Confronting the fear of death: Schopenhauer’s methods in conflict?

In the last chapter, I suggested that an inward turn defined the standpoint of philosophy for Schopenhauer in two related senses. Philosophy was inward-looking in turning to the subject to understand the mode of appearance of external objects. But philosophy was also inward-looking in turning to the self-experience of the subject to find a pathway that led beyond appearances, and to the thing-in-itself. In both cases, doing philosophy meant turning inward: away from the representation; into the depths of what lies within.

Yet that, I will be suggesting in this chapter, cannot provide us with the whole story about how philosophy is done. To find the sharp point of a wedge into a fuller account, there can be no better way of proceeding than by turning back to consider the moment that gives philosophy its beginning. And this is a moment that Schopenhauer, remaining faithful to the experiential commitments of his philosophy, would identify in profoundly existential terms. The search for an understanding of reality, it has sometimes been said, is grounded in the sense of human vulnerability. “The search for certainty and for the ultimate ground,” as Leszek Kołakowski remarks – for “a world of which the origin, rules and destiny we can grasp” – is “the expression of the experience of human fragility.”¹

It was this intuition that Schopenhauer was expressing in his turn when he put down the origin of metaphysics to the problem of suffering; and more specifically, to the anguish produced by the prospect of our own death (WWRii:161). Standing behind our fear of death – of our non-being – as the ground of its possibility was the crucial human ability, both blessing and curse, to be surprised at our own being. “No beings, with the exception of man,” Schopenhauer opens his essay “On Man’s Need for Metaphysics” to say, “feel surprised at their own existence, but to all of them it is so much a matter of course that they do not notice it.” It is only as the will – the inner being of nature – reaches reflection in human being that this surprise becomes possible to it. Nature “then marvels at its own works, and asks itself what it itself is. And its wonder is the more serious, as here for the first time it stands consciously face to face with death” (WWRii:160).

It was this existential confrontation that Schopenhauer placed at the root of metaphysical inquiry, and implicitly his own. It has been said indeed that the problem of death constituted Schopenhauer’s deepest motivating concern, and the problem against which his philosophy was measured for its success. It is death, Michael Fox writes, that “ultimately preoccupied Schopenhauer,” forming “the hub of the wheel from which all of his various doctrines radiate like spokes … The confidence with which Schopenhauer assessed his own contribution to philosophy can and should be seen as giving expression, in part, to his satisfaction at having overcome the fear of death through systematic, rational reflection.”²

How, then, had the fear of death been overcome? Yet in approaching this question, something more needs to be said concerning the presence of this fear in our lives. For the fear of death may provide philosophy with its starting point when it arises; yet how often does it in fact do so? Death, for all the engrossing interest philosophy has historically taken in it, in other ways appears to be singularly absent from the concrete present of our ordinary experience. We go about everyday life as if death simply did not concern us. As if this “internal human relation to mystery – to that which resists comprehension”³ was not internal at all; as if, to use Schopenhauer’s phrase, we were eternal: “everyone lives on as though he is bound to live for ever” (WWRi:281). Other philosophers, like the Epicurean Lucretius, might have here proposed subtle psychological interventions for discerning the fear of death that pervades our seemingly carefree everyday existence.⁴ More recent philosophers might offer the thought that this fear, or its conditioning awareness of death – for all its constitutive role as an “internal relation” – must be an achievement. But for Schopenhauer, the next step lies elsewhere.

There is in fact a noticeable tension that runs through Schopenhauer’s remarks concerning the epistemic availability of the notion of our own non-existence. At times, Schopenhauer speaks of this prospect as a firm epistemic possession: “man alone carries about with him in abstract concepts the certainty of his own death.” Yet “this,” he immediately continues, “can frighten him only very rarely and at particular moments.” And in the next moment, the initial positive affirmation has given way to something far weaker: “it might be said that no one has a really lively conviction of the certainty of his own death” (WWRi:281). This denial assumes more categorical tones elsewhere, as when Schopenhauer refers to our “deep conviction of the impossibility of our extermination by death” – a conviction so deep that our own death may indeed be for us “at bottom the most incredible thing in the world” (WWRii:487). If we can represent our death at all, this is because of the temporal nature of our consciousness. Yet this representation seems to constitute not only an extraordinary event, but indeed a veritably unattainable one. The prospect of our own death is fundamentally inconceivable to us.

Yet it is precisely by attending to this tension more closely that the resolution to the fear that stimulates philosophical inquiry can be identified. For a fear of death may indeed only supervene at extraordinary moments – and all we can say is that this is when philosophy will need to be done. Yet philosophy will respond to our need in a manner that calls precisely upon the truths already reflected in our resistance to being provoked to this fear, and our limited capacity to fully assent to our representation of this eventuality. If we ordinarily live in a state of unquestioning absorption in the present, and if everything in our phenomenology suggests an absence of doubt concerning our continued existence, this phenomenology can be subjected to interpretation. On closer examination – an examination that raises “mere feeling” to “reflectively appropriated insight” according to philosophical procedure – it turns out to contain precisely the metaphysical truth we require for our consolation. For our phenomenology, Schopenhauer would suggest – or rather, that aspect of our phenomenology that registers as the dominant chord – is simply an expression of our true inner nature. Our sense of endlessness reflects a primitive certainty that “there is something positively imperishable and indestructible” in us and a “consciousness of our original and eternal nature” (WWRii:496, 487). And this, of course, is in the first place our inner nature as will; and on another level, our nature as representing subjects whose supra-individual consciousness conditions the world.⁵

It is not, thus, that one lives “as though he is bound to live for ever” – but rather it is in fact the case that one does. For our true nature does not reside in our character as individuals, which can be affected by temporal events. Individuals, indeed, have no real existence; they exist only in the knowledge of a representing subject, which is conditioned by time, space, and causality. Untouched by the course of time and underlying the succession of appearances, by contrast, “our being-in-itself … exists in an everlasting present” (WWRii:479). When we suddenly call up a larger temporal perspective and the representation of our death impresses us with its inevitability, the anguish we experience belongs to us in our identity as individual beings that are phenomena of the will. The tension between the two “certainties” – the certainty that we will die, the certainty that we cannot – thus turns out to be a tension between two different ways of experiencing ourselves: as individual phenomena, and as will. Appreciating this distinction involves recognising that “the greatest equivocation lies in the word ‘I’ … According as I understand this word, I can say: ‘Death is my entire end’; or else: ‘This my personal phenomenal appearance is just as infinitely small a part of my true inner nature as I am of the world’” (WWRii:491).

Our astonishment at the finitude of our consciousness, which arises only infrequently due to the inertia of our truer nature, is ultimately grounded in an illusion – the illusion of the principium individuationis. To that extent, one’s horror at one’s prospective non-existence is as ill-founded as the wonder with which every new individual greets his present existence, finding himself “so fresh and original, that he broods over himself in astonishment” (WWRii:501). From the true metaphysical perspective, there is neither freshness to be found nor decay; the concepts of duration and extinction themselves “are borrowed from time that is merely the form of the phenomenon,” so that “the constant arising of new beings and the perishing of those that exist are to be regarded as an illusion” (PPii:269).

