Overcoming the Will to Live: An Introduction to Schopenhauer
Part 1

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Schopenhauer as Lebensphilosoph

This introduction to the thought of Arthur Schopenhauer is not, strictly speaking, a part of the series on “Heidegger’s history of metaphysics” that I have been writing now for almost five years. The reason is that Heidegger had little use for Schopenhauer, and not a lot to say about him. To my knowledge, he never taught a course on any of Schopenhauer’s works. While Heidegger mentions Schopenhauer in a number of places, he never devoted an essay to him.

Further, when Heidegger does mention Schopenhauer it is often to disparage him. In large measure, this is because Schopenhauer disparages other, greater philosophers. For example, in the first volume of the Nietzsche Lectures, Heidegger writes,

Schopenhauer’s major work appeared in the year 1818. It was profoundly indebted to the main works of Schelling and Hegel, which had already appeared by that time. The best proof of this debt consists in the excessive and tasteless rebukes Schopenhauer hurled at Hegel and Schelling his life long. Schopenhauer called Schelling a “windbag,” Hegel a “bumbling charlatan.” Such abuse, directed repeatedly against philosophy in the years following Schopenhauer, does not even have the dubious distinction of being particularly “novel.”[1]

Later in the same text, Heidegger writes: “In terms of content, Schopenhauer thrives on the authors he excoriates, namely, Schelling and Hegel. The one he does not excoriate is Kant. Instead, he thoroughly misunderstands him.”[2] Still later, Heidegger states that Schopenhauer “vulgarizes” Kant’s philosophy.[3] It is quite true that while Schopenhauer believes he is championing Kant’s philosophy, he manages to misunderstand him in important ways (which we shall discuss).

However, the major reason for Heidegger’s dismissiveness is that he perceives Schopenhauer as having nothing profound or interesting to say about being. Those already familiar with Schopenhauer may balk at this: doesn’t Schopenhauer say that the being of beings is an infinite, striving will, and isn’t this claim at least interesting? Not for Heidegger, because Schelling had made the same claim nine years before Schopenhauer published his magnum opus The World as Will and Representation. In his 1809 “Freedom Essay,” to which I have devoted a series of articles, Schelling writes,

In the final and highest judgment, there is no being other than will. Will is primal being [Ursein] to which alone all predicates of being apply: groundlessness, eternality, independence from time, self-affirmation. All of philosophy strives only to find this highest expression.[4]

Schopenhauer’s argument for being as will rests upon a twofold misinterpretation of Kant, which is fatal to the argument. The central claim of his philosophy, therefore, is without foundation. Though one could imagine other ways to justify the same claim, the argument Schopenhauer himself presents fails spectacularly. So why study Schopenhauer at all?

The reason is that while Schopenhauer may have been a bad interpreter of Kant, and a bad metaphysician, he was a profound observer of life. Schopenhauer offers us a viable and profound philosophy of life. It is not a “pie in the sky” philosophy; it is not unrealistic or idealistic (in the mundane sense of that term). Schopenhauer tries to confront what is terrible about life and to come to terms with it – to make sense out of our existence and, in particular, to make sense out of suffering.

This is not to say that his philosophy is gloomy and depressing. He does not tell us that things are hopeless. He gives us a way to lead a meaningful life. Further, what he tells us has a great deal in common with the most profound teachings of “Eastern philosophy,” especially those found in the Hindu mystical texts, the Upanishads, and the texts of Buddhism. Indeed, Schopenhauer was one of the first Western philosophers to be familiar with those works – and the first to be positively influenced by them.

In short, Schopenhauer is one of those philosophers who is a companion and a guide for life. Unfortunately, this would not have cut any ice with Heidegger, who was quite dismissive of the genre of “philosophy of life” (Lebensphilosophie). Heidegger regarded Lebensphilosophie as what we might call “philosophy lite.” He was only interested in metaphysics, and only when practiced by the most profound and interesting of philosophers. But let us set Heidegger aside for the moment, for we do not need to be governed by his prejudices.

Another reason to study Schopenhauer is that he was extremely influential. With Kant, German philosophy became largely indecipherable to the educated public, and the idealists who followed Kant were significantly more obscure. This was the beginning of the “professionalization” of philosophy, with academic philosophers writing almost exclusively for other academics. By contrast, Schopenhauer, who was a failed academic, is one of the clearest and most elegant prose stylists in German. As a result, he came to have a wide influence outside the academy (though, as we shall see, only late in his life). Nietzsche was famously influenced by him, as were Wagner, Weininger, Freud, and many others.

