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

Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation

Schopenhauer begins this text with the line "The world is my representation". Insofar as what we know of the outer world is not by means of direct experience, it represents our idea of the world as we can cognize it through our perceiving consciousness. But Schopenhauer's Ideas are not to be confused with Plato's Ideas. (Janaway sees Schopenhauer's Ideas "as a compromise between the quasi-Platonic notion of a 'better consciousness', the Kantian epistemological framework, and the doctrines of the primacy of the will.")

Plato makes a distinction between the phenomenal world and the true world of ideas. Likewise, Schopenhauer makes a distinction. However, to understand the ways in which he is Platonic and the ways he is not requires a brief background in Schopenhauer' engagement with Kant's view of the thing-in-itself, a view that informs and directs the place Schopenhauer accords to Plato's Forms.

Kant is a dualist insofar as he separates the world of the 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. (In a sense the strict separation 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 are beyond experience and to be opposed to phenomenonal representations, that is, objects of cognition able to be perceived through the senses. Because we are only ever able to 'experience' phenomena, the noumenal world represents a world of 'things' beyond experience and, therefore, beyond the practical limits of our reason. In 'determinate' experience, we are able to judge and categorize the world of phenomena. We can see, following a scientific model of causality, that events in the physical world submit to rules of causality. However, the noumenal world is not determinable in the same way.

There is a further and necessary distinction that must be made if it is not clear already. Kant allows for a plurality of things-in-themselves whereas Schopenhauer will insofar as, for him, the world of experience is, in a drastic way given the absence of causality whatsoever, a phenomenon of an undivided thing-in-itself (the Will).

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. For Schopenhauer Causality, as the form of time is an a priori principle that governs the world of phenomenon, a principle that does not apply to the thing-in-itself. Havoc would ensue if transcendent causality supervened on the phenomenal world, a difficulty taken up by Kant in the antinomies. Kant 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, where Schopenhauer does not, Kant 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 view 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." Cognition is placed, as it was in Kant, on the side of determinate experience. Causality, however, is limited to experience, a thesis that, while Schopenhauer thinks otherwise, goes beyond Kant.

Now it is possible to show why what Schopenhauer calls 'the world as idea' is of course the exact opposite of what Plato meant by "Idea" in his Theory of Forms. To be certain, 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. However, the idea remains always in the world of phenomenon even if it appears to hover at the very edge, at a point where it seems to touch the thing-in-itself. The ideas, for Schopenhauer, are not immutable Forms beyond the reach of causality, the true real 'things' in which the sensible world participates as they are in Plato but a form in which cognition appears to have quieted the Will's objectification.

For Schopenhauer, then, 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 'things-in-themselves' or the noumenal and what Plato called 'Idea' or 'Form' Schopenhauer calls the World as Will or the thing-in-itself. Phenomenon, then, can be seen as a playing out of the thing-in-itself in the 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, through music, and through Schopenhauer's conception of Ideas, the status of freedom in Schopenhauer's account remains unclear insofar as Will replaces the 'I think' that in Kant mediated the noumenal/phenomenal gap.

The World as Will and Representation 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.