On the Schopenhauer discussion (ep #114), I referred to his view qua idealist that, really, there was no world per se before the first perceiver, but also that science is correct in investigating ancient history, i.e. the world before perceivers. How could both of these claims be true? This is a general problem that idealism must address, summed up adequately by the old chestnut about the tree falling in the forest: The idealist must say that no, it doesn't make a sound, and in fact there's no tree or falling at all unless something (not necessarily a person) is there to witness it, to be a subject and thereby create it as a distinct object. Yet science still needs to work, i.e. people should be able to come along later and truly say that yes, there was a tree here standing, and it fell at such and such a time from such and such causes.
Here's Schopenhauer's formulation, from book I, section 7, original text pages 37-40. The context is the philosophy of science, and the difficulties that a purely mechanistic conception (which I think is the kind that at least we non-scientists generally think of as essential to science today), and he also bashes the idea early here of reductionism in science, which would entail that metaphysically, one should be able to reduce everything going on at a psychological level to biology, biology to chemistry, and chemistry to physics (which I also think is a guiding assumption of natural science, but Wes was arguing that non-reductionism is admitted by most philosophers of science; certainly one can't translate the vocabulary of biology into the vocabulary of physics). The bolding of key statements below is mine, as are some of the paragraph breaks:
We cannot understand how... one state could ever experience a chemical change, if there did not exist a second state to affect it. Thus the same difficulty appears in chemistry which Epicurus met with in mechanics. For he had to show how the first atom departed from the original direction of its motion. Indeed this contradiction, which... can neither be escaped nor solved, might quite properly be set up as a chemical antinomy...
...We see ever more clearly that what is chemical can never be referred to what is mechanical, nor what is organic to what is chemical or electrical. Those who in our own day are entering anew on this old, misleading path, will soon slink back silent and ashamed, as all their predecessors have done before them... Materialism... even at its birth, has death in its heart, because it ignores the subject and the forms of knowledge, which are presupposed, just as much in the case of the crudest matter, from which it desires to start, as in that of the organism, at which it desires to arrive. For, “no object without a subject,” is the principle which renders all materialism for ever impossible. Suns and planets without an eye that sees them, and an understanding that knows them, may indeed be spoken of in words, but for the idea, these words are absolutely meaningless.
On the other hand, the law of causality and the treatment and investigation of nature which is based upon it, lead us necessarily to the conclusion that, in time, each more highly organised state of matter has succeeded a cruder state: so that the lower animals existed before men, fishes before land animals, plants before fishes, and the unorganised before all that is organised; that, consequently, the original mass had to pass through a long series of changes before the first eye could be opened. And yet, the existence of this whole world remains ever dependent upon the first eye that opened, even if it were that of an insect. For such an eye is a necessary condition of the possibility of knowledge, and the whole world exists only in and for knowledge, and without it is not even thinkable. The world is entirely idea, and as such demands the knowing subject as the supporter of its existence. This long course of time itself, filled with innumerable changes, through which matter rose from form to form till at last the first percipient creature appeared,—this whole time itself is only thinkable in the identity of a consciousness whose succession of ideas, whose form of knowing it is, and apart from which, it loses all meaning and is nothing at all.
Thus we see, on the one hand, the existence of the whole world necessarily dependent upon the first conscious being, however undeveloped it may be; on the other hand, this conscious being just as necessarily entirely dependent upon a long chain of causes and effects which have preceded it, and in which it itself appears as a small link. These two contradictory points of view, to each of which we are led with the same necessity, we might again call an antinomy in our faculty of knowledge... The necessary contradiction which at last presents itself to us here, finds its solution in the fact that, to use Kant's phraseology, time, space, and causality do not belong to the thing-in-itself, but only to its phenomena, of which they are the form; which in my language means this: The objective world, the world as idea, is not the only side of the world, but merely its outward side; and it has an entirely different side—the side of its inmost nature—its kernel—the thing-in-itself... But the world as idea... only appears with the opening of the first eye. Without this medium of knowledge it cannot be, and therefore it was not before it. But without that eye, that is to say, outside of knowledge, there was also no before, no time. Thus time has no beginning, but all beginning is in time.
Since, however, it is the most universal form of the knowable, in which all phenomena are united together through causality, time, with its infinity of past and future, is present in the beginning of knowledge. The phenomenon which fills the first present must at once be known as causally bound up with and dependent upon a sequence of phenomena which stretches infinitely into the past, and this past itself is just as truly conditioned by this first present, as conversely the present is by the past. Accordingly the past out of which the first present arises, is, like it, dependent upon the knowing subject, without which it is nothing. It necessarily happens, however, that this first present does not manifest itself as the first, that is, as having no past for its parent, but as being the beginning of time. It manifests itself rather as the consequence of the past, according to the principle of existence in time. In the same way, the phenomena which fill this first present appear as the effects of earlier phenomena which filled the past, in accordance with the law of causality. Those who like mythological interpretations may take the birth of Kronos, the youngest of the Titans, as a symbol of the moment here referred to at which time appears, though, indeed it has no beginning; for with him, since he ate his father, the crude productions of heaven and earth cease, and the races of gods and men appear upon the scene.
You may recall that for Kant, whether or not time has a beginning or not is an antinomy: There are equally good reasons on both sides, and so the correct answer it to say that we just can't know and/or that the question somehow doesn't make sense. Temporal sequence only applies to phenomena, which depend on minds, so asking whether things in themselves are in an infinite or finite temporal series is attempting to use the concept of time outside of the realm in which it was developed, which is the realm of our experience. It does not follow from this that the Thing-In-Itself is atemporal, but simply that the Thing-In-Itself is not something we're in any position to make a judgment either way about. Compare to the question "Is God green?" You might say qua Maimonides that no, of course God is not green; colors apply to finite things. But neither can we positively say that God has the positive property of not being green, or not having color. Maybe He does have color, but in some higher way that we can't understand. We are in the same position regarding the Thing-In-Itself: by definition it's something we can't perceive or even really conceive of in its wholeness, in its essence, in its positive aspects.
Schopenhauer thinks that Kant is in no position to decide this issue "by definition," and thinks he has other reasons (mystical and artistic experience, i.e. the verdict of genius, plus the philosophy of science considerations surrounding "force" belabored in our discussion) for thinking we can know some positive things about the Thing-In-Itself, but he still fundamentally doesn't give us a reason for insisting on its lack of plurality and hence its non-temporal, non-spatial status. So why does he insist on this? I think he's just adhering to the heuristic (Kant might call it a regulative principle of Reason) to seek simplicity/unity. Saying that ultimately existence is One is supposed to be more satisfying somehow than saying that it's irreducibly Many. It's somewhat ironic that Schopenhauer dismisses this principle when it comes to science (in his rejection of reductionism) only to assert such unity at the metaphysical level.
Setting that aside, and granting Schopenhauer the point about the Thing-In-Itself's unified, atemporal character, and granting him the (contentious) proposition that differentiation within the Thing-In-Itself (the Will) only happens because perceivers pop up to perceive some part of the Will, haven't we just pushed the antinomy back one level? Schopenhauer is able to answer the question "does time have a beginning of not" by saying "no, not on the level of representation, but yes, before the first perceiver, there was no time," but he is then faced with a similarly insoluble question: "How could the first perceiver perceive something unless there was something already there to perceive?" This is to ask "why the principium individuationis?" which is in Schopenhauer's system the tragic question of Being.
-Mark Linsenmayer
So awesome, I love Schopenhauer. He has always struck me as ‘getting Kant right’ and essentially refining Kant’s work (even though of course he critiques parts of it, hence refining). I don’t know…but when I read Schopenhauer, there is just part of my ‘deep intuition’ that screams at me that within his work is expressed an incredibly important piece of the puzzle of Truth (with a capital T) we as philosophers (or any earnest seeker) seek to unravel. I always get this ‘vibe’ from reading Schopenhauer that he is truly agonized by not knowing the Truth and is a sincere aspirant of it as opposed to merely practicing intellectual masturbation; his very pessimistic and depressive character also reflects this I believe (i.e. seeing us all as damned and wretched for not knowing or having lost the Truth).
The piece you quoted here for example dealing with the nature of time and its relationship with the subject-object pair is a good example, Schopenhauer essentially distills and refines Kant’s work with a holistic approach of trying to account for our empirical experiences whilst also accounting for our rationalist intuitions and aspects not so easily quantified/measured and does so in a more ‘grounded’ and ‘careful’ fashion than other philosophers directly inspired by Kant.
I would love for you guys to come back to Schopenhauer (and even Kant) again from time to time as there really is just such a rich and profound labyrinth of work in these philosophers that one or two podcasts just does not do justice.
Thanks for the excellent podcast and work guys; will keep donating as long as you keep it up.
“This is to ask “why the principium individuationis?” which is in Schopenhauer’s system the tragic question of Being.”
I’ll give a slightly different answer to this post than I did in the other comment section because I think you’re on to something here. The principle of sufficient ground (or reason), which Schopenhauer views as synonymous with the principle of individuation, grounds everything but itself. In other words, there is no ground for the principle of sufficient ground, for it is the condition for grounding everything else. Upon observing any object or event, one can always ask why it occurred/exists and a ground can be given, but no answer can be given as to what grounds the principle of sufficient ground. For if one were to try to give an answer, one would already presuppose the principle in question and therefore not state anything other than a mere tautology. What is described here is simply a fact about the way knowledge works.
The problem underlying this philosophy, and indeed the characterising philosophical mistake of the 18/19th C. is the genetic fallacy. The confusion that the origins of something determine its nature: we learn about nebula through photographs, therefore nebula are ‘photographic’. We learn about the world via consciousness therefore the world is consciousness. It just doesn’t follow.
And you have here discovered one problem with the genetic fallacy: if we opt for it, we have to keep cycling back. If the origins of x determine x, then what are the origins of the origins of x? And so on. You end up having to break of out the genetic fallacy somewhere, here with Schopenhauer it’s The Will, and it is totally unlike its manifestations (having different properties), thus defeating one of the out-set goals.
