An Introduction to Arthur Schopenhauer’s Metaphysics
Arthur Schopenhauer, German philosopher, lived from 22 February 1788 – 21 September 1860.
It is said that Einstein while seated on a bus saw a clock tower and began mental exercises pertaining to speed-time. The result was the Theory of Relativity. There was another German, Arthur Schopenhauer, who enquired “What is the world really, in itself? And what am I?”
The result was a masterpiece “The World as Will and Representation”.
He reasoned: “The world spreads out before me, containing individual material things in space and time which change according to causal laws - but I myself am just the subject which is distinct from every object that it experiences, including that object which I call my body. There are two ways, by which what I call myself can be known. By the one way, from the outside, I am known as one object among other objects in the phenomenal world, the world as idea. As such an object, I am my body. By the other way of knowing, from the inside, I know myself immediately and as I really am in my experience of striving. Putting the two ways of knowing together, I may say that the body is 'the objectification' of the will; that is, the way the will appears to an outside observer (including myself)”.
Schopenhauer held, similar as his mentor Kant, that the world revealed in our ordinary intuitions, even when these intuitions are refined and systematized by science, is only, after all, a mere phenomenon, a moving-picture show cast on the screen of consciousness. As per Kant, show is not all there is, for behind it lies the 'thing-in-itself’, in contradistinction to the thing as it appears to the mind in perception. Kant taught that we could never know what the thing-in-itself was like, because we could never perceive it free of subjective forms of our own consciousness.
Schopenhauer differed. According to him, the 'will', which all know immediately and the ‘thing-in-itself’ are the same. By 'will' Schopenhauer means striving, impulse, instinct, interest, desire, emotion. In such experiences, he asserted, subject and object are not separate, as in other kinds, for the self that knows is also the thing that it knows. The will exists at various levels of development such as the inorganic, the vital, the human, and objectifies itself in various determinate forms. These forms are the Platonic Ideas. All things and events are illustration of one or another of these eternal forms.
To Schopenhauer the thing in itself, the will, is non dual and the individuality is illusory — a reflection of Vedantic 'That art thou'. In agreement with Kant's doctrine of transcendental idealism, Schopenhauer considered space and time to be subjective creations of the intellect and thus to be the principles of individuation. Space-time is the many-colored veil that stains the white radiance of eternity and only when the veil is rent, there is seen to be no difference between a thing that exists here and now and another thing that exists at some remote place in space and time. All reality is single will.
It is through the underlying unity of the will, for which the distinctions between to-day and to-morrow and between one individual and another (space-time) do not exist, we can understand facts such as the parent animal's action in laying its eggs where the offspring will find the food that they need when they hatch out. Also, it is owing to our own false vision which breaks the single reality into illusory differences of space and time and individuality that there is a problem here at all.
To Schopenhauer, all art are the revelation of the Platonic Ideas underlying the various stages and forms of objectification of will, but music alone, according to Schopenhauer, among the arts reveals the will itself, bare of objectification. Art has, therefore, a double value: first, as a pure joy in knowledge; and, second, as a release from the pain of desire.
Schopenhauer’s metaphysics teaches ‘complete and universal relativity of the world as representation’. This is adequately borne out through the current state of knowledge of quantum physics, which holds ‘a quantum mechanical description of a certain system (state and/or values of physical quantities) cannot be taken as an “absolute” (observer-independent) description of reality, but rather as a codification of properties of a system relative to a given observer’. Nevertheless, since quantum physics still functions within the axioms of space-time-objects, paradoxes such as, for example, ‘spooky action’ at a distance occur. But to Schopenhauer’s metaphysics space-time-objects are representations of a non dual will’s volitional states — so paradoxes rising of non-contextuality and non-locality (space-time) do not arise.
Schopenhauer’s metaphysics does not fall into the trap of solipsism. The axiom of ‘A universal will—in which we, as individual subjects appear’ —avoids solipsism, which is a potential implication of quantum mechanics. Schopenhauer’s metaphysics also is not subject to ‘Hard Problem of Consciousness’ — which pertains to question: ‘why and how humans have phenomenal experiences?’, since it holds the representational world as experiences of volitional states of the will itself.
Finally, Schopenhauer derives a balm for the troubles of taking the representational world as the only reality. He teaches that peace can be attained by renunciation of the falsity — renunciation of the false individual will. Thus Schopenhauer seems to provide an analytical philosophical justification for the faith based religious teaching of ‘Surrender of individual Will’.
