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Schopenhauer's Pessimism and Kant's Moral

Argument

Reid, Walter Joseph

Reid, W. J. (2016). Schopenhauer's Pessimism and Kant's Moral Argument (Unpublished master's

thesis). University of Calgary, Calgary, AB. doi:10.11575/PRISM/27714

http://hdl.handle.net/11023/3195

master thesis

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UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY

Schopenhauer’s Pessimism and Kant’s Moral Argument

by

Walter Joseph Reid

A THESIS

SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES

IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE

DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS

GRADUATE PROGRAM IN PHILOSOPHY

CALGARY, ALBERTA

AUGUST, 2016

© Walter Joseph Reid 2016

i

Abstract

In this thesis, I argue that Kant's Moral Argument (for the afterlife) gives good grounds to

reject Schopenhauer's pessimism. I begin by defining pessimism as the view that "life is not

choiceworthy," and dispelling some initial objections to it. Having established that pessimism

doesn't succumb to obvious objections, I develop three lines of argument that tell in favor of it,

each articulated in a chapter of its own that explains how Schopenhauer reconceives the

categories of, in order, will, goodness, and death. Schopenhauer’s overall argument moves from

will to goodness to death; and in the final section of the thesis I demonstrate how Kant's Moral

Argument undercuts the crucial assumption about death on which pessimism depends (i.e.

mortalism). I conclude by rejecting an evidentialist objection to the Moral Argument, according

to which evidence provides the only justifiable grounds for believing in anything, including,

crucially, in a just afterlife.

ii

Acknowledgements

I want to thank the many people from whom I received guidance and support on this

project. I am particularly thankful for the support of my philosophical teachers, including Mark

Migotti, Jeremy Fantl, Morny Joy, Joshua Goldstein, Allen Habib, Chris Framarin, Andres

Kraal, and Howard Hopkins. Their styles of teaching and writing have inspired and sustained my

own philosophical work over the past six years at St. Mary’s University and the University of

Calgary.

In the context of this project, I am particularly grateful to my supervisor, Mark Migotti,

whose inspiring teaching and writing ignited an interest in Schopenhauer that still burns strong to

the present day. I have learned a lot from Mark’s philosophical orientation, and the countless

hours he spent with me on this project improved it immensely. He has true philosophical talent,

and I couldn’t have asked for a better supervisor. I am also particularly grateful to Jeremy Fantl,

one of the few people in whom kindness and philosophical brilliance are found copiously and in

equal measure. Jeremy has supported me for many years, and I aspire to be a philosopher and

teacher of his caliber.

I also want to thank my long-term philosophical friends, Kyle Kinaschuck and Niall Roe,

both of whom have been trusty travel-partners along my philosophical journey. I’m particularly

thankful to Kyle for reading and editing an entire draft of the present work.

Finally, I’d like to thank my wife, Miriam Bronski, for being my best friend and helping

me with what matters the most. Thank you.

iii

Dedication

This thesis is dedicated to my most enduring philosophical mentor, Howard Hopkins.

iv

Table of Contents

Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………...i

Acknowledgement…………………………………………………………………………i

Dedication………………………………………………………………………………….ii

Part I: Schopenhauer's Pessimism

1.1 The Possibility of Pessimism…………………………………………………......1

Part II: Pessimism as Will, Goodness, and Death

2.0 Will

2.1 Will: Practical-Rational Judgement……………………………………………14

2.2 Schopenhauer’s Reconceiving of Will: Will as Effective Desire……………...18

2.3 Argument from Willing to Pessimism………………………………………....28

3.0 Goodness

3.1 Goodness as Objective and Unconditioned……………………………………..34

3.2 Goodness as Willed and Contingent…………………………………………….38

3.3 Argument from Highest Good to Pessimism……………………………………44

4.0 Death

4.1 Death as Ethical-Personal Immortality..........................................................…...51

4.2 Death as Impersonal-Deliverance……………………………………………….55

4.3 From Death as Impersonal Deliverance to Pessimism…………………………..59

Part III: Kant's Moral Argument against Pessimism

5.0 Kant versus Schopenhauer on the Intelligibility of Human Life

5.1 The Meaning of the Moral Argument……………………………………….…...66

5.2 The Evidentialism Objection to the Moral Argument……………………………69

v

Morality, by itself, constitutes a system. Happiness, however, does not do so, save in so

far as it is distributed in exact proportion to morality. But this is possible only in the intelligible

world, under a wise Author and Ruler. Such a Ruler, together with life in such a world, which we

must regard as a future world, reason finds itself constrained to assume; otherwise it would have

to regard the moral laws as empty figments of the brain, since without this postulate the

necessary consequence which it itself connects with these laws could not follow. Hence also

everyone also regards the moral laws as commands; and this the moral laws could not be if they

did not connect a priori suitable consequences with their rules, and thus carry with them

promises and threats. But this again they could not do, if they did not reside in a necessary being,

as the supreme good, which alone can make such a purposive unity possible. The Critique of

Pure Reason, 639

1

Part I: Schopenhauer’s Pessimism

Chapter 1: The Possibility of Pessimism

Arthur Schopenhauer believed that the deepest truth of which the human mind is capable

is the startling realization that “no life is, upon cold and mature reflection, preferable to non-

being.”1 This doctrine, named “Schopenhauer’s Pessimism,” is his most enduring contribution to

the history of philosophy, as it continues to inspire discussion almost two hundred years after the

original publication of The World as Will and Representation.2 It is a doctrine that admits of

varying interpretations, and it’s essential to define it right at the outset of this investigation. One

notable commentator, Julian Young, likens pessimism to the first Noble Truth of Buddhism: i.e.

that “all life is suffering.”3 Others, Jordi Fernandez and Bernard Reginster, characterize

pessimism as “the view that enduring happiness is impossible”4 following Schopenhauer’s own

remark that “everything in life proclaims that earthly happiness is destined to be frustrated or

recognized as an illusion.”5 A fourth, Mark Migotti, recognizes pessimism as including a

broader range of argumentatively related theses. That is, he sees pessimism as containing not

only a ‘metaphysical thesis’ that “life is suffering,” an axiological thesis that “there is no

unconditioned good,” and a conative thesis that “all willing is futile,” but also a prohairetic thesis

that “life is unchoiceworthy.”6 Migotti plausibly construes the first three theses are premises in

different arguments for the core, prohairetic conclusion that “life is unchoiceworthy.” Rather

than re-invent the Schopenhauerian wheel by trying to redefine it, I stick with Migotti’s account

1 Schopenhauer, The Wisdom of Life (New York: Courier Corporation, 2012) 12 2 198 years this December to be exact. 3 Young, The Death of God and the Meaning of Life (New York: Routledge, 2014), 84. 4 Reginster, The Affirmation of Life (Cambridge: First Harvard University Press, 2008), 22. 5 Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation (New York: Dover Publications, 1969) 573 6 Migotti, “Schopenhauer’s Pessimism and the Unconditioned Good.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 33 (4)

(1995): 643.

2

of claiming that the prohairetic thesis that life is unchoiceworthy constitutes the main claim of

Schopenhauer’s pessimism. To say ‘X is unchoiceworthy’ is to say it isn’t worthy of rational

pursuit or affirmation.7 Life being unchoiceworthy therefore amounts to the earlier quotation that

“life is not, upon cold and mature reflection, preferable to non-being.” I cannot, of course,

unpack this claim entirely right at the outset, but –for now—I hope to have established the

definition of pessimism under which I will be operating in this thesis.

Schopenhauer’s pessimism is, then, the view that human life is not choiceworthy.8 Such a

doctrine contradicts the widespread sentiment that life is choiceworthy: the vast preponderance

of people carry on their lives, marked with hopes, ambitions, and goals, acting as if there are

some goods worthy of pursuit. The student completes his credentials, falls in love, and settles

down to raise and support a family through his career; the worker strives to complete the

apprenticeship that will allow her to have the financial security required to pursue her hobbies;

and the artisan cultivates her craft until she achieves the highest creative expression of which she

is capable. These are but three personas among countless and the details of each individual’s life

varies infinitely, but in all cases -- mutatis mutandis – the fact remains that almost everyone acts

as if life were choiceworthy. The fact, in other words, that nearly everyone acts as if life is

choiceworthy must be contested with right at the outset of any thesis concerning whether life is

choiceworthy.

7 Following the Aristotelian account of prohairesis that I’ll explore later. For now, it’s important to note that

prohairesis is the process of rational decision making whereby one selects the means required to achieve an end

rationally judged as good. Saying that life is unchoiceworthy prohairectically speaking, then, is to say there’s no

final good in terms of which the pursuit of life itself is rendered intelligible. That is, life isn’t a means through

which one can achieve a highest, final good, so there is no reason to pursue it as a rational course of action. 8 It is noteworthy, at this point, to mention that Schopenhauer doesn’t credit himself with the creation of pessimism

as a doctrine: he believes that it’s found in many of the world’s great religious traditions. Instead, he prides himself

with the only philosophically defensible formulation of it. I, then, refer to “Schopenhauer’s pessimism” to denote his

version of pessimism, not to indicate that the doctrine is somehow uniquely his.

3

If Schopenhauer wants to advance the thesis that life is unchoiceworthy –contrary to

such widespread intuitions—he indeed owes argumentation for his position. The purpose of this

introductory section is not only to define pessimism, but also to demonstrate why it’s plausible

enough to warrant further philosophical attention, widespread intuitions to the contrary

notwithstanding. I therefore offer an introduction to and preliminary defense of pessimism in this

chapter: there are initial problems that confront Schopenhauer’s pessimism: i) he seems

implicitly committed to some form of optimism in his own writings –call this “The Inconsistency

Problem” and ii) life doesn’t seem to admit of being judged objectively as unchoiceworthy – call

this “The Objectivity Problem.” In what follows, I dispel the initial implausibility of pessimism

through providing a resolution to the preceding problems. The Inconsistency Problem will be

dealt with quickly, but The Objectivity Problem will require a more protracted treatment.

The Inconsistency Problem

I have stated that the main claim of Schopenhauer’s pessimism is that life is

unchoiceworthy. This stance seems inconsistent with not only widely shared sentiments, but also

some of Schopenhauer’s own remarks. For instance, in the Preface to Schopenhauer’s The

Wisdom of Life he insists there is an “art of ordering our lives so as to obtain the greatest

possible amount of pleasure and success, an art which may be called eudaemonology.”9 He

proceeds to define eudaemonology as the art of navigating through a life that “would be

decidedly preferable to non-existence; implying that we should cling to it for its own sake, and

not merely from the fear of death; and further, that we should never like it to come to an end.”10

How is Schopenhauer supposed to reconcile these remarks with his main claim that life is

9 Schopenhauer, The Wisdom of Life (New York: Cosimo Inc, 2007), 11. 10 Ibid., 1.

4

unchoiceworthy?

Prima facie, these remarks and the main claim constitute a flat-out contradiction: if life is

unchoiceworthy, then there’s no way to make existence decidedly preferable to non-existence;

but Schopenhauer’s eudaemonology presupposes there is a way to make existence preferable to

non-existence. One might be tempted to excuse the contradiction on grounds of Schopenhauer

simply changing his view: the text cited (i.e. The Wisdom of Life) was after-all originally

published in 1851, whereas The World as Will and Representation (in which Schopenhauer’s

pessimism was originally defended) was published in 1818. Thirty three years is more than

ample time for a philosopher to make doctrinal amendments. However, this simple-minded,

“modification view,” simply doesn’t make sense of Schopenhauer’s uniform endorsement of

pessimism throughout all his writings, including the very text under consideration. Indeed, in the

very next paragraph, Schopenhauer reveals that “now whether human life corresponds, or could

possibly correspond, to this conception of existence [i.e. a choiceworthy conception], is a

question to which, as it is well-known, my philosophical system returns a negative answer.”11

Schopenhauer’s commitment to pessimism, then, even during this later period is beyond

question. So how are readers supposed to make sense of this apparent inconsistency in his views?

The resolution is found within the following general principle: claiming that one can

pursue a choiceworthy course of action within a system S doesn’t imply that S itself is

choiceworthy (i.e. preferable to alternatives). For instance, there being a best course of action

(one most choiceworthy) as a slave does not imply that slave-hood is itself choiceworthy. Indeed,

there are clearly more choiceworthy ways of being a slave, given that one is already subjected to

that fate. One could, for instance, embrace destiny with a form of stoic equanimity instead of

11 Ibid., 1.

5

spending one’s meager amount of leisure time in self-pity over her plight as a slave.

I suggest that Schopenhauer offers a similar form of reasoning in the passage under

consideration. He is saying that given one is already a human being (which is itself an

unchoiceworthy state), there are courses of action that are more conducive to living well.

Schopenhauer’s pessimism is therefore consistent with his eudaemonology: the latter elaborates

the best way in which to pursue a choiceworthy life given that one is already alive, but that does

not imply life itself is choiceworthy. The consistency problem between Schopenhauer’s

pessimism and eudaemonology is therefore more apparent than real. There is, however, a more

pressing problem that threatens Schopenhauer’s pessimism: viz., its presumption that one can

make objective judgements about the choice-worthiness of life as a whole. It warrants a more

extensive assessment.

The Objectivity Problem

At this point, then, I want to address, but ultimately dismiss that objection with the hope

of heightening pessimism’s plausibility. The objection amounts to the claim that the choice-

worthiness of life can only be decided subjectively –i.e. from the point of view of an individual’s

own inner experiences with and evaluations of existence: this amounts to saying that

Schopenhauer’s objective claim that existence as such is unchoiceworthy cannot even be

possibly true. It is, so the objection goes, a kind of category error in which Schopenhauer

confusedly thinks one can make an objective pronouncement on an issue for which only

subjective evaluations are relevant. If Schopenhauer hasn’t dealt with this fundamental objection,

then the whole of his theory suffers refutations at the hands of the glib rejoinder that “I think my

life is worth living.” To dispel this objection right at the outset, and thereby deepen the appeal of

Schopenhauer’s pessimism, I will now try to spell it out and ultimately dismiss it.

6

I begin with clarifying the widely used philosophical terms “objective” and “subjective.”

The terms generally reference a relationship between a perceiving subject and some object. A

judgement becomes objective when it accurately represents the object rather than the subject’s

‘contributions’ to it; whereas a subjective judgement usually reflects a contribution that the

subject made to the object rather than the intrinsic nature of the object itself. For instance,

consider two people looking at a rope submerged in water. From a given angle the one person

can see the rope and judge “that is a rope” –an objective judgement; whereas the second person

might perceive from an angle at which the rope appears as a snake through an optical illusion,

and judge “that is a snake” –a subjective judgement. This should illustrate the distinction

sufficiently, but what would it take to make an “objective” judgement about the choice-

worthiness of life?

