Schopenhauer elaborates on Kantian insights. What Kant named the noumenon, is for Schopenhauer the real drive for everyone. But this is not grasped by us. We only grasp the representation which is a kind of scenery that is produced by the noumenic reality. But it appears according to our many expectations and our previous ideas of space and time. Space and time are our way of representing things in Kant, but is not the real.
Schopenhauer was extremely well-read. He was born in a unhappy marriage, and was supported mainly by his mother. He was born in Danzig, and his mother was a writer who was friends with Goethe.
Goethe wrote about a theory of colors, which Schopenhauer felt it important to disprove.
It seems Schopenhauer was a very difficult character.
”The good in his life came from women; yet he was misogynistic as hell”.
Schopenhauer rented a room by an old lady, but didn’t pay properly, and the lady passed away before he could pay the debt. What a guy!
His book was published in December 1818. The World as Will and Representation.
The will is the drive which is the true reality behind everything, and representation clouds it.
He thought that this work was a masterpiece. He capitalises on taking into account the persepctives of the Indian philosophies of the Vedas. He also read in English, which was not so common at the time. However, nobody noticed the work. It was much too strange. He was heavily disappointed.
He applied for a habilitation, after which he was entitled to give lectures (privatdozent) at the university of Berlin. It was the emerging university at the time because of prussian political power.
He did his habilitation in front of three professors, among them Hegel. Hegel had question which he was not happy with (the whole horse thing).
The great name in Berlin is Hegel, and he decides to have all his classes at the same time as Hegel; no one shows up, except for three students. He worked like this for about 10 years.
It seems however that he only gave 1 actual course; the same course over and over again for which nobody enrolled.
He became very frustrated and so wrote a book that was supposed to be much more easy to read; the Parerga et paralipomena. It is a sort of commentary on his major work, written in a more narrative way. Outside the academic world it became very famous. After the success of this work, people actually began to read The World as Will and Representation.
It is an effort of Schopenhauer to present his ideas in a way that was more accessible.
He collected everything written at the time about buddhism and Indian philosophy. He thinks that this is the ”native soil of thought” because it was both poetic, and deeply, and really, philosophical.
In these two essays, he expresses the idea that there is a drive, this Will. But it has nothing to do with human will. It is a blind impersonal force, which has no purpose or aim apart from maintaining itself. There is no purpose, no project, no telos. In order to maintain itself, it uses for its own self-preservation. (Rudolf Bernetti, wrote on the history of the concept of the subconscious before Freud, who has a full chapter on Schopenhauer, because the Will is a kind of unconscious; we think we do things because we decided to do so, but human will are only organs of the unconscious Will). Things like hunger and sexual desire are only by-products of the Will. It is a will that is restless. It is not at all afraid of pain, or death, and so we are under its spell each time we want to do something. Wanting to get out of this spell, is the most obvious affirmation of the will. In the moment you try to stop this process, you are only cancelling an epiphenomenon of it, but you are not getting to cancelling the drive itself.
In page 289, self consciousness is like one of the scenes on which the general representation takes place. Self consciousness gives us only access to the representation of the world. Self consciousness doesn’t show the drive behind the movie, the director, but only what the camera records.
If it so, how can we be aware of this Will?
There are a few moments in which we are able to grasp this structure. It’s like when you are watching theatre, and you happen to see someone changing their clothes in the corner, or the example of the veil of Maya, and sometimes there is a cut in it. There are three moments that are crucial for the alternative. One moment is the moment of radical compassion. There was a jesuit who wrote on buddhism trying to show that there is a similarity between buddhism and christianity in terms of ascetics. These people are not willing not, but not willing. Withdrawing is not-willing, and not willing not. You become free from the spell by withdrawing from it. In the moment that you are fully withdrawn, you are free to see it, you become your true self.
The true experience of beauty (of which he taught at his only course in Berlin), is a moment at which you forget yourself; your Self disappears as a representation. You don’t care what the others think of you, you are purely absorbed by contemplating. There is a denial of the self, a disappearance of the self, but rather a moment that display the true real.
The third possibility to be free from the spell of the will, is impossible for men, but possible for women who are pregnant and waiting to give birth. Because sexual desire is a trick of the Will, it is just a trick of the representation to bring people together. But after the intercourse, and these other instances of fake pleasure, the man goes away. The lady however, who remains pregnant, starts a period which is entirely unpleasant and a matter of life and survival itself. The woman has plenty of time to regret these few minutes of pleasure. And if she becomes able to give her life for the survival of the baby, then the law of nature is broken. Pregnancy is part of the representation to preserve the Will of course, but in the experience of pregnancy, the mother learns that she must keep living for the sake of the baby. This is the only case in which real altruism can happen.
Pregnancy is the redeeming principle. The woman is the intellect, and the man is the Will, but the intellect is most often an instrument of bio-ethics. But there are moments that this instrument of the Will, which is under the power of the Will, requires the ability to reveal how things really are, the fruit of the desiring and the constant drive and reproduction for its own sake. Thanks to this illumination, the intellect shouldn’t be an organ of the will, but is rather something that gives access to the true reality.
(In Camus, the serious approach is always engagement and action with the question of suicide. For Camus it is a crime to withdraw, whilst it is the goal for Schopenhauer.)
Poverty for Schopenhauer means emptiness and detachment. Not the detachment of any affirmation of the Will to power, but an attachment which suspends any Will to want to control or to possess. This is an element which is central to an unpublished work of Heidegger, where he reflects on the notion of truth as Ereignis (event). The truth is something that has to appear by itself by avoiding to interfere with it. We must withdraw from it and let truth emerge as it is.
