18: Arthur Schopenhauer, part I: Will & Representation

It's the perfect season to finally delve into the great pessimist. Arthur Schopenhauer is basically known for two things. First, uh he's quite possibly the most important influence on Friedrich Nietzsche, which is why we're talking about him on the Nietzsche podcast. But secondly, he's known for being the quintessential pessimist.

Schopenhauer argues that life and existence are futile, that there is no good served in all of the strivings of the human will, and that the best thing for us is to negate the will. The negation of all desires and goals, and yes, even the rejection of the world, because this is a world of untold and unimaginable suffering, an inevitable fact of our existence in it.

So those two things that everyone seems to know about Schopenhauer nevertheless may present something of a puzzle because Nietzsche couldn't be more opposed to such an outlook on life. Such a picture of the world.

And yet Schopenhauer had arguably more influence in shaping the early philosophy of Nietzsche than any other thinker. Why would it be the case that a Schopenhauer, who rejects life and rejects the world, Could give rise to Anietzia, the man who says that we must love our fate, say yes to life, and indeed wish for our lives to return to us endlessly, unchanged in any form or fashion.

to answer this question and to untangle this puzzle, how the no saying Schopenhauer influenced the yes saying Nietzsche. We're gonna do a sort of introductory course to Schopenhauer's philosophy. Um, and then we'll bring in Nietzsche's writings on Schopenhauer and Nietzsche as he relates to Schopenhauer in the episodes to follow.

This first episode of two will concern Schopenhauer's twin explanations of the world which are interrelated, and Schopenhauer would argue, depend upon one another, require and assert one another. There is the way of viewing the world as will And the way of viewing the world as representation. In one sense the world is an undivided, unchanging force which Schopenhauer calls will,

which is the true nature of all phenomena that arise. They're all just objectifications of the will, which is in itself just blind impulse. But on the other hand, the will takes on these different manifestations, or objectifications, that are recognizable and distinct from one another, which arise and pass away, and are thus temporary. in short, the world of representation um In this world things are subject to causality, to temporality, to laws

of space and laws of physics and uh the laws that govern matter, and thus all things are born, grow, and die. This is the world of representation, because this world as far as we perceive it, only exists as a representation in the minds of men, and there's no way to talk about it outside of that context. So this episode is about the theory behind Schopenhauer's philosophical approach.

We're talking about why it is that Schopenhauer argues that there are these two ways of viewing the world and what they entail and how he grounds his arguments that follow uh in the latter half of the book, which is about his practical philosophy. Um and so the episode after this one we'll talk about his practical philosophy, which means his ethics and his aesthetic ideas.

Um so the episode today will cover books one and two of World as Will and Representation, which is Schopenhauer's really his only book. Um you know, he wrote a lot of essays and fragments and aphorisms and elaborations on that book, but his whole work is centered around that single book. Um and so we're covering books one and two of that, which is what it it concerns what Schopenhauer would call

his the objective picture of the world, his epistemology and his ontology. The next episode will be Schopenhauer's Normative Ideas for Living in That World, and we'll cover books three and four.

Well at first, uh we'll talk a little bit about Schopenhauer's life. Unlike many other German philosophers who came from families of either academics or clergy, Schopenhauer came from a family of the merchant class. His father was a respected businessman, who settled the family in Danzig. The city was later taken over by the Prussians, and Schopenhauer's father moved the family to Hamburg.

The family lived there for twelve years, but Schopenhauer's father eventually began to show signs of mental unbalance. and died by falling into a canal one night in an incident that most regarded as likely being a suicide. This left the young Arthur Schopenhauer with only his mother and his sister, and uh Schopenhauer's relationship with his mother, Johanna, has been much commented on, but suffice to say they did not seem to like one another.

Um their correspondence and some of their interactions that have survived gives an image of a very hostile and sometimes nasty relationship, to say the least. So for example, um Schopenhauer's mother wrote novels, which were moderately popular at the time, and he allegedly told her that one day his writing would still be available when her books had been long forgotten, and his mother responded something to the effect of

Um, if I remember correctly, she said, you know, yes, I'm sure the one book you wrote will be available, you know. You know, will be but will anyone still care, you know? Um after his father died, um, young Arthur at seventeen years old, kept a promise he'd made to go t into the business world. Um and so the family home was sold. His mother and sister left Arthur for Weimar. Arthur as the inheritor of the Schopenhauer name was consigned to working at a uh an office as a clerk.

And the office was run by a merchant named Jinnish. Or Yenish, I guess. Uh this was an arrangement that Schopenhauer's father set up for him before his father died an untimely death, and now sort of in the wake of his father's death, Arthur Schopenhauer had little choice but to continue on that course. um until he was twenty one years of age, which was the point where he would inherit his share of the family fortune, or at least whatever was left of it, um that his mother hadn't spent.

His mother was living off this inheritance as an independently wealthy person, um, you know, and doing all of her creative pursuits in the meanwhile. Um and so the prospect of these four long years as a clerk were like torture to Arthur Schopenhauer. who he had studied in Paris, he had dreams of a literary career, and so two years into his time working for Yenish, he received a letter for h uh from his mother, saying that if he wanted to,

that he could regard his promise to his late father fulfilled and could change his way of living if he so desired. Upon reading this letter, Schopenhauer burst into tears and immediately walked out of the office.

Schopenhauer then went into higher education. He studied at Gotha in grammar school and then at Of uh at Weimar. And then he enters Gottingen University, where he studies medicine and science. He was around twenty two at the time. Um a teacher of his named G. E. Schulze told him that he should limit his reading of philosophy to Plato and Kant. Schopenhauer took this advice more or less literally, and as we will discuss, you can see the effect that this had on Schopenhauer's philosophy.

At a very early age, his philosophical ideas became relatively fixed, such that his philosophy did not develop at all beyond the initial ideas set forth in his book World as Will and Representation. Um, you know, for the latter two thirds of his life of his whole seventy two years on Earth, he more or less held to the same ideas. He wrote that book at twenty-eight years old, and for the rest of his years on the planet. Everything he wrote was just an elaboration on the same set of ideas.

And so as such, we cannot really say that he was influenced all that much by contemporary philosophers. Including some famous philosophers that he saw lecture in person, such as Fichte, because he'd already made up his mind on the core ideas. Meanwhile, he saw himself as the only legitimate interpreter and inheritor of the philosophy of Kant, and overall despised all others who claimed to be continuing Kantianism. Um this included Hegel, whom Schopenhauer especially hated.

Um so he publishes his book World is Will and Representation in nineteen eighteen and two years later he went to go lecture at university. He opened a course in Berlin for the summer semester. And he chose a lecture time at the same day and same time that Hegel lectured. Hegel at the time was a philosophical rock star, and he was very popular as a lecturer, to loads of people coming to his lectures. Schopenhauer was basically unknown at the time and lectured mostly to empty rooms.

So he tried for years, uh or for months rather, sorry, not years, uh he tried for months in vain to compete with Hegel, but he eventually gave up and he stopped teaching the course. Um Schopenhauer's uh philosophical uh grounding in Western philosophy seemed to be fixed within the world of Plato and Kant, without any possibility of being influenced by his contemporaries, but there was a third element which

which came from outside the Western philosophical tradition. For the first time, translations of some of the ideas of Indian philosophy, including Hindu and Buddhist philosophy, were coming into the Western world, Through translations that had never before been widely available. Schopenhauer read some of these imports, and this became the third pillar of his philosophical structure.

Specifically, the text that contributed the most to the views put forward in World of W uh as will and representation was the Upanishads. of which he had a Latin translation of a Persian translation of the Sanskrit original, and this translation first appeared in eighteen oh one. By combining Plato and Kant and then adding the influence of the Upanishads, Schopenhauer forged a new philosophical identity, and he was certain he would eventually come into fame and repute.

However, as with his lectures failing to find an audience at Berlin, Schopenhauer also failed to find a readership for his book. and it was mostly unknown and obscure, uh, up until the eighteen fifties, when Schopenhauer had become an an old man, and in in that decade he he did gain some deciphes in his later years and um because he got that taste, fame became like a manic obsession for him.