To answer that question, one would need to specify the referent to which the judgement is

applied; in this case the referent is “human life,” but what exactly is human life? It cannot be just

the world as such, for the world is –in some sense—ontologically independent from human

beings: it could continue to exist even if humans didn’t. Human life is, then, more naturally

understood as the realm of human experience, i.e. the conjunction of mental experiences had by

the kind “human.” For the very notion of choice-worthiness presupposes an agent (imbued with

mentality) who can make choices in the first place. However, given the necessity of locating the

judgements about the choice-worthiness of life in mental experiences, there arises a serious

problem for Schopenhauer, who wants to claim that human life can be objectively judged as

choiceworthy: viz., it seems that only subjective judgements can be applied to the mental

experiences that can be rightfully called “human life.” Much can be said in favor of this

objection.

7

For starters, it seems like one’s beliefs about her own mental experiences aren’t in the

same epistemological category as beliefs about the world as such. This difference is explained, in

part, from the perspective of justification, because beliefs about one’s mental experiences (to

which subjective judgments apply) don’t collapse from the forms of defeaters that undermine

beliefs concerning the external world (to which objective judgements apply).

We can say –in general—that the following principle holds with respect to beliefs about

the external world, but not one’s mental experiences: Q defeats S’s belief that P if there’s at least

one external fact according to which not-P and S understands the implication not-P has for her

belief. I’m not concerned with defending the truth of this principle, since our task isn’t the

epistemology of defeaters. What I do want to stress, however, is that whatever the correct

account of defeat is, objective judgements about the external world don’t get defeated in the

same way that subjective judgements about one’s experiences do.

To illustrate, take the case of a person holding the belief “Inherent teleology explains the

development of species on earth” (P). P gets defeated when there’s some facts according to

which not-P and S understands those facts imply not-P, e.g. (“Evolution explains human

development”). Notice the general process that occurs when beliefs about the external world get

defeated: S (if he’s a rational agent) believes P is true owing to some facts and evidence, and

then some further external facts and evidence demonstrate not-P, after which his initial belief

gets defeated. To take the earlier example, the person judges “that is a snake” owing to an optical

illusion, but then later changes her judgement when confronted with the objective fact that it’s a

rope submerged in water. By contrast, it doesn’t seem like beliefs about our own psychological

states get defeated in the same way.

Indeed, it seems that only an individual gets to determine whether some facts count

8

against the truth of her internal mental states. One thinks, for instance, of the sadomasochist who

proclaims during some extremely painful activity that “this brings me pleasure” whereas all the

“objective” facts about the pleasure centers in the brain and the nature of the activity suggest that

“this is painful” should be the right response. It seems in these cases that appeals to objective

facts aren’t enough to undermine the truth value of the statements the person makes about her

own subjective experiences.

Philosophically speaking, the explanation for this dissimilarity (with respect to defeaters

for external beliefs vs. beliefs about one’s own happiness) is found in what philosophers of mind

call “introspective infallibility.” The idea behind introspective infallibility is famously expressed

in Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy in which he, after considering the possibility that

he’s deceived by an evil demon, concludes that “I certainly seem to see, to hear, and to be

warmed. This cannot be false.”12 Later philosophers, including the early Sidney Shoemaker,

would further refine this thesis into the concept of incorrigibility: “a statement P is incorrigible

just in case, if I make the judgment, it is not possible for anyone else to show that P is false.”13

Most importantly for present purposes, Shoemaker maintained that “among the incorrigible

statements are statements about mental states, e.g. statements about thoughts…and subjective

experiences.”14 From this brief discussion, we can gather that statements such as “I am happy”

“My life is worthwhile” – which represent one’s subjective experiences, and against which

Schopenhauer’s whole philosophy vehemently argues—are not subject to the same kind of defeat

as statements concerning the external world. Indeed, on Descartes’ and Shoemaker’s respective

accounts, those statements are ones to which only the individual’s own internal deliverances can

12 Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), VII:29 13 Shoemaker, “Self-Reference and Self Awareness.” Journal of Philosophy 65 (19) (1968): 555-597 14 Ibid.,

9

provide defeaters.

Transposed into our main discussion, these considerations elaborate the central objection

to the main claim of Schopenhauer’s pessimism: viz., it is a category mistake to assume that the

statement “life is unchoiceworthy” constitutes an objective judgement. Such a claim is an

inherently subjective statement insofar as the only truth-makers for it are one’s own subjective

evaluations of her mental states. The main claim of Schopenhauer’s pessimism therefore seems

to suffer refutation at the hands of the simple appeal to one’s own subjective intuition that “my

own life is choiceworthy.” If Schopenhauer can’t overcome this objection, his whole doctrine is

refuted easily and doesn’t merit further attention.

My strategy of response is to grant generously for the sake of argument that some

individual lives can be judged as choiceworthy from that individual’s insulated perspective. But

insist that such a concession is consistent with Schopenhauer’s pessimism. To begin explaining

this strategy, I return to the distinction between objective and subjective judgements.

An objective judgement is one that characterizes something mind-independent (i.e. what

it is rather than what one’s mind fabricates it to be). Now, I already established the difficulty of

offering an objective judgement of human life. Mental experiences constitute the latter, and those

experiences only admit of being judged subjectively. I can freely admit that someone

subjectively judges her own life to be choiceworthy. However, it would be false to assume that

it’s impossible to offer objective judgements concerning the choice-worthiness of life as a whole.

Indeed, there is room for objectivity when making judgements about the choice-worthiness of

life. In particular, rather than considering one’s own human life qua subject, one can analyze the

life of a human being as such. That is, life as a general member of the kind “human.” That is the

level of analysis at which Schopenhauer thinks one should make judgements concerning the

10

choice-worthiness of human life.

Now the objectivity of judgement is introduced here through replacing “one’s own

mental states” with “what it is like to be a human being in general” as the object of analysis. So

then the objection that it’s unintelligible to make objective judgements about the choice-

worthiness of life fails. One might, however, refuse this introduction of objectivity through

noting that there’s some special reason to favor one’s own mental experiences when judging the

choice-worthiness of life. One is, as it were, in a privileged position to judge the choice-

worthiness of her own life. Then, if the objection holds, one would still be stuck in the realm of

subjective judgements concerning life’s choice-worthiness, and pessimism couldn’t even get off

the ground. Having established that objective judgements concerning the choice-worthiness are

possible, I now want to embark upon the further task of showing that considering the human

being as such is also the preferable perspective. That is, the correct perspective from which to

adjudicate whether life is choiceworthy. I maintain there are two reasons for which the

perspective of the human being as such is preferable to assessing the choice-worthiness of one’s

own life: i) the choice-worthiness of one’s own life is often due to luck rather than objective

features universally shared of all human existences, and ii) judging from one’s own perspective

amounts to a failure of moral awareness. Let’s consider each in turn.

The subjective judgement that one’s own insulated life is choiceworthy isn’t reliable on

Schopenhauer’s view, for it depends upon luck. Philosophers are more than familiar with the

idea that luck isn’t sufficient to grant one’s judgement in other contexts. For instance, take

Edmund Gettier’s famous counter-example to the Justified-True-Belief Model of knowledge in

which the intrusion of luck proves to preclude knowledge: Jones has solid evidence for the false

proposition that “Smith owns a Ford,” (S) and S implies three disjunctive propositions (1)

11

“Either Smith owns a Ford or he is in Barcelona,” (2) “Either Smith owns a Ford or he is in

Boston,” and (3) “Either Smith owns a Ford or he is in Brest-Litovsk.” Then, through sheer luck,

Smith happens to be in Boston, and (2) ends up being true. Jones therefore has a justified true

belief concerning (2), but can’t be plausibly said to know it. One important presupposition here

is that luck precludes knowledge.15

I submit that a similar form of reasoning is relevant to the case of the insulated individual

whose life happens to be choiceworthy out of luck. If one is born into a set of circumstances that

are unchoiceworthy (as Schopenhauer suggests), it might still be the case that those

circumstances are disjunctively related to choiceworthy states. For instance, “Either one

experiences the suffering inherent in life or one experiences pleasure,” “Either one experiences

death-agony or one is free from anxiety,” etc. Now Schopenhauer affirms that the first disjuncts

in propositions of this kind are inherent to life, but also admits that the second disjuncts can

obtain for individuals who are lucky enough to have the right circumstances and dispositions.

One could easily imagine that an individual’s entire life –through luck—could be a conjunction

(or predominantly a conjunction) of the latter disjuncts. However, having that state for one self

through luck isn’t sufficient to prove that the underlying structure (i.e. life) is itself

choiceworthy. Assuming otherwise, is tantamount to the lucky winner who claims that the nature

of a lottery is to give money, while ignoring the countless multitudes who lost. Luck and

happenstance with respect to the choice-worthiness of one’s own life are insufficient to prove

that life as such is choiceworthy.

Now, I postpone defending the claim that such choiceworthy lives are in fact by-products

of luck until later in the thesis. What I need to note now is that any given individual’s life is

15 Gettier, “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” Analysis 23.6 (1963): 121-123.

12

susceptible to luck, and that fact favors assessing choice-worthiness from the perspective of the

human being as such. Returning to the earlier analogy, to learn about the set-up of a lottery one

needs to look at the full range of data instead of selectively picking the lucky winners. Likewise,

to learn about the structure of human life as such one needs to consider the most general

categories of that existence, rather than synchronic reifications of individual human luck.

Considering the full range of data (i.e. the most general categories shared by all human

existences), illustrates a more accurate picture into which the vitiating factor of luck cannot

creep. Aside from this epistemic reason to favor the perspective of the human being as such,

there’s also a moral one.

This moral consideration announces the second reason to prefer the objective perspective

of the human being as such: viz., people who assess life from the perspective of their individual

lives are suffering from a failure of compassion. To affirm one’s own choiceworthy isolated life

while the countless multitudes of humans and animals are greeted with untold pain and hardship

daily is “to make a bitter mockery of the untold suffering of humanity.”16 Such a person, to speak

in simile, is like the employee of a corrupt company, who, while personally benefitting from the

company, is nevertheless worthy of contempt, since he is complicit in affirming a business

whose very set-up and essential structure necessitates it will engender widespread suffering. Just

as an isolated employee’s well-being cannot be considered choiceworthy in light of the overall

suffering engendered by her company, so too an individual’s own happy life cannot redeem or

make choiceworthy an existence in which suffering is the inescapable norm. Or as Schopenhauer

himself remarks: “that thousands had lived in happiness and joy would never do away with the

16 Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation (Cambridge University Press, 2010), 326.

13

anguish and death-agony of even one individual.”17 When one assesses life from the appropriate

perspective (i.e. one that includes recognition of the “anguish and death-agony” of individuals),

he must conclude that life is unchoiceworthy. The isolated individual’s choiceworthy life (even if

there were such a life) therefore wouldn’t count against Schopenhauer’s pessimism. And it

certainly shouldn’t be appointed as the correct perspective from which to make judgements about

the choice-worthiness of life. I have therefore established not only that the objective perspective

is possible, but also that there’s two positive reasons to favor it over the subjective one.

The main claim of Schopenhauer’s pessimism can therefore be considered not only

possible, but also immune to the obvious objections from subjective judgements that people are

wont to make (e.g. that my own individual life seems choiceworthy). Indeed, one can objectively

judge that human life as such is unchoiceworthy. The task of showing the doctrine’s coherence is

the comparatively easier one. I now, in the ensuing chapters, need to offer actual evidence and

arguments for the truth of that objective judgement. In what follows, I demonstrate that

Schopenhauer does indeed offer justification for that objective judgement through re-conceiving

of three philosophical categories: will, goodness, and death.

17 Ibid., vol. 2, 576.

14

Part II: Pessimism as Will, Goodness, and Death

Chapter 2.0: Will

In this first chapter, I explore the relationship between Schopenhauer’s accounts of will

and pessimism. I proceed in three phases. First, I characterize some classical accounts of will as

background against which the pessimistic nuances of Schopenhauer’s own account can be

brought out. At this point, I examine the conceptual precursors to the will found in Plato and

Aristotle as well as a fully developed conception of the will in Kant. Second, with these

antecedents in place, I’ll explore how an important part of Schopenhauer’s pessimism consists in

a re-conceiving of them. Finally, the chapter concludes by highlighting the central argument

through which Schopenhauer attempts to link willing with pessimism.

Chapter 2.1: Will: Practical-Rational Judgement

In ancient philosophy, it’s unclear whether there is a full-blown conception of “the will”

per se, but one does find material out of which the will was later born. For instance, in Plato’s

Republic Book IV, the soul is conceived as having a tripartite structure: there is (i) “the part

with which it lusts, hungers, thirsts, and gets excited by other appetites without reason and

appetitive part, companion of indulgences and pleasures,” (the appetitive part of the soul); (ii) the

spirited part of the soul, and the rational part of the soul which governs the preceding -- “it is

appropriate that the reasoning part should rule, since it is really wise and exercises foresight on

behalf of the whole soul, and for the spirited part to obey and be its ally.”18 These parts

correspond, respectively, to the Greek concepts of epithumia, thumos, and boulesis. Now, our

purpose isn’t to offer the best exegesis of Plato’s theory of the soul, but is instead to point out an

aspect of his theory that acts as a precursor to the concept of will.

18 Plato, Republic (Harvard University Press, 2013), 74.

15

For Plato, this tripartite conception of the soul suggests that one can pick out certain ends.

In fact, the word boulesis refers to a faculty in the soul for desiring and picking out as an end that

which is good; one can, for instance, take the appetite for sexual gratification and “reign it in” –

to allude to the charioteer metaphor from the Phaedrus —in accordance with reason by, for

instance, directing it towards the intelligible, good end of marriage instead of unbridled

debauchery. From this classical account, we have then a notion of human action as teleological

in the sense of being able to choose ends and align the different parts of the soul towards them:

the soul can conquer inordinate desire through reigning it in and successfully re-directing it

towards ends conducive to fulfillment. But there isn’t yet the notion of the will as a voluntary

faculty of the soul for choosing actions distinct from the categories of epithumia, thumos, and

boulesis. One can act under the influence of passion as opposed to reason, but there is no clear

ontologically distinct faculty that makes voluntary actions independently from these tripartite

aspects of the soul.

The full-blown conception of the will as voluntary faculty gets further brought out by

Aristotle but doesn’t reach full expression until Kant.19 This account’s most relevant features are

found in Nicomachean Ethics Chapter 1.7 in which Aristotle presents his famous “function

argument.” Aristotle maintains that “for all things that have a function or activity, the good and

the 'well' is thought to reside in the function.” To discern “the good” for human beings, then, the

argument suggests we’ll need to learn the function of a human being as such. Here, Aristotle

isn’t concerned with enumerating a list of things people consider good: rather, he’s occupied

with the more philosophically demanding task of identifying a highest good, and whatever it may

19 Although we arguably have a conception of the will –modelled off the theological notion of the will of God—

present from the patristic period in Augustine.

