That doesn't seem to answer my questions though. — schopenhauer1

Does Schopenhauer answer those questions? I don't know - I'm still going through the texts, but I wouldn't assume that they necessarily have answers. The will and the principle of sufficient reason may be comparable to the boundary conditions of his philosophy.

On the other hand, right at the beginning, he says:

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.

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.

I'll put this quote here too in order to rep correlationism.

...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.

The meaning of ancestral statements is supposed to be a problem for correlationism, but it's also an argument for correlationism. I don't remember M seeing that. But I read a good amount of his other stuff, and he has some wild beliefs about the resurrection of the dead --that it could happen in the flesh. So his anti-religion pose is complex.

...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

text
The physicist here is at least shrewd enough to put math on the side of appearance (for a human subject) but thinks some kind of pure 'matter' (matter-in-itself) makes sense anyway. To me ancestral statements are truly weird, possibly undecidable. But I'd rather call them out as semantically problematic than to show what a good little science boy I am and ignore the issue.

For context, I'm an atheist. No afterlife. No ghosts. I lean toward the tapwater 'miracles' of the mundane. So the usual psychologizing sophistry should be modified as you frame your retort. (Just kidding.)

It's a bit like what Descartes said, I forget the exact quote, but the gist of it being some philosophers try to complicate things so much to hide or obscure the fact that they are saying either silly or trivial things. 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.

And I think this applies to most "illusionists". It's just too obvious and when you deny things to this level, it's hard to proceed and get anywhere.



I do recall reading from you that you dislike Schopenhauer or aren't a fan. Now I can see your reasoning about it clearly. 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.

But putting that aside, issues of taste are not a matter of convincing anyone, we have to attempt to look at the topic as clearly as possible. It could be that by thinking about this issue too "Kantian" or "Schopenhauerian" or even "Russellian", could be an impediment to try and clear up what we are talking about.

I agree, we have access only to representations. Even what physics tells us about the world are representations, the way we are able to discern what parts of extra mental world is made of. But we have a problem, if physics were the whole story, then we would have to posit representations "all the way down", it could be the case, but it would eventually lead to a kind of Berkeleyan idealism.

So we can say something about it, I think. Whatever the "thing in itself is", we can, more or less safely say that it is non-representational in nature, it grounds our representations, and it must be something extremely simple.

Then we can argue if it makes sense to speak of this concept as being plural or monist, or if it has in itself, any causal powers. I very much agree with you that we do not know if the world has causality as a built-in feature. Our minds appear to have such a built-in causal mechanism.

Here we enter difficult territory. So while agree with most of what you say, I depart a bit in thinking it is completely futile to attempt to give (at least) some negative characterizations of what the thing in itself could be, there are a few clues we can follow, though we will never reach certainty.

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

Right. Good quote there. 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?

Maybe Schopenhauer would regard a rational world emerging from Will as a kind of miracle. The Greek gods had trials and yet were gods. We are Will and yet have trials oriented to a purpose (on the secondary level). Isn't the problem of pain part of the PSR?

Maybe Schopenhauer would regard a rational world emerging from Will as a kind of miracle. — Gregory

Then, to me, not much of an explanation. All things can be solved thus.

Some more good stuff that seems relevant:

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.

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.

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

I think there's a hidden motivation behind that, which is not facing up to the plight of existence. I mean, if you're a robot or an animal, then the whole anguish of being a finite human aware of her own demise and limitedness goes away. Kastrup has a paper on that, The Physicalist Worldview as Neurotic Ego-Defense Mechanism. It also explains the pervasive sense of exasperation that characterises the debate.

is not All Will? — schopenhauer1

The SEP entry on Schopenhauer is quite useful, particularly the heading on World as Will. It gives an account of Schopenhauer's ontology, which I think I'm finally beginning to understand.

I'm also just recalling where I part company with Schopenhauer - it's at this point:

...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.

I suppose this is where Schopenhauer is rightly described as pessimistic. But comparing Schopenhauer to Buddhism - and he invites that comparison, by making mention of Buddhist texts - it is salient to recall that whilst the Four Noble Truths describe existence as dukkha (distressing, unsatisfactory, painful) there is nevertheless an end to suffering; there is sukha as well as dukkha. Schopenhauer seems to recognise this in his respect for ascetic principles but I don't know if his 'metaphysics of the will' allows for anything other than suffering. Perhaps that's my residual Christian social conditioning. Or perhaps it's because despite his great insights and reading of the Upaniṣads, he never really encountered an enlightened sage or guru (which is a very rare event in any life.)

All that said, though, I still endorse the aspect of his philosophy in respect of 'the world as Idea', I think it's very important.

