Schopenhauer And Kant

The Metaphysics of Schopenhauer and Kant: from On the Possibility of Knowing the Thing-in-Itself (The World as Will and Representation, Volume 2) and the Transcendental Aesthetic (Critique of Pure Reason)

Randy Dible December, 2008

Kant made the foundational system and Schopenhauer breathed reality into it. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant begins with the section called the Transcendental Aesthetic (a transcendental critique of taste in the sense of a science of speculative philosophy accounting for “all principles of a priori sensibility”) wherein he applies key distinctions made in the introduction between pure and empirical knowledge to our frame of reference for experience (conditions for the possibility of experience, the “two pure forms of sensible intuition”) in the notions of space and time. In the first section he explains the nature of appearance or representation as divided into a prior and a posteriori, respectively, pure and empirical, which in our forms of sensibility or receptivity we intuit as form and matter. It is the principles of a priori sensibility which he develops in the transcendental aesthetic, beginning with space, ending with time, but both can be simply called dimensionality or extension, and as such constitute the frames of reference for our forms of experience. Indeed, space and time, in this transcendental or ideal aspect, are also called forms—forms of our intuition [of the world]. It is this ideality of space and time that Schopenhauer recognizes as the teaching of greatest significance from Kant. But where Kant failed to see, and Schopenhauer knew, was the higher teaching that the reality beyond the

representations and appearances, indeed the reality which lent itself to appearance and representation in micro, was neither absent nor inaccessible, but instead transcended the difficulties of access, in being, just being it. Reality is ever-present, and regardless of illusion and false appearances, it is always already the case. Kant failed to see, according to Schopenhauer, that there are modes of knowledge which accessed being by way of knowing (rather than thinking), knowing that the being of one’s own being and the being of the thing-in-itself (the thing) are the same being, the very being of being, which is being-itself. The things in themselves of Kant were not numerous noumena, but only one Thing-in-Itself, Being, according to Schopenhauer. And this teaching is nowhere more directly transmitted than in the wisdom of the Vedas, from the Upanishads. Early translations of these Indian texts were available to Schopenhauer, and he is known to have read the Upanishads every night before going to sleep. In the preface to the first edition of the World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer explains the prerequisites of the reader should he venture to understand the wisdom therein: “Kant’s philosophy is therefore the only one with which a thorough acquaintance is positively assumed in what is to be here discussed. But if in addition to this the reader has dwelt for a while in the school of the divine Plato, he will be the better prepared to hear me, and the more susceptible to what I have to say. But if he has shared in the benefits of the Vedas, access to which, opened to us by the Upanishads, is in my view the greatest advantage which this still young century has to show over pervious centuries, since I surmise that the influence of Sanskrit literature will penetrate no less deeply than did the revival of Greek literature in the fifteenth century; if, I say, the reader has also already received and assimilated the divine

inspiration of ancient Indian wisdom, then he is best of all prepared to hear what I have to say to him.”

There is a chapter of the second volume of Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation called “On the Possibility of Knowing the Thing-in-Itself”. Such a thesis as expressed in this title best articulates Schopenhauer’s key distinction from Kant. In the middle of this chapter, Schopenhauer states where he departs from Kant’s metaphysics: “… on the path of objective knowledge, thus starting from the representation, we shall never get beyond the representation, i.e., the phenomenon. We shall therefore remain at the outside of things; we shall never be able to penetrate into their inner nature, and investigate what they are in themselves. So far I agree with Kant. But now, as the counterpoise to this truth, I have stressed that other truth that we are not merely the knowing subject, but that we ourselves are also among those realities or entities we require to know, that we ourselves are the thing-in-itself. Consequently, a way from within stands open to us to that real inner nature of things to which we cannot penetrate from without.” (E. F. J. Payne translation, World as Will and Representation, Volume 2, p. 195)

“Space” according to Kant “is a necessary a priorirepresentation, which underlies all outer intuition….It must therefore be regarded as the condition of the possibility of appearances and not as a determination dependent upon them. It is an a priori representation, which necessarily underlies outer appearances.” (Norman Kemp Smith translation, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 68) There is a similarity between Kant’s abstraction of space itself or pure space, which is unlimited, and the unary “Thing-in-Itself” of Schopenhauer: “Space is not a discursive or, as we say, general

