The author of the work is the world as will and representation. Arthur Schopenhauer the world as will and representation

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) began his philosophical career as a privatdozent at the University of Berlin in 1820, and his interests had previously undergone a number of metamorphoses.

The study of natural science, and in particular medicine, at the University of Göttingen soon gave way to a deep passion for the philosophy of Kant. In 1813–1814, in the literary salon of his mother, at that time a famous writer, he became quite close to J. V. Goethe, who had a great, although very contradictory, influence on him. In the same year, 1813, Schopenhauer published his first philosophical treatise, “On the Fourfold Root of the Law of Sufficient Reason,” in which he quite sharply diverged from the entire previous philosophical tradition. The treatise, as if in embryo, anticipates almost his entire philosophy, which was soon set forth in Schopenhauer’s main work, “The World as Will and Representation” (1818, published in 1819).

Already his early works are distinguished by a style of presentation that combines the visionary, prophetic intonations of the German mystic J. Boehme, and the bile, sarcasm, dark wit, and causticity of the French thinker Voltaire.

The lectures of J. G. Fichte, listened to by A. Schopenhauer in 1811, as well as the unsuccessful competition with Hegel’s lecture courses, forever pushed the philosopher away from the field of “academic” philosopher and developed in him a persistent hostility to modernity and its problems. From now on, the solitary life of the thinker becomes Schopenhauer's life style. The only major event was the flight in 1831 from Berlin to Frankfurt am Main due to the cholera epidemic that swept through Germany and, in particular, caused the death of Hegel. In Frankfurt, Schopenhauer complements and interprets in detail the main ideas set out in his work “The World as Will and Representation”, writes an essay dedicated to “will in nature”, as well as collections of aphorisms that reveal in a new way certain facets of his teaching. He pays a lot of attention to the study of Buddhist philosophy, which affected his ethical ideas.

Schopenhauer characterized his teaching as the revelation of a secret that other thinkers could not reveal before him. The philosopher put the solution to the mystery of the world and what lies at its basis in the title of his most important work, “The World as Will and Representation” - everything else, like the work itself, was only a commentary, addition and clarification of this basic idea.

Starting from Kant’s idea of ​​the primacy of practical reason, the most important component of which was free, “autonomous” will, Schopenhauer defends the primacy of will in relation to reason, which essentially meant a movement in the anti-Kantian direction. On this path, he developed many interesting and sensible ideas regarding the specifics of the volitional (related to will) and emotive (related to emotions) aspects of the human spirit, their role in people's lives. Criticizing rationalistic philosophy for turning the will into a simple appendage of the mind, which is contrary to real life, Schopenhauer argued that the will, that is, the motives, desires of a person, the incentives to action and the very processes of its implementation are specific, relatively independent and largely determine the direction and results of rational knowledge.

“Reason,” as the previous philosophy understood it, was declared by Schopenhauer to be a fiction. Will must be put in place of reason. But in order for the will to be able to “measure its strength” with the “omnipotent” reason, as the philosophers made it, Schopenhauer, firstly, presented the will as independent from the control of reason, turned it into “absolutely free will,” which has neither causes nor grounds. Secondly, the will was, as it were, thrown over the world, the Universe: Schopenhauer declared that the human will is akin to the “mysterious forces” of the Universe, some of its “volitional impulses.” So, the will was turned into the first principle and the absolute - the world became “will and idea.” The “mythology of the mind” gave way to the “mythology of the will.” The one-sidedness of rationalism was contrasted with the extremes of voluntarism. All the diversity of the surrounding reality, all forms of life appeared in Schopenhauer as manifestations of substantial will, intuitively, by analogy with the “cognitive subject,” transferred from the inner world to the outer world. In a person, his feelings become an adequate manifestation of the will, and above all, sexual desire, which represents the “real focus of the will.” In the context of the ever-becoming will as the will to live, the intellect, according to Schopenhauer, can appear in the following forms: as “intuition” that knows the will; in the form of a servant, an “instrument” of the will; in the form of weak-willed aesthetic contemplation and, finally, in the form of conscious opposition to the will, struggle against it through asceticism and quietism. The last aspect, associated with opposition to the will, is the subject of Schopenhauer's ethics, which substantiates his theoretical and personal pessimism and misanthropy. Suffering cannot be eliminated from people’s lives, so he sees liberation from it in asceticism, in the renunciation of the body as a manifestation of the will and, finally, in the immersion of the individual will into the world, that is, its transformation into non-existence.