Dispelling this illusion thus involves an appropriation or indeed reappropriation of our true identity, which can be framed as a rediscovery of the experience of endlessness interrupted by the reflective representation of death. When this experience is disturbed through the intrusion of a temporal perspective – one deeply steeped in the illusions of individuality – philosophy rises to a higher perspective from which it can interpret the interrupted experience and reappropriate its meaning at the level of reflection. Having come to grasp the true nature of the world, we can now think, and not just feel, that we are endless.⁶ This involves shifting our viewpoint to realise that our true identity lies not in our individual consciousness but in the will of which it is a manifestation, and in the supra-individual subjectivity – no less “eternal” in kind – through which this manifestation is achieved in its purest form.⁷

The first tension structuring our account would appear on Schopenhauer’s terms resolved. Yet there is a second tension lying in the wings that now demands to be more carefully addressed – a tension that leads directly to the heart of my concern. For let us attend to the philosophical process that just came before us to consider how it relates to the characterisation of Schopenhauer’s philosophical standpoint offered in the previous chapter. Philosophy is called to respond to a fear; a fear that is founded on an error. It is an error, significantly, produced by an outward turn: we turn outward to look to the objective temporal course of our life, thereby disrupting our attunement with our inner nature. The moment of philosophical achievement then arrives as a (re)turn inward, to discover one’s true identity and reflectively appropriate the truth that consoles. This understanding would seem to harmonise perfectly with Schopenhauer’s standpoint as surveyed in the last chapter. Philosophy, we saw, commutes the knowledge of feeling into knowledge of reflection (WWRi:82; cf. i:271); and it undertakes its work by turning inward – a turn that characteristically brings a discovery of one’s true nature.

Elsewhere, Schopenhauer explicitly deploys the terms just used – inward and outward, subjective and objective – in connection with this question, as in the remark that if, in contrast to a “method of consideration which is directed inwards, we again look outwards and apprehend quite objectively the world that presents itself to us, then death certainly appears to be a passing into nothing” (PPii:275). Looking at the world “objectively” here consists of looking at it “as it appears,” as a representation, that is to say: at the (illusory) level of the phenomenal that constitutes an objectification of the will. An “objective” standpoint carries clear epistemic disvalue; the privileged vantage point is rather subjective in orientation.

But if this is the main significance and epistemic valuation of these two standpoints, what are we to make of the following? For there is another usage of the term “objective” in Schopenhauer’s work that contrasts sharply with this one, where an objective vantage point appears to be positively valued as the contrary – this time – of a negative notion of subjectivity. There can be no better location for taking stock of this other vantage point than the long essay titled “On Death and its Relation to the Indestructibility of our Inner Nature,” appearing in the second volume of the World as Will and Representation and containing one of Schopenhauer’s most concerted meditations on the problem of death. Here, Schopenhauer invites us to take a long empirical look at nature; or – in a metaphor already present elsewhere in Schopenhauer’s work but appearing here in heightened form – to put our ear to the language of nature to listen closely to what it has to say about death. Don’t assume, look and see, as Wittgenstein would later say: just take a look at how nature behaves. And looking closely, we see two sets of evidence – two sets of statements, or modes of speech. We see nature as it speaks through individuals: individuals shudder at the prospect of death and do their best to avoid it. Yet now we turn to look at how “the whole of nature” behaves towards death (WWRii:473); how nature speaks as a whole. And there, we see “life and death dependent on the most trifling accident,” with only an ephemeral existence in between; we see “animal and plant arise today and tomorrow pass away,” we see “birth and death follow in quick succession” (WWRii:474). We see nature declare the utter insignificance of individual beings and its indifference to their death or survival.⁸

An “objective and unprejudiced” look at this order of things will lead to the conclusion that the former region of speech must constitute only a local dialect, a conditional and one-sided region of nature’s language, which achieves completion only in the vantage point afforded by the whole. And this vantage point proclaims loud and clear that the constant passing of beings in and out of existence must be an illusion, not reality but mere appearance – “a jest” (WWRii:474); for were it not intended as a jest, it would be an unintended absurdity. Looking at the language of phenomena in this manner, and spurred on by a catalytic sense of the absurd, one will come to perceive that what is real is not individuals, but the universals they embody. For it is on universals – on the preservation of humankind rather than particular human beings, of leonitas rather than individual lions – that nature lavishes her care.

A “really objective gaze” will be able to pick out that which is “at all times one and the same” instead of that which is always in flux – the endless series of individuals. If we find it difficult to think ourselves into the content of such an objective gaze, it might help to begin by imagining its subject:

Yet if this viewpoint is here presented as one available to an idealised observer – a being, unlike any we know, capable of enjoying an “incomparably longer life,” and thereby enjoying conditions of subjectivity vastly different from, and superior to, our own – in other places it appears rather more closely within our reach, for it figures in the imperative as a form of vision we may be exhorted to attempt ourselves:

The striking feature of these remarks is that they commend to us a mode of observation in which insight into the illusory nature of individuality and thus the nature of death is gained not by peering inward, but on the contrary, by turning sharply outward to consider the phenomena. Yet isn’t this, now, an outward look that Schopenhauer had elsewhere disavowed? The idealised being who takes in the human race at a glance would seem to occupy a vantage point such as the one encapsulated in Parerga and Paralipomena, where, arguing the merits of a “subjective” philosophy, Schopenhauer would write: “when one looks outwards, where the vastness of the world and the infinitude of its beings display themselves, one’s own self as a mere individual shrinks to nothing and seems to vanish. Carried away by this immensity of mass and number, one thinks further that only the outwardly directed, and hence objective, philosophy can be on the right path.” It is “the inwardly directed philosophy,” by contrast, that has found the true path (PPii:16–17). The ideal observer just invoked seems to be faced precisely with such an immense “infinitude of beings”; yet far from falling into the thrall of illusion, the vision makes him wise. What has happened here?

Part of what has happened is a shift in Schopenhauer’s philosophical self-understanding. One of the most distinctive traits of Schopenhauer’s intellectual career, it has sometimes been remarked, was the singular tenacity with which he remained attached to his core philosophical convictions throughout his lifetime. In the introduction to the second edition of his work (1844), more than a quarter of a century after the original edition in 1818, Schopenhauer would announce in clipped tones with evident satisfaction: “I find nothing to retract.” (For “the truth,” comments David Cartwright in his biography, “does not change.”⁹) And yet that self-assessment concealed certain subtle yet significant shifts that Schopenhauer’s perspective had undergone over time – shifts that directly impinged on his view of the philosophical standpoint and its “inward-looking” character.

In Schopenhauer’s earlier work, the principal message had centred on the unavailability of metaphysical insight to the outward-turned gaze. Looking for the inner nature of things “from without,” we are “like a man who goes round a castle, looking in vain for an entrance, and sometimes sketching the façades” (WWRi:99). Hence the need for a turn inward, to that self-experience where the boundary between phenomenon and thing-in-itself begins to give way, allowing one to push beyond the appearances. It is that indeed which defines the seminal moment of philosophical discovery at the opening of book 2 of the first volume of the World as Will and Representation. In later writings, however, a rather different emphasis appears to emerge. For while Schopenhauer continues to affirm the importance of inner experience – and the subjective standpoint – as a source of philosophical understanding, this emphasis now seems to be assimilated into a more programmatic emphasis on experience more broadly. Metaphysics is described as “the science of experience in general” (WWRii:181); philosophy is “nothing but the correct and universal understanding of experience itself” (WWRii:183). And this means: of the whole of experience. It is not just the inner, but also the outer facts that are now more vocally inscribed into this whole. The inner nature of the world must be stamped upon the physiognomy of the world in its entirety, and not only in the pulsing of desire we find in our breast as we turn inward.

The meaning of the world, put differently, must be expressed in every part of its script. And it is indeed this metaphor – that of a system of unknown signs, a “cryptograph” (WWRii:182), a set of abstruse “ciphers” – that Schopenhauer now draws upon heavily to characterise the world of experience, making it the task of philosophy to unlock its meaning. This is similar to the way in which, “if we find a document the script of which is unknown, we continue trying to interpret it until we hit upon a hypothesis as to the meaning of the letters by which they form intelligible words and connected sentences” (WWRii:184). Philosophy must do this by seeking to connect the different parts of this unintelligible script with one another – including, crucially, the inner facts with the outer – in a way that places phenomena into the greatest possible agreement. This, inter alia, means that “the deciphering of the world must be completely confirmed from itself.” This approach – what Rüdiger Safranski refers to as Schopenhauer’s “hermeneutics of existence” – is linked with a clearer characterisation of the nature of philosophy and its aims: immanent, not transcendent; seeking to interpret, not explain.¹⁰

Several elements of this picture, to be sure, already had their roots in Schopenhauer’s earlier work. Certainly the notion of representations as a system of mysterious signs (standing “before us like hieroglyphics that are not understood,” WWRi:97), of nature as engaging in significant speech (every plant “says something that cannot be expressed in any other language,” WWRi:156), and of the philosophical task as an attempt at reading or bestowing meaning.¹¹ The outward-looking orientation connected with this hermeneutical approach, in turn, is captured well in an anecdote Safranski records from Schopenhauer’s time in Dresden, where he completed the first edition of the World as Will and Representation.

