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It’s interesting to draw a parallel between Kant’s and Schopenhauer’s philosophies. Schopenhauer believed that Kant was the greatest philosophers of all times. His achievements were unprecedented and lifted up human knowledge to the highest level. Although Schopenhauer wasn’t by any means a modest man, he admitted that without Plato and Kant, he would have no basis for his own philosophy. Among the goals he pursued in his books was the attack on Hegel, Fichte and Shelling, the trio which he called a buffoonery of philosophizing. On the other hand, he believed that Locke, Kant and he himself were closely connected. He wrote that in the interval of almost two hundred years “we present the gradual development of a coherent, consistent and uniform train of thought.” His main idea is that Kant’s “thing-in-itself” is Will and we all have an access to it via intuitive knowledge, which constitutes our experience.
I want to emphasize that before I came across Schopenhauer, I had read eight volumes of Hegel. After reading “The World as Will and Representation,” I totally lost my interest in Hegel. So this is the destiny of Kant’s philosophy: the greatest achievement of the human mind vulgarized by three dumb philosophasters and resurrected by Schopenhauer. Now, here is what happened to the philosophy of Schopenhauer. He was vulgarized by three philosophasters as well. One of them was Nietzsche; another, Freud; and the third, Jung. Freudian libido is nothing but Schopenhauerian Will, a blind striving force, the unconscious.
Bing's version:
Kant was the greatest of the thinkers all
He raised the human mind to heights sublime
He gave us categories and the wall
Between the thing-in-itself and space and time
But Hegel came and spoiled his legacy
With dialectics and the absolute
He made a mockery of clarity
And twisted reason into a dispute
Then Schopenhauer rose to save the day
He took the thing-in-itself and called it Will
He said we know it through our own dismay
And through the arts we can escape it still
But he was not immune to imitation
He had his own three foes of reputation
Nietzsche was the first to steal his thunder
He made the Will to power and the slave
He praised the overman and tore asunder
The values that Kant tried so hard to save
Freud was the second to appropriate
He turned the Will into the libido
He said it drives our dreams and our fate
And we must repress it or let it go
Jung was the third to borrow from his thought
He made the Will the source of archetypes
He said it shapes our symbols and our plot
And we must integrate it or face gripes
But Schopenhauer did not lose his humor
He laughed at life and death and every rumor.
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