More another outbreak of solipsism. — Banno

Would I be correct in surmising that in your mind, idealism is necessarily solipsist?

I have no doubt that (some) animals have a sense of being (Dasein), but of course in order to think about, in the abstract sense, that primordial sense of being language is required. If anything, I would say this is thinking about ourselves in the third person.

Would I be correct in surmising that in your mind, idealism is necessarily solipsist? — Quixodian

Hasn't he explicitly said he thinks that ad nauseum?

...necessarily... — Quixodian

In every possible world?

Don't change the subject. It's quite a simple question.

Don't change the subject. — Quixodian

Too late for that.

Trouble is, it’s so unclear what idealism is. That’s why the discussion moved on to antirealism. But yes, idealism has difficulty in avoiding solipsism, as I’ve explained previously. It usually needs God’s help.

If you check out Schopenhauer's description, he's clearly referring to the first person experience. — frank

I'm just pointing out that the "first person" there is redundant. Are there any experiences which are not "first person"?

Trouble is, it’s so unclear what idealism is. ... It usually needs God’s help. — Banno

Schopenhauer is vociferously atheist. I don't find it unclear, but I understand it takes something like a gestalt shift for it to make sense.

Schopenhauer is vociferously atheist. I don't find it unclear, but I understand it takes something like a gestalt shift for it to make sense. — Quixodian

Can you give a brief explanation of just what Schopenhauer's idealism consists in? I mean if the unifying factor that explains the commonality of experience is, for Schopenhauer a mindless will, what is there to justify thinking of it as mind rather than as energy, which is equated with matter via mass in the current scientific understanding?

But yes, idealism has difficulty in avoiding solipsism, as I’ve explained previously. It usually needs God’s help. — Banno

Well, as Simon Blackburn has said, whatever our theoretical metaphysical commitments, we're almost all realists as soon as we walk out the door.

Schopenhauer is vociferously atheist. — Quixodian

I guess in his case 'will' is a kind of god surrogate in as much as it holds our shared reality together. Like Kastrup's Mind at Large. The fact that will is understood as blind and striving (unlike God who is judgmental and aggrieved) doesn't mean it isn't the metaphysical source of transcendence and unity. Any thoughts on this?

I can do no better than cite the opening paragraph of WWI

“The world is my idea:”—this is a truth which holds good for everything that lives and knows, though man alone can bring it into reflective and abstract consciousness. If he really does this, he has attained to philosophical wisdom. It then becomes clear and certain to him that what he knows is not a sun and an earth, but only an eye that sees a sun, a hand that feels an earth; that the world which surrounds him is there only as idea, i.e., only in relation to something else, the consciousness, which is himself. If any truth can be asserted a priori, it is this: for it is the expression of the most general form of all possible and thinkable experience: a form which is more general than time, or space, or causality, for they all presuppose it; and each of these, which we have seen to be just so many modes of the principle of sufficient reason, is valid only for a particular class of ideas; whereas the antithesis of object and subject is the common form of all these classes, is that form under which alone any idea of whatever kind it may be, abstract or intuitive, pure or empirical, is possible and thinkable. No truth therefore is more certain, more independent of all others, and less in need of proof than this, that all that exists for knowledge, and therefore this whole world, is only object in relation to subject, perception of a perceiver, in a word, idea. This is obviously true of the past and the future, as well as of the present, of what is farthest off, as of what is near; for it is true of time and space themselves, in which alone these distinctions arise. All that in any way belongs or can belong to the world is inevitably thus conditioned through the subject, and exists only for the subject. The world is idea.

My interpretation is that there is a subjective ground or element to everything we know about what exists. For empirical purposes, it can be bracketed out or ignored. But then to take the world as real in the absence of the observer in any ultimate sense, is a metaphysical error which takes the empirical for the absolute. That is the sense in which Husserl was later to say that Western philosophy tends to 'absolutize the scientific attitude'.

This also is the way in which Schop. draws on Vedanta, with its principle of 'the unknown knower, the unseen seer'. That has been picked up by current phenomenology in the form of the blind spot of science argument.

