## 1. Life: 1788-1860



Exactly a month younger than the English Romantic poet, Lord Byron
(1788-1824), who was born on January 22, 1788, Arthur
Schopenhauer came into the world on February 22, 1788 in Danzig
[Gdansk, Poland] - a city that had a long history in
international trade as a member of the Hanseatic League. The
Schopenhauer family was of Dutch heritage, and the philosopher's
father, Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer (1747-1805), was a
successful merchant and shipowner who groomed his son to assume
control of the family's business. A future in the international
business trade was envisioned from the day Arthur was born, as
reflected in how Schopenhauer's father carefully chose his
son's first name on account of its identical spelling in German,
French and English. In March 1793, when Schopenhauer was five years
old, his family moved to the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg after
the formerly free city of Danzig was annexed by Prussia.



Schopenhauer toured through Europe several times with his family as a
youngster and young teenager, and lived in France (1797-99)
[ages 9-11] and England (1803) [age 15], where he learned the
languages of those countries. As he later reported, his experiences in
France were among the happiest of his life. The memories of his stay
at a strict, Anglican-managed boarding school in Wimbledon were rather
agonized in contrast, and this set him against the English style of
Christianity for the rest of his life.



The professional occupations of a merchant or banker were not
sufficiently consistent with Schopenhauer's scholarly
disposition, and although for two years after his father's death
(in Hamburg, April 20, 1805; possibly by suicide, when Schopenhauer
was seventeen) he continued to respect the commercial aspirations his
father had had for him, he finally left his Hamburg business
apprenticeship at age 19 to prepare for university studies. In the
meantime, his mother, Johanna Henriette Troisiener Schopenhauer
(1766-1838), who was the daughter of a city senator, along with
Schopenhauer's sister, Luise Adelaide [Adele] Lavinia
Schopenhauer (1797-1849), left their Hamburg home at Neuer
Wandrahm 92 and moved to Weimar after Heinrich Floris's death,
where Johanna established a friendship with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
(1749-1832). In Weimar, Goethe frequently visited
Johanna's intellectual salon, and Johanna Schopenhauer became a
well-known writer of the period, producing a voluminous assortment of
essays, travelogues, novels (e.g., *Gabriele* [1819], *Die
Tante* [1823], *Sidonia* [1827], *Richard Wood*
[1837]), and biographies, such as her accounts of the German art
critic, archaeologist, and close friend, Carl Ludwig Fernow
(1763-1808), and of the Flemish painter, Jan van Eyck
(c.1390-1441), published in 1810 and 1822 respectively. Her
complete works total twenty-four volumes.



In 1809, Schopenhauer began studies at the University of
Gottingen, where he remained for two years, first majoring in
medicine, and then, philosophy. In Gottingen, he absorbed the
views of the skeptical philosopher, Gottlob Ernst Schulze
(1761-1833), who introduced him to Plato and Kant. Schopenhauer
next enrolled at the University of Berlin (1811-13), where his
lecturers included Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) and
Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834). His university studies in
Gottingen and Berlin included courses in physics, psychology,
astronomy, zoology, archaeology, physiology, history, literature, and
poetry. At age 25, and ready to write his doctoral dissertation,
Schopenhauer moved in 1813 to Rudolstadt, a small town located a short
distance southwest of Jena, where he lodged for the duration in an inn
named *Zum Ritter*. Entitling his work *The Fourfold Root of
the Principle of Sufficient Reason* *(Uber die vierfache
Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde)*, it formed the
centerpiece of his later philosophy, articulating arguments he would
later use to criticize as charlatans, the prevailing German Idealistic
philosophers of the time, namely, his former lecturer, J. G. Fichte,
along with F. W. J. Schelling (1775-1854) and G. W. F. Hegel
(1770-1831). In that same year, Schopenhauer submitted his
dissertation to the nearby University of Jena and was awarded a
doctorate in philosophy *in absentia*. 



Leaving his mother's apartment in 1814 where he had been
residing briefly, Schopenhauer moved to Dresden, where he lived until
1818. There he developed ideas from *The Fourfold Root* into
his most famous book, *The World as Will and Representation*,
that was completed in March of 1818 and published in December of that
same year (with the date, 1819). In sympathy with Goethe's
theory of color, he also wrote *On Vision and Colors* (1816)
during this time. In Dresden, Schopenhauer developed an acquaintance
with the philosopher and freemason, Karl Christian Friedrich Krause
(1781-1832), who had also been one of Fichte's students in
Berlin, whose own panentheistic views appear to have been influential.
Panentheism (i.e., all-in-God), as opposed to pantheism (i.e.,
all-is-God), is the view that what we can comprehend and imagine to be
the universe is an aspect of God, but that the being of God is in
excess of this, and is neither identical with, nor exhausted by, the
universe we can imagine and comprehend. As we will see below,
Schopenhauer sometimes characterized the thing-in-itself in a way
reminiscent of panentheism.



After a year's vacation in Italy and with *The World as Will
and Representation* in hand, Schopenhauer applied for the
opportunity to lecture at the University of Berlin, the institution at
which he had formerly studied, and where two years earlier (1818),
Hegel had arrived to assume Fichte's prestigious philosophical
chair. His experiences in Berlin were less than professionally
fruitful, however, for in March of 1820, Schopenhauer self-assuredly
scheduled his class at a time that was simultaneous with Hegel's
popular lectures, and few students chose to hear Schopenhauer. Two
years later, in 1822, he left his apartment near the University and
travelled to Italy for a second time, returning to Munich a year
later. He then lived in Mannheim and Dresden in 1824 before tracing
his way back to Berlin in 1825. A second attempt to lecture at the
University of Berlin was unsuccessful, and this disappointment was
complicated by the loss of a lawsuit that had begun several years
earlier in August, 1821. The dispute issued from an angry
shoving-match between Schopenhauer and Caroline Luise Marguet (d.
1852), a 47-year-old seamstress, that occurred in the rooming house
where they were both living. The issue concerned Ms. Marguet's
conversing loudly with her associates in the anteroom of
Schopenhauer's apartment, making it difficult for him to
concentrate on his work. The conversations were apparently a matter of
routine that built up Schopenhauer's animosity, leading to the
explosive confrontation.



Leaving Berlin in 1831 in view of a cholera epidemic that was entering
Germany from Russia, Schopenhauer moved south, first briefly to
Frankfurt-am-Main, and then to Mannheim. Shortly thereafter, in June
of 1833, he settled permanently in Frankfurt, where he remained for
the next twenty-seven years, residing in an apartment along the river
Main's waterfront from 1843 to 1859 at Schone Aussicht 17,
a few minutes walking distance from Frankfurt's Judengasse. His
daily life, living alone with a succession of pet French poodles, was defined by a deliberate routine:
Schopenhauer would awake, wash, read and study during the morning
hours, play his flute, lunch at the *Englisher Hof* - a
fashionable inn at the city center near the *Hauptwache*
- rest afterwards, read, take an afternoon walk, check the world
events as reported in *The London Times*, sometimes attend
concerts in the evenings, and frequently read inspirational texts such
as the Upanishads before going to sleep. 



During this later phase of his life, Schopenhauer wrote a short work
in 1836, *Uber den Willen in der Natur* (*On the Will
in Nature*), that aimed to confirm and reiterate his metaphysical
views in light of scientific evidence. Featured in this work are
chapters on animal magnetism and magic, along with Sinology (Chinese
studies). The former reveals Schopenhauer's interest in
parapsychology; the latter is valuable for its references to the
preeminent Neo-Confucian scholar, Zhu Xi (1130-1200), as well as to
influential writers on Asian thought from the period such as Robert
Spence Hardy (1803-1868) and Isaac Jacob Schmidt
(1779-1847).



