Episode 114: Schopenhauer: “The World Is Will”

0:07 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 114 is something like what ultimately makes up the world? And we read Arthur Schopenhauer's the World as will and Representation, Volume 1, Book 2, first published in 1818. You can join the discussion, get the text and lots More information@PartiallyExaminedLife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, existing primarily as a lower level of objectification of the will, in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:38 Seth: This is Seth Paskin in Austin, Texas.

0:40 Wes: This is Wes Alwan, as innocent as a plant in Boston, Massachusetts.

0:46 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey Just Being Gravity in Middleton, Wisconsin.

0:51 Mark: Why the ground rules?

0:54 Wes: There is no ground.

0:55 Seth: There is no ground.

0:59 Dylan: There is only will.

1:00 Wes: It is groundless.

1:02 Mark: Number one, try not to assume our audience has read what we're talking about or has any other background in philosophy, although we'll refer to our Kant episodes, I'm sure, plenty of times. And actually, we did one on Schopenhauer a while back. Not the recent one on art and literature and things, but the older one on the. What was the name of that book?

1:21 Wes: Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason.

1:24 Mark: Exactly. Which he refers to in this book all the time.

1:27 Wes: Yes, he loves himself.

1:31 Mark: Number two, don't make arguments that hinge on something other than what we've agreed to read. What we've agreed to read in this case, just being book two of the. You know, I don't even want to. The volume one, volume two, Volume three. That's just because years later he decided he had to write appendices. So really the book proper is volume one. I have it as a paper book here. And within that there are four, what he calls books. The first one is the World as Idea. So it's actually very redundant of that episode we already had, or the World as representation or presentation, depending on your translation.

So that's all about the phenomenal world, the world of science, the world that we can know something about in ordinary way through perception. But the one we're focusing on is the second book, the World as Will. First aspect, the objectification of the will, which is all about what is the world, not as we experience it, but as it is in itself. Well, it is will, so we'll figure out what that means.

2:26 Wes: So, yeah. And the way to think about these four books is the first one, Epistemology, the second one, Metaphysics, the third one, Aesthetics, and then the fourth, Ethics.

2:35 Dylan: Mark, you Opened the podcast that the question for the day was something, what is the world made of?

2:40 Mark: Sure.

2:40 Dylan: Yeah. I just wondered how many podcasts we have that have that beginning.

2:45 Mark: Surprisingly, not that many compared to the other things, because we don't talk about metaphysics that often. One of the previous ones. If people are looking for other earlier episodes to listen to before this one. If you want to know the whole the world is an illusion kind of thing, his premise of the first book that we're not talking about today, the one on Berkeley, he really takes Berkeley very seriously here.

3:07 Dylan: Yeah.

3:07 Wes: And I think that's a good segue into some of the background to this, which is that Schopenhauer, like Kant and like Berkeley, is an idealist. I think that's something we haven't really emphasized about Kant in the past when explaining him, but it's true.

3:20 Dylan: Say what an idealist is, Wes.

3:23 Wes: It's all in your head, man. So for an idealist, what, the world consists of at least one aspect of the world. Right. Even though, for Schopenhauer, will say the world is will, it is also representation. The world as we know it consists of our ideas, and that's because that's the only way to which we have access to the world. So for Kant, he spelled this out in great detail as a theory of the way in which the mind constructs the world through these forms of intuition, space and time, and forms of the understanding, including especially causality. So these things aren't really out there. And the things in themselves, according to Kant, it's not. The things in themselves are unknowable. They're not spatial, they're not temporal. Those are forms that we provide with our own minds. And so what we call objects really are appearances or are representations or what Berkeley would call ideas.

4:18 Mark: What you're giving is Schopenhauer's positive interpretation of Kant. He thinks Kant contradicts himself all over the place. And at the end of my paper copy, in addition to the four books, was a lengthy, and I know, written much later critique of the Kantian philosophy that I looked at just the beginning of, because it's like over 100 pages going quite in depth through the Critique of Pure Reason. And he says that Kant changed his mind, that in the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, he gave straight up idealist arguments like the ones that he approves of, that the world of experience is an illusion in some sense.

In fact, Schopenhauer even uses vocabulary from Eastern philosophy to describe this. It's the veil of Maya, or you could think of our Buddhism episode where ultimately what we experience has no foundation. It is nothing. However, in the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, according to Schopenhauer, Kant backtracked a lot, and he added a section, for instance, called Refutation of Idealism, that he was very concerned, not to be confused with Berkeley. And so the big difference here, I think, is that Schopenhauer says, as you just described Kant very positively, one of the operations of the mind in putting experience together is to add causality, add space, add time, that therefore the things in themselves before they get to us, before they get to our experience, can't have those at all.

However, I always interpreted Kant, and we don't have to agree right now what Kant's real view is on this, that Kant just thought, we just can't know. Like, we know for sure that everything has to be causal and spatial and temporal precisely because those are structures of the mind. But what things may be outside, what things may be in themselves, who knows? So he, I think, is agnostic about whether there is multiplicity in the thing in itself or whether it's all one. But Schopenhauer, without actually, frankly, a lot of argument to this effect, says that, yes, positively, we can say that the thing in itself, this will that we're going to talk about is.

Is one.

6:14 Wes: So I don't think Schopenhauer is quite right about this, and any reader of Kant, by the way, when you read the Critique of Pure Reason, you're reading both editions at once. And his disagreement with Berkeley is really, Berkeley thinks we have access to the things in themselves. The things in themselves are ideas. Kant's refutation of Berkeley is that we don't have access to the things in themselves. So Kant really reinforces this lack of access point in his second edition where he gives this distinction between he calls himself an empirical realist and a transcendental idealist.

So, for instance, he says, this is Kant representations, when they're called external, doesn't mean that they are external in themselves, because they relate to perceptions in space, but space itself is in us. So he continues to say things like that in the second edition. I think his dispute with Berkeley is a little bit more technical because for Kant, objectivity rests on this sort of internal relation between the understanding and the constructed world, whereas for Berkeley, it rests on this external relation between our minds and God. So, anyway, I don't want to get us down that rabbit hole, but that's what I'll say about that.

7:19 Mark: But just that we started this by saying what is an idealist? And is Schopenhauer, is Kant an idealist in the sense that Berkeley definitely is? I mean, Berkeley is the paradigm case of an idealist. If the definition of idealism is what is the world ultimately made up of? If answer is ideas, then neither Kant nor Schopenhauer are idealists. They're only idealists about the phenomenal world, about the objective world as described by science. You can, you know, test something and go back and test it again. It's not subjective, it's not in my individual head. It's a shared delusion, if it's a delusion at all. But that's why you could say in the title of this that one aspect of the world is how it appears to us. So it is reality. Science describes reality, but it's just a weird kind of reality that's only in human minds, really.

8:04 Wes: It's just reality is in our minds.

8:07 Mark: Yeah, yes. And then this other aspect that Schopenhauer thinks that he somehow can get access to, that maybe Kant doesn't, is the thing in itself the numena, the will.

8:16 Wes: So this is a good segue into section 17 of book two. So he's done this whole, in the first book description of his version of idealism. And then the question becomes, well, how do we avoid solipsism? That's really the question of section 17. If we say that the world is just our representations, how do we say that all of us can be in the same room and look at the same table and have an objective perception of the same thing? So the way he talks about this is, he talks about, well, what is the significance of the representations, what determines their content and so on and so forth. So really he's asking the question of what mind independent thing is there, that that's going to give us some grounding of our individual representations so that there can be this larger objectivity?

9:05 Dylan: Well, but he spends most of that chapter reinforcing how clear the appearances are and how much we know about them. This whole section on natural science and ideology.

9:15 Mark: Not ideology, it's etiology.

9:17 Dylan: This weird E I in front of it. It's E, T, I, O. So it's etiology.

9:21 Wes: Yeah, yeah, But I think it is sometimes spelled an ei. Right?

9:24 Mark: Could be in any case. Right. It's the study of how things change.

9:28 Dylan: Yes.

9:29 Wes: It's a study of causal effect, connections between things. Yeah, yeah.

9:33 Dylan: So he spends a long time laying out how these kinds of descriptions of the knowledge of cause and effect and give an account of natural force and laws of nature, but then ultimately just says, but that's not enough. That's not really the thing in itself. And I guess besides laying out what he means by this etiology, the development of natural force, development of a law of nature, exactly where that turns and falls short. And his explanation for that, that's the turn that I'd like us to be able to say a fair bit about eventually. Because on the face of it, it sounds like he just says it's just an assertion. It's not at all clear how it would be apparent in any way that you missed that part.

10:18 Wes: I think the overall argument here is a very simple one, which is that we need something to avoid solipsism.

10:26 Mark: Can you read a quote? Because I actually don't see the point that you're making in this text at all. I'm interpreting it quite differently than this.

10:33 Wes: Well, he calls it egotism.

10:35 Mark: Okay, so this is not in section 17, then you're just jumping ahead?

10:39 Wes: No, no, because he implies it. The question of this section is. So in the second paragraph, the significance of the representation of perception. So a lot like. Mark, you looked at that appendix on the critique of Kant, and I looked at it as well. This is really kind of a restatement of his critique of Kant's thing in itself, because basically what he says here is that Kant thinks he needs some sort of mind independent entity to ground representations. And it's modeled on this subject object distinction where an object basically is causing the representation in me. And that's kind of what Kant says about the thing in itself, which according to Schopenhauer is completely illegitimate because causality is supposed to be just another form of representation, another thing that the mind supplies. We've already gotten rid of causality.

11:30 Mark: In fact, for Schopenhauer, it's the only thing that it is in essence. Space and time and matter, those are all like really one thing. It's not a table of categories. But in any case, yeah, his fourfold

11:41 Wes: root is basically everything is reducible to causality or the principle of sufficient reason for Schopenhauer. So basically his argument that says we need some sort of mind independent entity, it can't be Kant's thing in itself because we can't have causality operating on things in themselves. Math and science doesn't tell us the answer either, because they just give us the orderly arrangement of representations in space and time. They provide the form, so they can't give us, quote unquote, the inner nature of the phenomena, which turns out to be something like Force.

So Schopenhauer's argument is a process of elimination. He's saying we need some ground, but it cannot be the Kantian thing in itself. He really. He's not going to give the answer until section 18, where he's going to use the body as this thing that we have dual access to, to say, look, this is where it is. But he's more framing the problem here and critiquing Kant's solution to it. But this really is about avoiding solipsism, even if he doesn't directly say it. In this section, I have a response,

12:39 Mark: but I want to hear from Seth first, because we haven't heard from him at all.

12:43 Seth: I went straight to the section on the body. He actually does a much better job in book three, the first couple chapters, when he talks about Platonic ideals, where he outlines the difference between Plato and Kant that frames all this. But we can't jump there, so we're stuck.

12:56 Mark: All right, let me just give my response to Wes and then you can jump ahead and start us on the body. I agree that in this section 17, the point is, here's a quote. We wish to know the significance of these ideas. We ask whether this world is merely idea, in which case it would pass by us like an empty dream or a base vision not worth our notice. Or whether it is also something else, something more than an idea, and if so, what? So it's almost that there's a humanistic, a philosophical need to know more than just the surface of things. I don't think that the specific problem that is motivating him, it might have been motivating Kant, is how is it that when you and I both look at a table, that it's the same table?

Because actually Schopenhauer's solution wouldn't help us there. Because if the in itself, the. The thing in itself is just a one unified will that doesn't distinguish the table from me or you or anything else, then that is not going to be the thing that unifies our various manifold of perceptions around the table.

13:47 Wes: No, but it does unify. The idealist theory is we're in a matrix, so how are we there together? We have to be plugged into the same computer. And then the question is, how are you going to describe that same computer? Is it this object outside of itself which causes our representations? Or is it the Schopenhauerian version that's the goal of this, to put us in the same world together, Otherwise why else would we need a thing in itself? Right? What other Function. Could it possibly serve other than.

14:11 Mark: Your objection is noted. Let's pick a quote out as we go. Or. Seth, do you have.

14:14 Seth: I don't know that we need that much more. Idealism in the strictest sense makes people uncomfortable. Philosophers don't like the idea that everything is idea precisely because it makes it difficult to explain what Wes just said. And not only that, the fact that Schopenhauer is building from and on top of Kant's framework, and he's very exercised to point out all the ways in which he thinks Kant was wrong and how he's going to rectify that, is really all you need to know about the motivation behind what he's doing here.

