That doesn't seem to answer my questions though. — schopenhauer1
That which knows all things and is known by none is the subject. Thus it is the supporter of the world, that condition of all phenomena, of all objects which is always pre-supposed throughout experience; for all that exists, exists only for the subject. Every one finds himself to be subject, yet only in so far as he knows, not in so far as he is an object of knowledge. But his body is object, and therefore from this point of view we call it idea. For the body is an object among objects, and is conditioned by the laws of objects, although it is an immediate object. Like all objects of perception, it lies within the universal forms of knowledge, time and space, which are the conditions of multiplicity. The subject, on the contrary, which is always the knower, never the known, does not come under these forms, but is presupposed by them; it has therefore neither multiplicity nor its opposite unity. We never know it, but it is always the knower wherever there is knowledge.
So then the world as idea, the only aspect in which we consider it at present, has two fundamental, necessary, and inseparable halves. The one half is the object, the forms of which are space and time, and through these multiplicity. The other half is the subject, which is not in space and time, for it is present, entire and undivided, in every percipient being.
...it would be naïve to think of the subject and the object as two separately subsisting entities whose relation is only subsequently added to them. On the contrary, the relation is in some sense primary: the world is only world insofar as it appears to me as world, and the self is only self insofar as it is face to face with the world, that for whom the world discloses itself
the metaphysician who upholds the eternal-correlate can point to the existence of an ‘ancestral witness’, an attentive God, who turns every event into a phenomenon, something that is ‘given-to’, whether this event be the accretion of the earth or even the origin of the universe. But correlationism is not a metaphysics: it does not hypostatize the correlation; rather, it invokes the correlation to curb every hypostatization, every substantialization of an object of knowledge which would turn the latter into a being existing in and of itself. To say that we cannot extricate ourselves from the horizon of correlation is not to say that the correlation could exist by itself, independently of its incarnation in individuals. We do not know of any correlation that would be given elsewhere than in human beings, and we cannot get out of our own skins to discover whether it might be possible for such a disincarnation of the correlation to be true.
...our Cartesian physicist will maintain that those statements about the accretion of the earth which can be mathematically formulated designate actual properties of the event in question (such as its date, its duration, its extension), even when there was no observer present to experience it directly. In doing so, our physicist is defending a Cartesian thesis about matter, but not, it is important to note, a Pythagorean one: the claim is not that the being of accretion is inherently mathematical – that the numbers or equations deployed in the ancestral statements exist in themselves. For it would then be necessary to say that accretion is a reality every bit as ideal as that of number or of an equation. Generally speaking, statements are ideal insofar as their reality is one of signification. But their referents, for their part, are not necessarily ideal (the cat is on the mat is real, even though the statement ‘the cat is on the mat’ is ideal). In this particular instance, it would be necessary to specify: the referents of the statements about dates, volumes, etc., existed 4.56 billion years ago as described by these statements – but not these statements themselves, which are contemporaneous with us...
...
our Cartesian physicist will maintain that those statements about the accretion of the earth which can be mathematically formulated designate actual properties of the event in question (such as its date, its duration, its extension), even when there was no observer present to experience it directly. In doing so, our physicist is defending a Cartesian thesis about matter, but not, it is important to note, a Pythagorean one: the claim is not that the being of accretion is inherently mathematical – that the numbers or equations deployed in the ancestral statements exist in themselves. For it would then be necessary to say that accretion is a reality every bit as ideal as that of number or of an equation. Generally speaking, statements are ideal insofar as their reality is one of signification. But their referents, for their part, are not necessarily ideal (the cat is on the mat is real, even though the statement ‘the cat is on the mat’ is ideal). In this particular instance, it would be necessary to specify: the referents of the statements about dates, volumes, etc., existed 4.56 billion years ago as described by these statements – but not these statements themselves, which are contemporaneous with us
So then the world as idea, the only aspect in which we consider it at present, has two fundamental, necessary, and inseparable halves. The one half is the object, the forms of which are space and time, and through these multiplicity. The other half is the subject, which is not in space and time, for it is present, entire and undivided, in every percipient being.