Um nevertheless, during his lifetime, the philosophical direction set by Hegel remained the dominant direction uh within German philosophy, and Schopenhauer remained pretty obscure.

Um what else? Well there there's a couple of fun stories about Schopenhauer uh using fun in a darkly humorous way,'cause everything's gonna be a little bit dark today. Um You know, he pushed a woman down the stairs during an argument or or they fought and she fell down the stairs, however it happened. But Schopenhauer then fought against her litigation against him. She sued him for damages that he owed her by causing her a lifelong injury.

And um he fought five years of legal battles not to have to pay this woman anything. And eventually the court ruled that he did have to provide her with sixty dollars a year, which is in today's money nearest as I can figure it about eighty five US dollars. I got that figure cause Hollingdale. He he gives that amount as about, um, I think he says n nine pounds or fifteen pounds. I can't remember how much it was. Some small amount of pounds in nineteen seventy England, which is when the the uh

uh work that I was reading off of was published, was in sev nineteen seventy England. Set a little conversion to modern day US dollars, adjusting for exchange rate and inflation. Got about eighty five US dollars. So maybe that's accurate, maybe it's not. If it's not, let me know.

Um in any case, not a lot of money. Whatever amount we're talking about, not a lot of money that Schopenhauer had to pay this woman. But he just hated that he had to pay her anything. And when the woman finally died in eighteen fifty two, Um Schopenhauer received her death certificate and he wrote on it Obit Anis Abitonis, which is Latin for the old woman dies, the debt departs.

Um another fun story, Schopenhauer, when there was uh some civil unrest and rioting and socialist uprisings going on, at one point he went and he volunteered his apartment for the soldiers to use to get a better shot at the rioters. Um, you know, he didn't just consent to soldiers using his balcony. He like went down and opened the door and let him in and said, Come on, you can get a good shot at him from up here Um

These stories are often brought up because it it's you know, they're out outlandish. They they also show a dark side to Schopenhauer. But there's underneath a lot of the stories of Schopenhauer's life what we learn is a sort of stubbornness of character. obstinence, unwillingness to bend toward you know, for any reason or to anybody.

And so R. J. Hollingdale, uh, in his introduction to Schopenhauer's essays, he writes about Schopenhauer's daily habits, um specifically about his daily habit habits during the um twilight years of Schopenhauer's life.

And so just as we talked about Nietzsche's daily habits in the second episode, I think it's always illuminating to read about the day-to-day life of these figures, because it tells you so much about them. So Hollingdale writes, quote From the age of forty five until his death twenty seven years later, Schopenhauer lived in Frankfurt am Main. He lived alone in rooms, and every day of twenty seven years he followed an identical routine.

He rose every morning at seven and had a bath but no breakfast. He drank a cup of strong coffee before sitting down at his desk and writing until noon. At noon he ceased work for the day and spent half an hour practicing the flute, on which he became quite a skilled performer. Then he went out for lunch at the Englisher Hof. After lunch he returned home and read until four, when he left for his daily walk. He walked for two hours no matter what the weather.

At six o'clock he visited the reading room of the library and read the times. In the evening he attended the theater or a concert, after which he had dinner at a hotel or restaurant. He got back home between nine and ten and went early to bed. He was willing to deviate from this routine in order to receive visitors, but with this exception he carried on through for twenty seven years, end quote.

Hollingdale's conclusion from this is that this immovability is this central facet of Schopenhauer's personality. You know, he didn't walk every day because he was a health nut. We see no other evidence of health fanaticism in Schopenhauer's behavior. It's simply that he demanded that he keep to his routine every single day, come whatever whatever weather, and nothing would stop him.

And what's interesting is that we also hear this about Nietzsche in his daily walk, and also the people of Konigsberg set used to set their clocks by the regularity of when Kant went on his walk. Among all these German philosophers, we find this exceptional regularity with their daily habits, um, and always a quintessential walk.

So it's it's strange to me in a way. Um oh I mean in some sense it makes perfect sense, but these figures don't just share ideas, they share habits and uh certain patterns in their lives.

So in any case, Nietzsche first discovered Schopenhauer from a friend named Paul Dusen. who recommended that he read World as Will in Representation while the two were fellow students at Schulpeforte, um which is a renowned German boarding school that Nietzsche went to before he would go on to college, what we would call college in the US. Uh Dusan went on to become a noted Orientalist thinker and an explicator of Eastern philosophical concepts. and a respected writer in his own right. But

it he's really important to us in our story because he's the one who showed Nietzsche Schopenhauer. Nietzsche, in the words of Charlie Huneman, was quote, lit afire by Schopenhauer. He'd become, you know, very familiar with Plato and Greek philosophy generally Um and Nietzsche, like Schopenhauer, was very influenced in his thinking by Kantianism, especially the Neo-Kantian that we've uh discussed, such as Albert uh Frederick Albert Longe, Harman von Helmholtz,

Um you can more learn more about that that Neo Kantian influence on Nietzsche in episodes five and eight of this podcast, the ones on Heraclitus and on truth, respectively.

But Nietzsche took that initial spark set by Schopenhauer, and he went in a radically different direction than Dusan, rather than leading Nietzsche to the embrace of Eastern philosophical concepts, The fact that Schopenhauer had so successfully blended and drawn parallels between the ideas of Kant and the ideas of the Hindus and the Buddhists indicated something to Nietzsche about the parallels between Christian values and the values of the Buddhists.

Furthermore, Schopenhauer had dared to take the fundamental metaphysical ideas of the West, and of our religious background um you know, which Kant had translated into philosophical terms. Schopenhauer had taken these um fundamental ideas and followed them through to their final and necessary conclusion in an honest and fearless way. Um and Schopenhauer ultimately produces a philosophy which rejects the world and rejects all life.

Um he had done this in in his own eyes by fulfilling the Kantian metaphysics, by fulfilling the Kantian morality. all of which arguably began with Plato and his ideas of the cave, of the true world remaining uh unattainable to the senses, of reason providing the power to see through the veils of illusion.

So in short, Schopenhauer provided the insight Nietzsche required, in order to see through all the flaws as he saw them, the Inherent in the Western philosophical tradition, and within the strands of thought begun with the likes of Plato and later continued with Kant. If Schopenhauer is, in fact, thinking through the ideas of Kant and Plato to their logical conclusions, then Schopenhauer's honesty in this respect led him to this place of pessimism.

Nietzsche wished to fully embrace that honesty and to dare to ask those hard and terrifying questions about reality that Schopenhauer raised, such as Is life worth living? Or, you know, suppose that to not exist would be better than to come into being in this world of suffering?

Um where Nietzsche then departs from Schopenhauer is in the Uh it's in several ways, but one of the big ways is in his metaphysical shift, which we discussed in the very first episode, in Nietzsche placing all the value into this world of phenomena, and embracing the world of phenomena on that basis. He accepts this is a world of striving and suffering, but then seeks to affirm that world.

And we'll get into all of this much more in the later episodes when we talk about how Nietzsche dealt with Schopenhauer and how he moved beyond Schopenhauer. But I hope I've given you at least a somewhat comprehensible account of Schopenhauer's all overall life and significance. um the and what his significance to Nietzsche more than anything. And so that with all that being said, let's go to the text now. Schopenhauer's great work.

the world as will and representation, and I'm using the E. F. J. Payne translation.

Where I'd like to begin talking about Schopenhauer's actual philosophy is with the world as will, which actually is the topic of the second book. Schopenhauer he actually begins by talking about the world as representation first, but I'm gonna reverse the order'cause I think Um, I think his thinking and his method when talking about the world as well

is a bit easier to to get or to make it click um upon hearing a lot of this for the first time. So book two begins with Schopenhauer illustrating why it is that the world exists in these two aspects of will and representation. And his means of doing this is by turning our attention to the subjective experience. Specifically, he centers our focus on our own consciousness, our own awareness, and on our own bodies.

This observation, I believe, is the most profound among the first two books. It's the observation that the world, as we know it, exists in two aspects. them because one subjective experience exists in two aspects as well. Schopenhauer draws our attention to our own subjective experience, and particularly he says that the subjective experience that we human beings have of our own body is in these two aspects. On the one hand we're aware of our bodies as they exist in the form of objects.

