The world according to Schopenhauer, part 1:

The World as Idea – First aspect

By demand of the author, a precondition for the comprehension of „the World as Will and Idea“ is to be familiar with his disquisition “On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason”, which also represents its chronological pre-stage and the foundation of Schopenhauer’s entire philosophical system in form of a scientific law.

 

The most general formulation, freely adapted from Wolf, could be worded:

“Nothing is, without a reason why it is”

For Schopenhauer it was the principle of all clarification; a mean to trace back existence or connection of any matter to one of the manifestations of that principle. The theorem itself is not explicable any further since “there’s no principle to explicate the principle of all explication”.

Schopenhauer distinguishes four different embodiments of that principle, depending on the distinction of the types of objects, whereupon our cognitive awareness is based on the relation between subject and object.

The four shapes of this principle are: The reason for being, becoming, action and cognition.

* The first one is assigned to perception in forms of time and space (the principle of individuation; things have to occupy distinct portions of time and space to become specific individual things)

* The second one is assigned to causality and intellect (the relation between cause and effect and mind – this is more or less identical with Kant’s principle of causality)

* The third one is assigned to self-awareness and motivation (where all our wanting and acts of volition originate from - this is analogical to the principle of causality; motivation is causality seen from within)

* The fourth one is assigned to logic and rationality (this one means that if an adjudgement shall embody a cognition, it must have a sufficient reason – due to which it then obtains the predicate “true”; hence truth is the relation between adjudgement and something different that’s called its cause)

All perceptions, the way we experience them, are subject to one of these manifestations of his principle.

Schopenhauer claims: All our perceptions are objects for the subject (our consciousness) and are definably connected through the principle of reason. All objects are presentations to a recipient. The world of representation has to present itself in a subject's experience without which it would not exist.

This is where that whole “if a tree falls in the forest but noone is around – does it still make a sound?” theoretical problem derives from.

From this follows that “the world is my idea”, whereas this insight is gained from a subjective point of view and the definition doesn’t deny the world’s empirical reality. It is real because I think it's real.

With this notion Schopenhauer bases himself on Kant’s “transcendental idealism” and the consequential doctrine that we don’t perceive things like they really are in itself but only how they appear as a result of the nature of our sense organs (I guess this is easy to understand if you just think of the discrepancies of the idea a blind man has of an apple as opposed to a guy without taste buds – for one it’s probably something sweet tasting and refreshing while it’s a bright red, heart-shaped object for the other).

Schopenhauer regarded the differentiation of Kant’s “thing-in-itself” from the appearance, or as he called it - “the nomenon from the phenomenon”, as the most important philosophical achievement of modern times, although he also refers to the insufficiency in Kant’s specified definition of his thing-in-itself.

We’ll get more into detail about Schopenhauer’s idea of the “thing-in-itself” (no pun intended) in later installments.

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“If we were nothing but perceiving beings, our way to the thing-in-itself would be blocked altogether. Only the other side of our own nature can shed light on the other side of the nature of things in itself.”

That sentence directly leads to the discovery of the counterpart of the world as idea: the world as will;

And thus to my next installment...