14:44 Dylan: I just had one question about 17. To me, it turned on in the middle of it, he says, after explaining cause and effect, I meant this phrase natural force, and I wanted to see where he nails that down. At bottom. However, this is talking about etiology. It does nothing more than show the orderly arrangement according to which the states or conditions appear in space and time, and teaches for all cases that phenomena must necessarily appear at this time and in this place. It therefore determines for them their position in time and space according to a law whose definite content has been taught by experience, yet whose universal form and necessity are known to us independently of experience.

But in this way we do not obtain the slightest information about the inner nature of any one of these phenomena. This is called a natural force. It lies outside the province of an etiological explanation.

15:38 Wes: Were you reminded of Leibniz in any of this? And vis viva, do you remember that from our Leibniz episode?

15:44 Dylan: There's a lot of vis viva. Yeah, in this section. And then after what I just read, and he does this throughout the book, he emphasizes how much we know and how tied to causal relations everything is. And then he'll say, but we don't know what's on the inside.

16:02 Mark: Right?

16:02 Dylan: We don't know what those forces are in themselves, but those forces all give rise to explicitly causal relations. And I found myself over and over and over again feeling like he was regularly just undermining himself. He was presenting an incredibly strong argument that the world is just plain before us, and then saying, but we don't see the inside of it. Then he would go back and explain how plain before us it is, and then say, oh, but we don't know. And except for something like saying, well, we don't know what causes those motions, that inner force, it seemed to me that all you would have to do is say, well, the world is plainly just the manifestations of those motions and it's laid out before us.

And so I was constantly confused about what was the sign that we knew that there was this leftover stuff. Unless it's really just. That's the point of idealism, is that you come to this. It's a philosophical conundrum in no way associated with anything in the world.

17:06 Wes: So this is why I jumped on what I see as the fundamental motivation, even though it's kind of only hinted at here in the part Mark read in section 18, but he talks about it in numerous other sections, this avoidance of what he calls in section 19, theoretical egotism, because like the idea of needing to know the inner nature of things. I think I agree with you, Dylan. That's not motivation enough. It would never occur to. Well, I'm not sure that that's true. I'd have to think about that more.

17:32 Mark: Yeah, I think that fundamentally his motivation is religious, that he's been influenced by Buddhism and Hinduism and he even says toward the very end of this. And what we're going to get at more in our discussion of aesthetics, book three, for our next episode, is that we actually can have an intuition about the thing in itself. Unlike he acknowledges with Kant that the only way that we know things in the ordinary sense is through what he calls the principle of sufficient reason. In other words, through our experience, through our eyes and ears, and then using our minds to make generalizations about that.

And so what science is, is just a bunch of patterning, noting regularities in things. And all causation is just, and this sounds just like Hume, I mean, you know, that's where Kant picked it up, is just, you know, noticing regularities between things. That's all causation is. But there's no. When we think, of course, pre Hume, what causation it is, we think that there must be some necessary connection between this thing happening and then this thing follows. But with Hume, no, no, no, it's just patterns. And I think that's what Schopenhauer thinks that science is measuring.

But if we want to get back necessity, if we want to get back, well, what really made this thing follow this thing, then we would have to know something about the inner nature of things. And no, just straight up observation is supposed to give us that. So he thinks that science, even though he's already described it in book one, that, oh, it's just, you know, we make observations and we generalize about them. But no, the way that we actually do science, when we bring in a notion like force, is we're bringing in something that really could not be straight up given to us by the data.

19:05 Wes: Yeah, let's explain that a little bit more. Why don't you explain what that means exactly?

19:10 Mark: Well, we're going to have many sections on this.

19:13 Wes: I think I'm just. You brought up this thing on causality. I mean, I think the fundamental intuition is that causality, or a force is not something you can see or touch. It doesn't come in through the senses. So the idea is that what comes in through the senses are these, let's say, frames in a film series and the connections between them are not themselves empirical objects. And that's the intuition that bothered Hume and bothered Kant.

19:37 Dylan: But Schopenhauer goes way past that. The problem that I'm having is just the vigor with which he presents these etiological and cause and effect relationship. And they are that way for everyone. But now I have this thing underlying that. I found his bringing in of will or vis viva, or an internal motion of the world as being the source of those causal relations as very interesting. But I found it kind of strange that he wants to have the will be so different, yet so tied to representation. And after a while I was like, well, what the hell's the difference? There's not any difference at all between them.

20:22 Mark: So one of the big problems he's going to have throughout here is saying what the relationship is of the thing in itself, of will to the phenomena. And he can't say, like he's already said, Kant mistakenly said that it's causal. So you can't say ultimately the force of gravity, for instance, causes anything. He has to say that, no, it's the Earth, because it's close to the Moon, causes the orbit and you can talk about the regularity. And that's really all science does. But that the notion of the force of gravity, that's a term we use in science, but it's really picking out something that goes underneath science. Like, we don't really. All that science is strictly concerned with is the regularity, is Newton's laws of motion and things.

21:03 Wes: Yeah, you mathematically describe a relationship between the appearances. You give an equation for the way the Earth is going to move around the sun. And force is not itself, again an empirical observable thing. It's something we attribute to it by projecting our feelings of being impressed upon or our feelings of being pushed. Really, force is a projection of this subjective idea and it doesn't lie within the realm of representation. For Schopenhauer, what he's going to Replace causality with is, of course, unity. It's going to be a dual aspect theory where will and representation are two sides of the same coin.

It's just that you. And this kind of. Is a good segue again into the next section. It's just that they're a different form of access to the same thing, which our body is a perfect example of, because it's the one thing that we have this dual access to. Right? Our body is a form of subjective experience, but it's also an object in space and time that we sense as something external to us. It's got both internality and externality.

22:08 Seth: Is there anything wrong with starting from that? What if we take the argument this way? Schopenhauer says, look, if you think about your experience in your body, it's a starting point for understanding the world in kind of two different ways. The first is through the senses, and the second is what he calls through the body. So in one sense, the body is a representation among representations. What he means by that when he says representation, he just means object, object in the strictest subject, object sense that we're used to talking about. Where there are objects that are in space and time subject to the laws of causality that appear and are present for knowing subjects in the Kantian sense, where you apply these categories of time, space, causality, number those sorts of things, and your body can be like that.

But then you also are presented with what he calls internal motives that aren't subject to the same laws that govern representations. And you have an experience of yourself that's sui generis, not a part of everything else that's going on. And there's a way to think about what he's saying here is saying this experience in our body presents us with the fundamental problem that we see in idealism, where we see the world as this regular interaction between objects. But there's something else going on that provides continuity, that gives us a sense of identity, that creates individuation and so on and so forth.

So I was reading him not necessarily as saying something to the effect of here's the historical problem and here's my solution to it, but taking more of a phenomenological approach and saying, here is the experience that we have and what does it tell us about the way in which the world presents itself to us and then tying it back into these historical themes. Is that outrageous?

24:05 Wes: I think we basically. I mean, I just see 17 he sets up the problem, and 18 he says the body is the key to solving the problem. I see 17 is a yes.

24:14 Mark: What's the inner nature? And, hey, we have our own access to inner nature. At least of some part of it. So there you go.

24:20 Wes: Yeah, he sets himself up a real softball and then hits it out of the park. Really, this is one of the most fascinating things about Schopenhauer. As he thought about this dual aspect of the body that. I don't think listeners can correct me if I'm wrong. I don't think Kant ever thought about that or addressed it well.

24:36 Mark: And it's nice that he. In saying we've got a whole new ontological area. When we look at things from the perspective of our own internal dynamics, our own minds. Is that he brings pleasure and pain into that. That pain is not a sensation. Like the sensation of a rough surface. Or the sensation upon my eyes of the color red. Pain is not like that. Pain is just the will being confronted by something.

25:02 Wes: He calls it an impression on the will.

25:04 Mark: An impression on the will. That's interesting.

25:07 Wes: Yeah. We should definitely talk about what the will is. I think this section is the only one that really goes into it. What's odd is anyone with a background in philosophy. Is used to thinking about the will as having more to do with rational will. Right. Acting according to reasons and morality and things like that.

25:25 Mark: Yes. Even pre. Not even action, just intention.

25:28 Wes: Yeah. But he takes pains to say that that's not what he means. It's more like any movement. So he says things like every willing is also a movement of the body. It's not that second before you act. It's the whole unified phenomena of the movement of something. And then the internal thing that goes along with that movement.

25:50 Mark: Here's a quote, just to give his words. The act of will and the movement of the body. Are not two different things objectively known. Which the bond of causality unites. They do not stand in the relation of cause and effect. They are one and the same. But they are given in entirely different ways. Immediately and again in perception for the understanding. So immediately on the case of the will, perceiving your body sort of from the outside.

26:11 Wes: So your movement is like. It's the same thing from two different perspectives. It's the movement in the world of representation. What it feels like is like desire. Right. Or it could be desire or any number of other things. Whatever subjective feelings and experience goes along with this movement. I'm trying to avoid words which make it sound like it's causing it. But it's hard to do.

26:31 Dylan: You know, the way he does it is he says the Action of the body is nothing but the act of will, objectified, translated into perception. And he very soon takes this as far as you can take it. Every object, every perception is an objectification of will.

26:48 Mark: Every perception, yes.

26:50 Wes: It's not an objectification of my own will, but it's an objectification.

26:53 Dylan: Objectification of will in general. Right?

26:55 Mark: Yes. Yeah. Because everything.

26:56 Dylan: Everything is right.

26:57 Wes: Everything.

26:58 Dylan: And at the very last section of this book, he has a couple other ways of describing will. He says that the essential nature of will in itself is endless striving. He says eternal becoming, endless flux belong to the revelation of the essential nature of the will. So to me, it was will was understanding. The most essential feature of the world is motion, internal self, movingness.

27:26 Wes: Yeah. And I thought, like Mark, starting out with pain and pleasure is important because he basically says pain and pleasure aren't representations. Right. So that's really radical. Of course, Kant thought they were representations, and Kant thought of the will as sort of a part of empirical psychology, not this kind of metaphysical stuff. So pain and pleasure not being representations means that we have some kind of knowledge or experience. For Schopenhauer, that doesn't fall within the world of representation, which is part of what's so radical now about what he's saying. It's experience and yet it's not experience, at least in this German idealist tradition of what Kant would say is experience. It's not representation. It's experience, yet not representation.

28:10 Mark: And it's related to the sense organs, of course. In fact, he says any sense organ, if you overload it, you get pain. Right. So that right there. But it's not like we have a special sense organ. He thinks for pain or for pleasure.

28:23 Wes: Yeah. It's pain when it's contrary to the will, and gratification or pleasure when in accordance with the will. It's page 101.

28:30 Dylan: And so in some respect, that would be the sign of the will. Right. Is you have experience without objectification. In the case of pain and pleasure, your will is being impinged upon, and it's experienced as pain and pleasure. And those are.

28:45 Mark: It certainly involves objectification because you perceive something as hurting you.

28:49 Dylan: No, not necessarily. If you just itch all over yourself.

28:52 Mark: That's true.

28:53 Dylan: Right. There's all kinds of pain you have that has nothing to do with being impinged upon.

28:57 Wes: Yeah, but it's internal. But it's still part of the body and part of the world of representation. Right. Pain has some causal explanation in every case. Doesn't mean it has to be visible. Doesn't mean I have to like, oh, I see the knife going to my arm. It just means that in principle, it's part of the world of representation. So even if it's a tumor eating away at me, just because it's hidden doesn't mean it's not representation. I could in principle discover that maybe Schopenhauer does this.

29:23 Dylan: But now you're backing away from the whole thing, right? If the body is the objectification of the will, and pain is another manifestation of that, is it that pain is a one representation actually on another representation? Or is pain an activity of will being impinged upon? And if it's will being impinged upon, then that is an example of my direct access to the world of will, period, sans representation. And you could back away from that. But that's what he's presenting.

29:52 Wes: There's always two sides, right? There's always a representation for every willing and a willing for every representation.

29:59 Dylan: That then goes to my problem earlier, is that if you have representation for every will, then it's just extra. It's just overloading.

30:06 Wes: Just because he says pain and pleasure aren't representations doesn't mean he doesn't think there's an objectification representation that goes along with that. Every willing has objectified representation associated with it.

30:19 Mark: Let me ask this in a different way, because the dual aspect theory that we've talked about sounds to me like Spinoza, right? But Spinoza put that in terms of mind and body. He was reacting to Descartes and that mind and body are one in the same. And so there is a mental aspect, a consciousness aspect to my body, and that is the experience I have as a knowing subject. And then there is the body itself, the material. That sounds like Schopenhauer, but the way we've been talking about it, it doesn't seem like it's quite the same thing, because having an experience, which would be the mind side for Spinoza, it's not clear that that's the will side for Schopenhauer, in fact, having an experience is having presentations, is having representations.

