쇼펜하우어의 동고(Mitleid)의 윤리－고통의 편재성 진리의 정당화 문제를 중심으로

Abstract

This paper brings to light the significance of Schopenhauer’s ‘ethics of Mitleid’―by adopting a completely different approach from previous researchers. Schopenhauer’s philosophy starts from the truth of the ubiquity of suffering, ending up with the ethics of Mitleid. (Directly related to such premise and conclusion is Schopenhauer’s theory of the thing-in-itself. A critical philosopher, Schopenhauer, following Kant, adheres in principle to the position of the impossibility of knowing the thing-in-itself; meanwhile, he determines it as the “will.”) After classifying the existing objections to Schopenhauer’s pessimism into psychological, quantatative, and sociopolitical types, I will prove that all of these are due to a misreading of his philosophy. My discussion is to start from Schopenhauer’s epistemological argument over the “possibility of knowing the thing-in-itself”, through his analytic-philosophical argument which deconstructs the western theological root concepts, then to disclose that Schopenhauer’s philosophy is that which performed ‘ontological downward movement’, making humans come out of the animal of ideas back to the ‘Dasein of the body’. Schopenhauer confuted all the theological root concepts surrounding human beings thickly. He stripped off them the shells of the fictitious conceptions, thereby exposing the organismic truth of humans being the Dasein of the body. He demolished the ideal world inhabited by humans alone, having them settle down as a member of the kingdom of nature. Now a human being, as an organism with a body, is a manifestation of the “will to live” on this earth, like other animals. Schopenhauer, inheriting the concept of the thing-in-itself, determined it―on an organismic horizon―as the “will to live.” The deduction of the thing-in-itself as the will is based on the reality of organisms’ life. Schopenhauer’s philosophy is a thorough ‘immanent philosophy’ as ‘organismic metaphysics’. (Schopenhauer made clear that his own philosophy is “immanent dogmatism.”) Schopenhauer seeks after the substantial meaning of the thing-in-itself or Being itself on the horizon of organism.―The ethics of Mitleid is the conclusion of such ontology (the philosophy of organism). The theological root concepts work as a ‘rampart of ideas’, which hinders the expansion of the heart of Mitleid. The heart of Mitleid is that which tears down such a hard and strong wall, extending love to all organisms, thrown to the reality of suffering, furthermore to all beings. Thus, Schopenhauer’s ethics of Mitleid turns out to be anti-theological ethics of naturalism. Lastly, the ‘trap of the will’ argument of my own making will have criticism directed at the concept of “happiness” by the “denial of the will.” If Schopenhauer’s moral philosophy, without the transition to the phase of the denial of the will, had stayed at the expansion of the heart of Mitleid, then it could shine as pure and strict philosophical ethics.