He esteemed the principles of Christianity and Buddhism because their central requirement was faith in a redeemer rather than a creator. Christianity had no original metaphysics, but Buddhism on account of its metaphysics had an especial importance in Schopenhauer’s eyes. It was not only a pessimism, but a philosophy of pessimism. Our existence is only a blind struggle for enlightenment and arises out of a flowingchain of perennial re-births. Man needs to be freed from the illusion of existence and released from re-birth.
The World as Will and the World as Idea. In The Four-fold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, Schopenhauer summarizes knowledge as, “The world is my presentation,” which is Kant’s theory of knowledge. A conscious subject vitalizes all things. But the presentations have no corresponding reality in the outer world. They are created by my own subjectivity from the “principle of sufficient reason.” This has a fourfold root: logic, cause, mathematics, and will-activity. “The world of phenomena is my idea,” and in The World as Will and Idea Schopenhauer says, “This is a truth which holds good for everything that lives and knows.” Man alone can reflect upon this truth. When man comes to the realizing sense that the world is an ideal construction, he begins to philosophize as to the nature of the reality behind it. We remember that Herbart started from the same proposition. However, Schopenhauer departs from Kant’s teaching in one important respect: although he agrees with Kant that the thing-in-itself cannot be understood by ideas or a chain of reasoning, he holds that the thing-in-itself is knowable. The World as Idea is a world of appearances, but we can know the thing-in-itself by intuition—by “the look of genius.” The certainty of this first-hand or immediate knowledge shows how poor our second-hand or mediate knowledge is. For even reasoned or mediate knowledge in its most perfect form, viz., science, is under the law of cause and can therefore reveal nothing absolute. Science never gets below phenomena.
If reason reveals only the World as Idea, what revelation does intuition give of the thing-in-itself?Intuition reveals the thing-in-itself to be Will. Man finds, first, the Will to be in himself. He finds it objectified in his own body and in its members. All the members of the body are structures of some function. Every part is the visible expression of some desire. Hunger, speech, locomotion, have their different instruments. Will is immediately known to us as the reality in us. In spite of the exaltation of the reason by the modern Enlightenment, is it not secondary to Will?
For behold! Let me look beyond myself. The revelation of the reality within myself illuminates the reality of the outer world. My Will meets resistance in other things. The everlasting striving of the Will appears in all nature. It appears in the fall of a stone, the crystallizing of the diamond—in all the mechanical movements of matter. “The impulse with which waters hurry to the ocean,” the persistence of the magnet for the pole, the perennial push of vegetation, the motivation of animals, show by an analogy stronger than any proof that the reality of the world is fundamentally Will. All nature is in reality the “World as Will.” This Will is always one and the same. Only in the “World as Idea” do differences appear. Will is common to all and is the only reality. Differences are illusions, and the reason which exists only in man is one of those differences.
The World as Will and the World as Idea do not stand in the relation of cause and effect, but the World as Idea is the objectification of the World as Will. Will is to phenomena what essence is to expression. Will is the freedom that is within all things; and yet all things are determined when they have the form of ideas. There is only one Will, and so the world is in realitya unity. In essence all things are the same—in appearance they are different. The Will has no content; it wills to will—to live—to be actual. In the pantheism of the Will the World as Idea is an illusion.
The Will as Irrational Reality. Before Schopenhauer’s time European mysticism had been of one general type. However universal the character of illusory appearances had been to the European mystics, there had always been supposed behind the veil a rational reality. Indeed, the illusions themselves had been proof of the existence elsewhere of a governing reason. The mediæval churchman often preached a mysticism, and his exhortation to turn away from illusions of “the world, the flesh, and the Devil,” was based upon the compensation to be found in Heaven and in God. The ineffable rest in the bosom of God was reason enough for averting the eyes from the passing show of sensuous things. Schopenhauer now presents to the Occident another type of mysticism, and in this there is no refuge from illusions. This conception had long been common enough in the Orient. The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, written about 1100, represents fundamentally the attitude of the Persians of his time. “He is said to have been especially hated by the Sufis, whose practice he ridiculed, but whose faith amounts to little more than his own when stripped of the mysticism and formal recognition of Islamism.” (FitzGerald.) But in Europe Schopenhauer’s doctrine was unique, and he arrived at its construction by stripping mysticism of all its religious elements. Faith and belief are eliminated because they have no reality as their object. Reason produces only a world of illusory ideas; the Will is a reality, but it is a reality which is only a blind urgency—aninstinctive blind force. The essence of things is undirected striving. Life is the expression of the absolute unreason of the Will. It is a Will without an object. Nature is the objectification of the Will that perpetually creates itself and is forever unsatisfied, unresting, and unhappy.
“A Moment’s Halt—a momentary taste
Of Being from the Well amid the Waste—
And Lo! the phantom Caravan has reacht
The Nothing it set out from—Oh, make haste!”[72]