So consciousness seems like it applies to both that you can be conscious of. In fact, all we're usually paying attention to is the consciousness. Well, actually, this is what I'm not sure about, and because he didn't talk in these terms, and this is, I think, what we're having trouble with, it seems like sometimes the things that we're conscious of are representations. Are we ever conscious of the will itself? Like if we are conscious of desire or of pain, this is the question, I think he gives a kind of a confused answer that, that these are things that are directly related to the will.

A desire is a very primal manifestation of the will. But I think we still have to say it's a manifestation because we're experiencing it. So pain and pleasure likewise, they're getting at something deep in the inside of things that we can't normally get at. But just like you said, we can figure out, you know, what caused pain. We can do a physiological, anatomical account. Well, you could do the same thing with desire. So it seems like all these things, they. That we might say, oh, I know the inside of things, I have this special access, I have consciousness that shows me what will is.

Well, still all the specific instances turn out to be perceptions of some presentation. If I desire something, I'm feeling hot or whatever the feelings are. But there are always presentations involved.

32:14 Wes: The reason why I thought you pointed to the painted pleasure because this is where he explicitly says not a representation, but it's experience. So he seems to be really staking out this claim that there's non representational experience, which is what Kant would call intellectual intuition, which is what Kant thoroughly rejected. Intellectual intuition as a way of accessing things in themselves, which is also the way Plato thinks we access the Platonic ideas. It's weird for pain and pleasure to be that. I think you're right, Mark. It's confused because later on he's talking about things that sound like they would belong to this realm of willing, as if they're representational.

Sometimes it sounds like the will stands behind everything, but there's only an experience of its manifestations, an urge or something. Or at other times, especially early on here, it's as if we have this very, very direct access. And that's why it's the key to understanding the significance of our representations.

33:11 Mark: Yeah, we know immediately what will is because we do it.

33:14 Wes: Yeah.

33:14 Mark: Maybe doing versus perceiving is the way of thinking about it. That it's not just a matter of thinking about what the experience of willing is. That I have a sort a mental nudge or whatever. Because he thinks it's not a distinct experience from the movement of the body. Exactly. It is the movement of the body from the inside.

33:31 Seth: He says the act of will and the action of the body are not two different states objectively known, connected by the bond of causality. They do not stand in the relation of cause and effect, but are one in the same thing, though given in two entirely different ways. First quite directly and then in perception for the understanding the action of the body is nothing but the act of will objectified. That is translated into perception. It's not as though you say, I think I'm going to get up, or you say, I will, that I get up. And that's an act of will that then has a causal relationship that makes your body get up.

You simply get up. On the one hand, there's the action of your body moving and you standing up, but on the other there's the act of willing. And those are two aspects of the same thing. That's the point he's trying to get at. I get what he's pointing to. I mean, if you're locked into this framework where you have this issue of causality that you're trying to overcome and you're trying to figure out how ideas cause actions in the real world. And so you can either say, well, everything's an idea or there's some weird sort of mystical force, or it's guaranteed by God or what have you.

His strategy here is to say there is no causal relationship. You guys are misinterpreting the way that this happens. And fortunately we have these bodies that point us to how we can understand this.

34:48 Wes: It's a good, definitely a good restatement of all of this, of his dual aspect theory. And I think he even goes so far, you know, right after he says that, Seth, he says resolutions of the will relating to the future are mere deliberations of reason about what will be willed at some time, not real acts of the will. We can't emphasize enough that it is not this mental thing that precedes the action. It is the experience of the action from the inside. And I think it is non representational experience. It's the action, it's the movement of the body out in space and time, which is the representational experience. And then on the other side of that is a non representational experience. You could say what it feels like to do that and have the urge and act on it all at the same time. I don't know how you get at that exactly. Pain and pleasure is part of it.

35:34 Dylan: For me, the objectification of the will is that neat key that Schopenhauer brings, where the strivings that you see in our own bodies quintessentially manifest there similarly and in fact, not merely analogically, but in just the same way, but to differing degrees. You see those strivings in the whole world as objectifications of will. He insists that that will is the same will just objectified in different Degrees in different levels.

36:04 Wes: Yeah. And he starts that actually right in the next section as his first big argument for extending it. And we're going to now make this extension from our own bodies, and we're going to attributes it to everything.

36:16 Dylan: The thing about those feelings of inner striving, I guess this is the part that it seemed to me that Schopenhauer was allowing those to not be mediated perceptions, but those to be somehow the direct sense of will, not caused by will. But one of the unique things about being in our bodies is that we could have that primary experience of will that was unmediated by objectification. We could sort of be the object.

36:45 Wes: Yeah, that's the. For itself, as the tradition calls it.

36:50 Dylan: That's how I took the way he was presenting pain and pleasure as touching our will, changing our object.

36:57 Seth: A couple pages after what I just read, he says, the knowledge I have of my will, although an immediate knowledge, cannot be separated from that of my body. I know my will not as a whole, not as a unity, not completely according to its nature, but only in its individual acts and hence in time, which is the form of my body's appearing as it is of everybody. Therefore, the body is the condition of knowledge of my will. I cannot imagine this will without my body. There's something about this immediacy that I'm experiencing my will, but only in individual acts which correspond to acts of my body.

But in some sense I must have an idea of my will as a unity. What you're talking about, Dylan, is these experiences are still particular experiences. They don't get at how we're going to try to transcend this. But there's somehow some sense of connection or unity, these individual willing acts that I think has to be accounted for here.

37:55 Dylan: Yeah, Any kind of granularity would be objectification, because the will has no sense of part or distinction except via objectification.

38:07 Wes: The will is highly sexist.

38:11 Mark: So I'm trying to find a specific sentence in 19 that really gives the thrust of his argument. But I feel like I have to just start at the beginning of the second paragraph, even though it's rather long before it actually gets to the solipsism part. It's just because of this special relationship to one body that the knowing subject is an individual regarded apart from this relation. His body is for him only an idea, like all other ideas. But the relation through which the knowing subject is an individual is just on that account, a relation which subsists only between him and.

And one particular idea of all those which he has Therefore, he is conscious of this one idea not merely as an idea, but in quite a different way as a will. Okay, so that's all just set up. If, however, he abstracts from that special relation, from that twofold and completely heterogeneous knowledge of what is one and the same, then that one, the body, is an idea like all other ideas. Therefore, in order to understand the matter, the individual who knows must either assume that what distinguishes that one idea from others is merely the fact that his knowledge stands in this double relationship to it alone.

That insight in two ways at the same time is open to him only in this case of his one object of perception. And that this is to be explained not by the difference of this object from all others, but only by the difference between the relation of his knowledge to this one object and its relation to other objects. So that's all one half of the disjunction, which is the one he's going to go with. Or else he must assume that this object is essentially different than all others, that it alone of all objects is at once both will and idea, while the rest are only ideas, that is, only phantoms.

Thus he must assume that his body is the only real individual in the world, that is the only phenomenon of will and the only immediate object of the subject. Other objects, considered merely ideas, are like his body, that they fill space, blah, blah, blah.

39:53 Wes: So this is the argument for extending it. This is an actual argument for saying I can attribute will to other things. Here's why. I have to assume one of two things. Either I'm special, I'm different from everything else in the world, except for maybe other human beings. And I have a will, and they don't.

40:09 Mark: Don't even put that. Except that's part of the sophistry that's going on here is he puts our guilt about actual solipsism. I'm the only person and says, therefore will has to be in green beans.

40:20 Wes: Or the alternative is to say I simply have a different relationship to my body representation than to other representations. And then they in turn have that distinct relationship to their own body, except that they, of course, don't have knowledge and they don't have everything human beings have. And you know what it. But. So that's the argument. He's basically saying we can't avoid solipsism unless we make this extension or theoretical egoism, as he calls it in my translation. I think, Mark, you're using a different translation.

40:47 Dylan: I was trying to follow Mark and I got confused.

40:48 Wes: I couldn't.

40:49 Mark: Yeah, I'm looking at the Project Gutenberg Online one for these quotes here, for the most part, because I can just search that and scroll most easily. But I have a paper version that's.

40:57 Dylan: That's not the Payne translation.

40:59 Mark: No, it's the RB Haldane and J. Kemp translation, which is also the one. There's a Librivox version if people want to listen to this, which I did, and some of it is quite listenable.

41:09 Wes: He follows this. He says, whether other representations have wills is precisely the same question as whether the external world exists. And then of course, it exists. So therefore other things must have wills.

41:21 Mark: We can't prove that it exists, but only a nutter would think that's what he exists. So we don't even have to. We don't even have to grace that with any more argumentation. Obviously, will must extend to everything, because that's the only alternative.

41:33 Seth: Hi, my name is Mark, and I'll be doing your charitable reading tonight. So, look, Schopenhauer makes a couple of rhetorical moves in this argument that you guys are making fun of, but I think are actually not.

41:48 Wes: I'm not making fun of it.

41:49 Seth: Not horrible. All right, Marcus making fun of. So when he's talking about the twofold nature of your knowledge of the body, one of the things he says is, look, you have a choice in this matter. You can assume that your body is unlike any other body of which you have knowledge, that somehow it's exempt, or that the rules of causality don't apply in the same way to it as it does to everything else. That seems like a stretch. So he says, all right, well, if we're not going to assume that, then you have to go down this other path with me. And I think this argument is very similar.

There's a really nice phrase on page 103 in chapter 19, and he says, our knowledge, bound always to individuality and having its limitation in this very fact, means that everyone can be only one thing, whereas he can know everything else. And it is this very limitation that creates the need for philosophy, which is a nice little poetic.

42:47 Wes: Yeah, I love that too. Yeah.

42:49 Seth: And what he's trying to say here is, if you can grasp the idea that you experience your body, body, the way you experience the world is twofold. One is immediate and direct and individual. That's you. That's your experience of yourself as a self consciousness, as an individual, as an ego, whatever. And the other is this kind of regular way that Kant goes to pains to talk about and that it's More scientific, we'll call it, where you treat everything like an object of knowledge. You're a knowing being. It doesn't make rational sense to assume that you are the only thing that has existence in that first way as something that is a unity that experiences itself this way but can know everything else.

If you can know other objects in the world that have being in the first type as objects, then you have to assume that they have being in the second way that you do. What he's doing is more radical only in the sense that he extends it to all kinds of objects and doesn't just limit it to other human beings. When we talk about phenomenology and we talk about all these things, you know, in the 20th century, everybody was criticizing Heidegger and Husserl and all these guys for not extending it to others. They stratify. Schopenhauer will stratify different levels of being.

Later, in the latter half, he will stratify God. Then the later part of the book. Yeah, I think what he's saying is he's just taking to its logical conclusion. Say it doesn't make rational sense to think that you have some kind of exceptional existence. Because if you go that direction, it's not just solipsism. You're basically saying that you are God, that you make up this world. You're different. Thinking that God is some sort of a ground that makes your solipsism possible is really just doing extra work for saying I am God. And that's, I don't think, outrageous to say.

I don't accept that conclusion. It's not possible, it's not conceivable in a world where I know all these other beings that seem to have the kind of being that I have. To use some Heideggerian language, maybe I'm naive. This isn't crazy to me.

44:49 Wes: Yeah, it's not crazy to me either, actually. Although, to play Linsenmayer's advocate, I would say, well, why not just extend it to other human beings? People, you know, who obviously, like me, have pain and pleasure and knowledge and things like that.

45:03 Mark: He gives an argument throughout the rest of this book that really, it's back to philosophy of science. What we're really doing when we're recognizing that I have an inside and an outside, is not just attributing consciousness and then saying, oh, consciousness must be everywhere, and becoming a pantheist, making the exact move that Spinoza made. But he's saying that it's not just my having consciousness, it's my having Directed behavior having teleology. Kant would say that it's a regulatory idea that we conceive of nature, any part of nature, as teleological, and that we look at how things fall down and think of the action of gravity on a thing at least as analogous to the action of motives on us. And so that's what Schopenhauer is saying, that we actually are justified in that kind of extension.

45:52 Wes: He's not even making like a Chalmers esque kind of panpsychic claim where you say, well, the mind body problem is intractable. Therefore we have to attribute some level of consciousness to everything. So that to get human consciousness it's just a more complex arrangement of matter that has some more basic consciousness. It's like that, except I think will. I think, Mark, you're right, it's below the level of consciousness. It's more like drive or instinct. And also I think this Mark just gets back to your emphasis on causality and directed behavior. If the idea is, if you accept this Humean skepticism about causality and you don't really think any one thing can actually impinge and necessitate another thing, then you have to explain that necessity. And this gives you the key to doing that. We need this inwardness for the necessity part even of material objects as well.

