Essay on Spirit Seeing and Everything Connected Therewith

Schopenhauer's attempt to explain ghosts, second sight, and animal magnetism without either believing the spirits or dismissing the phenomena — an early philosophy of the paranormal.

by Arthur Schopenhauer270 passages held

German, the original language

Original title: Über das Geistersehn und was damit zusammenhängt
First published: 1851(aged 63)
Original language: German

Report a rights issue

Overview

Ghosts, premonitions, clairvoyance, the trances of animal magnetism: a serious philosopher took all of it seriously enough to explain, and this is the essay in which he did. Schopenhauer neither joins the spiritualists nor waves the reports away as fraud. He grants that people genuinely see apparitions and foresee events, and locates the cause not outside them but within — a "dream-organ" by which the will can perceive without the senses, so that a ghost is a real perception with no external body answering to it. It fits his system exactly: if the will and not the physical world is ultimate reality, then one mind reaching another across distance, or across death, is no miracle but an operation of the single force underlying everything. The essay stands fifth among the six long pieces in the first volume of Parerga and Paralipomena, the 1851 collection that finally won Schopenhauer an audience after thirty years of neglect. It is now credited as one of the earliest attempts to treat the paranormal as a subject for philosophical and psychological analysis rather than for faith or ridicule, and it fed directly into the psychical research that flourished later in the century. He wrote it with the confidence of a man who thought he already knew what reality was made of, and found ghosts easier to account for than his critics did.

Key concepts

What is the dream-organ?

A faculty by which the mind perceives without the outer senses — the same power that forms images in sleep. Schopenhauer uses it to explain visions, ghosts, and second sight as genuine perceptions arising from within the perceiver, rather than reports of anything physically present before the eyes.

What is animal magnetism in this essay?

The mesmeric trance, or somnambulism, in which a person's outer senses shut down and they perceive and act through the dream-organ — feeling at a distance, seeing without eyes. Schopenhauer takes the reported phenomena as real and treats them as empirical evidence for the primacy of the will over the body.

How does his idealism make ghosts possible?

If the physical world is only representation and the will the sole reality, then perceiving need not depend on external bodies at all. One mind reaching another across space, or across death, becomes no miracle but an ordinary operation of the single force underlying everything — which is why he finds ghosts easier to explain than his critics do.

What does he mean by second sight?

The genuine foreseeing of events — a perception, through the dream-organ, of what the ordinary senses cannot reach, including what has not yet happened. Schopenhauer grants that such clairvoyance really occurs and locates its cause entirely within the seer, never in visiting spirits or external signs.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Ghosts Explained by the Will

Are apparitions and second sight fraud, visiting spirits, or something the perceiving mind manufactures with no outside body answering to it?

Schopenhauer neither joins the spiritualists nor waves the reports away. He grants that people genuinely see apparitions and foresee events, and locates the cause not outside them but within — a "dream-organ" by which the will can perceive without the senses, so that a ghost is a real perception with nothing external behind it. It fits his system exactly: if the will and not the physical world is ultimate reality, one mind reaching another across distance or death is no miracle. The result is credited among the earliest philosophies of the paranormal.

perception
will
dreaming
somnambulism
clairvoyance
consciousness
hallucination
physiology
metaphysics
prophecy
vision

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 270
distinct concepts: 249
by passages held, corpus-wide: #111

What this book thinks together

Every arc around the wheel is one concept in this book. A ribbon joins two the text reaches for together, and its width is how many of its passages hold both. Strongest: epistemology with perception.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 20 pairings. 171 shared passages in all. 80 weaker pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
epistemology	perception	17
dreaming	perception	16
perception	somnambulism	16
consciousness	perception	13
metaphysics	perception	12
consciousness	dreaming	11
consciousness	physiology	10
consciousness	somnambulism	10
epistemology	metaphysics	9
perception	physiology	8
perception	phenomenology	7
dreaming	somnambulism	6
metaphysics	phenomenology	6
physiology	somnambulism	6
epistemology	phenomenology	5
dreaming	epistemology	4
dreaming	phenomenology	4
dreaming	physiology	4
epistemology	somnambulism	4
consciousness	phenomenology	3

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1813 On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and On the Will in Nature (Ueber die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde; und, Ueber den Willen in der Natur)
Schopenhauer's 1813 doctoral dissertation, and the book he told readers to finish before opening his masterwork; the 1836 essay bound with it hunts for the same metaphysics in natural science.
DEEN
1841 The Basis of Morality (Die beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik)
Two ethics essays written for academic prize contests — one crowned in Norway, one famously denied the Danish medal though it stood alone — issued together in 1841 as The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics.
DEEN
1851 Essay on Spirit Seeing and Everything Connected Therewith (Über das Geistersehn und was damit zusammenhängt) you are here DE
1851 The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Counsels and Maxims (Parerga und Paralipomena)
Half of Schopenhauer's Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life, the companion to The Wisdom of Life; Saunders split the two for English readers. Practical maxims for living, drawn from the 1851 collection.
DEEN
1851 The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; On Human Nature
Essays on ethics and politics that Saunders gathered — some from the 1851 Parerga, some from manuscripts unpublished at his death — under a title Schopenhauer never gave them.
DEEN
1851 The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, a Dialogue, Etc.
A dialogue on whether a useful faith can also be a false one, heading a cluster of essays on religion and art that Saunders drew from the 1851 Parerga.
DEEN
1851 The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Studies in Pessimism
The pessimism most readers know him by, stated without the metaphysics — Saunders' selection of the shortest, bluntest essays from the 1851 Parerga.
DEEN
1851 The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; the Art of Controversy (Parerga und Paralipomena / Nachgelassene Schriften)
Not from the Parerga at all: a manual of thirty-eight debating tricks that Schopenhauer drafted around 1830, left unpublished, and that reached print only in 1864, from his posthumous papers.
DEEN
1851 The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Literature
One of the topical selections Saunders carved from the Parerga for English readers, this one on writing, reading, and style; published in 1891.
DEEN
1851 The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer: the Wisdom of Life (Aphorismen zur Lebensweisheit)
His most cheerful book, a guide to happiness that opens the Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life; the pages John Oxenford's 1853 essay singled out when he introduced Schopenhauer to English readers.
DEEN
1851 Über die Weiber
Notorious far beyond its length: a few hostile pages on women from the second volume of the 1851 Parerga, an embarrassment to his admirers and a standing charge against him.
DE
Anmerkungen zu Locke und Kant sowie zu nachkantischen Philosophen (Anmerkungen Zu Locke Und Kant Sowie Zu Nachkantischen Philosophen)
Undated notes from his literary remains, engaging Locke, Kant, and the post-Kantian idealists; manuscript material sorted by his editors after his death, never a book he wrote.
DE
The World as Will and Representation (Die Welt Als Wille Und Vorstellung)
The masterwork, and the whole of his philosophy: one argument he refused to recast, only enlarge, across three editions between 1819 and 1859. Every other title on this shelf leads toward it or away from it.
DE

— or open another of their works