Under the Iron Firmament: Philosophy and self-perpetuating annihilation as epistemological paradigm
When you begin to read a book of philosophy and you find yourself to be certain that the very first sentence, claim-statement, and premise is wrong, it feels like something worse than a chore to continue onward. When that book is just one volume of two rather thick volumes, it is somewhat more painful than “many times as bad.” When the philosopher is Arthur Schopenhauer, and the work in question is The World as Will and Representation, then you find yourself reconsidering the purpose of your pursuits respecting his work and you consider perhaps not contributing what you had agreed to contribute, regardless of the need presented to you and with respect to which you felt honoured and inspired to be chosen. Was it like answering a “call”? No, it was like contributing to harm and crisis prevention on the off-chance that your (3000-5000-word) essay may be read in full in lieu of Schopenhauer. But then you started reading Schopenhauer and you thought, No wonder his work leaves people in such rough shape—it is almost impossible to disagree with without casting aside the “fact of (human) representation” and “the idea of free will.”
(Without the “idea” of “free will,” we would not have the “concept” of conscience. Without Schopenhauer’s “will of nature,” we would not have either Nietzsche’s “will to power” or his “idea” of the Ubermensch. Yes, blame Schopenhauer’s “effect” on Nietzsche for both of those and perhaps then also for several “fatal turns” in human history.).
All representations can serve a purpose. A “will” is a kind of personal or internal capacity for agency. But Schopenhauer is reductive in his philosophy with both. A representation doesn’t make up “all” of knowledge. While his argument is not that it does, he believes knowledge requires “representations” to such “sufficient effect” that knowledge is never sufficiently “sound” so as not to become subject to the “psychotic” forces of nature to humanity’s great detriment and potential destruction. A “bad representation” is far more common than a “good” one. Perhaps. But we are often led to believe that “most representations” are insufficient to allow us to make any predictions or preparations that would place us in control of “our environment” or (even) the “natures of other people.” We’re screwed, then, aren’t we? No, because his argument simply becomes a pessimistic account of “representation” in substituting it alone for every other faculty, capacity, agency, skill, and yes, gift that each of us either currently possesses or can learn to possess that can make something else, something better, out of, or in lieu of, a representation. In effect, Schopenhauer substitutes static knowledge and the need to form impressions, pictures, linguistic connections, and models for learning and human development itself. It’s possible that our impressions improve, it’s possible even that our representations become adequate, but that would not be sufficient for Schopenhauer, because it is likely that our world will not be based on our own representation, but on someone else’s (or even, God forbid, a crowding and motley of representations). Someone else’s representation, we will be told, is likely not to serve the purpose of knowledge or the realization of human potential or even the clear and direct understandings of ourselves and others. But again, there’s that issue with “hanging too much” of our own reality (either our present or our future) on “an image.” Would we really do such a thing? It isn’t necessary to go any further other than to say that education serves the purpose of teaching the difference between “evidence” and “support” and “conjecture” and “bias.” We should all receive such an education, but without it, I dare say, we still will not be hopeless. At the very minimum, some education, plus observation, our own experiences, the experiences and stories of others, and what others are willing to teach us for the sake of our value to them will make people sufficiently wary to at least question any representation that is making a “mess of everything.” What about the idea that there are “too many” representations in play in any precipitous instance? Does that not mean that the tendency toward anomie or worse governs reality? This, I’ve been told, is what we “see happening” every one hundred or so years. In the late 19th and early 20th Century, this was what was happening due to too many “competing ideas.” And today, it is too many “image-based, profit-driven, and misinformation-fuelled media” coupling with the same intensity of personal and public interest as then. Well, if there are “too many representations” at play and work, then the question becomes a matter of “who can represent,” so the question then becomes a matter of determining and then linking an object to a chosen subject from among an exceptional class of subjects. Even if we do not live in a democracy, leadership is supposed to directly provide governance for both our practical and most urgent concerns. It could become (we’re told) an issue of an “iron law inscribed as a limit within the human being,” something that “crops up” every hundred or so years, but in actuality the solution to this ends up requiring something far less drastic than the simple determination, the direct derivation, of a solution from the problem. (Remember Hitler? Yes, but remember also: German idealism –> Schopenhauer –> Nietzsche –> the “will to power” and the Ubermensch). Such conditions require the softer, less derivative, proposition of some “far more ideal” state or circumstance of representation among and for ourselves. We get it very wrong sometimes, don’t we? But humans can design controls, make observations, pass legislation and impose regulations and standards, and, yes, educate themselves and others as a recursive function of planning and improving. There is nothing inherently true or lawful about one or many representations being a necessary cause of our personal reality or even our shared human condition—in spite of the potential problem of this having occurred before or occurring at present. The question simply becomes: Can I still represent myself? And if not, is there an achievable way for me to better my capacity to do so (e.g. with the help of others)? The only natural fact about human beings is that, for as long as we have definitively been a species, we have lived in societies where we require other humans to help us to meet our basic needs. We have never had to