The World as Will and Representation

"That’s right. This book also has an interesting structure. It was first published in 1818, in December, although the first edition has ‘1819’ as a typo. Schopenhauer was only just out of his twenties then. He was a very young man, but he’d built this huge system of philosophy that was supposed to explain everything in a really ambitious way, covering aesthetics, the philosophy of art, and ethics. And, in 1844, there’s a new version published, shortly after The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics – this is the first volume with some minor changes, plus a whole new second volume, which is not entirely new thoughts but supplementary thoughts to the first volume. So, he writes about 50 essays about his own first volume, which elaborate on the system. Then there’s a third version in which there aren’t many changes at all, republished in the last few years of his life. But it is suggestive of the kind of thinker that he was. He founded a system and he tinkered with it for his whole life and built on it, which is different from, say, Nietzsche, where you almost get a different Nietzsche from book to book. Schopenhauer was elaborating on a huge system. Yes. He actually says that music is another direct expression of the will in a quite confusing discussion of music and what it can do for us. I think he just couldn’t find the words to describe how moving and powerful he felt music was. What he does get right here is his view that other art forms were mediated by what he called ‘the Ideas’, the essential attributes of the things; whereas music isn’t mediated by the Ideas. It isn’t depicting a given object. It’s abstract… Yes. I think he even said that if there was no world there would still be music, which is very mystical. But, the idea of the metaphysical picture you’ve given there is right. Will was his attempt to derive and characterize what Kant referred to as ‘the thing as it is in itself’. He wasn’t satisfied with what Kant said about it. He thought Kant almost contradicted himself by deriving the thing-in-itself as a cause of representation, when he’d already said that causality is something that stands between representations and not between representation and ‘the thing itself’. Schopenhauer thinks that we get this insight into the will by reflecting on our own experience of ourselves because we have this privileged access to one object—ourselves—which is unlike the access we have to other objects. At one point he says we’re not Engelsk opf , floating angels’ heads. If you read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason you’d think we were these disembodied intellects, just cognizing experience. But instead, Schopenhauer says, we’re also rooted in experience. We are driven by desire, our preferences and a kind of restlessness. That twofold experience of ourselves is the analogy he uses for interpreting the rest of experience. “He…said that if there was no world there would still be music” The rest of experience would be experienced as the same ‘ghostly procession’ as we would have if we were just these disembodied angels heads, if we didn’t interpret it as having something behind representation, which the representation is manifesting. And that’s what he called will and he called it will only as a memento of where the inside comes from. The risk of confusion here is that he seems to be attributing volitional states to inanimate objects. He thinks that all of nature is an embodiment of will. Bryan Magee suggested thinking of will as ‘energy’ in order to link Schopenhauer to physics after Einstein . But Schopenhauer tries not to use words like ‘force’, ‘energy’ and ‘power’ because those are words that are derived from representation. He wants to remind us that the key to interpreting outer experience is an insight that has come from inside, which is our experience of the will. It becomes a more and more abstract notion and it does start to sound just like ‘energy’, but he’s very firm on the fact that, even though he knows it risks confusion by anthropomorphising the world, the reason he’s chosen ‘will’ is as a reminder of that insight. Here’s one way of thinking about it. If I want to know about an external object, I have to represent it and infer from the outside what it intends or what its nature is from what I see. But if I introspect, I don’t have to infer. I don’t look at my arm and then know that my arm went up: I have some sort of privileged access to what explains my action, without having to infer from external appearances. I experience what moves me as an object in a specially immediate way which I cannot experience with any other thing. I’m sure there’s some speculative neuroscience or something like that going on and people would say that that is just another sensory phenomenon… Yes, that’s it. And I think that’s part of what Schopenhauer is getting at. That’s one of the ways he explains it. He sometimes calls the will ‘causality seen from within’. Everything else we intuit through their causal relations with one another, but our own movements we don’t have to intuit through causal relations. We somehow have privileged access to movements. Yes, we are sat on a metaphysical fault line. That’s the way Iris Murdoch looked at it. Our bodies are in the empirical world and our wills are in the noumenal world. That’s interesting. I’ve got a few thoughts. The fact that we are just manifestations of the will is not a happy fact for Schopenhauer. Our experience of it is always one of suffering because he thinks that, whenever we’re striving for something, we lack it. That lack is felt