16

be he argues it must exhibit the following three features: (i) “it is desirable for itself, (ii) it is not

desirable for the sake of some other good, and (iii) all other goods are desirable for its sake.”20

Aristotle’s answer to the question of what fulfills these features, that which constitutes the

function of human beings as such, is unequivocal: it is eudemonia. Or, to borrow the now famous

line, “it is the activity of the soul in accordance with virtue.”21 For the function argument, then,

Aristotle (a) starts with the claim that human beings as such have a function (which constitutes

their goodness), and (b) ends with the conclusion that the good for human beings is rational

activity of the soul. The highest good, then, consists in the fulfillment of this human function.

The argument can be summarized as follows:

1. A kind’s goodness is found in fulfilling its function.

2. Rational activity of the soul is the function of the kind “human being.”

Therefore, the goodness of the kind “human being” is this rational activity of the soul

(i.e. Eudaimonia).

The argument, as it stands, is formally valid, but the theory of will backing how humans are

supposed to achieve this final good isn’t spelled out fully. Instead, we get a theory of human

action relying on the following resources. Aristotle incorporates the categories of epithumia,

thumos, and boulesis, highlighting the latter as the faculty through which we come to desire that

which is good as an end for conduct. He further introduces the notion of prohairesis, as the

faculty for determining the means to achieving those ends. According to Charles Kahn,

prohairesis can be further understood as “the point of confluence between our desire for a goal

and two rational judgments: first, our judgment that the goal is a good one, and, second, our

20 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 2014), 36. 21 Ibid., 55

17

judgment that this action is the best way to pursue it.”22

Aristotle’s theory of action, then, contains at least three components relevant to our

discussion: (i) voluntary actions (which aren’t necessarily chosen in the sense of prohairesis just

mentioned). For instance, Aristotle considers acting under the influence of thumos as an instance

of voluntary action, but it isn’t “chosen” since one didn’t rationally deliberate about the means

for achieving the goal of that action. We also have (ii) that range of actions that are in fact

chosen since we selected the means for them (i.e. prohairesis). And finally (iii) the notion of

boulesis, a rational desire for that which is good or beneficial. Now to say, as Charles Kahn

points out, that Aristotle lacks a conception of the will, is to say that there isn’t a single concept

through which (i), (ii), and (iii) are all unified: a single faculty accounting for the directing of

ourselves in accordance with our desire for the good via means we’ve deliberately chosen.

One finds such a full-blown conception of the will in the Medieval period onwards, but

for the present purposes of understanding the background of Schopenhauer’s pessimism, I focus

on a figure of more direct relevance: viz., Immanuel Kant. In Kant, one finds the notion of what

I’ll call Willing as Practical-Rational Judgement, an account that subsumes much of the ancient

traditions while also clarifying and adding to them.23 Willing as Practical-Rational Judgement

states that willing (construed as a single unified faculty) is a process through which one (i)

judges certain ends as good (i.e. choiceworthy), and then (ii) determines the modes of

comportment required to attain those goods. Willing, in other words, is the process of what

philosophers call “practical reason.”

For Kant, practical reason is “a practical faculty given to us” through which one can

22 Khan, The Question of “Eclecticism”: Studies in Later Greek Philosophy (University of California Press, 1988),

240. 23 Kant, The Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (Cambridge University Press, 1998).

18

judge certain ends as good and “select the means towards those ends.” This means-ends

distinction follows Aristotle’s distinction between prohairesis and ends, but with Kant one finds

them unified through the idea of the good will. The Good Will is the proper use of practical

reason whereby one judges the end as good (and out of duty) pursues the means to it. There is

then, for Kant, a faculty whereby one judges ends are choiceworthy and good, and then

deliberates about the proper means for realizing them.

The important presuppositions of Willing as Practical-Rational Judgement are then,

unsurprisingly, the following: (i) there are choiceworthy goods worthy of pursuit, and (ii)

humans can realize them through the proper use of practical reason. We define the will as such

since both the classical accounts and now Kant identify willing as a process in which one (a)

judges certain goods as worthy of pursuit, and then (b) performs the behaviors required to attain

them successfully. This denotes that willing encompasses not only the judgement that X is in fact

good, but also the practical acts of attaining that good X successfully.

Now, it is my contention here, that a fundamental theme of Schopenhauer’s pessimism is

his denial of Willing as Practical-Rational Judgement. Once we’ve properly understood willing,

we’ll realize that there aren’t things to be judged as worthy of pursuit, and our wills aren’t

capable of performing the practical process of successfully pursuing them anyways.

Chapter 2.2: Schopenhauer’s Reconceiving of Will: Will as Effective Desire

The central contention of this section is that Schopenhauer replaces “Willing as Practical-

Rational Judgement” with “Willing as Effective Desire.” Willing as Effective Desire maintains

that willing consists of two features: (i) a blind process of ceaseless desiring, and (ii) a lack of

agent-causation between reason-states and behaviours: i.e. there’s no rational subject who can

pick reasons on which to act. Rather, actions are just the immediate expression of the Will over

19

which the “agent” exerts no control or causal influence. We consider each feature in turn.

For Schopenhauer, the will is indeed a blind ceaseless desiring force. He states this

almost verbatim: the will is a “blind ceaseless, striving force” which keeps the subject of willing

“continually on the turning wheel of Ixion,...always scooping water in the sieve of the Danaids,

and as the eternally thirsting Tantalus.”24 To gain greater understanding of this first feature of

Willing as Effective Desire, it’s necessary to situate it within the Kantian framework in which it

has intelligibility.

Here, attention must first be paid to the second chapter of WWR I, The Objectification of

the Will, in which Schopenhauer offers the most comprehensive treatment of his metaphysics of

willing. This passage itself assumes the reader’s familiarity with Immanuel Kant’s transcendental

idealism propounded four decades prior in The Critique of Pure Reason. I will not digress into an

analysis of transcendental idealism, but will only mention the parts apropos to the present task.

Elsewhere, in section 17 volume 1 of Parerga and Paralipomena, Schopenhauer takes it that:

Transcendental is the philosophy that makes us aware of the fact that the first and

essential laws of this world that are presented to us are rooted in our brain and are therefore

known a priori. It is called transcendental because it goes beyond the whole given

phantasmagoria to the origin thereof. Therefore, as I have said, only the Critique of Pure

Reason and generally the critical (that is to say, Kantian) philosophy are transcendental.25

For present purposes, the passage (i) references the Kantian thesis that the transcendental

subject possesses faculties through which representations of the world are created, and (ii)

implies that there’s a distinction between those representations and the thing-in-itself (i.e. the

24 Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, (Cambridge University Press, 2010) Book 3, 196 25 Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena (Oxford University Press, 1974), 82.

20

ding an sich) they represent. Alternatively, one could say that the mind mediates experiences by

creating a representational filter into which the actual nature of the world cannot penetrate. We

perceive only images but not the real thing they betoken.

Schopenhauer –as I said-- assumes this distinction between representations of the world

and the thing-in-itself, echoing it again in section 17 of The Objectification of the Will through

his discussion of how the natural sciences are designed to classify “those phenomena known by

us only as our representations.”26 Beginning in section 18, however, he quickly insists on

reconstructing the epistemological bridge between the noumenal and phenomenal world (i.e.

between things as they appear to me—as represented by the natural sciences, on the one hand;

and things as they are in themselves—as experienced non-representationally by embodied

beings, on the other). As Schopenhauer writes:

To the subject of knowing, who appears as an individual only through his identity with

the body, this body is given in two entirely different ways. It is given in intelligent perception as

representation, as an object among objects, liable to the laws of these objects. But it is

also given in quite a different way, namely as what is known immediately [i.e. non-

representationally] to everyone, and is denoted by the word will.27

Here, we learn that embodied subjects are privy to a unique form of knowledge, for they

experience not only the external representations of their body, but also the non-representational

willing that lies, as it were, on the “inside” of those representations. Willing, then, is the inner

nature of the world.

For Schopenhauer, willing isn’t simply the sphere of activity connoted by the English

26 WWR I, 67 27 Ibid., Book 1, 100

21

word “volition.” Rather, for Schopenhauer, willing is rooted in the Will (die Wille), a blind

metaphysical force characterized by blind ceaseless striving and desire. He writes: “the will, as

the thing-in-itself, constitutes the inner, true, and indestructible nature of man; yet in itself it is

without consciousness.”28 He continues that without consciousness, this surging force, i.e. the

Will “dispenses entirely with an ultimate aim and object. It always strives, because striving is its

sole nature, to which no attained goal can put an end. Such striving is therefore incapable of final

satisfaction.” Here, Schopenhauer makes a leap that might appear incredible to some readers:

from the claim that willing is the inner nature of the world, he infers that willing is a blind

ceaselessly desiring force. Now many may concede that we access ourselves as willing forces

internally, but how does that undermine the ability to direct the will rationally? This inference

requires further explanation, since –as stated so far—it doesn’t follow.

The answer to this question takes us to a consideration of the second feature

characterization of Schopenhauer’s view of Willing as Effective Desire: viz., the lack of agent-

causation between reason-states and behaviours: i.e. there’s no rational subject who can pick

reasons on which to act. Rather, actions are just the immediate expression of behaviours over

which the “agent” exerts no control or causal influence. Indeed, Schopenhauer explains the a-

rationality of the will through showing that there’s no agent “behind the scenes” causing

behaviour.

In the classical accounts we surveyed, there was first a subject who judges that X is good,

then directs his desires and willing towards the process resulting in the successful achievement of

X. I, for instance, judge that procreation is a good, and then desire the process resulting in a

procreative action of my body and ultimately progeny: this whole process constitutes the process

28 Ibid., Book 2, 19, 201

22

of Willing as Practical-Rational Judgement. However, for Schopenhauer, there is no separate and

prior process of deliberation that results in the willing of bodily activity: instead, bodily activity

is reducible to and indeed identical with willing and desire itself. He writes:

The act of will and the action of the body are not two different states objectively known,

connected by the bond of causality; they do not stand in the relation of cause and effect;

but are one and the same thing, though given in two entirely different ways, first quite

directly, and then in perception for the understanding. The action of the body is nothing

but the act of will objectified, i.e. translated into perception.29

Schopenhauer hereby denies the claim that the will causes bodily activity. There is no causal

relationship between the will and behaviour: the latter is simply the objective description of the

former that we access through phenomenal perceptions. There is then, for Schopenhauer, no

moment of judgement that X is good, on the basis of which we initiate the practical process of

desiring and acting towards X. There is no subject prior to the act, through whom we judge the

good, and then causally execute behaviours. There is only the blind process of desiring and

willing that is itself identical with those behaviours.

Schopenhauer’s proposal here might sound absurd, especially in light of our own folk-

psychological experiences of ourselves as first deliberating and then using our wills and desires

to bring about behaviours causally. But the underlying idea here is far from unique to

Schopenhauer, and receives support from the opponents of folk-psychological accounts of

willing and action, to whom many will be significantly more sympathetic. There is, for instance,

an interesting affinity between the Schopenhauerian remarks just made, and the position

endorsed in Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind:

29 Ibid., Book 1, 100-102

23

The clown’s tripping and tumbling are the workings of his mind, for they are his jokes….

Tripping on purpose is both a bodily and a mental process, but it is not two processes,

such as one process of purposing to trip and, as an effect, another process of tripping. Yet

the old myth dies hard. We are still tempted to argue that if the clown’s antics exhibit

carefulness, judgement, wit, and appreciation of the moods of his spectators, there must

be occurring in the clown’s head a counterpart performance to that which is taking place

on the sawdust. …There must be some shadow-operation which we do not witness,

tallying with, and controlling, the bodily contortions which we do witness.30

From these passages, we can now gather how Schopenhauer’s re-visioning of willing is

supposed to imply pessimism.

There is, to quote Ryle’s famous phrase, no “ghost in the machine:” no need, in other words, to

postulate an ontological duality between the body and mental faculties of willing and

deliberation. They have two senses but only one referent: they are different vocabularies that

refer to the same phenomenon. There is, then, no need to postulate a faculty of volition that

spookily causes bodily activity.

Schopenhauer’s argument belongs within the same tradition. Rather than postulating two

ontological categories (viz., bodies and faculties of volition) and having to explain the causal

relationship between them, Schopenhauer insists that there is no additional faculty above the

body. Rather, the body is just the manifestation of the desiring will – the will as experienced

through the filters of phenomenal perceptions. Will and body are two words for what is

ultimately the same thing under a different description.

Now despite having the virtues of being supported by Ryle’s considerations and offering

30 Ryle, The Concept of Mind, (London: Hutchinson, 1949), 13.

24

a resolution to the causation problem (i.e. how the will causes bodily activity), some might still

think that Schopenhauer’s reduction of the body to will isn’t plausible. One worry concerns cases

where the execution of the will is temporally distanced from the behaviour it intends to carry out:

that is, cases of willing something in the future. Take, for instance, the case of someone who

wills that he’ll finish his essay after the television show ends. He wills at time T1 that he’ll

complete the assignment after the show at some later time T2. Here, there seems to be a temporal

disconnect into which some kind of causation can creep. The man wills to finish the assignment,

and his resolve later causes his bodily actions of writing it, yet in those later instances of

behaviour the act of will doesn’t seem present (for the simple reason that it occurred in the past).

Willing and bodily activity, then, wouldn’t be identical. This possibility of future willing would

seem to undermine Schopenhauer’s claim that the will and body are identical (and hence his

corollary claim that the former is foreclosed from rationally directing the latter). But fortunately

for Schopenhauer, he anticipates precisely this objection.

He maintains that: “resolutions of the will relating to the future are mere deliberations of

reason about what will be willed at some time, not real acts of will. Only the carrying out stamps

the resolve; till then, it is always a mere intention that can be changed.”31 Schopenhauer accounts

for purported instances of future willing through claiming they are mere intentions. This seems

sound, since the opponent is claiming a causal relationship between willing and behaviour such

that the will causes the latter to come about. But in cases of future willing, the will often wasn’t

sufficient to cause the corresponding behavior. The man often “wills” to complete the

assignment but through akrasia or whatever other mechanisms fails to bring about his actions. It

is more natural then, to say the person intends future actions, but doesn’t will them until they are

31 WWR, 100

25

actually manifest behaviorally. Otherwise we are stuck with the puzzle of explaining why certain

instances of “willing” have causal efficacy whereas others don’t.

