PREVIEW-Episode 30: Schopenhauer on Explanations and Knowledge

0:00 Wes: This is a Partially Examined Life episode preview. You'll find the full episode available for purchase in the music section of the Itunes store or at partiallyexaminedlife.com store. If you want more than one episode, you can become a PEL citizen at partiallyexaminedlife dot com membership.

0:26 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who are at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 30 is what is an explanation with a discussion of Arthur Schopenhauer's on the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, Originally written in 1813, expanded and revised in 1847. For a link to that text discussion, other information, Please check out partiallyexaminedlife.com My name is Mark Linsenmayer, Mucho Macho in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:57 Seth: This is Seth Paskin, adhering to the Principles of Sufficient Reason of Being, in Austin, Texas.

1:04 Wes: And this is Wes Alwan in Boston, Massachusetts.

1:08 Mark: That was a very heterogeneous introduction.

1:14 Wes: I like that this is the least

1:17 Mark: dynamic part of Schopenhauer, the part that he's not well known for. But this was a recommendation that I got that like, oh, this is. In fact, he refers it as the introductory essay to his big work, the World as Will and Representation, or also translated as the World as Will and Idea. So you kind of have to read this first for any of that to make sense. And he refers to it all over the place in the other work. So that's what we read.

1:37 Seth: I think that was a good recommendation. I don't think it was. That was incorrect.

1:42 Mark: It was pretty clear. I mean, he's actually known for being a clear writer among the continental folks and in fact, aggressively rips on people like Hegel and Fichte for being incomprehensible and like, they're just covering up the fact that they have absolutely nothing to say.

1:58 Wes: That is just shiverish favorite part of the whole.

2:03 Seth: Throw a dart anywhere in the text and you'll find some sort of snide comment about he goes off on the academics for not reading his stuff. Do you remember that?

2:13 Wes: Yeah. When he was famously, you know, he'd scheduled his lectures against those of Hegel, and everyone went to Hegel's lectures and he just bitterly hated Hegel. But I'm wondering which parts of the. So he wrote this when he was what, 24? 25. It's his dissertation, right?

2:31 Mark: 25.

2:32 Wes: And then when it got approved back, yeah, he came back and added a lot of stuff when he was older.

2:37 Mark: Yeah. Like 35 years later, he edited. I'm just sure that's when he added all the nasty shit about.

2:42 Wes: Right. I was wondering, because that does sound like an old man.

2:45 Seth: Like, you know, and he also obviously added all of the references. He refers to the world as well and representation all throughout the book. And so those are clearly added at that time.

2:55 Wes: Yep.

2:56 Mark: Yeah. And so the stuff that he's famous for, he's famous for being Nietzsche's favorite philosopher. Right. As the guy behind Nietzsche's idea of the will to power, which was so influential then to Freud.

3:05 Wes: Yep.

3:06 Mark: And that's not the part that we read. This particular essay is just discussing his epistemology. Basically, he really has to go through the whole of his epistemology in the service of this one question. What is the principle of sufficient reason? I actually found the quote from the Monadology from Leibniz that introduces that term. Would you like to hear it?

3:26 Wes: Yes, please.

3:27 Seth: More than anything.

3:28 Mark: So we read Leibniz's Monadology for a past episode, and this probably came up very briefly, but here it is, verse 32 in that. And second, the principle of sufficient reason, in virtue of which we believe that no fact can be real or existing and no statement true unless it has a sufficient reason why it should be thus and not otherwise. Most frequently, however, these reasons cannot be known by us. So he's defined sufficient reason. He defines the principle using the term sufficient reason. So it's not very well elaborated. Certainly right here.

That's what an explanation is for anything that's there. Why is it there? That's the question. And Schopenhauer's big thing really motivating this whole essay is that that's a very vague question and people have specifically mixed up the idea of a causal reason. Right. Why is that? Poop on the floor? Well, because I had my dog in here and he, you know. Or the relation between premises and conclusion. So a logical reason. So he thinks that those have been mixed up to pernicious effect in past philosophers. Like in the arguments for the existence of God that Descartes and others put forward.

4:35 Seth: Yeah, yeah. We might generally say that he thinks that people have conflated reason with cause.

4:40 Mark: Yep.

4:40 Wes: Right.

4:41 Seth: Even the great Kant.

