Schopenhauer, Williams and Bunge on what philosophy can do for a life
Arthur Schopenhauer died on his sofa in Frankfurt on 21 September 1860. Bernard Williams was born on the date in 1929, Mario Bunge in 1919, Peter van Inwagen in 1942; Savonarola in 1452, and Virgil died on it in 19 BC. Each had a view on how much philosophy can settle, and they do not agree.
Arthur Schopenhauer, photographed by Johann Schäfer in 1859 · Wikimedia Commons
Arthur Schopenhauer died on the morning of 21 September 1860 in his rooms at Schöne Aussicht 16 in Frankfurt, seated on his sofa, aged seventy-two. His lungs had been failing for months. Wilhelm Gwinner, the friend who saw him last and became his first biographer, found him reconciled to dying and worried only that there were things he had meant to write. The account that has come down through Gwinner has him rising as usual that morning, washing in cold water and taking his breakfast before his physician arrived and found him dead. Whatever the detail, the man who had spent forty years insisting that the individual is an illusion and death a matter of indifference to the will met his own without recorded fuss.
Three philosophers were born on the same date in the next century, and each had a different answer to the question Schopenhauer's death poses. Bernard Williams, born in 1929, spent his career arguing that philosophy can help a person to live only a little, and that the systems which promise more do harm. Mario Bunge, born in 1919, thought that was defeatism and that philosophy should be made as exact as physics. Peter van Inwagen, born in 1942, has argued in print that no philosophical argument for a substantive conclusion has ever succeeded, and has gone on producing them for fifty years. Behind them stand two older figures: Savonarola, born on 21 September 1452, who thought he could reform a city by preaching, and Virgil, who died on the date in 19 BC having written the line that promised what philosophy is for.
The book was finished when he was thirty. The World as Will and Representation came out from Brockhaus in December 1818, dated 1819, and sold so badly that most of the printing was pulped. Its argument runs against the whole direction of German philosophy in that decade. Kant had said we cannot know the thing in itself. Schopenhauer said we can, from the inside: what I know my own body to be, before any concept, is will, a striving that wants without reason and is never satisfied, and the world that presents itself to me as an object is the same will seen from outside. It follows that life is suffering, since wanting is lack, and satisfaction only the brief interval before the next lack. Sisyphus, Tantalus and the Danaids are his images for it.
Rudeness followed. In 1820 he scheduled his Berlin lectures at the same hour as Hegel's; the students went to Hegel, and he never taught again. He settled in Frankfurt in 1833 and stayed for twenty-seven years, with a poodle, a flute and a growing list of enemies. Fame arrived at sixty-three, with the essays of in 1851, and the third edition of the big book in 1859, and by the time he died the young were reading him in preference to the professors. What they took from him was less the pessimism than its consequence: if the will cannot be argued out of existence, then philosophy's business is to see rather than to prove, and its two exits are aesthetic contemplation, in which the will falls quiet for the length of a piece of music, and the compassion in which one creature recognises itself in another. This site set that argument out at length in .
Samuel Clarke, Newton's advocate against Leibniz, was born on 11 October 1675; Hans Kelsen, author of the Pure Theory of Law, on 11 October 1881. Tschirnhaus died on the date in 1708, Zwingli in battle in 1531, and in 1939 Alexander Sachs carried Einstein's letter into the Oval Office. The thread is where reason's reach ends and responsibility begins.
Charles Taylor, Scott J. Shapiro, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Robert Alexy
His readers did the rest. Wagner wrote Tristan under his influence. Nietzsche called him an educator and then spent twenty years arguing him down, replacing denial of the will with its affirmation. Freud conceded that the theory of repression was in Schopenhauer before it was in him. Wittgenstein, at the end of the Tractatus, rewrote his subject as the limit of the world. None of them accepted the metaphysics, and all of them accepted the premise that a philosophy which cannot change what a person wants has to find something else to do.
