Therefore no truth is more certain, more independent of all others, and less in need of proof than this, namely that everything that exists for knowledge, and hence the whole of this world, is only object in relation to the subject, perception of the perceiver, in a word, representation. Naturally this holds good of the present as well as of the past and future, of what is remotest as well as of what is nearest; for it holds good of time and space themselves, in which alone all these distinctions arise. Everything that in any way belongs and can belong to the world is inevitably associated with this being-conditioned by the subject, and it exists only for the subject. The world is representation. — Arthur Schopenhauer, pg. 3
What does Schopenhauer mean by saying that "the world is representation"? — Wallows
Everything that in any way belongs and can belong to the world is inevitably associated with this being-conditioned by the subject, and it exists only for the subject. The world is representation. — Arthur Schopenhauer, pg. 3
The conditions he will discuss will be time, space, and causality which are the basis for the fourfold root of the principle of sufficient reason. — schopenhauer1
Now we must guard against the grave misunderstanding of supposing that, because perception is brought about through knowledge of causality, the relation of cause and effect exists between object and subject. On the contrary, this relation always occurs only between immediate and mediate object, and hence always only between objects. On this false assumption rests the foolish controversy about the reality of the external world, a controversy in which dogmatism and scepticism oppose each other, and the former appears now as realism, now as idealism. Realism posits the object as cause, and places its effect in the subject. The idealism of Fichte makes the object the effect of the subject. Since, however—and this cannot be sufficiently stressed—absolutely no relation according to the principle of sufficient reason subsists between subject and object, neither of these two assertions could ever be proved, and scepticism made triumphant attacks on both — Schopenhauer, pg.13
Now just as the law of causality already precedes, as condition, perception and experience, and thus cannot be learnt from these (as Hume imagined), so object and subject precede all knowledge, and hence even the principle of sufficient reason in general, as the first condition. For this principle is only the form of every object, the whole nature and manner of its appearance; but the object always presupposes the subject, and hence between the two there can be no relation of reason and consequent. My essay On the Principle of Sufficient Reason purports to achieve just this: it explains the content of that principle as the essential form of every object, in other words, as the universal mode and manner of all objective existence, as something which pertains to the object as such. But the object as such everywhere presupposes the subject as its necessary correlative, and hence the subject always remains outside the province of the validity of the principle of sufficient reason. — Schopenhauer pg. 14
Schopenhauer certainly believes that ‘world’ and ‘subject’ are indeed correlated. In this he is admittedly pretty close to correlationsim and, in particular, of course, to Kant’s own version of it. But although in some moods Schopenhauer does seem to casually presuppose it, he does not ever actually insist that the subject necessarily be a human being. On the contrary, he sometimes explicitly admits that it need not be. Although it does need to be living being, the subject could be a red kite, stonefish, cane toad or even an insect. Anything, in fact, it would seem, with eyes[3]. In the first volume of The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer makes the following ‘ancestral statement’ when writes of our world:
And yet the existence of this whole world remained forever dependent on that first eye that opened, were it even that of an insect.[4]
Fine! But where did that first eye come from?
There are clearly all sorts of very obvious problems here about what was happening before subjectivity emerged, since there could be no world supported by it (since ‘Intellect and matter are correlatives’ as he puts it).
Reading Schopenhauer’s work as a whole, one gets a vague sense that a material world is there and is building up to the creation of an eye. But there can be no matter in the world before representation. All such difficulties are summarised by Meillassoux as referring to the aforementioned ‘ancestral realm’. The key question pertaining to all talk of the ‘ancestral realm’ is, of course, this one: How are we to conceive of the empirical sciences capacity to yield knowledge of the ancestral realm?[5]
Or, more modestly and more specifically in relation to Schopenhauer, the question is: how do we explain all our scientific knowledge of the world as it existed and developed before the ‘first eye that opened’? It seems to me that Schopenhauer has no discernable answer to the philosophical puzzle of a timeless incubation period of representation itself but he does seem to believe that living beings were produced on a pre-organic stratum in the first sentence of the second volume of The World as Will and Representation:
In endless space countless luminous spheres, round each of which some dozen smaller illuminated ones revolve, hot at the core and covered over with a cold hard crust; on this crust a mouldy film has produced living and knowing beings; this is empirical truth, the real, the world.[6]
Admittedly, Schopenhauer does then go on to cloud this issue considerably by marking this view out as being provisional and programmatic and by rehearsing Berkeley’s argument that nothing can be perceived without a perceiver and thereby suggesting that his characterisation of what we take to be the real is naïve and pre-reflective in a way that has been philosophically revolutionised by the achievements of Descartes, Berkeleley and Kant. Nor, I should mention, does Schopenhauer clarify matters any further by his innumerable conflations of the terms ‘mind’ and ‘brain’[7].
