Download A response to the essay on Schopenhauer`s

2.7 S, 101.8 E
A response to the essay on Schopenhauer’s philosophy
(http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schopenhauer/)
‘He encomendado esta escritura a un hombre cualquiera;
no será nunca lo que quiero decir,
no dejará de ser su reflejo.’
To be fair I should go back to the primary sources, but life is short, and it is not fair to
keep you waiting forever for a reply. And you have after all recommended this as an
excellent essay on Schopenhauer’s philosophy, so I am prepared to trust you that it does
not misrepresent his thought too dreadfully!
The Four-fold root of the principle of sufficient reason
I have nothing to cavil at in Schopenhauer’s common-sense assertion of the principle of
sufficient reason and the necessity of the subject-object distinction as a precondition for
all knowledge. It is where ‘inspired by Aristotle’ he proceeds to divide that-which-is into
four different kinds of object, for which four different kinds of reasoning are appropriate,
that he loses me. I cannot see any compelling logic behind asserting ‘four different
intellectual paths’ which cannot be mixed, then using this as a stick to beat other people’s
philosophies with. If these intellectual paths really were independent and running in
parallel, it would surely be possible to distill a better rationale for them from
Schopenhauer’s dissertation than to say they are ‘inspired by Aristotle’.
I think that everything that is not amenable to experiment exists within the realm of what
Marco would call ‘axiomatic reasoning’; if we agree upon certain axioms, we can
develop those axioms logically in the same manner, whether we are talking about abstract
concepts, mathematical and geometrical constructions, or psychologically-motivating
forces. If we cannot agree upon any axioms, we must remain silent. In the realm of
mathematics, we find it very easy to agree upon axioms; in ethics, it is somewhat more
difficult; and in the realm of abstract concepts in general, our usual failure to define our
terms means that we thrash about helplessly thinking we share axioms when we do not.
In any case, if the product of our axiomatic reasoning is rejected by experiment- is
contradicted by sense impressions- we may need to revise our axioms, or check the
soundness of the links in our logic.
Schopenhauer’s critique of Kant
While we cannot know that there is such a thing as a ‘thing in itself’ existing
independently of our sensations, assuming that there is seems to me to be the starting
point of absolutely all productive reasoning. It seems to me to be more fruitful to say that
an external object causes our sensations. Anything that can be construed to cast doubt on
this by postmodernist advocates of hippy-dippy interpretations of quantum mechanics is
to be watched carefully.
At the same time, in so far as ‘the relationship between the thing-in-itself and our
sensations is more like that between two sides of a coin, neither of which causes the
other,’ is saying that mind is not something different from matter, but only matter looked
at ‘from inside’, it is saying something worthwhile. Indeed, for sufficiently large values
of ‘our’, I would be prepared to accept the statement. By that I mean, if ‘our sensations’
meant ‘the sensations of every object in the universe’, the statement would be perfectly
true.
The World as Will and Representation
‘He consequently regards every object in the world as being metaphysically doubleaspected, and as having an inside or inner aspect of its own, just as his consciousness is
the inner aspect of his own body.’ I would agree. This seems to be a useful idea.
Schopenhauer takes the one data point available to him of the inner aspect of the world
and from it extrapolates the inner aspect of the rest of the objects in the universe; hence
the bleak quality of his extrapolation is due to his own temperament and psychology. For
instance, his one data point is self-conscious and (in fits and starts) rational; why, then,
need the inner aspect of the world necessarily be ‘a mindless, aimless, non-rational urge’?
Why should the world be ‘an endless striving and blind impulse with no end in view,
devoid of knowledge, lawless, absolutely free, entirely self-determining and almighty …
in a condition of eternal frustration, as it endlessly strives for nothing in particular, and
as it goes essentially nowhere’? These are not suppositions forced upon Schopenhauer by
his one data point; they are certainly not suppositions forced upon me by my one data
point.
I think it just as likely that the inner aspect of everything is self-conscious, has aims, and
has some small portion of reason; that it be striving for something, be subject to law, and
going somewhere. This would seem to be a much more cheerful philosophy that fits the
data equally well.
I like very much the idea of consciousness as the same thing seen from ‘inside’; this
means that we can talk about the consciousness of an electron as validly as we can talk
about the wavelength of a cricket ball. It neatly removes the ‘problem of consciousness’,
and it also deters us from seeking anything unique in human consciousness, encouraging
us to be humane towards animals and plants.
Everything after the historical paragraph on Neoplatonist and Hindu thought in this
section seems to me to be wholly pernicious.
“Schopenhauer believes that the laws of nature, along with the sets of objects that we
experience, we ourselves create in way that is not unlike the way the constitution of our
tongues invokes the taste of sugar.” Pish tosh! This seems to me the same sort of
dangerous nonsense spouted by Ron Laura. This is much more profoundly unscientific
than anything said by the Taliban.