4:43 Mark: Yes. Just to clarify that example a little. So, like, the ontological argument says something like, oh, I have this idea of God, and the idea is so awesome that it must have been caused by something more awesome than it. And what could be more awesome than it? God. That's a very short version of descartes version. But that's right there you can see. Oh, relations between ideas. Schopenhauer was gonna say that's something that logic treats relation between actual things existing in the world. Like a God. No, that should be causality, if anything.

Right. Which if you listen to our Kant episode, you would see that God specifically is something that our knowledge does not extend to. Right. If we sort of keep to our empiricist principles to the extent that Kant buys into them. Right. What do we find in experience? Certainly we're not going to find God in there, even though we do have some abstract stuff that we can find in experience or in specifically in the transcendental grounds for experience. Right. What must be true in order for us to have experience at all. God is not in there. So Schopenhauer is following Kant in a lot of this.

And. But then in the course of this criticizes a lot of the specifics of Kant's epistemology, like the way he breaks down sensibility and the understanding and reason and has his own, I think, more modern version of some of these things. It's like, it's more of like if a scientist is examining how we actually perceive and put together sense data in our heads or something and trying not to impose a theory on it. It's a good step in that direction.

6:10 Seth: Yeah.

6:10 Wes: And just to backtrack to where you talked about the transcendental grounds of experience, the reason why the principle of sufficient reason is important to Schopenhauer is because he's thinking about Kant's concern about asking, what is it that makes experience possible? Or what's the structure of our experience? And one of the things that's really important for Kant is causality, as it was for Hume and others. And the idea is that even for something to count as an experience means that it must be causally structured.

6:43 Mark: Which doesn't mean that every single experience you have is of a cause and an effect. Like you don't necessarily see the cause of any particular thing you see. Right. But you assume that it has to have a cause. It's unthinkable that it could be otherwise. That's built into our expectations.

6:58 Wes: At the very least, it gets complicated with Kant because it's space and time can't really function without causality. So there's a relationship between space and time as structuring experience. And then something like causality, which Kant thinks of as this higher level concept of the understanding, along with other concepts those sort of work on space and time, which in turn work upon the Sensation that's introduced into that to structure experience.

7:28 Seth: You could almost use this as a teaching text for Kant. I mean, he articulates the structure and what he considers to be the strengths and weaknesses of the Critique of Pure Reason remarkably clearly. And I think he actually does a really, really good job of explaining how the difference between intuition and representation, you know, how you have the inner sense and the outer sense, and why you need the faculty of understanding to even create the external world. In fact, I made a little diagram that I will be happy to share. Oh.

8:01 Mark: So Kant's three faculties of the mind that he talks about, if you remember this, were sensibility, the understanding and reason. And sensibility is where we impose space and time. On what do we impose it?

8:13 Wes: On the given, on sensation, the manifold. Kant calls it.

8:17 Mark: Right, but which faculty does it? And I always wondered about this at the time. Like, the faculties didn't to me seem to line up with anything that a psychologist would recognize today. Like, it seemed to be buried in this old timey style faculty psychology. It seemed a little arbitrary. And we even had some disagreement at the time when we were discussing it of, like, what does what? Like, so I'm looking at a pen, and the sensibility recognizes that it's an object in space and time. The understanding sort of groups it into objecthood, right? I mean, because it imposes causality.

It imposes like, number, the fact that it's one as opposed to six pens, that other stuff. And then we added some disagreement. I thought that also just even identifying it as a pen was part of the understanding, that that's part of conceptualization, whereas reason is something sort of higher level that would come in and try to extend concepts about it in terms of how people are misusing reason, that reason is always trying to subsume your generalizations about the things of experience to the widest possible realm and to say, oh, well, see, everything that I experience has causality in it.

Therefore everything that exists, whether I experience it or not, the thing in itself must have causality, and that's reason going crazy. And the ideas of reason, the things that it shoots for are things like God, immortality, the big problems of philosophy that Leibniz and Spinoza and those guys were chasing, that Kant thinks that they were following this too far. They have to understand the appropriate limits of reason.

9:43 Wes: But reason extends the categories of the understanding beyond experience. I think the problem of saying, well, space and time do this versus the understanding does this. They all work together. So that if there were just the intuitions of space and time, you still Wouldn't have experience. Experience. Kant famously says concepts without intuitions are empty and intuitions without concepts are blind. Do I have that right?

10:07 Mark: Yep. Wait, Is it the other way around?

10:09 Wes: It might be the other way around.

10:09 Mark: It's the other way around.

