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Underneath the world we see, Arthur Schopenhauer believed, runs a blind, hungry force he simply called the Will. This lecture from Academy of Ideas opens his dark and beautiful metaphysics. Standing on Kant’s shoulders, Schopenhauer argued that what we experience is only representation — but if we turn inward, through our own bodies, we find the restless striving at the core of all reality. Every living thing devours to live, and the Will feeds only on itself. It is philosophy as a ray of light cast onto the misery and vanity of existence.
Full Video Transcript
In his masterpiece, The World as Will and Representation, the 19th century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer wrote,
For if anything in the world is desirable, so desirable that even the dull and uneducated herd in its more reflective moments would value it more than silver and gold,
it is that a ray of light should fall on the obscurity of our existence, and that we should obtain some information about this enigmatical life of ours, in which nothing is clear except its misery and vanity.
In this two-part series, we will examine the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer.
In this lecture, we will look at his metaphysics, or his claim that the world is will,
while in the second lecture, we will investigate Schopenhauer’s ethics.
Like many philosophers before him, Schopenhauer proclaimed wonder to be the impetus which impels individuals to philosophize.
Yet, unlike other philosophers, he maintained that this wonder arises simply because the world is such a wretched place.
Not merely that the world exists, but still more that it is such a miserable and melancholy world, is the tormenting problem of metaphysics.
Schopenhauer believed the role of philosophy to be to lay bare the true nature of the world, so as to shed a ray of light on the darkness of this miserable existence, and in doing so provide consolation for the fragile and finite human animal.
All those who preceded him had failed at this project, according to Schopenhauer, and he believed that he alone had uncovered the true nature of the world.
the world. In doing so, he saw his philosophy as a great gift to mankind, an oasis of peace
in the tragic and wretched desert of life. Subject to the limitation of human knowledge,
my philosophy is the real solution of the enigma of the world. Schopenhauer did not
envision that his philosophy would attract and be exalted by the masses. Instead, he
realized that for most individuals, the world’s existence is not a mystery at all. The lower
a man is in an intellectual respect, the less puzzling and mysterious existence is to him.
On the contrary, everything, how it is and that it is, seems to him a matter of course.
A common philosophical position many of these so-called lower men often adhere to is the
belief that the physical world, in the manner they perceive and experience it, has an independent
existence. This view, as Roger Scruton nicely explains, is problematic.
How can I know the world as it is?
I can have knowledge of the world as it seems, since that is merely knowledge of my present
perceptions, memories, thoughts, and feelings.
But can I have knowledge of the world that is not just knowledge of how it seems?
To put the question in slightly more general form, can I have knowledge of the world that
is not just knowledge of my own point of view?
The possibility of objective knowledge, or knowledge that is not merely my own point
of view, has been hotly disputed by philosophers throughout history, and this dispute influenced
Schopenhauer, so we will briefly outline some of the important viewpoints.
The German philosopher G. W. Leibniz, a member of the philosophical school known as rationalism,
believed that through the use of one’s reason, it was possible to obtain objective knowledge
of the world. David Hume, an 18th century Scottish philosopher and member of the philosophical
school known as empiricism, disagreed with Leibniz. Rather, he proposed that all knowledge
of the world was obtained through experience and therefore is always subjective and contaminated
so to speak, by the perspective or point of view of the knower. Objective knowledge, according
to Hume, is not possible for human beings. Immanuel Kant, an 18th century German philosopher
who was given the nickname the All-Pulverizer for supposedly destroying the foundations
upon which all philosophies before him had been built, was greatly influenced by the
ideas of both Leibniz and Hume. In fact, he claimed that he was aroused from his dogmatic
slumbers by the ideas of Hume. Kant was very concerned with whether or not it was possible
to obtain objective knowledge of the world, and was not satisfied with either the rationalism
of Leibniz or the empiricism of Hume. This led Kant to formulate his own position known
as Transcendental Idealism, which was extremely influential in the development of Schopenhauer’s
philosophy. Because of the impact Kant had on Schopenhauer, we will need to briefly discuss
Kant’s ideas before proceeding to Schopenhauer, but as a warning, Kant is
notoriously difficult to understand, and there is still no general consensus as
to the meaning of many important aspects of his philosophy. An integral
distinction Kant made which is essential to understanding transcendental idealism
is between the world as we experience it, which is called the world of appearances
or phenomenal world, and the world as it exists independent of our experience,
which is composed of what Kant called things in themselves. According to Kant,
we cannot obtain knowledge of things in themselves.
