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We have seen in the preceding chapter that Schopenhauer's profound admiration for Goethe did not prevent him from refashioning Goethe's theory of colours in a Kantian way, or at least in a way considered by him to be Kantian. But we also recall from the second chapter that his no less profound admiration for Kant had not prevented him either, already in the first version of his dissertation, from making some critical remarks about Kant, too, particularly where the latter's proof of the a priori nature of the law of causality was concerned. However, Schopenhauer did not put together an elaborate, public exposition of his attitude towards Kant until the appearance in 1818 of his own philosophical system, the first volume of which contains a supplement entitled "Critique of Kantian Philosophy". In the main work itself, too, we fmd an interesting chapter in which (foreshadowing the argument of the supplement) Kant's four "antinomies' are dismissed as 'sham fights' (Spiegelfechtereien). These antinomies are the mutually contradictory, yet each in itself equally irrefutable, theses into which any attempt at constructing a"rational cosmology" must necessarily run.* But according to Schopenhauer, only the successive antitheses (namely, the infinity of the world in space and time, its infinite divisibility, and the non-existence of God and of free will) are in accordance with the principle of sufficient reason (the a priori form of all knowledge), the chain of conditioning relationships being necessarily infinite

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-015-9369-4_5

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