A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, Consciousness, and Action: Part one: Schopenhauer and the art and Philosophy of melancholia.

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Schopenhauer and Hegel competed for students attending their respective lectures at the University of Berlin. Hegel won the competition and ended Schopenhauer’s academic career. Schopenhauer was one of the “new men” declaring that he was fighting under the banner of Kantian Philosophy. It is probably true that he was much closer to Kantian Philosophy than Hegel but it is not clear that, if Kant was alive to judge his writings, Schopenhauer would not have received the same kind of criticism that Fichte did.

Kant, in comparison with Schopenhauer, was the philosopher that best preserved in his philosophy a sound balance between firstly, theoretical and practical metaphysics, and secondly an integration of the domains of metaphysics and ethics. Reason, for Kant has the potential for revealing the complexities of the existence of the world, and the complexities of what ought to be done in such a world, and whilst it is clear that Schopenhauer shared some of Kant’s concerns and assumptions it is not clear that he did understand Kant fully. In the end the objective difference there is between these two philosophers may come down to a difference between a philosophical view of science and an artistic view of Philosophy. There is, of course, in Kant, respect for the Arts which we don’t find in Plato, but this respect does not, as might be the case in Schopenhauer, neutralise the power of the intellect(the faculty of the understanding and the power of reason) in favour of the power of the imagination and its practical relation to the emotions( both this power, and emotional susceptibility belong to what Kant would refer to as the faculty of sensibility).

Aristotelian and Kantian wonder in the face of the bare existence of this world is replaced in Schopenhauer with a metaphysical interpretation of existence that is basically experiential, related, that is, to an awareness that we have of the inevitability of death and the widespread prevalence of suffering and misery of life. It was this experiential relation to the world which motivated the Schopenhaurean desire to seek a metaphysical interpretation of existence. Buddha’s “journey of discovery”, his experience of the four great sights of sickness, old age, death, and a monks search for the causes of suffering and enlightenment, we know influenced Schopenhauer in his attitude toward suffering, death and what we have been referring to in this work as “the context of explanation/justification”. There are four aporetic questions that, for Kant, define the field of Philosophy; What can I know?”, What ought I to do?” What can I hope for?” and “What is man?” It is not clear whether the questions” Why do humans die?” “Why do humans suffer?” are aporetic questions of this kind that can inspire awe and wonder in the soul.

Evidence of prejudice in favour of the operation of the imagination over that of the operations of the understanding and the power of reason is also present in Schopenhauer’s characterisation of the theoretical relation we have to the world. In his view, we theoretically can imagine our world not existing. Kant’s response to this astounding feat of imagination would have been to point out that if it is true that we could really imagine such a thing(because what is imagined is a contradiction) this would only confirm the philosophical problems with the agency responsible for the tendency of thought to ascend like a bird into a stratosphere with no connection to the conditions which make flight possible. In this example, it appears as if the rule of experience is defying and denying the logical principles of non-contradiction(PNC) and sufficient reason(PSR). For Kant, as for Artistotle, the PNC and PSR are ontological, that is, they articulate the limits of experience by determining what something is, and what it is not. Kant’s metaphysical and transcendental logic are both determined by these prescriptive or normative principles. It is not, however, clear that Schopenhauer is not using the “experiential” “realities” of death and suffering to deny the prescriptive and normative values of logic and ethics. He claims, according to Patrick Gardiner(Schopenhauer, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1967) that what he has written in “The World as Will and Representation”(WWR) is the expression of a “single thought” and that this single thought can be divided into parts only if the relationship between these parts remain “organic”, that is, that every part “supports the whole just as much as it is supported by the whole” (P.31). This is as much an artistic allegory as it is biological. It is clear that the kind of prescriptive/normative defense of what is metaphysical and transcendental given by Kant is not embraced by Schopenhauer and to that extent, his accusations against Hegel’s religious appeals to the Absolute as being sensu allegorico rather than sensu proprio lack the power of a Kantian position. The metaphysical urge(which he represents allegorically) he refers to, appears real(actual) and almost biological, and contrast sharply with Aristotelian and Kantian claims that metaphysics is about “first principles” and potentialities rather than psychological entities and actualities. Suffering and death, for Schopenhauer, are actualities to be endured rather than potentialities to be responded to in a Socratic manner. Socrates’ response in his cell to death as a dreamless sleep indicates that death can be valued normatively as something “good”(cf Buddha). In the absence of experientially-based knowledge on what death is, there is no alternative, Socrates argues, but not to fear what you do not know and respond normatively as if it was good. Responding to death as an actuality, that is responding imaginatively and fearfully, rather than conceptually and rationally as a potentiality, entails responding in terms of the “urge” of a wish that assumes to know what it does not. This type of wish-fulfillment response merely creates a fantasy of death that is at odds with the philosophical response based on what we can and cannot know. Both Aristotle and Kant would have shared the Socratic view of death and both philosophers would have seen in Schopenhauer’s “value or norm-free metaphysics” a complex irrational defense by denial of practical reason and it’s prescriptive/normative character. It is relatively clear that the epistemology of Schopenhauer is not related to knowledge as conceived by both Aristotle and Kant.

