another, what is impossible
today may become possible tomorrow (flying to another galaxy, for instance)
depending on the means available, and in any case, any restriction on an
individual’s aim, however unreasonable, is a restriction on its free-dom -
which leads us back to Weber’s definition. Freedom therefore may only be
opposed to coercion if we adopt a definition of necessity that allows of all means,
however impractical or impossible. In other words, contra Weber, even absolutely impossible or irrational volitions
can be free, and then the only obstacle to the Will is co-ercion and not
physical-scientific “necessity”. Even where human beings attempt the impossible
– are constrained by “necessity” -, any attempt to restrain them from the
attempt, however foolish it may be, must amount to co-ercion. (This is what led
Nietzsche to re-define the notion of physical-scientific necessity.)
This inconsistency of the notions of freedom (the volitional aspect of the will and
its insatiable appetite) and reason (as the regulator
of the will both in terms of ends and means) poses an
insurmountable problem that affects Hobbes’s genial political theory of the establishment
of civil society from the state of nature. The Hobbesian commonwealth (contractum unionis) is formed when human
beings decide freely and rationally to curtail their insatiable appetites that
lead to the war of all against all in the state of nature. To overcome this
difficulty, Hobbes makes this political
convention depend on a scientific
hypothesis, namely, that it is the fear of death at the hands of one
another that provides the dira necessitas
for the establishment of civil society in which human beings relinquish their external freedom to
the State. Yet Hobbes cannot explain how human beings can choose rationally to
alienate their freedom in foro externo to the State when
evidently they are perfectly able to make such a decision….freely! Indeed, Hobbes concedes that in his commonwealth subjects
retain their freedom in foro interno - yet the two fora are not separable
or severable. However dire the “necessity” that
induces human beings to exit the precarious state of nature, it is still their
Reason applied freely that leads them into the contractum subjectionis to the State. [Cacciari quote from DCP]
Hobbes was always keen to reduce human beings
to their blind “passions” whilst at the same time reducing their volition to
the instrumental exercise of reason: his political theory is aimed at deriving
the foundations of a rational State by reducing human action as much as
possible to the predictability of mathematics and mechanics. Obviously, Hobbes
believed that rationality could be imposed “scientifically” on the Will.
FROM the principal parts of
Nature, Reason and Passion, have proceeded two kinds of learning, mathematical and dogmatical : the former is free from controversy and dispute,
because it consisteth in comparing figure and motion only; in which things, truth, and the interest of men, oppose not each other : but in the other there
is nothing indisputable, because it compareth men, and meddleth with their
right and profit ; in which, as oft as reason is against a man, so oft will a man
be against reason. And from hence it cometh, that they who have written of
justice and policy in general, do all invade each other and themselves with
contradictions. To reduce this doctrine to the rules and infallibility of reason, there is no way,
but, first, put such principles down for a foundation, as passion, not
mistrusting, may not seek to displace; and afterwards to build thereon the
truth of cases in the law of nature (which hitherto have been built in the air)
by degrees, till the whole have been inexpugnable. (Dedication to De Homine)
Here it is clear that “the rules and
infallibility of reason” – Hobbes’s mathematical
learning whereby “truth and the
interest of men oppose not each other” - are in complete opposition to
irrational “Passion” or self-interest – Hobbes’s dogmatic learning whereby “right
and profit meddleth with men” by warping their allegiance to reason – not merely in terms of instrumental “infallibility”, but above all in terms of “truth”,
by which Hobbes intends a universal value and not just logico-mathematical
consistency. For Hobbes, it is possible “to
reduce this doctrine [dogmatical learning - that is, political and ethical
science]” to a foundation of Reason based on “the truth of cases in the law of nature…by degrees, till the whole is
inexpugnable…. that passion may not displace it”. In other words, despite their appetite or “passion”, human beings are still able to follow the dictates of reason so as to preserve their
individual lives by choosing freely to erect a State that will guarantee social
peace. But Hobbes’s freedom, reason, life and peace are not purely instrumental
categories, for if they were there is no way that human beings could place them
“above” their egoism or “passions”. Clearly, these values must be universal and
not purely instrumental – they form part of the make-up of the world, of the
constitution of the universe in a way that clearly invokes the transcendental
if not divine nature of human being.