The philosopher is here turned, not inward to his own soul, but outward to the world to scrutinise its appearances. Similarly, the turn outward had registered significantly in Schopenhauer’s early work to the extent that it provided the content of the concluding moment of the “stepwise” unfolding of metaphysical insight. For the discovery of one’s inner nature, as we may recall – accomplished by turning inward – became a discovery about the nature of the world only upon turning outward to recognise the will in all phenomena. More distinctive, in this respect, in Schopenhauer’s later writings was the particular form that this engagement of outer experience would take, bringing a rapprochement with a specific kind of empirical perspective, namely that of natural science. This heightened rapprochement was visible both in the essays of the second volume of his main work, as well as in Schopenhauer’s slim yet important volume On the Will in Nature (1836), which proposed to investigate the meeting ground of his metaphysics and the empirical sciences.¹³

Whatever the precise character of the novelty and its extent, it would seem to provide important background for approaching Schopenhauer’s discussion of the fear of death in the essay we have just considered. Schopenhauer’s emphasis on the “empirical standpoint” on nature, on a study of the different regions of nature’s language, on an “objective” consideration of phenomena – all of this, it would seem, could be easily related to that intensified concern with the “outer facts of experience” and its more specific expression: a rapprochement with empirical science.

Or could it? My claim in fact is that it could not; and my main suggestion will be that to understand the standpoint at stake in this philosophical moment, it is not to the “objective” viewpoint of empirical science, with its outward-looking attention to the phenomena, but to that viewpoint – likewise concerned with the phenomena, but on a radically different level – constituted by a mode of attending with a far more central place in Schopenhauer’s philosophical scheme that we need to look: the aesthetic.

For if we were seeking for a notion of objective consideration specified in epistemically positive terms, we may now recall that it was precisely in the aesthetic context that we had earlier encountered a notion of objectivity carrying the highest epistemic credentials. In Schopenhauer’s idiom, the “aesthetic” regard and the “objective” regard shaded into each other with little to divide them. And they did so in a manner that allows us to draw an important distinction between two related yet distinct senses in which the notion of “objectivity” could be understood. For on the one hand, aesthetic experience was “objective” with regard to its object, in directing itself to the purest or “most immediate objectivity of the will” – the Ideas. Yet it was also “objective” in a sense closer to our own linguistic habits, with regard to its manner, in abstracting from an object’s relationship to one’s interests. Both senses were evident in Schopenhauer’s remark that “every existing thing can be observed purely objectively and outside all relation”; and since “the will appears in everything at some grade of its objectivity, and this thing is accordingly the expression of an Idea, everything is also beautiful … even the most insignificant thing admits of purely objective and will-less contemplation” (WWRi:210; emphasis added). The two senses were of course interdependent in so far as an Idea was an object abstracted from its relations to the will, and thus to other things.

The difference between the aesthetic and the scientific viewpoint, in these terms, could be understood in two ways, marking out the inferiority of the latter on both levels. For on the one hand, science takes an inferior object. While it shares the outward-looking direction to the phenomenal and indeed the universal that marks the aesthetic regard, its object is not the Idea but the concept (WWRii:442). Similarly, the scientific mode of attention achieves only partial independence from the operations of the will, forming a halfway house between interested and disinterested cognition, where it might also potentially serve as a preparation for the latter.¹⁴

With this higher notion of objectivity back within our sights, we will now have no difficulty recognising all the tell-tale elements in the essay we left behind. What had been the vantage point Schopenhauer had sought to conjure, proposing it as the content of a “really objective gaze”? It was the magisterial vantage point of a being “who lived an incomparably longer life and took in at a single glance the human race in its whole duration.” To the eye of such a being, Schopenhauer had written, “the constant alternation of birth and death would present itself merely as a continuous vibration” (WWRii:481). A single glance picking up a ceaseless vibration – the nature of this act of vision is still uncertain, the implication still muted. Yet with the act transposed to the imperative, it steps clearly into the light: for “let us now picture to ourselves,” Schopenhauer admonishes us, “that alternation of birth and death in infinitely rapid vibrations, and we have before us the persistent and enduring objectification of the will, the permanent Ideas of beings, standing firm like the rainbow on the waterfall” (WWRii:479).

Here is the tell-tale notion of the Ideas, certainly; and with it, several other telling signs. And not least among them, the crucial orientation around a focusing image in specifying the content of the objective view. The particular image just employed, the rainbow – itself a potent theme in the storehouse of Romantic imagination – would in fact recur in other contexts in explicit connection with the aesthetic standpoint, and often as a symbol of permanence within flux and unity within plurality, as when Schopenhauer would compare the Idea and the pure subject of knowing, in standing outside relations, to “the rainbow and the sun that take no part in the constant movement and succession of the falling drops” (WWRi:109).¹⁵ Using different but no less evocative imagery, it is the same orientation around a magnetic image that would be exhibited elsewhere in equally telling ways. The ideal observer taking in the human race at a glance, we have been told, would no longer see “a constantly new coming out of nothing and passing out of nothing” but a mere vibration. Yet this precise spectacle is summoned even more vividly before our eyes in the words that follow using a succession of striking analogies:

A trail of geometrical signs burned into our vision by motion iterated at electric speed – a trail of fire-juggling that is nevertheless the print of truth. Elsewhere in the essay the giddy speed productive of vision gives way to a hypnotic sway, and the commanding image solidifies into something stabler and more imposing:

Yet whether this is a triangle or a circle, a spectral rainbow or a stately pyramid, it is a set of images that we find at the heart of the act of “objective” vision that forms a central moment of Schopenhauer’s discussion of the fear of death. These are images calculated to draw us away from the local language of “individuals” to the language of nature as a whole, focusing our view on “universals” as the most significant sign and absolute currency; and this means: on the “permanent Ideas of beings” that constitute them. What this suggests is that at the heart of this transition – one integral to overcoming the fear that derives from the individual standpoint with its local language, and thus integral to purging the anxiety that sets philosophy in motion – is an act of vision fundamentally aesthetic in kind.

Indeed, with the proposed act of vision characterised in these terms, the different stages of the above account can now be tied more cohesively together. For with the transcendence of nature’s local dialect specified as a transcendence of individuals to the Ideas they embody, the conquest of our fear of death turns out to involve the assumption of a vantage point that will be familiar from our earlier discussion of the aesthetic moment – namely, that of the higher subjectivity that forms their correlate. If the Ideas are visible to us, it is in so far as we are considering phenomena from the perspective of our capacity as the supra-individual subject whose consciousness conditions the world. In this capacity, we lie outside the reach of these conditions, and thus outside the reach of time, as “timeless” as the “eternal Forms” (WWRi:179) we contemplate. The sting of death is thus removed through a reformed identity, or the reappropriation of one – an identification with what is eternal in oneself over which death has no hold. This, of course, amounts to nothing short of an act of self-transformation. With the job of philosophy done, I suggested earlier, “we can now think, and not just feel, that we are endless”; yet this thinking is itself a profoundly felt act of thought.

Don’t assume; look and see, Schopenhauer had counselled. This seeing now turns out to be no ordinary act of vision.¹⁶ Yet I would suggest that, to place this act in an even more illuminating context, it is not merely to the aesthetic standpoint, but to a more particular instance of that standpoint that we need to additionally direct our attention. For a being that could live an endless life, Schopenhauer had written, the illusions of individuality would fall away and the highest realities would be bared to view. Yet let us ask again: by what means? By a magisterial gaze launching forth – from a lofty standpoint that would appear to be located somewhere outside the world – to range over the endless expanse of time and pick out the Ideas standing stable within the flux. In Schopenhauer’s description, to be sure, there was no “launching” or “ranging,” only a single gaze absorbing its object in an instantaneous act of vision from a vantage point sub specie aeternitatis. Such verbs of motion are ones we contribute to bridge the distance between the standpoint of a superhuman being and modes of cognition closer to our own, in which movement of some kind is typically required for intellectual achievement.