learn to survive without guidance or direct assistance, without parents, some form of guardianship, or from outside our social group. We may become bound up intrinsically in the representations of others, but if we are aware that we have become so, then this is no longer necessarily an iron law or absolute limit upon us, but it can rather be something necessitating our personal care and attention. It is not always easy “to free oneself” but one may pursue this object in a number of ways, but certainly never without the advice, guidance, teachings, perspectives, or even the direct assistance of (countless) others throughout our lives and all of human history. One must also be concerned with replacing something bad with something just as bad or something even worse. But people live and learn and learn to live again all the time. Life and learning in life are themselves recursive and interminably faceted as expressive and reflective of our changing selves and our many choices. They are far from being an absolute and determinate set of conditions to which we must passively be bound. If you disagree with the latter, and believe that we are intrinsically just so determined, then that too requires an argument. And if you are able to make the argument yourself (rather than have it determined for you), then you are doing so by your own choice and free will. You could in this instance have made a choice other than the one you chose (and you still can). And if you were unable to choose? Or you believe that the iron law and limit upon humanity and human beings is both inherent and absolute? Then it is most probably true that your society does not believe in freedom. But that still allows for many others to argue for you, to argue that your own inherent condition can in fact be made free–although to make this a reality, you yourself would be required to make it become so.
One can look at “representation” separately as an issue but that won’t do adequate justice to “representation under nature” as a special problem for human beings. I’ve said that it is important not to “hang too much” of one’s own reality on representations. However, the problem of “nature” then appears and, without “representing” it, how is one to relate oneself to it? What can we “make of” nature—what “should” we make of nature?–and will people not fail to represent nature in a way that allows them to relate to it responsibly and in a way that allows them to survive it? It is not a small issue but rather, perhaps, a defining element in the challenge of being human on this planet. One has to “make something” of nature, but that itself does not, in and of itself, “represent” “nature” as a force adequately. But it is important to be mindful that humans didn’t come from “nothing,” but rather humans have lived “in nature in groups” for longer than we have even existed as a species. We do “come from nature,” so perhaps we can know it better than we tend to think we do. But with respect to forming adequate “representations” that will enable us to survive, we have had to respond to the need for human learning and development at all stages of us, with nature within ourselves and everywhere outside of us always threatening to wipe us out.
Representing nature as a “psychotic will bent on our destruction” might very well be how nature “should” appear to us at some point in our own social, psychological, and broader human development, if only for the sake of ensuring that nature is respected as the sublime power over and against human beings that it tends to be. Nature is “not expected to be kind,” we might say. But while “psychologizing” nature as “psychotic” and “hell bent on destroying us,” and as “cruel and merciless,” and as an “irrational and tyrannical will only for itself,” does adequately represent the “threat” nature has always posed to human beings, there is another side to nature, the side of “us” in what nature has to teach us about who we are. The ”psychological” cast of nature is something we ourselves learn intimately as we deal with our own physical selves, our changing bodies and minds, and this challenge that nature poses to us is one of the most difficult in life that many people will have to go through. Why is it this way? Why must it be this way? Why can’t we simply “always live comfortably,” “simply be in a kind of harmony” with our own natures and with nature’s nature? Why must we learn nature through this truly nightmarish aspect of it with which it has always and will forever threaten us, even to the point of actually annihilating us? Perhaps everyone must learn what there is to learn in struggling with and in coming up with an answer that is adequate for them respecting “all of what nature can be.” But it is likely that this is meant not to be adequate merely for them, but rather humans are meant to be “socialized,” “psychologized,” “cultured,” “learned,” “resilient,” “skilful,” “understanding of others,” “strong and capable enough to help,” and, yes, “familiar with nature” as members of the human group. And we cannot become this merely by way of ourselves as beings without the effects and influence of natures of our own. It is not possible. Because nature will not allow it. And if nature did allow it, then we would simply not become who humans have tended to need to be as human. Is it necessary to continue on? What about Schopenhauer’s representation of the “will of nature”? How we each, ourselves (even “personally”), “represent” nature is an expression and a reflection of our own human development (including our understanding of our own experience and our understanding of our collective experience) in coming to know nature better and know ourselves better through it. So the real problem with Schopenhauer’s representation is that it is “blind” to how nature, simply the way nature is, is “meant to shape us” as human, within the inescapable, distinctly human and highly vulnerable pattern of nothing else if not our situation in nature. Nature must be something important to who we become. We are who we are because of nature, because of nature’s nature and from our own natures. But to represent our whole human reality as reflecting and expressing nature’s grip upon us as that of a “psychotic will” over and against us will probably lead us only to making the effort (an “error” in my view) to disconnect ourselves from nature, or to otherwise relieve ourselves of our own natures, and we will simply no longer be recognizably, individually, and socially human at all. And where and how will that find us?