Bernard Arthur Owen Williams was born in Westcliff-on-Sea, in Essex, on 21 September 1929. He read Greats at Balliol, spent his national service flying Spitfires in Canada, and held chairs at Bedford College, then Cambridge, where he was Knightbridge Professor from 1967 and Provost of King's from 1979, then Berkeley, and finally Oxford, as White's Professor of Moral Philosophy from 1990. He also chaired a Royal Commission on gambling, which recommended a national lottery, and the 1979 committee on obscenity and film censorship, whose harm condition still shapes British law. He died in Rome on 10 June 2003.
His quarrel was with moral theory as such, and the two great theories in particular. Against utilitarianism, in the 1973 volume he shared with J. J. C. Smart, he argued that a doctrine which requires me to treat my own projects and commitments as one input among many into the sum of welfare attacks my integrity, in the literal sense: it asks me to be a channel for outcomes rather than a person who acts. Against Kant, in the essay "Persons, Character and Morality", he offered the man who can save only one of two drowning people, one of whom is his wife. The man who thinks, before diving, that it is his wife and that in situations of this kind it is permissible to save one's wife has had, Williams wrote, "one thought too many". The thought a decent person has is that it is his wife.
The positive view, if it is one, is in Moral Luck (1981) and Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985). Our judgements of people depend on things they did not control, and any theory that tries to purify morality of luck ends up describing nobody. Ethical life is thick with concepts, courage, cruelty, betrayal, which describe and evaluate at once, and the philosopher who reduces them to one thin principle has lost them under the impression of clarifying them. Shame and Necessity (1993) argued that the Greeks of Homer and the tragedians understood agency and responsibility better than the moderns who condescend to them, and Truth and Truthfulness (2002), his last book, gave a genealogy of the virtues of accuracy and sincerity that took Nietzsche's method and turned it to a defence of truth. This site considered the price of systematising morality in an earlier piece on Williams, and reported on the centenary issue of Philosophy devoted to him. He is the day's answer to Schopenhauer from the inside: philosophy cannot tell you what to want, and the theories that pretend to will make you worse.
Mario Augusto Bunge was born in the Buenos Aires suburb of Florida Oeste on 21 September 1919 and died in Montreal on 24 February 2020, five months past his hundredth birthday. He trained as a physicist, took a doctorate at La Plata in 1952, taught physics and philosophy at Buenos Aires until the political climate drove him out in the early 1960s, and from 1966 was Frothingham Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at McGill, where he retired at ninety. He wrote more than eighty books.
The largest of them is the eight-volume Treatise on Basic Philosophy, published between 1974 and 1989: two volumes of semantics, two of ontology, three of epistemology and methodology, one of ethics, a complete system on the model of the seventeenth century built with the tools of the twentieth. Its foundations are materialism, realism, and what he called systemism, the thesis that everything real is either a system or a part of one, so that the old quarrel between holists and individualists in social science dissolves once one asks what the system's mechanism is. Bunge had no patience with philosophy done any other way. Psychoanalysis was a pseudoscience; so were homeopathy, parapsychology and, as he saw it, most of what went under the names of existentialism, phenomenology and postmodernism. He co-founded the Society for Exact Philosophy and a Quebec sceptics' association, and he liked to say that a philosophy which did not learn from science was not worth the paper.
It is a direct contradiction of Williams, and it should be reported as one. Where Williams thought the ambition to make ethics a theory was the mistake, Bunge wrote a volume of ethics as the closing part of a system, and thought the reluctance to do so was a failure of nerve. The disagreement is not settled by pointing out that Williams is more read. Bunge's complaint, that a philosophy content to describe the thickness of ethical concepts has given up on explaining anything, has not been answered so much as ignored, and in Latin America, where he did more than anyone to institutionalise philosophy of science, it is still the majority view.
