Arthur Schopenhauer’s Idealism: Is Our World Just a Dream?

Arthur Schopenhauer was a prominent philosopher who pushed the boundaries of German Idealism to its full potential. Admirer and critical of Immanuel Kant, he revealed the true implications of the legacy of Kantian philosophy in ways that Kant himself did not foresee.

Realism and idealism are two contrasting philosophical perspectives. On the one hand, realism assumes that the world as we experience it is objective, meaning that it exists independently from our perception and cognition. It is the underlying philosophical assumption in the natural sciences. Idealism, on the other hand, holds that the world, as we experience it, is molded by our inherent cognitive structures. Hence, it distinguishes between the world as we experience it and the world in itself, known in Kantian philosophy as the phenomenon and noumenon, respectively. For adherents of this perspective, the ideal is the phenomenon and the real is the noumenon.  

Schopenhauer laments that “nothing is so persistently and constantly misunderstood as idealism, since it is interpreted as meaning that the empirical reality of the external world is denied”, as evident in Friedrich Jacobi’s criticism of Gottlieb Fichte’s idealist philosophy (Schopenhauer, 1818). Idealism, however, is not concerned with the empirical world itself, but rather with the many ways that our subjectivity conditions it, which is why idealism is best characterized as transcendental. In other words, idealism does not study the world itself, but the transcendental conditions that make our experience of the world possible. It does not deny empirical reality but repositions it as a subjective, rather than objective, reality and studies it as an ideal, or representation, as it appears to the subject. 

What Does Schopenhauer Say About Representation?

For instance, your perception of a flower is conditioned by your sense of sight and touch. The flower, as it appears to you, exists as an object only in relation to your senses as a perceiving subject. Although Schopenhauer points to an obvious and overly simple truth, namely that knowledge cannot exist independently from a knower, this truth is often overlooked in our ordinary experience, where we take our perceptions and knowledge at face value, disregarding our participation in forming them. 

Secondly, the mode and manner with which the world is represented is conditioned by the structures of our cognition. As Kant explained in The Critique of Pure Reason, the way we experience the world is determined by the a priori structures of our cognitive faculties that shape and organize the information we receive through our senses. Kant proved that the defining characteristics of the world we experience, including time, space, and causality, are the results of the properties of our minds rather than the reality of the world.

Schopenhauer credits René Descartes’ cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am) for establishing that the starting point of philosophy is within the subject, George Berkeley for establishing that objects are dependent on the subject, and Immanuel Kant for outlining the intricate mode and manner with which we condition our representation of the world. The world is presupposed by the subject, rendering it a mere ideal, appearance, or representation of reality.

How Does Schopenhauer Compare Consciousness with Dreaming?

The world is akin to a dream unfolding in, and determined by, our consciousness. Schopenhauer argued that the world must be recognized as such, for the same cognitive structures “that conjures up during sleep a perfectly objective, perceptible, and indeed palpable world must have just as large a share in the representation of the objective world of wakefulness” (Schopenhauer, 1818). 

Although materially different, the worlds of dreams and wakefulness are both shaped in the same way. Schopenhauer credits Vedanta philosophy as the earliest school of thought to recognize that the world has “no essence independent of mental perception; that existence and perceptibility are convertible terms” (Schopenhauer, 1818). He deems the assumption that the existence of the world is absolutely objective in itself as inconceivable and critiques realism as crude understanding, starting from an arbitrary assumption that “denies the first fact of all, namely that all that we know lies within consciousness” (Schopenhauer, 1818). 

The objects of the world are contents appearing in our consciousness. This does not mean that there is no world beyond our subjectivity, but that everything we know is an appearance within our consciousness. We cannot know the ‘thing-in-itself’, the world beyond our subjectivity, simply because we cannot step outside ourselves. 

While Kant believed that we cannot even begin to fathom what the noumenon world is like, Schopenhauer ventured to discover it. Although he had a deep reverence for Kant’s exposition of the intricacies of the phenomenal world, he argued that “Kant’s ‘thing-in-itself’ has unfortunately degenerated in his hands” (Schopenhauer, 1818). Strongly critical of Kant’s conception of the noumenon, Schopenhauer argued that we can have insight into the nature of the ‘thing in itself’ via introspection and by abstracting what our cognitive structures impose on what we perceive. For example, since we know that our perception of objects, time, space, and causality springs from ourselves and not the world, we can deduce that the world ‘in itself’ has neither objectivity, time, space, nor causality. 

But Schopenhauer goes even further than that and argues that the ‘thing in itself’ is Will. The will, according to him, is the blind, indifferent, irrational, and unconscious force that underlies the entire cosmos and sets it into motion. The world beyond our perception cannot consist of multiple objects. There can’t be perceptual flowers and flowers that transcend your perception, for the very existence of different objects is inherent to the structure of your perception itself. Instead, there is only one underlying will that expresses itself in the diverse manifold of objects we experience in the phenomenal world. As shocking as this sounds, how would you imagine a world entirely comprised of will?