The World as Will and Idea - Arthur Schopenhauer Flashcards
Plato and Kant are usually regarded as he main influences on his philosophical system.
windbag - a person who talks at length but says little of any value.
Hegel was his most despised philosopher, whom he describes variously as a charlatan, humbug and windbag.
He was known as the ‘misanthropic sage of Frankfurt’.
Philosophical background and starting point
Locke is important for the emphasis he places on epistemology and on the question of what we can know: ideas.
He has a celebrated account of primary/secondary qualities. Primary qualities such as solidity, extension, shape are held to be mind-independent. Secondary qualities, like colour, taste, sound and smell are deemed to be mind-dependent.
For Berkeley, the physical world is known not just through sensible ideas, nor is it only sounds, smells that are mind-dependent: rather the whole physical world is just a collection of ideas. All qualities (both Locke’s primary and secondary) exist only as they are perceived.
Schopenhauer rejects Berkeley’s metaphysics, his spiritualist account of the reality that lies behind ideas, according to which it is God who causes or imprints sensible ideas on our minds or immaterial substances.
Hume’s sceptical world-view (a world ‘unintelligible’ to human reason) woke Kant from his dogmatic slumbers.
The awakened Kant was alarmed particularly at Hume’s apparent undermining of science by the corrosive analysis of causality: the supposed intelligibility of causation by mechanical impact (e.g. of billiard balls) is an illusion, generated by familiarity/custom.
Kant’s response to Hume’s sceptical challenge involves a fundamental paradigm shift or new Copernican revolution.
Formerly there had been 2 ways of understanding causality:
1/ Empirically via experiment or induction
2/Rationally - principle of universal causality is rationally true
Kant proposes a third way , whereby causality is not a feature of the outer world (noumenal), but is an inner mental structure we must impose on the world.
Causality, space, time and substantiality are necessary mental structures all minds that make judgements based on sense-experience.
What we perceive of the world are products of our spatial, temporal, and causal structuring, which takes place at an unconscious level, and which Kant called the transcendental realm.
The world is empirically real but transcendentally ideal.
According to Kant, we cannot know what lies behind the ideal veil of appearances. That unknowable something is called the Ding an sich (the thing in itself), or noumenon.
Kant safeguarded science, but at a price, namely, that science is valid only within the world of experience. Hence, any rational or scientific attempt to move beyond the world of experience is ruled out.
World as idea and will
Positivism - a philosophical system recognizing only that which can be scientifically verified or which is capable of logical or mathematical proof, and therefore rejecting metaphysics and theism.
Schopenhauer believes he can go beyond positivism, beyond Kant’s transcendental and agnostic idealism, yet in a way that does not violate the austere conditions for a metaphysics laid down by Kant and implied by Hume.
He believes he is making his chief contribution to philosophy by identifying the thing which lies behind appearances. The source is our living bodies, through which he maintains, we gain some insight into the thing-in-itself.
I experience my body (a sort of Rosetta stone) in 2 ways: 1/ objectively, as idea, as I experience all other objects in the world 2/ more directly as the direct manifestation of the thing-in-itself (thereby breaking the Kantian prohibition)
The crucial area is motivation. Schopenhauer’s ‘will’ is the metaphysical reality which underlies or grounds all phenomena. Our best apprehension of it is in the phenomenon of motivated action.
Schopenhauer’s conclusion is that my bodily actions are will objectified, will made physical by the structuring of time, space and causality.
Hence that which had eluded Kant, can be known, Schopenhauer thinks, if we attend to our living bodies.
Our bodily feelings offer us the key or Rosetta Stone for deciphering the unknown languages of reality.
Rosetta Stone:
1/ a stone slab, found in 1799 near Rosetta, bearing parallel inscriptions in Greek, Egyptian hieroglyphic, and demotic characters, making possible the decipherment of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics.
2/ a clue, breakthrough, or discovery that provides crucial knowledge for the solving of a puzzle or problem.
Naturalism - the philosophical belief that everything arises from natural properties and causes, and supernatural or spiritual explanations are excluded or discounted.