In contrast, Locke conjectured a political
theory in which human beings can give themselves a rational political order – a
State - based on natural law or natural rights (jusnaturalism) without first
alienating their freedom. Such a freely-entered political order preserves the
natural rights possessed by humans in the state of nature, which amounts
therefore to a pre-political civil state (Bobbio, Da Hobbes a Marx). Like Hobbes, Locke conceives a legal system
erected by the State based on rights that derive almost entirely from Labor and
its pro-ducts – Property -, with the difference that for Locke property rights
based on Labor exist in the pre-political or civil state or state of nature –
they are natural rights -, whereas for Hobbes there can be no rights in the
state of nature but only in the State – all rights must be positive.
As a concession to Hobbes, Locke admits that
whilst Hobbes’s authoritarian state is not necessary, it would become so were
humans not to erect a neutral state to arbitrate their competing claims to
natural rights because, if their pre-statal society or pre-political state were
to descend into civil war – into the clutches of Hobbesian “passions” – then,
according to Locke, “the ensuing civil war of the state of nature would
continue indefinitely”. In other words, the conflictual Hobbesian state of
nature is not congenital to humanity,
and therefore the mechanical authoritarian State devised by Hobbes is not
inevitable. But if it is not pre-empted by the erection of a political state,
the Hobbesian state of nature may well eventuate and then - for Locke, contra
Hobbes - be impossible to escape. Locke’s theory deals neatly with one of the
principal objections to Hobbes’s political theory, which is that if humans were
originally in a bellicose state of nature, it is impossible to imagine how they
ever escaped it! – Which is why the
The obvious problem with Locke’s theory is of
course that it is impossible to identify the natural rights that he takes for
granted in setting out his theory of the liberal state. Indeed, the same
applies to Hobbes, because although his State is a state by conventional
institution and not by historical acquisition, it is impossible to see what role
it can play in its civil state (status
civilis) in the evolution of its social life in all its aspects (economic
and ethical) apart from its role in the reception of the status quo, that is,
the conditions that prevailed in the state of nature, at the time of the
establishment of the State. In other words, both for Locke and Hobbes, either
the State is an autonomous institution that, by that very fact, will inevitably
intervene in and interfere with its civil state, or else it is an entirely
neutral and mechanical entity that relies on the “organicity” or innate harmony
of that civil state – in which case, again, it is hard to see why a State
should be erected at all, except in the Lockean sense of insuring against the
degeneration of the civil
into a Hobbesian state of nature – but then, why should it do so, and according
to what “law” or “right” can it function other than Locke’s questionable “natural
law”?
It is this faith in the ability of reason as
intellect to act as and surge to the status of Reason as
an autonomous guide to action (Practical Reason) that Schopenhauer, after
Schelling, will demolish in his radical critique of Kantian ethics and, as a corollary, also in his critique of Hobbes’s authoritarian positivism and of Locke’s liberal jusnaturalism. For Hobbes and Locke, human reason is more than a calculative instrument that facilitates the reaching (con-tracting of many interests to a common
goal) of the social contract: for them, freedom and reason and truth are universal values that can overwhelm passions and egoism to
safeguard life and attain social peace. Reason is a positive quality of the natural order.
This “con-nection”, this nexus between the
Freedom of the Will and causality, between Freedom and Reason, and therefore
between intellect and thing, between Sub-ject and Ob-ject, is precisely what
Schopenhauer rejects in his critique of Kant’s idealism, and in his critique of
the Hobbesian account of the origin of the State, even as he accepts the infallibility of
logico-mathematics and scientific causality – their “necessity” – but only as
“instrumentality” at the service of the Will, indeed as an instrument or tool of coercion, not as
either a source of universal human values such as the primacy of preserving
one’s life or ab-solute necessity (an obvious pleonasm) as in Hobbes’s decision by
humans to alienate their innate freedom ob
metum mortis (upon fear of mutually-threatened death) – a “decision” that
is at once “free” and based on life as a supreme value, and yet dictated by the
dira necessitas which the state of
nature imposes on individuals or else in Locke’s natural rights
arising from Labor as the foundation of society.
Not so for Schopenhauer.
As we shall see, although Schopenhauer agrees with Hobbes that human
self-interest is in conflict with instrumental reason if it clashes too
violently with the self-interest of others, he denies that the decision to
erect a State or any other human decision can be a product of Reason in any
universal sense, but only in an instrumental one – because it is part of the
instrumental use of reason that it calculate also the long-term implications of
self-interest. The interaction of self-interest and reason Schopenhauer calls
“Egoism” (WWR, pars.61-2). Thus, Schopenhauer’s own appeal to reason as
intellect to derive the origins of morality and of the State falls into the
same difficulty as Hobbes’s in the sense that instrumental or calculative
reason plays a function that belongs properly to substantive or Practical
Reason in a Kantian sense.
