Pages

Friday, June 7, 2019

Schopenhauer On Kant and Scholasticism

In his essay, “Criticisms of The Kantian Philosophy” (Chapter: Appendix; The World as Will and Representation, Volume 1), Arthur Schopenhauer notes that scholasticism lasted for 1400 years before Immanuel Kant, but this would mean that scholasticism predates Thomas Aquinas, and that the scholastic system got manifested towards the end of the Roman Empire when there was a significant rise in the power and influence of Christianity. Here’s an excerpt:

"That Kant's great achievements were bound to be accompanied by great errors is easy to understand on merely historical grounds. For although he effected the greatest revolution in philosophy, and did away with scholasticism, which in the above-mentioned wider sense had lasted for fourteen hundred years, in order really to begin an entirely new third world-epoch in philosophy, the immediate result of his appearance was, however, in practice only negative, not positive."

According to Schopenhauer, Kant was unable to break away from scholasticism in every region of his philosophy. As an example of the bad segments in Kantian philosophy which are reminiscent of a scholastic mindset, Schopenhauer mentions the chapter on the Transcendental Ideal in Kant’s The Critique of Pure Reason.  “There now follows the chapter on the Transcendental Ideal, which at once takes us back to the rigid scholasticism of the Middle Ages.”

No comments: