METAPHYSICS OF THE WILL
We have seen that scientific explanation does not go beyond
presentations ordered in space and time. This is just as true of the
sciences of causation--the 'aetiological' sciences--as it is of
mathematical science. All that we learn from Mechanics, Physics,
Chemistry and Physiology, is 'how, in accordance with an infallible
rule, one determinate state of matter necessarily follows another: how a
determinate change necessarily conditions and brings on another
determinate change.' This knowledge does not satisfy us. We wish to
learn the significance of phenomena; but we find that from outside,
while we view them as presentations, their inner meaning is for ever
inaccessible.
The starting-point for the metaphysical knowledge we seek is given us in
our own body. The animal body is 'the immediate object of the subject':
in it as presentation the 'effects' of 'causes' in the order of
presentations external to it are first recognised. Now in virtue of his
body the investigator is not pure knowing subject standing apart from
that which he knows. In the case of the particular system of
presentations constituting his organism, he knows what these
presentations signify, and that is his _will_ in a certain modification.
The subject appears as individual through its identity with the body,
and this body is given to it in two different ways: on one side as
object among objects, and subjected to their laws; on the other side as
the will immediately known to each. The act of will and the movement of
the body are not two different states related as cause and effect; for
the relation of cause and effect belongs only to the object, the
phenomenon, the presentation. They are one and the same act given in
different manners: the will, immediately to the subject; the movement,
in sensible intuition for understanding. The action of the body is the
objectified act of will. Called at first the immediate object of
presentation, the body may now, from the other side, be called 'the
objectivity of the will.'
Thus, as was said, the 'law of motivation' discloses the inner nature of
causality. In causality in general we know only relations of phenomena;
but in the case of our own body we know something else that those
relations express; namely, the act of will determined by motives. Now
there are in the world as presentation other systems like that which we
call our body. Unless all these are to be supposed mere phantoms without
inner reality, we must infer by analogy, in correspondence with like
phenomena, other individual wills similar to that which we know in
ourselves. This inference from analogy, universally admitted in the case
of human and animal bodies, must be extended to the whole corporeal
world. The failure to take this step is where the purely intellectual
forms of idealism have come short. Kant's 'thing-in-itself,' which is
not subject to the forms by which presentations become experience, but
which experience and its forms indicate as the reality, has been wrongly
condemned by his successors as alien to idealism. It is true that Kant
did in some respects fail to maintain the idealistic position with the
clearness of Berkeley; but his shortcoming was not in affirming a
thing-in-itself beyond phenomena. Here, in Schopenhauer's view, is the
metaphysical problem that he left a place for but did not solve. The
word of the riddle has now been pronounced. Beyond presentation, that
is, in itself and according to its innermost essence, the world is that
which we find in ourselves immediately as will. By this it is not meant
that a falling stone, for example, acts from a motive; knowledge and the
consequent action from motives belongs only to the determinate form that
the will has in animals and men; but the reality in the stone also is
the same in essence as that to which we apply the name of will in
ourselves. He who possesses this key to the knowledge of nature's
innermost being will interpret the forces of vegetation, of
crystallisation, of magnetism, of chemical affinity, even of weight
itself, as different only in phenomenal manifestation but in essence the
same; namely, that which is better known to each than all else, and
where it emerges most clearly is called will. Only the will is
thing-in-itself. It is wholly different from presentation, and is that
of which presentation is the phenomenon, the visibility, the
objectivity. Differences affect only the degree of the appearing, not
the essence of that which appears.
While the reality everywhere present is not will as specifically known
in man, the mode of indicating its essence by reference to this,
Schopenhauer contends, is a gain in insight. The thing-in-itself ought
to receive its name from that among all its manifestations which is the
clearest, the most perfect, the most immediately illumined by knowledge;
and this is man's will. When we say that every force in nature is to be
thought of as Will, we are subsuming an unknown under a known. For the
conception of Force is abstracted from the realm of cause and effect,
and indicates the limit of scientific explanation. Having arrived at the
forces of nature on the one side and the forms of the subject on the
other, science can go no further. The conception of Will can make known
that which was so far concealed, because it proceeds from the most
intimate consciousness that each has of himself, where the knower and
the known coincide.
By this consciousness, in which subject and object are not yet set
apart, we reach something universal. In itself the Will is not
individualised, but exists whole and undivided in every single thing in
nature, as the Subject of contemplation exists whole and undivided in
each cognitive being. It is entirely free from all forms of the
phenomenon. What makes plurality possible is subjection to the forms of
time and space, by which only the phenomenon is affected. Time and space
may therefore be called, in scholastic terminology, the 'principle of
individuation.' While each of its phenomena is subject to the law of
sufficient reason, which is the law of appearance in these forms, there
is for the Will as thing-in-itself no rational ground: it is 'grundlos.'
It is free from all plurality, although its phenomena in space and time
are innumerable. It is one, not with the unity of an object or of a
concept, but as that which lies outside of space and time, beyond the
_principium individuationis_, that is, the possibility of plurality. The
individual, the person, is not will as thing-in-itself, but phenomenon
of the will, and as such determined. The will is 'free' because there is
nothing beyond itself to determine it. Further, it is in itself mere
activity without end, a blind striving. Knowledge appears only as the
accompaniment of its ascending stages.
Here we have arrived at the thought which, in its various expressions,
constitutes Schopenhauer's metaphysics. That this cannot be
scientifically deduced he admits; but he regards it as furnishing such
explanation as is possible of science itself. For science there is in
everything an inexplicable element to which it runs back, and which is
real, not merely phenomenal. From this reality we are most remote in
pure mathematics and in the pure _a priori_ science of nature as it was
formulated by Kant. These owe their transparent clearness precisely to
their absence of real content, or to the slightness of this. The attempt
to reduce organic life to chemistry, this again to mechanism, and at
last everything to arithmetic, could it succeed, would leave mere form
behind, from which all the content of phenomena would have vanished. And
the form would in the end be form of the subject. But the enterprise is
vain. 'For in everything in nature there is something of which no ground
can ever be given, of which no explanation is possible, no cause further
is to be sought.' What for man is his inexplicable character,
presupposed in every explanation of his deeds from motives, that for
every inorganic body is its inexplicable quality, the manner of its
acting.
The basis of this too is will, and 'groundless,' inexplicable will; but
evidently the conception here is not identical with that of the Will
that is one and all. How do we pass from the universal to that which has
a particular character or quality? For of the Will as thing-in-itself we
are told that there is not a greater portion in a man and a less in a
stone. The relation of part and whole belongs exclusively to space. The
more and less touches only the phenomenon, that is, the visibility, the
objectivation. A higher degree of this is in the plant than in the
stone, in the animal than in the plant, and so forth; but the Will that
is the essence of all is untouched by degree, as it is beyond plurality,
space and time, and the relation of cause and effect.
The answer to the question here raised is given in Schopenhauer's
interpretation of the Platonic Ideas. These he regards as stages of
objectivation of the Will. They are, as Plato called them, eternal forms
related to particular things as models. The lowest stage of
objectivation of the Will is represented by the forces of inorganic
nature. Some of these, such as weight and impenetrability, appear in all
matter. Some are divided among its different kinds, as rigidity,
fluidity, elasticity, electricity, magnetism, chemical properties. They
are not subject to the relation of cause and effect, but are presupposed
by it. A force is neither cause of an effect nor effect of a cause.
Philosophically, it is immediate objectivity of the will; in aetiology,
_qualitas occulta_. At the lowest stages of objectivation, there is no
individuality. This does not appear in inorganic things, nor even in
merely organic or vegetative life, but only as we ascend the scale of
animals. Even in the higher animals the specific enormously predominates
over the individual character. Only in man is the Idea objectified in
the individual character as such. 'The character of each individual man,
so far as it is thoroughly individual and not entirely comprehended in
that of the species, may be regarded as a particular Idea, corresponding
to a peculiar act of objectivation of the Will.'
Schopenhauer warns us against substituting this philosophical
explanation for scientific aetiology. The chain of causes and effects, he
points out, is not broken by the differences of the original,
irreducible forces. The aetiology and the philosophy of nature go side by
side, regarding the same object from different points of view. Yet he
also gives us in relation to his philosophy much that is not
unsuggestive scientifically. His doctrine is not properly evolutionary,
since the Ideas are eternal; but he has guarded incidentally against our
supposing that all the natural kinds that manifest the Ideas
phenomenally must be always represented in every world. For our
particular world, comprising the sun and planets of the solar system, he
sets forth in the _Parerga_ an account of the process by which it
develops from the nebula to man. This was referred to in the preceding
chapter. In his fundamental work he describes a struggle, present
through the whole of nature, in which the phenomenal manifestations of
the higher Ideas conquer and subjugate those of the lower, though they
leave them still existent and ever striving to get loose. Here has been
seen an adumbration of natural selection: he himself admits the
difficulty he has in making it clear. We must remember that it is
pre-Darwinian.
Knowledge or intelligence he seeks to explain as an aid to the
individual organism in its struggle to subsist and to propagate its
kind. It first appears in animal life. It is represented by the brain or
a large ganglion, as every endeavour of the Will in its
self-objectivation is represented by some organ; that is, displays
itself for presentation as such and such an appearance. Superinduced
along with this contrivance for aid in the struggle, the world as
presentation, with all its forms, subject and object, time, space,
plurality and causality, is all at once there. 'Hitherto only will, it
is now at the same time presentation, object of the knowing subject.'
Then in man, as a higher power beyond merely intuitive intelligence,
appears reason as the power of abstract conception. For the most part,
rational as well as intuitive knowledge, evolved originally as a mere
means to higher objectivation of the Will, remains wholly in its
service. How, in exceptional cases, intellect emancipates itself, will
be discussed under the heads of AEsthetics and Ethics.
That this view implies a teleology Schopenhauer expressly recognises.
Indeed he is a very decided teleologist on lines of his own, and, in
physiology, takes sides strongly with 'vitalism' as against pure
mechanicism. True, the Will is 'endless' blind striving, and is
essentially divided against itself. Everywhere in nature there is
strife, and this takes the most horrible forms. Yet somehow there is in
each individual manifestation of will a principle by which first the
organism with its vital processes, and then the portion of it called the
brain, in which is represented the intellect with its _a priori_ forms,
are evolved as aids in the strife. And, adapting all the manifestations
to one another, there is a teleology of the universe. The whole world,
with all its phenomena, is the objectivity of the one and indivisible
Will; the Idea which is related to all other Ideas as the harmony to the
single voices. The unity of the Will shows itself in the unison of all
its phenomena as related to one another. Man, its clearest and
completest objectivation, is the summit of a pyramid, and could not
exist without this. Inorganic and organic nature, then, were adapted to
the future appearance of man, as man is adapted to the development that
preceded him. But in thinking the reality, time is to be abstracted
from. The earlier, we are obliged to say, is fitted to the later, as the
later is fitted to the earlier; but the relation of means to end, under
which we cannot help figuring the adaptation, is only appearance for our
manner of knowledge. And the harmony described does not get rid of the
conflict inherent in all will.
In this account of Schopenhauer's metaphysical doctrine, I have tried to
make the exposition as smooth as possible; but at two points the
discontinuity can scarcely be concealed. First, the relation of the
universal Will to the individual will is not made clear; and, secondly,
the emergence of the world of presentation, with the knowledge in which
it culminates, is left unintelligible because the will is conceived as
mere blind striving without an aim. As regards the first point,
disciples and expositors have been able to show that, by means of
distinctions in his later writings, apparent contradictions are to some
extent cleared away; and, moreover, that he came to recognise more
reality in the individual will. On the second point, I think it will be
necessary to admit that his system as such breaks down. But both points
must be considered in their connection.
