Schopenhauer - Part 1: Kantian Idealism

For Schopenhauer Kant’s metaphysics were as self evident as Galileo’s contention in respect to the heliocentric model of the cosmos. Therefore, an elucidation of Kantian idealism will act as good grounding in respect to realising the competence of Schopenhauer’s project; The World as Will and Representation written in 1819.

In order to illustrate Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetic we must first analyse the empirical method of obtaining knowledge and define it’s limitation in respect to the scientific method, as we will see this has ramifications for natural laws.

John Locke, an English empiricist stipulated that the mind is a blank slate or ‘tabula rasa’ before sensory content is presented to it and apprehended. David Hume, by virtue of his empiricism advocated for this view and therefore defined that judgements could only be matters of fact or relations of ideas. That is to say respectively that judgements depended upon their truth through observation or were merely making explicit the subject of the judgement. Given that Hume thought these judgements exhaustive, a corollary would therefore be that there are certain things which we should not conjecture about and if we do they are meaningless.

If we think about science, it is predicated on the observation of cause and effect. We observe an event and hypothesize it's cause, testing it until we establish a conclusion based on a regularity derived from experimentation. From this, science hopes to establish a causal connection, the discord with empiricism however is that causality is a posit which cannot be verified through the senses, that is to say it does not conform to any of the possible judgements Hume stipulates. Causality may be thought of in scientific discourse as necessary but for the empiricist it is outside the parameters of what constitute legitimate knowledge, as it is not observable and hence there is nothing which necessarily links two distinct events.

Kant taking Humes fork as a basis for his argument appends apriori or a posteriori to what he refers to as synthetic and analytic judgements; these correspond respectively to matters of fact and relations of ideas in the Humean sense and clarify the method by which we validate the veracity of the judgement. For example, an analytic judgement like ‘a bachelor is an unmarried man’ makes explicit that which is already implicit, to be an unmarried man is to be a bachelor; therefore, the subject is contained in the predicate. As we know this without experience due to the fact that it is definitional we can append apriori to this analytic statement, apriori merely means without the requirement of experience. A statement such as the swan is black is a synthetic statement and these correspond to Hume’s matters of fact. Kant refers to them as ampliative because they extend the meaning beyond a definition; as such they require experience in order to validate the truth of the statement and hence synthetic statements are usually appended with a posteriori, meaning experience is a requirement. These combinations may appear exhaustive but as we shall see, for Kant they are not; this is because he accepts statements which are synthetic apriori.

The possibility of synthetic apriori statements must presuppose a grounding which is superfluous to experience, that is to say that we cannot suppose that the mind is a tabula rasa. Before moving forward with our exploration it is important to inspect Newton and Leibniz and their view of space and time. 

For Newton space and time were independent of any content, their existence was absolute and hence preceded any object. Kant took issue with this as absolute space and time presupposed determinism and hence exculpated moral discourse which required the freedom of the will. Kant wanted to know how one could preserve Newtonian mechanics but extricate space and time as absolute notions; but before we get to his conviction we will look at Leibniz and his monads. 

Leibniz thought that the world consisted in indivisible, non interacting souls call monads. Only things with extension in space can be divided, therefore, as they are indivisible they do not occupy space and time. These monads possess perceptions which essentially constitute their objects while space and time are the ordering of respective perceptions within each spiritual point. It is God who orders these distinct monads in a pre established harmony and since he does not need space and time in order to perceive, then it follows that space and time cannot be absolute. 

However, Kant argued that objects in space and time cannot exist independent of space and time in contrast to Leibniz who thought space and time secondary structures derived in reference to the perceptual contents of the monads. For Kant, since we do not know if God exists it is impossible to say whether or not there are objects which exist independent of space and time.

Kant believes that our experience is constructed apriori using the forms of space and time. Unlike Leibniz, it is our minds which are empty containers of space and time, and then, our sensory experience fills space and time with objects that it gives to us. 

Kant postulates faculties, affording us to construct our experience; one of which he refers to as the faculty of sensibility that contain the intuitions of space and time. This for Kant is what makes synthetic apriori statements possible. For example we can identify that a statement like ‘triangles have angles that add up to 180°’ as being necessarily true yet the statement is ampliative. This statement however is necessarily true because the synthetic apriori quality of space is being expressed and presented in the synthetic apriori quality of the statement that describes space’s geometric relationships. Our sensations are informed with an external empirical reality but this is only possible because the mind possesses space apriori, that is to say that our minds are not a tabula rasa. 

An implication of this is that we cannot know the thing in itself identified as the noumenal reality, all we can know is the phenomenal reality that is constituted by our faculties; the aforementioned faculty of sensibility parsing sense into space and time. This distinction is paramount when discussing Schopenhauer's philosophy.