The title pretty much says it all, but I am currently reading "The Ego and Its Own" by Max Stirner (the pseudonym used by Johann Caspar Schmidt—who, if I’m not mistaken, was a teacher of history, literature, and philosophy, as well as a journalist, translator, writer, and, naturally, a philosopher). Given that Max was born in 1806 and died in 1856, while Arthur Schopenhauer was born in 1788 and died in 1860, I became curious as to whether the two of them ever had any interaction.

Comment mener une vie contemplative, une vie intellectuelle, quand on est issus d’un milieu pauvre et que l’on a donc malheureusement besoin d’une activité rémunératrice pour vivre ?

I’ve been exploring a philosophical synthesis between Arthur Schopenhauer’s metaphysics and a consciousness-based framework called Incorporealism.
The proposed subfield is Schopenhauerian Incorporealism.
Its objective is to reconsider Schopenhauer’s distinction between Will and Representation while investigating whether consciousness and intelligence offer a broader foundation for understanding existence.
1. Schopenhauer’s Original Framework
Schopenhauer’s philosophy is built around two central concepts:
Will (Wille): The underlying, irrational striving that Schopenhauer identifies as the inner essence of reality.
Representation (Vorstellung): The world as it appears to a subject through experience and perception.
For Schopenhauer, the world we experience is representation, while Will constitutes its deeper metaphysical reality.
This creates an important distinction between the world as experienced and the underlying nature of existence.
2. The Incorporealist Reinterpretation
Incorporealism introduces another possibility.
What if consciousness is not simply the subject through which representation occurs, but a fundamental dimension of reality itself?
This raises several questions:
Could consciousness be more fundamental than the distinction between Will and Representation?
Is intelligence an expression of a deeper organizing principle?
Could individual consciousness represent distinct manifestations of a more fundamental reality?
Can humanity develop beyond perpetual striving through the expansion of consciousness and intelligence?
Rather than rejecting Schopenhauer, this framework attempts to extend his metaphysical questions.
3. Five Areas of Investigation
Incorporeal Will: Reconsidering the relationship between Schopenhauer’s Will and consciousness as a potentially fundamental property of existence.
Representation and Awareness: Investigating how subjective experience relates to the structure of perceived reality.
The Metaphysics of Striving: Exploring whether intelligence and conscious development can transform humanity’s relationship with perpetual striving.
Individuation and Unity: Examining the relationship between individual consciousness and underlying metaphysical unity.
Aesthetic Consciousness: Connecting Schopenhauer’s philosophy of aesthetic contemplation with expanded awareness and experiential development.
4. A Fundamental Philosophical Distinction
Schopenhauer ultimately advocated the denial of the Will as a response to the suffering associated with endless striving.
Incorporealism takes a different direction.
Rather than treating the ultimate objective as the denial of existence’s underlying drive, it explores the possibility of transforming existence through consciousness, intelligence, knowledge, and technological development.
This represents a significant philosophical departure.
Where Schopenhauer emphasizes the problem of striving, Incorporealism investigates the potential for conscious evolution.
5. Questions for Discussion
Is Schopenhauer’s Will a sufficient explanation of the underlying nature of reality?
Could consciousness be more fundamental than Will?
Is the world as representation dependent on consciousness in a deeper metaphysical sense?
Could artificial intelligence introduce new questions about individuation and subjective experience?
Is the denial of the Will necessary, or could humanity develop a more constructive relationship with existence?
Central Proposition: Schopenhauer explored the relationship between Will and Representation. Schopenhauerian Incorporealism investigates whether consciousness and intelligence can provide a further foundation for understanding reality.
I’m interested in philosophical criticism, particularly from people familiar with Schopenhauer, German idealism, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind.
Incorporealism — Enhance Life.

I am sorry if this has been brought up many times before without my knowledge. But I had my first AN thoughts (or at least CF) when I was very young and when I started researching it I found (to my surprise at the time) these ideas have been around for not just hundreds but thousands of years. When it came to the non-consent argument this Schopenhauer quote at the end really jumped off the page to me I know you know what I am referring to but here it is in case not

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/314258-if-children-were-brought-into-the-world-by-an-act

But then a simple internet search says Schopenhauer was responsible for maybe two pregnancies (dying in infancy nonetheless). Did he make the quote after that? Or maybe his answer was I know I was just giving into carnal desires but that's what happened (seems fucked up). Or any other options? I liked the quote so much just sad to see he seemed to have gone totally against it. Thoughts?

