Transcription
Nearly 20 years had passed since Arthur Schopenhauer had revealed perhaps the single most pessimistic philosophy in the history of the West. In 1818, he had argued that at the metaphysical core of all that was was simply the will, a ceaseless and eternal drive of coming to be, of which all that is is merely an illusory expression. That will also drives on the human being with a tyranny of endless desires, which can never be satisfied or quenched, only temporarily abated. For Schopenhauer, behind every appearance, every thought, every act of savagery or religious bliss, behind all experienced as such, was simply the mindless metaphysical striving of the will.
But following the publication of *The World as Will and Representation*, Schopenhauer wasn't satisfied with merely logical arguments for his philosophy. For 20 years, he collected what he took to be empirical proof, empirical proof of his metaphysical pessimism, culled from science. He published his findings as *The Will in Nature* in 1854, just 6 years before his death. But of his evidence for the existence of the will found at the core of the metaphysics of the cosmos, he dedicated the most attention in that book to how the occult, the occult, especially animal magnetism, magic, clairvoyance, and perhaps even the appearance of ghosts, were all proof of the existence of the will. But Schopenhauer rejected any and all spiritual explanations for these occult forces, given his own unique idealist theory of causation. How then does the world of the occult, the world of ghosts and magic, serve to prove the existence of the Schopenhauerian will at the center of metaphysics itself?
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The philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer is often sidelined in the progression of Kant to Hegel, but I'd also suspect because of his positions are frankly singularly alarming in the history of Western philosophy. Unlike virtually every philosopher before and since, Schopenhauer rejects existence is for the good in any sense. There is no God, there is no enlightenment, there's no soul to be saved. Consciousness is a persistent illusion at best, interrupted only by momentary aesthetic rapture or a living denial of the will to exist itself. Even self-consciously exiting existence is a pathetic confession of the will to live, a final desperate delusion. As an expression of the will, Schopenhauer takes himself to be the true heir of Immanuel Kant, whose critical philosophy argued that we have no experience of reality in itself. Rather, all of reality is filtered through the particulars of human consciousness, which is itself structured as a condition for the possibility of experience. For Kant, we never know the world as it is; we know the world as we are. Even metaphysical categories like space and time are simply functions of consciousness. The world as it is is fundamentally and forever unknown to us. According to the critical philosophy, all the contents of our experience are merely the phenomena, the mental representation of the true world, that is the noumenon, which is fundamentally, metaphysically hidden to us. Thus, any metaphysics arrived at through pure reason, well, it's fundamentally limited, it's capped because of the kind of being we are. The critical philosophy of Kant forever bars the door to direct our perception of fundamental reality through sensation or reason or basically any means. The real, for the critical philosophy, is forever hidden to us.
While Schopenhauer fundamentally accepts the overall characteristics of the Kantian philosophy, he decisively adds a further probe into the nature of the real, the noumenon. At the very heart of all phenomena, he does this by turning inward into our own subjectivity. Below the level of emotion, below the level of thought or even consciousness, is the direct drive to exist itself. This drive is what lies behind why there's something rather than nothing. It's an objective force of pure becoming, utterly thoughtless, directionless, metaphysically ubiquitous, and utterly unending. This force of pure existing, endlessly coming to be at the core of all that is, is what Schopenhauer famously termed the will. The will is truly what is in all appearances, all sensation, all thought, all consciousness. Even space and time are just representations, mere expressions of the will as they appear to us as ideas. The world is fundamentally the will, but always appears to us as objectifications in the form of the will as ideas. Thus, we never encounter the world as anything other than ideas. We're locked into the prison of consciousness, driven endlessly by the will. Indeed, for Schopenhauer, every desire, every hunger, every thirst, every moment in which we persist in existence, and even in our desire to cease existing, to exit existence, even the act of exiting existence is merely a manifestation of the tyrannical will driving us onward. From the ontological persistence of meteoric iron locked in the vast orbit of the blackness of space, to a blade of grass desperately absorbing sunlight in the dying days of autumn, to the joy of hearing the laughter of one's children, all of it, all of it just conceals the hidden reality of the will. The only respite from the driving tyranny of the will are brief moments of revery where subjectivity is conjured away in aesthetic experiences, especially music. In those brief moments, subject and object vanish in fanciful flights of beauty. Further, human beings can also tactically deny the will to live in aesthetic practices. But, um, to be clear, Schopenhauer refuses that any substantial bliss, enlightenment, or salvation is forthcoming. There's no hope of any of that. At best, there's simply temporary distraction from the throbbing insistence of the will. Even if one could satisfy the dictates of the will in a gluttonous orgy of consumption, that satisfaction turns to ashes, ashes of boredom. The libertine is rewarded with ennui. All conscious come to an end. Mortification of the flesh is just performance art. Self-help is a pipe dream. Enlightenment is the punchline of the joke of all so-called spirituality. And every crib is just a coffin. For Schopenhauer, the will is all that there is, and we only know that through the veil of an unending, torturous desire masquerading as consciousness. And every hope for the sensation of the will affirms it. Every moment of meditation confirms it. Every act of mindfulness is an expression of it. And every aim at salvation is a secret hope that the will, and only the will, never ceases. Even dreams of non-existence take the form of a something in consciousness, and even that non-existence is merely the will negated in the prison house of thought. The will might even mock such efforts if the will itself were not ontologically prior to the silliness of thought or consciousness, much less the delusions of gods, souls, and spirits.
