Anmerkungen zu Locke und Kant sowie zu nachkantischen Philosophen

Working notes from Schopenhauer's papers on Locke, Kant, and the idealists who came after — private philosophical jottings never shaped into a book.

by Arthur Schopenhauer437 passages held

German, the original language

Original language: German

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Overview

These are working notes, never a book shaped for readers. They survive among the Nachlass — the mass of manuscripts, drafts, and marginalia Schopenhauer left at his death — and record him thinking on paper about the philosophers who mattered most to his own position: Locke, whose distinction between primary and secondary qualities he prized; Kant, whom he revered and revised in equal measure; and the post-Kantian idealists Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, whom he attacked as impostors his whole life. The engagement is the one that runs through everything he published — he built his system as the true completion of Kant and spent decades insisting the idealists had betrayed it — but here it is caught in the raw, without the polish of the finished books. The record on these particular pages is thin, and honesty requires saying so: they carry no publication date, were never arranged by their author into a single argument, and reach a reader only through the labour of the editors who sorted his remains after 1860. They are of interest chiefly to readers who already know the philosophy and want the workshop rather than the finished front. As an introduction to Schopenhauer they are the wrong door; as a glimpse of how he read, they are a genuine one.

Key concepts

What is the Nachlass?

The mass of manuscripts, drafts, and marginalia Schopenhauer left unpublished at his death, sorted by his editors after 1860. These notes belong to it — thinking caught raw on paper, never arranged by the author into a finished argument, which is why they read as a workshop rather than a book.

What is Locke's primary and secondary quality distinction he prized?

Locke's split between qualities really in bodies — extension, shape, motion — and qualities existing only in the perceiver, such as colour, sound, and taste. Schopenhauer valued it as a first step toward idealism, then pushed past Locke, arguing that even the so-called primary qualities depend on the knowing subject.

What did Schopenhauer mean by completing Kant?

He kept Kant's division between appearance and thing-in-itself but held that Kant stopped too soon by leaving the thing-in-itself unknowable. By naming it the will, Schopenhauer claimed to finish the critical philosophy from inside rather than to found a rival one — the move his whole system turns on.

Why did he call Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel impostors?

He judged the post-Kantian idealists to have betrayed Kant — trading his hard-won epistemology for grandiose system-building and deliberate obscurity. Schopenhauer attacked them his whole life as charlatans propped up by university patronage, and blamed their dominance for the neglect his own work suffered for decades.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Reading Kant, Revising Kant

How does a system take shape before it is a system — in private notes, in the margins of the very philosophers it means to complete or destroy?

These are working notes from the Nachlass, never a book shaped for readers, and they catch Schopenhauer thinking on paper about the minds that mattered most to his own: Locke, prized for the primary-and-secondary-qualities distinction; Kant, revered and revised in equal measure; and the post-Kantian idealists Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, whom he attacked lifelong as impostors. The engagement is the one running through everything he published — his system as the true completion of Kant — but caught raw. The workshop, not the finished front, and the wrong door for a newcomer.

metaphysics
epistemology
causality
transcendental philosophy
categories
understanding
critique
subjectivity
intuition
reason
space
time

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 437
distinct concepts: 425
by passages held, corpus-wide: #78

What this book thinks together

Every arc around the wheel is one concept in this book. A ribbon joins two the text reaches for together, and its width is how many of its passages hold both. Strongest: causality with metaphysics.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 21 pairings. 200 shared passages in all. 79 weaker pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
causality	metaphysics	23
logic	metaphysics	22
epistemology	logic	20
epistemology	metaphysics	20
causality	logic	18
causality	epistemology	15
consciousness	epistemology	9
epistemology	subjectivity	9
consciousness	metaphysics	8
metaphysics	subjectivity	8
consciousness	subjectivity	6
epistemology	reason	6
metaphysics	reason	6
causality	reason	5
ethics	logic	5
logic	subjectivity	5
causality	consciousness	3
causality	subjectivity	3
epistemology	ethics	3
ethics	metaphysics	3
ethics	reason	3

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1813 On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and On the Will in Nature (Ueber die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde; und, Ueber den Willen in der Natur)
Schopenhauer's 1813 doctoral dissertation, and the book he told readers to finish before opening his masterwork; the 1836 essay bound with it hunts for the same metaphysics in natural science.
DEEN
1841 The Basis of Morality (Die beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik)
Two ethics essays written for academic prize contests — one crowned in Norway, one famously denied the Danish medal though it stood alone — issued together in 1841 as The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics.
DEEN
1851 Essay on Spirit Seeing and Everything Connected Therewith (Über das Geistersehn und was damit zusammenhängt)
An excursion into the paranormal — ghosts, second sight, animal magnetism — explained through his own metaphysics of will; the fifth of the six long essays in the 1851 Parerga.
DE
1851 The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Counsels and Maxims (Parerga und Paralipomena)
Half of Schopenhauer's Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life, the companion to The Wisdom of Life; Saunders split the two for English readers. Practical maxims for living, drawn from the 1851 collection.
DEEN
1851 The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; On Human Nature
Essays on ethics and politics that Saunders gathered — some from the 1851 Parerga, some from manuscripts unpublished at his death — under a title Schopenhauer never gave them.
DEEN
1851 The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, a Dialogue, Etc.
A dialogue on whether a useful faith can also be a false one, heading a cluster of essays on religion and art that Saunders drew from the 1851 Parerga.
DEEN
1851 The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Studies in Pessimism
The pessimism most readers know him by, stated without the metaphysics — Saunders' selection of the shortest, bluntest essays from the 1851 Parerga.
DEEN
1851 The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; the Art of Controversy (Parerga und Paralipomena / Nachgelassene Schriften)
Not from the Parerga at all: a manual of thirty-eight debating tricks that Schopenhauer drafted around 1830, left unpublished, and that reached print only in 1864, from his posthumous papers.
DEEN
1851 The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Literature
One of the topical selections Saunders carved from the Parerga for English readers, this one on writing, reading, and style; published in 1891.
DEEN
1851 The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer: the Wisdom of Life (Aphorismen zur Lebensweisheit)
His most cheerful book, a guide to happiness that opens the Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life; the pages John Oxenford's 1853 essay singled out when he introduced Schopenhauer to English readers.
DEEN
1851 Über die Weiber
Notorious far beyond its length: a few hostile pages on women from the second volume of the 1851 Parerga, an embarrassment to his admirers and a standing charge against him.
DE
Anmerkungen zu Locke und Kant sowie zu nachkantischen Philosophen (Anmerkungen Zu Locke Und Kant Sowie Zu Nachkantischen Philosophen) you are here DE
The World as Will and Representation (Die Welt Als Wille Und Vorstellung)
The masterwork, and the whole of his philosophy: one argument he refused to recast, only enlarge, across three editions between 1819 and 1859. Every other title on this shelf leads toward it or away from it.
DE

— or open another of their works