And yet it may now be recalled that Schopenhauer had already sought to bridge that distance for us in the same vicinity; and he had done so in ways calculated to bring out more distinctly both the aesthetic character of this standpoint and the means for its achievement. “Now if we cast a glance at the scale of beings,” he had proposed; and again: “let us now picture to ourselves that alternation of birth and death.” If the nature of this invitation is still not clear in such hypothetical and hortatory formulations, it stands out even more plainly elsewhere, and perhaps nowhere more plainly than in the striking remark that appears in Parerga and Paralipomena, framed as a statement about the sexual impulse, yet pointing to the same familiar context:

Contributing yet another image to the gallery of visual aids already before us, Schopenhauer here articulates openly what elsewhere remains implicit. The “rapidly turning spark” that appears as a circle and the “rapidly vibrating spring” that appears as a triangle do not turn at electric speed on their own before our passive gaze, nor is the pyramid of beings that sways hypnotically before us self-moving. The movement, Schopenhauer here clarifies – a movement indispensable for minds like our own – is one effected through the use of the imagination. Equally striking, the imagination can be guided and educated to its task in methodical ways: the passage we have just read shows us how. And in doing so, it has signposted clearly the active effort required for this achievement.

This, on the one hand, brings out even more strongly the ligaments connecting this act of vision to the aesthetic context. Yet no less relevant is to notice another set of ligaments, pointing us to a rather more specific context – that of the sublime. Discussing the mathematically sublime, Schopenhauer had spoken of an experience that took its starting point in a moment when “we lose ourselves in contemplation of the infinite greatness of the universe in space and time, meditate on the past millennia and on those to come” (WWRi:205). This, we may recall, was an image of absorption that turned out to belie an active employment of the imagination to bring the “infinite greatness” of the world into our sights. In the mathematically sublime, the infinite world forming one’s object appears without qualification; in the case of the “ideal observer,” by contrast, it is the world constituted by the Ideas that forms the contemplated object. Yet if we put this apparent contrast aside, the affinities between the two moments are not hard to trace out. And these concern most notably the nature of the gaze that is constructed within them. It is a gaze, in both cases, sent out to span over a large series or expanse: one lacking in limit, infinite, unbounded. This is a vocabulary that we can in hindsight pick up in Schopenhauer’s discussion of the fear of death as a pervasive motif: we are invited to picture to ourselves the succession of birth and death in “infinitely rapid vibrations”; to see the wonderful pyramid of beings “enduring in the species throughout the endlessness of time.” And as in the sublime, here too it is the imagination that is charged with a central role in bringing the unbounded into view.

Earlier, I had called the vantage point of Schopenhauer’s observer an “ideal” or indeed “superhuman” one, with a view to the fact that there are no such beings – ones with a longevity permitting them to survey the human race in its entire duration – among us. Yet that, it is by now fully clear, is far from true. For while this is not a viewpoint that is available to us actually, given our limited lifespan, it is certainly available to us in imagination, through an exercise of imagination not unlike the one that structures sublime experience.

There will be more to say about the importance of the infinitising viewpoint – what I have called the view sub specie aeternitatis – in what follows. But first, we need to take stock of where the above has brought us.

The aesthetic standpoint of philosophy

And on an initial estimate, it might not seem to have brought us very far at all. What had been our trajectory? Beginning from the existential concern that Schopenhauer had placed at the root of philosophical inquiry – the problem of death – we considered the solution he proposed for overcoming it. It was a solution that threw us straight into an apparent tension between the avowed inward-looking (or subjective) standpoint of Schopenhauer’s philosophy and another, this time outward-looking (or objective) standpoint that Schopenhauer invoked in articulating his solution. A conflict? we asked; and looked first towards Schopenhauer’s increased later engagement of outer experience and scientific empiricism, and then towards a more familiar perspective in which a privileged notion of objectivity was already at home: the aesthetic. It was a notion of objectivity whose appearance might seem unsurprising given its special significance within Schopenhauer’s scheme. And the supposed conflict could be dismissed by reaffirming the general relation between the two standpoints to hold as follows. Philosophy first looks inward to discover metaphysical truth – that is a view concerning how philosophy should be done. But with the task of philosophy complete, the world is revealed to be a place inescapably filled with suffering. Aesthetic contemplation offers itself as a respite, providing temporary appeasement by turning our gaze outward to the world’s aesthetic spectacles. On this account, the “inward” and “outward” standpoints reflect different stages of engagement, prior to posterior, within inquiry and outside it.

Yet what should now be remarked is a fact that may seem so self-evident that it risks escaping attention altogether: and this is that the act of vision examined above appears, not outside philosophy and once its task has been completed, but within philosophy itself. And it appears indeed within philosophy as one of the methods by which its insight stands to be achieved, helping us see beyond the epistemically conditioned level of individual phenomena to the Ideas that form the highest representable reality. The aesthetic vision Schopenhauer encourages us to adopt does not form a stage posterior to philosophical inquiry, but a procedure contained within it.

What importance should we attach to this fact? And should we be surprised by it? Whether we stand to be surprised by it, I will suggest, depends on which direction we face, and which resources we draw on in constructing our understanding. Yet my main argument – one that forms the heart of my reading, to unfold over this chapter and the next – will be that, having faced in the direction that brings the full gamut of evidence into view, the simple fact just remarked is indeed a significant one, and points to something broader with immediate relevance for the way we understand Schopenhauer’s philosophy. Considered more carefully, the aesthetic standpoint turns out to be, not posterior to philosophy, nor merely an isolated episode within it, but an element that demands to be acknowledged as a seminal aspect of Schopenhauer’s philosophical standpoint and philosophical self-understanding.

What has hampered this recognition, in great part, has been Schopenhauer’s own singular reticence on the topic. For on the one hand, a comparison of Schopenhauer’s characterisation of the philosophical and the aesthetic viewpoints in his main work immediately throws up revealing affinities. We may recall Schopenhauer’s evocative first account of the moment of aesthetic contemplation: “we no longer consider the where, the when, the why, and the whither in things, but simply and solely the what” (WWRi:179). Compare this with the philosophical moment, described by Schopenhauer as one in which one “does not ask about the whence, whither, and why of the world, but always and everywhere about the what alone” (WWRi:274). And if both moments share the parsing of their object – a “what” abstracted from relations – it is not surprising that they should share the transcendence of the will this reflects. Speaking of aesthetic experience, Schopenhauer would rehearse a familiar motif in declaring that the state of subordination in which knowledge ordinarily stands to the will can be transcended, so that “knowledge can withdraw from this subjection, throw off its yoke and … exist purely for itself” (WWRi:152). Elsewhere, Schopenhauer would characterise philosophical reflection in terms that directly resume the ones just heard, referring to the philosopher’s intellect as “detaching itself … from the totality of things” and “existing by itself” (WWRii:161).

A withdrawal from the world; a moment of self-subsistence to contemplate the essential – these similarities seem more than superficial, and are already richly suggestive. Yet despite these promissory notes, closer inspection reveals a dearth of explicit remarks that would connect philosophy to aesthetic perception. One seeks for them in vain, for example, in the locations where the character of philosophy comes up for direct discussion, and where one would have naturally expected to receive some orienting cues. Indeed, what Schopenhauer does say about the task of philosophy in such locations seems calculated to make doubt deepen. For prominent in Schopenhauer’s characterisation of philosophy is a notion of “articulation” that we have seen, and that seems to be closely associated with the rational, the conceptual, and the abstract. The task of philosophy is ultimately to offer what Schopenhauer describes as a “universal survey of life as a whole,” which is an advantage human beings have over animals through the faculty of their reason (Vernunft) (WWRi:85). Philosophy constitutes “the most universal rational knowledge” (Wissen), which must be “a sum of very universal judgments” that would deliver “a statement in the abstract of the nature of the whole world … a complete recapitulation, so to speak, a reflection of the world in abstract concepts” (WWRi:82–83). Reason or rational thought (vernünftiges Denken) is closely linked, indeed at times identified, with the capacity to form abstract concepts (e.g. WWRi:39, 151, 233).