One of the most noteworthy features of Schopenhauer's philosophy is, as
he himself thought, the acceptance from first to last of Kant's
distinction between the 'empirical' and the 'intelligible' character of
the individual. Every act of will of every human being follows with
necessity as phenomenon from its phenomenal causes; so that all the
events of each person's life are determined in accordance with
scientific law. Nevertheless, the character empirically manifested in
the phenomenal world, while it is completely necessitated, is the
expression of something that is free from necessitation. This
'intelligible character' is out of time, and, itself undetermined,
manifests itself through that which develops in time as a chain of
necessary causes and effects. That this doctrine had been taken up,
without any ambiguity as regards the determinism, by Schelling as well
as by himself, he expressly acknowledges; and he finds it, as he also
finds modern idealism, anticipated in various passages by the
Neo-Platonists. His adaptation of it to his doctrine of the Ideas is
distinctly Neo-Platonic in so far as he recognises 'Ideas of
individuals'; but of course to make Will the essence belongs to his own
system. 'The intelligible character,' he says, 'coincides with the Idea,
or, yet more precisely, with the original act of will that manifests
itself in it: in so far, not only is the empirical character of each
man, but also of each animal species, nay, of each plant species, and
even of each original force of inorganic nature, to be regarded as
phenomenon of an intelligible character, that is, of an indivisible act
of will out of time.' This is what he called the '_aseitas_' of the
will; borrowing a scholastic term to indicate its derivation (if we may
speak of it as derived) from itself (_a se_), and not from a supposed
creative act. Only if we adopt this view are we entitled to regard
actions as worthy of moral approval or disapproval. They are such not
because they are not necessitated, but because they necessarily show
forth the nature of an essence the freedom of which consists in being
what it is. Yet he could not but find a difficulty in reconciling this
with his position that the one universal Will is identical in all
things, and in each is 'individuated' only by space and time. For the
Ideas, like the thing-in-itself, are eternal, that is, outside of time
as well as space; and all the things now enumerated, forces of nature,
plant and animal species, and individual characters of men, are declared
to be in themselves Ideas.
He in part meets this difficulty by the subtlety that time and space do
not, strictly speaking, determine individuality, but arise along with
it. The diremption of individualities becomes explicit in those forms.
Yet he must have perceived that this is not a complete answer, and
various modifications can be seen going on. His first view clearly was
that the individual is wholly impermanent, and at death simply
disappears; nothing is left but the one Will and the universal Subject
of contemplation identical in all. Metempsychosis is the best
mythological rendering of what happens, but it is no more. Later, he
puts forward the not very clearly defined theory of a 'palingenesia' by
which a particular will, but not the intellect that formerly accompanied
it, may reappear in the phenomenal world. And the hospitality he showed
to stories of magic, clairvoyance, and ghost-seeing, is scarcely
compatible with the view that the individual will is no more than a
phenomenal differentiation of the universal will. A speculation (not put
forward as anything more) on the appearance of a special providence in
the destiny of the individual, points, as Professor Volkelt has noted,
to the idea of a guidance, not from without, but by a kind of good
daemon or genius that is the ultimate reality of the person. On all this
we must not lay too much stress; but there is certainly one passage that
can only be described as a definite concession that the individual is
real in a sense not at first allowed. Individuality, it is said in so
many words (_Parerga_, ii. Sec. 117), does not rest only on the 'principle
of individuation' (time and space), and is therefore not through and
through phenomenon, but is rooted in the thing-in-itself. 'How deep its
roots go belongs to the questions which I do not undertake to
answer.'[1]
[1] _Werke_, ed. Frauenstaedt, vol. vi. p. 243.
