Dichotomies III
This post is the third in a series which will explore the principles of Neither/Nor, in this case that every idea, concept, philosophy has a history. Listen here for background. See also “Dichotomies I: Tolstoy as Educator” and “Dichotomies II: Then We Take Berlin.”
Things are not what they seem
Last week, I promised I’d try to relate Taoist wu-wei to Schopenhauer’s will.
But what are the titular “Will” and “Representation” in Schopenhauer’s magnum opus, The World as Will and Representation (first edition 1818, second edition 1844)?
To understand this, we have to understand a bit about Kant (1724–1804), to whom Schopenhauer (1788–1860) is directly responding.
Can we not just skip Kant?
No, we can’t.
Immanuel Kant, in the Critique of Pure Reason (also known as “the first critique,” 1781), attempted to sharpen up the division between the apparent and the actual. Two later, in the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783), partly because nobody really read the Critique, he began to protest. Like a man waving his arms at traffic, Kant tried to flag down speeding metaphysicians to address the issues he had raised:
My intention is to convince all of those who find it worthwhile to occupy themselves with metaphysics that it is unavoidably necessary to suspend their work for the present, to consider all that has happened until now as if it had not happened, and before all else to pose the question: “whether such a thing as metaphysics is even possible at all.”
— Kant, Prolegomena, 4:255
In Schopenhauer’s view, nobody stopped until Schopenhauer himself did.
The central issue for Kant is whether we can know anything about “reality” from the “appearances.” If we can only know things through our senses and mind, and metaphysics is about “mind-independent” stuff, then Kant thinks metaphysics can’t proceed.
In Kant’s terms, the phenomenon refers to what we receive from our senses, structured by our cognitive faculties and forms of the intuition like “time” and “space.” The noumenon (the “thing-in-itself,” pl. noumena) is that which exists independently of our experience. In the first Critique, Kant argues that the sense- and mind-independent world cannot be known at all. Our knowledge is limited to the phenomena; we can never know the noumena definitively.
Was Kant the first to raise this question?
Not even close.
Kant wasn’t even the first in the modern era to seriously doubt the senses. John Locke (1632–1704) and David Hume (1711–1776) before him both did this, and Hume’s radical skepticism about things like causality is what famously woke Kant from his “dogmatic slumber.”
Moreover, this divide had been simmering beneath the surface since at least Thales of Miletus (~626–548 BC). I suspect it’s much older in Indian and Chinese philosophy, but Thales is a convenient place to start, since around the time of Kant, the Germans began to pretend that philosophy had been an inexorable march from pre-Socratic Greece to modern Prussia.1
For now let’s accept the story as given. Here’s R. J. Hollingdale (1930–2001), who translated Schopenhauer’s Essays and Aphorisms, on this duality:
Let us begin with the metaphysical problem and let us try to make clear that it is a real problem and not something dreamed up by an idle or an overrefined mind. Let us go back to the beginning of philosophy and science, back to Thales, traditionally the first philosopher and scientist, because we shall find already in Thales the basic metaphysical problem Schopenhauer seeks to solve.
Thales is credited with the theory that everything is ‘really’ water. What does such an assertion mean? Why should it ever have occurred to anyone to say that everything was ‘really’ water? On the face of it, the theory is a statement about the physical world as conceived by the Greeks of the sixth century B.C.: it means that, of the four ‘elements’, three are forms of the fourth: earth is solidified water, air rarefied water, fire (aether, the hot sky of the eastern Mediterranean) rarefied air or twice-rarefied water. But merely in these physical terms the statement is inexplicable: for not only does it contradict the evidence of the five senses, it also seems to lack any necessity. Why should earth not be earth, air air and fire fire, as they seem to be? Now the inexplicability is in the idiom; the novelty is the language of physics, and in order to see what is meant we have to translate it back into its original language, that of metaphysics. Translated into the language of metaphysics, ‘Everything is really water’ reads: The world we perceive is characterized by great diversity, but this diversity is not fundamental; fundamentally the world is a unity. But notice that this unity is precisely what is not apparent; what is apparent is the reverse, the diversity of the world, and the object of the hypothesis is to assert the apparitional nature of this diversity. In its last significance, therefore, ‘Everything is water’ means: The world of diversity is an apparent world; in reality the world is one. Thus we find at the very beginning of philosophy the assertion that there exist two worlds, the ‘real’ and the ‘apparent’, that everything is ‘really’ something else and not what it ‘appears’ to be. If we are willing to call the language of physics employed by Thales the content of the thought, and the metaphysical basis of this language the form of the thought, we can say that the difference between scientific and pre-scientific thought is not so great a gulf as it is often supposed to be: the content of the thought is new, but its form remains the same, namely that there are two worlds, the one perceived, the other a mystery. Only if Thales had said ‘Everything is really what it appears to be’ would the form of the thought have changed.
In other words, the appeal of dividing the world into reality and appearance comes from the difficulty of reconciling the wild diversity of sense experience (“Heraclitean flux”), and randomness in life, with the sense that there must be some underlying patterns or order.2
Why, then, are some things in life so orderly, and others so random? One possible answer to this question is that nature seems one way, but is actually another.
Hollingdale shows that although Thales’ “everything is water” now seems a bit odd, there are important related ideas which take the same form, like Democritus’ (460–370 BC) idea that although everything appears to be made of different things, everything is really made of one thing, namely indivisible atoms. This view is more obviously a contributor to the science of the past few centuries than Thales’ view.
How does this relate to Schopenhauer?
Kant thought that “reality,” the mind-independent noumenon, could not be known. This is a dissatisfying place to stop doing philosophy.
