Schopenhauer

This comes from a reader who is very well versed in Schopenhauer, who wondered in a message yesterday whether I was being too kind to Schopenhauer about having anticipated the Whiteheadian outlook (which, by the way, I did mostly to give Jon Cogburn some breathing room as I await his coming published argument for that point):

“Schopenhauer believes that ‘world’ and ‘subject’ are indeed correlated. In this he is admittedly pretty close to correlationsim and, in particular, to Kant’s own version of it. But Schopenhauer does not ever actually insist that the subject necessarily be a human being. The subject could be a red kite, stonefish, cane toad or even an insect.”

For what it’s worth, Meillassoux himself thinks Schopenhauer himself is not even a correlationist, but an absolute idealist.

As for the second part, I’m always unsympathetic to the argument that “philosopher X never said the subject has to be human.” If they don’t say it, I’m afraid the default is that that’s what they think. And it can’t just be an attempt to depersonalize the human, as people often try to find in the later Heidegger for example: “language speaks,” etc. When people want to challenge the correlationist outlook, they make a loud point of it, as Whitehead does.