This second volume of Schopenhauer’s magnum opus is mainly footnotes, expositions, and addendum to his main treatise. It does contain a multitude of hidden gems. Schopenhauer states, “Our whole consciousness, with its inner and outer perception, always has time as its form. Concepts on the other hand, as representations that have arisen through abstraction and are thoroughly general and distinct from all particular things, have (in this quality) a being that is certainly objective to a certain extent, and yet does not belong to any temporal sequence…. They must to a certain extent be reduced again to the nature of particular things, individualized and thus linked to a sensible representation: i.e. to a word. The word is therefore the sensuous sign of the concept and as such the necessary means of fixing it, i.e. of making it present to consciousness (bound up as this is with the form of time), and hence creating a connection between reason (whose objects are merely general universals that know neither time nor place) and consciousness (which is sensible, bound up with time, and to this extent merely animal)…. Only this makes possible other operations such as judging, inferring, comparing, restricting, etc…. Word and language are thus the indispensable means of clear thinking.”
Next, Schopenhauer takes a step back in scope to describe the object of philosophy. “The truly philosophical state consists in the first instance in being able to entertain a sense of wonder about habitual and everyday things, since this causes one to problematize the universal aspects of appearance…. The lower a person’s intellectual stature, the fewer riddles existence itself holds for him: everything for him seems self-evident, both as it is and that it is…. The philosophical sense of wonder that arises from this in certain individuals is conditioned by a higher development of intelligence, and yet not only by this; doubtless it is knowledge of death, together with reflection on suffering and the needs of life, that give a strong impetus to philosophical deliberation and metaphysical interpretations of the world. If our lives were endless and painless, it might never occur to anyone to ask why the world exists and precisely the nature it does.”
Schopenhauer’s great insight was distinguishing between the nature of appearances and the things in themselves. “The thing in itself can, as such, enter consciousness with complete immediacy only by becoming itself conscious of itself…. And since intuition can provide only appearances, not things in themselves, it follows that we have absolutely no cognition of things in themselves…. I accept this for everything except the cognition everyone has of his own willing…. It is more real than any other cognition. It is also not a priori…. In fact, our willing is the only opportunity we have to understand the interior of a process that also presents itself externally, and hence it is also the only thing that we are acquainted with directly and not, like everything else, given merely in representation…. We must learn to understand nature through ourselves, and not the other way around.”
The law of causation also plays an integral role in Schopenhauer’s philosophical system. “No truth is more certain than this, that everything that happens, be it small or great, happens with complete necessity…. Every being in the world is on the one hand appearance, and necessarily determined by the law of appearance, but on the other hand is in itself will, and in fact absolutely free will, since any necessity arises only through the forms that belong entirely to appearance, namely through the principle of sufficient reason in its different configurations…. Therefore people really only have the choice either to see the world as a mere machine that necessarily runs down, or to recognize as its essence in itself a free will that does not express itself directly in the effects of things but, in the first instance in their existence and essence. This freedom is therefore a transcendental freedom, and coexists with empirical necessity just as the transcendental ideality of appearances coexists with their empirical reality…. Every being, without exception, acts with strict necessity, but exists and is what it is by virtue of its freedom.”
Throughout this volume, the difference between the world of appearances and the things in themselves is drummed in again and again. “When directly intuiting the world and life, we usually consider things only in their relations, and consequently in accordance with their relative rather than absolute essence and existence. We look, for instance, at houses, ships, machines and such with the thought of their purpose and their suitability for that purpose. We look at human beings with the thought of their relation to us, it they have one; next we look at them with the thought of their relation to each other…. This is the consideration of things in their relations, indeed, by means of these relations, according to the principle of sufficient reason…. But if, by way of exception, we experience a momentary increase in the intensity of our intuitive intelligence, then all at once we see things with completely different eyes: we no longer grasp them according to their relations but rather grasp what they are in and of themselves…. Then each particular thing is the representative of its species: accordingly, we now grasp the universal in each essence. What we recognize in this way are the Ideas of things.”
Morality for Schopenhauer was a relation of the will and not, therefore, merely in the world of appearances. “Morality is what everything depends on, according to the testimony of our innermost consciousness: and morality lies only in the individual, as the direction of his will. In truth only the life course of each individual has unity, coherence, and true significance: life should be viewed as teaching us a lesson and the meaning of the lesson is a moral one. Only inner processes, to the extent that they concern the will, have true reality and are actual events; because only the will is the thing in itself.”
Finally, Schopenhauer riffs more on the true nature of the will. “In self-consciousness, the subject of cognition, as the only source of cognition, confronts the will as a spectator and, although it arose from the will, it cognizes the will as something different from it and foreign; thus, it cognizes the will only empirically, in time, and piecemeal in its successive acts and affects, and so experiences the will’s decisions only a posteriori and often very indirectly. This is why our own being is a riddle to us (i.e. to our intellect) and the individual views itself as newly created and transient although its being in itself is timeless and hence eternal.” He continues poetically, “Awoken to life from the night of unconsciousness, the will finds itself as an individual in a world without end or limit, among countless individuals who are all striving, suffering, going astray; and it hurries back to the old unconsciousness, as if through a bad dream. — But until then its desires are unlimited, its claims inexhaustible, and every satisfied desire gives birth to a new one. No possible worldly satisfaction could be enough to quiet its longing…. Everything in life proclaims that earthly happiness is ordained to be in vain or recognized as an illusion…. What is promised is not delivered, unless it is to show how undesirable the desired thing was…. And so happiness always lies in the future, or in the past, and the present is like a small dark cloud.”
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