Schopenhauer’s “The World as Will and Idea”: A Brief, Initial Review
In The World as Will and Idea (1818, 1844), Schopenhauer’s aim is “to impart a single thought” (5). This “thought” encompasses the entire universe, the essence of our existence within it, the way this essence shapes our relationships with each other, and two methods for re-seeing the whole construct so that we might live better lives.
Born two generations after Immanuel Kant, Schopenhauer saw himself as that philosopher’s “immediate successor”: no significant progress had been made, he believed, in philosophy between the time Kant’s work was published and the time Schopenhauer wrote The World as Will (309). Kant’s main contribution, found in The Critique of Pure Reason (1781, 1787), was his pointing out of the difference between the way other people and things appear to us and what those people and things are in themselves. Because our knowledge depends completely on our senses, we can never really know the true nature of anyone or anything.
Schopenhauer agrees up to a point, departing with his argument that there is one thing whose nature we can know with complete certainty: ourselves. Each of us, and everything else in existence — animals and plants, trees and rocks — manifests the will to live: the will, not a will, because everything that is, is nothing more than a phantasmic expression of the energy that underlies the foundation and flux of the universe. Human beings — at least some of them — may have more intelligence than an amoeba, but they’re both made up of and driven by the same essential stuff.
The separateness we feel — from other humans, from animals, from magnets, twigs, and stars — is an illusion, brought about by what Schopenhauer calls the individuation principle. (He was heavily influenced by Hinduism: at the time he was writing, ancient Sanskrit texts had recently been translated into Latin and so were becoming available to a broader European audience.) Throughout The World as Will, he compares this illusion to the Hindu concept of Maya, or the world of appearance — of idea — which seems real to us but isn’t.
The world, in his estimation, is a terrible place. “For whence did Dante take the materials for his hell,” Schopenhauer asks, “but from this our actual world? And yet he made a very proper hell of it” (245). In this world, each of us (or at least our minds, understandings, our capacities to reason) is a subject. As subjects, we have access to our own wills, the nature of which is to blindly and constantly strive and desire. All conflict can be traced back to this striving and desiring, which can never be fully satisfied because, as Schopenhauer writes,
…the nature of man consists in this, that his will strives, is satisfied and strives anew, and so on for ever. Indeed, his happiness and well-being consist simply in the quick transition from wish to satisfaction, and from satisfaction to a new wish. (200)
Not even the attainment of our wildest dreams is enough to keep the will in check. There is always something more to be desired, something new to be had. It’s a miserable cycle which, as is also observed in Buddhist thought, leads only to more suffering and, for most of us, lasts until death.
The good news, to the extent that we can call it such in Schopenhauer, is that this cycle can be broken — we can see through the illusion of separateness and gain a clearer understanding of reality. This can happen in two ways:
- We can immerse ourselves in art. When painting, poetry, or music beautifully and concisely captures the essence of existence, the individual viewer, reader, or listener loses their individuality, becoming, however briefly, the “pure, will-less, painless, timeless subject of knowledge” (142). Art makes us feel more connected to the universe. This is the more accessible route of the two.
- We can become ascetics. In denying the will by giving up all worldly things, the genuinely noble person punctures the illusion of the individuation principle to the point where there is no distinction between their well-being and others’, including animals’. The ascetic will not harm animals and will take action, however drastic it may seem, to mitigate all suffering (279). This is a difficult but not impossible path. History has produced a few outstanding examples: Buddha and Jean-Marie Bouvier de La Motte Guyon are two offered up by the author.
Both goals are admirable, but Schopenhauer himself wasn’t able to practice his principles in all his affairs. One story has it that he shoved his elderly landlady down the stairs after a dispute. According to another, he invited troops to use his window for a better aim at revolutionaries causing trouble in the streets. For what it’s worth, he never claims in World as Will to live his teachings to the letter.
Still, there’s a lot to be gained from this book. Schopenhauer provides a clear framework for understanding our place in the world — who we are and what drives us — and proposes an ethical system that acknowledges the moral usefulness of religion while discarding all its senseless superstitions. His analysis of desire and striving as ceaseless and insatiable remains important in our time (just ask any purchaser of products on Amazon, or anyone stuck in a social-media dopamine loop). The solutions he proposes to stop these cycles, though they may not be for everyone, are worth serious consideration — at least, the first one is. We’d all be much better off with more art in our lives.
There’s an artistry, too, in Schopenhauer’s prose, which R.B. Haldane and J. Kemp maintain in their translation from German to English. Schopenhauer may be known primarily as a philosopher, but he also had something of the poet in him, deploying vivid imagery to convey his ideas and make them stick in readers’ minds. The best example might be when he compares our immediate perceptions to sunlight and reason to that same light reflected off the moon’s surface (41). At the end of his discussion on art, Schopenhauer uses a brilliant extended metaphor to compare the whole of life to a piece of music: the bass notes are the basic elements all life springs from; the harmony corresponds to “animal life”; and the melody is “the intellectual life and effort of man” (198–199). The author’s style and writing abilities make reading his philosophy enjoyable despite the bleakness at its heart.
Work Cited
Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Idea. Translated by R.B. Haldane and J. Kemp, Digireads, 2020.