A much simpler escape hatch is possible, that conscious-access isn’t conscious-confining. In the same way that taking photographs of outerspace does not limit us to ‘photographic knowledge’ – we can determine more about nebula that on any single image by the logical relationships between images that tell us what they are like, what in otherwords, our photographic access is access too.
Schopenhauer here, and going all the way back to Berkely with his Master Argument (an ingenious genetic fallacy), just over and over makes the same mistake preceding all his analysis. The nature of the medium of access (consciousness) is the nature of what is being accessed (the world). Nope, just wrong.
cf. http://blog.mjburgess.co.uk/2015/05/schopenhaurs-camera.html
Schopenhauer never says the nature of the world is “consciousness.” Will is not conscious in itself.
I was too brisk there, the genetic fallacy does not rely on an identification, just the sharing of properties or some other kind of fallacious dependence. To rephrase, “we learn about nebula through photographs, therefore nebula are ‘photographic’. We learn about the world via consciousness therefore the world’s properties are consciousness-properties”.
See for example,
“And yet, the existence of this whole world remains ever dependent upon the first eye that opened, even if it were that of an insect. For such an eye is a necessary condition of the possibility of knowledge, and the whole world exists only in and for knowledge, and without it is not even thinkable. ”
The ‘existence of this whole world’ does NOT depend on the first eye that opened. The only argument which could substantiate that claim would have to contain a genetic fallacy.
The problem is that you have still failed to distinguish between the phenomenon and the thing-in-itself. The latter does not have these “consciousness properties” you speak of, only the former does. Hence, the world containing these properties does not in fact exhaust the world. Consider Schopenhauer’s title: The World as Will and Presentation. If one stops at the world as presentation, as you have done, then I agree that something like the genetic fallacy might obtain. Just a little bit past your quote, however, Schopenhauer seems to recognize and anticipate this very objection and calls it an “antinomy in our faculty of knowledge,” the solution to which involves distinguishing between the phenomenon and the thing-in-itself.
> The problem is that you have still failed to distinguish between the phenomenon and the thing-in-itself.
No I havent “failed”. There is no distinction. This distinction rests on a genetic fallacy, that the conditions of knowledge imply something about the properties of the objects of knowledge. Our knowledge is directed towards the things as such: that we are sometimes mistaken (that knowledge fails to obtain) does not imply that the world itself is split in two.
> and calls it an “antinomy in our faculty of knowledge,”
Yes, but it isnt an antinomy. It’s only an antinomy (by which he means essentially incomprehensible) because of his genetic mistake. It’s a easily resolvable and easily understandable question if you distinguish “the way things are” from “how we come to know about them”.
What was before the first perception? Well, very likely, exactly what the first perception was a perception of. If the first perception was of a blade of grass, in a field, on earth, in the universe, etc. Then all of those things were there just before the perception too.
It is possible I am wrong about that. The possibility of being in error however does not change the status of the claim, of perception or of anything else. The conditions for the possibility of knowledge divide knowledge into: what can be known and what can never be known. They do not divide *the world* into a ‘phenomenal veil’ and a ‘noumenal unity’, that’s the genetic fallacy at work. Perception is still perception of the world.
There, however, I’ve answered the question asked of Schopenhauer. It was very simple.
“Well, very likely, exactly what the first perception was a perception of… It is possible I am wrong about that.”
Schopenhauer argues in the Fourfold Root that perception itself is an intellectual process of the understanding, so he can say that you are indeed wrong about that. Perception is not some kind of medium or window through which “the world” passes into our consciousness. Rather, perception itself creates this world all on its own, such that the objects one perceives are actually nothing more than how one perceives them, i.e. creations born of the union of time, space, and causality. They do not exist a part from these conditions, as if there were an object behind the perceived object rubbing up against us causally in perception. Such a “transcendental object” is a contradiction in terms, since to be an object is to be situated in time, space, and causal relation to other objects. An object that exists outside of these conditions cannot be the cause of perception, for then it would already be known. Schopenhauer, moreover, repeatedly takes Kant to task for proposing just such an object. So once again, there is no fallacy.
> Schopenhauer argues in the Fourfold Root that perception itself is an intellectual process of the understanding, so he can say that you are indeed wrong about that.
Yes, but it’s not. That’s literally just a restatement of the same fallacy over and over. To say perception is an intellectual process is to say “the properties of the process of knowledge are the properties of what is known” ie. that properties(perception) are properties(intellect).
> An object that exists outside of these conditions cannot be the cause of perception, for then it would already be known.
That’s just a circular argument. What exists is what is known, therefore something cannot exist if it is not known.
> So once again, there is no fallacy.
No, you just keep restating it.
I’m not sure you really understood my post, Michael. You are assuming a particular theory of perception as true and then charging Schopenhauer with committing a fallacy based on him not also assuming it, which is rather convenient. Specifically, you have assumed a realist theory of perception, albeit not a robust one, in that you regard it as likely that objects can exist outside of their being perceived. You think Schopenhauer is wrong to state that the conditions for knowledge also condition what those objects are, since if objects can exist outside of perception, then we have no way of knowing what they are based simply on how we know them. Well, that’s great and does follow so long as we assume your theory of perception, but in my last post I tried, if briefly, to explain that Schopenhauer has a different theory of perception, and that because of this, no fallacy has been committed.
Not quite. I’m talking about the logical structure of the argument for his position. It is fallacious. One premise does not follow from the other. The conditions for the knowledge of something are not the same as the conditions for it being the case. His argument depends on them being the same.
He can /assert/ that they are the same *in this case*, sure. But then his entire system rests on an assertion, not an argument, and an assertion that is plainly false in every other instance.
“The cup is on the table” is the case when the cup is on the table. It’s not the case when you know the cup is on the table, nor is it the case when you are able to know, or given that you can know, etc.
“2 + 2 = 4” is the case in virtue of the properties of the mathematics involved, not in virtue of anything about how we know it. Our systems and mechanisms of knowledge /provide/ what is known, they do not make it the case.
This mistake is common to a great deal of philosophy of this period in many domains. Take, say, Nz’s or Marx’s analysis of culture: that the origins of ideas exemplify their character, eg. that if something has a servile origin it is itself servile.
This is exactly the same as saying, when an idiot says “2 + 2 = 4” then “2 + 2 = 4” must be wrong, because the person who said it is an idiot.
The conditions which make something the case are not the conditions of the possibility of us knowing it is the case. The properties of the systems which provide knowledge are not the properties of what is known. You cannot use an analysis of the conditions of knowledge to determine the conditions of what is the case: you cannot say that since we “layout” the world in a particular way, for consciousness, that space is identical to this laying-out. That’s false as an argument, and a major assertion otherwise. The “argument” is conscious-layout is a precondition for us knowing about space, *therefore* space is this laying-out. Nope.
You can just flat out assert what you like. But Schopenhauer and others really think they are making an argument. And they are, of course, it just happens to be false. A does not follow from B.
Michael, (this not for merely dispute purposes but for dialogue) you seem to be coming from a position raising these issues– “OFO (Ontological Facts are Objective):There are facts of the matter about ontology, which are objective.
“See e.g. Chalmers 2009, p. 77: ‘The metaontologist may ask: is there an objective fact of the matter about whether the mereological sum of two distinct entitiesexists? The ontological realist says yes, and the ontological anti-realist says no.’
“See also Sider 2009, p. 409: ‘[t]he answers to questions of ontology are“objective” … and “out there”, just like the answers to questions about the natureof electrons.’ Note that one could reject OFO either by 1) rejecting the existence of facts of the matter about ontology, or by 2) resisting their objectivity. Bennett’s‘antirealist’ (Bennett 2009, p. 40) says that there is ‘no fact of the matter’ about whether or not there are Fs.
“Bennett says she finds it hard to make sense of thissort of claim. One reading makes it a kind of non-cognitivism. On another reading it might be taken to mean that there is no mind-independent fact of the matter. On yet another, it might be intended to flag some sort of indeterminacy. Candidates here include 1) semantic indeterminacy (the meaning of ‘There are Fs’ is not sufficiently determinate to latch onto a particular ontological fact) and 2) metaphysical indeterminacy (the facts of ontology are themselves indeterminate in such a way as to fail to settle whether or not there are Fs). The question of determinacy needs to be kept apart from the question of objectivity.” (From https://www.academia.edu/2997607/What_Is_Ontological_Realism. )
So, lots of moving parts here. Schopenhauer was amazing in his early identification of issues of Continental Philosophy, but left gaping, undeveloped holes, whether approached from the Continental or Analytic position. I see Michael trying to fill in one of these holes from the OFO position and LemonCookies arguing from within Schopenhauer’s position.
I’m thinking that the problem is caused by some kind of realism always leaking back into question, even as Schopenhauer construes in Mark’s article. “Thus we see, on the one hand, the existence of the whole world necessarily dependent upon the first conscious being,” he says, “on the other hand, this conscious being just as necessarily entirely dependent upon a long chain of causes and effects which have preceded it.” He’s just pitting his own idealistic claim about the nature of time against a realist claim about time – and taking the latter seriously. Since “the whole world exists only in and for knowledge” and “time itself is only thinkable in the identity of a consciousness,” then so is the “long chain of causes and effects which have preceded”. But time is either a form of our knowledge in a Kantian way or it is a reality to which we must answer, no? Time is not supposed to be both appearance and reality, is it?
Even from a more empirical and naturalistic perspective we don’t have to be realists about time. There are many different conceptions and there is likely to be more in the future. It’s a huge deal in physics and otherwise a great tool that we wouldn’t want to abandon. But it is just an idea or set of ideas, a human construction that grew out of our most basic kinds of experiences and practices. It’s such a great idea that we easily think of it as reality itself. But it’s not. We like to count our days and one thing happens after another, sure, but thing-in-itself kind of time? Nah, that’s just mistaking a conception for reality.
“Our systems and mechanisms of knowledge /provide/ what is known, they do not make it the case… The conditions which make something the case are not the conditions of the possibility of us knowing it is the case. The properties of the systems which provide knowledge are not the properties of what is known,” etc.
