Arthur Schopenhauer: World as Will and Representation 1 - Will behind the phenomena

While the first section of Schopenhauer’s book was nominally Kantian, but in reality something else, the second section is a clear move beyond limits set by Kant. One of the most central thesis in Kant’s philosophy is that we do not have any access to things as they are in themselves. Schopenhauer flatly denies this and states that we indeed have such an access. If we were mere disembodied subjects, such an access wouldn’t exist, but we are not. In fact, we are very much embodied persons. Now, we can regard our bodies from an external viewpoint, as a mere object. Still, we also have access to what our bodies are, not as objects, but as things in themselves - through our will. For instance, we feel an urge to do something, and at once we can see this urge fulfilled in the movement of out body.

Superficially taken, Schopenhauer’s attempt to go beyond Kant’s limits for cognition resembles Fichte’s philosophy in the sense that both philosophers base their attempts on a practically understood self-consciousness. Yet, there are clear differences. While Schopenhauer’s justification is quite crude and seemingly based on nothing more than mere self-feeling, Fichte’s assumption is based on an interesting transcendental deduction: whole experience would not be possible without being set up by a practically understood self-consciousness.

Now, Schopenhauer distinguishes his primal will in itself from all motives seemingly guiding our actions. Such motives are mere phenomenal circumstances, which at most explain why we act at this moment and in this situation as we do. Primal will, on the other hand, is equal to action itself and is, according to Schopenhauer, ultimately explicable, because all explanations occur on the level of representations. In fact, no phenomenal restrictions apply to the primal will. Thus, on the level of will, Schopenhauer concludes, there are no separate individuals, but each and everyone of us is as well a representation of the primal will.

In fact, Schopenhauer goes even further and insists that animals, plants and even bare material objects are all just embodiment of will. At first sight, saying that e.g. gravity is a form of will is just replacing one difficult word (force) with another (will). Yet, it contains at least one description of such a force - it is somehow similar to the urge that we feel in our actions. While forces as such are just closed from us, will we know intimately well, and it is just a matter of extending this familiarity to, first, motiveless urges of animals and plants, and finally, to strivings of all material objects.

Although Schopenhauer then in a sense upholds an ontological monism - all is will - he does not endorse any monistic explanations in the level of science. On the contrary, science works at the level of appearance or representation, so there is no guarantee, he says, that e.g. organic phenomena could be reduced to chemical terms. In fact, Schopenhauer appears to suggest that no reduction of any kind can happen between different sciences. And indeed, if any type of reduction is to be effected, this should happen to a direction completely opposite from the usual attempts of reduction. In other words, inorganic phenomena, like gravity and magnetism, should be understood through an analogy to our own volitional efforts. In fact, Schopenhauer suggests that phenomena could be arranged in a hierarchy according to the level of resemblance they have with human volition. Such levels would then show different levels in the process of becoming apparent of the primordial will - mere material phenomena would show their origin in will least clearly, while human volition would show it most clearly.

We have already remarked about the resemblance of Schopenhauer’s notion of will with Fichte’s practical self-consciousness. Even clearer affinities Schopenhauer’s theory has with the romantic notion of phenomenal world as an appearance of forces of life. Like romantics, Schopenhauer notes that individuality is mere delusion, that everything originates from a unified source and that this source is embodied in a hierarchy of levels, where humanity holds the highest place. Even Schopenhauer’s insistence that at the level of phenomena different embodiments of primordial will strive against one another is not unlike e.g. Hegelian insistence that basic forces contradict one another and even cancel themselves in some circumstances. Furthermore, Schopenhauer’s statement that will can never completely fulfill its strivings, but is always driven to do more and more, is quite on line at least with the ideas of some romantics - although others imagined that at some level (perhaps with humans) such a primal need could be balanced by harmonious reason.

