Will and representation
Explanation
Arthur Schopenhauer, in The World as Will and Representation (1818), offered one of the most original syntheses between Kantian philosophy and Eastern mysticism. His thesis: the world has two faces. Seen from outside, it is representation (Vorstellung) conditioned by the forms of the subject (space, time, causality); seen from within, it is will (Wille), a blind, irrational drive, the ultimate source of everything that exists.
Schopenhauer identifies the Will with the thing-in-itself that Kant had declared unknowable. We cannot know it from outside, but we have privileged access to it from within: when we experience our own willing, our own impulse, our own desire, we are touching the very essence of the universe. And that essence is not rational mind nor a benevolent God, but a drive without purpose.
The consequence is a deep philosophical pessimism. The Will wills ceaselessly and without possible satisfaction: we achieve a desire and another appears, we fill one need and another arises. Life is perpetual suffering with brief intermissions of boredom, an eternal swing between lack and ennui. Individual consciousness is just a stage on which this universal drama is performed in personal key.
Schopenhauer proposes routes of partial liberation. Art, especially music (which he considers the most direct expression of the Will), momentarily suspends the dominance of willing and installs us in disinterested contemplation. The ethics of compassion, by recognising the other as another manifestation of the same Will, dissolves egoism. And the ascetic negation of the will (inspired by Buddhism and Hinduism) would be the deepest liberation.
His influence was immense. Wagner, Nietzsche, Freud, Tolstoy, Mann, Borges, Beckett and many others were shaped by his pages. Freud borrowed the image of the unconscious as blind drive; Nietzsche took the will but inverted it positively (will to power). And the entire contemporary tradition emphasising unconscious processes and pre-rational drives owes a debt to Schopenhauer.
For a theory of consciousness, the central contribution is the recognition that beneath rational, representational consciousness there lies a deeper, affective-volitional layer that actually moves the organism. Contemporary neuroscience, with its affective brains and its discoveries about pre-conscious decisions, confirms Schopenhauerian intuitions about the primacy of the volitional-emotional over the cognitive.
Strengths
- Pioneering dialogue with Eastern traditions.
- Anticipates the Freudian unconscious (the blind will prior to intellect).
- Articulation of metaphysics, ethics and aesthetics.
- Continuity with contemporary idealist proposals.
Main critiques
- Postulating a cosmic will is metaphysically extravagant.
- Radical pessimism seen as disproportionate by optimist critics.
- Insufficient articulation with empirical science.
- The 'direct' access to the noumenon through introspection is contested.