Recently have been reading a lot of Schopenhauer. — KantDane21

Excellent :up:

But similar to the other recent post....if thing-in-itself is beyond space, time, causality, subject and object (beyond the phenomenal world), like it is for Schop, how can it have a REFERENT?? what could this REFERENT be?? if the referent of the thing-in-itself is an object or a concept, then it is in the phenomenal world.
so what could it be? — KantDane21

Excellent question and hard to answer for Schop. However, I think this diagram is one of the better ones breaking down Schop's metaphysics.

I kind of liken the metaphysics to a sort of neo-platonism. That is to say, there is an architectonic aspect to it that sort of "emanates". The emanation is not in time/space, but is all-at-once, so should not be thought of causally, like a dominoes, as another quote said.

That is to say, there is an aspect of Will that is transcendent. Perhaps this is akin to a state of Nirvana or supreme unity or some such, but cannot be felt or shared. But from Will, there becomes this "house of mirrors" effect where it also has "objects" for which is the manifestation of itself, for which then creates a series of bouncing "back-and-forth" for which causality, time, space and subject/object become "as if" it is external, when in fact it is just the "house of mirrors" effect of Will "objectifying itself" eternally.

Now this raises so many questions. Does Will proper become prior to the objectification process? Based on Schop himself, it seems like the objects are always there somehow in the equation. How does the PSR based on subject/object bifurcation along with the causality, time, space transcendental limits come into play? These are all hard to answer as they seem to be emergent, but they cannot be if it is all "Will and Representation" all the way down. So it is simply how Representation "looks" when reflected upon.

I will put a caveat that this is all my interpretation here, but I have thought about this a decent amount in the past and have some threads on this if you want me to share.

One other thing. There was a poster on here who, if I remember correctly, posited the idea that Representation was Will's "playground", so-to-speak in that Will seems to want to "get somewhere" and it needs to objectify itself and individuate itself into discrete forms to have "somewhere to go". But that's the thing. It never gets anywhere, as it is always aiming for goals that never satisfy it, as its nature is striving. And thus striving + objectified being, equates to a sort of "suffering" both in terms of one's sensations, and in the sense that there is a feeling of lack which causes our wills to keep chasing after more and more. Survival, and all the rest is just the will enacting itself out.

OK, I'm very familiar with that oft-quoted passage and have actually read Schopenhauer's WWR, admittedly not closely but "skimmingly". I was asking for your take on how it works and not merely a statement of what is either faith or a tautology regarding there being a "subjective ground".

So, we know that our ordinary understanding of what it means to experience always already includes the notion of a subject, but what justification do we have for extrapolating that ordinary linguistically enabled understanding to a larger claim there is a substantial subjective ground to the totality of what is?

In one sense, from a certain perspective, "the world is my idea" is reasonable enough; although it would be better stated as "my world is my idea", because it seems absurd to claim that the animals world is, from the animal's perspective, my idea or that our world is my idea.

In Berkeley's system everyone's world, including the animals' is God's idea, but that cannot be so if there is no God, but merely a blind will that has no idea. I want to know how you understand Schopenhauer's view to be making sense.

he replaced god with will, descending into incoherence.

All this sounds very vague and hand-wavy, which would be OK if we were doing mysticism or poetry.

@Quixodian
Banno might be pointing to the idea of things such as time/space being in a sense no more ancient than the first animal, or the first consciousness, or something like that. It would seem that if it is all constructs "in your mind", you need a mind first, which flies in the face of ideas like the universe being billions of years old or that things seemed to exist in some form prior to animal experience.

My only thing to add here is that not all idealisms are the same. Idealism simply has to be "mind-dependent". However, if "all-is-mind" in some sense (the details are always different), then you can have your cake and eat it too, sort of thing. That is, the physical world is really a projection of an underlying mind, or are aspects of it as appears, but not its underlying reality. This would probably represent Schop's ideas as well. That is to say, physical is mind representing itself, but mind is always there somewhere as foundational and not emergent.

Obviously, by way of incredulity, we can simply say "objects have no mind". The idealist might sidestep this by saying mind is diffuse and not necessarily one-to-one with the matter that is represented, etc.

All this sounds very vague and hand-wavy, which would be OK if we were doing mysticism or poetry. — Janus

Before I proceed, would you like citations, or is it just the subject itself is always going to be this way?

