Mike's Concluding Thoughts on Schopenhauer

Below is the last part of Mike Wiest's review of and reflections on The World as Will and Representation, Volume One. The first two parts are here and here.

Well, I guess you can tell because I wrote this that I was impressed by Schopenhauer’s book. It seems to me to belong among the greatest works of philosophy ever, and to be the first (only?) time a major Western philosopher really absorbed the Eastern insights. But I may be still in the infatuated stage.

I guess the theory of determinism and freedom I gleaned from Volume 1 is not entirely satisfactory, but I think it is more than the usual semantic sophisms that attempt to make freedom and determinism compatible. Although S comes off as mainly determinist, I think it is an open question whether his scheme could be adapted to a quantum ontology (for example if quantum events are determined by nonlocal factors scattered all over spacetime including in the future). Maybe I’m also more open to him than most determinists because he admits and explains a much greater range of phenomena, such as the claims and behavior of mystics, than hard-core 19th-century-style determinists.

I fell in love with Kant when I read his abridged Critique of Pure Reason, I think mainly because of my pet interest in quantum and mental holism, and he was constantly talking about the various unities of the mind which people seem not to appreciate anymore. But reading S gave me a perspective from which to realize that a lot of Kant really is obscure (and according to S actually motivated by a perverse desire to symmetrically fill out tables of 12 categories), and a pretty clear and intuitive way to separate the baby from the bathwater. So S boiled down Kant’s baroque a priori subjective framework to basically spacetime and causality. I think this might be a great insight that survives the invention of non-Euclidian geometry and relativity theory. Why? Because, for example, it does seem that our perceptual intuitions really are in Euclidian space, and when we envision curved spaces we do so in Euclidian space, such as a 2D spherical surface in 3D.

That said, it is still hard to go along with S (or Kant) when he concludes that there is no space or time for the thing-in-itself. That is, it is relatively easy to accept that each of our subjective worlds are subjective brain constructs, but to take the next step to say that real objects are not objects at all, and don’t exist in an external spacetime, even though we can independently experience them and “cross-check” their existence, is difficult. [cf. Zen koan #43 Shuzan’s staff: “Shuzan held up his staff before the assembled monks, saying “If you say this is a staff, you oppose its reality. If you say this is not a staff, you negate the fact. I ask you, what is this?”] Maybe the relational interpretation of quantum mechanics gives us a framework for realizing S’s version of “empirical realism, transcendental idealism.”

Before reading S, I thought that maybe his pessimism was overstated by religiously-minded critics as a lazy way of dismissing his theory. Now I have to admit that his pessimism is pretty deep. It’s almost funny at times—at one point he even remarks how depressing the discussion is getting. If he gives up the purposelessness of the will, though, he will lose a major advantage over every optimistic philosophy—namely, that the problem of evil and suffering is not really a (philosophical) problem for him. (It remains a personal problem.) There is no good or even intelligent God to be paradoxically responsible for evil and suffering.

On the other hand, he is arguably no more pessimistic than Buddhism, since he affirms a path to a form of salvation. Also, the will in his theory seems to harbor a hidden dynamic—or will—towards realization, where realization means individuation and objectification but also enlightenment. Thus, although he argues against the notion of any permanent progress, his own contribution to the real progress of philosophy might be seen as part of a universal evolution towards “universal enlightenment” or “heaven on earth.” It’s a bit of a stretch…

Bottom line: In terms of his utility for us as students of the mind-body problem, I don’t think we get any new ideas about how the line between conscious and unconscious brain processes would show up in biology. What we may get is a (provisionally) consistent metaphysics that relates mind and matter without elimination, and explains the real basis of our moral sentiments. It’s also a pre-Freudian explicit theory of the unconscious. If you’re into this kind of thing, it’s an exhilarating ride!