Yet if we think we have any grip on Schopenhauer’s understanding of epistemic privilege and the divide that constitutes it, abstract concepts would appear to fall squarely on the wrong side of this divide. They are associated with science (WWRi:233), which is confined to asking why questions that presuppose the principle of sufficient reason – certainly not what questions like those that define the philosophical standpoint, for which even the principle of sufficient reason must be open to question. They are associated with temporal perception (WWRi:151) – time belonging to the forms of the phenomenon that aesthetic perception transcends. And there are clear statements to the effect that abstract thought is still governed by the will (WWRii:369: “In all abstract employment of the mind, the will is also the ruler”). Conceptual or rational knowledge is sharply contrasted with perceptual or intuitive knowledge (anschauliche Erkenntniß), such as the perception of the Ideas involves (WWRi:186), and there is no doubt which of the two possesses epistemic privilege.¹⁷

All in all, Schopenhauer seems to exhibit little interest in locating his own philosophical activity in explicit relation to the aesthetic ideal that occupies the highest epistemic pedestal within his scheme. Given these facts, it is little wonder that the relationship between the aesthetic viewpoint and the viewpoint of philosophy should not have figured positively in many of the readings of Schopenhauer’s philosophy responsible for our prevailing understanding of him.¹⁸

It would be a mistake, however, to succumb to these appearances too quickly. And perhaps the strongest initial hint to that effect, in this case, is the one offered by considerations of a biographical kind. For how, given Schopenhauer’s adulation of the artist-genius with a gift for the objective gaze, given the formidable place assigned to him at the apex of Schopenhauer’s intellectual aristocracy – “the elect,” he calls them, “the truly beautiful and the men of genius” (WWRii:396) – and given the pervasive contempt that marks Schopenhauer’s attitude towards ordinary minds that remain shackled to self-interest, can it be conceived that he could have drafted his role such as to exclude himself from the upper echelons? That he has not, however, is already implicit in the sprawling discussions of genius that recur in all of Schopenhauer’s works, which expound on the topic in minute and dilatory detail that bears all the air of intimate and first-hand expertise. We hear how geniuses think, how they feel, how they act and how they look, down to the weight and size of their brain from the inside: Schopenhauer seems to know genius inside out.¹⁹ Yet it is in the reflections contained in his private diary, Eis Eauton, that this self-identification perhaps achieves its most explicit form, as signalled in Schopenhauer’s remark about the “importance of the intellectual immortal man in me” that is “infinitely great compared with that of the individual,” or the importance of “the ideas left behind by beings like me.”²⁰ These words – which embody Schopenhauer’s awareness of his extraordinary intellectual standing – point us clearly to his characterisation of the artist-genius and the supra-individual subjectivity he brings to bear on his encounter with the world.

Yet if this kind of evidence already prepares us to look beyond immediate appearances, perhaps the most direct key for gaining access to what lies past them – what Schopenhauer himself would have called the “subterranean route” – is the very notion of articulation mentioned moments ago as the heart of Schopenhauer’s view of the philosophical task. For if philosophy articulates, what it articulates into rational form, as may be recalled from the last chapter, is something that originally constitutes a knowledge of perception or feeling. Indeed, the emphasis on immediate experience, and on a direct confrontation with the perceived world as the genetic source of insight, forms a central element in Schopenhauer’s philosophical self-understanding – and the understanding of where his own philosophical distinction lies. For “the entire neglect of knowledge of perception,” Schopenhauer writes, “has at all times been the main source of the errors of dogmatic philosophising” (WWRii:85). And Schopenhauer’s view of the uniqueness of his own philosophy is then summed up in the contrasting claim that “each one of [its doctrines] has been thought out in the presence of perceived reality and none has its root in abstract concepts alone” (WWRii:184). In this respect, it shares precisely the orientation of the arts, as made clear in the telling remark that “to enrich the concept from perception is the constant endeavour of poetry and philosophy” (WWRii:74; emphasis added).²¹

The open connection forged in this remark between art and philosophy is laid even barer elsewhere, where the long-awaited cues – still spartan, yet sufficiently clear – are finally received. For it is not any kind of intuition or perception, but the specific intuition that forms the object of the aesthetic regard – “that purely objective intuitive perception … wherein the (Platonic) Ideas of things are apprehended” – that, in Parerga and Paralipomena, is explicitly named as the material and kernel, not only of works of art, but indeed of “a real philosophical argument” (PPii:418). And driving more directly into the revelatory moment providing his own philosophy with its spine, Schopenhauer would elsewhere state: “whenever the inner nature of mankind is disclosed to us in history or in our own experience, we have apprehended this experience poetically” (WWRi:244). The suggestive analogies traced above between Schopenhauer’s characterisation of the aesthetic and philosophical standpoints, in turn, prove to be far from incidental, and what was merely suggested there is stated explicitly when Schopenhauer remarks that both “philosophy but also the fine arts work at bottom towards the solution of the problem of existence,” to satisfy the desire to “comprehend the true nature of things, of life, and of existence” and give “an answer to the question, ‘What is life?’” (WWRii:406).²² What is also worth noting in this context is that in specifying the “what” that philosophy takes as its question – a question answered through a statement of the inner nature of the world – Schopenhauer can often be seen alternating between two different formulations. For the correct answer to the question “what is the world?” is strictly speaking “will”; and this indeed is the specification Schopenhauer often invokes. At other times, however, it is the Ideas that figure as the primary reference, as attested by Schopenhauer’s remark that

Turning back, in fact, to the observation concerning Schopenhauer’s characterisation of philosophy in rational or conceptual terms, it would seem that the soundest way of understanding this is by taking the conceptual to constitute, not the starting point, but the form in which the starting point that gives philosophy its material – what is essentially a feeling, intuition, or perception – comes to be expressed. Philosophy, to put it plainly, “is not supposed to work out of concepts, but into them, in other words, to deposit its results in them, but not to start from them as that which is given” (WWRii:83).²⁴ To give abstract or rational form to experience merely means to render it communicable – and to that extent Schopenhauer would avow his philosophy to be rationalistic (PPii:10).

Philosophy then aims to commute an intuition into a communicable thought. And to the extent that this intuition is aesthetic – to the extent that philosophy takes its material from an intuition identified in certain locations with the aesthetic object par excellence, the Idea – the aesthetic character of philosophy is already manifested in its starting point.²⁵ That, however, only still forms half of the story. To place the full story before us, it is a typically Schopenhauerian move that we need to perform, turning inward to take stock of our own responses. Because to many readers, the encounter with Schopenhauer’s work would seem impossible to characterise fully in terms that fail to make reference to the aesthetic character of one’s response to it. And it has been Schopenhauer’s dazzling flair for the winning image that has often stood at the foreground of this encounter, imparting to the reading experience many of its climactic moments.

