Arthur Schopenhauer · Philosophy
Schopenhauer’s decisive move: through our own body, known from the inside, we discover what the thing-in-itself is - blind, striving <em>will</em>. And the same will, he argues, is the inner reality of everything: gravity, magnetism, plant growth, animal instinct, human desire. One groundless striving objectifies itself as the whole world.
In the last lesson the world stood before us as representation - appearance only, with the thing-in-itself locked away behind it as Kant had left it. Schopenhauer now finds the one place where the lock can be picked, and it is closer than anywhere else: our own body. I know my body, like every other object, as a representation - a thing in space, with a shape and weight, that I can see and touch. But I also know it in a wholly different way, from the inside: I experience its movements not merely as observed events but as acts of will. When I decide to raise my arm and it rises, I do not observe a cause producing an effect from outside, as I do with billiard balls; the willing and the bodily act are one and the same thing given in two ways - the act of will seen from within, the bodily movement seen from without.
This double knowledge of my own body is, Schopenhauer says, the single ‘word of the riddle’. Every other object I know only from the outside, as representation, with its inner nature hidden. But here, in my own case, the curtain is drawn back, and I find that what an object is, behind its appearance, is will. My body is simply my will made visible - the will become object. Hunger appears outwardly as the digestive system; sexual desire appears as the genitals; the grasping will appears as the hand; thought appears as the brain. The body is ‘objectified will’, the will rendered as representation. This is the breakthrough, and from this single point of inner access Schopenhauer will read the inner nature of the entire world.
Schopenhauer now makes his boldest leap. If, in my own case, the inner reality behind the appearance is will, then - since the thing-in-itself is one and the same beyond all the distinctions of space and time - the inner reality of every appearance must be will too. To suppose that I alone am will while everything else is mere lifeless representation would be, he says, a kind of ‘theoretical egoism’ that takes one’s own person as the only reality. Honesty requires the opposite conclusion: the will I find in myself is the very same will that manifests throughout all of nature. The world is will and representation through and through.
And so Schopenhauer reads will into the whole of nature, at every level. It appears as conscious desire and motive in human beings and animals; as blind instinct in the insect building its nest; as the unconscious striving of the plant turning toward light and driving its roots into the soil; and even, at the lowest level, as the blind forces of inorganic nature - the pull of gravity that draws the stone to the earth, the force that makes a crystal form, the magnetism that turns the needle north, the rigidity by which a body resists being crushed. All of these, he argues, are degrees of one and the same inner striving, the will, objectifying itself in countless forms. What physics describes from the outside as ‘force’ is, from the inside, will. The single will, beyond space and time and therefore beyond all multiplicity, expresses itself as the entire, endlessly striving world.
It is essential to grasp how strange and original Schopenhauer’s ‘will’ is, because the ordinary meaning of the word can mislead. We usually think of will as conscious, deliberate, guided by reason toward chosen ends - I will to do this because I judge it good. But Schopenhauer’s will is the reverse: it is primary, and intellect is secondary, a late and superficial product that the will grows for itself, like a tool, only at the higher stages of nature. The will does not follow knowledge; knowledge follows the will. We do not desire a thing because we have judged it good; we judge it good because we desire it. Reason, on this view, is the servant of the will, not its master - a lantern the blind giant carries, useful for finding its way but never the source of its motion.
This inverts the entire rationalist tradition, which from Plato onward had placed reason or a rational God at the foundation of reality. Schopenhauer puts at the foundation something blind, irrational, and ceaselessly striving - a will that wants without knowing why, that is at war with itself across all of nature (the lion devouring the antelope is the one will feeding on itself), and that drives every being to assert its own existence at the expense of others. This is perhaps the first great philosophy in the Western tradition to make the unconscious, irrational drive - not reason, not God, not matter - the ultimate reality. Its influence is immense: it stands directly behind Nietzsche’s will to power, Freud’s unconscious drives, and the whole modern sense that beneath our reasoning selves runs a deeper, darker current of desire. We have found what the world is behind its appearance. The remaining lessons follow the consequences: that existence is therefore suffering, that art offers a temporary escape, and that salvation lies in turning the will against itself.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Schopenhauer identifies the thing-in-itself as will : known first through our own body (which we experience both as representation and from within as willing), then recognised as the single inner reality objectified in all of nature. Explain the move from the body to the world-will.
Leads to Benedict de Spinoza.
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