46:51 Mark: So I have no problem with this initial argument as a way of introducing the concept of saying, well, I have an inner outer, so it's a little goofy for me to deny that you have an inner outer. And maybe everything has an inner outer or everything has. I won't even say goal directed behavior because goal implies a representation that you can have a goal in front of you. He really just. There is no better word than will according to this. Even teleology maybe is too complicated. And maybe that's why he doesn't use that term as much, because that seems to bring up goal.

Whereas no, I just a drive. So I have no problem with using this to introduce the concept that maybe will is everywhere. But then of course, he needs many more arguments to really establish that. And I think it's threefold. The notion of will gets introduced to us by the experience of ourselves. This argument about science and the utility of using the terms for force in science is another argument, not a slam dunk, but inductive argument for why we might want to apply this universally. And then really the slam dunk comes with this mystical knowledge that ultimately he thinks that if you can set aside all willing, all immediate desire, everything that individuates you, then you can Meditate upon the all in itself, the will, and we can actually have this.

He doesn't call it intellectual intuition, but direct intuition of the will. He emphasizes it's not just an inference that the thing in itself has all these properties. There's more to it than that. And that's what philosophy does. So we just had this whole previous episode on what great artists do and what philosophers do and what all deep thinkers do. They calm down and they get in a quiet area and they philosophize. And Thoreau, you can see he's talking about the same kind of thing. And mystics from all times and places, according to Schopenhauer, they all realize the ultimate oneness of the universe and blah, blah, blah.

48:40 Dylan: The examples we've been giving of this extension of the will as being striving and stuff. He goes all the way as far as you can go with it. And he has a. To me, it was a really nice version of it. In this short section 21, where he's just sort of trying to bring this home for the reader. He says, from all these considerations, the reader has now gained in the abstract, and hence in clear and certain terms, a knowledge which everyone possesses directly in the concrete, namely as feeling. This is the knowledge that the inner nature of his own phenomenon, which manifests itself to him as representation both through his actions and through the permanent substratum of his body, is his will.

This will constitutes what is most immediate to his consciousness. But as such, it is not wholly entered into the form of the representation in which object and subject stand over and against each other. On the contrary, it makes itself known in an immediate way in which subject and object are not quite clearly distinguished. Yet it becomes known to the individual himself, not as a whole, but only in its particular acts. And then he goes on. He says he will recognize the same will not only in those phenomena that are quite similar to his own in men and animals as their innermost nature.

But continued reflection will lead him to recognize the force that shoots and vegetates in the plant. Indeed, the force by which the crystal is formed, the force that turns the magnet to the North Pole. The force whose shock he encounters from the contact of metals of different kinds. The force that appears in the elective affinities of matter as repulsion and attraction, separation and union, and finally, even gravitation, which acts so powerfully in all matter, pulling the stone to the earth and the earth to the sun. All these he will recognize as different only in the phenomenon, but the same according to the inner nature.

He Will recognize them all as that which is immediately known to him so intimately and better than everything else, where it appears most distinctly, it is called will. It is only this application of reflection which no longer lets us stop at the phenomenon, but leads us on to the thing in itself. Phenomena means representation and nothing more. All representation, be it whatever kind it may. All object is phenomenon, but only the will is thing in itself as such is not representation at all, but toto genere different therefrom. So he's not making an argument here, he's just sort of summing up, there's

51:13 Wes: no argument in 21.

51:14 Dylan: That's true, there's no argument there. But he does drive home both that this goes all the way down, that gravity is will.

51:23 Seth: The Willis turtles I wrote Schopenhauer feels

51:27 Dylan: the force, but also that there is this peculiar direct access there.

51:34 Wes: But this particular argument is saying, look, we need to locate this thing in itself. We have access to representations, and then the only other thing we have access to is this experience of will, and that's it. And if we can't make the will, the thing in itself, then we're stuck in Kantland, where we have some unknown thing in itself that somehow causes representations. Blah, blah, blah.

51:56 Dylan: Yeah, we don't experience the thing in itself, but we somehow have access to knowing that it exists through will.

52:05 Wes: I think for Schopenhauer it's this non representational experience.

52:09 Dylan: We experience objects of the will or objectification of the will on a normal everyday basis. But we do have access to it,

52:16 Mark: the muddled reflections to bring in the Platonic comparison.

52:21 Dylan: Yeah, the only reason that's important is the thing in itself for Schopenhauer is much less of an abstract entity lying behind the scenes than it seemed to me. It is for Kant. It ends up being pointed to for Kant, but we can't know anything about it. We don't know anything about it. Whatever it is, it is. But for Schopenhauer, we have access to seeing it in some manifestation. Manifestation is even the right word.

52:48 Wes: We have some access to it, intuition. And the reason why I use that word is because that's. Kant considers this type of thing and rejects it. The Platonic access to forms is intuition. And then, okay, do we have that? No, we don't. Things in themselves are unknowable as representation, and they're unknowable intuitionally. So we're stuck here. He's saying, no, we do have these intuitions, not in the technical sense of spatiotemporal intuitions, but we have these non representational intuitions and pain and pleasure are primary examples.

53:23 Mark: I really think he thinks this ultimate knowledge of the thing in itself is esoteric knowledge. So we can contemplate just in the way Plato describes and get from individual things to what he later actually calls Platonic ideas. That he thinks these are the primary, the highest level objectification of the will. That the only thing they add to the will is just the fact that we're thinking about them. So they take the form of object for a subject, whereas the will itself isn't even that. But to get up to that form, that takes a certain trick. And then what is the move from Platonic ideas to the will itself? The thing itself that can't even be thought of because it can't be an object for thought. I think it's all very mysterious and intentionally so.

54:07 Wes: Yeah. And what we'll find out in book three, not everyone's good at getting to Platonic ideas, even though we have this direct access to the will. And where do these ideas even fall? They're definitely not within the world of representation. But how is it that they're individuated right when individuation is only supposed to occur in space and time? Schopenhauer doesn't explain that. So this weird quasi in between world of Platonic ideas, it is mysterious.

54:31 Mark: So maybe the missing link that we haven't spelled out here, it seems to be that we've gotten from. Well, maybe I have a will. And so maybe everything has a will to. Why? We think that will as a thing in itself is unitary. That there is just will. Capital W. A will and not the pantheistic. Well, just. There's wills everywhere and that's the ultimate inside of things. And there is nothing beyond that. Where does it. Does he have an argument for why will has to be unity other than just. Oh well, the plurality is something that the mind adds, so therefore the thing in itself can't have it. Is that really the best he does?

55:07 Wes: That's his argument, yeah.

55:09 Mark: Okay. Did this not strike anybody else as quite a leap?

55:12 Wes: The most difficult part of his theory is how do we explain our experience of ourselves as individual wills? It's one big will, Right? It's one big fat Jabba the Hutt that we are somehow pimples on our individual wills. How are we sort of attached and then have this illusion of individuality once we're individuated this way? Why do you show up in my world as a representation? Yes. In a vague sense, it's because we belong to the same unity but that's it. That's all you get. You don't get any details on how all that works. It's just that there's this unitary thing behind the scenes and it's somehow coordinating everything, right?

55:54 Mark: Yeah, it seems almost anything, you know, just like discussions of God. If you say it coordinates something, well, doesn't that imply it has parts or something, or purposefulness?

56:03 Dylan: It's like the ether. It holds energy and it disperses it. It has its own one thing and spreads it out all over the place. It's the container and the medium at the same time.

56:15 Mark: And purposefulness, but not in time. Yes, that's a big. That's his solution. Why are we individual? Because time makes us that way. As soon as the in itself breaks itself up over time and over space, then it creates individuals and thereby creates conflict because each of those things has a will. And so everything is going to be butting against each other. And there we start to sound very much like Heraclitus, that there's some kind of unity. But yet the way it shows up is in strife.

56:49 Dylan: But it's not the will breaking itself up. That's not the right way to. It's. The will is manifest as us.

56:57 Mark: It's manifest to us as us. Yeah. So it's only with the first perceiving creature. This is something he actually explicitly says in book one somewhere when he's trying to explain how idealism could work. You know, how is it that, yes, we can say there are prehistoric ages and blah blah, blah. We can say that there was an earth before there are human beings on it, before there were even animals or any perceiving creatures. But yet at the same time, we can say the moment the first perceiving creature came into existence, no matter how rudimentary its perceptions were, that's when the world as idea came into existence. That's when the thing in itself became phenomena.

57:33 Wes: The world is representation though, you mean? I don't want to get us confused between Platonic ideas and representations.

57:39 Mark: The Librivox version that I listen to actually interprets representation, which is presentation. In the paper copy. I have as idea with a small I throughout.

57:49 Dylan: I might have missed this in reading it, but why would there be a distinction between perceiving and non perceiving entities if there's no difference between them in terms of being objects of will? They all are manifestations of striving and they all react to things as objectifications of will. So why would there be any peculiar distinction of perception to the extent that they react. They are perceived.

58:16 Mark: Well, no, because some things react without perceiving, and it's only when you have perceptual organs that you get perception, and so some of your things actually become motives. A motive means you have knowledge of something and you react because of that.

58:31 Wes: According to him, I think here's a way to get at what Dylan's saying. So supposedly our representations, including our actions, are the flip side of the willing drive part, right?

58:45 Seth: Yep.

58:45 Wes: And aren't we supposed to think when a planet revolves around the sun that it's also objectifying its will? Even though we know it's not objectifying it in the sense that it's having representations, we know that's not the case because it doesn't have an understanding, it doesn't have a subjectivity. Don't we still have to believe that the will is being objectified some way?

59:06 Dylan: He says that Saturn is an objectification of the will and it is in its orbit around the sun. Yes, all of that he says.

59:14 Mark: When you say it's objectifying, that means it's making itself an object for perceivers.

59:18 Wes: Okay, okay.

59:20 Mark: Objectifying is not a metaphysical term. It is an epistemological term.

59:24 Wes: So before any perceivers come on the scene, it's objectifying. It's producing a potential representation.

59:32 Mark: You can't even say producers because there's no cause and there's no time. There's no time before.

59:38 Wes: Okay, okay, I get it. I get it. I kind of get it.

59:41 Dylan: In this case, then it's just what? At this point, it's just Will. I'm just having holy inconsistency, flags flying in my face.

59:48 Mark: Right.

59:48 Dylan: I'm like, it was all so beautiful just a moment ago, but now it's come crashing down.

59:53 Mark: Well, it's exactly the same problems you run into when you say, how did a God create the universe? Because this will, you're saying, is a unity, just like God. He doesn't want to call it God for various reasons.

1:00:05 Dylan: No, I don't think the same things apply at all. Because you're using will as a theological entity that has activity in a teleological way, and he is just using it as a motive of action.

1:00:18 Wes: But I think in Mark's defense here, you know, in many other systems, the God is playing the same role. Right. So in Berkeley's system, God is playing the role of grounding our representations. And the same thing in Spinoza. So it's this unitary, metaphysical thing outside of space and time.

1:00:39 Mark: That was the thing I was trying to emphasize.

1:00:41 Wes: Yeah, it has a lot of qualities which make it sound very much like the God of Spinoza, or sure, I mean, less so of Berkeley, but it's still serving that same function.

1:00:50 Mark: He wants to emphasize that it doesn't love you, it doesn't have a personality, so you don't want to call it God in any sense. It didn't create anything.

1:00:59 Wes: It just is blind impulsivity.

1:01:03 Mark: Right. Maybe that's not that far from why people called Spinoza an atheist, because his God didn't think about creating stuff and then create stuff. It just has an aspect that is the physical world. And so it's not that big a stretch here. It's just that Schopenhauer really doesn't like the superstition that comes along with theistic religion. And so he's going to deny that he's drawing on good company. He's drawing on Buddhism, according to his analysis, has basically the same metaphysics as Hinduism, except Hinduism has gods all over the place and Buddhism says no God.

But yet they both have the same picture of illusory immediate experience having underlying it some atemporal thing. Can't even call it a thing, can you? Because that would make it an object. And to talk about an object of all is to assume a subject. Yeah, it's already if something is thinkable even. He really follows Berkeley exactly on that argument.