In Schopenhauer the
Hobbesian necessitas is no longer
“dire” because all human actions are necessary, they are operari because he sees the Will as the qualitas occulta, as the real thing in itself, and therefore as “not free”. The
Reason of Hobbes is still the onto-theo-teleo-logical reason of the late
Renaissance, of Leonardo and Galileo, if not of Cusanus (cf. E. Cassirer, Individual and Cosmos): it is not just an instrument, but also a guide to universal truth, a
human inter esse, a human Reason albeit one understood as ultima or extrema ratio. His State is
a deus mortalis – “mortal” indeed
because it is the by-product of human appetite, dire necessity (fear of death)
and political convention, yet still a “god” because of its derivation from the
principles of innate reason. Hobbes keeps faith with the notion that truth must prevail over passion, reason over egoism. This is why human beings only surrender their freedom only in foro externo, in the political sphere when erecting the State, and then only ob metum mortis, fear of death, in “dire” necessity.
This decision requires in Hobbes an ultima
ratio that is founded on a human interest or inter esse (it is not, as in Schmitt, “auf Nichts gestellt”). Indeed, both in Hobbes and Locke the social
contract is founded on the common human interests of preserving life and
protecting and advancing the acquisition of wealth through Labor.
There is no such universal ordo et connexio rerum et idearum or social synthesis in Schopenhauer. The validity of the Kantian attempt to subtract Reason
from the instrumental/heteronomous necessity of “mathematics” so as to preserve
human Freedom of the Will (autonomy) is what Schopenhauer refutes – and so will
Nietzsche more consistently later. The recognition of the profoundly antithetical nature of the Classical notions of freedom and reason is what sets Schopenhauer apart from Hobbes and opens the way to a reconsideration of these notions, especially
freedom, from a metaphysical viewpoint. Whereas Hobbes cannot explain how Reason
can be consistent with and prevail over egoism to found the State, Schopenhauer
cannot explain how reason can be consistent with the State without turning into
Reason. In fact, Schopenhauer dispenses with Reason altogether, but then fails
to account for the existence of human society and the State in spite of
universal egoism and conflict. By denying the reality of Freedom and Reason,
Schopenhauer is already far advanced on Hobbes in a materialist sense; yet by
clinging to the reality of the Ego and its irreducible self-interest – however
deterministically understood as the Will or the obverse of the Kantian thing in
itself -, he simply condemns liberalism to failure as a political theory.
(Nietzsche will later dispense with the Ego altogether.)
In this regard,
Schopenhauer is mistaken when criticizing Hobbes for failing to see that
“rights” in the sense of prevention of “wrongs” must exist in the state of
nature – because Hobbes only intended by “rights” legally enforceable rights,
not merely the perception of “wrong”, which in any case boils down first to
dis-possession (possession is the only reality in the state of nature), and
then to the immediate threat to life (in the struggle for possession). Unlike
Schopenhauer, Hobbes does not fall into the error of moralizing possession by
appealing to an instrumental, cognitive sense of con-science or com-passion or
sym-pathy that requires the intervention of substantive reason, which
Schopenhauer has excluded in principle!
It is essential to
understand that Schopenhauer does not base himself on natural rights and most
strenuously not as derived from any “positive” concept of value-creation such
as Labor as the foundation of society and the State, which is what happens in
Locke. For Schopenhauer all positive
“rights” are based on negative
“wrongs” and the ability of individual Egoism to utilize reason as cognition of
the pain that certain actions can inflict on oneself. The State is not
therefore a positive institution designed or contracted to establish and promote,
let alone defend, “positive natural rights” arising from a positive human
shared quality – a Value like Labor or a summum
bonum. Not at all! The aim of the State can only be “negative” – that of
preventing harm or wrong; it arises purely out of the mechanical, defensive,
self-preserving nature of human Egoisms. Again, there is no universal human
interest here, as the preservation of one’s Life may be in Hobbes; there is
only Egoism. But in that case the
difficulty arises that, given that Egoisms can relinquish their self-interest
or appetite or “free-dom” only to a limited degree and not absolutely as in
Hobbes, then the determination of the precise limits of the State becomes
impossible except if instrumental reason turns into the ethics of the Mit-Leid – if it turns, that is, into
something more than calculative reason or intellect into a faculty with a
moral-ethical sense (which is what Nietzsche derided in Schopenhauer and why he
took Hegel’s dialectic of Vergeistigung
far more seriously). (Cacciari in PNeR.)