Life and Writings

Arthur Schopenhauer was born on February 22, 1788 in Danzig, then part of Germany but now part of Poland, and known today as Gdansk. The Schopenhauers were a wealthy mercantile family. Arthur’s father, Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer, was a well-educated man of the world who was already past middle age when his son was born (his wife, and Arthur’s mother, Johanna, was considerably younger than he). Heinrich spoke English and was an anglophile. Indeed, he named his son Arthur because it is one of the few names that is spelled identically in both English and German.

In 1793, when Arthur was five, Danzig was invaded by Prussia, and Heinrich moved the family and the business to Hamburg, where they remained until Heinrich’s death in 1805. Heinrich was a strange, melancholy man and it is generally thought that he took his own life – though the matter was hushed up. This event may have some significance for understanding certain aspects of Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy.

While Heinrich was alive he was determined that his son would grow up and run the family business. However, at a rather early age Arthur expressed the desire to receive the education appropriate to a scholar. So, Heinrich conceived of a diabolical scheme. When the boy was fifteen he made him an offer: either he could spend two years traveling around Europe, after which he would immediately go into the family business, or he could have the education he wanted, but he would have to spend those years at home studying. No travel.

Heinrich knew that Arthur, being a fifteen-year-old boy, would fall into his trap – and he did. Arthur chose to travel, and in those two years he gained a wealth of knowledge and experience. But when that idyllic period came to an end, Arthur faced what he saw as a bleak future. It was a future of material comfort, but of complete boredom running a business he had no interest in. Nevertheless, he had a strong sense of honor, and did not want to go back on his promise. Even after his father’s death and after Johanna had sold the family’s interest in the firm, Arthur continued to work for it.

After her husband’s death, Johanna Schopenhauer relocated to Weimar, which was a major literary center in Germany. In Weimar she reinvented herself and became hostess to the great artists and writers who lived there. Eventually, she would become a bestselling novelist famous throughout Europe. Indeed, for many years Arthur was more or less known as “Johanna Schopenhauer’s son.” He did not achieve fame until close to his death. Now, of course, he is quite famous and his mother is forgotten.

Schopenhauer had a particularly bad relationship with his mother throughout his life, and her fame only served to worsen it. Like his father, he had a melancholy nature and Johanna found him hard to get along with. Schopenhauer was a naysayer and a worrywart. Johanna, for her part, was not a loving mother. So difficult was their relationship that they never saw each other for the last twenty-four years of Johanna’s life.

However, when Arthur wrote to her from Hamburg that his life in business was hell and that he would like to go back to school and become a scholar, Johanna was completely supportive. So, around 1809 he moved to Weimar and began studies there. So great was the conflict between them, however, that Johanna refused to allow Arthur to live with her. He took private lodgings instead.

Arthur was a stellar student and initially intended to study medicine. However, he soon gravitated to philosophy. At Weimar he studied Plato and Kant. The two philosophers would be the greatest influences on his thought, a matter to which we will return later. At the time, the star philosopher in Germany was J.G. Fichte, who claimed to be Kant’s true successor. So, Schopenhauer relocated to Berlin, where Fichte was teaching. However, he quickly grew disenchanted with Fichte, who he believed muddied his waters to make them appear deep. As noted already, Schopenhauer’s impressions of the great German Idealists –Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel – were exceedingly negative. He felt that they were frauds.

In 1813, Schopenhauer wrote a doctoral dissertation entitled The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. The ideas in this work would form one of the major foundations of the later World as Will and Representation. He was granted a doctorate by the university of Jena and then moved back to Weimar. Though Schopenhauer continued to live apart from his mother, he often attended her salons. There he met the celebrated Johann Wolfgang Goethe.

You can buy Collin Cleary’s Summoning the Gods here.

During the period 1813-1814 Schopenhauer made the acquaintance of an orientalist named Heinrich Majer who introduced him to Hindu and Buddhist writings. In particular, Schopenhauer fell in love with a Latin translation of the Upanishads (referred to in The World as Will and Representation as “the Oupnekhat”). Not only did he find these texts thought-provoking, he discovered that they contained ideas very similar to some he had already formulated.

In the spring of 1814, Schopenhauer left Weimar to live in Dresden and in the years 1814-1818 he wrote his masterwork, The World as Will and Representation. It was published in November 1818. The German title Die Welt as Wille und Vorstellung is often mis-translated as “The World as Will and Idea.” But Vorstellung means “representation,” not “idea” (which is Idee in German). Schopenhauer was a highly cultured man and though he was very much a creature of habit, he enjoyed the nightlife in Dresden and frequently went to the theatre. Schopenhauer was also musically talented, and played the flute. We know that he had affairs with women, though he never married.