Mike on Schopenhauer: Part Two

Below is the second part of Mike Wiest's review of The World as Will and Representation, Volume One. The first part is here. The next post will have his concluding thoughts. - Steve


Book 3—The Representation independent of the principle of sufficient reason: the Platonic Idea: the object of art:

On page 169 Book 3 (of Volume 1) starts:

“In the first book the world was shown to be mere representation, object for a subject. In the second book, we considered it from its other side, and found that this is will, which proved to be simply what this world is besides being representation. In accordance with this knowledge, we called the world as representation, both as a whole and in its parts, the objectivity of the will, which accordingly means the world become object, i.e., representation. Now we recall further that such objectification of the will had many but definite grades, at which, with gradually increasing distinctness and completeness, the inner nature of the will appeared in the representation, in other words, presented itself as object. In these grades we recognized the Platonic Ideas once more… In all these forms we recognize only the different aspects of the principle of sufficient reason that is the ultimate principle of all finiteness, of all individuation, and the universal form of the representation as it comes to the knowledge of the individual as such. On the other hand, the Idea does not enter into that principle; hence neither plurality nor change belongs to it. While the individuals in which it expresses itself are innumerable and are incessantly coming into existence and passing away, it remains unchanged as one and the same, and the principle of sufficient reason has no meaning for it. But now, as this principle is the form under which all knowledge of the subject comes, in so far as the subject knows as an individual, the Ideas will also lie quite outside the sphere of its knowledge as such. Therefore, if the Ideas are to become object of knowledge, this can happen only by abolishing individuality in the knowing subject. The more definite and detailed explanation of this is what will now first concern us.”

The distinct grades of objectification of the will are Plato’s Ideas, the “timeless prototypes of natural things.” Because all things are phenomena of one will, they are in some degree of relationship and harmony with one another; however, because the will is blind, the Ideas are in tension with one another, vying to manifest in phenomena. The complex balance of harmony and conflict produce phenomena in spacetime, causally ordered.

[S mentions that Platonism gets ridiculed, and it seems to be fairly unfashionable nowadays too, so I thought it might be helpful to mention a modern version of Platonism I came across recently in a paper by John D. Barrow called “Godel and Physics.” Platonism is not the subject of the paper, and is really just a manner of speaking rather than a developed theory. Still, this example made S’s Platonism a lot more digestible to my modern mind. In it, the Platonic Ideas are the symmetry groups that define modern elementary particle physics, and the different particle fields are different “representations” of the Lorentz group. “Representations” here is the actual technical math or physics term for the different “realizations” or “instantiations” of a particular symmetry group structure, so the physics meaning seems somewhat consonant with S’s usage.]

Now, there is a will-less state that reveals the Ideas in direct perception (as opposed to conceptually): the perception of the Ideas is the source of true art. Ideas are “generative,” as opposed to concepts which are abstracted from perception and “exhausted by their definition.”

S gives an interesting theory of aesthetics, the beautiful, the sublime, and art; in which music holds a special place as the direct analogue of the harmony of the different levels of objectification of the will. He develops an analogy between the hierarchy of tones in music with their foundation in the low, slow bass; and the hierarchy of levels of reality. [Here the discussion reminds me of a number of other vibration models of reality and perception, from superstring theory to the Greek Logos to kotodama, the science of spirit-sounds in Japanese Shinto.]

Book 4—The World as Will, Second Aspect: With the attainment of self-knowledge, affirmation and denial of the will-to-live:

Here S treats the ethical aspect of human behavior, the nature and extent of human freedom, and his notion of salvation:

Volume 1, page 272: “The point of view given and the method of treatment announced suggest that in this ethical book no precepts, no doctrine of duty are to be expected; still less will there be set forth a universal moral principle… Generally we shall not speak of “ought” at all, for we speak in this way to children and to peoples still in their infancy, but not to those who have appropriated to themselves all the culture of a mature age. It is indeed a palpable contradiction to call the will free and yet to prescribe for it laws by which it is to will. “Ought to will!” wooden-iron! But in the light of our whole view, the will is not only free, but even almighty; from it comes not only its action, but also its world; and as the will is, so does its action appear, so does its world appear; both are its self-knowledge and nothing more. The will determines itself, and therewith its action and this world also;”

