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On Arthur Schopenhauer's The World As Will and Representation (1818), book 2.
Sure, we know from our senses and science what the world looks like to creatures like us, but if you buy Kant's view that this "world as appearance" is a construct of our minds, what's the reality behind the appearance?
Schopenhauer thinks that we can know this: The world is what he calls "Will," because just like know what it's like to be you from the inside (you don't just see your body move but know what it is to will that body to move), the rest of the world has a comparable inside, and it's that inside that explains all the striving that we see around us, whether it's plants growing toward the sun, animals acting on instinct, or physical objects following laws of motion and gravity.
So in a sense, everything is alive, and moreover, it's all the SAME living thing: a massive, singular Will that exists outside space, time, and the causal chain: It's a whole different thing than anything we perceive through the senses, yet all those perceived things are somehow manifestations of this Will. It's like the Force, except blind and futile.
That amounts to some highly chewy metaphysics for the regular four to slobber over. Read more about the topic and get the book.
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End song: "Sinking” from Mark Lint & the Simulacra, recorded in 2000, mixed just now. Descend into the Will itself!
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Schopenhauer picture by Genevieve Arnold.
Thank you.
As a devotee of Schopenhauer, I didn’t really feel the force of your criticisms, certainly not enough for me to respond to them. I mainly think you did an admirable job encapsulating the main idea of book two. As someone who’s always intrigued to find stuff like podcasts and videos being done on his favorite philosopher, I really appreciate this episode. I enjoy your other episodes too! Cheers.
You shouldn’t be a “devotee” of anyone, it just makes you sound like you’re being uncritical, which might explain why you didn’t get the force of their criticism. I’m not saying I get all of it either, but I also don’t get Shopenhauer in a lot areas. The point is that critique, at least if it is good, is insightful and enjoyable, especially when you’re dealing with philosophical problems. I like this podcast because they’re not too hung up about reaching firm conclusions, just deepening their insight.
Uh, what? I’m not uncritical. I’ve changed my mind on philosophical positions many times, sometimes drastically. That I currently find Schopenhauer’s system in general to best match my experience of reality doesn’t mean I will always accept it.
yeah what a cheap shot. I think sometimes a little devotion can provide a deeper understanding. If you’re just critical you can end up shallow. I think devotion can bring you closer to the emotional state of a philospher, it sort of turns them into an old friend. That way your critisisms are not just dismissive discarding but are earnest attempts at appropriating the philosophy. I doubt there would be any philosophy without devotion to philosophers.
Very well put.
“Man is not born to solve the problems of the universe, but to find out where the problems begin, and then to take his stand within the limits of the intelligible.” — said by Schopenhauer’s one time friend Goethe.
So as a follow up to my previous post, I agree about not getting hung up on reaching firm conclusions and about trying to gain insight, but as doubletake alludes to, sometimes insight cannot be gained if one does not at least take some kind of a stand. Genuine intellectual humility is not refusing to take a stand altogether but being willing to change one’s mind on where one stands in light of argument and evidence. I am not convinced that Schopenhauer’s system is in the vaguely described danger the gentlemen on this podcast have implied it to be in. I am fine having a discussion about that, but not because I’m an ideologue hell bent on retaining my hitherto firm conclusions. I am open to persuasion provided it is done fairly and one adequately argues one’s case. To me, though, a podcast and its comment section are probably not the best formats to do that in, as in this case, the former is simply the initial reaction to one section of a two volume work of philosophy. That’s why I simply gave my thanks for the episode and left it at that.
Sorry, what I said was pretty tactless. I jumped on you calling yourself a “devotee” (which I interpreted too strongly) which in my mind suggested an uncritical attitude (I had Ayn Rand fans in mind). Notice I didn’t actually say you being uncritical. I was just cautioning (and came off like a prick). I pretty much agree with what everyone else said afterwards.
Good to see a devotee of Schopenhauer.
Schopenhauer is the first philosopher I encounted and admired. I remember the thrill I got when I first read his essays when I was 15. The world looks different since then.
Schopenhauer has done a good job in the destruction of the ‘bad’ philosphy of others.
However, Schopenhauer’s construction is not very convincing. At best ,it is an interesting speculation.
His basic idea is that the will is the fundemental of the world. I disagree. Here is the proof:
Accroding to him, an atom as well as a human being is driven by will. Fine.
But the will of the atom is different from the will of human being, as human being is made of atoms.
Therefore, they cannot be both fundemental.
Therefore, will cannot be fundemental. (It would be fine if he argued that only the atoms have will.)
Q.E.D.