Schopenhauer’s response to suffering, which he described in very pessimistic terms was neither religious nor ethical but aesthetic: we calm our suffering breasts by aesthetic experience, the creation, and appreciation of art. Once again experience, devoid of organisation by the categories of understanding or power of reason is the refuge he retreats to. Now suffering, unlike death is something we can and do experience and no one should deny that creating and appreciating artworks is a possible response to both suffering and death but it should also be realised that the Kantian categorical imperative is a conceptual rather than an imaginative/emotional response to the experience of suffering and the inevitability of death. Admittedly Schopenhauer does claim that aesthetic experience is somehow related to truth and is revelatory of the essential and universal nature of reality perhaps in the same way as Plato conceived of his forms and their relation to reality. This claim, however, appears to be problematically non-conceptual and therefore non-propositional, and running contrary to Aristotelian and Kantian positions in several different respects.

Responding conceptually for Kant entailed responding in terms of the categories of judgment. It is these categories that organise and determine the possible forms that appearances and phenomena can take. All acts of understanding, according to Kant are reducible to judgments which involve a representation of representations of appearances. In other words, the concepts involved in judgments are functions, i.e. acts of the understanding by means of which a number of representations are brought under one common representation. (The term “act” for Kant but not for Schopenhauer, denotes that we are dealing with something that man does, rather than something that happens to him.(Schopenhauer believes that matter “acts” –WWR P-8-9) ) No concept, therefore, is ever in immediate relation to reality. Conceptualising suffering and death as potential “goods” therefore cannot be an aesthetic matter (which must involve intuitions of an object or work that have an immediate non-discursive relation to the object or work concerned). Aristotle in his turn, would have characterised judgment in terms of thinking something about something. In this characterisation, there is clear opposition to the Platonic theory of forms, an opposition that resulted in Aristotle’s hylomorphic theory and his theory of categories (which are not categories of judgment but rather categories of existence). Plato’s participation/ relation theory describes the relationship between the general form and the particular substance but this theory can not lead us, Aristotle argues, to the manifold kinds of things there are in the world and they also can not lead us to the essences of these kinds of things. “Socrates runs” and “Socrates is human” are different kinds of judgment(the one being said both of and in the subject and the other said only of the subject). Plato’s theory conflates these kinds of judgment thus disguising their essential difference to one another because the so-called “surface grammar” appears to be the same if all we have is a “participation relation” between the particular Socrates and the forms “running” and “Humanity”. The idea of “Categories” was thus born of the inadequacies of Platonic theory in the contexts of the demand for explanation/justification. Kant in his turn found these Aristotelian categories(of existence) inadequate for the purposes of logically justifying the truths of science and ethics. For Kant, therefore, without the Categories of judgment, the forms or concepts cannot be regulated by the principles of PNR and PSR, and theorising about the world becomes impossible.