This is the body as a representation. Schopenhauer operates within that framework laid down by Kant, that all things we perceive come to us through the sense organs. And thus we do not experience reality as it actually is, but merely reality as the sense organs represented to us. one's body is clearly an object within the world of objects, and it's affected by other objects. It's subject to the laws of physics.

that all the other phenomena have to obey. That means the body is subject to impermanence, to causality, to i impenetrability by other objects made of matter. Um not that the matter that makes you up can't be pierced or penetrated, but that, you know, when you place your hand on the table it doesn't pass through the table. Like other solid objects, you don't merely pass through things. You're not coterminous with other objects with mass.

You exist as a body that moves through time and space and occupies time and space like other objects. And this body is part of the world of matter, obeying the laws that govern matter. And you, as the knowing subject, perceive your body as a thing in that respect. And yet You also have a different experience with the body.

or a different aspect of your own experience. This subjective experience is unique to contemplating the body and that um it is the experience of having control over the body, that you don't you don't have that experience with any other phenomena you contemplate. Um and more than that, Schopenhauer argues that what it is that you are is coterminous with the body in so far as what you are is will.

So what he means by will is approximate to the subjective experience you have in acting as a subject in the world. What your will uh wills, you might say, so the body does. The body enacts your will in the world. And thus the body is the objectification of your will in the world.

And so what you are, in one sense, is that representation, but this explanation on its own is a little more than a tautology, right? Because we can't say that your your sense organs themselves are simply a creation of your sense organs. that um, you know, whatever the subject is, that senses, the thing that senses, um, is not itself a product of the senses. Whatever it is that represents.

Is not itself reducible to a representation. What are you in and of yourself that is not simply a representation? And again the answer is will for Schopenhauer. I think the argument here is very strong and that Schopenhauer's evidence for this Uh it's the subjective experience that everyone has, that we experience ourselves within the world as a thing moving towards a series of goals and desires. And these goals and desires are not autonomously selected, but an inextricable part of who you are.

And what is in your own nature, such that You hunger, and so your will becomes aimed at finding food and eating, and the body follows suit. Or you have a sexual desire and your will becomes aimed at fulfilling that impulse, or you have a desire for status or material advantage, whatever it might be. When you desire to act on this will, the body is the thing that acts and it does so in a way that Schopenhauer argues, ag agree with him or not on this, that he says it's not even a causal link.

The will is so fundamental that it exists independently of causality, because causality is simply a law of how phenomena behave. And the will in itself is not a phenomenon, because phenomena are things within this world of representation. Whatever is governed by causality is an object within that world of representation, so we cannot apply causality to the will in Schopenhauer's view. It instead the will is this groundless ground of all phenomena.

And so he writes in section seventeen of book two um Quote, we ask whether this world is nothing more than representation. In that case, it would inevitably pass us by like an empty dream, or a ghostly vision not worth our consideration. Or we ask whether it is something else, something in addition, and if so, what that something is.

This much is certain, namely that this something about which we are inquiring must be by its whole nature completely and fundamentally different from the representation. And so the forms and laws of the representation must be wholly foreign to it. End quote. So again, the something is the will, which Schopenhauer argues is more fundamental.

It's a more fundamental experience than consciousness or sentience or intelligence, however you want to call it. Because clearly life can exist without that. Different animals, different forms of life can have different levels or types of intellect. Human beings can have different linguistic frames for interpreting the world, different concepts, but we all have a will.

Animals exist which likely have no conceptual framework, very limited, but they still apparently have a will. The sine quan of being is that you have a certain nature which strives towards certain ends. And Schopenhauer argues, as a human being, we all have that subjective experience of being a willing being, of having a will. And that's an inner experience we all have, and have only for ourselves.

Since you are yourself a phenomenon, your experience of the will Is direct knowledge of the inner nature. Of a phenomenon, of yourself as that phenomenon. And thus, where the Kantian argument is that we only know the world of objects through representations and we can know nothing of the inner contents. In Schopenhauer's argument, well, you have direct knowledge of the inner contents of you. And what we find when we look there is will.

And Schopenhauer therefore uses this term to describe the inner nature of the true world, what they what we'll call the thing in itself. Um and so you know you have the thing as it appears and then you have the thing in itself, the thing as it really is. And this is because he believes that the thing in itself, as the groundless ground of being, must be universal and indivisible. That means that any insight into the thing in itself, the true world must hold everywhere and always.

Uh in book two, section nineteen he writes Something in the consciousness of everyone distinguishes the representation of his own body from all others that are in other respects quite like it. That is that the body occurs in consciousness in quite another way, totogenere different, that is denoted by the word will. It is just this double knowledge of our own body which gives us information about that body itself, about its action and movement following on motives.

as well as about its suffering through outside impressions. In a word, about what it is, not as a representation, but as something over and above this, and hence what it is in itself. And so

He Schopenhauer says, through this insight, of the body existing for us both as our will and as a representation, we can understand the nature of all things in the world. Phenomena as we experience them, Are our own representation of the world to ourselves? through our sense organs, and then through assigning them a conceptual understanding. But what lies beneath all things is will, a certain nature, uh striving towards a certain end.

Um, if this is too abstract for you, Schopenhauer writes in section twenty one of book two, building on these ideas, um that we we have an immediate knowledge of this, not just in abstract terms, but in concrete terms. This is in the form of feeling. Feeling is the manifestation of the will within the body. He writes that feeling quote makes itself known in an immediate way in which subject and object are not quite clearly distinguished.

Yet it becomes known to the individual himself not as a whole, but only in its particular acts. And so body and its feelings. These are for Schopenhauer the entry point for understanding the thing in itself, and to expand on why a little more. Drawing on Indian philosophy, Schopenhauer holds the thing in itself to be non dualistic.

Dualism in this context means The idea that separate things can exist independently of one another, which means that there is there's such a thing as both being and non being, that you can thus have many distinct beings which are separate entities. But these propositions all require us to presuppose things such as space, time, matter, and therefore causality, duration, impermanence, temporality, and so on.

But these are all representations, or they all obtain only in the world of representation. None of these are known to us. None of these laws I just listed or traits of objects that exist, none of these are known through direct experience of the inner content of the world. These are laws governing how phenomena behave and interact, how objects exist. not how the reality, which is the foundation for those things, behaves.

doesn't ever escape from the world as it appears. And so Schopenhauer argues that we've recognized, you know, after after we've recognized the will as the thing in itself, we can proceed to recognize it in all things. Knowing it in a sort of intuitive sense on the basis that we have an experiential knowledge, uh a direct and experiential knowledge of the inner contents of the world from within ourselves. And so

Dualism, dualistic, you know, the laws that govern dualism, that applies in the world of phenomena. To Schopenhauer, all of these um laws that establish separateness and distinctness. wouldn't apply in the world as well, in the world in and of itself.

So I'm going to read a long passage now where we get is uh a better idea we get the the transference of this concept of the will as the thing in itself to all sorts of processes and even inanimate things in nature, such as crystals and the process by which they form. Um we also get Schopenhauer's reasoning for why he chose to call everything a manifestation of will and didn't use some other term. And so we're gonna be reading again from section twenty one.

The reader who with me has gained this conviction. will find that of itself, it will become key to the knowledge of the innermost being of the whole of nature. since he now transfers it to all phenomena that are given to him, not like his own phenomenon, both in direct and indirect knowledge, but in the latter solely, and hence merely in a one sided way, as representation alone.

he will recognize that same will, not only in those phenomena that are quite similar to his own, in men and animals, as their inmost nature. But continued reflection will lead him to recognize that force that shoots and vegetates in the plant, indeed the force by which the crystal is formed.

the force that turns the magnet to the north pole the force whose shock he encounters from the contact of metals of different kinds The force that appears in the elective affinities of matter as repulsion and attraction, separation and union, and finally even gravitation which acts so powerfully in all matter, pulling the stone to the earth and the earth to the sun. All these he will recognize as different only in the phenomenon, but the same according to their inner nature.

He will recognize them all as that which is immediately known to him so intimately and better than everything else, and where it appears most distinctly is called will. It is only this application of reflection which no longer lets us stop at the phenomenon, but leads us on to the thing in itself. All representation, be it of whatever kind it may, all object is phenomenon. but only the will is thing in itself. As such, it is not representation at all, but totogenere different therefrom.

