There it is again:you speak out loud what I think in the deepest recesses of my mind.
The question is whether Schopenhauer, in claiming thing-in-itself is Will, contradicts Kant’s restrictions on knowledge and metaphysics; In the ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ Kant puts forward his theory of ‘Transcendental Idealism’ in order to criticise the area of metaphysics, i.e. the inquiry into the ultimate nature of reality. Kant sees this tradition as being tainted with dogmatism and consequentially: “has hitherto been a merely random groping” at the nature of reality. To solve this problem, Kant examines the nature of what it is for us to know an object of the world. He claims that in the dynamic between the subject knowing an object there lies our faculty of reason, which is not a passive faculty such as sight; we, qua humans, impose certain ‘categories’ onto experience in order for us to understand the world we live in, such as spatiality, temporality and causality;
they “are our contributions to experience” v. This leaves us with a distinction between how the world appears to us (the ‘phenomenal’ world) and how the world actually is in-itself, independent of our perception of it (the ‘noumenal’ world). And so, when we then consider that Kant believed that only objects we can experience can be objects of knowledge, we see that our attempts to transcend the phenomenal world to gain knowledge of the noumenal world, inevitably falls into error, as we cannot know that which cannot be experienced, and as reason imposes categories on our experience, we can never have experience of the world in-itself. In claiming this, Kant attacks the theories of metaphysics that attempt to gain knowledge of the thing-in-itself and sets a limit on the extent of metaphysical speculation, in that “the limits of knowledge coincide with those of possible experience” .
Schopenhauer says of Kant that his “greatest merit is the distinction of the phenomenon from the thing-in-itself, based on the proof that between things and us there always stands the intellect, and that on this account they can not be known according to what they may be in themselves.” . Schopenhauer adopts Kantian idealism but believes that there is more to say on the topic of metaphysics than merely that the thing-in-itself cannot be known and believed that, in a very particular sense, we can gain knowledge of the thing-in-itself. Despite this appearing like a contradiction of Kant’s idea, this tension will be resolved through elaboration.
Most significantly is Schopenhauer’s idea that we can know that the thing-in- itself is Will, however, it is important prior to elaborating on Schopenhauer’s conception of what Will is, to examine what he means when he says that thing-in-itself is Will.
A common misunderstanding of Schopenhauer is that he believed that we can, contradicting Kantian thought, have direct knowledge of the thing-in-itself and that it is Will. However, Schopenhauer makes a distinction between the thing- in-itself and the manifestation of the thing-in-itself in the phenomenal world. Schopenhauer is always aware of the distinction between will as his name for the noumenon and will as his name for its appearance or manifestation in the world of phenomena.
To claim that the thing-in-itself is Will would be to contradict Kant’s restrictions on metaphysics, but what Schopenhauer is claiming is not that the thing-in- itself is Will, but rather that the manifestation of thing-in-itself in the phenomenal world is fundamentally Will. It is indeed the case that Schopenhauer often calls the thing-in-itself Will, however, this is really only a solution to the problem of naming a thing which is beyond the bounds of our
experience (and therefore beyond our language). Therefore, we can see that when Schopenhauer claims that thing-in-itself is Will, he is merely naming the thing-in-itself after the most apparent and fundamental manifestation of thing- in-itself in the phenomenal world and not prescribing to it any of the features of what he means by the term Will. Indeed, it would be impossible, given that Kant established that we can only know what we can possibly experience, to give a descriptive name to that which we cannot possibly experience. Schopenhauer claims in his dialogues on death: “To answer transcendental questions in language that is made for immanent knowledge must assuredly lead to contradiction” . Now that we have a clear idea as to what Schopenhauer means when he claims that the thing-in-itself is will, we can now discuss how he comes to decide that the fundamental manifestation of the thing-in-itself is Will and what he means by the term.
Schopenhauer, in justifying why the fundamental manifestation of the thing-in- itself in the world of phenomena is Will, looks to the place of the subject, i.e. the agent whom knows, within the world of phenomena. He observes that we are conscious of ourselves, in one way, ‘from the outside’, as just an object (the body) interacting with other objects, just like we are conscious of an instance of billiard balls hitting other billiard balls, but we are also conscious of ourselves in a different way, as something more than just a succession of physical interactions. This way is the awareness of ourselves ‘from within’ as willing agents who are conscious of our actions, not as arbitrary movements, but as being willed by us. Gardiner claims:
“I am also conscious of myself in a quite separate manner ‘from within’. When I know myself in this second way, I grasp myself as will: it is precisely the awareness we have of our own bodies as expressions of will, and our own movements as acts of will, that distinguishes self-consciousness from the purely perceptual knowledge we have of other things” x
Schopenhauer believes that this second kind of self-awareness gives us a privileged view into the fundamental substratum xi of the world of phenomena; many people have attempted to determine this ‘from without’, i.e. from empirical investigation into the world of objects, but they have failed to do so. Schopenhauer says:
“On the objective path we never reach the inside of things...instead, when we try to find their inside from without and empirically, this inside always turns, under our hands, into an outside again”
By this Schopenhauer is claiming that to attempt to discover what is the fundamental nature of the manifestation of the thing-in-itself we cannot simply conduct our studies empirically or scientifically, we must look to the privileged consciousness we each have of one particular object in the world of phenomena: our own body, and extrapolate what we find is the inner nature of our bodies to all other objects. Thus as our bodies are fundamentally “will objectified” so are all things in the phenomenal world fundamentally objectifications of Will. Although not necessary to the question it is important to briefly mention that what Schopenhauer means by Will has nothing to do with ‘human willing’ or volition but rather: “’Will’ was for him the name of a nonrational force, a blind, striving power whose operations are without ultimate purpose or design” .
It is important to note that the fact we have ‘inner-knowledge’ or knowledge ‘from-within’ of ourselves does not mean that we have access to any kind of knowledge of the thing-in-itself, only of how the thing-in-itself manifests itself in the world of phenomena. This is for the following reasons; firstly, the thing-in- itself, as being something that the concepts of spatiality and temporality do not apply, must be undifferentiated as differentiation requires these concepts. And as knowledge requires a duality between a subject (he who knows) and an object (that which is known), knowledge necessarily requires differentiation, thus making it incompatible with the thing-in-itself and therefore unachievable given our epistemic requirements for knowledge as established by Kant. And secondly, our knowledge of ourselves ‘from-within’ “inhibits the dimension of time. Time, in fact, is its very form” . As mentioned previously the concept of temporality can only be a part of the phenomenal world and so any knowledge derived from ‘inner-sense’ can only be knowledge of phenomena and never knowledge of the thing-in-itself.
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Some gorts think of this Kantian Humility as an escape route.They say :Well,may be then "Thing-in-itself" is "Unicorns and Rainbows".
Rainbows indeed!As I write this my nose is blocked and I am coughing like crazy-so I would gladly unleash Inmendham upon people who say these silly things. The problem is that "reality" is made of layers upon layers of metaphors,so yes,it is not any easy task to comprehend not just mathematics and metaphysics but anything completely. But that does not mean that we should accept non- sensical ways of thinking of gorts.
Now,while I am still around,sure, I would play with these complex mathematical/metaphysical metaphors, sure,but I would never ask for life again.Come to think of it,I never asked for life this time either.By the way,some of the pop songs on youtube have hundreds of millions of views.
Inmendham's videos? A few hundred,if that.
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