Aesthetic experience covers both aesthetic action and aesthetic appreciation but it is the latter rather than the former that appears to appeal to Schopenhauer. All art-work for Aristotle is techné. Techné is produced and appreciated as part of the project of striving for a flourishing life. Part of this project obviously involves the desire to know that Aristotle refers to in the opening of his metaphysics and it also involves the learning that supervenes as a result of the arising of emotions in, for example, our relation to tragic works of art. This process of learning by catharsis specifically involves the transformation of the emotions of pity and fear into something good in our life rather than something negative and disruptive(calling for a pessimistic attitude of denial and withdrawal). The point however of the account Aristotle gives of Art is not primarily to achieve epistemological knowledge of the external world but also to acquire self-knowledge of the kind valued by the Delphic oracle: the kind of self-knowledge that is necessary for ethical agents striving for a flourishing life. Education in the virtues would for Aristotle obviously involve the transformation of emotions such as pity and fear into pleasures associated with learning: for Aristotle, there was a specific kind of pleasure associated with the “relief “that results from the transformation of the emotions of pity and fear. The “healing” process involved in catharsis is not a result of the purgation of the emotions of pity and fear, but rather a result of the emerging of the “virtue” in an agent engaged ethically in practical reasoning, i.e. we are describing here the self-knowledge of an “agent” for whom pity and fear are felt in the right way at the right time and in the right context .It is not clear that Schopenhauer could agree with Aristotle’s account given his very curious view of knowledge, human agency and the role of the Will in which he basically argues that the reason we ought to have compassion for each other resides in the metaphysical “fact”(?) that the Will is one Will which we are all a part of. Given his pessimistic descriptions of the experiences we have of the world and the supremacy of the actualities of death and suffering in the world, together with his curious idea that we should in some sense turn away from the Will and the World, it is difficult not to wonder how such a system can result in mutual love rather than mutual conflict( a kind of state of nature in which there is a war of all against all). Fredrick Coplestone, in an interview with Brian Magee in a work entitled “The Great Philosophers” (Oxford, OUP, 1987) summarises this concern in the following manner:

“Schopenhauer insists that as there is one ultimate reality, and as each one of us is identical with that one ultimate reality, therefore in some sense we are all one, ultimately. And he uses this theory as a basis for advocating compassion, sympathy, agapeic love as distinct from erotic love…..I find it difficult to see how, if each one of us is an embodiment of a reality which is self-devouring, torn by conflict, mutual love is a practical possibility. Would not one expect mutual strife, a strife which–given the nature of the underlying reality–could not be overcome?…..But this does not alter the fact that if we are all one Will and if this Will is something horrible, Schopenhauer was right in not stopping at the idea of compassion but in going on to propose, as an ideal, a turning against the ultimate reality…”(P. 224)

The basis of Schopenhauer’s choice of this idea of an ultimate reality is grounded in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Kant’s idea of the noumenon but it has to be said that there is no Parmenidean reconciliation of all Wills into one noumenal will in Kant. Will is for Kant, as it is not for Schopenhauer, an aspect of an Aristotelian life form. Schopenhauer in his theoretical witches brew has melted the Will down into some kind of universal “energy”(Magee’s term from the above interview) that does not obey the Kantian or Aristotelian PNC, or indeed any ontological distinction between the organic and inorganic. One key ontological distinction, vital to an understanding of Psychology, namely that between events that happen to man and actions that are brought about by the will and causa sui agency of man is, however, not completely dissolved in Schopenhauer’s cauldron of ideas and theories. Indeed his dual aspect account of the epistemological relation we have toward our bodies has inspired a modern Philosopher, O Shaughnessy who defines the will in the following way:

“Now “Will” is often construed either as “Impulsive act urge” or else as “striving”: the latter phenomenon being uniquely the expression-effect of the former: a kinship that explains the fluctuation in the sense of the word. And my concern is mostly with “striving” will..For it is natural to think of “the will” less differentially as the phenomenon of action force in the mind: a psychic force that is exerted on(as impulsive act urge) and by(as striving) its owner.”(The Will: a dual aspect theory vol 1, xxiii( Cambridge, CUP,1980)

