Earlier this year Klaus Rohde made a
number of posts about the ideas of Schopenhauer, the famous philosopher. I read
one of the essays Klaus recommended on Schopenhauer’s thought and wrote a
response to it.
I also read a book of extracts from Schopenhauer's ‘Parerga and Paralipomena’ in English and wrote two documents outlining some of the places where I
agreed with what Schopenhauer said in the extracts, and some of the places where I
disagreed with him.
But Schopenhauer wrote a magnum opus- practically the archetype of the magnum opus- outlining his mature thought, ‘The World as Will and Appearance’, which takes up three volumes in our library, and to argue about what he thought without reading it is really very lazy. So I thought I would have a go. I got out volume one, skipped the preface, and started wading in.
Unfortunately I did not get very far. And oddly enough I got hung up at the same point that a friend of mine got hung up on at the onset of ‘Mere Christianity’, by C. S. Lewis, when I lent it to him as an undergraduate. I rejected Schopenhauer’s initial argument, the foundation of the whole three volumes. The ‘oddly enough’ is because it was the identical initial argument of ‘Mere Christianity’- the assertion that consciousness is inexplicable by materialism. Lewis argues that consciousness is an irruption of the supernatural other into the natural universe, and from that goes on the derive Christianity; Schopenhauer argues that consciousness is the fundamental fact of the universe, the ultimate reality that generates the world of appearances around us, and that data from that world of appearances cannot explain consciousness.
I reject solipsism- the argument that the only data point I have is my own consciousness, therefore only I exist- because it is fruitless; you can’t do anything with it. It is an idea that leads nowhere and achieves nothing.
The idea that consciousness in general, as opposed to ‘my consciousness’ is the fundamental fact of the universe requires the existence of other minds.
How do we know these other minds exist? By observations we make of the world of appearances. So we must base our understanding of mind in general not only on the one data point we truly have access to, inside our own heads, but on how we observe mind to be manifested in space and time within this world of appearances. I think we cannot do this and fail to observe that mind is an emergent property. There is no sudden transition from things that are conscious to things that are not. We see insects displaying apparently conscious behaviour that we can model with a simple circuit. As we traverse the angora shawl of being*, more and more complex organisms display more and more complex behaviours, which we can explain more and more tentatively in terms of mechanistic inputs producing certain outputs. Eventually we get to us. Made out of the same kind of stuff, with a nervous system obviously just a more complicated version of the same nervous system the bugs have.
I think consciousness is just what a system of registering and reacting to sense impressions looks like from inside. A simple system, where we can see and understand that it is completely deterministic, might still feel like something from the inside. It might feel, to the moth, as if it chooses to dive toward the light.
It feels to me that I am composed of sense impressions and memories of sense impressions, and that there is nothing else. This no longer bothers me. (Of course you can come back and say: ‘Who is this ‘me’ who is feeling, Chris? Who is this ‘me’ who is no longer bothered?’ But this I will reject as mere semantic gymnastics, arguing about words rather than things.)
So I reject Schopenhauer’s fundamental division of the world into Mind and Matter. Solipsism is not rendered less vacuous and fruitless if Will, some fundamental thing underlying all consciousness, replaces my individual consciousness.
I went back some months later and had another go at ‘The World as Will and Appearance’. This time, I tried to do things properly and started with the preface. It reminded my strongly of the pretentious author’s note quoted in ‘Ghastly Beyond Belief’”:
Author's note: It is suggested that the reader not attempt to read this book at one sitting. The intellectual content of these stories, taken without break, may cause brain damage. This note is intended most sincerely, and not as hyperbole.
ARTHUR BYRON COVER, The Platypus of Doom and Other Nihilists
Really. Schopenhauer says that the entire book of ‘The World as Will and Appearance’ was the shortest way he could find to write what he wanted to say, that it was impossible to summarise, and that I would have to read the whole thing to grasp his idea. Now, I am not of the opinion that every idea can be squeezed into a thirty-second soundbite, but this seems to me just a teensy bit ridiculous. All the really big ideas that really are ideas can be squeezed down into something small enough for us to get our heads around. This does not mean that there are not lifetimes of work in unpacking everything that is involved with and implied by
‘It is impossible to convert heat completely into work in a cyclic process.’
Or
‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you’
Or
‘The square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides’
…but all these really big ideas can be expressed in a few little words. Claiming that your idea is bigger than all these ideas is up there on the angora shawl of pretentiousness with Mr Cover and his Platypus of Doom.
The other thing Schopenhauer told me in the preface was that ‘The World as Will and Appearance’ was intended as an extended gloss on his earlier essay, ‘On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason’, and should be read in conjunction with it, and that it was useless- Useless, I tell you! – to read his magnum opus without having first read ‘On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason’. I dutifully went back to the library to find it. But it was not there.
Right next to the works of Schopenhauer that were on the shelf was a slim book by Schrödinger, ‘My View of the World’. I took it home as a consolation prize.
Curiously, I found that it was not only next to Schopenhauer in alphabetical space, but in idea space. It contained what appeared to me to be practically the same Vedic philosophy of the primacy of mind.
He says, in a fine and honest way in his opening remarks, that there is very little about physics in his book, and that is because he came to his ideas about the nature of reality before he ever got into quantum mechanics: he was already marinated in the same ancient Hindu ideas that Schopenhauer had discovered and embraced so enthusiastically. I have taken the book back to the library already, so I can’t quote you the quote I wanted to quote you,*** but Wikipedia tells me: ‘At an early age, Schrödinger was strongly influenced by Schopenhauer. As a result of his extensive reading of Schopenhauer's works, he became deeply interested throughout his life in color theory, philosophy, perception, and eastern religion, especially Vedanta.’
Schrödinger did not ‘discover’ all the New Agey hippy-dippiness in Quantum Mechanics; he brought it with him. It was part of his worldview while he was figuring things out about the world of appearances, and he fit them in where they fit in his personal philosophy - and there we have one root of the muddle we are in now.
So I still have not read Schopenhauer’s Magnum Opus. Which is sad, since as Schrödinger says in a possibly apocryphal quote I found on the web just now: ‘If you cannot - in the long run - tell everyone what you have been doing, your doing has been worthless.’ I have not given up. But I have gathered enough, I think, to sum up my disagreement with Schopenhauer in a table contrasting him with the most useful and clear-headed philosopher since Aristotle and my personal favourite, 'the one American philosopher that could sing outdoors', Charles Sanders Peirce**:
*: This is my ad hoc replacement for the ‘chain’ or ‘ladder’ of being, which is what I really want to say, but which I am too conditioned by my reading of Stephen Jay Gould to dream of saying.
**: I have doctored this Hilaire Belloc poem to show you how to pronounce his name, in case you don't know:
***: Actually, I didn't take it back to the library, I lost it on my own bookshelves! Here is the quote:
Not a word here is said of acausality, wave mechanics, indeterminacy relations, complementarity, an expanding universe, continuous creation, etc. ... On this I can cheerfully justify myself: because I do not think that these things have as much connection as is currently supposed with a philosophical view of the world. ... In 1918, when I was thirty-one, I had good reason to expect a chair of theoretical physics at Czernowitz ... I was prepared to do a good job lecturing on theoretical physics ... but for the rest, to devote myself to philosophy, being deeply imbued at the time with the writings of Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Mach, Richard Semon and Richard Avenarius.
