I have finally decided that I am going to publicly (somewhat) and systematically address the error in Arthur Schopenhauer’s thinking, as it is also at the heart of my own personal problems. I’m going to try to not focus on editing my thought, to keep this as live a discussion as possible, to publish pieces extemporaneously, impromptu.

In Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (The World as Will and Representation), Arthur Schopenhauer tackles a monumental problem: the nature of the whole world, everything from the individual to heavens themselves, including the reason for living and the struggle of existence. Whether or not you land on the same conclusions as Schopenhauer, you will certainly find that his perspective is incredibly well-articulated and extremely relatable to most people throughout history.

In a nutshell, Schopenhauer’s philosophy is this:

“The world is my representation”: This is a truth valid with reference to every living and knowing being, though man alone is capable of bringing it up into reflective, abstract consciousness. If he really does so, philosophical discernment has dawned on him. It then becomes clear and certain to him that he does not know a sun and an earth, but only an eye that sees a sun, a hand that feels an earth; that the world around him is there only as representation, in other words, only in reference to another thing, namely that which represents, and this is himself. If any truth can be expressed a priori it, it is this; for it is the statement of that form of all possible and conceivable experience, a form that is more general than all others, than time, space, and causality, for all these presuppose it. … Everything exists for knowledge, and hence the whole of this world, is only object in relation to the subject, perception of the perceiver, in a word, representation. … Everything that in any way belongs and can belong to the world is inevitably associated with this being-conditioned by the subject, and it exists only for the subject. The world is representation.” (Vol I, 1.1)

Now elsewhere he goes on to eloquate that the other side of the coin of experience is the world as will. The world is representation, in that everything you experience is, namely, an experience belonging to you. We never truly know anything in itself, as it is beyond the perceptive limitations we bring to it. Most of the time for most people, our attentions are narrowed by the necessities of living. We live in a state of ceaseless striving because we are living for our own wills, however foolishly or clumsily. We only represent to our minds that which has importance for our sense of survival-security. Occasionally, however, we experience a release from that stress, in moments of beauty, moments of insight, moments of art, moments of pure sublime awareness, in the strong-soft flurry of a piano, in the free-spirited face of a girl, in the grace of a dancer, in the sublime experience of certain doom, etc. These experiences are beyond the world as representation. They are expressions of free will, the will within us accessing the essential structure of our experience by surmounting the demands that our survival places on us. Surplus imagination results in genius, beauty, freedom, joy, peace.

This is the germ of Schopenhauer’s philosophy. It is at once pessimistic and sublime, both in its content and stylistic form. He is no dull writer, but is lucid and direct and tangible. Yet, I find there to be something lacking, something amiss, and that is what I seek to disentangle. This is a very great Gordian knot, for his philosophy encapsulates so much of the human experience, the vanity of it all. It will require immense subtlety to loose.

The knot I wish to untangle is not easy to put into words, much less from one unified angle. It may be a philosophical error to assume that a truth is unequivocal and monolithic. It may be that truth is neither a polytheistic buckshot diffusion nor an ultimate monolithic system. Truth may be polytropic, an idealized sphere of gas that approximates a rougher complex star—i.e., there may be an untraversable gap between reasoning and perception, and truth belongs to the realm of reasoning alone, not to domain of perception. Or truth may be somewhat kaleidescopic: a really unified mystery that looks different depending on your reference frame, and truth is local to your reference frame. Perhaps we can or cannot get closer to the mystery at the heart of all things.

Schopenhauer asserts that life is inherently restless, that the necessities of living can only be either submitted to or escaped by way of a nihilistic nirvana bliss. But I know for a fact that rules and order can be fun and lifegiving, indeed that the absolute best way to survive and succeed is to open up to the beyond, that there is natural chaos with causal reality beyond necessity, that mathematical form and poetry are conveyances of being through form, that there is autochthonic form (such as words like pepper, free, joy, peregrination, elaboration, angst—words that structurally reflect their concepts and objects), that knowledge is a kind of being and belongs to a class prior to the division between knowledge and being, something in which is the evolutionary root seed of sentience.

On the one hand, I wish to overturn Schopenhauer’s axiomatic philosophy of the principle of sufficient reason. On the other hand, I wish simply to modify his philosophy, as it is incredibly close.
I wish to consolidate, coalesce, convey without crushing or rending concept from percept, essence from existence, pattern from matter. I wish to disclose the liberty at the heart of knowledge.

More to come.


July 8, 2022
Gorda, CA