Thanks for the post, Gang Sun. I disagree with your proof, which I find somewhat oddly worded. The multiplicity of wills, e.g. the will of a human being, the will of a pine tree, etc, only occurs by means of the form of being an object for a subject. This form of knowledge individuates the will as thing-in-itself into multiple wills, which are the Platonic Ideas, while the forms of space, time and causality individuate the Platonic Ideas into countless particular objects. The will in itself is not a numerical unity or plurality, which is to say it is not individuated, and it is this non-individuated will (the thing-in-itself) that is ultimately “fundamental,” not one of the individuated wills you mention.
“The multiplicity of wills, e.g. the will of a human being, the will of a pine tree, etc, only occurs by means of the form of being an object for a subject. This form of knowledge individuates the will as thing-in-itself into multiple wills…”
The post I just put up on idealism hints at my discomfort with this. It seems a chicken-and-egg problem: The will individuates because it becomes object for a subject, but there can only be subjects because the will has already become individuated.
“multiple wills, which are the Platonic Ideas”
This is an interesting formulation, and not how we took this (we discuss this more in ep. 115, being edited now). I took Platonic ideas to provide a template for the strivings of particular wills, e.g. to describe the teleology of a particular type of organism, but not to BE a will, and I can’t think of any passages in the book that would support this interpretation.
The “vaguely described danger” I think was laboriously and repeatedly described in the discussion as defining the relationship between Will and phenomenon (organism, rock, person, etc.). We can’t say the Will causes a falling rock or the growth of a plant or my character-driven actions. Instead, all of these different things are supposed to be identical with Will, but since they’re clearly not identical with each other, that’s a logical contradiction: A = B and C = B, yet A does not equal B. Neither can they be parts of Will, since Will has no parts.
As Dylan voiced, what does the concept of Will (as force in physics) actually add to the discussion? Yes, per Hume, science just describes regularities; it doesn’t tell us WHY one thing causes another at some deeper level that doesn’t just relate to patterning (i.e. A causes B because A is one of a class of things that one would expect to result in phenomena like B). But does adding the word “force” make this any clearer? Being able to relate force to the nature of the universe is supposed to satisfy this humanistic hunger for understanding, but it doesn’t, because we don’t know why individuation/strife happens at all. It’s just a brute fact, for Schopenhauer. So instead of the meaninglessness of the materialist, we get this far more pretentious meaninglessness of one claiming esoteric knowledge. Schopenhauer is far more satisfying given his due diligence in devising details for his theory than, say, Emerson, but displays the ultimate futility of motivating a metaphysics founded on a “One,” whether it be Will or God or whatever.
“The will individuates because it becomes object for a subject, but there can only be subjects because the will has already become individuated.”
I understand what you’re saying, which is that subject and object mutually presuppose one another. Schopenhauer calls this the “world knot,” and it is impossible to disentangle. For to collapse the subject into object (ontological realism) or the object into subject (ontological idealism) will result in irreconcilable contradictions, as Kant took great pains to show. Schopenhauer is an epistemic (transcendental) idealist and so maintains the mutual presupposition of subject and object as the proper starting place of knowledge and of philosophy.
“I took Platonic ideas to provide a template for the strivings of particular wills, e.g. to describe the teleology of a particular type of organism, but not to BE a will, and I can’t think of any passages in the book that would support this interpretation.”
No, I agree. The Ideas are basically templates as you say, but I don’t see that this contradicts the claim that they are distinct wills. Schopenhauer speaks of my character as my will, which I know only through its successive individual acts. So I have a will, you have a will, the lion has a will, etc. These wills are not different with respect to their being, but with respect to the degree of the objectification of that being they are objectifications of (in this case, the will in itself), and these degrees are of course the Platonic Ideas. Consequently, the Platonic Ideas can be called distinct wills in an epistemic rather than an ontological sense.
“but since they’re clearly not identical with each other, that’s a logical contradiction”
Unless I’m missing something in your argument, the action of a rock falling and the action of the growth of a plant are not perceived to be identical to each other precisely because perception involves space and time, which individuate the activity of the will into distinct events. The will cannot will two things at once. To do so is impossible. I cannot will to both stand up and sit down at the same time, for example. Therefore, the will can only will one definite thing in the present, which is without duration. What does it will? Existence or life, explaining the origin of the phrase “der Wille zum Leben,” or “the will to life,” Schopenhauer uses so often. There’s nothing else the will wills and the result is the phenomenal world. However, because there is nothing besides the will, at least from the standpoint of knowledge (though the will in itself is blind and without knowledge), the phenomenal world is merely the mirror or projection of the will itself. Moreover, the will is always directed towards its complete fulfillment. All willing implies lack or privation, or that which the will seeks by its very nature as will to obtain so as to no longer will, which must be toto genere different from the will. If the will were satisfied, then there would be no willing and thus no world. That there is a world means that the world is just the self-knowledge of the will (which is the “single thought” Schopenhauer mentions at the beginning that you had a laugh about). I’ve said more than I needed to here, but there it is.