Schopenhauer can never resist an image – a simile, an analogy – to illustrate his philosophical positions; time and time again, he reformulates his points anew in vivid comparisons, as if perpetually on the look-out for better-fitting bezels to bring out the sparkle of precious gems. Wittgenstein once complained of being unable to shake off a disposition to think in pictorial ways; Schopenhauer positively revels in it.²⁶ We have already had the chance to witness this in considering Schopenhauer’s resolution of the fear of death, where the use of image emerged as a central motif. Yet a few additional examples can help bring this pervasive bent more fully alive in this context. We may thus consider the analogy Schopenhauer offers on the same theme – the fear of death – in a bid to win us over to his view of our eternal nature: “Just as on the globe everywhere is above, so the form of all life is the present; and to fear death because it robs us of the present is no wiser than to fear that we can slip down from the round globe on the top of which we are now fortunately standing” (WWRi:280). Or again: “Death … is like the setting of the sun, which is only apparently engulfed by the night, but actually, itself the source of all light, burns without intermission, brings new days to new worlds, and is always rising and always setting” (WWRi:366). Discussing the priority of the will over the mind: “the intellect strikes up the tune, and the will must dance to it; in fact, the intellect causes it to play the part of the child whom its nurse at her pleasure puts into the most different moods by chatter and tales alternating between pleasant and melancholy things” (WWRii:208). Discussing the renunciation of the saint: “If we compare life to a circular path of red-hot coals having a few cool places, a path that we have to run over incessantly, then the man entangled in delusion is comforted by the cool place on which he is just now standing … and sets out to run over the path. But the man who sees through the principium individuationis … is no longer susceptible of such consolation; he sees himself in all places simultaneously, and withdraws” (WWRi:380).

Such examples could be multiplied indefinitely, and for many readers, what they would illustrate is a point made expressly by Bryan Magee when he wrote about Schopenhauer’s use of images that they “demand from the reader an imaginative response which is almost poetic.”²⁷ And the accent, I believe, should indeed be placed on the notion of a “demand” just invoked, and on the question this invites concerning the status of such literary elements in Schopenhauer’s understanding of philosophy. It has sometimes been asked, in the ongoing debates about the relationship between philosophy and literature, what importance we should attach to the form or style of a piece of philosophical writing in approaching it. In Arthur Danto’s view, the key question concerns the relationship between the concept of philosophical truth and the form of philosophical expression as this should be understood. Analytical philosophers, in this respect, have often been accused of a cavalier disregard of form – of the dialogue (in Plato), the meditation (in Descartes) – in seeking to engage the philosophical past on their own terms. Yet in doing so, Danto suggests, they run the risk of ignoring what the form of the text may be telling us about the notion of truth at stake, and the kind of relationship to which the text seeks to summon the reader: for it is possible that “something is intended to happen to the reader other than or in addition to being informed.”²⁸

One might raise a similar (if not identical) question concerning the philosophical importance, and methodological status, attaching to the poetic elements of Schopenhauer’s writing. And I would suggest that there is a strong argument to be made for deeming the presence of these elements far from incidental, reflecting something deeper about Schopenhauer’s epistemic ideal – about the notion of truth-making involved, and what must “happen to the reader” in making contact with it. For central to this ideal is an emphasis on perception and immediate experience that we have already seen, and that Schopenhauer expresses again clearly in the apophthegmatic remark that “all truth and all wisdom ultimately lie in perception” (WWRii:74). Yet Schopenhauer contributes something more to his specification of this ideal when in Parerga and Paralipomena he states: “To understand anything really and truly, it is necessary for us to grasp it in intuitive perception, to receive a clear picture [ein deutliches Bild] of it, if possible from reality itself, but otherwise by means of the imagination” (PPii:48). What this remark betrays is a governing equation between perceptual representations and images, which Schopenhauer reinforces more explicitly elsewhere.²⁹ It is this equation, combined with the privilege assigned to perceptual knowledge, that seems to underlie the special status carried by the image in Schopenhauer’s epistemology.³⁰ Truth takes place in perception, and perceptual representations are pictures.

Given this view, Schopenhauer’s embrace of poetic image may seem unsurprising; and Schopenhauer makes the connections clear when, having identified “genuine comprehension” with perception and the grasp of image, he relates this to the use of figurative expressions, whose aim is precisely to “reduce everything abstract to something intuitively perceptual” (PPii:48) and thus secure the object of understanding. It is indeed the broader capacity to discern patterns, analogies, and similarities – a capacity of which the use of figurative language would seem to constitute a more particular manifestation – that Schopenhauer elsewhere marks out as the special appanage of people with exceptional intellectual powers (WWRii:29).³¹ This is the larger epistemological context that must be taken to situate Schopenhauer’s own heavy employment of images and the pronounced literary features of his writing. It has been suggested that in Plato’s works, “the use of images … to convey philosophical insights demonstrates something philosophical about modes of human knowing.”³² Something similar could be said of Schopenhauer.

Yet it is now important to consider how the epistemic ideal just outlined stands to be related to the different forms of art as Schopenhauer understands these. For there is one particular form of art that this ideal would seem to stand in an especially intimate relation to; and that is poetry. To see this, all we need to do is to briefly bring into view how Schopenhauer characterises the task of poetry in his main work. For poets, as for other artists, what underpins artistic activity is a prior encounter with the Ideas through direct experience of the world. Having come into contact with the Ideas, the poet’s task is to establish this contact for the reader using his special medium – abstract concepts. In the World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer reaches for the telling language of chemistry to describe the transformation involved: “Just as the chemist obtains solid precipitates by combining perfectly clear and transparent fluids, so does the poet know how to precipitate, as it were, the concrete … the representation of perception, out of the abstract, transparent universality of … concepts” (WWRi:243). This activity, it will be readily seen, arrives as a direct fulfilment of the epistemic ideal articulated above. Yet it is important to place the chemical process in full display before proceeding further, and this involves attending, not only to the agency of the artist, but also to the activity exacted from the reader. For if the poet is to succeed in communicating the Ideas to the reader through the use of abstract concepts, Schopenhauer explains, “this can take place only by the assistance of his own imagination” (WWRi:243; cf. WWRii:424ff.). This is an assistance that Schopenhauer elsewhere stipulates as “a condition of aesthetic effect,” extending to all fine arts as their “fundamental law” (WWRii:407–8).

The task of poetry thus turns out to involve two kinds of commutation. On the one hand – and resuming the terms we had earlier used to describe the philosophical task – it seeks to commute the intuition of an Idea into communicable form, performing a movement away from immediate experience to the shared world of language. Yet this movement then finds its complement in another – a commutation working in the opposite direction, designed to return us to the immediacy of experience. For the next step, taking place within the reader, must be to return the concept to its origin, placing the reader in contact with the intuitions that formed its living source, and mobilising the reader’s imagination for this achievement.

If we were looking for a paradigm within Schopenhauer’s analysis of artistic forms in which his own writing could best be situated, it is indeed poetry that would seem to present the most hospitable terms, allowing us to locate both Schopenhauer’s reliance on imagery and the explicit appeal to the imagination to which this is tied. It seems to be no accident, in this respect, that in several places Schopenhauer draws poetry and philosophy into special connection, as we saw earlier (WWRi:244; ii:74). As with poetry, the aesthetic character of philosophy turns out to be realised on two closely related levels: with regard to its origin, in taking its beginning (at least in part) from an objective apprehension, and with regard to its expressive form, in using imagery to place the reader in contact with its genetic fount.³³

Indeed, even without the inward look – to our own responses – that gave us our foothold for bringing the aesthetic character of Schopenhauer’s work to clearer articulation, the striking manner in which Schopenhauer insists on characterising his own work might have served us equally well as an initial compass. “A single thought,” Schopenhauer would assert in introducing the first edition, is in reality all that finds itself expressed in the lengthy discursive journey extending between these two covers (WWRi:xii–xiii; cf. 285–86). Not a system of thought – whose parts stand connected in chainlike relations of dependence, of prior and posterior; in which one stone supports another, and should one give way, a fortiori should the founding stone do so, the supervening edifice collapses – but a single thought constituting an organic unity, whose parts might be dispersed for the purpose of communicating them to another’s understanding, but all the while retain the most cohesive internal bonds.

