I write the post in order to recommend Schopenhauer to Soloists. Specifically, the Appendix to his magnum opus, The World as Will and Representation. Now why should this be of interest to Soloists? The whole Appendix is devoted to Kant, and some of it will warm the heart of most Soloists. Not that Schopenhauer is just a Kant basher. He loves much that Kant was able to accomplish. If you want pure venom, you should read him on the German Idealists, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, esp. Hegel. “But the greatest effrontery in serving up sheer nonsense, in scrabbling together senseless and maddening webs of words, such as had previously been heard only in madhouses, finally appeared in Hegel.” (WWR, I, 429)
His attitude toward Kant is more like Rand’s toward Aristotle, to whom she admitted being in debt even though she disagreed “with a great many parts of his philosophy.” (AS 1171)
First let’s look at some of the positive quotations from the Appendix. (413-534)
(1) Kant’s greatest merit is the distinction of the phenomenon from the thing-in-itself, based on the proof that between things and us there always stands the intellect. . . “ (417)
(2) “Kant’s style bears throughout the stamp of a superior mind . . .Its characteristic quality can perhaps be appropriately described as a brilliant dryness. . . I find the same brilliant dryness again in the style of Aristotle. (428)
(3) “The Transcendental Aesthetic is a work of such merit that it alone would be sufficient to immortalize the name the Kant.”
Now let’s look at some negative quotations.
Now a look at some negative quotations.
(4). “In the polemic I am about to institute against Kant, I have only his mistakes and weaknesses in view. I face them with hostility, and wage a relentless war of extermination upon them, always mindful not to conceal them with indulgence, but rather to place them in the brightest light, the more to reduce them to nought. (417)
(5) He has nowhere clearly distinguished knowledge of perception from abstract knowledge, and in this way, . . .he becomes implicated in inextricable contradictions with himself.” (431)
(6) “He describes these schemata. . . in the strange ‘Chapter on the Schematism of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding,’ which is well known for its great obscurity, since no one has ever been able to make anything out of it.” (450)
(7) “I reject the whole doctrine of the categories, and number it among the groundless assumptions with which Kant burdened the theory of knowledge. “ (452)
Fred