On The Tracks of Solipsism. Meditation to the Point of Some Enigmatic Fragment from Schopenhauer's Doctoral Treatise

Abstract

This article is a proposal for in-depth reading of Schopenhauer's doctoral treatise "On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason" and a recontextualisation of his thought (Wittgenstein's early and later remarks about subjectivity, the analyses of ego-centric discourse in analytic philosophy of language). I venture to expose and at least partly analyse the basic problems implicit in the enigmatic statement made by Schopenhauer in his treatise. Such issued as the existence of the cognizing subject and its individualization, the relations between subject, body and will, self-identification of the subject and the role of first-person point of view are looked at from the perspective of the central question about the origin of solipsism in the modern philosophy of subjectivity. In a broader context, Schopenhauer's philosophy is considered as a key stage in the collapse of modern subjectivism with its idea of epistemologically and ontologically autonomous self-conscious subject.