The World As Will and Representation - Relationship To Earlier Philosophical Work

Relationship To Earlier Philosophical Work

The main body of the work states at the beginning that it assumes prior knowledge of Immanuel Kant's theories, and Schopenhauer is regarded by some as remaining more faithful to Kant's metaphysical system of transcendental idealism than any of the other later German Idealists. However, the book contains an appendix entitled critique of the Kantian philosophy, in which Schopenhauer rejects most of Kant's ethics and significant parts of his epistemology and aesthetics. Schopenhauer demands that the introduction be read before the book itself, although it is not fully contained in this book but appeared earlier under the title On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. He also states in his introduction that the reader will be at his best prepared to understand his theories if he has lingered in the school of Plato or he is already familiar with Indian philosophy.

Schopenhauer believed that Kant had ignored inner experience, as intuited through the will, which was the most important form of experience. Schopenhauer saw the human will as our one window to the world behind the representation; the Kantian thing-in-itself. He believed, therefore, that we could gain knowledge about the thing-in-itself, something Kant said was impossible, since the rest of the relationship between representation and thing-in-itself could be understood by analogy to the relationship between human will and human body. According to Schopenhauer, the entire world is the representation of a single Will, of which our individual wills are phenomena. In this way, Schopenhauer's metaphysics go beyond the limits that Kant had set, but do not go so far as the rationalist system-builders that preceded Kant. Other important differences are Schopenhauer's rejection of eleven of Kant's twelve categories, arguing that only causality was important. Matter and causality were both seen as a union of time and space and thus being equal to each other.

Schopenhauer frequently acknowledges drawing on Plato in the development of his theories and, particularly in the context of aesthetics, speaks of the Platonic forms as existing on an intermediate ontological level between the representation and the Will.