Religiosity as a Form of Metaphysic Cognition in the Philosophy of Artur Schopenhauer

Abstract

The subject of the article is an attempt to describe the position of religion in the collective world-view according to Schopenhauer, and the description of the mechanism leading from the religious world-view to a  higher cognition provided by philosophy. The first element is the discussion of the phenomenon of so called source metaphysical need, natural and shared by all human beings, characterizing the transcendent attitude of man. Since one of the answers to the need is philosophy, I discuss the way Schopenhauer understood philosophy, its role, tools and methods that are used or should be used. The philosopher was fully aware that philosophy is for the chosen only, and it is often replaced by religion, which Schopenhauer called the metaphysic for the mob, seeing its chief role in answering the existential questions. In the following part of my paper I  try to reconstruct Schopenhauer’s thought concerning the identity and parallelism of the results obtained by following these two distinct paths. According to the philosopher both of them: one of a philosopher and one of a man religiously engaged cross each other in one point, which is the true cognition and, in consequence, freedom.