Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism | Schopenhauer, Arthur - William Caldwell (essay date 1896)

William Caldwell (essay date 1896)

SOURCE: "The Positive Aspects of the System," in Schopenhauer's System in Its Philosophical Significance, William Blackwood and Sons, 1896, pp. 486-521.

[In the following excerpt, Caldwell outlines Schopenhauer's unique metaphilosophy.]

What is significant for philosophy in Schopenhauer is not so much the mere principle of will, which he sought to substitute for the idea of rationalistic metaphysic, as the simple fact of the attempted substitution. Strictly speaking, life cannot be grasped by thought as reducible, in the way of the old ontology, to some one or two entities. Whenever Schopenhauer talks of the will as if it were a thing in itself, we become distrustful of him. The chief safeguard of the will as a principle in philosophy lies in the fact of its being an impulse or an attempt, a fusion of all actual and imaginable entities into one grand effort to become all reality. The mind, in...

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