Schopenhauer’s magnum opus is about the nature of reality and the individual’s place in it. He begins with the understanding, “The subjective correlate of matter (or causality, since the two are the same) is the understanding…. To have cognition of causality is the understanding’s only function, its single capability…. All causality, and therefore all matter, and with it the whole of actuality, exists only for the understanding, through the understanding, and in the understanding…. What the eye, the ear, the hand senses is not an intuition: it is merely data. Only when the understanding proceeds from the effect back to the cause is the world present in intuition, spread out in space, its form capable of change, its matter persisting through time…. Just as the world as representation exists only through the understanding, it exists only for the understanding as well.”
Schopenhauer moves on to the conception of the world. “The world is exactly as it presents itself and it presents itself completely and without reserve as representation, held together by the law of causality. This is its empirical reality. But on the other hand, causality exists only in the understanding and for the understanding. Thus the understanding is always the condition for the actual (i.e. active) world as such and in its entirety: without the understanding this world is nothing.”
Next, Schopenhauer circles back to individual consciousness. “We start out neither from the object nor the subject, but rather from representation as the primary fact of consciousness, whose most essential and primary form is the subject/object dichotomy…. The total and complete relativity of the world as representation, both in its most universal form (subject and object) and the form subordinate to this (the principle of sufficient reason), indicates, as we have already said, that the innermost being of the world is to be sought in a wholly different side of the world, in something utterly distinct from representation…. This new, more highly potentialized consciousness, this abstract reflection of everything intuitive in the non-intuitive concepts of reason is the only thing that gives people the circumspection that so completely distinguishes their consciousness from that of animals…. People are determined by abstract concepts independent of the present moment…. It is only through abstraction that the simultaneous presence of such motives in consciousness can lead to the knowledge that one motive excludes the other and hence permits a comparison of the relative force each exerts on the will. Accordingly, the prevailing motive, in so far as it is decisive, is the considered decision of the will and announces itself as a sure sign of the state of the will.”
Reason is the next concept Schopenhauer tackles. “Reason only ever reproduces in cognition what had already been received by a different means, it does not actually extend our cognition, but only gives it a different form: it allows what is already cognized concretely and intuitively to be cognized abstractly and universally.” Next, Schopenhauer explains philosophy. “Philosophy has the peculiarity that it does not presuppose anything as already known… even the principle of sufficient reason itself…. The very thing that the sciences presuppose and posit as the basis and limit of their explanations is exactly what constitutes the real problem of philosophy…. The principle of non-contradiction only establishes the mutual consistency of concepts, but does not specify the concepts themselves. The principle of sufficient reason explains the connections between appearances, but not the appearances themselves. So philosophy cannot use these principles to search for either an efficient cause or a final cause of the world as a whole…. But such cognition is intuitive, concrete cognition: philosophy’s task is to reproduce this in the abstract, to elevate the succession of transient intuitions and in general everything that the wide-ranging concept of feeling includes (and designates merely negatively as knowledge that is neither abstract nor clear) into permanent knowledge. Accordingly, philosophy must be an abstract statement of the essence of the entire world, of the whole as well as of all its parts…. Philosophy will be a complete recapitulation, a reflection, as it were, of the world, in abstract concepts…. We human beings always lead a second, abstract life alongside our concrete life…. Our abstract life, as it appears before us in rational contemplation, is the calm reflection of the first life and the world it is lived in.”
Schopenhauer moves on to the subjective individual and his will. “His cognition, which upholds and conditions the entire world as representation, is nonetheless completely mediated through a body whose affections, as we have shown, are the starting point for the understanding as it inuits this world. To the pure subject of cognition as such, this body is a representation like any other, an object among objects…. The subject of cognition, appearing as an individual, is given the solution to the riddle: and this solution is will…. Every true act of his will is immediately and inevitably a movement of his body as well…. The entire body is nothing but objectified will…. The will is a priori cognition of the body, and the body is a posteriori cognition of the will…. The will is the most immediate thing in our consciousness…. Only the will is thing in itself…. All objects are the appearance, the visible manifestation, the objecthood of the will…. This thing in itself (we will retain the Kantian expression as a standing formula) can never be an object, because an object is only its appearance and not what it really is…. The concept of will is unique among all possible concepts in that it does not come from appearance, it does not come from mere intuitive representation, but rather comes from within, springs from everyone’s most immediate consciousness…. We are this…. It is only by virtue of time and space that something that is one and the same in essence and concept can nonetheless appear as different, as a multiplicity of coexistent and successive things…. The will as thing in itself lies outside the province of the principle of sufficient reason in all its forms, and therefore has absolutely no ground…. It is one in the sense that it lies outside of time and space, outside the principium individuationis…. The individual, the person, is not will as a thing in itself, but rather an appearance of the will…. Although the will is in itself groundless, its appearance is very much subject to the law of necessity, i.e. the principle of sufficient reason…. Although each motion is an appearance of the will, it must nonetheless have a cause that situates it in relation to a particular time and place, which is to say: not in general, according to its inner essence, but rather as a particular appearance…. What is universal, the common essence of all appearances of a particular sort, what must be presupposed if causal explanation is to have sense or meaning, is the universal force of nature, which can never be more than an occult quality for physics, precisely because this is where aetiological explanation ends and metaphysical explanation begins…. The differences between these original forces (forces that can never be derived from one another) in no way interrupts the unity of that chain of causes and the connections between all its links. The aetiology of nature and the philosophy of nature will never detract from one another…. Aetiology accounts for the causes that necessarily give rise to the particular appearances to be explained…. Philosophy however only thinks about universals, even in nature: here, the original forces themselves are its object.”
