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.
Ei kommentteja:
Lähetä kommentti