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by Swami Krishnananda
From http://www.swami-krishnananda.org/com/com_scho.html
Arthur Schopenhauer
If Hegel is the philosopher of the Intellect, Schopenhauer is the philosopher of the Will. He takes his start from Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and holds that the thing-in-itself which for Kant was an unknowable noumenon is knowable directly in one's own self as volitional activity. The Will is the thing-in-itself. Schopenhauer's Will is not the individual psychological will, but a universal metaphysical principle, spaceless and timeless and uncaused, even as Hegel's Reason, as he held, is not merely an individual function. The Will, says Schopenhauer, manifests itself in the individual as impulse, instinct and craving. The Will, again, it is that appears as consciousness and body. Thus the true self of man is identified with the Will.
Everything in the world, too, becomes an expression of the Will. The world is Will and Idea and has no independent material existence. The Will is above the Idea and is the only reality. The Will is blind, unconscious, and the Idea which is conscious is only its appearance in the intellect. We see nothing anywhere except the Will and the body which is the expression of the Will. Right from unconscious matter up to the self-conscious man the Will alone reigns supreme. It appears unconscious in something and conscious in another. It is all strife, activity, yearning that we observe everywhere. Desire is the cause of all things. With the Yogavasishtha, Schopenhauer would say that there is the eye because there is desire to see, there is the ear because there is desire to hear. The body and bodily functions are the expression of the Will. The digestive organs are the objectifications of hunger, the feet of the desire for movement, the brain of the desire for knowledge. There can be no body, and no world, without the Will. Longing, craving, or function, determines the nature of being, of the kind of organisation which becomes the body of the Will. The Will-to-live is the root of all things. It is the cause of struggle, suffering, pain. The Will is the great evil that accounts for the misery of all beings.
Schopenhauer's concept of the Will is fascinating. The Will is the Reality and it is blind urge. Consciousness or intelligence is its phenomenal effect made manifest in higher organisms in order to pave the way for the work of the Will in the world. For Schopenhauer intelligence is not the essential nature of the self. It is only a production of the brain created by the Will for its own purposes. Consciousness is an appearance, Will the Reality which is the immortal force that never dies with the death of individuals, never perishes through change. It may manifest itself in a mortal shape as individuals, but it cannot itself cease to be. The Will is imperishable being.
Schopenhauer's Will is more like the mula-prakriti of the Vedanta, which is essentially unconscious activity, rather than Reality whose essential nature is consciousness. Individual consciousness which expresses itself in the intellect is defined by the constitution of prakriti whose representation is the intellect. Intellect is the medium through which intelligence becomes manifest. But, in the Vedanta, prakriti is not Reality, and consciousness is not the expression of prakriti. Consciousness is the essence of Reality which is beyond prakriti. But it is true that the intellectual intelligence in man is controlled by its unconscious Master, the prakriti with its primary modes of Sattva, Rajas and Tamas. Perhaps the Freudian psycho-analysts would be friendly with Schopenhauer as he would be an aid in demonstrating their theory of psychological determinism, that the conscious is always determined by the nature of the unconscious, and that free-will is an illusion produced by the false notion that the conscious is independent of the unconscious. Instinct, craving, urge, is at the root of even the operation of reason. We are here reminded of Bradley's saying that metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct, and that to find these reasons, again, is no less an instinct. But the urge for knowledge is not an irrational blind force. The instinct that makes it impossible for us to desist from the noble enterprise of metaphysics is a superrational aspiration which voices forth the longings of the infinite in us. Schopenhauer's blind Will cannot answer to this deepest truth in us, nor can the unconscious of Freud go beyond a mere sum of the unmanifested creative impressions and impulses left by our past conscious acts, since ages. Consciousness is not a by-product of the unconscious Will, any more than it is a secretion of the material brain.