10:11 Wes: For space and time, even to fully do their work, the concepts of the understanding have to come into play and do something that Kant calls schematize them. That's more technical than we need. But so the concepts of the understanding, like, for instance, causality, they do their work to structure empirical sensory experience, but they're also used by reason outside of that realm, and that's where they run into problems. Kant, of course, isn't going to forbid you from thinking about God and freedom and all the things that he does in his, say, the groundwork for the metaphysics of morals and in his theological treatises.

He just is warning you to be cognizant that when you reason about God, you can't think that you're doing the same thing as when you're talking about objects within space and time, or else you'll get into trouble. For instance, his antinomies, where you can basically prove opposite things about God and you run into huge metaphysical disputes and the kinds of things that give philosophy a bad name.

11:09 Mark: So let's talk about then, how Schopenhauer's version of that is different. It seems a little more down to earth that whereas Kant is saying, well, when the understanding gets involved, it brings in these categories of the understanding. Well, how does it apply categories? What does this even mean? In some ways, because I think Schopenhauer gives less detail, he makes it a little easier to match up to some sort of physiological theory that seem accurate.

11:35 Wes: He thinks that what the understanding does is all explainable in terms of this sufficient reason and the four types that he spells out, or the mind in general. I think for him, the categories that Kant lays out, one of which is causality, all really amount to some sort of sufficient reason. So I think that's really what's going on here, where Kant talked about categories of the understanding. Schopenhauer is going to talk about the fourfold root of sufficient reason, but basically he's thinking about what the understanding does to structure experience.

We should describe Kant's. We've already talked about it. But Kant's doctrine of transcendental idealism, which is that we're so constituted, our mind is so constituted that we perceive things temporally, spatially, causally, but there's no space in itself or time in itself, or causality. In itself, if we remove the subject in quote, space and time themselves would disappear. Kant says in the Critique of Pure Reason. And then to go further into the quote, as appearances, they cannot exist in themselves, but only in us. What may be the case with objects in themselves, and abstracted from all this receptivity of our sensibility remains entirely unknown to us.

We are acquainted with nothing except our way of perceiving them, which is peculiar to us. So that's transcendental idealism for Kant, because he wants to distinguish it from something like Berkeleyan idealism, where everything in the world is mental. Kant is rejecting that. He's sort of saying he's agnostic about what the world really is, as in things of themselves. He's not going to make any assertions about whether things in themselves are ideas or matter or any of the things that the old metaphysicians used to debate about. We'll remain agnostic about them, about their existence, about the relationship to our minds, and will just say all we can know about objects is how they are in terms of the way we cognize them as subjects.

And then there's the whole problem of whether or not Kant claimed that things in themselves are causing sensations that we then organize into the phenomenal objects of our experience. Well, maybe, but not in the sense of causation as used as a category of the understanding, you know.

13:51 Mark: Right. That's very technical. I'm glad you pointed out to that specific point, because that's one of the ways that Schopenhauer diverges, that he specifically says that can't use the term causality to refer to the relation of the thing in itself to our experience. Causality is something within experience, period. That's the whole point of this. Breaking down the principle of sufficient reason into these categories is to say each of these covers a particular realm. So we already talked about causality, and that covers the things of our experience, what we call material objects.

And then another one is this logical entailment talking about concepts, not real things in the world, just these abstractions that we use to categorize things, to generalize about things and the relation between those. And so you can do all your formal logic, but that's a very different thing than talking about anything in the world. So this kind of sounds like Hegel's logic. That's what he's really objecting to here. The fact that you could talk about, oh, this phenomena, a logical consequent in the world, is that, you know, an opposite phenomena is going to come about the thesis and the antithesis and the synthesis.

And you can see this parallel between what happens in logic, between what happens when an organism develops and what happens in a society develops. You know, the progression of history, all this, you know, Hegel was all about these parallelisms all over the place. Schopenhauer is entirely about saying, no, causality is one thing, logical entailment is another thing. And then the other two, just to give the names of them here, are being in space and time. Two things can't be in the same spot at the same time. There's not a causal reason for that.

It's just that that's the nature of space.

15:25 Wes: So arithmetic and geometry come out of that.

15:27 Mark: Yes, and that they're intuitively obvious. And then the last one is the law of motives, this experience we have of ourselves as willing creatures. You know, how our motives drive us to do various things. Anyway, so there's more to say about that. And that in fact, that fourth one is sort of the. The window into the whole other side of Schopenhauer's philosophy that we're only going to really touch on today, which is all about the will again. And so this entire essay is just all about. This is what we can know. Here are the four ways we can know things. Anything outside that we can't know about it really is a very. Just negative, skeptical kind of thing.