Shortly thereafter in 1839, Schopenhauer completed an essay of which
he was immensely proud, "On the Freedom of Human Will"
(*Uber die Freiheit des menschlichen Willens*), that was
awarded first prize in a competition sponsored by the Royal Norwegian
Society of Sciences and Letters in Trondheim. A year later, he
complemented this with a second essay, "On the Basis of
Morality" (*Uber die Grundlage der Moral*) that was
not honored with an award by The Royal Danish Society of the Sciences
in Copenhagen, even though it was the sole submission in their essay
competition. The Society claimed that Schopenhauer did not answer the
assigned question and that he gravely disrespected philosophers with
outstanding reputations (viz., Fichte and Hegel). In 1841,
Schopenhauer defiantly published both essays together as *Two
Fundamental Problems of Ethics* (*Die Beiden Grundprobleme der
Ethik*). There soon followed an accompanying volume to *The
World as Will and Representation*, that was published in 1844
along with the first volume in a combined second edition. 



In 1851, Schopenhauer published a lengthy and lively set of
philosophical reflections entitled *Parerga and Paralipomena*
(appendices and omissions, from the Greek), and within a couple of
years, he began to receive the philosophical recognition for which he
had long hoped. The recognition was stimulated by a favorable review
of his philosophy ("Iconoclasm in German Philosophy," by John Oxenford) published in 1853 without signature in the influential *Westminster Review*, which at the time was under the editorial guidance of George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans). The review acknowledged the centrality of "Will" within Schopenhauer's outlook and drew insightful parallels between Schopenhauer's and
Fichte's more well-known thought. A year after the third edition
of *The World as Will and Representation* appeared with further revisions in 1859,
Schopenhauer died peacefully on September 21, 1860, in his apartment
in Frankfurt at Schone Aussicht 16. He was 72. After his death,
Julius Frauenstadt (1813-1879) published new editions of
most of Schopenhauer's works, with the first complete edition
(six volumes) appearing in 1873. In the 20th century, the editorial
work on Schopenhauer's manuscripts was carried forth in
authoritative depth by Arthur Hubscher (1897-1985).



Schopenhauer donated his estate to help disabled Prussian soldiers and
the families of those soldiers killed, who had participated in the
suppression of the 1848 revolution. An assortment of photographs of
Schopenhauer was taken during his final years, and although they
reveal to us an old man, we should appreciate that Schopenhauer
completed his main work, *The World as Will and
Representation*, by the time he had reached the age of thirty.


## 2. The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason



Schopenhauer's PhD dissertation of 1813, *The Fourfold Root
of the Principle of Sufficient Reason*, examines what many
philosophers have recognized as an innate tendency to assume that in
principle, the universe is a thoroughly understandable place. His
dissertation, in effect, critically examines the disposition to assume
that what is real is what is rational. A century earlier, G.W. Leibniz
(1646-1716) had defined the principle of this assumption -
the principle of sufficient reason - in his *Monadology*
(1714) as that which requires us to acknowledge that there is no fact
or truth that lacks a sufficient reason why it should be so, and not
otherwise.



Although the principle of sufficient reason might seem to be
self-evident, it does yield surprising results. For example, we can
appeal to this principle to argue that there can be no two individuals
exactly alike, because there would otherwise be no sufficient reason
why one of the individuals was in one place, while the other
individual was in another. The principle also supports the argument
that the physical world was not created at any point in time, since
there is no sufficient reason why it would be created at one point in
time rather than another, since all points in time are qualitatively
the same. Moreover, if the principle of sufficient reason's
scope of applicability is assumed to be limitless, then there is a
definite answer to the question, "Why is there something, rather
than nothing?" Schopenhauer was keen to question the universal
extension of the principle of sufficient reason, mainly owing to his
advocacy of Kant's view that human rationality lacks the power
to answer metaphysical questions, since our knowledge is limited by
our specific and narrowly-circumscribed capacities for organizing our
field of sensation.



Schopenhauer observed as an elementary condition, that to employ the
principle of sufficient reason, we must think about something specific
that stands in need of explanation. This indicated to him that at the
root of our epistemological situation, we must assume the presence of
a *subject* that thinks about some *object* to be
explained. From this, he concluded that the general root of the
principle of sufficient reason is the distinction between subject and
object that must be presupposed as a condition for the very enterprise
of looking for explanations (*The Fourfold Root*, Section 16)
and as a condition for knowledge in general. 



Schopenhauer's claim that the subject-object distinction is the
most general condition for human knowledge has its theoretical source
in Kant's *Critique of Pure Reason*, for Kant similarly
grounded his own theory of knowledge upon a highly-abstracted,
formalized, and universalized subject-object distinction. Kant
characterized the subjective pole of the distinction as the
contentless transcendental unity of self-consciousness and the
objective pole as the contentless transcendental object that
corresponds to the concept of an object in general (*CPR*, A
109). The general root of the principle of sufficient reason, as
Schopenhauer characterizes it, is at the root of Kant's
epistemology as well. 



Following the demanding conceptions of knowledge typical of his time
that had been inspired by Rene Descartes's
(1596-1650) quest for certainty (see Descartes's
"method of doubt" and his "*cogito*"
[Latin, for "I think"]), Schopenhauer maintained that if
any explanation is to be genuine, then whatever is explained cannot be
thought to have arisen by accident, but must be regarded as having
been necessary. Schopenhauer's investigation into the principle
of sufficient reason can thus be alternatively characterized as an
inquiry into the nature of the various kinds of necessary connection
that can arise between different kinds of objects.



Inspired by Aristotle's doctrine of the four basic kinds of
explanatory reason or four [be]causes (*Physics*, Book II,
Chapter 3), Schopenhauer defines four kinds of necessary connection
that arise within the context of seeking explanations, and he
correspondingly identifies four independent kinds of objects in
reference to which explanations can be given: 


1. material things
2. abstract concepts
3. mathematical and geometrical constructions
4. psychologically-motivating forces



Corresponding to these four kinds of objects, Schopenhauer links in
parallel, four different kinds of reasoning. He associates material
things with reasoning in terms of cause and effect; abstract concepts
with reasoning in terms of logic; mathematical and geometrical
constructions with reasoning in reference to numbers and spaces; and
motivating forces with reasoning in reference to intentions, or what
he calls moral reasoning. In sum, he identifies the general root of
the principle of sufficient reason as the subject-object distinction
in conjunction with the thought of necessary connection, and the
fourfold root of the principle of sufficient reason as the
specification of four different kinds of objects for which we can seek
explanations, in association with the four independent styles of
necessary connection along which such explanations can be given,
depending upon the different kinds of objects involved.



One of Schopenhauer's most significant assertions is that the
four different modes of explanation only run in parallel with each
other, and cannot coherently be intermixed. If we begin by choosing a
certain style of explanation, then we immediately choose the kinds of
object to which we can refer. Conversely, if we begin by choosing a
certain kind of object to explain, we are obliged to use the style of
reasoning associated with that kind of object. It thus violates the
rationality of explanation to confuse one kind of explanation with
another kind of object. We cannot begin with a style of explanation
that involves material objects and their associated cause-and-effect
relationships, for example, and then argue to a conclusion that
involves a different kind of object, such as an abstract concept.
Likewise, we cannot begin with abstract conceptual definitions and
accordingly employ logical reasoning for the purposes of concluding
our argumentation with assertions about things that exist.



