SCHOPENHAUER Explained: Metaphysics of the Will (pt. 1)

Schopenhauer's philosophy begins where the philosophy of immanuel kant's ends in facts in the foreword to the world as will and representation Schopenhauer makes the explicit demands of the reader to acquaint himself with the Kantian philosophy in order to firmly understand Schopenhauer it is therefore necessary to quickly reiterate the main points of counts philosophy in particular we'll discuss what Schopenhauer called Kant's greatest accomplishment consider the world we tend to think that what we see is what we get in the sense that we believe that the world as we perceive it is the world as it really is when you see a tree you assume that the tree is actually there in an objective sense you don't believe you're dreaming or hallucinating in other words you believe in a real objective reality and you believe your senses give you reliable information on the nature of that reality the accomplishment of Kant's exists in showing that this is not the case your knowledge of the tree is mediated not immediate what this means is that the image of the tree as you perceive it is not pure it has passed through the filter of your mind so to speak cons accomplishment was to show that there is no black and white distinction between subjects that is you the perceiving agents and objects the tree that you're seeing the subject is an active agent and not just a passive observer what does this mean it means that your perception of the world is shaped by your mind the three major tools your mind uses to make the image you see our space time and causality let's take a step back and see what is really set here because it's important to and is saying that time and space are not properties of the things in themselves your mind receives raw data goes to work and delivers a picture molded in the forms of space and time in other words space and time are not properties of objective reality the mind plays an active role in shaping your perception of the world like a filter it has a layer of reality to make the raw data intelligible in terms of time and space so what does this objective reality without time and space then look like now there is the rub because there is no way to know why because you're a human with the human mind you can never perceive things objectively because you will always be a subject you cannot escape your mind and perceive the world independent of it by virtue of you being a subjects true objectivity is impossible for example consider the following thought experiments imagine a world without humans what does this look like maybe you're thinking of a desert but the image in your mind is still from your perspective as a human to imagine a world without humans a world without perceiving subjects is impossible because you cannot escape your own mind the material world is contingent upon their being a subject in other words there is no object without a subject in Khan's own words if I take away the thinking subjects the whole material world must vanish as this world is nothing but the phenomenal appearance in the sensibility of our own subjects and as a species of this subjects representations for Schopenhauer this is Kant's greatest accomplishment the discovery of the following truth there is no object without a subject objective reality is not as objective as you think but where does this leave us what can we hope to discover about the strange objective reality this reality without subjects can we know anything about how the world really is without the meddling of our own mind in other words is truly metaphysical knowledge possible in our thought experiment we have shown how it's impossible to escape from mind so to speak and to take in a truly objective viewpoint this is why according to Kant's knowledge of the world as it really is is impossible this leaves us stranded we can never look beyond the limits of our mind and take a peek behind the curtain of the material world Schopenhauer however disagrees Schopenhauer discovered the single narrow door to the truth part to the narrow door this is Schopenhauer's starting points like cons he believes there can be no objects without a perceiving subject but unlike guns he believes that objective metaphysical knowledge is possible after all how consider your body Schopenhauer notices a strange duality in how humans perceive their own bodies on the one hand we experience our body as an object among objects that is to say I can look at my hands or my arm in the way a sculptor or a biologist might look at it in this way of looking at things my hands is not that different from the glass of water on my desk both are objects of the material world situated in time and space of course that's not a whole story because on the other hand I can feel my body I feel as if I live in it this body is mine I can command its movements feel it's pain notice its hunger notice its thirst in this way my body is not just one object among many in this way my body is really mine a unique object one of its kind in short the body reveals itself to us in two distinct ways the first way as an object among objects is what Schopenhauer calls representation the second way in which we feel as if we live in our bodies the way in which we feel hunger and pain and love this way he calls will so we say that our body appears to us both as will and as representation the fact that the body appears to us as will is what Schopenhauer calls the narrow door to the truth because when we've established that the body is both will and representation we must immediately ask ourselves the question what about the rest of the world could it be that just like my body the rest of the world is also both will and representation there are two possible answers to this question either my body and my body alone is a completely unique object in universe it would be the only object that is both will and representation for Schopenhauer this leads to a kind of theoretical echo ISM the belief that only I exists and that the rest of the world is mere fancy but this is not a tenable option for Schopenhauer theoretical egoism can never be demonstrably refuted yet in philosophy it has never been used otherwise than as a skeptical sophism ie a pretense as a serious conviction on the other hand it could only be found in a madhouse and as such it stands in need of a cure rather than a refutation rather we must go with the other option the entire world must be will not just my own body my body is not unique it is as much will as the rest of the universe is will the only difference is that it's impossible for me to experience the will of the world while it is possible for me to experience the will of my own body Schopenhauer's narrow door to the truth is this to infer from the intimate knowledge of our own body the existence of a will at work throughout the entire universe what can we say about this well first we can say what a will is not recall how following Immanuel Kant's time-space and causality fall in the domain of the representation in other words concepts like time and space are not