Arthur Schopenhauer: World as Will and Representation 1 (1819)

Although in the preface of the first edition of his main work, Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Schopenhauer is quite insistent that no one should read his work, before reading first Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and his own work on the principle of sufficient reason, when I first read the work, I understood it quite well without these aids and even by beginning from the second, supplementary book published later. This is mostly a testament to Schopenhauer’s skills as a writer. Compared to some of his contemporaries, Schopenhauer’s prose is even dull in its simplicity.

The first edition of the work divides into five sections, two dealing with world as representation and two with world as will, while the fifth is a detailed criticism of Kant’s philosophy. I shall follow Schopenhauer’s division in this regard and divide my account of the book into five consecutive posts.

Although I shall thus consider Schopenhauer’s relation to Kant in more detail in a later post, we can already note that in the first section of his book, Schopenhauer offers a quite simplified and even caricaturised version of Kantianism. Schopenhauer’s basis for his form of Kantianism is the conceptual pair of subject and object. Subject is that which is conscious of an object and neither can exist without the other, Schopenhauer says - there could be no consciousness without nothing to be conscious of, but also nothing to be conscious of without any consciousness. While object is spatio-temporal, subject is not. Still, space and time can also be seen as forms of being conscious of, in the sense that subject sees everything spatially and temporally. Same goes for causality - object follows causal laws and subject regards everything as following causal laws. Thus, without any subject, there would be no object, no space, no time and no causality. This quite straightforward idealism Schopenhauer takes as the essence of Kant’s philosophy - and essentially also as the kernel of Berkeley’s philosophy. All of this would quite confuse most Kantians, who would be quick to distinguish between Kant and Berkeley.

We have already seen Schopenhauer develop the basic structure of this first part in his book on the principle of sufficient reason, and what he adds in this work is mostly just the subjective correlates for the objective elements. We have already seen that Schopenhauer follows Kant in regarding space and time as forms of cognition - following Kant, he calls them objects of pure sensibility. Space and time alone would allow no change - space as such is not processual, while time as such has nothing abiding that could change. It is only their combination that makes it possible to experience something as changing, Schopenhauer says. This combination of the two happens through what Schopenhauer, again following Kant, calls understanding. But unlike with Kant, Schopenhauerian understanding does nothing else, but implicitly regards everything in space and time as causal. Causality binds space and time together through the notion of matter, which is just an abiding substrate for all causal changes. Schopenhauer takes this notion of understanding in a quite robust manner: there literally is a module in our brain that combines our individual perceptions into neat causal chains.

Even more adamantly than Kant does Schopenhauer insist that causality cannot be applied outside experience. In fact, Schopenhauer insists that objects do not causally affect subject. Neither does subject create objects, but both appear on the playing field at the same time.

Beyond sensibility and understanding Schopenhauer places reason, which for him, more clearly than for Kant, is a common name for our conceptual abilities. Indeed, it is our conceptual ability reason is all about, since it is the only essentially human cognitive faculty. Schopenhauer thinks that reason by itself cannot really do anything, but is always dependent on the content given by sensibility and understanding, because concepts are just abstract generalisations from perceptions. Still, for practical purposes moving to this level of abstractions is of necessity - for instance, we couldn’t communicate things to others, if we couldn’t use concepts for them. Even so, Schopenhauer emphasises the use of perceptual and intuitive examples even in case of scientific study, which is the place where conceptual side of cognition is at most in play - the certainty of even mathematical principles is essentially based on perceptions and intuitions. The most remarkable thing about this account is how unremarkable it is - even Wolffians could have accepted everything Schopenhauer had to say about reason.

Indeed, in a sense Schopenhauerian notion of reason is closer to Wolffian than Kantian philosophy. When it comes to the practical use of reason, Schopenhauer denies that reason could have any absolute moral principles, which would be based on nothing external. Thus, the only way reason could be used in action would be as a faculty for guiding us to as happy life as possible. Hence, the most perfect system of practical reason for Schopenhauer is Stoicism, which aims at human happiness and notes that it can be achieved only through perfect self-control.