A Paradox of Transcendence and Immanence

Abstract

In Schopenhauer on the Character of the World: The Metaphysics of Will, John E. Atwell characterizes Arthur Schopenhauer as follows: It would not be an exaggeration to dub Schopenhauer the philosopher of the body. To a greater extent than anyone before his time … he makes the body — that is, one’s own body (der eigene Leib) — the primary focus and indispensable condition of all philosophical inquiry. If required to give a single answer to the philosophizing subject’s question, ‘What am I’ Schopenhauer would surely reply, ‘I am body,’ though, he would just as surely add, ‘in more than one way.’ He therefore deposes the mind from the throne of philosophical investigation and installs in its place — the place the mind has occupied since at least the time of Descartes — the body, which plays the crucial role in theory of knowledge …, in ethics … and in metaphysics proper.1 In this chapter, I will follow Atwell’s observations by developing an introductory analysis of Schopenhauer’s theory of perception and the role that the body plays in it.