Schopenhauer

Julian Young

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134328826
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie der Philosophie

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) was one of the greatest writers and German philosophers of the nineteenth century. His work influenced figures as diverse as Wagner, Freud and Nietzsche. Best known as a pessimist, he was one of the few philosophers read and admired by Wittgenstein.In this comprehensive introduction, Julian Young covers all the main aspects of Schopenhauer's philosophy. Beginning with an overview of Schopenhauer's life and work, he introduces the central aspects of his metaphysics fundamental to understanding his work as a whole: his philosophical idealism and debt to the philosophy of Kant; his attempt to answer the question of what the world is; his account of science; and in particular his idea that 'will' is the essence of all things.Julian Young then introduces and assesses Schopenhauer's aesthetics, which occupy a central place in his philosophy. He carefully examines Schopenhauer's theories of the sublime, artistic genius and music, before assessing his ethics of compassion, his arguments for pessimism and his account of 'salvation'. In the final chapter, he considers Schopenhauer's legacy and his influence on the thought of Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, making this an ideal starting point for those coming to Schopenhauer for the first time.

Three

Metaphysics: The World as Will

The task of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, we saw at the beginning of chapter 2, is to get at the whatness of things, to get at that ‘essence’, ‘kernel’, or ‘in-itselfness’ that lies concealed behind their surface ‘appearance’. So perhaps – the thought might present itself – we should turn for an answer to natural science. Perhaps it is here that we will find the ‘inner’ reality that lies beneath (or within) the ‘outer’ surface of things. Schopenhauer begins Book II of the main work, at which we have now arrived, by arguing that this is not the case. Physics, he argues, can never be placed on the throne of metaphysics (WR II: 175). The ultimate whatness of things can be discovered, if by anything, only by philosophy.

In a way, this is an odd beginning to Book II. For since it is supposed to have been already argued in Book I that the whole world of nature is radically ideal, a kind of ‘dream’, it would seem to follow immediately and obviously that natural science can at best be concerned with the world as it appears, and cannot have anything at all to say about the world as it is in itself.

Kant, after all, had made clear that the whole point of his idealism was to save religion from the challenge of science by confining the latter to the realm of ‘appearance’. ‘I have’, he says in the introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason, ‘found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith’ (Critique of Pure Reason B, xxx) – to deny scientific knowledge to make room for, not indeed the knowledge that the world beyond space and time is the way Christianity says it is, but for, at least, the possibility that what Christians accept as a matter of faith might be true. So given, as we saw, that Schopenhauer accepts Kant’s proof of radical idealism as incontestably true, the job of excluding science from access to the ultimate nature of reality has, he ought to accept, already been completed.

But Schopenhauer does argue the point in a new and quite different way. This suggests the hypothesis that radical idealism is not genuinely in play in Book II. That though a partial idealism is assumed, though the everyday or commonsense comprehension of the world is assumed to be ideal, idealism about the space-time world, about nature as such, is not in play. Only on this assumption is natural science even a candidate for the title ‘that which reveals the ultimate whatness of things’.

This hypothesis, I shall suggest, represents the truth of the matter. For the project of Book II, radical idealism is fundamentally irrelevant. Though the book discovers something – Schopenhauer calls it, of course, ‘will’ – to lie beneath the everyday surface of things, this something is a natural entity, lies within the bounds of space and time.

This being said, however, it also needs to be emphasised that, as a young man, as the author of Volume I, Schopenhauer had a strong inclination to misinterpret his own project, to believe, as I put it in the opening chapter, that he had cracked the problem of Kant’s thing in itself. Many times in Volume I, that is, he calls the ‘will’ the ‘thing in itself’, and never gives any clear indication that this term is being used in anything other than its established, Kantian sense. In the next chapter, however, I shall show how the more mature Schopenhauer, the author of Volume II, came to see that this is a mistake; how he came to admit that the ‘will’, though esoteric, though lying beneath the commonsense surface of things, remains a natural entity and as such distinct from Kant’s supra-natural thing in itself.

COMPLETING THE SCIENTIFIC IMAGE

One reason, then, for beginning Book II with a discussion of natural science is that the scientific account of things is a candidate for being an account of their ultimate whatness – which would of course make philosophy in general, and Schopenhauer’s own philosophy in particular, redundant.

