Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

a hidden aspect of things — the ‘thing-in-itself’ — described by Schopenhauer as the ‘noumenon’. The thing-in-itself defines the intrinsic properties of a thing.

For Kant there are ‘noumena’ — the hidden aspects of things — as well as ‘phenomena’ — what is observed in the world. By contrast, Schopenhauer seems to be the first Western philosopher to have introduced the idea that the unknown aspect of reality is singular. There are phenomena then in the perceived world, but the hidden world is the ‘noumenon’ — singular.

So Schopenhauer’s basis for belief in a noumenal world differs slightly from that of Kant. Schopenhauer’s views run somewhat deeper perhaps, as the noumenon, what he called ‘the Will’, takes on a life of its own. Schopenhauer also equated his idea of the noumenon to Eastern belief systems — perhaps it is closest to the ‘Brahman’ of the Upanishads. The essential ‘oneness’ of the universe is a theme taken up again in future chapters. Schopenhauer’s idea of the Will has been described as an ‘immanent conatus’.

As I’ve said, Schopenhauer’s argument is a derivative of Kant’s. With Kant, it is the existence of synthetic ‘a priori’ statements that suggest the existence of an unknowable aspect to reality. (Remember back in Chapter 3 we saw that synthetic statements could only normally be seen as ‘a posteriori’ — in other words — after the event, after an observation.) For Kant, because things can be conceived without apparently any prior knowledge or perception on which the conception can be

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