Khrushchev in love

So I was literally forced to read the first book of Schopenhauer’s The World As Will and Representation which was, for the most part, fairly uninteresting. Except, that is, for this one part that was really interesting. For someone like me, anyway.

Schopenhauer builds this whole pseudo-Kantian structure around the world, but where Kant divides the world in two for primarily epistemological reasons, Schopenhauer’s interest is mostly metaphysical. Kant says we can know all about one half, and nothing about the other (not even that it exists), while Schopenhauer insists that we can know all sorts of things about both halves. Kant’s main interest in all this halving business is to make room in that inaccessible place for all the philosophically problematic stuff like God or free will. So if its something that he likes, but its hard to deal with philosophically, he calls it noumenal and says we can’t really know anything about it. Since Schopenhauer lets us access the other side, its clear that he’s up to something different.

Wait for it, we’re still not to the interesting part. So for Schopenhauer, the split sort of follows outside/inside lines, which lets us know things in different sorts of ways. I can look at my body as an object and learn all about it, from the outside. But I can also access it from the inside, because its my body: I can know all sorts of things about what it is to be me that just can’t be learned by looking at me from the outside. And for Schopenhauer, everything is like this – there’s something that is what-it-is-to-be-a-rock-from-the-inside, etc.

Still not to the interesting part. So Kant made a big deal about things like space, time, and causation being things that our understanding of the world forces onto it – the world-in-itself (if there is such a thing) has none of those things going on in it. Schopenhauer agrees, but adds that plurality must be one of those things that gets added by our understanding, since plurality can’t exist without space and time. So (maybe you can see where we’re going with this), although on the outside there are desks and people and me, on the inside (where things are as they are without my understanding imposing itself on them), there can be only one thing.

What-it-is-to-be-Khrushchev-on-the-inside is the same as what-it-is-to-be-Khrushchev’s-desk-on-the-inside, and so on. I know, who cares.

So we’re almost to the interesting part. Schopenhauer’s ethical system, built on this picture of the world, revolves around realizing all this through our sense of compassion. That is, compassion lets us see the world as it truly is and leads to a whole other set of bonuses that aren’t really important here. Our compassion is supposed to lead us to reject what-it-is-to-be-everything-on-the-inside, which ends up being the only moral, maybe even the only possible, option once this realization occurs.  The thing is, Schopenhauer was a dick. He pushed a woman, Caroline Marquet, living in his apartment building out of the house, injuring her, just because she was irritating him by making noise. He didn’t speak to his mother or sister for eleven years because they didn’t follow his advice on some investment.

So, and for me this is the interesting part, we have this philosopher who makes compassion the cornerstone of his ethics but himself seems particularly uncompassionate. In a sense, the whole World As Will and Representation then becomes an elaborately (and unnecessarily) argued case for Schopenhauer’s being a very, very bad person, on his own terms. More interesting, to me, is that the book was written, published, on Schopenhauer’s account, because he had a very important message to tell the world. It became a marginal classic of Western philosophy. And possibly because a cranky, callous man felt guilty for being such a cranky, callous man.