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 Representation

The World as Will and Representation was originally published in 1819. It was revised and republished in 1844 and again 1859 just prior to Schopenhauer's death.

Schopenhauer observes in the preface that "the whole work is only the unfolding of a single thought." So opens the first page of The World as Will and Representation. "The world is my representation," Schopenhauer writes. It is a single thought but one whose clarification takes more than seven hundred pages to develop. While the work represents a serious engagement, particularly with Kant, Schopenhauer's philosophy engages with the thought of Plato, Leibniz, and others, and in varying degrees draws upon many moments from the history of philosophy. Schopenhauer endorses Kant's notion that the outer 'world,' the world outside of our representations, cannot be directly known, that is, he supports the notion that we are only ever able to cognize objects given in appearances. Schopenhauer's philosophy is greatly influenced by Plato. However, although Plato's Ideas play an important part in Schopenhauer's thinking, his version of the Ideas should not to be confused with those of Plato. To understand the ways in which Schopenhauer is Platonic and the ways he is not Platonic requires a background of Schopenhauer's more thoroughgoing engagement with Kant, particularly, Schopenhauer's view of Kant's 'thing-in-itself,' a view that informs and directs the place Schopenhauer accords to Plato's Forms as well the ontological structure that Schopenhauer assigns to 'world.'

Schopenhauer's Kantian inheritance

Dualism

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 restriction of our cognition. In a sense, the strict separation of noumenal and phenomenal objects makes for the very restriction. For Kant, noumena include the soul, God, and other 'things-in-themselves' intuited by the intellect alone but these 'things' are beyond experience and to be opposed to phenomenonal representations, that is, objects of cognition capable of being perceived by 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. It is in 'determinate' experience that we are able to judge and categorize the world of phenomena. It is in experience that 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.

Now a further and necessary distinction can be made if it was not clear already from the previous suggestion, that is, that while Kant allows for a plurality of things-in-themselves Schopenhauer does not. For Schopenhauer, the world of experience is - in a drastic way given the absence of any causality whatsoever on the side of the thing-in-itself - a phenomenon of an undivided thing-in-itself (the Will).

Causality

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. However, it is a principle that does not apply to the thing-in-itself. For Schopenhauer, havoc would ensue if a transcendent causality supervened on the phenomenal world, a difficulty taken up by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason's (CPR) treatment of the antinomies, where he upholds the power of the subject to supervene upon appearances. Kant is well aware of the problem of freedom that ensues in the phenomenal model, that is, the determinism arising when all things are subjected to a thoroughgoing causality. In a way that Schopenhauer does not, Kant leaves open a gap, a possibility of supersensible causes beyond the phenomenal sphere and, therefore, a space for the subject in its freedom.

To the contrary, Schopenhauer's 'I' is empirical and has no transcendental or noumenal counterpart as in Kant. The rejection of a transcendental 'I' with causative power to supervene on phenomena puts in question the possibility of moral imperatives and of a subject of freedom. A consequence of Schopenhauer's view is that the "incursion [by the 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." Further, it is unclear how, or in what way, an empirical 'I' in the world of representation can be said to be truly causative. Cognition, as is the case in Kant, is placed on the side of determinate experience. Causality, too, is limited to experience. It is a thesis continued from The Fourfold Root that, while Schopenhauer thinks otherwise, seems to go beyond Kant's step back to a more modest view of causality (in the B edition of the CPR) as a regulative principle.

Now it is possible to show why what Schopenhauer calls 'the world as representation' must be the exact opposite of Plato's immaterial world of Ideas as developed in the theory of forms. From the previous, we can see that the species of causes Schopenhauer rejects are the only types Plato admits. To be certain, Schopenhauer's world as idea is the world as we experience it at its most ethereal point, e.g., in the experience of art or the sublime. However, the idea remains tethered to the immanent world of phenomenon even when it appears to hover at the very edge, at a point where it might touch the thing-in-itself. The ideas, for Schopenhauer, are not the immutable Forms beyond the reach of causality of Plato's Philosophy, that is, the true real 'things' in which the sensible world participates. The Schopenhauerian 'ideas' are objectifications of the Will in phenomenon, that is, 'copies' of the Will, an ironic point given Schopenhauer's privileging of perception over concepts.

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.