In fact, this puzzle of explaining why some mental acts of willing and deliberation don’t

cause their corresponding instance of behavior is a problem faced more significantly by the

classical accounts, and it is one to which Schopenhauer can provide a very simple answer. The

problem, to clarify, is accounting for akratic action: cases in which S knows action A is good,

desires and wills to do A, but through some weakness of will ends up doing not-A. These cases

require some serious philosophical explanation within the classical theories of willing. They

postulate two ontological categories: an agent and its actions. When all of the agent’s reasons

suggest action A, and she desires to do A, but her action ends up being not-A, its difficult to

explain how that happened. Plato dodges the problem through saying that one always acts on

what she thought was the good, but we know of cases in which a person identifies something as

not good but does it anyways (e.g. the self-destructive behavior of an addict). It is a problem

faced by the classical accounts for which they provide implausible solutions.

The problem indeed only exists for Willing as Practical-Rational Judgement, since the

judgements are supposed to be the determiners to which the will and subsequent practical actions

conform. An individual first judges X to be good, and then acts in accordance with that

judgement. However, from the Schopenhauerian perspective of Willing as Effective Desire,

akratic action is easily explained: those mental acts of judgement (i.e. one’s “reason states”)

aren’t even a part of the causal process through which actions are brought about. Rather, akratic

actions demonstrate and disclose the primacy of the will: the blind, irrational process of the will

ultimately determines what actions how about. And whatever phantasms of the imagination are

conjured up ultimately have nothing to do with what one wills. Reason states aren’t even a part

26

of the causal process of action, so there is no problem of akratic action for Schopenhauer.

Therefore, far from counting against Schopenhauer, the problem of future willing brings out the

further issue of akratic action that validates his theory over the classical one.

Schopenhauer’s theory of Willing as Effective Desire, then, appears to be a plausible one.

But how does he reach the core conclusion of pessimism (i.e. that life cannot be participated in)

from that theory? He achieves this connection through a third concept: suffering. The idea here is

that since the will cannot achieve fulfilling ends, willing agents will inevitably experience

suffering. And since suffering is not a state of affairs that can be justifiably affirmed, (and it is

the essence of life), it follows that life itself cannot be justifiably affirmed. At this point, we’ll

briefly defer spelling out the main argument from which that conclusion is supposed to follow.

And will instead focus first on the exegetical task of explaining how Schopenhauer’s

reconceiving of the will is supposed to support his pessimistic position that life cannot be

participated in.

The explanation for how his account of the will supports pessimism returns to the concept

of Eudaimonia, a state whose very possibility Schopenhauer denied at the beginning of this

section. In Willing as Practical-Rational Judgement, we learned that human fulfillment consisted

in the will being directed towards intelligible ends. Eudaimonia, then, consisted in the will

properly directing itself towards intelligible ends selected as being rationally desirable. The

problem that Schopenhauer’s Willing as Rational-Practical Judgement poses for this picture is

two-fold: the a-rational, ceaseless will is such that either (i) those ends cannot be achieved, or (ii)

if they are achieved, they won’t secure Eudaimonia.

(i) and (ii) are both initially spelled out in the following passage: “absolutely every

human life continues to flow between willing and attainment. Of its nature the wish is pain;

27

attainment quickly begets satiety. The goal was only apparent; possession takes away its charm.

The wish, the need, appear again on the scene under a new form; if it does not, then dreariness,

emptiness, and boredom follow, the struggle against which is just as painful as is that against

want.”32 Here, we learn that believing in a Eudaimonistic satisfaction of the will (which is

achieved through attaining a rational aim or goal) follows from a form of synchronic reification:

i.e. taking one moment of temporary satisfaction in abstraction from the enduring, diachronic

interplay between desire, willing, satisfaction, and suffering. In reality, all temporary

satisfactions are only apparent, since they contain the seeds of their own destruction. (i) and (ii)

are then further spelled out in another passage: human existence swings “like a pendulum to and

fro between pain and boredom, and these two are in fact its ultimate constituents.”33 From the

preceding two passages, we learn the way that Schopenhauer’s reconceiving of the will is

supposed to generate pessimism.

In Willing as Rational-Practical Judgement, the interplay between human faculties was

conducive to Eudaimonia. Recall that it started with a judgement, which reason could constrain

and allow the will to direct towards an intelligible end resulting in human fulfillment. Willing as

Effective Desire results in a much starker picture.

We start with desires (which are themselves ceaseless and never ending). These desires

(which are themselves expressions of the a-rational and ceaseless life force die Wille), then

direct the subject towards certain ends. Then, an end is either (a) not achieved, in which case un-

fulfillment results (i.e. suffering), or (b) the end is achieved, in which case boredom (which is

also conceived as a form of suffering) results. This revised conception of the a-rational, ceaseless

32 WWR 1: 314 33 WWR 1:312

28

will therefore shows that life is essentially suffering.

So far we’ve explained –exegetically—some of the reasons for which Willing as

Effective Desire is supposed to imply pessimism. We have, however, deferred detailing the main

argument through which that reasoning is supposed to be established. That is the task undertaken

in the present section.

Chapter 2.3: Argument from Willing to Pessimism

I maintain that the central argument for Schopenhauer’s pessimism can be formulated as

follows. I, following Migotti and others, call it ‘The Argument from Suffering:’

1. Desire leads to lack

2. Lack leads to suffering

3. Therefore, insofar as we desire suffering is inescapable

4. Desire is unavoidable

5. Therefore, suffering is inescapable (i.e. essential to life)

6. Suffering is not choiceworthy

7. Therefore, life is not choiceworthy (i.e. pessimism is true)

This is the skeleton of the argument onto which we now want to graft some conceptual flesh. The

first three premises lead to a crucial subordinate conclusion of the argument. Schopenhauer’s

commitment to the first two premises seems beyond dispute. He explicitly endorses the first

premise’s view that all desires arise from a lack: “...all striving springs from want or deficiency,

from a dissatisfaction with one’s own state or condition.”34 And likewise subscribes to the

second premise that lacking results in suffering: “we call its [i.e. the lacking will’s] hindrance

34 WWR: 1: 309

29

through an obstacle placed between it and its temporary goal, suffering.”35 Suffering is, then,

defined for Schopenhauer as the state of the will lacking (i.e. failing to achieve the satisfaction of

a given goal). From these two premises, we reach the subordinate conclusion of premise three:

insofar as we desire suffering is inescapable. This is a fairly simple chain of reasoning: all

instances of desire are from lack, and all instances of lacking constitute suffering, so it follows

that as long as we desire suffering is inescapable. Now finding a case of desire-less action would

be the obvious counterexample to this argument: for then we could act (i.e. will) without

suffering.

In premise four, desire-less action is precisely the possibility at which Schopenhauer

takes aim through affirming that desire is unavoidable. For Schopenhauer, the reasoning behind

this premise harkens back to the earlier observation about the identity of willing and action.

Recall that for Schopenhauer, to exist means to be constituted as a willing being, a ceaseless

series of desires. And actions are themselves identical with instances of willing: the former are

simply the phenomenal manifestations of the latter. So, willing without desire would be

tantamount to willing without acting, a possibility Schopenhauer has already explicitly

precluded. From the argument above then, we can conclude that suffering is inescapable. And

since suffering cannot be considered choiceworthy we have the final conclusion of the argument,

namely that life is not choiceworthy (i.e. Schopenhauer’s pessimism). So Schopenhauer’s

commitment to the argument is incontrovertible, but the extent to which we should accept it as a

decisive justification for pessimism remains questionable.

The possibility of there being choiceworthy forms of suffering is the primary obstacle to

the argument. We’ll call this “The Objection from Choiceworthy Suffering.” Unsurprisingly, the

35 Ibid., 309

30

basic idea is that there are cases in which actions can involve suffering but also be choiceworthy,

and therefore that premise six in Schopenhauer’s argument from suffering doesn’t establish his

pessimistic conclusion that life cannot be participated in. Let’s consider the case for

choiceworthy suffering.

There seem to be two kinds of action in which choiceworthy suffering can occur. The

first involves actions in which the suffering is justified through being a necessary means to

achieving some higher end; and the second involves actions that contain their goal or end inside

their very performance. The first can be called “Instrumental Action” (henceforth, IA), and the

second “Telically Closed Action” (henceforth, TCA).

IAs have a very familiar structure: Action A is an IA if A is performed for the sake of

some greater good X. Take, for instance, the cases mentioned frequently in theodicies: Job

continued to act through his suffering, because it was necessary to acquire the moral character

God required of him. Here, suffering isn’t considered choiceworthy for its own sake, but can still

be classified as choiceworthy all things considered: it is instrumentally justified through some

good external to it. The permissibility (or to use our word, “choice-worthiness”) of suffering in

cases of IA are explained through a “domino effect of obligations.” Normally, we think suffering

is unchoiceworthy since there’s some prima facie obligation not to affirm it. We refuse to

dismember someone because it would inflict suffering on him and we have an obligation against

that. However, there are cases in which we have an overarching obligation that nullifies the

prima facie one. Suppose, for instance, one has an overarching obligation to protect his country

in times of war. And dismembering an enemy solider is a necessary means through which one

can fulfill the overarching obligation. Then, we see the domino effect of obligations: the

obligation not to dismember the person gets “knocked down” by the obligation to protect one’s

31

country in times of war.

Kant’s Law explains that effect: it states that if one has an obligation to X, then one can

X. This “ought implies can” principle explains the knocking down of the prima facie obligations.

To take our earlier case: if one ought not to inflict suffering on someone, then one can avoid it.

However, since one ought (all things considered) to protect his country, and inflicting suffering

is necessary to do that, then one cannot avoid it. One is therefore released from the obligation to

avoid affirming suffering.

Now, I maintain that a similar form of reasoning can impute the argument from

suffering’s crucial sixth premise that suffering is not choiceworthy. The reasoning begins by

affirming that suffering is not choiceworthy in itself, but then invokes IAs, in which Kant’s Law

justifies discharging one’s prima facie obligation to avoid affirming suffering. Suffering is not

choiceworthy then, but our moral obligation to avoid it gets discharged since it’s a necessary pre-

condition for fulfilling some overarching obligation. Life, for instance, may indeed have many

moments of suffering that aren’t in themselves choiceworthy, but we have no obligation to

disaffirm suffering and renounce the world, for those sufferings allow us to achieve some greater

goods. IAs therefore seem to refute the argument from suffering’s sixth premise.

I contend that TCAs (the second kind of action listed above) also refute the sixth premise.

One (for our purposes) important example of TCAs is familiar to deontologists, and involves the

performance of actions that constitute the fulfillment of duty. I contend this kind of action

constitutes another case of choiceworthy suffering. I’m referring to cases in which one suffers

from an action, but that action instantiates the fulfillment of a moral duty.36

36 I say “instantiates a moral duty” to emphasize that the action itself is the fulfillment of the moral duty, rather than

the action being done for the sake of some moral duty that spookily exists in abstraction from it. The duties should

32

For instance, a plausible way of construing the moral obligations engendered through a

nuptial promise is to see them as a series of actions demanded by a vow. When I promise to love

someone “for better or for worse,” my moral obligations here get instantiated as a series of future

actions in which I live out that vow. It’s easy to conceive of cases in which I affirm my own

suffering through living out my martial vows. Perhaps one’s husband becomes a dysfunctional

schizophrenic, and continuing to live out the marital vow results in tremendous suffering. Yet

one has a duty to sustain the bonds of love, so the suffering becomes choiceworthy. The living

out of the marital vows is choiceworthy then, and indeed even obligatory although it results in

great suffering. So it seems that premise six in the argument from suffering succumbs to cases of

IAs and TCAs.

Now, we have offered –briefly—two cases in which suffering seems to be choiceworthy,

contrary to premise six in the argument from suffering. Rather than offer Schopenhauerian

responses to their specifics, I want to highlight how the success of both examples presupposes a

commitment to precisely that idea which Chapter Two demonstrates as being Schopenhauer’s

next target: namely, the idea of a highest good. In the case of IAs, we must assume there’s some

unconditionally good end for the sake of which one’s actions are performed. If there aren’t final

goods for the sake of which we perform an action, then the suffering in that action cannot be

justified. There would be no redemption of the suffering, since there would be no justifying good

for the sake of which that suffering was endured. So the very reasoning behind IA as a

counterexample to the argument from suffering’s sixth premise necessitates that there is indeed

some highest good. Likewise, in the case of TCAs, one cannot fulfill her demands to the good

be construed here as grounded in reason and not existing in abstraction from the performances of and deliberations

about them.

33

unless that good obtains. If, to use our example, there was no actual good of living out one’s

marital vows, it wouldn’t make sense to endure suffering for the sake of allegiance to a goodness

that is ultimately illusory.

Schopenhauer’s riposte to our objections is therefore antecedently presupposing his

arguments concerning the lack of an highest good in the world. We should then proceed directly

to the assessment of Schopenhauer’s account of goodness, for –at the very least—his argument

from suffering relies antecedently on his arguments for the lack of a highest good. Without

establishing the absence of an highest good, he cannot demonstrate his pessimism.

Schopenhauer’s denial of the highest good is thus the topic to which our second chapter will now

turn.

34

Chapter III: Goodness

This third chapter features a similar three-fold format to the second. First, I begin with a

historical genealogy of the concept of goodness, as it’s articulated in Plato, Aristotle, and Kant.

Second, with this contextualization in place, I proceed to show how Schopenhauer’s re-

conceiving of that conception of goodness expresses an important part of his pessimism: namely,

that pessimism results from the realization that there’s no highest good in the world. Finally, we

conclude by considering a central argument through which Schopenhauer attempts to infer

pessimism from his re-conceived conception of goodness. Ultimately, in this chapter, I

demonstrate that Schopenhauer’s argument from the absence of a highest good to pessimism

presupposes mortalism (i.e. the thesis that the person is annihilated at death). This subordinate

conclusion sets the stage for the fourth chapter on death.

Chapter 3.1: Goodness as Objective and Unconditioned

I begin then with some classical conceptions of goodness, that consider goodness as

being objective and unconditioned. While classical conceptions of goodness are far from

monolithic, there’s enough commonality to draw out several themes for our purposes. As in the

last section, we begin with Plato, proceed to Aristotle and end in Kant. After this sketch is in

place, we’ll be able to identify the features of the classical account whose falsity Schopenhauer

believes to imply pessimism.