Operari
sequitur esse. By reprising this Scholastic formula in his searing
critique of Kant’s ethical formalism and transcendental idealism (v. The Basis of Morality), Schopenhauer
seems only apparently to uphold the
fundamental tenet of Western metaphysics – that life and the world are divided
into permanent reality or sub-stance (what “stands under” appearances or
supports re-ality, “thing-iness”) and transient ap-pearance (what is a partial
re-presentation [Vorstellung] or
“view” [Anschauung] of reality),
between the supra-sensible
and the sensible worlds. For Western metaphysics since at least the
pre-Socratics and Plato, it is Being that determines the actu-ality of the
world, its “workings” (Wirk-lichkeit)
or operation (operari). Being is the causa causans or the first cause of all
that ec-sists: all else are mere appearances (Kant’s blosse Erscheinungen).
Yet in reality Schopenhauer’s re-assertion of the principle that “actuality
follows being” constitutes a radical inversion (Ver-kehrung) of the Platonic chorismos,
properly theorised by Descartes and then by Kant, whereby Being is a fundamentum that brings together the
Subject – Idea (Plato), the res cogitans (Descartes)
or Reason (Kant’s Vernunft) - and the
Object – the res extensa, the thing-in-itself. It is this “bringing together”, this
“fusing” of mind and body - or better, this com-prehension of body by mind, of
Object by Subject - that is the ultimate aim of Western metaphysics since its
origins in ancient Greek natural theology. That is the ultimate philosophical
quest articulated in the Scholastic adaequatio
intellectus et rei (congruence of mind and thing). As we know, this adaequatio has never been achieved in
Western metaphysics and has degenerated either in the adaequatio intellectus ad rem (materialism), or else in the adaequatio rei ad intellectus
(idealism).
Schopenhauer’s re-affirmation of the
Scholastic formula only apparently
evokes the Platonic chorismos of
Subject (the Ideas) and Object (the apparent world) because in reality he is
stating that the ultimate impenetrability of the Object, of the
thing-in-itself, means that no Kantian Reason or Platonic Idea or summum bonum will ever be able to
reconcile appearance and reality, operari
and esse. All that we know are
appearances (Vorstellungen), because
Reality is a qualitas occulta that
can neither com-prehend nor be com-prehended by the totality of appearances.
Hegel’s pretense to be able to reconcile the real with the rational, actu-ality with poss-ibility, is thereby renounced and denounced by Schopenhauer as a perversion of the true
Kantian recognition of just such impossibility. Where Kant went wrong for
Schopenhauer, however, was in positing the existence of a Thing-in-itself, an
Ob-ject separate from and opposed to (Gegen-stand, standing against) the
Sub-ject that perceives or re-presents it, and then in insisting that despite
this antinomic opposition, it is possible to identify a Pure Reason (reine Vernunft) – a Subject or Ego-ity
(Ich-heit) - that can provide the indispensable adaequatio in the guise of an ordo
et connexio rerum et idearum.
For Schopenhauer, once again, – and later
above all for Nietzsche - no such adaequatio
is possible, and the Kantian Reason is only an “astute theology” (Nietzsche in Twilight) - sterile in its very formal
“purity” and therefore incapable of providing the order and connection between things and ideas. Yet this failure is
not what matters to Schopenhauer! (Cf. Cacciari, DCP) For him, no “separation”
between mind and body is possible, not indeed because the two can be reconciled
“rationally” as both Kant and Hegel pretended to do – this is the real meaning
of the Freedom (Freiheit) of German
Idealism -, but rather because esse est
percipi – because to be is to be perceived – and therefore all that we know
about life and the world is that they are the unity of Will and Representation, the individual subject-object. It
is the Will, not the Kantian noumenon,
that is the qualitas occulta of the
World, and it is the Will’s Representations of the World that constitute the totality of our knowledge. Not, once
again, the “totality” of the Ratio-Ordo
so desperately sought by Western metaphysics, not the totality of the Freedom
of the Will with its theo-logical
origins in the “Soul” of pre-Socratic Greece – but quite to the contrary an instrumental totality whereby it is not
the Will that is free to act, to decide, but rather it is the impenetrability
of the Will, its “unknowability”, that constitutes the “free-dom”, the
contingency, the sheer poss-ibility
that envelops it, that con-ditions its operari,
the actu-ality of the World. All that we know and that we can know are the
“effects” of human action that we can then ascribe and attribute to “causes”
that we can link only instrumentally
to the effects. The belief that beneath
or behind or beyond these instrumental connections there is an underlying
“reality” is quite simply fanciful; as Nietzsche put it, “the real world has
become a fable” (Twilight of the Idols).