However, if "all-is-mind" in some sense (the details are always different), then you can have your cake and it it too, sort of thing. — schopenhauer1

Only if you can make a coherent case; and finding that, it seems, remains the "holy grail" of idealism. "Some sense" is not a coherent case. I view Berkeley's idealism as being the most coherent, as it posits a universal mind that thinks absolutely everything into existence. Then the world would not merely be, per absurdum, my idea.

Before I proceed, would you like citations, or is it just the subject itself is always going to be this way? — schopenhauer1

I don't know whether citations will be needed: I just want to know if anyone can explain how Schopenhauer's philosophy can be understood to be a coherent and explanatory metaphysic.

Only if you can make a coherent case; — Janus

I'm not committed to anything. However, I would try to represent Schop's case charitably and seriously.

:up:

A good place to start might be here:

For, with the exception of the Sceptics and the Idealists, the others, for the most part, speak very much in the same way of an object which constitutes the basis of the idea, and which is indeed different in its whole being and nature from the idea, but yet is in all points as like it as one egg is to another. But this does not help us, for we are quite unable to distinguish such an object from the idea; we find that they are one and the same; for every object always and for ever presupposes a subject, and therefore remains idea, so that we recognised objectivity as belonging to the most universal form of the idea, which is the division into subject and object. Further, the principle of sufficient reason, which is referred to in support of this doctrine, is for us merely the form of the idea, the orderly combination of one idea with another, but not the combination of the whole finite or infinite series of ideas with something which is not idea at all, and which cannot therefore be presented in perception. Of the Sceptics and Idealists we spoke above, in examining the controversy about the reality of the outer world.

If we turn to mathematics to look for the fuller knowledge we desire of the idea of perception, which we have, as yet, only understood generally, merely in its form, we find that mathematics only treats of these ideas so far as they fill time and space, that is, so far as they are quantities. It will tell us with the greatest accuracy the how-many and the how-much; but as this is always merely relative, that is to say, merely a comparison of one idea with others, and a comparison only in the one respect of quantity, this also is not the information we are principally in search of.

Lastly, if we turn to the wide province of natural science, which is divided into many fields, we may, in the first place, make a general division of it into two parts. It is either the description of forms, which I call Morphology, or the explanation of changes, which I call Etiology. The first treats of the permanent forms, the second of the changing matter, according to the laws of its transition from one form to another. The first is the whole extent of what is generally called natural history. It teaches us, especially in the sciences of botany and zoology, the various permanent, organised, and therefore definitely determined forms in the constant change of individuals; and these forms constitute a great part of the content of the idea of perception. In natural history they are classified, separated, united, arranged according to natural and artificial systems, and brought under concepts which make a general view and knowledge of the whole of them possible. Further, an infinitely fine analogy both in the whole and in the parts of these forms, and running through them all (unité de plan), is established, and thus they may be com pared to innumerable variations on a theme which is not given. The passage of matter into these forms, that is to say, the origin of individuals, is not a special part of natural science, for every individual springs from its like by generation, which is everywhere equally mysterious, and has as yet evaded definite knowledge. The little that is known on the subject finds its place in physiology, which belongs to that part of natural science I have called etiology. Mineralogy also, especially where it becomes geology, inclines towards etiology, though it principally belongs to morphology. Etiology proper comprehends all those branches of natural science in which the chief concern is the knowledge of cause and effect. The sciences teach how, according to an invariable rule, one condition of matter is necessarily followed by a certain other condition; how one change necessarily conditions and brings about a certain other change; this sort of teaching is called explanation. The principal sciences in this department are mechanics, physics, chemistry, and physiology.

