5.64 Here one sees that solipsism, rigorously followed through, coincides with pure Realism. The I of solipsism shrinks to an extensionless point, and the reality coordinated to it remains.

What reality coordinates to an extensionless point? Wittgenstein is not a solipsist, that much is clear. Schopenhauer on realism: “Realism aims precisely at the object without subject; but it is impossible even to envisage such an object distinctly.”[1]

“The fundamental error of all systems is the failure to recognise … that intellect and matter are correlatives, i.e., that the one exists only for the other, both stand and fall together, the one is only the reflexion of the other, and indeed, they are really one and the same thing regarded from two opposite points of view; and this one thing, I am here anticipating, is the manifestation of the will, or the thing-in-itself.”[2]

That is to say, we cannot conceive an object without a subject, and vice versa.

Weiner (p. 78) quotes a long passage from Schopenhauer WWR Vol. II, p. 193 in which Schopenhauer writes that in a sense an identity of the ideal and the real might be affirmed.

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[1] Everyman edition of Schopenhauer’s WWR, p. 19.

[2] Ibid., p. 21.