The world as Will
Kant's thing in itself is Will: a blind, aimless striving that is the inner essence of every appearance. Intellect is merely the Will's tool.
The Nineteenth Century · 1788 – 1860
Arthur Schopenhauer
叔本华
The essence of the world is blind Will, life a pendulum between pain and boredom, and release lies in art, compassion and asceticism. He brought Indian thought into the West and made pessimism a system.
Philosophy of LifeBirthplace: Danzig (Gdańsk)
Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills.
Source: On the Freedom of the Will (1839)
Schopenhauer was born in Danzig to a rich merchant who meant him to inherit the business and took him on a two-year tour of Europe on condition that he then apprentice himself. In 1805 the father fell to his death, probably by suicide, and it took two years before his mother let him give up commerce for study. Johanna Schopenhauer, a Weimar salon hostess and best-selling novelist, got on terribly with her son; she said his book would end as wrapping paper for druggists, he said hers would be forgotten while his endured, and after 1814 they never met again.
He studied at Göttingen and Berlin, heard Fichte lecture and despised him, and in 1813 took his doctorate with On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which led Goethe to discuss colour theory with him. In Weimar in 1814 he encountered a Latin translation of the Upanishads, 'the consolation of my life'. In 1818, at thirty, he finished The World as Will and Representation, believed he had solved all of philosophy, and treated everything he wrote afterwards as commentary. The book found almost no readers and most copies were pulped.
In 1820 he lectured at Berlin and deliberately scheduled his course against Hegel's; hardly anyone came, and he hated Hegel ever after as a 'stupid, clumsy, nauseating charlatan'. Fleeing cholera in 1831 he settled in Frankfurt, where for twenty-eight years he lived alone with a poodle, walked two hours a day, played the flute and read The Times. In 1851 Parerga and Paralipomena, with its essays and aphorisms, brought him sudden fame in old age; 'the Nile has reached Cairo', he said.
His system: the world as representation obeys Kant's a priori forms, but the thing in itself behind representation can be known from within, and it is Will, a blind, purposeless, insatiable striving that appears as gravity, hunger and sexual desire alike. Unsatisfied desire is pain, satisfied desire is boredom. Temporary release comes through art, above all music, which makes us 'pure will-less subjects of knowing'; lasting release comes from seeing through the illusion of individuality into compassion, and finally from the denial of the will to live. Wagner, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Freud and Wittgenstein all read him.
Key Ideas
The pendulum of pain and boredom
Unsatisfied desire is pain, satisfied desire boredom; happiness is only the temporary absence of pain. Life's ledger runs at a loss.
Release through art
Aesthetic contemplation lifts us momentarily out of the Will into pure knowing. Music copies no Idea but is the direct language of the Will itself.
The ethics of compassion
Individuality is illusion; seeing through it one recognises one's own suffering in another's. Compassion is the sole basis of morality.
Denial of the Will
Final release is the saint's path: asceticism, renunciation, the Will turning against itself and going out. It converges with the Buddhist nirvana.
Influenced by
- Immanuel Kant
He saw himself as Kant's one true heir: the distinction of appearance and thing in itself is right, but the thing in itself is not unknowable, it is Will.
- Plato
Plato's Forms became in his system the grades of the Will's objectification, the objects of aesthetic contemplation.
- George Berkeley
- David Hume
- Meister Eckhart
Influenced
- Friedrich Nietzsche
At twenty-one he chanced on The World as Will and Representation in a Leipzig bookshop and read it in a fortnight; Schopenhauer became his 'educator', and later his antithesis, the denial of the will turned into the affirmation of life.
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
He read Schopenhauer as a boy, and the closing passages of the Tractatus on will, ethics and the mystical speak with Schopenhauer's accent.
- Max Horkheimer
He read Schopenhauer as a boy and returned to him in old age: compassion for suffering and doubt about progress were the roots of his departure from orthodox Marxism.