With precious little exceptions, contemporaries like Thomas Ligotti and David Benatar come to mind, the philosophy of Schopenhauer has been basically ignored and rejected. Indeed, metaphysical pessimism, the existence of any kind is always for the worse, finds very few proponents. Perhaps a form of very staunch Terra Buddhism, and even occasionally Judaism, are somewhat rare exceptions. Calet is a rare expression of religious pessimism, and traditionally in Judaism, the angels attempted to persuade God not to create human beings at all. We would just wreck all of creation. And in ancient times, when the ancient rabbis were all called to a vote about whether it would have actually been better, been better if human beings were never created at all, the rabbis agreed with the angels: it would have been better for us to never have been. Existence is a scam, and the only lucky human beings are those never born, as the old Jewish joke goes, which was a favorite of Freud. I suspect that Schopenhauer has been passed over not because of the lack of his philosophical and metaphysical merit, but frankly, out of a profound, unphilosophical, naive, and panicky quality of much of Western philosophy. The idea that ultimately the good is real, just is an assertion, it's not an argument.
But as I mentioned, Schopenhauer was not satisfied to merely have deduced his position on the sheer merit of philosophy. No, he held a truly totalizing philosophy that held that all of reality, not merely human consciousness, but all of even physical nature, as much as there is a physical nature, and idealism, was all an expression of the will. Thus, in so far as his philosophy works true, he should be able to find evidence of the will not only in the structure of human thought and desires, but also in the fundamental fabric of nature, or at least its representations to us. And 20 years after the publication of *The World as Will and Representation*, he revealed his findings in the 1850s, *The Will and Nature*. But at least for the purposes of this channel, it's in these essays, along with another couple of essays about fate and the appearance of ghosts, ghosts and spirits, that are actually the most interesting. Again, for this channel, why? Because Schopenhauer thought his philosophy was most radically confirmed, empirically confirmed, by occult phenomena, especially things like animal magnetism and magic.
As you probably know, in the latter 18th century, Franz Mesmer apparently discovered vast tidal currents prevailing all things, what he termed an animal magnetism that, properly manipulated, could result in healing from a vast array of illnesses, everything from congenital blindness to melancholia, what we would now recognize as a range of different mental illnesses. By inducing a trance state, known variously as being mesmerized, magnetized, and later hypnotized, the patient could be subjected to a range of treatments, from simply running over the body with magnetic bars to bodily touch to frankly bizarre electromagnetic treatments, which could, uh, take that pervasive vitalist fluid and manipulate it. The goal in these treatments was to induce a crisis. Sometimes this would involve convulsions and vomiting and shrieking fits, by which a humoral blockage, yep, it's still humoral medicine, was cleared. Those blockages were cleared, and the animal electricity was allowed to properly flow through the body and thus heal the illness. Though in this process, professional magnetizers, yep, they were called magnetizers, began to notice something strange in their patients. In this alteration of consciousness, in the trance state, the patients not only had the ability to speak, but they often seemed to know things that they shouldn't, that they couldn't. Seemingly, this involved a kind of clairvoyance that allowed them to know what was going on in distant places, in the non-present, in the past, and in the future, and even sometimes in worlds beyond our own, extraterrestrial planets, and the spirit realm. Things like remote viewing, divination, speaking with spirits of the dead, and extraterrestrials, as I mentioned, along with many other feats of the paranormal, astounded audiences at that time, including an otherwise very skeptical author, Schopenhauer.