A perfect unity diffusing itself spatio-temporally through the prism of understanding – yet these, of course, are terms that immediately evoke the ones Schopenhauer uses to describe the Ideas as they enter the filters of individual representation.³⁴ As such, they point powerfully towards the aesthetic notions governing Schopenhauer’s philosophical self-understanding. And they do so, it may be noticed, in ways that provoke a telling echo of Schopenhauer’s description of the philosophical task as we have elsewhere seen it. Not to demonstrate – not to move forward from one claim to another in a linear progression typical of argument, of “philosophy as system” – but to articulate a single intuition into its prismatic conceptual form.³⁵

Inward, outward – forward through rational argument? The “argument from analogy” revisited

I have been arguing that the participation of Schopenhauer’s philosophy in the standpoint identified on his own terms as aesthetic enters into Schopenhauer’s self-understanding in important ways, and should do so equally in the way we characterise his philosophical standpoint. In this context, the discussion surveyed earlier – Schopenhauer’s response to the fear of death, with its focus on images, its conscription of the imagination, and references to the archetypal aesthetic objects, the Ideas – becomes easier to place, and read in its entire significance.

There is still a final step to be taken before the above account is complete – a step that will enable us to extend it to its full reach, and in doing so, to tie our evidence more tightly together. Yet it will be helpful here to briefly pause to survey the distance covered, placing in full profile the understanding of Schopenhauer’s philosophical method that has emerged from this investigation. Our point of departure was an apparent conflict between two standpoints or methods exhibited in Schopenhauer’s work – the subjective or inward-looking standpoint avowed by Schopenhauer, and a different objective or outward-looking standpoint invoked in his discussion of the fear of death. A closer examination of the latter pointed us towards its aesthetic character, and a broader sweep of the evidence suggested that it stands to be aligned with a more wide-ranging specification of the philosophical standpoint in aesthetic terms. With the apparent conflict resolved, both turns – inward and outward – thus demand to be recognised as occupying an integral place in Schopenhauer’s philosophy.

I have been speaking of two turns distinct enough to be placed in conflict; yet having argued for the presence of both in Schopenhauer’s scheme, it is important to attend to what unites rather than divides them. For the facts of self-consciousness that provide one’s inner gateway to what lies beyond the phenomenal clearly stand to be distinguished from the objects of aesthetic vision, which are located firmly within the phenomenal boundary. As John Atwell points out (echoing Schopenhauer), the awareness of the will cannot be a matter of intuition (Anschauung) – as are the Ideas – because all intuition is spatial and the willing subject is not in space.³⁶ Yet the identity of one’s will and one’s body that constitutes the metaphysical insight produced by this inward look, we may note, is one that Schopenhauer describes as a knowledge in the concrete (Erkenntniß in concreto), and a knowledge one normally possesses as feeling (Gefühl) (WWRi:102, 109).³⁷ As Schopenhauer explains elsewhere (WWRi:51–53), “feeling” is a broad category that includes every modification of consciousness that does not constitute an abstract knowledge of reason; thus, it is essentially a negative concept. As such, the perception of the Ideas must also be presumed to be included within its scope. It is this general epistemic category therefore under which both turns – inward and outward – allow themselves to be jointly ranged, providing Schopenhauer’s method with its formal unity. Not reason, but feeling: this is the soil from which philosophy takes its beginning and its material. And this, after all, was a point that Schopenhauer had already openly proclaimed when he had written, “everyone knows without further help what the world is”; the task of philosophy is simply to “reproduce this in the abstract,” providing rational articulation to “successive, variable perceptions, and generally all that the wide concept of feeling embraces” (WWRi:82).

Yet this statement of methodological unity, it must now be remarked, is not entirely free from difficulties – difficulties once again stemming from a scrupulous comparison of different regions of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, and this time the testimony of his theoretical remarks with the evidence of his practice. It is in fact the formulation employed in closing the last section that here offers us the best point of entry into one of the most important difficulties. The task of philosophy, it was said, is not to move forward from one claim to another, in the style of systematic philosophy; philosophy indeed does away with proof and rational argument altogether. It is a description of the philosophical task, of course, that will be familiar from the previous chapter, which the above remarks concerning the status of feeling directly resumed. If the notion of “movement” is to be applied to philosophical inquiry at all, I suggested in Chapter 1, the most appropriate way of characterising this would be as a movement, not forward, but upward – a movement upward from knowledge of perception or feeling to its rational articulation.

And yet it may not have passed unnoticed that it was precisely the vocabulary of a rectilinear progression “forward” that had infiltrated that earlier discussion (Chapter 1) at a key juncture. For Schopenhauer’s philosophical discovery, indeed, appeared to bear the character of a sequential unfolding from the start: first there was the experiment of imagining one’s body from an objective vantage point (one’s will estranged); then the surprised recovery of one’s body from the inside (one’s will remarked); then the realisation – intuitive and indemonstrable – that one’s body is one’s will. Yet this sequential character appeared to deepen as soon as that first indemonstrable insight was achieved, and having turned inward to discover the will as one’s own inner nature, one turned outward to recognise it as the inner nature of all phenomena. One went on to extend that first insight to other human beings, via a rejection of solipsism; then to all other beings, via a rejection of the uniqueness of the human phenomenon; and then to the entire world. “Moving forward in this manner,” I had suggested, one gradually came to recognise the will in all natural phenomena. Yet how now, given Schopenhauer’s own view of the philosophical task, could one make sense of this sequential movement?

It is a question that commentators have not ceased to press; and given the position of high architectonic importance this moment occupies in Schopenhauer’s philosophical process, it is no accident that it should have come up for special – and often incisive – scrutiny. If our attention was earlier focused on the tense relation between “outward” and “inward” in Schopenhauer’s method, it is the “forward” that has seemed particularly troubling in this part of his account. The visible ambivalence displayed by readers over the most appropriate term for characterising the moment at stake is in itself revealing of the interpretative difficulties involved. And these, above all, are difficulties concerning how to engage the strong emphasis on argument or demonstration – the very notions whose applicability in philosophy Schopenhauer had elsewhere called into question – that appears to govern it, imparting to this movement forward all the inevitability of a logical drive. We find it referred to as a process of “projection” or “transfer” (Schopenhauer’s own locution); yet we also find it referred to as “an argument” – an “argument from analogy” that, Arthur Hübscher notes, has long been deemed to hold Schopenhauer’s thought together.³⁸

And the last characterisation, it must be admitted, would seem to find significant grounds for support in Schopenhauer’s discussion. How to deny, indeed, the logical transitions that appear to form the hinges of the movement by which philosophical insight flows outward from self, to other human beings, to world? If the key to my own phenomenon is the will, then the same must be the case for other human beings. If it is the case with other human beings, it must be the case with all other beings and phenomena in this world. Otherwise, my only discovery would be a personal truth applicable to none other than myself.³⁹

Yet if this is an argument, as several commentators have suggested, it seems to be an awkward one in many ways. As Robert Wicks has interestingly observed, for example, the analogy seems to move entirely in the wrong direction. “If we have a large set of items that are identical in many key respects,” he points out, “and if we are sure that a newly encountered item has all those key respects, except for one, about which there remains some uncertainty, then it is reasonable to suppose that it has the remaining aspect.”⁴⁰ In this case, by contrast, we are not trying to subsume the one into the many, but the reverse. Julian Young, on his part, has suggested that the transfer of the metaphysical insight to organic nature is more strongly motivated by rational grounds than the transfer to inorganic nature. The former is grounded in Schopenhauer’s understanding of teleology, but “in contrast to the demand for the extension of will to organic nature, we have a certain choice about extending it any further.” Schopenhauer, however, offers us two reasons for completing the transfer, in Young’s view: the law of homogeneity (which seeks to subsume all species under the highest genus, and methodologically demands that if we can extend it, we must); and the fact that failure to do so would condemn our understanding of the natural world to irredeemable obscurity.⁴¹