1:02:00 Wes: Yeah, I think he's rejected Kant because causality is just a form of the understanding. Right. But his alternative is unity. Right. In the dual aspect theory, it's one same thing. But unity is also a form of the understanding. And it seems to me any system like this will fall prey to the same sorts of objections. Once you've said that everything by which we understand things is. I guess it comes back to the intuition, the non representational experience thing, but it's problematic.

1:02:29 Mark: So we had this similar discussion with Maimonides earlier in the year that you don't want to say that God has properties because he's above all properties. So in the same way, the thing in itself for Schopenhauer is prior to all properties, so you can't really say it is unity. Even you could say it is not a plurality, if that's to give the Maimonides solution here.

1:02:50 Wes: Well, let's look at section 25, where since we're talking so much about this section 25, where he talks about the unified will versus the individuation. Yeah. Time and space individuate, you know, in 25, plurality is the result of time and space and time and Space are the individuating principles. So the thing in itself as such I'm reading on page 128, is free from all forms of knowledge. And of course, when he says in itself, he means the will, even the most universal, namely that of being object for the subject. In other words, it is something entirely different from the representation.

Now, if this thing in itself, as I believe I have sufficiently proved and made clear, the will, then considered as such, and apart from its phenomena, it lies outside time and space and accordingly knows no plurality, and consequently is one, yet, as has already been said, it is not one as an individual or a concept, is right. He's trying to wriggle out of that problem, but as something to which the condition of the possibility of plurality, that is the Principium. I taught Latin at the college level, and I can't pronounce this right. It's foreign.

Therefore, the plurality of things is space and time that together are. The objectivity of the will does not concern the will. I love this. It's of no concern to me. Which, in spite of such plurality, remains indivisible. It is not the case of there being a smaller part of the will in the stone and a larger part in the man, and so on and so forth. It's hard to grasp this relationship between a unified, indivisible thing and then the way it gets broken up on this other side within the world of representation.

1:04:37 Dylan: You know what it is, is it's quantum field theory.

1:04:40 Mark: Oh, yeah.

1:04:40 Wes: Let's do it, man. I just broke out a joint. So

1:04:46 Dylan: I waited a while to say this.

1:04:49 Mark: Thank you.

1:04:50 Dylan: In quantum field theory, all electrons are resonances of an underlying electron field that permeates the universe. So each electron is an individual resonance within this electron field. And the electron field is not a bag of electrons. It's not as if it's just sitting there. You can pluck electrons out of it. It's there as its own entity, but it's never interacted with as an electron field. It's only interacting with individual electrons that are manifesting that underlying electron field. So you can never touch the electron field. You can only touch electrons. But the electrons aren't there without the electron field. And that's how they, in fact, connect to one another. They interact with one another. I'm telling you, it's quantum field theory.

1:05:39 Wes: Wow, man. That is pretty amazingly analogous.

1:05:42 Dylan: Yep.

1:05:43 Mark: Since that hinges on something other than

1:05:45 Seth: what we've agreed to read, we'll probably

1:05:47 Mark: just let it sit there. But I think it's Great. For a further episode or something like that.

1:05:51 Dylan: There's a book we can read.

1:05:53 Seth: There's always a book we can read.

1:05:55 Dylan: Well, but let me tell you, it's important this way. It's called what is Quantum Field Theory for? By Sunny Auyang. And she explicitly is trying to do a Kantian reading of quantum field theory. She ends up having this long exposition about it being Leibnizian. Vis viva monad, stuff like that.

1:06:14 Mark: That's very cool. As well as pushing that off to a future episode, I am also actually happy to push off this fundamental metaphysical problem of how can a unity manifest itself as multiplicity? I mean, we can, of course, we should read more of what Schopenhauer has to say about it. But that is the discussion for our Parmenides episode. And I think a lot of the motivation that he's going on here. He brings up Parmenides specifically and quotes him. And it seems that he's drawing on a very old philosophical intuition that comes up in Plotinus and Plato and many, that somehow everything has to be one.

Even though he says doing science against what we would think are the goals of physics. Right, to reduce the various forces to a single force, for instance. He thinks that that is bad science. But as a metaphysical principle, yes, for some reason, unity is the unescapable destination. But we should read the Parmenides quote here anyway, to see how he thinks that's relevant.

1:07:11 Wes: Just as everyone possesses the complex of flexible limbs, so does there dwell in men, the mind in conformity with this. For everyone, mind and complex of limbs are always the same, for intelligence is the criterion.

1:07:24 Mark: So that's supposed to be a fancy version of what he says right before this, which I really like this quote. Teeth, throat and bowels are objectified. Hunger, the organs of generation are objectified. Sexual desire, the grasping hand, the hurrying feet correspond to the more indirect desires of the will which they express. So he's dealing with teleology. What is the relation of Darwin? Origin of Species is about the same time as this, right?

1:07:47 Dylan: It's 50 years later, right?

1:07:49 Wes: Yeah. This is 18. 18. And Origin of Species is 18 what, 56.

1:07:55 Mark: Or he does not have the Darwinian conceptual apparatus at his hands, but he's trying to account for a lot of the same phenomena that Darwin was trying to account for and thinks that we don't need something crazy and mechanistic like Darwin is going to recommend. And he looks down on that kind of stuff. In fact, later in this book says, you know, because the commonalities among things are Not a matter of genes or the fitness of organisms for their environment. It's not a matter of natural selection or anything like that. It's a matter of the fact that they're all manifestations of a single will.

So this is an argument, an indirect argument for the unity of will by the fact that we see so much harmony, despite the fact that there's also fighting and conflict. He says that these can both exist at the same time, but it's atemporal. The bird will build a nest for the chicks that are not yet born. And it's not like the bird has any knowledge that the chicks are going to come along or anything like that. But it's because there's something working what we would consider backwards in time.

1:08:56 Wes: Yeah. This is section 28. It's not just that animals are adapted to the environment, the environment is prospectively adapted to the animals and the solar system is basically adapted itself to a pre. He calls it a presentiment in my translation of coming organisms. Right. So it's this idea, it's kind of an intelligent design idea where. Except it's a non intelligent. It's. It's the blind striving design, but it's a function of the unity of that blind striving once it's broken apart in the plurality and representation that we see those representations working together and reflecting that unity.

1:09:33 Mark: It would be nice to think that this was a step on the road to Darwinism, but I don't think it was. Let's have some explanation for this. That's not intelligent design at all. Seems like a big step, a big deal.

1:09:44 Dylan: When I was reading Schopenhauer, I was very surprised when I read and saw that it was written in 1818. It seemed later than that.

1:09:52 Mark: Revised a few times. Yes. But therefore he did put out and this part was added. So it was like after.

1:09:58 Wes: It was 1850s, I think 1854 was it.

1:10:02 Dylan: Maybe it's because it was revived. I don't know. It just felt a lot more like something written on the Darwin timescale.

1:10:09 Wes: I think before Darwin, all this talk of adaptation, I mean that was in the air for quite a while before Origin of Species.

1:10:16 Dylan: Yep.

1:10:17 Mark: We're learning about intellectual history.

1:10:19 Wes: Cool. Yeah. So the second edition was 1844.

1:10:23 Seth: Actually, unlike many of the other philosophers that we do read, we have to give Schopenhauer credit for, I would say at least being moderately on top of the science of his day and trying to account for that. If you guys remember reading the Principle of Sufficient Reason, he's Got some pretty extensive stuff in there about optics, talking about the way the image works on the eye and trying to take that into account. And there are points during the book where he's bringing in scientific, biological and so on principles. And I think he must have thought of himself as not simply proposing some kind of abstract philosophical theory, but that his ideas, he thinks, are supposed to work in harmony or in concordance, at least with scientific principles and knowledge of biology and chemistry and so forth.

That's why it's easy to laugh when he talks about digestion and reproduction and sexual urges and all that kind of stuff. But I think he legitimately believed that somehow what he was talking about was exemplified in those cases and that he had some kind of knowledge about it. He's not just talking about the savage, right? I mean, we read a lot of philosophers who just talk shit about stuff they don't even know about and expose their ignorance and historical and racial biases and things like that. And at least he seems to be pretty well informed.

1:11:50 Mark: The stuff that he rips on 50 is probably stuff that he read.

1:11:54 Seth: That's true and that's current.

1:11:58 Mark: He also just refers to various superstitions and dismisses the world's religions, even as he says that, wow, so many of the world's religions get at this very same point that I'm getting to, despite all their barbarism and superstitions and their historical peculiarities and things from different directions. So he uses things to support him.

1:12:17 Seth: Sure. And he also quotes Greek extensively and then provides, conveniently, Latin translations for those of us who don't know Greek.

1:12:26 Mark: That's actually one of the things I noted in the footnotes that like, yeah, in the second edition he added the Latin and not just left it at the Greek. And actually in the Librivox, they don't translate any of it. So they just read the Latin.

1:12:39 Seth: Oh, they read the Latin or the

1:12:40 Mark: Greek, either one, and then move on. Occasionally someone will just say quote in Greek and they'll move on, but they. I guess they didn't have a version in front of them with these nice footnotes I have in my paper copy. The quotes in these things are usually meant to give an air of sophistication to what he's already said. Like, he's not making an additional point. He's just saying somebody famous said something a long time ago. Kind of like what I'm saying here it is. So I think you can generally skip them.

1:13:09 Seth: Yeah, it has the taste of the appeal to authority, but there are some Pretty extensive quotes in there. I have to say that I was looking up some of the Greek, I'm not gonna lie.

1:13:21 Wes: So what do you guys think of his talk of character?

1:13:24 Mark: Let's take one step there by just, in general, the ways that the will manifests itself. So that there are lower forms and there are higher forms. And the lower forms are like the law of gravity and impenetrability. And the higher forms are us.

1:13:41 Seth: I actually found that really fascinating. When he starts talking about hierarchies with respect to the ways in which will manifests itself. I was ready to check out because that felt to me like, okay, well, we've had this relatively rational discussion. Where he at least gives arguments for how these things work. Now it's just going to get into the anthropocentric, speculative kind of bullshit. But I thought he had something very interesting to say about gravity. He says we never see or experience gravity. That gravity manifests itself, so to speak, as a law of nature only in individual and particular acts.

And it manifests itself in exactly the same way in every instance where it's applicable. And he basically infers from this that gravity and other laws of nature are the lowest levels of the manifestation of will. And maybe as close as you can get until we get to Platonic ideas of direct objectifications of will. In that the law of gravity has no particular existence itself. It is only something that manifests in individual instances. But it manifests in exactly the same way in every instance. So it has no individual character, so to speak. It has no variation.

It's exactly the same everywhere.

1:15:12 Wes: This is section 26, by the way.

1:15:14 Seth: I thought that was kind of an interesting way. I guess I never thought of it quite in that way. That the repetitive, consistent and simple way in which it is applicable in every situation makes it fundamental. But at the same time, simple, I guess, is a description.

1:15:33 Wes: Well, the lack of individuality, right, is just the uniformity part. So the difference between. When you do rocket science, you can make calculations and very precisely predict. And land a spaceship on a comet if you want to, or an asteroid. But human beings are much more unpredictable with these different grades of objectification that you get into. In section 26, you also get these different levels of individuality. Which in part has to do with unpredictability in the sense that it's a much more complicated causal system. Right? You can't say, you know, if you stimulate me in some way, I'm going to react the same exact way every time.

1:16:15 Seth: The most universal forces of nature exhibit themselves as the lowest grade of the will's objectification. Their particular phenomena alone are subject to the principle of sufficient reason, just are the actions of men. On the other hand, they themselves can never be called either cause or effect, but are the prior and presupposed conditions of all causes and effects through which their own inner being is unfolded and revealed. So when he's talking about gravity, right, he says it is therefore wrong to say that gravity is the cause of a stone's falling.

The cause is rather the nearness of the earth, since it attracts the stone. Take away the earth and the stone will not fall, although gravity remains. The force itself lies entirely outside the chain of causes and effects, which presupposes time, since it has meaning only in reference thereto. But the force lies also outside of time, Right?

1:17:07 Mark: So that clarifies the point that we're trying to make earlier, that when you're actually giving a scientific explanation, all you're doing is just saying cause, cause, cause, and you use the term force. But that in itself is qualitas occulta. It is an unknown. It is something that we cannot really understand, at least using the scientific terminology. It's only when we get into philosophy and start reflecting on will that we really understand what force means. And so, yes, we bring that to bear in giving our scientific theories and in choosing scientific language.

But is not itself an element, I think, in the scientific theory. He's going to have to say, and that's what I think is confusing. I think he's not very consistent about that, because he does, you know, we were talking about intellectual history and how he's dealing with teleology here. He's in a phase where vitalism, where talking about forces in the way that he does is. I don't know if it's in vogue, but it's one of the possibilities on the horizon. And he argues in favor of vitalism against mechanism. And mechanism seems to be what one subsequent led.