Probably there are many works in philosophy that have altered the lives of the people who read them and through these people have altered the course of history. It seems obvious that Schopenhauer’s work would be among the most likely to have had this effect on his readers (and perhaps, then, on “all of us”). It was actually his effect on Leo Tolstoy and Simone Weil that persuaded me to read Schopenhauer and to try to get a sense of how one might approach The World as Will and Representation and “works like it.” After reading Schopenhauer, Tolstoy underwent a total conversion to the way of Jesus, seeing a strict adherence to Jesus’s path as the only possible hope for humanity, and, while I think Tolstoy’s embrace of the Beatitudes (as the social code of the community of “Tolstoyists” he then established) to be indicative of the despair and hopelessness he experienced from reading Schopenhauer’s work, Tolstoy’s was such a complete reversal within personal worldview and with respect to the confidence he once had had in his own works of language, that it seems to me that one’s own power of language and communication itself can become lost when one’s “natural belief in representation” disintegrates. Simone Weil’s death at such a young age occurred shortly after reading Schopenhauer, and although I am certainly not suggesting that there was a direct link between her reading Schopenhauer and her becoming ill and then dying, Weil was likely highly affected by Schopenhauer’s work, but her untimely death makes it impossible to state exactly how her own perspective would have changed.
Works that take as their object something universally determinative of human reality itself, like the natural activity and practice of “making representations,” and works that attribute characteristics to something absolutely determinative of that which itself shapes all of human reality (i.e. “the will of nature”)–works whose object is that which humans simply and naturally “always do” and which entirely forms “our world in signs,” thereby making up all of human reality, but with that object being always and completely immersed in an entirely irrational force sweeping reality “impossibly beyond all possible signs”–such works themselves require language to provide the basis for their own persuasive power. “Will” itself is a concept that Schopenhauer treats as static, univocal, and utterly determinative, although “will” is something that changes throughout an individual’s developmental, personal, and social history. Schopenhauer’s work is entirely predicated on static, univocal, and determinative concepts that are “just-so-placed” in relation to one another, much as a subject requires a particular verb for it to take the object “just so” to mark the relationship and meaning already determined between them. But there is far more to human language than Schopenhauer’s “determination of representation” allows to be made visible from the “frozen stage of development” in which he situates humanity with respect to nature, and there is more to “us” and “nature” than a static and univocal concept of “will” will allow us to grasp. The “verb” itself, the verb in and of itself, can liberate a mind and heart from its being made subject to pre-determined predications through thought, ideas, and communicative acts that allow further development to occur in any person or group in relation to a “greater picture of reality.” Static, univocal, and determinative concepts freeze the subject in its relation to the object, with the verb being pre-determined through a priori sets of terms, connections, and relations. Nature is never just “a will” and we can become capable of far more with language as we change and develop. To doubt language is simply to doubt our own present understanding, and this is simply how we apprehend in ourselves our need to change and grow, that we desire to communicate better simply for the purposes of communicating better. In our human development throughout our lives, language can become more fluid, and new and luminous sentences can be formed and shaped around the possibility of “more realia” and of a greater number of verbs for life within these, and all this can then allow us to describe a dynamic and polymorphous world in which our “will” can learn from nature and nature can then, through us, become the spring of change, growth, and our very own human evolution.