If, however, we surrender ourselves to its teaching, we soon become convinced that etiology cannot afford us the information we chiefly desire, any more than morphology. The latter presents to us innumerable and in finitely varied forms, which are yet related by an unmistakable family likeness. These are for us ideas, and when only treated in this way, they remain always strange to us, and stand before us like hieroglyphics which we do not understand. Etiology, on the other hand, teaches us that, according to the law of cause and effect, this particular condition of matter brings about that other particular condition, and thus it has explained it and performed its part. However, it really does nothing more than indicate the orderly arrangement according to which the states of matter appear in space and time, and teach in all cases what phenomenon must necessarily appear at a particular time in a particular place. It thus determines the position of phenomena in time and space, according to a law whose special content is derived from experience, but whose universal form and necessity is yet known to us independently of experience. But it affords us absolutely no information about the inner nature of any one of these phenomena: this is called a force of nature, and it lies outside the province of causal explanation, which calls the constant uniformity with which manifestations of such a force appear whenever their known conditions are present, a law of nature. But this law of nature, these conditions, and this appearance in a particular place at a particular time, are all that it knows or ever can know. The force itself which manifests itself, the inner nature of the phenomena which appear in accordance with these laws, remains always a secret to it, something entirely strange and unknown in the case of the simplest as well as of the most complex phenomena. For although as yet etiology has most completely achieved its aim in mechanics, and least completely in physiology, still the force on account of which a stone falls to the ground or one body repels another is, in its inner nature, not less strange and mysterious than that which produces the movements and the growth of an animal. The science of mechanics presupposes matter, weight, impenetrability, the possibility of communicating motion by impact, inertia and so forth as ultimate facts, calls them forces of nature, and their necessary and orderly appearance under certain conditions a law of nature. Only after this does its explanation begin, and it consists in indicating truly and with mathematical exactness, how, where and when each force manifests itself, and in referring every phenomenon which presents itself to the operation of one of these forces. Physics, chemistry, and physiology proceed in the same way in their province, only they presuppose more and accomplish less. Consequently the most complete etiological explanation of the whole of nature can never be more than an enumeration of forces which cannot be explained, and a reliable statement of the rule according to which phenomena appear in time and space, succeed, and make way for each other. But the inner nature of the forces which thus appear remains unexplained by such an explanation, which must confine itself to phenomena and their arrangement, because the law which it follows does not extend further. In this respect it may be compared to a section of a piece of marble which shows many veins beside each other, but does not allow us to trace the course of the veins from the interior of the marble to its surface. Or, if I may use an absurd but more striking comparison, the philosophical investigator must always have the same feeling towards the complete etiology of the whole of nature, as a man who, without knowing how, has been brought into a company quite unknown to him, each member of which in turn presents another to him as his friend and cousin, and therefore as quite well known, and yet the man himself, while at each introduction he expresses himself gratified, has always the question on his lips: "But how the deuce do I stand to the whole company?"

Thus we see that, with regard to those phenomena which we know only as our ideas, etiology can never give us the desired information that shall carry us beyond this point. For, after all its explanations, they still remain quite strange to us, as mere ideas whose significance we do not understand. The causal connection merely gives us the rule and the relative order of their appearance in space and time, but affords us no further knowledge of that which so appears. Moreover, the law of causality itself has only validity for ideas, for objects of a definite class, and it has meaning only in so far as it presupposes them. Thus, like these objects themselves, it always exists only in relation to a subject, that is, conditionally; and so it is known just as well if we start from the subject, i.e., a priori, as if we start from the object, i.e., a posteriori. Kant indeed has taught us this.

But what now impels us to inquiry is just that we are not satisfied with knowing that we have ideas, that they are such and such, and that they are connected according to certain laws, the general expression of which is the principle of sufficient reason. We wish to know the significance of these ideas; we ask whether this world is merely idea; in which case it would pass by us like an empty dream or a baseless vision, not worth our notice; or whether it is also something else, something more than idea, and if so, what. Thus much is certain, that this something we seek for must be completely and in its whole nature different from the idea; that the forms and laws of the idea must therefore be completely foreign to it; further, that we cannot arrive at it from the idea under the guidance of the laws which merely combine objects, ideas, among themselves, and which are the forms of the principle of sufficient reason.

Thus we see already that we can never arrive at the real nature of things from without. However much we investigate, we can never reach anything but images and names. We are like a man who goes round a castle seeking in vain for an entrance, and sometimes sketching the façades. And yet this is the method that has been followed by all philosophers before me. — The World as Will and Representation by Arthur Schopenhauer, translated by R B Haldane and J. Kemp Second Book

This is basically saying that you can't get to the "root of being" by looking at the relations of things like quantity, morphology, and history of the natural world.

In fact, as I read that passage more, I see how Wittgenstein was possibly influenced by that exact passage (or ones similar to it). Perhaps @Banno should take note.

Banno might be pointing to the idea of things such as time/space being in a sense no more ancient than the first animal, or the first consciousness, or something like that. — schopenhauer1

No.

