Abstract

In Beyond Good and Evil, section 15, Nietzsche offers a criticism of the Kantian contention that the external world is but the work of our organs. As such, he claims, our organs, as part of this world, would by implication also be the work of our organs. Unless then we are to assume that the concept of a causa sui is not an absurd one, the external world is, reduction ad absurdum, not the work of our organs. This paper offers a defence of Schopenhauer from Nietzsche’s charge of circularity, based on the contention that the apparent circularity arises only upon the Nietzschean assumption that the transcendental idealist is, in fact, mistaken in his conception of a transcendental subject. It is only by assuming that Schopenhauer was mistaken, for example, in supposing the law of causality to be of a subjective and transcendental nature, that Nietzsche can even speak about the subject or the world as ‘caused’. A true grasp of Schopenhauer’s position can only lead to the conclusion that no causal chain, let alone a circular one, is at play here. Nietzsche’s error is diagnosed as arising from a deepening of historical sense, which assumes, from the outset, that the conceptual categories of the perceiving subject do not offer us an aeterna veritas. Finally, Nietzsche’s misconception, and his subsequent inability to diagnose it, arises from Schopenhauer’s own inability to escape what Wittgenstein terms the “temporality of our grammar.” Schopenhauer simply does not have the words at hand to ever remove the notion of temporality from the idea that the subject and the world ‘create’ each other. Taking cognisance of Schopenhauer’s ‘double aspect’ theory of the subject, removes from the relationship the notion of causality upon which Nietzsche’s critique is based.