1:18:09 Wes: Well, he argues against a complete reduction. He's saying biology cannot be completely reduced to physics and chemistry, even though they're related because of the unity of the will.

1:18:20 Mark: Yes.

1:18:20 Wes: You will see in many ways that in some way we will see chemical processes and physics in organisms, and they will explain organisms to some extent, but there will always be something extra which makes them non reducible.

1:18:33 Mark: Yes. So if you had a pure science of mechanism, then everything should be reducible to causes and effects, and all complicated accounts of cause and effect should be able to be reduced to simple, to subatomic particles. So he says well, you know, this was okay for Democritus long ago, but we modern people, we will not be excused for such stupidity.

1:18:55 Wes: We should be careful here because there's two ways to think about it. So on our Chalmers episode, remember, it's fairly uncontroversial now that you can't take all the propositions of biology and reduce them to physics and chemistry. In principle, that's not possible.

1:19:10 Mark: Dylan, do you agree that that's not controversial?

1:19:12 Wes: It's not controversial among philosophers of science that reducibility is not possible. That's an epistemological problem. The reducibility is not possible. Possible. But that doesn't mean that at some level biology doesn't all causally boil down to chemistry and physics. We'll address this more when we finally do this in a philosophy of science episode. But Chalmers, if you remember, was arguing also against reduction. I'm taking his word on it, that this is fairly uncontroversial among philosophers of science, that biology doesn't.

1:19:42 Dylan: I would say it's a live argument, but there are certainly plenty of people who argue against reduction, but they probably

1:19:50 Mark: don't do it on Schopenhauerian grounds that there's fundamental vital force that can only be understood metaphysically in terms of will.

1:19:58 Wes: Right.

1:19:59 Mark: We can at least understand Schopenhauer's where he fits into this scheme.

1:20:02 Wes: This is sort of a. Is the whole sum of the parts problem and it is actually a difficult metaphysical problem. So we can't fault him for making the anti reductionistic argument. But yeah, there's more to it than

1:20:13 Dylan: that, as Marx says, is Schopenhauer's need for anything more than needing a metaphysical handle for why things move on their own as opposed to moving as a result of something else running into them? So you want to deny the clockwork universe in which everything is the result of another cause acting upon it? You want to have essentially intrinsic motion, intrinsic striving.

1:20:38 Mark: I'm not sure.

1:20:39 Dylan: So he wants to have a metaphysical entity that will manifest that.

1:20:43 Wes: Well, I think that's the case for Leibniz. Right. That's definitely Leibniz's motivation. So for Leibniz vis viva, which by the way, on the level of physics is kinetic energy, is also a way of saying that these monads, if you think about Leibniz, actually you see a lot of similarities with Schopenhauer because there's monads everywhere and they have subjectivity. It's a panpsychism and the universe is

1:21:06 Dylan: contained in every one of them.

1:21:07 Wes: Yeah, but the vis Viva. Part of it is that Leibniz is operating on this Aristotelian conception of substance in which substances have to be self active, they have to be windowless, that can't come from outside, they can't be impinged upon in that way. So that's a definite motivation. But I think he's operating more on the accepting the Humean argument against causality. Look, causality is not something we can see and touch. Show me where this force is. It's a very intuitive argument. All you see is correlation. Everything that looks like causality is correlation. Show me where the force is. So Schopenhauer in a way is saving that. He's saying, well, yes, on the level of representation there is no force, but on the level of will, the unity of the will grounds these interactions between representations.

1:22:00 Mark: Causality can tell us why something moves at a particular time, why it moves in the direction it does, but it can't tell us why it moves at all, why there is movement. So talking about the will is supposed to contribute. But I'm not sure if Dylan characterized it the way Schopenhauer would, that it gives it its internal motion. That does sound right, because that's just like the inside of us. But we don't want to see it as like the will is the first cause or something because that would put it in the chain of causation. So it's not a cause, but it's a manifestation.

And this is. We're back to the same problem again. How did he talk about the relationship between will and phenomena if it's not causal? And it can't be simply identity? Because then one billiard ball hits another. Well, what's going on inside? You can't say the will of one is impin. Well, you can say the will is one is impinging upon the will of another. But that's still different than saying there's

1:22:52 Wes: no causal thing there. There's one atemporal, aspatial will out there and we're seeing a pattern that reflects that unity. We can't really say anything more about that. It's not impingement. It looks to us like that, but that's just a reflection of unity.

1:23:08 Mark: But there's a level at which we can talk about impingement of will. So it's an intermediate level of explanation between the scientific talking about causality and then talking about just the will itself, which we can't really talk about at all.

1:23:20 Wes: What do you mean impingement of the will?

1:23:23 Dylan: Well, pain. Right.

1:23:24 Mark: And he talks about Gravity demonstrates that a will is not toward a purpose, even though we might think that our will is, you know, I always do something for a reason. But when we get down to it, raw will, gravity will never be satisfied. Even if all the matter in the universe were balled up in one ball, then still gravity would compete with impenetrability.

1:23:45 Wes: There's no causal relationship between will and representation. No, Mark, you were sort of getting us into this discussion of his compatibilism, which starts out on that path on section 20. But basically you say, wes, why did you perform some specific action? And someone's going to say to me, there's a scientific explanation involving the brain and causality and everything. You can give a materialistic scientific explanation of why I did what I did, or you could give some subjective explanation, you were hungry, something like that. But underneath that there's still the operation of will.

But the two things are not incompatible, right? So you might think, well, how can you actually be willing something if you're just a billiard ball within some causal chain getting knocked about, right? How is there any sort of self activity there? And so for Schopenhauer, there's not. It's not like the will is puncturing the causal universe and inserting itself as this basic cause. It's just that it's the flip side of the coin. It's the dual aspect theory again. So the compatibilism rests on this idea that even though we can give these causal explanations of our behaviors in time and space, on the other side, on the level of will, they are just manifestations of will.

1:25:09 Dylan: Isn't it all turning on what Schopenhauer means by objects are manifestations of will as opposed to being caused by will. I think he just says that.

1:25:19 Wes: Go to section 20, this second paragraph. But these acts of the will have a ground or reason outside themselves in motives. Notice, acts of the will. So our actions. Yet these motives never determine more than I will at this time in this place, in these circumstances. Not that I will in general or what I will in general. In other words, the maxim characterizing the whole of my willing. Therefore, the whole inner nature of my willing cannot be explained from the motives, but they determine merely its manifestation at a given point of time. They are merely the occasion on which my will shows itself.

The will itself, on the other hand, lies outside the province of the law of motivation, and so on. So this is what I'm calling his compatibilist theory. And then he's going to go on to say that these actions that I Take are actually a manifestation of my character. On the level of representation, you can give a causal explanation, but on the level of will, it's just a manifestation of character and doesn't boil down to some etiological explanation.

1:26:25 Dylan: This point about motive is part and parcel to the extension of the will that we've been talking about earlier, except from the other side, acknowledging that motives are a manifestation of willing, but it's not will itself. Importantly, that will does not require motive. Even if motives are a manifestation of will.

1:26:47 Wes: Well, motives are actually, I think for him, pretty firmly within the world of representation.

1:26:52 Mark: They're causes.

1:26:53 Dylan: That's why I called them manifestations of will.

1:26:55 Wes: Right, yeah, I just wanted to make that clear. So they're manifestations in the sense of that dual aspect theory where every representation is an objectification of will, but they're not the experience of will. That's not representational.

1:27:08 Mark: Seth, you should read the quote that you tweeted. It's right at the end of 19.

1:27:12 Seth: Here, let's see.

1:27:14 Mark: Hold on, about the stone.

1:27:16 Seth: Oh, that was my favorite part. Spinoza says if the stone was flung through the air, that the stone would think he was flying of his own free will. And I merely add that the stone would be right.

1:27:27 Wes: Yeah, that's great.

1:27:29 Mark: And then. But let's read what's right after that to explain why that is. Why is it right?

1:27:35 Seth: If it had consciousness, it would be able to make judgments.

1:27:37 Wes: The impulse is for it, what the motive is for me. And what in the case of the stone appears as cohesion, gravitation, rigidity in the assumed condition is by its inner nature the same as what I recognize in myself as will, which is just

1:27:55 Mark: a restatement of a point that he made quite a while ago. But we're getting into though, the differences in the way he wants to talk about these things. So we've got in section 23, the difference between a cause and a stimulus and a motive. So that a motive involves having a presentation. Only creatures that can have presentations can have motives, have experience. And he thinks even animals, they do have, you know, an idea of causality and object permanence. So even though they don't have concepts, they can't think they have a presentation, which is a quite a full blown thing.

1:28:31 Wes: They have knowledge and they have understanding.

1:28:33 Mark: They can, you can have understanding without concepts, without thought, without reason. Yes, exactly.

1:28:38 Seth: Well, yeah. Without purpose. Right.

1:28:40 Mark: Well, they have purpose for sure. Without motives. Right.

1:28:44 Seth: Without motives. Sorry, yeah.

1:28:47 Mark: The next one down is a stimulus which can still set off quite a complicated array of reactions. But that's different than a cause.

1:28:56 Wes: He's saying that basically the stimulus lies in between motive and physical cause. So yes, physical causes are completely determinative. You do one thing, you know exactly what's going to happen. The motives are at the level of subjectivity, but the stimulus is you do something that's very complex organic system, and any number of things can come out of that.

1:29:21 Mark: Section 23, I call a cause in the narrowest sense of the word, that state of matter which while it introduces another state with necessity, yet suffers just as great a change itself as that which it causes, which is expressed in the rule action and reaction are equal. On the other hand, skipping down. I call stimulus such a cause as sustains no reaction proportional to its effect, and the intensity of which does not vary directly in proportion to the intensity of the effect. So the effect cannot be measured by it. So think about if you pour water on a plant and then the plant grows up into a tree.

1:29:53 Wes: Yeah. A small stimulus can yield a large effect. And any organic organized body, any stimuli are just anything that affects organic bodies.

1:30:03 Mark: So it's a type of cause, but to be distinguished from causes as used in physics and chemistry. And he makes a big deal about this because then that's a step up to motivation. So these are the three levels of complexity, but they're all basically types of cause and effect in none of them. When you're talking about motives, even though for us it seems like, well, I'm free if I'm doing something according to my motives, that might be the way we would think of it. But for these guys, since they didn't have an idea of, well, I did this because my brain chemistry made me like, that's not really on their radar yet.

1:30:34 Wes: I think that's on their radar. I mean, with Descartes. But the whole point, this is subjective reason, right?

1:30:38 Mark: I remember brain chemistry coming in here when he says there is evidence that the brain is the seat of the will. And so actually by pointing out that when your brain gets damaged, then that can change your will is not strangely pointing at something in the field of phenomena which has to do with motives. When it has to do with human behavior, it's pointing out to something in interaction with the will.

1:31:05 Wes: Are you trying to claim that there's not an awareness of the relationship between brain and consciousness? The brain is causing consciousness, the brain causing consciousness.

1:31:12 Mark: But remember, consciousness does not accord in Schopenhauer with either will or representation. Consciousness is not really a word that he uses a lot.

1:31:20 Wes: I Think that this is besides the point.

1:31:22 Mark: Yeah, you're right. This is minor.

1:31:23 Wes: When you. This is part of a fourfold root thing, you know, you can give an explanation of human behavior on two different levels. One of them is just physical causality, and one of them is in terms of motives. Why did you go to the fridge?

1:31:37 Mark: They're both causalities.

1:31:38 Wes: My brain did a bunch of things and pulled the strings and my body did this. Or why did you go to the fridge? I was hungry. Those are the two different levels of explanation we can give for that same action.

1:31:50 Mark: So he thinks that will enters into it when he says, well, the motive can determine that you do something at a particular time. But etiological cause and effect stuff cannot explain in general why we get hungry or what we get hungry for. Right. That would have to be one of the things. I'm not even bringing in freedom yet. I'm just still bringing in where Will comes in here.

1:32:11 Wes: No, I don't think that's the case.

1:32:13 Mark: Isn't that what you said earlier? That we need Will to bring in in general the kind of things we want and that we want them, Whereas a particular instance of me wanting something or me acting on a desire is cause and effect. But we need to get beyond that to talk about my intelligible character.