So, from an absolute point of view outside of time, the will is free, but the will of any individual in time is determined by causes in time. There is an exception though:

Volume 1, page 287: “Man, however, is the most complete phenomenon of the will, and as was shown in the second book, in order to exist, this phenomenon had to be illuminated by so high a degree of knowledge that even a perfectly adequate repetition of the inner nature of the world under the form of the representation became possible in it… At the end of our whole discussion it will also be seen that, through the same knowledge, an elimination and self-denial of the will in its most perfect phenomenon is possible, by the will’s relating such knowledge to itself… In just this way, it exhibits the phenomena of holiness and self-denial… In this sense not only the will itself, but even man can certainly be called free, and can thus be distinguished from all other beings.”

From the point of view of causality, a person’s character is his fixed individual nature that determines the moral quality of his actions. In that context all our actions are fully determined by the intersection of our character with various circumstances (including the changing circumstance of our own growing knowledge about our own individual character as revealed by our actions). The above-mentioned freedom seems to manifest itself as a suppression of a human’s character, rather than an actual change of character, so that a sort of universal self-less personality emerges (p.403).

Page 404: “Now since, as we have seen, that self-suppression of the will comes from knowledge, but all knowledge and insight as such are independent of free choice, that denial of willing, that…only direct expression of the freedom of the will…is not to be forcibly arrived at by intention or design, but comes from the innermost relation of knowing and willing in man; hence it comes suddenly, as if flying in from without.”

[He approvingly quotes Christian descriptions of this phenomenon as the “catholic, transcendental change,” a “new birth” resulting from “grace” rather than natural causality. On page 405 he summarizes the extent of his agreement with Christian theology: “The doctrine of original sin (affirmation of the will) and of salvation (denial of the will) is really the great truth which constitutes the kernel of Christianity, while the rest is in the main only clothing and covering, or something accessory.”]

I’m generally pretty skeptical of “compatibalist” views of the relation between determinism and free will, but in S’s theory it does seem conceivable that the will that is the impetus for everything that is, when it realizes—i.e. creates—what it has willed, might wish to suppress itself, or at least its individualistic ego-centered physical-biological aspects. (Especially since it realizes all existence is “suffering,” fear and never-satisfied cravings, the dukkha of the First Noble Truth of Buddhism.) The will as thing-in-itself wills whatever it wants, freely, so when it realizes what it is—in a human brain, it may “change its mind.” The physical body may behave differently than it otherwise would have, but we might say the physical laws (for S these include causes, stimuli, and motives—all deterministic) are not changed or violated….It’s just that certain factors or forces have been reduced in amplitude, are not as strenuously fought for, but this change has no motive. Ultimately I can’t call this a deterministic theory, but it provides a scheme in which human behavior can transcend physical laws without directly violating them.

Here I’ve emphasized S’s treatment of freedom and determinism, but he also develops an interesting ethical theory. I find it to be a pretty intuitive model for moral realism. Though S says his philosophy won’t tell us how to behave, he explains that our actions nevertheless carry a real moral significance. Here is how he introduces the concept of “wrong”:

P334 “Now since the will manifests that self-affirmation of one’s own body in innumerable individuals besides one another, in one individual, by virtue of the egoism peculiar to all, it very easily goes beyond this affirmation to the denial of the same will appearing in another individual. The will of the first breaks through the boundary of another’s affirmation of will, since the individual either destroys or injures this other body itself, or compels the powers of that other body to serve his will, instead of serving the will that appears in that other body… This breaking through the boundary of another’s affirmation of will has at all times been distinctly recognized, and its concept has been denoted by the word wrong (Unrecht). For both parties instantly recognize the fact, not indeed as we do here in distinct abstraction, but as feeling.”