Writing in a similar context, John Atwell initially calls upon the language of argument and inference in discussing this philosophical moment, yet he goes on to suggest that, on closer inspection, the argument fails due to a problematic premise, namely, that we represent other bodies in the same way as we represent our own. He then proposes an alternative construal that centres on Schopenhauer’s analysis of human action and takes Schopenhauer’s main insight to concern the duplicity of human action – as a bodily movement and as an act of will, or as a manifestation of character and an act of character. Yet this proposal, significantly, is accompanied by an outright dismissal of the language of argument and inference. Schopenhauer, Atwell states, “does not think … that logic or reasoning (certainly not reasoning by way of an argument by analogy) demands an extension of what we recognise about ourselves to outer objects.” And like Young, Atwell stresses Schopenhauer’s reliance on the unwelcome consequences of failure to perform this extension: the acceptance of the mad, but also evil, belief in theoretical egoism (what was referred to as “solipsism” above), and the failure to arrive at a satisfactory understanding of the world.⁴²

What these readings suggest is that if there is an argument, it is only an argument in part, or it is an argument that fails its purpose; and on one interpretation, there is no argument at all. Yet if we set aside the merits of the argument itself, it is important, in approaching the issue, to be clear about the consequences that would arise for Schopenhauer’s own philosophy from granting the mere existence of argument in this context. And the central consequence, as already stated, would be to reveal a grave stress fracture within his philosophy, bringing Schopenhauer’s philosophical practice and his philosophical theory – where the disavowal of argument had been expressed in clarion terms – into direct collision, and into a collision taking place right within its heart. Given the problems of internal coherence this would pose, not to mention the problems attaching to the argument itself, this ought to serve as a prima facie ground for conferring on the last-mentioned interpretation – one doubting the presence of argument – the default privilege.

It is then as a way of redeeming this privilege that one might suggest returning to Schopenhauer’s account to consider in greater detail one of its climactic moments – the moment in section 21 of WWRi, where Schopenhauer turns to recapitulate the first step of the discovery: my nature is will. The passage that follows is one that we have already seen in part in Chapter 1, and can now place before us in full to appraise its significance. “The reader who with me has gained this conviction” – the conviction concerning his own nature – Schopenhauer writes, “will find that of itself it will become the key to the knowledge of the innermost being of the whole of nature.” He continues:

Now how are we to understand the epistemic process placed on display in this marvellously suggestive passage? We may notice that Schopenhauer speaks of “continued reflection” (Reflexion). Atwell glosses: “hence” what is at stake is “a function or operation of human reason.” For one of the capacities and functions of reason, as Schopenhauer himself has suggested, is to survey the world as a whole (recall: “the universal survey of life as a whole [is] an advantage which man has over the animal through the faculty of reason,” WWRi:85). And it is such an act of holistic surveying that Atwell takes this passage to be representing. This, in turn, appears to provide the grounds for Atwell’s view – which seems to sit awkwardly with the non-rationalistic bent of his account of Schopenhauer’s metaphysical insight as we just heard it – that philosophical knowledge is gained through reason.⁴³

And yet is this indeed the most plausible interpretation? For on the one hand, it must be readily conceded that in the overwhelming majority of contexts in which the term “reflection” appears, it seems to be strongly linked with rational and abstract knowledge. We see this, for example, in the remark with which Schopenhauer introduces the notion of abstract reason in WWRi:36, writing: “yet another faculty has appeared in man alone of all the inhabitants of the earth; an entirely new consciousness has arisen, which with very appropriate and significant accuracy is called reflection [Reflexion].” We see it again in a remark that contains a quintessential expression of Schopenhauer’s view of philosophical inquiry: “intuitively … every man is really conscious of all philosophical truths; but to bring them into his abstract knowledge, into reflection, is the business of the philosopher” (WWRi:383; emphasis added). On the other hand, it may be noted that there is a certain slippage between two separate terms indifferently translated as “reflection” in Payne’s English text – namely, Reflexion and Besonnenheit – and there are contexts in which the latter is associated, not with the abstract knowledge of reason, but with the objective perceptual knowledge of genius.⁴⁴

Such considerations might seem to lend force to Atwell’s remark that the internal evidence is too slender, and Schopenhauer too reticent on the topic, to fix the usage of this term and give it a firm and technical place within Schopenhauer’s epistemology.⁴⁵ And in the light of such evidential shortage, the main basis for Atwell’s interpretation would seem to lie in the assumption – apparently supported by Schopenhauer’s own testimony – that a more holistic way of regarding the world forms the epistemic preserve of reason. Now on the one hand, the foregoing discussion should already have done some work to loosen the grip of this kind of assumption, in bringing into view an encounter with a boundless (“holistic”) object that turned out to be aligned with an aesthetic rather than rational regard.⁴⁶ Yet to loosen it further, it is to the above passage itself that we need to turn back to discover the resources that best serve to interpret it.

For Schopenhauer indeed has spoken of the application of “reflection” as what “leads” a person who has gained the primary insight into his own nature to discern the same nature in everything around him. Yet it is a rather different emphasis – an emphasis not on compulsive logical progression, but on freely self-disposing movement – that has been sounded in the remark just preceding, where the initial conviction is described as one that “of itself” becomes a key for the understanding of nature. The reader “will find” – not the reader “must.” Whatever view we take of these delicate markers, however, it is clear that there is little in the act of reflection presented in this passage to suggest a progression mimicking an argument in form – a progression from one claim to another, from premises to conclusion. Instead, it is a different kind of affinity that this passage evokes. For we may recall, in this context, one of the ways in which Schopenhauer elsewhere speaks of the philosophical task. Faced with a world of unknown “ciphers” and “signs,” philosophy strives to decipher them; the mark of a successful deciphering is the way it places phenomena in the greatest agreement. It is to this picture that the above passage unobtrusively returns us – with its suspenseful notion of a “key,” suggestive of closed doors and unsolved mysteries – and likewise to its conception of epistemic achievement, one that lies in the discovery of agreement, of harmonious connections, of recurrent pattern. The keyword here is “recognition”; it is a matter of coming to recognise that everything around one exhibits a common pattern or signature, so that one sees everything as something or sees something in everything. The act of reflection registers as a moment of perceptual synthesis, of synthesising disparate phenomena under a single sign – the sign that represents what is essential in them.

Yet these, of course, are terms that directly evoke the ways in which we have heard Schopenhauer describe aesthetic contemplation. The cognitive act through which one succeeds in beholding the will in particulars – and the will, Schopenhauer writes, “is indivisible and is wholly present in every phenomenon”⁴⁷ – and that act through which one succeeds in beholding the Ideas both involve a transcendence of the particular towards its essential reality. Already, the link to the aesthetic context seems plainly carved out. It stands out even more plainly elsewhere, and nowhere more so than in a remark that appears only shortly after the passage we have been considering, to resume and re-express its standpoint. There, leaving behind the descriptive tones he had earlier employed to characterise the transition by which the will is read into the entire world (“he will recognise,” “continued reflection will lead”), Schopenhauer turns to issue us with an invitation – an invitation whose protreptic undertone may make our memory stir.⁴⁸ “Let us consider attentively [mit forschendem Blicke betrachten] and observe,” he suggests to us there,

With the last remark, the penny finally drops – yet in a way that only makes explicit something that the visual language pervasive throughout the text had already richly signalled. And this is that the effort of recognition to which it is appealing is one distinctly aesthetic in kind. To see the will in all things, we need to look – and to look with the eyes of the imagination.⁴⁹ It was an exercise of the imagination, as we have already had occasion to discover, that Schopenhauer would not be urging upon his readers for the last time.

If the above is correct, Schopenhauer’s philosophical practice in this central moment turns out to be in full harmony with his theory, preserving its commitment to excluding rational argument from the sphere of philosophical method.⁵⁰ What takes its place is seen to be a way of engaging the phenomena that bears a strongly aesthetic aspect. Unified in this manner, Schopenhauer’s method exhibits the double character of an inward and outward turn that share their opposition to the methods of rational thought. Yet I would argue that, even with this richer account in place, the character – and more specifically the aesthetic character – of Schopenhauer’s philosophical standpoint has still not stepped fully into the light. For this to happen, the picture requires an additional touch of depth; or what, in keeping with Schopenhauer’s own diction and philosophical spirit, we might aptly call its “height.” Let us turn to address it.