Metaphysics and morality in Schopenhauer and Kant

Abstract

The concept of thing in itself as propounded by Kant “works” as the only argument in order to give support to modern science and open way to a free will. Such a concept, however, was considered illegitimate, and the aporias that were aroused by it were seen as absence of philosophical fundament whose validation was therefore a quest of German idealism in its search of a subjectivity that was conceived within a philosophy of immanence. The empirical realism was maintained precisely by the concept of thing in itself, a concept whose dissolution would mean the loss of the transcendental dimension that both Kant and Schopenhauer want to preserve. This concept has the twofold interest of Kant: besides limiting the scientific knowledge to the notion of phenomenon, the thing in itself leaves room for considering a free will, that is, makes room for a moral consideration of the world. Now, when Schopenhauer explains the notion of will as the thing in itself (and not the subject), he relies on the ambiguous concept for the same goal sought by Kant: to make room for morality. The difference is the type of morality that one tries to justify: for Kant, the Judeo-Christian moral as reached by a Lutheran deflected route, to which free will is conditio sine qua non. In the case of Schopenhauer, the Hindu-Buddhist morality, which propounds freedom as the karmic nullification by denying will itself.