But what is, in any case, obvious in the quote from The World as Will and Representation about the insect’s eye is Schopenhauer’s characteristic lack of, as opposed to Heidegger’s resolute attachment to, what some may be lured into calling the slightly maladroit term ‘specicism’. (It would be strange if Heidegger and Schopenhauer were bedfellows, given Heidegger’s snide sideswipes against Schopenhauer in, for example, the Nietzsche lectures. We must not imagine, though, that just because Heidegger disavowed Schopenhauer he did not borrow anything from him and their aesthetics, in particular, share some striking similarities[8].) Admittedly, in Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of the Platonic Ideas, which is a kind of weird neo-classical adjunct to his Kantian philosophy of the will as thing-in-itself, Man is the pinnacle of all the Ideas. And in his aesthetics, which is largely based upon his Platonic metaphysics (the chief exception here being music and, arguably, tragedy), the quintessentially Schopenhauerian and, in fact, ultimately classical claim is that: ‘Man is more beautiful than all other objects’. Or, as Dale Jacquette has phrased it: ‘Schopenhauer’s nineteenth century transcendental idealism confirms the ancient Greek ideal of the human form as paramount among artistic subjects.’[9] Or, alternatively, as Clément Rosset, has it: in Schopenhauer, humanity is a ‘privileged manifestation’[10].
So it would be obviously wrong to simply assert that there is no privileging of the human or ‘specicism’ at all in Schopenhauer’s philosophy. But although man may indeed be paramount among artistic subjects, he is not paramount among existence subjects, to coin an admittedly initially rather unattractive phrase. If ‘correlationism’ is, therefore, defined as the characterisation of man and world as being irreplaceably interlocked (the phenomenological fetish), Schopenhauer can justifiably be denied the label. If it is to be defined – and it hasn’t been, so far, by Meillassoux[11] – as animal and world as being interlocked then he can justifiably be attached to it.
No object without subject. But who is the subject? The Schopenhauerian insect belongs to Meillassoux’s ancestral realm. Meillassoux: ‘I will call ancestral any reality anterior to the emergence of the human species’. — https://speculativeheresy.wordpress.com/2010/09/22/%E2%80%98the-terrifyingly-ancient%E2%80%99-is-schopenhauer-a-correlationist/
Schopenhauer is not talking, in the manner of Locke and most scientific realists, about representations of corresponding real objects that lie behind appearances. For it is only in appearances that objects are even objects at all, and what is represented is the thing-in-itself, which is itself not an object, and contains none. So we have the thing-in-itself on one side, and representation on the other, and given this picture it’s natural to think that the thing-in-itself causes our representations, that whatever it is that is out there is connected deterministically to our perceptions. This is wrong, however, because causality is entirely restricted to the domain of representation. The representational realist way of thinking about our relation to the world, in which an external reality supplies stimuli which are processed and presented to us as sense-data, is not what Schopenhauer has in mind at all. It is much deeper than that. Not only can there be no causal link between the thing-in-itself and our representations, but there can be no plurality of objects. A representational object such as a table does not correspond to a table-in-itself, but is a non-causal individuated manifestation of the thing-in-itself.
But there is a difficulty here in talking about “the thing-in-itself” or “the will”, because such terms assert unity, which gains sense only in contrast with plurality; beyond our representations there is no one, and no many. Schopenhauer admits this difficulty, but says that there is no other way we can possibly talk about it. We simply cannot hope to transcend the forms of our understanding. The unindividuated will is part of his central insight and does not stand on an edifice of routine logic as does his empiricism. He must use the concepts and language he has to invite us to see what he has seen.
But there is an even bigger problem, a problem with the whole doctrine. If the thing-in-itself is undifferentiated, spaceless, timeless and causeless, then surely it cannot have any intelligible relation to our representations? The only relations which exist conform to the principle of sufficient reason, which, conditioning our experience of the world and our thinking, must only apply to representations. Therefore in doing philosophy, which itself proceeds according to the principle of sufficient reason to find explanations for things in the world, the thing-in-itself seems to be factored out of the equation completely, and it is then mere idle speculation to wonder what it might be. A more parsimonious theory would do away with it entirely. I happen to think this is a clue to a deep problem with Kantian philosophy – a problem with the underlying conception of subject and object, internal and external, indeed with the whole tradition of epistemology as first philosophy — but Schopenhauer forges ahead from his traditional Kantian starting point towards his key innovation, which is his characterization of the thing-in-itself as will. But more of that in a later post.
Ancestrality: Millions of Years Before Time
Schopenhauer’s philosophy can be seen as a brand of what Meillassoux calls correlationism, which has it that subject and object cannot each be considered independently. We have access only to the correlation between them, and can never step outside of this relation to see how things “really” are. In introducing his argument against correlationism Meillassoux brings up ancestrality. If space, time and causality are mind-dependent, then what can it mean to say that the Earth formed 4.5 billion years ago, before the advent of life? Before any knowing consciousness existed, what do “years” and “the Earth” refer to, and what does “formed” mean, without space, time, objects and causality?