For Schopenhauer, human beings are not essentially rational, but are desiring, emotional animals whose rationality was developed to serve and maximise the will to life.
The thesis, that human, and indeed all beings, are expressions of a blind, ceaseless will to life, is probably Schopenhauer’s principal and most original philosophical contribution.
Species-solipsism, where only human beings are fully real, is a position held by religious systems, such as Christianity. However, Schopenhauer whose sympathies lie with the pantheistic religions of the East tries to show that this cannot be sustained.
The emerging sciences were demonstrating that there is little that separates homo sapiens from the rest of the natural world, and in particular from the higher mammals.
Humans are not a different sort of being, distinguished by the supposed possession of an immortal sou, but are simply the last or highest development of nature - a lustful, aggressive animal.
All animals (including humans) are expressions of the will to life.
There are 2 errors to be avoided:
1/ Will is not force or energy, for this is to reduce Schopenhauer’s system to materialism.
2/ We should not fix our concept too narrowly on our own experience of human willing.
We must always remember the starting point: our bodily experience in motivated action.
Anticipating Freud, Schopenhauer argues that sexuality dominates our mental lives , and that this makes sense if we are essentially will to life, rather than rational thinking beings.
For Schopenhauer, life is not about happiness or satisfaction, but about desiring, striving, longing, craving and hence suffering. Dante’s Inferno is far more convincing than his Paradiso. In short, the world is a struggling hell, not a blissful heaven.
Art
Art has a more fundamental role in Schopenhauer’s system than merely to provide illustrations for his main metaphysical thesis.
He argues that in aesthetic perception we come closest to understanding the world as idea. Here, he draws on Plato’s Theory for Forms.
We can see through the empirical representation to the underlying idea. This is made possible when an idea has been purged of its wilful element, when it does not evoke in me any desire.
Aesthetic judgement, according to Kant, is disinterested. It enables me to transcend my particular egoistic and pragmatic ways of seeing or apprehending the object. I don’t see a rose that relates to my specific needs or desires, but an eternal Idea of a rose that any human being in any time or culture could see.
Music is the highest art form because it expresses most distinctly the inner nature of the whole world.
No philosopher before Schopenhauer has assigned such an exalted place to art. For in our awareness of Ideas, we are will-less, which is the highest moral state.
Pessimism and Salvation
Although art releases us from the servitude of the will, this release is only transitory. Aesthetic contemplation is bound to be interrupted, by some wilful call of nature (e.g. pang of hunger).
Schopenhauer examines the way to a more lasting liberation in Book Four.
Schopenhauer compares life to a circular path of red-hot coals having a few cool places. It is these areas we self-deceptively describe as happy or satisfying.
We look forward to them as we walk round, deceiving ourselves, once again, that we are going somewhere - that either individual or human history has a goal.
These coal-less areas are little more than the absence or suspension of pain - like the momentary respite from an itch or thirst.
This explains why we are always getting ready to live; why our happiness is always being projected into the future.
Nothing can satisfy desire, because in itself, noumenally, there is only desire.
The endless cycle of life is desire, then some satisfaction, then of boredom, which leads back again to desire.
The world is a grisly place; for even the momentary satisfaction of desire is won at the expense of some other being in the world. The will to life is not just lustful and greedy but necessarily aggressive.
Plants consume water and air; animals feed on plants; human beings prey on plants, animals and each other.
To exist is to be unjust, since it is impossible not to encroach on the will of another.
Because we are the highest and most complete objectification of will, we human beings torture and suffer most. In this limited sense, there is justice in the world: the torturer is itself tortured.
For Schopenhauer, the world is essentially and not just accidentally wrong. Because the thing in itself is desire - longing, hungering, thirsting - ‘suffering is essential to existence itself’.
Schopenhauer’s pessimism is radical because for him the cause of our discontent lies in the substance of the world - in its being will to life.
Life in short is morally wrong, has no meaning or purpose and will always have more pain than pleasure.
Summary
In his major work, Schopenhauer holds that all nature, including man, is the expression of an insatiable will to life; that the truest understanding of the world comes through art, and the only lasting good through ascetic renunciation.
