As Stephen walks down Fleet Street in Wandering Rocks, the hum of dynamos in the powerhouse suggests an elemental energy pulsing in all things, including people: "Beingless beings. Stop! Throb always without you and the throb always within. Your heart you sing of. I between them. Where? Between two roaring worlds where they swirl, I. Shatter them, one and both. But stun myself too in the blow." This metaphysical reverie was inspired at least in part by an American novel that the young Joyce reviewed, but the influence of that work seems limited. A richer possible source is Arthur Schopenhauer's philosophy, which can account both for the impression of formless energy permeating the universe and for its connection to the energy, possibly sexual, throbbing in Stephen.

Many annotators (Thornton, Gifford, Johnson, Slote) have affirmed an observation made by Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann in their edition of Joyce's Critical Writings (1959). In the 17 September 1903 Daily Express, at the end of his short review of Kentucky writer James Lane Allen's novel The Mettle of the Pasture (1903), Joyce quoted "a passage of great charm" in which the hero's mother sadly weighs his refusal to marry his fiancee as she had urged:

For her it was one of those moments when we are reminded that our lives are not in our keeping, and that whatsoever is to befall us originates in sources beyond our power. Our wills may indeed reach the length of our arms or as far as our voices can penetrate space; but without us and within moves one universe that saves us or ruins us only for its own purposes; and we are no more free amid its laws than the leaves of the forest are free to decide their own shapes and season of unfolding, to order the showers by which they are to be nourished and the storms which shall scatter them at last.

In this passage Mrs. Meredith confronts the limits of her agency,  beyond whose small reach lies a vast "universe" that, operating both "without us and within," shapes our destinies. As Mason and Ellmann note, there is a clear resemblance here to the sentences in Wandering Rocks. Like Meredith's mother, Stephen recognizes that his ego hangs between alien worlds "without" and "within," and even his word "shatter" seems to recall her use of "scatter." Joyce must have recalled Allen's conceit as he wrote, and to the degree that Stephen can be identified with Joyce there is verisimilitude in his thinking these thoughts in June 1904, less than a year after the review was published.

But Joyce does something very different with the conceit. Instead of an abstractly conceived universe that has its own "purposes," and lays down "laws," and "saves" or "ruins"––a kind of pantheistic version of traditional Christian belief––the dynamos in the powerhouse give Stephen a far more concrete and less tidy sense of what lies beyond the reach of human senses. They are "Beingless beings," humming with vital energy but lacking purpose, intelligibility, and even discrete existence. Instead of a lawful universe Stephen detects only a "Throb always without you and the throb always within," two pulsing, swirling, "roaring worlds" that so threaten the "I between them" that he longs to "Shatter them, one and both." The pessimistic urgency of his sentences bears little resemblance to Mrs. Meredith's calm acceptance in The Mettle of the Pasture.

Joyce could possibly have arrived at this vision on his own, but some tracks laid down earlier in the novel encourage a search for sources of conceptual inspiration. The last time that readers entered the thoughts of a solitary Stephen, in Proteus, he was using the ideas of Jacob Böhme and George Berkeley to look for a metaphysical reality deeper than the evidence of his senses. Might not the metaphysical sentences in Wandering Rocks be continuing that kind of philosophical search? Vincent Van Wyk has urged me, in several personal communications, to consider the relevance of Schopenhauer's Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (1819, reissued in a longer version in 1844), which Joyce's contemporaries knew as The World as Will and Idea (1883-86), a translation by Richard Burton Haldane and John Kemp. Far more than James Lane Allen's novel, this great philosophical work inquires into the shared reality underlying the world "without" and the world "within." Schopenhauer writes that "the solution of the riddle of the world is only possible through the proper connection of outer with inner experience" (6th ed., 1909, 3 vols., 2:20).

Schopenhauer sets himself the task of finding a way to "go beyond the phenomenal" (1:159) to some grasp of the noumenal reality that Kant called the Ding an sich, the thing-in-itself. He agrees with Kant that our experience of physical objects, existing in space and time and causally related to one another, is only "idea" (Vorstellung), the perceptual construct of an embodied creature. We perceive only what our sensory and neural organs convey to consciousness, which means that we do not perceive reality so much as construct it: "All that in any way belongs or can belong to the world is inevitably thus conditioned through the subject, and exists only for the subject. The world is idea" (1:4). Behind this "idea" (or "representation," as later translators have rendered it), most people would assume that some actual objects are out there. But no one can perceive those objects as they are in themselves.

