Philip Reynor

12/12/04

The World is Will

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This paper will examine Schopenhauers central thesis that the world is will. It will endeavour to structure the many premises which Schopenhauer posits for his thesis with the aim of revealing the form of his argument. Having done this we may can then assess the validity of Schopenhauers conclusion. Of the many premises that Schopenhauer cites some are irrefutable and have been proved so, posthumously, by the advancement of science. Others, however, are highly arguable and thus warrant critical assessment. The first obstacle in this enterprise is, however, conceptual: the manifold senses of the term will, Schopenhauers conceptual centrepiece, must be clarified. I. Schopenhauer uses the word will in three different senses within his magnum opus The World as Will and Representation, and each sense has its own meaning and implications towards his central thesis. The first is the most pervasive sense, the will in terms of its everyday denomination, i.e. as a strong determination, desire or wish exemplified in statements like the will to live and so on. Schopenhauer then brings up the word will when he is discussing our knowledge of the phenomenal world of sensory experience. He argues that if we didnt have any direct knowledge of the inner sense of ourselves, our movements and those of all the people and objects in the material world would be unintelligible to us. We would be unable to connect all our sensory perceptions into intelligible representations of the physical world. How I make sense of these perceptions, their unity, is they are given in my own experience as
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acts of will in coordination with our inner sense of ourselves and only in this way, according to Schopenhauer, can the phenomenal world be intelligible to us. The introduction of a third usage of the word was misguided and caused for much confusion in the interpretation and reception of Schopenhauers philosophy. In short, other less loaded terms could have been used such as energy or force; here for the sake of clarity we will capitalise the third sense. Nevertheless, Will in this third sense is both the most interesting and complex as it is used to denote the noumenal that is, the thingin-itself or the world as it is outside of, or not subject to, the categories of the understanding. Schopenhauer is taking his lead from Kantian philosophy here, but he adds a twist to Kants concept of the noumenal. For Kant thing-in-itself is not a possible object of knowledge but a noumenal realm stripped of all possible cognitive categories such as space, time, extension, causality, etc., which inhabit the phenomenal realm, the realm of what appears objects, things. Schopenhauer holds that the noumenal must then underlie the phenomenal and since it is not subject to the categories it cannot be described in terms of them. We cannot say, for example, that Will would be here or there, now or then, this or that, one or many, and so on. It is, rather, the very possibility of the world as it appears, the possibility of knowledge and the application of the categories of cognition. We might say, with reservation, that everything partakes of the Will, every rock, tree, every molecule, every atom, every living thing, and that their appearance to a knowing subject is predicated on Will which is itself not that which appears. Schopenhauers view is thus that knowing subjects as Will, or as partaking in Will, come closest to apprehending the noumenal through a will to life (life is a manifestation of Will) and that that inner sense brings us closer to the noumena than anything else. The knowing subject as a thing which knows and partakes in Will is therefore in a privileged position. The Will is unknowable in itself, [b]ut it appears as such
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a blind urge and as a striving devoid of knowledge in the whole of inorganic nature, in all the original forces.1 II. Now that the meanings of the word will are clearer, we can progress. It should be made clear that Schopenhauer does not try to prove indefinitely that the will exists and it is not apt to criticize him for his lack of proof, as a proof of this sort is not possible. At present Schopenhauer is relating the phenomenal sensory world as governed by the categories and the principle of sufficient reason to something else that is outside that phenomenal world and therefore not provable in terms of the principle of sufficient reason or understandable in terms of the categories in this sense there can be no proof. But Schopenhauer sees the will much like a black hole in the sense that black holes cannot be directly known by us through perception, but we hypothesise their existence in order to explain spatial anomalies that do not cohere with our cosmological theories; the anomalies force us to amend our theories. Black holes are theorised areas of space that we believe are the result of a stars collapsing in supernova, the gravitational force of such an object is so massive that not even light can escape rendering the black hole visible only in terms of its effects, that is, unknowable as it is in itself or not directly knowable. This analogy, however, ultimately fails in that it is steeped in causal, phenomenal terminology and supported by empirical evidence. Schopenhauers point is that it is possible for reason to exceed the limits of experience. Reason can form transcendent metaphysical conceptions, although without intuition these concepts are empty of content. In a sense then, within the Kantian framework, the unknowable can be conceptualised through rational arguments and premises but it can never have a referent, an object.

The World as Will and Representation, i.149

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The following are some of Schopenhauers arguments for the world as will.2 1.
A material object is made up of a space occupied by matter

and energy, which are one and the same thing or in Schopenhauers words: force and substance are inseparable because at bottom they are one.3 This is central to Einsteins theory of relativity. 2. The human body is a material object and thus it is comprised My bodily movements are known to me not only indirectly of the same things as any other material object.

3.

(externally) as observable movement but also directly (internally) as acts of will.

4.

Therefore it is possible (at least in the case of my own body)

that an act of will and the movement of a material object are one and the same thing apprehended in two different ways. 5. 6. Willing need not be a conscious activity even in a consciously If all material objects are in one sense phenomenal and in active being. another noumenal then the human body also has this dualistic nature and is in a sense noumenal.

7.
8. willing. 9.

Our conscious willing cannot be noumenal but must be We can have no direct knowledge of the inner depths of our We can have no direct knowledge of the noumenon.

objective phenomenon.