In Plato, his conception of goodness is made explicit in the widely discussed Allegory of

the Cave from The Republic. Disclosing the effects of education on the soul is the purpose of the

passage, but it also serves my purposes of understanding the Form of the Good. In the allegory

itself, Plato (through the character of Socrates) invites Glaucon to imagine a cave where people

are chained to face a wall on which the shadows of figures are cast. Sounds are heard by the

35

prisoners, and they falsely believe them to emanate from the shadows. Then, Glaucon is asked to

imagine how the prisoners were freed from their shackles and gradually brought out of the light:

“suppose...that someone should drag [the prisoner]...by force, up the rough ascent, the steep way

up, and never stop until he could drag him out into the light of the sun.”37 The sun, in this

allegory, symbolizes the Form of the Good, and the objects in the cave represent those

incomplete representations of reality. – mere appearances and illusions.

Implicit in this dichotomy –between the Forms and mere appearances—is a

philosophically relevant distinction between appearance and the evil, on the one hand, and reality

and the good, on the other. Appearances are that which is subject to change and not the

ultimately real constituents of reality; and reality is that which is timeless and hence good.

Indeed, for Plato, the very definition of a natural evil seems to be that which destroys and hence

that which engenders change: “’then whenever one of these [i.e. a natural evil] is present in

something, it makes the thing to which it is present bad, and in the end, it dissolves it entirely and

destroys it?" ---"Of course.”38 The evil, then, is that which causes change and the deterioration of

a thing –in a word: becoming. It is, for instance, the rot in the wood the disease in the body, that

which leads to their fading away. By contrast, the Form of the Good possesses eternal durability,

as we learn in the Timaeus (37E6–38A6).

For Plato, then, the Good is construed as an objective (i.e. mind, and convention-

independent value) in the world. Indeed, more than being objective, it is even construed as being

amongst the most real things in existence. It is not a nominal category created by human beings,

but is instead a participant in an eternal, timeless order of things. It exists out in the world as a

37 Plato, The Republic Book VII, (Penguin Group Inc), 365-401 38 Ibid., 609

36

locus of value.

In Aristotle, one again finds a similar picture of objective-intrinsic goodness emerging,

although it’s rendered significantly more immanent than the Platonic Form of the Good. I earlier

mentioned that the term Eudaimonia expresses Aristotle’s immanent conception of the human

good, but didn’t proffer a complete account of it. Eudaimonia gets defined as “the activity of the

soul in accordance with virtue” (arête), but that warrants further elaboration. Etymologically

speaking, the term comes from the Greek eudaimon, which is itself composed of two further

parts: eu, meaning “well” and daimon, meaning “divinity” or “spirit.” Some have ventured to

claim the term means living well in accordance with a divinity (i.e. living the kind of life

befitting a god or a life that a god would approve of), and others have opted for the idea that the

term is synonymous with eu zen, meaning living well or having a flourishing life. In either case,

my primary concern is not with elaborating what eudaimonia consists of, but is rather with

identifying the ontological status it is supposed to enjoy.

The ontological status of the good is suggested in an important passage from the Ethics,

in which Aristotle insists: “if among the ends at which our actions aim there be one which we

wish for its own sake, while we wish the others only for the sake of this, and if we do not choose

everything for the sake of something else (which would result in an infinite regress, so that all

desire would be futile and idle, it is clear that this one end will be the good and indeed the

highest good.”39 This passage implies that, for Aristotle, unless there’s a final objective, highest

good, there would be an infinite regress of contingent goods; and therefore no final good in terms

of which the pursuit of all the others would be justified. From this passage one can easily infer

what the ontological status of the good is supposed to be for Aristotle: it must be construed as a

39 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (Harvard University Press, 1982), 1094a19-27

37

single objective good, whose value is intrinsic (i.e. is not derived from its extrinsic relation to

anything else).

Kant remains within this tradition of seeing goodness as objective and unconditioned,

although his definition of the good differs. Rather than conceiving of the good as a Form, or

Eudaimonia, Kant insists that the only unconditionally good thing in the world is the Good Will.

Indeed, in a famous passage from The Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, one reads:

“nothing can be possibly be conceived in the world, or even out of it, which can be called

good without qualification, except a good will.”40 For Kant, then, the highest good is a good will.

For all other things possess only a qualified goodness insofar as they can be used for bad ends.

For instance, the virtues of intelligence and prudence are generally considered goods, but they

only have conditional goodness since they can be deployed towards the unjust ends of, say,

criminal activity or miserly self-concern.

The ontological status of this good is, moreover, objective and intrinsic. It is objective

insofar as its validity holds a priori for the kind of beings humans are (the good will doesn’t

admit of variation and isn’t beholden to convention). It is an expression of “universal laws” by

which all rational agents are bound. And the good will is again an intrinsic good: its value

doesn’t depend upon anything extrinsic to itself or even its ability to have efficacy in the world

for achieving specific ends. Indeed, as Kant writes: “even if this person's will has no power at all

to accomplish its purpose; not even the greatest effort on his part would enable it to achieve

anything it aims at, ... the good will of this person would still sparkle like a jewel all by itself.”41

Kant here is insisting that the good will is of intrinsic value insofar as it retains its worth even in

40 Kant, The Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, (Cambridge University Press, 1996), 17. 41 Ibid., 18

38

the absence of being able to effect any good within the world. It is, then, beyond question that for

Kant, just as much as for Plato and Aristotle, goodness is conceived as a kind of objective

intrinsic value, an unconditional source of value.

Now it is my contention that a primary part of Schopenhauer’s pessimism is his denial of

this vision of Goodness as objective and intrinsic. And indeed a replacement of it with what I’ll

call Schopenhauer’s view of Goodness as willed and contingent.

Chapter 3.2: Goodness as Willed and Contingent

Now, as with our section on willing, I want to highlight the fundamental assumption on

which the preceding accounts of goodness depends; for the refusal of that assumption marks the

meaning of Schopenhauer’s pessimistic re-conceiving of the category goodness. The assumption

is that there’s –in fact—some objectively and unconditionally good things in the world (i.e.

things that are good for their own sake and independent of our desires, or conventions, or

whatever other subjective-determinates might make something good). To understand

Schopenhauer’s pessimism as –in part—a re-conceiving of the category goodness—let’s explore

his challenge to that assumption.

The classical view of goodness as objective and intrinsic presupposes ontological realism

concerning the category of goodness: goodness –whether it be a monolithic Form of the good, as

in Plato, philosophical contemplation, as in Aristotle, or the good will, as in the Kantian

account—is conceived as an objective category: something that exists out in the world

independent of our beliefs, desires, intentions, and conventions. Goodness, then, brings objective

value into the world: something out there that makes the world good independently of us. Yet,

Schopenhauer denies precisely that account of goodness –as objectively bringing value into the

world—and his pessimism can be –in part—understood through that denial.

39

In World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer defines goodness through a

distinction between relative and unconditional goodness: relative goodness is “the fitness or

suitableness of an object to any definite effort of the will[;]”42 whereas unconditioned goodness

is “an object’s ability to achieve total satisfaction of the will’s efforts.”43 This means that the

goodness of something consists in its capacity to satisfy the human will. An apple, for instance,

is good insofar as it satiates one’s will not to hunger. Through defining goodness as a function of

a thing’s capacity to satisfy the will, Schopenhauer inverts the classical account of goodness.

In the view of goodness as objective and intrinsic, one desires or wills to attain something

because it is recognized as a good. One’s mind goes out into the world and discovers things as

goods worthy of pursuit. For Schopenhauer that very process is inverted: something is good

because one desires and wills it, whereas with goodness as objective and intrinsic one desires or

wills it because it is good. There is, then, no objective goodness in the world according to

Schopenhauer. There is only conditionally valuable objects, ones that gain goodness from the

quality we imposed upon them.

While denying unconditional goodness, Schopenhauer still offers (in a widely-discussed

passage) an ersatz highest good. After claiming that a highest good “cannot be conceived,”44 he

mentions:

However, if we wish to give an honorary, or so to speak an emeritus, position to an old

expression that from custom we do not like entirely to discard, we may, metaphorically

and figuratively, call the complete self-effacement and denial of the will, true

willlessness, which alone stills and silences forever the craving of the will; which alone

42 WWR 1: 360 43 Ibid., 360 44 Ibid., 362

40

gives that contentment that cannot again be disturbed; which alone is world-redeeming;

and which we shall now consider at the conclusion of our whole discussion; the absolute

good, the summum bonum; and we may regard it as the only radical cure for the disease

against which all other good things, such as all fulfilled wishes and all attained happiness,

are only palliatives, anodynes.45

Here, it is important to understand how Schopenhauer has inverted the view of goodness

as objective and intrinsic. If there’s no unconditioned or highest good, it is thought that the moral

project of participating in life is fundamentally irrational. The idea here is a familiar one:

practical reason discovers there to be certain ends amongst which we should choose. There must,

moreover, be some highest good (whether it be monolithic or plural) towards which all our

instrumental ends are directed. There has to be some ultimate reason for which we act –a final

good that brings value and purposes to all our strivings. Otherwise, human actions are just futile

endeavors to aim at a target that can never be hit. It is my contention that a fundamental meaning

of pessimism (brought out by this extended discussion of goodness) is the tragic realization that

no such final goal or end obtains. There’s no final value in terms of which the individual

moments of human life acquires a deeper significance. There is instead just an endless series of

actions devoid of any more significance than what our desires choose to impose upon them.

In a particularly bleak passage, Schopenhauer characterizes this pessimistic vision of a

world without any overarching value or highest good in life:

It is really incredible how meaningless and insignificant when seen from without, and

how dull and senseless when felt from within, is the course of the life of mankind. It is weary

longing and worrying, a dreamlike staggering through the four ages of life to death, accompanied

45 Ibid., 362

41

by a series of trivial thoughts. They are like clockwork that is wound up and goes without

knowing why. Every time a man is begotten and born the clock of human life is wound up anew,

to repeat once more its same old tune that has already been played innumerable times,

movement by movement and measure by measure, with insignificant variations. Every

individual, every human apparition and its course of life, is only one more short dream of the

endless spirit of nature, of the persistent will-to-live, is only one more fleeting form, playfully

sketched by it on its infinite page, space and time; it is allowed to exist for a short while that is

infinitesimal compared with these, and is then effaced, to make new room. Yet, and here is to be

found the serious side of life, each of these fleeting forms, these empty fancies, must be paid for

by the whole will-to-live in all its intensity with many deep sorrows, and finally with a bitter

death, long feared and finally made manifest.46

There is, then, no final good in terms of which human life gains meaning and

significance. Just the blind a-rational striving of the will to live (die Wille) constantly bringing

beings back into eternal oblivion no sooner than they had emerged from it. Or, to repeat this

same pessimistic sentiment in the eternal soliloquy of Macbeth:

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day

To the last syllable of recorded time,

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

46 Ibid., 321-322

42

And then is heard no more: it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

Schopenhauer’s pessimism (within the context of my discussion of goodness), is not only this

tragic insight that life lack the highest good required to make it signify something. There’s also a

second reason why the lack of highest good suggests pessimism: viz., Schopenhauer thinks that

without a highest good, the only rationally acceptable way to comport oneself through life is

through the denial of it. Now this might sound paradoxical, but attention to Schopenhauer’s

theory of asceticism makes sense of it.

Schopenhauer’s theory of asceticism contains what we can call the “soteriological

paradox of willing.” The paradox consists of two seemingly incompatible propositions: (i)

affirming life is obligatory, and (ii) affirming life is impermissible. Prima facie, (i) and (ii)

constitute a deontic contradiction: if affirming life is obligatory, then it’s not impermissible, but

that consequent contradicts (ii). And Schopenhauer subscribes to both propositions: affirming

life is obligatory, since not-affirming one’s life at a given moment (i.e. suicide) is taken as

immoral by Schopenhauer. In suicide, one denies the will-to-live (die Wille) for the wrong moral

reasons. Rather than denying the will because of its lack of a highest good or tendency to create

suffering for all sentient beings, one instead denies the will for its impact on one’s own person:

Far from being denial of the will, suicide is a phenomenon of the will's strong

affirmation. For denial has its essential nature in the fact that the pleasures of life, not its

sorrows, are shunned. The suicide wills life, and is dissatisfied merely with the condition

on which it has come to him. Therefore he gives up by no means the will-to-live, but

merely life, since he destroys the individual phenomenon. He wills life, wills the

43

unchecked existence and affirmation of the body; but the combination of circumstances

does not allow of these, and the result for him is great suffering.47

To avoid this failure of moral awareness, Schopenhauer claims we must be committed to (i). But

he likewise insists upon the seemingly contradictory proposition that affirming life is

impermissible, as we can see from his commitment to the view that asceticism and denial of the

will to live is “the highest moral ideal.” Indeed, instead of affirming his own individuality (as the

suicide does), the ascetic denies his own ego’s self-referential pleasures, and is thereby able to

realize that all beings are essentially one. That is, while the illusory phenomenal world creates a

diversity of different beings (through the principle of individuation), all beings are ultimately the

same in essence: all are manifestations of the one, unindividuated Wille. So, then, it seems life

both ought and ought not to be affirmed. How can one reconcile this apparent contradiction?

Schopenhauer achieves a reconciliation between these two propositions through

circumscribing the referent to which the term “life” refers. In the proposition “affirming life is

obligatory,” the term life doesn’t refer to life qua an individual, but rather life qua the ascetic,

whose primary project is to overcome individuality through a systematic denial of self-referential

desires. Once the desires have been burnt away, there is only that state of suffering-free

willlessness (which Schopenhauer, to recall, identified as the ersatz highest good). In the second

proposition “affirming life is impermissible,” the terms life denotes life qua an individual, the

endless series of sufferings, strivings and illusions, that state of sound and fury, signifying

nothing (i.e. our Shakespearean description of a world without a highest good). An upshot of this

distinction concludes our discussion of Schopenhauer’s re-conceiving of the category of

goodness. It shows that, for Schopenhauer, the following tragic insight arises out of a

47 Ibid., 390

44

consideration of a world without a highest good: life can only be permissibly participated in

through the denial of one’s individuality. One’s life qua an individual cannot be permissibly

participated in. There is no good to be had in life as an individual –salvation only comes through

emancipation for the individual’s ensnarement to the Wille.