With this set of regulations about what counts as a legitimate way to
conduct explanations, Schopenhauer ruled out the often-cited and
(especially during his time) philosophically often-relied-upon
cosmological and ontological arguments for God's existence, and
along with them, all philosophies that ground themselves upon such
arguments. He was adamant that the German Idealist outlooks of Fichte,
Schelling and Hegel rested upon explanatory errors of this kind, and
he regarded those outlooks as fundamentally wrongheaded styles of
thought, for he saw their philosophies as being specifically grounded
upon versions of the ontological argument for God's existence.
His frequent condemnation of German Idealism was advanced in light of
what he considered to be sound philosophical reasons, despite his uncompromising *ad hominem* attacks on Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, who he described repeatedly as "humbugs" and "charlatans."


## 3. Schopenhauer's Critique of Kant



Schopenhauer can be called a Kantian in many respects, but he did not
always agree with the details of Kant's arguments. As noted,
Schopenhauer's teacher in Gottingen was G. E. Schulze, who
authored in 1792, a text entitled *Aenesidemus*, that contains
a criticism of the Kantian philosopher, Karl Leonhard Reinhold
(1757-1823). Reinhold was a defender of Kant, and was known for
his Philosophy of the Elements (*Elementarphilosophie*) that
was expressed, along with some earlier writings, in Reinhold's
1791 work, *The Foundation of Philosophical Knowledge*
(*Fundament des philosophischen Wissens*).



Schulze's critique of Kant is essentially the following: it is
incoherent to posit as a matter of philosophical knowledge - as
Kant seems to have done - a mind-independent object that is
beyond all human experience, and that serves as the primary cause of
our sensory experience. Schulze shares this criticism of Kant with F.
H. Jacobi, who expressed the same objection five years earlier in
*David Hume on Faith, or Idealism and Realism, a Dialogue*
[1787] in an appendix entitled "On Transcendental
Idealism." Schulze argues that Kant illegitimately uses the
concept of causality to conclude as a matter of strong epistemological
requirement, and not merely as a matter of rational speculation, that
there is some object - namely, the thing-in-itself -
outside of all possible human experience, that is nonetheless the
cause of our sensations. 



Schopenhauer concurs that hypothesizing a thing-in-itself as the cause
of our sensations amounts to a constitutive application and projection
of the concept of causality beyond its legitimate scope, for according
to Kant himself, the concept of causality only supplies knowledge when
it is applied within the field of possible experience, and not outside
of it. Schopenhauer therefore denies that our sensations have an
external cause in the sense that we can know there is some
epistemologically inaccessible object - the thing-in-itself
- that exists independently of our sensations and is the cause
of them.



These internal problems with Kant's argument suggest to
Schopenhauer that Kant's reference to the thing-in-itself as a
mind-independent object (or as an object of any kind) is misconstrued.
Schopenhauer maintains instead that if we are to refer to the
thing-in-itself, then we must come to an awareness of it, not by
invoking the relationship of causality - a relationship where
the cause and the effect are logically understood to be distinct
objects or events (since self-causation is a contradiction in terms)
- but through another means altogether. As we will see in the
next section, and as we can see immediately in the title of his main
work - *The World as Will and Representation* -
Schopenhauer believes that the world has a double-aspect, namely, as
"Will" (*Wille*) and as representation
(*Vorstellung*). The German word "*Vorstellung*," can be translated as
"representation," "presentation,"
"idea," or "mental image."



Schopenhauer does not believe, then, that Will *causes* our
representations. His position is that Will and representations are one
and the same reality, regarded from different perspectives. They stand
in relationship to each other in a way that compares to the
relationship between a force and its manifestation (e.g., as
exemplified in the relationship between electricity and a spark, where
the spark "is" electricity). This is opposed to saying
that the thing-in-itself causes our sensations, as if we were
referring to one domino striking another. Schopenhauer's view is
that the relationship between the thing-in-itself and our sensations
is more like that between two sides of a coin, neither of which causes
the other, and both of which are of the same coin and coinage.



Among his other criticisms of Kant (see the appendix to the first
volume of *The World as Will and Representation*, entitled,
"Criticism of the Kantian Philosophy"), Schopenhauer
maintains that Kant's twelve categories of the human
understanding - the various categories through which we
logically organize our field of sensations into comprehensible and
interrelated individual objects - are reducible to the single
category of causality, and that this category, along with the forms of
space and time, is sufficient to explain the basic format of all human
experience, viz., individual objects dispersed throughout space and
time, causally related to one another.



Schopenhauer further comprehends these three (and for him,
interdependent) principles as expressions of a single principle,
namely, the principle of sufficient reason, whose fourfold root he had
examined in his doctoral dissertation. In *The World as Will and
Representation*, Schopenhauer often refers to an aspect of the
principle of sufficient reason as the "principle of individuation"
(*principium individuationis*), linking the idea of
individuation explicitly with space and time, but also implicitly with
rationality, necessity, systematicity and determinism. He uses the
principle of sufficient reason and the principle of individuation as
shorthand expressions for what Kant had more complexly referred to as
space, time and the twelve categories of the understanding (viz.,
unity, plurality, totality, reality, negation, limitation, substance,
causality, reciprocity, possibility, actuality [*Dasein*], and
necessity).


## 4. The World as Will



It is a perennial philosophical reflection that if one looks deeply
enough into oneself, one will discover not only one's own
essence, but also the essence of the universe. For as one is a part of
the universe as is everything else, the basic energies of the universe
flow through oneself as they flow through everything else. For that
reason it is thought that one can come into contact with the nature of
the universe if one comes into substantial contact with one's
ultimate inner being.



Among the most frequently-identified principles that are
introspectively brought forth - and one that was the standard
for German Idealist philosophers such as Fichte, Schelling and Hegel
who were philosophizing within the Cartesian tradition - is the
principle of self-consciousness. With the belief that acts of
self-consciousness exemplify a self-creative process akin to divine
creation, and developing a logic that reflects the structure of
self-consciousness, namely, the dialectical logic of position,
opposition and reconciliation (sometimes described as the logic of
thesis, antithesis and synthesis), the German Idealists maintained
that dialectical logic mirrors the structure not only of human
productions, both individual and social, but the structure of reality
as a whole, conceived of as a thinking substance or
conceptually-structured-and-constituted being.



As much as he opposes the traditional German Idealists in their
metaphysical elevation of self-consciousness (which he regards as too
intellectualistic), Schopenhauer philosophizes within the spirit of
this tradition, for he believes that the supreme principle of the
universe is likewise apprehensible through introspection, and that we
can understand the world as various manifestations of this general
principle. For Schopenhauer, this is not the principle of
self-consciousness and rationally-infused will, but is rather what he
simply calls "Will" - a mindless, aimless,
non-rational impulse at the foundation of our instinctual drives, and
at the foundational being of everything. Schopenhauer's
originality does not reside in his characterization of the world as
Will, or as act - for we encounter this position in
Fichte's philosophy - but in the conception of Will as
being devoid of rationality or intellect.



Having rejected the Kantian position that our sensations are caused by
an unknowable object that exists independently of us, Schopenhauer
notes importantly that our body - which is just one among the
many objects in the world - is given to us in two different
ways: we perceive our body as a physical object among other physical
objects, subject to the natural laws that govern the movements of all
physical objects, and we are aware of our body through our immediate
awareness, as we each consciously inhabit our body, intentionally move
it, and feel directly our pleasures, pains, and emotional states. We
can objectively perceive our hand as an external object, as a surgeon
might perceive it during a medical operation, and we can also be
subjectively aware of our hand as something we inhabit, as something
we move willfully, and of which we can feel its inner muscular
workings. 