16:02 Wes: All of it starts with his reconceptualization of the role of causality. Specifically, he's thinking about the human body as a strange intermediate type of physical object to which we have access.

16:14 Seth: So we have this, the four different objects which are subject to their own variations of the principle of sufficient reason. The objects being the external world, motives, I guess, the pure concepts or the pure intuitions. And then also the fourth one, which is logical entailment. Right. Representations.

16:34 Mark: Representations is kind of the whole thing. I wouldn't write that.

16:38 Seth: Okay, well, let's just say this. The first class of objects that he talks about, which he spends, you know, half the book, half the book on, is what he calls empirical representations, what we would call the external world. And he wants to be clear that he's talking about the external world and not ideas and not logical abstractions and all that sort of thing. So Schopenhauer is committed to this subject object. I hesitate to use the word ontology. That's not the right thing, but a subject object construct, knowledge is knowledge of the object by the subject.

That's the structure that he's inherited, and that's what he's trying to rationalize here. He wants to make clear that there is no such thing as an unmediated object or just an object in itself that comes prancing through our senses, whole and complete, into our consciousness. And he spends a fair amount of time talking about examples of how, for example, the image on the retina is inverted and the brain has to do a whole bunch of calculation to turn the image back around, otherwise we'd see the world upside down. And he says if you just think about your picture of the world and you imagine that picture coming sort of whole and complete through your eyes into your head, it's completely ridiculous.

And it's actually a pretty charming and convincing argument that sensation does not have what it takes to give you the, what we would call the external world. So let's go ahead and start there.

18:08 Mark: I like that. I just heard, and we used on the last, on our Kant episode, the analogy that people give for Kant of the rose colored glasses. But the rose colored glasses just filter something out. We still are seeing everything we would normally see. So that makes it sound like, well, I don't know what the world is like for aliens. They could like perceive those extra senses, but we only have the five senses. So we distill the world down to those five senses and. But we get it. But that still sounds like the world is, at least insofar as it can fit through our filters, is being shoved into us.

Whereas the. This picture is like, no, no, no. Sensibility, sensation. This is the contrast with Kant's faculty of sensibility, which is this kind of more sophisticated thing that has imposes space and time on stuff. But sensation itself gives us almost nothing, very little. And all has to get put together by our minds, by the understanding and what's the raw sense data coming in and what processing is going on in the brain to make 3D images or whatever.

19:07 Seth: He talks about it in a number of different ways, but he does spend some very specific time saying that if you really think about what raw sense data is, and he specific the way he does mention the five senses, but he focuses on sight and touch. He says if you just think about what comes through raw sensation visually, and then you take a look at what you actually get out of it to create the external world, like for example, the perception of depth, like that's huge, right? There's no three dimensions in visual imagery. What comes to you is just simply impressions in two dimensions.

And your brain has to construct perspective and the third dimension. That's part of, of what you do to process the information and he makes the point that you're doing this, you're not doing it consciously. It's not a rational, conscious action. This is his meaning of the word intuitive that he, you know, he takes from Kant. We intuit. It's what the understanding does, is the understanding takes all of this information and it puts it together to create this external world. So the world is a construct of the understanding. But that doesn't mean that you can create the world simply through your own inner mind or simply through the understanding.

And so he talks about the combination of two different things. One thing he calls the outer sense and one he calls the inner sense. The outer sense is what we might think of as sensations that impact our five senses. Sight, sound, taste, touch, smell. And he makes a point of saying that the structure of the possibility experience of this type is space.

20:41 Mark: It requires both space and time.

20:43 Seth: Oh, wait, I'm getting there.

20:45 Mark: Saying outer sense requires both, but whereas

20:47 Seth: inner sense, no, the external world requires both. What he says is that if you just strictly take the notion of outer sense, that the structure of that is space, and then we have the inner sense, which he says is representation. And that has as its structure time or succession. And it's the combination of sensation and representation, space and time, the subject and the object that the understanding then brings together and basically intuits this concept of causality on it. And you get the objective world.

21:21 Mark: It sounds like he's really saying the understanding in one mental act applies causality and space and time.

21:27 Wes: Sensibility is applying space and time, and the understanding applies causality. Right.

21:33 Mark: See, that's Kant's view. I thought that.

21:35 Seth: I don't think that's what Schopenhauer is saying.

21:36 Wes: Right.

21:37 Mark: That the senses give you very little about even space. Like the fact that to know that something is an object in space, you have to move your hand around it and feel on all the sides. Certainly not 3D space.