“we don’t know why individuation/strife happens at all. It’s just a brute fact, for Schopenhauer. So instead of the meaninglessness of the materialist, we get this far more pretentious meaninglessness of one claiming esoteric knowledge.”
With respect, this is completely inaccurate. Schopenhauer is clear about why individuation and strife happen. Individuation occurs because the forms of knowledge get applied to the activity of the will. Strife occurs because, as I said above, all willing implies lack, or the absence of satisfaction. The phenomenal world is the mirror of the will, which means that the will perpetually feeds on itself and is therefore perpetually unsatisfied. As soon as you satisfy the desire of hunger, for example, five hours later you are hungry again. Why? Because the will in general has not been satisfied by eating food, which is just another manifestation of itself. As for the question of meaning, there is a common misconception about Schopenhauer that says he thinks life is utterly meaningless (whether “pretentiously” or not). Consider the following quote:
“The expression, often heard now-a-days, “the world is an end-in-itself,” leaves it uncertain whether Pantheism or a simple Fatalism is to be taken as the explanation of it. But, whichever it be, the expression looks upon the world from a physical point of view only, and leaves out of sight its moral significance, because you cannot assume a moral significance without presenting the world as means to a higher end. The notion that the world has a physical but not a moral meaning, is the most mischievous error sprung from the greatest mental perversity.”
He also says that life without pain has no meaning. But life is certainly filled with pain, therefore there is a meaning to it. It’s not a “brute fact,” or to use Schopenhauer’s language, “an end-in-itself.” If you’re curious as to how this can be, then I highly recommend reading book four. I know it’s not on your podcast list to read, but Schopenhauer is not blowing hot air when he recommends that his readers read the whole and twice. The second volume is also filled with essays clarifying the thought of the first volume. So there is a real danger about criticizing Schopenhauer as you have done, since the criticisms often amount to hasty generalizations.
Regarding the one and the many: “So in a sense, everything is alive, and moreover, it’s all the SAME living thing: a massive, singular Will.”
Of Being (one) and beings (many): how is Being distributed among beings (the ontological difference of Heidegger)
To say that Being is equivocal means that the term ‘Being’ is said of beings in several
senses, and that these senses have no common measure (to say that “man is” is different from saying the “tree is” or the “rock is,” since they have different types of being.
To say that Being is univocal, means that Being has only one sense, and is said in one and the same sense of everything of which it is said, whether it be man, animal or plant.
If Being is said in one and the same sense of everything that is, then what constitutes the difference between beings?
Beings that are distinguished solely by their degree of power (will) realize one and
the same univocal Being, except for the difference in their degree of power (will) or its
withdrawal. Difference as a degree of power is a non-categorical, non representational difference in that
it preserves the univocal sense of Being.
The univocity of Being is the equivocity of difference.
Trying to use Heidegger to CLARIFY Schopenhauer??!! Egad!
Yeah–the only Heidegger in my response was of his presentation of the problem: “how is Being distributed among beings (the ontological difference of Heidegger).” He in fact raised the problem that Schopenhauer was trying to answer with the concept of the will. The rest is post-Heidegger.
Mark: honest, I’m not using Heidegger here except as a starting point. My “egad metaphysics” is more complicated than that, in that Schopenhauer posits Will with the potentially same metaphysical baggage as that of God (as was remarked in the podcast).
From the position of the One: Being/Will/God distributes its essence to individual beings can be pictured (metaphor) as the primal essence of Being as a can of white paint (white being the presence of all possible colors, (yes, black is a different discussion)) being poured into sub-buckets, each being all the possible colors with their own bucket.
Philosophically, the bucket represents the form-Plato/category-Aristotle (where judgment operates by allocating things to different pre-established categories, static and sedentary) while the paint represents the flow of the intensities, energies, powers and disjunctive allocations of the paint which are uniquely sized, not measurable by representative categories, but by new processes exceeding or undoing the emergent order.
In opposition to the paint bucket concept where flows accumulate in categorical buckets, is the concept of reality where things pile up in big heaps, as opposed to some Platonic bucket which distributes them to begin with.
Being does not pour itself into a bucket, but finds itself in fluid places like sand finds itself in sand dunes. Paint/sand thus becomes the multiplicity (many) grain of sand/flow of paint, difference in flux which gives foundation to the One, the bucket, the sand dune, and is flowing rather than a static representation. This Will is living while the will of the One without the many is the same as the God which Nietzsche opposed. Ok, I’m tired now, so I now invoke my previous post for the bigger picture.
This sounds a lot like Plotinus to me.
Alan, Plotinus did posit the One as the principle of being, but like Kant, invoked intellect (reason) as grounding of essence/whatness/intelligibility. “Intellect is an eternal instrument of the One’s causality” (SEP).
