Dennis Vanden Auweele looks at Schopenhauer’s philosophy of religion. Schopenhauer, he argues, was in dialogue with contemporary scholars of Asia such as Creuzer who were actively researching Asian religions and developing philosophies of myth. According to Auweele, Creuzer had a great, though unacknowledged, influence on Schopenhauer’s thought, in particular his view that global systems of myth are related, and originate in South Asia. Schopenhauer parts ways with Creuzer, however, in developing a theory that systems of myth are rooted in intuitive rather than conceptual understanding. Myth is not a clear and abstract system of meaning, but rather an allegorical expression of basic metaphysical truths that the originators of mythology grasp intuitively. For Schopenhauer, systems of myth (and by extension religions) agree to the extent they share a grounding (pessimistic) intuition. Auweele finds resources in WWR for Schopenhauer to develop a theory of myth-making that accounts not only for myths that accurately depict reality (pessimistic systems of myth, for Schopenhauer) but for how and why some myths and religions get it wrong (and stray into optimism). The result is a sophisticated philosophy of religion and a useful and original intervention in a contemporary debate over the origin of myths.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte addresses Creuzer’s skeptical concerns in this highly critical review published in 1793. Fichte specifically considers Creuzer’s assertion that the capacity to determine oneself to moral and immoral action violates the principle of sufficient reason. Fichte dismisses the objection as having already been refuted by Reinhold in the second volume of the latter’s Letters on the Kantian Philosophy. In that work Reinhold argues that it is absurd to inquire after an objective ground through which the free will determined itself to a given action because it is supposedly intrinsic to the freedom of our will that it have the capacity to determine itself independently of objective grounds. Furthermore, Fichte affirms Reinhold’s claim that the (logical variant) of the principle of sufficient reason demands not that all existents have an external cause, but only that nothing be thought without a ground. Although Fichte agrees with Reinhold that reason has a very real ground to think of freedom as an absolute cause, he criticizes Reinhold for supposedly naturalizing the will’s supersensible capacity of self-determination.

In his Skeptical Reflections on Freedom of the Will with Respect to the Most Recent Theories of the Same (1793), Leonhard Creuzer avows his skepticism with respect to freedom of the will. His skepticism applies equally to our moral psychology and to proper philosophical treatments of free will. According to Creuzer, philosophy has fared no better than common sense in adjudicating the dispute on free will. He discusses the purported inadequacy of pre-Critical treatments of free will by thinkers such as Crusius, Leibniz, and Spinoza, and maintains that the Critical philosophy has not succeeded in resolving this perennial dilemma but has merely determined the problem more precisely.

The fourth chapter follows the ramifications of this investment in a Platonizing imagination of learning and knowledge into the discipline of philology, showing how such a template interacted with the tensions inherent in philology as a practice. If it is the case that the demands of an increasingly specialized scientific philology and the expectation of a fully personal and individualized formation of the self (Bildung) were increasingly drifting apart, I want to show that philology in its self-descriptions still tried to keep those poles together, especially through maintaining a rhetoric of philological feeling. The authors this chapter focuses on are Friedrich Creuzer, Friedrich Thiersch, August Boeckh, Friedrich Ritschl, and Hermann Usener.