It is that of which all representation, all object is the phenomenon, the visibility, the objectivity. It is the innermost essence, the kernel of every particular thing, and also of the whole. It appears in every blindly acting force of nature, and also in the deliberate conduct of man, and the great difference between the two concerns only the degree of the manifestation, not the inner nature of what is manifested.

So I think that clarifies a lot of this. Um to clarify that last sentence there, actually, there's no more will in the human being than in, say, the crystal or the stone or the animal. Even though the human is a more complex phenomenon. The will is, for Schopenhauer, everywhere and always the same, and indivisible. It's very similar to concepts in Indian philosophy like the Atman in that respect.

Physical reality is not separate and not separable from this single essence which cannot be divided from itself at any point. It only divides into different representations within the world of appearances, but as he says um actually later on in book three, which we'll cover next week.

that if we agree with Plato, this world of appearances is simply a dreamlike reality in which all things eventually pass away. Um it's you know, he he likens the world of representation to being more like a dream than the world as pure will, which is the real character of the world. And so the will is equally distributed everywhere. It is the background substance of all being, just as much in man as in animals or plants.

And Schopenhauer even includes forces such as magnetism in his description of things that are simply objectifications of the will. So why the term will, aside from the explanation he's already given, why not make up a new term rather than choose a term like will, which might carry connotative or cultural baggage?

Well, Schopenhauer says we have to borrow from the lexicon of familiar things in order to name the thing in itself, even though it is The thing in itself is not correlated with anything in particular, and the best word to choose is derived from man's will, because this is our term for the only direct experience we have with the thing in itself, which is our own inner experience.

The name is chosen because quote, the direct knowledge of which lies nearest to us and leads to the indirect knowledge of all others, end quote. So Schopenhauer suggests that coming up with a new word would only be appropriate for something truly and purely in the abstract, something for which the facts are only inferred and never directly experienced.

But our direct experience does exist and it's through the will. And so Schopenhauer he also justifies the his choice of the word will with the term force, which he could have chosen. And personally I think that would have been a fine word to use. But the problem Schopenhauer has is much the same as the issue he has with inventing a new word. Force is too abstract, he says. He says quote

If we refer to the concept of force to that of will, we have in fact referred something more unknown to something infinitely better known, indeed to the one thing really known to us immediately and completely. End quote. So his argument is that we add really nothing explanatory by calling the thing in itself a force or designating it as force. Will is something that we understand, that we experience in our desires and in our emotions.

We haven't expanded the meaning by calling it force instead. The concept would remain abstract. But consider it the other way around, which is what Schopenhauer actually does. We can understand what a force is. Through the concept of will, in in Schopenhauer's view, at least, we actually do add new understanding to the concept of force, that is, understanding what a force might be as the thing in itself. Um force as such by reflecting on and meditating upon our own experience of having a will.

and acting upon the world in accord with that will, we might gain an understanding of what a force is. And so we don't gain anything by calling it the world as force instead of the world as will, but the other way around does add something and um Now I think Schopenhauer is correct here. The word will does give additional meaning.

uh whether or not he's correct that what a force is is actually um you know comparable to the subjective experience of the will, uh whether you find that compelling or not, that that that is the argument he's making.

Um I watched a conversation about Schopenhauer between uh Brian McGee and Frederick Copelston while I was doing research for this episode. And uh McGee wished that Schopenhauer utilized the term energy, and he suggested that physicists of the modern day have come to something similar to this understanding. Um Copelston argued back that energy is a good term but only

for like the fundamental nature of the phenomenal world, right? The world of of representation, not for the Numenon. Um And it I think McGee actually might have not not really understood the phenomena Numena split, which I a lot of people don't, even very intelligent people. Um but Copelston was keen to point out Schopenhauer really believed he was breaking through to the Numenon, to the world in itself.

by drawing on our intuitive understanding of the will. This is an ontological claim. Schopenhauer is actually not talking about what we would call energy. He's literally talking about will as the fundamental nature of reality. And so Copelston questions, as I'm sure many of you are doing, whether Schopenhauer really broke through to the thing in itself, in so many words. And Copelston said he defers more to Kant and thinks this phenomena Numena split.

or divide remains pretty firm. And Nietzsche might actually agree with this assessment, uh, in my view. But I hope what I've conveyed here um might help to explain how Schopenhauer was doing philosophy in a way that appealed to Nietzsche, um, in that he's beginning from himself and his own consciousness, his own awareness. his own immediate certainties in order to philosophize. And so Schopenhauer

is rather like Descartes in that respect. He's counseling the subject who's reading along with him, go back to the foundations of what the individual knows for himself by direct experience. But where Descart found thought as the fundamental subjective experience cogito ergosum, I think therefore I am, notice that Schopenhauer instructs us to look instead to something different. Feeling, desire, want.

In a word, the passions. This is the gateway to understanding the fundamental reality not intellect or thoughts, but passions. And ultimately, He's only using these passions to indicate something even more fundamental, because the term will is only an approximation, right? So that's this is the starting point of the Schopenhauerian philosophical approach. Look to yourself, to your immediate certainties within your subjective experience.

We all have these objects which we represent to ourselves, which is only seeing the outside, what is superficial to the object. But we have this one object which we can see the inside of, which is our own body. And what we find on the inside of the body. Exists within all phenomena, because all phenomena are the objectification of a reality which is not itself. divided or distinct or different. It's not itself an object. It's not objectified.

Now, one might ask at this point what it really means to say that everything is merely will. Why shouldn't we simply follow the scientific method to determine the true character of what reality is? Um again that's the same problem with the understanding of McGee where he's talking with Copelston. To this I would simply say no amount of science can ever break us out of the limitations of empiricism.

The world as we know it we receive through the senses. Schopenhauer accepted this fully, and believed that the only way we could thus posit anything about the world as such is through reason. And this is by making those synthetic judgments a priori that we discussed in episode sixteen, the episode on the congenital defect of philosophers. And so as a refresher, these are conclusions one can draw which provides new information strictly through the investigation of logical concepts.

Strictly through applying reason to those concepts which we know to be true and extrapolating conclusions by those means. So what Schopenhauer is doing here, or at least this is his attempt, the use of reason to leap over the phenomena Numena chasm, and notice this has been his his project when we take a step back and look at it in the grand scheme of things. It's the same thing that we see of going all the way back to the preplatonic philosophy.

You might call to mind the definition that Nietzsche gave in those lectures about who the philosopher is and what the philosopher does. Philosophy is the art of representing universal existence in terms of abstract concepts. And that's what Schopenhauer's doing. His attempt is to provide an explanation for universal existence. His major problem to overcome is that Western philosophy had become obsessed and had this fixation.

on how we only know the outer appearance of existence and not its inner character, and so this is the first task which he must solve, at least for himself, by drawing on what he knows subjectively to be the inner character of existence. And so another phenomena to consider is the animals. From all accounts, animals act without representations. They don't have the kinds of sophisticated minds that we have. Rather, they engage in blind activity with no representation of the object of their goal.

W whether animals actually have representations or not is beside the point to Schopenhauer, because he says they act as though motive is unknown to them. They act as though they have no conceptual understanding. So if they don't ha live in this world of representation, at least not to the degree that we do, um, that isn't to say animals don't have knowledge, but

What they have is what we'll call direct knowledge, right? It's not intellectual or abstract knowledge. The animal thus shows how the will works even without the aid of representation. The faculty of representation is not necessary for the will's activity. In fact, in most phenomena, there's no awareness or self awareness of the will at all. It is simply a blind striving. That would be the case with uh gravity, for example.

Schopenhauer argues that gravity, like all forces or laws that we perceive in nature, represents the will in its blindest form of striving, which is distributed in all things with mass and is simply this tendency, um this will for large objects with mass to accumulate more mass to themselves. Gravity acts.

as a force and a constraint in all phenomena, as they in turn will themselves to exist. And so gravity tries to constrain all things with mass, and then these things amass with with mass, you know, emerge, such as animals which strive not to be constrained. Schopenhauer prefigures Nietzsche in characterizing the driving force behind the actions of all things as blind causes rather than conscious motives.

