Maybe the answer is that space and time develop along with everything else. — csalisbury
To put it another way: Kant and Schopenhauer's transcendental categories are indeed the necessary conditions for Kant and Schopenhauer's phenomenal flux, but then, couldn't this experience of flux be supervenient on earlier experiential forms? — csalisbury
I did read the article, which was lucid, but I wasn't sure how it tied in with the last few posts here. — csalisbury
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. — critique-of-pure-reason website
Oh yeah, I think it's definitely true, for Schopenhauer, that (re)presentations depend on (re)presenting organisms. In that bit I quoted from WWR in the OP, he's pretty explicit about that. But he also doesn't seem to really care about the paradoxes. — csalisbury
I don't see any paradox in Schopenhauer's views. At best he's forced to 'admit' that there's something unknowable about the Will, which is hardly surprising because it's the noumenon. The time stuff isn't paradoxical unless you adopt assumptions from outside his framework. — The Great Whatever
But again, I do not think this answers the question. How is it that representations come out of nowhere at "x" particular time? If the representations do not come from the beginning along with Will itself, then there is no explanations for how representation, time, space, and causality even came about? You need to have the world of representation in order for time, space, and causality to be there in the first place. If it is not there from the beginning, then there is a gap in explanation that is similar to any other theory of mind, or epistemology in general whether materialist or idealist. — schopenhauer1
Yeah, I mean I'm not all that interested in taking this convo from the top. The disagreements at that level are vast, insuperable, built of other disagreements. You think ppl share no world, I think they do. Idk, I guess we just have different approaches. I don't think, at this point, we can benefit much from one another. — csalisbury
It's fine. I'm a little sick of all of it myself I feel like I've already 'graduated,' no one has anything interesting to say on the subject I haven't heard already, and I think the important insights can't be communicated anyway. — The Great Whatever
It's fine. I'm a little sick of all of it myself I feel like I've already 'graduated,' no one has anything interesting to say on the subject I haven't heard already,and I think the important insights can't be communicated anyway. — The Great Whatever
About the Chronos paradox and the need for representations to be supported by organisms? — The Great Whatever
Mother Theresa was totally on board with-the-world-as-suffering view and not only surrounded herself with the suffering but often denied them ways of easing that suffering. This is empathy not for people but for proofs. Many pessimistic philosophers do the same with ideas about the suffering imo) — csalisbury
But the world as idea, with which alone we are here concerned, 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 [pg 040] 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 (χρονος), 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. — selection of section 7 of WWR
This to me, just seems intuitively not convincing. It does seem that there was a time/space causality before the first organism. — schopenhauer1
No, I think most pessimistic philosophers begin as sincere sensitive souls, who truly wish that things were different. But this kind of pessimism easily devolves (or calcifies) into a narcissism of suffering, of striking the pose of the the Saint in Agony. It's worth noting that Beckett, Cioran & Schopenhauer all had exquisitely maintained hair. I've mentioned that before, I think, here or on the other forum and I've also mentioned my favorite anecdote - Cioran's letter to someone or other about seeing Beckett on a park bench and being just bowled over with envy for how deeply he appeared to be in despair. Susan Sontag, apropos of Cioran, describes the pessimistic style as often veering dangerously close to a 'coquettishness of the void.' . One becomes invested in one's pose and routine, which begins earnestly, but which becomes a well-oiled machine that runs on examples and aestheticizations of suffering. To quote Beckett: ''I must have got embroiled in a kind of inverted spiral, I mean one the coils of which, instead of widening more and more, grew narrower and narrower and finally, given the kind of space in which I was supposed to evolve, would come to an end for lack of room"Do you mean to say that many pessimistic philosophers think that people should suffer, or that many pessimistic philosophers are wedded to their own dogma that people suffer more than they enjoy, and to their attendant dogma that therefore life is shit? — John
There was, but this fact only arises once consciousness does. In other words, the way consciousness is structured is such that it must project time backward. — The Great Whatever
I actually don't think he is saying that time existed in any absolute sense before consciousness. — schopenhauer1
Time/space/causality is simply the flip side of will. Time/space/causality only adheres in organisms. Organisms cannot exist before point 0. Since time/space/causality is the flip side of will, since organisms need to exist for there to be time/space/causality, then organisms had to exist in some ever present state for there to be time/space/causality. — schopenhauer1
Time doesn't really 'exist,' for Schopenhauer, since existence is 'reality' or roughly 'causality,' which presupposes time. Time isn't real in the Kantian framework in a very substantive sense -- it's ideal. — The Great Whatever
You are thinking of the world as temporal in-itself, which Schop. denies. It's as if the organisms are 'keeping' time in place, so they had to be around since the beginning, making sure that the time before there was time didn't cause a paradox. But if you scrap all that and realize that time isn't real in the above sense, none of this is problematic. — The Great Whatever
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