So there at least you have the beginning of an answer - that multiplicity belongs to the domain of objects, but that the subject - that which knows but is never known - has neither multiplicity nor its opposite. — Quixodian
Maybe Schopenhauer would regard a rational world emerging from Will as a kind of miracle. — Gregory
Can he go backwards, take a new path around embarrassing subjectivity ? Is the quest for the pure dead object beyond description, free from anthropocentric taint, a perverse theological quest ? The Real is always out of reach. To me it seems that Kant might even have had ancestral statements in mind. They even tempt me to posit some vast black precognitive voidstuff. But I refuse to pretend I can give such a phrase meaning. If there's a glitch in the Matrix, so be it.Let us suppose a subject without any point of view on the world – such a subject would have access to the world as a totality, without anything escaping from its instantaneous inspection of objective reality. ... it would no longer be possible to ascribe sensible receptivity and its spatio-temporal form – one of the two sources of knowledge for Kant, along with the understanding – to such a subject, which would therefore be capable of totalizing the real infinity of whatever is contained in each of these forms. By the same token, since it would no longer be bound to knowledge by perceptual adumbration, and since the world for it would no longer be a horizon but rather an exhaustively known object, such a subject could no longer be conceived as a transcendental subject of the Husserlian type. But how do notions such as finitude, receptivity, horizon, regulative Idea of knowledge, arise? They arise because, as we said above, the transcendental subject is posited as a point of view on the world, and hence as taking place at the heart of the world.
The subject is transcendental only insofar as it is positioned in the world, of which it can only ever discover a finite aspect, and which it can never recollect in its totality. But if the transcendental subject is localized among the finite objects of its world in this way, this means that it remains indissociable from its incarnation in a body; in other words, it is indissociable from a determinate object in the world. Granted, the transcendental is the condition for knowledge of bodies, but it is necessary to add that the body is also the condition for the taking place of the transcendental. That the transcendental subject has this or that body is an empirical matter, but that it has a body is a non-empirical condition of its taking place – the body, one could say, is the ‘retro-transcendental’ condition for the subject of knowledge.
....
To think ancestrality is to think a world without thought – a world without the givenness of the world. It is therefore incumbent upon us to break with the ontological requisite of the moderns, according to which to be is to be a correlate. Our task, by way of contrast, consists in trying to understand how thought is able to access the uncorrelated, which is to say, a world capable of subsisting without being given. But to say this is just to say that we must grasp how thought is able to access an absolute, i.e. a being whose severance (the original meaning of absolutus) and whose separateness from thought is such that it presents itself to us as non-relative to us, and hence as capable of existing whether we exist or not. But this entails a rather remarkable consequence: to think ancestrality requires that we take up once more the thought of the absolute; yet through ancestrality, it is the discourse of empirical science as such that we are attempting to understand and to legitimate.
Or as Tallis cleverly pointed out in one of his books, the explanations they try to give are more difficult than the phenomena they are trying to explain. — Manuel
is not All Will? — schopenhauer1
...Schopenhauer’s particular characterization of the world as Will is nonetheless novel and daring. It is also frightening and pandemonic: he maintains that the world as it is in itself (again, sometimes adding “for us”) is an endless striving and blind impulse with no end in view, devoid of knowledge, lawless, absolutely free, entirely self-determining and almighty. 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. When anthropomorphically considered, the world is represented as being in a condition of eternal frustration, as it endlessly strives for nothing in particular, and as it goes essentially nowhere. It is a world beyond any ascriptions of good and evil.
But is not All Will? Why Object (and its form space/time)? He only says a subject is for an object, like it's just a matter of course. But then why posit undifferentiated Will? Essentially he is positing epistemic dualism and metaphysical monism. But why is there an epistemic coming from the metaphysical at all? — schopenhauer1
Ok, so my problem again is that whence the individuation and PSR and mind and objects if all is unindividuated Will? Without making non-helpful analogizes to "maya" and such, many-is-one thing isn't explained. Again my question is:
Whence PSR if all is Will? Whence objects, and their more Platonic Forms? That is to say how can the Will be "doing" anything (like objectification) if Will is atemporal?
