Schopenhauer's Intellectuality

993 Words4 Pages
However Schopenhauer’s epistemology was grounded in the application of the basic intellectual function of causality to the raw materials of the sensations that all perception, therefore knowledge, is not only through sense experience but of the intellect, his whole system of philosophy was a radical severance of both the intellect and the will. His concept of will is of all possible concepts the only one which has its source not in the phenomenal, not in the mere perceptive ideation, but comes from within, and arises in the most immediate consciousness of each of us. Therefore, what everyone of us experience is nothing but the objectification of our own will, and that direct knowledge we have of our own willing is not the knowledge of an entity…show more content…
Therefore, the act of the will, or every true act of the will is inevitably a movement of the body. The act of the will and the action of the body are not two different states of objectivity known, connected by the bonds of causality, but they are one and the same thing. The action of the body can be called an act of the will objectified and available to perception. Indeed, the whole body is objectified will, or will that has become representation or perception. Thus, willing and acting are distinct only in reflection, and in fact, they are one and the same. Furthermore, any knowledge that belongs to the objectification of the will as its higher grades, and sensibility, nerves, and brain, just like other parts of organic life, are the expression of the will at the stage of…show more content…
Man, as the understanding subject has an inner nature that is to be known, and as an understanding subject with a body that is objectified will, we ourselves are the will, and the act of the will is the essence of each of us. It is given by Schopenhauer, namely, the will, to the being of all existents, but especially the being in-itself of the body. The will’s appearance happens through the body. The will shows itself in voluntary or deliberate movements of the body. Therefore, the body itself must be a phenomenon of the will and must be related to an individual’s will as a whole. All human beings possess knowledge of the inner nature of their own phenomenon which is often identified as a ‘feeling’. The knowledge of one’s own inner being that comes to one as representation through one’s actions and through one’s body is named ‘will’ by Schopenhauer. His pessimistic approach is that, the world is essentially and not accidentally wrong, that the world is present ills, he holds, are not accidental but ‘necessary and universal’. What he wants to show is that, because the thing-it-itself [will] is a drive that was continuously willing, it also longing, striving, hungering, in other words, desiring – then – suffering is essential to existence itself. Hence, there will always and everywhere be more ‘unhappiness’ than happiness. It is because, for Schopenhauer, the cause of

    More about Schopenhauer's Intellectuality

      Open Document