Human beings do, however, have one source of insight into the permanently hidden reality surrounding them––not through sensory knowledge of the world of physical objects, but by knowing one physical object from the inside. The familiarity that most interests Schopenhauer is not primarily cognitive. Unlike Plato, who sought knowledge of the "Ideas" through intellectual activities (dialectic, mystical intuition, erotic contemplation, memory of past lives), he focuses on the "will" that motivates human actions. Like another famous voluntarist, Augustine, he believes that will is a more fundamental director of human life than intellect, that it underlies all human emotions and desires, and that it connects human beings to the universal source of being.

But Schopenhauer, the first professed atheist in the European philosophical tradition, does not locate this metaphysical reality in the mind of God. He posits instead an impersonal, "blindly acting" force that exists outside of objects, outside space and time, outside causality, outside the duality of knower and known. "It appears in every blind force of nature and also in the preconsidered action of man; and the great difference between these two is merely in the degree of the manifestation, not in the nature of what manifests itself" (1:143). Unlike Kant's things-in-themselves (the Table behind the table, the Horse in the horse) this noumenal being is not plural, but rather a single undifferentiated reality manifested in all the things we experience. Schopenhauer named it Will after the connection with human willing, but he might as easily have called it Force, Energy, or Drive.

Despite his claim that the riddle of the universe at large can be solved by looking within, Schopenhauer never suggests that introspection can yield direct insight into this undifferentiated reality at the heart of things. The will-to-be manifested in human motivations is no less opaquely unfathomable than the will-to-be manifested in external phenomena. Like Freud, whom he appears to have greatly influenced (though Freud denied it), he believes that most of the contents of the human mind are not available to consciousness, since we repress thoughts and desires that are too terrifying or shameful to reconcile with our conceptions of ourselves. Even if we could access all these thoughts and desires, they would still be dualistic constructs of the subject that thinks and desires, and hence far removed from that which underlies existence.

Nevertheless, the blind agency operating in all things can be felt in the deep-rooted human need to survive, and even more strongly in the need to procreate. Schopenhauer assigns more importance to sexuality (including emotions that many people would prefer to call "love") than any other philosopher before Freud: "Indeed, one may say man is concrete sexual desire; for his origin is an act of copulation and his wish of wishes is an act of copulation, and this tendency alone perpetuates and holds together his whole phenomenal existence. The will to live manifests itself indeed primarily as an effort to sustain the individual; yet this is only a step to the effort to sustain the species, and the latter endeavour must be more powerful in proportion as the life of the species surpasses that of the individual in duration, extension, and value. Therefore sexual passion is the most perfect manifestation of the will to live" (3:314). This powerful unconscious drive, which Freud came to call Id, "springs from the depths of our nature" (3:310). It is "the most vehement of desires, the wish of wishes, the concentration of all our volition" (3:314), "the ultimate goal of almost all human effort" (3:339).

It is also, Schopenhauer recognizes, the source of untold misery, frustration, confusion, conflict, and distraction, and he deplores the way important work is forever being interrupted by the "trash" that sexual desire throws up (3:339). His strong focus on sexuality and his strong ambivalence about it hold obvious relevance to Stephen Dedalus, a young man who has renounced a puritanical church without finding a way to leave behind its teachings and embraced the ideal of sexual love without finding a partner to replace prostitutes. "Your heart you sing of," Stephen thinks, but at the deepest level what impels and torments him is "the throb always within." If this throbbing urgency is indeed sexual, that appetitive drive in no way conflicts with Stephen's search for metaphysical truths. Sensory phenomena and sexual longings are windows onto the same inscrutable "Will."

Schopenhauer does not exalt will as Nietzsche does. In various ways, most notably in the realm of aesthetics, he charts paths by which human beings can lessen the grip of interested volitional striving and become disinterested observers. This aspect of his philosophy is at least roughly congruent with Stephen's wish to escape the hold of the two throbs, though Stephen gives it a far more violent expression. In a fantasy of apocalyptic destruction that he repeats in Circe with his Wagnerian cry of "Nothung!," he grandly thinks of smashing both worlds. The thought of how this universal ruin might impact the "I" in the middle deters him: "But stun myself too in the blow...Not yet awhile. A look around." He thinks of being stunned, not obliterated: apparently his belief that the Christian God would not annihilate a soul he made immortal gives him a Get Out of Will Free card.

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John Hunt 2023