Schopenhauer circles back to the world. “This world in which we live and have our being is, in its whole essence, the will through and through, and at the same time representation through and through…. Everyone finds that he is this will that makes up the inner essence of the world, and he also finds that he is the cognitive subject; the whole world is only the representation of the subject and to this extent it exists only in relation to his consciousness, as its necessary bearer.” Now, he goes back to the nature of the will, “In fact the absence of all goals, of all boundaries, belongs to the essence of the will in itself, which is an endless striving…. Every goal that is achieved is once again the beginning of a new course of action, and so to infinity…. Eternal becoming, endless flux belong to the revelation of the essence of the will.”
Schopenhauer riffs on meditation, the subjective perspective, and the nature of the will. “No longer led by the forms of the principle of sufficient reason to pursue merely the relations between things (which in the end always aims at their relation to our own will), if we stop considering the Where, When, Why and Wherefore of things but simply and exclusively consider the What, if we do not allow our consciousness to become engrossed by abstract thinking, concepts of reason; but if, instead of all this, we devote the entire power of our mind to intuition and immerse ourselves in this entirely, letting the whole of consciousness be filled with peaceful contemplation of the natural object that is directly present… we lose ourselves in the object completely, i.e. we forget our individuality, our will, and continue to exist only as pure subject, the clear mirror of the object, so that it is as if the object existed on its own, without anyone to perceive it…. The individual has lost himself in this very intuition: rather, he is the pure, will-less, painless, timeless subject of cognition.” However, Schopenhauer understands that everyday life is not often like this. “As long as our consciousness is filled by our will, as long as we are given over to the pressure of desires with their constant hopes and fears, as long as we are the subject of willing, we will never have lasting happiness or peace…. But when some occasion from the outside or a disposition from within suddenly lifts us out of the endless stream of willing, tearing cognition from its slavery to the will, our attention is no longer directed to the motives of willing but instead grasps things freed from their relation to the will, and hence considers them without interests, without subjectivity, purely objectively; we are given over to the things entirely, to the extent that they are mere representations, not to the extent that they are motives: then suddenly the peace that we always sought on the first path of willing but that always eluded us comes of its own accord, and all is well with us…. The particular intuited thing is at once and inseparably raised to the Idea of its type, and the cognizing individual is raised to the pure subject of will-less cognition; as such, neither stands in the stream of time or any other relations…. Happiness and unhappiness disappear: we are no longer the individual, this is forgotten, we are only the pure subject of cognition: we continue to exist only as the one eye of the world.”
Schopenhauer discusses art. “As we have said, the whole visible world is only the objectivation, the mirror of the will, accompanying it for its self-cognition and indeed, as we will soon see, for the possibility of its redemption; as if, at the same time, the world as representation, viewed on its own breaking it free from the will, letting it be the only thing occupying one’s consciousness, is the most joyful and the only innocent side of life; — we have to consider art as the greater intensification, the more complete development of all this, since it essentially accomplishes the same thing as the visible world itself, only more concentratedly, with deliberateness and clarity of mind, and it therefore may be called the blossom of life.”
Schopenhauer describes infinity, time, and history. “An entire eternity, i.e. an infinite time has elapsed before the present moment, and thus everything that could or should have become already necessarily has become…. Cognition made possible by the principle of sufficient reason can never allow anyone to gain access to the inner essence of things; all we do is chase appearances to infinity…. The truly philosophical way of looking at the world, i.e. the way that leads beyond appearance and provides cognition of the inner essence of the world, does not ask where or whence or why, but instead, always and everywhere, asks only for the what of the world…. In the world of representation, the will finds a mirror in which it can cognize itself with an increasing clarity and perfection that culminates in the human being…. Since the will is the thing itself, the inner content, the essential aspect of the world, while life, the visible world, appearance, is only the mirror of the will; life is as inseparable from the will as a shadow from its body…. The individual comes into being and passes away; but the individual is only appearance, it exists only for cognition that is caught up in the principle of sufficient reason, the principium individuationis…. The present is the only form of all life…. Since the whole human being is only the appearance of his will, nothing can be more mistaken than for him, starting from reflection, to will to be something other than he is: this is a direct contradiction of the will with itself…. Every individual, every human face and its life history is just one more short dream of the infinite spirit of nature, the persistent will to life.”
Finally, Schopenhauer returns to the nature of the world. “Eternal justice is really part of the essence of the world…. The world in all the multiplicity of its parts and forms is the appearance, the objecthood of the one will to life…. The world itself is the world tribunal, the Last Judgment…. The greatest, most important and most significant appearance that the world can show us is not someone who conquers the world, but rather someone who overcomes it…. If the negation of the will has arisen in someone, that person is full of inner joy and true heavenly peace, however poor, joyless and deprived his situation might look from the outside…. It is an imperturbable peace, a profound calm and inner serenity…. Every fulfilled wish we wrest from the world is really like alms that keep the beggar alive today so that he can starve again tomorrow; resignation on the other hand is like an inherited estate: it frees its possessor from all cares forever…. Negation is the only act of the freedom of the will that emerges into appearance.”
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