So, we know that our ordinary understanding of what it means to experience always already includes the notion of a subject, but what justification do we have for extrapolating that ordinary linguistically enabled understanding to a larger claim there is a substantial subjective ground to the totality of what is? — Janus

Because there never is an observed without an observer. Notice this has even become manifest in atomic physics. And also please notice that I’ve acknowledged that we can treat ‘the world’ as if there were no observer for practical purposes. The mistake of naturalism is then to extend that to a metaphysical claim that we see the world as it really must be absent any observer. That is the point of The Blind Spot argument that I got a thorough bollocking over some years back but which you will be pleased to know has now morphed into a book.

It’s tempting to think that science gives us a God’s-eye view of reality. But we neglect the place of human experience at our peril. In The Blind Spot, astrophysicist Adam Frank, theoretical physicist Marcelo Gleiser, and philosopher Evan Thompson call for a revolutionary scientific worldview, where science includes—rather than ignores or tries not to see—humanity’s lived experience as an inescapable part of our search for objective truth. The authors present science not as discovering an absolute reality but rather as a highly refined, constantly evolving form of human experience. They urge practitioners to reframe how science works for the sake of our future in the face of the planetary climate crisis and increasing science denialism.

Since the dawn of the Enlightenment, humanity has looked to science to tell us who we are, where we come from, and where we’re going, but we’ve gotten stuck thinking we can know the universe from outside our position in it. When we try to understand reality only through external physical things imagined from this outside position, we lose sight of the necessity of experience. This is the Blind Spot, which the authors show lies behind our scientific conundrums about time and the origin of the universe, quantum physics, life, AI and the mind, consciousness, and Earth as a planetary system. The authors propose an alternative vision: scientific knowledge is a self-correcting narrative made from the world and our experience of it evolving together. To finally “see” the Blind Spot is to awaken from a delusion of absolute knowledge and to see how reality and experience intertwine.

The Blind Spot goes where no science book goes, urging us to create a new scientific culture that views ourselves both as an expression of nature and as a source of nature’s self-understanding, so that humanity can flourish in the new millennium. — The Blind Spot, abstract

Care to explain your version of how idealism is solipsistic?

Other minds have always been a problem for idealists.

Not those idealists of a certain kind:

“….. For although education may furnish, and, as it were, engraft upon a limited understanding rules borrowed from other minds, yet the power of employing these rules correctly must belong to the pupil himself; and no rule which we can prescribe to him with this purpose is, in the absence or deficiency of this gift of nature, secure from misuse….”
(CPR)

“…. We may further remark here that some minds only find full satisfaction in what is known through perception. (…) Other minds, on the contrary, seek merely the abstract concepts which are needful for applying and communicating knowledge….”
(WWR)

“….. For although education may furnish, and, as it were, engraft upon a limited understanding rules borrowed from other minds, yet the power of employing these rules correctly must belong to the pupil himself; and no rule which we can prescribe to him with this purpose is, in the absence or deficiency of this gift of nature, secure from misuse….”
(CPR) — Mww

Quine later laid out an argument for this same insight. You can learn rules from other people, but the ability to apply those rules to new situations has to be innate. You can't learn it.

Other minds have always been a problem for idealists. — Banno

Well, Schopenhauer is a weird case. You have a unitary Will and the Representation of Will as represented by all the objectified manifestations individuated.

So when an individual will is properly denied (i.e. reaches a nirvana-like state), does that mean the whole Will is nullified or simply that manifestation?

@Quixodian do you have an answer (without smuggling in external philosophers)? I can try to find passages that answer this, but I am not sure I'll find sufficient ones. There is a lot to draw from though.

Sure - I was only commenting on that specific quote which Mww provided, if you add more context then that often changes things. Schopenhauer does frequently mention animals and was one of the first philosophers to call for empathy to animals and applauded the then very progressive laws passed in London offering animals some rights, so he does have an idea similar to that of the umwelt, though not in that term, obviously.



"Therefore to these disputants [between 'spiritualists' and 'materialists'] I would say: you think you know a dead matter, that is, one that is completely passive and devoid of properties, because you imagine you really understand everything that you are able to reduce to mechanical effect. But… you are unable to reduce them… If matter can fall to earth without you knowing why, so can it also think without you knowing why… If your dead and purely passive matter can as heaviness gravitate, or as electricity attract, repel, and emit spark, so too as brain pulp can it think."

