The Pure Willless Subject
In section 12 of the Third Treatise, Schopenhauer re-emerges through the unacknowledged quotation of his phrase 'pure, will-less, painless, timeless subject of knowledge'." For Schopenhauer this 'pure, will-less subject' is the subject of aesthetic experience, a state of consciousness in which all our desires, interests, and feelings are suspended, and we exist merely as a subject of knowledge that mirrors the world without imposing subjective forms upon it. In particular, space, time, and causality are absent as organizing forms ofour experience. We abandon ordinary empirical consciousness for a 'higher' consciousness; we perceive not the ordinary spatio-temporal world of particular material things, but universal Ideas, which Schopenhauer conceives along Platonic lines. This state of aesthetic suspension has, allegedly, two features of value: because the will is temporarily absent, we enter a state of unusual calm, in which striving, seeking, fleeing, and suffering cannot occur; and we simultaneously achieve greater objectivity than in our rule-governed empirical knowledge of the world.
Schopenhauer reasons as follows:"
1. Empirical consciousness of the world is always within the forms of space, time, and causality imposed by the subject.
2. The subject's intellectual imposition of space, time, and causality on experience is driven by human needs, interests, and affects (in short, intellect is governed by will).
3. The 'higher' aesthetic consciousness is a form ofcontemplation by the intellect quite independent of human needs, interests, and affects.
4. So the aesthetic consciousness is independent also of those subjective forms (space, time, and causality) that are necessitated by our having needs, interests, and affects.
5. So aesthetic consciousness is a more objective cognition of the world than ordinary empirical consciousness.
Having accepted the Kantian framework of space, time, and causality as governing empirical knowledge of the world, Schopenhauer makes two radically un-Kantian moves. First, he attributes to this framework a purely instrumental necessity: experiencing causally ordered material objects in space and time is a condition of our inhabiting the world in such a way as to satisfy our desires and needs, to predict and manipulate things, ultimately to survive and reproduce, driven by the will, or indeed will to life, that is primary in human beings and explains the ordinary operation of their intellect. This leaves the way open for a second, drastic move: that when we step back from willing, the Kantian rules about experience and knowledge simply need not apply. Will-free cognition is allowed to break the rules, and is portrayed as superior because it does so.
The vision behind Schopenhauer's theory of aesthetic experience is Platonic, not Kantian. Objects of knowledge exist beyond the empirical realm, beyond mere appearance, and cognition of them is an abnormal and uncommonly uplifting state of mind. The objects of this cognition, which Schopenhauer even calls Platonic Ideas, are universals rather than particular spatio-temporal objects, and they are not subject to time, change, or causality. Schopenhauer departs from Plato in holding that these Ideas are known by a kind of perception which excludes conceptual thought and ratiocination. Reason too is demoted to an instrumental role in our survival as living creatures and cannot take us to the supposed higher realm. So what happens in aesthetic experience, according to Schopenhauer, is that we free ourselves of the will, and we relinquish the ordinary way of considering things, and cease to follow under the guidance of the forms of the principle of sufficient reason merely their relations to one another ... Thus we no longer consider the where, the when, the why, and the whither in things, but simply and solely the what. Further, we do not let abstract thought, the concepts of reason, take possession of our consciousness, but, instead of all this, devote the whole power of our mind to perception, sink ourselves completely therein, and let our whole consciousness be filled by the calm contemplation of the natural object.18
Nietzsche's term 'objectivity' and his 'eye' metaphor in GM III. 12 gain their energy by tapping into his predecessor's account. Schopenhauer's