(Hannah Arendt’s nearly total misreading of Nietzsche in this regard – “if both
the real and the apparent world have disappeared,” she quips, “then nihilism is
all that is left” – is due to her inability to understand that neither
Schopenhauer nor Nietzsche are seeking to condemn “morally” the world for its
lack of Freedom, but rather they deny the existence of this Freedom itself – they certify the ‘death of God’!)
It is hard to overestimate the importance of
this “inversion” both of the distinction between appearance and reality and of
the concept of Freedom operated by Schopenhauer: here for the first time is the
full re-elaboration of the concepts of metaphysical reality and of freedom –
and therefore of metaphysics and ethics - not as functions of the Will intended
as the free volition of the human Subject ab-solved
from all “necessity”, of human spontaneity and liberum arbitrium as the quasi-divine faculty of the human spirit
or soul. Instead, the human will and the reality or World that it confronts are
now seen as functions of the sheer contingency of the World, of the sheer
instrumentality of Life. (Cf. on this elaboration so fundamental to the entire negatives Denken, Heidegger’s seminal
work on Schelling’s Treatise on the
Essence of Human Freedom.) For these reasons – the obliteration of the
“freedom” of the Subject and its subordination to instrumental reason or
intellect (Kant’s Verstand or
understanding) -, Schopenhauer’s thought represents the essential crossroads of
and underlying link between the mechanicism of Machiavelli and Hobbes,
political liberalism from Locke to Mill and Constant, empiricism from Berkeley
to Mach, the utilitarianism of bourgeois socio-economic theory, and relativism
from Nietzsche to Heidegger: it represents, as it were, the interpretative key
to the most important developments in Western philosophical, scientific and
political thought concomitant with the rise of the capitalist bourgeoisie. (In
our series on “Capitalist Metaphysics”, we have shown how Schopenhauer’s
thought is fundamental to understanding the most essential categories of
bourgeois economic theory from Neoclassical marginalism to the
Before Schopenhauer, all of Western thought
had presumed the meta-physical
(beyond physics) “freedom” of the Subject or Spirit as against the “necessity”
of the physical world – because, as Kant postulated, only an independent,
autonomous entity – an Ego and its Reason – could be able to com-prehend and so ex-plicate the natural world with its “physical laws”. By contrast,
the most central concept in Schopenhauer’s philosophy, which represents the
consecration of the negatives Denken
from its origins in Hobbes to its positive elaboration in liberal political
philosophy and finally in Nietzsche’s nihilist ontology, is the Principle of
Sufficient Reason which states, quite simply, that whatever is has greater
reason to be than what is not. Human action, the operari, therefore, is not and cannot be the pro-duct of an
autonomous or “free” Subject, of an Ego-ity, because no “autonomous” cause can
ever initiate a heteronomous chain of cause and effect and still less explain
its existence so as to guarantee its scientific validity, its status as Truth!
If every cause must have an effect, the instrumental reason or intellect or
understanding (Verstand) that can
trace the causal connections between events can never also explain and
under-stand (Lt., sub-stantia, stand
under) them ab-solutely (unconditionally) – “freely”. Its under-standing of
reality can be only instrumental, only a “tool” conjectured by humans – never
ab-solute in a quasi-divine, theo-logical sense. Kant’s hesitations in this
regard in the Third Critique and in the Opus
Postumum are quite sobering; his recourse to an intuitus originarius (discussed by Heidegger in his Kantbuch and in his commentary on
Leibniz and Schopenhauer in Part Two of The
Metaphysical Foundations of Logic) and his assertion that he had to limit
the scope of human knowledge so as to preserve “faith” is quite (sit venia
verbo!) revealing! (Cf. on this
Heidegger’s treatment of “inverted Platonism” in his Nietzsche.)
