The Taking of the Biscuit
Schopenhauer is not a philosopher in current vogue. In itself this is no surprise. His division of thought into aspects, an understanding which grasped the world through concepts, and an amorphous acephalous Will, which was the idea, fell out of favour at the end of the nineteenth century, and never really found it again. The logical crudities and inaccuracies of a system that on the one hand, thought that understanding was merely a product of Will, and yet on the other, that it gave an objective viewpoint on the world; or a system which hypothesized a force, the Will which was at once utterly self interested and fixated with death, and yet on the other could by definition never die; or again a Will which was clearly at once within every individual, and yet not of them (as it must resonate between them all); were all simply too great. And yet, in spite of this brusque dismissal on the part of philosophy, there remain three lessons which surely it would be well to learn from Schopenhauer’s failure, before we simply close The Book (he only wrote, and then rewrote, the one). Firstly it is clear that although derided, as a system, an important aspect of Schopenhauer, namely the division of the mind into Will and reason, has survived into modern thought. Secondly, Schopenhauer’s is a great cautionary tale, about what happens when philosophy, or indeed any system, attempts to be too greedy, and make far too big a claim about itself, its role and status. Thirdly, it is clear that Schopenhauer’s basic division between encompassing language and partial Will, could, with a bit of care once again become a highly useful idea for our times (although maybe not quite as Schopenhauer meant it to be). I will consider each of these uses and abuses of Schopenhauer in turn.
Schopenhauer’s most insidious and insistent influence on modern thought, comes, appropriately enough, through the agency of others - most particularly Freud. Freud ‘lifted’ the entire idea that the mind was divided into logical consciousness and illogical, and somehow more real unconscious (or Will from Schopenhauer). With this borrowing, came also a theory of research and practice. It is a cardinal feature of ‘the unconscious’ that it does not behave as the rational mind, and therefore needs to be explored rather indirectly. Perhaps here two slightly different affinities need to be mentioned.
On the one hand, both Schopenhauer and Freud argue that one cannot create a lexicon of passions, where every passion is defined and redefined according to simple rules of composition (hate is anger plus an idea, or pride an excess love of the self). - A method that had long been the practice of philosophy, was thereby dismissed by these two modern thinkers, on the grounds that it allowed the passions too much logic. Passions were never logical, and therefore could and would behave in ways which we never could or would, simply expect. The effect of this first aspect was highly problematic. If one rules that the mind does not have the right to understand its passions, the mind must also lose all ability to meaningfully control them. For Schopenhauer, this was simply how it was, and it would be folly to claim or to think that anything else was possible. For Freud, by contrast, this move led to the claim that there was one way to understand passion, and one profession qualified to do so - namely psychoanalysis. What was in Schopenhauer, merely a nice little philosophical paradox, becomes in the hands of Freud, an excuse to invent a profession, and make money. More importantly, there is clearly a very critical principle at stake here. Once this move is allowed, and the mind is deprived of its one (albeit possibly faulty) means to control its own passions, then all hell is likely to break loose in the mind, as passions war like spoilt children for the mastery of thought. This move in turn, is of course grist to the analyst’s mill, and yet is problematic for the rest of us.
On the other hand, the means by which the domain of the Will was to be explored, were, for both thinkers distinctly artistic. It was in art, Schopenhauer claimed, that the Will was directly incarnated for all to see (or even more to hear); While for Freud (and even more Jung), ‘the unconscious’ and artistic expression were closely interlinked. Once again this tie in has resonated across the century and a half or so since it was first suggested. We all ‘know’ the unconscious is artistic and creative. At this point one needs to remember that Freud at least, saw the mapping out of ‘the unconscious’ as a scientific discipline. The somewhat audacious claim here, is therefore, beyond a mere claim about the artist in us all, and becomes a direct attempt to lock within a hard science, the methods and creative powers of art. The result is of course that such a discipline frequently makes ludicrous, and rather dismissive claims about the status of artists, claims that attempt to capture the profoundly shocking, within a comforting (if apparently scandalous) cliché cum paradox: For example, Dali was really a suppressed homosexual, or Dickens has a problem in infant sexuality. Such ‘explanations’ clearly never explain anything. They merely provide a voyeuristic mind with a nice little (imagined) peep show, and an excuse to stop thinking. Or better they make cheap ‘copy’ for the art critic, and ‘lay commentator’.
Moreover taken together these two aspects have an additional, and far more directly troubling implication of their own. The Mind is seen at once as the peculiar provenance of the expert, but also as the domain in which art expresses the stuff of science. Running in the opposite direction, it is therefore a place whereby with cunning, one can use the principles of art (according to the rules of science), to manipulate passion and therefore thought, to make individuals act in certain ways. That is, the two taken together define the space within thought, which at once legitimises and defines the circumvention of the individual’s conscious mind in the interests of some large corporation (advertising), or state (perhaps it is no wonder that Hitler claimed that Schopenhauer was his favourite philosopher…).
It probably needs to be noted though, that in a sense the last point and the previous two aspects need not both be ‘true.’ The language of advertising was opened out and defined in the direction mapped out by Freud and Schopenhauer (running from conscious to unconscious); and exploited by advertising which attempted to move in the opposite way. Now although advertising needs the language and the ‘understanding’ of the forwards move to define its parameters, it does not follow, that its own ‘backwards’ move is not unique unto itself. It can be ‘right’ or at least powerful, when the move in the opposite direction is daffy!
