04.23.06

Schopenhauer on death

Posted in Philosophy at 10:09 pm by nemo

Here’s a passage from a new book on Schopenhauer, Dale Jacquette’s The Philosophy of Schopenhauer, remarkable for revealing the latent potential of ‘transcendental idealism’.
I am not a Schopenhaurian, but the brilliant clarity of his thought compared with the hopelessly barren world of Darwinian reductionism with its cult like converts is refreshing.
Science has very few options at this point (they are confused the Bible Belt is saying nasty things about them). Schopenhauer’s thought might help those who can’t bring themselves to Kant and who are cripples of current science education (indoctrination) to get some inkling of where positivism is miscast at its foundations.
Schopenhauer, arguably, creates a problem by turning Kantian ‘transcendental idealism’ (which isn’t transcendental or idealism) into a slightly Fichtean idealism of the type of Kant’s successors.
But he is close enough to both Kant, science, and the Upanishads to show one way out of the morass of the current regime of scientism.

Schopenhauer’s philosophy often gives the impression of having been composed expressly for the purpose of reconciling the phenomenal will to the inevitability of death. All the apparatus of his main treatise, the fundamental distinction between the world as Will and representation, the concept of thing-in-itself as beyond the principium individuationis, and fourfold root of the principle of sufficient reason, can be understood as contributing to a moral, metaphysical and mystical religious recognition that death is nothing real and hence nothing to fear.
If Schopenhauer is correct, he proves that death is not an event, and hence altogether unreal. Death is not an event in the world as representation, but is rather an endpoint or limit of the world as representation, and in particular in the first-person formulation as my representation. The world as representation begins and ends with the consciousness of the individual representing subject. At the moment of death, all representation comes to an immediate abrupt end, after which there remains only thing-in-itself. An individual’s death is not something that occurs in or as any part of the world as representation. Nor can death possibly be in or a part of the world as thing-in-itself or Will. There are no events or individuated occurrences, nothing happening in space or time, for thing-in-itself, and in particular there is no progressive transition from life to death or from consciousness to unconsciousness. If with Schopenhauer we assume that there exists only the world as representation and as thing-in-itself interpreted as Will, then there
is no place on either side of the great divide for death, no possibility for the existence or reality of death.
Death is nothing whatsoever. It is unreal, and yet it is the purpose and fulfilment of life. Like the Stoics and Epicureans, Schopenhauer argues that death is nothing to fear. Nor, although it offers release from the sufferings of the will to life, does death provide a meaningful form of salvation. Schopenhauer attributes an implicit understanding of the unreality of death to persons who are able to face each day of life without abandoning themselves to despair, and to soldiers and other persons with dangerous occupations who confront the challenges of each moment with courage. Such persons act in practice just as though they understood in theory that death is nothing real. At the moment of death, when consciousness runs up against its limit in the last instant of life, at the final moment of consciousness, Schopenhauer maintains that the world as representation, “my” representation, as each person can say, ceases to exist. The only world an individual subject can possibly know ceases to exist as immediately and completely, and in the only conceivable way, as any existent thing can ever be destroyed, at the moment of death. There is nothing whatsoever left over when death limits representation, except for thing-in-itself (WWR 1: 280).
Schopenhauer’s Kantian and Platonic metaphysics is tempered by its uniquely Buddhistic and Hinduistic, rather than Jewish, Christian or Islamic, concept of the soul’s salvation. The immortality of the soul is understood by Schopenhauer as the indestructibility of Will as thing-in-itself, the pure willing that transcends or underlies the empirical individual willing that Schopenhauer refers to as the will to life. As thinking subjects we are immortal only in the attenuated sense that Will willing purely within us can never be destroyed. When the world as representation in its entirety, including the representing subject’s body, ceases to exist with the passing of the representing subject’s last moment of conciousness, Will as thing-in-itself at the core of each thinking subject alone remains (WWR 2: 215). There is therefore something in each of us that is immortal. The part of us that survives death is not, according to Schopenhauer, as some sects of Judaism, Christianity and Islam have taught, the personality or self or soul of the thinking subject. It is rather the impersonal Will within, the indestructible thing-in-itself, transcending space, .time and causality, that is in no way part of the world as representation or subject to any sort of change.

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