The feelings S is referring to are a “mental pain” of injustice in the victim and the “feeling of wrong committed” in the perpetrator. He develops this principle in a variety of cases, and distinguishes this negative ethical principle from the positive virtues that flow from the will-less consciousness. He discusses various approaches to the will-less state, and explains the distinction between the denial of the will arrived at by a clear objective perception from the apparent denial of the “will-to-live” in suicide. I won’t dwell on his ethical theory because I don’t feel competent to compare it to other approaches and attempt an overall assessment. But again, it seems to offer an intuitive metaphysics for a kind of moral realism—but with a more qualified freedom than one might expect from a moral realist theory.

(S’s final chapter of Volume 1 is an appendix on Kant, sketching K’s principal merits—which S earnestly considers to be epoch-making, as well as detailing his errors. I think Volume 2 is essentially further elaboration of the theory presented in Volume 1, and responses to objections composed over 30 years between the publication of Vols. 1 and 2.)

Guest Post: Mike's Review of Schopenhauer

I am happy to introduce a guest post below, authored by Mike Wiest. In a discussion in the comment thread of an earlier post (“Pan-Intentionality”), Mike mentioned his recent reading of Arthur Schopenhauer’s work, and talked about connections he saw between Schopenhauer and the topics that he, Justin and I were talking about. Below is the first of a series of three posts containing Mike’s summary review and reactions to Volume One of The World as Will and Representation. I’d also like to note that Justin, in a similar spirit, also brought up Nietzsche in the discussion, and he followed up with a post on the metaphysics of Nietzsche’s concept of the Will to Power at his blog, Panexperientialism. Here's Mike--

The World as Will and Representation, Volume 1

Schopenhauer claims at the outset that his entire book was aimed at and necessary to communicating a single thought. He states further that because of the organic inter-relationship among the aspects of that single thought, his book must be read twice to be fully comprehended (as, he says, with a great musical composition). I only read it once, but I think the thought is something like this: We can know Kant’s unknowable thing-in-itself, the true nature of the world, by direct conscious perception; and what this experience discloses is that all of our individual wills and consciousnesses are “phenomena” of a single, unconscious, universal will outside of time.

Book 1—Representation:

The beginning of philosophy for S is to realize that this world of objects is our representation, and furthermore that all objects are for a subject: all objects are subject-objects. He thinks that only Kant’s teaching can effectively produce the insight that removes the “child-like realism in which we are all born.” And thus “My philosophy starts from Kant’s, and therefore presupposes a thorough knowledge of it.” In particular, Kant taught us the distinction between our experience of an object, the phenomenon, and its true inner nature or reality, the thing-in-itself. (Despite this statement I think one could read and enjoy S without having read Kant: S’s Kant is easier to understand than Kant in his own words.)

But Kant missed that the a priori framework for all experience (including time, space, and matter understood as the principle of causality) are all manifestations of one principle of sufficient reason, which says every event has a cause and implies universal determinism (—but this is not S’s last word on freedom!). This causal law and determinism apply to all objective phenomena, meaning that every event in spacetime has a cause in spacetime, which is the reason the event happened then and there. But because causes and effects in spacetime constitute the form of our subjective understanding of objects (they are prerequisites for being an object), objective phenomena are all for-a-subject. It may not be so difficult for a panpsychist to accept that all matter has a subjective aspect; the hard part is accepting that we cannot think of the thing-in-itself as matter (event protoconscious matter) evolving in spacetime. Again, the matter model is perfectly effective empirically, for describing the network of objects and causes, but we have no inkling of the thing-in-itself behind our representations (this will change later in the book). Thus, our causal reasoning cannot be used to explain the origin or form of the fundamental forces, nor anything outside the causal network. Similarly, there can be no question of a causal relationship between subject and object, in either direction. Rather, subject and object are necessary poles of all objective existence in spacetime.

