II. Philosophical Background and Starting-Point

Probably the best way of approaching Schopenhauer's philosophy is to see the philosophical development which lead up to it; Schopenhauer places particular weight on his more immediate predecessors, and particularly (as we have seen) on Kant. But Kant's philosophy, as expressed in his great Critique of Pure Reason (1781), did not arise spontaneously: it 'sprung forth', as Schopenhauer says in a letter of 1831, 'from Locke's and Hume's speculations, or at least sets out from them'. Schopenhauer is unusual amongst German philosophers in the significance he accords to the British development in philosophy. In the 1853 review, mentioned above, John Oxenford emphasized Schopenhauer's British orientation: 'Hobbes, Berkeley, and Priestley, whose existence has been almost ignored by modern German teachers, are at his (Schopenhauer's) fingers' end, and he cites them not only as kindred souls, but as authorities.'

Locke is important, according to Schopenhauer, for the emphasis he places on epistemology, on the question of what we can know. Locke's answer in his Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690) is, in a word, ideas. What we immediately know of the world are ideas, either of sensation or reflection. This is important for Schopenhauer, because of its subjective starting point, although Locke is neither entirely original nor very clear or consistent in this standpoint. Descartes anticipates him; and Locke is notoriously ambiguous in his use of the term idea and about how ideas relate to objects in the world. However, Locke was moving in the right, subjectivist direction, according to Schopenhauer, as is shown in his celebrated account of primary/secondary qualities, which holds that the colour, taste, sound, and smell of objects are mind-dependent. This development is taken further by Berkeley, who is more consistent than Locke. For Berkeley the physical world is known not just through sensible ideas, nor is it only sounds, smells, heat and cold that are mind-dependent: rather, the whole physical world is nothing more nor less than collections of ideas. All qualities, including solidity, extension, shape - which Locke held to be mind-independent qualities - exist only as they are perceived. As Berkeley famously puts it in his Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), Section 3, the existence of physical things consists in being perceived: their 'esse is percipi'. In clearly presenting idealism for the first time in the history of philosophy, Berkeley has made a lasting contribution, says Schopenhauer, who is then quick to add that the rest of Berkeley's doctrines 'cannot stand the test of time' (W. W.I., p. 4). Schopenhauer rejects Berkeley's metaphysics, his spiritualist account of the reality that lies behind ideas, according to which it is God who causes or imprints sensible ideas - which constitute the physical world - on our minds or immaterial substances.

It was Hume who identified the weaknesses in the Berkeleian or in any philosophical system which attempts to move from the world of ideas, or sensible impressions, to a spiritual cause and perceiver. The chief difficulty is that we do not perceive such substances or their (supposed) creative action; all we perceive are our perceptions or ideas. We also have no reason to believe that everything must have a cause. Nor can we be sure that we (i.e., our minds) are anything more than collections of floating ideas. In short, for Hume, we can be rationally certain of our ideas, and little more.

It was this sceptical world-view which woke Kant, as he put it, from his dogmatic slumbers.14 Prior to this, he had been a relatively complacent follower of the dominant Enlightenment world-view, which combined Newtonian science with the Rationalist metaphysics inspired by Leibniz. The awakened Kant was alarmed particularly at Hume's apparent undermining of science by the corrosive analysis of causality he presented most strikingly in his Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (1748), section 7.

Kant's response to Hume's sceptical challenge is set out in the first Critique, and involves a fundamental paradigm shift or new Copernican revolution. Formerly there had seemed to be only two ways of showing that causality always obtains in the physical world, and hence that our natural world is law-abiding, as assumed by science. First, one could argue this from experience or induction - for example, from observing that every time fire is applied to dry paper, the paper burns. Second, one could argue that the principle of universal causality is self-evidently true: that nothing in the world can exist outside the causal chain. However, Hume showed that each of these ways - characteristic of the empiricists and the rationalists, respectively - was flawed. Now Kant accepts Hume's criticisms; but he proposes a new, third way of justifying causality, whereby it is a feature not of the outer world, but is an inner, mental structure which we must impose on the world. So causality always and everywhere obtains in the physical world in much the same way that people with pink-tinted contact lenses must always see the world in a pinkish light. It was in this novel way that Kant made science safe from the dangers of Humean scepticism.

