“To separate faith from philosophy”

Abstract

Abstract Surveying Schopenhauer’s published work attests to a profound engagement with Spinoza. Most references that make it into his published work are to Spinoza’s Ethics and usually concern the philosophical problem of individuation, but it would be hasty to conclude that Schopenhauer does not enter into philosophical debate with Spinoza on the material of the Theological-Political Treatise. In fact, there are some uncanny similarities and telling differences between that work and Schopenhauer’s own philosophy of religion, which he develops throughout his published works but most comprehensively in his ‘On Humanity’s Metaphysical Need’ (1844). This chapter concentrates mostly on what we see as the implicit dialogue that Schopenhauer is having with Spinoza. It argues that the differences in their ways of appreciating religion derive from different ways of doing metaphysics, which, further, cast light on why Schopenhauer believes he has “much more right” than Spinoza “to call [his] metaphysics an ethics.”