Both Schopenhauer’s archnemesis Hegel (1770–1831) and Schopenhauer (1788–1860) himself attempted to wrangle with the severance between the phenomenon and noumenon in different ways.
For Schopenhauer, the divide is between “representation,” or abstraction from the senses, which relate to Kant’s phenomena. But Schopenhauer, unlike Kant, claimed that it is possible to know the thing-in-itself, the noumena, or “reality.”
He agrees, as Kant argued, that it is impossible to know reality through what he is calling “representation,” which is abstraction done in the mind. But it is possible through another source we have of knowledge, which is not abstract. That way is not through the mind but through the body. This is because our bodies are part of reality, in a way that our minds are not. The fact that Schopenhauer puts the body ahead of the mind, and life ahead of thinking, is one of the reasons I think he is so important — even though I disagree with him substantially in other regards
Schopenhauer calls the body a “subterranean passage” to reality:
In consequence of all this, on the path of objective knowledge, thus starting from the representation, we shall never get beyond the representation, i.e., the phenomenon. We shall therefore remain at the outside of things; we shall never be able to penetrate into their inner nature, and investigate what they are in themselves, in other words, what they may be by themselves. So far I agree with Kant. But now, as the counterpoise to this truth, I have stressed that other truth that we are not merely the knowing subject, but that we ourselves are also among those realities or entities we require to know, that we ourselves are the thing-in-itself. Consequently, a way from within stands open to us to that real inner nature of things to which we cannot penetrate from without. It is, so to speak, a subterranean passage, a secret alliance, which, as if by treachery, places us all at once in the fortress that could not be taken by attack from without. Precisely as such, the thing-in-itself can come into consciousness only quite directly, namely by it itself being conscious of itself; to try to know it objectively is to desire something contradictory. Everything objective is representation, consequently appearance, in fact mere phenomenon of the brain.
— Schopenhauer, WWR II, Chapter XVIII (trans. Payne)
Schopenhauer claims that Kant’s noumenon, the “thing-in-itself,” or “reality,” can be known directly through the body, because our body is part of it. He further argues that the nature of everything we find in reality, our bodies included, is the will. This is not conscious, motivated human will, which is a specific form of Schopenhauer’s metaphysical will. Instead, it is a kind of striving he finds throughout nature.
Schopenhauer’s will characterizes not just humans, not just animal and plant life, but also the laws of nature:
Therefore, if I say that the force which attracts a stone to the earth is of its nature, in itself, and apart from all representation, will, then no one will attach to this proposition the absurd meaning that the stone moves itself according to a known motive, because it is thus that the will appears in man.
— Schopenhauer, WWR I, §19
Schopenhauer claims, then, that we live in two worlds. The first is of the will, which is Kant’s noumenon. The second is representation, abstractions built up from Kant’s Kant’s phenomena.
Notice, however, that while Kant was interested in reality versus appearance, Schopenhauer has shifted the conversation to the nature of reality and the nature of appearance. The former is the will, constantly striving blindly and never satisfied. The latter is representation, abstracting away from the messy business of life.
For Schopenhauer, the will is relentless and insatiable. It seeks satisfaction constantly but never reaches it.3 Because of this, our lives are full of long periods of striving and short periods of relief from this striving.
One of the main ways Schopenhauer thinks we can find a bit of peace is through art. He thinks art, plus a denial of the urges of life, are the least-bad way to cope with the insatiable nature of the will.
Here’s one of his passages which I find most hilarious:
As a reliable compass for orientating yourself in life nothing is more useful than to accustom yourself to regarding this world as a place of atonement, a sort of penal colony. When you have done this you will order your expectations of life according to the nature of things and no longer regard the calamities, sufferings, torments and miseries of life as something irregular and not to be expected but will find them entirely in order, well knowing that each of us is here being punished for his existence and each in his own particular way. This outlook will enable us to view the so-called imperfections of the majority of men, i.e. their moral and intellectual shortcomings and the facial appearance resulting therefrom, without surprise and certainly without indignation: for we shall always bear in mind where we are and consequently regard every man first and foremost as a being who exists only as a consequence of his culpability and whose life is an expiation of the crime of being born.
— Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms (1851)
Nietzsche will take Schopenhauer’s divide a step further, making Schopenhauer’s will into the Dionysian and his representation into the Apollonian form of art. He will also come to reject Schopenhauer’s “pessimism” and ascetic/life-denying tendencies.
Neither Kant, nor Schopenhauer, nor Nietzsche propose dichotomies that are precisely the same as the one that I’m addressing in Neither/Nor. But in some ways, apart from his analysis of the nature of the thing-in-itself (the insatiable will), Schopenhauer is the closest, as we shall see in future posts.
Best,
Bryan
See Bryan Van Norden’s brilliant piece on this dynamic: “Western philosophy is racist.”
The Old Testament focuses on the question of whether there’s an underlying unity of moral order set by God behind the apparent moral diversity. If there is a moral order, why don’t rewards and punishments reliably seem to align with attempts to understand these rules? There’s definitely some correlation with good outcomes in following the “laws of morality” (e.g. the commandments), but they are not enforced as consistently as, for example, the “laws of nature.” This leads to the “problem of evil,” and eventually (as Spinoza argues) to resignation to ignorance of the mind of God. I sort of think the reality/appearance divide might be related in spirit, a kind of “Greek problem of evil,” which comes from seeing hints of a unity behind diverse appearances.
If this sounds like Buddhist dukkha, that’s no coincidence; Schopenhauer read Sanskrit, especially praising the Upanishads, and knew the Pali canon.