Schopenhauer’s conception of will as stretching over the organic and inorganic would not be accepted by O Shaughnessy who articulates clearly an Aristotelian/Kantian recognition of the fact that firstly, the mind is active because it is alive, and secondly, that the fact that psychological actualities are constitutive of such an active mind is a de re necessary truth in logic. The mind, that is, consists exclusively of phenomena of the type or kind “psychological”. The system is also non-substantival which means that it must be constituted of Aristotelian “forms” or “principles” inserted in a matrix of a hierarchy of life-forms stretching from those that grow and reproduce to the next level of those that perceive, move, and feel to the next level of those that are capable of discourse and are rational. O Shaughnessy’s theory is clearly hylomorphic in the way that Schopenhauer’s cannot be, and insofar as Kant’s Anthropology is also hylomorphic it would seem to follow that we cannot regard Schopenhauer’s position as purely “Kantian”. Schopenhauer, however, does share with both Kant and O Shaughnessy a dual-aspect theory of action and the will.

An interesting feature to note also is the relevance of Schopenhaurean reflections to the Freudian theory that is also grounded on hylomorphic theory. There are elements of both mourning and melancholia in Schopenhauers metaphysical “experiential” starting point, and Freud was one of the first theorists to recognize that whilst melancholia was a pathological condition in need of specialist treatment, mourning as a condition also required a form of “healing” in which his very Aristotelian “Reality principle” needed to establish itself in a mind dominated by the pleasure-pain principle( in which phantasy-laden wishes and desires were related to the loss of something that the mind was denying was lost). In melancholia, the issue is more serious, according to Freud because self-destructive desires were operating in the mind, making the healing process difficult, if not impossible. With these thoughts in mind perhaps we can see in the Schopenhaurean account that the wish to make the individual a part of one all-encompassing Will contains at the very least a trace of the healing process of mourning. Buddha, of course, sought the healing of suffering via enlightenment, via searching for “the causes of suffering”. Meditating Buddhists often describe the act of meditation in terms of a theory in which they claim that the self is not something we can search for because it is involved in any act of searching. Whether this can be mystically described as it has been, in terms of a self that has been taken out of itself and somehow independent of space, time, concepts, and the categories of the understanding, is questionable.

Let us for the moment, however, concentrate on the positive aspect of Schopenhauer’s theory, namely aesthetic experience and see if it contains the potential for a healing process: see, that is, if it can explain and justify what has been discovered in a context of discovery in which suffering and death play such a crucial metaphysical role. Bryan Magee in his work “The Philosophy of Schopenhauer”(Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1983) characterizes the aesthetic experience in the following way:

“There are times when we look at something, whether new or familiar–it can be anything from a panoramic vista to a small mundane object such as an apple or a doorknob–and realize we are seeing it in a singular way. We seem to be taken out of ourselves. It is as if time had stopped, and only the object existed, standing before us unencumbered by any connections with anything else–just simply there, wholly and peculiarly itself, and weirdly, singularly thingy. And yet the fact that it is being seen as if it is not enmeshed in time and space, and as if nothing else existed, seems to imbue it with a universal significance, our sense of which is the most powerfully felt aspect of the whole experience.”(P. 164)

This is the experience of the beautiful for Schopenhauer, Magee argues. The experience of the sublime he goes on to argue is a subordinate form of the beautiful and Kant is referred to in this context in spite of the fact that for Kant there is one very crucial difference between these two forms of experience and that is, the beautiful involves the play of the faculties of the imagination and understanding whereas the sublime involves a conflict of the imagination with the understanding and the sublimation of this conflict by the idea of ourselves as moral agents. The sublime for Kant, then, is related to the realm of the ethical in a way in which the beautiful is not. There are also problems with the way in which Magee chooses to describe the experience of the beautiful. In Kant’s description of this experience, there is a reference to the fact that we are not in the realm of the conceptual and must rely on the capacity of discourse to use language sensitively to give an adequate account of the experience. Here we are in the realm of the poet who, surely would not claim that we are “taken out of ourselves”. This kind of description(“taken out of ourselves”) we are more likely to encounter in mystical writings such as that of the spirit-seer Swedenborg.

