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Maya’s Mask

Schopenhauer wrote that having freedom of action means that “I can do what my will wants”; while having freedom of will means that “I can choose what to will.”67 He claimed that we have freedom of action, but we do not have freedom of will. In fact we cannot consciously choose what to will; will is independent of our consciousness. But still will is free. It is free because it is not influenced by worldly causes and effects, it is outside of the world.

One way to express this idea is by saying that others’ actions are immanent to my conscious representation of reality, while my personal will is not. Immanent means pretty much ‘inside’, ‘within’ something, and its meaning is opposed to transcendent, meaning ‘outside’ that something. The gods of the ancient philosopher Epicurus are completely transcendent to the world because they don’t care at all about men and the Earth.68 The philosopher Baruch Spinoza, on the other hand, imagined a totally immanent god, identical to empirical, physical reality—to the point that he simply is nature. Not entirely happy with these two weird words (immanent and transcendent), Immanuel Kant took from medieval tradition the term transcendental. By this he meant what applies to everything, what encompasses all that exists; but he gave a new verve to this concept.

Kant felt that things are not in themselves as they appear to men. Actually this is not exactly breaking news: since Thales (the first recognized occidental philosopher) almost everyone in the field of philosophy pretends this world is a cover for a transcendent ‘real reality’ we are not able to see directly—and, typically, almost everyone adds that philosophy is the medicine you need to get beyond.69 But Kant believed that this fake world we live in depends just on the limits of our mind, of our capacities to know. Then, even if we cannot know anything about the transcendent ‘real reality’, we can know something about our cognitive faculties, about how we construct the world we live in.

Two points Kant made were important for Schopenhauer then (and for us now). First: a fundamental condition of knowing is a place from where things are organized altogether, and Kant called this the transcendental subject. The subject is neither in the world he lives, nor somewhere else far from it. It stays right on the border of experience.

Second: one of the means by which our mind builds the world we live in is causality, a never ending series of causes and effects. Everything has a cause, and this cause surely has another cause, and so on. To the point that it’s not easy at all to understand what the word free means.

Twilight Will

Schopenhauer was a fan of Kant but he saw things a little differently. The world I see is built by my mind, true. I could never find freedom in such a world because I’ve built it up myself using causality as cement, true. But will is not a part of this ordered and squared world, not at all. Will lives in the all-singing all-dancing transcendency.

If Kant had always respected the limits of knowledge, what our minds try to reach but what necessarily stays out of sight, Schopenhauer instead found in will a direct access to the true essence of the world, a bridge to seeing beyond experience. As a living being I can feel my will speaking in me at any time, and this will is true, ‘really real’. My self-consciousness gives me the opportunity to observe will subjectively and directly, instead of objectively and indirectly as when I look at another’s actions. And, if we are careful observers, it comes clear that this will is prior to consciousness, it is its background and condition of possibility.

Did Schopenhauer take a step forward or backward in respect to Kant? Did he walk again into the transcendent (so into something no one can really be sure to know) or did he actually stay on the transcendental line? Is will a crappy, inevitably obscure concept or not? Michel Foucault wrote