On Schopenhauer's Debt to Spinoza 1

Abstract

Schopenhauer offers ‘nature is not divine but demonic’ as a direct rebuttal of Spinoza's pantheism, his identification of ‘nature’ with ‘God’. And so, one would think, he ought to have been immune to the ‘Spinozism’ that became, as Heine called it, ‘the unofficial religion’ of the age. In fact, I argue, Schopenhauer's Spinozism is at least as deep as that of any of his contemporaries: his debt to Spinoza, I claim, is deeper than his more obvious debt to Kant. From Spinoza, he absorbs into his own system: monism, ‘all is one’; double‐aspectism, the mental and the physical are aspects of the same thing ’; panpsychism, everything has a mental as well as a physical aspect; and ‘will’, ‘striving’ is the mental aspect of all things. Schopenhauer does criticize the pantheism that had made Spinoza so à la mode: the divinity of the One is ‘shipwrecked’ on the suffering and evil of the world. Ultimately, however, this criticism dissolves in the face of Schopenhauer's ‘better consciousness': though a world overwhelmed by suffering is something that ‘ought not to be’, Kant's idealism shows us that, in the end, not only this world but also the primordial will that is its source belong to the realm of mere appearance. Ultimately, Schopenhauer's primordial One turns out to be, like Spinoza's, ‘divine’.