Schopenhauer, Arthur

views updated

SCHOPENHAUER, ARTHUR

life and works
will and representation
ethics, aesthetics, and the meaning of life
bibliography

SCHOPENHAUER, ARTHUR (1788–1860), German philosopher.

Arthur Schopenhauer produced a system of metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics centered around the notion of the will. His works became influential on European philosophers, artists, and other intellectuals in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

life and works

Schopenhauer was born in Danzig, the son of a wealthy merchant of cosmopolitan outlook and a mother who was to make her career as a popular novelist and patron of the arts. Though originally destined for a career in business, Schopenhauer struck out on his own in 1809 and attended university in Göttingen and Berlin. His first philosophical work, published in 1814, was a doctoral dissertation entitled On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, an original analysis of different forms of explanation that he continued to regard as integral to his philosophy. In 1819 after a short but intense period of writing and synthesis of various sources (chiefly Kant, Plato, and the Upanishads) Schopenhauer produced the major work of his life, The World as Will and Representation. A second edition appeared in 1844 with some revisions and a new second volume of explanatory essays. This two-volume work is the central standard work on which his reputation chiefly rests.

Schopenhauer had tried and failed to establish a lecturing career for himself in Berlin. Despite or perhaps because of this, he was contemptuous of university philosophy, especially for its falling under the influence of Friedrich Hegel and the German idealists. The second edition of The World as Will and Representation and other works published in the 1840s are peppered with vitriolic attacks on Hegel and his legacy (which by then was past its peak). Among Schopenhauer's other works, two essays on ethics are especially notable: On the Freedom of the Will and On the Basis of Morality, which he published together under the title Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics in 1841. In 1833 Schopenhauer had settled in Frankfurt am Main, and spent his last three decades there, living a comfortable if essentially solitary life. Another two-volume work, Parerga and Paralipomena, appeared in 1851, consisting of "aphorisms on the wisdom of life" and many extended essays, some profound, some scholarly, and some opinionated, including a misogynistic essay "On Women." Parerga attracted some readership, and Schopenhauer enjoyed correspondence and visits during his last years that gave some evidence of growing, if belated, recognition. He died in Frankfurt in 1860.

In 1877 Wilhelm Wundt called Schopenhauer the "born leader of non-academic philosophy in Germany." Schopenhauer never had any systematic following, but his pessimism and his aesthetic theory were especially influential and continue to be the most discussed parts of his philosophy. Most important among those whom he influenced were Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche. Thomas Mann and Ludwig Wittgenstein were among a later generation to fall under his pervasive influence, and Sigmund Freud's theories of the unconscious and the centrality of sexuality were partially enabled by Schopenhauer's doctrine of the will.

will and representation

Schopenhauer takes from Immanuel Kant the distinction between representation (Vorstellung) and thing-in-itself, the former comprising the objects presented to the mind in experience, the latter a reality that transcends our capacity for experience. Schopenhauer argues that Kant left the thing-in-itself a "riddle" that surpasses human knowledge, and offers to solve the riddle by showing that the reality underlying both the material world and the self is will. The single world therefore has two aspects: it is human representation, but beyond that it is will. Schopenhauer's theory combines idealism—saying that the material world of objects in space and time does not exist independently of the subject's experience—with a metaphysical account of the fundamental essence of reality as will, a principle of striving without consciousness or purpose.

Schopenhauer reaches this conclusion from an initial consideration of self-consciousness. Individuals have an "inner" experience of themselves as agents, in which a subjective mental state of willing realizes itself as a moving of the physical body in space. The intimate awareness individuals have of themselves in action not only undermines any dualist picture of the relation of mind and body, but, Schopenhauer argues, also provides the key to understanding the relation of inner and outer in the world as a whole. The self is a microcosm analogous to the macrocosm, and what appear as external material bodies in space and time all have the same inner essence as ourselves, that is, they are will.

This core notion of the will gives rise to considerable philosophical difficulties. If it is the thing-in-itself, then it should be unknowable, yet Schopenhauer claims knowledge of it. Some interpreters have attempted to remove this inconsistency by arguing that Schopenhauer's position has greater complexity than he sometimes acknowledges, and that will is simply the one common essence of all experiencable objects, while the world considered truly in itself remains unknowable. But even with this modification it is hard to grasp the nature of Schopenhauer's will. It is called will because it corresponds to the human will known in self-consciousness, but Schopenhauer offers assurance that the will in nature is without intention, rationality, or concept and is neither a conscious nor even a mental force.

The influence of Schopenhauer's doctrine of the will stems not from its technical qualities as an exercise in metaphysics, but from the powerful vision of the character of the world and the human individual that he hangs around it. The world has no plan or purpose and is not rationally constructed. The single world-will endlessly tears itself apart through the multiplicity of individuals as which it manifests itself. Sexual instinct is

the focus of the will in the human body and psyche. Human beings, like all organic nature, are primarily expressions of will to life, an unconsciously existing drive to survival and reproduction that dominates their psychology and pushes them on independently of all choice or reason and subjects them to inevitable and unredeemed suffering.

ethics, aesthetics, and the meaning of life

Driven thus by the will, which is the underlying essence of the human character, individuals are predominately egoistic for Schopenhauer. Yet he believes that in each person there is at least a germ of compassion, the incentive that opposes egoism and seeks the well-being of others rather than one's own. Compassion is the foundation of morality. One cannot teach someone to be moral, because the composition of their character is inborn and unchangeable; moral principles, laws, and constraints can only channel behavior into less deleterious forms. The deeper significance of compassion for Schopenhauer is that it diminishes the influence of the individual's will and hints at the more profound truth that individuality is really illusory. To commit wrong is to encroach upon the will of another individual; the good person does this as little as possible because he or she places less of an absolute division between individuals, and has the intuition that at the level of the thing-in-itself individuals are all the same will.

A prominent feature of Schopenhauer's system is his aesthetic theory. He regards aesthetic experience as a disinterested contemplative consciousness in which the will of the individual is temporarily suspended. Aesthetic experience is valuable for him because it is a respite from the round of desire and suffering to which humans are condemned by their nature as willing beings. But in addition he argues that it enables a timeless knowledge of universals in nature, which he calls Platonic Ideas, and which are inaccessible to ordinary empirical consciousness. The subject of aesthetic experience transcends its own embodiment as a willing individual, and the contemplated object is elevated to an Idea rather than a mere empirical object. In addition to this general theory of aesthetic experience Schopenhauer gives an account of the value of the different art forms, suggesting that some offer predominantly the peace of will-less experience, others knowledge of universals in human life, tragedy being the prime case of the latter. Finally Schopenhauer gives an account of music, which he regards as a uniquely important art form because it provides a direct copy of the movements of the will itself and replicates the whole range of manifestations of will in the world of human experience.

Schopenhauer's philosophy culminates with an account of salvation, which despite his atheism has affinities with parts of Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism. Salvation is needed because the world is full of unredeemed suffering and humanity's essence as will is to blame for the human predicament. Schopenhauer argues that if everyone properly understood the nature of their existence, they would judge that nonexistence would have been preferable. It is only if one's attachment to life and individual embodiment wanes, and the will to life within one turns and denies itself, that one can be free of the curse of unfulfilled willing and suffering. Schopenhauer is usually accounted a pessimist. The emphasis he places on mystical selflessness can be defended as a positive counter to pessimism, but is itself a fundamental negation of the value of human existence as an individual subject of will. The influence of this negation on Nietzsche was particularly pronounced.