“Wake up, my friend, and leave childish things behind!” – Schopenhauer’s quote of La Nouvelle Heloise, V. I at the beginning of The World as Will and Representation (“WWR”), Volume I, First Book – for WWR I use the edited and translated version by Norman, Welchman, and Janaway.

I began going through Schopenhauer’s work and taking notes relevant to I of the The Unnamable – but the project overwhelmed me, I might as well have copied all of Schopenhauer, both volumes of WWR and his On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (“OTFROTPOSR”). I put my work aside, thought it an impossible undertaking. I return to it to note a few comments. As noted in regard to the Schopenhauer Log, I hope that the Log as a whole builds on itself and reveals more than any individual post.

As with the Schopenhauer Log itself – Schopenhauer as a place to stand, to start, to jump off from and expand beyond Schopenhauer – here Schopenhauer as a place to stand, as a jumping off place, helps to understand the nature of I in The Unnamable, helps to see how Beckett himself might have (or might not have) used Schopenhauer and expanded beyond Schopenhauer to know and to formulate I.

As noted in the Introduction post, in the first paragraph of WWR, Book One, Schopenhauer writes: “‘The world is my representation’: — this holds true for ever living, cognitive being, although only a human being can bring it to abstract, reflective consciousness: and if he actually does so he has become philosophically sound. It immediately becomes clear and certain to him that he is not acquainted with either the sun or the earth, but rather only with an eye that sees a sun, with a hand that feels an earth, and that the surrounding world exists only as representation, that is, exclusively in relation to something else, the representing being that he himself is.” (23)

Later, in Book Three, Schopenhauer notes that time, space and causality are the structure of our intellect, and “The view of things made possible by (and according to) this structure is immanent; on the other hand, the view that becomes aware of its own condition is the transcendental.” (195) There is in these words, and in the Schopenhauer quotes above, an embryo of two kind of I’s, more particularly, in the latter, of an I that “becomes aware of its own condition,” an I who understands, at last, “that he is not acquainted with the sun or earth but only with an eye that sees a sun, with a hand that feels an earth, and that the surrounding world exists only as representation….” And yet, the first kind of I is an I in service of the will, buried in a body, and is ever present – both I’s might be said to be ever present. Beckett’s innovation was to recognize two separate I’s, and to shift, in his prose, the center, the I, to the latter kind of I, who, besides the rest, looks on the other I, the embodied I moving about in a world. This shift results in a completely new way of seeing, and in illuminating the world in a new light.

Beckett’s I is different from the Proustian-like “moments” of Schopenhauer’s Book Three of WWR. In Book Three, Schopenhauer has an idea that one can escape a mind which creates an entire complex, a world in time, space and causality, a mind that serves the will, only in moments that constitutes the experience which might be called aesthetic pleasure. In such moments, “cognition tears itself free from the service of the will so that the subject ceases to be merely individual and now becomes the pure, will-less subject of cognition, no longer concerned with relations following the principle of sufficient reason but instead resting and becoming absorbed in a steady contemplation of the object presented…” (200, 201) In this state, “we lose ourselves in this object completely, i.e., we forget our individuality, our will…” (201) “We devote the entire power of our mind to intuition and immerse ourselves in this entirely, letting the whole of consciousness be filled with peaceful contemplation of the natural object that is directly present, a landscape, a tree, a cliff, a building, or whatever it might be…” (201)

And yet, Schopenhauer goes on to state that “anyone who has become so engrossed and lost in the intuition of nature that he continues to exist only as the pure, cognitive subject will thus be immediately aware that as such he is the condition, which is to say the bearer of the world of all objective being….” (203, 204) This latter awareness is closer to Beckett’s I, to what Beckett’s I has become, how he was born, how he lives. It is an experience – an experience like this – brought to awareness, and so to knowledge, so I is born, I becomes the I who has always been there. I note that it is in prose, in Beckett’s prose, that Beckett can most fully explore this I (i.e., without a body on stage), why Beckett’s prose is (perhaps) his most important work.

To turn from the Proustian-like moment, to grasp a bit of what Beckett’s I in The Unnamable might experience, and so from experience to concept know, we might return to Schopenhauer’s OTFROTPOSR, or to WWR Book One on representation. I note that Beckett’s I is alive, he is not born of philosophy or concepts, is not a concept, is experiencing a way of being that is real and a predicament not only of I’s but of human life. 

When an I has experienced a feeling that the world is unreal, that even his body is not his, and when this knowledge comes to conscious awareness, I is aware that he is looking on, I comes into being. In the first class of objects for the subject in The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, Schopenhauer states that our understanding forms a union combining heterogenous forms of sensibility (including forms of time, space, and causality – each a product of a mind) into a complex, a totality of representations. In this complex this entire objective real world exists for us. One has formed the world, and the world exists in whole in each person, created by that person, mere appearance, a mere representation of objects and things but not essence, not “the thing in itself.” Schopenhauer states in WWR, Book One, that readers having grasped the four classes of the principle of sufficient reason will be convinced that the past and future are as unreal as any dream. He notes that the view is ancient – Heraclitus, Plato, Spinoza, Kant, age-old wisdom of India, Maya, the veil of deception, etc. (28) As noted, Beckett shifts the I itself, the center, to this view, the way of being that exists and is like looking on, wondering, doubting – seeing, experiencing aporia, as if outside of time, outside space, not embodied and yet an individual, filled with will, desire, doubt, the experience of an I.

I note, Schopenhauer states in a footnote of Book Four of WWR, in an attempt to help clarify, he says, the fact that the individual is only appearance, not thing in itself, how absolutely impossible it is, he says, to be aware of ourselves in ourselves independent of the objects of cognition and willing: “Rather, as soon as we try for once to understand ourselves and to do so by turning in on ourselves and directing our cognition inwardly, we lose ourselves in a bottomless voice and find ourselves like hollow, transparent spheres from whose void a voice is speaking, while the cause of it is not to be found within, and in wanting to grasp ourselves we shudder as we catch nothing but an insubstantial phantom.” (304) This sounds a lot like the unnamable I. But for me – this I is aware of so much, he has come to know he is not acquainted with the sky or earth, but merely with an eye that sees a sun, a hand that feels an earth.