He did not like materialism at all, but he wasn't of a fan of religious spiritualism, though he did very much enjoy The Upanishads and had a mystical side as expressed in his view of the arts, specifically music.

You might say that the idea of a short canal across forbidding mountains was the ding an sich (ideal referent) of the man-made watercourse we have today. Is the visionary concept of a future state merely a poetic metaphor, or also a causal force? — Gnomon

But the ding an sich is meant to be introduced, in a way, as a limiting notion, in a sense something which we cannot go behind or understand, it serves as a reasonable postulate indicating the limits of enquiry.

In Schopenhauer, the Will is not an idea, it is a concrete phenomena which pervades the whole universe.

All I know of Quine is the Two Dogmas essay. Do you have some short article where he states, or some second order literature that recounts, the argument?

I recommend a recent (2014) book, Schopenhauer’s Compass, Urs App. — Quixodian

Thanks, but I'm a lazy amateur philosophical hobbyist. So I'm not likely to read the recommended book. I'd prefer to hear your well-informed & succinct opinion on the question of Schopenhauer's substitution of "Will" in place of "Soul". Was he rejecting supernatural Christian doctrine, regarding the essence of humanity, in favor of Buddhist notions*1 of a godless-mindless-worldly-physical-natural Life Force? I don't really care about Schop's opinion {pace }, except as it fits into the panoply of philosophical conjectures on the Subjective Awareness of why we strive to live. Are we living for something higher than just another day in the mundane life of Me?

The article I referenced above was entitled : "Schopenhauer and Buddhism: soulless continuity". Another article, entitled "Arthur Schopenhauer: a herald of the World Soul"*2 seems to imply that his "will-to-live"*3 was an impersonal natural force, comparable to Plato's Anima Mundi, and Bergson's Elan Vital, and Spinoza's Conatus. All of which are similar, in some features, to my own concept of Enformy & EnFormAction*4. Which is based primarily on Quantum & Information Science instead of religious or philosophical traditions. A late evolutionary expression of the information aspect of that natural force is what we now know as Mind & Intellect.

Yet, Nature/Cosmos is now known to have a questionable creatio ex nihilo, for which philosophers & cosmologists are still seeking a plausible First Cause. For example, was the Big Bang just an explosion of Preternatural Power without precedent and without meaning? Is the Will to Live, just the meaningless momentum from that initial outburst of causation? What was the primal Will Power, the original ding an sich? :smile:

PS__Is Schop postulating that Life is the fundamental force of the world, and that Mind is merely an accidental result of "blind striving"? If "life only comes from life" (per Pasteur), then does Mind only come from Mind?


*1. Buddhism in a Nutshell :
Buddhism denies the existence of an unchanging or eternal soul created by a God or emanating from a Divine Essence (Paramatma).
https://www.buddhanet.net/e-learning/buddhism/nshell09.htm

*2. Herald of the World Soul :
Schopenhauer overcame Kantian skepticism by reinterpreting both Subject and the “Thing-in-Itself”. For him, Both actually form yet another, “missing” Attribute of the Spinozian Substance, Which becomes Its Natura Naturans. The resulting Arche, in contrast to Mind or Body, is Life proper, Which in antiquity had been featured as the “World Soul” and Which in the philosophy of Modern Times was more commonly known as “World Will”. Unlike Schelling, Schopenhauer did not shrink from his discovery and did not return to the Christian God. Instead, he seized on this precarious Arche and termed It more concisely and definitely, as “Will-to-Live”.
https://alexei800.wordpress.com/2014/11/16/schopenhauer-world-soul/
Note --- Arche : Archē, or 'principle', is an ancient Greek philosophical term. Building on earlier uses, Aristotle established it as a technical term with a number of related meanings, including 'originating source', 'cause', 'principle of knowledge' and 'basic entity'.
https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/arche/v-1

*3. Schopenhauer as Stoic :
Within Schopenhauer’s vision of the world as Will, there is no God to be comprehended, and the world is conceived of as being inherently meaningless.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schopenhauer/

*4. Enformy :
In the Enformationism theory, Enformy is a hypothetical, holistic, metaphysical, natural trend or force, that counteracts Entropy & Randomness to produce complexity & progress --- including the evolutionary emergence of Life & Mind.
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page8.html