We Slaves

12) Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation

With the preceding in mind, consider that deep misunderstanding which overcame Arthur Schopenhauer when he interpreted that which was most intimate as being more complex, more entangled, higher, and more evolved:

While every human being is then to be regarded as a particularly determined and characterized phenomenon of will, even to a certain extent as an Idea of its own, but in animals this individual character is entirely lacking, with only species having a characteristic significance—and its trace ever more vanishes with every greater distance from human beings, with plants finally possessing no other particularly individual characteristic than those that allow of a complete explanation in terms of external favorable or unfavorable circumstances of soil and climate and other contingencies—all individuality finally vanishes in the inorganic realm of nature.

And later he continues:

That which makes its appearance in clouds, stream, and crystal is the weakest resonance of the will that comes more completely to the fore in plants, still more completely in animals, most completely in human beings.

If anyone has ever held these words in their thoughts, and considered them true with the most serious mind, then surely they have mistaken locality for hierarchy. However, all of this precedes the unexpected. And, to his credit, Schopenhauer seems to have acknowledged his own error.* So, while it is hardly imaginable that he would have had the courage to destroy a work of over six-hundred pages with one single sentence, Schopenhauer’s precedence must be followed. We must be cautious in mistaking that which is present in location for that which is absolute in the world.

*“Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world. This is an error of the intellect as inevitable as that error of the eye which lets us fancy that on the horizon heaven and earth meet. This explains many things, and among them the fact that everyone measures us with his own standard—generally about as long as a tailor’s tape, and we have to put up with it: as also that no one will allow us to be taller than himself—a supposition which is once for all taken for granted.”—from Thomas Bailey Saunders’ translation of Schopenhauer’s Parerga und Paralipomena.