applicable to the will the will is simply not the kind of thing that has a time and space this is impossible for our reason to comprehend in the sense that we literally cannot imagine a spaceless timeless thing but that's why the will outside of the small glimpse we experience through our bodies is necessarily foreign to us if the will is spaceless and timeless then it follows that the will is undifferentiated in time in space what does this mean to use a metaphor it means that the will is one in the domain of the will there are no different things multiplicity the existence of multiple things is not applicable to the will because multiplicity requires a spatial element of the will Schopenhauer says it is free from all multiplicity although its manifestations in time and space are innumerable it is itself one though not in the sense in which an object is one for the unity of an object can only be known in opposition to a possible multiplicity more yet in a sense in which a concept this one for the unity of a concept originates only an abstraction from a multiplicity but it is one as that which lies outside time and space the premium individual series ie the possibility of multiplicity only when all this has become quite clear to us through the subsequent examination of the phenomena and different manifestations of the will shall we fully understand the meaning of the county and doctrine that time space and causality do not belong to the thing in itself but our only forms of knowing this idea is extremely important because in its consequences we will find the basis for Schopenhauer's ethics but for now Schopenhauer invites us to look at the world around us knowing that beneath it all lies a strange mysterious will he invites us to look at the world with his new knowledge in the back of our heads after looking inwards we are now asked to look outwards part 3 the will in nature up until this point Schopenhauer's observations have been of a theoretical nature Schopenhauer has shown that a strange mysterious will lies hidden beneath all of nature from the loftiest galaxies to the simplest blade of grass at this point Schopenhauer wants to discuss the characteristics of this will in order to do so it's necessary to abandon theoretical arguments and take a look at the world as it shows itself to us in other words it's time to go from a theoretical to an empirical point of view Schopenhauer looks at the world in a scientific manner and tries to uncover fundamental principles that show its inner workings the world as will and representation is full of examples of such empirical observations he makes two important observations first that the world is full of suffering in a particularly grim passage he tells us the story of explorer jung han who relates that he saw on the island of java a plane as far as the eye could reach entirely covered with skeletons and took it for a battlefield they were however merely the skeletons of large turtles which come this way out of the sea in order to lay their eggs and are then attacked by wild dogs who with their United strength lay them on their backs strip off the small shell of the stomach and so devour them alive but often then a tiger pounces upon the dogs now all this misery repeats itself thousands and thousands of times year out irin for this then these Turtles are born for whose guilts must they suffer this torment where for the whole scene of horror human history is the tale of one bloody conflict leading to another even plants suffer a great deal for their entire lives revolve around to struggle for sunlight Schopenhauer is the first observation namely that to exist means to suffer stands in sharp contrast to his second observation namely all that exists wants to live Schopenhauer notes very much ahead of his time that procreation and self-preservation seem to be the chief occupations of all that lives that may sound obvious today but remember Schopenhauer wrote his major work some 40 years before Darwin published On the Origin of Species and almost an entire century before the age of Freud's because of this observed struggle for procreation and self-preservation Schopenhauer will sometimes speak of the will to life instead of simply of the will it should be remembered however that the will to life is not simply a motivation of living beings but that the will encompasses all of reality even in organic matter such as rocks and rivers it's just that any organic world these motivations are most clearly seen so this is the world according to Schopenhauer a veil of Tears and ending suffering suffering this in part created by ourselves in our vain attempts to prolong life because after all do we not cause suffering when you eat plants or animals just as the lion kills the Gazelle to stay alive but why must this be the case at this point Schopenhauer has merely observed the suffering of the world and not explained it if his philosophy of the will is to really be a metaphysical explanation of the world then the will must explain why the world is as it is and that's exactly what Schopenhauer does remember how in part two we discussed how the will is undifferentiated in time and space in other words how do will is one what this means is that beyond the illusory world of the representation beyond the world as we ordinarily experience it there is no you or me no here or there no this no that there is just will and nothing else in the domain of the will that is to say on the deepest most fundamental level all of existence is one big hole this is because as we've seen the will is beyond time and beyond space so why is there suffering in the world because there is multiplicity instead of unity the world has representation which comes into existence with a perceiving subject divides the unified world of the will into the categories of objects and subject first and in the categories of time space and causality second in the domain of the will there are no different things and therefore no conflicts because we're with the conflict be there is simply will and nothing else it's only in the representation that is to say in the world of our experience that conflict can rise because now there is a you versus a me a wolf versus rabbits hunter versus prey but deep down beyond the illusion of the representation we are one and the same a great undivided whole the biggest mistake a Schopenhauer is that we are not aware of this basic truth therefore with the same necessity with which the stone falls to the earth the hungry wolf buries its fangs in the flesh of its prey without the possibility of the knowledge that it is itself the destroyed as well as the destroyer the fundamental truth can be restated as follows there is no you and the world on a fundamental level you in the world are one and the same there is no principle of individuation Schopenhauer is fond of using the latin term in keep human individual series that separates you from the world all is one this is the basic idea of Schopenhauer's metaphysics of course now that we notice the question arises what we do in other words it's time to discuss ethics

