Schopenhauer and Kant

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) was, at the turn of the 20th century, the most widely read philosopher in Europe. He exerted an influence on art, literature and psychoanalysis, and philosophy, especially with regard to Friedrich Nietzsche's and Henri Bergson's ideas of time. Even if he claimed to follow Immanuel Kant in his theory of time and space as being a priori forms of perception, there are also other lines in his thought on time that led to significant differences.

In his thesis On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, Schopenhauer refers to Kant's transcendental idealism when he presents time and space as the class of objects that is ruled by the principle of sufficient reason. Time and space are the formal parts of representations. Whereas space is the form of outer sense, time is the form of inner sense. Neither can be perceived on its own; instead they are conditions of the possibility of perception which precede experience and are thus called a priori forms. So far, Schopenhauer's considerations agree with Kant's transcendental aesthetics. But during the preparation of his main work, The World as Will and Representation, he deviates from Kant's conception.

According to Kant, perception is completed by sensation as the matter of representation. Form and matter constitute human sensuality, which is the receptive part of our faculty of cognition. with [Page 1143]regard to time this means that we perceive any impressions on our senses in time. Time itself, however, is merely a subjective condition and not a quality of things in themselves. Kant makes a sharp distinction between sensuality and intellect, which is the spontaneous part of the faculty of cognition. Therefore something must be given to the receptivity on which the intellect can act and complete the sense perception to an object of experience.

Schopenhauer refuses this distinction and combines sensuality and intellect to yield “intellectual perception”: A complete representation, even an object of experience, is created by the intellect whose function is to connect time and space. Matter consists in this connection and is identical with causality. Nothing is presupposed that is given to the subject from outside, and the whole “world as representation” seems to be totally subjective, a “dream” or an illusion created by the “veil of Maya.” But these considerations, which are based on Kant, stem from an abstraction in Schopenhauer's eyes; they have to be complemented by consideration of the “world as Will.” According to Schopenhauer, Will is the thing in itself outside of time, space, and causality. Taking the concept of a thing-in-itself from Kant, Schopenhauer emphasizes that Will is subjective and is the one essence that objectifies itself in terms of time and space as a manifold of appearances; in that sense, time and space are the “principle of individuation.” with this metaphysical assumption the fact corresponds that the function of the intellect in creating the world of representation as subject to the principle of ground depends on Will: The intellect is serving the Will supplying it with motives; if it does not, tormenting boredom arises. Already in the dissertation Schopenhauer had called time the “prototype” of all forms of the principle of sufficient reason because it has only one dimension and one direction: Every moment is caused by a previous moment. In his main work he writes that the principle of sufficient reason is “the most general form pertaining to all objects of cognizance that stands in the service of Will.” By connecting time and space, the intellect places the present into a net of structurally defined moments that constitute past and future. with this, the present, which is the only true reality of existence, becomes the unextended and insubstantial boundary between past and future,

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