Each of these statements, on which you base your charge of fallacy, is an assertion of your theory of perception, not an argument, so that what you impute to Schopenhauer is equally attributable to yourself. If, according to you, knowledge conditions what is known, not what things are, then Schopenhauer is wrong, which trivially follows. But if, on the other hand, knowledge conditions both what is known and what things are, as Schopenhauer asserts, then you are wrong to advance the charge of fallacy, which also trivially follows.
Now, does Schopenhauer merely assert this, or does he have an argument? He does, and I would refer you to the section on the intellectual nature of perception found in the Fourfold Root essay, wherein he does not propose anything like the fallacy you have so strenuously asserted his having committed, as far as I can tell. If you have no interest in doing so, I can try to sketch it briefly for you here, if you prefer.
Yes, I’m certainly interested in an argument that both conditions are the same! From what I have read of Book I he just assumes it.
However it is my understanding that his theory of perception is argued-for / grounded-on this equivocation, rather than the reverse. I cannot really see how you could do the reverse: argue for a theory of perception *first* and then argue that the properties of perception are the properties of the world. What could an argument for perception possibly look-like that doesnt presuppose something about the relationship between epistemology and metaphysics?
However, I am really quite interested to see if it can be done. I was myself an idealist for several years, and was more-or-less Schopenhauerian before becoming Husserlian. When I review the arguments which I was using however the relevant ones here contained genetic fallacies. Perhaps it is my understanding which is mistaken..
Alright, I’ll try to give you what I take to be his argument, assuming also that I have understood your criticism correctly. In the aforementioned section of the Fourfold Root, Schopenhauer argues that sensation only furnishes the raw data from which the understanding (or the brain) then constructs objects. My senses provide certain impressions, such as “cold,” “smooth,” etc, which are then taken by the understanding to create the object known as a counter-top or what have you. Crucially, a mere sense impression is not an object. This means that an object’s properties cannot be derived from sensation, but from the understanding applying its forms to the raw data sensation has provided. And what are these forms? They are our old friends: time, space, and causality. Another way to look at it is to try to imagine sensation without a brain or nervous system. Would such an entity have knowledge of objects? Clearly not, for what has been described is a contradiction in terms, biologically speaking. This is to say that the understanding expressly creates what we call objects, such that these objects are nothing more than the union of time, space, and causality. These objects cannot, therefore, exist prior to this process and travel ready-made through the senses and into my consciousness; they rather have to be built, like a house, from raw materials; otherwise, the understanding would be superfluous and sensation could occur without a nervous system, which is evidently not the case.
Right, good. This should make where I am locating his mistake clearer (it is still very much present!):
> but from the understanding applying its forms to the raw data sensation has provided. And what are these forms? They are our old friends: time, space, and causality.
No! This is the one of his equivocations. Yes, on his theory of perception, consciousness has to layout (construct) representations… but the mechanism of this construction is not the content of this construction: the “spacial mechanisms of consciousness” are not space. Perspective is not space. When you draw a picture of a landscape you use some mechanism to represent the distances between objects, but this representation and its mechanism is not *what* you are drawing. The logical content of your picture (the landscape) is not The Picture.
So here’s the first equivocation: the mechanisms of representation are not identical to the representational content. Consciousness does not “use space” it uses “perspective” to represent space.
> This is to say that the understanding expressly creates what we call objects, such that these objects are nothing more than the union of time, space, and causality
Good! We can see clearly here how equivocation #1 leads to the errant conclusion. Consciousness is not using “time, space, causality…” to construct “objects”. This is like saying your drawing of a landscape is using “time, space, … ” to construct “mountains”. It isnt. It’s using “perspective, shading, …” to construct “mountain-representations”. That is, its using the mechanisms of painting to represent space,time, objects, etc.
So the understanding does not create “objects”, it creates representations of objects. Objects are the logical content of these representations, in the way that the mountains are the logical content of a painting of mountains.
So while, yes, representations depend on consciousness, objects themselves do not. I fully agree, given his basic perceptual language, that there could be no representations of objects before anyone was around to represent them. Of course!
But only with the equivocation that the mechanisms of representation are the content of representation, does this imply his conclusion in Mark’s article. And this equivocation is plainly false; the two things are totally distinct.
“the mechanisms of representation are not identical to the representational content.”
This is correct, but Schopenhauer never claims they are identical. An object, as I just got done trying to explain (or at least, I thought I did), is the result of the forms of time, space, and causality being applied to raw sense data. Again, an object, as an image or picture formed by the understanding, is not identical with its properties, that is, it is not identical to time, space, and causality, but is that which results from their merger, such that all objects necessarily possess the properties of temporality, spatiality, and causal efficacy. I read your original objection as saying that we can’t know the properties of objects based on the conditions for knowing them. I’m saying that, yes, we can; i.e. we know they are necessarily temporal, spatial, and causally efficacious because we call an object that which results from the merger of time, space, and causality. An object is not a sense impression and nor is it a thing-in-itself. The former is what an object is shaped from by the understanding; the latter is what the object is a part from its being conditioned by time, space, and causality, which is to say that the thing-in-itself lies outside of these forms and is not an object.
“Consciousness is not using “time, space, causality…” to construct “objects”.”
Good, because neither does Schopenhauer think this, which means you’re still confused. The understanding, which is just the formal name for the processes of the brain and nervous system, constructs objects, not consciousness. Consciousness is simply the state of being aware of objects. It’s not a “thing” that “does” anything. Hence, speaking of equivocating, you cannot do so with consciousness and the understanding.
> that is, it [the object] is not identical to time, space, and causality,
This isn’t my objection. I think the equivocation is so deeply engrained in this thought that it’s difficult to see.
> The understanding, which is just the formal name for the processes of the brain and nervous system, constructs objects, not consciousness.
The point isnt what is doing it: objects are not constructed at all.
> but from the understanding applying its forms to the raw data sensation has provided. And what are these forms? They are our old friends: time, space, and causality.
Let’s focus here. Now you can you see that there is an unfounded claim here? Yes, under his theory of perception we can say The Understanding uses various mechanisms to construct representations. But it is an assertion to identify these with space, time, etc.
The mechanisms of representation are not what is being represented:
Mechanism = Spacial-Understanding, Represented = Space
Mechanism = Time-Understanding, Represented = Time
Mechanism = Object-Representation, Represented = Objects
Schopenhauer is saying that the mechanisms of the understanding *are* space, time, etc. That Object-Representations *are* objects.
He has no argument for this, and just takes it to follow from a genetic fallacy. That because we learn about Space from Spacial-Understanding then they have the same properties…
” the whole world exists only in and for knowledge, and without it is not even thinkable.”
That is, whatever knowledge amounts to, the world amounts to. This is a false equivocation.
The logical content of representation (space, time, objects, whatever..) is not identical to the mechanism of its representation (spatial-undertstanding, time-understanding, object-representation, etc.). The conditions of representation (, presentation, knowledge, etc.) are not the conditions for the content of representation being the case.
When I draw a picture I use various techniques to represent, (perspective = spatial-understanding, colour = object-representation, …) . The logic content of my picture, the what-is-being-represented is not the same as how I am representing it. The painterly-mountain isnt the mountain. A photograph of a room isnt the room. That we learn about rooms from photographs is irrelevant.
Schopenhauer equivocates on the content of representation with the mechanisms of representation. He does with a few arguments which all reset on a genetic fallacy, that the conditions/properties of the origin of something are the conditions/properties of it. That we come to know space through spatial-representation therefore space is spatial-representation, etc.
You’re starting to repeat yourself without further clarification, so this may be my last post. I’ve seen nothing in your posts to suggest a “deeply ingrained fallacy” has been committed. I rather see a deeply ingrained misunderstanding of Schopenhauer’s philosophy that is to blame for this accusation. Nevertheless, I will try to address your claims once more.
“The point isnt what is doing it: objects are not constructed at all.”
This statement is itself merely an unjustified assertion as well as the origin of the charge of fallacy. You can’t have it both ways and charge Schopenhauer with committing the same alleged mistake you yourself make.
“Mechanism = Spacial-Understanding, Represented = Space
Mechanism = Time-Understanding, Represented = Time
Mechanism = Object-Representation, Represented = Objects”
Schopenhauer never uses this kind of language and I must confess I have no idea what you’re trying to say here. Once more, it seems you’re disagreeing with Schopenhauer on account of his having a different understanding of perception from you, which of course isn’t valid to do.
“That is, whatever knowledge amounts to, the world amounts to.”
Nope. We’ve come full circle here, which means you haven’t really understood anything I’ve said. The world does not amount to what knowledge amounts to. The thing-in-itself is unknowable, yet part of the world. This I mentioned back at the start of our conversation. Might I suggest that you abandoned only a misunderstanding of Schopenhauer’s philosophy and not his philosophy proper? You could also go back and read the Fourfold Root if you believe I’ve done a poor job expressing his views here..
Then I shall also make my last* comment on the issue, and as simply and clearly as possible.
Representations (, claims, propositions, ideas, etc.) have two aspects. They have: 1, logical content: what it is they are about. and 2, their origins: how it is that we can make the claim, what it takes to be able to represent something, etc.
The properties of (1) are not the properties of (2), and the argument that the properties of (1) follow from the properties of (2) is a fallacy, and can be easily demonstrated to be one.
If you wish to claim (1 – content) and (2 – origins) share properties then you have to provide an argument, and a good one.
The central arguments in the idealist tradition, as far as I am familiar with them – and in particular the ones which schopenhauer uses often – repeatedly rest on the fallacy that the properties of (1) “just follow” from the properties of (2).
There is no argument that has been put forward so far, that I can see in your posts or Schopenhauers to substantiate the claim that (1) and (2) share properties in the case of representation.
That is, in the case where Schopenhauer says that the content of representation (space, time, objects, etc.) has the same properties as the mechanism of representation (the understanding, consciousness, etc.). For space *just to be* an aspect of the understanding you need to provide a very strong argument: I have seen none but the fallacious one that “because the understanding uses spatial-representation, space is spatial-representation”, etc.