Now, what was just as astounding was how to actually induce this trance state. While Mesmer and his followers initially employed long magnetic bars and electrical devices, truly powerful magnetizers, as they were called, they were able to simply induce this trance state without any tools at all, sheerly through will alone, will alone. Further, that those in the trance could peer back into the distant past or into the future through long gulfs of distances, and perhaps even beyond this world. Well, that was all truly perplexing. How would the consciousness of the entranced be able to cross such vast gulfs in an instant? These questions puzzled a great many people, but Schopenhauer thought he might have a solution in his philosophy of the will.
Conscious perception is firmly structured by things like space and time and cause. As Kant pointed out, however, there are forms of perception, Schopenhauer argues, in which the otherwise firmly fixed structures of consciousness are in fact greatly loosened. We might say that happens in dreams. In dreams, we vividly experience a reality without that data emerging from our sense organs, and yet those perceptions appear real, sometimes violently so. Further, unlike perception, dreamscapes are much more loosely bound by the transcendental constraints of things like space, time, and causality. But what's doing the perceiving in the dream state? What's doing the perceiving there? It isn't consciousness, at least not consciousness as we normally know it. And Schopenhauer terms this dream organ as a kind of conscious unconsciousness. It's what's doing the perceiving in that unconscious state. Recall that in the Kantian philosophy, and thus the philosophy of Schopenhauer, space, time, and causation are merely categories of human consciousness. They are, to use a bit of the technical language, the transcendental conditions for the possibility of consciousness itself. Thus, while space and time are necessarily features of human consciousness, they need not be fundamentally real. They're required for structuring all experience of phenomena, but there aren't necessarily noumenal. Space and time might not exist in reality. But the pre-conscious, the subconscious state of dreams, seems metaphysically prior to full consciousness and full perception, and thus, Schopenhauer argued, perhaps it's actually closer to the objective reality of the will. And this was the key: perhaps those entranced were in a deeper state of perception than even normal dreams, and that, given that normal dreams are only loosely structured by the metaphysical constraints of space, time, and causality, perhaps this even deeper state allows the dream organ to perceive beyond the veil of those very constraints, given their closer access to the noumenal will itself, beyond all space, all time, all causality. This means that the entranced could perhaps perceive well beyond those constraints as well, thus distances of time and space and even causality could be instantly crossed by the perception and consciousness, consciousness of the entranced person, giving them paranormal powers of remote viewing, divination, and even contact with other kinds of intelligences.
Further, argued Schopenhauer, that because expert magnetizers could induce this state in others purely through will was also compelling and interesting. For in the long history of every culture, there was a notion that certain powerful people could through various means impress their wills upon reality through non-natural means and through non-natural causation. Yeah, these people could wield magic. The will, recall, is simply all that truly is, and all of nature and all of consciousness that perceives it are merely expressions or objectifications of that primordial will. But the will is, as I mentioned a moment ago, ontologically prior to any categories like space, time, and causation. If all there is is will, we are merely self-conscious regions of that will, and if we turn our consciousness to that will, perhaps again using that dream organ, we might be able to wield the will, short-circuiting the typical metaphysical barriers of space, time, and causality. We might might be able to cause something across the gulf of space and time purely through the force of our will. Magic was for Schopenhauer the practical dimension of metaphysics. And yes, I, I see all the FOMOites in the back with your hands up because I know that Aleister Crowley defined magic as the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with the will. I see you in the back, you look great in black. But to be sure, Crowley and Schopenhauer's philosophies are otherwise wildly divergent from one another, but in this case, they do interestingly overlap. But for Schopenhauer, magic, in so far as it's possible, is actually only achieved through the will.