Chapter 3.3: Argument from Highest Good to Pessimism

From this exegetical discussion of the connection between Schopenhauer’s re-conceiving

of goodness and pessimism, I hope to have drawn out two themes, relating to an argument for

pessimism. The first theme is that pessimism follows the objective absence of a highest good in

the world; and the second theme is that (morally speaking) the most choiceworthy pursuit is one

which denies participation in life (viz., asceticism). I –influenced by Mark Migotti-- call the

argument that captures these themes, “The Argument from the Highest Good.”48

It features the following, simple form:

1. If life is choiceworthy, then it contains a highest good.

2. Life does not contain a highest good.

3. Therefore, life is not choiceworthy.

The argument is clearly valid, containing a simple modus tollens style inference. And

Schopenhauer subscribes to the reasoning behind the premises. He insists that if the pursuit of

conditionally good things is justified, then there’s some final, highest good that can be attained

through them, a highest final good. However, Schopenhauer repeatedly insists “there is no

highest good, no absolute good, for it, but always a temporary good only.”49 This conclusion

results from an earlier passage in which Schopenhauer argues the following: “the good is,

48 This argument was originally formulated by Mark Migotti in his “Schopenhauer’s Pessimism and the

Unconditioned Good” (1991). 49 WWR1:362

45

according to its concept, ton pros ti, hence every good is essentially relative, for it has its

essential nature only in its relation to a desiring will. Accordingly, absolute good is a

contradiction; ... it signifies a final satisfaction of the will, after which no fresh willing would

occur.”50 Schopenhauer’s argument then follows from his theory of will through two simple

steps: (i) his argument that goodness is “essentially relative” (i.e. good equals subjective

satisfaction of one’s will), and (ii) that nothing ever satisfies the will. So since nothing ever

unconditionally satisfies the will, there is –on Schopenhauer’s definition—no highest final goods

in terms of which all human actions can be justified. Schopenhauer is then clearly committed to

the argument, exegetically speaking.

The conditional premise is one about which Goodness ad Objective-Intrinsic Good

agrees. For instance, in a passage cited by Migotti, Aristotle writes: “if among the ends at which

our actions aim there be one which we wish for its own sake, while we wish the others only for

the sake of this, and if we do not choose everything for the sake of something else (which would

result in an infinite regress, so that all desire would be futile and idle), it is clear that this one end

will be the good, and indeed the highest good.”51 Migotti gives a further and highly plausible

formulation of this argument in Schopenhauerian terms:

If every alleged good were good only in virtue of its relationship to something else

distinct from itself, then it would not finally be intelligible how anything could be good at

all; and if the goodness of any alleged good were finally unintelligible, nothing could be

justifiably called “choiceworthy” (since intelligible choice of its nature aims at perceived

50 Ibid., 362 51 Migotti, “Schopenhauer’s Pessimism and the Unconditioned Good” Journal of the History of Philosophy 33 (4)

(1995): 654.

46

good), including, by instantiation, human life itself.52

I consider this argument to be sound. However, it only establishes the conditional premise that if

life lacks a highest good, then it isn’t choiceworthy. The crux of the issue thus remains whether

there is a highest good. At this point, then, I don’t want to dispute the conditional premise, but

will instead focus on a problematic presupposition of the minor premise (i.e. that there is no

highest good). My strategy for contesting the minor premise involves showing its assumption of

mortalism (i.e. the thesis that the individual is annihilated at death).

My argument isn’t a new one (indeed it can be found in Kant), but I hope the connection

that I make between it and Schopenhauer’s pessimism will be. I intend to establish the

dependence of the minor premise on mortalism through showing how immortalism guarantees its

contradictory (i.e. the existence of the highest good). Kant establishes that very dependence

through his Moral Argument:

1. Moral actions aim at the highest good

2. If there’s a highest good, then there’s an afterlife

3. If moral action is perfectly coherent, then there must be a highest good

4.Therefore, one is rationally required to hope there’s an afterlife (and hence a highest good)53

In premise one, Kant endorses similar considerations to the ones found throughout the

classical tradition: all actions aim at some perceived good. Many think that the teleological

model of action (i.e. that actions are means within a structure of practical reasoning for achieving

an end) is contrary to the deontological spirit of Kant’s ethics. However, the picture isn’t that

simple. While Kant insists that the justification for a moral action is found deontologically (in its

52 Ibid., 655 53 Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (Cambridge University Press, 1997), 120.

47

satisfaction of a moral maxim), and not in its teleological fulfilment of some end. He still insists

that actions themselves are teleologically structured: actions are selected as means for the

attainment of some end. They therefore have goals at which they aim, even if they cannot be

morally justified on the basis of their achievement of that end.

This includes, in the context of premise one, the fact that Kant considers the aim or goal

of moral actions to be the fulfillment of the highest good. For Kant, the highest good is

construed as “a state in which happiness is proportioned to virtue.”54 In other words, a state in

which the acts of the virtuous are met with happiness, and the wicked do not prosper. So while

Kant is obviously opposed to viewing happiness as a justification for a moral action, he

nevertheless insists that the highest aim of the moral life is to have the fulfillment of one’s duties

align with one’s personal happiness. The question then arises of whether there is such a highest

good.

In premise two and three, Kant grapples with this question and its relationship to the

intelligibility of moral action. Concerning premise two, Kant takes it as empirically obvious that

the highest good doesn’t obtain within this world: happiness is not proportioned to virtue.

Indeed, he insists that “without a God and a world invisible to us now, but hoped for [i.e. the

afterlife], the glorious ideas of morality are, indeed, objects of admiration, but cannot be the

springs of purpose and action.”55 This passage, taken in context, is meant to imply that the

afterlife is necessary to achieve a reconciliation of happiness and virtue, since the world doesn’t

guarantee they’ll be a connection between them. Experience teaches that the good suffer and the

wicked prosper. Moral agents must therefore hope for the after-life to ensure that their actions

54 Ibid., 120 55

48

remain intelligible (i.e. that there is some good the pursuit of which gives ultimately meaning

and significance to the actions of their lives).

Through claiming that the afterlife is necessary to make moral action intelligible, I am

not saying that morality depends upon the afterlife or a God who is supposed to supply it. Rather,

the claim is that moral action becomes incomplete (in the sense of lacking full intelligibility)

without postulating it. The reason for this is found within Kant’s Ought Implies Can (OIC)

principle. Namely, if one has an obligation to do something, then it must in principle be possible

actually to do it. Transposed into the context of the argument, OIC entails that if pursuing the

highest good is an intelligible enterprise, then it is something that one can obtain. However, if

one didn’t believe in the afterlife, then one could not obtain the highest good. One would

therefore be engaged in the unintelligible act of pursuing an end one knows she cannot obtain,

and moral action would consequently be unintelligible, albeit one would remain bound to act

ethically. Indeed, as Kant writes in a largely overlooked passage from his Lectures on Ethics:

“We are obliged to be moral. But morality implies a natural promise: otherwise it could not

impose any obligation upon us. We owe obedience only to those who can protect us. Morality

alone cannot protect us.”56 The meaning of this somewhat enigmatic passage is that while moral

duties exist independently from consideration of God and the afterlife, moral action remains

incomplete without the promise that the ends of morality and the ends of one’s personal

happiness will be aligned. And the alignment of those ends can only be guaranteed through the

afterlife. Or as Mark Johnston writes: “in the case of Kant, this [i.e. theism as allegiance to the

good] need not rest upon the base idea of the afterlife as the incentive to be moral, but on the

56 Kant, Lectures on Ethics (Hackett Publishing, 1963), 82.

49

better idea that morality by its nature requires the support of the afterlife.”57 The idea, then, is

that belief in the afterlife is rationally required (as the argument’s conclusion above states). For

without belief in the afterlife, one cannot have the guarantee that moral action is intelligible

insofar as there’s no assurance that it will complete its aim of having happiness proportioned to

virtue.

That is to my mind the most plausible rendition of Kant’s Moral Argument. I now want

to begin the task of making its relevance to Schopenhauer’s pessimism more explicit. It’s

important to note that Kant essentially agrees with a core claim of pessimism: namely, that the

world, in and of itself, doesn’t provide justification for a choiceworthy life. Life is not

choiceworthy through itself since there’s no evidence for a highest good in terms of which moral

actions become intelligible. In Schopenhauer’s argument, he concludes that since there’s no

highest good in the world, one can infer that life isn’t choiceworthy (i.e. pessimism). The

absence of the highest good is inferred from there being insufficient evidence for it in the world.

Kant agrees there’s insufficient evidence for it in the world, but nevertheless upholds the

necessity of believing in the highest good and affirming the choice-worthiness of life. How does

Kant do this?

Kant contends that while evidence cannot support the highest good and its concomitant

judgements of the choice-worthiness of life, one can still ground them through hope. Kant’s

statement of this contention is unequivocal: “without a God and a world, invisible to us now, but

hoped for [i.e. the afterlife], the glorious ideas of morality are, indeed, objects of approbation and

of admiration, but cannot be the springs of purpose and action.”58 Taken together with the earlier

57 Johnston, Surviving Death (Princeton University Press, 2012), 12 58 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (Boston: Bedford, 1929), 639.

50

discussion, this passage discloses the Kantian response to Schopenhauer’s Argument from the

Highest Good. It demonstrates that the argument presupposes mortalism (i.e. that the human is

annihilated at death). However, if immortality is something for which we can legitimately hope,

then it’s hard to see how the Argument from the Highest Good can succeed. Indeed, the afterlife

provides precisely that assurance of the highest good that its second, minor premise denies. To

adjudicate Schopenhauer’s pessimism then, the Argument from the Highest Good is insufficient.

One also needs to look at the plausibility of immortality, a doctrine whose falsity the argument

presupposes. Death, and that for which one can hope beyond this life, is therefore the topic to

which the fourth chapter will now turn.

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Chapter IV: Death

In this penultimate chapter, I follow the same three-fold structure of the preceding ones.

The chapter begins with tracing a classical account of death, in opposition to which

Schopenhauer devises his own. At this point, ideas of death from Plato to Kant are considered.

The view of Death as Ethical-Personal Immortality will emerge from the discussion: it defines

death as having two features (i) immortalism (i.e. that the person exists forever), and (ii) cosmic

justice (i.e. that happiness will ultimately be proportioned to virtue post-mortemly). Secondly,

the chapter then explicates how Schopenhauer’s conception of death, that I’ll call Death as

Impersonal Deliverance consists in the denial of (i) and (ii). Finally, the paper then identifies that

the argument from Death as Impersonal Deliverance to pessimism as the central inference on

which all the arguments for pessimism I’ve considered depend. With that claim in place, I will

have accomplished a full characterization of the meaning of and arguments for pessimism, and

will finally be in a position to assess its truth value in the fifth and final chapter.

Chapter 4.1: Death as Ethical-Personal Immortality

In this section, I want to explore death as Ethical-Personal Immortality, which, again, has

two defining features: (i) immortalism, and (ii) cosmic justice. I begin with Plato before

addressing Kant, whose treatment of the Moral Argument (earlier discussed) for the after-life

will prove important for our purposes.

Plato’s treatment of death is impressively diverse, but for present purposes we want to

telescope in on, first, the assumption of immortalism and, second, the assurance of cosmic justice

found in the Myth of Er from book X of The Republic.

Plato indeed endorses the view of death as a gate way to personal immortality. In the

Phaedo, for instance, readers find the widely discussed “affinity argument” for the immortality of

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the soul. The argument runs as follows: there are two ontological categories in the world –as was

discussed earlier: the Eternal Forms and the temporal world of illusions. The mind partakes in

the attributes of the former more than the latter, so it’s likely that the soul –like the Forms—is an

eternal, incorruptible entity. One then concludes by analogy that the soul is more likely to be

immortal given its affinities with immortal things.59

Now my goal here isn’t to defend particular arguments for the existence of the soul, but is

instead to note how Plato repeatedly assumes a picture of immortality (if it’s true) to consist of

an immortalization of the person –that is, one’s personal soul continues to exist beyond the death

of its corresponding physical body. This immortalist picture is assumed throughout not only

Plato’s arguments for immortality, but also the myths from which readers gather his commitment

to a second feature of immorality: viz., cosmic justice.

Indeed, the Myth of Er , for instance, Plato conceives of a moral universe in which the

wicked are punished after death and the good receive just reward. The myth itself recounts a

(presumably hypothetical) cosmology where that could occur.

It begins with the character Er (the son of the Pamphylian Armenius), who after being

slain in battle was taken home to be buried. On the twelfth day of lying on his funeral pyre “he

returned to life and told them what he had seen of the other world.” I quote Er’s post-mortem

experience at length:

…when his soul left the body he went on a journey with a great company, and that they came

to a mysterious place at which there were two openings in the earth; they were near together, and

over against them were two other openings in the heaven above. In the intermediate space there

were judges seated, who commanded the just, after they had given judgment on them and had

59 Plato, Phaedo (G.M.A., 1977), 78b484b8

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bound their sentences in front of them, to ascend by the heavenly way on the right hand; and in

like manner the unjust were bidden by them to descend by the lower way on the left hand; these

also bore the symbols of their deeds, but fastened on their backs… Then he beheld and saw on

one side the souls departing at either opening of heaven and earth when sentence had been given

on them; and at the two other openings other souls, some ascending out of the earth dusty and

worn with travel, some descending out of heaven clean and bright…., and they went forth with

gladness into the meadow, where they encamped as at a festival; and those who knew one

another embraced and conversed, the souls which came from earth curiously enquiring about the

things above, and the souls which came from heaven about the things beneath. And they told one

another of what had happened by the way, those from below weeping and sorrowing at the

remembrance of the things which they had endured and seen in their journey beneath the earth…

while those from above were describing heavenly delights and visions of inconceivable beauty.

After recounting this, Plato has Socrates inform Glaucon that the whole story “would take too

long to tell,” but insists that the passage just quoted contains the following message: “he [i.e. Er]

said that for every wrong which they had done to any one they suffered tenfold” and likewise for

those who performed good in life “there were blessings as great.” We have, then, a cosmological

view whose eschatology secures the highest good. The world, on this view, is perfectly just:

happiness is proportioned to virtue, since those who are good receive their just reward in the

afterlife, whereas the wicked atone for the misdeeds that went unpunished on earth.60

Here, we find the crucial assumption that even though the world is not a fundamentally

just place, there is a realm beyond the world through which it is secured. The wicked may

prosper and the just might suffer, but the world at large is still fair: the scales of justice are

60 Plato, Republic, 614-621.

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balanced in the after-life. there is cosmic justice, since the actions that one performs ultimately

achieve the end of the highest good: i.e. in the afterlife or the eschaton, happiness will be

proportioned to virtue. The good will achieve beatitude and the wretched will suffer for their

heinous crimes. This conception of Death as Ethical-Personal Immorality therefore undermines a

central claim of Schopenhauer’s pessimism, viz., that there’s no highest good. While there may

be no such good in this life, one nevertheless ought to affirm the choice-worthiness of existence

as such since the highest good can be achieved after death: there is a direct causal connection

between one’s actions in this life, and attaining the highest good in the next.

One sees, then, that Death as Ethical-Personal Immortality contains two theses: (i)

immortalism (the thesis that the person exists eternally), and (ii) cosmic justice (the view that the

happiness will ultimately be proportioned to virtue).