“It is the human being that, in its very effort to know anything, objectifies an appearance
for itself that involves the fragmentation of the Will and its breakup into a
comprehensible set of individuals.” This even more dangerous nonsense- for it reintroduces the privileged position of the human being and human consciousness that was
removed earlier, undoing the good work achieved by regarding every object in the world
as being metaphysically double-aspected.
(To be fair, there does not seem to be any trace of this sort of thing in the abridged
extracts from the Parerga and Paralipomena on ‘Thing in itself and appearance’ that I
have been reading.)
Transcending the human dimensions of conflict
Aesthetic Perception as a Mode of Transcendence
Here I part ways completely with Schopenhauer. What he says is entirely determined by
his own psychology; when I admire an apple tree, I do not admire it as an ‘UrApfelbaum’, an approximation to some Platonic ideal of an apple tree, any more than I
admire my wife as a manifestation of the ‘Ewig-Weibliche’. When I admire things I
admire them as unique, irreplaceable, individual, ‘things-in-themselves’. It is the fact that
a particular apple is the sole solitary instance of that thing in the universe that makes it
infinitely precious and marvellous to me; I am devoted to the differentiated, the
particular; I am inordinately fond of beetles.
We do not need ‘artistically minded geniuses’ to inspire us. We live in a continual deluge
of beauty, overwhelming us- if we but let it - with the fantastic multiplicity of all-that-is.
Simone Weil writes that as great a tragedy as the suffering in the universe is the
unappreciated beauty in the universe. We need no sterile Platonic ideals; they are as
fruitless as the aluminium trees of Reverend Straik in ‘That Hideous Strength’.
In this discussion of aesthetic perception as a mode of transcendence there is a strain of
elitism that is repugnant to me, a contempt for ordinary people that seems to runs through
much of Schopenhauer’s writing from what I have read thus far.
Moral Awareness as a Mode of Transcendence
‘Once we recognize each human as being merely an instance and aspect of the single act
of Will that is humanity itself, we will appreciate that the difference between the
tormentor and the tormented is illusory, and that in fact, the very same eye of
humanity looks out from each and every person.’
Schopenhauer surely realised that this cuts both ways, and does not define a direction for
morality. There is no reason for us to chose the tormented over the tormentor. If he did
not realise this, he ought to have. IMHO Borges, an author strongly influenced by
Schopenhauer, develops this idea in his story ‘Deutsches Requiem’.
http://www.literatura.us/borges/deutsches.html
If I loathe myself, if I resent being the slave of this blind aimless Will, recognising that I
am an instance of humanity myself frees me to take out my loathing on the rest of
humanity, to punish my detestible self in ways that will not physically hurt me on these
other manifestations of this ‘single act of Will that is humanity itself’.
Much more likely to engender compassion, to my way of thinking, is to think of each
individual as an irreplaceable and unique thing, valuable in itself.
“Negatively considered, moral consciousness delivers us from the unquenchable thirst
that is individuated human life, along with its incessant oscillation between pain and
boredom.”
I do not want to be delivered from individuated human life! As I said above, I find
diversity inspiring and uplifting, not unity. And I do not find life an incessant oscillation
between pain and boredom. When I am not working to accomplish something useful
(which I find has its pleasures and interests, whatever the task) or actively amusing
myself (as I am now) I find the state I naturally fall into is one of ecstatic contemplation
of the marvellousness of the universe around me. Schopenhauer may have felt his life to
be an incessant oscillation between pain and boredom; if so, I pity him, for his life was a
tragic waste.
Asceticism and the Denial of the "Will-to-Live"
“Schopenhauer believes that a person who experiences the truth of human nature from a
moral perspective — who appreciates how spatial and temporal forms of knowledge
generate a constant passing away, continual suffering, vain striving and inner tension —
will be so repulsed by the human condition, that he or she will lose the desire to affirm
the objectified human situation in any of its manifestations.”
To which I can only reply, pish tosh! Or perhaps, ‘bullshit!’ Of course, within the cage
formed by our sense perceptions, we are each free to embrace whichever philosophy we
like that does not contradict those sense impressions; but it seems to me that given this
choice we ought to embrace one that lifts us up and makes us useful to one another, not
one that drags us down. We ought to believe the best philosophy we can imagine that is
not inconsistent with the data. Optimism is to me the first and foremost duty of man. The
glass is not half empty, it is half full. If you ‘lose the desire to affirm the objectified
human situation in any of its manifestations’, you can never be part of the solution to
anything, only part of the problem, and perhaps it is best for you to be processed into
‘PhilosophergroTM’ organic fertiliser.
On a more ad hominem level, from reading about Schopenhauer’s personal life, I do not
think he has anything to teach us about asceticism. Such things cannot be apprehended
intellectually, they have to be lived.