Schophenhauer has always had a "minor league" status in the history of philosophy -- he's regarded as a "wild" thinker, more speculative than technical and, if given credit at all, viewed as historically influential on Nietzsche, Freud, and Wittgenstein.



Most books about Schopenhauer accordingly treat his historical place, often giving short shrift to his actual arguments, or are biographical (Helen Zimmern's biography is an especially good, entertaining one). This one is different, the first I've read that takes on a more critical analysis of Schopenhauer's actual arguments.



Schophenhauer is a post-Kantian. While adopting Kant's arguments on objective knowledge as conditioned by the contributions of knowing subjects, in effect superimposing space, time, causality and other structures on experience, he rejects Kant's resulting critical limits on the extent of knowledge. Kant famously claims that, since knowledge requires this contribution by the subject, the pure object, the "thing-in-itself" must remain inaccessible, and by its very definition, unknowable. Schopenhhauer refers to this rejection of knowledge of the thing-in-itself as Kant's "error." In its place, he claims that the thing-in-itself is accessible via knowledge of the thing-in-itself within us, which he identifies as Will.



Schopenhauer presents his argument as an "analogy" but Wicks (correctly, I think) claims that it is not and in doing so makes Schopenhauer's argument much more interesting. At a high level, Schopenhauer's argument is that of all the objects of the world, we bear a peculiar relationship and insight into one -- our own bodies. In the case of that one body (echoing Kant's two aspects) we are aware both of object and subject united. All human beings share that awareness and insight, but, Schopenhauer thinks, why are the two aspects limited to human beings? What is peculiar to human beings is self-awareness, but the underlying unity of subject and object, he thinks, itself must be shared by all entities. All entities, including inanimate objects, then must be both subject and object. And the character of this subject that we are aware of in ourselves, Will, must be the character of the subjectivity of all entities.



The argument is oddly parallel to the "anthropic principle" argued by physicists in debating the status of physical constants and their relationship to scientific knowledge in the 1990s.



I don't think Schopenhauer's argument stands, for reasons that have been talked about in many critical interpretations of Schopenhauer. His arguments for the limitations of the conditions of knowledge, inherited from Kant, compromise his claim to knowledge of the thing-in-itself even where that knowledge is founded on self-reflection. But what that criticism opens, I think, is a question that Wittgenstein raises much later, especially in On Certainty -- is it really "knowledge" we are concerned with?



Schophenhauer's account of our awareness of our own subjectivity slips into objectification and thus can't be knowledge of the thing-in-itself (since the thing-in-itself is never an object, objectivity always being informed by the conditions of knowledge imposed by a subject). But Wittgenstein's suggestion is that since the subject in this case is something we "are" rather than something we perceive, our relation to it is not one of "knowing" but rather something more simply of being the subject. Heidegger makes similar arguments to the effect that our relationship to ourselves is one of being ourselves (in Heidegger's case, a problematic relationship of its own) rather than, in accordance with traditional philosophy, one of knowing.



Wicks himself thinks that Schophenauer's argument is sound (or at least more sound than I think). He argues that knowledge of the thing-in-itself, on Schophenauer's account, admits of degrees. Kant's limitations argument, he agrees, provides a binary -- the conditions of knowledge are applied or not, and if they are, then what is known cannot be the thing-in-itself. But Wicks relies on Schopenhauer's account of the relationship between Will and object as one of the Will "manifesting", rather than "causing", itself in objects -- that account, he thinks, allows for such degrees of knowledge, so that the Will can be known, in the technical sense, at least dimly. I don't think that's sufficient for two reasons -- one that this "dim" knowledge would at best be partial and questionable (i.e., not knowledge at all in the favored sense) and, the other, that while the account may well allow for degrees of knowledge, it doesn't imply them or even strongly suggest them, leaving the notion of these degrees of knowledge looking more like an ad hoc patch for the theory than an integral part.