Peter van Inwagen was born in Rochester, New York, on 21 September 1942, took his doctorate there in 1969, taught at Syracuse for twenty-four years and has been John Cardinal O'Hara Professor at Notre Dame since 1995. He converted to Christianity in 1980 and was baptised an Episcopalian in 1983, the year An Essay on Free Will appeared. That book restated the case that free will and determinism cannot both be true so cleanly that it revived a position most analytic philosophers had written off: if determinism holds, our acts are consequences of the laws of nature and the state of the world before we were born, and neither of those is up to us, so neither are our acts. Material Beings (1990) argued that tables and chairs do not exist, only particles arranged tablewise and chairwise, while living organisms do, and set metaphysics a question it has been chewing since, of when parts compose a whole.
The reason he belongs in this thread is what he said in his Gifford Lectures at St Andrews, published as The Problem of Evil in 2006. He proposed a test for whether a philosophical argument succeeds: could it, laid out at leisure before an audience of ideally intelligent and genuinely neutral agnostics, move them to accept its conclusion? By that standard, he said, the argument from evil fails, and so, he was candid enough to add, does every other argument for a substantive philosophical thesis, including his own. Reviewers objected that the audience is mythical, and that an argument which shifts a neutral hearer without converting her has surely done something. He has not withdrawn the claim. It is Williams's scepticism about theory, arrived at from the opposite end, by a man who builds theories for a living and is honest about their yield. He turns eighty-four today.
Girolamo Savonarola was born in Ferrara on 21 September 1452. In the Florence of the 1490s, with the Medici driven out, the Dominican friar became for four years the most powerful voice in the city, and used it to build a republic of penance: the bonfires of vanities in the Carnival processions of 1496, 1497 and 1498, in which paintings, mirrors and books went into the flames, and a war on the pope that ended, on 23 May 1498, with the friar hanged and burned in the Piazza della Signoria. Machiavelli, who had watched, gave him a sentence in The Prince that has outlasted the sermons: the armed prophets conquered, the unarmed were ruined, "as happened in our time to Fra Girolamo Savonarola, who was ruined with his new order of things immediately the multitude believed in him no longer". This site's piece on Machiavelli argues that the line is more often quoted than understood; the friar remains its permanent illustration, a man who supposed that a city could be reformed by being told the truth loudly enough.
Publius Vergilius Maro died at Brundisium on 21 September 19 BC, of a fever caught in Greece, with the Aeneid unfinished. He asked that it be burned. Augustus overruled him and had Varius and Tucca publish it with the fewest possible changes, which is why the poem has half-lines in it to this day. The philosophical claim on Virgil is a single sentence from the second Georgic: felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas, happy the man who has been able to learn the causes of things. It is usually read as a salute to Lucretius and to the Epicurean promise that understanding nature frees one from fear. Fewer readers go on to the next line, where Virgil says that fortunate too is the man who knows the rustic gods, and settles for that. He was describing, in 29 BC, the choice this whole date turns on: to know the causes, as Bunge demanded, or to live decently without them, as Williams thought most of us must. Schopenhauer, on his sofa, had concluded that knowing the causes does not help; the will goes on wanting whether or not you have understood it. Dante made Virgil the guide who can take a soul as far as reason goes and no further, and there is something to be said for a date that ends where reason stops.
Earlier instalments of this series include 19 September; Nietzsche, who took over where Schopenhauer left off, has a piece of his own.
Arthur Oncken Lovejoy was born in Berlin on 10 October 1873. He made the history of ideas a discipline, traced one idea from Plato to the Romantics in The Great Chain of Being, and helped write the rules of academic freedom he later qualified. The same date, in four Catholic countries, did not exist in 1582.
Jacques Derrida died in Paris on 9 October 2004; Nicolai Hartmann died in Göttingen on 9 October 1950. One spent a career showing that presence never quite arrives, the other rebuilt an ontology of levels in which being does not depend on anyone's knowing it. The date puts the two reflexes of twentieth-century philosophy side by side.
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