What things may be in themselves I know not, and need not know, because a thing is never presented to me
otherwise than as a phenomena. It is only the world of appearances which we can know, and according to Kant,
this world is organized or structured by fundamental principles, most notably space and time, which Kant described as forms of intuition and
and causality, which Kant called a category of the understanding.
Space and time, along with the 12 categories Kant identified,
of which causality is but one, structure or make possible
our experience of the world. Furthermore, according to Kant,
space, time, and causality are not features of things in themselves.
Or as Christopher Janeway explains it, Kant thought that the world of appearance
must occupy space and time.
It is obviously hard to imagine there not being space or time,
but Kant went further and argued that without them there could not be a
knowable world at all.
A similar point applies to cause and effect and to the principle that things
can endure
unchanged through time. The rules of the empirical world
are that it must contain enduring things arranged in space and time
and having systematic effects upon one another. Nothing else Kant argued
could ever count as an empirical world that we could know.
However, his most startling claim is that all these rules are not present in the
world
as it is in itself. They are all rules simply about how the world must be
if we are to be able to experience it. Upon reading Kant, Schopenhauer underwent
what he called
an intellectual rebirth, and proceeded to use Kant’s core ideas
as the foundation upon which he built his own philosophical edifice.
Schopenhauer’s interpretation of Kant was that space, time, and causality
do not exist in the world, but are instead features of our mind which it
uses to construct our experience.
It should be noted that there is still disagreement as to whether Kant
actually meant that these principles were features of the mind.
However, that is how Schopenhauer interpreted him. The world as we
experience it is structured by objects
arranged in space and time, which have causal relationships with
other things. Now if space, time, and causality
are features of the mind, then it follows according to Schopenhauer
that the objects of the world depend on the mind for their existence
and that the world as we know it is a representation created by our mind.
Schopenhauer famously expressed this idealist position by proclaiming
the world is my representation. Schopenhauer’s idealism
or his belief that all objects of experience are dependent for their
existence on the brain
or a knowing subject was influenced by Kant as well as the famous
Irish philosopher George Berkeley. He expressed his idealist position in the
following quote
If accordingly we attempt to imagine an objective world without a knowing subject,
then we become aware that what we are imagining at that moment is in truth the opposite of what we intended,
namely nothing but just the process in the intellect of a knowing being who perceives an objective world,
that is to say, precisely that which we had sought to exclude.
For this perceptible and real world is obviously a phenomenon of the brain,
and so in the assumption that the world as such might exist independently of all brains,
there lies a contradiction. While Schopenhauer agreed with the fundamental
tenets of Kant’s ideas, he also believed that there was a major inconsistency
which lay at the heart of his philosophy. Although Kant claimed we can never come
to know the nature of reality in itself, he thought there must be something which
exists independently of us that is the cause of our representations, or the
world that appears to us. If such a postulation is not made Kant reasoned,
then one would have to arrive at the absurd conclusion that our
representations of the world arise out of nothing. Kant proposed the existence
of mind independent, or what he called transcendental objects, which are the
cause of our representations, but which we can never ascertain the nature of. Yet
this made no sense to Schopenhauer, as according to his interpretation of
Kant’s transcendental idealism, space, time, and causality are features of the
mind. This means it makes no sense to speak of things in themselves causing
our experience, as causation requires a knowing subject. In a similar manner, since objects
can only exist within space and time, and because space and time also require a knowing
subject, it also makes no sense to speak of objects which exist in an independent manner.
The being of an object in general belongs to the form of appearances, and is conditioned
by the being of the subject in general, just as the object’s manner of appearance is conditioned
by the subject’s forms of knowledge. Hence, if the thing in itself is to be assumed, it
cannot be an object at all. Schopenhauer, however, did not disagree with Kant that there
must be some substratum underlying our experience of the phenomenal world. Yet he did not think
we could arrive at knowledge of such a substratum by gazing outward at the objects of our experience.
On the path of objective knowledge, thus starting from the representation, we shall never get
beyond the representation, i.e. the phenomenon. We shall therefore remain at the outside of things.