18 See Schopenhauer 178.
subject of aesthetic experience leaves behind empirical particulars and survives as the receptor for the eternal Ideas which are the 'adequate objectification' of the thing in itself, or the nearest approach we can make within experience to reality 'itself'. At the same time the subject loses the sense of himself or herself as an individual and becomes, in Schopenhauer's words, 'the single world-eye that looks out from every cognizing being'.19 Thus, allegedly, the object is raised to the level of the universal, and the subject, by way of a loosening of the sense of his or her individuality, progresses towards an identification with the world as a whole. Aesthetic experience achieves greater objectivity than everyday understanding or scientific knowledge, in that the explanatory connections pertaining among the subject's representations—connections instrumental in attaining the goals of willing—are all dissolved. Because these connections of space, time, and causality are forms inherent in the subject, their temporary abeyance yields a cognition closer to 'what truly is', as Plato would put it.20 The artistic genius is pre-eminent in attaining this kind of cognition, according to Schopenhauer:
the gift of genius is nothing but the most complete objectivity... the capacity to remain in a state of pure perception, to lose oneself in perception, to remove from the service of the will the knowledge that originally existed only for this service ... the ability to leave entirely out of sight our own interest, our willing, and our aims, and consequently to discard entirely our own personality for a time, in order to remain pure knowing subject, the clear eye of the world.21
Nietzsche contends that this Schopenhauerian objectivity is a sham for two reasons. It makes a theoretical mistake about the nature of knowledge, and it misrepresents its own motivation, concealing its own end-directedness, its own specific expression of a 'will'. In both cases, as we shall see, Nietzsche's objection adopts a quasi-Schopenhauerian position in order to counter Schopenhauer. First, as the latter part of GM III. i2 makes clear, in demanding the lapse of all active, interpreting powers, and hoping to leave in operation something resembling an eye that looks in
19 Ibid. 198; my trans. of das eine Weltauge, was aus allen erkennenden Wesen blickt.
20 Schopenhauer's motto for the Third Book of The World as Will and Representation is Plato's 'Ti to on men aei, genesin de ouk echon ... ?' ('What is that which always is, and has no coming into being?'). The same title page announces 'the Platonic idea' as 'the object of art'. For Schopenhauer's problematic conflation of Plato's Ideas and Kant's thing in itself, see Schopenhauer (1969: i. 170—8) and my discussion inJanaway (1996). 21 Schopenhauer (1969: i. 185—6).
no particular direction and from nowhere, Schopenhauerian objectivity demands an impossibility. Such interpreting powers attach necessarily to any striving, embodied being, for whom to lack such powers would be to have no cognition at all. Secondly, the aspiration towards utter will-lessness is self-deluding, since the very act of conceiving such would-be escape from the desires and attachments of embodiment is itself the fulfilment of an end, the stilling of a pressing desire. The theory of pure painless objectivity owes its existence to a felt need within the theorizer.
Schopenhauer's notion of objectivity is a paradigmatic instance of the ascetic ideal's combined self-belittlement and self-transcendence. It presupposes that one can cease to acquiesce in one's preordained place as an individuated outlet for the world-will's self-expression, and rise above the disvalue of ordinary human existence towards a state of salvation or redemption (Erlösung). Although Nietzsche's critical conception of the ascetic ideal eventually subsumes almost every aspect of extant culture, Schopenhauer provides the most immediate and decisive model of the ide-al—and also the most vulnerable. In Platonism or Christianity, my fallen or embodied existence stands to be redeemed through my continuing to exist as something that supposedly I truly am: a pure, timeless, immaterial essence. For Schopenhauer, by contrast, there is no immortal soul, no divine purpose, no rational essence in me or in the world. The only 'order of things' is the brute fact of existence and the blind striving for existence. The 'real self' is the will to life.22 So the only hope is that this self will manage to gain enough knowledge, or sustain enough suffering, that it is brought to negating itself. Schopenhauer's conception of redemptive objectivity approaches the limit of self-destructiveness, and fulfils its paradigmatic function for Nietzsche because of this very extremity.
