Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism | Schopenhauer, Arthur - Radoslav A. Tsanoff (essay date 1942)

Radoslav A. Tsanoff (essay date 1942)

SOURCE: "The Moral Gospel of Pessimism," in The Moral Ideals of Our Civilization, E. P. Dutton & Co., 1942, pp. 389-405.

[In the following excerpt, Tsanoff outlines Schopenhauer 's criticisms of Kant's moral law and contrasts Schopenhauer's "pessimistic ethics of redemption" with Kant's a priori metaphysic of morals.]

In [Schopenhauer's] view of human life, a life of insatiate greeds preying on each other, of wretched and futile desires, what meaning could morality have? A moral philosophy which ignored these basic facts of human nature and motivation would be vain irrelevance. In the fourth book of The World as Will and Idea Schopenhauer, probing the dismal outcome of his metaphysics of the Will-to-live, had traced the large outlines of a pessimistic ethics of redemption. In his work The Basis of Morality, he takes up more systematically this problem: "Is the...

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