Arthur Schopenhauer: accessibility pioneer?

Arthur Shopenhauer’s masterpiece ‘The World as Will and Representation’ is a stone-cold classic, which influenced everyone from Nietzsche to Freud. It’s also famously one of Western philosophy’s most boring books. Most editions are around 550 pages split into four sections across two volumes. But there’s a trick to it. The entire book is hiding on page one. Here it is:

“The world is my idea

-this is a truth which holds good for everything that lives and knows, though man alone can bring it into reflective and abstract consciousness. If he really does this, he has attained to philosophical wisdom. It then becomes clear and certain to him that what he knows is not a sun and an earth, but only an eye that sees a sun, a hand that feels an earth; that the world which surrounds him is there only as idea, i.e., only in relation to something else, the consciousness, which is himself. If any truth can be asserted a priori, it is this: for it is the expression of the most general form of all possible and thinkable experience: a form which is more general than time, or space, or causality, for they all presuppose it; and each of these, which we have seen to be just so many modes of the principle of sufficient reason, is valid only for a particular class of ideas; whereas the antithesis of object and subject is the common form of all these classes, is that form under which alone any idea of whatever kind it may be, abstract or intuitive, pure or empirical, is possible and thinkable. No truth therefore is more certain, more independent of all others, and less in need of proof than this, that all that exists for knowledge, and therefore this whole world, is only object in relation to subject, perception of a perceiver, in a word, idea. This is obviously true of the past and the future, as well as of the present, of what is farthest off, as of what is near; for it is true of time and space themselves, in which alone these distinctions arise. All that in any way belongs or can belong to the world is inevitably thus conditioned through the subject, and exists only for the subject. The world is idea.”

This level of density is the standard through all 550 pages, digressions upon digressions and footnotes and proofs. But there in that first paragraph is basically the whole thrust of the work: that there is no such thing as objective reality. Reality is something that, while it exists, is filtered through my senses, and only I perceive it in just this way.

Schopenhauer admitted the insight itself wasn’t new (Indian thinkers, among others, had already made the same point). And so he uses this book to work through the exciting implications of the idea, and to make these exciting implications as tedious to read about as is humanly possible. 

Depressive and lacking self-awareness

Schopenhauer was an unlikely vehicle for this world-changing theory. He considered himself a failure and spent much of his life depressed. For most of his life, his work sold poorly and his ideas were disregarded. When, late in life, his sales took off and he became something of a literary celebrity, he was saddened that his philosophical ideas were ignored. His most popular essays were his criticisms and he was admired only for his skill as a stylist. He resigned himself to being forever misunderstood and likely forgotten by history. His next move was to try to find a wife. While fulfillment in the intellectual sphere had eluded him, perhaps it could be found in domestic life. 

It could not. 

A 19th-century DiCaprio

In perhaps the greatest proof he provided of the idea that reality is as we interpret it, 39-year-old Schopenhauer apparently believed that his romantic overtures would be welcomed by 17-year-old Flora Weiss. She recorded in her diary that she had thrown away some grapes he had given her:

“Because ugly old Schopenhauer had touched them.”

He never married. He relied on French poodles for companionship towards the end of his life. 

Despite his miserable existence, Schopenhauer’s key contribution to western thought was to demonstrate that objective perception presupposes knowledge of causality. 

That’s to say, external reality exists but we each ‘create’ it via our sense perception.   

Despite blundering through life getting almost everything wrong and being sad, Schopenhauer is today remembered as a great thinker. It was he who refuted Hume’s assertion that reality was fixed and objective. But he also refuted Kant, who had claimed that there was no objective reality that could be proven.  

And modern neuroscience confirms his a priori assertion to be empirical fact: the human eye is one of the most studied areas of the central nervous system. And we know that the visual cortex has more processors for interpreting sensory information than for receiving it.   

When we talk about accessibility today, we are tipping the hat to Schopenhauer. Today we acknowledge that everyone’s experience is a little different and that some factors demand special consideration. 

The world is idea. 

And this is true for every individual. Whether colourblind, or with limited vision. Whether older and less accustomed to recent online conventions. With sensory or physical disabilities that make interaction with the online world a challenge. Everyone’s reality is a unique construct of their perception. And we owe it to ourselves to ensure that everyone can access our online products in a way that is comfortable and optimises their experience. 

And we don’t generally think about Schopenhauer at all when we make considerations about accessibility online. And it’s likely that our having forgotten him would not surprise him one bit.