Volume 14, 2018
History of Philosophy
Yasuo Kamata
Pages 101-106
From Spontaneity to Will
A Transcendental-Philosophical Reconstruction of the Schopenhauerian Philosophy
In the history of philosophy, Schopenhauer was often described as a forerunner of the Lebensphilosophie (Kirkegaard, Nietzsche). In recent decades the amount of Schopenhauer researches carried out in the context of his current philosophy, namely of Kantian philosophy and German Idealism is increasing. This paper attempts to show that the Schopenhauerian concept of the will was derived in the latter sense from the “spontaneity of self-consciousness” found in Kant’s Critic of Pure Reason, and refers to his first published work On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which was published in 1813, exactly 200 years ago, and to his Manuscripts Remains. From this point, it will be clear that the structure of the experience and its object, the world as representation with its manifold components: the immediate presence of the representation, the latent corrective experience as its background, and the Platonic idea as a product of imagination, which is the cognition influenced by the will, is also generally penetrated by the will as the transcendental condition of the possibility of experience. The famous title of “the world as will and representation” includes and expresses this great transcendental-philosophical project.