1:32:30 Wes: Yeah, you might be right, because the whole character thing is strange. But in a simpler case, like the case of cause and effect, right? Everything is determined, right? It's completely a deterministic system. It's just that force is something outside of that system. So when I say billiard ball one moved because billiard ball two hit it, the hitting determines the time and the place of that manifestation of the movement of the other ball. But it doesn't determine why it moves in general. Right, the why it moves in general. This is where Dylan's getting at this whole self active Leibnizian thing where it has to have something in it. Except that's not that way for Schopenhauer. It's from another angle. The will explains this and not what we think of as causality, right?

1:33:23 Mark: So the existence of gravity at all has to be explained in terms of the will. The regularities that we observed and we call gravity, well, that's just science. But saying what it is in its inner nature, calling it gravity, that brings in the will.

1:33:35 Wes: But the same thing applies to human beings. On one level. We can say, why did west do this? And we can give an explanation in terms of his motivations. We could give a very. A psychoanalyst or a psychologist's he was a psychopath or this or that. Right. We could give those sorts of explanations. And that's completely legitimate. Just in the same way that a physics is legitimate in describing the interaction of the bodies on the level of representation. But on the other side of things, there's still. This is the compatibilism part. It doesn't get rid of the fact that my behavior as a whole is a manifestation because we can't say it's caused by.

Of my character on the will side of things. He's thinking especially of intelligible. He thinks of intelligible character, right, as this almost like a Platonic idea. Every individual human being has their own Platonic idea. And then our empirical character is a direct manifestation of that.

1:34:33 Mark: So instinct in general, the teleological forms of things, let's say. So in other words, the way in which an animal grows, the instinctual ways in which we do search for food or procreate or any of that stuff, whether we're plants or animals or even people, insofar as we're acting analystically according to the way that our organs grow in certain ways, the way that we breathe, blah, blah, blah. All the stuff that we don't put up to choice is all determined by, he thinks, not mechanical causes. Although of course again the mechanical causes come in when we say why did the plant grow now?

Well, because I added the water to it. But in general its nature, why it grows in response to water is because of something like a Platonic idea, because of like a template that exists outside of space and time that then manifests itself in this thing. And so that supposed to explain why there is a target for a certain animal or plant that it tries to grow toward this target, because that's set up by the will at some deeper level than individual manifestations.

1:35:39 Wes: Yeah, you're reading a lot of teleology, you know, which I didn't even think about teleology while I was reading all this. But I mean I thought that was a good explanation. But you see this so teleologically.

1:35:49 Mark: Yeah, well, he talks about instinct a lot in here. I'm just even looking at the section we were looking at about plant life, mere vegetation, as blindly impelling force. We shall claim according to its inner nature for will and recognize it as just that which constitutes the basis of our own phenomenal being. So all these pushes are will and in the same. So the connection I'm making is that he does talk in some detail here about for humans, our intelligible character. And actually we shouldn't spend too much time on this because in book four, he talks about it way more.

So we should just have a future discussion on book four, but we can at least get at the outline that he thinks, as you said, Wes, that throughout our lives, no matter what kind of free choices we think we're making, and no matter what the individual circumstances that buffet us here and there, our actions always just end up sketching out this character that we just have. So you're just a bad person and there's nothing.

1:36:39 Wes: Yeah, so this is in section 20.

1:36:41 Mark: It's the same with animals and with plants. They each have. But like you said, for humans, we each individually have our character. There's like a Platonic form for each of us individually. For an animal or for a plant, it's like the whole species has a form that it tries to grow toward. So that's the teleological bit.

1:36:57 Dylan: Striving is different than teleology. It seems less wholly end directed in the sense of a kind of final version directed. The striving seems much more dynamic and adaptive, or possibly adaptive along the way.

1:37:14 Wes: So teleology is a form of causation. It's final causation. And I think Schopenhauer, on the level of will, there's no causation. And then on the level of representation, it's all efficient causation. So the unity that will may give the appearance of teleology, but it's not like Schopenhauer thinks there are final causes in nature. Unless you translate that into.

1:37:38 Mark: Right, they're not final causes in nature.

1:37:40 Wes: Manifestations of will, the Platonic ideas.

1:37:43 Mark: Yeah, okay, exactly. So what final cause was for Aristotle was just another part of the full causal picture. It was a description of nature. Well, for Schopenhauer, he still does think that's what the whole vitalism and all this stuff is, that somehow notions of will can help you to do at least biology. Maybe not physics physics, but some kinds of science. Actually, even that we already said this, that even talking about gravity, you're bringing in a notion of will, even if you're not using it as an explanatory piece of the causal puzzle in the way a naive physicist might think.

And so biologists can be much more overt about this, that, yes, I can give a picture of efficient causes in terms of the chlorophyll and what chemical reactions are going on that makes the plant grow or makes the animal grow correctly, or the embryo grow in a deformed way, blah, blah, blah. But all that would still leave unexplained grow into the plant or animal that it does. Right. He doesn't have DNA and things here to draw on, he doesn't have Darwin to draw on. So he thinks you need will to actually do science in this way. And I think you're right.

Teleology, that notion seems to bring up having an end. And so does teleology work to describe gravity? Well, not exactly, not if it means that there's an end in mind. But when you get to these more complicated things, yes, there is an end in mind and it's the Platonic form.

1:38:59 Wes: Let me say this though, despite Schopenhauer's anti reductionism and vitalism and all that, he can be a complete causal determinist in our contemporary sense and a complete naturalist about nature and still be the compatibilist that he is and still say, look, force is not a phenomenon, it's not part of the world of representation and it lies outside of it. And the same thing for intelligible character and all that stuff, Platonic ideas. So again, the what and the where of the billiard ball getting moved, that's within the causal world of representation.

But that it moves, this larger thing must be a manifestation of will and that we do a particular action. Yes, I can give a completely scientific explanation of why everything I did today, completely causal reductionistic explanation. But as a compatibilist I could still say it's also a manifestation of intelligible character and all that causal stuff is just a patterned reflection of that intelligible character on the other side.

1:40:07 Dylan: So what difference does it make having them both there?

1:40:10 Mark: I think in section 24 he says that if you didn't have the account of the will, then you'd have a mechanism built on empty air. It's like saying, accepting a Humean version of causation, that causation is just patterns and just say, well, that's all we can know. And he just finds that that's not satisfying as philosophy and even to a scientist that really wants to understand what's going on and not just be able to predict and control, to actually understand, you'd have to bring in the will into the story.

1:40:38 Dylan: Yeah, but it's a placeholder that doesn't amount to any understanding really.

1:40:42 Wes: Right.

1:40:42 Dylan: If you say the force of gravity is will, you're not going to say you understand it unless you have a relation that shows how in terms of force, I'm going to have units for it, I'm going to have a way of measuring it. Right.

1:40:54 Mark: Well, Right. That's not a matter of understanding it. According to his interpretation, the only way to understand it is to understand from the inside. Right? According to his response. I don't think a scientist is going to agree with that.

1:41:03 Wes: It is a scientific understanding, but it's not. He seems to be against reducing the experience of red to a certain frequency of light. And he talks about the light beating on your eyes a certain number of times per second. And so if you're colorblind, you don't know how to count that sort of remark. As absurd as it sounds, what he's saying is the same sort of thing we talked about in our Philosophy of Mind episode, which is that you can't give an explanation of why a certain frequency of light would produce the subjective feeling of red or violet as opposed to green.

There's no why this subjective feel to that particular stimulus. This is the whole mind body problem restated, Right? Syntax doesn't add up to semantics. We can't derive from brain activity by itself what representations would be. In the same way, we can't derive from the syntax of a language the meanings of the language, what words are going to correspond to what objects. So that's this argument, and what he seems to be implying here is that there's a problem with Kant in that Kant is giving you the general form of things. Yes, it's in space and time, there's causality, blah, blah, blah.

But why this particular history of the world? Why these particular events? Why the particular experience of red here, and so on and so forth. That's content. Where does that, all that content stuff come from? Well, if you're Kant, you might think of it as there's things in themselves affecting the mind and producing those representations. That's analogous to the object producing wavelengths of light beating on the eye and producing these subjective experiences. But for the reasons we already stated, that's not good enough. And the will is the only way.

I think Schopenhauer thinks he can save this. The will provides us with the particular content. This is a weird section where it sounds like he's talking about sense data. And we don't get sense data unless we fess up to will as thing in itself. I don't know. Did you guys not read this the same way or.

1:43:04 Dylan: No, it sounds right. I mean, will is a kind of big vat of the source for everything, right? It's where all the extra action in the world is. Because if you have everything be causal, A to B to C to D, then you don't have Any way of saying how A got there, right, and why A wants to move to B? Except Schopenhauer says over and over and over again that you just have an account of the patterns, right? But why does the electron want to go towards the proton? That's all, Will. That's the source for everything.

1:43:40 Wes: So he even says at one point, therefore, the more necessity any knowledge carries with it, the more there is in it of what cannot possibly be otherwise thought or represented in perception as, for example, space relations. Hence, the clearer and more satisfying it is, the less is its purely objective content, or the less reality, properly so called, is given in it. And conversely, the more there is that it must be conceived as purely accidental, the more it impresses us as given only empirically, then the more that it's properly objective and truly real.

This is part of where I'm getting my sense data interpretation from. So the accidental, the empirical, this content, this is as opposed to. So the clarity part comes from, oh, look, there's all these universal relations in space and time, causal stuff, completely formal. But the particular, subjective, sensuous. What does it feel like? Experience? That's the content. And it sounds like that for him is the most real part. And we're going to see in section 3 on aesthetics, this is actually setting us up for aesthetic experience of particular content as being most real in some sense.

1:44:53 Mark: Yeah. So I'm going to punt the rest of this discussion until next time.

1:44:57 Wes: All right.

1:44:58 Mark: I wanted to make sure that before we were done here, we talked more about strife. Strife comes up in talking about not only it is the principle of individuation at all. Once perception separates out two things, it thereby gives each of them sort of an individual will. And those could potentially run into conflict. But then he also uses his strife to explain the hierarchy. You know, that there are these lower objectifications of will, like gravity and then higher ones. So this is what is page 189 in the original book. Somewhere in the middle of that section.

1:45:31 Wes: It's in sections 27, it's right before

1:45:33 Mark: there's like a quote In German, page

1:45:35 Wes: 146, I think, okay, if several of

1:45:39 Mark: the phenomena of will in the lower grades of its objectification, that is in unorganized nature, come into conflict because each of them, under the guidance of causality, seeks to possess a given portion of matter, there arises from the conflict of the phenomenon of a higher idea which prevails over all the less developed phenomena previously there, yet in such a way that it allows the essence of these to continue to exist in a subordinate manner in that it takes up into itself from them something which is analogous to them. This process is only intelligible from the identity of the will which manifests itself in all the ideas, and which is therefore always striving after higher objectification. So that's interesting. There's a striving after higher objectification. I don't know if I can make sense of this whole picture.

1:46:23 Wes: So he gives examples. Right. Just your arm moving against gravity is an example of different gradations of the will fighting over matter.

1:46:33 Mark: Yeah, well, but it's the taking up into itself that is difficult.

1:46:37 Wes: And this is important, by the way, because this is one of the things Nietzsche picks up on big time, this whole idea of these different drives and some are dominant and some are subordinated.

1:46:47 Mark: A very familiar modern thing is the idea of complexity, of life then eventually being overcome by entropy. So it's the lower phenomena always end up tearing our bodies, these complicated constructs, which, according to Schopenhauer, are sort of the more vivid and higher realizations of will, but they end up getting ultimately knocked down by the lower.

1:47:11 Wes: Yeah, so he says the more perfect idea resulting from such a victory over several lower ideas or objectifications of the will gains an entirely new character just by taking up into itself from each of the subdued ideas an analog of higher power. And later on, he talks about health as an expression of the victory of the idea of the organism over these subordinated physical and chemical forces. This kind of entropy, in the end, death, of course, finally wins, which is the other forces have their sway rip us apart. This is not inaccurate. Right. Because an organism is a negative entropy. It produces disorder, it kills things. So it produces greater entropy outside of itself in order to produce negative entropy in its higher order within itself.

1:48:03 Mark: Yeah, well, and that goes very much with the teleological point that I was making earlier, that will has its own theology and that's pushing toward these Platonic forms which are somehow the highest manifestations of the will. And so health is when you are, as an organism, best attaining the Platonic form of your type of organism.

1:48:23 Wes: Yeah. Against all these competing forces, this strife. Yeah. No victory without struggle.

