Idealism without Absolutes: Philosophy and Romantic Culture

Schopenhauer’s Telling Body of Philosophy

161 Schopenhauer’s Telling Body of Philosophy
Joel Faflak . . . the intellect remains so much excluded from the real resolutions and secret decisions of its own will that sometimes it can only get to know them . . . by spying and taking unawares; and it must surprise the will in the act of expressing itself, in order merely to discover its real intentions. —Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation I It is a commonplace that Schopenhauer anticipates Sigmund Freud. Schopenhauer ’s will suggests Freud’s Triebe, the dark materiality of the ego’s substratum fundamental to the psyche’s makeup yet beyond its control.1 Together Schopenhauer’s will and representation suggest Freud’s primary processes and secondary revision, the latter evoking a type of deceptive consciousness of the former. For Freud, interpretation and the talking cure mitigate this deception, just as his metapsychology is a theoretical epoché of the psyche’s empiricism. But for Schopenhauer the fundamental condition of being is representation’s inability to read the will’s “real resolutions and secret decisions ,”2 as if psychoanalyzing a patient who invites yet pathologically resists enlightenment. Embodying the Kantian idealism of the mind’s representation 162 Joel Faflak of the world, the will remains symptomatic. The subject’s “immediate knowledge ” (WWR 1:102) of the will is through his body, which anthropomorphizes the will as its most “immediate” representation of itself. However, the idealism of this representation relies “parasitically” on the will as “organism” (2:216). The will-as-body is representation’s fundamental “condition” (1:102) of being at the same time that it is vulnerable to this body’s “every perturbation ” (2:216). Nurtured by the traumatic agitation of the intellect by a will that the intellect would also cure, idealism offers the impossible enlightenment of psychoanalysis. For Tilottama Rajan and David L. Clark, Schopenhauer’s “deconstruction ” of “Kant’s idealistic insistence on the assertion of the mental categories against the world of necessity . . . structurally anticipates the contemporary emphasis on the subversion of the subject of writing and the unconscious ” at the same time that his “resistance to this deconstruction intimates a survival of idealism.”3 This survival is the present essay’s theme. David Farrell Krell argues that a “crisis of reason” emerges from a tension between a “transcendental critique of pure reason,” authored in Immanuel Kant’s three Critiques, and a “genealogy of reason,” suggested by his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View.4 This is the crisis of a subject whose sum depends on the epistemological ambivalence of the cogito, a shuddering in the body of Reason as it encounters the uncanny doubleness of its psyche.5 Recognizing the willing subject as subject to the will’s blind determinism, Schopenhauer rethinks the cogito as the sum of its deconstructive parts. He reads this uncanniness through a doubled and antagonistic self-positing: that of representation’s aesthetic imperative, through which the subject knows himself, and that of the will’s “immediate” manifestation of itself in the body, an other self-positing at once essential and alien to enlightenment. Hence, Schopenhauer puts an end to the aesthetic in the ascetic’s end to knowing, which in turn traumatically ends the subject. The ascetic, as we shall see, marks the symptom of idealism’s essential trauma: the idealist subject comes to know the will only by setting aside this knowledge’s traumatic impossibility. Faced with this trauma, the (Kantian) idealism of philosophy’s complete telling of itself is haunted by its own materiality, what I will call philosophy’s “telling body,” which expresses the anatomy of idealism’s interiority . The World as Will introduces into its writing the psychology of the philosophical subject who is unable to speak of, and hence to comprehend the body of, her own functioning. The text thus narrativizes within the body of Reason idealism’s promise of enlightenment as this body’s undoing. Schopenhauer inherits from Kant idealism’s interminable struggle with the fact that the subject is the “knower” yet never “the known” (WWR 1:5) of his own consciousness. Freud’s version of this idealism decodes the symptom’s cryptic body of evidence as if to put the body aside. But as the embodied 163 Schopenhauer’s Telling Body of Philosophy pathology of consciousness, the symptom is itself a reading of the psyche in the body that thwarts the patient’s attempt to speak the symptom’s...