From this observation, Schopenhauer asserts that among all the objects
in the universe, there is only *one* object, relative to each
of us - namely, our physical body - that is given in two
entirely different ways. It is given as representation (i.e.,
objectively; externally) and as Will (i.e., subjectively; internally).
One of his notable conclusions is that when we move our hand, this is
not to be comprehended as a motivational act that first happens, and
then causes the movement of our hand as an effect. He maintains that
the movement of our hand is but a single act - again, like the
two sides of a coin - that has a subjective feeling of willing
as one of its aspects, and the movement of the hand as the other. More
generally, he adds that the action of the body is nothing but the act
of Will objectified, that is, translated into perception. 



At this point in his argumentation, Schopenhauer has established only
that among his many ideas, or representations, only one of them (viz.,
the [complex] representation of his body) has this special
double-aspected quality. When he perceives the moon or a mountain, he
does not under ordinary circumstances have any direct access to the
metaphysical inside of such objects; they remain as representations
that reveal to him only their objective side. Schopenhauer asks,
though, how he might understand the world as an integrated whole, or
how he might render his entire field of perception the most comprehensible, for as things stand, he can directly experience the
inside of one of his representations, but of no others. To answer this
question, he uses the double-knowledge of his own body as the key to
the inner being of every other natural phenomenon: he regards -
as if he were trying to make the notion of universal empathy
theoretically possible - every object in the world as being
metaphysically double-aspected, and as having an inside or inner
aspect of its own, just as his consciousness is the inner aspect of
his own body. This is his rationale for rejecting Descartes's
causal interactionism, where thinking substance is said to cause
changes in an independent material substance and vice-versa.



This precipitates a position that characterizes the inner aspect of
things, as far as we can describe it, as Will. Hence, Schopenhauer
regards the world as a whole as having two sides: the world is Will
and the world is representation. The world as Will ("for
us", as he sometimes qualifies it) is the world as it is in
itself, which is a unity, and the world as representation is the world
of appearances, of our ideas, or of objects, which is a diversity. An
alternative title for Schopenhauer's main book, *The World as
Will and Representation*, might well have been, *The World as
Reality* *and Appearance*. Similarly, his book might have
been entitled, *The Inner and Outer Nature of Reality*. 



An inspiration for Schopenhauer's view that ideas are like inert
objects is George Berkeley (1685-1753), who describes ideas in
this deactivated way in his *A Treatise Concerning the
Principles of Human Knowledge* (1710) [Section 25]. A primary
inspiration for Schopenhauer's double-aspect view of the
universe is Baruch (Benedict) de Spinoza (1632-1677), who
developed a similarly-structured metaphysics, and who Schopenhauer had
studied in his early years before writing his dissertation. A
subsequent, but often highlighted inspiration is from the Upanishads
(c. 900-600 BCE) which also expresses a double-aspected view of the universe as having objective and subjective aspects, referred to respectively as Brahman and Atman. 



Only a few months after completing his dissertation, Schopenhauer was
exposed to classical Indian thought in late 1813 by the orientalist
Friedrich Majer (1771-1818), who visited Johanna
Schopenhauer's salon in Weimar. Schopenhauer also probably met
at the time, Julius Klaproth (1783-1835), who was the editor of
*Das Asiatische Magazin*. As the records of his library book
withdrawals indicate, Schopenhauer began reading the Bhagavadgita in
December 1813 or very soon thereafter, and the Upanishads in March
1814, coincident with the time when Schopenhauer's thought
assumed an explicitly atheistic quality. Only a year before this, he
was referring to himself explicitly in his notebooks as an
"illuminated theist," i.e., a mystic, in an 1812
discussion of Schelling's philosophy (*Manuscript
Remains*, Vol. 2, p. 373).



Schopenhauer's appreciation for Indian thought was augmented in
Dresden during the writing of *The World as Will and
Representation* by his 1815-1817 neighbor Karl Friedrich Christian Krause. Not only was Krause a metaphysical panentheist (see biographic segment above), he was also
an enthusiast of South Asian thought. Familiar with the Sanskrit
language, he introduced Schopenhauer to publications on India in the
*Asiatisches Magazin*, and these enhanced Schopenhauer's
studies of the first European-language translation of the Upanishads:
in 1801, a Persian version of the Upanishads (the Oupnekhat) was
rendered into Latin by the French Orientalist, Abraham Hyacinthe
Anquetil-Duperron (1731-1805) - a scholar who also introduced
translations of Zoroastrian texts into Europe in 1771. 



Despite its general precedents within the philosophical family of
double-aspect theories, Schopenhauer's particular
characterization of the world as Will is nonetheless novel and daring.
It is also frightening and pandemonic: he maintains that the world as
it is in itself (again, sometimes adding "for us") is an
endless striving and blind impulse with no end in view, devoid of
knowledge, lawless, absolutely free, entirely self-determining and
almighty. Within Schopenhauer's vision of the world as Will,
there is no God to be comprehended, and the world is conceived of as
being inherently meaningless. When anthropomorphically considered, the
world is represented as being in a condition of eternal frustration,
as it endlessly strives for nothing in particular, and as it goes
essentially nowhere. It is a world beyond any ascriptions of good and
evil.



Schopenhauer's denial of meaning to the world differs radically
from the views of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, all of whom sustained a
distinct belief that everything is moving towards a harmonious and just
end. Like these German Idealists, however, Schopenhauer explained how the world that we experience daily is the result of the
activity of the central principle of things. Just as the German Idealists accounted for the great chain of being - the rocks,
trees, animals, and human beings - as the increasingly
complicated and detailed objectifications of self-consciousness,
Schopenhauer explained the world as
objectifications of Will. 



For Schopenhauer, the world we experience is constituted by
objectifications of Will that correspond first, to the general root of
the principle of sufficient reason, and second, to the more specific
fourfold root of the principle of sufficient reason. This generates a two-tiered outlook (viz., Will [= reality] vs.
objects-in-general [= appearance]), that articulates into a
three-tiered outlook (viz., Will [= reality] vs. universal,
non-spatio-temporal objects vs. individual, spatio-temporal objects),
by further distinguishing between universalistic and individualistic
levels within the sphere of objects. 



The general philosophical pattern of a single world-essence that
initially manifests itself as a multiplicity of abstract essences,
that, in turn, manifest themselves as a multiplicity of physical
individuals is found throughout the world. It is characteristic of
Neoplatonism (c. third century, C.E., as represented by Plotinus
[204-270]), as well as the Buddhist Three Body Doctrine
[*trikaya*] of the Buddha's manifestation, that is
developed in the Yogacara school of Mahayana Buddhism as represented
by Maitreya (270-350), Asanga (375-430) and Vasubandu
(400-480).



According to Schopenhauer, corresponding to the level of the universal
subject-object distinction, Will is immediately objectified into a set
of universal objects or Platonic Ideas. These constitute the timeless
patterns for each of the individual things that we experience in space
and time. There are different Platonic Ideas, and although this
multiplicity of Ideas implies that some measure of individuation is
present within this realm, each Idea nonetheless contains no plurality
within itself and is said to be "one." Since the Platonic
Ideas are in neither space nor time, they lack the qualities of
individuation that would follow from the introduction of spatial and
temporal qualifications. In these respects, the Platonic Ideas are
independent of the specific fourfold root of the principle of
sufficient reason, even though it would be misleading to say that
there is no individuation whatsoever at this universal level, for
there are many different Platonic Ideas. Schopenhauer refers to the Platonic Ideas as the direct
objectifications of Will and as the immediate objectivity of
Will.