In a way, the value of life, consists in teaching us not to not will life. This is how life prepares us in the end.
There is no novelty in the essays we read. This is all something he said prior in the World as Will and Representation.
There is a kind of heroism too in Schopenhauer, but that of the mendicant man. There needs to be an exstinguishing of Nirvana, because what we call life is an illusion, so the leaving of life is a death, certainly, but it is The Death.
Schopenhauer endorses the theory of metempsychosis, and the business is to get rid of it altogether. In order to get rid of it, you have to use the system without participating in it actively.
However, as much as it sounds eastern, his work stands thoroughly grounded in Western philosophy.
(Currently there is much debate on dismantling the philosophical canon, because it is ”european”, though this isn’t entirely true either, most people in it weren’t european for example. There is a reflection in Schopenhauer which critiques the very model of the canon of Western thought, which belongs itself to the Western canon.)
Schopenhauer had a problem with the need of recognition to the point it was probably almost pathological, which exposed himself terribly to the lack of it. Schopenhauer is known for his philosophy at the university (professors are not philosophers).
Schopenhauer’s rhetoric is a kind of deus ex machina, when you cannot explain something, you just put the Will.
”the cleverness of Reason is to create figures that catalyse the events of history”.
Schopenhauer is in love with Italian art, (or everything that Hegel doesn’t like), and the two just happened to have very different opinions on things.
Auguste Comte: Almost the contemporary of Schopenhauer. Auguste Comte (1798-1859), is not very well-read himself but still very influential. He adopts a semblance quite similar to Hegel, everything happens in three steps.
The three moments are the: theological, the metaphysical, the positive. This movement is not always simultaneous. In some disciplines, such as mathematics, they had already reached the positive state, the final state, wherein it is only possible to increment knowledge, but the method is entirely finalised.
The theological stage is a kind of anthropomorphically mystic stage, in which we project ourselves and explain things via invisible actions.
In the theological stage we elaborate abstract notions that allow us to understand, but these themselves have something that is an improvement from the past stage, but that doesn’t allow a science. For the true science, we cannot focus on cause and effect.
The positive stage: What does science do? It is a system of relations in which we can give a ration between different relations through calculation. We would be able to describe the general system of relations. Philosophical anthropology.
Comte calls the study of the relation between people ”Social Physics”. It is something very different from physics, and so instead invents the word sociology. Comte is the inventor of sociology.
”The dead rule the living.” (From the Course of Positive Politics).
There is always a kind of process of inertia, so people who think in a certain way, think so because of the prior generation, and they keep it because of inertia. Thus, the ideas we hold is only a survival of the past generation, but has nothing to do with its greatness.
The true realisation of Nazism in Germany was in the 50s. The people who were adolescent and went to school during those regimes were taught all these principles without further reflection that continue on.
From the point of view of most philosphers he is much too schematic, and he is most interesting through his single analyses rather than his schematic overviews. He also created his own secular religion kind of (positive religion).
His philosophy became very popular, because it created a frame which many other authors could recognise, such as a kind of deterministic evolution.
(Jäger who comments on Aristotle determines Aristotle in a similar frame as Comte creates).
Hayek wrote an essay on Comte which might be interesting (bleh).
We are reading two short texts of Karl Marx, which quite nicely reflect some crucial insight. One is a preface to his treatise on political economy. It really tells the story of how Marx gave up philosophy and became an economist. He engages with the philosophy of Right by Hegel. Marx’s first work was a commentary on this work of Hegel. Then we read Marx on Feuerbach on Alienation. Reality is made up of a structure, and a superstructure (the ideology). The structure is a kind of epiphenomenon. The structure is given by the relation of economic production.
Basically, philosophy and ideology become the same. Together with Engels, he writes a critique of philosophy, The German Ideology. And the Misery of Philosophy. Marx argues that different classes have a certain ideology which comes along with the class. In the atrium to the Humboldt university in Berlin, it is written: Philosophy until now has interpreted the world, and from now on, we must change it. Philosophy is a question of changing things.
Later Marxists, such as Antonio Gramsci, corrects and contests Marx on this point. Gramsci argues that whilst philosophy is an ideology, when it is established, it has a feedback with the economic structure. For Gramsci, you cannot only change the economic structure, you have to also change the intellectual structure, the intellectual hegemony. For Marx this is not the case. If you change the economic structure, ideology goes with it.
Franz Brentano requires a bit of effort because there are a lot of weird names in it. Brentano got into trouble and so couldn’t teach anymore, and Husserl always claimed him as his true master, despite having really got his PHD from elsewhere. Brentano is considered the founder and initiator of Phenomenology. It is from him where the term Intentionality is derived. On the other side, Brentano also is claimed to be the founder of the austrian philosophy, such as analytic philosophy.
A liminal figure whom both great traditions consider to be very important. In WW1 he had to go back to Austria during which he immediately died (L bozo). He was a priest, but had his priesthood renounced after the institution of the dogma of Papal Infallibility: When the pope speaks on customs and morals, he is infallible.
In that moment, he was asked to give a lecture for a learned audience who were not professional on a historical introduction to philsophy. This is the text we are reading. He talks of the four phases of philosophy.
It is a strange discipline because it shares the idea of a development, but does not agree that it is a progress. One cannot say that one philosopher is better than another. It is a progress that always has to be seen as a rediscussion of topics and arguments that come back. It shares with fine arts however that it is a return of the same kinds of styles.
Philosophy’s phases have 4 unfolding moments. So each phase has 4 phases. Via this interpretation he tries to explain in which phase all major figures belong. It is an attempt made by one of the best minds of the 19:th century, in which he tries to look at every major author in a certain scheme which is both illuminating and dull. It is a good way to end the course.