This is my problem in a nutshell: Why, Schopenhauer, is the content of representation nothing but its origins (in the Understanding)? It does not logically follow that they are the same.
NB. —
Further given that (1) and (2) are logically distinct, why should we just not treat them as actually metaphysically distinct in the case of consciousness and representation? The simplest explanation of the world is on in which they are, and in the absence of any successful argument to the contrary, this is my position.
Namely, that the mechanisms of consciousness present the world, and that the properties of the world are fundamentally different to those of consciousness. This however does NOT lead to the Kantian confusion (which is to raise this into High Metaphysics), but to an epistemological problem. What consciousness represents is “the thing in itself” (the thing in itself is nothing more than the representational *content* of consciousness), but it cannot represent *every* property – and indeed it may misrepresent. Thus there is a set of propositions {A, …} that we can know, and a set {B, …} we cannot know. That is it, no veil, no noumena, no theatre. The cup in front of me is the cup, its properties are its own, and I know a few of them via consciousness.
* I have written http://blog.mjburgess.co.uk/2015/05/historical-philosophy-fallacy-of-origins.html , a first draft that needs a little work
Thanks very much to both of you, Michael and LC, for an illuminating exchange.
The underlying question here is the status of epistemological accounts. Each of you is claiming that the other is putting forth an analysis of knowledge that lacks proper support. But what are the grounds for making any claim about epistemology? Kant thought he discovered a firm dividing line between the knowable and the unknowable, but Schopenhauer accused him of ruling out metaphysics by fiat, i.e. by definition.
“…This is to say that the understanding expressly creates what we call objects, such that these objects are nothing more than the union of time, space, and causality. These objects cannot, therefore, exist prior to this process and travel ready-made through the senses and into my consciousness; they rather have to be built, like a house, from raw materials; otherwise, the understanding would be superfluous and sensation could occur without a nervous system, which is evidently not the case.”
This is in effect to define the world “object” as referring to an idea that we have, when our pre-philosophical sense of the term implies no such reference. To argue positively that a “mind-independent object” is a self-contradictory term requires a great deal of effort (see our Berkeley episode), but that’s what’s required to motivate the idealist position. Schopenhauer explicitly says he’s an idealist; it’s not true to say that the thing-in-itself is PART of the world; it (Will) is the WHOLE world, while the world of representation is also the whole world, though taken in a different aspect.
What I did not see in Schopenhauer is a positive argument that concepts like temporality, spatiality, and causality CAN’T apply to the thing-in-itself. The strongest claim Kant makes is that we don’t have any warrant to attribute such qualities to it. The burden of proof would then be on Schopenhauer to show that Kant is wrong here, right? Instead, Schopenhauer gives a vivid description of a metaphysics and epistemology that is different from Kant’s. What are supposed to be the grounds for judging between the two? I think Schopenhauer thought that his view fit the facts better, that, as I described earlier, he could explain the use of “force” in science in a way that Kant couldn’t. We went through those claims to superiority on the podcast and found them largely unconvincing.
“it’s not true to say that the thing-in-itself is PART of the world; it (Will) is the WHOLE world, while the world of representation is also the whole world, though taken in a different aspect.”
Yes, of course. By “part” I meant an aspect of the world. I should have been more precise.
“What I did not see in Schopenhauer is a positive argument that concepts like temporality, spatiality, and causality CAN’T apply to the thing-in-itself.”
Objects are appearances, which simply means that they are conditioned by time, space, and causality. The very notion of an appearance necessarily implies that of which it is an appearance, or that which appears in appearance (the thing-in-itself), which therefore cannot be identical to the appearance itself, so that it cannot be in time, space, or causal relation to anything. To assert that the thing-in-itself can be in time, space, and causal relation to other things is to assert that appearances are the thing-in-itself, which is a contradiction in terms. It would be like asserting that a shadow is identical to that which casts it.
“The very notion of an appearance necessarily implies that of which it is an appearance,”
So where does Schopenhauer get this notion of “appearance?” From the phenomenal world, e.g. you see the bent stick in the water but then on closer observation see that the stick is not in fact bent. (Note that Berkeley denies this; for him, the bent-stick idea and the straight-stick idea are part of one cluster; there is nothing behind the appearances; therefore they’re not really appearances at all in the sense you’re using the term.) You see a mirage (an appearance of water) and see that the reality is just sand and sunlight. The far off car appears small but reveals its true size as we approach. Were it not for these experiences, we wouldn’t know what this “appearance to reality” relation is. You might say that such a relation is a law for all of our perceptions; as with the ubiquity of causality, we know a priori that any given thing we look at is going to reveal more of its true nature on closer inspection (and note also that this relation is in no way reducible to causal relations, nor to space and time).
So what justifies projection of this appearance-reality distinction beyond the realm of appearance by which it was born to say that all perceptions (even the close-up ones) are merely appearances, and that behind all of those there must be some reality that’s fundamentally different in character from these appearances (even though straight-stick-reality is not fundamentally different in character than bent-stick-appearance)? Is this case not exactly parallel to the case with causality?
So don’t pretend that this appearance (phenomena)-reality (thing-in-itself) distinction is something that you can blithely claim knowledge of in the way you just have. If S’s metaphysics/epistemology is the true one, then the appearance/reality distinction that we know about can only be analogical to the appearance (phenomena)/reality (Will) distinction. It’s a relation that we only know one side of.
“So where does Schopenhauer get this notion of “appearance?” From the phenomenal world, e.g. you see the bent stick in the water but then on closer observation see that the stick is not in fact bent.”
No, certainly not from that. I want to say I’ve already answered this question. He gets it from an analysis of the nature of cognition, in large part already argued for by Kant. We know things as they appear in time, space, and causality, which means we don’t know things as they are in themselves, which is to say, a part from these forms.
I really appreciate the exchange here and your knowledge of Schopenhauer, but I think you’ve given us a pretty good demonstration here re. the downside of being a “devotee,” as the original exchange had it. I’m asking you to consider, for yourself, the ultimate grounds for deciding these issues, and you just can’t seem to take the bait, and just keep repeating points about Schopenhauer that we already know.
What grounds an analysis of the nature of cognition? To me, our common experience vastly underdetermines the number of fruitful stories we can tell about it, so I’m interested both in the picture that Schopenhauer paints and in why, for example, subsequent philosophers (Michael mentioned Husserl, who retains many elements of transcendental idealism while getting rid of the thing-in-itself, as did Hegel and just about every other neo-Kantian and virtually everyone else in the Continental tradition) moved past that picture. Schopenhauer declares himself a type of idealist, and yet when Michael cogently puts forth a pretty common argument against idealism, you not only can’t articulate why Schopenhauer’s version is immune to his attack, but you claim not to understand what he’s talking about because he’s not using Schopenhauer’s exact language. Understanding a figure INVOLVES being able to translate that figure’s language into other terms, and if such a translation is losing something from the original, then there’s a discussion to be had about what exactly is being lost and why: simply correcting the terminology doesn’t accomplish this.
A pretty obvious symptom of devoteeism (which you’ll see in plenitude if you look at our past discussions for the Rand and Pirsig) is an insistence that any possible objections to the cherished philosopher must be misunderstandings. Of course it’s quite possible (probable!) that it attacking a text one can misunderstand, and t’s great that primary texts offer the richness that allows one to return to them to get more out of them even after a cursory (or not so cursory) dismissal, but I’ve put a lot of time into Schopenhauer over the last month, and have earned the right to be legitimately puzzled by many of the points that he thinks are clear and rightly recognize a number of his arguments that are just plain bad, perhaps the most central of which is this mere determination by definition that things-in-themselves can’t have space/time/causality/etc. As you point out, the point follows from “his analysis of perception,” but since this is not a conclusion that Kant himself drew (the whole point of Kant’s system was to rule out metaphysics of the sort that S. is engaged in; we just can’t say anything positively or negatively about the thing-in-itself at all, not that it’s non-temporal or temporal), then there needs to be a positive argument for S. being so emphatic about the point, and simply positing a definition for “appearance” that implies the position does not amount to an argument.
Wes is a devotee of Freud (whom we’re about to record on for Monday), but (I think) is easily able to see the limitations of Freud’s scientific positivism, and argue (based in part on things he’s read by subsequent thinkers talking about Freud) that many of Freud’s insights survive the problems, which were largely a matter of the time and place Freud was writing in. Given that Schopenhauer is writing in 1817 or so, it would be EXTREMELY SURPRISING if there weren’t a lot of ridiculous points in it that are easier to put into perspective given the passage of time. So, e.g., Kant argued that Euclidean geometry and Newtonian physics are things we can know a priori, that they’re essentially part of the human mind, and Schopenhauer assumes in book 3 along similar lines that tonal Western music is basically a law of nature, and says a lot of silly things about science in book 1 (that deeply influence what he as to say in book 2 about Will and science, as explored on the podcast) that are a direct result of vitalism being the scientific trend of the day. Heck, the most damning take on Schopenhauer’s system is from his biggest fan, Nietzsche, who convincingly argues that even if you accept S’s whole picture of the human condition, becoming an ascetic (i.e. pursuing S’s conception of virtue) is not the answer.
So say something that indicates you’ve applied some level of critical thought to any significant aspect of Schopenhauer’s system and I’ll stop being a dick here. 🙂
And I like to think I’ve also ably demonstrated what it takes to be a devotee of oneself… Unfortunately in my case, the symptoms seem terminal.
“So say something that indicates you’ve applied some level of critical thought to any significant aspect of Schopenhauer’s system and I’ll stop being a dick here.”
