6. Arthur Schopenhauer

In the spring of 1813, Schopenhauer left Berlin due to the unrest of the war and went to Weimar via Dresden. He did not like the conditions in his mother's house, so he initially settled in Rudolstadt. In the summer of 1813, he worked on part of his theory of ideas. All our ideas are objects of our cognizing subject. But nothing existing and independent on its own, nor anything separate and torn off, can become an object for us. The ideas stand in a lawful connection which is given to them by our cognitive faculty and which can be recognized in form from its nature. The ideas must stand in such a relation to each other that we can say: one is grounded in the other. Reason and consequence is the general form of the connection between all ideas. There are four kinds of grounding: the ground of becoming, of cognition, of being and of volition. In becoming, one change is justified by another in time; in cognizing, one judgment by another, or by an experience; in being, the position of one part of time or space by another; in willing, an action by a motive. Schopenhauer gave a detailed account of what he had to say about these propositions in his essay "On the Fourfold Root of the Theorem of the Sufficient Ground", which earned him the degree of Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Jena on October 2, 1813. In November of that year he returned to Weimar, where he remained until May 1814 and lived in close contact with Goethe. Goethe had read Schopenhauer's first work and was so interested in the author that he personally introduced him to the theory of colors. Schopenhauer found that his philosophical convictions and Goethe's Theory of Colors were in perfect agreement. He decided to justify this in a special treatise, which he began to write after moving to Dresden in May 1814. His thoughts on the nature of sensory perception also developed in the process. Kant was of the opinion that sensations arise from the excitation of the senses by "things in themselves"; these are the simple impressions of color, light, sound, etc. As these come from outside, they are not yet arranged in space and time. For this order is based on an arrangement of the senses. The outer senses arrange the sensations in space, the inner sense in time. This gives rise to perception. According to its nature, the intellect then arranges the perceptions according to the concepts of cause and effect, unity and multiplicity: Cause and effect, unity, multiplicity, etc. In this way a coherent experience is formed from the individual perceptions. Schopenhauer finds the senses quite unsuitable for the production of perception. The senses contain nothing but sensation. The sensations of color, for example, arise through an effect on the retina in the eye. They are processes within the organism. They can therefore only be perceived directly as states of the body and within it. The inner sense initially arranges the sensations in time so that they gradually enter consciousness. They only acquire spatial relationships when they are perceived as effects and an external cause is inferred from them. The arrangement according to cause and effect is a matter for the intellect. It regards sensations as effects and transfers their causes into space. It takes possession of the material of sensation and constructs the views in space from it. These are therefore the work of the intellect and not of the senses*. Since the objects that are seen and felt in space are derived from the senses[^1] Since the colors are first built up from the semantic perceptions, they cannot be derived from them. Therefore, colors, which are sensations, cannot be derived from objects, as Newton does. They are created by the eye and must be explained by the eye's equipment. It must be shown how the retina produces colors. Only the cause of colors, light, which is still entirely uncolored, can be transferred to the outside. Goethe also assumes the uncolored light in his Theory of Colors. Schopenhauer's work "On Sight and Colors" was published in 1816. Goethe had already received the manuscript from the author for review in 1815.