ABSTRACT
Schopenhauer is an ambivalent reader of the Kantian philosophy—at times, he presents himself as a studious follower of Kant and a loyal defender of his doctrines; at others, he is instead a fierce critic of Kantian orthodoxy and a vocal proponent of heterodoxy. The complicated relation between Kant and Schopenhauer has been most closely studied in relation to their metaphysical systems. The present paper concerns a neglected aspect of Schopenhauer's mature thought which is similarly influenced by Kant's critical philosophy, namely, his philosophy of mind and the distinction between the faculties of sensibility, the understanding, and reason. In this context we find what Schopenhauer claims to be Kant's “monstrous” and “major and fundamental mistake,” namely, “the failure to distinguish between abstract, discursive cognition, and intuitive cognition” (WWR 503). Shopenhauer argues that the intellect and intuition turn out to be much more closely intertwined than Kant allowed—in fact, the “intuition is intellectual” (e.g., FR 54, 75; VC 213; WWR 471) and, conversely, “the intellect is intuitive” (e.g., FR 76; WWR 483). The main goal of the paper is to reconstruct Schopenhauer's account of the tight relation between the cognitive faculties, with an eye to how it constitutes a departure from Kantian orthodoxy. As will become clear, this turns out to be somewhat delicate, since his account of the faculties resembles, at least at first glance, the claims that Kant himself makes about the influence of the understanding in perceptual experience. Nonetheless, a clear and substantive disagreement between Schopenhauer and Kant emerges from this analysis: contra Kant, Schopenhauer holds that the understanding's cognition of causation is indiscriminate, that is, blind and unsystematic, and so non-conceptual.