We shall never be able to penetrate into their inner nature and investigate what they are in
themselves, in other words, what they may be by themselves. Schopenhauer thought that the
philosophical task of laying bare the true inner nature of the world would be impossible were it
not for the fact that there is one object in the world which we experience from within, that being
our own body. Consequently, a way from within stands open to us to that real inner nature of
things to which we cannot penetrate from without. It is, so to speak, a subterranean passage,
a secret alliance which, as if by treachery, places us all at once in the fortress that
cannot be taken by attack from without. When we direct our awareness inward, Schopenhauer claimed,
we will discover at the core of our being an unconscious instinct or force characterized by
a restless striving. This force at the core of our being Schopenhauer called will. In
fact, Schopenhauer thought that our body was a manifestation of will, so that our body
and will are really one and the same thing presented to us in two different ways. Our
body is presented to us in the form of representations, and our will is presented via direct inner
experience. Since he proposed that we can most clearly intuit the raw desire that is
the will within us during the sexual act, and when our survival instincts are activated,
he also called it the will to live.
Although our body is the only object in the world which we have inner access to,
Schopenhauer thought that because it is apparent that all life strives fundamentally towards survival,
nourishment and propagation,
it was justified to assert that all life forms are similar to us
and that they are also manifestations of the will to live, or will.
Everything presses and strives towards existence.
Let anyone consider this universal desire for life.
Let him see the infinite willingness, facility, and exuberance with which the will to live presses impetuously into existence
under a million forms everywhere and at every moment.
In such phenomena, then, it becomes visible that I am right in declaring
that the will to live is that which cannot be further explained, but lies at the foundation of all explanation.
Schopenhauer didn’t think it was appropriate to claim that only organic life was the manifestation of will, but not inorganic nature.
Doing so would introduce into the world an unnecessary divide between the organic and inorganic.
Instead, Schopenhauer claimed that not only is will the true inner nature of all life forms,
but of everything that exists.
It is, as he wrote, the kernel of reality itself.
We must therefore also apply the key for an understanding of the inner nature of things,
a key that only the immediate knowledge of our own inner nature could give us,
to these phenomena of the inorganic world, which are the most remote of all from us.
For this word indicates that which is the being in itself of everything in the world, and is the sole kernel of every phenomenon.
Since everything in this world, organic and inorganic alike, is a manifestation of will, at its core everything is one with everything else.
The separateness of all things is nothing but an illusion.
This conclusion of Schopenhauer’s in many ways parallels that found in the Upanishads, the text which founds the basis of Hinduism.
This thou art, the perceiver and the perceived are one.
While Schopenhauer is known to have studied Eastern philosophy, he arrived at this position independently prior to being acquainted with the Upanishads.
Certain philosophers throughout history, perhaps most notably Spinoza, have ascribed to pantheism and claimed that this world is the manifestation of a divine and benevolent god.
As an atheist, Schopenhauer thought the pantheist position to be ludicrous, for he proclaimed that if the pantheist opened his eyes to the misery of the world,
he would have to admit that a God, who should presume to transform himself into such a world,
would certainly have been inevitably troubled and tormented by the devil.
Instead of being a manifestation of God, Schopenhauer thought the world is a manifestation of will,
which is a blind impulse or force which is not divine or benevolent, but demonic.
As manifestations of will, all life blindly strives towards nourishment and propagation.
However, since organisms must feed on other organisms to nourish themselves,
and all organisms are manifestations of will, Schopenhauer concluded that
the will must live on itself, for there exists nothing beside it, and it is a hungry will.
In order to convey the pain and horror which arises when the manifestations of will feed on
each other, Schopenhauer conveys a striking image by rendering, in his own words, an account given
by a European explorer. Schopenhauer describes how the explorer saw an immense field entirely
covered with skeletons and took it to be a battlefield. However, they were nothing
but skeletons of large turtles, five feet long, three feet broad, and of equal
height. These turtles come this way from the sea in order to lay their eggs, and
are then seized by wild dogs. With their united strength, these dogs lay them on
their backs, tear open their lower armor, the small scales of the belly, and
devour them alive. But then a tiger often pounces on the dogs. Now all this misery
is repeated thousands and thousands of times year in, year out. For this then,
When are these turtles born?
For what offense must they suffer this agony?
What is the point of this whole scene of horror?
The only answer is that the will to live thus objectifies itself.
In the next lecture, we will investigate the ethical side of Schopenhauer’s philosophy.
That is, we will look at what it means for us human beings to be manifestations of will,
and how this knowledge should guide our action.
As we will see, as manifestations of will we are condemned to a life of misery, pain,
and suffering.
And according to Schopenhauer, there remains only one thing we can do if we are to find
any semblance of peace on this miserable earth.
We must escape from the will.
Source: Academy of Ideas