And he even extends this to mankind. He he sources these causes to the nerves and to external stimuli. He writes in book two, section twenty-three, quote, All that occurs in the body must occur through will. Through here this will is not guided by knowledge, not determined accorded according to motives, but acts blindly according to causes, called in this case stimuli, end quote.

And so he then discusses at length in the same passage why stimuli shape the existence of all living things and his final step is to account for things w even without organs, without nervous systems, and without physiology. These are things without any receptivity to stimulus, without any motive or knowledge at all. And so that includes phenomena like we talked about before, like the law of gravity.

Um he also lists, quote, the powerful, irresistible impulse with which masses of water rush downwards, end quote. f or quote, let us look at the crystal being rapidly and suddenly formed with such regularity of configuration. It is obvious that this is only a perfectly definite and precisely determined striving in different directions constrained and held firm by coagulation, end quote. And so The reason for bringing all this up, the this link between mankind and the animals and blind forces.

Is that further in the same passage still in twenty three? Um here Schopenhauer lays it out explicitly that what we do as beings that exist in the light of knowledge is it is fundamentally the same activity that all the objectified forms of the will engage in. He writes. Let us observe the choice with which bodies repel and attract one another, unite and separate, when set free in the fluid state and released from bonds of rigidity.

Finally, we feel directly and immediately how a burden which hampers our body by its gravitation towards the earth increasingly presses and squeezes this body in pursuit of its one tendency. If we observe all this, it will not cost us a great effort of the imagination to recognize once more our own inner nature, even at so great a distance.

It is that which in us pursues its ends by the light of knowledge, but here in the feeblest of phenomena, only strives blindly in a dull, one sided, and unalterable manner.

So I know at this point the dire materialists among the audience are probably still fairly perplexed or frustrated. Why regard the world as will except in perhaps a poetic manner? You know, the materialist is probably still waiting on some material evidence that he can use to explain the material world, uh tautological as that is.

Or perhaps you know the modern materialist materialist even realizes the hopelessness of such an endeavor and has abandoned the very pursuit of providing a universal explanation for existence in the form of concepts. And to this type of person I will employ the rhetoric of appealing to them along the conceptual lines they're probably more comfortable with.

by pointing out that Schopenhauer is, in a sense, operating from a very sceptical stance here, rather than a stance of credulity, even though it m perhaps might not seem like it. And

Uh perhaps Schopenhauer's even being more skeptical than the average materialists are being. And to explain why this is uh we'll go back into Schopenhauer's epistemology, which is largely the subject of the first book, the part which is most heavily indebted to Kant, um although Kant's influence is all over the whole work, and Kant is generally known He's generally known for attempting to salvage many of our metaphysical or moral prejudices through the use of rigorous logic.

But we also have to recognize that Kant wrote a text critiquing reason and delimiting the boundaries of what reason could explain.

much of Kant's contribution to philosophy is actually in more rigorously laying out what logic cannot do. And Schopenhauer is right alongside him in that. And so Schopenhauer provides a more straightforward version of Kant's arguments, which is not a hard thing to do, to be more straightforward than Kant, but he provides a more straightforward version of Kant's arguments and the limitations of reason.

contrasted with what we do have sufficient reason to believe. And Schopenhauer sums up this whole post Kantian epistemology as follows. And this is in section one at the very beginning of the whole book. Quote: No truth is more certain, more independent of all others than this. namely that everything that exists for knowledge, and hence the whole of this world, is only object in relation to the subject, perception of the perceiver, in a word, representation.

Naturally, this holds good to the present as well as of the past and future, of what is remotest as well as what is nearest, for it holds good of time and space themselves, in which alone all these distinctions arise. Everything that in any way belongs and can belong to the world is inevitably associated with this being conditioned by the subject, and it exists only for the subject. The world is representation. End quote.

Schopenhauer then quotes in the same section Sir William Jones. from the book on the philosophy of the Asiatics, which establishes this attempt of Schopenhauer's to syncretize Kantianism with Indian philosophy, um, which makes Schopenhauer so interesting to me. Um So Schopenhauer quotes Jones as follows The fundamental tenet of the Vedanta school consisted not in denying the existence of matter, that is, of solidity, impenetrability, and extended figure, to deny which would be lunacy,

But in correcting the popular notion of it, and in contending that it has no essence independent of mental perception, that existence and perceptibility are convertible terms, end quote. And uh Schopenhauer's comment on that quotation we just read is quote these words adequately express the compatibility of empirical reality with transcendental reality.

And that is really that's the Kantian master stroke of epistemology, right? And Schopenhauer puts it into such easy to understand terms. There's some kind of transcendental reality behind the senses which we can't have direct knowledge of, but we can know that it exists. It transcends what we can glean through s empirical sense data. How do we then come up with a picture of the world which is compatible with both views of reality, both with the empirical view and with the transcendental view?

That's what the Kantian or the Schopenhauerian is aiming for, and why such a person might not be inclined to To accept the view of objects as merely material, which is somehow explained by material, or to say that everything is explained by the laws of nature. We can perceive the laws of nature again only through the way they affect objects or appear within the behavior of the world of phenomena.

The laws of nature are relative to the world of phenomena, and so the kind of world that Schopenhauer is pondering, uh insofar as he's talking about the world as will, can't be explained with scientific endeavors. Ever doesn't ever get there. Um to expand a little further. uh of what we mean by this, uh that we, you know, experience the laws of nature through objects. um we have to talk about um the principle of sufficient reason which

I'm not going to get super into in this episode, but we have to talk about it at least a little bit. So in section four, Schopenhauer discusses how the existence of all matter as we know it must presuppose the concepts of time and space. um just as a precondition for the existence of matter. You have to believe in time and space.

causality, which is where time and space intersect, must also presuppose time and space there by that token. And so Schopenhauer writes quote The law of causality receives its meaning and necessity only from the fact that the essence of change does not consist in the mere variation of states or conditions in themselves. On the contrary, it consists in the fact that at the same place in space there is now one condition or state, and then another.

And at one and the same point in time there is here this state, and there that state. And skipping further through the passage Change, i. e. variation according to causal law, always concerns a particular part of space and a particular part of time, simultaneously and in union. Consequently, causality unites space and time. Um and so he's arguing here from the position of pointing out what he would call a priori knowledge about the world.

Just by our means of per s perceiving the world, of our perception of the world, um, we gain this a priori knowledge. So this comes you know, from our perception of duration, impenetrability, divisibility, permanence, mobility, and so on. There are a number of traits or aspects of matter that follow logically from the very idea of distinct objects existing within space and time.

This is, to put it simply, what Schopenhauer calls the principle of sufficient reason, knowledge of the subject, of the object, of the relationship between them, which contains within it time, space, and causality. The principle of sufficient reason is how we it's uh it's the basis of understanding what governs the world of phenomena. It's his means of giving a shorthand for the axioms that we have to accept for a ma as a matter of course.

In just in the practice of applying reason to the world as we experience it. which is the world of appearances. And so we experience objects and phenomena that are subject to causality, which means they exist in space and time and have limitations within those dimensions and so on.

Um and this all follows from the principle of sufficient reason in Schopenhauer's view. He puts this very straightforwardly in uh section seven. Still in book one, where he writes that time, space and causality quote Yet because they are essential to the object as such, they can be found also from the subject, in other words, they can be known a priori, and that to this extent are to be regarded as the boundary common to both.

But they can all be referred to one common expression, the principle of sufficient reason. And so this is an a priori judgment. Time and space are necessitated by the existence of objects, and thus the existence of objects can lead us to extrapolate to the conclusion that there is time and space, right? without an understanding of the principle of sufficient reason, um, you know, without an understanding of causality and permanence and duration and all that.

Then there is no coherent representation of the world. That's not possible without the principle of of sufficient reason. Uh this is part of what makes mankind such a complex manifestation of the will, uh what Schopenhauer would call a more complete

or more visible objectification of the will's nature. We have the principle of sufficient reason which allows us to make of these sophisticated representations of the world and which allows our will to pursue and strive after ever more individuated and ever more complex aims. Since the world of phenomena is this world of representation, um, this would imply that the quote unquote world experienced by lower animals.

or by something which merely blindly wills through its drives and by means of stimuli, would not be anything like our own world. This might not even properly be called a world at all. except insofar as it's part of the world as will. Um a certain degree of intellect or or a degree of consciousness is required to represent the world as humans have done. Schopenhauer writes this is back in section four quote.

