Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

From the previous chapter, we saw two somewhat unusual notions of morality from Kant and Schopenhauer, and it’s worth returning to these in the light of what has been said above. Kant’s kingdom of ends is interesting in that Kant seemed to be hoping that one day we might be able to dispense with the need for moral rules (which he himself was constructing) but could instead be innately good. It’s clear, from this, that he did not believe that we are already innately good. We need the rules, until such times as they become ‘second nature’ (or perhaps he was really thinking of the Kingdom of Heaven). Kant was more or less saying that God, or some universal tendency towards goodness, will eventually save us from ourselves and dispense with evil.

Schopenhauer had a rather different take on things. It’s important to remember that ‘The Will’ for him, is something of a blind and impersonal force. It is not the same as ‘The One’, at least not in the way the One is normally regarded in ancient Greek philosophy, as equivalent to ‘The Good’. Instead, the Will is a blind and impersonal force, potentially cruel and violent as well as kind and loving. Or maybe just indifferent. So, very much like nature herself, and by implication, very much like our own animal natures. Hence, Schopenhauer sees that it is by resisting the Will that we achieve any kind of goodness. Schopenhauer is saying, we need to do our own rescuing! In a sense, Schopenhauer is delivering that ‘objective’ reason that Kant had been seeking in order that we might respect moral rules. As we saw earlier, Schopenhauer thought that it was the recognition of interbeing that was the key to our

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