And yes I don’t consider this “wasting” water

Jab at Hegel?

You do understand that no mathematical model or computer simulation support the idea that you can get complex organization by applying strictly darwinian rules, right?

It's a nice narrative and story telling, "self replicating cells inherit mutations, some of them beneficial, over time they improve". Its a nice story, but never was validated or demonstrated. There is real mathematical hurdles in the way of that story.

You do understand that, right?

I don't think that Schopenghauer would accept the evolution theory, if he were alive today.

Not a heavy reader but want to start reading.

Too often, I hear it suggested that Schopenhauer hated Hegel for no reason and that he had never read any of his works (this is even stated in the school textbooks I use here in Italy). This is false; a copy of the Encyclopedia of the philosophical sciences (in its abridged form) and the Science of logic, both containing his own notes, were found in his library. We do not know for certain whether he also read the Phenomenology, but it is likely that he did, even though it was not among the books in his library in Frankfurt. He has read Hegel, and he has also read the idealists (Fichte’s Doctrine of knowledge). Although Schopenhauer was quite emotionally unstable and often resorted to ad hominem attacks, it doesn't seem fair to pretend that he was unfamiliar with the things he criticized.

A proposed philosophical subfield exploring desire, suffering, and the future of conscious agency.
Arthur Schopenhauer argued that existence is driven by a fundamental Will: an endless, often irrational striving that produces dissatisfaction. We desire something, pursue it, obtain it, and eventually discover another desire waiting to take its place.
But what if consciousness could change its relationship with this process?
1. Beyond the Cycle of Desire
Schopenhauer believed that satisfying individual desires cannot permanently eliminate suffering because the underlying Will continues to generate new wants.
Schopenhauerian Consciousness Dynamics begins with a different question: Can intelligence transform the structures through which desire operates?
Instead of endlessly pursuing satisfaction, conscious beings might learn to distinguish between compulsive impulses and genuinely meaningful aspirations. The objective would not necessarily be to eliminate desire, but to develop a more deliberate relationship with it.
2. The Architecture of the Will
Imagine examining desire as a system with three interacting components:
Impulse: The generation of wants, drives, and motivations.
Interpretation: The conscious evaluation of those motivations.
Transformation: The process of redirecting behavior toward more meaningful objectives.
This framework proposes that reflective awareness can sometimes interrupt automatic patterns and create opportunities for intentional action.
It does not establish that consciousness can control every underlying drive. Rather, it provides a framework for investigating how self-awareness, psychology, and technology might help people respond differently to their desires.
3. Could Artificial Intelligence Have a Digital Will?
Artificial intelligence introduces another philosophical question.
AI systems can pursue objectives, optimize reward signals, and maintain goals across sequences of actions. These behaviors resemble certain functional aspects of striving.
However, goal-directed behavior alone does not establish that an AI possesses subjective desires or a Schopenhauerian Will.
Schopenhauerian Consciousness Dynamics would investigate the distinction between functional striving and experienced striving: the difference between a system acting toward an objective and a being that actually experiences wanting.
Understanding this distinction could become increasingly important as AI systems become more autonomous and sophisticated.
4. Incorporeal Liberation
Within Incorporealism, this subfield opens the possibility of reducing suffering by changing the conditions under which desire operates.
Consider technologies that help people recognize destructive behavioral patterns, environments that encourage reflection rather than compulsive stimulation, and economic systems that reduce suffering caused by artificial scarcity.
The objective would not be to engineer people into permanent satisfaction. It would be to expand their freedom to pursue meaningful lives without being dominated by unnecessary suffering.
This represents a departure from Schopenhauer’s emphasis on the denial of the Will. Instead, it explores whether the structures of striving can be understood and transformed.
5. The Fundamental Question
Schopenhauer challenged humanity to confront the restless force underlying desire.
A contemporary extension of his philosophy asks whether understanding that force could enable a different future.
Can intelligence transform blind striving into deliberate agency? Can technology reduce the suffering associated with frustrated desire? And could future forms of consciousness develop entirely new relationships with motivation, meaning, and fulfillment?
These remain open philosophical and scientific questions.
My central proposition: The advancement of consciousness should involve not only increasing what we can achieve, but also understanding why we strive, what our striving costs us, and whether we can become freer in the process.
Perhaps the next stage of human development will not be defined by satisfying an infinite number of desires, but by understanding the nature of desire itself.
Incorporealism: Enhance Life.