You could have asked this question sooner if that’s what you were really looking for out of me. I am not convinced by your and Michael’s criticisms, but that doesn’t mean I have no criticisms of Schopenhauer! For starters, Schopenhauer’s anti-Newtonian, pro-Goethean tract On Vision and Colors as well as the later On the Will in Nature contain many unscientific opinions which have not held up to evidence. His notorious essay On Women, while in some respects misunderstood, contains many unjustified and bigoted remarks on the female sex. Next, there is the question of what implications, if any, Darwinism has for his overall system; I have not quite made up my mind if Darwinism poses a problem, though I suspect not. As for his politics, Schopenhauer argues for the use of capital punishment and hereditary monarchy, and I am not fully convinced by the arguments he gives for these positions. Finally, of current interest to me is what the mystic and ascetic experiences when the will has been denied, that is, it is unclear whether he or she experiences a mode or aspect of the thing-in-itself that is not the will or he or she transcends the thing-in-itself entirely (which is to say, unlike what you briefly implied in the podcast, the mystic/ascetic does not experience the will, for this is precisely what has been denied). A corollary to this problem is the precise relation of his philosophy to certain religions, such as Christianity and Buddhism, and to what extent he can deny revelation. Another way of posing this problem is to ask if Schopenhauer’s philosophy implies atheism or a kind of negative (apophatic) theology.
I don’t know how “significant” you find these aspects of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, so maybe you won’t be satisfied. In all honesty, I do agree with Schopenhauer in the main, in that I find his epistemology, ontology, aesthetics, and ethics compelling and agreeable. My devotion isn’t blind, however. For example, I used to count myself as a Spinozist in that I thought Spinoza’s account of the world and of ethics was basically correct. If I discovered that you made a podcast on Spinoza 6-7 years ago, I would have likely given my thoughts in support of him. I have one good personal friend with whom I can discuss philosophy, but it’s hard staying in touch due to our schedules. Thus, I post on various internet comment sections and forums, despite their inadequacy for doing so, in part to expose myself to criticism. I always have the nagging feeling that there’s no way X or Y philosopher has it right, and the only way to leave the echo chamber of my own mind is to come online. If something seems too convincing, I am apt to doubt it sooner or later. All of this is to say that I may be a devotee, but I am not a blind devotee. Defending a philosophical system is the only way to discover its problems and just because I may not see or understand that such problems exist now, doesn’t mean I won’t in the future.
Lastly, I might add that I don’t find that arguments in and of themselves necessarily motivate belief. I experience what we call the world and all a philosophical system can do is approximate that experience through the use of concepts. Belief in it is then predicated on whether it feels right, not whether one knows it to be right. A philosophical system is the rough sketch of a landscape, or a part of it, instead of the real thing, or the imperfect translation of one language into one that is less precise. To be demand certainty that a philosophical system is true is therefore absurd. Doubtless one of them is probably true, but this can never be communicated such that all will agree. I’m not saying this to excuse myself from the rigors of logic, but simply to state that my aim isn’t to convince you of my position (at least not primarily), or to imply that you are all intellectual dwarfs compared to the uninhibited stream of truth from which I draw and have access to. Rather, I’m trying to open myself up for criticism, not all of which I may see (assuming there is genuine criticism afoot in this comment section). Take what you will out of this post.
The thought occurred to me after writing this post that certainty might not be the same as knowledge or truth, but I think you get my point. Or not.
That’s a much better response that I would expect from those Pirsig and Rand guys, so I’ll retract that comparison, as it was a cheap shot. I maintain that if you only really understand one philosopher you don’t actually understand any philosophers, but by all means, people should pursue philosophy in whatever specialized or dabbling member best suits them.
Well, I do try to understand more than one philosopher, and I’m not sure I have implied otherwise. To understand someone like Schopenhauer, one has to understand Kant, and to understand him, one has to understand the British empiricists and continental rationalists, and to understand them, one has to understand scholasticism, and to understand scholasticism, one has to understand Plato and Aristotle. Doing philosophy is in large part reading through its history, which I’m working on, slowly. So agreeing with one philosopher (for the moment) doesn’t mean I don’t read or plan on reading the others.
And I’m very glad to not be lumped in with the Randroids.
[! Warning: I wrote the following very drunk on Saturday (morning – I stayed up!). I decided not to post it and put it in my email drafts to edit. However I’ve had subsequent thoughts which are more general and are not close enough to this comment to be worth editing it, so I’ve just decided to post it rather than throw it away. !]
Mark, re devoteeism
I can understand why you’ve reached that conclusion about LC but i’m not quite convinced it’s true. Above he has made criticisms, etc. but I just also think there’s another force at work.
In older metaphysics, and especially idealism (and continuing to this day via phenomenology, etc.) everyone begins with a “framing metaphysical point-of-view”. That is a way of describing ordinary experiences, a framing language and set of ideas that are meant to obviously describe to the things you can point to.
Oftentimes entire debates share the same frame. For example Berkely and Locke both responding to mediv. scepticism, basically accept thier framing metaphysics: some things are Appearances, something Illusions … and everything is encountered ** first as an Idea in the Mind **. Bekerly, given this framing, makes some true remarkable and brilliant arguments… if you already take it to be “obvious, a given” that the cup you’re pointing to is actually just an idea in your mind then, via the Master Argument, you ought to believe everything is an idea. And you should!
Locke here I think loses the debate completely because he starts with the same frame and cannot really mount a successful reply from within it. Locke sounds closer to modern views, so he’s most often pushed and defended against Berkeley who is introduced to undergrads via caricature (the reality, of course, is just too difficult for first year). However the scandal is Berkeley decimates Locke. Berkely mounts challenges from a quasi-sceptical frame, one that Locke buys into, and in buying into it, dooms himself. For example (very approximately….), Locke partitions primary and secondary qualities based on how they present themselves to us. Space is primary because it doesnt change itself depending on your pov. Colour is secondary because the colour of objects can change relative to observers. Berkely then, masterfully, points out perspective. (And my banging on about perspective in this comment section can be hooked partly up to this point). Berkekely says the geometry of objects (ie. Ideas!) does vary across observes (from one view, the cup lip is elliptical, from another circular.). Berkely here is right… Locke can’t mantain his distinction in terms of differences between ideas… representation just varies to much (it’s the logical structure we infer from representation, what it is about, that remains fixed… not the representation itself…).
The reply to Berkely here is the same reply I gave about representation. The Idea (representation, mode of representation, mechanism of the understanding, particular form of representation) is “layed out differently” from a different perspective. *BUT*, now rejecting Berkely’s framing metaphysics, we dont encounter ideas *in* the mind (qua container). Ideas (representations) are reactions – thus they are *about* non-conscious objects. (Rather than as Bekerely would have it, transmitted to inside the mind by God…). Thus space doesn’t change deepening on perspective… perspective just encodes geometry in subtle and different ways. Geometry is the constant that perspective orients itslef around… the real geometry can only be found by looking at relationships between perspective shifts… it’s revealed via perspective but it is never found in it: the geometry of an object belongs to the object. In inferring the logical content of representation we can also infer its logical structure… we can say “that Idea is about a sphere!” despite never being actually able to render a sphere in perspective. )
That doesnt take down berekely of course, it only shows an alternative framing that doesnt make him automatically or obviously correct (which is what many idealists consider their positions to be).
So, as an argument for why my framing is better than Berkeley’s framing, consider looking at an object you have never seen before from a large angel. You can only look at it from that angle, but there’s a mirror and you can see all the sides. Now, everything is taken away and you’re asked to recreate the object in clay (or whatever).
Here’s the key thing: your perspectival position will have shown you brims (of holes) as ellipses… but you will not even recall that, you’ll recall its circular – and put a circular hole in. You will make all kinds of adjustments automatically , and not just sculpt *exactly* what you saw at that angle… but rather the full object that you immediately understood looking at it. That is, with only one perspective, you will be able to reacreate the object in full.
How is this possible? If geometry is nothing but how the mind lays things out, then you would not have enough information to do that. However, actually, the geometry of objects is merely represented by the mind. And you intuitively grasp the logical relationships between the sides of the object, its edges, holes, corners, etc. You understand that what you observed was a means of representing space/geometry, and that means encodes information about the logical structure of objects in space. Ie. though our visual field is flat and perspectival We know the objects our field represents (what it is about, it’s logical content) are not flat and perspectival. And by intuively grasping the relationship between the real geometry of past objects and the representational geometry of our visual field, you knew exactly what the real geometry of the object was.
So to fully account for this ability, we need to say that Ideas (representations, etc.) have content (what they are about, eg. strange objects) and they have a mechanism or form of presentation (eg. perspective). That is, when you looked at the object the mechanism of conscious representation here was extremely limited: a flat visual field, with depth-perspective. Certainly not encoding enough information about the entire object to recreate it. However the representation was *about* an object with its own independent geometry. By knowing how the geometry of the world matches up to perspective, you can recreate the original object. Ie. we discover that inferring the logical content and structure of representation is easy, we do it constantly. We rarely get confused and think that the brim of a cup is really an ellipse: we automatically parse it as a circle. And thus we also discover that the “literal representation” and its mechanisms (perspective,etc.) is not at all like what it is representing: an ellipse isnt a circle. That the properties of representation are not those of its content… that space isnt perspective.
(There is an alternative idealist explanation: that the geometry of objects is, yes, different than perspective but still ideal… because this geometry is actually just nothing more than a pattern *within* perspective. ANd yes, in a way of course they are right… we discover the geometry of the world by taking different perspectives and noticing the pattern. What the idealist fail to see however is that this pattern is in the content of the representation… it’s **never** in the representation itself!)
Reality is, incidentally, what provides the logical relationships between experiences and the infered content of experience. It’s actually hard if you go far enough to think what more an object could be than the infinite number of ways it can affect other things. This is how i actually ended up switching to realism.. by taking phenomenology too its logical conclusion: ie. that realism didnt have to be noumenalism, that is a commitment to hidden objects that we never experience. No no, objects are nothing more than the relationships they maintain.
Most idealist/phenomenologist/etc. major works are basically consequences of their adopting a particular framing metaphysics – which they take to be just obvious (“just point to…”) – and then working through the consequences of this frame. Its understandable why this is… they think their interpretation of the prima fascie moment of experience (“the very first act on which all others depend) is obvious… their way of thinking about it is encoded in examples, illustrations and criticisms of rival views from their pov. Given that it is obvious, true, incontestable then it provides a very strong foundation for building a system.
