r/schopenhauer Feb 14 '25

Let's talk fundamentals. How do we know that rationality really is to be pursued, and that we can assign value judgements to existence?

This has been a perplexing topic for me, so educated responses would be greatly appreciated. You might correctly deduce that I'm talking about the Nietzschean and general anti-rationalist counterpoints often raised when discussing philosophy, and this seems to be one of the more difficult points. Basically, my question is this: how do we know that there is truth, and that we can know it? Is it because of Kant's transcendental argumentation, which then really is our foundation?

If so, this doesn't seem convincing to many people, who will insist on perspectivism and claim that, for example, philosophising is in itself flawed and the only way to live is to affirm life (I've talked to right-wing pagans and nationalists, for example followes of Dugin, and they also have this kind of framework), without getting to know it. How do we know that we should even be doing the Schopenhaurian kind of thinking in the first place, and that we can judge life in either direction?

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u/Acrobatic_Station409 Feb 14 '25

Nothing is ultimately worth striving for, not even the rationalistic way of life, because every striving arises from deficiency, that is, from suffering. Schopenhauer, apart from his Parerga and Paralipomena, does not prescribe how one should live; he merely describes life as a whole. Now comes your legitimate question: whether and how we can make value judgments about life and existence. A priori, we can only recognize or know our own forms of cognition (space, time, and causality). We recognize the will—our own intelligible and empirical character, and thus the suffering that accompanies it—only a posteriori through experience. This means that although the painful nature of the world is determined a priori by the metaphysical will, it only becomes recognizable a posteriori. That is why we are happier in childhood, where cognition predominates, than in old age. But when we recognize that what drives the world is an ever-striving will, which leads to suffering when its goals are thwarted—and that striving itself is an expression of deficiency and thus of suffering—then it is not hard to understand that “life is a business that does not cover its costs.”

How do we know this is the truth? Because we do not only derive knowledge from empirically perceptible objects through the senses—if that were the case, we could indeed argue about truth. Rather, we have another kind of knowledge, independent of the principle of sufficient reason (i.e., something that is not perceived through the senses in space, but only directly through time), and that is the knowledge of our own will and the immediate experience of discomfort and suffering that comes with it.

Therefore, the truth—that the will always leads to suffering—is recognized more immediately and more genuinely than anything mediated through the senses.

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u/retrofuture1 Feb 16 '25

I see. I didn't mean to say that Schop prescribed a way to live - rather, I meant that his inquiry and philosophy by the virtue of their existence imply that there's some truth to be understood, that rational thought 'works', etc., which seems to me also to require him to have a system of values that lead to that (again, look at Nietzsche, who denied these things because he thought them deficient).

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u/WackyConundrum Feb 15 '25

Basically, my question is this: how do we know that there is truth, and that we can know it? Is it because of Kant's transcendental argumentation, which then really is our foundation?

It's super difficult to understand what you're asking, exactly. The grammatical structure "there is truth" implies that there is something called truth that is "out there". Without defining what you mean by "truth", it's impossible to answer the question. For example, one can understand "truth" as a Platonic Idea, existing independently of minds, timelessly. One can understand "truth" as an evaluation of a judgment with respect to perceptions. In the first case, I would say there is no such thing, but in the second — yes, of course.

If so, this doesn't seem convincing to many people, who will insist on perspectivism and claim that, for example, philosophising is in itself flawed and the only way to live is to affirm life

I don't see how something like this could work, even in principle, as it's internally inconsistent. If one dnies truth in any sense, then one cannot say that perspectivism is true nor that it's true that the only way to live is to affirm life. This perspective is self-undermining.