Let us try to apply the above claims to a QuattroCento work of art in which we experience the “mass-effect” of the stone of a building we find beautiful. Now such an experience is clearly spatial even if there is an “air” of the timeless, an “air” of time, coming to rest in this singular object that has clearly been created with the intention of being responded to(meaning that the category of judgment Kant calls “Community” is very relevant here—a category in which agents relate to patients). To say in this situation that the patient(the appreciator) has been taken out of themselves is highly problematic. How would we characterize such a state of affairs in terms of the fundamental Kantian ontological differences of that which someone does and that which happens to someone? If the appreciator becomes the agent in taking themselves out of themselves how is this done given what O Shaughnessy claims are the logical limits of a will? A Wittgensteinian grammatical test to determine whether the will is involved in something that happens is the so-called imperative test. Can you order someone to take themselves out of themselves? Even if a Buddhist monk responds to this by a meditation process in which he is “at one” with his slow breathing body and thought has been shrunk to a pinpoint of activity it is not clear that this description even applies here. Does he not intend to continue meditating? He must, simply because the process is rigorously controlled and takes years to perfect. The aesthetic experience is clearly much more complex than Magee’s description of it. One master can order his pupil to meditate but this process requires self-control and it appears perverse to insist that we are being taken out of ourselves. This must fall into the category of events that O Shaughnessy claimed: “it is logically impossible that they should be willed”(Volume 1, P.1). It seems, that is, that if such an event as “He has been taken out of himself” can occur it must necessarily be something that happens to a man and not something he actively does, If it is something that happens to a man we will then need to explain the agency involved. One possible “agency” is a God but this would be rejected by Schopenhauer.

Both intention and desire are necessary for the operation of the will and both, as we have noted above, are critical for the creation of a work of art. Magee in the quote above does not talk about this aspect but we can nevertheless explore the idea of whether the artist is in any sense taken out of himself when he is engaged in his act of creation. Freud would certainly concede that whilst this might not happen in every work of art, it is certainly possible that the process of working at his art over a long period of time might transform the desires and intentions of the artist. Freud thinks that this process is still in a sense pathological(sublimation is a defense mechanism) but it is at the same time a developmental or “healing” process. Aristotle was more inclined to appreciate the value of art than his teacher Plato. He would have seen artistic creation to be organized by the principles of the productive sciences and he would also have seen the activity itself as leading to Eudaimonia–the good-spirited flourishing life(via an actualizing process, obeying principles of the practical sciences).

In order to illuminate the aspects of sublimation and creation referred to above, let us consider the work of Michelangelo in relation to the aesthetic experience as seen through the eyes of a Kleinian art-critic, Adrian Stokes(The Collected Writings of Adrian Stokes, vol 3(Thames and Hudson, 1978)

Michelangelo’s works speak for themselves. They are larger than life sublimations of a Greek spirit that is almost paradoxically religious and philosophical. The magnificently sculpted forms of the “Times of the Day” at the entrance to the Tomb of the de Medici’s are studies in Time, Stoicism and depression. They are clearly projections of the spirit of Michelangelo who lost his mother at the age of 6 and went to live whilst still nursing with a woman who owned a farm and was part of a family of stonecutters. His father had no profession and lived precariously off occasional and transient posts of authority in local government. The family became close when Michelangelo was becoming rich and famous and Stokes’s evaluation of the correspondence was that the family were using Michelangelo for their own ends. The larger than life aspect of many of his works might refer to the aggression that the artist harboured as a consequence of his suspicions. Stokes interestingly agrees(perhaps congruently with Schopenhauer’s metaphysics) that there is a mystical element in the work of art which seeks to unite everything into one in an experience reminiscent of breastfeeding where the whole experience is “oceanic”. We are meant by the artist to feel at one with the world in the way in which we may feel at the deepest points of sleep, when, like Socrates, we have truly accepted death, or perhaps in deep meditative states. This oceanic feeling is related to what Stokes calls the manic trend in art and he claims it is present in the work of Michelangelo. Counteracting this manic aspect is the self-sufficiency or independence of the object we are contemplating. Here space is critical in the experience(contrary to Schopenhauer’s characterization of aesthetic experience). Space, Stokes claims is the matrix of order and distinctiveness for separated objects. A mother, in Kleinian theory, is a separate independent object, for the mother may spatially disappear (go her own way at any point in time), perhaps never to return. This is the source of the Freudian reality principle that seeks to sublimate manic and depressive tendencies. We can see this aspect of the work of Art in Michelangelo’s “Times of the day” where each of the times of the day asserts their presence with a suggestion of a realistic sublimation of the manic-sexual which was also on display for all to see in the Classical nudes. The oceanic and rhythmic world of flesh has come under the control of the work and thought of the artist. In other works of art we can see this oneness in, for example, the block of stone which is then carved by a work process into the singularity of an unfinished Slave or Giant. This particular work we refer to is unfinished and leaves us with an impression that the figure is bursting out of the stone thus testifying to the presence of both of the above aspects of a work of art. Michelangelo is the action artist par excellence. Berenson captures his intentions well when, in describing his etchings and paintings, he says that we see :