This tends to modify considerably, but does not overthrow,
Schopenhauer's original system. In very general terms, he is in the
number of the 'pantheistic' thinkers; and it is remarkable, on
examination, how these, in Europe at least, have nearly always
recognised in the end some permanent reality in the individual. This is
contrary to first impressions: but the great names may be cited of
Plotinus, John Scotus Erigena, Giordano Bruno, Spinoza (in Part v. of
the _Ethics_), and finally of Schopenhauer's special aversion, Hegel,
who has been supposed most unfavourable of all to any recognition of
individuality as real. It is more true, Hegel maintains, that the
individuality determines its world than that it is determined by it; and
there is no explanation why the determination should be such and such
except that the individuality was already what it is.[2] And, if
Schopenhauer's more imaginative speculations seek countenance from the
side of empiricism, there is nothing in them quite so audacious as a
speculation of J. S. Mill on disembodied mind, thrown out during the
time when he was writing his _Logic_.[3]
[2] _Phaenomenologie des Geistes_, Jubilaeumsausgabe, ed. G. Lasson, pp.
201-3.
[3] Letter to Robert Barclay Fox, May 10, 1842. Printed in Appendix to
_Letters and Journals of Caroline Fox_, third ed., vol. ii. pp. 331-2.
'To suppose that the eye is _necessary_ to sight,' says Mill, 'seems to
me the notion of one immersed in matter. What we call our bodily
sensations are all in the mind, and would not necessarily or probably
cease, because the body perishes.'
The association with pantheism Schopenhauer accepts in principle, though
the name is not congenial to him. In his system the Will is one and all,
like the 'Deus' of Spinoza. The difference is that, instead of ascribing
perfection to the universe that is its manifestation, he regards the
production of a world as a lapse from which redemption is to be sought.
His doctrine has been rightly described, in common with the predominant
philosophical doctrines of his period, as a resultant of the deepened
subjective analysis brought by Kant into modern philosophy on the one
side, and of the return to Spinoza in the quest for unity of principle
on the other. Why, then, it may be asked, are Fichte, Schelling, and
Hegel the constant objects of his attack? The true explanation is not
the merely external one, that they were his successful rivals for public
favour, but is to be found in a real antithesis of thought. Within the
limits of the idealism they all hold in common, Schopenhauer is at the
opposite pole. In spite of his attempt to incorporate the Platonic
Ideas, and in spite of his following of Kant, whose 'intelligible world'
was in essence Platonic or neo-Platonic, he could find no place in his
system for a rational order at the summit. Now this order was precisely
what Fichte and Hegel aimed at demonstrating. If Schopenhauer is less
unsympathetic in his references to Schelling, that is because
Schelling's world-soul appeared to him to prefigure his own attempt to
discover in nature the manifestation of a blindly striving will or
feeling rather than reason. Suspicious as he shows himself of possible
plagiarisms by others, the charge cannot be retorted against himself.
The supreme principle of Fichte, it has been pointed out, has an
actively volitional character and was formulated before Schopenhauer's:
but then it is essentially rational. For Hegel, what is supreme is the
world-reason. Hence they are at one with Plato in holding that in some
sense 'mind is king.' For Schopenhauer, on the contrary, mind, or pure
intellect, is an emancipated slave. Having reached its highest point,
and seen through the work of the will, it does not turn back and
organise it, but abolishes it as far as its insight extends.
Yet to say merely this is to give a wrong impression of Schopenhauer.
Starting though he does with blind will, and ending with the flight of
the ascetic from the suffering inherent in the world that is the
manifestation of such a will, he nevertheless, in the intermediate
stages, makes the world a cosmos and not a chaos. And the Platonists on
their side have to admit that 'the world of all of us' does not present
itself on the surface as a manifestation of pure reason, and that it
is a serious task to 'rationalise' it. Where he completely fails
is where the Platonic systems also fail, though from the opposite
starting-point. His attempt to derive presentation, intellect,
knowledge, from blind striving, is undoubtedly a failure. But so also
is the attempt of the Platonising thinkers to deduce a world of mixture
from a principle of pure reason without aid from anything else
empirically assumed. Not that in either case there is failure to give
explanations in detail; but in both cases much is taken from experience
without reduction to the principles of the system. What we may say by
way of comparison is this: that if Schopenhauer had in so many words
recognised an immanent Reason as well as Will in the reality of the
universe, he would have formally renounced his pessimism; while it
cannot be said that on the other side a more explicit empiricism in the
account of the self-manifestation of Reason would necessarily destroy
the optimism.