painfully and that’s why we are motivated to strive in the first place. Even if we satisfy our desires and we’re no longer striving, we succumb to boredom. He has this famous line that life swings to and fro like a pendulum, between boredom and pain. He really thinks there’s nothing for us in life. It’s just either pain or boredom and we’d be better off not existing at all. He quotes Sophocles in the second volume of The World as Will and Representation , so the later volume, and he quotes the part of Sophocles where Sophocles is reporting the advice of the woodland sage Silenus to King Midas: never to have been born is best, and the next best is to die soon. Then Nietzsche explicitly attributes this wisdom to Silenus in The Birth of Tragedy . Schopenhauer also, on at least two occasions, quotes Hamlet ‘s famous soliloquy, “To be or not to be, that is the question”. Chapter 46 of the second volume of The World as Will and Representation actually ends with a collage of literary examples of this world-denying pessimism, going right from the ancients, even ancient Mexican culture—he talks about these parturition rituals where people would regret and mourn when someone was born and would celebrate when they died—all the way up to the Italian atheist and pessimist Giacomo Leopardi. He mentions him right at the end, with Byron. There is something equivalent, but there are differences, too. Schopenhauer thinks that the only way to escape suffering is to achieve an ascetic self-denial that results in a kind of will-lessness. It resonates with the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path, extinguishing the fires of desire. Even in the very final lines of the first volume of The World as Will and Representation , he talks about the impasse that exists between the person who has denied the will to life, the saint, the ascetic, and the person who hasn’t, the person who’s still full of will. He says their life to us is nothing and our life to them, with all our suns and galaxies, is nothing. And the very last word of The World of Will and Representation is ‘nothing’. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . In other places, Schopenhauer says ‘ nirvana ’ is just a word for this ‘nothing’. It’s a word for the nothingness that a life without will looks like, viewed from a life with will. So , The World as Will and Representation ends on a note of mysticism, which was really attractive to both the early Wittgenstein and to Iris Murdoch. I’ve heard a lot of people characterize Buddhism recently—people like Graham Priest—as an optimistic philosophy, not a pessimistic philosophy, precisely because it has this form of salvation in it. I’m inclined to think that, even though there is salvation in Schopenhauer, its form is anything but optimistic. To me, accepting all possible sufferings in life as if they were your own and being spiritually crushed by that, does not sound like a happy ending. It sounds like a terrible way to be saved. So, I don’t think there’s much optimism in Schopenhauer. He’s a pessimist through and through, although—important historical fact—he doesn’t use the word ‘pessimism’ (or the German equivalent) in the early works at all, and sparingly in later works. He doesn’t really have it to hand. It was a fairly recent invention."

"I personally think ‘Representation’ is better. ‘Idea’ is ‘Idee’ in German. The ‘Vorstellung’ of the original title is really ‘Representation’. That’s my preferred translation. What I really admire in this theory is the notion of a continuum of responses. He gives us the idea that, at the beginning, the sublime not so different from beauty. But eventually you arrive at what he calls “the full impression of the sublime.” The examples he gives begin with the setting sun: a winter scene of the rays of the setting sun, reflected by masses of stone. Then you have solitude: he gives the example of the North American prairies. Then bare rocks or desert. Then comes the Kantian examples: overhanging cliffs, rushing masses of water, storms, perhaps. Then we finally get to an overwhelming, raging waterfall. It’s so loud we can’t even hear the sound of our own voices. Or, it’s a storm with such howling wind and lightning and thunder claps, we can’t hear anything else. The idea is that the self feels annihilated. We are powerless against nature. This is very close to Kant, still, I think. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter But here’s where it differs—you get Schopenhauer’s ideas on metaphysics here—the subject feels himself or herself “the eternal, serene subject of knowing” who is the “supporter of this whole world.” Therefore he thinks that the sublime gives insight into the world as it actually is in itself. So you can see his unique combination of a kind of Platonism and Indian philosophy. He quotes the Vedas in this section. It’s just a really interesting moment in his philosophy. Unlike Longinus’s work, the book is not a treatise on the sublime. In fact, none of the other three are. But it’s a really well-written section from one of the great stylists of German philosophy. To me, the intriguing idea is this notion of the continuum. Exactly. Schopenhauer’s answer is not completely clear. Because he distinguishes them, but he doesn’t do it in the way Kant does, which is more rigid, you might say more clear-cut. Still, Schopenhauer thinks there’s some difference between the two kinds of experience: beauty is felt to be in harmony with our perceptive faculties, is easily comprehended. But the sublime stands in contrast to our abilities to perceive. Even more than that: threatens our very feeling of life."