Schopenhauer’s empirical bent is revealed in his attention to observable data. He explores in detail the discoveries, findings, and methods of the natural sciences. His philosophy of language, likewise, is founded on linguistic data, much of it derived from historical philology and from explorers returning from obscure corners of the planet with new linguistic evidence.
Yet Schopenhauer’s terminology might mislead the reader. He relies on words like ‘Will’ — the capitalization hinting at the centrality of the concept in his thought. The reader can be forgiven for thinking that Schopenhauer is referring to a metaphysical entity instead of empirical evidence.
He has, however, so remade and redefined the word that it now serves as shorthand for a bundle of empirical data, as Lenart Skof writes:
The profound affinity between Schopenhauer and Radical Empiricism is documented by Schopenhauer’s method of observing reality and its phenomena and his reliance of on the achievements of the natural sciences of his time. In the second book of The World as Will and Representation, metaphysical ways of speaking like that of “objectifications of the Will” serve only as metaphors for a number of empirical phenomena, which already in the first book had been freed from the old epistemological modes of subjective knowledge.
Not only does the ‘Will’ seem like a suspiciously metaphysical concept for an alleged empiricist to embrace, but Schopenhauer even begins to discuss Platonic ideas — or ideals — which seem to place him in the middle of a metaphysical tradition.
One way, perhaps, to understand Schopenhauer’s seeming metaphysical discourse as compatible with the hypothesis that he is an empiricist is this: to see the ‘Will’ as being an abbreviation for ‘my experience of the Will.’ The empiricist will deny that there is a metaphysical object called the ‘Will,’ but the empiricist cannot deny that I have some experience of what I call the ‘Will.’
Likewise, I can have the experience of noticing similarities among different objects, and can label a list of those similarities as a Platonic idea. In this way, possibly, Schopenhauer does not follow the metaphysical path of trying to describe what metaphysical objects like the Will or a Platonic idea are, and does not attempt to create an epistemological system explaining how we can know about such objects.
Instead, he turns to concepts of art and morality, in a development which tempts the reader to think him a proto-existentialist. Lenart Skof continues:
The body, as the first representation, revealed to the thinker the world as Will — the immediate world as the effects of matter. However, by shifting into the world of Platonic ideas in the third book, Schopenhauer undertook a task that could only have one possible solution: Dismissing the principle of reason was now only possible through the brilliant artistic act, and through related forms of artistic contemplation of ideas, and, analogously through the world as suffering, and the related conception of his main ‘existentials’ (guilt, conscience, grace, the path of salvation) based on the negation of Will, or asceticism.
The Will, then, is not a metaphysical object, but rather an object of perception. The ‘World as Will’ and the ‘World as Representation’ together compose all experience — and all possible experience.
His own scheme of philosophy, in the development of which he proceeded around or, more precisely, over and above Kant, turns back on itself and can only boomerang. Thus, already in the second book, Schopenhauer is forced to start discussing Platonic ideas as the models of objectifications of the Will, although methodologically, these ideas do not yet belong there at all, as the theme discussed in this book is the world as Will.
Schopenhauer frequently compliments Kant, and it is clear that he has embraced parts of the Kantian system, while rejecting some other parts. In any case, space and time, as the prerequisites for any experience, and as formed by the mind to make experience possible, are central to Schopenhauer and are also the constituent ingredients for causality.
Considered in this way, Schopenhauer is an empiricist or a phenomenologist. He seems to have wrestled with slightly different understandings of Kant’s Ding an sich, at times under the influence of Gottlob Ernst Schulze.
On the one hand, as a student of G.E. Schulze, Schopenhauer was tempted to join Schulze and write that the Ding an sich is an illegitimately postulated construct, and that we have no valid reason to assert that there is such a thing.
On the other hand, Schopenhauer is tempted to retain the Ding an sich in his own system, but to redefine it substantially. Since the Will is behind our sensations and perceptions, as objectified Will, then perhaps the Will is the Ding an sich. If the world is will and representation, then every representation is the will: the will is the cause of, or lies behind, every representation.
If we understand Schopenhauer to assert that even the self is composed of will and representation, then it is only another small step to say, that for Schopenhauer, “I am the Ding an sich.”