21:50 Wes: That's Kant's views as well.

21:52 Mark: But just the way he analyzes it, that the understanding is the thing which he's really just. The understanding is the mind, whereas sensibility is the senses, the five senses. Like he really makes it concrete, as opposed to these. Oh, they're all faculties of the mind and they work together in these complex ways that are unobservable. This is supposed to be, like, scientifically observable, that we get a certain brightness coming from a certain direction and a certain brightness on another part of my retina coming from another direction. And that's all we get from the senses. And we have to Put that together.

22:20 Wes: He's just rehashing Kantianism, except he's using the brain and the retina and things like that.

22:28 Mark: But isn't he relabeling what Kant's faculties were? I mean, he kind of just really. You might as well just say he's throwing away Kant's model of the mind in favor of something that is functionally close to it, but is really. It's not faculty psychology at all, I don't think. It's just here's the five senses and they're giving us stuff. And the structure that Seth just related between inner and outer sense, the inner

22:49 Wes: and outer sense is all Kant. That's not the innovation that Schopenhauer is bringing to this.

22:54 Seth: I didn't say it was an innovation. I just think he's doing a pretty. This is a very clear way of explaining how you must have the understanding in order to have an external world and that there is no external world without the understanding. He says you can have this inner sense where we do representation or represent, and it occurs purely in time, not in space. Right.

23:18 Mark: And it's second order, it's perceptions of your perceptions. Right. You're dwelling in time on the individual things that come in through your senses and putting them together.

23:27 Wes: Also, inner sense consists of things like emotions and all the things that you experience that are temporal but are not objects within space. So outer sense is time and space.

23:39 Seth: That is not at all how I understood this. And later on, when he talks about the form of will, he's going to talk about the form of inner self consciousness, being in time alone.

23:51 Wes: I think we're agreeing there.

23:52 Mark: I have a quote that supports Seth's interpretation here, which is section 19. All immediate knowledge is nevertheless acquired by the subject through the inner sense alone. The outer sense being again object for the inner, which in turn perceives the perceptions of the outer. So in other words, outer sense is your five senses collecting thing. It's not in time and in space. It's just them collecting this raw data that then is sort of considered by the inner sense. And it's like we're observing and that's where we have. I mean, the senses themselves don't have a structure of subject and object or something like that. That's our experience as a whole, which he says are immediate. That's what we call our experience is really all this inner sense where we're dwelling on the results that have come in from sensibility, from the senses. And so that's this consideration in time.

24:39 Seth: Right.

24:39 Wes: This is outer Sense. If you were to draw a diagram, which I have, the outer sense, in a way, ironically falls as a little sphere or circle within inner sense. But again, that's Kant. What we can say is that you're given sense, data, raw sensation. What Kant called the manifold. And what Schopenhauer goes into great detail here describing, for instance, spots on the retina. And that requires structuring by the mind in order to be considered an experience at all.

25:11 Seth: It requires structuring by the mind to be considered an object at all. There's no objectivity and no object without the subject.

25:18 Wes: Right. Can I touch on what I think is the important innovation over Kant here? I think Schopenhauer, what he spends much of the time doing in the section, I don't think the inner and the. I mean, that's all taken straight out of the Critique of Pure Reason. What Kant added years later when he had to elaborate his transcendental idealism because he was accused of being a Berkeleyan. And that's where you get all the inner and outer sense stuff. I think the innovation is where Kant thought of causality as strictly about being between external objects and the subjects.

In order to have an experience of objects, they had to be thoroughgoingly, causally interconnected. Schopenhauer is worried about a particular kind of causality which is between the human body and objects. And he thinks that that is actually the most important element of how causality grounds experience. And so that's this relationship between inner sense and outer sense, where at the same time we're both having sensations in our bodies and yet we are externally referring them to objects outside of us. That externalizing feature where we think of ourselves as being affected by objects outside of us is critical to creating this objective, empirical world.

And that's something, I think, Seth, you were getting at this. But that's something that Kant does ignore.

26:40 Mark: So is the kind of example you're talking about, the one that I started to describe about the way I know that an object is in space. One of the ways I can know is by feeling around it. So it has to do with the causal interaction between my hand and the thing as I feel around it. So I'm taking an active role in creating the experiences that then I can put together to synthesize to say, this is an object in 3D space.