Will's indirect objectifications appear when our minds continue
to apply the principle of sufficient reason beyond its general root
such as to introduce the forms of time, space and causality, not to
mention logic, mathematics, geometry and moral reasoning. When Will is
objectified at this level of determination, the world of everyday life
emerges, whose objects are, in effect, kaleidoscopically multiplied
manifestations of the Platonic forms, endlessly dispersed throughout
space and time. 



Since the principle of sufficient reason is - given
Schopenhauer's inspiration from Kant - the epistemological
form of the human mind, the spatio-temporal world is the world of our
own reflection. To that extent, Schopenhauer says that life is like a
dream. As a condition of our knowledge, Schopenhauer believes that the
laws of nature, along with the sets of objects that we experience, we
ourselves create in way that is not unlike the way the constitution of
our tongues invokes the taste of sugar. As Galileo Galilei
(1564-1642) states in "The Assayer" (1623), if ears
tongues and noses were removed from the world, then odors, tastes, and
sounds would be removed as well.



At this point, what Schopenhauer has developed philosophically is
surely interesting, but we have not yet mentioned its more remarkable
and memorable aspect. If we combine his claim that the world is Will
with his Kantian view that we are responsible for the individuated
world of appearances, we arrive at a novel outlook - an outlook
that depends heavily upon Schopenhauer's characterization of the
thing-in-itself as Will, understood to be an aimless, blind
striving.



Before the human being comes onto the scene with its principle of
sufficient reason (or principle of individuation) there are no
individuals. It is the human being that, in its very effort to know
anything, objectifies an appearance for itself that involves the
fragmentation of Will and its breakup into a comprehensible set of
individuals. The result of this fragmentation, given the nature of
Will, is terrible: it is a world of constant struggle, where each
individual thing strives against every other individual thing. The
result is a permanent "war of all against all" akin to
what Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) characterized as the state of
nature. 



Kant maintains in the *Critique of Pure Reason* that we create
the laws of nature (*CPR*, A125). Adding to this, Schopenhauer
maintains in *The World as Will and Representation* that we
create the violent state of nature, for his view is that the
individuation we impose upon things, is imposed upon a blind striving
energy that, once it becomes individuated and objectified, turns
against itself, consumes itself, and does violence to itself. His
paradigm image is of the bulldog-ant of Australia, that when cut in
half, struggles in a battle to the death between its head and tail.
Our very quest for scientific and practical knowledge creates -
for Schopenhauer sinfully and repulsively - a world that feasts
nightmarishly upon itself.



This marks the origin of Schopenhauer's renowned pessimism: he
claims that as individuals, we are the anguished products of our own
epistemological making, and that within the world of appearances that
we structure, we are fated to fight with other individuals, and to
want more than we can ever have. On Schopenhauer's view, the
world of daily life is essentially violent and frustrating; it is a
world that, as long as our consciousness remains at that level where
the principle of sufficient reason applies in its fourfold root, will
never resolve itself into a condition of greater tranquillity. As he
explicitly states, daily life "is suffering"
(*WWR*, Section 56) and to express this, he employs images of
frustration taken from classical Greek mythology, such as those of
Tantalus and the Danaids, along with the suffering of Ixion on the
ever-spinning wheel of fire. The image of Sisyphus expresses the same
frustrated spirit.


## 5. Transcending the Human Conditions of Conflict


###  5.1 Aesthetic Perception as a Mode of Transcendence



Schopenhauer's violent vision of the daily world sends him on a
quest for tranquillity, and he pursues this by retracing the path
through which Will objectifies itself. He discovers more peaceful
states of mind by directing his everyday, practically-oriented
consciousness towards more extraordinary, universal and
less-individuated states of mind, since he believes that the violence
that a person experiences is proportional to the degree to which that
person's consciousness is individuated and objectifying. His
view is that with less individuation and objectification, there is
less conflict, less pain and more peace.



One way to achieve a more tranquil state of consciousness is through
aesthetic perception. This is a special state of perceptual
consciousness where we apprehend some spatio-temporal object and
discern through this object, the object's essence, archetype, or
"Platonic Idea" that corresponds to the type of object in
question. In this form of perception, we lose ourselves in the object,
forget about our individuality, and become the clear mirror of the
object. During the aesthetic perception of an individual apple tree,
for example, we would perceive shining through the tree, the archetype
of all apple trees (i.e., the Ur-phenomenon, as Goethe would describe
it) in an appreciation of every apple tree that was, is, or will be.
The kind of perception involved compares, for example, to the
traditional portrait artist who discerns the shapes that nature
intended to realize in a face, but that were not ideally realized. The
painter consequently removes in the artistic portrait, the little
hairs, warts, wrinkles and such, to present a more idealized, angelic,
timeless, and perfected facial presentation, as we might see in a
wedding or religious portrait. 



Since Schopenhauer assumes that the quality of the subject of
experience must correspond to the quality of the object of experience,
he infers that in the state of aesthetic perception, where the objects
are universalistic, the subject of experience must likewise assume a
universalistic quality (*WWR*, Section 33). Aesthetic
perception thus transforms an individually-oriented state of
consciousness to a universally-oriented state of consciousness, or
what Schopenhauer calls a pure will-less, painless, and timeless
subject of knowledge (*WWR*, Section 34).



Few people supposedly have the capacity to remain in such an aesthetic
state of mind for very long, and most are denied the transcendent
tranquillity of aesthetic perception. Only the artistically-minded
genius is naturally disposed to and can supposedly remain at length in
the state of pure perception, and it is to these individuals
Schopenhauer believes we must turn - as we appreciate their
works of art - to obtain a more concentrated and knowledgeable
glimpse of the Platonic Ideas (i.e., into the essences of things). The
artistic genius contemplates these Ideas, creates a work of art that
presents the Ideas in a manner more clear and accessible than is usual, and
thereby communicates a universalistic vision to those who lack the
idealizing power to see through, and to rise above, the ordinary world
of spatio-temporal objects.



Schopenhauer states that the highest purpose of art is to communicate
Platonic Ideas (*WWR*, Section 50). As constituting art, he has
in mind the traditional five fine arts minus music, namely,
architecture, sculpture, painting, and poetry. These four arts he
comprehends in relation to the Platonic Ideas - those universal
objects of aesthetic awareness that are located at the objective pole
of the universal subject-object distinction at the root of the
principle of sufficient reason. Schopenhauer's account of the
visual and literary arts corresponds to the world as representation in
its immediate objectification, namely, the field of Platonic Ideas as
opposed to the field of spatio-temporal objects.



As a counterpart to his interpretation of the visual and literary
arts, Schopenhauer develops an account of music that coordinates it
with the subjective pole of the universal subject-object distinction.
Separate from the other traditional arts, he maintains that music is
the most metaphysical art and is on a subjective, feeling-centered
parallel with the Platonic Ideas themselves. Just as the Platonic Ideas
contain the patterns for the types of objects in the daily world,
music formally duplicates the basic structure of the world: the bass
notes are analogous to inorganic nature, the harmonies are analogous
to the animal world, and the melodies are analogous to the human
world. The sounding of the bass note produces more subtle sonic
structures in its overtones; similarly, inanimate nature produces
animate life.