Schopenhauer believed that with The World as Will and Representation he had unlocked the mysteries of the universe, and fully expected that the book would be widely read and reviewed. Instead, by 1835 almost the full first printing remained unsold and the book received no attention from academics. Schopenhauer decided to try and correct this situation by returning to Berlin and offering university lectures in philosophy. But this was a terrible failure owing (so it is said) to his giving the lectures at the same time Hegel scheduled his.

Schopenhauer stayed in Berlin for six years until 1831 when a cholera epidemic hit the city. It killed Hegel, amongst others (though the cause of Hegel’s death is disputed). Schopenhauer fled and took up residence in Frankfurt, where he would remain for the rest of his life. And he began to write again. In 1836 he published On the Will in Nature. In 1839 he was awarded a prize by a Norwegian academy for his essay The Freedom of the Will. A year or two later he wrote another essay titled The Foundations of Morality.

In 1844 he published a second edition of The World as Will and Representation, this time with an accompanying second volume of elucidations. (A third, even longer edition was brought out the year of his death). In 1851 he published a collection of popular essays in two volumes called Parerga and Paralipomena. “Parerga” is the plural of “parergon,” meaning something secondary to the main subject. “Paralipomena” comes from a Greek word meaning “to omit” and refers to things left out of the main body of a work.

All this time, however, Schopenhauer remained an obscure figure. Then in 1853 an English journal called The Westminster Review (edited by George Eliot) published an unsigned article titled “Iconoclasm in German Philosophy,” which mostly concerned Schopenhauer. The article led to an awakening of interest in his thought in England. It was published in German translation as well, which led to widespread interest in Schopenhauer in his native country. Suddenly, as an old man, Schopenhauer was famous. By 1857 lectures on his philosophy were being given in universities. Schopenhauer was quite pleased by all the attention showered on him, but he didn’t enjoy it for long. He died in 1859.

The World as Representation

In this series, we will focus on Schopenhauer’s major work, The World as Will and Representation. To understand that work we must begin with Kant, for Schopenhauer believed that his own philosophy was a development of Kant’s. Indeed, he believed (like Fichte) that he was completing Kant’s philosophy by drawing out implications that the great man himself did not recognize.

I have written a number of essays on Kant’s philosophy for Counter-Currents. Here it will suffice to mention that Kant’s revolutionary thesis was that the world we experience is partly a construction of our minds. This is what it means for Schopenhauer to say that the world is “representation.” What we experience are representations (in Kant’s terminology, “phenomena”) that are the product of innate mental structures which give form to raw sensory input.

As a result, we always experience the world as it is for us, never as it is in itself. This claim is sometimes mistaken for the currently fashionable, New Agey idea that each of us “constructs his own reality.” And Schopenhauer’s words certainly have the potential to mislead us in this regard. The World as Will and Representation begins with the following statement:

“The world is my representation”: this is a truth valid with reference to every living and knowing being, although man alone can bring it into reflective, abstract consciousness. If he really does so, philosophical discernment has dawned on him. It then becomes clear and certain to him that he does not know a sun and an earth, but only an eye that sees a sun, a hand that feels an earth; that the world around him is there only as representation, in other words, only in reference to another thing, namely that which represents, and this is himself.[5]

However, Schopenhauer’s claim that “the world is my representation” is intended as deliberately provocative. For both Kant and Schopenhauer, we all live in the same reality, precisely because human beings all construct reality in pretty much the same way, using the same innate mental structures.

He goes on to say that the world as representation has two halves: subject and object. The object is perceived by us in space and time (which, for Kant, are “forms of intuition” which have no reality independent of subjectivity). The other half of representation is, of course, the subject, which, he says, “does not lie in space and time.”[6] By “the subject” Schopenhauer is not referring to my body and its senses which I most certainly do perceive in space and time, occupying the space in front of the keyboard and clacking away as the minutes tick onward. Instead, Schopenhauer is referring to the pure “subjectivity” for which even the body is an object. The subject, thus, is defined purely as that to which objects (of any sort) appear.

This way of putting things is an attempt by Schopenhauer to streamline and simplify Kant’s claims about experience – and, as a first approach to Kant, it is quite valuable. Schopenhauer streamlines Kant in another, significant way. Kant had talked about how the faculty of “understanding” (Verstand) works to construct the objects of experience through the application of twelve fundamental categories, which function as innate structures in terms of which the subject always perceives and understands reality.