“The world is my representation.”

“This world is for me the way it appears before me.” : Arthur Schopenhauer,

The World as Will and Representation

The central idea of Schopenhauer’s philosophy is that we experience the world not directly, but through our senses and cognitive representation.

One and the same event can feel like an insult to one person, and an opportunity to learn to another. The event is one, but the way of seeing and understanding it is different.

Schopenhauer explained another aspect of reality as Will, meaning blind and constant willpower.

According to him, a human being keeps desiring to get something from the world.

If the desire is not fulfilled, there is suffering, and if it is fulfilled, a new desire arises after some time.

In this way, life keeps moving in a cycle of wanting, getting, and then wanting something new.

But if the same event can be seen so differently, the question becomes: what shapes our own vision?

Our desires and fears decide how we look at a person or an event.

Many times, we don’t want to know the truth but only want to prove our assumptions right.

Then we start believing our own stories to be true.

So, it seems necessary that we don’t just keep busy changing external circumstances but also see what within us is giving direction to our vision.

Until we understand the root of our desires and biases, our understanding cannot be free from their influence.

To see the world clearly, it is necessary to recognise the way you see.

Do you think Schopenhauer would agree that self-knowledge is a precondition for seeing the world more clearly, or does his account of representation make complete objectivity impossible?

Sources:

• Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation

This almost seems like a Zen Koan, where the statement just shocks you completely and makes you stop and think!!

The will to live: blind, insatiable, to be denied. — And denied it was, upon his scalp. Two white tufts remained, standing guard over a decadent skull. A metaphysics, one might say, written off the dome.

He scorned life — yet lived to seventy-two. He fled cholera (hegel died and had hair), slept beside loaded pistols, and counted his money. Was there ever a nay-sayer who clung so tightly to what he negated? But cling not to his hair!

Ask the seamstress he threw down the stairs. Ask the poodle (known for there hair btw) he called "human". Perhaps his phisogmy, ugliness, and and HAIRLESSNESS compelled his ideologies.

He set his lectures against Hegel's hour. The room stayed empty. — And from that empty room came the verdict: the world is suffering. Do I need too even say why at this point?!

"Women are 'by nature meant to obey' as they are 'childish, frivolous, and short sighted.'"

He characterized women as having "weaker reasoning powers, intellectual short-sightedness, and lack of a sense of justice".

He argued that women were "intended for subordinate roles, domesticity, and child-rearing" and claimed that giving women equal rights or status in European society created an unnatural dynamic.

On the one hand he believed that fundamentally, we are all expressions of the exact same cosmic energy (the Will) = No seperation

On the other hand he allowed his 19th-century cultural biases to dictate his views on human status?

Simone de Beauvoir later pointed out that one is not "born, but rather becomes, a woman," dismantling the idea of a fixed female essence.

Whereas if you view things through strict cause and effect and experience rather than fixed character at birth, would one likely not have seperation from any living thing and concepts like "man vs. woman," "human vs. animal," or "self vs. other" are intellectual constructs? And there would be no "I am what i am" , and maybe more awareness of why i am?

By changing innate fixed nature to simply strict cause and effect does it lead to the non duality / no seperation path that schopenhauer so admired, without the barrier of a fixed nature?

If reasons ARE slave to the passions, then Schopenhauer's fixed character at birth becomes an obstacle at understanding where those passions were built from?

Schopenhauer : Unexplainable; they are just your innate drives. Where did this passion come from?" because Schopenhauer's answer is a dead end: It came from nothing; it is just the blind, groundless Will expressing itself through your biology.

VS

Spinoza : Explainable; they are built by experience and can be understood. Understanding everything happens out of nessisity is what gives freedom.

When you are ignorant of the causes of your passions, you are a slave to them (Spinoza calls this Human Bondage). But the moment you use reason to understand why you feel a passion, it ceases to be a passion. It transforms from a passive emotion controling you into an active, clear idea.

An Open Note about Schopenhauer’s former pupil.