In Schopenhauer's philosophy, the individual is the center of self-interpretation, knowledge itself is of a kind of anthropological nature, it is anthropomorphic, moving from subject to object, always by analogy with the subject. Hence, all categories of the world opposing the subject - space, time, causality - are interpreted by the philosopher, in essence, physiologically. The world as a representation is a product of the activity of the brain of a subject who not only knows, but first of all wants, drives.

Assessing Kant’s transcendental idealism, Schopenhauer wrote: “Kant quite independently came to the truth that Plato tirelessly repeated, expressing it most often as follows: “This world that appears to the senses has no true being, but is only eternal becoming; it simultaneously exists and does not exist, and its knowledge is not so much knowledge as a ghostly dream." It is not at all accidental that this particular philosophy in the middle of the 19th century found such a wide resonance among the creative intelligentsia. The composer R. Wagner, the Basel historian J. Burckhardt, and especially the young professor of classical philology, who spent a lot of time studying the philosophy of Plato and the philosophy of pre-Socratic Greece, F. Nietzsche, became followers of Schopenhauer.

The surrounding world is a mirage, a phantom, a creation of a functioning mind - a myth that is created by each individual under the guise of objective reality, projected by him outside himself.

I want to explain here how this book should be read so that it can be better understood. What it has to communicate is one single thought. And yet, despite all my efforts, I could not find a shorter way to present it than this entire book.

I consider this idea to be something that has been the subject of searches for a very long time under the name of philosophy, which is precisely why historically educated people have considered it as impossible to find as the philosopher’s stone, although Pliny already told them: “How many things are considered impossible until they come true.” "(Hist. nat. 7, 1).

Depending on which of the different sides to consider this single thought, it turns out to be what was called metaphysics, and what was called ethics, and what was called aesthetics. And, of course, she must “be all these things” if she really is what I say she is.

System of Thoughts must constantly have an architectonic connection, that is, one where one part always supports another, but is not supported by it, where the cornerstone finally supports all the parts, without itself being supported by them, and where the top is supported by itself, without supporting anything. Vice versa, one single thought no matter how significant its volume, it must maintain perfect unity. If, nevertheless, for the purpose of transmission, it allows division into parts, then the connection of these parts must still be organic, that is, one where each part supports the whole as much as it itself is supported by it, where no one is the first and not the last, where the whole thought from each part benefits from clarity and even the smallest part cannot be fully understood if the whole is not understood in advance. Meanwhile, a book must have a first and a last line, and therefore in this respect it always remains very unlike an organism, no matter how its content resembles it: there will thus be a contradiction between form and matter.

From this it is clear that under such conditions there is no other way to penetrate into the thought presented here than read this book twice, and, moreover, for the first time with great patience, which can only be gained from a benevolent trust that the beginning almost as much presupposes the end as the end presupposes the beginning, and each previous part presupposes the subsequent one almost as much as the subsequent one presupposes the first. I say “almost” because this is not quite the case, but honestly and conscientiously everything possible has been done to first present what is least likely to be explained only from what follows, as in general everything has been done that can contribute to the utmost clarity and intelligibility. To a certain extent, this could have been successful if the reader, while reading, thought only about what was said in each individual place, and did not think (which is very natural) about the possible conclusions from there, thanks to which, in addition to the many actually existing contradictions to the opinions of our time and, probably the reader himself, many more come, biased and imaginary. As a result, passionate disapproval arises where there is still only an incorrect understanding, all the less recognized as such that the clarity of syllable and precision of expression acquired with difficulty, although they leave no doubt about the immediate meaning of what was said, cannot simultaneously indicate its relationship to everything else. Therefore, as I have already said, the first reading requires patience, drawn from the trust that the second time much or everything will appear in a completely different light. In addition, serious concern for complete and even easy understanding of a very difficult subject should serve as an excuse if repetition is encountered here and there. The very structure of the whole - organic, and not like links in a chain - sometimes forced me to touch the same place twice. It was this structure, as well as the very close interconnection of all parts, that did not allow me to carry out the division into chapters and paragraphs that I so valued and forced me to limit myself to four main sections - as if four points of view on one thought. However, in each of these four books one must be especially careful not to lose sight of the main idea to which they belong, and the consistent course of the entire presentation, due to the necessary details discussed. This is the first and, like the following, inevitable demand presented to the unfavorable reader (unfavorable to the philosopher, because the reader himself is a philosopher).