Another, more interesting, reason is that for Schopenhauer, ‘just what the sciences presuppose and lay down as the basis and limit of their explanation is precisely the real problem of philosophy’ (WR I: 81–2), from which it follows that ‘science is the corrected statement of the problem of metaphysics’ (WR II: 178). For Schopenhauer, then, as mentioned in the first chapter, philosophers need to know a good deal of science (a sentiment all modern philosophers of science would endorse). ‘No one’, he admonishes, ‘should venture [into metaphysics] … without having previously acquired a knowledge of all the branches of natural science which, though only general, is yet thorough, clear, and connected’. But this is not to find an answer to the question of metaphysics but simply because ‘the problem must come before the solution’ (WR II: 178–9).

Schopenhauer himself, as we saw, satisfied this condition by devoting his first year at Göttingen to the study of natural science. Though his yearning for a ‘better consciousness’ links him to Romanticism, it is an important fact, as we noted, that he does not share the hatred of science generally characteristic of Romanticism. Throughout his writings he preserves a strong interest in science, the World as Will being regularly punctuated by strongly expressed views on contemporary scientific issues: the impossibility, as he sees it, of reducing biology to physics, the superiority of Goethe’s theory of colours to that of Newton, the wrong-headedness of atomism and so on. Schopenhauer did not like scientism, the claim that science is capable of answering every question that is of human interest. In particular, he disliked the ‘fine airs’ which misinterpreters of science sometimes adopt towards philosophy (WR II: 172). But science itself fascinated him.

All this suggests a non-hostile, collaborative relation between science and philosophy (traditionally known as ‘the queen of the sciences’); that natural science, by itself is somehow incomplete, that ‘physics is unable to stand on its own feet, but needs a metaphysics on which to support itself’ (WR II: 172). It suggests a conception of philosophy such that at least one of its fundamental tasks is, as we might put it, the completion of the scientific image of reality.

NATURAL FORCES

So how and why is natural science incomplete?

Science aims at explanation – at explaining particular phenomena by subsuming them under causal laws. So the essence of science is the discovery of causal laws. But what makes something a law as opposed to an accidental correlation? Why are we sure that smoking causes lung cancer but not so sure that eating red meat causes bowel cancer, even though in the latter as in the former case there is a strong statistical correlation between the two phenomena? Ultimately because in the first case but not the second we are able to give an account of what it is that connects the phenomena. We have, that is, some idea of what Schopenhauer calls the ‘inner mechanism’ (WR I: 100) connecting smoking with lung cancer. This, he holds, is always the case. In so far as we claim something to be a genuine law, we suppose there to be some ‘inner conditioning’ (FW: 34) in which that law is grounded, something which authenticates its status as a law. Even if we do not know what this ‘conditioning’ is, our conviction that there is a law is the conviction that such a ‘conditioning’ exists. When we get down to the fundamental level of matter these items which make laws laws are what Schopenhauer calls ‘natural forces’. Putative examples he gives are gravity, impenetrability and electricity (WR I: 97, 141).

Forces are neither causes nor effects. They do not belong to, but rather preserve and ‘express’ their natures in, lawful patterns of cause and effect. They preserve ‘the unalterable constancy’ of those laws through time (WR I: 97). That small objects are attracted towards the centres of large objects, for example, is both an expression of, and is constituted as a law by, the force which we call ‘gravity’.

Science, then, committed as it is to laws of nature, is committed to the existence of natural forces. But what are these forces? What is gravity? To this question it gives no answer. So far as science is concerned gravity is a ‘qualitas occulta’ an ‘unknown X’, (WR I: 125, WR II: 318, WN: 317–20). Hence, though fascinating and useful, the image of the world produced by science is essentially facile, two-dimensional. It is like ‘a section of a piece of marble showing many different veins side by side, but not letting us know the course of the veins from the interior of the marble to the surface’ (WR I: 98). Though a distinction is generally made between explanatory sciences such as physics and chemistry and descriptive and classificatory sciences such as botany, really, all science is merely descriptive. It shows the ‘orderly arrangement’ of natural phenomena but explains none of them (WR I: 96–7).

Schopenhauer acknowledges, of course, that in science one theory often gets absorbed into a more fundamental one. Forces such as solubility and rigidity inherent in gross bodies (sugar lumps) may be explained in terms of those bodies being structures of more refined objects (molecules) together with the laws governing the behaviour of the latter. Theory reduction can go, however, only so far. Sooner or later science must reach a bedrock level of entities and a bedrock level of most fundamental laws governing the behaviour of those entities. It is the forces presupposed by these laws, the ultimate, ‘original’ forces of nature, which Schopenhauer claims to constitute the fundamental mystery, the ‘insoluble residuum’ (WR I: 123–4) of natural science.

