Arthur Schopenhauer

(PD) Painting: Ludwig Sigismund Ruhl
Schopenhauer in 1815, painting by Ludwig Sigismund Ruhl

Arthur Schopenhauer (born in Danzig, February 22, 1788–died in Frankfurt am Main, September 1, 1860) was a German philosopher whose philosophy was influenced by Plato, Immanuel Kant and the teachings of the Upanishads. He had an outspoken pessimistic view of life, because life for him equalled willing and willing resulted in suffering. The main themes of his philosophical thought are present in his major work Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung ('The World as Will and Representation', or 'The World as Will and Idea'), published in 1819.

Early life and study

In his childhood he travelled extensively and went to Germany, France and England. His mother was a novelist and through her Arthur became acquainted with Goethe, Schlegel and the Brothers Grimm. He briefly studied medicine at the University of Göttingen and went to Berlin to study philosophy. In 1813 he received a doctorate in Jena for his dissertation On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, in which he laid the groundwork for his later philosophy.

Philosophy

The World as Will and Idea

Schopenhauer begins his book with the line "The World is my idea". By that he means that what we know of the outer world is not by means of direct experience; it is our idea of the world as we know it through our perceiving consciousness. Schopenhauer has an interesting and tangled relationship with the history of philosophy, particularly Plato and Kant.

The ancient Greek philosopher Plato already made a distinction between the phenomenal world and the true world of ideas. Schopenhauer likewise makes a distinction but in order to understand the ways in which he is Platonic and the ways he is not requires some background in Schopenhauer' engagement with Kant, one that informs and directs his own re-definition of Plato's Forms.

Kant is a dualist insofar as he separates the world of our senses and the world of things-in-themselves. For Kant, things-in-themselves must remain unknown to us because of the restrictions of our cognition. (Perhaps, in a sense, the division of noumenal and phenomenal makes for the very restriction.) For Kant, noumena include the soul, God, and other 'things-in-themselves' intuited by the intellect. These things beyond experience are to be opposed to phenomenon, the objects of experience that are perceived through the senses. Because we are only ever able to 'experience' phenomena, the noumenal world represents a world beyond experience and beyond practical reason. In 'determinate' experience, we are able to judge and categorize the world of phenomena. We can see, following on the scientific model of causality, that events in the physical world submit to rules of causality. However, the noumenal world is not determinable in a similar way.

But there is a further and necessary distinction that must be made. Where Kant allows for a plurality of things-in-themselves, Schopenhauer does not. The world of experience is, in a drastic way, the phenomenon of a thing-in-itself that is one and undivided.

For Schopenhhauer, as made plain in his dissertation The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, the two-world model of reality of Plato, Leibniz and, to a lesser degree, Kant, misunderstands the function of causality when it admits to supersensible causation (§18). Causality, as the form of time, for Schopenhauer is the a priori principle that governs the world of phenomenon and does not apply to the thing-in-itself. Havoc would ensue if transcendent causality supervened on the phenomenal world. Kant notices the antimony. He is well aware of the problem of freedom that ensues in the phenomenal model, that is, the determinism that arises if all things are subjected to causality, but he leaves open a gap for the possibility of supersensible causes beyond the phenomenal sphere( the latter being the only types Plato admits).

The consequence of Schopenhauer's conclusion is that the "incursion [by thing-in-itself] into the phenomenal world must be uncaused," and the principium individuationis limited to time and space, which do "not belong to the thing-in-itself, but are only the forms of our knowing" (113) Cognition is placed, as it was in Kant, on the side of determinate experience.

Now, what Schopenhauer calls 'the world as idea' is of course the exact opposite of what Plato meant by "Idea" in his Theory of Forms. The world as idea is the world as we experience it at its most ethereal point, e.g., the experience of art or the sublime. The ideas, for Schopenhauer, are not immutable things-in-themselves beyond the reach of causality in which the sensible world participates .

For Schopenhauer, the thing-in-itself is an indivisible whole ungraspable with the mind. And, given the limitation of causality to phenomenon, it is the only 'thing' free of causality. What Kant called 'the thing-in-itself' and what Plato called 'Idea' or 'Form' Schopenhauer calls the World as Will. Phenomenon, then, is the playing out of the thing-in-itself in its objectification of Will. While there are means by which we may get a glimpse of the other (noumenal) side of reality (the Will or thing-in-itself) through the experience of our own body (that is part of the Will), through art and through music, the status of freedom in Schopenhauer's account remains unclear insofar as the Will replaces the 'I think' that in Kant mediates the noumenal/phenomenal gap.

The World as Will and Idea consists of four parts:

1. in the first part Schopenhauer discusses the difference between the world as we know it and 'the world as Will'.
2. in the second part he suggests that there is a deeper underlying reality than the reality as science describes it, a world we can get a glimpse of by experiencing our body moving.
3. in the third part he gives a detailed discussion of art. By contemplating the sublime in art, we get a glimpse of the Will, a feeling that is very similar to the admiration of beautiful and impressive scenes of nature.
4. in the fourth part his pessimism takes over. He explains why there is no escape from suffering in the world because we cannot silence the blind force of the Will, the desire. Still, it helps to lead a life of asceticism and the repression of our desires can guard us from too much suffering.