Hardly any philosopher is as thoroughly misunderstood as Arthur Schopenhauer (1788—1860). Posterity made a pessimist out of him, a misanthrope with a poodle who preached suffering and despised women. These cliches have a kernel of truth. But they obscure what weighs more than any anecdote: Schopenhauer posed the question that the whole of modern philosophy evades. What happens when we regard the body not merely as an object but as a gateway to reality itself?
#The Body and the Thing-in-Itself
Schopenhauer begins where Kant stopped. Kant had shown in his Critique of Pure Reason that everything we know is shaped by the forms of our understanding. What the world is in itself, beyond our representations, remains unknowable. In his dissertation On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (1813), Schopenhauer had systematically investigated the forms of this knowledge. His main work, The World as Will and Representation (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1819), takes the decisive step further.
The insight sounds plain: we have a body. This body is an object among objects, visible and measurable. At the same time, we experience it from within as drive, as striving, as hunger and longing. In this duality, Schopenhauer argues, lies the key that Kant sought in vain (cf. Schopenhauer, 1819, section 18). What we experience in the body as will is neither representation nor construct. It is the thing-in-itself, immediately lived.
#Will as World-Principle
Schopenhauer’s boldest step was to extend this bodily experience to the whole of nature. Everything that happens in the world has an outside and an inside. The outside is what one sees and measures. The inside is the will: not will in the sense of conscious intention, but a metaphysical principle that pervades every appearance from within. Gravitation, the life-drive in every plant, the urge in every animal — behind all of it stands a force that physics can describe but never explain (cf. Schopenhauer, 1819, sections 23—27).
This has consequences that reach beyond academic questions. If the will is the essence of nature, then appearances are not merely mechanically connected but inwardly related. Individuation — the separation into individual beings — belongs to the world of representation. In the essence of things there is no difference between what acts in you and what acts in an animal, a plant, or a stone. Schopenhauer called the principium individuationis the veil of Maya (cf. Schopenhauer, 1819, section 63).
#Music, Compassion, Denial
Three consequences follow from this metaphysics of the will, and each reaches far beyond academic philosophy.
Music holds a unique position in Schopenhauer’s thought. All other arts depict the world of appearances. Music depicts nothing. It is, Schopenhauer says, the immediate expression of the will itself — not the image of an idea, but the image of the will (cf. Schopenhauer, 1819, section 52). This makes aesthetics in Schopenhauer something other than in Kant or Hegel: not a matter of taste, not formal analysis, but ontology. Nietzsche took up this thought in The Birth of Tragedy (1872) and developed it further. Wagner revered Schopenhauer deeply and understood his music dramas as sounding philosophy.
Compassion forms the core of his ethics. Not a commandment, not a duty, but a bodily experience stands at the beginning: in the moment you feel with another, you experience that the boundary between you and them is an appearance, not the essence of things. Schopenhauer calls this the secret passage that connects all beings (cf. Schopenhauer, 1819, section 66). This insight touches the core of what is further developed in the philosophical tradition as thinking empathy: the capacity to contact the interiority of another through one’s own interiority.
The denial of the will to live is Schopenhauer’s most radical concept. If the will is the cause of all suffering, then salvation lies in its overcoming. Not through action, not through dominion over the world, but through a quiet letting-go — which Schopenhauer found again in the ascetics, in the Indian philosophers, and in the saints of the Christian tradition.
#The Open Question: Blind or Conscious?
Here lies the point at which natural philosophy takes up and goes beyond Schopenhauer. Schelling had written in his Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom (1809): Willing is primal being. For Schelling, the will was a spiritual will, a cosmic intelligence that speaks through nature. Schopenhauer adopted the basic thought but altered its orientation: his will is blind. It drives, it urges, it wills, but it does not know what it wills. This blindness is the core of what is called his pessimism.
Jochen Kirchhoff takes up Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of the will and radicalises it in a different direction (cf. Kirchhoff, 2021). The will that works through nature is, in Kirchhoff’s account, not blind but conscious. The cosmos has an inner dimension, and this inner dimension is not dull striving but directed aliveness. This changes the entire diagnosis: suffering arises not because the will is blind but because the human being has become cut off from the direction of this will.
The question that follows concerns anyone who reflects on their own existence: Is the drive you feel within you blind or directed? Does the striving that moves you have a direction pointing beyond you? Schopenhauer posed the question. The answer he gave was not the only possible one. It is continued in the thinking about the world-will as a cosmic principle, in the question of death in philosophy, and in the tradition of wisdom that Schopenhauer himself sought in the Upanishads.
#Sources
- Kirchhoff, J. (2021). Schopenhauer — Denker des Willens und des Mitgefuhls. YouTube: Jochen Kirchhoff — In Memoriam.
- Kirchhoff, J. (2023). Der Weltenwille als Baustoff und Lebenstrieb des Kosmos. YouTube: Jochen Kirchhoff — In Memoriam.
- Schopenhauer, A. (1813). Uber die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde. Rudolstadt.
- Schopenhauer, A. (1819). Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. Leipzig: Brockhaus.
- Schopenhauer, A. (1844). Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Zweiter Band. Leipzig: Brockhaus.
- Schopenhauer, A. (1851). Parerga und Paralipomena. Berlin: A. W. Hayn.