Having explained the account of Death as Ethical-Personal Immortality, I now want to

expose (briefly) its relevance to Kant’s Moral Argument against Schopenhauer. Recall the Moral

Argument:

1. Moral actions aim at the highest good

2. If there’s a highest good, then there’s an afterlife

3. If moral action is perfectly coherent, then there must be a highest good

4.Therefore, one is rationally required to hope there’s an afterlife (lest moral action becomes

unintelligible).

For Kant then, the choiceworthiness of life presupposes belief in the afterlife. For without it the

task of pursuing the highest good is rendered unintelligible, and without a highest good there are

no –as I earlier established—choiceworthy goods that make the process of practical action

intelligible to begin with. One needs to assume that she can achieve the ends of ethics through

55

having happiness proportioned to virtue, but without a perfected state of the afterlife its

impossible to justify that assumption. The crux of the whole argument for pessimism then, is

whether the account of Death as Ethical-Personal Immortality, endorsed in different forms by

Plato, and Kant, actually holds. That is, are there good reasons to believe that its two features

obtain: (i) personal immortality, and (ii) cosmic justice. It is, however, a central contention of

Schopenhauer’s that these features don’t obtain. In fact, his analysis of death is aimed at a

straightforward denial of them.

Chapter 4.2: Death as Impersonal-Deliverance

Schopenhauer’s own account of Death as Impersonal Deliverance denies Death as

Ethical-Personal Immortality, and a deep meaning of Schopenhauer’s pessimism can be

ascertained through understanding that denial. It is my contention that Schopenhauer’s account

of Death as Impersonal Deliverance contains two salient features: (i) an impersonal view of

immortality, and (ii) a denial of ethical eschatology (i.e. in the end there’s no justice for the

individual).61 I now exegetically explicate each feature.

Schopenhauer’s view on death and immortality isn’t as clear-cut as those of other

atheists. In the famous Epicurean argument about death, it is assumed there that once death

arrives “we are not.” For death is considered the annihilation of everything that constituted one’s

61 I should note that Schopenhauer does indeed have a vision of cosmic justice, and even devotes section 63 of

WWR I to his conception of “eternal justice.” However, his vision of cosmic justice is purely pessimistic, and lacks

any assurance that happiness will be proportioned to virtue. Rather, he argues "If we want to know what human

beings, morally considered, are worth as a whole and in general, let us consider their fate as a whole and in general.

This fate is want, wretchedness, misery, lamentation, and death. Eternal justice prevails, if they were not as a whole

contemptible, their fate as a whole would not be so melancholy. In this sense we can say that the world itself is the

tribunal of the world. If we could lay all the misery of the world in one pan of the scales, and all its guilt in the other,

the pointer would certainly show them to be in equilibrium.” The world is then surprisingly on Schopenhauer’s view

just, but the vision of justice only serves to reinforce his pessimism: for the nearly ubiquitous wretchedness and evil

of human beings is coupled with a nearly ubiquitous level of “punishment” in the form of sickness, misery, disease,

and ultimately death. But bracketing this pessimistic vision of “justice” it indeed fair to attribute a lack of cosmic

justice in the traditional sense to him: i.e. justice as happiness being proportioned to virtue.

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self. However, for Schopenhauer, while the subject does indeed die, his impersonal essence as

will and thing-in-itself is nevertheless immortal. I call this, for the sake of simplicity, impersonal

immortality.

Schopenhauer characterizes the impersonal nature of immortality in Section XLI of

WWR II, On Death and its Relation to the Indestructibility of Our Inner Nature. Death as

Impersonal Deliverance assumes mortalism (insofar as it affirms that the individual ceases to

exist), but also affirms the deliverance from one’s individuated being to the indestructible life-

force of the will-to-live, which is itself immortal. That is, at the moment of death, one’s person

as empirical willing subject of suffering and striving ceases to exist, but one’s inner nature as the

will-to-live continues to endure. Schopenhauer explains this type of immortality through an

example: “because the strong arm that three thousand years ago bent the bow of Ulysses no

longer exists, no reflective and well-regulated understanding will look upon the force that acted

so energetically in it as entirely annihilated.”62 He extrapolates this example to the entire human

person: while the particular individual, who was animated by the life-force of will, ceases to

exist, that animating force itself is indestructible. So there is, for Schopenhauer, a definite sense

in which one is immortal, but his account nevertheless denies the first fundamental claim of

Death as Ethical-Personal Immortality; viz., mortalism.

However, Death as Impersonal Deliverance also belies the second feature of Death as

Ethical-Personal Immortality, namely cosmic justice. Schopenhauer replaces the eschatological

moments of justice in the earlier accounts with a vision of death as being capable of achieving (at

most) deliverance from suffering. Rather than death being a gateway to a state in which

happiness is finally proportioned to virtue, Schopenhauer envisions it as a final release from the

62 WWR 2: 471

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shackles of suffering and willing, a release in which one’s individuality fades away. To explain

how death constitutes such a deliverance for the individual, it’s necessary to examine

Schopenhauer’s discussion of time.

At the beginning of the section, Schopenhauer insists that fear of death, “which is the

greatest of all anxieties,”63 arises from a misunderstanding of the relationship between time and

being. In the western world, he claims the great metaphysical and religious systems “...teach man

that he came but recently from nothing, that consequently he has been nothing throughout an

eternity,”64 and that he will soon return to that “absolute nothingness.”65 Or, if the system is of a

religious orientation, the eternal nothing and flash of fleeting existence are usually followed by

“an imperishable and immortal state.”66 In either case, there remains a problem concerning the

being of the individual and time.

If one assumes no afterlife, then one is left with a story in which the being fortuitously

arises from the eternity of non-being that preceded its birth, lives a fleeting existence, and then

recedes back into an eternity of oblivion. If, on the other hand, one assumes an afterlife, then the

story becomes one in which the being doesn’t exist for an eternity, lives a brief life, and then

enters a post-mortem state whose characteristics are in some ways determined by the actions of

that brief life. In both instances, a host of philosophical problems arise from trying to explain the

individuated subject’s relationship to time: e.g. what happens to the subject after the death of its

body? When does the subject die? etc.

For Schopenhauer, this entire philosophical stance (of viewing the subject as a separate

63 Ibid., 470 64 Ibid., 464 65 Ibid., 487 66 Ibid. 488

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entity whose relationship to time requires explanation and induces philosophical conundrums) is

manifestly misguided. For it fails to recognize the ideality of time: viz., that time is not—as Kant

argues—a real property of the external world but is rather an a priori category through which we

structure experiences in the first place. For Schopenhauer, there ultimately is not ontologically

differentiated subject whose mortality or immortality is in question. There is only the timeless

will that objectifies itself as the illusory phenomenal forms that one experiences temporally.

Deliverance, on this model, consists of the realization that the phenomena in the external

world and most importantly one’s own person, are not ultimately real things that can be born or

die. There is no death! There is then, a form of impersonal deliverance promised by

Schopenhauer’s account of death, for it reveals that there ultimately is no separate self about

whose immortality one must be concerned. Rather, what one calls “the self” is the an

instantiation of the eternal, timeless Will to which the terms “birth” and “death” do not apply.

“One” is the eternal, to speak as a mystic might.

This seems to provide a kind of deliverance insofar as it reveals that death and the fear of

it, regarded respectively “as the greatest of evils, and the greatest of anxieties,”67 are ultimately

both unfounded. Death is an illusion about which one need not be afraid and that one will never

ultimately undergo. In the same instance, however, this alternative vision of deliverance plays

directly into the hands of a pessimism vision of the world.

Indeed, there can be no cosmic justice amidst such a world, since the actions that

individuals perform ultimately have no final effect on their destinies. This is a threat to goodness,

and the moral life more generally, for it demonstrates that what one does in this life (whether one

was a saint or the most immoral of men) ultimately has no final significance. That consideration

67 Ibid., 470

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(i.e. that death threatens goodness) is, to my mind, the main argument for Schopenhauer’s

pessimism, although it hasn’t yet been stated anywhere in the Schopenhauer literature. The

assessment of that argument is therefore the task to which the final section of this chapter turns.

Chapter 4.3 From Death as Impersonal Deliverance to Pessimism

This section formulates what I consider to be the central and most significant argument

for pessimism, one that culminates the highest good argument:

1. If life is choiceworthy, then there’s a highest good.

2. There is no highest good.

3. Therefore, life is not choiceworthy.

Now, at the end of chapter two, it was demonstrated that this argument depends crucially on the

assumption of mortalism. It was agreed, by Kant and Schopenhauer, that the world has no

highest good. The realization of the highest good must therefore require an afterlife through

which goodness can be purported to virtue. Yet, as I’ll argue, Schopenhauer’s final and central

argument for pessimism belies that possibility. The argument can be stated as follows, The

Argument from Mortalism:

1. If there’s a highest good, then there’s an afterlife

2. There is no afterlife

3. Therefore, there’s no highest good

This argument, taken together with the Argument from the Highest Good, imply pessimism.

Before I consider the cogency of the argument, it’s important to establish that Schopenhauer is

actually committed to it exegetically. A good measure of textual evidence has already been cited

to support Schopenhauer’s commitment to the second premise, so the crucial task is establishing

that he links the absence of a highest good with mortalism. To demonstrate that Schopenhauer

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pledges allegiance to that link, I show how his reasoning can be plausibly situated in a tradition

that take death to threaten goodness. Hereafter, I examine that tradition, and then show how

Schopenhauer’s reasoning fits directly into it.

An ancient suggestion that death threatens goodness is found in the book of Ecclesiastes

in a passage that Schopenhauer himself quotes:

So I turned to consider wisdom and folly. . . . Then I saw that wisdom excels over folly as

light excels over darkness. The wise have eyes in their heads, but the fools walk in darkness. But

then I remembered that the same fate befalls us all, wise and foolish alike. And I said to myself,

“What happens to the fool will happen to me also. Why then have

I been so very wise?” And I came to see that this wisdom also is vanity. There is no enduring re

membrance of the wise or of the fools, for in the days to come all will have been long forgotten.

The wise die just like the fools. . . . So I hated life, because what is done under the sun was

grievous to me; for all is vanity and a chasing after wind.68

Here, a prized form of goodness, namely, “wisdom” is having its value called into

question by death. Later, this same suspicion about the value of wisdom extends to all goods:

“everything that confronts them is vanity, for the same fate comes to them all, to the just and the

unjust, to the good and the evil, to the clean and the unclean, to those who sacrifice and to those

who do not sacrifice.”69 In these passages, the central idea is that death threatens goodness. And

the reasoning behind that conviction, stated in Kantian terms, is that happiness is not

proportioned to virtue. Whether one pursued the goods of wisdom, virtue, etc, is ultimately just

vanity and of no consequence, because the same fate ultimately befalls the person who sought

68 Ecclesiastes 2:12-17 69 Ibid., 9:2-3

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their opposites of ignorance and vice. Whether one was good or evil doesn’t ultimately matter

since there’s no highest good attained through life; one simply and ultimately, irrespective of

one’s conduct, falls back into the abyss of nothingness after death.

Situating Schopenhauer’s argument within this tradition, I can begin to explain premise

one’s claim that “if there’s a highest good, then there’s an afterlife.” The idea starts with the

claim established earlier, namely, that there’s no highest good within this world. Then, a

necessary condition for the claim that there’s no highest good for human beings in general is that

there’s no accessible world in which such a highest good could obtain. The primary candidate for

such a world is, of course, the afterlife as traditionally construed. So precluding the possibility of

such a world ends up being a necessary condition for affirming there’s no such good for human

beings.

The explanation of the inference goes further, however, when we consider the

contrapositive of the premise: if there’s no afterlife, then there’s no highest good. Now the claim

that there being no afterlife is a sufficient condition for undermining a highest good seems

somewhat extreme. Yet that is precisely the claim upheld by the tradition in which I intend to

place Schopenhauer’s argument. Recall that in Ecclesiastes “everything is vanity” in the face of

inevitable annihilation. No matter what one does, her actions will never amount to the attainment

of the highest good, since annihilation befalls the just and unjust alike. In Kantian terms,

happiness is never ultimately proportioned to virtue, so the choiceworthiness of pursuing life and

all its goods is called into question. Pessimism seems inevitable.

Schopenhauer, on my reading, is making a very similar argument with respect to the

connection between mortalism and highest good: i.e. that death threatens the highest good. The

argument is implicit in how he discusses the meaninglessness of life, which culminates in

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nothing greater than death. He writes: “every time a man is begotten the clock of human life is

wound up anew, to repeat once more its same old tune that has already been played innumerable

times, movement by movement and measure by measure, with insignificant variations...each of

these fleeting forms [i.e. human lives] must be paid for by the whole will-to-live in all its

intensity with many deep sorrows, and finally with a bitter death, long feared and finally made

manifest.”70 Here, one finds a picture of existence in which every human life has no ultimate

consequence or significance, and culminates in death. Schopenhauer appears committed to the

threat that death poses to goodness in this passage. For if one assumed the opposite, viz., that the

seemingly inconsequential moments of life culminated in an afterlife, then his pessimism would

be seemingly impossible to countenance. Indeed, there would be an overarching process through

which the seemingly futile actions of this life would be connected to the attainment of the highest

good. For instead of life’s actions being futile and never adding up to anything, the choice of –

for instance—pursuing virtue in this life would ultimately culminate in the attainment of

beatitude afterwards: happiness would be proportioned to goodness. Yet, the inevitable terminus

of our existence in death, as mentioned in the passage, precludes such a process. This passage

contains an implicit endorsement of the reasoning I ascribe to Schopenhauer, but some readers

might demand a more explicit commitment to it.

That desideratum is satisfied through referencing Schopenhauer’s atheism. In the first

volume of World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer only makes use of the term

“atheism” once, but it demonstrates his commitment to the inference (i.e. “if there’s a highest

good, then there’s an afterlife”). In the passage, Schopenhauer mentions “the debate between

materialism and theism, in other words, between the assumption that a blind chance, or an

70 WWR 1: 322

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intelligence arranging from without according to purposes and concepts, had brought about the

world.”71 The theistic side of the debate assumes that “if something in nature is suitable and

appropriate, it is a work of intention of deliberation, of intelligence.”72 Teleology is the concept

invoked here: if things in nature appear to possess a purposiveness, then there is some end

towards which they are directed. Assuming that the whole of nature is arranged so that things

within it possess a purposiveness, has, to many philosophers, suggested a divine designer (i.e.

God). In the context of ethics, for instance, assuming that one’s actions can be successfully

directed towards the achievement of the highest good (i.e. that virtue and happiness will

ultimately align) assumes a divine being who guarantees that acts of virtue will correspond with

happiness in the afterlife (since no such correlation exists observably in natural laws). Yet, as is

well-known, Schopenhauer insists that no such divine designer exists. There is God in the world,

as evidenced through the total lack of anything more than illusory teleology, but there is instead

only the blind Will. However, without such a God, to provide an afterlife in which happiness is

proportioned to virtue, all the evidence suggests that no highest good can obtain (since one

doesn’t find such a correlation in the ordering of the natural world either).