So what about all those sigils and ceremonies and incantations that fill all these books of magic? Well, he argues they're basically redundant. But perhaps, like the bar magnets of the early magnetism movement, they were kind of magical training wheels. They act as a kind of focus for the will that you need at first, but perhaps with some practice, would-be magicians would grow beyond them. Further, the focus of the will as magic also explains why magic was forbidden by all the monotheistic religions. Well, malevolent magic was always outlawed by virtually every culture, and in fact, Schopenhauer takes the ban on magic by the Romans to be basically proof that it must have been real, because the practically minded, aqueduct-building Romans would not waste their time and waste laws on mere superstitions that didn't really do anything. The Romans were scared of stuff because it was real, and the ban on magic by the Romans was proof for Schopenhauer that it was real. But why did the monotheists ban all kinds of magic? Because when they consolidated all metaphysical power into one being, God, it became ipso facto blasphemy to allow that power any kind of metaphysical power like that to anything else or anyone else. Monotheism logically means that miracles must replace magic, such that magic becomes associated with the demonic. Now, of course, Schopenhauer thinks that angels and demons and jinn and gods of any kind are metaphysical nonsense. So his theory of magic is neither spiritual nor material, but one of metaphysical voluntarism. It's the will. It's a fully idealist theory of magic. And to further prove this, he dives into the history of magic, citing a numerous amounts of books about magic from antiquity, from the ancient Romans and the Greeks, to Delio, to Agrippa. And he has an especially fondness for Paracelsus, because obviously Schopenhauer has a fondness for Paracelsus. Further, he also contends that spirits or ghosts may actually be expressions of individual wills, as much there are individual wills. Schopenhauer is a bit more guarded, however, on these points, so keep that in mind. But something like expressions of individual wills imprinted into nature, and then put on a kind of auto-repeat. Those why those who die violently or unjustly often appear as ghosts. Schopenhauer argues that perhaps in their very last moments of life, they were willing to live, they were trying to survive, to endure with such tenacity that the region in which they perished of the will, the region of the will in nature, was impressed upon with their final moments of willing, the desperate desire to stay alive. Thus, what we perceive our spirits aren't spirits of the dead people at all, but impressions of their will enduring into nature long after their death, like a memory, like a thumbprint of the will into nature itself. In fact, we may not be seeing them with our eyes at all, according to Schopenhauer. He actually contends that perhaps it's our dream organ that perceives them, and maybe that's why they tend to appear at night, near to sleep, or even in sort of sleep-like states. Indeed, even very intense desires, like profound grief, can actually conjure just those perceptions, again, not as ghosts or spirits, but manifestations of our will. We desire to see people that we've lost so desperately that we conjure them into being, so to speak.
Even divination is explained by Schopenhauer's philosophy. In the will, the past, the present, and the future are all united in so far as they exist at all. Indeed, everything that has ever happened has already happened. Schopenhauer was a hyper-determinist, and thus when someone is entranced and using their dream organ, they're merely able to see through time, either the distant past or the distant future, and simply perceive events as they have always already happened or happening in the will, in the eternal present of the will. In this case, in the form of either divination or remote viewing. Thus, we're condemned to perceive the present is merely an aspect of the kind of being that we are, or at least that we are normally. We perceive the present because of the kind of being we are, not because of the nature of time. In so far as time even exists, exists subjectively. And such alterations of perception, or by using another organ of perception, such as the dream organ, we're able to bend the rules of human perception, as it were, and thus see time from a will's eye perspective, I suppose.
Now, for most people, these aspects of Schopenhauer's philosophy making him, you know, already more unappealing, and he's horrifyingly pessimistic, so it makes his philosophy not just dreadful, but laughably credulous. But regardless of how we might evaluate the truth of these claims, we have to admire that Schopenhauer did seek out and discuss frankly rather fringe positions using true intellectual rigor. Most people don't have the bravery to investigate very unusual things like that in a public setting. Further, it was part of his overall ravenous intellect to reveal the truth of his philosophy in every aspect of existence, including what we would now call the paranormal. And finally, Schopenhauer is interesting in that he's among the last of the great philosophers to actively engage with the study of the occult with great seriousness at length. And thus, what we may argue about to what degree, I don't know, Hegel was influenced by Western esotericism, Schopenhauer is directly engaging with occultism in nearly monograph-length texts. Now, these essays are practically unknown in contemporary philosophy. They're a bit of an embarrassment, I think, and occultism, I think, also just generally doesn't do modern philosophy that well, and that's all a bit of a pity, to my mind. So you should read these if you're interested in this material, and you can find Schopenhauer's essay on Fate, on Spirit Seeing, on Animal Magnetism and Magic in the wonderful new Cambridge editions of Schopenhauer. And of course, you probably also should read his masterpiece, masterpiece, *The World as Will and Representation*, as well. Honestly, Schopenhauer is one of the absolute best writers in the history of philosophy, and, um, even though reading him will probably give you at least a few existential crises, I'm going to say it's worth it. Until next time, I'm Dr. Justin Sledge, and thank you for watching Esoterica, where we explore the arcane in history, philosophy, and religion. [Music]