Now, S thinks that Kant and many other philosophers have been confused about perception and its relation to concepts and rational thought. For S perception is already intellectual (or cognitive). In particular, perception is immediate causal understanding (an intuition based on normal context, called illusion when wrong). For example, rather than merely sensing a two dimensional pattern of colors, I perceive “(this sensation in my visual field is caused by) an object nearby in 3D space in front of me.” This faculty we have in common with animals. Reason is a basically uniquely human faculty that uses concepts abstracted from perception to reach conclusions about past and future events (called error when wrong). This ability liberates us from the present. S has a nice pictorial way of representing reasoning (using Venn diagrams) as a procedure of passing between different concepts by means of what they have in common. He claims this simple framework can account for all our reasoning. Kant’s error in this context is roughly that he takes concepts to be primary and perceptions are to be understood in terms of concepts, whereas S teaches that all original evidence lies in perception, and concepts merely systematize, fix, and communicate evidence from perception.

[I’m not sure yet how I feel about the relational interpretation of quantum mechanics. But from this line in the Stanford Encyclopedia article about it, it seems to be a specific instantiation of S’s doctrine that objects and their various properties exist only relative to a particular observer: “Quantum mechanical relationalism is the observation that there are no absolute properties: properties of a system S are relative to another system O with which S is interacting.”]

Book 2—Will:

It’s what Kant missed when he said the thing-in-itself is absolutely unknowable. Considering things objectively, from the outside, we can never fathom their inner nature. But S points out that there is one thing whose inner nature we have special access to. S says that in reflecting on the contents of our own consciousness we find something absolutely distinct from all the objects in our representation (i.e. even subject-objects), namely feelings that reflect our will.

Volume 2 page 202: “…Not only willing and deciding in the narrowest sense, but also all striving, wishing, shunning, hoping, fearing, loving, hating, in short all that directly constitutes our own weal and woe, desire and disinclination, is obviously only affection of the will, is a stirring, a modification, of willing and not-willing, is just that which, when it operates outwards, exhibits itself as an act of will proper.”

Our will is often unconscious, but in experience it manifests pleasurable and painful states where our preferences are apparent, like anger and lust. Of course the various passions are usually experienced as entangled with our representations of our body and other bodies in spacetime, but for S the road to truth is to clarify the distinction between them. The point is to realize that our will is our deepest reality, our innermost essence (not our intellect, which serves the will, and is in fact “objectified” will). The next—big—step is to see that my inner nature, my true existence, is identical with the thing-in-itself of the whole world.

So we are to understand that the apple’s falling and the seedling’s sprouting are impelled by the same will (though unconscious) that ultimately drives us. This world is the objectification, or mirror, of will. We cannot consider it as multiple because space is the principle of individuation, which exists only in our representation. It is outside of all causation, but the world of causes in beginningless time arises out of it. Grades or levels of objectification of will correspond to inexplicable laws or entities that must be presupposed in our causal explanations. For example, physical causes, stimuli, and motives all necessarily bring about particular effects in particular circumstance, but represent different levels of objectification of will. Physical causes lead to an effect that is of the same physical magnitude as the cause, whereas stimuli are small causes that lead to large effects, and motives are causes that have passed through knowledge, i.e. through a conscious brain process. [To me this is account of the objective world as a shell whose inner being is mental in nature is reminiscent of Gregg Rosenberg’s contemporary account, in which causality is carried by experiences corresponding to a hierarchy of natural individuals, and the temporally ordered flow of events arises from some kind of meta-temporal nexus of events.]

The thing in itself, the universal will outside of time, is unconscious and purposeless, a blind “procreant urge of the world” (that’s Whitman, not S). But we can also say that it wills to live:

Volume 1, page 274: ‘The will, considered purely in itself, is devoid of knowledge, and is only a blind, irresistible urge, as we see it appear in inorganic and vegetable nature and in their laws, and also in the vegetative part of our own life. Through the addition of the world as representation, developed for its service, the will obtains knowledge of its own willing and what it wills, namely that this is nothing but this world, life, precisely as it exists. We have therefore called the phenomenal world the mirror, the objectivity, of the will; and as what the will wills is always life, just because this is nothing but the presentation of that willing for the representation, it is immaterial and a mere pleonasm if, instead of simply saying “the will,” we say “the will-to-live.” ‘

We are the highest level of reflection (i.e. objectification) of the will.