In the structure of music, Schopenhauer discerns a series of analogies
to the structure of the physical world that allow him to claim that
music is "a copy of Will itself" (*Abbild des Willens selbst* [italics in original German]) (*WWR*, Section 52). His view might seem extravagant upon
first hearing, but it rests on the thought that if one is to discern
the truth of the world, it might be advantageous to apprehend the
world, not exclusively in scientific, mechanical and causal terms, but
rather in aesthetic, analogical, expressive and metaphorical terms
that require a sense of taste for their discernment. If the form of
the world is best reflected in the form of music, then the most
philosophical sensibility will be a musical sensibility. This
partially explains the positive attraction of Schopenhauer's
theory of music to creative spirits such as Richard Wagner and
Friedrich Nietzsche, both of whom combined musical and philosophical
interests in their work.



With respect to the theme of achieving more peaceful and transcendent
states of mind, Schopenhauer believes that music achieves this by
embodying the abstract forms of feelings, or feelings abstracted from
their particular everyday circumstances. This allows us to perceive
the essences of emotional life - "sadness itself,"
"joy itself," etc. - without the contingent contents
that would typically cause suffering. By expressing emotion in this
detached way, music allows us to apprehend the nature of the world
without the frustration involved in daily life, and hence, in a mode
of aesthetic awareness akin to the tranquil philosophical
contemplation of the world. Insofar as music provides an abstract and
painless vision of the world and of inner life, however, it also fails
to evoke the compassion that issues from identifying tangibly with
another person's suffering. This deficiency motivates a shift
from musical, or aesthetic, awareness to moral awareness.


### 5.2 Moral Awareness as a Mode of Transcendence



As many medieval Christians once assumed, Schopenhauer believed that
we should minimize our fleshly desires, since moral awareness arises
through an attitude that transcends our bodily individuality. Indeed,
he states explicitly that his views on morality are entirely in the
spirit of Christianity, as well as being consistent with the doctrines
and ethical precepts of the sacred books of India (*WWR*,
Section 68). Among the precepts he respects are those prescribing that
one treat others as kindly as one treats oneself, that one refrain
from violence and take measures to reduce suffering in the world, that
one avoid egoism and thoughts directed towards revenge, and that one
cultivate a strong sense of compassion. Such precepts are not unique
to Christianity; Schopenhauer believes that they constitute most
religiously-grounded moral views. Far from being immoralistic, his
moral theory is written in the same vein as those of Immanuel Kant
(1724-1804) and John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), that
advocate principles that are in general accord with Christian
precepts.



Schopenhauer's conception of moral awareness coheres with his
project of seeking more tranquil, transcendent states of mind. Within
the moral realm, this quest for transcendence leads him to maintain
that once we recognize each human as being merely an instance and
aspect of the single act of Will that is humanity itself, we will
appreciate that the difference between the tormentor and the tormented
is illusory, and that in fact, the very same eye of humanity looks out
from each and every person. According to the true nature of things,
each person has all the sufferings of the world as his or her own, for
the same inner human nature ultimately bears all of the pain and all
of the guilt. Thus, with the consciousness of humanity in mind, a
moral consciousness would realize that it has upon and within itself,
the sins of the whole world (*WWR*, Sections 63 and 64). It
should be noted that such a consciousness would also bear all of
humanity's joys, triumphs, and pleasures, but Schopenhauer does
not develop this thought. 



Not only, then, does the specific application of the principle of
sufficient reason fragment the world into a set of individuals
dispersed through space and time for the purposes of attaining
scientific knowledge, this rationalistic principle generates the
illusion that when one person does wrong to another, that these two
people are essentially separate and private individuals. Just as the
fragmentation of the world into individuals is necessary to apply the
relationship of causality, where *A* causes *B* and
where *A* and *B* are conceived to be two independent
objects, this same cognitive fragmentation leads us to conceive of the
relationships between people on a model where some person *P*
acts upon person *Q*, where *P* and *Q* are
conceived as two independent individuals. The conditions for
scientific knowledge thus have a negative moral impact, because they
lead us to regard each other as individuals separate and alien to one
another.



By compassionately recognizing at a more universal level that the
inner nature of another person is of the same metaphysical substance
as oneself, one arrives at a moral outlook with a more concrete
philosophical awareness. This compassionate way of apprehending
another person is not merely understanding abstractly the proposition
that "each person is a human being," or understanding
abstractly (as would Kant) that, in principle, the same regulations of
rationality operate equally in each of us and oblige us accordingly as
equals. It is to feel directly the life of another person in an almost
magical way; it is to enter into the life of humanity imaginatively,
such as to coincide with all others as much as one possibly can. It is
to imagine equally, and in full force, *what it is like* to be
both a cruel tormentor and a tormented victim, and to locate both
opposing experiences and characters within a single, universal
consciousness that is the consciousness of humanity itself. With the
development of moral consciousness, one's awareness expands
towards the mixed-up, tension-ridden, bittersweet, tragicomic,
multi-aspected and distinctively sublime consciousness of humanity
itself.



Edmund Burke (1729-1797) characterized the sublime as a feeling
of tranquillity tinged with terror, and Schopenhauer's moral
consciousness fits this description. Just as music embodies the
emotional tensions within the world in an abstracted and distanced
manner, and thus affords a measure of tranquillity by presenting a
softened, sonic image of the daily world of perpetual conflict, a
measure of tranquillity also attends moral consciousness. When
attaining the universal consciousness of humanity that transcends
spatial and temporal determinations, the desires that derive their
significance from one's personal condition as a spatio-temporal
individual are seen for what they are, as being grounded upon the
illusion of fragmentation, and they thereby lose much their compelling
force. In this respect, moral consciousness becomes the
"quieter" of the will, despite its first-person
recognition of human torment. Works of art that portray this kind of
sublime consciousness would include the *Laocoon* (c. 25
B.C.E.) and Hieronymous Bosch's painting, *Christ Carrying
the Cross* (c. 1515). 



Negatively considered, moral consciousness delivers us from the
unquenchable thirst that is individuated human life, along with the
unremitting oscillation between pain and boredom. Positively
considered, moral consciousness generates a measure of wisdom, as
one's outlook becomes akin to a universal novel that contains
the templates for all of the human stories that have been repeating
themselves generation after generation - stories comic and
tragic, pathetic and triumphant, and trivial and monumental. One
becomes like the steadfast tree, whose generations of leaves fall away
with each passing season, as does generation after generation of
people (Homer, *Iliad*, Book VI).



Schopenhauer maintains similarly in his "Essay on the Freedom of
the Will" (1839) that everything that happens, happens
necessarily. Having accepted Kant's view that cause and effect
relationships extend throughout the world of experience, he believes
that every individual act is determined by prior causes or motives.
This fatalistic realization is a source of comfort and tranquillity
for Schopenhauer, for upon becoming aware that nothing can be done to
alter the course of events, he finds that the struggle to change the
world quickly loses its force (see also *WWR*, Section 56).



Schopenhauer denies the common conception that being free entails
that, for any situation in which we acted, we could always have acted
differently. He augments this denial, however, with the claim that
each of us is free in a more basic sense. Noting that we have
"an unshakeable certainty that we are the doers of our
deeds" ("Essay on the Freedom of the Will",
Conclusion), he maintains that our sense of responsibility reveals an
innate character that is self-determining and independent of
experience. Just as individual trees and individual flowers are the
multifarious expressions of the Platonic Ideas of tree and flower,
each of our individual actions is the spatio-temporal manifestation of
our respective innate or intelligible character.