For about three years this is pretty much what I did. I’d try not to read too much until I was told someone else had the same thoughts I was having. What I was basically doing is looking out at the world (“here’s my hand”, “my hand is a phenomena”, “there’s nothing else under it – just look!”, “there is no subject/ego”, etc…) and taking my frame as obvious, try to solve a great many metaphysical problems and build an intricate and clever system.
For example I have only read bits and pieces of Schopenhauer, and mostly after i’d moved away from traditional idealist thought. So I never realised that the argument he gives against solipisism was almost exactly the one I gave! A lot of what i would do is go to philosophy groups and debate metaphysics and try to formulate arguments, examples, etc. that were water-tight to convince other people. And I had a great many, only one now however (about language and reference) have I not later discovered elsewhere. However the point isn’t that I’m clever, quite the opposite: that really quite a lot of this does just follow if you can get intuitively inside a particular frame.
So the deveteeism I read in LC is not to Schopehauer himself, but to his metaphysical frame (the “obvious” intutions which are taken to describe the what-is-to-be-explained).
To quote Poincaré:
Space is another framework which we impose on the
world. Whence are the first principles of geometry de-
rived? Are they imposed on us by logic? Lobatschewsky,
by inventing non-Euclidean geometries, has shown that
this is not the case. Is space revealed to us by our senses?
No; for the space revealed to us by our senses is abso-
lutely different from the space of geometry. Is geometry
derived from experience? Careful discussion will give the
answer—no! We therefore conclude that the principles
of geometry are only conventions
He’s equivocating on space and geometry, which confuses the whole quote. There’s a case for saying the principles of geometry are only conventions, but he neglects to realise that all explanations rest upon conventions in this way – but that does not make their content, what it is they are explaining, conventional.
Space is whatever explains objects being positionally-related to one another (ie. the relations ‘between’, ‘on top’, ‘under’, ‘1 mile away from’, etc.). We can use geometric conventions to provide that explanation, but that doesn’t render the content of that explanation (space), a convention itself. Objects remain positionally-related to one another despite Euclid’s myopia. (Ironically this another genetic fallacy.)
There is no deep *metaphysical* problem in explanations resting on conventions: that we decide to use one system to describe something rather than another does not change the status of what we are describing. There is an *epistemic* problem however, since no system will be exhaustive: some truths will be concealed by our choice and others revealed. Nevertheless, the solution to this problem isnt to say we’re hopelessly confined – but rather to keep varying conventions and thus to obtain an understanding of more and more facets of the world.
I must say you are very hard to follow.
You seem to believe that there is some such thing as physical space.
Or to put it in another way there exists an external world were objects are located at different positions.
Furthermore you seem to believe that the objects in this space has some sort of geometry, “the geometry of an object belongs to the object”, I don’t really understand what you mean by this but maybe you mean that it makes sense to say “the table has three dimensions”, and that this somehow is about the tables geometry.
“the table has three dimensions” is a fine claim when taken at its ordinary meaning, but it makes no sense whatsoever as a metaphysical claim, an ordinary object could be describes just as well having any number of dimensions and so could space itself.
Poincare puts it more colorfully:
Can we maintain that certain phenomena which
are possible in Euclidean space would be impossible in
non-Euclidean space, so that experiment in establish-
ing these phenomena would directly contradict the non-
Euclidean hypothesis? I think that such a question can-
not be seriously asked. To me it is exactly equivalent to
the following, the absurdity of which is obvious:—There
are lengths which can be expressed in metres and cen-
timetres, but cannot be measured in toises, feet, and
inches; so that experiment, by ascertaining the existence
of these lengths, would directly contradict this hypothe-
sis, that there are toises divided into six feet.
> I don’t really understand what you mean by this but maybe you mean that it makes sense to say “the table has three dimensions”, and that this somehow is about the tables geometry.
Not quite. I mean that each corner of the table is diagonal to every other conrner; that two of its sides are longer than the other two, etc.
“The table” is an object partly comprised of other objects (table legs, table top, etc.) which are comprised of atoms, etc. all “arranged in the shape of a table”.
That is, a table is more-or-less “stuff arranged table-wise”. This “arranged table-wise” is what I mean by its geometry.
Space has a geometry. Objects have geometries. “Geometry” doesnt just mean the structure of space, it means “the shape and relative arrangement of the parts of something” – hence the geometry *of* space.
And while I think poincare is right in his premises, his conclusion is off. Merely because we can translate between euclidean and non-euclidean representations of space does not mean that space has no geometry itself. I can describe a sphere in spherical coordinates or cartesian coordinates, my ability to do this does not deprive the sphere of its own geometry.
Indeed the great mess which ensues from a cartesian description (as compared with a spherical description) is partly a symptom of its actual geometry.
All this tells us is that a geometry is not casually/physically/mathematically determinative in a particular way (ie. it does not preclude any physical phenomena) , that isnt at all to say it doesnt exist.
Incidentally, i’m not here assuming a substantial or “physical” understanding of space. Space, even if it’s just a particular form of the relations between things, still exists (qua those relations) and still has a geometry (qua the geometry of those relations).
“Merely because we can translate between euclidean and non-euclidean representations of space does not mean that space has no geometry itself.”
No but it does mean that you can’t use the fact that geometry is used to describe space to imply that space has a geometry, you see geometry is used to describe many different things, most of which have nothing whatsoever to do with geometry, take for example this old story:
“How can you know that?” was his query. “And what is this symbol here?”
“Oh,” said the statistician, “this is pi.”
“What is that?”
“The ratio of the circumference of the circle to its diameter.”
“Well, now you are pushing your joke too far,” said the classmate, “surely the population has nothing to do with the circumference of the circle.”
To quote Monthy Python, “it’s only a model”, it’s not the real thing.
Then why would you think that space has a geometry?
If you have two models describing the same thing how do you discern which one is analogous to the actual thing? You give the example of, cartesian description (as compared with a spherical description).
Simplicity in the model does not mean that the real thing is simple, neither does a complex model mean that the real thing is complex.
Suppose someone where to say: all these geometries, circles and lines, positions and so on, who needs them? Really all you need is sets and the relations between sets, it’s simple
you get geometry for free, you even get numbers. Therefore reality is made up of sets.
In the beginning of this thread, Michael poses the following supposed genetic fallacy
“we learn about nebula through photographs, therefore nebula are ‘photographic’”. But you have to be far more careful in stating where the fallacy in this inference comes from. Indeed, the properties of nebula are, in some part, at least a function of the properties of photographs of nebula, or a function of the properties of sets of photographs, or a function of multiple measurements. No one has seen nor grasped a nebula close up, and all of the properties that we assign to nebula are dependent upon various measuring devices. Everything we know about nebula is a function of the properties of various measuring devices, and each of these devices has its own properties. A realist will smuggle in the so-called real nebula—or the ‘content’ of these devices in Michael’s language–to account for all of the measurements on these various devices, but the properties of that real nebula, in some way, are dependent upon properties of photographs. For instance, a photograph has a domain of variability, a two-dimensional surface, just as a nebula may be composed of multiple two-dimensional surfaces—these share certain properties. If you gloss over photographs and nebula, and reduce them to meaningless bundles of ‘photographic’ and ‘nebular’ properties, or ignore the complex functional dependency between them, then you won’t see their dependency.
The realist wants to make that dependence go in a certain direction—the real object causes all of those properties of measuring devices to be what they are. The idealist wants to make the dependency go in the opposite direction—the object is a theoretical construction based upon the measuring devices (where perception is the primal measuring device). I’ll cut to the chase—I see no immediate reason why this dependency cannot go in both direction, and looking at the history of philosophy, my bet is that anyone who dogmatically takes either side of this position is almost surely missing something in their philosophy.
Michael tends to state Moorean facts such as ‘There is a table’ as premises for argumentation, but these sorts of facts simply do not persuade idealists. Moorean facts are, as Russell put it “one of those things that we know better than we know the premises of any philosophical argument to the contrary.”, or appeals to the disquotational theory of truth, such as ““The cup is on the table” is the case when the cup is on the table”, in his arguments. There is a lot of metaphysical baggage behind this sort of argumentation (which must be argued for independently, as Wayne pointed out ‘a lot of moving parts’) which I believe Lemon is rebelling against.
I found the exchange between the both of you illuminating.
Well this comment is a brilliant statement of the genetic fallacy!
> the properties of that real nebula, in some way, are dependent upon properties of photographs.
No they’re not. You have mistaken an epistemic dependence (I come to know about the nebula via photograph) for an ontological one (the properties of the nebula derive from the properties of the photograph).
> I see no immediate reason why this dependency cannot go in both direction
The problem is that all the arguments for one direction (the flattening of the logical content and reduction to its origin) are fallacies. Mistakes. Confusions.
> these sorts of facts simply do not persuade idealists.
Oh but theyre not meant to be persuasive! The project of philosophy is to explain your explanandum, and what is the explanadum of metaphysics? Well “all that is the case”, the “what’s going on”.
Everyone agrees that your system needs some way to account for statements such as “the cup is on the table”. The idealist account is merely convoluted in this case, and simple in the case of “I am hallucinating a cup on a table”. And the realist account is simple in the cup-case and convoluted in the illusion-case.
Idealism thus trades on koans demonstrating illusion and mistake, as a psychological nudge in their direction. The arguments for their positions however, as far as I have ever encountered them, are just full of logical errors.
So why chose realism then? Well because the entire set of things-which-are-to-be-explained are best explained, most simply account for by realism. And that is the argument for it, which does not rest upon a fallacy.
As far as idealism goes, it is just terrible at explaining a great many things. Just catastrophically bad. Hence Mark’s article.
If we compare what Mark has summarized regarding LC’s position (compared to Michael’s):
“Don’t pretend that this appearance (phenomena)-reality (thing-in-itself) distinction is something that you can blithely claim knowledge of . . . The appearance/reality distinction that we know about can only be analogical to the appearance (phenomena)/reality (Will) distinction. It’s a relation that we only know one side of.”
