Answers to Schopenhauer kritik on the meaning of life

What is the meaning of life:
1. Opportunity & possibility (I think you could defend this with various positive psychology grounded in science)
2. Freedom/choice/autonomy
3. Love & relationship
4. Community, group, and family
5. Progress (you can defend this evolutionarily)
6. Imagination & creativity & art
7. We make our own meaning of life (it would seem most philosophers, psychologists, coaches, and self-help gurus have a semi-coherent idea of this articulated in their philosophy–meaning, purpose, & goals)

Other assorted thoughts on Schopenhauer:
1. I think Schopenhauers critique is possibly very tied to his culture & moment in time. Here is a short summary from the Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy:
2. It also seems tied to his ideas of suffering & fate (determinism). *****
3. Moreover–he has a distinct anti-rationalism. (indeed it seems anti-democratic)
4. It seems odd that he would deprive people of the very thing he had. Also, his hyper-skepticism seems to ignore the value in goals and purpose. It ignores the value in the will. (further, his place in history didn’t allow him to see the place of emergence & self-organization & chaos theory–the role of order amidst the chaos that arose during the 1990s’ and 2000′s.)
5. Also the chaos he saw was the flip side of freedom. (It also seems to me that his critique was more of emotional will than of rational)–it also seems an evolutionary understanding solves many of the problems he suggests.
6. The resulting theory justifies multiple forms of oppression & genocide. You can’t separate Schopenhauer from Hitler and the worst depots in history.

Despite its general precedents within the philosophical family of double-aspect theories, Schopenhauer’s particular characterization of the world as Will, is nonetheless novel and daring. It is also frightening and pandemonic: he maintains that the world as it is in itself (again, sometimes adding “for us”) is an endless striving and blind impulse with no end in view, devoid of knowledge, lawless, absolutely free, entirely self-determining and almighty. Within Schopenhauer’s vision of the world as Will, there is no God to be comprehended, and the world is conceived of as being meaningless. When anthropomorphically considered, the world is represented as being in a condition of eternal frustration, as it endlessly strives for nothing in particular, and as it goes essentially nowhere. It is a world beyond any ascriptions of good and evil.

Schopenhauer’s denial of meaning to the world differs radically from the views of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, all of whom fostered a distinct hope that everything is moving towards a harmonious and just end. Like these German Idealists, however, Schopenhauer also tries to explain how the world that we experience daily, is the result of the activity of the central principle of things. As the German Idealists tried to account for the great chain of being — the rocks, trees, animals, and human beings — as the increasingly complicated and detailed expressions of self-consciousness, Schopenhauer attempts to do the same by explaining the world as gradations of Will’s manifestation.

For Schopenhauer, the world that we experience is constituted by objectifications of Will that correspond first, to the general root of the principle of sufficient reason, and second, to the more specific fourfold root of the principle of sufficient reason. This generates initially, a basic two-tiered outlook (viz., Will [= reality] vs. objects-in-general [= appearance]), that articulates into a three-tiered outlook (viz., Will [= reality] vs. universal, non-spatio-temporal objects vs. individual, spatio-temporal objects), by further distinguishing between universalistic and individualistic levels within the sphere of objects.

The general philosophical pattern of a single world-essence that initially manifests itself as a multiplicity of abstract essences, which, in turn, manifest themselves as a multiplicity of physical individuals is found throughout the world. It is characteristic of Neoplatonism (c. third century, C.E., as represented by Plotinus [204–270]), and it is also characteristic of the Buddhist Three Body Doctrine [trikaya] of the Buddha’s manifestation, which is developed in the Yogacara school of Mahayana Buddhism as represented by Maitreya (270–350), Asanga (375–430) and Vasubandu (400–480).

It continues:

Will’s indirect objectifications appear when our minds continue to apply the principle of sufficient reason beyond its general root such as to introduce the forms of time, space and causality, not to mention logic, mathematics, geometry and moral reasoning. When Will is objectified at this level of determination, the world of everyday life emerges, whose objects are, in effect, kaleidoscopically multiplied manifestations of the Platonic forms, endlessly dispersed throughout space and time.

Since the principle of sufficient reason is — given Schopenhauer’s inspiration from Kant — the epistemological form of the human mind, the spatio-temporal world is the world of our own reflection. To that extent, Schopenhauer says that life is like a dream. As a condition of our knowledge, Schopenhauer believes that the laws of nature, along with the sets of objects that we experience, we ourselves create in way that is not unlike the way the constitution of our tongues invokes the taste of sugar. As Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) states in “The Assayer” (1623), if ears tongues and noses were removed from the world, then odors tastes and sounds would be removed as well.

At this point, what Schopenhauer has developed philosophically is surely interesting, but we have not yet mentioned its more remarkable and memorable aspect. If we combine his claim that the world is Will with his Kantian view that we are responsible for the individuated world of appearances, we arrive at a novel outlook — an outlook that depends heavily upon Schopenhauer’s characterization of the thing-in-itself as Will, understood to be an aimless, blind striving.

Before the human being comes onto the scene with its principle of sufficient reason (or principle of individuation) there are no individuals. It is the human being that, in its very effort to know anything, objectifies an appearance for itself that involves the fragmentation of Will and its breakup into a comprehensible set of individuals. The result of this fragmentation, given the nature of Will, is terrible: it is a world of constant struggle, where each individual thing strives against every other individual thing; the result is a permanent “war of all against all” akin to what Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) characterized as the state of nature.

Kant concludes in the Critique of Pure Reason that we create the laws of nature (CPR, A125). Adding to this, Schopenhauer concludes in The World as Will and Representation that we create the violent state of nature, for he maintains that the individuation that we impose upon things, is imposed upon a blind striving energy that, once it becomes individuated and objectified, turns against itself, consumes itself, and does violence to itself. His paradigm image is of the bulldog-ant of Australia, which when cut in half, struggles in a battle to the death between its head and tail. Our very quest for scientific and practical knowledge creates a world that feasts upon itself.

This marks the origin of Schopenhauer’s renowned pessimism: he claims that as individuals, we are the unfortunate products of our own epistemological making, and that within the world of appearances that we structure, we are fated to fight with other individuals, and to want more than we can ever have. On Schopenhauer’s view, the world of daily life is essentially violent and frustrating; it is a world that, as long as our consciousness remains at that level where the principle of sufficient reason applies in its fourfold root, will never resolve itself into a condition of greater tranquillity. As he explicitly states, daily life “is suffering” (WWR, Section 56) and to express this, he employs images of frustration taken from classical Greek mythology, such as those of Tantalus and the Danaids, along with the suffering of Ixion on the ever-spinning wheel of fire. The image of Sisyphus expresses the same frustrated spirit.

In one sense, Schopenhauer never saw the ways in which western modernity solved some of the problems he seemed to highlight (ie technology solves disease).