Schopenhauer sees the problem:
Thus we see, on the one hand, the existence of the whole world necessarily dependent on the first knowing being [...]; on the other hand, this first perceiving animal just as necessarily wholly dependent on a long chain of causes and effects which has preceded it [...] These two contradictory views, to each of which we are led with equal necessity, might certainly be called an antinomy in our faculty of knowledge [...] [Vol I §7]
His answer is that the past exists now, for us, and came to exist for the first knowing consciousness. When it made this first appearance, it already had the character of endlessness in both directions, past and future. So, oddly enough, time had a beginning but was and is inherently beginningless. The same goes for the world as representation in general. Objects of the past are objects for us just as much as present objects are. This does rather make it seem as if ancestral objects are nothing but fictions. At least with objects which exist among conscious beings in the present we can say that they are manifesting the will, but now it seems that the ancient Earth and its objects and events are nothing but convenient stories. However this is not quite right. We say that the moon is about 400,000 kilometres from the Earth, yet neither the Moon nor this distance have any reality beyond our representations. The ancient Earth, separated from us by time rather than space, is no less real than this – which is still as real as can be – though it can obviously never be an object of perception for us. It is “less real” only insofar as we ordinarily think of ancient objects as somehow less real. — http://critique-of-pure-reason.com/schopenhauers-key-concepts-1-representation-vostellung/
Is the mind part of the world? If it is then time/space/causality exist in the world, just as the mind exists in the world. If the mind is all there is, then it doesn't make sense to use the term, "Mind" any longer. There is just the "world" (the paradox of solipsism).However, he does not deny that things existed prior to the first animal experience of the world, but he does say there is a sort of paradox where time/space/causality does not exist without the transcendental conditions that structure these particular things. Being a Kantian Idealist, he thinks that these things are in the mind, and not in the world. Thus, without a mind, there is no PSR, no time/space/causality. — schopenhauer1
I certainly understand your objection- Schop wrote his work before Darwin's evolution was written, so I often wonder if that would have changed his position on both Platonic Forms and Representation. However, he does not deny that things existed prior to the first animal experience of the world, but he does say there is a sort of paradox where time/space/causality does not exist without the transcendental conditions that structure these particular things. Being a Kantian Idealist, he thinks that these things are in the mind, and not in the world. Thus, without a mind, there is no PSR, no time/space/causality. He even discusses the idea of the first animal eye, I believe and the strange paradox of this being the first representation. Actually, his idea here can is still relevant in modern (post-evolutionary studies) philosophy in the idea of ancestrality in the philosophy of Meillassoux. — schopenhauer1
My essay On the Principle of Sufficient Reason purports to achieve just this: it explains the content of that principle as the essential form of every object, in other words, as the universal mode and manner of all objective existence, as something which pertains to the object as such. But the object as such everywhere presupposes the subject as its necessary correlative, and hence the subject always remains outside the province of the validity of the principle of sufficient reason. The controversy about the reality of the external world rests precisely on this false extension of the validity of the principle of sufficient reason to the subject also, and, starting from this misunderstanding, it could never understand itself. — Schopenhauer, The World As Will And Representation, pg. 14
The whole world of objects is and remains representation, and is for this reason wholly and for ever conditioned by the subject; in other words, it has transcendental ideality. But it is not on that account falsehood or illusion; it presents itself as what it is, as representation, and indeed as a series of representations, whose common bond is the principle of sufficient reason. As such it is intelligible to the healthy understanding, even according to its innermost meaning, and to the understanding it speaks a perfectly clear language. To dispute about its reality can occur only to a mind perverted by oversubtle sophistry; such disputing always occurs through an incorrect application of the principle of sufficient reason. This principle combines all representations, of whatever kind they be, one with another; but it in no way connects these with the subject, or with something that is neither subject nor object but only the ground of the object; an absurdity, since only objects can be the ground of objects, and that indeed always. If we examine the source of this question about the reality of the external world more closely, we find that, besides the false application of the principle of sufficient reason to what lies outside its province, there is in addition a special confusion of its forms. Thus that form, which the principle of sufficient reason has merely in reference to concepts or abstract representations, is extended to representations of perception, to real objects, and a ground of knowing is demanded of objects that can have no other ground than one of becoming. Over the abstract representations, the concepts connected to judgements, the principle of sufficient reason certainly rules in such a way that each of these has its worth, its validity, its whole existence, here called truth, simply and solely through the relation of the judgement to something outside it, to its ground of knowledge, to which therefore there must always be a return. — Schopenhauer, The Will As World and Representation, pg. 15.
How is the book going now that you devoured it. — schopenhauer1
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