–I think this same critique applies equally to Michael’s position (although eloquently expressed via ETOH, etc.): as he says, “What consciousness represents is “the thing in itself” (the thing in itself is nothing more than the representational *content* of consciousness), but it cannot represent *every* property – and indeed it may misrepresent. Thus there is a set of propositions {A, …} that we can know, and a set {B, …} we cannot know. That is it, no veil, no noumena, no theatre. The cup in front of me is the cup, its properties are its own, and I know a few of them via consciousness.” Can you blithely claim knowledge of things?
Similarly, are not Michael’s following assertions questionable?:
“There’s a mirror and you can see all the sides with only one perspective, you will be able to recreate the object in full.”
“By intuively grasping the relationship between the real geometry of past objects and the representational geometry of our visual field, you knew exactly what the real geometry of the object was.” Wasn’t this Bergson’s argument of metaphysics?
“By knowing how the geometry of the world matches up to perspective, you can recreate the original object.” (Heavy duty reliance on “knowing”, the algorithim argument for AI.)
“’Literal representation’ and its mechanisms (perspective,etc.) is not at all like what it is representing: space isn’t perspective.” (On what basis is ‘literal representation’ privileged?)
“Reality is, incidentally, what provides the logical relationships between experiences and the inferred content of experience.” (Now we have the concept of Reality as the grounding of reality with the help of logic connected to experience, but without explanation)
Michael how is your position not similar to LC’s idealist position in “adopting a particular framing metaphysics (“just point to…”)”’—- not “their way of thinking about it is encoded in examples, illustrations and criticisms of rival views from their POV? Given that it is obvious, true, incontestable then it provides a very strong foundation for building a system,” not “the ‘obvious’ intutions which are taken to describe the what-is-to-be-explained”?
I affirm your advocacy to “keep varying conventions and thus to obtain an understanding of more and more facets of the world.”
Well I have admited to adopting framing conventions in my (realist) explanations of examples, but the examples themselves are just problems to think about. And I’m not adopting a frame in my criticism of idealist arguments.
My criticism of idealist arguments is simply that they equivocate on epistemic dependence and ontological dependence. And thus they assume the properties of the origin are the properties of the thing: if you use language to describe it, it is linguistic. If you use a game to describe it, it is a game. If you use conventions to describe it, it is conventional. If it is known by experience, it is experiential.
This are all fallacies. They do not follow. These *arguments* are wrong. Their conclusions might be right, but that requires an argument that doesn’t beg the question… all the idealist ones do.
So what system do I adopt? I’m adopting the one where the logical content of experience (what it is about) has an independent existence. That is, i’m saying “it is known by experience, but it is not experiential”. That again would be a fallacy if this were my argument (it would be the same fallacy in fact). But this isnt my argument.
My argument is that this conclusion/system/etc. offers a powerful, simple and clear way of accounting for everything we wish to account for.
I also wish to observe that the reverse conclusion (“it is known by experience therefore it is experiential”) has no arguments to support it, and the analogue of my argument (appeal to explanatory power) is catastrophic in the case of idealism. Idealism explains very little and makes a great mystery out of everything else.
Marc’s comments come the closest to my views. Among other things, he said, “The realist wants to make that dependence go in a certain direction—the real object causes all of those properties of measuring devices to be what they are. The idealist wants to make the dependency go in the opposite direction—the object is a theoretical construction based upon the measuring devices (where perception is the primal measuring device).”
What Micheal refers to as a “genetic fallacy” is, I think, predicated on the realist’s position. Real objects are the original cause of the properties that appear to us, the realist supposes, and so the idealist’s claim that objects are constructs of the mind is considered an error that confuses our knowledge of the thing with the real thing that’s known. But the genetic fallacy accusation doesn’t hold up unless the realist picture is true and that’s what’s in dispute. So it’s a kind of question begging.
As I understand it, one way forward is to attack the appearance-reality distinction and with it the very notion that our ideas represent things-in-themselves. There are at least two arguments against this sort of arrangement that seem pretty convincing to me. One of them is to point out that since things-in-themselves are by definition beyond the realm of appearances, it is impossible to measure our knowledge or ideas against the real reality they supposedly represent. For this reason, the argument says, the correspondence theories of truth are incoherent because it’s impossible to check that correspondence. The other argument attacks the thing-in-itself and other similar ontological claims as a conceptual error, as the fallacy of misplaced concreteness or reification. Idealists and materialists alike, John Dewey said, make the same mistake of conferring existential status upon the products of reflection. In this case, the view is that the thing-in-itself is not an actual ontological reality but rather a philosophical posit, an idea that’s meant to explain the regularities known in experience. And if that weren’t bad enough, the experiences from which this idea was derived in the first place are considered to be mere appearance as opposed to the real reality.
But these arguments come to me from pragmatists and radical empiricists, not idealists.
> I think, predicated on the realist’s position.
It isnt. It’s the observation that epistemological dependence is not ontological dependence. Those are just different. If you want to make the case that they are the same you cannot just assume it.
> since things-in-themselves are by definition beyond the realm of appearances, it is impossible to measure our knowledge or ideas against the real reality they supposedly represent
This begs the question. You are beginning with the idea that a ‘thing in itself’ is “beyond”. Realism has really nothing to do with “things in themselves” or “beyonds”. In general, it’s just the position that the logical content of experience has an independent standing (the properties of things and their relationships stand in virtue of their having independent existence. They are by no means “hidden”… this is just what idealists have assumed must be the case because they were responding to veil-of-perception sceptics.
The real object is just that object which provides the logical content to representation. It isnt “by definition” hidden, it’s exactly the opposite! This is just idealists misunderstanding scepticism.
> because it’s impossible to check that correspondence
This again equivocates on epistemic and ontological dependence (and it thus begs the question). The logical content of a representation is what is being represented. That does not change given that we make mistakes, nor does it require anything to be the case about knowledge. The ability to know for certain that the claims about the world we infer from experience are true isnt a preconditions for those claims being about the world – it’s completely incidental.
A photograph produced by a camera, and a photograph produced by Photoshop have many of the same properties (ink, paper, etc.). One tells us something false and the other true, whether our inferences are correct based on these photographs has nothing to do with their properites but whether their content is there. The logical content of the photographs, what they claim to represent, is being represented in the case that it is actually being represented.. our knowing or not-knowing which is real and which is fake changes nothing.
You have to provide an argument that establishes *not assumes* that epistemological dependence is ontological dependence. My point is here in these comments is that all the central arguments i have seen are just fallacious, as are these, in they assume these two are the same. It’s just a confusion.
What evidences our claims about the world does not determine the nature or status of these claims. “There is a tree in the field” is true if there is a tree in the field, even though the *evidence* for this claim is a photograph.
Equally, experience has logical content. That’s non-negotiable. An experience of a cup isnt just the particularities of that experience (ie. nothing more than perspective, hue, etc.) – my ability to grab the cup and use it as an object *entails* that i make inferences from experience that are not about experience. Very nearly all our claims are about the content of experience not its particularity: “there is a tree” not “i percieve a fuzzy colour patch shaped leafy; now i percieve a colour patch shaped blowy-leafy; etc. – (note that even in these claims were i try to make statements about my perception I cant help but involve statements that rely on contentful-inferences, ie. leaves, etc.).
So what’s your argument that this logical content is nothing more than experience (or that it reduces to it, or that it’s properties are those of experience, etc.) ? The arguments you have provided beg the question.
My argument that the logical content has independent standing, that its properties are not mental or reducible to experience, is that this explains a tremendous number of things extremely simply and effectively.
The alternative, which is to say the content “is just” its origin – that the properties of what experience is about are just the properties of experience (eg. that space is just perspective, etc.) – this hardly explains anything. And makes a terrible mystery out of very nearly everything.
It’s only virtue is that it seems to ease our discomfort at epistemological uncertainty, but even this is a cheap bluff: every idealist reintroduces at some point a dichotomy between “real and illusion” in order to make sense of mistakes, lies, etc.
Micheal said, “This again equivocates on epistemic and ontological dependence (and it thus begs the question). The logical content of a representation is what is being represented. […] You have to provide an argument that establishes *not assumes* that epistemological dependence is ontological dependence. My point is here in these comments is that all the central arguments i have seen are just fallacious, as are these, in they assume these two are the same. It’s just a confusion. […] Equally, experience has logical content. That’s non-negotiable.”
I believe the non-negotiable part of your stance is precisely what’s in dispute and its non-negotiability is very likely to preclude your ability to see what I’m saying. It has already caused several major misunderstanding, so please pretend for a few moments that it is negotiable.
One misunderstanding that’s worth mentioning is your request for “an argument that establishes *not assumes* that epistemological dependence is ontological dependence”. Also, you continue to claim this is a fallacy or a confusion” insofar as it “assume(s) these two are the same”. I think you’re misunderstood because I am not arguing that they’re the same, do not believe they are the same, and do not assume that they are the same. Instead, the argument is for a rejection of this ontological dependence because the notion is incoherent and impossible. It’s a critique of that non-negotiable part because it’s metaphysical nonsense that should be dropped altogether. This is a metaphysical dispute but not the kind where I am offering an alternative ontology but rather rejecting these kinds of metaphysical entities because they’re not ontological realities at all but rather abstract ideas posited by philosophers. (That’s why examples comparing photographs and photo-shopped photographs is not relevant. As Mark L said earlier, the contrast between illusion and reality is no problem within the phenomenal, empirical world, but the distinction between appearance and things-in-themselves, as we and Shopenhauer inherited from Plato and Kant, is about the phenomenal and noumenal, with the latter being the classic home of metaphysical speculations.)
“The noumenon is a posited object or event that is known (if at all) without the use of the senses. The term is generally used in contrast with, or in relation to “phenomenon”, which refers to anything that appears to, or is an object of, the senses. In Platonic philosophy, the noumenal realm was equated with the world of ideas known to the philosophical mind, in contrast to the phenomenal realm, which was equated with the world of sensory reality, known to the uneducated mind. Much of modern philosophy has generally been skeptical of the possibility of knowledge independent of the senses, and Immanuel Kant gave this point of view its canonical expression: that the noumenal world may exist, but it is completely unknowable to humans. In Kantian philosophy, the unknowable noumenon is often linked to the unknowable “thing-in-itself” (Ding an sich, which could also be rendered as “thing-as-such” or “thing per se”), although how to characterize the nature of the relationship is a question yet open to some controversy.” — Wikipedia
What evidences our claims about the world does not determine the nature or status of these claims. “There is a tree in the field” is true if there is a tree in the field, even though the *evidence* for this claim is a photograph.
