Life! Life! From the Father of Lights!

Schopenhauer, in his dreary hermitude, a fantasy of the infinite confined to the pitifully finite, is most infamous for inverting Leibniz into the first truth of pessimism: “this is the worst of all possible worlds”1. Turned inside-out by a world that seems to, from at least one perspective, enjoy our suffering, the German had taken to felling the metaphysical lie that had haunted humanity for millennia—he refused to allow his cantankerous and disgruntled view of reality to be dismissed by metaphysical musings and theological imaginings. He, of course, went on to engage in his own highly speculative metaphysics, but he had succeeded in knocking down the breakwater which had held back the tide from the piddling, cloistered reflections of the now collapsing security of Christendom.

But what Schopenhauer failed to do was move past of his possibly unrecognised, brutal dismissal of a modern orthodox Kantianism: by noting Kant's failure to find “ground” for his theory of the human self, we find that his ethical view of self-recognition in discovery and reflection floats free over the “70,000 fathoms of the deep”2—the will influences our rationality and the will cannot be undermined. Kant is a metaphysician who has tricked himself into thinking he has found the comfort of reality once again; he flies over creation but fails to describe what he is, only ever grasping at what he thinks he is. The gap, while not necessarily wide, leaves us in philosophical insecurity.3

But this isn't the only way. Contemporaneously with the irate German, a Melancholic Dane had also realised that we hang high above creation if we let ourselves be carried off into the self-involved subjectivity of “imagination”4 or the altogether more dangerous objectivity of “materialism”5. Instead of starting with "the universe" or “human history”, our heroic malcontent dared to believe what that wise man from antiquity said:

“One must first learn to know oneself before knowing anything else. Only when the person has inwardly understood himself, and then sees the way forward on his path, does his life acquire repose and meaning; only then is he free of that irksome, fateful traveling companion—that life’s irony which appears in the sphere of knowledge and bids true knowing begin with a not-knowing (Socrates), just as God created the world from nothing.”6

The agent qua contingent and possible being, bound up in the necessity of ...