Schopenhauer in 60 Minutes

Great Thinkers in 60 Minutes

Walther Ziegler

• Publisher: Books on Demand
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9783750498853
• eBook ISBN:
  9783753450261
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Schopenhauer is renowned as the greatest, most brilliant pessimist among philosophers. He was the first to discover that our lives, and world history, are governed not by reason or rational planning but rather by the same blind, hungry will as drives the lives of animals and plants. Instead of reason, says Schopenhauer, there rules, as the basic metaphysical principle, just the "the blind will, appearing as the tendency to life, the love of life, vital energy... the same thing as makes the plant grow". Because every being on earth is filled with this blind will and needs, in order itself to live, to find its place in the sun by pushing other beings aside, persecuting and hunting them, devouring them and itself fearing being devoured. Even the majestic lion stands on a mountain of corpses to which he owes his existence. But worst of all are human beings, who inflict pain both on animals and on each other. They use their intelligence to systematically exploit, build factories, lock animals in cages and stalls and fight wars for land and materials. Like the Buddhists, Schopenhauer concludes that life necessarily means suffering. "Every life-story is a story of suffering", he writes. And like the Buddhists too he draws a radical conclusion. We must say "no" to life and resists its pressure by means of art, asceticism and meditation. But what does it mean to say "no" to life? If our lives are indeed just a devouring and being-devoured under the impulse of blind will, how can we ever escape this fate? Of what use is a pessimism like Schopenhauer's today? Schopenhauer provides uncompromising answers to these questions that still fascinate us two hundred years on. His key ideas are presented here with the aid of over a hundred quotations from his finest work. The book appears as part of the popular series "Great Thinkers in 60 Minutes".

Schopenhauer’s Central Idea

The World is Only My Representation

Schopenhauer’s main work and masterpiece, The World as Will and Representation, begins with a very short, simple sentence:

But already this apparently simple statement of fact contains a provocation. If the whole world is only “my representation”, this means that I may well not be seeing the world as it is at all but rather only as I imagine it to be. But this is indeed what Schopenhauer is claiming by advancing this proposition. All the things that we take to be real and objective we owe in fact only to our ideas or images of these things:

In the first instance, then, the world consists only of the ideas or representations that we have of it. Thus, the lumberjack whose job it is to cut down a tall tree will certainly have a different “representation” of this tree in his mind than will the children who like to climb on it, or than the courting couple who come there in the evening to kiss and cuddle under its boughs. One and the same tree, one and the same world, are perceived in very different ways:

This is the reason why we often find ourselves “talking past one another” and saying to one another things like “what strange ideas you have” or “my goodness, what kind of a world do you think you’re living in?” Schopenhauer draws a very serious conclusion from such apparently trivial turns of phrase:

But how is our consciousness made? How exactly does it function? Schopenhauer relies, in his philosophy of knowledge and perception, very strongly on Immanuel Kant, for whose writings he had an enormous admiration. Already several decades before Schopenhauer Kant had proven that we human beings perceive and know the world only through not just one but two types of “filter”: firstly, through our necessary sorting of all that we perceive into the forms of time and space; and secondly through the further organization of these perceptions in terms of the “categories of thought”. Our minds are so made, Kant argued, that we are compelled first to order everything that we encounter in terms of its place in the sequence of time and its position vis-à-vis other things in the order of space and then to further order these things located in time and space in terms of logical inter-relations, such as one being the cause of, or caused by, another. In other words, whether we wish to or not, we are simply made in such a way that the world must present itself to us as composed of things that “exist now”, “will exist later”, or that “happened before” or “happened long ago”. We are also made in such a way that all that we encounter must present itself to us as “next to”, “behind”, or “above” other things and so on. And finally, our minds are so made that whatever enters our field of knowledge must do so in a form that concords with certain logical dimensions or classes. Any known tree, for example, will have to fall into such categories as “wooden”, “big”, “heavy”, “green”, or “about to fall over” and furthermore into such logical relations as “about to fall over because the lumberjack has cut deeply into its trunk with his axe.” Kant also strongly emphasized, however, that, given these “filters” placed before all our knowledge, it is impossible for us to know anything about how the world might look if these filters were not there. The “thing in itself”, the “tree in itself”, the “world in itself” remain secrets for us. All we can know of them is that there must be “something” there for our minds to “filter”.

But it is just at this point that Schopenhauer goes beyond, and contradicts, his admired philosophical master Kant:

Man has, Schopenhauer insists, not only a representation of the world around him but also of himself and his living body. And it is just this living body that necessarily alerts us to the fact that there does exist, behind all our conscious representations of the world, something specific and knowable: namely, that universal will that is the will-to-live. Contrary, then, to what Kant believed, we can acquire knowledge even of the inmost essence of the world and of the things that make it up. Our living body unlocks for us what Kant considers to be the impenetrable “secret” that is the “world in itself”. This is the case inasmuch as, in contrast to the way in which we represent to ourselves everything else in the world, we have, of our own bodies, a double representation or experience:

In other words, we perceive our own body, and represent it to ourselves, in the first place just as we would perceive and represent to ourselves a wardrobe or a chair: i.e. as an object of a specific height and weight. Above and beyond this, however, we also perceive and experience our bodily existence in a much more intense and direct way that has nothing to do with the way we experience the wardrobe or the chair. We experience ourselves through our bodies as beings impelled by drives and urges, such as hunger, thirst, sexual desire and needs of many other kinds. In other words, we experience ourselves through our bodies as beings consisting of will:

Once we have discovered in this way, in a first step, the will within ourselves in the form of an individual certainty of its presence, we can then go on, in a second step, to discover the reality and operation of this will in the entirety of external Nature:

By transferring, then, our direct certainty of our own existence as will onto other human beings, animals and, in the end, onto the whole of Nature, we recognize will-to-live to be the force that pervades and constitutes the universe as a whole:

The Real World as Blind Will

For Schopenhauer, then, there lies behind all the phenomena that make up the world and even, interestingly, behind the forces and motions involved in the non-organic part of Nature, a single universal, indivisible, eternal Will. Every human being, he argues, should be able to come in the end to recogn...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgements
• Table of Contents
• Schopenhauer’s Great Discovery
• Schopenhauer’s Central Idea
• Of What Use Is Schopenhauer’s Discovery for Us Today?
• Bibliographical References
• Already published in the same series
• The author
• Copyright