27:02 Wes: So all of those sensations that I'm having, I'm collecting them together as one. But for Schopenhauer, critically, I'm attributing them all to the same object outside of me. Right. So it's not just like I'm having a bunch of sensations and I'm like, oh, my body feels. It's interesting, you know, I have these feelings all over my body. They're automatically outwardly referenced and causally referenced. I'm always thinking of them as caused. That's something that Kant ignores. And I think Schopenhauer is right about this. It's critical to constructing our world of objects, this idea that we are ordering all our sensations spatially and temporally, but always we have to causally attribute them to this single object outside of us.

And even though we're temporarily running around the object, looking at different perspectives, feeling it, it's critical that they all get attributed to this as being caused by this single object. Kant is thinking about causes as in the causal relationships between all those objects out there. He's not thinking about the causal relationship between all those objects out there and my body as the sort of mediator between inner sense and the outer.

28:15 Mark: Now, how does this map to the inner and outer sense thing?

28:18 Wes: Because the inner sense, right, is all the, is all the self attributions of sensations, right? All we would have, you know, the immediate sensory manifold are visual sensations and then feeling sensations. Now individually those things are temporal. They would succeed one another. But in order to build them up spatially, in order to have the idea of them belonging to one spatial object, I have to say that they have been caused by the same thing out there and that allows me to hold them together. So outer sense is built up afterwards, the inner sense of all my sensations.

I'm not just saying, right, I have, oh, you know, again, I have all these feelings and look, they're succeeding in time. To get outer sense, I've got to go further than that. And that's where causality comes in as crucial to giving me outer sense. Outer sense is built up on this inference, or whatever you want to call it, that all the sequence, this temporal sequence of inner affectations is attributable to something out there that's unified. That's one that doesn't seem to accord

29:21 Mark: with what you were saying, Seth.

29:23 Seth: No, well, I mean, look, I'm happy to defer. The key point here is that there's this faculty of understanding that does all of this work to create what we call the empirical representations, which is to say the external world. The external world is not given. And raw sense data is not sufficient to even give us something like an idea or anything like that. You can't even have a concept of an object without all this work being done. So, you know, what Wes was saying was, oh, I touch this thing and I feel all around it. And then I realize that it all belongs to the same object. No, you create the concept that it is a single object in your understanding.

29:59 Wes: I think those are the same. I don't see why we're disagreeing.

30:02 Seth: It's a different way of saying it so that you don't focus on there being a quote unquote object out there that you then piece together sensations of. Instead, your understanding determines what's considered what. What is an object and what it's distinct from. The only point I wanted to make about the time space component was that the form of pure sensibility that is time is something that we have internally. And the form of pure sensibility of space is something that applies to sensations. And that these two things, when brought together, are what then allow you to create the objective external world.

In fact, create the concept of objects and an external world. It seemed to me that the sense of time applies to some kind of inner life and the sense of space applies to some kind of outer life. And together, you put it all together, and then you get the world. And of course, you as an object in it, your body, yourself as an object in it. Because your experience of your own body is itself sensory experience as well, at a certain level, or at least looked at from one perspective.

31:08 Wes: Well, we have a double. What he calls a double experience of our own body. Right.

31:11 Seth: Yeah, exactly.

31:12 Wes: And that's where inner and outer come in again, because in one sense, the body is an outer object, outer object of outer sense, you know, which we experience as an object. But on the other hand, it's an object of inner sense in the sense of we know what it's like. You know, we have feelings in the body that we experience directly.

31:28 Seth: Yeah.

31:29 Mark: So I don't think that the analogy that we're playing around with or that, you know, it's like the outer sense goes and gets space and then feeds it to the inner sense, which does the examination as the time element. I don't think it works that way. I think we need to say the five senses gather what dead information that they have. This very, you know, light coming at this side of my retina now. And all that gets put together. I mean, you could say it's an inner sense. And that's what that quote that I said. All knowledge is nevertheless acquired by the subject through the inner sense alone.

The outer sense, again, being object for the inner, which I think is just really peculiar. That you've got this self consciousness built into perception. I just think that's pretty remarkable. But in any case, it's that act of the inner sense that is really adding all this. It's adding everything the understanding adds. And like you were saying, obviously it depends on what it has at its disposal, what kind of things it's going to come up with.

32:21 Wes: Yes, thanks for listening to this episode preview. I know it stopped just when things were getting really good, so please go download the full episode. You can purchase it in the music section of the itunes store or at partiallyexaminedlife.com store, where you can become a Partially Examined Life citizen and get expanded access to our hefty back catalog, a heap of bonus content, and earn the right to participate in not school online discussion groups with other listeners. Go to partiallyexaminelife.com membership for details.