1:48:30 Mark: Yeah. So later in the same section here, this is where he sounds very much like Heraclitus. Thus everywhere in nature we see strife, conflict, and alternation of victory. And in it we shall come to recognize more distinctly that variance with itself which is essential to the will. Every grade of the objectification of the will fights for the matter, the space and the time of the others. The Permanent matter must constantly change its form. For under the guidance of causality, mechanical, physical, chemical and organic phenomena eagerly striving to appear, wrest the matter from each other, for each desires to reveal its own idea. This strife may be followed through the whole of nature.

1:49:04 Wes: And so that's even in something as simple as the revolution of the planet, where centripetal and centrifugal forces compete with one another. So that gives you the very Heraclitean view, sort of tension of a bow. The word for bow in ancient Greek is a lot like the word for life, where that tension is a kind of strife. It's two different forces working against each other to produce a tension.

1:49:28 Mark: It's only one step from everything is strife. To the Buddhist, everything is suffering. And so then what does the wise person do? Well, somehow overcome that, Overcome your own will, your own drives, the things that make you suffer, the desires that make you suffer. And that's how to die with dignity, basically, to get away from this horrible thing that we call life. That's what wisdom amounts to. But it's not suicide if you commit suicide. That's just. That's one part of your will saying, screw this, the big cop out. It's renunciation. That's the asceticism is what he ends up recommending. But that's book four stuff, Mark.

1:50:10 Wes: Have you already read book four?

1:50:11 Mark: I listened to it. I did not read it. It is freaking really internally redundant. It does actually go off on some like, political stuff a little bit.

1:50:20 Wes: Well, this, I have to say this, as much as I enjoy Schopenhauer, the fucking repetition, man. Oh my God. An editor would have.

1:50:28 Dylan: It would be one book, not four books.

1:50:31 Wes: It's so unnecessary. And then he, what, 30 years later or something, he had to add more to it of the same of saying the same thing over and over again.

1:50:39 Mark: That seems to be the thing like. And he criticizes Kant for this, that Kant for like wandering around and giving a whole bunch of attempts at explaining the same thing, when really he's just explaining it once and perfectly and that should be it. And. But Schopenhauer really does think that he's awesome in his explanations because when he revises himself, he just adds to it generally he doesn't seem to rework parts like you see in Kant from Version one to Version two.

1:51:06 Wes: There's no evidence of unity of the will in this, there's evidence of strife and like wandering around and. Yeah, did you look at the intro

1:51:15 Mark: to this book at all?

1:51:16 Wes: I actually tried to listen to the Preface. And it is just that is actually unlistenable. It's torture.

1:51:23 Dylan: What?

1:51:23 Mark: So much of his kvetching that, you know, I'm just sick of it. I don't want to hear. We've had. This is our third Schopenhauer episode. And I know that he's a surly bastard and I just don't need to hear him rip on Fichte anymore exactly how horrible it is. They'll say, and certain horrible people. And then we'll put a footnote. It'll just say Hegel. So he's got the kvetching in there.

1:51:46 Wes: It really is different in character than the rest of the book.

1:51:49 Mark: But, yeah, the very first thing he says is, you know what? This whole book is a unity. And so you just can't read just part of it. In fact, you have to read the whole thing through twice because the first time you're not necessarily going to know how the sections all relate to each other. But. But once you read it back through the second time carefully, you will see that it's really all just one idea. It's not even just, you know, I had one good idea and then I had another good idea and tacked it on. It's just all one organic single idea. This is the fucking arrogance that he gets for, like, I could not possibly make a mistake because it all flows out of one.

1:52:24 Wes: Just because he had a trust fund. He had a trust fund. He had a trust fund and a poodle and lots of time on his hands, but it's still great. Don't get me wrong.

1:52:34 Mark: But enough. I'm glad we're going to be talking about music and stuff next time because that's the thing that he's famous for. But I. I don't need to do book four right away. We can do stoicism and Hindu philosophy and crap loads of other things and maybe someday come back to book four.

1:52:49 Wes: Mark, you. You are a principle of plurality and individuation. Breaking it up like this.

1:52:56 Mark: I think the pieces are in strife with one another.

1:53:00 Wes: Well, I think we've lost Dylan and Seth.

1:53:03 Mark: Seth, do you have a closing?

1:53:04 Seth: I feel terrible about my participation on this episode. You know, I read this book predominantly in Planes over the last week and a half as I was going to and from Florida to visit my folks for Passover. And I was very into it. Putting aside the repetition, I thought the writing was clear. There were a lot of interesting ideas. I was kind of inspired thinking to myself, it's one of those books that has some currency in the canon when you're going to graduate school, but also has a dramatic title that makes you feel like you should know what it is.

You know, like the Critique of Pure Reason and the world as will and representation. It promises the answers to many things. And there's a lot of stuff in here I really like. I think the move of focusing on the body and the experience of the body, generalizing from that. And that move to go from the, you know, your individual experience to general experience. Some of the talk actually about even motives and instinct, I thought was really interesting as a way to differentiate, even though he has to do that because he wants to avoid confusion between saying will and saying consciousness.

He doesn't want to ascribe consciousness to plants, for example. But I'm with Dylan on this final point where all of these are poetic and nice and cool and interesting. But will has no more explanatory power, in fact, much less so than God or the good or any other groundless ground. I don't know ultimately what he accomplishes. What does he get out of this that the scholastics don't, for example? I don't know. So it was a very enjoyable exercise. And I even read the parts in book three that Wes recommended about the Platonic ideas. And that introduces yet another interesting and suggestive way of interpreting that without there being any way to really cash it out in a meaningful way.

So I was kind of enthusiastic and naively optimistic. And when you guys started cutting into them early, I started to feel a little ashamed about my positive and buoyant attitude.

1:55:17 Wes: Did you not get my approving attitude towards him, though?

1:55:22 Seth: I did, but I felt bad about this one. I feel bad about the experience of it. But I really enjoyed reading it and I'm glad that I did. Schopenhauer is a bit of a curmudgeon, at least that's his reputation. But his writing and his thought process is really clear. He just maybe is like a second rate thinker, you know, I don't think he's second rate.

1:55:46 Wes: And I friggin love Schopenhauer, despite my poking fun at him. But look, he was a curmudgeon, so if he can dish it out, he should be able to take it. So what I think is really, really great about this is you look at these different ways other philosophers had tried to solve this problem. It's ultimately this kind of epistemological problem that leads into metaphysics as a solution. And you might have a materialistic view of the world. And that materialistic view might get very Metaphysical and substance based. Or even if you have the typical idealist view of the world, in a way, it's just more of the same.

It's just you're calling it ideas and you say, okay, it's grounded in God and whatever. But Seth, what you were pointing out, I think is key, which is when he's talking about will, he's talking about something that's going to lead into Nietzsche and talk about will and drive. Nietzsche will kind of slide back and forth between this talk of the will and this coming from Schopenhauer and then talk of drives, which leads into, for me, my interest in Freudian drive theory. But the importance of the drive is it's beyond subject, object. It's at the borderline between subjective experience and something that's purely physical.

So in a way, he's not making this typical choice, right, between the idealists versus the materialist choice between matter and idea as the fundamental thing. He's saying there's something that is neither and underlies both. So I think that's really cool. Even though Spinoza did it in his own way, I guess.

1:57:23 Mark: Well, as usual, I just think that this reading sets us up. It brings up some good topics for future discussions that I think the fundamental metaphysical point of interest here is the problem of the one and the many, of why you would think that there is a one behind all the many. And what kind of explanation is available for saying how the one manifests itself as the many. And maybe it's just a hopeless endeavor because he really goes into as much detail as. As possible, as he thinks possible and revisited this time after time after time, and just thinks that there are limits.

You know, we're getting at the limit of the thinkable, of the discussable. And so I don't think he's very clear. And I know we didn't go sort of into the text of exactly how he thinks Platonic forms come out of the will. But you know, Wes, you already pointed out the difficulty there of how just by adding a subject, contemplating it, in other words, giving it the form of objecthood, could the will, this unity, become a multiplicity of the perfect triangle and the perfect elephant and all these other perfect things.

1:58:31 Wes: And Wes and Mark and Seth, you know, and down to left level of

1:58:34 Mark: granularity, even though I don't find his account of the mechanisms or the motivation for why these things should. But the picture he gives is pretty fascinating and it's certainly interesting to see how it dovetails with what he takes. The cutting edge science of his Time to be. And if we can project it forward and say it's all quantum theory, then so much the better. That's not going to save its biology. But maybe there's a cutting edge biological thinker now that will let us bring back atemporal vitalism of the kind that he's arguing for in the face of a mechanistic Darwinism.

There's a lot of interesting stuff here. And despite my justice ripping on him for being so arrogant about calling the whole thing a unity, Seth's closing there, you know. What does he gain out of all this? Well, what he gains is book four is Buddhism. Like that's what I think his ultimate purpose here is, is that he was very influenced by Kant, but then he also read Indian philosophy and those sparked a connection in him. And in some ways he's using a lot of Kantian vocabulary and his really quite well thought out evolution of Kantian vocabulary to express an intuition that is foreign to Kant, that comes from Indian philosophy and from Buddhism of this is all just an illusion.

And all the things that are making me so cranky, I need to get over them and relax and become a subject of pure knowing and get into good music. And that'll make me not a good person in the way you. You and your virtues and your imitatio Christi bullshit. But my own more Eastern take he's saying on virtue is what I can attain to with this philosophy. Dylan, you got anything else? Any last words?

2:00:21 Dylan: I agree with you a bit about the one and the many. But to me, the fact that he focuses on will and this kind of intrinsic activity as the way of parsing out the one and the many makes it much more interesting. So often the one and the many are always separated out as unactive entities. So I like that very much about him. He is painfully repetitious. And I still think that as evocative as it is, the will is a kind of placeholder. And I found just remarkable how far he was willing to go with this mechanistic view of it and then veer away. It makes him seem very mystical.

2:01:11 Seth: I think that tinge of mysticism is probably intentional. Dylan.

2:01:16 Dylan: Yeah, it's not bad. And as fun as it is to read, it takes longer than it should because it is repetitious.

2:01:24 Seth: Maybe that could be our next product.

2:01:26 Wes: I read this twice and summarized it the second time.

2:01:30 Dylan: So Schopenhauer, the good bits.

2:01:35 Wes: No, it could really be boiled down to a very short.

2:01:39 Dylan: Oh, that'd be a whole product. Pl. The boiled down version yeah, pal.

2:01:45 Wes: Boil downs.

2:01:46 Mark: It's got a very monad like structure in that any one section makes so many references to the so many other sections in the book that it does. Like, even though we didn't read book four on freedom of the will and the intelligible character, we got a pretty darn good idea of it here. And even though we didn't read book one on representation, like, we got a lot of it in here.

2:02:08 Dylan: It's a manifestation of its own will.

2:02:11 Wes: Yeah, 17 and 18 give you a lot. There are refinements elsewhere.

2:02:16 Seth: There are two rhetorical red flags that one should always be wary of when reading philosophy text. The first is it should be immediately obvious. And the second is, as will become clear later, both of which he employs liberally.

2:02:35 Mark: Yeah, well, next time we're going to move on to book three and we'll have a musician guest. It's my first authentic rock star guest. It's Jonathan Segel, who is the violin player for Camper Van Beethoven and played with Sparklehorse and has a lot of solo albums and some cutting edge musicology. But because we have a guest who is not someone we want to torture, then we did not say we're going to do all of book 3. Look on partiallyexaminedlife.com to see the precise readings all mapped out and you can comment on whether you like this episode, what else you want us to talk about, etc.

On partiallyexaminedlife.com where we put up lots of blog posts, basically a daily email. You can sign up and you'll get blog things in your email box. We've got a Facebook group that's extremely active. We have a Twitter account you can follow. We have a LinkedIn group. Want to remind folks that we are an Amazon affiliate. So if you go to partialexaminlife.com, really, whenever you're going to buy anything from Amazon, it is the will. The will prompts you, you must go to our site first and just click on that Amazon link in the right hand side.

And then anything you buy in that session, anything you add to your cart, I believe, and then purchase within the next 48 hours, we'll get a cut of that at no additional cost to you. We're also an Audible affiliate. We're adding that to the bottom of our donate page. So if you are gonna sign up for Audible anyway, why don't you do it through us and we'll get a little commission for that. In fact, I am now officially the narrator of a couple of Audible titles. The one on Nietzsche just came out at the time we're recording this, that is for sale, so check it out.

And thanks to everybody who's given us a donation. Thanks also to everyone, the smaller donors, the many, many people who've signed up for our citizen site where you can get bonus audio. Maybe we'll have a not school group on book four here. Somebody should propose that. Thank you, everybody, and good night.

2:04:37 Seth: Good night.