The world according to Schopenhauer, part 2:

The World As Will – Second Aspect

Oh, you’re back! Well, if anyone’s still with me, I’d better get going.

In the last installment we already saw that the world as we perceive it at first glance is nothing more than representation of perception, and I also announced that this time we were going to see that there’s another side to things, which Schopenhauer called “the world as will”.

So here goes...

The subject of cognition (yes, that’s you), which appears as an individual through its identity with its body, perceives said body in two manners: First as a representation to an understanding outlook as an object among objects, a physical body in a physical world. Looking around, you perceive your surroundings in the same way as you do looking down to inspect the stunning beauty of your own body.

But at the same time we perceive that body in a different manner, which is termed ‘will’.

I think it’s evident that you don’t perceive your own actions and movements in the same way that everyone else perceives them. Otherwise you wouldn’t have any understanding of your own motives and perceive your acting and reacting in a similar manner as you perceive for instance a stone falling to the ground after being lifted up into the air. Without another way to perceive your own self you would just look at what you do and have to put up with your performance in the same way you look at anything else happening around you – like seeing a car passing by or rain coming down; you don’t question it and shrug it off since there’s nothing you can do to understand any reasoning behind it.

You probably could still come up with fancy names and laws describing the conduct of any given thing, yourself included, but you wouldn’t have any insight into its nature. The only thing able to shed a light on the nature of your inner self is the will.

I should add that although your actions are perceived in those two entirely different ways, your will and its representation are directly connected. Every act of will simultaneously appears as an action of the body, and translates into perception.

The will mustn’t be confused with motivation either. In the words of Schopenhauer himself:

“Motives never determine more than what I will at this time, in this place, in these circumstances, not that I will in general, or what I will in general, in other words, the maxim characterising the whole of my willing. Therefore, the whole inner nature of my willing cannot be explained from the motives, but they determine merely its manifestation at a given point of time; they are merely the occasion on which my will shows itself.”

We can say that motives are just symptoms of our will.

It doesn’t make a difference if your will to act involves conscious thinking either. The will that takes effect when you make conscious decisions, is the same will that is responsible for the beating of your heart or you popping a boner.

It’s not like the action follows an act of will or the will causes the action, they’re one and the same, only appearing to be connected by causality.

“Therefore, in a certain sense, it can also be said that the will is knowledge a priori of the body, and that the body is knowledge a posteriori of the will.”

The body is merely an objectification of the will, as for instance a hand appears as the physically manifested will to grab; teeth and stomach are objectified hunger; your genitals are objectified sex drive; your giant beer belly hanging over said genitals is your manifested will to get shit-faced drunk all the fucking time.

All of you, as you sit there in front of your computers, are just your manifested will to live. But more about that later…

In the first installment I already explained the differentiation between Schopenhauer’s representation of a thing from the thing-in-itself. Although the thing-in-itself is different in its nature from all objects depending on the constraints of time and space, it has to borrow an object’s name and Schopenhauer chose the word ‘will’. If you had to give the thing-in-itself a name at all, it couldn’t be any other term than ‘will’, since there isn’t anything else the human mind has a better understanding of than that.

The will that everyone experiences as the most intuitive part of their consciousness, can also be recognized as the essence of all other appearances in nature, not only of man and animal. Schopenhauer ultimately states that it’s the same force in everything surrounding us. The growing of plants, magnetism and gravitation, electricity – will – the thing-in-itself.

Since the will is not something occupying space and time, there can be no causal interaction between the will, as a thing in itself, and events in the ordinary empirical world.

This applies to all natural phenomena. Everything differs in appearance, not in its inner nature, (inner nature = will, remember?). “The will as a thing in itself is entirely different from its appearance and free from all forms of appearance altogether.” Only by fully realizing that the will is an entity in itself, and one and the same in all embodiments, one can fully understand the Kantian doctrine that time, space and causality aren’t features that can be assigned to the thing-in-itself but only to forms of cognition.

Thus the will in itself lacks cognition/identity, in its nature it’s blind, striving without cause or aim. “The multiplicity of things in time and space, which all are its objectification, doesn’t strike the will and it irrespectively remains indivisible. There’s not a smaller part of it in a stone and a bigger one in a person.“ The principle of pieces of a whole, and the more or less of things, means nothing in the face of the will. All that stuff only applies to the visibility of things, the objectification. You’ll obviously find that to a higher degree in a plant than in a stone, or respectively in an animal than in a plant, and so on. The grades of the will’s occurring transitions into appearance, of its objectification, are of course endless.

But Schopenauer further explains that the multiplicity of appearances on these different levels strikes the will even less than the nuances of its objectification, meaning the amount of individual things of each form or particular occurrences of a force; since that multiplicity is directly entailed by time and space which don’t have any influence on the will. “It becomes manifest in one oak tree just as well as in millions... “

The essence of the will is not drawn apart and divided in the unlimited space, but this dimension only belongs to its appearance; whereas itself is present in everything live lock, stock and barrel.

Conclusion: “The world as idea” as a whole and every little part it constitutes of is nothing else than the objectification of the will: Will becomes object, which is our representation.

Got it? Just kidding. How about another one for the intellectual elite?

Take a look out your window. All you see there, no matter if it’s a bunch of model sluts at Malibu beach or rusty bars in front of a barbwired courtyard with people in orange suits, all that, is the “world as idea” for you, okay?

Now get away from what you just see with your eyes and hear and feel with your senses (sorry guys, it just doesn’t work without any abstraction). You’re more than just what other people see, right? There’s something going on inside of you that your environment has no clue about, right? And if you then realize that all those other people out there are more than what you can see, too, then you’re pretty close to the concept of the “world as will”.

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Those were pretty much the basics you need to implement into your thinking in order to understand what comes next. What will follow now are the second aspects of the world as will and idea which really make up what’s so fascinating and unique about Schopenhauer’s system. So watch out for the next installment, due whenever I get my ass in gear again.


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