Abstract: An explication of Schopenhauer’s diagnosis vis a vis Kant’s “great mistake”: his conflation of abstract and empirical elements of the mind –or operations of the brain, as Schopenhauer would see it– in reference to the greater concept of perception. I will be looking at a section of Schopenhauer’s Appendix of the World as Will and Representation that purports to pick through and upgrade some major ideas of Kantian epistemology as they relate to perception; these ideas include: representation, object-of-representation, understanding, sensibility, the forms of intuition and the infamous Kantian categories.

Schopenhauer’s Critique of Kant (I): Transcendental Aspects of Perception

 

 

In the Appendix of Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation lies one of the most historically seminal and selective critiques of Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy. Schopenhauer’s admiration for certain aspects of Kant’s system, the complexity of the mentioned system, and Schopenhauer’s rigor ensured that the criticism would be lengthy and nuanced. In these coming essays, I propose to explicate — in no particular order — certain parts and aspects of Schopenhauer’s thoughtful diatribe against Kant’s philosophy, beginning with the critique of the Kantian account of perception.

Schopenhauer’s argument against Kant’s theory of perception is an attempt to point out the weak point in Kant’s epistemology; consequently Schopenhauer calls Kant’s problematic explanation of perception his “great mistake” (437). According to Schopenhauer, this mistake is a result of Kant’s fundamental misunderstanding and conflation of perceiving and thinking, a mistake that is grossly inextricable from Kant’s highly intricate and interdependent philosophy. According to Schopenhauer, the Kantian blunder of bringing thinking into perception and vice versa is a result of Kant’s theory of understanding, which includes the Categories, and lies somewhere in between the realms of perception and pure thought, yet seems untenably necessary for both.

Schopenhauer blithely accepted the argument and conclusion of Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetic, and thereby considered space and time to be the forms of intuition within which human subjects must necessarily perceive and think about reality[1]. Though Schopenhauer subscribed wholeheartedly to Kant’s doctrine of the forms of intuition and built his own epistemology on this Kantian basis, Schopenhauer was less than satisfied with Kant’s convoluted account of empirical perception. Schopenhauer was discontented with the fact that Kant could so exhaustively argue and explicate the forms and yet had little substantive to say about perception.

For Kant, perception consists in empirical content being “given” to a subject via the sensibility or that openness to the given content. For Kant, empirical perception provides us with a representation that is “given from without”, but it is only via thought or judgement (i.e. the categories) that we are able to know the object of representation[2]. The second half of Kant’s famous remark “Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind” seems to guide his reasoning when he makes perception of objects reliant on thinking. Objects of experience, then, are both conceptual and and objectual – as it were. Perceptions become known as perceptions of objects only via the categories and thought, an aspect of knowledge totally distinct from perception. It is this intermixing of perception with thinking that brings Schopenhauer to say “[Kant] did not properly separate knowledge of perception from abstract knowledge…” (437)

Thus, Schopenhauer understands Kant to be claiming that perception itself is non-objectual and thus not necessarily causal, but instead these elements are added by the “understanding” through the categories. Though Kant seems to affirm that causality is necessary for knowledge of objects of perception, he does cannot apply it perception itself as this is prior to thinking (i.e. the categories; and, of course, in Kant’s theory of the understanding causality is one of the categories). Looked at in this light, it is questionable whether or not Kant actually has a theory of perception at all, or whether his theory only deals with our thinking regarding content that is gratuitously “given” to our senses.

At risk of repeating myself: Kant does point to the necessity of understanding for knowledge of the objective world, but does not consider the understanding to be a faculty of perception. This makes little sense to Schopenhauer, who’s ideas regarding the “understanding” and one of its elements – a priori knowledge of causality – as a sine qua non of perception at all. This follows from Schopenhauer’s understanding of causality expressed in the Fourfold Root of Sufficient Reason in which it is noted that via the “understanding’s” construction, an external world of objects exists for the subject of representation. The understanding is for Schopenhauer the faculty by which perception is possible: it is that which allows perception to be intellectual at all. Though Schopenhauer’s “understanding” does include causality (as do Kant’s categories), Schopenhauer’s “understanding” plays the role of a perceptive faculty and thus relegates its forms of space, time, and causality to the role of active perception. This contrasts with Kant’s split of the forms on one hand, and the categories (including causality) on the other, all the while ignoring the role causality has in perception – as opposed to conceptualizing – of objects as such.