A person's intelligible character is a timeless act of Will that
the person essentially is, and it can be conceived of as the
subjective aspect of the Platonic Idea that would objectively define
the person's inner essence (*WWR*, Section 28), as a
portrait artist might perceive it. This concept of the intelligible
character is Kantian (*Critique of Pure Reason*, A539/B567),
and in conjunction with Kant's correlated concept of an
empirical character (i.e., the intelligible character as it is
experientially expressed) Schopenhauer regards it as a means to
resolve the problem of freedom and determinism, and to be one of the
most profound ideas in Kant's philosophy.



From the standpoint of later philosophical influence,
Schopenhauer's discussion of the intelligible character
resonates with Friedrich Nietzsche's injunction to "become
what one is" (*Ecce Homo*, "Why I am so
Clever", Section 9). Schopenhauer believes that as we learn more
about ourselves, we can manifest our intelligible character more
effectively, and can play our designated role "artistically and
methodically, with firmness and grace." With self-knowledge, we
can transform our lives into works of art, as Nietzsche later
prescribed.



Character development thus involves expanding the knowledge of our
innate individual tendencies, and a primary effect of this knowledge
and self-realization is greater peace of mind (*WWR*, Section
55). Moreover, since our intelligible character is both subjective and
universal, its status coordinates with that of music, the highest art.
This association with music - as Nietzsche probably observed
- reveals a systematic link between Schopenhauer's
aesthetics and his moral theory, and it can account for
Schopenhauer's reference to the emergence of pleasing aesthetic
and artistic, if not musical, qualities in connection with the
expression of our acquired character.


### 5.3 Asceticism and the Denial of the Will-to-Live



According to Schopenhauer, aesthetic perception offers only a
short-lived transcendence from the daily world. Neither is moral
awareness the ultimate state of mind, despite its comparative tranquillity in contrast to the
daily world of violence. Schopenhauer
believes that a person who experiences the truth of human nature from
a moral perspective - who appreciates how spatial and temporal
forms of knowledge generate a constant passing away, continual
suffering, vain striving and inner tension - will be so repulsed
by the human condition and by the pointlessly striving Will of which
it is a manifestation, that he or she will lose the desire to affirm
the objectified human situation in any of its manifestations. The
result is an attitude of denial towards our will-to-live that
Schopenhauer identifies with an ascetic attitude of renunciation,
resignation, and will-lessness, but also with composure and
tranquillity. In a manner reminiscent of traditional Buddhism, he
recognizes that life is filled with unavoidable frustration and
acknowledges that the suffering caused by this frustration can itself
be reduced by minimizing one's desires. Moral consciousness and
virtue thus give way to the voluntary poverty and chastity of the
ascetic. St. Francis of Assisi (*WWR*, Section 68) and Jesus
(*WWR*, Section 70) subsequently emerge as Schopenhauer's
prototypes for the most enlightened lifestyle, in conjunction with the
ascetics from every religious tradition.



This emphasis upon the ascetic consciousness and its associated
detachment and tranquillity introduces some paradox into
Schopenhauer's outlook, for he admits that the denial of our
will-to-live entails a terrible struggle with instinctual energies, as
we avoid the temptations of bodily pleasures and resist the mere
animal force to endure, reproduce, and flourish. Before we can enter the
transcendent consciousness of heavenly tranquillity, we must pass
through the fires of hell and experience a dark night of the soul, as
our universal self battles our individuated and physical self, as pure
knowledge opposes animalistic will, and as freedom struggles
against nature. 



One can maintain superficially that no contradiction is involved in
the act of willing to deny the will-to-live,
because one is not saying that Will is somehow destroying itself, but
only saying that a more universal manifestation of Will is
overpowering a less universal manifestation, namely, the natural,
individuated, physically-embodied aspect. Within this opposition, it
does remain that Will as a whole is set against itself according to
the very model Schopenhauer is trying to transcend, namely, the model
wherein one manifestation of Will fights against another
manifestation, like the divided bulldog ant. This in itself may not be a
problem, but the location of the tormented and self-crucifying ascetic
consciousness at the penultimate level of enlightenment is
paradoxical, owing to its high degree of inner ferocity. Even though
this ferocity occurs at a reflective and introspective level, we have
before us a spiritualized life-and-death struggle within the ascetic
consciousness.



This peculiarity notwithstanding, the ascetic's struggle is none
other than a supreme struggle against human nature. It is a struggle
against the close-to-unavoidable tendency to apply the principle of
sufficient reason for the purpose of attaining practical knowledge
- an application that for Schopenhauer has the repulsive
side-effect of creating the illusion, or nightmare, of a world
permeated with endless conflict. From a related angle, the
ascetic's struggle is against the forces of violence and evil,
that, owing to Schopenhauer's acceptance and interpretation of
Kant's epistemology, locates these forces significantly within
human nature itself. When the ascetic transcends human nature, the
ascetic resolves the problem of evil: by removing the individuated and
individuating human consciousness from the scene, the entire
spatio-temporal situation within which daily violence occurs is
removed. 



In a way, then, the ascetic consciousness can be said symbolically to
return Adam and Eve to Paradise, for it is the very quest for
knowledge (i.e., the will to apply the principle of individuation to
experience) that the ascetic overcomes. This amounts to a
self-overcoming at the universal level, where not only physical
desires are overcome, but where humanly-inherent epistemological
dispositions are overcome as well.


## 6. Schopenhauer's Later Works



At the end of the first volume of *The World as Will and
Representation* (1818), Schopenhauer intimates that the ascetic
experiences an inscrutable mystical state of consciousness that looks
like nothing at all from the standpoint of ordinary, day-to-day,
individuated and objectifying consciousness. Conversely, he adds that
from the standpoint of the ascetic's mystical consciousness,
where only knowledge remains and where "the will [to live] has
vanished," the physical world itself, with all of its suns and
galaxies "is - nothing," likening this consciousness
to "the Prajna-Paramita of the Buddhists" (*WWR*,
Section 71) to conclude the book. He also states in the same section
that this mystical consciousness has an ocean-like calmness,
tranquillity, confidence and serenity, adding that if one were to seek
a positive characterization of the mystical state, we could refer
loosely to words and phrases such as "ecstasy,"
"rapture," "illumination" and "union
with God." Schopenhauer recognizes a positive content to the
ascetic's mystical experience, but he regards the experience as
ineffable.



This advocacy of mystical experience creates a puzzle: if
*everything* is Will without qualification, then it is unclear
where to locate the will-less mystical state of mind. According to
Schopenhauer's three-tiered philosophical schema, which is now
coming into question, it must be located either at the level of Will
as it is in itself, or at the level of Platonic Ideas, or at the level
of individual things in space and time. It cannot be the latter,
because individuated consciousness is the everyday consciousness of
desire, frustration and suffering. Neither can it be located at the
level of Will as it is in itself, because the Will is a blind
striving, without knowledge, and without satisfaction. 



The ascetic consciousness might be most plausibly located at the level
of the universal subject-object distinction, akin to the music-filled
consciousness, but Schopenhauer states that the mystical consciousness
abolishes not only time and space, but also the fundamental forms of
subject and object: "no will: no representation, no world"
(*WWR*, Section 71). So in terms of its degree of generality,
the mystical state of mind seems to be located at a level of
universality comparable to that of Will as thing-in-itself. Since he
characterizes it as not being a manifestation of Will, however, it
appears to be keyed into another dimension altogether, in total
disconnection from Will as the thing-in-itself. This is to say that if
the thing-in-itself is exactly congruent with Will, then it is
difficult to accept Schopenhauer's mystical characterizations of
the ascetic consciousness, and at the same time identify a consistent
place for it within Schopenhauer's three-tiered philosophical
schema of reality.