All causality, hence all matter, and consequently the whole of reality is only for the understanding, through the understanding, in the understanding. The first simplest present manifestation of understanding is perception of the actual world. This is in every way knowledge of the cause from the effect, and therefore all perception is intellectual, end quote. Further down in the same passage he writes What the eye, the ear, or the hand experiences is not perception, it is mere data.

Only by a passing of the understanding from the effect to the cause does the world stand out as perception extended in space, varying in respect to form, persisting through all time as regards matter. End quote.

So without our interpretation of the sense data through a conceptual framework, and Schopenhauer's view, there is no reality in the sense that we would normally conceive of reality. um which is the world of representation. This is this is how Schopenhauer interprets and carries on Kant's transcendental idealism. This is how he understood it. The world we live in is not direct contact with an objective reality. and we don't interface with reality from an absolute perspective.

But the world we live in is also not an idealistic creation of subjective experience. That would be a collapse into Berkeleyan idealism or worse a collapse into solipsism. Schopenhauer basically sees both views as fundamentally mistaken. The world is not strictly a world of objects, or strictly a world of matter that can be explained solely in material terms. The world is is not all st you know, on the other hand, a purely subjective generation of the consciousness.

Those two approaches are sort of what he sees as like the two big errors of epistemology, and he classes the first of those two as materialism, as I've also called it. And his criticism of materialism is as follows. Objects can't be separated from representations. He doesn't believe that representations can be their own explanation. Materialism leaves out the subject, in Schopenhauer's view. It tries to take causality, for example, and treat it as an eternal fact.

But Schopenhauer constantly reminds us that we only have perception of this fact or any facts through the intersection of subject and object, of knower and known. He establishes this framework early on in the text in section two, where he explains that each person is the knowing subject, whereas their body is an object or representation.

And therefore, sh for Schopenhauer the subject object distinction is a priori and universal. Subject and object, in his framing of it, corresponds also to knower and known. For anything to be known there must be a knower. And without an object to be known, the knower can't exist either um'cause then there would be nothing to be known, and so you don't really have a knower. And so he writes That which knows all things and is known by none is the subject.

Everyone finds himself as this subject. And then further down he writes whatever exists exists only for the subject, end quote. And so again, it's only through the intellect that we can make the conceptual framework of causality in order to represent the world to ourselves as the knower. Schopenhauer's problem with materialism is that it assumes a dead world, it assumes that objects can exist without a subject, which he thinks is impossible.

Um, you know, he believes that's nonsensical, it's saying the known can exist without the the knower. Material objects aren't real for Schopenhauer unless they're represented by the knower. Without the knower to represent reality, we have no way of knowing that there is any reality and

Um, you know, now obviously Schopenhauer does believe something still exists independent of knowing. He would say that's the world as will, but that isn't a world with objects or knowable things. This isn't a world we can conceptualize. Um or rather, once we do conceptualize about it, it becomes objectified and therefore becomes part of the world of representation, right? So that's the that's the trap of the phenomena Numena split.

Material is something which Schopenhauer considers, therefore, indirectly given to us, because it comes to us through the sense organs. What what we do directly know, in Schopenhauer's view, is the immediate knowledge of the representation. the representation um is the only thing we have direct knowledge of. But we don't we don't actually know that any material is really out there for whatever that might mean, in in order to have the justification to designate the world as material.

because the status of being a material thing is simply a conceptual designation. So it's a second order, it's a conceptualization or an interpretation So that's the indirect aspect, right? Um of what is directly given to us, which is the representation, the direct empirical experience. And so we're explaining what we directly experience, the representation, in terms of something we would be experiencing only indirectly, which is this conception of the material world.

Schopenhauer also seems to find it absurd that we might explain things like will or consciousness through sheer matter. Personally, I think that is

cuts to the quick of Schopenhauer um, you know, the his reasons for rejecting materialism. It just doesn't suit his taste. He's part of the German idealistic tradition, which is large largely opposed to vulgar materialism and scientism.

and he believes a metaphysical stance to be essential as a grounding to any pursuit of knowledge. And he's also, as we said, enamored with the Indian philosophers Who hold that the world is Lila, or a playing of forces within this world of illusion, and that the true reality behind the veil of Maya is an undifferentiated indivisible unity.

Now on the other hand, the opposite side of the issue, Schopenhauer also criticizes like what you might call vulgar idealism, and he uses Fichte as his whipping boy here. He calls Fichte's philosophy fictitious, and his problem with Fichte is that he leaves out the objective. He thinks Fichte thinks that all reality flows forth from the subject.

And he thinks Fichte's philosophical mistake is in taking the principle of sufficient reason, which again includes our knowledge of objects and subjects, time and space and causality. Fichte takes this and makes it absolute. Um and this is not an absolute, Schopenhauer argues. The principle of sufficient reason is relative and conditioned, it exists within the world of phenomena which we experience.

Uh Schopenhauer writes With Fichta, by virtue of the principle of sufficient reason as an eternal veritas, the ego is the ground of the world or of the non ego, the object, which is just its consequent, its product end quote. Um so Fichta's mistake is making the thing in itself into a subject. A knower, as an independent entity which is not dependent on the objective world. And in this sense, he makes the world in itself equivalent with God and with Bishop Berkeley's idealism.

But Schopenhauer thinks the subject-object distinction even only obtains in the world of phenomena, in the world of representation. In fact, the thing in itself is not the knower, and it's not the subject. It's the groundless ground of both, which is the will. The will, in Schopenhauer's view, is what creates the very possibility of there being a knower and a known. It's the driving force that brings those things into existence.

Schopenhauer is insistent that all of these laws that we perceive, the law of physics, the laws that govern relationships and interactions of material objects don't reveal anything about this indivisible thing in itself that's the real character of reality. And so he sums up his disagreement with both these schools of metaphysical thought as follows, and we're still reading from section seven quote.

The philosophy of Fichta, not otherwise even worth mention, is of interest to us only as the real opposite of the old and original materialism, making a belated appearance. Materialism was the most consistent system starting from the object, as this system was the most consistent starting from the subject.

Materialism overlooked the fact that, with the simplest object, it has at once posited the subject as well, So Fichte too overlooked the fact that with the subject, let him give it whatever title he likes, he posited the object, since no subject is thinkable without object. And so materialism and idealism, in all their vulgarity and incompleteness, are both what Schopenhauer would classify as the errors and the pitfalls brought on by the development of reason.

Schopenhauer argues that logic is a sort of second order derivation on perception. Direct perception is a pure form of knowledge. And so the development of reason is not a wholly good thing. He writes in section ten reason is feminine in nature, it can give only after it has received, end quote. And then, skipping further down the passage, he says concepts in general exist only after previous representations of perception, and in reference to these lies their whole nature, end quote.

In other words, conception is secondary to perception, and the double meaning of the term conception in English is apropos of the meaning of calling reason feminine in nature, Reason is a means of coming to judgments by examining abstract concepts, but the concepts themselves are derived from what Schopenhauer calls immediate knowledge, which is the perception of the world.

And again, it it acts according to the pr principle of sufficient reason. Um and so you have to take in the sense data before um y as the raw material that reason then needs to do concept formation. Um and Schopenhauer goes so far as to say that in actual thought we conduct our thinking in accord with immediate knowledge and leave logic unused. He elaborates on this argument in detail in section fourteen.

Asserting that we follow habitual conceptual frameworks and actual practice and that much of our thinking in terms of perceiving and interpreting the world is spontaneous and automatic. In fact, the ability to employ logic in order to do things like represent complex philosophical problems is not a trait shared by all, and more importantly, it's not a trait needed by most. He's critical of how concept formation can and has led to errors, and how it allows rhetoricians to mislead people.

He writes in section eight. as from the direct light of the sun, to the borrowed, reflected light of the moon, so do we pass from the immediate representation of perception, which stands by itself and is its own warrant, To reflection, to the abstract, discursive concepts of reason, which have their whole content only from that knowledge of perception and in relation to it.

