Reconstructing Schopenhauer's Ethics: Hope, Compassion, and Animal Welfare

by Sandra Shapshay

At the apex of his influence, from about 1860 up to the start of World War I, Schopenhauer was known first and foremost as a philosopher of pessimism. Still today, his main reputation is as one of the few philosophers to have argued that it would have been better never to have been.

Sandra Shapshay aims to complicate and challenge this predominant picture of Schopenhauer's ethical thought, arguing that while the pessimistic, resigned Schopenhauer represents one side of the thinker, there is another, more hopeful side that is equally important to his legacy and essential to fully understanding his philosophy. Schopenhauer's ethical thought contains a hopeful, progressive strand, and the main task of this book is to reconstruct it. The resulting position, which Shapshay terms "compassionate moral realism," offers a hybrid Kantian moral realist/sentimentalist theory and a Schopenhauerian value ontology of degrees of inherent value.

The reconstruction is novel in three main ways. First, it views Schopenhauer as a more faithful Kantian than most commentators have been apt to recognize. Second, it sees Schopenhauer's philosophy as an evolving rather than static body of thought, especially with respect to the place of the Platonic Ideas in his system; Schopenhauer's views in the philosophy of nature changed as he encountered proto-Darwinian thought, and this change weakens Schopenhauer's own grounds for pessimism. A third novelty is the claim, concerning his ethical thought, that there are really two Schopenhauers rather than the "Knight of Despair" and the "Knight of Hope" distinction introduced in this book helps to capture the incompatibility between the resignationist and the compassionate moral realist sides of Schopenhauer's ethical thought.

248 pages, Hardcover

Published January 2, 2019

Reviews

[Becky Caiger]

I spilled water on it and also squished a bug on it mr beck is gonna be upset but its ok because this book was fire

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is wonderful, and emphasizes many of the things that I find compelling about Schopenhauer, while bracketing some of the "Knight of Despair" aspects of his work that I find less helpful or interesting. At first I was struck by how often Shapshay comes back to the same passages, but was ultimately charmed by how well it complemented her metonymic reading of Schopenhauer's metaphysics. In this sense, I think it took seriously the style of engagement demanded by the book as characteristically aesthetic. The reconstruction of the sublime as reflecting dignity in some sense is something I noticed before, especially fresh off of readings of Kant that drive home the reflection on cognition more generally that aesthetic judgment is supposed to give rise to. The reconstruction in this section is remarkably vivid and ties the historical threads between Kant and Schopenhauer here very nicely. Last and perhaps most importantly, Schopenhauer's ethics, and particularly his meta-ethics are put into a compelling dialog with contemporary moves in analytic ethical discourse, and I think what emerges is actually a quite powerful theory: it gives me many of the things I want from a meta-ethical theory. There are some points that I am not quite convinced on, but the book delivered on many of the things I wanted from it.

[Rik Ouwerkerk · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very well written, though sometimes shallow, reconstruction of Schopenhauers ethics. Although its first few sections contain the most interesting insights, Shapshay seems to sometimes lose track of some of the nuances of Schopenhauers metaphysics. Still, this book must be applauded for breaking with some of the more harmful traditional readings of Schopenhauers moral philosophy.