References
Schopenhauer: A Very Short Introduction
Christopher Janaway
Decoding Schopenhauer’s Metaphysics
Bernardo Kastrup
…
Arthur Schopenhauer, German philosopher, lived from 22 February 1788 – 21 September 1860.
It is said that Einstein while seated on a bus saw a clock tower and began mental exercises pertaining to speed-time. The result was the Theory of Relativity. There was another German, Arthur Schopenhauer, who enquired “What is the world really, in itself? And what am I?”
The result was a masterpiece “The World as Will and Representation”.
He reasoned: “The world spreads out before me, containing individual material things in space and time which change according to causal laws - but I myself am just the subject which is distinct from every object that it experiences, including that object which I call my body. There are two ways, by which what I call myself can be known. By the one way, from the outside, I am known as one object among other objects in the phenomenal world, the world as idea. As such an object, I am my body. By the other way of knowing, from the inside, I know myself immediately and as I really am in my experience of striving. Putting the two ways of knowing together, I may say that the body is 'the objectification' of the will; that is, the way the will appears to an outside observer (including myself)”.
Schopenhauer held, similar as his mentor Kant, that the world revealed in our ordinary intuitions, even when these intuitions are refined and systematized by science, is only, after all, a mere phenomenon, a moving-picture show cast on the screen of consciousness. As per Kant, show is not all there is, for behind it lies the 'thing-in-itself’, in contradistinction to the thing as it appears to the mind in perception. Kant taught that we could never know what the thing-in-itself was like, because we could never perceive it free of subjective forms of our own consciousness.
Schopenhauer differed. According to him, the 'will', which all know immediately and the ‘thing-in-itself’ are the same. By 'will' Schopenhauer means striving, impulse, instinct, interest, desire, emotion. In such experiences, he asserted, subject and object are not separate, as in other kinds, for the self that knows is also the thing that it knows. The will exists at various levels of development such as the inorganic, the vital, the human, and objectifies itself in various determinate forms. These forms are the Platonic Ideas. All things and events are illustration of one or another of these eternal forms.
To Schopenhauer the thing in itself, the will, is non dual and the individuality is illusory — a reflection of Vedantic 'That art thou'. In agreement with Kant's doctrine of transcendental idealism, Schopenhauer considered space and time to be subjective creations of the intellect and thus to be the principles of individuation. Space-time is the many-colored veil that stains the white radiance of eternity and only when the veil is rent, there is seen to be no difference between a thing that exists here and now and another thing that exists at some remote place in space and time. All reality is single will.
It is through the underlying unity of the will, for which the distinctions between to-day and to-morrow and between one individual and another (space-time) do not exist, we can understand facts such as the parent animal's action in laying its eggs where the offspring will find the food that they need when they hatch out. Also, it is owing to our own false vision which breaks the single reality into illusory differences of space and time and individuality that there is a problem here at all.
To Schopenhauer, all art are the revelation of the Platonic Ideas underlying the various stages and forms of objectification of will, but music alone, according to Schopenhauer, among the arts reveals the will itself, bare of objectification. Art has, therefore, a double value: first, as a pure joy in knowledge; and, second, as a release from the pain of desire.
Schopenhauer’s metaphysics teaches ‘complete and universal relativity of the world as representation’. This is adequately borne out through the current state of knowledge of quantum physics, which holds ‘a quantum mechanical description of a certain system (state and/or values of physical quantities) cannot be taken as an “absolute” (observer-independent) description of reality, but rather as a codification of properties of a system relative to a given observer’. Nevertheless, since quantum physics still functions within the axioms of space-time-objects, paradoxes such as, for example, ‘spooky action’ at a distance occur. But to Schopenhauer’s metaphysics space-time-objects are representations of a non dual will’s volitional states — so paradoxes rising of non-contextuality and non-locality (space-time) do not arise.
Schopenhauer’s metaphysics does not fall into the trap of solipsism. The axiom of ‘A universal will—in which we, as individual subjects appear’ —avoids solipsism, which is a potential implication of quantum mechanics. Schopenhauer’s metaphysics also is not subject to ‘Hard Problem of Consciousness’ — which pertains to question: ‘why and how humans have phenomenal experiences?’, since it holds the representational world as experiences of volitional states of the will itself.
Finally, Schopenhauer derives a balm for the troubles of taking the representational world as the only reality. He teaches that peace can be attained by renunciation of the falsity — renunciation of the false individual will. Thus Schopenhauer seems to provide an analytical philosophical justification for the faith based religious teaching of ‘Surrender of individual Will’.
References
Schopenhauer: A Very Short Introduction
Christopher Janaway
Decoding Schopenhauer’s Metaphysics
Bernardo Kastrup
…
