In Our Time - Schopenhauer Flashcards
Schopenhauer’s central idea was that everything in the world is fundamentally united by a will to live. It’s 2 key features are that it is infinite and meaningless, and leads to boredom or suffering. The only escape is through self-denial or art (mainly music).
He came of age in early 19th century Germany when Hegel was very prominent.
Hegel was professor of philosophy at Berlin and drew large audiences to his lectures.
Hegel had this totalising system which purported to explain the unfolding of the world’s spirit through time.
At every moment in the history of the world’s spirit, according to Hegel, there are internal contradictions. These have to be overcome by the forging of a new and higher version of itself.
This is sometimes put in the form a thesis, antithesis and a new synthesis. The idea is a dialectic, moving forward in time, with an increase in value and increasing level of perfection. The final perfection is the full realisation of the spirit in history.
Geist = the spirit or the true meaning of things
There was also a burgeoning counter-Enlightenment movement - Romanticism. The view was that science/reason could not explain everything, and that nature, art, poetry and literature had a part to play.
Schopenhauer called Hegel a charlatan: a person falsely claiming to have a special knowledge or skill.
He thought his work was a bombastic smokescreen for some rather empty thought.
Schopenhauer’s thought was very non-historical. He didn’t think that the essence of human beings or the world every really changed. The idea everything was progressing in history towards perfection was completely anathema to Schopenhauer.
Schopenhauer particularly like Kant’s epistemology or theory of knowledge - the distinction between the phenomenal and the noumenal world.
The phenomenal world is a world as we perceive it through time and space and organised by the laws of causality (network of causes and effects).
What would happen if these conditions were bracketed? Or if these glasses were removed?
Schopenhauer and Kant says that we would have the world-in-itself - the noumenal world.
Kant would also say that we cannot directly experience the noumenal world and that knowledge of this world is impossible.
For Kant there are unanswerable questions about the noumenal world because there is no empirical basis upon which we can formulate answers.
Schopenhauer attempts to overcome this prohibition, by distinguishing between representational and non-representational knowledge. This is an anti-Kantian view.
Schopenhauer thinks that our inner access to the body is a form of non-representational knowledge which can bypass the Kantian prohibition. It works as an access to the citadel of the ‘in-itself’.
He thinks that if we focus on this inner access to the body, then we are nothing but a set of desires and drives, also known as the Will. He then proceeds to extend this insight to the whole world. He believed that everything in the phenomenal world is an objectification of the Will.
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