ascetic consciousness

is an overcoming of the quest for knowledge. As such, it is a symbolic return to adam and eve to paradise.

In a way, then, the ascetic consciousness can be said symbolically to return Adam and Eve to Paradise, for it is the very quest for knowledge (i.e., the will to apply the principle of individuation to experience) that the ascetic overcomes. This amounts to a self-overcoming at the universal level, where not only physical desires are overcome, but where humanly-inherent epistemological dispositions are overcome as well.

is located neither in the platonic realm, nor in the everyday realm, but at the very level of the universal subject-object distinction, at a level of universality comparable to that of will as thing-in-itself.

The ascetic consciousness might be most plausibly located at the level of the universal subject-object distinction, akin to the music-filled consciousness, but Schopenhauer states that the mystical consciousness abolishes not only time and space, but also the fundamental forms of subject and object: 'no will: no representation, no world' (WWR, Section 71). So in terms of its degree of generality, the mystical state of mind seems to be located at a level of universality comparable to that of Will as thing-in-itself. Since he characterizes it as not being a manifestation of Will, however, it appears to be keyed into another dimension altogether, in total disconnection from Will as the thing-in-itself. This is to say that if the thing-in-itself is exactly congruent with Will, then it is difficult to accept Schopenhauer's mystical characterizations of the ascetic consciousness, and at the same time identify a consistent place for it within Schopenhauer's three-tiered philosophical schema of reality.

is not only where physical desires are overcome, but where humanly-inherent epistemological dispositions are overcome as well.

ascetic consciousness, n.All

ascetic consciousness