Thus, Schopenhauer’s causality-equipped perceptive faculty of the understanding assigns bodily sensations (or impressions) causes a priori; objects (causes) and an external world (space and time in which the objects consist) are constructed from the minimal input of our senses. Instead of throwing out the question of how one receives the content of perception prior to conceptual (not formal) thinking, Schopenhauer throws away eleven of the categories and relocates the remaining category (causality) to the faculty of perception. Schopenhauer’s understanding thusly answers the question of perception. According to Schopenhauer Kant failed to do this at all, and his attempt to work around the question results in serious problems: the inability to delineate the boundaries of perceptive and conceptual knowledge.

To play on the other half of Kant’s dictum regarding thoughts and contents, Schopenhauer stresses that “Thoughts without content are empty…” in his criticism of Kant[3]. In order for the idea of empirical objects to arise in our faculty of reason (Vernunft), the content of the idea must come from perception (as does all empirical content according to Schopenhauer.) The problem with Kant’s system, however, is that it begs the question of perception when it assumes that we can have a concept of objects that precedes any sort of impression of them. For Kant, the thinking categories are what is utilized to know objects in representations “given”, but in order for a given representation to have an object, there must be a subjective counterpart (this is why Schopenhauer’s “understanding” is a part of the faculty of perception, and Kant’s “understanding” as a faculty of thinking, is incapable of doing what Kant wrote that it does). The very subject-object dichotomy demands that any application of it be two-fold: every object is an object-to, and every subject a subject-of: no subject without object or vice versa. This is a simple and indubitable proposition that Schopenhauer holds consequently as an analytic truth: the very meaning of the terms necessitate this truth. In light of this axiom and a Kantian epistemology carried out to its full empericist implications, Schopenhauer says

Generally, according to Kant, there are only concepts of objects, no perceptions. On the other hand, I say that objects exist primarily only for perception, and that concepts are always abstractions from this perception. (448)

In summation, it is worth noting the following dilemma with which Schopenhauer challenges the Kantian theory. If indeed our representations must be processed by the categories of our thought in order for us to know their objects (which exist only in relation to subject), then the original representation before thought (which Kant says is the concern of sensibility and the Form of Intuition) has nothing to do with objects. Not only does this preclude any real idea of what “perception” might be or what role it might play, but it suggests that objects and their “causal” properties as given to our knowledge by the categories, they are not contained in space and time directly, but added later (as they are not given to us in our bare perceptions, but only in thought). So what then is the object of the categories? It is not supplied to it via perception (as our representations do not contain objects before they are “thought” according to Kant), but if the object is something that is thought exclusively by the categories then Kant’s theory collapses into absolutely subjective idealism and he betrays his dictum that thoughts “without content” are empty.

Finally, I suggest that this implies that Kant’s theory of perception is thus completely subjective and idealist and inconsistent with his greater goals, or it is incoherent as Schopenhauer suggests: a philosophy that conflates perceiving and thinking and must deal with these issues with specious rationalizations masked by verbiage and prolixity.

Endnotes

[1] In the Schopenhauerian schema the conclusion that thought must be subsumed under these forms follows from the correlative conclusion about the forms’ ubiquitous role in perception. This is because for Schopenhauer concepts are necessarily without content; they are empty and only via representations of the world are they filled with content. Kant too would claim that the same conclusion follows from his system of thought, but the very issue addressed in this essay points to the disparity between Kantian and Schopenhauerian ideas of concepts. Kant’s concepts are such that they bring the classification of objects to a given “impression” (that according to Schopenhauer acts for Kant as a representation) on one hand, and on the other hand Kant’s Ideas too are objects of reason that have a priori content. For more on Schopenhauer’s understanding of reason and conceptual knowledge see his doctoral dissertation On the Fourfold Root of Sufficient Reason.

[2] Kant says as much in the very first sentence of his “Transcendental Logic” in the Critique of Pure Reason: “Our knowledge springs from two fundamental sources of the mind; the first is the capacity of receiving representations (receptivity for impressions), the second is the power of knowing an object through these representations…”

[3] See Chapter 5 of the Fourfold Root of Sufficient Reason for Schopenhauer’s philosophy of reason and concepts. He rigorously upholds the Kantian idea that “thoughts without content” are empty in a way that he thinks it more coherent than Kant’s own philosophy (which Schopenhauer considered marred by the Categories and “Ideas of Reason”)

-Unless indicated otherwise: all citations from Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation Dover Edition – trans. E.F.J. Payne.

Bibliography Forthcoming (when I stop being lazy)