Schopenhauer's position on whether the thing-in-itself is Will
consequently presents some interpretive difficulties. In *On the
Will in Nature* (1836/1854), he almost always speaks as if the two
are identical. In the second volume of *The World as Will and
Representation* (1844), he addresses the above complication, and
qualifies his claim that the thing-in-itself is Will. He states in the
1844 work (reciting manuscript notes from 1821 almost verbatim, so
this is not an "1844" or "later" view) that it
is only "to us" that the thing-in-itself appears as Will
and that it remains possible that the thing-in-itself has other modes
of being that are incomprehensible in ordinary terms, but that might
be accessible to mystical consciousness (*WWR*, II, Chapter
XVIII, "On the Possibility of Knowing the
Thing-in-Itself"). He concludes that mystical experience is only
a relative nothingness, that is, when it is considered from the
standpoint of the daily world, but that it is not an absolute
nothingness, as would be the case if the thing-in-itself were Will in
an unconditional sense, and not merely Will to us. 



In light of this, Schopenhauer sometimes expresses the view that the
thing-in-itself is multidimensional, and although the thing-in-itself
is not wholly identical to the world as Will, it nonetheless includes
as its manifestations, the world as Will and the world as
representation. This lends a panentheistic structure to
Schopenhauer's view (noted earlier in the views of K.C.F.
Krause). From a scholarly standpoint, it implies that interpretations
of Schopenhauer that portray him as a Kantian who believes that
knowledge of the thing-in-itself is impossible, do not fit with what
Schopenhauer himself believed. It also implies that interpretations
that portray him as a traditional metaphysician who claims that the
thing-in-itself is straightforwardly, wholly and unconditionally Will,
also stand in need of qualification.


## 7. Critical Reflections



Schopenhauer's intermittently-encountered claim that Will is the
thing-in-itself only *to us*, provides philosophical space for
him to assert consistently that mystical experience provides a
positive insight. It also relativizes to the human condition,
Schopenhauer's position that the world is Will. This entails
that his outlook on daily life as a cruel and violence-filled world
- a world generated by the application of the principle of
sufficient reason, is based on a human-conditioned intuition, namely,
the direct, double-knowledge of one's body as both subject and
object. So along these lines, Schopenhauer's pessimistic vision
of the world can itself be seen to be grounded upon the subject-object
distinction, i.e., the general root of the principle of sufficient
reason. As mentioned above, we can see this fundamental reliance upon
the subject-object distinction reflected in the very title of his
book, *The World as Will and Representation*, that can be read
as, in effect, *The World as Subjectively and Objectively
Apprehended*.



This observation does not render (within the parameters of his
outlook) Schopenhauer's ruthlessly competitive world-scenario
typically any less avoidable, but it does lead one to understand
Schopenhauer's pessimistic vision of the world-as-Will, as less
of an outlook derived from an absolute standpoint that transcends
human nature - although he frequently speaks in this
absolutistic way - and as more of an outlook expressive of human
nature in its effort to achieve philosophical understanding. Owing to
its fundamental reliance upon the subject-object distinction,
Schopenhauer's classical account of the daily world as the
objectification of Will, is understandable not only as a traditional
metaphysical theory that purports to describe the unconditional truth.
It can be understood alternatively as an expression of the human
perspective on the world, that, as an embodied individual, we
typically cannot avoid. This tempered approach, though, does leave us
with the decisive question of why the world would appear to be so
violent, if the universe's core is not thoroughly
"Will," but is also something mysterious beyond this. For
if Will is only one of an untold number of the universe's
dimensions, there would be no reason to expect that the individuating
effects of the principle of sufficient reason would generate a world
that feasts on itself in the manner that Schopenhauer describes.


## 8. Schopenhauer's Influence



Schopenhauer's philosophy has been widely influential, partly
because his outlook acknowledges traditional moral values without the
need to postulate the existence of God. His view also allows for the
possibility of absolute knowledge by means of mystical experience.
Schopenhauer also implicitly challenges the hegemony of science and
other literalistic modes of expression, substituting in their place,
more musical and literary styles of understanding. His recognition
- at least with respect to a perspective we typically cannot
avoid - that the universe appears to be a fundamentally
irrational place, was also appealing to 20th century
thinkers who understood instinctual forces as irrational, and yet
guiding, forces underlying human behavior.



Schopenhauer's influence has been strong among literary figures,
which include poets, playwrights, essayists, novelists and historians
such as Charles Baudelaire, Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, Jorge
Luis Borges, Jacob Burckhardt, Joseph Conrad, Andre Gide,
George Gissing, Franz Grillparzer, Thomas Hardy, Gerhardt Hauptmann,
Friedrich Hebbel, Hugo von Hoffmansthal, Joris Karl Huysmans, Ernst
Junger, Karl Kraus, D. H. Lawrence, Joaquim Maria Machado de
Assis, Stephane Mallarme, Thomas Mann, Guy de Maupassant,
Herman Melville, Robert Musil, Edgar Allan Poe, Marcel Proust, Arno
Schmidt, August Strindberg, Italo Svevo, Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev,
Frank Wedekind, W. B. Yeats, and Emile Zola. In general, these authors
were inspired by Schopenhauer's sense of the world's
absurdity, either regarded in a more nihilistic and gloomy manner, or
regarded in a more lighthearted, absurdist, and comic manner.



Among philosophers, one can cite Henri Bergson, Julius Bahnsen, Eduard
von Hartmann, Suzanne Langer, Philipp Mainlander, Hans Vaihinger,
and Friedrich Nietzsche, where each tended to focus on selected
aspects of Schopenhauer's philosophy, such as his views on the
meaning of life, his theory of the non-rational will, his theory of
music, or his Kantianism. Insofar as he influenced Nietzsche, who
subordinated science to art, Continental philosophy's
twentieth-century challenge to purely literalistic styles of
philosophy via Nietzsche is anticipated by Schopenhauer's view
that music expresses metaphysical truth more directly than does
traditional philosophy.



Schopenhauer's theory of music, along with his emphasis upon
artistic genius and the world-as-suffering, was also influential among
composers such as Johannes Brahms, Antonin Dvorak,
Gustav Mahler, Hans Pfitzner, Sergei Prokofiev, Nikolay
Rimsky-Korsakoff, Arnold Schonberg, and Richard Wagner. Insofar
as he influenced Wagner, who is the father of twentieth-century music
written to accompany and enhance motion pictures, Schopenhauer's
theory of music as the expression of a continual flow of emotion
stands significantly behind the contemporary experience of music in
artistic and communicational media.



Schopenhauer's 19th century historical profile is
frequently obscured by the shadows of Kant, Hegel, Marx, Mill, Darwin
and Nietzsche, but more than is usually recognized, in his rejection
of rationalistic conceptions of the world as early as 1818, he
perceived the shape of things to come. The hollow, nihilistic laughter
expressed by the Dada movement at the turn of the century in the midst
of WWI, reiterates feelings that Schopenhauer's philosophy had
embodied almost a century earlier. Schopenhauer's ideas about
the importance of instinctual urges at the core of daily life also
reappeared in Freud's surrealism-inspiring psychoanalytic
thought, and his conviction that human history is going nowhere,
became keynotes within 20th century French philosophy,
after two World Wars put a damper on the 19th century
anticipations of continual progress that had captured the hearts of
thinkers such as Hegel and Marx.