Kant, in short, accepts idealism; although he is reluctant, as Schopenhauer sees it, to be as forthright in his idealism as was Berkeley. Yet this is the true tendency of his thought; for Kant showed that not only is causality a necessary mental structure in all minds that make judgements based on sense-experience, but that space and time are, as well. So what we perceive of the world are products of our spatial, temporal, and causal structuring, which takes place at an unconscious level - which Kant called the transcendental realm - and from which active structuring we get our orderly world of experience, or - as Berkeley called it - ideas.

This, according to Schopenhauer, is the great contribution of Kant, who showed in systematic detail (which is absent in Berkeley's work) how the empirical world is objective, and distinguishable from the imaginary, yet is still a world of ideas or appearances: that it is (to use Kant's formula) empirically real but transcendentally ideal. Yet what, then, lies behind this ideal veil of appearances? Because our world is composed and bounded by our sense-experience, Kant holds, we cannot know. That unknowable something is what he called the Ding an sich (the thing-in-itself), or noumenon. Schopenhauer agreed with Kant that the thing-in-itself cannot be known either by pure reason, as rationalists like Descartes thought, or by empirical experience and reason, as some empiricists such as Locke believed, or by systematized experience, which is science. For each of these three approaches uses causality as though it were a bridge that can connect us to that which really exists independent of our experience - the things in themselves, unconditioned by our ways of knowing. But that is not tenable, as Hume and Kant showed.

So Kant safeguarded science, but at a price, namely, that science is valid only within the world of experience. Hence any rational or scientific attempt to move beyond the world of experience is ruled out. Thus neither the world-view of religion - with a God, immortal souls, an afterlife - nor the materialistic viewpoint, can be justified, at least not on rational or theoretical grounds. For since causality (as a transcendental form) is valid only within the empirical world of objects, it cannot carry us to that which transcends them.


III. World as idea and will

Here, then, we have Schopenhauer's starting point in Book One of The World as Will and Idea. The idealistic view he outlines was first stated by Berkeley, purified by Hume, enriched by Kant, and is now finally corrected and simplified by Schopenhauer himself. In short, this is a world of orderly ideas or phenomena, in which science can reign, unhindered, but which allows no scientific or theoretical access to that which lies beyond these appearances. Put in another way, Schopenhauer accepts, broadly speaking, the familiar positivist view of the world advocated by phenomenalists such as J. S. Mill and, in our own century, by Logical Positivists such as A. J. Ayer. On the other hand, Schopenhauer repeatedly rejects the forms of idealism of his contemporaries, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, who, he scornfully claims, have simply ignored the positivistic implications of the British Empiricists and of Kant.
Of course, this is just the beginning of Schopenhauer's story, since he believes that he can go beyond positivism, beyond Kant's transcendental and agnostic idealism, yet in a way that does not violate the austere conditions for a metaphysics laid down by Kant and implied by Hume. In this respect, in his commitment to a metaphysical explanation, Schopenhauer is closer to his fellow German idealists than he is to Kant, and he is closer again to Berkeley than to Hume. And it is here, in Book Two, that he believes he is making his chief contribution to philosophy by identifying the thing which lies behind appearances. For there is a source, Schopenhauer argues, which previous philosophers had strangely ignored, given that it is so close to home - that is, our living bodies, through which, he maintains, we can gain some insight into the thing-in-itself.

My living body is, in Schopenhauer's view, a sort of Rosetta Stone. I experience it in two ways: (1) objectively, as idea, as I experience all other objects in the world, but also (2) more directly as the most distinct manifestation or expression of the thing-in-itself. The crucial area here, at least initially, is that of motivation - a word which Schopenhauer introduced indirectly into the English language.17 Thus when I reach for a drink to quench my thirst, I am doing one thing which can be known in two ways. First, it can be known by ordinary sense perception. You and I can both see my reaching and that it is prompted by thirst. But I, alone, am in a position also to experience this same motivated action inwardly - in a more direct, less mediated way. I do not have to see my parched lips to know that I am thirsty, or observe my hand moving to know that I have acted. What am I aware of here? What distinguishes this inner awareness from the outward perception that is accessible to all?