The second lesson that Schopenhauer teaches us, is again rather a negative one. Schopenhauer’s great mistake lay in his universalist claims. That is, from the fact that there was (according to Kantian theory at least) a dimension in a thing, the thing in itself, which could never be perceived (a table in itself, is not the same as its perception). This element (for Kant at least) is a natural mystery (without ever really being mysterious). Schopenhauer understands the ‘thing-in-itself’ as if it were really a single ‘thing’. Thence he argues that one only needs to understand this thing in a single entity, say the human body, to comprehend in nature. Thence he argues that one can generalize from the nature of the body itself, universal truths about matter itself (that is, embodies Will). Schopenhauer thereby simply ignores all those nice little philosophical questions about whether life is different from matter, or whether individuals are distinct from materialism. This last move is one, which has earned Schopenhauer almost universal philosophical condemnation.
However, beyond the mockery of philosophers, there is something rather human in Schopenhauer’s folly. The drive to universalize an argument from limited empirical consequences, is one that haunt and motivates us all. Take the example of global warming. The real problem, I mean the really frightening thing about global warming, is that we simply do not know what it will effect. We rummage around finding and re-finding ‘things’ which it will change, hoping against hope to define it (while all the while fearing we cannot ever really know what it will do). Linked to these arguments, there exists at almost each and every point, that deep temptation to ‘think like Schopenhauer’. We produce a series of simplistic solutions (be it carbon trading or Kyoto) based on a single line of thought. Those who cannot bear the shifting mirage of possibilities, take refuge either in the comfort of either denying global warming is real (even as the ice caps melt); or in thoughts of universal disaster. Therefore, Schopenhauer’s universalism is not some product of the Nineteenth Century Romantic movement, but is rather a thought which haunts us all, as we strive to design for ourselves a mind (but also a world) in which we can have some peace and quiet. Likewise Schopenhauer also (indirectly) traces just how pessimistic humans are ‘happy’ to be, so long as their minds are still. The world might be horrid, and the mind torrid, but if it is simple, then no matter (I suspect this argument produces torture myself…).
The third, and far more positive lesson Schopenhauer which teaches, is much deeper. Right at the heart of Schopenhauer’s thought (even if he does not realize it), is a strange juxtaposing between two ways of viewing the world. On the one hand, one can, as a part, look upon the world as if it were a whole, in which ‘reality’ and meaning resided. Moreover one can make this move, not because the world is somehow ‘real’ and directly contains meaning, but rather because the very mechanism by which we think (language and logic) imposes upon us the demand that we attribute meaning to the world. That is, we tie up that world within a complete and defined system. The world which we consciously inhabit is an artificial construction where a desire for wholeness (in a system) and a desire for meaning, hook up together, and become as one (we want a theory of Everything be it physics or religion).
Schopenhauer’s mistake at this point was then to accept that a degree of wholeness was native, was natural to the world. A move that is all the more problematic when one considers what must surely be the most original aspect of his theory. Namely the fact that (once the verbiage is cast aside) there need be nothing universal in the nature of the Will itself. That is, if it means anything, the Will surely refers to the fact that the mind is at each and every point a radial part, which is necessarily always caught up in a process of becoming something else. Moreover it is this ‘something else’ that clearly needs to be thought as having two dimensions of its own. On the one hand, a passion is clearly caught up in becoming something else, some other passion (which is why one cannot present a lexicon of passions). Each passion is always on a very strange journey of its own. On the other hand, there is nothing really so very stable about being a ‘human being’. To be a human is to be part of the world: It is therefore to be caught up in affinities with myriad others by whom one is changed (and whom one changes in turn). The Will (as Nietzsche discovered) once it is slipped off from its comforting universalism, becomes free to resonate across different individuals, and peoples, breeding what and where it likes.
The effect of this last point is that Schopenhauer, from this perspective, allows one to explain the urge to universalism, which haunted the second point, and the causal inversion which characterized the first point. Will itself invents a world of parts. A world, in which, everything (including the environment) is naturally a part of numerous different registers all at once. And yet at the same time the mind wishes each part to genuinely be ‘whole’ (and thereby reverses the causality of part to whole). It thereby grasps each ‘part’ as if it represented the universal ‘Will’, which can be bound up in a single ‘thing in itself’. Schopenhauer’s own mistake becomes therefore in a very real sense, the paradigm in which all our thought risks being caught. We want to ‘save’ the environment, by which we mean save the world we were bought up in, ignoring the fact that environments always change at all times. Or again, we know that environments do always change, and so deny that humans are caught up in a change, and therefore the tangible reality of global warming. That is, the reality itself (as a good thing-in-itself should) eludes us, while still being so present to our minds (what is more present than our experienced world?). It leaves us merely with a series of parts, which must be left unresolved into wholes, in spite of the very great temptation which haunts all thought, so to do.
Perhaps this last point is the ‘true’ ‘unconscious’ which Schopenhauer (if not Freud) drew so close to uncovering. An unconscious which is less dynamic force, and more elusive smear. Or better, which actually has no reality of its own, beyond the fact that it demands that each and every thought remains fundamentally in the part and not the whole. And moreover, that each such ‘part’ is always caught up in many processes, many potential ‘wholes’, (many of which are irreconcilable or frankly contradictory) to each other. It is only onto this world of parts, that wholes are grafted (through reversing causality, and inferring a cause from a part). Any true tragedy (in contrast to the rather stodgy miseries which Schopenhauer imagined) is that is it very difficult to wrest our mind away from the assumption that the second order reality of this world of wholes is not somehow the ‘true’ one. A fact that might have been harmless in Schopenhauer’s day, but becomes rather problematic once humans have a real ability to unpick/re-pick the global environment through their own actions (or inactions). A problem which then Schopenhauer, at once illustrates (in making the mistake himself) and yet allows and gives one, some of the tools to move beyond it.