The second requirement is that before this book the introduction to it should be read, although it is not in it itself, but appeared five years earlier, under the title “On the Fourfold Root of the Law of Sufficient Reason.” Philosophical treatise." Without acquaintance with this introduction and propaedeutics, it is absolutely impossible to correctly understand the present work, and the content of the said treatise is as much assumed here as if it were in the book itself. However, if he had not appeared several years before her, he would not have opened my main work as an introduction, but would have been organically introduced into his first book, which now, since it lacks what was said in the treatise, shows a certain imperfection by this very fact. gap and must constantly fill it with references to the mentioned treatise. However, it would be so disgusting for me to copy from myself or painstakingly retell once again what had already been said once that I preferred this path, even though now I could better present the content of my early treatise and clear it of some concepts arising from my then excessive enthusiasm for Kantian philosophy - such as, for example, categories, external and internal feeling, etc. However, these concepts are also there only because until then, I had never, in fact, plunged deeply into working on them . Therefore, they play a secondary role and do not touch the main subject at all, so the correction of such passages in the mentioned treatise will be accomplished in the reader’s thoughts by itself thanks to familiarity with “The World as Will and Representation.” But only if from my treatise “On the Fourfold Root” it is completely clear what the law of sufficient reason is and what it means, what its power does and does not apply to; if it is understood that this law does not exist before all things and that the whole world does not appear only as a result and in force of it, like its corollary, and that, on the contrary, the law of sufficient reason is nothing more than a form in which an object constantly conditioned by the subject is recognized everywhere , whatever kind it may be, since the subject serves as a cognizing individual, only in this case will it be possible to begin the method of philosophizing that was first tried here, completely different from all that existed before.

The same aversion to literally copying from oneself or retelling the former in other and worse words - for I myself anticipated the best - led to another gap in the first book of this work, namely, I omitted everything that was said in the first chapter of my treatise “On Vision and Color” and what would otherwise be given here verbatim. Consequently, familiarity with this previous short work is also assumed here.

Finally, the third requirement for the reader could even be silently implied by itself, for this is nothing other than familiarity with the most important phenomenon that philosophy has known for two Millennia and which is so close to us: I mean the main works of Kant. The effect they have on the mind of the one who actually perceives them can be compared, as has already been done, with the removal of cataracts from a patient. And if we continue this comparison, then my plan should be characterized as follows: I wanted to give glasses to those for whom the named operation was successful, so that it itself constitutes a necessary condition for using them. Although, therefore, my starting point is entirely what the great Kant expressed, it was precisely the serious study of his works that allowed me to find significant errors in them, which I had to isolate and reject, so that, purified from them, his teaching could serve me foundation and support in all its truth and beauty. But in order not to interrupt or confuse my presentation with private polemics against Kant, I put it in a special appendix. And just as much as, according to what has been said, my book presupposes familiarity with Kant’s philosophy, it also requires familiarity with this application. Therefore, it would be advisable to read the appendix first, especially since in its content it is closely related to the first section of this work. On the other hand, due to the very essence of the subject, it was impossible to avoid the fact that the appendix sometimes did not refer to the work itself. It only follows that the appendix, as well as the main part of the book, must be read twice.

The work presents the material systematically, but, as Schopenhauer assures, it must function as a single thought. To understand the book, you need to study three sources: the works of Plato, Kant and the Upanishads. According to Schopenhauer, Hindu literature has a great influence.

The first book puts forward the thesis: “The world is my idea” - a truth that is true for all living beings, but only a person can bring it into consciousness. The world, as a conscious idea, is the starting point of the philosophical spirit. It expresses all types of every possible and conceivable experience in the world. Everything that exists for knowledge (the whole world) is an object in relation to the subject, a representation. The subject knows everything and is not influenced by anyone. Object - body, representation.

Schopenhauer divides ideas into intuitive, the conditions of which are time, space and causality (intuitive reason) and abstract (concepts) - reason.
Matter is causality. Schopenhauer's philosophy is Kant's transcendental idealism.

The second book (ontology) states that the world is will. The will is revealed by the inner experience of the body. The action of the body is an act of will that has entered into contemplation. The will is the knowledge of the body a priori, the body is the knowledge of the will a posteriori. Subjects are an individual thanks to such a relationship to their own body, which outside this relationship is only a representation for him. The unconscious will takes precedence over the conscious intellect.
Will is the essence of man, intelligence is its manifestation. The only self-knowledge of the will as a whole is the idea as a whole, the entire contemplated world.