“A striving to pack into the least possible space the utmost possible action with the least possible change of place.”(The Drawings of the Florentine Painters, Chicago, 1938)

Michelangelo’s relation to death is well characterized in the two works: the Pietá in the Duomo and the Rondanini Pietá. Here we have in stone what we witnessed in Plato’s Phaedo in the cell of Socrates, namely, the close juxtaposition and acceptance of being and nothingness, life and death.

In an atmosphere of mourning, we witness in many of Michelangelo’s works heroism of the human spirit that knows no boundaries, and yet is neither manic nor depressive. We can see clearly here the inappropriateness of the Schopenehaurean insistence that space has no role to play in the aesthetic experience and we can also question the aptness of the words “He was taken out of himself”. Aristotle pointed out that one of the principles of the hylomorphic theory was that in all change something endures throughout the change. If this is correct the words above must be self -contradictory in more senses than one. What endures, endures in space and this must be the matrix of aesthetic objects. This Aristotelian principle also raises the question of whether in the intuitions involved in the aesthetic experience the time condition of experience is completely removed. Time, if it is involved in the experience of QuattroCento buildings like the courtyard referred to above, is not quantitatively determined as in the Aristotelian formula: “the measurement of motion in terms of after”, but there does seem to be a “presentness” in the work that is suggestive of the presence rather than the absence of time. The question is how to characterize this aspect of the experience.

Perhaps Merleau-Ponty can assist us with a phenomenological account in which time is considered not as an object of knowledge but as a dimension of our Being. We do not experience time as “a succession of nows”, (as common sense suggests), argues Merleau-Ponty, because each now is only an “intentional” view of the world that cannot be observed because one view observed by another does not necessarily reveal its intentional content. The idea of an observer generates events that are observed and this generates an image of time as a flowing river which actually reverses the direction of time: the waters that have flowed by are now sinking into the past and the waters coming from the source of the river in the mountains are now in the future:

“for time does not come from the past. It is not the past that pushes the present, nor the present that pushes the future, into being: the future is not prepared behind the observer, it is a brooding presence, moving to meet him, like a storm on the horizon.”(P. 478 Phenomenology of Perception London, Routledge, 1962)

We cannot, Merleau-Ponty argues, introject the time of things into ourselves:

“Yet this is what psychologists do when they try to “explain” consciousness of the past in terms of memories, and consciousness of the future in terms of the projection of these memories ahead of us(P.479)

Merleau-Ponty then asks what it is that underlies our consciousness of time and he claims the following:

“It is in my “field of presence” in the widest sense, this moment that I spend working with, behind it, the horizon of the day that has elapsed, and in front of it the evening and night-that I make contact with is and learn to know its course.” (P.483)

Here there is no “I think”, indeed there does not appear to be an “I” at all, merely a network of intentionalities that Merleau Ponty, following Husserl, characterizes in terms of retentions and protensions that are not remembered posited or projected but are rather constituents of a consciousness of this “field of presence”

On this account, we see that it may not make sense to speak of time coming to an end.