It might be objected that since theory reduction, explanation, must stop somewhere, it is of course the case that, ultimately, one will arrive at laws grounded in forces which are incapable of further explanation. But this is to misunderstand Schopenhauer’s account of the incompleteness of natural science. His objection is not that science cannot explain fundamental forces, but rather that it can’t attach any meaning to its fundamental terms.

The background to this is Schopenhauer’s empiricist criterion of meaningfulness discussed in the last chapter. According to that principle, ‘it must be possible to verify the [meaningfulness of a] concept with perceptions which stand to abstractions in the relation of examples’; it must be possible to specify in experiential terms, what it would be like to come across whatever it is that is being talked about. As we saw, Schopenhauer uses this empiricist principle to debunk pseudo-philosophical ‘scribbling’ about ‘the Absolute’ and ‘the Infinite’s evolution into the Finite’. But, he now observes, left to its own devices, science is in the same boat. Just like Hegel’s ‘Absolute’, gravity is, to science, a mere ‘X’. It uses empty words so that, quite literally, it doesn’t know what it is talking about.

In Michael Frayn’s play Copenhagen, which concerns a meeting in 1941 between Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, the founders (along with Einstein and Max Plank) of quantum physics, Bohr raises an objection against Heisenberg’s ‘Indeterminacy Principle’ (if you know the position of a subatomic particle you can’t know its momentum and vice versa) and against his approach to fundamental science in general. His complaint is that he, Heisenberg, doesn’t care what his theory means, only that the sums come out right. This I think is Schopenhauer’s complaint about natural science as such. At its fundamental level, he suggests, it doesn’t know what it means.

So, left to its own devices, it is ‘inadequate’ (WR II: 176). It needs help, ‘is unable to stand on its own feet but needs a metaphysics on which to support itself’ (WR II: 172).

THE NATURE OF MATTER

So physics needs metaphysics, science needs philosophy. But equally, as we saw, metaphysics needs science, since it is the latter that is the ‘corrected statement of the problem of metaphysics’. Why does philosophy need science? Why does philosophy, in particular, need to get its fundamental science right in order to even start its thinking from the right place?

Schopenhauer has decided views about the nature of matter. Matter, he says, is ‘pure causality’ (WR II: 305). Its ‘whole essence consists in acting (ibid.). It is ‘not extended [in space] and is consequently incorporeal’ (WR II: 308). It cannot itself be perceived but merely ‘exhibits itself as body’ (WR II: 305, 309). These interesting remarks are intended to oppose ‘atomism’ – the view that the world’s ultimate constituents are tiny chunks of matter in terms of whose behaviour everything else is to be explained. This view, which Schopenhauer calls a ‘revolting absurdity’, though propounded by Locke (and two thousand years before him by Democritus), finds particular favour in France due to ‘the backward state of [French] … metaphysics’ (WR II: 302), the inability of French philosophers to think seriously about the foundations of natural science (an inability, one might be tempted to add, which continues to this very day.)

Putting these remarks together, we can understand Schopenhauer’s view to be that what the best science does is to dematerialise or desubstantialise matter. Opposing the ‘chunky’ view¹, Schopenhauer understands good science to hold that the ultimate constituents of matter are extensionless centres of ‘pure causality’, in other words of force. The natural world is nothing but space filled with (as modern science calls them) force fields. These fields of force, as Schopenhauer puts it, ‘objectify’ themselves – are experienced by us – as perceptible bodies, yet outside the human mind such bodies have no existence. When we say that a body is ‘hard, heavy, fluid, green, alkaline, organic and so on’, we are merely reporting the ‘action or effect’ of force fields on the human mind (WR I: 458).

This account of the status and nature of material bodies casts the theory of perception discussed in the last chapter (pp. 36–9) in a new light. According to that theory, it will be remembered, the ‘understanding’ constructs its account of the external world by inferring from sensations to objects as their external causes. In this way it produces what we might call the ‘manifest’ or ‘common sense’ image of the world. In fact, however, according to what Schopenhauer takes to be good science, all these inferences (inferences that are absolutely necessary to human survival) are mistaken. Nothing object-like exists outside the mind. According to the best science, bodies are nothing but ‘spaces filled with force’ (WN: 207).²

***

There is, then, a relation of mutual dependence between science and philosophy. On the one hand physics needs some further discipline to attach meaning to its fundamental terms (and if not ‘meta-physics’ what else?) for otherwise it is, at root, a meaningless, though technologically useful, enterprise. But on the other hand, philosophy needs science to tell it, with precision, just what the problem of understanding the whatness of the world amounts to. The problem, we now know, is to describe the character of the fundamental forces of nature and thereby to do what science itself cannot do, complete the scientific image. How might it...