Equally, experience has logical content. That’s non-negotiable.
> The noumenon is a posited object or event that is known (if at all) without the use of the senses.
Yes, and as I said realism has nothing to do with the noumenon. This is just a misunderstanding that comes from medieval veil-of-perception scepticism.
Realism does not need to assert there are any objects “known without the use of the senses” – I think that’s quite a ridiculous position. And the stupidity of this position has been taken by the idealists as an argument *for* idealism, which is even more stupid.
The issue isnt whether you’re sceptical that the “intentional relation” (to use ‘neutral’ terminology) is ontological. However that is a pertinent issue. The point i’m raising is that what ever point you start from, experience has intentional and epistemic relations.
The what you know isnt just there in any given experience. We know 2+2=4 but there is no 2+2=4 experience. We know a cup’s brim is circular without there being any cirlcular-brim experience. All our knowledge is *about* non-epsitemic relationships.
Now you’re free to say these relations (which Husserl and Satre called transcendent, but we might just say “arising out of intentionality”) arent ontological. But you need to provide an argument for this.
My argument that they are ontological is that this accounts for a great many things very simply, etc.
I take it you think you can say “ontological” is incoherent – but this is question-begging. You say it’s incoherent because you’re assuming that “what is know by experience is experiential (genetic fallacy) therefore we cannot know ontological relations because they are not experiential”>
IF experience can provide knowledge of non-experiential (mental, ideal, etc.) properties. Then there is no incoherence, no issue. And it seems obvious to me that it can (language provides knowledge of the non-linguistic: a “car” isnt the word car, convention provides knowledge of the non-conventional: a meter isnt the convention “meter” , etc.). Knowledge does not need to share properties with what is known in any other case.
What’s you’re argument that “intentional relations” cannot be ontological? . What is your argument that “ontological” is incoherent?
Well, I already gave my “argument that ‘ontological’ is incoherent, although I didn’t put it in those terms. (The shifting of terms makes communication difficult.) It would be nice if you addressed the criticism I offered above concerning the fallacy known as reification. That is the argument for the incoherence of the various correspondence theories of truth, wherein knowledge of an object corresponds to the actual object. This is important for our discussion insofar as you are saying it’s a genetic fallacy to treat the two sides of this dualism (a.k.a., the epistemic and ontological sides) as if were just one side.
And I’m saying the second, ontological side, is not the real reality to which our ideas must correspond but is just another idea. Reification is a conceptual error wherein an abstract idea is treated as if it were a concrete reality. This is an error committed by idealists and physicalists and so the argument cuts against Kant’s noumenal realm, against Schopenhauer’s will, against realism, and against your accusations of the genetic fallacy. Please check it out and give it some thought.
I’m not claiming that the abstract intentional structure of consciousness *is* the object, i’m claiming that structure is caused by it.
If you’re saying that it’s reification to say, “pass me my pen” is reifying the pen – then yes, i’m reifying. But that’s not a fallacy.
What rules-out the consciousness being about non-conscious object? I cannot think of anything which would rule that out. Any argument to the contrary would also rule out language capturing the non-linguistic, etc.
If nothing rules it out – and ruling it in is so wondefully simplifying and explanatory – why not rule it in?
I really cannot see your argument here. I’m shifting language in order to be more precise about the disagreement.
Michael, you say >>I’m claiming that structure is caused by . . .the abstract intentional structure of consciousness<>consciousness being about [the] non-conscious object.<< Both are reification statements about the Kantian noumenal.
Does language capture the non-linguistic? Well maybe there are some limitations (e.g., non-reification) to your claims as being so, even if ruling out limitations is so wonderfully simplifying (though I would not add the explanatory part (therefore lets not rule it in). So, this is not so much about your not seeing the argument as your not agreeing with it.
I agree with you about your criticism of idealism. It is your argument for realism that seems unjustified. (I guess I'm a contingent realist as the devil is in the details).
You say "the logical content of experience ["what they [it] claim to represent"] has an independent standing (the properties of things and their relationships stand in virtue of their having independent existence. . . The real object is just that object which provides the logical content to representation."
It seems fantastic that "the real object is just that object which provides the logical content to representation."
"The ability to know for certain that the claims about the world we infer from experience are true isn’t a precondition for those claims being about the world – it’s completely incidental. " (Therefore, epistemic truth is incidental)
"The logical content of the photographs, what they claim to represent, is being represented in the case that it is actually being represented. " How do you know, and how could not knowing not change everything?
"My ability to grab the cup and use it as an object *entails* that I make inferences from experience that are not about experience. Very nearly all our claims are about the content of experience not its particularity." Does this not express your privileging of inferences/content of experience/representation over experience/particularity/singularity?
"So what’s your argument that this logical content is nothing more than experience . . . Logical content has independent standing. . .The alternative, which is to say the content 'is just' its origin – that the properties of what experience is about are just the properties of experience (eg. that space is just perspective, etc.) – this hardly explains anything." Are you not continuing the object/subject divide by claiming that logical content supervenes experience, that space is not just perspective (reification)?
I just listened to the (then)recent podcasts on Schopenhauer and read this ENTIRE thread of comments in short succession. Schopenhauer was what I was looking for specifically when I encountered PEL for the first time.
Today was just about the most enlightening I’ve have since first opening my eyes.
Well done PEL crew, as always. The comment section was pivotal for my understanding of ideas that have been on my mind for years since my first reading of Schopenhauer.
Michael, Mark, David, Marc, K, LemonCookies(high five) You gentlemen are inspiring.
Special Thanks to The Wayne Schroeder whose comments have been especially insightful.
Thanks, Jeffrey Rohde
In one of the earlier posts it was stated that, in part one of volume one of The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer just assumes that space, time and causality are contributed to our representation of the world by our understanding. That’s exactly right! He does do that! In the preface to volume one Schopenhauer is very explicit that he expects his readers to have already read and understood The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason in additional to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Moreover, he even suggests that it would be better to read the appendix to volume one before starting at the beginning of the book (Criticism of the Kantian philosophy). So it’s no wonder that you see Schopenhauer assuming things that he gave ample warning about.
In terms of the distinction between appearance and reality, I just wanted to make the following comments. Several times throughout his writings Schopenhauer is clear about the fact that we can’t resolve certain sceptical challenges that present themselves to us as human beings. What is there apart from our perceptions? Do they point to anything else apart from themselves? Are they representations of something? Or are they just free floating without representing anything aside from themselves? How can we know? We can’t know with any degree of certainty! But what I see Schopenhauer doing is putting an unanswerable skepticism aside and asking how our experience is possible with the assumption that our perceptions point to something besides themselves. “Now if the objects appearing in these forms are not to be empty phantoms, but are to have a meaning, they must point to something, must be the expression of something, which is not, like themselves, object, representation, something existing merely relatively, namely for a subject. On the contrary, they must point to something that exists without such dependence on something that stands over against its essential condition, and on its forms, in other words, must point to something that is not a representation, but the thing-in-itself. Accordingly, it could at any rate be asked: Are those representations, those objects, something more than and apart from representations, objects of the subject?”(WWI, p.119) So, with regard to the appearance/reality distinction I think that Schopenhauer wants us to see our perceptions (representations) as appearances or representations of something (at this point he is not saying what). We have our perceptions and experiences, but then we simply ask what there is besides these perceptions and experiences. Whatever else there is apart from our representations would constitute ‘reality’ in the appearance/reality distinction.
Given that we are susceptible to certain sensations, as human beings, how does the paltry data of our senses result in the causally ordered spatiotemporal world that we perceive? How, from the little bits of sensory stimulus that we are susceptible to, do we come to perceive a world where objects exist in space and time and interact in causally ordered ways? Just from a purely a posteriori perspective, how do we manage to project a three dimensional reality from sense data that only touch the surface of our physical body? For example, the image on our retina is two dimensional, but our experience of that object in the world is three dimensional. The raw sense data themselves don’t seem to contain the ingredients, all on their own, to provide us with a representation of a causally ordered spatiotemporal world. What about time? How are relations of time supposed to get into our heads from the raw sense data of our bodies? It seems fair to suggest that perhaps it is our own understanding, our own minds, that provide the spatiotemporal framework with which we order the raw sense data that comes to us from our physical bodies.
So, assuming that it is our minds that impose space, time and causality upon the raw data of our sensations, the world as it appears to us must be drastically different from the world as it is in itself. Why is this so? Because space, time and causality are functions of a perceiving subject, as we have just seen. They belong to the subject of experience, not the object. Whatever it is that we perceive has already gone through the forms of space, time and causality before we are aware of it. If space, time and causality are properties of a perceiving subject, then it would seem that they cannot be properties of a non-perceiving thing. They are conditions of knowing and not properties of the thing that is known. At its most basic level we are presented with a subject which perceives and an object which is perceived. This is the most basic condition of experience. To know anything you have to have a subject and an object. Schopenhauer shares Berkeley’s claim that there is no object without a subject. The notion of an unperceived perception is unintelligible. But, again, if we want to bypass a kind of solipsistic skepticism, and we want to ask what there is besides subject and object, what is it that enters our forms of understanding, then I think that we have to accept that whatever it is that exists beyond the subject/object condition is going to be totally different from what we perceive through our mental faculties.The subject/object condition is the condition of a knowing subject, and does not touch upon the question of what still exists apart from or before the subject/object condition produces its representations. “…everything again that can be represented only by their means – all this as a whole does not really belong to what appears, to what has entered the form of the representation, but only to the form itself”(WWI, p.120). The primary condition of our knowing anything rests primarily upon the division of subject and object, but what else is there besides this? What is there apart from a subject that perceives and an object conditioned by the subject?For Kant it is an x, for Schopenhauer it is Will.