ABSTRACT
Reading the foregoing chapter might well have convinced one that it is Arthur Schopenhauer, above all, who has tried most painstakingly – though not necessarily successfully – to accommodate post-Kantian philosophy to a vision of a bleak, hostile ontology. But Schopenhauer’s problematic metaphysical attempt to identify the Kantian noumenal world with an undifferentiated will was not Schopenhauer’s exclusive argument for the non-existence of God: his resolute attachment to Christian morality supplied him with what he took to be further rational grounds for disbelieving in God’s existence; an argument to be examined – and in part, reconstructed – shortly. Later, Schopenhauer’s introduction of the notion of a nontheistic salvation into his system will be considered, primarily because this was an account that Nietzsche took obvious pains to discredit in many of his writings, on the grounds that since Schopenhauer’s philosophy retained any such notion of salvation it was still to be regarded as being tied to a residual religious bias, basically being the inheritor of Christianity in this regard. Nietzsche thought that the Schopenhauerian – just like the Christian and the ancient Platonic – valorisation of a painless world over our terrestrial one was to be physiologically explained as the preference of an ailing constitution on the part of the valoriser. Programmatically outlining the Schopenhauerian account of salvation, where the structural tie obtaining between the concept of salvation and of present dissatisfaction is often quite self-consciously explicit – as are its historical ties to Christianity – will therefore prove to be of obvious benefit in preparing us for an examination of Nietzsche’s approach to what he takes to be the religious mentality or ‘ascetic ideal’.