Yes, that I know very well. It's his conclusions that are most interesting to me, not his metaphysics so that part you have to explain the least to me (i.e. blind striving will leading to suffering in the animal/human perspective). And I agree, SEP does a good job characterizing it thus.

However, that still doesn't answer my actual question at hand about Schop's metaphysics:

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

and previously put in more detail along similar lines:

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

The world is a wheel, and the world is a fire. The world is a Firewheel.

Bhikkhus, 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.html

How much does Schop add ? Stuff on music and art ? How much does Kant help ?

In my paper translation, estrangement is detachment.

Bhikkhus, 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.'

https://accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn35/sn35.028.nymo.html

In other words, the withdrawal of libido into internal images and concepts, away from transitory humiliating worldly things. I must be my own refuge, control my unruly mind, reel in my greedy tentacles. The world becomes a spectacle that doesn't tempt me.

Any answer belies some sort of theological implication and Schop certainly said he didn't believe in a telos of the Will. — schopenhauer1

I don't know if Schopenhauer really addess the origin of the subject and the principle of sufficient reason. I've about exhausted my knowledge of the topic, but if anything comes up in further reading, I'll let you know.

How much does Kant help? — plaque flag

Those passages you quote are from the Pali texts of Theravada Buddhism, 'Theravada' meaning 'way of the Elders' who claim to have preserved the original tradition most faithfully. They are addressed to monks, who have renounced hearth and home and live according to monastic rule. But as it happens, I first encountered Kant through T R V Murti, The Central Philosophy of Buddhism, which was about the later form of Buddhism, the Mahāyāna (around first century CE) of Nāgārjuna (sometimes dubbed 'the second Buddha'). It is a more, shall we say, cosmopolitan form of the teaching, where renunciation is more an inner state or skill - there are enlightened householders, such as the silk merchant Vimalakirti. The world of Mahāyāna Buddhism is an extraordinary kaliedoscope of philosophical ideas.

I should add, Murti's book is deprecated by later Buddhist scholarship due to its supposed Euro-centrism and intellectualism, but it was one of those books that was formative in my spiritual development - so much so I just shelled out thirty five bucks for a fresh copy to replace my withered paperback original. You can find a preview here where Murti compares Madhyamika (Middle Way) with Kant.

Incidentally Chapter 5 of Schopenhauer’s Compass is titled Multiplicity and Oneness

Let me know if you find anything.

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

I am not impressed by what others think unless it accords with what I think, or they can change my mind by arguments powerful enough to be convincing, so I will not be swayed by an appeal to authority in the form of an appeal to genius. I don't claim to be right, just expressing my view. I was writing somewhat in haste, and I was reaching for a word...mis-something...but I couldn't quite find it, so I settled for "stupid".

Of course, I don't think he was stupid in the sense of possessing a low IQ, or being unable to understand the philosophical tradition or come up with new ideas or being a poor writer, but perhaps he was too enamored of his own brilliance to see past his presuppositions. Anyway, the word I was searching, I've since found: "misguided".

As I've acknowledged our introspective intuitions may give us insight into the nature of the "in itself", but the question then would be "which intuitions?" since we have each seem to have our own. In any case even if some intuition gives insight into the in itself, that it does could never be demonstrated. This is the glaring issue with purported so-called "enlightenment".

Let me know if you find anything. — schopenhauer1

That chapter contains the answer you're looking for, I think. There's a pretty generous preview in Google Books (in fact I could read the whole chapter online in Chrome, although when I tried it in Firefox it told me 'page not included in preview'.) in any case, I couldn't hope to summarize it as it is a very dense chapter.

The point about Urs Apps' book is that it really situates Schopenhauer properly in his milieu, describing his interactions with and reactions to the major figures in his orbit including Fichte and Schelling and others not so well known now. It also makes clear how much Schopenhauer was actually a quasi-mystic, in that his influences and teachers were very much drawing on Plato and neoplatonism and saw themselves as representing the grand tradition of true philosophy by returning to the 'unitive vision' or 'the vision of the One'. Hardly any of that comes through in modern treatments of Schopenhauer and of course it is mainly extinguished in what passes for philosophy today. Really an excellent book. I'm also going to track down Magnificent Rebels by Andrea Wulf, about the German romantics, an ideal companion volume, I think.

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".

I mean, sure, if you ask for demonstration in the sense of empirical evidence like physics, that can't be given here. But this arises too with many issues such as free will or that each of us has conscious experience, etc. Demonstration can be an extremely high standard to meet in philosophy.

Demonstration can be an extremely high standard to meet in philosophy. — Manuel

According to You-Know-Who, only mathematics affords demonstration, as opposed those propositions that are “immediately certain”, which, I guess, just means those propositions that don’t require demonstration.