The third book (aesthetics) talks about the world as a representation. Various manifestations of a single will should be identified with the “ideas” of Plato and the “thing in itself” of Kant - forms outside of space and time, independent of the principle of reason. The individual knows only individual things, the pure subject knows ideas. Brilliant individuals are subject to strong emotions and passions. Genius and madness have a common ground. Genius is liberated from the power of the principle of reason. The genius cognizes ideas and becomes a pure subject of knowledge. All people are able to endure this experience (enjoyment of beauty, for example). If you do not cognize the idea, but are guided by the will, then desires will never be satisfied. The idea is quite conceivable.

The fourth book (ethics) talks about the world as will, and sets out the philosophy of “practical life”. Philosophy is theoretical in nature.
The basis of life according to Schopenhauer is suffering. The affirmation of the will to live is expressed in selfishness and injustice. When only knowledge remains, the will disappears. The will is destroyed by coming to awareness of itself. The only act of free will is liberation from the world of phenomena.

Thus, Schopenhauer's work examines the question of the status of the nature of the world as objects of philosophical reflection.

The initial ideas of Schopenhauer's teaching are fixed by the title of his main book: the world as a representation by wills. Schopenhauer writes: “The world is my idea: here is the truth that has force for every living and knowing being, although only a person can raise it to reflective-abstract consciousness, and if he really does this, then a philosophical view of things arises in him. It then becomes clear and undeniable for him that he knows neither the sun nor the earth, but knows only the eye that sees the sun, the hand that touches the earth; that the surrounding world exists only as a representation, that is, exclusively in relation to another , representing what man himself is... So, there is no truth more undoubted, more independent of all others, less in need of proof, than the one that everything that exists for knowledge, i.e. this whole world, is only an object in relation to to the subject, contemplation for the contemplator, in short, representation... Everything that belongs and can belong to the world is inevitably marked by the stamp of this conditioning by the subject and exists only for the subject. The world is a representation." And then he adds: “This truth is not distinguished by novelty." In fact, the image of the world as given through my consciousness (here: representation) has deep roots in the previous philosophy of modern times, one way or another falling into the mainstream transcendentalism.

From Descartes through Kant and Berkeley there is a tradition according to which, in the study of human cognition, the world is interpreted as appearing to us through our ideas. Schopenhauer's concept clearly and unambiguously moves such ideas to the center of philosophy. According to Schopenhauer, Kant drew incorrect dualistic conclusions from the transcendentalist thesis he vigorously introduced and well demonstrated. Meanwhile, only consistent progress along the path of transcendental cognitive and life experience is required. The original transcendentalist thesis defines both Schopenhauer’s theoretical-cognitive and life-meaning position. Schopenhauer emphasizes that the thesis about the world as my idea and about its givenness through my experience, which European philosophy acquires with such difficulty and through complex intellectual calculations, is given in Eastern wisdom systems, for example in the Vedas, as a simple, original position. The European spirit still has to learn such simplicity and originality of vitally correct philosophical premises and approaches.

The situation is more complicated with the interpretation of the world as will. Here the polemic against the classical approach enters a decisive stage. Classical philosophy could not be reproached for underestimating the problem of will. Almost every major philosopher, starting from ancient times, considered himself obliged to pose the question of will, its relation to reason and its freedom and to solve it in one way or another. However, Schopenhauer argued that the history of philosophy in general - the history of modern European philosophy in particular and especially - still failed to do justice to the category of will.

Starting from Kant’s idea of ​​the primacy of practical reason, the most important component of which was free, “autonomous” will, Schopenhauer began to defend the primacy of will over reason, i.e., he began to move rather in an anti-Kantian, anti-classical direction.

On this path, Schopenhauer developed many interesting and sensible ideas about the specifics of the volitional (related to will) and emotive (related to emotions) sides of the human spirit, their role in people's lives. For example, he criticized classical rationalism for turning will into a simple appendage of reason, which contradicts real life. In fact, argued A. Schopenhauer, will, i.e. motives, desires, incentives to action and the very processes of its implementation, human aspirations are specific, relatively independent and largely determine the direction and results of rational knowledge. Correctly emphasizing the specificity and significance of human will and emotions, Schopenhauer, however, used his research to significantly correct the ideas of classical philosophy regarding the mind. He declared the “reason” of classical philosophy to be just a fiction. Traditional rationalism as a whole was rejected by him as a fable about a directly and absolutely knowing, contemplating or perceiving mind, invented by professors and becoming necessary for them. According to Schopenhauer, will should take the place of reason. But in order for the will to be able to “measure its strength” with the “omnipotent” reason, as the classical philosophers made it, Schopenhauer, firstly, presented the will as independent of the control of reason, turned it into “absolutely free will,” which supposedly has no reasons, no reason. Secondly, he seemed to overturn the will onto the world, the universe: Schopenhauer declared that the human will is akin to the “mysterious forces” of the universe, some of its “volitional impulses.” So, the will was turned into a first principle and an absolute, into an ontological, epistemological and ethical principle, which means: the world in Schopenhauer’s image became “will and representation.” The idealism of rationalism and the “mythology of reason” of classical philosophy gave way to the idealistic “mythology of will.” This trend was then continued in the philosophy of Nietzsche.

