In Search of Schopenhauer's Cat: Arthur Schopenhauer's Quantum-Mystical Theory of Justice

5. Platonic Ideas

Chapter 5 Platonic Ideas The final link that Schopenhauer uses in filling the gap between subject and object is his understanding of the Platonic doctrine of Ideas. Schopenhauer’s understanding is, however, somewhat different from what is popularly taken to be Plato’s own meaning. Plato is popularly understood as holding that there is a separate world of Ideas, that that separate world is the “real” world, and that the world of our experience is only a flickering and indistinct reflection of it.1 Schopenhauer scholar David W. Hamlyn explained “Schopenhauer is less concerned with the ontological status of the ideas than with their logical character as representations.”2 There is undoubted truth in Hamlyn’s observation, but Schopenhauer would probably have responded that Plato too was less concerned with the ontological status of the Ideas than is commonly supposed. Plato’s famed “Allegory of the Cave,” Schopenhauer would have argued, is more prop33 1. Cf. Plato, Republic, bk. VII. 2. David W. Hamlyn, Schopenhauer: The Arguments of the Philosophers (London : Routledge, 1985), 104 (hereinafter, Hamlyn). erly understood as an allegory of the sun, and bespeaks a form of enlightenment whereby the “thing-in-itself” of the subject can come to contemplate the “thing-in-itself” of the object from a unique and scarcely describable perspective—outside time itself. Plato put it this way: [T]he true analogy for this indwelling power in the soul and the instrument whereby each of us apprehends is that of an eye that could not be converted to the light from the darkness except by turning the whole body. Even so this organ of knowledge must be turned around from the world of becoming together with the entire soul, like the scene-shifting periactus in the theater, until the soul is able to endure the contemplation of the essence and the brightest region of being.3 We saw earlier that Schopenhauer found “will” to be the thingin -itself of all reality by finding it first in the human subject’s attempt to understand the true nature of the reality of his own self. In that context he found “will” to be directly and immediately presented (and not represented) to the mind of the perceiving subject, and he reasoned that “will” or its non-self-conscious, or nonintelligent, or inanimate analogue is the thing-in-itself of all other reality. We cannot have direct, immediate knowledge of the thing-in-itself, the true reality, of objects outside ourselves, because our knowledge, since it is that of a perceiving subject, is conditioned by the structure of the instrument of perception, that is, our own mind. It is, according to Schopenhauer, the instrument of perception, or rather its structure or configuration, which imposes time, space, causality, and individuality on the objects of perception. We can only have direct, immedi34 3. Plato, Republic, bk. VII 518C, in Plato: Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (New York: Pantheon Books, 1961), 750–51 (emphasis added). ate knowledge of “will” in ourselves, because in that context, the context of our selves, we are both subject and object, or more properly perhaps, an entity in which subjectness and objectness are somehow fused. The main problem with Schopenhauer’s ontology is that even if one accepts his thesis that the perceiving subject can know “will” as the thing-in-itself of his own being, Schopenhauer gives us precious little justification for the conclusion that the perceiving subject can somehow understand that “will” is also the thing-in-itself of all other objects, or even that the perceiving subject can know anything at all about the thing-in-itself, the true reality, of other objects. It is at this point that Schopenhauer’s understanding of Plato’s theory of Ideas comes to the rescue. Schopenhauer wrote, “Idea and thing-in-itself are not for us absolutely one and the same.”4 That is a cryptic and potentially misleading statement. The focus should be on the words “not .l.l. absolutely.” There is obviously some strong connection between the Platonic Idea and the thing-in-itself, that is, true reality, and it is a connection that comes close to the two being “one and the same,” but not absolutely so. For Schopenhauer, the Platonic Idea is the thing-in-itself, the true reality, but with one single limitation : it exists in the relationship that object bears to perceiving...