The best word, Schopenhauer maintains, to describe this familiar yet cognitively strange being or activity, is 'will'. Yet it is vital to appreciate that he is using the word in a novel and extended way: as the best term for something that had not previously been understood. For Schopenhauer, will is neither a cause nor an effect, neither spatial nor temporal: it is that metaphysical reality which underlies or grounds all phenomena, although our best apprehension of it is in the phenomenon of motivated action. This is so, because our awareness of such action is non-spatial; and being without one of the transcendental forms, our awareness is less structured and veiled.

Schopenhauer's conclusion is that my bodily actions are will objectified, will made physical by the structuring of time, space and causality. Hence that which had eluded Kant, and which he thought was intractably unknowable, can be known, Schopenhauer thinks, if we attend to our living bodies - which Kant and nearly all earlier philosophers had ignored. So our bodily feelings offer us the key or Rosetta Stone for deciphering the hitherto unknown language of reality.

What really exists, then, can be known not by objective means (as was thought by philosophers before Schopenhauer) but subjectively: by those intimate, personal feelings and sensations- longing, throbbing, hungering, which were hitherto dismissed with embarrassed relief. For Schopenhauer, human beings are not essentially rational, but are desiring, emotional animals, whose rationality was developed to serve and maximize the will to life. And it is not only our bodily actions that are essentially will, but so are our bodies themselves. Thus 'teeth, throat and intestines are objectified hunger, the genitals are objectified sexual desire' (W.W.I., P.41). This thesis, that human, and indeed all beings, are expressions of a blind, ceaseless will to life, is probably Schopenhauer's principal and most original philosophical contribution.



So while Schopenhauer wishes us to accept that the world is idea, he also tries to show us in Book Two that his first position (the idealism of Book One) is not complete. Unaccounted for is the inner meaning to things, which we all feel in an immediate, inchoate way, but which before Schopenhauer had not been given clear philosophical articulation. One main way by which he tries to move us in this metaphysical direction - which again shows his affinity with Berkeley - is through his use of solipsism, the extraordinary theory that only myself or modifications of myself exist. For our adhering consistently to idealism, as set out in Book One, will lead, he argues, to a form of solipsism in which the whole world has reality only as idea, as a dependent object for me, as pure knowing subject. The world, in short, will be like a very orderly and vivid dream, although not one in which I (David Berman) am the dreamer but only one of the characters in the dream. I cannot be the dreamer, since then the dreamer would be an object, and hence no longer the subject having the dream.

This, according to Schopenhauer, is the philosophical position which underlies scientific positivism, even though most scientists are either unaware of it or would prefer not to think about it. It equates what is with what can be experienced. and refuses to go beyond experience or appearances to that which appears. Yet such agnostic naturalism, although it is formidable scientifically, does not fit our sense of ourselves as subjective, acting human beings. I feel that I am something more. something different. than mere idea or natural henomenon. Although I cannot prove it, I feel intuitively and immediately that my body at least is something different. And this intuition is enforced by the awful facts of death and suffering, facts that resist any satisfactory scientific or naturalistic explanation. Perhaps if we were immortal and always healthy, we could ignore metaphysical questions about the meaning of life and death, but as we are all suffering, mortal beings, we cannot.

Thus I feel that I have an inner core, that I am something that cannot be adequately explained by science; and this, Schopenhauer argues, is will to life. But then, am I the only being that is more than idea, that exists in itself as will? To be sure, I cannot be immediately aware of anything else, or any other body, in this intimate way. But it is hard to believe that other human beings are only my ideas, rather than things in themselves, like me. Yet if I wish to be strictly rigorous, I can refuse to accept this. No one can disprove this metaphysical form of solipsism: that I (David Berman) alone exist, that everything else is a mode of me, that the world is my dream. However, as Schopenhauer says, this form of solipsism (which he calls 'theoretical egoism') is more suited for a madhouse than for philosophical refutation. Hence one should conclude that every other human being, and not just myself, is a wilful thing in itself.