Schopenhauer's theory that consciousness is only a mirror of the unconscious Will is, as it can be very easily shown, an untenable assumption. The arguments against materialism naturally level themselves against this view of Schopenhauer. How can consciousness be manifested by an unconscious principle unless it is hidden in the unconscious itself? If consciousness is latent in the unconscious, then the unconscious itself must be endowed with consciousness, though we may accept that this consciousness remains unmanifested in it. If consciousness is different from the unconscious, it is not even a manifestation of the unconscious, and in this position even the existence of the unconscious cannot be known for want of any relation between consciousness and the unconscious. We can as well say that the unconscious does not exist at all. If, on the other hand, consciousness and the unconscious are one in essence, the unconscious gets illuminated by consciousness and its essence becomes consciousness. Even on this supposition the unconscious ceases to be. If it is said that the unconscious alone is, and there is no such thing as consciousness, we say that, as in that case no one would know that there is the unconscious, there is no warrant for the supposition that the unconscious exists. Schopenhauer can convey to us no meaning by asking us to run away from Reality or to overcome Reality. Reality cannot be abandoned or destroyed or overcome; it is the Supreme Being which every one has to realise in one's own self. How can such a Reality be a blind Will, a body of craving that brings misery? Instead of asking us to rise from phenomena to Reality, he wants us to be rid of Reality. Moreover, the real should necessarily be the good. It requires no argument to prove this, for the Real is naturally not different from one's own self. Have we to flee from our own selves? Has this teaching any sense?
Schopenhauer's Will, the evil principle, has to be considered a cosmic conception of the individual will which is characterised by the evil of craving. A cosmic being, by itself, cannot be evil, for no ethical or moral value, desire, pleasure or pain can be attributed to what is super-individual. Evil is meaningful only in the individual, not in Reality. We can accept the theory of a primordial unconscious cosmic existence, as the prakriti of the Vedanta, and a conscious Idea appearing in it, as Ishvara or Hiranyagarbha. But we cannot make even this conscious Idea an appearance of the unconscious, for consciousness cannot proceed from unconsciousness. We have to posit a Reality whose essential nature is consciousness and which manifests itself in the cosmic unconscious as the conscious Idea. Further, the evil has to be confined to the individual psychological will which is a spoilt child of the cosmic Will, and should not be taken to the cosmic Will itself which is a metaphysical principle transcending good and evil. Schopenhauer's advice that one should free oneself from the evil will amounts to nothing more than that one should transcend individual existence, and cannot mean that one should avoid Reality itself, which is an impossibility. He has made the mistake of objectifying the individual will in the cosmos and calling it a metaphysical Reality. Even if everyone's will is to be evil, it does not mean that the cosmic Will is evil, for even all individual wills put together cannot make the cosmic Will. The argument against Kant's supposition that the categories of the understanding, objectively present in the sense that they are in all men, determine the nature of perceived objects, applies also to Schopenhauer's belief that the evil will has a metaphysical existence. Will is not Reality; it is the dynamic executive power of consciousness, cosmically as well as individually. In the cosmos it is free; in the individual it is bound and determined.
Schopenhauer's philosophy has, however, great value if only we would take it in its application to psychology, and not as a fully convincing system of metaphysics, not forgetting at the same time that while psychology is concerned with the behaviour and the functions of the individual mind, it is totally ignorant of the transcendental aspirations and the sublime conscious endeavours of the higher spiritual reason in man. Our want, says Schopenhauer, determines and is at the bottom of our reasonings. It is not because we reason that we want; reason is the servant of want. Want is considered to be the master of even the reason. We cannot influence people by appealing always to their understanding; understanding is dominated by volitional cravings. We have to appeal to the Will which is the seat of desire. Schopenhauer thinks that there is no use of reasoning and argumentation with people,—they can never be persuaded or convinced by appeal to reason,—they yield when the activities of their Will, their private cravings, their urges, their interests are appealed to. We forget what we merely understand; we remember what we desire. Reason or understanding is a mere tool in the hands of the cravings and fears of the Will. The Will-to-live, not the understanding, is the mainspring of all action. Schopenhauer would agree with us if we say that all life is a struggle for food, clothing, shelter, sex and protection from outside attack. Only we have to add, though Schopenhauer never seems to have had the patience to reflect over it, that there is another higher instinct, a secret aspiration in man which supersedes all the lower instincts, the aspiration for the wisdom of Truth, notwithstanding that this is rarely seen in most human beings.