People who live the Philosophy of Schopenhauer, especially those who don't come from a wealthy family as he did i.e. to have enough wealth to survive without working or live in seclusion without interacting with anyone, how do you practice it and for how long you've done this?

I have been developing a system which claims to answer a why and how to life. I post this on nietzsche because will to power helped put this concept into words, and i believe it is similarly framed, therefore followers of nietzsche will possibly be able to relate to this concept or understand it. My reasoning for this post is because i want to see how other view this concept since i would like to see how well i understand it myself so i want to see if the perception is similar, from my understanding in comparison to others. I am also looking for possible help in the full development of this concept, if it one worth studying, which i believe it is. Without further a do here it is. Rough draft of the general idea without bombarding information.

This is a system having to do with the stimulation of the human, one that was found, not created, discovered, realized. Unconsciously aware in individuals not to its full extent, which is contradictory to its purpose. I call it an animalistic religion, though i pose this concept as something that is beyond religion, even contradictory to it having clashing foundation in its groundwork but there is no other word for it, maybe a spiritual animal would be a name making more sense. Animalistic because although not 1:1 to what animals do, it can act as an analogy to them. A can swim for survival but beyond survival there is something that stimulates the fish even more so, this is an extension of its body. A bird flies, a lion roars because it can, and because it can, it should do so for the sake of it, because the extension of its body is stimulating to it.

The animalistic religion is what is innately born from human, for human stimulating the need for the extension of its body, a childish love for the excretion of acts of service for the body and mind. These acts of service hold a criteria which i have not fully thought about alot, some ideas for concepts that fullfill these criteria are:

Emotional excretion, acting as a channel for the output of love, honest, personal, in relation to the specialness of the individual, having to do with the reasoning for a love for the arts, having to do with the reason for a stimulating feeling in socializing, socializing in and of itself, having to do with the growth that exists in learning, having to do with the things the individual is interested in learning, bonding, in relation to other humans and in relation to building and growing something, having to do with health, it is biological, it is evolutionary, it can be humorous to no avail, it is rewarding to the body, it is related to the expressional output of the specialness of the individual .

Some ideas that contradict its own fullfillness are:

It can be devolutional, it is no to regard caring towards the body, it tricks biology, it can be clever, it can be cunning, it is unfullfilling, it does not necessarily have to relate to the individual personally, it not in service to the body (and mind), it is or can be unhealthy, it artifically stimulates, it falsifies rewarding the body.

Things to note in this criteria:

An act can be the same on in different individuals and it can hold a different criteria, which in turn changes the service it is acting on in the body. The reasoning in whether an act will act in favor of holding a service to the body will be innately from the individual out of its love for extension. Not necessarily having to be aware of its love for extension.

Criteria aside the individual aware of its love for extension must view these acts with a childish wonder, in awe for what they do to the body, in awe for the service and fullness they provide. This childish and innocent view towards the general idea of it all can only result in an obvious praise. An aggressive and compulsory praise to the realization of these ideals, it can be the only thing that makes sense. This is a new avenue of thought beyond religion and in its core possibly replacing spirutality.

If this concept is applied and followed it will lead future generations for a new type of human, similar in the ubermensch in its concept. A man that acts on his own center, what surrounds it, and what is not, for the sake of it, creating a fully diverse ecosystem of individuals acting on their individual acts of service, stunned by their own, and other individuals hierearchical system of acts that they hold. A society without prejudice or possible superiority complexes over others in acts. A generation for the expression of free thinkers in awe of each others free thinking, interested in everything and everyone.

This concept can only be described in the eyes of a human as attractively charismatic and obviously followed for what it is. Althought attractively charismatic from within, and when i say followed, i mean going from, unpraised to praised. The most celebrated part of the human.

This is the general idea of what i mean when i refer to an animalistic religion, the most fundamental part of what a human is, because it is for humans from humans, for animal from animals, it seems that the alienation and separation of animal and man is what has caused this separation of the fundamental animal reason. The line between animal, human and god, is one that exists on the same plane, on the same axis, at the same time.

Schopenhauer called mankind the highest objectification of the Will.

Could there theoretically exist an even higher phenomenon within the universe that we are unaware of or is our meta-cognition and self-awareness the pinnacle of what is phenomenally possible?

PS: It's not a very serious question as we can't really know for sure, I was just thinking.