Metaphysics

Abstract

In Chapter I we saw Schopenhauer adopting the view that the world with which we have experiential acquaintance is of merely ideal, phenomenal status. In Chapter II we saw his endorsement of a version of conceptempiricism according to which cognitively meaningful discourse is restricted to discourse about that to which we have, in principle, experiential access. If we add to these two parts of the Kantian legacy the idea that metaphysics is the study of that which lies “beyond experience” (CPR B 18, Prol. § 1) an idea which, so it seems, at least, Schopenhauer also endorses

By metaphysics I understand all so-called knowledge that goes beyond the possibility of experience, and so beyond nature or the given phenomenal appearance of things, in order to give information about that by which, in one sense or another, this experience or nature is conditioned, or in popular language about that which is hidden behind nature and renders nature possible (WR II p.164)

a further aspect of Kantianism seems to be something Schopenhauer ought also to endorse the impossibility of metaphysical knowledge. But in fact he does not. Though Kant has indeed demolished the assumption of the “preKantian dogmatics” that pure thought can reveal to us the nature of ultimate reality (WR II, p.182; cf. WR I p.426), properly conducted, he holds, the metaphysical enterprise still remains a viable one: Kant’s “despair” (WR I p.428) was premature.