ABSTRACT
Schopenhauer, although he attempted to retain what he took to be the moral essence of the Christian religion (see W I 387-88), nonetheless definitively abandoned – rather than held in abeyance, as being beyond the scope of human knowledge – the metaphysics of Christian theism. He had both an indirect metaphysical argument and a more direct ethical argument for this rigorously atheistic position. As the focus of our interest here is predominantly Schopenhauer’s atheism, however, detailing a convincing philosophical reconstruction of the whole of Schopenhauer’s impressively comprehensive metaphysics of the will in all its depth and ramifications is beyond the scope of the present chapter; nor is the concept of ‘will’ itself (as it appears in the Schopenhauerean text) something I should like to define precisely here. Nevertheless, it is now both possible and necessary to outline the Schopenhauerian metaphysic of the will in a serviceable way; that is to say, in a manner which allows us to look at Schopenhauer’s attempt to argue against the existence of God.