As long as our attitude is one of pure perception, all is clear, firm, and certain. There are neither questions nor doubts nor errors. End quote.

Further down the passage he writes With abstract knowledge, with the faculty of reason, doubt and error have appeared in the theoretical, care and remorse in the practical If in the representation of perception illusion does at moments distort reality, then in the representation of the abstract, error can reign for thousands of years, impose its iron yoke on whole nations. to stifle the noblest impulse of mankind. End quote.

And so unsurprisingly what we have here is an attitude very similar to Plato. When we consider all that has been said thus far, Schopenhauer believes that with a higher degree of intellect one can gain a more complete understanding of reality, a truer perception of reality, such that, in the platonic sense, the truly wise person does actually see more than the average person.

But many people will be misled by, you know, the shadows on the cave wall and the deception of the shadow puppets being paraded around to dupe people with these errors of thought. um the wise person goes out into the sunlight of wisdom. Um

But um the key thing here so the intellect, a couple of takeaways from that, these kinds of considerations. Here, intellect is not an unmitigated good, but also Even though a lot of people are enslaved by errors, um a truly transcendent intellect could effectively perceive a different world from the one that ordinary people do.

Really the last thing we'll talk about today, um, on this very long episode, uh, will be Uh this is where another element where we bring in Plato, because the the other huge influence of Plato on Schopenhauer's metaphysics is the theory of ideas, um, also known as the theory of forms. Um it's a bit confusing because sometimes the title of Schopenhauer's book is translated as World as Will and Idea rather than the translation I have translates it as World of Will World as Will and Representation.

But I don't like the translation saying world as of as will and idea, because representations and ideas in Schopenhauer's philosophy are actually two distinct terms. He directly references Plato's theory of ideas in the book, and the Platonic idea it's totally separate thing from just the general term representation. A representation is any perception of any object or phenomena in the world that's known by the knowing subject.

The way Schopenhauer uses the Platonic forms or the Platonic ideas is not to refer to the representations themselves. What he was referring to is the gradations of the representation. And what this means will require further explanation. Um, as I mentioned before, Schopenhauer argues there isn't more of the will in a man than there is in a stone. The will is one at all times and always everywhere equally distributed.

The way he thinks about it instead is the degree to which the will is revealed, which is to say objectified or manifested, which is to say perceived and represented. And so this is what he means he says in in in this respect there is more visible will in a plant than in a stone. There's more visible will in the animal than in the plant, and then there's more in the human than in the animal. The will reveals itself, becomes more and more visible, more realized, and these higher and higher forms.

And so these gradations then, of different classes of things, men, animals, stones, to put it in descending order, or even then with the laws of physics. Gravity, causality, and so on. These are all to be understood synonymously with Plato's theory of ideas. All of these are objectifications of the will, but they exist at a different gradient, at a different gradation. Schopenhauer argues that Kant misused the word idea, and he clarifies that he uses the term in the Platonic sense.

He quotes Diogenes Laertius, who gives the shortest and most concise description of the platonic doctrine Plato teaches that the ideas exist in nature, so to speak, as patterns or prototypes, and that the remainder of things only resemble them and exist as their copies, end quote. And then to clarify how platonic ideas fit into his own philosophical system, Schopenhauer writes, By idea I understand every definite and fixed grade of the will's objectification, end quote.

So, what has taken shape so far? This is an atheistic world. It's a world without any meaning other than the will blindly striving to exist in every conceivable pattern or another. And the will is represented in one form or another by these conscious beings that have been been called out of it its uh bosom to experience it, as beings with an intellect, and that's the human condition.

Um this is at bottom a senseless world. It's not created by an intelligence or redeemed by a god. The world at its base is something totally unintelligent, the will, And this will is not sentient or conscious, but uh in the sense of a god or a personal being, but the will is you could say its consciousness itself, sort of in the sense of the Atman and the doctrine of Advaita Vedanta. will exists as the consciousness of all beings.

So that we can't say that it's without consciousness because we're conscious and we are the will. And so Schopenhauer quotes a mystic, Angelus Silesius, who wrote, I know God cannot live a moment without me. If I should come to naught, he too must cease to be. And so in Schopenhauer's argument, that's like a mystical epiphany. Of the coterminous nature of the will with all being, which one experiences directly in their own consciousness.

um only with Silesius it's represented in religious language. It's you know, it's interpreted as the consciousness of the Godhead being synonymous with the consciousness of of Silesius himself with the knowing subject, but so this omnipresent will has consciousness only in its manifest forms, in the objectified or the represented form.

In its essence the will is blind and And although perhaps it has that like immediate intelligence that Schopenhauer ascribes even to the animals, and seemingly even to forces or physical laws you know, an inanimate object. The immediate knowledge pushes the phenomenon in a certain direction, and this is felt and not thought.

it's non-rational, or we might even say pre-rational, and that's the essence of everything. And so in this schema, Schopenhauer then brings in the platonic forms As a means of explaining or classifying all the different phenomena within that. uh world as will and representation. And the the gradations are according to how fully the will is revealed or made visible in all of these different things.

Um and you know, the the the the term he uses is principium uh individuationist, the principle of individuation. representations come into existence by becoming distinct from other phenomena, and so Schopenhauer says, you know, the lowest gradation of the will, the most general ideas, pl ideas here in the Platonic sense.

are the laws of nature themselves. So gravity um and so he writes in section twenty-seven. This is in book two. Quote We should see the will express itself here in the lowest grade as blind striving, an obscure, inarticulate impulse. Far from susceptible of being directly known, it is the simplest and the weakest mode of its objectification. But it appears as this blind and unconscious striving in the whole of unorganized nature.

and all those original forces of which it is the work of physics and chemistry to discover, and to study the laws, and each of which manifest itself to us in millions of phenomena which are exactly similar similar and regular. and show no trace of individual character, but are mere multiplicity through space and time, i.e., through the principium individuationis, as a picture is multiplied through the facets of a glass. So the laws that uh obtain over everything in reality, like gravity.

How does gravity exist? Well it exists as properties uh as a property of objects with mass, right? So the lowest gradations of the will, in Schopenhauer's view. exist as properties or facets of all phenomena. They're so generalized that they lack all individual expression. And so gravity um exists equally in all objects with mass, or rather d distributed equally through all mass itself, I guess we could say. You know, you might have more mass in a certain area, but

Mass itself all has gravity. And so the story of the world for Schopenhauer is the story of the will striving for higher and higher gradations. um higher objectifications of itself, which means more individuated, more visible, more perceptible objectifications. So at the lowest gradation we have forces, at higher gradations we get inanimate objects. than plants, lower organisms. Each of them has more potential

To manifest uniqueness in individuality, to be a distinct thing, which is the very nature of the world of representation. Everything makes its own distinct, specific demand on reality. in whatever form it takes, and it's driven by its own purposes, its own goals, its own aims, which then clash with all these other representations of the will.

And therefore, through this striving, and inevitably through conflict the will is more fully revealed. the more particular and contrived desires Dictate the higher gradations or patterns in which the manifested will take shape. And so eventually then we get to mankind, where these types

Or patterns become so specific that Schopenhauer argues each man could very well be his own platonic idea. And so he writes in section twenty eight quote The character of each individual man, so far as it is thoroughly individual, and not entirely included in that of the species. May be regarded as a special idea, corresponding to a special act of the objectification of will.

So whereas in lower species of animals the species differ from one another, but you know, one ant doesn't differ too greatly from another ant of the same species. In man the differences can be so extreme, people can be aimed at ends or goals which are mutually exclusive and incompatible with one another. People live in such extremely different environments and have such wildly differing cultural norms and societal standards and moral agendas.

And so Schopenhauer considers man to be the most sophisticated and most visible objectification of the will that exists, and he he effectively starts from man as as the justification of reality and the origin of reality. um not the origin of the Numenal World, the world of the will, but in terms of the world of representation that Schopenhauer um believes man can mankind, the subject, to be a sort of precondition of, right? And so he writes in section twenty eight, quote.

