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.
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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