This may appear to take us far from the aesthetic theory in which the pure, will-less subject originates. How can that aesthetic theory lead us to the 'limit of self-destructiveness'? Why should 'objective knowledge', which requires a knowing subject for whom this state is conceived as blissful, be linked at all with an aspiration towards the extinction of the subject? Unless we can see how these ideas are connected in Schopenhauer, we stand little chance of understanding them as Nietzsche's subtext in the
22 Schopenhauer ii. 606.
Genealogy. Schopenhauer's philosophy unfolds a long continuum of states which redeem what he sees as the absence of positive value in life. Aesthetic experience is at one end of the continuum, extinction at the other. The key to the unity of his thought is the thesis that value can be retrieved to the extent that the individual embodiment of will abates. One wills less and less, and locates significance less and less in the individual living manifestation of will one happens to be. In aesthetic experience willing abates totally but temporarily, and one ceases to be aware of oneself as individual. But similar notions of selfless objectivity apply in Schopenhauer's ethics and philosophy of religion. In describing those who have undergone the ultimate redemption which he calls the denial of the will, Schopenhauer asks us to recall his characterization of aesthetic experience and imagine the 'pure, will-less, timeless' state prolonged indefinitely.23 Aesthetic objectivity prefigures the disintegration of one's ability to place value in the striving, egoistic, material individual one is—that disintegration which is for Schopenhauer the sole hope of cheating life of its emptiness of genuine, positive worth. This disintegration connects with his morality of compassion too: 'the identity of all beings, justice, righteousness, philanthropy, denial of the will to life, spring from one root... the virtuous action is a momentary passing through the point, the permanent return to which is the denial of the will to life'.24
Up to a certain point on the Schopenhauerian continuum of detachment from individuality the subject of knowledge remains: it apprehends the aesthetic universals, it regards other living things as equal in value to itself. But further along this same continuum lie states which can be described as extinction. At the furthest point is the individual's death, which Schopenhauer describes as 'the great opportunity no longer to be I'/5 But the state of 'denial of the will' occupies a point poised between objective knowing and extinction. In this state one has not died; one continues to exist, but experiences the saintly or fully resigned vision which eschews assertion of will and identification of self with any individual component of the world-whole. Philosophical analysis must stop here, for Schopenhauer, and yield to mystical utterance or silence. In the final section of his book26 he must describe denial of the will in contradictory ways: 'Only knowledge remains; the will has vanished,' and 'such a state cannot
really be called knowledge, since it no longer has the form of subject and object'. 'We have before our eyes in perfect saintliness the denial and surrender of all willing,' but this 'now appears to us as a transition into empty nothingness'.
The World as Will and Representation, a book that opens with 'The world', closes with the word 'nothing' (Nichts), and in its sublimely eloquent and unnerving final pages presents nothingness as the opposite of willing, and as 'the final goal which hovers behind all virtue and holiness'; we are naturally disposed to fear it, but must learn to embrace it, or face the lack of any consolation:
Before us there is certainly left only nothing; but that which struggles against this flowing away into nothing, namely our nature, is indeed just the will to life which we ourselves are ... That we abhor nothingness so much is simply another way of saying that we will life so much, and that we are nothing but this will... Yet this consideration is the only one that can permanently console us, when, on the one hand, we have recognized incurable suffering and endless misery as essential to the phenomenon of the will, to the world, and on the other see the world melt away with the abolished will, and retain before us only empty nothingness. 27
Nietzsche's expression 'willing nothingness' (das Nichts wollen; GM III. 1, 28) is a pointed misuse of Schopenhauerian terms. In Schopenhauer's language 'nothingness' and 'willing' are supposed to be mutually exclusive conditions. But Nietzsche is not fooled. Why is nothingness portrayed as the ultimate 'goal'; why is it conceived as offering 'consolation'; why is it posited as the occasion of redeeming value, to be positively welcomed as such? Because the theorist of nothingness is willing it mightily as the resolution of affective needs of his own: he wants or needs some validation to be granted to existence, to stave off folding under total despair. We see this need fulfilled when Schopenhauer announces that 'nothing else can be stated as the aim of our existence except the knowledge that it would be better for us not to exist'.228 Life at least has the point of coming to realize its own pointlessness. Nietzsche's formula 'willing nothingness rather than not willing' gives acute expression to this feature of Schopenhauer's axiological system.29
27 Schopenhauer 411. 28 Ibid. ii. 605.
29 I return to 'willing nothingness' and the ending of GM III in Ch. 13 below.
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