Now Magee believes he can explain away the contradictions in Schopenhauer’s theory by reference to Plato. According to him, aesthetic entities:

“.. inhabit the world of phenomena and are universal and timeless…They are the Platonic ideas, as understood in his special sense of the term: and what he is now saying is that when we see something as beautiful we literally are seeing the universal in the particular, because what is happening in such moments is that we are catching a cognitive glimpse of the Platonic idea of which the object of our contemplation is an instantiation. We are apprehending in and through the object the timeless reality of which the phenomenal object itself is merely an ephemeral image. We are seeing it as it were, “pure”: we are seeing through the sense dependent trappings of accidental qualities and mind-dependent trappings of location in time and space and causal interconnection, to the universal that all these are manifestations of.”(Magee The Philosophy of Schopenhauer P.165)

Magee is transporting what is true of the aesthetic judgment(namely subsuming the particular under the universal) to the level of perceptual experience. He is also mischaracterizing the role of time in the experience if the above reasoning relating to the presentness of an artwork is correct.

Schopenhauer’s metaphysics according to Professor Brett(History of Psychology) is incoherent and his concept of the will is what he calls a “Blind spot” but Brett’s reflections are probably motivated by a disappointment that the Will is not approached more scientifically in terms of “observation”:

“…the Kantian concept of the self as the source and bearer of all phenomena is converted into will: the indefinable is thus defined, but as this is not volition, being the presupposition of all volition, it is soon to be declared Will-in-itself, and so passes out of the reach of Psychology. Though the system constructed by Schopenhauer thus tapers away into possible concepts, its point of view brought into relief some fruitful ideas. The philosophic mind tends frequently to value the processes of thought overmuch: it puts its view of knowledge in the place of actual activities and regards rational conduct as necessarily a product of reason. But the character of an action is not necessarily the same as its cause: instinct, for example, may lead to action that is rational in its method and its results, though not in origin…The phenomena of animal behaviour suggest(to any but a Cartesian) that there may be forms of action that achieve rational results without conscious processes of reason: below the animals there seem to be various degrees of life in which activity is less and less associated with intellectual processes, until at last the line is crossed and we come to the inorganic and to simple motion. This inverted evolutionism moves from intellect to force. By calling force “blind will” it obscures its illogical transition, but cannot wholly veil the movement. We cannot get back again from force to will, nor from the blind cosmic will to the individual act of choice.”

The above is devastating criticism that agrees to some extent with the criticisms presented above but for the wrong reasons. Situating the Will in a context of discovery where observation is the key activity, as Brett does, would be rightly questioned by those in agreement with O Shaughnessy in volume two of his work “The Will: a dual aspect theory”, and the criticism would paradoxically have a Schopenhaurean animus grounded as it is in the epistemological relation one has to one’s own body(a necessarily non-observational relation). Whilst Brett was correct in his criticism of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics he missed his contribution to an epistemology that in fact is shared by Aristotle and Kant and can also be used(but not by Schopenhauer) to generate the normative dimension of our ethical understanding of action. This “dual aspect” epistemology of action, however, is not “experientially related” to the suffering and death that leads to the search for causes in the context of discovery. It is rather based reflectively on the “reasons” that are given in the context of explanation/justification. The issue is indeed not how to remove knowledge from the context of action but rather how to present its “form” so as to preserve the integrity of will and action and a philosophical characterization of their essence. Brett sees in Schopenehauers system a confusion between will and intellect when he should have been seeing instead a confusion between the levels of our experience and our conceptualization of that experience. This is why we accused Schopenhauer of being one of the “new men”. What is of value in Schopenhauer, Brett claims, could have been achieved by using the technique of observation but Schopenhauer knew that experience was richer than what can be observed of it. The “first principles” or reasons that Schopenhauer gives to justify what is of value in his account are inadequate, perhaps because he could not see the value of the Aristotelian Categories of existence and the Kantian Categories of judgment(Schopen hauer preserves only the category of causality). Given that his view of causality obeys neither the Aristotelian or Kantian principles of PNR or PSR perhaps there is some justification to the suggestion that what “caused” Schopenhauer to reflect in the way in which he did about the Will was a disposition towards depression that he attempted to sublimate via his work. Just as we can in the works of Michelangelo, see the projection of his condition, perhaps the same can be said of the words of Schopenhauer. Perhaps we can see in his depressing work a manic attempt to burst out of the stone of classical theory(Aristotle and Kant).