Channel: Weltgeist

Views: 14,614

Rating: 4.9550562 out of 5

Keywords: arthur, schopenhauer, arthur schopenhauer, philosophy, german philosophy, world as will and representation, immanuel kant, kant, freud, einstein, nietzsche, continental philosophy, principium individationis, all is one, multiplicity, existentialism

Id: i87hX_uznEQ

Length: 19min 31sec (1171 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 01 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/WeltgeistYT]

Abstract: In my experience, Schopenhauer’s metaphysical system (as opposed to his ethics and aesthetics) have been very much overlooked. They are worth exploring.

This video talks you through Schopenhauer’s metaphysical system. Starting with a quick recap of Kant, we then see where Schopenhauer departs from him through the “narrow door to the truth”: Schopenhauer’s discussion of the twofold knowledge humans have of their own body, and how this leads to “the world as Will”. Then a brief discussion on the famous “Will to Life”.

If you have never heard of phrases like “the illusory character of the principium individuationis” or “there is multiplicity where there should be unity”, you’re very welcome to give this video a watch.

[u/Cerevor]

Schopenhauer is my favorite philosopher, and you did a really good job of introducing his thougths via Kant. I'm looking forward to part 2, and in the meantime I thought I might share a video from Kurzgesagt (a semi philosophical channel) that plays with Shopenhauer's idea of multiplicity vs unity: The Egg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6fcK_fRYaI

[u/sigma6d]

Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.

— Schopenhauer

I’m partial to Bertrand Russell’s treatment of Schopenhauer, labeling him the layman’s philosopher.

[u/Eauor]

Thank you, Weltgeist, for making this! I’m very Interested to learn more, be sure to post part 2 when you’re done.

[u/daljit97]

I think the biggest "issue" in Schopenhauer's metaphysics is to consider whether the knowledge of the self is noumenal or not. Schopenhauer is often inconsistent in his wording regarding this, but he does mention that the thing-in-itself cannot be known as even knowledge of the body happens in time (hence it is not noumenal knowledge). Furthermore, he also asserts that the knowledge of the body is more "intimate" (I think he suggests that it is "closer" to the noumena) than that of ordinary phenomena as it doesn't happen in space, but it is hard to even consider the meaning of "close" or "intimate" in this sense because in order to define those terms one would have to know the extremes of the scale being used to describe those words. How do we know for example, that knowledge only in time is actually is "closer" to noumenal knowledge if we don't know anything about the noumenon? The noumenon could be completely different that any sort of knowledge of phenomena (whether or not that knowledge is "spaceless"). If one admits that the knowledge that Schopenhauer is talking about is just like the other knowledge of ordinary phenomena, then has Schopenhauer really advanced Kant's metaphysics in any meaningful way? I think this criticism was explored by one of his students, but I am not sure about this.

[u/King_Reason]

“Of how many a man may it not be said that hope made a fool of him until he danced into the arms of death.”

[u/[deleted]]

[removed]

[u/jameSmith567]

In his video, Weltgeist says that Schopenhauer had influenced Nietzsche.... I don't think that it's something that Schopenhauer would be praud of... I'm pretty sure Schopenhauer would consider him as a charlatan, just like he considered Hegel as a charlatan.

[u/finiteRepair]

Does philosophy not concern itself with the temporal? Even if he is sexist or otherwise anarchistic by our modern lens should we not still consider his views?