The World as Knowable and Unknowable

The problem of knowledge in the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer

“No individual is calculated to last forever; it is swallowed up in death; yet in this way we lose nothing, for underlying the individual existence is one quite different whose manifestation it is. This other existence knows no time and so neither duration nor extinction” ¹

A common criticism, among others, of Schopenhauer’s philosophy is that he does not tie up some loose ends. He does not present a tidy and coherent system in which everything is set in apple-pie order. Against this- and Schopenhauer himself readily admitted it- it should be pointed out that philosophy can recognise the impossibility of omniscience and still be philosophy. In a way similar to Noam Chomsky when he criticizes the attempts to understand (and even reproduce) human cognition as nothing but machinery and computational programming as hopelessly misguided (thus the absurdity of AI being anything but a name for a tool), the demand for absolutes in human knowledge (or knowledge as such) can itself be criticized. Omniscience may be neither necessary nor potentially even meaningful. Who says there must be ultimate satisfaction within the human condition?

Who says that all anxieties can be overcome with knowledge?

Maybe -and again Schopenhauer would agree – the human condition has an inherent built-in ambivalence; that we are in a sense the ultimate as well as the conditioned reality. That we are both the knowable and unknowable. Figuratively speaking, our feet are planted right in the ground that our thoughts busy themselves trying to understand. Bifurcation, duality may be just the condition of immanent knowledge. And what transcends knowledge also transcends duality, and so includes everything.

Of immanent knowledge, this much can be said;

There exists the empirical, external world of objects – objects that are already in a sense ‘beings for us’. The mere fact of our being conscious, or perceiving, means that an anything-but-disinterested relationship exists between what appears to us and what we are. ‘Life’ as we know it is the interaction of everything within consciousness, and consciousness is the awareness of this interaction. More, a fundamental element of consciousness is the awareness of the relationships (hence, dependencies) of these objects within time and space. There’s no getting away from the existence of an objective, external world of objects (phenomena) whose being means something for-us – as long as there is subjective consciousness. But that does not mean more than it says. And it does not exhaust the whole of reality.

Without subjective consciousness there is no objective world. But subjective consciousness is only part, only a mode of our being. In that sense, we transcend the entire world and the selves we think we are- not by going off to another world, but by our embracing the other side of this one in our root; the world of being(s)-in-itself instead of beings-for-us. If all things perceived within consciousness are as such wholly conditioned by consciousness, what is unconditioned and hence ultimate is neither things, nor consciousness, nor perceptible.

Consciousness is not the cause of anything in the objective world. Consciousness is the producer of the entirety of the ‘objective’ world. It is the condition by which an objective world and causality in general is perceived. Without consciousness there can be no objective world, nor causality in general because there can be nothing objective without a subject, no objects for perception without perception. But the subject for whom the objective world and causality in general exist cannot be an object among the other objects. Neither does it enter into the principle of causality because only other objects can be causes for objects.

We straddle both sides of the world, or like a membrane connect as well as separate them. Yet even so, nothing outside of consciousness is ever perceived, and so one side of the world, the most intimate in the sense of it’s being our innermost essence, remains entirely dark, impenetrable.

With the “I” there is by necessity the other, the world of objects for the “I”. But – according to Schopenhauer – even this “I” is not unequivocal.

For Schopenhauer, we are composite (or split) even in the “I”. There is a knowing and a willing part. The knowing part can attempt to know the “I” in self-reflection but must fail. This is because the true subject cannot be objectively known and remain a subject, but also because the will simply wills and nothing more can be known of it. To put it (badly) to know it is just to be it.

“However, therefore, a knowing consciousness may be constituted, there can always be for it only phenomena. This is not entirely obviated even by the fact that my own inner being is that which is known; for in so far as it falls within my knowing consciousness, it is already a reflex of my inner being, something different from my inner being itself, and so already in a certain degree phenomenon. Thus in so far as I am that which knows, I have even my own inner being as phenomenon; on the other hand, in so far as I am directly this inner being itself, I am not that which knows.”

1. Both quotations from Arthur Schopenhauer, “On the Suffering of the World”