Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism | Schopenhauer, Arthur - Arthur O. Lovejoy (essay date 1911)

Arthur O. Lovejoy (essay date 1911)

SOURCE: "Schopenhauer as an Evolutionist," in The Monist, Vol. XXI, No. 2, 1911, pp. 195-222.

[In the following essay, Lovejoy contends that Schopenhauer, especially in his later writings, proposes doctrines akin to Darwin's evolution.]

The Absolute of the philosophy of Schopenhauer is notoriously one of the most complicated of all known products of metaphysical synthesis. Under the single, and in some cases highly inappropriate, name of "the Will" are merged into an ostensible identity conceptions of the most various character and the most diverse historic antecedents. The more important ingredients of the compound may fairly easily be enumerated. The Will is, in the first place, the Kantian "thing-in-itself," the residuum which is left after the object of knowledge has been robbed of all of the "subjective" forms of time and space and relatedness. It is also the Atman of the Vedantic monism, the...

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