However, Schopenhauer reduces Kant’s faculty of understanding simply to “knowledge of cause and effect.” It is not that he thinks Kant’s categories do not exist or do not operate in consciousness. He is just offering a simpler, more elegant way in which we can understand the faculty of understanding itself. He writes that “To know causality is the sole function of the understanding, its only power, and it is a great power embracing much, manifold in its application, and yet unmistakable in its identity throughout all its manifestations.”[7]

This is because the understanding is essentially that which puts the “why?” to things – which was, in fact, the subject of Schopenhauer’s earlier work The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. Let’s take a look at the basic ideas he presents there, for he presupposes them in The World as Will and Representation. The “principle of sufficient reason” (henceforth, PSR) is an older idea in philosophy, and the phrase itself was introduced by Leibniz. The PSR states that for everything there is a sufficient reason, sufficient to make it be or exist, or be the way it is. Schopenhauer holds, in true Kantian fashion, that our belief in the PSR is innate.

He believes, further, that sufficient reasons fall into four categories or types (Schopenhauer’s “fourfold root”):

1. “A is a sufficient reason for B” means “A causes B.” This is the PSR as applied to the physical realm. For example, dropping the bottle on the floor causes it to break means that a sufficient reason for the bottle’s breaking is that it was dropped.
2. Further, the “framework” of the physical world is understandable through mathematics (as when we calculate the area of a room). In the realm of mathematical truth, “A is a sufficient reason for B” if A is a mathematical demonstration of B, or if A mathematically entails B. For example, we demonstrate that the circumference of a circle is 360 degrees through a geometric proof. Or: we show that A = C because A = B and B = C (i.e., a sufficient reason for A = C is that A = B and B = C).
3. In the realm of action, where some living things (including humans) act from motives, A is a sufficient reason for B if A is a motive that motivates the action B. For example, I walked down the street because I wanted to get to the grocery store.
4. In the realm of thought, governed by logic, A is a sufficient reason for B if A entails the truth of B. For example, if it’s true that all dogs are mammals, then it must be true that my dog is a mammal (i.e., a sufficient reason for my dog being a mammal is that all dogs are mammals).

In Kantian terms, the PSR, as a function of the understanding, deals only with objects as perceived by a subject. It is, in effect, a category which we use to understand the world of appearance – and which we have no choice but to use. The mind is determined to think in these terms (in the language popular today, the mind is “programmed” to think this way). But this means, as Schopenhauer points out, that we cannot understand the subject-object relationship in terms of this principle.

In other words, it is illegitimate to understand the subject, for instance, as the “effect” of a cause. Remember that “subject” here means “subjectivity” which is conceived purely as awareness of any sort of object. The principle of causality is used by subjectivity to make sense out of appearances or representations. But when we posit something as the “cause” of subjectivity itself, we are applying the idea beyond appearances, beyond what subjectivity actually experiences, because we do not experience subjectivity as being caused by something external to it. Indeed, we do not, in fact, experience anything as external to subjectivity at all, in the sense of being “outside” subjectivity and its representations.

Subject and object are the two poles of the world of appearance or representation (Vorstellung): there is me (there is subjectivity), and there is it. Never one without the other, and neither is conceivable without the other. But we cannot get “behind” the appearances to know what causes them.

Schopenhauer draws a parallel to the Indian doctrine of “the veil of maya” in speaking about how we cannot get beyond appearances. Life can, in a certain way, be understood to be a long dream that we cannot ever awaken from in order to know that it is merely a dream. The question is: whose dream is it? This is, essentially, a question Schopenhauer will answer in the next section of the book.

The foregoing summarizes the essential points of Book One of The World as Will and Representation, titled “The World as Representation, First Aspect.” This is the most tedious section of the entire volume (indeed, the only tedious section). With some modifications, it is basically a rehash of Kant (with evident influence from Fichte and Schelling). In our next installment, we shall turn to one of the most celebrated parts of the text: “The World as Will.”

Notes

[1] Martin Heidegger Nietzsche, Vol I: The Will to Power as Art, trans. David Farrell Krell (New York: HarperOne, 1979), 34.

[2] Heidegger Nietzsche 1, 107.

[3] Heidegger Nietzsche 1, 155.

[4] F.W.J. Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 21.

[5] Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Vol. I, trans. E.F.J. Payne (New York: Dover Publications, 1969), 3. (Henceforth, WWR 1.)

[6] WWR 1, 5.

[7] WWR 1, 11.