Yet can we stop there? Wouldn't that be a sort of species-solipsism, where only human beings are fully real? This is a position which has been held by religious systems such as Christianity; but Schopenhauer, whose sympathies lie with the pantheistic religions of the East, tries to show that this species-solipsism cannot be sustained. And here his sympathy for the ancient Eastern wisdom unites with his interest in physiology and biology. For, as those emerging sciences were demonstrating, there is little that separates homo sapiens from the rest of the natural world, and in particular from the higher mammals. Perhaps the most striking literary expression of this idea - which has become familiar since Charles Darwin - is presented in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (published a year before The World as Will and Idea) which describes the creation of a man by natural means. So human beings are not a different sort of being, distinguished by the supposed possession of an immortal soul, but are simply the last or highest development of nature - a lustful, aggressive animal, in Schopenhauer's view, that can reflect on itself by the use of concepts. Apart from this reflective ability, there is no significant difference between ourselves and the so-called lower animals: we are all expressions of the will to life. The differences are of degree rather than kind, as can be seen in the varying complexity of the nervous systems, which shows a continuity from the simpler to the more complex organisms. So if we are going to be consistent, we must attribute will to even the lowest animals. But neither can the process stop there, since between even the simplest animals, like the amoeba, and the more complex plants, such as the venus fly trap, there is too much in common to suppose that animals are essentially different from plants.

Yet neither is Schopenhauer prepared to draw the line at living beings. Here he goes further than even the Eastern thinkers, since he argues that even inanimate objects - particles of dust - possess an inward, noumenal nature. They, too, are expressions of will, although at a lower level of actuality. Hence the whole world is will. There is no turning back, no drawing the line in the face of solipsism. Either accept that this world is a dream, in which there is no dreamer or thing-in-itself(the epistemic solipsism of Book One), or that I alone am a thing-in-itself (Book Two's metaphysical solipsism), or allow that the whole world is will. Of course, in allowing this, we must realize that the concept of will has been and must be extended, since the way that will objectifies itself in me, in my complex body, will be different from its manifestation in a spider or a blade of grass. We must stretch our imagination to recognize that all nature is will in varying grades of objectification.

Hence there are two dangers or errors to be avoided. We must not understand will as so dilute that it loses its connection with our starting point: our bodily experience in motivated action. So we should not make the mistake of one recent commentator who supposes that the will is force or energy; for this is to reduce Schopenhauer's system to materialism} Yet neither should we fix our concept too narrowly on our own root experience of human willing, as another commentator has done, for then we would be making Schopenhauer into an animist.

Although he has arguments that indirectly confirm his main thesis that the world is will, it is important to recognize that for Schopenhauer there can be no proper philosophical argument for this thesis. This is so because all proper arguments or proofs are based on the principle of sufficient reason, a principle which obtains only within the phenomenal and not in the noumenal world, or between the two worlds. Ultimately his thesis depends on whether he has convinced us of the significance of our immediate inward feelings - that in hunger and lust we are most distinctly aware of ourselves as will, as that which appears less distinctly in ordinary perception.

One of his indirect or supporting arguments concerns sexuality - a subject rarely, if ever, discussed by traditional philosophers. Clearly anticipating Freud, Schopenhauer argues that sexuality dominates our mental lives, and that this makes sense if we are essentially will to life, rather than rational thinking beings. Schopenhauer also believes that he can solve certain hitherto intractable puzzles, such as that concerning free-will. The puzzle was nicely stated by Dr Johnson when he said that 'All theory is against the freedom of will; all experience for it.' Why, in other words, do most of us feel that we sometimes act freely, yet recognize, in retrospect, that our actions were predict- able and determined? Schopenhauer's answer draws on his two-world theory. Our feeling of freedom is a feeling of our inner, noumenal will, which, being outside the principle of causality, is free and undetermined. But henomenally, as an individual person in space, time and causality, we are rigidly determined (W.W.I., pp. 45-6).

Schopenhauer also, characteristically, draws on various art-forms for confirmation of his thesis. Consider even the simplest fairy tales. Most of them concern a young hero or heroine, who, while beginning well enough, soon has to struggle to regain the happiness for which she longs. In Cinderella, for example, the story details her deprivations, ordeals and distress. But what happens when she finally realizes her desire and marries the handsome prince? Well, they live happily ever after, and the story ends. But why is so little space given over to their happy life ever after? Schopenhauer answers that it would be incredible, even to children; for life is not about happiness or satisfaction, but about desiring, striving, longing, craving, and hence suffering. Moving from low to high art, this is also the reason, Schopenhauer suggests, why Dante's Inferno is far more convincing than his Paradiso. In short, the world is a struggling hell, not a blissful heaven.


by David Berman
Introduction (Parts II and III) to the Everyman Edition of ArthurSchopenhauer's
The World as Will and Idea 1995