concept of relations of things in general, but a pure intuition. For, in the first place, we can representto ourselves only one space, and if we speak of diverse spaces, we mean thereby only parts of one and the same unique space. Secondly, these parts cannot precede the one all-embracing space, as being, as it were, constituents out of which it can be composed; on the contrary, they can be thought only as in it. Space is essentially one; the manifold in it, and therefore the general concept of spaces, depends solely on [the introduction of] limitations. Hence it follows that an a priori, and not an empirical, intuition underlies all concepts of space.” (Ibidem, p. 69) But this one-ness is only because for Schopenhauer “…our knowledge consists only in the framing of representationsby means of subjective forms, such knowledge always furnishes mere phenomena, not the being-in-itself of things.” (Payne, Volume 2, p. 194) For Kant, “the intuition has its seat in the subject only, as the formal character of the subject”, but Schopenhauer intuits that the subject is merely a subjective form of pure or transcendental subjectivity, known in the Vedas as Atman (the Self, in contrast to the Jivatman or Jiva, the individual self), which is the ground of the human or any other being. Perhaps one could say that the pure or empty space or subject of the object or thing is the thing in itself, not that we are to confuse the pure dimensionality of space or dimensioned space (extended space) or the frame of reference that is space with the pure subject of knowing, for that is to be carefully distinguished from the subjective form (the frame of reference). These may seem trivialities if taken purely as technicalities, but what they signify is the point at which Schopenhauer departs from Kant, in the leap from the ponderability of substantiality to the reality of substantiality, in other words, from the knowing of form to “knowledge through identity”, in the words of Franklin Merrell-Wolff, a twentieth century Californian mystical philosopher of the Sierra Nevadaswho has

made a similar departure from Kant as did Schopenhauer. Merrell-Wolff has said that Kant’s greatest merit was to show the inverse relation of “ponderability” to “substantiality.” Here, “ponderability” means the ability to think of or represent, that is, as appearance, and “substantiality” means independence or “own-being”.

Kant: “Our exposition therefore establishes the reality, that is, the objective validity, of space in respect of whatever can be presented to us outwardly as object, but also at the same time the ideality of space in respect of things when they are considered in themselves through reason, that is, without regard to the constitution of our sensibility. We assert, then, the empirical reality of space, as regards all possible outer experience; and yet at the same time we assert its transcendental ideality—in other words, that it is nothing at all, immediately we withdraw the above condition, namely, its limitation to possible experience, and so look upon it as something that underlies things in themselves.” (Norman Kemp Smith, p. 72) Kant continues “With the sole exception of space there is no subjective representation, referring to something outer, which could be entitled [at once] objective [and] a priori. For there is no other subjective representation from which we can derive a priori synthetic propositions, as we can from intuition in space.” Later in that same site, “The transcendental concept of appearances in space, on the other hand, is a critical reminder that nothing intuited in space is a thing-in-itself, that space is not a form of things inhering in themselves as their intrinsic property, that objects in themselves are quite unknown to us.” (Norman Kemp Smith, p. 74)

Again, the key idea is Schopenhauer’s point of dissension from Kant, where he becomes inebriated under the influence of the highest Atman of that holistic

medicine from India. Such a philosophical giant as Schopenhauer, even on the shoulders of such a figure as Kant, cannot have the last word on the nature of the Self, for only one-self can, and in the case of this author, these figures are only my representation, the mere repetition of my own inner nature, at least it is so for myself. And my own dissension is that that though there truly is pure subjectivity ontologically prior to all possible events and entities, prior to all actual events and entities, it is not ultimate, however most prior. In the context of Schopenhauer’s interpretation of the Upanishads, it seems he would side with Samkara’s Advaita Vedanta in asserting that Atman is Brahman (NirgunaBrahman in particular, that is, Brahman without any qualifications, conditions or limitations), but I reject this as it is applied in the ultimate case. For me the highest Atman (Self), the One, or what I call “pure subjectivity” (which some Hari-Krsnas employ in the context of their Bhedabhedaveda, Difference-and-Non-difference Vedanta), or “pure self-reference” (as the One is found to be in logic and cybernetics) is penultimate reality rather than the ultimate reality it seems to be for most monists. Indeed I charge most monists, whose intentions I am in complete agreement with, with confusion of the One or Being with the category of the ultimate. On this note, I will end with Schopenhauer quotes about the pure subject of knowing, from the supplement by that title. To Schopenhauer, it is a secondary matter of interpretation whether, in retrospect, the subjective form or individual knows itself to be in its formless essence “all things” or “exclusively one” (Payne, p. 371). “With the disappearance of willing from consciousness, the individuality is abolished also, and with it its suffering and sorrow. I have then described the pure subject of knowing, which remains over as the eternal world-eye. This eye looks out from all living beings, though with very different degrees of

clearness, and is untouched by their arising and passing away. It is thus identical with itself, constantly one and the same, and the supporter of the world of permanent Ideas, i.e., of the adequate objectivity of the will.”