I’ll take up where I left off above. The problem of those who posit the One over the many have to account for how the many derive from the one. I do not accept the Kantian transcendental deduction (reason provides the judgment which is grounded in the categories including space and time), although he does better than claim God as the ground of truth. On the other hand, Schopenhauer juxtaposes a God-like concept of Will (a-temporal, a-spatial) which inexplicably distributes itself into beings, or as LemonCookies states: “Schopenhauer is an epistemic (transcendental) idealist and so maintains the mutual presupposition of subject and object as the proper starting place of knowledge and philosophy.”
Without presuming a pre-existing unity, we can observe that every aspect of reality evidences individual difference (“singularity”) which is based on the specific and unique development or becoming of each individual.
Valid difference must not be considered as difference from the same (subordination to identity) nor as based on representation (subordination to intellectual categories), nor as based on opposition (subordination to contradiction rather than based on repetition) etc. In fact, identity, representation and opposition are effects, products of a primary difference or of a primary system of differences.
A conceptual idea of difference is reflected in differential calculus: take two entities, x and y. Let D(x) symbolize any infinitesimal difference in x. Let D(y) symbolize any infinitesimal difference in y. If x is a straight line parallel (non-intersection) to the straight line y, then an infinitesimal difference in either can cause them to eventually intersect and thus establish a relationship–have an effect on each other. Difference can thus be extrapolated from a math concept to the founding principle of all reality, as with thermodymics. The second law of thermodynamics states that “heat does not pass from a body at low temperature to one at high temperature without an accompanying change elsewhere.” The efficiency of the work a system is able to do is based on the difference between the temperature entering the system and the temperature leaving the system—implying that efficiency of work is based not on intensity (temperature) but rather difference in intensity.
What drives reality is the continuous gradient between entities. The metaphysics of difference would thus be the explanation for how Schopenhauer’s Will becomes manifest in reality.
Mark’s attribution of “the veil of maya” to buddhism is a little problematic. Although, Buddhism generally looks down upon the material world as transitory and fleeting, “maya” (Sanskrit for Illusion) is taken from Vedanta. Look up “Vivarta-vada” of the Indian philosopher Sankaracharya.
Yes, I’m aware of the difference, but it doesn’t matter to Schopenhauer
Is there more information linking Schopenhauer’s Will to ideas of samsara, moksha, maya, or Vedic or Buddhist thought in general? If anyone knows of references to point out more of Schopenhauer’s relation to those eastern philosophies, I’d be greatful for a link.
…now I’m back to episode 94, Schopenhauer, originality, Led Zeppelin and Fleetwood Mac. Rock on.
Being a Schopenhauer fan, I was very happy to hear that you are tackling his main work. And you did a great job!
One thing though: I might just have missed it, but I believe you didn’t do Schopenhauer’s argument for the will being one single entity complete justice. As far as I recall, it is quite simple:
1. The notion of numbers or multitude depends on the notions of space and time (since you need space and time to count things).
2. Space and time are forms of the world as representation. The will is a-spatial and a-temporal.
3. Thus multitude or number does not apply to the will.
So really, saying “The will is one” is a convenient simplification for “It doesn’t make sense to talk about any number of will(s)”.
There is one particularly fascinating disciple of Schopenhauer, called Julius Bahnsen, who developed a very elaborate and well thought-out metaphysics based on a pluralistic will. Unfortunately I don’t remember enough to give an adequate overview here, and to my knowledge his writings (the main one being “Der Widerspruch im Wissen und Wesen der Welt”) are not available in English, so I am leaving this here just as a side note.
I would be very interested in listening to an episode on Quantum Field Theory.
The irreducibility of biology is perfectly explicable without any metaphysical assumptions once you’ve understood the concept of emergence.
What was the name of the author and book Dylan referenced where he seemed to think that Schopenhauer connected with Quantum Field Theory?
The book I was thinking of is by Sunny Auyang called “How is Quantum Field Theory Possible?” Here’s a link to the dust jacket description and a table of contents: http://www.creatingtechnology.org/quantum.htm
The book is expensive new, but you can get reasonably priced versions on abebooks.com.
I’m so glad you posted this. Just got to this episode and was having a devil of a time trying to find the book you mentioned.
Ditto! Thanks
I found Seth’s explanation of Schopenhauer’s examination of the experience of “the body”, as representing the fundamental problem of idealism, was clear and succinct. The idea that as object and subject we, as bodies, could conceive of reality as idealistic.
Though I remain unconvinced of idealism I found the explanation clarifying.
Thanks.
I say this on here just because this is a Schopenhauer episode, but you guys should look into doing his The Art of Controversy. Not only is it a highly entertaining read, but it’s something that listeners can apply to the arguments given in every episode and be able to point out the logical fallacies/rhetorical moves the texts make.
While he technically addresses ways to win an argument even when you don’t have truth on your side, it’s also a good background in logical fallacies which is helpful when unpacking the arguments of different philosophers and strains of thought.