Schopenhauers conclusion from all this is his central doctrine of the world as will, he says: With me it is the will-without-knowledge that is the foundation of the reality of things4. The first two of these premises are natural laws proven by science and a lengthy discussion is not warranted in this paper. If premise three is true then it follows that premise four is also true so firstly I will be looking at the validity of the third premise.
2

These nine arguments are taken roughly from Bryan Magees The Philosophy of Schopenhauer, vii.137-8 3 The World as Will and Representation, ii.309 4 The World as Will and Representation, ii.269

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In the third premise it is argued that the will is manifest in our bodily movements or our body is the Will objectified. Schopenhauer calls these manifestations acts of will; but is it possible for something that cannot be objectified to manifest itself directly in the objectively known world as representation? This manifestation does not imply, however, that these acts are causal or spatial, no, they are only manifested in the phenomenal world which is governed by the principle of sufficient reason and are not subject to the principle itself. But these acts of will are subject to the dimensions of time (this is why they cannot be the thing-in-itself) and time cannot characterize the noumenal. So if an act of will doesnt have its root in the phenomenal world, only its manifestation, and it doesnt have its root in the noumenal; where then do these acts of will originate? Supposedly, we have direct knowledge of them through inner sense as we do feelings and emotions such as love. This inner sense is part of the self-consciousness which is made up of the knower and the known; the known therefore must be the will from which these acts originate. As Schopenhauer says himself;
The knower himself precisely as such can not be known, otherwise he would be the known of another knower. But as the known in selfconsciousness we find exclusively the will.5

But emotions like love do not necessarily have to manifest themselves in bodily actions, so why must acts of will become manifest in this way or, put in Schopenhauers own words, how come the act of will and the action of the bodyare one and the same thing?6He also states that every impression on the body is also and at once an impression on the will; so if emotions act on the will in the same way as they act on the body and it is impossible to be in love and not feel love, which includes many involuntary internal symptoms (that feeling in the pit of the stomach, unexplained increase in heart rate and blood flow and all the other
5 6

The World as Will and Representation, ii.202 Ibid, i.100

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symptoms of love), so if the impression on the body outside bodily movement is the love then is the impression on the will not an act of will in the form of the symptoms of love, without any external bodily movement? These symptoms must be acts of will as they are not controllable by the person themselves, that feeling of love is an act of will and is not known objectively. So, with this clear, I will look at premise four; and it becomes more difficult to state that an act of will and a bodily movement are one and the same thing and thus makes it more difficult to state that will and material object are also one and the same thing apprehended in two different ways. If an act of will is not necessarily manifest in bodily action, then the will and material object are not necessarily one and the same thing; as the will can be the symptoms of an emotion and in that way may not necessarily be objectified at all. The fifth premise must be true if the will is to exist at all. For if, as is already mentioned, will and bodily movements are one and the same thing and a reflex action is an unconscious movement then the act of will is necessarily an unconscious movement and cant be thought of prior to the movement but only in retrospect. The same principle applies to the will in emotions; if you fall in love with someone, you are not aware of when or how it happened you are only aware of it in retrospect when you recognize the symptoms of love in yourself; as is equally true of reflex actions like a sudden twitch in an arm the twitch is only cognized upon reflection. The seventh premise has already been exemplified earlier when I talked about acts of will not existing in a spatial or causal way but only in a temporal one. The noumenal realm is not subject to the principle of sufficient reason and hence the act of will could not be noumenal because of its existence in time. Premises eight and nine can be examined together. If these two premises are true then they imply that the noumenon is the will, in the third sense, and hence the thing-in-itself. But if this is true
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then how is this knowledge possible? How can phenomenal knowledge give us non-phenomenal knowledge? Since, if we are conscious of ourselves directly as will then we contradict the meaning of the third sense of will. But we could be conscious of ourselves as will, in the third sense, by the acts of will, in the second sense. This would lead to some experience as nonphenomenal which then leads to knowledge of your will.7 The next question is then obvious: what is non-phenomenal knowledge and is it possible? In my opinion Schopenhauer should have stayed agnostic with regards to the thing-in-itself as any phenomenal knowledge of the will doesnt shed any light on the thing-in-itself. Also with regard to Schopenhauers third sense of the will as described by him in many instances as blind, irresistible urge8but he blatantly contradicts this in the same work when he attributes the will, in the third sense, as having an unconscious purpose to it in animal life. He equates it with animal instinct in statements like this one;
The one year old bird that has no notion of the eggs for which it builds a nest; the young spider has no idea of the prey for which it spins a web9

In conclusion, Schopenhauer does have an argument for his central thesis that the world is will and I have presented it here in the form of the nine premises mentioned earlier. His argument is a rational one and these premises supposedly lead to knowledge of the noumenon or thing-in-itself. Schopenhauers philosophy does contain contradictions as do the works of many other philosophers, but these minor infractions could be made right by reinterpretations of his philosophy. Finally, Schopenhauer expects us to believe his philosophy because:

7 8

J.E. Atwell Schopenhauer on the Character of the World, iv.108 The World as Will and Representation, i.275 9 The World as Will and Representation, i.114

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He holds that when reality is viewed in this light the problems and paradoxes all melt away; all the details fall into place, everything makes sense.10

Bibliography: E.F.J. Payne; The World as Will and Representation, Volumes I & II, Dover Publications (New York) 1969.

10

B. Magee The Philosophy Of Schopenhauer, vii.140

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B. Magee; The Philosophy of Schopenhauer, revised ed, Oxford University Press (New York) 1997. J.E. Atwell; Schopenhauer on the Character of the World University of California Press (London) 1995. Russell, B; History of Western Philosophy (Oxford 1974). Popkin, R; The Pimlico History of Western Philosophy (London 1999).