In order to manifest the full significance of the will, the idea of man would need to appear. not alone and sundered from everything else, but accompanied by the whole species of grades, down through all the forms of animals, through the vegetable kingdom to unorganized nature. All these supplement each other in the complete objectification of will. They are as much presupposed by the idea of man as the blossoms of a tree presuppose leaves, branches, stem, and root.

They form a pyramid of which man is the apex. If fond of similes, one might also say that their manifestations accompany that of man as necessarily as the full daylight is accompanied by all the gradations of twilight, through which, little by little, it loses itself in darkness. or one might call them the echo of man, and say Animal and Plant are the descending fifth and third of man, the inorganic kingdom is the lower octave.

And so you'll find many more music metaphors for describing these uh metaphysical positions if you decide to read Schopenhauer for yourself. What is implied by this passage is these gradations depend on one another and

does not and cannot sensibly exist outside of an ecosystem that mankind depends on. Mankind exists in dependence on that ecosystem. And thus also in dependence on weather patterns and climate and geological processes and all the laws governing that and so on and so forth, until we conclude that man depends on the most rudimentary objectifications of the will. the physical laws, just as well as he needs other animals and plants in order to find sustenance.

And so further down in the passage Schopenhauer writes We find, however, that the inner necessity of the gradation of its manifestations, which is inseparable from the adequate objectification of the will, is expressed by an outer necessity in the whole of these manifestations themselves. him by reason of which man has need of the beasts for his support. The beasts and their grades have need of each other, as well as of plants.

which in turn require the ground, water, chemical elements, and their combinations, the planet, the sun, rotation and motion round the sun, the curve of the ellipse, etcetera, etcetera,

At bottom this results from the fact that the will must live on itself, for there exists nothing beside it, and it is a hungry will. Hence arise eager pursuit, anxiety, and suffering. End quote. In short, everything survives by consuming and dominating the lower gradations of existence. The will exists in a constant state of strife with itself, ever moving in directions which never ultimately satisfy it. Every pursuit brings it best to itself.

A momentary relief for the will is ever hungry, and what satisfies one manifestation of the will means the destruction of another. Think of the good of the owl versus the good of the mouse. The various gradations of the will can therefore never know peace in the world of representation. As they strive to exist, that striving brings them into conflict with others, and the contest never ends because the will is never satisfied.

And from this assessment, you may be starting to get a picture of the depressing world that Schopenhauer established in his writing, and just why it is he's considered the great pessimist. But we won't get fully th into that until the next episode. But uh we'll look at one more passage and this passage is in s section twenty nine and it's at the end of book two.

And uh it elaborates on this vision of the world and will perhaps titillate you further as to the depressing nature of Schopenhauer's outlook. He writes, quote, In fact, freedom from all aim, from all limits, belongs to the nature of the will, which is an endless striving. This was already touched on above in the reference to centrifugal force.

It also discloses itself in its simplest form and the lowest grade of the objectification of will, in gravitation, which we see constantly exerting itself, though a final goal is obviously impossible for it. For if, according to its will, all existing matter were collected in one mass, yet within this mass gravity ever striving towards the center, would still wage war with impenetrability as rigidity or elasticity.

The tendency of matter can therefore only be confined, never completed or appeased. But this is precisely the case with all tendencies, of all phenomena of will. Every attained end is also the beginning of a new course and so on ad infinitum. The plant raises its manifestation from the seed through the stem and the leaf to the blossom and the fruit, which again is the beginning of a new seed, a new individual that runs through the old course, and so on through endless time.

Such also is the life of the animal, procreation is its highest point, and after attaining to it, the life of the first individual quickly or slowly sinks. While a new life ensures to nature the endurance of the species and repeats the same phenomena.

Indeed, the constant renewal of the matter of every organism is also to be regarded as merely the manifestation of this continual pressure and change, and physiologists are now ceasing to hold that it is the necessary reparation of the matter wasted in motion for the possible wearing out of the machine can by no means be equivalent to the support it is constantly receiving through nourishment. Eternal becoming, endless flux, characterizes the revelation of the inner nature of will.

Finally, the same thing shows itself in human endeavors and desires, which always delude us by presenting their satisfaction as the final end of will. As soon as we attain to them they no longer appear the same, and therefore they soon grow stale, are forgotten, and though not openly disowned, are yet always thrown aside as vanished illusions.

We are fortunate enough if there still remains something to wish for and to strive after, that the game may be kept up of constant transition from desire to satisfaction and from satisfaction to a new desire. The rapid course of which is called happiness, and the slow course sorrow, and does not sink into that stagnation that shows itself in fearful enui that paralyzes life, vain yearning without a definite object, deadening languor.

According to all this, when the will is enlightened by knowledge, it always knows what it wills now and here, never what it wills in general. Every particular act of will has its end, the whole will has none.

Just as every particular phenomenon of nature, is determined by a sufficient cause so far as concerns its appearance in this place at this time, but the force which manifests itself in it has no general cause. And so? We gain an insight into the inner truth of nature by looking to our own will. What is the nature of that will? It's never satisfied. Willing as the underlying process of reality, that's the thing.

the vision here. When one attains one of the will's specific goals, one of their own goals, this n does nothing to change the will's general goal or its general character. Its general character is to strive and seek and pursue and desire. not to be satisfied, not to have its desires sated, but to continue desiring. And so once those desires are fulfilled, suddenly the will's no longer satiated by what it just before seemed like it couldn't bear not to have.

And this is Schopenhauer's explanation of both the inner character of our own lives and of reality itself. As abstract and overly conceptual as this episode has probably been for many of you, if you've stuck it out to the very end, hopefully you can now see the connection between Schopenhauer's attitude towards life and his metaphysics. The fundamental Western orientation towards philosophy was through this idea of the two worlds, the world of mere appearance and the world as such.

Plato and Kant had affirmed this division, and Schopenhauer embraced them both fully and sought to synthesize them. Um and this idea that had seized him at a young age, such that he wrote World as Will and Representation at twenty-eight, didn't change at all for the rest of his life. And I think this comes from Schopenhauer's temperament. And what he found, I think, to match his temperament philosophically, he found from the ancients in the form of Vedic philosophy.

And this idea around which the rest of his philosophy is a mere elaboration is that conviction that he expresses at the end that all life all existence is at bottom of one character, and that it has a single intelligible character, which exists beyond any of its individual representations.

And that finally because it is one, we can gain an awareness of what this one is, because we're part and parcel with it, and by investigating ourselves in our own awareness, we can come to understand it as the will. This will is As he elaborates later, the will to exist, the will to be. Every individual objectification of the will strives against one another, making the world of representation a battleground.

But for all this horror and strife, the true world which is itself blind will, is never divided, never dies nor is born, never passes away or changes. And so we have the agreement with those, you know, among the Indian philosophers and Schopenhauer, the simultaneous assertion that That the world is already pure and liberated and free in every respect, and yet the world as we experience it is one of injustice and violence and tragedy. Because our nature is to strive and to cling to existence.

against all these laws of nature that eventually overcome us and subsume us. We live in suffering, in a state of either want or dissatisfaction. Now, if only a person could use this power of reflection that we've gained, the ability for representing the world, which still comes to us through the will, right? It's bestowed onto us by the will striving such for individuality that it creates these beings that can represent the world into concept.

But what if there is some way man could take advantage of his existence at this point as the highest gradient of the will's manifestations, in order to free himself from the suffering of the world? Um a person that could ach attain that kind of liberation would be able to use their reason to perceive the world in a different way. And perhaps by seeing the illusory, dreamlike nature of phenomena, one could rationally come to understand that desiring such phenomena is ultimately unsatisfying.

And perhaps by that realization you could train the mind to stop striving. But since striving is the very character of the will, and the will is the world. That means a rejection of the world. And uh that's where Schopenhauer's philosophy all leads. But we'll talk about that next week because we're already way over on time from what I imagined we'd be. Um, but you get a long episode this week. Um

Alright, hopefully it'll be even darker and colder by then, at least for us folks in the Northern Hemisphere. Uh join me next Tuesday where we discuss part two, Schopenhauer the Great Pessimist. Signing off. If you enjoyed the Nietzsche podcast or found it helpful, Visit us and support the show at patriot com slash. in the description. Or just share the show with any of your friends.