My guess is that "objectification" is an eternal process that is foundational to Will, not contingent upon it. If Schop is to maintain a double-aspect, Will and Representation are never primary and secondary but always one and the same thing. But it begs the question, why is there a PSR, a mind, and individuation and all its manifestations? Why is this an aspect of Will? Why is Will not just undifferentiated Will and that's it? Any answer belies some sort of theological implication and Schop certainly said he didn't believe in a telos of the Will.
— schopenhauer1
Your answer didn't seem to answer that but reiterated that we have reason and understanding and such by way of Will. That doesn't seem to answer my questions though. — schopenhauer1
https://accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn35/sn35.028.nymo.htmlBhikkhus, all is burning. And what is the all that is burning?
...
The eye is burning, forms are burning, eye-consciousness is burning, eye-contact is burning, also whatever is felt as pleasant or painful or neither-painful-nor-pleasant that arises with eye-contact for its indispensable condition, that too is burning.
Burning with what? Burning with the fire of lust, with the fire of hate, with the fire of delusion. I say it is burning with birth, aging and death, with sorrows, with lamentations, with pains, with griefs, with despairs.
...
The mind is burning, ideas are burning, mind-consciousness is burning, mind-contact is burning, also whatever is felt as pleasant or painful or neither-painful-nor-pleasant that arises with mind-contact for its indispensable condition, that too is burning.
Burning with what? Burning with the fire of lust, with the fire of hate, with the fire of delusion. I say it is burning with birth, aging and death, with sorrows, with lamentations, with pains, with griefs, with despairs
...
https://accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn35/sn35.028.nymo.htmlBhikkhus, when a noble follower who has heard (the truth) sees thus, he finds estrangement in the eye, finds estrangement in forms, finds estrangement in eye-consciousness, finds estrangement in eye-contact, and whatever is felt as pleasant or painful or neither-painful-nor-pleasant that arises with eye-contact for its indispensable condition, in that too he finds estrangement.
He finds estrangement in the ear... in sounds...
He finds estrangement in the nose... in odors...
He finds estrangement in the tongue... in flavors...
He finds estrangement in the body... in tangibles...
He finds estrangement in the mind, finds estrangement in ideas, finds estrangement in mind-consciousness, finds estrangement in mind-contact, and whatever is felt as pleasant or painful or neither-painful-nor-pleasant that arises with mind-contact for its indispensable condition, in that too he finds estrangement.
When he finds estrangement, passion fades out. With the fading of passion, he is liberated.When liberated, there is knowledge that he is liberated. He understands: 'Birth is exhausted, the holy life has been lived out, what can be done is done, of this there is no more beyond.'
Any answer belies some sort of theological implication and Schop certainly said he didn't believe in a telos of the Will. — schopenhauer1
How much does Kant help? — plaque flag
I think your reasoning is on the right track, though I very much disagree with calling Schopenhauer "stupid" - heck the fact that a good deal of the fathers of modern physics - Einstein, Schrodinger and Pauli all considered him a genius, cannot lead me to that conclusion. — Manuel
Let me know if you find anything. — schopenhauer1
The example of Schopenhauer pointing out that Kant assumes plurality when he argues for the existence of "things-in-themselves", isn't an intuition. Individuation is something we do to nature, it's not something that is inherent in it. So, in this sense the "thing-in-itself" makes more sense than "things-in-themselves". — Manuel
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. — schopenhauer1
Kant didn't say if the thing-in-itself was an object or subject. Schop said it was Will but mind understands the Forms, not Will. So the thing in itself is unknowable for him and also how reason comes from will. I know you like to think of it like two sides of a coin, but doesnt Schop say *everything* is will? So reason is somehow will I'm guessing — Gregory
I'm more inclined to wonder "how" reason can be Will. "Why" implies there's a teleology before mind, which Schop denies. Kant advocated for blind faith in God. Maybe understanding Will takes some faith since it's beyond reason. You don't seem to be satisfied with this line of thought nevertheless. Sorry — Gregory
Religious is an ambiguous term. Schop like the religions of the East — Gregory
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