Another unexpected paradox awaits us in Schopenhauer's philosophy. If the world is both representation and will, then it is logical to assume the consistency of these two aspects in Schopenhauer’s teaching. Meanwhile, the situation is different. Schopenhauer plans to substantiate the thesis about the world as will by first showing all the instability and antinomy of the assertion about the world as a representation. (Here, by the way, Schopenhauer was ready to use the term “antinomy,” although he was critical of Kant’s doctrine of antinomies.)

The world as a representation, Schopenhauer argues, is, as it were, divided into two parts, which is the source of many contradictions and discord in classical philosophy. On one side are ideas about objects with their spatiotemporal forms; on the other - ideas about the subject. Both “halves,” limiting each other and competing with each other, nevertheless coexist in each individual human being. Schopenhauer considered the discovery and study of this duality to be Kant's main theoretical merit. An equally important achievement of Kant is that he discovered the duality of the world of intuitions and the world of concepts. But Kant failed, Schopenhauer insists, to truly feel what drama is associated for a person with the transformation of the world into my idea, a transformation, however, inevitable, inevitable. Although Kant and the Kantians tried in every possible way to get rid of the transformation of the world into dreams and illusion (arising from the transcendentalism of ideas), their decisions were not correct. Kant kept returning to materialism, and the latter, according to Schopenhauer, is simply “ridiculous” for those who have already taken the path of transcendentalism. (True, Schopenhauer recognized certain advantages of materialism, which provides natural science with a convenient, although incorrect, position when space and time are declared to be real entities.) Kant did not understand, Schopenhauer declares, that it is not fictitious antinomies, but one main and real antinomy that fetters all human knowledge , as, indeed, the existence of man in the world. What is the essence of this original antinomy? On the one hand, the existence of the world turns out to be dependent on the first cognizing being, no matter how imperfect it may be. On the other hand, this first being itself depends on a whole chain of events in the world preceding its life. This means that already over the first idea, from which the existence of the world begins, there is a fundamental and, moreover, insoluble contradiction. It is insoluble neither for empiricism, which puts representation at the forefront, nor for rationalism, which relies on the world of abstract concepts devoid of clarity. The antinomy would lead to a real loss of peace, when the “word of clue” did not come to the rescue. This word is will. Schopenhauer collects in the history of philosophy (based on Augustine, Spinoza, etc.) all statements or reservations where nature is ascribed a “striving” similar to will. He also relies on the statements of natural scientists who, like Euler, assumed “inclination and aspiration” to exist in nature itself.

In the “vital forces” of nature, Schopenhauer sees the “lowest level of objectification of the will,” while he represents the “direct manifestations of the will” in living beings in the form of a kind of ladder of the universal development of volitional principles and impulses, crowned by the highest, i.e. human will with its objectifications. “What appears in the clouds, the stream and the crystal is a faint echo of the will, which appears more fully in the plant, even more fully in the animal and most fully in man,” writes Schopenhauer in “The World as Will and Idea.” In the world, according to Schopenhauer, not only will is “objectified,” but also “competition,” which can be observed both in the animal world and in inanimate nature. The “higher,” which arises from the “lower” manifestations of nature, absorbs all the lower levels and at the same time “objectifies” their “aspirations.” At the same time, Schopenhauer warns against replacing empty references to the will of specific causal studies of well-defined phenomena of nature and human life. The will, “diffused” in nature and culture, is needed by the philosopher more than by the natural scientist. However, Schopenhauer predicts that natural science will continually invent its own methods of “reviving” and spiritualizing nature. Despite the overexposure of voluntarism, this tendency in Schopenhauer’s philosophy is very relevant. Schopenhauer today has many followers among those who seek to establish new - “trusting”, “kinship” - relationships between man and nature. It was precisely this kind of relationship that Schopenhauer advocated and always justified philosophically. In his handwritten legacy there is the following entry: “When I see a mountain, then I am nothing other than this mountain, this sky, these rays: the object appears, appears, in its pure grasp, in infinite beauty.” This is how Schopenhauer’s “metaphysics of nature” is born, where the concept of will coexists and echoes the concept of beauty.