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

How do we know that individuation is something we do to nature, and not something nature does to us? After all it is not we who decide what will appear to us and how it will appear to be divided up. The idea that something completely unitary and undifferentiated could give rise to an infinitely complex individuated world of things and relations seems more implausible than that there are indeed things in themselves. Of course, we don't know, and we don't have to decide either way, because it really makes no necessary difference to how we will live our lives.

Sure, and even here, one could make the Cartesian argument that even mathematics could be deluding us, some demon making us think 2+2 is 4, maybe it’s something that else. Very unlikey, not impossible.

I mean, a good deal of epistemological questions do not affect our day to day life, we pursue them because we find some of them interesting. What makes a tree seperate from the ground a *fact* about the world? Or a chair different from a table? Is that a fact about the world or something that pertains to the way we conceive the world?

It seems to me that hard problems remain, no matter what we postualte, individuality being a hard topic, as is identity and grounding relations…

…..some demon making us think 2+2 is 4…. — Manuel

Yeah, those damn demons. If one of ‘em wants to make me only think it’s me counting my own fingers, not much I can do about it.

How do you know those fingers are yours??? :eyes: :naughty:

As you say, it’s not impossible that someone will claim they are his.

Ok, I read a little and it looks like I pretty much got it right as to his "mechanism" earlier in this thread. The book said:

Notice specifically the three step process of Schelling.

See what I said earlier:

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

But again, as poetic as this looks, as I indicated in that quote, it loses any explanation outside of theistic speculation. Theism would denote that God (All-Will) wanted to reveal himself to himself and thus individuated himself via emanations into lower worlds via some Platonic unfolding from universalized Forms to gross individualized forms in the world of time and space. This is all Platonic/Neoplatonic.

Schop is advocating for non-theistic All-Oneness that individuates into multiplicity. That is harder to explain intelligibly as to how All-Will can become multiplicity. This in the end, for all his awesome ideas, becomes a mere assertion. All he can do is point to other non-helpful assertions such as the Vedas/Upanishads whereby the idea of Maya and "illusion" enters the equation. All is one, but we don't realize it. But then the illusion becomes the thing to be explained. Why is the "illusion" so complicated in its phenomenal form if everything is at base oneness? If anything, the more complexity of scientific discoveries reveals this. You can superficially say that physics reveals a sort of "oneneess" in something like a Unified Field Theory, but that is very superficial as that itself is gotten to because of complex mathematical formulations that reveal that, not because it is so apparent because of its basicness to being.

Rather, being seems to be interminably complex and individuated, contra Schopenhauer. He (and others) take the idea of things like "ego" (individual-selfish-drive) and "compassion" (the drive to feel empathy and help people despite one's selfish pull), as some sort of reified unity, when in fact they are just dispositional psychological attitudes, nothing more. They are complex pheonemona and it's often hard to tell what is purely ego and purely compassionate. One can twist those two concepts to variations all day (loving myself is loving others is loving everything is loving myself again, etc. etc.). But this is all just word-play and concept-games at this point, not true metaphysics.

It is yet to be determined why illusion would enter the system at all for Schopenhauer. My way to try to recover this is to emphasize Schop's idea of Will's immediacy and not it's transcendence. That is to say, there can never be a prioricity in his system. This World of Appearance is literally Will-objectified/personified. There is no Will and then appearance. But again, that doesn't say much either except what we already know, that the world appears to us a certain familiar way and that there is another aspect of it that is mere unity. That doesn't explain why unity needs appearance.

Perhaps the only answer is a quasi-theological one. Will needs appearance to be its double-aspect because Will wants it in some way so as to have a way to enact its striving nature. Striving without objects, is basically nothing. But then, here we go again with a theological explanation of some sort of logos, desire, reason, etc.

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

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

You keep just reiterating what it is that needs to be explained. Why is there a mind that understand the Forms and reasons, if all is Will? Why multiplicity if all is in reality Will?

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

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

Have you read my full posts? I go over how Schop is not theological. So sure, change it to how. Whatever. It's still asking the same question. And I go over the point that this is exactly where Schop seems to be at a loss. How/Why a unity is multiplicity without theological implications. Does Will need Representation? How is it that there is this Will with a sort of "glitch" of Representation in the first place? Why not just Will without that "glitch"? Religions have all sorts of poetic answers to this.

Religious is an ambiguous term. Schop like the religions of the East

Religious is an ambiguous term. Schop like the religions of the East — Gregory

I'm starting to see why @Banno was frustrated at your answers. Are you reading my posts in full where I cover this? There is nothing more frustrating in a forum where someone answers your post as if you did not already cover that topic, as if bringing up the topic as if it wasn't discussed previously when in fact, it was. Please read my previous response again and if you want to pull specifics, we can discuss that.