To my mind, then, the central argument for Schopenhauer’s pessimism hinges on the

assumption of mortalism. To demonstrate that contention, I want to revisit briefly the structure of

the arguments in each of the preceding chapters. Three arguments were explicated as part of a

cumulative case argument for pessimism, and the first two were found to have a premise

dependent upon the subsequent one.

In Chapter Two, ‘The Argument from Suffering’ emerged from my discussion of the

71 WWR 1: 400 72 Ibid., 400

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category of willing in Schopenhauer:

1. Desire leads to lack

2. Lack leads to suffering

3. Therefore, insofar as we desire suffering is inescapable

4. Desire is unavoidable

5. Therefore, suffering is inescapable (i.e. essential to life)

6. Suffering is not choiceworthy

7. Therefore, life is not choiceworthy (i.e. pessimism is true)

At the point, it was established that the argument’s success hinged crucially on the sixth premise

that “suffering is not choiceworthy.” However, the ability to establish the truth of that premise

presupposed a discussion about whether there are any highest goods that can make the category

of choiceworthy action intelligible in the first place.

In Chapter Three, I therefore investigated whether any such goods exist. From the

discussion, ‘The Argument from the highest Good’ emerged:

1. If life is choiceworthy, then it contains a highest good.

2. Life does not contain a highest good.

3. Therefore, life is not choiceworthy.

This argument sought to justify the first argument’s sixth premise through showing that reality

lacks the highest good required to make actions choiceworthy. This second argument was itself

reliant upon a further presupposition: that mortalism holds (i.e. the present life is the only source

from which a highest good can be justifiably affirmed). The question of whether there’s an

afterlife is therefore paramount to the argument.

Indeed, in Chapter Four, the analysis of death explicitly revealed that the highest good

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argument’s denial of life’s choice-worthiness necessitated precluding the after-life. The

following argument was considered:

1. If there’s a highest good, then there’s an afterlife

2. There’s no afterlife

3. Therefore, there’s no highest good

It was established that Schopenhauer stands within a tradition that considers the lack of an

afterlife as threatening the highest good. In light of this argument, and the two prior argument’s

dependence upon it, the crux of the entire case for pessimism becomes whether there is reason to

believe the afterlife obtains. If the afterlife obtains, then pessimism is false; and if the afterlife

does not obtain, I haven’t offered any convincing reason to refute the three arguments formulated

in favor of pessimism. The plausibility of belief in the afterlife is therefore the topic to which the

final chapter now turns.

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Part III: Kant’s Moral Argument against Pessimism

Chapter 5.0: Kant versus Schopenhauer on the Intelligibility of Human Life

In this chapter, I establish that Kant’s Moral Argument gives good grounds to deny

pessimism, since it justifies believing in an afterlife in which the highest good obtains. The

claim, in other words, is that the afterlife provides a good in terms of which the choice-

worthiness of life becomes intelligible: it makes sense to affirm life and pursue goods, since the

universe it arranged in such a way that acting appropriately will guarantee realization of those

goods. In the chapter, I defend this claim in two phases. First, I begin by reiterating the Moral

Argument, and specify what “one ought to believe in the afterlife” means. Second, I consider an

objection to the argument: what I’ll call the Evidentialism Objection: namely, that one isn’t

justified in believing something unless one has good evidence for it; but ultimately find that

objection to be unsatisfactory. With this defense of the Moral Argument in tact, I will hope to

have established my main thesis that Kant’s Moral Argument gives good grounds to deny

Schopenhauer’s Pessimism.

Chapter 5.1: The Meaning of the Moral Argument

Let’s begin by reiterating the Moral Argument:

1. Moral actions aim at the highest good

2. If there’s a highest good, then there’s an afterlife

3. If moral action is perfectly coherent, then there must be a highest good

4.Therefore, one is rationally required to hope there’s an afterlife (lest moral action becomes

unintelligible).

Instead of defending the argument’s truth value at this point, I want to investigate what it means,

and how that meaning is supposed to impugn pessimism. In particular, I’m concerned with

67

investigating what exactly the conclusion means and its relationship to pessimism. The

conclusion is that one is rationally required to believe in the afterlife. Another way of saying that

S is rationally required to X is to say that S ought to X. However, there are many ways to

interpret the modal term “ought,” and it’s important to clarify them.

Given that the conclusion implies an “ought,” looking at that term’s meaning is a natural

starting point. Most semanticists note that “ought” captures a variety of meanings, of which the

following are examples:

1. Prudential: Mark ought to save his money

2. Teleological: One ought to use quality materials to build an enduring structure

3. Epistemic: The car ought to arrive in New Haven tonight (given its speed)

4. Bouletic: Boaz ought to attend his mother’s funeral (given her desires)

5. Deontic: Everyone ought to alleviate suffering

The conclusion’s “ought” is teleological: it is assuming that belief in the afterlife is a

necessary presupposition for making moral action intelligible in the world. Indeed, the highest

good is a world in which everyone is happy, but their happiness must stem from moral virtue (to

satisfy the demands of justice, for a world populated with happy but wicked beings wouldn’t

constitute the highest good in any plausible sense). In the actual world, however, as

Schopenhauer and Kant concur, there is neither enduring happiness nor a necessary connection

between happiness and virtue. One is then left with a choice: one can either accept that there’s no

highest good, the pursuit of which makes human action choiceworthy or intelligible (and thereby

become a pessimist); or one can believe in the afterlife, and thereby have a doxastic structure

through which human action again becomes intelligible. Kant’s main claim is that one ought, as

a postulate of practical reason, believe that there’s an afterlife to avoid the pessimistic and indeed

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rebarbative horn of this dilemma.

That main claim is paramount to a central argument for pessimism. In Chapter Four, the

following was formulated as an argument on which the other two arguments for pessimism

depend:

1. If there’s a highest good, then there’s an afterlife

2. There’s no afterlife

3. Therefore, there’s no highest good

Now Kant’s Moral Argument impugns premise two. Now, of course, the conclusion of Kant’s

Moral Argument is not that there is, factually speaking, an afterlife. Rather, it impugns the

argument indirectly through showing that the confidence one can have in that premise is aporetic

at best, and that practical reason demands one should in fact denounce it.

The dialectic between Schopenhauer and Kant thus far can be summarized as follows:

Schopenhauer begins by offering a case for the claim that life is unchoiceworthy, one which

crucially hinges on the assumption of mortalism. The Kantian can then respond by claiming that

the truth of the crucial argument’s second premise is aporetic at best. And, in fact, there is an

obligation in practical reasoning to denounce the crucial second premise. Therefore, one ought

not to affirm that premise, and one cannot have confidence that the arguments for pessimism

succeed.

This mode of response is persuasive to many, but it is liable to an important objection:

viz., that since one lacks sufficient evidence for belief in the afterlife, she is unjustified in

holding it. I call this the Evidentialism Objection. Since the success of the Kantian response to

Schopenhauer hinges crucially on refuting this objection, I devote the concluding portion of my

thesis to it.

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Chapter 5.2: The Evidentialism Objection to the Moral Argument

The Evidentialism Objection states that my application of Kant’s Moral Argument

presupposes a false principle: viz., S can be justified in believing P at time T without sufficient

evidence for P at T. This objection traces back to William Clifford’s Evidentialist principle that

“it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe anything upon insufficient

evidence.”73 The idea here is that one can only hold justifiable belief in P at a given time when

one’s evidence supports belief in P at that time; the contrapositive is, of course, relevant here,

insofar as it implies one shouldn’t believe in the afterlife unless there’s sufficient evidence for it.

Now there are cases in which this reasoning indisputably holds. For instance, if a

physician holds the belief that a patient is healthy, but failed to run the appropriate diagnostic

tests, then she would be culpable. Even if –and this is the somewhat more controversial point—

the patient was healthy, the physician would still be culpable. For, according to evidentialism, it

is intrinsically culpable to hold beliefs for which one has insufficient evidence. This same

reasoning seems to apply in most other cases, mutatis mutandis.

On this objection, then, believing in the after-life is an unacceptable stance to take, since

it’s based upon insufficient evidence. Believing in the afterlife may indeed provide a framework

through which human action becomes intelligible One therefore cannot appeal to it when trying

to refute Schopenhauer’s pessimism. To eliminate this objection, I (a) show there are cases in

which one can permissibly believe in the absence of evidence, and (b) demonstrate that belief in

immortality satisfies the features of such cases.

The strategy is to devise cases in which S can justifiably believe P, but S lacks sufficient

73 Clifford, “The Ethics of Belief.” Philosophy: The Quest for Truth. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010,

135.

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evidence for P. For that would undermine the evidentialism on which the objection to the Moral

Argument depends. Before devising such cases, I need to say a word about the relationship

between evidence and belief itself. While I concur with R. J. Collingwood’s claim that “when we

try to define ‘evidence,’ we find it very difficult,”74 I believe that the following account –taken

from Jaegwon Kim-- of evidence should be sufficient for the current purposes.

Kim claims “one thing is 'evidence' for another just in case the first tends to enhance the

reasonable-ness or justification for the second.”75 This passage implies a normative relationship

between evidence and justification. Whenever E is evidence for P, E enhances the justification

for P. Assuming, as the evidentialists do, that justification is a virtue of beliefs, there is likewise

a transitive relationship between evidence and belief. Evidence generates justification and

justification generates belief. The degree of one’s evidence is proportioned to the degree of one’s

justification, which is in turn proportioned to the degree of one’s belief. Another –stronger—

way of stating the relationship upheld by evidentialists is in terms of supervenience. X

supervenes on Y if and only if Y guarantees the presence of X. In this context, evidentialist claim

that belief supervenes on evidence insofar as whenever S and S* have evidence E for P, both will

believe P. This statement of the relationship between evidence and belief provides a clue for

constructing a case against evidentialism.

Pragmatic encroachment cases, defended by Jeremy Fantl and Matthew McGrath (among

others), demonstrate that belief doesn’t always supervene on evidence – contrary to

evidentialism. These cases state that practical factors (what they call “stakes” impact whether

one knows). This means that two people may have identical evidence, but cannot both have a

74 Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956). 75 Kim, “What is Naturalized Epistemology?” Philosophical Persepectives 2, Epistemology, Ridgeview Publishing

Co: 381-405

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justified belief in light of the stakes. For instance, suppose Smith and Jones both possess

identical evidence with respect to the proposition that “my flight leaves to Chicago at 13:30”

(F).They both checked the flight screens, the original ticket displays that time, and the airport

schedules are generally uniform, etc. Smith and Jones would generally be said that have a

justified belief that F given their evidence. However, suppose further that Smith is a

neurosurgeon who needs to arrive in Chicago punctually to perform a life-saving transphenoidal

surgery on his brain cancer patient. Many claim that since the stakes are raised in Smith’s case,

his evidence no longer warrants a justified belief that F. To fulfill his epistemic duties, he should

check the flight schedule every 30 minutes to preclude the highly unlikely but possible chance

that his flight got switched. This pragmatic encroachment case undermines the supervenience

thesis forwarded by the evidentialists: it shows that identical evidence doesn’t always imply the

same state of justified beliefs.76

The purpose of this section is not to assess the success of pragmatic encroachment. Such

an exercise would go far beyond the parameters of the current project. However, I do want to

stress that such cases give good grounds on which to deny evidentialism. Before I proceed to the

second task of explaining how believing in the afterlife is a justified case of not proportioning

one’s belief to the evidence, I want to mention a further kind of case in which the evidentialist’s

supervenience thesis fails.

I argue that interpretation disrupts the supervenience between beliefs and evidence. That

is, there are cases in which two people have identical evidence, but each justifiably arrives at

different beliefs owing to the non-evidentiary influence of interpretations. To illustrate this, take

the following example of Chris, Eric, and Jasmin. Suppose that Chris and Eric both have

76 Fantl and McGrath, Knowledge in an Uncertain World (Oxford University Press, 2009)

72

identical evidence about Jasmin’s character. Both have witnessed the same behaviours, her

reactions under a broad series of circumstances, and other phenomena relevant to gaining hetero-

psychological knowledge. Chris, having a European cultural framework, comes to believe that

Jasmin is assertive; whereas Eric, having an Asian cultural framework, comes to believe that

Jasmin is rude. This seems like a more than reasonable occurrence, and in fact happens quite

frequently. The point I’m trying to illustrate is that what evidence implies is sometimes not

immediately entailed by the evidence itself, but is instead the result of interpretation. Both Chris

and Eric have identical evidence with respect to Jasmin’s character, but each winds up with a

different belief.

The easiest way to explain this, on my view, is that evidence and justified beliefs aren’t

bijectively related: that is, there isn’t a one-to-one correlation between bodies of evidence and

justified beliefs. This would, of course, imply that the supervenience thesis between beliefs and

evidence fails.

Now, I believe that I have presented two plausible cases in which beliefs and evidence

aren’t connected through a supervenience relationship. This, to my mind, undercuts

evidentialism. What I hope to establish now is that believing in the afterlife can possibly be

construed as at least one of the cases in which evidentialism breaks down. I now proceed to that

task. I think the paradigmatic case of permissibly believing without evidence occurs when

there isn’t decisive evidence for either position, i.e. when one is faced with an aporia. An aporia

occurs when there’s an impasse in thought owing to the inability to prove either of two

contradictories. The afterlife is precisely such a case in which evidence cannot be decisively

called to testify in favor of either position. In such cases, one is naturally invited to decide her

beliefs on the basis of non-evidentiary factors.

73

That reasoning is precisely in the spirit of Kant’s Moral Argument. Since evidence cannot

decisively decide the matter, and it’s not –as I just established—impermissible to believe in the

absence of sufficient evidence, one ought to decide her beliefs on the basis of other criteria. This,

in turn, invites hoping for that which would ground all that one can value, namely the highest

good. Even though one cannot prove the highest good, there’s no positive reason against it. And

in fact one is rationally required to hope for it to make human life as a whole coherent.

Now, I admit that these remarks in no way prove that the highest good exists, or even that

Kant’s Moral Argument is certainly sound. What I do hope to have established, however, is that

Kant’s Moral Argument has a certain appeal given its ability to ground that which matters most

for goodness in human life (viz., the highest good). And it is immune to the strongest objection

against it (viz., the evidentialist one considered above). Therefore, unless and until one offers a

successful refutation of the Moral Argument, I believe that we ought to hope (along with Kant)

that there is indeed a highest good that undercuts the pessimistic vision of the world offered by

Schopenhauer.

References

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Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956)

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