Schopenhauer has been on my radar for a while because like Donald Trump, Schopenhauer was a Kantian. To better understand how Trump will complete German idealism, one must first wrestle with this great thinker. While some philosophers content themselves with attempting to explain a single concept Schopenhauer decides he would rather explain everything from magnets to women ☕. Combining Kant’s distinction between idea of a thing vs thing in itself (in short, your idea of a car is not the car) and Platonic Idea (there is a single tree in a realm of forms which all trees in our world are representations of) he comes up with his own spin on things stating that the world presents itself to our experience as individuations of a single thing. That thing is Will. So hypothetically the process could go something like this Will encounters a subject and gets objectified into a Platonic idea. This platonic idea then encounters space and time where it is objectified once more into a perception, like a tree for example. So, what exactly is Will? Will is actually very similar to the Buddhist concept of desire. This is no coincidence as Schopenhauer calls the translation of the Vedas one of the greatest gifts of the 19th century. Will can be considered the universal principle that animates the universe. A blind insatiable striving. One outcome of this is that everything that wills, suffers. And since everything that exists is a manifestation of will it means that everything suffers. This plants Schopenhauer squarely in the school of pessimists. To Schopenhauer life can be broken into two experiences. One is either striving after something or bored (read depressed). Schopenhauer would say that the happiness we feel when accomplishing a goal isn’t actually happiness it is merely the cessation of suffering that was caused by the desire. Once this desire is gone a new one almost instantaneously takes its place. He also has some interesting ideas about art that somewhat resonated specifically that good art lifts a person out of their subject-ness for brief periods of time. It opens them up to look at the world more universally. For example, you hear a sad song and can join in not with particular sadness, but sadness at a universal level. He ends the book by talking about ethics
“For virtue certainly proceeds from knowledge, but not from the abstract knowledge that can be communicated through words. If it were so, virtue could be taught, and by here expressing in abstract language its nature and the knowledge which lies at its foundation, we should make everyone who comprehends this even ethically better. But this is by no means the case. On the contrary, ethical discourses and preaching will just as little produce a virtuous man as all the systems of æsthetics from Aristotle downwards have succeeded in producing a poet.”
He boils down a virtuous person as one who makes less distinction than is usually made between himself and others. Because to Schopenhauer this distinction between I and you is illusory, as he quotes often- tat tvam asi (Thou art that). So, I assume he would rewrite the golden rule from “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” to “do unto you as you would have you do to you”. He ends the book by describing what he considers to be the most moral thing you can do. In short it is to live an ascetic life. There are only two ways you can do this; one is to be a saint. I.E to recognize that I and you are illusions. This knowledge curves the saint’s will to life and thus the saint’s suffering. This as was stated above can’t be taught. The second way is to experience suffering at such a high level that it forcibly breaks your will. You become will-less. I am surprised by how closely this aligns with my Matrix/Mushroom idea. As a random bit of trivia in his later life he lived alone except for a succession of poodles that he named Atman. Overall, this book was quite dense at times, full of interesting insights at others. I found it difficult to stay engaged for the entirety of it, but when I was engaged it had its rewards.
Arthur Schopenhauer